Memory bites

So this whole blog is one long memory. And being such, it is filled with inaccuracy. Just sayin'. Nothing purposeful, but the old gray matter ain't what it used to be.

Anyway, back at the Arlington Street Church. I never did join the theater troop. I believe they were on their way out of town, to do a road tour. They planned to attend other sanctuaries, rallies, protests and similar gatherings across the country. Or so I think. The memory. I know this. I continued to live in the house on Grove St. sleeping on the couch, with my sometimes boyfriend Kenny, who was real cute and also a real folk singer.

This was after Rick the Actor, so it had to be after the Theater group in the basement. Or so logic would dictate. With Kenny, I would go to all night hootenannies at a little coffee house on Charles St. (I think. Maybe it was on Revere? Note to self, find the menu I saved for the sake of my old age memoirs and see if the address is there. Not that anyone will care, it's just that I care).

Better than the menu, I found an article with a drawing from 1967 of the club, definitely on Charles St. Already in 67, they were lamenting the end of folk music.

Sword in the Stone, circa 1967, by S. Grosso

I think there was a curfew in Boston and no one was to be out after a certain hour. Keep your rabble indoors! Otherwise they might get roused up and, I don't know, throw some tea into the harbor.

Everyone was very stoned in those days, so anything could have happened in the wee hours.

Maybe there was no curfew and the guy who ran the coffeehouse, who was tall with short cropped hair and I think used to be a drill sergeant in the Army, he was the most unfolk like folk proprietor I ever met, maybe he just liked to make you stay and listen to all the performers, even the really bad ones, so he locked the door, kinda like my high school did the night of our prom, when we had to stay up all night and watch Sound of Music.

Kenny sang "My name is Jimmy Brown, I am the newsboy of this town." He was my true love until he discovered beer and started hanging around with the other guys out back of the Coffee house.

Then came May 20,  the Arlington Street Church sanctuary and the New England Resistance office on Stanhope Street next door to the Boston Police sub station, with the marijuana plant in the window. There I discovered Jim Havelin about the same time I finally got my turn to claim the closet as my own private room.

Income Inequality

I am a 19 year old. I am supposed to be poor. I am supposed to live in a one bedroom apartment with two other girls and our sometimes boyfriends. I am meant to work in the sub basement of Filene's as Christmas help, because college and adventure and I can always go home to mom if things get really really bad.

There are lots of us; we are legion, the urban poor youth. It is our rite of passage. We enjoy scrounging our furniture off the streets of the better parts of Beacon Hill on trash days.We relish our trips to the Army-Navy store for peacoats and combat boots that our parents and uncles wore, maybe even into actual combat. Maybe our peers returned from Vietnam wore these khaki mittens. Or maybe it is all surplus as the sign says. It is warm and comfortable and cheap.

We like eating "egg hole" sandwiches and Campbell's tomato soup with Kraft cheddar melted into it. We like getting the end-of-shift produce from the back of the Farmer's Market once a week for salads and omelet stuffing. We like Ripple and Annie Green Springs wine.

There are others whose poverty is not voluntary. These are the ones we call beggers. Whose poverty is poverty, homelessness, job loss, despair and what was not yet called PTSD. One is the man with no legs who scoots around on a little cart, the old woman whose heavy woolen coat drags through the slush on the sidewalk behind her as she walks heavily from door to door. A few tattered souls at the Park St. Station where the redline disgorges passengers each morning and scoops them up again at dusk. They have no homes, the have no names. They hold their cups or sometimes hats out for pedestrians to donate to their cause. In the winter there is stiff competition from the Salvation Army and others with donation boxes and signs that are made by machine, not scribbled in crayon.

Then there is this guy:

He stands outside the entrance to Filene's basement, the one on the corner of Washington St. across from Jordan Marsh. They are the two main department stores in Boston. I see him every evening as I climb the stairs from the second basement to the street. He leans on one crutch, clutched with one gnarled hand, mittenless, so every knuckle shows knobby white. the other arm outstretched supported by a heavy metal brace of some kind. In his outstretched hand he holds a metal cup.

He could be anywhere from his mid forties to mid-seventies. Dirty gray hair covers his face, long strands whipped by the wind, matted beard and mustache obscuring chin and mouth.


The hairy man with the crutch is there all winter. He thrusts out his stiff arm; shoppers drop in coins or sometimes dollar bills; or just pass him by; he never speaks.

Today is Christmas Eve. Filene's basement turns into bedlam. Gail and I give up folding and refolding and just stand behind our counters. People pay us for merchandise or they don't. Security guards dressed as Santas smoke behind pillars and drink from flasks they keep in pockets tucked under their giant beards. Or we imagine they do. We make up stories about them, that they live in a sub-sub basement, in warrens beneath the subway, that they sneak in at night and change all the displays and cavort naked in the aisles. Why not? Regular customers do the same thing.

 

Finally it is time to go home. Gail goes out one door; I go out the other, up two flights of stairs, out of he artificial dark of the second mark-down basement into the natural dark of winter. Snow blowing, fuzzy streetlights, chestnut vendors on the corner by the Park Street Station. And there he is. With his one outstretched arm, his stiff legs, teetering back and forth, his beard and hair staff with snow and dirt, his mouth contorted. He teeters and rocks and clutches his cup, calling in a voice that seems to big for his weak frame, a lone coin rattling in his cup, shoppers becoming shadows in the dim snowy light, drool flying from his reddened lips, he shouts his demands to the deaf ears of Christmas Eves down through the ages: "Give me your money! Give me all your money!"