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David's Contribution: New Friends-Chapter 2
The Monet exhibition, now over, was still fresh in everyone's mind. 'Many minds', to be precise. Not in Davey's mind, for sure.
Davey Picker scanned through the usual row of dumpsters in northwest Portland one morning and found half a croissant with egg with only one little patch of mold in a McDonnie's cardboard container, a half carton of juice and an apple, half of which had been eaten by someone or something, he couldn't tell.
Cars were whizzing by on Highway 30 as he climbed out of the last dumpster, his legs covered only to avoid injury in the dumpster, not to ward off the chills of the October morning, for an Indian summer was in progress. Cold weather had been delayed.
He had been named David a long time ago, 17 years ago to be exact, had tried school for about six years, had been compared unfavorably to other students who seemed to have new backpacks and new phones and new shoes whenever...he got tired of telling people he was waiting for his new things, decided school just didn't agree with him, and had dropped out. A social worker made a perfunctory search. The worker hadn't a chance of finding him. Davey specialized in not being seen or found.
His father and mother, not exactly parent material, had moved to Salt Lake where Davey's grandma lived. He hadn't seen them for years.
Dumpster diving was OK, although a variable sport. One never knew what one would find, and some days were absolutely incredible.
Like the day he found a pair of pants, lined jeans, that fit him...well, he could get them on at least.
Also like the day he found a warm ski jacket which really was his size. He ignored the blood stains around the collar and the hole in the right pocket.
A day without some kind of discarded food wasn't common. The dumpsters around restaurants and fast food places were amazing hordes of uneaten food some days.
Other days were 'slim pickings'. He usually found something he could trade for food or quarters sometimes on those days
He found a body once but only because his nose found it and he didn't pursue the matter past the anonymous tip he left in a police station bathroom addressed to the officer on desk duty. He was aware that the nail sticking up usually got pounded down.
At one time he'd wondered why few homeless activists were actually homeless. He didn't wonder about that any more.
He found a lot of books, but he wasn't a speed reader.
His hair was a mousy, dirty blonde. He had no mirror and was spared the hassle of shampoo and comb. Hair care was a breeze. He just got up in the morning or whenever the police told him to move on.
He had a permanent place to sleep, kind of. An older man who didn't talk had a tent and a mattress in an odd place and had taken him in one cold night. On a notepad, the older guy told wrote that his name was Jon, whose legs bounced incessantly. Davey guessed he was as old as forty or something. Jon wrote him a note sometimes to ask Davey a question or tell him things.
Three freeways with a couple of on-ramps formed a 5-sided landscaped knoll perhaps 50 yards on the side which was totally inaccessible except for a hole in a fence connecting the island of greenery to the surrounding concrete under a freeway bridge.
First, one had to go to a street, walk under that street's culvert, turn right, climb out onto the slanting concrete wall under one freeway, walk across, find the hole in the fence, slide through, then walk a narrow ledge to the otherwise isolated 'island' of lawn and trees where they slept.
The local grocery wasn't local. It wasn't close either. Their trips had to be planned carefully. Time of day, weather, traffic plus a few more practical, personal concerns had to be considered before wandering off to the store. There wasn't a bathroom which welcomed homeless people on every corner and jail awaited those who took a dump in the middle of the street. They usually ended up grocery shopping right after they had managed to wash someplace.
Constant auto traffic blocked out silence, but a pair of headphones from the dumpster with a damaged cord fixed that. On sunny days, they could sit outside the tent and just veg out all day if they wanted. They had been shot at only one time and the guy had missed.
Once in a great while someone would throw out their trash toward them. No one threw money.
The older man took medicine of some kind every day and had Social Security which was directly deposited on the second Wednesday of every month.
On that day, they bought groceries and picked up the man's medicine. During the week prior to the second Wednesday, eating was a dicey thing. The money didn't last. They couldn't freeze or refrigerate their food.
The traffic speed on the 405 and 26 and 84 and 5 freeways picked right up some miles out of Portland at certain times of the day.
As those freeways converged downtown during rush hour, however, with traffic funneled down to one lane in places, the traffic speed couldn't overtake an elderly man walking with a cane. The speed of traffic in some spots approached zero for a few seconds near the approaches to the Vista Ridge Tunnel headed west toward the Zoo and the ocean beaches.
Eric and Randy hadn't seen the Zoo yet and their driver was stalled in traffic some distance before the tunnel. Looking to his left Randy looked down and saw the tent and the young man on a mat beside it. "Look, Eric. Look at those guys."
He reached over and brought Eric over him to have a look. "They sleep and eat down there, I guess."
"I guess that works in the summer unless it rains but it will be November soon and colder weather's coming. I wonder what they'll do then," said Eric. "Let's find out."
A Schuyler security guard approached the tent a few days later and found Davey and his roommate at home. "Anybody home?"
"Who wants to know?"
"I work for some people that are paying to interview homeless people. A couple hundred bucks for an hour interview plus lunch...come any week day dressed as you are."
Both of the men stood up. "Where do I sign up?"
"No sign up, no personal information required. Just questions and lunch. The security guard gave them the address. "Just ask for Henri, the secretary."
They both thought Henry was a weird name for a secretary but were too polite to say so. They thought tomorrow was a good day to answer questions and eat lunch. The two men walked to the Pearl district the next morning at 9 o'clock, moving their way to the address they had memorized.
They were a bit out of their element, being a number of blocks from the Skidmore fountain and the Burnside bridge. They arrived at a building with a doorman, approached him and asked for 'Henry, the secretary' adding that they had been invited for questions and lunch by Eddy, the guard.
The doorman, polite enough, made a quick phone call; a footman escorted them up to the penthouse. They could see themselves and the footman in the polished brass walls of the elevator. As they emerged at the top, the sense of place hit them full force and they both felt out of place.
An explosion of color, warmth and senses met Davey and his friend, flowers everywhere he looked. The footman led them to a pair of tall doors, knocked, touched something on his wrist and the doors opened a little all by themselves.
The footman then pushed them open after asking their names and announced: "Mr. Davey Picker and Mr. Jon Jones" to see Henri."
The latter gentleman stood behind his desk, came around and shook their hands, and urged them to sit and be comfortable.
"May I offer you coffee? Tea perhaps? Soda?
Jon had missed coffee and asked for it. "Would you like cream or sugar with your coffee?"
"Both please."
Davey was sure they wouldn't have his favorite soda.
"Do you have a Dr. Pepper?"
Henri smiled at him. "We do have that." He nodded to the footman who left to get the requested items and to notify the kitchen of two extra guests.
"Thank you for coming today. We've been expecting you.
Let's start with these envelopes." Henri gave both an envelope with five twenty-dollar bills in it. They looked inside, counted and smiled.
"Eric and Randy are asking the questions today and will be in shortly. Would you like to wait for them in the library through that door? Here, I'll show you in."
The two men stood and followed Henri into the small library with its five soft leather chairs, overstuffed. They sank into the chairs placing their backpacks close by after stuffing their envelopes inside the backpacks.
"Have you ever seen as many books in one place?" Davey didn't expect an answer. Jon never talked.
"Yes, I worked in a library once."
Davey jumped out of his skin. He hadn't heard Jon's voice before, a fine, deep sound. His head swiveled around to look at Jon who was looking right at him and grinning. "I can talk. I just don't because it doesn't get me anywhere. I stopped talking because the voices told me to stop but they're still there."
A little creeped out, Davey was glad when the library door opened. Two men came in and took seats beside them after introducing themselves as Eric and Randy. They both were dressed in a suit and were clean. They both looked happy and looked Davey and Jon right in the eye instead of their eyes shifting away as if Davey and Jon didn't exist.
"Thanks for coming over. We haven't met you before. I'm Eric and this is Randy. You don't know us from Adam. We both grew up here and moved back east and recently moved back to Portland and we're trying to get to know our neighbors. We saw you from the car a couple of days ago and hoped we could talk and have lunch. Are you game for some questions?
They nodded.
"Can we assume you are homeless since you are living in the tent, first of all?"
Davey nodded.
"Do homeless guys usually talk about getting a house someday?"
"No. Usually we talk about where we can get something to eat or where we can get clothes or how to stay warm."
"Do you talk about getting jobs?"
"I guess so, but nobody hires homeless guys for very long. We don't show up to work on time because we don't have cars and sometimes no clean clothes to wear and some of us are strung out or drunk or in the hospital. Homeless guys don't make great employees." Davey was warming up to his subject.
"If the voices in your head are telling not to go to work today or if you've run out of medicine for your chronic diarrhea, even if it is available over the counter and the store is two miles away and you don't have a washer and dryer, that's your smelly day and no employer wants you then either."
Randy had turned a little pale by then and Eric nudged the conversation in another direction. "What's the number one thing every homeless guy wants?"
"The same thing every guy with a house wants...to be happy, useful, normal...independent, to make a living, to pay the bills, and to be free."
"Are most homeless guys hetero?"
"Some are pretty homophobic; some would screw anything that didn't screw them first. I don't know. I'd guess the percentages are the same as the hetero crowd."
"Do people come up and talk to homeless people?"
"Other homeless people talk together in line for a shelter, sure. Nobody with a home in a car pulls over and parks and approaches a homeless guy just to talk. If they walk past us, their eyes pan across without stopping to look. We might as well be a tree as a human being."
"The exceptions are first-responders. Cops will come up and talk and so will some social workers and shelter volunteers. There is a priest at a homeless church on Burnside who said hello and talked to me before."
"I've never had a preacher or a teacher talk to me except when I was in school for six years. Doctors and dentists don't stop to talk, but they don't stop and talk to anybody unless it's for money. Just saying."
"How would you fix the homeless problem?"
"First, don't assume it's a 'problem'." Second, don't assume it can be fixed. You can't fix people. They fix themselves with support."
Unless you can fix mental illness and repair broken families and remove guilt and build self-esteem and repair the self-worth issues... issues that we all have and are lucky they haven't crippled us yet, lucky we have support systems that got us through, you can't fix squat."
"You can give houses to the homeless but without jobs to pay the property taxes and electricity and all the rest, they'll soon be homeless again.
"You can't fix it with gifts of money. Money eventually runs out without a job. You can send them somewhere else for a short time; more will come back to replace them. It would be nice if there was a middle ground."
"Right now, people in the 'have a home' crowd see themselves as "not homeless" and the homeless crowd identify as "homeless" and the two clubs rarely mix. Somebody ought to invent a third-party crowd that sees themselves as migrating, to the "home crowd or to the "homeless" crowd and plan interventions for that group, which is a place a lot of people find themselves with some real worries about how to move on."
Eric and Randy listened and thank the men for visiting. Lunch was served, a great meal, roast beef, roasted potatoes, corn on the cob, a lunch salad, peach pie and then Jon and Davey left with their backpacks.
"While we think up how to approach all this, what can we do for them?"
"They need a quiet job here where they can come work at their own pace. Jon has his Social Security. Davey has no income. Their food comes from the Food Bank branch at St. Stephens which isn't far from their tent. Henri's notes indicate that Jon used to work in a library."
"Perfect. We haven't put the library in shape yet."
"Let's hire it done. We'd have to pay a librarian to tutor him in modern library techniques including the RFID chips to monitor checkouts and the associated library software."
"Jon can sort the books that come in, label them, learn to value them and we'll get a tutor for Davey...he said he went to sixth grade only and his mind is sharp as a tack. I guess he could use the reading and math skills if he wants them. We could offer at least."
"Let's also offer to pay for a room close by for the cold winter months, perhaps to include kitchen facilities and a decent bathroom and access to the Pearl condo supply closets for daily stuff."
A Schuyler guard once again came back to the island a few days later to ask them if they would visit again for lunch. He found the tent and other items gone and no sign of Davey or Jon.
Life went on in the Pearl. The apples were ripe now, the days were getting shorter. Daytime temperatures were dipping into the 40's again, flirting with freezing, but still above 32° F. There wasn't a sign of Jon or Davey. Eric and Randy decided they had moved on. They had dispatched private investigators around the Burnside area with pictures from the security cameras. Nobody had seen 'nothing'.
Eric focused on the artificial island off Angola. The technology for artificial reefs fascinated him. The storms that formed in the Atlantic with their agitated seas produced waves. Those waves contained enough energy to mold coastlines, let alone a man-made island.
The engineers had studied the lagoons and reefs of the South Pacific.
A system of concentric rings of reefs, constantly replacing the outer ring as needed, seemed to work on the supercomputer models. The outer 'reef' was an enormous chain of floats weighted down with chains of stainless steel that moved with the wave action just under the surface of the water but limited energy transfer to the next ring in, a thick, floating ring 60 feet wide made of concrete and rock with embedded thick rubber balloons in a plastic matrix for buoyancy. The entire ring had perforations to allow spray and waves to trickle down back to the sea.
Those combinations of rings were repeated several times until the water around the island was still, mirror-like. The inner ring was fended off the island by hydraulic interfaces which absorbed energy and provided enough energy to keep pressure in the water supply of the island, and forced correcting adjustments to the hydraulic systems linking the island to the inner ring on the opposite side of the island from the opposite incoming ring.
The island design was simple. A layer of thick hard plastic floats many feet across supported other layers of progressively less mobile and stronger materials, all waterproof with enough perforations to allow accumulated water to seep back to the ocean. The entire island had an enormous thick rubber foam piece underneath with embedded thick rubber balloons close to the plastic floats for upward buoyancy. Pressure in those balloons was monitored and adjusted as necessary, providing consistent upward pressure on the island deep in its base.
Construction took four years. Some of the technology was invented during the construction process. A runway and support buildings were built from light composite materials. Drilling equipment began to arrive. A fusion reactor was brought in to provide power for the pumps and the drills. It also provided enough power to pump seawater off the island that leaked around the drill and supply the balloons. A second fusion reactor in a separate ship anchored off the island produced power to run all of the general electrical needs through waterproof cables.
The mining of rare earth ores began. Ships transported the ores to the shore for refining under military guard since these minerals were more useful than diamonds. The Trust's investment was repaid in the first two years and then became a constant stream of income.
A letter came to the Pearl condo in November of 2016.
Dear Eric and Randy,
The police raided our camp the week you had us over even though the city councilwoman said she thought the sudden relocations were 'outrageous' and put us on a bus to California. Jon and I have started back to school. This letter is a requirement for English class, among other things. I remembered your names as I remember both of you and your kindness to us. I remember your faces, the meal you served, and your nice house.
Once in California, we got arrested again for showing up at the bus station, I guess, and in jail we were offered classes to get out. We decided that was a good idea anyway and found out that teaching classes on the Internet was a way to make money.
I got access to a computer at the library after we got out and found a decent camera and we started teaching people how to be homeless for ten bucks a whack per lesson and no one signed up. We found a price point at two bucks where guys would pay to learn stuff.
So, we did that and made enough for a better camera, then a place to live, then hired help and now we're ready to take our first vacation. We were hoping to come to Portland and stay with you guys for a few days."
Sincerely,
Davey (David) and Jon
PS We smell better now. Regular showers with soap are amazing. Jon is a gorgeous back washer and seems able to make showers a thrilling event, if you know what I mean. There, I got three adjectives into one sentence and still got my point, er his point, across. Cheers! Email address below. DJ
Eric showed the letter to Henri who had already seen it and shed a tear over it. They called Randy in and his eyes watered for some reason.
"My man is hard with a soft core and Jon's man has a soft core too," Eric announced. "I cried too. OK with you if they stay here with us for their vacation?"
"More than OK, Eric. I think we have an extra suite somewhere in which up-and-coming fuckers can vacation to their cock's content."
Davey and Jon were met at the airport by a Schuyler driver and limousine. They drove back to the Pearl on the Burnside bridge, past the Mission and up to the condo. The doorman hadn't changed. He called a footman to usher them up to the Penthouse where Eric and Randy rushed to the elevator and stopped suddenly.
Before them were two men, remarkably tan, fashionably dressed but not overly so, clean, smiling.
Eric and Randy took them in their arms and buried their faces in their necks. They smelled like their citrus-based cologne. Jon couldn't keep his eyes off Davey and vice-versa.
"We thought we might not ever see you guys again," Eric said. "I'm so glad you thought of us. It's almost supper-time. If you guys want to supervise the footman in your suite while he unpacks your things, he's probably itching to start. Or you can send him away, your call."
"Nothing on the agenda this evening except for a swim if you want, talking, a pajama party, supper, not in that order. I forgot 'fucking' on that list."
Davey's face flushed and he grinned.
"Yeah, he said, "especially that. Just before supper and after supper and at bedtime and first thing in the morning..."
"When Jon gets enough nookie, often enough, I mean, his voices go away and when he has them now, they always tell him to fuck some more, or so he keeps telling me. I'm starting to wonder if he's got a case of those 'convenient' voices you always read about."
"Keeping those voices away has become my ass's main job now. I should be applying for a therapist's license or something...at least my ass should."
"It got started on the island in the tent in the winter. He kept me warm in some unusual ways and that morphed into me keeping him warm in some usual ways and pretty soon it got to be a habit that had nothing to do with warmth, just good semi-clean fun."
"I still wonder if some jealous bitch was stuck on the approach to the tunnel and saw more than she wanted to and complained to the cops, leading to the raid."
Randy laughed. "This condo is a bitch-free zone. You can fuck anytime, anywhere to your heart's desire...if we could make it a requirement, we would."
"More than half of us have partners. It's not unusual to run across fornicating friends and employees in this building."
"There are some well-used long maple benches at poolside with four-inch cushions on them that have seen more action than Times Square after dark," said Eric.
"I'm feeling like a swim, come to think of it," laughed Jon. "Maybe after supper?"
"The pool is open 24/7...no lifeguard, although a lot of lives have been improved a lot, none have been saved of which I'm aware."
"We've seen group life-improvement sessions down there from time to time, in case you're interested in group therapy," Randy added.
"I ought to be interested," said Jon. "I've participated in those a lot over the years and used to fantasize during bored moments about the kind of group therapy I'd run if I was the leader. Like I'd be saying to the new group member, 'And how, shove, does, shove, this, shove, cock, shove, feel, shove, in your, ass, shove?" Jon illustrated each 'shove' with a forward thrust of his pelvis.
The four men cracked up and the visitors went off to unpack. Eric and Randy looked at each other. "Wow, Eric said, "there go two hunks of burning testosterone. As their slightly perverted host, one of them, I suggest we supervise their play in the pool tonight. We wouldn't want them to get lost or anything."
"Yes, indeed. Also, there has to be an escort to guide them back home safely."
Supper, veal piccata, noodles, green beans with Tart Tatin, a wonderful upside-down apple cake...
Pool, four handsome, fit and naked men throwing a ball over a net, each pair gathering in a corner for a few minutes when they made a point and the game ending in a draw, necessitating each pair to choose a bench...
Sex on the benches, the meeting of the mouth, the nip on the earlobe, watching the other pair, inspiration, acceptance, intimacy, rubbing, sucking cocks, hard with velvet skin, licking, tongues thrusting to moisten, insertions, thrusting, noise, gasps, climax, cum...
The four men dived back into the pool to rinse, jumped out to grab clean, dry, fluffy towels, then the run naked back to their suites.
Randy and Eric lay in bed side by side, looking up at the ceiling. "Those guys looked hot," said Randy, "and at the same time, I'm not ready to share you, for some reason."
Eric nodded. "My cock liked the idea for a few minutes; my brain tells me my cock likes any guy who likes me and that's no basis for sexual decisions."
"You are more than enough for me and you turn me on. My cock doesn't have to consult my brain when I look at you and your ass. It just stands up and wants to play. Your ass likes my cock a lot and just sucks it in and that feels so good."
"I love the feel of my balls slapping against your ass cheeks. I love my mouth on your nipples and your neck. I love the taste and smell of your cock. It's so fresh and sweet and warm. Your cum tastes amazing. I love all of you, Randy. You're my man and I belong to you."