Same Kind of Different As Me (11 page)
Over the years, I got a few jobs through something called the Labor Force. You ever go down to the city and seen a buncha raggedy-lookin men crowded on the sidewalk in the early mornin, then you mighta seen a place like the Labor Force. I was one of them men, showin up in the mornin hopin to get a job doin work nobody else want to do—like pickin up trash, cleanin out a ole warehouse, or sweepin up horse manure after a stock show.
I remember one time they took us way on over to Dallas to clean out the Cowboys stadium. They even let me look at the game for a while.
I wanted to work a regular job, but I couldn’t read and couldn’t write. I didn’t look right neither ’cause I only had one set of clothes that was wore out all the time. And even if somebody was to look past all that, I didn’t have no paperwork like a Social Security card or a birth certificate.
At the Labor Force, you didn’t even have to tell em your name. Somebody just pull around in a truck and holler out somethin like, “We need ten men. Construction site needs cleanin.” And the first ten fellas to climb on the truck got the job.
At the end of the day, we’d get $25 cash money, minus the $3 the Labor Force done advanced you for your lunch. Then they charge you $2 for drivin you to your job. So at the end of the day, you’d get maybe $20, not even enough to rent a room. Now let me ask you somethin. What you gon’ do with $20 ’cept buy yourself somethin to eat and maybe a six-pack a’ some-thin to help you forget you gon’ sleep in a cardboard box again that night?
Sometimes it’s drinkin or druggin that lands a man on the streets. And if he ain’t drinkin or druggin already, most fellas like me start in once we get there. It ain’t to have fun. It’s to have less misery. To try and forget that no matter how many “partners in crime” we might hook up with on the street, we is still alone.
I ended
my affair with the Beverly Hills painter only to begin a new one—this one with my wife. With counseling behind us, each of us moved several giant steps in the other’s direction. I kept both hands in the art business but traveled less and spent more time with Deborah, Carson, and Regan. I also began to take spiritual matters more seriously. Deborah, meanwhile, continued her volunteer work and her pursuit of God, but committed time to the things that interested me.
Chief among those became Rocky Top, the 350-acre ranch we bought in 1990. Perched on a three-hundred-foot mesa overlooking a shimmering arc of the Brazos River, the ranch house became a refuge for our family. We decorated it cowboy-style, from the buffalo head over the stone fireplace to the autographed his-and-hers boots from Roy Rogers and Dale Evans to the herd-sized trestle table we parked in the kitchen, big enough to seat fifteen hungry hands. So authentic and picturesque were the architecture and decor that style magazines photographed the house for feature stories, movie directors paid to use it as a set, and Neiman Marcus began shooting its Christmas catalogs there.
But for Deborah, the kids, and I, Rocky Top was a place to escape the clamor of the city. Bald eagles soared and dived above the Brazos, their high keen startling the deer that frequented the river’s edge. In a verdant pasture below the house, we kept twenty-eight longhorn cattle. (Every year, Deborah gave their babies terribly un-cowboyish names like Sophie and Sissy, and I let her.) And during the spring, lush thickets of bluebonnets covered the rolling chaparral like a violet quilt.
Carson and Regan were teenagers when we settled in at Rocky Top, and they spent their last few years before college importing carloads of friends, hunting, fishing, and exploring miles of winding trails on horseback.
At the ranch, Deborah and I cemented our relationship as best friends and ardent lovers, growing so close that we began to joke that we felt “velcroed at the hearts.” The ranch also became our geographical anchor, a place that, wherever else we might move, we knew we would always call home.
As it turned out, we did move. In 1998, tired of the Park Cities, the Dallas rat race, and what Deborah would later describe as “twelve years of exile in the ‘far east,’” we returned to Fort Worth. We moved into a French mansard-roofed rental home on a golf course and began building our new home on a secluded lot near a nature preserve on the Trinity River. Then we began to plan what we thought would be the last half of our lives.
We hadn’t been in Fort Worth for more than a few days when Deborah spied an item in the
Star-Telegram
about homelessness in the city. The piece mentioned a place called the Union Gospel Mission. At the time, an insistent voice in Deborah’s heart told her it was a place she might fit. Not long afterward, a letter arrived from Debbie Brown, an old friend, inviting us to join “Friends of the Union Gospel Mission,” a circle of philanthropic donors. Deborah immediately told me that not only did she want to join, she also intended to inquire about volunteering at the mission itself.
“I was hoping you’d go with me,” she said, smiling and tilting her head in a way so irresistible I sometimes thought she should register it for a patent.
The mission, on East Lancaster Street, was tucked deep in a nasty part of town. While it was true that the murder rate in Texas had been falling, I was sure that anyone still doing any murdering probably lived right around there.
I smiled back. “Sure I’ll go.”
But secretly, I hoped that once she actually rubbed shoulders with the kind of scuzzy derelicts that had robbed my gallery, Deborah would find it too scary, too
real
, to volunteer on East Lancaster. Then we could revert to doing our part by dropping off some old clothes or furniture—or, if she really found it tough to tear herself away, more money.
I should’ve known better, for other than yellow jackets and black-diamond ski slopes, Deborah feared only one thing.
Now
, believe it or not, there used to be what you might call a “code of honor,” or unity, in the hobo jungle. Down there, if one fella got hisself a can of Vienna Sausages and there was five other fellas around, then he gon’ give each one of em a sausage. The same goes for his six-pack and his half-pint and his dope. ’Cause who knows whether somebody else might have somethin he wants a piece of the very next day?
One of the fellas in my circle had him a car he was livin in, a gold Ford Galaxy 500. Me and him got to be purty tight, so one time when he was runnin from the law and he had to get outta town for a spell, he asked me to watch out for his car. It sure wadn’t no new car, but I liked it and it run purty good. I didn’t drive it around much ’cause I never had drove nothin but a tractor. But he’d been stayin in it, so I figured I would, too.
That’s when I got me an idea: There was enough room in there for more than just one fella to sleep. So I started rentin out two sleepin’ spots in the backseat—$3 a night. Fellas said it beat sleepin on the sidewalk. I had me a regular Galaxy Hilton there for a while till the police showed up and hauled it off, said my little hotel had unpaid tickets and no insurance.
Regular folks that live in neighborhoods and go to work every day don’t know nothin about no life like that. If you took a normal fella and dropped him off in the hobo jungle or under the bridge, he wouldn’t know what to do. You got to be taught to live homeless. You ain’t gon’ put on no suit and no tie and think you gon’ be pullin off the hamburger drop.
So I had me some partners for a while. But after a few winters went by, I began to pull away from the folks I’d been runnin with. Kinda slipped off into silence. I don’t know why. Some kinda “mental adjustment,” maybe. Or maybe I was just goin a little bit crazy. For a real long time, I didn’t speak to nobody and didn’t want nobody speakin to me. Got to where if I felt threatened, I’d attack. I took some money from a hamburger drop and bought me a .22 pistol. Thought I might need it for protection.
You get a spirit in you, a spirit makes you feel like nobody in the world cares nothin about you. Don’t matter if you live or die. People with that spirit get mean, dangerous. They play by the rules of the jungle.
I earned respect with my fists. One time I was talkin on a public telephone, and this fella that was waitin to use it come up and hung up the phone while I was still talkin. I took that telephone and broke it on his head. He fell on the ground, hollerin and holdin his head, blood gushin out between his fingers. I just walked away.
Another time, while I was sleepin under the tracks, some gangstas from the projects crept up in the hobo jungle and started stealin what little bit the homeless folks had. They was young black fellas—actin the way some young fellas act, like can’t nothin touch em long as they stick together and cuss you loud enough. It was dark and I was lyin inside my cardboard box awake when I heard em slither up, whisperin.
Now I can’t use the kinda language I used that night, so let’s just say I called em some names. I busted outta that box with a sawed-off piece a’ steel pipe in my hand and started swingin: “You done tried to jack the wrong man! I’ll
kill
you! You think I won’t? I’ll
kill
you!”
There was three of em. But when a crazy-lookin homeless man is swingin a pipe at ever head in sight and threatenin murder, three against one ain’t no good gamble. They took off runnin and so did I: straight to the gold Ford Galaxy that my friend had done got back from the police. I jumped in and dug the key outta the seat cushion where I knowed he stashed it. Then I cranked up the Galaxy and headed for the projects to get me some revenge.
I couldn’t see the thieves no more, but I knowed where they come from and the projects was just a few blocks away. I was drivin fast and purty soon I could see the brick buildings peekin up over the long, low dirt pile some-body’d put up along the street to keep cars from drivin up where the folks stayed. When I got to that dirt pile, I never even slowed down, just jumped the curb and punched the gas. That Galaxy zoomed up that dirt hill and went airborne just like you see them daredevils do on TV. I landed smack in the middle of the projects with the car smokin like a coal train.
I jumped out with the engine still runnin and started hollerin. “Bring it on! Bring it on! Come out! I’ll
kill
you!” It was late, but there was still a few people in the big courtyard. Most of em ran in their houses, the mamas snatchin up their children and hustlin em indoors.
Didn’t take long before lights started comin on. I knowed folks was callin the police on me, so I jumped back in the car and sped outta there. I had created a real problem and had to go hide out for a spell. The police come and took my friend’s Galaxy again, but they didn’t arrest him ’cause he swore somebody stole it. (I guess I had since I didn’t tell him I was takin it.) Besides, he didn’t match the eyewitness stories of the man folks said had crashed a flyin gold car into the middle of the projects.
If all that had a’ happened these days, somebody prob’ly woulda pulled out a gun and tried to shoot me dead. But back then, not a single one of them boys would come out and face me. I guess they thought a man crazy enough to jump a car into a place with women and children around might be crazy enough to kill em. They was right. If I’d a’ found em, I would have. ’Specially if I’d a’ thought to grab my gun.
I had to lay low for a while after that so I hightailed it back to Lousiana to let the heat die down. Took my pistol with me. That’s how I wound up in one of the worst hellholes ever invented by a white man.
I made it to Shreveport, but I didn’t have no money. I had that .22, though, and I figured if I waved it around at somebody who did have some money, they might give me some of it. I ain’t proud a’ this one bit now, but I decided to rob a city bus. All I had to do was wait on a corner till a bus slowed down and stopped. When the door opened, I jumped up on the steps and showed the driver my pistol.
“Open that box and gimme that money!” I hollered. There was just a couple of folks on the bus and they ducked down in their seats real quick. One lady started cryin.
The driver’s eyes got real big. “I can’t open it,” he said, his voice kinda shakin a little. “I don’t have a key. You can’t get the money out unless you break it.”
I looked down at the money in the box then at the folks hunkerin down in the bus. I could hear that lady, still cryin. I looked back at the driver and saw he was looking at my gun. Then I got off the bus. I was mean and bad, but not mean and bad enough to shoot a man just ’cause he showed up for work on the wrong day. But now I had the law on my tail in Fort Worth
and
Shreveport, so I decided to turn myself in. I didn’t tell the police my real name, though. Told em my name was Thomas Moore. But it wouldn’t have mattered to the judge if my name was Abraham Lincoln. He found me guilty of armed robbery and sent me to Angola prison for twenty years.
It was May 1968. Now in case you ain’t heard nothin ’bout Angola, it was hell, surrounded on three sides by a river. I didn’t know this then, but in those days, it was the darkest, most vicious prison in America.
A few days after I got there, a prisoner I had met back at the Shreveport jail saw me and reached out like he was gon’ shake my hand. Instead, he gave me a knife. “Put this under your pilla,” he said. “You gon’ need it.”