Chapter 4

GRANNY SAL was in her usual position outside Walgreen’s Drug Store. If she hadn’t been there, people would be concerned. As far as G2 knew, she had been there every morning for years. She sold the local street paper for a dollar and always seemed to have a stack of them beside her little campstool. The publisher sold the papers to Sal for thirty-five cents, so G2 figured she made a pretty good profit and could buy food and wine anytime. She lived in a shelter where she paid $5 a night for a cot, a meal, and hot water. G2 figured she had to sell ten newspapers every day to pay for her sojourn. That was a lot of work for very little benefit, but it had made Granny Sal a fixture at Walgreen’s. Everyone knew her, and she knew a little something about everyone.

When G2 was new to the streets, he thought he would get a job writing for the street papers. Some of them paid fifty cents a column inch for stories, but a column inch was a lot of words, especially when the two-page story he wrote had been cut by an editor to a two-inch blurb. G2 decided right then that he would save all the words he was writing and get his book published someday and then he would be set for the rest of his life and wouldn’t have to panhandle anymore. The longer he wrote, the less he could remember what he was writing about. Things kept distracting him. For example, there was the blue Volvo, license number 123REJ that was always parked at the free clinic. Now 123REJ was a very interesting license number. If G2 was inventing license numbers, that was one he would have invented. 123 REJect. It was easy to remember. “Elegant,” he remembered a college composition professor saying about his writing once. G2 could think of a lot of elegant license plate numbers that started 123. 123GO. 123ABC. 123HIC. People might have trouble with that one, he thought. Who would know that it meant “Here I Come?” He’d have to work on that one. He had jotted it down on a piece of paper and carefully folded it up in his pocket with the little stub of pencil that he had. Sometimes he saw one of his license plate ideas on a car. SPY007. That was his. He must have lost that piece of paper and someone from the license bureau found it and made the plate. Or probably it was those punks.

G2 had been in a rough part of town, looking for a place to sleep for the night that wouldn’t be raided by the police. They were making sweeps through some of the best places to sleep and forcing people to move away. The bridge under which he’d spent nearly a week out of the rain had been cleared the day before. He was walking down a street just after dusk, looking for an out-of-the-way place to lie down and have a sip of wine when he was distracted by a license plate that said “PMPRD.” It was a shiny car and looked out of place on the dirty street. He stopped and fished out his pencil and a slip of paper. While he was concentrating on the license plate, trying to puzzle out what it meant, he had missed the approach of three men until one grabbed him by the collar and hauled him back against a brick wall. “Wha dya thing ya doin. Ya innersted in Big Jim’s wheels?” “You under cover? A cop?” “Just a wino, bro. Dummy.” The words came too rapidly for G2 to sort them out, but when he tried to protect his bag, it earned him a punch in the stomach. The canvas bag was ripped off his shoulder and the contents dumped out on the ground. One of the men grabbed the paper bag with his wine in it. And unscrewed the cap. He poured back a slug of the precious liquid and then spewed it out of his mouth all over G2. “Tha’ shit’s nasty,” he said, and flung the bottle against the wall where it shattered. G2 wept more for the bottle than from the punch. “My bitch tasted like that, I’d make the dog lick her.” “Look at this: A journey alone by G2. Dude’s a goddam writer. Les see what you wrote.” G2 always intended to write the story of being homeless and sell it. Now these punk bastards had it. He screeched as he launched himself toward the punk with his words and was rewarded with a fist to the jaw that sent him back into the wall. He hit his head on the bricks hard enough to stun him and he slumped to the sidewalk. “Nothin’ here but license numbers,” the punk laughed. He didn’t know which one. Papers were being scattered. Ten precious pieces of paper and his pencil. All the work since he’d been homeless. G2 raised a hand just to have it slapped down. “You stay ‘way from the Pimp Ride, asshole. We fine you here again, you a dead bum.” Someone kicked him and the three started laughing as they walked away looking at his sheets of paper. “Big Jim’s waitin’,” he heard them say.

Those punks probably went to jail with his license numbers. That’s where they made license plates—in jail. They went there with his numbers and made them into license plates and that’s why now G2 saw license plates that he wrote on cars that were on the street. He was keeping track of which ones were his ideas. It was a long time ago, but G2 remembered.

Granny Sal recognized G2. Granny Sal recognized everyone. She greeted her customers by name, even the ones in suits and shiny shoes. A lady came out of the drug store with a cup of coffee. “Granny, I got you a cup of coffee and a donut. Here’s a dollar for the paper.” Granny Sal smiled her gap-toothed grin and took the money and food, handing the woman her paper. “And how’s that little Josh?” Granny asked. “He over his cold now?” “He’s doing fine now, Granny,” the woman said. “He’ll be back in school Monday.” “That’s good,” Granny Sal said. “I got a little something for that cute little boy.” She dug in her apron pocket and produced a wrapped piece of peppermint candy. “This’ll help his little sore throat. You give it to him and tell him Granny Sal says to get well soon.” “Thank you Granny.” The woman took the newspaper and the peppermint and headed for her big SUV in the parking lot.

Granny Sal sat on her little camp stool with her legs stuck straight out in front of her. Anyone coming up that side of the street had to either step over her, or step off the curb to go around her. But no one seemed to mind. Granny Sal had a little something for everyone and everyone, it seemed had something for Granny. She saw G2 as he approached and struggled up off her stool to stand. She was scarcely taller when she stood up than she was when she was sitting on the little stool.

“G2! You’re back,” she said, holding out her arms to hug the man. G2 quietly came into her arms, waited patiently while she hugged him and watched her sit back down on her camp stool. “You’ve been gone a long time, G2. You just passing through?” He nodded and looked up at the sky. “Yes,” Granny said, “almost time for the weather to change. You’ll be heading south with the birds, I suppose. What’s it like in the South? I imagine it’s all sunny beaches that you vacation on in the winter, isn’t it G2? Pretty girls in bikinis bringing you wine with a little umbrella in it. How I envy you traveling around. I can’t move from my spot, I tell you. Wouldn’t last a day if I had to find a new place to sleep every night. And my customers—what would they do? If I wasn’t here for them, they’d be in an awful fix. I figure this stool is where I live my life and this stool is where I’ll die one day.” G2 liked Granny Sal. She never expected him to say anything. She made up all the stories about him that she told and he believed her. Yes, he would head south for the winter and sit on fine sunny beaches in Florida. Maybe he would just go all the way out the end of Key West and then dive right into the ocean and swim to Cuba. He could get on a cruise ship as a porter and go on down to Rio in South America. All he had to do was listen to Granny Sal.

“I have something for you, G2,” she said. “Been saving it because I knew you’d come back.” She searched pockets that seemed to be hidden all over her clothes. G2 reckoned that if you emptied out all her pockets, she’d be skinnier than his arm. Finally she pulled out a tiny pad of paper and a pencil that was three inches long. It didn’t have an eraser. “Here we are,” she said. “I just found this little notebook. Some of the pages are used, but there’s lots of new paper in there. And this pencil? Would you believe they were giving them away at a street fair? See, it says WXRX on the side of it. A radio station that was playing music so loud it hurt my ears a block away. But they had pencils they said were for golfers. As soon as I saw it, I thought G2 don’t play golf, but he still needs a pencil. This will help G2 write his novel, I said to myself. Maybe he’ll publish some articles in The Roof and my customers, right here on this block, will read what he wrote in this little notebook. You’ll be a great writer someday, G2. And I want an autographed copy of whatever it is you publish. Don’t forget your Granny Sal.”

G2 took the offered pencil and paper. It wasn’t every day that he got new paper, and the pencil he had been using earlier in the day was only as long as the first joint on his thumb. It still had some lead, though. G2 would whittle it down with a piece of broken glass and still get a page or two out of it.

Gerald played golf once in college. He figured that there wasn’t much to it. You swung a club at the ball and then putted it in the hole. That much, at least, was just like playing miniature golf. Easier, since there were no windmills. The recruiter that was interviewing Brian and Gerald in college took them to Lake Geneva and treated them to a weekend at the Playboy Club. This was the high life he was telling them they would enjoy as sales managers. There were half a dozen other recruits, three Regional Sales Managers, and the National Sales Manager. Golfing was a requirement. Gerald and Brian rented clubs and decided to share a single set. The $40 greens fee included a golf cart and the friends were joined by Steve, the National Sales Manager and a recruit from Chicago named Ed. Ed was a serious golfer. Every drive went straight down the fairway. He was shooting just over par at the seventh hole. Steve was a serious golfer, too, but didn’t have any of the skills that Ed had. He replaced several balls that went into the rough or water hazards and it seemed that every stroke was accompanied by a string of curses. After three straight balls went into the water off the sixth tee, Steve turned to the others and in a burst of frustration said, “Well boys, now you know the National Sales Manager really sucks cock.” There was a long pause before he continued in a somewhat lower voice, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell that to the other managers.” Brian and Gerald nodded seriously while Ed guffawed. Apparently it had been a joke. Gerald’s play was also frustrating, though he wasn’t as prone to fits of tantrum like Steve was. It just didn’t seem that he could get the ball in the air. He hit line drives that barely cleared the ground and at one point simply used his putter to hit the ball seven times down the fairway to the green. At the ninth hole, a short one, Ed handed Gerald a driver from his bag and said “Here. Try this and keep your head down and your eye on the ball.” Gerald followed the instructions and swung hard at the ball. He connected. The ball soared high into the air. It overshot the par 3 hole by fifty yards, and they heard it hit pavement near the trees. The private airstrip was just on the other side of those trees and all four men watched as the ball took a long high bounce and came down on one of the single engine planes parked near the runway. They looked in shocked amazement as Ed took the driver from Gerald and put it in his bag. “I say we call that a hole-in-one for everyone on the team,” Steve said. The four men moved quickly to the tenth tee where three bunnies were serving beers.

G2 looked around for something to write in his new notebook while Granny Sal watched. There were cars stopped for the traffic light at the corner. A man pushed a shopping cart out of the drug store and over to his Toyota in the parking lot. G2 couldn’t figure out how a person could buy so much in Walgreen’s. A young couple sat at the bus stop, cuddled together, occasionally turning to kiss each other as they talked quietly. Two crows noisily fought over a MacDonald’s bag in the parking lot and beyond them a cat stalked forward planning a stealth attack. An airplane streaked overhead leaving a contrail, but just too far away to be heard above the din of the city traffic. When G2 opened his eyes wide and really looked at the world around him, there was so much that he was almost overwhelmed. Then he saw it and all his attention narrowed to a single point. The noise and distractions of the city fell away, leaving him with a moment of crystal clarity as he opened his notebook and wrote: CC1492.