An impassive face hovered behind the glass port punched into the security door.
His tangled hair, down to his shoulders, had gone to ash. It’d never been that long. Fish eyes bulged behind oil-pawed spectacles, trapped on the residents’ side of the oil-pawed wire mesh glass. Dwindled brilliance in the eyes, like the dying embers of his hair. Jowls bristled with patchy mutton chops sprinkled white like dirty rice. His chest was an asymmetry. Eric lost one of his breasts to cancer a few years back, the same cancer that sucked the marrow out of him now.
He opened the door and I took a couple steps into the common hallway. The sweet and pickled musk of urine and BO hung on the air, that YMCA smell.
“Hey, Eric,” I said, trying to sound merry.
“Hi.” He stuck out his palm and his fingers stood out so rigid they splayed a little back from the palm. A formal greeting for an old friend, but Eric always did that. We shook hands, and his palm seemed too soft for the kind of life he’d had. I always expected calluses.
Then Eric mumbled the way he did when he wanted money. But this time, his subspace grovels whispered something else. “Could you go out and, uh, buy me, uh, . . .” and the stalled phrase turned into a run-on, “a-couple-a-bottles-a-beer?”
I thought he’d been sober for a few months.
“Sorry, Eric.”
A door from one of the SRO rooms cracked open and a man listened in. Eric walked over to the man and whispered through the slit to the staring eye. The man nodded and Eric slipped some cash under the door chain, and the door closed. Eric shambled to his room. He called it the Thorazine Shuffle. I shuffled behind him and we slipped into his room.
Mountains of canned goods and Chips Ahoy stacked on the dresser, a heap of dirty laundry in the corner, bottles of scrip on the nightstand for the pain. The see-through Topaz clock-radio played Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season) by the Byrds, knocking Marlboro ash off the speaker holes on its top. Eric usually went for Debussy and Dvorak, so the down tempo threw me. His hair, the music – it made him an unintentional hippy.
He put his room key on his nightstand and turned the radio real low and sat on the plastic-sheeted bed. He throttled through a coughing fit. He’d hacked like that for 20 years, about as long as he’d fought booze. What surprised me about Eric was how good his skin always looked. Like a complexion airbrushed onto a GQ cover. Like he took good care of it. But sometimes a man with schizophrenia didn’t wash his face or comb his hair or even wipe his ass. His shoulders weighted down with an involuntary apathy, which translated in the DSM to the negative symptoms of psychosis, abetted by first generation anti-psychotic meds. In the florid days, Eric would ship out to Reed State Mental Hospital a few times a year. But over the last few years, the volume on the delusions and the command hallucinations had dialed down a few notches.
He lay down on the unmade bed and rolled over to face the wall. I made sure the chair was clean and sat down at the foot of the bed.
“Did you ask that guy for beer?”
“Yeah.”
I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me.
“Just thought about it this morning,” he said.
“Oh.”
I glanced over at the dresser. On top, a half-dozen volumes of ‘Microbial Toxins,’ encyclopedic tomes from the ‘80’s, leaned like dominos. They were from Eric’s pre-med days, before his break.
I sniffed something. Listerine maybe.
“So, how long you been sober now?” I wondered.
“Since last October.”
“That’s . . . five months.”
“I ask myself, what’ve I got to lose.” He faced a few inches from the lath walls. The plaster seemed to take half his voice and soften the words.
“Uh-huh.”
“Sometimes, I just wish I could go to sleep. And wake up the next morning. And everything’d be better.”
“One day, you will.”
“Huh?”
“I mean, one day, you’ll go to sleep. And then you’ll wake up, and God’ll be standing there. And you’ll say, ‘You mean, all that was just a bad dream?’ And God’ll say, ‘Yup!’”
“That’s exactly what I said to my dad the night before he died.”
I peered out the sole window beyond the head of the bed. A film of rain superimposed itself on a screen clogged with pigeon feathers and diesel soot. The sky smoked with a low ceiling of clouds and a steady, three-day drizzle.
“Just a bad dream,” I said.
The murk made the street lights switch on early. I glanced at the door.
“When’s that guy gonna be back with the beer?” I wondered.
“Few minutes.”
“Mmm.”
“I just can’t take this anymore, man.”
My boot knocked against some paper bags lodged next to the nightstand. Glass clinked.
“Beer?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.”
“Just this morning.”
“The beer.”
“Yeah. It helps with the pain.”
“The beer does?”
“When I mix it with these.”
He rolled over, handed me a bottle of pills. My eye caught Vicodin in the jaundiced light that metered out from the water closet. He rolled back and faced the wall again. Nicotine painted it the same amber as his overgrown nails.
“How long have we known each other?” he wondered.
“Jeez, Eric. Goes back 18 years.”
“Remember the old Mustard Seed Mission?”
“When that guy, Bill, with the pot belly used to run it? What’d we call him?”
“Bowling Ball Belly Bill.”
I snapped my fingers. “Bowling Ball Belly Bill!”
“Bowling. If you think about it, it’s really a weird way to forget about your problems,” he said.
“Always hated it myself. Mind if I throw these out?” I said, nudging the empty bottles with my toe.
“No. Trash chute’s down the hall, on the left.”
I grabbed the soggy paper bags, opened the door, and walked down the hall. I opened a closet marked TRASH and looked inside the bag before I offered it to the underworld: four drained quarts of Miller. They jangled as they echoed down 16 stories of roaring sheet metal.
When I came back, Eric had braided himself into a chrysalis on the bed with his sheet. Only his head poked out. He faced the wall. He reminded me of a picture of a sleeping Bedouin man I’d seen in an old National Geographic.
“Sometimes, if I don’t move, and just relax, it doesn’t hurt as bad.”
“And the beer helps.”
“Not really.”
“You sure you want what that dude’s bringing then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay.”
“I’m tired.”
“You want the lights off?”
“Not that kind of tired.”
I got up to turn off the lights.
“Don’t turn them off. I’m weird about my lights. My lights and my music.”
Someone knocked. I opened the door the obligatory crack. The nervous man with the beer stood there like room service.
“All they had was Bud, Eric,” he said.
I opened up and he passed the package through along with some small bills.
“Keep five, Oscar,” Eric said.
“Thanks.” He kept an Abe Lincoln and handed me the rest.
“No, thank you.”
We smiled and I locked the door.
“I never really liked Budweiser,” he said as I set the bags and the change next to the bed.
“I can give ’em to Oscar on the way out.”
“I’ll think about it.”
Clothes poured out of the closet, frosted with room dust and cigarette ash, white like a breaker pounding a winter beach. Bags of old hospital bills and newspapers crisp and yellow billowed around the resale clothes. People magazines. Smithsonians. All of it composing a disregarded biography piled into his 10 by 8 YMCA cell. He told me that after his mother died, when he’d been 18, the landlord stacked all their furniture and clothes out on the sidewalk. He’d been an only child, and his father had died the year before, cut down by the same scythe that had taken his mother: alcohol. He only had one aunt. And he’d already had his break, the psychotic kind.
The state hospital would take him when no one else would. In fact, it insisted. “IC = Insist on Coming, or Involuntary Commitment, whichever you prefer,” he’d once said. And during one of its insistences, an attendant there cornered him in the shower, and jacked him off. Beyond that single Involuntary experience, Eric would die a virgin.
“Could you read something?” he asked me.
“Sure.”
“Ecclesiastes, chapter three.” A pocket bible, one of the only books not hibernating in a blanket of dust, sat on his nightstand. I reached over and grasped it, and opened its faux leather black cover to a page as thin as the square of toilet paper which marked the page.
I turned off the radio and, by a dirty light of ochre and gray, I read.
When I finished, the thrum of rain on the window covered his wheezes.
“You know what I always liked about you?” he asked.
“Uh-uh.”
“You always wore a clean shirt.”
I smiled.
“And you took a shower every day. And everything you said always made sense.”
“I learned a lot from you, too.”
“But I learned more from you.”
I shook my head. “Your IQ has at least 30 yards on mine.”
“’Member that movie we were gonna make?” he said. “AA Supervixens?”
I chuckled. “Yeah, I forgot about that.”
“We never did make that.”
“Tell you what. After you go, . . .” I couldn’t finish. The sky shed its dew. I unwrinkled my face and swallowed. “Just come back and help me make it.”
“I wouldn’t want to scare you.”
“Nah, you won’t. Just wear one of those reindeer tiaras.”
“Okay, I will.”
Beads of rain seemed to dissolve on his window.
“You know, there’s things you know about me that nobody else knows,” he said. “And there’s things about you I know that nobody else knows.”
“That’s right.”
After awhile, muffled snores drifted together with the rain patter. From behind, the wisps of his wildman’s beard poked out over the soft slope of his shoulder.
A couple get well cards taped to the door; one from a social worker, one from Ralph, his AA sponsor. On his dresser next to the old Zenith black-and-white TV, a little velvet reindeer waited for release from its shrink wrap, the words Love You stamped in white on its head like cake icing.
The splash of traffic. A metronome of husky snores. A dusty detritus coated the inanimate world in candied glaze. I turned off the bare bulb over the wash sink, and sunk into the rhythm of the rain tapping his window.
After a few minutes, I took the key from his nightstand, slipped out the door, locked it, and slid the key back under. It barely made it through.
I crossed the street to the parking lot. The mizzle soaked the integument of April, rinsing coaly snow and mushy road salt into the sewers. I walked to my truck. I hadn’t washed it in months but it shimmered in the coppery street lighting. That night, I slept a peace unbroken by any dream of the world. I never saw Eric again.
© 2024 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23
Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Five of his short stories have recently been published online:
Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)
The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW
I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October
Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within
You Get the Two has been published by Hellbound Books and is available in print, ebook, Kindle or audio format at https://a.co/hVI8QbZ