Thursday, October 25, 2018

A Devil Dog in the Dark



I met Keith Sullivan on a Friday in September, the last day of Summer. I almost met him every day for a month before that, but kept not doing it. Eventually, it started to seem stupid not to after so long, so that day I stopped at the bench where he sits on the corner of Broadway and High and stuck out my hand. I didn’t necessarily have time, because I was on my way somewhere else. But when wasn’t I? I’d passed him a hundred times—literally a hundred times—and never said a word to him. But a few days after he showed up, and kept showing up, we began to take note of each other as fixtures in the busy downtown corridor. The faces, the cars, the bikes, ever flowing, never slowing, a river of humanity constantly changing and always on its way somewhere else.

But not us.

Every day the same. Me coming to work, him sitting on his bench. I was to and fro from appointments on Campus, parking in the rear of the huge building and walking around to the front where my office is, because there are three differently-keyed security doors and an elevator ride between me and my office if I go straight through. Plus, the creepy basement I'd have to pass through is straight out of Silence of the Lambs, and to be honest, I avoid it whenever possible. So I’d pass Keith four or five times a day, sometimes as many as ten times. As the days wore on, we began to look each other in the eye and give with a nod, the way some men do. A tip of the cap in acknowledgement that we were sharing space and time in life as our routines brought us into proximity like two ships passing. Except that I was the only one doing the passing, because Keith never moved an inch from his bench on the corner of Broadway and High.

He had a backpack and one of those little upright suitcases with the extendable handle and wheels that you roll onto the plane as your carry-on, and if the bench had been a bus stop, I would have believed that he was waiting on his ride to be about his daily business. But his bus never came, because it isn’t a bus stop and Keith isn’t on his way anywhere else. He just needs somewhere to be, and the corner of Broadway and High has a nice wooden bench on it where you can sit and watch the world go by. You’re a block from the Greyhound terminal, two blocks from the library, across the street from a Whole Foods, and the University of Oregon’s Baker Downtown Center is a huge building with overhangs that make for a nice rain shelter. There are worse places you could be if you just need somewhere to be.

Keith is a nice looking guy, with the tan and weathered face of someone who’s walked the world. Trim and in his early fifties, he’s got the faded denim eyes of a gunslinger, but the staid manner of somebody who’s in on the joke. His silver mustache is just shy of epic, and with his cropped silver mane, he looks like he could’ve been a riverboat gambler in another life, or somebody’s savvy AA sponsor in this one. But of course, Keith Sullivan is none of those things. Keith Sullivan is homeless.

It took me over a week to firmly settle on this determination, based on the few second walk-bys I got each day. Nothing about his appearance or affect backed up this notion; he didn’t have a sign or a cup, and he never asked for money. On the contrary, he was quiet, minded his business, and never said a word to anyone. He didn’t have a shopping cart or a cardboard box, just his two careworn pieces of luggage, that looked like they would if he were a twenty-something trekking across Europe and staying in youth hostels. He wore a jacket with a hunter’s camouflage pattern, he smoked Pall Mall straights, and his hat marked him as a US Marine. 

I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Marines. Growing up on military bases my whole life, Marines were a routine part of my life. They guarded the gates, played reveille and taps as the flag went up or down at the beginning and end of each day, jogged together in formation down the road rhyming their rhymes, and their Honor Guard attended every funeral. Because we were a Navy family, I always heard them referred to as Leathernecks and Jarheads. Our Polack jokes were Marine jokes instead, the punchline always about their diminished IQ, although I never understood why. They were just stupid because we say they’re stupid. 

Except that every Marine I ever met up close knew a hundred different ways to kill you with a rolled-up newspaper—ninety-nine of which hurt—but they’d pick up a kid with a skinned knee and deliver him to his mama with all the tender care of a dog carrying her pups by the scruff. I can’t remember a single word to the Navy fight song, but I could snap off all three verses of the Marine Hymn—on key mind you—at the drop of a hat. Some of the men I respect most in the world and count among my closest friends are Marines, and I’ve yet to meet one I didn’t like. Keith Sullivan is no exception.

Baker Downtown Center is a hub of activity and attracts of a lot of the city’s homeless population. Consequently, we have a dedicated maintenance person who comes around every day to clean up all the broken beer bottles, cigarette butts, garbage, needles, and the occasional pile of human feces. Several times a year, the Police show up to roust someone sleeping in the parking lot, or passed out in the bushes on the nod from a heroin bender. And although Keith’s bench is bolted into the concrete in deference to this milieu, and has a center armrest to prevent people from lying down on it, he himself is the antithesis of all these things.


The area around his bench is cleaner when he leaves than when he came. Professionals working in the building will sometimes park beside him on the bench to enjoy a smoke, believing that they’re just sitting next to a fellow citizen of our fine town. He sometimes rousts the parking lot sleepers himself to get them going in the morning, because you can get sentenced to sixteen hours of roadside cleanup for that kind of trespassing and vagrancy if they have signs posted, which Baker does. I never knew that. But then there were a lot of things I never knew until I shook Keith’s hand on Friday, September 21.

By the time we officially met, I’d decided that he was for sure homeless. What finally convinced me was that his hands were always dirty, and it was the kind of dirt that you can’t wash off. The kind that gets ground into the pores by hard living, when you never come to rest on anything but wood, concrete, and steel. I’d had that kind of filth ground into my hands through decades of construction work, and knew that all you could do was wait for the skin to slough off and replace itself with the new stuff. Always assuming you get to stop grinding for any length of time. Of course, Keith never had that chance, and wet wipes and public restrooms are no match for the grime of all the world.

I was on my way to a dive watering hole by the name of The West End to tip a few back in celebration with a friend who’d gotten a promotion, but decided I just couldn’t walk past Keith one more time, and nod and be on my way without saying a word to him. So I stopped and introduced myself, shook his hand, and when he asked me for some spare change I took him back to my truck in the parking lot to get him one of the supply bags that the wife and I have assembled for distribution on just such occasions. On the way we talked some about his time in the Corps, the homeless outreach and fundraising efforts he’d lead in Seattle, and how friendly people are in Eugene. After I handed him the bag—which is comprised of a little folding cash, food, water, gloves, socks, and first aid enough for a day or two—he showed me some pictures on his phone of the people and organizations he’d been with in Seattle.

I was struck by how intense he was about his previous life, pride absolutely beaming in his eyes, like he wanted me to know that he hadn't always been this guy. He’d had his moments in the sun. In deference to that, I chatted with him much longer than I actually had time to, and then shook his hand again, wanting him to know that I saw him for who he is, and not just a statistic or charity case. Then I got in my vehicle and drove off to my real life, patting myself on the back for being a helluva guy, and then washing his homeless cooties off of my hand with the Purell that I keep in my truck. You know, because I'm a helluva guy.


I had a good time celebrating with my friends at The West End, and then went home and told my wife that I’d given another bag away and would need a replacement to put in my truck for the following week. I don’t remember a single other thing that happened until Monday. Why would I? I guess it was a pretty ordinary weekend. I probably puttered around the house on Saturday, making excuses to watch Netflix instead of mowing the lawn. On Sunday, I suppose we ran errands and went to the big family lunch where I played pillow fight and demolition croquet with my nieces. I couldn’t say for sure that all of it actually happened, but I’m guessing it did, because that’s pretty much how the weekends all go.

But come Monday morning, I went back to work and there was Keith again, sitting on his bench at the corner of Broadway and High. Only now I couldn’t just walk past him on my way to somewhere else. Now I knew his name, where he was from, and that he was a Leatherneck-Jarhead vet who had served his country—my country—only to find himself living outdoors. So in an effort to keep my self-appointed status as a helluva guy alive, I stopped and made some small talk with him. Have you ever been so stupid as to ask a homeless dude how his weekend was? I now have the dubious distinction of being able to say that I have. I may as well have asked him how it was sleeping on the sidewalk. Was the concrete to your liking?

I recently had to lay down on the concrete floor of my office to get under my desk and unscrew some attachments in preparation for moving across town to yet another location, my fourth office in less than three years. I was probably on the floor, which has a quarter inch of industrial carpet on it BTW, for ten minutes. When I got up, I had a crick in my neck and a dull ache in my lower back that took two days to go away. When I was six years younger than I am today, I spent most of one night sleeping on a carpeted floor in the master bedroom of a vacant house I was helping my buddy to fix up for sale. That was the night I discovered that I don’t sleep on the floor anymore. Not even on deep pile carpet with memory foam pad under it. Now I’m six years older and have even less tolerance for that kind of thing, and Keith is yet another six years older than me, at fifty three. Well, he’ll be fifty three on December 13th. Close enough. I can’t imagine how he even gets a wink of sleep.

How was your weekend? Sweet, fancy Moses.  

Still, in my defense, I knew that Keith was a proud man, a veteran, a leader in charitable circles, and obviously didn’t want to be reduced to a one-dimensional demographic. So I made the conversation I would with any other contemporary I’d met on the street and somehow struck up a friendship with, despite the awkward mismatches that created sometimes. So as the days wore on, I’d talk to him about politics, about faith, about high finance, and a bit about whether or not Joe Bonamassa could really play the blues. Pretty much anything but homelessness. Some days he’d join me in my walk around the block on my coffee breaks, or over to Whole Foods to pick up bananas for the wife, and we’d talk about his life story.

He’d spent four years in the Corps and was honorably discharged with two purple hearts from injuries sustained in Beirut and Grenada. I knew plenty about the Corps because I grew up in the midst of Marines and could quote their latin motto, their favorite lines from Marine Corps Patron Saint Chesty Puller, and even do a decent rendition of the Hymn. Keith didn’t mind being called a Letherneck or Jarhead, though the first time I did it, he asked if my old man was a goddam Squid, because that’s the only way I’d hear dumbass terms like those. And, in fact, my old man was a goddam Squid, so I asked Keith how Marines would refer to themselves. He said they called themselves Devil Dogs.

I’d heard the term before, but always assumed it was derogatory, like the others. But it turns out that the term was given to them by the World War I German Infantry, who feared the Marines like no other force on Earth. Teufel Hunden might be more correctly translated from the German as "hounds from hell," but a rose by any other name… The Devil Dogs got their fearsome reputation among the Krauts because they would advance through impenetrable fog-banks of mustard gas and blizzards of shrapnel and hot lead, only to emerge undaunted and bringing hell with them. The Marines took it as a compliment and appropriated the term for themselves with pride.

Some days when I’m in a hurry, I’ll walk past Keith with a quick fist bump and a “Give us a bark, Devil Dog!” To which he replies, “Oorah!” as we both go on about our day. Other days, we’ll share a couple of breakfast burritos and talk about his experience as an HVAC technician and metal worker in the SMART Union, Local #9 in Golden, Colorado. He wants to get back into that line of work when his doctors give him the green light, so he’s asked me for a recommendation when he applies at the University maintenance department. I guess I forgot to mention that he survived a bout of stage three colon cancer while being a homeless vet. In a cruel dichotomy, the VA paid for his treatment and then released him to the street to recover. He says Chesty Puller hasn't given him permission to die, so he’s got a medical marijuana prescription and drinks a half-dozen tall-boys a day to get through. I can’t say I approve of the tall-boys—because it’s fucking Pabst—but whatever gets you through, I guess.

Keith’s life has been shot through with cruel dichotomies. He’d been an advocate for the homeless for years, and then become homeless himself after his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident. He survives on about twenty bucks a day, culled from various sources. He texted me the other day, looking for some wire strippers so that he could strip a bundle of wires he found in a dumpster next to the chiropractor’s office they’re remodeling over on Pearl Street. You get more at the recycle center for stripped copper wire than for the insulated stuff. I didn’t know that. It makes sense, of course, but I’ve haven’t had much occasion to recycle anything for money since before the turn of the century. He collects bottles and cans in a given circumference around the Baker Center, but he told me that he can’t go west of Willamette Street, because the homeless people from that point on are all crazy meth heads and heroin addicts that will jack other homeless guys for everything they’ve got. A subculture I had no idea about.

Keith has a cell phone, an EBT card, a PayPal account, and a Facebook page, so I guess as homeless people go, he’s pretty high falutin'. He keeps telling me I should get back on Fb so that we can friend each other, but right now I’ll settle for being his friend in real life. Though I always demonstrate dutiful interest when he brings up his Fb page to show me the people who still email him and send a few bucks to his PayPal account from time to time. He can scroll through his timeline for days, showing posts and pictures of him with donors, volunteers, and lovely people from back when he was a Real Boy.

At times, Keith has disappeared for a day or two, and I started to worry that something bad had happened. After the first time he dropped out of sight, he showed me the Wonolo app he has on his phone that pings him for day labor, explaining that he’d been away stacking pallets and clearing out rentals for a property management agency. Other times, he’ll get a little influx of cash from one of his Seattle benefactors, or a particularly good haul of bottles, and he’ll save it up for a rainy day (or night, as the case may be), and spend it at the 66 Motel, staying until the last possible second for check-out. On those mornings, I can’t even lure him out with a texted offer of a chorizo breakfast burrito from Burrito Boy—our favorite breakfast place, just down the street from Baker—and I just have to eat both of them myself. Oh, the humanity.



I don’t mean to paint a Rockwellian portrait of homelessness. Keith is a bit drunk almost all of the time, his stainless steel water-bottle is full of beer, and his words are always slightly slurred. As a result, he tends to go on about the same things over and over, having forgotten what stories he’s already told. He has a bit of a complex about being looked down upon by the housed and the gainfully employed, so he cites his life-experience and triumphs often, becoming more and more belligerent and defiant about it the drunker he gets. He forgets that I’m there to work, and will sometimes stop me for a rambling conversation that I genuinely don’t have time for, and will continue in an unbroken stream until I put a stop to it by telling him that I have to get back to it.

Still, I wonder what I’d be like if our positions were reversed. I've lived in my car and a tent in Skinner Butte Park, but even then it was only so I didn't have to suck it up and ask my parents for help. And I was in my twenties, so it was kind of an adventure that made for an interesting anecdote. So even at my most delusionally self-righteous, I don’t imagine that I would have half the composure or grace that Keith demonstrates every day. I throw a fucking tantrum internally if I don’t get my favorite parking spot or somebody takes three days to reply K to one of my texts. One day he asked me if I read the Bible, and I said that I do. He told me that his favorite verse was in Psalms where it says: The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those whose spirits are crushed. He reads one Psalm, one Proverb, and one chapter from the Book of Acts every day. I guess it’s true that man does not live by bread alone…


One morning I didn’t find Keith at his bench on my way in, but happened to see him across the street, hurriedly tucking his stuff into his backpack in the alcove of the chiropractor’s office. Somebody had arrived on a motorcycle and wanted to park it in the alcove, so they were running him off. He saw me from afar and waved, so I stood waiting for him, shivering a bit in the chilly Fall air, a harbinger of things to come. He came over kind of sheepishly, still a little bleary-eyed. I poured him a cup of coffee from my thermos and we sat on the bench for a few minutes. He was cussing the alarm on his phone that hadn’t gone off for some reason. Then he looked and saw that his phone was dead.

“Close one! They’ve got trespassing signs posted over there and I know I gotta be up and out by 6:45a at the latest. Don’t wanna find myself on roadside cleanup again,” he said. “I’ll just hang out here for a bit until they open up over at the supermarket. They let me charge my phone if I buy anything, even if it's just a stick of gum.” As we sipped our coffee, he said that his backup sleeping spot, in the stairwell of the parking garage over on Oak, didn’t have such an early checkout time, but was just inside the circle of crazies who might just jack him in his sleep, so he preferred the chiropractor’s alcove. I nodded sagely in agreement.

The next morning I brought him my zero-degree REI sleeping bag that had been stashed quietly in the garage since it was last used for a camping trip, almost twenty years ago. Lindsay isn’t fond of camping, saying that we work way too hard all year to go and pretend to be homeless as a hobby. I always laugh at that joke, no matter how many times I’ve heard it. When I told him, Keith laughed, too, which I was glad about. That could have gone either way. 

Later that day, I found the yoga mat I bought from Walmart back when I was fooling myself into believing that I would use my coffee breaks to do some downward dog and get my lazy ass into a shape other than round. I think I actually used it twice in the year since I’d bought it, then stashed it in the Chasm of Shit I Don’t Care About in the alcove between my desk and the wall. I only found it again because they’re moving me out of my office and down to a location on campus, so most of my stuff is in boxes. I’m not thrilled about the move, or the reorganization they’ve got going on in our department. Although it does mean that I’m up for a promotion, which I’m kind of stressed about. It’s something that I talk to Keith about sometimes, one of those weird mismatches that could otherwise be so awkward. 

I gave Keith the mat on my way out of the building, and the next day he called me early in the morning to tell me how much he loved it. He’d actually been able to roll over in the night without waking himself up. I can empathize with that as one of life’s little joys, since I usually wake myself up every night rolling onto a bum left shoulder from my construction days. And I’m indoors. Jeez, what would that be like on the sidewalk? When I told him later about the move and possible promotion, he said that he’d say a prayer for me. I got a bit choked-up by that, but didn't want to let a Marine see me cry.

A week or two later, I was working late, trying to get a bunch of projects cleared off the deck so that I’d look good when they went to check my stats before the promotion interview. I came out of the office a little after 8:00p, and realized that Fall was hard upon us. The night was chilly, and I was struck by how deeply dark it was, not a trace of gloaming left in the sky. I was walking down High Street, having never been on it that late—as I’m usually home and dry by then—wishing I'd gone through the building and the creepy Silence of the Lambs basement instead. The canopy of overhanging oak and maple trees blotted out most of the light from the street lamps, so I traced my way slowly through the darkened corridor, hoping I wouldn’t run into the denizens that run the Baker Center while the gainfully employed are away. I came up on the bench cautiously, until I realized that the silhouette sitting there was in fact Keith.

I don’t know why it had never occurred to me that he had the same number of hours in a day to fill that I do. Not just during the daylight hours, but at night while I’m having dinner and watching TV as well. It’s like I thought everyone else on Earth were all just figments of my imagination, and nothing happens in the world while I’m asleep. He was just sitting there, staring out into the street, and I was struck by how much he looked like a guy watching TV in a living room, except he was on a bench on the corner of Broadway and High, just watching the sparse traffic go by. I looked on for a full minute, unexpectedly heartbroken by the image of a decent man sitting alone in the dark.



I started whistling a tune so that I wouldn’t surprise him when I emerged from the darkest part of the tree tunnel. He looked up at me and gave with a tired smile. “Heeeeeyyyyy…what the hell are you still doing here?” he asked. He was fully in his cups and I-love-you-man-drunk, so I sat down on the bench next to him and cracked open my beat-up old thermos, pouring out the last of my stash for us to share together. It’s a good thermos, a warhorse leftover from my days in the field, so the coffee was still hot even twelve hours later, pluming steam in the chilly air. I told him I was bucking for that promotion and was working the OT to impress the brass. He laughed and made the kind of jokes about the powers-that-be that a Devil Dog Staff-Sergeant would make about the Platoon LT. "Don’t call me sir, I work for a living!" That joke is older than me, but I still laughed.


When I asked him what he was doing hanging out here so late, he informed me that the crew remodeling the chiropractor’s office was also pulling a late one and were just wrapping it up for the night. So he was stalling, waiting for them to go so that he didn’t have to sleep in his backup spot in the stairwell of the parking garage inside the fringes of crazy-town. It turns out he had some good news: a woman named Angela that works in Baker had seen him around, the same as me, and been lending him the use of the trunk of her car to store his things in during the day, so he didn’t have to drag the suitcase, sleeping bag, and yoga mat around everywhere he went. Even better, she had offered to let him sleep on her couch on Friday and Saturday nights. I got a lump in my throat and was immediately mortified by how many times I’d patted myself on the back for giving him a bag of my old long-johns, some quarters for laundry, or a pack of smokes.

 Helluva guy, helluva guy. Just ask me, I’ll tell you.

We toasted with our coffees to his stroke of good fortune and the chances of my promotion, like any friends and brothers in arms would. He knew I was moving the next day and wouldn't be running into him as much, so we made plans to have dinner together the following night. Then I got a worried text from my wife wondering what was keeping me, so we got up from his bench, hugged, and I headed for home. I could smell a residue of stale beer and the grime of all the world on me as I drove toward the warm light of my hearth and the open arms of my wife. I added another to the million prayers I’ve said for Keith, and knew that he was saying one for me, too, because he promised he would. I've had a dozen people praying for me to get that promotion, but if I wind up with it, I know his entreaty will be the one that put me over the top. No doubt in my mind.



I wish I could say that Keith got back on his feet, but he was still sitting on a bench in the dark, staring into eternity as I drove away. He probably still is, even as I write this. I wish I knew what the endgame here was. I wish there was some sunset I could ride off into, my good deeds done and my promises kept. But there isn’t, there’s just the next day. I guess that’s life. Still, I’m comforted when, like Keith, I think of one of my favorite Bible verses: He who gives to the poor, lends to the LORD who will repay in kind. Sometimes I think about what it is I’ve been trading for with my spare change, wire-strippers, and leftover jackets and work-boots. Because rather than being rewarded with breakfast burritos and Pall Mall straights, I find a new grace for all the stress, disappointment, and anxiety of life.

I just think of Keith, and the rest is easy.



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