Sisterhood of the infamo.., p.22
Sisterhood of the Infamous, page 22
I tried to look into the cut, but his flesh was so bloated; his body had long since gone to work to close up the wound and protect against infection. I could not see much, but I could guess at the depth of the cut and the amount of exertion likely applied to whatever sharp object had exacted it. What I could not see were the layers of skin, muscle, and connective tissue that had been violated, but still the injury was impressive, monumental. I could tell from the swelling and the devastation it wrought. I knew the man would lose his hand and his livelihood, regardless of whether he worked with his hands, though it was clear he was not trapped in any humane or white-collar profession. He had a jacket but only a T-shirt underneath, and his blue jeans were as fecund as his bandage. But if he lost his hand there’d be no reentry into polite society because a missing hand is the end of an acceptable appearance. He’d be a freak, a mutant, and irredeemably homeless. I told the man he’d get sepsis if he kept playing with the bandage. He grunted.
I told him how the skin would turn green and begin to peel; his fingers would go numb and the entire appendage would break off as though it belonged to a hollow, papier-mâché puppet. That he’d be lucky with only that, because the sickness might travel in the other direction, up his arm, and render it dead and contagious. I told him he needed antibiotics and clean dressings, but he said, “I’m hungry.” There was a convenience store down the block, and I tried to take him by his other hand, swollen with dirt and callouses, but he shook me off and headed in the direction of the store.
His voice was too vague in volume, barely intelligible, but he knew what he wanted. Nuts and beef jerky: I bought as much as he could carry, and a bottle of whiskey, so he could disinfect the cut—that was as close as I was going to get him to medical attention, besides the other twenty bucks I slid into his jacket sleeve before he walked me back to the bus stop. That’s when I decided all my money was going to the homeless. I wasn’t sick then. I had beaten everything my body had thrown at me, every habit and every weakness. I kept to a diet and exercise after working on all those cancer studies. I knew the odds and the causes. I knew what to avoid, in which contexts, and the amounts I could conceivably tolerate. I was keeping to all the limits. My decision had nothing to do with redemption or making a name for myself. It was as pure an act as I will ever carry out. Now that I’m dying, I can be assured of my legacy.
I had a lot more money when I made my decision. I had a lot more money when I was healthy. Cash, certificates of deposit, T-bills, mutual funds, and the stock that our grandparents had purchased for us at birth, although my sister squandered hers. AT&T, thousands of shares, purchased for nothing and now worth five figures at least. Our grandparents wanted us to have old money, stable money, money that just multiplied upon itself like a disease to inoculate ourselves with. They wanted to ensure we would never be hungry and never be homeless. As long as we owned a piece of corporate America, they figured, we wouldn’t have to resort to shoplifting or prostitution. My grandparents had faith—more than I had. I kept only so much money in my cash accounts so that I’d be covered by the FDIC. Hadn’t they learned anything from the Depression? Wasn’t the stock market volatile and irrational on occasion, a finicky barometer for the health of the economy? Perhaps they remained naïve about money. But stock became respectable again. Or it became an acceptable risk. It separated the potentially marginal from the completely naked. Perhaps they thought they could buy the next generation out of venereal diseases and public shame. That’s what they must have thought when we were born and when we were still babies.
Once they died, we were free to spend that money. My sister squandered her stock. She sold it for rent money, for plane tickets, for affecting the kind of luxury that is merely temporary: facials, massages, and experimental treatments on her tired muscles. I imagine there must have been some clothes, evening gowns, as if she were going to the Academy Awards and sitting in the front row with the biggest stars, sure to be on camera. She must have burned right through that money as if she were a club kid. I know about dancers. I know they’re all cokeheads. My sister and I never talked about money until I got sick, and I had to write a will. I told her she wasn’t going to be in it. She said she was fine with that, but she wanted me to leave something to my niece, her daughter. She did not say what or how much.
I thought, for a while, this might be a good idea. Generous, practical, rational in the eyes of our friends and what is left of our family. My sister and her husband, who called himself a musician but never played a concert or composed anything, certainly couldn’t provide for my niece. They were hustlers, though in New York I suspect there was some prestige to this. Lining up gigs, going on auditions, bartering their services for babysitters or preschool fees. They were artists. If they hadn’t been artists, though, they would have been losers: the unskilled, undereducated people who hung on to their dreams too long; adolescents in their forties, nearing fifties, without pots to piss in. And this includes their rent-controlled apartment. But if you put “artist” before or after someone’s name, it changes everything. She’s got carte blanche with museums, banquets, lectures, and universities. My sister and her husband, another artist, are not poor. They are dedicated and self-sacrificing. Their friends will stage a benefit—they’ll put on a show in a donated concert hall or a dormant Broadway stage—if they get sick or when they have to retire because of age or infirmity. My sister said of course she wanted her daughter to go to college; she didn’t want her to lead the life that she had. But who was going to pay for it?
Not me. Because I knew what leaving money to my niece meant: making my sister a trustee. Putting her in charge of whatever I willed to my niece. The money would be gone before she could spend it. Or before they could spend it on her education. A private school, a summer camp, or piano or guitar lessons: no. It would have disappeared, turned into vapors, by the time my niece was old enough to understand that she’d been given an inheritance. By the time she could decide what she wanted to do with it. If her mother ever bothered to tell her that it existed. There was one other possibility, leaving my sister’s husband in charge. I could have made him executor of the estate. He could have drawn a salary. And he could have been my niece’s trustee. I would have done it even though technically he’s a pianist like Jasmine was though he had been classically trained and still practiced relentlessly. Then I remembered overhearing something he said about my acts of charity. He said they were nowhere near as random as I thought they were, and they were too showy and too much about me. I should have realized this would come from the man who had chosen to marry my sister. She exacted a pull on him that could only have been doubled on my niece, and I said no. No to all three of them. No to the remains of my family.
I have to pay a percentage to the conservator, but the homeless are getting whatever is left. I can’t keep track. Already I’ve given away so much: to the man with the swollen hand, a woman named Flora, the shingles lady, and Jimmy Stixx and his girlfriend, Leesa. He had a girlfriend, but he couldn’t live with her, or the landlord might find out, raise the rent, and then she’d also be homeless. And homelessness is not for unmarried couples, Leesa said. It’s only for wives, mothers, and maybe old ladies, because they’re either already owned, or they can’t be. The competition for possessions, the human kind, is just too savage.
Leesa told me all about it when I wrote the check out to her, because Jimmy couldn’t take a check. He had no identification. The homeless are not big on identification to begin with. They’ve renounced their driver’s licenses and their insurance cards and trashed their report cards and tax records, if they ever had any tax records. The papers that make us citizens—birth certificates and vaccination charts—what makes us whole, valid participants, equals, or something other than wax figurines placed between the bright and beautiful so they might have to watch their steps, not trip over the scenery—all of that stuff had been burned, immolated for these people. The commitment to homelessness is total.
The homeless prefer aliases. They’re big on aliases and the things that happen to their bodies: teeth that crack or barely cling to the gums, their fractured ribs, their jaundiced skin, and their diseased blood. They’re very big on dermatological conditions. Swarms of fungi, scabies, and impetigo. It’s in the blankets and mattresses at the shelters, or they pick up these scourges from encampments, tarps shared as bed covers, or cardboard for living quarters. Water pools on their sunken tents, and they wash their faces in it. I’ve seen trench foot, particularly among men. They always manage to find that one damp spot in Los Angeles, a toxic oasis in the stucco desert. The dampness turns their feet to paper, then to pulp, then dust vaguely organized with hair and nails.
The homeless live in a reverse world, or the opposite of everything that is Los Angeles. They’ve stopped caring about appearances, associates, the neighborhoods they came from, the people they grew up with; they’ve stopped caring about food. They assume they’ll go hungry. They plan on it. This is their power, the core of their resistance. I took Flora to a steakhouse and she wanted a hot dog. I took her to Carney’s on the Sunset Strip, and she wanted steak. I bought her a steak sandwich at a deli, but she was afraid her teeth would fall out if she tried to bite into it. The only meal she ever enjoyed with me came with a Bloody Mary she didn’t drink; it was the celery that amazed her, cold and crunchy at the back of her mouth. The homeless don’t dream of heat and hot water in their dreams, the reveries of the infamous. They dream about refrigeration, creating their weather. Or maybe celery doesn’t keep well in Dumpsters.
The shingles lady: the first time I saw her, it was in the parking lot of a grocery store. The next time, she was panhandling a few blocks west in front of a restaurant. The restaurant let me bring her inside because they’d never seen her before, but they said we had to leave her bags at the coat check. They never let us back in again after that. The shingles lady shuffled between several locations. I couldn’t always keep track of them. They changed without notice, from the Valley to West Hollywood. She got around somehow, without my help: I never let a homeless person in my car. I never drove them anywhere. I never approached the teenagers I saw if they were alone. There were always witnesses. I wasn’t stupid, though I was unaware, incapable of anticipating how fickle they could be in their tastes, needs, and modus operandi. The shingles lady switched up her outfits, from a cowboy hat and boots to gloves and a snood. In winter she wore skirts and T-shirts as if she were a hippie; in summer a bomber’s jacket she occasionally wore inside out. What she feared most was being recognized. Recognition is the last thing the homeless want.
I didn’t have to do what I did. I didn’t have to buy the shingles lady tampons, but I knew they were what she wanted; so she could wear underwear again and pants, too. I didn’t have to buy Flora a raincoat, but she said she could make it into a lean-to if necessary; so it worked double duty. I could have volunteered at a soup kitchen or made donations. But then the homeless would have just been numbers to me, like the tumors I counted on one of my research projects. Count, or be counted, it turns out. Some people count more than others. The ones who appear on our televisions, in our magazines, and in the movies: they count the most. They are more than numbers; they are points of aspiration. We are confronted by them so often, in so many different contexts, that we have no choice but to inculcate them into our minds and our subconscious. From there they tell us how well we measure up and how deep and depraved are our failures. We—the no-talent, overfed, and underappreciated; we—the statistics, combed through on the census tracks, whose numbers never rise high enough for any Gallup poll; those of us without box office takes, Nielsen ratings, or a spot on the Billboard Hot 100. The homeless, meanwhile, number in the hundreds or the thousands, in amounts no one can count accurately as if they were stars, infinite galaxies, or the mutations cancer cells are capable of. They live on the edge of the great insatiable pit of loneliness, and they make no secret of it. They are done acting cool, knowing what is hip, being on the up and up or in the loop; they are finished acquiring possessions, positions, Brownie points, or star stickers. They are done getting and spending, fucking, and stargazing. Now that’s punk if you’re asking. That’s authentic and authentic suffering.
The homeless are my people, though I am forced to admit I am not one of them. I know this because I will be counted at least twice when I die, which is more than any homeless person is counted. I know this because of how I used to count cancers, breast by breast, always totaling into an odd number. When I found an even number of cancers, I knew I had done something wrong or that a woman was struck twice; perhaps in the same breast, perhaps in both of them. I’d have to go back to the documentation, research other databases, and figure out whether someone’s cancer had already been previously recorded in another epidemiological study. Once when I was counting, I discovered someone I knew, the mother of one of my sister’s ballet friends. She was an actress and then a photographer. Her entire life was there for me to summarize and record for posterity, as if getting cancer were her only accomplishment. Certainly it will be that way for me, several times over.
I will be counted once for my breast, and one or more times for this jungle of metastases: the right hipbone, lungs, spleen, brain, and liver. Whether each incidence of cancer will get its due recognition is up to the doctors and who wants to be responsible for what. Some of my cancers have already been registered through scans, biopsies, studies, and that last, formal declaration of surrender: the tumors were inoperable. At the end the medical examiner will take out these organs, weigh them, and find them hollow. The cancer may not have fully consumed them, but their innards have been chewed, as if sampled, then spit out. The cancer is always looking for something more to its taste, complex and succulent.
When I told Jimmy Stixx I wouldn’t be seeing him anymore because I was sick, because I was dying, he didn’t say what everybody else said. He didn’t say he was sorry or I shouldn’t talk that way, that attitude was everything, or that I could extend my life in precious days and months if I got myself right with the world. He didn’t say that I should think about all that time I had left, and all the wonderful things I’d be able to fill it with. “What can I do?” is what he said. He gave me his girlfriend’s telephone number; so I could call if I needed him. He almost gave me his denim jacket, the one with the Rolling Stones logo with Charlie Watt’s autograph ripped into it. That jacket was what he had managed to preserve of his past life as a drummer and roadie. He worked on the Stones’ tours of ’72, ’75, and ’78, or so he said, although the condition of the jacket spoke in his favor. He had the autograph embroidered over so it wouldn’t fade, but the sleeves were white threads, insubstantial, skeletal from what they had been thirty years earlier. A lot like my own bones must be, I imagined. I wanted to take it from him, but I couldn’t. I also thought there might be other things he could do for me later. Much later if I remembered to ask him.
Chapter 16
The reporters wanted to know how we felt about the arrest. We hadn’t heard about the arrest; we kept the television off that night. Barb seemed to rest better without it. But we knew what to do when the doorbell went off and the telephone rang. We knew to ignore the sound of the doorframe inhaling as someone was trying to push the door in, thinking we’d just leave it unlocked and they were welcome to come in at any time. Maria and Ionie came in through the back door behind the house, where they could avoid the gauntlet of microphones and cameras set up by the front steps. There were Barb’s charts to update, and the night nurses had to be consulted. Barb had to be bathed; her patches and port had to be checked. The sheets had to be changed, and the diaper and the towel Barb slept on in case of accidents; there was the medicine to administer. I don’t know exactly how much morphine Barb was on by then, though the dosages seemed more frequent to me. Her breathing thickened, or the effort needed to complete a breath increased. Her feet shuffled, like she was running in her dreams.
We managed to get through all of the morning routine—although it was taking longer, because Barb’s joints and muscles had stiffened, like she was braced for something—until Ionie had to take the sheets to the washing machine. On her way past the window beside the front door, she saw them: the reporters, drawing closer together, and the camera and microphone crews lining up behind them.
“Who are they expecting to come out now?” she said upon returning to the bedroom. “Like we have nothing better to do than be interviewed.”
“Something must have happened,” I said. “Some new development.” I realized how much I must have sounded just like them; that I was living from one big moment to the next, strung along by the suspense. “Turn the TV on,” I said and noticed how Maria was grimacing. “Low. For just a minute.”
On the screen, there was a police officer, the front left of his uniform overtaken with badges, bars, and other decorations, talking about closure and justice. He was complimenting his colleagues and reassuring the public because the killer had been apprehended. The police official was certain they had the right man. A vagrant, a homeless man, a hobo: the police officer didn’t have much trouble coming up with ways to describe who this man was. A bum, a transient, a street person; a threat to the health and safety of the community that the LAPD is proud to have taken care of, through hard work, a lot of hours, and determination and grit. The police officer also thanked Jasmine’s neighbors, who had cooperated with the investigation, although they had identified this man as a gentle soul. They could not imagine his hurting anyone. He was the neighborhood mascot, a beggar in front of the local grocery-convenience store. He ate garbage out of the Dumpsters and panhandled in the parking lot.
