Chapter 6

G2 liked being South in the winter. It wasn’t like it was never cold. But what sent the locals running for sweaters and overcoats felt like a spring breeze to G2. He didn’t plan to stay in this particular town for long, but the train had run out of track when it reached the ocean, so he had to find the necessities of life and then find a way out of town. His path took him through the Historic District. G2 was tired and weak. He hadn’t had food since ... He couldn’t remember exactly. His bottle and the loaf of bread had run out on the train. A big sign near the river said “No panhandling.” Bums seemed to be ignoring the sign as they approached people asking for a couple of bucks, sometimes even grabbing hold of a sleeve if a passerby ignored them. These were people that G2 didn’t want to be involved with. He turned south on Whitaker and saw a man give two dollars to a woman selling flowers. Half a block further, the man dropped the flower on the sidewalk. G2 picked up the flower and caught up with the man to return it to him. “Oh for Christ’s sake. Get lost. I already donated. Come any closer and I’ll call the cops.” The man continued on his way leaving G2 with the flower in his hand. It wasn’t a real flower. It was made of straw or reeds. G2 recalled that some of the homeless who camped over near Tybee Island cut the reeds and fashioned them into roses, then others sold them for a living. It was delicate—beautiful in its own way.

Of course, Gerald knew roses. His mother loved them. Gerald kept his paper route until he was a sophomore in high school and one of the things he did with his money was join the Rose of the Month Club so that he could plant roses for his mother. She was so sad after his father died. There were two bedraggled rose bushes in the back yard and in spite of their lack of care (and the number of times they’d kicked a football into them), his mother would sit at the kitchen table looking out into the back yard in the spring and stare at the blossoms. Gerald read up on the care of roses and joined the club, determined that he would make a rose garden that would match the White House. During the spring and summer, he received his monthly rose bush in the mail and read the instructions for care and planting. Then he dug a spot in the back yard and planted it. Come November, the instructions changed. The dormant plants received in the mail were to be hung in a cool dry place until the ground thawed in the spring and then planted. Gerald hung the five winter roses from hooks in the garage and hoped it didn’t get so cold that they plants died. Winter care for the roses that were planted had been difficult. Thanksgiving weekend, even though there was already snow on the ground, Gerald went out to the rose bed, pruned, and trenched his roses. This amounted to cutting them back impossibly far, then loosening the dirt around the roots and laying the rose plants over on their sides. Then he covered the plants with newspaper and straw to protect them during the winter. The job took him all day on Friday after Thanksgiving. He had even pruned and trenched the two straggly plants that had been there before he started his project. He had prepared his rose bed the previous spring by building a raised bed out of old 2x4s that he buried an inch deep and filled the inside with fill dirt from a home construction site that was being dug a block away from his house. In spite of warnings from the neighbors about the composition of the soil and the inadvisability of digging a basement, the contractor had dug out a full basement for the new home, so Gerald had carted away all the top soil he could in his wheelbarrow and filled a bed 12 feet long and six feet wide in the back yard. The basement of the new house was poured concrete and the framing was up when the first big thunderstorm hit that spring. After the storms, the builder had returned to find the basement cracked and flooded. Sage neighbors had wagged their heads and commented about too much clay for a basement, an underground river, and quicksand under the town. Gerald didn’t know how much of what the neighbors had said was true, but he did have dreams about the whole town being slowly sucked into the ground because of the quicksand underneath. The builder didn’t return that summer and the site stood derelict through the winter, framed studs standing like stark bones of a house that would never be built. The city eventually condemned the place and bulldozers came in to remove all sign of human habitation, which meant taking away all the building supplies and filling in the basement. Gerald couldn’t remember that a house had ever been built on that lot before he left for college.

In the spring, Gerald uncovered his roses as soon as the snow had melted off the straw. He stood them upright and gently packed the soil around their roots. He planted the five winter roses and then cancelled his membership in the Rose of the Month Club. There was no room for more than the 14 roses he now had in his garden. By Easter, all of the roses had leafed out and sent new shoots up to the welcoming sunlight and by June the buds had appeared on the bushes. Gerald watched his mother fix her coffee and sit at the kitchen table each morning looking out at the rose bushes and the riot of colors that they bloomed in. Gerald had not planned the garden by color, but rather by the month of the delivery. There were yellow roses next to pink next to white next to red. They bloomed all summer long and until Gerald left college and started wandering the country, he returned every Thanksgiving to prune and trench the roses and each spring break to set them upright again.

G2 wondered, as he looked at the Savannah rose in his hand if the roses were still there. Did anyone care for them? Were they all as straggly as those first two had been, or were they all dead by now? Sometimes when G2 smelled fresh coffee, he had a fleeting glimpse of his mother at the kitchen table flit through his mind. She had loved the roses.

A kind person at Sweet Charlotte’s saw G2 hanging around the back door, looking to see if there had been any slices of pizza thrown in the garbage. He was almost faint with hunger and his head complained of having had no wine. Sometimes the garbage behind a restaurant was not too bad. More and more, they were dumping things down garbage disposals at restaurants, though. He might have better luck at a grocery store, but couldn’t think where there was one just at the moment. A woman in an apron appeared at the back door shaking a cigarette out of a pack as she opened the door with her shoulder. She had spiky hair and tattoos that ran up her left arm. The inside of each wrist was tattooed with a Chinese character. Half a dozen earrings hung from each ear and there was a hoop stuck through her eyebrow and another through her nose. She looked tough, but Gerald thought she was strangely pretty. She looked up at him as she emerged from the kitchen. “Hey, you!” The voice wasn’t sharp, but G2 shied away nonetheless. He was used to being shooed away from places and found it best to just go. “Don’t go,” the woman said. “Come here. You hungry?” G2 nodded his head. “Wait.” She went back inside and came out a moment later with a paper plate and three slices of pizza. “Here. Sit down and eat. I like company when I come out to smoke.” G2 sat on the step at her feet and savored the pizza. It was cold—not refrigerator cold, but cold like it had been sitting out for a while. “You’re new around here, aren’t you?” G2 nodded, his mouth full of pizza. “If I have leftovers you’re welcome to them. People leave so much food on their plates it’s a shame to waste it. When they leave slices of pizza, I stack them up and hand ‘em out if people need something to eat. Better than throwing it in the garbage. That one’s the specialty of the house. Enough calories in one slice to keep a normal man going for a week. Three meats and three cheeses and guaranteed to give you greasy farts all night long. Can’t believe guys bring their dates here and then think they’ll get lucky later on. I’m vegetarian myself. I eat pizza, but just with tomato sauce and vegetables on it. My own specialty. I’ll save a piece for you tomorrow night.” She finished her cigarette about the same time G2 finished the last slice of pizza. He turned to her and said “God bless.” “Don’t worry, She will,” the woman responded. “Now how about you help me out a little. I haven’t had time to get out front and clean things up. Take this broom out and sweep the walks in front of the restaurant nice and clean. Pick up the trash and put it in the can out there, don’t just sweep it into the street. Bring the broom back here when you’re done and I’ll give you a couple bucks.” G2 took the broom and dustpan and hurried to the front to sweep the walks. He was happy to repay the woman’s kindness.

G2 knew how to sweep. He learned from a pro. G2 called him Mr. Bags in his head, but had never heard his name spoken. He wore the baggiest pair of pants G2 had ever seen on a skinny man. Mr. Bags said they fit him just fine before he went on his diet. Mr. Bags showed up at the local coffee shop about 11:30 every day with his broom. The broom was worn down to little more than a stub, but it worked just fine on the cement sidewalk. He would politely and carefully begin at the crack in the sidewalk coinciding with where the coffee shop adjoined the upscale restaurant next door. Mr. Bags never swept in front of the restaurant. “They got people who do that,” Mr. Bags would say. “I don’t want to take anybody’s work away from them, even though they don’t do a very good job.” He pointed out the bits of trash in the gutter. Each night after closing, the restaurant sent one of their busboys outside with a hose that he hooked to the faucet and used a special wrench to turn on. He sprayed from the front of the restaurant out to the street, sweeping all the accumulated day worth of gum wrappers and mint papers and occasional pile of dog poop out into the street. There he left it, assuming that it would get washed down the gutters or a street sweeper would come by in the middle of the night and vacuum the crap up. Mr. Bags, however, was meticulous. He swept carefully, one section of sidewalk at a time from the building to the curb. But he didn’t sweep the detritus off the walk. He used a piece of cardboard, swept the trash onto it and deposited it in the receptacle outside the coffee shop. Then he moved to the next section of sidewalk and swept it. The piece of corrugated that Mr. Bags used as a dustpan was his sign. It read: “Not poor. Just can’t afford food. Thanks for helping.” It was a lot of words, G2 thought, but people often struggled to read the sign while Mr. Bags used it to catch a batch of dirt and paper. The other side of the sign read “Tips appreciated.” That way no matter what side of the sign people saw, they got the message. Those who read always seemed to have a dollar or two for Mr. Bags.

It wasn’t just sweeping. Mr. Bags had carefully instructed G2 on how to sweep properly, how to wait for a section to clear of customers before attempting to sweep it, and how to make sure his sign was always face up. Mr. Bags also acted as a sort of unofficial busboy. If he saw people finish at a sidewalk table and stand to leave, he politely asked them if he could take their paper cups and dishes for them. He would hold his sign in one hand like a waiter’s tray and put the trash on it. Customers often put a dollar or some change on the table which Mr. Bags picked up as he was cleaning. “It’s all about customer service,” Mr. Bags said. Some people said that Mr. Bags had once been a waiter in a fancy restaurant. Some even said it was the restaurant next door. Why he had become a street sweeper, though, no one knew and Mr. Bags didn’t say. He would disappear from about 2:00 until 5:00 when he would once again be at his appointed station. On nights when the theatre across the street had performances, he would often stay late, sweeping the sidewalk in front of the coffee shop even though it was closed. People leaving one of the restaurants nearby and hurrying to the theatre sometimes left him a little something on one of the tables. People with doggy bags from their restaurant seemed prone to realize that they couldn’t take the food into the theatre with them and left that.