“No cutting up, ” the driver says. “I’ll put you out right in the middle of the Cross Bronx Expressway if you start cutting up. I swear to God I will”
By the time the Greyhound pulls into the Port Authority, Don Callahan is drunk. But he doesn’t cut up; he simply sits quietly until it’s time to get off and join the flow of six o’clock humanity under the cold fluorescent lights: the junkies, the cabbies, the shoeshine boys, the girls who’ll blow you for ten dollars, the boys dressed up as girls who’ll blow you for five dollars, the cops twirling their nightsticks, the dope dealers carrying their transistor radios, the blue-collar guys who are just coming in from New Jersey. Callahan joins them, drunk but quiet; the nightstick-twirling cops do not give him so much as a second glance. The Port Authority air
smells of cigarette smoke and joysticks and exhaust. The docked buses rumble. Everyone here looks cut loose. Under the cold white fluorescents, they all look dead.
No, he thinks, walking under a sign reading to STREET. Not dead, that’s wrong. Un ndead.
EIGHT
“Man,” Eddie said. “You been to the wars, haven’t you? Greek, Roman, and Vietnam.”
When the Old Fella began, Eddie had been hoping he’d gallop through his story so they could go into the church and look at whatever was stashed there. He hadn’t expected to be touched, let alone shaken, but he had been. Callahan knew stuff Eddie thought no one else could possibly know: the sadness of Dixie cups rolling across the pavement, the rusty hopelessness of that sign on the gas pumps, the look of the human eye in the hour before dawn.
Most of all about how sometimes you had to have it.
“The wars? I don’t know,” Callahan said. Then he sighed and nodded. “Yes, I suppose so. I spent that first day in movie theaters and that first night in Washington Square Park. I saw that the other homeless people covered themselves up with newspapers, so that’s what I did. And here’s an example of how life—the quality of life and the texture of life—seemed to have changed for me, beginning on the day of Danny Glick’s burial.
You won’t understand right away, but bear with me.” He looked at Eddie and smiled. “And don’t worry, son, I’m not going to talk the day away. Or even the morning.”
“You go on and tell it any old way it does ya fine,” Eddie said.
Callahan burst out laughing. “Say thankya! Aye, say thankya big! What I was going to tell you is that I’d covered my top half with the Daily News and the headline said HITLER BROTHERS STRIKE IN
QUEENS.”
“Oh my God, the Hitler Brothers,” Eddie said. “I remember them. Couple of morons. They beat up… what?
Jews? Blacks?”
“Both,” Callahan said. “And carved swastikas on their foreheads. They didn’t have a chance to finish mine.
Which is good, because what they had in mind after the cutting was a lot more than a simple beating. And that was years later, when I came back to New York.”
“Swastika,” Roland said. “The sigul on the plane we found near River Crossing? The one with David Quick inside it?”
“Uh-huh,” Eddie said, and drew one in the grass with the toe of his boot. The grass sprang up almost immediately, but not before Roland saw that yes, the mark on Callahan’s forehead could have been meant to be one of those. If it had been finished.
“On that day in late October of 1975,” Callahan said, “the Hitler Brothers were just a headline I slept under. I spent most of that second day in New York walking around and fighting the urge to score a bottle. There was part of me that wanted to fight instead of drink. To try and atone. At the same time, I could feel Barlow’s blood working into me, getting in deeper and deeper. The world smelled different, and not better. Things
looked different, and not better. And the taste of him came creeping back into my mouth, a taste like dead fish or rotten wine.
“I had no hope of salvation. Never think it. But atonement isn’t about salvation, anyway. Not about heaven.
It’s about clearing your conscience here on earth. And you can’t do it drunk. I didn’t think of myself as an alcoholic, not even then, but I did wonder if he’d turned me into a vampire. If the sun would start to burn my skin, and I’d start looking at ladies’ necks.” He shrugged, laughed. “Or maybe gentlemen’s. You know what they say about the priesthood; we’re just a bunch of closet queers running around and shaking the cross in people’s faces.”
“But you weren’t a vampire,” Eddie said.
“Not even a Type Three. Nothing but unclean. On the outside of everything. Cast away. Always smelling his stink and always seeing the world the way things like him must see it, in shades of gray and red. Red was the only bright color I was allowed to see for years. Everything else was just a whisper.
“I guess I was looking for a ManPower office—you know, the day-labor company? I was still pretty rugged in those days, and of course I was a lot younger, as well.
“I didn’t find ManPower. What I did find was a place called Home. This was on First Avenue and Forty-seventh Street, not far from the U.N.”
Roland, Eddie, and Susannah exchanged a look. Whatever Home was, it had existed only two blocks from the vacant lot. Only it wouldn’t have been vacant back then, Eddie thought. Not back in 1975. In ’75 it would still have been Tom and Jerry’s Artistic Deli, Party Platters Our Specialty. He suddenly wished Jake were here. Eddie thought that by now the kid would have been jumping up and down with excitement.
“What kind of shop was Home?” Roland asked.
“Not a shop at all. A shelter. A wet shelter. I can’t say for sure that it was the only one in Manhattan, but I bet it was one of the very few. I didn’t know much about shelters then—just a little bit from my first parish—but as time went by, I learned a great deal. I saw the system from both sides. There were times when I was the guy who ladled out the soup at six p.m. and passed out the blankets at nine; at other times I was the guy who drank the soup and slept under the blankets. After a head-check for lice, of course.
“There are shelters that won’t let you in if they smell booze on your breath. And there are ones where they’ll let you in if you claim you’re at least two hours downstream from your last drink. There are places—a few—
that’ll let you in pissyassed drunk, as long as they can search you at the door and get rid of all your hooch.
Once that’s taken care of, they put you in a special locked room with the rest of the low-bottom guys. You can’t slip out to get another drink if you change your mind, and you can’t scare the folks who are less soaked than you are if you get the dt’s and start seeing bugs come out of the walls. No women allowed in the lockup; they’re too apt to get raped. It’s just one of the reasons more homeless women die in the streets than homeless men. That’s what Lupe used to say.”
“Lupe?” Eddie asked.
“I’ll get to him, but for now, suffice it to say that he was the architect of Home’s alcohol policy. At Home, they kept the booze in lockup, not the drunks. You could get a shot if you needed one, and if you promised to be quiet. Plus a sedative chaser. This isn’t recommended medical procedure—I’m not even sure it was legal, since neither Lupe nor Rowan Magruder were doctors—but it seemed to work. I came in sober on a busy night, and Lupe put me to work. I worked free for the first couple of days, and then Rowan called me into his office, which was roughly the size of a broom closet. He asked me if I was an alcoholic. I said no. He asked me if I was wanted by the police. I said no. He asked if I was on the run from anything. I said yes, from
myself. He asked me if I wanted to work, and I started to cry. He took that as a yes.
“I spent the next nine months—until June of 1976—working at Home. I made the beds, I cooked in the kitchen, I went on fund-raising calls with Lupe or sometimes Rowan, I took drunks to AA meetings in the Home van, I gave shots of booze to guys that were shaking too badly to hold the glasses themselves. I took over the books because I was better at it than Magruder or Lupe or any of the other guys who worked there.