While all this happened a half dozen men watched me from inside the lobby of the hotel. Not interest, just assessment. Town Car. Three-piece suit. Carrying a wardrobe trunk. Meanwhile they wore threadbare sweatpants and decaying T-shirts, shabby shoes and scruffy haircuts. Which is a kind of ensemble too. The vagabond. The pauper. The bum.
But despite these differences we recognized one another. Like knows like. It’s in the hardened skin and haunted eyes. Those didn’t change just because I wore a vest. The men saw beyond my costume.
And in return I recognized not just them, but their surroundings. Suddenly I understood this hotel. The smudged front windows. The clusters of cigarette butts on the sidewalk, a medley of mentholated brands. Pea-green lobby walls for that institutional feel. I’d stayed in SROs many times and saw what happened when they tried to privatize. The rooms were slightly refurbished, but the clientele stayed the same. By the Bay was just a flophouse that went pro.
The guys inside must’ve been wondering the same question I asked myself.
Why was a guy dressed like me staying there?
All of us watched as the only person with the answer had her driver put the Town Car in gear.
28
HEROIN, like I said before, robs you of your empathy. And that’s a problem, because empathy is what separates human beings from teenage boys. A real heroin addict is as callous as your average fourteen-year-old, and even after you kick, there’s a long period before your sense of mercy returns.
Once that’s back, you feel the rest of yourself resurface too, including your libido. And that part doesn’t thaw. It flashes from frozen to blazing. Your resting body temperature even goes up a few degrees. That’s probably a fact. So all this recent abstinence had been an extra special trial. It made my body fussy, touchy, even a bit vengeful. Just caressing a keyboard could give me an erection. Without the proper outlet my head had even started to hurt sometimes. So when my room phone rang, I hardly noticed because my chastity headache had a ring to it.
When I finally realized the bell wasn’t going between my eardrums, I rolled over, onto my stomach, so I could reach the phone. This was the closest thing to sexual contact I’d had in well over a year. When I picked up the receiver and tried to say “hello,” all I managed was a deep, long, nearly orgasmic groan.
A distracted woman’s voice replied, “You have a wake-up call.”
I’m ashamed to admit this, but when I heard it was a woman, I nearly finished myself off right there. I humped my mattress on instinct. Nothing crazy, I wasn’t thrashing around, but if anyone had been there, they’d have noticed the faintest tremor, side to side, going on around my groin. A breath escaped from deep in my lungs. Maybe lower.
“You there, Mr. Rice?” she asked.
“Almost,” I muttered.
“What is going on?”
Clarity finally returned to me.
“Didn’t ask for a wake-up call,” I groaned.
I heard the air from her nostrils through the pinpoint end of my phone receiver.
“That’s not what I mean, Mr. Rice. There’s someone here in the lobby. They asked me to wake you. Understand?”
“Uuhhhh.”
“What?”
Quiet.
“Hello …,” the woman said.
A little more quiet.
“Mr. Rice?”
“Tell her I’ll be down in a few minutes,” I said. I reached the first floor feeling relieved.
And I entered the lobby of the undead. There were four figures who’d gathered around a cheap big-screen television as if it were a trough full of brains. Occasionally they’d talk or clap and laugh while watching a basketball game, but they still seemed like zombies to me.
The tiled floors of the lobby were so scuffed I thought the streaks were the design.
And the walls gave off the perfume of stale beer. Even this early in the day.
What a palace. Thank you, Washburn Library, for helping me relive my twenties.
But I guess the real reason I suddenly felt pissy was because I thought I’d left places like this behind. I’d been an Unlikely Scholar for less than a year, but already felt entirely changed. Maybe I’d hoped that the Library had made me elegant. Like I’d become a viscount in Vermont.
“Surprise!” yelled one man in a wheelchair.
I thought, for a moment, that he was talking to me, but he pointed to a player on the TV screen. I stepped out of the elevator and passed that mad crowd. I expected a cross-looking Gray Lady to be waiting, but she wasn’t.
The front desk would be familiar to anyone who’s bought Chinese food in a ghetto. Inch-thick bulletproof sheets between you and the money.
Behind the Plexiglas shielding I found a beefy short-haired woman with her arms crossed, sitting at the front desk. She had wide little feet that she balanced against the desktop as she leaned backward in a chair. There were four textbooks set out on the counter, and her stubby toes curled over the pages as if it was them doing the studying while her hands and mouth went about the work of answering the hotel phone.
“I’m Ricky Rice,” I said. “You called my room?”
She pulled her feet off the counter and slipped them into a pair of red flip-flops waiting on the floor. I wondered if she was a Samoan. I’d never seen one in person before, but her color looked right. That and her thick, curly brown hair. A wide face that spread into a soft chin.
“You said there was a woman waiting for me?”
She stood up. She shimmied to get a better view. She was a woman who really liked to dance, I knew this about her instantly. Her gestures showed a graceful pep.
“Where’d he go?” she asked.
“It was a man?”
“Sure was.”
“What did he say?”
“ ‘Is Ricky Rice staying at this hotel?’ And I checked, said you were up on the fourth floor. Then he asked me to call, so that’s what I did. He walked around the lobby for a minute. But he’s gone now.”
“Did he have a big gut? Cheap suit. Face like a dog biscuit?”
She laughed. “He was thin enough.”
Now I looked out those front doors, expecting the stranger to walk in. It couldn’t have been Claude anyway. Since he’d dropped me off, he knew I was there. So who? The uncertainty made me twitch.
I asked, “Did he dress as well as me?”
This wasn’t my finest outfit, but still a blue-ribbon winner when you consider how men dress today. Just a sports coat and a pair of gray flannel trousers, my white shirt from the plane trip, a tie, and a pair of black Derbys. She leaned forward, forehead against the spotty Plexiglas, inspecting my outfit.
“He dressed better,” she said.
Not the answer I’d been expecting.
“Did he say anything else?” I asked.
“You in trouble with the cops?”
“Not in a long time.”
I tried to make it sound casual, goofy, but I felt like she could hear snippets of my court appearances playing in the spaces between my words. The woman even cocked her head, as if listening. I felt ashamed, so I turned to go back upstairs and wait for the Gray Lady’s arrival.
Then the woman at the front desk knocked on the glass.
“He said one more thing.”
I walked closer again.
“Asked if there was a lady with you.”
29
MY FATHER DIED ALONE. Died that way even though my mother lived in the same town and I was two hours away down in New York City. My older sister, Daphne, was probably the farthest off, out in Long Island, and couldn’t visit. But distance wasn’t the issue. He wanted us to keep away, and we agreed.
Not that the rest of us were all that chummy. We weren’t the family that gabs on the phone every Sunday. My mother, Carolyn, and I had a habit of sending birthday cards to each other a few weeks late. Sometimes we even misspelled each other’s names. I felt closest to Daphne and visited her when the weather was nice. (Those Long Island buses leav
e you standing in the cold too damn long.) Maybe most families are closer than ours turned out to be, though I wouldn’t bet money on that.
Sargent Rice—that was my father’s given name—remembered how much he paid for a meal in a Spokane restaurant back in 1959. Could even tell you what he tipped, down to the cents. Absolutely rhapsodized about that meal: two eggs sunny-side up, four sausage links, two slices of toasted white bread, only one pat of butter but they gladly brought more, a cup of black coffee, and a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. All for $3.01, including gratuity.
It wasn’t the food that mattered, but the bargain. He bought zipper-less jeans from the “defective” bins. Found my mother a ten-cent iron missing its cord, bought a cord for a nickel, and fixed it himself. The iron didn’t actually work, but what a savings that would have been! More than practical. Not simply frugal either. While most people like to dream or hope or fantasize, Sargent Rice never indulged. Instead he devoted all that human passion to finding cheap deals.
You don’t exactly love a guy like that. Not because you don’t want to, but because his nit-picking frustrates that emotion. To love a guy you have to think he’d run in front of a subway train to save you. My father would’ve stopped at the turnstile, hesitating because the fare had been increased.
And yet my father was the one who believed in the Washerwomen most. He convinced my mother—a sixth-grade history teacher when they met—to join. To raise their children in a “cult.” And when my mother and father went out proselytizing, other Christians called them much worse things than cultists. That’s dedication. That’s faith. How could a person like him make such a leap in one way, but in all others remain the model of prudence? As a boy I asked him about this all the time. Why do you follow the Washerwomen? And his answer remained the same: common sense. This was the mystery of Sargent Rice.
But a mystery only satisfies if there’s an answer at the end, and he refused to offer one. He used to hold me close, so close I could see the life behind his eyes, but his soul always scurried off to hide. I’d run my fingers across his cheeks as he read to me, thinking I could pluck at his spirit as easily as an eyelash. But when my fingers got too close, he’d shut his eyelids. Wouldn’t open them again until I dropped my hands into my lap. Even then I understood his irritation. No one wants to get poked like that, but why couldn’t he understand what I was really after? How could a child be wiser than a grown man? Eventually I got exhausted, I’d done too much begging, and I gave up. I felt affection for him, nothing more. Even our mother came to think of him as a reliable friend, that’s all.
For him this realization was slow in coming, though it did finally pop in December of 1971. The Washerwomen didn’t let us celebrate Christmas because of its pagan origins. Just more evidence that the world had fallen into disrepair. You want to talk about a way to make yourself weird in America? Skip Christmas. Jewish kids and Muslim kids know what I’m talking about. Jehovah’s Witnesses too. Where’s your wreath? Your window display? It was just one more thing that put the Washerwomen in a bad light. We didn’t realize it, but our neighbors were making a list.
But in private my family still gave one another little gifts. That’s a hard habit to kick. My dad sat on our living room couch, the one with a cheetah-skin pattern. I was seven and Daphne, twelve. She danced badly, showing our mother a few steps, and I tried to imitate Daphne so our mom would watch me too. Meanwhile Carolyn Rice packed the torn wrapping paper inside old newsprint so the Washerwomen wouldn’t know we’d traded presents. The other faithful families might’ve been doing the exact same thing, but we couldn’t be sure. And in the midst of this my father reached a pretty obvious conclusion. He’d been watching us quietly for a while. His gift that year? We gave him a pocket mirror. When he unwrapped it, he held it up between two fingers like he was lifting a mouse by its tail.
He coughed once, and I peeked at him. He shook his head faintly. Sargent Rice was as skinny as a lamppost and looked even slimmer on our wide couch.
He said, “This family won’t even visit my grave.”
We turned our backs on Christmas, on public school. On private school and Catholic school too. We weren’t allowed to play with “outside” kids. That’s what we called them. The world had broken, all of it failing fast. The Washerwomen were trying to save as many of us as they could before God’s last bell. My father took this seriously. “You all better be ready,” he’d snarl at Daphne and me every time we talked back or tried having a little fun. You all better be ready. But for what, exactly? He wouldn’t say.
30
I LEFT THE WOMAN at the front desk and went back up to my hotel room to put on some finer clothes. When the woman said my visitor had dressed better, I guessed that our target had found me. So much for surprise. This hotel provided no protection, and I already didn’t trust the Gray Lady worth a damn. What could I rely on besides myself? Only the clothes. Wearing them felt like donning armor.
I started with my burgundy sock garters.
In my room I slipped out of the slacks, down to my boxers, and then pulled those sock garters up around my calves. Their contact endowed me with a feeling of renewed elegance and security. I just lounged in my rickety wooden room chair, wishing I had some money left so I could buy breakfast. I’d spent my cash on those newspapers and magazines in New York. But despite a little hunger I felt like a rajah. I didn’t even put the socks on yet, so the garter buckles bounced lightly against my skin when I shifted my legs.
My own family, I don’t want to say we grew up poor, because that wouldn’t be exactly true. We chose poverty, made a bit of a vow. We weren’t supposed to pay much attention to material things, though of course that only made my sister and me want them more. This was hard on me, but impossible for Daphne. She wasn’t even allowed ribbons to tie her hair. Those gifts we gave one another for Christmas? Mostly books. Packs of flash cards. (Yay?) A plastic model of the human anatomy. (Our mother quizzed us about the names of organs.) Nothing fun, that’s for damn sure. So we learned to sneak our pleasures up the back stairs.
Daphne, five years older than me, owned a yellow plastic ring that she only dared to wear in the shower. The rest of the time she kept it wrapped in a sock and tucked into one of her old shoes. I knew about it because younger siblings are born detectives. That same Christmas night, when my father came to his lonely revelation, my sister and I had a fight. She wouldn’t stop mocking me for my bad dancing. It was about that, but it wasn’t. We were brother and sister, destined for disputes. So she made fun of me and I showed the yellow plastic ring to my father. I thought he’d yell, maybe take it from her for a month, but he was already in a bad mood. He made Daphne melt the ring in a pan on our stove.
FINALLY, I decided to put on some gray socks. They stretched and held so nicely once I attached them to the clips of the sock garters. Then it was time for the suit, a gray pin-striped number that flattered my narrow shoulders but still showed off my tight waist. Black Church Chetwynd shoes, and last, my fedora. It had a mulberry-colored band that complemented the burgundy sock garters. Why did this matter? Who would even know they were there, since my pants hid the garters? Me, that’s who. I knew.
I looked at myself in the long mirror that hung on the back of my room’s door, and for a moment I felt sheepish about going outside looking so dandified. This outfit would’ve made my mother blush and my father grumble. They had rules against flashiness, and as I looked at myself, I understood them. You might focus on a man who primps himself, but it can be hard to trust him. When he’s looking deep into your eyes, he may only be checking his reflection. Maybe I should just go back to the slacks and sports jacket, wear the same shirt I’d traveled in.
But no, I wasn’t my parents’ boy anymore and these decisions were mine alone. Funny that I was forty and still needed to remind myself of this.
After I’d dressed, there wasn’t much to do but wait for the call. In that quiet time I pulled out the photo of my sister holding me as a baby. The one
I’d dropped when Lake came to get me. I weighed it in my palm. She’s five in the snapshot, which means it was 1965. Ten years later Daphne was murdered.
Eventually the room phone rang.
I reached the lobby once again expecting to find the Gray Lady standing there, but my only greeting was a toot from the Town Car parked out front. That guy in the wheelchair was still in front of the television in the lobby, still shouting at the players on the screen. He was one of those guys who can’t grow a beard, just sprouts patches of desert brush along his neck and chin. He saw me step out of the elevator, and pointed so his friends would look at me.
“I didn’t know this hotel had a maître d,” he said.
The other three men just about burst, laughing at my outfit as I rushed to the front doors. Before I got outside, the two-wheeled entertainer spoke again.
“Table for four!” he yelled.
I was in such a hurry to reach the sidewalk that I almost tripped on the raised doorjamb, and that didn’t help my sense of dignity. Claude stepped out of the car and came around to open the Gray Lady’s door. She hopped out quickly. If she heard those men giggling inside, she didn’t associate it with me. Instead she only waved at Claude, who shut the passenger door, got back in, and drove away.
“We supposed to run after him?” I asked. “ ’Cause I’ve got this bad leg.”
“Claude’s got other business,” she said. “Garland’s a small city. We walk.”
Had she not heard what I’d said? In case she hadn’t, I stood there and pointed at the right leg, but the Gray Lady had trouble seeing my point because she’d already marched a block ahead. I had to scramble to catch up.
San Pablo Avenue, the street we were on, had a booming spirits industry. Bars and liquor stores on every other block, and half-dead homeless people haunting all the corners. These men and women, mostly men, sat on benches or leaned against stores. They stretched and yawned, as if they’d only just been released from their crypts. When we passed them, I looked away.
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