He thought: Nothing. Nothing to live for no way. I would like to see a nuclear blast. Hope Korea drops the bomb. Be a motherfucker. People with limbs frayed. People with skin falling off, like slabs of meat and flesh in the butcher shop. People goddamn glowing green. Zombies. Radioactive sewer rats. Probably resembled the lives of homeless sewer rats all the world over.
Memories haloed Leo’s skull by then, sometimes sort of happy.
Memory was a disingenuous pastime; sure, sometimes he thought maybe everybody’s memories dematerialized to tears and fears, like a balancing act in the long run. He had seen plenty of both back when he lived in regular houses. Back until his late forties, he had been a truck driver. He had been a cabman. Picked up whores. Picked up druggies. Picked up Muhammad Ali one time. Picked up Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen was a short guy. Whiny. Whined about his motel room, his food, his fans.
Bruce Springsteen. Narcissistic little bastard.
These days, Leo welcomed a catastrophe. He had spent half of his life drinking too heavily, Lord knows, still managing at the edges of the rental world. Since then. The same song. The same pictures played in his dreams, churning alongside his daylight frustrations. Lucky he was a big guy. Kept moving. Kept living. Problem though was when he slept, or lightly dozed, he started twitching. He noticed that about the others. Most times when he saw a bunch of alley cats passed out, or sleeping, they were twitching in their sleep. Like him.
The problem with memory was that he always returned to the worst. He returned to the question of whether the hypothetical holocausts in the newspapers resembled the conflagration he personally witnessed, or erstwhile lived. Trapped in a house fire. Five years ago. So what if he could have died? Forget about that past life. Ya mangy alley cat. Keep living like a zombie. Burned-out.
Tough luck.
Paula shouted, “Hey Leo, want a coffee to go?” He limped to his bicycle. Leo got irony. Maybe he only got irony; sometimes every blah blah blah in his head sounded like sarcasm. And he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when he remembered he officially got listed on the homeless statistics a few years back when the half-decent apartment he lived inside burned to the ground. A wayward life. A few drunken decades. A house fire. “Hey, be careful,” he heard as he hit the curb.
He realized, before he’d bicycled halfway to the Interfaith Community Shelter, that he’d begun the morning badly. The house fire was a ticket to panic. He couldn’t handle rehashing the memory without believing his vascular system imploded inside his rib cage. He might hit his zero/void, the point where he blanked out. Hey, stupid, stupid, he thought, why can’t ya forget to start remembering?
It may have already begun. The street traffic surrounded him like swarms of locusts. The cars blazed like flashlights inside a pinball machine. He bounced here, there, and back and forth, a pinball surrounded by sounds, brrnnngs. The flippers whacked him. Again. Again. They whacked. They hurt him like salt to his wounds. And like a wound that was too painful to touch, he couldn’t remember much without retreating to the safety of knowing he could never live like the house cats again.
Doubted it. He zero/voided too often. He blanked. The blankness where his fragile self-identity broke into a thousand reflections. But he couldn’t bring himself to look at one of them, the edges singed by chiaroscuro reflections of himself going up in smoke. He was belligerent, unresponsive, or unpredictable when he was stuck inside it.
The bell rang when Leo entered Kelly Liquor Barn, fingering two dollars in his pocket. “Hey, how about I buy one beer in a five-pack? Come on. I’ve been a good customer. When all the other bums see me buying here, they buy too. Call me the Pied Piper, right?”
The Kelly clerk straightened his shoulders, then arched his eyebrows, making Leo wait while he helped other customers. The average bum couldn’t wait patiently three minutes, so Leo beat the odds, unfolding his Santa Fe New Mexican. Remember the headline: “US and Korea Escalate Nuclear Arsenal Conflict.” Coupons. Advertising. A local news story on water-rights disputes.
The subsequent story involved a cold case. A cold case? Sounded to him like a frozen-dinner package. Leo paused to glance impatiently at the store clerk, while he impatiently skimmed the newspaper. And?
He had a hard time following the text. The photo was conventional. The cold case suspect (roughly answering to Leo’s size, age, and height statistics) was a mangy white guy. Second-class citizen. Reported to have been homeless for stretches in the 1990s. He had been incarcerated in 2003. And? He escaped in 2011.
So was this news, or old news?
The next paragraph clarified that the escapee might be involved in several recent homicides. Police investigations saw signature evidence fitting a pattern. Circumstantial evidence led the police to investigate the possibility the suspect was behind the recent deaths of Lisa Marie Bennett by fisticuffs and strangulation, and the death of Marie-Jose Jaramillo by bludgeoning and strangulation. He is considered violent so the police ask that people do not approach him if they do see him.
Leaving Kelly Liquor Barn, Leo squatted on the steps, his hands still stuck in his pockets. No luck scoring a Camo. His hands slowly ungripped, and reached for the newspaper stuffed inside his armpits. Yep, he wanted to read the article again. He couldn’t say why he recorded the victims’ names, Lisa Marie Bennett, Marie-Jose Jaramillo. The suspected cold case killer’s name slipped his mind.
Leo visited the Santa Fe Interfaith Community Shelter twice a week.
The real name for the shelter was Pete’s Place, by the way. Leo visited when he needed basic necessities. He grabbed a shower. Swallowed a hot lunch. He never spent the night. Tensions lingered whenever he ran into that short guy, the in-house manager. The in-house manager, Schroeder, still shot him nervous looks. Funny, back when he was a cabbie, Leo remembered believing Santa Fe didn’t look like a town with many indigents. Santa Fe belonged to cultural sophisticates. But there were indeed a few poor places — barrios — on the outskirts of this fancy town for folks with second homes and favorite pets.
The building that housed the shelter had formerly been a pet store. Local citizens of this “cultural mecca” had shown their humanitarianism — their truly “impeccable refinement” — and converted the pet shop into storage space for humans beings.
Alley cats still called the shelter by the former pet store name, Pete’s Place. Yep, per usual, Leo got the irony.
’Cause an animal shelter was an animal shelter
Leo got Pete’s Place better than he got the designation shelter. Somebody was always ready to steal your bike, skim your small change. The guests included: Dope fiends. Alcohol fiends. Clowns with all kinds of maniac lunacy. Me. Me included. ’Cause sometimes I pull crap like the incident with Schroeder.
Needing a drink, Leo cut a path behind the Allsup’s; blankets and bottles littered the asphalt nooks. He checked the empties. No luck. Then he spotted Kasey and MaryAnn — a couple of sewer rats so addled and addicted they wore tatters — doing what alley cats do. Howling, while nursing Smirnoff vodka.
Leo thought, I could ask for a shot, or stick around, wait for them to start carping.
Soon enough, Kasey accused MaryAnn of seeing somebody.