Homeless Claude

by Kevin Adair

"The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls," or so goes the psalm by the perennial poets of the 60's, Simon & Garfunkel. Growing up with that musical phrase playing frequently in my mental jukebox, I have kept my eyes and mind open to graffiti, looking to see what it would say to me. There is an occasional interesting message, and frequent eulogies for people to "rest in peace" but most of what I have seen are people's names or tag names. And, although I have met a lot of people, and often pay attention to people on the street, it wasn't until I traveled to New Orleans recently that I believe I met one of Paul Simon's prophets.

His name was Claude, and I met him through friends of friends. Some friends of mine in Chicago gave me the names of some friends of theirs in New Orleans. I was down there attending a tradeshow for the National Cable Organization, but in the evenings, rather than attending the organized parties by VH1 , MTV, CBS and CNBC, I slipped away to meet up with my new friends, Doug and Sherren.

The evening after the second show day, I went to Doug's mask shop where he and I had agreed to meet. We then walked to the bar where his girlfriend, Sherren, was working. The bar, Club Brazil, was down at the far end of the French Quarter where few tourists ever go, entirely a different world from Bourbon Street. I had visited Bourbon Street on my first night in town, and it is alive practically any night with revelers from around the world. On Bourbon, it is legal and common to carry drinks from one establishment, down the street, and right into the next. The bars, restaurants, and clubs feature all varieties of food, drink, music and sex (from peep shows of all genders, to "Pull a rope and give the girl of your choice a shower!", to female impersonators, to all female group make-out and grope shows called 'orgies' even though the women keep their thongs on). All of this can be experienced without ever leaving the street because every sex show bar has graphic pictures on its outside wall and a wide open door.

I travel often, and I tend to feel more comfortable where the locals hang out rather than where tourists are most tightly congregated. I enjoyed watching the people on Bourbon Street, but after one night I was ready for less tourist traps and less tourists.

As we arrived at Club Brazil, Doug immediately introduced his three friends who were sitting outside the club at a sidewalk table and who were the only patrons that early in the evening. Around the table were a doctoral student in electrical engineering and theoretical physics named Hkale, Jason who was in Doug and Sherren's band, and Jennifer whose clothes and granny-style glasses on a chain gave her an artistic look. We were all in our mid to late twenties. No sooner had I arrived and met them, than another individual showed up wearing black pants and sweater that was torn. He in his mid-fifties and one of only four or five African-Americans that I saw during my week-long stay in New Orleans. Neither his clothes nor he himself had been washed in quite a while, but his eyes were very bright. Doug and I went in and met Sherren who served us a couple of locally brewed dark beers. When we returned to the outside table, Hkale, Jason, and Jennifer were all talking to this gentleman who was standing. He said that his name was Claude. From his disheveled appearance I thought he was hustling for money, but he wasn't; he was talking about God. So, I tried to quickly mentally categorize him as someone who used God to ask people for money. However, his speech was far beyond the "I'm a good Christian who is saved... and at the moment in the need of money." So, I stopped mentally categorizing and listened.

He was talking in very abstract concepts about what you had to do to actually physically reach God and Christ, and what it was all about . That was where Doug and I joined the conversation.

Claude said, "Christ is in the 4th dimension. Do you know what that is: the 4th dimension or the 5th dimension?!"

I turned to Doug and quietly joked that they were a pretty good group from the 60's. Doug smiled.

Claude went on, "Do you know what it is to be in the 5th dimension?"

We said no. "Of course you don't because you're human, because you're...... Human. And you're not God, but God knows and Christ knows. Do you know what it is to understand the 5th dimension or even the 4th!!? Computers can make models of more dimensions, but can you understand them?" As he said that, Claude started talking directly at Hkale who appeared to be understanding all of what Claude was saying. As Claude continued, Hkale looked more and more fascinated and dumbfounded, hanging on every word that Claude spoke. Imagine, a disheveled guy on the street making an astro-scientist dumbfounded. Hkale's interest spurred my interest as well.

Claude went on to explain what it meant to be in different dimensions. He said, "You can draw 2 dimensions on a piece of paper, and this is the way you do it. It is only a matter of magnitude. Let's say we are here at zero." He used both of his hands to point to his feet on the sidewalk as he faced us. Then he used himself to graph out his words. "Now let's say we step to the right. Now we are at one. Next let's go one further," which he did; "We are at two. What have we done? We've added one to one and moved further to our right and now we're at two. One plus one is two." We all understood to that point. He continued to pace it out for us on the sidewalk as he went on, "Now what if we add three to two? "We just move further to our right and we're at five. Two plus three is five; that's what addition... is." He accented certain words as he spoke. "What if we moved three in the other direction? Now we go past zero to a number which just happens to be a negative one. We're still on a line, but now we see that our line doesn't just go to the right it also goes to the left. And, it goes as far in either direction as we could ever go. That's addition and that's subtraction, but it's only on that line. What if we say two times three?" He looked at us for a response; we just stared on. "Well then we take ourselves from that line and we get out!" and he jumped toward us, sprightly hopping three times. Then, he retraced his steps. "When we go back to zero what we have created is a rectangle: zero to two and then out to three creates a rectangle two long and three wide. This rectangle is how big?"

"Six square units," quickly volunteered Hkale.

"Yes!" shouted Claude as his eyes lit up. "It is six because that is what multiplication is ! Multiplication is based on the area created when you multiply width times length; that's why two times three is six! Now what if we don't stop there? What if we say two times three times four !? We've made our two-times-three rectangle," as he walked his invisible rectangle one last time, "But to then say times four, we have to go somewhere else ! We have to go out of our plane into space!" Claude reached down at both sides of his feet, grabbed the ends of his imagined rectangle, one side in each hand. Then, staying crouched, he raised his hands about a foot each time as he counted to four until his arms were above his head, creating an invisible box. Finally, in a series of moves that would have made Marcel Marceau proud, Claude rubbed the top surface of his box and ran his hands up and down its sides before bursting his head through the box's lid, standing up within it, and opening both his hands to us. "So now we have a cube, not a cube exactly, but a cube-like object. You see it's two by three in area, but it's four in thickness. We've gone out of our plane here and are now in spatial geometry. The cubic area of that object we've created which is two by three by four will mathematically equal two times three times four. And, that's what multiplication is ; it's the measurement of the area created by multiplying the lengths of the sides of the three-dimensional object that we theoretically describe. But what if we take that one step further ? We make an object two by three by four by five ! But we can no longer describe that in our three dimensional world. We have now created the fourth dimension. And what is it to live in the fourth dimension? Jesus knows that because Jesus is a being beyond dimension."

At this point, Hkale whose head was nodding slightly throughout Claude's entire description said, "The way to look at the fourth dimension is, according to Einstein, if you take your cube and move it. Then all the space that is filled from the point that you start to the point that you end is what you would measure. Take your two by three by four figure and move it to a total of five locations, and all the space it filled is two times three times four times five. Thus, your cube is moving though four dimensions, and it occupies a measurable space."

"Yes!" shouted Claude, "But that doesn't explain the fifth dimension or sixth dimension or seventh dimension or Nth dimension, and that's where God is; God lives in the Nth dimension. God lives in the Nth dimension. But we can conceptualize it theoretically, and we can create on the computer the size and some properties of what things would be like if they were in the fifth or sixth or seventh dimension. A computer can give us a representation of it."

Then Claude said, "There was a man who never died. There was a man who never died, a body was never found." Jennifer asked, "Christ?"

Claude said, "No, Christ was our Savior." Jennifer nodded quickly and strongly. No one spoke to disagree. Claude continued, "But Christ died. He died and then rose again. But this was a man that never died." We all shrugged. Claude said, "He was Elijah. He was taken up to that next dimension directly, in a chariot of fire, so there was no body left behind to be found." Jennifer nodded again. "Elijah never died, but now we have to spend our time learning how to solve the problems in our lives. Then he looked at Hkale. "That's your job. Old Claude has done what he can to understand how to solve them. To make it so we don't pollute our world to death, and destroy it from within; or if we do, that we find another place to go. Or better yet, that we find a way to follow Elijah before it's too late. Old Claude has done what he can. Now it's your turn." Claude spoke right to Hkale. Hkale sat nodding in amazement and agreement with Claude's every word.

I, on the other hand, was too skeptical to allow all this to go on unquestioned. First, I quietly joked to Doug, "You staged this for me, didn't you? You never met me before, you bring me into your place, and you pay all these people for me to watch and interact with." Doug laughed, "Sure. We're scratching for rent and I paid all these people just for you to have fun."

Claude continued, "We need to learn how we can follow Elijah to go off beyond this dimension and be closer and closer to God."

I decided that this was the point for Claude's speech to become a dialogue. I prodded him, "Does that mean we'll become God or equal to God ourselves?"

Claude said, "No, because God will always be beyond whatever we can become. He'll always be that next level beyond."

I said, "Right, I agree. No matter how advanced the system we explore or create or find or discover, we can always conceptualize God beyond that; that's why we cannot become God. But we work as hard as we can to become as close as we can to God."

Claude slowly nodded at me, and his eyes brightened as he pointed at me and said, "Riiiight!"

I needed to know more about Claude. How someone so intelligent could be homeless was very confusing. "Claude," I asked, "Who are you? When did you come here?"

He said without emotion, "I was the highest paid scientist for UNICAL, one of the oil companies. They just paid me... to think. I got a doctorate from UCLA. They just paid me to think, and that's what I did. I thought up compounds and chemical bonds, created formulas and designed new products. Before that, I was a professor. I taught people." (That made sense, I thought.) Claude continued, "I've got a daughter, she's a teacher. She went here to Loyola, [There's a Loyola College in Louisiana as well as one in Chicago] she thinks I'm a bum." Claude changed the subject and went on, "We have to work and fight, to learn how we can solve our problems, before we destroy ourselves. We create computers that attempt to think but they can't think as well as we can think. So we are not as good a creator as God is. There's another force that works as we're learning and building up, and it works to break us down." Claude paused and looked at us. When none of us responded Claude said, "Entropy!" and I realized he had been waiting for us to guess. "Entropy," said Claude, "is the force that brings order toward disorder."

Hkale was nodding and I was smiling, but the rest of the listeners looked confused. I jumped in with my favorite example, which is my bedroom. I told them that I work constantly to keep my bedroom neat, but, it's not neat; it's a mess. "I never work to make it a mess," I said, "But all my cleaning efforts are in constant battle with forces beyond my control. And that's entropy, the constant tendency for order to go toward disorder. It affects the entire universe just like it affects my room." Claude gave a single nod and smile to me and said, "That's right. That is right. We have to conquer entropy, fight it before it beats us and there's nothing left to save." Then again Claude turned to Hkale and said, "That's what you have to do. You have to find a way to continue my work. You are the one who must find a way to solve our problem. Find a way to stop our society and our world from falling into entropy." Hkale's eyes were huge as if he was in a trance and his head nodded slightly and constantly as Claude spoke to him. Claude continued straight into the young man's face as if none of us were there any longer. "It would have to be.... You." Hkale's face turned from one of enthusiastic listening to a new look of strident dedication. It was as if he had found his new life vision; he understood that it was immense in magnitude, none-the-less, he was ready to step up to the challenge. Hkale was charged: scientifically, spiritually and theoretically, he was in complete harmony with Claude. I was amazed.

Throughout Claude's speech I continued a quiet dialogue with Doug. Claude never appeared to notice, mostly I guessed because he was so focused on Hkale. I asked Doug, "I wonder why someone with so much intelligence is homeless." Doug said that he had no idea. I said, "I bet he just couldn't deal with the daily rat-race. He couldn't deal at all. Even if the corporate world was hanging on his every word and giving him tons of cash just to think, he still had to deal with some level of daily grind, and still had to live too much of his life in one office or another." Doug agreed.

Jason periodically ducked inside the bar to buy Claude, Hkale, and Jennifer drinks. Doug and I just nursed the drinks we had so as not to miss anything. Staying within earshot, I had pulled chairs outside for Doug, myself and Claude. The five of us sat and listened, and Claude sipped his liquor but never sat down throughout his entire sermon.

"Now...You...must..." Claude spoke directly into Hkale, "Rise to the challenge! Finish the job. Figure out...Discover how Elijah did it. So we can follow. Elijah discovered it thousands of years ago. We should know by now. We must know soon. Then we can follow and go to the fourth, fifth and sixth dimensions closer and closer to God, so none of us would die. You must do this, and you can not wait too long. You must solve this problem before old Claude dies. Finish my work, so we can all go...go and follow Elijah to the further dimensions, before any one of us...dies."

Claude stopped speaking and just looked at Hkale who stared back. We all sat in silence for a long moment, then Hkale spoke, "Wo-ow!" Hkale's voice cracked slightly. "I've got a lot of work to do." His eyes grew huge behind his black framed glasses; then he added, "But I've got some idea of how to get started."

Claude smiled. He knew that he had set Hkale on a new journey. Claude's quest might now indeed also be Hkale's. Claude stood holding his glass close to his face. He sipped slowly, very satisfied. Hkale was converted and none of us was unmoved. I marveled silently that here was an individual who had found a functional synthesis between science and religion. Philosophers and theologians have been searching for that for centuries. They should have just came down here and asked this homeless guy in New Orleans.

The amazement was obvious on all of the listeners' faces. I wondered if I had just sat in on the founding of a new form of cult. Claude's words had effected me as well. Not that I was looking to throw the rest of my life away and become Hkale's new research lab assistant, but who could help but root for them in the 'figure out a way to conquer death' department?

Claude had paused, allowing his words to germinate in our heads. I took advantage of the silence and asked, "Claude, you've got to tell us why is it that with so much intelligence and so much ability you live in the park?"

Claude slowly turned his gaze to mine and looked deep into me. He answered my curiosities with one word, "Entropy." I nodded and smiled to him and he went on, "The sky keeps me warm....The sky is my blanket. I have all I need." He said, "My daughter went to Loyola. She thinks I 'm a bum. But the real reason is...entropy."

"See," I quietly said as Doug and I shared nods, "He has to live where he's free."

Claude's sermon was not over. He began again, "God wants us to learn. He gave us the power to understand, and he is slowly teaching all of the Universe's expanding mysteries to man..."

"To people." I suggested.

"No," he reasserted, "To Man."

"But..."

Claude cut me off and looked at Hkale cautioning, "There's a ton of distractions, and we've gotten caught up in the wrong things"

"Like..." I prodded.

Claude looked at me; "Like women. We've taken women out of their place and now they are working."

"What!?" I demanded.

He went on, "They should be taking care of their children. That's what God designed women to do is take care of the children."

It was clear that of all the listeners I had the most problem with Claude's latest declaration, and considering Jennifer's presence, that confused me. But more than that, I had to be sure he meant what he had just said. Here he had just been going on and on about all these huge idealistic, globally beneficial concepts on how to find a way to save humanity, and now this comes out of his mouth. Finally he had said something tangible that I specifically disagreed with. So I said, "Do you mean that women are less intelligent than men?"

"Well," he said, "it's a different kind of intelligence."

I grilled him. "Do you mean that women are lower than men?"

He answered, "There is an order, it goes God, then man, then woman."

I said, "I know a lot of women who are at least as intelligent, even more intelligent than many men."

He responded, "But that's not the way it should be. We've taken women out of their environment and we've forced them to compete with man and it's unnatural."

Jennifer had been quiet through all that, so I stepped up and said, "How can you say that about women?" I was trying to call out Jennifer on my side of the argument when he said, "Women provide many things that men don't. They provide children. They provide nurturing, and what else..." We waited for him to go on. "And what else?" Claude demanded. We were silent, so Claude answered, "Women provide....Discipline. Men without women tend to be not as focused. Women provide discipline, and that is their purpose." He felt he had covered that subject and was ready to move on.

I didn't let it lie. "What you're talking about is tendencies," I countered. "And the difficulty is that if you get caught up in tendencies then you'll lose an intelligent partner in your life or in your work who happened to be female. Because a lot of men have more discipline than a lot of women, and a lot of women are more intelligent than a lot of men."

For the first time, Claude appeared slightly flustered. "Women have great....importance." This scene, he was playing straight to Jennifer. "Without the discipline that they give men, no one would get anywhere. Women are....crucially important, maybe even, more important." With that, he actually got Jennifer nodding in agreement with him. That done, he went back to his task at hand. "We must each center on our correct roles so we can focus all of our energies on breaking through this dimension. We must take that next step before we manage to destroy ourselves.....or before entropy does."

But I didn't let up. "You're leaving out a lot of people, by saying God, then man and then woman. What about homosexuals, what about people who are gender neutral or transvestites or transsexuals? What about all these differences that don't fit into your categories?"

"Homos! Homos! Homos!?" He shouted with obvious scorn. "Why do you think they call them...Homos !?" He was trying to draw the others to his side to collectively put down 'Homos,' implying that by limiting yourself to being one (homo), that you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing. But this time I got to them first. I said, "Homos! We're all homos, homo-sapians. Homo just means one; plus, we're all individuals so again, we're all homos!" Claude said once again, pleading to the crowd, "HOMOS!!!!" But they responded on my side. "Homos! Homos! We're all homos," said Jason and Doug together. "Homo is one, one is homo!" I repeated. Finally, Claude just fell silent and shook his head.

I guess that broke the spell because everyone started to move around restlessly. It suddenly occurred to me that my bladder could not wait any longer, as it had been several hours. The same thought must have hit the other listeners as well for Jennifer, Doug, Jason, and I each quickly ducked inside to the restrooms. On my way back to the outdoor table I stopped to talk with Doug who was standing at the bar with Sherren. She was very curious what we had been up to all this time, but she also had to tend to her now busy bar. Her customers kept her ducking away, but she was clearly frustrated that she couldn't get more of a picture of what had been going on from Doug's brief soundbites. Jason came up to the bar with several empty glasses and waited with Doug for Sherren to return from her other tasks. I went back outside.

Claude was talking quietly with Hkale; their faces were almost touching. Jennifer was looking on. When I sat back down, they quickly finished, and Hkale took his turn inside the bar.

I asked Jennifer, "How can you accept that he sees you as being in third place just because of your gender?"

"No," she said, "He just said that women have different roles," and she turned to Claude for support. Claude attempted to explain again that everybody is important, and without everybody that we are not a complete triangle. "We need all sides to be complete."

I said, "I agree it's a triangle and that men and women are different, but you make women below men in your triangle, where I put men and women as even with each other, and both well below God." Now Jennifer nodded in agreement with me, and we looked to Claude for a response. Claude was silent.

Jennifer shivered, looked off in the direction of Sherren's bar, and then got up and walked that way. Since Claude is African-American I thought about saying, "Considering so many people use racial tendencies to wrongly limit people, how can you use gender to do the same thing?" But I didn't say that. Instead, I said, "You are very far-sighted; you've got amazing views. I have learned from you tonight, and I think we all have. But you're still limited in many ways: you're still limited by your bigotry."

Claude said, "Maybe that's true....Maybe that's true."

I said, "For example, you went on and on about homos. How do you know that I am not gay?" As I said that, I realized it was a better example than the African-American question. "How do you know that I am not gay?" I repeated.

Claude said, "I don't."

I continued, "And how can you dismiss me out of hand, or dismiss intellectual women? Or any individual just because of the way their entire group scores on some test overall? How can you diminish or discriminate based on that?"

"Well, I can't." Claude paused; after some silence he said, "Maybe there are some things that Claude still has to learn."

I was hoping that we would all regather and that the talk would continue. But it was clear that it wasn't going to happen. Jennifer and Jason and Hkale were mingling just inside the bar, they hadn't rejoined our discussion. They had their own conversation circle near Doug who was still sharing brief conversations with Sherren. Claude said, "Excuse me, I live like an animal." At which point he walked out into the street beyond a parked car.... and he peed on a tire.

As he finished, the rest of the people came out. Doug came over to me. The other four were all preparing to leave. Then, Jennifer, Jason, Hkale, and Claude spoke and/or waved their good-byes, and walked away in the same direction, three of them toward their homes and Claude toward the park.

I watched them leave and said quietly in their general direction, "If I were homeless and a genius, I'd live in New Orleans."