Oh, Where are You Now

By Jim Fremstad
Contributing Writer

I met “Kelly” at a meeting in a local church, and saw him at other meetings over the course of a few weeks. I realized that he was homeless, transient, and prone to alcohol abuse on a level that few of us would survive. The beating drum had a different rhythm for him, and its cadence was convoluted. He received messages from our environment that were interpreted by different processes- he was a Bostonian Kerouac, a Thoreauian hobo, a rider of trains, and a disturbed alcoholic veteran of his own battles with his personality, his past, and his paranoia. He slept under warehouse loading docks, but wore a tie and a Concordia Cobber cap, so he would appear less disheveled and vagrant. He was “Kelly” after Hogan’s Hero’s Kelly, irascible, irreverent, and a tribute to the human genome; he was a survivor.

At five feet four inches tall with an Irish temperament and the spirit of a bantam feather-weight,  he was no stranger to altercations with his fellow vagrants, run-ins with the law, and an emotional pallet of guilt, inadequacy, and claustrophobia. His life was his art, a 21st century Van Gogh, whose landscape was his dignity viewed through a distorted prism of denial, defiance, and deluded dependency.

So I let him sleep at my home, offering first a storage shed, then the garage, and then the basement. I liked him, and having my own distortions of vision and perception, I thought that he was responding well and staying sober. I was encouraged and felt a sense of ownership for his success. I borrowed him a bike, and blew it off when the handle bar basket went missing. I employed him as a laborer for food, shelter, and a few bucks on the side. He bought some groceries with food stamps, so I lent him fifty bucks to continue his job search.

He had a sponsor, attended a few AA meetings, and was looking into VA Housing. He had a physical evaluation scheduled and life was looking up for him. Even my significant other, Irene, a woman possessed of a phenomenal Germanic work ethic, who tolerates fools and alcoholic malingerers and the welfare unemployed with a disdain that rivals my contempt for the Tea Party, thought he was on the path. He left my home to move into the VA housing facility along with my $300 bike.

I saw him walking on the street two days later, picked him up, and we went to a meeting together. I didn’t ask about the bike. I didn’t need to. I had seen him, finally, in the reality of his disease, and I knew that I had substituted my reality for his, and this was my situation, not his. He moved to Williston, and blew off his court fine for public intoxication, dishevelment, and throwing coal at another vagrant. I responded to his occasional phone calls, drunk and sober, and dropped my story line of opinion and judgement.

Last night he called me. He was hauled back to Moorhead to pay his $450 dollar fine;, he assured them that he would pay it and was let out. He’s conned the best, and the State has spent far more than that in transporting and housing him for the purpose of some misguided sense of “social order” control.

I hope that Mitt Romney, Perry, and Cain are brought to justice soon. I hope that North Dakota’s political elite who sacrifice the roads and infrastructure of Williston, and the Vikings aficionados who would build a coliseum at the expense of capital improvements to our educational system, funded with regressive taxes, and Morris Lanning, who advocates lower taxes for the wealthy at the expense of our cities and counties, eventually are subject to the same stringent strictures. Ethical lapses, in service of self-centered goals, should be subject to the same public disapproval, and punitive response by our society. But every one has an ego, and judgement is an egotistical need. So I find myself convicted.

Oh, Kelly called me, so I laid a sleeping bag on my garbage can for him to use. I feel better, and if Morris is ever homeless, I’ll let him use it to, after Kelly is done with it. But I suspect that his nest is well feathered, and his pension secure; now if he’d just move to North Dakota.

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