Travels with Lizbeth

by Lars Eighner

  * * *

  I PACKED SLOWLY and then I sat on the curb on the street that ran by the bamboo.

  Tim said he was going to a homeless camp he had discovered to the south. When I was sure he had gone that way, I took my things to Sleazy Sue’s. Sue’s had closed in early September. We slept under the building for a couple of nights, but then there seemed to be no reason we should not sleep in the main entryway. The entryway was a five-by-eight room that showed only a door-sized arch to the alley.

  I was at a loss for many days.

  SEVENTEEN

  A Roof over Our Heads

  On Halloween 1989 I saw Tiny, who had owned Sue’s. He suggested that I camp on Sue’s porch and I admitted that I had already been doing so. Tiny said his lease on the building was paid through November and I could stay on the porch at least until then if I wished. That was the first I knew that Tiny did not own the building as well as the business that had been there. His offer seemed a tremendous boon, for although the nights were not yet very cold, the fall rains had set in.

  I visited the barren ground where the bamboo had been. I could not even tell precisely where our camp had been. Lizbeth sniffed around a bit, but I do not think her nose told her more than my eyes told me.

  The Austin Grackle ran a free display ad, soliciting a cheap or free typewriter for me. The result of this was an old upright Royal delivered to Ramblin’ Red’s. One of the regular contributors at The Grackle left some typing paper, Wite-Out, and steno pads for me at the office.

  I found a stout cardboard box that would hold the typewriter and my supplies. When it did not rain I got the box from under Sue’s and took it to the pew at Ramblin’ Reds. I forget now what I was working on, but remember only that I was frequently interrupted by the principal neighborhood drunk.

  Vandals had smashed the pew after I had left for Hollywood. But when I returned, the proprietor of Red’s, who had preserved the pieces, had it reconstructed, refinished, and reinstalled. The drunk perceived that I had something to do with the pew’s disappearing and reappearing and for some reason resented me.

  To avoid him, I tried to work on the porch at Sue’s on Monday, the sixth of November. In the afternoon a police car pulled into the lot and a policewoman got out. She demanded my identification as soon as she was sure Lizbeth was restrained. I pulled my ID card out of my wallet and flipped it at her feet. This was exactly as other officers had instructed me to do so that I would not have to come near them, but it infuriated this one. I thought it was standard operating procedure, but she took it as an affront and I never could quite explain to her why I had surrendered my identification as I had.

  She asked me what I was doing on the property. I told her I had the permission of the owner—by which I meant Tiny. That she contradicted, and I said at any rate I had the permission of the man who had the lease on the property. She retired with my ID to an old blue Cadillac at the far end of the parking area. I cannot say that I had ever noticed this car before. Much of the paint was worn off or rusted through and the plastic parts of the fenders were broken or missing. Indeed I did not recognize it as a Cadillac.

  The officer had a discussion with the driver of the car and in a few minutes the car drew near the porch. The driver was a very old and frail-looking man and the passenger was a blue-haired woman of about his age, but better preserved. This was Lefty Smith and his wife. Smith chewed on the stub of a cigar that had gone out as I explained to him that Tiny had told me I could stay on the porch until his lease ran out at the end of November. Smith’s hearing was much impaired and about half of what I said had to be repeated to him by his wife. Even so he seemed to get only parts of what was said.

  He said that he owned the property and that Tiny’s lease was several months in arrears. His manner was gruff and abrupt. I supposed Lizbeth and I would have to move on. Smith said the property had been sealed by the bankruptcy court, otherwise he would have taken possession of it by now. But at last he said he could see no harm in my remaining for a time, provided I did not allow companions to join me and provided I was sober. I assured him I could easily meet his conditions and he dismissed the officer.

  I learned that Smith’s policy was to be petty and mean, but to be so through intermediaries such as the police officer. Whenever someone applied to him directly he was perfectly accommodating, so long as it cost him nothing out of pocket.

  He and his wife often stopped and spoke to me as I typed on the pew at Ramblin’ Red’s. Eventually I learned that he owned the strip center as well as Sue’s.

  Lefty had an overpowering fear of dogs. Some others have been afraid of Lizbeth when her behavior could be called ambiguous. But around Lefty, she was as docile as she was with children. I wondered if she did not recognize infirmity as well as she recognized childhood—I suppose that passes credibility. At any rate she was always on her best behavior when Lefty was around and he was always deathly afraid of her.

  On the ninth, a heavy-duty pickup came to Sue’s while I sat on the pew at Ramblin’ Red’s. The truck pulled up on the sidewalk at the gate of the patio and soon a group of three or four young men were loading liquor from the bar into the truck. I recognized a couple of the young men as bar workers, but as staff tends to rotate from bar to bar, I was not sure which bar they were working for. One of the young men looked a lot like Clint, whom I had left in the shack on Avenue B when Lizbeth and I first set out for California, and whom I had not seen since the previous summer at Shipe Playground. I could not trust my eyes at that distance. I found it hard to believe that Clint would be working for a bar, but if it were he I thought he would not reckon it a favor for me to hail him while the others were around.

  Tiny came around the next day. He suggested I might be more comfortable on the patio and gave me the key to the patio gate. I believe he might have done so sooner if he had got rid of the liquor sooner. The patio key did not, of course, admit me to the bar, but the high fence around the patio would have concealed any effort to break into it. Now, of course, I knew there was no court seal on the bar. That was just what Tiny had told Lefty to keep him at bay. Tiny had filed for personal bankruptcy a few months before, and no doubt the papers connected with that had convinced Lefty of Tiny’s story. The bar was in fact, but not in law, bankrupt.

  I had heard from some of Sue’s former employees that the bar was far in arrears in rendering to the IRS the taxes that had been withheld from paychecks. Unfortunately, in such a situation the IRS holds the employees responsible as much as the employer, and many of them were in serious trouble, although they had done nothing wrong.

  I stashed my gear on the patio, and Lizbeth and I went Dumpster diving. When we returned I found that a car was parked on the sidewalk at the patio gate. There were two men in suits in the car and so I sat on the pew at Ramblin’ Red’s to see what might develop. One of the men got out of the car. Although I could not recognize Clint from the same distance, I could see the man was a Treasury agent. I cannot say precisely what a T-man looks like, but I know one when I see one. I was afraid the IRS was going to seize Sue’s and with it my gear on the patio.

  I tied Lizbeth to the bench and went into Ramblin’ Red’s to ask if anyone knew what was going on. The proprietor and one of the staff stepped out of the shop and the three of us gawked at the Treasury men. The proprietor refined upon my observation. “Secret Service,” he said. Mrs. Lyndon Johnson was having her hair done at the beauty parlor that was next door to Sue’s.

  * * *

  SUE’S PATIO SEEMED a wonderful place to be. Lizbeth could be let off her leash. I could leave her locked on the patio with some confidence that no one would interfere with her. Parts of the patio had been roofed, and with but a little difficulty I placed my bedroll where there were no leaks. The patio bar, where the keg beer had been served, also remained dry and I set my typewriter on it. Happily this was near enough a street lamp that I could work at night. The pay phone had not been removed and was in working order, although I never made muc
h use of it.

  The first night, someone, I imagine it was the drunk, tried to climb the fence into the patio, but Lizbeth convinced him to climb back before I was fully awake. I suppose he had been sleeping on the patio before. Despite occasional similar intrusions, I enjoyed my privacy on the patio second only to my ability to work there. This privacy was not the sort of privacy one misses while in a dormitory or a barracks, but was a kind of privacy that is more to do with having a right to be somewhere. And, I will have to admit, it had something to do with my having some ability to exclude others.

  Since our camp had been busted, I had been afraid of Tim’s showing up again. If I was where I had no right to be, I would have no right to prevent him from being a few feet away. But I could count on Tiny to back me up if I wanted to keep Tim off the patio, and this was a great relief to my mind.

  I discovered that the water was still on in the little taco stand attached to the bar, which had reopened briefly before the bar closed. The stand and the bar had once been separate properties, though they had a common wall, and the meters and accounts remained separate. I ran hoses from a spigot outside the restaurant to the patio and thus managed to shower. By then I had not had a real shower or bath in several months and I hardly minded that the water was cold. I showered every day for about a week—removing the hoses when I was done to avoid calling attention to the arrangement.

  I worked as hard as I was able. The thought of what might happen at the end of the month terrified me so, I simply refused to think of it. We had an unusually long spell of cold, wet weather that put an end to my daily showers and slowed my work because my fingers hurt too much for me to make them hit the keys. When the wind was strong, my papers got wet and I was afraid to uncover the typewriter.

  Lefty discovered I was inhabiting the patio. I was afraid he would suspect the bankruptcy action was not as he had been led to believe. I did not like to deceive him and I did not like to be caught between him and Tiny. But Lefty, though he could not bear to part with the price of a new car, was a very rich man; he had leased the bar to Tiny for about twenty years, during which time he had recovered his investment in the property more than thirty times over. If he had been very eager to repossess the property immediately, he could have consulted an attorney, but he had been unwilling to go to that expense.

  I did my best to volunteer nothing that would compromise Tiny. I played stupid for the first time in my life, and I felt stupid for not having seen before how smart a strategy that can be. A little stupidity went a long way, for Lefty always clung to his snap judgments, and once he was convinced I was a dimwit, he never changed his opinion.

  On the twenty-second, Tiny gave me the key to the bar. He told me he had no intention of vacating the bar until January and he thought he might get Lefty to keep me on as a watchman after that. That did not seem very promising to me. I could not see how the building could ever be anything except a bar, but that the property was not zoned for a bar was one of the reasons, after years of battling the neighborhood association, Tiny had given up on the business. Without a speck of insulation, the building required several thousand dollars a month to air-condition—a cost that might be borne by a popular gay bar with an established clientele, but one that no restaurant, or any other business I could think of, could withstand. I thought Lefty, who took pride in being a sharp businessman, would realize he could do nothing with the building except raze it.

  But it was true that so long as the building was vacant, Lefty would need a watchman if he did not want the place reduced to rubble.

  The weather had become so bad that I could not work on the patio. As a bar, Sue’s had been dim, and the few windows that were not boarded over were nailed shut and darkly tinted. I had light to work for only a few hours of the brightest days. The gas was still on in the bar, but there was only one small space heater, which did little physically to heat the place, though it was cheery to look at.

  On a dry day I found a mattress and springs by a Dumpster and dragged them to the bar. At night I laid these in front of the heater. For a while I concealed my bed in the daytime, for I did not want to make the situation entirely clear to Lefty or to whoever else might come into the building.

  On the third of December I was in Ramblin’ Red’s, talking to the staff and warming myself, when I noticed Clint was in the store. I had not seen him come in. I had not spoken to him since the summer of the year before. I told him to drop by Sue’s sometime that we might discuss old times.

  I was a little surprised to be awakened by Clint’s knocking on the door at first light the next day—if only because he was not, to my memory, an early riser. Lizbeth was overjoyed to see him.

  It had been Clint moving the liquor out of Sue’s. He did not work for the bar that bought the liquor, but had done it to settle a bar tab. This seemed peculiar to me because I had never known Clint to drink more than half a beer at a sitting and I could not imagine him in a bar.

  Clint told me he was living in a very small house, about eight blocks away, with an Indian student named Gupta. Whatever the truth of that was, I eventually discovered that Clint actually spent much of that winter on the streets, sleeping in boiler rooms of apartment buildings on the coldest nights. Clint began dropping by the bar every two or three days.

  Even before the gas was turned off, the bar became extremely cold at night. I had been working in a small room that adjoined the patio because I had discovered it had the best light. At one time the room had been the patio bar and there was a long flap that had opened to provide service to the patio. I removed the nails that had sealed the flap, and on warm days I opened it for even more light. The room was about seven by eight by five. Eventually I noticed that with the flap down and the door closed, the room was the warmest place in the bar, for in so small a space Lizbeth’s body heat and mine had some chance to accumulate. I moved the bed into the small room.

  When Clint stayed the night, as he did more and more often, he slept on the two-foot width of floor that was left beside the bed. As the door opened inward, finding our places at night was rather like working a slotted number-square puzzle.

  Lefty discovered that I was occupying the bar. He saw that the furnishings were being removed bit by bit. He could not have continued to believe any of the court-seal nonsense, but evidently he and Tiny had reached some kind of understanding, although as they came to the end of a twenty-year business arrangement that had profited them both handsomely, they seemed to me to argue needlessly over nickels and dimes.

  Lefty especially approved of my taking up in the small room, for this kept my bedding and writing effects out of the way. He had begun to cast about for new tenants, although he said he would not show the place until he received the key from Tiny. He wanted Tiny to make a copy of the key for him—after all, I had one. But Tiny confided to me that he believed this was a matter of symbolic importance to Lefty. Once Lefty had the key he would consider the building and everything in it his property again.

  On the twenty-first of December, Lefty brought me what he called Christmas dinner—it was obviously from his wife’s kitchen: turkey and all the trimmings. I thought it most politic to remain too stupid to notice the date. He returned on Christmas Day with two more dinners, these from a community dinner for senior citizens and boxed in plastic foam.

  We had in these days some of the coldest weather Austin has ever had. One night the low was two degrees Fahrenheit officially—I set out the refrigerator thermometers Tiny had left in the beer coolers and they read something below zero on the patio—and the highs were generally in the twenties. Lizbeth and I stayed bundled up in the little room day and night—there was no question of working. I am doubtful we would have survived in the open.

  I had received a few tips for packing up glassware and such for the various bars that were absorbing Sue’s equipment. And one evening that it had been warm enough I had gone around to the Dumpsters, and a woman, seeing me digging in one, had given me twenty dollars. For Christmas
I gave myself an oil lamp. I bought the scented lamp oil for it at a yuppie hardware store nearby and continued to buy the expensive oil for a long time before I discovered the store had kerosene. A friend of Tiny’s gave me a propane lantern, and until I broke the chimney I had plenty of light to work at night. I burned the propane lantern for heat on some of the coldest nights and so managed to keep the temperature in the room at thirty-five degrees.

  At the first of the year, Tiny came around with a hired truck and men he had found at the informal labor market—which the city has since disbanded on the theory that the sight of so many people looking for work might create, in the minds of people attending events at the city’s new convention center, an unfortunate and accurate impression of the Austin economy.

  As Lefty watched and whined at the removal of almost every fixture, Tiny and his men removed the things that Tiny reckoned to be his. He said he would come back to check the premises that evening, and if he was satisfied, he would mail his key to Lefty. Of course Tiny never sent the key and he told me he never would, just to spite Lefty.

  Then Sue’s was gone and the place was Lefty’s vacant building.

  Without gas, electric power or running water, for the water in the taco stand was soon shut off, the bar was little better than a cave. In some respects it was worse, for Lefty felt he had claim on as much of my time and labor as he wanted. I was essentially a serf. But I had a mailing address and at night, by kerosene lamp, I could write whenever Lefty had not exhausted me. I managed to register to vote—and the registration stood up to a challenge from an old political enemy—but though I wrote the Secretary of Commerce I could not get counted by the census of 1990.

  A cave would have offered more privacy. Lefty insisted that, no matter the weather, I had to keep the building open during all daylight hours, lest he lose a prospective tenant, and in the summer, since the windows were sealed, I had to keep the doors open at night as well to keep us from baking. The nights the doors stayed open, Lizbeth proved her worth, for the winos in the neighborhood continued to think there was a huge stock of liquor in the bar.