from “Living in the HUD: The Amazing and Perilous

    Lives of People in Public Housing”  by Tom deMers

Strange Encounter

Late Monday morning I let myself into Dixie’s apartment. “Always knock” is a cardinal rule of property management, but I didn’t knock. Dixie was not there. She had passed away over the weekend at the hospital. A sour smell of laundry and old food greeted my nose. It emanated from the boxes and bags of stuff stacked everywhere. I stood in the silence. The place was all Dixie. Her love of plants was in the crowd of greenery near the window, in the shoeboxes of thread stacked near the old Singer, the pile of bags mounded against one wall, a heap large enough for an adult to tunnel into and live like an Eskimo.

Concerned about the fire hazard, I had looked through those bags before. There were men’s clothes and women’s, petite and large sizes, sweaters and shorts, a big bag of afghans, enough socks to supply a village, her village, her tribe of homeless refugees. Dixie had lived on the street for years, lived in her car while she had one. Now with an apartment of her own, she supplied others, a hot meal, some nights on her sofa. Her place operated as a kind of substation of the local homeless shelter, a fact that upset our more staid residents. Even faced with inspections and threats of eviction, Dixie kept faith with her tribe, offering what she could despite the consequences. Dixie had had a heart to match her size.

Not that all this stuff was pure altruism. Dixie had been a pack rat who never met a piece of junk she didn’t love, never found a broken gizmo whose higher purpose she could not divine. The people you see pushing shopping carts chock full, with plastic bags swaying like full udders, that was Dixie, holding off privation by loading up on everything she could lay her hands on. It showed up most with food. I stepped to the refrigerator and opened the door. Inside was a sheer wall running from freezer to crisper. No space between, just package to package, can to box, so dense the appliance bulb was only a glow through the plastic bag of dinner rolls. Packed this tightly refrigerators cease to refrigerate and food spoils. I had worried that Dixie would poison herself or one of her guests, but what took Dixie down wasn’t food.

Recently her diabetes and poor circulation had somehow expanded to a lung condition. Before going to the hospital, she’d been put on oxygen. Sometimes after a short walk, she would turn the oxygen up to full, a small plastic tube in each nostril, and sit for long periods catching her breath. Often she fell asleep like that, and I imagined Dixie’s passing as a weary sleep from which she could not wake. The Salvation Army worker who called me from the hospital said they couldn’t find a pulse.

Once I remember approaching Dixie in a chair. She had been there for some time and with her chin on her chest, I could not tell if she was asleep or not. I bent down and asked if she was all right. Her head rolled up, her large brown eyes fixed on me. “I’m all right,” she said in her musical drone, then rolled her eyes in a way that expressed the ridiculousness of her plight. For nearly every person, however severe their physical condition, has a memory of health and mobility, an innate sense of wellness and an awareness of the dignity conferred by a world where respect is granted first and foremost to those who stand alone and unassisted. Dixie, over one hundred pounds overweight, who wrapped her thick ankles in ace bandages so they wouldn’t fail her, living with the after effects of polio, prone to unexpected nose bleeds and other public humiliations, had a clear eye for her own image. Her roll of the eyes seemed to say, “Look what has become of me! I, who was once as lithe as Cindy Crawford and twice as clever. See how I’ve grown, how my organs desert their functions and leave me grounded in exhaustion.”

Then her eyes spoke with a wicked twinkle, “Ain’t life a bitch!”

I shut the refrigerator door hard so it would close against the mass. Then I heard a sound, someone stirring on the sofa. We had a guest. I walked into the main room and saw a man pulling a soiled pillow over his head, a blondish head I’d seen before.

“Hey, Leo! Time to wake up. Leo!”

“Huh?”  He looked up at me, confusion in his reddened eyes.

“You’re not supposed to be here, dude. Dixie’s the only one on the lease.”

“Where’s Dixie?” he asked.

“She died last night.”

“Dixie?” I nodded. “I don’t think so,” he said.

“Yeah. The hospital called. Her heart stopped.”

Leo had been slipping in and out of the building for weeks before Dixie went into the hospital, courting invisibility as the building gossips farmed out the information: “Dixie’s got a young man coming in. What right does she have? He doesn’t’ pay any rent. Why can’t I have a young guy to come in with me? The management in this place plays favorites or else they’re plain dumb. No, just stupid. Where do they hire these fools?”

While I turn a blind eye to a few illegal sleepovers, especially when the temperature is dipping into the teens, the pressure is on to throw the bums out. Poverty is bad enough without riffraff who sleep in their clothes: “They have bugs. They smell. They’re alcoholics. They steal anything that isn’t nailed down.”

All of which may be true but avoids the difficult fact that public housing exists to ensure the safety and survival of the most vulnerable of our people. While Dixie herself is tolerated, even loved, not many in the building share her ethics. The human tendency to get all you can, then slam the door on anyone left behind is as evident here as elsewhere in society.

I ride down the elevator with Leo to ensure his departure. We don’t say anything. As he leaves, Leo shakes his head and mumbles something about Dixie, then up loud he says, “I got a feelin’.”

Two days later I’m on the patio throwing out a discarded TV when I see a tentlike apparition trundling toward me. Pushing her walker and snorting oxygen, irascible and forlorn as ever, it’s Dixie. Dixie’s pulse like the rest of her, was seriously unreliable. She told me that as a nurse was making out her termination report, she opened her eyes and asked for a glass of water.

“Sure fooled ‘em that time,” Dixie cackled.

Her toothless grin was the best thing I’d seen in weeks.

THE END