Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (20 page)

Santa Two
: (
sits up
) How about a fuckin apartment? You got one?

Santa One
: (
to
SANTA TWO
) Don’t say a word, you cocksucker, don’t say word one.

Daughter One
: It’s Malachi, and Malachi’s barred for life, no parole. Attacked a cop in the building with a knife.

Santa Four
: (
bullhorn
) Man’s life is cheap as beasts’.

Daughter One
: Ah, Malachi, you pissed everyone off.

Santa Two
: You think I’ll weep? No, I’ll not weep.

Daughter Two
: Many do not know they have climbed a steep hill and now stand overlooking the rocks and sea below.

Santa Five
: (
grabs bullhorn from
SANTA FOUR
) What is the cause of thunder?

Daughter Three
: On Day Five those still unsold are coated with chocolate. Very popular, especially among children and junkies, they line up on the Day Five, singing and scratching.

Santa Four
: (
wrests bullhorn back from
SANTA FIVE
,
then whispers to
DAUGHTERS
) Watch this. (
whispers through bullhorn
) Martin. Martin. Martin.

Santa One
: Jesus Christ I miss her. I’m talking straight talk, numbhead.

Daughter Two
: It’d never work. I’d never get him to Mexico. Not enough vodka in the world to keep him unconscious that long. I’d have to kill him.

Daughter One
: Something must be sacrificed.

Santa One
: With the ass, with the ankles, with the feet. God, I miss her.

Daughter One
: Even moonshots jettison the spent engines to get home.

Daughter Two
: Buy him a jug, make sure he kills it. When he falls, make sure he falls face-first into a snowbank, take off his shoes, lose the jacket. But…but…but someone will find him, a samaritan, a Florence-goddamn-Nightingale. How to disguise the body as the heat dribbles out of the flesh?

Daughter Three
: By Day Five each donut was maybe twice its original size, it had become a real meal, and it cost no more than Day One. Good value.

Santa One
: Shut up! Don’t speak!

Santa One
: Look at that picture, she’s holding you in her arms. I talk to her, you cocksucker.

Daughter Two
: Bleeding must be quicker than freezing.

Santa One
: If she were alive I know we’d be together.

Daughter Three
: Day Six—colored sprinkles! They sink into the chocolate like jewels in a crown. The original donut is a mere vehicle at this point for the sprinkles, the scaffolding can now be removed. Most of us really just want the sprinkles.

Santa Four
: How many goddamned days are there? (
sees
SANTA FIVE
,
whispers through bullhorn
) Martin. Martin. Martin. (
chuckles
) Gracious, my lord, hard by here is a hovel.

Santa Three
: Wait a minute, dryballs, let me speak. Who you know is of vital importance in America. Who you know, how well do you know them. VITAL!!!

Santa Two
: Methinks the ground is even.

Santa Four
: Horrible steep.

Santa One
: (
stacking newspapers
) Grist for the mill. It’ll all be in my book—
The Pine Street Palace
—and my son will be just another character in that book. Useless fuck. Leaving his blood outside to rot. Like one of those pollacks who lived beside the train tracks that carried the Jews to the camps, leaning on his shovel and waving as the train smokes past. My imbecile son, standing there waving. (
punches fist into palm
) Worthless fuck. If you don’t believe in yourself all is lost.

Santa Four
: Where do I know you from, are you on tv or something

Santa One
: I’ve never seen you before.

Santa Four
: Why’re you dressed up like Santa?

Santa One
: I said I don’t know you.

Santa Four
: Of course you know me, everybody knows me. Besides, we’re neighbors now.

(1989)
I lock myself away for a week at a time, trying to cultivate compassion. I listen to the Zen master speak, try to understand his words.
The mind created everything, the mind can repair anything
. I understand this as he speaks, take notes so I’ll remember, and then he tells us not to try to understand, to let the “dharma” wash over us like rain. Cross-legged under an enormous tent, a three-ring circus tent, a few hundred of us listening, and all I can hear is that we must heal our relationships with our fathers. This is not what I came for, not what I want to hear. Is he saying that my mind created my father? Is he saying my mind will repair him?

I end up in the dharma tent after a year in therapy. At my first appointment, after a few background questions, Lou shook his head. Why had I taken so long to get help? he wondered. Did I think he was a miracle worker? I joked that I was afraid he’d lock me up, that I questioned my grip on sanity sometimes. For some reason tears were streaming down my face. Lou didn’t laugh. In fact he said that he could and would commit me to a psych hospital if he felt I was a threat to myself. He said he would do that for me, that he wouldn’t let me hurt myself. Thirty days with a phone call, he said. I shook my head, called his bluff,
No, no, no, wait, wait. I work with the homeless, it’s nearly impossible to get a placement.
He lifted the phone—
I can,
he said. But I hadn’t said anything about hurting myself, had I? The thought hadn’t crossed my mind. During that first fifty-minute session he also told me I was an alcoholic, to which I agreed. I’d known it forever, though it seemed the least of my troubles. He explained that he wouldn’t waste his time treating me unless I quit drinking and started going to twelve-step meetings.
Fine
, I said, anything to get this over with as quickly as possible.
It also means you can’t get high anymore
, he informed me,
not ever again.

No problem, I said, fully intending to give it all up.

Both Emily and Richard told me that I didn’t have a drug or alcohol problem, that Lou sounded like a crackpot, that I should never see him again. For the next few sessions I’d get high in the pickup on the way home, which seemed to pleasantly erase any hard feelings that had risen to the surface. I took to drinking a six-pack of nonalcoholic beer a night. I went to meetings once or twice a week, feeling absolutely nothing on the walk over, only to leave feeling wretched. And I couldn’t stop crying. I cried every day for a year, and then the flow lessened. I was fortunate that my job on the Outreach Van brought me in frequent contact with Jeff, who’d been sober for a couple years now, which seemed an impossibly long time. I’d tell Jeff how much I hated the meetings and he’d just nod. I’d tell him how awful they made me feel and he’d just smile.

One night Russell, still sporting his captain’s hat and white shoes, takes another stick of gum, like a fish swallows a hook. Slowly, over the next year, we reel him in, we
track
him, seek him out, let him ride the Van with us. Eventually we find out he’s seventy-six years old, that he’s been on the streets for almost twenty years. In the ’60s Russell had a girlfriend, Rosie, and Rosie had a sister Louise. The three of them were crossing Charles Street one day and a car hit Rosie. As Russell tells it—
She went up in the air and then she came down. Oh boy oh boy
. After that Russell wandered, eventually moving from doorway to doorway on Newbury Street, checking in on all the homeless women.
My girlfriends
, he calls them. The sister, Louise, is now in a nursing home, has been for years, and I begin driving Russell to see her. He tells me he’s planning to propose to her, out of love and because he believes she has some money stashed away. He wants to know if I can help him to buy a car so he can drive her away from the home. Louise has grown batty, repeating herself endlessly, a tape loop jammed inside her. She calls Russell
My little Russell, my dear little Russell
, those days she remembers who he is, and tells him she thinks she’s already married. I suggest to Russell that perhaps if he gets his own apartment his chances with Louise might improve. He’s reluctant to leave his homeless friends, but the chance of marrying Louise is enough to convince him. We start the process. It takes months—endless paperwork, missed appointments, inscrutable evaluations, foot-dragging all around—but the day he unlocks the door to his subsidized apartment, his hand still on the knob, it hits him—
Ah, the key to heaven
, he whispers.

The Zen master tells me that my body is the continuation of my father’s body. This is a hard fact, he says. By now I’ve already spent countless hours in twelve-step meetings, perched on a folding chair, listening to sorry-assed people tell sorry-assed tales in one church basement after another. I’ve heard a pilot talk about waking up in Paris, not remembering he had flown himself and three hundred passengers in the night before. I’ve befriended a guy who poured gasoline on his hand and lit it, just to get the morphine. It takes a year to realize I am no different from anyone else. The Zen master says that if I can understand the nature of my body I will understand the cosmos—this is one promise of Buddhism. Unfortunately, I learn, the path to understanding is through my father’s body, which, it seems, is my body, inescapably.
To be caught in a notion of self is bad. To be caught in a notion of nonself is worse
. I saw him sleeping in the sun on a bench on the Esplanade. He rose and staggered to the edge of the river to piss. Jesus said,
Forgive!
Buddha said,
Awaken!
The first warm day of spring, families out for a Sunday stroll. I watched them watch him, saw how they steered clear. That fucking little girl.

In the mid-1970s, the years my father was in prison, I’d cruise the dark streets of my hometown with Phil in oversized cars we called “boats.” One night we’d test-drive crystal meth cut with marijuana, the next was valium spiked with schnapps. Cheap Trick sang “I Want You to Want Me” from the eight-track, a love song, we understood the sentiment.
The present is made entirely of the past
. The Zen master looks at me as he speaks—
Dwell in the present but learn from the past
.

You must understand that Boston’s essentially a small town, its streets unplanned, sinuous, cow paths paved over and widened. I could have risen from bed any night and walked directly to where my father slept. In fifteen minutes or less I could have found him, taken his hand, led him home. Instead I locked my door, got high, slept until the sun entered me again. The Zen master says that we are adrift in a river of forgetfulness, which still, some days, doesn’t sound like the worst place to be.

(1990)
Emily and I end it after I’ve been sober for a year. I can’t give her a reason not to go to graduate school in California without me. It’s been ten years since we found out who we were. She’s ready to start a family. I’m ready to curl up in a ball for a few more years. That summer I live on the boat and by August Lou says that I have to stop working at Pine Street. Even though I’ve sworn that I’d outlast my father, that I’d be damned if I let him drive me from my job, I quit. Or, more accurately, I just never return when summer ends. For the next ten years I will not set foot in Pine Street. Instead, I go back to school, finish my undergraduate degree, get my diploma. Lou tells me this is a good idea. If Lou had told me to spend a year building sandcastles I would have moved into a sandbox.

One day, that first winter away from Pine Street, I see my father poking through a trashbarrel—something I’d never seen him do before. This will go on forever, I think, he will die outside like this. But within a year he qualifies for an apartment. The same program as Russell. One of the forms he’d filled out made it through the channels. Unbeknownst to me some strings had been pulled by those I once worked with. Lauretta. Tommy. Hilary. After five years on the streets my father’s delusions have become more acute, his toes have been nearly frostbitten off and the damage from alcohol has moved into its next demented phase. But he has made it off the streets alive. I move to New York a year later, to Brooklyn, to begin graduate school. To study poetry.

Before I leave Boston I stop by and visit Russell every month or so. Russell has some problems adjusting to life inside—he can’t figure out how to use the newfangled faucet in the shower, so he washes himself in the sink. He complains softly that the shower’s broken, and I show him again how to work it. I give up trying to explain how to change channels on his television—it seems enough for him to plug it in to turn it on, unplug it to turn it off. His walls were stark when he’d moved in, so I gave him a crewelwork sunflower wallhanging that my grandmother had made years before. In the early winter dark I remember her spreading it out on her lap, a ball of bright yellow yarn unspooling at her feet, batted around by the latest kitten,
Dark Shadows
on tv. And then she would fold it up, go into the kitchen and return with her glass of ice and whiskey.

Jasper, of the expensive shoes, of the vintage suits, of the playing-at-being-homeless, appears in Brooklyn a few months after me. Offered a full scholarship to study art at Cooper Union, he moves to New York and falls immediately into heroin. Within a few years I will see him panhandling outside the Bedford Avenue L station. Thirty-three, still beautiful,
Jasper
, I’ll say,
what the fuck are you doing?
He’ll talk of this job that has fallen through or that gig that dried up, someone who owes him something, a debt soon to be repaid. Sleeping on the roof of his ex-girlfriend’s building, things should turn around next week. The last time I saw him he told me he was moving to L.A., where the winters “aren’t so brutal.” Jasper had moved into the building in the Combat Zone just as Ivan was forced out. The Mafioso heard Ivan was selling heroin out of his building, and that could not be tolerated. I never wanted to know about Ivan’s relationship to junk, perhaps afraid I’d fall into it myself. Ivan found a storefront in the South End, but within a year I heard he was in the hospital. I went to see him and he called it hepatitis but I knew it was AIDS. Norma, a co-worker, told me Ivan started showing up at Pine Street after I left Boston, but had refused to speak to her. And then he vanished, no word of him came from anywhere, for a year, then three, and then we knew he was dead. Richard died a couple years after I moved to Brooklyn. I drove back and sat with him in the hospital for a few days, but his breathing was already erratic, his eyes seemingly uncomprehending.

I stay in New York after getting my degree, teach poetry in the public schools. After the years in the shelter it’s what I want, to work with children. I work in Harlem, in Crown Heights, in the South Bronx. Some of these neighborhoods look like Dresden after the firebombing. I thought I was getting away from the homeless, but you don’t move to New York City to escape the homeless. In some schools half the kids I work with live in shelters. Some of these kids write the best poetry I’ve ever read, weird and alive, but some still can’t read in the sixth grade. I get desperate with the nonreaders, want to grab them and say,
You don’t have much time
. My father’s letters follow me, forwarded from Boston to Brooklyn, psychic bombs. He’s been housed for five years now, and I decide one day to visit him. I want to see his room, look in his face, ask him a few questions about my mother.