Girl in Pieces

I’m sitting outside on my break, next to the Go players, when I realize that the kind of place that will rent to me, the kind of place I could probably just barely afford, isn’t the kind of place that even advertises in something like the Tucson Weekly or on the Food Conspiracy co-op board. Credit checks, first and last, security deposits, and, as one Go player helpfully tells me as he looks over my shoulder at the ads, “If you ain’t lived in Tucson before and never had no utilities in your name? You have to pay fucking two hundred and forty dollars just to get your gas turned on. They call it a deposit.”

Another player says, “Seventy-five dollars to turn on the electric.”

They all start grumbling about rents and the economy. I wonder where they live and what they do, because they don’t seem to have jobs. They just come here every day, all day, and drink coffee and eat bagels and then go home, leaving their coffee mugs filled with cigarettes. For me to clean out.

Evan.

Evan liked to cruise restaurants and bars that had outside seating, snatching half-spent cigarettes from ashtrays. He would lead us through the narrower parts of St. Paul, where people looked out the windows of high, stuffy-looking apartments with listless eyes, or slumped inside three-season porches. If we could work up the money, sometimes we were able to find a room for all three of us for just a week or so in some crappy house, barricading a shoddy door against the druggies who came looking for late-night handouts. It was nice to be in a room, though, instead of crouching together in an alley, or trying to find a good spot by the river with the others.

The place that will have me won’t have fees, or first and last. It won’t even be in the paper. I toss the Weekly on a chair and go back to work.

After my shift, I ride my bicycle back down to Riley’s neighborhood and then a few blocks farther, where the sidewalks become cramped and cracked and the houses squat closer together. Just like in St. Paul, in this neighborhood people are still doing nothing, but doing it on porches of decrepit apartment buildings or while leaning against telephone poles, because it’s warmer here. I ride until I find a scrawled sign Scotch-taped to the chain-link fence in front of a peeling white building: ROOM FOR LET, ASK INSIDE, 1A. The front door to the building is wide open. Two houses over is a drive-in liquor store.

Inside, an elderly man answers the downstairs door marked 1A, OFFICE. The room behind him is dark. He blinks as though the light hurts his eyes.

“You Section Eight? Don’t matter if you are. Just want to know up front.”

“I don’t know what that is,” I tell him.

He shrugs, pulling a thick jumble of keys from his pocket. We walk down the matted red carpet in the lobby to some creaky-looking stairs. There are doors all along the first floor, most with peeling paint.

Blue duct tape holds in loose plaster on the stairwell walls. The old man stops to lean on the banister. I hesitate and then touch my fingers to his elbow to help. The skin there is whitish and dry, cracked.

“Sixteen steps,” he breathes. “I bet you don’t know how old I am.” His crinkled eyes are tinged with pink. His nose sprouts hair and blackheads. My grandmother always took care of herself: she had her hair done every week and she smelled like creams and cinnamon. I wish I had remembered to ask my mother about her, what happened to her that made the insurance for Creeley stop.

This man is crumbly old, and not well taken care of. He laughs, revealing a damp and largely empty mouth. “Me neither!”

On the second floor, he pauses. “You seem a little young for a place like this, but I don’t ask questions. A lot of people here have troubles. I just ask they don’t bring any extra, you understand?”

I nod as he leads me to a door that has been plastered and painted with a sickly shade of brown over an already strange shade of orange. I lived in some crappy places with my mother, where mice ate through cupboards. I lived outside with rain and icy snow. I lived in Seed House. These shitty, broken walls and crappy paint and this old, old man: it all falls somewhere in between. After what I’m used to, it’s not paradise, but it isn’t hell, either.

The room isn’t much bigger than a large bedroom, with an extra room off to the side. That room, I find out when I peer in, is actually a combination kitchen and bathroom, with a dented pink refrigerator and an old-looking sink on one side and a toilet and tiny claw-foot tub on the other. There’s no stove and the tub is the smallest I’ve ever seen. When I climb in and sit down, my knees press almost to my chest. It’s weird, yet I kind of like it.

He shrugs. “The building is old. Nineteen eighteen, maybe? Back in the day, tubs was a real luxury. People laid a board across them to eat supper. That was the dining table! There’s a common bathroom down the hall for the men. I try to give the rooms with toilets to the ladies.”

He says across like acrost. People laid a board acrost them to eat supper.

The ceiling is a maze of peeling paper and red and yellow splatters. I look over at the man.

He rubs his chin thoughtfully. “Well, see, that was old Roger. Sometimes he’d get the fits when he was drinking, start the fighting with the mustard and the ketchup. He liked his hot dogs, our Roger.

“Got a ladder you can use to clean it up. Knock twenty bucks off the first month since the room isn’t cleaned. There’s a fella down on the first floor used to do my handiwork, but he don’t wanna do it no more.” He pauses. “Call him Schoolteacher, cuz that’s what he used to do, I guess. He’s always jawing about something. I guess you can’t really get rid of what you used to be. It kinda sticks to you.”

Outside, sometimes that’s what older people became known for: not their name, but what they used to do, before they ended up on the street. MoneyGuy. BakeryLady. PizzaDude. If you were a kid, though, that’s all you were: Kid. I wonder what I’ll be known as here, if I’ll just be Kid again.

I wonder how Schoolteacher got from his classroom to this broken-down place.

The old man glances back out at the front room. He seems puzzled for a minute; then he says Ah.

“No bed,” he tells me. “Took that away when Roger passed. Knock another ten off the monthly rent, then. Was just a mattress really, anyways.”

In the front room, there’s a lamp with a dubious-looking shade, a plain card table, and a green easy chair. He sees me looking and smiles. “Partially furnished,” he says.

“Three eighty-five a month includes utilities, but if you bring a television in and want the cable, you’ll have to set that up and pay yourself, though a couple of gentlemen on floor one seem to have figured something out on the sly. And I don’t have any of that wiffy.”

He says, “Most of us are just month-to-month, you know, one or two week by week, if that’s what they want. I do need a security deposit, though, that’s my rule, even if you’re short-term and you don’t seem like trouble. You never know when someone’s gonna do some damage, am I right? That’ll run you two hundred dollars, but you get it back if you leave your room in good shape.”

He pauses, looking down at me sternly. “Liquor store gets a little noisy if that’s a bother to you. I’m not particular, but like I said, just bring the troubles you already got and no more than that.”

A television across the hall sends off the sounds of tinny laughter. Someone down the hall sings softly in Spanish.

I don’t know how to do any of this. I don’t know if this is a good place, or a bad place, or what I should ask about. All I know is that this is the place I have money for right now, and that this man seems nice, and he’s not asking for an application fee or a credit check or anything like that. I’ve been in worse places, and I feel scared, but I look up at him anyway and nod. I can’t find my words, and my hands are trembling. I don’t want to think about what might happen if this turns out to be a horrible place.

He stoops to brush a fly off his pants leg. His toes are gnarled and dirty in his sandals. “I’m Leonard. Why don’t you tell me your name and we can start this beautiful friendship.” He reaches down to help me up from the tub.

I take his hand. It’s surprisingly soft, and I smile in spite of myself. I relax a little. He seems so nice, and honest. “Charlie,” I tell him. “Charlie Davis is my name.”