Lost December Read online

  “I’ve heard that before,” he said.

  I sat up. “You can smell my breath if you want.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll pass.”

  “I’ve been staying at the Bellagio. I just lost all my money.”

  “I’ve heard that before too. May I see your I.D., please?”

  “It’s in my bag.” I turned to get it. My bag was gone. My suitcase was still there, but my carry-on bag had disappeared. Everything I needed was in the bag: my wallet, my I.D., my money and my cell phone. Then it hit me, the ring was gone too. I looked around frantically. “I’ve been robbed.”

  The officer just looked at me. “No I.D.?”

  “I had a ring in there. It was worth thirty thousand dollars.”

  “I just need your I.D.”

  “Didn’t you hear me? I’ve been robbed. My bag had everything!”

  He looked at me dully. “Do you want to file a report?”

  I wanted to scream. “Will it do any good?”

  “It will for your insurance claim. Or if someone turns it in, we can contact you.”

  “Contact me on what? My stolen cell phone?”

  “Sir, settle down.”

  I wanted to throttle this guy. When I had gained control, I said, “I have nothing. I have no place to go.”

  “There’s a rescue mission up off Bonanza. They have beds and a soup kitchen.” He pointed. “It’s straight up the boulevard from here.”

  “I’m not sleeping in a homeless shelter.”

  “I don’t care where you sleep, as long as it’s not here.”

  I stood and wiped the dirt from my pant legs. “Eight months ago I had a million dollars,” I said.

  “Vegas is magic. You can see David Copperfield make an elephant disappear or go to a casino and make a fortune disappear.”

  “Are there any pawnshops around here?”

  “That’s like asking if there are any casinos.” He walked back to his patrol car and sat there until I walked away.

  I walked up the boulevard. Pawnshops are ubiquitous in Vegas—they follow gambling like seagulls follow shrimp boats. I had never been inside a pawnshop before. It looked like an indoor flea market without the energy. The place was dirty and dank, with surveillance cameras in the corner of the room. At the back of the shop was a wooden counter and behind it were rows of guns locked up in a case. A large man wearing a Stan Ridgway T-shirt, bald with a goatee, sat behind the counter looking at me with a grim expression. “What can I do you for?” he asked in a gravelly voice.

  “I’ve got to sell some things,” I said.

  “Whatcha got?”

  “I’ve got an iPad and an iPod,” I said.

  “Anything else?”

  “Some clothes.”

  “Don’t do clothes.”

  “They’re expensive clothes,” I said.

  “Don’t do clothes,” he repeated. “Let me see the electronics.”

  I took them out of my suitcase and set them on the counter.

  “I’ll give you two hundred dollars for the iPad and seventy-five for the iPod.”

  “How about my suitcase?”

  He looked at it. “Fair condition. I’ll give you forty-five dollars for it.”

  “Forty-five dollars? It’s a Louis Vuitton. It was over three hundred dollars new.”

  “It’s not new anymore.”

  “How about two hundred dollars?”

  “I’ll give you fifty-five. Final offer.”

  I looked at the bag. I wasn’t about to carry it around with me. “Do you have any backpacks?”

  He pointed to the wall. “Over on that shelf.”

  “How much are they?”

  “Depends on the pack.”

  I walked over and selected one that was big enough to fit my clothing, but not so big to look like I was camping. I checked the price tag: $27. I looked back at him. “How about I trade you the suitcase for this pack and fifty dollars.”

  “What’s the price on it.”

  “Twenty-seven dollars.”

  “Then I’ll give you the pack and twenty-eight dollars.”

  The guy wasn’t budging. I relented, bringing the pack up to the front. I filled it up with my clothes, then lifted my suitcase up to the counter.

  “Don’t put it up here,” he said. “Just leave it on the floor.”

  “Sorry,” I said, setting it back down.

  He took out a calculator and a pad of paper and pen. “We got an iPad for two hundred, an iPod classic for fifty-five.”

  “Seventy-five,” I corrected.

  He looked at me. “Seventy-five. Then fifty-five for the suitcase minus twenty-seven for the pack, the total is three hundred and three.” He opened his register and took out some bills. “Here’s your money.”

  I put the money in my front pocket, then turned and walked out. I sat down on the sidewalk near the side of the building to think. I knew I wasn’t thinking right. I was depressed, angry, desperate and scared. I had $303 to my name. I needed to conserve every dime until I could create some kind of situation for myself. I had to come up with a plan before what little money I had left was gone—before my clothes were dirty and I stank too much for anyone to hire me.

  Hire me? How would I get a job? I had skills and schooling, but I had no I.D., no address, no résumé and no phone. I had hired dozens of people for Crisp’s and I had never hired anyone on the spot. It was always a phone call the next few days or weeks. Where would they call? And even if someone did hire me immediately, it would be weeks before I received my first paycheck. How would I cash it without I.D.? I began to understand the downward spiral of homelessness.

  There had to be somewhere else I could go for help, if I could just think of it. As I thought of the people I knew, the reality of my life hit me like a truncheon. I had no friends—no one I kept in regular touch with. I suppose that was part of the initial allure of the Wharton clan—it was the first group outside of a work environment that I had belonged to. I had no church. No social club. No fraternity. In college I went from class to work and then home. The only friends I had, if you can call them friends, were my associates from the copy centers, and, because I was their manager, none of those were close. At the time I blamed it on the stigma of officers fraternizing with the troops, but the truth was, I just didn’t have time for anyone.

  Sadly enough, the Wharton group was it. Sean and Marshall were users and Candace had left me. Suzie was who knows where. Lucy would help, if she could, but she didn’t have any money and I didn’t even know where she was. The only one I knew I could turn to in a crunch was James. And he was gone.

  As far as family went, I was in equally bad shape. My grandparents on both sides had passed away years earlier. The only relatives I had from my mother’s side lived back East, and the last time I’d seen any of them was at my mother’s funeral when I was seven. The closest thing I had to a family was the group my father had created: Henry, who had thrown me to the curb, Mary, who was an appendage to my father and would do nothing without his consent, and my Aunt Barbara and Uncle Paul. I knew Barbara and Paul well enough to know that they would side with my father.

  As awful as it sounded, spending the night at the homeless shelter seemed to be my best option until I got things figured out.

  I spent the afternoon making my way to the rescue mission. It was easy to find. There was a massive gathering of humanity in front of the building. I felt uneasy as I approached the crowd. Some of those around me were obviously mentally ill, talking to themselves; some were shaking, addicts of one substance or another; then others were just people like me, down on their luck. People like me? I doubted there were many displaced millionaires in the crowd.

  I pushed my way to the front, looking around for someone to explain how things worked when a woman shouted at me, “Get back in line!” She pointed at me and almost everyone around me turned to look at me. Drawing attention to myself was the last thing I wanted.

  A large man covered in tattoos s
hoved me. “Get in line.”

  “I’m trying to find the line,” I said.

  A moment later a man near the shelter’s door raised his hands and shouted, “That’s it, that’s it.”

  I turned to the man behind me. He wore army fatigues and his gray hair was pulled back in a ponytail. “What’s he talking about?”

  “They’re out of room,” he said.

  “So what do we do?”

  He looked at me with an amused expression. “Find a nice dumpster, somewhere that don’t smell too much, and make sure it ain’t on trash day. I lost a buddy that way.”

  “I’m not sleeping in a dumpster,” I said.

  “Suit yourself,” he said. “There’s always the tunnels.”

  “What are the tunnels?”

  “Flood tunnels under the city. There’s a whole world underground.”

  “Where do you find them?”

  He grinned. “They’re everywhere, pal. There’s one underneath you right now. But you’ll need a flashlight. And a knife.”

  “Why a knife?”

  “You never know who’s down there.”

  My world had transformed from dream to nightmare. I wasn’t like these people, I told myself, these “homeless.” I had run a multimillion-dollar business. I had an M.B.A. from Wharton. I’d stayed in Napoleon’s house.

  These thoughts brought me no comfort. No, I wasn’t like them. I wasn’t as smart. If they had that kind of money, they would cling to it like a life raft. They wouldn’t have given a dime to Sean.

  I walked around the area until two in the morning—until I couldn’t walk anymore. I was tempted to use the money I had in my pocket for a cheap hotel room, but that would be shortsighted. What would I eat with? I found a place to sleep behind a pyracantha bush in a park. Sleep isn’t the best description of what I did. I think I woke at every sound. Being homeless is a frightening thing.

  Years earlier, in my college sociology class, the professor asked us to contemplate what it would be like to be dropped into a foreign country without shelter, friends or currency. I never imagined that I’d have the opportunity to find out firsthand what that would be like. Over the next few days I learned about this culture I was now a part of. I was amazed at how uncomfortable “normal” people were around me and became aware of their subtle, furtive glances of pity or disdain.

  I learned that there were more than 14,000 homeless in the city and just a small number of beds available for them. Even then, many of the homeless stayed away from the shelters after being beaten up, having their things stolen or both.

  The streets weren’t any safer of course. The homeless fall victim to other homeless, drug addicts, gangs and sometimes even the police. In civilized society there are rules, courtesies and pretenses, but they don’t apply to those on the street. The concrete outdoors is as mean a world as nature itself—a violent world, where the strong prey on the weak.

  If you couldn’t get out of the quicksand

  when you were strong,

  how are you going to get out

  after you’ve lost all your strength?

  Luke Crisp’s Diary

  For the next few days my space behind the bush at the park was my home base. I found some cardboard, which I laid flat over the bush’s fallen needles. I bought a loaf of bread and a box of crackers, a package of toilet paper and a plastic bottle of water, which I purchased more for the receptacle than the liquid.

  I bought a newspaper and started looking through the help wanted ads. I found a few openings for managerial positions and I called from a pay phone at a 7-Eleven to schedule interviews. My first interview was two days later with an office supply company. The day of the interview I shaved and washed myself with paper towels from the sink at a nearby gas station, then put on my cleanest clothes. As I looked at myself in the mirror, I wished that I hadn’t let my hair grow so long in Europe. I did my best to make it look good, then walked four and a half miles to the interview.

  I arrived at the interview sweat-stained from my walk, sunburned from exposure and puffy-eyed from lack of sleep. I had, out of necessity, brought my backpack, which looked out of place in the corporate environment.

  The receptionist was indifferent toward me and I waited in the lobby for nearly an hour, which, frankly, I didn’t mind, as it was air-conditioned and furnished with soft, vinyl couches.

  When the HR director finally walked out into the lobby to get me, I could see from her eyes that I had already failed the interview.

  The first thing the woman asked was to see my résumé, which I didn’t have, though I offered her a verbal one. She listened to me for a moment, but I could tell it was only out of courtesy. She asked just a few more surface questions (the obligatory kind, not the ones you ask when you’re serious about hiring), then said they’d give me a call if they decided to hire me—ignoring the fact that she’d never asked for my phone number.

  Over the next week I went to three more interviews, all with similar results. Actually, worse results, probably due to my increasing desperation. My father used to say, “The world only offers you what you don’t need.” He may have been right. You can’t get a bank loan until you can prove you don’t need it, and it’s tough to get a job if you don’t already have one.

  In spite of my thrift and near starvation, I was quickly running low on money, so after just one week of rejection I decided to lower my sights and applied for four custodial positions. If I couldn’t work in an office I could, in the meantime, clean one. I was astonished to find out how competitive it was to get a job cleaning a building—even a warehouse.

  Actually, the interviews for the custodial positions were more painful than those for the managerial positions. One of them was with the daughter of the owner of a wholesale plumbing supply outlet. I had graduated summa cum laude from ASU, earned an M.B.A. from Wharton, had managed a multimillion-dollar business before I was twenty, and there I was in a warehouse, sitting in a taped vinyl chair at the mercy of a nineteen-year-old girl who had a lip ring, two nose rings, a massive tattoo on her neck and kept saying “we was.” I didn’t get the job. I didn’t get any of them.

  By the end of my third week on the street, I was overcome with despair. I felt like I was walking in a haze, which is no surprise since I don’t think I had slept for more than two hours straight since I’d left the Bellagio.

  One morning I saw my reflection in the glass window of a building and had to stop to make sure it was me. I was unshaven and dirty and my hair was long and matted to one side. I realized what people saw when I applied for a job. I looked miserable. I looked homeless.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-Five

  Under the Las Vegas streets resides a silent,

  subterranean village of the city’s homeless.

  “It’s not a bad life,” one of the tunnel dwellers said to me.

  “Two walls and a roof overhead. Beats sleeping in the park.”

  Luke Crisp’s Diary

  Living in the park was getting more untenable. One night I heard a drug deal going down just on the other side of the bush. Fortunately for me they didn’t know I was there. Another night, I woke to the sound of a police radio. I peeked out of my space to see three patrol cars parked on the near side of the park. Someone had been stabbed to death. That’s when I decided to move.

  The next morning I went into a thrift store and bought a flashlight with batteries, a sleeping bag, an inflatable cushion, a package of toilet paper and a bowie knife. I strapped the knife to my leg and fastened the sleeping bag and cushion to my pack. In my walking I had passed the opening to one of the flood tunnels about a mile from the park. As I walked toward the tunnel, I felt like I was walking into the mouth of a beast—one that might swallow me forever.

  I turned on my flashlight and went inside. I passed two people—one drunk, the other passed out—about twenty yards from the entry. I kept on walking through the darkness. Not counting the rats, I didn’t see anyone else, though I passed several pl
aces that stank of urine or feces. About a hundred yards from the tunnel’s entrance I found a place where someone had spray-painted HOME SWEET HOME.

  I laid my flashlight against the concrete wall, then made a nest of some scraps lying around, cardboard and newspapers, inflated my pad and rolled out my sleeping bag. I turned off the flashlight, and lay back. Before I fell asleep, a thought went through my mind—the same thing I had thought in Saint-Tropez: If only Dad could see me now.

  During the time I spent underground, I met scores of people, including a couple who had brought in a bed with a headboard. They also had Ansel Adams prints leaning against the tunnel’s concrete wall—all the comforts of home. I don’t know if the tunnels ever flooded, they didn’t while I was there, but most of the time a small stream of runoff ran through the center, which we used to bathe.

  Some time after I’d moved into the tunnel, Christmas decorations began appearing in the store windows outside. It’s strange how irrelevant time becomes when there’s nothing to pin it to. I had no calendar, no watch and no reason to own either. There were no events in my life, no dates, no holidays, just daily survival. I kept telling myself that I was still going to escape, but each day it seemed less likely. I ate at the soup kitchen when I could, but not always, and my money was dwindling. The weather got colder, but not intolerable. I suppose the moderate winter is one of the reasons Vegas attracts so many homeless—at least those that it doesn’t produce itself. If I was just one state north, I might have frozen to death.

  As I became more depressed, I became more nocturnal, usually beginning my day around 4 P.M., eating dinner at the soup kitchen, then wandering around at night. I preferred the world at night, when it was less crowded—when normal people slept and the world was left to us, the invisible. I didn’t do much but think. That’s all there was to do, think and walk.

  One night I was crossing through a home supply store’s parking lot when I was attacked by two men. I didn’t run as I didn’t even see them coming. I was immediately knocked to the ground.