‘Buzzard’s luck,’ Art Castro murmured to himself. This would probably waste the last fragile string he had left to yank at the LAPD. On what was probably no more than a fool’s errand for Jack Liffey and his daughter. He sighed and picked up the telephone. He hadn’t really noticed the sorry state of his relations with the LAPD until a few months earlier when his contacts were almost all gone. One by one they’d taken themselves off the job or moved to other departments in Duarte or San Bernardino – or just gone off him, for some reason. Sergeant Javier Guzman was seemingly still taking Art’s calls, but he didn’t sound very happy about it. In the end, he agreed to check Missing Persons for him.
‘This is a favor I’m doing, Javi,’ Art Castro said. ‘It’s not a money case. I’d like to find the kid before he’s peddling his ass to all the gabachos in Bentleys at Heartbreak and Vine.’
‘Don’t play no raza card on me, Ar-tur-o. Not since your buddy there at Rosewood flaked on us and testified and hurried on to the White Guy Fortress up in Idaho.’
‘No buddy of mine, if you mean Marty Hansen. He just worked down the hall.’
‘Hansen, yeah, that’s the puddle of filth I mean. The guy testified he never ever talked shit like “spic” and “greasers” to anybody, oh, no, he loved Mexes like his own wife and kids, and the defense produces a tape with a hundred fifteen “spics” and “beaners” on it. Blew our case against the Garzas to hell.’
‘Shit, man, you got plenty of problem guys in the department, too, that nobody brown will deal with; still think the only trouble with this city is too many blacks and Mexicans.’
‘I hear you. But we’re evens after this, A.’
‘I don’t know why you want to be that way. I do you specials all the time.’
‘It’s tough these days,’ Javier Guzman said. ‘This new chief is all bad news on favors. I don’t want to look up some day and see some rat squad sticking a piece of paper in my hand, OK? I swear I’ll light that Shoes up. And you, too, if it tracks to you.’
‘I’ll keep you in my good mind, Javi, I mean it. Gracias. Never no bad shit.’
‘Code four, ese. Be good now. I’ll get your info-nympho.’
The mother and daughter had devoured their Old-Time Movie meals at warp speed – Felice’s spaghetti on side-by-side burger patties (called the Sophia Loren Special, which she didn’t want to think about) and Millie had the ham steak with a pineapple ring on top (Princess Grace’s Wedding), while Maeve had picked a little at a godawful salad of near-frozen iceberg lettuce dolloped with something sweet and lumpy and pink. Everybody had refused seconds or desert, and Maeve phoned Gloria to ask about a shelter. Maeve was certain they existed, but she had no practical knowledge of their whereabouts.
‘So you picked up some strays?’ Gloria said evenly on the cell.
‘That’s not how I’d put it.’
‘Of course not. Mother Theresa and how many kids?’
‘One daughter. They really need a nice place to stay, Glor.’
‘You got the Beverly Hilton not too far from you.’
‘Be serious, please. You can point us.’
‘I don’t know Hollywood, hon. I was never on the job there. San Pedro I could tell you three places off the top of my head. Harbor City … Wilmington. OK, how ’bout this. I heard Catholic Liberation opened a women’s shelter downtown last year. I think it’s on Third or Fourth a little west of Alameda.’
‘Do the women have to be Catholic?’
‘No way. Nobody does that stuff.’
‘That’s a pretty rough area, isn’t it?’
‘Where are you calling from?’
‘OK, I get it, Mom.’ The ‘mom’ was as gently ironic as she could make it.
‘They’ll be in good hands with Liberation, believe me. Those women are so clean and good they frown if you make a joke.’
‘Thanks a bunch, Glor.’ She cut off before Gloria could get in another snide dig about picking up strays.
‘We got a place to stay,’ Maeve announced. She realized she should probably call ahead, but she had an inkling they might be much better off this late at night just showing up and throwing themselves on the mercy of the nuns, or whoever ran the place.
‘Thank you,’ Felice said gravely. ‘I wish I could give you something.’ The little girl looked very guarded, as she had all evening.
‘That’s OK. Let’s get your stuff.’
‘We’ll go fetch it and meet you right back here,’ the woman said.
Maeve realized immediately that the woman didn’t want her to see where they were staying, but it could have meant a long walk with their possessions. ‘I have a car around the corner. Look, I promise I won’t watch where you go. I’ll wait anywhere you say and you can go out of sight.’
Millie squeezed her mother’s arm with some message Maeve couldn’t read.
‘Your daughter’s tired,’ Maeve said.
‘Why you be so nice to us?’ the woman asked. ‘We ain’t had nothing but busted luck since we got to this awful city. People so mean here, the eating places they soak they throwouts in bleach so can’t nobody eat it outta the dumpster.’
‘Aw, I didn’t know that. That’s terrible. My parents taught me to be nice to folks. Don’t you think people should help other people?’
Maeve thought she could just see tears in the woman’s eyes. The little girl, who’d obviously had her share of busted luck too, remained hard and suspicious.
‘Some day, when you’re back on your feet, you’ll remember this and help somebody else. That’s the way it comes around. OK?’
The woman nodded, and the little girl thrust out the doll toward Maeve. ‘Here.’
‘Will you let me hold her, just for a minute or two?’ Maeve said.
Millie nodded grimly.
That evening, Conor had started getting used to his utterly plain room at the Fortnum. Austerity normalized, like everything else. It was a strange thing, he thought, but any resting place that didn’t devour you or call down the dogs of hell, you pretty quickly come to feel safe, even a bit homey. His only problem really was the squashed roaches on the walls, almost like a wallpaper pattern. Before him, somebody had had a contest with himself to see how many he could crush every night, and nobody had ever cleaned up. It was hard to imagine a hotel that didn’t even scrape off the dead roaches between guests, but some things were getting easier to imagine every day.
All Conor’s life, his father had written about the poor, the working poor in America and the dirt poor in Mexico, and he really admired his father for doing that, but he realized how abstract it had all remained for him. It hadn’t really penetrated his personal reality out in suburbia, not in any meaningful way. He remembered the joke he’d heard at school about the kid at Beverly Hills High who’d written an essay about poverty. Everybody was poor, the maid was poor, the cook was poor, the butler was poor …
He went out at night, braving the busy murmuring darkness all around, along Sixth Street and then San Julian, to Mike’s Market two blocks away and bought a sponge and some 409. He retraced his course and started wiping off the insect remains and depositing them in the plastic bag he’d been given for his purchases. Thrift, he thought. Never in his life had the reuse of a plastic bag meant anything at all to him. I’m learning a few new things here. I’m learning how other people have to live. He tried to think of rhyming lines for a song about extreme forms of thrift, but nothing would come. Bag. Tin can. Need-feed. Plastic.
Even the roaches were poor, he thought.
They were very careful to make her park around the corner at Cherokee Avenue, but Maeve could see the dark alley toward which Felice and Millie walked hand-in-hand. Aw, no, she thought, when they confirmed her suspicion by turning abruptly down the alley. They’d actually been living in a cardboard box, or under a hedge, living rough. It was inconceivable, though she had certainly tried to conceive it. No wonder they’d seemed so unwashed. She glanced down at the naked doll beside her, left in her temporary custody and nearly wept.
‘Sorry, dollie. I’ll get you some clothes. I promise. And your owner. My little sister.’
They came back with a dilapidated pair of those red plaid hard-board suitcases from Kress or Newberrys that you never saw any more. She’d had a tiny one herself as a child, for weekends with her dad, before her mom had replaced it with a Gore-tex wheelie from some catalogue.
‘Your dollie was almost crying, she missed you so much,’ Maeve said.
The little girl glanced at Maeve as if she were nuts, then sat in the back seat and withdrew into herself.
‘It’s not far,’ Maeve said reassuringly, though she was a bit nervous herself about driving into Skid Row after dark.
She headed back along Sunset Boulevard, past gentrifying Silverlake and Echo Park, and just as she approached the cheery overlit and counterfeit Mexican tourist trap of Olvera Street, she headed south into Downtown on Main. She motored slowly east along Third Street through a stretch of abandoned buildings that grew darker and more forbidding. No center to be seen. She came back along Fourth, hoping Gloria hadn’t got it wrong.
But eventually the shelter stood out like a radiant island on the street, with even a bit of lawn protected by a high wire fence. She stopped right in front.
‘You guys wait.’
Maeve plucked up her courage and walked to the gate and called to a large black woman who was sitting on a beach chair on the lawn, smoking. ‘Ma’am. I have a mother and child who need a shelter bad.’
‘We full up.’
‘Please.’
‘Wait there, girl.’ The black woman frugally scraped the burning tip off her cigarette, tucked it into the grass beside the leg of her chair, and went inside.
Eventually a thin woman with graying red hair came out into the puddle of brighter light by the door. She looked vaguely familiar to Maeve.
‘Hello, there, I’m Sister Mary Rose.’
It was the voice that did it, and the nervous energy that the woman gave off. Omigod! Maeve thought. But she betrayed no sign, because the woman obviously didn’t recognize her. After all, she was almost ten years older now and Maeve’s jump from nine to eighteen was much bigger than this woman’s forty-five to fifty-four.
‘I have a mother and young girl in the car who really need shelter.’
The woman sucked her teeth an instant. ‘We’re always full by this time.’
‘They need a place really really bad, ma’am.’
‘Don’t get in a tizz. We’ll set up cots or something until we have room.’ She used a key from a chain around her neck and unlocked the gate. ‘Bring them in. Let’s see what we can do.’
The woman hurried away into the building. Eleanor Ong was her name – whatever her nun name had been before and probably was again, Maeve thought. Her father had been madly in love with her then – yes, it was almost ten years ago, not too long after he’d left her own mother. Eleanor had already quit some convent, but apparently she’d gone back, or she’d gone back to work with her order on some dispensation. The coincidence was just too great, but life was like that.
Maeve vaguely remembered that her dad and Eleanor had been tied together and thrown down a storm drain during a heavy rain by a couple of Mafia thugs, and the relationship had turned out badly after that. The poor woman couldn’t handle her dad’s life, she had said, like several other women had said later. But why not? Her dad had never been a Sunday School picnic, but he always gritted his teeth and set off up that sad lonely honorable road that everybody else just talked about. It was why she loved him so desperately, and Eleanor Ong should have, too.
Maeve brought Felice and Millie out of the car, clutching their string-wrapped suitcases. Once they were into the yard, Maeve closed the gate behind them so it at least appeared to be locked. ‘That woman said she’ll find you a place to sleep. I gotta go.’ She felt terribly vulnerable out there on the street alone but she didn’t want to get mixed up with the nun.
‘Thank you, Maeve,’ Felice called through the fence. ‘You been a prayer’s answer. We won’t forget you.’
‘I won’t let you. I’ll come tomorrow and find out how you’re doing. I want to get the doll some clothes.’ Though she had a ton of second thoughts about coming back here. She was afraid Eleanor would recognize her in some way. But that was a pretty long shot. Eleanor reappeared as they were still talking, and she decided she’d better disguise her voice a little.
The nun greeted Felice and Millie warmly where they waited patiently. ‘You’ll have to be on fold-a-beds for a few days, but they’re pretty comfortable. I use one of them myself. You’ll have a private space and you can lock the door. We’ll get you some food tonight if you haven’t eaten.’
‘Oh, no, we ate up a storm thanks to this kind young lady.’
Eleanor turned to look at her, and Maeve decided it was past time to split. ‘Gotta go,’ she called in an unnaturally deep voice.
That only drew Eleanor’s attention. ‘The Lady Lone Ranger rides off. Hi-yo, Silver.’
‘That’s sexist,’ Maeve said automatically, then fought to unlock her car.
‘I think I knew a girl like you once,’ Sister Mary Rose called wistfully. ‘I have a memory for faces.’
‘No way. No no. I’m from Kansas.’
‘Give my regards to the others in your family back in Kansas.’
All the hair on the back of Maeve’s neck stood on end.
There was a soft rap on Conor’s door, and he guessed, by its volume if nothing else, that it probably wasn’t anybody dangerous. He opened on a very short old man wearing one of those Jewish skullcaps, navy blue with a white pattern around the rim – what were they called? He felt bad he didn’t remember. The man also wore a thick wool suit and white shirt but no tie.
‘Hello, sir.’
‘You’re new here. I’m your neighbor, Samuel Greengelb. I bet Vartabedian’s gonifs haven’t had a chance to threaten you yet. Feh, the room smells of carbolic.’
‘It’s just 409. I was spraying to clean up the cockroaches.’
‘With all due respect, nu, you should spray the gonifs the first time you see them. That will take the smell away. Listen, have we met?’
‘No, sir, I don’t think so.’
The old man sighed. ‘I have to check these days. I sometimes forget things.’
‘Come in, sir, please. Mr Greengelb. My name is Conor Lewis.’
‘An interesting name. Of the Irish, no?’ He took a step inside the room.
Conor shrugged. ‘The last name is Welsh really, but my mom was real Irish, from Cork – Brigid Glanchy. That where-you’re-from stuff doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m a mongrel American.’
‘Heritage should mean to you, my son. Look, there are three of us who live here for many years, and we’re fighting back against the new landlord. We joke we are the three Musketeers. The new owner of this hole is Armenian and he should know better. They were once victims, too. But the thugs he hires are the true mongrels – they’re of the lost ones, men with no family, no roots. They’re from the army or worse – just guys sent to places of much killing for money. Fighting dogs, you point them and take off the muzzle.’ He shrugged.
The man came in stiffly and Conor realized again just how short he was, barely to his chin. A selfish thought occurred to him – that there were interesting songs to be found in this man, and then less selfishly, there was obviously a real drama playing itself out here. Something his father might admire. And he liked the man’s abrupt manner, almost rude. He’d never seen anything like it. ‘Sir, please sit on my chair. I can’t offer you coffee or anything yet.’ Conor sat opposite him on the bed.
‘You look like a smart boy. You play chess?’
‘I’m afraid not, sir. My friends at school always said they preferred games with more chance of cheating.’
Greengelb laughed. ‘I been playing chess with a dead Russian Jew for many years, name of Boris Shpilman – forty years dead but in all the books. Real problems he posed, all the time. The Shpilman Gambit. The Shpilman Knight Opening. Oy.’ He tapped his forehead with three fingers. ‘Very hard to outthink this man.’
Chess didn’t interest Conor, but the rest of the story did. ‘Sir, can you tell me about these thugs who come around?’
‘The akhzers pound on our doors late at night and yell at us for the owner, Vartabedian. The elevator they have already kiboshed. They are heartless men who have no brain of their own. You watch – soon they will cut off the heat or the water or some new atrocity. I curse them and say they should lose all the ill-gotten money they are paid to painful and bungling doctors. Let them suffer and remember.’
Conor couldn’t help laughing at the colorful curse. ‘If I stay at the Fortnum a while, do you think they’ll threaten me?’
‘Nu, probably not.’ He gave an elaborate shrug. ‘You they can throw out any time. You don’t have a lease from the old owners. Bless the souls of 4-G Property Management, who that was. They were good to us for fifteen years, paid a Jamaican super named Bevan who kept the place up, painted the halls, changed the bulbs, fixed stuff. The 4-G stood for four guys from the Valley, but we knew them as the four goy dentists. When all this loft insanity started, sadly the four dentists saw a chance to make big money. The four shmos is all they are now. Vartabedian will probably throw us out in the end, and he’ll bring in cheap labor to rebuild the place and sell his “artist lofts” for millions.’
‘How can you stop him?’
Greengelb shrugged. ‘He’s got the bigshot lawyers. And we’re at the end of our rope, but we don’t give up easy. Morty Lipman is my nexdoorekeh, room 324. We’re D’Artagnan and Athos. And Joel Wineglass upstairs is with us, too. Maybe Porthos. But those gonifs of Vartabedian’s never even heard of all-for-one or Milady. They’re ignorant as bricks. They never read nothing but Donald Duck.’
Conor was a bit chagrined that he’d never read Dumas either, though he’d seen the movies.
‘These thugs,’ Greengelb said with a smirk. ‘I watched them one day in the coffee shop over on Broadway arguing about what side the jellied toast falls on. Amazing shmucks, truly. As if this is science.
‘The little one, always clinging to a knife, he says, “The jelly side up, it’s got more air resistance.” Strange that he’s the optimist. He’s the really evil one.
‘So the big one holds the toast out and drops it with a flip, and it falls on the dry side just like the meshuggenah says.
‘“My mistake,” the big thug says.
‘“What you mean?” the knife guy says, very suspicious.
‘“I jellied the wrong effin’ side.”’ Greengelb cackled at his own joke, real or apocryphal.
Conor did his best to laugh anyway.
‘You sure I don’t know you?’
‘You do now.’
Maeve came home pretty late – on a school night, too – and parked as quietly as she could on Greenwood Street. She’d had just a single twinge as she’d passed the street sign at the corner. She could never completely forget that the street, and its namesake klika, were burned into her life now, an Old English G tattooed on her left breast that neither her dad nor Gloria had seen. She tiptoed up the walk. Her dad was somewhere deep inside, but she was shocked to find Gloria waiting on the glide on the front porch, nursing a beer.
‘No sneaking home here, hon. Stakeouts are my game.’
‘I knew I should have gone back to Redondo.’ That was her mom’s house where she could always sneak in, a half-dozen ways. ‘So, you do a lot of stakeouts?’
Gloria frowned. ‘Sit.’
Maeve sat on the rickety Adirondack chair that tended to throw you back hard if you weren’t careful. She was avoiding the glide where Gloria sat. Gloria creaked the glide a little with a kick. Maeve wondered if the balky glide had been there since Boyle Heights had been the first Jewish suburb of L.A. a century ago, before the Jews had moved on west.
‘You don’t ask the questions. I ask questions. That’s the deal with cops.’
‘It wasn’t really a question.’
Gloria gave her the fish eye, and Maeve subsided to neutral. ‘Anything. Ask.’
‘You know perfectly well that your dad is helpless right now. I know you’re trying to do some work as his stand-in, but it might end up involving him in some way. Don’t get skittery now and start denying things right and left. I know you picked up a couple of sad sacks in Hollywood because you called me about it. Good for you.’
‘Should I have just left them in that awful alley where they were living?’
‘Remember, I ask the questions.’
OK, Maeve thought. I’ll play it your way – hardball all the way. I won’t tell you that the woman who runs that shelter is Eleanor Ong, dad’s staggering Really Big Love from long ago – and this torch-bearer, this beautiful skinny woman with all the freckles, might have recognized me. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Ms Hard-Nose Cop. Except you can’t because you won’t deign to meet me on equal terms.
‘I just want to protect you and your dad, hon. You can understand that. Is there anything I need to know about all this? Jack has enough trouble worrying about his condition and his damn dog recovering from the cancer – and, I admit it, worrying about me, too. I’m not so easy to live with. He sometimes worries himself sick about this hard case and all her problems.’
‘I love you, Glor.’
‘Thank you very much, Maeve. Love is not always relevant or sufficient, but it always matters. And I’m glad you care.’
‘Do you think I’m hurting Dad? Honestly? I’d rather die than hurt Dad.’
‘I have no reason to think so. But can you stay in touch with me about what’s going on?’ Gloria was studying the empty beer bottle in her hand, as if she couldn’t meet Maeve’s eyes. ‘For his sake. You don’t have to find me civil or fair or motherly – just truly fierce in defense of your father.’
Sure. But trust was already a lost game, Maeve thought, since she was still feeling a bit angry and wasn’t going to tell Gloria about Eleanor Ong. ‘Of course,’ she said, feeling a bit sick inside.
NOTES FOR A NEW MUSIC
Day 3
Met some wonderful old Jewish men who somebody’s trying to throw out of this hotel. My neighbor Mr Samuel Greengelb visited me for a long time. He even taught me some Yiddish, which he speaks fluently. (I didn’t know anybody spoke it anymore.) It’s very sad, too; he’s very afraid that he’s starting to lose his memory. More to come on this. I’m exhausted now.
It was about nine at night, and Maeve’s father sat in his wheelchair in the kitchen reading a book, with Loco lying across his feet. He’d lifted the foot-pads up to rest his feet on the floor beside Loco – either to gain comfort for himself or to comfort the dog.
‘What you reading, Dad?’
He nodded a greeting to her and held up the book, a Cormac McCarthy that she didn’t know.
‘You like it?’
He made a noncommittal face and then retrieved a notebook to write.
VERY DARK
‘That’s like saying Groucho Marx is funny.’
He smiled and nodded. Then at Maeve’s urging they had a discussion – if you could call it that – about divorce. Maeve got around to asking him which of the women he’d known in his life, excluding Gloria and his first wife – her own mother, of course – had meant the most to him.
YOU LEARN SOMETHING ABOUT YOURSELF FROM EVERYONE YOU LOVE
He quickly inserted the word ‘IMPORTANT’ with a caret after ‘SOMETHING.’
That was terribly diplomatic, she thought, but not what she wanted.
‘Sure, I learned a lot from Beto, too,’ she said. And I hope you never see the tattoo, she thought. ‘But, really, Mr Loved-Each-One-in-Her-Own Way. If you had to say …’
PROBABLY ELEANOR. DO YOU REMEMBER HER? LONG AGO.
‘A little bit. I was very young. What was it about her?’
LOST. LOVELY. TRYING DESPERATELY TO DO GOOD IN THE WORLD. BUT NEEDY.
He smiled warmly and laughed.
AND SOME SEX STUFF I WON’T TOUCH ON.
‘Were you her first lover? I know she’d been a nun.’
YES BUT IT’S COMPLEX.
‘You always say something like that to avoid explaining. One of these days you’ve got to start talking again.’
‘Ack,’ he said desperately.
‘Sorry, Dad. That wasn’t fair. I’d better go home to bed. This is a school night.’
When she finally got home to Redondo at about ten, she called Art Castro on his cell.
‘It’s not a complete report yet, kid, but I know your boy is in town. He accessed an ATM at a Skid Row mini-mart called Mike’s. He’s either staying at one of the flops nearby, or he’s got a pal in one of the fancy new lofts. They’re asking a small fortune for those places. Of course he could be camping out on the street with the schizos and winos. You didn’t say if he brought any gear.’
‘Thanks, Art. I’ll tell Dad when he’s ready to go on the hunt.’
‘Sure, kid. You’re just keeping his spot on the bench warm.’ He sounded skeptical, but basically not all that interested.
‘That’s the deal.’ If she’d learned one thing from her dad it was to keep her mouth shut and resist the temptation to amplify, justify, explain. ‘He owes you one.’
‘Oh, a lot more than one.’
She hung up and thought immediately about her father. Did she really expect him to join the hunt at some point, become reanimated all at once by the challenge, or some other impetus? Good work, Maeve, now you go back to school and I’ll take over.
It was terrifying to her that he seemed so small and powerless now. He had once been big enough to blot out the sun, and now he seemed just shriveled and weak – not so much in his wheelchair, but in her head. This silence, when his voice had once filled a whole house, had once perfectly filled her longing for company, for someone to joke with and ask questions and always, always back her up. Dad, oh, I still need you.
She wasn’t even sure if she’d said any of it aloud, but there was an addendum in her head that she knew she hadn’t said out loud. Don’t go yet, please. She hurried downstairs and threw her arms around her mother, who was sitting on a kitchen stool raising and lowering a teabag in a cup.
‘Your dad?’ Kathleen Liffey said.
‘Yeah. I can’t stand it. He keeps getting smaller and it makes me smaller, too. I want him to talk to me.’
Her mother tipped the cup to study the color of the liquid, then kept dipping. ‘Being brave never feels brave, does it? When Jack and I split up – God, that was so long ago – I kept wanting to find him somewhere in the house to tell him what I was feeling.’
‘Oh, Mom!’
‘But I have hopes. For something in life. I don’t know what. I’m sure I’ve had enough of sorrow.’
So much for running to her mother for comfort – her mother, deep in her own misery.
‘I’m not so terrible, am I?’ her mother asked.
One problem with positive thinking, Jack Liffey thought, was that adopting an expectant attitude predisposed you to a sense of failure.
‘We must be very patient now, Mr Liffey. We’ll start getting it, any time now. I’ve seen it happen many times. Try to press our nice soft foot against my hand.’
Of course, the alternative was moping. It was important to count your blessings, even as a cripple. It got you a close parking place in most lots, a good spot for your chair at the movies. And once you could accept it, most people offered you help, a push over a big hump, a quick fetch of something you needed. After they got over the terror of meeting your eyes.
What was that, anyway? People mostly glanced away quickly as if you were a schizophrenic who was about to sit beside them on a bus and tell them all about the tinfoil hat that kept out the rays from space. While children stared hard at you, sizing up a freak for the entertainment value, for tales to pals. The life of Cain.
But another advantage: he now had the opportunity of experiencing two different lives in a single lifetime, learning something to convey to the remains of the normal one from the new one. Able and disabled. Conventional and challenged. Pre-crippled and crippled. Normal and lame. John Doe and Gimp. Like everyone else, he had pushed the thought of what it meant to be ‘like that’ aside for most of his life. Now there was no choice. He was like that. Exiled to this lesser world and deprived of so many simple things, left a kind of intelligent jellyfish to be moved out of the way of those who were doing real things. But still loved, he thought, still with Gloria’s fingers running through his hair. Yes, count your blessings, Jack Liffey. Keep me in a crate in your closet, you great big unsentimental woman.
Despite occasional claims by Los Angeles homeless authorities that ‘most’ of the homeless who want a bed are sheltered every night, at least 83 per cent of the homeless in L.A. sleep the night behind bus benches, under overpasses, in business doorways, in alleys, in unlocked autos, against houses with wide eaves and under park trees.