On Fri, 16 Jun 2000, mitch wilds wrote:

> Your street scene reminds me of my own personal street person, Richard,
> who hung out on Broadway between 110th and 116th during the early
> 1980s while I was at Columbia.  Before being fully acclimated to the
> "make no eye contact" New York attitude and being hit up for change
> all the time, I decided to adopt one street person in the city.

We did something similar in East Lansing, but it was more like a group
effort, certainly not my own personal street person.

Hugh was a tall old gentleman with bushy eyebrows, intelligent eyes, a
Roman nose, a beret, a tobacco pipe, and an old Army jacket.  In East
Lansing he fit in easily -- he could easily be mistaken for a somewhat
scruffy professor.  He looked a lot older than he really was.

My friend Grebner first encountered Hugh in a rooming house on Grove
Street; this was 1974.  The landlord, a jovial Harvard Law graduate who
was at the time one of East Lansing's worst slumlords of student housing,
with his infamous 13-month lease (you paid rent by 4-week "rental period",
13 times a year), had allowed Hugh to live in the rooming house cellar for
free in return for janitorial services.

At that time, Hugh was living on a $25/month loan from his mother.  For a
while, this meant that he lived on nothing but potatoes, but eventually he
figured out that he could buy bags of generic pancake mix and have food
all the way until the next check arrived.  The cellar was not a healthy
place to live, and he could often be heard coughing.

Hugh wrote notes to the tenants in a peculiar, very Germanic script, and
he was utterly unwilling to be interrupted.  Grebner's room was off the
kitchen, and accessible only through the kitchen; late one night, he came
home to discover that Hugh had barred all the doors into the kitchen so
that he could very slowly and methodically scrub the floor.  Grebner
banged on the door, but Hugh ignored him; eventually, he had to climb into
his room through a window.

Hugh was very taciturn under most circumstances, but with some people he
would open up and tell them a lot about his paranoid view of the world.
The chief villain was The Woman With The Bullet-Shaped Earrings, who
reappeared again and again in different guises (e.g., elevator shoes and
a blonde wig).

He also liked to look up specific names in the phone book, mark them on a
map he had, and draw very precise lines connecting all those points into
an elaborate star design, with his own location at the exact center.  He
also had a sketchbook which was full of pictures of little rabbits and
pictures of strangely multicolored flames, or maybe leaves.

When Hugh would speak to you, he would invariably speak in code, with
certain terms for concepts or people.  He never used the word "I" or "me";
rather, he would say "this one".  He never said "lawyer", preferring the
term "kangaroo jockey"; he never said "police", always "bear" or "bears".
He had nicknames or codenames for all the people he knew, and never
referred to them by name; he called Grebner "Grubby"; other friends were
"Groucho", "Ol' Rabbit Test", and so on; I don't remember them all.

As a general rule, Hugh would only speak to men he trusted; it was rare
for him to speak to or even acknowledge a woman.  He would also decide he
was mad at you for unknown reasons with no provocation, and sometimes if
he was very peeved, would "hit you with a rocket."  That meant filling an
envelope with six or seven very random frames cut from newspaper comic
strips, and mailing it to you with no return address.  Of course his
Germanic script on the address was unmistakeable.

In 1976, Grebner moved back into that same rooming house and found that
Hugh was still there.  He was determined to improve Hugh's living
standards, and wanted to get him on some kind of public assistance.  Of
course, Hugh was too terrified to ever do that kind of thing on his own,
so Grebner (who didn't have a car) had to take him on the bus to the
welfare office at 6am and wait all day.  That's what it took to apply for
assistance in the 1970s.

To while away the hours in the welfare line, Grebner brought with him a
book about C.G. Jung.  It might have been the Freud-Jung letters or
something.  Someone near them in line noticed the book, and said brightly,
"Who's Jung?" (pronouncing it like "junk").  Grebner, trying to brush the
guy off, muttered something about Jung being a disciple of Freud.
Hearing that, Hugh sat bolt upright in fury.  "Jung a disciple of Freud?
That is HERESY!" he shouted, and lectured at length about how Jung's
writings are a REFUTATION of Freud, and on and on.

But Grebner helped him negotiate all the forms and requirements and got
him on General Assistance and food stamps.  Another friend got him a room
in Spartan Hall, an ex-hotel which is probably East Lansing's closest
approximation to an SRO.  Hugh lived there for the last 14 years of his
life.

Hugh was a habitue of the East Lansing Public Library, where he spent many
hours reading domestic and foreign newspapers, books, etc.  However, at
one point he became convinced that The Woman With The Bullet-Shaped
Earrings had somehow infiltrated the staff.  She would come out into the
public areas, pushing a cart of books to reshelve, moving gradually down
the row of shelves in what he saw as an obvious attempt to corner him.  He
would carefully get up and relocate to another table, only to find that
she was working her way back along another row of bookshelves toward him.

He was so concerned about this that he took the very extreme step (for
him) of speaking to the library director, Virginia Albright (one of the
nicest people in East Lansing).  He sat down with her in her office and
explained what was happening.  Unfortunately, it appears that she was
unable to maintain a completely straight face through this, and when she
laughed -- as he told me later -- that's when he knew that she was one of
THEM.

Grebner heard about the Albright interview and went to see her himself to
assure her that Hugh was completely harmless.  Virginia, bless her heart,
did not want to let on that there was anything the least bit odd about
Hugh.

Hugh was pretty left-wing in his politics, and another one of his big
villains was Margaret Thatcher, whom he always called the Iron Maiden.
He was also a cousin of some kind to a well-known liberal U.S. Senator of
those days.  But Hugh always refused to register to vote, because he said
that THEY would get his name that way.

In the early 1990s, politics in Michigan took a conservative turn, and the
legislature voted to kill the General Assistance program that supported
Hugh (the one form of welfare that did no involve dependent children).
In theory, as a long-term paranoid schizophrenic who hadn't been gainfully
employed in forty years, Hugh would have been eligible for Social Security
disability, but that would have required some kind of medical
certification.  Hugh was adamantly opposed to any truck with doctors.

So perhaps it was for the best that he had a heart attack and died, only a
few weeks before General Assistance was cut off.  He was only in his early
60s, which startled those of us who had known him as an old man for almost
two decades.

---
Lawrence Kestenbaum, [log in to unmask]
The Political Graveyard, http://politicalgraveyard.com