I reach across his desk to shake his hand. A bunch of pigeons flap past, breaking the tension, and I step back at the noise and drop my hand.
For the righteous falls seven times and rises again, but the wicked stumble in times of calamity, Raymond says.
Goddamn, more Bible talk. Like I told him, I knew about the bank but I didn’t know the bank teller would walk. That’s the truth. I don’t care what Raymond thinks. And if he can’t think clearly, he’d better start looking on the employment page of Craigslist. Because if he thinks I’ll back him at the risk of my own job when all he can do is quote the Bible, well, then so much for thinking.
I leave Raymond’s office and walk outside. The fog remains heavy and drips form along my face, pushed by the wind. Big Pete is still outside the drop-in trying to shake down staff for smokes. His dope-fiend partners Ross and Jim are with him scratching their arms like they have fleas. They used to work in the shelter before they started using again. Clean for five years, then boom, got the itch. Now they make no sense. Their minds are rattled like someone shaking a jar filled with marbles.
I cross my arms against the cold and lean against the shelter building. A rat scurries along the curb and I almost jump out of my skin. I slump against the building again, heart pounding. Sometimes, I wonder when I lost it. I don’t know. I don’t. I remember as a teenager, I backed into a car and broke one of its taillights. I had just gotten my license. I left a note on the windshield with my name and number. I told my father, thinking he’d be all kinds of proud of how I took responsibility, but instead he read me the riot act about how the owner of the car would call and take us to the cleaners for every nick and scratch. I was sixteen and the old man made an impression. You get raised to do the right thing and tell the truth, but not if it might bite you in the ass. That’s the message. Whether I learned that then or learned it later and just think I learned it then, I can’t say.
I should have known Raymond, being a minister and all, would cause problems. I hired him last year. His first day on the job he taped a piece of paper above his desk with this on it: There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land. Deuteronomy 15:11.
Well, if God commanded that Raymond take on Martin, he gave him a tough assignment. Martin’s a big old bald-headed crazy bastard, maybe about fifty. He dresses in black and wears a winter coat streaked with bird shit no matter how warm the weather. He talks to himself for long stretches at a time. Whatever he’s hearing inside his head tears him up. He’ll sit giggling in a corner unaware of how much he sweats and stinks by wearing that heavy coat. He carries bags of salt and pours the salt in his mouth like normal guys would peanuts. The counselors in our mental health program refer him to San Francisco General every now and then. The doctors tranq him and he comes back to the drop-in doing the Thorazine shuffle.
Then one day Laird stepped in all high and mighty with his AT&T bullshit. Saying how we got to do this, that, and the other for Martin. Do an intervention, he said. We can’t just sit back and let the man eat salt. We have to intervene.
Well, goddammit, Laird, I said, intervene then. You go and take on this guy and hold his hand and put him on every goddamn waiting list around for this and that halfway house and see just what the fuck you can do for him. And if you do get him in somewhere, how long do you think he’ll stick? How long do you think it will be before he stops taking his meds and wanders off? You think we haven’t tried, Laird? You think Martin hasn’t sampled the hospitality of several halfway houses after weeks and weeks of effort on our end? I tell you what, Laird. I’ve been doing this job for fourteen years. We’re done trying, Laird. We got a good little routine now with Martin. He hangs in the drop-in and eats his salt, and we give him a shelter bed. Works for Martin. Works for me.
Laird complained to McGraw, who was busy making appointments with some suits downtown about the youth program. Kids are good for fundraising. People care about kids, the younger the better. They’re like puppies. People don’t care about homeless adults. They’re not puppies. I can just see McGraw listening to Laird and noticing his fucked-up yellow teeth and how he spits a little when he talks. McGraw’s a flowchart guy. Information flows from the bottom box to the box above it and from that box to the next higher box. He’s the top box. Laird skipped some boxes going directly to McGraw. McGraw doesn’t like to see the flow interrupted. He sent Laird back down the chart to me and I sent him further down to Raymond. McGraw didn’t follow up and neither did I.
Then someone from the mayor’s office called about Martin. I could only guess Laird had complained to somebody at City Hall. I told the someone who called that Martin was seeing our counselors on a daily basis, that he used the drop-in center during the day and slept in the shelter at night, and the someone said, I see, and we both hung up.
Never heard another thing from the mayor’s office or from Laird either. He had done his thing. He had stirred up his little shit and convinced himself of his power. Not that he didn’t care about Martin. On a scale of one to ten, I’d say Laird was about a two, because, as he said, he would get Martin breakfast.
Raymond however was a ten and then some. He took Martin on like a mission.
I stay standing outside the shelter trying to clear my head. Trying to think. How do I tell McGraw we lost all of a crazy homeless guy’s money? I won’t. I can’t. My legs feel locked at the knees. I don’t want to move, but I got to. I got to get on and deal with McGraw. Better me going to him than him calling me in.
I walk toward the admin building, each step an effort. Then it hits me and I stop so fast I almost fall over. A way I can tell McGraw that Raymond lost Martin’s money but that we won’t have to pay it back. Raymond will have to be the fall guy for this to work but he’s the one who got us into this mess. What else can he expect? Payback’s a bitch. I got it almost worked out when I hear Big Pete calling me.
Pete’s about as wide as the block and more than six feet tall. He’s always moving, little darting moves like he’s trying to fake someone out. At the same time his head bops around like one of those little dolls you see on the dashboard of a taxi, but he’s retained his muscle somehow. Hands thick as bricks. When he fights, his fists emerge from the long sleeves of his frayed trench coat like something shot out of a cannon. We don’t allow him in the drop-in or the shelter, because one time, for no reason, he kicked someone’s ass so bad the guy nearly died.
Hey, man, Pete says, jogging across the street, coat flapping around his waist. Jim and Ross watch him.
What’s up, Pete?
It’s all good, you know that.
He laughs, puts on his sunglasses and leans down by my ear like we have some secret deal going on.
You help me out, man? Loan me a dollar?
I like that. Loan. I reach into a hip pocket for the change I keep on me so I don’t have to pull out my wallet. I always give Pete money when he asks for it. I’d rather do that than have him coldcock me for my wallet. Jim and Ross stretch their necks out trying to see how much I hand him. Four quarters. Pete takes it without a word.
One morning several months back, after everyone had been kicked out of the shelter, Raymond came to me and said, We got to get Martin on disability so he can get a place to live. I told him the last time we tried to get Martin on disability was about three years ago. He was denied because of an obsession he had at the time with trash. He used to pick up bits of paper on the sidewalk outside the drop-in for no other reason than he got a kick out of doing it. No matter how small, Martin picked it up and threw it away, talking to himself the entire time. Sometimes, he just shoved the bits of paper in his coat pocket. I’m not going to say the sidewalks were much cleaner, but they weren’t as cluttered, I’ll give him that.
When the disability people came out to interview Martin, they saw him doing his thing with trash and were impressed but in the wrong way. They said Martin’s trash fixation showed he cared about his community. Therefore he was not all that nuts. Therefore he could find a paying job like janitorial work. Therefore he didn’t need disability.
The book of Proverbs says, If you mistreat the poor, you insult your Creator, Raymond said when I finished telling him the story.
What’s that supposed to mean?
That failure does not excuse us from doing nothing, Raymond said.
I didn’t stand in his way. I figured Martin would be denied and Raymond would find another Bible quote and move on. What I hadn’t counted on was that by then, Martin had some things going for him. He had stopped picking up trash. Instead, he had started eating salt. The disability people stared slack-jawed as Martin ground mouthfuls of salt instead of answering their questions. Raymond stood behind him, Bible in hand.
Whether it was through God’s intervention or the salt, Martin got his disability. Not only did he get it, his start date was rolled back to his original disability application three years earlier. Crazy Martin got $21,600 dropped in his lap just like that, plus the start of a regular monthly check of six hundred dollars.
Laird was stewed, man. He gave Raymond looks that Ray Charles could have seen were so full of hate that they’d have made even Muhammad Ali nervous. Laird complained to me that Raymond should have spoken to him because he had been helping Martin. That he had been working on something with Fresh Start’s mental health guys. And what were you working on, Laird? I didn’t wait for an answer because he and I both knew he didn’t have one to give. But he had one more curveball to throw.
What are you going to do now?
What do you mean?
How’s he going to handle all that money by himself? Did you ever think of that?
The bastard had a point. Once Martin cashed his check, Big Pete and every dope fiend in the city would be on him like white on rice and that twenty-one K would be gone, man, gone. They’d beat his ass, take his money, and leave him bloody and broke if not dead.
But Martin wanted his money. He might have been crazy as a crack whore, but he wasn’t so far gone he didn’t know he had been approved for disability. And Laird kept tweaking him: Where’s your money, Martin? Where’s your money?
Raymond had given the disability people the shelter as Martin’s address. He locked the big check and the monthly checks that followed in a safe and put Martin off when he asked about them by giving him a few bucks out of pocket. But Laird wouldn’t let up. He would buy Martin breakfast and ask him why he hadn’t received his money.
The checks started piling up. Laird took Martin to the disability office to complain. The disability people called and asked why we weren’t giving him his money. I told Raymond this couldn’t continue.
Raymond said he would get Martin a bank account so he could deposit his money and save it. I said, Yeah? Martin’s going to walk into a bank and set up a savings account? I’ll go with him, Raymond said. What’s to stop him from withdrawing all of it at once? I said. I’ll make it a joint account, Raymond said. He can’t withdraw anything without my signature.
I’d had other staff, formerly homeless guys like Laird, get the good Samaritan bug and try to help some of our other head cases with their money by managing it for them. But each time the money got the best of them. They’d take a bit here, a bit there. They’d start getting high again. Finally, they’d disappear and the money with them, leaving the head case howling at the moon.
If I let Raymond help Martin start a bank account, the rest of the staff would want to know why I wouldn’t let them do the same thing for the many other Martins we had. They’d have all these dollar signs dancing in their eyes and accuse me of letting Raymond get over with Martin. I’d have a small riot on my hands.
