One Was I (another fragment)
February 5, 2010 From the story Once Was I:
The man swings open the door of the 9th or 90th precinct and enters the small reception room. Beads of sweat slide down the side of his reddened face. Plastic chairs line the walls of the small empty room. Behind a thick pane of glass the clerk pecks at the keys of an electric typewriter. Behind her, a sprawling room of cops and cubicles.
The man waits and the clerk ignores him. Finally, she stops typing and chews on imaginary gum. “Yeah.”
“I need to report a missing person.”
“Who’s that?” she asks.
“It’s me.”
“Who’s the missing person?”
“I am.”
The man feels his skull about to crack under her glare. An instant before the two-inch glass shatters, she walks back and speaks to an officer. She returns and points for him to sit his ass down.
He sits in one of the hard plastic chairs and tries to bolster his defenses with his faith in the good of humankind and justice, but his confidence is paper thin, not even a day old. What will happen, where will he be taken? He is obviously not welcome here. A penniless groveler disrespecting their institution, disrespecting order and society, disrespecting the one chance of life. A groan escapes before he can stop it. He looks to see if the clerk heard him. She did. Her eyes cast a stern warning.
“Sir, what can I help you with?” Two armed officers stand over him.
“Oh, thank you.” The patience in the officer’s voice encourages him. “I don’t know how to say this….”
“Spit it out.”
“Today, I woke up in an alley somewhere. I don’t know how I got there or where I was. I can’t remember anything. I don’t know where I live, where—“
“Where are your shoes?” the policeman interrupts in the same calm voice.
“Ah! I don’t know. Stolen. I just don’t understand what kind of person—”
“Where did you wake up?”
“I don’t know”
“At a stranger’s place?”
“In an alley.”
“An alley. Where were you the night before?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is there someone you can call?”
“No! I’m telling you I can’t remember anything. I know I have friends and a family somewhere.” Emotion cracks his voice and the second officer hands him a wadded piece of clean toilet paper.
“Let me see your left hand.” He leans over and scrutinizes his hand. “Don’t wear a wedding ring?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could’ve gone the way of the shoes,” the other officer says.
“Whatever way that is.”
“Exactly”
“Alright, how much did you have to drink?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” The cops smirk at each other and look down on the man like parents who wait for the child to admit he has been stealing cookies.
“Look, these are good clothes. This is good material. I’m not just some drunk off the street. Somewhere I have a wardrobe and—”
“Okay, okay—”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Sir, I’m going to tell you what to do. First, pull yourself together. Second, you need to man-up. This is simple. All you got to do is stay sober for one night. Just one night. That’s how we start. If you can’t do that, well….”
“It doesn’t take that much man,” his partner adds.
“I haven’t been drinking. I came to you for help, not—”
“Whoa! Hold on! Did you just say you haven’t been drinking? Are you coming in here, the house of the law, and telling us you haven’t been drinking?” The cop looks at him with such self-assurance that a sliver of doubt cracks the man’s resolution. “Let’s not dig ourselves into a hole here. Now, tell me this: can you give it up for one night?”
“Yes,” he weakly answers.
“I’m sorry, was that a yes?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Let’s see where that takes us.” The officer returns to the back room. His partner stays a few more moments to study the broken man.
The man walks without care for where he goes or where he ends. Every direction is concrete, pavement, brick walls, and more walls within walls – a lifetime of construction. His heels scrape against the concrete and his face hardens with each step until his eyes are cast in scorn and insolence molds his pursed lips. This hardening takes years of hard-ass streets and seeing shit happen every day. It takes a childhood of “shut your Goddamn mouth ‘fore I knock it shut.”
A heavy construction truck rumbles down the street and shakes the ground. The man steps into the road. The big diesel blows like a foghorn. The man growls from the deep. Two symmetrical patches of hair on his head blow wildly as the truck swerves sharply, tilting its weight hard to one side. People on the sidewalk steer wide of the man or turn quickly away.
“No shoes, no service,” says the bartender as he takes a deep drag from his cigarette. Past the shabby bar, darkness and secrecy veils private couples who sit at private booths evenly dotted with dim lamps. Five regulars sit content with drinks half full. The door closes and for a moment the man is silhouetted against a neon sign. He steps barefoot to the bar.
“This is the thing. My shoes were stolen – right off my feet.” The regulars look up from their mediations. “I woke up in an alley today, on the ground, flat. My shoes were gone, no wallet, no money, nothing. I didn’t know where I was, how I got there. People were watching me, said they thought I was dead. Maybe I was, because I still don’t know where I am. I don’t even know…anything. The cops won’t help, I’ll tell you that. I don’t really expect anyone to help. I just want a drink and a seat, just for a little bit.”
“Well, you came to the right place,” says the bartender. “We don’t let just anyone come off the street and drink for free. Oh, no. You been coming in here for years.” Everyone turns for a closer look at the man. “Most of the time you’re wearing shoes, but sometimes you come in telling how somebody stole the pants right off you as you stand right where you are now in full bloom!” A few laughs from the audience. “You even got a name.” The bartender lets everyone hang on to the suspense.
Finally, the man asks in a wavering voice, “What’s that?”
“You go by Aza. Ring a bell?” The man shakes his head. “Last name, Skoonk. No?” The youngest of the regulars snorts out a laugh. “You’re first name is Drunk. D-R-U-N-K. Drunk Aza Skunk!” The bartender explodes with laughter and makes sure his audience joins in.
A bullet of humiliation tears through the man’s side. Like a soldier facing his enemy and knowing he is going to die, he stands tall. The regulars stop laughing, all eyes on the man who does not move or speak.
The man sitting closest, an old bearded man with two gnarly scars on his face, speaks with a hard-whiskey voice: “I’d like to buy him a beer.”
This knocks the smile off the bartender’s face. “I’m not serving this man.”
“You ain’t never seen him before in your life.”
“He don’t have any money. He doesn’t even got any shoes. No shoes, no service.”
A man with crazy blue eyes sitting next to the old beard, as battle-worn, beer-worn, and smoke-worn as the rest, pronounces with authority: “Let him have a beer.”
“Look at him with his torn up clothes and no shoes, no money,” pleads the bartender. “Just some bullshit story, and you want me to serve him?”
Crazy Eyes points to the man’s jacket. “That pocket’s cut clean.” He demonstrates in the air how to quickly cut a wallet out of a jacket with a knife.
The old beard pushes a stool over with his boot. “What’ll you have?”
“I’ll have the same, thank you.”
The old man tips his beer at the bartender, who sets a bottle down hard on the bar. The beer erupts with foam. The bartender throws his towel on the bar and wipes up the beer.
The man nods a thank you to the regulars and takes an unimpressive swig. At the end of the bar, the youngest of the regulars bores down on the man with a disdainful eye. Somewhere in his hard 30’s, his rough life is easy to imagine growing up a dead end kid and magnet for conflict.
“So, what line of work you in?”
“What da fuck?” asks the giant man beside him who brings to mind the elephant-on-the-stool circus trick. “How’s he know his work?”
“You ask casual, it might trigger something. You don’t remember nothing? Then how you know how to talk?”
The man shakes his head.
“You don’t look like the drinking type. No offence,” the old beard says.
“Maybe we’ll find out,” adds Crazy Eyes.
“It’s like a fresh start,” says the youngster. “I’d love to wake up a new man and forget all you assholes.”
“The sooner you start, the better,” says the big man.
The drunk man in the middle swivels his chin up and squints his eyes until he finds the man. “You gotta go down to the police station and tell ‘em they got to file you as a missing person. Tell ‘em you’re no dribbling drunk.”
“He don’t know that,” the bartender points out.
“Send him a whiskey,” says the youngster.
“You’re buying.”
“My ass.”
“Send him a whiskey!” the drunk man in the middle exclaims.
The bartender thumps a shot glass on the bar and fills it with well whiskey. The man lifts it slowly to his mouth and takes a gentle sip. “I already went to the police.” He throws back the whiskey and grimaces. His eyes water as he blindly hands the shot glass back to the bartender. “Ah! They don’t want me and I don’t want them.”
“You gotta go stand your ground,” says Crazy Eyes. “That’s the only way—”
Air raid sirens scream out the night. The bar freezes. No one moves until the dead end kid jumps up and shuts the black metal shutters over the narrow windows. Lights are cut. The room is black except in the private booths where faces look out over a dim flicker like an old photo, underexposed and grainy, a study of light and shadow.
The sirens bawl and wind down to silence. A candle wick flickers and pops.
“What was that?” someone nervously asks.
“A test,” says the old beard.
“They can’t just run the sirens without telling no one!” exclaims the bartender.
“They can do whatever they want.”
Lights go back up. Solemn chatter fills the room as everyone tells their stories of air raids, close calls, and false alarms.
The behemoth looks over at the man. “Hey. Tell me this: where’d you serve? That’s something you just don’t forget. It’s in your blood and your bones.” The regulars nod in agreement.
The man concentrates and again searches for traces of memory and experience. “You’re right,” he says to the big man. “It’s here, in my bones, I can feel it. But….”
“What do you know about it?” the old beard asks the big man. “You were on the front stage. The only thing you worry about is keeping your uniform pressed.”
“That’s not how it is, man. It’s tense. It’s real fucking tense. Just a quarter mile between you and the Germs. You look over in the glass and they’re looking right back at you, just waiting. You don’t understand if you ain’t been there.”
Crazy Eyes sneers. “I’d been in Changchun just three weeks when the Russians broke the line. Eighteen months start to finish, I was there. I was in north Iran for a week when war broke out in ’83. Two tours, three years. There’s no sittin’ on your ass waiting around. I’ve seen more blood than you’ve seen beer in this bar. Don’t tell me about what’s tense.
The youngster grins at the big guy. “The border’s where they send the hacks and senator sons. I had it tougher as a kid on my block.
“Your sister play hard to get back then?
The younger man cracks the behemoth on the cheek bone and knocks him back against the drunk man in the
“I told you!” the youngster screams at the downed
With surprising speed the giant leans forward and back-arms him in the chest, knocking him completely off his stool and into the radiator. The youngster writhes, his breath knocked loose, and his hands pressing into his back. He pushes himself up to his hands and knees. When he stands he is holding an M9 Beretta, pointed at the big man.
“I told you!
“Put that away,” the bartender says in a hushed voice. “Put that away now!
The other regulars do not even flinch. “Shoot the mother fucker,” the old man says bitterly. “Shoot me while you’re at it, you fuck.
The bartender swings around the bar, but is careful not to catch attention from the private side of the room. “Three seconds and you’re never coming back. 1—
The drunk man in the middle thumps his empty bottle down on the bar. “Africa. Three wars, seven tours. Don’t tell me about nothing.
Despite the drunk man’s end-all statement they continue to debate the valor and relevance of their tours-of-duty, the savagery they witnessed, and tension on the borders. They argued whether the Allies failed by giving up France and Belgium in the Treaty of ‘48, whether the Soviets triumphed by seizing Japan, then failed by attempting China. The tales and tribulations they all knew well, but given another window they indulge once again in their defining moments. The man sips his beer, listens to the stories, and thinks back on the day and the people on the street who were just like him, struggling to stand straight and walk tall. We are all fighting the war.
Countless nights he spent on the same stool talking to the same men about the same wars. Even the days were the same. He rose at 6:30, made coffee for the day, then walked down to the café for sausage, eggs, bacon, and toast with other dock workers and deckhands. He worked cargo from 8 to 5, dinner at 6, bar at 7, home by 11:15, asleep by midnight. This was his life.