I'd been here before. Last Thursday, following up on the list Richard Garces gave me. The guy who finallyadmitted well, yes, he did kind of look after things (nowhere in evidence now, I noticed) had shown me around, guided me to boxes of books stacked in the hall by his own cramped room.
It all looked substantially different now, of course. Perspective is everything.
Lights-out was at ten. Then you lie listening to bodies turn on the spit of their memories, volleys of farts from newly challenged digestive systems, the occasional scream or convulsion, conversations so private that only one person's involved. You feel the rasp of coarse blankets, monitor the thunderlike rumbling of your own bowels. You're asleep, then awake, then asleep again but aware you're dreaming: another border given way.
What time of night is it? No way to know. Have you slept an hour? Four hours? Ten minutes?
A single bare bulb hung at the back of the hall, eclipsed as pilgrims shuttled back and forth to the bathroom. Then they'd settle back into beds hawking, hegiras having stirred up various sediments in chest and head.
Never more alone than at 3 A.M. Wake without reason, night's face staring you clown. ERs fill with patients. Men my age suddenly alert, certain that the pain in their aim's a heart attack.
Dim residual light from outside, lash of car headlights. Someone moving below me. A voice.
"You okay up there, man?"
"What?"
"Been slam-dunkin' yourself for the better part of an hour now."
"Sony."
"Hey. No problem. God knows I'm used to it."
"Come here often, do you?"
"Regular Soup Kitchen Sam, yeah."
"Don't guess you know what time it is."
If I'd had a brother, this was the way it might have felt. Parents elsewhere in the house. Two of us up here in the crow's nest holding out against the world.
"Three-eighteen."
Okay. So that morning light in the window's only imagination. Too much night left.
"Name's Griffin, right?"
A beat went by. Two beats.
"Word is, you're a good man. What everyone says. What they don't know is why you'd be down here now, way you are."
I give up. Don't know, myself.
"My grandmother used to tell me how this collector'd come 'round. Tell her records show she owed some arrears. He'd stay to drink a cup of coffee, then after he was gone she'd lift up the napkin, find a five-dollar bill there."
"Heard the same story about Pretty Boy Floyd."
"Right. People be callin' you Pretty Boy Griffin soon." He laughed. It sounded like someone choking. "You ain't though."
"Pretty boy?"
Same laugh. Neither of us said anything for a while. Lay listening to the bodies around us.
"Grandmother raised me. Neither one of us ever knew where my mother might've got off to. Never developed much feeling for people-maybe because of that, who knows? Mostly dog meat, from my experience. Scrape out the bowl. But I purely loved that woman."
One of our shipmates lunged past, bouncing from bed to bed, and fetched up against the wall, where he began sonorously throwing up. Raw-meat smell of blood.
"Gran's life was hard. Wasn't much ever came along to ease it."
We fell asleep again.
Then, five or so, some fool decided his destiny was to liberate whatever I'd squirreled away in my bunk and came rooting. I heard him four steps off. I'd just clamped a fist around his balls when a hand snaked down from the bunk above, wrapped hair about itself and lifted. The would-be hijacker's eyes went round. Feet half a foot off the floor.
"Your call," my bunkmate said. "What'U we do with this piece a shit?"
"What the hell. Turn him loose, I guess."
"You sure?"
"Yeah."
"Not much fun in that, is there?" But he set him down.
The hijacker scuttled away.
Light had begun breaking outside. Real this time, not imagined. We lay there wide awake.
"Berouting us for breakfast soon enough," my bunkmate said. "You up for slimy grits, soggy toast and half-done eggs?"
"I've handled worse."
"Bet you have."
Roused by light and smells from the kitchen, without realpurpose, direction or goal, bodies had begun staggering about, a kind of Brownian motion.
"Don't mean to impose. Your life and your business. But why are you down here?"
"Trying tofindmyself."
"Bad thing to lose."
"Have to admit it takes some doing." Or maybe not, come to think of it.
Meanwhile, things had picked up in the kitchen.
"Smell that coffee. No better smell in the world." Spoken like a true New Orleanian.
"One tip for you, though."
"Okay."
"Don't touch the casseroles or macaroni. Pasta here'H kill you. It's documented."
33
SIMPLE SUZIE WAS around fifty now, my age, a little less. She'd been on the street for twenty years at least, and everyone knew her: cops, mail earners, newspaper boys, homeowners and apartment renters on her usual beat just riverside of Claiborne in the triangle formed by Felicity and Melpomene, enclosing Terpsichore, Euterpe, Polymnia. Some of these people gave her food, others asked about her dog Daniel. Daniel had been dead as long as she'd been on the streets, but she still talked about him all the time. For eight, ten years Suzie's husband beat her eveiy other day or so. Then one day he came home from work early (he'd been firedbut failed to tell her that) and because she didn't have dinner ready (at four in the afternoon) grabbed Daniel up by the hind legs and swung him against the wall. Dog barely had time to bark twice. And when Suzie bent over the clog, something like oatmeal with ketchup coming out its ears and broken skull, he started in on her. When neighbors checked a couple of days later she was still lying there in the kitchen. Went to Charity and hadn't been the same since. That's when she became Simple Suzie and a denizen of New Orleans' streets, as famous in her own uptown way as Sam the Preacher or the Duck Lady in the Quarter. Police never found the husband.
As he struggled up the slope towards sixty, Ed opened the door one day to an unexpected visitor: no word for it then, but now we call it Alzheimer's. Within a year things had got bad enough that he couldn't live alone anymore and moved in with his only daughter and her husband. Within two, things were bad enough that he couldn't do much of anything on his own. Dress himself, for instance, or see to personal hygiene. And within three, daughter Cassie had died, leaving husband Al (for Aloysius, but no one God help him knew that) with three kids under ten, Grandpa Ed and a job that paid three-sixty-five an hour. The kids pretty much fended for themselves as Al began coming home later and later from work. Then one day he didn't come home at all. Couple of days after, Ed realizedhe was hungry, no one had been bringing him food. He pried off a simple window lock. Using the lock as a lever, a closet doorknob as a hammer, he worked the pins out of the door hinges. He went downstairs into the family room, where the kids, startled at the appearance of this naked old man smeared in his own excrement (though in fact they looked much the same), began screaming. Ed walked on into the kitchen, found a box of grits and some dodgy cheese, threw it all together in a pan to cook. While it did so, he called the police. Spent a few months over at Mandeville, then was released. The hospital delivered him to a halfway house on Jackson. Smiling and yessiring the whole time, he checked in, went through the door of the room he was to share with three others, and right out the window. Now, still smiling, still yessiring the whole time, he was one of those guys you saw going through the trash you'd put out curbside. These days he had quite a wardrobe he'd retrieved from those trash cans, and showed up on the streets each morning in a new outfit.