Ragged Company

Out of all the things I could have thought about over and over, I thought about a line from a movie.

Which one?

Casablanca. When Bogie says to Bergman, "The world don't amount to a hill of beans to two small people like us?" Remember that?

Yes. I remember. Why? 

Because that's what I think it's all about in the end. 

What? 

Well, you live, you become, and sometimes, at the end of things, maybe you feel deprived, like maybe you missed out somehow, like maybe there was more you could have -- should have -- had. You know? 

Yes. Yes, I do. 

But the thing is, at least you get to finger the beans. 

Yes. I like that -- you get to finger the beans.  

Do you ever do that? 

All the time.

Ragged People starts with this exchange between two unnamed people and I found this notion of fingering the beans to be intriguing and profound. As we meet and get to know the four main characters of the book -- the ragged people, the rounders -- the hints of their mysteries and hidden pasts promise to develop into a powerful story.

In the middle of a killer cold snap, these four homeless people decide to find warmth and shelter in a movie theater. They have the money for tickets, and despite the discomfort their presence causes, and the claustrophobia and judgement they themselves feel -- The boys were all eyeballs and Adam's apples -- they lose themselves in the dark of the theater and further lose themselves in the story they see on the screen. They return to see movies again and again, and even when the cold snap breaks, they have become such cinephiles that the four continue to see films daily, sometimes crossing paths with an uptight Square John who learns to tolerate their presence. When one of the four finds a winning lottery ticket -- worth $13.5 million -- they need the new acquaintance to help them claim the winnings and adjust to their new lives. Only through meeting the homeless group does the uptight man realise that he is just as ragged, just as spiritually homeless.

I wish that I liked movies more -- as an art form, I rarely find them illuminating, even rarely find them entertaining. But the following could just as likely have been said about the great books I read:

As I said, some stories become your blood… I couldn't sit back in my seat at all. Throughout the entire spectacle I sat leaning forward, elbows on my knees, chin cupped in my palms, crying sometimes, sighing, watching, feeling the blood moving in my veins, drinking it in, becoming it, feeling it become me. Invaded. Inhabited. Known.

And I really wanted this story to invade and inhabit me, but it didn't feel true. Richard Wagamese writes in the acknowledgements that he'd like to thank all the workers in the missions and hostels he stayed in over the years -- They showed me the way up when all I could see was down -- so I assume that he was once homeless, making me feel ill-equipped to judge, to stand back and say, "No, no, that's not what it's like". But how authentic is it to have four homeless characters who are each on the street by choice? None of them seems to want permanent housing (which is what all of us with comfortable lives are led to believe is the solution) and even when the circumstances of their lottery winnings mean they really can't live on the street any more, it's to the streets they return when any of them becomes too stressed. And while I have been scared of and yelled at by homeless people, this book seems to want to make the case that we're all just people and if we really see each other, peace and understanding will follow. This didn't feel written by a formerly homeless man.

The character of Amelia One Sky, One for the Dead, was a powerful and calming presence, and even though Wagamese is an Ojibway, I wonder if her character is too stereotyped. Like the "Magical Negro" that black people object to in films (Bagger Vance or John Coffey from The Green Mile), do Natives object to their presence in stories being reduced to drumming circles or mystical interactions with the Shadow People? This didn't feel written by a Native.

But Ragged People is powerfully written. It introduced me to these broken people, and by the time their back stories were revealed, I cared about them and was touched by the pain that had sent them to the streets. Wagamese is poetic, whether describing the bleak:

You can pull aloneness around you like an old coat sometimes and the Palace was full of coat-wearing motherfuckers.

See, the street wears people, breaks them down, but a rounder wears the street.

Or when he's describing the artistic, the sublime. His movie criticism, through the mouths of his characters, almost made me want to see these old 80s/90s movies again (almost). But one of my favourite parts was the description of Timber's carving of Dick (reduced to my favourite bit):

It's the eyes that have all the power. The eyes. They bulge somewhat in their sockets, and from the angle I'm standing at, the one I can see perfectly in profile looks full, like a bladder, a filled wet sack of life. Staring at the floor they droop, hanging like tears on the skirt of bone that's the upper edge of his cheekbones, two small fists under the skin. Unblinking. Unmoving. His eyes hold all of him.

As an aside on my own reading experience here, I thought that the names of the characters were an obvious attempt to link four elements -- One Sky for air, Digger for earth, Granite for stone, Timber for wood, with Double Dick representing a cross that links the circle of the other four together -- but just as I was wondering if it wasn't all too obvious (are these elements like the home-building materials of the Three Little Pigs?), the book describes how the original four actually represent the four points of a Medicine Wheel. So although Granite was necessary for parts of the plot, there's really no room for him within the communion of friends or their eventual fates (and James and Margot are even less necessary). One part that really worked for me was the story of Digger's time with the Ferris Wheel. It was written with such knowledge and intimacy that I believed, I lived, every word of it. This is an obvious literary gift of Wagamese: He did the same for me with hockey in Indian Horse and baseball in A Quality of Light.

Ragged Company is the selection for this year's One Book One Community events and I am looking forward to seeing Richard Wagamese read from this book in person. Hopefully any lingering questions I have can be answered at that time, for although I have very much enjoyed fingering the beans here, I'm unsure what they amount to in the end.

Here's a couple of homeless stories:

There's a used book and video store we used to go to with my in-laws, and one rainy day we decided to take a trip out there. It's in kind of a tricky place to get to and the parking is in the rear, but we parked near the door and made a dash to the store between the raindrops. When we got to the alcove that the rear door is in, we could see that there were two ragged looking men asleep up against the door, bottle of something standing up between them, and not willing to disturb them or try to walk around them, we ran, through the rain, along the side alley and to the front door. My in-laws are in their 70s, so this was no small inconvenience to them, but they are people with good hearts and the situation didn't make them upset really, but the more she thought about it, the more Granny decided that the store owner should know that there's a situation that might be costing him business. She politely pointed out that there were a couple of men asleep in the rear, blocking the door. The grey-ponytailed owner then laid in to my mother-in-law, saying "Yes, it's raining. Are you telling me you expect me to kick them -- a couple of fellow human beings -- out of the shelter they were able to find, just so you don't get wet?" It was a very nasty tirade and I'm certain this man, this store owner, felt vindicated and probably enjoys having this story to tell to his fellow right-thinking-socialist-hippy-friends about how some old lady was uncomfortable being exposed to homeless people. I haven't been back to that store -- he obviously doesn't need my money -- but it's a major contrast to the homeless people in Ragged Company. In the book, and this was one of my problems with it, the four main characters go to great pains to never inconvenience, to never even be visible, to the Square Johns.

My father's older brothers, the twins Allen and Alvin, looked way more Native than my Dad or their sister, and to some extent that may have affected the way they were treated, they way they behaved. Not able to hold down jobs, each of them became drunks by middle age, but while my uncle Alvin had his wife Patty by his side to the end of his life, Allen was divorced when I was a kid and really had no one permanent watching out for him. My mother told me once that he lived in a motel in Toronto with a series of women, spending his pension on cheap booze. His kids and their families live in Toronto so to the extent that I ever thought about him, I figured he was doing what he wanted to do. A few years ago, Mom told me that they had heard from one of my cousins that Allen had finally lost the last of his girlfriends, and not being able to handle the responsibility of paying for his motel room, was living on the streets. I was floored -- I had a homeless uncle. My Dad, not terribly close to his brothers, nonetheless offered to let him come back home to Nova Scotia and live in the apartment over their garage. Dad paid for Allen's flight and Mom set up the room comfortably and I was proud that they took responsibility for him -- I've always wondered why the families of homeless people don't just take them in -- doesn't everybody have somebody? The honeymoon didn't last long, though. Despite rules to the contrary, Allen was smoking in the room above the garage, and still being a drunk, my parents were worried that he was going to burn them down eventually. Within a few weeks, Mom was out looking for a more permanent home for Allen, and soon enough he was moved to a rooming house full of men just like him; it seemed like the best solution. There were too many rules for him at this new home, however, and it wasn't long before Allen took off. Word eventually came to my parents that my uncle was back on the streets of Toronto, and within a year, word came that he was dead. I'm sure that Allen looked like just another drunk Indian to the people who passed by him, if they even took to the time to really look at him, and it's amazing to me that he (and his twin Alvin) share my upright, Square John, Dad's dna. And it's interesting to me that, despite my objections to the idea in Ragged Company, I can only conclude that becoming homeless was a choice my uncle made. Simply offering enough shelter for everyone isn't the fix-all solution, and as foreign as it seems to me, maybe some people belong on the streets. (I'm uncomfortable even concluding that; I don't think I actually believe it.)