There was a virtual stampede to my side. The Jesus Saves Mission and its lackluster luncheon were forgotten. I was the man with the real goodies, and scores of winos and winettes started reaching fawningly toward me, poking tremulous hands in the direction of the brown paper bag I rested out of their reach on my shoulder. Information was screeched at me, tidbits and non sequiturs and epithets:
“Fuck, man.”
“Glueman, Gluebird!”
“Sister Ramona!”
“Wetbrain!”
“Gimme, gimme, gimme!”
“See the sister!”
“Handbill!”
“Glueman!”
“Oh, God. Oh, God.”
“Warruuggh!”
The crowd was threatening to drive me into the gutter, so I placed my brown bag on the sidewalk and backed off as they descended on it like starving vultures. Pushing and shoving ensued, and two men wrestled into the street and began feebly clawing and gouging at each other’s faces.
Within minutes all twenty bottles were broken or snatched up, and the sad boozehounds had dispersed to consume their medicine, except for one particularly frail, sad-looking old man in ragged pants and a Milwaukee Braves T-shirt and Chicago Cubs baseball cap. He just stared at me and waited at the head of the bean line, along with the few other indigents who hadn’t seemed interested in my offering.
I walked over to him. He was blond, and his skin had been burned to a bright cancerous red after years of outdoor living. “Aren’t you a drinking man?” I asked.
“I can take it or leave it,” he said, “unlike some others.”
I laughed. “Well put.”
“What do you want the Gluebird for? He don’t hurt nobody.”
“I just want to talk to him.”
“He just wants to suck his rag in peace. He don’t need no cops bothering him.”
“I’m not a cop.” I opened up my suit coat to show I was bereft of hardware.
“That don’t prove nothin’,” he said.
I sighed and lied: “I work for an insurance company. Marquette owes Melveny some money on an old employee claim. That’s why I’m looking for him.”
I could tell the wary man believed me. I took a five-spot out of my billfold and waved it in front of him. He snatched it up.
“You go down to Sister Ramona’s; that’s four blocks west of here. It’s got a sign out front that says ‘Handbill Passers Wanted.’ The Gluebird’s been working for the sister lately.”
I believed him. His pride and dignity carried authority. I took off in the direction he was pointing.
Sister Ramona was a psychic who preyed on Milwaukee’s superstitious lower middle classes. This was explained to me by one “Waldo,” an ancient bum lounging in front of the storefront where she recruited the winos and blood bank rejects who carried her message via handbill into Milwaukee’s poorer enclaves. She paid off in half gallons of wine that she bought dirt cheap by the truckload from an immigrant Italian wine maker from Chicago. He jacked up the alcohol content with pure grain spirits, which weighed in his vino at a hefty one hundred proof.
Sister Ramona wanted to keep her boys happy. She provided them with free outdoor sleeping quarters in the parking lot of the movie theater she owned; she fed them three grilled cheese sandwiches a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year; and she bailed them out of jail if they promised to repay the money by donating their blood for free at the blood bank owned by her gynecologist brother, who recently lost his license from poking too many patients in the wrong hole.
This came out in a torrent of words, unsolicited. Waldo went on to explain that the only trouble with Sister Ramona’s scam was that her boys kept kicking off of cirrhosis of the liver and freezing to death in the winter when her parking lot became covered over with snowdrifts that she never bothered to clear out. 01′ sister had a high turnover, yes, sir, Waldo said, but there were always plenty of recruits to be found: sister was a wine cono-sewer supreme and she made a mean grilled cheese sandwich. And she wasn’t prejudiced, Waldo said, no sir, she hired white men and Negroes alike and fed them the same and provided them with the same flop-out space in her parking lot.