Stephen Dixon - Garbage

I pick the paper scraps out, shake the sand off and put them in my pocket. Helena comes out of the elevator as I’m about to go in it and I tip my hat at her. She acts like she doesn’t know me and I hold the elevator button at L and say “Shaney, tenant in the hotel here, friend of the nightclerk Eric, how you doing?”

“Oh yeah or at least I think so. This morning, am I wrong? I was so freaking sleepy and didn’t have in my lens. Fine thanks,” and stands there staring at me and I say “Well, isn’t fair keeping other people upstairs from using the elevator, so I’ll be seeing you,” and she pinches my sleeve and says “Want company? I could take an hour’s detour and you were terrific last time, despite what I might have said in my sleepiness — you really got me going,” and I say “Not today thanks though thanks for asking, I mean that, and you know I didn’t do anything of the kind to you,” and go in the elevator and press my button.

“Don’t depreciate yourself,” she says as the door closes, “or you’ll never get anywheres good.”

There’s a lilac smell she left that I like and I almost feel like riding up and down another time to keep sniffing it. Reminds me of me on her, just faint traces of her body especially around the armpits and breasts, though mixed with my liquor and after awhile her sweat. And also of my grandmother when I was a boy, not only the toilet water she always wore but the bunches of lilacs she vased in one vase on their bar’s free food counter every spring and made me trolley from home at least once a year then to smell them. “Stick your big nose in there, kiddy,” she’d say. She and my grandfather are also at that gravesite.

In my room for almost nothing better to do I take the bandage off even if I’ve a week to and stick it in the wastepail. Maybe the wound will heal faster in just plain air but what the hell do I know? In the mirror I’ve a long raw ditch in my head and the stitches have almost disappeared. Metal plate inside my skull I’m afraid to touch I can’t even look where. Otherwise I’m quite a mess. Bags under my eyes, lost weight in the neck and face, skin paler, hair greyer, right side of my head again hurts, eyeballs bloodshot when I never noticed them anything but all white before, even my teeth ache. So my bar’s locked up. All right, forget it for now. If anything, till you get yourself more in control, just try and joke about it, and ten seconds later: piss, shit! How’ll I make my way when I haven’t got hardly a pot saved to lick from and have to soon pay the bar rent and other bills and this hotel in a few days? and I slam the medicine chest door till the water glass falls off the toothbrush holder underneath and bounces around in the sink while I try to catch it before it breaks.

I drink a stiff drink and another and slap the mattress with my fists and shout “Christ, sons of bitches,” and then think easy there, getting nowhere by this, they could knock down the door and lock you up for being a sicko for all you know and I lie on the bed and think what to do to get my permit back and stop from losing my bar for good and right away drop off for an hour when I was trying my hardest not to.

I dream about being naked in bed with Helena though here she has specks for breasts and a much larger rear but is her same age and I’m only a year older than her and she comments on my “delicious sunbit skin.” She’s supposed to be my sister, a telegram she hands me says, who in truth died of a doctor’s mishap at home when she was eleven and me twelve and is also at that gravesite. And just when I’m about to shoot in her with more body thrills and force and noise than I had in real life this morning and maybe ever and Helena screaming my ears out too, I awake from the sound of a Sanitation snowplow grating against the pavement.

I pace around the room and can’t think of a thing to do about how to reopen the bar and get my trash picked up on a regular basis. Tribunal? What do I have for it and another inspector that’s new? Lawyer? Just for a talk with one what’s to lose? I fish out the business card that lawyer slipped into my wallet at the hospital ward, call her and say “Janie Pershcolt? Shaney Fleet here, remember me?” and she says “Sure, how are you, what’s up?” and I tell her what’s happened till now to me since I last saw her, and when she asks, refresh her memory a little about what went on before.

“You know, for a moment I couldn’t place you apart from the rest of my prison charges but now I do. How’s your gash? You really got stabbed bad.”

“Hit with a pipe. Bandage came off today.”

“Knife or pipe, it’s cause for celebration, right? because it means the doctors think you’re getting well, so I’m glad.”

“I took the bandage off myself, so I don’t know if it was the best thing.”

“Don’t worry, you look better with it off, right? And when you look better your spirits soar, which always improves the healing process, so coming up right behind it should be your complete cure. Okay, what I can do for you straight off the skin of my head is the following. Present the civil court a petition of redress in your name exerting upon them in no uncertain terms the pressing need if not fullfledged professional necessity on your part to, nah, that won’t do. Your predicament’s more complex. Give me a day to filter through it. But it by all means seems, and this is from the heart, not the legalese brain, that every human being conducting a legitimate business in the city ought to have the indivisible right to get his commercial trash collected just as every private carter ought to have the same right to refuse to handle a customer if it’s not because of race, religion, sex and the rest of those reasons. But let me quote my rates so we later don’t have to resort to blows over it because we didn’t know such and such was the price, right? For the brief I’ll have to draw up in your behalf in the next few days and which should rescind your fines and violations, impose a restraining order on Stovin’s and force one of the other carters to accept you as a client, it’ll be eight hundred dollars plus whatever ancillary expenses are required for cabs and calls and so forth, agreed?”

“I don’t have that kind of money.”

“You own a bar, don’t you, so you must do well.”

“It’s a small inexpensive joint for too much rent and with all the companies who service me raising their prices from month to month. It barely stays afloat.”

“Then sell it, because you can’t win without a lawyer. With the rest of the money from your bar’s sale and possibly compensatory penalties you’ll get from Stovin’s, you can open another place.”

“I couldn’t get much for the bar. Maybe a little something for a few of the older fixtures. But nothing enough for opening a new bar and zero from anyone for taking over the bar’s name and lease.”

“What kind of ready money do you have then?”

“A hundred, fifty, like that but at the most.”

“To get even the brief typed without pages of smudge marks and wine stains and a couple of court copies made will cost me more than that.”

“Then how about one of those free voluntary whatever-they-are lawyer organizations for people like me who can’t afford high fees?”

“Mine’s not high, it’s low. But because it’s the slow season and with my own onslaught of bills to pay, I could reduce it for you by two hundred or so.”

“I still can’t, so what about that Legal Aid group?”

“I hope your joint earned you a poverty level income or less last year and the state declared you an indigent, because if not, Legal Aid can’t touch you.”

“I at least got above poverty, thank God.”

“Was what you earned the same amount you reported?”