Roasted Rabbits and Guns N' Roses
A lean man in perhaps his late 50s entered the street ministry for morning coffee and donuts. He carried a stick roughly the length of a croquet mallet. It was too short to serve as a walking staff and too thin to serve as a cane. The stick had intricate carvings at both ends.
A weapon? A scepter? A riding crop? A wand? Something that initiated transubstantiation?
With these dudes, you never know.
A volunteer asked him about it and the man launched into an enthusiastic explanation.
He used the stick to beat brush to flush out and capture various small woodland creatures that he presumably killed, skinned, and fried up for supper in his camp down by the river. The man also said he had carved the stick in an intricate manner to render it more aerodynamic in flight when he winged it into the brush to rattle some branches and flush his quarry.
Hearing this, my mind instantly rocketed to a chapter in Grapes of Wrath where Tom Joad or someone on their version of the American Diaspora kills and eats a rabbit or squirrel. I also thought of my father eating squirrel stew, possum pie and roasted rabbit as a kid during the Depression. He claims it was good eating, but then again, he added, you'll eat anything when you are hungry, and he was hungry and for a time lived out of a sedan and in a box car that wasn't moving.
The man wanted to demonstrate his prowess winging the stick. In the parking lot! He flung open the front door and walked outside. Three of us inside had a clear view. He winged the stick with an effortless demeanor and it twirled through the air like the rotors of a helicopter toward a cedar hedge some 20 feet away. The stick buried itself halfway into the hedge. I half expected a squirrel to dart out and we'd add the poor son-of-a-bitch to the industrial mac and cheese on the menu for lunch! He walked to the hedge and extricated the stick like a Portuguese toreador I once saw do to a dead bull in Lisbon.
He came back inside the ministry and we all said we admired his talent and that was no lie.
I thought about his Grapes of Wrath suppers down by the river. A pressing question entered my mind: what was the soundtrack of the meal? Almost all the homeless men and women I encounter have the ability to play music through their phones, and many of them have portable speakers to pump it up wherever they might be.
Yes, what was the soundtrack? Got to be Guns N' Roses. Got to be a big hair metal rock act. “Welcome the Jungle” and tasty barbecued rabbit where, “...the grass is green and the girls are pretty...please take me home...”
I mention Guns N' Roses because I hear it played on these men's phones all the time (never women's). It was the soundtrack of their youth and 35 years later the soundtrack of being homeless.
It all made perfect sense, especially if you have listened to Guns N' Roses (loud). These men were in their teens and 20s when “Sweet Child of Mine” and “Paradise City” were monster, party, hell raising hits. Now in their late 40s, 50s and early 60s, listening to this raucous band returned them to their more powerful selves. Music often does that.