IF the American economy is on the brink of meltdown, it’s hard to credit it from here. Unemployment in the area is at 3.6 percent, the house-price curve has very slightly dipped but not plunged, and a new business and residential district is climbing fast immediately north of downtown, where the masts and swinging jibs of tower cranes crowd the sky, excavators dig yawning pits in the ground, and men in hard hats swarm over a square mile of concrete, rebar and forsythia-yellow gypsum board. In still-booming Seattle, it’s left to the homeless to remind us of economic calamity.
Tourists interviewed for a recent article in The Post-Intelligencer sang the city’s praises but complained of the panhandlers and “transients.” Thinking it a bit rich for tourists to beef about other people’s transience, I took a homeless man out to lunch.
Fred Spruitenberg came here in 2001, drawn, like so many new Seattleites, by the prospect of employment. In Salinas, Calif., he read in a newspaper about the magnitude-6.8 earthquake that February and imagined a city knee-deep in fallen masonry and broken glass: “I know how to work a broom and shovel.” He bummed the Greyhound fare from a Catholic charity and took the 25-hour ride north to his new life. “Best move I ever made,” he said. “A person who goes hungry in Seattle has to be crazy. People here are so kind-hearted.”
He was just shy of 50 at the time, and in better shape than he is now. Short-sighted, short-winded, with the weathered face of a foretopman, Fred’s full of rueful humor at his own recklessness. He laughed when I asked him when he’d last owned a car: “1999,” he said. “Never again. The world doesn’t need me as a driver — I just never know how much I’m going to drink.”
Most nights he sleeps on a narrow pad at the St. Martin de Porres shelter for men over 50. The pads are “this far apart,” he says, his hands framing the size of a smallish trout. Most mornings he goes to his usual spot on Second and Madison, near the entrance to the Federal Building, and sells Real Change, the lively local weekly put out by homeless advocates and sold by homeless people, who buy the paper for 35 cents and charge $1. Twenty copies a day net Fred $13, plus bonuses from customers who give him a $5 bill and tell him to keep the change.
He loves books. Over lunch, he talked of O. Henry, Steinbeck and Khalil Gibran, and insisted that I read Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” a poem I’d often skipped over in anthologies. I’m now as hooked as he is on the poem, which on one level is about the peril of addiction to the intoxicating fruit hawked by the goblin men: “She sucked and sucked and sucked the more/ Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;/ She sucked until her lips were sore ...” On another, with its constant refrain of “Come buy, come buy,” it’s about the treacherous allure of shopping itself.
Like Fred, Seattle has been a longstanding client of the goblin merchants. The city is littered with expensive toys and baubles, like Paul Allen’s grand folly, the Experience Music Project, a globular, multicolored extravaganza designed by Frank Gehry and known as “the hemorrhoids” by employees of the public TV station that overlooks it, but which now appears to my eye as a cornucopia of goblin damsons, figs and pomegranates.
Likewise, the new $52 million, 1.3-mile streetcar line, a pet project of the mayor, which runs from downtown to the giant construction site of South Lake Union, and whose shiny red, orange and purple cars are cute, quaint and eerily underpatronized. This is the city that a couple of years ago came within an inch of spending $11 billion (including the cost of debt service) on a new monorail system, cool as an iPhone but of doubtful utility.
As the faint breeze from the east strengthens into the frigid wind of recession, Seattle will have to reckon with its weakness for the goblin stuff. A chastening reading of Fred’s favorite poem might be a good place to start.
