Two weeks later, I had retrieved three copies of my class set of The Motel Life from storage. For several days, I carried them around on my walks and bike rides with the intent of distributing them to Mark. Once in his possession, he would distribute them to select street readers and kick off my idea of the Old Crow Book Club on Mark's sidewalk, or salon as we had taken to calling it.
At last, there he was on an overcast Tuesday afternoon with two of his buddies in attendance. One of them held a full bottle of Old Crow. The other man, elderly, black, wore a trench coat and ball cap. He walked with a cane in in his right hand. In his left, he clutched a brown paper bag that bore the unmistakable shape of booze. Old Crow Man was introduced to me as Sean. Paper Bag Man was introduced to me as Red. Red was on his way to a bus stop to a ride to somewhere.
I produced copies of The Motel Life for Mark and he eagerly accepted them. I told him in roughly a month we would convene on the sidewalk and discuss the book.
Sean offered me a hit off the Old Crow. Last time he offered, I'd declined. A man can't pass up that offer twice in a lifetime and still consider himself a follower of John Steinbeck's editorial ethos because John Steinbeck once wrote: “An American writer has to know his land and the people if he is going to write about America.”
Right now, the Americans that most interest me as a writer are those homeless moving or not moving among their land. I don't know what their land is, or what stake they have in any American land. I won't pretend I know anything about them or the professionals and advocates trying to assist them, but I am seeing and swimming upstream and downstream in this story. I might even be fishing for something from the bank. Writing as fishhooks, a great German nihilist philosopher once wrote.
I took the bottle of Old Crow, unscrewed the cap, and glugged a belt. Sweet Jesus! It all brought back my Old Crow hi jinks in the cheap lazy gray days of Portland in the late 80s when Bud Clark was doing his quirky thing. I remarked to the gang that I tippled Old Crow back in the day because it was Blutarsky's preferred liquor in Animal House.
Oh that set them off! We then launched into a lively conversation about the movie and I told them that years ago in a Newport dive bar, I'd actually met the woman who flew in through an open window and landed in the horny kid's bed.
Oh, they loved that!
It was time to leave and do whatever I was supposed to be doing, but the Old Crow burned like Hades in my belly and I completely forgot about my destination and didn't give a country lick. Old Crow is like that.
A week or so later, I scored a rare gem at the bookstore and was cruising happily on foot toward Mark's office. I was wishing he'd be holding court with his usual crew so he might share the joy of my literary find. I also wanted an update when we might convene the inaugural meeting of the Old Crow Book Club.
Hot damn! There Mark was on the sidewalk with three other men and a little tan dog. They were in a giddy mood, laughing, yukking it up, and Mark greeted me warmly. I didn't recognize two of the men or the dog.
Mark's consistent happiness often makes me reflect on my own state of happiness or unhappiness. He appears happy with his life on the streets and is certainly not a member of the obviously deranged type of homeless person I sometimes encounter. Is Mark an anomaly? How would I know? How would anyone ever know? Do homeless outreach workers conduct contentment surveys of this kind? Would there be any value in such a survey?
Here's an interesting question: what would the garden variety therapist say to Mark? Would he or she focus the so-called therapy on Mark's drinking? Would there be any discussion on his apparent unconventional state of happiness? Would the therapist bother to meet him where he's at and throw away the jargon and agendas? What is the larger issue of his homelessness? Would there be any discussion about the trauma imposed by capitalism? Do therapists ever consider such a root cause for so many problems of the mind and body that afflict American life? Maybe they should.
A vast majority of Americans feel strongly that people like Mark should work, work, work. Get a job! A life on the streets is a disgrace. You're a loser. I don't feel that way at all. I never have. Mark isn't contributing to society, so the old saw goes, but neither is he doing anything to ruin the planet or other human beings, like so many others. Consider his carbon footprint over yours. Consider his non contributions. He's not flying to Paris for a weekend or speculating in Bitcoin or clearcutting forests or developing phone apps to further pollute our mind. He lives entirely on what he earns collecting cans and bottles. I doubt Tom McCall ever had that in mind with Oregon's visionary Bottle Bill back in 1971, but so be it.
I don't know where I am going with this digression, but every time I see and talk to Mark and his crew, it makes me see and think hard about American life in ways I have never seen or thought before. In other words, I am seeing and thinking anew. If I were ever to have a headstone, I would want something like, “He was a man who always seeing and thinking anew,” as my epitaph.
Back to the sidewalk.
Typically this crew drinks malt liquor and Old Crow and smokes cigarettes and vapes weed, but today they were exclusively passing around a bottle of Beam's Eight Star.
Many moons ago, I swigged Eight Star while playing touch football on a rainy Sunday morning. It was sheer gutter swill, but it did make me a better quarterback on that muddy gridiron.
One of the men offered me a belt, but I declined. Another man, younger, sitting on the sidewalk near Mark, reached into his backpack and pulled out a copy of The Motel Life. He then launched into a rhapsodic review of the novel's opening chapters, Mark seconded him, and I joined the chorus of approval. Vlautin really gets it going fast in this book. That's how you get people to read books! Get it going! Be direct!
The younger man was ready to start the Old Crow Book Club right then and there! He was positively jacked and tipsy. I had to cut him off and said we all had to finish the book first. Moreover, we didn't have a bottle of Old Crow for the occasion. He agreed and returned the book to his backpack.
I asked the crew what they were doing today.
Mark practically screamed: “THINKING! TALKING ABOUT THE WORLD!”
“And why not,” I said, “at least you guys have original thoughts and discuss things.”
In all my time around these men, I had never heard them utter phrases like “dumpster fire,” or “a lot on my plate,” or “the optics are bad” or any bullshit parroted from FOX News.
Perhaps that shouldn't surprise me. I need to stop registering surprise when I encounter homeless people and discover many of them are totally original human beings, as is every human being until something undermines or obliterates their originality and they end up fools or factotums or clods or cliches or inane or insane.
I might also add that Mark's crew employs the word “ motherfucker” with delicious hilarity and certainly better than anything heard on the fake cop movies about the inner cities.
Yes, I must smote my surprise and get on with seeing and thinking anew, cultivate a deeper understanding. It's the only way to proceed with this story, whatever this story is.
Mark and I set the time for the inaugural meeting of the Old Crow Book Club for a Sunday at one in the afternoon. We both agreed that if it was raining we would go on as scheduled. Rain would never deter us Oregonians! Besides, we'd have Old Crow to warm our gullets.
The appointed time arrived and I walked toward Mark's sidewalk with a pint of Old Crow in the pocket of my corduroy coat. I kind of felt like a literary gunslinger packing it.
Rain threatened. I wanted it.
There was Mark, reading of course. He saw me and said hello. He told me that other club members couldn't make it. I felt a momentary pang of disappointment at their absence, but Mark was here, I had bourbon, and I was curious to hear his thoughts about The Motel Life, a novel somewhat about the struggle of homelessness. But first he launched into an enthusiastic review of his latest read: a novel that was apparently the source material of HBO's lusty vampire show, True Blood. He said his next book after this one was the Odyssey. He had it on hold at the library.
I asked Mark if he'd ever read Cannery Row. I'd just finished the short novel and marveled at its humor and relevance to contemporary affairs, namely homelessness.
He had not read it. He would be soon. In fact, I decided at that moment that Cannery Row was the next pick for the Old Club Book Club. Why did I get to decide? Because I was a teacher and supplied the Old Crow, that's why!
I extricated the pint, broke the seal, and took a belt. Hellfire! No wonder this shit almost killed William Faulkner! I handed Mark the bottle and told him the rest was his. He glugged a shot and thanked me.
Then we got down to the proper intellectual business at hand—a discussion of The Motel Life. It lasted 20 minutes and what especially struck Mark about the novel was its devastating and unrelenting bleakness. True enough, I thought. But Mark added that the the bleakness didn't ruin the loyalty between two young brothers living out of a cheap motel and hiding from bad luck and bad decisions. They had almost no hope of ever making it in America but they had each other and they were holding on the best they could. I suggested the novel's ending offered the surviving brother a ray of hope, that he could get it together and make something worthwhile (to him) of his life.
Mark agreed.
You know, reader, where I wanted to go next with Mark on this line, but I didn't. Maybe after we read Cannery Row. Maybe never.
And thus concluded the inaugural meeting of the Old Crow Book Club.
Considering the positive impact of "non-contributors" is an innovative and worthwhile exercise in today's environment. Good post, Matt.