To Play the Fool

Brother Fire

The fog lay close over San Francisco the morning the homeless gathered in the park to cremate Theophilus.

Brother Erasmus had chosen the site, the small baseball diamond in
the western half of Golden Gate Park. Only one or two of the men and
women who came together recognized the macabre irony in the
site's location, which adjoined the barbecue pits, and wondered
if Brother Erasmus had done it deliberately. It was his style, to be
sure.

The first of the park's residents to wake that gray and
dripping January morning was Harry. His awakening was abrupt as always,
more a matter of being launched from sleep by the ghosts in his head
than it was a true waking up. One moment he was snoring peacefully,-
the next he snorted, and then there was a brief struggle with the
terrifying confines of the bedroll before he flung it off and scrambled
heavily upright to crash in blind panic through the shrubs. After half
a dozen steps his brain began to make its connections, and after three
more he stopped, bent over double to cough for a while, and then turned
back to his bed beneath the rhododendrons. He methodically loaded his
duffel bag with the possessions too valuable to risk leaving
behind--the photograph of his wife and their long-dead son taken
in 1959, one small worn book, a rosary, the warm woolen blanket some
kind person had left (he was certain) for him, folded on their front
steps--and began to close the duffel bag, then stopped, pulled it
open again, and worked a hand far, far down into it. Eventually his
fingers closed on the texture they sought, and he pulled out a necktie,
a wadded length of grubby silk with an eye-bruising pattern that had
been popular in the sixties. He draped it around the back of his neck,
adjusted the ends in front, and began the tricky loop-and-through knot
with hands composed of ten thumbs. The third time the slippery fabric
escaped his grasp, he cursed, then looked around guiltily. Putting an
expression of improbable piety onto his face, he returned to the
long-unused motions. The fifth try did it. He pulled the tie snug
against the outside collars of the two shirts he wore, then after a
moment of thought bent again to the duffel bag. This time he did not
have to dig any farther than his forearm before encountering the comb,
as orange as the tie and almost as old. He ran the uneven teeth through
his thin hair, smoothed the result down with spit-wet palms,
straightened his wrinkled tie with the panache of an investment banker,
and pulled the top of the duffel bag shut.

Harry took a final look around his cavelike shelter beneath the
shrubbery, swung the bag over his right shoulder, and pushed his way
back out into the clearing. He paused only to pick up the three dead
branches he had leaned against the tree the night before,- then,
branches upraised in his left hand, he turned west, deeper into the
park.

Scotty was awake now, too, thanks to Harry's convulsive
coughing fit 150 feet away. Scotty was not an early riser. He lay for
some time, listening through a stupor of sleep and booze to the
preparations of his neighbor. Finally Harry left, and the silence of
dripping fog and cars on Fulton Street lulled him back toward sleep.

But Theophilus was your friend, he told himself in disgust; the
least you can do is say good-bye to him. His hand in its fingerless
glove crept out from the layers of cardboard and cloth he was swaddled
in, closed on the neck of the bottle that lay beside his head, and drew
it back in. The mound that was Scotty writhed about for a moment;
gurgles were followed by silence,- finally came a great weary sigh.
Scotty evolved from the mound, scratched his scalp and beard
thoroughly, drank the last of the cheap wine against the chill of the
morning, and then with a great heaving and crashing hauled his grocery
cart out of the undergrowth.

Scotty did not bother with self-beautification, just set his weight
against what had once been a Safeway trolley and headed west. However,
he walked with his eyes on the ground, occasionally stopping and
bending down stiffly to pick up pieces of wood, which he then arranged
on top of his other possessions. He seemed to prefer small pieces, but
he had a sizable armful by the time he reached the baseball diamond.

As he went under the Nineteenth Avenue overpass, which was already
humming with the early bridge traffic, Scotty was joined by Hat. Hat
did not greet him--not aloud, at any rate-- but nodded in his
amiable way and fell in at Scotty's side. Hat almost never
spoke,- in fact, he had received his name only because of the headgear
he always wore. Brother Erasmus might know his real name--Harry
had once said that he'd seen the two men in deep
conversation--but no one else did. Hat migrated about the city.
For the last few weeks, he had taken to sleeping near the Stow Lake
boathouse. Today's hat was a jaunty tweed number complete with
feather, rescued from a bin outside a health-food store,- it was marred
only by three small moth holes and a scorch mark along the back brim.
He also wore a Vietnam-era army backpack slung over his shoulder. In
his right hand he held a red nylon gym bag that he'd found one
night in an alley. (He had discarded most of the burglary tools it
contained as being too heavy, though the cash it held had been useful.)
In his left hand he clutched the pale splintery slats of a broken-up
fruit crate. His waist-length white beard had been neatly brushed and
he wore a cheery yellow primrose, liberated from a park flowerbed the
previous afternoon, in his lapel.

From across the park the homeless came, moved by a force most of
them could neither have understood nor articulated. Had you asked, as
the police later did, they could have said only that they came together
because Brother Erasmus had asked them to. That good gentleman, though,
despite appearing both lucid and palpably willing to help, proved as
impossible to communicate with as if he had spoken a New Guinean
dialect.

And so, despite their lack of understanding, they came: Sondra from
the Haight, wearing her best velvet,- Ellis from Potrero Street,
muttering and shaking his head (an indication more of synapse damage
than of disapproval),- Wilhemena from her habitual residence near the
Queen Wilhemena Tulip Garden, her neighbor Doc from the southern
windmill, the newly-weds Tomas and Esmerelda from their home beneath
the bridge near the tennis court. Through the cultivated wilderness of
John McLaren's park they came, to the baseball diamond where
Brother Erasmus, John, and the late, lamented Theophilus awaited them.
Each one carried some twigs or branches or scraps of wood,- all of them
tried to assemble before the sky grudgingly lightened into morning,-
the entire congregation came, each adding his or her wood to the pile
Brother Erasmus had made beneath the stiff corpse, and then standing
back to await the match.

Of course, there were other people in the park that morning. Cars
passed through on Nineteenth Avenue, on Transverse Drive, on JFK Drive,
but if they even noticed the park residents drifting through the fog,
they thought nothing about it.

Other early users, however, did notice. The spandex-and-Nike-clad
runners from the neighboring Richmond and Sunset districts had begun to
trickle into the park at first light. Committed runners these, men and
women who knew the value of sweat, unlike the mere joggers who would
appear later in the day. They thudded along roads and paths, keeping a
wary, if automatic, eye out for unsavory types who might beg, or mug,
or certainly embarrass. It was actually relatively rare to see one of
the homeless up and around at this hour, though they were often to be
glimpsed, huddled among their possessions in the undergrowth or,
occasionally, upright but apparently comatose.

This morning, though, the natives were restless. Several runners
glanced at their chronographs to check that it was indeed their usual
time, two or three of them wondered irritably if they were going to
have to change where they ran, and some saw the sticks the
tatterdemalion figures carried and abruptly shied away to the other
side of the road.

The morning's injury (aside from the blow that had downed poor
Theophilus--but then, that was from the previous day) happened to
a bright young Stanford MBA, a vice president's assistant from
the Bank of America. He was halfway through his daily five-mile stint,
running easily down Kennedy Drive past the lake, the morning financial
news droning through the headphones into his ears and the thought of an
ominous meeting in four hour's time looming large in his
consciousness, completely unprepared for the apparition of a
six-foot-four bearded lunatic crashing out of the bushes with a huge
club raised above his head. The MBA stumbled in sheer terror, fell,
rolled, struggled to rise, his arms folded to protect his
skull--and watched his would-be attacker give him a puzzled glance
and finish hauling the eucalyptus bough out from the bushes, then walk
away with the butt end of it on his shoulder and the dead leaves
swishing noisily and fragrantly behind him.

By the time the trembling jogger had hobbled painfully onto Park
Presidio, hitched two rides home, iced his swollen ankle, and
telephoned the police, the assembly in the glen was complete: some two
dozen homeless men and women, arrayed in a circle around a waist-high
heap of twigs and branches, into which was nestled a small stiff body.
They were singing the hymn "All Things Bright and
Beautiful," painfully out of tune but with enthusiasm, when
Brother Erasmus set the match to the pyre.

The headline on the bottom of page one of that afternoon's
Examiner
read: HOMELESS GATHER TO CREMATE BELOVED DOG IN GOLDEN GATE PARK.

Three weeks later, his breath huffing in clouds and the news
announcer still jabbering against his unhearing ears, the physically
recovered but currently unemployed former Bank of America vice
presidential assistant was slogging his disconsolate way alongside
Kennedy Drive in the park when, to his instant and unreasoning fury, he
was attacked for a second time by a branch-wielding bearded man from
the shrubbery. Three weeks of ego deflation blew up like a rage-powered
air bag: He instantly took four rapid steps forward and clobbered the
unkempt head with the only thing he carried, which happened to be a
Walkman stereo. Fortunately for both men, the case collapsed the moment
it made contact with the wool cap, but the maddened former bank
assistant stood over the terrified and hungover former real estate
broker and pummeled away with his crumbling handful of plastic shards
and electronic components.

A passing commuter saw them, snatched up her car telephone, and called 911.

Three minutes later, the eyes of the two responding police officers
were greeted by the sight of a pair of men seated side by side on the
frost-rimed grass: One was shocked, bleeding into his shaggy beard, and
even at twenty feet stank of cheap wine and old sweat,- the other was
clean-shaven, clean-clothed, and wore a pair of two-hundred-dollar
running shoes on his feet. Both men were weeping. The runner sat with
his knees drawn up and his head buried in his arms,- the wino had his
arm across the other man's heaving shoulders and was patting
awkwardly at the runner's arm in an obvious attempt at
reassurance and comfort.

The two police officers never were absolutely certain about what had
happened, but they filled out their forms and saw the two partners in
adversity safely tucked into the ambulance. Just before the door
closed, the female officer thought to ask why the homeless man had been
dragging branches out of the woods in the first place.

By the time the two officers pounded up the pathway into the
baseball clearing, the oily eucalyptus and redwood in this second
funeral pyre had caught and flames were roaring up to the gray sky in
great billows of sparks and burning leaves. It was a much larger pile
of wood than had been under the small dog Theophilus three weeks
earlier, but then, it had to be. On the top of this pyre lay the body
of a man.

The Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula,

without comforts, without possessions, eating

anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on

the ground.

"God Almighty," muttered Kate Martinelli, "what'll you bet Jon does a barbecue tonight."

She and Al Hawkin stood watching the medical examiner's men
package the body for transport. The typical pugilist's pose of a
burned body was giving the men problems, but they finally got the fists
tucked in and loaded the body onto the van. The cold air became almost
breathable.

"You know," remarked Al, squinting up at a tree,
"that's the first joke I've heard you make
in--what, six months?"

"It wasn't a joke."