32
That whole day I strayed through the city, seeing it as though for the first time. Fresh off one of the ships, without even language to contain this experience, codify it. A painter onceremarked that seeing consists of forgetting you know the name of the thing that's seen.
I remembered the voiceover beginning Tavernier's Deathwatch and circling back at the end. Harvey Keitel's eyes have been replaced with cameras. Eveiything towards which he turns his head now is captured, caught: he's become the ultimate artist. 'He told me he spent that whole day walking…' Keitel like Oedipus by movie's end, blind yet-because from some immeasurable mix of guilt and love he chose that blindness-humanized.
Soon too, like Keitel's character, I found myself in a mission, upper bunk near the back of the dorm, after a dinner of vegetable soup heavy on cabbage and white beans, two slices of white bread piled atop, mug of coffee, the whole of it consumed in the shade of your basic Fundamentalist ranting. Recalling all those youthful Sundays back home, packed into my suit (pajamas worn under, suit scratchy wool like Mom's army-surplus blankets) and clip-on tie, pantseat polishing hardwood pews under stained-glass windows illustrating the parable of the talents, Jesus bringing in sheaves, the prodigal son, stone rolledback from the tomb.
I'd been here before. Last Thursday, following up on the list Richard Garces gave me. The guy who finallyadmitted well, yes, he did kind of look after things (nowhere in evidence now, I noticed) had shown me around, guided me to boxes of books stacked in the hall by his own cramped room.
It all looked substantially different now, of course. Perspective is everything.
Lights-out was at ten. Then you lie listening to bodies turn on the spit of their memories, volleys of farts from newly challenged digestive systems, the occasional scream or convulsion, conversations so private that only one person's involved. You feel the rasp of coarse blankets, monitor the thunderlike rumbling of your own bowels. You're asleep, then awake, then asleep again but aware you're dreaming: another border given way.
What time of night is it? No way to know. Have you slept an hour? Four hours? Ten minutes?
A single bare bulb hung at the back of the hall, eclipsed as pilgrims shuttled back and forth to the bathroom. Then they'd settle back into beds hawking, hegiras having stirred up various sediments in chest and head.
Never more alone than at 3 A.M. Wake without reason, night's face staring you clown. ERs fill with patients. Men my age suddenly alert, certain that the pain in their aim's a heart attack.
Dim residual light from outside, lash of car headlights. Someone moving below me. A voice.
'You okay up there, man?'
'What?'
'Been slam-dunkin' yourself for the better part of an hour now.'
'Sony.'
'Hey. No problem. God knows I'm used to it.'
'Come here often, do you?'
'Regular Soup Kitchen Sam, yeah.'
'Don't guess you know what time it is.'
If I'd had a brother, this was the way it might have felt. Parents elsewhere in the house. Two of us up here in the crow's nest holding out against the world.
'Three-eighteen.'
Okay. So that morning light in the window's only imagination. Too much night left.
'Name's Griffin, right?'
A beat went by. Two beats.
'Word is, you're a good man. What everyone says. What they don't know is why you'd be down here now, way you are.'
I give up. Don't know, myself.
'My grandmother used to tell me how this collector'd come 'round. Tell her records show she owed some arrears. He'd stay to drink a cup of coffee, then after he was gone she'd lift up the napkin, find a five-dollar bill there.'
'Heard the same story about Pretty Boy Floyd.'
'Right. People be callin' you Pretty Boy Griffin soon.' He laughed. It sounded like someone choking. 'You ain't though.'
'Pretty boy?'
Same laugh. Neither of us said anything for a while. Lay listening to the bodies around us.
'Grandmother raised me. Neither one of us ever knew where my mother might've got off to. Never developed much feeling for people-maybe because of that, who knows? Mostly dog meat, from my experience. Scrape out the bowl. But I purely loved that woman.'
One of our shipmates lunged past, bouncing from bed to bed, and fetched up against the wall, where he began sonorously throwing up. Raw-meat smell of blood.
'Gran's life was hard. Wasn't much ever came along to ease it.'
We fell asleep again.
Then, five or so, some fool decided his destiny was to liberate whatever I'd squirreled away in my bunk and came rooting. I heard him four steps off. I'd just clamped a fist around his balls when a hand snaked down from the bunk above, wrapped hair about itself and lifted. The would-be hijacker's eyes went round. Feet half a foot off the floor.
'Your call,' my bunkmate said. 'What'U we do with this piece a shit?'
'What the hell. Turn him loose, I guess.'
'You sure?'
'Yeah.'
'Not much fun in that, is there?' But he set him down.
The hijacker scuttled away.
Light had begun breaking outside. Real this time, not imagined. We lay there wide awake.
'Berouting us for breakfast soon enough,' my bunkmate said. 'You up for slimy grits, soggy toast and half- done eggs?'
'I've handled worse.'
'Bet you have.'
Roused by light and smells from the kitchen, without realpurpose, direction or goal, bodies had begun staggering about, a kind of Brownian motion.
'Don't mean to impose. Your life and your business. But why are you down here?'
'Trying tofindmyself.'
'Bad thing to lose.'
'Have to admit it takes some doing.' Or maybe not, come to think of it.
Meanwhile, things had picked up in the kitchen.
'Smell that coffee. No better smell in the world.' Spoken like a true New Orleanian.
'One tip for you, though.'
'Okay.'
'Don't touch the casseroles or macaroni. Pasta here'H kill you. It's documented.'
33
Simple Suzie was around fifty now, my age, a little less. She'd been on the street for twenty years at least, and everyone knew her: cops, mail earners, newspaper boys, homeowners and apartment renters on her usual beat just riverside of Claiborne in the triangle formed by Felicity and Melpomene, enclosing Terpsichore, Euterpe, Polymnia. Some of these people gave her food, others asked about her dog Daniel. Daniel had been dead as long as she'd been on the streets, but she still talked about him all the time. For eight, ten years Suzie's husband beat her
