It was the final straw, that notice from the Social Security Administration. According to it, Darryl was deceased. Not just that, but he died four years previous and therefore his estate owed the government this humongous figure, he could not remember how much, for continuing to receive money after death. He was a bit simple, poor man. At seventy-five he still could not grasp the ways of the bureaucracy, had no notion how to procure legal help. His online applications for jobs, made on library computers, went unheeded. His rent, two months overdue, had prompted the eviction notice that was left on the kitchen counter, along with the keys. He stepped, with a suitcase in hand and inside his shirt a pocket organizer and pen, onto the sidewalk, after carefully shutting the door. He wondered, for the hundredth time, where he ought to go. He believed, if Mom still were living, he would not be in this fix. But Mom was cremated, her ashes strewn in the flower bed she once cultivated. Her check had never been much, but she always knew what to do. His steps automatically turned in the direction of downtown, the part where the street people hang out. His mind was filled with tangled references to a younger day, fifty years ago, when he was essentially a hobo. In those times, he did not need to think about it. There were day jobs for the taking. All one had to do would be to show up and wait in line. Life was so easy then that he had hitchhiked across the Midwest multiple times, owning just a few clothes and having less than five dollars to his name each time. Still, he found a bed and food at the end of any journey.
He was on a different planet these days, for the 60's gave way to a decade of increasing myopia and erosion of the poorest ones' ability to make money. Following the accidental death of his big brother, Darryl reconnected with his family in the mid-'70s and settled down to a life of labor carpentry and staying home with his mother. He was a television watcher and he liked to rest from his labors with beer and TV episodes of favorite comedies and westerns. Being a lonely soul, who shunned contact with strangers, due to an inability to relax and hold interesting conversations, he entertained no illusions of having a friend or a wife.
Oh he once might have married a girl, when he and a nearly forgotten girl named Ellen both were twenty, for she was vulnerable and lonely at the time and did not recognize his silence for the handicap it would become, had not grasped that he had no notion of how to support or care for a family. It was up to him to walk away and in his state of alienation become the rootless wandering soul that made no connections, soul to soul, beyond the family.
His walking took him the length of Bradbury Street, a decision calculated to avoid the clubs on First Avenue. Then a right on Wylie Avenue, which should actually be Second Avenue. It was a street of mixed business and residential interests. Most of the homes were fenced with chain links, all modest wooden constructions. Among the businesses were a glass company and someone dealing with car batteries. A person could bring an old battery there and get a few bucks in return. Wylie Avenue intersected with Baldwin Street, a wide avenue with hundreds of pedestrians intermingled with street folk and hustlers. Darryl had never been precisely a street folk but used to approach a few now and then. The last episode among them had been an uncomfortable one. It began with Darryl spending a few days in jail, for hitchhiking too near the freeway. A fellow jailbird adopted him, for no reason he could discern. He had been sitting on a bench, staring at nothing, when Jake approached him and asked him to join him, instead of acting like a fool, "which is what you're doing."
Darryl was grateful to receive any attention at all, even if insulting. He followed Jake and stood around, listening to him speak and throw a few barbs at other inmates from time to time. Seems he held a grudge against black people. "After what they did to me -" he said to one inmate. Jake must have fancied himself Darryl's mate and protector. He had a way of moving between him and anyone attempting to start a conversation. Darryl remained passive, partly because it was his nature, but also because Jake promised to get him bus money out of town.
