Katie

I clock in.

Hey, good-looking, Hank says.

He’s always hitting on me. He’s not handsy about it, just kind of flirty. Sometimes he’ll bump against me, but I don’t mind. I like him but not in that way. He knows. As long as he does, and he doesn’t get handsy, I’m OK with it.

He hands me a clipboard with a list of detox clients. It’s the first of the month. Everyone got their checks so most of our beds are empty. Beds. They’re actually exercise mats on the floor with a blanket and a sheet and a pillow. We had beds once, but clients pissed themselves and ruined the mattresses. So now we have mats.

Hank points out a guy on mat two. No name. A John Doe. Just came in, Hank says. Too drunk to do an intake. He doesn’t know him. Thought maybe I would. I take a look. Young. A pale red plaid shirt covers his thin chest. Strings of blond hair stick to his forehead. I don’t recognize him.

Hank wrote, “10:30 p.m.,” by the guy’s name, the time he checked him in. I start at eleven. I wonder if the guy had really been that drunk or if Hank just didn’t want to do the intake because it was so close to quitting time. Put him on a mat, leave the paperwork for me. He may dig on me but that don’t mean he’s not lazy. I give Hank a look

Don’t do me like that, Katie, he says. It ain’t about that. He was too drunk.

He goes on: One of our regulars, Walter Johns, asked for detox and told Hank that there was a man passed out on the sidewalk in front of Fresh Start. Walter didn’t know him. Hank did Walter’s intake and then went outside with a volunteer. The guy was laying on his back by a trash bin. Hank shouted at him and he kind of mumbled and rolled onto his side. Hank and the volunteer put on plastic gloves and lifted him up under the arms and half-carried, half-walked him inside. They put him on a mat to sleep it off.

Go over and look at him, Hank says. Maybe you know him.

I will. Can I have some coffee first?

Hank’s the super on the swing shift; I’m working the overnight shift. I’m in charge tonight because my super called in sick, so it’s just me and another guy, Joe, working. He’s what our boss, Tom, calls a paid intern. He’s a graduate student at the School of Social Work at San Francisco State University. In staff meetings, Tom talks about how we should all follow Joe’s example and go to school, get a college degree. I don’t know what Tom’s thinking. He’s not an alcoholic, that’s one thing. He started here years ago doing community service to work off parking tickets and got hired. He went back to school, graduated college. I was still a client then, but I remember staff complaining how Tom was getting promoted ahead of them because he had a degree and they didn’t. He’s nice enough but he doesn’t know. Neither does Joe, and he’s nice enough too. Real eye candy. Got an ass that won’t quit. I’m just saying. But he didn’t drink half his life away like the rest of us. AA meetings are our classes. Our sobriety chips are our degrees. Tom thinks it’s too easy to go from the street to work at the place where we detoxed. He likes to think that’s what he did, but he didn’t. He had a job delivering pizzas and he got another job working with drunks, that’s what he did. Good for him. He went to school. Not all of us will. Not all of us want to risk failing. That’s one good way to start drinking again. We got no work history to get hired anywhere else but Fresh Start. We know the clients. We used to drink with them. That’s a kind of education. Tom should be satisfied with that. If he’s so big on college, hire those kinds of people. He can’t because the pay is too low. But we’ll take it. Aim higher, he says. If you’re drowning you can’t just be satisfied with a life preserver. You got to swim toward shore. He doesn’t know. The life preserver is my sobriety. I hang on to it a day at a time like the Big Book says.

Hank clocks out, lights a smoke, and sits at a table in detox. Before he got sober five years ago, he was beaten up one night and woke up in San Francisco General unable to see because his eyes were all swole up. That was it. That did it. Not being able to see freaked him out and he got into a recovery program and stopped drinking. He smokes too much. His sandpaper voice deep with hard scratches. Cigarettes will kill you just like alcohol, but I figure you can only give up so many addictions in one lifetime. He’s quit enough shit. He’s also losing his hearing in his left ear. Whoever beat him up gave that side of his head a good workout. When I talk to him, he cups his bad ear with his left hand, and he leans into me like something unseen is pushing him. He did my last intake. I don’t know if I can do this, I told him. You’ll be OK, he said in that voice of his. I know, I said, a day at a time. I’ve heard it all before. You haven’t heard this, he said. At first you got to take it a minute at a time. Tell yourself, I won’t drink for sixty seconds. Then take it to the next sixty.

I followed his advice. He wasn’t hitting on me then. He was like a big brother. Still is. He just gets flirty. A minute at a time became a day at a time. Some days are harder than others. Some days, I’m back to a minute at a time. Little things. Like a cloudy day, something that simple and my mind goes dark. I get depressed. Sixty seconds, Katie, I go, sixty seconds. You’d think after almost two years sober I’d have it down, but the urge to drink is like an allergy. You never know what’s going to set you off sneezing. It’s a big deal to Hank that he did my last intake. That I stopped drinking after he put me in detox. Like he had a hand in it, and he did, but I’m the one who chose to stop. He didn’t make that choice. He didn’t stop me from buying a bottle. I stopped me. That’s my ego talking, I know. Ego can lead to anger and anger can lead to drinking. I should be grateful to Hank. I am. I just wish I liked him the way he’s liking on me. Being alone, that can be hard too. Sixty seconds, Katie. Count. Sixty seconds.

Walter stirs from his mat. He sits staring at his feet. Getting up, walking stiff-legged, he staggers as if the floor has slanted to one side. He moves toward Hank, his right arm stretched out to grab the back of a chair. He sits. Hank gets him a cup of coffee and Walter tries to drink it but his hands shake. He sets the cup on the table, leans forward, and sips. His lined face drains into his chin like it might slide right off. He and Hank ran together on the street when Hank was still drinking. Everyone he knows is on the street. I may have drunk with Walter too, when I was out there, I don’t remember. Probably. I drank from, like, when I was fourteen to must’ve been thirty-four, thirty-five, maybe. I watch Hank and Walter talking. It’s quiet, I might join them. Everyone I know is either still drinking or in recovery. How do you see someone outside that loop? I wonder. What would Joe and I talk about?

I’ll do the bed check, Joe says.

OK, I say, and give him the clipboard.

Every half hour we walk through detox to make sure the clients are OK. By OK, I mean breathing. Used to be we checked on them once an hour, but last year a client, Carol, died in detox so now we check on them every thirty minutes. I’m not sure it matters. If someone stops breathing five minutes after we check on them, what are we supposed to do? I guess we’d do our walk-throughs every fifteen minutes. Pretty soon we’ll be sitting beside them until they wake up.

Carol was a friend of mine. She and I used to drink together back in the day when I was running the street. I sobered up but she stayed out there. I’d placed both her and Walter in the McLeod Hotel but they dropped out. Too many people died there, they told me.

Turns out, on the night she did herself in, Carol had mixed Valium and vodka. You can’t OD on Valium alone, but if you mix it with alcohol, well, off you go. But how was anyone to know what Carol had taken when the cops led her out of the paddy wagon? I was told she was walking and talking. Not well, but no different than any other intoxicated client. An hour later she was dead. I wasn’t on that night. I found out the next day. It hit me hard. When I stopped drinking I used to sit with her, usually around Van Ness where we had panhandled together. Her unwashed red hair, dulled from sleeping in Golden Gate Park, hung to her shoulders covering the holes in the collar of her jean jacket. She flashed me a smile, the lines in her face etched with dirt. Looking at her, I felt grimy, even woozy, like I was back doing it with her, like I had never cleaned up. It took a few seconds for that god-awful feeling to leave but when it did, I was like so happy. I felt light and clean, the Bay breezes ruffling my shirt and my hair still damp from a shower that morning, and my mouth didn’t taste of all kinds of stink from drinking, and it was hard to hold back how good I felt.

Carol would tell me how happy she was for me. But if she had wine, she’d always offer me a drink. If I said anything—you know, like, It was a long day today—she’d say, Here, have a drink. I’d not sit with her long. You don’t go to a whorehouse for a kiss; you don’t hang out with a drunk for their company if you’re not drinking. I don’t remember who told me that but it’s true. I didn’t want to slip. Still, I felt bad when I heard she died. Guilty somehow. Like because I’d gotten sober, she died alone. I would have died if I hadn’t quit. I was glad I wasn’t Carol, and that made me feel guilty too.

I watch Joe pause by each mat and notice a paperback sticking out of his hip pocket. He’s a reader. He always has a book. With all his education and the fact he’s a good ten years younger than me I’m guessing, I know he wouldn’t look at me twice, but he’s fun to watch. That ass. I’m sure he’d want to take a date to a club for a beer. Maybe not. Maybe after being around drunks all day at work the last thing he’d want is a drink. There’s always Starbucks. That’s what I’d tell him if he gave me the chance.

I tease Joe, call him a normie, you know, as in normal. He’s a normal guy. He’s not an alcoholic. He can have one drink and stop and not even think about it. When I was drinking, sometimes I’d stop after one just to prove I didn’t have a problem, but I wanted a second drink and a third and a fourth and on and on. Hank says sobriety is a state of mind. That after so many years you can look at a billboard advertising some kind of booze and not think about it anymore than you would a car passing you on the road. I’m not there. I see a sign for booze and for a second it’s like a contact high. I can feel it running through me.

I’m a little old for Joe, I know, but younger guys can like older women. Joe does little things like holding a door for me or he’ll ask if I want a cup of coffee when he gets one for himself, and he’ll walk me home if I don’t have a ride. Not too many men look at me like a woman they would ask to walk home. His momma raised him right is all I’m saying. He stops at the door of the Bridge Hotel and I turn around and face him and that’s when I think he should kiss me. He doesn’t. Just says, See you at work tomorrow, Katie.

Sometimes, I dream of my ex, Matt, a heroin addict. We met in the Redwood City program. When he got out, he rented a room on the second floor of a house in the Richmond and sold plasma until he found a job working for a gay phone-sex company. I had just moved into Oliver House. On weekends, I’d request a pass and go over to his place. I’d show up in the morning and he’d still be in bed and I’d take off my clothes and crawl in with him.

The last time we were together, I heard him in the hall shower after I’d spent the night, and I decided to give him some love. I got out of bed, put on my robe, and walked into the bathroom. I eased the shower curtain back, thinking I’d slip in and surprise him. I almost started laughing thinking how he’d jump in surprise, and I saw him standing under the water, back to me, tipping back a beer, and I jerked back almost falling. Matt spun around.

Goddamn, Katie! What are you doing?

I ran out the bathroom and into his room and started putting on clothes; Matt followed me dripping water.

Katie, it’s not what you’re thinking.

What is it I’m thinking, Matt?

It’s just a beer. I can drink a beer.

He reached for me and I slapped him and his hand went up to his face and I pushed past him to the hall carrying my shoes.

Katie!

I hurried down the stairs and ran outside still holding my shoes, my hair all crazy from sleep like the fucked-up, barefoot, homeless woman I once was.

He called here once late at night on his day off. Like two months ago. I answered and he said he saw a client he thought had been sober drinking in a club in the Haight. What do we do? he asked. I mean I thought she had cleaned up. I wondered if he had tried to pick her up and then recognized her and freaked out. Sometimes Carol and I would go to clubs on the first of the month when we got our general assistance checks. We’d drink with all the normies and get just as drunk as them. Guys would take us home. Be careful, girl, we’d say to each other. It was never great sex, kind of hurried and sloppy, and they’d get off not thinking too much about me. I waited for them to fall asleep. Then I’d wander their apartment, sit in the living room in the dark like it was my place. The shelf of paperback books. The kitchen sink cluttered with unwashed dishes. The framed prints with trees and inspirational sayings. I remember one: It always seems impossible until it’s done—Nelson Mandela. I thought of that when I got sober, how I stared at those words written below pale mountains pressing against a purpling sunrise. Then I rinsed my mouth with toothpaste I found in his bathroom. I went back to the bedroom and smoothed out the sheets on my side of the bed. Not really my side. The side I slept on. Anyway, he didn’t move. I didn’t want to wake him. Would he remember me if he did? Probably. Maybe not at first but probably. Would he want me? Might. But it’s weird because I wouldn’t be drunk and I’d have this stranger on me with morning breath. Anyway, he didn’t so much as move. I forgot what he’d been drinking. I eased out, closing the door behind me like I was never there.

I wonder if Joe had been drinking the night he called all upset about the client he saw drinking. I wonder who she was. Did he hit on her before he knew who she was? Joe can drink. He can hit on anybody he wants, I don’t care. I mean I do but I don’t. Maybe he’s still at that stage where he can get wasted and still come to work. Maybe it’s not a stage. Maybe he can do that the rest of his life. I don’t know. I can’t.

I lean back in my chair, watch Joe bend over each mat as he checks the detox clients. Tight jeans. It was at an AA meeting, I think, that I heard someone say you shouldn’t get in a relationship at work during your first two years of sobriety, to avoid the kinds of stress that can send you back to drinking. But not working and no sex is another kind of stress. Been sober eighteen months. I got a job and I’m not drinking. No reason I shouldn’t try my luck with a fuck buddy.

I see you watching that boy, Hank says.

What you saying?

Katie girl, you’d turn him inside out.

I’d go easy on him.

I gotta wiggle a worm, don’t know nothing about if you need salvation.

Please!

Hank laughs. I think if I gave him the chance he’d jump on me in a minute. I don’t like him in that way. I mean, I don’t get that feeling in my chest looking at him as I do watching Joe. Hank’s more like a big brother sort of. I don’t know. He’s not bad looking. He doesn’t have an innocence about him like Joe does. There’s a hardness to him, like a busy, unpaved road. He’s thinking of leaving Fresh Start. Maybe taking a job at Walmart. He took it kind of serious what Tom said about moving on and swimming to shore and all that. He won’t go back to school or anything, but a different job, a totally different job, might be a good thing. Leave the old life behind. Working here you’re really not off the street, I get it. But you’re sober. There’s no forgetting your problems behind a bottle. I’m tired of dealing with people like my old self, drunks calling me names, cussing me out. Like they forgot we used to be on the street together. I get disgusted and beat up on myself for who I once was, like them, and they see my disgust and hate on me. I think Carol hated on me at times. Sometimes when she drank she’d turn mean. I’d never noticed that before, when I was drinking with her. But I sure noticed when I stopped and began doing her intakes. She’d tell me in a hoarse voice that sounded like she was not fully awake, We all got to die sometime. You think you won’t? You think you’re sober and that changes who you are? You’re a drunk who ain’t drinking. That makes no sense. I’m a drinking drunk. I ain’t never going to quit. You can forget where you come from, Katie, but I won’t.

Maybe another job would be good for Hank, but I think no matter where we go we’ll always carry our old selves with us. We’ll always be drunks, just not drinking drunks, so he might as well stay here. I will.

I squint to see Joe moving from mat to mat, the dim ceiling lights being no match for the shadows. At the table that Hank is sharing with Walter, he’s again trying to drink coffee but his hands shake so bad he puts the foam cup on the table, and this time leans forward to drink from it like dog lapping from a puddle.

Joe stops by the mat with John Doe. He stares down and then bends over and leans in. After a moment, he drops to his knees and gets closer. Hank notices and comes up behind him. Joe stays down by the guy.

Everything all right? I shout.

Hank says something. Joe shakes his head. He stands. Hank kneels and leans in like Joe had. Joe watches Hank. Hank turns to him and raises his chin toward me. Joe comes over looking serious as a heart attack.

What’s wrong? I ask.

The guy on mat two, Joe goes, voice shaking

What about him?

We don’t think he’s breathing.

Don’t think he’s breathing?

He’s not breathing, Katie.

I stare at him and then I’m up and beside Hank. He holds two fingers against the guy’s neck.

Talk to me, Hank, I say.

Nothing, he says. No pulse.

A blanket covers John Doe’s legs. He smells of wood smoke and of poop, like he crapped himself in his sleep. Hank shakes his shoulder. He pumps his chest, one, two, one, two. The guy rocks like a log. His open eyes don’t blink. Hank gets up pressing his hands against his knees like they hurt. He pulls the blanket over the guy’s face. I swallow hard as if something’s sticking in my throat.

He’s already cold, Hank says.

You mean he’s dead? Joe says, his voice almost cracking.

I still can’t speak.

There was nothing wrong with him when I brought him in, Hank says. He was drunk that’s all.

Hank didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t either. Me and Hank got nothing to do with this. I was so used to fucking up and having to cover my ass when I was drinking that I didn’t know what to do if something did go wrong. But this isn’t that. I’m not drinking. This is just bad luck. For John Doe and no one else.

Poor guy, Hank says. I’ll call Tom.

I’ll call 911.

I can call it if you want.

I got it. You call Tom.

Hank lets out a deep breath. He doesn’t move. He takes my hand and begins saying the Serenity Prayer. Joe watches us. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. When we finish, Hank squeezes my hand.

Sixty seconds at a time.

Back at you, I say.

I remember taking Valium one time after drinking a fifth of vodka with Carol. I don’t know how many pills I took but Carol said, What are you doing? You want to kill yourself? She stuck her fingers down my throat and made me vomit. A fire burned in my throat as I retched, and the puke covered her fingers, but she kept them down my throat until I had nothing left. Carol wouldn’t let me pass out. She said my soul would leave me and never come back. I’d be sleeping forever in darkness. She held my arms around my knees and rocked me back and forth and we stayed awake all night. A pain in my temples felt like screws being turned. My hands shook. Carol got us a mickey when Fred’s Liquor opened at six. I held the bottle in both hands like a prayer and drank.

Most days, after a night in Golden Gate Park, Carol and I would work Van Ness, taking turns panhandling on the median near the intersection with Golden Gate. We had ourselves a cardboard sign we tore off a box we found in a dumpster: homeless. anything will help. god bless. Carol had these markers from a shoulder pack a kid forgot at a bus shelter. Probably a kid. Had a blank spiral notebook in it with a few math problems scrawled in pencil like the kid was just getting used to writing. Simple stuff like 3 + 6 = 9. I wondered what had happened. Was this one of those missing kids pictured on supermarket bags? What if it was? What if someone sees us with their pack? Carol thought I had a point and got rid of it, but she kept the markers. I used to draw, did you know that? she said. I shook my head. Well, I did, she said.

Carol took the lead with the sign while I waited across the street to relieve her. She’d hold it and when the light turned red she’d walk between idling cars and not say a word, just hold our sign. Sometimes, someone called her over and gave her a dollar or some change. Most times, people just stared over their steering wheels without blinking and ignored her. When she got tired or too warm in the sun, she gave me the sign and I took over. When it got really hot, we sat under the awning at a McDonald’s and propped the sign up against the building. Usually we’d get enough for a couple of quarts of Thunderbird. One afternoon, we both passed out and someone stole my shoes. Had to have tugged them off my feet. I didn’t feel a thing. I sat there my mouth tasting all kinds of foul from having slept after we shared a bottle, my body slick in its own oiled mess. Where’re my shoes? I wondered. It just kind of hit me: I have no shoes. Someone took my shoes. I started laughing and then I got pissed. Carol lay on her side snoring, her head on our sign like it was a pillow. She had her shoes. Why’d someone take mine? I thought of taking hers. I thought and thought and then I did. I pulled them off her feet, gray sneakers that had once probably been white. They fit. A little tight but they fit. She kept on sleeping. She looked peaceful. Staring at her I tried to imagine us in a meadow. People walked past us, their knees level with my eyes. They stepped around us, and then I stood and they moved away, really skipped away like dancers, they didn’t miss a beat, and then they resumed walking in a straight line again. Looking down at Carol, I said, I took your shoes. I knew taking her shoes, well, there’s just something rotten about that. I didn’t want to be that rotten but I was. I felt bad—not so bad as to give them back—but bad enough to say I’m going to detox. Hank checked me in. I took a shower and he gave me clean clothes, a yellow T-shirt and blue jeans, both of which were too big, and another pair of shoes. Sandals really but they fit better than Carol’s shoes. I told him how I’d taken her shoes and I started crying. I hung on to them. I told myself I’d give them back when I got out of detox but I never did. I didn’t have them with me when I saw her. And I didn’t tell her I had taken them. I never mentioned them. About six months into my sobriety and about two months after I started working at Fresh Start, she died. The coroner had taken her body by the time I came into work. Funny the things you think of, but at the time my mind went back to the night I left her and how pebbles and bits of glass cut into the thin soles of her shoes. I could feel them dig in, like they were trying to get at my feet, and how I kept walking and hoped she’d yell for me so I’d turn around and go back and return her shoes.

I left a message for Tom, Hank says. He didn’t pick up.

I put down my phone.

They said they’re on their way, 911. Asked me if it was an emergency.

What’d you say?

Not anymore.

I glance around for Joe and see him sitting at the table with Walter. Hank and I go over and join them.

You ever seen a dead body? Hank asks Joe.

No.

Walter fingers an ashtray like maybe he could conjure up a smoke. Hank gives him one of his. Walter jams it in his mouth and Hank lights it for him. He stopped drinking cold turkey for a couple of months last year after he had a seizure. We had to refer him to San Francisco General. When he was released, he hung out at Fresh Start, stayed in our shelter at night. During the day, he volunteered, made coffee, and mopped the floors. What else could he do? No halfway house would take him, because he hadn’t been through a program. No program would take him, because he had been through pretty much all of them. Besides, they all had long waiting lists. Maybe that’s why he started up again. To have a purpose.

You know this guy, Walt?

Walter shakes his head.

He kind of looks like Rodney, I say.

Who’s Rodney? Joe asks.

A-Rod? Walter says. No, it’s not him.

He hangs around on Larkin, Hank says. Buys his wine at the convenience store on Eddy.

The blond guy, I say.

Yeah, Walter says. A-Rod, everyone calls him.

No, that’s not him, Hank says.

That’s I what I said, Walter says.

But it looks like him, I say.

He’s not A-Rod, Walter says.

Who’s A-Rod? Joe asks.

Joe asks if any of us want coffee. Me and Hank shake our heads. Walter nudges his cup forward and Joe takes it and walks to the counter. He’s great eye candy but it’s not going to happen between us. The way he walks me home, that’s nice, I have to admit. I don’t want to talk about how I’m not drinking all the time. Maybe if Hank got a job at Walmart he’d talk about something else. Maybe then I’d like him in the way I like Joe. It was good he said the Serenity Prayer. It kept my head straight. I liked that Joe took my hand at that moment.

I wonder what the dead guy thought this morning. If he knew he was sick, if he felt funny, funnier than normal. He was probably hungover. I imagine him in Golden Gate Park waking up, pulling his knees into his chest against the cold. He probably got up and rolled up his sleeping bag. Or maybe he just had blankets. They’d be wet with dew. He might have had a shopping cart. He may have hidden his gear behind bushes. That’s what I did. That was me. It may not have been the dead guy at all.

We hear sirens and then the red lights of a squad car and an ambulance splash light against the windows. I get up and Hank follows me to the door. I open it to two officers. Three paramedics stand behind them in the shadows. One of the officers takes out a notepad. He has a heavy face and looks almost bored. His partner appears younger and stands to one side.

We got a call about a deceased person? Officer Notepad says.

Yes, I’m the one who called, I say.

Hank and I walk them over to John Doe. The heavy sound of their steps echoes off the concrete floor behind me. They glance at Walter, who stares down at the table, chin against his chest. I wonder if he has nodded off. The paramedics squat down and one of them pulls the blanket off John Doe’s face. They stare at him.

How long has he been like this? one of them asks.

He came here about ten thirty tonight. We did a bed check at eleven and this is how he was, I say.

He was passed out on the street in front of the building, Hank says. He was breathing, too drunk to walk. Me and a volunteer brought him in.

The paramedics look at John Doe again.

Do you know who he is? one of them asks.

No, sir, I tell him.

Officer Notepad takes our names and phone numbers. One of the paramedics covers John Doe with the blanket again.

We’ll call the coroner to pick up the body, one of them tells me.

If you get a name for him let us know, Officer Notepad says.

He and his partner walk back outside and sit in their squad car. The paramedics follow.

Hank picks up the clipboard and hands it to Joe.

Better go see that everyone else is breathing, he says.

Joe takes the clipboard. I watch him, not feeling a whole lot one way or the other.

I’ll call Tom again, Hank says.

I’ll miss Hank if he goes to Walmart. I think it’ll be weird for him to work in a place with people who could never imagine a guy dying alone on a mat on the floor. Hank and I wouldn’t have work to talk about anymore. I don’t know what we’d have to say to each other. But we’d still have a lot in common. Too much. Maybe we’re meant for each other after all.