The Walking Men
Jane Salisbury
Word Count 1614
In 1984, I went to work as a reference librarian at the Central Library in Portland, Oregon, a few blocks uptown from the Multnomah Hotel (now the Embassy Suites), where my grandfather used to go every morning to read the Oregonian and visit with his old friends. When I visited, I would drive there with my grandparents down lower Burnside, then as now, skid row. My grandmother always said two things as I gawked at the men waiting on the sidewalk in a breadline or hanging out the windows of the single-room occupancy hotels in their undershirts in the summer: one, “Don’t look” and two, “Poor souls”. “Don’t look” was both the admonition not to stare and her wish to protect me from public drunkenness. “Poor souls” was her own natural compassion, and usually just murmured quietly, like a prayer.
Once I worked at the library, I could no longer look away from those solitary men: they came to the library every day as patrons. There was the man, older, leathery, with a few homemade tattoos, who inspected the golf pencils for the best-looking points and spent the next few hours drawing intricate, heavily-leaded drawings. And the young man, disheveled and disoriented, with wild blond hair, who came in many days of the week, asking for a tattered obsolete railway timetable that was kept just for him behind the desk. And Liam, who practically ran from one room to another, pushing up his glasses as he went, until he was gently slowed down by the security guard. When he was calm, Liam spent long hours perusing various city directories and talking importantly to himself. And the man whose name was Paul, I think, but once said to me that his name should be “Hello” because then he would be greeted by his name everywhere. A scholar who read art criticism and philosophy (I remember him asking once for something by Walter Benjamin) he had beautiful manners, though shabbily dressed and red-faced. Sometimes he had that careful drunken way of moving. When Paul learned that I had adopted a baby, he brought me a beautiful, strange photo of a child who looked as if she was just apprehending the world for the first time. And the man who just got stuck sometimes. I’d see him on the sidewalk or in the library, walking along, and then just stopping as if by a brake, where he would stand for many minutes before starting up again. And the mean man who berated the librarians at the documents desk, and the speller, and the fair-haired young man who became agitated at closing time because he was worried that we might close a minute early, racing from one floor to another checking clocks.
And the man whom I saw more often on the street than in the library, but whose condition and expression broke my heart. He was a handsome man, probably my age when I started at the library, thirty-ish. Dark hair, slight, with a haunted expression, and a painful way of walking. Sometimes with a pack, sometimes with nothing, wearing a too-big coat, he looked as though he could neither stop walking, nor bear to go on.
And then there was Barry Sutton. Everyone knew his name, and as I came to learn, years later, so did half the people in Portland. Barry was a wiry man, who moved between the three floors of the library, always taking the stairs at top speed, never the elevator, and often ricocheting from one reference desk to another. He often raised issues, objected to various policies, and accused staff and patrons of talking about him or treating him unfairly. He was a harried man with a mission. The library guards asked him to leave periodically because he disturbed patrons and staff, raising his voice, making accusations. But like all patrons, he was welcome to come back when his exclusion expired, usually the next day.
After a few years, I left the Central Library. In the late 1980s, I started a grant-funded project called the Old Town Reading Room, at 3rd and Couch, near the old touchstones of the Downtown Chapel and the Multnomah Hotel. It was a storefront library – no ID, no card, all are welcome, take what you want, spend the day reading – and only the library’s usual behavior policies, myself and one volunteer to keep it from becoming loud, dangerous or disorganized. We had no security. One of the best volunteers was Karl, a Vietnam veteran and an accomplished painter, who had lost two and a half fingers in the war and called our place Oscar Tango Romeo Romeo, OTRR for short. Some of the same men at Central came. They took care of the OTRR and me: one man surreptitiously plugged my expired parking meters, and others made sure that decorum was maintained, persuading drunk patrons to leave before I could step in. They made it a library. The OTRR lasted for nine years.
Out on the street, I’d see Barry go by. The Old Town Reading Room was too small for his paranoia, and he never came in. But the drawing man came in, and the haunted man walked by often but never stopped.
Twenty, thirty years went by. I moved on. I still worked for the library, but behind the scenes, and missed the wandering men. I saw Barry, glimpsing him in different parts of town, his pack larger, his back bowed, immediately recognizable, even blocks away. I saw the walking man with the haunted face, all over town, walking more slowly and with more difficulty, but compelled to walk, his hair as dark as ever, his handsome face aging a little.
On November 5th last year, I opened the Sunday Oregonian to the obituaries, always my first stop. I read: “ Thomas Barry Sutton, Jan. 30, 1950 – Sept. 24, 2023.” Wild-eyed Barry, with his shaggy hair and beard, smiling, holding his bike, looked over his glasses at the photographer. I read on, stunned.
Barry had not just frequented the library. He had visited the Unitarian Church, the Metanoia Peace House, the Multnomah Friends Meeting, the City Council, the Zen Community of Oregon, and Havurah Shalom. He had harangued, and become friends with, city councilmen and professors. He had shown up at community gatherings of every stripe, colloquia on racism, homelessness, labor.
These communities, true friends to this prickly, mentally ill, difficult man, had seen him through his last days, supporting him after a stroke and on to a peaceful and comfortable death at Hopewell House, a beautiful residential hospice.
I learned more at his funeral which packed the light-filled Unitarian Church in downtown Portland two weeks later. I felt compelled to go, rearranging appointments to get there. I wanted to represent the library, and I wanted to witness such kindness. I knew almost no one, recognizing only a few well-known faces and one other library friend, a Quaker. The 23rd Psalm was chanted in Hebrew and recited in English. A Quaker-style half-hour was held to allow anyone to speak. Barry’s cousin who had loved his as a child, and watched the Pendleton Rodeo through a hole in the fence with him, and lamented his life on the street spoke. Others spoke honestly of the truth of mental illness and an entire life spent on the street, but loyal to Barry and his insistence on his own terms. I spoke.
I am a shy person, but something made me stand up. I said that I did not know Barry, truly, but for several years, I saw him almost every day. I said that I could never stop wondering and worrying about him, and could never have imagined how his life ended, in friendship and comfort. I thanked these people for putting my sadness for him to rest.
On the way to Barry Sutton’s funeral, I had driven downtown over the Broadway Bridge. It was a cool fall day, late in the afternoon, the trees were in their glory. Driving post-covid is strange: the city is full of speed demons, and lost people seem to be everywhere. Bridges are especially complicated, narrow and crowded, and leading headlong into the complicated sidewalks of downtown. I watch closely.
As I came into the curving ramp that leads downtown from the Broadway Bridge, I saw the haunted walking man, going along the sidewalk. I had first seen him nearly forty years earlier, but his hair is still black and his face still so handsome. He walked even more slowly, each step hurting each foot in a different way. He carried nothing. His face was a mask of sorrow or despair.
At the funeral, as I listened to Barry’s true friends, the rabbis and monks and priests and ministers and politicians, the dark-haired man walked on in the back of my mind. I imagined that he was walking by the church outside as the day faded, and dark came.
A key sits on my desk next to cups of pens and pencils and a Chinese box full of paper clips. On one side, it says “PRIMUS. DO NOT DUPLICATE”. On the other, it says, crookedly, 24, and then CL1. It opens many of the doors at the Central Library. I stole it, taking it with me when I left Central. I loved having my own key and so I kept it. I catch sight of it on my desk and think of Barry and the walking man, and the simple, imperfect welcome that the library offered to them. Knowing that it is so little, I bless them in the only way I can, to think of them and to remember them.
Jane writes and lives in Portland, Oregon, where she has almost always lived. She worked as a librarian in Oregon, Alaska, and California for many years, and spends her time walking, volunteering for Write Around Portland, gardening and talking to her small grandson. She has published in Street Roots, Ruminate, Desert Call and Pensive.