by Bill Clegg
Shelter
Where? the cabdriver asks me as we speed south, away from Chelsea, away from the Maritime, away from my family. Lisa’s taxi is nowhere to be seen, and in only a few blocks I’m not thinking about her, about them, anymore. I’m thinking about where to go next. I have half a bag in my pocket and a burnt stem. I need to get somewhere to smoke. We sail past the Gansevoort, where I know I can never return. Not after the morning three days ago with Noah and the private investigator. And not after—I think, but I’m not sure, I can’t remember exactly—leaving scrapers and ashtrays caked with drug residue in the room, maybe even a stem. I’m usually hypercareful. Usually I wipe everything down meticulously, repeatedly, so that no one who comes into the room to clean will ever know what has gone on. But we left in such a hurry and I was wild with panic from the stories of the police coming to One Fifth looking for me and DEA investigations. I picture the managers at the Gansevoort and the Maritime combing the rooms with police officers and DEA agents—fingerprinting the vodka glasses and television remote controls, collecting flecks of drugs from the carpet to test in a lab, fishing ATM receipts from the trash cans and calling Chase to get all my details. Nowhere seems safe. Whatever anonymity I enjoyed before now feels like it has disappeared. Noah and the private investigator can find me anywhere. I turn my cell phone off. Didn’t Brian say something about how they could track me by my cell phone signal? I’ll use pay phones to call Happy. I’ll tell him my cell is busted.
I finger the tiny plastic bag in my jeans pocket and trace the shapes of the few medium-size rocks it contains. Where can I go? Where? I need to get somewhere safe, and nowhere is. The cabdriver asks me again where I’m going, and I tell him to go east. East of Fifth, somewhere near Houston. East seems like a frontier. An unexplored country worlds away from the west Village and Chelsea where I have been the last few weeks. As we cross down onto Houston and barrel east, I feel like I am crossing out of a ruined country into a fresh new world. I’ve been here a million times and yet nothing seems familiar. The buildings, signs, restaurants, and even the people seem generic, implausible, somehow unconvincing as New Yorkers, as New York. Like a film shot in Toronto attempting to mimic Manhattan.
I ask the cabdriver to pull over at Houston and Lafayette. I notice the meter has not been turned on. I also notice that the driver’s photo has been covered with a strip of cardboard, but even so, I can make out a name, Singh or something like that, something Indian or Pakistani. The driver is black and definitely not Indian. I start to panic and fish a ten from my jacket and stick it through the small Plexiglas window. The black, non-Indian, meter-neglecting cabdriver laughs as I scramble out the door.
Where am I going? There is only $9,000 and change in my bank account and the end is in sight. I think through the list of hotels I’ve been in—Gansevoort, 60 Thompson, Washington Square, W, Maritime. I need someplace new and decide to try the Mercer Hotel. It’s the closest and I imagine a clean, serene room with extraordinary soaps and a powerful shower that will wash away the gritty ordeals of the last few days. Maybe this will be the last one.
I walk into the chic, quiet lobby and approach the front desk. I ask a young woman if there is a room and she asks me to wait a moment. She returns a minute or two later with a man, someone in his late thirties or early forties, with glasses. He immediately says, I’m sorry but there is nothing here for you. I ask him if there is nothing or if there is just nothing for me. He answers, I think you heard me, with a hostile expression. The woman looks embarrassed and will not meet my eye. It takes a few beats for me to fully take in what is happening. It must be clear that I am strung out. I realize I haven’t looked at myself in a mirror since leaving my room at the Maritime. Are my eyes bloodshot? Do I smell of smoke and alcohol? I can’t remember if I showered this morning. My face prickles with shame and I leave without saying a word.
Out on Mercer Street I’m terrified. I have somehow, without seeing it happen, tripped over some boundary, from the place where one can’t tell that I’m a crack addict to the place where it is sufficiently obvious to turn me away. I look at my hands to see if they are shaking. Suddenly, for the first time, I feel as if I might look and act and sound in a way that I am not able to see. Like body odor or bad breath that is only detectable to other people, my movements and my whole bearing could be invisible to me. I try to figure out if people are staring. If they are registering disgust as they walk past. My pants feel very loose. It’s been over a week since I’ve had a new hole punched in my belt, and my navy turtleneck hangs stretched and baggy off my frame and must, it just must, reek. Though I have been doing drugs, drinking liters of vodka a day, not sleeping, and running from hotel to hotel for a month, it dawns on me like a great shock that I might actually look like a junkie. I feel that whatever capacity I’d once had to move through the world undetected has vanished, that CRACK ADDICT is written on my forehead in ash, and everyone can see.
I am nowhere and belong nowhere. I can now see how it all happens—the gradual slide down, the arrival at each new unthinkable place—the crack den, the rehab, the jail, the street, the homeless shelter, a quick shock and then a new reality that one adjusts to. Am I now in the purgatory between citizen and nobody, between fine young man and bum?
I start walking. It’s late morning and the streets are full. They are full, but somehow it seems that a path is being made for me. As if people are stepping aside, avoiding me. Not wanting to brush up against me. Can they ALL see? Is it THAT obvious? Is there blood on my face? I need to get to a mirror. I see a dingy-looking bar somewhere north of Houston. It’s open and I head straight for the bathroom. I lock the door and my hands fly to the bag and stem and lighter and furiously pack a hit. I avoid the mirror, because if there is something hideous there I don’t want to see it yet, not before taking a blast. I turn the water on to hide the sound of the lighter. I pack nearly half of what’s in the bag into the stem and take a giant hit. I pull what feels like a galaxy of smoke into my lungs and hold it there until I choke for air. The room becomes a billowing white cloud, a sauna of crack smoke, and luckily there is a small window above the sink that I immediately open. Next to the sink is a mirror, and as the thick smoke snakes out through the window, I look. My eyes appear green and red, and the turtleneck collar of my sweater has what looks like white paste on it. The sweater and jacket seem three sizes too big, and there is snot dried and packed below my left nostril. Weeks of beard growth have grown in black, with flecks of silver and blond and red. Silver? I see an old man staring back in the mirror: gaunt, shaky, and frightened. Weathered. I take another hard pull of the stem and blow the smoke out the window. I take another. And another. I sit on the toilet and let the drugs dull the horror of the morning, and a low flame of calm begins to rise. Someone finally knocks. I take another quick hit off the stem before I clean off my sweater and face and splash some water on my cheeks. I look in the mirror again and see that I still look pretty rough. But now it seems slightly funny, less dire. The knock comes again and I pack up my stuff, flush the toilet, and head out through the bar to the street without looking left or right.
I see a cab and wave it down. The name of a newish hotel at Park Avenue South and 26th comes to me—the Giraffe—and I tell the cabdriver to go there. Kinda far, he says. Or I think he says. What did you say? I ask, and he laughs. I repeat the question and he answers, sarcastically, Glad to take you anywhere you want to go. The relief of the hits I’ve just taken fades quickly as we head up Third Avenue. I start wondering if I should get out of the city, but when I think of places like Florida and Boston, I immediately come up against the problem of finding drugs. Also, I can’t travel through an airport in the area, certainly not Newark. I imagine photographs of me posted in all of them, and dozens of Penneys swarming the terminals. The cab slows, caught in traffic. As horns sound around us I feel caged and vulnerable. As if the cab could be surrounded at any moment. I throw a twenty into the driver’s seat and get out.
The Giraffe
is ten blocks away. I begin to monitor my breath and try to impose a sense of ease as I get closer. Calm, I repeat to myself. Calm. The hotel is empty and smells like ammonia. Everything is very new and much more corporate than I had imagined. It feels wrong. Still, I go up to a guy at the counter and ask for a room. He’s cheerful, in his twenties, and says sure. He asks for my I.D. and starts typing away at his keyboard when an older woman joins him behind the desk and says she’ll take over. He looks confused and steps aside as she inspects my passport and the screen he had been typing on. Oh, she says, it looks like we’re full up. The young guy begins to say something but stops himself. Really? I ask. Yes, she says, we’re booked through the rest of the month. I start to say something but realize there is nothing to say, so I turn around and head through the door, onto the street, where there are two gridlocked corridors of traffic stalled up and down Park Avenue South. If SoHo had seemed a strange landscape, this bustling, steely sliver of the metropolis is utterly other. There is no soft corner, no shadowy sanctuary to hide in. The cold March sun glares everywhere, shines off the cars in traffic, the glass panes showcasing large restaurants with multiple eating levels, the cuff links and briefcase buckles of the perfectly dressed businessmen marching blankly between appointments. I head back to Third Avenue and then south. Again, it seems as if people are clearing a path for me, stepping aside, making way. I remember a dream I had growing up—about a picnic in the woods and an invisible force that magically lifts all the food off the blankets and carries it beyond the tree line. Everyone—my parents, my sister, childhood friends, our neighbors—accepts that the food is gone, but I refuse to let go of a bag of Cheetos. I’m determined not to lose this bag and as I hold on, thrash alone against the unseen hand pulling just as hard to rip it from me, everyone steps away. One by one, they shrink back to the field’s perimeter and refuse to come near me. Walking down Third, I shudder at the spooky precision of what the dream forecast. I feel very small and freakishly large at once. Critical and insignificant. At the very center of things and at the farthest edge.
I remember a building, some kind of subsidized housing development on 23rd Street, where I had once seen what I thought were junkies. The memory flashes through me like a strobe of hope. I remember the place was next to a used-furniture store I had gone to, years before, looking for a rug. I pick up my pace and when I hit 23rd Street, head east toward Second. I see the used-furniture shop and then see the building. I can also see—how can I say this?—my kind, everywhere. Shuffling here and there. Leaning against buildings. Arguing into pay phones. They might as well all be dressed in bright orange jumpsuits, they stand out so clearly to me. I exhale and begin to relax. I lean up against the building and let the sun hit my face. The warmth feels wonderful and it’s a relief to stop moving. I feel safe for the first time all day.
After a few minutes, I see a guy who apparently has some kind of authority over the scattered flock outside the building. Someone asks for a light, another pats him on the back. He whistles at a middle-aged woman entering the building. By the way she laughs it’s clear they know each other. He has a glint of kindness in his eye, but also a toughness. He squats to smoke a cigarette not too far from where I am standing, and I go over to say hi. We talk for a while. He seems to get me. Get what’s up without my saying a word. I feel comfortable. Comfortable enough to ask him if there is a place inside where I can hang out. A place I can duck into and crash and be left alone. It would be worth someone’s while, I add. As I speak, he half smiles, as if he has been expecting every word. After a pause, he says, I know just the person. And don’t worry, no one will bother you. He says he’ll arrange it and quickly disappears into the building. I go to a cash machine at the bodega next door. Twenty or so minutes later he comes out of the building and says, It’s all set, follow me. I walk in and we go to a desk. They ask to see my passport, and I am given a sign-in sheet where I write my name and the time. My new friend, whose name I don’t know, says to the very old man behind the counter that I’m with him and just visiting.
We go up the elevator to a high floor, fifteen or sixteen, and he asks me if all this has been worth his while. I hand him $200 and he smiles and says, Yes, well, yes, it has.
We get off the elevator and head down a hall, and for some reason I’ve not had a jumpy impulse, a nervous second, since entering the building. Even signing in and showing my passport felt perfectly safe. We stop in front of a door and he knocks gently. I can hear a woman’s voice on the other side, something thudding to the ground, and a high, squeaky giggle. The door opens and a small black woman stands there, beaming. Oh, hello, you’re the young man Marshall mentioned. C’mon in. Her accent is tricky—Cajun, southern, something. She tells me her name is Rosie and to sit right down. My new friend, who I now know is named Marshall, excuses himself. The door clicks behind him, and Rosie and I are suddenly all alone in an apartment the size of three refrigerator boxes. I take a seat on a wicker loveseat heaped on either side with boxes and luggage and bags upon bags spilling with string and Styrofoam and towels. There is a familiar smell in the room. Familiar enough that I ask her if she minds if I get high. She says, in that high voice and tricky little accent, Why, of course I don’t mind, so long as you share.
As we sit down in Rosie’s tiny space, I wonder how Marshall knew what she and I had in common. On the surface we couldn’t be a less likely pair, but in one way we are the same. We’re the Harold and Maude of crack addicts, I think, as she pulls out a green metal box where she stores her stems, scrapers, and lighters. I pull out my bag and off we go, me and Rosie: cleaning our stems, packing hits, getting high.
My bag is soon empty and I ask her if I could have one of my dealers come up, and she says probably not. If I wanted more, I could give her cash and she would just go get some. She makes it sound so easy, so innocent. As if she were just running to get me some aspirin from the corner deli. And so I give her $400 and she shuffles out of the room. By this time the sun has gone down, and aside from the green Christmas lights Rosie has strung up over her stove, I am sitting in the dark. She is gone an hour or more and after I scrape my stem (and hers) and smoke down the last of the residue, I begin, for the first time since I walked up to this building, to worry about something being wrong. The possibilities begin to hatch in the quiet dark of Rosie’s den. Has she stolen from me? I wonder, but then I remember I’m in her apartment. Where would she go? She would eventually have to come back here. Or maybe she’s been caught scoring and is being dragged back here with a small army of police officers.
I begin to fear that the whole thing is a setup. That Marshall is an undercover cop or a snitch. How else would someone just conveniently have a sweet little old lady crack addict handy to shelter yours truly from the storm?
But Rosie’s no snitch. Rosie’s been smoking crack under the Christmas lights and showing me her half-finished art projects. At some point I almost leave but the prospect of a big haul of crack on its way is too powerful to abandon. So I close my eyes and wait.
I’m asleep when Rosie unlocks the door. Ooh, I’m sorry to take so long. It was a little trouble getting so much. But we did and here I am. I think you’ll be pleased. Who is this angel? I think as I wake up. Rosie lights a candle and asks me to hand her my stem. She gives me another new screen and fusses over the stems and the bags like a chemist and finally passes mine back to me with an enormous rock lodged at the end. Make up for lost time, she says, and giggles as I draw in a gale of smoke and think, here, here at Rosie’s, this is a place I could die.
Rosie talks about New Orleans. She talks about her mother, who was a painter, and all the famous jazz musicians and artists she knew. Her daughters were talented when they were young but they gave it all up. She isn’t going to give up, ever, and she gestures around us to all the bags of materials she has collected over the years. You never know what you’ll need, she says, chuckling, you never know. Rosie must weigh only eighty pounds. She is no more than five feet tall and her hair, if she
has any, is hidden under a faded silver scarf. All her art projects are half to three-quarters finished. I’ll just glue some beads here and it will be just right. All this needs is an old hairnet to fasten around the edges. One of these days I’ll paint the unfinished wood on this one. None of them look like anything, and they are all just one or two little tasks away from being beautiful. Rosie’s hands shake violently as she holds each little almost-beautiful nothing up to the light.
After a few hours of smoking and listening (Rosie never asks any questions), I get restless. The room is too small. Rosie never quiets. And I have a little mountain of drugs in my pocket that makes the world seem manageable.
I leave Rosie a few rocks and a hundred dollars, and she pats my forehead as I go and says, Come back. Don’t forget Rosie. Come back.
I head out through the brightly lit hallway and down the elevator and sign out at the counter. Humming with drugs and shaky from not eating all day, I’m conscious of how ruined I must appear now. Even worse than this morning.
How will I ever be able to check into a hotel in this state, I wonder, as I walk, as slowly and calmly as I can, out onto 23rd Street. It’s late in the evening now. People are out, rushing home from dinner, heading to their softly lit apartments, and feeding their cats or dogs or paying their babysitters. Buses squeal down 23rd Street, and guys from karate practice walk together with their uniforms still on and their workout bags slung over their shoulders. My heart pounds hard behind my chest and blood streaks through my veins like electricity. I feel as light as a wafer and my pants won’t stay up. I can’t use my phone because I’m afraid I’ll be tracked down again. There is just over $8,000 left in my account, and I can’t fly anywhere, stay anywhere, appear anywhere I am known. I can’t just walk into any hotel, because two have already refused me and that was earlier in the day, several bags of crack ago, when I was more presentable. On the corner of 23rd Street and Second Avenue, I am frozen. Where do I go? Every direction is wrong. Where?