Route 70 to Durham was snowed under. So was 40. He fled in the opposite direction, back across the city to Carleigh. All the exits were blocked. He spent the night in a motel. He didn’t sleep. He sat bleakly on the edge of the bed, watching TV and urinating every fifteen minutes.
At dawn he followed a slow-moving snowplow to Goldsboro. From here the road was clear to Kinston. By midnight he was on the coast, in Moreland City. Another motel. He found a clip of six one-hundred dollar bills in the pocket of the sheepskin. A positive omen if ever there was one! But he still couldn’t sleep.
One more night, one more motel in South Carolina, then he was in Atlanta.
He decided he’d come far enough. He checked into the New Forest Park, near the airport, and slept for eleven hours.
He swam in the pool, ate huge meals, bought some clothes, took long walks, jogged. An old bell captain gave him an address in East Point and he began playing poker again. But he couldn’t concentrate and in two weeks lost most of his cash.
He was paying for everything with checks and credit cards. That meant that all his spending could be traced back to him here in Georgia, but there was no way to avoid that. He’d move on soon enough. To Vegas maybe, or LA.
Eventually. But not until he calmed down.
Then, roaming around one night, he was mugged and lost everything. He didn’t report it to the police. The paperwork would just mean further identification. But he cancelled his cards by phone. He was still tidy-minded enough to do that.
At the end of the month he left the hotel without paying his bill. He slept in the BMW.
He got a job waiting on tables in a restaurant on Ivy Street. The tips were generous and he moved into a rooming house. He played some more poker. He kept losing. Then he was fired.
He worked for a while in a carwash, then a supermarket, then in the cafeteria at Spelman College. Then nothing.
A student bought his sheepskin coat for twenty dollars.
He sold the BMW.
More poker, but the losing streak continued. It was definitely hoodoo time.
On his first night on the streets he climbed up on the roof of a service station and slept there. After that, roofs became his specialty – warehouses, office buildings, department stores, schools, the post office, even Exhibition Mall and the St. Joseph Infirmary.
His fellow-derelicts called him ‘Housetop Harry’ and began imitating him. Soon the roofs of Atlanta were crowded with squatters. The scandal became nation-wide and the Mayor ordered the Police Department to put a stop to it. Joe and hundreds of others were herded into the slammer. He gave a false name and was released the next day.
He moved into a large wooden packing case in a vacant lot on Memorial Drive. It was five feet high and seven feet long. He filled it with straw and a mattress and pillows – whatever he could salvage from dumpsters.
He lived there all spring and summer and fall, begging for handouts during the day, entombed as snugly as a bear in a cave at night.
Nobody bothered him, except, occasionally, some neighborhood kids who threw rocks at his hovel and once, when he was out bumming, poured paint on his blankets.
Two black cops visited him and beat him up because he was a honky, but they didn’t evict him.
After that he was left alone and became part of the rubble.