Shingles and the Street

In Austin, Texas, it costs at least $40 per day to stay in a clean hotel room in a safe neighborhood where it's easy to score reefer and crack. Liquor stores nearby are of the small variety with as many pints as fifths. The hotel rooms echo, but they have a bed, shower, toilet, telephone and some furniture. The sparseness of the sound is what makes the place scary.

Coming inside after living on the street or in a barn or where your senses constantly are stimulated takes courage. Desensitizing what makes one feel alive is slow death, a kind of decay by disorientation.

That is what my friend who I have been writing about is experiencing. About 10 days ago he was evicted from the property he thought would be a stable place to live. It wasn't. The person who told him to come hadn't paid the electric bill for a long time. There was no juice for anything, and also no water. So the toilets didn't replenish. He wasn't too sad about having to leave. He would have stayed, but the landlord wanted everybody out. Wanted just to clear everybody out.

That Monday my friend was diagnosed with shingles. That Wednesday he had no place to live. So he stored his trailor, gathered up his Futon mattress and hit the street looking for a place to lay his head and ride out the awful pain. He couldn't afford the three prescriptions given to him by the hospital doctor. One would have cost $100. The other two maybe $50 each. So he bought a bottle of brandy and found that $40 per night hotel room. It was weird hearing his voice echo in the room when we talked on the phone.

The room did not have a tub, making it impossible to soak his now-raging case of shingles, which bloomed on his belly right at the belt buckle and on his back at the waist. It was too painful to wear pants. Anyone who has had shingles or has seen anyone with the disease will never forget it. Gritting teeth through the pain and moans of misery remind that one is no longer young. This is, as my friend called it, "an old person's disease. I'm now officially old," he said. He is toothless and 55.

He managed enough social security dollars to pay for a week at the hotel, and watched TV, something he has not seen for a long time, except for occasionally in a store. The programs, he said, lacked good stories. They didn't make him feel good. He wanted to feel better.

He went out every day, played his flute on the street for as long as he could stand the belt buckle on his shingles, made a little money then went back to his room in excruciating pain.

Today he is out on the street again. No more money for a hotel room; no word from his social worker with possibilities; only potential relief in the bushes where a guy he trusts lives and might be willing to let him stay for a while. But he doesn't want to give that friend shingles. Last night he was hoping other friends would allow him to stay in their barn, a garage-like place without hay. Just a floor on which to lay his Futon, remove his belt and relieve some of the pain.

Here in Wisconsin it is pouring rain in the small city in which I am planted for now. Unemployment here is down almost two notches to about 17 percent. We're all just hanging on.