Disgust and Desire, a novel (chapter 4)
Chapter 4
*Please consider:
1. Subscribing if you haven’t yet (paid is always appreciated)
Sharing this post (if you like the story)
“Recommending” “Sincere American Writing” on your Substack page.
Thank you for reading, everyone!!!
###
Disgust and Desire, a novel
Chapter 4
It was evening. Saturday night. Just past dusk. Sam walked north along the East River Promenade, heading towards the underside of the Williamsburg Bridge, in the Lower East Side. He’d jumped the turnstile and taken the Q train and then switched to the F. Then he walked. He was trying to find the others.
Passing the Grand Street Mini Field #3, he saw and heard some teens still kicking a soccer ball around. They could barely see the ball at this point, Sam thought. But when you’re young it didn’t matter. Nothing did. Death wasn’t real. Love hadn’t yet broken your heart. Adulthood hadn’t smashed the glass of your spirit into a thousand pieces. That was all in the distant future. You had life. Beautiful, treacherous life. The beginning of the Yellow Brick Road. Who could know it was a path leading cows to slaughter?
Then he was there. He saw the deep shadow under the bridge, dark and menacing. It reminded him of Seattle, when he was at the university, when he met some junkies off campus and fell in briefly with them. For a while he picked up their dope. He picked it up from some shady Mexicans under the I-5 Bridge, the sound of cars rushing above him, that same deep shadow, his pulse pounding in his ears like the rush of a river, his fear raw and real. It had been a thrill. He even shot up once. But he never did it again. It was too good. He knew he’d die. He stuck to alcohol.
Three of the four were there: Jumping-Jack; Kennedy; Meth-Man-Michael. Robert wasn’t there. He didn’t mind. The three men stood round a barrel which had raging flames rising from it. It was a little chilly out. He smelled the trash the fire burned. Nasty. Even though he too was homeless, these guys always somehow seemed more…feral than him. He’d come from something and had fallen. Most of them had started more or less at the bottom.
Jumping-Jack got his nickname because, in the winter, when he was cold, whether inside or outside, he did hundreds of jumping jacks. Kennedy was named so because he had come from Boston originally and his accent made people laugh and say, Hey, you sound like John F. Kennedy. Meth-Man-Michael—or Triple-M, as some referred to him—had his name because A. His name was Michael. B. He was, in fact, a man. And C. He was addicted to meth. He’d met Kennedy first, in 2018, seeing the guy digging through a trash dumpster on Avenue A in the East Village. They became fast friends.
“Hey,” Sam said. He heard the loud rush of cars moving over the bridge above, constant, never-ceasing, that thunk sound of tires. He thought of the East River in the night, the blackness, and the other side of the bridge: Brooklyn. He’d only been a few times. Williamsburg, specifically, was too hipster for him. Too white and rich. Too cool and self-ironic. Too yuppie. Although, it wasn’t as if the Upper East Side was all that different. And yet somehow it was. He couldn’t explain it. It was an energy. A sense of calm. And yet he felt annoyed by all the college kids. All the hospital employees at Weill-Cornell Medical Center and the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Rockefeller University Medical Center.
“Ehhhhhh, Sam,” Kennedy said, that thick Boston accent.
Sam approached, stood by the barrel. The orange licking flames felt good. It was starting to cool down.
They bumped elbows, the “slapping-skin” of Covid times.
“What’cha been up to, mate?” Kennedy said.
Sam looked at Jumping-Jack. He looked ok. Torn jeans. Boots. Beat-up leather motorcycle jacket, a thick silver zipperdangling from the bottom.
“Hey man,” Jumping-Jack said.
When he gazed at Meth-Man-Michael the guy looked awful. Sniffling. Eyes going all over the place. He was high. He kept rubbing his palms together, looking at the ground, laughing at nothing.
“How long’s he been like this?” Sam said.
Kennedy shrugged. “Shit, mate. He’s always like that.”
Sam looked at Jumping-Jack. Jumping-Jack shrugged.
“Well,” Kennedy repeated. “Where you been?”
Sam swung his messenger bag round to his torso. He opened it and felt around for his pint. Jack Daniels. He’d lifted it from a liquor store. He went in, slipped it into his bag, and paid for a forty of Mickeys.
Now he pulled out the pint and the warm forty. He handed the forty to Kennedy.
“For me?” Kennedy said.
“For everyone.”
“Thanks buddy,” Kennedy said. He unscrewed the gold cap and chugged.
The flames licked and popped. A motorcycle rushed north on FDR highway. A car backfired on Delancey Street. Sam unscrewed the cap of his pint. He drank a deep one. Wiped his chin. The liquid gold fire burned in his chest and it felt good. He handed it to his right, to Jumping-Jack.
Jumping-Jack glugged.
The forty and the pint went round the circle between them. For a while no one talked. Just the heat of the fire and the smell of diesel oil and of the East River, the cars and the urban noises around them. He would sleep on the bench again, around 70thand 5th. By the park. He’d jump the turnstile and take the F and Q back again. Later. For now he’d drink.
Kennedy said, “Man. You hear about what happened to Gonno last week?”
Gonno was another homeless guy. He was black. Gonnowas short for Gonorrhea; the guy had gotten just about every STD known to man. You name it he had it: Syphilis; Gonorrhea; Hepatitis C; Herpes; Chlamydia; even, unfortunately, HIV. He was on meds for the HIV. He got them free from Planned Parenthood using Medicaid. He was straight. He just used dirty needles. But about four months ago he met a woman he really liked. They fell for each other. A white woman. Not even homeless. Not yet at least. She’d been down on her luck. Had a job and lost it. Slept in her car. An ex had beat her up. She had a nasty speed addiction. She and Gonno had met by a fluke: He walked by her car one night and she was just getting in. He asked her for a smoke and it went from there.
“No,” Sam said. “What happened?”
Kennedy glanced at the others. They nodded. The pint reached Sam. It was over half empty. He’d need more. Meth-Man-Michael drank from the Mickeys forty. He’d been silent so far. He stared at Sam and said, “Man.” He scanned around them. It made Sam uneasy. “You ever wonder if, you know…” here Triple-M lowered his voice to a hissing whisper. “You ever wonder if you’re being followed by the F…B…I?”
Sam grinned. He sucked from the pint. He wiped his chin. Sam shrugged. “All the time, Triple-M. All the time.”
Triple-M laughed, like a wild, drunken hyena.
“Anyway,” Kennedy said, an edge of irritation in his voice. “Last week, this random homeless guy none of us knows informs us that ‘our buddy’ looks like he got beat up pretty bad. We said: Who? He said: That black guy. We know a few of them. We said: Describe him. He said: Mid-thirties; bald; a few big tattoos on his neck. Ah, we said: That’s Gonno. Anyway. He told us where he found him. We went there. It was over in the Bowery, near the Houston Street Playground. We found him literally lying inside of a dumpster. He was beat to shit, Sam. I mean someone really went at him. We pulled him out. Dried blood all over his face. He reeked like human shit. He’d peed himself. We pooled and got him a cup a coffee and a doughnut. He said he and his lady were just hanging out in her car and out of nowhere a guy walks up and smashes out the passenger side window with a baseball bat. It was her crazy-ass ex. Next thing he knows the guy drags him out of the car. Gonno’s woman is screaming, telling him to stop. No one’s around. It’s late, yaknow, like 2 AM. The guy is screaming all kinds of insane racist slurs, calling him Nigger this and Nigger that. Then the guy starts beating Gonno with the bat. Gonno blacked-out. The next thing he knew he woke up to us pulling him out.”
Sam took a pull off the pint. He passed it. Triple-M still had the forty. He’d almost killed it. The flames were getting lower. Jumping-Jack walked away and returned with some bad, wet, rotten wood and dropped it into the barrel.
“Jesus H. Fucking Christ,” Sam said. “Is he okay?”
“We took him to the ER. He was there overnight. He won’t be able to pay for it of course. They know he don’t have insurance. When he got out he was all bandaged up. He said he’s ok but they said he had some brain trauma, and that he was lucky to be alive.”
“That’s fucked,” Sam said.
“Yeah,” Kennedy said. The orange flames reflected in his eyes. “A few of us are thinking of trying to find the guy.”
“What would you do when you found him?”
Kennedy shrugged. The pint got passed to him. He drank. It was almost empty. He passed to Sam. Sam held it like a talisman.
“I dunno. Kill him, maybe.”
“Seriously?” Sam said.
Kennedy shook his head. “I don’t know man. I just feel bad. Poor fucking Gonno.”
“It’s fucked,” Jumping-Jack added.
“Sure is,” Sam agreed.
Sam drank down the rest of his pint. He flicked the empty bottle into the barrel, where it’d get eaten by the flames. For some reason in that moment he thought of his ex. Zelda. Zelda. They’d met in Rehab. When he was 32. She was in for heroin. He for drinking. She had that tragic, wounded look in her dark eyes. She was tall, thin—you could see her ribs poking out—and had short, rough brunette hair. They met on his fifth day inside. She’d been there on and off for years. A 30-day stay, then out, then relapse, and then back again. Everyone knew her there. All the staff. She was a legend, had a reputation. She was known as a slut. But he didn’t see her that way at all.
He was mopping the kitchen floor one night—everyone had chores—before an AA meeting (he hated the meetings; he found them too religious and one-sided) when she walked into the kitchen, making Doc Martin boot marks all over the perfectly cleaned white-tiled floor he’d just done. His shoulders fell.
“Are you serious?” he said, to the woman’s back.
She didn’t respond. She walked to the cabinet, extracted a glass, went to the sink, filled it, and drank it all down in one massive gulp.
Then she looked at him. She saw the bright white tiles. Surely she could smell the bleach and hot soapy water he’d been using to clean it. They caught eyes and held. She was taller than him by an inch or so. There was something so tragic and dramatic about her eyes. About her whole face. The little button-nose. The dark circles around her eyes. Her angular, sharp cheeks. Her skin was as pale as the moon.
“What’s your name?” he said.
“Who’s asking?” Her voice was soft, feminine, high-pitched. But there was an edge to it.
He grinned, just barely. “I am.”
“Who’re you?” He both liked and disliked her teenage attitude. It was immature. But sexy.
He smiled wider. “Sam. Sam Bouchard. Alcoholic.”
She chuckled. “What’re you a salesmen?”
“No,” he said, his feelings hurt. He was sensitive. Always had been. She poured another half glass full of water from the faucet. She turned her back to him. She drank it. She left the glass in the sink.
“I’m Zelda Dawkins. I’m a junkie.”
“You seem pretty young for a junkie.”
She shrugged. “Twenty-four.”
“Where’re you from?” he asked.
She crossed her arms. She walked right at him, those skinny, pale long legs. She had on a shredded denim skirt which ended just above her knees. A scar ran across her right arm, off-brown and mottled.
She stopped at him. She said, “You ask a lot of questions.”
“Maybe.”
“Where’re you from?”
He laughed. “Seattle.”
She ran her hand through her short frizzy hair. She stared at him for what felt like forever. And then she bent down slightly and whispered into his ear, “I’m from wherever you want me to be from, honey.”
She walked past him. He didn’t see her again for a whole week.