She clutched the front of the black nylon jacket I was wearing and pressed her head against my chest. She made no sound, but I felt her sobbing. “No one even notice,” she said softly. “I promise. No one notice.”
She quietly opened the door, not looking inside. She didn’t go in with me.
A small desk lamp cast a meager light. I didn’t see him at first, just a shape in the corner, then I made out the wheelchair beside a small, unmade cot. His back was to me. That would make it easier, I figured. I approached, careful not to make any sound. But he moved his head, as if he knew. I saw that his left arm was gone. Then he jerked suddenly, like an animal sensing a predator, and in the half-light I glimpsed his wet eyes staring out madly from the scarred and discolored flesh that had been his face.
I took the cord from my pocket and clenched it in both hands. He looked right at me, right into me, the entire time I killed him.
In the years since, I’ve spent a lot of time in libraries — when they don’t chase me out — reading everything I can about what happened to soldiers in Vietnam, trying to understand what I saw in his eyes. Trying to find some kind of explanation. There isn’t one. He’s still looking at me. Right now.
Days later, Laurie answered the downstairs bell to find Phi on our doorstep.
“Let me show you,” she said, taking hold of Laurie’s hand. “Get your husband. Want show him too.”
She walked us around the bright, sunny grounds, proudly showing off the yard work she’d had done after the recent rains. The place had never looked better. Everything all cleaned up. She pointed to several big black bags of yard waste piled in the driveway.
“You take to dump?” she asked. “Please.” She stuck a couple of twenties in my hand.
As I got my coat, Laurie asked, “Why would she ask you to do it?”
“I’m guess I’m handy.”
Three months later, Laurie went looking for a bigger office and never came back. Well, only to get her stuff. And the cat. I don’t blame her. I was now the one screaming my head off in the middle of the night.
My company moved, but I stayed — even though there was nothing holding me here. I had no job, but Phi let me stay on upstairs — that was the deal, of course. No more rent, ever. The screaming stopped — my magical solution to saving our happy home.
With Laurie gone, I hated the place. Phi told me I could live out back above the carport, in the garret she used for storage. I’d need to fix it up — no problem for a handyman. A few weeks later I was watching a new young couple giddily take over the home in which Laurie and I had wanted to spend the rest of our lives.
Phi’s properties always needed maintenance of some kind or another. She dutifully gave me fix-it jobs, even though I was pretty shitty at it. But I figured things out and got better at manual tasks. Odd jobs got me through a few rough years. At least until the morning an ambulance came and took Phi away on a gurney. She died in Alameda Hospital the next day. I kept a vigil in the waiting room until they made me leave. I wasn’t next of kin. “There is no next of kin,” I told them. Her next of kin was long gone, somewhere six feet deep in Indochina.
The state, of course, took her house.
Learning to be handy has served me well the past few years. It’s helped me survive on the streets. I know how to jury-rig shit like I never imagined. I spend a lot of time at public libraries, reading mostly, and eventually I stopped typing Laurie’s name into the computers. But I don’t get jobs anymore. The roadside Mexicans have the day-labor market locked up. At least I’ve learned to sleep so lightly I never wake up screaming. I’m like a soldier in his tent, always on alert, living by his wits, hunkered down in the middle of a fucking war zone. Who knew it would ever get this bad — whole villages of us camped under freeway overpasses living hand-to-mouth. And wouldn’t you know: from where I am tonight, out of the rain but freezing my ass off, I can see the top floors of the empty office building on Harrison Street, where once I had a view of the lake.
About the Contributors
Kim Addonizio, an acclaimed writer of poetry and prose, is a Pushcart Prize winner, a National Book Award finalist for Tell Me, and a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her works include Jimmy & Rita, What Is This Thing Called Love, Lucifer at the Starlite, Little Beauties, My Dreams Out in the Street, and The Palace of Illusions. Her new books are a collection of poems, Mortal Trash, and a memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress.
Carolyn Alexander is a writer, storyteller, English teacher, and librarian. She revels in the use of the English language, and has written original material for single and tag-team storytelling performances as well as for the San Francisco Mime Troupe. She has a BA in English from Cornell University and a master’s in library science from Columbia University.
Phil Canalin is a twenty-five-year public health finance manager in Oakland, most recently for the noted Health Care for the Homeless program. He loves writing fiction, poetry, and children’s stories, and currently resides in Alameda with Sue, his wife of thirty-six years. His latest publication is Invisible Society Fables, short stories based on his experience with homeless people and their caregivers. For more information visit www.philcanalin.com.
Jamie DeWolf is a performer, film director, and showman from Oakland. He is a National Slam Poetry Champion, NPR’s “Performer of the Year,” and has toured everywhere from Moscow to San Quentin State Prison. DeWolf is the writer and codirector of the feature film Smoked, and the host and creator of Tourettes without Regrets, the longest-running monthly underground variety show in Oakland. Watch his films and performances at www.jamiedewolf.com.
Katie Gilmartin’s checkered past includes stints as a union organizer, bona fide sex researcher, and college professor. She now teaches printmaking classes and runs the Queer Ancestors Project, devoted to forging relationships between queer artists and their ancestors. Her illustrated noir, Blackmail, My Love, is set in San Francisco in the dark ages of queerdom: 1951. Winner of Lambda and Indiefab Gold awards, the narrative is a revelatory history of San Francisco’s sexually complex underground.
Judy Juanita’s debut novel, Virgin Soul, follows a black teen who becomes a member of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s. Her short stories and poems have appeared widely and her plays have been produced in Oakland, San Francisco, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and New York City. De Facto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland traces her development as a writer, activist, and independent woman.
Dorothy Lazard manages the Oakland History Room, a special reference collection in the Oakland Public Library. She holds a master’s degree in library and information studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College in Baltimore. Her writing has appeared in The Public Library: A Photographic Essay by Robert Dawson, Essence magazine, and the librarian blog The Desk Set.