The Devil's Due

It was a foggy autumn morning in Eureka, California, when I wandered off the street into a warm office with fluorescent lights buzzing. Brown water stains formed puzzle pieces on the roof paneling in the foyer. I smelled bleach and vagrancy, a pungent aroma that I, no doubt, added to. I’d slept under a redwood tree the night before, and bits of bark and forest floor had attached to my dreadlocks. But the redwood feathers weren’t at all like pine needles with their waxy and nearly odorless nonchalance—more a vague musk like dried moss.

My mission was to apply for food stamps, hike the redwoods, and hang out and play hacky sack with other backpackers for two weeks until my stamps arrived at the soup kitchen in Arcata that everyone used as an address. Then it was back to sunnier climes, or perhaps the desert. I didn’t count on the biting cold of Humboldt or the Chinese-torture nightly drops.

The sky was blasting blue during the day, but last night was a wake-up call. Literally. The fog condensed on those redwood feathers, and big, fat drops would land everywhere. I thought I was on a dry patch, but after three landed on my bag and one on my third eye, I relocated and tried snuggling up against the base of the redwood trunk. Drip drop, no matter where. Not that I got wet, but I did have to toss my bag in the dryer after spanging fifty cents that morning.

I observed a nod to continue.

“And so, it’s gonna be back to sleeping under bridges and such canopied compartments where no one will see me after dark. Under the 101 freeway is probably my best bet. I’ve always liked the sound of cars passing above. It washes around the concrete like an ocean wave crashing.”

I was explaining this to my caseworker, Marc, according to his name tag, who’d told me to give him a synopsis of where I was at and what landed me here. He was right in that middle spot of life where, if you don’t work out, you turn to flab under your white Oxford button-up. But although he’d developed waxy jowls, he had bright eyes when he glanced from his screen to me, and I felt like I could be candid with him because of his tie, which was jet black and striking blue, with orange brightening to yellow in the center, depicting a tropical sunset. The black relief of a coconut tree on the shore was like a vivid chord of hope in Marc’s sad little cubicle. Everything was beige, even his computer terminal, and except for a picture of a little girl with a big smile and two missing front teeth, that tie and myself were the only flare in this ticky-tacky box where Marc logged the form I’d filled out into his computer—black screen, green font, all caps.

But as he entered the data, he seemed sincerely curious about how I got by, and I decided to tell him about how I’d once made sixty bucks in an hour when I flew a sign in Stockton on a Sunday afternoon.

“Flew a sign?” asked Marc. He told me to start from the top, so I obliged.

Another hobo named Teddy explained that cardboard signs are a hobo’s debit card, but it takes time for the machine of humanity to cough up enough cash so that you can do what you need to do. He had an eight-dollar-a-day habit, and so he’d only be out on the on-ramp for fifteen minutes, maybe a half hour, with his HOMELESS HUNGRY GODBLESS sign.

Before we met Teddy, he’d been opposite us across a boulevard that bled onto the freeway—the northbound on-ramp—and for hours we’d had no success with our thumbs snagging a ride southbound, but watched in awe as people pulled over, about every fifth vehicle, and handed him cash or food or both. He’d thank them and then stash the food behind his backpack, pocket the cash.

After about twenty minutes, a patrol car flashed its lights, and Teddy folded his sign and nodded to the officer. The cop drove away slowly, and Teddy unzipped his backpack and stowed at least seven bags of fast food inside. They didn’t all fit, so he carried one in each fist. He walked down from the on-ramp to the sidewalk under the interstate.

My road dog, Moses, and I had been narrating his process when he called something to us that we couldn’t make out over the sound of traffic. But when he lifted up the two bags of fast food, we understood he was offering breakfast.

We scampered across the boulevard to a fat stripe of overpass shade where Teddy squatted.

“You guys will never catch a ride out of here. These local folks is only going a few miles down to church and back, but if you fly a sign, you can make enough for a bus. Where y’all headed?”

“Santa Cruz,” said Moses.

Teddy handed us each a fast-food bag and said, “If y’all are particular, I’m sure I got a variety in my pack, but I don’t eat this garbage. I just need my daily eight, and the cops know that. He must have been feeling some type of way,” Teddy said, and looked up the road.

“He’ll be circling back, but if you want, I could show you where you can sleep if you don’t make bus fare. I’ll let you borrow my magic marker for some signs. Can’t believe you don’t know about the hobo’s debit card.”

About a half mile into the industrial section of town near the tracks, Teddy tilted a plywood board that had been covering the window of an abandoned brick building. He’d removed the board and tacked it up with a single nail. From the floor just inside the window, he picked up a 2x4 to prop the board open as we scrambled inside. Then he swung the board closed. There was enough light from skylights near the ceiling to see the enormous concrete floor.

“Wish I had roller skates,” Moses said.

Teddy had some choice pieces of cardboard, and he handed Moses a big black marker and said, “Now don’t get too clever; just keep it simple. It’s not about the words; it’s about you standing there in need. A rectangle of cardboard says it all.”

“I’m sure the passersby could appreciate some nuance,” I said.

“No need for poetry, but please excuse me while I set myself straight. I’ll be back in about an hour or two.”

As Teddy crawled back out the window, I wished him Godspeed.

Moses’s sign was to the point: NEED BUS FARE. Mine was, against the advice of Teddy, a little more convoluted: LIKE JESUS TRAVELING HOME HOMELESS.

After a twenty-minute nap, Moses and I decided to take advantage of the daylight hours and headed back to the on-ramps with our debit cards. In the hour that we stood opposite each other, with the boulevard between us, his sign made him $182, which did make my $63 lackluster, but after traveling penniless for two months, we bought a couple 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor to celebrate as we walked to the bus station.

“Paid like fat-cat bureaucrats!” exclaimed Moses.

“Who’d have thunk a piece of cardboard could be so compelling?” I said. “God bless Teddy.”

The bus tickets were $40 apiece, and when we arrived in Santa Cruz that night, Moses insisted that we celebrate with a top-shelf bottle. We bought two. Easy come, easy go, but that hobo’s debit card was a game changer.

I shrugged.

“Fascinating,” Marc said, but I could tell by his voice that he was distracted. “See here,” he said, pointing at his computer screen, “that you signed up for food stamps in Tucson last month, L.A. the month before, and San Francisco two months before that.”

“My thumb gets thirsty and needs to snag a ride after I’ve seen what there is to see in a place,” I said. Then, “I used to just shoplift and dumpster dive—I mean, I still dumpster dive, but food stamps make it so I don’t gank for sustenance. Tip of the hat to the tax man on that, eh?”

“Have you thought about applying for SSI?”

“Retirement?”

He pointed at a paper tacked onto a partitioning board of his cubicle. It depicted a stick man relaxing in a hammock. In block lettering above, it said: SSI: PERMANENT VACATION.

“I’ll put it to you like this,” said Marc. “If you fill out the SSI form now, it can take a year, maybe less, but if you convince the government that you’re crazy, you’ll receive a check with money that starts adding up the moment the form is processed.”

“Adding up?”

“Uncle Sam will give you back pay at $900 a month, so if it takes a year for you to play the part, that’s over $10,000.”

“The part, like being crazy?”

“And are you not? The thing is, instead of applying at all these different offices for food stamps, why not get a check deposited into your bank account?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Get one, but take your time. If it takes you years, that back pay keeps stacking up.”

He winked.

I frowned, then looked at him sideways.

He nodded. Shrugged. I shrugged.

“Seems like a no-brainer,” I said.

“Just a misfiring one.”

Looking back, perhaps he was the devil, but I filled out that form and signed that dotted line. Back in Arcata, I told some hippies at the soup kitchen about SSI. Some told me they were already on it or had been rejected by the Snake.

“Well, call me loony and start filling that baloney, I say,” I said. “I’m fixing to get paid!”

That summer, I hopped trains from Portland, Oregon, to Fort Collins, Colorado, with a ragtag crew of seven. We dumpster-dived, asked for spare change, flew HOMELESS HUNGRY GODBLESS signs, and dined at church soup kitchens, which sometimes gave us bags of ramen and cans of beans. From Fort Collins, we caught a ride in a van with Bodi to a Rainbow Gathering in Michigan. The cops showed up with a couple of Native American tribal elders, and the press, to have a discussion about the unpermitted event where the Rainbow Family had built camps across the river. Latrines had been dug into ancient burial grounds. Shitting on bones in a sacred burial was a bit much for me, so I hitchhiked back to the West Coast with a girl who’d just graduated high school and had parents in Olympia, Washington. I painted their house red for $800 and then went festival hopping.

After festivals ended in late September and blustery autumn announced its bone-biting intentions, I had just enough coin for a ticket to the Big Island. On the Hilo side, I decided to get to work convincing the government I was crazy. Some said it was a pipe dream and would be a false start because of the gatekeeper. Dr. Hashimoto was a samurai, and he rejected all but the most touched. However, when I reenacted the moment I was rejected from the monastery and burst into tears, he put his hand on my shoulder and said he would arrange for me to speak with a psychologist.

And for Dr. Fred, twice a month for an hour, I was the freak I needed to be—twitchy, quick to tear up, easily distracted. At the time, I lived in a lava tube in Mackenzie Park. I explained to Dr. Fred that it was the end times. I once commanded him to repent. But in hindsight, it wasn’t so much the content of what I said as my delivery—consistently batshit. After six months, he let the Powers That Be know that I was off my rocker and over the moon.

When the check for $8K arrived, I took it immediately to the real estate office, waved it around, and asked if there was anything in Seaview. In 2002, there was one lot with a crazy neighbor. Birds of a feather? Sold.

But karma has a way of connecting dots, eh? No one gets away with anything—certainly not yours truly. The disability check checked me eventually, with an infamous coconut tree that shook hands with Papaya Farm Road and made a side bet with gravity that my arms wouldn’t do enough to avoid the penalty of paralysis, no matter how hard I flapped. Gravity won that bet, and now I sit more than a lama in Tibet, balancing a check on a cage above wheels for a deal I once made with a devil named Marc.