The Lexicographer's Rules

Lacy launched a new project for the homeless this week. They were out, the weather was warm, before these last few days of snow. They have resumed their stations. Their clothes stink of mildew, urine. Their bodies smell like leftover turkey. Lacy, if you remember, comes from privilege. She assumes there was once civilization in the homeless. For some, yes, for some, no. Or they had it and forgot it. It will need to be relearned. But she does not know this. She prints fliers. They say in bold letters, four to a sheet, "IF you are HOMELESS...!!!! FREE showers available. NO CHARGE!!! Saturdays 4 to 6 p.m." It has her address at the bottom. By 4 o'clock last Saturday there were 22 people waiting outside her apartment, not too far from campus, waiting for showers. A quiet queue, although the Lebanese landlord grappled with one in a dispute over a broom. Two homeless women spooned out laundry detergent to the line of other hopefuls, putting it in soda cans with the top ripped off, plastic mugs, cupped hands. The idea was that they would also wash their clothes in the shower. The clothes would dry on their bodies. Very efficient. "Looks good, looking good." Lacy marched down the line with a stack of white hospital linens under each arm. Yes, these people certainly need showers. Many showers to be had. Yes. Carlos was the first. He was mangy and balding, showing the glistening scar on his skull where bone and tumor were removed in 1974. Lacy gave him a new bar of soap, a washcloth and a towel. "The soap is yours. Please leave everything else in the bathroom." She repeated it in school-book Spanish. Carlos tried to bring his roped-together milk crates, four blankets, two winter coats and his one-eyed kitten up the stairs with him. Lacy's apartment is on the third floor. Lacy looked distracted. "Umm, you can't bring that up there. There's no place for it. No vengan las cosas, Señor." Carlos stood there for a second, then carefully returned the soap and towel and washcloth and shoved off down the street, dragging one blanket, his crates riding on top. The Iglesia del Dios Pentecostal was having an open house followed by supper and sermon in an hour. "Wait! Wait! What?" Carlos explained clearly in excellent English, in the same way he spoke to police and other city officials. "I cannot leave these things down here. They will be taken. If I am not with them, then they are not mine, and others will take them. So, I cannot leave them." "Oh, right, yes. Um, I'll watch them." This meant the apartment was open to the shower-takers. She would not be able to monitor. Not that they were automatically thieves, but... She should have called one of her girlfriends for help. She held the kitten as it clawed her expensive sweater. Carlos went up to the open apartment. "It's on the right. Right by the door. Don't, um, touch anything else?" She said this more as a hopeful question than an order. Carlos came down forty-five minutes later. I believe I have seen this in a movie before, or perhaps read it elsewhere, but it is a fact: Carlos smelled like the first floor of Macy's. He had tried every perfume in the cabinet. CK One, Opium, Chanel No. 5 (an expensive gift from Lacy's ex-boyfriend). Carlos had also tried every bottle of conditioner, shampoo and styling gel, all the sprays and cremes, on his hair. Its sparseness was glued to his head. It would be rock hard when it dried. I'm also pretty sure he used her deodorant, but I didn't think it would be helpful right then to mention it. He carried one of his coats. His Winter Coat, he called it. Wool, wooden buttons, an extra zip-in layer, only a few moth holes. Very warm. And now, very wet, and heavy, its body trailing behind him as he walked. The arms were looped around his waist, fastened with safety pins, like a scarecrow clothesline. "The water did not want to behave, but I have won." "Oh, Christ. Um, no problem. Okay, I'll be back in a minute." Carlos held out his hands for everyone else to smell. Lacy took the steps two at a time. The bathroom was flooded. Towels, every towel in her linen closet, were tamped into a tight dam at the door, four inches of water behind. The shower was still running. The drain was plugged with hair and a sock. He had taken the kind of bath a child takes once they learn to enjoy it. There must have been geysers. The steam dripped off of everything, and Carlos seemed to have put as much grime on the white walls as he had in the water and down the drain. "Christ. Will they all be like this?" I heard later she sent the rest of them away. She's now trying to get the youth hostel over on Amsterdam to accept vouchers for showers from the homeless, but I don't know what's become of that.

From the Dictionary of American Regional English, a publication I highly recommend. If your local library does not have it, you might encourage them to consider purchasing it. "gaum" v2 Alsp sp gawm, gorm [EDD gaum v.4 "To stare idly or vacantly.. gape.. be stupid, awkward"] chiefly NEng Cf gaming adj 1. with "around": To move awkwardly or clumsily. 1892 DN 1.210 e MA, Gormy or gormin' around [g@m-]. Said of a horse that "gawks" in stable or harness. 1909 DN 3.411 nME, Gawm around... To move around in an awkward way. 2. also with "up": To make an awkward job of (something); to bungle, cobble up. [Perh infl by gaum v1 3] 1941 LANE Map 463 (Awkward, clumsy) 1 inf, sRI, He [g@mz] everything up. 1966-69 DARE (qu. KK63, To do a clumsy or hurried job of repairing something: "It will never last—he just_______.") Infs KY40, ME22, Gaumed it up. 1969 DARE FW Addit KY6, Referring to a pre-fabricated house, Inf said it wouldn't last because he contractor "just gaumed it up." 1975 Goulde ME Lingo 114, Gorm... A favorite Maine word.. meaning to behave in a stupid, awkward manner... A mane who bungles a job has gormed it. 3. with "around": See quot' als vbl n "gauming." 1971 DAAARE File Cape Cod MA, "Gawming" .. was not unknown .. in my childhood, 1902-1915+... Gawming was used in this sense, "Oh I just went down town gawming around," meaning to look around to see what one could see or hear what one could hear... "Gawming" cold have been a variation of "gawking." "gaum" n2 Also sp "go(r)m" Also gaumhead [EDD gaum sb.3; OEDS gom sb.4] nNEng Cf gaum adj2 A clumsy person; a lout. 1941 LANE Map 464 (Awkward person, lummox) 5 infs, VT, ME, Gaum; 1 inf, nsMA, Gaumhead.1975 Gould ME Lingo 114 Gorm—pronounced gaum... A clumsy oaf... A boy with two left hands is a gorm. 1977 Yankee Jan 113 cs ME, If it happens that you're' so conked out that you trip on your way out the door, you might feel like a lummox—which is a clumsy oaf—in other words, a gom.

Comments written on a 700-word American literature essay just returned by my instructor M. Smith, the kind of graduate student who stares at the floor when he lectures. First paragraph: "Excellent gloss." Second paragraph: "Good." Words underlined. "Good." Fourth paragraph: "Excellent." Then, suddenly: "Have you shown this? How does this fit into your argument?" Sixth paragraph: "Have you shown this?" "A good quote, but how to you account for the differences here—in Emerson the notion of place is 'a force of doom' rather than a site chosen by 'Divine Providence'? Surely this is quite different?" Back: "This feels like a paper that might have benefited from another draft. You have plenty of good ideas here, but once you to paragraph 4 these ideas start to come somewhat haphazardly, with little attention to the overall logic and structure of your argument. You mention a contradiction without analyzing it in the last sentence of paragraph 4, and then apparently bring it up again in your conclusion in the midst of a new quotation from Emerson followed by one from Hawthorne. What is your essential argument here? It seem to be the first sentence of your paper—if so, then eliminate everything in your paper that does not contribute to supporting it." My first sentence is 22 words long.

I thought, for just a second, that you were talking about Union Square in New York, say, a hundred years ago when it still had cable cars and they would come ripping around Deadman's Curve where Broadway and 14th Street rails used to do an insane jog and jerk. Used to kill, like, a dozen people and a couple of horses a year. Some kind of timewarp on your part, I thought, maybe the result of some Beowulf-LCD-wearable computer IPO-funded research whose press release I missed one day when I had to work late and then came home and went to bed with the shortwave radio tuned to white noise to block out the Puerto Rican couple upstairs listening to infomericals on Univision until 3 a.m. when they both leave for shitty jobs downtown. But I see now that you were talking about San Francisco today and everything's all right.

It can still happen. Susan's friend Caryn was found dead on the third floor of the Bowery Hotel after two days in the city, her body sweating from steam heat and an overdose of heroin. Three cops threw a rug over her head. At 17, her internship represented a precociousness also marked by graduation from high school a year early and advanced placement at Michigan State based on college prep classwork. It was clear that her the time in the city held higher rank than the hastily acquired internship at a weekly magazine. One week she applied for the internship, the next she was in the East Village, Alphabet City, sharing a studio with Susan, a copy editor in her mid-twenties. Caryn packed two bags, one of them completely filled with compact disks, the other filled with clothes and camera equipment. She looked 17. She wore her straight hair to her shoulders and added red tint every other month. Her fashion choices were based on what her pocket book would let her get away with, whatever scraps a scholarship education left. No Gap, but men's dress slacks cut to suit and hitched up with a spangled belt, no socks, black leather shoes beaten about the toe and heel by years of wear, no bra, and t-shirts marked with band names and call letters. Her build called into question any claim to adulthood, predicting hips and breasts to come, and she still walked like a freshman in the senior's hallway. She watched the world not at all, but partook of events marked by groups of people and excitement. It was in this way that as the city slowed during her first evening she found herself sitting on the curb at Houston watching a pair of men pull a third man from the middle of the street. One with mustache and pear torso, the other in sweats top and bottom, the men dragged the body arms first and feet skidding to the dirt under a struggling tree, leaving a shoe behind. A van honked and swerved and the shoe flew from beneath its tire with a thump and lay motionless on the inside lane and nobody paid any attention. Unhurt, its owner lay covered in blackness, public and private, and belched. Whatever persons that remained moved away, headed for other pursuits, some disappointed by the lack of anything more gruesome than a homeless drunk, others disgusted by the idea that a man would crawl into the street on his own, no worse than an animal, like a snake or an opossum that might seek the warmth of the pavement. Caryn sat on the curb and watched as one of the rescuers wiped clean his hands on the grass and the other nudged the awakening body with his foot. It rolled over in an exaggerated motion, and spoke, and the black man's chin now hung over the edge of the curb, both his arms at his sides, palms up, and his socks baggy on his feet. "Mah-huh?" he said finishing the roll of his body, now on his back, his eyes trying to focus on the flat orange sky. His jeans were rust and unraveling at the cuffs, his sleeveless shirt unbuttoned, his face marked by ancient acne pits and recent whiskers.