Zeke

I first heard about you in a library board meeting. A homeless guy had been playing video games on the library computer. The director, a young guy with a red beard and close-set eyes, said that he made one of the employees uncomfortable. “He makes noises when he plays,” the director said. “He’s a big guy and she feels uneasy when he’s around.”

The director annoyed me because he could not make decisions. Instead of running the library, I thought, he kicked everything up to the board. I looked around the table and saw the director, five White women of a certain age, another white guy and me. It was nine on a weekday night when the meeting was supposed to end at eight thirty. I had not eaten and my stomach was growling. People seemed more interested in batting things around than solving them. It”s not a board-level issue, I thought. The director should take care of it. The caucacity. Oh, the fucking caucacity.

“What kind of noises does he make?” the president of the board asked. She was an older woman with a dry face and a raspy voice.

“Any action we make,” another board member, an attorney, said, “Needs to be checked against the policies in the employee handbook. The rules committee should look into that.”

“What does he wear?” someone else asked. “Does he smell?”

“Can the employee sit someplace else? someone else asked. “Like, at the reference desk on the other end of the second floor?”

Basta, I thought. No mas. I raised my hand and raised my voice. “Does he pay taxes?” I asked.

“No,” the director said.

“So eighty-six the guy,” I said. “The social contract is a contract. Why are we even discussing this?”

The room was quiet. Then, a woman named Isa spoke up. Isa was different from the rest of the board. She was a friend from outside the library, a Salvadoran who taught wood-shop and advocated for immigrant rights. “Libraries are for everyone,” she explained. “Even homeless people”.

I remembered the year I had spent homeless when I was seventeen. When I came into a town, the first place I visited was the library. There would be a clean chair, a space where nobody tried to scam me, steal from me or molest me, and all the books I could read. It was an island of quiet in a rough sea. Once, I tried to steal a book from the library in Rock Springs, Wyoming. An alarm went off and I handed it back, sheepishly. The day after that happened, the librarian, an older woman who looked to me like a high school English teacher, said, “You always read good stuff”. I never tried to steal from a library again.

The memory made me reconsider my position about you. “Is the guy harming anyone?” I asked.

“No,” the director said.

“Does he bother anyone else? I asked.

“No.”

“Then the employee should grow up and get off our tits,” I said. “The library is for everyone.”

The director pursed his lips inside his beard. The president squinted at me. The abruptness of my change surprised even me. Memory can do that.

When I tell people that I was homeless, that stops the conversation. The truth is less impressive than it sounds. When I was seventeen, I was angry. I disliked where I came from. My parents’ fundamental sin, I thought, was to force upon me the curse of consciousness for their own selfish purposes. I felt uncomfortable with existence, and I disliked taking orders. To get away, I took a trip. I hitchhiked and travelled by freight across the country. When it was over, I came back. Whatever it was that made me angry enough to leave home and sleep in building sites and Salvation Army shelters burned itself out. Maybe I got older. Maybe my frontal lobes developed, as they do, I understand, in late adolescence. Maybe I learned that you can’t “get away” from home because home is in the here-and-now that you carry with you. Maybe I finally grokked that sleeping alone in U Haul trucks and under bridges really does suck. Whatever it was, I became normal again.

I don’t think about that time much now. I am, after all, normal. If someone were to meet me on the street, they would think I look like any other not-too-bright straight cis white guy of a certain age. But the minutia of homeless life — banausic shit, like stashing a bag, finding a place to clean up, finding a place to sleep — stick to people who have been homeless as muscle memory the way military habits stick to veterans. I did not mind the physical part of being homeless. I enjoyed pissing in the desert, feeling a callus grow on my hips and the small of my back. What hurt was the lack of a home. Whenever I sat down, someone would ask me to move along. Cops would flash their lights if I walked off the road. Women would give me the side-eye. That’s why I liked libraries. They were the only place where I could just be, without anyone bothering me.

I still get impatient in meetings, and I have no time for chickenshit rules. Those are the vestiges of the itch that made me ride on freight trains and wash my hair in gas station bathroom sinks.

A week after the library board meeting, you were in the parking lot, across from my house. . It was raining and you were trying to stay dry. You were wearing your winter uniform — long oil-cloth duster, cowboy boots, army pants and a red white and blue cowboy hat with a belt tied around it as a hatband and an eagle feather sticking out toward your five o”clock. I thought two people were having an argument, but it was just you, shouting at someone nobody else could see. I walked into the library and found the director. “The guy is downstairs,” I said. “It is fine with me if he hangs out in the library, but he is bothering the neighbors now. I am the neighbors. I can’t hear myself think.”

“I”ll let him inside,” the director said.

“What”s his name,” I asked.

“Zeke.”

The day after I saw you in the parking lot, I saw you on the street by the post office. “Hey, Zeke,” I said. You nodded and kept walking. The day after, I saw you sitting on the bench in front of the library with your belongings piled next to you. A backpack, a sleeping bag, a foam pad, a pair of shoes. Not unlike what I carried when I was on the road. “Hey Zeke,” I said. The third time I saw you, you asked, “What”s your name?” I said that my name was John. You offered a fist-bump and said, “Hey, John.” You told me that you were not schizophrenic. That’s how I learned that you are schizophrenic.

Before I knew your name, I called you “Custer”. You have a thin nose and chin, a hawk-like face, blue eyes, long hair, and a long, General Custer-like beard. You are the same age as he was when he died. He was a career military man — he made his bones in the Civil War, before he became a metonym for hubris and Native genocide — and you like to wear army fatigues. You once told me you wanted to join the Marines, start from the bottom and work your way up. I was sympathetic because I, too, regret not having served. I didn’t join when I was military age because I had an attitude. You didn’t join because you are schizophrenic.

When you take your hat off, your hair and beard make you look like Rasputin, instead of Custer. You almost always wear your hat. I am not used to seeing you without it.

Six months after we first met, I asked a friend of my son if she knew Zeke, the homeless guy. “You mean the captain,” she said. “I call him that because of the hat.”

“He’s a decent guy,” I said. “I enjoy his company more than I do that of the numb-nuts on the library board.”

My son rolled his eyes. “You quit the library board, dad,” he said.

“Best decision I ever made,” I said.

“We were sick of hearing you bitch about it.”

“I see that guy Zeke all over the place,” my son”s friend said, “He’s like a fixture in town. I didn’t know his name until you told me”.

In the summer, you shed the duster but you keep the military look. Your top is a fatigue shirt with the sleeves cut off. You sleep rough — my wife sees you sleeping on the bench at the train station — but you are clean. Your hair is long, blond, combed and tucked behind your ears. Your beard is not matted. You don’t smell. You keep the hat — weathered, curled, neon stars and stripes — regardless of the season. Everyone knows you by the hat. You told me once that a guy in a bar in Elmsford offered you a hundred bucks for it but that you turned him down. Below the neck, you are long and lanky. Keep the hat, lean a long gun against you, put a pistol and a cartridge belt around your hips and color you black and white, and you could be Wild Bill Hickock, or Billy the Kid.

You have good days and bad days. Sometimes, your speech is slurred and other times you speak clearly. . Sometimes you are depressed and sometimes you are consumed by curiosity. Once, before I could say “hi,” you told me about how you were worried about some research that you had done. The government could create a weapon using a mag-lev wave, you said, that could blow a crater in North America. It wasn’t so much that they could do it, you told me. Instead, it was that they were doing it. When I said that I had never heard of that program, you said that that was the scary part — that nobody knew about it.

After I learned your name, I realized that I saw you everywhere. I would see you outside the library and the police station. My writing space overlooks a six-foot-high brick wall that separates our property from an alleyway. Sometimes, I would see your hat over the brick wall, bouncing the way you do when you walk. I thought of pulling the window down and shouting Zeke, but I never did that, because I did not want you to think I was a voice in your head. My days are pretty solitary now. I write in the mornings and I run a business remotely in the afternoons. I can go weeks without seeing anyone other than family. Talking with you at lunchtime, when I walked to the post office to pick up the mail, became an important part of the day. When I saw you on the street, you would ask me how my day was going. “Same old shit,” I would say. “What about yours?”

“Same old, same old.”

“What do you have planned?”

You would straighten up from the wall you were leaning on, or shift your weight on the bench where you sat. You would consider your options. “I don’t know,” you would say. “I’ll see what happens”.

Then, I would go back to my office and spend the rest of the day in silence. You would go back to leaning on the wall.

You became used to me. Once, you called me from across the street. John, you said. I turned and waited as you crossed to where I was standing. “The hackers are using i-pads,” you said.

“What hackers,” I said.

“The hackers,” you said.

“Why don’t they use laptops,” I said.

“It”s the coders who use laptops,” you said.

“Coders are degenerates,” I said.

“Degenerates, sociopaths and schemists,” you said.

I remembered a judge I had stood in front of recently. A guy had done unsanctioned work on a property that I own. I had had to hire a licensed contractor to fix the damage he caused. When I sued the guy in small claims court, the judge had a thick, turkey neck, broad shoulders, a furrowed brow, and no patience with the doctrine of proximate cause. The defendant had walked free. I still nursed a grudge.

“Don’t get me started on judges,” I said. “Nothing is worse than judges.”

“Judges are the worst,” you said.

We commiserated for a beat. Then, I remembered a sales tax return that I had to file that afternoon. I gave you a fist bump and walked back to my office. You went back to walking Cedar Street.

I became the Zeke whisperer. When you were shouting at your demons, I could calm you down. Once, when I heard you arguing with yourself in the library parking lot outside my window, I warmed a pork bun and put on a pair of crocs. When I found you, I saw that you were not arguing with yourself. You were sitting on a chair, arguing with a young woman who lived next door to us. She was asking you to be quiet. You were shouting that the cops were on a mission to destroy you and that you had proof of it. I handed you the pork bun and you slammed it onto the blacktop.

“Hey,” I said.

“Fuck,” you said.

“This is the first time I have complained,” the woman said. “But you do this every day and I will call the cops if you keep it up.”

“Come here,” I said. I beckoned to the woman. She was mid to late twenties, Asian, with a septum ring. If I were younger and unattached, I thought, this could be a rom-com meet cute. Couple meets arguing over homeless man. She is an ice queen. He is random. She teaches him to balance his checkbook; he teaches her to be kind. Homeless guy gets cleaned-up and housed. Maybe the homeless guy gets together with a hippie chick. The woman from next door hesitated, and then we walked out of the parking lot, out of earshot.

“You can’t talk to him like that,” I said.

“He is like that every day,” she said.

“The cops don’t know what to do with him, either,” I said. “There’s no point calling them.”

I noticed that the septum ring was an upside-down horseshoe, rather than a ring, with what looked like spades on the ends. The rom-com video faded to black and white, then a dot, and then it disappeared.

“If you want him to shut up,” I said, “Talk to him nicely for five minutes. If you do that, he’ll quiet down. Being confrontational doesn’t work.”

“I see you talking to him most days,” she said. I wondered what she saw, when she saw that. A hot older guy? A grandfather-aged man with too much time on his hands?

“Schizophrenics are crazy,” I said. “You can’t expect a rational response.”

She looked over my shoulder toward the parking lot where you were sitting, then she looked at me.

“Nice to meet you,” I said. She smiled, grudgingly.

“Nice to meet you, too,” she said.

When I walked back to the parking lot, you were sitting quietly in the chair where we had left you. You had picked the pork bun off the ground and had eaten half of it. I never saw the woman again.

Here are a few things that you have told me:

Your blood type is O-negative;

You struggle with anxiety, but you don’t like meds;

You like weed;

Your biological father lives in Missouri;

Air tags scare you;

When you shout at your demons, you know that you are shouting.

I don’t know what you mean when you say “air tags,” but you like to say it.

A month after our first fist bump, you told me that you had gone to a school in Samoa named Coral Reef Academy. When you were there, you said, you went on a date with the Prime Minister”s daughter. She was the first woman you had been with. And she worked in a hardware store, you told me. That’s how you met. The prime minister”s fucking daughter! You told me you had a classmate named Earl Sweatshirt. I didn’t believe you so I checked out your statements online. Google told me that there is, in fact, a rapper named Thebe Neruda Kgositsile, who goes by the name Earl Sweatshirt. In the late 2000s, he was sent to a therapeutic retreat school for at-risk boys in Samoa named Coral Reef Academy. Coral Reef Academy”s website says that it is a solution for parents who want more than the typical therapeutic experience for their son. The curriculum consists of clinical immersion, clinical therapy, academics and recreation and fitness. And you knew how to say, “Hello, beautiful lady. I am hungry for your love” in Samoan. So you weren’t bullshitting.

Three of my friends sent their kids to therapeutic boarding schools. One tells me that he had to hire an ex-Marine to kidnap his daughter at three in the morning to transport her to the school. “Don’t be there when I do it,” the Marine had told him. “That would only complicate things.”

“It’s a huge industry, I told you once, “The troubled teen industry. That’s the fucked part.”

“Oh, yeah,” you said. “They kept me in a hole in Virginia.”

“I thought you were in Samoa,” I said.

“I was in Virginia, too.”

I was never sent to a therapeutic school, but if I had been born thirty years later, I believe that I would have been. I was certainly obstreperous enough. It just wasn’t done when I was that age. I have tried to imagine what it would be like to be a sixteen-year-old woken at three in the morning by a couple of big guys and packed off while your parents in the next room pretend not to hear, but I can’t. Did they send a marine for you, when it was time for you to go? Did you go quietly, did you struggle, did you scream? Did the unfairness of it overwhelm you, or were you used to it, having been roughed up before? Was the guy wiry or roly-poly? Did he work alone, or did he have a partner? Was he rough with you, or was he quiet? Did he tell you, “We can do this the easy way, or we can do it the hard way”?

“What was in Virginia?” I asked you.

“I ran away,” you said. “Three times. Each time, I went to the local police station and each time they brought me back.”

“That’s why they put you in the hole?” I asked.

“That’s why they put me in the hole.”

“And why they sent you to Samoa, I”ll bet,” I said.

“I think so, yes,” you said.

You told me that you started school in Edgemont, a tony school district near my house. Around tenth grade, they sent you to a detox facility in Atlanta and then you went to Virginia. You had tracked down your high school transcript, from Edgemont, you told me. Something on it said “Keystone,” for Pennsylvania. That really bothered you, because you didn’t know where it came from.

“They messed with my memory,” you told me once.

“What messed with your memory?” I asked.

“The meds they gave me.”

“When did they start giving you drugs?”

“When I was four.”

“Holy fuck.”

So — as best I can construct the narrative — after you left Edgemont, you went to detox in Atlanta and then your parents sent you to the school in Virginia. When you proved to be a hard case, they sent you to Samoa. Far from the mainland but close to American territory. Outside the jurisdiction of the American legal system. Impossible to escape from. The Devil’s Island of the troubled teen industry.

When you came home from Samoa, you had aged out of the system and burned your bridges with your family. You were released onto the street.

You told me that the people you call your parents are not your real parents. Your biological father, you said, was born in Texas, but he lives in Missouri. Your father-father — the adoptive father, the guy you grew up with — is a litigation attorney. He and your mother don’t take your calls anymore, and they don’t let you see your biological parents.

You never said much about your biological mother.

You said that you once went by your parents’ — your adoptive parents’ — house. You told me the address, in a town on the other side of the county. You said that, when you went by, no car was in the driveway. That made you suspicious. “Why is there no car there,” you asked me. “Isn’t that weird? Doesn’t that tell you something?”

“Call them,” I said. “I do,” you said. “But they don’t answer.” You showed me your SNAP card. It had your first name on it, followed by a common Jewish last name. When I drove by the address you gave me, I saw a McMansion-type town home. There was one car in the driveway — a Subaru, I believe. I did not see anyone in the front yard.

Most people you see on the street — unhoused people — can be distinguished from homeless people because homeless people still have social contacts. If you lose your apartment, you can couch-surf with friends and family until you wear out your welcome. When that happens, you become unhoused. My own father could be a hardass. God knows I tried his patience. I punched holes in walls, broke household appliances, fought with him physically. I believe that that was hard on him because he had lost his own father when he was young. When I was born, he wanted me to help him have a father from the other side. The unfairness of the expectation that I should fill that man-shaped void is, I believe, what angered me and what drove me away. But I always knew that I could come back. It was bad enough that I was an angry adolescent and he was a gastroenterologist. It would have been infinitely worse if I had been a schizophrenic and he had been a litigator.

I enjoy your company, but you really are, you know, difficult. When you smoke cigarettes, you flick the butts onto the street even when I tell you to put them into the trash can next to you. You tell me that you message Donald Trump but he does not message you back. You say the library Director gave you lead paint to drink. You shout when I tell you that the Director is a decent guy even though he wastes time in meetings, and that you can’t buy lead paint anywhere now anyhow. You annoy the neighbors when you argue with yourself. When the county gave you housing, you lost it because you trashed the place and got in fights with the neighbors.

I think that you are unhoused because you pissed off one too many people.

You look back on your time in Samoa fondly. You told me that you could hike, fish and kayak there, and that the island was so small that you had the freedom to go pretty much wherever you wanted. The fruit was delicious and there was, you know, the Prime Minister”s daughter. It sounded like paradise. Much better than sleeping outside and cadging money in suburban New York.

“You should go back,” I said.

“I tried,” you said.

“What happened,” I asked.

“I was subject to an illegal deportation.”

When you tried to travel to Samoa, you told me, someone — TSA, CBP or Samoan immigration — told you that the residency right you had as a student had lapsed and that, because of that, you could not enter the country. I imagine you showing up at the arrivals gate in Faleolo airport in your duster, your chest-length beard and hair, and your neon cowboy hat. When the immigration officer asks you a question, you tell him that your blood type is O Negative and that you are worried about air tags tracking your location. Maybe you tell them, truthfully, that the time you spent in Samoa was the happiest in your life. With a poker face, they inform you that your entry visa has been denied. That’s what you call an illegal deportation. I call it exile from paradise.

Once, when I was on the road, I woke up in a boxcar. It was early morning but the sun was already hot and bright. The land was brown and covered with brush. The string of cars I was in was pointed west; to the south, I saw low, rocky hills. The floor of the boxcar was covered with graph-paper like dimples that were filled with a viscous brown oil. When I stuck my head out of the door, I saw two hoboes.

“Hey, bro,” one said when he saw me.

“Hi,” I said.

“Where’s my cigarettes,” the other said to the first.

“Broke up,” the first one said.

“Now I’m broke up,” the second one said, “Like my cigarettes.”

When I looked at my watch, I saw that it was eight-thirty. I asked them how to get to town. My plan was to hang around Midland and Odessa for the rest of the cold months and then head up to Wyoming. If I had stayed in prep school, I thought, I would have already finished breakfast and I would be seated in first-period class. I would be taking notes and worried about an upcoming test or paper. Here, there was just blue sky. The lack of a schedule or a deadline, something to lean against, terrified me. You push and push, I thought, and then there’s…nothing. When I left the guys to walk toward the highway, they had not gotten out of their sleeping bags. They were still arguing about their cigarettes. They would do that all day. The oil from the floor had soaked through my jeans and my shirt and the sun made me squint. I could never be like those guys, I thought. You can take the kid out of the middle class, I thought, but you can’t yak, yak, yak.

A few things went right through me when I was on the road. One was looking at the light coming from home windows when I walked through a strange town at night. Another was the way women on the sidewalk would look past me. A third was the way guys would use the terms my wife, my house, my kid as if they were nothing. These days, I use those words. My wife and I bicker the way long-term married couples do. I snore. She nags. In public, we have our schtick. The kids put us through what kids put you through. But I know that, now, someone gives a shit if I live or die. Without them, I would lie next to a railroad siding in Big Spring at midday and argue about a pack of cigarettes. I would spin up and out of orbit. I bitch and moan about the way I live now, but I would use a baseball bat to hold on to it.

Like me, you were born middle class. You had a father who was a litigator. He flew to California, Texas and Las Vegas to handle cases. He owned a McMansion in a nice suburb. Kids at the school you went to — the regular school, the one you went to before you were packed up and sent to detox and therapeutic programs — study AP calculus, debate and drama club. They join the fencing team to help their applications to Harvard and Yale. But you have burned your bridges. Your father shut you out and you can’t go back. You are legitimately crazy, not just a kid with an attitude. Unlike me, you have achieved escape velocity.

On the road, people come and go. You might spend a week crashing at a building site with another guy who you never see again. A guy you see every day when he gets his coffee at the same donut place as you might stop showing up. People and things slip past. It took me a few decades to realize that the housed world is not different. People come and go. There is a stickiness and a longer tail than on the road — we have obituaries, reunions, online presences that homeless people do not — but eventually, the people you know disappear.

A month or two ago, I realized that I had not seen you for two weeks. I asked the library director what happened. “I don’t know,” he said. “He might have gotten housing. We”re pretty happy he’s gone.” The stuff that you had left in the parking lot — the chair you had taken from the dumpster, the pack, the sleeping bag, the foam pad — was no longer there. I looked for traces of you along Main Street. I walked the trail behind the school where you said you sometimes slept, and I looked in the train station and at the waterfront park. I remembered a podcast about a disconnected payphone that people use to speak with absent parents, dead partners, children who have left. I would like to ask you what happened, but I do not have a number to call or a doorbell to ring. I did not know what the protocol was in a case like this. Do I say Kaddish, search for belongings to burn, speak with you on an imaginary telephone line, sing songs? You are not here to ask. If you were, I doubt you would have an opinion on the subject. In your absence, there was nothing to bang against.

A cop asks a man lying on the street, “What is your name and address?” “I am Santa Singh, of no permanent address,” the man replies. In frustration, the cop turns to the other man. “What is your name and address,” he asks him. “My name is Banta Singh, and I live next to Santa Singh,” the other man says.

What’s your snappy answer?

So, you are gone. When I realized that, I looked for a beginning, a middle, a denouement and an end, but I found blue sky wrapped in thin air wrapped in bupkis. Your disappearance didn’t make sense. Brute facts often don’t. These are Hudson Highlands, fools. Sit down and wait for them to crumble. I regret that I was too busy cracking jokes to say goodbye and to ask all the questions that I had. If I were to track you down — if I found a door with you behind it and knocked on it and you answered — I would want to say everything and nothing. That you should never shave your beard or get rid of the hat. That you remind an older guy of himself when he was younger. That a mental-illness-sized wall separates us, but that we can stick our fingers through the cracks. That the book I tried to steal from the Rock Springs Public Library was Volume Two of the Gulag Archipelago. That I, too, know what it is like to have a father you can’t please. That the Prime Minister’s daughter probably remembers you, too. That there is something behind our eyeballs, but that after a point words fail.

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