Joy Extinguished

Howard's World

I woke up with 16 cents in my pocket,
kind of hungry, and determined to get a cup of coffee and read some Pat Conroy, as my sole source of joy, which I did. My food card is down to $1.49, with 6 days left in the month. I am walking in the shadow of the valley of death. Not only that, things kind of suck...
I keep telling Howard,
(the 65 year old guy, who I talked into coming with me on the train, to get out of New Orleans) to put his stuff out of sight in the morning, and not leave a spread out blanket, as a signal to unscrupulous other homeless people, like a big white flag saying "I surrender! I surrender my stuff!"
But, yet, Howard persists in living in the squalor which you see to the left. He could, with a little effort, put his stuff up higher in the holly bush, so that someone walking by wouldn't even see it.
I'm almost 20 years younger than he, but I assume that I've had more experience with thieving homeless guys than he has.
Cookout Goes Up In Smoke

Damn, How much meat are they cooking??

Last night, after it got dark, Howard and I left the library. I went to get my bag and guitar from Save-A-Lot, and then checked the Save-Even-More, on general principle.
There were turkey drumsticks, sausages, a dozen eggs, and some thin-cut top round steaks, all of which was technically expired, but not yet physically expired.
I had thought that I would have to walk all the way to the railroad spot, to get the kielbasa and the rack of pork ribs and the "frozen" pizza, along with the salt and pepper, but decided that the newly found food would be enough, and that the rest would "keep" in this refrigerator-like weather that we have been having.
As I was walking back to the graveyard with the food, I took a different route, following intuition and the general principle that; if you go the same way every time, you will never know what you might be missing; and found two racks, which looked like they had come out of a refrigerator. They were leaning against a trash can. They were well suited for the cooking of what we had. They would even hold eggs in place to be roasted.
I threw those grates, along with some red oak wood, over the wall in a certain spot, then went to enlist the help of Howard in carrying it to the back, behind Nathaniel Elliot's tomb, where I had constructed a barbecue pit, using part of a wall which had come loose around Samuel Ashton's place.
I soon had a roaring fire going. Howard's lack of experience reared its head again when he asked: "Shouldn't we put the food on the fire?," when the flames were leaping to about 3 feet above the grate.
"No, the first thing to do is to let all this wood burn down to a bed of glowing embers.That is where you get your steady heat from. Then, we can feed it fuel as necessary. It won't be ready for another 20 minutes or so." 
Why some people expect to be able to cook something which takes 45 minutes in an electric oven set to 350 degrees in anything less than 45 minutes is beyond me. If that were viable, why wouldn't people just set their ovens to 500 degrees to speed things up?
I let the flames burn out, leaving a bed of embers such that you couldn't hold your hand 5 inches over the grate for more than 5 seconds, and then arranged the food on our "stove" with the heartier items, such as yams in the middle and the more delicate things, like the thin-cut top round steaks, on the edges, and then told Howard that I would be back in a half hour, and to "flip it every now and then."
I then ran to the store to get one can of Steel Reserve Lager.
Returning to the graveyard, I noticed a cop car parked nearby.
Perching myself on a trash can and looking over the wall, I saw the beams of a couple flashlights, cutting swaths left and right and moving in the general direction of where our grill was, closing in on Howard.
Howard was trapped, no way out, a sitting duck; his back literally against the wall -like what was on the grill; dead meat!

I tried to imagine what he would possibly tell the cops, should they find him. I watched as one of them apparently found him, as the beam from his flashlight stopped moving at the very spot where he should have been.
I listened for Howard's voice, but didn't hear it. Being hard of hearing himself, Howard tends to yell to whomever he is speaking to, which is, I think, common amongst the hearing impaired. I didn't hear Howard yelling, or anything else. The silence was deafening; you could hear a pin drop; it was deathly still.
Soon, I heard the distinctive sound of the blast of a fire extinguisher, then saw a thick cloud of white smoke rising up from the area behind Mr. Elliot's tomb, becoming illuminated by the street lights, as it floated above the top of the wall, and departed the graveyard, like the ghost of our barbecue.
I gave up on turkey drumsticks and roasted eggs, and went back to the sleeping spot.
Howard was there.
He told me that he had gotten some kind of cramp in his stomach "I have a hernia," and that he decided not to wait for the food to finish cooking, but left. He acted surprised when I told him about the police and their fire extinguisher.
I wondered if the police had encountered him, threatened him with jail for trespassing and starting an open fire in an historical graveyard (which is on the National Registry of Historic Graveyards), and Howard spilled the beans, ratted me out, sang like a canary, turned on me, and fingered me; all at once; then concocted the "stomach cramp" story, hoping to pull the wool over my eyes, leave me in the dark, throw me off, and hoodwink me.
I'm not sure what really happened in that graveyard in the middle of last night. Howard dropped off the sports section at my holly bush this morning, as if nothing had happened, though. He may have left the graveyard, thinking that I was going to cook the food anyways, and bring whatever I hadn't eaten, which would have been a considerable amount, back to the sleeping spot, so, why wait around...maybe he had gotten a creepy feeling, the willies and a chill down his spine, just as someone was phoning the police.
This morning, the opinion of one of the ladies at Pollman's Bakery, after I had related the above story was that the police were on high alert for smoke coming out of the graveyard because, just recently, someone was shot and wounded in another cemetary and his body set on fire because the shot didn't kill him and the guy was out of ammunition; (but had a lighter, I guess.)
This morning I bit the bullet myself, and went to Waterfront Rescue Mission to eat their noontime meal. It was red beans and chopped up hotdogs in a red bean sauce, poured on top of white rice, with a piece of yellow cornbread, some boiled mustard greens, and a brownie; with a cup of amber iced tea to wash it all down. Not bad but, of course, they have electric stoves and ovens.