Fat City

by Leonard Gardner

  “Don’t pay no attention to her. She been drinking.”

  “Get that shitbird out of here.”

  “We been out on the town tonight.”

  “Take the shirt off a man’s back. If that isn’t just so perfect. If that isn’t just like him.”

  Earl edged toward the door. “She just like to blow off steam. Don’t listen to her. We gets along. How I handles her, I just don’t pay her no mind. Thing you got to understand about her is she a juice head.”

  “I know,” said Tully. “And she won’t eat, either.”

  “It all on account of her unhappy life and all that shit, and there nothing I can do about that, so I don’t let it worry me. Look like you had your fight. How you come out?”

  “I won.”

  “That right? I seen you on the poster. Like to watch a good fight now and then. Maybe I catch you some time. But they no point in you coming around here no more. She don’t want to see you. Oma, you wants to see this man?”

  Oma, her brown curly hair in disarray and the broken bridge of her nose shining under the overhead light, replied with an incoherent oath and kicked out her foot, her shoe flying off toward them and falling on the floor.

  “You see how it is. I been away—man give me some shit and I don’t take shit—now I’m back. You a fighter, you know what I’m talking about. They a right way and a wrong way to take care of yourself.”

  “That’s right,” agreed Tully.

  “One thing I don’t need is trouble. Man see trouble coming he better off walking down the other side of the street. You got your stuff.”

  Tully raised his hand, still holding the T-shirt, to Oma. She did not look at him. Earl closed the door.

  To hell with her, Tully thought, going down the stairs. Don’t think you’re hurting my feelings. To hell with you, lousy bitch. That poor sucker can have you.

  Before he had reached his hotel a ghastly depression came over him, a buzzing wave of confusion and despair, and he knew absolutely that he was lost.

  22

  Tully was drunk for several days before he changed hotels, and the strange thing about that melancholy time was that he did not think of his wife. It was as if in losing Oma he had lost his love for Lynn. It had been overwhelmed by the monumental misery of the present. He yearned for Oma. Desolate, he could think of no relief but her. When he remembered how she had irritated him beyond endurance, he detested himself for his weakness; if he had loved her before as he did now, he could have tolerated her. But his love had come too late. That he had not felt it before was reason for bewilderment. For his wife he felt nothing. She seemed not even to exist.

  Ruben came on the third day and found him in bed. Outside it was already dark. The rain that had kept Tully in the room with a fifth of whiskey and a loaf of whole-wheat bread was still falling. At first he had not responded to the knocking, but after a moment of keeping silent, afraid it was Ruben out there in the hall, he began to think it might possibly be Oma. When the knocking came again he called: “Who is it?” And he heard that composed inevitable voice.

  “Ruben.”

  There was nothing for Tully to do but open the door. After he did so he got back under the covers. Ruben switched on the light and stood at the foot of the bed, his hands around its scratched metal tubing.

  “Billy, you can talk to me. What is it? Why you doing this? Is this any way to treat your body?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know?”

  “I didn’t do nothing.”

  “You’re going to ruin yourself with that stuff.”

  “Only had a few shots.”

  “Why didn’t you come to the gym yesterday? Work up a little sweat be good for you. Let me have a look at that eye.”

  “Been laid up with a cold.”

  “I was by yesterday and you weren’t in.”

  “Must of been asleep.”

  Ruben was now removing the adhesive strips from Tully’s brow. “I looked through the keyhole. You weren’t here.”

  “Out to eat, I guess.”

  “Looks good. Think I can leave these off. You’re still a good healer. Be a nice firm scar. You could go again in two or three weeks. You won, so what you boozing for? You stink, I mean it’s disgusting. You’re not fooling anybody. I can see what’s going on.”

  “You don’t know how bad I feel.”

  “Pains?”

  “I’m hurting, all right.”

  “Is it your kidneys?”

  “Lost my girl.”

  “That all that’s wrong? You sure? What girl’s that?”

  “My girl. Left me for a colored guy and I just sat around and let it happen and now I’m sick over it. Should of cut him from asshole to belly button.”

  “That same one? You left her.”

  “It wasn’t my idea. You’re the one made me move out.”

  “I didn’t have a thing to do with it. You wanted to leave her. So I gave you the room rent. You don’t want a pig like that tied onto you, fine young athlete with your future still ahead of you.”

  “I just needed a few days to myself, then I was going back to her.”

  “You said you were going back to your wife.”

  “How could I go back to my wife? I don’t even know where she is. And I don’t want to know.”

  “You don’t want that other one, either. She can’t give you nothing. You can get a thing like that on any street corner.”

  “Don’t call her a thing. I’ll get up and belt you one. There’s nobody like her on any street corner. There’s only one her.”

  “If you’d get up and come down to the gym you’d work this out of your system. Anybody’d think about women, laying in bed all day.”

  “I’m just sick over it. I can’t think straight. Think I want to fart around the gym after something like this? I never felt so bad in my life.”

  “You’re a lot better off without her. You can take it from a man with a family. I’m settled. My mind’s at ease. You guys run around making love in bars don’t know what a good woman is.”

  “I’m just sick about it, the way I bungled this thing.”

  “Let’s go out and get you something to eat.”

  “Not hungry.”

  “Come on.”

  Tully slid farther under the twisted blankets. “What do you care? I should never listen to you anyway. You’re the one got me into this and now you don’t give a shit.”

  “Well, I’m sorry about it, but everything’ll work out for the best.”

  “You don’t give a shit about what I’m suffering.”

  “Tough, I know. Why don’t I come back tomorrow? I’ll pick you up and take you to the gym. So keep yourself clean. I want you in shape for a workout.”

  “You don’t know,” Tully mumbled, and as Ruben went on talking, he pretended to drowse.

  The next day Tully lurched down the stairway with his bags. Leaving no message for Ruben, he moved to the Owl Hotel. After resting on the sagging bed, one foot on the floor to slacken a sensation of backward sinking, he went down to the street to approach nourishment obliquely, drinking a Bromo Seltzer at the Old Peerless Inn, then eating a pig’s knuckle. Hours later he returned to the Oxford Hotel and found his key no longer worked.

  On the days and nights that followed and became indistinguishable in his memory, he pined for Oma and abhorred his unfathomable stupidity. The thought of existing alone produced instants of vertigo. On waking after a night of arrested falls, hammering heartbeats and sudden breathless staring, he quailed before the emptiness of the day ahead. Without Oma he felt incapable of anything. He could not bear the thought of training, not only because of the effort he could never summon from himself now, but also because the idea of fighting was disorienting in its repugnance. He felt that everyone at the Lido Gym was insane.

  One night he awoke sitting up in bed with the dusty curtains, still on their rod, ripped down and covering his head. In his dream he had been accomp
anying a beautiful woman through a train in search of privacy, until she had disappeared into some compartment and he had run through the car trying doors, meeting only a featureless man, whom he had begun to strike. It was all forgotten in a moment of thrashing panic under the curtains. When he hurled the rod to the floor, a mumbling voice swore beyond the wall.

  In the morning waking was like a struggle with death. Exhausted in the dismal sheets, hearing the coughing, the hawking and spitting in other rooms, he sank and rose between consciousness and sleep for nearly an hour before dragging himself up and crossing the cold linoleum to urinate in his washbasin. He was laden with remorse. His life, he felt, had turned against him. He was convinced every day of it had been mislived. His attention dulled, his ears humming, a sense of emptiness and panic hovering about him, he feared he was losing his mind. Catastrophes seemed to whisper just beyond hearing.

  After dark he walked by Oma’s hotel and stood below her window until a police car slowly passed. But the following night when he entered the Harbor Inn and saw her with Earl, his first impulse was to turn and go out. His pride took him to the bar, where with studied casualness he had the quick drink of a busy man. He was sure they had seen him. Whenever he glanced at them they were looking away; and he was surprised that Oma did not attract him. He felt nothing, no vengefulness, no familiarity, no desire. He was not even interested. He went out with a sense of relief and was a block away before feeling the impact of the encounter and the shame of his inaction. Later, in bed, he evoked her for a few sad moments with his lips against the sheet.

  His jaws bristled with rust-brown stubble. A gray coating covered his tongue like mold. Intending to wash his socks, he postponed washing his feet. And his thoughts all flowed back to regrets. Sometimes, encouraged by signs of tolerance, he bought a drink for someone on a stool beside him; but these companions seemed invariably to lose interest in his unhappiness and he felt his generosity was accepted under false pretenses. One man, in loose pinstripe trousers and Eisenhower jacket, he slammed against a jukebox and chased outside and up the street for an entire block, the pursuit continuing into the next block at a walk, the man glancing back over his shoulder while Tully shouted.

  Bemused, he sat in theaters resounding with hoof-beats and gunfire. He paid his rent by the day, then not at all, meeting the bundled and palsied, gray-faced clerk with hearty promises, until one evening there was a different padlock on his door. Downstairs he argued, shouted, hit the counter, and not having the money to redeem them, he left without his bags.

  He went to the Azores Hotel, down near the channel, and an old man with broken capillaries puffed up the stairs ahead of him to unlock a cold narrow room. Over the rippled wallpaper on the ceiling were large stains the color of tobacco juice.

  When Tully came downstairs into the bleak, stinking bar, lit by unshaded bulbs hanging from long cords above a row of derelicts hunched over glasses, the bartender was roaring at a woman. Her stool stood in a puddle. Waistless, fat-necked, her face and ankles swollen, her bruised legs spotted with scabs, she sat holding her drink in her lap, out of the bartender’s reach, and declared indignantly that she was not going to leave until she finished it.

  At noon the next day Tully ate a bowl of oatmeal covered with sugar. He drank coffee sweet as syrup and went on to the Harbor Inn for a glass of wine. Later he bought a fifth and set off to find a warm place to drink it. A cold wind was scuttling papers along the gutters. Dark clouds lay over the delta fields visible to the west beyond the tanks of the gas works that rose from green nettles and fennel and wild oats on the bank of Mormon Slough. In the reeking entrances of vacant storefronts, men in overcoats, sitting on flattened cartons, looked out with rheumy eyes.

  Locked in a stall of the men’s room of the public library, Tully sat with his bottle in the same morose stupor that had delivered him from so many days, yearning for Oma, who already had begun to fade from his memory and become fixed and disembodied and eternal in his being. He left after prolonged pounding and finally the intrusion of a custodial face under the stall door.

  Out on the street under a turbulent dusk sky, he encountered a flow of pedestrians hurrying from closing stores. Unheeded in their midst, a shouting Filipino evangelist gesticulated with a trumpet. Frail, elderly, and suffering with loose dentures, he stood before a music stand on which, fastened with clothespins, sheets of paper fluttered. Tully, swaying in a wide stance, paused on the corner, and the small man, pacing the street near the curb, zealously harangued him. Understanding nothing but a few recurrent phrases in the torrent of jargon, Tully felt he was being taken for a fool.

  “Piss on you,” he said, moving a few steps away to the crosswalk, where, from the curb, he addressed each oncoming pedestrian: “Piss on you and piss on you,” until the evangelist began playing Tea for Two on his trumpet.

  Tully was a block away and still hearing those halting notes when it began to rain. His hair and the shoulders of his jacket were soaked before he reached shelter in the nearest bar. There he remained, listening to the splash and beat of the rain, aware of cold windy openings of the door as men entered with upturned collars or went out, feet pounding on the wet pavement. To the conversations on either side or to the room in general he contributed a few remarks: “Just because they’re sitting on that little hair mattress they think they got life by the balls . . . I served my country . . . You ought to be ashamed of yourselves . . . What’s your name? . . . Better watch yourself . . .” On rising sea rolls of nausea, his mind lapsed, his head sank to the bar and he drifted in a vast circle. He remained there until impelled to the lavatory; then he tilted slowly over with his stool, crashing painlessly and without sound to the floor. He became aware of hands under his arms as he tried to rise. Upright, gripped around the chest from behind, he was propelled out the door, his protesting voice sounding far away, as if from another room: “Let me alone, I’m all right.”

  He revived standing on the sidewalk holding on to a windowsill. He tried to tuck in his shirttails, forgot them, took a resolute step and in a forward plunge was running, striving to stay up, afraid of the damage of falling, then not caring. He struck the pavement face-down and lay for a moment feeling an odd pride that it had not hurt. When he rose he discovered blood running from his nose. Sitting in a windy doorway, he stanched the flow with his handkerchief. Cars splashed by, figures ran past, neon flickered in the rain. Tully rose and with a hand on walls and windows he progressed down the sidewalk to the corner, where he stood awhile before venturing diagonally across the street amid sounding horns and on to the Azores Hotel. He was stopped at the office at the head of the stairs by the red-faced clerk.

  “Want something?”

  “Just going to my room.”

  “You don’t have no room here.”

  “I was here last night.”

  “So where’s the rent for tonight?”

  “Pay you in the morning.”

  The clerk motioned toward the stairs.

  “Just want to go to my room.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “Don’t tell me to get out, you son-of-a-bitch. You talking to me like that?”

  “Go on, get moving.”

  “Don’t you tell me to get moving. You don’t tell me nothing.”

  Tully went back down the stairs and into the rain. Midway in the next block, in the dark recessed entrance of a store, he stumbled against something and was kicked. Cursing, he backed away and sat down on the concrete.

  “I’ll cut your throat,” said the man farther inside. “I got your number. I’m wise to you. Keep your hands off me. You come back here again I’ll stick you.”

  “I’ll come back and kick the shit out of you, you don’t shut up.”

  “I’m ready for you.”

  Rain was blowing in on Tully, and after judging that he had remained long enough to show the other that he was not intimidated, he got up and tried the doors of several parked cars.

  On a dark quiet street, in an asp
halted loading area strewn with refuse, Tully came upon a great steel incinerator. Cylindrical, the chamber rose well above his head, funneling up to a flue. He had noticed its thick silhouette against the wall of the supermarket, and now in the beat of the rain he felt around its rusty surface and found the door. He swung it open, leaned in and his hand contacted cardboard cartons.

  “Who’s in there?” He climbed in. Under a soft ringing he felt around, clearing a place for himself among crates and boxes and finding a quantity of shredded paper. This he threw to the center, where the chamber’s breadth permitted him to lie full length, and he settled into it with a groan of relief. But he was in a draft. He crawled to the square of dim light, thrust his arm out into the rain and pulled the door almost shut. The chamber now was completely dark. He lay back and burrowed into the paper. Once he thought he heard a truck grinding by, but then he was riding it himself, going somewhere down a long straight road.

  He was sick, overcome by repugnance and despair. Aware of nudgings against his foot, he opened his eyes to muted daylight and had no understanding of where he was. Facing him in a rectangle of light was the upper half of a young Chinese in a green smock.

  “Come on. Out. I got trash to burn.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Come on. What you think this is, a motel or something? Get out.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do.”

  “Come on, come on. You crazy? You’re going to get killed some day, you don’t watch it. Get out. What’s the matter with you? You don’t even want to move when somebody’s going to light a fire under you? You going to lay there and argue?”

  Tully rose, his feet sinking, and he climbed out the door. Squinting irritably, he cleared his throat, spat, leaned forward and with the aid of a finger blew one nostril and then the other. Crinkled strips of white paper clung to his clothes. The rain had stopped. It was early morning, cold and cloudy. The young man in the grocer’s smock began throwing cartons into the incinerator.

  That afternoon Tully arrived at the gym. There were bloodstains on his jacket; he was dirty and unshaven, and it was all the fault of a lousy hotel clerk, he said, an explanation that did not lessen the anger in Ruben’s eyes.