Cliff Gallant in Bayside. photo/John Duncan
Cliff Gallant’s homemade crusade to help Portland’s poorest
“Because you are a great nobleman, you think you are a great genius. Nobility, fortune, rank, position! How proud they make a man feel! What have you done to deserve such advantages? Put yourself to the trouble of being born — nothing more! For the rest — a very ordinary man. Whereas I, lost among the obscure crowd, have had to deploy more knowledge, more calculation and skill merely to survive than has sufficed to rule all the provinces of Spain for a century.”
— Figaro, addressing Count Almaviva in Act V of The Marriage of Figaro, by Pierre Beaumarchais, 1778
“Though wages for the lowest paid jobs have risen across the country at the fastest rate in four decades, the number of households struggling to get by in Maine grew nearly 7,000 from 2021 to 2022. As a result, a total of 249,725 households (or 42%) were living paycheck to paycheck … with little or no savings and one emergency from poverty.”
— United Ways of Maine, May 23, 2024
Figaro failed.
Not on stage, of course. In Pierre Beaumarchais’ scandalous 1778 play, The Marriage of Figaro,and the smash-hit opera Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte made of it eight years later, the sharp-tongued servant outwits the lazy and lascivious Count Almaviva, who invoked an aristocrat’s jus primae noctis (“right of the first night”) in a bid to bed Figaro’s bride-to-be, Suzanne, before their honeymoon. Almaviva’s demand was akin to a famous quote by our nation’s leader: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.” But Figaro, aided by his fellow servants, humiliates the count and saves Suzanne from state-sanctioned rape.
And neither on the streets of France did Figaro fail. Despite King Louis XVI’s efforts to ban the play, the show eventually went on and so riled the masses’ resentment of the rich that Napoleon, among other historic figures, later considered it the de facto beginning of the French Revolution that erupted in earnest a decade later, resulting in Louis’ decapitation and the monarchy’s end.
Figaro and the revolution he sparked failed in the broader mission to establish liberty, equality or fraternity as guiding values in France and the United States, whose revolt against the English crown Beaumarchais also actively supported by, among other things, helping smuggle weapons and money to rebel colonists before his country formally joined the fight. Aristocrats now rule the U.S. with the people’s blessing, and the state, from Washington, D.C., down to puny cities like Portland, openly functions to further enrich the wealthy and keep the rest of us in near or total destitution, unable to live free lives or realize our collective power to overthrow those petty tyrants.
Still, for a fictional character, Figaro accomplished a lot. Now it’s up to flesh-and-blood folks in our failed society, like my old friend and colleague Cliff Gallant, to help others stay fed, sheltered, appreciated and alive.
Four years ago, Cliff began researching, compiling and printing an extensive guide to free resources for low- and no-income people, then walking the streets of Portland handing copies to strangers who need a hand. Inspired by Beaumarchais’ character, he named it Figaro’s.
Bollard readers may remember Cliff as the author of “Jake Sawyer’s Story,” tales from the life of the legendary local outlaw biker and bodybuilder that ran in these pages from May 2016 to May 2017*. Raised in North Yarmouth, Cliff’s country-boy fascination with Portland led him to enroll at Cheverus High School in the late ’50s, and after three years overseas with the Army in the late ’60s, he came home and sold ads in the Portland Press Herald for over a decade.
“I made a decision long ago that I would find out everything about Portland that I could,” Cliff told me when we met last month at the Coffee By Design in Bayside. Now almost 80, he knows the city like the backs of his still remarkably strong hands.
The Press Herald was a valued and respected newspaper in the 1970s and ’80s, which granted even a greenhorn salesman like Cliff a regular audience with powerbrokers like the owners of big downtown department stores. But Cliff was also comfortable in the company of those mired in the muck of Maine’s most hopeless places. As a teen in North Yarmouth, he often hung out with kids institutionalized at the state’s notorious Pineland mental hospital in nearby New Gloucester — a medieval facility whose horrors he still cannot unsee, and whose former residents he now sees shuffling along the sidewalks of Portland.
Another formative experience was the decade Cliff spent after the Herald working as a long-term substitute teacher in the “special” and “alternative” education programs at Portland and Deering high schools. There, as at Pineland and the dreadful Long Creek children’s prison in South Portland, the state’s response to youth exhibiting troubling behavior was to lock them away and criminally neglect them.
“The most intense experience I had was teaching an Alternative Ed class at Deering for a semester when the regular teacher was out with a serious illness,” Cliff recalled. “I was homeroom teacher to about a dozen students who had been deemed to be too disruptive to be in a regular classroom. We were all contained in a windowless, fifteen-foot-square masonry block room for four hours a day.
“What was to my advantage was that I had never had an education course in my life, so I wasn’t hampered by traditional ways of doing things,” he continued. “It all worked out, though. I still run into some of those students today. I’d like to say that they’re an assortment of doctors and dentists and engineers, but mostly they’re grisly, hard-ridden gents and heavily rouged, wide-hipped ladies running in and out of bars who yell out, ‘Hello, Mr. Gallant!’ when they see me.”
Before The Bollard brought him aboard as a columnist in early 2015 (see “Portland, Straight Up,” on our website), Cliff wrote 147 consecutive weekly columns for the bygone Portland Daily Sun about the city’s history and its major and minor characters. He’s also been a tour guide for many years. So perhaps only someone like Cliff, with his encyclopedic knowledge of the city, would endeavor to create an encyclopedia of local charitable programs. And surely only someone like Cliff, who can relate to our poorest neighbors in part because he’s one of ’em, could accomplish this feat basically on his own.
“I was walking on Congress Street one day and a homeless person spare-changed me,” Cliff said, recalling the incident shortly before the pandemic that inspired Figaro’s. “Normally I wouldn’t question anyone who’d come up asking me for money. But he looked lucid, and he looked as though he was hesitant, like I might be the first passerby he’d ever asked for money, or maybe just one of the first.
“And so I said to him, ‘What are you doing? Where is this going to lead? You’re walking up to a stranger on the sidewalk and asking them for money. … Why should I?’ I was coming home from work, from a job that I didn’t particularly want to go to that day, and [he’s] asking me for money.
“And he said, ‘You know what? I just don’t know where to start. … Admittedly, I have a substance abuse problem. I’m probably an alcoholic. I also smoke a lot of marijuana, so maybe I could start there. But on the other hand, I don’t have all the education I need, so I’m not able to get a job that I might enjoy. I just don’t know what to do.’
“I gave him two dollars and then I walked away thinking, What he needs is a resource guide that he can go through and say, These are the resources that are available to me,” Cliff concluded. “So, therefore, the Figaro’s resource guide was founded.”
Figaro’s is literally and obviously homemade, printed in a spare room of Cliff’s Munjoy Hill apartment with a Canon he only sorta knows how to use. The front and back covers are a thick cardstock to repel the elements, and the sheets of typing paper between are bound with those hard plastic spines that are a bitch to pry open, but Cliff’s devised a technique using a pen that works OK.
The first page inside lists emergency and various other crises hotline numbers, but Cliff purposely follows this with more enticing information, like how to score a free bike, a free cell phone, and free computer time, to persuade people to read on. His lists of food pantries and soup kitchens explain exactly where and when those services are available, which bus lines will bring you there, and the phone numbers (not just the websites) of providers. Sections for addiction treatment, job training and work opportunities follow, among numerous other topics.
The layout’s a little clumsy, and the graphics are simple black-and-white symbols denoting concepts like justice, dentistry and domestic violence. There’s some poetry at the end, as well as artwork, in color, by locals who participate in programs for artists with disabilities. I made it all the way through this sad and beautiful little book dry-eyed until I reached the final page: blank ruled lines beneath the heading “IMPORTANT PERSONAL CONTACT INFORMATION.” The mere idea of someone scrawling their important personal contacts there crushes me flat.
Cliff’s handed out over 830 copies of Figaro’s so far, including guides left at the library and soup kitchens, where resource-desk staff and nuns distribute them. “I spent the pandemic walking up and down Congress Street, giving Figaro’s to people who were sleeping in doorways,” he said. “I would walk down to Commercial Street, to where the bridge is, where that huge encampment was, and hand out Figaro’s there. And down in Bayside as well, wherever people were camping out.
“People are happy to get it when they get it,” he said, but then added, “you have to be a little judicious in how you approach them. You know, people sometimes are taken back by someone handing them something for nothing. So I don’t make a big deal of it. I just go up and say, ‘Can I give you this resource guide?’ And then you see them reading it. And then later they come up to me on the street and say, ‘Wow, I found something!’ I had so many people tell me they have found various resources that they didn’t know existed.”
In last month’s cover story, “The Tippers,” I’d noted that wartime psychological operations often try to convince the embattled population of “enemy” countries that large numbers of unseen allies are ready to come to their aid. So the next thing Cliff said really struck me.
“I think the salient message — and this is what I would stress — is that each one of these resources emanates from a person or group of people who genuinely care. These are people out there who are dedicated to helping people. … If they didn’t care, they wouldn’t be in that line of work.”
People like Danielle Smaha, a communications director at Preble Street, one of Maine’s largest social-service organizations. “It’s so important to have people like Cliff in our community,” she wrote in an e-mail to The Bollard. “People who care about people who are unhoused and vulnerable, people who choose compassion and understanding over stigma and judgment, and people who dedicate their time and resources to others.”
“I’ve gotten so many calls from people from these various agencies that are praising the publication, saying, ‘I didn’t know myself that there were so many resources available. It’s good to have it,’” Cliff said. “Probably the most common comment I [hear] is, ‘Why doesn’t the city put out something like this?’”
I answered that question earlier: our city government exists to serve wealthy and propertied citizens, and is downright hostile to the poor and homeless. To be fair, I searched the city’s website for a list of similar services, and the one I finally found would fit on one page of Figaro’s, including several listings that basically just say, Call the cops.
Cliff has had some help producing Figaro’s. Reggie Osborn, the well known Portland dance instructor, put the guide online (at figarosportland.org), where it can be translated into over 100 languages. (Cliff has also printed copies in French, Swahili and other languages to distribute to new Mainers.)
But Figaro’s is not an organization, nonprofit or otherwise, and Cliff doesn’t ask for monetary donations, only paper and toner for his temperamental printer. His wife Leslie and her sister Cindy have contributed some supplies, as has historian and former state lawmaker Herb Adams; Leo Pelletier, proprietor of Mainely Frames & Gallery on Congress Street; photographer and WMPG jazz DJ Dave Wade; retired local attorney Bill Roche; and former marketing agency owner David Swardlick, who’s since developed some real estate downtown.
“I have been incredibly impressed with the quiet and selfless dedication of Cliff Gallant to helping Portland’s homeless or otherwise disadvantaged community members,” David wrote in an e-mail. “Figaro’s Resource Guide started out as, what seemed to me, the most unlikely vehicle to get into the hands of those most in need. A big, thick, old-school, spiral bound, photocopied book full of names, and places, and phone numbers. But Cliff’s dogged determination to walk the streets and encampments, and say hello to people that many of us are afraid to connect with, and ask them their opinion about whether they might use this, and then giving away copies — I just think has been remarkable.”
“One thing I would like to stress is that providing resources to individuals is neither a liberal nor a conservative thing to do,” Cliff said. “No one on either side of the political spectrum is going to object to making information available to people. You’re not giving them money, you’re not underwriting their illusions about themselves. You’re just saying these resources are available to you. So if someone is conservative, they don’t necessarily need to be repulsed by this.”
Including visual art and poetry was “sort of an afterthought,” said Cliff, “but I know that it’s very affirming for individuals to have their artwork and their poetry in a publication. They aren’t fully cognizant of the fact that I’ve handed out only 800 or so. All they know is that they’re in a publication and anyone could see it, which is true. I mean, to their minds it’s probably tantamount to being published in The New Yorker.
“I saw one woman one day in Longfellow Square with a copy of Figaro’s, literally running around saying, ‘I got my poetry in this magazine!’ That was quite an experience for me.”
Cliff’s mindful never to be preachy. “I look for ways to inspire people without delivering platitudes to them, without pointedly making suggestions about how they might live their lives, or coming up with inspirational sayings, or aphorisms to live by and that sort of thing,” he said. “Because I thought that would just be a turn-off to these people, if they get the feeling that I feel like I have answers that they don’t. … If someone has a severe drug dependence, they’re not gonna have their life turned around by an essay or a poem or a piece of art.”
And Cliff has the street smarts to stay safe. “I’ve spent a lot of time on the other side of the tracks, and I’m not going to scoot away when trouble arises. I might even gravitate towards it,” he said. “So, no, I’ve not had any problems.”
That being said, “If someone is broke and they’re out of cigarettes and they’d really like to have a beer, and you walk up and you say, ‘Can I give you something?’ — it could be five bucks, but instead you say, ‘Oh, here’s a publication book’ — you got to be very careful. If I sense that someone is in that sort of need, I will generally just walk up and say, ‘Here,’ and keep walking. I don’t say, ‘Can I give you something?’ Or, ‘I hope you’ll find something in this of use to you.’ I just give it to them.”
Cliff made the point several times that Figaro’s is not intended to aid only homeless or addicted people, but just as much, if not more so, to help the hidden poor struggling to pay rent. “The low-income people who have an apartment, that are not variously addicted, they are more apt to make use of these resources,” he said, as are immigrants who are housed.
Still, the book Rough Sleepers, by Tracy Kidder, about Dr. Jim O’Connell’s mission to save homeless Bostonians, was a major inspiration for Figaro’s. Cliff updates and expands the guide almost constantly and prints new versions four times a year. He said he’d appreciate having a volunteer or two to help contact the agencies, charities and churches therein to ensure their information is up to date, and spoke of eventually forming a nonprofit to expand Figaro’s into other cities. If that happened, the next city for which he’d like to publish an edition would be Boston, where Dr. O’Connell worked.
I don’t think securing enough paper and ink is going to be a problem for Cliff once this story hits the streets. Last month, when I described Cliff’s project to my pal Dale Rand, owner of the eponymous Portland print shop, it took him exactly zero seconds to offer more paper than Cliff would go through in a year.
So yeah, one could say Figaro only made it so far. Then again, around here, across an ocean and several centuries, he’s still stirring solidarity among the underclass, one homemade survival guide at a time.
*Subscribers to our Substack, bollardhead.substack.com, get a PDF version of “Jake Sawyer’s Story” in its entirety.
Cliff’s on Facebook, and he can be reached via e-mail at gallant.cliff555@yahoo.com or by phone at (207) 550-1410 if you’d like to lend a hand.
