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MUSEUM OF MODERN MYTHOLOGY AND POP CULTURE
COMMUNITY ARTS CORNER
NOVEL EXCERPT OF A WORK IN PROGRESS:
PLUGGED INTO THE ABYSS
By DAVID A. LEMMO
The discovery of a man's true character, stripped of the street-sharp barriers
of toughness he exploits to operate in Oakland's underground.
Much later, I got my car and drove through sluggish traffic to San Pablo Avenue. I wanted to familiarize myself with the area I would be working tomorrow night. Maybe I'd even have a look at the inside of Jaycee's without making anyone suspicious or paranoid. When I did get there it looked like the place was closed, boarded up; but it wasn't. Jaycee's was a chipped and cracked red-brick hunk with a tacked-on looking wooden door---a one-story abomination near the intersection of San Pablo Avenue and Myrtle Street, on Myrtle; in other words, near the corner of Shit and Hole.
I heard a noise coming up from behind, and turned; a white woman wearing a jagged grey sweater, stained oversized brown pants, and dirty red tennis shoes drug a metal cart full of clothes, plastic bags full of things, and a well worn sleeping bag. Her anglo face, layered with the grime of the streets, looked my way; graying brown hair was tied back with a blue scarf. The resigned green eyes went wide at sight of me. She stopped. A dirty right hand clawed into a front pocket, rummaging around. Her face screwed up tightly; her eyes screamed at me from within---frantic-mumbled words entreated me. She yelped as her hand withdrew, holding up a crumpled photograph.
I took this as her desire for me to inspect the photo and reached out---the photo was thrust into my hand. The woman swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and let go of the cart with her left hand. She raised her arms over her head like a worshiper in supplication to her god. I noticed that both of the elbow areas of her filthy sweater were worn through, showing a green undergarment. I looked at the photo. An infant. I turned it over; according to a penciled inscription the photo was ten years old. The woman now wrung her hands, bleating like a lost animal and nodding toward the photo.
Pity nudged me; I shook my head and handed it back. "Maybe I can help you," I asked. "Could you use some money?" She slowly pushed the photo back into her pocket. "Do you understand me?" I asked. Her green eyes lost all hope again.
Her left hand took hold of the cart's handle. Her whole body lurched in the effort of pulling the cart into motion again. She moved slowly down the street, broken-down, ageing by the second and probably better off dead. Did she know she would never find that baby?
I took a deep breath, tried ignoring my feelings of pity, and then turned back to Jaycee's. Against my better judgement, because I didn't want attention which would get back to the later, night crowd, I entered the place. The music was actually pleasant, Ray Charles, and there were a few older black guys at the bar drinking. Not the usual night time crowd described to me by Lydia Mayfield, Alfred, Raphael and Fernando. The bartender was a burly light-skinned black man with a chef's apron over his clothing. Before he looked at me, I quickly pushed my way back through the door to the glaring sunlight. Nothing was happening inside, and there weren't enough people in there for me to get a little nosy without drawing unwanted interest and suspicions.
I checked out the area near the bar for several blocks around, walking among the usual pan-handling homeless; I found mostly liquor stores, convenience stores, pawn shops, crappy motels and down-and-out hotels, hair salons, and a few struggling markets. There were a lot of other people walking around, mostly black, and after almost an hour of checking the streets out I kept running into the area's hustlers, those who were probably out of any mainstream way of making a living, but were not eating-out-of-garbage-cans-homeless. They made their livings by the streets and the streets alone. Theft, prostitution, drug dealing, mugging, pickpocketing, one hustle or another, take your pick; it all went back into the mainstream economy, in the end, anyway.
None of the mini-malls or parking malls had been constructed in this part of the city, yet, and there were many unoccupied, boarded-up buildings waiting for the demolition crew to wipe out their existence. Until then, people could still find shelter for the night. Some of them, homeless, others, squatters who really knew how to hustle for a living but couldn't quite afford to rent a cramped, filthy room in the projects or a shitty hotel; they lived among the homeless in abandoned buildings, usually aligned with a few friends so that someone was always at the building, or part of the building, to protect their belongings. I snaked my way through filthy alleys and dead ends, climbing fences, scaring a cat, and being offered a bag of meth by a young Mexican kid before coming upon Jaycee's from behind. I had to climb over the chain-link fence of a great apartment complex to get to the door. The one-story chipped and cracked brick shack had grafitti over grafitti covering grafitti on the back wall.
I stuck an ear up against the door and listened. Nothing. I stepped back, listening again. More nothing. In the distance a car horn blasted and then another. I grasped the door knob. It was locked. I twisted and heaved, but couldn't force it open. I let go of the doorknob. As Jaycee's was set flush between two other buildings, there were only two windows; both barred. No sneaking in later and mingling with the crowd; not without breaking and entering, that is. I turned around facing the chain-link fence and the giant apartment building. To the left was an alleyway leading to another metal fence which ended at the ten-foot taller fence of the apartment complex. There was actually a tree on the other side of the shorter fence. To the right a long alley ran into a two story stucco building. Instead of going back the way I had come, I turned left and walked down that alley; I had the fence and the five story apartment complex on one side, and different one and two story buildings on the other. I easily climbed over the shorter fence at the juncture of both, and stood there a moment listening to a jet scream overhead; I kept my eyes on my surroundings.
There were four large ugly stinking garbage containers in an area where the one and two story buildings left off and another of the five story apartment complexs began. The ground was littered with broken glass, fast-food-wrappers, feces, and other examples of our progress as humans. The three guys standing by the tree had probably been startled still at my appearance and were now watching me. One was a tall sour-faced black guy in soiled worn fatigues; above the bill of his cap the words Cosmo Man were stenciled in black. The other two were white; an in-bred looking blond with a pendulous bottom lip and an attempt at a beard wore layers of filthy jeans and long sleeved shirts; the short chunky darker guy in last century's polyester pants and a shredded-stained brown leather jacket was putting something into his back pocket.
None of this was any of my business. There was every reason for me to be on my way. Something made me want to find out what was going on. I slowly began walking toward them. The black guy fidgeted, the blond looked at the black guy, and the short one in the leather jacket glanced about the area; his wide brown eyes told me something was wrong. I halted four feet from them. I waited a few seconds. The black guy's face was as grizzled as a wart hog's. He nodded his head at two of the nearby trash containers.
I looked back at him, and then ran my eyes around the containers again. There it was; something stashed on the ground between both of them. I walked over to it feeling the three behind me being very still. I halted. Jammed between two stinking containers was a worn, grey and brown figure. It looked like a woman; the brown pants had been pulled down to the ankles; the grey sweater was torn, revealing a soiled green undergarment. I stared at the blue scarf lying at my feet, near hers.
I turned and looked at the trio. They just stood there trying not to register emotion; the in-bred guy smiled for a second, his blue eyes looked befuddled. I turned back to the probably dead body of the baby-seeker. It was only an hour since I'd met her. I got on my haunches and had a closer look. Breathing shallowly because of the garbage stench, and to slow down my pounding heart, I looked at the scratches and abrasions over the exposed bottom half of her grime encrusted body. Her neck was at an odd angle because it had been broken. A line of sweat appeared above my forehead. I wiped it away and wiped that hand on my jeans.
I stood, wondering about her metal cart. I opened one of the dumsters and looked inside; just the usual accumulated filth of civilization. I closed the lid, and then stepped over to the other dumpster. I lifted this lid. There was the metal cart emptied of its contents, which were spread out nearby. Even the raggidly sleeping-bag had been rejected. I closed the lid and turned around. The two white guys were gone but the black guy was still there. His creased face looked as curious about me as I was about him.
I slowly walked over to him; he watched with slitted eyes as I stopped four feet away. "Who were those two guys?" I asked. I could smell the whiskey in him.
Cosmo Man said, "Ah came here on my way somewhere and they was fuckin' with the woman." He looked around the area, I quickly doing the same. He continued, "They claim they was tryin' to wake her." He looked at me and nodded, saying, "Wake her---they was actin' strange, scared, so Ah 'trad to ask them questions by pulling out a joint to make them stay around." His eyebrows raised and he scratched along his jaw. "Ah was about to light up when you appeared."
"Ever seen her, before?"
"Seen her?" His black face broke into a brief grim smile. "We all know her around here. She was harmless." A breath forced its way out of him. His brown eyes, touched by tears, misted. He shook his head, tugged at the brim of his cap and said, "She like to drink beer and watch football at the bar down the street."
I smiled and nodded. Cosmo Man waved down the alley beyond the tree; "With that cart she always had, she had to come here this way."
We backtracked the only logical way the baby-seeker could have gotten into that corner of the streets, Cosmo Man and I eventually squeezing through a narrow alley formed by two multi-storied, rotting buildings. We scuttled along like rats, stepping through puddles of rank water, broken glass, and over feces, finally finding ourselves on San Pablo Avenue three blocks from Jaycee's. The building that had been on our left was a shabby three story hotel; the one on our right a closed-down boarded-up food market. We stood in the foyer of the abandoned market. Dusk was sneaking around the next corner, and a slight breeze felt good for a few moments.Cosmo Man told me, "Ah never seen them two guys around here."
I nodded. He had to be thinking that he'd never seen me around here, either.
Cosmo Man nodded. "Ah go and ask around. Find out where they are." He nodded again curtly, turned and walked down the street, swerving around a homeless guy lotus squatted in the middle of the sidewalk. He then bopped off as if to the beat of music.
I walked away from the direction of Jaycee's and at the first public phone I came upon, called the police. Disguising my voice and speech patterns, I quickly told them what was what, where it was, and described the two white guys. I hung up, walked away and got my car. I was still seeing the baby-seeker in my mind as I drove off for dinner with my sister at our parents' house. Driving across Oakland to San Leandro, I thought about my first encounter with the homeless woman and how I'd thought to myself that she would have been better off dead. Now she was...I felt...weird about myself. It was like I'd made a judgement and it had come to pass. In a horrible form. I felt dirty sweaty and there was something deep inside me gnawing away...
By the time I got off the freeway into San Leandro I needed to pull over to the first bar I saw. I needed a shower. A bath. I got out of the car and went into the bar not noticing anything about the place. I ordered a beer, paid for it, and then went into the men's room. I took my shirt off, and washed myself at the sink. Richard Valentine, private detective, trying to clean the streets off of him. Scrubbing my body with water, I thought about how someone finding the dead baby-seeker might not want to get involved by reporting this to the police. I dried myself using half of the plasti-cloths in a dispenser. Had I not anonymously reported it, the baby-seeker could have ended up lying there for days until the weekly garbage pick-up or the stench forced someone into reporting the decomposing body.
Putting my shirt back on, I looked at myself in the mirror over the sink. I didn't like what I saw. I also didn't know what it was about what I saw that I didn't like. The door opened and someone entered the rest room. I heard him step over to the urinals; the stench of a chemical deodorant wafted about for a few moments. I ran some water through my hair, and made myself as presentable as I could. I looked better than I felt.
I left the bar without touching the beer, got into my car, and drove six blocks to my parents' home. Through dinner, my father, as usual, did most of the talking and Mom had to intrude her questions for Michelle. This left me able to settle myself down. I couldn't stop thinking about the doomed baby-seeker and how she was a gruesome sideshow of this Marsha Mayfield drama; or was it that she was really just a gruesome sideshow of my own life?
Later, we'd just finished dinner, more or less, and were still sitting at the dining room table. "Dis is da way it's supposed to be," Dad said, as he poured everyone another glass of wine. My parents have good taste in wine and my rare imbibing of the grape is usually with them.
My sister nudged me with a foot. "Richard, tell me about Sheila, this woman you're dating."
"We're not dating. We're just good friends."
Michelle sat to my left. Mom, with brown curly hair (now dyed) and blue eyes, just like Michelle, was at my right. Dad sat across the table looking at me intensely.
"You seem to spend a lot of time together," Michelle said. She took a sip of wine.
"Yeah," I told her. "We're friends."
"What's she do?" Dad barked.
"What do you care?" Mom interjected, tapping him on an arm. "He says they're just friends."
"Yeah, just friends," he growled, fingering his glass of wine.
Michelle said, "Let's satisfy Daddy's curiosity," then laughed, and added, "and mine, too."
"You guys are making too much of this," I complained, waving a hand. Elizabeth Stanton flashed through my mind; another woman I was attracted to, but who was married; there was also Sharon Williams, who owned a small cafe downtown but wasn't married.
Mom was staring at me curiously. I hoped she couldn't read my thoughts; she'd think I'd gone woman-crazy or something...
"What?" Dad challenged. "This Sheila do sum'tin you don't wanna talk about?"
"O.K.," I told them. "She runs a nudist camp near Lake Temescal."
Michelle laughed shrilly and then Mom laughed; Dad said, "Yer ass."
I tried to change the subject by asking Dad, "So, did you ever find that weird thing you were looking for that you couldn't talk about, but wanted to?"
He had a mental shutdown, and then quickly recovered, saying, "Dat's police biz'niz. Why? You got sum'tin?"
Mom and Michelle looked at us they way they do just before he and I get into one of our fights.
"No. Unless you're looking for a strong-arm street thug who may be working the downtown area." I thought about that gold toothed maniac a moment, wondering if, after my intervention today, we had seen the last of him.
"Naaw," Dad was saying. "Nuttin like dat. I mean, way out'a da ordinary."
"What the hell is it?"
"Nuttin."
"Nuttin," I mocked, nodding. "We're talking about nuttin, again."
"Yer ass."
"You guys are two nutty Italianos," Mom said, shaking her head.
"So," Michelle asked, "what does your friend Sheila do for a living?"
Dad settled down and eyed me intensely.
I cleared my throat. "She runs a shelter for women."
"A shelter," Mom spoke up, "what do you mean, a shelter?"
"You know," Dad barked. "When doze women get knocked up or are on dope---"
"Daddy!" Michelle snapped. Her eyes said that she was very disappointed. I knew that look, well...
Then I thought about how the baby-seeker could have used their help. "There are women with drug problems," I said evenly. "And some are pregnant. But, there are also victims of violent husbands that beat them."
"Oh," Mom said, "like that place Heather started years ago to help women."
"It's the same place. Sheila is one of the persons who founded the shelter with Heather."
Mom smiled and said, "That's nice. There should be a place where women can go to when they need help."
Michelle smiled at me.
They all started talking. I sort of spaced out, the dead baby-seeker haunting me again. I forced my mind into thinking about my case. I needed to go to Jaycee's, again, during the evening and locate that pimp Aaron. And that was just for starters...
"Richard," Michelle interrupted my thoughts. "Come back. You're on the streets, again."
I suddenly knew what it was that I didn't like about myself. While washing up in the rest room of that bar, just before arriving here, I had looked into the mirror and didn't like what I saw. What I saw was that I fit into the fabric of the streets...how I was part of it. Filth, crime, dead bodies---it was all no big deal. Business as usual. I had to take a deep breath to keep myself from shouting in disgust.
I looked at Michelle, hearing Jimmy Manet's voice in my head, saying, You're addicted to the streets.