Better Living Through Poverty, Part II

The weather has changed. Fall is definitely here. Where a cool summer breeze or a cold night would creep in before, the very attitude of the environment has grown cold.

My phone says it’s only fifty degrees Fahrenheit but my bones have a dull, throbbing ache in them. I can hear the pitter patter of rain drops against the thin aluminum hull of my aging car. All the windows are fogged up from restlessly tossing and turning in the backseat.

I slept. Not as well as usual but that’s all relative. But now I’ve got something new to contend with — something I had never contended with before: sickness.

I got sick. It happened suddenly. One night I felt a chill pass through my body and my sinuses filled up. Mucus pouring down the back of my throat brought me to reflexive coughing fits. When I discovered I was sick, I was parking behind an old Masonic Lodge about one to two nights a week. In rural New England, it’s the easiest spot that’s out of sight.

I’ve yet to see a Mason. If they see me, they say nothing. I arrive when it’s dark and leave before the sun shines.

Out of sight almost always equals out of mind.

And now I’m dealing with my first bout with snot and crap clogging up my sinuses.

Sickness changes it up, let me tell you. It’s harder to sleep through the night. Bones feel dry and brittle. My usual exuberance to go into the gym for my morning shower and shave are now carefully metered to hide from the other guests that I’m ill.

I’m not sure if the other gym members suspect I’m homeless. A few spot me getting out of my old, dingy car, rifling through my trunk to get some toiletry items and a change of clothes. I never make eye contact and just pretend in my mind, “I’m Chet Vance, regional marketing manager for VibraCo. I’m an enterprising 30-something-odd going into the gym to get some motivation for the rest of the day. Not at all a homeless person.”

I always took pains to make it look like it was just a business casual thing. Whether everyone is fooled is beyond me but they don’t ask and I don’t advertise.

But this is Day One of being sick. My mucus comes out a bright yellowish green. Definitely a sinus infection. My body is lagging heavily. I suspect it was the employee flu shots given out in the hallway last Thursday but that, I hope, is just idle paranoia.

I jump into the nearest shower stall and turn the faucet up to blazing hot in an effort to dislodge some of the hardened scum built up in my respiratory system.

As I wash myself in the hot shower in the gym, I silently rue the fact that I have money in this next employee auction. Once a quarter, my employer auctions off items and all the employees silently bid on them. This time, there was a very nice handgun on the list. At a price well below what I could hope to get it anywhere else, I put my bid down.

Now, there’s a chance I don’t get it. That’d make my manager pretty happy. He made it no secret he also bid on the gun. Of course, for him, it would just be another gun among many.

My manager likes to tell me about how many AR-15 rifles he has accrued in a hidden, underground shed on his property. According to his last count, it’s fifty seven… Fifty seven AR-15s of various makes, models, and calibers.

He’s pretty tight to the chest about the reasons for the huge stockpile in guns, ammo, food, and rural acreage but I’m pretty damn certain he has some post-Apocalyptic fantasy all played out in his mind. And when it does, on his rural Vermont property, he’s ready to subjugate and rule with an iron fist.

Well, I don’t think I’ll ever be a future warlord of America, but I do own a handgun. It’s a simple, effective handgun. Four magazines. Jacketed Hollow Point rounds. Tritium night sights that glow bright green in the dark.

If my manager saw my handgun, I’d like to think we would be kindred spirits in the world of survival and preparation. In actuality, it’s just me preparing to survive my own personal apocalypse: daily life.

As a homeless person who lives in a gun-permissive state, I take pains to protect myself and my very limited property.

With an opioid epidemic turning seemingly everyone in my area into ravenous drug-addled thieves, I don’t even feel all that paranoid in my decision to arm up.

My boss is an aspiring local warlord. Me? I’m just coughing up green phlegm in the shower stall of a local gym, hoping to warm up and get through the weekend.

God, I hope I get that gun. It’s a nice full-size .45 pistol with extended 14-round magazines and a fiber optic glow-in-the-dark front sight post.

Or I could use that same amount of money and place it into savings where I could then hope to get a single bedroom apartment that I would just spend all my money on to maintain and still only sleep in it.

But, god, when you’re sick, you want that safe, warm, cozy apartment. Some place that’s away from prying eyes and you can just be in peace to endlessly blow snot into tissues and watch shitty action movies on FX.

That’s the part that makes me sad. Remembering what it was like to spend oodles of money on a rented, partially carpeted one bedroom apartment. Man, it was nice!

I hop out of the shower and realize no one else is in the locker room. The weekends are the best for taking that long shower. No one comes in and if they do, they’re hardcore regulars and are in-and-out.

I pop two Vitamin B complex and a ginseng. I’m sick and I don’t feel like mucking up the benches or machines so I quietly depart through a back door. Save the workout for a different day when I’m not actively spreading infection.

Once outside, the cold air hits me right in the lungs but it doesn’t hurt all that much anymore because my lungs don’t have five pounds of crusted phlegm in them.

I feel almost — dare I say it — normal?

The key word here is weekend. And it is the weekend. I got lucky. I got sick on a weekend. That gives me two days to recover before going back into work.

And who knows? Maybe I’ll win that fandangled new .45 caliber handgun I’ve always wanted. Maybe my warlord boss snags it from me and saves it for a future child-bride in his harem of 14-year-old war refugees?