The weather outside was clear and calm. Most days in Seattle are grey, but now I remember only the sunny ones.
I rode around on the bus for three or four hours. By then a huge Jamaican woman was steering the thing. “You can’t just sit on the bus,” she said, talking to me in her rearview mirror. “You’ve got to have a destination.”
“I’ll get off at the library, then,” I said.
“That’ll be fine.”
“I know it’ll be fine,” I told her.
I stayed in the library, crushed breathless by the smoldering power of all those words—many of them unfathomable—until Happy Hour. And then I left.
The motor traffic was relentless, the sidewalks were crowded, the people were preoccupied and mean, because Happy Hour was also Rush Hour.
During Happy Hour, when you pay for one drink, he gives you two.
Happy Hour lasts two hours.
All this time I kept my eye out for the belly dancer. Her name was Angelique. I wanted to find her because, despite her other involvements, she seemed to like me. I’d liked her the minute I’d seen her the first time. She was resting at a table between numbers in the Greek nightclub where she was dancing. A little of the stage light touched her. She was very frail. She seemed to be thinking about something far away, waiting patiently for somebody to destroy her. One of the other dancers, a chop-haired, mannish sort of person, stayed close to her and said, “What do you think you want, boyo?” to a sailor who offered to buy her a drink. Angelique herself said nothing. This virginal sadness wasn’t all fake. There was a part of her she hadn’t yet allowed to be born because it was too beautiful for this place, that was true. But she was mostly a torn-up trollop. “Just trying to get over,” the sailor said. “The way they charge for these drinks, you think you’d be half-complimented.” “She doesn’t need your compliments,” the older dancer said. “She’s tired.”
By now it was six. I walked over and stopped in at the Greek place. But they told me she’d left town.
The day was ending in a fiery and glorious way. The ships on the Sound looked like paper silhouettes being sucked up into the sun.
I had two doubles and immediately it was as if I’d been dead forever, and was now finally awake.
I was in Pig Alley. It was directly on the harbor, built out over the waters on a rickety pier, with floors of carpeted plywood and a Formica bar. The cigarette smoke looked unearthly. The sun lowered itself through the roof of clouds, ignited the sea, and filled the big picture window with molten light, so that we did our dealing and dreaming in a brilliant fog. People entering the bars on First Avenue gave up their bodies. Then only the demons inhabiting us could be seen. Souls who had wronged each other were brought together here. The rapist met his victim, the jilted child discovered its mother. But nothing could be healed, the mirror was a knife dividing everything from itself, tears of false fellowship dripped on the bar. And what are you going to do to me now? With what, exactly, would you expect to frighten me?
Something embarrassing had happened in the library. An older gentleman had come over from the checkout counter with his books in his arms and addressed me softly, in the tones of a girl. “Your zipper,” he said, “is open. I thought I’d better tell you.”
“Okay,” I said. I reached down quickly and zipped my fly.
“Quite a few people were noticing,” he said.
“Okay. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” he said.
I could have gotten him around the neck right then, right there in the library, and killed him. Stranger things have happened on this earth. But he turned away.
Pig Alley was a cheap place. I sat next to a uniformed nurse with a black eye.
I recognized her. “Where’s your boyfriend today?”
“Who?” she said innocently.
“I gave him ten dollars and he disappeared.”
“When?”
“Last week.”
“I haven’t seen him.”
“He should be more grown up.”
“He’s probably in Tacoma.”
“How old is he, about thirty?”
“He’ll be back tomorrow.”
“He’s too old to be yanking people off for a dime.”
“Do you want to buy a pill? I need the money.”
“What kind of pill?”
“It’s psychedelic mushrooms all ground up.”
She showed me. Nobody could have swallowed that thing.
“That’s the biggest pill I’ve ever seen.”
“I’ll sell it for three dollars.”
“I didn’t know they made capsules that size. What size is that? Number One?”
“It’s a Number One, yeah.”
“Look at it! It’s like an egg. It’s like an Easter thing.”
“Wait,” she said, looking at my money. “No, right, yeah—three dollars. Some days I can’t even count!”
“Here goes.”
“Just keep drinking. Wash it down. Drink the whole beer.”
“Wow. How did I do that? Sometimes I think I’m not human.”
“Would you have another dollar? This one’s kind of wrinkly.”
“I never swallowed a Number One before.”
“It’s a big cap, for sure.”
“The biggest there is. Is it for horses?”
“No.”
“It’s gotta be for horses.”
“No. For horses they squirt a paste in its mouth,” she explained. “The paste is so sticky the horse can’t spit it out. They don’t make horse pills anymore.”
“They don’t?”
“Not anymore.”
“But if they did,” I said.
Steady Hands at Seattle General
Inside of two days I was shaving myself, and I even shaved a couple of new arrivals, because the drugs they injected me with had an amazing effect. I call it amazing because only hours before they’d wheeled me through corridors in which I hallucinated a soft, summery rain. In the hospital rooms on either side, objects—vases, ashtrays, beds—had looked wet and scary, hardly bothering to cover up their true meanings.
They ran a few syringesful into me, and I felt like I’d turned from a light, Styrofoam thing into a person. I held up my hands before my eyes. The hands were as still as a sculpture’s.
I shaved my roommate, Bill. “Don’t get tricky with my mustache,” he said.
“Okay so far?”
“So far.”
“I’ll do the other side.”
“That would make sense, partner.”
Just below one cheekbone, Bill had a small blemish where a bullet had entered his face, and in the other cheek a slightly larger scar where the slug had gone on its way.
“When you were shot right through your face like that, did the bullet go on to do anything interesting?”
“How would I know? I didn’t take notes. Even if it goes on through, you still feel like you just got shot in the head.”
“What about this little scar here, through your sideburn?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I was born with that one. I never saw it before.”
“Someday people are going to read about you in a story or a poem. Will you describe yourself for those people?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m a fat piece of shit, I guess.”
“No. I’m serious.”
“You’re not going to write about me.”
“Hey. I’m a writer.”
“Well then, just tell them I’m overweight.”
“He’s overweight.”
“I been shot twice.”
“Twice?”
“Once by each wife, for a total of three bullets, making four holes, three ins and one out.”
“And you’re still alive.”
“Are you going to change any of this for your poem?”
“No. It’s going in word for word.”
“That’s too bad, because asking me if I’m alive makes you look kind of stupid. Obviously, I am.”
“Well, maybe I mean alive in a deeper sense. You could be talking, and still not be alive in a deeper sense.”
“It don’t get no deeper than the kind of shit we’re in right now.”
“What do you mean? It’s great here. They even give you cigarettes.”
“I didn’t get any yet.”
“Here you go.”
“Hey. Thanks.”
“Pay me back when they give you yours.”
“Maybe.”
“What did you say when she shot you?”
“I said, ‘You shot me!’”
“Both times? Both wives?”
“The first time I didn’t say anything, because she shot me in the mouth.”
“So you couldn’t talk.”
“I was knocked out cold, is the reason I couldn’t talk. And I still remember the dream I had while I was knocked out that time.”
“What was the dream?”
“How could I tell you about it? It was a dream. It didn’t make any fucking sense, man. But I do remember it.”
“You can’t describe it even a little bit?”
“I really don’t know what the description would be. I’m sorry.”
“Anything. Anything at all.”
“Well, for one thing, the dream is something that keeps coming back over and over. I mean, when I’m awake. Every time I remember my first wife, I remember that she pulled the trigger on me, and then, here comes that dream …
“And the dream wasn’t—there wasn’t anything sad about it. But when I remember it, I get like, Fuck, man, she really, she shot me. And here’s that dream.”
“Did you ever see that Elvis Presley movie, Follow That Dream?”
“Follow That Dream. Yeah, I did. I was just going to mention that.”
“Okay. You’re all done. Look in the mirror.”
“Right.”
“What do you see?”
“How did I get so fat, when I never eat?”
“Is that all?”
“Well, I don’t know. I just got here.”
“What about your life?”
“Hah! That’s a good one.”
“What about your past?”
“What about it?”
“When you look back, what do you see?”
“Wrecked cars.”
“Any people in them?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“People who are just meat now, man.”
“Is that really how it is?”
“How do I know how it is? I just got here. And it stinks.”
“Are you kidding? They’re pumping Haldol by the quart. It’s a playpen.”
“I hope so. Because I been in places where all they do is wrap you in a wet sheet, and let you bite down on a little rubber toy for puppies.”
“I could see living here two weeks out of every month.”
“Well, I’m older than you are. You can take a couple more rides on this wheel and still get out with all your arms and legs stuck on right. Not me.”
“Hey. You’re doing fine.”
“Talk into here.”
“Talk into your bullet hole?”
“Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I’m fine.”
Beverly Home
Sometimes I went during my lunch break into a big nursery across the street, a glass building full of plants and wet earth and feeling of cool dead sex. During this hour the same woman always watered the dark beds with a hose. Once I talked with her, mostly about myself and about, stupidly, my problems. I asked her for her number. She said she had no phone, and I got the feeling she was purposely hiding her left hand, maybe because she wore a wedding ring. She wanted me to come by and see her again sometime. But I left knowing I wouldn’t go back. She seemed much too grownup for me.
And sometimes a dust storm would stand off in the desert, towering so high it was like another city—a terrifying new era approaching, blurring our dreams.
I was a whimpering dog inside, nothing more than that. I looked for work because people seemed to believe I should look for work, and when I found a job I believed I was happy about it because these same people—counselors and Narcotics Anonymous members and such—seemed to think a job was a happy thing.
Maybe, when you hear the name “Beverly,” you think of Beverly Hills—people wandering the streets with their heads shot off by money.
As for me, I don’t remember ever knowing anybody named Beverly. But it’s a beautiful, a sonorous name. I worked in an O-shaped, turquoise-blue hospital for the aged bearing it.
Not all the people living at Beverly Home were old and helpless. Some were young but paralyzed. Some weren’t past middle age but were already demented. Others were fine, except that they couldn’t be allowed out on the street with their impossible deformities. They made God look like a senseless maniac. One man had a congenital bone ailment that had turned him into a seven-foot-tall monster. His name was Robert. Each day Robert dressed himself in a fine suit, or a blazer-and-trousers combination. His hands were eighteen inches long. His head was like a fifty-pound Brazil nut with a face. You and I don’t know about these diseases until we get them, in which case we also will be put out of sight.
This was part-time work. I was responsible for the facility’s newsletter, just a few mimeographed pages issued twice a month. Also it was part of my job to touch people. The patients had nothing to do but stumble or wheel themselves through the wide halls in a herd. Traffic flowed in one direction only, those were the rules. I walked against the tide, according to my instructions, greeting everybody and grasping their hands or squeezing their shoulders, because they needed to be touched, and they didn’t get much of that. I always said hello to a grey-haired man in his early forties, vigorous and muscular, but completely senile. He’d take me by the shirtfront and say things like, “There’s a price to be paid for dreaming.” I covered his fingers with my own. Nearby was a woman nearly falling out of her wheelchair and hollering, “Lord? Lord?” Her feet pointed left, her head looked to the right, and her arms twisted around her like ribbons around a Maypole. I put my hands in her hair. Meanwhile around us ambled all these people whose eyes made me think of clouds and whose bodies made me think of pillows. And there were others out of whom all the meat appeared to have been sucked by the strange machines they kept in the closets around here—hygienic things. Most of these people were far enough gone that they couldn’t bathe themselves. They had to be given their baths by professionals using shiny hoses with sophisticated nozzles.
There was a guy with something like multiple sclerosis. A perpetual spasm forced him to perch sideways on his wheelchair and peer down along his nose at his knotted fingers. This condition had descended on him suddenly. He got no visitors. His wife was divorcing him. He was only thirty-three, I believe he said, but it was hard to guess what he told about himself because he really couldn’t talk anymore, beyond clamping his lips repeatedly around his protruding tongue while groaning.
No more pretending for him! He was completely and openly a mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other.
I always looked in on a man named Frank, amputated above both knees, who greeted me with a magisterial sadness and a nod at his empty pajama-pants legs. All day long he watched television from his bed. It wasn’t his physical condition that kept him here, but his sadness.
The home lay in a cul-de-sac in east Phoenix, with a view into the desert surrounding the city. This was in the spring of that year, the season when some varieties of cactus produced tiny blossoms out of their thorns. To catch the bus home each day I walked through a vacant lot, and sometimes I’d run right up on one—one small orange flower that looked as if it had fallen down here from Andromeda, surrounded by a part of the world cast mainly in eleven hundred shades of brown, under a sky whose blueness seemed to get lost in its own distances. Dizzy, enchanted—I’d have felt the same if I’d been walking along and run into an elf out here sitting in a little chair. The d
esert days were already burning, but nothing could stifle these flowers.
One day, too, when I’d passed through the lot and was walking along behind a row of town houses on the way to the bus stop, I heard the sound of a woman singing in her shower. I thought of mermaids: the blurry music of falling water, the soft song from the wet chamber. The dusk was down, and the heat came off the hovering buildings. It was rush hour, but the desert sky has a way of absorbing the sounds of traffic and making them seem idle and small. Her voice was the clearest thing coming to my ears.
She sang with the unconsciousness, the obliviousness, of a castaway. She must not have understood that somebody might be able to hear her. It sounded like an Irish hymn.
I thought I might be tall enough to peek inside her window, and it didn’t look like anybody would catch me at it.
These town houses went in for that desert landscaping—gravel and cactus instead of a lawn. I had to walk softly so as not to crunch—not that anybody would have heard my steps. But I didn’t want to hear them myself.
Under the window I was camouflaged by a trellis and a vine of morning glories. The traffic went by as always; nobody noticed me. It was one of those small, high bathroom windows. I had to stand on tiptoe and grip the windowsill to keep my chin above it. She’d already stepped from the shower, a woman as soft and young as her voice, but not a girl. Her physique was on the chunky side. She had light hair falling straight and wet almost to the small of her back. She faced away. Mist covered her mirror, and also the window, just a bit; otherwise she might have seen my eyes reflected there from behind her. I felt weightless. I had no trouble clinging to the windowsill. I knew that if I let go I wouldn’t have the gall to raise my face back up again—by then she might have turned toward the window, might give a yell.
She towelled off quickly, briskly, never touching herself in any indulgent or particularly sensual way. That was disappointing. But it was virginal and exciting, too. I had thoughts of breaking through the glass and raping her. But I would have been ashamed to have her see me. I thought I might be able to do something like that if I were wearing a mask.