American Purgatorio (21 page)

“Wife,” I told them.

“Whatever,” Jimbo said, and he told me to stretch out and relax. And because I was exhausted, I put my head on my backpack. But Craig and Jimbo didn't stop talking, and they didn't stop trying to get me to drink. They seemed to have an endless supply of both words and lukewarm beer, and try as I might to keep up with their drinking, at a certain point I got full of beer, didn't want any beer, and I told them, “I don't want any more.”

It wasn't just the beer. It was my unwillingness to listen to them, the sense of being polluted by their words and their attitudes. And at this point the mood might have turned sour except that we were coming down out of the hills, the last range of rocky hills before the coast. And by the time we entered the area of greater metropolitan San Diego the two of them were happy again. They started talking about Anne, as if she wasn't dead, coming up with schemes to find her. “Put an ad in the paper,” they said, or “Put up flyers on telephone poles.” They knew San Diego like the backs of their dicks, they said, and they told me to relax, to do nothing, and let them take care of everything.

The brown land was frosted with springtime green, but mainly it was covered with houses. Millions of people lived in the subdivisions cut into the hillsides. We drove through a town called El Cajon, which means “the box,” and through La Mesa, which means “the table,” and I didn't know where we were going, or where I was gong with them, until, following the freeway to the end, we arrived at the Pacific Ocean. Craig parked the car near a pier in a place called Pacific Beach. A lot of people in bathing suits were walking on the streets and it was warm, even before summer.

Craig and Jimbo told me to watch the car while they got out, walked across a nearby intersection, and returned with bags full of hamburgers and french fries. They divvied up the waxy paper bags and as we were about to eat Craig realized we didn't have any ketchup. “Can't eat without ketchup,” he said, and I was the one volunteered to go back to the fast-food restaurant and get some.

Which I did. It felt good to stretch my legs and see people again. No one looked up when I walked to the condiment counter and grabbed a large handful of ketchup packages. I took this booty back to the waiting car, but the car wasn't waiting. I looked in various parking lots, and it wasn't there. It wasn't parked on the street, and it wasn't circling the street, and although I waited for them, pacing back and forth, hoping they went to get some gas, I knew that now, here I was, with nothing. I threw the ketchup packages into a plastic trash container.

I didn't mind losing my pack or my clothes or even my notebook. But my photographs were in that pack. Anne, or what was left of Anne, was in that car. There was still a memory, the trace of memory, but everything else was gone. And I tried to see this as something new, a fresh start. I told myself that now, with nothing, I was a new man. I tried to see myself as reborn, but by this point I was getting a little tired of being constantly reborn.

4.

I was thinking about Chief Joseph, the leader of the Nez Perce Indians, who in 1877 was put on a reservation. He had signed a treaty with the United States government, but because of a gold rush on his ancestral land was forced to flee that land and fight for that land, until, when the hopelessness of his struggle became obvious, he surrendered. “I am tired,” he said. “I will fight no more forever.” He was then taken to a reservation where he survived to see his people decimated by disease.

He didn't have to survive, I thought. And I didn't have to survive, but it was habit now, or genetic, and once I got my bearings, the first thing I did was make a phone call. I was going to call and get some money, but to make a call I needed money, and I didn't have any, not even a thin quarter, so I stood by the entrance to a convenience store near the beach and asked people coming out for change.

Simple enough, I thought. I was an honest-looking person, and as people walked out of the Speedy Mart or the Quick Mart I tried to explain my situation. “What happened to me…” but before I could get started the people left me standing in the gum-stained entrance. So I changed my approach, got straight to the point. “Can I have a quarter?” I said, first to a woman, then to a girl, then a man, and you'd think, by the way these people refused to look at me, that a quarter was a lot of money.

For a while no one even acknowledged my existence, so instead of asking them to put a quarter in my open palm, I found a plastic bag and held that out, and maybe it was the bag or a new attitude, anyway, someone finally put a quarter in the bag and with it I called American Express.

I was thinking they would help but after finally getting through to the woman on the other end, she told me that my card had been terminated. I asked if it was possible to get a loan and I could tell by her tone of voice, even over the phone, even though she was calling me “sir,” that I didn't really exist for her. She didn't say anything disrespectful—the call might have been monitored—but I got the idea I was on my own.

Fine, I thought. Or as Jimbo used to say, Whatever.

Since I was close to the water I walked down to the white cement boardwalk, to a wooden pier, called Crystal Pier, jutting into the ocean. I walked out to the end of it, and I could see in one direction the sun reflected into broken shards of light on the water, and in the other direction, the land and the city and the mountains in the distance. I walked from there to the beach itself, across the sand, and although I didn't have a bathing suit, I found a less populated spot, secluded by eroding cliffs; stripped down to my underwear; and waded out into the waves.

The water was colder than I expected but I was a man of adjustment, and so I got used to that. When I was far enough out, I dove in and swam, playing in the waves, holding my underwear to keep it from slipping off. In the water I felt somewhat rejuvenated, and I stayed there until my fingers started to wrinkle. Back on the beach, I stood in the sun, letting it warm me and letting my underwear dry.

Although I never got one of those hamburgers, my hunger wasn't terrible, and with my clothes back on I walked to what they called the boardwalk. There weren't any actual boards, but there was a cement wall separating the littoral world from the civilized world and I sat on that. Looking off into the blue water, I could hear the sound of skateboard wheels, the conversations of freckled couples, and the cries of scavenger seagulls circling over my head.

That's when I heard someone calling out “Van Belle!”

I heard the words but they had no meaning for me.

“Van Belle?”

And yet for some reason I thought the calling was aimed at me, as if some person recognized me, and so without assuming I was the target of the calling, I turned. A scrabbly man crouched against the cement wall was calling me over.

“Remember me?” he said, and he sat up and smiled as if smiling for a photo. “Steve Polino,” he said. “From Claremont. You're Van Belle, right?”

I nodded, thinking I might as well go along with it.

This Polino fellow asked me if I was hungry. “I know all about bad times,” he said, and he took me to a dumpster behind a taco stand, one of several he said he knew about, and we found, down in the bowels of the dumpster, some leftover Mexican food wrapped in clear plastic bags. The food inside was just a lot of rice with bean juice in Styrofoam containers, no tamales or enchiladas, but we scraped off the specks of dirt and pieces of congealed lard, and with some containers of salsa we sat together on a bus-stop bench, enjoying our starchy repast.

This was the beginning of living on the beach. Polino took me under his wing, showing me where to find food and where to clean up. He took me to his shelter and invited me to stay. It was near the beach, in a maintenance room in the Surfer Hotel, a cinder-block room with a drain in the concrete floor, and most of it was taken up with the hotel's heating and cooling system. Which meant it was warm at night and there was a comforting white-noise drone in the background. Somehow Polino had a key, so it was private, our cavelike home, and all we had to do was make sure we cleared out during the day.

I call it a home because Polino had it set up with some domestic touches. Behind the heating unit he'd hidden a box with books and blankets, and he gave me a blanket, or loaned it, and sometimes, on cold days, we wrapped ourselves in our blankets and sat on the beach in the fog, contemplating the enveloping grayness. We lived the beachcomber life together, or in close proximity of each other. Our gainful employment was panhandling, but our main activity was sitting on the cement wall separating the beach from the boardwalk and developing our tans. Polino was already deeply bronzed, with an added layer of dirt that protected him from the sun. It's called a homeless tan, and sitting outside all day, day after day, I began, inadvertently, to develop my own.

Bums, or people called bums, are largely invisible. People with regular lives don't like to see people living on the street so they don't. But in the cracks and corners of the world these people also have to eat. As did I. Which meant I had to beg on the street or scrounge in the trash, and the problem was, I didn't like it. I could have adjusted, but because I saw it as a temporary state, I didn't. I didn't submit to my new lifestyle, and told Polino that I wasn't going to live like this for long.

“What's the matter with living like this?”

“It's not the way to live,” I told him. But it happened to be Polino's way to live, so he was slightly insulted.

“How do you want to live?” he said.

“Not like this,” I said.

“You have something better?”

“I don't intend to keep eating out of dumpsters,” I said. I told him I planned on getting a job.

Anne always wanted me to get a job, or a better job. I remembered—I wasn't sure it was Anne—a girl walking barefoot on some hot asphalt somewhere, telling me to be ambitious. Was it Anne? It probably was Anne but why was I always thinking about Anne? Anne was dead. I wasn't dead. I was determined to remember other things, new things. I wanted to remember new things, but the problem was, I didn't. Days went by and I didn't do anything but sleep and eat and sit on the boardwalk wall with Polino. I could have remembered that but it wasn't very memorable.

I'd given up the idea of calling my friends. I realized that I didn't have any friends. All my friends were Anne's friends. New York was part of another life. The memory of it lingered, a little, and one time, walking across the warm sand, I told Polino about my life with Anne.

But he was unsympathetic. “She's gone, dude. Get over it.”

“Fine,” I said. “Whatever.” And even though I said “Whatever,” and even though I continued eating out of dumpsters, I refused, in my mind, to become part of Polino's world. It was a pathetic world, I thought. Not my world, and yet all the time I thought I was resisting that world and the indolence of that world, I was succumbing. I needed to survive and that's what I did.

I had a job, briefly. Polino, it turned out, never bothered to learn how to drive, and when a friend offered him a job driving someone in a car, I took it. I was to drive a girl—in her car—to a house. She was to go inside and I was to wait in the car and, in case of emergency, to come into the house, which I was assured would never be necessary. When the night of my job arrived I walked to the girl's house. She was waiting for me, all business. “You don't look too good,” she said, and although she told me I smelled bad, she let me drive her to the house where she had a massage appointment. She went into the house while I listened to the radio and watched the quiet residential street and the light from the streetlight shining on a nearby garden. When she came out of the house, about an hour later, she started yelling at me. She told me I was fired. “You're too dirty,” she said. “It's bad for my reputation.” I didn't know what had happened. I would've argued my case, but I didn't really care about my case. Why should I care? When she reached into her purse I told her to keep her money, which seemed to mollify her, and then I drove her home. I walked through the nighttime streets back to my makeshift shelter where I curled up with my blanket and listened to the humming of the air-conditioning machines.

Living on the edge of the continent, at the edge of society, I was feeling less and less connected to the world. I was pretty sure the massage girl had spoken to me, but whatever had happened between us, I was obviously of little consequence. I was more or less invisible. And when I say I didn't care, it wasn't specifically the incident with the girl. I cared about nothing. Or almost nothing. There was
one
thing, one small ember of desire still burning in me. Given a chance, I would have said that I wanted to be loved. But given the growing inconsequentiality of my life, and the fact that the girl hadn't even recognized me as a living being, I was lowering my sights. I wanted to be loved, yes, but at this point it was enough to simply exist. It's fine, I said to myself, and if it wasn't completely fine, or perfectly fine, at least it was somewhat bearable.

Gradually I submitted to the way of Polino, the way of doing the least amount of anything. As I got used to eating garbage I let my disgust fade away, and it was liberating to do this. To surrender to the least resistance. That's what I thought I was doing. Not fighting the world, or society, or the events of my life, but forgetting them. That's what I thought.

5.

One day Polino and I were walking down an alley off the main Mission Beach boulevard. We were talking about some girl Polino had seen, watching the people walk to the beach, and Polino told me he'd been married, so it surprised me when he then said, “Look, here come our dates.” I looked up as two girls were crossing the street in our direction. And just about as I saw them I felt this object hit me in the stomach. It was an avocado. A partially eaten avocado rolled onto the sidewalk and I looked up and saw a man running down the alley. Another man staggered up to us and said that his friend was drinking too much and didn't know what he was doing. Well fine, I thought, okay, no problem. A drunk, right? What are you going to do?