Timmy

I clock out of the Giant Eagle around 7:30 and take my ride, which is to say Shanks’ Pony to the PNC Bank on the quad. The branch is closed but they have an ATM that takes check deposits. My paycheck is pretty good, and with the mob of roommates at Chaos Central I don’t see myself having much trouble with rent, so I deposit the check and pull out $50.

The four more blocks to the Upstage is almost ritual at this point. I walk back past the nearly silent towers that are Pitt’s main dormitories, past the front of the Dirty O, already live with late diners and early drinkers, the sound of Snoop Dogg booming from the upstairs bar, audible over the other sounds of the city.

The Upstage is on the third floor of a four story office block, incongruously located a floor above The Attic (a slightly higher priced fratboy meat market, catering to the little rich kids with mommy and daddy’s credit cards), and one floor below Club Laga (a stark dance space, known for catering to the various subculture cliques, the bright and garish neon and glitter of rave Fridays fading into the monochrome PVC and silk of goth/industrial Saturday). There’s no line at the street-level door, and Timmy, my favorite panhandler, is holding it for people.

Timmy is as much a performer as I am, but his stage is the street. Between his military pension and his social security checks, he has no need to work the crowds; he does it for fun. He owns a house in one of the more fashionable sections of Highland Park and pays more in property tax each year than most people earn. I spotted a couple tells when we met, and I treated him to a cup of coffee, getting the whole story.

Timmy enlisted in the US army in 1968, rather than wait for the draft. He served in the 101st Airborne in ‘Nam during a four year tour that ended with the fall of Saigon, and when he returned to civilian life he found it no longer suited him. He re-enlisted and went career, opting for Officer training. In ‘91, on February 28th, 1st Lieutenant Timothy Walker took a stray bullet in the upper portion of his right chest fifteen minutes before the declaration of the cease fire of Operation Desert Shield, becoming one of the only 1,068 casualties of the first Gulf War.

With more than twenty years in, he decided that retirement was a definite option. He left the service with a Purple Heart, a Congressional Medal of Honor, and a fully vested military pension as well as VA disability benefits. He used the GI Bill to go to university, but still found civilian life unfamiliar and strange. It wasn’t until he studied cultural anthropology and engaged in an exercise in Civil Disobedience that things began to make sense.

The course’s instructor gave the class a project; they were to spend four hours panhandling and write a paper on it. Those four hours changed his life. Today Timmy wears a dreadlocked wig, his old army uniform, and a pair of beat up paratrooper boots, but he’s exchanged his weapon for a paper cup. He’s currently working on his doctoral thesis about the results of combat on vets.

We exchange smiles and fist-bumps and I enter the door and head up the rather rickety staircase.