[There's a book- Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, by Richard Farina. I guess there's only so far down you can go and so many times you can go there before something has to change. This chapter traces the last leg of my journey down and the pivotal moment when my life began to change... Forever]
If you're going to be a homeless bum, Phoenix was the place to be. By this time I wasn't fooling myself anymore, I was a drunk and a bum. I heard a guy years later say, "I wasn't homeless, I was backpacking across America." Kind of a Jack Kerouac perspective, I guess. I was a drunk, I was a bum and I was a fuck up. Every place I went the story was the same. I worked; I got drunk; I got fired; I went someplace else and did the same thing again... I called it the shampoo existence- lather, rinse, repeat. No matter what, I always wound up sleeping under bridges, it was the same scenario played out over and over again. I was down, but I wasn't all the way out...at least not yet. I had hitchhiked out of Denver stopping at missions where I could find them along the way, Colorado Springs, Pueblo... Finally at the southernmost part of the state, just before Raton Pass, I got picked up by a guy heading for Phoenix. We swapped off driving and went straight through.
I went to the mission in Phoenix and met an old guy named James from Boston. James had a van and we hooked up with a roofer. We did a couple of roofs and the guy split with the money...so, we went to the nigger pool. They sent us to a jobsite in Scottsdale where we were laborers cleaning up where they were building a sub division. After we got paid the first week, James decided to go back to Boston, it was pretty clear he was having trouble doing manual labor, he was pretty old and all of the years of drinking had taken their toll. He gave me the van which was old and not really worth a fuck, but it was a place to live. I built a bbq and got a little tv and lived on the jobsite. There was a big swimming pool and I met a retired gangster from Chicago who hired me to move a little dirt pile from his yard.
He was a pretty cool guy, he gave me a key to get into the pool enclosure, so I didn't have to hop the fence when nobody was looking. They had showers in there, so I could get a shower everyday- something you need in Phoenix in the summer. Every day he came up with little jobs for me to do. I think he just wanted another Italian to talk to. We used to sit in his yard, drink beer and shoot the shit. This guy knew everybody up in Chicago- he told me stories about people like Sam Giancana. One day when I wasn't working, I was laying in my van watching a ballgame when the cops showed up. The gangster came out of his house yelling at the cops, telling them to leave me alone because I belonged there. After a couple of months the job ended and I went to work with the lawn service that did the sub division. I moved into a cheap motel in Phoenix. The first night I met Brock.
Brock was a drywall guy with one eye and a bad heart. He was the cheapest guy I ever met... he had a pacemaker and was supposed to get the battery changed but he wouldn't go- he was afraid he'd miss out on getting paid, or something. I told him, please, go- I'd keep working and give him his cut. I was scared shitless he was going to drop dead on a jobsite or some shit like that. One reason that I started working with him, he had a set of Ames tools which make drywall faster. When you get paid by the foot, this is important. We worked in Phoenix for about a month and then went up to Show Low. Brock had a wife in Ohio and wanted to go see her. We finished up an old folks home in Springerville and headed up to Ohio. Brock's wife lived in the next town from my old buddy Larry, so I looked him up. He wasn't working so we put him on with us. There was quite a bit of building going on in Ohio, but in the winter time they pretty much shut things down. By December, it was time for me to go back to Phoenix. I hopped on a bus and went back.
When I got back, I stayed with my buddy Mike that had the lawncare service for a bit, but he had a wife so I didn't feel too comfortable around her- she didn't drink. By this time, my drinking was getting really bad. Me and a guy named George got an apartment in the black part of town and worked out of the day labor. After a month, George got paranoid about living there and left. The landlord showed up one day wanting to know why we weren't paying the rent. He was a cop. I showed him the receipts and apparently the management company was ripping him off. He told me I could stay there free as long as I didn't let the place get turned into a crack house. I was the only white guy in half a mile in any direction. One night I was watching tv when I heard a commotion in the alley in back. I grabbed my .357 Mag. and went out. Four or five Mexicans had this skinny black kid jacked up in the alley. I popped off a couple shots in the air and they took off running. The next morning I got visitors.
The skinny black kid was there with a couple other guys. One of them stuck out his hand and said: "I'm Billy and I wanted to thank you for bailing my little brother Ike out last night. This is our friend Ron." I invited them in and we had a beer or two. We started hanging out together every day, we'd go over to the park and shoot hoop with whoever was there. Billy and I were pretty close. We hung out at his Uncle Calvin's apartment around the corner and drank. In the morning, Billy would come by and beat on my window yelling: "Come on nigger, get up out the bed." He and Unc, his uncle Calvin were some of the best people I ever met. When I was in Vietnam, I got Malaria which never goes away. I was to the point where I was drinking every day and not eating. I couldn't afford to do both. I started getting sick all the time. Billy's grandmother lived down the block and she would make homemade chicken soup and his sister Caroline would bring it over and feed me. As soon as I was strong enough, I was right back over at Unc's drinking again. I weighed 115 lbs and it was getting pretty clear that I was going to die pretty soon. Working was out of the question by this time. I was in really rough shape, I never shaved anymore, or took a shower hardly...I was one of those people that you tried to avoid when you see them on the street. When I opened the door for somebody at a store, they looked the other way instead at me. It was getting to where I didn't even want to be around me.
What I needed was a plan. I went over to Unc's and took a shower (he had hot water and my electricity had been off for a while), put on my last clean shirt and walked a mile or so to the offices of the National Council on Alcoholism. My plan was simple. I would go there and if I talked right to them, they would send me to someplace like Betty Ford Clinic or Sedona Villa where I could learn to drink like a normal person and maybe I would hook up with some rich people and at least come out with a job.
I must have looked pretty rough, people were going by in cars throwing shit at me out of the windows. When I got there, I went in and walked up to the receptionist and said: "I need some help."
"What can I do for you?" She asked.
"I'm an alcoholic and I need some help."
"I'm sorry, we don't do that," she said.
I looked at the sign on the door and turned back; "This is the National Council on Alcoholism and you don't fucking do that? I need help."
"I'm sorry, Sir, but we don't do that here."
"Well what the fuck do you do then?" I guess I was a little loud because a guy came out of his office and asked me what the problem was. "This is the National Council on Alcoholism, I'm an alcoholic and I need some fucking help."
"Come on in my office, and we'll see what we can do," he said. Now we were getting somewhere, or so I thought. "I think we can help you," he says. "Come with me, we'll take a ride." So we go out and get in his car and he takes me to LARC. I forget what the L stands for but the rest is Alcohol Recovery Center. Basically, it was the drunk tank, where they bring the wino's when the cops pick them up. Obviously, this guy had mistaken me for a bum and had overlooked that I was a quality human being that belonged in Sedona Villa (a posh rehab) at the very least.
So we get to LARC and go to check me in. I forgot to mention that I hadn't had a drink that day as I wanted them to see that I was serious about getting help. We go up to the desk and the intake woman says, "I'm sorry, but we can't let you in here."
"Why not?" I asked.
"Because you're not drunk. You have to be drinking to get in here."
I had about three bucks on me and there was a liquor store just across the street about a hundred yards or so. "Wait just a minute," I said, "I'll be right back." I guess they could see what I was up to because the woman changed her mind and let me in. The man that brought me there's name is Chuck and I owe him my life.
Next: Lemonade Out Of Lemons: The Kid Becomes The Guy