I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive

by Steve Earle

  “Twenty bucks? You must be crazy, cabrón. My friend told me you were a médico, not a pinche junkie.”

  “I was a physician, once upon a time, but if I were still licensed to practice I would not be sitting here in this, uh, establishment engaged in this tedious conversation. The service that you and your lady friend here require is highly illegal and very expensive. Your friend no doubt informed you what my fee would be.”

  “He said a hundred and fifty. I paid him fifty up front.”

  “Your friend is a very enterprising young man. The price is a hundred. Twenty, in cash, to the gentleman across the street and the remainder to me before I perform the procedure. You’ll have to take up the matter of your friend’s commission with him personally. Now run along, son. I’ll take good care of her until you get back.”

  He motioned to the barmaid to come over.

  “Teresa, will you help me out, hon? My Spanish leaves a lot to be desired.”

  The boy stood there seething for a moment, his hand straying to the small-caliber pistol tucked into the waistband of his pants, but then he thought better of it. He was alone there, far from the west side, with no one to back him, so he resigned himself, turned, and slunk out the door. By the time the kid returned from his errand Doc had learned all he needed to know from the girl but he was getting sick again so he held out his hand for the dope and excused himself.

  “Boarding house just up the street there. One hour from now and bring the rest of the money.

  “Now we’re cooking with gas!” Doc rubbed his hands together and none of the regular customers even looked up from their beers as he muttered through his preprocedure checklist on his way to the door.

  He made one stop, at the liquor store across the street for a fifth of pure grain alcohol. Most of the liquor store’s patrons actually drank the stuff, but Doc bought it only for its antiseptic properties; the owner was an occasional patient, so Doc’s credit was good. He was reasonably sure that he had everything else he needed on hand in his room.

  Doc couldn’t help feeling bad for the girl. The people that Doc usually treated were like him, outcasts of various persuasions, marginalized largely through actions and choices of their own. Granted, almost none of them came from as privileged a background as Doc’s, but Doc knew that poverty alone could never account for the complete lack of compassion for one’s fellow man in evidence on any South Presa Saturday night. They lied and they cheated and they turned one another in to the police. They cut and they shot and they pounded their neighbors’ faces into bloody pulp and strangled their own best drinking buddies with their bare hands, but Doc tried not to judge. Being in the unique position of having lived on both sides of the tracks, he knew firsthand that there was, truly, no more or less honor among patricians than among thieves.

  The whores were Doc’s most regular patrons. For the most part he treated them for infections of their “moneymakers,” which were invariably remedied by large intramuscular doses of black-market penicillin. Over Doc’s halfhearted objections, most girls were back at work in less than a week, but he always recited his litany of dos and don’ts for the working girl anyway, if only to make himself feel better.

  By far the most debilitating of all the hazards of the world’s oldest profession was pregnancy. The girls were all junkies. Most supported their own habits as well as their boyfriends’ and could ill afford an enforced nine-month sabbatical. A few were simply careless and came to Doc for help again and again, and he wondered that they were still able to conceive after so many years of abusing themselves. Nevertheless, he took their money and performed the procedure.

  And he’d take the pachuco’s money but only after an intense internal dialogue on his way down the street and up the stairs to his room.

  Normally Doc had no compunction about performing the procedure that had long been his stockin-trade and the primary means of supporting his habit, and he wasn’t sure why he was having trouble with this one. Maybe it was the girl herself. Doc didn’t need more than one look to know she didn’t belong there. She was Mexican and obviously only recently arrived on this side of the border and therefore undoubtedly Catholic. She was also not much more than a child. Doc knew that to someone like her, the very idea of terminating a pregnancy had to be at once deeply shameful and utterly terrifying. Doc had performed well over a hundred abortions since setting up shop on the South Presa Strip, but not a single Mexican girl had sought his services until now. They sat out their pregnancies and then, against Doc’s advice, went straight back to work, some taking turns caring for one another’s children in shifts. It was the gringo girls, the lost daughters of Baptists, Methodists, and Pentecostals, who came to Doc when they were in trouble. After taking into account the complete lack of character exhibited by the father of the Mexican girl’s baby, Doc finally succeeded in convincing himself that it was all for the best.

  Marge was a big-boned, snuff-dipping, fifty-something redhead who ran the Yellow Rose Guest Home with an iron hand. Doc knew that if Marge’s door was closed before dark, then Dallas, the blonde who ostensibly rented the room next to his, was in there with her, so he didn’t knock.

  Marge had lived in the ground-floor apartment all of her life, having inherited the property and little else when her father died, when she was barely out of her teens. She understood the secret language of every creaking board in the place and she knew all of her tenants by their footfalls, so when she heard Doc mount the staircase, taking the steps two at a time, she hollered through the closed door like a field hand, her usual mode of communication.

  “Doc, you all right up there? Anything I can do?”

  Doc was already cooking up the dime bag of dope. “Well, if you ain’t too busy you could boil some water for me and … you hadn’t got any more old towels that you were going to get rid of, do you, hon?”

  Downstairs, the bedroom door opened and Marge emerged holding her battered terry-cloth robe together with one hand.

  “Oh, hell, who’s knocked up?”

  “Nobody you know. Just a kid. A civilian.”

  “Civilian? Now wait just a minute, Doc. I don’t need no pain-in-the-ass regular citizen down here looking for his slut-of-a-knocked-up-cheerleader daughter!”

  “She ain’t that kind of civilian, Marge. This one’s a Mexican girl. Wetback, fresh up from the interior. Hell, she’s just a baby herself. She’ll be along directly, her and a sawed-off little west-side punk. Holler before you send them up. And try not to scare the hell out of her, if you don’t mind.”

  Marge got a smile out of that one but she took full advantage of the fact that Doc couldn’t see it.

  “Scare her? Well, I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Doc.”

  Dallas emerged from the door behind Marge brushing her long platinum-blond-shot-with-silver hair; it cascaded over one shoulder in a shimmering curtain.

  “You know, Marge. Like that little colored gal that Harelip Jimmy brought around. She probably kept runnin’ down the river to the Gulf of Mexico you scared her so bad!”

  “Well, that’s different. She was a nigger and Jimmy should have known better than to bring her up in my house without he gets permission first. Besides, they scare easy when they ain’t travelin’ in a crowd, niggers do, everybody knows that. Dallas, darlin’, if you could put the water on I’ll just run out to the laundry room and see about those towels. Scare her! The very goddamn idea!”

  Manny had charged the pachuco twenty dollars for a dime bag, that is, ten dollars’ worth of dope in a red balloon. The one-hundred-percent markup was his usual premium for selling to someone that he didn’t know based on Doc’s word alone. A South Presa dime bag was a serious shot of dope. Novices usually split one into two shots and did well not to throw up. Doc had been known to bang as many as three at once, but right now he needed to keep his wits about him. Actually, he’d been operating at a deficit for most of the day and the dime bag felt pretty good; he tasted the taste, the tingle, and, for a fleeting instant, hi
s chin dropped down on his chest.

  The voice starts out low like it always does but it isn’t soft. Subliminally irritating, like a fine grade of sandpaper.

  “Come on, Doc. Can’t you help me out? My back’s killin’ me!”

  “You’re already dead!” Doc barks. “Now leave me alone!”

  “Wha’s that, Doc?” Marge bellowed.

  But the spell was broken and the voice faded away into a vague ringing in Doc’s ears along with any trace of a buzz.

  “Nothin’. Nothin’ at all. Just thinkin’ out loud.”

  There was a sharp rap on the screen door downstairs.

  “Hey, Doc! You got company down here!”

  “All right, all right, already! I ain’t deaf! Quit your caterwaulin’ and send ‘em on up!”

  Normally, Doc would have completed his business with the young couple in a little over an hour and sent them on their way with a handful of penicillin capsules, but this time there were problems. The girl bled profusely and it didn’t want to stop. It was touch and go for a while but Doc’s hands were rock steady as long as he had enough dope in him, and his fingers remembered what to do even though morphine had long shrouded his brain in perpetual mist. Without any conscious deliberation, his focus shifted, allowing him to concentrate on the crisis at hand and to forget about anything and everything that haunted him, be it whispering voices or the discarded remains of the fetus in the washbasin on the dresser.

  Without a hospital’s facilities at his disposal, Doc had to improvise. A transfusion was obviously out of the question, so it was imperative that he stop the bleeding immediately. He knew better than to expect any helping hand from the girls. Marge couldn’t be bothered, and Dallas instantly lost consciousness at the sight of blood. He scrambled to rip narrow strips from the sheets, dropping them into the boiling water in hopes of killing any organism that had taken up residence there, and, when they cooled a little, he packed the birth canal full of the makeshift bandages and applied constant pressure with the heel of his hand until the bleeding finally stopped.

  The girl had lost a lot of blood and couldn’t be moved and so far the boy had only been underfoot, so Doc sent him home, assuring him that she would be strong enough to go in the morning. Doc noted that the little bastard didn’t hesitate for a second, leaving without so much as a nod to the girl. The bleeding came back in fits and starts, and the dressing had to be changed every couple of hours, so for Doc it was a long, anxious afternoon.

  But by four o’clock, the bleeding had finally stopped for good and the girl was resting comfortably enough that Doc felt safe asking Dallas to keep an eye on her while he slipped out to Manny’s spot to cop.

  The afternoon’s windfall allowed the purchase of a quarta— two and a half grams of dope for fifty dollars—and Doc still had a few bucks left over for a week’s rent, some groceries, and a carton of smokes. He looked in on the girl, shot another lick of dope, and by four thirty he was back at his table in the beer joint nursing a beer and chain-smoking Camels in hopes that lightning would strike twice in one day.

  The happy-hour crowd began to filter in. Unlike the daytime patrons, these folks were mostly squares who busted their backs all day long building houses that they could never afford to live in or repaving perfectly serviceable roads in neighborhoods way across town. They arrived in groups of three or four, drank a pitcher of beer among them, and maybe shot a game of pool before hurrying home in time for supper. It was always one of them who dropped the first nickel in the jukebox.

  The Mexicans usually played records by the local conjuntos, like Santiago Jimenez or Trio de San Antonio, or maybe one of the big mariachi bands from Mexico, with blaring trumpets and a singer with a voice to match. Songs about the black-eyed girl they left behind and the beautiful mountains they would never see again.

  Fine. Sad songs in a language that he barely understood were easy enough for Doc to tune out. He knew some of the melodies by heart and hummed along when he was in the mood.

  But when one of the redneck boys lurched toward the box, fishing in his Wranglers for a nickel, the hair stood up on the back of Doc’s neck. He knew it was only a matter of time before one of these peckerwoods bellied up to the Wurlitzer and punched in N26.

  Now you’re lookin’ at a man that’s gettin’ kinda mad

  I’ve had a lot of luck but it’s all been bad.

  “Fuck me,” Doc grumbled under his breath. He’d spent a lot of his life in bars all over the South, and it never fucking failed. If you sat there long enough, some asshole would play a Hank Williams record. Ol’ Hank dead and buried beneath six feet of rusty red Alabama dirt for the better part of a decade now, still taking their nickels and making them cry. Doc looked around the room. There were construction workers, warehouse hands, soldiers from Fort Sam, and layabouts on disability. They ranged in age from their early twenties to seventy-something but they all loved Hank. They loved him when he was alive and now that he was dead they loved him even more. Even the Mexicans loved the son of a bitch, even though most of them couldn’t understand what he was singing about. Hank’s songs were their very own trials and tribulations set to a rock-steady beat that they could dance to. Each and every one believed that Ol’ Hank was singing to him individually, or at least exclusively to people like him. Regular folks with kids to raise and bills to pay, most of them overdue. They had no way of knowing that at this very moment somewhere across town, in solid, old-money Victorian houses in Olmos Park and Alamo Heights, doctors, lawyers, and politicians were mixing themselves highballs and cranking up Hank on their hi-fis. Oh, they had plenty of Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole records on their automatic changers, but when they were drinking, only Hank would do, and there wasn’t one of them who would pay a dime to hear any other hillbilly singer in the world.

  Doc didn’t wonder why they all insisted on doing this to themselves. He knew what was getting ready to happen. When one of Hank’s records dropped into place on an automated turntable, even the initial rumble of the needle in the well-worn grooves sounded lonesome. The crying steel guitar was the bait but it was the beat that set the hook, and by the time Hank’s voice crackled from the speaker it was too late. There was no escaping now.

  No matter how I struggle and strive

  I’ll never get out of this world alive.

  Jesus Christ! That voice. That gut-wrenching, heart-rending wail that got down in your bones like a cold wet day. The keening of a hillbilly banshee, heralding imminent doom.

  “That’s enough, goddamn it!” Doc shouted out loud—but only a handful of patrons paid any attention and none of the regulars even looked up from their beers. They’d all witnessed outbursts from “that crazy old man who sits at the table in the back of the joint,” but they could never make heads or tails of what he was going on about. “He just does that,” they’d whisper. “He talks to himself sometimes.”

  Doc pried his fingers loose from the edge of the table and propelled himself through the door and out into the street.

  It was hot and dark and quiet. The streetlights cast elongated shadows on the empty street, out-of-kilter trapezoidal ghosts of simple one-and two-story structures that had housed respectable businesses. The pawnshop was a barbershop once, a place where people gathered to trade neighborhood gossip and tell tall tales. The abandoned building across the street was a family-owned hardware store, bins filled with shiny new fasteners and fittings of every description: wing nuts and carriage bolts and ten-penny nails.

  But, like Doc, the buildings were derelict. Has-beens; shadows of their former selves waiting around for time to take its slow but steady toll.

  ***

  The familiar fall of faltering footsteps follows behind him. The shuffling echo ceases abruptly each time Doc breaks his stride, but he knows from experience that if he turns around he’ll see only his own shadow stretching from sidewalk to sidewalk like a black chasm opening in the middle of the street. So he just keeps on walking and the ghost follows him all the
way home.

  The Mexican girl was still sleeping soundly so Doc excused Dallas; he sprinkled a good lick of dope on a Juicy Fruit wrapper, which she accepted gratefully before hurrying away. He had intended the quarta to last for a while. At least a couple of days. It would have been like taking a little vacation, a rare reprieve from the daily grind. Just sit up, reach for his outfit, and get straight without having to leave his room, just like the old days. Maybe put a pot of coffee on the hot plate and read the morning paper like a citizen.

  Maybe next time. He needed to get high. Mindful not to disturb the girl, he located his outfit by feel, carefully fishing around between the mattress and the box spring for the blue velvet bag. It had once dressed an elegantly shaped bottle of Canadian whiskey. Now it held all Doc’s paraphernalia: bent-handled spoon, rubber tourniquet, and gleaming glass-and-stainless-steel syringe.

  Most junkies had to settle for homemade contraptions contrived from eyedroppers and rubber bands, but not Doc. His rig was a family heirloom, part of a fine old set of German-made instruments that his grandfather had given his father when he graduated from medical school. Dr. Ebersole the second had kept them unused in a glass case in his office until the proud day they were handed down to Doc. Only the syringe had survived, and at times he’d been tempted to toss it into the nearest trash can, but the truth was that Doc hadn’t carried it around all these years for sentimental reasons.

  In a half cc of water (the capacity of the average rig on the street), three bags of Mexican brown cooked down to the consistency of a good milk shake. Granddaddy’s giant-size German behemoth held three times that amount, so Doc could load up without fear of a clogged needle and a wasted thirty-dollar shot.

  Yeah, Doc liked the big shots, the kind that would kill most junkies, the kind that rattled his teeth and made him sweat and drool as he rocked back and forth on the edge of his chair. But he never fell out. He always came back at the last possible instant, blinking and sighing in resignation as he found himself back in his shit-hole room. And the ghost was always there watching him.