Henry
I remember his hands mostly.
From the first time I met him through the next few times we stood together, smoking cigarettes on Chestnut Street, they were all I could look at.
Like the hands of a corpse, they looked carved.
His fingers were long and thin and held together by knuckles that looked ready to explode. Yellow nails marked the ends of his black fingers like stains. His palms had been worn to the color of bone.
Weathered and cracked, these hands, you could tell, had been through hell.
Shaking his hand, cold and clammy and weak, you could feel a ghost there.
I have always felt that the hands of a man can tell his stories for him. They can tell of the life that he has lived. The scars on a man’s hands telling his war stories. Telling the world that he has been through it. Whatever his own it may have been. A man’s polished and manicured hands telling the world that he has done everything to avoid it. Whatever his own it may have been.
This man’s hands told me that he was done living. They told me that he was indeed a ghost. Invisible, he stood in the shadows waiting for this curse called life to end.
Though, looking beyond his hands, there was a different story to be told. With his wide and yellowed bloodshot eyes, he saw through the shadows and into the light. His laugh was as sincere as it was meaningless. Only the laugh of a child could match it’s effect. In this man’s spirit there was life. Beautiful, beautiful life.
This man had been homeless for longer than he cared to remember.
His ruin was addiction.
He had a family, a wife and a daughter. He had relatives. All of them living their lives and doing well for themselves here in this very city. His family had been forced to shelve the love they once held for him, he gave them no other choice. They gave him a chance. And another. And another.
And then, no more.
The man that his family has forgotten, lies before him, pieces of that character embedded within the creases of his cold and dead hands. These hands, worn and scared by the years that he himself would soon rather forget, remain before his eyes, forever at his sides, as reminders of those days that led him to this life.
He lived in an alley, he begged for his food and money, he was everything that a homeless man is. He had nothing that a wealthy man has, but he did have his pride. He would never accept money from a friend, nor would he ever panhandle in the company of a friend. He would reluctantly let you buy him lunch, though he would prefer to give you a handful of his own change and send you off to the nearest vending machine to buy him a soda or a candy bar. He could have made a lot of money on the busy corner of Chestnut and Broad but he made a lot of friends there instead.
This modesty, his laughter and the way he could sit on a window sill and smile a big toothless grin at the worst of the world passing by, I admired all of this.
In the time of nearly a year, in all the time that I knew Henry as a friend, I never saw him with his hands in his pockets. I never saw him sitting on his hands. He held them out to the world, out to himself. He was showing everyone who cared to know, that he has been through it and it hasn’t beaten him.
As much as he had wished to forget his past, he had, it seamed, no intentions of hiding from it.
I admired that mostly.
Copyright © June 2008 Chris La Cour
The Character of Filth
The man behind the counter is on the phone. He’s yelling. He’s talking so fast that we can’t make out anything he’s saying. He’s speaking English but his thick Indian accent hides any clues as to what he is saying from our ears. The parts of his conversation, his over the phone rampage, that we can make out are the parts where he over emphasizes things like,
“Fuck you” and
“You fucking asshole.”
Oh, and his English becomes crystal clear when he yells,
“You’re fucking dead!”
As we stand back waiting for his tirade to end I turn to the lobby window.
The playground in the courtyard sits in a junkyard state. The slide lies in the grass, its legs rusted and broken off years ago. The wooden see-saw has rotted away to a moldy broken plank. The sand box sits in the dark filled with weeds and broken liquor bottles.
The man behind the counter hangs up his phone, finds his inner calm and politely asks us what he can do for us.
“We need a room,” I tell him.
“I don’t have any,” he answers.
“O.k.”
We turn for the door. Just then another traveler walks in.
“Hi, I would like a room for the night.”
The man from behind the counter slides a piece of paper, a form, across the counter to this other man. “Fill this out.”
I look at Jeremy, already half out the door, and see my own confusion reflected back in his eyes. Jeremy walks back to the counter to question the man’s motives. He looks at Jeremy and then looks to me. He studies us for an uncomfortable moment before sliding another form across his counter.
This odd introduction would later reveal itself to have been a sign of things to come. A hint of the absurdities waiting for us behind the door to our room at this ridiculous excuse for a motel.
Twenty three dollars a night. We paid for two nights.
We walked from the office with our key. We laughed as we each turned our heads back to reflect on what had just happened.
We were just outside of Washington D.C., in some ghetto. It’s well after midnight on the first day of a three day road trip.
We had spent the day riding our BMX bikes in Baltimore, tomorrow we would check out D.C. then head north for a day of riding in Philadelphia before heading home.
While on these trips we have always been open to staying in dives. In fact I have often preferred the character of filth over the sterility of a Holiday Inn. Besides, dirty carpets and bed sheets riddled with cigarette burns was always cheaper than clean sheets and pillows topped with mints.
The sounds of a sex act in the next room, muffled through a thick expensive wall, were just something that would keep you awake. It’s annoying. On the contrary, the soundtracks of prostitutes and junkies doing their work, through thin cheap walls, would become a reason to stay awake. Drug addicts and drunken homeless men roaming the parking lots and balconies of these cheap motels never failed to deliver the most colorful of conversations. The character of filth as I call it.
However, twenty three dollars a night was the cheapest I have ever paid for a room. The filth, the character, of such a cheap room should not have come as a surprise.
The door to our room, if you could go so far as to call it that, was actually a cheap hollow core door. I believe a closet door. It was broken just above the knob and lock. With the door locked you could push on the top half of the door with your hand and it would flex in toward the room so far that you could reach in with your free hand and unlock the door. Needless to say, that along with this discovery, any sense of security had now been tossed out the window. Literally, as the window too had been broken in such a way that it was actually jammed open. Outside this window, the back of the building, it was dark and everything as far as we could see was overgrown with tall weeds and grasses.
I had seen dirty carpets in motel rooms before, though I have never actually seen dirt and bits of gravel drug in from the parking lot. The carpet was so grimy that it had been rendered black and slick. They don’t put black carpets in motels, not even in the cheapest. Next to the bed, floating on the black sea of oily carpet was a condom wrapper. No condom, just a wrapper, torn open and discarded on the floor.
The bathroom was as disgusting as you could imagine it to have been. Showering was out of the question. We were afraid to touch anything. Even taking a piss, for that matter, was done with the care of a crime scene investigator.
The whole room reeked of cigarette smoke. That’s not uncommon. But there was another smell caught in the air of the room. Something indescribable, we stood there taking in deep breaths of the stink, trying to taste the smell with our imaginations. Is that death in the air?
The bed was made neatly. This, along with the condom wrapper on the floor, led us to believe that this room was rented by the quarter hour as well as nightly.
It was late spring, but with the window open, the room was a bit chilled. Jeremy pulled the comforter from the bed,
“What, the, fuck, is that?”
The white sheet lay smoothed out over the mattress, near the bottom third of the bed, a large dark stain showed through the sheet. We pulled the sheet from the bed.
“Holy shit.” in stereo.
“Is that blood?”, again in stereo.
The stain was nearly a foot and a half in diameter. It was that specific color of old blood. Not exactly brown or red. Almost black in the center and lighter towards the edges. I have no idea why Jeremy felt the need to flip the mattress, but after he did, I had wished that he had not. The stain was there too, on the other side. Such a blood stain soaked through a mattress could only mean the obvious. What the hell happened here? When? And why the fuck was the mattress still here, being slept on?
At this hour, and in real need of rest, we just put the bed back together and lay on top of the comforter. We laid there wearing every bit of clothing we had, as well as our shoes. I lay on my back with my hands on my stomach, trying not to move too much. Trying not to absorb any of the filth of this room. This was a bit too much. At that moment I longed for a Holiday Inn. We agreed that in the morning we would get our money back for the second night.
Just as our heads hit the pillows, the first train cruised past. Not too far from our open window, just beyond the overgrowth. Commuter trains would pass one after the other through the night.
I managed, somehow, to actually get some sleep.
In the morning, I sat on the end of the bed, sitting on top of somebody’s last drops of life, watching the news. The room’s door was wide open, Jeremy was being careful in the bathroom when some random guy without a shirt came walking in the room as though it were his own. He stepped right up to me as though we knew each other. He asked me for a cigarette, I handed him one. I then handed him my lighter, he lit the cigarette and he walked away.
The same man was behind the counter as last night. He almost seemed offended when we told him that this motel was too much of a shit hole, that we wanted our twenty three bucks back, what we had paid him for the second night. We would find somewhere else to sleep.
Riding in D.C. turned out to be a bust. The city was hosting some Strawberry Festival, I have no Idea what a Strawberry Festival is or what it means, but for us it meant police everywhere. That meant no riding. So we headed north earlier than scheduled.
We rode for a few hours in Philadelphia before heading home.
On our way out of Philadelphia we stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts. We met a homeless man who began begging us for a ride north. He was so insistent that he made it difficult for us to get back into Jeremy’s car without him. He stood at the car waiting for Jeremy to unlock the doors.
We changed his mind with a handful of Percocets.
Copyright © March 2008 Chris La Cour
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