SoMa Literary Review - Blind Johnny Ray

Blind Johnny Ray

By Andrew Dugas

Excerpted from the novel “Sleepwalking in Paradise ”

For the first few years that I lived on Cole Street , Blind Johnny Ray never hit me up for spare change. It didn't matter that his favorite bench was just two doors down from my building, nor that I passed him, sitting there, at least twice a day.

I began to wonder if it was me.

Johnny always seemed to be chatting with other neighborhood folks, smiling and laughing, his teeth flashing in the San Francisco sunlight. In his trademark sheepskin coat, he lounged upon that bench like a mountain man making a guest appearance on the Tonight Show, a silver-maned Grizzly Adams with dark glasses and white cane.

And if anyone offered him coins or doggy-bag leftovers, he didn’t seem to mind.

But he never asked me for anything, not even a quarter.

Things changed around my third Christmas in the neighborhood.

One windy Saturday, Johnny was making a scene outside the Postal Chase, the local mailbox and shipping store. Using a metal newspaper stand as a table, he was trying to box up and wrap some toys, red and blue Power Ranger action figures in their plastic and cardboard packaging.

He would be managing just fine, his fingers feeling along the edges of the box and folding over the burlap, but then the tape dispenser would fall or the wind would pull at the paper, and he would be forced to stop and go back a few steps.

After a few rounds of this, the paper was crumpled almost beyond use and tangles of tape clung to Johnny's sleeves. He was hurling curses like thunderbolts, causing all the café goers and holiday shoppers to cross the street. I was prepared to do the same, but the girl I was with - a certain legal secretary, nothing serious - said awww and pursed her lips in a way that made me dizzy.

So I stepped up, going over to Johnny and offering to help. It only took me a couple of minutes and I even paid for the shipping to Albuquerque, much to my girl's delight. We went on our way, picking up a bottle of wine at Alpha Market before going back to my apartment.

A few days later, I passed Johnny on his bench and ventured a hello. This time he answered, sending a warm rush of surprise through me.

"Hey, thanks a lot for your help. With the presents for my boys, I mean." Johnny told me about his two sons and how, no matter what, he sent them Christmas presents every year. "My wife threw my ass out and I can't be with them on account of how I'm a derelict and all."

His dedication seemed very sweet, but just by piecing together certain details, I figured his kids must have been full grown by then, college age at least. I wondered what they thought of all the action figures arriving like clockwork year after year. Of course, it was more likely that his wife had long since moved and the toys were piling up in the Albuquerque Post Office. Johnny didn't exactly have a return address.

"No problem, Johnny," I told him. "No problem at all."

The next year, right after Thanksgiving, he stopped me on the corner and asked me if I could help him with the presents again. And maybe write out a card for him, since I was a journalist and all. I said yes, the same way I would say yes for the next three years after that.

I didn't know it at the time, but that first experience outside the Postal Chase had automatically enrolled me in the Blind Johnny Ray Benevolence Society, an ever shifting group of Cole Valley locals that looked out for him. We thought about Johnny when we were sifting through the spare change on our bureaus and wondered about his shoe size when cleaning out the closet. We set aside containers of leftover chicken and rice when cleaning up after dinner.

This generosity did not extend to all the bums in the neighborhood. Despite its hippie heritage, the Cole Valley of the early 90s was not particularly civic-minded when it came to the homeless problem. No, there was something about Johnny himself, something in his gentle manner and kind behavior that, even when he was clearly inebriated, elicited this response from the the Blind Johnny Ray Benevolence Society.

Maybe we just didn't see him as a homeless person.

Johnny began "accepting" my help. He never called it panhandling, and technically I guess it wasn't. He didn't stand on a corner asking random strangers for spare change, and he didn't lean against a wall with a paper cup extended for offerings. Rather, he waited until he encountered someone he knew and accepted any help offered. Whatever it was or wasn't, I never felt like I'd been panhandled.

Sometimes, though, he did reach out.

One night, Johnny mumbled something at me in a low voice as I was coming home. I couldn’t make out what he’d said, so I asked him. He repeated, almost painfully: "Can you help me?" He seemed embarrassed. "I'm hungry." He hadn't eaten since the day before, so we walked down to Haight Street where I bought him a burrito.

We sat in the little park by the N Judah tunnel, right off Cole. As he ate, I collected the scraps of foil wrapping and crunched them into a silver ball. The night was quiet and the sky full of pink fog.

The occasional mercy burrito was about as far as my financial generosity stretched. Being a struggling hedonist with no real job, I had little to offer, cashwise. I tried to make up for it in other ways, with leftovers or little gifts. Since I supplemented my meager newspaper paycheck by working catering gigs, I often had party leftovers. Mini-quiche hors d'ouvres and slab-ends of brisket.

But the most memorable gift I ever gave him wasn’t food but an improbable Playboy magazine in Braille that I'd found in Aardvark Books. Two dollars. It was just a thick sheaf of brown burlap riddled with punched out dots and the famous bunny logo stamped on the cover in black ink.

I handed it to him and watched as his fingers danced across the cover. Then he chuckled and solemnly promised to only read the articles.

My last winter in Cole Valley, El Nino came blowing through town like a giant gray industrial mop, dumping endless rain and scouring the trees and power lines. Falling branches punched four million dollar’s worth of holes in the Conservatory of Flowers, a Victorian confection of white frosted glass in Golden Gate Park .

I found Johnny soaked and huddled in a basement doorway. I brought him back to my building, thinking he could stay in the garage. The landlord, Baba Ram Paul, had an old microbus up on blocks and it would not be the first time one of the tenants had used it as an ad hoc guest room.

After getting him clean and dry, I gave Johnny some old sleeping bags and told him he could come up the back way to use the bathroom off the sun porch. My roommates weren't crazy about the arrangement, but I shamed them into compliance.

This scheme lasted barely three days, ending the morning that Johnny emerged from the van, stretching and growling like a bear. He didn't notice Katherine, the financial analyst from the second floor, putting out her recycling. She screamed and ran up the back stairs, tripping and ripping open her shin along the way.

Baba Ram Paul arrived before the cops and instinctively knocked on my door first. I recognized the sound of his bony knuckles against the glass. "You know anything about somebody living in the garage?" He was a skinny old ponytail hippie who always wore old-fashioned carpenter's overalls with paint splatters and lots of pockets and loops for tools.

He was not happy to hear that I was actually responsible.

Johnny had to go, he said. He didn't mind that I'd put Johnny in his microbus without asking, but Katherine was too freaked out by the incident. I didn't argue, although I knew that not so many years ago Baba Ram Paul would've been fine, and let Johnny ride it out, as long as he was someone's guest.

But times had changed. The city had changed. The New Economy was driving rents into the stratosphere, and Cole Valley had quiet tree-lined streets and charming shops and cafes. People like Katherine or William the Marketing Manager on the third floor were happy to pay a premium to live there. Every time someone like me moved out, Baba Ram Paul did a quicky remodel and moved in the Katherines and the Williams at three times the rent.

There was no room for the Johnnies in the new equation. Not even in the garage.

At least Johnny had gotten through the worst of the storm. I bought him some coffee at Spinelli's and apologized for the way things had gone down.

He clapped me on the shoulder. "No worries, Tommy. You probably saved my life."

I went to work, and that was the last time I saw him.

By then, my life was changing too. I was already trying to get out of journalism and into writing that actually paid a living wage. I’d been doing press releases and Web site content for some non-profits on a volunteer basis, and it was already leading to paying work.

Less than a year after El Nino, I was leaving Cole Valley myself, moving over a couple of hills, into my girlfriend’s place by Dolores Park. Throughout the packing and garage sales and dropping boxes off at Good Will, I'd held onto the old sleeping bags Johnny had used during the storm. I wanted him to have them.

But Johnny was nowhere to be found. Mike at the Tassajara Cafe had heard that he’d bummed a ride down to LA and had kept going East, into the desert. Probably trying to get back to Albuquerque . After loading the final box into my car, I drove around the neighborhood and the edges of Golden Gate and Buena Vista Parks, just in case, but there was no sign of him.

In the end, I left the sleeping bags on Johnny's bench. Winter was still ahead and someone would be able to use them. I made a silent prayer for Johnny's well-being, then put the car in gear and drove out of Cole Valley .

A Midwesterner by birth, an East Coaster by upbringing, and a West Coaster by choice, Andrew Dugas once spent four years in Brazil by accident. His work has appeared in Unlikely Stories 2.0, edifice WRECKED, Unbound Books, and elsewhere.