MAY THE ROAD RISE TO MEET YOU (Conclusion)(Charles E.J. Moulton) I knew that the can lay there somewhere in the bottom of the bin. I saw it flashing through the blue plastic bag on the bottom. If I just could get ahold of it, I would have my ten dollars worth this morning. That would be enough for some shower gel, toothpaste and a couple of meals at the shelter. But it was just too deep down this time with too many banana peels on top. My arms started hurting by the sheer force I used in searching for this thing.

Several people passed behind me. As always, they sneered, snorted or felt sorry for me. Maybe they did all three. Either way, I didn’t bother to react. My right hand delved deeper down into the hole, between old fast food cartons and left over burgers. I didn’t bother about eating some of that food like other homeless people would. I wasn’t that desperate yet.
My time as a homeless person was going on its forth year. I knew the twists and turns. Friends of mine had been homeless for ten years. One guy I knew for twenty. Missy, Pelican, Joey and Sam, they all lived under the bridges. They had all been hard working professionals before the cataclysm hit them and shoved them out of the infrastructure, into the non-existant lot. Missy was an ex-journalist. After her boyfriend killed himself, she was out on the street.

Me? Well, let’s say alcohol and fast women had produced half of the bargain. My ex-girlfriend leaving me did the next part. Me not keeping my job did the rest. My folks, I hear you say? Couldn’t they help me? My dad died of malignant cancer ten years ago. My relatives, including my mom, all lived in Washington State. Most of them didn’t know of my situation. My mum had her meager retirement money and I still called her from time to time, telling her lies about me still looking for jobs and auditioning for shows. I kept telling her that I was scraping together money for a trip back to Seattle.

Well, last year my mom came to New York City. A friend of mine had taken me in to his flat for the week my mom came to visit. I had washed and shaved in the homeless shelter and pretended to be a normal person living in the other guys flat. My mum had lived in a hotel. Once she was gone, I had thanked my friend for his services and gone back to being bad old homeless me. I wanted no charity. If I went back to functioning in the real world, it would be on my own terms. My own lack of smarts had produced this mess long ago. My own smarts were going to repair it.
I have always been too proud to collect charity and pity and too proud to handle both. Even as a homeless person, my integrity forbade me to settle for less. That was maybe sometimes a problem.

Sitting here with a simple pencil and a stack of white paper, I look back at the events that occured this winter and I wondered to myself how things could change so quickly and why. I am here to write this down in order to try to figure out what went wrong and where I am today in spite of those efforts. It is a wonder I am here at all.
My life?
This is what my life has been like.
I was educated at Northwestern University and started working on Broadway at age 23. I was in Equity, took singing lessons, taught acting and worked as a waiter, had a rich girlfriend. But once the job offers dwindled down and the auditions started failing, I sunk into a depression. Dad’s death made me cry and the fights with my fiancée brought me into the arms and charms of booze and bimbos. My girlfriend’s money became my money and when she found out that I was stealing from her account, the wonderful life long relationship that once was turned into dust. The offer to work in L.A. came as blessing for her, not for me. Soon, she was off and I was alone in a strange city, almost two and half thousand miles from home.
It was downhill from there.

Once I had not landed a show in three years, I began doubting my quality as an actor. Old alcoholic me finally landed a job as a night watchman at one of the local museums. But when burglars stole a painting during my shift, I was fired for being reckless. I couldn’t pay my rent, I got thrown out of my Brooklyn flat and there I was, three years later, mostly living in Manhattan shelters or sleeping in Central Park.
The greatest city in the world? I don’t know. Maybe. I just know that New York City had almost 50,000 homeless people sleeping in shelters in 2012 as opposed to 13,000 in 1983.

I had spent so many nights sleeping in shelters, collecting cans to refund, even on good days singing a song or two with a hat in front of my feet to collect some dough. But there were also nights when no beds were available in the municipal homes. On those days, the old alleyways, parkbenches or bridges had to suffice. It was November. If the winter was going to be as bad this year as the last, I was afraid my toes were going to turn black.
I knew that I could collect thirty dollars worth of refundable cans and bottles on good days. That would give me a good meal and a place to sleep in a shelter, maybe shower off the garbage. Sometimes I even bought something new to put on, brushed my teeth and on good days I even got to borrow some after shave. There were even days when people mistook me for a normal person.

Now, I shook the old hamburger bun off the cuff of my old jacket and threw the can into my shopping cart. I found it. Another five cents. Another can. Gee wiz, this cart was full now. My ten dollars worth made a lot of noise. Seven hours of work. I was hungry. Dear sweet Lord, I was hungry.

Dragging my feet down the pathway, I threw a glance over at the skyscrapers of the city that had been both good and bad toward me. My feet hurt, my back ached, my pride throbbed. So, I sat down, dragging my all too young feet over to a park bench close by and sat down.
Almost at once, a young girl came jogging by in pink and white sweats. I took no notice of her at first. Just that her Mp3-player was blasting some rock ‘n roll number into her eardrums while she kept her body fit. I couldn’t recall seeing her in the park before, although she did seem familiar to me. The face maybe resembled someone I had known, but that person’s haircolor had been different. This girl was a brunette. Could it be? Nah, forget it.
She passed me without noticing me and I remained there on my Central Park bench with my ten dollars worth of refund. Stupid to leave the refund in the cart. It would be a miracle if that refund was still there, if I fell asleep. As always, my resignation began creeping up my spine. Eventually, it landed in my head and I closed my eyes and fell asleep.

I woke up about an hour later with a huge hole in my stomach that told me that I definately had to get myself some food very soon, if I wanted to survive. The miracle had come true. My refund was still there. Those strange dreams had not helped me, in spite of the intact refund, and the fact that the November weather gave me the chills didn’t help either. That cute chick was still here, but now she was sitting on a parkbench way on the other side eating a cheese bun and drinking some water. Obviously, her training pass was over and she was contemplating going home again.
I still couldn’t place her, really having only seen her briefly from the side. And with that haircolor, I really couldn’t say who she reminded me of. Someone important. Someone from my past life. Someone with style. But who was she? A friend? A colleague? A cashier at a local supermarket? In any case, I would have to see her up close to really place her. Then I could relate to who she was. She belonged to a time when I used to have self confidence.

I stood up, sighing, shaking my head, realizing that I had not even turned forty and now was living off other people’s garbage. If I ever got back on my feet, I would never sneer at anyone ever again. A tear rolled down my left cheek. I felt awful. No bad audition would ever harm me again. I was in hell. Hell was a place on Earth, not heaven.

I went to the closest supermarket I could find and got rid of my cans. The extremely rude cashier wanted to get rid of me quick and I screamed at him that I was an ex-actor whose life had gone down the tubes. I even showed him my diploma from the Northwestern University that I kept in my jacket pocket.
He said nothing after that.
I went out of that place ten dollars richer another tear poorer. An hour later, I was sitting by a table at the homeless shelter eating a hot meal and drinking some liquid that resembled a holy soft drink. I showered and shaved, bought some second hand clothes from the discount that didn’t stink and walked out hoping that that two dollars that I had left would grow into enough cash to pay for a night’s sleep.

I wandered about for the next hour and I guess I must’ve looked rather clean, because people really did smile at me. Manhattan looked okay that day and I ended up passing a rather posh hotel. I have no idea what made me stop there. In any case, I did. I stood there for two minutes and was going to leave, when the girl that I had seen in Central Park earlier that day appeared in an elegant coat and an evening dress. I guessed, she was going out to have a business meeting. She eagerly spoke into her cellular phone in a fast dialect that I was sure had been New York once but was colored by Californian slang, telling the person on the other end that she was on her way to “bounce to a meeting with an associate that called her a Betty”. I smiled, realizing that she had never spoken like that when I had known her.
She remained standing there, speaking into her telephone.
All I could do was stare at her. I grabbed the necklace that hung around my neck. That little silver medallion, a small nightingale, had been hanging around my neck for the past fifteen years, ever since I had met Charmian. To this day, even after all these years of not being together with her, it hung there still.
This girl in her posh coat also sported a necklace exactly like mine. It was the nightingale.
A tear rolled down my cheek.

The years passed in a frenzy and I saw myself ten years younger, an actor, a singer, working. An alcoholic casanova, but working. I saw myself six years younger and I saw disaster. I saw myself now and I saw hell.

The woman that stood there speaking into her mobile phone was my old girlfriend Charmian Manchester. Her hair was dyed brown now. Why had she dyed it brown, when the whole world aimed to become blonde? Why had I not recognized her?
I opened my mouth to speak, but she left me before I could say anything. I followed her down the street. In a frenzy, I ran after her and realized I had lost her. So, I went back to the hotel and waited for her.

Sitting on a park bench again opposite the hotel, I munched on three breadrolls I had bought for my two dollars in the local bakery. My thoughts were circling my head. I couldn’t believe my luck. Charmian? Here? In New York? And me? Of all the people in this city, I had the luck of meeting her now after all these years?
Obviously, she was successful. She just had to be, living in an elegant hotel and obviously still living in L.A. and not begging for money. So ashamed. My life a waste, I had even missed the chance to open my mouth. But why had I not spoken to her? Because I had been homeless now for four years, that was why? Maybe, I had no integrity left. Maybe my chances of survival were limited.

So, I waited and waited and waited. And it got colder and colder and colder.
Finally, Charmian returned.
The feeling in my legs at this time was gone and still I ran up to her before she entered the hotel.
“Charmian,” I called out, before even crossing the street. A car almost hit me. My ex-girlfriend turned around. She saw me and could not place me at first.
“Excuse me,” she said, slowly. “Do I know you?”
I shivered, my whole body aching.
I shrugged. “It’s me. Buddy Young.”
Her jaw dropped. “Robert?”
She shook her head. “But ... what’s happened to you? Aren’t you ... an actor?”
I shook my head. “I ...”
Somehow, I couldn’t get the words out. All the bottled up emotions came exploding up through my soul and hitting my face. I saw Charmian and how successful she was. Then, I saw myself and what I had turned into. Endless pain hit my heart. In any other situation in my life I had been able to control myself. Even searching trashcans. Now I was confronted with my old life and it felt like staring up from a very deep pit up at my old self.
I sobbed.
“Charmian,” I said, shaking all over. “I’m homeless. I have been for the past three and a half years.”
Charmian dropped her purse on the ground, slapping her hand against her face, producing a high sound that sounded like a squeak.
“How?”
She kneeled down and fumbled after her purse. She did so without even taking her eyes off me, as if really doing so would maybe actually making this illusion disappear.
She picked up the purse, walked up to me and looked at my necklace. It was the same necklace that I had given her and me on the day we had become a couple.
She took it into her hand, looked at it and smiled bitterly. I could see it in her eyes that she really regretted having left me.
“Robert? How did this happen?”
She shrugged, trying to make sense of this image of me standing opposite her, smelling like garbage.
Again, she slapped that right hand with its pink nail polish against her mouth and whimpered.
“Oh, God, Robert. I wish I hadn’t left you. I have been so miserable. I wanted to call you. A relationship of mine turned so mean and once it did, I broke into a thousand pieces. Gee, Robert, I had your old number. I kept on calling it and that woman there said that you had been thrown out. What happened? Couldn’t you get a job? Say something, man!”

The tears were streaming down my face. The cars and the cop cars were driving back and forth behind me. Rappers were beat boxes the mickey out of my back and posh jet-setters were conversing about their new networking.
“I gave up auditioning, babe,” I finally said, after the tears had subsided. “I got a job as a night watchman and then there was a burglary. I was blamed and fired. I couldn’t pay the rent, babe. I just couldn’t. I was thrown out. I have been living in shelters ever since.”

Charmian started pacing the sidewalk. So much so, that the hotel guard in front of the hotel took a step off his silly red carpet and cocked his head. He asked if he could be of assistance. Charmian just shook her head.
“This all makes sense, Robert,” she said.
I winced. “How so?”
She turned to me. “I have ...”
She smiled, bitterly. “I have been so stressed out since my last relationship. The list of my one-night-stands have been endless. You have kept on popping up in my head.”
She stretched her arms to her sides.
“It’s like I have been fleeing from you. I told myself that there was no way in cold hell that I ever could find you again. You had no trackable e-mail, no cellphone number, no address, you are not even in the web, no facebook. It’s like you don’t exist.”

Charmian took a step closer to me. Her eyes met mine and now I saw what she was feeling. My God, I saw this woman’s soul. She raised a hand up to my cheek and touched it. That slow caress was the most beautiful feeling I had ever had. All the old emotions danced again. I couldn’t believe what I was experiencing. Hope. Was this hope? Beyond all this noise in this city, I actually felt hope. I dared not even contemplate it. Was I going to remain homeless? I didn’t know.

She started jabbering, crying, talking in unorganized and illogically put together sentences, regularly drying her tears off her face. Sometimes, it was hard to make out what she was saying. I started crying, as well, just because she cried.

“Why did you cheat on me, Robert? Steal my money, drink so much? Why did you? God, I loved you. I still love you, babe. I won’t let you go now. This is a sign from heaven. Please don’t leave me now. I came here for a job. Oh, Robert. My company in L.A. sent me here instead of another chick that traded with me. I insisted on coming. I just wanted to see this city again. Actually, something in me wanted to experience the nostalgia of seeing where we used to live. I was sure that I wasn’t going to see you. But here you are. Please, Robert. I have thought about you. Please, let’s work this out.”

I looked up at the stars, that somehow were visible up there in spite of all these city lights. Biting my lip, I closed my eyes. I sighed and winced.
“Charmian, there is not one day that has gone by that I haven’t regretted what I did. If you would take me back, I would do anything. But you are in L.A. What am I going to do?”
“Do you have anything that holds you back here?”
“Of course not.”
“Then, come back with me, babe. Let’s not lose this. I've known you since my childhood. We were best friends. Once I realized what I had done, it was too late. I don’t want to lose you. I will get you a ticket, get you a room here in the hotel so you can shower. I will get you new clothes. Anything. Just let’s work this out.”
Charmian shrugged.
“Maybe I have idealized you, but every relationship I have had since you has been awful and after every break-up I wished that I could have my best friend back. Maybe you caught me in a good, or in this case bad, time. I have spent years thinking about you, Robert.”
I nodded. “Please, Charmian. Change my life. Now.”
Charmian smiled.
“God, you are a gift from heaven.”
She grabbed the necklace.
“The nightingale.”
I uttered a shaky sigh.
“I can’t believe this is happening.”
She shook her head, her eyes twinkling with delight.
“Neither can I.”

All the pain of the last few years returned. I remembered sitting with her in her parent’s house, I remembered kissing her goodnight, moving to New York, listening to our special love-song by Buddy Holly. I remember fighting with her and her moving away. I remember becoming an alcoholic, becoming homeless, losing all hope and feeling like the loser I was.
She strode up toward me, a few soft steps. Old feelings returned. A very old Robert came back, the Robert from college, the Robert with a job, the Robert with joy in his heart. I really couldn’t get used to being that person again. I wanted to, but it would take time to realize that I was no longer a loser.
“Charmian,” I asked, “would you be willing to get me back on my feet?”
One tear fell down her cheek.
She nodded, very tenderly.
The crazy thing was that when the elegant architect kissed the toothless bum, nobody noticed.

Even now, years later, with me back on the Broadway scene and Charmian and me nursing our first child, I still can’t get used to being a winner. I still think I have to stop and check the wastebaskets for bottles.
I have done one thing, though.
Every week, on my free day, I help out at a homeless centre. After all, many old friends still live there.
Luckily, Charmian always comes with me.
I can never stay there very long.
After every visit, my eyes are always wet with tears.
Especially since I know I cannot help my old friends.
I am humble.
I know that no matter how famous I become, I know that I always have to be thankful for what the good Lord has given me: a career. More importantly, he gave me back the love of my life. I will never let her go again.
I love her so.

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