Marvin Howard has bought some things recently: A seven-in-one Sunbeam kitchen center, a food dehydrator, a set of his and hers watches, an electric typewriter. These aren't all the things, but they'll give you the basic idea.
You would think maybe he was trying to get the economy moving again all by himself. You would think maybe he had a kitchen and a girlfriend and something to type. But Howard doesn't have much of anything, except bills.He's what they used to call a drifter. For the past two winters he has lived in a basement apartment in Sugar House. Now it's time to move on again.
Last Sunday he gathered up a few of his more portable belongings - his tent, some cans of food, his dog Snowy - and began walking to Texas.
Dallas is where he's headed. Dallas is the headquarters of Sweepstakes Clearinghouse, the mail order company that has enticed him to spend much of his $400 a month disability check on things he probably doesn't need.
He thinks the company has been overcharging him for some of the items. So he's walking to Dallas to try to set the record straight, and to pick up the lambswool bomber jacket he bought from them. The jacket and a 117-piece tool set are the only items he's finished paying for. He still owes $967, plus shipping and handling, on the other things.
He figures if he camps out for the next few months he can save enough money on rent to pay off his bills. Then maybe he'll come back to Utah and get his '84 Buick Skylark out of storage. The car doesn't actually run, but this may be where the 117-piece tool set ($139) will come in handy. Right now, though, the tools are stored in the broken car.
As he talks, rattling off the prices of his mail-order purchases, his wool cap slips slightly over one eye. That, and his white beard and the red- and white-striped shirt, make him look for a moment like a pirate setting off on a daring sea voyage.
He can remember the prices of everything. It may, in fact, be the reality that he does best. The reality of other things - the particulars of how he got two broken legs, for example - bobs in and out of sight, sinking under the surface again just when you think you've almost got it in focus.
The broken legs happened one evening in 1988. He was crossing the street at West Temple and 800 South. But wait. He interrupts the story to explain what happened earlier that day. He was standing outside the Little America hotel and some voices said: "You'd better watch out because Sen. Hayakawa is in town."
Just a few hours after that, Howard was run over by a car on West Temple. The reporter waits to understand the connection, then finally asks what Sen. Hayakawa has to do with the accident.
"You tell me," Howard answers. "I think it had something to do with some senators and the pretenses of the police department. Unless it had something to do with my previous enlistment."
When he was 19, in 1959, he enlisted in the Army in California but was given a medical deferment. Over the years he has worked at various jobs. Washing dishes. Repossessing cars. Sweeping floors. "For a person of my standards, that's about the best I can do," he explains. For the past 18 years he has been on Social Security disability.
The past two winters that he has lived in the basement apartment in Sugar House are the longest he's stayed in one spot since he was a teenager. For most of his life he has lived in single-room-occupancy hotels and under the occasional viaduct. Once he lived in a pup tent in the snow in Northern California.
Once he rode a bicycle from Pennsylvania to New Mexico during the dead of winter, a trip motivated by a letter from a storage company informing him he had to move his belongings to a different locker. Sometimes, even if you don't have friends or a job waiting for you somewhere, you can have obligations anyway.
A neighbor offered to lend him a bike for his current trip to Dallas. But he has Snowy to think about now. Snowy isn't the dog he wanted. He wanted a big dog. But Snowy, a little white spitz, is the dog he ended up with in a trade.
He and Snowy left Sugar House for Texas last Sunday. A neighbor baked him brownies and his landlord ended up offering him a ride to Provo. It was quite a big send-off, really, for a man who usually just slips in and out of places.
He doesn't have many friends. "I'm too busy paying bills, as you can see," he explains.
The last anybody saw Snowy and Howard they were heading out of Provo, Snowy on his little spitz legs, Howard on the broken ones that don't seem to have healed quite right. They were planning to walk up Highway 6 toward Price, then eventually on to Albuquerque, and then Texas.
Unless he's been really lucky getting rides along the way, he's probably on the road right now. On Sunday he'll turn 53, somewhere.