13
During the first few years that Eric attended UCLA, life got very hard for his brother Thomas. The lean escapee found a shopping cart and traveled the streets of Los Angeles gathering things that he found beautiful and useful. He loved blue glass and chrome, red cloth and books. He collected all kinds of books. Some he could read and others not. He ranged all over L.A., sometimes sleeping in Griffith Park, sometimes in the cavelike feeders to the concrete L.A. River. He was robbed every other month or so but only raped once, by a wild man who came upon him sleeping in an alley off Florence, when he was thinking of going back to his alley valley.
Once Thomas went down to Malibu and walked the beaches where he’d gone with his brother and Dr. Nolan. He didn’t stay long because the sun on the sand was too bright.
The police stopped him all the time, but he used Bruno’s Social Security card as identification and claimed that he was twenty-three. The police believed him because after all that time living outside, Thomas’s voice had become rough and his face was quite weathered and beat-up.
He had no friends. The only people he knew were other street people who traveled the avenues and alleys looking for refuse that was either edible or of some value to someone somewhere. He gathered bottles to return for the deposits and copper piping from discarded air conditioners, stoves, and refrigerators. These valuable metals he brought to recycling centers for a couple of dollars every now and then. In an old mayonnaise jar he kept the carcasses of interesting bugs that he’d find. In the day sometimes he’d dump out the bugs and investigate God’s divine will manifest in their intricate designs.
While Thomas walked, he’d usually have a running dialogue with his mother, Branwyn.
“Mama, why am I like this?” he’d ask periodically. “Why am I walkin’ down Pico with nowhere to go to? Why am I bein’ punished? Am I so bad that I don’t get to have a home like the other people in the world?”
“There’s nuthin’ wrong wit’ you, baby,” Branwyn would say in Thomas’s highest voice. “You just too good for some’a these people who think poor peoples are evil. They can’t see you for what you are because of your old clothes and the dirt and your shoes with the holes in ’em. If you were to get all clean with new clothes, people would see you for what you really are, and they would give you a job and an apartment and you wouldn’t be so lonely and sad.”
After a conversation like this, Thomas would make a pact with himself that he would find a way to get new clothes and a bath and then he would find a job and make a life and Monique and Lily could come visit and even tough-minded Harold would be proud of him.
But after a week or so of trying to get enough money, Thomas would sink once again into despair. He’d drink wine sometimes but not too often. Being drunk made him confused, and he couldn’t find his place when he knelt to the earth trying to meld with the planet.
He went into the homeless shelters only rarely. The people there were scary, and made him too afraid to sleep. In the night when he was awake, all the sad noises of the men in the bunks around him made him want to run and scream.
So he spent most of his days wandering and his nights in lonely places where wild men and the police wouldn’t look.
He had a big umbrella for when it rained and a silvery, thin blanket that a young white couple had given him. The metallic coverlet was hardly thicker than tissue paper, but when the weather got cold he was always warm with the silver sheet wrapped around his skinny frame.
The years went by, and he hardly ever thought about Ahn or Dr. Nolan or Eric. Then one day he found a child’s book, written in French, about a skinny blond child named Madeline Blanchet. He stared at the book for a long time thinking that the name was trying to tell him something, something about him.
Toward the end of this part of his journey, Thomas found a pair of barely chipped sunglasses. The lenses were almost black, and wearing them Thomas could walk on the sunshiniest days and never wince at all. It was like walking in the darkness even though everyone else around him was in light. This was a deep comfort to Thomas. He wore these glasses every day, was wearing them as he walked down Venice Boulevard, a little past Fairfax, thinking that he’d reach the ocean again in a day or two and wondering what that child’s book was trying to say.
On the way he met a Mexican boy who was selling sacks of oranges to passing cars. When Thomas walked by, the boy broke open one of his bags and gave Thomas four large oranges.
He was thinking about how kind that boy had been and how delicious the orange was when he remembered his grandmother. Grandma Madeline. Once he remembered her name, the phone number came along with it.
“Niggah, what you want?” a thirteen-year-old tough standing among his posse asked. He flicked his hand out as if he intended to slap Thomas, who flinched in defense.
The six or seven boys laughed at the frail young man with the big chapped hands.
“Yeah, bum,” another boy said. “Why you stinkin’ up our air?”
“My grandmother,” Thomas said. “I need to talk to her.”
Thomas had used his last dollar three days before buying adhesive strips for his feet. His feet often bled from corns and chafing and so were in perpetual need of new bandages.
The smallest of the black boys took out a pocket knife. He picked out the blade but didn’t point it at Thomas.
“I need to call my grandmother,” Thomas said.
“Niggah, get away from here ’fore I cut you,” the armed boy said.
Thomas shied away, knowing that the children didn’t want to hurt him but they might if they blustered too much and whipped themselves into a frenzy. He’d seen it happen before. Groups of young men and boys sometimes made themselves into killers.
Thomas went north on Orange Grove wondering where he could get the quarters to call his grandmother Madeline. For many blocks in either direction the sidewalks were empty. There was an occasional person standing in his yard, but Thomas knew not to accost a person in front of his house. It was too threatening, and the person might call the police.
Four blocks from the incident with the boys, Thomas heard someone calling.
“You. Hey, you.”
A boy, maybe one of the ones from before, was jogging up the street toward him. The boy was alone, and Thomas was thinking about his grandmother, and anyway, he couldn’t run because of his leg, his bloody feet, and his cart and because running meant guilt. And even if the boy was alone, soon others would join him to chase Thomas down.
This child was twelve or thirteen. He had a thick neck and intense eyes.
“Hey, man,” the boy said. “I’m sorry ’bout them. You know, I gotta uncle live in the street. They say he’s schizo, is that’s what’s wrong wit’ you?”
Thomas hunched his shoulders and shook his head. He didn’t know.
“His name is Alfred Kwawi,” the boy continued. “You know’im?”
“No. Sorry.”
“That’s okay, brother,” the boy said. He reached into his pocket and came out with a fistful of change. “Here you go.”
As soon as the money was in Thomas’s hand, the boy took off in the direction from which he had come. Thomas stood there for a moment trying to remember where he was standing and the features of the boy’s face. He forgot so many things in his days on the street — he would have forgotten the incident with those boys in an hour or two — but he wanted to remember kindnesses. He collected them the way he collected blue glass. An old white woman on Wilshire that once sat next to him and shared her sandwich, a stray dog that slept up against him on a cold night before he got his silver blanket, a black man who stopped to help him pull his cart out when it had fallen into a ditch — he remembered every moment of kindness and carried them along with his cart to remember at night. He penned these events as well as he could into a bound book of blank paper he’d found behind a stationery store. Every now and then he’d copy the acts of kindness onto a new leaf in the book and admire his penmanship and the benevolence of his fellow man.