My friend and co-worker Mark Levesque died May 15. Mark was one of the other 1 percent, the 1 percent whose antics and doings don’t fill our media. Well, maybe he wasn’t statistically one of the lower 1 percent, but close enough for me and surely close enough for him.
Mark was a co-worker, a colleague, and that’s probably the first time anyone has called this hardcore working-class man a colleague. He worked where I work, at a place called H.O.M.E. Co-op, a working community of, for and by the low-income and very-low-income in rural Maine, the northern tier of Appalachia, where the poverty is as stark and grinding as anything you’ll find in the more southern heart of Appalachia — and where the weather itself can take the life of the discarded who are left to live in their cars and unheated makeshift shacks in the middle of Maine’s sometimes vicious winter.
But even our community is not completely immune to the class apartheid that has taken the place of racial apartheid. A road runs right through the middle of our campus. On one side are the workers who run our sawmill, shingle mill and garage, and on the other are the administrators who organize their labor. The only thing missing is the tracks.
Mark worked on the side of the road where the hands are scarred and so big and burly they would have trouble hitting one keyboard letter at a time. The side of the road where the men never wear shorts or sandals. There Mark ran the Market Stand, where the hardcore working poor come for the food bank and daily soup kitchen. And they come to relieve the tedium of the unemployment and underemployment to which society has consigned them. The ever-present coffee is free if you have no money, and aside from the Bangor Public Library 20 miles away, it is the only place I know of where poor people can go and be warm and stay all day and be welcome. To many, this is as valuable as the free food that fills their stomachs.
This is where Mark spent his winter days and half his summer days, when he also ran the grounds crew. And these are the people with whom Mark shared his days and the last 20 to 25 years of his life. In all those years I knew Mark, he never owned a car, but he loved to drive his riding mower over the domain he worked hard to maintain.
Mark lived in a small one-room apartment over the pottery studio, where he loved to watch the Sox, his only companion amid the near-constant hum of the Fort Kent to Key West Route 1 that passed not 100 yards from his small front porch. There on the porch Mark had set up a small grill, and like when he rode the mower, he beamed with pride when he was working his little grill.
Mark was maybe a few years younger than my 57 years, and in 21st-century America, he had no health care and in any event, outside of H.O.M.E.’s outreach program, he had no way to get to a doctor or a clinic. From time to time he told me he wanted to take me up on my offer to help him sign up for Obamacare, but I get that a lot from poor people who want health care but have been slowly and steadily pounded into the ground and laid bare by a system that, instead of creating jobs with livable wages and benefits, pries into every crevice of one’s being and demands volumes of documents and paperwork in order to access the myriad programs the poor need to scratch out a subsistence living. It’s hard to find one’s birth certificate and Social Security card when one is constantly moving from here to there in a never-ending hunt for affordable housing.
Mark never did get around to walking across the road and up to my office for the 20-minute phone call that would have given him affordable health care. And I don’t blame him, though I could see his health was deteriorating.
I’ve learned a lot in my years of working at H.O.M.E. Co-op, and I learned as much from Mark as from anyone anyone else. Thank you, Mark. We miss you.
Lawrence Reichard is an assistant director of H.O.M.E. Co-op in Orland.