Unlike Etta

I ride the underground every day and on bad ones think of jumping. I play with the idea. Convince myself that I really will this time and get that rush of excitement at the end of something. But it’s all just for thrills because I know I don’t have the courage and no, it isn’t courageous to keep on living in the face of my exile, necessarily. Across North Capital I can see the door to the first and last bar I wandered through tonight, where Fenton the bartender tells me jokes in the early evenings. I do not get them or else I don’t like them or sometimes am offended by them. They are never funny. I smile or laugh as is appropriate. Sip my beer. Buy another. Decline to continue our chats. Never talk about myself beyond finethanks. Some old drunk died there tonight just before sunset and when I walked up the first time an ambulance was parallel parking out front, its lights not flashing. I stood near the door as they tried to wheel the dead one out on a stretcher. The doorway was too narrow and they had to strap the body in and turn it sideways. The paramedics grunted as they lifted him up. One said, “Shit, there goes what’s left of my disc.” Between the personal problems of the paramedics and the curiosity of the drinkers, the exit seemed to take hours.

Every time I’ve stumbled in here in the last five years it seems liken another one of these old buzzards has disappeared. The bartenders and crowd have grown younger. Remained white in a neighborhood that has changed. Fenton says he’s leaving the job soon. “It’s not safe here.” He peers down at the tabs spread out before him. I remember stepping back from the bar. I remember a drunken confession with an Irish kid named Billy. “Wigwearer, I don’t like him,” says Fenton. I think the feeling is mutual. The wigwearer deserts me. Two stools down I see skinny old Sully who looks like cancer no longer in remission. If he’s in the right mood he’ll buy me drinks. Tonight he’s with a large blonde woman with ribbons of many colors in her hair. He is buying her drinks and giving her stupid advice the way these drunks with ties on like to do. They think they are different because they have somewhere to go. I have a tie on and can afford to be drunk so you should listen to my wisdom, learn from my life. Thanks, I’ll learn what I want to from your mess.

Still, I want to talk. I ask Sully if he remembers a mayor named Bernstein. I’ve poked him in the back and he has turned to me and I can see his gray eyebrows twitching in recollection. Or possibly annoyance.

“He was a congressman from Virginia,” he tells me and turns back to the blonde, whom he calls Lorraine. It doesn’t matter. I’m stammering and I can’t think of much to say.

I step down from my stool, take two steps back. The waitress ignores me. I look around at all the short-haired young men in their yellow ties and all the women in their pink sweater dresses. Sully and Lorraine are putting on their coats. Over his shoulder I see a pale white face in the dimness looking my way. I’m leaving. A song comes over the jukebox for the third or fourth time since I’ve been here and I yell to Fenton for a shot of something strong before I leave, bourbon or something to make me gag the way the drinkers in this lousy bar make me gag. I ask Fenton who is singing the song and he says Etta James and if he hears it one more time tonight, he’ll kill the jukebox. I sing along lightly while he fetches my shot.

All I could do was cry
I was losing the man I love
And all I could do was cry…

Fenton gives me a dirty look for singing as he sets me up, then greets two women to my right. I have admired their collective loveliness and apparent sincerity from afar for some time. I have always wanted to make their acquaintance, to inform them of this tremendous affinity I feel toward them. But now this shot sits before me, the very one that I know will put me over the edge. I will become a babbling semi-human with driftwood for brains if I throw it down atop the other, the preceding, poison. I will be perfected. I think and sip what’s left of my beer. Think and sip. Think and sip. But it’s an expensive shot, thanks Fenton, and as I drink it down without tasting it, I hear the women laughing and I wonder which of the million things there are to say to them Fenton has chosen. When Fenton goes away, I tell them about the dead guy. They listen without interest. I tell them he was my father, and they listen without apathy, almost like a friend, or a lover, might listen. This attention encourages me so when one of them goes to the toilet I ask the other if I could see her again sometime. She says she thinks her friend might be interested. I say I’m not interested in her friend, but want to go out with her, to know her better. She says to ask her friend. Shortly I make my way toward the toilet and run into the friend and ask her if I could see her again sometime. She smiles, stoops down to tie her shoe. I make a joke in poor taste and she rises, taller than me by at least four inches, and says I should ask her friend.

Outside tonight, my eyes water and my knees buckle. Just because I am inside me doesn’t mean I understand anything. I peer back through the door again, into the bar, out of the bar, back to work, home and through all of my years and I cannot find the reason. I see a couple embrace, come together illuminated below a street lamp. His gray scarf is blown from about his neck and she grabs it in the wind, twirls it back around him twice then kisses him and asks him a question I cannot hear. I wonder how I will get to my house. It is too far to walk, too cold to wait for a bus, the subway is closed for the night and I cannot afford a taxi. I walk across North Capitol Street to a small patch of snow and drop my backpack, fall back flat into the snow. Lie there. Looking out of the bottom of my eyes I can still see the door of the bar but no one’s emerging. How long can I stay in this snow? I’m getting wet and the cold begins stinging my legs. Good. I hate myself, want to die in this snow. Freeze to death.

A face appears above me. I recognize the bouncer. He is stocky. His dark hair is combed back and held in place with copious goo. His lip has a kind of Irish curl like my brother’s. He is looking down at me like I’m some kind of dead dog in the road. Then he realizes that I am like him and young and says, “Hey, buddy, you alright?”

I tell him I am.

“Then get up.”

I tell him I do not want to.

“Alright,” he says, his eyebrows meeting in the middle, “then fuck you, loser.”

I thank him anyway, “Thanks, anyway.” I lie there and it seems as though time itself has frozen, until I’m startled by another face above me. It is a pale man with no hat and thin sandy hair. I find him homely. He has a beard and behind thick wire frame glasses the concerned magnified eyes of a DHS middle manager or below. “Excuse me,” he says. He’s nervous. “Are you okay?”

Yeah, uh-huh.

“You need some help?”

No, I kind of want to stay here, actually.

“You’ll freeze to death.”

Oh, I’ll be all right.

“No. You won’t. Please get up.”

I see he’s got a girlfriend and I am touched by his caring so I take his hand and stand. I walk over a few feet to grab my backpack. I reassure him that I’m all right and no, I won’t just fall back down when he leaves so, he leaves. I fall back down and it comes to mind that his caring is meaningless. It has nothing to do with me. He was probably a nice guy and I’ve never trusted nice guys because they lie. That’s what’s nice about them. They tell you what you want to hear to make you feel good.

By the time I perceive the flashing lights I’m on my second chorus of Etta James and I feel helpless just like Etta only I’m not losing the man I love, only me. This time it‘s an ambulance and a woman doing her job of rounding up all of tonight’s losers too drunk to get inside so they won’t freeze to death and make the news. The official nature of her uniform and her ambulance cause me fear so I rise to my feet before she reaches me. She looks kind. Her eyes are round and her face is round and her brown cheeks are red from the cold. She offers me a ride home and her eyes twinkle with sincerity. She has dedicated her life to saving strangers whom God was considering knocking off and for some reason I think that is beautiful. No, no. I can walk. I don’t live far. I explain this gently, clutching her forearm. I am tremendously grateful and I express that with this touch. When she turns off her lights and pulls away, I fall back down thinking about how degrading it is to have to rely on strangers to save me who are obligated by morality or by law to do so. In this moment lying drunk but somehow comfortable in the snow, I think I must be feeling that warm, cozy feeling reported by those who almost freeze to death. I am surprised by the ease of my surrender. This time I really was letting it happen.

I must have fallen asleep because my clothes seem suddenly wet and my hands and feet are numb. I remember thinking this is it, that this is what I don’t know, when I feel a hand on my shoulder and open my eyes to find a man stooping at my side. Gray and black mustache, pockmarked skin behind scattered gray whiskers. His eyes look indifferent. “C’mon, get up,” he grunts and tugs at my shoulder. I’m not resisting but I’m not submitting either and he repeats, “C’mon, get up.” It’s more of an instruction than a request and he sits me up. Across North Capital, I can see the whole front of the bar. No cars are left on the street.

Something in the back of my mind says I’ve been waiting for a thing that isn’t there anymore and that it must be time to go and yes, I’ll go with him. I know I will go with him because he says he will not leave me. I see he won’t be fooled like the others, and I allow him to hoist me out of the snow and up into the darkness of the early morning. We begin to walk down the gradual slope of F Street. The mustached, pockmarked, whiskered, indifferent man is silent, holding my right arm like we’re walking down the aisle just married. I’m crying lightly, like Etta, like silent hiccups, gasping for cold air. Maybe it’s the stinging in my legs that causes the crying. I trip and fall violently forward and down onto the pavement. The man picks me up with the help of an older man, short, big-bellied, bug-eyed, wool-capped, prepared. Now we are three and the older man tries to chase away my sadness cause he hates crying. Got I hates crine. C’mon, boy, it’s all right. Only it sounds like he says it’s all rot. I’m exhausted and wet and pained and I’m in and out, sometimes hardly doing my own walking but I think I know where we’re headed when we are joined by a young man who moves so fast it seems like I blink and he’s behind me and I blink and he’s at my side and I blink and he’s up on the corner under the street lamp kind of yellow now, long like the lamppost, and he makes me dizzy so I close my eyes hard, shake my head then reopen them and he’s in my face saying something strange like How you justafine or How we justafine or We justafine and you walking clean now but like a dead man later man. Way you taking him Arnie, shit, like he can’t believe it. “I’m sorry,” I mutter and close my eyes again and leave them closed, let the men carry me some, waiting to reopen, hoping he’s gone like a lemon in a slot machine, gambling and I win. He’s way behind us now and I can hear him back down the block laughing. Now we are three again, but really two, because I am out.

I’m semi-conscious and doing my own walking when we reach a hulking building with no signs but marked by scattered legions outside putting off their own entering despite the great cold. Some stand in the shadows of the streetlights and I can hear them as we pass, their voices are like minor chords with volume dials, sometimes loud, sometimes quiet, minor chords. There are women and men and I recognize a woman from South Capital. I’ve seen her on the 42 bus. One evening on the bus she was not alone and I sat behind her and stared at the back of her coat and the part in her hair that went from the forehead I’d seen when she’d boarded to the collar of that coat which was tan. I’d listened to the conversation she was having with her riding partner at first intentionally and then with a painful passivity. Sitting back against my seat, looking out my window, I tried to concentrate on the passing city. I looked at addresses in windows, the street signs, only three lights on in that building, probably just the janitor. Twenty people outside the 11^th Street Mart. It is not a popular store but a free market corner. Men lined up as if for an indoctrination, some standing straight and tall, some slouching with no support, unsure they want to be here, feeling like they want to go home to see their mom. There was a woman with straw-colored hair, face down on the cement, pointing feet-first from the door of the corner market, toward that very corner, out into the intersection, like an arrow. The men on the corner acted as if she weren’t there. The light changed and the bus driver stopped filing his nails. The bus hissed, shook, and rolled on, rattling. The scene outside the shelter is like that. The three of us ascend the steps and push through the double doors into a crowded hallway at the end of which sits a man at a table making ready, taking names. “Who’s he?”

“Kid, I dunno, he was just lyin’ there. He’ll be alright when he’s dry.”

“What about you?”

“Dry.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I ain’t had enough to eat today.”

“Too late now.”

“All right, a couple of cots.”

I’m sure the man at the table is a priest so I say, or possibly yell, the thing the priest says right before he gives out the body of Christ, “I’m not worthy father. I’m not worthy to receive you.”

“Would you be quiet, people’s trying to sleep.”

“Only say the word,” I whisper.

I’m being stared at. Men hoist up their heads and stare at me, my clothes, my shoes wet but clean, my bag which I clutch to my body and stare back out of the corners of my eyes trying to keep pace with my indifferent savior who is taking me somewhere. At the end of the hall we turn through more doors and into the corner of a barracks-like room with hammock-like cots. Suspended from the ceiling in the opposite corner at the end of a row of high venetian-blinded windows is a TV, sound down, flashing the dark room with a blue and white light. I hear snores and quiet talking. There are four empty cots to our left and the man takes me to the second one and says, “Sleep here.”

I sit down on the edge of the metal frame cot, look up and he’s gone. I’m alone and I feel unfriendly and also helpless, like Etta, but now I’ve stopped crying and become a little frightened, unlike Etta. This place smells like shit and I’m reminded that I am going to piss myself if I don’t pop this balloon fast. I was told where the toilet is but there’s no way I’ll find it now. Then again, smelling like piss won’t be so out of place here. I will not leave this cot. I wonder what has happened to my savior and what to do with my bag. I shift my weight back onto the cot and something gives. It is torn in the middle and useless. I move to a neighboring cot, untie my shoes, push them underneath, decide to use my coat as a pillow since there is none. I bunch it up and lie back, but not straight because my exceedingly swollen bladder will not permit this. On my side I face the multitude, the helpless multitude, the helpless, male multitude of hungry, dirty wanderers. This is the land called Wandering and I wonder if any of the lonesome folks in the barracks tonight have killed a brother. I listen to a conversation two cots down between a young white man and an obese, slightly older black man. These are the last words I hear before a fitful slumbering:

“Cherry was next door to me. Her old man owned a hardware store.”

“Hammers and nails, man.”

“Yeah. He let her work there and I could work there Saturdays and Sundays.”

They are talking softly, side by side, facing the TV, sound down, suspended from the ceiling.

“Where’s this?”

“Minneapolis.”

It is a sort of pausing and pleading like he wants to go back. An explaining.

I’m awakened once in the night and it’s the man who saved me and I have angered him. “I told you that cot over there.” I wonder why it matters and I explain to him my reason for shifting cots and he tells me to move up one more, that I’m in his bed, but they all look the same to me, no one better than the other except that they are all better than the one I was in before.

The next time I awaken, there’s a gray-white light visible between the blinds. There is an arrow in my head, maybe two. My bladder is a far worse problem. I can leave now but I absolutely must pee. I lie still at first, taking in the scene in the barracks one last time. The savoir is settled in snoring behind me. I recognize his voice. The new light reveals on the cot to my left a long, skinny, white kid. He is facing away from me, in his fetal position, stripped to his blue boxers and above the covers. Everyone who has a blanket is sleeping above it. Red hairs climb above the elastic of his shorts, bunch in the small of his back like a rusty ravine. His powder-white skin glows like lime against the green of his cot. I am not exactly happy to be alive and I kind of wish this arrow in my head were real. I turn, then sit, then stand. In my socks I walk out into the hallway crowded with bodies. I ask a Rasta man where the can is and he says it’s around the corner. But all the doors look the same and every inch of this place smells like shit. The third door I try opens to the overflowing, waterlogged receptacle of the waste of this overflow, this frozen-boned, under-loved, wandering waste of the city I live in. I slop some waste on top of the waste and walk back to the barracks where my coat and bag await me, unstolen. As I walk through the overflow in the hallway, I feel I should be saying thank-you to everybody. I see the vacant table I thought was an altar. I see a clock and it reads 6:25. A bell begins ringing. Through the green doors and into the gray and white morning. There is no song in my head but an arrow, maybe two. Downtown, morning people reject the cold, defy it on their way to their offices to wait for lunchtime. I head for the subway.

© James O’Brien

James O’Brien grew up in Maryland but has lived in Northern California for many years. In Oakland, he writes about the aftermath of gun violence, telling stories of former victims, survivors of the killed, and former perpetrators working to reduce violence and help their city heal. He has published nonfiction (selected articles at www.icecityalmanac.com), and recently has had his first short fiction published.

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