© Mike Guardabascio
I could smell the crack burning when I got back to the Shelter with that day's supplies—and I knew we'd probably lost Philip. There's a tipping point in every battle with addiction, where you either begin the long climb back to sanity, or plummet straight down without pausing again to look back. The kid had been clinging to that balance for two days, since the last time Rod and I shook him straight, and it smelled like he'd made his move. I parted the hibiscus branches and stepped off the sidewalk—the Shelter wasn't much, just bare dirt behind the bushes, and room enough for the three of us to sleep safely tucked out of sight. The enclosure was empty, except for a few discarded beer cans and candy wrappers—as a rule, we liked to keep it clean. There was no sign of Philip, but the sweet-bleach scent lingered, and I knew he'd been there.
A rustling to the right caught my attention, and I jumped back out onto the sidewalk, to see Philip running crookedly down the street, east towards the college where I knew he was scoring in the dorm hallways. A bicyclist had to swerve into traffic to avoid him—I opened my mouth to shout, "Philip!" after him, but realized how many cars with open windows were idling between us, waiting on the signal. I closed my mouth. The late afternoon sun was pointed at the back of my neck like a sniper rifle, and my legs were already rubber from walking all day. I wouldn't have had the energy to chase Philip down even if he hadn't been cracked out. There was nothing for me to do but get back inside, out of the heat, and hope he came back before it got dark. I was sure he wouldn’t.
* * *
We had always called our little nook the Shelter, because that's what it was. We wouldn't call it a home, because it wasn't one, any more than the homeless shelters downtown were capable of actually sheltering you. Home isn't where the heart is—and I never bought the downtown shelter bullshit about the homeless being at home everywhere. Rod, Philip and I had all had homes once—not just places we slept every night, but places where we kept our shit. Cabinets, toilets, sinks—that's what a home is. You're stuck with your heart regardless.And the Shelter was blessed with none of those amenities, though we had designated an isolated clearing through the bushes ten yards east as our pissing spot (all shitting was to be done at the Borders on Bellflower, which was staffed entirely by liberal arts students who lacked the heart or the venom to roust us from the stall, depending on your perspective). Other than that one luxury (and a spot to take a leak without a cop jamming his nightstick up your ass was a luxury), the Shelter was unspectacular aside from its location. We were protected from eyesight (and the noise of PCH traffic) on all sides, closed in by four walls of hibiscus bushes that lines PCH from 7th to Anaheim. Our spot was located just a minute from Anaheim, and the 24-hour convenience of a 7-11. There was an adjacent taco shack that had 50-cent fish tacos during happy hour, and if you hadn't gotten anything in your cup by then, you could always find a student to buy you three or four. They all had so much money—it's not like when I was in college, when we ate nothing but ramen and drank nothing but Pabst.
Behind the Shelter was a slope, which reached up from the bushes to hold up a Radisson, the hotel I'd stayed in after Emily had kicked me out. The hotel staff was less forgiving than the liberal arts majors, and the bushes shielded us from them as much as from the prying eyes of passing motorists and cops. That was the trade-off. The Shelter was comfortable—none of us had ever been kicked or spit on here, and if you scored you had to go to a dealer, instead of having him hover around you. The other luxuries—a shittable toilet four blocks away, cheap tacos, generous students—all of those came from sleeping in a nice part of town. The nicer the neighborhood, the nicer your life—but the nicer the neighborhood, the harder everybody was looking for people didn't belong. And we certainly didn't belong—but we (Rod and I, at least) liked that. We like cramming the margins of society back into the middle of suburbia.
Philip—he'd start screaming if you called him Phil—was born and bred into this. The kid was a Reefer Madness producer's wet dream. He'd been an honors student living in the 'burbs on the east side—in 11th grade, he was walking home through El Dorado when a guy offered him a free gram of rock. That night, he was back with fifty bucks. Two weeks later he was sneaking his dad's vintage record collection to Fingerprints to sell them by the crate. His parents didn't fuck around—they threw him out as soon as they caught him. He bounced around for a few months before I found him at the university and brought him back to the Shelter. He was wild, and reckless, and even though Rod and I couldn’t afford the risk of having him here, we'd wanted to save him—me, because he was almost a carbon copy of my oldest son, and Rod because I'd wanted to.
"But he was fucking dangerous," I screamed at myself in my head. We couldn't keep him off rock for more than a day or two, and he was absolutely nuts when he was high, horny as a hot cat and no less diseased for the desire. He burned too bright for the invisible life we were living here.
I dug into the dirt with my thumb, and scooped a handful of loose soil out—I looked at Philip's setup. He'd cooked on a goddamn plastic spoon again—I told him not to do that. Easy way to end up more fucked up than you wanted to be. I picked the warped utensil up, and turned it over, examining it. It looked like modern art. Maybe it was. Maybe I could walk to Wendy's and grab a bunch of spoons, and knives, and sporks, and torch them with Rod's lighter—I could put them on exhibit. The papers would love it—homeless artist sculpts from trash. "One man's trash is another's masterpiece…" I could tell the story about Philip, and my sons, on Oprah—I'd be so rich, I'd be so fucking rich, I could buy Rod and me a house. Fuck, I could buy Emily's house from her, I could call her sister and tell her everything, I could—
Stupid. So stupid—practicality pierced my fantasy, as always, and wounded it mortally. Imagine—telling someone in person that the fucking spoon was art. Imagine. I folded the spoon up and dropped it into the little hole I'd dug, then dragged the dirt back over it with my boot and tamped it down. I took the time to smooth the dirt with my hands, to make the ground look perfect again. Philip…why wasn't there anything anyone could do to pull people up when they'd fallen?
The bush behind me rustled, and I jumped up startled—it was Rod. "It's okay," he said, putting down a white plastic bag and holding his hands out to me, palms open.
"What are you doing coming in that way? Did the manager see you?"
Rod put his hands on my shoulders, and his warm, sweaty forehead against mine, clammy and cool. "Shhh honey, come on. Come on."
"Stop it—I'm serious! They'll lock us up, Rod!"
He just kept shushing me—it drove me crazy when he treated me like that, like I was nuts. "Rod, I'm serious. Goddamnit, I'm serious!"
"Shhh, shhh, it's okay. Tell me what happened."
"Philip! It was Philip. He was smoking—he ran away when I got home. I think he's gone—I think we lost him."
Rod frowned, his big, brown eyes opening wider. "Honey, we lost Philip a long time ago. You know that."
"But—"
"Come on. Come on, you know that." He hugged me, pressing my forehead against his shoulder, firmly. I stopped trying to explain it to him and started crying, so frustrated I could barely breathe, letting the smell of his sweat and his filthy shirt flood through my lungs and drive the smell of Philip away.
* * *
We drank the tall boys I'd bought at the 7-11 and talked, as the setting sun turned the sky beyond the branches orange and red. It wasn't a good talk. I loved Rod, and he loved me—but sometimes we got confused, and we couldn’t tell who was being crazy.Rod, who was ten years older than me (almost 50), was a product of Ronald Reagan. When the Gipper was governor of California, he'd closed all the public mental institutions in the state, turning thousands of unbalanced people out onto the streets—Rod was one of them. He'd been institutionalized by his wife shortly after their wedding, when he wouldn’t stop talking to himself. It was, admittedly, an annoying habit of his but six days out of seven, he was fine when he was with me. And six days out of seven, I was fine with him—but sometimes our seventh days overlapped.
"So," I asked as I handed him his another Pabst. "Anything good today?"
He snorted. "Guy coming off the 405 gave me a two-dollar bill."
"A two-dollar bill. Is it fake?"
Rod smiled and shook his head. "No, honey, they're real. The government hasn't printed them for a while, but it's still real money."
"No, I know they used to make them, I just mean, is the one he gave you real or fake."
"How the fuck should I know? What the fuck do I look like, the Chairmen of the Fed?" He was getting angry. "The 7-11 took it, so I guess it's real. Here." He reached into the plastic bag and pulled out four bananas, and a Naked juice—an extravagance, but affordable if he'd really gotten two bucks from a single car. Rod and I were very scurvy-conscious, and tried to eat as much fruit as we could scrounge, even if it meant a few extra trips to Borders every week.
Sitting cross-legged in the dirt, facing each other, we polished off the six-pack and tore into the food, splitting the bananas and taking turns sipping the juice, eyeing each other to make sure nobody was taking more than their share. The night deepened outside the Shelter, the hum of traffic breaking apart into stray buzzes—overhead, high above us, the Radisson sign kicked on loudly. Other than that, it was quiet—it took a long time to get used to how quiet it was on the street, the absence of a home's white noise—no refrigerator, or television in the other room, or electricity.
When we'd finished, it felt later than it probably was—it was starting to get a little colder every week, the sun was going down a little earlier each day. Rod stared at me, like I was a collection of puzzle pieces he was sizing up before starting to put them together. "So," he said, carefully placing the peels and cans into the plastic bag. "You said you saw Philip."
I chose my words carefully. "Yes. He was cooking up when I got home. Took off towards campus when he heard me coming."
"Honey, you know we haven't seen Philip in a few months, right?"
Again, I took my time answering. Rod could get confused sometimes—this wasn't the first time he'd thought Philip had disappeared. But he could get defensive—and sometimes it was easier to slowly try to bring him back. "Sure. But, he was here today, Rod, I saw him."
"It would just seem…strange, to see him here again, after all that time, don't you think?"
"I saw him Rod. He was burning rock right there, where you're sitting."
"Where's his works, honey?" Rod asked quietly. "If he was here, where's his works? What did you do, clean up after him?"
My face turned red—he was going to be difficult. I didn't need him to be difficult right now. "Yeah, I did. He cooked on a plastic spoon, like I was always warning them never to do, and it made me so mad I buried it." He opened his mouth, but I knew what he was going to ask. "And no, I don't remember where, alright. But I'll dig this whole fucking place up if it would shut your mouth."
"Honey—"
"Goddamnit, stop it! I'm not crazy Rod—you're the one who was in the fucking nuthouse." As I said it I knew what was going to happen, and he sprang at me from his crouch, punching me in the right ear and pinning me down in the dirt, making my eyes tear as he slapped me over and over. There was no point in fighting back—my body was wasted compared to Rod's, and if I tried to fight him back he'd just end up forcing me into a hospital, which neither of us wanted. As always, he turned himself off after a minute, and slumped back onto the ground, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes. I stood up and dusted myself off, moving my arms and legs slowly and taking deep breaths, checking for broken ribs, or anything else I couldn't just sleep off.
"I'm going to bed," Rod said, in a dead tone. He put the trash back in the plastic bag and leaned it against the Shelter's widest trunk, to remind himself to throw it away the next day, then he unfolded our blanket (a discarded comforter we'd found last Spring after all the college kids had moved out for the Summer), and lay down under it. It was a queen, so it was big enough for both of us—I sighed, and climbed beneath it, under my side. He fell asleep right away, but I lay awake for what felt like a very long time, listening to the sign and the bugs and the occasional car, and Rod's breathing, and wishing, on my back in the dirt, that there were stars above me instead of hibiscus branches and the orange glow of the Radisson.
* * *
I woke to someone kicking me in the side, and I was immediately terrified that Rod had turned a corner—I'd always known I wouldn't be able to stop him if he did. But it was Philip standing over me, shaking, the Radisson sign making a silhouette out of him as he lunged down on top of me, straddling me at my waist as he grabbed me by the shoulders and shook, rattling me as hard as his need was rattling him. He was talking so fast I couldn't hear anything he was saying, and I tried to reach over to shake Rod, but my arms were pinned at my side.Still spitting and hissing, he headbutted me, and my vision went black for a second as he clawed at me, digging his hands into my pants, trying to find money—which I never carried on me. I lay perfectly still, my breath caught in my throat—I tried to shout to Rod but couldn't force any sound more than a rasp. Philip stopped trying to rob me, and started shaking me again—I was so scared I started crying, as he spat over and over, "Save-me save-me save-me." He was sobbing too, his eyes pleading and reaching out to me like lighthouses of need, boring an abyss into my forehead. I was sure he was going to kill me, just to put all that pain into someone else, if even for a second.
Then with one high, long keen, he jumped off me and ran away. Unable to stop myself, I stood to follow him—Rod still slept soundly on the ground. Gingerly, I crept out of the enclosure, and looked up and down the sidewalk. It was the dead of night, and there were no cars on the street—there was no Philip either. He was gone. It was at least an hour before the sun was going to come back up—it was beautiful, the street, with nobody on it. It was the first time I'd stood on it without being afraid, and I'd never realized how beautiful it was.
Part of me wanted to go sprinting into the dark. To leave Rod and the Shelter and my own fear behind and go find Philip, to cling to him and clutch him to me, to force him to rise into the sky with me, or to crash into the ground with him. To explode from the cracks and the margins into the center of the page, even if we could only stay there for a day. There was a time when I would have gone—but it wasn't this morning. And the change didn't come from age, or AA, or a priest. It was different now because my legs were too tired for running. And that was all.
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