I hung out with a friend on Friday, a friend who is going through it right now.
I didn’t know he was going through it, the last time we hung out, about six weeks ago. He told me he was fine, he was staying at this Airbnb, and when that ended, he was going to find an apartment, going to start this job his brother had lined up for him.
What actually happened, was two days after that, he ran out of money for the Airbnb. The job fell through. He, with nothing but his laptop and a pack of clothes on his back, ended up at the Sawmill, which is this terrible dive bar in Schenectady, where we’ve all found ourselves too many times.
He ran into Albert, an older guy, who took one look at my friend, with his expensive laptop in the shittiest bar in town, and realized that there was a story there. He asked my friend to come over, to tell it to him.
My friend has been living with Albert for the last six weeks. We — my friend and I — kept in distant touch over that time — I ascertained that my friend was living in an apartment out in rural Schenectady county. Figured he was renting it. Figured he needed a break from the city life. Had no idea my friend was broke, living with a man who had taken pity on him at a bar.
My friend is a veteran. He joined up at 17, didn’t quite know what he was getting himself into, but figured he’d do what everyone in his family has done. Now he’s an anarcho-communist. He’s worked in politics for the last decade, trying to get left candidates elected across the country.
But politics didn’t treat him right, and he left. And now he’s homeless, trying to figure out his next move.
When I showed up that night, my friend and Albert were drinking beer in Albert’s garage. It was heated by wood stove and uncomfortably hot in there, but I didn’t mind it. It was a welcome change from the chill of the autumn night. My friend greeted me with a brief hug and a brotherly slap on the back, and we went out to smoke. He told me how bad things were. He went from a pretty intense political job that paid decently to working as a caretaker for autistic adults. His ex wanted to get back together, but none of the problems that broke them up in the first place had been fixed. He’s scared of her lack of commitment.
I could tell he felt shitty about it.
My friend feels shitty about a lot of things, these days.
My friend warned me about Albert — warned me that we were not on the same side of the aisle as him, politically. But he told me that Albert was essentially a good guy, had a heart of gold. Was a millwright, and a union member. Albert builds electric turbines. He does the kind of hard manual labor that made General Electric rich. That, well, continues to make GE rich; the kind of work that used to make the people who lived in Schenectady enjoy a decent living.
We go inside, sit at the round wooden table in the center of the garage. Albert drinks his beer and gazes at my friend, who stares at the cigarette in his hand, eyes vacant.
“Found him at the Sawmill,” Albert tells me, a note of pride in his voice. “I knew there was a story there. Brought him home.”
“That’s right, you did, Albert,” my friend says, tapping his cigarette into the crystal ashtray. His eyes are still fixed on the cigarette.
“I’m an old man,” says Albert. “I don’t ask for much. Just a nice person to come home to.”
Albert is a closeted gay man, my friend told me when we were smoking outside. My eyes narrow when Albert admits that he wants to hug my friend, that he’d love to give him a little kiss now and again — but they both say, at nearly the same time, that my friend is straight; that it’s never gonna happen.
I ask my friend, later, if there’s anything I need to do, here. If I need to rescue him from a predatory situation, but my friend just laughs. “He’s just a lonely old man, and he knows if he tried anything with me, I’d kill him,” my friend tells me, which settles that.
“Tell her about how you lost your union pension, Albert,” my friend says.
“You did?” I ask.
“Yeah,” says Albert. He takes his baseball cap off, rubs his head.
“Thirty years, he worked for the Teamsters,” says my friend, voice full of barely constrained rage.
“That’s fucked up,” I offer.
Later, when we’re driving to the Sawmill, I tell Albert that my boyfriend, Alex, works for the state, in a call center. That he’s even represented by a public sector union.
Albert laughs. “That’s not working with his hands, though!” I watch him shake his head scornfully in the rearview mirror.
Albert takes no pride in the union he belongs to. He takes plenty of pride in the work he does. But the union? It’s “a ponzi scheme,” he tells me.
“If there’s no one paying into it at the bottom, if the young guys aren’t paying into the retirement, there’s nothing for us who have been there for years,” he says.
I wish he’d connect the dots. It isn’t the union leadership — or maybe it is — but what could they really do, in the face of a deeply entrenched cultural red scare that destroyed Americans’ faith in organized labor?
Albert — conservative curmudgeon that he is — is at once the cure for and the cause of his malaise. He and his fellow workers built this country, with their bare hands. We are living off the fruit of their labors. But maybe if he and people like him had voted for candidates who would protect workers’ rights to organize, to advocate for themselves, rather than candidates who gave bosses everything they wanted on silver platters — but I know that’s stupid. Because which Democrat in the last thirty years really did anything to protect working people? Which Democrat, in upstate New York, really worked to prevent GE from selling the jobs of Albert’s friends and neighbors overseas? Why should Albert feel enthusiastic about voting for Joseph Biden, who my friend helpfully reminds Albert, voted for NAFTA?
We ask Albert why he loves Trump so much.
“Because he does what he promised to do! None of the other asshole politicians are that honest.”
“What about Bernie Sanders?”
Albert makes a face like he’s about to throw up.
“He’s a socialist!” Albert says, outraged.
“But he says what he’s going to do, right? He’s honest about wanting socialism, at least,” I point out. I figure if I can get him to say one good thing about Bernie, maybe we have somewhere to go from there.
“He’s not honest!” says Albert, spitting mad. “He’s a socialist!”
Albert and my friend tell me about the men Albert had picked up before, men who stayed with Albert before my friend showed up; men who Albert had given free lodging to in exchange for simple affection.
“They were dirty crackheads,” Albert says. I gather that they used and abused Albert, though I’m not quite sure on the details.
“If they ever came back here, I’d kill them,” says my friend, and he’s dead serious as he says this, with that intensity in his eyes that has always scared me. “No one will ever disrespect you around me, okay, Albert? No one will ever disrespect you in front of me.”
I sometimes wonder about my friend.
We arrive at the Sawmill — yes, we wear our masks, even Albert, who pulls a blue kerchief over his nose and mouth. I wonder at his lack of a proper mask in October, this far into the pandemic. I wonder if it’s out of a steadfast refusal to confront the reality of what social distancing entails. But maybe he just prefers to tie a kerchief, I tell myself.
We don’t stay long.
It doesn’t take long for my friend to nearly start a fight — doesn’t take long for him to get up in the face of a gangly college student who mentions he’s from a small town in Westchester. That town, you see, is where the suburbanites live. It’s full of rich, white assholes. This kid must be one of them.
I pull my friend away, assure the bartender we’re leaving, pile my guests back into my car.
“He didn’t ask to be rich, you know,” I scold my friend, as we drive uptown, so we can hit the only drive-thru still open. “He didn’t ask to be from Westchester.”
“And I didn’t ask to be poor,” my friend tells me.
I’ve got nothing for that.
Albert is a heartbreak of a man. My friend is half his age, is loaded with talent and potential, and probably will end up — this is the glass half full side of me speaking, — very happy, in his life, once he deals with his anger issues. But there’s always a chance that my friend will end up bitter and alone, grasping for affection anywhere he can get it. I’m terrified of that future for him.
I’m starting Jaya Time back up, folks. I took a longish hiatus to work on a media startup, Them & Us Media, but T&U needs to reevaluate the direction it’s going in, and I, personally, need to reevaluate my need to work a ton for free. I’m so happy to be back. Writing this week’s missive was a cathartic, strange, lovely experience.
I’ll see you guys next week.
Good to have this back! This was rather touching too and has left me moved but very confused and saddened
Ahhhhhh the saw mill the hole in the wall that has been home to many of Schenectady’s downtrodden and recluse. If it weren’t for Covid I’d be there now 😁