Another Bullshit Night in Suck City Read Online Free PDF Page A

the Cage, this is where they strip down naked and hand in their clothes, to be stored overnight in the Hot Room. The Hot Room has a door like an old freezer, with that kind of pull handle, but inside it’s a sauna, wood-lined, set for maybe 180 degrees fahrenheit. To kill any bugs, to vaguely sanitize the clothes. Inside the Hot Room the smell is of superheated sweat, quick-fermented, an almost shiny smell, as shiny as an overworn coat. The joke is that it’s a good place to go to make out. Meet me in the Hot Room in ten minutes, we joke with our co-workers. If I’m not there start without me, they joke back. An as-yet-unnamed inner ring of Hell. A counter separates the guests from the two workers who take their clothes, live-in staff, formerly homeless guys who now live at the shelter, have their own rooms. A transitional step, theoretically, back into the world. Normally there are two counselors working Housing, one for the Brown side, one for the Yellow, but often one fails to show, which can make things difficult. The live-in staff worker takes the bed ticket, hands back a plastic bin with a wooden hanger and a wrist tag inside. The guest hangs his jacket, pants and shirt on the hanger, then puts his shoes, socks, underwear and whatever else into the bin. Both the hanger and bin are then given back to the live-in staff worker, who walks the hanger into the Hot Room, puts the bin on a shelf. Similar to a coat check at a museum, the number on the hanger corresponds to the number on the wrist tag, except this is also the number of a bed. Each man is allowed to store one bag overnight—by nine there is a mountain of bags to negotiate around. My job is to oversee this operation, to see it moves along smoothly, defuse any incidents. Mirrors are screwed to the walls along the benches the guests sit on while they undress, only these mirrors are made of stainless steel, not glass—glass could break, become a weapon. Someone might punch the face looking the wrong way back at him. The screws that attach the metal to the wall cause slight indentations, the indentations cause distortions, creating a funhouse effect. Your head in this mirror, if held at a certain level, becomes massive. Your chin vanishes. Move slightly and you can have superman arms, or a belly that takes over your body. You can open your mouth and it keeps on opening, becomes your whole head. Some of the drunk guys, some of the psych guys, you see them, halfway naked on a bench, staring at their reflections, open-mouthed— When did I become a gargoyle?
    How do they navigate an hour, I wonder, let alone a city, a lifetime? One of my first nights upstairs a man needs a new set of clothes—maybe he’d pissed himself, maybe he had bugs, maybe it was just time. As I head for the room where the donated clothing is sorted and stored, I stop, whisper to Gabriel, a salt-of-the-earth Midwesterner who approaches the job with a mixture of gravitas and levity that I aspire to, How do I know what size he wears? Gabriel just looks at me and smiles— You ask him .
    Just off the changing room are the showers, a tiled room with a dozen showerheads, where the men pass through and hopefully linger, if only for a few moments. I move between the men undressing and the showers, stand between the two rooms, subtly looking over their bodies, checking for rashes or discolorations or anything weird, which I will report to the clinic. I will check the condition of their clothes and offer replacements. If a man is too drunk I will send him back downstairs to sleep it off in the lobby rather than risk a scene in the dorms. But I won’t do any of this at first, at first I won’t know what I am doing, beyond watching them wash, beyond steering them upstairs without any hassles. At first I will count how many times the button must be pressed for a man to take a shower. Some drunks seem to find the water an annoyance, some psych guys speak directly into the spigot, arguing with the