When Ike Blessed my Feet

Homeless doesn’t mean worthless

My mentor has been after me for decades to write a memoir and I continue to resist. I joke that I’m not old enough but the truth is that I feel like I don’t have anything new to add to the litany of abuse/addiction/recovery memoirs.

What I do have, however, is a trove of material for my fiction.

In the winter of 1997 I began seeing this really big old black guy sitting on one of the steam grates downtown. He’d sit there under a blanket with snow falling all around him or be lying down on the grate.

Maybe I’ve gotten too used to that kind of sight living where and when I do, but at the time that really shocked me. When I saw the big man upright (and he was big!) I’d put a buck in his cup. It became a thing. I’d nod at him and put that folded up dollar in his cup. Over time I got up my nerve and asked his name. Ike.

When a friend’s mother was dying of breast cancer, I asked Ike if he prayed. He nodded. I asked him to pray for Vera and he nodded again.

I got to where I’d look forward to seeing Ike downtown. And, yes, I’m real clear on the fact that putting that dollar in his cup made me feel like I was a tiny bit better than the hordes pushing past him. I took a slippery little pleasure in knowing his name because that set me apart from those other heartless rats in the race. It was as if I really cared about the guy.

I guess I did because when he disappeared it worried me. By this time I’d gotten a part time job working in a poster kiosk in a kind of vertical mall in what had once been the railroad terminal downtown. Three days a week, ten hours a day, pushing the Frida Kahlos and Michael Parkes and wondering if Ike was ok (interesting that it never occurred to me that he might have gotten help and was now living indoors).

Then one day I looked up and here came Ike down the ramp towards my kiosk. He was grinning and when he got to the counter by me, he reached into the frayed neck of his sweatshirt and pulled out a key on a shoelace.

“I got a place to stay at”, and he was beaming from ear to ear. So was I.

After that I didn’t see him too often. In the nice weather sometimes I’d see him sitting around out by where the buses pulled up in front of the Terminal Tower. We’d chat a little but there wasn’t much to talk about really. We didn’t have anything in common.

Then I was downtown one Saturday right after getting my acceptance letter to Columbia University. I felt like I was floating. And seeing Ike was icing on the cake. I must have almost danced over to where he was sitting on a low concrete barrier. He seemed happy to see me. I don’t think I asked how he was doing; I just launched into my Big News.

He smiled and reached down with one enormous hand and squeezed the top of my foot.

“There. A blessing for your foot.” Then did the same on the other foot. “There, another blessing.” So my feet have been blessed by Ike and maybe that’s why I have smart feet that keep me on the beam.

That’s the last time I saw Ike. But a year earlier I’d written a story that was partly about Ike. I’d written it while studying writing with Steve Lattimore during my lightning fast three semesters at Case Western Reserve University. Steve’s was the first writing class where I had to finish a short story; four actually. We all had to finish four short stories after workshopping them in class. My story about Ike was my last story of the semester and also my final exam.

When I got it back (and I think I still have it somewhere), Steve had written under the “A”: You will be a publishing writer. I guarantee it.

Thanks, Ike.

Thanks for reading Writers Guild — A Smedian publication

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