Delivery’s in the rear,” says Mr. Albanese of Dean Witter, glancing up at me from his cup of coffee and his Wall Street Journal as I approach his desk at 6:15 A.M. that next morning.
Fortunately, no one else in the firm is in yet in this part of the office, so I don’t have to endure any more embarrassing reactions to my jailhouse attire. True, my jeans are washed, and my Members Only jacket isn’t too wrinkled. But the paint-speckled sneakers make me look like exactly what Mr. Albanese apparently thinks I am—a delivery guy or some dude who’s wandered in from the street.
“Mr. Albanese,” I say as I step forward and introduce myself, “Chris Gardner. We’ve got an appointment this morning at six-thirty, and I’m sorry I’m early.”
“That’s all right,” he says. “I’m an early riser.”
“I am too.” I nod, go-getter that I am. Now I see that he’s taking a closer look at me, my cue to come up with a genius explanation for my lack of professional attire. After a beat, I begin: “Today might be the most important day of my career, and I must admit, I’m underdressed for the occasion.”
Apparently not amused by my attempt at irony, he agrees: “So I see,” then adds, “What happened?”
None of the lies that I can conjure in this instant are either bizarre or plausible enough to answer him. So I tell the truth, minus the part about going to jail, but including pretty much everything that’s happened recently: Jackie emptying the house, taking everything, including my car, and especially how she has my son and I don’t know where either of them are.
Listening intently, Mr. Albanese interrupts me before I can get out my last sentence: “You think what you’re going through is rough? Try having to put up with three different broads pulling the same stuff!” Turns out, he’s been married and divorced three times, taken to the cleaners each time, and he launches into a series of stories about his ex-wives. For twenty minutes he rants and raves. Just when I think we can segue back to the main question of my future, he remembers something else: “And then this gal I was seeing, let me tell you what she did.”
The truth is that I’m here to tell him why I’m going to be an asset to Dean Witter in the firm’s training program, and I am not so much interested in commiserating. But obviously this is a very cool guy, so I listen and nod and say at appropriate times: “Oh my God!”
Finally, he spends his wad. Instead of hearing me out or asking me questions, he stands up from his desk, takes a slug of coffee, and says, “Be here on Monday morning, and I’ll walk you into the training session personally.”
Just like that. The heretofore-locked gates to Wall Street had opened. I was in! It wasn’t a million dollars in my pocket or the keys to my own red Ferrari, but it was validation. The funny part was that after worrying about my clothes—and only later learning that Jackie had taught herself to drive a stick shift in order to get our car, which I never saw again, and take Christopher to the East Coast, along with the key to the storage locker where she put all my stuff—the story about why I was underdressed was how I bonded with Albanese. It just went to show that God does work in mysterious ways.
Of course, there were no guarantees. As a trainee, I would make a stipend of $1,000 a month, and between putting in the actual training hours, assisting the brokers around the office later in the day, and studying every other waking hour for the exam, there wouldn’t be a moment left over to earn any additional income. That was going to mean some very lean living. It also meant that until that first stipend check came in at the end of the first month, I had some major issues to tackle.
By that next Monday I’d been able to secure some nights on various friends’ couches, line up some meals, borrow enough money to ride BART to work, and find a buddy willing to loan me a suit and a pair of shoes that would get me to that first check. The suit was two sizes too small, and the shoes were two sizes too big. Even so, I walked tall and proud into work that first day, surprised to see a face I’d first seen there several months earlier. A brother named Bob—or “Bow Tie Bob,” as I had dubbed him on account of his ever-present bow tie and horn-rimmed glasses and milquetoast, country club demeanor—who was a Stanford graduate and the first African American ever put in the training program. After I’d met him back when I first started stopping by, I was just eager to talk to anybody and happy to see another brother in there. Introducing myself, I’d said, “Wow, you’re in here? Wow! How did you get in? What do I need to do to get over? What did you do?”
At the time of those first conversations, Bow Tie Bob had only recently started the training program and seemed more interested in talking about how he had graduated from Stanford, where he played on the golf team, than about how he had broken the color barrier in the financial world. Since it was obvious that I had no credentials, hadn’t even gone to college, belonged to no clubs, and didn’t play golf. He didn’t have much reason to talk to me at all, although the looks he threw at me were quite articulate, saying in essence: Where did you come from?
For all I knew, Bow Tie Bob could have grown up in Watts. But he had gone to Stanford—which I wasn’t knocking in the least—where it appeared his whole life history had begun and ended, and he had molded himself into the whitest black boy I’d ever met. At least that was my take earlier on.
In an interesting twist, I discovered that Bob was still in the basement, in the same training program, because he had yet to pass his test—after three tries. In the process, he had been transformed from preppy Bow Tie Bob into a radical Bobby Seale. Instead of welcoming me into the program, he greeted me by conveying just what the challenges were and letting me know that the test was culturally biased.
“Really?” I said, wondering if that was true.
“That test will beat you down, oh man,” he warned me. “It’ll beat you down.”
From day one, it was clear to me that I had to do well my first time out of the gate on the test. Business was business, and no matter how much a company wanted to promote equal opportunity, I was sure there was no way they were going to have two black people on the payroll who flunked the test. Circumstances being what they were, I would have one shot. That was why I avoided even associating with Bob, as if his problem, whatever it was, might be catching. After he launched into his culturally biased complaint one too many times, I eventually called him on it, quipping, “Bob, didn’t you go to Stanford? Culturally biased? What the hell! You of all people should know that stuff because that’s where they teach it.” That pretty much was the most contact we had from then on.
In my habit of seeking out individuals from whom I could learn, I hooked up with Andy Cooper, a corner-office guy, one of the top producers at the firm who was selling tax shelters—before the tax laws changed in this era. These deals—usually in real estate, oil, or natural gas—could yield huge write-offs, anywhere from two-to-one up to four-to-one. The basic way these tax shelters were sold was to call and invite prospective investors to a seminar. From the advice given to me by Bob Bridges, I established standards of discipline as to how many phone calls I made every day, with two hundred being my daily requirement, no matter how discouraging the responses. Since Cooper had seen that I was pretty disciplined on the phone, he gave me the job of calling the tax shelter leads and getting them there in person, where he made the pitch, closed the deals, and took all the commissions. As a trainee, I was doing the grunt work for free, something that I didn’t quite grasp until later. But it actually didn’t matter to me. All I cared about was succeeding in this business, learning everything I could, and getting as much experience as possible.
When I wasn’t training, working, or studying, all I cared about was finding out where Christopher was and reuniting with him. But that worry raised the ongoing problem that I had nowhere to live other than at Latrell’s, at her mother’s back house, where I had a room to myself; at Leon Webb’s crib, where I crashed on the floor; at the apartment of my childhood friend Garvin’s briefly; or occasionally with a couple of different women who didn’t mind sharing their beds and their cooking, though I didn’t have much to offer in return other than my lasting appreciation.
Unbeknownst to me, I was fine-tuning the ability to move frequently, even constantly, unaware of how critical these skills were going to become. After that first stipend came in, I went out immediately to buy a better suit. With the suit I wore on my back, the other one on a hanger in a garment bag slung over my shoulder, a few toiletries, and my books, I was self-contained. Rather than leave my stuff at anyone’s house, I got in the habit of keeping everything with me. One evening at work when I hadn’t lined up a place to stay that night, it occurred to me that since I was usually one of the last to leave the office, no one would be the wiser if I slept under my desk. After all, I was usually the first one there in the morning too.
That first night was strange, like I was going to get found out—not for sleeping at work, but for not having anywhere else to stay. But the fact was that I wasn’t like Bow Tie Bob, who kept getting more chances, and I wasn’t like Donald Turner, who was in the training program with me and whose big brother was a top producer at the firm: True or not, the other guys had infrastructures in their lives that I did not. Donald was high-strung and intent on passing, but if he didn’t, his brother had his back, no question. Not that I felt sorry for myself, because that wasn’t going to help me. But I had to face facts: there was no backup plan, no safety net, nobody needing me to succeed to make themselves look good. This was all on me. If I needed to sleep under the desk, then that was what I would do.
After a couple nights, I discovered that sleeping at work was not only convenient but cut down on train fare and there was no bed to make. I would just lie down, sleep, get up before anyone got there, wash my face, freshen up as best I could, brush my teeth and hair, splash water from the sink on my body, paper-towel off, and get some deodorant action going. Sometimes I had the same clothes on, and sometimes I changed my suit and shirt—which I had in my hanging bag. By the time others walked in, I was already on the phone, making sure I got a head start on those two hundred calls a day. I would finish up relatively early in the evening, making sure I didn’t call too late. Then it was back to studying.
During the weeks that followed, whenever worries about what I couldn’t control overcame me, my focus saved me. If I could just put my head mentally in the call—being positive and friendly but sticking to business, in a time-efficient, productive manner—and create that discipline to keep going, keep dialing, keep putting the phone down and picking it up, then I could survive until night, when I could hit the books, which were really mind-numbingly technical but which I convinced myself were as captivating as the greatest stories ever told. Years of hearing Momma tell me that the public library was the most dangerous place in the world because you could go in there and figure out how to do anything if you could read, I also convinced myself that all this information I was learning in preparation for my exam was going to give me that competitive edge so I could pass it that first time.
When my brain wanted to give up, my attitude was that I had to study like I was in prison—because knowledge was power and freedom. An image rode along with me of Malcolm X in prison, teaching himself by studying the dictionary, starting with “aardvark.”
With all this moving around, though, I hadn’t had any luck locating Jackie and my baby. In fact, she was the one who actually managed to track me down and begin a series of torturous phone calls. At Latrell’s, when she first called and asked for me, I got on the phone and was met with sheer silence from Jackie and the sound of Christopher screaming in the background. So I replied with sheer silence, my stomach tied up in knots. It was the first time but not the last, and whether by coincidence or not, every time she called, wherever she found me, Christopher would be crying in the background. Every time, I was in full-blown anguish, but my training from the Navy, and from the stillness I saw in my mother when she was under assault, kept me from saying a word. Finally, unable to provoke me, she would hang up. The click echoed for a long time after I put the receiver down.
Each time I went through the process of mentally changing the channel, dialing into the frequency that tuned me into what I was studying. Sometimes the thought of Bow Tie Bob helped me kick into overdrive, reminding me of the test’s requirements. With a 60 percent or higher failure rate, it covered the Wall Street gamut—financial instruments, products, stocks, bonds, municipal bonds, corporate bonds, convertible stock, preferred stock and regulations—to a depth rarely covered in college business courses or even in some MBA programs. Containing 250 multiple-choice questions, the test had several sections, and I would have to pass 70 percent across the board—options, equities, debt, municipal finance, corporate finance, regulations, rules. Failing even one section was automatic failure of the whole test.
With enough money from the stipends, I found a low-cost rooming house in Oakland, not too far from downtown and Lake Merritt. For all intents and purposes, it was a flophouse, though decently kept up, that included three meals a day or whatever I could eat while I was there. This was a different world than any I’d lived in before, with people just barely scraping by, some with mental problems or addictions, one stumble away from falling through the cracks. Not that I was judging, but I couldn’t relate. The rooming house was just a temporary, low-cost option where I could sleep, study, and eat on the occasions that I made it back in time for the evening meal.
For a while I was able to eat during the day whenever tasked with gofer work to set up the conference room for Andy Cooper. As trainees, Donald Turner and I were responsible not only for making the initial calls to leads and following with mailings and more phone calls but for putting out the sandwiches and other light refreshments before the seminars began. If people didn’t show, the sandwiches definitely didn’t go to waste. Constantly hungry, I didn’t mind being asked to do that job at all.
At the same time, I had started to look beyond my exam, at climbing the Dean Witter ladder, and wasn’t sure it was such a good idea to cast myself too much in Andy Cooper’s crew. For Donald Turner—whose brother was already established and aligned with Cooper, there wasn’t much choice. Part of the reason he was so high-strung was the very real pressure on him to live up to expectations based on his brother’s star performance.
He had to produce, especially when he was already being spoon-fed business—not all the time, but often enough—from his brother’s contacts. This seemed to only make Donald, already pale, go whiter. About my age, clean-shaven, with his red hair combed like a schoolboy’s across the front, he had a small, thin voice and a way of finishing up his pitches and his phone calls by saying, “All right, bye-bye.”
I wanted to lean over and say, Who the hell are you saying bye-bye to?
And he had the good leads. Me, I made the cold calls. I didn’t know them, they didn’t know me, but they knew the name of the company and took my call. OJT allowed me to develop three important skills. First, I had to make my call quota. Next, I had to learn how to quickly assess whether this was someone who was just chatty or really worth pursuing. Finally, I had to know when it was time to wrap up. This became a game for me—to know if the prospect was getting ready to say no or hang up on me. My internal mantra was: I’m going to hang up on you before you hang up on me. But to my prospect, I said “ThankyouverymuchHaveaniceday” as if it were one long word.
This way, no matter the outcome, I could win. In order to not seem rude, I’d always say the same thing: “Thank you very much, have a nice day,” as clearly and quickly as I could. Polite and businesslike, I didn’t have to hear no or the angry sound of the phone being hung up, the call didn’t reflect badly on me or the company, and I could be on to the next call—dialing the old-fashioned rotary phone, like cranking away at a lottery wheel.
Whenever I stopped, with nothing else to concentrate on, there was nowhere else to go in my head except for my powerlessness at finding and seeing Christopher.
The other trainees knew I was intense, obviously. But I saw no reason to confide in anyone where I was staying or what drama was playing out in my personal life. It helped me to reflect on something Momma had said to me way back when I had illusions of becoming an actor—the time I asked her for five dollars and instead of giving it to me, she made a point by suggesting that I act like I had five dollars. That had cooled me off being an actor real fast. But there was something else in her message that became relevant now. No matter what I had in my pocket, no matter what my suit cost, nobody could prevent me from acting as if I was a winner. Nobody could prevent me from acting as if my problems were all in the process of being solved. Pretty soon, my acting as if was so convincing that I started to believe it myself. I began to think futuristically, as if I had already passed the test as I weighed what would happen next.
This was what I puzzled over while riding BART over from Oakland and back every day, every night. The patronage system of favors done in return for favors owed had started to make me wary. I realized that, by sticking with Andy Cooper, I’d end up more or less working for him and catching his overflow. That was one route to go, the stepping-stone path, maybe safer, but ultimately less lucrative. The riskier approach was to carve out a niche of my own, to build my own base from scratch. For a new guy who hadn’t even passed his test yet, deciding to take that approach would be a couple notches past cocky and just shy of foolhardy. Still, from what I was learning around the office, the major players were the few brokers who did their own thing—putting time into research and combining traditional and nontraditional ways of getting the biggest bang for their clients’ bucks and themselves.
Dave Terrace was one of the cats I kept an eye on. With one of the biggest offices at the firm, he traded back where all the heavy hitters sat, behind the floor where us newcomers were, and whenever I could, I turned around to watch him do his thing. Pure business—no flash, solid, consistent. He might not have been making more than Andy Cooper, but he was in solo flight. That appealed to me. My choice was made. As it later turned out, to have gone and hitched a ride on the tax shelter bonanza that Andy and his guys were enjoying would have sent me into the same crash they all faced when the tax laws changed.
The day of the exam arrived. Donald Turner, wound up tighter than ever, looked so stressed I thought he’d kill himself if he didn’t pass. Bow Tie Bob wasn’t taking the test again at this exam, possibly because he was busy filing complaints about its cultural bias. Maybe to Donald and some of the other trainees I appeared to be annoyingly relaxed. Not so. Inside I had the raised adrenaline and tension of a warrior going into battle, a gladiator ready to take on his most lethal opponent—if need be. But I was prepared. Nothing stumped me; there were no tricks. No cultural bias either. I knew the answers. The test was easy. In fact, I whipped through the first half with time to spare, took the break, and did the same when we came back for the second half of the test.
We had to wait three days to find out the results. That was just enough time for the delayed-reaction freak-out to take place. What if I only thought it was easy? What if I didn’t spot the trick questions or the cultural bias? What if the test was about to beat me down after all? Scolding myself, I repeated my mantra that there was nothing on there I’d never seen before and just to leave it alone.
The phone call couldn’t have come fast enough. One of the associate branch managers was on the other end when I picked up the phone in my room.
“The suspense is over,” he began, waiting for my reaction.
I waited too, saying nothing.
“You passed, Gardner,” he chuckled, probably aware of the monstrous sigh of relief and release that came from my lungs. “Overall you scored eighty-eight percent,” he went on. “You did great.”
Neither surprised nor elated, I was grateful. Sitting on the edge of my bed in the rooming house, I let my mind go blank and just let myself breathe. There was no one to go celebrate with, nobody who understood what this meant. Whether or not Donald Turner passed, I never knew. But I did know that my colleague Bow Tie Bob wasn’t going to be thrilled.
What did it mean? That I passed the test, but only one test. Like I’d won a qualifying race for the Olympics. My training was over and I was ready to compete. Now I was going back to scratch, back to cold-calling out of the white pages. I was going in to build my own book, whatever it took, cranking out calls that I’d pitch and close, finding my niche. In some ways, the stakes had just gotten higher than before when the company had an investment in training me. That was done. Now I had to produce. But something had changed. No longer did I have to prove a damn thing. My confidence was as big as the Pacific Ocean. I had passed. Finally, I was legitimate. I had my papers.
Jackie sits across from me at the Berkeley coffee shop, a month or so later on a Friday afternoon, as I try hard not to be rattled, no matter what she throws at me.
It has been four months since she left with my son, and our car that I’ll never see again, putting me out into the cold. That alone is bizarre, but we have also just come from court, where things have taken an additionally strange turn.
In the days leading up to the court date, she had placed a few calls to me and had actually spoken, refusing to let me talk to Christopher or to give me any information as to his whereabouts, but baiting me with some details—like the fact that she taught herself to drive a stick shift in order to drive across the country and that she had lots of lawyer power. The lawyer was a “brother,” someone I’d come to refer to as a “poindexter”—a dry, bland, non-threatening eunuch. Though I suspected that she meant her brother the lawyer, when I walked into the hearing with my lawyer—whose fee cost me most of my salary that first month as a broker—I saw that her representation power consisted of someone from the local DA’s office, representing the state, and the arresting police officer.
The next surprise was that Jackie decided not to bring charges. Just like that. In my analysis, right or wrong, it seemed that all of this had been Jackie’s way of having contact with me. That was supported by her suggestion that we go somewhere and talk.
Fine. Here we are. She seems to know where I live, like she’s been keeping tabs on me, which indicates that she knows I passed the test. But she’s got nothing to say about that. Sure, maybe she has some sour grapes. After all, she never believed I could do it without the college degree, or possibly she was projecting her own insecurities, or maybe she has other people telling her that she’s missing her dream while I’m chasing mine. Whatever is the case, of course she doesn’t congratulate me that I have the license and the job. But then again, she has something that I don’t have—our son. Oh yeah, and she has my stuff. Not that there’s much I could use at the moment, given my temporary lodging, which in the foreseeable future isn’t about to change.
My decision not to be part of the Cooper Clan wasn’t the most practical initially. In terms of commissions, I was at about $1,200 a month now, though I could have made more had I been willing to help set up bigger deals for Andy to commission for himself while taking over some of his smaller deals as they became available. Instead, I wanted to nab bigger and smaller deals for myself, even though there was no promise that I’d get either. That was my choice—I had a higher ceiling but less of a floor. I approached the numbers game with eyes open, knowing full well that X number of calls equals X number of prospects equals X number of sales equals X number of clients equals X number of gross commissions, or dollars in my pocket. Out of two hundred calls, a great batting average was ten first-time clients, with half that many turning into repeat customers—where money was made. Doing my own thing, I was the assembly line, cranking, dialing, and smiling. I was good, so good that several more senior brokers made overtures to me to collaborate with them, to help boost their numbers. Whenever they did, without being ungrateful, I typically responded, “No, I don’t think I’ll take you up on that. I just want to build my own book. But thanks for thinking of me.”
This entitled me to be named, nearly continuously, the “Broker of the Day.” At first, this sounded like an honor, a step up. Broker of the Day was the point man for any office walk-ins who didn’t already have a broker or an account at the firm. Usually walk-ins wanted specific information or had an idea of something they might want to buy. In San Francisco, where peace and free love had ruled not many years earlier, there were nonetheless racial biases in 1982, and it was soon clear that these walk-ins weren’t expecting to see a black man as a stockbroker. That added another layer of challenge, but I acted as if it wasn’t an issue and offered my full assistance. “How do you do? I understand you want to buy a Ginnie Mae?” We’d go over the particulars. Or: “You want to put money away for your grandkids? Yes, I have some suggestions.”
A few times, after I had laid all the groundwork and basically written up the ticket, I subsequently learned that I hadn’t gotten the commission. Why? “Well,” the branch manager said on those occasions, “they wanted someone with more experience.”
The first time this happened I steamed. The second time I confronted my boss. “Let me see if I got this right? They’re basically buying stock in Commonwealth Edison, correct? To get the dividend yield, the income, it’s not going to change based on who gets the commission. Same stock, same company. But they wanted someone with a little more experience? He gets the commission that I set up?”
It wasn’t rocket science. The reality was that people had never dealt with a black person before and didn’t want to, even though I’d done a great job and made them some money. But I was learning that I could turn down being Broker of the Day. Back I went to smiling and dialing. The lesson here wouldn’t necessarily apply to other guys, but for me it was apparent that I did better on the phone. If I could get someone excited about the opportunity to make some money, if we could make the connection, that was the way to go. Besides, though I could resort to the vernacular any time, any day, I was not audibly black on the phone. Maybe that stemmed from the knack of learning other languages—musical, medical, financial, Anglo-Saxon, whatever. And a name like Chris Gardner? No telltale ethnicity there. I could have been anybody from any background.
The phone became my color shield. I actually discouraged new clients from coming into the office in person, which was one of the ways other brokers liked to close their deals. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” I’d say once we established that we were going to do some business. “Let’s open the account, send me in the check, and we’ll get the company to send your confirmations out, and we’ll just get going. Will you be mailing the check today or would you like to do a wire transfer?”
When folks wanted to come in, I had an easy way of saying, “No, that’s not necessary, because it’s so hectic and crazy in here. Let’s do it over the telephone.”
After the four months since Jackie had split with Christopher, the ball was definitely starting to roll, but it hadn’t translated into much of a change in my income yet. I had no outward symbol of my success so far to wave like a flag in front of Jackie.
Instead, I give her as little insight into where I’m at as she’s giving me about my kid. Finally, she slides a key in my direction and tells me where the storage locker is that contains my stuff. But what I want most, she refuses to offer—my child. With the least amount of reaction I can give, I pocket the key and leave, reeling inside.
Well, I think, before I truck back to Oakland, I don’t have anywhere to put my stuff yet, but at least I can go dig out a couple items of clothing and my trusty briefcase that I purchased almost a year earlier when I first made my foray into the business world.
Later that night at the rooming house, as I’m airing out the suit and shining the shoes that I pulled from storage, I pause to admire my stylish, brown-leather Hartman briefcase—something I’d spent what seems like an exorbitant $100 on. Just then, I’m startled by the sound of firm knocking at the door. The rhythm of the three knocks—short, short, long—reminds me of Jackie’s way of knocking. But then again, that’s highly unlikely.
Sure enough, as I open the door, there she is. Not alone. In Jackie’s arms is Christopher. My son, my baby! He’s nineteen or twenty months now—looking more like three years old, more beautiful than I had remembered him in my every waking and sleeping recollection. Between my shock and my euphoria, I don’t know what to say.
There is more shock and more euphoria to come as Jackie hands him to me and as she does says, “Here.” From behind her she produces a huge, overstuffed duffel bag and his little blue stroller. Again she says, “Here.”
I’m holding Christopher, hugging him tight to me, still not following what’s happening.
Slowly it dawns on me that this isn’t a visit but that she’s actually leaving him in my care. Though she says little, I know her well enough to realize that this is it and that she just can’t do this anymore.
From our brief exchange, it’s apparent that she is feeling the pressure of raising a child as a single mother at the same time that she is establishing herself professionally. I also sense that she regrets taking him out of state and not working out a joint arrangement earlier on. But none of that is spelled out exactly in words. She does tell me what’s inside the duffel bag, including the monster package of Pampers, what he needs to eat and how often, what he shouldn’t eat—“no candy”—and then she tells Christopher goodbye and leaves.
“Christopher,” I tell him over and over, “I missed you! I missed you!”
“I missed you too, Poppa,” he says, talking in a full sentence now and with one of his wise expressions, like he’s already a veteran of change and knows we may be in for a rough ride.
Or maybe that’s what I’m thinking. Whatever is going to happen, two things I know are true. First of all, I have my son back with me and nobody on this earth is going to take him away from me again. That’s a principle of the universe now. Second—and I already know this to be a fact—we have just become instantly fucking homeless.
Time changes when you’re homeless. Seasons turn out of order, all in the course of a day. Especially in San Francisco, which has all four seasons all year round. During the daylight hours of the working week, time feels sped up, passing way too quickly. Nights and weekends are another story. Everything slows to an ominous crawl.
Your memory changes when you’re homeless. Always moving around, changing geography, having no address, no anchors to tie to when events take place. It becomes hard to recall whether something happened a week before or a month before, yesterday or three days ago.
How did I become instantly homeless, especially now that I was a stockbroker working for Dean Witter? Because children were not allowed at the rooming house. No exceptions. The days of crashing on the couch at my friends’ homes were over too. I’d imposed enough when I was in the training program, but to ask to stay for a few nights and add, “Oh, by the way, and my baby too?”—that wasn’t going to fly. The ladies I was seeing may have been fond of me in the sack but weren’t going to be pleased about me showing up with an inquisitive, active toddler.
The one lucky break I caught in trying to figure out how to navigate a whole new terrain was the fact that it was a Friday when Jackie showed up with Christopher, giving me at least that night at the rooming house before being thrown out the next day. That also gave me the weekend to find us a place to stay and a day care situation starting on Monday.
We hit the streets Saturday with all of our gear, him in the stroller, as I practice the new balancing act that’s going to get all too familiar, heading down toward the “HOstro” to check out the price of some of the HO-tels—emphasis on first syllables no accident. I’m having a major internal debate over the questions: What am I gonna do? How am I gonna do this? One line of thinking says, I’ve got my baby, I’m not giving him up, that’s not an option. Another voice reminds me, Ain’t no backup here, no cavalry coming in for reinforcement.
The day care center in San Francisco at $400 a month is out of the question. With rent at least $600, that would take up what I’m earning after taxes, leaving nothing for food, transportation, and diapers. At a pay phone I call a few friends to see if they’ve got any inside scoop on day care facilities in the East Bay. One of the places looks wonderful. It too turns out to be over my budget; besides, they don’t accept kids who aren’t potty-trained.
“Okay, Christopher,” I tell him as we start to leave, “we’ll work on that, okay, baby?”
As I’m looking around, hoping that it won’t be too long until I can afford having him here, I notice that the day care management has a sign on the wall declaring the center to be a place of “HAPPYNESS.”
For a minute, I start to question in my mind how good a child care facility can be that can’t even spell “happiness” correctly. Of all the things I have to worry about, that’s not one of them. Even so, back out on the street, I feel the need to make sure my son knows that the word is spelled with an I and not a Y. H-A-P-P-I-N-E-S-S.
“Okay, Poppa,” says Christopher, repeating the word. “Happiness.”
“That’s a big word,” I say with approval, wishing that I could ensure Chris’s and my own happiness in the immediate future.
The ability to spell is not my main concern when I call the numbers I’ve been given for Miss Luellen at one house and Miss Bessie at another and a third place on Thirty-fifth Street—babysitters who keep kids on a regular basis but not any kind of day care centers with licenses and registrations. The woman on Thirty-fifth says to bring Christopher early on Monday and says that I can pay her by the week. One hundred bucks. There’s no real money savings except that I can pay as I go. Though this doesn’t do a lot to reassure me that he’s getting the best care possible, it’s better than nothing.
For a place to stay that night, I get us a room over in West Oakland on West Street at The Palms, so named for the one palm tree in the courtyard and a second one on the corner two hundred feet away. From what I can tell, the only residents besides us are the hookers. Later, this doesn’t bother me, but for the time being all I can do is get us into the room as fast as I can, double-lock the door, and turn the volume up on the TV to make sure we don’t have to hear the sound effects of any tricks being turned.
It costs me $25 a day for the room, which comes with a color TV, one bed, a desk and a chair, and a bathroom. But okay, we’re here. That’s my new philosophy: wherever we are, we’re here, this is where we’re at, and we’re going to make the best of it. For now.
When I managed to step out of the blur of space and time to look at the big picture, the reality was that I had the job and the opportunity that was going to change our circumstances and lives forever. Nothing was going to shake my conviction, not even the mental and actual calculations of what I’d have left over after the cost of The Palms and babysitting, and not even the screaming and sobbing that Christopher began the minute we walked into the babysitter’s place.
That killed me. He could probably feel my reluctance to leave him with strangers, but I had no choice. All I could do was reassure him, “I’ll be back. I’ll be back.” Backing out, practically in tears myself, I kept repeating, “I’ll be back.”
When I came to pick him up that evening, he ran up and almost jumped into my arms. “See, I told you,” I reminded him.
But the next morning it was worse. Getting him out of the hotel and into his stroller was a struggle, and he started wailing the second we rolled around the corner onto Thirty-fifth, me chanting all the way in the door and out: “I’ll be back. I’ll be back. I’ll be back.”
The days and images begin to streak by as the nights get longer and the air becomes colder and wetter. After picking him up, I usually take him for something to eat, somewhere warm and cheap where I air my concerns with my little sidekick, telling him, “Naw, this ain’t gonna work. The Palms is too expensive, man. Remember the house? Yeah, in Berkeley, our little house. It was ours. This transient thing’s no good.”
Christopher gives me one of his furrowed-brow expressions.
How can I explain to him or myself? It’s not just the whores, the dopeheads and winos, and the street lowlifes, it’s the feeling of not being settled, of having no home base or support group. It’s about the noise and the lights constantly going from the outside because The Palms is right on the drag, the “ho” stroll, with car horns honking, music playing, and people hollering. The TV helps drown some of it out, enough for me to chew on any and all options, to focus on what to do and how.
Every now and then, kindness sprang up out of nowhere, and in the least likely places, as it did one evening when we came back to The Palms and one of the sisters working the street approached us. She and her colleagues had seen me with Christopher in the stroller every morning and night and probably figured out our deal. A black man with a little boy in a stroller, a single dad—it wasn’t anything they’d seen before.
“Hey, little player, little pimp,” she said as she came close, a candy bar in her hand to give to Christopher. “Here you go.”
“No, no,” I insisted, maintaining Jackie’s rule against sugar, “he don’t need any candy.”
Christopher, unfortunately, was disappointed and started to cry. “Don’t cry,” she said and reached down into her magical cleavage and produced a $5 bill, handing that to him.
Did I object? No. Christopher was so happy, he looked like he preferred the money to candy. Smart boy.
“Well, thank you,” I muttered, not knowing if she knew that her $5 bill was going to buy us dinner around the corner at Mosell’s, a soul-food kitchen both my son and I loved.
The same sister and a couple of the other ladies of the night started giving Christopher $5 bills on a regular basis. In fact, there were some days when we wouldn’t have eaten without their help. At my hungriest moments, when we were running on empty, I would roll the stroller by their stretch of the sidewalk, on purpose, moving real slow just in case none of the familiar faces were working the street yet. There was a purity in the help these women gave us, with nothing asked in return. Kindness, pure and simple. On uncertain days, I thought of us as wandering in the desert, knowing that we were being led to a promised land and that God was sending his manna to feed us in a most unique way.
From this point on, nobody could demean a whore in my presence. Of course I don’t advocate prostitution, but that’s their business and none of mine.
My business was Wall Street, nothing else.
Dialing and smiling, at work I am soon the Master of the Phone, the ultimate cold-call salesperson. It’s my life force. My way out. With every single one of those two hundred calls, I’m digging us out of the hole, maybe with a teaspoon, but bit by bit. The urgency increases, driving me that much more when I look at my son and have to leave him every day, knowing I don’t have the luxury to just be positive and persevere. No, I’ve got to get there today. It’s not like I can cruise for a bit, then crank it up tomorrow. Hell, no. It’s now. There’s nobody handing me business, I’m not Donald Turner with a brother upstairs, and I’m not one of the veterans with existing books just servicing clients. This is all on me. Every phone call is a shot, an opportunity to get a little bit closer to our own place, to the better life I want to live, a life of happiness for me and my son.
Without offering an explanation, on various occasions I brought Christopher to work with me, another sign to my coworkers of my diligence. After everyone left, usually by 5:00 P.M. on the dot, 5:30 at the latest, I would stay on, continuing to call, and then we’d both stretch out and sleep under the desk. The rest of the office was used to my staying late and never seemed to suspect anything. Some were amused, and most of them cheered me on with their usual parting words of, “Go get ’em, go get ’em.”
In the morning they reacted the same way when most of them arrived around 7:30 or 8:00 and I was already at my desk, making phone calls, Christopher occupied with a picture book or scribbling on paper. For not even being two, he had an uncanny knack for playing on his own and not distracting me from work.
The only person who seemed puzzled at all was the branch manager, who was typically the first person in the office every day. He never said a word, but I was sure he wondered how I managed to beat him there on those days, with my baby in tow no less.
To my knowledge, no one there knew that I slept under the desk with Christopher on those nights when I didn’t have anywhere to go—whether I took him to the babysitter early in the morning, picked him up in the evening, and came back to the office that same night, or whether he stayed with me in the office that day. What they did know was that I was hungry for success. How literally hungry they didn’t imagine.
Part of what was driving me were my circumstances. Because I’d made the decision to build my own book, it was going to take longer to see the dollars in my pocket. I was starting small, building trust, developing relationships; it was like planting seeds, watering them, letting them grow until it was harvest time. It was a process that had its own cycle, often a four-to six-month cycle, sometimes longer. That farming metaphor took me straight into winter, when I knew it was going to be extremely tight until spring. So I cut back on everything, making sure that I carried all our stuff with me every day, juggling the duffel bag, the briefcase, my hanging bag, the Pampers box, and an umbrella as I moved us downstream from The Palms, where a room and a color television cost $25 to a trucker motel that got us a room and black-and-white TV for $10 a day. The neighbors were now mainly truckers and the prostitutes catering to that clientele, right off the freeway. Heavy-duty turnover. After eating, we came home each night and locked up tight, refusing to go out even in nicer weather.
On weekends, when there’s no rain, we take advantage of San Francisco’s many public parks and opportunities for free entertainment. One of our favorite stops is the children’s playground in Golden Gate Park, where Christopher can play in the sandbox or climb on the jungle gym while I sit in a swing, mulling over how to get from today to tomorrow. One day I only have enough money to either get us back to Oakland on BART and stay in the trucker motel or get us a drink and a snack from the refreshment stand.
“No drink, Christopher.” I try to calm him down as he starts to cry. “We’ll have a drink and popcorn next time.” This kills me.
The next time we have the same dilemma, I buy him what he wants, unable to say no this time. That’s one of the nights that’s balmy enough that we sleep, or try to sleep, on a grassy corner of Union Square, not far from the same spot where the guy who tried to pick me up once called San Francisco “the Paris of the Pacific.”
We sleep close to the side of the park that’s underneath the Hyatt Hotel on Union Square, not as luxurious as some of the other hotels in the neighborhood, but clean and modern, a beacon of security and comfort that somehow makes me feel better, even sleeping in its shadows. Diagonally across from our corner is the city’s truly dangerous real estate, particularly at night, bordered by the Tenderloin, the part of town where I first lived, back when it was easy to rough it.
But roughing it takes on a whole new meaning in this period. After thinking that I really knew San Francisco, I now come to know the city on a far more intimate basis—not just where there are and aren’t hills, but the degree of their angle and grade, the number of steps it takes to push the stroller up them, or how many blocks to walk the long way around to avoid a hill, and even where the cracks in the concrete sidewalks are. Cracks in the concrete. Becoming familiar with cracks in the concrete is not some obsessive-compulsive pursuit, it is a matter of survival for maneuvering a child in a fragile stroller with everything I own on my person—under time and weather constraints.
The rains come hard this winter of 1982 and early 1983, eliminating the options of outdoor free activities or sleeping in the park. Though I’ve avoided food lines, I can’t anymore, not with a hungry little boy, and we soon start making our way over to Glide Memorial Church in the Tenderloin, where the Reverend Cecil Williams and activists in the community have been feeding the homeless and hungry down in the church basement, at Moe’s Kitchen, three times a day, seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days of the year.
The best part for me is that on Sundays after church services, instead of standing outside in the lines that go down the street and around the corner, we can take a different route through the building and down the steps to Moe’s. But no matter how we get there, as I take a tray and start down the cafeteria line, I see only dignity—no matter how fragile—in all the faces lined up with me, all of them adults, none with children, some who look like they’re working like me, others who are definitely unemployed.
You never felt like you were less after going there to eat. You were in line with men, women, blacks, whites, Latinos, Chinese, like the United Nations, many at different stages of some kind of issue: drugs, alcohol, violence, poverty, or borderline crazy, on medication, on hard times. But we were just there to eat.
There were no questions, no interrogations or credentials required for being needy. It didn’t feel like a handout. It was more like someone’s mother wanting to feed you—Boy, you sit down and get something to eat. And when we got to the food, it was an ample serving, not skimpy, but hearty and tasty. American fare. More manna.
In later years I would have to tell everyone at Glide to warn folks what can happen to children when you start them off eating at Moe’s Kitchen. In fact, Christopher later shot up to six-foot-eight, 260 pounds. He could really eat at Moe’s, even as a toddler. When you left, you were never hungry, and it wasn’t just that you weren’t hungry, you felt better. You felt better because you couldn’t wear out your welcome at Glide. You couldn’t wear out your welcome at Moe’s Kitchen.
The Reverend’s sermons fed my soul too, reminding me of what I kept forgetting—that the baby steps counted, even if it wasn’t happening as fast as I desired. After church service, without fail, the Reverend stood outside the sanctuary in the hallway or on the steps outside, hugging every single person as they left. Anybody who wanted a hug got a hug. First time I went to get a hug, it felt like Cecil Williams knew me even before he knew me. With what looked to be a smile permanently etched on his wise, round, ageless, handsome face, and with his larger-than-life stature that convinced me he was much taller than he really was, his arms were outstretched as he bear-hugged me and said: “Walk that walk.”
I hugged him back, blessing him with my thanks, telling him I was going to walk that walk, not just talk the talk, that I was going forward.
Later, the Reverend admitted that I came to his attention because it was so unusual to see a man standing in a food line with a baby. There wasn’t anything I had to explain about my situation. He seemed to know. Not just that he could see I was a single father, but that he could see who I was, my degree from God, as Moms would have said, my good, my soul, my potential. Maybe that was why, when I found out about the homeless hotel he had started down the street, he agreed that I could stay there.
Kindness personified. The first homeless hotel in the country, housed in the Concord Plaza at O’Farrell and Powell, started by Cecil with the ambitious idea of giving women and children without homes a place in which to transition, to start over, to be empowered. Many eventually went on to work at the hotel, at the restaurant, or in one of the many different expanding programs that Glide offered. Though rooms were free for the night, for reasons of safety, fairness, and efficiency, there were rules of conduct that had to be followed explicitly.
When I talked to the Reverend, I acknowledged that obviously I wasn’t a woman, but I was homeless and I did have a child. Most importantly, I had a job. I just needed someplace to live until I could put together the money to get an apartment.
“Fine,” he said, not thinking twice. He had been watching me with Christopher. He trusted me. “Go on down there,” he reassured me, letting me know who to see and what to say.
When I stepped inside the first time, I was swept up in a sea of fading pea green—pea green carpet and peeling pea green wallpaper. Looking pretty much like any skid row Tenderloin hotel, it had been taken over by Glide and just needed work—just as all of us in many of the programs at Glide needed some work, some TLC, some time. But it was beautiful to me all the same. The deal was this. No one was admitted into the hotel before 6:00 P.M., and everyone had to be out by 8:00 A.M. No one received a key. No going out once you were in for the night, and no leaving your things in the room because they’d be gone when you returned. When you left the room, you took everything you owned with you. No one was assigned the same room two nights in a row.
It was catch-as-catch-can. And if you didn’t get there early, before the hotel filled up, you were out of luck. There were no reservations, no one giving you special treatment and saying, “We knew you were coming so we held you a spot.”
The rooms were all different, most of them with just the basics—a bed and a bathroom. Some rooms had televisions. Really, Christopher and I cared more about getting fed at Glide and checking in at night, knowing we were set until tomorrow, than about what was on television.
For the rest of my life, there will never be enough I can do for Cecil Williams and Glide. He was so beautiful to me, to my son, and to generations of San Franciscans from all corners of the community. Every Sunday morning in church, as I prayed to find my way out of the problems of this period, I just knew that if I could hold on, everything would be so fine I’d never have a care in the world after that.
Well, of course, as I later would learn, it doesn’t work like that. Anyone who believes that money saves all has never had any money—like me back then. The late great rapper Notorious BIG put it best when he said, “Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems.” What I would discover was that while money is better to have than not to have, it not only doesn’t fix all problems but brings with it problems that Chris Gardner circa the early 1980s couldn’t have imagined. The only glimmer of the future that I had that was correct was the idea that whatever success I was able to achieve, I was going to share some with Glide, to put it back into Cecil’s hands, even if I didn’t yet know how.
Did I ever in my wildest, most confident visions imagine that I would help bankroll a $50 million project that Cecil Williams and Glide would undertake twenty-five years later to purchase a square block of real estate in order to create affordable housing for lower-income families and a complex of businesses and retail shops to create employment opportunity—right there in the Tenderloin where I used to count the cracks in the sidewalk, a block away from Union Square and $500-a-night hotels, not to mention the most expensive stores in the city like Neiman Marcus and Gucci? Not for a minute.
All I knew was that if the Reverend had not been there, my dreams might never have come to pass. Maybe something else would’ve happened or someone else would have stepped forward. It’s hard, though, to conceive of having the same incredible good fortune of being able to walk alongside greatness like his. Later married to the renowned Japanese American poet Janice Murikatani, Cecil was already a prominent social leader, someone who seemed tuned in at a higher level than most human beings. The important thing is that he was there, and he would be there long after I was blessed to have had his help, not just talking the talk with brilliant oratory but walking the walk—feeding, teaching, helping, sparking miracles daily.
An instant miracle took place for me once Cecil took us in. Without having to spend $300 to $600 a month on somewhere to sleep, I was able to get Christopher back into the San Francisco day care center in Hayes Valley, now at a cost of $500, but it was a place where I knew he was getting great care. Every morning, long before 8:00 A.M., I had us packed up with all our gear as I performed my poor impression of a man pretending to have eight arms, somehow holding the umbrella over my head after setting up the tent over the stroller and Christopher from the sheets of dry-cleaner plastic as we took off.
To get on the bus wasn’t even worth it because unbalancing my hanging bag, the umbrella, the briefcase, the duffel bag, and the box of Pampers and then trying to fold up the stroller was more trouble than just walking the extra fifteen minutes. Even in the rain. That was, as long as I could avoid the hills. The good news was that I could park our car (the stroller) at day care, stash our stuff in it, and then hop on the bus downtown to the office.
On the weekends we had to be out of Concord Plaza during the day. These rules were stringent. There was no just laying up. You either went to work or to look for work. Christopher and I already had a routine of pursuing every free bit of entertainment in the city. We went to the park, the museum, the park, the museum, park, museum, then maybe we’d go see friends, or if we had a couple of extra bucks, we’d ride the train over to Oakland, go visiting and get something to eat, and head back in time to make sure we got into a room.
As long as I could stay in the light, figuratively speaking, by keeping my focus on what I could control, worry and fear were kept at bay. That’s why I pinned my concentration to tasks in front of me, not letting myself agonize about the grade of the hill I was pushing our unwieldy ride up, but studying every crack and crevice in the concrete sidewalk, studying the sounds of the stroller wheels, noticing that I could move to that syncopated beat. Sometimes the effort made me happy, it let me dance, when some might have said that I didn’t have anything to dance about. It made me happy to put money away, in small $100 or $50 increments, to just deposit it and not touch it, to not even think about it but to know I was doing something to move us closer to the goal of having our own place.
In order not to touch my stash, there were occasions when I sold blood, each time swearing I’d never do it again. It wasn’t the shame of having to go there that ate at me, although I wasn’t proud that I was choosing between the lesser of two evils—whether to sell blood so as to be able to afford a room if we missed the cutoff at the shelter or sleep in the park. What haunted me were some of the down-and-outers I saw at the clinic; some had made some bad choices, and some had gotten there through no choices of their own.
One rainy evening after I tore out of the Dean Witter office fifteen minutes late, raced across town on the bus and sprinted up the several steps to Christopher’s room at the day care center, packed us up and then hauled ass at top speed over to the Tenderloin, we missed check-in at Concord Plaza by ten minutes.
Pissed, tired, wet, I head toward Union Square, walking Christopher under the awnings of the hotels and stores. With payday a week away, I have enough money for us to eat dinner and ride the train, which I’ve done before, just riding through the night until we’ve both had a little sleep and the morning comes. Aw, man, I realize, five more bucks and I could get us over to the trucker hotel for the night. Tense and tired, I get this whiff of cigarette smoke that smells so good. Of all the things that I’m not going to spend money on, it’s cigarettes. But a Kool menthol cigarette right about now would definitely take the edge off.
“Poppa,” Christopher says as we pass by the entryway to the Hyatt Embarcadero, “I gotta go to the bathroom.”
“You do?” I say excitedly, since we’ve been working to get him out of Pampers. “Okay, now, you hold on, we’ll get a bathroom,” and I roll us right into the Hyatt lobby and follow signs to the back and down the steps to the men’s room. After he does his thing, most successfully, we exit the bathroom and I notice a hotel guest, suit-and-tie guy, at the cigarette machine, putting in his quarters—ten of them—but having no luck getting the machine to give him his pack of cigarettes. Not about to walk away, he starts pounding the machine, rocking and humping it so that the cigarettes will fall down, apparently.
“Sir,” says a bellman who comes to see what the ruckus is about, “that’s okay, it must be broken. Just go to the front desk and tell them you lost your money. They’ll give you a refund.”
The hotel patron heads upstairs, and I follow, watching him weave through the crowd in the lobby and approach the front desk, soon pocketing the refund.
Two bucks fifty cents just like that. It’s so easy, I have to give it a try. But instead of jumping on it immediately, Christopher and I mill about, acting as if we’re patrons. Then I approach the young lady at the front desk and tell her about losing my change in the cigarette machine.
“So sorry,” she nods, opening up a cash drawer, “somebody else lost their money earlier. We’ve got to put a note on that machine.”
“Good idea,” I say, graciously accepting my “refund” of two dollars and fifty cents.
That little hustle worked so well, I gave it a shot at the St. Francis, at the Hyatt Union Square, and at a couple of other hotels that same evening. With twenty-five or so hotels in the vicinity, in the days that followed I scored at as many as ten hotels at a time, making twenty-five extra dollars a day. Being really slick about it, I made sure that I slid in after a shift change, just so that nobody would recognize me from a previous time.
After two weeks of this, I called it quits before my luck ran out. Later, when I did pick up my cigarette habit again and could afford it, I figured that I paid back the tobacco companies big-time. As for the hotels, in years to come I would repay my debts to many of them many times over, although in early 1983, not long after Christopher’s second birthday, that was not a future I could see.
While that million dollars and that red Ferrari I was going to drive one day still existed in the abstract of the future, there came a point when it wasn’t like I could reach out and almost grab on to them anymore. My feet hurt, my body ached. A darkness began to seep into the days, not just outside in the weather, but in my head. At the office, no, that was where the sun was shining, where the brightness of my potential buoyed my spirits, where the crops I’d been planting were starting to bud all over the place. But the second I left work, my spirits dipped—because always in the back of my mind I knew that if the bus ran late, or if Christopher wasn’t zipped into his cold-weather clothes fast enough, or if we got to the shelter late, or if I didn’t have time to pick something up to eat before we went up to the room and locked ourselves in, I had to come up with a plan B right away.
Having to compartmentalize and organize all our stuff to keep it contained, like in the military, was beating me down. Everything had to be rolled up and ready to go at a moment’s notice, everything had to be able to be located at all times, what you needed when you needed it—a sock, a Pamper, a shirt, a toothbrush, Christopher’s clothes, a hairbrush, a book that someone left on the train that I was reading, a favorite toy. It started getting heavy, all that shit I was carrying and the weight of the stress and fear.
Weekends, when I tried to do fun things for Christopher and give him a sense of normalcy, I still had to carry the stuff. At the parks, the museums. At church.
The worst of this period takes place in approximately March, right when I know things are really about to bloom at work, and this one night I roll in to the front desk at the shelter, where they all know me, and I hear, “Well, Chris, we’re all full, sorry.”
What can I do? Out on the street, I head to the BART station, asking Christopher, “You want to go look at the airplanes at the Oakland airport?”
We’ve done this drill before, taking public transportation out to one of the two airports and finding a waiting area with semicomfortable benches—where we look like we’re travelers anyway. As we ride over to Oakland and approach the MacArthur BART station, Christopher tells me he has to go to the bathroom, and I roll us off the train and head to an individual bathroom I’ve used there before—where I recall it being possible to lock the door from inside. As soon as we’re in there I realize that we don’t have to leave immediately. We can rest, wash up, take our time, even sleep.
“We’re gonna wait,” I explain to Christopher, “’cause it’s rush hour right now. So we’re gonna wait in here and be quiet, all right?” I make up a game called “Shhh”—I tell him that no matter how loud someone knocks on the door, the object is not to say a word. No matter what.
MacArthur, a major transfer point in Oakland, is probably the largest station in the BART system, with every subway train coming through. With so much activity, they keep the bathrooms pretty clean, but they’re much in demand. In no time, the pounding on the door starts—people obviously don’t want to wait. But eventually we can hear the train coming and that wave leaves as those travelers probably realize they can use the bathroom in their own home. As it gets later the knocking becomes much more sporadic.
With no windows, no ventilation, no natural light, the bathroom was tiled from floor to ceiling and wasn’t more than ten-by-five, with one toilet and one small wash basin and a mirror made out of reflective stainless steel. By turning off the light, it was completely dark—dark enough that if I was really tired I could sleep. Christopher had a gift for sleeping everywhere and anywhere. I couldn’t bring myself to stay in there for too long, only once or twice staying the night, but for a short period, maybe a little more than two weeks, the blessed mercy of BART’s public facilities gave me needed shelter during the darkest part of homelessness.
Maybe the reason I was able to see it that way came from the dual life I was living. At night, on weekends, and after hours, it was the dark side of California dreamin’: being kept out, sneaking into fancy hotel lobbies to get out of the rain, wishing to be anywhere else but in that BART-station bathroom. By day redemption came from the fact that I was living the great American dream, pursuing opportunity, pushing myself to the limits of my abilities and loving every minute of it. My intimate knowledge of BART became a blessing in other ways. Many years later my firm was selected to be the senior manager on hundreds of millions of dollars in bond issues for BART. I do believe that my honestly being able to say to the BART board of directors, “Look, I know this system better than any of these guys from Merrill Lynch or Solomon Brothers because I used to live on BART,” made the difference.
Though Glide was my saving grace back then, I did set a time limit for myself in terms of how long I would let myself stay there, knowing that I had some savings built up and that the time for my commissions to start adding up was just around the corner. Nobody was standing over me with a stopwatch or a calendar, of course. Still, I believed that if I could grab a few hours of rest during rush hour or stop in at that BART bathroom after sleeping at the airport or on the train, at least in time to wash up for work, then someone else could have a room at Concord Plaza that night. Or so I rationalized.
The one advantage to the BART station bathroom was that nobody else apparently ever thought of it, so there was no line to get in, not to mention that I didn’t have to rush insanely at the end of the day to make sure we got there on time and there were no rules to follow other than my own. If I made it to Glide and got a room at the hotel, great. If I could get a locker at the San Francisco BART station and not have to haul gear for a night, even better.
A question now pulsed maniacally in my brain. Why was I putting myself and my kid through this? Why couldn’t I slow down, take longer to get out of the rut, dig into my savings, and put us up back at The Palms? Why did I refuse to break the $20 bill that could have bought us a night at the trucker hotel? I followed my gut, which told me that breaking that $20 bill meant we might not eat. Twenty dollars was and is some real money, but when it’s fifteen, twelve, seven, four, it goes fast. Having a pristine, unbroken twenty in my wallet gave me peace of mind, a sense of security.
But it wasn’t just the internal struggle over each and every expenditure that was raging inside me. There was also a fight of a much bigger and different magnitude, a battle royal between me and the forces that would control my destiny. These were the same forces that robbed my mother of her dreams, everything from her father and stepmother not helping her go to college, to my own father for giving her a child to raise on her own, to Freddie for beating her physically and psychologically, to a justice system that locked her up when she tried to break out of her bondage. Over the six, seven, eight months that I’d been without a home, a taunting voice that had lurked in the back of my mind now seemed to suddenly gather strength—right at a time when I could see the finish line. The voice mocked me, sounding a hell of a lot like Freddie, just telling me, You slick motherfucker, think you so smart ’cause you can read and pass that test, but that don’t make you shit, you big-eared motherfucker, WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? Sometimes it sounded like a damn sociologist, quoting statistics, telling me, Unfortunately, your socioeconomic upbringing has predetermined that breaking out of the cycle of poverty and single-parenting is highly unlikely given the fact that you are among the 12 to 15 percent of homeless people who are actually working yet still can’t manage a living wage.
The voice made me angry and made me fight harder. Who did I think I was? I was Chris Gardner, father of a son who deserved better than what my daddy could do for me, son of Bettye Jean Gardner, who said that if I wanted to win, I could win. I had to win, however I was going to do it. Whatever more I had to do, whatever burden I had to carry, I was going to rise up and overcome. But the quicker my pace and the harder I pushed, the louder the self-doubting voice became. Are you crazy? You’re deluding yourself! At my lowest point of wanting to finally give up, throw in the towel, call it quits, spend whatever money I’d accumulated, and hitchhike to somewhere else, I caught a second wind—a burst of confidence—as a feeling of grace found me. Hold on, that feeling said, hold on. And I do.
Early spring arrives, bringing more rains, but it’s warmer outside, my paychecks are starting to grow, and my savings account balance tells me that I’ve got enough to afford a cheap rent. San Francisco apartments are way too expensive, so that leaves Oakland, where I start my hunt on weekends. There are hurdles of questions: “Well, how long you been on your job? You’re not married? You’ve got a baby? What’s going on? What’s a man doing with a baby?”
Some of the questions are overt, some not. But the process does become somewhat discouraging as I keep stepping down, notch by notch, both in the neighborhoods where I’m looking and in my expectations. In fact, as a last resort, one Saturday when the weather’s taking a break—no rain, even some patches of sunshine breaking through the fog—I decide to go check in the vicinity of The Palms, back in the “Ho”-stroll.
As I’m passing by a place on Twenty-third and West, my attention is grabbed by the sight of an old man sweeping down a front yard—or really, more a patch of what could be called a front yard, now covered in concrete, with blades of rebellious grass still poking up from the cracks. It’s not the grass that amazes me but what I see just in front of the little house—a rosebush. Of all the times I might have walked by this spot, I never saw this house, and certainly not that rosebush. Come to think of it, I never saw a rosebush anywhere in a rough urban part of town like this. I’m fascinated. How do you get roses in the ghetto?
I strike up a conversation with the old man, whose name is Jackson. By the count of wrinkles on his brown leathery face, either he is really up there in years or he has seen some rough living. After some friendly chitchat about the weather and my good-looking son, just as I get ready to keep on rolling, I notice that the front windows of the house are papered over.
“Anybody living in here?” I ask Mr. Jackson, nodding at the house.
“No, ain’t nobody living in there,” he says, explaining that he and his family own the building but live in an upper unit. They’ve been using it for storage for almost three years.
“Is it for rent?”
“It could be,” he shrugs, then offers to show me the unit and the work that would be involved.
The minute we walk in, right as I’m drowned in a funky, musty smell of a place that hasn’t had any light or air in a long, long time, I see this whole downstairs space, covering the entire length of the building, and the smell is suddenly minimal. It’s so beautiful, even in the dim lighting, I’m speechless. There’s a front room, then a big-ass bedroom perfect for Christopher, a bathroom, over here a kitchen, next to it a dining area, and there’s a little doorway to another room that could be my bedroom.
Now comes the test. “Can I rent it?” I say, right at the top, and before he can say no or start the qualifying questions, I let him know from the get-go, “Look, I’m fairly new on my job. I have my baby here, and there’s no wife in the picture but—”
“Son,” he says, “you can stop right there. You done told me everything I need to know. Y’all can move in here.”
For a few moments I don’t trust that it’s over, that the long night of homelessness is over, that I’ve won. Mr. Jackson confirms it by saying that all I need to give him is the first month’s rent and a $100 cleaning deposit.
“What if I clean it up myself and save the hundred?” I counter.
As he studies me for a beat or two, my heart races as I worry that he’ll change his mind. Then he says, “Okay, son.”
This was it. This was the most beautiful spot in the world to me, somewhere to call home for me and my son. There is no feeling in the entire emotional spectrum of happiness that can ever come close to the feeling I felt in those moments and on that fine spring day and in every day that followed whenever I returned in my mind to seeing that rosebush in the ghetto and having it lead me to our first home off the road of homelessness.
Appropriately, it was not long before Easter, a celebration of rebirth and resurrection, a time of new beginnings, new roads. To remember this time, from these days on I made it a point of trying to get back to Glide for Easter Sunday each and every year—no matter how far away or busy I was—not to relive the painful memories of where I’d been before but to celebrate the miracles that happened next.