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To Move Heaven and Earth

Jeff Burt

    Today I dig out a septic tank and shit-caked leach lines. Tomorrow when I join my fellow homeless workers hanging together in the morning at Home Depot trying to get picked for a day job I might landscape or knock out walls for a do-it-yourselfer. I know I will take less than a day—a half-day job, a two-hour job, an hour job, smaller and smaller segments of a day, would all be fine. I count time in dollar bills as they enter my hand. A twenty, and a paid lunch. No complexities—hard currency, fast food. I have been jobless for two years, homeless for one year and more, and forgotten forever.
    Work—you stand, you ride, you dig, you ride, you stand again. All of these are distinct and become all of your life in the moment. This is not a Zen experience with leaping across halves of the brain. This is the hypothalamic now, the reptilian now, the fear now, the now now.
    I have learned that to move heaven and earth, for the earth part, one must actually move earth.

    Many day laborers sing, or moan, as is their voice. We sing of love, of sexual conquest, of sexy women, of drugs and beer, of violence; we sing of God, for God, against God. But the songs we share, that we burst out and sing together, are always about love, the love for another, the love for a woman. We sing like sailors once would chant, we sing only short stanzas, ribald and muscular, protecting the hearts that beat the syllable love loudly, then softly, loudly, then softly, sending it coursing through our cells. It is only then, when we notice the beating, that it wounds. The remainder of the long spells without singing is like the mind unobservant of the concussive heart.
    On the street corners where my brothers perform, those who can keep a guitar by their bed under a bridge or a grove of trees or an uncle’s garage, have coins and currency tossed into the hat or guitar case for most songs, but the songs that draw the purses and wallets the quickest are the love songs, old love songs, new love songs, songs in French and Arabic and Italian. Men who can strum four chords make pittance, but a man who can strum the chord of love with his vocal cords is the man who will dine better at the end of the day.
    When you have a job day after day, month after month, year after year, you wake with expectations. The expectations can cause anxiety or promise to fill your body. When you wake on the weekends, your expectations change, or perhaps they vanish as rest comes to rescue the mind by taking it from the swells and eddies to the shore. But to a man in a shed living on a borrowed couch and donated clothes, most days start with no expectation, no change. Most days don’t even have anxiety, for what climb in elevation of promise or fall over a cliff into despair could possibly happen to someone washing his face with a small cake of soap from the Salvation Army? Water runs from the hose to the basin. Soap lathers. It is all very simple. If the water doesn’t run or the soap does not lather, what difference does it make? If I miss my corner at Home Depot, will it make a difference to my long-term objective? Do I even have an objective? Right now, all I have are daily needs.
    Today could be the last day that I work for a week.
    Today could be the last day that I work.
    Today could be the last day.
    Today.
    
    A deranged barbarian, a human reverted to pre-literate being—I know the look, the look of how evoluted the other, how de-evoluted I appear. We eat charred hearts like hyenas, scavenge like bears through trash cans and dumpsters, carry broadaxes somewhere under our three sweatshirts, if not on drugs then we should be on drugs, if not drunk then perhaps a little alcohol might do us good. So if I eat on the bus, all those thoughts will run through the other passengers’ minds. I know. I used to have the same thoughts of these savage assassins of protocol.
    But many of us are refugees from economic hurricanes with no country to take us in, no longer part of the going forward history of this country, trapped in barbed wire of the border crossing that is the holding cell for neither this nor that, months, days, years of loss.
    I have read that in Africa generations of the displaced have survived on nothing more than familial identity to grasp and the concept of homeland that would be returned to them, a heaven on earth. Decades in the holding tank, treading water, surviving.
    But we have no homeland. We have a plot of land as large as our bodies, a small rectangle on which to work out our fate. And when we do enter the country, it will not be the same country as we left, refugees out of time, out of destiny, out of communal history.
    Even though sane, some of us at times fight flying the pennant of mental illness, the flags of abyss and loneliness. We talk to ourselves, but we talk to ourselves aloud too often, or with too high a volume. No one notices a priest speaking to himself, or an engineer, or a teacher, or a doctor. But the further down the pay scale the more we begin to assign a mental deviation to the self-talker, so that when we hit clerk, assistant, homemaker, auto specialist, day laborer, they are noticed.
    Some homeless sing, because all they have is songs. A homeless man or woman wrapped in two coats and gloves on a summer day singing is deemed crazy, while the radiologist walking from one building to another with a lead apron below his blue coat singing out loud is sane.
    An unshaven man with busted flaps for shoes and a K-mart bag for a backpack singing Alleluia diverts the most sympathetic eyes as the people scatter on the sidewalk, while a pastor with the cloth around his neck sings The Devil with the Red Dress On and gathers smiles and high fives.
    I talk like many, unable to keep myself from sharing to the next man, greedy for an audience. I have little to share. I have no intimacy, therefore lack any sensitive speech. I have no circumstances to share that anyone will be eager to hear, no history, no future, no dreams.
    Yet I speak. I talk of politics aloud in husky voice, of medicine and prosthesis and bio-robots with vigor. I speak aloud to have the waves of sound to pound the drums of my ears, to vibrate the cochlea and canals, to work the hammer, anvil, and stirrup like a Greek god pounding out a shield of brilliance.
    So I sing. Let them guess my occupation.

———

    It takes thirty minutes to get to a place to stand for work.
    It takes sixty minutes and a three-mile walk to get food stamps.
    It takes ninety minutes and a four-mile walk to get a bus pass.
    It takes forever to get your identification, and then you are never pleased with who you are, as if magically the act of identifying one’s self could generate a different name, a genie could give you a wish for a successful past, a pleasant present, a promised tomorrow.
    It’s not simply the picture.
    It’s the same old name, the name of the failure.
    It’s the deleted history. The lack of an address.
    If I could only augment my skills with a few classes, the job counselor says, forgetting I don’t have a shiny dime to my name. If I could only have a permanent mailing address other than homeless services post office boxes the human services clerk says; if I could only get a foot up and make enough to get on food stamps things would start to pick up, the food distribution person says; if I could only be optimistic without reason, the social worker says; if only you could eliminate your desires your needs would be less, my Buddhist advocate says; if only you could eliminate your negative desires and ask God to help you with your positive desires your needs would be met, my Christian advocate says; if only you could win the lottery or find money laying on the ground, my buddy says; if only.
    A journey begins with a single step. Many of my journeys have been just that, a single step, and a falling back, a starting over, a falling back. Each person takes his or her own journey, but we day-laborers and homeless in the range of sanity desire mostly a tourist guide, somewhere on a beaten path we could trace like a child traces the raised outline of a spider’s web in a children’s book, quietly, studiously, to the end. Where does it start? Just point to the place and we will walk whatever miles it takes to get there. We don’t care where it goes. To be on the way to anything would be pleasant. To have taken three or four steps in the same direction, stopping, and going in the same direction again would be pleasant.

———

    What is one without an occupation? When meeting someone, the second or third question is what do you do for a living, and what can I say? An occupation defines status, interest, perhaps lifestyle. And day laborer defines status and lifestyle as the lack of status and lifestyle, and certainly not the interest of the day laborer, and does not pique the interest of the other person either.
    When someone states his occupation as an engineer, people already have catalogs of perceptions—intelligent, well-schooled, hard-working, barely social, introverted, high-salaried, and married or marriageable.
    When someone states her occupation as marketing, the catalogs of creative, extroverted, talkative, artsy, well-dressed, and anxious may come forward.
    Store clerk, bus driver, programmer, salesperson, nurse, contractor, even drug dealer, car thief, scam artist, all with images and character ascribed. What images cascade for day laborer? Homeless? Little to start a conversation with. Little to sustain a conversation. I love music, many types, but who will stay in a conversation with me for ten minutes about music when they know I live in a shed and do landscaping if I’m lucky a few days a week?
    A surname once described your profession—Fowler, a person who handled birds; Smith, a person who had a craft done by hand; Wheeler, a person who worked with wagons; Lord, a person who didn’t work but owned others who did.
    What would my name be described by my current profession? Oddjobber? Shoveler? Hoer? Stoneplacer? Workless?
    Many of us are liars, not habitual liars, but commonplace. We enhance our resumes to get work. If someone asks have we ever framed, we say yes, though a hammer and nail may be as foreign to our hands as a surgical scalpel, or no more recent than the skin of a beautiful woman. If someone asks have we ever done grout, we say yes, though more probably we’ve cleaned grout with bleach or removed it with a screwdriver or dremel, the artistic touch of laying grout not part of our skill set.
    We lie about our recent housing. We invent circumstances, a personal history, just to get a leg up, a foot hold in the climb of the daunting mountain face. We know that if we can only get that first step, that job, that apartment, that benefit, that care, that counseling, that food, that handout, that it will be the first step of many up the wall of rock. So we lie, we lie about having the first place that supports us. Yes, we have family in the area. Yes, we are just waiting on a check. Yes, we got screwed. We have always been screwed.
    Two out of three of us lie, a job counselor told me, and I wondered why the other third did not? Perhaps they were religious zealots, or too simple mentally, or too troubled, to lie. And why must we lie? It’s not exactly for show, since we have nothing to display. It’s not for inflating our own egos, since we have virtually none. It’s all done for the leg up, the hold, the hold to be able to reach to the next hold, and on and on up the rocky face, to a job, to a home, to a life.
    A life. That would be nice.

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