Another Bullshit Night in Suck City Read online

  One morning he asks me why I call him Joe, that his name’s Martin. Martin Adams. I have no idea where the name Joe Morgan came from, and turns out neither does he. He tells me that when he walks along the streets he can hear his father’s voice calling him, Martin, Martin, Martin, that he’s always moving either away or toward that voice. Now that I know his real name I take him to the Social Security Administration offices to see if they have him in their computers. It turns out he’s been getting a disability check for the past twenty years, and that this check’s been going to his brother, a middle-class guy living in a nice suburb, who’s Martin’s payee. In the beginning the brother would drive into Boston, find Martin, buy him a meal, some new clothes, leave him with fifty out of the three-hundred-dollar check. Sometimes even take him home for a few days, wash him up. But after a while the brother came into the city less and less. The checks kept coming, the brother ended up putting an addition on his house, a sunroom off the kitchen. When they sat across from each other in the Brown Lobby, after twelve years without a word, Martin deadpanned, I haven’t seen you around lately, where’ve you been?

  As fall sets in I begin letting Martin sleep in my studio. After seeing him lurking outside my building one too many damp mornings as I come in from a night on the Van, I invite him in. Put a blanket on the floor as if he were a dog, make him coffee when he wakes up, let him out in the afternoon. Work is seeping into every pore. I take a photograph of him and he asks, Why do I look so old?, convinced I have doctored it. Inside, outside, home, homeless, the lines blur. He’s as old as my father but he’s not my father. At night I drive the Van to abandoned buildings, to stairwells in alleyways, to bridge overhangs. I know the names of the guys who stay in each spot—that Kevin will be at the Horseshoe, that Skid will be on the B.U. blower, that Gabe will be on the Mall, and he will have nailed another sole to one of his shoes, every night he tries to make them even, now teetering on five-inch platforms. Near North Station I squat in a doorway beside Black George, who’s been talking detox lately. A friend from New York, just off the train, passes by us on the sidewalk, five steps away. Without thinking I call out his name, Chris, and he turns, tentatively, takes a step closer, stops. I’m sitting in the shadows with Black George, wearing a coat I lifted from the clothing room, a bottle between us. The coat won’t last me through the night, I’ll pass it on to someone who needs it more. How’s it going? Chris asks, confused.

  I’ve been with Emily for nine years, working at Pine Street the last four. Halloween I spend the night with a friend in the East Village, a woman I’ve been seeing off and on for years. Emily finds out, confronts me, and I see that I really don’t know what I’m doing, that I’m adrift, as the Buddhists say, on a river of forgetfulness. A hungry ghost. Emily tells me I have to either get into therapy or we’re done. I call Lou, a therapist who comes recommended by another friend. An appointment is set for the next week, coincidentally on the anniversary of my mother’s death, six years before.

  That weekend a friend takes me to a party in the South End, to the loft of the brother of one of the Beastie Boys, or so she claims. Wearing a sweater pulled from Pine Street’s clothing room, I feel shabby beside the beautiful people. After an uncomfortable hour I end up in a back room with my friend, smoking crack until daybreak. I’ve never done it before, and I’ll never do it again, but it makes me feel like Superman for fifteen minutes at a time, full of self-confidence and charm, until the hit wears off and each nerve screams for more. Before I take the first lungful the guy with the lighter asks if I know what I’m doing, if I’ve done it before. He even tells me not to, tells me he hasn’t left that pipe for three days. I nod my head like I understand, like there’s nothing I don’t understand, as I fall back on the couch, my lungs now big with smoke.

  the pine street palace

  Friday the 13th, 1989 (January)

  Dear Nick,

  What does it feel like to drive a van for Pine Street—scooping bodies off our filthy streets to carry them to the well run Pine Street Palace?—

  A gentle-old man—in our fully fucked up clothing line this morning—smiled—as he said to me—behind him—“This place has died since Mr. Sullivan died. This new man is an asshole—he hires assholes and they work like assholes—!”

  I fully agree—Up Pine Street! A Palace of Serfs—

  Respectfully—Jonathan

  This letter comes a few days after another in which he tells me, “I did apply for a job at Pine Street in a letter to Mr. Ring several weeks ago—a job as a counselor—No answer. I have since found out through the grapevine that one must be out of Pine Street one full year before he or she can get a job there.—So it goes. I must struggle on.”

  One night in late January the counselor working Housing will be unable to rouse my father. Slumped and naked, he will stare at himself in the funhouse mirror, repeating, But I’m only twenty-eight years old, why do I look like this? What happened to my body? The counselor, new to the shelter, half believes this man is twenty-eight, half believes the telescoping of thirty years. This counselor will work with me later that night on the Van, and apologize for being late, explain he was with a drunk who kept saying he was twenty-eight, but his body looked forty years older, his body ruined. I knew he was talking about my father even before he said his name. I was the one who was twenty-eight. Within a week this note will appear in the log:

  6 February 1989

  8:20 Jonathan Flynn responded to a guest’s request that he share a can of deodorant with an intense verbal assault toward the other guest on racial and sexual themes. Mr. Flynn would not respond to intervention. In fact he accelerated his verbal assault still on racial and sexual themes, but with more focus on verbal ridicule and perhaps a more colorful group of slurs.

  8:50 The SPO, Chris, Paul, Greg and Brian escorted Mr. Flynn to the Brown Lobby wrapped in a sheet, as he had refused to dress himself.

  I come in to work at nine that night, stopping first to read the log. I see the note about my father, see the way the woman at the desk watches me as I read. Then I pass through the lobby to pick up the Van, to drive it to the back door, to load it with food, coffee, blankets, the nightly stopover before heading out. Passing through the lobby I see my father, upright and ranting, his head lolling from side to side, his naked body wrapped in a sheet. I walk past him, past my co-workers, who had spent the last hour wrestling him down from the showers, who had finally given up trying to get the motherfucker dressed again, grabbed a sheet, wrapped him in it, dragged him down. I’d never seen this before, never seen a man dressed only in a sheet in the Brown Lobby. Roman, almost Imperial.

  ham

  Noah had grandiose plans to save the world. Noah, it should be remembered, was a disreputable man who heard a voice. The villagers, his neighbors, laughed. Noah, a bit of a drunk, was not taken seriously. The voice said, By what you make you will save the world. And so, reluctantly at first, Noah began his life’s work, an impossible project, something much larger than himself. But at night Noah was again filled with doubt, and he drank to quiet the voices. The people in his village spoke behind their hands as he passed, touched their caps, smiled. The village was miles from the ocean and Noah was spending his days building a boat—Made it out of hic-kory barky-barky.

  Noah had three sons—Shem, Ham and Japheth. Ham came upon his father one day, naked and ranting, building his impossible boat in a blackout. God had spoken, God kept speaking, God wouldn’t stop speaking. For witnessing his father naked and drunk, Ham and all his offspring became accursed forever, to the end of time.

  My father may not hear voices but he also has an impossible project, he’s also filled with a force larger than himself. In nearly every letter my father has sent me for the last twenty-five years he tells me his writing is going very, very well. His novel, such as it is, if it is at all, written in blackout and prison, is his ark, the thing that will save him, that will save the world. His single-mindedness impresses most, his fathomless belief in his own g
reatness, in his powers to transform a failed world, to make it whole again by a word, by a story. That if you stick with your vision long enough you will be redeemed. All this in the face of near-constant evidence to the contrary. The actual circumstances of his life—his alcoholism, the crimes he’s committed, his homelessness and decades of poverty—these are mere tests, and what is a faith not tested? Noah needed to gather nails, to sort the animals, to convince his sons. He planed his timber and laid out the ribs. His ark would be bigger than the temple. We all need to create the story that will make sense of our lives, to make sense of the daily tasks. Yet each night the doubts returned, howling through him. Without doubt there can be no faith. At daybreak Noah looked to the darkening sky and vowed to work faster. My father cannot die, he tells me, will not, until his work is completed. But is there a deadline inside him for when he must finish, a day, like Noah, when the rains begin? When the boat, finished or not, begins to rise from the cradle?

  Within a week after seeing him wrapped in a bedsheet and ranting, his bare feet in a pool of his own piss, my father has gone down even further, each night coming into the shelter drunker, more abusive, more out of control. He takes a swing at Cookie, calls her a “dyke cunt,” but Cookie gives him another chance, merely puts him out for the night—He’s your father, for chrissakes. But by the end of the week, when I arrive at nine for my shift, my co-workers look at me wearily—they’ve had another long night battling him. I’ve chosen to leave him to them, to escape the building, to spend my nights driving the streets. Finally, he is brought up for barring:

  13 February 1989

  Jon was OFN this evening, and when he was told he had to go to the Laundry Room he exploded into anger. He started yelling and screaming racial slurs, lesbian cracks, verbal threats and every swear he could think of toward Dianne and Cookie. He was highly intoxicated, very upset and unmanageable. He was finally escorted by Paul and he was shouting and swearing all the way down the alley. Jon has created problems in housing and this is not his first outburst at the front door. When he is intoxicated he is extremely hard to handle and its time for BH20 and a rest for the staff.

  Stamped in for “BH20 or Bar,” meaning if he refuses to go to the thirty-day lockup detox at Bridgewater State Correctional Facility he will be barred for at least two months. He’s described as “w/m, 5’7”, white hair, slanted eye, gray stubble, 150 lbs.” I know my father will never voluntarily check himself back into prison. At the change-of-shift meetings his barring is voted on. I am at one of these meetings. The vote goes nine to bar, one against, and one abstention. I would like to say that I abstained from the voting, but I don’t remember if this is true. It is just as likely that I voted to bar my father, in support of my co-workers.

  The rains, as we all know, did come. The boat lifted above the drowned world, and the disbelievers perished, and no one was more surprised than Noah. The first right thing he’d done, and it came from obeying a voice only he could hear, which others took as proof of his madness. But what of Ham? It didn’t matter if he told anyone about his drunken father or not, if he chided him or tried to dress him, if he lifted his struggling body back into bed, if he took his hand and told him where to place his feet, none of this changed the fact of what he’d seen. It’s possible he opened a door innocently, followed the sound of Noah’s voice cursing God and the sky, possible he didn’t even look, that he turned away before seeing. And it’s likely that Noah hadn’t noticed the door opening, couldn’t have told you who had come in, which son, wouldn’t remember anyway. Apparently it’s God’s call. Ham saw his father drunken and naked, and for this he was cursed, and all of his offspring, and the races that led from these offspring, accursed forever.

  four

  headlong

  All over the city men are falling—nosedive, header—crab-walking from benches lower and lower until the ground rises up to catch them, until the earth says stop, until the sidewalk tilts and the lights go out. From above, with infrared, you can see them, the outlines of bodies dotting the city, falling to their knees, rolling onto their sides, frozen in a pantomime of sleep. Points on a map, an electrified tourist map, the scenic spots lit up, marked. Scan the corners, the edges, the just-out-of-sight, the places men go to piss, any horizontal will do. One of those lights could be my father, but he keeps moving, through the night, finds a stone mattress, dozes off.

  fuckin gonuts

  setting:

  A donut shop, evening.

  Marie: I saw your father the other day.

  Son: I didn’t know you knew my father.

  Marie: He didn’t look so good.

  Son: Maybe it wasn’t him.

  Marie: Who else would it’ve been?

  Son: I mean maybe you got him confused.

  Marie: Confused?

  Son: With someone else.

  Marie: Who?

  Son: Another man.

  Marie: Which man?

  Son: Someone else. Someone not my father.

  Marie: Why would I do that?

  Son: I don’t know. I didn’t know you knew him. Do you know him?

  Marie: He’s a hard guy not to know.

  Son: Maybe it’s not him.

  Marie: Who else would it be?

  Son: A lot of guys.

  Marie: He sleeps in the parking garage, right?

  Son: Sometimes. Which garage?

  Marie: Barlow and Ron were giving him a hard time the other day.

  Son: Barlow’s garage?

  Marie: And that kid who got himself burned—

  Son: Kevin?

  Marie: He was good-looking, before they set him on fire. You can tell.

  (beat) Barlow did it.

  I don’t know, maybe Barlow. Crazy enough, when he’s drunk—

  (hisses to manager) SNAKE!

  (beat) Buy me a coffee, would you? The manager’s putting his eye on me.

  (beat)

  Son: (standing)

  Marie: Would you hang out with someone who even maybe set you on fire?

  Son: You want a donut or something?

  (beat) I’m going to get a donut. You want one?

  (beat) I’ll get two.

  (beat) You know anyone named Eno?

  Marie: How can you hang out with someone who set you on fire?

  Son: Eno the Beano?

  Marie: You talk to your old man much? He’s not making much sense these days. Like he’s been out too long.

  (beat) What’s a beano? Some kind of pill?

  Son: You never heard of him?

  Marie: I know an Eno. He sells drugs. Wears that nasty hat.

  (beat) Keeps the drugs in the hat, like he’s clever.

  (beat) Your father into drugs—?

  Son: This Eno told my father I was into drugs.

  Marie: (beat) Everyone says that.

  Son: I mean, who is this guy?

  (beat) Everyone says what?

  Marie: Well, you are, aren’t you?

  Son: I don’t even know him.

  Marie: (beat) It snowed last night.

  Isn’t it early for snow?

  (beat) I ended up in the garage. The top landing’s okay.

  (beat) Barlow’s voice coming up the stairwell. I kept real quiet.

  (offhandedly) Your old man doesn’t look good. Someone should get him inside.

  Son: You should get inside.

  Marie: You getting more coffee or what?

  Son: (sits down) I don’t even know him.

  Marie: He’s got those crazy eyes, like one’s unscrewed or something.

  (squints into Son’s face) You’re lucky you don’t look like that.

  (beat) The manager here’s been hassling people lately.

  Sticking his nose up my ass.

  (beat) Like you’re going to get hurt if you don’t drink more coffee.

  You don’t even have to do anything.

  Could be freezing rain, nuclear winter. Coffee’s gone, you’re out.

  Son: We can still try to get you
in somewhere.

  (beat) You know, it’s what we do.

  Marie: (ignores him) Last Sunday Barlow and Ron were out of booze.

  Crazy looking for it.

  Only the bootlegger on Sundays. No credit with the bootlegger.

  Not for Barlow, not for anyone.

  You need cash.

  Who has cash, Sunday morning?

  (beat) Barlow killed a guy.

  Son: I heard.

  Marie: That’s got to be something.

  Sixteen years in Walpole.

  (beat) They shouldn’t have let him out, a guy like that.

  (beat) So Barlow and Ron lure this old man upstairs—

  Son: They—?

  Marie:—They lure your old man upstairs.

  Top floor. That empty building beside the garage.

  Said they had a bottle.

  You know the building, all the windows gone?

  No one there on Sunday.

  (beat) When they get to the top they grab him—

  (beat) Upside down, five-story drop.

  Held him by the ankles. Upside down.