Down and Out
We sat on a tombstone in St. James Episcopal Church graveyard, one
of the oldest in Philadelphia, near Sixty ninth street and Paschall Avenue.
It was the afternoon of a spring day and the grass in the cemetery was
greening up, mostly onion grass and that smell was in the air.
It mixed with the smell of beer breath and the musty clothes of Joe Bogess
and me. He had taken me as a protege of sorts and had shown
me the ways and customs of the muzzlers, the down at the heels men who
stuff circulars and flyers in your mailbox, on your wrought iron porch
railings, over your doorknobs. Sometimes the circulars ("Sale
Crest toothpaste $.69 at the Acme") didn't make it to the doorknobs and
mailboxes. Sometimes they would end up in storm sewers or at
paper recyclers where a hundredweight would get sufficient money for a
couple of beers.
But on this particular day we were sitting on the tombstone and gaunt
Joe Bogess was waiting for his son to come home from school.
The son wouldn't know it. The son and his mother, and maybe
a new husband, I don't remember, lived in a house visible from the graveyard.
It was a semi-detached row house with an enclosed front porch raised above
front garden. Not a good block for delivering circulars because
of the steps and all the ins and outs you would have to do to avoid stepping
in people's gardens. There was another son but he was away
at college. The few times we got sent to deliver circulars
in this section of the city, Joe would make sure to arrange things so he
could be in the cemetery around 3:00 - 3:30 p.m. for then he could see
his boy come home from school. The kid would walk down the
street east from Sixty-Ninth Street and into the house. Sometimes
he would walk alone, sometimes he would walk with a friend or two.
Ninety seconds, maybe two minutes if he dawdled, that's how long he was
visible to Joe from this vantage point in the graveyard. I
was always more concerned about Crandall, the supervisor who drove around
in a van checking that we'd delivered the circulars.
One time, I guess the boy stayed after school, we didn't see him come
home, so we went back to work. But on this day we did see Joe's
son come home. Though it's been fifteen years from then until
this writing of it, I remember it well because I saw Joe Bogess crying
and I felt something of his immense sadness. The kid, a boy
of 15 or 16 years walked by. He didn't resemble Joe as far
as I could see. He went in the house, on this day he had no
friends with him. I saw tears come up from Joe Bogess's eyes
which he quickly wiped away. I was going to run over to the
house, bring the boy out and introduce him to his father, but Bogess told
me not to, and I didn't.
Once in a while I have reason to go by 68th Street and Paschall.
Not much in the scene has changed. I ran across Crandall a
few years ago and he said that Joe Bogess had died. Still,
rarely do I smell onion grass that I don't think of the boy, and Joe Bogess
and me out in that cemetery.
Bogess was a tall man, rail thin. At night time if you didn't
look too closely he could appear respectable, long blue overcoat, grey
felt hat, wide brim two dimples in it worn slightly cocked.
In daylight you could see how threadbare was the overcoat, how sweat-stained
was the hat, all standing on thin shoes rockered fore and aft.
He taught me muzzling and he showed me something of the Skid Row.
He taught me something of the difference between being a friend and being
a customer, client or patient. In his own estimation Joe Bogess
was a bum, a failure in almost every realm of his life, save one.
He used to recount that at the Normandy Invasion he did not retreat, "I wasn't any hero, didn't save anybody's ass but my own, but I kept going
up that beach, didn't turn tail, didn't run." On the street
all seemed willing to confirm Joe's estimation of himself; the suspicious
looks from policeman, folks that suddenly found it necessary to walk on
the pavement on the other side of the street, even the man that gave him
five cigarettes when he had only asked for one. I knew, or
came to know while working with him, the rough outlines of his history: unremarkable
childhood, the World War II which he rated as the best part of his life,
the start of regular heavy drinking, marriage and children,
then the breakup over booze, loss of jobs and then giving it up entirely,
except for this intermittent muzzling, and settlement on Skid Row.
It was just that one season that I knew him. From February
until about June I was out of work. I had learned about the
existence of the muzzlers when I as a college student had volunteered to
work at the Diagnostic and Relocation (now Diagnostic and Rehabilitation)
Center on skid row. I knew that if you showed up about 5:00
in the morning at one of the muzzling companies and it was a busy day,
you would get sent out to deliver circulars. At the end of the day
they would pay in cash. The rate of pay was the minimum wage
for the number of hours you were out delivering minus two or three dollars.
If you worked from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. that would be $1.95 times 8 hours
= $15.40, minus $2.40 = $13:00. There were no receipts that
I remember. I do remember the older muzzlers laughed when the
paymaster reported the two dollars and forty cents went to taxes and insurance.
It was difficult to be righteous with the company about what was fair
compensation as we muzzlers took advantage at every turn of avoiding doing
the work we were sent out to do. What I didn't realize then,
Bogess did, ("We're bums, they know we're goddam skid row bums"), was that
the companies really didn't care whether we delivered the circulars or
not. Being advertising, their customers paid them for the number
of thousands of circulars delivered. The company charged their
customers for how many thousands of circulars were sent out with the muzzlers.
There often was a large discrepancy between how many circulars we got and
how many got delivered. As long as we weren't too obvious in
the ways we neglected to deliver the circulars, nobody cared.
Bogess taught me the manner in which the job was supposed to be done,
and then he taught me the way to do it. A muzzler always has
a partner. The van supervisor assigns partnerships.
Crandall gave me to Bogess. "He can cover for you when you
take your break, Bogess." Crandall was a man from the streets
and though an employee of the Parks Advertising and Distributing Company,
it was generally agreed that "Crandall's been there before" and the men
who got work liked getting assigned to Crandall's van.
"Crandall, if you got your muzzlers, load up", 6:30 a.m., six or eight
of us would load Crandall's van with bales of circulars, leaving enough
room for us to crawl in between the van roof and the bales.
We'd each be issued a satchel. Bogess got to sit in the front
seat usually because he and Crandall were friends going way back.
Off we'd go. First stop always, no matter whether we were assigned
north, south, west or northeast, was a bar at Front Street and York.
Bogess and Crandall would laugh at my abstention, "how can work unless
you've had breakfast?"
In the months I knew Bogess I saw him eat solid food only one time.
He was so weak that day that he only could carry about ten pounds of circulars
in his satchel. I got some hamburgers at a MacDonald's we had
come upon. He ate one joking "how can you eat this stuff with
nothing to wash it down?"
Crandall would drop us off with our satchels full, ordinarily 50-70
lbs. of paper, with instructions to "key off of 15th Street and 16th Street
north to the top, I'll pick you up at 11:30". Crandall would
then travel up 15th Street or 16th Street leaving off on the pavement bundles
of circulars to resupply us as we made our way north toward the 11:30 rendezvous.
Bogess would take 15th Street and I, his partner, 16th Street, and begin
north. Every house, every railing, every doorknob, extras for
each doorbell if the house was broken up into apartments. Joe
and I would "key into" each other. This means that when I would
come to a corner I would wrap left around the corner and paper the houses
on that side street. Joe Bogess would wrap to the right.
We would meet each other in the middle of that row, cross the street and
paper away from each other back towards 15th or 16th Street. In
this manner, in and out, in and out, we would progress northward covering
every building on 15th Street and 16th Street and all buildings between
those two streets.
Crandall would have other partnerships traveling along on 16th and 17th
Street, 17th and 18th Street, 18th and 19th Street and so thoroughly covering
a particular section of the city. Of course, diagonal streets,
railroad rights of way and dead ends could make the job confusing.
Crandall more than once had to go search for someone who had gotten lost
in a rabbit's warren of complicated intersections and headed off in an
uncharted direction. In order to find the errant muzzler Crandall
would follow "the paper trail" at the end of which was usually the
lost muzzler.
From time to time I would key in on a side street and paper almost all
the way down the block before meeting Joe. Crandall put me
with Bogess because he knew Bogess was sick and a young partner could compensate
for it allowing Bogess to keep up with the other teams. Sometimes
I would key in and do the whole side street, 16th to 15th and back and
not see Bogess at all. He'd always catch me a few streets up
looking refreshed and I knew he'd had the fortune to come upon a friendly
bar on his key street.
If Bogess wanted to take an hour or two off, he'd instruct me to "paper
the corners kid, I'll meet you at Hunting park in ten minutes".
This meant to put circulars only on the first two or three houses on either
side of a street corner - do not bother delivering all the way to the interior
of the street. The supervisor, unless he were very thorough
(they weren't) would notice only the houses near the corner and confidently
but wrongly assume that all houses on that street got the circulars.
Bogess would be in a bar on Hunting Park Avenue drinking beer and telling
me stories waiting for our next pick up time. The extra papers
we'd stuff in a storm sewer or throw in an abandoned house.
Sometimes if he was in the right mood, Crandall himself, would tell
us all to paper the corners. After we'd quickly completed this
task, he'd drive the still half full van to the junk man and get enough
cash from the sale to treat everyone to an hour or two at a bar.
After which we'd all return, rested, in moderately high spirits to Parks
Advertising Warehouse where the paymaster would steal two or three dollars
from our minimum wage. Except for Bogess, we thought we had
bested the company. Bogess said, "We're picking each others
pockets, but they have more pockets".
When I had worked at the Diagnostic Rehabilitation Center I was taught
to look upon these people in the tenderloin as people with problems.
And it was the job of the DRC and the folks who worked there to help solve
these problems. The problems were poverty, alcoholism, homelessness,
tuberculosis, mental illness and many others. Much discussion
focused on the problems and how to understand the problems, and their courses,
their etiology, and ways to help solve or avoid them. The men
who were clients of this social and medical service agency seemed by and
large to agree to this kind of relational framework. They had
the problem, we offered help with it. The counselors got to
define the problem and the therapies appropriate to its amelioration.
The clients got to agree with the diagnosis or disagree, comply with proffered
courses of treatment or walk. If they disagreed their arguments
did not carry the same force as that of the counselors (many of whom were
recovering from the problem) because assignment of a diagnosis in itself
degraded whatever the client had to say.
The men and women of the DRC then, through the years, and now have helped
thousands recover from the ravages of drunkenness and drug abuse.
They have gently and persistently cared for folks who had lost all care
for themselves. My point is to contrast two kinds of relationships. My
experience at the DRC prepared me to learn something that Joe Bogess started
to teach me and I have been trying to learn since that green onion
spring day when Bogess cried over the son he had abandoned.
It's about relationships and the kind that money can buy and money can't
buy. My assertion, my thesis, throughout this paper is that
Homelessness only becomes a possibility in a society that is structured
around, dominated by, and dependent upon the kinds of relationships money
can buy. Homelessness may be a consequence and result of a
large number of proximal causes and social dynamics but the condition of
its possibility comes about in our community life when we give up or are
made to give up the relationships that can't be reduced to economic exchanges
and buy what passes for their replacement.
We have accepted relationships which were characterized by mutually
accepted duties and obligations enveloped by notions of propriety, custom,
morality, embedded in ideas of family, relatives, friendships, authority
and religion that supported customary ways of making a living, reproducing,
getting along. Insofar as we are satisfied with the transformation
of personal or reciprocal use relationships into cash or commodity relationships
then we might not notice that the social world in which we live is profoundly
different than that of our ancestor's (rural Ireland, early Philadelphia)
or that of people whose social formation is much different than our own
(Tonga).
Were it just a matter of inequitable accumulation and distribution of
wealth, the matter of homelessness might be ameliorated by various kinds
of transfer payments e.g. subsidized housing, cash assistance, food vouchers,
health care and rehabilitation programs and the establishment of rights
claimed against the state for shelter, jobs, showers and sickness treatment.
If there had been an unbiased observer, someone of disinterested perspective,
an objective reporter, he would not see Joe Bogess as very distinct from
the typical client or patient of the Diagnostic-Relocation Center that
I had met and worked with on their problems. And yet I sensed
in this a difference. I was the same person and much about
Bogess was similar to other men on skid row. The difference
had something to do with our encounter. He befriended me.
He could have been a client, a patient - me a social worker or a counselor.
It wasn't an intense, or long lived friendship, but it was that and not
patient/counselor, what I'm calling cash or commodity relationships.
In the presence of tragedy, failed character and immense sadness, one kind
of relationship stands in mournful union, the other sees problems to be
solved, issues to be dealt with, and release from them at the end of the
work day. The communities in which cultural anthropologists
have lived and studied are communities often marked with a social organization
founded in kith and kin relationships: communities wherein the ordinary
activity and production of its members is accomplished within a web of
reciprocal relations. Our community, this Philadelphia place,
is a social place wherein many of our necessary, useful and productive
relationships are exchange relationships. Because of the medium
of our exchange is not loyalty, intimacy or reciprocal solidarity, I have
been calling them cash and commodity relationships. These relationships
are consequent to and generative of a way of living that has been capable
of creating great wealth but which as an integral part of its dynamic necessarily
creates a kind of impoverishment for us all that we very accurately call
Homelessness.
Joe Ferry
ex: Homeless in My Hometown
Temple University, 1986
