Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (4 page)

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.

(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:

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.

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:

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.

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 the 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.

(1964)
While in the Palm Beach County Jail my father’s job will be to sit in a booth and work the switch that lets people in and out of the front gate. Button Man. In from the outside, out from the inside. If he lets a man escape he will have to serve that man’s time, that’s what they tell him.
The Button Man
will be the title of his novel. I’m too young to know what prison is, nearly too young to know what a father is, or that mine is gone.

He thinks (approximately):

He thinks:

He thinks:

He thinks:

Sherrie writes:

Pogo writes:

Steady Ray writes:

He thinks: