Tod doesn’t appreciate the improvement. Well, if he does, he’s pretty nonchalant about it. On the whole. But get this. You know that sexual thing we started doing, so very perfunctorily, out in Wellport, that sexual thing with our-self? Tod’s working at it much harder now. In celebration, perhaps, of his increasing vigor—or as a form of training. All the same, it’s by no means clear to me that we’re making any progress. . . . Tod? I don’t know. How is it for you? Any good? Because from my point of view it’s still a total flop.
His dreams are full of figures who scatter in the wind like leaves, full of souls who form constellations like the stars I hate to see. Tod is conducting a long argument, and he is telling the truth, but the invisible people who might hear and judge luckily refuse to believe him and turn away in silence, weariness, and disgust. Often he is resignedly mutilated by sour aldermen, by painfully fat lord mayors, by put-upon railway porters. Sometimes he glows with great power, which rushes out and solves and clears everything: a power lent by the tutelary maker who presides over all his sleep.
The pimps, and the little hookers . . .
I puzzle at the local economy, the commerce, the apologetic arrangements of the ignored, of the cooled city. And this I get plenty of opportunity to do—to puzzle at it, I mean. I puzzle a lot, if the truth be known. In fact I’ve had to conclude that I am generally rather slow on the uptake. Possibly even subnormal, or mildly autistic. It may very well be that I’m not playing with a full deck. The cards won’t add up for me; the world won’t start making sense. It’s certainly the case that I appear to be hitched up with Tod like this, but he’s not to know I’m here. And I’m lonely. . . . Tod Friendly, stocky, emollient Tod Friendly, moves around at large in the city’s substructures, the shelters, the centers, the halfway houses, the flops. He isn’t one of the entrenched busybodies or Little Annie Fixits who, for pressing personal reasons, somehow need to police these mysterious institutions, where abuse is the buzzword. He comes and goes. He suggests and directs and recommends. He’s one of grief’s middlemen. For life here is junkie, is hooker, is single-parent, is no fixed abode.
Hookers have this thing for mature men. They do. You hardly ever see them bothering with guys their own age. Watchfully the Johns back their way into the significant rooms, the short-lease apartments of the low tenement on Herrera, a building that basks in its own brand of damp and dread. An act of love occurs, for which the John, or the trick as he’s called, for some reason, will be swiftly remunerated. Afterward the fond couple will stroll back onto the street, and part. The men slope off, looking ashamed of themselves (doing it for money like that). But the hooker will ravenously remain, on the sidewalk, in tank top, in hotpants, killing time before her next date. Or hitching rides to nowhere with the additional old stiffs who cruise by in their cunning old cars. Tod is quite often to be found in the tenement of whores. He’s a senior citizen, so the girls are forever putting their moves on him. But Tod’s not there for the sex and the dough. On the contrary. He shells out (token sums, like a couple of bucks), and invariably keeps his pants on (he doesn’t even consider them; they are other). Basically it seems that Tod scores drugs here. Not for his personal use: the tetracycline, the methadone—it all finds its way back to the pharmacy at AMS. Then, too, there are physical injuries to be tackled, in the tenement on Herrera, with its twisted sheets, its stained bidets.
At the flops, the bums all eat the same thing. Unlike in a restaurant or the AMS commissary. It isn’t good, I think, when everyone eats the same thing. I know that none of us has any choice about what we eat; it’s all down to drainage, and some systems are obviously better than others. But I get a woozy feeling when I watch them spoon away, and the plates—twenty or thirty of them—all fill up with the same thing. . . . The women at the crisis centers and the refuges are all hiding from their redeemers. The crisis center is not called a crisis center for nothing. If you want a crisis, just check in. The welts, the abrasions and the black eyes get starker, more livid, until it is time for the women to return, in an ecstasy of distress, to the men who will suddenly heal them. Some require more specialized treatment. They stagger off and go and lie in a park or a basement or wherever, until men come along and rape them, and then they’re okay again. Ah shit, says Brad, the repulsive orderly, there’s nothing wrong with them—meaning the women in the shelter— that a good six inches won’t cure. Tod frowns at him sharply. I hate Brad too, and I hate to say it, but sometimes he’s absolutely right. How could the world fix it so that someone like Brad could ever be right?