Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron's Ghost

by J. Malcolm Garcia

  “Experience is something you pick up every day,” he said. “Education takes time. I’m still not done with my classes. I don’t know how long it will take. You have a college degree. You have that much.”

  I looked at him.

  “Do it,” he said.

  I heard no resentment in his voice, no veiled anger toward a new colleague who also happened to be a college graduate and more than ten years his junior. I was not an alcoholic. I had never been on the street.

  “Do it.”

  I heard in his voice the weariness of someone who had been up all night with too little to do and who was still awake and knew he would be unable to sleep for hours. Perhaps in his exhaustion he had an image of his own future and, in a moment of clarity, seeing where his life would lead, decided to pass his ambitions on to me.

  The end came when a counselor position opened. Curtis thought the center needed to promote more women. Only four were on staff. He gave the job to Mary, an intake counselor who was a new employee.

  I don’t know how Gypsy heard about Mary. He came in that afternoon with a bicycle pack filled with his framed certificates. I wasn’t there, but I heard he walked into Curtis’s office and placed each certificate on his desk. He began shouting. Everyone watched him through the glass window of Curtis’s office that overlooked the drop-in. Curtis waited for Gypsy to finish. Then he spoke. When he finished, he and Gypsy stared at each other for a long time before Gypsy slumped slightly. He gathered his certificates into his bicycle pack and then hesitated. He stared at the pack for a long time. Then he tossed it to the floor and walked out.

  Shortly after I was hired at the Ozanam Center, I’d spoken to Curtis about the extension classes offered at Berkeley. Alcoholism was considered a disability, and Gypsy and other recovering staff were eligible for state aid. The California Department of Vocational Rehabilitation covered their tuition. I, on the other hand, would have to pay out of pocket. The classes cost $300 apiece.

  “Are they worth it?” I asked Curtis.

  He considered my question, looked down at his desk and then back at me. A recovering alcoholic himself, he had lost an eye somehow and had had it replaced with an artificial one that was larger than his real eye. The new eye appeared magnified, and I never knew how to look at him without staring at it. So I focused on the knot in his tie.

  “I wouldn’t do it,” he said, finally. “You’d learn something, but for the cost all you’ll get is a certificate. So what? You already have a college degree. Spend your money on grad school.”

  Gypsy finishes his joint, puts on his shoes. He writes a check for his rent and includes a note giving thirty days’ notice. He knows the manager of the Cadillac will keep his damage deposit. Someone will clean his room, clear out his clothes, and toss everything else. He feels an odd lightness followed by a brief flash of apprehension.

  He leaves the Cadillac and walks toward Leavenworth Avenue. He will cut through Civic Center Park, cross Market Street, and turn down Seventh. He knows everyone who hangs out in the park, just as he knows about every street person in San Francisco. They’ll give him shit because this time he won’t be generous with his change and smokes. He understands what’s coming. He knows he’ll go through his cigarettes and money soon enough. They won’t know until later. Then they’ll understand.

  The Ozanam Center’s board of directors interviewed me for shelter director along with seven other candidates from outside the agency. I didn’t get the job. I was disappointed but also relieved. I knew I wasn’t ready. In 1986 the position opened up again, and this time the board hired me.

  About a week after my interview, I saw Gypsy waiting to sign into detox. He sat in a corner chair wearing a sweatshirt and jeans and a navy-blue stocking cap. His face was lined with dirt and his clothes smelled of wood smoke, as if he’d been camping. He refused to look at me. Tears streaked his grimed face. I didn’t know what to say, and so I said nothing.

  I look back at that moment now and think that Gypsy had no sense of himself. His emptiness was complete. Just as it was that morning he walked me to the bus stop; uncertain, walking one way and then the other, no options. He was the number of extension classes he had completed, the amount of text he had memorized. When that failed to earn him a promotion, he had nothing, and, worse, nothing mattered.

  Gypsy was admitted to detox but walked out the next day. I never saw him again. Perhaps he got on a Greyhound bus and left to start over elsewhere. I hope so. I don’t want to remember him as I do Little Stevie, Rocky, Alabama, Eddie Conover, and the dozens of others I admitted to detox who drank themselves to early deaths.

  I prefer to remember the last time I saw him sober. I had arrived for my job interview at 8 a.m. wearing a suit and tie. A few of the staff whistled, and I couldn’t help but laugh despite my nervous state. Bill gave me shit about my college degree, but wished me luck.

  An Ozanam Center board member stepped out of a room on the mezzanine and called my name. I stood, rubbed my sweating palms against my pants. Halfway up the stairs I glanced down and saw Gypsy emerge from the drop-in. I wouldn’t know until the next day that he had completed his final shift and delivered his resignation letter. He was wearing a leather jacket, plaid shirt, jeans, and polished brown boots. Hair slicked to one side, his gunfighter mustache trimmed to perfection. He raised a hand and I waved back.

  The board member gestured to me and Gypsy nodded encouragement. I continued up the stairs. I looked back one last time to see Gypsy push open a side door and turn right, toward Sixth Street.

  Stabbing Johnny

  (1987)

  About a year after Bill stabbed Johnny in the neck, Randy began drinking again. I won’t blame Randy’s drinking on Bill, but he did change Randy’s life and mine. If Bill hadn’t stabbed Johnny, I wouldn’t have left the Ozanam Center and Randy would not have been promoted to shelter director. The rest of it, Randy’s ex getting sick—well, no one saw that coming any more than we anticipated Bill stabbing Johnny.

  All of this happened more than thirty years ago, but here I am, still living a life undestroyed by the things that claimed so many others, thankful I was spared their problems but burdened all the same with loss and regret.

  I met Randy in 1985. He was an intake counselor. That year I had been promoted to social worker, helping homeless people apply for benefits. I answered to the shelter director.

  Randy had recently graduated from an alcoholism treatment program in Redwood City, about a forty-five-minute drive south of San Francisco. Although he was fifty-six, his years of drinking had not aged him. Lines did not crease his face, no gray in his blond hair. He smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. He had been married and divorced three times and was seeing his first wife, Susan, an insurance agent in Gilroy, again. They got together at her house on his days off. Sometimes the three of us would catch a movie together.

  On a Wednesday around five in the morning in November 1986, Bill and Johnny requested detox. Their fat dog-eared files testified to the dozens of times they had been through detox. Bill stood about six feet tall. He always wore blue jeans, a light brown leather jacket, and cowboy boots. His thinning black hair tumbled over his forehead and a handlebar mustache framed his mouth. He walked with quick stiff strides, and he had an unpredictable temper. He never looked at you when he spoke, but past you, his glance curving around the side of your face. Johnny was the Mutt to Bill’s Jeff: short and pudgy, a harmless follower. He wore two wool shirts and a couple of pairs of pants at a time no matter the weather, and a pair of sneakers. He smelled of his own funk and the damp grass where he slept.

  An intake counselor asked Bill and Johnny if they had anything they wanted locked up. Bill gave him some change and a radio held together with duct tape. The counselor wrote Bill’s name on a piece of paper, stuck it to the radio, put it inside a closet, and locked the doors. He then assigned them beds. A few people in the dormitory knew Bill and Johnny and greeted them in voices that sounded like the strained barking of old do
gs.

  Three hours later Bill asked to check out. It was close to six in the morning, so the liquor stores on Sixth Street would open soon. Bill asked for his radio and change. The counselor gave them to him and Bill left, Johnny following him. They walked four blocks to Sixth Street, San Francisco’s skid row, and pooled their money. The damp air laced with car exhaust and the odor of garbage held an acrid stink that clung to Fred’s Liquor Store as they entered it.

  As Johnny told me later, they bought two fifths of Thunderbird wine, wandered over to the Bryant Street overpass, and drank. Johnny closed his eyes. He thought of those National Geographic specials he had watched in the Salvation Army shelter a couple of weeks before, of rushing rivers funneling into canyons, curving around rocks, all foaming and splashing, and he opened his eyes and realized he had pissed himself. He told Bill, and Bill laughed. Johnny’s mood shifted and just like that he was furious. He stood up, grabbed Bill’s radio, and made like he was about to throw it in his face. Bill scrambled to his feet and balled his big hands into fists. He moved on Johnny fast. Johnny froze. Then, still clutching the radio and with Bill almost on top of him, Johnny screamed and bolted back toward the center.

  Two hours after Bill and Johnny left detox, I was standing at the front door of the center signing people in on a clipboard. I noticed Randy clocking in to work. Then Johnny barged shrieking through the front door with a radio clasped to his chest. I stepped back just as Bill ran in behind him and threw him to the floor. He jerked Johnny onto his back and held him by the throat. Johnny made squealing noises and rolled his head, and Bill swung his right arm back and I saw the pointed tip of a knife blade sticking out from his hand.

  “Give me my radio!” Bill shouted, and plunged the blade into the right side of Johnny’s neck.

  “I need backup!” I yelled.

  A homeless guy with a shaved head ran toward me from the drop-in area and tackled Bill. I heard the blare of approaching sirens and knew one of the intake workers had called the police. Two squad cars pulled up outside. A cop stepped out of the lead cruiser and another cop followed him inside. The first cop looked at Bill and the guy holding him, then turned toward Johnny and saw the blood from his neck pooling on the floor. The second cop applied gauze to the wound while the first cop called for an ambulance. Then he turned back to Bill and saw the knife on the floor, the thin blade sticking out from a handle wrapped in rubber bands.

  “What happened?” he said.

  “He stole my radio and I stabbed him, that’s it,” Bill said so matter-of-factly that he sounded almost reasonable.

  The cop asked me and the guy holding Bill what we’d seen. As we answered, an ambulance parked behind the squad cars and two medics walked in. The cop motioned with his chin toward Johnny. The medics wrapped his neck with gauze, put him on a gurney, and wheeled him outside.

  “Okay,” the cop said to us.

  He put away his notebook, picked up Bill’s knife, and dropped it in a plastic bag. He handcuffed Bill and took him outside, his partner following him. They didn’t bother with the radio. The guy who had tackled Bill asked me if he could have it.

  “Sure,” I said.

  After the police and ambulance left, Randy and I walked to Civic Center Plaza and bought coffee. I told him it bothered me that I hadn’t tackled Bill like that other guy did, that all I had done was yell for help.

  Randy laughed. I must have seemed very young to him, a twenty-six-year-old who still judged himself by the rules of the playground. Randy was a middle-aged man who could consider with clear eyes the many years of his life wasted by booze and how far he had come a year into his recovery. He had a job, an ex-wife willing to give him a second chance, and enough money after rent for clothes, food, and a bus ticket to Santa Clara. He felt good.

  Johnny stayed in the hospital two days. Bill had just missed an artery. When he was discharged, Johnny asked for a taxi voucher and caught a cab to the Ozanam Center. He spent his days playing pinochle with guys waiting to get into detox. At night he helped set up the shelter with the dozens of exercise mats that served as beds. Drawings of buxom women decorated the mats, and sometimes when Johnny would trace one of the figures with a finger, I wondered if he was thinking of an ex-girlfriend or an ex-wife or anyone at all.

  He left the center only to eat. He wasn’t drinking.

  Two weeks after his discharge from the hospital, Johnny and I were subpoenaed to testify at Bill’s trial, the summons served to us in the drop-in center. Johnny testified first while I waited in the hall outside the courtroom and looked through the crack in the door. He sat on the right side of the judge, hunched forward, pale and skittish. I couldn’t hear him but I saw the back of Bill’s head and the orange collar of his prison jumpsuit.

  Then I took the stand. I described to a district attorney how Bill had wrestled Johnny to the floor and stabbed him. The public defender representing Bill did not question me. When the judge dismissed me, I stepped down and walked around the desk where Bill sat. He drew a finger across his throat and scratched at a mole as if he meant nothing by it.

  He was sentenced to nine months in San Bruno County Jail.

  I didn’t spend much time worrying about Bill. I had other things on my mind. The center’s shelter director, John Staley, had open-heart surgery and took a two-month leave of absence. The executive director of St. Vincent de Paul, Ken Reggio, asked me to fill in. I had applied for the shelter director job in 1984, but the board of directors had chosen John.

  Now, with little notice, I was responsible for a dozen shelter staff who often didn’t show up for work or were drunk when they did. Staley had tolerated their behavior. A recovering alcoholic himself, he understood what I did not—that no matter what a bunch of screw-ups his staff might be, they weren’t on the street because they had jobs. That counted for something. Not everyone, Staley knew, attains the purest sobriety.

  I, however, saw an opportunity to make an impression. When a staff member came in late or didn’t show up or stank of alcohol, I fired him. No warning, just you’re out. By the end of my first week on the job, the shelter had an entirely new staff. Reggio took notice. He fired Staley and recommended me to the board of directors, who hired me.

  I offered Randy my old social worker job. He was responsible, thorough, and well liked. He was also my friend. He accepted. His first clients included the shelter staff I had fired. He helped them apply for unemployment.

  From my new office above the drop-in I’d see Johnny playing pinochle at a table near a stack of exercise mats in a corner. Guys hit him up for change and cigarettes, but he didn’t go with them to the liquor stores. He rarely left the center. He felt better than he had in a long time, he told me, but he no longer felt like himself. Something was absent. He didn’t know what it was, but he knew if he had a drink, he’d find it.

  Bill completed his sentence in July 1988. When he was released he caught a bus to San Francisco and walked to Sixth Street. That night he came to the center and requested detox.

  The next morning, Reggio asked me to walk a new St. Vincent de Paul board member through the center. I introduced him to the intake counselors and some volunteers, including Johnny, who were serving coffee. When I took the board member upstairs to the detox, I saw Bill sitting at one of the tables. He had put on weight. The waxy whiteness of his skin shone beneath the ceiling light. He noticed me and stood up. I didn’t move. He pointed a finger at my temple. My heart rose to my throat.

  “Bang,” he said.

  After I walked the board member to his car, I hurried over to the coffee bar and pulled Johnny aside.

  “Bill’s out,” I told him.

  “You seen him?”

  “He’s in detox.”

  I think at that moment Johnny experienced fear and relief. He had been living in the center twenty-four/seven, avoiding the temptations of the world outside for months. He must have known that one day his refuge would be breached. Maybe that had been his plan all along. Waiting for the breac
h. The trigger, AA members call it. A reason to drink again.

  Then again, he may have thought nothing like that. What I do know is that he walked out from behind the coffee bar and I never saw him again.

  I started thinking about a change myself. Weeks earlier, Robert Tobin, the executive director of Hospitality House, a homeless services agency in the Tenderloin, had asked me to apply to be director of the Tenderloin Self-Help Center, a program he had developed to help the homeless mentally ill. I had declined the offer because I had only recently become shelter director.

  The people who came to the Ozanam Center rarely ventured north of Market into the Tenderloin, a gritty downtown neighborhood wedged between tourist-friendly Union Square and City Hall. Dope fiends called the Tenderloin home. Alcoholics stayed south of Market, close to Sixth Street. I knew I wouldn’t see Bill in the Tenderloin.

  When I called Tobin and told him I’d take the job, he didn’t ask why I’d changed my mind. I gave my notice and encouraged Randy to apply for shelter director. He considered the responsibility and the stress that would come with it and where that stress might lead. Still, he applied and was hired.

  “I’m ready for this,” he told me.

  Six months after Randy became shelter director, his ex-wife came down with what she thought was stomach flu. Susan couldn’t keep food down and experienced painful spasms. Her doctor performed an upper endoscopy and made a diagnosis: stomach cancer.

  He told me later how that weekend he and Susan sat on the couch in the living room of her house. Randy absorbing the news. Evening. The curtains closed, Susan crying. Two lamps on the end table, dim yellow light. The TV turned off. The distant drone of an airplane, cars passing by on the street. The odd creaks and groans of the house and the low hum of cicadas.