Don Paul (by Ian Zelazny)

DON PAUL

Don Paul is homeless. He’s waiting around to get a bed at the New Orleans Mission on 1129 Baronne Street. Paul is wearing blue jeans and a black leather jacket, his face pale underneath a few days of stubble. I tell him I’d like to ask him a few questions. “What kinda questions you got?” he says with a snarl.

His hair is long, graying, and swept back behind his ears. I ask if he has any good stories and his tone softens.

“Yeah, I was a really successful hair dresser in Dallas. Worked in Houston, lived on the water. Came down here to work on the Green Lantern. And I don’t know what happened. I just got caught. Everyone left me here, took off back to Dallas. I was just about ready to get an apartment and everything before all this stuff happened.”

We sit down on a curb facing a small grocery. It’s marked ‘Danny Food’ in bright neon letters.

“You know, when it rains it pours. It really does. That’s the truth in life – every time you think everything’s going your way just hold up a cigarette.” Paul holds his up, purses his lips and blows on it.

“But uh, I’m a survivor. Ain’t nothing’s gonna get me down. Even if… There are some days I want to give up, you know what I mean? I mean, what else are you going to put me through, God? But I keep on surviving.”

Paul looks up at the plain red brick mission. It has long windows filled with dark blue glass. A parking lot and chain-link fence wrap around the building.

“I gotta be up at the mission at six o’clock. If I don’t get in there tonight then shit… I was in the work program until I got hurt from my job so I wasn’t there for a month, so I lost my bed.” Don Paul indicates his left boot. “I got a foot fungus. The sewer pipes broke and I got some weird ass fungus on my foot and I almost lost my foot. I was in the hospital for a month.”

The sign for the mission is just a white banner with blocky teal letters. There’s a crowd of people outside, some standing, most sitting. I ask Paul about his childhood.

“You know, I had a good childhood. My mom was cool man, my mom was very cool. I used to ski, went out on the ski slopes. I graduated from high school, worked in a salon. And my dad was a successful, a really successful doctor, but he was an alcoholic.”

A few guys are sitting up against the store, talking. The overpass behind us is punctuated by streetlights. Cars wail.

“I don’t know if you know about full-blown alcoholics like I do. They take a full bottle of vodka and just slam it down. When he drank he wasn’t one of those fun alcoholics. He was one of those crazy alcoholics. Slapped my mom around, all kinds of crazy shit. He used to go on a two, three, four day bender and mom would ship him off to rehab. He’d come back and be good for a while, then right back. They put him on Antabuse one time. I was walking home from school and I see all these ambulances, cop cars and as I’m walking I go – man, that’s my house. He set a giant fire in the living room. He took all the furniture, broke it up. He burned the house down.”

Paul speaks warmly.

“Mom stayed with him til’ her death.” They’d passed away only recently. “I talked to my sister and you know what she said? She said after Mom talked to you last night she died. I said you gotta be kidding. And she said no. And she called me up a week later and she said, you know, Dad died.”

He had gone to visit his Mom.

“She was so thin, I mean, she looked like a scarecrow.” Paul’s brow furrows. He stares intently at the ground. “I really wished I wouldn’t have seen her because I wanted to remember her the way that I knew her. Man, my foot is killing me.”

There’s a dilapidated wooden house nearby, cracked planks barely holding up a morass of moss and vines. A cardboard sign is propped up against Danny Food. It says “WIC ACCEPTED.”

“You know, bad things happen, but it’s how you handle it. If you fly off the handle and go all kinds of crazy, make things worse, or you sit there and analyze the problem and just take care of it. I didn’t want to get out of here and truck all the way to LSU to get those IVs. I didn’t want to truck all the way by the Superdome to talk to those people at Wound Care. But if I don’t take care of it I’ll be walking around with one of those metal foots. Life’s going to throw you all kinds of blows. After all that crap I’ve been in…” Paul trails off.

“I’m just a bozo doll. I keep kicking. No matter how you kick me, no matter how you punch me, I’m going to bounce right back up.”