Force of Nature

by Stephen Solomita

  But he was just as glad to hear the shower running in the bathroom down the hall. He wasn’t off the roller coaster, by any means, but he was growing more used to its sudden twists and turns. Studying Moodrow’s information would give him an outlet for his excess energy and he started to call to his partner when the bathroom door opened and a woman walked out. She was nude and only partially dry and she didn’t notice Tilley at the end of the hall. In an instant, he understood the pleasures of the voyeur. Despite the sense of himself as a peeping Tom (and despite his feelings about Rose) he experienced that sudden flush in the crotch which precludes taking any steps to turn the situation off.

  She was short and heavy-set, though not actually fat, with strong, heavy thighs, a thick triangle of jet-black pubic hair and large, sloping breasts. That his attention did not, at first, go to her face and her features indicates, perhaps, a lack of social consciousness. That he spent almost a full minute trying to see the top of her pussy through that black forest, convicts him of the charge. She was young, no more than twenty-five, and for the life of him, he couldn’t see how Moodrow managed to get her into his apartment. He even considered the possibility that she was some sort of relative, in which case he was going to look awful bad if Moodrow came out and found him staring at her. Nevertheless, he was too fascinated (and too excited) to step away. He did, however, finally manage to raise his eyes far enough to get a good look at her features. It was the waitress from the Lip Cafe. Her inky hair and the wet platinum spikes, which now lay flat against the sides of her head, left no doubt.

  “Jesus Christ,” Tilley said involuntarily.

  She drew a quick breath, then recognized him. Letting the towel casually fall to cover her body, she stared at him without blinking. “You see anything you like?”

  “I saw everything I like,” he answered truthfully.

  “Everything?” She cocked an eyebrow, turned her back and began to walk toward the bedroom. “Moodrow’ll be back in a few minutes.” Her large, round ass rose and fell with each step. Tilley could almost feel its warmth on his fingertips. At the doorway, she turned back to him and giggled. “I love guns,” she said. “I love them. How come your partner has so many guns?”

  Before Tilley could move, she was inside and he heard the door close, firmly. He wandered into the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee. On the table, on a large piece of white oaktag paper, was a detailed floor plan of the Lexington Avenue armory. And a note which read: “Out bagel hunting. Be back in fifteen minutes. Say hello to Gretchen.”

  Ten seconds later he was lost in the floorplan. The Lexington Avenue armory, now used entirely as a men’s emergency shelter, is really one large (4,000+ square feet) room, holding six hundred beds on its concrete floor with small areas on each side of the building partitioned off for special use. Moodrow’s drawing indicated a large security force in a twenty-foot, north-south corridor by the main entrance. On the south, a stairway led to a second floor of offices, the headquarters for Social Services. On the north was a dayroom, separated from the sleeping area by a wall, with a dozen long tables and benches. In the back, on the western wall, were the toilets, showers and sinks. The center, the heart of the building, was the real home for the homeless. A concrete-floored room with a curved, black ceiling hanging forty feet above. It held an ocean of beds with six security desks scattered against the outer walls.

  “So what’s ya name?”

  She came upon him so suddenly, he answered without thinking: “Tilley.” Not Detective Tilley, or Jim Tilley. He had never, to his knowledge, identified himself with his last name before.

  “I’m Gretchen,” she said, extending a hand. Her spikes, he noticed, now stood straight and sparkled with glitter. “Pleased to meet you.”

  He took her hand and shook it, then asked, as casually as he could manage, “Have you known Moodrow long?” Moodrow never talked about himself. Tilley didn’t know, for instance, if Moodrow had any family in the neighborhood or what he did with his time off.

  “Everybody knows Moodrow,” she replied, somewhat ambiguously. “He’s like Mr. Purple. You know that guy who used to get horseshit from the park and bring it to his garden? Then they took down his garden and built a building.” She peered intently into Tilley’s eyes. “Mr. Purple. You know who I’m talking about?”

  “I don’t think so. I haven’t been on the Lower East Side long. Anyway, that’s not what I meant about Moodrow.”

  “So what’d you mean?”

  Tilley looked at her for a moment. There was a nasty edge to her voice, despite a naive midwestern twang. He thought of Rose and the comparison had him instantly annoyed. “What are you gonna do, Gretchen, bust my balls? This ain’t the right time.”

  She gave him a “who cares” shrug and turned away. “If you wanted to know how long I’ve been fucking him, you should have asked me.”

  Two minutes later, she and her attitude were both gone. Five minutes later, Moodrow walked in. He was whistling.

  “Hey, Jimmy. How’s Rose feeling today?”

  “She’s all right. You don’t seem too concerned, though.”

  “That’s because I called St. Vincent’s about an hour ago. I talked to the cop in charge of her security. He says she’s okay. He’s seen much worse.”

  “Well, I just wanna know if it hurt.”

  “What hurt?” Moodrow’s perplexed look pleased his partner immensely.

  “When you played that game with your .38.”

  He sat in the chair and giggled. “Yeah, it hurt.”

  “How come you’re so sure?”

  “Cause we took turns. You want a bagel?”

  Tilley was hungrier than he thought and went through two hot onion bagels, spread with lox and cream cheese, while Moodrow outlined the campaign.

  “You checked out this floorplan?” He swept his hand across the oaktag, scattering bagel crumbs and specks of dried onion on the floor. Tilley nodded, mouth full, and Moodrow went on. “The only thing you don’t know is that the area under the officers on the second floor is for storage. Blankets, linen, mattresses, tables, chairs. My understanding is that the area’s big enough to hide in, but crammed full of supplies.

  “This front desk, here, is where security operates. What they try to do is control the situation by keeping out weapons and people who don’t belong. They do maintain a presence inside the big room, but they try to keep out of the way of the…fuck, I don’t know what to call them. My man says they’re all criminals, but he can’t treat them like criminals. He only intervenes in cases of violence. As far as drugs and sex goes, he don’t wanna know about it. His name’s Spender Crawford and he spent eight out of the last eleven years in the joint. He stays at an SRO hotel in Brownsville that he says makes the shelters look like nursery school.

  “Anyways, whether security’s on the take or not, all the drugs and sometimes sex are done in the back, by the toilets and showers, and security don’t go in there. Deliberately don’t go in there so’s the…” He stopped for a second time, then chose the word ordinarily used to describe the mass of humans caged in a prison. “So the ‘population’ can have a place to get off. The day room, on the north wall, is used for meals and card games, a place for the men to hang out before they go to sleep.”

  Moodrow went on for a few moments, describing details of the day room and the social services floor, and it struck Tilley, his mouth stuffed with food, that Moodrow was proceeding as if Tilley’s cooperation was understood. This was the plan—Stanley Moodrow’s plan—and Tilley was the hired gun who’d carry it out. Then Jim Tilley realized he didn’t give a shit about Moodrow’s presumptions and, impatient, interrupted him. “Can it be done?” he asked.

  “Anything can be done,” he said, evenly.

  “By who?”

  Moodrow looked shocked, but Tilley only smiled and stuffed even more of the bagel into his face. He said, “Tell me the meat of it. Tell me how it can be done.” It came out sounding like a fart underwater. Tilley actually
sprayed him with bits of cream cheese, but Moodrow, who knew exactly what he wanted, went on eagerly.

  “Jimmy, it’s gonna be so fucking simple, you’re not gonna believe it. You’re gonna wish it was harder. You remember what I said about security? Mostly all their force is up front, by the main entrance. That’s because all the other doors, except for the fire doors, are locked. There’s a security guard assigned to the fire doors in the day room, but there’s no security on the western end, by the showers and toilets. Still, the population almost never fucks with those doors because they set off an alarm when you open them and that pisses off security enough so they put a man by the showers for two or three days. Which is bad for business, right?

  “So what’re we talking about? A corridor, maybe twenty feet wide, with toilets, showers and sinks running from one end of the building to the other. This is where Pinky Mitchell works. He’s there every night, selling ten dollar bags of junk for which he pays nine dollars. And right down in this corner, by the showers, is a fire door that leads to an alleyway running along the western edge of the armory. You’re gonna go inside around six. Fake it so they give you a bed, which shouldn’t be hard because it’s summer and there’s always extra beds in the summer. Ten o’clock, I’ll be out in that alleyway. You take little Pinky Mitchell and push him through the door. The junkie weighs maybe a hundred twenty pounds and on top of that I got it from Spender that the corner by that fire door is very quiet. Very secluded. The reason being that anyone stupid enough to wander that far away from the population is subject to being raped by aggressive bi-sexuals who like to hurt as much as they like to fuck.”

  “Sounds like jail,” Tilley said. “Sounds like prison.”

  Moodrow stopped for a moment. He went to the stove and put up water for coffee. “Well, they got metal detectors at the front entrance. That ain’t to keep out the pacifists.”

  “What if Mitchell don’t show?”

  “Once you’re registered, you can come and go as you please. There’s a coffee shop on 28th and Lex. If it’s a no-go, come up there and meet me. I’ll hang around until a quarter of ten. Even if you think it’s a go and it don’t work out, I’ll come back at eleven. After that, it’s lights out. Now I got a mug shot of Pinky Mitchell and a walking description. Study it good. You go in at six.”

  25

  MOODROW DROPPED TILLEY AT 32nd and Park, leaving him to walk the six blocks to the armory. Tilley was wearing a gray, gymrat t-shirt, dirty khaki trousers, Adidas sneakers and a lightweight, olive-green fatigue jacket. His hair was mussed and he hadn’t shaved, but they’d made no real attempt to create a disguise. He didn’t, for instance, look desperate or crazy or stoned, because everyone is entitled to a bed. Nobody can be turned away unless their behavior is violent or psychotic, and even then only by calling in the cops. If Tilley could walk up to the doors, he would get a place to sleep, even if the armory was full and they had to ship him by van to another shelter.

  The rain had slackened into a warm mist that settled on his shoulders like tepid soup as he walked slowly down Park Avenue South. There were officially homeless people on every block, though virtually all of them in this part of Manhattan had places to sleep. There are a dozen welfare hotels within walking distance of the armory, The Prince George and the Martinique being the most famous and the largest. In hot weather, naturally, the residents come outside to look for relief, just like poor people everywhere. But there are no parks here, no benches or trees to sit under. This is the heart of Manhattan, a mainly commercial district that includes both the Empire State Building and the million dollar brownstones east of Lexington Avenue. Out here, the action is on the streets. If you don’t believe it, just ask the army of prostitutes who will invade these streets about ten o’clock.

  No surprise, then, that knots of people, attached to the outer walls of the armory like barnacles on the bottom of a ship, crowded the sidewalks. They would not give way and longtime residents of the neighborhood were forced to walk around them. In one case, a group of men passing a quart bottle of something wrapped in a brown paper bag were at that stage of intoxication where loud voices and waving arms are taken for granted. As they told their stories, gesticulating wildly, the men and women who rented or owned the wildly expensive brownstones on the other side of Lex, had to step across pools of water by the curb to get to their homes.

  None of this bothered Tilley, of course. He had good reason to be there and, according to Moodrow, should not interact with the other men in the shelter. Moodrow had instructed his partner to “play it close to your chest” and “keep your head down until the moment comes, then take him out fast.” Unfortunately, he hadn’t provided Tilley with a contingency plan. In case he was put in a position where he had to “interact.”

  Tilley was on 26th Street, walking from Park toward Lex and the only entrance to the armory, when a tall white man, about forty, sporting tattooed twin dragons on his bare arms and a string of gold earrings that ran to the top of his ear, greeted him with a loud whistle. He was standing with a small circle of men, casually passing a joint, and his companions all laughed appreciatively.

  “Hey, sweetie,” he shouted at Tilley’s back. “You wanna be my honey tonight? Hey, sweetie, I axed, ‘Do you wanna be my honey tonight?’ Don’t be stuck up. I’ll use my Brylcream so it won’t hurt but a little bit.”

  Tilley kept walking, mortified beyond belief, but still walking. He had never been in jail, because when he was fourteen, his amateur coach, Joe Johnson, told him that if he fucked up, he, the coach, would walk away. Before that, despite good grades, he ran with the craziest kids in the neighborhood. Yorkville may not be Harlem, but if your playground is anywhere in Manhattan, the lure of the street comes with the territory. The alternative, taken by many parents, is to keep the kids confined to apartments and play groups until they reach high school.

  So Tilley stayed out of jail, but he did learn the lessons of jail from friends who went the wrong way, one of which is how to react when another man calls you a punk. Tilley’s first emotion was one of wounded vanity. How dare anyone challenge Superman? Couldn’t they see what they were dealing with? As he continued down the sidewalk, he suddenly became aware of the eyes staring at him. He felt as if every one of those desperate faces, especially the dark ones, was singling him out for attack, even the droolers and the mumblers, who huddled in doorways across the street.

  What he was feeling was (and is) the paranoia of the middle and upper-class residents of Murray Hill and Kips Bay, the neighborhoods closest to the shelter. Tilley didn’t understand the process at the time, but, just as the residents do, he quickly replaced his fear with anger. And realized, just as quickly, that even though he felt like one of us, he would surely have to become one of them if he had any hope of completing his job in the shelter.

  At the front of the armory, the large, wooden doors, complete with metal detectors, were wide open and led directly to the front security desk. There were two blue-uniformed rent-a-cops, both black, standing behind the desk. One wore a nametag bearing the name Crawford, the other, the name Foster. Crawford, who sported sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve, was the heavier of the two, with a flat, square face and large features. He stared directly into Tilley’s eyes until their gazes locked, telling the cop, without words, that he was Moodrow’s connection inside the shelter. The other man, Foster, was thinner, especially his face, which was nearly gaunt. A long, raised scar, a bottle scar, ran along the side of his throat, from his chin to his right ear.

  “What you want, homeboy?” Foster asked, grinning up at Crawford.

  Tilley lowered his gaze, as instructed, and replied, “I need a bed. Someone told me I could get a bed here.”

  “Well, you in the wrong place, homeboy. The Waldorf-Astoria is uptown.” Foster’s own wit so amused him, he nearly fell out of his chair.

  “I don’t have no money for a hotel.” Tilley played it straight. Homeless and hopeless. “I don’t have no money at all.”


  “What you say?” Foster’s voice rose into a squeal, matching the movement of his eyebrows toward the ceiling. “No money? I heard all you whiteboys is rich. How come…”

  His monologue was interrupted by the weight of Crawford’s hand on his shoulder. “That’s enough, Alley. Best let it slide.”

  Foster looked up in disbelief. “Shit, Sarge,” he said, “I’m jus’ playin’ with the boy. What’s your problem with that?”

  “Listen, asshole,” Crawford said, his grip tightening on his subordinate’s shoulder, “how do you know who this whiteboy is? How do you know he ain’t from some TV station? How do you know the motherfucker ain’t wearin’ a tape recorder right this minute? You send this man up to the social worker and stay the fuck off his case. Hear me?”

  Reluctantly, Foster pointed to a stairway on the southern end of the building. “See the social worker upstairs,” he said. “Her name is Ms. Winters. When you get signed in, she’ll give you a paper. Bring it back down and I’ll put you in a bed. That suit you, whiteboy?”

  “Thank you,” Tilley mumbled, turning away.

  “The pleasure was all mine.” Foster threw one last shot as Tilley disappeared up the stairs in search of Ms. Winters. Moodrow and he had prepared a long story, a “past” in a Detroit factory with closed plants and a trip to New York in search of a job. Their scenario had Tilley staying with friends initially, then tossed out when no job was forthcoming. Lacking the money to get back into the housing market, he was, by all standards, homeless.

  But Ms. Winters hadn’t the slightest interest in Tilley’s history.

  She asked him if he had ID and when he started to explain that his wallet had been stolen at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, she waved him off. “No ID?” she asked. “Fine, no ID. No address? Fine, no address. No social security number? Fine. You’re makin’ my life easier.” She looked up and smiled, “We don’t worry about people using these facilities illegally. Anybody with an apartment who comes here to sleep is crazy enough to rate a hospital bed. By definition.”