Christman

B

y Gabrielle Bilik

The man stumbles down the steep steps of the eighteen wheeler. He re- aligns his tripped up feet, and starts walking in the direction the trailer is tugging towards. Aiming towards the bent line of the horizon where the ground and the sky sear together into little waves, he walks leisurely but with purpose. No money. No car. No destination in particular. The 105 degree weather makes the air buzz in such a way that brings life to even the dead skin cells being scintillated off the top of his head. Little Rock, Arkansas. One arm balancing his belongings on his shoulder, the other swinging alongside as if to encourage the thick, gasoline infused air to fan through his body.

It was easier to breathe once the truck’s grumbling had faded away into the distant forwards. The growling engine was an echo of the angry driver’s murmurs inside. A rare occurrence but a pest, nonetheless. No means no.

“It was like I was invisible sometimes. The cops, the perverts-nobody bothered me,” says Frederick Christman. “That was only one of a few times.”

With a quick tug on his leash, Roscoe, Christman’s pug-husky mixed puppy, yanks us out of his past. Frederick Christman is a man of a certain age. His denim jacket is tattered, like the way some stores sell them today, except this one isn’t perfectly torn, it’s just weathered, like it used to be whole. He looks like someone straight out of a romanticized 70’s movie. His old Saturn is parked outside of the Coffee Camp in downtown Plattsburgh, his usual hang out. The hood has the face of an exotic woman drawn on it in black ink. She has short hair that curls up close to her scalp and she’s glancing furtively back, presumably over a shoulder, but no shoulder was drawn. Christman drew it himself. It’s his wife of twenty years.

“We’re going through a break up right now,” says Christman.

“She’s left eight times over the course of twenty two years. Back in December she gave me the option of taking the kids or leaving, so I took my nineteen year old son to New Mexico. We recently just got back,” says Christman.

Since moving back from New Mexico, Christman is living in Saranac. They’ve had a trailer sitting on 40 acres of land since 2000, with 50,000 acres of wilderness as their back yard. The first two years that they lived there they didn’t have running water or electricity, but they now have solar panels installed.

“We’re working on becoming friends,” Christman says, referring to his wife. As he speaks he begins to hand roll a cigarette out of Top rolling tobacco.

“He’s in kind of an interesting predicament. I guess everyone is where they are for some reason or another,” says long time friend and Coffee Camp employee Bevan Brady.

Christman has traveled a long road to get to his current station, the four lane bridge in Arkansas, just a small segment, slid out from underneath a scattered array of overturned images from his memory.

Originally born in Juno, Alaska, Christman began satisfying his wanderlust at a young age. Shortly after the death of his father, his mother moved them to Morrisonville, where she stayed for about 56 years.

“I started running away from home every summer starting when I was twelve up until I was about sixteen. My mother stopped chasing me after a while, so once no one was chasing me I didn’t run away anymore,” says Christman.

That first summer he ran away, he headed for Canada. “I hitchhiked up and down 401 eating out of garbage cans.”

For a short while after that he lived on a commune in the Florida Keys. At the age of seventeen he went to Puerto Rico to join his brother. His brother was living with a wealthy Jewish man in San Juan. Together they owned a big antique shop in Plaza Las Americas. The store had 21 offices littered throughout Europe and Southeast Asia.

“They would get these big crystal bowls and oriental rugs. We lived in this big condominium four blocks away from the beach, and it was full of antiques,” says Christman.

His brother was working as head manager of the antique shop so he helped him get a job beveling the designs out of the oriental rugs.

“This plaza was beautiful, models would come work there,” he says smiling, “We used to also go around the Caribbean,” to neighboring islands such as St. Thomas.

After that Christman alternated between living on a commune in Vermont and working on an oil field in Louisiana. It was during this time that he had the experience in Little Rock. He spent those years hitchhiking back and forth.

“During the fourteen years that I was going back and forth I never stole anything. I did a lot of panhandling. The bibles says ask and ye shall receive, well I asked a lot,” Christman says. “People were always very nice to me. I never had anything bad happen to me. I would ask everyone I met for 25 cents, and I would get anything from one dollar to fifty dollars. I would make at least 50 dollars a day. That was a nice part of my life. Travelling and talking to people.”

In 1972 he went to college in Glendale, California. He was married in Santa Monica and his first daughter was born that year. In the fall of 1973 he was sent to prison for two years. By the time he got out he and his first wife were divorced.

Over the next few years he met another woman and had two children in Arkansas. That relationship fell through and Christman moved to Jamaica where he met the beautiful Jamaican woman whose face adorns his car. They had four kids together. They struggled for two years to get her a visa. Just when he was about to give up he met a nineteen year old god send from Austin, Texas that had just come into an inheritance of Thirty million.

Just before his wife officially moved up in 1989, his brother passed away. Since then hardship has been lingering at his heels, but it has been more determined to knock him down in recent years. In 2008 his mother died and his wife left him with their four young children to care for. He took them to Maryland, but when they returned to Plattsburgh, he lost a trucking job and took up driving taxi.

Christman points out the similarities between hitchhiking and driving taxi. “Hitchhiking, you get picked up by ten strangers a day and when you drive taxi you’re picking up ten strangers a day and getting paid for it.”

He imparts this kind of wisdom many times throughout the conversation. He tells raunchy jokes and shares his experiences.

“He always has great stories. He reminds me of my dad in that way,” says Coffee Camp employee Sam Allen. “He’s just one of those people who you can tell has seen a lot more than you have, so I usually listen to what he has to say.”

At present Christman is keeping pretty busy. He lives with his nineteen year old son, and he has many hobbies that he enjoys dabbling in including oil painting and as a videographer.

“Well I’m depressed and who wouldn’t be depressed. I’m depressed about the break- up of my family and the death of my family. They tell me depression is an illness so the state sends me an SSJ check for my illness. My son gets one too because he was traumatized by a fire that killed his best friend.”

So now my nineteen year old and I are waiting for a friend to get out of prison. We’re going to Alaska. We’re going to ride the ferry up from Seattle and get off at six different stops along the Alaskan Coast,” Christman says, “I don’t know if we’re coming back."