Other People with Less Experience

-Garrett Ashley

Coming out of the Harbor Supply store, I saw myself thirty years from now. The old man was wrinkled, sun-damaged, hair slicked back hard against his scalp. He sat on the iced-over steps, rocking his snow-covered shoulders in the direction of the parking lot. I'd been homeless for a brief time, so I could relate. I'd lived out of a car in a Wal-Mart parking lot. It wasn't so bad, and was done primarily because I had been on the move so fast that I couldn't afford to immediately get a place to live. I turned out fine but could never get used to the feeling of being noticed by people who parked next to me.

Everywhere is a terrible place to be homeless, but Laramie was particularly harsh. There were no shelters and nowhere to be warm. Anti-homeless measures went into place not long ago: sitting and resting ordinances, concrete spikes under overpasses. 

When I lived in a car, nights would get so cold I worried I wouldn't be able to move the next day. My bones stuck together; my body grafted to the car seat. The old man looked through me, facing some inevitable direction into nothing. I realized that he might freeze to death if I didn't invite him to come stay with me and Jasmine.

#

"You could have asked me first," Jasmine said. "You could have called me first. You could have called Pat. You could have taken him to a shelter in Portland for all I care."

"I agree, it was stupid of me. I'm stupid. I know."

"Like, were all the shelters in Portland closed or something?"

"Yeah," I lied. Other people with less experience would have ignored the old man entirely. But I'd briefly stayed at a Portland shelter, stood in the lines, spoke into the caged windows and hauled the plastic bins back and forth, not knowing whether I would be assaulted or robbed. A cop recently shot a homeless person in a shelter. The world is a dangerous place like that.

"You're not stupid."

"Sometimes though."

"Pat's moving into this room next month. How long does the guy plan on staying?"

"He doesn't say much. I'll find him something. Don't worry."

Over in the corner, knees balled up to his chin, the old man shook something off, some feeling, some depression.

The room was full of insects. There were also rats and squirrels, miniscule beasts we could hear scratching, the vibrations meeting your ear through the carpet. 

Also, the bedroom was haunted by the ghosts of two people who died there. Jasmine, shortly after buying the place, broke her arm in when something shoved her off a chair as she installed the fan blades. And then her boyfriend, Pat, walked by one night, saw something get up from the floor, bend over, and fly out the window.

Pat's moving into the room was a contentious subject because going in there at night had become a ritual for me. When the house was quiet, I sat on the floor waiting for something to happen.

Something other than cockroaches, mice scratching clawing through the insulation, the sound of leaves and twigs dragged through the ventilation by the teeth of squirrels.

Now things had quieted down, Jasmine consented, Pat nodded his head, gave his grunts, poked up his finger slightly, indicating something positive. 

Later I hunched over a plate of frozen food in the dark, waiting for something to happen. The old man over in the corner rubbed the top of his head vigorously, said something through a thick cage of whiskers, then went quiet.

#

For six months I lived with Jasmine's brother, some hippie I met at a swap meet outside Portland. Jasmine said I had this kind of sexual neutrality about me that she liked. I told her okay, I'll be your roommate if that's what you want. I felt like a cat toy with legs until I came to Laramie. When I got here, nobody knew me and I finally felt I could have a voice again, laugh, twiddle my thumbs, not think about anything. Jasmine would ask what was on my mind, and, for a little while, there wasn't anything really on my mind, maybe not except what to eat or whether Jasmine had had a bad day. 

I loved Jasmine. She had long, translucent arms, she touched my back, rubbed the skin through my shirt, felt the hard lump of my neck. She was a bad roommate but a good friend, and I felt comfortable around her.

I didn't know how to explain the feeling of wanting to help the old man out. I felt like she of all people would understand. It's like I'd personified an inanimate object, something to rub between my fingertips. Except the object sat on your dresser for a dozen years and one day it fell and broke and I was filled with an empty feeling, practically over nothing. 

#

"I want to be a singer," Jasmine said. She ran the deli at Publix, and also owned a snowball stand a few blocks from the house. When she was home, she stood in the kitchen eating tiny sandwiches or sitting at the desk in her bedroom, trolling Etsy for hand-made model components. She kept a table in her bedroom where she'd started the foam base for a bus stop scene, but God only knew how long this hobby would keep up now that she wanted to be a singer. 

I'd never even heard her mention singing before.

Pat touched her ankle.

The old man sat in the corner of the living room, a blanket thrown across his knees.

"I'm a good singer, huh?"

"You're really good. You should hear her," Pat said to me.

"What's that?" Jasmine said, looking over at the old man.

"He said something," Pat said.

"I'd love to hear you," I said.

She sang. 

I would never ask another person to sing without music, no matter how badly I was in love with them.

I didn't know if her singing had any merit to it, if she knew that what she was doing might be harmful to the old man. I think hundreds of Americans find homeless people living in their furniture and closets every year. The homeless people put up with their melodies, raucous sexual enterprises, smelly laundry, 2am trips to the bathroom, constant starvation, never knowing when the owners might leave so they can crawl out of their hiding places to poke their heads into the fridge. Singing seemed like a small thing to put up with, but I couldn't imagine Jasmine going anywhere with this. 

"When I was a little girl I wanted to be a dancer."

I said, "It just costs so much money to do that kind of stuff."

Pat said, "A person can learn to dance without spending money."

When Pat got up to go to the bathroom I told Jasmine she should just move somewhere else and be a singer. She looked away from me, at the wall. Her hands were tangled together between her knees. She knew how these things were.

"Has he said anything yet?"

We looked at the old man sitting in the corner, headphones plugged into the record player. He bobbed his head like a cork in water.

He muttered something to me about work early in the morning. He knew where he was, that he was in someone's house. He knew he had a lot to do. He said he felt like a fixture. He didn't want to be a solid piece of evidence that someone once existed.

A lot of what he told me ran together in my mind. His voice was like someone speaking from another room. His voice, I swear, ran into one ear and out the other, as though it came from another dimension, and I might have picked up bits and pieces of it, folded the pieces together to form something tangible.

"He thinks he's about to have a job at Panera."

"He's been in my things," Jasmine said.

"He wouldn't go through your things."

"When did you ever talk to him? Have you actually had a dialogue?"

"When you were both asleep, sure."

Jasmine was a good person, with a good heart. Or else she would have kicked him out the moment he got here. 

She showed me an experiment where I looked at a handful of soap bottles, turned away, turned back, and had to guess what bottle she'd pulled away.

When I couldn't guess she said: "See there? You wouldn't even know if he's taken anything."

"Does he have a name? What's his name?"

In the 1970s, according to my father, the only homeless people you ever saw hung around big cities were mostly invisible, the only people that could see them were people from the country. The homeless wore clothing that was too big for them, like country people. Since my father told me this I'd always imagined that the majority of homeless get their clothing from country people.

When Pat came back, flopped himself down between us, we talked about how beautiful Jasmine's legs are.

#

Down on the beach, the sun became an untraceable mark in the sky, everything gray. Shivering, the old man followed behind me with a PVC pipe. I showed him one of the hard-to-spot pinky holes and told him to dig there. He got down on his knees and scooped at the sand. He came up from the hole with a clam. He even put it in the basket for me.

This is what we talked about:

"Did you ever run away when you were little?"

No.

"Did you ever stay with a woman before?"

No.

"When did you last have a job?"

I worked with my father pulling rattlesnakes out from under porches.

"Are you comfortable?"

No.

"Are you comfortable with yourself?"

Yes.

"How old are you?"

My father was a sergeant in France during the second world war.

"I'm sorry I haven't been able to find you any work. I'm trying." 

The old man, in his movements, was slow, meticulous, fragile. He reached into his back pocket, held himself, seemed to forget the strap was slipping from his tiny shoulder. He moved unevenly over the sand. I readjusted the bag onto his shoulder and a clam fell out. It wormed its way back into the earth, spewing black liquid from its ass as it disappeared.

#

I stuck my head through Jasmine's bedroom door and saw the old man standing there, a blue dress hanging from his fingertips.

I went into the room and took him by the elbow. "What the fuck are you doing? Are you trying to get us both kicked out?" 

I was furious. But I understood his mistake, the feeling of imagining life as someone else.

#

Sometimes I helped Jasmine with her sceneries. We sprinkled dusty grass onto the painted foamboard, then, under Jasmine's supervision, I poked a charged wire against the foam and the blades came to life. Jasmine misted alcohol and glue over the foamboard. We waited, and I thought of the wires in her wrists, the dreamcatcher tattoo on the back of her hand, the way she slammed bottles and sprays, seemingly angry at the thing she was trying to perfect. I loved her, except she never washed the bathroom or took out the garbage and she lobbed her dishes in the sink, not caring whether anything broke. I took pictures of the messes left, just in case. I thought, in some way, that she was worried about the bridge of responsibility she'd soon share with Pat. He was just a kid, pretty much, currently going through his alcohol phase. Pat talked about drinking and binging and the women he'd fucked and tattoos he'd drawn in a little notebook. This wasn't her, not in the slightest, and even though she went through that phase herself, with the tattoos and the sex and a motorcycle and everything, she couldn't help but feel like something was wrong with it all. 

"You're wrong," she said. My hands were behind the toilet, unscrewing the valve, fixing the toilet, finally. "Please stop trying to examine our relationship."

Jasmine mostly chose to focus on her parents when undergoing bouts of self-examination. This was her mother's fault, this her father's. Now she blamed her disregard for our shared domestic obligations on the presence of the old man, who she said reminded her too much of her father. What a smell he generates, she said. Look at all this waste! I didn't tell her that, in a way, he was actually me, a literal me that I had become tethered to. And what was our relationship, me and Jasmine? I wanted to ask her, but my emotions were too heavy for the kind of rejection I expected to get from her.

When I thought of my father, I imagined his big calf muscles, the way he'd swing a wrench at you if you weren't paying attention to whatever he was showing you how to fix. The last thing he taught me, before I moved to Laramie, was how to fix a toilet. I wondered if he would have taught me even this if he'd known I would, essentially, fix toilets for a living one day.

Pat's opinion of the old man was that everyone had times of weakness. He said I could get in a lot of trouble, letting someone like that come live with us. He'd even said—I heard him say this, anyway, not to me—that if it were up to him, the old guy's butt would be out the door, whether there were shelters available or not.

Jasmine had trouble with her father growing up. So "I understand," she said. She wanted to talk to me about everything I was going through. She understood even though most people wouldn't, that this thing I had with the old man (it's not a thing, I told her) was only a phase, and once I got past the obsession with righting myself morally/individually, we could go on living our lives and go to the movies and eat fast food like we used to. 

"I just felt bad for him. That's all," I said. I tried to keep my excuses simple enough to digest. I imagined living in a world where decisions had simpler motivations. Like: "I just really wanted to do something good for somebody." I didn't want everything I did to relate somehow to my father.

#

It's not even that I wanted to go home. But I wanted my family to say, offhandedly, without prompting, that it would be nice if I came around, they haven't seen me in a while, they missed me, would I come home? I wanted to be blamed for my leaving. I wanted it to be said that, if I wasn't so arrogant, then I would have a place right there, where I grew up. 

#

While the old man wandered around the house, I went into the back room to see if I could have an experience.

When Pat eventually moved in, the old man would be out, and my routine of sitting on the floor and hoping for an experience would be drastically altered.

I stood there in the middle of the room in the dark. This is what I felt.

A coldness came over me, like they say. I remembered in high school a chain-link fence that ran along the edge of the football field and ended with the woods.

We crawled over the pipe spanning a small stream, a sewage ditch, flecked with moss.

Other things I experienced: the touch of a hand on my shoulder, hairs standing on the back of my legs, the feeling I might sneeze, a fast heat spreading from the center of my chest to the ends of my fingertips.

#

When I caught the old man going through Jasmine's things again, this time shuffling plastic items around in her battery drawer, I came unhinged. It's not like I hadn't sacrificed everyone's trust in me for his second chance. "When you come into someone else's home, this isn't how you pay them back."

He whispered something about looking for batteries.

"When you take things that don't belong to you, then you might as well not even stay, you might as well not be anywhere."

Later, Jasmine reported a few things missing: a small packet of gum, a wooden box full of cheap jewelry, a pair of underwear she'd stuffed in a sock drawer that she promised to return to, one day, if she ever gained her weight back.

"It's him. I know it's him. You see the way he looks at me?"

Jasmine gave me this look and I resisted calling Pat, telling him to get home immediately because Jasmine was about to have one of her spectacular moments. I'd had these kinds of moments before. Except where I stutter, Jasmine rambled. Where I squeezed the folds of my elbows, Jasmine jogged in place, holding her breath. While I sat at the desk, no computer, no books, but stared at the wall, Jasmine told me everything, asked me to hold her, cried on my shoulder, and I never knew what to do but say something about it being a good day, that we could just go outside and get some fresh air.

#

I spent the morning digging up a client's rose bush to get to a leaking pipe. I had mud up to my knees. Mud dried on my hands on the drive back. Something smelled awful when I got home. The refrigerator stood open. The medicine cabinet was also open, Sudafed missing, Ibuprofen, two bottles of NyQuil, a small bag of lemon drops. A bottle of bleach sat overturned in the sink next to a mixing bowl. 

After retrieving the old man from the bathtub, cleaning him up, giving him a new shirt and some pants, we began the task of cleaning the kitchen. When Jasmine came home to take a nap between shifts, she discovered a large yellow stain on her sheets. But the old man had hidden himself in my bedroom closet. I found him there smoking one of Pat's cigarettes. 

So I knew that this was the last straw and the old man needed to go. I liked Jasmine more than I liked the old man. And now I didn't trust him, which tore me to pieces. Just when I'd started to feel something reconnect on my insides, I was back to square one, the fear of living out of a car in the back of my mind, the memory of getting in trouble growing up and doing drugs and not having a support system, it all came back to me at once.

"Not again," she says. "I just don't know if I can handle this again."

"It won't happen again."

"I still haven't found the stuff I'm missing."

"It's somewhere," I said.

Jasmine disappeared into her room to take inventory.

There were these mixed feelings about what to do for somebody in need. We couldn't assume the old man was really, really in need, but we had to assume that he was in need, given the brazenness of the thefts, the pilfering, the lolling, the crooked eyes, the old man's illusive, subliminal language. The bruises appearing on his lower arms, the claw marks, the sense of insecurity when he passed by a mirror, which caused him to lower his head, look away. The blood on the blanket where he slept, the smell of the air and the empty warm spot where he'd been in Pat's cold, haunted room.

#

In the night there was a kid standing in the bushes looking through the kitchen window. But there was nothing to be done. The neighbors wanted their kids to see what a drug addict looked like, what sort of house he stayed in, what our people were like. They were like their parents' spies, and they were seeing something everyone would have to see one day or another, whether in themselves or in someone else. There he was, the little balls of his muscles flexed beneath wax-paper skin, the black-and-blue teeth, yellow-tipped hair, blades of bone trying all it can to tear through the skin, elbows the size of raindrops, a nose like a strawberry. 

Late at night, after the sun fell behind Laramie, I went to the back room and stood by the window hoping for the touch on my shoulder, the shiver of breath against the skin of my neck. The big tree outside the window shook. The old man sat in the corner. He'd nodded off, arms around his knees. There was a ghostly quality about him. The air became cold. I felt the touch, was reminded of a time when my father took me out to look at ostriches. I came home with two big, shimmering eggshells. It was cold, and as I held one of the shells, something pushed me, and I dropped the eggshell and it shattered on the kitchen floor. The world was not a safe place to live, my dad used to tell me.

#

A pair of white exercising shoes were missing from my closet. So were a set of earbuds, which I keep in a little wooden box on the floor. I looked through the old man's usual hiding places, in the vents and behind garbage cans and under bushes. The old man, when he listened to his music, had the same set of earphones as usual. He'd never worn a pair of my shoes. I didn't know what to make of any of this. 

This is what happened when I talked to him:

He drew into himself.

He pulled his knees up to his chin, tucked his hands under, rubbed his cheek against his knees.

He said something.

He barely even looked at me anymore: now he reached up a hand, touched my wrist, which lay draped across my ankle.

"You can talk to me. Come on, what is it?"

He drew so far into his knees he no longer had a face. His sharp curled form was like a nest of gray hairs poking out from bony flesh. The room smelled. I understood that I no longer wanted the old man. I'd done all I could do. I couldn't stand him. We were not the same person and we never had been. He was a static object on the floor of Pat's future bedroom. The old man refused to bathe. He refused to look at me when I spoke to him. 

But I couldn't get rid of him. If I turned him out the door, he might never trust anyone again. I might not sleep at night. Worse yet, I might sleep fine.

In order to have the old man removed, I took the following items from Jasmine's room: a pink, plastic case full of mints, a pair of six-pound dumbbells, some books, three figurines from an upcoming bus stop scene, some cheap rings she'd left on the dresser. But then it came to be that I couldn't use Jasmine this way. I told her all about my plan. So she made me dump the trash out, and we rifled through all the sticky napkins and wrappers and frozen food boxes and smelly leftovers for her figurines and rings.

"My grandma gave me this one," she said.

"I didn't know."

"I can't believe you almost did this to me."

For punishment, she said, I had to throw the old man out myself. But I just didn't know how to do it. 

He looked at me occasionally, winked accidentally.

I broke down. I asked Jasmine for advice. How should I kick the guy out without feeling anything at all?

"Kick his ass out. Tell him to walk the hell away and don't come back. The degree to which you are angry will balance out any feelings of guilt. That's my experience with men."

It felt strangely mundane, the tone of our conversation. We could be talking about ways to change a flat, or what color to make the garage on her newest scene. We could be talking about fixing a toilet.

#

I decided to try one last time to save the old man:

"Have you ever gone through my things?"

No.

"I'm missing a pair of shoes. I can't find my earbuds, either."

No.

"If we had a rattlesnake under the house, would you pull it out for us?"

Yes.

"Does it make you angry when I ask you questions like this?"

No.

"Do you ever want me to shut up?"

No.

"Can I ask you something?"

Yes.

"Before you go to sleep, do you ever hear anything? Any noises? Whispers? Breathing?"

Yes.

"Of what?"

No.

"Of who?"

No. 

"I have something to say to you."

Yes.

#

I told myself as I lay awake at night that there was no point in devoting myself to an individual who either didn't want to be helped, couldn't speak correctly, couldn't hear correctly, or who had gone the long road and come out behind the rest of us, us being myself, and that had become learning tools for—I couldn't keep thinking on it. When I went to work the next day, I'd make a plan. My plan would be of ways to kick the old man out. I would do it swiftly, thoughtlessly, and Jasmine would have more respect for me.

The old man moaned something in the dark. Wind picked up. The tree was outside the window but it was too dark to make anything out beyond the lights from an apartment complex a block over. I knew there were knee-high weeds next to the road in front of Jasmine's place. Nothing had ever changed or improved.

#

When I got home, Jasmine had already kicked the old man out. He was already nearly a half-mile down the road—I could see him, just out the window. I looked out the window and watched as the old man shrank to the size of an insect.

Jasmine said, "It's not that I disagree with you bringing him in like that. That's not what this is about."

"He needed to be out of Pat's room anyway."

"You know I think you're a good person," she said.

"I think you're a good person, too."

"Do you really?"

I didn't know if Jasmine was really a good person. I'd seen her do horrible things, this the least of them. But I didn't know Jasmine, really. I knew that she wanted to sing, dance. I knew that she liked men with tattoos, she had tattoos herself, she built models in her bedroom, but I had no idea who she was, Jasmine the person, whether I ever really loved her, whether she was worth knowing, really, whether she was good for me, for Pat, for anyone.

"We need to clean the back room. It smells like—"

But I was looking out the window, trying to keep an eye on the old man.

"Hey, did you hear me?

But I was trying to keep an eye on the old man. When I lay awake, thinking of the old man out on the street again, I would remember myself, I would think of myself, myself, myself, what could I have done better? I watched him shudder, the size of a dot, and imagined his body splitting into two, becoming two old men the size of fleas, the size of cells, the size of atoms, becoming invisible, more invisible the more I looked.