by Charles Bock
He could close his eyes right now and recall the great Victorian mansion. Most of New Orleans still was a wreck, but the garden district had remained untouched, and the French Quarter, too, and the gated home had appeared so stately and ominous to Lestat. Lestat hadn't talked to another human being for three consecutive days at this point, and something like eleven of his previous fifteen had been without significant human contact, but his three-state journey had been completed, and he'd buzzed and buzzed. And hadn't it been a thrill when a voice answered him? Hadn't it been a moment to remember? Through the speakerphone, Lestat had learned that Anne Rice does not live here anymore. She has sold the house and moved to California. These were the things that stayed with you, you didn't even have to try to remember. On a bench in Jackson Square park, with the rest of a long and humid day ahead of him, Lestat had slowly eaten through a dozen crawfish served in a paper basket, and he'd thought about the recklessness and foolishness of hiking halfway across the country to meet Anne Rice. He'd thought about the things he'd wanted to ask her and then he'd seriously considered whether, in all honesty, Anne Rice would have been able to help him, even if she hadn't moved across the country. Lestat had started to worry about where things were going for him and what he was going to do next, and then a wailing had surprised him, the shock being that the cries were not coming out of his own throat, but from another bench. This chubby chick. Bawling up a storm. People were turning their heads to watch, but Lestat was the only person to go up to her. He approached with the intention of telling her to shut the hell up, but they'd stolen her dog, was the thing. Those bastards had cut her dog's leash from off her wrist while she was sleeping. Lestat had calmed her as best he could, but this chick was a life force, loud and manic and in no condition to figure out what she had to do next. It had been easier for Lestat to concern himself with her problems. It allowed him to delay his own. Lestat had tracked down the nearest police station, and he'd learned that this crazy chick's hound had indeed been found. Whoever had stolen the dog must have had more on their hands than they could deal with because they'd abandoned the dog. A morning jogger had come across it, but by that time the animal was scared and distrustful. It had taken good chunks out of the jogger, and put up quite a struggle when the humane society arrived. The upshot being the chick's dog was scheduled for destruction. The chick had the dog's papers, its registration, and its record of vaccinations, but policy was policy. Even when Lestat used his emergency quarters and tracked down a public advocate who would listen, there weren't a lot of legal options. In the end, all the advocate had been able to do was help register a new dog from the pound—a playful brownish-gray mutt. Which is how Lestat had met Danger-Prone Daphney. Lestat remembered the whole thing like it was still happening.
Problem was, Danger-Prone Daphney swore she'd never been to New Orleans, Daphney was a West Coast gal; Lestat must have mistaken her for some other pregnant goddess. Moreover, the time frame of Daphney's pregnancy didn't jibe with when Lestat had supposedly helped her, and neither did her dog's age. All facts and evidence pointed to the impossibility of Daphney being in New Orleans at that time, and Daphney enjoyed lording this over Lestat, using it as a trump card in their arguments, or when she was simply pissed at the world. The alcohol had affected Lestat's brain, Daphney would say. He was the one with the memory problems. Lestat had no answers for this, so he would put up a stoic front, admitting that he was wrong, ha ha, it was kind of funny, wasn't it. Meanwhile, Lestat's memory was one of the few things he believed in, and it embarrassed him to no end that he'd juxtaposed Daphney's hair and body onto another experience. In a million years Lestat never would have admitted that when he focused, he saw he had not helped Daphney in the French Quarter; but a pockmarked and thinwaisted wild child, who, in the end, also had not returned Lestat's affections. Lestat was painfully aware of his habit of attaching himself to chicks who wanted only platonic friendships from him; and while he wished he could change what had—and hadn't—taken place with these women, he was basically resigned to bad endings, accepting of what he thought of as his fate. Throw in his sense of duty toward a damsel in distress. You start to understand why he'd saddled up alongside Daphney for so long, why he sometimes called home and asked his mom for help with Danger-Prone Daphney. The nursing supervisor at County General, Lestat's mom always asked how Daphney was doing, and told Lestat to get that girl to a hospital. Then his mom always caved and helped with whatever situation Daphney had gotten herself into. His mom accepted the charges whether Lestat called from the middle of a self-pitying drunk, whether he felt lonely and worn down, when he called to tell his mom lies about how he was doing or just to get medical advice. The sound of his mom's voice never failed to bring Lestat to the brink of tears. However, if Lestat's dad answered the phone, the charges would not be accepted. Lestat's father felt it was his son's decision to leave, it would be his decision to come back, and until then, he would not get on the phone with Lestat. Whenever Lestat's call home started winding down, the firm hard silences of Lestat and his mother trying to find something to talk about were resonant, and lots of times, Lestat got real quiet and started sputtering, not because he didn't know how to talk, but because this wasn't one of his fleece jobs or shell games; because too much had happened for him to put into words to someone who meant this much to him. It was impossible to figure out where to start.
So the dial tone broke; the pay phone receiver went back into the cradle, the phone slammed back into its station, it dropped and hung and was suspended from its steel cord. Lestat left the booth and headed toward the corner where the big Mexican wasted time by doing chin-ups on a construction stanchion. He walked away from the stanchion and past the bench with the old toothless lady and the old crippled man and their plastic bags of glass and aluminum. Lestat walked down the street and toward the bevy of transvestite hookers who occasionally treated him to Hostess CupCakes. He crossed the street to get away from the crazy blind man defecating on the sidewalk. The black guy trying to sell a new Rolex ignored Lestat. The incense salesman trained his narrow eyes and, in a heavy Caribbean accent, whispered, You in a dark place now, lad. Lestat wore two pairs of socks at all times to try to cut down on his blisters. He cobbled the rubber soles of his boots, layering them with Super Glue, running a Zippo lighter up and down the soles. His feet still cramped and grew swollen. His blisters ballooned and popped and became infected. No matter how hard Lestat tried to stay on the shaded parts of the street, he attracted killer sunburns. No matter how many times he told himself he was going to stop sniffing glue, he sniffed, leaving the lid off the glue, the cap off the marker, drying out both items, rendering them useless. Lots more grocery dumpsters had padlocks nowadays, and this gave Lestat an excuse to be lazy, and he'd pretty much given up on dumpster diving. Necessity had made him a student of the protocols of toilet paper acquisition, though, and he'd accumulated a stash of standardized mini-napkins that were rough on his ass but still did the trick, pocketing napkins from each trip he made to Mickey Dees, rummaging through public garbage cans for paper bags with coffee cups or sandwich wrappers (sometimes napkins had been left in there). Lestat worried about toilet paper more than food or even where to crap—hunger wasn't novel anymore, and finding a public restroom wasn't usually so difficult; but clean underwear was another matter. Clean underwear was one of the things that tangibly separated Lestat from the bums. Bums were hopeless, in Lestat's eyes—they were lost causes. And any blurring of the line between Lestat and a lost cause was of no small concern to him. Which is why, when Lestat didn't have napkins, he used old newspapers. He used paper bags. He used his right sock one time when he had the runs; afterward he turned the sock inside out and was about to put it back on and then thought about it, good and hard.
Out here you found yourself in situations where there was no right answer, where you didn't want to live like this but here you were and now something had to be done, a decision had to be made. Large, rectangular cars slowed as they approached Lestat
on the corner, the windows rolling down with an automatic hum, revealing middle-aged men, elderly men, one at a time, alone in a prehistoric car that slowed and pulled up. The small talk would be awkward and finally Lestat decided to forgo small talk, he just threw himself into the passenger seat and named his price. When Lestat fell to his knees he felt like he was betraying everything he knew about himself, and at the same time it was a very logical decision. Lestat needed money to eat. He needed money to live. There was a chance he'd get taken to an apartment where he could get a shower. There was a chance an old guy would give him jackets he hadn't worn in years. There was a chance Lestat could empty the fridge and a chance that he could stuff his pockets the moment his trick's back was turned. The stink of an aged scrotum after it had been cooped up inside ancient jockey shorts was the most vile thing ever known. The taste of powder-dry semen was three times worse. Lestat went into long quiet sulks. He lost his appetite for weeks at a time. He gave up fast food entirely and used his money for tuna fish tins and went back to diving in dumpsters for scraps, and occasionally still broke down, springing for a gooey slice. Lestat often got abdominal cramps that doubled him over. He was always starving. He was severely constipated, then had bouts of diarrhea like nobody's business. He drank sodas for energy and the carbonation and caffeine made him dehydrated. He became jittery, anxious, paranoid, jumpy and bitter, cynical and nonresponsive. In the middle of talking about one thing, he'd get lost and drift away. Never one to put on weight, Lestat grew more and more gaunt, the sockets of his eyes sinking into his head, his collar gaping from off his neck. When it got hot, Lestat itched; when it was cold, he itched worse, constantly, everywhere, weird-ass rashes, underneath his thermals, kind of like bedsores, only Lestat rarely slept in a bed, so it wasn't that. His fingers were so caked in dirt that he had to stop brushing his teeth with them. He had lice. He had ticks. Lestat got chills, he got the shakes, he coughed and coughed, for like six months now he'd been coughing. When Lestat got out into the country he'd try to find one of those supersize gas stations that catered primarily to truckers. Most had shower stalls in their bathrooms and Lestat used them whenever possible, letting the warm water pour over him, watching the river of black go down the drain. He'd scrub the nicotine and grime off his hands, and it wasn't until after the first twenty showers that he realized the pink liquid soap only made his rash itch worse. Old acquaintances frequently commented on how shitty he looked. They said it was like staring at a fucking ghost, dude. Lestat would look back at them, a silence in his face, a distant light in his eyes.
No longer could he articulate a particular reason to stay on the streets, yet going home was not an option, not really, and so he passed long stretches in hiding, shuffling along, dragging his feet, trying to get to the next thing to get through, waiting for the day to be over, for the night to be over, bouncing between people who wanted as much from him as he needed from them, asking passersby for a few extra bucks, for spare change, for money to help get a room, could they spare some change for bus fare, a slice of pizza, could they spare a cigarette, a working pen. When Danger-Prone Daphney hadn't started showing yet, the two of them targeted rocker dudes who thought they could make Daphney. They targeted old people and hippy-looking college chicks with leather sandals and anyone else who looked like they'd be soft marks. Lestat would park himself right in the middle of an upscale shopping area with heavy foot traffic. He'd lean against a wall and watch the beautiful people toting their shopping bags and talking on their cell phones. Only instead of slinging his rap, Lestat would stare at the flow of lives he would never lead, whose comfort he would never know. People walked past and ignored Lestat and he resented them. Their eyes glanced over him and he despised them. Whenever pedestrians slowed down and reached for the places they kept their currency, wanting to know if he was okay, what Daphney's story was, whenever that happened, Lestat wished those fuckers were dead. Sitting on the curb out along Hollywood's hipster mecca of Melrose Avenue, the pointy bones of his ass would be sore, and Daphney would be rambling about this and that, and Lestat would look up at the palm trees that lined the sides of the street, and the way their clusters of leaves slumped toward the centers of the traffic median would have Lestat seeing the bowed, furry heads of repentant children. Would have him seeing hands clasped in prayer.
The sane sober businessman does not walk down the street talking out loud to himself, but the crazy homeless man does. And this, Lestat understood, was one of the fundamental differences between the two. Over time Lestat had also grown to understand how the former becomes the latter. How all your thoughts and frustrations can inch closer and closer toward one uninterrupted rant. How the chasm between a person and the world around him can grow, a shell forming between the life you once had and the life you are living.
Lestat had been out on the streets for fuck knew how long, and as he ran along the edge of this stupid-ass punk gig out in the Nevada desert, bulling through brush, he did not try to pick out the faces of people he knew. Lestat didn't want to see those ugly mugs, yet they were unavoidable all the same, fighting in the mosh pit, standing in the crowd, sitting on abandoned couches, wandering aimlessly, passing around bottles and joints, exchanging war stories—the stragglers, the outsiders, the dirty smelly weirdos who showed up at the party with no real connection and were always the last to leave, the forlorn ones who walked on the railroad tracks on the edge of the night and stood in the middle of moving traffic and tried to rinse a few more drops from the sadness that was their joy. Lestat recognized the faded gleam of their smiles. He remembered their smells. It was as if he had some kind of inbred detection system. He did not need to feel connected to them to be connected with them.He did not need to see their faces to know their stories, he knew them anyway, whether he wanted to or not:
The classically trained pianist and standout gymnast who was suicidal because he was in love with his older sister—he had been out on his own for five days now.
The college underclassman who went hitchhiking for the summer and took a bad hit of the wrong drug and since then had wandered aimlessly, half-witted.
The rambunctious daughter rebelling against her father's hypocritical religious doctrine.
The young woman who'd kicked her habits and gotten a grip on her inner pain to a point where she'd obtained a GED, a farty little paper-hat job, and what had seemed like a new lease on life, until familiar demons took hold.
When Lestat hadn't been on the road for too long, a freak snowstorm had hit the Windy City. It was supposed to be spring, but a cold front had blown in from the Great Lakes and the heavens had opened up. On that night the snow had been truly fearsome, and Lestat had been on the south side. The snow was coming down in thick sheets, swirling in the cross drafts and winds so it looked like flakes were arriving from three and five directions at once, glistening in the streetlamped light, wondrous against the grand and imposing backdrop of housing projects and brownstones and dim gray subway cars roaring by on elevated tracks. It had been the kind of cold that set a brutal numbness through your fingers and toes, too cold even for delivery boys to salt the sidewalks or shovel snow. Parked cars were covered in drifts so perfect as to be chaste. The pigs were searching for homeless people to get off the streets, into shelters and hospitals. Whether the bums wanted to or not, they had to go. Lestat was on his way to an all-night pool hall when he came upon an ambulance, pulled up to the sidewalk, its sirens whirling, its back doors flung open. A pair of paramedics in black parkas were trying to get someone onto the stretcher—trying to work with whoever was wrapped inside that battered trench coat, one of those obviously insane people who was constantly jabbering and screaming. It took Lestat a moment to recognize the person. This woman—she was forever collapsed in the corners of delivery ramps and storefronts, withdrawn from the foot traffic as if it were lethal, bunched up in a ball, beer cans strewn around her, maybe the remains of a take-out tray. Lestat was the kind of guy that most people crossed the street to avoid coming int
o contact with, but this old woman looked so demented that, usually, she was too much even for him. Only, the thing was, every once in a while she'd looked at Lestat and her eyes had contained a lucidity that was frightening. Lestat did not know this woman's name, he did not believe that nine out of ten times she would have been capable of responding to it. But the tenth time, the lucidity in her eyes made him sure this woman had moments sane enough for her to know what was happening to her, what her life was becoming. Lestat could not see her face on that winter night. He'd been standing down the street a bit, but was close enough to witness the black parkas of the paramedics, their wet vinyl sheen. The two men were bent over the woman's huddled body and she had the shakes real bad. While the paramedic on the left shone a pen flashlight into her eyes, the woman held still as best she could. She looked into the light and in Lestat's memory, her profile was bluish and pale, and she answered their questions as best she could, her tone acquiescent, that of a child who knows how important it is to obey orders. She could not stand on her own and the paramedics helped her up and moved her toward the back of the ambulance. She whimpered and they nodded and one strapped her into the stretcher and jacked it up so she was sitting in a diagonal position. The other took out a stethoscope and started into her layers of clothes. It was possible that the homeless woman had been through this many times, that the paramedics who covered this stretch of the city knew her name, that this was all routine, but it seemed unlikely to Lestat. What was happening was serious. The paramedics were either going to save the woman, or she was going to die, or maybe they would save her but she would have to have like her foot amputated. It was possible they would treat her and then would have to let her go and she would continue toward her inevitable death. Like how a family of grown children flies in from all over the country, coming together at their parents’ home for Thanksgiving dinner, and this gathering of all grown children happens only once every few years, and so is an event of paramount importance, with days’ worth of cooking, bottles of wine get emptied, hours of fun and goodwill and best behaviors, even when the pumpkin pie comes, everyone still talking and catching up and reminiscing and joking. So no one pays attention when Mom takes a tray into the kitchen. Sister begins clearing plates. Grandpa and Dad are still talking, discussing politics or what have you, but the oldest brother wanders off to check on the score of the game; the middle brother heads into the backyard where he lights a cigarette and calls his girlfriend to see how her dinner went. Cousin Ned has to change the baby, maybe check his e-mail. Gradually the table empties and the participants disperse to different parts of the house, and the dinner is over. One way or another that crazy homeless woman on the stretcher had reached what Lestat felt to be a moment of gravity. A Thanksgiving dinner of sorts was at hand. But after it was finished, instead of flying back to whatever neat little life the woman had for herself, she was going to have lost a leg to frostbite, or she was going to be right back on the streets, getting drunk and scaring the normals and on occasions more and more rare, suffering a twinkle of sanity.