Category: Biographical

We met her today at the Ojai Coffee Roasting coffee shop. She’s 82, and just finished a month-long, $20,000 intensive live-in workshop (along with four other $20,000 per person attendees) with self-help guru Byron Katie. Nope, I’ve never heard of Ms. Katie before. But for that sort of money, I’m thinking I that I have a lot of self-help to give! Our coffee-drinking friend, a Brit, met her husband in South Africa. Living in England, she refused to move back to Apartheid South Africa, so after 20 years of marriage, they divorced. She departed with $1 million of his $10 million wealth. His subsequent two wives got the rest of it, upon his death. She’s still mad about that. And, nope, I never even learned our coffee-drinking friend’s name. But I will, when she attends my new self-help seminar, now on the drafting table.

Ellen (not her real name) was a long way from home, wherever home used to be. Since she exhausted her savings after being laid off her job in 2005, home becomes anywhere in Sacramento that she can find to lay her head.

On this wet and stormy night, she would lay her head near the river, where I found her playing a card game she invented herself. Since she was playing it alone, I presumed it to be a derivative of solitaire, seven piles of cards being flipped and arranged in an indecipherable sequence. She had two names for the game, neither of which would appear in an English language dictionary.

I settled in on the neighboring bench to listen to her. The narration that followed was at times difficult to follow. I learned that Ellen had studied computer software and knows five programming languages. After being illegally dismissed from her previous, final employment, she sued them for wrongful termination. A flurry of unsuccessful lawsuits depleted her resources. Ellen bounced from couch to couch until she wore her welcome threadbare. The streets alone welcomed her.

Ellen’s verbal articulation and expressive voice made the veracity of her claims hard to dismiss, yet the warm shimmer within her voice showed she was not tired of life. She possessed a vibrant glow, as if, despite being encrusted with grime and worn with wear, at any moment she would uncover the golden nugget to forever change her fortune.

If she appeared on the Homeless Elocutionist of the Year television game show, she would bring tears and a standing ovation from the crowd, and even the most berating, hardened judge would cave in and give her a compliant thumbs up. This, despite her caked-on street muck and the impressive odors that accompany those with limited accessibility to bathing.

I probed, “So how are you managing to eat, Ellen, with no income?”

Her answer was oblique. Apparently foragers makeshift from a variety of sources which are difficult to easily enumerate.

Suddenly she dug within the plastic bags that apparently housed all of her worldly belongings, extricating a battered teddy bear with two bug-like antennae inexplicably sprouting from its forehead. A faded pink ribbon hung around its neck.

“We’re bear-ly making it!” she confessed, the bright tone in her voice contagious. Her widened eyes were eloquently expressive, with the easy capacity to grab me by the throat.

I squirmed uncomfortably, increasingly cognizant that my own life was stacked unaccountably in my favor. 

One advantage of hearing a stranger’s story is that it leaves the option of our own opinions. Sure, Ellen’s story was gripping and persuasive. It challenged me. It bent my stereotypes of a homeless, down-on-her-luck woman.

If it were true.

With no way to establish the veracity of her story, it could all be fabrication. Aren’t the Homeless born manipulators, just waiting to hit up their audience with “The Ask” for a dollar or two? Sure, Ellen seemed accomplished and talented. But she might just as easily be delusional or conniving.

My mental arguments and counter-arguments were like the quick tides of water sloshing in a bathtub. I wanted to walk away, but I felt stuck.

Slowly and quietly, I pulled my wallet from my back pocket, realizing with a start that my choices were limited–I possessed only one dollar and a twenty dollar bills. I awaited a confirmation of which bill to choose, with no result.

But just in case those gripping eyes were telling the truth, I pulled out the twenty.

I thanked her for the time together. “Maybe this will help with your next few meals,” I nearly apologized.

I stepped into the dark and rain of this stormy night, and all the way back, I wondered whom I had really met–and what she had seen in me.

When we lose confidence in the direction our lives are navigating, we may look to the example of those in our family tree who achieve success or recognition. Uncle Henry invented a greenhouse tomato humidifier that would hydrate the dirt without the need for a drip sprinkling system. Forebear Grandmother Merva developed a chili recipe which she marketed so successfully that the revenues allowed her to invest her fortune in NASCAR championship racing cars, each one emblazoned with a logo promoting her very own “Mother’s Butt-Kickin’ Beans.”

Some of us who lack such a prominent and impressive family tree struggle through life’s mundane struggles, hoping to come up occasionally for air.

This describes Steven, a student in my classroom housed in the parole office. Having attended my class for over two years, he struggles to maintain his fifth-grade reading level, suffering from dyslexia and other learning disabilities.

Steven has difficulties making appropriate behavior choices. A few months ago, he arrived in class with one eye swollen shut and his face badly bruised. Believing himself to have been disrespected upon leaving a bar, he took up fisticuffs with two fellow revelers, who got the best of him. Fortunately for him, he survived, and the assault charge was eventually demoted to disorderly conduct.

Within weeks he was re-arrested for carrying an illegal switchblade. Again, the judge reduced the charges since the blade only fractionally exceeded the legal length. Saved again. He will do community service.

Last week he earned himself another court date by threatening the clerk in the general relief office for not providing him the benefits he was convinced that he deserved.

As many of us do during times of emotional distress, he fished through his family tree to validate his self-worth despite his recent incorrigible behavior.

“I’m not a great example to my daughter,“ he began. “My brother, though, he really made something of himself,” Steven boasted. “Did you know he earned certifications to do plumbing, carpentry and auto body repair?”

“That’s amazing!” I responded. “What a talented guy!”

“Not only that,” he continued. “He was an ordained minister.”

I was impressed. “Where was his church?”

“Oh, he didn’t have a church,” Steven explained. “He had lots of time to study, though. He earned his vocational certificates and his ordination while he was in prison.”

I sat in shocked silence.

“Yeah. He did 31 years for murder before he passed away from cancer in prison last week.”

He stared silently and blankly at me, like an actor who has forgotten his lines.

“I’m going to miss him,” he muttered. “He was the best brother you could ever want.”

When is Yogi Berra’s birthday? What date did the War of 1812 begin? Exactly how many days until July 4? How many years and days old is your friend? What day did Saigon fall to North Vietnam?

If you’re standing on the corner waiting for the bus with John (not his real name), as I do nearly every workday, he could instantly tell you the answers to these and a great variety of other odd, date-related trivia questions. John has an exceptional ability to recall and calculate dates.

He does not consider his abilities exceptional. In fact, John assumes that everyone should be able to perform these same mental gymnastics.

John is exceptional in another way—he speaks with perfect diction. Not just good diction—perfect diction. He eschews colloquialisms and possesses such a perfectly neutral dialect that, had he served as his speech coach, he could have made George W. Bush sound positively educated.

There’s one more unusual thing about John. He’s schizophrenic. He is so heavily medicated that all expression is permanently drained from his face. He struggles to stay awake, even when he’s standing at the bus stop.

John regularly lists all the old VHS tapes and DVD movies he has recently watched, listing all the actors’ names, the names the characters play in the movie, and of course, the year of each movie’s release.

John waits with me at the bus stop as he travels from the mental health facility to his group home. In one hand he always clasps a round red plastic container held together with scotch tape, white paper cutouts taped to the front to mimic a television screen and tuning knobs. The white paper at the top identifies his construction as “Mental Television.” In his other hand he holds a crude, hand-made semblance of a person’s face drawn on paper cup and attached to the end of a screw. It represents the face of a man who is watching the Mental Television.

I hope to see him at the bus stop again tomorrow, when I will again try to understand my friend, the Fabulous Calendar Man, and tune into the Mental Television that holds his view of the world.

I first became aware of the existence of San Luis Obispo, California, in 1969. It was my freshman year in college near Chicago. My brand new roommate thrust his hand into mine and declared, “Hi, I’m Rob, and I’m from San Luis Obispo.” Hailing from the picturesquely named Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, the odd name of the California town stayed with me.

Neither of us could know that less than two years later I myself would visit SLO, not on a lark of a trip to the west coast, but on a mission. Rob had been hitchhiking home for Christmas vacation in 1971. The convertible veered off the road and flipped. The owner was killed outright, and Rob was comatose.

Rob and I had sung together in glee club. When the club toured California in the spring of 1972, 25 club members crowded into his hospital room. As his closest friend at the time, I was ushered to his bedside. He appeared to be taking a nap, hair neatly combed; I shouted into his ear as if that would break the coma’s hold. Still, he slept on. Eventually, we all vacated the hospital room.

My next visit to SLO was in 1974. Rob had continued to sleep on. When the nursing staff at the long term care facility rolled him onto the grass, strapped into his wheelchair, they had to reassure me that the person I saw was indeed my former roommate. Pale, blind and curled in a fetal position, I made a vigorous attempt to rouse him. Instead, Rob would sleep on for another 12 years before his light would finally be extinguished.

Tonight we are again in San Luis Obispo, waiting for the start of the movie, “Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould”. The theater looks tiny because it is. There are exactly 47 seats. I sit in one of those seats, reviewing my own inner life, and a consequential chapter that started playing here in San Luis Obispo, what now seems so long ago.