Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron's Ghost

by J. Malcolm Garcia

  I told Granny I insisted on certain conditions. In exchange for staying at the center, she would need to use her Social Security check to rent a room or a small apartment instead of blowing it on storage lockers. There were places with subsidized units she could afford. I would help her empty the lockers. In addition, Granny would work at the front desk every morning, signing people in who needed to see our benefits advocate. “You have to earn your keep,” I said. Granny imitated my stern look and then laughed, her face crinkling into dozens of lines. I told her I’d pair her with Napalm at the front desk, and she stopped laughing.

  Ron shut off the lights except the ones in the drop-in, where Granny would spend the night in her wheelchair. I would sleep in my office. But first I ran across the street and bought two hamburgers, an order of fries, and two Cokes. When I returned, Ron got up to leave.

  “No fooling around,” he said, and grinned.

  “Don’t forget to pick up the damn dog,” I told him, and I locked the door behind him.

  Granny and I sat at the counter and ate. She thanked me for the burger and asked where in San Francisco I lived. I told her I didn’t live in the city; I rented a house on a hill overlooking vineyards in Sonoma County. Some neighbors raised horses, and one had sheep that he let into his house. Granny made a face. She popped a fry into her mouth and said she’d grown up on a farm. Her family had kept chickens. I told her my mother had raised chickens when she was a girl, and my older brother had once had a pet duck named Quacker. “A duck is not a chicken,” Granny said. “Thank you,” I said. She told me her childhood home had stood where the Civic Center Plaza was now, and that she was a member of the Brooks family for whom the exhibition center Brooks Hall was named. She’d been specially invited to attend the grand opening.

  I asked what it was like.

  “Crowded.”

  “Who was there?”

  “All the famous people of the city.”

  “Like who?”

  “All of them,” Granny said.

  “When did it open?”

  “Years ago.”

  I stopped asking questions. We finished our burgers and fries, and I went to my office. I didn’t believe Granny was related to the Brooks family any more than I was. Then again, I hadn’t believed Terry had cancer.

  In the morning Granny had coffee, and Paul brought her a breakfast of toast and oatmeal from Saint Anthony’s Soup Kitchen. She sat at the front desk, and when we opened, she told the stream of people pushing through the door to “Sign in, goddamn it.” When the initial rush was over, I asked Granny to show me her storage lockers.

  She rented three on Turk Street and one off Van Ness Avenue. I suggested we check out the Van Ness locker first. We walked several blocks to get there, Granny pausing from time to time to catch her breath, leaning heavily on her wheelchair.

  When we opened the Van Ness locker, I saw a kitchen table set with plates and silverware and a yellow rug beneath it. Boxes filled with tissue-wrapped cups and glasses and cutting boards were stacked against the concrete walls. Sheets covered a red mohair sofa and a gray lounge chair. Some of the furniture, Granny said, had belonged to her parents. Some of it she had bought when she’d cleaned houses in Pacific Heights.

  Granny and I spent another night at the center, and the following day we walked to the Turk Street lockers. These were filled with boxes of old newspapers, magazines, rusted cans, broken pieces of furniture, and frayed clothes, some green with mold and looking as if they’d been pulled from a dumpster. At first I thought the newspapers and magazines might have stories about the Brooks family, but I found only dead mice between the gnawed pages. It was as if there were two Grannys: the methodical, organized woman on Van Ness, and the bag lady on Turk.

  I started clearing the Turk Street lockers, since they appeared to contain nothing of value. I wore a scarf around my face and filled garbage bags. Granny wrung her arthritic hands as I discarded one pile of magazines after another, her face wrinkled with worry. Finally, she couldn’t stand it. When I took a break, she started emptying the bags back into the lockers.

  “Granny! What are you doing?”

  “Ooh,” she said, reaching into a bag to withdraw a wrinkled Life magazine between her thumb and forefinger as if it were a gold nugget. “Can’t get rid of this. No, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “This is very old,” she said appraising the magazine with a cocked brow and then placing it deliberately in the locker, careful to disturb only cobwebs.

  I gave up on clearing the lockers that day and suggested she consolidate, moving a load of things she felt she had to keep to the Van Ness locker. Granny agreed. But the torn magazines and other odds and ends did not fit with the dollhouse tranquility on Van Ness. Without any urging from me, Granny discarded the items we had piled in her wheelchair and pushed over from Turk Street. She looked morosely at the trash bins spilling over with her garbage. I asked Granny what she was thinking.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I’m tired.”

  Sometimes Granny and I walked to a small restaurant on Golden Gate Avenue for lunch. The owner was obsessed with salads. He screamed “Salad!” when we walked through the door and brought us two whether we wanted them or not. In addition to the salads, I ordered two BLTs. Granny asked for a glass of red wine. She watched a waiter pour it, and then she sipped it, her pinkie in the air. She closed her eyes, tipped her head back, and swallowed. I could tell that she had left me for a memory. I never asked where she disappeared.

  After lunch I walked Granny back to the center and then left to attend meetings. Whenever I was gone longer than Granny preferred, guys on the street would tell me, “Your grandmother is looking for you,” and laugh. When I’d get back and ask Granny what she needed, she’d have little to say other than that she had cleaned my office or had put a quarter in the parking meter, saving me from a ticket. Sometimes, as I was leaving the center, she would shout my name. If I was in a hurry I’d say, “Not now, Granny, not now,” but she would continue calling “Malcolm!” her voice cracking and then getting louder, “Malcolm!” primordial in its insistence, its need.

  At night Granny and I sat in the drop-in and listened to the windows trembling from the trucks rumbling past and watched the shadows roam across the walls. We rarely spoke. I’d hear water drip somewhere, the creaking of pipes. Men and women drifted by outside shrouded in fog, hazy reflections of who they had been during the day. I felt the solace of the empty building, released from the echoing demands of needy people.

  One night I cracked open a can of beer I had bought at a corner store.

  “What’s that?” Granny asked.

  “Beer.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m thirty-five and single and spending my nights with a seventy-eight-year-old woman.”

  Granny got a kick out of that.

  Once I asked if she’d ever married. “Oh, I had plenty of boys,” she said. “Went out with one in the afternoon, another at night.”

  “But were you ever married?”

  She shrugged. I let it go and watched her begin to fall asleep, the dog curled on her lap.

  “Where’d you get Missy?”

  Granny opened one eye and rolled her head toward me. “Found her,” she said, and then she closed her eye, keeping any further information to herself.

  About a month after Granny began staying at the center, Terry requested a vacation. She said she had family in Florida she wanted to visit. She had no vacation time coming, but I gave it to her because I sensed what lay behind her request. She left on a Wednesday, just after our weekly staff meeting, which she attended in a wheelchair with a brown suitcase at her side. The chemo had shrunk the stomach tumor, and Terry too. Her clothes hung loosely, and her skin looked ashen. She wore a red beret to conceal the bald patches on her head.

  I went over schedules, shift changes, budget reports. When I’d finished, I asked if anyone had anything they wanted to bring up. Terry raised her hand and withdrew
a sheet of paper from her pocket. Unfolding it, she read our names and what she liked about each of us. She included some gentle criticism: Poppa Ron was too nice and allowed participants to take advantage of him. I attended too many meetings. Doug should brew stronger coffee. Granny needed to bathe her damn dog. Then Terry folded her list and put it back in her pocket.

  “That’s all I have to say,” she said. “I’m leaving for Florida.”

  We stood up and one by one hugged her.

  Poppa Ron drove Terry to the airport. She died in Tampa three weeks later.

  I remained with Granny overnight at the center for eight weeks. During that time, she finished emptying all three of her Turk Street lockers. I helped her put the money she saved into a bank account, and we began filling out housing applications. Sometimes Poppa Ron spared me and spent the night with Granny, and sometimes Julie did. Tommy, one of my counselors, filled in too. He was an easygoing, beefy guy with a rambunctious laugh and a clownish sense of humor. He worked the front desk alongside Granny in the morning and called her “Miss Marcella.” Beneath his humor, however, was a paranoia that made him question the motivation behind any kindness. He was convinced that I was helping Granny clear her lockers only because they held objects of value. My nights with her, he thought, were interrogation sessions during which I tried to get her to relinquish her treasures to me. I told him I was more than happy to let him take over and help Granny empty her lockers. He returned to the center one afternoon holding a wooden coffee grinder that Granny had given him. She said it had belonged to her mother. After work Tommy caught a bus to a Mission District antique store and sold it for fifteen dollars. The next morning, he showed me the receipt from the sale.

  “I got mines,” he said.

  The newly opened Turk Street Apartments had several government-subsidized units available. I met with the landlord, who put Granny on his waiting list. About four weeks later he called and offered her a studio apartment. Her rent would be just six hundred a month. I sat with Granny as she signed the forms. Poppa Ron picked up her furniture from the Van Ness locker and delivered it to her new place. I visited the next day and was impressed at how quickly she had arranged her living space. Plates and cups filled the kitchen cupboards. The sofa stood against one wall on blue carpeting. The round breakfast table and four chairs took up a corner. Sunlight filled the room and illuminated a painting of a red barn that Granny had hung on the newly painted white walls. Missy stood on a deck overlooking Turk Street and barked at the pigeons. Granny wore a bright yellow dress, a white apron around her waist.

  I told her I was proud of her.

  “Shoo,” she said, and blushed.

  The following morning Granny walked into the center pushing her wheelchair and wearing a fur coat, rouge on her cheeks, and eye makeup. She took off her coat and threw it at me, then laughed at my astonished look. She kicked up one leg to show off her high heels and then reached for her wheelchair to stop from falling.

  “Lord, what having a home can do to some people!” Julie shouted.

  A week later in January 1992, Julie left for Mississippi as Manuel. She called once to tell me the funeral was beautiful, “but, Malcolm, I forgot how hot Mississippi can be!” She had met a wonderful man, “a big ol’ bear of a man, Malcolm!” at the reception afterward. She didn’t elaborate, didn’t call again, and didn’t return to San Francisco.

  My father called me at the center about that time to tell me my Uncle Joe had died after a long illness. He was eighty. After I got off the phone, I walked around the block to shake off the shock. I remembered how Joe had helped me when I lived in New York and the dinners I’d shared with him. I wrestled with the regret of not having kept in touch. I must have mentioned my bad news to someone on my way out, because when I returned, Granny said, “I heard about your uncle. I just want you to know I know.” She reached for my hand. “I want to give you this.” And she wrapped her hands around mine.

  That was it. But it was enough.

  Three months after she moved into the Turk Street Apartments, Granny again began amassing what I can only describe as garbage: discarded newspapers and magazines, pieces of broken metal, wooden boards, even twigs. Someone had given her two cats. She also had two pigeons that she kept in cages she never cleaned. Circular stains began to mar the blue carpet. The apartment reeked of cat piss and body odor, and Granny kept the thermostat on high, exacerbating the stench. She would not let me or anyone else clean her place and bustled around in a frenzy at the mere suggestion: “Don’t touch anything! Don’t touch anything!” Other tenants began complaining. Granny said people needed to mind their own goddamn business. When I suggested that her neighbors had reason to be concerned, she told me to shut the hell up. She stopped paying rent and began staying in her old spot on Market Street. The landlord tossed her furniture and charged the center a thousand-dollar cleaning fee. I released the pigeons and kept the cats.

  Granny continued coming into the center for coffee, wearing several layers of clothes and smelling of wood smoke from the homeless encampment where she spent her nights. She drank her coffee and then made her way to Market Street, avoiding me.

  One afternoon I saw two paramedics attending to her and asked what was wrong. Someone had called 911 about an old woman in a wheelchair who appeared dead, they told me. “I was asleep,” Granny said. But she appeared to be having trouble breathing, and the paramedics put an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth and told her they wanted her examined at San Francisco General Hospital.

  “She has lice,” they said. “Do you know her?”

  I did, I said, and told them where I worked.

  “C’mon, Marcella,” they said.

  I took Missy.

  Granny remained in the hospital for seven days. She had suffered a mild heart attack. I visited her one afternoon. She was as pale as her white hospital gown and complained about the food. I went across the street and bought her some spaghetti at an Italian restaurant. She twined the noodles around a plastic fork, spattering her chin with red sauce. “Why can’t the hospital serve food like this?” she wanted to know. Her gown drooped off her right shoulder, and I noticed a large tattoo snaking down her spine. Granny saw me looking at it and pulled up her gown.

  “Got that in the navy,” she said, her mouth full of spaghetti. “Dubya-dubya two. Australia. With MacArthur.”

  “Wasn’t that the Philippines?”

  “He came to Australia after the Philippines,” she said. “Terowie.”

  “What?”

  “Terowie.”

  I stopped at the library on my way back to the center and looked through histories of World War II. Women, I learned, did serve in the navy then and called themselves WAVES, short for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service. And General Douglas MacArthur, after being forced out of the Philippines by the Japanese in early 1942, had ended up in Australia. It was in the small town of Terowie that he made his “I shall return” speech.

  I left the library no more certain about Granny than when I had entered. She could have heard about Terowie in any number of places. And she could have been in the WAVES too. In the end it didn’t matter whether she was speaking the truth or making up stories. I’d still be looking after her when she was discharged from the hospital.

  And, sure enough, another hospital social worker gave Granny another bus token, and she walked into the center with another note recommending we find her shelter. She was smaller and gaunter than I remembered. I told her she could stay at the center until we found her another place to live. The same rules applied: She would have to volunteer. In addition, when she got a new apartment, someone from the center would help her maintain it, and that would mean tossing anything she brought in from the street. Granny agreed. I fully expected a replay of what we had just been through, but I had no idea what else to do. Despite her contrary nature, I had become very fond of Granny. The mysteries of her life intrigued me. She might sabotage all my best efforts on her behalf but I could not
abandon her. The center was meant for people like Granny.

  “You’re killing me,” I told her.

  “Shoo,” she said. “I’m your ticket into heaven.”

  We found Granny a room in a government-subsidized residential hotel not far from the center. The twelve-by-twelve-foot space held nothing more than a bed, dresser, closet, and mirror. Poppa Ron, Tommy, Doug, and I visited Granny regularly and threw away newspapers and magazines and anything else that began to accumulate. I expected Granny to object, but she was strangely passive and watched us scour her room without complaint. “Well, here I am,” she would say, that isn’t-this-something look on her face. She used an inhaler now, and her breath rattled in her chest. She stopped coming into the center except for one afternoon to tell me that Missy had died. I walked with her back to her room and found the dog stretched out on the floor. Rigor mortis had begun to set in. Granny knelt beside Missy, balled her hands in the dog’s fur, and wept. I had questioned much of what Granny had told me about her life, but I had no doubt about her sorrow. When she stood, I wrapped Missy in a towel and told Granny I would bury her. On the way out, I noticed a cracked metal bucket filled with dirt, twigs, and feathers that had spilled across some yellowed newspapers. I cleaned it all up and carried it out with Missy.

  Two months afterward, on a warm June afternoon brushed by breezes off the bay, Tommy discovered Granny dead in her room, seated in her wheelchair, head drooped to one side, eyes closed, and a blanket across her lap. The hoarded secrets of her life were hers forever now. A box in Granny’s closet held her birth certificate, a high-school diploma, and a yellowed black-and-white photo of a young woman who looked very much like her. According to the birth certificate, Granny was ninety, not seventy-eight, as she’d told us. But her name was Marcella Brooks.

  I spoke with the San Francisco Coroner’s Office about burying her, but since neither I nor anyone else at the center was related to Granny, her body could not be released to us. Instead it would be held for twelve months. If no family member claimed it, the body would be cremated and the ashes scattered. A priest, the coroner said, would be present.