Elizabeth didn’t debate beauty, ugliness, love, or freedom. It was the same argument. There’s either too much or too little of any of them.
— I try to make things better. When I first started painting I was involved with negativity, and at a certain point I realized that I wanted to be the kind of artist that would make things better rather than comment on the negative side of things, the ugly side of things. I’m always working on the beautification of the things around me. It’s not just me sitting in front of an easel painting a picture. It’s getting up in the morning and eating the right food…
They ordered another round and some peanuts for Paulie.
— If I make myself healthy and feel good, then I can also make things around me healthy that aren’t healthy. I have my breakfast, then I sit in front of my easel and I dream a lot. I just look at what I’ve done from the day before, or just from the past. I appreciate my work more than I ever did before. If I do something new that makes me happier, I leave my studio, and I socialize a lot after I finish a piece. I really try to be more with the people around me, to just enjoy their company.
Elizabeth was easy, a two-beer drunk. Paulie might be dreaming now. She told him she’d go crazy if she went homeless.
— It helped me straighten out, because I had a lot of time. I didn’t work, I had no bills, so I had all this time to think about how things were going for me. I wasn’t really happy when I first left home. I left all my old friends because I didn’t feel I could fit in. I was always suffering or in pain over one thing or another. When I was on the street I got rid of my shyness, it always got in my way. When I was a kid I couldn’t even talk to some people. I had to ask around for small jobs, I had to communicate more with people so I could just get by, and I found that people would give me jobs, or they would give me money free, and say, here’s five dollars, get a meal, or invite me in for a shower, a change of clothes. People would invite me in to sleep the night. I slowly became more social…
Elizabeth gave him money. She never asked him to come for dinner. She never cooked. Even if she did cook, she wouldn’t have. She wasn’t Ron.
— You weren’t scary and threatening like that hairy, smelly guy on the block last year. He was kind of like a cartoon homeless guy. You didn’t know what he was going to do.
— I offered him a sandwich one time, and he said no. I was a cleaning man for the building next to me, and he’d been chased from another stoop, he began to squat on the property I was cleaning. I told him, Listen, if it was up to me, I’d let you stay here. But the tenants, there are children in the building, and there are ladies in the building who are frightened, so you can’t stay here. I tried to make that up to him by saying, Do you want a dollar or two? Do you want a sandwich? He’d always say, No, no, no. But I know he was hungry, he would scrounge around in the garbage can for something to eat. I knew he wanted to scare people away.
— You weren’t frightening. You were compelling.
Paulie’s eyebrows shot up. It was the other-people-are-other-people look.
— A lot of the young people didn’t really appreciate my craziness or my living on the street. They would use me as a target for their aggression. They would throw bottles at me and cans, and a couple of times I got into scuffles with people, because I was trying to make things better. I would tell people, Why don’t you loosen up a bit? They would take that as an attack on their being, so they would try to chase me, or punch me. I don’t recommend leaving home and trying to live on the street at this time. There are too many people who don’t appreciate that.
Elizabeth asked Paulie if he meant the crusties.
— I don’t understand what they’re about. Not that they have to be about anything, but they must have an idea of life that is different from most people. They don’t eat that much. I know they drink all the time, and when they’re done drinking they leave like fifteen bottles on the street. They break them on purpose. They’re interesting to me. They’re like gypsies. They’re being persecuted. They’re constantly moving from block to block to find a place where they can squat and not be told to move.
Elizabeth told him she hated the ground they squatted on.
— I want to have faith in them, and I think they’re important to the community because they’re a minority which I think should be part of the community and not shunned, pushed aside. Maybe they’re sick. I was sick on the street at first. I had my first breakdown, call it a breakdown, in 1967, my friends brought me to a psychiatrist, and he was giving me medication, and that seemed to straighten me out a bit. I wasn’t as crazy. But when I moved to our block, in 1971,I began to get sick again because I wasn’t eating right, and it was part of my illness that I objected to medication, and that was one of the major keys to my health. It keeps me from hallucinating, getting paranoid.
Paulie was a better person than she was. Elizabeth was unmedicated.
— Do you remember when we first began to say hello? she asked.
— No, he said.
It was always like that.
— I had a lot of things I was disturbed about. My kid brother died in Vietnam, and my brother and sister got married and they moved upstate. They didn’t like blacks, or third world communities. Most of my family was like that. When the poor people, the third world, started to move closer to them, they decided they didn’t want to bring their kids up with that, they thought it would be a bad influence. They gave up on me too. My older brother could have taken me in for a while, but there wasn’t room for me. My younger brother was my favorite, and when he died in Nam, around the same time, my mother was murdered. She was shot by my stepfather.
His face showed nothing.
— My brother died first. I told him you should try to think twice before you go in. He didn’t, he went and six months later he died. He got shot down at Hamburger Hill. They took a whole month to find him. I used to have dreams that he was captured and being tortured. You know, all those stories?
Elizabeth held Paulie’s rough hand. Her hand was proofreader soft.
— He was nineteen, he was gone. My mother got remarried to this guy who was a friend of the family. She was having a hard time with him too. He was a cop, and after he retired, they got a house down in Florida. I didn’t see the place, but I can imagine it was terrible. Then all of a sudden we get a phone call, Mom was dead, she was shot by our stepfather. They had a trial in Florida, I was sick, in and out of the hospital. I just couldn’t go down to the trial. My family was pissed at me. And revenge hit my family. They wanted to get this guy. My sister was afraid he was going to kill her, she was a little nutty. It wasn’t that way. My mother could get under your skin…
Elizabeth ordered another round.
— He murdered her, Paulie.
— He killed her, and he got an acquittal.
— On what grounds?
— Florida is kind of a conservative state.
— He didn’t do any time?
Elizabeth might not do time for doing a moron. She had more justification. Her action wouldn’t be personal. It’d be a social attack.
— My mother was the one who kept the family together, Paulie said.