Fogtown (12 page)

A monk making the rounds mistakenly believed the property manager had nodded off and tapped him on the shoulder. The brown robe stood at the table and said, not unkindly, “I’m sorry, lad, but there’s no dozing in the dining room. It’s against the house rules. If you need a good kip, take it elsewhere.”

“I ain’t sleeping, father,” Jeeter protested. “I’m resting. I’ve been working hard lately. I’m pooped out.”

“Have you been doing the Lord’s work?”

“Each and every day. You wouldn’t believe it if I told you, but the truth is, I do his dirty work.”

The obese priest lanced Jeeter with an unsparing squint. The cleric’s eyes were pellets of straw-colored clay; his shabby robe was rough and
woolly. His fingernails were black with dirt. His breath was vile with port wine. “Whatever you do, son, contain your conceit, and always keep the name of Jesus in your thoughts.”

“I always do, padre,” Jeeter replied as the priest moved on to monitor the patrons at another table. “He’s in my receipt book. Him and all the other damn reprobates who owe me money.”

Trailing in the priest’s wake, Mama Celeste cropped up at Jeeter’s table. She put the shoebox on the tabletop and waited until she knew what she wanted to say. Jeeter Roche took advantage of her silence and kissed his lips with his teeth. He put his elbows on the paperback, made a steeple with his fingers and said, “Well, if it isn’t Mama Celeste. We’ve run into each other twice in one day. What a privilege. Care to sit down?”

Mama was too proud to be seated in his presence. “No.”

“You want something from me?” he asked.

She stated her claim. “You said you’d evict me.”

“Are you referring to us talking this morning?”

“Damn right I am.”

Gorged on fiction and powdered eggs, a meal fit for a king, Jeeter undid the top button of his jeans and settled back in his seat. “Don’t take things out of context, Mama. I said I’d have to evict you if you didn’t pay the rent on time. The law requires me to do that. It’s not my choice.”

Mama put her hands on the table. “Don’t feed me that saccharine. You said you’d throw me out.”

“That’s untrue. I never said that.”

“You know what?”

Jeeter hesitated. “Tell me, I’m all ears.”

“You’re a goddamn liar.”

Jeeter wasn’t happy to hear this. His credibility as a drug dealer hinged on his popularity. Someone calling him a liar wasn’t good publicity. Someone doing it in Saint Anthony was akin to murder. That was another thing he’d learned in the pen. What other folks thought of you was dire. But he was a landlord. He took people’s
hard-earned money from them and they hated him. There were only a few things you could count on in life. There was the sun in the morning. There was the moon at night. There was the rent you had to pay until the end of time, and there was Jeeter at your door to collect it. It was a contrary position to be in. He said, “Mama, do you read books?”

Mama Celeste glared at him. Dreadlocks cascaded over her shoulders. “Don’t give me that flimflam. I read the newspaper and
Reader’s Digest.”

“Me reading books smartened up my ass. If you don’t pay the rent, what am I supposed to do, pay it for you?”

Mama banged her fist on the landlord’s plate of food. “I ain’t asking you to pay nothing for me. I got money.”

Powdered egg bits rocketed off the plate and onto Jeeter’s goose down vest. Keeping his temper, he said, “Then what’s the damn holdup? May I remind you, that as we speak, you still owe me for this week?”

“I know that.”

“Then where’s your money? The rent is due.”

“You didn’t have to threaten me. I have rights, damn it.”

The acne scars on Jeeter’s cheeks pulsed with blood. He calmed himself by putting his hand on the paperback. He had an insatiable longing to return to the country the author had created. There were gorgeous women in it. Beautiful nights. Lovely flowers were everywhere. It had to be a better place than Saint Anthony Dining Room.

“Rights?” he said. “Wise up, Mama. You don’t have any rights. Nobody does. You have choices. That’s all you have. And you made the wrong one. I didn’t make you not pay the rent. You did what you did out of your own volition. That’s democracy.”

Democracy was a concept most folks didn’t understand. Like the dude Jeeter had sold thirty-seven hits of acid to last month. The guy was a friend of a friend. Seemed like a responsible adult. Paid cash, which was always good. Then Jeeter received word through the grapevine the dunce had transported the hallucinogenic across state lines and had gotten busted in Texas. The LSD had been blue-double-dome,
250 micrograms a tab. Not the finest product on the market. There was talk about it being speedy. But the bottom line was that the fellow didn’t have to buy the acid. He didn’t have to go to Texas with it. And it was his own fault if he was in prison doing eight years for possession of an illegal substance.

Mama Celeste rebuked him. “There are laws on my side.”

“Be real,” Jeeter ridiculed. “You know better than that. We’re talking about the Allen Hotel. What law? There isn’t any. If you want to keep a roof over your head, you’d better play ball with me.”

“You’re a rotten dog for saying that.”

Her condemnation of Jeeter Roche rang out across the dining room with the clarity of a finely delivered trumpet solo. A security guard built along the lines of a heavyweight boxer overheard them and came over to the table to find out what it was about. He got in between Jeeter and Mama and said, “What’s going on here?”

Mama stamped her foot. The shoebox jumped an inch off the tabletop. She put her hand on the lid to keep the money from flying out. “Not a damn thing. Him and me are discussing something. Mind your own business.”

The guard was taken aback by her miff and puffed out his chest. “This is my business.”

“No, it ain’t.” Mama was losing it and the sensation was delicious. “We’re having a private conversation, me and this creep. We don’t need you in on it.”

“You.” The guard waggled a hairy finger at Jeeter. “What’s your story?”

Jeeter relished what he was about to say. He arched his eyebrows in feigned innocence, tilted his head, and pouted, “I don’t know this broad. Never seen her before in my life. I was just sitting here eating my fucking eggs and reading my damn book and she came up to me and started to bug me. Accused me of all kinds of shit, really hassling me.”

“That’s a lie,” Mama blurted. “Don’t make like you don’t know me, you bald-headed motherfucker.”

“Lady, enough already,” the guard said. “We can’t have you causing shit. It’s against the rules. This is the property of the Catholic Church. You can’t do that in here.”

The security guard swept Mama Celeste off her feet and dragged her away from the table. Pinning her and the shoebox in a bear hug, he hauled the old woman out of the cafeteria and up the loading ramp to the street, dumping her by the garbage cans on the sidewalk. Saint Anthony maintenance workers were hosing down the pavement, the signal that it was time to push on.

Slowly pulling herself together, Mama moseyed onto lower Jones Street. Every inch of sidewalk was packed with homeless men and women and their dogs and shopping carts. The burned-out hulk of an Oldsmobile without any windows and chrome was at the intersection. The hood was up, the engine gone. Huddled in a doorway was a cluster of Salvadoreño youths talking and drinking wine. Flocks of sea gulls rose and fell over the telephone lines.

As Mama Celeste strolled to Market Street, the wind chased bits of paper. The sun was bivouacked behind two black clouds serrated by the fog. She buttoned the army coat and glanced at the darkening sky. Her mien was distant. She had to find a bathroom quickly.

T
HE AFTERNOON MOVED ON
, galloping toward sundown. The trees, buildings, and automobiles along Market Street were pink, gray, and black. In the smoggy distance was the Maria Alicia Apartments, a three-storied stucco low-income housing project. An SRO hotel used to be at the site—the Gartland Apartments—but it was destroyed in an arson-related fire in December 1975. Twelve residents died in the conflagration. Seventeen others were never found. People said the landlord did it, but nobody could prove it.

Waiting for his wife to emerge from Martuni’s Lounge, a Market Street bar, a vexed Jeeter Roche analyzed his marriage. Chiclet had been getting loaded all day long. First the Valium and now Placidyl, a controlled substance classified as a hypnotic. She had downed two pills an hour ago, and when she didn’t feel them right away, she took two more. Then it hit her all at once.

How long had him and Chiclet been married, a couple of months? How she carried on, dabbling in dope and messing around with that idiot Stiv Wilkins—as if it was a secret—Jeeter could swear it had been a century. Maybe the age difference between them was the problem. Jeeter had a good twenty-five years on Chiclet, most of them spent in prison.

To complicate things, Chiclet didn’t share his love for literature. Books bored her and this pained Jeeter to no end. He couldn’t tell his woman about the Brazilian writer Amado. Couldn’t tell her about a
world that was better than getting high, and better than the one they were living in.

Jeeter saw a police car jet east on Market Street. The cruiser ran the red light on Gough Street, and then the red light on Franklin Street. The sole thing him and her ever talked about was the price of weed. That was his fault. After all he provided the dope and the money and kept her in the drug room to look after their enterprise.

His reverie was cut short as Chiclet, fixing her makeup, paraded out of the bar. The green anorak she had on was skanky and marked with cigarette burns. A quartet of pimples tattooed her chin. Her hair was mussed, draggling over her nose, and getting in the way as she applied cobalt blue lipstick to her mouth.

Richard Rood studied the dope dealer and his wife from behind a parked Saturn sedan. They were a diorama of white people and their problems. He could see them in a museum of the future: urban primitives and their mating rites. They were fools is what they were. He gobbled at them, his gravelly voice carrying across the street: “Yo, baby, yo.”

Jeeter froze when he heard Rood. Nothing was worse than that man. Not pestilence. Not disease. Not starvation. Not even death. Too bad the black dealer wasn’t a figment of his imagination, the aftermath of taking too many drugs and seeing too many things that weren’t there. “Goddamn it,” he said to Chiclet, pinching her arm. “We’ve got company.”

Eating up the asphalt in his Timberland boots, Richard Rood made a beeline toward the Allen’s property manager. His eyes were somber. His fists were balled. Four inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter than the white man, he transmitted enough hatred to scare the heebie-jeebies out of Jeeter Roche.

Richard gazed at Jeeter, targeting him with a reptilian stare that had taken thousands of hours to perfect in front of a mirror. “I’ve been looking for you, boy. Been wanting to talk to your ass.”

Jeeter was in a lightweight North Face goose down parka held together with duct tape. Corralling his emotions into a semblance
of coolness, he twisted his chapped lips and answered, “I could care fucking less. You know why?”

“Why?”

“You were at my house earlier and you were messing with Chiclet, you turd, that’s why. What the fuck is wrong with you? You lost your mind or what?”

Richard was terse. “You got something to say about it?”

Jeeter could smell the shabbiness of Richard’s patent leather suit. “Yeah, I do. This is my wife we’re talking about. What did you have to freak her out for? It was unnecessary. You’re out of line.”

Richard was nonchalant and hawked a lunger on the ground. “I didn’t do nothing untowardly to her.”

“Bullshit.” Jeeter was excited. “You were trying to intimidate her.”

“Who says? That cow?” Richard Rood picked his nose and then motioned at Chiclet. “She’s all high.”

Jeeter’s goose down parka billowed in the wind. “You seriously suck, dude. You’ve got no respect for nobody or nothing. You’re an animal.”

“Too bad.” Richard spread his arms, indicating serenity. “You dig me?” Nourished by the mounting acrimony, he offered an invitation. It seemed like the manly thing to do. Move the debate to a higher level. A tremor of undiluted hate blanched his face when he said, “You want to fight?”

Jeeter flung the parka on the sidewalk like a bullfighter’s cape. “Hell, yeah. I can’t have you dogging my old lady.”

Taking the initiative was Jeeter’s first mistake. The combatants squared off under the streetlights and Richard made contact. He lashed out at Jeeter, feinting left hooks, and connecting with right jabs in the gut, all the while saying, “C’mon, you want a piece of me? What are you waiting for?”

Jeeter retreated a pace, windmilling his arms. Getting jabbed in the stomach hurt. Made him want to toss his cookies. He wasn’t ready for no boxing match—and that became his second mistake. Richard snapped off a punch that clipped Jeeter on the nose; a gout
of blood streamed from the white dealer’s nostrils as he rocked back on his heels.

Richard Rood crowed, “You gonna cry, little pussy? You want your mommy?”

Afraid that Jeeter would get pulverized, Chiclet stepped in between Richard and her husband. Her neck was buried to the chin in a cashmere scarf. The anorak’s upturned collar scalloped her high-boned cheeks. The wind coming off the street had burned her skin crimson red. She placed a hand on her hip and said to Richard Rood, “What do you want from me and Jeeter?”

Richard dropped his fists and targeted her with a disingenuous smile. A smile that had several subtexts: repugnance, interest, and abhorrence. He schooled his eyes on Chiclet’s body with undisguised and scientific interest. He’d never been with a woman. Not in the Biblical sense. Technically, he was a virgin. Wouldn’t know a vagina if it hit him in the face. Personally speaking, he was a child of sodomy.

He examined her breasts, their roundness showing through a ratty cardigan ski sweater. He appraised the lines of her buttocks bunched inside a pair of melon pink capris. He measured the narrowness of her ankles and the Indian sandals on her feet, the emerald green nail polish on her toenails. She was as queer to him as an alien from another galaxy.