5/11/2017 Still There by Sammie DowningStill There The metal chair stuck to Frank's thighs. He let the metal—a garish ‘70s orange—adhere to his wilted skin. Even under all that sweat Frank managed to remain dry and flaky. He stayed after the spaghetti lunch; it was too hot to walk to the library today. The promise of air-conditioning, a computer and a chair to take a nap lingered a mile to the south. But Frank couldn't bring himself to stand up. “God, what I would give for an Old English,” Terry said, a heap in the grass to Frank’s right. “How 'bout it? What a day for a park beer.” Frank, along with the other men loitering outside the church, understood the meaning behind Terry's voice, not his words. To most people, Terry’s speech was like a heat mirage—elusive and full of flickers. Frank wished he had a cold cloth to put over his head. His hands swelled on hot days. He often wondered if it was dehydration that caused his fingers to grow to twice their normal size and turn bright white with little webs of red. Most things were as he expected, but the lack of water was one thing he wished he’d known before, not that it would have made much difference. Plenty of coffee but no water. In the end it worked out; there were no bathrooms either. Frank rolled his McDonald’s coffee cup in his hand. He could probably get the clerk on Pennsylvania Avenue to give him a refill before he was forced to buy another. A senior cup of coffee cost 67 cents; Frank was only 50 but he wasn’t easily offended anymore. “You'd think nobody had anywhere else to be,” Terry said with a sloppy, hand wave. Then he laughed until he choked rolling around in the brittle, September grass. After the purple thunderstorms of May, the city of Denver began to slowly shrivel. By fall, even the pine needles turned a rusted orange and crinkled from aridity. The grass in front of St. John’s Cathedral was crowded as usual. Some chairs were set out, but most of the guys couldn’t bring themselves to sit. Instead, they sprawled in the lawn between sidewalk and street. Their backpacks and carts spread onto the sidewalk, perfect for snagging ankles; but no one walked on that side of the street anyway. Too hot to tell stories so the men languidly rested in silence. All except Terry who couldn’t seem to stop his high-pitched, chorus-boy voice. Terry was always telling somebody something even after the lights went out and the foreman told him to shut the hell up. “Boy I am telling ya,” Terry said to Brian, a heavy-lidded man lounging on the grass. “Plasma makes me all soft, man. I don’t like it. Makes me all dummy. You get like that? All woozy and all over the place?” Frank looked at his own grizzled arms. During clean stretches he rubbed Crisco on his skin to get rid of that walking red, that lived-in sunburn. But he couldn't erase the bloated, protruding veins. Giving plasma made him look like a heroin addict—the veins in his arms swelled into fat bridges across his forearms. At the hollow of his elbow, his entire skin was raised—a fleshy tumor. All of that for 20 dollars a donation. It didn’t matter that real heroin addicts’ veins disappeared, thinning into illusive blue rivulets. People still looked at Frank’s arms and assumed. “But man, that nurse Dolores, she keeps me coming back, god damn! You know her? The blondie at the clinic? Knows right where to go, she does. I’d like to lick her tits like butter.” Terry put his hands out in front of him and massaged the air. Terry wasn't talking to Frank. He wasn't talking to anyone, but Frank was listening. He didn't believe in eavesdropping any longer. There were simply things you heard and things you didn't. And you heard a lot of things when you sat by yourself at the Mission. “Keep dreaming.” Brian horse-laughed from the ground. “Cuz that’s about as close as you ever gonna come to tits as fine as those.” He propped his head on his arm and looked up at Terry. “Damn, it’s hot,” he said with a yellow smile. “I’d just like to feel em, you know. Just touch em. I feel like a kid that’s never gone and felt a girl's titties before. Like they’re still a motherfucking legend, man.” Frank coughed. His whole body quaked with the force of it. Phlegm rattled in his ribcage and shot out his mouth of its own accord. His lungs were getting worse. He could feel it when he climbed up to the top bunk—that panting, desperate feeling—trying to find enough air. And the phlegm was now a putrid brown, some yellow. No one on the grass turned to watch him cough. That was the difference between Frank and the Chiva guys. It was his lungs, not his veins, that shrank. They were becoming a shredded, flimsy mass inside his chest. Last Wednesday Frank went to the free clinic for a routine check-up. No one bothered with a urine or blood test for guys like him, but they always made sure to take an X-Ray. A volunteer doctor with a shiny gold wedding ring and smooth skin showed him exactly what crack had done to his lungs. After the doctor left and Frank sat alone on the examination table, paper crinkling below his ass-cheeks, he managed to convince himself that what he saw was beautiful. Tender white flowers sprouting from human tissue. As if within his body, he held spring. A couple of guys walked up to the stoop sporting blue bandages across their left arms. That plasma bandage was familiar on a day like today. A middle of the month day. Days when Ready Man Labor filled up before four am and less than half the men were taken. The idea of plasma money made Frank ache. Desire. Like a mosquito bite that swelled and grew hotter just by thinking about it. A hidden, insatiable itch that only money and what followed could alleviate. The sight of all those plasma guys got that bite to itching. Frank didn’t have two cents in his pocket and he wanted it to stay that way. It was safest, he’d discovered, to never have money. Not even for the bus. He walked at least seven miles a day, from one feed to another, all to avoid five dollars in his pocket. He didn’t deserve it, he told himself. It could buy him two trips on the bus some frigid, midwinter morning. But more often than not, it brought that taintless freedom, release from this body—this life, and then, inevitably, shame. It was best not to want money. It was best to always try sleep at the mission and pray his number was called. If it wasn't, he stayed on Terry’s back porch. But Terry’s HUD apartment had no rules. Without rules Frank was a dangerous man. There was no curfew, no foreman, no 60-day suspension for using. Terry always kept the back porch open but the apartment door locked. The light overhead was invasive, the air itself smoggy and heavy-handed. All Frank wanted today was someplace dark, a crevice in which to slither. Frank closed his eyes and tried to sleep but as soon as his lids shut the rumbling started. An unusual mechanical chuffing that grew louder and louder. These back streets didn't usually see any trucks or semis, but this one sounded big. That sound, that singular, diesel heaving, and Frank knew which truck it was. They all did: a city contractor’s truck, red, with two doors, a big bed, and two men up front. The lawn fell dead silent when the city truck appeared. Nobody moved as the engine hummed to a halt in front of the church. The driver stayed in the truck as the man in the passenger's seat stepped out. He was dressed in Carhartts that fit perfectly, like he’d bought them himself. His t-shirt was completely white except for yellow stains at the pits. “You guys know the drill,” he said. “Two hundred dollars. No paperwork. Be done in two hours, maybe less.” Fancy Pants popped out a hip, like he had all day to wait for them. He chewed gum and his jawbone swirled around the side of his face. The protruding bone kneaded the air like a stubby oar. Frank turned away from the man. He said no to plasma today, he could say no to this man. Silence ballooned over the lawn. No one was going to say yes. Some of these guys might have said yes in the past, but this was the type of work that stained you. Even these men couldn’t shake a day spent with the red truck. Guys returned looking like specters, hollow-eyed and trembling. The others weren’t like him; they hadn’t yet learned how to grow numb. After a few prolonged moments, the man said, “Look, I can make it two-fifty. One guy could do it himself, but I’ll take two. Each walks with two-fifty.” He surveyed the men. There was the calm of his steady glance. Frank hated that. Everyone assuming they knew, just by looking at him, what it all meant, his origins—the “this is who you are and I know exactly how you got here” look. Frank stood, his legs moving on their own accord. This was how it always worked: he suddenly found himself in the neighborhood he avoided, or standing for 250 dollars—feet driven by that mosquito bite chewing on his lungs, that desire, that guttural, primal craving. As he rose, Frank pulled his ripped jean shorts further down his thighs. They rode up in those chairs and he chafed without underwear. He had a constant blistering rash between his scrotum and each thigh. Peeling white flakes and red blisters. Red and white like the rest of him. “Looks like it’ll just be you, partner.” Like it was a rodeo, like it was all a game of Cowboys and Indians and today, Frank could be the cowboy. “Slide in,” Fancy Pants said. Every man on the grass turned away as Frank climbed into the truck. The ride onto the highway was quiet. Every car was stopped, and they whizzed past on the shoulder. When cars sat with their engines off on the highway, an apocalyptic sensation burned in Frank's gut. He had a sudden urge to look up. The two men on either side of Frank ignored him, pretending that his presence didn’t enter their sphere of reality. Frank was always aware of his smell in moments like these—when he was in an other place, where people like him were in the minority. Frank imagined his smell filling a pungent cloud around him. It was as if he smelled himself for the first time in years. Other people were familiar with their own scent. Their laundry, their sheets—it all smelled like home. But for Frank, smelling his own distinct scent was an alienating experience. He began to think that old fruit, salty stench only appeared when he stepped out of the circuit of churches, the mission, the library and City Park. Once, at a coffee shop where he’d met his daughter, his smell made him nauseous. Ashamed. Not because he smelled bad or because he was sweaty, hot and unshowered. He was ashamed because it had been so long since the man who smelled like this existed. His daughter hugged him and didn’t look uncomfortable. She was glad to see him after all that time. The tenderness of her hug, so small—he knew there was no way she couldn’t smell this other him that began and ended in coffee shops or cars like this. The only other times Frank allowed himself to make a little cash were when he helped Mr. Wizard with his computer. Mr. Wizard made it into HUD housing; he was one of the guys who got his own apartment in a seedy downtown neighborhood for the price of a bag of groceries a month. Because, the city reasoned, it was better to have a man O.D. or drink himself bloody in his own home than on the streets. According to Mr. Wizard, he had a son somewhere; in Kansas or Missouri. Last Mr. Wizard heard he’d had a kid or maybe two. It was difficult for Frank to call him Mr. Wizard when he stood in his grimy apartment, with his stringy grey hair and thick ‘70s glasses. But here, names were shed and regrown, like peeling skin. For now, he was Mr. Wizard because Monday through Friday he flew a sign on Broadway and Alameda wearing his wizard hat and robes. And on Thursday nights he read people their tarot cards at that hippie café downtown. He’d spread the cards on the table; lovingly flip over The Emperor, run his fingers across his lips and say, “You have great triumph before you.” Sometimes, Frank let him read his cards. “You follow the path of the light.” Mr. Wizard paid Frank five dollars to send his emails and get Microsoft Word to open on his computer. Once, Frank had known a lot about computers. He’d been paid a great deal to speak in a language entirely made up of the numbers one and zero. Sometimes Frank believed that’s where he lost himself—in screens where he couldn’t decipher between one and nothing. Only after weeks of not being picked at Ready Man, only when Frank didn’t even have enough change for a cup of coffee, did he help Mr. Wizard with the computer Christ’s Body Ministries gave him. It was an old PC the size of a briefcase. The kind Frank used to take home from work and let his daughter play solitaire on. Sometimes Frank thought about his daughter but most of the time he didn’t. If he did think about her it was about taking her to the office when she was six and she went “Trick or Treating” around the candy dishes in the cubicles. If he thought about her it was a fleeting memory of burying her pacifier in the garden or telling her he could still see her smile when she hid her lips under the blanket. Mr. Wizard told Frank when a new apartment opened up in his building. “You could slip in there, eh,” he said while he leaned his sweaty body in towards Frank. His halitosis infringed upon Franks personal space. “Tony’s up and lost it, got kicked out a few nights ago. Say, you’re pushing fifty-five, right? That’s when you’re home free.” And even though it would be easy to fill out the paperwork, even though he could qualify and have a bed and a shitty hot-plate kitchen, Frank knew it would be all over the second the door closed behind him. The thought of waiting every month for a disability check, the thought of even filling out a form saying he was disabled made the thin film around his world threaten to split open; to let reality sieve through. He lived in a place where there was no up, no down, no forward, no backward, no yesterday and no tomorrow. Because in that type of world he never stole his daughter’s birthday checks, pawned her bike, her Barbies, her mattress. He never forgot to feed her, never found her asleep in front of the heater, curled in a ball on the carpet, a sweatshirt draped across her shoulders. She was so small that a single shiver quaked through her entire body. In the world Frank assembled he never missed her continuation, graduation, or even dinner at all. In the sphere he constructed for himself, no daughter ever lived to be forgotten. To be hurt. To reject him. In his heart, he was not the type of man to be disabled. Even though his heart couldn’t handle the simple function of remembering. He thought back to the last time he and his daughter had coffee. She bought him an Americano and let him pick the table. With her bright red lips and hair that hung between two, smooth shoulder blades he wondered when she had started wearing make-up, when she first kissed a boy, how she’d managed to grow up without him. When it was all over she insisted on walking him to the bus. He didn’t blame her. Even he wouldn’t have given himself money for the ride. When they arrived on the scene, the blue and red lights ricocheted onto the concrete highway walls. The driver stayed in the truck but Fancy Pants and Frank stepped out onto the asphalt. Bumper-to-bumper traffic occupied the one free lane. It was a one-car accident, the Jeep neatly crushed with very little debris on the road, considering. Only a lot of broken glass. No doors or wheels were thrown into the shoulder; not like some Frank had seen. The crash area was so neat there wasn’t even a survivor. “The coroner is going to take him soon. You might have to help with this one. Then you're gonna mop up. Bada bing, bada boom. Got it?” Fancy Pants pulled a big white spaceman suit out of the bed of the truck. “Ok.” Frank didn’t take the suit. “Suit up, partner,” Fancy Pants said, popping his hip. “Let's be done in an hour. That’s when they want it taken care of, lots of Labor Day traffic.” He tipped his head. “We'll be in the truck,” he said, disappearing behind the shiny red door. Frank climbed into the suit one foot a time. He was self-conscious about his lack of underwear. Even though his balls chafed against the jean cutoffs there was still a lot of open space. He wondered if people washed these suits. It was blistering hot inside the white plastic and his thighs rubbed together. The driver must have been speeding in order to flip the car like that. Going too fast in the left lane, reaching down to send a text, or to change the radio station as he slammed into the median. The green Jeep Wrangler cartwheeled over the cement blockade and landed underbelly up on the wrong side of the highway and the driver slammed through the windshield. Frank could see the body, smell him, from the moment they stepped out of the car. He saw kids peeping out their windows on their way to the mountains. Accidents on highways were always odd to him, a voyeuristic circus. A helicopter circled overhead; Frank was probably on the news right now, a white blob amidst the cars. The accident must have happened not even ten minutes before Fancy Pants came to pick him up. Frank watched the coroner. He never wanted to get in the way of the scientists, the people who really did have training. Men like the coroner could tell the man's family how he hit the ground, at what angle the impact occurred, if he was dead the moment he flew through the windshield. Frank didn’t want to interfere with the facts or the way the story played out. He was peripheral, the guy who got paid under the table to clean up the mess. He knew what an important story this was. But the coroner waved Frank over anyway. It was surprising how fast the sun had done its job—the cadaver didn’t quite look like a body any longer. But 105 degree weather could do that to any man, dead or alive, Frank thought. The man's odor swelled into the air around him. It pulsed into the heat mirages—the man's body shedding tissue and fiber in ripples of gas. “Can you help me get him up?” the coroner asked. As the car flew through the air, the man was ejected through the Jeep's windshield. When he hit the asphalt his head split open like a cracked watermelon. Even still, the skin remained attached at the back of the skull. The effect was a head that looked flayed, an animal skin spread out on the floor. Brain matter and blood frothed on the asphalt like a frying egg. On his way through the windshield the glass cut him open, ripping the skin on his neck, his arms—tearing his suit to shreds. “I’ll grab his legs, if you could grab his head and we can put him on the stretcher.” The coroner hustled to the end of the man's body. On his knees like a crab, avoiding the broken glass on the asphalt. He wasn't looking at the body—only pieces of the body, his feet, his hands, ways to pull him closer to the stretcher. Each glance was strategic and reserved. But Frank knelt by the body's face and stared. Unlike the rest of the cadaver, which wilted and oozed out of its previous shape like hot wax, the man’s head looked almost undisturbed from this angle. Wider and heart shaped. Frank reached out and touched it. He cradled the messy head and lifted; fingers sinking into cheeks and brain and goop. Together Frank and the coroner lifted what they could of the man onto the stretcher. The rest of the body remained in a hot, sizzling stew on the asphalt. The coroner gave Frank a curt nod and scuttled away. One by one the cars and ambulances departed and a tow truck came and lifted the vehicle out. When everyone finally departed it was simply Frank and the leftovers. After every accident he always had an odd sensation that in the bustle to hurry everyone off the road, something was left there. Something he felt he shouldn’t be the one to pick up. The man's remains seeped into the air around Frank in a dizzying, putrid cloud. His gag reflex was long gone and he breathed in and out normally, something even the coroner couldn't do. It was no wonder Fancy Pants and his companion come looking for clean up crews at homeless shelters. There, with group showers and four toilets for two hundred men, they lived in stink. While the shelters were cleaned frequently nothing could completely decontaminate the green tiles and moldy bathrooms. There was never anything white at the shelters—not even the sheets. It wasn’t as though they were animals, or that they didn’t take care of themselves. Some men, ghosts of their former suit-wearing selves, flitted in quietly at night, made their beds in the morning. They shaved meticulously in the yellow mirrors before they were turned out before dawn. These men clung to the habits of former lives and on the street, in a Starbucks by the window with a hot coffee, their alternative lives were imperceptible. Their clothes might have been more worn than your everyday man’s, they might have smelled strongly of aftershave, but in general there was little physical difference between these men who flocked to the mission waiting for their lottery number to be called, and the men they once were—sitting with a hot coffee by the window in the family room. There were others too. The men who pissed their pants so no one rummaged through their pockets while they slept. Men who layered their clothing, concealing chicken flesh and bones beneath six pairs of jeans. There were men who should have been institutionalized in an old America. Maybe they still should be. They had years of gunk folded into the wedges of their ears. Frank was used to smells, to infections that oozed and soiled bandages, clogged toilets, that chemical crack-sweat—his own coffee-shop smell. This man's remnants lying on the asphalt did not faze him. First, Frank took a rag and a bucket and ran over the dead man's slimy shadow on the asphalt. Another reason they fished for volunteers at the shelters: there is a numbness acquired, the capacity to separate oneself from the reality of any situation. The numbness desensitized you to the everyday violence of life; the humanness of inhumanity. He ran his hands along the road, fishing the flesh and intestines and blood off the cement. It was just another mess. Not something that once functioned like a clock, one organ leading to the next, protein cells and white blood vessels, all feeding a living creature who had friends, family. Even if there wasn't a numbness, Frank thought, there was a hunger, an insatiable ache that dominated some men at the shelters. Men like Frank. Men who couldn't say no to 250 dollars. Frank placed the soiled rags into the hazardous material bucket. He took the power sprayer out of the back of the truck. Unleashing the hose onto the tar, the water pulsed against his hands so hard it stung his palms. These were industrial-strength cleaners. Not even restaurant kitchens had machines with this much power; with water like shotgun shells ricocheting against the black tar. Fancy Pants was right. It didn’t take long. No more than an hour. The cement was already dry and steaming, clean of any permanent stains. The funny thing about the power washers is that all they do is disperse the particles, not eliminate them. They thin them into millions of little pieces and send them spreading in every different direction. In the end, the man was still there, itsy bitsy pieces of himself powered into the seams of the road. You could have gathered a DNA sample off the tar if you wanted to—he was still there. Frank took off his spaceman suit, one foot at a time and placed it in the hazardous materials bucket as well. He was painfully aware of the fact that while he wore that suit, he’d sweat through his shorts. Fancy Pants stepped out of the car and let Frank slide in. The three of them drove off. “Where do you want us to drop you?” Frank thought about it. All he wanted was a clean bed, his own bed. He could afford one after today. But the hostel on Colfax was not a place Frank needed to be. It was a first-of-the-month kind of place, orbiting on an axis of disability checks and reservation dividends. Frank wanted a shower. He could feel his dick sliding against his sweaty thigh and it made him feel like a pervert. It didn’t matter that underwear was hard to come by in the shelter, it felt dirty. He was ashamed to look anyone, especially a woman, in the eye with himself undone like this. It made walking down the streets feel wrong. And Frank was also afraid of this other smell, the one that came and went with situations like these. If he spent too long with that smell, he would inevitably feel ashamed and that was one thing he couldn’t manage to grow numb to. Frank tried to think about the places he could go, but they were all places he didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to go to HUD housing. He didn’t want to go back, to go forward. He wanted to disappear—to be spread into tiny particles around the world. Never noticed but still there. He didn’t want to be a man who was once a father, once a programmer, once a husband, once a son. Once a man who knew how to speak using only the numbers one and zero. He didn’t want to be “once was.” He wanted to be zero. Bio: The poet Ed Roberson once told her, “You only have one life and you only have one work.” Advice she's taken to heart–she's filed taxes in 7 U.S. States and now finds herself working on a cattle and deer station in the depths of New Zealand. Find her fiction at Entropy Mag, her poetry at 3am Magazine and her blog at www.herearelions.org. Comments are closed.
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