Force of Nature

by Stephen Solomita

  She handed him a slip of paper, instructing him to return it to the security desk. “If you’re still here three days from now, you’ll be called back for a formal interview. We serve three meals per day: at eight, twelve and five. That’s it, enjoy the facilities.”

  Foster’s mood had turned around when Tilley confronted him again at the front desk. Except for the two of them, the security corridor was empty. “Say, homeboy,” he whispered. “Ms. Winters give you some? She clean your pipes? Shit, you finished too fast. Come that fast, ya’ll won’t get invited back up.” He began to laugh loudly, perhaps at Tilley’s puzzled face. Ms. Winters was tall, fat and fifty years old. She was also warm and friendly. Was his embarrassment the whole point? He could feel his blood starting to rise and he looked at the security guard more closely. He was taller than Tilley by three inches or so, but thin, so that Tilley estimated their weights as pretty near the same. Perhaps he would fake him with a shoulder, then commit to the left hook. Maybe he’d drive a roundhouse kick into Foster’s lower ribs. That’d wake him up in a hurry.

  Somehow, Foster caught the change in Tilley’s attitude and began to look him over more closely. Tilley could almost hear the gears turning. Finally, Foster reached across the desk and gave Tilley’s hand a little slap. “Hey, man, don’t take it the wrong way. I’m just playin’ with ya. You know what I’m sayin’? We really in the same boat. Got ta keep our spirits up, right? Check it out. I’m givin’ you bed number 255. That’s a special lucky number. It’s right near the security desk which means nobody gon’ bother yo raggedy ass.”

  Having gotten the last word, he pointed toward a door in the back wall of the corridor. Tilley walked to it, pulled it toward him and stepped into his new home. The humidity hit him first. It was nearly seven o’clock and the temperature outside was eighty degrees. The day’s rain, light as it had been, seemed to be oozing from the concrete floors and he instinctively flinched as he felt the droplets of sweat collecting in his hair and under his arms. Then he saw the room for the first time. It was enormous, not as long as a football field, but much wider, like four basketball courts arranged in a square, and contained row after row of beds, each with its starched, scratchy sheet and gray blanket.

  He must have stood there for several moments, the door held open, too intimidated by the immensity to enter. Then he heard Foster’s voice behind him: “What’s the matter, homeboy. Y’all don’t care for our facilities?” He pronounced the last word syllable by syllable: “fa-ci-li-teeeeees.”

  Bed number 255, as promised, was in the last row by the southern wall, next to the security desk. The guard, whose nametag read Diaz, looked Tilley over, then nodded. “What’s happenin’, man. You feelin’ okay?” He was short and very broad, with small, serious features. Tilley’s first reaction, that Diaz was being kind, was quickly replaced by the realization that the guard had a reason for probing. He was puzzled over what Tilley was doing inside this sweaty room when he could be outside where it was more comfortable. Diaz, himself, was sweating profusely.

  “I’m fine,” Tilley said. “I’m trying to get the feel of this place. “I’ve never been in a place like this before.”

  “Well, you can stay wherever you want. I’m jus’ tryin’ to see if ya feelin’ all right.” He turned back to his book, indifferent.

  Tilley sat at the edge of the bed, a cot really, and noted the number on a small metal tag riveted to the iron headrail. Bed number 255. Now he had a home, a space that was his space alone, which did not belong, by right, to everyone on the street. He looked around, automatically sizing up the “population.” There weren’t many people in the room, maybe thirty or forty. They were scattered and anything but threatening. These were the mumblers, the droolers, the screamers, the drunks. Too far gone to notice the weather or too tired from staying awake all night, from being chased from doorway to doorway, always looking for a space where they wouldn’t be asked to move on, or attacked for sport by sadists masquerading as children.

  It was not a place for the mentally alert, however, which is why Tilley stood out and why Diaz had questioned him. Tilley’s bed being only fifteen feet from his body, the guard had surely felt that it would pay him to find out how crazy Tilley was. If, for instance, he might suddenly become violent. Once reassured, though, Diaz’s book became far more interesting than Tilley’s existence.

  So Tilley got off the bed and took a little tour. He went, first, into the showers and toilet area. There were no towels or soap in sight, but rolls of toilet paper hung from a chain which was padlocked to the wall on either end. A bearded man, soiled clothes hanging on a shiny, metal hook, showered in the nearest stall. Another man shaved at a sink. From the far stall, at the southern end of the building next to a fire door topped with a red light, Tilley could hear the grunting, slapping sounds of humans in lust. A sign on the fire door, which someone had underlined with a magic marker, announced: FIRE EXIT. FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY. CAUTION. UNAUTHORIZED USE WILL SOUND AN ALARM. A smaller, handmade sign hung below: If You Get Caught Using This Door, You Will Be EXPELLED From This Shelter. Moodrow was right. If Pinky Mitchell was anything like the burnt-out junkie he was supposed to be, the whole thing would be easier than a stroll down Fifth Avenue.

  Tilley left the shower room and continued to reconnoiter. He peeked into the day room, found a small group of men playing poker with matchsticks and another security guard, a bearded Sikh, surprisingly enough, bearing the nametag Singh.

  Five more minutes in the armory and he had seen everything but Pinky Mitchell, so he decided to leave and circle the building. Perhaps Mr. Mitchell was outside, with his clientele. Crawford had told Moodrow that Mitchell’s usual pattern was to wait until 9:30, when everyone came inside, before setting up in the shower room, but it wouldn’t hurt to check. Then too, it was only 7:30 and Tilley couldn’t stand the idea of waiting in that steambath for two more hours. He’d come early, to make sure he got a bed, but that didn’t mean he had to lie in it until it turned into a salt lick.

  It was still overcast outside, still oppressively humid, but the evening seemed positively balmy compared to the fog inside the main body of the armory. Tilley walked south on Lex to 25th Street, then turned west to circle the block. There were a lot more people out now, gathering for the night’s bed. A fair number were “media” homeless, elderly derelicts pushing grocery carts stuffed with a life’s possessions, but the majority, by far, were young, in their twenties or early thirties, and they were just as obviously stoned: on crack or dope or juice. What difference did it make?

  A few of the spectre-thin, hollow-eyed junkies were sick and some of the drunks were asleep. Most of the “population,” however, was quietly waiting for the call to go inside. In this heat, they would stay out until security was ready to lock the doors, or until the cops came by and moved them on. As Tilley walked slowly down the block (as befits a man taking a stroll alongside his own home), he searched each face for the quarry, Pinky Mitchell. Nobody greeted him, but nobody seemed anxious to harm him, either. They were just looking for a place to sleep, maybe a meal, before they took off in the morning to pursue whatever pleasure or pain the streets had to offer.

  The cliché about prison is that ninety-nine percent of the convicts just want to do their time and get out, but the other one percent are so utterly, viciously crazy, they keep the joint in constant turmoil. This is because, sooner or later, every convict will come into contact with the crazy one percent. For Tilley, circling the building while staring into every face, that principle was raised to the level of self-fulfilling prophecy. He met his one percenter on 26th Street, standing in the same place, surrounded by his boys. But this time he wasn’t after Tilley’s ass.

  “I want them sneakers,” he said as Tilley came abreast of him. “Gimme them sneakers.”

  The sneakers in question were well-worn Adidas basketball shoes. The theft here was to be purely symbolic, the humiliation part of the ritual of dominance.

  “Boy, you must be har
d of hearin’. I said I want ya sneakers.” He pitched his voice high, in homage to his mostly black audience. He was taller than Tilley, but slender. And stupid.

  Tilley stopped about eight feet away, but kept his eyes off the man’s face. The asshole was leaning against the wall of the armory, standing on one leg with the other drawn up against the brick. Very tough. Very bold. But with all his weight against that wall, there was only one way he could move, if he had time to move at all, and that was right at Tilley.

  But he wouldn’t do that. Tilley’s guess, as he took the first step toward the man, was that he was too stupid even to consider that Tilley might fight back. In his surprise, he’d probably try to move backwards, into the wall, and thus become a frozen target.

  Maybe Tilley had been Nostradamus in another lifetime, because that’s exactly the way it went down. As Tilley took the man’s throat in his left hand, the only thing that moved were the man’s eyes, which opened wide and gleamed with sudden understanding, but just for the second or so it took Tilley to drive four straight right hands into his face. The slap of his knuckles against the left side of that face and the echoing chunk of the man’s skull against the brick were among the most satisfying sounds Tilley had ever heard. Pure, sweet music.

  But Tilley didn’t stop to admire his work. He stepped away immediately, turning to see how many friends the man had, but the “bros” had moved back, not closer. A short, black man smiled and put up a hand, palm out. “Easy, brother,” he said. Then repeated it. “Easy, brother.”

  “Anybody else want my shoes?” Tilley looked each man full in the face until, one by one, they made the ritual denial by breaking eye contact. Then he turned to check the sneaker thief. The man was sitting on the sidewalk, holding his face in his hands, moaning softly. Tilley squatted beside him and said it plainly: “Don’t sleep here tonight. Walk over to the emergency at Bellevue. Spend the night.” He hesitated, but got only a groan for an answer.

  “Why don’t you take off right now?” Tilley had a job to do and he didn’t need to be watching his back. He had no illusions about the metal detectors actually keeping weapons out of the shelter. If necessary, he would beat this man until he took the trip to Bellevue by ambulance and the man sensed it. Without looking at Tilley, his hands still cupped over his eye, he struggled to his feet and walked east, toward the hospital.

  “The man is nothing but a lowlife fool.” A tall bearded man, his accent unmistakably southern, passed Tilley a lit joint, which he accepted, though he didn’t draw the smoke into his lungs. Tilley didn’t have anything against good weed, but he was already stoned out of his mind. The adrenaline had begun to flow the minute he left Moodrow and the safety of the Plymouth. Now it was gushing.

  The rest of the men were as friendly as the southerner and Tilley stayed close to this knot. He let them anoint him as one of their own as they bullshitted about life on the street. About a mission on East 45th Street where the food was deteriorating. Another in the West Village, just opening up. Tilley was questioned, but when his short answers made it clear that he wasn’t ready to part with his life’s story, they let him alone.

  Finally, as Tilley was almost certain it would, the talk turned to drugs. They had broken into smaller groups and Tilley was standing with two men, passing a bottle of wine, when the smaller of the two, Smitty, said, “The vultures be here soon. Uh-huh. Vultures comin’. I can smell ’em.” He actually turned his nose into the wind and sniffed. “Uh-huh. Smell ’em.”

  “What the fuck is he talking about?” Tilley asked the other man, Angel Lopez, a Mexican from Los Angeles.

  “He’s talkin’ about the dealers, man. Now it’s almost time to go inside, they come around and set up.”

  “What kinda drugs?”

  “There they be.” Smitty gestured with his chin at the three blacks walking on the opposite side of the street. “Uh-huh. Them’s the crack boys. Sell crack inside. Bad people. Uh-huh. Vulture people.”

  Tilley leaned over and whispered into Angel’s ear. “Any smack, man? Anybody doin’ smack inside?”

  “I knew that shit, man. I jus’ know you dig dope, man.” Angel laughed, delighted with his prediction.

  “I ain’t no junkie,” Tilley protested, “but sometimes it helps take the pain away. Check it out.”

  “Thass chill, man.” The Mexican had a round, chubby face and when he smiled, which he did often, he looked like an animated Cabbage Patch doll. “I’m jus’ fooling with you, man. So happens the Lexington shelter got the best dope of any shelter in the city. Little Pinky, man, dealin’ Blue Thunder so pure it’ll rush you for ten minutes, man. Thass if you boot it. You got works, man?”

  The “works” he referred to was the one-piece, disposable syringe addicts used to inject their dope. The plural was a carryover from when junkies used an eyedropper and a disposable needle, fastened together with the edge or a dollar bill or a collar. “Booting” was a technique used by junkies to prolong the initial rush. That rush being the only reason for injecting the drug in the first place. Instead of shooting the whole hit at once, the addict allowed the blood to come back up into the syringe, then pushed it back into the arm, then allowed it to come up again.

  “No, man. I was afraid to carry them in there. I didn’t know if they’d search me or something.”

  “Don’t worry,” he answered, “you can share mine.”

  Tilley nodded, agreeable, just as if sharing needles in the age of AIDS wasn’t equal to walking blindfolded along the edge of the World Trade Center’s roof, and they talked for maybe another ten minutes. Until Angel spotted a familiar face walking toward Lexington Avenue.

  As advertised, Pinky Mitchell was frail and unsteady, a gray ghost of a junkie in a dirty suede jacket and greasy jeans. Nobody spoke to him as he made his way down the block, though heads jerked up like fans doing the wave at a football game. The look in the eyes of the junkies was intensely greedy, a zombie’s imitation of lust.

  “Uh-huh,” Smitty said, “Las’ vulture settlin’ down. Come to his perch. Uh-huh.”

  Angel laughed. “Look at that motherfucker strut. Now that Pinky got the bad dope, he thinkin’ he’s the king of the shelter.”

  “I don’t see how he keeps it,” Tilley said. “Little faggot like that. I’m surprised someone don’t take it off him.”

  “He’s in with the security,” Angle responded evenly. “They hold most of his shit for him. He probly don’t have nothin’ on him now.”

  “Uh-huh,” Smitty agreed. “Thass why the boy don’t do nothin’ on the block. Everything inside where the security protects his ass. Uh-huh. Pinky spend all day boostin’ from the stores. Uh-huh. From the black mall on Sixth Avenue. Thass the boy’s main income. Uh-huh.”

  Moodrow’s information had Pinky Mitchell paying nine dollars for a bag of dope that sold for ten, which didn’t leave much room for security’s piece of the action. More than likely, there were two things that kept Pinky Mitchell’s ass safe: he never kept more than a few bags on his person and his clientele’s understanding that if they took him off, they would lose the connection forever; a junkie’s worst nightmare.

  It was 9:15 by then and Smitty announced that it was time to begin drifting toward home. Fifteen minutes later, the big room, temperature raised to roasting by the addition of six hundred bodies, was full. Pinky Mitchell had set up, on schedule, in the shower room, dealing bags of dope to the tune of flushing toilets. There was nothing to do, but wait and hope that Mitchell didn’t decide to leave.

  Angel Lopez was sitting on the end of Tilley’s cot, shouting something Tilley couldn’t really hear. The noise level inside that room was unbearable, like standing in front of a practicing rock band. Every kind of music, from Lite FM to the hottest salsa, blared from portable radios scattered throughout the room. Alcoholics, locked in sleep, snored heavily while mumblers stood on their beds, ignoring the pleas of the security guards, and shouted their paranoid complaints to whatever demons haunted their nights.

>   Add to this the cheers and curses of the regular evening craps game and the hundreds of cot-to-cot conversations and you have some idea of the insanity in that room. There were four fights in the next half hour. They were the only relief from the noise and the heat. Two were unprovoked hitter attacks on mumblers. Two were attacks by victims on criminals after their property. All were broken up by security before Tilley could get over to check them out.

  At 10:10, he went into the shower area and found Pinky Mitchell swaying on stoned, rubber legs. He was just to the south of the center of the building, along with a half dozen fellow dopers, about fifty feet from the fire door. The coke dealers were on the north side of the building, gathered about the magic powder. They were considerably more vigorous than either Pinky Mitchell and his junkie pals or the circle of juicers who guzzled wine against the north wall.

  In the end, the timing was perfect. Tilley stood in the shower room, close to the circle of junkies, trying to look like a doper with no money, while he watched the action. Pinky was doing bang-up business and thoroughly enjoying the attention. Each time a customer approached him, he solemnly dipped his left hand into his shirt pocket, extended his closed fist, then accepted payment with his right hand.

  The situation defied belief, even by a cop who’s supposed to know better. The drugs were right out in the open and there was an overwhelming sense that this last bit of pleasure must not be taken away. Thus the swaying junkies, voices slurred; the cocaine freaks chattering away like teenagers on the telephone; the drunks, loud and threatening; the mumblers and droolers; the paranoids and the depressed who sat with their heads in their hands, un-moving, for hours at a time. The whole shelter reeked of hopelessness.

  There was a clock on the wall over the sink, with a sweep second hand. Tilley actually watched it, willing himself to remain in place until it stood perfectly upright. Then he took two steps toward Pinky Mitchell and grabbed the junkie’s shirt with his left hand, pulling him close.