The Corner of Peachtree & Nowhere

            A lady, neither well nor shabbily dressed in a conservative pantsuit, approaches Victor Wright on Alabama Street, where Wright sits in a chair at his vending stand, “Victor’s Bargain Center” he calls it.  She asks Wright if he remembers her, reminding him that she was here yesterday, but didn’t have money for the soda he gave her with the understanding that she would pay later.  Wright nods, and offers an open palm in response for and beneath her extended fingers.  The quarters she drops clang together, as she thanks him once more.

Wright is not a simple man, and he has not led a simple life.  I could give you the irrelevant biography that you don’t care about.  I could tell you that Victor Octavious Wright was born on July 1, 1947, in Jamaica.  That when his father, a minister, was transferred to Belize, Wright moved and lived there for 17 years.  Where his mother lived also until her death 18 years ago, and where his father still lives.  I could tell you that he is one of 11 siblings, most if not all of whom have emigrated to the United States and now live in California, Ohio, or the metro Atlanta and Miami areas.  That they perform a variety of working class jobs, positions ranging from construction worker to bank teller. 

Or does it matter less that Wright has worked a flea market in San Antonio, construction work himself in California and Atlanta, as well as once operating a thrift store, also here in Atlanta, in 1997 and 1998?  Or I could tell you he currently operates a vending stand yards from the corner of Peachtree and Alabama Streets just outside of downtown Atlanta’s Five Points subway station, where he sells a variety of retail items.  One can buy a Tootsie Pop or a Sprite.  Or he’ll sell you a Georgia Tech hat or Atlanta sweat shirt.  But there’s probably a better chance that you’re on the market for batteries, his best-selling item.  I could tell you he claims to have not been to a movie in better than two decades.  Maybe talk about how he (sort of) gets by making under $10,000 per year, perhaps about the $9,000 he owes Grady Hospital after he had a minor heart attack and a mild stroke in 1995, a feat he managed to accomplish even without having health insurance.  But damned if I really feel I can explain Victor Wright, or if I even feel like I really know him all that thoroughly, and I’ve met with him more than a dozen times. 

But I’ll try.

Larry hangs out around Wright’s stand outside Five Points station a lot.  The requisite and accompanying drunk to Wright and his social clique amongst the vendors at Five Points Station, Larry seems to scrape together just enough cash to buy enough booze every day, even without the benefit of a regular job.  The first time I meet Larry he gives me a traditional and typical sob story about being hungry and just wanting to come up with the money to buy a burger and fries from McDonalds. 

A harmless, clueless white boy far outside of his element and his bubble, I give him a couple singles, primarily just to shut him up.  Larry mumbles something or other about the Lord in thanking me and goes on his way, ostensibly to take a walk to the near-by McDonalds. 

I will not be making that mistake again.  Two days later I see Larry again, hanging out by Wright’s stand.  Drunk, Larry has seemingly forgotten my goodwill, but does want more of my money and, while lightly and alternately pushing both of my shoulders, mumbles something I do not really catch or understand about my mother, though I am pretty sure he is questioning the validity of my family lineage.  I’m forced to finally shove him off of me and tell him to “leave me the hell alone,” before Wright speaks up on my behalf. 

Wright tells Larry, multiple times and in no uncertain terms to leave me alone or he will call the police.  But Larry appears to have had a little (lot) too much to drink and isn’t about to listen to anything resembling reason and instead continues his running self-righteous monolog. 

Wright eventually has enough, “What is wrong with you?  Do not disturb me, ok?  That’s the last time you will do it.  This is the last time.  Have some respect for people, man, do you want to get in trouble and go to jail?  Do you want to go to jail or what?  Just what is wrong with you!?”  Wright takes out his mobile phone.  “You have a cell phone?” I exclaim to the pauper as he starts dialing.  Larry exits stage left, and I’m not sure if Wright even actually talks to the police (or even if that is, in fact, the number he is dialing).

Wright is a 55 year-old man, about average in height in standing at no more than five feet ten inches. Weighing in at a svelte 280 pounds, down from 320 in years past (“I could put a plate here on my stomach and eat off of it [while] sitting straight up”), Wright is a couple ZIP codes away from looking healthy.  And his natural beauty doesn’t make up for it.  He has a few big moles growing off of his cheeks and the right side of his neck, and Wright’s nostrils are also about two sizes too big.  It would probably help if he still had those four or five missing teeth back, too.

In addition to selling out of his vending cart, Wright also sometimes helps people help themselves, selling some of his merchandise for him on consignment.  “Some guys, they want to make a little money for themselves, I will give them a certain amount of merchandise and they will sell it… I help people, that’s my life.  People tell me I’m too nice, but I can’t help it.  I’ve been through some hard times myself.”

And easier times.  He met Nancy years ago, back home in Belize.  They quickly fell in love and wed in or around 1968, before having two children in Central America, a son and a daughter.  Stanley, now 35 years old and doing construction work, moved to the United States and California in 1985.  Wright’s daughter Suzanne is 33 and lives back in Belize.  Perhaps by virtue of the fact that they rarely communicate, Wright doesn’t even know what, if anything, she does.  Just that, more than once, Suzanne has asked him for money because, according to Wright, her husband doesn’t work and can’t support her and their children.

When I ask why Nancy didn’t accompany Wright when he moved to the United States, he explains that she “was the reason I left, because she’s crazy.  She tried to kill me in my sleep.”  Wright asserts that “I am a very spiritual man,” and that, one night back in Belize, he was sleeping peacefully in bed when “the spirit, God, was talking to me and said ‘Victor, open your eyes’ and I saw my wife standing over me with a butcher knife and I grabbed it.”  Maybe some would not continue to live with and remain married to a person who attempted to murder them with a butcher knife, but Wright isn’t just anybody.  He gave it another try “because I’m hoping things to get better.”  A year later, Nancy once again tried to murder him in his sleep, the second time with a pair of scissors.  This time, it was not divine intervention, but Nancy making a racket that woke Wright, allowing him to thwart his wife’s further attempts to end his life.  Perhaps two is his magic number on murder attempts before calling it quits, because this time Wright determined that enough was enough, and decided to start over again in the United States.

So Wright went the way of his siblings and came to America.  He joined one of his brothers, in California, where they both worked construction to pay the bills.  Wright says coming to the U.S. is a choice he has never regretted.  That it “was a good decision, I don’t have to go work through a lot of changes to survive here.”

In 1987 Wright started a seven year-tenure in San Antonio, where he operated a stand in a flea market.  Eventually another brother, Dolton, “needed me to come out here.”  Dolton told him that they could team up doing construction work in Atlanta, and they’d both be better for it.  “He wanted me to stay here because he wanted to help me so bad.  He wanted to help me by working with him and he helped me while I’m working with him.”

Working construction with his brother in Atlanta, he began having arthritis problems with his knee.  This was also when Wright ballooned up to those 320 pounds.

Then came 1995 and the relatively minor heart attack and stroke which sent Wright to Grady for a few days and racked up that $9,000 debt to the hospital.  Wright claims that doctors attributed the health problems to stress more than anything else, though he is unable to provide me with a convincing argument that it was “stress” more than his weight problems.  And as one of about 41 million Americans without any medical insurance, he didn’t have any help with his hospital stay.  I ask about this and Wright sure appears to be less troubled by his lack of medical coverage than his words would indicate, telling me very non-chalantly that “yeah, it’s a very big concern but I can’t afford it right now.”

He hasn’t made much, if any, progress in paying off those hospital bills, and sure doesn’t look to be in any position to do so anytime soon.

So how is Wright doing, financially?  Well, he is not finalizing construction plans on his dream home.  He claims that on average his income from his vending stand, his sole source of earnings, will run in a “typical month, about, I’d say $800.”  So Grady probably will not want to hold its breath on collecting that nine grand.

His health problems were not enough to push him out of the construction business.  No, but when his other knee went out, again with arthritis, he knew he had no choice but to hang up his hard hat.  Relying on the experience he picked up in San Antonio, Wright followed the advice of a friend and got his first vending stand outside Five Points Station.

But over 20 years ago, long before he found his way to Atlanta, Wright found love again when he met Mildred at an International House of Pancakes way back in California, 23 years ago this November.  According to Mildred, Wright saw her in the restaurant and told himself that if she left while he was still there that he would stop her and talk to her.  It was full and when Mildred tired of waiting she turned to leave.  But, Mildred says, Wright knew the Lord was telling him that she was the person he was to spend the rest of his life with.  Wright gave Mildred a ride to a Laundromat, where “we talked and talked and talked and talked.”

Wright remembers that fateful trip to the pancake house with even more spirituality than Mildred.  He says that he took one look at her and that God spoke to him, indeed telling him that this was the last woman he would ever want or need.

Mildred is also the mother of Wright’s third and final child.  In her book, No Shame in My Game, Katherine Newman notes that “a quarter of the nation’s children under the age of six now live in poverty.”  She also writes that “more than five million of these poor children live in families in which one or both parents worked all year.”  Meet Grace, Victor and Mildred’s daughter.  Now 15, Grace has since escaped that statistic by virtue of aging, but is still part of the veritable national plague that is working poverty in the United States. In their book, The Forgotten Americans, John E. Schwarz and Thomas J. Volgy discuss the working poor phenomenon in America.  “The actual number of American workers experiencing working poverty is more than double the official estimates. Including family members, nearly thirty million people - the equivalent of every man, woman, and child residing in this nation’s 25 largest cities – live in this condition.” 

A man approaches Wright at his stand, pointing down at a pastry on the sidewalk, a pastry he just purchased from Wright a few minutes ago.  Wright tells him he will give him another one, prompting me to ask Wright what the exchange concerns.   “He dropped a honey bun just now, and he wants me to replace it, which I’ll do.  He’ll probably still pick it up and eat most of it, but I don’t care.”

Money may often be on Wright’s mind, but he says that one expense he does not have to worry about is rent.  “Sometimes I stay at my brother’s…and if not then I go to Mildred’s house,” with Grace.  Mildred is in the process of buying the home that she, and often Victor, share with their daughter, which is a bit tricky since she does not have a job.  It is never made clear to me, just how Mildred does get by, exactly.  Just that she relies on state programs for help.  “She is getting help from the government.  She gets help and right now she needs lots of help, that I can’t do all that she wants me to do.  She doesn’t have a job and bills are catching up in there…and that’s why I got to do what I can to help her.” 

I meet Mildred when I find her in Wright’s chair, manning the stand (the “family business”?) one day.  Wright’s back is giving him trouble and he is taking a rare day off, since she can just run “Victor’s Bargain Center” herself.  In addition to the usual selection of food, drink, and retail items there are a number of small paintings today.  I inquire about them and she explains that she painted them, that with money pretty tight right now, she is trying to make some money off of her “talent.”

Wanting to ingratiate myself to her, I pretend that I do not find them almost comically devoid of artistic quality, and ask how much one of the small ones costs.  “I figure that one there, I should sell for about fifteen dollars.”  Three times what I’m willing to part with for a bad painting, I thank her and tell her I will have to give it further thought.

Something that clearly does concern Wright a lot is the fact that he is forced to commute by bus every day via MARTA.  “If I can get, I’d like to have me a vehicle where I can pick up my own stuff and get more.  I ride the bus to get here.”  A friend of his drops off all of his merchandise every day early each morning, and Wright sets up, often with the help of Larry who may or may not be drunk by set-up time, typically about 6 or 6:30 a.m..

“Yeah, if somebody will give me a chance to get me a vehicle, that would help me a lot.  A friend of mine, that he does [have a car], he has a vending stand here also. 

Right now I have my stuff in the other guy’s van, I gotta be here all the time because I don’t want to leave my stuff out in the street.  When he takes his stuff out of the van, I want to be able to see what’s going on.”

So with the only thing in Wright’s life at a higher premium than time being money, what does Wright manage to do for fun?  He says he hasn’t been to a movie in 20, 25 years, and that he has never in his life been to a professional sporting event.  Maybe the occasional nice meal out with Mildred?  Maybe, except who would be paying for that?  Mildred doesn’t have a job, and Wright’s is so insubstantial that he had to borrow $120 of his vending stand’s $175 per month rent for November from a friend.  He also had to borrow money just to buy his annual vending license, and he got his at a steeply discounted disability rate of $50.

Wright isn’t living on the street, so things could be worse, but things could also be a lot better, for Wright and others.  In Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, she cites an Economic Policy Institute study indicating a “living wage” for a single parent household with two children to be $14 an hour.  Which is $30,000 a year.  Which is also more than what 60% of Americans earn.

Wright certainly makes nowhere near $30,000 per year.  When I ask Wright just what he does, for fun, for entertainment, he at first says he never does anything for fun, that he’s just too short on time and money to have any fun.  Pressed, he’ll admit that his favorite source of entertainment is going to church.  But how does Wright get to church?  Does he take the bus as he does to work every day?  No, he just tunes in.  He admits to watching the Trinity Broadcast Network more than any other channel. 

He tells me that “I was born in a church.  My father is a minister, and I have learned to love the Lord.”  A love which apparently includes spending hours every week of his scant free time watching church on TV.

Wright has come to know the people, the flavor of his “neighborhood” outside the station.  “I know lots of people.  A lot of people that was on drugs, I help them get off the drugs.  I teach them, I give them the word of God.  A lot of times, I just witness, I’m a Christian person.”  Is this part of why he claims to try to help people?  “Always.  Everybody says I’m not supposed to do it but, see, when you bless people, God blesses you in return…I don’t have to tell people everything that God gives me, but, you know, it’s better to give than to receive.”

When asked if his monotonous, unyielding and predictable lifestyle, not having the time do anything even if he had the money, bothers him, he agrees.  “People come by here and talk to me.  That’s all I ever do.  And yeah, it bothers me.”

Like so many of the working poor in America, Wright and his family are very interdependent.  No, Wright and Mildred aren’t married and Wright isn’t sure they ever will be officially and legally joined, but he still refers to the mother of his child as his “wife,” and if she is short on cash for something but he can help out, he will.  And if he needs money for his stand or anything, and Mildred has her head above water, she will try to look out for him.  His relationship with his brother Dolton is very similar; they both help the other when and if they can. 

A lot of people, a lot of his friends, are those people he just sees around his “office”, people he spends time with outside Five Points Station.  Including Lanitta Sullivan, a friend that he met and made just from meeting her around Five Points.  She says of Wright, “he’s got a good heart, he’ll do anything he can to help you.”  Lanitta’s husband Levi concurs with her assessment.  “Far as I know him, he’s a Christian man, and it takes a person with a good heart to be a Christian.  Far as I know he started off by McDonalds just with that suitcase and had a few items he was selling.  Yeah, right by McDonalds here.  He started off smaller, worked his way up to a nice stand.”

Levi says he thinks Wright gets some of his regular business just by reputation.  “If you go buy something, you should spend your money where you’re getting common courtesy.  And he looks out for you, when you’re short, when you ain’t got nothing.  If we ain’t got no money, he’ll tell us ‘you want a pop or something?’”

That’s what Wright will tell you, too.  Speaking of people in general, Wright insists that “if they want something to eat I get them something to eat, if they want something to drink, I get them something to drink.  If they need something on credit, I give it to them on credit.”

Wright did take off of work for a couple days over the Thanksgiving holiday.  See, the day before Thanksgiving, he noticed he was having a curious problem.  “I couldn’t stop urinating, and the bottom of my penis and my belly hurt.” Not too many would second-guess his decision to have that one checked out.  He headed over to the Grady Emergency Room where he was quickly diagnosed with a urinary tract infection.  Wright spent the night in Grady, and didn’t make it back to work until the Friday after Thanksgiving. 

After this day’s questions have been answered, the tape recorder put away, my bus schedule tells me I’ve got some time to kill before I should leave.  There are two chairs, Wright’s and an unoccupied one.  I sit back in that one and almost immediately notice how, the only white person in sight or not, I instantly become a natural piece of the Bargain Center.  A kid walking by with his friends, maybe teenagers and maybe not quite, asks me how much the Doritos cost.

 “Hey Victor,” I shout through half a dozen people, “how much are the Doritos?” 

“50 cents!”

“50 cents, guys,” and the kids keep walking.

Not a minute later a man in his 30s asks me who’s in charge.

I direct a finger towards Wright.  “Big dude, sitting down.”

A little later, moments before I head for home, a man inquires of Wright how much two AA batteries cost.  This reminds me that I’m actually in need of a couple of those myself.  Wright tells him that eight batteries will run him five dollars, three dollars for four, and a dollar-fifty for the two.  The man just wants the two but doesn’t have any change, so Wright tells him a buck will suffice.  As I’m leaving I tell Wright that I, too, need two AA’s.  I take out my wallet, discover and tell Wright that I actually don’t have any singles or any change, so never mind, I don’t need the batteries, after all.  Wright scowls.  “Just what is wrong with you?” he says, and stuffs two batteries in my hand.  I put them in my jeans pocket, clasp a hand on his shoulder, give him a smile and continue to wonder how so much can be right with him.

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