I was pregnant with David Jason, living alone in a furnished flat in an old neglected Victorian in a depressed neighborhood. The glass in the windows was original, it was distorted and speckled with small air bubbles trapped in once molten swirls; the roller shades, the stiffener in them long ago oxidized to a dirty sienna, were brittle with age. The flat was filthy and full of cockroaches. I scrubbed for days with two friends helping me, giving the kitchen the first real cleaning it had had in many years. I set out offerings of jar lids of government-surplus cornmeal at the back door so the roaches would feed there instead of in the cupboards.
The door at the rear of the flat opened onto three cement steps with iron-pipe railings that led to a garage that housed a coin-operated ringer washer. Immediately behind the garage was a Santa Fe railway track. Freight was the only thing hauled in those days and at night the slow, long line of lumbering cars would rock along the rails in a dreamy rhythm that was amplified and imitated by the house.
I liked the sound of a train. It comforted me somehow, evidently since infancy. My mother told me about a train trip she took with me when I was only a few weeks old. She laid me on the seat beside her and I was lulled to sleep by the rhythm of the movement. A man boarded the train and when he saw my mother he moved to sit in the seat beside her. His eyes were fixed on her. She is a pretty, well groomed woman. He must have been quite taken with my mother’s natural, blonde good looks because he didn’t notice that I was snoozing on the seat. He came close to sitting on me. I never, as a child, understood why it was so funny that he was a priest.
The owner of the Adammsesque two-story lived in the flat across the hall from me. He was a harmless old fart, as lonely and neglected as his house. The two had come to resemble each other as the toll of the years was paid. He seemed happy to see a fresh young face. The day I moved in he gave me a lovely dresser scarf from the twenties and told me he had once contracted severe poison ivy on his genitals, causing them to swell three times their normal size. I pondered the odd choice of personal history he had chosen to share. I guessed he just wanted me to know he wasn’t always so broken and decrepit. He wanted me to know he had once had a use for his genitals. Afterward, I avoided him, except when the rent was due. Then he waited for me.
I liked living in the flat. It was the first place that was mine, except for my secret hiding places. When my parents threw me out of their house, I was seventeen and pregnant. I had never intended to let my parents know I was with child, there was no point, in my opinion. Linda, a girlfriend, thought my parents should know and over my sincere protestation she called my mother. I knew once the phone call was made that I was going to become homeless. Sure enough, within forty-eight hours of the call my father was explaining to me how my mother couldn’t take my bad behavior anymore and I was to leave the next morning. He gave me fifty dollars and said, “Have a good life.” I don’t remember how I got there but the next day I arrived at Linda’s house with two small boxes, a sleeping bag, and a guitar.
Linda was a friend of mine in high school. She had delivered two children out of wedlock in her early teens, evidently, no big thing in her family. Her children were adopted out and she seemed unaffected by this when we talked about it, laughingly claiming she “just couldn’t resist anyone poking fun at her.” She was, like me, a senior in high school but she was more than a year older, being pregnant had delayed her academic schedule somewhat.
We had graduated and she had immediately married Kennie, a swarthy and handsome young fellow with a hard edge to him. They moved across the new freeway to the West Side, a section of town where the population was a mix of poor folk of differing ethnicities, mostly they had skin darker than mine. Poor light-skinned residents were common, too; but no one there was rich.
She told me I could stay with her and Kennie until I found a place to settle. I felt as if I were intruding, I got clear vibes from Kennie that he wasn’t happy that I was there. He didn’t want any of my friends there. Linda was pregnant for a third time and was content watching soap operas all day. This was my first exposure to soaps. I never saw my mother watch one, Perry Mason was the closest thing I ever saw to a soap.
These really were soap operas, the sponsors were all laundry-soap companies, the motto of one company reflected the “free” dish in each box of powdered soap. DUZ for dishes. There was a clean plate in every box to remind the consumer that DUZ was useful for cleaning more than laundry, I guessed. So many women had this pattern in use in their homes it seemed to me that the women must use as much DUZ as they could so they could get more dishes.
The women I knew, all fighting the curse of insufficient funds, used DUZ as a tool of empowerment. Buying DUZ was a way they could autonomously decide to get a new set of china. None of their husbands, who would notice if the wife purchased a new set of china, was likely to remark on a lone, new dish. These men didn’t know what the housewives and their girlfriends were up to during the day, they probably assumed the dish was from a neighbor’s house as ingredients for the day’s menus were frequently borrowed and returned from house to house.
Relentlessly, glacially, piece by piece, these women built their collections of ‘free” dishes; by the time the husbands caught on, the accumulation would be well under way, and almost every husband could then be convinced that there was no additional economic pinch suffered in acquiring dishes “free” with the soap. Other husbands wouldn’t care either way, some wouldn’t notice the slow growth of the set or the sneaky but liberating behavior. I don’t think Kennie was the noticing kind.
Every day Linda watched the soaps, especially her favorite, the new and scandalous, All My Children. I still remember the few shows I saw with her, their cheap production, content-less plot lines, and snail’s pace numbed my mind. Infidelity within the Frame family was the focus. I was floored when I saw the show again twenty-seven years later -- Steven and Erica Frame were still at the same old, same old, although it seems to me that the actors have changed in substance, if not in style. I wondered how much the same Linda was after twenty-seven years; did she still watch All My Children? I sure wasn’t the same.
, I didn’t live with Linda and Kennie for long. I went to stay with two friends who were sisters and their bed-ridden mother, long an invalid due to an aneurism, and their father who traveled continuously for his work. Ten days later I had found the Victorian on Clark St. and I returned to the West Side to retrieve my worldly possessions: a sleeping bag, a few books of fairy tales, a guitar, some antique coins, and my clothes. I found a friend to drive me across town to Linda’s in his Volkswagen Beetle, a vehicle plenty large to move all my things. We pulled up in front of the house and I went and knocked on the door, but the house was empty.
Linda and Kennie had moved out. The back door was unlocked. My sleeping bag and guitar were on the floor of the vacant living room. Everything else was gone. No coins, no clothes, no books left. A guitar, a sleeping bag and the clothes on my back were my sole possessions. I was glad I had the sleeping bag. When I finally found Linda and Kennie in their new apartment near our old high school, she told me that she had given my things to the Good Will.
Thank the godesses for my psychiatric social worker. She helped me get on welfare until David Jason was born. It was welfare that allowed me to rent my flat for fifty-dollars a month and to feed myself and my rapidly growing child. My mother hates this woman to this day, I’m sure; and compared her to Nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, but this M.S.W. was the only one to offer me help getting off the streets.
The interview at the welfare department was a traumatic experience. I was led to a cramped interview room with stark white walls, where a sweaty, dirty-old-man made me give him the details of my sexual encounter with the baby’s father. He wanted to know specifics, too. What positions were you in? Where were your legs? Who else was there? Who else have you had sex with? How many times...?
The questions were degrading and endless. When I protested that these questions were too personal and irrelevant, he told me that I was officially under arrest and that he would have the police take me to jail instead of merely filing charges against me if I didn’t cooperate fully. What I had done was a jailable crime, he said. He never suggested filing charges against the father, a twenty-four year old player, more than six years my senior.
Eventually the interview was over and I was given a check for my new landlord and a ration of commodity food. This distribution practice was designed long ago to starve Indians forced onto reservations while giving the appearance of feeding them – a practice later extended to other powerless communities across America; it is the food that refugees, prisoners, poor children, senior citizens, and the homeless are still fed. I had heard about giant, subterranean, warehouse-sized chambers full of butter, waxed cheeses and sacks of flour were stored.
If I was being fed surplus government cheese like prisoners and housed by the government like prisoners, then I was in the same social class as the prisoners, refugees, mentally disturbed, and cognitively stalled people for whom capitalism had not developed an exploitative mechanism, in other words, the surplus people. Surplus food for surplus people.
No one amasses their own wealth, except in a few rare instances. Wealth is amassed by the continual labor of people who do not live as comfortably as the wealthy profiteers. Barefoot workers make athletic shoes in the Phillippines and Indonesia. Reproduction rates combined with insufficient educational, nutritional, and economic power assure there will be generation after generation of barefooted shoemakers, an unending supply of surplus people to be exploited by market capitalists.
More than anything I wanted the status of my child to rise above surplus, even though I doubted that my position ever could. My mother made it amply clear that I was not wanted. As soon as my parents dared, I was ejected from my home with a warning not to contact them or my brothers and sisters again. The father of the child denied paternity. I was the only one who believed that my child was not surplus, even though I knew that I would not be there to tell him that.
So I lived almost peacefully in the Victorian for five months before I was sent to the maternity home. I missed my family, but not the continual derision I received from them. Here there was tranquility, inside these ancient, disintegrating walls. I only let in whom I wanted, when I felt like it. One hot July day I let in my boyfriend and a friend of his. The friend was scrawny and his sandy hair was disheveled. He eyes were sunken in dark hollows. I can’t remember why the boys were there or how long they stayed. In fact I forgot all about the visit until one pressure-cooked August night.
That night two trains had passed by since dark, one was short and clicked rapidly along, inbound toward the freight yard. The other was northbound. Heavily laded with the agricultural and mineral wealth of the more southern parts of the state it was long and slow, the clacking of the wheels on the rails muted by friction and mass. The vibration was transferred through the earth and air to the frame of the house. The glass in the windows vibrated with the rhythm. The sound relaxed me. The second train took a long time to pass by, at least half an hour. I fell asleep before it had finished passing.
When I awoke the night was very still, I relaxed and watched the patterns of light dance across the back of my eyelids. I thought I heard a noise and hoped I hadn’t. I half-jokingly wondered to my self “What bit of Hell is come to visit now,” a mantra I muttered to myself when my instincts told me something was about to go wrong; I listened again and heard nothing. A minute later the sound returned with enough volume to convince me that I wasn’t just imagining it.
I strained to hear where the noise had come from. It sounded like a puppy at a door, but a weak one without the insistence and enthusiasm a happy healthy puppy exercises. Where I lay, I couldn’t tell where the scraping sound came from, so I rose from my bed and made my way slowly, moving only when I heard the intermittent sound. After some minutes the sound ceased repeating itself and I crept between my sheets again. I snuggled under the covers, pulling them close around my shoulders, grateful they still held my body heat. I dozed peacefully off.
Then, through my half-sleep, I heard the noise again. This time I felt my pulse quicken. The sound came again. This time it sounded like it was coming from the front or back door, located on a straight line with each other. The exterior bedroom wall abutted the right side of the broad front porch. I had heard no one come across the squeaky front porch boards. The scraping sounded again, this time I thought I heard an animal groan.
Oh my God, I thought, an animal had been hit on the tracks or on main thoroughfare just across the rail tracks. Mine was the nearest residence. I was now sure some poor animal had climbed a stranger’s stairs, clinging to life in a desperate search for help. From the sounds it made I was sure it was badly hurt.
My pregnant body was pushing massive amounts of nurturing hormones through my veins already, and as my pulse quickened, so did my concern for the wounded dog. I had decided it was a dog because the scrapping sounded louder than that I thought a cat could produce, and it sounded like a dog’s and not a cat’s claws on the wooden door. I could hear the tapping noise of its claws as they scraped the door.
I reached out for the doorknob, and a spark, like a miniature lightening strike, flew from the iron knob to my hand. The shock registered a sharp stinging in my fingers where the charge first entered my body. I had grounded the knob to earth and I withdrew my hand and shook it in surprise and pain. I grabbed the knob again. With my free hand I flipped the freshly cleaned wall switch to the overhead light on and then shifted it to work the dead bolt, releasing the lock. I turned the doorknob.
As the door latch released from the mortise and the paneled and framed exterior door moved toward me, it was pushed forcefully inward. I thought of a rabid dog. Had I just condemned my self to an attack by a wounded animal? The head and shoulders of a man, recently a boy, propped against the door slumped inward onto the service room floor. The electric light reflected off the yellow walls and illuminated the figure sprawled at my feet. It looked like a rag doll, but I knew it was a man, a filthy man who had been sweating heavily and rolling in dust.
My heart clutched and loosened all at one moment. I knew in a flash that something was terribly wrong with him and that he was utterly defenseless. He was barely conscious, his head lolled to one side and I could see the blood oozing from his nose and mouth pooling around his cheek. His eyelids fluttered and his hands worked making grasping motions.
I recoiled as I recognized him as the friend my boyfriend Michael had brought to visit in July. He looked like he might die right there, he breathed with difficulty. First, I called an ambulance, then I called my boyfriend. He came immediately.
I should have known or been told that this man was a heroine user, a junkie. He put needles in his arms and forced a narcotic into his system. He did this many times a day. I had heard of junkies before, but I hadn’t ever seen one that I knew of. Now one was lying dying on my floor and I didn’t know what was going on. After I made the calls I grabbed a blanket and returned back to the man-boy and sat beside him on the hot floor. I covered him. He gagged vomit from his throat. I had no idea what was wrong. I tried to talk to him, but I talked to myself, going through my slim first-aid knowledge.
Something was very wrong with this man but I didn’t know what. He didn’t have broken bones or any vital wounds, just some scabs on his exposed skin in all stages of healing -- some spots looked infected. The bleeding grom his nose and mouth made me think he had a concussion. Since I didn’t know what was wrong I just left him still, covered him, made sure he was breathing and waited for help to arrive.
My boyfriend arrived in a couple of minutes. I told him I had called the ambulance. He looked at me in disbelief and horror.
“You what?” he demanded. I repeated that I had called for help.
“Call them back.” he told me, “Cancel it.” I was incredulous.
"Can’t you see how ill he is," I asked.
“You fool,” Michael replied, “don’t you know he’s OD’d on heroin, they’ll arrest him for sure.”
“No!” I returned emphatically, “he’s dying.”
Further discussion was suspended when we heard the ambulance. Within minutes they were at the rear door, assessing the problem. The ambulance attendant inquired if we knew what the problem was. I cast my gaze at the ground hoping Michael would respond; after all it was his friend. But he stood by mutely and so I whispered the word “heroin” under my breath. The ambulance attendant (these were pre-EMT days) cocked his head and looked at me. Even though I couldn’t see his face I felt his eyes burn a hole in me. “Heroin.” I repeated. “Figures.” said the attendant shaking his head. “God I hate this.” he said as they loaded him onto the stretcher.
The sudden activity partially roused the friend who feebly tried to move but could only make partial floppy movements, his arms collapsing like those of one of those figurines made of beads strung on elastic and mounted on a platform with a push-up bottom. You push up on bottom and it eases the tension in the elastic and the body of the figure collapses. The friend was taken to the hospital where he recovered within a few days and was released to the custody of the sheriff’s office.
The next day, I cleaned up the blood on the back-entryway floor using a toothpick to remove it from the cracks between the tiles. I washed the smears from the wood work and door panels.
Outside, I scrubbed bloody hand prints from the pipe railing, but when I tried to clean the concrete, but too much time had passed. The steps had heated in the sun all afternoon and although the hour was late, the outside temperature was still over ninety degrees. The blood on the stairs had oxidized where it had dried and despite my scrubbing, the iron in the friend’s blood bonded to the cement and remained there longer than I did.
A few days after this incident, my boyfriend informed me that he had a day of “business” to take care of and asked if I wanted to go. We left in his car. I inquired where we were going and he told me we were going to visit friends to try to raise bail for his junkie friend, newly released from the hospital into the loving care of the Sheriff. We stopped at a craftsman-style house in a declining neighborhood constructed during the 1930s. Michael rolled to a stop under the shade of an overgrown Chinese Elm tree.
We got out of the car and climbed the steps to the porch of a rundown rental. A man answered our knock and let us into the living room. He closed the door behind us. A sobbing woman, with her face hidden, sat crumpled in an easy chair. She, however was not taking it easy, her chest and shoulders heaved with stifled sobs. The man who let us in turned to Michael and asked what was up. Michael didn’t bother to introduce me to the man, which was alright with me. He explained that we were there to try to raise bail for their mutual friend in the custody of the sheriff.
I didn’t like the look of the man, his demeanor frightened me. I knew we had interrupted him in the middle of a rampage. I could smell the rage in the air. I knew the smell from the countless rampages of my own father. The air was thick with the pheromones of the rage of the man and the fear and suffering of the sobbing woman. I knew the situation was ugly, but there was no way I could be prepared for what I was about to experience. “Alright,” said the man, “you guys wait here and I’ll go get the money”
Then he turned to the woman. He walked to the chair where she cowered. I could now see that she had been hurt. Blood oozed from a split in her lip. Her eye was blackened. The man stood over the woman. He held out his hand to her and demanded, “Take it, take it, damn you.” Without raising her eyes to him, she mutely shook her head no. His fist connected with the side of her face in an explosion of force. Drops of blood, saliva, and tears peppered the back of the chair she huddled in, as she tried to protect herself by becoming smaller and less visible.
“Here,” he demanded again, “take this!” I could see him holding out a lipstick- red capsule which appeared to be Seconal, a pharmaceutical drug used to induce sleep that was abused by many of the kids I knew -- some even injected it into their veins. I had swallowed this substance when I was a Junior in high school but I didn’t like the groggy, drugged feeling. I had been raped while under the influence of another such drug and I refused all drugs in the category “downers” ever after. In my mind, the term downer was appropriate, and now here was another situation where downers and abuse were connected.
The crumpled, bleeding, battered, slight woman spoke in a whisper through her bruised, swollen lips without lifting her head to meet his eye, “Please, no, no. I already took two.” The man turned to a cabinet placed against the wall, opened a drawer and withdrew a huge black metal pistol. As he turned back to her, he slid something and the gun made a noise I had heard only on television, but which scared me thoroughly. He extended his arm and pointed it toward the woman.
She was groggy from the Secanol she had already taken. She must have known the gun was trained on her without having to look at it, the noise of the shell being forced into the firing chamber seemed to me to reverberate. He stood over her, the gun now pointed at her head. He stroked the side of her face and interlaced his free hand with her long blonde hair as gently as a lover. Abruptly, he twisted her hair in his fingers, balled his hand into a fist and jerked her upright in the chair anchoring her there, then he pressed the gun against her temple and pinned her head between the chair and the gun in his other hand. The barrel was pressed so hard against her head that I could see the dent it made in her flesh, pressure resisted by the soft tissue of her head. He let her hair fall loose and took the capsule of Secanol from between his front teeth with his free hand. He forced the capsule between her lips and smiled sadistically when she swallowed it. He took the pistol away from her head and put it into the back of his waistband.
The woman asked for permission to use the toilet, her words were slurred and she mumbled. He grunted and she opened her bloody mouth to show him that the capsule had been swallowed as if she’d done this ritual a hundred times. She cowered under his steely gaze and slunk into the bathroom, closing the door quietly behind her, never once lifting her head. “Fuckin’ women,” the man said as if disgusted. The whole scene had taken only two or three minutes, but time stretched itself out into what seemed an eternity. I felt sick, dizzy, overwhelmed. I avoided his face, terrified that if I made eye contact with him he would turn his rage toward me. He told Michael he would be back in a few minutes with the money and that we should wait there. He turned on his heel and the sound of the hard soles of his boots hammered on the steps and faded down the walkway.
“Is he gone?” The bathroom door opened a crack and a swollen eye peered out at me. “Yes,” I replied. “Please help me, please. He’s trying to kill me he wants me to overdose and die. Please,” she pleaded; tears streamed down her cheek mixing with her blood when they flowed to the level of the oozing from the crimson slit in her bruised lower lip and cheek. She opened the door and surveyed the room as if she wasn’t sure he had really gone. I reiterated that she needed to get out of that place, we all knew he was returning and would in all likelihood resume his morning amusement of torment.
When I suggested she call the police, an even greater terror filled her face. She shook her head and asked me to call a cab. My fingers felt like dead wood as I struggled with the phone book on the stand beneath the phone. I couldn’t remember that they were listed under “Taxicabs,” and my search for “Cabs” netted nothing. “Taxi,” she urged me on. I flipped to the Ts and found the number for Yellow Cab. My hand shook violently as I forced the dial to make its slow rotation with each number, “Come on, Come on,” I begged the inert piece of plastic and metal. Finally a voice at the other end of the line responded cheerily. The battered woman, now that I could see her, was no more than a girl my age. She croaked out her address. “Please, hurry,” I said, “this is an emergency.” “We’ll do the best we can ma’am,” the cheery voice answered. “Thank you,” I said and put the phone down in its cradle.
We all went out onto the porch. Within a few minutes the cab pulled up in front of the house, and the woman, as if she had been shot from a cannon, raced to the curbside, and opened the cab door shouting, “GO. GO.” She jumped in and slammed the door behind her. The cab pulled away from the curb before the rear door was closed. The driver had seen her condition and evidently feared for his own safety. The woman never looked back. Michael and I went back inside the house.
After a while the man came back empty handed, he had been unable to raise funds for bail. He asked, “Where’s the woman?” I kept my eyes downcast and heard Michael reply, “She left.” I suppressed the urge to run and moved the instant Michael took my arm and guided me to the front door and out onto the porch. As we descended the stairs I could hear him repeat, “Fuckin’ women. Shit.”
I never looked back.
