Charles D'Ambrosio - Loitering - New and Collected Essays

He shows me his veterans ID, establishing his credentials, his suprapatriotic right to feel and also express his grievous outrage.

“That’s some real shit,” he says. “Dennis R. Burns. US Army Retired.”

I tell him my first name.

“You know anybody?” he asks.

“You mean, like, somebody that could do something? Like Jesus Christ?”

“You a Born Again?”

“I was just joking.”

“I know somebody,” Dennis says.

I ask him if he knows what’s going on.

“Yeah, got a guy with a gun, big black guy, 110 Vine Street, apartment #210. L. was throwing furniture at his girlfriend. This was about midnight. I’m the one that called the police, stupid me. I’m the maintenance man. L.’s generally a quiet guy, a little hypertensive, but nice. Very intelligent, well spoken.”

“So he has a gun?”

“He’s got two, a 9mm and something else, like a.357. I hope they don’t hurt the man. Are you a journalist?”

“I’m really wet. You want some coffee?”

“What happened to your hands?”

“They’re all fucked up. It’s not contagious or anything.”

“Are you a reporter?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“7-Eleven’s open. We could get coffee at 7-Eleven.”

On the way there I pull out my Olympus Pearl-corder S803— testing, one, two, three —and discover the batteries are dead.

“You sure you’re a journalist?” Dennis says. “Hey, my son’s an editorial cartoonist for the Albuquerque Times . He makes fun of everything — politicians, everything. He’s always got a shitty fucking look on his face — like you.”

On the way back from 7-Eleven with our coffees we hook up with Tom, who’s drinking something throttled in a brown bag. He tells me, “I been up all night and I’m getting kinda moody. We were just gonna get drunk and listen to Elton John or some Asian music. But this gunman kept me up all night.”

“And they wouldn’t let us on the bus,” Dennis says. And then he asks, “You ever write about Veterans Affairs?”

I feel bad I’ve led him on. “No,” I say.

“There’s prejudice on the bus,” Tom says. “Those that like to drink and raise hell can’t get on the bus. I tried to sleep on the sidewalk but it didn’t feel right.”

I ask about the gunman again.

Tom says, “I don’t like L., but he’s a human being. I live right above him and he’s always yelling, ‘I don’t like white music!’ I’m reservation Indian, but I’m part white too. I’m glad he’s gone. He’s gone now. He’s not a tenant. Soon as he gives up, I mean.”

I really want to know who the gunman is but certain elements of life in what’s essentially an SRO conspire against the ready flow of this kind of information. In the main you’re talking about people at the tail end of a trajectory, people who aren’t any longer carrying around much of the baggage by which we’re known to each other — family, jobs, schools, common aspirations, sundry memberships and affiliations, political grievances, etc. — and so asking for anything in the way of remotely biographical material brings scarcely more than vagaries. Dennis, for instance, insisted several times that the Bad Guy, L., was nice, a nice guy — but I don’t get what kind of very elastic notion of “nice” he’s talking about, given what’s going on. And while of course everyone, even the most wrecked and destitute among us, has a unique personal history, the problematic nature of trying to gather information about people who’ve severed too many basic ties is this — that in a sense we truly have history only insofar as it’s shared, and too much uniqueness really leads away from individuality to anonymity, the great sea of the forgotten. And because the Bad Guy is busy and I can’t talk to him, I’ve got to rely on people who might reasonably be expected to know him, and in fact don’t. I suppose it could also be said we’re known to the extent that we’re dull and orbital about our life, that what’s quotidian about us is more easily shared than the exuberances and passions that push us out of the predictable.

And something like this is further confirmed when Dennis, Tom, and I arrive at the bus. Apparently the deal is that Metro brings around a bus for all the folks who’ve been forced to evacuate in situations like this, an ordinary accordion-style city bus where people can sleep and keep warm. Inside this bus what you see is pretty much a jackpot of social and psychic collapse, a demographic of bad news. Everybody in there’s fucked up in some heavy way, dragged out of history by alcohol, drugs, mental illness, physical decrepitude, crime, old age, poverty, whatever. Riding this bus in your dreams would give you the heebie-jeebies big-time. There are maybe ten or fifteen people on the bus but between them if you counted you’d probably come up with only sixty teeth. In addition to dental trouble, there are people leaning on canes, people twitching and barefoot with yellow toenails curled like talons, gray-skinned people shivering in gauzy nightgowns, others who just tremble and stare. They’ve been ripped out of their bedrooms and are dressed mostly in nightwear, which is something to see — not because I have any fashion ideas or big thesis about nighties and pj’s, but rather because, this surreal dawn, the harsh, isolated privacy of these people is literally being paraded in public. The falling rain, the bus going nowhere, the wrecked-up passengers dressed for sleep, the man with the gun — these are the wild and disparate components of a dream, and I haven’t slept, and it’s just weird.

And meantime that rodent-like anti-whatever vehicle has parked in the street below the Bad Guy’s window and there’s a super highly trained SWAT guy launching tear-gas canisters. We hear the dull pop report like a distant shotgun blast, and then a rainy sprinkling of broken glass on the sidewalk.

“There goes the windows,” Dennis says. “Those are double-pane, $145 apiece. I got a very secure job.”

“Look how fast I left,” Tom says. He pulls a TV remote control out of the pocket of his sweats and clicks at the sky. “It’s pitiful, I know. It’s pitiful.”

“What are the rooms like?” I ask, kind of trying to figure the size of the rooms and calculate how fast the pepper spray or tear gas or whatever will take effect.

Dennis says, “You got one room. You got a stove in the room. You got a fridge in the room. You got a bed.”

After I hear Dennis describe the Bad Guy’s room, the story, the night, everything, starts to end for me. I know they haven’t got him and maybe things will go crazy an hour from now, two hours from now, and people will die or some other TVish sort of scenario will play itself out, but I don’t care. I’ve been out here for seven-plus hours and I’m really wet and can’t hardly bend my fingers anymore. My feet ache and swell inside my boots, even though I’ve removed the laces. But that room! I’m starting to feel all buggy imagining that man in that room. It sounds so simple, so stripped, so precariously close to nothing, yet outside all this complication is whirling around, cops and meter maids and a SWAT guy and a crisis negotiator and TV and spectators, everyone focused on this man in a room with a stove, a fridge, and a bed.

What would you do? How would you end this story?

I walk back to my place, change into dry pants, and feed the dog a bowl of kibble. I sit on the edge of my bed. To keep my feet from cracking I’ve bought a lot of fancy lotions, the labels of which make outlandish, existential promises. One offers itself as “cruelty-free”; another says it will rid my skin of the toxins that are an inescapable part of modern life. The thing is, over the last couple weeks my desire to believe has collapsed into actual belief, and I slather the stuff on like holy water at Lourdes.