We get back to the Merry-Go-House and brainstorm. Kay suggests I apply for Section 8 help. Maybe I can get some money for rent, she says.
I apply, but the state wants me to submit tax information that I don’t have. I haven’t filed taxes since I fired my accountant years ago. Very few people have paid more taxes than me. I can’t believe California or the federal government has the gall to ask for more. Are they not content with the tens of millions I’ve paid them? The system is broken when, after millions of dollars paid in taxes, the government won’t help out because I owe them a few hundred thousand. They are just looking for ways not to help. The whole goddamn system is set up to screw you if you’re down on your luck.
At the end of month three, I’m three hundred dollars short on rent. I had another seventy-six dollars, but needed that for living essentials. Kay said it would buy me to the end of the month, but then I would need to leave unless I could come up with the rest.
When the sun is up, all is well. I relax on the porch, smoke cigarettes, and tell stories. I’ve even picked up the way these people talk. I know when to say, “Okay,” “Yuuup,” “Right?,” and “Nah, he/she said/did what?” The palm trees don’t go anywhere, and you can count on the sun to keep on rising. At least we have the weather.
But when the sun goes down and we stub our cigarettes on the porch and go back to our rooms, Hopelessness is always waiting for me. I’m alone and defenseless. I don’t fight it anymore. Sometimes I don’t even cry. We don’t talk. I walk into its damp dark lair, let its clawed tentacles wrap me, squeeze me, then crush me. It’s black, I can’t see a thing; not forward or backward. But I feel. My rib cage collapses under the pressure. Lungs deflate. Hopelessness hisses that there will be no relief, no reprieve. Money will not come to the rescue. Money has abandoned me for good this time. Money has better things to do, better friends to be with, better lovers to fuck. The grip tightens. Money doesn’t even remember you. You’re nothing. Breathing becomes difficult. Smoke burns my sinuses. Hell’s smoke.
Wait, that actually is smoke.
I remove my headphones. The smoke alarms in the hallway are wailing. I sit up and look around. The room has a cloud of smoke in it, swirling around the ceiling. Puffs of yellow smoke seep in from the cracks around the door. I hear yelling down the hall. The room feels like a sauna. I open the window and take a breath of the outside air. Cool wind blows in from outside but the smoke in the room grows thicker. I grab my duffle bag and stuff in what I can grab. I was wise enough never to unpack, but I had a few things. I pull on my shoes and wrap myself in the wool blanket from my cot. The power goes out and I see the glow of fire from under the door. I’m coughing bad despite decades of practice inhaling smoke. I tie a shirt around my face and stay low. The smoke is getting thicker. Sirens in the distance. People are yelling things outside.
In elementary school they told us to check the temperature of the door knob before opening a door in a burning building. The doorknob is hot, but not scalding. I unbolt the deadbolt and turn the knob, which is harder than usual to turn. As soon as the latch clears the strike plate, a freight train of heat and smoke blows open the door and knocks me onto my back. A spinning column of flames leans into the room and spreads out across the ceiling. The flames reach for the window. The heat is unbearable. Like a waterfall’s roar the fire drowns out all other sound. Cracks, pops, and hisses snap out of the rushing sound of the flames. It feels like my skin is on fire and my eyes are melting.
I roll over onto my stomach and army crawl to the window. I’m dizzy and my cough is incapacitating. I can’t move. The window isn’t far away (the whole room is only a few square feet), but I’m caught in the cloak of smoke. Blinded and suffocated. The carpet is like lava. Finally I’m at the window and leaning out, filling my lungs with cool fresh air. I have to jump. Maybe I can make it to the next house’s roof. I have to try. It’s either get a few broken bones or become spent carbon along with the rest of this place. I pull myself up and get my knee up on the window sill.
From behind I’m lifted by my armpits and thrown over a shoulder. A firefighter yells something to me and puts the wool blanket over my back. My stomach is bent over the firefighter’s shoulder. He spins around and marches me through a flaming doorway and into the smoke-filled hallway. I can’t stop coughing. At the end of the hall he turns hard to go down the stairs and my head bangs against his oxygen tank. He bounces down the stairs and knocks the rest of the wind out of me.
The outside air is cold in my lungs. I’m dropped onto a waiting stretcher and an EMT straps an oxygen mask to my face. Other things are strapped or clamped to me as I’m rolled down the driveway and into the back of a waiting ambulance.
24
The hospital releases me the next morning. My blood-oxygen levels have returned to normal, and they’re confident that the smoke didn’t cause any permanent damage to my lungs. My foot was burned at some point, but they’ve treated that and given me another Vicodin prescription for the pain.
I am released into the care of the Red Cross. A rec center gymnasium has been converted into a shelter for the tenants of the Merry-Go-House for the next five days. We are given a cot, a blanket, access to second-hand clothes, and three warm meals a day.
Kay tells us that the fire started on the first floor in one of the back rooms, what would have been the room across the hall from mine if we were on the same floor. That’s where Tyrone lived. Tyrone had always been an angry person. He was one of the tenants who were forced to live in a halfway house by court order, and he had more restrictions than those of us staying there by choice. Ankle monitor and all that. On the night of the fire, Kay had told him that his parents were short on rent this month, and that he would not be able to stay unless he made good on the rent. If he couldn’t stay at the halfway house, he’d have to go back to county lockup.
So, as Kay should have expected, Tyrone acted out. He used his last forty-five dollars to buy a five gallon gas jug and five gallons of diesel fuel. He returned to his room after the rest of us had gone to bed. He soaked his bedding and mattress in fuel, and poured the rest of the jug all over his carpet and walls. Then, tapping into his inner lunatic, he lit a cigarette, dragged the mattress down the hall, leaned it up against the door to Kay’s room, and dropped his cigarette on it. He then returned to his room, threw his bedding into the hall in front of his door, lit that on fire, then shut his door and ignited his room.
Since Kay was on the first floor, she climbed out her window easy enough and called 911. By the time the fire department arrived, everybody was accounted for except for me, Tyrone, Ron, and Maria. Maria lived in the room across from me, the one directly above Tyrone. She had climbed out her window and jumped to the ground, her pant leg caught a screw in the window seal and she swung around heels over head. She fell straight onto her face on the driveway below. Paramedics say she died on impact. That, or laid there on the cement with a cracked skull and writhed in pain for nearly twenty minutes then died from catastrophic hemorrhaging. Nobody saw her until the firefighters arrived.
Ron slept through the whole thing. His room was near the front of the building on the second story and he had a habit of sleeping under his bed (paranoid, I think). Firefighters kicked open his door, didn’t see anybody in the room, and figured he had run off. Ron woke up the next morning soaked in water from the firefighter’s hoses and wandered out onto the street, asking why firefighters were showering the house.
Firefighters found Tyrone’s body curled up against his window, charred like a hotdog microwaved for a half an hour. Apparently his window was jammed.
Anyway, Kay told us, we need to find somewhere else to stay. The county authorities deemed what was left of the house uninhabitable and condemned it. The Red Cross has phones we can use to call family and friends. We can keep the blankets and clothes they give us. I asked, “What about those of us without family and friends?” She told about shelters in the area if we were unable to find a place to stay. Good Shepherd Ce
nter, PATH, The Midnight Mission, Union Rescue Mission, Weingart Center, and more. The Red Cross has brochures with contact information for each one.
Everything I owned, including my phone and scrip slips, was lost in the fire. My only possessions were the scratchy clothes given to me from the Red Cross, my Vicodin prescription, six Vicodin the hospital had given me, and the wool blanket I was sitting on.
How would the FBI get ahold of me if they tracked down my money? How was I going to build a client base and pharmaceutical operation? Stay in a shelter? A homeless shelter? Nope. Couldn’t do it. Can’t. I have Caleb’s number memorized, so I use a Red Cross phone to call him.
“Hello?”
“Hey, it’s me, Caish.”
“What do you need, Caish?”
“Well, the house I was staying in just burned down, and I don’t have anything. I was wondering if you could help me out.”
The line was silent long enough to make me nervous, then Caleb asked, “Your house burned down?”
“Well, it wasn’t my house, but yeah, the place I was staying.”
“Mhm.” He didn’t sound convinced.
“No, seriously, Google it. The Hope’s Haven House. The LA Times ran an article on it. Two people died. I was carried out of my room on the shoulder of a firefighter. I’m not kiddin’ around. Everything I owned was lost in the fire.”
“Hm. Well. Here’s the thing, Caish. Toni is in a rehab clinic. We’ve had to dip into our savings to pay for that. We don’t really have much we can spare.”
He couldn’t be serious. I gave them that money. That was mine, and I helped them. Now they wouldn’t help me, with my own money? “What do you mean?”
“I mean I won’t wire you money. Especially since you’d just use it for heroin.”
“I wouldn’t use it for heroin.”
“Then you’d use it for rent and use the money you saved on rent for heroin. Either way I’m buying you junk.”
“Caleb, I don’t have any money. You can’t give me back even a little bit of the millions of dollars I gave you?”
“Sorry, Caish. I can’t help you.”
That fucking selfish bastard. “Can I at least stay with you guys until I get back on track?”
“Stay with us? Caish, no. Toni overdosed on Fentanyl and almost died because of you, and now you want to live with us? No. Absolutely not.”
“You fucking selfish bast—”
“Don’t ever call me again, Caish.” He hung up. Just like that. Left me, the one who had given him over a million dollars, out to dry. Out to die. People are so selfish.
Fuck. I have to call my ex. The last human I know. The house I bought my son and ex has two guest rooms, and right now I need one. Luckily, that’s another number I have memorized.
“Hello?”
“Hey, it’s me, Caish, don’t hang up. Don’t hang up!”
“What do you want?”
“I need to come stay with you and Mark for a few days, the place I was staying in just burned down and—”
The line went dead. I call back, two rings, call ended. I call again and it goes straight to voicemail. What more could I have done for these people? I gave them more than they could ever obtain on their own. More money than they should be able to spend in their lifetimes. And now that I need a little bit of help, just a place to stay, for Christ sakes, they turned their back on me. Heartless, black-souled, empty conscious, selfish motherfuckers.
When the Red Cross kicks us out four days later, I walk straight to the Downtown Disciples Mission. A Catholic shelter. A Catholic homeless shelter. Because I guess that’s what I am now. My burned foot is in excruciating pain, but I don’t take the Vicodin because that’s the only way I can make any money. The government and everybody I know has abandoned me, so I have to crawl out of this hole without any help. Which I will. I’ll bounce back. I’ll overcome this. My grandpa used to say, “Keep your head up, it’s darkest before dawn. When things seem at their worst and darkest, the sun will rise and everything will work out.” Probably an easy platitude to believe when you’re living a middle-class life in Missoula, Montana. His darkest predawn was probably a toothache.
By the time I hobble into the shelter, my foot is bleeding through the shoe I got from the Red Cross. The shelter has a medical staff that sees to me and gets me bandaged up. I ask them for painkillers, and they give me Lortab. Four of them. I take two and slip the other two into my pocket for later resale. The shelter’s intake paperwork isn’t too bad. Without any assets, incomes, or relations, most of it is inapplicable. I’m given papers with directions to my room, the cafeteria, the chapel, and the washroom. Meal times are laid out for me. A nurse helps me to my bed in a room full of bunk beds. I get a bottom bunk near the center of the room. The nurse brings me a water and snacks, asks me if I need anything else (to which I respond more pain killers), then leaves me to my loneliness.
It’s the middle of the day and a few people are milling about. Maybe they would buy my pills. Probably not. Of all places to sell something, a shelter has to be the worst. If anybody here had any money, they wouldn’t be here. I need to get out on the street, take my product to the market.
There’s no other way of putting it, this shelter is depressing. It smells like bleach, the lighting is half-ass, the cream colored walls are killing me with blandness, and all these pictures of Jesus are creeping me out.
There is a service tonight at 5:00 p.m. that the shelter recommends I attend. It’s right before dinner. And although it’s not required to get your dinner, it sort of is. I don’t do anything to pass the time. I wallow in boredom until five o’clock. I watch children play, oblivious to their circumstances. Chasing each other around the beds, sitting close, complaining to an adult about the unfairness of their playmate, and then settling down with their face buried in a smartphone or a tablet. In a homeless shelter.
The service is shitty, of course. I am surrounded by hundreds of homeless people. Hundreds. All wearing gallons of cologne and perfume in lieu of using soap and water. The homeless men look like the roller brush taken from underneath a street sweeper. The grime and scraps that end up in the gutter have become animated and they are now surrounding me. Lest you doubt their authenticity, lean in and take a whiff. Or lean away and take a whiff, you’ll smell the rancor either way. Most of the woman don’t look completely derelict, just destitute. But some certainly have that street-sweeper-brush look.
And these people have children.
These people bring babies into these circumstances.
We, the damned, file into a chapel and take our seats in the pews. Half upholstered. As if they ran out of tithing money before they could wrap the backs of these benches with padding. We sit uncomfortably close. “Scoot in,” we’re told, “we have a full house tonight, so we’re going to need to get cozy.” We scoot and scoot some more until we are sitting arm-to-arm. I’m fresh deli meat between two pieces of moldy bread. The room is sweat-through-your-shirt hot, and the service hasn’t even started.
Finally, at 5:17 p.m. a pastor walks in carrying a massive gold-leafed Bible. He stands at the pulpit and looks us over. He’s silent at first, waiting for the crowd’s murmuring to die down. When it’s silent, he revels in the room’s new focal point: him. He stays quiet and smiles, looking around as if proud of all of us for graduating from something.
He looks down at the Bible in front of him and pulls it open to its pre-marked page. He checks to make sure we’re still there, then begins.
“‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.’ This, brothers and sisters, is the beloved text of Psalm 23:4. We know it well. How often have we recited this very scripture, using it for strength, relying on it for guidance? But why do we stop there? Why do we quote one verse and not the next? King David wrote this famous verse with the inspiration of our Lord. Did he not have that same inspiration in scribing the next verse? The next cha
pter? Psalm 24 begins: ’The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein. For he hath...’”
The pastor goes on but he’s lost me. Too many questions. And I can’t help but wonder about this guy. Does he get paid to do this? He must. Why else would he do this? But how? These people are poor. Maybe he moonlights as a pro bono preacher, and in the daytime he does his paid work in middle-class congregations. Does this guy actually know the Lord? Does the Lord know him? Does the Lord know me?
“Hey,” the broom next to me whispers, “you don’t actually believe this shit, do you?”
“What?” I ask.
“Ya know, this bullshit preacher man is spewing, you don’t actually believe it, right?”
“Um, I dunno.” I hadn’t been listening for a minute, so I wasn’t sure what the pastor was talking about or what the broom was referring to. “I wasn’t really listening.”
“I’m Sam.” The broom holds its hand out in front of it like it’s a robot about to dice chives with its palm. I reach over and shake its hand.
“I’m Caish.”
“Here’s the thing,” Sam whispers loud enough to get the woman sitting in front of us to turn around with a scowl, but he presses on, “religion is a virulent contrivance to subjugate the masses to ‘virtuous”’—here he used air quotes—“obedience. An obedience that requires one to give up money, time, and free thinking to tax-exempt institutions and corporations claiming divine endorsement.” Sam looks at me out of the sides of his eyes with a look of satisfaction. His face was asking me to thank him for giving me the truth.
“Okay,” I mumble.
“The ontological fallacy of anthropocentrism and megalomania is the product sold by the preacher. The preacher—”
“Sam, I appreciate the insights, but I’m just here for the food and bed.”
Malibu Motel Page 33