Another Bullshit Night in Suck City Read online

  I work the Cage for a few months through that first fall, until the cycle of life within the shelter begins to make some sense to me. Patterns emerge. On Fridays, payday, there’s more money to check in, more drunken men pushing it at me through the slot. The drunks show up later and are, depending on the man, either more boisterous or more sullen. Jimmy’s got the shakes again, after a month of doing so well. He’s perfected the trick of stashing a fifth in his sleeve, of raising his arms with a flourish above his head for the frisk. Eddie is carried in by the cops again—not only did he lose his leg beneath a bus a few winters before, but now he’s lost his fake leg. More than likely he took it off himself and brandished it at a passerby, some “punk-assed bitch.” Some get government checks, either for a physical disability or a mental one. They call the mental ones “nut checks.” These checks come on the first of the month, a time when the predators, usually the young addicts, show up at the shelter, lurking, waiting for a mark. Staff that have worked the shelter longer know the thieves, know their targets. But the old guys are easily lured away by a bottle, down the alley, only to limp back, sheepish, a pocket torn, a bloodied ear, broke again.

  Joy works the front desk. She’d been a cokehead and a prostitute and is now an oversized redheaded mother to the guys. Years later she will end up in a room with a shotgun across her lap, back to dealing and smoking crack 24/7. When I first land at Pine Street she is benign and ravaged, a failed queen who seldom leaves her throne at the front door. We catch them on the way down, Joy says. Next stop, the morgue. Each year we count a hundred, a hundred and fifty, dead from the year before. These are just the ones we can name, the ones we know. In a few years we will begin holding a memorial service for them, reading off the names of those we can remember, mostly as a way to stave off our own sense of desperation, of hopelessness. We will build two hundred crosses in my loft, paint them white, paint the name of someone who had died on each one, hammer them into the Common one night, an instant graveyard.

  funeral, unattended

  (1963) Sunglasses in the visor, wallet in the glove compartment, satchel in the back. A sports coat on a hanger so it doesn’t wrinkle. Look the cop in the eye, nod, don’t look at the cop at all, adjust the mirror, the ashtray empty, the window down. Drive with both hands so as not to draw heat—respectable citizen, upright. The red light turns green but no one’s behind, no one honks.

  My father drives back to Scituate one day and everything’s been replaced. Houses have changed color and there are more of them—the bookstore’s now a knick-knack shop, the bookie’s a barber, the package store’s a bank. He digs his heel in below the gas pedal as he steers, his heel wears a hole in the carpet, beneath the carpet is steel. Sweat drips from his ankle in summer, collects in the hole, eats away at the steel. Without thinking he will end up outside the house he grew up in, he will look at the front door but he will not enter. His legs will not carry him, his hand will not work the latch, as in the dream when you come to the threshold you know you must pass but cannot. Open your mouth to scream but nothing comes out.

  My mother by now has a warrant out on him for nonpayment of child support. “Nonsupport” we call it around my house. I’m three, and cannot remember my father, who is thirty-three. After my mother left him he drifted, south again, eventually ending up back in Palm Beach. There he’s found the title for his book—The Little World of Pier 5. It’s all mapped out in his head, he just has to write it down.

  Idling outside his family home my father sits in his car, a wood-grained Ford station wagon, a “Woodie,” a car the Beach Boys sing about. The springs buried in the seat dig into his back. This is the house he lived in, off and on, until he married my mother. He looks up to his mother’s bedroom window, the shade pulled half down, how he left it when he left, his mother bedridden then. If he opens the car door the inside light will click on and he will be illuminated, he will turn from shadow to object, become solid, something you could attach handcuffs to. Two brothers he went to school with have become town cops, the Breen boys, those ignorant fucks. They know my father’s face, know about the warrant, one even stops by my grandmother’s for coffee, promises to keep a sharp eye out. If my father’s foot comes off the clutch, touches down on the tar, the sirens will sound, the Breen boys will appear with their warrant, their clubs, say, “Aha,” say, “Gotcha,” carry him away, the car left at the stoplight, the door sprung open, the interior light lighting the now-empty seat, the seat shaped like his body, the radio playing Top 40.

  Move your foot from the brake to the gas, keep your foot on the clutch—the house stays where it is, stays where you left it. Close your eyes and you see it—open them and it’s there. A sunspot on your eyelid, that’s home. Cover one eye and it flattens, it shifts to one side. Cover the other, it shifts to the left. Blink slowly back and forth—the house swings like a pendulum on a grandfather clock, your mother laid out in the parlor.

  Did he know he would never return, never walk up the front steps, never enter the kitchen again? A woman he almost recognizes carries a platter up to the door, sandwiches maybe, but what is her name? Inside there will be plenty of liquor, a sea of booze, but not enough. If he steps into the house again not even the walls will stand where he remembers. Each room will be smaller, rooms he’d forgotten will appear between them. The paint will be wrong and he will not find the hole where he kicked his foot through the plaster the night of the storm when he knew his boat was badly anchored. If he pushes open the door his mother will be dead inside and if he doesn’t, well, what will that mean? If he pushes open the door he can say goodbye to her body but what is the body? If he crosses the threshold the police will be waiting in one of two small rooms, ignorant fucks, waiting for his return, they have waited all these years. Blood from a stone. Once he could outrun them but he no longer knows the way through his own house.

  hiss & fall

  Spring-timed, the showers run maybe thirty seconds before the valve twists shut and you are forced to hit the stainless steel button again. When the water shuts off sometimes the man beneath the spray beside you doesn’t notice. Hands in his hair, lather running in streams down his face, eyes straight ahead—the sound of water surrounds him, you keep hitting your button, but this one man is lost—lost in the white tiles, lost in the fluorescence, lost in the hiss and the fall.

  After the Cage, Housing is the next level of work open to newcomers. Or at least this is where newcomers are encouraged to work. Only a few hours a night, like the Cage, but it’s more intense. No longer are you protected behind steel mesh. This is where the men bring the bed tickets that were handed out earlier at the Cage, this is where they strip down naked and hand in their clothes, to be stored overnight in the Hot Room. The Hot Room has a door like an old freezer, with that kind of pull handle, but inside it’s a sauna, wood-lined, set for maybe 180 degrees fahrenheit. To kill any bugs, to vaguely sanitize the clothes. Inside the Hot Room the smell is of superheated sweat, quick-fermented, an almost shiny smell, as shiny as an overworn coat. The joke is that it’s a good place to go to make out. Meet me in the Hot Room in ten minutes, we joke with our co-workers. If I’m not there start without me, they joke back. An as-yet-unnamed inner ring of Hell. A counter separates the guests from the two workers who take their clothes, live-in staff, formerly homeless guys who now live at the shelter, have their own rooms. A transitional step, theoretically, back into the world. Normally there are two counselors working Housing, one for the Brown side, one for the Yellow, but often one fails to show, which can make things difficult. The live-in staff worker takes the bed ticket, hands back a plastic bin with a wooden hanger and a wrist tag inside. The guest hangs his jacket, pants and shirt on the hanger, then puts his shoes, socks, underwear and whatever else into the bin. Both the hanger and bin are then given back to the live-in staff worker, who walks the hanger into the Hot Room, puts the bin on a shelf. Similar to a coat check at a museum, the number on the hanger corresponds to the number on the wrist tag, except this is
also the number of a bed. Each man is allowed to store one bag overnight—by nine there is a mountain of bags to negotiate around. My job is to oversee this operation, to see it moves along smoothly, defuse any incidents. Mirrors are screwed to the walls along the benches the guests sit on while they undress, only these mirrors are made of stainless steel, not glass—glass could break, become a weapon. Someone might punch the face looking the wrong way back at him. The screws that attach the metal to the wall cause slight indentations, the indentations cause distortions, creating a funhouse effect. Your head in this mirror, if held at a certain level, becomes massive. Your chin vanishes. Move slightly and you can have superman arms, or a belly that takes over your body. You can open your mouth and it keeps on opening, becomes your whole head. Some of the drunk guys, some of the psych guys, you see them, halfway naked on a bench, staring at their reflections, open-mouthed—When did I become a gargoyle?

  How do they navigate an hour, I wonder, let alone a city, a lifetime? One of my first nights upstairs a man needs a new set of clothes—maybe he’d pissed himself, maybe he had bugs, maybe it was just time. As I head for the room where the donated clothing is sorted and stored, I stop, whisper to Gabriel, a salt-of-the-earth Midwesterner who approaches the job with a mixture of gravitas and levity that I aspire to, How do I know what size he wears? Gabriel just looks at me and smiles—You ask him.

  Just off the changing room are the showers, a tiled room with a dozen showerheads, where the men pass through and hopefully linger, if only for a few moments. I move between the men undressing and the showers, stand between the two rooms, subtly looking over their bodies, checking for rashes or discolorations or anything weird, which I will report to the clinic. I will check the condition of their clothes and offer replacements. If a man is too drunk I will send him back downstairs to sleep it off in the lobby rather than risk a scene in the dorms. But I won’t do any of this at first, at first I won’t know what I am doing, beyond watching them wash, beyond steering them upstairs without any hassles. At first I will count how many times the button must be pressed for a man to take a shower. Some drunks seem to find the water an annoyance, some psych guys speak directly into the spigot, arguing with the pressure, pleading. Most hit the button five or six times, enough for a quick lather and rinse. Sometimes a drunk will go over to the other side, turn psychotic. Sometimes the psych guys will start drinking, some call it “self-medicating” but it looks like clinging to an anvil in the middle of the sea. Like everywhere, some are ashamed of their bodies, turn their faces to the tiles, hold their hands over their privates as they walk. Some glance at others’ bodies, some glance longer. Some stand defiant, with their hand on the button, pressing it like a gambler murmuring, Hit me. Burt comes in every night, stands under the shower for an hour, slams the button over and over with the side of his fist. I don’t know his story. To chat is difficult up in Housing, difficult to start up a conversation with a naked man. Burt looks like he works construction, at least he wears a hardhat, and his clothes are often covered with plaster dust. A big man, barrel-chested, he comes upstairs in the last hour, stands under the hot water until it’s time to close up, his legs spread wide. He looks like a construction worker, but perhaps it’s just a costume. Perhaps he was a construction worker, once, and at some point he lost his job, got laid off. Maybe he never was, technically, constructing anything, maybe he did demolition, maybe they handed him a sledgehammer and a pry bar, pointed to a wall. Maybe he drank, maybe the job dried up, maybe he swung the sledgehammer at the boss one day, maybe one day they pointed to the door. In subsequent months I’ll see Burt walking downtown. Once or twice I’ll see him dozing on a bench in the Common, still wearing that yellow plastic hardhat.

  my dostoyevsky

  (1964) Head bowed, faux contrite, my father stands in the dock, listens to what he’s done, awaits his sentence. It could be a year, it could be five. The judge asks if he has anything to say in his own defense and my father says nothing. The arresting officer tells the story of finding him behind the wheel of the Palm Beach sheriff’s family car. In the backseat were the passengers he’d picked up, as if he were driving a taxi and they were his fares. It’s against the law to impersonate a taxi in Florida, but this lesser charge is dropped for the greater charge of stealing an automobile. My father was drunk at the time and in a blackout, though he never uses that word. The words he uses are “toxic amnesia.” Still bleary, he remembers none of it.

  He’s been held in the “stockade” since his arrest, five weeks ago, awaiting trial. But now there is no trial, just the formality of sentencing, as he enters a guilty plea. He stands in the dock, does not fight what the judge hands down—six months’ hard labor in the county jail. In lieu of doing time he could pay a fine, not much, really, a few hundred dollars, he could wire his father and ask for the money, but maybe both of them know it’s better this way. My father, it seems, cannot stop drinking. Not on the outside, not on his own. For almost twenty years, since high school, he has identified himself as a writer, but he has yet to write much, beyond notes scribbled out on cocktail napkins, titles for his novels-to-be. He’s been locked up before—a week here, an overnight there—so he knows what the inside of a cell is like. No leniency begged—he will be sober for a few months and he will write out the novel that sits in his head. Something inside him knows it won’t get done otherwise, that the booze is eating away at his talents, his energies. In six months (no, five, he gets credit for time served), he will emerge with a draft. This setback will be turned into a victory. It will quiet the chatter in his head.

  He thinks:

  This will be my prison novel. My Dostoyevsky. My Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn will be green with envy when he reads this shit.

  Except this isn’t a prison—it’s a county jail. Palm Beach, no less, hardly Siberia. Here the prisoners play Monopoly in the hallways. He isn’t doing time for any grand or noble purpose—it’s an everyday drunk charge, a car stolen in a blackout. But prison sounds more grandiose than jail, and grandiose is preferable to commonplace. Years later he will be arrested again, for robbing banks, though really it’ll be for passing forged checks. This time he will end up in prison, and he will be given more time, three to five, but by then his powers, whatever they once were or might have been, will be gone. He may imagine another novel will come from it but nothing will. By the time he gets out this second time he will be nearly fifty, having drunk heavily for thirty years, and he will live in Boston from flophouse to flophouse, driving a real taxi now, not a sheriff’s car, twenty years after going to jail for impersonating a taxi.

  exterminator!

  Just off the showers is the drying room, where a live-in staff worker sits in a closet, handing out towels and soap, flip-flops and johnnies. One flight up to the dorms another live-in staff worker leads each man to the right bed, after silently aiming his flashlight at the wrist tag. Sometimes it goes smoothly, often not. At nine o’clock we hurry the last guy upstairs, close the Hot Room, set the thermostat, go down to the lobby, write up the night in the log:

  9:10 Housing firsts—

  Tonight I was called to the fourth floor to rescue Isaac Clegg, who not only fell out of bed, but had the bed fall on him. Upon extrication Isaac was found to have a cut above his eye, and was brought to the clinic for a look. The bed was returned to its proper position.

  Amazing how easily the skin of a drunk splits open, their blood really does flow more freely, thinned out by the booze. I helped Isaac to his feet, walked him downstairs, leaving tiny crimson drops all the way. The nurses had gone for the day so I dressed the wound myself.

  And Russell Pagano had a Kwell.

  In the beginning this is my true purpose, the thing I can do that seems to help, that seems to do something. “Kwell” is the brand name for a skin lotion/shampoo used to kill bugs—head lice, pubic lice, scabies—which feast on human blood. Kwell’s active ingredient is DDT, the banned pesticide, and the warning states it’s not to be administered to th
e same body more than once in thirty days, though we sometimes do, if the bugs are especially pernicious, if they have taken up residence, built cities. I’ve been trained to kill bugs from an early age. To keep me busy my grandmother would send me into her yard with a bottle of bleach to pour down the anthills—a thrill to see thousands of ants stream out of their underground world and writhe. Later, the last house my family lived in was infested with carpenter ants, bigger than the ants I’d bleach, meaner, named (or misnamed) for their tendency to eat through wooden sills and joists. Hours were spent with a hammer on the sewer cap in the backyard under the spotlight, crushing those that scurried into the light.

  At Pine Street I continue in my role of exterminator. I have a way with the psych guys, a certain patience to sit and engage them in twisted ramblings, about aliens invading their bodies, about self-dentistry and handmade shoes, then gently steer the conversation back to their need for a Kwell. George likes to set trashbarrels on fire in the Common and warm his hands over the flames, muttering about his lost kingdoms. George, to hear him tell it, is a deposed, and sometimes a beheaded, queen. Queen George. Lice thrive so well on his body that they can be seen crawling over him from twenty paces. I sit beside him as he picks one the size of a corn kernel off his neck. He holds it to his eye and speaks, a benediction. To get George upstairs is a coup, to convince him to peel off the layers of clothing collected over god knows how many months and stand before me naked, six-four and muttering, to allow me to apply the poison to his back, between his legs, to the red spots that cover his chest—this is my destiny. First I bring him to the clothing room to pick out a complete new outfit—a pair of gray wool pants, not covering his ankles, as is his style; high lace boots; a thermal t-shirt; three wool sweaters; a long snorkel jacket with fur trim around the hood. To Kwell George can take an hour or two—first he needs to strip, then shower, then the lotion needs to seep into his skin, then he has to shower again. I sit beneath the fluorescents, listening to how they tried to burn him at the stake but he wouldn’t catch fire, his big hands still working his flesh, searching for his dying minions. Nothing in the shelter makes more sense to me, makes me understand my purpose more, than to kill bugs on a homeless man’s flesh, to dress him well in donated, cast-off clothes, to see him the next day, laughing beside a burning barrel.