A few years ago, Tom DeMott invoked “the 28th annual (something like that) West Harlem Coalition Anti-Gentrification Street Festival” in the following story about his conversation with Olaf — a homeless man from Tom’s tribe. Their encounter hints at how Tom came to be the source of a humane tradition that’s got legs.
I passed by one to my left, a six inch horizontal tube of sliver-painted scaffolding between us. I glimpsed the standard black magic marker declaration of homelessness propped on the white sidewalk cold concrete, passing on a lot of unedited words displayed on brown cardboard with scissor-cut edges.
There was another in place as I approached the next street crossing, on the other side of it. He’d set up within feet of a newspaper stall’s wall. Its crisp plastic housing provided a sterile backdrop to his pile. The area of my walk is near Zabar’s fine foods. Customers feel guilty in the blocks nearby, and happy after they’ve left the store, so it is in their political and religious interest that the bums know where to catch a dime from them. An old friend and tenants’ rights ally who’d been assassinated on 147th street and dumped in the Bronx because of his uncompromising political beliefs — and, on account of brave and risky housing court defense strategies which included a bid to have a notorious Italian landlord’s yacht confiscated — referred to Zabar’s as “The Temple” with both humor and an unnerving venom.
The walk light was red. A few cant-waiters of the cell phone variety made their move anyway. I was in no hurry to get to the responsibilities of home. The blanketed man looked comfortable surrounded in Taj Mahal turrets of possessions. At the foot of them, he too, was introduced by a lengthy treatise. “Veteran” was the most eye-catching, common as it was, on the streets of the seven letter words. I looked for a dog but he didn’t have one. I passed him by too after the light turned green.
Near the crosswalk toward the next block a bearded man with a thirty gallon white plastic bag beside him on the brown-flecked snow appeared to be rummaging near a metal-grated garbage basket. There was a plaque attached to it which advised in large-lettered brought-to-you-by that the container was a green gesture of an omniscient city-councilman whose manipulative instincts found yet another way to promote name-recognition with social consciousness while he voted down-the-line with big real-estate interests. I noticed matching plastic bags wrapped around each of his sneakers as I passed him by. Snowboots.
Halfway across the street I turned back, unzipped my nylon satchel and fished in my spare-dollar stash pocket — mini-funds for musicians, sad story subway tellers, and general mendicants of all races, creeds, and genders. Top doughning went to players of notes and gals of gals. This morning I’d just harvested the ones that grow into litter on my desk, crumpled green billed-up ones from emptied blue jeans as they get prepped for their post-week-worn detergent dose. I’d waited a few jeans, so I was strapped.
I approached carefully, thinking how not to offend since he was occupied and there were no placards in sight. Reaching my hand out in a slow arc, I said, “Here man, take a few bucks.” He raised his head with not an ounce of hurriedness,· and with neither hostility, nor deferential gratefulness. This was not the first time he’d been interrupted by unsolicited contributors. He advised that he neither needed it, nor “had any use for it.” He thanked me though, and with remarkable speed assessed we were from the same tribal area.
Within minutes I knew, in some detail, of his youth in Africa. Basic things like Tanzania being his favorite country, and his sense that Mali would have been a close second if he’d stayed longer, and that he liked the continent’s music. And more complicated concepts he’d developed from living in places of conflict wherever his missionary parents ended up dragging him to. He did not respond to my joy in the constant surprises of the blues-tinted harmonica riffs fluttering hither and yon in ballads Malian. Maybe he was out of Africa before Sonny Boy infiltrated the interior, although Mr. James Brown must have already added his licking stick to the Jali’s mandinka harp.
He did mention how a guitarist named Maximus-Unitas-Adjanohun answered the question: is forgiveness a Christian or a Voodoo idea? “Forgive everyone, even the one who has tried to seduce your wife,” were the lyrics he contributed from his song called “Pardon.”
My tribe he figured was unions; that I’d been in and around them long enough to have gained his level of wisdom about them, and that I might also know something about the nature of work, at least in some parts of the U.S. of A. So he talked at ease and without any indication he thought he needed to feel me out before trying the goodfoot on me. It was a pleasure to be far away from white wine mantelpieces and cut through the bullshit. His worldliness allowed him to speak on any topic with neither the generalized invention nor pretense, so we started a good chat that peeled along to the bells of art brut. Oh, we were out in the cold. He didn’t smell.
He said he was often misunderstood with his explanation of changes in America that took away satisfaction from workers. “In Japan; their secret is they are never satisfied with what they make or how they make it. People tell me I think like Donald Trump but he always wants to point fingers at some bunch out there,” he took his hand and snapped at the air out there. “That’s what he does. But I’m talking about what’s happened to women, men and kids over time. How before they were happy and their lives were not filled with crap.”
I nodded but he looked at me and I could tell he thought he needed to get me farther onto his family farmland. Just a little bit more. I mean the guy had conversational powers of observation I don’t encounter anymore. Those surrounding me now have heads so full of barricades they cant watch the bodies in simple silence. Even though he didn’t know any of them, I felt him surmising that some of their weary dimmery had rubbed off on me. But, he wasn’t sure.
“Listen, you ever eat ? I didn’t hear the word and asked again. He said it, and then, “It’s an American Indian staple?”
I still didn’t hear it and moved on as I have learned to do when I need to wing it owing to my got-my-yah-yah’s-out ears.
“No, I’ve been on reservations, but haven’t heard of that.” He was thinking so I kept going. “I like driving, so I drive through things. Truck drivers don’t dig it in cities, but I’ll go anywhere, not that I like European traffic circles. I drove in those Indian lands out west. The food stops out there had everything to do with meat. Gas stations and cooked meat steaming in plate glass windows. That’s what I remember about their food. A lot of meat cafeteria-style at all their oasis stops. And cigarettes and alcohol on colored signs all over.”
“What about curry?”
“Well, I love curry.”
“OK. Listen. Let me lay this on you. The way American Indians cook, and Indians from India cook, it’s the same. The women passed down the recipes for a thousand years, well, it was mostly the women, not always. So, what they made changed over time. It was a little by little thing. When you eat that food, you’re eating a thousand years. That curry you eat now comes from learning. It’s like what you know now that you can tell your grandkids. A thousand years. You know if the grandmas ran the world, the non-vengeful grandmas, it would be a peaceful and productive culture.”
I didn’t want to forget his ideas and asked, asked for permission really, if he would wait for me to pull out my pad and take a note or two. While I was half-kneeling, he found a less than pristine book-sized white paper bag in his own sack of possession and pulled out a black marker. He began a printing process of his theory on it that ended up being a kind of a mathematical equation constructed in the open, undyed middle spaces of his little bag. I scribbled on my pad without the clarity of his block letters. He had three prominent drops of tannish orange baby food goo in his beard that could have been labeled on the little jars of baby dining with any identifying description from pumpkin to peach, from fowl to flesh. He was a survivor, not a performer.
And this picker was a tweaker. “I tweak the precinct cops into unconstitutional acts against my person.” He’d tweaked me to get me into conversation. He didn’t get all arrogant and say that, but if not me, his world would have drawn in someone curious else. His relationship with the police must have gone through disparate stages in the sparring before the main event he seemed most proud of. And, the throwdown was not even with the coppers. He didn’t say so exactly in our conversation, but they’d somehow found his father who showed up in the neighborhood after decades of being out of touch. “He tried to bring me home!”
With great satisfaction, Olaf told me his father the missionary had been almost horrified by his outlook on the world. He’d told his father he couldn’t come home because he had a two year plan to go to Sing Sing and learn to be at youthful ONE — to make intellectual communion with a class of citizens in the joint who were in need of him and who he was in need of too: “black gangsters.” Black at them, he’d serve some time.
I could not imagine Olaf having this conversation with another passerby, certainly not with the same nonchalant, truthful bravado. I was not flattering myself. The attentions of the ragtop man were just part of the collision of bodies on a sleeping city sidewalk. They’d been approaching me to share their brown paper bags of glue for forty-five years. Hell, longer. The gypsy kids came to me out of the bamboo while their mothers were weaving baskets down by the stream. Merrily, merrily, it started then, at eight years old. Oh, I was a natchul.
I advised Olaf that he “thrilled me.” Surrounded in silence, and his idea of achievement that was true to me. The directness of his plan hit me with a feeling of deep emotional attachment. It was hellfire right on it. I had played ball in the wooden gym at the end of the worn stone archways of Sing Sing where doves flew above in the sunlit rafters unbothered by our long echoing bounces, and the grunts and shouts of our elbows. Most intense ball I’d ever played, gushing out from prison bodies, not dribbling. And there, here, us introverted madmen, fiddling with the garbage.
I told him about our street fair this past year, how the little kids had come up to the table unsolicited by grown-ups, pulled out the chunks of colored chalk from fresh boxes we’d hoped they’d enjoy, and started-in with their street truths on the pavement after they’d tired from hours in the bouncy castle. I explained our theme this year had been “bring out your art, show it, play it” and that people did. They just came out of their apartments and decorated emergency police barriers — the kind used at riots in the old days, and, in this millennial one, as pens for idea control to make protesters feel small. They’d hung sculptures from fire escapes, set up their own tents for portrait taking on-the-house or to move on their felt chotskies for that dime, wrote poems or politics on the street themselves, even wrote defiant notes on a discarded door in a building alleyway.
“You’re what? What was that called?”
“It was the 28th annual (something like that) West Harlem Coalition Anti-Gentrification Street Festival.”
“You call it that?” he said and made me repeat it with joy and wonder emanating from his Twits’s beard, enjoying both a non vendor block party howl and applauding the unknown longevity of it.
“Shoooot, we register it like that on our application to the city permit department every year.” That was boasting. This open air conversation allowed it. Besides, we were standing not far from flamboyant Edgar Allan Poe Street.
“That minute on the phone as they take down the basic information gets more humor-fully aged every year. It’s a reward, more and more, as the enlightened liberal government assures the peoples’ all-the-tired-horses’ events are getting their polished evictions.” He pulled shut the red strap on his bag.
“Aint New York grand?” he said.
.
We parted as if we’d seen each other regularly since the 60’s, as if we were kindred spirits of the basketball diary, as if it had been a night of dancing to soukous or merengue, a toast to curry-making. We were just kind of happy to know each of us had been where some truth lies in the past and future. It wasn’t pretension, just some happenstance sharing, nothing grandiose, except for both of us extranjeros. When the make up drops, it’s just brothers and sisters shimmying unsubordinated in beautiful towns ordinary.
Humming and shimmying, and raising hell. And, despite that, him with no bed.
I was late, missed my Mom’s metoprolol tartrate dose, and would have to explain my affair at the trash can. Instead of carrying on with my walk, I went down the stairs to the subway turnstile. A woman was seated on the gum spotted-dog floor. I gave her Olaf’s bucks and she thanked me as if it were twenty. So, big postal pension boy pulled out a twenty.
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May a tumbleweed like Olaf, or someone like her, blow into your next thousand years of curry.
.
March 2016