2 Mormons 1 Bum

Truth Shopping in
Pre-Post-Apocalyptic America

Last month, while our government entered into its fifth consecutive year of 110% commitment to the egregious fucking up of shit in the Middle East (as well as doing a bang up job on the home front), I went home to Louisville last Easter weekend to mourn the death of my grandmother, Velma Louise "Weezy" Staggs, who, while sleeping in her hospital bed at the Meadowview Nursing & Convalescent Center, passed away at 10:14 on a wet and frigid Saturday morning. She was 86 years old.

While Weezy & I weren't especially close (although she did regularly send me second-hand copies of our mutual favorite of the checkout-lane literary spectrum, The National Enquirer), her death was more than enough to trigger the kind of hellish, it's-always-three o'clock-in-the-morning-of-the-soul-kind of introspection already common to pale, pasty, twenty-something types like myself. And I thought I was totally desensitized after watching Videodrome; here I discovered, face to face with the gaping maw of human mortality, I wasn't coping as well I should be.

Without getting too Deepak Chopra on you, how does one ultimately find meaning in 21st century, post-whathaveyou America? Tip of the iceberg: Remember when Friends was going off the air and you knew someone who was, on some level or another, disturbingly concerned about whether Ross & Rachael would finally get together? Or when Hans Blix & Co. found virtually nothing under the sands of Iraq but more sand and still we continued charging to the national credit card more bombs, more troops, more blood? Or how about the fact that more people in our nation have voted for Taylor Fucking Hicks than their formerly coke-addicted, Christ-tard fraud of an American President?

How do we - as youngish Americans born unto Reagan era profluence and greed, weened on vapid infotainment and technological luxury during the Clinton years, and repulsed in our nascent hyper-aware adulthood by the inevitable rise of soulless, quasi-fascist corporate empire courtesy of Bush II - hope to extract one grain, hope to collect one tiny quark of genuine purpose from an often disingenuous American life?

Perhaps more importantly, how can I hope to do the same? As an overanalytical contrarian nerd whose atheistic tendencies and unabashed anti-Americanism already serve to alienate himself from whatever forms of false comfort otherwise afforded viz. the dry rot of current politico-spiritual conventions... well, what can I do? Join the Army, find Jesus/Allah/Xenu, or all of the above? Maybe I could stitch nifty, animal-cruelty-free booties for the malnourished children of Whatopia? Live each day like the shiny happy people in a workplace motivational poster?

It's a valid question to ask one's self, especially in lieu of a massive, potentially historic presidential election just months away; as our country dusts off the national microscope and pretends to examine our own cancerous cells, united by fear and panic and consumption, ask out to the great aether: who are we?... what do we believe?... how can we not get fucked so badly again, oh my Lawdy?... is Obama a terrorist Muslim sleeper agent sent straight from the bowels of Arab Hell? Say it ain't so!!!!...

Heavy solipsisms, to be sure; fueling a restless amble through Cherokee Park and, subsequently, Bardstown Road in search of meaning, an answer...

...........................................................................................................................................................................

... or the new Kanye West album(!).

Yes, friends, I admit it to be true: Unlike our President, I do indeed care about black people.

As the soft, warm neon sign of Ear-X-Tacy came into sight I knew that my salvation, however fleeting, had been staring me in the face right from the very beginning, my answer and meaning neatly prepackaged in a layer of majestic cellophane. And why not? Acts of commercial consumption often serve to assuage any immediate sense of metaphysical desperation inherent within our society. Vapid, culturally-ingrained malaises are, by their very nature, as temporary and as disposable as are their supposed cures (see: embarrassing domestic squalor v. Clorox, Febreze; physical imperfection v. Tai-Bo, Botox, Viagra; feelings of inadequacy v. Miller Lite, Corvette; et al.) and it's quite natural these days to confuse them with real problems and their hard-earned solutions.

But could they not only relieve the woes of one man, a la schizophrenic Green Party ethos, and bestow upon the end-user a much broader purchase? Perhaps one of social responsibility that's all the rage right now? Me, in my little bubble of woe-is-me-grief, mustering the wherewithal to support a local business (did you hear that, conscience? I said 'LOCAL'!), greasing the gears of industry with my depreciating currency, but what's more, I'll purchase a used CD, one that has already been manufactured and, hence, recycled, which therefore reduces both my carbon footprint upon this dear, sweet mother earth of ours as well as my level of anxiety about living in it. A win-win, and oh! how my heart would rise... But for the grace of Starbucks-drinking hippies in hybrid SUVs, there go I... (Book of Douche, ch. 4, v. 69)

As firm as my economically-enlightened convictions seemed, I wasn't even fifty paces from the pearly plexiglas gates before my hopes, much like those of this country, were shattered by a fucking bum.

...........................................................................................................................................................................


By my estimation Warren Young, Jr., of Louisville, Kentucky's West End slumzone, has never been elected President of the United States of America.

Dressed in ratty, mysteriously stained jeans, dilapidating Converse All-Stars, dingy Army fatigues, and a floppy-eared lumberjack's cap, Mr. Young, 41, is what you and I would refer to, commonly, as a bum. A street person. Dreg of society. Whatever you'd like to call him, he was standing between me and my cellophane grail. As I made my final approach, I did my best to pretend like he wasn't even there.

" 'Scuse me, sir..." he slurred, then ,"Sir! S'cuse me!", straining his voice into a wet bark that rose above the traffic. "Now, I know you don't care 'bout where I served or what I did in the military, but if you could just give me a few minutes of your time."

Ear-X-Tacy wouldn't close for another few hours, so I had plenty of time to engage in a quick exercise of false, holiday-appropriate compassion. We shook hands and introduced ourselves.

"So, Warren, what did you do... I mean, what did you do over there?" I asked him.

He stood there blinking at me in silence, a few seconds of this, then spouted, "My job was to coordinate artillery fire."

"Like mortars and stuff?"

He smiled. "Nah," he continued, "mortar rounds is small enough so anybody in the infantry can handle 'em. Them shells is like 88 millimeters. Small rounds, really."

"So you worked with bigger stuff, then, like Howitzers?"

"Exactly. You know a little, huh? Yes sir, what I did was, I dealt with Howitzers, sir, which is a much, uh... a much bigger round, a much bigger gun, about a hundred, hundred-fifty caliber shell."

At this point Mr. Young digressed into labyrinthine technical minutiae that I couldn't really follow: talk of fire patterns, target triangulation, and other complicated military neologisms recited near-verbatim from a thick manual buried deep in the troubled skull of the black man standing before me. Any worries I had about whether he was full of shit or not quickly dissipated with this display of knowledge.

Anxious to carry out my plan of retail therapy in the decidedly warmer shopping pastures just within reach, I told my new best friend to wait here for a few minutes because I had to go and buy something, and also because, unbeknownst to him, I was too loathe to admit the necessity of breaking a fifty-dollar bill, which was the only thing I had on me (aside from my bank card; not like I wouldn't've, like, totally sprung to an ATM, or whatever...).

"Okay, sir," he said. "Right here. I'll wait up for you right here. Thank you, sir. I'll be right here, sir. Thank you, sir."

I tried in vain to purge this middle-class anxiety attack, as all my thoughts kept zeroing in on the dried spittle that had encrusted, lattice-like, into Mr. Young's beard. Fuck it all! I decided to cut short my buyer's dilemma, bought the Kanye record, and went back into the cold where I discovered that misery, in all its myriad forms, loves company.

Indeed: As I walked over to our beloved bum, whom made some new best friends while I was busy spreading the cheese, he looked up at me, shouted "Hey! Hey, man... aw I'm sorry. What was your name again? I'm bad with names, sir."

I looked nervously at the two clean-cut white boys who flanked either side of him. They were wearing black zippered fleece.

Backpacks. White dress shirts. Ties.

I took a deep breath. "Smith," I said, extending a hand to smiling Mr. Young for a reintroductory shake, then adding "Joseph Smith." The all-weather evangelical probes from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (whom Ill refer to as "Todd & Cody") made faces best described as the kind of face a person would make upon reaction to the video whereby this essay derives its name.

"These fine young men has been tellin' me that most people don't think of Mormons as Christians!" Mr. Young explained.

"Oh," I say. "Well, I guess Christianity is a blanket term, a catch-all, really, for a lot of different, uh, beliefs, eh fellas?"

Warren blinks a silent, toothless smile, his grin soaked in pure ether. I count how many teeth he has (6 or 7). The Mormons, who cannot blink, refrained from smiling and did not show me how many teeth they have (all of them). By this point they can smell my hostile atheism like the booze on Mr. Young. I felt like I was at the nexus of some cosmic point of interest, a surreal wrinkle in space-time. Suffice to say, things got weirder.

"Here you go, Warren." I handed over the twenty, unable to look him in the eye. "Spend it however you want, do you hear me? "

"Aw, thank you sir. Hey," he opens his arms for an embrace.

Though I don't normally give hugs and money, I wanted to extract a little more from Mr. Young. What he said is presented here; pieced together by my already short-term-challenged memory, is a story that has become all too familiar to us:

I worked at a mental health clinic before the Gulf War, back in in '91. Metzger's[sic]? It was like a hospital, you ever heard of it? I don't think its around here anymore. Got reactivated in 2002, not too long after September, um, September the eleventh had happened, went back to Iraq.

I was a corporal[sic] in the 82nd Artillery. We were comin' outta' Fort Bragg, North Carolina; part of the initial, uh... the initial invading battallions that went in to Iraq. We started at the South and just moved upward. It was real quick, too. At the beginning, we didn't have to do no real fighting. Anybody who would've fired on us already, like, knew that they was gonna get blown away, so why even try, you know? Ain't nobody dumb enough to take on a tank. We just rolled right in.

When the occupation set in, that's when things started to get bad... like, what I do, um, what I did was something I just couldn't do in that kind of theatre of combat. I mean, when you're fightin in, uh, a tight urban environment, you just can't bring down Howitzer howitzer fire at all. It's too close quarters. My training didn't make me a police man, you know?

Todd & Cody, to their credit, successfully managed to keep their iPods fully sheathed as they endured, with obvious boredom (heavy sighs, shuffling of feet, piquant navel-gazing), Mr. Young's throughly depressing professional history.

Over the next five minutes, Mr. Young, in a fit of good-natured drunkeness, tried getting me to salute, along with him, "our wonderful country, the United States of America". It didn't work. I wished him farewell, and, almost as an afterthought, wished the Mormons good luck with their conversion, that I hoped I didn't spoil anything for them.


...........................................................................................................................................................................


I ran away from the scene, much like we are all too free to run away from a lot of things this country tries to shit on us. Our options for distraction and entertainment have, for what seems like an eternity, far outweighed our dwindling options for finding meaning, doing good, and electing representatives who will not abuse their awesome, planet-leveling powering to deter us from those pursuits and onto things like wars of revenge, gross neglect of domestic liberties, global economic and environmental meltdowns, neo-fundamentalism, and kick to the curb their golden calf, the troops, whom most Americans are inclined to forget when military deaths are down and the cost of milk is up.

And I highly doubt that my Grandmother, in those final moments of her life, was worried in the slightest about any of this bullshit. Or even Mr. Young for that matter, who, though chewed up and spit out by the most powerful force on this dying planet, is clinging on to something that might have mattered once, but is now all that can sustain him, along with the booze, a man fading gently into the background radiation of a country on the verge of making a decision that is, for him, much too late.

At least with $20 dollars in his pocket, Warren Young, Jr., will be able to forget, if only for a little while, things that we can forget just as easily: why we're even over there any more, how badly things have gotten since, or (more importantly) have things ever really been good?

Like coping with the death of a loved one, national self-deception just takes practice. Just ask Uncle Sam.