by Steve Earle
Doc couldn’t credit any science or craft, certainly no skill of his own, for young David’s inevitable recovery. It wasn’t a matter of faith because Doc reckoned faith was the act of believing in something without any physical proof, the proverbial leap beyond ration and reason. Doc still didn’t believe in much of anything, unless it was Graciela herself. But he had personally witnessed her perform one miracle after another, so no suspension of disbelief was necessary. He knew from experience that the kid would pull through, just like that redheaded girl last week.
Her old man had cracked her head like an egg without leaving a mark on her face. A smart pimp never hit a girl anyplace that might show because it damaged the merchandise. The girl couldn’t see her way clear to calling the law dogs down on the son of a bitch so she refused to go to the hospital and she damn near died before somehow she wound up on Marge’s front porch and Marge and Dallas had helped her up the stairs and banged on Doc and Graciela’s door. Graciela had taken the girl’s hand and begun to pray and Doc had shined his little light into one of her eyes and then the other, and though it defied what sixteen years of formal education and a lifetime of misery had taught him, he knew that she’d make it. He knew because they all made it. All they had to do was get through that door. Sometimes he would perform the procedures that he’d been taught, but he was never sure if he was really contributing anything. The first few times cold chills ran down his spine but eventually he became accustomed to knowing. Now he just knew and that was all and that was that. The girl made it. And when she was up and around she left her pimp and left town and began a new life somewhere else.
And David would make it too.
“I’ll be down the hall if you need me,” Doc whispered, and Graciela nodded affirmatively, but he knew Graciela wouldn’t be coming to bed and he was too tired to undress so he lay diagonally across the four-poster and fell asleep.
Doc’s back in his old office above the liquor store in Bossier and he’s drawing down a shot of straw-colored liquid from a bottle marked with crossed bones and a grinning skull into his big glass syringe. He thumps the syringe just below the needle with the back of his index finger and squeezes out the last tiny bubbles of air. Clenching the loaded syringe between his teeth like a pirate’s dirk, he’s just about to wrap the rubber tube around his arm and summon up a suitable vein to receive the dose when someone clears his throat. He knows the voice before a word is uttered.
“What the hell are you waitin’ on, Doc? Christmas?”
Hank’s leaning against the examining table, his pants down to his knees, his shorts pulled down just far enough to expose a patch of translucent flesh the size of a half-dollar. He looks like hell, eat up with the gaunt-ass, Doc used to call it, his skin the color of spoiled milk, but he does appear to be solid enough to stick a needle in and when Hank turns and glares back over his shoulder, Doc can only stare slack-jawed in return.
“I swear to God Almighty, Doc. You gonna stand there and stare at my ass all night or are you gonna give me a shot?”
Doc looks down at the loaded syringe, then over at Hank, sighs, and crosses the room.
“Sure thing, Hank. Take a deep breath.” He deftly stabs the needle into the spare flesh, pressing the plunger with his thumb and watching the liquid disappear into Hank’s hip. What a waste. It won’t even help the pain. Nothing helps Hank’s pain.
Hank’s tucking in his shirt and eyeing Doc suspiciously. “You ain’t turnin’ queer on me, are you, Doc?”
Doc’s still disoriented but he has managed to regain the power of speech. “I wouldn’t worry too much if I were you, Hank. Even if I were a little light in my loafers you wouldn’t be my type. I’ve always been partial to an ass with some meat on it.”
Hank looks Doc up and down. “You all right, Doc? You ain’t actin’ like yourself.”
“Yeah, I’m okay. It’s just that, well, I’m a little bit…”
Fuck it, Doc decides. Just ask him.
“Is this a dream?”
Hank manages half a smile and shrugs. “For you, maybe. For me it’s just a place that I can follow you and she can’t get in the way.”
“But you’re alive. I mean, you look as alive as you ever did.”
“I’m only alive because it’s your dream and you’re dreamin’ that you’re back in Louisiana, and in Louisiana I was alive. That is”—Hank surveys the office with distaste—“if you call this livin’.”
“So—when I wake up, you’ll be dead again, and we’ll be back in Texas?”
Hank’s up and moving now. Restless, pacing the worn linoleum floor.
“I reckon. It don’t make no never mind to me, Doc, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what would ever make you want to go back to a place like that. All that bleedin’ and screamin’, one hard-luck case after another. And what do you got to show for it? Nothin’. Bean money, at best, and nothin’ to knock the edge off at the end of a long, hard night.” Hank stops, freezing for an instant before turning and closing in on Doc in one long, sliding step, leaning in close, grinning from jug-handle ear to jug-handle ear.
“Big ol’ shot of dope’d be good right now, wouldn’t it, Doc? Just what the doctor ordered? Well, you’re the doctor!”
Hank steps aside and with a flourish reveals the medication cabinet, its doors open wide to showcase an army of glistening amber soldiers dressed in shining glass armor. Doc crosses the room in a step or two and reaches for a bottle, half expecting, even hoping, that it will melt in his hand, but it doesn’t. It’s hard and cold to the touch, every bit as solid as Hank is in this topsy-turvy dream of Doc’s. Without bothering to sterilize his syringe he turns the bottle upside down and pushes the needle through the rubber cap.
“There you go, Doc! Live a little. I don’t understand the attraction myself. That stuff’s just medicine to me. It does wonders for the pain in my back but then it puts me right to sleep. Give me a drink of whiskey any ol’ day of the week.”
Doc’s got the tourniquet wrapped around his arm again and he’s found a vein but Hank’s rattling is getting on his nerves…
“What the hell are you waitin’ on, Doc? Christmas?”
Hank’s leaning against the examining table again, his pants down to his knees, his shorts pulled down just far enough to expose a patch of translucent flesh the size of a half-dollar…
“Goddamn it, Hank! That’s not funny!”
“Heh, heh, heh! I’m sorry, Doc. If you could’ve seen the look on your face just now. Go on. Do yourself up a good one…”
“Yeah, right! And then there I’ll be, starin’ at your narrow hairy ass again. And again, over and over until hell freezes over, I guess, and you’ll still be laughin’ and I won’t be any higher than I am right now! No, thanks, amigo!”
Hank pulls up his pants, buckles his belt, and takes a purposeful step toward Doc.
“Miss it, don’t you, Doc.”
“Sometimes.” He shrugs. “But I don’t miss waking up sick, or getting rousted by the cops, or hustling all day and all night.”
“You’re still hustlin’, Doc. Harder than you ever have. Harder, now that you’ve decided to take the weight of the whole goddamn world on your shoulders. Tell me, what did any of them lowlifes ever do for you?”
“It’s not about them, Hank. It’s about her.”
“Well, that’s about the first true thing to come out of your mouth in a coon’s age, Doc. It’s all about her. She’s got you, all right. You and everybody else she casts that evil eye of hers on. You don’t, none of you, take a piss without she gives you leave first.”
“That’s a lie!”
“Oh yeah? Then prove it. Take a shot of dope, Doc. You know you want to.”
“I don’t! I don’t want to live like that anymore!”
“Sure you do, Doc. Otherwise, how come you’re here?”
“Even if I did … I can’t. She touched me and now I can’t. Even if I w-wanted to!”
“Well, she ain’t here, Doc. You ca
n have one here! This is your dream.”
“No, I can’t! I tried!”
“That wasn’t her, Doc. That was my handiwork. Try again, Doc. I promise, I won’t mess with you this time. I just wanted you to know what it felt like. To not be able to get what you need.”
“And you won’t stop me.”
“I can’t stop you forever. Like I said, I was just messin’ with you. It’s your dream, Doc.”
Doc looked around. It was still his office and the syringe was still full.
“Well, all right, then. And you go on and have yourself a drink, Hank, by all means.”
“Huh! Well, if that ain’t the meanest thing anybody ever said to me. Don’t you know that I would if I could, but I can’t.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because there ain’t no whiskey in this goddamn hophead dream of yours. I’ve looked all over this place and there ain’t nothin’ around here but dope.”
Hank’s right. There’s nothing in the medication cabinet but morphine. Not even an aspirin.
“Well, if it’s my dream then it’s my dream, Hank, and I never thought I’d ever be the one to say this, but if you’ll just shut the fuck up and let me shoot this one good lick of dope in peace you can have all the whiskey you want.”
Hank reaches inside his coat and his face lights up. “Well, what have we got here?” He produces a pint of Four Roses and twists off the cap.
“Well, thank you, Doc! I don’t mind if I do.”
Doc only nods and focuses on the business at hand, his first shot of dope in nearly four months. It always annoys him when other junkies equate injecting narcotics with the sexual act. He reckons a good shot of dope is a far superior sensation. But then the needle slips into the vein on the first try and Doc realizes that his dick is as hard as a rock. He lets the load of dope go and then…
… Doc woke up to find that he had, indeed, come in his sleep, the first wet dream of his life at age fifty-six. To his surprise, he was deeply ashamed. He changed his shorts, depositing the soiled ones in the garbage. He wasn’t sure exactly why. After all, it was Graciela who sat by Doc’s side for seventy-two solid hours when he was kicking, emptying buckets of puke and cleaning up when he soiled himself and the bed, but he kept the dream to himself, a trail of bread crumbs back to his old life. Just in case.
XIV
The corner of South Presa Street and Chicago Boulevard was the bargain basement of prostitution in San Antonio, Texas, and the girls that worked it were reminded of their lowly status every time they looked in a mirror. The corner girls didn’t keep well, exposed to the elements as they were, summer sun blazing down on asphalt until pools of oil simmered in the potholes, bone-chilling wind and needle-like rain in the winter taking their toll. The wear and tear was visible even to the drivers of the vehicles that slowed down for a better look as they approached and then sped away, showering the girls with gravel as they accelerated, adding injury to insult. When a car did stop, the girls pounced on it, knowing that whoever got her hand on the door handle first would turn the trick.
Collecting their money was another matter. They were freelancers for the most part, no pimps to enforce a pay-up-front policy and protect them from johns who got a little too rough. The right to retain 100 percent of their earnings was small consolation because the pickings were slim and most of the customers were first-timers who would never come back once they discovered that the girls who worked out of the boarding house and the motels were younger, prettier, and only marginally more expensive. The only repeat business on the corner came from the deadbeats and nut jobs who’d already been eighty-sixed from every respectable den of iniquity on the strip.
Some of the girls on the corner weren’t girls at all, and it was a tall, angular black transvestite sporting a tight-fitting gold lamé dress and a five o’clock shadow who muscled his way up to the late-model Ford station wagon first, but for once, it wasn’t the customer who was in for a surprise.
“Oh my Lord!” the creature gasped, straightening up to his full six feet and backpedaling when the priest’s collar flashed, white against black, as he reached across to roll the window down. “One of y’all gonna have to get this one, ladies. Miss Tiffany’s goin’ to hell but not today, honey, uh-uh!” He smoothed his skirt as he teetered away, traveling quickly if not quietly on heels that would have crippled half the real girls on the strip. The others filled the void, jostling and elbowing for position.
After all, Tiff figured, a hustler’s got to have a code. Even the lowest of the low have a line they won’t cross. What would his grandmama say if she looked down from heaven and saw her baby boy rolling around in the back of a station wagon with a man of the cloth!
The priest proffered a bill grasped tightly in his fist; he thrust it out the window and waved it as if it emitted an alluring aroma and then snatched it back again, and the sharks moved in. “Twenty dollars just to take a ride and talk. It’s only information I’m after. I’m trying to find someone.”
“Hold up!” the he-she bellowed like a bull, breaking character to make sure that he was heard and clattering back to the car. Only a tough bleached-orange-headed Mexican girl that everybody called Sweaty Betty took exception.
“That ain’t right, Tiff! You know it ain’t! You walked away!”
Truer words were rarely spoken on South Presa, but twenty dollars was equivalent to four blowjobs, the better part of an hour’s work, so the lanky hustler stepped up on the curb, towering over the competition, and made a show of reaching into his beaded purse.
“Yeah, well, who died and left you Jiminy fuckin’ Cricket? Move on, y’all, before you make me get this razor out an’ cut one of you silly bitches a new pussy! You know that I will!” There was some grumbling but everyone stepped aside as he slid into the passenger seat next to the priest, slammed the door, and rolled the window up. “If I were you, I’d drive, Padre, before these hos tear up your nice car.”
Everybody on South Presa knew that Tiffany wasn’t really a girl. Some knew that he had once been Daryl Dennis, a big football star back at Eastside High in Longview, Texas, heavily recruited throughout the Southwest Conference. Some cracked jokes about his having played tailback but never to his face. Most called him Big Tiff in order to distinguish him from another Tiffany for the purpose of conversation, not that anyone who actually knew the two was ever confused.
Little Tiff was white and actually female, a lipstick lesbian who literally held her nose as she swallowed one cock after another in order to support a fifty-dollar-a-day heroin habit. Big Tiff, on the other hand, never touched dope but constantly nursed a half-pint of gin in a brown paper bag and enjoyed his work immensely.
Nevertheless, the two Tiffanys were in pretty much the same boat on South Presa Street.
Big Tiffany was a little too muscular to ever really pass for female. Most of his customers were latent-homosexual specialty tricks who still required at least the pretext of femininity before they fucked a man in the ass. Little Tiff hated men, but as far as she knew, women didn’t pay other women for sex. Her constitutional inability to hide her contempt for her clients consigned her to a place alongside the other oddities at the dark end of the street. In a more open-minded city, New Orleans or New York City, perhaps, the pair might have been exotic selections in the stable of an upscale establishment. But not in the home of the Alamo and legendary lines drawn in the sand. Texans liked to keep their freaks in the freak show.
Whatever his intentions, the priest was no different than any other rookie on South Presa. Not knowing the lay of the land, he gravitated toward the obvious, the activity that was visible to the untrained eye. The plan was to find a girl that he could pay to tell him what he wanted to know, so he’d driven up and down the strip several times a day for weeks. Now that he had finally worked up the nerve to stop, the result was wholly unexpected.
“You … you aren’t really a woman, are you?”
Tiffany reached over and nudged the steering wheel
back to the center as the wagon veered uncomfortably close to a parked car.
“No, I ain’t, but I’m really a ho, so come on with that twenty, honey! And keep your eyes on the road before you hurt somebody out here.”
The priest realized that his hands were trembling and the steering wheel was slick with sweat. He was beginning to decide that his little fishing expedition wasn’t such a good idea after all and maybe he’d seen enough of the seamier side of his parish for one day. He laid the twenty on the seat between them. “Well, here then, just take this and I’ll drop you off right—”
Tiff reached over and snatched the twenty and added it to the padding in his bra. “Oh, hell no, you won’t! The least you can do is turn this thing around and carry me to the spot where you picked me up! I ain’t walking all the way back up this raggedy-ass street in these heels, honey.”
The priest turned into the beer joint and circled the parking lot, eager to release this monster he had mistakenly netted. His leg cramped and twitched as he strained to hold down the clutch, and his heart pounded in his ears so loud that he couldn’t concentrate enough to even pray. Finally, there was a break in the traffic and he pulled out and headed back up the strip toward the corner.
“Slow down, honey!” Tiff admonished. “You’re gonna mess around and get us pulled over and then how you going to explain that to your congregation.”
The priest backed off the accelerator. He said one Our Father and two Hail Marys to himself to calm his nerves, and it helped him some. It wasn’t primarily fear that caused his ears to ring and his heart to pound but carefully suppressed anger. Anger at himself for being so inept, and anger at Tiff for being what he was and treating the priest like a taxi driver. The nerve of this abomination! He followed the prayers with a series of long, slow deep breaths, in through his nose and out through his mouth, the way his boxing coach back at seminary had taught him. He began to feel better immediately and somehow, somewhere halfway between the beer joint and the corner, he recovered his resolve and he remembered that it was his calling that had brought him to this terrible place. That this was his parish and these people were his flock and the children of God, no matter what the old women in the congregation believed. Even this aberration that now rode by his side was worth saving … and maybe she, or he, could at least tell him what he wanted to know. He had to find this girl everyone was talking about and see for himself if the stories were true. He said another Hail Mary, out loud this time, and suddenly gunned the station wagon, accelerating into a hard left turn into a side street followed by a right into an unpaved alley.