I’m standing at Golden Gate and Leavenworth across from Fresh Start. It’s a program that serves the homeless in the Tenderloin. I’m the director, I’m in charge, but not really. What happens on a given day more often ends up directing me than the other way around. We offer twenty-four-hour detox and a daytime drop-in center. In another building on Leavenworth we have a homeless shelter. I have four floor supervisors, six counselors, a benefits advocate, an outreach worker, and two support group facilitators. Homeless men and women also help out as volunteers. They mop the floors, check people in at the front desk, answer phones, serve snacks, and make coffee. In exchange, I guarantee them a shelter bed.
Glancing up at the second-floor window of my office, I see my boss, James McGraw, leaning over my desk. What’s he doing here? Squinting through the gray morning fog, I watch him open a cabinet and remove a file. I rub my face, look at the time on my phone. Eight o’clock. He never comes in this early, and he has never riffled through my files, at least that I know of. Sure, he’s the executive director. He can do what he wants, but I don’t like this. More than that, I know it can’t be good.
I open and close my eyes, open and close them again, and shake my head. My temples pound with the reverb of a hangover. I take a deep breath and try to shake it off knowing that’s not going to work. You knock off a six-pack of Budweiser the night before and this is what happens, I tell myself. Should’ve taken two or three Advil when I got up this morning. Could’ve used some coffee too. Rather have a beer to take the edge off, for real. Might have one for lunch then stop somewhere for a grilled cheese sandwich with onions and garlic to kill my breath. Learned that trick from Walter, a forty-something homeless alcoholic. I’ve put Walter in detox more than a few times. One day he came in slurring his words and swaying, and I noticed that I didn’t smell booze on his breath. It was godawful in every way, thick enough to cut with a knife, heavy with undefinable odor, but nothing I could discern as alcohol. I mentioned that to him and he told me in a rush of barely intelligible words about his grilled cheese sandwich concoction. He thought of it after our social worker got him a job interview at a temp agency. Walter had some time before the interview and started drinking. He knew he couldn’t risk smelling like Thunderbird wine. So he went to David’s Deli on Larkin Street and ordered a grilled cheese with a unique set of ingredients he thought would obscure the fact he’d been drinking. He winked at me, thought he was pretty clever. Then he asked for detox. When I saw him later, he never mentioned the interview, so I presume he didn’t get the job. Being barely able to stand probably didn’t score him any points, breath or no breath. He drank way too much for his sandwich trick to work. Lesson learned. One beer at lunch, I tell myself. One beer and a grilled cheese sandwich.
Moisture collects on my beard, the fog so dense it clings like an extra layer of clothes. A shiver rattles my spine. I expect the fog won’t lift until midday. Typical San Francisco winter. I should’ve called in sick with this hangover, then tried to persuade my girlfriend, Mary, to do the same and come over. She’s a paralegal at Welfare Mother’s United, an advocacy group for single moms. A few months ago, her boss asked me to speak to her staff about what we do at Fresh Start. I noticed Mary right off. She had curly black hair and a smile that pulled me in faster than a whirlpool does a drowning man.
Are you coming over? she asked me last night. I was on my third beer by then.
I want to, I said, but I’m tired. I think I’ll stay in.
There was a long pause before she said, OK.
I felt sort of bad. Then I drained my beer and got up for another one.
It had been a bad day. I fired one of my staff, a guy named Frank Harrison. When I hired him, Frank had just graduated from a forty-five-day alcoholism program and had moved out of a halfway house and into a hotel for recovering drunks on Ellis Street. Then he came in loaded one day for his shift and I told him to leave. Had he left, eventually we could have worked something out. I would’ve cut him a deal: You can keep your job if you stop drinking and attend at least one AA meeting a day, but he didn’t leave. He cussed me out and threw a vase of fake flowers at my head, clipping my left ear. A little more to the right and I would have had a full-on concussion. I can handle being cussed out; a broken head, not so much. I cut him loose. But I was generous. I mean, I’ve got a heart. If I fired him, I knew he wouldn’t be eligible for unemployment. However, if I called his termination a layoff, he would be. A layoff isn’t an employee’s fault. I had nothing against Frank. He just started drinking again. Most of my staff does. I drink, but I don’t act a fool at work. There’s a difference.
Frank didn’t act particularly appreciative. In fact, he didn’t say anything, I mean literally not a word. He just left. Like everything had gone according to plan, as if he had planned for this outcome. No job, no reason to stop drinking. I felt set up in a way. He didn’t need an excuse but I gave him one. And I guess he gave me one too, because I knew he’d be one more of my guys I’d see back on the street. It’s not my fault, but it weighs heavy. Or maybe like Frank, I just wanted to drink too. Whatever. I sure tied one on last night.
What’s going on, Tom Murray?
I turn to see Walter walking up behind me.
Morning, Walt. I was just thinking of you.
What about?
Nothing special.
He tugs a blue cloth cap down on his head; a storm of gray curls sprouts out around both of his ears. When he doesn’t wear the cap, he sports a toupee so black it looks like he shined it with shoe polish. The hairpiece slants increasingly askew as the day and his level of intoxication progress.
This morning, his hands shake as violently as my head is pounding. A rip stretches like a scar down a sleeve of his open brown corduroy jacket. He’s wearing a couple of sweaters punched with holes. The breeze carries the odor of his sweat-dampened clothes into my face. He has a bird-lidded look, as if he is still half asleep.
What’s going on, Tom Murray? he asks again.
Coming to work, same ol’ same ol’.
You got circles under your eyes as big as hammocks.
I’m taking on the characteristics of my clients.
Walter laughs, revealing saliva-slick pink gums absent of teeth. He always calls me by my full name. Tom Murray, where’re you going? Tom Murray, I need to talk to you. Tom Murray, what’re you doing? Like a parent scolding me. He says he’s from Gulfport, Mississippi. Lost his home in a hurricane and came to San Francisco because he has family in Oakland. I don’t know if any of this is true, but if he has people across the Bay they must not want to see him, because I refer him to our shelter almost every night.
Tom Murray, help me out with a dollar.
A dollar? What’re you going to get for a dollar?
I give him ten bucks and tell him to buy us both some coffee. He hurries up Leavenworth to a convenience store on Eddy. I don’t expect him to buy coffee for either of us, not the way he’s shaking. In a few days he’ll pay me back. He’s good about that. He’ll hand me a ten-dollar bill, maybe more, whatever he thinks he owes, and I’ll take it knowing I’ll give it back to him in a day or two. But at that moment when I take the money from him he will smile and feel pretty good about himself. See Tom Murray, I told you I’d get it back to you, the grin on his face will declare, and it will be a genuine and honest expression of how he’s feeling at that moment, not his shuck and jive, what-can-I-get-out-of-Tom-Murray routine. I will thank him and he’ll feel part of the human race again, a guy like any other paying his debts, as if he owed a balance on a credit card. Or maybe not. Maybe he’s just playing me for a fool he knows will give him more money the next time. I try not to give it too much thought.
You need a new coat, Walter. It’s December, man, you’ll freeze.
Clothes closet going to be open, Tom Murray?
Yeah, and if we don’t have what you need, go to Sally’s, I tell him, using the shorthand for Salvation Army.
Mr. McGraw’s in your office, Tom Murray.
I see that.
I saw him go in.
What time?
Maybe an hour ago.
Seven o’clock in the morning?
Walter shrugged.
You in trouble, Tom Murray?
No more than usual, I don’t think.
Walter laughs.
You want cream in your coffee, Tom Murray?
Sure.
I first met McGraw three years earlier at the monthly meeting of the Department of Social Services. The directors of nonprofit programs for the homeless always attended. Salvation Army, Episcopal Sanctuary, St. Vincent de Paul Society, the whole clique. They used their time to plead for money. I was a social worker for Central City Shelter on Ninth Street. The director, Harry Earl, would drag me along to talk about clients we had helped get jobs and housing.
I respect the difficulties the city faces with the budget, Harry began, always the diplomat. Still, I’d appreciate it if you would remember the numbers of people we’ve saved from the streets when you consider the budget. Whatever you do, we’ll continue our work knowing we can count on your support.
After he finished, Harry would fold his hands and bow his head as if he was about to pray. He had a thick mustache and goatee that lent him the dignified air of a monk straight out of the Middle Ages. The twelve commissioners always thanked him for his good work. Harry would nudge me to start my spiel. I rattled off stories of guys finding work after years of being on the street. I didn’t bother to say these were day labor jobs and that they took the work in the middle of the month after they’d gone through their general assistance checks and needed money for alcohol and drugs. No, I just talked about guys like Walter going to a warehouse to unload trucks for eight hours as if it was a new day dawning for the Seven Dwarfs: Heigh ho, heigh ho, it’s off to work we go. Really, I made myself sick sometimes with my bullshit. We were begging and telling lies, but as long as we told the lies the commissioners wanted to hear, we’d get our money.
Then at one commission meeting, the secretary asked if James McGraw with New Horizons Inc. had any comments. Harry groaned.
He’s new, and he’s trouble, Harry said.
New Horizons was a small agency that offered shelter to homeless people. McGraw, a former welfare-rights advocate, had just become executive director and had plans to expand. I’d heard his name mentioned at provider meetings, but I didn’t know him. When I saw him at one of the monthly meetings, he was wearing a loud purple shirt and a thin, black leather tie. A bush of untamed blond hair spread in all directions like vines searching for a trellis. Hands on his right hip, a corner of his dark blue jacket draped behind him. His left fist gripped a piece of paper that he glanced at before he spoke. He looked furious. He didn’t have to open his mouth for me to know he wasn’t there to beg.
I wrote down my comments, but I don’t need this, he said waving the paper. I don’t have to remind myself of what to say, because I know it; I see it every day in our shelter when I come to work. We provide people with barely enough to rent a skid row hotel room a dog wouldn’t live in, and you want to cut their checks even further so they can’t afford even that, he said in a high-pitched, nasal voice. We foundations appeal to the state for moneys it says it has and we get nothing but scraps, and we’re expected to feel grateful.
His glasses crept down his nose and he scrunched his face to push them back up, tossing his head to keep one of many strands of hair from his eyes. He looked at his paper and then jammed it into his jacket pocket.
I never understood budgets and spreadsheets and why people said moneys when they talked about grants instead of just money. I got lost in the intricacies of community block grants and federal McKinney fund applications and in abbreviations: CMHS, HUD, HA, TLSHC, HIC, and, of course, DSS. What I did understand was that there weren’t enough shelter beds, weren’t enough detoxes, weren’t enough jobs, weren’t enough anything for the people I wanted to help. Whenever I got someone a place to live, it was always in a filthy hotel room I’d never stay in. Listening to McGraw, I realized I wasn’t alone. Maybe he understood why people said “moneys” instead of “money.” Maybe he knew what all those abbreviations stood for. He probably did. But what mattered to me was that he sounded like he felt the same way I did about those crappy hotel rooms.
Imagine sleeping on a bed stained with dried urine and filled with lice, he said. Imagine scratching yourself. Imagine thinking that this is what your city feels you are worth. Now you want to take even that away. We don’t have enough room in the shelters for the people coming to us at night. Where exactly would those people who now stay in hotels go when they can no longer afford their rooms? The turn-away figures for shelters are up twenty percent this year. Low-income housing stock has fallen ten percent. There’s no fat on the bone. Never was. Perhaps we’ll just refer our people to the front lawns of your homes, and you can provide them with the tents and sleeping gear you bought your children for their Boy Scout camping trips.
When he stopped talking, the commissioners stared at him looking as jittery as someone suffering from indigestion. Maybe they were. Thank you, the chairman finally said and closed the meeting. As we got out of our chairs, agency directors clustered around McGraw and talked at once. Jesus, what are you doing? Just promote your agency, they told him. Don’t scold. We have to work with these people. They recommend our budgets to the Board of Supervisors. Are you trying to lose all your funding? McGraw smirked, turned, and walked away. I watched him leave. I thought, I want to be that guy.
I didn’t get into social work for the love of people. I delivered pizzas for Charlie’s Restaurant out in the Mission. I double-parked all the time and collected enough tickets to wallpaper a house. A judge sentenced me to one hundred hours of community service at Central City. I served coffee and put mats on the floor at night for the shelter. Every so often, I ripped off a few pizzas and donated them. After a few weeks, one of the shelter staff started drinking again and lost his job, and Harry offered the position to me. The job paid more than Charlie’s. I took it.
My coworkers were all guys who had been homeless. They had drunk most of their lives away and hadn’t worked in years before Harry hired them out of detox. They were nervous and seemed to think they were going to screw up. A lot of them started drinking again just to get the screw-up part over with rather than to keep waiting for it to happen. I did my job and didn’t trip. In a couple of months, I was promoted to shift supervisor. Day after day, I made calls to find shelter for families when we had no room.
Nothing.
Day after day, I made calls to see which inpatient alcohol programs had beds.
Nothing.
Day after day, I called temp agencies to see who was hiring.
Nothing.
Day after day, I talked to every agency and asked for something
Day after day, what did I have to offer?
Nothing real.
I didn’t have to love people to know this was wrong.
About two months after I had seen McGraw, Harry asked me to fill in for him at a DSS meeting. Just do what I do, he said, thank them for their support and that’s it. But by then I was sick and tired of the hamster wheel entrapping our clients. Just the previous night I’d spoken to a guy who had completed an alcohol program. He was on the waiting list for a halfway house and needed shelter, but we had no space for him, and every other shelter was full too. I advised him to spend the night at a Denny’s. It’s open twenty-four seven. That counted as a housing referral and I put it down in my stats. Numbers don’t lie, people do; and I was lying for a living. I just waited to clock out so I could go home and crack that first Bud. So when I stood before the commissioners, my heart thumping because I was not accustomed to speaking in front of people and was hungover to boot, I let loose my frustration.
Not only should you fund us, but you need to fund many more like us, I told the commissioners. We need more programs, not fewer. We have no place to refer people. My hands shook. I spoke too fast. I lost my place in my notes. I felt the blank, angry looks of the commissioners. I stopped talking and sank into my seat. McGraw leaned over.
Good job, dude, he said.
A few months later McGraw asked me to be the director of what he had dubbed his adult services initiative. This included three programs he had recently acquired through state and city grants: Fresh Start; The Bridge, a transitional housing program; and The McLeod, a hotel for homeless addicts. In addition, he had received funding to enlarge the homeless shelter at New Horizons.
I took the job and my name was soon added to a chart in his office of the new programs. Small squares held the names of individual staff members. From those boxes ran lines to other boxes that held the names of shift supervisors. Their boxes in turn connected to a box with my name. A rectangle at the top of the chart held McGraw’s name in bold block letters. My box linked to his.
New Horizons was no longer a small agency. However, I would soon see how much McGraw’s adult services initiative had cost him. To maintain his programs he needed to maintain the city’s financial support. Once a month at the DSS meeting he had to court the same commissioners he had once mocked. They said nothing but offered McGraw thin smiles, expressing their contempt, I think, for his 180-degree turn. Maybe not. Maybe they smirked at all of us. McGraw may have been late to the party but we were all beggars. Whatever they thought of him, he was playing by their rules now and no longer railing against crappy hotel rooms. They gave him his money. Prodigal son. I don’t remember how I felt. Betrayed sounds right. I mean what happened to the guy who stood up to the commissioners and said things I’d been thinking for a long time? How do you just turn like that and become someone else? He was no different from my old boss Harry. Maybe he just grew up. I get the money thing and all, but man. He was no bullshit. And then he was all bullshit, obedient as a guide dog. And so was I, because I didn’t object. The money thing applied to me too. I had a job. I worked for McGraw. He signed my checks. I was now no more a crusader than he. So I guess I grew up too. I wasn’t going back to delivering pizzas. But I also didn’t have to be his groupie. Not as I once was. Not anymore. The bloom was off the rose or however that goes. I could assert myself that little bit. When he would offer to take the staff to dinner or when he invited us to his house for a holiday party, I passed. I came to work each day and clocked out each night. At home, I opened the fridge and had a cold one and another one after that and another one until all I thought about was getting to bed before I nodded out. The next morning I got up and made it to work. I did my job, never called in sick, as much as I sometimes wanted to. I gave McGraw that much and no more.
The wind picks up and the fog swirls until it blocks my view of McGraw. A Muni Metro bus wheezes past disturbing pigeons pecking at trash on the street. I don’t know how long I’ve been staring at McGraw, but I can’t stand here all morning, although with this headache I really don’t feel like talking to him. I cross Leavenworth, wade through homeless people already gathering outside Fresh Start.
We don’t open until nine, you all know that, I remind them, as the loose line swings to one side so I can pass through and unlock the security gate.
Tom Murray, Walter shouts.
I turn around. He hands me a cup of coffee with his right hand, holds another steaming cup in his left. He offers me the change. I can’t help but smile. I had him all wrong this morning.
Keep it, I tell him. You’ll ask me for it later. Now, I got the jump on you.
He gives me a knowing grin, puts the money in his pocket.
I got to talk to you, Tom Murray.
About what?
The clothes closet.
You already did, I say. Wait until we open, Walt.
I open the gate, close it behind me, and unlock the door. Inside, light filters through the frayed, closed curtains. Metal folding chairs stand piled against the walls. A clipboard lies at an angle on the front desk. The floor, mopped from the night before, still smells of bleach. Shadows envelop a cubicle used by my benefits advocate. Missing persons fliers tacked to a bulletin board curl at the edges. Conscious of all the eyes on me from outside, I take a deep breath, let the silence sink in.
Another deep breath.
Exhale.
Again.
Listen.
Nothing.
No noise.
I take a final breath and notice one of my homeless volunteers, the Iraq War vet Jay Spencer, standing at the top of the stairs by a desk I gave him, his station to answer the phone. He has a wide face, stocky build. His short red hair points up from his scalp with the precision of shorn grass.
Morning, Tom, Jay shouts.
Hey, Jay, I say.
Jay has post-traumatic stress disorder. He used to come in every morning, sit in the reception area, and refuse to speak. How do you get someone to talk? I asked myself. I had never taken a counseling course. I decided I just had to force him. So I made him our volunteer receptionist.
For two days, the phone rang and rang while Jay sat beside it as if he didn’t hear it.
Jay! I yelled. Answer the phone!
He looked at me. He turned toward the phone as if he had just noticed it. He reached for the receiver. In a barely audible voice thick as syrup he said, Fresh Start. May I help you? He listened for a moment and then told me the caller was from Goodwill. They were asking for me. They had some clothes they could give us. I thanked Jay and took the call. In a world of reduced expectations, Jay meets my definition of success.
Mr. McGraw’s in your office.
I go up the stairs and stop at Jay’s desk.
I see that, thanks. He let you in?
Yes, sir, Jay says.
I look through the window of my office door and watch McGraw fussing with papers on my desk. It looks like he’s organized them into piles beside a stack of crisp manila folders. That’s what he does with his desk when he’s nervous. Organizes papers. Tidies up. Every year, when the city threatens to reduce our funding or when he’s behind on grant applications or when he has appointments with potential donors, McGraw reorganizes his files like it’s priority number one.
I set my coffee down and stand outside my office. McGraw looks up.
Hey, Tom, he says. He gets from behind my desk and opens the door a little too fast so that he stumbles when he steps back.
You don’t have to knock. Your office.
He laughs a little too loud. I drag my fingertips over the pile of files.
I can actually see my desk.
You can arrange it any way you like, he said, but I find putting folders with budget stuff and other financial things in one of the top drawers of your cabinet and files with program information below them works best for me.
Thanks.
Staff folders go behind the files with the flow charts and our five-year plan.
Got it.
You really should be better organized. There’re grants coming up that we need to apply for soon.
Get me the application and I’ll fill it out, whatever you need.
You don’t run an independent ship. Fresh Start is part of New Horizons.
Never said it wasn’t.
You’re accountable. You need to be a team player.
I am.
Here’s an opportunity to show me.
He gives another forced laugh, picks at his left thumbnail, and rubs his nose. I’m about to offer him a Kleenex when he pulls a file and hands it to me: Okri, Bobby. Bobby is one of my four floor supervisors.
We have to change the status of this guy, Okri.
Why? I ask.
He takes Bobby’s folder, opens it, and removes the two pages inside and tears them in half and then tears them again.
Make a new file for Okri. List him as a homeless volunteer.
He’s staff.
He’s dead, Tom.
McGraw drops the sheets in the trash. One flutters to the side and I pick it up. I look at it and then let it fall from my hand into the trash.
Dead?
Dead.
What happened?
McGraw rubs his face and sighs.
OD’d. Someone found him in his room after the fire alarm went off. Apparently when he passed out he had a cigarette going and it lit up the curtains in his room. Not bad, but the fire department was called and evacuated the building. TV showed up. He had his staff badge in his wallet. Police called me.
I don’t know what to say. I’d known Bobby since I started working for McGraw. He was a big old dude in a cowboy hat, jeans, and a T-shirt—the top of which was covered by a thick gray beard. He came in every morning for coffee and called me Kid. Hey, Kid, you’re taking this job too serious. Smile! And I would. He had been a Navy cook and volunteered in the kitchen. He made good casseroles out of government-issue cheese, canned pork, and rice. Heavy but edible. Maybe not so much pepper next time, he’d say. A little more cream of mushroom soup. Like he was Julia Child. A personable guy, Bobby. Always used our bathrooms to clean himself with a washcloth after spending a night in Golden Gate Park. He would stink of sweat and campfires but never of booze. When he came out of the bathroom, he rolled his sleeves down. He’d shot heroin and speed when he was younger, and his track marks embarrassed him.
He listened well. Whenever we had somebody who had burned all their bridges with alcohol programs, who had been eighty-sixed from all the shelters and just wanted to start a bar fight in the middle of the drop-in, I’d send for Bobby. He’d chill the guy right out until they had it together enough to leave the building without busting any heads.
My contract requires me to hire the homeless, the idea being that people with problems can help other people with problems. I select my staff from the few among them who get clean, or short of that, ones like Bobby, who keep it together despite their vices. If nothing else, they know their world. One time on my way to a meeting, I saw a shelter client holding a knife to a volunteer’s throat. Bobby was standing beside the guy calm as calm can be. I paused, considered the knife. Serrated edge. Maybe a Gerber, I didn’t know. The volunteer’s eyes were so wide I half expected to see planets orbiting around them. He had his hands raised above his head and sweat was waxing his face to a shine. He could not have sat more still if he’d tried.
What’s going on? I asked.
Nothing, Bobby said, I got this.
A late afternoon mood swing?
Something like that, yeah, he said.
You got this covered?
Yeah. Bobby said.
Do I know you? I asked the guy with the knife.
He looked at me, eyebrows puckered in thought.
I don’t think so.
We’re good here, Bobby said.
OK, I said and left for my meeting.
When I returned an hour later, Bobby was working the front desk. He told me the guy with knife had wanted a bus token and got pissed off when the volunteer didn’t have one. So he threatened to slit the volunteer’s throat. Bobby chilled the dude and the volunteer quit. I wonder why, I said, and we both laughed. Bobby handled it, no one died, all good. Plenty more volunteers where that one came from. Another example of a positive outcome in a world of reduced expectations.
I don’t know how Bobby chilled people, but it’s a skill I appreciate more than I can say. He was someone I could depend on. So when I had a staff opening, I hired him. With his first paycheck he rented a room in the Higgins Hotel about a block away. I offered to put him in The Bridge but he said he didn’t want a program with staff looking at him cross-eyed, wondering if he was using. A place to lay his head free of any hassle. I’d see him come in to work with his hair wet and slicked to one side from a shower and I used to tease him about how he no longer washed in our bathroom. You’re costing me a hygiene stat, I told him. But I gave you a housing one, he said.
This is the holiday season, Tom, McGraw says. I shouldn’t have to tell you that Christmas is the time of year when we do our biggest fundraising. It doesn’t look good when you’re trying to raise money and one of your staff ODs and starts a fire. You think the commissioners won’t ask me about this?
He starts pacing. He picks at his fingers some more, bites his upper lip. I know what he’s thinking: The commissioners will want answers. They wouldn’t care about our contract. Why had we hired an imperfect homeless guy? They’d needle McGraw and they’d enjoy needling him. The press would likely pick up on it: A staff member of Fresh Start, a program of New Horizons, is among the dead. Drugs are suspected.
We need to take Bobby off the staff list, McGraw says.
The city gets the staff list every month with my services report. They have his name already.
Then tell us what to do, Tom. This isn’t just my problem.
I drag a hand over my head, my heart thumping. Jesus, whatever happens McGraw’s going to make it out to be my fault. I really wish I hadn’t cut Mary off last night. I don’t know what I want from her, but I sure feel alone right now. Like a little kid lost in a mall, that kind of alone. I try to think, break it down. How close, really, do the people at DSS review the information I send them? They get the same stack of forms from all the other agencies. If they read every piece of paper they’d never go home. So they probably don’t. Most likely. Therefore, we can fudge.
If anyone asks, we can say we paid Bobby when he filled in for somebody out sick. He worked as a sub. He wasn’t staff. Not like regular staff.
McGraw stops pacing. He turns his head toward me, a smile creeping across his face.
We always give volunteers a chance by hiring them as subs, he says.
They make mistakes.
We were giving Bobby a chance just like our other volunteers. Look at all the people we’ve helped.
We have that in the stats? McGraw asks. The numbers of people we helped get into drug programs and helped get jobs.
Of course, I say. I turn that in too, every month.
McGraw stares at me hard. After a moment, he throws his head back and laughs and we high five and I start laughing too. We’re like addicts ourselves, racing from one crisis to the next, thrilled when we avert disaster. I have no respect for the guy, but I’m hooked. Sorry, Bobby. I really am. I don’t want to think about him now. I will later when I’m home and drinking a beer. He might appreciate that.
I notice McGraw looking at me again. No smile. I’d never known that a second ago he was all kinds of relieved. Like he just puts the brakes on as if something unseen had snapped its fingers. He keeps staring at me for what feels like a long time.
There’s something else, he says finally. One of your staff, Harrison, I think?
Yeah. Frank Harrison. I fired him. What about him?
He came to my office yesterday. He says you drink on the job.
Bullshit.
That’s what he said.
And what did you say?
Do you drink at work, Tom?
I hold his stare.
You approved the termination.
This is not about his termination. It doesn’t look good when you got a staff member overdosing and starting fires and his program director is accused of drinking at work by a terminated employee.
McGraw drums his fingers on my desk.
He’s saying it because he was terminated.
I don’t know if the commissioners will see it that way.
If I told you Frank had said this about you, you’d laugh in my face.
He’s not saying it about me.
I try to stay calm. Fog pebbles the window with droplets. Car horns just below me on Leavenworth blare but sound far off. The pain in my temples is on overdrive. I hear the pounding in my head.
Check my evals, I say slowly to keep my voice from shaking. With anger, fear, both. You wrote them. Bumped my pay up after each one. I don’t remember you mentioning I had a drinking problem.
No one was saying anything about you then.
I’m out of words and feel exhausted. My heart beats in panic. I want to sit. I keep standing.
It doesn’t have to be a termination, Tom. I can call it a layoff. Blame it on a funding cut. I’ll give you references.
All because of a fired employee’s accusation?
I can offer you severance. A good package.
Me and Bobby, I say.
It’s not like that.
What’s it like?
I told you. Right or wrong it doesn’t look good, Tom.
I look out my window at the YMCA across the street. I see young women stretching in an aerobics class. Young, long brown hair, tight black leggings. Leaning to the left and then to the right, arms thrust upward. I see a woman with a boombox. She sets it down and within seconds the whole room erupts, the women shaking to tunes I can’t hear. The bright room wrapped in gold light. I feel their joy. Even Jay watches them.
I can’t stop Frank from lying about me because he’s pissed off I fired him.
Do you drink at work? McGraw asks again.
I work at work.
I hear something clatter in the hall and McGraw and I look out the door. Jay is leaning over his desk. The phone lies on the floor, two lines blinking. Jay sits back, folds his arms, and starts to laugh.
You don’t run an independent ship, Tom, McGraw says, watching Jay. You just watch yourself and watch who you hire. And you can clear more of your ranks today starting with Jay.
Jay?
Yeah. He really should be on disability.
We’re working on it.
Have him mop floors if you want but take him off the reception desk. You need someone normal answering your phones.
McGraw drags a finger over a cabinet and looks at it for dust. He notices a piece of paper with some notes on it from last week’s staff meeting and hands it to me.
You should file this.
I take it, drop it in a trash bin without a glance. McGraw shakes his head as if I’m beyond hope. Maybe I am. He goes out without another word and doesn’t close the door behind him. Pausing at Jay’s desk, he picks up the phone. Jay stops laughing and thanks him. McGraw checks for a dial tone. Then he walks down the stairs.
I look at the wall clock. Almost nine. I’ve got a few minutes to talk to Jay. Won’t take long. Maybe I’ll make mopping the floors sound like the job of the century. Maybe I’ll put him back on the phone when things settle down and McGraw won’t notice. Maybe Jay won’t care. Him and Bobby. My morning.
I rub my temples. I’m sweating. I’m definitely going to have a beer at lunch. Screw Frank. Maybe he did smell beer on my breath one day, I don’t care. So much for those grilled cheese sandwiches. Bottom line, I’m here and he’s not. I still wish Mary was with me, meeting me for lunch or something. If I call her, I’ll have to apologize for blowing her off last night and I’ll feel worse. If she says she can see me after work I’ll get home and just cancel on her again, I know it. I’ll open the fridge for a beer, just one, and then it will be two and three and that’ll be it, I won’t see her. But God it’d be nice to be with her right now. Someone. Just to be told everything will be all right. It’s so quiet. So nice and quiet. My favorite part of the day is right before we open, that and when I get home and pop open my first Bud and relax.
I let out a long breath, massage my temples again, and get up and open the door.
Jay, I got to talk to you but first I need you to go out and get me another coffee and some Advil, OK? You know what? Screw the coffee. Just the Advil. Would you do that for me please?