IF YOU HELP THE SAME PEOPLE TOO OFTEN by J. Malcolm Garcia
I’m sitting at the Department of Family Services with this Iraqi guy and his family. Refugees. Fresh out of Baghdad. Arrived in San Francisco last night. I need to connect them with social security, food stamps, Medicaid.
Welcome to America.
His wife holds two kids and he cradles a baby girl. He gestures toward the men’s room and then holds the baby out to me to hold. I shake my head. Liability. If something were to happen while I held your baby . . . Sorry, man, I say. He shrugs, takes the baby with him to the men’s room.
I need a cigarette. How do I say that? They speak no English. A translator at the settlement agency explained what we’d be doing today. He should have come with me, but, typical nonprofit, we don’t have enough staff to go around.
I tap my pack of smokes and point outside. The wife smiles, and I stand, cigarette in hand. I spread my fingers. Five minutes, I say. More smiles. Outside, the sun’s reflection dances across the back windows of parked cars and I squint, cupping a lit match in my hand.
“Hey, brother, you got another one of those?”
I turn and face a homeless guy I recognize right off. Little Stevie Krantz, a patchy half-ass beard blotting his face. Crack dealer back in the day. Walked around in a body-length mink coat no matter the weather. Hotter’n hell and there’d be Stevie in his coat, all five foot, four inches of him sweating rivers. Mister Big Man with a roll of bills in each pocket.
Booze did him in. Just started sipping and nipping. More and more, morning, noon and night. Next thing you know, Stevie’s on Sixth Street messing himself, walking barefoot hollering at the moon. Mink coat funky as road kill. Booze, man can you believe it? A fifth of this, a fifth of that. Amazing when I think about it. All that crack he dealt, and it was booze that rocked his world. Still, he was able to knock up Vernetta. Back in the day, she was as fine as she wanted to be. But in the end what she got was rank Little Stevie.
“What’s up, Stevie?”
“Tom? Hey, man! I didn’t know it was you!”
He hugs me, raw alcohol breath melting my face.
“Get off me.”
He backs away and I give him a smoke.
“Where’ve you been? Haven’t seen you in like years, man. You’re not at Out of the Rain no more, Tom?”
“No,” I say. “It hasn’t been that long. About two years. I left.”
“Hear about your boy Michael?”
I shake my head. Michael was my office manager at Out of the Rain, a social services agency for homeless folks I directed. I hired him out of our shelter like I did most of my staff. The contract required I do that. Funders saw us as more than a service agency – a kind of vocational rehabilitation center for people who had been on the street.
When you’re required to hire the homeless, you know, recovering drunks who more often than not start drinking again, schitzos who forget to take their meds, whacked-out, traumatized combat veterans that don’t take shit, you count on the few Michaels of the world who didn’t drink, talk to themselves or pick fights. He was one of the few normal people I hired. I hadn’t seen him in months.
“He was diddling me and Vernetta’s kid, man, our son, Stevie Junior. Police called him on it. He’s running. But he can’t run far. Far enough from me, anyway. Sick motherfucker diddling a three-year-old kid. I’ll kill him.”
I give Stevie a look and he holds it, his eyes shot through with the red lines like you see on road maps, but I can tell he’s serious. Serious as a heart attack.
“I don’t know anything about that,” I say.
“I’m just saying so you do know. He’s your boy.”
“Stevie, you’ve been such a standup father, I’m impressed you care.”
He lurches at me and swings, his left fist just missing my face. I’m surprised at his speed, a little of the old crack-dealing Stevie not so pickled after all.
“Take it easy,” I say, stepping back.
“I’ll kill him!” Stevie shouts, shadow-boxing a tree thinner than him.
“Where’d you hear this about Michael?” I ask, feeling an old here-we-go-again weariness coming on.
“Streets.”
“Sidewalks got lips? Tell me who told you?”
“I saw John. They’d started a business together.”
“What kind of business?”
“Mail.”
“Mail?”
“You on the streets, you could use them for an address. You know how it is. Shelters always put a time limit on how long you can have your mail sent to them. So for twenty-five bucks a month, you use Mike and John’s address.”
Not bad. I must have had more than one hundred guys using Out of the Rain for a mailing address before I cut that shit loose. Too much paper and with a staff that could not alphabetize and clients accusing us of stealing checks we couldn’t find, it became my definition of hell.
John was always thinking, always laying plans for some get-rich-quick scheme. Get enough guys receiving disability or social security, that twenty-five bucks a month could add up. Keep their jobs at Out of the Rain, do the mail thing on the side until it takes off. Yeah, it could add up real good for John and Michael. Not likely, but it could if you convinced people who liked to drink and shoot up their money to part with the twenty-five dollar fee. Good luck on that.
I had been program director of Out of the Rain for seven years before I resigned. I don’t know, I was tired. Same people like Little Stevie day-in day-out no change. Breaking up fights, being called all kinds of motherfucker by the same drunk who five minutes later hits you up for a dollar and can’t understand why you just 86’d his ass. Staff as loopy as the clients. Homeless or formerly homeless, Out of the Rain was about the only place that would hire them. Some of them were crazy, but they knew that much. I, however, had options. I could leave. A solid education, no drinking or mental problems. I had that much going for me. When I earned a master’s in social work, I thought I wanted to save the world. I didn’t. I walked.
I’m a case manager now with International Assistance, Inc., an agency that helps refugees. Mostly Iraqis because of the war. Most like me have an education and job skills. They are grateful to be here. They are polite. If they drink or use, they don’t do it in front of me, and they don’t come to my office fucked up. Once they get settled, they find work and I don’t see them again. Ever. They’re on their way. That’s the way I like it. They don’t come back every day to show me how they are slowly killing themselves with booze or some shit like Little Stevie.
John was my outreach worker and if anybody was diddling anybody, I thought it was him. He always brought in young women he found on the street. Hookers, runaways, slumming college graduates. He turned them over to the benefits advocate who would help them find a place to stay. Nothing wrong with it, but I wondered. Surely there were homeless men who crossed his path and needed help, too. But he always found women. Young women. I told him he better not be bringing them home with him. He looked shocked at the idea and denied anything. He stayed in touch with them after they found shelter or were placed in a rehab program. Follow up, he explained. To show “positive outcomes” on his stats. That’s legit. I was required by the state to document everything. Maybe it was a head trip, an ego thing for John. Still, I wondered about him. But then I wondered about all my staff. None of those gals ever complained about John, however. Never. You can’t fire somebody for something you think they might be doing.
“Where’s John at, Stevie?”
“Hurley Hotel. That was their office.”
Office, I mutter to myself. I give Stevie another smoke.
“Mike always had my back.”
“I know,” Stevie said. “He took care of Vernetta when I couldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t stop drinking is what you wouldn’t do and turning her onto crack.”
“Hard to believe. Sorry I swung on you.”
“If I was back on the job I’d 86 you.”
“This is a public sidewalk. You got another smoke?”
“I just gave you one. Straighten up. Look after your kid. Where is he?”
Stevie shrugged.
“With Vernetta’s momma I think in Oakland.”
“You think. You seen Vernetta?”
“No. Heard she took off after this thing with Michael and hit the streets. I don’t know where.”
“I got to go back inside.”
Stevie nods, sucks on his cigarette, crunching his face as he exhales.
“So what in hell are you doing here?”
“Working with Iraqi refugees.”
“Man, what you doing with A-rabs?”
“Later.”
“Later on, bro.”
He walks off, swaying from side to side, arms out, a sailor of the streets in search of balance. I rejoin my Iraqi family. They smile, I smile back. They face forward and continue waiting for their name to be called. Patient people, for what they’ve been through. I give them that.
To tell you the truth, I hate fucking babysitting. It’s easy, but it’s long and boring. No war stories with this job. We could be here all day. I cover my face with my hands, thinking. Michael, Michael, Michael. Not you. Of all people, not you. I don’t believe it. I don’t want to.
He wasn’t a friend really. I don’t know what I’d call him. Close colleague, I guess. We went through some times together. State budget cuts, drive-by shootings, the deaths of some clients and staff. It left a bond of sorts.
“I have to go,” I tell the Iraqis.
They look at me puzzled. I point outside. They smile.
“Smoke?” one of the kids asks stretching out the “o” sound more than he needs to, but he’s learning.
“Yeah,” I say and stand up. “Smoke and drive.”
I make a motion of gripping a steering wheel. I point outside, make the driving motion again and then point back inside.
“I go, come back.”
I tell a security guard the name of the Iraqi family and ask if he would show them to a window if their name is called while I’m out. They have translators here, so I’m good on that score. The security guard’s cool. Not a problem, he says. I shake his hand. No drama. It suits me most of the time, but I don’t want to hold anyone’s hand right now. I walk outside. I need to find John.
I’d never have noticed Michael if the copy machine had not jammed. But it did jam as I was trying to print some sign-in sheets for the front desk. It was always something. Running a nonprofit was hard enough without the copy machine crapping out on me. But when you depend on donated equipment, what you get is used and cheap. I spent more money repairing things than I would have had I bought it new. But my board of directors never listened to that argument when I asked them to authorize an equipment expenditure.
So there I stood, staring at the copy machine’s blinking red lights telling me it was in cardiac arrest.
“I can fix that, sir.”
I glanced at this guy looking over my shoulder. Big dude, black square glasses, short brown hair combed to the right side. Late thirties, maybe. Red plaid shirt tucked into his jeans. Work boots. Pleasant voice but impassive. Almost a monotone. I thought, “Who called the repair man?” and immediately began worrying about how much we had left in the budget for maintenance and if it would be enough to pay him.
“Did we call you?”
“No, sir.”
He smiled just a hair.
“I stay in the shelter.”
He stepped around me, opened a panel on the copy machine and twisted a few knobs. He yanked out the ink cartridge, pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper and then slammed the ink cartridge back in and shut the panel. The copy machine began clicking and flashing green lights. Then it fell silent like a car with its ignition shut off. After a moment, it started humming again and the rest of the sign-in sheets began dropping into a tray.
“Thanks.”
“No problem, sir.”
I watched him take a seat in the drop-in center and remove a paperback book from his backpack. He crossed his legs and started reading.
“Who is that guy?” I asked Jay, my receptionist.
“I don’t know,” Jays said. “I’ve seen him around.”
“How long?”
“A while, I think,” Jay said and started slapping his face.
“Don’t start,” I told him.
That’s the kind of thing I dealt with among my staff. Jay was a whacked-out, sandy-haired Vietnam combat vet with post-traumatic stress disorder. I met him when he sat in our drop-in center and refused to talk to anyone. Just stared at the floor. I’m not a clinician. I just do what I think makes sense. How do you get someone to talk? I asked myself. I made him our volunteer receptionist.
For two days, the phone rang off the hook while Jay sat beside it and refused to lift the receiver. Colleagues from other agencies complained that they could not reach me. I know, I know, I said. We’re having trouble with our line.
Finally, I had enough.
“Goddamnit, Jay!” I yelled at him one afternoon. “Answer the fucking phone!”
He looked at me and listened to it ring. His hand reached for the receiver with the tentativeness of a bug emerging from a cocoon. In a barely audible voice thick as syrup he said, Out of the Rain. May I help you? He listened for a moment and then told me the call was for me. In a world of reduced expectations, Jay met my definition of success.
Now the phone was ringing again and he stopped slapping himself and picked up the receiver like a champ.
“It’s Anne in the kitchen,” Jay said. “The coffee machine is broken.”
“Broken? Like in pieces?”
“It’s not working.”
I look at the line of hungover homeless guys waiting at the coffee counter.
“Jay, go ask Michael what he knows about coffee machines.”
The Hurley Hotel smacks up against a dilapidated convenient store. Old men, older than they need be, lounge by the door or sit on plastic milk crates hustling crack to anyone walking by. Shriveled, even older looking men, long time dope fiends and drunks most of them, wander inside to get cash from the storeowner who serves as their payee. Their disability checks come to him. He doles out cash and takes a percentage. They’re usually broke within two weeks. In that case, he loans them money.
When the next month’s check arrives, he takes his percentage plus what he loaned them plus interest and hands out what little is left. Naturally it doesn’t carry them through the month so he loans them more money and the cycle repeats itself. They can’t win. Not a bad racket. I wonder if that’s what John and Mike were ultimately thinking. Use the mail drop as an in to becoming payees.
I go inside the Hurley’s darkened lobby and ask a man behind a barred window for John’s room. He points upstairs.
“What number?” I ask.
Two women leaning over their walkers follow his finger, their mouths open, and then look at me.
“Room 302,” one of the women tells me.
I approach the stairs, feeling my asthma kick in as the mildewed funk of a hotel that has not been cleaned for months penetrates my lungs. It’s the kind of odor you smell in old people’s homes: decay and rot and a languid mugginess that suspends itself among the cobwebs and take the place of air. At least the air I breath. I blast spray from my inhaler into my mouth outside John’s door before I knock.
“Hey, John!”
The door opens a hair, then widens when John sees me.
“Hey, Tom,” he says. “Good to see you.”
I haven’t seen him since I resigned but he looks the same. Short, with a bowling ball stomach and the two bottom buttons of his shirt open, revealing his undershirt. Gray hair brushed back off his forehead. Glasses one size too large balanced loosely on his nose.
“I heard about Michael,” I say.
John lets me into a small room with two desks. Metal filing cabinets stand behind the desks. I step around them and open the closed curtains, revealing a dust-covered window and the brick wall of the convenient store. Pigeons coo on the sill.
“Dark in here.”
“That’s how Michael always had it. I got tired of arguing with him about it. It’s not like there’s much to see.”
“You live here?”
“Mattresses in the closet. Throw them on the floor at night.”
I approach one of the desks and see a tray filled with business cards.
Michael Keys, Administrator
Homeless Mail Depot, Inc.
I notice small framed photos of the girls John brought in to the drop-in center on one of the desks beside a stack of business cards with John’s name and title: “C.E.O.” Little notes are scrawled across the photos. Thank you, John. I love you, John. You’re the best. John. He even has one of Vernetta and Stevie Junior. Here’s a big wet kiss and hug for you for helping me get straight. He sees me looking at it.
“I probably shouldn’t have that one out.”
“If you weren’t doing anything wrong, you got nothing to worry about, I expect.”
“I wasn’t. The police saw it and didn’t say anything.”
“I’m just saying.”
“I wasn’t.”
“So what happened, John?”
“How’d you hear?”
“Ran into Little Stevie. He said Stevie Junior is with Vernetta’s mother.”
“I heard Vernetta gave him to her NA sponsor to watch and never came back for him.”
“I don’t know.”
“Little Stevie says he’s going to kill Michael.”
“He’d have to stop drinking first, although he still has a good left hook.”
“All’s I know is what Jay told me. Michael was at work. The phone rings, Jay picks up. It’s the police. They want to know if Michael works there. Jay doesn’t say yes, doesn’t say no. He tells them about confidentiality and how he can’t give out information on anyone – staff or clients. I guess the police gave him a hard time, but Jay didn’t budge. You know Jay. When he doesn’t want to talk, he doesn’t talk.
“After the cops get off the phone with him, he tells Michael they’re looking for him. Michael bolts. Doesn’t say anything. Just leaves. This is all what Jay tells me. I called him after Michael called me. He was at the Greyhound bus station. He said he had to leave immediately and didn’t have time to explain. He said if I wanted to know what’s up to call Jay. Then he hung up and I did what he said. I called Jay.”
John stops talking, slumps in a chair all rumpled and defeated. He’ll have to get a roommate I expect. I feel for him. He was finally pursuing one of his schemes instead of just talking about it. Well, he’ll know better next time. Let dreams stay dreams.
“Michael said to have his Out of the Rain check made out to me to cover rent, but they’re not going to do that, are they?”
“No, they can’t.”
“He’d have to be here to sign it over to me.”
“Not likely.”
“No.”
He pulls a drawer open on a file cabinet. It’s stuffed with white envelopes. I thumb through them. Disability checks, welfare. Alphabetized, too.
“We were just getting started.”
“You hear from Vernetta?”
“She called me the night before the cops came and started screaming about Michael being a pervert. I think she was high. Said something about Stevie Junior saying things Michael did to him when he babysat a couple of nights before.”
“What’d Michael say?”
“He was in the shelter filling in for one of the guys who didn’t show for work. I was asleep when he got off shift. The next morning I had a comp day and Mike was at work doing his regular job when the cops called and all this happened. They came here that afternoon. They said Vernetta filed a complaint against Michael. They searched this whole place and ran a check on me.”
“What they find?”
“Nothing. They told me child molesters want to get caught. That they hate themselves. But Michael didn’t leave a clue.”
A pigeon flaps its wings against the window smearing grime with its feathers.
“Did you have any hint . . . ?”
“The only weird thing he did was take down the mirrors here. He said they were old and he wanted new ones but he never replaced them. But that was just strange. It didn’t mean he was screwing Stevie Junior. He’d see a TV news report about kids being abused and he’d get really upset. But one of the detectives said that’s not unusual. They have a lot of denial, he said. Child molesters really hate other child molesters.”
He closes the cabinet drawer, dumps Michael’s business cards in a trash can.
“So much for these,” John says.
Michael saved my ass. He fixed the coffee machine and kept the copy machine working. He was my missing mechanic, and before long he showed the signs of a great secretary. He asked me if he could organize the front desk because it took too long for staff to find referral slips and bus tokens. He was right. The front desk, where everyone coming in had to stop and sign in, was a mess. Papers strewn everywhere, none of them useful. Michael made files, threw away trash that had been stuffed into drawers, refilled the pen holder and put the tokens in a tin container he found. Obvious stuff, so simple really, but it was never done before Michael arrived. Soon, I began letting him in a few minutes before we opened the drop-in so he could staff the front desk himself. Finally, when my office assistant at the time fell off the wagon, crack pipe in hand, I hired Michael to replace her.
I shut John’s door behind me. Walked down the stairs, remembering. Michael told me he was an Army brat and was raised to address his father as sir long before he joined the Army himself. He serviced planes. He was married by the time he re-enlisted. His wife grew lonely living on a base, he said. He was stationed in South Dakota when she killed herself. Her death sent him over the edge. He drank. Eventually he was discharged as medically unfit to serve. He traveled the country, homeless, landing in San Francisco and Out of the Rain.
I didn’t do a background check on Michael or any of my other staff. I didn’t have the budget or the time; too busy trying to get crap fixed and begging for money to even think about doing something like that. His value to me was all I needed to know. If he had a police record, so what? Damn near every homeless person I know has a record. It comes with living on the street.
I believe he was in the Army. All that sir shit. It makes sense. Or at least an Army brat. Perhaps he was married. But did she die by suicide or leave him? Was he medically discharged from the service for mental health reasons or was he thrown out because he was suspected of violating kids? Is his name really Michael? I doubt it.
After I hired him, he remained in the shelter until I told him to leave. He had a job, money for an apartment. He had no reason to occupy a bed someone without a job could use. He resisted until finally I gave him a deadline to be out. I now wonder if he knew what would happen if he lived alone. That the shelter had not only been a place to lay his head, but a crowded, noisy place that prevented him from being alone with his desire.
It was John who walked Vernetta into the drop-in center. Of course, and why not? She was the hottest thing we’d seen. Man it seems a lot longer than two years ago that John walked Vernetta into the drop-in center. Yeah, fast-talking Vernetta, fine as wine, sashaying, light-skinned Puerto Rican gal who made even me look twice. Wearing a pink dress that showed off her cleavage and trim legs. Twenty something. So hot I couldn’t make up my mind where to look. Vernetta sucked the air out of the drop-in. Even the most dazed drunk felt their head clear and vision return, a new light in their eyes. A bottle of wine and a dime of crack had nothing on that girl.
Vernetta sat down and surveyed the place like she owned it, like she was trying to determine how to redesign the whole thing. We’d get people like her. People who didn’t belong, who seemed to land from Mars and rattled our usual routine of freak outs and fights. For a moment, they were something fresh and different and gave one a sense of possibilities until we all calmed down and recognized them for what they were: an accident waiting to happen. Some little hotty using her hotness to get what she wanted. Booze, dope, whatever. They didn’t come to Out of the Rain by accident.
So she started hanging with Little Stevie. He still knew where to get dope even if he was too drunk to deal it himself. For a quick fuck or blowjob, Little Stevie turned Vernetta onto crack. She’d come strutting into the center zippidy do dah, speeding her brains out, jamming cigarettes in her mouth like fire crackers and throwing them out just as fast, talking a mile a minute. She was possessed, out of her mind. Little Stevie passed out in a chair smiling in his sleep. Dreaming of booze and Vernetta on her knees.
It amazed me how raggedy she got so quickly. Stopped changing clothes. The one dress, that first one we saw her in, torn and stained. Face all droopy. Like Jay said, she’d look good if she stuck her head in a tub for two hours and washed her hair.
But she was feeling no pain and clearly not smelling much either. I don’t know when I noticed her pregnant. It just kind of dawned on me like it dawned on everybody else. Suddenly her little stick body had a bulge. I was so used to dealing with drunks, I at first thought her kidneys were going and she was retaining fluid. However, that bulge got bigger and bigger and then it hit me. Oh, shit, I thought, oh shit. I told her what crack would do to her baby. How he might be born blind or without an arm or a stomach. How his brain could be mush. She could never sit in one place long enough to listen.
Michael never seemed to notice her. Instead, he did his job with an unbroken rhythm, asking me to sign check request forms so we could buy more bus tokens.
“Thank you, sir,” he always said when I handed them back to him.
Then I stopped seeing Vernetta. She disappeared. I asked about her, but even Little Stevie didn’t know. Not that he cared. He bragged about knocking her up but that was as far as his fatherly concern went.
“Sir, I need to talk to you,” Michael said to me one morning when the last thing on my mind was Vernetta. It was budget renewal time and I was busy drafting reasons why the state should continue funding us.
“You know Vernetta?”
“Of course. I’ve been asking about her.”
“She’s staying with me.”
What? You? I thought. Michael and Vernetta? He was almost squeamish around her like a grade school boy who didn’t want to sit with girls. He barely acknowledged her when she asked him for the bathroom key. I never saw them once talking together.
“When this happen?”
“A few weeks ago after work. I saw her on the bus and sat with her. She’s pregnant, sir. She had been off crack two days then but had no place to stay where someone wouldn’t be using. I told her she could stay with me if she stopped smoking crack. I told her she has to attend an NA meeting twice a day and show me a note from the facilitator. Little Stevie doesn’t know.”
“What makes you think she’s not going out and lighting up when you’re here?”
“I’d know if she was smoking again, sir. She’s scared about this baby.”
“She should be. When’s it due?”
“Four months.”
“How long she been with you?”
“Three weeks. Clean so far. Hard at first.”
“I bet.”
We both knew this violateed rule number one: never, I mean never, was a staff person to take a client home. All sorts of problems with that because it usually means the staffer was exchanging their crib for sex. Even if that wasn’t the case, the accusation, if made by a manipulative little dope fiend like Vernetta would be hard to refute. Why did you take her home? Why not put her in a shelter?
A woman’s homeless shelter wouldn’t take her because she was a crack head. A battered women’s shelter wouldn’t want her because she wasn’t battered. A detox wouldn’t want her because she was pregnant. A hospital program wouldn’t take her because she didn’t have insurance and whatever indigent programs they had would be full.
So Michael had her.
“You’re not touching her are you? I’m talking even a hug.”
“No, sir. You can come over if you want sir and see for yourself.”
“She seeing a doctor?”
“The free clinic, sir.”
“How’s the baby?”
“Good, they say. If she stays off the crack.”
“Ok.”
I look at him for a minute. He stares at the floor.
“Well, sir?”
“It’s not your fault your wife killed herself.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“Don’t do shit to make up for something that wasn’t your fault.”
“I’m not, sir.”
“This isn’t your kid.”
“I know, sir.”
“Go find your own.”
“I don’t know where to look, sir.”
We look at each other. He takes off his glasses and wipes his eyes.
“Keep your hands off her and don’t say a fucking thing about this or it’s our ass,” I say. “I won’t be able to protect either one of us.”
“Yes, sir.”
I took a homeless gal home once. My first social work gig was at a detox center. I had just completed my master’s program. Jean was thirty-seven, ten years older than me. Speed freak. Wore sandals, jeans and T-shirts and babbled on about people thinking she looked like Janice Joplin. She was prettier than that. A cross between a dead head and a cowgirl. She made no sense high, but I was drawn to her. I felt it when I saw her. A tingly desire that forced me outside and away from her when she was in the building. But she knew. Maybe she felt the same way.
“Pick me up a block from here by the park,” she whispered to me one afternoon in a voice not influenced by speed at all but was direct and slow and airy. My heart banged against my chest as if my rib cage was bars containing it.
You have a choice, I kept thinking as I drove slowly toward the park. You can keep going, turn around. I didn’t. I took her to my apartment. She dropped her pants and pulled down her panties. She was ready to do it just like that. Later she took off all her clothes and I saw where she had burned herself rolling over drunk into camp fires lit beneath overpasses. In the morning, she asked if I had five dollars I could loan her. I gave her twenty. She went on another speed run and when I saw her again most of her teeth were missing and she was off on her Janis Joplin jag again. Without teeth, I thought she was disgusting. My skin crawled when I thought about sleeping with her.
I don’t feel good saying that, but it’s how I felt. That was the only time I did something like that. Ever. And I checked on Michael. Vernetta said he never so much as laid a finger on her.
Michael liked the dark.
I had not known that about him until I dropped by his basement apartment in the Mission to check on Vernetta unannounced. The drawn curtains, stained carpet, stale air. A hot plate on a card table. Two chairs. In the shadows, a back room where the whir of a fan muffled the sounds of traffic. One lamp. Off.
“How you doing, Vernetta?”
She was swollen to a point where the T-shirt she wore barely fit over her bulging stomach. But her eyes were clear, voice steady.
“Real good.”
“Where do you sleep?”
“Michael’s room. He stays on the couch. I told him he didn’t have to, but that’s how he wants it.”
“Good.”
I look in his room. Paperback books on the floor. Bed made. No photos. A bath towel thrown over the door. Curtains drawn here, too.
I went back into the living room where I noticed folded sheets and neat stacks of shirts and blue jeans and socks. He must change out here.
“Don’t you want any light?”
“TV gives off light. I don’t mind. It’s how Michael likes it. He’s had a lot of loss in his life.”
“He told you about his wife.”
“Yeah. I don’t want to crowd him. It’s his place. If he wants the lights off, they’re off.”
Perhaps I thought he wanted to keep out the hot summer sun. Perhaps for privacy. The apartment did face the sidewalk. Perhaps to save money on electricity. He had after all just moved out of our homeless shelter.
My parents were like that. They grew up in the Depression and were very conscious about wasting money. They shut off all the lights except those we absolutely needed. If you’re not in the kitchen, shut off the lights. If you’re not in the living room, shut off the lights. I think now that I should have known the reason Michael shut off the lights was all together different. But why? He did his job. Came to work at nine and was never late and left at six, not a second before. Among my staff that was abnormal because it was so normal.
Hell, I just thought, he likes the dark.
The Hurley is one block away from Out of the Rain. I haven’t been back since my last day there. A lot of memories. The problem with leaving a job is that you leave part of who you are behind. The job becomes your identity as much as your name. I’m not just Tom, I’m Tom the director of Out of the Rain.
It feels good walking through the doors again. I don’t even pause at the front desk, but start jogging up the stairs feeling again the need to rush and get things done. Budgets, staff meetings, program development. Not enough time in the day.
“Please stop, sir.”
I pause on the stairs. A man in a suit and tie seated behind the front desk cocks a finger and signals for me to come back. I give him my name and explain I want to see the director, Deborah Brinker. Miss Deborah, he corrects me. Ok, Miss. Deborah. No, I don’t have an appointment, but she will know me. I was the director before her, I explain. I gave her her orientation.
He appears unimpressed. He gets on the phone and pages her. I notice a sign in big block letters behind him on a billboard:
NO FIGHTING
NO WEAPONS
NO SWEARING
NO DRINK AND/OR DRUGS
At the bottom in pencil someone had scribbled, no, no, no, nothing!
The reception phone rings and after a brief conversation the front desk guy hangs up, tells me to sign in. Then he points to the stairs and I walk to what was once my office.
Not anymore. Deborah’s desk divides her from the clients who walk through the door. Framed degrees hang on the wall, and she corrects me when I address her as Deborah.
“Miss Deborah, please,” she says, never taking her eyes from my face. I feel homeless suddenly. Inadequate.
Miss Deborah sits behind my desk facing the door. When I was director, the desk faced the wall so when people came in, I had to turn around to talk to them with nothing between us.
Miss Deborah reaches across the desk and shakes my hand. Various degrees and certificates hang on the walls.
“Nice to see you again, Deborah,” I say.
“Miss Deborah, please.”
“I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am to hear about Michael and to offer my support. If there’s anything I can do. I could volunteer a few hours a week if you need – ”
“I appreciate that,” Miss Deborah says cutting me off. “It’s been quite a shock. Totally unexpected.”
“I can imagine.”
“The board of directors knows about this, but not our funders. I hope it doesn’t go that far. Everyone understands, of course, Michael wasn’t my hire.”
“What does that matter?” Inside I’m seething: of course he wasn’t her hire. She isn’t mandated to hire the clients because at my last board meeting I recommended they stop requiring this and give the new director a break.
“Nothing hopefully. But if this frightens funders, if they worry about the type of staff we have, I’ll be forced to emphasize he wasn’t my hire. That mistakes were made under the previous director, which we are now correcting. I am going to have to let John go. It’s impossible for me to believe he didn’t know about what was going on.”
Previous director. That mistakes were made under the previous director, which we are now correcting. Like I’m not even sitting across from her. Like I don’t exist except as an excuse. I keep control of my temper, but my voice shakes.
“I just saw John and he didn’t know anything.”
“He only outreaches to young women. Did you ever notice that?”
“Yes, but . . . “
“Did you do a background check on either him or Michael? Did you try to confirm their job histories? Michael’s so-called time with the military? I did. No Michael Kelly with his birth date and social security number was in the Army.”
“It’s probably not his real name.”
“All the more reason for background checks, isn’t it? And did you know Vernetta lived with him when she was pregnant? I’m sure you didn’t, but why did you permit a staff member to babysit for a client?”
“What he did on his off hours . . . “
“He brought the baby here to work I’m told. You must have known that much.”
I don’t say anything. You do what you can. A lot of doors were closed to Vernetta. I didn’t see the harm. Not from Michael.
“It’s a good thing you left when you did or you’d be answering a lot more questions,” Miss Deborah says. “I’ll try to keep this from following you. You work with refugees now, right?”
I nod like a kid in front of the school principal.
I stand to leave.
“I just came to offer my support,” I say in a voice quieter than I intended.
“I have an appointment.”
Miss Deborah extends her hand. I ignore it and turn around. I notice a man in a suit and tie sitting behind Jay’s old desk.
“Is there a problem, Miss Deborah?” he says rising out of his chair.
“No,” she says. “The gentleman’s leaving.”
Vernetta had a baby boy she named Stevie Junior. That was more credit I’d have given his father, who never made it to the hospital. Nine damn pounds. She stayed straight while she was with Michael and the doctors thought the boy would have little-to-no brain damage from crack. Over time they would know, but his prognosis was strong.
The hospital set her up in a half-way house for single moms kicking addiction. She could stay a year. Vernetta was set. I let Michael use the Out of the Rain van to drive her from the hospital to her new home. He hauled her things up three flights of stairs to her room. It had bay windows and a nice view of the ocean and hardwood floors that caught the sun and shined like ice. We set up the baby crib and made her bed. She thanked me for “everything,” although I did very little except gape at her when she first came in. For Michael she had no words. She embraced him and sobbed. He held her like a robot and looked over her shoulder. Not a blink or a tear or an expression of any kind. Just a blank stare and a stiffness to his body as he patted her back one, two, one two and then stopped.
“Pretty controlled in there,” I said when were back outside.
“Military training, sir.”
“You did good, man. You should be really very proud.”
“I am, sir.”
“Don’t just drop out of her life. She still needs you. Little Stevie isn’t going to be any kind of dad to that kid.”
“No, sir, he won’t. I’ll come by. I told her I’d babysit when she needed. She can bring him to my apartment or I’ll pick him up. And I’ll keep this quiet.”
“Fuck that. I don’t care who knows. Look at her. It worked out. What can anyone say? Vernetta can bring him to work if she’s in a jam.”
“I’ll take care of it, sir. I’ll watch him.”
Now I wonder: what was he doing in that little cubicle that was his office? Stalking? Waiting for the right person to come along? Biding his time for a pregnant crack head in need of shelter? Seeming to show no interest in her. Watching. Planning. The cubicle was his hideaway, concealing the secret to who he was as he waited to make Vernetta’s kid his own. Jesus. Who would have known what he was planning?
About a year later, I resigned after one of my staff threw a flower vase at me for firing him when he came into work fucked up. He missed, but I thought, That’s it, a vase to the face. I’m out of here.
I don’t know when the abuse started. I hope after I left. Vernetta brought Stevie Junior to work so she could attend NA meetings and Michael watched him. I hope it wasn’t happening right under my nose. In the bathroom or something when he changed diapers. I don’t want to think about it.
After I submitted my two-week notice, I told Michael he should leave, too. I knew of a job opening at Hap Street Youth Center for an office manager. After school activities for wealthy suburban kids in Walnut Creek. Easy. No stress. Go for it, I told him. He said he would, but never applied. To work with kids, you must agree to a background check. I hadn’t thought of that before now. I guess Miss Deborah had a point.
What was it like for Michael to be on that Greyhound bus after he hung up with John? Did he feel badly? Did he think, Another close call? I’ll stop it this time. I really will. Or was his escape part of the thrill?
Sitting in his seat hunkered down, maybe a hat pulled over his face, I imagine him pretending to be asleep until he does fall asleep, only to awaken some place else hours later. He finds a homeless shelter and sleeps among other homeless men to protect himself from himself below the police radar.
If Michael is caught and I’m called to testify, I would talk about the man I knew. I would stand up for that man not because I condone child abuse, but because that man and I were colleagues, partners. And, for a while, he did a good thing by Vernetta.
Then I think, “Testify, my ass. Fuck him. Fuck skipping a background check, and fuck not having the time or money to do the things that maybe I should have done.”
My ignorance disgusts me.
I doubt the police will find Michael. Stevie Junior wasn’t his first kid, I’m sure. If they had not caught him before, why now? He was messing with the child of a crack head and a skid row father. We’re not talking the Rockefellers here.
And now Vernetta is on the street again. My kid was abused by the man who helped me, maybe even saved my life, and boom, the dam broke and she cut loose and got herself some crack. An overwhelming desire always waiting to bust out. She needed an excuse and got a great one. And Stevie Junior, where the hell is he? Is he really with Vernetta’s mother, or her NA sponsor, or just out there too, lost and unrestrained?
These days, I live alone in an apartment, the curtains wide open, you bet. Lights on, mirrors in place. I don’t watch my neighbor’s kid, nothing, even though she’s a single parent and has asked me. I do like her, but I don’t want to take that on, if you know what I mean. I prefer to help people I won’t see again.
Like my Iraqi family. Wrap things up at the Department of Family Services this afternoon and they’ll be on their way and I’ll be on mine. No drama. Yeah, it gets old, but I can deal with that. I prefer old to the alternative. If you help the same people too often their little mindless shit will either add up to nothing or something and you have to decide which. Me, I don’t need to know.
J. Malcolm Garcia has had work in The Virginia Quarterly, Missouri Review, Ascent Magazine, The Best American Travel Writing, and The Best American Unrequired Reading. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.