Loitering: New and Collected Essays (5 page)

“Is there a reporter here?” some guy demands to know.

His voice wavers with anger but his question floats unanswered and hangs ignored in a rude silence until, unnerved, I point to the parking lot and say, “Yeah, there’s tons of them. They’re all over the place.”

Even as I watch the guy walk off I know in a low-frequency animal-to-animal way that he’s the one, the man I need to talk to. Some part of this story is lodged inside him. In terms of clothing alone he’s way worse off than I am, and what he’s wearing, jeans and a T-shirt, show he’s been rudely expelled from one cozy circumstance and dragged against his will into the rain. He’s now caught in between, trapped in some place I recognize as life itself. It’s obvious he hasn’t been sober in hours and maybe years. If it could be said that these big-deal journalists have control of the story, and therefore, in a fundamental sense, are liars, albeit professional and highly compensated, then this guy is the anti-journalist, because in his case the story is steering him, shoving him around and blowing him willy-nilly down the street. The truth is just fucking with him and he’s suffering narrative problems. He began the night with no intention of standing in this rain, and his
exposure to it is pitiful. As he moves unheeded like the Ancient Mariner through the journalists I feel a certain brotherly sympathy for him, and I’m enamored of his utter lack of dignity. He’s moved beyond all poses. I know he’ll come back to me, that it’s just a matter of a little more rejection, and when he returns, when he settles on me, I’ll welcome him like a prodigal.

He doesn’t know it yet, but I’m the only one who will listen to him.

Meanwhile we’re at the edge of dawn, a first feathering of gray light that brings a bum stampede to the streets of Belltown. I live down here, and every morning at roughly five o’clock bums pour out of the missions and shelters and alleys in a kind of shabby and shadowy pre-commute, followed by the real thing an hour or two later. They pool up and briefly form a chorus. They fish around in squashed packs of
GPC
cigarettes, fire up. “Look at these news-media dicks,” they say. Lights have come on in the
IBEW
Local 46 building and a few guys with lunch buckets are standing outside the Labor Temple Restaurant and Lounge. More and more people are standing around, trying to figure out what’s going on. When the bums ask what’s happening the question sounds yearningly metaphysical or like a child stirring from a dream. Their need to know, at any rate, is tonally different than that of
a big-league journalist. And still we’ve got beaucoup reporters doing their insane pantomime of sincerity in the parking lot. It’s like the Hitler tryouts in that Mel Brooks movie
The Producers
. None of the TV people have budged from their encampment in the parking lot, and I realize they’re operating under the strictest criterion of relevance—every camera is focused in the same direction—and that their sense of the narrative is, generally, in sync with the police, that is, their reason for being here will end in a roughly coincident moment.

The guy’s back. No one will listen to him, he’s just learned.

“These fucking cops,” he starts right up. “These goddamn pigs! They said there’s no room on the bus. Me and my friend been standing in the rain all night. I’m a vet and he’s an American Native. That ain’t right. And these fucking assholes—you don’t believe me? Here’s my card.”

He shows me his veterans ID, establishing his credentials, his suprapatriotic right to feel and also express his grievous outrage.

“That’s some real shit,” he says. “Dennis R. Burns. US Army Retired.”

I tell him my first name.

“You know anybody?” he asks.

“You mean, like, somebody that could do something? Like Jesus Christ?”

“You a Born Again?”

“I was just joking.”

“I know somebody,” Dennis says.

I ask him if he knows what’s going on.

“Yeah, got a guy with a gun, big black guy, 110 Vine Street, apartment #210. L. was throwing furniture at his girlfriend. This was about midnight. I’m the one that called the police, stupid me. I’m the maintenance man. L.’s generally a quiet guy, a little hypertensive, but nice. Very intelligent, well spoken.”

“So he has a gun?”

“He’s got two, a 9mm and something else, like a .357. I hope they don’t hurt the man. Are you a journalist?”

“I’m really wet. You want some coffee?”

“What happened to your hands?”

“They’re all fucked up. It’s not contagious or anything.”

“Are you a reporter?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“7-Eleven’s open. We could get coffee at 7-Eleven.”

On the way there I pull out my Olympus Pearl-corder S803—
testing, one, two, three
—and discover the batteries are dead.

“You sure you’re a journalist?” Dennis says. “Hey, my son’s an editorial cartoonist for the
Albuquerque
Times
. He makes fun of everything—politicians, everything. He’s always got a shitty fucking look on his face—like you.”

On the way back from 7-Eleven with our coffees we hook up with Tom, who’s drinking something throttled in a brown bag. He tells me, “I been up all night and I’m getting kinda moody. We were just gonna get drunk and listen to Elton John or some Asian music. But this gunman kept me up all night.”

“And they wouldn’t let us on the bus,” Dennis says. And then he asks, “You ever write about Veterans Affairs?”

I feel bad I’ve led him on. “No,” I say.

“There’s prejudice on the bus,” Tom says. “Those that like to drink and raise hell can’t get on the bus. I tried to sleep on the sidewalk but it didn’t feel right.”

I ask about the gunman again.

Tom says, “I don’t like L., but he’s a human being. I live right above him and he’s always yelling, ‘I don’t like white music!’ I’m reservation Indian, but I’m part white too. I’m glad he’s gone. He’s gone now. He’s not a tenant. Soon as he gives up, I mean.”

I really want to know who the gunman is but certain elements of life in what’s essentially an
SRO
conspire against the ready flow of this kind of information. In the main you’re talking about people at the tail end of a
trajectory, people who aren’t any longer carrying around much of the baggage by which we’re known to each other—family, jobs, schools, common aspirations, sundry memberships and affiliations, political grievances, etc.—and so asking for anything in the way of remotely biographical material brings scarcely more than vagaries. Dennis, for instance, insisted several times that the Bad Guy, L., was nice, a nice guy—but I don’t get what kind of very elastic notion of “nice” he’s talking about, given what’s going on. And while of course everyone, even the most wrecked and destitute among us, has a unique personal history, the problematic nature of trying to gather information about people who’ve severed too many basic ties is this—that in a sense we truly have history only insofar as it’s shared, and too much uniqueness really leads away from individuality to anonymity, the great sea of the forgotten. And because the Bad Guy is busy and I can’t talk to him, I’ve got to rely on people who might reasonably be expected to know him, and in fact don’t. I suppose it could also be said we’re known to the extent that we’re dull and orbital about our life, that what’s quotidian about us is more easily shared than the exuberances and passions that push us out of the predictable.

And something like this is further confirmed when Dennis, Tom, and I arrive at the bus. Apparently the
deal is that Metro brings around a bus for all the folks who’ve been forced to evacuate in situations like this, an ordinary accordion-style city bus where people can sleep and keep warm. Inside this bus what you see is pretty much a jackpot of social and psychic collapse, a demographic of bad news. Everybody in there’s fucked up in some heavy way, dragged out of history by alcohol, drugs, mental illness, physical decrepitude, crime, old age, poverty, whatever. Riding this bus in your dreams would give you the heebie-jeebies big-time. There are maybe ten or fifteen people on the bus but between them if you counted you’d probably come up with only sixty teeth. In addition to dental trouble, there are people leaning on canes, people twitching and barefoot with yellow toenails curled like talons, gray-skinned people shivering in gauzy nightgowns, others who just tremble and stare. They’ve been ripped out of their bedrooms and are dressed mostly in nightwear, which is something to see—not because I have any fashion ideas or big thesis about nighties and pj’s, but rather because, this surreal dawn, the harsh, isolated privacy of these people is literally being paraded in public. The falling rain, the bus going nowhere, the wrecked-up passengers dressed for sleep, the man with the gun—these are the wild and disparate components of a dream, and I haven’t slept, and it’s just weird.

And meantime that rodent-like anti-whatever vehicle has parked in the street below the Bad Guy’s window and there’s a super highly trained
SWAT
guy launching tear-gas canisters. We hear the dull pop report like a distant shotgun blast, and then a rainy sprinkling of broken glass on the sidewalk.

“There goes the windows,” Dennis says. “Those are double-pane, $145 apiece. I got a very secure job.”

“Look how fast I left,” Tom says. He pulls a TV remote control out of the pocket of his sweats and clicks at the sky. “It’s pitiful, I know. It’s pitiful.”

“What are the rooms like?” I ask, kind of trying to figure the size of the rooms and calculate how fast the pepper spray or tear gas or whatever will take effect.

Dennis says, “You got one room. You got a stove in the room. You got a fridge in the room. You got a bed.”

After I hear Dennis describe the Bad Guy’s room, the story, the night, everything, starts to end for me. I know they haven’t got him and maybe things will go crazy an hour from now, two hours from now, and people will die or some other TVish sort of scenario will play itself out, but I don’t care. I’ve been out here for seven-plus hours and I’m really wet and can’t hardly bend my fingers anymore. My feet ache and swell inside my boots, even though I’ve removed the laces. But that room! I’m starting to feel all buggy imagining that
man in that room. It sounds so simple, so stripped, so precariously close to nothing, yet outside all this complication is whirling around, cops and meter maids and a
SWAT
guy and a crisis negotiator and TV and spectators, everyone focused on this man in a room with a stove, a fridge, and a bed.

What would you do? How would you end this story?

I walk back to my place, change into dry pants, and feed the dog a bowl of kibble. I sit on the edge of my bed. To keep my feet from cracking I’ve bought a lot of fancy lotions, the labels of which make outlandish, existential promises. One offers itself as “cruelty-free”; another says it will rid my skin of the toxins that are an inescapable part of modern life. The thing is, over the last couple weeks my desire to believe has collapsed into actual belief, and I slather the stuff on like holy water at Lourdes.

I ease my feet into my boots and head back to First and Vine. In my mind I’m turning over the possibility that this whole strange night is a love story, and that if it is, if in fact there’s some kind of romance at the heart of it all, then the entire event will elude me. Also I wonder, in an idle, academic way, why the police alone are so refreshingly without irony. Then I wonder why I find it refreshing. Then I think about the crackheads who stole my belt and raincoat and how the economics
of addiction might connect up with this event. Then I go back to considering the love angle, how it’s nearly impossible to convey our deepest passions yet damned easy to share what’s dullest and worst about ourselves. I’m already composing the story in my head, but when I get back to First and Vine everyone’s gone. The crime scene is no longer officially a scene because the yellow ribbon has been rolled up and taken away. The Bad Guy has surrendered. The police have left. The TV people are off on other assignments. Dennis is gone. Tom is gone. The bus is gone. The window is bashed to hell, the blinds mangled, but otherwise there’s no sign of the siege and the night’s dreamy drama; the workaday world is beginning and all of life is back to pumpkins and mice, and I feel like I’m just waking up, standing there on the sidewalk, all alone, loitering.