Last week, I had to fly to Texas for a funeral. While there, I visited the Alamo, and the historic Menger Hotel where Teddy Roosevelt recruited his Rough Riders. But despite all the history of this great city, the best thing that happened to me was hanging out with a couple street people who clean rooms at a cheaper hotel I downsized to. They get 3 bucks per room. They sleep beneath a stairwell.

I first met Sam with soap on my face, dripping wet from the bath. Uncharacteristically, I’d left the “Do not Disturb” card off the door.
Sam was all apologies. I apologized him back. No need to make up the room, I was fixed for towels.
I got dressed, hid my computer under the mattress, put a few hundred bucks in cash I’d brought into my raincoat, and left the room to catch a bus, wherever that was. The front desk clerk was occupied.

A woman and her baby were reporting that someone had stolen a thousand bucks in cash from her room. It was lying out, she said, and when she got back, it was gone. Made me happy I’d hidden my computer and packed everything else worth a buck.

Sam was cleaning a room downstairs, so I asked him where to catch a bus to the nearest Goodwill Store to buy some Texas related shirts or other swag. He and the girl he called his wife gave me directions and said they’d be going down there and we might run into each other.

Back in the room to grab my IPod and earphones, I decided to ask if they’d show me the way. “So,” I said, “the clerk was talking about a thousand missing bucks.”
“This is 216,” Sam told his wife. “We got a guy in 218 we don’t know his name, he lives there, we don’t ask, we just call him 218, so we’ll call you 216.”

His wife launched into it. They wouldn’t steal. They were homeless, but they wouldn’t steal, and if they did, they wouldn’t be standing around a block away waiting for the bus. She threw her arms around expansively and had the tone of a meth tweaker. I’m not easily convinced, but they clearly weren’t the perps.  

I judged them the salt of the earth, my term for junkies and welfare subsistents. But they were proud to be homeless and not helping the rich get richer in any direct manner. They were both veterans, both had problems, he had cancer, and she’d done more than her quota of street drugs.

“We got all this,” she said, waving her arms around, “and God provides” testifying to incidents when a few bucks came their way after trusting to Him.

 I’ll believe anything, so I swallowed their simple faith in things easily. They toil not, neither do they reap, I figured, living the life Christ said works.
I would find out they do toil, and they do reap, and not only cleaning rooms or their sleeping niche, but the meaner streets of San Antonio. But while we waited for the overdue bus, 218 showed up.
“Hey, 218 meet 216. I told him I don’t know your name, so I just call you 218.”

218 was riding a bike to some appointment at a hospital, but he had time for Sam and his wife. He had a wide smile and fit in with their mystic views, and touched on how the light like the sun is still there behind any clouds, and our temporal, brief lives being fine. They shared a narrative, these three.  “Butterflies live only a short time, and it’s good,” he said.
“I like seeing them butterflies on their way to Mexico and back up north to where 216 (me) lives,” she said.

Once downtown, we walked along, with more and more street people, most of whom Sam patted, fist bumped, shook hands and talked to. And then Peto, white framed sunglasses, and suspicious eyes my direction.

“Who’s he?” He didn’t hear me say I was a cop. I’m so funny, I kill myself.  Sam says for us to go on, he’s got some business to attend to, so we walked along, and at one point crossed the street to avoid potential trouble of the Debo kind.

“You know about Deboing, you got to know about Deboing. These kids come up and whatever they want, they say, ‘that’s mine,’ and grab it and most people just let it go. I hate that shit, but these kids they figure they take what they want. These streets are everybody’s, white people too, and these kids don’t own them, ain’t supposed to anyway.”
And then Sam was back. Wearing the white sunglasses.

“He Deboed my cousin out of them, and I told him he had to give them back. I used to run these streets from when I was 13, before I went into the Army. I had an army of my own, street kids all I had to do was to whistle, the marks would be surrounded and give up whatever I wanted them to.”  

She told me Sam weighed 240 pounds when she first met him. Now he’s down to around 150. Cancer. Still, he looks healthy.
“He’s Native,” she said, “He won’t take none of that stuff for the cancer. He just stays pure, does good all day long and trusts everything will be right.”

We browsed the Goodwill store and I bought a polyester woman’s blouse with skulls all over it, a Texas soccer shirt, and a NASCAR inaugural Texas raceway shirt ten years old and still in great shape. Total price 10 bucks.

Walking back, he sees Peto again and trades the glasses back for a pair his wife could wear, trusting Peto would give the white ones back to his cousin. He gave cigarettes away to several kids, a few hostile and uncommunicative with facial tats to match.

We got some Mexican food at an old café. While Sam used the café restroom, his wife told me he’d won her heart telling a story in Lakota language about the Crow and the Rabbit being separated by death, but reunited as animals that could fly.

“I don’t know the language, but it still made me feel great,” she said, and she asked him to tell the story in English. “And say some in Native for him Sam” which he did, and it was good.

 Instead of leaving me on a pretty rough corner, prime Deboing territory, they walked me to a better bus stop. They were tired. Explaining themselves, the streets, their past and present worldviews, their progress, the ethical life, it was hard for me, and I mostly just listened. We shook hands, hugs, and they were ready to go. They have a schedule, a timetable just like the straights.

“We aren’t much for partying. We’ll hang by a fountain for a while, go over to our spot, grab our blankets and turn in early. You’ll be all right here. We didn’t want to leave you on Market St.”

“When you got the key to the city like Sam, you run the streets,” she had said. “Show him.” Sam fumbled around through his pockets. He had layers of paper between his money and anybody who might want it but finally found the key. “I thought you’d lost it,” she said, grinning. He looked back at her as if to say, as if.
He held out a small propeller piece of metal.

“It’s a key to all the water faucets they don’t let us use. It’s like the bathrooms they don’t let us to use. They got a building downtown that would put us all up inside, but you think they’d do that?  Better to be empty,” she said, “but we’re okay, we’re better than that.”

The bus was late, but I got home to the motel, took a nap, and decided to go out again for souvenirs. Got a Tony Lama horsehair belt for my wife. Got a shot glass with the Alamo, “Freedom isn’t Free,” schlock patriotism.  I can be patriotic, don’t get me wrong, but the kind of patriotism that led Sam and his wife out of poverty and back again, and the nationalism that chews up the underclasses and spits them out, not so much.

 I walked for miles, and waited again for the bus, later than the last time. Smoked a cigar, got dizzy from the tobacco and diesel fumes from the buses that I stopped counting. Watched families and couples in horse drawn carriages like those transformed for Cinderella from pumpkins. Pitied the horses, but some of them weren’t yet worn out. Like Sam and his wife, not worn out, but worn.  

Time on the street changes. You watch the good and the bad and the ugly.

 At Coyote Ugly bar, the girls strut on the bar in cowboy boots, denim shorts as brief as panties, midriffs, legs, arms tattooed in the best modern way, some as crude as blue prison tats, some for a time colorful, well drawn. You watch and choke down a cheap yellow beer and go home, to your room, or house.

You’re more wary, being on the street, putting on various masks, fierce, smiling confidant, walking around trouble every time you sense it. So why did I trust Sam? I’m not always the best judge of character, but when I know, I know.

In India, Sam might be recognized for what he is. A holy man.
Like the Preacher says in Grapes of Wrath, there ain’t no good or bad, just things people do. That’s an overstatement, of course. There is good and bad, and Sam’s been both and worked both ends against the middle.

“When I was thirteen, I used to make people give up their billfolds. I’d take the money, and give them everything back but their driver’s licenses, and tell them they better not report it, I knew where they lived. Awful. But I’d go right out and mail it back to them.” After the army, he worked as a crane operator, but the cancer weakened him so he couldn’t hold up his arms like you have to.

He’s worked both ends against the middle, but he wised up and wises up others. He’s an object lesson in why the death penalty is a rotten, atavistic, useless institution unfit for an ethical society. It’s a dumb law because guys like Sam and even murderers can do society a solid. Like many murderers we incarcerate but then steer younger inmates to rehabilitation, he’s found redemption and spreads it. Who knows but he’s saved some of us from their murderous impulses.

 He knows how to preach to the street. He has what I saw on a tomb in Ireland, “improving conversation.” He stares at death and the world of souls and materiality with what another saint, Dorothy Day (founder of the radical Catholic Worker paper and movement to help underprivileged people) called precarity.  He cultivates, not entirely by choice, nor not entirely not by choice, not poverty, but for better or worse, a precarious existence. He plants seeds in the lost and wandering. He keeps the faith with them. He steers, and doesn’t drift.

A decent society should pay him both respect and enough money to continue as long as he can. He certainly has skin in the game of our world. It’s brown, worn but open and proud. But we can’t afford compassion.

We’d have to see his humanity and understand society’s responsibilities for the degradation he’s overcome. That kind of understanding is costly, but he’d say it can’t be bought.

 I’d say it can’t be commodified. Like salt, he can purify and season, but he works with souls, not flesh. He shines.

And we have such people in Duluth as well. Step to the side and picture them.