For the People Page 4

  We had moved to Philadelphia when Dad was hired away from an editing job at Washington University in St. Louis—where he and my mother both had roots—to become a full-time staff writer in Philly for a Big Pharma company. My parents bought an affordable house in a Philly suburb where there were good public schools and hoped to build a more comfortable, secure life. And then he and a dozen other professional writers who were hired with him were all laid off, without explanation. Once my father lost the job that anchored it all, and far from any family who could help out, my parents were struggling. My father’s unexpected layoff was the first time I really grasped that power does what it wants to outsiders, and not necessarily with malice. Sometimes power is just indifferent, self-absorbed, blindered and clueless, or guided by a star that points far away from where the rest of us need to go.

  After getting laid off, my dad became a full-time freelance writer. He co-wrote a book on European treatments for drug addiction called Drug Trip Abroad for some professors at the University of Pennsylvania. He wrote government reports for the National Institutes of Health and corporate propaganda, did some journalism, and wrote scripts for one-minute-long commentaries read by a local TV news anchor. The freelance writing was a hustle of short-term deadlines and short-term payments up against a long-term mortgage and other steady bills. All the while he continued writing novels, all but one under his name. Before and after he had a family to support, he wrote novels with good publishers and good reviews, but that didn’t turn into much money in his lifetime. Meanwhile, my mother was busy with kids and part-time work, including at our public school library for a while.

  Probably my parents’ wisest decision after moving from Missouri was to buy a cheap house and live in a neighborhood that provided good public schools. We lived in a mostly white, moderately affluent, politically conservative, Christian (at least in the performative sense) suburb that was proudly unburdened by big government in 1970. Most of the houses had cesspools rather than sewers. There were no public swimming pools. Even the local YMCA pool was unaffordable, possibly by design. Sidewalks were scarce. Some of the richer areas near us had big lawns that went all the way to the curb, and kids got yelled at by homeowners for walking on the grass next to the curb. Cars were permitted in that part of town; human feet, not really. The lesson was clear: You got exactly what you could afford and nothing more—not even a sidewalk.

  In high school, I worked hard. My mind was set on going to a really good and prestigious college, as I was sure that would lead to unlimited opportunity. I thought that a strong work ethic and a good education would be my armor against the trouble my parents had in their lives, even though I knew that my parents’ education and work ethic had failed to protect them.

  At school and in the neighborhood, I usually kept to myself or hung out with a hardy band of outsider kids. I had reasons to feel like one: My parents were older and didn’t socialize with a lot of the other parents. My dad’s limp was increasing and obvious even before arthritis disabled him—other kids used to ask me if he was my grandfather. My dad was Jewish, unlike nearly all of our neighbors, in a place where young boys played a rough game of tackle football they called “Screw the Jew.” My mother was a devout Christian married to a secular Jewish man, which worked for them but was even more unusual. We were a little different in any gathering of Christians or Jews, no matter how welcoming. Our politics didn’t match the neighborhood. Also, everybody could tell we were broke: The car was beat if it was even running; the clothes were secondhand thrift-store items, hand-me-downs, or from Kmart if they were new. And our gradually becoming supported by government programs was embarrassing for my parents and, by extension, for me. My dad had no control over his physical illness, had volunteered and served in a war, and was a good man his whole life. My mom was a bright idealist who graduated from high school at sixteen before completing college and attending divinity school. She came from a family of Missouri dirt farmers and raised a family. My parents were decent people who had tried hard. Their troubles felt embarrassing and unfair.

  I learned to embrace the outsider identity and its broke principles: Get by with less because you must; fix things yourself; spot pitfalls and avoid them because you have no resources to climb out of the pit; know that all jobs are worthy and so are the people who do them; no one “deserves” anything. My competitive spirit showed up. I enjoyed figuring out how to get things done with less, learning to fix or replace the part that was broken rather than replace the whole machine, avoiding waste, being self-reliant, thinking critically, getting ready to overcome whatever came next. I was a kind of survivalist, a fan of people who were self-reliant enough to make or fix or figure out anything. I felt like a saner version of the guy with the backyard bunker full of canned food.

  I learned valuable lessons from trash picking and then fixing broken furniture, clocks, and lamps; from building bicycles with cannibalized dumpster-dived parts; repairing our roof; replacing the clothes dryer belt and motor assembly; replacing the frozen, cracked toilet tank and its mechanism; and eventually fixing and tuning up cars. Working on cars taught me to reject the idea that everything is a trade-off in a system—that improving one thing always makes something else worse. It turns out that a well-tuned car is faster, more powerful, quieter, smoother, more fuel efficient, and pollutes less all at the same time—no trade-offs needed.

  Fixing cars and machines taught me that in any repair there are always a couple of details that delay or derail the whole project, like a couple of stripped bolts or rusted nuts that take more time to remove and replace than the other twenty-five combined. Working laboring jobs—as a janitor, landscaper, painter, and carpenter’s flunky—taught me how skilled and how interesting these jobs and the people who do them can be. And all of it taught me that things other people are eager to discard in their entirety can be fixed, repaired, repurposed, and rehabilitated enough to move us further down the road. There’s almost nothing that can’t be made better immediately and last awhile until something completely new and much improved comes along.

  Even as I learned broke skills, I had no grasp of affluent skills necessary for a life I wasn’t living. I wasn’t good at feeling comfortable in airports and airplanes, understanding the basics of banking and finance, buying nice clothing, acting right in nice restaurants and vacation spots, being socially capable around affluent people, or accepting gifts gracefully.

  As a teenager, I wanted to outdo the comfortable kids, especially the mean ones who rode around in their parents’ nice cars and wore pricey clothes. I would leave class and jump straight into my parents’ squeaky old Rambler with my vinyl “bobo” sneaks and drive away. Outside of school, the comfortable kids and I were seldom in the same spaces; we didn’t see each other’s lives. I simultaneously idealized their lives and rejected them.

  My parents’ challenges and losses made it easier for me to feel my wins. I was already overcoming challenges in high school and at home. They were proud of me for my achievements, even the humble ones. And, though it made me uneasy, I already knew that in a polite, racist society, I might have the disadvantage of being broke with an increasingly disabled dad, but I had the formidable advantage of being white.

  Classes in my Philly-area suburban public school were a lot different from those in my diverse St. Louis city public elementary school, where I attended kindergarten through third grade. Race wasn’t talked about in my high school, except awkwardly in history class. But the effects of institutional racism were everywhere. Like many suburban public high schools at the time, my school was officially integrated but actually segregated, one classroom at a time. Our high school was separated into three tracks. Track 3 was predominantly Black and brown kids with a few broke white kids. Track 2 was mostly working-class and broke white kids, or affluent kids who were acting out. Track 1 was primarily affluent white kids. There was a smattering of Black and brown kids in Tracks 1 and 2, but the pattern was clear
. I saw the separation, but said nothing and did nothing. I stayed busy scheming on good grades, the troubles at home, and what great things might come next if I just worked hard and got into a good college.

  Toward the end of my high school career, my dad’s health crashed. For a couple of days, he had been upstairs gobbling aspirin, hoping that his hip joints would loosen up one more time and worrying about how to pay medical bills if he went to the hospital with no private health insurance. Then, one night, I watched two burly EMTs struggle and sweat carrying him on a gurney down the narrow stairs in our house before loading him into an ambulance. Strapped in on the tilting gurney, he was trying hard not to call out in pain from the unavoidably rough handling on his frozen, crunching hips. I could see it in his grimace and how tightly he grabbed the gurney’s sides.

  My dad would spend most of a year in Bryn Mawr Hospital for bilateral hip replacement surgeries and lengthy rehabilitations. Hip surgery is moderately intrusive and highly effective now. But in 1978 in his case it meant incisions from mid-thigh to his lower ribs on both sides, lots of old-school bone carpentry, and lengthy rehab. There were separate operations for each hip. My mother kept us together. We visited him a lot, transported mostly by me in the older-model Plymouth Fury my aunt had handed down to us, which I tuned up and maintained. My previously strong grades suffered, but I kept visiting anyway.

  The summer before the year I graduated from high school, I would often visit him in the hospital after my workday, wearing painter’s pants covered in drywall dust. I would roll him up and down the hallways, standing with one foot on the back of the wheelchair like a skateboarder, while pushing with the other foot or dragging it like a rudder on the shiny floor tile to steer around corners at speed. As we skated by, my dad would greet and wave to the other long-term patients. He was a predictably popular raconteur with the hospital staff.

  He was mobile for a few years and happy about it, until the artificial joints failed. Even worse, he had developed osteomyelitis, an incurable bone infection that meds kept under control for the last twenty-five years of his life. The artificial hips had to be removed but were never replaced. Spongy tissue filled the gaps where bone had been. He was mostly confined to a wheelchair until he died in his mid-eighties. Fortunately, Social Security disability payments stabilized his moderate income. To the end, he never really complained—fake curmudgeon though he was. But I didn’t know all of that was coming when I visited him in the hospital during high school, hoping and expecting a more favorable result.

  My dad was from a big immigrant family of Russian Jews and talked to everyone. He had always talked to everyone, whether as a kid helping his dad sell fruit and paint houses, as a St. Louis public high school grad working as a hospital orderly, or as a U.S. Postal Service letter carrier for six years after high school before Pearl Harbor. He enlisted right after Pearl Harbor, and served as a weatherman stationed on a U.S. Air Force base on the Pacific island of Kwajalein, where military planes from all over would constantly fly in and out. In freer moments, the troops stationed there and those laying over would gather on the beach to cook fish, drink beer, and talk. But that was over thirty-five years before his hospitalization.

  With the Bryn Mawr Hospital workers, he told stories and joked around. They responded with hospital gossip and their own stories; he’d tell us the best ones he heard when we visited. I remember watching an indulgent smile form on the face of a Black nurse while she drew his blood as my dad ran through a small catalog of Shakespearean quotes about blood: “Blood will have blood” and so on. His performance looked like an encore. The nurse drew his blood all the time, but she didn’t seem to mind passing the time with an old storyteller. The kitchen workers, med-techs, maintenance engineers, janitorial workers, orderlies, and nurses were a multiracial and multi-ethnic group, far friendlier than the doctors. They usually smiled at my dad when I wheeled him around. The doctors were all white, more occasional in their comings and goings at the hospital, mostly aloof and talking among themselves about their work, their cars, and golf.

  Even my dad’s ordinary interracial engagement at the hospital was a revelation to me, a nostalgic, nearly forgotten echo from my youngest school years at Pershing Elementary in St. Louis. In my high school, there was almost no contact between Black and white students, thanks partly to the different tracks. Black students were mostly behind the walls of other classrooms and out of my sight during the school day. There were virtually no Black teachers or staff who regularly dealt with students. In the hallways, even different racial and economic groups within each track hung together.

  I still remember making my way to class and noticing a new student, a tall pale white kid with a shock of black hair who had arrived from England and was a phenom on the soccer field, immediately popular with the girls, unlike me. I’d seen enough British comedy on television to figure his cockney accent and casual clothing meant he was working-class. He was talking and laughing with a Black kid who was a star on two other sports teams when they began to raise their voices and square off. A few other Black kids were also talking, standing nearby. None of them were in my classes. They suddenly got quiet. The English kid hollered, dramatically bobbing his head up and down: “I’ll beat you black and blue!”

  The Black kid was already grinning before he finished: “You got that half right!”

  At that, the two of them and all the Black students nearby dissolved in laughter. My immediate sense that this was a real fight turned to surprise when they all began laughing, giving dap, and shaking hands. I didn’t know engagement like that was possible in my high school. Obviously, in my Track 1 classes and on my block, I was missing something that was happening elsewhere—a familiarity, an affection that was capable of crossing racial and cultural barriers and exploding them, even in public. I longed for that kind of exchange. It felt like something I’d touched when I was much younger, in St. Louis, had slipped away in this Philly suburb as I grew up. I had seen it in the hospital. But, owing to the bitter logic of racial segregation in America, I wouldn’t see it again until I was in law school, working for homeless people one semester in New York.

  It was the winter of 1986 and around 20 degrees outside the gigantic, magnificent doors of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, and next to Rockefeller Center—two icons of institutional power in America’s most powerful city. I was twenty-four years old. It was midnight.

  I was standing in the shadows of the cathedral with six or seven white, Black, and brown homeless men. Our beds for that evening were a row of thick cardboard garment boxes that each of us had dragged to the site earlier that day. Each box was shorter than a coffin, but roomier. We lined them up against the gothic stone retaining wall that separated the cathedral’s grounds from the wide adjoining sidewalk where tourists lingered in daylight. The men I was with were talking.

  “You think he’s coming tonight?”

  “Who?”

  “The veteran.”

  “Oh. He’s around? I heard he wasn’t around.”

  “He went off over at the other place a couple nights ago, I heard.”

  “I just stay in my box. I just stay in my box if it happens.”

  I listened closely, but didn’t want to show my confusion. I was a different kind of tourist, merely observing homelessness for the night with a friendly homeless client, Frank, who had volunteered to be my tour guide. I was the only one who wasn’t really homeless; Frank was keeping my secret and I didn’t want to blow it.

  Lisa was my girlfriend at the time. She and I were spending the first semester of our last year of law school as unpaid interns for different nonprofits in New York. We were also living together for the first time after being a couple less than two years. She was interning at CARE helping feed the world, a passion of hers and an homage to her pre–law school Peace Corps years and her childhood as an Air Force “brat” who lived overseas. I was interning at New York’s
Coalition for the Homeless helping homeless people get housing, or something like it, in the biggest city in the richest nation in the world. The Coalition had gained a national spotlight after it persuaded New York State’s highest court that the New York State Constitution contains a human right to housing, a right the U.S. Constitution lacks. I wanted to be in that fight. Lisa and I were contemplating careers as public interest lawyers, drawn to the drama and mission of the work.

  The men’s breath rose as glowing gold vapor in the cold, illuminated by yellow streetlights. I gave up on figuring out what their conversation meant and focused on imitating their movements so they wouldn’t know I was a fake. I got distracted, wondering if I could actually sleep in a garment box in 20 degrees, even with my multiple layers of cloth coats, gloves, and hats.

  The day had started normally enough. I’d spent a few hours in the Coalition’s modest offices in my worn, button-down oxford shirt, dealing with individual homeless people’s issues. Some had lost crucial belongings in the shelter system. Others had civil citations to answer from police who’d been “moving them along.” In the afternoon, I rode the subway to recount the number of working toilets at one of the city’s shelters. My task was to inspect to see if the city shelter was in compliance with a consent decree that required an adequate ratio of toilets and sinks per shelter occupant. The city had been faking compliance by showing inspectors toilets, urinals, and sinks to count that were being used only by staff or that weren’t even functioning. The shelter itself was poorly lit, with an open grid of beds laid out on the hardwood floor of a forgotten Victorian basketball court. A cast iron balcony above served as a skinny running track. There was heat and shelter, but it was also a good place to get your stuff stolen or get hurt or get no sleep or get lice before the staff followed strict policy and pushed you and your belongings out early in the morning, allowing you and your belongings to return only after dark. Understandably, many homeless people preferred to sleep on the streets. After counting the plumbing fixtures, I returned to the office.