Superior Ave. VI (End on a prayer)

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This must have been at least a decade later from where I sat homeless in Cleveland, Ohio.  Real-time so to me, the author penning the page, this is like ... gad, what... a year ago?  Year and a half, maybe.  Some shit.  I'm at the wedding of a couple of friends I know from the bar at which I'd be working at the time.  I'd be somewhere around two-ish years clean from the stuff, staying away on the marijuana maintenance plan.  Having employed the geographical cure they told me in rehab would never work, I moved to the west coast to keep myself clean... like I couldn't find it out there.  Well at the time of this alliteration I'm about to pick apart, I hadn't found anything stronger than alcohol or pot.  Hadn't looked for it.  Didn't want it.  Not for over two years, at this point.

Let me start off by saying again how much I hate weddings.  Mine or anyone else's.  Whether or not I have to make a speech has nothing to do with it.  I just do not like weddings.  I feel it's an irrational ritual, there I said it.  As a man who loves the freedom of being able to do what he wants, when he wants, I of course tell myself, Goddamn, I hope I never get sucked in, at least not for years and years.  That being said, my main point is the only fact.  I flat out don't like weddings.

So I'm at this wedding, somewhere on the west coast, somewhere around two years clean, more than a decade after this homeless Cleveland.  At which time I'd be working behind the bar of a club where I'd stack kegs in walk-in coolers, stack cases of beer on top of one another, while stacking those two junk-free years together, smoking pot and writing about getting high.  Which incidentally would be how I would stay clean for those two years and longer.  Go figure.  Anyway, the crowd at this bar I work at is not conducive to the type of person coming fresh off a heroin needle.  My lack of a self identity would be complex and my fish out of water would be obvious.  Picture a petty high school popularity contest and flashing colored lights.  Now turn up the vile, horrid and unintelligent thump of club music and sell alcohol in the midst of hot cocktail waitresses dancing on the bar.  This is where I worked.

So from this place, I meet two people that end up getting married.  The wedding reception is a mere reflection of the bar on any given Friday night, mixed in with a bunch of family I don't know.  So sure, I have no problem admitting it, I slunk outside several times to catch marijuana tokes from a one-hitter in my pocket.  The kind that looks just like a cigarette.  The kind I can smoke in public, stealing quick hits on downtown streets, looking as if I'm lighting up on the way to work, an  average inconspicuous Joe Camel.  I slip outside with a couple people from the bar whom I know partake and we all stand in a circle behind the building and get high.  Then I wander back inside and talk to some more people I barely know and basically feel my usual out of place.  So I slip back outside by myself this time and decide to walk around several downtown blocks, catching a few more one-hits to the face.

I end up at the 10th and Commerce bus station where homelessness runs ramped.  A man stands ragged with his back against a wall, not waiting on a bus, just hanging out.  There's nobody else around in a smellable distance so I ask the guy if he wants to take a toke.  We smoke several one-hits, looking like we're lighting cigarette butts, over and over.  The guy has no home, no car, no girl, no family... nothing.  No one but himself.  He keeps calling me Travolta, since I'm wearing a somewhat expensive club shirt I'll inherit form a sober friend, Blackie Rhodes, from the rooms where people don't drink.  We pass the pot between us, he tells me his name.  I forget it before he says it.  That's how I do it, names go in one ear and out the other.  So I end up calling people hey you or brother.

Anyway, this homeless piece of shit, right?  This dirty, trashy transient, dig?  This no good low down bum on the street and I have one of the most intelligent, stimulating conversations I'll have for many moons.  We inhale and discuss the nature of life, the frailty of people and freedom from possessions.  The freedom of a chainless existence.  Free to live life full and hard, surviving on divine timing.  Content to forge paths that typical people couldn't comprehend.  Paths they'll misunderstand, feel sorry for and superior because of; unable to get passed the poverty of the situation or the stigma of the lifestyle, to see the beauty in the simplistic complicity of the machine, the system which we all make up.  We smoke and talk of what it is to be free, to chase dreams, to live out of a duffel bag and write it all down, with nothing to hold one to a home town but a habit.  Lucky above all to be stringless and free to drift about and experience it all.  Quick, quick... before we get old and die.

I find it odd that instead of chumming elbows with the rest of the thousand-dollar-purse carriers like I should be, I'm down here at the bus station, pulling drags off the drug pipe; connecting more with a homeless man, high on grass than the wedding guests, in a self proclaimed high-class of their own. 

I part ways with the dispossessed fellow and wander back into the downtown reception hall, watching the fabulous dancers spin with cocktail glasses and swizzle stick grins.  I'll hang out and show my face, wondering when it's time to leave.  By the time I do, I'll be showered in alcohol and in need of a couch to crash on.  On my grand exit from the place, I'll shake hands with a couple I'm friends with and make a prediction they'll be getting married some day.  I will be completely stoned and hammered, vocalizing random thoughts, turning the air uncomfortably awkward between the couple, I'm sure.  Making a prediction of a marriage at a wedding, would have been impressive had they stayed together long enough to finish out the year.  They'll split up in 4 months and there will be my foot in my mouth again.  As per usual.

I feel now, here in Cleveland, Ohio, exactly the same as I will 12 years from now at that wedding party, smoking transient buds in a Tacoma, Washington bus station. Hanging with the homeless can be fun, provided I can stand up, walk away and go home.  Sleeping in shrubbery down by the river was not my finial resting place.  Walking around downtown like I was right now, trying to keep moving and find a secluded spot to sleep for an hour wasn't my end of the line.  Sitting with the Prince in a homeless concrete jungle wasn't my ultimate destination, I'm just passing through.  I don't need to make friends, not here on the bottom.

I'm just laying low and staying the fuck out of dodge.  Hanging with the homeless when I was homeless just made me feel vulnerable.  I'm safer keeping to myself, Robby's and Crowley's company, doing what we can to sleep on Jefferson's floor for the night. 

Sure, right now I was by myself, walking 3 am downtown streets, trying to stay moving.  Sleeping for an hour at a time then picking up and keeping on.  I wont feel safe lying on a bench with my eyes shut.  Not in the silent darkness of where nobody looks.  True, I was taking bird baths in gas station bathrooms, sleeping where I had to, eating what I could... but there's a big difference between being out a roof off for a night or two and giving in to the full onslaught of living on the streets.  Yes, I was broke, strung out, stealing razors on the way in into the gas station and shaving with the liquid hand soap in the bathroom mirror.  OK, I did hide a small duffel bag of clothes in the wilderness, carrying my home slung over my shoulder like a snail on vacation.

But still... I wouldn't consider my self technically homeless. 

To be judged by the literal sense of the word, yeah sure, alright I was homeless but I never did get comfortable with the idea.  Never did I nestle into the bricks and start learning names.  Wandering streets with random bums and junkies, talking transient talk.  Never did I completely let myself go into the idea that the streets were it and I'd be here for the duration, or for any real time at all.  I had it in me to change my situation and that I would.  I couldn't see giving up this early on in the game.  I am at life's transit station.  Just passing through.

I had nowhere to go but onward, I was learning the names of the streets as I walked.  There was nothing else to do for another four hours but keep moving and maybe head back to where Cain and Robby are posted up on train station benches, catch another hour or so of sleep before the sun comes up and our palms come out.  I walked up East 12th and took a left on Lakeside.  I figured I'd go walk down by the water, stare into Lake Erie for a while.  Kill some time.  I got to E. 9th and made a right, thinking to myself the whole way.

I can honestly say It's not pride that keeps me from calling it quits on a concrete comforter, from investing in a cardboard box for a roof with a matching mattress and will work for food sign.  Pride.  Please.  I gave that up the first time I asked another grown man for anything to spare.  I pawned my pride for pocket change.  Like a dwarf's dick in the pool, my dignity has shriveled.  Self respect, self worth, image, confidence... sold it, cheap.  Whatever.  The issue is not with that.  It is the fact that man can do anything man puts his mind to, which is a fact truer than most.  I have proven this to myself by staying as high as I did, as long as I did without legal income, tender or residence.  If I can do that, I can do anything.  There is no reason for me stay on the bottom.  Not when I've got so much further to fall.  From where I was, walking early morning streets, a viable chunk of my future hinged on what I did in these next few weeks.  Thomas Frye, the fallout guy... will he fall or will he fight?

I kicked a stone with my shoe, walking up E. 9th toward the water, passing a park on my left and hoofing it high over a set of train tracks.  I got to where the water meets the shore and the land meets the water.  The Rock and Roll hall of Fame sat proudly to my left, jutting in juxtapositions of mirrored glass angles and shining metal.  There was a small edge of the water park ahead of me which I walked toward, still raking through the thoughts in my head, turning over the very soil, fuck a new leaf.

This whole homeless thing is a major line the sand for me.  A current line I can either push back farther, spending my time swilling cheap wine with downtrodden men in Chuck Manson beards,  regaining the taste for Mad Dog 20/20 since I stopped drinking it in high school but now it's all I can afford... or I can keep the line where it lays and focus on changing my situation.  Turn around and better myself before I don't have the opportunity to anymore.

Thomas Frye has never gone full homeless.  I believe he aims to keep it that way.

I stood overlooking the bleak black midnight water of Lake Erie as it crashed and foamed below me.  I love the smell of large bodies of water, salt or fresh, it connects with something in my soul.  I took in a lungful and exhaled a clean breath.  My feet skittered across a long vast concrete deck spattered in goose poop to an area with a gargantuan decorative anchor taking up space near slews of stone public benches.  Slowly I walked, perched a bit above the water along a low fence lining the edge of the deck.  Small waves crashed as they rolled into the rocks on the shore just below me.  I stared for many minutes into the deep vacant churn of the undertow, contemplating the meaning of homelessness and  formulating an escape.  Giving real thought to my options, which weren't many, teetering here on the edge of this long hard fall.  Losing myself in the depth of the rhythmic waters, thinking about what a low down dirty son, friend and brother I've been and how far I've fallen already.

Gone from steak eater to street sleeper in no time at all.  Now I have nothing to grab onto to pull myself out of this tar pit.

I have sold all I own for the habit.  I have lied to everyone I know at least once.  I have stolen from department stores, hardware, automotive, book and grocery stores, clothing departments and freezer sections, from family and co-workers.  If I had any friends I'd steal from them too.  I've cheated my parents out of copious amounts of money they never did know about.  I have scraped streets with dirty palms extended, breathing the words of the weak who survive on change in a cup.  I have pulled from public ashtrays and lit the shorts in front of an onlooking gathering of decent people ... and still, I could not fathom giving up and attaining a full state of homelessness.  I fear I would never make my way back.  That I'd fall so far out of the social norm, I'd lose contact with what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior.  God forbid I break all my walls down and pull a sock off in a public restaurant dining room, cleaning the lint from between my toes, sitting on the edge of a decorative goldfish pond by the long line of patrons in the lobby.

It's true, an addict has a certain amount of self respect he's got to be willing to scrap for the procurement of his chemical.  Either that, or he's made of money... or he doesn't stay high.  Keep addicted long enough and the bottom drops out like the floor on that carnival ride that spins so fast you stick to the wall.  The longer you remain strung out, the easier that pride will be to walk away from.  Easy like leaving that stinking pile of puke on the pavement from where you got off said carnival ride and hurled up your lunch, as you easily walk away hoping nobody saw.  While all self respect runs down through the cracks in the sidewalk.  With the issue of pride gone, the addict soon finds he is able to reach new lows rather quickly.  Maybe a bit too easily. 

After a long motionless coma, where my focus was devoured by Lake Erie's murky waters and all its frigid thoughts, I turned and walked back towards the city, the pale lit skyline hurling tall into the abyss of night.  I trudged all the way back up E. 9th.several blocks up hill.  Late night commerce was sparse, lights were out in shops and the city slept.  Random cars of drunken clowns drunk driving downtown drove by periodically.  I kept walking.  A lowered Elcamino pushed by with two 12's thumping a box in the trunk.  Another car followed behind it, a late 80's Caprice Classic.  They both turned left on St. Clair, I spun heels to my right and started heading west on St. Clair.  After three blocks I crossed the street and headed up E. 6th.  Then I crossed the street again and shot down Rockwell, heading towards the conglomeration of streets that meet in a cumulation of commerce where Ontario, Superior and Euclid all hug up around W. prospect.  Right in front of Tower City. 

In the daylight hours this area is a runny bowl movement of buses and taxis and hectic traffic passing hoards of pedestrians  carrying shopping bags or rushing with briefcases.  At night it was vacant with homelessness abound.  The taxi cab drivers were at home in bed, sleeping as the bus drivers were, waiting for the alarm to hail off a wake up call under the strict demand of the mortgage payment. 

There were several heavily used ashtrays near Tower City's entrance, now locked up for the night.  Always good for a score or two in the daytime but it meant pulling the short from a public ashtray in front of about 40 or 50 Clevelandites who were no doubt miles above you on the ladder of superiority.  Nothing says degenerate like a man sifting through public ashtray sand.  At night, there were enough random broke smokers walking around pulling shorts from the tray gravel, I figured they would have been all been ravaged by now.  Out of the eight or so ashtrays, I found two partially burnt cigarettes.  One was a Newport, almost completely unsmoked.  The other one was about ½ gone, a generic with lipstick on the filter.  The Newport was the Cadiallic of the two so I slid the almost untouched menthol behind my ear and put someone else's nasty discarded filter in my mouth for a quick nicotine fix.

“Pride is overrated.”  I thought, pulling back on the rotten smoke.  “Pride don't keep you high so who the fuck needs it?” 

I though it but I didn't necessarily believe it.

In fact even in my lack there of, I still viewed myself as having a whole lot farther to fall, pride and self respect wise.  It was very easy to compare myself to those close friends who far surpassed my level of degeneracy.  I've known those who violently spared for change many years before I bit that nasty bullet, taking the necessity pride swallow.  These friends have had on some occasions, dreadlocks and tract marked wrists.  Sometimes they'd bathe, sometimes not.  Traveling the country on the dose, following dead shows, festivals and tours.  Maintaining a habit on the road.  Running sheets from coast to coast.  Books and books of 'em.  Traveling.  Waiting long hours at dirty dopesick train depots.  Shameless beasts, unflinching when it came to panhandling.  They'd sit backs against downtown walls, stretched on a sidewalk, harassing  passers by for pocket change as I sat there with them, minding my own business.  Calling  from their comfortable perch on the stoop like they were selling hot dogs at a ball game.

“Change, here.  Change... Hey, hey... you got any spare change?  No?  Change... change.  Hey, you... you got any change?” 

I hated being around it, couldn't stand to be a part of it.  All their stigma had long been wrung dry until such a degrading act  is no different than hailing a cab or tying shoes, something done without thinking.  Just muscle memory at this point.  Fueled by the necessity to quell a horrible sickness such as the one that plagued them.  Fuck that.

Not that I'm better than anybody... shit, look at me.  I'm smoking a shorted cigarette from a public ashtray and making a left on W. Prospect. so I can keeping moving and not get jumped by a pack of wandering late night jackals.  How in god's good name can I judge or see myself superior to anyone?  I'm on my unfocused way back to where I've got everything I own in this blistering world stuffed in a duffel bag, stashed behind a dumpster in a bad neighborhood.  I'm just saying...  I hope I never get to that point.  It is my new future bottom.  I'm a bum on the streets, pointing at some other bum, saying “Damn, at least I'm not like that guy.”  Sitting against a wall, yelling out into a crowd of on-comers for handouts, playing the game of odds, sheer numbers.  Thinking: One of these fools standing here has to have a quarter.

No, not me.  If I'm going to beg for your change I'm going to stand up and walk over to you, like a person.  Like a human being.  Give you an excuse like a real man would,  My car is out of gas like 16 blocks up the road, you got anything you could spare?  I'll not call out to you from a far, without the common decency to even stand up.  No.  I'll look you in the eye and lie to your face, like a real ass hole.

I walked the wrong way up Frankfort Ave. and somewhere along the way I ended up on Rockwell.  Huh... I'm not sure what happened there.  From the inside out I was learning the city streets, beating shoes on nighttime concrete.  Sidewalk surfing in black pumas.  An object in motion remains in motion until it finds a secluded place to perch.

... And then I looked up and there it was, somewhere in between Rockwell and Superior Ave., on a side street connecting the two, nestled on the back side of a darkened downtown parking lot, in a corner where several building's met at right angles.  Hanging down from the metal lip of a low standing billboard was a reachable ladder.  Another small rusty latter dangled over a thick concrete overhang, accessible from the fire escape of one of the buildings.  I could climb from the fire escape to the edge of the roof, shimmy over with no problem to grab the ladder hanging from the metal lip of the billboard and pull myself up onto a different view of the city.  The rusty catwalk on which I'd be perched was virtually hidden in the shadows beneath the bright lights that shone on the advertisement above.  The contrast between light and dark did the trick of creating a blind pocket virtually invisible from where I was standing on the sidewalk.  In fact, I had to walk a considerable distance into the black night parking lot to even be able to tell if the catwalk extended all the way into the shadows, which it did.

I made my way to the low hanging fire escape and looked up.

On the billboard was an advertisement for a shaving gel, The Edge, with a man's profile gobbed in a white shaving cream and a razer sheering it clean down to the skin.  The green color of the gel looked cool and mentholated in the bright glow of the lights illuminating the billboard for the passing traffic on Superior Ave. to see.  I made the climb and within minutes I was sitting, legs dangling over the edge with a considerable distance to fall beneath me.  I looked down.  My shoestrings were hanging above the black abyss of asphalt.  Even straining my eyes, I couldn't see the bottom.  Like it didn't even exist.  Like it wasn't even a threat to me, perched over the edge without a safety net.  I looked up.  The Edge.  It looked so foamy up close.  Cool and refreshing.  It made me consider trying the brand next time I was shoplifting for shaving cream. 

Then I set my gaze out over the night time streets of the city, just enough off the ground to give me a decent birds eye.  Not enough to kill me if I fell but probably high enough to break everything I've got, as the ground comes up mighty fast and hard when falling from a billboard.  I would think.  The traffic was sparse down Superior, as the majority of Cleveland slept.  There was an old man with short wiry gray hair and dark skin walking up the sidewalk.  In-between he and I was a small unlit parking lot, surrounded on three sides by buildings.  I was perched in a dark corner of that lot, on the invisible hanger just below the main stage of an inner city advertising amphitheater buried in a stack of Cleveland concrete. 

In a man's life there are probably 4 or 5 extremely relevant turning points when giving his full life a once over in retrospect.  A time one could point to and say, If I'd have done something different right here, none of this would have happened.  I was at one of those points, sitting with legs dangling, looking down at how far I'd have to fall, unable to see the bottom.  I am on the edge of a new can of worms, somewhere between calling myself homeless and trying to spend the night on Jefferson's couch.  Mr. Crowley was somewhere about 20 blocks back, on a secluded train station bench, two benches over from Robby, sleeping.  I had wandered off, trying not to stay in one place for too long.. 

A cool summer night has come out of that hot summer day.  I was wearing a thin black hoodie, zipped only halfway.  It was the perfect warmth for the light breeze dusting through the buildings.  I must have sat under that billboard for an hour and a half that night, letting the time slip through my fingers and wondering how I let myself end up here.  With dangling legs over the edge, I was sure the ground would stop my fall with an instant headache and a broken back before I'll do anything to stop myself from falling any further. 

I've gone from walking through houses with a professional and well paid clipboard in the name of the bank, to walking the 3 am streets, trying to find a secluded bench I can catch an hour's sleep on.  From pulling shirts and neck ties from the closet, freshly dry cleaned suit jackets and pants from hangers to pulling a wrinkled sweatshirt from a duffel bag on the back edge of some parking lot.  Gone from begging the bank to please cash my $1200 paycheck without an ID, to begging for a dollar in front of the bank.  I've fallen this far already and look how much farther I've got to go.  On the edge of  being homeless for real, staring down into the black nothing below me with a long way to fall 'till I hit bottom.  A good portion of my life hinges on what I do in these next few days.  With it all on the line like it is and Thomas Frye without dime one, without a home or anyone to fall back on...what's going to happen next? 

First things fucking last, I've got to find a roof.  Something stable.  Fuck this wandering around shit, sleeping outside.  I'll get in too deep and never make it out.  I've got to do something here.  I thought, swinging my legs.  My head was a playground in which I lived.  I had been thinking hard pretty much non stop since I'd embarked on this lonely late night sidewalk stroll, ending up here on the edge of a billboard for The Edge shaving gel, on the dangerous edge of having nothing to lose and nowhere to go.  I figured with reality's weight on my shoulders, the closest thing to a safety net I was going to get would be a carefully crafted and heartfelt plead to whoever was in charge of such things as what's going to happen next.

So I am not ashamed to admit what I did next. 

It had been a while since I'd said anything out loud that night, let alone anything to the Lord but on this cusp of bad decisions, eyes gaping downward toward a long fall to the illusive bottom, in the last ditch effort of a man with his face in the shit fan, I whispered up a prayer to god, hoping someone up there was listening.

“God... please...”  I slowly spoke out loud into the stale city night, my shoes dangling loose like a boot lace noose over the edge.  “... help me.”






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