by Greg Ames
To make my rent, I wash dishes at Wang’s Clam Digger in east Dearborn. My boss, Henry, a heavily tattooed albino, wears a gun holster under his fringed leather jacket. Every day is fraught with anguish and insanity. And every night I attempt to contact Francesca. I send her Wang’s discount coupons in the mail. I stand on her parents’ moonlit front lawn, hoping to rekindle her dormant enthusiasm. “Francesca,” I shout at her bedroom window. “You know I love you.”
She says that if I don’t go away, she will call the cops and have me arrested.
Entire weeks are a blur, a smear of vague memories. I wander across America, distraught, blind drunk most the time. I work countless part-time jobs. In Hellwater Springs, California, I’m known by some fraternity guys as Caveman. I sleep on the beach in my pissy trousers. They yell “Caveman!” and throw beer cans at me.
“I have work to do,” I say, spinning around, throwing wild blind punches.
They drive away in their Lexuses and BMWs, laughing.
Even in despair I’m industrious. I return their empty cans and bottles, pocket the deposit money.
At night, an elderly woman named Lillian cuddles up next to me for warmth. Her breath is awful, bracing. A foretaste of death.
“Frosty … snowman,” she sings softly in my ear.
I can’t sleep without drinking myself into a blackout. My stomach lurches when I try to eat anything solid. Two of my teeth come loose; one falls out into the sand.
“I loved her like air, like food,” I say. “I even neglected my work for her.”
Lillian spoons her tiny body against me.
The next morning I wake up hungover, feeling humiliated even though I can’t remember much from the night before, and it occurs to me that I need to go home. Brooklyn was never the problem; I had been the problem. New York City, I realize, is where I belong. New York City is where I will finally create a monumental work of Promethean ambition.
I hitchhike in cars, trucks, and vans. Our country is so huge and filled with wackadoos. A generous and violent coke fiend treats the last leg of my trip as a solo mission, charioting me from Bloomington, Indiana, without stopping. He plows ahead at an incredible rate, averaging somewhere between seventy-five and ninety miles per hour. His meaty hands strangle the steering wheel of his Dodge Charger. He snorts cocaine off the blade of a pocketknife while driving. I try not to look directly at him.
He drops me off somewhere in the Bronx.
“Thanks, man,” I say to him. “God bless.”
He rolls down his window and glares at me. “Fuck off,” he says mildly. A gray cloud emerges from his mouth. He’s too tired to put much venom into the insult. He has not slept much in the previous seventy-two hours. I know what that feels like.
I ride the 1 train to 96th, transfer to the 2, and sleep ’til Brooklyn, where I transfer again at Atlantic and get an R to 25th. There’s a hard-packed ectoplasm of dirty, crusted snow on the ground. I see gray snow banked up on sidewalks and pressed high against the sides of buildings, clinging to the walls. The temperature is 11° F, according to a flashing sign outside a closed bank. My breath steams from my mouth. I feel my brow wrinkling and my jaws grinding. I’m home.
On Fifth Avenue and 19th Street, I slip and slide on the sidewalk. These borrowed shoes are three sizes too big. Inside the bodega on Molly’s corner, I buy a twelve-pack of Yuengling.
“Raaaa!” A lean, bearded man lurches from a doorway and approaches me, his face swollen, darkly bruised around the eyes. “Raaaa!”
“Hello, Lucifer,” I say and hand him a dollar. I have two in my pocket. “I told you I’d give you something.”
“Oh,” he says, looking down at the bill. “Merry Christmas.”
“You too,” I say. “Stay warm.”
A brick props open the building’s security door. I race up three flights of steps. “Hey, anybody home?”
Molly emerges from behind the yellow bedsheet that separates the kitchenette from the living room. “Popcorn,” she says, holding up the bowl. “Have some, Todd. As you know, I only use real butter. The fake stuff, I’ve heard, causes cancer and liver damage.”
“It’s good to see you again,” I tell her.
She holds out the bowl and rattles it at me. “Get it while it’s hot!”
My numb fingers rummage awkwardly in the bowl.
“Oh, good. You bought beer,” she says and kisses my cheek. “Whoa, Grizzly Adams, you might want to think about investing in a razor.”
Her open laptop gives off its familiar blue glow. She sits on the futon and begins pressing keys. “These GMOs are really bad news,” she says in a quiet voice.
She’s still so beautiful.
The winter wind howls outside. Hail pounds at the windowpanes. It sounds like little kids are standing below and tossing pebbles at the glass.
NOTHING TO DO WITH ME
One morning over breakfast Milana told me about an old boyfriend of hers, Steven Trimm, who had self-published a chapbook of haiku. Peripheries, he’d called it. He carried dozens of copies around with him in a hemp shoulder bag and sometimes read his poems at open mikes and on street corners.
“He sounds like a jackass,” I said.
“Well, I thought it was cool that he had a passion,” Milana said.
At the age of twenty-three I was still learning when to speak and when to stay silent. It was a painful process. Even though I wanted to demean the guy some more, I decided to let it go. I wasn’t going to let the ghost of this Steven Trimm character and his hemp sack get me into a pointless quarrel with my beautiful girlfriend. After all, Milana was living with me, not him.
“I agree. Here’s to Steven,” I said, toasting my orange-pineapple juice. “Out on the periphery.”
“You think everything’s a joke, but for your information being an artist takes a lot of courage.” Milana was a modern dancer and had many artist friends, whereas I was still floating around a year after college, working a dead-end job for the city. I kept talking about going to France but it didn’t look like it would ever happen. “Being an artist also takes hard work and dedication,” she said.
I knew that. But I wasn’t going to bow down before a self-published haiku writer.
“Steven took his craft very seriously,” she said. “Some people don’t think making art is a great big joke.”
My buddy Clay had recently taught me an all-purpose phrase that he said worked like a charm with his girlfriend. “You’re right, honey,” I said, reciting Clay’s lines. “I am wrong. I was insensitive.”
Milana just stared at me. “What’s that you’re doing?”
“What?”
“Are you imitating a robot?”
“No! I’m saying that you are right. I am wrong. I was insensitive.”
“So you admit that it’s difficult to write and publish a haiku?”
“I am sorry,” I tried again. “You are right. I am wrong. Honey, I was insensitive.”
“I think you’re mocking another person’s attempt to be creative because you’re too scared to try anything like that yourself, and you’re intimidated by people who do.”
One thing about me: I loved a challenge. I said, “How does it go again? Refresh my memory banks. Five-seven-five, right?”
“Oh, stop. I’m not saying that I want you to—I love you for you, babe. I don’t expect you to—”
“Five-seven-five.” I’d taken a few English-lit courses in college. “No sweat. Any monkey could haiku.”
Milana smeared apricot jam on her toast. “You’re cute.”
“You want a poem, lady? You’ll get one. Tonight. Count on it.”
She laughed. “Yeah?”
“Shake on it.” I held out my hand. “Deal.”
On my break from cleaning sidewalks that morning, I peeled off my sticky gloves, busted out my new ballpoint pen and notepad, and prepared to write. I touched the pen’s tip to the paper, so ready to write.
Nothing happened.
Not a problem, I
decided. Inspiration didn’t come all at once, I understood that, but you had to become willing to receive it. I kept the notepad in the back pocket of my work pants for the rest of the day. Every now and then I made ready to compose, my pen poised over paper. “Fat cloud in the sky …” Five syllables. A start. It was tricky, because I had an inborn disdain for any type of structure, and haiku was nothing if not structured. I put the pad back in my pocket.
My coworker, James, a tall, dark-skinned man in his late thirties, walked ahead of me with his dustpan and broom. Every now and then he turned and observed me from behind his mirrored sunglasses with a sort of vague anthropological interest. One of his favorite phrases was “White folks crazy.”
James shook his head in mild reproach, and his out-of-fashion Jheri curls glistened in the sun. All the other black guys on our crew had shaved heads or close-cropped hair. They taunted James, called him “Dripmaster Flash,” but James never bothered to respond. He wasn’t their friend; he wasn’t my friend. He just showed up to do his job. He wasn’t there to play the fool. Our boss, a balding white sadist named Mike McCloskey, left him alone. James carried himself tall, even when he was dragging four dripping trash bags across the street.
Meanwhile, now that I had embarked on my new avocation as a poet, the twenty-block stretch of Main Street, which I had patrolled blindly for months with a pan and broom, appeared new and interesting. For once I was really looking at what was going on around me. I saw pigeons strutting Mick Jagger-like on cracked concrete. I saw three winos, gap-toothed and debonair, chatting on a junked lavender sofa under a skeletal maple tree. I saw a pink gum blob, melted on the sidewalk skillet, clinging in long delicate strings to a fast-walking businessman’s wingtips. I saw Korean hot dog vendors playing Chinese checkers on a rickety card table between steaming grills. Fast-talking merchants sold purses, watches, jewelry, shea butter, hot sauces, and jerk spices. The books for sale ranged from Soul on Ice to Wretched of the Earth to Pimp: The Story of My Life. Cosmic orange flyers for weaves and extensions swirled around one’s feet, promising 100 PERCENT REAL HUMAN HAIR!!!! I lingered in the clouds of African violet and sandalwood incense smoke, browsing the bootleg VHS tapes from blockbusters still in theaters.
By lunchtime I felt like I was seeing the world afresh. The break room offered a choice of reading materials: USA Today or nothing. I hunted for poetic material in the Life section. Twenty minutes into my lunch hour, I put down my slice of pizza and wrote my first full haiku:
Priest on a blanket
asks the new kid to join him
for a slice of cake
James didn’t think much of it—“Hmnpf” was his review—but that didn’t discourage me. This first haiku opened the floodgate. Within minutes I wrote another, and another. They were not good, but it didn’t matter. I wrote about pigeons and street people and stray dogs and politicians and the Middle East. By 2:00 I’d written a dozen.
Most of these poems, thankfully, have slipped through the loosely woven net of my memory, and the notepad has not survived my many abrupt and ill-advised moves, but a few haiku still remain fresh in my mind, the ones that seem to drift toward grief. One of Milana’s gifts to me, I realize now, was the daily example of her kindness. She wasn’t even all that tolerant, but she had me beat by a mile. Despite all my posturing and bravado, I was just a sheltered kid from a provincial town who found it easier to mock everything than admit ignorance and ask for clarification.
That afternoon James and I drove a hundred wet trash bags to the dump, where a private waste management company would cart them off the next day. I rode shotgun and scribbled poems while James leaned out the driver’s side window and said, “You’re doing it, angel,” to women in power suits; “You’re doing it,” to college girls in short shorts and to the Jamaican queens in their bold floral prints; and, mixing it up a bit, “Keep on doing it now,” to the hippie chicks in their long peasant skirts who sold incense, homemade jewelry, and Lebanese hash out of their Army surplus duffels.
Somehow this wasn’t considered creepy. Most of the women seemed to take it as a compliment. I have since tried to say, “You are doing it, angel,” to a few ladies, and I wouldn’t describe the results as successful. Some men can chat up strangers with style and charm, and some men cannot. This was James’s own original catchphrase, spoken so many times in my presence that it sounded as familiar to my ears as “Hello” and “How are you?”
James flirted with more women in an hour than some guys do in a month. He flirted with women in wheelchairs, women in passing cars, nuns in habits, and one outpatient whose head was in halo traction. He didn’t care, as long as they were female and in the eighteen-to-fifty-five age range. I don’t even think James was trying to get laid. He just liked to acknowledge their beauty.
“This is my time,” James said, his eyes concealed by his wraparound shades, his right arm draped over the steering wheel. “Summertime, summertime.”
“Mine too,” I said. “I like the scenery.”
He nodded. “Nice scenery,” he said. We drove on to the dump.
The job had been decidedly less utopian during the winter months when, instead of pans and brooms, James and I had carried snow shovels. Our backs ached as we trudged through snowdrifts wearing hooded parkas, waterproof gloves, and rubber boots. During February in Buffalo, a man’s thoughts sometimes turned to suicide. Attractive women still walked by us while we tried to get warm in a vestibule of the Main Place Mall, but James remained silent. Once I said, “Hey James, you missed one. Didn’t that ‘angel’ warrant a ‘you’re doing it’?” and he told me to stop running my mouth. It was the only time he ever snapped at me.
The melting month of March seemed years away.
Even in winter, though, we owned the street. Sometimes we were more like policemen, James and I, than sanitation workers. We knew all the homeless people and kept up with the feuds and rumors. We knew that one old man had Alzheimer’s or some form of dementia, so we didn’t hold it against him when he pissed on the tram tracks. We knew that Laurel traded sex for drugs. One of the other guys on the crew, Tareq, once told me that Laurel was in her late thirties, but I refused to believe that. She looked sixty.
“Hey there, Tareq,” Laurel would call out in a coy voice. “Why you ain’t called me?”
She teased all of the sanitation guys, trying to provoke or embarrass them.
“You left your wallet in my bedroom,” she said to James once, who just walked by her in silence.
“Some sad shit right there,” Tareq said, shaking his head.
Laurel inspired one of the few haiku I still remember:
A rotten molar
she spits from her mouth and coughs
clutching a gin flask
Sometimes I’d sit beside her on my smoke break. When she was drunk or high she babbled and growled and gesticulated with her dirty hands, the words unintelligible, her yellow-and-blue eyes glassy and raw, but occasionally a name or a place would bubble to the surface of sounds—Dolores, Chicago—and I’d attempt to piece together a narrative from the clues she’d dropped. I imagined that few people, if any, took the time to listen to Laurel, so I made an effort to sit with her whenever I could. Dolores, she said, Chicago, she said. She smelled bad, though, like rotten eggs. I held my breath and tried to conceal my discomfort when she touched my hand. She asked me if I had a girlfriend. I told her all about Milana. My girlfriend was an artistic, brilliant, no-nonsense asskicker. I loved talking about her, partly because the relationship bestowed upon me a glamor or mystique I hadn’t possessed before. Laurel said, “Hold on to that one.” I wished her a good day and walked away thinking Dolores, Chicago, Dolores, Chicago. I was twenty-three years old. Whose name, I wondered, would remain on my lips after everything else had burned away?
On the snowy streets James and I walked side by side. Occasionally I hung back, let James get ahead of me. He never turned around, always kept moving forward, his shovel balanced on his shoulder. More than once
I snuck into the mall, hotfooted it to TGIF, shook off my coat, and slammed down a couple of beers at the bar. James never said a word to me, and he never ratted me out to McCloskey, as far as I know, but it now shocks me that I could have been surprised by James’s occasional chilliness with me. What did I expect? Even though I was a loafer, I think I assumed everyone would give me respect, whether I’d earned it or not.
The homeless needed far more help—medical and psychological—than we street sweepers and snow shovelers could offer. On a gray February afternoon, James and I came across a stabbing victim lying on the sidewalk. Somebody had plunged a flathead screwdriver into the man’s chest. I took a knee and tried to calm him, but he writhed and squirmed so much that I couldn’t do anything. I had no medical training. Still, I put my hand on his shoulder, said, “Relax, relax, relax,” thinking he should try to remain immobile, calm his breathing, not tighten up in the cold.
James said, “Don’t get that man’s blood on you.”
A crowd formed around us. The ambulance would take forever to come because of the snow and traffic, and the police were nowhere to be found. For a long minute we all stood around like catatonics, the orange light from our truck’s beacon flashing across the dirty snow.
Finally James said, “Fuck this. Grab his legs.”
I hoped he wasn’t talking to me. As much as I wanted to help the guy, I’d also heard that one shouldn’t move an injured person. Everybody knew that.
He definitely was talking to me, though, because he said, “Hey, Slim,” which was the nickname our boss, McCloskey, had bestowed on me. I was a tall, gawky kid, all rib cage and elbows, and I hated that nickname because only really scrawny or superfat guys were ever called “Slim.”
“Grab his damn legs, Slim.”
“But it’s a crime scene,” I said. “Shouldn’t we wait for the cops?”
“Come on now,” James said. “Move.”
Against my better judgment, we hoisted the shrieking man into the sour-smelling bed of the pickup truck, where he lay between the bloated black garbage bags, and James drove fast through a lace curtain of falling snow.