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

Monopoly in the hallways. He isn’t doing time for any grand or noble purpose—it’s an everyday drunk charge, a car stolen in a blackout. But prison sounds more grandiose than jail, and grandiose is preferable to commonplace. Years later he will be arrested again, for robbing banks, though really it’ll be for passing forged checks. This time he will end up in prison, and he will be given more time, three to five, but by then his powers, whatever they once were or might have been, will be gone. He may imagine another novel will come from it but nothing will. By the time he gets out this second time he will be nearly fifty, having drunk heavily for thirty years, and he will live in Boston from flophouse to flophouse, driving a real taxi now, not a sheriff’s car, twenty years after going to jail for impersonating a taxi.

exterminator!
    Just off the showers is the drying room, where a live-in staff worker sits in a closet, handing out towels and soap, flip-flops and johnnies. One flight up to the dorms another live-in staff worker leads each man to the right bed, after silently aiming his flashlight at the wrist tag. Sometimes it goes smoothly, often not. At nine o’clock we hurry the last guy upstairs, close the Hot Room, set the thermostat, go down to the lobby, write up the night in the log:
    9:10 Housing firsts—
    Tonight I was called to the fourth floor to rescue Isaac Clegg, who not only fell out of bed, but had the bed fall on him. Upon extrication Isaac was found to have a cut above his eye, and was brought to the clinic for a look. The bed was returned to its proper position.
    Amazing how easily the skin of a drunk splits open, their blood really does flow more freely, thinned out by the booze. I helped Isaac to his feet, walked him downstairs, leaving tiny crimson drops all the way. The nurses had gone for the day so I dressed the wound myself.
    And Russell Pagano had a Kwell.
    In the beginning this is my true purpose, the thing I can do that seems to help, that seems to do something . “Kwell” is the brand name for a skin lotion/shampoo used to kill bugs—head lice, pubic lice, scabies—which feast on human blood. Kwell’s active ingredient is DDT, the banned pesticide, and the warning states it’s not to be administered to the same body more than once in thirty days, though we sometimes do, if the bugs are especially pernicious, if they have taken up residence, built cities. I’ve been trained to kill bugs from an early age. To keep me busy my grandmother would send me into her yard with a bottle of bleach to pour down the anthills—a thrill to see thousands of ants stream out of their underground world and writhe. Later, the last house my family lived in was infested with carpenter ants, bigger than the ants I’d bleach, meaner, named (or misnamed) for their tendency to eat through wooden sills and joists. Hours were spent with a hammer on the sewer cap in the backyard under the spotlight, crushing those that scurried into the light.
    At Pine Street I continue in my role of exterminator. I have a way with the psych guys, a certain patience to sit and engage them in twisted ramblings, about aliens invading their bodies, about self-dentistry and handmade shoes, then gently steer the conversation back to their need for a Kwell. George likes to set trashbarrels on fire in the Common and warm his hands over the flames, muttering about his lost kingdoms. George, to hear him tell it, is a deposed, and sometimes a beheaded, queen. Queen George. Lice thrive so well on his body that they can be seen crawling over him from twenty paces. I sit beside him as he picks one the size of a corn kernel off his neck. He holds it to his eye and speaks, a benediction. To get George upstairs is a coup, to convince him to peel off the layers of clothing collected over god knows how many months and stand before me naked, six-four and muttering, to allow me to apply the poison to his back, between his legs, to the red