afliction is a treasure...

when one Man dies, one Chapter is not torne out of the booke, but translated into a better language;

John Donne.

Rudólfo Verdádes lived what the most charitable among us might have called a useless life, if we called it a life at all. He abrupted as a young boy into the conciousness of the small Southwestern community in which, for all anyone knows, he spent his whole life, emerging from one alleyway and disappearing down another, collecting—so they say—odds and ends of things people discarded so that he could sell or trade them for food and drink. No one knew where he slept, or where he changed the ragged but clean clothes that he wore, except for Doña Oliváres, who was as much a mystery as Rudy was, showing up in town already widowed but with five daughters whom she detested, and who ran off one by one with the first man who would have her.

The old woman washed and ironed people’s clothes and cleaned their houses to provide for the family, and even after all the girls were gone, they would still drop their clothes off for Doña Olivares to do for them. It was the price she paid for keeping them at arm’s length. But she would look for Rudy, and say, “Come by the house. I have some shoes for you.” And he wasn’t too proud to wear them. Nor the pants that didn’t always fit just right.

He started drinking early. Booze was cheap then. When he was fifteen, he already looked old enough to buy it himself, and it didn’t take but a few pop bottles for the refund, a bycycle tire or chain, or some other found bric-a-brac to net him enough coins for a bottle of “Sweet Lucy.” People might have suspected that Rudy stole, but he was never caught at it. During the “50s” when rock and roll became king, and it blared out of every souped up heap in town, business was brisk with hot rodders always on the lookout for a fancy hood ornament, a radio, or a nice set of hubcaps, and Rudy had the knack of always finding the right item for you. In later years, it was said that Rudy was the only one who could come up with that very special set of spinners that were so rare that you never heard of but one rod ever sporting them at any one time. Rudy gave that business up before more than one furrowed brow ever came to more than that.

He started selling blood when he was eighteen. He didn’t really have to, but it was easier than scavenging, and they gave him an extra five dollars because he had a very rare blood type. In fact, one day, Doña Olivares came to find him and took him to her house where a big car picked him up and took him to the hospital. It seemed that a very important man in the state had a very rare blood disease and a very rare blood type: Rudy’s type. He was more than willing to help. They gave him a few dollars and enough food to last him a week. And he might have been the first to wear scrubs on the street, although nobody ever mistook him for a doctor on a cigarette break. It wasn’t the last time this happened. People came for him to escort him to the blood bank on a regular basis. Food and a little money would be left for him at Doña Olivares’s house. Rudy became the healthiest drunk in town. This was more or less his life except for the couple of months that he disappeared and came back sporting army fatigues and combat boots. During a brief period, he even mowed a lawn now and then, but gradually he metamorphosed back to his old self. The boots lasted him two years.

Rudy lived through the upheavals of the 60s, the moaning and groaning of the seventies and the numbing blare of the 80s and the 90s without changing one bit. There was just something about the world order that never appealed to him. But except for Doña Olivares, he outlived all his sources. His externals weren’t the same. There is just something utterly disheartening and futile about crushing aluminum cans for money to buy alcohol with. The world had dragged him along as an adjunct to its purpose. Now he was just the equal of any sixty-eight year old man who was judged not for his aspirations or lack of them, but for his years: the age at which the world looks at you as a liability.

One day, walking through the city dump, he found a velvet painting of a famous rock and roll star, and a spinner. He knew where to sell the painting. He didn’t know why he kept the spinner. When he reached the tavern where a young man that he knew would be a sure buyer for an item of this sort, the young bartender was already dead, shot through the heart by the same fellow who was stuffing money from the till in his pocket and aiming the gun at the young son who had just brought his father some fast food for his lunch. Rudy cracked the hold-up man's head with the spinner, and the thief returned the favor on his way down by shooting Rudy.

In the hospital, the doctor told Doña Olivares that Rudy wasn’t going to make it. He had a bullet through his head.

“You know, you have the same blood type as he does. You could use some of it yourself.”

The old lady had cancer. She said, “Haven’t you sucked out enough of his blood already?”

“Rudy has a living will, Mrs. Olivares. We’ll keep him alive as long as we can, but every one of his internal organs is of great value to some individuals who are of great service to this country and who have the same blood type as he does. Rudy won’t awaken from his coma.”

Doña Olivares went home and locked herself in and never went outside the house again.

Rudy’s liver is somewhere in Washington, his heart is in the state capital, and his marrow is inside the bones of the son of a drug dealer in Mexico. The young boy whose life he saved in the bar joined the army. And somebody somewhere is looking through Rudy’s corneas right this minute at the shit we’ve made out of this planet.

He never got around this good before he died. He wasn’t worth a damn—but you know, he could always come up with just the right item you were looking for.

Noe.