The Call for Something

By Stephen Thomas

At twenty-two years of age, Del Booker finds himself on the brink of adulthood. But he's still dependent on his family. He never even got his college degree. Meanwhile his friends are all at Ivy League schools while he grapples with his decision to become an artist. Eventually his sense of guilt becomes too much and, more childishly than ever, decides to run away from home.

The odyssey that follows is more than just a job-huntit is the reluctant embracing of responsibility that begins to define, for Del, what being a grown-up really means.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: May 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466935709

Stephen Thomas

I am a writer, yogi, gardener, traveler, and lover of life. I have worked in ministry, drove ambulance in LA, worked in a mental hospital, and industry (the last two are really quite similar).

Book preview

The Call for 

 Something

Stephen Thomas

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© Copyright 2012 Stephen Thomas.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

isbn: 978-1-4669-3571-6 (sc)

isbn: 978-1-4669-3570-9 (e)

Trafford rev. 05/22/2012

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Contents

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XXV.

XXVI.

XXVII.

XXVIII.

XXIX.

XXX.

To my Mother

Many thanks to

Lou Fuentes, Jeff Quincy and

Gemma Ramos

When I was a childe, I spake as a childe, I vnderstood

as a childe, I thought as a childe: but when I became

a man, I put away childish things.

i Corinthians 13:11

—

Let me say first of all that you can never read all people write, since it always starts by remembering, and remembering has as much to do with what you forget. So I’ll just start and I hope I don’t forget too much. And since I haven’t had a chance to forget it yet, let alone remember it, I guess it would be best if I began with the end; so I’ll start there and then.

Right now I’m at the subway, headed to Union Station in DC; and I’m taking inventory. It isn’t difficult. All I have is what’s in my backpack—a pen that I stole, with the name of the place that I stole it from printed on it, which I hope nobody notices; and some empty sheets of paper—I grabbed as much as I could get my hands on, but it probably won’t be enough. I have my Anthology of Rap that I carry everywhere, which my friend Connor Grunoigen gave to me. Although I don’t know if he’s still my friend. Not that I have to worry about that now though, since I’ll probably never see him again.

What else. Not much. I have no cell-phone—I never did, except for a couple of months one semester back in high school, during my second junior-year (I got held back). But then one day I went totally bananas and threw it off Key Bridge, into the river. I remember it was the one thing my dad actually praised me for—getting rid of that cell-phone. He doesn’t like cell-phones, and neither do I. I guess that’s the only thing that we have in common, my dad and I. My sister tells me he and I are so much alike, which is why we don’t get along; but I don’t see it. I don’t think we’re alike at all. Anyway I don’t like cell-phones and I realize I’m probably the only twenty-two year-old who can say that. I don’t like credit-cards either, even though I have one, but I especially hate it now since I have no job.

So that’s me: a pen that I stole and some paper; my anthology of rap and a credit-card. I have no clothes, except what’s on my back; and I have no job. I also have no home. I’m jobless and homeless.

I do have some change to make calls with. And I would like to say that I have no family; but that wouldn’t be true. I do have a family, but I disowned it. Or maybe they disowned me; I’m not sure. In either case it is a relief, since I’m starting here where I stopped having a family—where my relations with all of them ended. But in the first place, I’m probably the last person you should ask, about my family. I’m sort of the black sheep of that clan, so I shouldn’t speak for them. And in the second place, I wouldn’t have enough paper to right my relations with them all, as much as I might like to; they don’t much like me, I don’t think. So I’ll start where I got kicked out of my dad’s apartment, ending up jobless and homeless after abandoning my family and standing now at the payphone at Silver Spring politan, sweating through the only shirt I have in the hot summer air in Washington DC, wondering where to go, if there was somewhere to go from Union Station; or what to do, if there was something to do.

But I have been homeless before. It ended badly though—with me catching pneumonia and somehow ending up at the hospital, where my information was taken and my dad contacted. What I probably should have done, since I’d run away in the winter, was not buzz my hair so close. I should’ve let it grow out. But it’s a habit: I always keep my head buzzed low and tight. It’s great in the summer, but not so good when it’s cold out, which it was that time that I ran away and wound up almost dead. Therefore I should probably go to California this time, or maybe Florida, or at least somewhere hot. Although it is hot now; it’s hot as hell.

But let me tell you, in case you’re wondering what I’m running from. Because it wasn’t hell, or anything; it wasn’t bad, in the strict sense of the word. I lived in my father’s apartment. He’s retired. He took a package from the IMHE a bunch of years ago and lost all the money in investments and now he does consulting-work to pay rent on his two-bedroom in Silver Spring; he does alright. But the part that’s really bad, if you even wanna put it that way, is the part that makes me look bad—meaning my siblings. I have four of them—two brothers and two sisters. They’re all older than me. Lenin, the oldest, runs a fancy hotel in Edinburgh. You’ll have heard of it, if I mention the name. The next oldest, Lugh, works on the London stock-exchange: big money. Then there’s my oldest sister, Kali. She owns a restaurant in the British Virgin Islands. She just got a Michelin Star which is a big fat deal in the restaurant-world; she’s getting ready to open up another location in Barbados, from what I hear. Finally Brianna works for the JIS in Kingston, Jamaica. She’s the youngest, besides me; and given that I’m nine-and-a-half years younger than her, I’m pretty sure I was an accident—unplanned, I mean. Which’d be appropriate, all things considered. Unplanned: the story of my life. Del’Ante Booker: the story of an unplanned life.

At any rate, all my siblings were gone-up out of the house by the time they were eighteen, and here I am twenty-two years-old and still leeching off my dad, pretending to be some kind of artist. So whatever he said to me that morning when he kicked me out—I mean I can’t remember all the words, because of how emotional it was; but whatever he said, he’s right. Because I do sometimes get the feeling that I’m worthless—I mean I do tend to feel quite guilty sometimes, especially when I go to an audition and don’t give it everything—or even anything. When I start having thoughts about if acting is something I really want to pursue, or not. Because to be quite honest, I just sort of fell into acting by default. It was the one and only thing I was ever any good at, back in high-school. I didn’t even go to college. I didn’t even try to go. I mean I figured What’s the point. I was always such a terrible student: I was never good when it came to books.

Anyway I remember, vaguely, waking up after an epic five days of insanity, all around the Independence Day holiday, right in the middle of the summer. And all I can remember is that as soon as I woke up I re-realized all over again that this wasn’t my home—that I’d already been kicked out. I’d gotten myself into all kinds of legal trouble with the police and I’m not totally sure if my dad knew all the details or not, but if he did then you can be damn sure he didn’t want me hanging around. At this point he probably hated me almost as much as he hates the cops, which is saying a lot: my dad can’t stand the cops. He had a lot of bad experiences with them in his childhood, growing up in Jamaica. So for me to bring them to his front door was definitely not a good thing. Anyway that’s where I start remembering, is with me in the middle of a Saturday morning, in the middle of some terrible nightmare and I’ve got a nasty headache; a bar of light is coming through a curtain slat, slicing my open, and I feel like I’m bleeding from my ear. Meanwhile my dad is yelling in my other ear—what else is new—but I’d take bleeding over that, any day. And now before I know it, it’s gone to late morning and doors are banging open and all it is is yelling, yelling, yelling. And you’d think I could just take any of a million conversations I’ve had with my dad, since they were all the same anyway; but I really can’t. I mean it’s like I can’t remember a single word. And maybe that’s why they turned less into conversations and more into plain old shouting-matches, which I never won, because I’m not much of a shouter. But he’s right though. Whatever the hell he said, he is right; I’ll give him that. I’ll give him anything, if he’ll just go away and let me go back to my nightmare, which he did eventually: he went away and now it’s going on early afternoon and the bars of light are moving across the walls and now Dad has really got my attention all of a sudden, because he isn’t yelling anymore. He’s got that cold Gestapo voice like he’s already come to a decision; and when a Jamaican goes cold and starts talking quietly, that’s when you know you’ve got to worry.

I’m still asleep when he comes in and starts saying stuff and I start talking back, but I’m asleep, so I don’t know what the hell I’m saying. We must have come to some sort of agreement though, because the next thing I realize I’m nodding like a madman and saying Yes to everything, just to get him out of the room. And the reason for that is that I start remembering. All the last couple of days are coming back to me and I’m thinking Holy crap, that wasn’t just a nightmare; and maybe he sees it on my face or something, because then he says he’s going to buy the paper I think, which is when I remember—the paper. I hear the jingle of keys and all the locks on the door cackling and snitching and all I can think is the paper, the paper. So I get up, kind of—I’m still kind of sore and I have a headache like you’d never believe, but I’m not dizzy now at least—and I feel under my mattress and sure enough there’s all those papers there. And I just can’t help myself: I go back to reading—studying. Making sure my confession, or my statement or testimony or whatever you want to call it, isn’t too incriminating. I look at the papers, and weather, the humidity or the heat, had already made some pages yellow; or maybe I’m just not used to the light this time of day; but one sheet still has the red stains on it and god knows if that’s the blood, or maybe it’s the wine; but either way it’s all coming back to me and that means Everything is true and god, I’m such a bastard, and How much does my dad know, and Maybe that’s why he left, is because he knows. And you really shouldn’t be here. He’s giving you the chance to get out before he calls the cops. Not that he would call the cops—would he? No, he hates the police—which is exactly why he wants you to get out. Get the hell out of his life and don’t drag him into all this mess. It’s my problem and I’ve gotta go. So I grab all the papers and crap and shove them all together and I figure I’ll just figure it all out later, somewhere else, like preferably somewhere safe and as far the hell away as I can get, which is probably why I pick up the phone to call Vic; but while I’m dialing, something feels wrong—which is when I remember that You can’t call him anymore; his phone is dead now. I’d forgotten that. So get some more paper since you’re always running out of it; grab some paper and get out. So I did. I grabbed some empty paper; and I left.

I.

What people don’t seem to realize about homelessness and joblessness is that being homeless is a job. If you’d only take a minute to observe, you’d see what I’m talking about. All those homeless people begging for change—they’re all at work. They’re all on the job. They’re not just sitting around, hoping for a windfall; they’re working. You can see how they each practice different techniques. Some have the one with the mantra, calling out the same phrase over and over, making their general announcement for change. Others have a card with all their credentials written down—the war they fought in and how many children they have and what their qualifications are—whether they’ll work for food or for money or what have you. Then you’ve got the ones who bring their work with them—they come out with an ear-bud in one ear, singing along to Sweet Honey in the Rock or Marvin Gaye, with a cup down at their feet for donations. Or else the ones who pretend they aren’t homeless—the ones who rotate their locations—usually standing outside a 7-11 or a CVS and asking for a very specific amount of change, like thirty-five cents, which, given most people, if they’re willing to spare anything, will usually give up a dollar. Then there’re the ones who come right out and give a story. They approach you in the parking lot with their pants creased and their shirts ironed and they say they left their wallet at home and just need enough gas-money to get back—if you could just spare a couple of bucks. And finally there’re the ones who just sit there with a big cup in front of them, waiting. They don’t say anything; they know that you know. They sit outside a spot where you just got done buying some crap that you don’t need and that you’ll feel guilty about buying and so toss some coins in their direction. And I’ve talked to some of them. I’ve talked to many, actually. I remember one—he was a big fat guy who always had sweatpants on, always in the same spot and you could see him every single day, his pockets bulging with change. And he told me that he owned an apartment in southwest, a pretty cheap efficiency; and that on a good day he could haul in over a hundred dollars just sitting, not even begging, just sitting with a big plastic cup in front of him. I mean he didn’t have a sign, or even sing or anything; he just sat there with his plastic cup. He told me that he had a whole host of regular clientele, who could always be relied on to drop a few dollars in his palm. He told me that it was all about how you present yourself. So all I’m saying is that these homeless people aren’t just sitting around; they’re like any working person: they’re figuring out what they’ve gotta do.

Of course there are the ones that you can just tell. Their faces are sagged and drooped and their eyes are wide and hollow. They look old, but at the same time they look like little children. I mean if you look just in their eyes, they look like kids. They somehow look really young and really old at the same time. They’re all wrinkled and saggy and usually some part of their body isn’t working right, besides their face, so that they limp around or have some kind of nervous tic that makes them look freakish—and they know they look freakish, but they can’t help it; they keep scratching their neck or else rubbing their arm in some kind of freakish way. And with those people, you know they didn’t actually plan on being homeless, but that their homelessness just happened while they were busy pursuing something else. Probably heroin, from the looks of it; but then again, you never know. All you know is that they’re hell-bent on one destructive thing in life—one thing that destroys their sense of how to look normal. And I’m not here to judge; I wouldn’t know; but I have actually had some experience with various drugs. I mean I’ll confess that I’ve done just about everything. I drew the line at heroin, though. I snorted it once, by accident, which, I know enough to know that snorting it doesn’t count—but I can tell enough to know that with certain people, when you look into their eyes, that unlike you they know what their life is all about. And even though that’s sad in certain ways, in other ways it isn’t sad at all. All that’s sad is that you get sad, when you see it. All that’s sad is your perception. Because with those people, if you put a mirror right up to their face and showed them what they looked like, they wouldn’t be surprised. They wouldn’t even care. Most of us would be horrified if who we really are came to the surface. We’d wonder what the rock we were about. But not them. They know what they’re about. And they’d trade all the misery of their lives with the highs they’ve experienced and they wouldn’t change a thing. Which makes sense if you think about it, since at the end of the day, any life is just an experience.

And not that I wanted to have a homeless experience. But if it came to it I could show you things. For instance, I could show you where the Indian guys outside of Indique dump their naan at the end of a slow day; or close by where you can sleep under the bridge north of Taft, where the road by Rock Creek is abandoned. I could show you bus-shelters that tend not to get crowded, where you could spend a night out of the rain. And I can find plenty of busy places where other folks don’t come to beg. I can find all sorts of park-benches that are nice and smoothed-out for you to sleep on. I can even find spots where you can shower for free, if you don’t go there on the frequent—and that’s the whole key to being homeless: it’s all about knowing when to be visible, and when not to be. In other words, being homeless is all about knowing when to move on versus when you’ve found a good place to stay. So it isn’t any different from any other walk of life. It’s a big challenge, is what I’m saying. It doesn’t come easy and it takes work. And so I guess I was trying to explain all that to Sybil Osier, when I called her up from the metro-station at Silver Spring. I’d originally been hoping that she would let me crash at her place—even though I wasn’t sure where her place was, at that point, since it was summertime. She could’ve either been up at school, taking classes, or somewhere in the DC-area; but either way I’d hoped she’d put me up on her floor or something, for a couple of nights.

Sybil and I had known each other since high-school. She was two years younger than me, but she had skipped a grade, so now she was going into her junior year in college, in Connecticut. I’d actually visited her once. I crashed at her dorm. I guess some people thought we were going together; but we weren’t. Although for a while I confess that even I wasn’t sure. Because sometimes it seemed like we were going together; but then Sybil is a pretty inscrutable character. She was kind of a genius, if it comes to that. Come to think of it, all my friends were geniuses. They all went to Ivy League schools, for one thing—although I’m not sure if Cambridge is an Ivy League school, but I do know it’s a damn-good school. That’s where Connor goes, is to Cambridge. His girlfriend, Mae—my friend—is at Columbia. Anyway. Sybil and I had been good friends since early high-school and for whatever reason her family had sort of adopted me. I mean next to the Grunoigens, the Osiers were like my surrogate family. Not that Sybil and I were like siblings. Mae and I were more like siblings; but Sybil and I, we had actually made out, on a couple of occasions. Although we’d never had sex. At any rate Sybil went to this great university up in New Haven, Connecticut, and I was hoping that she’d be up there and up to letting me crash. New Haven was close enough to New York that I’d be able to commute, and check things out in Manhattan, and possibly get my feet wet and eventually move into the city. So that was my idea, at least—was for Sybil to put me up; but before I even had a chance to broach the subject, we got into this whole inane discussion that was very pointless and annoying.

Rush-hour had come in. It was maybe five o’clock in the evening and I remember feeling the sweat between the phone and my ear and my shirt sagging from the moisture in the air and hearing the loud obnoxious voices on the subway-system’s PA, telling us to look out for any suspicious items or activity and me wishing that the phone-booth at least had a door that you could close—but that was wishful thinking. If you’ve ever taken the DC metro or used one of their public phones you’ll know what I’m talking about. Because the phone-booths don’t even have a whole wall, let alone a door to close—the so-called walls, as I put it, only come down halfway: they cover your upper half, but leave your legs exposed. Anyway it was rush-hour and I could see the legs and feet of people walking past me in all directions and I looked down at my arm and noticed that I’d gotten a tan, just walking to the metro. My dad’s black, but my mom was from Inverness—she’s white—so I’m only half-black and very light-skinned and I tan quite easily. Anyway. I’m standing there rubbing my head, which I do quite frequently after I’ve buzzed it, and Sybil and I are getting more and more involved in this inane conversation.

How’d that audition go, she eventually asked. She meant some audition for some play. But you never could tell if she was asking, or what the hell. She has this deep, resonant voice, which is very sexy for a girl, but which doesn’t go up at the end of her questions—like as if she already knows the answer, or like she’s bored, or something.

The audition, I said. Oh yeah, the audition. I didn’t tell you? I didn’t. I mean it wasn’t. I mean you haven’t answered any of my emails. How come?

And then we got engaged. Because with Sybil, you’ve gotta touch a nerve quick, or else she goes dead with boredom. So luckily, I got a nerve. "Look Del I don’t have time to answer every single one of your emails, especially when I don’t even know what they mean, when I’ve got things that I know the meaning of, and that are important, that also require my attention. And what do you mean, it wasn’t."

Yeah that’s a really good question, I said. Not that I knew what she was talking about.

So what do you mean, she asked.

Okay well I’m not totally sure what you’re referring to, but if it’s about my conversation with your mother—

"No it’s not about your conversation with my mother. What do you mean that your audition wasn’t."

"Oh that. Well, strange as it would seem, it was actually because of your mom that I didn’t go."

You didn’t go, she said, and then she repeated it, kind of sarcastic and defeated. Ya didn’t go. Yup. I shoulda known. And then I heard the crinkling of plastic and paper, which meant that she was reaching for her weed. I could even see her, leaning back to the coffee-table and grabbing that ashtray. And probably she had that sweater-robe thing on, even though it was summer, because she always kept whatever room she was in at minus-twenty-eight degrees, or thereabouts. So I heard the papers crinkling. "And you talked with my mother. And not that I even need to ask; but how, exactly, was it her fault that you didn’t go."

"Not that it was her fault. I wouldn’t say that. It’s just that we got into a very detailed conversation. A very philosophical conversation." I was trying to keep her engaged.

But I was losing her again. Mm, she said. She was starting to fade; she was bored. But you could often count on a quick rebound, when chats about her mother were involved; so I banked on that; and sure enough, "And what did you take away from your little tête-à-tête, with Mother."

Well it was hard keeping up. But I would say the main thrust of her discourse, if you will, was that Life, so to speak, is pointless.

No, she said patiently, with her eyes closed, which I could just tell. I could hear the boredom just oozing through the phone. But Sybil was trying; you had to give her that. No. And by that point the joint would be unlit between her two fingers, and she’d be propping up her head by the