Memoirs of a Flower Child - George S Geisinger (the best books to read txt) 📗

soup kitchen I needed to know about, how to get nickels and dimes for cigarettes from the Jesuits, how to sleep in the mission when it was too cold to sleep in the park.
Christopher knew how to work the streets, how to get along. He rarely broke the law, except to use his heroin and his pain killers, smoke his drugs. Like Jonathan, he had his sources for drugs. By that time I could not afford to drive a car anymore. My mom sold my old car to a cop, with my bong on the floorboards. I wondered why the cop didn't come looking for me. Christopher was a small man, and slight, with a trim red beard and blonde hair. He was a nice guy, bright and kind. He and I shared a room now and then. We were close friends. He knew the same drug addicts and drunks I knew. We were all like that. It was a brotherhood. Drug addicts and drunks. It seemed nothing could ever take that issue away from any of us. It was a brotherhood on the streets of the city. The drunks and the drug addicts of the city. That's who we were.
He would bring home a little cheep wine and a little bit of cheese for supper, when we never had any supper otherwise. He would give me a cigarette or two now and then. I would go over to the place where the university students got lunch and sit on the park bench outside, where one waits for the bus, and a healthy, strong young man would walk by sometimes. He always gave me a cigarette and a light. I don't remember that young man's name, if I ever knew it. He was a student. He was not a part of the street brotherhood. Christopher would come home to my single room where he slept on my floor, and he would bring some little morsel to eat when he could. He knew I was starving. He knew I was at the mercy of the streets.
We would drink our alcohol and smoke our drugs. We were both addicts, like I said. He was a nice guy, a good friend. He never hurt me. He never did anything to hurt my feelings or did anything to treat me badly. Then I went back to the state hospital suicidal again, and lost track of him.
A long time later I found the program and got sober. The streets and the brotherhood of the streets did not want to forget me. Those guys did not want to let me go. I was one of them. Wouldn't I just smoke a joint with them? Wouldn't I just have a beer? But my answer was always “No” then, until some of those guys would not speak to me anymore. I didn't care. I'd found sobriety. I found the way out, and I stayed out.
One day I saw the other Chris, the one who freeloaded his way to California with me once on the bus. He always said he'd pay me back. I've stopped waiting. Chris was at an outpatient department of a hospital with some little pregnant girl. She looked like she'd pop in about two weeks.
He said, “Where are we living now?”
I asked him if he still partied anymore.
He said he had a joint now and then.
I told him I'm sober. I did not tell him where I was living.
He said Christopher had opened his window in his little room downtown one day, and started shooting his guns out the window. The Police came and tried to defuse the situation, but Christopher would not stop shooting.
He had stock-piled a lot of ammo for his guns he'd brought to the city with him when he was kicked out of the house by his folks a long time ago. He could not find sobriety and was tired of playing the streets. He was trapped in the game, a needle junky and a drunk. He believed he would never be anything different. He believed he could not win.
The Police did everything to defuse the situation, they tried not to hurt him, but Christopher would not stop shooting. The Police killed him. Suicide by cop. “He took his life as lovers often do. This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you. Starry Starry Night...”

***

I went back to the state hospital to visit, in my car one day after I was sober a long time. There was Gibbs, the artist, sitting outside the ward in a chair with some other guys. There he was, hobbling along slowly, as I beckoned for him to come to my car.
A long time ago, Gibbs and I, and a car load of guys from the halfway house had driven out to the country once, to a place where the creek had a beautiful rocky bed, where the water babbled like music, to a place where Nature had not yet been adulterated. He had taken his sketch pad. I had taken my guitar. Some of the guys went swimming in the creek on the hot summer afternoon. The hood of my car accidentally blew up over the windshield on the way out to the country on the interstate, blocking my vision at 75 MPH. The latch to the hood had broken. A man and his father we'd never met before, helped us. They had an old junker, just enough like my old car, they had the parts. They knew what to do. We were back on the road, all fixed up, in no time.
Now, these many years later, Gibbs was noticeably shorter in stature, and walked slowly, as if his feet hurt him. He'd been a strong, tall, strapping young man, full of life and health and strength when I knew him. This was Gibbs, the less of a man, and he got in my car reluctantly, complaining he would get in trouble if I took him off grounds, afraid of me, as if I didn't know he couldn't leave. Gibbs had become a defeated man.
I asked him what had happened to him.
Gibbs had jumped off a bridge trying to kill himself, shattering his ankles and lower legs. He would not die. He was lucky he could walk at all. I asked to see his sketch pad. Gibbs had always been a talented artist. Many of his sketches were still brilliant in his state of defeat.
I asked him about the other George. He said George's mother had thrown away his prize record collection. George had one of the finest classic record collections I'd ever seen. He had the complete recordings of Beethoven and Mozart, for one thing. George had a source of income for a while. It must have been a job or an inheritance or something. He'd spent thousands on the recordings of the great masters of music. Other guys in the brotherhood of the streets spent their money on classic rock, but not George. George spent his fortune on the masters. His mother had thrown them all away when George went into the state hospital the last time. George was another defeated man. Gibbs said George scarcely ever talked anymore.
I offered Gibbs $20 cash for one of his sketches. It was worth every penny of it, and then some. Gibbs wouldn't take the money. He took $5. I asked him to tear out the picture so I could keep it. He was nervous, jittery, self-conscious. He tore into his work with trembling hands, until it was worthless, ruined. But I kept it, insisted he keep the money.
I could never find that country stream again. I went there looking for it with some girl driving me years later, and we got lost. She couldn't understand why I cried over it. I couldn't tell her about my friends then. I could never tell her. She couldn't ever seem to understand how I could talk to God like I believe He's real. Well, if He's not real, what is? But I couldn't make her understand, about the time I lost my mind again.
No one seems to understand why I cry whenever I hear that old song.

Driver
Chapter 11

When I was making a living, I was a driver.
No, not the big rigs.
No, not the big time, either.
I drove pizza.
I drove flowers.
I drove rental cars to auction.
Penny ante stuff.
None of the rental car companies ever run their cars into the ground. Sooner or later, I think it's usually around 45K or 50K on the odometer or so, they all auction off their cars and renew their fleets with new inventory.
GPS systems did not exist when I was driving for a living. We relied on maps and our own working knowledge of the area on the job, any job. I almost had enough confidence about certain areas, I considered driving taxi more than once, but I had enough trouble with the money driving pizza, I decided against driving taxi. Besides, taxi drivers have a bad way of getting mugged or shot. I never needed money that bad, not even when I was starving, believe it or not.
Shuffling the rentals to auction was an interesting job.
We were centrally located near the BWI airport, but we operated throughout the tri-state area, including the District. There were auction sites all over, and there were multiple pickup sites for cars.
I remember we were on the job in the rally van, waiting for a run on 9/11. When the Twin Towers fell, we were all listening to the radio as we waited for the last minute inspections to finish. The supervisor got the call to move, and he drove us down past the Pentagon for a pickup. There were Military vehicles with 50 caliber machine guns mounted down there, with the National Guard at the ready, as we drove passed the smoldering Pentagon. Those boys meant business. Yes sir. The traffic passed them by very politely, no doubt about it.
We'd get assigned our cars, slap on a tag, get the keys and we'd be gone. There were usually six or eight drivers. We'd run one driver per car, running flat out all day long. The only break we'd get was when we were riding in the rally van, going to another pickup.
Sometimes we'd work 6AM to 8PM. We got paid by the car. Those were usually gravy days, making lots of money, but some days we'd burn up the whole day in traffic trying to get from one drop-off point to the next pickup spot.
Sometimes we'd work the interstates all day, running about 85 to 90mph all day, watching for cops, weaving through traffic. It was dangerous work, and I didn't like that part of it. I've seen too many fatalities on the highway to take that sort of thing lightly. More than once, I talked to the other drivers in the rally van about slowing down the pace on the interstates, but they always said they needed to get in as many