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The Downtown Club was an old and well-established bastion for the shakers and movers in Dallas, Texas. That's what it was called -- The Downtown Club. Not a fancy or imaginative name, but one had to be well-heeled and successful in business as a first step to becoming a member. Then there was the matter of being recommended by five long-standing members, plus numerous other prerequisites for joining. Oh, yes, and one had to be of the male gender. The club was one of the last holdouts as a hang-out for men only. How long that would last was anybody's guess, but the members continued their enjoyment of the club and their comrades as though things would go on the same forever.

Raymond Stump had been a member for a relatively short time by the measures of most members. He had finally passed all the requirements of membership just about 10 years ago. So he was kind of in between being an old timer and a newcomer. But he had long since gained popularity with other members, and was held in high esteem by those who knew him. Ray was a wealthy insurance man who had made it to the top of his profession, both in his professional skills and in the enormous money he made. Dallas had been good to him. And he was relatively good to Dallas.

Thursday evening was poker night at the club. Members who regularly played poker on that night had leave of their wives and their business worries, and they had a rousing good time on those nights. The chef always prepared a table full of specialties on which they could nibble until well past midnight. Waiters were kept busy mixing and serving drinks to the several tables of players. Most professional players -- that is, those who made their living playing -- would never consider consuming any alcoholic beverages while playing. Itdulled the senses too much. But these guys were not professional poker players. They played as an excuse to spend the night out with the boys. And it wouldn't matter if any of them dropped a couple thousand dollars during the evening. And for those who won that much, it wouldn't make any difference in their bank accounts.

Thursday evening. Poker evening. Along about midnight, when Ray had gotten a bit juiced up, he and the men at his table were more interested in talking and telling jokes than they were in playing serious poker. ''Hey guys,'' Ray raised his voice a bit to try to get his companions' attention. ''Listen, listen. I heard this idea at lunch the other day, and it struck my funny bone. One of the guys I was with at lunch said, 'You know what I'd like to do? I'd like to buy a small island in the South Pacific, and build me a big casino where all my friends could come and relax and enjoy themselves. And I'd have a huge neon sign out in front with letters six-feet tall that said To Hell With Poor People!' ''

Everyone had a big laugh over that one, including men from some of the other tables. Some nodded their heads as though they wished they had said something that clever. ''Ray, you are something else,'' one of his poker buddies said, laughing and shaking his head.

''Well, hey, it wasn't my idea, you know, but I must confess I rather like the suggestion. The sign! Man, I like the sign! To Hell With Poor People!'' More laughter from his buddies. The poker playing came to a standstill at Ray's table as well as a few adjoining tables. Ray's story had tickled the ears of some, but it also brought forward a topic of conversation with which they were all familiar. Poor people. People on welfare. People with the damnable AIDS disease. Unemployed people. Street people. Homeless people.

Their conversation wasn't the sort that expressed sympathy and concern for those people. It was rather the drag that they were on society. And everyone had their favorite bad words to bring forward about the poor. ''Hell, most of these people could get work if they wanted it. The trouble is, mostof them are too damned lazy. They're a leech on the rest of us,'' one of the men began.

And that started it. A cascade of familiar words -- almost like negative proverbs -- about the poor and homeless. ''I tell you, it burns me when some of these people drive up in a Cadillac to get their food stamps!'' one fella said, as though he was the first one ever to try that line.

The man serving drinks to the table from which that comment came didn't show any sign that he had heard the remark, but he was thinking, ''There's no way these folks ever get near enough to a poor person to see whether or not they're pickin' up food stamps. Cadillac my hind end.''

Ray jumped into the verbal assault. ''Listen, I haven't got anything against poor people, per se ...'' Others nodded their heads in somewhat pious agreement. Ray continued, ''But I've become pretty much convinced there's no excuse for it in most cases. People can pick themselves up by their bootstraps and improve their lot ... sweeten this drink up for me, will you son?'' he said the waiter.

''We're just spending more and more of our tax money on people who don't want to work. That ain't right,'' another chimed in.

And so it went for another half hour or so. Ray didn't mention that he had indeed picked himself up by his bootstraps, from poverty to enormous wealth. Something in him said he didn't want these wealthy colleagues to know that he had come from dirt poor beginnings. He would rather they just assumed he had always been a man of wealth, that he was from ''old money,'' not ''new money.'' Chances are, however, that they knew he wasn't from an old money family. He considered himself lucky to be accepted into the elite company of old-monied people.

Ray and his five younger brothers were sons of a poor tenant farmer near Perham, Minnesota. Ray was old enough to remember the Depression years on the farm, when there was barely enough food to put on the table. Their father just couldn't improve the family's financial situation as the yearsrolled by, partly because he had the bad luck to be renting a farm that had mediocre soil, and partly because during the Great Depression prices were so low it didn't make any difference even if he did produce good crops. Ray never could figure out why it was called the ''Great'' Depression -- there wasn't anything great about it in his eyes.

Nor was there anything great or noble about being poor. From the time of his early teen years Ray began to resent his poor background. Although many other people in those years were low on the economic scale, Ray considered it a curse to be poor. Because of their poverty, the family never had more than basic bland food; and clothes for the six boys always looked as though they were ready for the rag bag. He would some day escape the poverty cycle, he vowed to himself many times over.

It couldn't happen too soon as far as he was concerned. So he dropped out of school following his junior year in high school, ostensibly to make a little money to help the family finances, but in his own mind it was the beginning of his plan to make money -- lots of it -- so he would never again have to suffer the disgrace of poverty. In his eyes it was definitely a disgrace.

Ray worked a variety of jobs in his late teen years, and eventually wound up in his early 20s working for an insurance agent. In spite of his not having finished high school, he soon began learning enough about the insurance business to study for and get his certification as an agent. It wasn't long before he felt this would be his path to riches. And he was right. He became a star salesman and after a time established his own agency. He was on the way to stardom in his field.

He needed a bigger field of operation -- and Texas provided such a field. It was the late '40s, and after some investigation, he decided that Dallas, Texas, was the place where he needed to be to cash in on the lucrative field of insurance. He risked what he had built up in his own agency, and moved to Dallas to start from scratch. Within a decade he was a prosperous insurance executive with a large stable of salespeople andan income that seemed it would never end. He had left his poverty behind, as far behind as he could leave it -- geographically, financially, and psychologically. In his mind poverty was still a curse, a curse which he thought most people could avoid if they really tried, as he had. And as he had succeeded.

Ray's life was not all smooth. The long hours he spent building up his business had the effect of distancing himself from his wife and three children. The divorce which followed was devastating to him, more from the status standpoint than that the family had broken up. And it meant more time spent at the club to fill the few hours of free time he could carve out each week. Meanwhile he had helped his five brothers, one by one, to get through college, and each of them was on a track similar to Ray's. A successful attorney, a doctor, a real estate broker and two younger brothers who would climb the ladder of success in some field or another as oldest brother Ray would advance them whatever grub stake they needed to get on their way out of the poverty cycle. And that was indeed commendable.

Friday on his way to work, Ray ordered his chauffeur, ''Will you please take some other route this morning? I hate going past that food kitchen where all those street people are waiting for free food.'' He didn't know why he hated it, he just didn't want to have anything to do with the scene. ''And Willy, let's stop at the United Way office. I need to make sure everything's going right for this year's drive.'' Ray was chairperson of the annual United Way drive this year, and he was determined it was going to go over the top more than in previous years. Ray was good at raising money. He had been chairperson of the capital funds drive for their new church building a few years ago, a drive that went far beyond what the pastor and church council members had dared to hope. Ray could raise money for church and for United Way. He knew that United Way assisted many poor and impoverished people, and he was glad for that -- as long as he could keep a safe distance from anyone who was actually in need.
He was particularly self-conscious in the presence of poor people, didn't know how to act. So it seemed best to him simply to stay as far away as possible from any contact with the poor. ''To hell with poor people!'' still found a silent welcome home in the back recesses of his mind. He didn't know why. The contradiction in him was that he felt good about raising money for the poor, even though he believed most of them didn't need to be poor. And he didn't want to get close to any poor people.

But then there was Larry. No one knew his last name. But Larry somehow always seemed to find his way to the entrance to Ray's office. He wasn't any trouble. He was just there. He was a street person, had no home, was in obvious poor health, and always seemed to be needing a bath. There was no law against Larry loitering around the front entrance to Ray's office, but Ray wished there were a law. In fact at times he tried to get the police to shoo Larry away. But a few days later Larry would be back, watching overweight Ray, in his $1,200 Italian suits, enter his office, and he'd be there when Ray came out to do lunch with his friends or customers. Larry was a pain in the butt to Ray. If someone had asked Ray why that was so, he wouldn't have been able to come up with a logical answer, but he knew deep down that he didn't like having Larry there, practically on his office doorstep. If he had gone to a counselor about it, maybe Ray would have discovered that Larry was too much of a reminder of Ray's own roots. Roots of poverty. The curse of poverty. So Ray passed him by nearly every day as though Larry didn't exist. It was the only thing Ray could do, because there was no way he could become involved with one of these hundreds of street people. Ignore them, Ray said to himself. I'm doing my part with my work in United Way. I can't deal with individuals.

But Larry weighed on his mind more than Ray realized. He could put him out of sight for a time, but in the back of his mind Larry was there, nagging him. The silent nagging culminated in a traumatic dream Ray had one night. Or was it a nightmare? Whatever it was, it bothered Ray for severaldays, to the point that he sought the help of a counselor, someone to whom he could relate this stupid dream.

''I dreamed I had died!'' Ray said, beads of sweat forming on his forehead. The counselor was properly calm and unmoved.

''Well, tell me more,'' cool counselor invited.

''I don't know ... this sounds crazy!'' Ray continued.

''Most dreams sound crazy when we wake up,'' counselor responded.

''But I was in hell!'' Ray almost shouted. ''Great balls of fire, I was in hell!''

''All right, so it was a dream,'' the counselor almost smiled. ''Just tell me how much you can remember.''

''Well, there was this guy named Larry ... Larry is a bum, a street person, who hangs out in front of my office. And there was Larry off in the distance. I think he was in heaven. Lord, I was scared, because I was in hell. And what was that street bum doing in heaven, for God's sake?''

''Was there anything else?''

''Yeah. There was St. Peter, or someone, I don't know who it was. And he was over there with Larry, in heaven. I asked him what the deal was, that I was in this God-forsaken place, and Larry was apparently in heaven. After all I had done for the church and United Way and Lord knows what else, what was that no-good bum doing in heaven, and I'm in hell?''

''What did St. Peter, or whoever, say?''

Ray paused a while before answering, softly and slowly, ''He said I'd had my day, my good times and all, and that Larry was one of the forgotten people. I guess he implied that I blew it. I don't know, I was confused. I'm still confused.''

''Is that it?''

''No, I asked the guy, whoever he was, if he could send a message to my brothers, maybe send Larry! -- because they are following the same track as I was. If I blew it, maybe my brothers could be warned, somehow ...'' His voice trailed off. ''I don't know exactly what I was saying or what I was asking.'' Ray paused as if trying to recall the dream. ''The guysaid that they have the same chance I had to hear the message, whatever that meant.''

''Do you know what it meant?''

''No, how should I know what it meant? It was a dream. It was unreal.'' Ray paused, then continued, more subdued, ''I thought, hey, if someone were to come back from the dead -- okay, so let's continue this stupid, unreal dream -- if someone were to come back from the dead, my brothers at least would be spared the hell that I was in.''

''And ...?''

''And the guy said if they didn't hear the message, they wouldn't pay attention even to someone coming back from the dead.''

''That's it?''

''Yeah, that's it. Confusing, isn't it? I don't know even now if I'm awake or dreaming.''