Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (5 page)

The Pine Street Inn occupies an entire city block in Boston’s South End. When it moved here in the early 1980s the neighborhood was verging on derelict, even though it’s minutes from downtown. White flight in the ’60s and ’70s, combined with an economic practice known as “red-lining,” where certain sections of the city (read:
black
) were deemed not worthy of investment by the banks, left every third building vacant. The building that became Pine Street is a landmark, a replica of a Sienese tower, marking the entrance into Boston as you drive north on I-93. The tower was used by firemen for a hundred years to practice jumping from a burning building into a net below. Then it became a shelter.

Across from Pine Street, across East Berkeley, looms the Medieval Manor, which describes itself as a “theatre-restaurant.” It opened, coincidentally, the same year the Pine Street Inn moved from its original location, on the real Pine Street, to this abandoned fire station on Harrison Avenue. The Medieval Manor, in its brochure, invites one to “step back hundreds of years into a bawdy, rollicking romp through the Middle Ages.” You sit at long tables as “guests of the king,” while “the minstrel, jester, oaf and wenches respond to the Lord of the Manor’s every whim.” While taking in the fun you are offered a “sumptuous, seven-course banquet, eaten without fork, knife, or spoon.” The Medieval Manor promises to be “the time of your life.” Occasionally, when dinner is being served at Pine Street, a well-dressed party of four appears at our front door, obviously having taken a wrong turn. They ask, timidly, if this is the Medieval Manor, and sometimes I say
yes
, and direct them inside.

Most have been in one war or another—Vietnam, mostly—for some it’s true and some just believe it’s true. Many have been married, many have been in prison. One man speaks through a hole in his throat. Several are blind, many deaf or near deaf. The junkies have holes in their arms that won’t heal. A cotton wick needs to be inserted daily, to drain the pus, and most days they forget to have it done. The epileptics need their meds or they seize—if they drink on their meds they seize worse. Men come through the door with limps and canes, with walkers, crutches, in wheelchairs, and crawling. Some are carried in, draped between two friends, feet dragging behind. One has a glass eye he keeps losing. One has
FUCK YOU
tattooed on the inside of his lower lip. A few have tears tattooed on their cheeks, which means they’ve killed someone. Some have scars from the corners of their mouths to their ears, which means they squealed. Many fingers are gone, or half gone, to heavy machinery or knife fights. Some earlobes have been nibbled off by rats. One guy was set on fire—now the burn scars rise up his neck like flames. A few of the old guys have hernias—their stomachs have fallen into their testicles, which now hang enormously between their legs. Kenny has had the same cough for five years, so he cannot sleep upstairs. At one point David’s teeth were giving him trouble, so he got a book on dentistry from the library and began to learn on himself. He opens his mouth and shows us, how he’d pulled out the infected tooth with pliers, super-glued tiny nails in its place.

That first summer twenty or thirty guys could be sprawled out on the benches and floor of the Brown Lobby. We put a cap on the number we will allow in after nine, send the rest back into the night. As the nights get colder more men show up, and a temperature is agreed upon, maybe forty-five degrees, if it gets below that we won’t turn anyone away. The lobbies will be open and the men can wander in anytime. Still, some freeze to death outside, those that can’t make it back, those that forget there’s someplace to go. As fall becomes winter the numbers sleeping in each lobby increase, until by January there are a hundred, a hundred and fifty men sprawled out. Clusterfucked, now there’s nowhere to even put your foot—guys stake out corners, tabletops, benches, any square of open floor, and still more come, without anywhere to fall but on top of someone else, who yell and kick and punch the intruder off. Some end up playing cards and smoking beneath the gloom of an exit sign or in the shaft of light coming from the open door of the piss-soaked bathroom. Some wrap their bodies around their possessions and feign sleep. Some pace and mutter, bend to pick butts off the tile, their fingers orange with nicotine. Some piss themselves in their sleep, and the piss spreads out, soaking those unfortunate enough to be in proximity. The weekend supervisor calls himself “Captain Yusef,” and he calls the 3-to-11 the “Can-Do Shift.”

After work we go out drinking, to the Rat or the Middle East or to Chet’s Last Call, to hear the Minutemen or the Pixies, the Del Fuegos or Galaxie 500. Motorhead or Flesh For Lulu. Or just to drink, to lean into each other and shout over the noise, to put our lips to each other’s ears, to see how it feels to be that close, another’s voice vibrating inside our brains, barely understood but enough. Enough to drive to her apartment after closing time and stay. And then the next afternoon we’re both back in the Brown Lobby, listening to the reading of the log. Only now I’d been in her room or she’d been in mine and we know more about each other, we’d seen each other naked or felt the other’s nakedness in the darkness and we’re both sheepish but charged up by it all and we know we’ll go out drinking again after the shift only maybe this time alone or maybe just go straight to her apartment.

Often I feel like a glorified security guard, often a guest is asked to take a walk because there isn’t time to deal with him any other way. And if a guest begins to “escalate,” to “go off”
(Look! here comes a walking fire!)
, it threatens the whole building,
poof
, up in flames. Some days it feels like an unending play, a play that began from an idea, the idea of bending down to someone struggling, but that idea kept expanding, like some theory of the universe, until it grew so large that it will be impossible to ever stage. It has become nearly the size of air, or water. A map the size of the world.

It could have just been a job, a paycheck, relatively well-paying for unskilled labor. For some of my co-workers it was, some make a career of less. But I didn’t think working with the homeless would be my career. I left several times, for a month or six, only to return, start again, back in the Brown Lobby. I didn’t care so much about the money, I had other ways to make money. But I kept returning. At the shelter no one asks where you come from or why you ended up there. The woman I went home with didn’t ask why I wasn’t trying for something more—a nice car, a real apartment. No matter what I’d say it’d only be half believed anyway. After eight hours her clothes and her hair smelled just like mine.
Everyone’s here for a reason
, Joy says, looking at a well-dressed, seemingly put-together guy who claims to be temporarily in a tight spot. She gives him a bed, and by the end of the week the police carry him in, legless and swinging.

(1960s)
I crawl toward my father’s face as we lay on the grass beside a whitewalled tire—a snapshot, an artifact—evidence that at some point, at least once, I was an infant in his arms. The father as ship, as vessel, holding the child afloat. But there was a parallel father as well—the drunk, the con, the paranoid. The father as ship, but taking on water, going down.

When I was six months old my mother gathered us up and left. The truck came while Jonathan was at work and moved us, back to Scituate, one town over.
It’s a complete mystery to me why she’d leave. I wasn’t drinking, I never drank, not when I was working
. This is his version. She never spoke about that day, not to me. What I remember is that every six months for the first five years of my life we moved, but all within the same town, like we each had one foot nailed to the sidewalk. For a while we stayed on the couch of a woman my mother worked with at a restaurant. This woman’s husband lived in a wheelchair, the house all ramped and railed. We slept upstairs, in a hallway, between rooms, out of the way. We were getting on our feet, looking for a place. My mother’s parents lived in the same town, she must have left us with one or the other, some nights, just us kids. Our mother wouldn’t have stayed with them, not too often. Twenty, twenty-one, she wanted to make it on her own. Not even a high school diploma, she held two or three jobs, in bars and restaurants, in convenience stores. A certificate from hairdressing school, but the only hair she cut was ours, my brother’s, mine. Bottle-blond sometimes, she wore a wig sometimes. Once she got her own room she’d line the wigs up on styrofoam heads on the thrift store bureau she’d painted blue. Until then we rented rooms, we rented houses, we crashed with co-workers, with friends, each a rathole, a sty, each a step down. I couldn’t help out, my hands useless, not sized for anything in that world. I played with a little stuffed monkey (“Jocko”—expensive, imported, my father charged it to my grandfather, mailed it to me on Christmas), I entertained her as best I could. I’d explain the games I invented, the fort I’d built out of blankets and chairs, how the cat was now my prisoner. “Whatd’ya want me to do,” she’d say, “stand on my head and spit nickels?” When I misplaced a mitten or a Matchbox she’d barely look up from whatever she was doing, just matter-of-factly point out “If it was up your ass you’d know where it was.” I loved these expressions, playful and surreal.

Five years of this, of piecing together lousy jobs, of roaming, and she had enough. She took a job at the bank, as a teller, so we’d have insurance (
bluecrossblueshield
), so she could get a loan, a mortgage. She could still work nights and weekends in bars, in restaurants. The Bell Buoy. Pier 44. The Ebb Tide, with its unintentionally tragic name. For a while she woke up at five to open the bakery at the supermarket, where she made donuts. This was the only real supermarket in town, having drawn the lifeblood (
bigfisheatlittlefish
) from the smaller markets. I remember it being built on the muddy field that the tenements once occupied. A friend had lived in one of those decrepit buildings—the yellow trucks came one day and knocked them all down. Each evening after the workers left I’d creep around the machines and mud. A small outbuilding was left standing and inside were boxes filled with skeleton keys (a key to a skeleton? or was the key itself a bone?). I took some home and the next evening this building too was gone, bulldozed under.

The bank gave her a loan to buy a two-thousand-dollar ruin, a complete wreck of a house. Nightly the raccoons came to our ramshackle porch and raided the garbage, which was submerged in the yard beneath a lid that flipped open when you stepped on it. We’d watch them from the kitchen with the lights out, amazed at how organized they were, a team—one holding open the lid, another reaching into the pail and passing out the bones and scraps to a line of hungry bandits. The lookout would raise a paw and hiss if we came to the door.

Unless a boyfriend was sleeping over she would bring my brother and me to the supermarket rather than leave us in that drafty house to wake up alone. We’d wander the empty aisles while she opened the bakery. It was unspoken, but we could eat anything we wanted, as long as we hid the evidence. At least that’s how I understood our agreement. An entire supermarket. Like a television game show. Aisle of cracker, aisle of chocolate. A few years later I would walk in with the silver coins I stole from the coffee can in her bedroom, coins she’d hoarded from the bank, from tips, and use them to buy candy bars, until one day a cashier asked if I really wanted to use a rare Flying Liberty silver dollar to pay for a Heath bar. Soon after I began shoplifting, deciding it was wrong to take money from my mother. I hit all the stores she had worked—the convenience store, the newsstand, I even had my eye on the bank. I found a loose grate that led into a crawlspace and to the bank’s basement. I was skinny, I had a plan. In the supermarket I mirrored what I had done just a few years earlier as my mother was busy making donuts in the still-dark morning, only now I did it in daylight. I was maybe all of eight. I’d wander in, put plums in my pockets, Twinkies, walk out. We got no allowance, and this was where the food was. The good food. I had been feeding myself there as long as I knew. Soon I didn’t even bother to see if I was being watched. I ate the plums as I wandered, left the pits on the shelves beside boxes of cereal, beside the faces of smiling athletes. I’d go to the bakery, look past the glass cabinet at the donut machine, I’d remember standing on a chair watching the yellowy dough extrude into the hot oil, watching the donuts form, roiling in the agony of becoming. My mother would set us up at the formica lunch counter on the spinning stools and give us juice, milk, hot donuts. I would take the little packages of jelly and fill my pockets, the vast parking lot slowly coming out of the darkness through the plate-glass windows behind us. Occasionally a carpenter would come and rap on the window, hoping to be let in, to be allowed an early donut. Occasionally my mother would unlock the door, let him in.

Within a few months the house caught fire—the raccoons toppled a smoldering grill left on the back porch. My brother and I were asleep upstairs when our mother came in with Vernon, her boyfriend at the time, and lifted us, still wrapped in blankets, to carry us through the smoky house. The fire station sat directly across the street, I remember running up the stairs, busting in on the firemen’s card game. The firemen barely looked up from their hands, gestured to the alarm box on the wall, told us to pull it. Only then did they throw their cards down, jump into their boots and slide down the pole to the waiting truck. They drove past the house first, then returned, dragged the hoses into the backyard, put out the blaze.

It turned out not to be such a bad thing, as my mother got some insurance money and had the whole house renovated. Vernon was a carpenter, did all the work. He was also married, so this was a way for him to spend more time with her without arousing suspicion.

I got stopped one day as I was leaving the supermarket, a half-eaten candy bar in my hand. The manager brought me into a little room elevated above the registers that had two-way mirrors on four sides, just like on television. I realized he sat up there on the lookout for people like me. I felt sick. He asked what I was doing and I said I didn’t know. He asked where my mother was and I said at work. He asked me for the number and I said he couldn’t call her there, that there was no phone. I might have even started to cry. He asked if I knew that what I was doing was wrong. Yes yes, I said. After an hour he let me go. He told me he’d have his eye on me, that he wouldn’t forget my face. I never told my mother, even when, years later, she was pressuring me to get a job there, bagging groceries, stacking shelves, anything.