[This is a story I wrote many years back. I’m putting it here for a particular reason, which I explain in the note at the end. But please don’t sneak ahead and read the note unless you’ve given up on the story and can’t take any more.]
The time I spent living under a bridge like a troll has to have been the worst in my whole life. It’s cold as shit under there, and naturally the eight months I spent were from October through May.
I can’t tell you how stupid it feels to be without a place to live. Sure, you’re lonely and miserable, but I’ve been lonely a lot by nature and misery can become strangely normal, but the whole time, I never stopped feeling stupid. How the fuck did I get myself into this, why don’t I get out of it, what’s wrong with me, did I leave all my mental equipment in a bus-station men’s room, that sort of thing.
It stinks under a bridge, and even though you’re protected in a way, it’s an insulting kind of protection, like having the environment thumb its nose at you–“Oh look at you, sap, this is the best you can do, I know rats that have it better.” Nobody pissed under there when I was around, but it still stank of piss from before, and when I went off to dredge up some food, somebody’d come from somewhere and piss under there again. And I don’t like to say it, I did too, sometimes. In the winter. Jesus, you don’t want to go out where it’s even colder, with the wind along the river, just to take a leak.
The one good thing, in an ironic way, was when the river froze over. It was pretty small as a river, but out where water is precious there’s a tendency to call almost anything that flows for eighty percent of the year a river because then it sounds like you’ve got water–“I’m going down to the river.”
But when it froze over, I walked out on the ice. First of all, I think better when I’m moving, and it’s warmer when you’re moving (assuming the wind isn’t whipping down the channel, as it did all too often) and out in the middle it didn’t stink. Sometimes you could play one of those I’m-lost-in-the-frozen-north games with yourself, which is a lot better than I’m-lost-in-the-middle-of-an-American-city.
Second, you’re walking on water, and who hasn’t wanted to (come on–right?). Third, I could feel life flowing along underneath me, the current’s moving even if you can’t see it or feel it, and you know the old moldy carp, the sixth-generation granddaddy catfish are trading wisecracks and letting each other know they don’t give a rat’s ass if spring ever comes because then they’ll just have to dodge hooks and nets.
I used to make up stories that the fish would tell each other, especially when it was getting on toward evening and I couldn’t face curling up in the stink and pretending I was just oh-so-warm when really I couldn’t quite stop feeling my toes but wished I would soon because they hurt, shit did they hurt.
Old Frank Catfish, he’d been a river pilot in the old days, led schools of shad upstream to spawn. (I don’t know if that river ever had shad–I don’t even know what a shad looks like.) “‘Mess of bedsprings ahead,’ I told ’em, ‘gotta detour a bit to the left, damn good spawning grounds though. You’ll be proud of those fry.'” “Eeyup,” says Claude Carp, who’s retired from the Riverbottom Navy with the rank of commander, “them shad were a peaceable tribe, I miss ’em. Too many trash fish around these days. Got some goldfish moved in, come right out of the sewer.” Then they’d go on and reminisce at each other, fins hardly moving, because in the winter a fish has about as much metabolism as a weed, and a conversation like I just related would take them three and a half hours to get through. No, I wouldn’t want to be a fish–that’s how I’d end up thinking each time, and maybe that was the idea behind it all, finding something worse off than I was so at least I could get some sleep.
It was just that one winter. Another one would have killed me.
Here’s the part that I don’t totally understand. I probably could have got a job. I mean, you have half a brain and a pair of hands, and you don’t drink too much or take drugs (all true of me, in varying degrees) and you can get a part-time, ten or twenty hour a week job, a little here, a little there, and you can eat and at least occasionally sleep inside. And there are shelters these days, even in the most medieval American city.
But I didn’t want that. I wanted to be down there, shitting off the side of a rotting piling when nobody was looking and grabbing garbage and rolling in the stink. I hadn’t already gone down far enough, I guess. I’d felt rotten, but I wanted to feel as rotten as anyone could feel, and I didn’t know what would come out the other side.
What did happen was, come May and whiffs of flowers drifted under the bridge, when maybe it would have been possible to live there and think softer troll thoughts, I just walked out, panhandled $2.85, went into a thrift shop, bought a shirt and a pair of pants, went back to the river–and not under the bridge either–stripped bareass, jumped in, scrubbed off eight months of dirt with some old leaves, tied a rock around my old clothes, put on my thrift-shop snazzies, went in town, bought a comb and a throwaway razor with the 35 cents left and got a fast-food job, all in under three hours.
I guess I had to know, and now I know. How deep could I go, and how far could I come back? Well, I could have gone deeper–I didn’t kill, I didn’t steal (much), I didn’t go wino and I didn’t sleep in my own shit like a gorilla. But for an upright, intelligent mammal, I hit the damn-near bottom. My goal now is to be something like head of an ad agency. Why? Action-reaction. As far down as you go, the farther up you can come on the rebound. As for ad copy, I’ve got a collection of metaphors you wouldn’t believe.
[Explanatory note: For my column at the Welcomat in the ‘80s, I sometimes dropped in a piece of fiction – but not labeled as such. I figure it’s the reader’s job to decide what he or she is reading. Well, with this one – which I have changed only to correct one typo – a bunch of people who I thought knew me fairly well took it as a real reminiscence or confession or what have you.
[So, though I’ve already let the kitten out of the sack here by admitting it’s fiction, I’m wondering how many of you, today, might have taken this for my version of reality? Send a note if you have a comment. Don’t if you don’t. Either way, drink a cup of tea in my name.]
lickhaven 