beggars *can* be choosers: repost

Perhaps you are in denial, perhaps you were brought up in a barn: whatever, as the kids say, in a tri-syllabic and weirdly stressed fashion.

what-ev-er. {roll eyes::purse lips}

I'd never heard it codified, or even noted an attempt to put it into words, before attending the memorial service for a homeless man named Joe who managed to touch many lives in the large city where we lived and slaved -- back in 1997, the Pre-Marlinspike Hall years.

Yes, his name was Joe.

Every charitable institution and person in the area wanted to claim special status for having known, loved, served, worried over, and self-defined by... Joe.

I was Homeless Guy Joe's best bud... Homeless Guy Joe came to me first when in need... I volunteered to be Homeless Guy Joe's payee back when we knew where he was most of the time... And so on, and so forth.

It turned out that Homeless Guy Joe made out like a bandit. Or perhaps it is better put that he made out like Robin Hood, for he was a generous fellow, was Joe. Very polite, unless agitated, sometimes by circumstances apparent only to his psychotic self. Good table manners.

I am going to stop italicizing "Joe" because, well, because it really was his name. Joe Coppage. He lived in our neighborhood long before we did -- an intelligent and, by all accounts, normal young man who went off to college to study architecture, only to be cruelly consumed by the sudden onset of schizophrenia. He was a slender white man, very unkempt, and was probably in his mid-40s when he died. Ah, wait. I have a photograph, famous now among my particular do-gooder group. It was taken by Charles Hinkle, who likely would bop you one if you intimated that he did any good for anyone, ever. You'll find his photo next to "curmudgeon."

He was beaten to death -- Joe, not Charles!

What Joe could possibly have possessed that would prompt someone to rob him -- or what he might have said to so enrage another -- is impossible for me to imagine, because Joe was decidedly mild-mannered and certainly destitute. We don't really know the scenario, the context, for his murder -- he was found on the sidewalk. I believe he spent about a week in the ICU, on a ventilator, without ever regaining consciousness, before one of the nurses recognized him. I am sure he was hard to recognize at that point.

[Wow. I just flashed on the memory of another man, John, who died of complications from AIDS. We managed to get him into a marvelous hospice -- and it was shameful how relieved and delighted he was by having his own room, a view of the courtyard full of flowers and a large fountain -- but mostly? Mostly he cried over having clean sheets and enough blankets, and over being clean between those sheets, under those blankets. After admission, John was only cogent for a day or two and spent the rest of his time hallucinating. He incorporated birds from the courtyard into his visions and seemed to consider them potent omens. He told me what bird I would see before I died. (I keep an eye out.) The day he died, he was demanding and yelling for an Arby's roast beef sandwich, which we got on our way to see him. You could say we were in denial -- we knew the state of his mouth, his esophagus, his stomach -- we were, in fact, intimately familiar with his entire gastrointestinal tract. You could say we were desperate to assuage our feelings of guilt and shame. You could even say that the only real grief we felt was for ourselves.]

Speaking of do-gooder guilt and shame, the opportunity to speak was extended to everyone at the memorial and Celebration of Life for Joe Coppage, and it took a long while to work through the apocrypha. Almost everyone shared a funny or touching anecdote -- Joe's life story was full of them:

In the early hours of one Christmas morning, Joe found a suicidal man huddled on the floor in the communal bathroom, heroin at the ready. The man told us later that day that Joe went to the bathroom, then turned, as if in afterthought, and said "Jesus was homeless, too." [If I hear this story again, I may be ill. It's true, though.]

Joe sat down at the piano one day and riffed off a jazz improvisation that left jaws hanging lax. And ask though we did, he wouldn't play again.

Then there were all those cute occasions when Joe refused to take his clothes off before showering. He always wore a donated suit, although he eschewed vests. His clothes ended up encrusted with the stuff of life -- feces, cigarette ashe, highly sugared coffee. Pellets of that ubiquitous non-dairy creamer stuff.

My most special memory of Joe? That would be the last time I saw him. He had not been around for weeks, but showed up for a hearty evening soup (plus salad and bread sticks!) on a night so cold that all the city shelters agreed to function over capacity. For some odd reason, I remember that we were "over" by five. Joe had frostbite on the very tip of his nose, and on his ear lobes. I did not get to see his feet, but I suspect they might have been bitten too. He was more cogent than he had been in years and we talked as he ate, the conversation being so normal that I don't recollect it. This memory is very visual -- my eyes kept straying to his ear lobes, black and swollen. A couple of the volunteers physically struggled with him after dinner to get him out of his nasty suit, into the shower, then dressed in a brand new ensemble, complete with fresh newspaper -- he liked to wear layers of newspaper with his clothing -- a common enough practice and wise, as it insulates against the cold.

There were two people who spoke the night of Joe's well-attended memorial whose words profoundly impacted me.

The first person, although unknown to you, needs no introduction. He knows best and has always known best. He walks the talk and disdains those who just sort of stumble along the roadway. He is a prophet, and looks down on the rest of us confused do-gooders, down the length of his long, long nose. (I'm implying that he fibs.) I'll call him Ed because that's Ed's name.

There were a lot of preachers there, and he was one, as well, although he is loathe to lump himself among his fellow sermonizers. You see, he left mainstream pastoring in order to live in community and among the poor, hungry, homeless, sick. He can be very annoying because he makes my conscience hurt.

He spoke near the end, after all the feel-good Joe stories that had people sniffing and dabbing at their eyes while gently laughing about the good old days.

Ed told us that we had helped to kill Joe, that we used him up like some lucky totem. Never once in all the years of "ministering" to him had we seen to it that he get consistent treatment for his severe mental illness, that he take the meds to counteract his psychoses.

Ed said that we wanted Joe to remain sick, that the Joe we liked was Crazy Joe. When Joe was medicated, he wasn't really all that cute, he didn't say the darnedest things.

Ed said that Joe was the city's homeless mascot and that we had used him as publicity, a white man from the neighborhood being a better emblem for fundraising than the black crack addict with HIV who was our more representative guest.

The second person who spoke to my heart was Marilyn. She is a complicated thing, is Marilyn, but that is a separate blog entry.

She told us a story of long ago -- maybe 20 years ago or more. Like Joe, she had lived in the neighborhood most of her life. For a while, he would wander among the streets, remembering who knows what, and looking for God knows whom. As time went by, his behavior became more and more erratic and he began to do things like gift his former neighbors with piles of excrement, neatly deposited by their front doors.

In those days, the shelter staff held informal weekly meetings and potluck suppers at Marilyn's house. Joe developed the habit of dropping by -- usually he just sat on her porch swing, muttering over and over the words by which he was best known: Pray for me. Pray for me. Please pray for me. (He drove otherwise even-tempered people insane with this incessant request. One minister of my acquaintance actually interrupted his sermon to yell: "I will NOT pray for you right now. Shush!")

But there came a summer night when Joe was hungry. He didn't want shelter food, so he decided to check out the staff meal over at Marilyn's house. Knocking on the door, he made his request known.

He was ushered in, and Marilyn set herself the task of making him a plate.

"We have egg salad, veggie lasagne, rice noodles with peanut sauce, meatballs, squash casserole, and crusty bread. What would you like?"

"A cheeseburger," said Joe.

"No, we don't have any burgers tonight. How about some meatballs and squash casserole. Nancy-Kate made the casserole, so you know it's good!" continued Marilyn.

"A cheeseburger," reiterated Joe, who seemed to know what he wanted.

She was losing patience. Finally, after a few more rounds of obstinance, Marilyn put a little of this and that on the paper plate, grabbed some napkins and a spoon, and thrust it all at Joe.

He looked a little frightened at that point, and held out his hands as if to push it away.

"That's okay, no, no, no. Pray for me?"

And with that, Joe went off into the warm fragrant night, unfed.

Marilyn told it better -- she laced it with funny details and had a timing that rivaled the best of raconteurs. But the punchline, the lesson, does not need any decoration:

Beggars can be choosers.

Walking home after the service, I remember trying to reconcile Ed and Marilyn's messages, trying to marry them together.

Were we to override Joe's wishes and force pharmaceutical normalcy on him, place him in adult day care for the sake of sanity? Were we to offer him a smorgasbord of choices, and delight in his choices, even when we did not understand them, even when he went away hungry?

And why, oh why, had we not had these conversations while he was still with us?