#40: I Miss Melvin.

Life was so much simpler back then.

Note: A month ago, after writing more than three dozen of these Street Creds, I took a break. Frankly, they were just taking up too much bandwidth: the relationships had become more complex, the boundaries more tenuous, and the writing more complicated. I’m starting to do them again, although probably more like every couple of weeks instead of every week. And I’ll intersperse with some other writing. Hope you enjoy it all.

I have a habit of getting in over my head. I don’t trip, stumble, or dive in—it’s more I just kind of wander into situations and, as the Talking Heads put it so eloquently, “I ask myself how did I get here?”

Street Cred began as a single post in Writing Asides—a series about what writers do when they’re not writing (I.e., napping, staring, making tea). One of the things I do when I’m not writing is hang out downtown talking to people—including those I describe as “my friends who live on the street by day and wherever they can at night.”

So, I decided to write a few essays about them. In the first essay “Ain’t No Then No More” I wrote about several. (Most names and some facts are changed, as usual…except Kenny and Melvin with their permission).

I began with Kenny, the Amherst graduate (’79) and former “close personal friend” of the Dalai Lama who’s currently living by choice (Kenny, not the Dalai Lama) in a tent across the river on a small level site on a steep slope. Currently, he’s mad at me for some reason. Our relationship hasn’t been the same since I inadvertently got him kicked out of a bar. He also keeps insisting I’m receiving something in return for the money I give one of my friends. (I’m being rather genteel here.) I’m not. Neither is he. I think he’s jealous of what I’m not getting. And don’t want to get, for that matter.

One day I mentioned to a fellow alumnus that the Amherst alumni magazine should do an article about Amherst grads who live on the street. He laughed ruefully, agreeing in principle, but said, “Well, the alumni magazine is kind of a promotion piece for the college—they probably don’t want to advertise to parents that for $100,000 a year their kid can learn how to live on the street.”

Next, I wrote a long paragraph about Jake, who is so good at making up stories to get money that the entertainment value is almost worth the cash. I just gave him some money to get work boots for his new job. I can’t wait to see the work boots. But I’ll probably have to.

Oh yeah. There was Sebastian. I’d forgotten about him ’til I started this piece. He’d come up from Florida with his girlfriend, but they left after they woke up one night and there was a hungry raccoon or similar on the top of their tent.

When I first met Gwen, I’d see her up by the Town Common, talking to no one in particular. But lately we’ve had some brief conversations and she seems more grounded. Maybe they got the meds right. (Takes one to know one.)

I mentioned Jimmy, the notorious small-town/small-time drug dealer who usually hangs out by the parking garage. I’ve only interacted with Jimmy once. I wanted to let him know a mutual friend had passed. (Not from an overdose, I’m glad to say.) He couldn’t picture the guy but was pleasant enough. Jimmy comes and goes. I think going means time in jail—never, it seems, for very long.

But my favorite friend on the street was and always will be Melvin.

I don’t expect to see Melvin again anytime soon. Maybe ever. He said it was OK to use his real name as long as I stayed away from certain personal issues. So I won’t tell you why I don’t expect to see him again anytime soon. It was just Melvin being Melvin.

I miss Melvin. And the longer he’s gone, the more I understand why I miss him. When I began this series, I said, in a way that I admit was both naive and aspirational, that I was going to write about “my friends who live on the street….”

I definitely consider Melvin a friend. But my experiences with other people on the street have challenged my assumptions about friendship. I mean I don’t have any enemies on the street. But friends? I’m still contemplating, even wrestling, with that one. And it’s worth an essay of its own.

’Til then, I’ll leave you with the quotation at top—one of Melvin’s presumably inadvertent, inscrutable insights that I wrote on my whiteboard after talking with him one evening. In some way, it sums up what this project is all about. Especially the second part.