Oscar

She knocks.

I look up from my desk. Walter has just left. She doesn’t move, stands by the open door to my office, sucks on her lower lip. I wait, take her in. High cheekbones, loose-fitting jeans torn at the knee. Tits just so, pressed against her T-shirt. About my age, I’m guessing. Mid, late thirties—something like that. A red welt on her arm, a cut on her swollen chin. Right cheek is swollen too. She wears makeup, not much though, perhaps to hide the bruised cheek. A blue scarf covers her blond hair.

Whatever happened, she put some time into herself before coming here. She has pride. I like that. It means either she doesn’t know what this place is or she does and wants everyone to know she’s different. That she doesn’t belong here. I want her. The thought, more of a conclusion really, comes to me just like that. I want her. I’ll do her. She’s mine. That’s how I roll. I think of the couple who walked in last month. What was the wife’s name?

Yes? I say.

She hesitates. My desk faces the wall. When I turn toward the door, I face her. I have arranged my office in accordance with social services psychobabble bullshit drilled into me at in-service trainings. Your desk should not stand between you and the client. No barriers. Don’t cross your legs or fold your arms across your chest. Hands on your knees. Be open, accessible. Appear as vulnerable as the client. Instill trust.

People get paid to dream this nonsense up. I deal with the crap and turn it to my advantage. The trainings provide a day off more or less without cutting into my vacay time. Sign in, hang out until the first break, split, and go home. Nobody notices. I spend maybe two hours at the training and then take the rest of the day off.

What are you? Like a social worker, right? she asks. Her voice is soft, a little hoarse. I like its rough edges.

Benefits advocate, I say. Basically the same thing as a social worker. More or less.

I called a help hotline. They told me to come here.

I see. What’s going on?

I watch her step into my office, staying close to the wall until she reaches a chair and sinks into it. I follow her eyes as they wander the bare walls, my cluttered desk, the pile of trash bags in a corner filled with donated clothing I’ve yet to sort. I flip a switch, turn on a ceiling fan. I keep the windows closed and my office gets stuffy. If I opened them, I’d smell the piss on the sidewalk from the night before and the spilled garbage scattered by dogs.

My office opens to the drop-in center where people with no other place to go hang out playing cards and sleeping during the day, heads on the tables or sometimes stretched out on the floor. Three alcoholism counselors stand around desks in back. They check clients into a second-floor detox. If they’re too drunk to make it up the stairs, they’re put on exercise mats near the intake desks. I notice Katie come in through a rear door. She punches a clock with her time card. She normally works the swing shift but she’s in early. Maybe someone on the morning shift had to leave.

Katie. I like her. I could have her. But she has a job, a place to live. She doesn’t need me. No, I have no need for her.

I think I need a place to stay, the woman says.

You think?

I do.

I look at the clock. Eleven. The day already feels long. I started at eight. Caught the N Judah train from my apartment in the Richmond District, the morning fog off the Bay still heavy as a blanket. It will be just as heavy when I go home. I’d like to move to the Mission. Not nearly so much fog. But the Richmond’s out of the way. I rarely run into any clients and coworkers there. The gray drab of the fog keeps everyone inside. What happens in the Richmond stays in the Richmond.

Looking at the woman, I’m glad it’s been a slow morning. Walter and just one or two others before him. I just finished giving a guy a letter to get on general assistance. To receive GA, the city’s lingo for welfare, you have to show you have a place to live. The city requires a receipt from a landlord. However, to get a receipt you need the GA check first to pay for a place. No check, no place. No receipt, no check. The proverbial catch-22. Smoke and mirrors to deny welfare and save money. Crazy, right?

I think so too. I got tired of telling clients there was nothing I could do. The city’s rules. I’m helpless, whine, whine, whine. Fuck that. That’s not how I roll. No, I came up with a plan, ingenious when I think about it. No one else, not the benefits advocate before me or the guy before that one, thought of it. I did.

I love telling this story. Here’s what I do: I type To whom it may concern on Fresh Start letterhead to the DSS. This letter, I write, is confirmation that so-and-so has a room at one of the residential hotels in the Tenderloin. Please facilitate his GA application so he may continue paying rent blah, blah, blah.

The DSS doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t challenge me. It just needs the paper, some kind of bogus documentation that the client is spending the welfare check on housing. The client gets the check and may use it for rent, booze, or both. That’s not my concern. I get my clients their GA checks. I keep them off the street for a night, or at least I give them that option. I beat the system. I accept the gratitude of my clients. I care. That’s how I roll.

I might have missed this woman had it been a busy morning. She might not have waited for me. It’s the first of the month, which is always kind of a slow time. Mother’s Day, the clients call it. The DSS issues welfare checks on the first and the fifteenth of every month and men emerge from nowhere to lay claim to women with dependent children who receive cash grants and food stamps. I see the women later, broke usually and sometimes beat up, sometimes kicked out of their apartment with or without their kids. I wonder if that’s her story. Part of it anyway.

You mean you need shelter? I say to her.

She nods yes.

OK. Any children?

No.

Good, I think. I don’t take women home who have kids. Gets a little complicated with kids. I rummage in my desk for a shelter directory.

We have a shelter here but it’s just for men.

She doesn’t respond.

That doesn’t mean I can’t help you, I say.

She has all her teeth. Funny the things I notice. But teeth are a plus. Most of my clients don’t have teeth or the few they do have stand alone in their mouths like rotted stumps, brown and chipped, ready to dissolve into what’s left of their gums. Their fingers, too, are often stained from rolling cigarettes. Her fingers look as pale as mushroom stems.

She stands out as much as that woman and her husband I saw last month. The husband wore black slacks, a pressed shirt, and dark tie as if he thought some sort of formality was involved in asking for help. At first, I thought he was dropping off a donation. His wife stuck close to his side and I caught a whiff of her perfume. She looked anxious, as if she had not slept. Her clothes fit her well. She was put together, flat stomach, slim hips, full mouth with red lipstick. I imagined touching her neck.

Her husband held a referral slip like it meant something. He took out a pair of reading glasses, read it, and handed it to me: Needs housing, someone had scrawled across it. The man explained he had been a chef at a Marina District restaurant, someplace I’d never heard of, when an earthquake damaged the building beyond repair and he lost his job. She had been a bank teller but got laid off about the same time. They resorted to temp agencies but found little work. After they lost their apartment they stayed with friends. It was a friend who suggested they go to the DSS for help. Someone there sent them to Fresh Start.

We don’t belong here, the husband said.

But you’re here, I replied.

They looked at the floor. Outside my office, men and women in clothes that hadn’t seen a washer in days, reeking of their own fetidness and the smoke from campfires they had passed out beside in Golden Gate Park stood waiting to be let into the drop-in center. They raised their voices above one another and got louder and louder until the words collapsed from the weight of their own volume into a tumult of senseless noise made even louder by the spacious building that had once been a warehouse and now served as an echo chamber to all the racket. The husband and wife stared at me bewildered by all the commotion.

Do you have a place to go tonight?

No. But we’re not homeless, not in that way.

In what way are you homeless?

The husband didn’t answer. His wife glanced at the ceiling and held a hand up against the lights. I smiled understandingly. It was a smile that reassured and prodded shy smiles from them in return, because to them it meant what they wanted it to mean: Things would work out. Things would be fine. It told them they mattered, but to believe this they had to believe in me, to give up a part of themselves to me and be led into the unknown. To be dominated, as I liked to think of it. I mattered, not them. To be sitting in my office meant they no longer existed as anything more than my clients, whom I would do with as I pleased. For their benefit or my pleasure. Sometimes both, but not often. My choice in any case. I held my smile just long enough to provide temporary comfort before I dragged a hand across my mouth and wiped it from my face and the ambiguity of their situation returned and they stood looking at me, a man they did not know but wanted to trust, who did not appear to be all that different from themselves, but who, without my smile, conveyed no thought or feeling at all. Be a mystery, I told myself, and exert control.

`After a moment, I explained to them that I could give them shelter. By shelter I meant an army cot and a blanket. However, I would have to refer the wife to a woman’s shelter. If they had a child, I could refer them both to a family shelter. Without a child, however, they would have to split up.

Men and women sleeping together—it gets complicated, you understand, I said. Of course, if you want to stay together, I can refer you to a residential hotel. By hotel, I mean a room in a rundown building in the Tenderloin or on Sixth south of Market. Do you know Sixth Street? It’s skid row. We’re not talking Marriott, just so you understand.

I think someone made a mistake, the husband said. I don’t think they meant to send us here. They gave us the wrong referral.

I did not ask who that someone was. Some bureaucrat under the illusion that a nonprofit social services agency could help where the feds, state, and city could not or would not. I didn’t tell them they were too late, that they were no longer deserving of help. Not once they reached this level. They were down now with the bad people: drunks, junkies, hookers, those homeless men and women who had been on the street for years and lived off soup kitchens and shelters and the stamina of their abused bodies. The ones stepped over and ignored. That’s who came to me. That’s who they were now.

Mistake or not, that’s what I can do for you, I said.

We’ll take a hotel, the husband said.

I gave them a seven-day referral to a dive on Eddy. I stood and shook their hands. I held onto the woman’s hand and squeezed her fingers before I let go, and she pulled her hand away but not quickly, and she gave me a searching look and he returned her look.

I saw the couple the next morning. The husband still wore his tie and slacks. Her hair was pulled back and looked as if it had not been combed. Their clothes were not as crisp as the day before. Perhaps they had dressed in a hurry and did not pause long enough to pat out the wrinkles. Or maybe they slept in them, huddled together, frightened. The hotel, they told me, disgusted them. Rats, broken toilets, filthy mattresses, no sheets or blankets. How could it even be called a hotel?

I tried to warn you, I said.

The couple returned to the hotel and stayed for the length of their referral. They stopped by my office day after day looking a little more haggard each time. I gave them referrals to soup kitchens and a Salvation Army jobs counselor. The husband stopped wearing his tie. His wife kept her hair pulled back but it was clear to the benefits advocate that she was no longer washing it. Circles pooled beneath her eyes, and lines I had not noticed before stretched out from around her mouth, thinner without lipstick. When their time at the hotel was finished, they asked to stay in a shelter.

You’ll have to split up, I reminded them.

We understand, the man said.

I gave the man a bed ticket for the Fresh Start night shelter. The line to get in starts at five, I told him. First come, first served. I then made some calls to three women’s shelters. I asked the first two if they had space. They did. I thanked them and hung up without reserving a bed. The third shelter, Randolph House in the Haight, was full. That’s what I wanted to hear. I got off the phone, wrote her a referral, and gave it to her with a bus token.

The number nine bus will drop you almost at the door, I explained. You catch it at Market and Van Ness Avenue. You should leave here about five.

She and her husband thanked me. They left my office and sat in the drop-in center like two people in a doctor’s waiting room. They asked me for something to read, but I had nothing. They shifted their chairs away from two drunken men arguing over a pinochle game, toward other men who staggered and shouted at the walls. I let them use the staff restroom so they would not have to deal with the vomit and the clogged toilets in the one in the drop-in. Sometimes, the wife asked to sit in my office. The husband stayed in the drop-in, and I wondered if he was trying to prove something to himself. That he could handle it. Take it. Did he think he was being strong for her? His wife watched me dispense bus tokens and write letters for GA applicants. I glanced at her off and on and concluded that if she was not comfortable, she at least felt safe with me. My office. My domain. She had left her husband to sit beside me, her protector.

It’s a pleasant memory, but I cannot linger on it. I have another woman in my office, the one who came in after Walter. She is waiting for me to help her. She needs me now.

I’ll make some calls to women’s shelters, I tell her.

Will I get in one?

We’ll see. A lot of people got their checks today so shelters should not be as full. But you never know.

She stares out a window at Leavenworth Street and crosses her arms. Her T-shirt rides down one shoulder, and I notice pale purple bruises before she tugs it back up without looking at me.

There’s this place in the Haight, I tell her. Randolph House. I can’t promise they’ll have space. It depends how long they’re letting people stay. It only has ten beds. But it would get you out off the street.

OK.

I call and get a recording: If you’re calling about shelter, press three. Another recording: The shelter is full at this time. Leave your name after the beep and you’ll be put on a waiting list. If a space opens, someone will call you.

Hello, I’m the benefits advocate at Fresh Start, I say, talking as if there is a real person on the other end. I have a client who needs a bed.

I pause, pretend to be listening.

Will do, I say after a moment. Thanks for your time.

I hang up.

They won’t know if they’ll have a bed until later. I’ll call back.

I hold out hope, wanting her to see me making an effort. A nice man trying to help. Earn her appreciation. Wear her down with the waiting, the calls, the worry. Increase her dependency.

Thank you, she says.

I worked it the same way with the man and his wife. He got in line for the shelter and she prepared to leave for Randolph House. She and her husband looked at each other. They held hands and stood for a long time facing each other. Then she let go of his fingers and walked out of the drop-in looking very small. I watched her go, entered two shelter referrals on the stat form in my computer and clicked save.

I waited about ten minutes to give her time to reach Market and Van Ness. Then I grabbed a red marker, locked my office, and got in my car. Prostitutes lingered outside. I sized them up but wanted nothing to do with them. I drove down Larkin to Market and hung a right until I reached Van Ness. I saw her standing off to one side from a huddle of people beneath a bus shelter, her back turned against a hard-blowing, damp wind. I beeped and beeped again until she looked up. She looked confused and then she recognized me and hurried over. I rolled down the passenger door window and was about to say, I got off early. I’m headed home and live that way. Let me give you a ride, but she opened the door without question and got in.

I hope it’s that easy with this woman here. As she waits to leave for Randolph House, I bide my time by collecting loose pens and markers on my desk, gathering them in a bunch, and brushing them in a drawer.

Housekeeping, I tell her.

I consider the drawer and decide to take a blue marker with me. The color of her headscarf. I will draw a line on my bedroom door, a notch of sorts to indicate I had her. I used a red marker for the husband’s wife, red to remind me of her full mouth.

I watch a bus drone past my office window. An old man sits in the doorway of a closed thrift store across the street. Fog stretches across the top of the store, thick fingers of it breaking and twisting.

Hey, you got any bus tokens? Katie asks me, poking her head through my door. I got a guy I need to send to General.

She notices the woman and drags a finger over the woman’s swollen chin. The woman pulls away. Her eyes tear up.

You all right, honey? Katie asks the woman.

Here, I say, giving Katie a token.

She takes it and gives a slight jerk of her head toward the door. I get up and follow her out. The woman turns slightly in her chair to make room for me to pass her and my hand brushes against her shoulder. She flinches.

Where’re you going?

To get more bus tokens, I tell her.

I let my fingers linger against her shirt. She stiffens but doesn’t move. I close the door behind me.

What are you doing for her? Katie asks.

Shelter.

Looks like she needs more than shelter.

That’s all she asked for.

Look at her, Katie says. Those aren’t birthmarks on her face. If a man did that to her, she’s not going to talk to you.

I don’t appreciate her tone. A little pushy. A little forgetting herself.

I’m just saying you might need some help on this one, Katie says. She might not open up to you.

She will. She has.

Katie shakes her head. I watch her walk away and go back into my office.

Sorry to keep you waiting.

It’s OK.

I sit back at my desk.

Let’s try Randolph House again.

She taps her foot against the floor as I dial.

It’ll be fine, I tell her in a voice I know sounds soothing, calm.

She nods, says nothing.

They get that way after a while, get quiet. The uncertainty. What’s there to say? The man’s wife had been quiet in my car after she got in, and I didn’t speak, so that she would know I was comfortable with her silence. I parked across the street from Randolph House and walked her inside to the reception desk. The sound of dozens of women’s voices rushed us in a rising chorus of shouts and demands. Dirty blankets filled a cart, smelling of the women who had used them. Steam rolled across the ceiling from a shower room and the weight of it pressed against my face. A woman wrapped only in a towel ran past us, grabbed another woman by her hair, and screamed at her for taking her shampoo. Her towel fell away and they fought naked, rolling on the floor, pale wet flesh flopping and slapping the tiles. The receptionist tried to break it up but slipped on the towel and fell cursing.

The wife reached for my hand.

I can’t stay here, she said.

I had not expected this level of chaos. I had presumed we’d make it to the desk and the receptionist would turn us away. Sorry, we’re full. I would have pushed back, said that I was the benefits advocate for Fresh Start, that I had called and been promised a bed for my client. I would have put up a good fight all for show, of course, and then walked out with her. But this was better. Fewer theatrics. On my end, anyway.

She followed me to my car and got in. I looked at my watch. Her husband had probably been assigned a cot by now. I turned the ignition key and flipped on my headlights and drove through the fog to Lincoln Way. The trees in Golden Gate Park loomed in the mist. I turned onto Twelfth Avenue, drove three blocks and parked. She did not ask where we were going.

I live there, I said and pointed.

She looked out her window at the peeling yellow paint of my apartment building and then turned to me, and I stared back at her and kissed her on the mouth, my eyes open. She didn’t move, didn’t close her eyes either. I looked hard at her, pulled away, and continued looking at her. She shook her head, opened her mouth. Her hands fluttered on either side of her face and words caught in her throat as if she was trying to say something that was beyond her abilities of speech. She glanced up and down the empty street, at the quiet houses. She didn’t move. She looked at me once more, eyes red. I worried she might ask for her husband, but she didn’t. Her husband was equally helpless, equally alone and desperate and far away. Lost and tired, I thought. Lost and tired.

The thinking necessary to bring her to this point had entertained me, kept my mind in motion, every second belonging to itself and whatever occurred within it either informed the next or did not, but now she was broken, defeated. I had only to finish a game that had already ended. I felt bored. I watched her open her door, get out, and wait. I felt for the red marker in my pocket. I opened my door. Neither of us spoke as we walked up the steps, our silence a pact so solitary in its understanding of her limited options that we both knew there was nothing more to be said.

Now I am involved with another woman, another game. I anticipate a similar ending. I call Randolph House and get the same recording.

If you’re . . .

Hello, yes, I called earlier from Fresh Start about a bed for my client. You have a bed?

. . . press three.

That’s great, thank you. I’ll send her over.

I hang up. I expect that Randolph House will be calmer this time. That’s fine. I know what to say.

Randolph has a bed, I tell her. Took a while but it was worth the wait.

I flash her a quick reassuring smile. I expect her to look relieved. Instead, she crosses her arms and stares at the floor.

What’s wrong? I ask.

May I see the woman who was just here?

Katie?

Is that her name?

Yes. Why?

I just want to. I liked her. Can’t I?

Of course. Sure, you can, but it would be a mistake. You need to go to Randolph House now or you’ll lose your bed.

I’ll go, but I want to see Katie first.

Her voice rises, cracks. Nervous but insistent. Almost annoyed. At me. My mind goes blank. I don’t know what to say.

Just go to the shelter, I insist. I try not to sound angry, control the tone of my voice.

She stands.

Where’re you going?

To see her. Katie.

She walks out the door.

Wait.

She turns to me. A determined stare. I drum my fingers against my desk. She doesn’t move. She’s already gone. I’ve lost her.

The other woman, the man’s wife, she did as I told her. Tears inside my apartment but no questions. I wonder where she went after she left the next morning. Did she meet her husband? I assume she did, assume she told him nothing. I didn’t expect to see them again and I didn’t. Where did they go? Maybe it worked out for them; maybe it didn’t.

Just a minute, I say again. Wait here.

I stand, walk past her and into the drop-in. A missed opportunity. It happens. I imagine her staring after me and regretting her decision. Too late. I reject her. That’s how I roll.

I stop at Katie’s desk. A woman sits beside her. Circles of pink rouge make the woman’s pale, tense face look even paler.

My client wants to speak with you, I say.

Oh?

I’ll send her over.

I’m doing an intake.

I look at her client. She stares straight ahead. Thirtyish. She smells of cigarettes. But the way her straw-colored hair trails down to the small of her back interlaced in one long braid appeals to me. She spent a little time on herself making that braid.

Take my client, I say. I’ll finish here for you.