“If you have nothing to hide, sir, I don’t see why I can’t — ”
“Work to do. Excuse me.” He tapped seven times on the door. Three big men let him in and kept me out. A blast of hot air. Scalding steam.
An hour later I came back, tapped seven times on the door. The big men nearly threw me off the stairs. Mr. Ho stood over me, at the bottom. “Whatsa matter, you? Go home. Take care your family. Let me do my work, so you have nice clean shirt to wear, okay?”
I don’t know, even now, if my editor wanted the story. He liked the anecdotes I brought back to him from Pedro, and even let me develop a couple as short features. “Good local color,” he said. But on the sweatshop thing all he said was, “Careful.” And one night, “Why the hell are you always working so late, George? We don’t have a wide-enough circulation to justify your efforts. Go home. Take care of your family.”
Today I find Pedro hunched above his grave, coughing so hard he can barely breathe. I drop the blanket I’ve brought him and walk him to my car. “No, George, I cain’t leave my TV settin’ here,” he wheezes. “I’ve never left my TV.”
“I’ll unplug it for you and put it in my trunk. It’ll be okay.”
“Dopeheads’d swipe it in no time. They sneak in here at night to do they deals, you know. Fuck they johns, pass out. I’m tellin’ you, city’s going to hell.”
“Easy, now.” I help him into the car.
The neighborhood clinic, on Dallas Street, sits across an alley from a chipped brick building with a hand-lettered sign in an upper window: “Bombay Films.”
Teenagers fill the waiting room. Tattooed and pierced. One’s eating Fritos. He keeps dropping the bag. He looks like he’s asleep, except every now and then when he nibbles a chip.
An orange-haired boy is sharing a can of RC Cola with a girl whose lips are purple. “It was the real deal, man,” he tells her. “We could actually taste the meth on each other’s tongues.” At his feet, a duffel bag with a chewed-on pipe and several bags of Ramen.
I flash my Blue Cross card; the receptionist hands me some forms to fill out for Pedro. They feel damp in the small, humid room.
Pedro’s huffing beside me. “Is gone,” he says. “Poof.”
“What’s gone?”
“The neighborhood. Look at this shit.”
He means the kids around us.
One boy says to a nervous friend of his (leg like a jackhammer, bouncing up and down), “No bullshit, he’ll help me off the streets.”
“He’s a dealer, man, how’s he gonna help you off the streets?”
“Brother connected. Not like them preachers at the soup kitchens. They just like us, man.”
“How you mean?”
“They got nowhere to go, either.”
Forty-five minutes later, a young doctor helps me guide Pedro to a leather table in a little room. “Undo your shirt, please,” he says. He’s blond and horsey-looking. Pedro’s stopped coughing. His buttons are dusty.
After a brief examination, the doctor motions me into the hall. The place smells of Mercurochrome, wet tennis shoes. “You’re this fellow’s guardian?”
“Not legally. I look after him, some.”
“Where’s he live?”
“In the graveyard.”
“Homeless, then?”
“I guess … yes, you could say that.” Though it seems to me he knows exactly where he belongs.
“He’s not getting enough liquids. The dry throat, the coughing, and so on. Is there some way you can make sure he gets several glasses of fresh water daily?”
“Sure.”
“There’s a bigger problem.”
“What’s that?”
“Asthma. Pretty severe, I’m afraid. God knows what he’s exposed to, living outdoors all the time. Probably has several allergies. I’d like to put him on a breather for half an hour, open up his lungs. Can you wait?”
“I’ll wait.”
“I’ll set it up, then.”
The light’s too bright in Pedro’s room, and he’s blinking like a broken stoplight. “I’m missing Jeopardy,” he says.
“I’ll get you back soon.”
“It’s half over! George, what if someone steals my Christmas bulbs?”
“We’ve got to get you well, man.”
The kids’ talk in the waiting room depresses me, so I wait outside, in the alley behind the clinic. It smells of urine. The door to the building abutting the clinic is open, showing a steep wooden stairway, crooked, cracked, water-damaged. I look for steam, but don’t see any. At the top of the stairs there’s another sign for “Bombay Films” by a frosted-glass door. Next to it, a torn black-and-white poster. Marlon Brando kissing Maria Schneider.
The economic life of the city, pumping away. Whatever problems in the world, the movies can fix ’em.
Back in the clinic, Pedro is huffing into a cardboard tube on a machine that looks like a carpet cleaner. I give him a thumbs-up and he scowls. In the waiting room, the girl with purple lips slowly licks Madonna’s face, on the cover of Vogue.
Back in the alley, a woman approaches “Bombay Films” wearing a yellow mini-skirt and spiked heels. A Walkman rides her waist. She flicks a cigarette into an open trash bin and starts up the stairs. Halfway up, her left heel catches an exposed nail and she stumbles. “Goddammit!” she says, spotting me, grabbing her ankle. “These your stairs? I’ll sue you bastards!” She whips off her shoe.
The door at the top of the landing groans open. A paunchy, bald man in cowboy boots. He’s wearing thick glasses. “Are you the dancer from Haughty Bitch Showgirls?” he calls down the stairs. “April?”
She pulls a pack of Marlboro Lights from her right jeans pocket. “Guzman?”
“Yeah. Call me Goose. They told me you had tits, April.”
“Fuck you.” She climbs the stairs and shoves past him into his office.
He studies me, adjusting his glasses. “You’re the new guy, right? From the distributors downtown? Barney? Beatty?”
“Not me.”
“Come on up. Cup of Flesh is ready to go.”
“I’m not the guy.”
He twists his glasses again.
“I’m just waiting for a friend at the clinic.”
He perks back up. “Blood test? Your buddy getting married? Need some stag films?”
“No thanks.”
“All right, then.” He wags his head sadly. “Change your mind, I got some stills here that’ll dilate your fuckin’ pupils.”
I reconnect Pedro’s television. He settles down for The Price Is Right. “I tol’ you I’s gonna miss Jeopardy. Mr. Ace Reporter.” His voice is high and scared. “You’d think he’da figgered that out.” The doctor had given me an inhaler for him, and I plug it into his mouth.
The doc had also handed me a packet of Accolate tablets. “Twice a day with lots of liquids. Can you bring him back, end of the week? I’d like to check on him.”
“Sure.”
“You can keep an eye on him, right? In case something goes wrong with the medications?”
“Absolutely,” I say, realizing the truth of my words as I speak them. “He’s pretty much family now.”
On Friday, as I’m waiting in the alley while Pedro puffs for Doctor Horsey, April appears in Guzman’s stairwell, wearing only a bra and panties. Grape lipstick. Small, powdered breasts. “I’m auditioning for Goose’s latest Western epic,” she says. “Saloon Sluts. He’s up there now, setting up the cactus.”
I smile.
“If I get the part, I get to die. Got a light?”
“Sorry, no.”
“You work at the clinic, or what?”