The Power Of The Dog (74 page)

May ’95 be better.

More guests at the gathering of the dead last night. The old regulars, and now Father Juan. Mowed down in the cross fire I created, trying to make peace in the war I started. He brought people with him, too. Kids. Two SD gangbangers, children of my own old barrio.

They all came to see the old year out.

Quite a party.

He looks at the front page of the paper and notes without much interest that NAFTA goes into effect today.

Well, congratulations, everybody, he thinks. Free trade shall bloom. Factories shall spring up like mushrooms just across the border, and underpaid Mexican labor shall make our tennis shoes, our designer clothes, our refrigerators and handy household appliances at prices we can afford.

We shall all be fat and happy, and what’s one dead priest compared to that?

Well, I’m glad you all have your treaty, he thinks.

But I sure as hell didn’t sign it.

The Road to Ensenada

The Golden West

All the federales say

They could have had him any day.

They only let him go so long

Out of kindness, I suppose.

—Townes Van Zandt,
“Pancho and Lefty”

San Diego
, 1996

The sunlight is filthy.

Filtered through a smudgy window and dirty, broken venetian blinds, it creeps into Callan’s room like a noxious gas, sick and yellow. Sick and yellow also describes Callan—sick, yellow, sweaty, rank. He lies twisted in the unchanged-for-weeks sheets, his pores trying (unsuccessfully) to sweat out the alcohol, dried saliva caked at the edges of his half-open mouth, his brain trying feverishly to sort out the bits and pieces of nightmares from the emerging, waking reality.

The weak sun hits his eyelids and they open.

Another day in paradise.

Fuck.

Actually, he’s almost glad to be awake—the dreams were bad, made worse by booze. He half-expects to see blood in the bed—his dreams are incarnadine; blood flows through them like a river, connecting one nightmare to another.

Not that reality is much better.

He blinks a few times, assures himself that he is awake, and slowly swings his legs, aching from the lactic-acid buildup, to the floor. He sits there for a second, considers lying back down, then reaches for a pack of cigarettes on the bedside table. He pops a cig in his mouth, finds his lighter and shakes the flame to the tip of the cigarette.

A deep inhale, a wracking cough, and he feels a little better.

What he needs now is a drink.

An eye-opener.

He looks down and sees the empty pint of Seagram’s at his feet.

Hell’s fuck—and it’s happening more and more these days. More and more my aching ass, he thinks. It’s happening every night now. You’re finishing the whole bottle and leaving nothing for morning, not the thinnest ray of amber-liquid sunshine. Which means you’ll have to get up. Get up and get dressed and go out to get a drink.

Used to be—doesn’t seem like that long ago—he’d wake up with a hangover and what he’d want was a cup of coffee. In the earlier days of those earlier days, he’d go out to the little diner on Fourth Avenue and get that first headache-relieving cup and maybe ease into some breakfast—some greasy potatoes, eggs and toast, the “special.” Then he stopped eating breakfast—the coffee was all he could handle—and then, somewhere in there, somewhere along the slow, drifting river trip that is an extended bender, it became not coffee he wanted in the first awful hour of the morning, but more liquor.

So now he gets to his feet.

His knees creak, his back hurts from sleeping so long in one position.

He shuffles into the bathroom, a sink, toilet and shower crammed into what had once been a closet. A thin, insufficient lip of metal separates the shower from the floor, so in the days when he was still taking regular showers (and he pays a considerable extra amount each week for the private bathroom because he didn’t want to share the common one down the hall with the babbling psychos, the old syphilis cases, the drunken old queens), the water always overflowed onto the old, stained tile floor. Or sprayed through the thin, ripped plastic shower curtain with the faded peace flowers on it. He doesn’t take many showers now. He thinks about it, but it just seems like too much work, and anyway the shampoo bottle is almost empty, the remaining shampoo dried up and stuck to the bottom of the bottle, and it’s too much mental effort to go into Longs Drugs and buy another. And he don’t like being around that many people—not that many civilians anyway.

A thin sliver of soap survives on the shower floor, and another shrinking bar of strong-smelling antiseptic soap—provided by the hotel along with the thin towel—sits on the sink.

He splashes some water on his face.

He don’t look in the mirror but it stares back at him.

His face is puffy and jaundiced, his shoulder-length hair long and greasy, his beard matted.

I’m starting to look, Callan thinks, like every other wino, junkie and drunk in the Lamp. Well, shit, why not? Except that I can go to the ATM and always get money out, I am like every other wino, junkie and drunk in the Lamp.

He brushes his teeth.

That much he does. He can’t stand the stale-whiskey-and-puke taste in his mouth—it makes him want to puke more. So he brushes his teeth and takes a piss. He don’t have to get dressed—he’s already dressed in what he passed out in, black jeans and a black T-shirt. But he does have get his shoes on, which means sitting back on the bed and bending over and by the time he finishes tying his black Chuck Taylor high-tops (no socks) he almost feels like going back to bed.

But it’s eleven in the morning.

Time to get going.

Get that drink.

He reaches under the pillow, finds his .22 pistol, sticks it in the back of his waistband under the oversized, untucked T-shirt, finds his key and walks out the door.

The hallway stinks.

Mostly of Lysol, which the management pours around like fucking napalm to try to kill the stubborn scents of urine, vomit, shit and dying old man. Kill the germs anyway. It’s a constant, losing battle—which is what this place is anyway, Callan thinks as he presses the button for the single, cranky elevator—a constant losing battle.

Which is why you chose it to live in.

Place to finally lose your own constant losing battle.

The Golden West Hotel.

SRO.

Single Room Occupancy.

Shit Right Out.

The last stop before the sheet of cardboard on the street, or the coroner’s slab.

Because the Golden West Hotel converts welfare checks, Social (in)Security checks, unemployment checks, disability checks directly into room rent. But once the checks run out, you’re Shit Right Out. Sorry, pops, hit the street, the cardboard, the slab. Some of the lucky ones die in their rooms. They haven’t paid their rent, or the smell of the decomposition seeps under their door and finally overpowers the Lysol, and a reluctant desk clerk puts a handkerchief over his nose and turns the passkey. Then the call is made and the ambulance makes its slow, accustomed trip to the hotel, and another old guy is taken out on a gurney for the last ride, his sun at last setting over the Golden West.

It’s not all old winos. The occasional Euro-tourist accidentally finds his way here, lured by the bargain price in otherwise expensive San Diego. Stays his week and checks out. Or the young American kid who thinks he’s the next Jack Kerouac or the new Tom Waits is attracted by the down-and-out seediness—until his backpack gets stolen from his room with his Discman and all his money or he gets mugged in the street outside or one of the colorful old-timers tries to grope his joint in the common bathroom. Then the would-be dharma bum calls Mommy and she phones her credit card to the front desk to get sonny boy out of there, but he has seen a part of America he wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

But mostly it’s old drunks and ancient psychotics, gathered like crows in the torn chairs in front of the television set in the lobby. Babbling their own dialogue, arguing over the channel (there have been stabbings, actual fatalities, over The Rockford Files or Gilligan’s Island; shit, there have been stabbings over Ginger versus Mary Ann) or just mumbling internal monologues from real or imagined scenes playing out in their own brains.

Constant losing battles.

Callan doesn’t have to live here.

He has money, he could live better, but he chooses this place.

Call it penance, purgatory, anything you want—this is the place where he conducts his long self-punishment, pounds the booze in slowly fatal amounts (lethal self-injection?), sweats the night sweats, pukes blood, screams his dreams, dies every night, starts again in the morning.

I forgive you. God forgives you.

Why did the old priest have to say that?

After the fucked-up shootout in Guadalajara, Callan made his way to San Diego, checked into the Golden West and started drinking. A year and a half later he’s still here.

This is a setting for self-hatred. He likes it here.

The elevator arrives, complaining like a tired old room-service waiter. Callan cranks the door open and hits the button below the faded L. The grille-door shuts, cell-like, and the elevator grinds its way down. Callan’s relieved that he’s its sole occupant—no French tourist jamming it up with duffel bags, no out-to-find-America college kid whapping him with his backpack, no smelly old drunk with BO. Shit, Callan thinks, I’m the smelly drunk with BO.

Doesn’t care.

The desk clerk likes Callan.

Nothing not to like—the strange, young (for the Golden West) guy pays in cash, in advance. He’s quiet and doesn’t complain, and there was that one night when he was standing there waiting for his key and this mugger pulled a knife on the clerk and this guy looks over and then just dropped him. Drunk as a lord and he just dropped the mugger with one punch, then politely asked for his key again.

So the clerk likes Callan. Sure, the man is always drunk, but he’s a quiet drunk who don’t cause no trouble, and that’s all you can ask for. So he says hi when Callan drops off his key, and Callan mumbles hi back and heads out the door.

The sun hits him like a punch in the chest.

Dimness to sunlight, just like that. Blinded, he stands and squints for a moment. He never gets used to this—they never had sun like this back in New York. Seems like it’s always sunny in fucking San Diego. Sun Diego, they oughta call it. He’d give his left nut for one rainy day.

He adjusts his eyes to the light and walks into the Gaslamp District.

It used to be a tawdry, dangerous neighborhood filled with strip joints, porno places and SROs—your typical downtown in decline. Then the shabby hotels started to yield to condos as the process of gentrification set in and it became hip and trendy to live in the Lamp. So you have an upscale restaurant sitting next to a porn shop, a hip club across from an SRO, a condo building with a coffee shop on its ground floor playing neighbor to a derelict building with winos in the basement and junkies on the roof.

Gentrification is winning.

Of course it is—money always wins, and the Lamp is starting to become a yuppie theme park. A few of the SROs hold on, a couple of porn shops, a small handful of the seedier bars. But the process is irreversible as the chains start to move in—the Starbucks, the Gaps, the Edwards Cinemas. The Lamp starts to look pretty much like everywhere else, and the holdout porn places, alkie-bars and SRO hotels resemble aboriginal Indians drunkenly loitering in the parking lot of American commerce.