Clem's Story

I used to hang out in a bar about a mile from my house. My routine was to take a book in or write letters at the bar while having a pint. It never fails to draw a conversation about what I’m reading or writing. Some people would get offended: “Hey, do you take your beer into the library too?” was the best remark I received. But it never fails that someone will speak to you if you’re seemingly content to be doing your own thing, but I don’t generally mind. If there are writers who don’t know this already: bars are excellent places to pick up stories if you’re patient and can piece together the strands so they make sense to the sober. I was always happy to put down my book or pen and chat, and I got to know several of the regulars over time—some of them were there seemingly no matter what day or what time I decided to drop in. I kept them at a distance—no phone numbers, no rides home, etc--because most of them were hardcore/lifestyle alcoholics with whom it would have been difficult to maintain normal friendships, particularly those who had pickled their brains to the point I would hear the same story from them just about every time I saw them. No doubt the bartenders could recite many of these stories as well. Illness, injury, death, abuse, neglect, crime, and loss were common themes. Most of the stories I heard were mundane, but occasionally there was someone with a real tale to tell and the ability to do it.

Clem was one of those guys. He was a friendly man, usually drunk or on his way there by the time I saw him, but he was a generally happy drunk if you caught him early enough in the night. He was short, had salt-and-pepper hair and mustache and expressive, bloodshot eyes. One of the first things he asked me was whether I was a god-fearing man. When I said I wasn’t, he nodded and said he wouldn’t be anymore if he hadn’t seen an angel with his own eyes. And then he told me the bulk of the story that follows. 

Clem's childhood biography is brief and hard. He was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, the third of four children. His father left early on, and when he was only three years old, in a fit of deranged anger, his mother purposely poured a boiling kettle of water on him, leaving scars down his back that he pulled his shirt aside to show me.

After this incident, the children—three boys and one girl--were eventually taken away from his mother for good. The eldest three were placed in a foster home while the youngest boy, still an infant, went to a social services hospital. Clem was young enough when this happened that it wasn’t until he was eight years old, when the government finally turned the youngest boy over to the foster home as well, that he knew Clem had a younger sibling. The first foster home did not work out, so the four children were sent to live with an elderly couple who were kind to the kids. Although the couple never legally adopted the four children, Clem’s sister stayed with them into adulthood, caring for them until they died.

Clem went to school until he was 14, when he left and apprenticed as a carpenter. Over the years, he worked his way up, eventually owning his own business and making an excellent living, able to put away money. Over these years, he also developed into a drinker of colossal capacity. He once broke the record in the Glasgow pubcrawl, which runs 130 bars, by taking a drink at 78 of them. At the last bar, he walked in alone and said he did not want a drink, so the bartender promised to buy him one in the morning since he’d broken the record already. The challenge had taken from 9 in the morning until 11:30 at night, but he beat a man from Liverpool—a challenge of principle that kept him going. He stayed up all night, drinking water so he would not have a hangover, and went into the last bar the next morning, took his free drink, then put in a full day of work.

In his 30s, he spent a summer working in Spain after falling asleep on a train and ending up there, broke, without sufficient funds for return fare. He got a job at a bar in a hotel catering to a lot of Scotsmen, so he worked as a cultural draw. “If someone wanted a pint or a fag, I’d know what they meant, so the management liked that.”

Rather than have money taken out of his wages to rent a room, he slept on the beach and had the chambermaids let him into an empty room each morning to have a shower. After the season was over, he had enough money for his ticket home and then some.

About three years ago, while in Ireland, Clem met a beautiful redheaded American woman. They fell in love and returned to the States together. They moved to Olympia, Washington, where the girl and her family were from. But one night soon after, they got into an argument and she stabbed Clem in the hand with a kitchen knife. Angry and drunk, he shoved his hand into his jeans pocket to keep it from bleeding and decided, what else, to go get a pint. He went out into the cold, wet night and started walking. He was found by the police, unconscious and bleeding to death on the side of the road.

He woke up in the hospital. He asked what had happened and they told him. He decided he wanted to leave the hospital but couldn’t find his clothes. “The police have them as evidence,” the desk nurse told him. Without changing, without even removing the catheter from his arm, he sneaked out of the hospital and walked all the way back to his house, where he found it was cordoned off by police tape. He approached the house and the police told him it was a crime scene. Clem replied, “I know it is. I’m the crime.”

His girlfriend’s parents were there, and they owned the house. They refused to let him in, but a sympathetic police officer let him sit in her car. “Do you have anywhere to go?” she asked. He said he didn’t, and she took pity on him and drove him back to her apartment where she gave him some of her boyfriend’s clothes to wear, and then she drove him back to the house. “I think you should find somewhere you can go,” she told him, before letting him out of the car.

So, he headed north, toward Seattle. Along the way, as he was walking, he became despondent and decided to kill himself—he didn’t say how. But he survived and again woke up in the hospital. They admitted him to a halfway house after a few days. Once he got out, he continued to walk north. At one point along the way, he came to a bridge over some water and decided again to kill himself. He walked to the middle to throw himself off of it but looked down at the water far below and decided it would hurt too much. He hiked down toward the water figuring to drown by putting rocks in his pockets and walking in, but a fence blocked access to the water. He walked up and over to the other side. Same problem. He tried both sides of the other end of the bridge and found those blocked as well. Exhausted from all of the climbing, he found a bench, lay down, and went to sleep. When he woke, a woman in black was standing over him. He couldn’t see her clearly, but he heard her say, “Go back where you came from.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I don’t have any money.”

She repeated herself. “Go back where you came from.”

He closed his eyes for a moment and when he opened them she was gone. He looked all around and she was nowhere to be seen in any direction. “That was my angel,” he said. He said he realized that she meant to return to the halfway house, so he went there and stayed for a few days until they arranged for him to get a bus ticket the rest of the way to Seattle.

In the city, he lived on the streets for two years. During the first year, he said he tried three more times to kill himself. Once, he waded into Lake Washington until he was over his head and let out his air, but someone dragged him out and performed CPR and brought him back to life.

Life on the street was hard, he said, but he got the hang of it after a year of learning how to survive. He got to the point that he knew where to eat and could work out five meals a day if he wanted to. He also found a mission where he could wash his clothes once a week and take a shower and use toiletries and shave.

Then, on September 12, 2001, the day after the World Trade towers were attacked, Clem did something he rarely did—he went downtown during the night because he wanted to be around other people. There, a church preacher was speaking to a crowd gathered somewhere near Pioneer Square. Afterward, Clem spoke with the speaker and told him his story. The man took Clem to his church and introduced him to the deacon, who agreed to help him out.

Since that point, Clem has been in and out of trouble and work. With the help of the church, he cleaned himself up and found work, but when he has money, he admits that he’ll compulsively drink it away or spend it on gambling, drugs, or prostitutes. Finally, Clem asked for his paychecks to go directly to the deacon, who would put aside his money in an account and give him an allowance, pay his rent, pay his bills, etc. He got Clem a truck and a cell phone.

Clem works hard to keep balanced. He spends all day Sunday in church and associates with the church members most of the time—many of them are his clients. And periodically, he turns his back on the church and disappears “into the dark” for a time. The deacon has been known to go out looking all over the city for Clem when he does this. Sometimes the deacon will get a phone call from Clem at four in the morning days later. He’ll be out of money, drunk, with nowhere to go. The deacon comes and picks him up and they start all over again.

“Where are you now?” I asked him.

“Drinking. I haven’t placed a bet or seen a whore yet, but it’s a matter of time.”

“You say it like you have no choice,” I said.

He looked at me seriously. “That’s the point!”

“I presume rehab isn’t something you’re interested in right now? Do you want Mike (the bartender) to call the deacon for you? Or me?”

“No, I’m fine. I am where I am.”

Then he told me his older brother and younger brother are both working men in Aberdeen, both doing well and both have enough money to send him a plane ticket any time he wants to return. They’ve offered. There, he has 10,000 pounds waiting for him. He put it away in a trust account that can only be accessed from within the UK. "Insurance," he said. Insurance that he wouldn’t spend it in America and wind up broke.

I was shocked. “Then when all you have to do is make a call, why did you live on the street for so long? Why did you try to commit suicide when you could’ve changed your circumstances?”

He shook his head. “Pride. Because if I do that then they’ll know I’ve been beaten. . . .By her (the redhead), by America. I’ve got too much stubborn pride.”

 I haven't seen Clem in about 7 or 8 years, and I just came across this document in my files. I've thought about him and his story a number of times in the intervening years. I don't have any commentary to add to it, other than I wonder where he is. I've asked around and nobody who knew him has seen him in a long time. I've checked obituaries now and then for him, but I don't know his last name. He never offered it and I never asked.