Guerrero
By Sean Beaudoin • From Instant City Issue 4, The Mission
6:00 a.m.
The peeling Victorian sits on the north side of Cesar Chavez, on the south side of a Safeway lot, three lanes of non-stop traffic and no good bars to speak of. Two flats are connected by a tile staircase, an ever-present smell of wet rug and spilled soy and roommate. There’s a crayoned wall and a stack of Viet-era magazines and a fireplace filled with dead flowers. I hear everything from my center room: laughter, anger, orgasm. Running along my spine, the vibrations rise through the joists and the cheap plank floor.
9:00 a.m.
Johnny, who lives across the hall.
“Good morning.”
“Hi.”
Johnny, with his beard and slippers and trucker’s belly, looking down at me, worried.
“Why are you lying on the floor?”
“No reason.”
“Aren’t you cold without any clothes?”
“A little.”
Johnny, depressed, on my couch with a crumpled tissue, telling stories, boyfriends come and go, have come and gone.
“You’ll be alright,” I say.
He nods, staring at my record collection, the last eight or ten left, a Human League and a Ramones, some other stuff.
“You mind if I play ‘Jolene’ again?”
“Not at all.”
He lifts the needle.
Johnny, who loves Dolly Parton.
10:00 a.m.
Susan, who collects the rent and arranges house meetings.
“Need some help getting up?”
The floor is splintered in circles, lacquer worn away. Downstairs, someone plays the old piano, which sounds like a lowing cow, a barely realized minuet.
“No, thanks.”
“Listen,” she says, trying to smile but missing. “Listen, I don’t want to pry, but is this something that could involve a lawsuit?”
Susan, with the three best rooms, a hoarder. Floor to ceiling boxes, beads, bolts of fabric, doll heads, gears and wires, articles about the hats of Jackie O.
“Highly unlikely.”
She looks out the window. There’s broken machinery in the garden, compost unattended, a small patch of cement yard, more cigarette-butt than cement. It’s like the city has been crop-dusted grey.
“Listen,” she says, “I don’t want to pry, but if you’re just going to lie there, how are you going to pay your rent?”
Noon
Larry and Laura. The couple who thumbed from North Carolina, the sounds of rutting from the room above.
Larry with his three-string guitar, two-string drawl, black turtleneck. You can take the seed out of the hay
but not the hay out of the seed.
“Don’t you wanna hot dog? Don’t you wanna get up and see a movie? Damn, boy, are you even alive?”
Larry, sweating and chewing his crank-lip and clomping around me in circles, the white-boy duckwalk, pretending to play Chuck Berry on a broom.
Laura, long and straight and auburn, who carries scissors in her purse “just in case,” a smile that says she can’t wait. Laura, standing in my doorway in a T-shirt and panties. “I could get you a blanket.”
“No thanks.”
Laura, throwing things at Larry’s head, a good aim, his dented skull.
“That woman think she’s Orel Hershizzer.”
Laura with a laugh that sounds like a tubercular mule.
“Ah swear, that is so funny, HEE HAR.”
2:00 p.m.
Brian, the rumor, the roomer. Brian with extensions piled like an understudy for Carmen. Brian in bare feet and loose pants, taut, halfway between dangerous and not.
“Monday’s my recital.”
“Wonderful.”
Brian sweeping into my room to stretch, one leg extended, mastering the Alexander Technique in a crouch against the wall. He contorts, twists, a spasm of muscle, suddenly over me. He frowns.
“Is this some kind of protest? It seems like a protest.”
“I don’t think so.”
“But of what?” he asks, pirouette. “No fair this, no fair that. We want justice.”
I don’t answer, watch him lower into an impossible split. “I guess this means you can’t make my recital?”
“I’d like to. Probably no.”
Brian, twirling away to his room full of plants, his radio, some crackly station, banjos or drums or ululating Arabs. Brian disappearing for a week, then coming back and insisting his new name is “Ariel.”
4:17 p.m.
Misha, elaborately dreadlocked, bored, in bangles and cheap jewelry, the real stones in some Manhattan safe-box that will open on her twenty-fifth birthday. Misha, who squats at my side, showing white thigh, wanting to really talk, wash her feet in the Ganges.
“You ever wonder if there’s a purpose?”
“Yes.”
“You ever wonder what happens after?”
“Certainly.”
“You ever wonder why we’re even here?”
“Many times.”
“I don’t mean in this house.”
“I know what you mean.”
She arranges her skirts. More thigh. She runs her finger around me, like a chalk outline.
“Is it yoga? Is it meditation?”
“I’d move,” I admit, which feels like a betrayal, “if I could make myself want to.”
She laughs, then stops, worried it was the wrong thing. Her shirt falls away, shoulder draped with a ruinous tattoo, an enormous lizard playing the stand-up bass, distended and green, the idea of some drummer who dumped her over the phone.
5:05 p.m.
Tom, nut-bearded and nut-eyes, skinnier than anyone in America has a right to be. Tom, who’s on an allowance, after Susan cashes his SSI, runs out of Bull Durham mid-month and then will roll anything: lint, leaves, dust, hair. Tom, who told me he once “climbed the Gate Golden,” and was disappointed to find there was nothing there. Tom, who eats mayonnaise out of a jar with two fingers. Tom, who knows he’s not allowed in my room, but likes to peek in.
6:30 p.m.
Dave and Janet, married. Janet, over forty and Dave maybe twenty-five. Dave, with an ancient Volvo and greasy handshake. Dave who once took me to an apple festival where we polished off a sac of Royal Gala’s and watched clog dancers spin in bonnets.
Janet, embarrassed. “Dave’s got an old soul.”
“You don’t need to explain.”
“I’m not trying to.”
Janet who claims to be a nurse, who has a room full of tinctures and concoctions, a gynecological exam table from the twenties. Straps and wires, leg stirrups.
“It’s an antique.”
Janet, round and vaguely menacing, prepared to inject remedies, insert spansules. Aminos and lysines and B-12.
“I’d start you on a course of antibiotics right now. You could have something serious.”
“No, thanks.”
She shakes her head, repacks her Gladstone. “Suit yourself.”
“I won’t come crying,” I say, half-a-beat before she says, “Don’t come crying.”
The stairs creak, with her weight and its intent.
Midnight
Ananda, mulatto, whip-tight, a bike messenger in riding shorts. Ananda smelling like a drayhorse, rubbing my forehead.
“My mother has a new husband. This one’s white, too.”
“Rich?”
“She lays around all day in a satin robe.”
“Like Eartha Kitt?”
“No, like you.”
Ananda, who takes me in her arms some nights, dark nest scratching my back while we spoon, chaste, warming one another.
“Sorry, but I’m not getting down on the floor.”
“I don’t blame you.”
Ananda, who wears tube socks on her arms like debutante gloves. Who has a horizontal scar under one eye that only makes her more beautiful.
Dawn
My wife put me on the Greyhound almost a year ago, “You’ll be back.” The diesel groaned away from Chicago, three days eating out of a grocery bag, highway pickets flashing like microfiche, billboards and winter desert the only things between old and new and two dusty bumpers. I finally arrived, five a.m. on cold Market Street, which lay unloved between the spread legs of San Francisco. I had two drinks in a bar where some men were painting an Aztec warrior on the wall and then found a job calling people, harassing them with promises of free gym memberships, “Hello. Are you, by chance, overweight?”
I slept in an all-night laundry for a week, on ridged orange seats bolted to the floor.
“Hey, buddy, you can’t lay there.”
“My sweater is on spin.”
“Beat it.”
An index card said Cheap Room on a corkboard in a grocery that sold green drinks. Hi! Do you prefer to live as a community?
No.
Share meals and chores and experiences?
Not really.
Are you looking for something different?
Than what?
$260 a month. Cook once a week. Not scared of vegan, wicccan or AIDS.
5:56 a.m.
At first light I can see out the window. It’s an odd angle, from the floor, looking up and away, ignoring the street. It’s a view of eaves and gutters and under-roofs, a line of grinning flats. Pink-green. Orange-blue. A dire love me trim. For half a block, I can see the tops of windows, the tops of heads behind them, peering out for the mail or bus or the hope of someone to wave at. I can see the reflection of televisions—hosts and scores and a cartoon ferret—distended across white plaster ceilings. The horns of insulted cabs play call and response. Upstairs, a faucet turns. Someone coughs, three times.
If you lay and watch long enough, along the curving ridge of Guerrero Street, every description will have an action to complement it. Every reason will have a reason not to. Soon, Johnny will come in with breakfast. Thursday will be Friday and the morning’s noises, laughter, anger, orgasm, will thrum along my spine.
