LIFE AMONG THE RUINS

By Rob Rosen

From the boardroom to room-and-board to cardboard.  That’s how I like to describe my life.  It has a certain ring to it, don’t you think?  Not necessarily a nice ring, mind you.  At least not to my ears it doesn’t.

Unfortunately, the dot-com bust was just that, a bust.  Busted me, my family, and my life all the way down to this.  Kablam!  (That was the sound my world made when it exploded out from under me.)  And the nineties started out so great for people like me.  Princeton afforded me the knowledge base and all the contacts I would need to start my life out in a grand way.  I even met my future wife there.  Man, she was a smart one.  And beautiful to boot.  Though, truth be told, I wasn’t too shocked when she left me.  Women like her weren’t meant for a life like this.  Funny, men like me aren’t either.

Still, I can understand why she did it.  We went through so much of our money that first year.  Plus a great deal of her parent’s money; which is what I think really pissed her off.  The weekly phone calls to see how things were going were always tinged with a bit of superiority to them.  After all, my father-in-law was a self-made millionaire by the time he was 30.  I don’t think he ever really believed much in me and my ideas, anyway.  He wasn’t of my generation.  Didn’t understand the power of the Internet and all the wealth it could bring.  Of course, looking back, I suppose he was right.  Mostly.  Too bad only hindsight is twenty-twenty.

And yet so many people made so much money in those early years.  And a great deal more lost their shirts.  Me, I lost a considerable amount more than that.  The banks were eager to lend us the money, at first.  They were giving it out to everyone back then.  They were also quick to take our home away from us when we couldn’t pay it back.  My wife went shortly after that.  Her parents were glad to have her back on their own turf.  I got the feeling they were thrilled to be rid of yours truly.  Fuck ‘em, I say.  Fuck the whole lot of them.

Fuck me too, while we’re at it.  I was too proud to take their money when it all fell through.  And my parents had none to give.  Easy come, easy go.  Right?  Too bad it’s never easy to get it all back.  Or any of it, for that matter.  I may have saved face, but managed to retain little of anything else.

Too bad I can’t say that there’s a silver lining or much of a bright side to all this because life inside a cardboard box holds little of either.  Oh well.  As they say, it could be worse.  Of course the they that said that weren’t in the predicament that I’m in now.  Of that I’m fairly certain.  At least I have my health, I suppose; though lord only knows when I’ll get to see a doctor again to prove that one.  I don’t think I’ve actually seen one walk down this particular alleyway that I now call home:  my Maytag Maison.  Home away from… well, everything.  Again, oh well.  Who am I to complain?  (Stan Purcell, nice to meet you.)

My neighbors, if you can call them that, refer to me as the C.E.O.N., which stands for the Chief Executive of Nothing.  An apt title and far more creative than you’d expect coming from the likes of them.  Though who am I to pass judgment?  I haven’t actually been invited into most of their cardboard-cutout homes to see what degrees and diplomas they have nailed up.  (Or taped up, as nails don’t work too well on our little creations.  They tend to get knocked down once you start hammering.)

There are, however, just a few unexpected advantages to being houseless.  (I prefer not to say homeless, as I do consider my little hovel my home.  Home is, after all, where the heart is.  And mine still furiously beats within this chest that now resides in this box that is situated snugly within this dark, little alleyway.)  I do get to make my own hours now.  Wake when I want to.  Sleep when I want to.  Tell whomever to fuck off whenever I damn well please.  There are no bills to pay.  No rent.  No one soliciting me to buy their crummy credit cards.  (Which went a long way in getting me into this mess in the first place.)  No bad television to watch.  (Though the guy in the street next to mine lives in a Panasonic box and sometimes we like to pretend.)  And no nagging wife or in-laws to contend with. Hell, I even manage to get some sex in from time to time.  Al fresco.  Of course, my wife never smelled like stale urine.

Okay, so I’m a little bitter.  And better men than me have sunk far lower.  Well, maybe not much better and maybe not so far.  Still, I’m pretty sure there must be other Princeton alumni sleeping under bridges and abandoned buildings somewhere in this great land of ours.  I can’t possibly be the only one. Can I?

Maybe I should take a poll and find out…

Nope.  No other Princeton alums among my fellow down-and-outers, least not as far as I could tell.  Though I did find out some interesting things about the people that dwell nearby.

Okay, first off, crack cocaine burns like a motherfucker.  No, I had never tried it before.  Yes, I knew that it was the wrong thing to do.  No, I didn’t care.  Yes, I decided that I’d probably do it again.  So what?  Besides, the only way the guy in the box next to mine would give me the time of day was if I shared a hit off his pipe.  Seemed right neighborly of him if you ask me.  Though lord only knows what that shit was cut with.

Anyway, his name was George and, no, he didn’t go to college.  Didn’t even finish high school.  He’d been homeless and houseless since the age of 15.  Fifteen!  Can you imagine?  Well, neither could I.  Broken family was an understatement.  From what I could gather, which was hard because the guy slurred like he was sucking on marbles (dental hygiene is not a high priority amongst people like myself), he’d been physically and mentally abused by his mother and her string of gentlemen callers since about the age of 7.

To hear him describe it, the streets were a far better cry than where he had come from.  I suppose he had a point.  Though the streets surely had aged him before his time.  He looked to be in his late 30s, but he assured me he was only 25.  (I vowed to myself that the next 2 dollars that came my way would go towards a cheap bottle of moisturizer.  I’d be damned if I’d be houseless and withered.  Besides, the crack had greatly diminished my usual hunger pangs, and my money seemed to be far better spent on some Oil of Olay.)  Funny thing was, the guy didn’t seem all that depressed.  Maybe he was just having a good day.  Glad for some unexpected company, I supposed.  Still, I was relieved that our interview was brief.  I hated looking at his face and seeing my own future in it.  (In my day, I had always been considered quite handsome.  As vanity comes freely, I decided to hold on to it for the time being.)

With a nice little buzz on, I fairly sped down the alleyway to the corner.  That’s where I encountered Mary.  Mary was clearly insane.  You don’t need a degree to figure that one out.  (Which was a good thing, because mine was in Business and not in Psychology.)  Mary had a little lamb.  She called it Fluffy.  In actuality, Fluffy was a dirty, old sock.  Fluffy was none too happy with my questioning.  Neither was Mary.  I learned little from either one except to stay clear of that corner from then on out.

Rounding the bend I begged my way passed a gaggle of teenagers.  Who says today’s youth is without sympathy?  I netted 2 dollars and a Powerbar.  If the crack hadn’t been causing my teeth to gnash and clench, I might have actually eaten it.  Instead, I tossed it to Mary.

Just because I’m houseless doesn’t mean I’m selfish.  Far from it, actually.  Who better than me knows just how awful starvation truly is?  Besides, most of my meals come from a nice Korean guy who gives me his restaurant’s leftovers.  I rarely go hungry for very long.  And they say that Korean food is good for you.  Promotes longevity.  Though who wants to live that long anyway?

Not me, boy.

I continued on my journey. San Francisco, after all, is awash in houseless vagrants, such as myself.  Funny how the richest cities are home to the most poor.  (Not funny ha-ha, though.)  I came across Alan in no time flat.

Alan was without a box to sleep in.  He braved the elements with only the clothes on his back and a filthy, matted blanket.  Like me, Alan was college educated.  He’d been married, had kids, a decent job, the whole shebang.  But Alan also liked the bottle.  Booze over brains, as I like to say.  Shame really.  He seemed like a decent fellow, when he wasn’t three sheets to the wind, which was often.  Addictions are a nasty thing.  (Now that I think of it, maybe I will stay clear of that crack stuff from here on out.  At least I manage to stay relatively clean and have a roof over my head, however impermanent it may be.)

I moved on from Alan with a strange new feeling of resolve.  It seemed to me that, as bad off as I was, which was pretty bad, there was always room to sink even lower.  Unlike George, I did at least have a good upbringing, an education, and a decent life up to this point.  I wasn’t crazy like Mary, and I was a hell of a lot cleaner than Alan.  I suppose there are differing degrees of one’s own personal hell.  And as close as I was to the fire, at least I wasn’t completely consumed by it.  Maybe there was hope for me yet.  Maybe.  Then again, in order to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you have to have boots to begin with.  If I was to pull the strings on my tired, old shoes, I’m sure they’d split right in two.

My last encounter was with Janice.  Fine, she wasn’t much to look at.  Maybe once she had been, but years on the streets hadn’t done much for her figure or her face.  Still, she was pleasant enough.  Seemed somewhat clever.  Was at least clean.  She even retained her sense of humor, which is usually the first thing to go when you become houseless.  Most importantly, she appeared sane.  (Sanity is usually the second thing to go.)

Life among the ruins affords me little intelligent conversation.  Surprisingly, this is something I missed even more than regular meals, showers, or even sex.  You can lose it all, it seems, but once your mind goes there is seriously no hope.  And hope is something I can’t afford to lose.

Janice invited me into her makeshift tent that she had constructed out of discarded blankets and boxes.  Quite a nice set up, really.  Nicer than my box, by far.  There was easily room enough for the both of us in there.  She offered me a Coke and some food.  She even gave me a book.  I hadn’t read one since all this began.  She didn’t mind if I sat there and read it, which I did.  Gladly.  I suppose she was lonely, but then again, so was I.  I missed my wife and family.  Missed it all, really.  My life, as it was.  With all its faults and burdens.  But did I really have to come to this to realize that?

I stayed on with Janice after that day.  We’re like two peas without a pod.  But maybe some day.  Who knows what will happen next?  I do know this, though.  I never did buy that moisturizer, like I said I would.  Instead, I went out and bought me some new shoestrings.  I figured that if I was gonna do some pulling, I better have something strong to tug on.