Children of Nowhere

H.R. LoBue Fine Art Photography

Written by Bernard j. Bass

          I’d always heard about those folks that spent a night in a shelter or dressed up as a homeless person only to write about it for a shared glimpse into the harsh realities of such a curious situation. Feeling their newfound view to be legitimized by a quick dip in a dirty pond, they’d write their insights in articles and newspaper columns or shoot the thing for television shows like What Would You Do? But those fuckers had a way out and there’s a mindset to that. And it’s a mindset that keeps them from the nasty, gut-wrenching nut of the whole thing. For them, they were never truly destitute. Never once was it the end of the road. When things got rough, those fuckers had a bank account and a phone. Waiting for their return home, they had a dog or a cat or a kid. They had a lover with whom to love, fuck or fight. They had a closet full of clothes and a floor to vacuum. They had a car that gave them the luxury to bitch about gas prices or money for a bus when walking was a laughable option. Those fuckers, they had a fucking home. Whichever way they’d spin it, no matter what, there was always a safety net. And mine, well my net was dead.

          The second floor of the shelter consisted of eighteen bunk beds relegated to the jobseekers and the sick. Since I was actively looking for work I’d be allowed to bunk with thirty-five others rather than share the floor with seventy-four. Wherever you slept though, the shelter required a shower before you did so and that was located on the second floor as well. So before making my way to bed every night after dinner, with a hundred plus homeless men lining their way up the stairs, I’d stand and wait for a shower.

          The shower line was a lot like the breakfast line only in every direction dirtier. Waiting to shower were scores of homeless men that had just spent over twelve hours on the streets. This was the type of line that bumped, pinched and squeezed and whatever the hell they did out there, it sure as shit wasn’t clean.

          It was my first shower line and already I’d been in it for a half hour while only making it midway up the stairs. The guy a step below me, he stared up at my face the whole time. I’d not yet have anything to occupy my attention so when I’d mistakenly look back at him he’d shoot his cankered mouth open to a split-lipped smile and instantly look away. This would happen a few times and he never once closed his eyes. It was like peek-a-boo with a toddler only really, really fucked up.

          Belts must have been hard to come by in this place because mostly everyone didn’t have one, including the guy in front of me in line. If the showers were on the first floor then the line to it at least would be level. This line however, moved its way up the stairs so the pocked and pimpled ass of the person in front me was directly in my face. Uncomfortable things packed the view of whichever way I turned my head so I leaned on the stairwell wall and counted the ceiling stains instead.

          I had finally reached the top of the stairs and was two spots away from the shower when the middle of the line erupted into greetings and cheers. Looking down I’d see a group of men circle and gather around someone who’d just been allowed to skip to the center of the line.

          “Well how the fuck you been,” one guy said.

          “What the hell happened to you,” said another.

          A younger kid approached him with an embrace and said, “Missed you, Dude.”

          The sudden celebrity smiled as he emerged from a sea of homeless hugs, his neck wrapped in a thick, white bandage. “Just got out of the hospital,” he said.

          With an arm still wrapped around the back of this guy, the young kid said, “What happened?”

          “I don’t know, man,” he said. “I’d been shooting in my neck for years and never missed. Just a bad slam, that’s all.” With one hand he gently massaged at his bandage and with the other he mussed the back of the young kids hair. Flashing a rotten-toothed smile he said, “Dumb luck I guess.”

          “Damn,” the young kid said. “Well, welcome back.” And the split-lipped guy behind me smiled wide.

          At the top of the stairs, a guy who worked at the shelter pushed me forward and said, “You’re up.” Handing me a small, ripped-stiff towel he said, “Make it quick.”

          When I rounded the corner my biggest fear was realized. The shower was communal. Fuck, I thought. Even jail had individual stalls.

          Picture a dirty homeless guy, any one of them that you’ve come across on any given day. Think about the layers of decay that cover the whole of his body. Think about the open sores and the unseen cornucopia of contagions coursing through his infected blood. Now think of the feelings of disgust, sad or not, that surface when you see him. Hold on to that feeling for a second and let it fester. Got it? Good. Now think of him joined by six others, packed together in groups of seven, completely butt-ass naked and inches from your face.

          Nothing about the shower was roomy and much like the line itself, its occupants bumped, grazed and squeezed so I washed in record time and indeed made it quick. Rinsing the bar’s soap from my hair, a guy to my right let out a sharp, high-pitched yelp. My eyes shot open to see a pale, hairless, chubby guy to my right wincing in pain. He’d evidently been shaving his pubic hair and nicked his upper thigh. I looked away and down at the chipped tile floor and watched his blood mingle with a pool of dark, amber urine. Coursing through dirty, naked toes, I watched it slowly swirl around and down through the shower’s uncovered drain and wished that my feet were anything but bare.

          Exiting the shower I’d join the others in an attached room to towel off and put my dirty clothes back on as quickly as I could. In every direction were weathered men bending to dry their lower extremities and never in my life had I grazed or bumped so much ass crack and limp, dangling junk.

          Before I had the chance to leave, the shamelessly public pubic hair shaver stood beside me. Wide-eyed and creepy, from one person to the next, he’d stare at everyone as he reached below his pimply belly to towel off his dirties in the crowded mission bathroom.

          I’d later learn to inhale my dinner so to skip this shit altogether.

          Escaping the bathroom, I made my way to the number of the bed I’d been given and quickly took a seat on the bottom bunk. Already the room was filled with a myriad of snores and sleep gags as I glanced around the surroundings of my dreary new home.

          The eighteen bunks made up thirty-six beds and each had a different stained blanket that was rarely or never washed. One was a single-toned mud-brown but I’m pretty sure it was leopard print once. Another was a shit-smeared paisley. Some were covered with little clotted hearts and others with snotted-spaceships, blood-planets and stars that long ago had gone dark. The guy across from me, his was Winnie the Pooh. The way the honey was stained and how the cartoons were situated over his midsection, it seemed to me that Pooh had just grabbed a drippy fistful of shit strait from the guy’s bloody honeypot.

          The room of bunks was cramped to say the least and, even though I tried to stay to myself for the first week or so, I had no choice but to get to know a few of my roommates.

          There was a guy in the bottom bunk to my right. I didn’t know his name. To myself, I called him Dr. Death. He called me Brian. He was old and hadn’t showered since I’d been there and I was sure that he hadn’t changed the rags he’d been wearing either. No doubt the balled up, soiled sheets on the piss-stained mattress hadn’t been changed for weeks. The one time I’d seen him outside of the shelter, he flaccidly shuffled a half-block and back, violently coughing and hunchbacked with a crooked wooden cane.

          Lying in bed, Dr. Death didn’t always seem altogether out of it. He had a certain capitulated softness about him, like he knew he was dying rotten and forgotten in a rescue mission and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. He smelled of sick, sweaty incontinence, an old alkali and acrid bile kind of stink, stagnant and neglected.

          When I first returned to Eureka, out of the few items of clothes that I chose not to part with were a pair of black pants, a solid red necktie, and a white button up shirt that I’d wear everyday while looking for work. Every night I’d return to the shelter dressed to my dirty nines, sit on the edge of my bed and watch Dr. Death gag and cough for hours. To my right, in a container he kept on the floor at his bed, he’d puke a slimy green chunk of disease and night after night, I’d watch as it slowly crawled its way to the bottom of the bucket.

          Unlike anywhere else in the room, there was a foot and a half partition that separated the two of our bunks and it may have been what kept me alive. It was my living room.

          With specks of vomit shining dull in his frazzled gray-brown beard, Dr. Death looked up at me and said, “Hey there, Brian.”

          I looked up and smiled, tried not to gag and said, “Well hello.”

          As he’d been doing for the last week, he asked me how my workday was. I stopped telling him that I didn’t have a job because I’d rather him not ask me what was with the shirt and tie so I said, “All right.” I said, “Work was good.” And he thought what he thought with a smile and coughed something up into the bucket between our bunks.

          The guy on the bottom bunk to my left, his name was Carl. With a calm and low-key demeanor, he just sort of sat back in his bed and watched the crazy take place around him. And he was smart as a whip too. Carl, he could recite by heart every passage from the Bible. He didn’t believe any of it but he knew it word for word. Equally as impressive was the fact that, in the mid to late eighties, Carl was a Manhattan prostitute. Why so impressive? I hadn’t a clue but it was far different than anything else in this West Coast, California homeless shelter. So I listened.

          “I didn’t have to have sex a bunch,” he said. Stretching over six feet, Carl was tall, and he was rawboned-thin with blotched purple skin. He looked at least ten years older than he was and most likely felt that way too as he cracked all over whenever he attempted to move. “It was the eighties so everyone’s closets were pretty much nailed shut,” he said. He’d lay his book open on his chest and say, “Even alone, they’d just pay me to lie down in a motel room next to them and whack off. Sometimes they’d just watch but other times they’d whack off too.”

          Maybe I paid closer attention to Carl because he’d come from back east. Maybe I was curious as to what may have caused someone aside from myself to retreat to the left coast.

          Looking up at me from under his lesion-riddled brow, in bed Carl said, “Didn’t stop me from getting AIDS though.”

          And then there was Captain Freak. He was the pale, chubby, bald, socially retarded, expatriate in the top bunk to my right. He was also the guy who’d cut himself shaving on my first night in the shower.

          He’d been missing for a few days and as it turned out he’d been in the hospital. A few nights prior he said to me, “Bernie, I cannot breathe that good.” In hindsight I felt terrible for not paying attention to him. I honestly would have taken him more seriously if for one, I wasn’t stuck wondering how the hell he knew my name and two, if he didn’t seem so hell-bent on all things freak.

          On the night he returned, after the shower, he ambled his way through the flood of bunks and stopped at his bed. Tucking a dirty, pit-stained V-neck into loose, purple tidies, he turned his Tweedledee-torso toward my face. Thin trails of blood dripped from a dozen or so spots on his head and, still looking at me but to one of the new guys he said, “Watch out. Some of these beds, they got bugs.”

          Even though we’d just showered he still smelled perverted. Like he’d done to me a week before, he lifted his shirt to show some new guy a rash under the shaved, still beaded pit of his arm. With his eyes still on me, he said to them, “It’s no good,” like Gouda without the A and the new guys were all freaked out.

          Over his V-neck, he buttoned a pressed tan dress shirt all the way tight to his wiggling throat. A drop of blood trailed through a wispy, gray brow and into one of his wide-open eyes. All I was actually thinking though, was why he wore that to bed.

          Not a foot from my face, he snapped the crotch of his tidies and then ran a hand over the top of his albino-white scalp, squinted from the blood and said, “That razor was sharp.”

          “Yeah,” I said. “You’re bleeding pretty heavily.” And as he licked the blood from the palm of his hand, I was actually only thinking that his fingernails were well manicured, his cuticles nicely pushed in.

          “They thought I was having some heart attacks,” he said.

          “Oh yeah,” I said. “What did they say it was?”

          “They say that I have bronchitis around my heart.”

          When I asked if he was on any antibiotics he said, “Not until tomorrow.”

          “Well,” I said. “Then no kisses for you tonight, cowboy.”

          “And MRSA,” he said.

          What could he expect when sleeping over Dr. Death?

          I had just got out of the shower and was sitting on my bed in only my boxer shorts. Feeling his blood-beady freak eyes explore the whole of my vulnerable boy-body, I looked down at my feet and just hoped he went away again.

          Turning from me, he kicked the puke bucket closer to my bunk and stepped on Dr. Death’s mattress. After laboring his way up to bed, he grunted to his side and coughed and farted himself under his Disney princess blanket. Softly placing his head on the pillow, blood pooled into his wide-open eyes and he looked right at me and smiled, incessantly not blinking.

          This place, I thought, it’s way beyond awkward.

          To cordon me from the rest the room, I’d tie a sheet to each side of the bunk above me. Letting each sheet drop, I’d fall into my bed, curl around a broken spring, and breathe in and out a heavy sigh of the farts and coughs of thirty-five other sick, homeless men. And to myself I’d say, “I wish you a beautiful night of rest, sweet children of nowhere. And God help me.”

 

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