Listen, missy, if you really want to know why I live on the streets, you need to hear the story of my whole life, and I doubt if you have the patience. You’re probably just like all the other college smart-asses who think they’ll be able to understand what it means to simply not give a flying fuck about the present, much less the future. Hell, I don’t understand it myself, it’s just something that happened.
That’s right, girlie, I didn’t just make a decision one day to give up a normal life. It took me, I’m not sure I even remember, quite a few years to realize that I had become one of those people who people like you call homeless. I’ve got several homes I could go to if I wanted, but that’s the point: I don’t want to live with my ex-wife or either of my kids. I’m sure they’d take me in if they knew where I was, but they don’t.
You really want to hear my story? Okay, but it’ll cost you. There’s a liquor store around the corner where you can buy me a half-liter bottle of Four Roses. Then come back here. We’ll sit right on this bench and I’ll begin.
No, I don’t want you to buy me lunch. I never have a problem getting food. Hell, there’s dozens of restaurants I can walk to. They throw away tons of food. But nobody throws booze away.
###
I’ll just put that in my pocket for now because I’ll probably be thirsty after talking to you. I haven’t talked much these past few years. I’m gonna start by telling you everything you need to know about my childhood. I want to see if you can figure out a pattern, okay? If you can do that, you can bring me another bottle the next time you’re in the neighborhood, and I’ll tell you some more.
What’s that? Oh, I guess maybe three sessions will cover everything. We’ll see.
The first thing I became aware of in my life was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Since I was three months shy of three years old, I probably don’t actually remember it; I probably remember everyone talking about it. I do remember my third birthday party because that was the day my Uncle Nick was drafted into the Army. After basic training, he was sent to Italy. He drove a supply truck for three years, bringing live ammunition to the front lines every day.
My first best friend was a boy named Willy, whose father had come from Germany as a young man. We used to play war in my sandbox and Willy was always the Germans. Before long, we both realized that some day he would have to go fight for Germany while I would be fighting for the USA. It didn’t seem fair. To ease Willy’s suffering, whenever my brother played with us, we would let him be the Americans and I would be the Japs. They were even worse than the Germans because everyone knew how sneaky they were.
I started kindergarten in 1943. Sister Gretchen taught us to act like “good little soldiers and sailors” in preparation for our eventual service in the armed forces. I decided that I would rather be a sailor than a soldier. I wanted to go out on a big boat in the ocean, not drive an ammo truck like Uncle Nick. I got a navy blue sailor’s suit for Christmas that year which made me very proud. Whenever I wore it, Sister Gretchen put me in charge of the recess bell.
For my fifth birthday I got a board game called “Salute the Flag.” Up to four players could choose a branch of service—Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Corps—and, with the roll of the dice, advance from enlistee to Commander-in-Chief. Whenever a marker landed on a flag, all the players had to stand up and salute the flag in the center of the board. The last one to salute had to drop back one rank. I was such a good saluting sailor that I almost always won. I knew all the ranks long before I could read the funnies by myself. I also knew that a Lieutenant in the Navy equaled a Captain in the Army and a Navy Captain equaled an Army Colonel. I could hardly wait to be seventeen and enlist.
Turning five also meant that I could go to the movies with my mother and my brother on Sundays. They usually showed two westerns, one with Gene Autry and the other with Roy Rogers. They also showed cartoons and previews, but what I liked best was when the newsreels had pictures of American battleships shooting down enemy planes. Some day I hoped to fire one of those big guns and blow Jap planes out of the sky.
But V-J Day came as soon as we dropped atomic bombs on Japan. What’s that? Don’t they teach history anymore? It means “victory in Japan,” the day the Japs surrendered. V-E Day—you can figure that out by yourself, I hope—had come before I finished first grade. In a way I was disappointed. The war was over eleven years before I’d be old enough to fight. It didn’t seem fair.
The only good thing about the War being over was the end of gasoline rations. My father took our car off the cinder blocks and we started going for drives on Sundays again. I had forgotten all about the beaches at the Jersey shore, but the first time we went down I remembered having been there before. I learned to swim in the ocean the next summer and knew more than ever that I would join the Navy when I grew up. We would always take the scenic drive home and stop at one of the overlooks. My parents would point across the bay at the New York skyscrapers, but I didn’t care about them. I preferred looking with wonder at the big Navy ships docked at the ammunition pier a mile away.
Over the next few years I saw a lot of war movies and read a whole series of books about the Battleship Boys, two friends who had enlisted in the Navy together and were lucky enough to be assigned to the same ship. The best part, I thought, was spending the nights sleeping in hammocks. One day my father took my brother and me to the Bayonne Navy Yard to tour a destroyer. Was I disappointed to see bunks built into the bulkheads instead of hammocks strung from the overhead! Maybe, I hoped, the overhead on a little destroyer wasn’t high enough. But when I saw The Fighting Sullivans later that year, I lost hope. The five Sullivan brothers slept in bunks, too, and they were on a battleship.
But I stopped associating battleships with hammock-sleeping about twenty minutes into the movie when the first brother was killed. The ship was attacked by Japanese aircraft in the middle of the night. Fire broke out in a gun turret when it was hit repeatedly by the warplanes’ wing-mounted machine-guns. Dozens of sailors were either shot or burned to death. The noise was as frightening to me as the flames.
Yeah, I guess you could say that I was having doubts about enlisting in the Navy.
Four years later, we were on vacation down the shore when we heard the radio announcement about troops being sent to Korea. My mother said, “Oh, there’s another war,” and I knew she was thinking that my brother was sixteen, eligible for the draft in two more years. I was only eleven and found myself hoping this war would last long enough for me to serve. By that time, I had enjoyed too many war movies to be afraid anymore.
I made my next major life-decision when I was thirteen and finishing up the eighth grade. I had to decide whether to go to an academic or a vocational high school. My parents explained that they could not afford to send me to college, but offered to let me live at home for free if I could raise enough money for tuition. That sounded like a good deal to me, and I began thinking of myself as an engineer or a teacher rather than a sailor. Anyway, I worked part-time at two different drug stores during my high school years and saved almost all the money that I earned. By the time I graduated, I had enough for my first year’s college tuition and had already put into motion a plan to get the other three years paid for.
According to their catalog, Catholic University of New York had an ROTC scholarship program. It was mandatory for freshman year, but if you opted to continue three more years and agree to two years service as an officer, the Army would pay your tuition and commission you a second-lieutenant upon graduation. Two years of military service was required of all men in those days. I had long been prepared for it. The problem experienced by most of my friends, however, was that they never knew when they’d be drafted. My brother, for example, was already married when he finally got the “Greetings” letter. By taking advantage of the ROTC scholarship, I could get my military obligation over two years after college and start my career at the age of twenty-three. I thought it was a damned smart plan. My father agreed. So did Uncle Nick, who joked that pretty soon he’d have to salute his nephew. Villanova had a Naval ROTC program, but I knew I couldn’t afford to pay room and board, so I’d have to settle for the Army. I could live at home and take the bus to Manhattan.
Now it’s time for your test, girlie. If you knew me back then, would you have expected me to be a hawk or a dove during the Vietnam War?
Well, you got that right. I was definitely on the side of the hawks. Now I’ve got to think hard to remember those next few years, so that’s all I’m gonna tell you today.
###
I figured you’d be back for more. A few bottles of booze isn’t much to pay for a story like mine. Okay, today I’ll tell you all about my early military career. It turned out a lot different from what I’d expected.
A few of my older high school buddies had joined the National Guard as an alternative to the draft. Eight years of part-time service in the Guard (a drill one evening a week plus two weeks active duty every summer) would satisfy one’s military obligation. That knowledge gave me a new idea. If I enlisted in the Guard, I’d have more than four years service by the time I got my commission and thus be eligible for extra longevity pay. My father again agreed that it was a good plan. Uncle Nick warned me, though, that, if another war broke out, my entire unit would be called up. But I followed my instincts and decided there wouldn’t be another war over the next four years and enlisted the day after my seventeenth birthday.
By the time I started college I had already been through basic training and earned a marksman rating with a rifle. The ROTC officers were impressed. And the mandatory military history course was a plus for me because I was majoring in history. Everything was going as planned until the end of my freshman year when I failed the physical because of my nearsightedness. I couldn’t see well enough to be an Army officer. I was not offered an ROTC scholarship. “But I can see perfectly with my glasses, sir,” I pointed out to the cadet commander.
“But what happens if they break in the heat of battle?” he replied. “Or while you’re driving a jeep? You call yourself a marksman, but you can’t even see the target without your glasses, much less the bullseye.”
So I had to modify my plans. My National Guard enlistment had been for three years, about half of which was completed. There was no way out of the rest. But I had learned to enjoy it. I had initially been assigned to one of the gun crews. We were an anti-aircraft battery with four 120-milimeter guns, one of eight such batteries strategically located in a circle around New York City. If the Russians tried to bomb the city, our mission was to shoot down their planes over the ocean. I started out as an oiler and would have to learn six different jobs before I got to fire the gun. But when the C.O. saw my test scores a few weeks later, he switched me to the radar platoon.
You don’t know what radar is? Jesus, kid, where have you been all your life? It stands for radio detection and ranging. You send high-frequency radio waves into the air. When they hit metal, they bounce back in such a way that you can tell the distance, the angle, and the height above ground of an airplane.
So, where was I? During my second two weeks of active duty, I quickly learned how to operate all three stations—elevation, range, and azimuth—and could lock on to a plane thirty miles away. Radar seemed like magic. We could tell the gun platoon exactly where to aim long before they could see what they were shooting at. During the first week, I observed the senior radar crew as they directed nine successful hits and five misses. I took over in the second week, and we scored twelve straight hits. The targets were small, slow, inexpensive radio-controlled planes, but I knew in my growing militaristic heart that we could take out any Russian bomber that tried to attack New York.
Without the ROTC scholarship, I had to get a full-time job to generate tuition money if I wanted to stay in college. Between carrying eighteen credits a semester, working forty hours a week, and one-night-a-week military service, I didn’t have much free time. When my enlistment was up, I was already a corporal and three-eighths finished with my military obligation. It seemed silly to waste the time and training, so I re-enlisted for another three. My civilian job—grocery clerk in a supermarket—was boring but necessary. College was tough because I didn’t have enough time for study. But the National Guard service was the best part of my life in those years. I knew what I was doing as a radar operator, I respected my platoon sergeant and lieutenant and they respected me, and I had made a few good friends in my unit. Most of my college classmates lacked the discipline I had learned, and they knew practically nothing about weapons or survival. Just as Sister Gretchen predicted, I had become a good soldier.
That’s right, Missy, I still remember my kindergarten teacher.
The next big step came in late 1957 when my unit took over the operation of a Nike Ajax battery on Sandy Hook. The regular army was upgrading to the new Nike Hercules, so the four gun batteries in my battalion upgraded to guided missiles. We were a step away from the cutting edge of military technology! The missile crews were smaller than the gun crews had been, but the radar platoon was twice as big. There were two separate radar vans—one to lock on to the target aircraft and one to guide the missile to it. We couldn’t miss!
The next two years went pretty smoothly. I was made assistant store manager, I managed to pass all my courses and even got a few Bs to balance my two Ds. I was about to be promoted to sergeant. But I realized I had a problem coming up. I had been planning to switch to night-shift manager at the store so I could do my student teaching the following fall, but that would limit me to only two other courses on Saturdays. That meant I would have to take the other two during the summer. But my Guard unit was scheduled for training camp right in the middle of the summer semester. I couldn’t be in two places at once. I needed to graduate the following June so I could start teaching in September. I couldn’t afford another semester in college.
The problem was solved, at least in my mind, when I found out how the Reserve was different from the Guard. A guy at work had just finished six months on active duty and was required to put in six more years in the Army Reserve. But Reservists got to pick their own time for training camp. It didn’t even have to be in the summer—any two-week period was okay. So, I went to my C.O. and explained my problem and my proposed solution. He didn’t like the idea of losing me but understood my reason and agreed to approve my transfer from the Guard to the Reserve. As he said those words an idea popped into my mind and I asked, “Would you approve my transfer to the Naval Reserve?”
“It’s your job to find a unit that’ll take you,” he answered, “but you’d look awfully funny in bell-bottoms.” Wise guy!
As things turned out, I found a unit that would gladly take me, a World War II destroyer based in Port Newark, the USS Hawkins. The Captain needed a sonarman—that stands for sound navigation ranging, which works by sending sound waves into the water to locate submarines—and he figured that my radar training would enable me to pick up how sonar worked without much trouble. And, as soon as I completed the paperwork, I could spend two weeks on a sister ship out of Newport News training under a Chief Sonarman who owed him a favor. That was fine with me because I had two weeks coming up between the end of the spring semester and the beginning of summer. He said I’d have to drop a rank to Seaman, but if I completed all the practical factors in my two weeks training and passed the written test, I’d be promoted to 3rd-Class Petty Officer.
The two weeks at sea on a destroyer were great. The Chief Sonarman was the best teacher I ever had. Radar and sonar were similar in that they both were used to locate and pinpoint the position of potential targets. Radar uses radio signals to find planes and control the aiming of anti-aircraft guns and the tracking of guided missiles. Sonar uses sound waves to find submarines and control the firing of depth charges. The difference is that a radar operator makes decisions based on a blip on the scope while a sonarman must also interpret the sound of the signals bouncing off the sub to determine its direction. For two weeks I spent twelve hours a day in the sonar shack learning by doing and four hours a night studying the manuals. By the time I got back to Port Newark I was a crackerjack sonarman. “When World War III breaks out,” I told my Captain, “the Russians will never get a submarine past me.”
I finished college on schedule, in June 1960, quit my job at the supermarket in mid-August, did my two weeks active duty, and started teaching history at a local high school in September. I didn’t have the discipline problems with the kids that the other first-year teachers had. The principal, a World War II veteran, attributed it to what he called my “military bearing.” He said I looked, sounded, and acted much older than twenty-one. He was right. I had never wasted time or money and had no tolerance for those who did, regardless of age. I told my freshmen that they were training to be responsible, self-disciplined adults and I expected them to act in that manner. Talking without permission, horsing around, and lack of preparation were simply unacceptable. It did not take long for them to learn the meaning of my favorite word.
For me—and for my students when I managed to explain the significance—the most exciting event of the year occurred on May 5 when Navy Commander Alan Shepard was rocketed into outer space. “The Russians may have beaten us by orbiting the first satellite,” I told them, “but we’re catching up. If we all work to our utmost capacities, we’ll beat them to the moon.” And eight years later we did, but many Americans, myself included, no longer cared.
But at that point I really believed I had made a life for myself. I had managed to make it through college while working full-time and proved that I could teach high school. I was about to start the first two courses toward a master’s degree. If I passed the test—and I had never in my life failed a test—I would be promoted to 2nd-class petty officer in July. With two and a half years left to complete my obligation I was confident of making 1st-class, maybe even Chief. If so, I was pretty sure I’d stay in another twelve to be eligible for a military pension.
The next turning point in my life occurred in July of 1962 when my ship was activated. According to the Captain, the increasing presence of American military advisors in South Vietnam—see, we’re finally getting there—necessitated the re-deployment of five ships from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea. That meant the activation of five Reserve ships for deployment to the Med. The Middle East still needed a major American presence.
There was a great deal of unhappiness among the crew. Many did not want to lose their jobs or leave their families. There was no way of knowing how long we’d have to remain on active duty. I was one of the fortunate ones. I had no family responsibility and the Board of Education legally had to grant me a military leave and take me back. I didn’t look forward to delaying my master’s degree, but that was personal. I had a duty to serve. We all did. We had all taken an oath of allegiance with full knowledge that we might be called up at any time. That’s what the Reserve is—trained military personnel ready for service when needed. Our country needed us.
But a week before we were scheduled to depart, the Captain called me up to the bridge to explain that I wouldn’t be going. Though he believed I was a good sonarman, he had decided that I wasn’t as good as the Chief who had trained me. He had pulled some strings to get him assigned to the Hawkins and was transferring me to a shore-based Reserve Center that needed a sonar instructor. I found myself very disappointed. I had been looking forward to active duty in the Mediterranean. In fact, I’d been privately hoping we’d be sent to the South China Sea where I’d have the chance to see some real action. Instead, I’d be teaching recruits what I already knew rather than learning what I didn’t. I volunteered to take the place of one of the Reservists who didn’t want to go. The Captain reminded me that it was my duty to obey orders.
###
As of March 1964 I had completed my eight years of part-time military service. I was no longer eligible for the draft and therefore no longer required to stay in the Naval Reserve. I had been too busy working on my master’s degree to have the time to study anything else, so I had not made Chief Petty Officer and somewhat reluctantly decided not to re-enlist. While the personnelman was processing my discharge, he asked me if I wanted to be an officer. When I asked how, he explained that college graduates who had completed their military obligation were eligible to apply for a direct-appointment commission.
I pointed to my glasses and asked, “What about these?”
“You could still be an LDO,” he answered.
“A what?”
“A Limited Duty Officer. You could never command a ship, but you could free up another officer doing some kind of desk job. We all know the Navy’s short of officers and pretty soon that business in Vietnam will turn into a real war. It’s worth applying, and you can do it right now.”
I thought about it for a minute and told him to go ahead. I wouldn’t be shooting planes out of the sky on a battleship or directing depth charges on a destroyer, but I was going to be an officer in the United States Navy! Sister Gretchen would have been proud!
It took a few months to complete the paperwork but I was eventually sworn in and commissioned a Lieutenant (Junior Grade). Because of my education, eight years service, and age, I was allowed to skip the initial rank of Ensign. I was made a Public Information Officer and was expected to interpret Navy policy to the general public in a positive way. That sounded like a job I could do. There was growing unhappiness about our increasing involvement in Vietnam. People needed to understand why we had to be there. I managed to get a billet with a Public Affairs group in Manhattan and was soon writing press releases and speeches to explain why America needed to help the South Vietnamese prevent a communist takeover.
On August 2 came the news that the North Vietnamese Navy had attacked two American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. Congress responded five days later with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that authorized President Lyndon Johnson to take whatever action was necessary to safeguard American servicemen. A week later Congress approved Johnson’s War on Poverty, an enemy that more Americans were probably aware of than North Vietnam and the Vietcong. Johnson was elected in a landslide. Besides the War on Poverty, he had managed to get Congress to approve an omnibus civil rights bill as well as Medicare, and 61% of the voters apparently believed he’d be less likely than Barry Goldwater to escalate the war in Vietnam.
I had voted for Goldwater for the same reason. I believed that the only way the South Vietnamese could defend themselves would be to stop the North Vietnamese from supplying the Vietcong in the South. I thought I understood our policies better than the average American because I had the advantage of reading all that material from the Navy Department every week. Much of it was classified, of course, and I could not pass it on, but reading it motivated me to make my reports as persuasive as I could. It was my duty as a Navy officer. So I was surprised—and pleased—when, in January 1965, President Johnson ordered continuous Navy bombing of military targets in the North. For a domestic-policy-oriented President to do that meant that he was listening to the right military advisors.
You can see that even after our involvement in Vietnam escalated into a real fighting war, I was still a hawk. I truly believed we had to stop the communist North from taking over the democratic South. I wished I could have been there to do my part, but at least I was making a contribution by writing on behalf of our nation’s cause.
That’s all for today, missy. I’ll finish up tomorrow.
###
Back again, kiddo?
Okay, now I’ll tell you how things began to change. Most of my colleagues at the school were opposed to the war. They said it was none of our business, that the South Vietnamese government leaders were completely out of touch with the people, that we were sending American men to die in defense of a wealthy elite, that the domino theory was no longer viable. In the summer of 1965 I learned that one of my first-year students had been killed in action. I remembered him very well because he had been my first real success. He was reading at a fifth-grade level when he started high school but managed to catch up to his classmates by graduation. He had done it by hard work and will power. He came to me after school one day and asked for help. I worked with him almost every afternoon and because I was willing to spend the time, he was willing to do what he had to do. His death a year later made me wonder, for the first time, whether we really should be sending our young men to fight in Vietnam. At that point we had 185,000 troops supporting the 400,000-man South Vietnamese Army trying, not yet with much success, to stop 35,000 Vietcong guerillas. Writing in defense of American policy was getting harder and harder.
I was promoted to Lieutenant in early 1966 and given a new assignment: to write news articles about the success of the “brownwater” Navy. This was the newly-created Navy Mobile Riverine Force Mekong Delta, made up of special units with shallow-draft boats for patrolling the Mekong River Delta and transporting Army infantry companies and Navy SEALS to their missions. It was hard for me to imagine small boats as capable of carrying out naval operations, but the idea gradually came to make sense to me as I read the official documents. There was simply not enough solid land for a military base. But the more classified material I read, the more questions came to mind: Why were so few prisoners being taken? Why were entire VC units listed as killed in battle? During World War II and Korea we had taken prisoners of war. Why did we have to kill everybody in Vietnam?
Of course, I couldn’t write that. No, I had to write what amounted to fiction that would make readers proud to be Americans, defenders of the weak, rescuers of the oppressed and the downtrodden. But the American public was no longer supporting the Vietnam War. Anti-war protests were happening all over the country. People had been promised a complete victory almost immediately. Instead, we kept sending troops—540,000 by 1968. The more bombs we dropped on Hanoi and other northern cities, the more troops they sent to help the Vietcong. We were bombing the Ho Chi Min Trail but communist forces kept coming. In January 1968 they surprised us with the Tet Offensive, simultaneous attacks on major South Vietnamese cities during their most important religious feast when, in previous years, they had taken time out from the war. Demonstrators outside the White House chanted, “Hey, hey, L.B.J./How many kids did you kill today?” Two months later President Johnson announced that he had ordered the bombing to stop, asked to begin peace talks in Paris, and promised not to seek re-election in November. Richard Nixon became the next President because so many Americans had come to associate wars with Democrats.
Although Nixon promised to “Vietnamize” the war effort by bringing home American troops, he wasn’t doing it fast enough to satisfy the public. Anti-war demonstrations continued all over the country. Then, in late 1969, came the first report of an infantry company’s slaughter of civilian residents in the village of Mylai. Army officials denied it. I barely made it to the faculty rest room to vomit.
Since I no longer could justify in my own mind our military presence in Vietnam, I did what I thought was the only honorable thing to do: I resigned my commission. The problem was that the Navy ignored me. They kept mailing me the public information packet every week. I had stopped writing propaganda and packed my uniform in mothballs, but the Navy kept me in standby-reserve status. My resignation wasn’t accepted until February of 1973, a week after the peace pacts were signed in Paris. By then we had invaded Laos and Cambodia, convicted Lieutenant Calley of premeditated murder at Mylai, and resumed heavy bombing of the Northern cities. On the home front we had witnessed the assassinations of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X, the killing of four protesting college students by the Ohio National Guard, the resignation of the Vice President, and the outbreak of the Watergate scandal which eventually led to President Nixon’s disgraceful resignation. The last American combat troops left South Vietnam in March and the North Vietnamese completed their victory within two years.
As for me, I continued teaching high school and married one of my colleagues who had been a dove all through the war. We used to argue about it every day until I realized how wrong the entire Vietnamese policy had been. Once I admitted it to myself, I could admit it to her. We bought a house in the suburbs, had a boy and a girl, and my wife gave up teaching to be a full-time mother. To our relatives and friends we looked like the perfect family. But we argued whenever we were alone. It was my fault more than hers. She wanted to get on with life, but I couldn’t help dwelling on the past. I grew moody and sullen, lost interest in the kids. Nothing seemed to hold my attention except that stupid war. I became obsessed with it, read everything written about it. Each new fact that I learned added to my obsession.
The official casualty count was more than 43,000 Americans killed in combat, plus almost 11,000 who died there of other causes. That was mind-boggling to me; how could 11,000 Americans not in combat die? The South Vietnamese Army lost about 200,000, the North, 900,000. Worst of all, at least 1,000,000 Vietnamese civilians died.
The numbers staggered me. I felt guilty at first, guiltier every day, every month, every year. When I reached the point at which I could no longer teach American history without breaking into tears, I had to quit. My wife went back to teaching and I stayed home with the kids for a few years. They were in school by then so I had a lot of time on my hands. Eventually, the guilt changed to shame and I was no longer fit to live with. My wife divorced me and got custody of the kids. She didn’t hate me, didn’t even ask for alimony or child support, just wanted me out of their lives, and I didn’t blame her. I moved to Manhattan, got a job in a supermarket, and lived in a furnished room upstairs. I never tried to make any friends, just lived my own quiet life, trying to live without thinking about life, one day at a time.
As the years passed, I gradually realized I didn’t want to work anymore. But I kept going in every day because that’s what people expected. It took maybe a few more months to decide that I didn’t have to do what people expected. I just stayed in bed one morning. When the manager came up to check on me, I didn’t even try to make him understand what was wrong. I walked out with the clothes on my back. I’ve been on the streets five years now and I haven’t figured out a reason not to stay.
End of story, young lady. Go home and write your paper.
END
