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A hearty laugh and a life of hard knocks
(by Tim Woodcock - April 16, 2008)
Frederick Moore has a loud laugh — the kind that fills rooms. He can crack himself up during the course of one of his own stories, and frequently does.
During his varied life, the 55-year-old Moore has accumulated plenty of good stories to tell.
He has particular affection for the couple of years he spent driving a cab in the mid to late ’90s. This was in Chicago, where he spent much of his adult life. The years that Moore spent as a cabbie, from 1995 to 1997, were the years of the OJ Simpson murder trial. Moore, who is black, thought from the start that OJ was guilty. Nevertheless, he would adopt a pro-OJ position, which is what he says white customers wanted to hear. It was a way to “have fun with them,” and it made for endlessly entertaining cab-ride conversations.
During those years as a cab driver, he whizzed all around Chicago and got to know it inside out. A short while later, he moved back to his hometown of St. Louis — or, to be accurate, he was moved back. More on that key distinction later.
Moore currently lives in Walnut Park, a northside neighborhood that he characterizes as being full of charming small houses and tidy lawns. By day it is a delight, he says, but after dark it can become a very different kind of neighborhood with crime rates among the worst in the city.
Since moving back to St. Louis, he has had a number of short-lived, rinky-dink jobs and his performance at those jobs has been erratic. In some cases, he admits, “I would have sacked me, too.”
Although for many years he held a salaried position working for the federal government, Moore is reconciled to the fact that working as a cleaner, parking attendant or shelf stacker is as good as it’s going to get at this stage in his life.
You see, in 1997 everything changed.
Moore was assaulted — cut across the neck with a knife — and while in the hospital was put into a medically induced coma. When he came around, he was informed that his status as HIV-positive, which he’d known about since 1986, had developed into AIDS. And his sister, who was bedside with him, said, “You know you’ve moved?” meaning she was in the process of moving him to St. Louis in order to better care for him.
Moore says when he found out in the ’80s that he was HIV-positive, he “gave up on life.” He took to drink and drugs. “I really didn’t care.”
“I maxed out every credit card … and then I lived. I haven’t recovered from that yet,” he says, with one of his hearty, room-filling laughs.
But this time, learning that his HIV had become AIDS, depression was not the issue. Suddenly he was back in St. Louis with his sister, whom he describes as his best friend, and the rest of his relatively small family.
Too ill to work for about a year, Moore’s standard of living plummeted. He has had various jobs since, but the barrage of regular medical appointments that goes with having AIDS is not especially compatible with jobs that pay hourly.
He recalls his first visit to a welfare office to apply for financial aid and crying as he thought, “I don’t believe I’ve got to this level.” But that now is his reality. “This is a new world,” he told me more than once, referring to different aspects of his situation.
Welfare payments are the only way to make ends meet when you have $1,400-a-month bills for medicine and are in the market for minimal-wage jobs (if and when you are healthy enough to work), he says. Moore says he’s been caught earning too much in the past and has lost coverage of his medical expenses as a consequence. He will not make that mistake again.
Learning to live with AIDS and moving back to St. Louis went hand in hand and represented a severe narrowing of his world.
St. Louis doesn’t know how to mix it up in the way that Chicago does, he says, and as a consequence his circle of friends here is “totally black and gay.”
He lives in a building run by Doorways, a local charity that houses individuals with HIV/AIDS, and living in the northwestern section of the city means it takes two buses to get anywhere. The prospect of going out somewhere and relying on public transit to do so can be just too exhausting to contemplate, he says. Moore found he was buying monthly bus passes and was not using them enough to justify the expense. He now buys daily passes when he needs them.
“My life is so closed,” he says. “And I don’t like it being so closed.”
I ask him, if you get a job, what will you do first to improve your life? It is not the right question. When, he corrects me. When.
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