Part 1b. When Herman and I Met It Was Albany
This is a frame and it actually happened.
I originally met Herman at a self run vagrant shelter in Albany NY two years before I became infected by the homunculus.
It was about a year after the collapse, and six months after the planning committee gained complete control over every aspect of benevolent services in the area.
I had been hitchhiking across the state in the middle of a winter dump and the second night after landing in Troy the chill point went 30 below zero. So I took a bus down to Albany because there was still one of the few YMCA blocs in operation at the edge of the city.
There was no room at the YMCA, not even on the floor of converted storage containers tacked against makeshift holes in the outer shell of the building. Everybody who lived outside, wanted to live inside. It was getting dark so they let me make some soup and then sent me in a car to the shelter.
The man in the car told me I was lucky as we pulled up on a full block of ghosted brownstones, ironically annexed by the planning committee and turned into vagrant shelters after the collapse.
I got out of the car with my pack and went up the chipped stone cut polished stairs.
The heavy sculpted double doors thick with black enamel shut with a heavy muffled chunk and bounced in its locking mechanism with the crisp solid kind of click all heavy tall doors make when the hinges are nicely oiled.
I was waved into a reception area.
I walked through what was once a beautiful livingroom with velvet wallpaper, now watermarked and torn in strips to reveal the buckling plaster.
Undamaged spots where mirrors and photos used to hang were stenciled in black dust over time like the mist of a cave painting.
A disassembled brass chandelier hung down almost sideways like a cliche, with wires poking out each tip behind the stolen fixtures.
This place had a history that obviously included the previous occupants leaving quickly in a grab what you can and get out of here now kind of scene; forced out or absorbed in the collapse.
Etched French doors with knocked out hinges sat at either side of the reception area with yellow cellophane tape across each pane substituting for or bracing the broken glass.
I figured the doors were most likely removed to fit the large metal 1970's pearlized clay-green school principal desk with aluminum trimmings dropped in the middle of the wood paneled dining room.
The man at the desk in a green army jacket waved me in covering the mouthpiece of the black rotary phone. "I'll be with you in a minute." I sat down on the springy couch.
At this point in our history I've mentioned my abnormalities several times vaguely. It's ok if you're wondering about them because they've already started to become accepted at this point in the story's timeline.
If you're one of those people who used to know me a long time ago but don't any longer, you maybe are expecting me to say next in some flat tone of Burroughs that 'I pulled my wrinkled zed stroke 192 form out of my pocket wrapped around the last of my boiled cottons' or something.
It's not that kind of story, and I stopped writing under that influence in 1991.
Plus nobody has given my abnormalities a zed stroke anything since I was little, and even if I had any cottons, there would be nothing left to boil out of them.
Luckily for people like myself, the committee didn't concern itself with documenting differences and disorders. The lunatics were running well beyond the funny farm by now so there was no point in singling themselves out for ridicule under the wake of over assessment and personality scales.
The regular people were also just fine. They were given plenty of resources to consolidate and build their own services as well. I mention this just in case you were becoming concerned about them.
The man behind the desk in the army jacket was round and had a mustache. He went back to the phone call.
From what I gathered he was talking a friend of his out of blowing his own head off with some sort of gun. I realized at that moment I had walked into a 1980's style, stereotypical vietnam vet social worker talking down another vet having a flashback type of scene.
It was boring. I wouldn't have even mentioned it if this wasn't something that actually happened and was necessary to getting us to the part when I meet Herman.
I waited for it to be over. When it was over, I said the YMCA sent me because they're full.
The round man with the army jacket and now confirmed to have had a mustache got up out of his chair with a struggling humph. "We only have one rule, you clean up after yourself and no leaving the building after 9pm."
There were two rules.
He walked out from behind the desk. "Oh, you also can't leave until it's at least 0 degrees outside."
There were three rules.
"Oh and no girls..." he looked at me for a full 2 seconds "...or patrons, are allowed to stay over night in the dorms." The man poked his head out the doorway and I heard him say "Hey Herman come show this guy around."
"Herman will show you around. He'll set you up with a bed in the dorm as well." He handed me a clipboard with some sort of cursory information form on it. "Here, fill out what you can on this form, anything you can't answer just leave it blank. Do you have a pen?" I shook my head no. He dug a pen from a box on the desk. "Make sure you bring it back, these things are like gold around here." I said ok and followed Herman out the door.
Please remember here that Herman in this part of the story, isn't like Herman now.
Just like my own abnormalities hadn't surfaced with no homunculus to amplify and order them, Herman's own issues were pleasantly at rest below the surface, waiting for the trigger to release the damage which would envelop him completely and forever.
He hadn't yet become a paranoiac shut in, he had no collection of hats, and there were no eggs being hidden. He could go and come from his living areas as easily as George does now, or myself before the infection by the homunculus surfaced with its rules and habits.
Herman had a very clear and sharp perspective of what was going on around him at a given moment. He was the first to realize I had become infected by the homunculus, before I even knew it myself.
It was his detached sweetness that would have been the only precursor, which could be recognized easily if it had the specific social traits to put it in the context of an abnormality; if abnormalities were still being categorized and segmented away from normal behavior.
I followed Herman up the perfectly polished marble spiral staircase and into a kitchen the size of a carport.
The kitchen was lined to the walls with various refrigerators and freezers. A little man was sitting at the table eating a full pound block of butter with a silver potato knife.
He sensed my entering but didn't look up from the NY Times, which he seemed to want very much to appear to be reading. "What's your birthday?"
Herman looked at the ceiling with an oh brother face. "Just tell him your birthday."
I told him.
The little man put down the potato knife and looked at me. "You were born on a Wednesday." He paused nodded as if I agreed with him, then picked the knife up and went back to eating the block of butter, slowly turning the pages of the newspaper as if there was no conversation in the room.
I was told later he did this every day; sitting down and eating a block of butter while appearing to read the Times front to end. I was also told he refused to wash any dishes which was a sore point for many of the residents, though nobody would barely mention it directly.
He was one of those kinds of characters you wind up hearing stories about when traveling in the circles of road people. With this guy it was an old standard: he was actually a millionaire and lived in the shelter out of choice because no family members would have him. This rumor gave him the ability to move in and out of spaces with people being helpful and polite, just in case it was true and he was in fact a walking lottery ticket.
It turned out, I was told much later, that in the end he was just one of the previous tenants of the building before the collapse, and everything changed so slowly around him he just continued living there; unaware, like a frog in a slowly heating pot of water.
Ironically he probably would have wound up in the shelter or one like it eventually anyway. The planning committee was very efficient in their foresight when it came to placement of the natives after a major change in the residential restructuring of an area.
We left the kitchen and Herman said "I'll show you the activities room on the way to the dorm."
There were 3 main living areas in the shelter. Men's shelter on 2nd floor, women's on 4th and the common area on the middle 3rd. First floor was administrative like I told you before.
We walked through the open wall which never had a door into the activities room, a huge space with vaulted ceilings and one of those round window areas with a point like a castle. You probably know the kind.
The scene in the room was like a chaotic level out of Dante's hell or something like it.
Mismatched and carefully upholstered fine leather comfort chairs lined the walls, left behind by original owners, or even worse, previous tenants.
A cluster of kerosene heaters sat in the middle of the room with black soot flaking down from the ceiling like poisoned flurries.
On the once valuable chairs and couches was a mix of men brown with dirt and beards, and haggard torn women on their laps or running around barely contained in stretch pants and tight jeans with holes in them, their tired trade also made irrelevant after the collapse and the planning committee's declassification of illicit behaviors.
There was a large tv on one side of the room with three guys watching some sort of sports event. One of them in glasses held together with a paperclip would stand up every few minutes, turn the tv volume dial up and down three times yelling "shut up, shut up, shut up!" at the guy standing at the other end of the room blasting blue oyster cult on a 1970's gradeschool media cart tape recorder.
There was yelling and laughing in the rest of the room, bottles of thunderbird and Robetussin were being swung and passed around.
A ragged couple appeared to be trying to do sex to each other behind a ripped room divider in the corner. If it wasn't fascinating it would have been disgusting.
It was actually pretty disgusting anyway.
I half expected someone to wheel in a gigantic golden calf with flowers around its neck and Charlton Heston to come out and start yelling at everybody.
One of the women got up off a guy's lap yelling and slapped him in the face. The rest of the room went silent with a hush. Except for the tv, and the music. The room was still noisy. The people went silent. Some of the people went silent. Most of the people didn't pay attention.
The woman now red fisted, spun slowly looking at the rest of the people in the room bugeyed with flaking painted on makeup accented and cracking under her stringy black frazzled hair like a halloween wig.
She started screaming without many actual words making it through, and then stopped screaming, and then a gurgling sound, and then she fell on the floor with eyes open and mouth half closed with collection of spit bubbles forming in the corner of it.
Herman vaguely and in a matter of fact tone looked over at the lady and slowly turned around. "I should go tell the man with the mustache to call an ambulance. I'll show you the dorms on the way down."
I followed Herman down the spiral stairs and in to the second level. We walked down a short hallway that was obviously newer than the rest of the building, having been built to buffer the men's dorm from the staircase.
The dorm was split down 3 lanes with 2 level metal bunkbeds, each with one of those thin vinyl cracking mattresses with the muted light blue or salmon color stripes and those round metal screens on the sides.
Each bunk had various states of clutter and pillows with blankets folded.
Herman took me down to the end of the first row next to a window. "Here, you can stay in this one." The steam radiator made a series of clanks and then relieved itself with a hiss.
My bunk was next to the window. It was smelly there and Herman told me "It belongs to the birthday man." Which was Herman's name for the little man eating butter with a potato knife. He was referring to the jars of urine next to the bunk across the row from mine.
Herman showed me his bunk which was next to the door. He was in charge of turning out the lights like a grownup version of Brady bedtime for lunatics.
"Don't leave your stuff there on top of your bed like that. If you have anything costs money you should give it to the man with the mustache." There was an obvious confusion on my face I'm sure because everything I had cost money, and although yes I assumed he meant valuables I still wasn't sure where to put my regular stuff.
Herman was never very good with other people's facial expressions, he stood there obviously waiting for me to sort my valuables so we could go tell the man with the mustache about the most likely dead lady.
Herman was also incapable of understanding sarcasm, something it took me a few tries to figure out, and also something that alienated George slightly at first.
I pulled my glasses and passport out of my bag and stuffed it under the bed. "Ok, let's go tell the guy about the lady."
"Are you sure you want to put everything under your bed like that?" Herman bent down and pulled the bag out and walked it over to me as if he was to show me where to put it.
He stood looking at me for a solid 30 seconds as I waited for him to explain where I should put it instead. He didn't say anything, just kept looking at me.
"Um. So where should I put it?" I relieved Herman of the bag and looked around for a locker or something.
"I mean it goes under the bed but like this." Herman took the bag and slid it back under the bed again. "That's better let's go."
I mentioned it looked the same to me and Herman got up without responding.
It was from that point on that Herman and I became friends. It wasn't until at least a year later that Herman's eccentricities would begin to become debilitating, and 2 until my own abnormalities would surface under the infection by the homunculus.
We left the shelter and headed down to Brooklyn once I saw an announcement the building 2 houses from the one I grew up in had become available under the Benevolent Committee's housing redistribution act.