my slant on life was forever changed on the day I became an 'invisable man:'
It all began with:
'Yesterday upon a stair,
I met a man who wasn't
there...'
From the poem 'Antigosh'
And ended when:
'I had the blues because I had no shoes
until upon the street I met a man who
had no feet.'
Dennis Watley
Therefore, I must initiate what follows in a kind of historical shorthand:
'OPERATION MINCEMEAT' WAS A SUCCESSFUL DISINFORMATION PLAN...
It all began with:
'Yesterday upon a stair,
I met a man who wasn't
there...'
From the poem 'Antigosh'
And ended when:
'I had the blues because I had no shoes
until upon the street I met a man who
had no feet.'
Dennis Watley
Therefore, I must initiate what follows in a kind of historical shorthand:
'OPERATION MINCEMEAT' WAS A SUCCESSFUL DISINFORMATION PLAN...
CONCEIVED BY THE BRITISH DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR WHICH helped to convince the Nazis that The Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia instead of Sicily, the actual objective. A fellow by the name of Ewin Montagu who happened to be a Naval British Lawyer decided to write a fictional book about this event on weekends when he had a bit more time. His version of this event became a book by the name 'The Man Who Never Was,' which was a tale about a fictitious British Officer named Major William Martin whose corpse washed ashore in Spain carrying equally fictitious top-secret documents and personal letters in order to provide the Nazis false information. The book was eventually made into a movie staring Clifton Webb and Gloria Graham. What follows, however is not about the movie or book or a tale about Clifton Webb and Gloria Graham. It is more of a narrative of how I became 'The Man Who Never Was' quite by accident when I happened to drop my wallet on a drug store floor.
I will begin by saying that I was born back in the day when you could still hear the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner grocery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat. Back then, the taxicabs were all Checkers, with ample room for your legs, and the drivers knew where Denver's Union Station was and always helped you with the luggage. In that city, there were apartments with three bedrooms and views of the Rocky Mountain Range. Cars were never double parked. Shop doors weren't locked in the daytime. Bus drivers still made change. All over town, the cops walked the beat and everyone knew their name. You wore galoshes in the rain. Waitresses called you honey. You slept with the windows open to the summer night...
...But the time I lost my wallet cities like these had been hammered to dust by time, progress, accident, and greed. I had quite suddenly become an old man 78 years-of-age minus an identity; devoid of having a bank account Visa card, Social Security identification, or a driver's license neatly stuck inside of his wallet and safely hidden in his front pant pocket. I was informed by my bank that there was longer any money in my account. It had been breached and had automatically been closed. For safety's sake, the bank manager suggested that I open a new account in another bank. On the basic level, of course, this meant that I was completely out of finances and no longer had a verifiable identity, which meant that I nether had the money or identification in order to accomplish that task.
I felt as if a double-decker bus had just run over me.
I promptly telephoned the local Social Security office and informed them of my situation and told them of my wallet loss and bank invasion and the suggestion from my former bank that I open a new account in another facility, which I would be unable to do until they sent me my check. I was then put on hold. As I waited for the voice to return, I was beginning to realize that the proper protocols to resolve my problem would solely be up to me, since I had been waiting for over 20 minutes for them to get back to me. They never did; and it was shortly after that when I began to realize that each day the citizens of our country pass one another in the street and almost never connect, and I was now moving among them without an identity and completely devoid of money.
Out on the sidewalks on that Thursday afternoon plump with spring I watched people moved about, talking with one another, angling through traffic toward a bookstore or a boutique, rushing to pick up children from school, to trade or bargain with each other over a proposed business deal, or just looking up at the sky and thinking about what a wonderful day lay ahead. More than once I found myself staring up at a signs which read: Chase Bank or The Bank of America, which was the most obvious symbol of any city, with their penthouses snug and distant at the apex. I had become an individual who was now cut off from the throbbing engine of the city itself; and it was while I stood in line at the Carmichael, California office of the DMV to obtain a new driver's license and senior citizen's ID that I began to experience what I would like to term as: 'The Poor Pitiful Me Syndrome.'
I could no longer enter restaurants or shops or movie houses. And in an important way, this was terribly sad. The fabled energy of any city is the result of small daily collisions: the push and shove of people on the street, and without it there is a remorseless process which often effects individual lives; it alters the entire way of life. I was now trapped in a semi-permanent indigence, the steady reminders that there is nothing ennobling about poverty. These thoughts served as a heartbreaking reminder of others out on the streets without an identity, who daily lived with fruitless encounters and dispiriting defeats and that nothing compared to the life of folks living in a cardboard box on the street.
I somehow slowly became aware of the hollow-eyed men in filthy coats imploring me to grant them alms as I passed them on the street; two blocks later, every other woman is beautiful, with dark flirting eyes eating a wonderful lunch at an expensive outside table of a restaurant; at the next corner a religious lunatic pursues you, flailing at you for your sins, preaching your doom in capital letters. In a little over an hour, I had experienced pity, anger, lust, incomprehension, elation, loss.
Having moved to the city of Sacramento 2 years before, I recalled the fact that I had once lived in the City of New York, where all around me lay a Secret City, and now found myself in a city that held secrets, as well. Houses with lost histories, streets turbulent with emanations of power. Places so new that the odor of paint stains the air; others so old that they are to a neophyte explorer incredibly new and surprising. There were, however, other places that only a few knew about; others so commonplace that it is still possible to move around without being appalled by either hollow grandeur or unspeakable degradation.
That even here in Sacramento, as you round a corner, a group of hustlers, peddling heroin and crack- cocaine, used books or stolen watches, sees you and they are suddenly tense, poised for action, like an orchestra awaiting a downbeat. There were were young men and women on the corner willing to sell their bodies in order to get money in order to live another day. People without jobs or families or shelter. This defeated army of mendicants seemed to be made up of the same winos and junkies and the quite literally insane as the City of New York had been. Sacramento too contained many unwilling recruits that had simply run out of luck.
It was my hope that this would not be my unending future.
My eventual upswing began as I happened to switch on my television set and saw the face of a 58 year-old African-American man by the name of Anthony Ray Hinton, a man who had served 30 years on Alabama's Death Row for the murder of 2 fast-food restaurant managers in Birmingham; and after diligent legal work on his behalf by The Equal Justice Initiative had finally gained his freedom. I doubted that the 'I once was broke and lost my identity for a little while' moan would ever compare to what Mister Hinton had gone through. That dynamic began to teach me that anything and everything was possible, that I could still go forth in the morning, turn a sudden corner, and discover with astonishment that I was capable of surprise. On such days, when you surrender to the most romantic emotion of life: You want to live forever...
...But there were others out there, men and women with large plastic bags beside them on the sidewalk on El Camino Avenue poking around in a garbage can, eating a piece of uneaten bagel and gathering 4 empty Diet Pepsi cans to stuff into their plastic bag. Men who glare at you, their yellow-hollowed eyes peering above a mask of thick wiry beards who spit at you and yell:What's choo lookin' at, man? Ain't you never seen a homeless person before? As he begins to lift his bag full of rattling cans and running off, talking to himself as he lopes toward another street. And you somehow know that the man with the plastic bag on his shoulder and the split screen in his head wasn't alone, wasn't some municipal oddity. What is extraordinary is that the general population hasn't risen in outrage.
Perhaps the cause for this municipal numbness is simple: We have become used to seeing many atrocities on our television sets. On a day a story breaks about a black man being shot in the back by a white cop, the story has vanished from our from the newspapers and our collective consciousness with an assist from ISIS and who may or may not be announcing that they are running for the presidency of the United States today. We have little time to mourn the brief event of a black man running away and being slaughtered by a white cop, and could care even less about the guy with the plastic bag on his shoulder and the split screen in his head...
...If this attitude continues and there are only 25 bums on Sacramento's El Camino Avenue now, make way for another 100 in the near future. If there are 2,000 homeless this year, get ready for 1o,ooo. Our collective consciousness is dying, we dismiss the street people as something less than human; and nobody seems to care - do we? - the horror is that there is no horror...
...With our American gift for syrupy platitude, nothing will change in the foreseeable future. The squeegee brigades will continue to appear at major intersections, holding rags to clean auto windshields, grabbing windshield wipers to force compliance; the homeless will rummage through thousands of plastic garbage cans left out for pickup in front of our homes, looking for cans which can be exchanged for cash; and we will continue to complain, enraged by the mere sight of them on our city streets, wishing that they would just forever disappear...
...And we should be shamefaced for allowing them to forever remain invisible...
I will begin by saying that I was born back in the day when you could still hear the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner grocery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat. Back then, the taxicabs were all Checkers, with ample room for your legs, and the drivers knew where Denver's Union Station was and always helped you with the luggage. In that city, there were apartments with three bedrooms and views of the Rocky Mountain Range. Cars were never double parked. Shop doors weren't locked in the daytime. Bus drivers still made change. All over town, the cops walked the beat and everyone knew their name. You wore galoshes in the rain. Waitresses called you honey. You slept with the windows open to the summer night...
...But the time I lost my wallet cities like these had been hammered to dust by time, progress, accident, and greed. I had quite suddenly become an old man 78 years-of-age minus an identity; devoid of having a bank account Visa card, Social Security identification, or a driver's license neatly stuck inside of his wallet and safely hidden in his front pant pocket. I was informed by my bank that there was longer any money in my account. It had been breached and had automatically been closed. For safety's sake, the bank manager suggested that I open a new account in another bank. On the basic level, of course, this meant that I was completely out of finances and no longer had a verifiable identity, which meant that I nether had the money or identification in order to accomplish that task.
I felt as if a double-decker bus had just run over me.
I promptly telephoned the local Social Security office and informed them of my situation and told them of my wallet loss and bank invasion and the suggestion from my former bank that I open a new account in another facility, which I would be unable to do until they sent me my check. I was then put on hold. As I waited for the voice to return, I was beginning to realize that the proper protocols to resolve my problem would solely be up to me, since I had been waiting for over 20 minutes for them to get back to me. They never did; and it was shortly after that when I began to realize that each day the citizens of our country pass one another in the street and almost never connect, and I was now moving among them without an identity and completely devoid of money.
Out on the sidewalks on that Thursday afternoon plump with spring I watched people moved about, talking with one another, angling through traffic toward a bookstore or a boutique, rushing to pick up children from school, to trade or bargain with each other over a proposed business deal, or just looking up at the sky and thinking about what a wonderful day lay ahead. More than once I found myself staring up at a signs which read: Chase Bank or The Bank of America, which was the most obvious symbol of any city, with their penthouses snug and distant at the apex. I had become an individual who was now cut off from the throbbing engine of the city itself; and it was while I stood in line at the Carmichael, California office of the DMV to obtain a new driver's license and senior citizen's ID that I began to experience what I would like to term as: 'The Poor Pitiful Me Syndrome.'
I could no longer enter restaurants or shops or movie houses. And in an important way, this was terribly sad. The fabled energy of any city is the result of small daily collisions: the push and shove of people on the street, and without it there is a remorseless process which often effects individual lives; it alters the entire way of life. I was now trapped in a semi-permanent indigence, the steady reminders that there is nothing ennobling about poverty. These thoughts served as a heartbreaking reminder of others out on the streets without an identity, who daily lived with fruitless encounters and dispiriting defeats and that nothing compared to the life of folks living in a cardboard box on the street.
I somehow slowly became aware of the hollow-eyed men in filthy coats imploring me to grant them alms as I passed them on the street; two blocks later, every other woman is beautiful, with dark flirting eyes eating a wonderful lunch at an expensive outside table of a restaurant; at the next corner a religious lunatic pursues you, flailing at you for your sins, preaching your doom in capital letters. In a little over an hour, I had experienced pity, anger, lust, incomprehension, elation, loss.
Having moved to the city of Sacramento 2 years before, I recalled the fact that I had once lived in the City of New York, where all around me lay a Secret City, and now found myself in a city that held secrets, as well. Houses with lost histories, streets turbulent with emanations of power. Places so new that the odor of paint stains the air; others so old that they are to a neophyte explorer incredibly new and surprising. There were, however, other places that only a few knew about; others so commonplace that it is still possible to move around without being appalled by either hollow grandeur or unspeakable degradation.
That even here in Sacramento, as you round a corner, a group of hustlers, peddling heroin and crack- cocaine, used books or stolen watches, sees you and they are suddenly tense, poised for action, like an orchestra awaiting a downbeat. There were were young men and women on the corner willing to sell their bodies in order to get money in order to live another day. People without jobs or families or shelter. This defeated army of mendicants seemed to be made up of the same winos and junkies and the quite literally insane as the City of New York had been. Sacramento too contained many unwilling recruits that had simply run out of luck.
It was my hope that this would not be my unending future.
My eventual upswing began as I happened to switch on my television set and saw the face of a 58 year-old African-American man by the name of Anthony Ray Hinton, a man who had served 30 years on Alabama's Death Row for the murder of 2 fast-food restaurant managers in Birmingham; and after diligent legal work on his behalf by The Equal Justice Initiative had finally gained his freedom. I doubted that the 'I once was broke and lost my identity for a little while' moan would ever compare to what Mister Hinton had gone through. That dynamic began to teach me that anything and everything was possible, that I could still go forth in the morning, turn a sudden corner, and discover with astonishment that I was capable of surprise. On such days, when you surrender to the most romantic emotion of life: You want to live forever...
...But there were others out there, men and women with large plastic bags beside them on the sidewalk on El Camino Avenue poking around in a garbage can, eating a piece of uneaten bagel and gathering 4 empty Diet Pepsi cans to stuff into their plastic bag. Men who glare at you, their yellow-hollowed eyes peering above a mask of thick wiry beards who spit at you and yell:What's choo lookin' at, man? Ain't you never seen a homeless person before? As he begins to lift his bag full of rattling cans and running off, talking to himself as he lopes toward another street. And you somehow know that the man with the plastic bag on his shoulder and the split screen in his head wasn't alone, wasn't some municipal oddity. What is extraordinary is that the general population hasn't risen in outrage.
Perhaps the cause for this municipal numbness is simple: We have become used to seeing many atrocities on our television sets. On a day a story breaks about a black man being shot in the back by a white cop, the story has vanished from our from the newspapers and our collective consciousness with an assist from ISIS and who may or may not be announcing that they are running for the presidency of the United States today. We have little time to mourn the brief event of a black man running away and being slaughtered by a white cop, and could care even less about the guy with the plastic bag on his shoulder and the split screen in his head...
...If this attitude continues and there are only 25 bums on Sacramento's El Camino Avenue now, make way for another 100 in the near future. If there are 2,000 homeless this year, get ready for 1o,ooo. Our collective consciousness is dying, we dismiss the street people as something less than human; and nobody seems to care - do we? - the horror is that there is no horror...
...With our American gift for syrupy platitude, nothing will change in the foreseeable future. The squeegee brigades will continue to appear at major intersections, holding rags to clean auto windshields, grabbing windshield wipers to force compliance; the homeless will rummage through thousands of plastic garbage cans left out for pickup in front of our homes, looking for cans which can be exchanged for cash; and we will continue to complain, enraged by the mere sight of them on our city streets, wishing that they would just forever disappear...
...And we should be shamefaced for allowing them to forever remain invisible...
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