David Means

There’s this old man who walks along the fence next to the hospital, or, say, down near town, wobbling in his loose, flapping shoes, digging around in the garbage can on the corner, smoking a cigarette, clutching it between his battered fingers, or simply walking with his shoulders braced as if he knew he was some kind of fodder for speculation, because it seems to be so consistent, his homeless rooting, keeping to a pattern, moving south on Midland Avenue for a half mile to Franklin Place and then left on Franklin and down Franklin to River Road, along River Road to Front Street, left on Front and up Front back to Midland, and then, presumably, around again. By virtue of his consistency, he has edged his way into the consciousness of just about everybody who has driven more than once down Midland Avenue, or Front Street, or, to a lesser degree, Franklin Place.

Rain or shine, for about a year and a half, give or take, he has slogged with the same gimp, the same loping swing of arms, the same cigarette burning between his fingers, and he’s rooted in the same trash cans—the one on the corner of Midland and Franklin, or the one on the corner of River and Front. Leaning down with his underwear showing in winter, pale yellow, say, or his pants hiked up too far over his shirt in summer, he goes against the elemental facts in a disconcerting way that makes those passing him shrug and wonder brie y what his story might be before going back to their lives, half caring and half not caring, subsumed in the responsibilities at hand, so to speak, or caring deeply with a flash of intense sadness and wonder, resolving to sign up to work at the shelter in town, the Soup Haven, or whatever it’s called, or not caring one iota and getting riled up thinking about the ease with which a man can pass his life in what must be a pleasurable vortex of non-time that comes from following a set path day after day, say, insane or on the edge of insanity, as a way of escaping responsibilities, dodging them for the poetic stance of being the odd homeless gent, strangely formal in the way he daintily roots, poking at the trash with a stick, his face like that of an old sea captain, say, or of a farmhand of some type, which leads some to speculate that he was once one of those ship workers, river pilots who at times come in to land at the dock on the river to catch a cab down to the Bronx, expounding stories of bridge heights and the way the tides have to be calculated before you take a ship upriver, attesting to the way it all works—one man captaining the boat from the harbor to the river mouth, another bringing it upriver. Weather-beaten, some think while passing him on a windy day, watching the way he lists with his arms out at his sides, winglike, the tail of his shirt uttering behind him as he walks.

The way he roots through the garbage cans in the winter snow and in the summer heat with an admirable persistence serves as a touchstone, fuelled by the concept of mental illness a oat over the land, even, say, for the less educated observers who just see him and think, Fucking crazy old homeless bastard hanging in there, still going, still doing his thing. The phrase “mental illness” shrouds his body as he walks, and orients him, slips him like a peg into whatever dreamy ideas of madness ll the minds of those passing and pushes away the thought that he is, in a way, say, a re ection of some part of themselves that might, someday, under the right circumstances—a nancial loss leading to ruin, say, or some neurological disorder, an improper linking of nerves, or a shady haze of undetected tumor, or some sharp trauma abrupt enough to throw off their general balance—irrevocably force them into the same circumstances, wandering day after day, sticking to the same general pattern, stopping to dig in the public trash can for discarded bottles or scraps of food or newspapers to read.

Those who pass have had a sense that perhaps, at least in theory, at least as some kind of innate potential, they may—unlikely, hugely unlikely—someday and themselves in the same circumstances, although with variations, of course, and themselves feeling something that isn’t simply shame but something deeper in the self, an obliviousness that allows for wandering in ice-cold air with your shirt wide open, a deprivation of life force, or of gumption, or of will that could leave you shuffling through a limited space, say, always keeping close to the safety of shelter if there is shelter, or to the house of older parents who, bewildered by the state of your life, will take you in and give you a bed and care for you as best as they can, telling you to stay in when it’s cold, building a fire, listening and waiting for you to speak with coherence, to give a sign that somehow you are going to pull out of this and get your life back together, say, or that you are just gathering your equilibrium and finding a foothold in reality, or at least in common sense, having known you—your parents—when you were a full-blown functioning adult in the world, making deals, establishing relationships with others, cleaning your body and dressing in accordance with the climatic conditions, enjoying good days and bad days, lingering over the beauty of the world, over, say, an amazingly graceful football play in which the receiver hooks his arm up without looking to clutch the ball in a way that seems to defy not only the nature of physics itself but something more, the potential in the act itself, or, better yet, over, say, the way a kid, like your own son or daughter, if you have one, looks up at you, beaming after accomplishing some new task, such as putting a round peg into a round hole instead of a square one, or, even better, over, say, the way the pianist Sviatoslav Richter occasionally held back from playing while the audience waited and grew impatient, first making noise, mumbling and talking, anxious and expectant, while he sat on the bench and held his fingers poised to play, letting the sound of the Moscow hall reverberate with all the coughing and tense laughter, the whispering, and then waited and waited until a deep quiet fell, a silence that anticipated the first notes and then grew even deeper, it was said, until there was nothing but the creak of the seats and the soft, muted thump of shoe soles against wooden floorboards, and then an even deeper, astonished silence that seemed, in all its starkness, accusatory and frank, judging the ineptitude of those who would, in a few minutes—or by that point perhaps never—listen to the beautiful music that his fingers would produce if they received the proper instruction from the brain of the virtuoso, who was temperamental and elegant and oddly dumb at the same time, a man holding his fingers clawed over the keys and casting back upon the world an innate sense of that which lies between the flesh and the soul, forcing it on the audience with his unusual—albeit par for the course when it comes to creative geniuses—behavior.

It’s not just that you went to visit him when he was in Rockland, now called Blaisdell Addiction Treatment Center, stopping on the way to pick up some hard candies and a bagel and a large coffee, as he had requested, and that you went in and checked in with the receptionist and signed the register and ignored (as best you could) her blunt, bored stare from the other side of the window—the grille of the voice-hole mute and silent—and then went through what seemed like a set of air-lock doors to the elevator, standing alongside one or two other visitors who also held bags of food, and then went up to attend the obligatory class, hearing the same nurse give the same speech about freedom

(Focus on thought, Remember where it leads, Eliminate the error, Explore other options, Don’t react, respond, Organize thoughts, Motivate to do better), her face slack and sweet but also bored, everyone uncomfortable on the hard steel chairs, with the sense that through the door the patients were gathering, waiting.

It’s not just that you drove over there and parked and felt the sorrow of the locked ward from the outside—the building relatively new on the old hospital grounds, the other buildings, some barracks-like, others elegant and Gothic, their windows boarded up with blank sheets of plywood, mildewed gray, gaping—knowing that you’d enter his building and go through the above-mentioned routine, also aware as you sat in the car for a minute that the same hospital had a mention in the Ginsberg poem, again and again (“I’m with you in Rockland!”), which made you feel part of literary history somehow, and also made you wonder if perhaps you could use this in a story, take advantage of the fact that you were in a real situation with your real brother, who was back again in what might be the terminal treatment for his condition.

It’s not just that the third time you visited him you sat in the car and rehashed the way it would happen, at least until you got in and sat with him face to face, listening to whatever he was going to say, sharing the food, leaning back, taking in the room—the little kids visiting fathers, the older folks visiting young patients, the celebratory hilarity of the homecomings lifting the air with a sweet vibration—sat in the car and rehashed the way you’d go in, face the mute receptionist, go through the air-lock device, and then sit through the talk on 

 again, after checking your food bag with the orderly. It’s not just that the third time you went to visit, on an autumnal day with the leaves brilliant in the sharp morning sunlight, you’d go through the routine and then sense again, while you were talking, trying to coax him into a positive vision of what he might become, the cycle of the entire story up to that point, rolling in hoops, swinging around both of you, and you’d shrug it off and watch while your brother removed the lid of his cup, blew across the surface, and took a sip and then another sip and then leaned his head back and swallowed, flexing his throat and the sinewy muscles of his neck, exposing his gaunt breastbone, which looked covered in tissue paper, and then, when his head came back down, met your gaze with deep brown eyes while between you, in the quiet, unspoken silence that suddenly opened, there would be such a thick exchange of information that you’d both tear up and clear your throats and you’d push the bag forward and say, I brought you a bagel, like you asked, and some hard candies, and he’d give you a look that was so thankful, so absurdly out of proportion to your act of kindness that you would know right there—amid the din of love talk between visitors and patients—that the tenor of his thank-you would come back to haunt you later, no matter what happened.

It’s not just that in the car before going up on the third visit you’d granted yourself a bitter kind of solace, because you were not locked up there and he was, and you were able to find words to situate yourself in life, and he didn’t seem able to do so at that moment—a kind of purity of resolve (in the car) that sat behind your eyelids when you shut your eyes and let the sunlight purge through in a blood burst of warm red. It’s not just the clean, hard facts that you understood, in the car, and that were so threadbare and old hat that almost anyone could have recited them, beginning with the use of chemicals that sparked dopamine production and lodged themselves in organic compounds called receptors, and then from there took over what was originally a unique story—the Hudson River house, the art work, his stone-carved faces in the front yard, the view of the river from his back patio, his name, Frank, the minutiae of his story—and transmuted it into a clichéd tale that changed only in the terms that were used to describe it, so that those who were once known as mad, Skid Row bums, stumblebums and drunkards and junkies were now seen as diseased victims who might be treated.

It’s not just the fact that in the car, or a few minutes later, riding up in the elevator with an older couple who told you they were from the Bronx, both working people, you were aware that part of the tragedy of the situation was the loss of story inherent in the hospital walls, the sealed doors, the sign-in sheet, and the folding chairs that were standard issue for this sort of place, along with the social worker who had a heavy Haitian accent and told you, when you were done with the visit, that he’d watch out for your brother in particular, responding to your politeness (you were extra polite), his face wide, moonlike, and his eyes watery, at his place behind the nurse’s desk outside the meeting room. It’s not just the way he told you that your brother stood out as a lively patient, that he was getting his act together, and that he would, quote, soon find his path, he likes to draw and everyone knows he’s an artist, unquote.

It’s not just that you went home and read Thomas Merton and reread a line you’d underlined in his book “Seeds of Contemplation,” which stated in no uncertain terms that humility was the only antidote to despair—that you read it a few times and then went into a deep contemplation out on your back deck, smoking a cigar, wondering if there was a way to become humble before the preordained humiliation of a chemical addiction, wondering if the narrative thrown around your brother would look just as absurd when folks in the future found out that it had nothing at all to do with the way the compounds locked into receptors but originated with something else that was, at that time, out on the deck, out in the world, as mysterious to you as it was to everyone else.

It’s not just that he went from a halfway house called Open Arms, a neat and tidy little house in the town of Haverstraw, tucked up amid the river-town streets, with a view of the river—a glint of blue through the trees in the summer, more stark and open in the winter—to the hospital cleanup ward, and then up to Rockland for the first time, and then back to Open Arms again for a second stay, and then back to the emergency-room cleanup ward, and then up to Rockland (as you’d think of it some of the time), and then out of Blaze (as you began to call it later) into Open Arms again, and then to Blaze for a third, final time, which seemed to matter so much the third time you went to visit him, sitting in the car, watching the rain come down, the smell of the bagel and the coffee in the air, ruminating over the way the names of the institutions seemed to map out with neat concision, to make orderly what wasn’t orderly, as if language itself were straining to show in clear terms the structure of the story that was forming around him, just as his wife’s name had matched the name of his first roommate in the halfway house, and he had felt the mockery of fate itself, had said to you, Jesus, what are the chances that I’d have a roommate with a slightly feminine name and a wife with a slightly masculine name, and that somehow I’d be put in with this guy who is half my age and just going through this for the first time, with his life spread out before him, for God’s sake, while I’m here with my life not spreading at all, because even if I stay clean I’ve only got, what, a dozen years left?

It’s not just that it seemed, on the third visit, as you signed the clipboard, that you were a signatory to some insoluble time-sense, and that the duration of your visit would be a stasis of time that would forever play itself out in the revisiting of the situation from that particular point of time in relation to what happened later, and that would, in hindsight, seem marked, somehow, in relation to the way the hospital ward stood, even as you signed in, as a momentary, fleeting refuge from the wild torments of the outside world, the indelible real places—the old house on the river that had been empty since your brother’s divorce, and the old art studio in the rehabilitated mill building where he had worked on his paintings, and the river itself, the shoreline down near the state park where he’d hiked with his son—that would when he thought back on them spark in him a need, a desire, to rehash his relationship with the chemicals that eased the pain they produced. It’s not just that you’re constantly embarrassed by or ashamed of the circularity of the story when you think of it. It’s not just that no matter how hard you try to see his story in simple tragic terms, as an Aristotelian process, you also feel yourself spinning back into the cycle that might eventually devour him, losing touch with whatever cathartic elements might lie hidden within the structure of his story as it relates to your own, partly because you are still part of the story and it has yet to reach its terminus and therefore the overarching arc hasn’t been reached yet—at least, so it seems.

It’s not just that you went to the state park to walk one afternoon and found his boots near the edge of the palisade, the sheer drop-off to the shore of the river. It’s not just that no matter how often you sort and pick through the story, alongside your parents and your sister and everyone else, you can’t help but find yourself, against your better nature, feeling the big sway and spin of the cosmos—the dark eternal matter of the stars, which, however isotropic or evenly balanced, seem, when you think of him, to be moving in a circular pattern that reminds you that the nurse explained, each time, during each pre-visit orientation, that part of the healing process was to step off the merry-go-round and never step back on.

It’s not just that so many of the organic compounds, landlocked by their restricting bonds, all those fuzzy quantum orbitals, tend toward formations that are elegantly circular. It’s not just that he took his boots off and leaped from the palisade and lifted his hands and flew out over the river and then back and that he felt himself relinquished of his condition and totally free for a few seconds, with the water below him. It’s not just that you imagined this as you sat in the car in the parking lot, after the third, maybe the fourth, visit, with the smell of damp paper bag and steaming coffee and—between those smells—the bready bagel smell. It’s not just that you only imagined the boots and then felt strange about the image, and remembered hiking back down the trail and along the railroad tracks to the road, stopping to stare at his house, now under new ownership, situated a quarter mile up the road from the stone quarry, the one you used in one of your stories, years back, when you were first beginning to locate the sober source of your own vision.

No, it’s the fact that he never had a chance to fly and that you never really found those boots and that each time you visited him he seemed to be only slightly better. It’s the fact that when you left him behind, speeding down the road past the old Rockland buildings, boarded up and unused now that most of the mad and crazy are outpatients, medicated, wandering the streets and the homeless shelters, you felt a keen elation. It’s the fact that once again you were joyfully facing the harsh limitations of reality, admitting that it all had to be taken and turned into a story of some kind. Otherwise, it would just be one more expression of precise discontent. And expressions of discontent—you think in the car, sitting in front of your own house now—no matter how beautiful, never solve the riddle of the world, or bring the banality of sequential reality to a location of deeper grace.

David Means

David Means

Fiction

Winter 2019 - Double

Two Ruminations on a Homeless Brother