Every decent American family, except those irreversibly disintegrated by divorce, incest, or inheritance issues, still celebrates Thanksgiving by coming together on the fourth Thursday in November every year. With the excuse of giving thanks to the kind natives and honoring their ancestors, they gulp down big quantities of turkey, pumpkin pie, and cranberry sauce. Originally meant as a sacred celebration, the festive day has passed through a profane intermediate stage to end up eventually as a rather vulgar event. Many people just call it Turkey Day. The pharmaceutical industry anticipates the intestinal complaints by advertising for laxatives and other medicines that prevent gas, constipation and bloating weeks ahead of the holiday.
On these special days, just like Christmas, it’s not just loneliness that hits home hard but charity as well. All the soup kitchens in the city organize special Thanksgiving dinners for the less fortunate. Philanthropists venture into crime-ridden neighborhoods to hand out turkeys to the poor and needy.
The New York Times writes about Franciscan Father Benedictus who drove a van loaded with ham and turkey to the South Bronx to perform his good deeds. The article mentions a Puerto Rican mother on welfare who is so overwhelmed by this that she helps the Father out by pointing out all the bad guys who were scheming to exchange their turkey around the corner for crack or smack.
“Every year the same bullshit with the holidays. Everybody gets the guilties,” Bernard sneers over the sudden outburst of generosity. We are sitting around the fire with Tony and the Kool-Aid Kid, eating the minestrone soup that Bernard had made the day before.
The radio plays easy-listening music and the DJ mentions the holiday after every song. “Fuck Thanksgiving!” says Bernard. “All Indians exterminated. That’s a nice way to say thank you.” Bernard doesn’t have any special plans for the day. He actually hates holidays. When he had his forty-first birthday a week ago, he announced he was going to do “nothing fucking speciaclass="underline" just breathe and thank God I made it through another year.”
I wasn’t there, but Bernard told me that it had been a nice day after all; Professor Williams had paid a surprise visit and had given him some money. Bob had also come by with a couple of vials of crack as a birthday gift.
Tony is getting ready to eat turkey at his sister’s place. Bernard leaves for his bunker to “relax,” his euphemism for smoking crack. The Kool-Aid Kid doesn’t seem to have a clue about Thanksgiving, but has understood that his previous behavior was unacceptable. Maybe Tony taught him a lesson. Now he cleans every plate he uses, he even rinses the cup from which he just drank his lemonade Kool-Aid.
The Kid throws a few more newspapers on the fire and is getting wood, but he stumbles and with a crash the wood falls out of his hands. Bernard storms out of his bunker. “Goddammit,” he screams. “I only try to relax and that is already an impossible challenge. I just have to light my lighter, and it is just like an alarm that goes off! And that fire, by the way, is only for cooking, not for letting it burn for hours for nothing. And don’t let those empty pots burn on the grill.” We see the flames licking the handles of the pan. A smell of burned Bakelite hangs around the fireplace. “And by the way, there are still fifty gallons of water at the exit.” Bernard disappears into his place grumbling, and the Kid tries to wash the frying pan and the coffeemaker. The metal filter of the coffeemaker now falls in the dust and dirt on the ground, along with the lid of the frying pan. The Kid puts everything back together; it’s dirtier than it was before. He looks helplessly at me and leaves.
I have an appointment with Marcus. We’ve gotten to know each other pretty well, especially since I gave him a copy of the key to the Northern Gate, so he doesn’t have to get in through the rabbit hole. Every time he hears me passing on my bike, he calls out: “Antoine, ça va?” from his cave and we have a little chat in French.
Last time we discussed the healing properties of carrot and beet juice. Marcus advised me to drink at least two pints daily as a heavy smoker and coffee user. Before that, we talked about neo-realism in cinema. He mentioned illustrious names such as Margaretha von Trotta, Werner Herzog, and Andrej Tarkovski. In better days, he studied biochemistry and anthropology at Columbia University and took a course in modern film. It’s a shame that talks with Marcus consist of his confused monologues in which he jumps from one subject to the other and can’t seem to focus on anything.
To enter Marcus’ well-hidden cave, you have to go up the stairs of the emergency exit and then balance along a dangerously narrow wall. His place is triangular, bounded by the slanting tunnel wall and another six-foot wall that is on the side of the tracks. His cave consists of three interconnected spaces. Marcus gives me a little tour. The back space is basically storage space for firewood. Every day, he drags a few broken branches from the park into his cave so he will never run out of fuel. The middle space is a library. Piles of books and newspapers are stacked and orderly. In the corner is a sculpture of bicycle wrecks and old vacuum cleaners, a critique on the wasteful Western culture of discarding and disposal. The front room is his living room. A little daylight penetrates this space since it is the closest to the exit.
Marcus grabs a few plastic bags with newspaper clippings and magazines. “My portable archive.” He smiles. “I am hooked on information.”
Marcus shows me an article he is studying at the moment, a long piece from the New York Times Science supplement about the Space Lab. According to Marcus, the Space Lab needs serious improvements and he is planning to write NASA with some suggestions. Every important word in the article is underlined; in the sidelines are unreadable notes and exclamation marks. When I look closer, I notice actually that every verb, noun, and adjective has been underlined.
After Marcus puts his huge backpack on his shoulders, we are ready to go. I would like to talk about his time in college, but Marcus has already started an unstoppable monologue on the situation in the world. Every time he finishes a sentence and I want to change the subject, he has already launched into the next stream of associations. In fifteen minutes he covers: Chomsky’s conspiracy theories and his thoughts on U.S. imperialism; the eviction of a squat on the Lower East Side; international solidarity between the squatters of Berlin and Zürich; capitalist abuses of the Swiss pharmaceutical multinational Ciba-Geigy; the growing rate of genetic defects and cancer cases among yuppies on Long Island; the repression of the student protests on Tiananmen Square compared with Gorbachev’s handling of the unrest in Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia; the Mafia in Little Italy versus the Triads in Chinatown; and the disturbed ecological balance on this planet that he illustrates with illegal logging on Borneo and the dwindling salmon population in Northwest Canada.
Marcus’ factual knowledge is astonishing. When he is finished, I have a headache. I realized many things were wrong in this world, but I have never heard such a condensed critique of modern society. Marcus now rummages in a garbage can in the park, and carefully gets out a plastic transparent bag with a big clod of toilet paper. These are poopy bags for dogs, he explains. Since the city heavily fines dog excrement, there is a new market for special bags with disposable gloves. The glove is made from paper tissue and once the poop has been picked up, can be turned inside out in the bag. Marcus collects these bags, because a copy of the Village Voice fits into it exactly.
While Marcus is checking every garbage can for the useful stuff, he greets fellow homeless people who are cruising the streets with their shopping carts. He points them to the West Side Community Center as the place that serves the best Thanksgiving meal in the hood.