Another Bullshit Night in Suck City Read online

Son: They didn’t drop him?

  Marie: Five stories I heard.

  (beat) Even took his coat.

  Son: (beat)

  Marie: It snowed last night. Slush everywhere.

  Son: The Van has coats.

  Marie: Last night Barlow was telling the story.

  His voice come up the stairwell, like he’s whispering in my ear. (shivers)

  Said next time he’ll drop him.

  You know the building I mean?

  Son: (beat) I never noticed.

  Marie: He’s a freakin psycho, Barlow.

  Son: How did they get inside?

  Marie: Your old man doesn’t look good. He’s outside all the time.

  (beat) The manager kicks you out of this place at nine-fifteen.

  Last night he put his face this close to mine. This close.

  I had to wipe the spit off.

  It doesn’t close until nine-thirty. That’s what the sign on the door says.

  How can he do that? Is that legal?

  how’s my driving?

  (1989) I steer the Van down the Mall dividing the up from the down of Commonwealth Avenue, its walkway littered with statues of the unknown rich—a man in a sailor’s hat looking over a bronze sea; a man with one hand in his coat pocket, fingering his coins forever. Past the benches my father haunts, three a.m., the radar begins to hum. What color was his blanket yesterday? Olive drab? Maroon? Last night it snowed, you could follow his footprints from his bench to the church overhang, until the snow filled them. I drive slowly past a blanket shaped like a man—here is a man, shaped like a blanket, shaped like a box, shaped like a bench. Easy to miss. If this is my father, if I leave a sandwich beside his sleeping body, does this become a family meal? Is this bench now our dinner table? Are we inside again? Is this what it means to be holding it together? Am I coping? How’s my driving?

  It’s just Jeff and me tonight, someone didn’t show. Shaved head, weight lifter, ex-Marine—Jeff has been working with the homeless since he quit drinking a year ago. His girlfriend didn’t follow him into the land of sobriety. This causes Jeff a lot of turmoil. His anger, though, can be an asset on the Van. More than once I see him slam a homeless guy against a wall who’d threatened us. A hands-on kind of counselor, a cowboy, a terminator. It’s against policy but there’s something refreshing about it, once in a while. Good to have him on your side. Aside from these infrequent outbursts he possesses the gentle demeanor that sometimes trails the newly sober, that deep acceptance that comes with realizing how badly you’d fucked up your life. Yet he’s still drifting dangerously down his own river of rage.

  I hop the Van over the curb into Boston Common, which isn’t legal, but the cops ignore us. On the Common a man’s allowed to graze a flock of sheep, goats, cows, whatever, this is in the articles of incorporation from 1634, this is the original purpose for this public land. But that same man, that shepherd, is not allowed to sleep. If the shepherd falls asleep he can be arrested. The sheep may all be asleep but the man must watch them sleep. Russell walks the periphery. Plaid suitcoat, red shirt, polka-dot tie, white shoes. Hard to miss. He’s become our favorite person lately (Who is your favorite bum?). Tonight he sports a captain’s hat. My recent coup was to offer him a stick of gum and have him accept it. This after three years of seeing him sleeping out, three years of him telling us he was just on his way home, only to find him later in a doorway on Newbury.

  Dear Nick…what does it feel like…scooping bodies off our filthy streets…to carry them to the well run Pine Street Palace?

  I stop the Van beside an unidentifiable form asleep on a bench, offer to watch the radio. Jeff knows why I stay behind, but he doesn’t ask about it. I write in the log, 3:05, _____ on a bench, the common by the bandstand. Jeff squats beside the bench, to see if John Doe is breathing, to see if he’s hungry, to see if he’s covered. Scooping bodies off our filthy streets. Who is our John Doe? What does this feel like?

  25°. Snow builds a monochromatic city. The statues stare over the shapes of sleeping men, whitening. Still not cold enough to drive the hard-core guys inside. Bobbie Blue-Eyes. Jimmy the Hat. Black George. Indian Dave. The blankets that cover them are now also white. Jeff comes back. It’s Paul, he says, he just wants another blanket. I write, “Paul Carney, blanket.” Jeff shakes the blanket out—a red sail in a white sea—dusts off what snow he can, drapes the rough wool over the shape of Paul. Paul’s shape fills the bench, the blanket becomes a fort. His breath fills the fort, heats it. Words come from Paul’s head. A knock on my window—Denis Delaney, his face covered with tar. His knuckle leaves a black kiss on the glass. Always wild, but even for Denis this is another level. I get out, mention the tar. Denis tells me it came from the Lord, The Lord offered His cup and I drank it, drank its sweetness, to drain the evil out. The Lord did this because Denis is the devil.

  How so? I ask.

  I cut people up, he answers.

  A new map of the city has been created, several maps, actually, transparent layers, they can be laid one on top of the other. One shows only fire hydrants, another only stoplights, another each school. My map would show the places one could sleep if one was or became or planned to be homeless. It would show each bench, each church step, each bridge, each horizontal, each patch of grass. We ask Paul if he wants to go back to the shelter with us but we know he won’t go. No, no, he says, I’m just out here enjoying a little fresh air. I do my best thinking out here. We got him to talk to a psych doctor once, the doctor asked if he heard things other people don’t. Sure, Paul answered, I hear birds in the morning when everyone’s sleeping, I hear trees rustling when no one’s around. We convince Denis to come for a ride, I lay a blanket on the seat, give him cigarettes, coffee. I say, Let’s go talk to someone about the Lord. He stares at the tip of his cigarette, murmurs into it. Oily light, steam rising from cracks in the asphalt, rivers of heat flowing beneath the streets, the center of the earth boiling, heat factories on the edge of the highway, acid rain. We drive slowly to City, talking calm and low, hoping a psych nurse is on duty, but once we pull in Denis refuses to enter, wanders off between streetlights.

  Back downtown we check the alley off Bromfield (bomb- field). Best to make a racket walking down Bromfield, sweeping the flashlight in arcs before you to scare away the rats, calling out, Moses, Moses? Maybe we have a message for Moses, maybe he’s unbarred, maybe some meds await him in the clinic. At the end is a gate you shoulder open that leads to a staircase behind the Orpheum Theater. If we don’t find Moses on one of the landings we’ll find someone else, huddled in the pissy utter darkness, who either knows Moses or doesn’t, who either knows or doesn’t know where to find him. Changeable and random. Some guys check into detox for the winter, some burrow deeper under blankets.

  Later I’ll stand over my father as he sleeps under the church halogen. Impossible light. Jeff stays in the Van, lets me do this alone. Snow dusts his blanket, his eyebrows, the bag tied to his wrist like a tourniquet. Barred now, now nowhere inside for him to go, now every night I could find him. Starlings fill the trees above us—isn’t it late for starlings, don’t they fly south? His chest rises and falls, tiny cracks in the dusting of snow, miniature avalanches, a distant rumble. The halogen’s hum fills the sphere of light I inhabit. I cannot remember a way out of this sphere. He breathes in this hum. I breathe in his hum. If his chest still rises, if his blankets seem adequate, then I won’t enter this building he has built. If I step into the lobby of his chest I will sink up to my knees in nothing. I will lose my feet, like traversing a swamp. We had gardeners and chauffeurs growing up, he says. When this is over I’ll be sleeping inside the Ritz, where I belong. I stand on the sidewalk searching my pockets for the key, embedded in the asphalt below my feet. What does it feel like…whose filthy body…how far to the palace…?

  fort point (mountain of shoes)

  A mountain of shoes reaches nearly to the ceiling. In another corner a mountain of t-shirts beside a mountain of sweaters. Mountains of pan
ts, suits and underwear rise up one floor above. Tectonic fashion plates colliding. These new mountains loom above where the men sleep. This is the “overflow” shelter, Fort Point, a warehouse just across the highway from Pine Street. The deal to transform it into an “overflow” shelter, to get the men off the floors of Pine Street, was negotiated with the city in 1987. Other shelters have opened as well—the Laundry Room at Boston City Hospital, where you sleep to the sound of dryers tumbling sheets through the night; the Round Church, where you are offered a stiff-backed chair, and if you doze and fall from the chair you are asked to leave; the Armory, where you sleep beside a locked room filled with machine guns and dynamite. By now nearly every church basement in every town in America is lined with at least a handful of folding cots. At dinner with Emily’s parents one night Ray will ask me how many homeless there are in America now. A million, I’ll estimate, maybe two. Four hundred million people in America, Ray bellows, even two million is an acceptable percentage.

  From the start Fort Point is like Australia—an island off the highway, floating on a cloverleaf off I-93, difficult to reach. Those who work there are cowboys, renegades, they make their own rules. Sometimes a guest who’s barred from Pine Street is given a second chance at Fort Point. A ten-story warehouse slated for demolition, directly in the path of what will be called the “Big Dig,” maybe it will last five years. To invest structurally in Fort Point is silly—to replace broken windows, leaking pipes, or even paint the walls. It takes on the feel of a theater set, the bare minimum to get the men fed, showered and into bed. The food is driven over from Pine Street in the same vans that transport the guys who cannot negotiate the highway, the ones who even if you walk them to the Mobil station on the corner and point to it, That building right there, draw a little map, still they walk off in the wrong direction. Truly a temporary shelter, which is perhaps ideal.

  Above the men sleeping at the doomed Fort Point (“the Fort”) rise the mountains of clothes. A couple of live-in staff workers tear open trashbags of donated cast-offs, toss them into the appropriate mountain, using shovels, rakes, mostly their hands. Another couple of guys are in charge of sizing the shoes and pants, marking the size on a piece of masking tape. A job with no end, for the mountains before them grow faster than they can measure. Finally it’s decided that some of these clothes should be sold to the Rag Man, sold by the pound, the money used to buy new socks and underwear. Never enough socks and underwear. The Rag Man sorts through the clothes quickly—anything usable will be put in his buck-a-pound bin, the rest will either be shredded for mattress stuffing or donated to Third World countries as a tax write-off.

  My father will end up sleeping at Fort Point even after he’s unbarred from Pine Street. Six months outside have filled him with bitterness. Or brought to the surface the bitterness he always carried, and this bitterness is directed toward Pine Street. The months he sleeps at Fort Point I will not see much of him. Within six months he will be barred from there as well, for bringing a bottle of vodka up to his bed one night, after months of going downhill. It’s February again, and he is Johnny Bench.

  I’m making twelve dollars an hour, plus benefits. Medical, dental, sick days, vacations. The first ten visits to my therapist are covered. That spring, as part of a nationwide protest, tent cities are erected all over America. As shelter workers I suggest we print up t-shirts that read, THE HOMELESS PAY MY RENT, but no one else thinks it’s funny. Across from the tent city on Boston Common is an ice-cream shop, Emack and Bolio’s. The name comes from two men who stay at the shelter sometimes. As younger men they’d been radio personalities in Ohio, comedy and songs. We all know them. Ten years earlier they were being evicted from their Boston apartment, and a young lawyer took on their case, pro bono. They lost, but the lawyer offered them twenty dollars apiece for the right to use their names for a business he was starting with a friend. Emack and Bolio’s. The sign shows two hobos licking cones. Though they ended up being homeless for years on end, the real Emack and Bolio were also offered free ice cream for life.

  My first summer at Pine Street I drove a van around Boston to pick up donations one day, mostly clothing. Brooks Brothers was one of my stops, the same Brooks Brothers where my father had charged his suits to my grandfather years before. A well-dressed man directed the van to the alley, where he met me at the side door, holding a box the size of a mid-sized television. He handed me some paperwork, pointed to where I should sign. I glanced it over and noticed the declared value of the box was ten grand. Four suits, each valued at over two thousand dollars. A tax write-off. Ten grand? I said, holding the pen. I tried to imagine Beady-Eyed Bill in a two-thousand-dollar suit. The guy looked annoyed. Ralph always just signs, who the hell are you?

  the bootlegger

  The Bootlegger sells one thing—pints of Pastene white port, sweet rotgut, four dollars a pop, no credit, no arguing, his trunk open until the product’s gone. Circling the shelter in his beat-up station wagon before dawn, he parks in the shadows between streetlights. We see him there just before the sun comes up as we bring the Van back at the end of the night. No one’s ever seen his face, not clearly, and no one knows his name. He lives somewhere in Southie, buys by the case. Even if you bought each individually at a package store it’d only be a dollar fifty per jug. But the package store won’t open until eight, and in three hours a lot can happen, none of it good. It’s a high-risk business—patrol cars, desperate clientele, darkness—hence the markup. The drunk has to have enough wits about him to put four dollars aside the night before. Some try to stash a bottle before stumbling off to sleep, but then you have to remember where you stashed it—it was dark then and it’s still dark—if it’s even still where you hid it, with the whole city searching for a sip from eleven to eight, the dead time. Even if you could afford a bar, if your clothes weren’t shiny and you didn’t stink, the bars close by one. One until eight’s a lifetime. If you work it right you blackout by eleven, and the sun blistering your lips wakes you. When the sun’s up you can always stem enough for a bottle—a good morning, a beautiful day, an upturned palm. It’s better if they don’t see you shake—many don’t understand that a sip stops the shaking.

  At dawn dew shines off the blacktop. After I write up my notes from the night on the Van I end up leaving the shelter with the men, on their way to the labor pool or to the Bootlegger. I see my father by the Herald Building, half a block ahead of me, near where Martin hears his father calling. Lit doorways, brightening sky, the city beautiful and empty, cleansed by the darkness. I catch up with my father, fall in step, we walk together toward downtown. I ask how he is. He claims not to be drinking, but I don’t think he knows what this means. I’m trying to put some money aside, he says, get my life back together. Then, surprisingly, he asks if I think there’s something wrong with him, he’s been told he has paranoid delusions, and sometimes he thinks it’s true. I ask him if anyone ever diagnosed him, if he’s ever seen a psych doctor. No, no, but I’ve been told I’m paranoid, that I have delusions. A house built of cards and now the house is gone. We pass Danny, rising from a grate, wool-wrapped, army wrap, the blanket slides to the ground. What you fear your whole life comes to pass. You end up living toward it, you spend your life running from it but your foot is nailed to the sidewalk. You circle around it until you wear yourself down. As I look at my father I can see, for the first time, how afraid he is, how he’s been trying to run for a long time. Do you think I’m delusional, do you think I’m paranoid? Yes, yes, and for this I would even drive you to the doctor myself, in my own car, on my own time. But he wants no doctor, won’t commit to an appointment, he’s late for the slave traders, all the jobs will be taken, all the vans full, he’s got to scrape some money together. The bridge goes over the Turnpike here, we split off and I walk the ten blocks home, down the alley, along the wrought iron, a cage around me, a camera watching.

  over 100 lbs.? over 100 miles?

  In my father’s bag he carries a change of underwear, socks, so
ap, a toothbrush, a comb. Pens to write with, paper for letters, the forms he needs to prove to whichever agency whatever they need to know. What was your last job? What was your last address? What is your mother’s maiden name? A paperbag with handles, reinforced with duct tape, inside a plastic bag, the type they give out at supermarkets. From this bag, in the restroom of the library or the bus station, he can make himself recognizable, to himself, which has become a daily struggle. Outside too many nights and your face begins to change, to alter. You spend time being invisible in public places, trying to look like you are waiting for someone, that you haven’t been in that booth, nursing that coffee, not long. You stretch it out, for when it’s gone so is your reason for being there.

  At his table in the reading room of the library my father fills out a form from the Department of Health and Human Services. He’s trying for a disability check, as it’s becoming difficult to even work day labor, sleeping outside every night, difficult to pull himself together from his bag. On this form he lists his previous work experience as “Longshoreman,” “Laborer,” “Cab Driver.” The type of business for each is “unloading ships,” “construction,” “transportation.” The dates he worked each job (month and year required) are “varied” to “varied,” “varied” to “varied,” “7 days” to “10 years.” The days per week are “_____,” “_____,” and “seven.” The rate of pay is “union rate,” “union rate,” and “tips.” In part two he changes his job title from longshoreman to “scallywag,” which my dictionary defines as a scamp or rascal. The form asks:

  A. In your job did you:

  Use machines, tools, or equipment of any kind? yes or no. no.