“Understand what?”
“About what’s happening down there.”
“Where? Sixth Street?”
“Look at it,” he said. He reached over and tapped the window; stared through it. “Look at the people... there, you see that guy in the wheelchair and the one pushing him? Across the street there?”
I leaned closer to the glass. The man in the wheelchair wore a military camouflage jacket, had a heavy wool blanket across his lap; the black man manipulating him along the crowded sidewalk was thick-bodied, with a shiny bald head. “I see them.”
“White guy’s name is Baxter,” Eddie said. “Grenade blew up under him in ’Nam and now he’s a paraplegic. Lives right here in the Majestic, on this floor down at the end. Deals crack and smack out of his room. Elroy, the black dude, is his bodyguard and roommate. Mean, both of ’em. Couple of months ago, Elroy killed a guy over on Minna that tried to stiff them. Busted his head with a brick. You believe it?”
“I believe it.”
“And they ain’t the worst on the street. Not the worst.”
“I believe that too.”
“Before I went to prison I lived and worked with people like that and I never saw what they were. I mean I just never saw it. Now I do, I see it clear — every day walking back and forth to work, every night from up here. It makes you sick after a while, the things you see when you see ’em clear.”
“Why don’t you move?”
“Where to? I can’t afford no place better than this.”
“No better room, maybe, but why not another neighborhood? You don’t have to live on Sixth Street.”
“Wouldn’t be much better, any other neighborhood I could buy into. They’re all over the city now, the ones like Baxter and Elroy. Used to be it was just Skid Road and the Tenderloin and the ghettos. Now they’re everywhere, more and more every day. You know?”
“I know.”
“Why? It don’t have to be this way, does it?”
Hard times, bad times: alienation, poverty, corruption, too much government, not enough government, lack of social services, lack of caring, drugs like a cancer destroying society. Simplistic explanations that were no explanations at all and as dehumanizing as the ills they described. I was tired of hearing them and I didn’t want to repeat them, to Eddie Quinlan or anybody else. So I said nothing.
He shook his head. “Souls burning everywhere you go,” he said, and it was as if the words hurt his mouth coming out.
Souls burning. “You find religion at Folsom, Eddie?”
“Religion? I don’t know, maybe a little. Chaplain we had there, I talked to him sometimes. He used to say that about the hard-timers, that their souls were burning and there wasn’t nothing he could do to put out the fire. They were doomed, he said, and they’d doom others to burn with ’em.”
I had nothing to say to that either. In the small silence a voice from outside said distinctly, “Dirty bastard, what you doin’ with my pipe?” It was cold in there, with the hard bright night pressing against the window. Next to the door was a rusty steam radiator but it was cold too; the heat would not be on more than a few hours a day, even in the dead of winter, in the Hotel Majestic.
“That’s the way it is in the city,” Eddie said. “Souls burning. All day long, all night long, souls on fire.”
“Don’t let it get to you.”
“Don’t it get to you?”
“...Yes. Sometimes.”
He bobbed his head up and down. “You want to do something, you know? You want to try to fix it somehow, put out the fires. There has to be a way.”
“I can’t tell you what it is,” I said.
He said, “If we all just did something. It ain’t too late. You don’t think it’s too late?”
“No.”
“Me neither. There’s still hope.”
“Hope, faith, blind optimism — sure.”
“You got to believe,” he said, nodding. “That’s all, you just got to believe.”
Angry voices rose suddenly from outside; a woman screamed, thin and brittle. Eddie came off the bed, hauled up the window sash. Chill damp air and street noises came pouring in: shouts, cries, horns honking, cars whispering on the wet pavement, a Muni bus clattering along Mission; more shrieks. He leaned out, peering downward.
“Look,” he said, “look.”
I stretched forward and looked. On the sidewalk below, a hooker in a leopard-skin coat was running wildly toward Howard; she was the one doing the yelling. Chasing behind her, tight black skirt hiked up over the tops of net stockings and hairy thighs, was a hideously rouged transvestite waving a pocket knife. A group of winos began laughing and chanting “Rape! Rape!” as the hooker and the transvestite ran zig-zagging out of sight on Howard.
Eddie pulled his head back in. The flickery neon wash made his face seem surreal, like a hallucinogenic vision. “That’s the way it is,” he said sadly. “Night after night, day after day.”
With the window open, the cold was intense; it penetrated my clothing and crawled on my skin. I’d had enough of it, and of this room and Eddie Quinlan and Sixth Street.
“Eddie, just what is it you want from me?”
“I already told you. Talk to somebody who understands how it is down there.”
“Is that the only reason you asked me here?”
“Ain’t it enough?”
“For you, maybe.” I got to my feet. “I’ll be going now.”
He didn’t argue. “Sure, you go ahead.”
“Nothing else you want to say?”
“Nothing else.” He walked to the door with me, unlocked it, and then put out his hand. “Thanks for coming. I appreciate it, I really do.”
“Yeah. Good luck, Eddie.”
“You too,” he said. “Keep the faith.”
I went out into the hall, and the door shut gently and the lock clicked behind me.
Downstairs, out of the Majestic, along the mean street and back to the garage where I’d left my car. And all the way I kept thinking: There’s something else, something more he wanted from me... and I gave it to him by going there and listening to him. But what? What did he really want?
I found out later that night. It was all over the TV — special bulletins and then the eleven o’clock news.
Twenty minutes after I left him, Eddie Quinlan stood at the window of his room-with-a-view, and in less than a minute, using a high-powered semiautomatic rifle he’d taken from the sporting goods outfit where he worked, he shot down fourteen people on the street below. Nine dead, five wounded, one of the wounded in critical condition and not expected to live. Six of the victims were known drug dealers; all of the others also had arrest records, for crimes ranging from prostitution to burglary. Two of the dead were Baxter, the paraplegic ex — Vietnam vet, and his bodyguard, Elroy.
By the time the cops showed up, Sixth Street was empty except for the dead and the dying. No more targets. And up in his room, Eddie Quinlan had sat on the bed and put the rifle’s muzzle in his mouth and used his big toe to pull the trigger.
My first reaction was to blame myself. But how could I have known or even guessed? Eddie Quinlan. Nobody, loser, shadow-man without substance or purpose. How could anyone have figured him for a thing like that?
Somebody I can talk to, somebody who’ll understand — that’s all I want.
No. What he’d wanted was somebody to help him justify to himself what he was about to do. Somebody to record his verbal suicide note. Somebody he could trust to pass it on afterward, tell it right and true to the world.
You want to do something, you know? You want to try to fix it somehow, put out the fires. There has to be a way.