A Wino’s Wisdom

I stayed in my 3^rd floor castle for several months.  Then Tom, an old high school running mate, convinced me that I needed to move into an apartment with him and two other guys.  Well that rock along nicely, for a while.  My running mate left early in the lease, and the other two guys failed to tell me that they were not renewing the lease until the last minute.  

This left me without a place to stay.  I spent 2 or 3 nights sleeping in my car before I managed to locate and rent an apartment.  I needed one that I could afford by myself.  Now remember this is 1971.  I was making a whopping $2.60 an hour which was a dollar more than minimum wage, and I took all the overtime I could get.  I really did not have the resources to rent a penthouse abode. 

What I ended up with was in an old quadplex apartment house.   It was in what I liked to call Providence’s Bermuda triangle.  My apartment was in the middle of a triangle formed by the main Providence police station, a fire station, and a major inner city hospital.  There were always sirens going off.  It became so that you just did not pay attention to them. 

One evening I was in the downstairs apartment of a fellow tenet.  There were a couple of other local residents there.  We were playing poker and sharing some suds.  We heard a multitude of sirens.  We noticed a lot of flashing lights outside.  No big deal, that happened all the time.  We just continued our poker game.  Finally, after about an hour of the lights flashing and much commotion outside, we did become mildly curious.  One of us decided to take a peak outside.  The building next to ours had all but burned to the ground.  Shrug.  We went back in and finished our poker game.

It was not uncommon for hookers to work the corner a ¼ block for the apartment house.  One in particular I remember because this prostitute was a he dressed as a she.  He was doing a pretty regular business on that corner.  One summer evening 2 or 3 of us were sitting on the stoop avoiding the heat inside the building and sharing a six pack.  We began yelling every time a car stopped and he went up to it, “Hey, she is a HE!”  After we drove off 3 or 4 cars, he came up to us.  He pleaded that he was just trying to make a living.  He touched a soft spot in our hearts, and we stopped.  That or  we belatedly became afraid he might have a pimp somewhere.

The building directly across from ours was a flop house inhibited mainly by elderly winos.  You would see them sitting outside on broken down kitchen chairs in the grassless yard drinking from brown paper bags.  I came home one afternoon and one of them was lying in the middle of the intersection.  I did not know if he was alive, passed out, or what.  I really did not want to be responsible if he needed medical help.  I went to a pay phone and called the police.  Twenty or thirty minutes later they show up.  Remember the main station was but a few blocks away.  All they did was drag the guy out of the middle of the street and prop him up against a wall.  Off the policemen went to fight crime and protect the American way of life.

One  summer evening we were again on the stoop trying to stay cool.  This particular night we had shared more than a six pack and we were all feeling mighty good.  Down the street is one of the elderly winos wobbling his way towards us.  We decide to have a little fun, and when he is close enough we begin to engage him in conversation.  One of us pops the question of all questions.  We ask the old wino, “What is the meaning of life?”  He takes a swig from his brown paper bag, ponders for a minute, and then begins to expound in an unintelligible mutter.  This goes on for a couple minutes when we notice the wino is urinating in his pants as he is revealing the meaning of life to us.  The wet spot in the front of his khakis grows bigger and bigger the longer he pontificates.

Reflecting back on it, perhaps the moral of this story may be that all any of us want is a warm feeling in our crotch from time to time.  Perhaps that is the meaning of life.  Strikes me that is about as good as many I have heard over the years.