Hell's Half Acre

by Will Christopher Baer

  Right.

  You want another? says Mao.

  I shake my head.

  Well, then. When are you going to eat a bullet?

  The third whiskey sits before me, untouched. My stomach is gurgling for lack of food and the bartender is a madman. I think he should have called this place The Faustus. I think my skull is full of black ice. Mao begins to wipe down the bar with a rancid yellow towel. The stink of mildew. That lazy eye drifts by, unfocused. The fucking thing is making me seasick and I try to ignore it.

  Were you ever married? I say.

  Mao jabs one finger at the lazy eye. No, he says.

  I shiver, unsurprised. That eye would be hard to deal with.

  You? he says.

  A long time ago, yeah. But she killed herself. Blew herself to bits.

  Mao looks up. You serious?

  Yes.

  Then I apologize to you. That was some insensitive shit to say.

  I tell him not to worry about it. I tell him that it was a long time ago, another lifetime. Mao nods and murmurs and graciously tilts his head to the left so that I don’t have to face the lazy eye. I tell him she was very brave, my wife. That she killed herself only out of the desire to sidestep a slow death. I am tempted to tell him that I don’t have arthritis, that I spend a lot more time daydreaming about various gruesome ways to kill myself than I do actually bothering to masturbate. I’m not quite sure if this is true, however. And while it has a nice ring to it, I don’t think such a confession would exactly put a smile on Mao’s face. Anyway. I am trying to cut back on these incidents of drive-by intimacy. I stand up and tell him thanks and realize I am a trifle unsteady. I am wobbling. The third whiskey remains untouched and I ask him to please raise a toast to the next suicide that walks through the door.

  Outside and yes, noticeably drunk. I have no sense of direction, no sense of time. I am wobbling on a street corner in downtown San Francisco. Vision is unreliable and after six, seven blocks, I am fast approaching blackout but not yet illiterate and the street signs that loom fuzzy black and white along my periphery identify this corner as 6th and Mission and danger is everywhere. Don’t laugh but I think I’m being followed. I hear footsteps, echoes. I take a few steps and I hear the scrape of leather against stone behind me. I stop walking and the echo is gone and I know this is the paranoia of bad movies.

  The nostrils twitch and I smell feces.

  Cut away to handheld camera, delirium tremens.

  I swing left and right now full circle and find the shitter, a runaway white girl sixteen maybe seventeen, a poor little crackhead crouched in blue doorway with bright yellow miniskirt bunched around her waist, leaving a wet black steaming coil of shit on someone’s stoop.

  Daffy.

  This could be a clip from 20/20. Lost children etc.

  Probably her condition should trouble me, it should offend me or move me somehow. But I am too drunk and blind and preoccupied with my own problems to care about the public health and anyway it’s not my doorway. The girl has to poop somewhere and even now her lips curl into a yellow snarl because I am staring at her. From her point of view, I am a stupid drunk middle-aged pervert and I’m staring at her, I’m invading her personal space. And if I breathe a word to her, if I offer to help this girl or give her money or a word of advice she will surely bite me.

  I stand with my back to her a moment. Drunk but not unaware. The shitting girl is exactly the sort of lost soul that normally I would be compelled to help. I have a touch of Travis Bickle in me, says Jude. The watcher, the idiot avenger. But I’m not half the psychotic cracker that Travis was and I like to think my social skills are better by a mile or two. Anyway, something possesses me to turn around and ask the girl if she needs help. She has finished shitting by now and I can smell it. Her face is cracked and yellow and what’s left of her brown hair is thin and stringy. Her eyes are black holes but I notice with a kind of horror how shapely her legs are.

  This girl was once a beauty.

  Five dollars, she says. Give me five dollars.

  I fumble with my money and locate a five dollar bill. I don’t want to think about what manner of service she might provide for five dollars. And when she sees the money, her small teeth flash.

  Hey, mister. Let’s go. I’ll make you feel alright.

  I shake my head, confused. Because this isn’t going to help her and I don’t know what will. I try to think what Jude would want me to do. She’d want me to be kind to this girl. Take her to IHOP and feed her pancakes with blueberry syrup, then coax her life’s story out of her. Then go out and kill the father or brother or boyfriend who made her like this. But I can only imagine that. I can only give her the five dollars and turn away from her but she grabs at my arm, her nails raking the skin along my wrist.

  I raise my hand to hit her, to drive her away, but stop myself. She falls against the wall, screeching.

  Jude would not want me to hit this girl, I don’t think.

  The death shuffle. I walk a mile, or so it feels. And I have no fucking idea where the hotel is. I mutter to myself about milk and fallen angels and pretty polly and the glory of Ludwig Van in a terrible British accent because in the adolescent reptile portion of my brain I want to be Malcolm McDowell when I’m drunk but I am generally not so clever or elegant. I am stupid and cruel and violent and lonely and aching and maybe it would be best to take a cab out to Berkeley and curl up between Jude and John Ransom Miller like a lost sibling and worry about my intentions tomorrow but I am drunk and like any droog what is full of piss and lacking the common sense to lay down his head and sleep or die, I want to fight or fuck someone.

  I want to fight John Ransom Miller.

  Dear Jude, where are you. I want to be perfect just like you.

  I can hear the freeway, the rush and hiss of a thousand cars. The edge, I am coming to the edge of something and I wonder if I am near the ocean and now I raise my eyes to see the curved freeway overpass like the massive spinal column of conjoined twins and glowing against black sky are the big green signs that provide blunt directions to Chinatown and North Beach and suddenly I am scared of the government and I want to get inside. I want to get inside and in the distance a shadowy line of people waits against the white wall of a building below the freeway. Three vertical black words against the wall over their heads, with a crude black arrow pointing to the heavens. It takes me a minute to make out the words but soon I form them silently with rubber tongue. The End Up.

  Fate, baby. This is my new destination.

  Melt into the line outside the End Up. Become a falling leaf brown and gold falling anonymous to earth with thousands of others. Infinity is mine, for two seconds. Then spot a mesmerizing blond girl with wide brown eyes and sharp features, hip bones jutting through thin nylon skirt. Belly button and nipples and goosebump arms and meathead boyfriend. Wobble like a duck. I gaze up the length of the line, where two very muscular bouncers with gold jewelry and black baseball caps are methodically patting people down before they go inside. They are looking for drugs, probably. But this is no problem, as I’m not holding. I forget for the moment that I am carrying a gun.

  I turn to the nearest person, a Latin kid with blue hair. What is this place? I say.

  He regards me with pity, scorn. It’s like a rave, man. But better.

  Wow.

  The kid edges away from me, as if I have the pox. You better straighten up, he says.

  What’s the rumpus?

  You’re drunk, he says. And you smell like almonds.

  I sniff myself, lifting one arm to my face. The kid is not wrong. I stink of almonds and I am about to say so but the lifting of my arm has apparently caused an unfortunate redistribution of personal mass which throws me off just slightly and I fall sideways into the blond girl with goosebump skin. She recoils in disgust and says loudly, oh gross and now the boyfriend leaps on me, beating me in the face and chest with stony fists and I am knocked backward, flopping into the crowd like an inflatable man and now fi
sts come hammering down on me from all sides. Monkey in the middle. Something hits me in the eye that feels like a rock. Claustrophobia, numb panic. My cheek is gouged open by a sharp ring and the blood runs into my mouth and now someone lands a heavy fist in the back of my neck. This drops me to my knees. I’m trying to decide if I care for a fight and really I don’t. I’m too sleepy and my arms and legs are like boiled noodles but I can fight if necessary and so I try to push myself upright as a heavy boot sails into my ribs, maybe six inches north of the hole Jude left in me so many years ago and I roll heavily over the curb. I flop into the gutter on my back like an old dog that wants his belly scratched.

  The commotion draws the attention of the bouncers and one of them stomps down the sidewalk, muttering into a headset. For one truly stupid moment, I think he’s coming to save me.

  He’s not.

  The bouncer crouches over me, cursing. He says some unkind shit to me. Then frisks me with big, unforgiving hands. He gives my testicles a brutal squeeze and I nearly vomit in his fucking face. He takes my money, all of it. He puts it into his own pocket, which seems grossly unfair.

  But then I’m drunk, yes.

  I am really very drunk and a drunk is not quite human. I have therefore forfeited my civil rights. I mumble at him to please fuck off anyway and he laughs. He finds the gun. He grunts with purely sexual satisfaction and leans down close and whispers, the cops are coming you piece of shit and I hope you sleep like a baby. Then unceremoniously bashes me between the eyes with the butt of my own gun.

  fifteen.

  AND I WAKE UP ON A RUBBER MAT. Bright light overhead and fine powder of broken glass in my eyes. Force them shut and extend one hand to examine my environment. There’s maybe an inch of water on the floor, cold water and I can hear the steady drizzle of a burst pipe. My hand splashes around in the water a while, blind and weak. My hand is a drowning rat. Unsanitary perhaps, but I use my wet fingers to soothe my eyes. I sit up and look around. The cell is five feet by seven. Overflowing toilet and two bunks tricked out with rubber mats. An inch of standing water on the floor and now I comprehend that I touched my sore eyes with toilet water. Brilliant. I’m alone in the cell. I was violent and they wanted to isolate me. I was comatose and they wanted to keep the crazies in the drunk tank from eating me alive. I’m wearing an orange jumpsuit and my bootlaces are gone. I was suicidal, maybe.

  The memory is fucked, full of holes. Handcuffs chewing into my wrists. Crumpled in the backseat and my view of the world is sideways, upside down. The back of a cop’s head through steel mesh. Fuzzy blond hair. He wears no hat and I am muttering a lot of nonsense about Nazis. He ignores me but when we arrive at the station he drags me out of the car in such a way that my skull smacks into the doorframe with a lovely hollow thud. The booking process is hazy. But I can imagine it. I have been arrested before and I always fuck up the fingerprinting. They tell me to relax and I immediately go tense. The prints smear every time and it pisses them off no end. I was carrying no identification and I wonder what name I gave them. Ray Fine. Fred, or maybe Jack. That would have been beautiful. I might have slipped into my role of Jack the retard. The cops would not likely be amused by Tourette’s. They would probably beat a guy pretty severely if he was barking obscenities and repeating everything they said.

  Oh, god.

  I seem to remember a gloved finger wiggling around in my asshole, but maybe I was dreaming of Jude just now. I remember the sudden flash of the camera. That mugshot is a rare beauty, I’m sure.

  I sit up and stare at the toilet. The water is churning up over the sides like there is big trouble underground. The water looks clear enough, for now. But as soon as I use the toilet then I will have my own nasty fluids rippling around me. I may as well take a shit on the floor.

  I wonder if they gave me a phone call. That phone call shit in the movies is nonsense. The scene where some poor bastard is moaning about his rights. I know my rights, he says. I want my phone call. The phone call is not a constitutional right, as far as I know. Thomas Jefferson and the rest of his crew didn’t have telephones, and anyway they sure as hell didn’t give a shit about any drunk asshole’s rights. And the word asshole is crucial. If you get arrested for public drunkenness, it’s because you’re an asshole. You walk in the door and you’re already an asshole. You’re an asshole. I’m an asshole. Everyone in here is an asshole. The cops can wait three days to charge you if they feel like it. And if you’re an asshole with no manners, well. You may as well forget about your fucking phone call for a while.

  But I appear to be on suicide watch. And this means that somebody will come by to rattle my cage before long. They have to be sure I don’t eat my own tongue or gouge out my eyes. They have to at least pretend to care. I slosh over to the door like I’m going duck hunting and man I am none too steady. Drunk as a bishop even now and when did I last eat something. The tomato sandwich that Molly made for me. I wonder how she would like me now. I lean against the steel door and I hope my neighbor is friendly. I put my mouth close to the little window, pressing my lips against the cool mesh.

  Hey, I say. Anybody out there?

  Long hollow silence and for a few horrifying moments I imagine I’m the only one. Like something out of a science fiction movie. All of the prisoners have died of some horrible virus. The guards have fled and the prison is functioning on computer autopilot. But that can’t be.

  Hey, I say.

  Shut the fuck up, says one thin voice.

  Then another, dry and torn. What’s up, cousin?

  Confused, I say.

  About what? says the voice. You’re in the pokey.

  Yeah, I get that. Are we on suicide, though?

  Damn straight, he says.

  Fuck me, I say.

  I always go suicide, says the voice. Always. Like flying first class. I got to have my privacy.

  Yeah. But they hold you for seventy-two, I say.

  Nothing wrong with that, cousin. Three days peace and quiet.

  I close my eyes. Three days drifting on a rubber mat in a pool of my own urine. And no cigarettes. I will probably die without cigarettes.

  How long since the sheriff last came by?

  Don’t have a watch, cousin. But I’d say a half hour. At least.

  The thin voice pipes up. Bullshit. It was ten minutes ago.

  You shut your hole, says the torn voice. You got no concept of time.

  Hey. You want to come suck my fucking dick?

  Laughter, wheezing. What dick?

  Thanks, I say. Thanks anyway.

  I flop down on my little rubber lifeboat and wait for the next head count. I chew my lip for the residual taste of tobacco. I stare up at the bright fluorescent tube of light and wonder if it is day or night. I would sleep, if I could. I would dream.

  Come footsteps. The rattle and echo of a billybat against one steel door after another. Then a chorus of voices, the music of hollow bones. I can’t be sure if they are coming from within or without. To hell with boys creeping up slowly. I’m hungry, hungry. And a man may fish with a worm that hath eat of a king and then eat of the fish that fed on the worm and around and around you go. Through the guts of a beggar and I don’t like ice cream.

  On my feet and to the door.

  The face of a young black guard appears at my window. The whites of his eyes like porcelain. He thumps the door and asks if I’m okay.

  Yeah. Thanks for asking.

  He grunts and starts to move on.

  Excuse me?

  Yes? His eyes narrow.

  I hesitate. I need to sound sane and I’m not sure my voice is reliable.

  What do you want?

  I need to speak to someone. I’m not sure I belong here.

  The other prisoners begin to wheeze and cackle like a gang of chickens.

  I’m not suicidal.

  The guard peers at me. What’s your name?

  Poe, I say.

  He consults a clipboard. Yeah, he says. The ex-cop.

  I�
�m not a cop. I’m just a regular asshole, now.

  Says here you’re an ex-cop.

  Furious whispers from left and right. Long slow, creeping shadows at the edge of my vision.

  I sigh. Yeah. What am I charged with?

  Assault, he says. Public drunk. Vagrant. Resisting arrest. And oh, shit. You won the lottery. Looks like you’re up for murder.

  Did you say murder? That doesn’t sound right.

  Tell it to the detectives, he says. They’ll be wanting to talk to you, now you’re awake.

  He moves along to the next door and my neighbor says that he doesn’t belong here either. That he’s not crazy. He wants a phone call, a lawyer. He knows his fucking rights. Then he lowers his voice and confides to the guard that the fallen prophet Jeremiah has in fact been creeping around in his cell all night with his guts leaking out between his fingers and the motherfucker won’t shut up. Jeremiah is pissed off at God and he won’t let the rest of us sleep. The guard laughs and moves along.

  I squat in the center of my cell with eyes closed. Murder, huh. That wasn’t part of my plan for this night, I know that much. I try to remember what happened. There was a sad fucked-up scene with an Asian whore. Then stumbling drunk. I was offensive. There was some sort of slapstick confrontation with a bouncer outside a nightclub that might have got messy, but murder seems a bit extreme.

  I open my eyes now and a funny thing happens. I look around and for two seconds maybe three, this is no jail cell. I see fake wood paneling and molded furniture, avocado green. I see a stained mattress with faded blue stripes and I see an open doorway and miles and miles of yellow earth and this is home. This is my trailer back in Arizona.

  I believe I would trade my soul for a cigarette.

  The mad jangle of voices, farther away now. The drip of my toilet like a soft summer rain.

  The thin voice. Hey, man. What the fuck? You five-oh, or what?

  Long time ago, I say.