A Not Uncommon Occurrence

I’m still cold on the drive back from that nasty meat locker of a room.

It’s around 3:30 in the morning when Maggot Arm Joe and I get home after dropping Sergei at his condo. Hank Crow’s asleep at the desk as I let myself in. Maggot Arm Joe heads up to his room while I check the desk for messages from Tara. Nothing. I decide to give her a buzz in the morning. Hank Crow’s hard to wake up, so I leave him alone. Why wake him up to make him go to sleep? I put up the “Closed” sign so no one’ll bother him, and I grab my sport jacket off the back of one of the seats and I take two of Hank’s beers out of the minifridge, leave him an IOU note for them, and go to the front stoop.

I put one beer in my sport-jacket pocket and one in a brown paper bag so I can drink it out on the front step. I walk out, the beer in my pocket weighing one side of the jacket down and pulling against my neck. I sit down and the glass bottle clunks on the steps through my jacket pocket and I look up at the blank sky. I’m wondering what I’m going to do with my life. Whether this plan for the money works out or not, there’s no way I can continue like this. I’m looking ahead, a year, two years, five, ten, and the years just seem to loom ahead the same forever with boredom and violence and sadness. Every one like the one before it until they stop.

Maybe I should clean out and see what Tara says about a new improved Nick Ray.

I take a drink of the cold beer and feel suffocated as I drink because I can’t breathe through the nose.

I finish the first beer and decide to take the other one to bed.

I drag my way up the steps hoping that I can get a decent night’s sleep before checking on Harry Fudge’s names sometime tomorrow. I open the door and flick on the light and am knocked back in fear and anger when I see that I’ve been robbed. It rolls in slowly at first. I don’t see the video camera, I don’t see the television, the window’s been broken and is open to the fire escape. Then it hits me: the computers are gone, and with them several names that may be worth twenty grand apiece. I can’t believe it. To lose all hope this quickly.

I smash around the room. I throw my keys and the plastic Subaru key ring explodes and the plastic and keys go skidding across the hardwood floor. I try to calm down, to do what someone better than me would do, to assess, to calmly and rationally see exactly where it is we stand. I make a mental list.

Gone:

Television

VCR

Video camera

Computers and monitor

My jar of change by the ashtray

Gone.

I take another deep breath and try to see what’s left before I come to any judgments, before I lose control.

They left the kiddie pool, which is sagging and growing a translucent film. And they left a pile of shit on my bed. I look closer and there’s two muddy footprints and indentations on either side of it. Some clown squatted and shit on my bed.

I call the police and the woman on the nonemergency line tells me it’ll be between one and three hours before the cops come by. I tell her about the shit on my bed and she tells me that doesn’t speed up the process, that it’ll be between one and three hours before I see a cop. I tell her I could be arrested in five minutes if I tried to sleep in the park and she patiently tells me that maybe I should go to the park then.

I hang up and look around. The computers are gone, it keeps coming back to me, this fact won’t go away, it annoys me like a barking dog. We still have the ones Maggot Arm Joe’s holding, but they may not have anything, and we could be out a lot of names and a lot of money if I can’t find these. I go down to the desk and wake Hank Crow up.

“Boy, what time is it?” he says.

I tell him what happened.

“You say he shit on the bed?”

“He,” I say. “She. Who the fuck knows?”

“It’s a he,” Hank says. “Not a fucking woman in the world would steal from a man and shit on his bed.” He rolls his head and his neck cracks a couple of times. He lights a cigarette. “Woman shitting on a bed—I refuse to accept that.”

“Was anyone in here looking for me?” I say.

“There was a young fellow with meat looking for you and your lawyer friend.”

I look at him.

Hank Crow says, “I signed for it—I signed for meat. Told the fellow I never thought I’d sign for meat, but there it was. Lot of things happen that I never thought I’d see—people taking time to shit on beds when they should be busy stealing. Me signing for meat. It’s a hell of a strange world if you live long enough.”

Hank gets up from behind the desk and takes me out back, behind the staircase where we keep broken refrigerators and old space heaters. There, on a wooden pallet, is a stack of Mel Collins’s freeze-dried meat that’s six feet tall and four feet wide. It could fill you up after the apocalypse. Next to it is another pallet of meat.

“You signed for it?” I say.

“I did,” Hank Crow says. “I signed for yours and for Joe Cole. You eat meat?”

“Nope.”

We stand there looking at this pile of meat for a while and I want to cry. This is what I have in the world.

“The guy that delivered this—did he go up to my room?”

“No. Dropped it off and went away. Saw the truck pull out myself.” There’s a pause. “Sorry I was asleep, Nick. Wish I could help you with this.”

I shake my head. “Looks like they came in and out through the escape—you probably couldn’t have done anything.” I pat him on the back and he and I go out to sit on the front steps with, a couple of beers while I wait for the cops to show up. The night’s quiet enough for us to hear the electric lines doing their business.

“You ever been robbed before?” Hank says.

I nod, tell Hank about when I was in Buffalo and someone took all my stuff. This is right after the marriage broke up. when I still had hopes of hanging around and impressing Cheryl with how much better and focused and driven I had become. A month after I moved out of the house, my new apartment got ripped off. They had great taste. I had a collection of over three hundred blues albums from the 1940s and 50s, including all the original Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf albums on the Chess label. An ex-girlfriend of mine had given me a framed still, autographed by Chuck Jones himself, from “Duck Amuck,” my favorite Looney Tunes cartoon. A pre-CBS Fender Stratocaster worth a couple of grand. This was the last good stuff I had and I thought of it at the time as some sort of message, a message that said, Don’t focus on things. Time to learn and simplify and understand life, but, like most of my self-improvements, it didn’t take. It was only a couple of months later that I was out of Buffalo, and I’d started the drift that would eventually wash me up here.

“Sounds like you had good taste, not the thief,” Hank says.

“Thing is, they left the bad stuff—Muddy Waters only cut one shitty album and they left it.”

Hank Crow looks out at the street and takes a drink of beer. “Not Electric Mud? The psychedelic one?”

I nod.

“You had that?”

“I did.” I take a drink of the beer and listen to the power lines buzz. I think of people in my room, rummaging through what little I have. It’s a lousy feeling. “Fuck.”

“I had a house burn to the ground,” Hank says.

“Here?”

He shakes his head. “Back East. Boston—I was coming up from Bridgeport—one of only two cities to elect a socialist mayor.”

“No shit?”

Hank looks happy. “And the only United States city to reelect one—for eighteen years.” Hank Crow lights a cigarette and offers me one. It’s menthol, and I give it some thought, but I take one anyway, thinking it might calm me down. “That’s where I was coming from—thinking socialism would change everything. Working folk would matter—take and share what was theirs—so, I’m supposed to unionize this shelving plant next to the Neco factory in Cambridge. I tell you, the whole street smelled like Neco wafers. Five years of my life smelled like that.” He pantomimes a sniff, takes a drag of his cigarette. “Long story short, some men in charge did not share my vision of a united workforce. They burned my house down. Shot my car out. Called me all their names.”

I think of what that could mean, to lose everything when you actually had something to lose. I think everyone must have had a harder life than me, which comes from my father. Whenever I cried as a kid, he’d show me a picture of this sideshow geek, the Human Torso. The Human Torso, according to my dad, he painted with a brush between his teeth, he was an auto mechanic, he married and fathered seven kids. Look, my father would say, and he’d poke a picture that looked like a huge worm of a naked man, look at him, he’s got no arms and legs and you don’t see him crying. I say to Hank Crow, “What did you do?”

“I moved, son. I left the East—came out here.”

Some newspaper tumbles down the street and gets stuck in the fence of the condemned building across the street and flutters its edges in the wind.

“Could be worse,” Hank Crow says.

“True,” I say. “But that doesn’t do me much good.”

“I didn’t say it would do you much good,” Hank says, and laughs. “Just said it could be worse.”

“I still have my meat,” I say, and smile.

“There you go—that’s the spirit, son.”

Neither of us says anything for a moment and the night sounds announce themselves in the quiet space. There’s a couple fighting diagonally across the street at the Mark James Hotel. I see their frustrated shadows against the shade every now and then. Car horns sound. Horns from the harbor.

“What are you going to do when they close the Lincoln?” I say.

Hank shrugs. “I got family in Oregon. I could stay here. I like the sun. I’m an old man, Nick. I may write my life story.”

“Really?”

Hank laughs and takes a drink of beer. “Why not? Not every book can be about Elvis and Princess Di.”

And I think, but don’t say, that no one would be interested in Hank Crow’s story. The American public doesn’t much care to read stories about good people who work hard and have nothing to show for it. They don’t want to hear about poor people who stay poor people. Start in a log cabin and end in the White House? Cool. Start in a log cabin and end up renting another log cabin, you’re shit out of luck, no matter how much you may have helped the working conditions on any number of assembly lines. People don’t like to hear the world isn’t fair and it isn’t nice, and they’re sure as hell not going to pay to hear it.

Hank wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “How about you? You’re a young man—what the hell are you going to do?”

I tell him that I may have some money coming in, but that the robbery may have set me back. I fill him in without going into too much detail.

“Money with the Russian?”

I say yes.

“Fool’s gold, son. You got nothing if you’re relying on that boy.”

“Could be,” I say. “But then I’ve got nothing either way.” Then it hits me that maybe Sergei stole this shit. I don’t know him that well. He could have done it. Hell, Maggot Arm Joe could have. The two of them have been going at me with their plan since the get-go. Maybe I’m being taken out of the deal? I close my eyes, and feel the sting of my cuts opening fresh. I can’t think this way—they are my partners. They wouldn’t do this. But still, it keeps coming at me like a popcorn kernel in my throat—they might. Greed makes people do shit.

A cop car pulls up in front of the “No Parking” section of the curb in front of the Lincoln. Hank gets up and says quietly to me, “I’ll take my leave of you now, if you don’t mind.” He takes our beer and goes behind the desk, slinking away from the cop, whose name, his name tag says, is O’Hara.

“You call about a robbery?” Officer O’Hara says.

I nod and lead him up toward my room. Our feet clunk heavily on the old wood stairs, which give just a bit under the weight. This is a pretty beat-up building, maybe it’s best that the city’s closing it down.

I open the door, and gesture for Officer O’Hara to go on ahead of me. He walks into the room and kicks into the kiddie pool and sloshes a little funky water over the side.

He looks at me. “You have children here, sir?”

“No,” I say.

He takes out a pad and pen and points to the kiddie pool with his pen. “What’s this for, then?”

I’m too tired to make anything up, so I say, “My girlfriend and I had sex in it.”

He shakes his head. “If you’re not honest with me, it’ll be hard to help you, sir.”

“Look,” I say. “That’s the truth, but it’s got nothing to do with the crime.”

He asks me what was taken, and I tell him about the change jar, the VCR and TV, and the video camera.

“What’d you have a camera for?” he says.

I point to the kiddie pool and he rolls his eyes and clicks his pen on and off a couple of times.

“Okay,” he says. “What else is missing?”

I tell him about the three hard drives and the monitor.

“Why do you have three computers?” he says, and makes it sound oily.

He gives me a look that says he thinks I’m small-time bad news and why can’t he just get called on to protect and serve the good people?

“I just do,” I say. “Look—I was the one robbed here.”

He nods in a bored way.

“They were piece-of-shit 386s—they weren’t stolen. There’s no one to buy them.”

“Okay,” he says. Two more clicks of the pen. “Anything else?”

And I lead him over to the bed and point at the pile of shit on it. I make careful note of the footprints and tell him that there are probably fingerprints on the headboard where he steadied himself.

Officer O’Hara says, “That doesn’t help us.”

“Doesn’t help you? Isn’t this a clue? You’re looking for this guy,” I say. “This is his MO. He’s the shitter.”

Officer O’Hara points at the shit and says, “We see this all the time.”

“Really?” I say. Somehow this is more disturbing than being robbed. A whole world of people rob houses and do this?

O’Hara’s still pointing at the shit. “This is not an uncommon occurrence.” He flips his pad shut.

“So,” he says. “It doesn’t look good.”

“What are the odds I can get my stuff back?”

He shakes his head. “Not good.”

“What about the fingerprints on the bedpost?”

O’Hara laughs. “You’re kidding, right?”

I’m not kidding. Hell, I thought they’d take samples of the shit and do a DNA scan of some sort. The look on my face must suggest that, no, I’m not kidding.

He says, “No offense, sir. But you lost some appliances. They aren’t coming back.”

He tips his cap and tells me that he has my number, and if anything turns up, he’ll give me a call. He ducks out of the room and down the hall and I hear his feet making their way down the stairs while I stand there looking at my room and wondering what I’m going to do.

I know I need to call Sergei and tell Maggot Arm Joe. I need to let them know, and I need to see their reactions to see if they know about this. But I need sleep more than I need anything else. I go downstairs and grab a key to one of the vacant rooms the hookers use and go to sleep there in a strange bed with a strange window and a whole new bunch of noises that would probably keep me up if I weren’t so tired.