On the Nickel

by John Shannon

  ‘You get the guest room, friend. My name Chopper Tyrus, and don’t let that name worry you none. I don’ be choppin’ nothin’ but cotton. That all ancient history.’ Jack Liffey felt himself lugged by stages closer to the doorway. ‘I think I call you Richard, my genna’man. I always partial to that name. And I hope you got a taste for ham ’n’ motha-fuckahs for dinner.’ He laughed. ‘Tha’s beans an’ franks to you this wet night, for real. Just jokin’ ’bout what we call that whack C-ration that ever’body hate back in Nam – the ham ’n’ limas. Shit, and always just four fuckin’ cigarettes. Seem I always got Kools.’

  Jack Liffey remembered it clearly, indeed, even from his posting in the radar trailer in Thailand. They hadn’t been called C-rations any more, not officially, but everybody still did, anyway, and ham-and-limas was the one that you could never trade away, especially for the prized spaghetti and meatballs or the steak and potatoes.

  ‘You been in the big Nam, Richard? You look ’bout the right age.’

  He’d actually been in Thailand most of his tour, but he was part of the whole fucked-up event, and he’d been over to Nam often enough on R-and-R to nod now without feeling bad about it.

  ‘No money an’ no voice. You don’ got much to contribute tonight, do you, Richard?’

  My luggage is coming along later, Jack Liffey thought.

  Los Angeles has approximately 85,000 homeless people. It may not seem much for a city of four million, but New York City, with almost twice the population, has only about 40,000 homeless people. Chicago has less than 10,000 and San Francisco about the same. What does distinguish homelessness in Los Angeles is how few of its homeless are sheltered – approximately 21 per cent compared to 57 per cent in San Francisco and more than 90 per cent in Philadelphia, Denver, or New York City. These cities have made the political decision to try to house anyone who needs and wants a roof. Los Angeles has not.

  TEN

  Reality is a Hardship for the Prissy

  It was only a ten-minute drive home from The Nickel so Gloria headed east on Fourth Street to see if Maeve had just fallen dead asleep at home and was ignoring her cell. It was a cinch Jack wasn’t going to answer anything. She stopped illegally on the long and narrow 1930s’ viaduct that spanned riverbed and rail yards, just after the weird triumphal arch rising weirdly out of its side rails. She stepped out of the car, stared downward for a moment at the chemical-tainted rainbow-slick on the water flowing south in the channel, maybe twenty feet wide, that ran off-center in the broader concrete river. A car pulled out to pass her, honked as if annoyed, and she turned and gave it the finger. Then she slowly tore up the photograph of the nun’s painting of Jack Liffey, doubled and tore again, letting pieces flutter away into the shadows far down below.

  The nerve of that bitch. Trying to saddle her with a memento of her own love for Jack. Naïve only went so far, Miss Nun. It’s out of your control, woman. I may have had my doubts about the guy, but he belongs to me now, even if he is a basket case.

  She stewed over it the rest of the way home, something about her own destructiveness in ripping the photo to shreds having disturbed her deep inside, until suddenly all her sour jealous rage blew away in an instant. She braked to a harsh stop on Greenwood, right in front of her geraniums. The front door stood wide open with the living room light pouring out unnaturally and every bug on earth heading for it. And his pickup was gone. She left her car running and sprinted for the door, yanking out her service pistol on instinct.

  ‘Maeve! Jack!’ She paused a second on the porch. ‘This is LAPD, Sergeant Ramirez! If you’re a burglar, you got two seconds to get on your face or you’re dead where you stand!’

  She came in slowly, her eyes scanning the front room with care. Nothing. She knew she should call for backup, but this was different, and she rushed the kitchen with the pistol thrust ahead of her, some of her training evaporating in the face of this violation of her personal space and the alarm over her vulnerable loved ones.

  She checked the pantry before moving on, starting to get a grip and shutting doors behind her now. She would hear anything come open. She found the old house landline phone with its receiver smashed – something Jack might do in frustration. Loco glanced up at her curiously from the back porch, but the screen door was hooked and no one had come in or out that way. The dog wasn’t alerting on anything, if he still had it in him, but he did look uneasy. In another few minutes of rampaging through the convoluted old two-story house, she’d satisfied herself that there were no home invaders in any closet, or under a bed, or behind the shower curtain. At least no one over a foot tall. And she knew for a fact that neither Maeve nor Jack was at home either. Not good news – not in Jack’s case especially – unless maybe he and Maeve had left together. But it would have been a real struggle for Maeve to move Jack by herself. And where was Jack’s car? Gloria finally stuffed her Glock .40 back into the holster clipped against her skirt.

  She hated herself for it, but she went straight to the fridge and opened a beer. She’d had a twelve-hour police shift and a four-hour shift of her own and she was beat. Corona, don’t fail me now.

  After sucking down half of it, she called Jack’s ex-wife Kathy in Redondo and discreetly found out that neither Jack nor Maeve was down there. OK, when it’s the end of the world, who do you call? Everybody has someone. Someone you never wanted nor expected to see failure in their face.

  She speed-dialed three. It was the cell of Paula Green, her best friend from the Academy, who’d offended somebody upstairs and been stuck in the Foothill station in Pacoima in the north San Fernando Valley for three years – for a black woman it was like being assigned as liaison to Guadalajara.

  ‘Green.’

  ‘Paula, thank god. This is Glor. I really need a friend.’

  ‘Don’t hyperventilate, girl. You know you got one.’

  Chopper laid out a thick bedding of newspapers on the far side of his small cardboard home, for insulation and padding, and then offered Jack Liffey a fraying blanket he’d borrowed from the tent next door. He had a thin old foam pad for himself and a comforter that was leaking stuffing.

  ‘Well, Richard, we best beat a retreat indoors. They more rain on the way. Lot of skipskaps push theyselves into the missions on the rain nights, but we got a nice dry home out here. And safe from all them steal-me-Elmos. Can’t trust nobody indoors.’

  He dragged Jack Liffey foot-by-foot into the shelter and on to the newspaper padding, and then settled the blanket over him. Almost immediately a patter started up on the plastic over the top of the fridge boxes, then steadied, curiously like the sound of fire. ‘Stay warm, man. Better to stay than fight to get there.’

  Jack Liffey made a gesture of writing on his palm.

  ‘I get you. We a little short a’ pens and pencils in here, Richard. And I ain’t so good with readin’ neither. Got some a’ that dis-lexus thing with words I been tole.’ He lit an old olive-colored kerosene lantern with a cracked glass chimney and set it in the doorway, though once Jack Liffey’s eyes had adjusted, he could see a faint glow of the city still reflected off the clouds over the buildings. The rosy warmth of the lantern felt good and the local light was immensely reassuring. Jack Liffey had never in his life felt quite so helpless. He almost laughed at himself, at how, some time back, how dependent he had once thought he’d been, when he was still in a comfortable wheelchair, and still had shoes and a wallet, and a writing pad, and a world of loved ones around him. Now he had none of that, but he’d certainly become well-traveled in misfortune.

  ‘Hey dere, perfessors,’ Chopper called out to a pair of cops walking past, the nearest one a black woman. They wore long transparent raincoats and plastic shower caps over their hats.

  The woman squatted down to peer inside.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Tyrus. S’up witchou?’

  ‘Nothin’ pricey. I be shelterin’ a new frien’ and he cain’ hardly talk. He a real moot. Man want to write to me. Either of you got a ol’ pencil stub
to borrow me?’

  The male cop remained disdainfully back from the boxes, on his guard, while the woman patted her shirt through the transparent plastic. She dug out an old Bic and handed it to Chopper. ‘Who you got back there? You didn’t go and mug Mr Richie Rich, did you, Chopper? That’s not like you. Are you OK, sir?’

  She pushed the lantern aside and crawled half into the shelter, shining her flashlight on Jack Liffey’s face. A kind of stubbornness made him nod, rather than put himself into the care of the police.

  ‘Why don’t you write me your name, sir? And your last address.’

  Just as she was digging for a notebook, a powerful car accelerated past them, and Jack Liffey caught sight of the tail end of a police car. Both of their chest-pack radios started squawking orders. Then a siren whooped from the fleeing car.

  ‘Gotta go, Diana,’ the male cop announced. ‘Ten-thirty-two. Gun – it’s just two blocks away.’

  ‘You take care of yourself, sir,’ the woman said, as she patted Jack Liffey’s leg. ‘Chopper’s a little schizy but he’s harmless, and I happen to know he got a great big heart.’ She patted Chopper’s leg and backed out of the shelter. The two cops hurried off.

  ‘Why she gotta say that?’ Chopper complained. ‘I as rationalistic as a sober judge. Here, Richard. Write your name on some a’ that paper under you.’

  IM JACK. THANK YOU, CHOPPER. He wrote big and slowly in the wide margin of a display ad from the Times, then showed it to Chopper, who laboriously sounded out the message, let it sink in and seemed to comprehend it as part of a slow process of absorption.

  ‘You Jack, not Richard. OK, Jack. Give me pounds.’

  He held out a fist and Jack Liffey returned the old greeting as best he could, a couple of fist-bumps and then a finger-clasp up and down and a pull-away. They both smiled, knowing its Nam roots.

  ‘Knowledge is power,’ Chopper said. ‘Good Conduct.’

  Jack Liffey had a tattoo on his upper arm that proclaimed those very two words – acquired on Tu Do Street during a night of drunken revelry, under the superstitious urge to stay out of trouble long enough to get home unkilled. He was tempted to show the forlorn message to Chopper, but the air was just too cold for any disrobing. He’d read recently that they’d renamed Tu Do Street these days. It was Dong Khoi now – which was supposed to mean uprising. Why not – it was their country. They could call it Death to Americans, if they wanted.

  MY WHEELCHAIR WAS STOLEN.

  This one was much harder for Chopper to decipher, but it seemed only a matter of time and false-starts, because eventually the man nodded with great gravity and repeated it aloud.

  ‘That’s so low. They’s hitters out dere gonna steal yo’ dirty underpants wit’ you in ’em.’

  I WILL PAY YOU TO CALL MY WIFE TO COME GET ME. TOMORROW. Somehow, Jack Liffey just couldn’t bear any more humiliation tonight, and he didn’t want to move any of his aches and pains. He was relatively comfortable in his exhaustion where he lay, and he felt a kind of loyalty to Chopper’s hospitality. It might do him some good in the general humility sweepstakes to spend a night on The Nickel, especially with this gentleman that he’d been assured by the cops was trustworthy – if a little off his rocker.

  Chopper finally mouthed out the message and took it in without a hint of questioning Jack Liffey’s motives for waiting until the next day. ‘OK, Richard … Jack. Tonight I beat you at chess.’

  Oh, shit, Jack Liffey thought. He hated chess, a game that required insane concentration. He’d played seriously for a while in high school, until his friends had started reading books on it, and then he’d walked away from the game until forced to play it again by his buddies in the radar outpost in Thailand, where there was virtually nothing else to do. As far as he was concerned, chess was a dark angel that thrived on OCD. Too much eyeball-to-eyeball, too much descent into some as-yet-to-be mapped intensity center of the brain that he had little access to.

  One of his missing-child cases had carried him into a strange cultish circle that had worshipped Jack Parsons, the Jet Propulsion Lab scientist (and devotee of the black magician Aleister Crowley) who had blown himself up in his home in Pasadena in the 1950s. Parsons had left a note before the blast: ‘I saw those guys playing chess and suddenly decided that I did not want to end up like them.’ Yes.

  But Jack Liffey reclined on his elbow like a Roman feaster and resignedly watched Chopper Tyrus set up a tiny traveling peg-seated chess set between them. What the hell. One night.

  Chopper took white, and Jack Liffey knew within a few moves that he’d be OK for the night. Chopper played jailbird chess, speed chess – every fervent move chosen within a few seconds, never thinking more than one move ahead. It was like playing with Tweetybird on crack. ‘Ooooh, look! A move!’

  Jailbird chess was so subversive of the choking intensity of the game as he’d known it that he wouldn’t be challenged at all. For one evening he could be a good sport.

  * * *

  Paula came immediately, as Gloria knew she would, toting a little overnight bag that said OJB on the side. That was for Oscar Joel Bryant, the name of a black L.A. cop who’d died arresting three gunmen in the 1960s. The LAPD’s African-American officers association was named for him.

  ‘Thanks a bunch for coming, Paula. Your Captain up there in the far valley still calling you a neegress?’

  ‘I think somebody got him wise. I’m black now. Not African-American, mind you, but you can’t expect some of these guys to get too sensitive all at once.’

  ‘No, it would probably signal the end of the world. President or not. Thanks again.’

  ‘You don’t send out a distress signal because there’s a little leak under your sink.’

  ‘Maeve and Jack are both missing.’ She handed Paula a beer and the woman took it and sat heavily. ‘Either separately or together. I don’t even know. Her car’s gone. His car’s gone. The front door was standing open when I came home. That’s not a good sign.’

  ‘Jack’s still … the same?’

  ‘Same old same old. Maeve is playing PI a bit again, looking for a missing boy. Supposedly she was just making the first moves in order to crank Jack’s motor a bit. The boy is the son of an old friend of his.’

  ‘So do we go after this boy or Maeve or Jack?’

  ‘As far as I can tell, it’s mostly taking place on Skid Row so maybe we can do it all.’

  ‘Oh, OK. Only thirty or forty square blocks of missions and flops and dead old buildings. And more cardboard tents than you can peek inside in a week. In the rain. That ought to be a snap.’

  ‘And flesh-eating bacteria if you touch the wrong skell. Or triple-TB – the nasty one that meds can’t stop.’

  ‘Shit, we could all end up in Magic Mountain.’

  ‘The amusement park?’

  Paula swigged down some more beer and smiled. ‘The book. It’s about a TB asylum. Never mind. Should we do it now?’

  ‘All I needed was your moral support to get me back there. I’ve been around the block a few times with no luck, but I didn’t look under every leaf. I’m sorry to drag you out, but I just can’t leave Jack out in that hard rain, not in his condition. I talked to the locals down there but those boneless cops were no use. Rookies.’

  Paula nodded. ‘Don’t I know them. Last week I got called to a banging in east Pacoima. The kid who was shot was still lying on the porch, very dead, waiting for the coroner, and three cops were interviewing his pals. This was all taking place in Spanish, of course.

  ‘Then I heard a shriek – “El mismo carro!” – from one of the kids. I recognized the sound of a throaty old 1950s’ muscle car rolling up the street behind me.

  ‘When I turned, I saw an Impala low-rider with faces and headbands in all the windows, and I just went into some deep instinct. I walked across the yard and pointed straight at the car like an old witch. The car took off fast without even anybody waving a pistolo or throwing sign. When I looked back at the porch, that whole crowd of
macho men had emptied itself inside the house. Forget backing me up.’

  She drank off the beer. ‘I admit I was scared to death, and it was a fairly dumb move, but, you know, it wasn’t the kids in that car that got me – I hate to say, but even to save my damn life I wasn’t gonna be seen backing off by a bunch of guys on the job. Maybe I’ll leave Foothill Station a legend.’

  ‘You’re a legend right now, girl.’

  ‘Fuck me, Eddie – you give to that bitch and her Home For All?’ Moses Vartabedian exclaimed. ‘That’s just one loud-mouth nun.’

  Vartabedian fussed with a black stogie, then reamed the end with his gold cigar tool.

  ‘Shit, yeah,’ Wolverton said. ‘Give the do-goods a little public help. It sends a signal when the feature writers come around.’ Indeed, he thought. He still remembered the woman from L.A. Loft Living who’d talked amazingly dirty for three solid minutes while she was stripping for him and then had done a few tricks on the carpet he’d only really heard about.

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘Actually, I do, V. I’m not that cynical. I really do believe in helping the homeless. We’re gonna coexist down here, like it or not.’

  ‘What do you guys think?’ Vartabedian exhaled smoke from the stogie and glared at his two hirelings, McCall and Thibodeaux, who seemed content to stand either side of his door like mismatched stone lions.

  ‘Nobody remembers givers for shit,’ McCall said. ‘Just look at the world’s greatest taker.’ He flicked his head at Thibodeaux, who was running a finger along his unopened switchblade as if petting the head of a snake. ‘Nobody ever forgets Rice.’

  Thibodeaux snicked the blade out, as if on signal, then walked the open knife end-to-end along his fingers in a showy way, like George Raft with a quarter on his knuckles. Having their full attention, he concluded his act by pretending to saw his own dick off.

  No, Wolverton thought, flapping away Vartabedian’s smoke. Even if he had fifty more years of the architectural redesign of these insipid beaux-arts buildings in Downtown and all the other half-assed gentrifying, and having to chum up with other slippery shmucks like Vartabedian who had the money to finance it all, he’d probably never forget this one job and this one little loon who’d turned up somehow on it. It was a pretty big job, worth a million and change for his studio, or he’d’ve checked out already, maybe start on the hill house that Madonna had wrecked above the reservoir that was waiting now for a fresh look, or hunt up that magazine chick for a second interview, though he couldn’t even remember her name or what it was exactly that she’d been howling there at the end when she was down on all fours.