After a lousy night's sleep and an even lousier breakfast at the homeless shelter on Baker Street, I knew that I needed to find work and a place to live, and find both quickly. Arriving the day before in a freight yard near Baltimore harbour after riding all night in the end of a hopper car, I was completely filthy. I'd managed to get most of the filth off my face and hands by washing in a public toilet but there wasn't much I could do about my clothes - at least not until the nearest Salvation Army store opened. At the shelter, the night porter or gate keeper or whatever he was called, had taken my name and given me a cot number and instructions that breakfast would be at 7:30, and afterwards I would have to leave by 8:30, rain or shine, sleet or snow, hell or high water. No, there would be no help from that arrogant sourpuss.
It was at that point that I even started questioning whether it had really been necessary to run away from Chester and the comfy situation with Ellen and family. Would the mob types from the club really pursue me? Taking a job below minimum wage, no bank account, no ID, they had to know I had a shady background. But how shady? In retrospect, I realised and accepted that they couldn't be sure I wouldn't go to the law and try for a deal. Yeah, running had been the right thing to do.
As I was leaving after the 'breakfast', to my surprise and relief, sourpuss was not in the reception cubicle. Instead in his place was an elderly couple with name tags indicating the church they belonged to and their names: 'John' and 'Martha'. John, a quiet reserved type whose face I couldn't even begin to read, looked the part of a retired bureaucrat. Martha, on the other hand, seemed to be one of these caring sympathetic types (some folks would say a bleeding heart) or maybe she was just skilled at looking that way -- over the years I'd seen all types.
I turned to her and got her eye before opening with a thanks and "Miss Martha, I know it's not your job but I'm just trying to get back on my feet. I know how to do lots of different kinds of work around houses and gardens. You must know somebody who needs stuff done -- like gutter cleaning, clipping, mowing, painting, repair. Heck, I can do lots of kinds of home repair work and construction, I just don't have tools or transportation."
"And you don't have a social security number or drivers license either?"
So Martha had been around the block a time or two. I gave her a look that said she had read me correctly.
"Well do you have a name?"
"Art."
"And a last name?"
"Chester. Art Chester, you know like the 21st president's except in reverse order and without the 'A' in the middle."
The night porter had surprised me when he'd asked for my name and I'd fallen back on my old system of using the name of some city where I'd been -- 'Chester' in this case. When he'd asked whether 'Chester' was my first or last name, I decided to say it was my last name because Chester as a first name sounds a little fancy for a guy sleeping in a homeless shelter. And the 'Art' I did get from the 21st president's last name. I've used lots of systems to remember my phony names -- when I was in Chester, Pennsylvania, I used 'Al' as a first name. Why? The letters 'A' and 'L' are short for 'at large', which as a bail jumper, I was.
Martha: "Well we don't need anything right now at our house, but let me think a minute. Oh, why don't you wait outside and maybe I can think of something."
So I waited outside on sidewalk. Maybe something would turn up. It must have been around nine when the two of them came out and I got up and looked expectantly at Martha. She turned to me and said to meet them in the parking lot around the corner on Mountmore in 10 minutes. I knew I was in luck because she was supposed to just say they weren't allowed to arrange jobs for 'clients'.
In the parking lot, Martha was standing next to the passenger side of the car, her husband John was sitting behind the steering wheel. Obviously she was the arranger and doer in that marriage.
"My friend Lisa has a home that she's having trouble keeping up. Right now she says the gutters have been overflowing and there's some other stuff wrong. You wait here. She'll come by for you in a half hour or so. You'll have to mention our names so she knows who you are. Oh yes, and be sure to use the same name that you gave me and remember which one is the first and which one is the last name."
I agreed, at the same time ignoring her barb. What else was there for me to do? Guys like me have to eat a lot of shit along the way. Then I sat down on the curb to wait.
Sometime later, a light blue Ford sedan stopped and the lady driver with grey-streaked black hair put down the front seat window and looked at me.
"I'm Art. You must be Lisa. John and Martha told me to expect you."
"That's me. Hop in Art."
The drive to her house didn't take as long as I'd expected and not much was said on the way. When we got to her house - a two-story brick bungalow like they built in eastern and mid-western cities in the late 40's and 50's - I saw right away that the place was an example of deferred maintenance. The lawn was mowed but it looked like some kid had done a 'lick-and-promise' job of it. Lisa showed me where the gutters had overflowed and showed me the ladder in the garage. Being a bungalow design, the gutters were only around 16 feet up so it was easy with the ladder. There were lots of rotten leaves and dirt in the gutters and from the way it clung to the gutter bottoms, it looked like they hadn't been really flushed out for years. After I got most of the stuff out, I told her I needed a long hose for flushing.
"The company that cleaned them last didn't need a hose."
"They needed one but they didn't use one. That's part of the problem."
Her hose wasn't long enough so we borrowed from a neighbor and I spent another half-hour or so flushing the gutters and then realised that the downspouts were backing up. One was so badly blocked, I had to take it all apart to get the crap out. By the time I got the gutters all cleared and clean, it was around noon and Lisa told me to come in for lunch. Over a lunch of bread and cold cuts and salad, she asked if I could make her lawn look better.
The sad sack who'd been mowing for her had missed spots and hadn't even tried to get close to the hedges and edgings. I got out the mower and mowed the whole thing like it should have been done in the first place. Then I went to work with the grass shears. Lisa came out of the house and asked where I kept the rest of my clothes -- mine were already pretty sad looking when she picked me up and cleaning gutters sure hadn't helped. After I told her she was looking at my whole wardrobe, she asked my sizes and said she'd go to the Salvation Army store and get me some spares. I was pulling weeds from the flower beds when she came back with several pairs of jeans, a couple shirts, underwear, socks and even a denim jacket. She asked me to come in for coffee and said I should shower and change into some clean clothes. I guess I must have really looked pretty ragged and smelled bad if she wanted me to shower and change before finishing work. I was glad there was a real man's shower in the basement so I didn't have to fuck with a bunch of fancy rugs and cosmetics and towels and shit like most women have in their bathrooms.
Over coffee Lisa tried to find out where I came from and how I got so far down and out. Evasive as usual, I answered in generalities and deflected her questions with questions of my own. She wasn't very forthcoming either but I did find out that she was separated from her husband and that they had two grown children in their late 30's -- one living in living in Ohio and the other in Arizona. The age of her kids surprised the hell out me because I'd estimated her to be 50 to mid-50's. The age of her kids would put her a lot closer to 60. (Later on she told me she was 66.)
Around five, she had me quit and paid me $90 for a little less than six hour's work. I told her I could paint and pointed out the peeling and faded paint on the garage door. Actually all the window frames and trim were in bad shape too, but I would keep that for tomorrow. We agreed that she would collect me at the shelter the next day early so she could give me a real breakfast. Lisa even said I should just leave my 'new' clothes in her house and said she was sorry that I couldn't sleep in her basement (because the neighbours would talk).
The next morning after breakfast, we went to a Lowe's store and bought paint, brushes, sandpaper, sanding block, putty knife and a razor edge scraper. (Her husband must have done absolutely nothing on and around the house because his tool collection was not much more than a hammer, pliers and some screwdrivers.)
Lisa was really surprised when I was done prepping and priming the garage door by around ten. I could almost see the wheels turning in her head as she calculated how cheap she could get all the window trim painted and sure enough, before the primer on the garage door had dried, she said I should start prepping the windows. Now I knew I had several day's work at least and I figured there'd be more by referral.
That afternoon a woman in a white Mercedes coupe parked in front and as she walked up the sidewalk, complimented me on the work I'd done and was doing. Lisa asked her in and around a half hour later, Lisa asked me to join the two women for coffee. Jolene, the friend, was one of these women that you first take to be in their thirties but up close, you realise that your estimate was around 20 years too low -- in other words, she was a damn nice early 50's and dressed very stylishly and tastefully. She also gave the impression of being a no-nonsense business woman - an impression turned out to be very correct. Several times as we were having coffee, out of the corner of my eye, I caught her giving me an appraising look.
Right from the beginning, Lisa had been very correct towards me, although at the same time, somewhat standoffish. After Jolene's visit, Lisa did seem to be more cordial, sometimes it seemed to me that her cordiality even bordered on flirting.
The rest of the week went pretty much the same. Lisa would collect me at the shelter, give me breakfast and I would get in a full 8 hour day. By Friday afternoon I had prepped all the ground floor windows and I was more than $400 richer than I'd been on Tuesday morning and I thought that by Saturday night, another $120 would come on top of that. Talk about a good story for Forbes magazine, I could see the headline: 'Arthur Chester Increases Net Worth 8-Fold in One Week!'.
When we got to the shelter, she told me that she wanted me to help her with something else on Saturday. It turned out that Lisa wanted to go to some kind of artsy furniture flea market in Hagerstown and she wanted me to go with her -- she'd pay all expenses and give me 50 bucks besides. What the hell, I didn't have anything else lined up for Saturday anyway and it'd be nice traveling without running away from somewhere or somebody.
So the next morning she collected me early and on the way to Hagerstown, we had a super breakfast at a Holiday Inn on the way out of Baltimore. At the flea market we walked and looked and walked and looked and by around one in the afternoon, she decided on an old mirror to hang in her upstairs hallway. At lunch in Hagerstown, she sprang the next surprise on me.
