A winter strategy
This article was first published in the Minden Times in October, 2024.
I was exploring an unfamiliar town on foot, as is my wont, making up stories to explain to myself what I saw, and had gotten into the industrial entrails. Out of the pedestrian and pragmatic landscape appeared a beautifully designed building, deep-sea blue, large, with graciously curving roof lines. I squinted to make out the name: Inuit Cultural something something. Huh? I’d have come closer, in spite of the Keep Out signs in three languages, but there were a couple guys sluicing out a dilapidated truck, so I asked another guy leaning over the fence taking a smoke break what it was. ‘Jail’ he said.
It brought to mind a short story by O. Henry that was in my high school English Literature text. I love O. Henry’s super extravagant use of language and ironic approach to reality, and I have a book of his short stories, published 1979, so old it makes me sneeze when I open it. There it is: The Cop and the Anthem.
Soapy lives quite happily in an unhoused manner until the chill of autumn creeps through his newspaper duvet and his mind turns to a winter strategy. His favourite option is what acquaintances of mine who have experience affectionately call ‘three hots and a cot’: the slammer. He considers ‘the Law…more benign than Philanthropy [where] if not in coin you must pay in humiliation of spirit for every benefit received…Wherefore it is better to be a guest of the law, which, though conducted by rules, does not meddle unduly with a gentleman’s private affairs.’
Soapy’s first attempt to snare an appearance before a kindly Magistrate is to get seated in a ‘glittering café, where are gathered nightly the choicest products of the grape, the silkworm and the protoplasm’ and do what my acquaintances with experience would call an E&R – an eat and run. In Soapy’s case, having declared penury, he’d wait patiently for the cops. The top half of him might pass muster, but his frayed pants and decadent shoes deny him entrance.
He enjoys a more modest meal at a less pretentious place, but instead of calling the cops, they unceremoniously throw him out.
He sidles up to a ‘young woman of a modest and pleasing guise’ window-shopping within ear-shot of a ‘large policemen of severe demeanor’ and proposes inappropriate and probably illegal activity; she hooks her arm in his and proposes that, to start, he ‘blow her to a pail of suds’.
Soapy shakes her off and rushes to the entertainment district, where in front of a ‘transplendent theatre’ and a lounging policeman he commences ‘to yell drunken jibberish at the top of his harsh voice. He danced, howled, raved and otherwise disturbed the welkin’. To no effect: the cop dismisses him as a Yalie celebrating a sports win.
He brazenly steals an umbrella left temporarily outside a cigar shop and dares the owner to charge him, only to find the owner begging forgiveness, as he had himself just picked up the umbrella in a restaurant, perhaps in error.
Despondent, and with Jack Frost nipping at his run-down heels, Soapy heads back to his home park bench but stops to admire organ music emanating from a quaint old church. The majestic music moves him to reconsider his life choices and to resolve to take a higher path.
But along comes a policeman. ‘What are you doin’ here?’
‘Nothin’, says Soapy.
‘Come along’ says the policeman.
‘Three months’ says the Magistrate the next morning.
The Arctic town I was exploring has a very high rate of homelessness and very cold winters. The shelters are plugged because there is no place to move on to. The town is built on piles and I was told the common practice of sleeping underneath buildings protected people from the punishing wind, but was no guarantee of avoiding freezing to death. The beautiful blue building seemed a much preferable alternative.
I was told the police did take the homeless into custody to save them from freezing. I asked whether an 80-rooms-or-thereabouts military barrack in the industrial wastelands, not beautiful but serviceable, looking and said to be usually vacant, could be put to better use. Negotiation had been attempted but came to naught -- sorta like Soapy’s unresponsive cops. I suggested picking the locks. My listeners suggested that might get me three hots and a cot. I was tempted – I’ve been in jail once (just two hots and I never used the cot) and it wasn’t so bad.
On my way back from my exploratory trek, the work men were gone and I ventured closer. The sign read Inuit Cultural Skills Project. Soapy’s skills, I wondered?
