Was I among bums or frat boys? And who the fuck was Shirley?
A third bum meandered over. This one was a little more fucked up. I mean, they were all fucked up. But the first two, there was something a little clean about them on the inside. They almost seemed like regular people. Or like they had been regular people not too long ago. But this new third one, his eyes were holes; he looked nasty and hollow inside.
He handed me a beer. “ ’Ere ya go,” he said.
But I liked the guy.
Sometimes, that rough-around-the-edges look in a person’s eyes was really just good manners combined with an uncomfortable mattress.
“Man, oh man,” he said, “you are one crazy mother-fucker.” He started to laugh and looked at the other two bums to join in. They kind of smiled but didn’t really laugh. And then the crazy, beer-giving bum asked, “So man, what’s up with you? Like, all of a sudden you swoop down on us like you’re Batman or something and you dump all these sandwiches and beer and cash from the ATM machine on us. Fucking nuts!”
I thought, I’ll say it’s nuts. Jesus. I did that? How much beer?
He laughed some more and it was that laugh where the tongue is kind of fat and forward in the mouth and there’s a dopey smile. And it all just lets you know that this is not a really smart person. So proceed with caution.
“Dude, do you even remember anything? Like, do you remember talking to Boner? That was fucking hysterical—hiss-ter-i-cal! What was that shit you was talking about, Boner? Semi-exotics or something?”
The black guy said, “Semiotics, ChapStick. We were discussing my former life as a semiotics major at Brown.” He glanced at me. “Do you recall any of our conversations?”
I caught the plural. “Um, actually? I really kind of don’t remember a whole lot. Jesus, it’s freezing out here. How can you guys—” And I stopped myself.
The first bum, though, he answered the part of the question I left off. “It just happens. You don’t decide one day: I think I’ll go out and become homeless. It’s a whole set of circumstances that align in just the right way.”
And the Chapstick guy said, “Yeah, and smack.”
“Yeah, that didn’t help.”
I was thinking, What the hell are semiotics? Is that something I should know about?
Two more came over, girl bums. And all the guys started acting like guys, teasing and fiddling with the girls. And they were all girly, laughing and slapping shoulders and saying, “Screw you,” but playfully.
I was trying to think of a way to thank them, then back away and walk across the street to my apartment. But at the same time, there was something so oddly compelling about it all. Like with the girls. The way they both had relatively clean nails and hair. The rest of them, forget it. But these little details—hair and nails. It was like this was their last link to civilization and they weren’t going to give it up.
It frightened me in a way I didn’t understand.
And they were both very drunk.
I wondered if I had appeared as drunk to these bums as those girl bums appeared to me now? Or had I been even drunker?
And was I with them for the whole two days?
One of the drunk bum girls looked at me and said, “Sam-which man? Can you spot me another ten? Please?”
And that’s when I realized, Yup. It does appear that I have settled in quite well with these nomads.
And suddenly, it made a kind of perverse sense. It was, after all, my greatest fear: I would end up a bum, like one of them. A nothing. I didn’t have family to fall back on. It was all up to me. I’d been—I wasn’t sure if afraid was the word (maybe angry??)—with bums my whole life. I’d never seen them as actual people. But on some level, didn’t I have to know they were?
I must have developed some grand notion when I was drinking: Let us study the bums! Maybe thinking that doing so would prevent me from becoming one. Even though I knew I of course couldn’t actually ever be a bum. I had ambitions and, I thought, some kind of talent. I wasn’t lazy like the bums. Though this thought didn’t comfort me as much as I expected it would.
God, it was all so Phil Donahue. And why did my mind keep flashing on an image of a hand extending a wad of tissues, clean and white: an offering.
Did I friggin’ cry with the bums? I did, didn’t I?
Man.
Despite evidence to the contrary, I hated drinking to the point that I misplaced really big slabs of time. And then slowly, over hours, days, weeks, or even months, recalling with horror what I did or said while in such a lubricated state. It was like I was two people—or more. And I didn’t personally know any of them.
Just then, a tall and elegant black woman approached. At first I thought she was in evening wear; a dark pantsuit and a long coat. But as she neared me I could see that her clothes were old, the dark colors not quite matching, and the coat was a man’s cut. Everything was well-worn, though meticulously cared for.
I was sitting back down with my new friends, who didn’t seem to know that I lived across the street. I was freezing my ass off but I couldn’t leave because it was too fascinating to hear them talk about the crazy guy who descended upon them two days before.
The woman stood above me, then reached down and extended her smooth, bony hand. She said, “Augusten, come. Let’s take a walk.”
She knew my name.
I stood.
What was interesting was that all of the others stood, too. Even the girls, and they could barely stand.
She smiled at them and then she led me away. After we were about a block from the cinema, an amused smile formed on her lips. “Do you remember me at all?”
“Sorry,” I told her, “I don’t.”
She laughed. “That’s okay. I’m Shirley.” And then she told me that we’d sat together on a bench for four hours last night at Abingdon Square Park, just over on Hudson and Eighth. She said we talked. And then we sang some songs to keep warm.
“But I don’t sing,” I told her.
She smiled. “Yes. I know. But I do.”
“You’re a singer?” I probably had my eyebrows raised because I was thinking, When? Between Dumpster dives?
“We had this exact same conversation last night. And you asked me, ‘You sing? When, between Dumpsters?’ ”
I was horrified. “I said that?”
She nodded, then she laughed and put her hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay, honey. Really. I get it. I do. Like I told you last night, I wasn’t born out here. I had a real and proper home once. But the booze,” she said, her voice trailing off.
“Is that what happened?”
She looked at me. “It isn’t the half of what happened, but yeah. Heroin happened, too, and then nothing else after it. I lost my job, my kids. I lost my career. Shit, I was only twenty-three, right around your age. And I was thinking, really seriously thinking, about becoming a professional singer.”
“Sing something,” I said to her. We had just turned left and were, to my surprise, approaching Abingdon Square Park once again. But it was the first time for me. Well, this me.
Shirley stared straight ahead, the most curious, almost knowing, smile on her face. And her skin—she had such fine skin, impossibly. She didn’t seem like a bum at all. She was a lady. A real lady, not a girl or a woman. But a lady from another era. From a time of hats and stocking seams and steamships and comportment.
What the hell was she doing being a bum?
Just then, her features changed and a full-blown smile seemed to light up the area around us. She grabbed my arm excitedly. “Look! Look! It’s snowing. It’s Christmas and it’s snowing!”
It was. Heavy, wet flakes—fat and white, though stained orange by the street lamps, were just beginning to fall.
She clapped. “We’ve made enchantment.”
When I didn’t say anything she shot me a glance. “Don’t you recognize that line?”
“What line?”
She turned and faced me, her hands on her hips. “Are
you telling me you have never seen A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams?”
“I’ve heard of him,” I said.
When she rolled her eyes her whole head rolled with them. “Oh, Lord have mercy on him, he’s just a young nincompoop and with your love and guidance, he will grow out of it.”
I grinned stupidly. “Is it a movie?”
She slapped me, not lightly, on the shoulder. She was a very touchy person, that was for sure. “Yes, but it was a play first. You know? People ... stage ... audience. A p-l-a-y,” she spelled. Then, “Promise me something.”
We had reached the park. She untied the pretty blue scarf around her neck—it was the only thing she wore that was fresh, new—and used it to dust the bench of snowflakes, my side first. Then she dusted her side and we sat.
“Promise me that you will—every once in a while—watch a movie that was made before you were born. And also that you’ll see a play now and then. Promise me,” she said.
I told her I would.
She smiled, pleased. And then she said, “I would ask you to promise me something else but I know you can’t.”
I didn’t say anything. Maybe because she had already known me for four hours but I didn’t know her at all; something felt almost spooky.
She was watching me.
“I would ask you to promise me that you will stop this crazy business about wanting to be ‘a bum,’ as you so elegantly put it. It is most certainly not, as you say, ‘your destiny.’
“And I would ask you to stop drinking because I know. I know what alcohol does to a person. Especially an ambitious young person with so many dreams and more talent than she even knows what to do with.” She smiled and hugged herself. “Oh, when you are young and you have talent and you know, you know in your bones that you are going to go so high and so far.”
Then she let go of herself. “Those are the ones booze seems to hunger for the most. And once you are with the drink, oh, how it strip-mines the soul. In the end you wind up with nothing at all. And it’s like that for everybody. It doesn’t matter how rich you are or how poor or how white or how yellow or”—and here she looked down at the sidewalk—“how much of whatever it is you have inside you. It just does not matter. The drink is stronger. It will always win and you won’t even know it’s trying to until it has.”
She paused and closed her eyes, lifted her face to the sky. Almost like she was facing the sun, wanting it to give her that good, clean feeling you get from it. But there was only a street lamp and falling snow. And I watched as flakes smacked her face and melted instantly. And then I realized, it must be the feeling of the snow hitting her face and instantly melting that she enjoyed.
She looked at me then, her face moist. Snowflakes had gathered in her eyelashes and made it appear as though she had been crying. And then I wondered, has she?
As much as I wanted to think of her as a homeless, rambling drunk, I could not. Because everything she said almost had the tone of a bell, a certain purity. I thought, then, of the phrase, It rings true. And I realized, this is where it comes from; somebody telling you what is, and you hear the bell in their voice and know they’re right.
I almost couldn’t tell if she was giving me advice or telling me my fortune, like they were all mixed up.
She continued, “And if I could, I would ask that you write. You kept saying last night that you had ‘whole worlds’ inside of you that you needed to get out. Well, get them out, my dear. Focus on this. On something positive for yourself. And for others. I would ask you to set those worlds free.”
I caught myself looking at her clothing. And I realized immediately why I was doing it. I was looking for a way to discount everything she was telling me. Because there was something too true in her words. It was frightening in a way and I wasn’t sure why.
Or, maybe she really was just a rambling drunk.
Suddenly, she clapped her hands. “Okay, enough heavy. It’s snowing. It’s Christmas. We both have some fine company. How about a song? Shall I sing you something? It’ll be my Christmas present to you.”
We were sitting side by side on the bench, and she took both of my hands in hers and placed the entire pile of our hands on her lap. She looked at me with such intensity in those eyes, with dare.
I smiled at her. “Yes, please do sing something.”
I hoped I wouldn’t laugh during her rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” or whatever it was she had in mind.
God, what if she sings “The Chipmunk Song”? I thought, then bit the inside of my cheek.
But Shirley did not sing any Christmas carols nor did she launch into “The Impossible Dream.”
Shirley sang an aria.
It was the music of my early childhood; an opera my mother used to play on summer afternoons. I knew it the way a person can know a smell they cannot name but that transports them to one specific moment of one specific, long-gone day. It felt like opening the door to your childhood room and finding that nothing at all had changed. Her voice was unspeakably magnificent.
Perchè, perchè, Signor,
Ah, perchè me ne rimuneri così?
As she sang, the windows of the brownstone across the street shimmered in reply. Her voice had weakened the molecular bond of glass. It filled the space between the flakes of falling snow and packed the air with beauty.
It was, at once, Christmas in Manhattan.
I cried but I did not make a sound.
When she finished, Shirley bowed her head and was silent for a moment. Without looking up she said, “Vissi d’arte from Puccini’s Tosca. Do you speak Italian?”
I shook my head.
Shirley smiled at me. “It means, Why, why, O Lord, why do you reward me thus?”
“Burr, I gotta say—I’m a little worried about you,” Matt said over our table at China Grill. “You’re almost—and please, don’t take this the wrong way, okay? But you’re almost—really, quite nearly—sunny. Should I take this to mean that you had yourself a merry little Christmas after all?”
I smiled. “Actually, I did.”
He laughed. “Oh, really? That’s great, Burr, that really is. Went home to see the folks, did you? Yeah. Except, didn’t you have something of a Dances with Wolves childhood? Or maybe it was raised by wolves. Either way, I don’t think you went home. And I’m your only friend, so we know you weren’t with any human people. I think you crawled into your lair with a few bottles of Wild Turkey, whooped it up making prank calls to the maternity ward at Lenox Hill.”
“Well, aren’t you the new Steve Martin. But I do need to correct you on a few points. The first being, you are not my only friend. I have a number of friends but none of them have ever met because I compartmentalize. You occupy the compartment that exists to make me feel broad-minded and Societally Conscious—all my other friends are over six feet, like me. You are my short-person friend. If you were Asian or black, we could see each other twice as often. That’s why I always turn you down when you ask me if I want to go to a movie.
“Now, if you think I would make prank phone calls to a maternity ward, you just don’t know me at all. I have doctor friends, and all it would take is one case of good French wine and any one of them would walk up to maternity and tell one of the mothers that she had better prepare herself, she was going to have a Harlequin baby.
“And finally, I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas morning with some bums, the ones that hang out at the movie theater around the corner from me. The place with the skanky red carpeting?”
Matt choked on the ice cube he’d been knocking around in his mouth. He crunched down on it and killed the choke. “Are you fucking kidding me? You spent your holiday with homeless people on the street?”
“Yeah,” I said feeling very bright-eyed. “With one in particular, Shirley.”
“You didn’t fuck her, I hope. Christ, Burr, tell me it wasn’t some homeless chick that got you to play for the other team.”
“No, I didn’t fuck her, ass
hole. We talked.”
“You talked. What? For two days?”
“Actually, I think it was three. But I only remember one. Part of one, really. And mostly, just a few hours of the one. Anyway, that doesn’t matter. What matters is, it was inspiring. Or wait, maybe that’s not the right word.”
He was watching me. If I levitated or if smoke began to vent through my ears, it wouldn’t have surprised him.
“Okay, she didn’t inspire me. She showed me something more surprising, more astonishing, and more, just more beautiful than I know how to explain. It’s like, she could have been huge—Beverly Sills or ... I don’t know their names—but she was The Met, she was Carnegie Hall; Matt, she made the windows shake in their frames.”
He was watching me with his eyebrows raised and a sort of, And when are you going to start making sense? expression on his face.
“I know this sounds weird, but here’s my point—all of it was wasted. She had—has—this epic talent and she’s a homeless alcoholic. She’s not some big opera singer at the Met. She’s a bum lady. With this secret voice. Almost like a prisoner with a ten-carat diamond who can only wear it inside her cell and prance around alone.
“And you know the first thing that came into my mind when she was done singing for me? I thought, if I had been born with a talent that large I never would have started drinking. Almost like having such a huge gift would insulate you or protect you. Because it would feel like you had this destiny. So you didn’t have to worry. I wouldn’t drink because I had too much talent to drink. And then I kind of looked at Shirley sitting there on that bench and I knew, Oh yes I would. And something in me just fucking clicked.”
Matt placed his elbows on the table and leaned forward. “Augusten,” he said.
You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas Page 8