When I was eighteen years old I met an older woman in Manhattan named Ellen. Everyone who went to my university knew her. She was a fixture. Like Amir’s or Mama Joy’s deli or the Cosmo restaurant. A small, quick-moving woman always carrying two or three heavily laden bags with a voice that was pure New York…distilled through years of cigarettes and bus exhaust. Her voice was kind of a female equivalent to Lou Reed’s: smoky, knowing, world-weary.
Ellen was in her late forties. Her politics were radical. An advocate for the homeless. A tireless debater. An opponent of both Reagan and Bush and everything bourgeois. She was an inveterate smoker. Bipolar. A mother of three. A veteran of years of New York politics. And, like tens of thousands of other New Yorkers in 1987, Ellen had no place to live. She slept where she could. She, too, was homeless.
I’m a city kid. I grew up in the Reagan 80’s. Things were tough all over. I worked in soup kitchens as a teen in the midwest. People I knew sometimes passed through the line. In Manhattan things were magnified. On my stretch of Broadway early one morning I once counted twenty-four people sleeping in the space of one block. Where other people, I’m sure, would see Ellen as a “bag lady” and nothing more. I didn’t. It’s never that simple. My friend Karl, a minister’s son coming from the city of Detroit, knew this too. He befriended Ellen and helped her out with food and a place to stay a couple times. It was through Karl that I met Ellen.
What is there to say about the endless coversations that Ellen and I had in diners all over the city? (Tom’s. College Inn. The Mill. Vaselka’s. The Kiev. Leshka’s. Chock Full o’ Nuts.) I don’t know. Ellen was a complex person. She was someone I’d always hoped would get it together enough to write her own story. Hell, I lent her my first electric typewriter (never to be seen again) the summer she found a room in an apartment off 126th and Lexington. She wrote some great letters to me. I still have them somewhere.
But that was so long ago. A year and a half friendship, when you’re eighteen…leaves a mark, but also becomes in some ways a part of your past. To be honest, there is no way I can speak for Ellen. There is no way I can do her justice. Her sense of humor. Her sense of outrage. Her way of interacting with the city. It’s all mixed up in how I see New York, and in some ways, in how I see myself…
—————–
I would get calls. It’d be 9:30 at night, or 7 in the morning. Ellen might be at a diner somewhere. She might be in the lobby of my building. She might be freaked out at a hospital emergency room. I’m not rich, but I always had six bucks for a cheap meal and a pack of cigarettes. And I always learned something new from Ellen. About life. About politics. About New York City and the people I shared it with. So I’d go.
I’d meet Ellen at homeless encampments in the subway. Herald Square. Grand Central Terminal. Or at Tompkins Square Park or a nearby squat. New York was different then. Maybe for some the eighties in New York meant glitz and flash. It was also a dirty, crack-smoke-filled decade riven with ruined lives. At one point, the New York Times reported that one in nine New Yorkers used cocaine on a daily basis. From where I stood, that was totally believable.
Ellen was different. She was, let’s face it, mentally ill, but she was also an incredibly smart and fierce observer and reader of the politics of the day. She’d grown up in a prosperous family on the Upper East Side. She’d had two different families. Her grown sons did their best to care for her at times. But they didn’t share her world…and didn’t join it. And Ellen in some ways chose to live the way she did, however desperate and difficult that made her life and those who cared for her.
There is too much that Ellen taught me to convey here. But if I could communicate one essential point it would be this. No one has made as clear for me the connection between poverty and privelege that Ellen did. At her best, she was able to bring humanity, to bring a face and a story to the very real people who found themselves homeless on the streets of New York. She was also able to explain clearly how racism, how economic injustice and pervasive discrimination boxed people in and kicked them to the curb, forced them into lives where they were treated like human trash, and often ended up living a literal reflection of that.
White, middle class kids like me saw the world as “cause and effect.” That was so easy. So simple. You make mistakes, you end up on the street, you end up poor and destitute. Ellen was able to show me how privileged I was. How when I made mistakes….and I did…they were forgiven…solutions were found. She showed me how I saw the world through a lens that made judging other people a very comfortable thing to do. How easy all my assumptions were. How those assumptions always justified…at the end of the day…a course of action that I was going to take anyway. The easy way.
But Ellen took it further than that. Conversation by conversation, example by example…over endless cups of coffee….Ellen showed me how my privelege was actually linked to other people’s suffering, how in order for some to have plenty, plenty others had to have not much. It’s like the line to all the good things in life was six billion long, and I happened to be born (like Ellen herself) right up near the front…
I didn’t earn that. No one does. And there are times, asleep in my comfortable bed in California that I wake with a start. I’m dreaming about a voice from my past. A cigarette-fueled voice from New York City. Someone with whom I’ve lost touch…someone I don’t know what happened to. (I last spoke to Ellen in the early nineties when she was in the hospital for an operation.)
I’d call her my conscience, but that would be lying. I’d call her a lost friend, and that would be closer to the truth. But more and more I feel like there’s something specific to that voice that I can’t quite pin down. On some level…it’s like New York City itself is speaking to me. Telling me to open my eyes. Telling me to wake up.
essay © 2005 paul delehanty / kid oakland
I cross posted this from LSF, since some folks had trouble getting this to come up on their consoles.
Hope y’all like it.
Thank for posting the whole essay here kid. Don’t forget us when there’s more.
should I cross post my comments?!
just kidding.
I’m not kidding…of course you should.
The point is to communicate….last I checked. Whatever advances that is to the good.
i was kidding about the comments. I think cross posted diaries themselves are cool though… for comments it seems like each site has it’s own conversation… the pieces are essays, but the comments are replies, even if they are to the same essay each time they should evolve if they are worth making, and if they are to another comment, then clearly they should be original.
however, why not? some comments are like mini essays so if someone wants to do that, I withdraw my humorous implications. It gives pause for thought.
š
You may have had your eyes and heart opened by this woman but to do that you yourself had to be the kind of person who allowed that to happen.
Learning is always a two way street whether you know it or not she may have learned from you also.
And because you wrote this so beautifully I think I will now be haunted by wondering what has happened to her.
It makes me want to find those letters.
That was a summer of real hope. It was really important to her to be living in Harlem next to La Marqueta…to have a room of her own…and a typewriter.
But things always seem to go wrong when you’re poor and living on limited means. There’s so much more to this story…I realized that in writing it.
As for losing touch…I am hopeful I will hear something…I sent the link to friends from that time…maybe they’ll let me know. Life is like that sometimes.
If by some chance you find out what happened to her I hope you could let us know, good or bad?
And yes when poor the most miniscule setback becomes magnified a hundred times and anyone with any amount of money will probably never understand that.
two things… everyone should be able to have a 20 x 20 space to live with a roof and insulation in the city. They should stack them however they have to do this, but ideally distributed around the city in neighborhoods and not in monotonous projects… groups of five and ten or so.
people that don’t want to live in houses need to be allowed places to sleep in the city and for those places to be safe… to camp in the city.
socialized medicine.
even better the second time around. Your writing is so awesome and I get to read it for free, so what could be better than that. I am hoping everyone is lucky enough to have an Ellen in their life. I did.
Thanks again….
I thought your story was vivid and powerful too, hell, you should repost your comments here!!
You remind me about all those people you know “on the block” in a city. Friends. Neighbors. People you trade hellos with…which are sometimes the “good energy” you need.
On the block doesn’t seem to mean all that much anymore. But for some people you can say that phrase and it means so much. Everybody belongs to everybody on a block. It’s like that.
There’s weak links, yes, but you look out for each other…or try.
now a days people are afraid or don’t even trust their neighbors or worry it might become to involved, to much of a commitment..if the timing doesn’t suit their needs…..fuck em….I’m in LA now, and I have a few Gladys Kravits that lurk around, i see them through their window shades..I will try to talk to them, ask them how they are..if they voted..I mostly get one word answers and then they scurry back into their homes. Kinda like Hitchhiking. What the fuck happened to Hitchhiking. There is no trust in America anymore. Now that we have Bush..he will continue to scare people and it will be perpetuated. I think the fact that hitchhiking is not around anymore really says something about the decline of neighborhoods, neighbors and familia. I am computer dumb..or I woulda crossposted my Dkos comment on your awesome essay.
died after the first few reports of rape & murder on the road – perpetrated by drivers and hitchers alike. Seems like for every “Woodstock” there’s an “Altamont”. Yin/Yang, Good/Evil. Always a question of balance, now tipped in the wrong direction.
me think about my first pitcher of beer. It was at a place in Midtown, I think it was called McCann’s, but I’m not sure anymore.
I remember that I was probably 14 and I went over to my friends house in suburban NJ, and we watched the first quarter of the Boston College-Miami game. Then we hopped on the train and went into the city.
We hopped around Washington Square Park for a while, and then headed uptown. Thought we go in a bar and ask for some beer, just to see what would happen.
They served us beer, but I’m pretty sure it was a little watered down. And then we watched Doug Flutie’s Hail Mary pass sail through the air…
Manhattan in the 80’s had an outlaw flavor. It was a lot tougher than it is today. But I didn’t love it any less.
I miss the real 42nd St. Before Rudy disnified it. It is slowly losing it’s character, I loved all the characters the city had to offer. All of them. That was America to me. All of it wrapped up in one city, guarded by lady liberty.
An obit of Lucien Carr
Or this Harvey Pekar appreciation of Herbert Huncke
The beats loved Times Square….loved the vibe, the people, the flavor. Hell, we did too. 18 year olds running around the city for the first time.
I remember seeing a man in a business suit sprinting desperately uptown in his socks at 3 in the morning. Stuff like that you don’t forget.
A friend of mine ran into Kurt Vonnegut in Times Square when it was still a seedy wasteland. He went up to him and asked:
“Sir, are you Kurt Vonnegut?”
Vonnegut replied,
“It’s your guess, kid.”
Only in Times Square. Only in New York.
a friend and I went into a girly show off 9th or 10th…first time..thought WTF..try everything once. Well, he wanted to see a private show…i tried to convince him what a private show was…he slapped down the money and we were escorted down a dark long tunnel hallway..many doors on each side…as we are walking he says….(we’re 18) “I thought we were going to go on the stage and sit in front of her and get a private show”….”No” I said (so drunk) “we are going into a private room and …” suddenly a man throws a couple of sheets at us and we are standing in front of a door. The door opens and one woman tells us to come in…we do, then another woman also enters…”You want a Fuck or you want a Suck”…my friend turns white as the sheets…”um…we just want a private show” “Maybe you can dance for us”…the other woman….”what the fuck are you two little shits up to”…”Ummmmmm..we are just visiting from California and thought it would be fun to…”…. louder she bellows….”You want a fuck or you want a Suck”…”ugh ohhhhh” …other woman…”Are you Faggots”…I pulled out I think a total of 50 bucks and said we had made a mistake and that we really had to leave….we ran out…laughing all the way back into the theater that we were watching the show from in the first place…the entire place looked so different after we had experienced our “Private show”….Boy..that was a blast!
NY story. Repeated a thousand times by kids from the burbs.
thanks for the links…what fascinating people..loved that The Grateful Dead paid Huncke’s rent at the Chelsea hotel and that he lived until 81, wonder if he ever expected to live that long? “The Beat Generation” seems ripe for Film, you have a screenplay in you?…starring none other than our pal Johnny Deep.
I had an Ellen, named Bart. I was not but about 8 when he first spoke to me. He was the crazy hermit that lived across the road. Had dozed up all the topsoil into long rows, because “the gummit pizened it with that damn DDT.”
I think that he spoke to me because I didn’t think he was crazy, and I wasn’t afraid of him like the other kids were. He would take off in the fall, Hobo to Florida, and show up again in spring, open up his little shack on the south shore of the Island, on the high ground up from Mud Creek. We spent a lot of time pulling weeds off the Hill, sometimes talking, sometimes just watching the activity in the swamp, or the fields. It was then I became an environmentalist.
One year Spring came as usual, but Bart did not. We heard later that he had died in a boxcar coming home that spring.
But I know what you mean about hearing the voice, and waking up at night.
I hope that sometime, somewhere, everybody gets to have an Ellen, or a Bart.
Nice to read you again. I’d give you a 4, if I could.
Good to read your stuff again KO
as always, Paul.
Ellen showed me how my privilege was actually linked to other people’s suffering, how in order for some to have plenty, plenty others had to have not much.
Our Methodist preacher loves this topic. He continually drives us to work in this life towards what he calls “God’s economy,” where those who have much will not have too much, and those who have little will not have too little. His other favorite line is, “The good news is, we have plenty of money to fix_____.” (fill in with poverty/hunger/healthcare/you name it) “The bad news is, it’s all still in your pockets.”
This is my first drop-in to Booman’s new site. Nice to see familar faces.
Nice to read your work again.
Growing up in Ronnie’s world, as my kids did. Brown shirts @ the high school [ok, ribbon nazis], voracious greed disguised as “individual effort”, the list is too long.
Our “Ellen”, a homeless man, mentally ill, used to walk by and we’d talk. Very bright, very open, and he played an old guitar he always carried with his “traveling gear”.
Alot of folk didn’t feel comfortable around him because of his appearance, but my kids & I trusted him, and we learned from each other. He was lucky. After about a year, he began to accept help from a local group that worked with the mentally ill. Another year and he put his MS in math to work as a middle school teacher [one of my kids was there at the time].
Two year later he married and left the ‘ville. Now? People from the various “group homes” around here wander the streets, heavily medicated, for untold hours until check-in time. Cops file “danger to self or others” all the time – usually because the damaged one asks. Used to be people had access to care by the best we had. WTF, more important to build miniature bombs.
as usual. thank you. i grew up in n’yawk. brings back memories.