Lest we forget

Arnie scraped the last bit of pizza cheese off the top inside of the cardboard box with his cleanest dirty finger. He had three fingers remaining on his left hand, but only one finger and a thumb on his right, so he didn’t have much of a choice. He’d found the box in the dumpster behind the rundown tenant building he’d been trudging through this evening.

It was a start for a good night for him, as not only had he found an almost clean sock to nearly match the one he was wearing, but he’d also been near the front of the line at the soup kitchen a few blocks north of where he was now, ensuring he got a full bowl of hot soup and two slices of bread and butter.

After leaving the kitchen and getting away from the other street people there, he’d found the pizza box. Opening it with less enthusiasm than he would have if he’d missed several days’ worth of meals, he was pleased to find the cheese stuck to the top of the box and a little sauce for flavoring that had probably spilled in the box delivered to its recipient. By the looks of the box, and the lack of any rat droppings, Arnie suspected the box had been thrown away just that afternoon, if not within the last couple of hours.

Cleaning off the last bits of cheese and sauce, Arnie felt satiated for the first time in weeks. Tonight he would go to sleep without worrying about the gnawing hunger in his belly that was his almost constant companion here on the streets. He’d find his place to sleep and he wouldn’t have to worry about his left foot growing cold in the night air because of the shoes he wore and the missing sock he’d suffered with for the past month.

Tonight would be a night of easy slumber if Arnie could find his place that was out of the way of other transients on the streets, away from the hookers who kept vigil on the corners until all hours of the early morning, away from the beat cops who would roust him if he’d chosen the wrong doorway to spend the night.

Arnie knew of such a place. He didn’t go there often because other transients might be watching and if they saw where he went to hide, they’d soon follow. Someone would try to steal his hidey hole and leave Arnie to find another.

Arnie was not a large man anymore. Arnie knew he was in the wrong world for a man his size. He barely tipped the scales at 155 pounds now, down from the 202 he’d weighed when he served in the Army. He had a limp from where a car had hit him one night back in the spring, shattering his hip. The V.A. hospital did what it could for him, but once he’d healed, he was returned to his world of the streets.

It hadn’t always been this way for him. He’d fought in the first Gulf War in early 1991 as a tank commander and the rank of Staff Sergeant with the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st of the 7th Armored Cavalry.

Sergeant Arnold Zylestuezki earned a few medals for bravery, including the Bronze Star, but the one that had cost him the most was the Purple Heart the division commander pinned on him in the VII Corps field hospital.

The rocket propelled grenade that slightly damaged the right front quarter of his Abrams M-1 Tank damaged Arnie enough he could no longer be in the Army. He was shuffled from field hospital to the evac hospital, to stateside’s Walter Reed, then a series of rehabilitation centers and outpatient halfway houses until he was healed enough the army said there was nothing more they could do for him.

That’d been four years and seven months ago. The V.A. did what they could for him, but one of Arnie’s injuries caused infrequent, but devastating migraines and sometimes blackouts from the pain. He went through several jobs in the first years out of rehabilitation. He had been adept at fixing things, but he could not hold a steady job because of the re-occurring headaches that would put him down for days at a time.

Eventually Arnie got tired of applying for jobs he knew he’d lose. His compensation from the Army was not enough for the one-bedroom apartment in a better part of town, especially if he wanted to eat as well. His head injury, where a small piece of the ablative armor lodged itself under his helmet and deep into his frontal lobe, left him unable to secure a driver’s license.

Social Security wouldn’t help for another 19 years, no matter what the doctors said. When Arnie thought of this, he would chuckle to himself. He planned on being dead a long time before social security started paying him.

Arnie had spent his first winter on the streets on south side of Little Rock without much trouble. He could no longer afford the apartment he was in and left it just hours before the local sheriff would have evicted him. He left behind nothing of value except the medals he’d been awarded. To someone they might have been valuable, but to him they had cost him his life.

He’d made bi-weekly visits to the V.A. hospital to get at least one good meal and to re-new his medication. The winter nights were cold in Little Rock, but not as cold as his days as a child in Detroit or the nights in the desert of Iraq. With a little prior planning, Arnie was able to suffer a little less than many of the others on the streets.

His mind was still sharp analytically, although he knew there were many things he would never remember again. He tried not to think about the passing of his parents several years before he joined the Army because he could remember just vague faces and a few scattered memories. Nothing to treasure on the long nights on the street. A tragic car accident which he could not recall took them both, leaving Arnie and an older sister without parents in his final six weeks in high school.

The rocket propelled grenade removed almost all of the memories of his sister. She’d come to see him many times at first in the hospital. Her visits came much less often after Arnie admitted he could not remember her or his parents enough to carry on a conversation about them, no matter how many photos were shown to him. She tried to make the connection to her brother, but he was not the little brother she’d grown up with and soon even she stopped visiting. It was a hard thing for her to do, but her visits made him uncomfortable and made her even more so.

Not long after Arnie recovered from his hip damage, he found a hiding place no one else had found.

Arnie tried to stay away from the regular street people. It wasn’t that he was afraid of them, he just didn’t like them. Arnie didn’t feel like he was better than them, just that they were not the type of people he felt like being around. They were dirty for the most part, and unkempt. Arnie knew he wasn’t as clean as he used to be, but he shaved as often as he could, bathed when given the chance and cut his own hair with a pair of scissors he’d found near an abandoned barber shop.

He also found their language vulgar and hard on his ears. He didn’t recall having a faith in God, but the coarse language the others used so often made Arnie feel as if someone were striking out at God for their lot in life.

The women who also lived on the streets tended to have morals Arnie did not agree with. He couldn’t say why, but it seemed to him the women would sleep with any man who offered them food or drink or drugs.

Arnie prided himself on avoiding hard drugs, although he drank from a bottle if he could afford one. He told himself he did it to help him forget the pain he was constantly in, but he also knew the truth that he drank to forget everything that was his life now.

On one night many months back he’d been harassed by a trio of street thugs who wanted nothing more than to fight with Arnie. They threatened him and spit on him for being in their area and Arnie quickly left the block on which they were lording over.

Luck had him skirt down an alley between two buildings that were very close together and had an enclosed walkway between them. From the street, it looked like a dead end, but Arnie found that behind the large pile of debris from a remodeling project, was a hole that led under the walkway. If someone had seen him come in here, they too would find the spacious area and want part of it for themselves.

The area he found was almost 12 feet wide and eight feet long at its longest. The ceiling was over four feet above his head so he could sit upright in the near totally enclosed and warm “room.”

He waited silently in the dark for a very long time before venturing back out of his hiding place to make sure he had not been discovered. With careful, silent movements he was able to better hide the entrance of his new place. Now, even if someone else came into the alley as far as he did, they would not see the entrance.

Over the next few weeks and months he improved his spot with the box springs he’d snuck in one early, rainy morning when there was no one on the streets, with dry cardboard from the fruit market two blocks away, and the carpet pieces he carried with him under his clothes to protect himself from other people’s punches.

The box spring Arnie recovered after someone in an apartment let it fall three stories, landing near a large trash dumpster Arnie had been sleeping behind. He took it quickly to his hiding place before it got too damp.

The blanket he’d liberated, he didn’t like to think of himself as a thief, from the back of a work truck that had parked too near an alley he was frequenting that week.

Tonight, a good night for Arnie as his stomach was as full as it had been in months, he would seek out his private place, curl up under the blanket he knew would be there and warmed by the walkway air vents, and the camouflaged Army jacket he wore.

Beneath him would be the last remnants of a single bed’s box spring, several layers of dry cardboard boxes and some carpet pieces he’d been hoarding.

He would sleep comfortably and soundly.

…if he could get there without being seen.

…if no one else had found his place.

…if he could recall the directions to get there.

A twinge at the top of his spine belied the prospect of a good evening.

Arnie’s head started hurting and he suspected a migraine might be building. He had to find his hiding spot soon, before the migraine set in for a few days of misery. He hoped the blackout wouldn't come, but with the way he was starting to feel, he wasn't so sure this would not be one of the big ones.

The pizza box was dropped back into the dumpster as the headache started to work its way through his shoulders and into the back of his head. Arnie had experienced the early stages of the migraine before and he knew the lower it started in his back and shoulders, the worse it would be.

It made him angry that in all likelihood, he would end up throwing up the fine food he’d eaten. If he could keep his bearings, he hoped to find his hiding hole shortly after dark. The alley would very dark as well as the entrance to the alley as it was hidden by poorly placed street lights.

On a good day, Arnie could remember exactly how to get to his place. On bad days, he often forgot how to get there and would wander around for hours and sometimes all night before either giving up or deciding it was unsafe to venture to his spot.

Ambling in the general direction he knew he should go, Arnie felt the headache manifesting itself in his neck and base of his skull like an extra three gravities. The dull ache between his shoulders was moving itself into his chin and jaw area. The old Army jacket scraped on his neck hairs and a ringing in his ears was getting loud enough to cover the sound of his shoes on the wet pavement.

Like a slow-moving dark shadow, the pain slowly worked its way into his head.

He continued to walk in the general direction he needed to travel. He stopped several times in shaded areas between buildings to recover so he could walk a little more. The sun was setting on the horizon, behind the clouds which were bringing the dizzily rain and soon the street lights would flicker alive to cast harsh shadows.

Arnie knew he needed to find the right block to be on before too much longer. He knew if he was not close when darkness came, chances were he’d not find his safe place and he’s spend the night on the street, wet from the rain, cold from the falling temperatures and in pain from the migraine.

His shoes were wet and squishing from the water on the streets and the puddles he didn’t see as he continued to stumble forward. Nothing mattered now to him except to find his place to sleep and hide from the light.

He arrived on the block he was looking for just as the street lamps did their best to erase the darkness in the area. Many of them were broken and would never come to life again until city workers replaced the bulbs.

Arnie, headache beginning to throb behind his eyes with the pulse of his heart, saw no one near, but still he worked his way through alleys, around open windows, and over foot paths no longer used until he worked his way under a chain link fence across the street from the alley his hiding hole was in.

A hooker stood at the corner, underneath the lone street lamp in the area. He couldn’t go into his alley without her seeing and even in the pain he was in, he was not ready to surrender his privacy. He hunkered down under a piece of abandoned sheet metal to wait out the hooker. He knew she would either move on or find a john to take her for a ride.

The hair on his head began hurting. His fingers trembled in the cold and he fought to keep his teeth from chattering. Water dripped from somewhere down his back, but the pain in his head was worse, so he ignored it.

He kept his eyes tightly shut from any light. The ringing in his ears was louder than the falling rain and his stomach protested the food it held. Arnie knew that to throw up now would bring unwanted attention onto him. Bile worked up his throat which burned, but not as much as the hurt in his head.

The hooker was picked up by a man in an expensive car and once again the area around Arnie’s alley was clear.

He slowly got out of his hiding spot. His knees hurt, his back hurt, his gut hurt, his hands hurt, his feet hurt and his head hurt.

Still, he was almost home.

No one saw him as he slipped into his hole, gently bringing a piece of discarded drywall over the entrance.

Inside, the lighting was near non-existent. Arnie had used an oil lamp on the few occasions he needed light, but the lack of fuel kept its use at a rare minimum. When feeling better, he knew he could lay here in peace and day dream of good things, but tonight, he thought he could hear blood rushing though the veins and arteries in his head.

Arnie crawled onto his bed, removing the damp jacket and sliding his shoes off. The shoes would dry in the warm air that circulated in this room and he would use the jacket over the dry blanket.

Gently pulling the blanket over him, because every movement was painful and every sound was deafening, he laid his head down on a makeshift pillow made of shredded foam inside a torn shirt. The jacket he put over the blanket for extra warmth and he curled into a fetal position.

A small sob escaped from between his lips.

Eyes closed, head covered, and breathing silently as possible, Arnie finally fell off to sleep, away from the pain in his head and body.

His last conscious thought was of the smell of his home. He smelled coffee, French Vanilla, as he drifted off. Gone was the smell of musty blankets, wet shoes and dirty clothing.

In spite of the pain, Arnie fell asleep with a smile.

And somewhen in the night, Arnie left his life in the hiding hole he called home.