-1-

February, 1981

t was an unusually cold night, even for February in New York, but the two couples walking down Broadway didn’t seem to mind.  Ann, the tall blond in the raccoon coat, had just turned 25 and she, her lawyer boyfriend, her brother David and his wife Liz had just left the restaurant where they were celebrating.  They were all laughing after much champagne as they passed a group of derelicts hovering over a fire in a metal garbage can.  Two of the bums stepped away from the flames as they walked by, asking for money.  One was polite and pathetic; the other was belligerent and grabbed David by the arm.  David shook him off and they continued walking, all still merry but David, who became suddenly solemn.

“Don’t let them bother you,” said Liz, indicating the group around the fire.  “This is New York.”

David looked thoughtful.  “No…it’s just…I think I know one of those guys.  I think the one who grabbed my arm is my Uncle Leo.  Wait here.”

He left them standing in shocked disbelief.  “What’s he talking about?”  Liz demanded.  “Who’s Uncle Leo?”

“Well, we did have an Uncle Leo,” Ann said, hoping desperately it wasn’t this derelict, “but he disappeared years ago.”  They watched, suddenly shivering, as David talked to the man, then to the group, and then pointed over to Ann.  “Oh my God,” Ann said, “it must be him.”

David motioned them over.  Just as they reluctantly approached the shabby group, David said “O.K., now!” and suddenly all six of them burst into a loud, off-key rendition of “Happy Birthday,” sung directly to Ann.  They even sang “Happy Birthday dear ANN SCHWARTZ,” as David sang along in delight and Ann looked frantically, futilely for a place to hide.  She didn’t know whether to cry or scream.  When the song ended, she chose screaming.

“I’ve never been so humiliated in my life!  How could you do this to me?  People for blocks around heard that!  My last name, even!”

David chucked gleefully, handed “Uncle Leo” a five dollar bill, and they all continued on down the street.

Left behind in the freezing night were five men and one woman, all homeless and friendless.  Although some of them had known some of the others for years, none considered the others his friends.  They were just people to stand around the fire with, to mutter to, sometimes to sleep near in a doorway of a particularly bad neighborhood.  Lately there had been a rash of muggings of bag ladies and bums because of a rumor that many of them were really rich crazies who carried thousands of dollars stashed in their filthy clothes.  “Uncle Leo,” whose name, by an incredible coincidence, actually was Leo, had once known someone like that.  He was known as Mr. Deal.  Leo, who had never had more than $200 capital at one time in his life, couldn’t imagine why a rich person, even a crazy one, would ever choose to live in the streets or in one of the shelters set up around the city.

Leo was as unscrupulous as he was poor and tried for years to come up with a way to part Mr. Deal from his money, but failed.  He even tried to rob him in his sleep (there being no particular honor among derelicts) but Mr. Deal had befriended a skinny but still menacing German shepherd which guarded him day and night.  Unfortunately for Leo, the dog outlived Mr. Deal who, upon his death, was found by the police to be carrying $112,000 in large bills on his person, plus the key to a safe deposit box holding over a quarter-million dollars worth of IT&T stock.

The media loved the story and really played it up.  It was one of the few news stories that Leo and the other bums followed and discussed.  They were filled with dismay to read that all of Mr. Deal’s holdings went to his only surviving relative, a niece who lived in Miami Beach and was married to a plastic surgeon.

There was one other guy standing around the fire now who Leo suspected might possess more than he let on.  His name was Donald Fuller, and Leo thought he might be related to the Fuller Brush people.  Leo—and everybody else—knew Donald’s last name only because, on one layer of clothing which sometimes showed up, depending on which season it was, Donald wore a name tag reading “Hi!  I’m Donald Fuller,” and under it, in smaller letters, “Elmira, N.Y,” implying, at least to Leo, some sort of important life before he fell into his current state of disgrace.

Also, Donald was even more of a loner than most, and even more paranoid and distrustful of people both within and outside of their world.  Leo didn’t realize that much of that attitude applied to him only, because of his constant prying.  Leo was sure Donald was hiding something and went out of his way to find out what, but Donald would not cooperate. 

Donald was a wino who went on periodic binges, which should have made him an easy mark for his fellow derelicts who were not winos but only bums.  But he was also smarter and shrewder than the others and so far had managed to avoid all confrontations by simply disappearing when he was at his most vulnerable.  He would reappear several days or weeks later.

He never revealed where he’d been, but that wasn’t especially unusual as people came and went every day on the streets.  Sometimes they came back, sometimes they didn’t, sometimes they’d be found dead in an abandoned building or curled up, frozen and stiff, under a pile of garbage.

Donald was sober now, or reasonably so, but he hoped that wouldn’t be for much longer, now that they’d come into the $5 for singing happy birthday to those people from New Jersey, or maybe Brooklyn.  Donald had been to New Jersey at least two or three times in his life, but never to Brooklyn.  He’d never much wanted to go before, but in thinking about it now, it had a sort of exotic ring to it.  Brooklyn.  Maybe he’d take a trip there when it got warm.  But right now, all he wanted was a shot or two of Thunderbird or whatever they could get a gallon of for $5.

Leo, who held the money and therefore considered it his, had other ideas.  For $5, he could get a room in one of the fleabag hotels nearby, and tonight, with the wind chill factor at minus nine, that sounded especially appealing.  He also could eat for a couple of days on $5.  Leo did not think of getting wine.  In his own strange value system, he considered drinking degrading and morally wrong.

But Donald and the others who were alert enough to have seen the $5 felt that the money should belong to all of them, for they had all sung for it.  Willie, an old toothless black wino, was the most insistent.  “I wants my cut, man.  This here is a democracy.  Let’s vote on it.”  Two of the men immediately raised their hands, before the choices were announced.  The lone woman, Tiny, who was wearing three coats, mumbled over and over, “What’s going on here?  I’m so confused.  I’m so discombobulated.”  Harry, a tall, thin, elderly man who looked surprisingly clean and well-dressed, at least from a distance, walked away.  A former vaudevillian who still referred to himself as “in show business,” he felt it was beneath him to argue over such a petty sum.  He would only beg when not in the presence of his fellow beggars, and even then he would lie.  “Pardon me,” he would say in an affected voice, “I seem to have lost my wallet.  Could you possibly spare a dollar or two for a cab?”  Sometimes it worked.

The last man around the fire, Cap, who claimed to have once been a captain in the merchant marine and loved to tell tall tales and sing sea chanties and even recite things like “The Face on the Barroom Floor” when he was lucid, looked as though he were back at sea now as he stood swaying over the fire, staring into the distance as if searching for land.

Donald, who was getting colder and thirstier, suddenly lunged for the money, which Leo was trying to put in an inner pocket.  Leo, who was small but surprisingly strong, shoved him back and he fell to the ice-covered concrete, hitting his head on the garbage pail and passing out.  Leo immediately walked away, with only Willie following him, still claiming his share of the money.  Everyone else scattered in different directions, as they usually did at any sign of trouble.  They did not believe in taking care of their own.

Donald woke up sometime later and saw an unfamiliar woman standing over him.  She had set her three shopping bags near his head and the stench was so overpowering that Donald, though used to unpleasant odors, gagged.  He, like most of the street men, carried no bags.  He wore all his belongings on his back; when these clothes became too rotted to wear, he’d simply exchange them for something better at the Salvation Army or a well-stocked trash can.  But the women, no matter how far gone, seemed to retain some of their nesting instinct and carried around bags and bundles overflowing with old newspapers, rotting food, clothes, a few leftover relics from their past, often more normal lives, and an incredible assortment of junk picked up in their travels through the streets.  The bags, like the women who pushed, pulled or carried them, always smelled.  But this was the worst Donald could remember.

“Christ, what have you got in there?”  Donald said as soon as he had scrambled far enough away to breathe again. 

“My cat,” the woman answered in a small, flat voice.  She too was small, or looked as though she might be under all her layers of coats, sweaters, pants and scarves.  “My cat died and I don’t want to leave him.  He was a good cat.”

Donald vaguely remembered seeing a bag lady with a cat on a string a long time ago.  He didn’t remember the woman but he remembered the cat.  “Was it a big black cat with a crooked tail?”

The woman looked startled, then suspicious.  “No, that was Ralph, he ran away a long time ago.  This is Eugene, he’s orange.”  They stared at each other in silence.  “How did you know Ralph?”

“Oh, I’ve been around,” he said, a little proudly.

“Ralph was very smart,” she said, “but he liked to explore.  Eugene was a very dumb cat but he was good.  He never tried to run away.”

“Why don’t you take him to the ASPCA?”

“No!  They’ll burn him up, I don’t want him to burn up.  He likes cold weather, he gets very tired in the heat.”

“So why don’t you bury him?”

“I can’t.  I don’t have a shovel.  Could you help?”

Donald couldn’t remember the last time someone had asked him to do something.  Even blind old ladies sensed enough not to ask him for help crossing the street.  He didn’t know now whether to be annoyed or pleased.  He stood over the almost dead fire and rubbed his head where it had hit the pavement.  No blood.

“Please,” she asked, looking awfully small to be on her own anywhere, no less living on the streets.  “He’s just a little cat.  He was my friend.”

Donald thought about it for a long time.  “You got any money?”  She shook her head.  He thought more.  What had she ever done for him?  He didn’t even know her name.  “What’s your name?”

“Joy.”  That seemed to convince him.

“O.K.  But you’ll have to carry everything.  I’m not carrying those bags.”

She smiled at him, and Donald realized he couldn’t remember the last time someone had smiled at him.  “Where will we go?” she asked.

“To the park.”  They were only a few blocks from Central Park, which would be deserted at this time of night.  “We’ll look for something to dig with on the way.”

In the gutter, they came across a part of a car, or maybe a bicycle.  Donald wasn’t too mechanical, so he couldn’t be sure. 

Central Park would be scary to anyone but them at this hour.  But they walked very slowly into its depths, slowly mostly because Joy, with her three heavy, overflowing shopping bags bumping against her legs, couldn’t go any faster.  Donald was impatient and walked quite a ways ahead of her.  He also wanted to avoid the smell.

They walked a long way.  Every now and then Joy would call out, “Isn’t this a good spot?” and Donald would yell back, “Keep going, keep going.”  He didn’t know why it wasn’t a good spot, it just wasn’t.  Finally he turned off the path into a little clump of trees and bushes.  There was a full moon so it was quite bright, and Donald at once began to dig with his car or bicycle part.

The ground was nearly frozen so it was a lot harder to dig than he’d expected.  He’d never have agreed to do this if he’d known how difficult it would be.  Yet somehow there was something satisfying about it.  It felt like real work. 

The hole wasn’t very deep when he decided he was finished.  His hands hurt.  Enough of this real work.  “O.K., stick the cat in,” he said to Joy.

She rooted around in one of the bags for a while, the D’Agostino one, but couldn’t find the cat.  She got frantic and started throwing things onto the ground and in the bushes.

Then she stopped.  “Wrong bag,” she said as she began to gather up the things she’d thrown out, including the old newspapers, and shove them back in the bag.  The second bag—Bloomingdale’s, a favorite with the bag ladies—proved more fruitful:  she lifted out the rotting remains of her cat, which had obviously died several days ago, before the freeze set in.  Donald stepped back, but watched closely as she placed the cat in the grave, lay a newspaper on top of it (he got a glimpse of a headline in the moonlight:  Presley Death Ends Rock Era  Drug Abuse Ruled Out) and began covering it with clumps of dirt.

When she had finished, the dirt didn’t completely cover the paper.  She stared at it for a moment, then walked on top of the grave and stomped her feet for several minutes.  It didn’t seem to help much, although it made a horrible, crunching sound.  Finally she stepped away, picked up her bags and started to walk off.

“Don’t you want to say something?” Donald asked.

Without looking back, she said, “Oh yeah.  Good bye, Eugene,” and continued walking.

Donald tried to remember a prayer, but the only one that came to mind was “Now I lay me down to sleep,” which didn’t seem too appropriate, so he shrugged his shoulders and walked off behind Joy.

In a minute, he had passed her and when another minute later he turned to look back at her, he noticed a dark shape approaching the grave.  He realized it was a dog, a half-starved German shepherd (maybe Mr. Deal’s) which began to dig furiously at the grave.  He didn’t know whether or not to tell Joy.  Then he told her, and they watched together as the dog began to pull the cat out by the head.  When he started to tear viciously at the neck, they turned without a word and continued walking slowly down the moonlit path, Joy a few steps behind with her bags bumping heavily against her legs.

-2-

hen Donald had graduated from the sixth grade, his teacher asked him to write the class prophecy and read it at assembly.  Donald made most of his friends sports heroes and the girls were either mothers or salesladies.  He made himself a spaceman.  He wasn’t far off.

When Joy was in the sixth grade, she was the fastest runner in her class.  Faster than the boys even.  She was still running, but she wasn’t winning any more.

-3-

onald didn’t expect ever to see Joy again.  They traveled in different circles.  He spent the next few months trying to keep warm.  He thought a lot about getting in shape.  He always thought about getting in shape toward the end of winter because that’s when spring training started, and Donald had been a runner on his high school cross country team.  Every spring he thought about jogging, but he never did it.  Last year he even suggested to Leo that they jog together.  Leo always seemed to be hanging around him anyway.

Leo didn’t want to jog.  He thought Donald was completely out of his mind to suggest it, and it convinced him even more that Donald came from a rich family.  Only rich people jogged.  Like lawyers.

But Donald knew he’d be 39 or 40 or 41 soon, and he had to stay in condition.  Life on the streets is tough.

One day in April he decided he was really going to do it.  He’d had a good night’s sleep on the 7th Ave. IRT (he’d only been woken up twice by a transit cop) and by a great stroke of luck he came across a left sneaker on the sidewalk which almost matched a right one he’d found several days ago, and was only a couple of sizes too big.  It was a very warm day and he remembered from his spring training days that it was unhealthy to overdress, so he went into Central Park, hid behind some bushes (very near where he’d buried Eugene) and stripped to his shorts.  They were striped boxer shorts he’d gotten from the Salvation Army only a few weeks ago, so they were still relatively clean.  He was sure they looked just like running shorts.

He shoved his clothes well back in the bushes, then remembered to do some warm-up exercises.  He made four or five attempts to touch his toes, did a few jumping jacks and then emerged from the bushes and embarked on his run.  On one foot, the one with the green sneaker which was a little tight, he wore only a woman’s white anklet.  On the other foot, the one with the black sneaker that was too big, he wore three sweat socks, the top one with a green stripe which exactly matched the other sneaker.

He hadn’t run in years, but he was confident it would all come back to him.  His life now was much harder than it had been in high school.  He started off fast and was feeling very pleased and proud of himself until he realized he was running downhill.  When he reached a flat path, he had to slow down considerably, but he still felt he was doing well and thought how impressed everybody would be to see him, except there was nobody around.  Then he heard the footsteps of another jogger approach from behind.  He looked over his shoulder and saw a young man wearing Adidas shorts, an Adidas sweat shirt, Adidas sneakers and color-coordinated socks and sweatband.  The path between the bushes was very narrow here, and the other jogger said “Excuse me” a few times to Donald, who had no intention of letting this kid beat him.  Finally, realizing Donald was deliberately not letting him pass, the kid said “Get out of the way, you fucking asshole,” and shoved by him.

“WEIRDO!”  Donald shouted after him.

In a minute, he came out onto a path lined with benches filled with people.  Now they could admire him.  But instead of admiring him they laughed at him or made faces or turned away.  He couldn’t understand it.  He thought he looked as good as any other jogger.  But he was used to people’s negative reactions so he just kept on running, slower and slower but still running, until a little girl pointed at him and said “YUCK” very loudly.  Then he decided it was time to stop, so he turned around, took a different, emptier path and very slowly now, breathing hard, walked back.

When he got to the spot where he’d hidden his clothes, he was quite startled to see Joy standing there, staring down at the slight indentation in the ground which had briefly been Eugene’s grave.  She had acquired another shopping bag.

She looked up when he approached but didn’t seem to recognize him.  “Your penis is showing, you know,” she said.  He looked down and indeed, it was protruding through the fly of his boxer shorts.  He turned modestly and stuck it back in. 

“What are you doing here, Joy?” he said.  Her mouth fell open.

“How’d you know my name?”

“I helped you bury your cat, remember?  Right here.”

“Oh.  Well, that’s why I’m here.  I’m visiting his grave.”

“But he’s not here any more.  Don’t you remember the dog ate him?”

“You’re a very smart person.  Who are you?”

He started to put on his pants.  “I’m Donald Fuller and I won first prize in the science fair for my moon terrain.”

She looked impressed.  “Wow.  The moon.”

“Well, I’d never actually seen it of course, up close, but I have a lot of imagination.”  He began putting on the first of his three shirts, over which went two sweaters, a jacket and an overcoat.  His “Hi!  I’m Donald Fuller” name tag was still attached to the outermost sweater.  That was his good sweater.  He’d even had it dry cleaned once, although the dry cleaning man had been reluctant to take it and only finally agreed when Donald offered to pay in advance.  For his address on the receipt he’d put “The World Is My Acorn,” and chuckled.  The dry cleaner didn’t smile.

Then he had forgotten what he’d done with the sweater (he’d lost the receipt almost immediately) until two months later when he passed a dry cleaners and it came back to him in a flash.  Except he couldn’t  remember which cleaners he’d taken it to, so he spent days going from one cleaners to another (sometimes back to the same one several times) asking if they had “a nice blue sweater size large.”  He finally hit the right place.  The man didn’t remember the sweater, but he remembered Donald.  “It’s been here over two months,” he said, looking at the receipt attached to the sweater.  “That’ll be another two dollars for storage.”

Donald didn’t have two dollars, so he had to leave without his sweater.  It was hard, seeing it hanging there all clean and not being able to take it.

“Do you have a card?” he asked the man, so that this time he wouldn’t forget where it was.

“Get the fuck out of here,” the man snarled, and put the sweater back on the rack.  Donald slept in a doorway right across the street that night and first thing the next morning, after smearing eight or nine car windshields with a slimy, spit-coated rag and collecting $2.10 from the sometimes annoyed, sometimes nervous drivers, he went back to the cleaners.  He was so excited about picking up his sweater.  They even gave him a hanger and a plastic bag.

Donald continued talking to Joy as he carefully pulled this sweater over his head.  It certainly needed cleaning again, but he didn’t know if he could handle it.  It had been such an ordeal.  “I’ve always been fascinated by outer space,” he said through the sweater.  “Haven’t you?”

“Not especially.”  She looked up now into the sky.  “It’s so far away.  I don’t exactly understand it.”

Donald’s head finally emerged from his sweater.  He looked at her closely.  She was small and dark and looked like she probably used to wear lipstick.  “Want me to explain it to you?”

They sat together on a park bench for hours that warm April night, and Donald told her about outer space.  He told her as much as he could remember, which was quite a bit considering he couldn’t even remember how old he was.  A lot of things she already knew, like there were nine planets in our solar system and all the planets rotate on their axes and revolve around the sun (he thought that was a very sophisticated piece of information and was disappointed when Joy said disdainfully, “Oh, I  know that.”).  But most of what he told her she didn’t know, or didn’t know she knew, and, when she was able to pay attention, she seemed impressed.  Donald was very pleased to be impressing someone today, after his miserable failure as a jogger.  He talked on and on.  Sometimes she listened, then her eyes would glaze over and she’d begin to mumble to herself, or to sing.  At last, in the middle of his discussion on infinity, she announced, “I’m hungry.”

Donald said nothing.  He was hungry, too, but his feet hurt from running in the wrong size sneakers and he was exhausted.

“I’ll go get something,” she offered.

“See if you can pick up a bottle of something, too.”

Donald watched the small, shapeless figure in the red coat disappear into the darkness.  She took all four shopping bags.  Maybe she wouldn’t come back.  He didn’t really care—his head was too full of outer space. 

Joy walked around the park, slowly, as usual, because of her shopping bags, and stopped at an occasional trash basket to look for food.  She hadn’t yet found anything when she came across a young couple having a picnic on a bench just inside the park.

She put her bags down and sat on a bench right across from them, watching them intently.  At first they ignored her, but when they realized she was staring at their food, they became uncomfortable.  They had a large assortment of Chinese food in little cardboard containers.  Joy knew they wouldn’t eat it all.  People never did.  She waited patiently.

They realized they were full long before they really were, gathered up the remains and threw them into a trash basket, smashing the containers down into the other garbage as they glared at Joy.  Then they went back to the bench to pick up their belongings—a blaring transistor radio, a camera, a large Tiffany’s shopping bag (Joy would love to get her hands on that).  Joy immediately walked over to the trash can and pulled out the soggy paper bag with the squashed containers inside.  She opened one of the containers and began to eat its contents with her hand.  The couple looked on in horror.  They had seen derelicts eating out of garbage cans before, but never eating their garbage, gnawing on their discarded bones.

The girl started to gag and yanked her boyfriend off down the path, leaving the Tiffany’s bag behind.  Joy walked over and picked it up.  It contained only a newspaper.  She was thrilled.  She put the rest of the Chinese food in it, picked up her other bags, and slowly made her way back to Donald.  

They slept on adjacent benches in the park that night.  Joy woke up several times during the night and looked over to see if Donald was still there.  He was, sleeping soundly after his good Chinese dinner.

When he woke up the next morning he ached all over.  It felt good.  Joy was already awake, and was sitting on her bench holding two donuts.  She walked over to him and handed him the chocolate one.  He didn’t know where she’d gotten them, but he did know this was a good woman.  Breakfast in bed!

“That was fun last night,” she said.  “Like school.  But better.  No tests.”

“Whaddya mean, no tests?” Donald said between bites.  “What’s an asteroid?”

“I don’t know.”

“What does the moon do to the earth?”

“I forget.”

“The TIDES, God damnit.  What’s in Saturn’s rings?”

“I don’t know.  Some stuff.”

“JOY!  What’s the matter with you?  Don’t you remember anything?”  He was quite exasperated, not aware of how much he forgot every day.

She started to cry as she stood over him, holding her half-eaten donut.

“Oh, stop,” he said gruffly.  She didn’t, she just stood there crying.  He didn’t know how to deal with this.  It seemed much more complicated to him than surviving in the streets with no food and no money in the middle of winter.  “C’mon, don’t cry,” he said, his voice a little softer.  He knew it was his fault that she was crying, and he couldn’t look her in the eye, although she seemed to be oblivious of him anyway.

Finally he grabbed her arm and pulled her down on the bench next to him.  She stopped crying immediately and sat very still and quiet.  He put his arm around her.  She lay her head on his shoulder.

“Oh shit,” he muttered.  “Now what the fuck have I done?”

-4-

hey were inseparable from then on.  They slept side by side every night, although the most physical contact they had was the morning Joy had put her head on Donald’s shoulder.

It was very unusual in their community for a couple to be formed, and they were considered strange even by their fellow derelicts.  They were teased mercilessly, sometimes hostilely.  Leo was especially hostile, for he felt that any money Donald may have would now certainly be grabbed by Joy.  He resented her tremendously and totally ignored her.  The other men in Donald’s loose circle of acquaintances resented her simply for being a woman.  In spite of their current life style, most of them were actually quite conservative and traditional, and they believed that women belonged at home.  They weren’t proud of being down-and-out, but it was at least acceptable.  But not for a woman.

Tiny, the only other woman who regularly frequented their hangouts, was too overwhelmed by life to care about Donald and Joy’s relationship, or even to notice.  She was aware only of her own confusion and was terrified by it.

Cap, who had the reputation of a dirty old man, may actually have approved of Joy and her relationship with Donald, but he had disappeared sometime during the spring.  It was rumored he had died in the charity ward of Bellevue, but no one knew for sure.  Or cared.

Donald spent the first several weeks of his new life with Joy in a drunken stupor, partly because he knew she was there to watch over him, partly because he was very frightened by being this close to anyone, and mainly because Joy was much more adept than he at begging, and willingly handed her money over to him.

She would stand in heavily populated areas, such as in front of Macy’s or Bloomingdale’s, and sing spirituals in a surprisingly sweet soprano.  Sometimes she would preach, too, and then she would be very loud and forceful as she waved her arms about and pointed at people and recited disconnected verses from the Bible.  Sometimes she’d preach on the subway during the morning rush hour, and her voice was even louder than the roar of the train.  Here, people gave her money to get rid of her.

When she sang on the streets, however, people dropped money into her little yellow plastic cup because they thought it made them virtuous.  They’d throw in a nickel or dime and feel good for the rest of the day.  And Joy seemed to be a worthy person to give money to.  She was doing something, not just standing there with her hand out.  And although she was obviously somewhat less than middle class, she looked more strange than repugnant.  She was relatively clean for a bag lady.  Her shopping bags overflowed with garbage, but she tried hard to keep her body and her clothes reasonably clean.  In high school, she had studied home economics for three years, and there was great emphasis on cleanliness.

Of course, it was impossible to be too clean on the streets, but at least she wasn’t covered with sores and, when she moved away from her shopping bags, she didn’t smell too much.  And she took very good care of her feet.  She didn’t want them wrapped in fetid rags like so many of the other street people.

Donald was very pleased that she took such good care of herself, especially of her feet.  “Maybe some day we’ll jog together,” he told her during a sober moment.

Every morning when Donald would wake up sick and hung over, he’d say “I really gotta stop, I really gotta get myself together.”  Joy would shrug her shoulders noncommittally, and he would take that as a cue to ask for more money.  She didn’t care; she gave him everything.  This made some of the others even more resentful.  He was being “kept,” whereas they had to earn their money by a hard day’s begging or windshield cleaning.

Willie, who had a stronger sense of self-preservation than most derelicts, was filled with rage.  Once, while wiping the windshield of a man who immediately rolled up his windows and locked the doors, obviously not intending to give him anything, Willie happened to glance across the car’s hood at Donald, who was sitting comfortably in a doorway, drinking out of a quart bottle of almost-respectable wine that Joy’s money had paid for.

The combination of the hardass, rich (it was a Cadillac) white man and Donald’s lounging in luxury was too much for Willie, and he began pounding furiously on the Cadillac’s side window.  The driver, nervous but not willing to give in, began honking his horn at the car in front of him, which was stopped at a red light.  The other car didn’t move (the driver seemed somewhat amused by the scene behind him, which he watched intently in his rear-view mirror) and Willie pounded harder until there was a crash and his hand went through the window.  The Cadillac’s driver and Willie were equally startled, but the driver recovered first and swerved his car around the car in front and through the red light, leaving Willie standing in the middle of Ninth Avenue holding a large chunk of shatter-proof glass.

The light changed to green but Willie remained standing there as traffic moved around him.  By the time the light changed back to red, he was waving the piece of glass triumphantly over his head.  “You better pay me for my services, man,” he yelled to the next car that stopped, “if you want your car INTACK.”

The next several drivers gave him money and he was delighted with this new ploy until he realized he had collected enough money for some whiskey.  He threw down the piece of glass and never remembered to use it again.

One of the new bums who had turned up during the spring was Cecil.  Donald and Joy were already a couple by then and he seemed to accept them as such from the start.  “You know, you kids oughta get married,” he often told them.  “Get married, settle down, get a little place, have a couple of kids.”  He looked at Joy.  “Are you too old to have kids?”

“I don’t know,” she’d reply.  “But who wants kids?  They tie you down.  I like my freedom.”  In the eighth grade, Joy’s class had been asked to write on “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up.”  She handed in her paper with six words written on it:

Free

Free

Sounds good to me

She flunked.

Cecil’s favorite money-making scheme was to walk into a bar (there were scores of them in the Times Square area alone) and take money off the bar.  Sometimes he could grab a couple of dollars at a time that way, until the bartender or a patron noticed what he was doing.  He was an undistinguished looking character, small and pale with wire-rimmed glasses, which helped.  And he could even go into the same bar a couple of times a day, if he made sure a new bartender was on duty each time.

There was one bar that he especially liked, because it was close to the flophouse where he often spent the night and because its layout made it easy to take the money and run, but there was a big, furry, friendly-looking dog which hung out there a lot.  The dog belonged to two of the bar’s regulars, a grossly overweight woman and her pathetic, mousy husband who waited on her hand and foot, often bringing her Cheese Doodles, Twinkies and Doritos from outside because the bar didn’t stock them.  Their dog, who wasn’t as friendly as he looked, growled every time Cecil would enter the bar, even if he was on semi-legitimate business, like using the men’s room.

Cecil tried hard to befriend this dog and its owners, but they didn’t fall for it.  Stealing money from bars seemed more of a challenge to Cecil than a matter of desperation, though.  Every few weeks he would disappear and come back several days later with a pocketful of money.  Then he’d treat everybody around to a couple of bottles of whiskey or sometimes a couple of buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken or some Big Macs from MacDonald’s.  Nobody ever returned the favor, but he didn’t mind.  “When I got, we got,” he’d say grandly.

He was especially generous toward and protective of Joy.  He always gave her extra food, and promised her if she and Donald got married he’d buy them a wonderful wedding present, like a vacuum cleaner.

Donald and Joy didn’t consider marriage even a remote possibility.  Like the other people who lived on the streets or in the flophouses, they lived one day at a time.  Donald remembered his father using that phrase over and over, particularly after attending one of his AA meetings.

When he was a boy, Donald had gone with his father to a number of AA meetings.  He found it fascinating to listen to the almost unbelievable stories some of the members told.  His own father’s story he found boring.  All he ever did was come home drunk with a silly grin on his face and fall asleep, and in the morning be guilt-ridden and apologetic.  His mother’s stories would have been much more entertaining, but she vehemently refused to attend a meeting.  Donald suggested to his father that he spice up the stories a bit, perhaps borrowing from his mother’s experiences, but his father saw no virtue in parading around the yard nude or falling down the stairs and breaking three ribs.  He was a quiet, peaceful man, until his wife drove him to violence.  But that was only when he was sober, so he didn’t see any reason to mention it at AA.

Cecil went to AA meetings quite often, but only to get the free coffee and cake or to get out of the cold.  He tried to get Donald and Joy to go but they wouldn’t.  But Donald thought about it a lot.  Sometimes he’d ask Cecil to repeat the stories he’d heard, and Cecil would, although he got them all mixed up.

“Well, there was this guy, Bill,” he’d begin.  “No, not Bill, that was another guy, this guy was, let me see now, what was his name, Tom?, no that’s not it, well I forget, let’s say it was Tim, just for the hell of it, so anyway, so this guy Tim, let’s say, he has a nice house and everything, and a car, or maybe two cars, and a wife and a coupla kids, so one day Tom takes his kids…”

“Who’s Tom?”  Donald broke in.

“Tom’s this guy here, who do you think?”  Cecil replied in exasperation.

“I thought his name was Tim.”

“Whaddya, crazy, his name is TOM, my FATHER’S name is Tim.  This guy is Tom.”

“In a small but defiant voice:   “Tim.  You said Tim.”

“AS I WAS SAYIN’,” Cecil continued, “so this asshole TOM takes his kids out for a nice little drive one night when he’s loaded and one of ‘em gets car sick and pukes all over the front seat so Tom gets pissed off and slams the kid in the head and the kid starts to scream and everything and then when Tom turns to slam him again to shut him up, he rams the car into a tree and bang, just like that, the kid’s dead.  And Tom’s hand is still hanging there waiting to hit the kid but he’s dead, the kid’s dead, but Tom still hears him screamin’ in his head, even now he hears him screamin’ in his head, it kinda got stuck in there because that’s the last thing he heard, you know?  So that’s the story.”

“That’s a terrible story.  Why’d you have to tell me that story?”

“I don’t know.  I made it up.  You wanted a story, I told you a story.”

“You know what’s wrong with you, Donald?  You’re confused.  If you wasn’t so confused, you wouldn’t be here.  You’d be a regular guy just like Tom there, slammin’ your kid in the head for pukin’ in the car.”

-5-

fter those initial few weeks, Donald and Joy, in their own unorthodox way, did settle down.  Donald became accustomed to and less frightened of Joy’s presence, and felt less need to be constantly drunk.  He usually managed to stay sober throughout most of the day, and then would put himself to sleep at night with a bottle of wine.  A lot like his father.

Joy was still willing to give him her money.  She was quite trusting and fearless, and Donald worried about her.  He thought she was very naïve for someone who lived on the street.

Now that the weather was warm, they slept outdoors almost every night.  Donald spent much of his time in the park, watching the joggers and thinking about jogging again himself.  He talked a lot about it to Joy.  “As soon as I get some real running shorts and some sneakers that fit,” he’d say.  He didn’t want his penis flopping out again, and his feet were still blistered from his last attempt.  He still talked about their running together.  She wasn’t interested, but she always encouraged him.  “I think that’s very nice, Donald, ” she’d say.  “I don’t like to run (except alone).”

When Joy was five, in kindergarten, she could outrun the whole class.  One day the children were lined up at recess for a race.  The teacher, a strict, outspoken and imposing older woman said, “She always wins.  This time, let’s beat Joy!”

At “ready”, before “set” and “go”, Joy took off across the field, left the school ground and made a beeline for a tree.  She quickly climbed it and wouldn’t come down until recess was over.

Joy kept herself very busy.  She went off every weekday morning to preach on the subway, and every afternoon, except Sunday, she’d sing on the street.  Donald never went with her on the subway—he didn’t like being trapped with all those people, and Joy’s religious fervor made him uncomfortable.  But he sometimes went with her when she sang.  He thought she had a beautiful voice, although he tired of her spirituals.  He tried to convince her to sing other songs, but she couldn’t think of any and he could think only of Christmas songs.  So sometimes she’d sing “Jingle Bells” or “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” but Donald noticed she collected less money with these songs, so he told her to stop.

Then he remembered “Swanee River,” one of his old favorites.  Her audience became very moved when she sang it, especially the part about the old folks at home.  They thought she really meant it, and gave her more money than usual so that she could get back to her family. 

When Donald was little, a relative had given him a tiny red piano for his birthday, along with a little book of play-by-number songs.  Donald wasn’t very musical, and the only song he’d ever learned to play was “Swanee River.”  He played it over and over, much to his parents’ annoyance.  Finally they took the piano away from him but he’d still pretend to be playing it, using the table top as his keyboard.

His mother forbade him to sing it in her presence, so to taunt her he’d sing it silently, moving his lips and pounding on the table.  That infuriated her even more.  Once she hit his hand with her big wooden cooking spoon and broke two of his fingers.  He never sang it again.  But he loved hearing Joy sing it, and his fingers moved in the air as though he were accompanying her.

Joy loved music and she loved to sing.  She especially loved singing Donald to sleep at night, although the wine usually beat her to it.  During the summer, after returning from one of his mysterious disappearances, Cecil bought her what was to become her greatest treasure:  a radio contained in a big orange plastic headset.  Donald thought she looked wonderful in it.

It opened up a whole new repertoire to her, and she began wearing it when she sang on the street, singing along as best she could to whatever was playing.  She usually knew very few of the words, but what words she did know she sang out loudly and happily.  She didn’t realize that other people couldn’t hear the music on her radio, so all they’d hear would be her singing a word or a phrase or two.  Most people found it very amusing.

One day Cecil told Joy about a place he’d discovered in his travels on the Bowery.  It was a men’s shelter called Open Arms.  He’d spent an occasional night there if it was cold and he was stuck in the area, but he considered Times Square his home.

He encouraged Joy to go there because of a Saturday night program they sponsored called The All-Star Review.  It was a variety show in which virtually anyone could participate, and did.  The audience was made up not only of local derelicts and crazies, but also the old people from a near-by senior citizens’ center.  They were much more tolerant of those who lived on the fringes of or outside normal society than most people, perhaps because of their age and their own relative poverty. 

Joy was very interested.  “I’d like to go hear music,” she told Donald.  To Donald, it sounded like going out on a real date.  He agreed.

That Saturday night, they took the subway down to Houston Street.  They were very excited—the farthest from Times Square they’d been in months was Bloomingdale’s, except when they slept on the subway, but then they never got off the train.

They arrived in the middle of the first act, a juggler dressed in a clown suit who kept dropping the balls.  “It’s all part of the act, folks,” he reassured the audience, “it’s all part of the act.”

Donald and Joy caused quite a commotion when they walked in because of Joy’s rattling, thumping shopping bags.  Everyone in the incredibly quiet audience turned to stare at them.  “Hey, you’re making me drop the ball,” the juggler complained, forgetting that it was “all part of the act.”

Donald and Joy sat down in the back.  Joy was disappointed no one was singing; she wasn’t interested in jugglers.  Donald, though, was very content.  He put his arm around her.  He remembered going to a drive-in movie once, and seeing a horror film.  This reminded him of that.

The next act was a comedian, and although no one understood any of his jokes or thought anything he said funny, everyone laughed at what seemed like inappropriate times.  The comedian, a neatly but shabbily dressed little Jewish man, was encouraged by the laughter and went on and on.  The people running the show began giving him signals and motioning him off the stage, but he happily ignored them.  Finally, one of the Open Arms’ staff members slipped unobtrusively over to the outlet where the microphone was plugged in and unplugged it.

The comedian just spoke louder and everyone could hear him fine, but one of the other staff members yelled “Mike’s out!  Can’t hear you!” from the back, then walked up onto the stage and made a great show of trying to fix the problem as the old man tried to yell even louder.  But the audience took this as a cue to clap so he finally gave up in defeat.

“You didn’t hear my best material,” he said as he walked off the stage flapping his arms.  “I got a million of ‘em.”

To Joy’s delight, the next act was a singer, among other things.  He was wearing a frayed black tuxedo with a bright pink ruffled shirt and a lot of jewelry.  Also an obvious hairpiece.  He was introduced as “The fantabulous, the stupendous Roy Urg, straight from Las Vegas!” (She read off a card which Roy had given her.)

His act consisted of a number of imitations of other performers.  They were all unrecognizable.  He announced who most of them were beforehand (Dinah Shore, Milton Berle, Pat Boone, Rodney Dangerfield) but a few of them he asked the audience to guess.

“O.K., here’s a good one.”  He sang “Danke schön” with a western accent.  Silence.  “C’mon, this is one of your favorites.”  Finally someone yelled out, “Marlene Dietrich?”

“WHERE have you people BEEN?”  He seemed astounded.  “It’s WAYNE NEWTON!”

“O.K., try this one.  This is an easy one.  If you don’t get this one, you all go to the funny farm.”

No one laughed.  The comedian who’d been on before him was stone faced.  “He thinks he’s funny,” he said to the deaf old lady next to him.  “He ain’t funny.  He don’t know what funny is.  I’M funny.”

The impressionist began to prance around the stage, grimacing and making strange, jerky movements with his arms.  Anxious for him to finish, the audience yelled out a barrage of names:  “Groucho Marx!  Lucille Ball!  Jerry Lewis!  Mae West!”  His movements became more frantic.  “Miss Piggy?  Ed Sullivan?”

At that he stopped.  “It’s RICHARD NIXON!” he screamed.  Shaking his head in disgust, he left the stage.  A few people clapped, Donald among them.  He had thoroughly enjoyed the performance.  Joy liked only the singing.

The next act was two old black tap-dancers who sprinkled a little sand on the stage before they began.  They were very good, and received a very enthusiastic response, even from Joy.  She mostly enjoyed the piano accompaniment, even though the piano was tinny and out of tune.  Donald whispered to her during the performance, “I used to play the piano.”

Joy was thrilled.  “Donald, that’s wonderful!  Maybe you could play for me sometime.”  He didn’t reply, but “Swanee River” immediately began to run through his head.

The last two acts were singers—an Irish tenor and a woman who attempted an opera aria.  Donald had never seen Joy happier.  She usually seemed content, but now she seemed transported.  Both singers were terrible, but she clapped and clapped and even yelled “Bravo!” to the opera singer.  People turned to look at her.

After the show, there was coffee and donuts.  Donald and Joy ate without speaking to anyone else, then headed uptown to Times Square.  It had been a glorious night.

-6-

onald and Joy continued to go to The All Star Review every Saturday night throughout the summer.  A few other people tried to talk to them, but they kept to themselves.  Many of the acts were repeats, and Donald sometimes fell asleep during those.  Joy always woke him when a new act came on.

After every show, Joy would try to convince him to play the piano for her so they could perform together at the Open Arms.  Donald always insisted he’d have to rehearse first, and he had no piano.  He told her to perform by herself—after all, she did it almost every day on the street and in the subway.  She refused.  She had never performed on a real stage with a microphone before, and she was too frightened to do it by herself.

“These people are PROFESSIONALS,” she’d say.  “I just sing on the street.”

“Joy, you’re the professional,” he’d say.  “You get paid for your singing.  It’s like your career.”  But she remained in awe of the stage and all the performers, no matter how bad.

The summer slipped away.  It was an easy season for them.  It was warm and they didn’t have to worry about shelter.  When it rained, they slept in the hallway of one of the deserted buildings in the area.  They didn’t know of any coed shelters, and they couldn’t afford hotels.  They brushed their teeth and washed as best they could at an open fire hydrant or a water fountain in the park.  At night, they washed their clothes in the boat pond and spread them on bushes to dry.

Joy continued to be the main breadwinner.  If she didn’t earn enough money to buy food, Donald would scrounge for it in garbage cans (leftovers were plentiful in the summer thanks to the picnickers) or he’d clean some windshields.  He didn’t believe in standing on a corner with his hand out, although he had no compunctions against stealing food from the outdoor food stands which proliferated on Ninth Avenue during the warm weather.  Both he and Joy were very adept at this, although they had to be careful not to frequent the same stands too often.  But they’d both forget which stands they had pilfered from recently, so they were constantly being chased away by the proprietors.

Tiny died one day while trying to steal a banana from one of these stands.  She tried to pick up only one but it was attached to a bunch and she was quickly spotted.  Still clutching the bananas, she collapsed and died on the street as she was trying to run away.  Lately Tiny had hardly been able to walk.  Her oozing, swollen legs and feet were wrapped in bandages which gave off an unbearable odor.  Some of the street people were glad she died.

When they did an autopsy at the morgue, it was discovered she had been suffering from a disease which destroyed her brain cells and made her senile.  She wasn’t just crazy.  Somehow this information filtered down to Joy.  She didn’t know why, but she was relieved.

Cecil remained closer to Joy than to anyone else.  He still encouraged Donald and Joy to get married.  Donald just shrugged his shoulders, but sometimes he would fantasize about them having a real home and he’d work and they’d get a piano.

Joy told Cecil about how they wanted to perform together at the Open Arms, but Donald needed a piano to practice on.  One hot Sunday afternoon, Cecil came upon Donald and Joy sitting on a doorstep.  He was carrying a package which he thrust at Joy.  He hadn’t seen them in several days and the package was torn and dirty.

Joy opened it like a little girl on her birthday.  It contained a little red piano.  Joy was thrilled.  “Oh, Donald, look!  Now you can play for me.”  She handed the piano to Donald, who stared at it in awe.  It was almost exactly like the one he’d had as a child.

“Thank you, Cecil,” he said, overwhelmed.

“Don’t thank me, thank her,” Cecil replied, pointing to Joy.  “She gave it to you.”  He walked away.

Although Donald understood what Cecil had done, he felt flooded with love for Joy.  He put his arms around her and kissed her on the mouth.  It was their first kiss.

“Ugh.  That’s disgusting,” said a teenager to his buddy as they walked by.  “Those people shouldn’t be allowed to do that.”

Donald picked up an empty beer can and threw it at them.  It missed, and they laughed as they walked on.  Donald didn’t care.  With Joy at his side, he began to play “Swanee River” on his new piano.

-7-

he next Saturday night, Donald asked the emcee of The All Star Revue if they could perform.  The woman, a gushing, social-worker type, said of course, of course, any time.  Donald became immediately anxious.  “In a few weeks, maybe,” he told her, already considering backing out.  But Joy had overheard and was very excited.

“Just think, Donald,” she whispered during a pathetically obvious magic act.  “We’re going to be All-Stars, just like him.”  She indicated the old man on the stage who shook violently as he tried to pull a stuffed rabbit out of a hat.  Everyone had seen him put it in the hat, so it wasn’t much of a surprise.  But everyone applauded enthusiastically.

Donald was too nervous to stay for coffee and donuts that night.  He needed a drink right away.  They left after the last act and were headed for a nearby liquor store which Donald had discovered after their first night at the Revue, when he spotted someone familiar sprawled on the sidewalk, the scarred, bald head gleaming under the streetlight.  At first Donald couldn’t remember who it was, then he realized it was Cap, who everyone thought had died months ago.

“Cap!”  We thought you were dead!”

Cap looked at him indignantly.  “I ain’t dead,” he said.  “I just moved.”  His eyes shifted to Joy.  “Who are you?”

“I’m Joy.  Who are you?”

“I don’t know any Joy,” he said, and then began to chuckle.  “I don’t know any Joy,” he repeated gleefully, “but I sure could use some.”  He continued chuckling and babbling to himself as Donald pulled Joy off to the liquor store.

They began practicing together every night after that.  Donald’s fingers went automatically to the right keys on the piano, although it had been over thirty years since he’d last played “Swanee River.”  They could barely hear the faint, tinny piano over Joy’s mournful singing, but Donald knew it would be fine with the big piano on the stage.

He became more and more nervous, though, and started drinking heavily again and talking about outer space.  It seemed to give him confidence.  Joy tried hard to pay attention, although she had no idea what “black hole” and “big bang” meant.  She thought they sounded obscene.

As Donald got more anxious, Joy got more excited.  She told everyone they were going to perform on a real stage and invited everyone to come.  No one was too interested except Cecil, who felt responsible.  He asked them to run through their act for him, and was disappointed that they were doing only one song.  “It’s the only one I can play,” Donald explained.

Cecil applauded heartily when they finished.  “A sure-fire hit,” he told them.  “It’ll bring the house down.”  Joy wasn’t sure what that meant.  She hoped it was good.

The only other person who was interested in their act was Harry, who still talked constantly about his triumphs in vaudeville.  He wasn’t interested enough to hear them rehearse, however.  But mention of their performance gave him an excuse to ramble on about himself.  “I was a real star once, you know,” he declared.  “None of this small-time stuff.  I mean vaudeville.”  He said “vaudeville” as though it were sacred.  “I was a song and dance man, myself,” he said for the hundredth time.  “I didn’t just sing, I did it all.  I sang.  I danced.  I did a little comedy, a little magic.  A real Renaissance man.”  Donald and Joy nodded, bored.  “Maybe I will come see you kids, give you a couple of pointers.”

Leo, who had given up hope of obtaining any of what he believed to be Donald’s fortune, saw no reason to associate with him any longer.  He had befriended someone else who seemed to have more possibilities.

Donald confided his fears about the performance to Cecil one day in a Flame Steak restaurant.  They went into these self-service restaurants as much as they could get away with to escape the heat, the cold or the rain.  And also, of course, to eat.

They never had to buy anything.  There were always huge amounts of  food left behind on the tables—steak, baked potato, garlic bread, salad.  There was usually only one over-worked busboy to clear all the tables, so if they went at a busy time there were always many uncleared tables.  It usually took a while for the busboy to notice them.  When he finally did, he would angrily snatch away the tray with the remaining food and tell them to leave, but he never demanded that they put down what they had in their hands, so they always held onto as much food as possible in both hands and ate as fast as they could.

As Donald was trying to tell Cecil of his nervousness with a mouthful of baked potato, he was interrupted by a teenage girl wearing designer jeans and expensive boots asking for a handout.  They were both startled.  “Sorry, dearie,” Cecil said, “You got the wrong table.”  She walked off to the next table.

As they ate, they watched her go to several tables.  “I wonder what a girl like that is doing here,” Donald said.

“There’s six million stories in this city,”  Cecil said dramatically.

A few minutes later, she sat down near them with a tray loaded with food.  Someone must have given her money.  She ate ravenously, although not as fast as Donald and Cecil, who were almost finished and still hadn’t been noticed.  As they ate the vestiges of the previous diners’ desserts, a nun in a long black habit came in, asking for donations.  She went from table to table, holding out a tin cup and asking in a singsong voice, “Please give to help the Lord’s work.”  A few people dropped in a coin or two.  She scrutinized Donald and Cecil and passed them by.

When the teenage girl noticed her, she became very agitated and stopped eating.  She turned to a man at the table behind her.  “Is she a real nun?  She’s not a real nun.  She’s using God to get money for herself.”  She pointed at the nun and began to shout:  “Fake nun!  Fake nun!  Fraud!  Fraud!”  The nun ignored her and continued on her rounds.  When she was done, she walked up to the girl and spoke to her very quietly.  Donald and Cecil couldn’t hear what she was saying.  By now they were finished eating and they got up and walked out right behind the nun.  Donald had seen her around for years, and had often wondered if she were a legitimate nun.  He decided to ask.

“Pardon me,” he said politely, just in case, “but are you a real nun?”

She turned to him, her eyes filled with hate.  “You degenerate scum,” she hissed.  “May your flesh turn to shit and stink in hell forever.”  In the same breath, she turned to a man just walking in and said in her singsong voice, “Please give to help the Lord’s work.”

-8-

onald managed to put off their debut for another two weeks.  He drank heavily every day, so Joy made him rehearse with her in the morning, before she left for the subway.  He was hung over and testy, but at least he was sober.  She was delighted to find a book on astrology in the gutter one day.  It was called “The Stars and You,” and she thought it was about outer space.  She gave it to him hoping it would distract him.  After determining that he was a Scorpio and she a Pisces, he read their horoscope for the night they were to perform.  Joy’s was benign but his was ominous:  “a cataclysmic event.”  He interpreted that to mean he was going to forget the music or in some other way ruin their performance.  He drank even more.

Two days before they were to perform, he read his horoscope for that day.  It said to concentrate on his health, it would pay off in the future.  He decided to stop drinking.  He was quite sick that day and worse the next.  Joy stayed with him and brought him soup from Chock Full O’ Nuts.  Cecil tried to convince him to have “just a couple,” but he was adamant.  He didn’t want to jeopardize Saturday night.

“I’ll have a drink on Saturday, if I don’t feel better,” he said.  But he’d been through this before, and was confident he’d be fine.

Saturday was a beautiful August day.  Donald woke up feeling better than he had in weeks.  He was a little weak and still nervous but Joy stayed with him all day and let him ramble on about the stars and music and his parents.  “My father was a good man,” he told her, “just boring.”

They got cleaned up as best they could and headed downtown after Joy splurged on a Filet o’ Fish and french fries for both of them from MacDonald’s.  They arrived at the Open Arms very early.  Donald handed the emcee a slip of paper on which he’d written the name he wanted them to be introduced as.  Then he sat at the piano and began uncertainly to pick out the notes of  “Swanee River.”  After a few false starts—his red piano had only eight keys—he found the right keys.  Joy stood by the piano and watched in awe.  “You can really do it,” she said.  “You can really play the piano.”  Donald gained confidence and played louder, even experimenting with the pedals.  Then Joy began to sing along.

They rehearsed their one song over and over until people began filtering in, Harry and Cecil among them, although not together.  When Donald and Joy went to sit in the audience, Donald’s anxiety returned.  They sat through several other acts, Donald too nervous to pay attention, Joy filled with excitement.  Then the emcee announced, “I am pleased tonight to welcome a new act to our stage—ladies and gentlemen, let’s give a warm welcome to—she glanced down at the paper Donald had given her—“The Astronoids!”  Joy bounced up eagerly and even with all her shopping bags moved quickly to the stage.  Donald followed reluctantly behind.  His hands were sweating so much he was afraid they’d stick to the keys.

Joy lugged her bags onto the stage, but left them off to the side.  Donald sat at the piano and Joy stood in the center of the stage, her hands clasped.  She was wearing what she considered her best dress, a baggy blue dress with little sprigs of flowers.  Her hair, which she had washed only three days before in the ladies room at Penn Station, was neatly combed.  Donald was wearing his good blue sweater, even though it was a hot August night.

The applause died down.  There was a long pause.  Joy looked at Donald.  His hands were frozen in his lap.  He was sure he’d forgotten the notes.  From the back of the room came an annoyed voice:  “C’mon already.  I’m on next.  Let’s go.”  It was the old Jewish comedian.

Donald began to play, one note at a time.  It sounded surprisingly loud in the hushed room.  Then Joy joined in, her voice strong and clear.  She felt as though she were singing at Carnegie Hall.  They performed flawlessly.  When they finished, the audience clapped politely, as always, except for Cecil, who applauded wildly, but Joy heard the cheers of thousands.  Donald stood beside her and held her hand.  It was as much to steady himself as anything else, he was shaking so.  Joy was almost crying.  It was their moment of triumph.

Suddenly Donald’s hand gripped Joy’s very tightly, his eyes rolled up in his head, his entire body stiffened and he toppled to the floor, his body jerking, making strange, animal-like sounds.  When he fell, he pulled Joy down with him.  She couldn’t free her hand from his white-knuckled grip, and she lay beside him screaming “Donald!  Donald!”

After a moment’s stunned silence—some people wondering whether this was still part of the act—the emcee rushed onto the stage yelling, “My God, somebody bring me a spoon or something for his mouth!  He’s having a convulsion!”  Cecil, who had lived on the streets for many years and who had seen many things, jumped onto the stage and yanked Joy’s hand out of Donald’s.  “Call an ambulance!” he shouted.  Then, quietly to Joy he said, “I knew he shouda had a drink.”

Harry left quickly.  He didn’t think they were very good anyway.

-9-

onald was taken to Beth Israel Hospital.  The ambulance attendants would not allow Joy to come with him.  They asked if she were his wife.  “No, I’m his…I’m his…”  She couldn’t come up with a word.  As the ambulance pulled off she ran after it screaming:  “His friend!  I’m his friend!  His friend!”  But the ambulance, with its sirens screaming, weaved through the traffic and disappeared.

Joy stood on the sidewalk sobbing.  Suddenly Cecil was there beside her, panting heavily from having carried all four of her shopping bags from the Open Arms.  He set them down gently and put his arm around her.  “Let’s go home,” he said.

“Where?”  Joy asked.  “I don’t have a home anymore.”

***

They slept in the park that night, after talking long into the night about Donald.  “I don’t understand it,” Joy said.  “He’s really very healthy, you know.  He’s a runner.  And he’s very strong.”  She looked at her hand, which still bore the marks of Donald’s nails.

“He stopped too fast,” Cecil explained.  “Sometimes it happens.”

When she woke up the next morning, she looked immediately at her hand.  The marks were still there.  It reassured her somehow, as though a part of Donald were still with her.  She woke up Cecil and said she wanted to visit Donald in the hospital.  Cecil didn’t want to go; he said he had other things to do.  Joy shrugged her shoulders, picked up her bags and headed out of the park by herself.  A few minutes later, she was back.  “Where is he?” she asked Cecil.  He wrote “Beth Israel Hospital, First Avenue and Seventeenth Street” on a scrap of paper.

It took her two hours to get there.  She kept getting lost and no one would give her directions.  When she finally found the hospital, she had no idea where to go.  She decided she’d just go from room to room until she found him.  Before she could get past the first desk, a nurse called out sharply, “Can I help you?”

Joy generally did not get a very positive response when she asked for help, so she usually avoided doing so.  But here was a woman asking her if she could help her!  “Oh yes, please, I’m here to visit Donald Fuller.  He’s my very good friend.  Do you know where he is?”  All the nurses behind the desk looked at her suspiciously.

“He’s not here,” one said.

“Oh yes he is,” Joy retorted.  “They brought him here in an ambulance.”

“I said he is not here,” the nurse repeated.

“Well, where is he then?”

A big black nurse walked out from behind the desk.  “He’s not here, and if you don’t get out of here, I’ll call the police,” she said.  Joy walked out as the nurse reached for the phone.

She decided to try another entrance, but as soon as she walked in, she was stopped by a security guard.  “What are you doing in here?” he said gruffly.

“I’m looking for my friend, Donald Fuller,” she answered firmly.  “He got sick and they brought him here in an ambulance.”

 “Look, lady, you can’t come in here.”  He stared at her shopping bags.  “This is a hospital.  Sterile, you know?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Sterile.  Clean.  You can’t come in.”

“I’m clean.”  She was horrified.  She was still wearing her good dress.

“Lady, don’t make me drag you out of here.”  That was the last thing he wanted to do.  He didn’t want to touch her.

“But I have to see Donald!  He’s my friend!”

Menacingly, but so that no one but Joy could see, he took out his gun and pointed it at her stomach.  She picked up her bags and backed out the door.

-10-

ad no one stopped Joy, she still would not have gotten in to see Donald.  He was in the locked ward reserved for psychotics, drug abusers (both those withdrawing from hard drugs and kids on bad trips from psychedelics), and alcoholics, like Donald.  It was a large room with twenty beds separated only by curtains, all of which were pulled back so everyone could observe everyone else’s misery.  The beds were filled with screaming, moaning, whimpering, mumbling, laughing or retching men in various stages of psychosis, or withdrawal.  Some of them were simply in a state of stupor, staring at the wall.

Donald, though, was staring at something which terrified him:  hairnets, floating lazily through the air, falling out of holes in the ceiling onto his bed, occasionally landing directly on his head.  He grabbed them off the sheets and threw them violently off his bed into a huge pile on the floor.  He scratched and clawed at his head, pulling out tufts of hair and making his scalp bleed in futile attempts to remove them.  He couldn’t understand where they were coming from, or why no one else seemed concerned.

He kept calling for someone to take them away.  An aide came and watched him with her hands on her hips.

“Please, get them off me,” he begged.  He was continuously picking at himself and brushing them off.  He was wild-eyed.  “Put something over my head so they don’t fall on me.”

“How ‘bout a big hairnet?” the aide taunted.

He was frantic.  “Look at them all!”  He pointed around the room, under the beds.  “Can’t you fix the ceiling?  Please, please help me.”

The aide leaned over next to his bed, made a scooping motion with her hands, and opened them over Donald’s bed.  “Here, enjoy yourself,” she chuckled as she walked away.

Donald was still picking at the sheets when an elderly man was escorted to his bed by a nurse.  “There he is,” she said, indicating Donald.  “Donald, you have a visitor.”

Donald looked up, although his hands continued their constant sweeping and plucking.  He stared at the stooped, thin man.  The man had tears in his eyes and was shaking his head.

“Michael,” the man said at last to Donald.  “Michael, what have you done to yourself?”

Donald’s hands paused mid-air.  “How did you find me?”

“The name tag.  My name tag.  It was on your sweater.  The hospital called information in Elmira and asked for Donald Fuller.  They thought it was you, and maybe you had a family there.”

Donald said nothing.  His hands dropped to the bed.

“Michael, what happened to you?  How did you get here?”

“Look, I’m o.k.  Really.  I just had a little dizzy spell.”   He looked up at the ceiling and began to pull again at his hair.  “How’s Mom?”

“Michael, she’s dead.  She’s been dead for nine years.”  Donald’s expression did not change.  “She asked for you on her death bed.”  Donald sneered.  “Michael, what has happened to you?”

“I said I’m fine.  I have a very nice girlfriend named Joy.  And I’m getting back into running.  I…I just need some new sneakers.  You don’t look so hot yourself, for a track coach.”

“Michael, I retired ten years ago.  I’m an old man.  I’m alone now.  And I want my son back!”

“Well, I’m doing fine here.  I’m leading my own life now.  And I don’t need you.”

“Yeah.  Your own life.  I see…Donald,”  he said, and turned to walk away.

“Pop!”  His father turned back, hopefully.  “Could you do one thing for me before you go?”  The old man reached out to Donald.

“Please, Pop, please get these hairnets off me.”

***

By the next day, the hairnets had disappeared, although for a while they were replaced by pink mice that darted back and forth under the beds.  By the time they, too, disappeared, Donald was totally physically and emotionally spent.  He had no other visitors.  He had neither the strength nor the desire to do anything but lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, the holes through which the hairnets had dropped having miraculously closed up.

He was lying there wondering about that when an orderly deposited a package on his bed.  It was addressed only to “Mr. Fuller.”  The orderly said it had been left at the desk.  Donald opened it without much interest.  But his eyes widened when he saw what was inside:  a complete running outfit—t-shirt, sweatshirt, sweatpants, shorts, socks, and best of all, beautiful silver Nike sneakers.  He yanked one foot out from under the sheets and tried on a sneaker.  It fit perfectly.  He lay back down and clutched the other sneaker to his chest.  “Thanks, Pop,” he whispered.

*** 

Donald was in the hospital another week.  He didn’t want to leave.  Although he had lived on the streets for years, he was afraid to go back this time.  He had grown dependent upon and attached to Joy, and she hadn’t come to visit him.  He didn’t know that they wouldn’t let her in; he had no way of contacting her.  She didn’t have a telephone.  He was sure she’d left him, had grown tired of his drunken ways, of supporting him and taking care of him.  He thought he’d ruined her big night, her debut at the Open Arms.  He thought she’d forgotten him.  She didn’t seem to remember things too clearly as it was.  He thought he’d never find her again.

During the week, he had to go to daily AA meetings held on his floor.  It brought back many memories.  He wondered if his father still went to meetings.  He thought of his father only as he had been in the past; the man who had visited him in the hospital seemed like an imposter.  He also had several counseling sessions with Mrs. George, a psychiatric social worker.  She asked about his interests, and he spent a long time discussing outer space.  She tried to direct his thoughts toward what he could do with the rest of his life, how he could return to the mainstream.

She offered to find a halfway house for him and help him get a job.  He thought a lot about having a real home again, but he wasn’t ready to take immediate action.  It had been too long.  But he was getting massive doses of vitamin B to counteract the effects of alcohol on his body, plus other vitamins and a well-balanced diet.  He also got a decent haircut and a new set of clothes.  The hospital threw out all of his other clothes, except for his blue sweater with the name tag on it, which he demanded back.

He looked and felt physically better than he had in years.  That, plus his new jogging outfit, inspired him to make some attempt to rehabilitate himself, to get back into shape, maybe to at least start thinking about returning to the straight world.

He left the hospital filled with a mixture of anxiety, loneliness and hope.  His clothes were clean, if not stylish, and he carried with him a package containing his new running clothes and his old sweater.

He squinted when he walked out into the bright late-summer sunshine.  He hadn’t been outdoors in over a week.  He stopped just outside the door to determine where he was—and where he was going.  That’s when he heard the faint but unmistakable sound of  “Swanee River” drifting through the sultry air, coming from—where?—somewhere, around the block.  He ran down the sidewalk and turned the corner.  The singing vanished.  He thought he must have imagined it.  Maybe he still had the DT's.  Maybe he should go back into the hospital.  Slowly, he went back around the corner, down the block and around the other corner.  And there, still wearing her blue dress, surrounded by all her shopping bags, stood Joy, now singing, “Go Down Moses.”  She saw Donald but continued singing, a tentative look in her eyes.  She, too, had been fearful—fearful that Donald had been released days ago and had not wanted to come back to her.  So she didn’t move but kept singing until he ran up to her, grabbed her in his arms and kissed her.  He stroked her now dirty, stringy hair.

Passersby looked on in curiosity at the odd scene:  Donald, now clean and neatly dressed, and Joy, who had camped out across the street from the hospital and had not wanted to risk missing Donald by taking the time to wash her hair or change her clothes and thus looking dirtier and more disheveled than ever, hugging passionately.

It was at that moment that Donald, to his surprise, realized that he did feel stirrings of passion for Joy—the first time he’d had such feelings since he’d been living on the street.  To him, Joy was not a dirty shopping bag lady but a loving, pure woman who, he now knew, he loved.

-11-

onald wanted to get a hotel room that night, but they couldn’t afford it.  Joy’s location outside the hospital had not been very profitable, and she had less than a dollar.  He had nothing, but after ten days in a comfortable bed, he wasn’t ready to face sleeping on a park bench.  He also wanted to lie beside Joy and see her without her clothes on.  In all their months together, he had never seen her naked.

But they had to settle for the park.  At least it was still warm.  He was filled with enthusiasm that night and talked for hours about his hopes for his new life.  He told her he was going to get a job and after he’d saved enough money, an apartment.  He told her how much he wanted her to be with him.  She looked at him skeptically.  He thought it was because she didn’t believe him; he didn’t know it was because she did.

He found a newspaper in the park and read it by the light of a park street light.  There was an article in it about the New York Marathon, only a little less than two months away.  He got very excited.  “Joy!”  A marathon!  It goes through all five boros!  Maybe I’ll run in it.  I can start to practice right away.  Look!”  He pulled out his running clothes from his shopping bag.  Joy was more interested in the shopping bag than the clothes.  “Tomorrow, I’m going to run.”  He used his new clothes for a pillow and fell asleep to Joy singing “Red River Valley.”

He was up early the next morning.  Carefully, he put on the shorts, t-shirt, socks and sneakers.  Then he transferred his “Hi!  I’m Donald Fuller” button from his sweater to his t-shirt.  Joy looked at him proudly.  “Do you want to run with me?” he asked.  “Maybe we can get you some stuff to run in.”

“I have to sing, Donald,” she said.  “Besides, where could I leave my things?”  The only person she would trust to watch her bags was Cecil, and he wasn’t around.  She had too many bags to hide in the shrubbery, as Donald was able to do with his one bag.

So Donald set off through the park again, this time looking like any other jogger.  He was thin, well-rested and well-fed, and although he didn’t yet have the stamina to run far, while he ran he looked good.  He remembered everything his father—who had also been his track coach—had told him about long distance running:  how to pace himself, how to breathe, how to move his arms and how to come down on his toes, not his heels.  This time, no one laughed or pointed at him; a couple of other joggers even nodded at him, and one woman smiled.  But he still kept looking down at himself to make sure nothing was exposed, even though his shorts had no fly.

A half-hour later, after he had run what he judged to be about 2 miles—not bad for virtually his first time out—he went back to the spot where he’d left Joy.  He was jubilant.  “I’m on my way,” he told her.  Again, she looked at him with apprehension.  “Don’t worry, Joy, you’re coming with me,” he said in response to her look.  She managed a faint smile.

He ran every day after that.  He tried to increase his distance by about a half-mile a day; that way he’d be at just about 26 miles by the marathon.  He discovered the jogging track around the reservoir, and found out from another jogger that it measured one-and-a-half miles, so he was able to calculate his distance precisely.  He didn’t have a watch, but sometimes he’d ask other runners the time when he started and finished, although he wasn’t really concerned about that.  All he wanted to do was finish the race.

He took good care not only of himself (he didn’t drink at all) but also of his new clothes.  He tried to rinse out his jogging clothes after every run, and he went to the Salvation Army to get some everyday clothes so he could keep the shirt and pants from the hospital in good condition.

So Donald now had a shopping bag of his own, which contained his clothes, a razor, soap and his little red piano, which Joy had been carrying for him.  His bag was small and neat and didn’t smell, though, and it made him acutely aware of  the condition of Joy’s bags.  Although she was surprisingly clean for a bag lady, her bag’s weren’t—they still overflowed with the accumulated possessions of a lengthy stay on the street.  He decided to talk to her about it.  It was the first time he’d ever made any complaint or criticism of her.  He was very direct.

“Look, Joy, those bags stink.  You don’t need all that garbage.  Why don’t you throw some of  it out?”

She was shocked.  It was the most emotion he had ever seen her display (he was of course unconscious during his convulsion and had no idea of the extent of her reaction).

“Donald, these things are important to me.  They’re the only things I have.  I can’t throw them out.  They’re like my home.”

“Well, then, it’s time to clean house.  You don’t have to throw it all away, just get rid of the junk, like the old rags and newspapers and I bet you have some old rotten food in there, too.”  He didn’t really know what lurked in the depths of those bags, and occasionally he’d be quite startled to see her extract some odd item, like a wind-up alarm clock (which she sometimes used, although it was never set at the correct time) or an electric curling iron.  He didn’t know what the curling iron was, and she explained it to him very rationally.  “I hope you get to use it some day,” he told her.

“Donald, leave me alone,” she said now.  She refused to discuss it again, and he didn’t press her.  In many ways, Joy was very easy-going, but when she had made up her mind about something, she was adamant.

Donald also could not convince her to run with him, so he continued to run every day by himself.  After a few weeks in the park, he decided to expand his horizons and venture out into the city.  Traffic was hazardous, but he was undaunted.  The first day, he ran around the perimeter of the park.  He judged it to be about six miles, and it was a lot more interesting than running around the reservoir.

After a few days of that, he decided to run throughout the city—maybe even into another boro!, he thought excitedly.  It had probably been years since he’d been out of Manhattan.  But before attempting that, he ran all the way to the lower tip of Manhattan, to Battery park, where he stayed for a long time, watching the Staten Island Ferry chugging purposefully back and forth in the East River.  It was a breezy September day, and the bay was crowded with boats of all kinds, sailboats, tugs, barges, the Circle Line filled with tourists.  Donald waved at them, although they couldn’t see him.  He also could see New Jersey, Staten Island and—best of all—Brooklyn from this location.  He decided that as soon as he was ready for it, he would tackle Brooklyn.  He took the subway back that day; it was too far to run.

By early October, he was able to run down to the Brooklyn Bridge and across it into the wilds of Brooklyn.  He discovered the promenade in Brooklyn Heights, with its spectacular view of Manhattan.  But his unsurpassed favorite place to run was on the Brooklyn Bridge, with cars zooming along beneath him.  He could look down and see them, or look through the cracks in the boardwalk and see the river far below.  Or he could look at Manhattan, which never looked quite real from a distance.  He was always awed by it.

Joy’s life, meanwhile, went on as always.  She continued singing to earn the money to support them, although they didn’t need as much now since Donald wasn’t drinking.  She listened politely when Donald talked about his ever-changing plans for the future, but she made no attempts to change herself to fit into those plans.  To Donald’s relief, she couldn’t manage more than four shopping bags at a time without moving them in stages, so she didn’t acquire a fifth.  But she was constantly acquiring new things to pack into them, and Donald was always astounded that she was able to carry them.

Although he never again asked her to discard anything, on several nights when Joy was asleep he surreptitiously burrowed through her bags himself, removing what he assumed to be the worst offenders, including several rotten apples, piles of shredded newspaper and a filthy rag which smelled suspiciously like a dead cat.  He removed a significant amount of junk, but Joy never seemed to notice, even though she was able to walk much faster with her lightened load.

-12-

hroughout this idyllic—for Donald—period, they avoided the Times square area and all their usual haunts and acquaintances.  They did once run into Leo, though, who looked at Donald’s relatively clean clothes and neat appearance suspiciously.  “Come into some money lately?” he asked in an unpleasant tone.

“Bug off, Leo.”

“Missed me, eh?” Leo chuckled.  “I hear from Harry you had some kind of attack or something that night you did that show.  So what’s the story?”

“Look, Leo, I’m doing fine.  Give my love to the old gang.”  They walked away as Leo looked at Joy with resentment.  He was glad to see, however, that at least she didn’t look any better.  Donald may have gotten uppity, but she obviously was still one of them.

With the end of summer, the nights began to get cold, and Donald and Joy decided it was time to leave the park and find warmer lodgings.  He saw it as a step down, and announced that they definitely would not sleep in doorways or hallways of abandoned buildings.  They would settle down in one of the big three—Port Authority, Penn Station or Grand Central Station.  At least they were fairly clean and safe, and they had bathrooms.  And also, to Donald, they had an air of respectability that a condemned building and the A train lacked.

They moved into Penn Station.  They slept in various corridors and waiting rooms and were rarely disturbed.  There was a large subculture of homeless people living there, and they were, if not accepted by the authorities, at least tolerated.  They made no friends there; Donald especially was wary of the other derelicts and also felt somewhat superior to them now.  After all, soon he would have a job and a real home.  He remained aloof.  Joy, however, missed Cecil, and one day decided to look for him.  She wandered all day through Times square, asking anyone who looked as though he might know if Cecil was around.  No one even knew—or would admit to knowing (you can’t be too careful on the streets)—who he was until she ran into Willie, who was cleaning off windshields for the matinee crowd.  She tried to talk to him.

“Man, I am employed here,” he replied, indignant at the interruption. 

“But please, Willie, just tell me if you’ve seen him.”

“No I ain’t, and good riddance to him.”

She wandered off, determined to keep looking.  On the next block, sitting in a sunny doorway and reading an old newspaper, she found him.  She was delighted.  “Cecil!  Where have you been?”

“Philadelphia,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Philadelphia!  Were you on vacation?”

“God, no.  I had to pick up my check.”

“What check?”

“My social security check.”

Joy was impressed.  “Social security!  How do you manage that?”

“Joy, I had a home once, and a job once, just like everybody else.  Didn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” she said slowly.  “Maybe I did, a long time ago.”

“Well, I was a cook in a restaurant for years, then I got laid off and then, I don’t know, I decided to move to New York, I thought it would be better here.”  He looked around and shrugged.  “It ain’t.”

“So you get a check every month?”

“Yeah.  It gets sent to my cousin’s.  He lets me use his address.  And when I go down there, I stay with him a couple of days.  It ain’t much, but it’s warm and dry.  And I give him part of my check.”

“Why don’t you move in with him?”

Cecil looked startled.  “Why should I?  Anyway he won’t let me.”

Joy asked Cecil no more questions.  She was just glad to see him.  She told him, very concisely, all that had happened to them since she left him that day she’d tried to visit Donald in the hospital:  “I couldn’t get in but Donald got out and now he runs a lot and we live in Penn Station.  Why don’t you come visit us?  It’s real nice there.”  She lowered her voice, as though she didn’t want anyone else to discover her secret.  “It’s very fancy.”

“Maybe I will,” he said.  Then he asked about her singing and Donald’s piano playing.  She told him she was singing as much as ever, but Donald had gotten discouraged with the piano because he still could play only “Swanee River” and even he had finally gotten tired of it.  He tired to pick out new tunes, but never seemed to get beyond the first three notes.

Cecil asked if they ever went to the Open Arms, but she said Donald was too ashamed to go back and she wouldn’t go without him.  They were very close now, she said.

They talked until dark, at which point Joy said she had to go home to Donald.  She was very happy as she shuffled off toward Penn Station with her shopping bags rattling around her legs.

A few days later, on a beautiful, early fall day, Donald was jogging down First Avenue on his way to Brooklyn (he had never made it to any of the other boros) when he spotted Mrs. George, his social worker, crossing the street near Beth Israel.  He stopped to talk to her; she had been very nice to him.  “Donald, I’m so glad to see you!  I would have contacted you weeks ago, if there was any way to find you.”

“I move around a lot,” he said.

She motioned him off the street and onto the sidewalk.  He continued to run in place while they talked.  “Donald, I may have a job for you.  I’ve been in touch with an agency that’s trying to help people like you” (Donald winced) “and I told them about you.  They might have work for you.”

“Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about that myself, Mrs. George,”  Donald said.  “I was thinking of getting a job in a carwash.  I think I have a certain affinity for that kind of work.  I’ve had some experience at it.”

Mrs. George had an idea of the kind of experience he had had and smiled.  “No, Donald, this would be working as a messenger, delivering mail and packages from one company to another.  It would just be here in Manhattan—do you know Manhattan, how to get around, I mean?”

Donald had spent years on the streets and subways of New York; he knew them as well as he knew the map of the solar system.  He got excited.  “Sure I do.  I can do that.  When do I start?”  She brought him up to her office, made a few calls, filled out a few forms, and Donald got the job.  She verified his social security number (she couldn’t believe he’d remembered it correctly, but he had) and gave him the address of the agency out of which he’d be working, which was just off Times Square.  She said he should go directly there, but after he left her office, he decided to finish his run first.  When he arrived at the agency two hours later, he was dripping with sweat and smelled like a locker room.  Mr. Sussman, who had hired him sight-unseen, shook his hand gingerly.  He knew something of Donald’s background from Mrs. George and was already somewhat skeptical.  But then, most of his employees were a bit eccentric.

Donald was to start on Monday.  He was to wear normal street clothes and take public transportation, not jog, from one office to another.  He would pick up his check every other Friday at the agency.  If he didn’t have a bank account (he didn’t), he could sign it over to them and they would cash it for him.  Mr. Sussman advised him, however, to open a bank account.  Donald’s head reeled.

After giving Donald subway and bus maps to study and twenty subway tokens, he told him to report in at 9 a.m. Monday.  Clutching his maps and his bag of tokens, Donald walked, very slowly now, back to Penn Station.

-13-

onald expected Joy to be thrilled with his news; she was not.  She was stunned.  “But Joy, now I can save up for an apartment for us.”

“Aren’t you happy here, Donald?” she asked, looking around the waiting room in which sat several weary commuters, several wary tourists and a number of derelicts, winos and bag ladies, waiting out the evening until it was late enough to go to sleep.

“Joy, I’m happy with you,” he said.  “But don’t you want a real home?”

“I guess so, Donald,” she said.  “It will just be so different.”

***

He began using Joy’s alarm clock starting that Monday morning so he could be out jogging by 6 a.m.  His neighbors, lying on their newspapers, pieces of cardboard and bundles of rags, did not appreciate it, but they were soon to be roused anyway by the maintenance men and the hordes of commuters trooping by.

He ran for two hours, then went back to Penn Station to clean up.  Joy had watched his bag for him; if she wasn’t available when he ran, he’d leave it in a locker.  (He’d tried a few times to convince Joy to store some of her bags for a day, thinking maybe she’d forget about them.  But she, possibly thinking the same thing, wouldn’t.)  All in all, Penn Station was a very convenient place.

He reported to the agency at exactly 9 o’clock, carrying his bag in one hand and the alarm clock, which he decided to appropriate permanently from Joy, in the other.  He wondered if there were some way he could attach it to his wrist.  Mr. Sussman was pleased to see that Donald was on time, and showed him a locker which he said Donald could use for as long as he worked for them.  (He had a lot of people in situations similar to Donald’s.)  Donald was thrilled:  a place to call his own.  It was small, but it was a beginning.  He wanted to carry his clock with him, but Mr. Sussman convinced him it wouldn’t be necessary, so all he took were his tokens and his maps.

He went to eight different offices that day and didn’t get lost once.  Most of them were in midtown, the part of the city most familiar to him.  Two were on Wall Street (he took his lunch break in Battery Park and felt nostalgic about his last visit there a month ago) and one was on upper Broadway.  He reported back to the office at five o’clock, feeling very satisfied.  It had been a good day’s work, and he’d even picked up a dollar in tips, plus one company offered him coffee.  Mr. Sussman seemed satisfied too.  Donald picked up his bag and headed home to Joy.

His second day on the job, while waiting for his first assignment, he met a young black college student who was there working his way through night school.  He was reading the sports page of the newspaper, and Donald, reading over his shoulder, noticed an article on the Marathon, which was in two weeks.  “I’m going to be in that,” he announced to the college boy, whose name was Dwight.

Dwight was mildly interested.  “Oh yeah?  You entered?”

“What do you mean, entered?  Can’t I just run?”

“No man, you have to enter officially and get a number.  It’s too late now.”

“Too late!”  Donald was aghast.  “It can’t be too late.  I have to run.”

“Well, you can run unofficially,” Dwight said.  “But you won’t get timed or anything.”

“I don’t care about that,” Donald said, greatly relieved.  “I’d rather be unofficial anyway.”  Dwight told him where to go and what time to be there; a friend of his was running so he knew all about it.  Donald was so excited he almost left the office right then to run, even though he’d already run fifteen miles that morning.

For the next two weeks, he set his alarm for 4:30 a.m. so he could be on the street by five.  He loved running then; most of the city was deserted and he could run in the middle of the street.  Five a.m., he thought, disproved the notion that the city never sleeps.

He believed that he was running about twenty miles a day now, and was very confident about the Marathon.  On Sunday, always a quiet day in the Wall Street area, he talked Joy into going there with him to cheer him on while he ran.  He sat her down on a garbage pail and ran around the same block for three hours.  She cheered every time he ran by.

He continued working and running and his excitement became contagious.  Joy was very proud of his running and awed by his job, although there was no appreciable change in their life style yet.  The only jobs she remembered having were in a fried chicken place and a laundromat.  She had loved working in the laundromat; she became mesmerized watching the clothes flop and spin and swoosh around and neglected her duties.  She was fired.

Donald passed often through Times Square during the course of a day’s deliveries and now, rather than avoiding people, he kept his eyes peeled for any of his old acquaintances.  He wanted everyone to know how successful and important he was now.  He made sure never to put any mail or messages in a pocket where they couldn’t be seen, but to carry them ostentatiously so people could see he was on an important mission.  He saw Cecil (who also came to visit them in Penn Station) and Willie and Leo, who were hustling and harassing people as always.  Once, down by Wall Street, he saw Cap, who seemed to be gradually moving south for the winter.  Cap didn’t recognize him and asked him for a handout.  Donald was so honored to be asked that he gave him a dollar, the only money he had on him.  He went without lunch that day; he wouldn’t consider begging himself.

After two weeks of working, he picked up his first pay check.  It was so impressive—it even said “Payroll check” on it, and his name, correctly spelled (he checked)—that he wanted to take it home and show it to Joy rather than cash it.  Mr. Sussman convinced him to cash it—he was afraid Donald would lose it or think he had and that would cause complications.  So Donald signed it over to Mr. Sussman who gave him $227.00 (it seemed like a million to Donald) in return.  Donald carefully counted it, then divided it up and put it in six different pockets.  He tried to steer clear of anyone he knew now, especially Leo.

The marathon was that Sunday.  It was a crisp, sunny day.  Donald ran around the block once to warm up, then shoved his bag into one of Joy’s (he preferred not to do that but he thought he’d need his clothes at the finish line and besides, there was a good bit of room in Joy’s bags now since his furtive midnight raids).  All he carried with him were some subway tokens.

He decided they should go out for a good breakfast.  He knew he should load up on carbohydrates, and they certainly could afford it.  They were on their way to a local greasy spoon, which welcomed anyone who could pay for their own food no matter how they looked, when they passed a balloon man, blowing up his balloons.  Donald had an idea:  “Joy, why don’t you hold a balloon, that way I’ll be able to find you at the finish line.”

Joy was delighted.  “Oh, boy, a balloon!  Can I pick it out?”  She chose a big blue one; blue was her favorite color.  She held it tightly in her hand—even with her bags—as they walked to the coffee shop, and continued to hold onto it while she ate.  After they finished, it was time for Donald to begin his long journey to the Staten Island side of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which involved the subway, the Staten Island ferry and two buses (he had the directions memorized).  He felt like he was going to Europe.  He told Joy where the finish line was in the park—he wasn’t worried about her getting lost there—and made her promise to wait there for him.  “Hold your balloon up high!” he yelled to her as she walked away.  It bobbed in the air over her head.

It took a very long time, but he finally arrived at the bridge, along with thousands of other nervous, excited runners.  His shorts, socks and t-shirt were clean; he’d even used soap to wash them with.  On his t-shirt his “Hi!  I’m Donald Fuller” button was prominently displayed.  All the other runners seemed to have official numbers pinned to their shirts; he wondered if anyone would try to stop him from running.  He pushed his way into the middle of the throng and no one seemed to notice.

Suddenly everyone started shuffling forward; he didn’t know if this was the beginning of the race or not—he hadn’t heard a gun go off.  But the shuffling started going a little faster, and the next thing he knew he was on the middle of the bridge.  He felt more as though he were being carried along by a slow-moving current than running.  Somehow the whole mass seemed to progress forward.  In front of him, behind him and to either side, all he could see were bobbing heads; above him were several noisy helicopters, seemingly hovering in one spot although they, too, were slowly inching their way toward Brooklyn.

And then they were in Brooklyn and crowds of people appeared on the sidewalks, yelling and clapping.  He felt as though they’d already crossed the finish line.  When he ran cross country in high school, there was never anyone to cheer him on; he ran through quiet streets and parks, and if anyone did see him, they had no idea he was in a race.  This was very different; there was a festive, almost carnival-like feeling to the race.  Although most of the runners were very serious about their running, their adrenalin was running high and at this point they were all still excited and optimistic.  The spectators were cheering and children were already offering candy and water, although Donald was in the middle of the mob of runners and couldn’t possibly get to the side until they began to thin out.

He finally did manage to work his way to the outside and discovered a great advantage to that position:  instead of just hearing the general cheers of the crowd, sometimes people actually singled him out—along with other individual runners—to cheer on.  They’d look right at him and scream, “Looking good, looking good!” or “Keep it up, no number!”  But the most wonderful—and amazing, considering he was running—thing was that a number of people were able to read his name tag and yelled out, “Go Donald go!” or “Yea Donald Fuller!”  He was flying.

He ran easily through the rest of Brooklyn, into Queens, across the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, up First Avenue in Manhattan, and across the Willis Avenue Bridge into the Bronx.  He was elated.  He couldn’t believe that people were cheering for him.  He ran close to the spectators and grabbed cups of water and pieces of candy even when he didn’t need them simply because they were offered to him.

He was in the Bronx, rounding a corner toward the last few miles of the run downtown to Central Park, when a boy on a bicycle came crashing through the crowd on the sidewalk and headed directly toward him.  Donald swerved at the last minute to avoid him and although the boy only grazed him, he felt something go crunch in his ankle as he tried to twist away.  He tried to keep running, but in a few steps dropped to the ground, clutching his ankle.  The boy threw down his bicycle and ran to Donald.  “Oh man, I’m sorry, I don’t know what happened, I lost control, I’m sorry, are you all right?”

“Help me up, help me up,” Donald yelled, grimacing in pain.  The boy and several other people got him up, but he couldn’t even walk, no less run.  He sank to the street in despair as the other runners, intent only on getting through the last few miles, stepped around him.  A few looked down at him with sympathetic expressions or mumbled “Sorry, guy,” but none of them stopped.  He understood; he wouldn’t have either.  The neighborhood people, though, swarmed all over him.  The boy who had run into him was almost crying.  “Maybe if you lean on me, you can make it,” he said.

Donald was numb with disappointment.  He knew he couldn’t finish.  He bit his lip to keep from screaming at the boy.  A few minutes later, a Marathon official pushed through the crowd around him, looked at Donald’s ankle and called for an ambulance on his walkie-talkie.  Donald protested feebly that he had to get to the park, that someone was waiting for him there.  “Look, when you don’t show up, she’ll go home and you can call her,” the official said.

“She doesn’t have a telephone,” Donald replied bleakly.

“So call a neighbor.”

“They don’t have telephones either.”

“Where do you live, on Mars?”

“Sometimes,” Donald said.

The next thing he knew, he was on his way to Lincoln Hospital.  At least this time he was conscious, although he didn’t want to be.

-14-

e had a broken ankle.  It would be in a cast for six weeks and then he had to take it easy for another few weeks after that.  “I wouldn’t run on it ‘til the spring,” the doctor said cheerfully.  “Good thing it’s almost winter, no reason to be out running now anyway.”

It was late in the afternoon when they let him go.  He asked a nurse how to get to Central Park from there by subway; she told him, but said someone should pick him up.  He shrugged, then stumbled out the door into the chilly October afternoon with his cast and crutches, woozy from the painkiller and still wearing only his running shorts and t-shirt.

It took him hours to get to the park.  He hadn’t even considered going directly to Penn Station; Joy had promised she’d wait for him at the finish line and he knew she’d be there.

The painkiller was wearing off and his ankle throbbed more and more.  The doctor had given him a prescription for more pills, but he couldn’t pay for it and he didn’t want to have to fill out more forms.  It had been difficult enough to convince them to send the doctor bill to the agency.  He was too afraid to say he had no home and, he now realized, probably no job.  He was afraid they’d stick him in a back ward again, and this time never let him out.

So he struggled slowly into the now-deserted park, in pain, dizzy and shivering violently from the cold.  It certainly was not the way he’d imagined it.  He saw the blue balloon, still bobbing valiantly, hopefully in the air, long before he saw the small person under it.  When Joy saw him, her face lit up.  “Donald!  I knew you’d do it!”  She didn’t seem to notice his cast and crutches.  “Here, I have a sandwich for you.”  She thrust a soggy brown bag at him as he slumped onto a bench.

He pushed it aside; he felt nauseous from the medication.  “I don’t want it,” he said to a crestfallen Joy.  “But please, Joy, get me a bottle of wine.”

***

It was Sunday and the liquor stores were closed, so Donald would have to wait until tomorrow for his wine.  He put on another few layers of clothing; the only thing that would fit over his cast were his sweatpants, which were elasticized at the ankle.  He told Joy the whole sad story and she hugged him tightly.  “You almost finished, though,” she said.  It did not comfort him.

They went to sleep huddled together on the grass, the balloon tied to a trash container next to them.  In the morning, all the helium had leaked out of it and it lay, a shriveled little piece of blue rubber, on top of yesterday’s garbage.

He did not set the alarm for the next morning; there was no reason to get up now.  He would never go back to the agency; he certainly couldn’t work as a messenger now.  Mr. Sussman would soon get the bill for his ankle, and then he would know what happened.

Donald sent Joy out for wine as soon as the liquor stores were open.  Then he told her to go to a drugstore for his pills.  He insisted she leave her bags with him; he was sure they wouldn’t sell her anything otherwise.  When she came back from there, he sent her for food and then to the Salvation Army to get some warm clothes for both of them.  He didn’t want to attempt the move back to Penn Station today; he wanted to rest.  The combination of the wine and the pills made him very high.  Tomorrow was soon enough.

Tomorrow never seemed to come.  Every day, all he wanted to do was drink and feel sorry for himself.  Donald was not usually a self-pitying person, but this time he felt as though he’d really had something and it was taken away.  One day on Joy’s orange radio, he heard a song called “Don’t Cry Out Loud.”  There was a line in it that said “Fly high and proud/And if you should fall/Remember you almost had it all.”  In spite of the title, it made him cry.

Joy did not seem distressed by his behavior, although she was sorry to see him so sad.  She took loving care of him, bringing him food and wine and making sure he was dressed warmly enough.  As Thanksgiving approached, the money Donald had earned from his two weeks’ work disappeared, and Joy realized she’d have to go back to singing.

Between his ankle and his drinking, Donald was virtually helpless.  Joy decided they should move back into Penn Station or some place safer and warmer.  She didn’t want to leave him alone all day outside.  He refused to move.  “Donald, you have to be inside,” she pleaded, “and me, too.  It’s getting very cold at night.”  He refused again, and ordered her to find some large cardboard boxes and drag them into the park.  They would insulate them with rags and newspapers and sleep in them.  He had done it before.

Reluctantly, she complied.  It took her several days to find boxes big enough and hours to drag them to Donald.  One was from a refrigerator, one from a stove.  She thought about what the kitchen must be like that the new appliances were installed in.  She had always liked kitchens.

Joy went by herself to one of the soup kitchens for Thanksgiving dinner.  She ate all her turkey, cranberry sauce, sweet potato, string beans and pumpkin pie, then asked for another helping “to go.  For a sick friend.”  They wouldn’t give it to her.  She wound up going to a coffee shop and getting a turkey dinner.  Donald ate huddled in his box.  He couldn’t finish it; his appetite had decreased in inverse proportion to his drinking.

By Christmastime, it was too cold at night for Joy even in her box.  “Donald, why don’t you get your cast off and we can move indoors,” she’d ask.  He couldn’t contend with returning to the hospital.

“I don’t feel like it,” he’d reply.  “Stop bugging me.”  But she worried about him getting sick in the cold; he barely moved and she thought maybe he’d get frostbite, especially on the foot with the cast on it, as the toes were covered only with a sock.  And Joy knew that should he be approached by someone who wanted to roll him, he could no longer protect himself.  He couldn’t even run.

Joy came back from singing one night and found Donald curled up in his box, unmoving.  His hands were ice cold.  She called his name and shook him; he didn’t respond.  She knew he was dead.  She became hysterical, at which point Donald opened his eyes just long enough to say “Shut up out there,” then passed out again.

Joy knew they needed help.  She decided to turn to Cecil.  She had seen him on and off during this bleak period and filled him in on what was happening.  She went now to all his usual hangouts and couldn’t find him.  Maybe he was in Philadelphia.  She searched for a few days, in between singing.  She hated singing in the Times Square area, but she had to find Cecil.

She found him on Christmas Eve morning, chatting with, unfortunately, Leo.  She blurted out that Donald needed help and Leo smirked.  “It’s about time he fell off that high horse,” he said.

“He was not riding a horse,”  Joy said indignantly.  “He just got sick.”

Cecil went to the park with Joy.  Donald was still passed out.  Cecil and Joy sat on a bench and tried to figure out what to do.  They were at a loss until Joy remembered Mrs. George.  Donald had thought very highly of her and spoke of her frequently.  Joy asked Cecil to go to the hospital and speak to her.  “Joy, I really don’t want to go there,” he said.

“But they won’t let me in,” she said,  “I couldn’t even get in to visit Donald.  Please, Cecil, you have to go.”

There was a long pause.  Then Cecil said, “Joy, there’s something I didn’t tell you about me.  I was in a hospital, a mental hospital, on and off for years.  Oh, I know, I know, I seem completely normal to you” (Joy nodded solemnly) “but I have these little quirks.  Anyway, I’m scared of ‘em now.  Hospitals, I mean.  I had a lot of bad experiences there, you know?”

“Yeah, I know.”  Joy was thinking of the gun in her stomach.  “Just come down there with me, o.k.?  You can wait outside. But if they won’t let me in, then you can try, o.k.?  You look so respectable now.”

“I just got back from Philadelphia,” he said in explanation.

“Please, Cecil, we really need you.”

Cecil nodded.  “O.K.  Let’s get this over with.”  They tried to wake Donald to tell him where they were going, but he only mumbled something unintelligible in reply.

“What did you say?” Joy asked.

He mumbled again.

“What?  What?” Joy persisted.  It sounded important.

“I am observing a very significant aurora borealis,” he said distinctly; then he nodded off again.

Cecil and Joy covered him as well as they could, then headed for the subway.

This time, Joy left her bags with Cecil, who waited across the street and down the block.  She went to the main desk and said she had an appointment with Mrs .George (Cecil had told her to say that).  Since she looked like the type of person Mrs. George often saw, they didn’t question her and directed her to the correct office.  She knocked timidly on the door, then pushed it open.  Mrs. George was putting on her coat; it was Christmas Eve and she was leaving early.

“Mrs. George?  I have to talk to you,” Joy said.

“Do you have an appointment?”  Mrs. George looked puzzled.

“No, but…”

“Well, make an appointment for after the holidays, o.k.?  I have to go now.”

“He’ll be dead by then.”

Mrs. George sighed, took off her coat and sat down.  She had learned long ago that holidays don’t mean too much to someone with no home and no family.

As soon as Joy mentioned Donald’s name, Mrs. George was interested.  She said that Mr. Sussman from the messenger service had called her the first day that Donald didn’t show up for work to see if she knew where he was.  He was annoyed but not surprised.  A few days later, he called again, saying he received a letter for Donald in care of him.  It was from a hospital, and he was worried.  He held onto it, thinking Donald might yet turn up.  A few weeks after that, he called again.  He’d received another letter for Donald from the hospital and since he was sure he’d never be able to find Donald, he’d decided to open it himself.  People like Donald, he felt, had given up their legal rights when they decided to live outside of society.

The hospital bill explained things sufficiently for Mr. Sussman.  “Well, the end of a successful career,” he said to Mrs. George.  She contacted Lincoln Hospital and told them that Donald was a homeless man who would not be able to pay the bill and who, in fact, they would not be able to contact.

The hospital sent her and Mr. Sussman, as Donald’s social worker and employer, more forms to fill out, verifying that Donald was indigent.  It sometimes seemed to Mrs. George as though the main function of her job was to fill out forms.

She had taken a liking to Donald, though, and was hoping she would one day hear from him again, although not this way.  She suggested that Joy try to convince him to come back to the hospital.

“Mrs. George, you don’t understand.  I can’t get him to do anything.  I can’t get him to move.”

Mrs. George was having a big family gathering at her home that night and had a lot of cooking to do.  She didn’t know what to tell Joy.  But she understood that Donald was all that Joy had; he was her home and her entire family all wrapped into one cold, alone and drunk bundle of rags huddled in a cardboard box in Central Park.  She agreed to go up to the park with Joy and Cecil and see what she could do.

Donald was still in the same position he’d been in when Joy had left him, and Mrs. George realized that he probably wouldn’t have lived through Christmas.  She shook him and yelled at him and was able to arouse him enough to say that they were taking him to the hospital to get his cast off.  “Then you can run again,” she said.  That seemed to please him.

Then she went out to the street and flagged down a police car.  In a few minutes, Donald was again on his way to the hospital.

When he came to, he was back in the same ward as last time.  He was too groggy to comprehend what was happening; all he knew was that he was warm and comfortable, and that was enough.

-15-

e recovered much faster this time, probably because this bout of drinking had lasted for only two months instead of several years, and also he had been in very good condition.  The doctors knew he was prone to convulsions and started him on dilantin immediately, so his weakened body did not have to undergo that ordeal this time.

As soon as he was fully conscious, when he was still feeling very sick and weak, Mrs. George came to see him.  It was Christmas morning and she stopped in for only a few minutes, but she felt it was vital to come now.  She believed in the “get ‘em while they’re down” school of therapy when it came to treating alcoholics.  They were generally very remorseful and repentant at that stage and were still willing to listen.  It took a few days for them to build up their defenses again and by then it was too late.

The day after Christmas, she started making phone calls.  When she went to see Donald that afternoon, she had some good news.

Donald was feeling much better.  His cast was off, which had boosted his morale considerably.  On Christmas day, several volunteer and charitable groups had brought him a number of little presents:  toothpaste, after shave, a necktie, a book.  He was still very sick, but he was aware enough to be touched.  A children’s choir from a nearby church sang Christmas carols in his ward, and for those few minutes, all the crying and yelling and craziness stopped.  The music made Donald think of Joy; he wondered how she was spending Christmas.  (She stayed with Cecil all day.)

The first thing Mrs. George told him was that he didn’t have to worry about the bill for his ankle.  He was both relieved and worried.  She said she had spoken to Mr. Sussman.  Donald looked at her hopefully; maybe they would hire him back after all.

“I’m afraid they won’t take you back,” she said, as though reading his thoughts.  “Perhaps if you’d called in, explained what happened…”

“Well, it’s a little late for that now,” he said, thoroughly dejected.  “But it all seemed so hopeless then…”  His voice drifted off.

“Well, don’t give up yet, Donald.  I have another job lined up for you—in the Planetarium.”

The job of his dreams!  He couldn’t believe it.  She told him he’d be working in maintenance—mopping and sweeping, actually—and he’d be on probation for the first few months.  She said she had to pull a lot of strings to get him the job and she was counting on him to do well this time.

She again offered to find a halfway house for him, and for Joy, too.  She said she’d try to find one where he and Joy could live together.  She knew how unhealthy it was, physically and psychologically, to live on the streets.  She knew how easy it was to backslide.  But he said no, he thought it would be too much for Joy to handle so suddenly and he’d rather stay in Penn Station until he could afford to get a place on his own.  He didn’t think it would take him long.

She provided him with all the positive reinforcement and encouragement she could during the next week, during which time he also attended daily AA meetings.  But aside from the promise of his new job, the most significant factor contributing to his recovery was Joy’s visits.  Through Mrs. George, she was able to visit Donald frequently.  During her first visit, she left her bags with a reluctant Cecil (he was willing to mind them in an emergency, but otherwise, he did not especially care to touch them).  Donald told her to leave them in a locker in Penn Station which she did for her subsequent visits, although with great trepidation.  She clutched the keys tightly in her hand throughout her visits, then went right back to Penn Station to reclaim them.  She was always relieved that they were still there.

Donald was released the next week, again with a second-hand but clean suit of clothes and shoes and this time with an overcoat.  He felt very spiffy as he walked back to Penn Station.  If he’d had his sneakers on, he would have run.  The doctor said his ankle was completely healed.

He reported to work at the Planetarium right after New Year’s.  He was given a uniform which was a relief to him as he would not have to worry about his clothes.  He would look just like all the other workers there, which was exactly what he wanted.

His new supervisor, Joe, welcomed him warmly (he knew nothing of Donald’s background) and took him on a tour of the building.  When Donald was in high school, his class had taken a trip to New York and visited the Planetarium, among other places, but he had not been able to go.  His mother had been drinking heavily and his father said he needed Donald to stay home to take care of her.  Donald often missed school for the same reason.

Now, not only was he being given a private tour of the Planetarium, but he was being paid for it.  He had enjoyed working as a messenger; he was going to love this.

Best of all, that afternoon Joe asked if he’d like to see one of the shows.  “I ain’t too interested myself, but feel free.”  Donald went in the big auditorium with the domed ceiling and sat literally on the edge of his seat for the entire show.  He was enthralled.  He was familiar with much of the material, but some of it was new to him.  There had been a lot of new theories and discoveries since he had last studied astronomy.  He decided that his first purchase with his first paycheck would be some new books on the subject from the adjacent Museum of Natural History bookstore.  His second purchase would be a present for Joy, maybe one of those new miniature cassette players with headphones.  He wondered if they made cassettes of spirituals.

After the show, he met up with Joe.  Joe was very easy-going and never in a hurry.  He had Donald do a few odd jobs, changing a light bulb, unclogging a toilet, but mostly Donald just followed him around “learning the ropes,” as Joe said.

At the end of the day, Donald jogged back to Penn Station, met Joy in their usual spot and threw his arms around her.  “This is it!” he exclaimed.  “I’ve reached the top.”  To Donald, standing on a ladder changing a light bulb represented success.  He told Joy all that happened, and she was again awed.

“You can do anything,” she said.

“I guess so,” he replied.

He felt totally fulfilled.  He loved his job, he loved Joy and he was optimistic about the future.  He jogged down to Penn Station from the Planetarium almost every day (he didn’t jog on his way to work; he didn’t want to arrive sweaty).  It was almost two and one-half miles so he was still keeping in shape.  He thought about entering the next Marathon.

When he picked up his first check, he bought three astronomy books and the cassette player for Joy.  Then he took Joy and Cecil out to dinner in the Flame Steak on Broadway which he had so often frequented.  This was the first meal he’d ever eaten there that he’d paid for.  It tasted a lot better.

Mostly, though, their lives didn’t change much.  They continued to eat on Joy’s money or at a soup kitchen.  Joy had gotten very good at soliciting handouts from local restaurants.  They still slept in Penn Station.  Joy still sang on street corners, and lugged her shopping bags everywhere.  The bags still stank even though Donald continued to make periodic raids on them as Joy slept.

And yet, everything was different.  Donald became more and more animated.  He told Joy every night of things that had happened during the day:  a new person he had met, a new skill he had learned, an exhibit he’d seen during a visit next door to the Museum, a joke that Joe had told him.

He and Joe had become quite friendly, although Donald was evasive about much of his past and present life.  He said he had a girlfriend named Joy who was a singer and they lived together “in the vicinity of Penn Station.  It’s very convenient.”  Joe was married and had two grown children and lived in Brooklyn.  One day he invited Donald and Joy, who he hadn’t met yet, to his apartment for dinner.  Donald was very excited and said he’d have to ask Joy.

She flatly refused, saying she had nothing to wear.  Donald found that very amusing as just then she was wearing two dresses and a pantsuit.  But she wouldn’t budge from her position, and sulked all night.

As Donald became more socialized, Joy became more withdrawn and fearful.  When one Saturday a few months after beginning his new job he announced it was time to start looking for an apartment, without a word Joy picked up her bags and walked off.  Donald walked after her.  “Wait, Joy.  You’re coming too.”

“Oh no I’m not,” she said, and continued to walk away.  Donald couldn’t understand it.  He had no intention of moving away and leaving Joy behind.  But then he thought, well, maybe while I’m looking for a place, it would be better without Joy.  She’d never leave her bags behind.  She does look a little…seedy.

So he went off on his own, The New York Times in hand.  By the end of the day, he realized he couldn’t possibly afford even one place he’d looked at.  Although his standards weren’t too high (Penn Station was nice, but it wasn’t exactly The Waldorf), he thought that $500 a month for a tiny, dark, dreary studio apartment wasn’t much of a step upward.  It made him claustrophobic.  And that was the cheapest place he was shown.

When he told Joy he hadn’t found a place yet and was very discouraged, she perked up.  “Don’t worry, Donald.  We’ll be just fine here.”

The next day at work, he asked Joe if he knew of any apartments in his neighborhood, Flatbush.  Joe said he’d ask around.  Soon after, he said he heard of a place; it was small, but it was clean and cheap.  He knew the super of the building.  He again invited Donald and Joy to dinner and said they could look at the apartment afterwards.  Donald mentioned it to Joy; she said no.  He didn’t push her as he thought his chances of getting the apartment might be better on his own.

So, feeling very guilty about going without Joy, he took the subway to Flatbush with Joe the next day after work.  He told Joe that Joy had a prior engagement (the last time he’d said she was sick and he had to stay with her).

It was the first time he’d been in a private home in years.  He was very nervous about acting properly.  At dinner, he didn’t make a move until Joe or Stella, his wife, did first.  After dinner (homemade spaghetti and meatballs—what luxury!), they all sat in the living room and watched the news.  It all seemed very unreal to Donald, both the news itself and the fact that he was sitting there watching it.

Then he and Joe went to look at the apartment.  As Joe said, it was small, but it was certainly big enough for him and Joy.  After all, they didn’t have much to put in it.  He told the super he wanted it and took out a roll of bills to leave a deposit.

“You shouldn’t be walking around with all that money,” Joe said.

“Ah, I’m used to it,” Donald said with a shrug.  In fact, he was, as he was spending very little of his salary and hadn’t yet opened a bank account.

He tried to control his excitement as Joe walked him back to the subway.  He hoped he had handled everything all right, all the arrangements.  He hoped he had remembered everything the super told him, about signing the lease and when to pay the rent and when he could move in.  At the subway, he pumped Joe’s hand effusively.

He and Joy would have their own home in less than a week.

-16-

hen he got back to Penn Station, he found Joy curled up in a corner, crying.  Aside from her red eyes and nose, something else looked very different.  Donald realized with shock that her lips were also red, or rather bright pink.  She was wearing lipstick.  Then he noticed she was also wearing eye makeup, some of which was beginning to run down her cheeks.

“Joy!  What’s happened to you?”

“Please don’t leave me, Donald,” she sobbed.  “Please don’t move away.  I’ll try harder.  I’ll go to a beauty parlor.  Just please don’t go.”

He almost laughed, he was so relieved.  “Joy, I’m not going to leave you.  We’re going to move together.  We’re going to have our own apartment.  Wait ‘til you see it; it’s got a real stove and refrigerator and everything.  And you can decorate it any way you’d like.”

She was not consoled; in fact, she cried harder.  “No.  I’m not moving,” she managed to get out between sobs.

“But Joy, you can make curtains and stuff and I’ll let you pick out everything we need, dishes and potholders and everything.  You took home ec, you know about all that.”

She stopped crying and wiped her tears, smearing the eye makeup all over her face.  In a firm voice she said, “Donald, I said I’m not moving.  This is my home.  This is where I belong.  And you do, too.”

He shook his head sadly, “Not any more, Joy.  And I am going to move.  I want you to come with me very much, but if you won’t, I’m moving anyway.  But I’m not leaving you; you’re leaving me.”

Then they each shook their heads and retreated into their own worlds, Joy’s filled with fear and loneliness, Donald’s filled with a mixture of sadness, excitement and hope.  He was determined to convince Joy to come with him during the next week.

-17-

he would not change her mind.  Donald begged, threatened, reassured; it was hopeless.  He thought if she would at least come to look at the apartment, she might be less afraid.  She wouldn’t go.  As the week passed, even in her resistance, she clung to him more and more.  He thought maybe when the time came for him to actually move in, she would relent.  She did not.

Moving day dawned bright and cold.  Donald got up early and took a last run through Central Park.  Joy was still asleep when he left, which, he realized as he was running, was a mistake.  She might wake up and think he had already moved.  When he got back, she was sitting in a sad little heap on the floor.  When she saw him she jumped up and hugged him.  “I knew you’d come back!  I knew you wouldn’t go!”

“I didn’t go yet.  I was running.”

“Oh.”  Her arms dropped.  “Are you…going?”

“Yes.”  She turned away.  “Joy, please come with me.  I don’t want to leave you.  This is scary for me, too.  I really need you.”

“I can’t, Donald.  I have to stay here.”

“But why, Joy?  Tell me why.”

In a small voice:  “Because this is where I belong.”  And then, in almost a whisper, “And this is where I want to be.”

***

Joe had offered to help Donald move, but Donald told him since he was leaving Joy in their old apartment with all their furniture, he had nothing to move.  He did not tell Joe that all he owned, aside from the clothes on his back, were a few toilet articles, his gym clothes and sneakers, three astronomy books, one astrology book and a little red piano, all packed into one sad-looking brown bag.

He held that bag now in one hand and stroked Joy’s face with the other.  Tears were again streaming down her cheeks.  He dropped the bag and hugged her.  She didn’t hug him back.  Then he took out a scrap of paper and wrote his new address on it for her.  “Don’t cry on it, Joy,” he said as he gave it to her.  “You’ll smear the ink and then you’ll never find me.”

“Well, you know where to find me,” she said.  Donald picked up his bag.

“Please, Joy…?”

She shook her head.

He walked away without looking back.

-18-

he previous tenant of Donald’s apartment had left a few old pieces of furniture—a wobbly table, a studio couch, two straight-back chairs.  Donald planned to find whatever else he needed on the street.  He had often seen perfectly good pieces of furniture tossed out when he had no home to put them in.  With his well-developed scavenger instincts, he knew he’d find lots more now.

His apartment seemed both too big and too small.  Its bigness lay in its emptiness (it echoed every sound) and its loneliness; its smallness in its walls and its inevitable comparison to Penn Station and the outdoors.  It was freshly painted and its barren white walls seemed, to Donald, to cry out for graffiti.  It was what Donald was used to.  But he managed to restrain himself, except for one small “Donald and Joy” above the studio couch.

He went over to Joe’s that afternoon.  Stella, having heard he’d moved in with very little, offered him some of their old kitchenware—dishes, utensils, pots and pans—and a set of old sheets.  The dishes were chipped, the pots dented and the sheets mended and patched, but to Donald, they seemed luxurious.

He turned down their offer to stay for dinner; he was very anxious to cook his first meal.  The only meals he’d made in the past year had been cooked over a fire in a trash barrel on the street.

He lugged his new acquisitions home, then went out to a grocery store to buy some staples.  He wasn’t even sure what staples were any more, so he followed a lady around the store and put most of the things in his shopping cart that she put in hers.  At one point, he even had several cans of cat food, until he remembered he didn’t have a cat.  The woman kept turning to look at him suspiciously.  He just smiled. 

When he got home, he had quite an assortment of items:  toilet paper (he never would have thought of that—he was used to using whatever was handy); napkins (seemed unnecessary, but what the hell); half and half (he had no idea what that was for); a package of pancake mix (sounded exotic); a loaf of bread (still soft!); a package of hot dogs (that was lucky); and one can of cat food that had somehow slipped through.  Maybe he’d get a cat.  Maybe that would convince Joy to move in with him.  And even if it didn’t, it would be nice to have something warm and furry to come home to.

He cooked a hot dog dinner that night, then sat on his studio couch and read one of his astronomy books by the light of the one overhead bulb.  He decided the first thing he’d search for on the street would be a lamp.  Then he looked up his horoscope for the day in The Stars and You, the astrology book Joy had given him. It was last year’s horoscope, but since he didn’t believe in astrology anyway, he didn’t mind.  It said, “Tension in the office.  Don’t press for a raise.”  He tried to remember where he’d been a year ago, even give or take a few months, but all the days, weeks, and months blended together.  And most of the years, too.  But he was quite certain he hadn’t been in an office.

***

He came home from work a few days later and found Joy and all her shopping bags parked at his front door.  He was overjoyed.  “Wait till you see it!  Of course it needs a woman’s touch.”  He opened the door with a flourish and presented his apartment with a sweeping gesture.  “Well, this is it.  What do you think?”

She walked haltingly into the middle of the room.  She stood there, still clutching her bags, and looked around.  She stood there for a long time, not saying a word.  As Donald watched her, a realization came to him, and with it a great sadness.  Joy looked like a fish out of water or an animal in a cage.  She looked like she couldn’t breathe.  She looked very, very small.  Now he understood what she had been trying to tell him.  She was right.  She didn’t belong there.

“It’s very…nice,” she finally said.  “Do you want to show me around?”

“There’s not much else to see.”  He showed her the kitchen and the tiny, empty bedroom.  Then they sat stiffly on the couch.  They were both terribly uncomfortable.  He did not try to convince her to move in.  He knew she wouldn’t anyway.  He struggled for things to say; she replied with a word or two.  After an endless twenty minutes, she stood up.

“I have to go now,” she said.  She gathered her bags and walked toward the door.  He did not try to stop her.  “I’ll miss you a lot, Donald,” she said, “but I’ll be all right.”  She stared at him.  “Maybe you’ll come back,” she said slowly.  “People do, you know…I’ll be looking for you.”

“You never know,” he said.  He closed the door behind her and leaned against it.  “Good-bye Joy.  I’ll miss you, too.”

-19-

e knew he would never go back.  He did try to find her once, a few months later.  He went to Penn Station after work and looked in all their regular places, but she was not there.  Then he walked up to Times Square, looking for her or for Cecil, Leo, Willie, anyone who knew her.  He found no one.  The next day, he went down to Joy’s favorite corner near Macy’s during his lunch hour.  He saw her from across the street.  He could hear her strong, clear voice above the traffic.  “At least she’s not singing ‘Swanee River’,” he thought.

He started to cross the street but stopped.  He watched her for several minutes.  She did not see him.  It was a warm spring day; she was wearing her blue dress.  Her shopping bags were in a circle around her.  A few people dropped change in her cup.  She smiled vacantly and continued to stare at something only she could see.  He did not cross the street.

-20-

t was October.  Donald couldn’t believe a year had passed since he ran in the last Marathon.  This time, he remembered where the time had gone clearly; almost every day stood out in his mind in some way.  He remembered the day he had found—or, later on, when he had more money, bought—each piece of furniture, each dish, each book in his apartment.  He remembered the few occasions when he’d had company—usually Joe and Stella.  He remembered each time he’d hung something on the wall, especially the trouble he’d had with the big map of the solar system.  He remembered vividly the day he’d brought home his cat, which he’d found when she was a tiny kitten mewing in a box in the garage.

He was sitting contentedly now in front of his television (the color wasn’t very good, and the picture was fuzzy, but it was the height of luxury to Donald) watching the New York Marathon.  He’d thought a lot about running in it again—this time even entering officially—but decided against it.  He was still jogging, but somehow the Marathon didn’t represent the same thing this year as it had last year.  Donald had already won.

Lounging back in his favorite chair, a big, over-stuffed armchair he’d found on the sidewalk, he watched as the first runner crossed the finish line.  The cameras focused on the winning runner as someone threw a silver cape over his shoulders and handed him something to drink.  Then the runner seemed to get lost in the mob of well-wishers.  The camera panned the cheering, clapping crowd.

Donald smiled.  He remembered those people so well, and how much it had meant to him when they had called out his name and cheered for him.

Suddenly he sat bolt upright.  “Oh my God, it can’t be!”  But he knew it was.  He had gotten only a glimpse of the top of Joy’s head, but there, bouncing unmistakably above her in the clear autumn sky, was a big blue balloon.

She was still waiting for him.

The End