Hiatus

Dearest Gentlest Readers,

Pudgy Millions will be taking a (brief-ish) hiatus.  The Editorial Board is back now from Lesotho and we are currently deciding what to make of the whole experience.  At the moment, however, things are quite busy, and we–the Editorial Board of sterling journalistic integrity–don’t want to pawn off any cut-rate, two-bit hackery on you, Most Dearest and Gentlest and Loyalest of Readers.

So we’re taking a bit of a break and mulling over some new ideas.  Maybe some music-related essays?  Maybe some Chicago-related essays?  Maybe more tall tales from Lesotho?  There are still plenty in the vault, after all.

The best thing to do, then, is keep Pudgy Millions on some kind of alert or feed, something that will notify you when a new post goes up.  This way you won’t have to check the site needlessly.

Anyhoo, take care for now, you old Pudgy Millionaires you.

Remember: that’s the way the whole durned human comedy keeps perpetuatin’ itself, down through the generations, westward the wagons, across the sands of time until–aw, look at me, I’m ramblin’ again.

The Pudge abides.

Basotho Wedding

Gentle Reader:

We–the Editorial Board of ecumenical intent–thought you might be interested in this video.  It was taken during a wedding we attended in Mokhotlong.  Please turn your speakers up as high as they go.

On second thought: if you are at work, and are possibly not supposed to be reading a blog about Africa, then do not turn your speakers up as high as they go.

The pastor, who is female, is delivering the part of the sermon where she tells the couple to love one another.  I think.  I mean, that’s what it sounds like, doesn’t it?

The sermon went on in this vein for twenty minutes and–sheesh, just watch for yourself.

done

Friday Poem: Hotpants

As is well known, we—the Editorial Board of upright demeanor and stolid temperament—usually turn a scornful eye toward all matters of the flesh.  Such concerns are inherently plebian in nature.  But perhaps today we shall make an exception.

***

Hotpants

M. Gratius II

peeking cheek

parabolic curve

a miscalculation of cloth

with each step

the tide recedes

bare beach

in the moonlight

Alex & Shanteria

My memories of Shanteria are vague.  I met her just once, a few months after I arrived in Phoenix, and then never again.  She was a tall black woman with long intricate braids that hung halfway down her back.  Her eyes were kind and she seemed content, almost peaceful, in a way that few people out on the street are.  When I mispronounced her name—Shanteria—she gently corrected me.

“It’s Shanteria, honey,” she said.  “But don’t worry.  Everyone says it wrong.”

She had come in to use the phone, calling her daughter in Baltimore, to see how she liked 3^rd Grade.  After a short conversation, she hung up, smiled at me, and left.  Her beaded extensions slapped against the doorframe on her way out.

Shanteria was a grown woman, someone’s mother and someone’s daughter.  She was killed in early October.

***

Alex is Shanteria’s boyfriend.  He is an addict who spends his days at a construction site breaking concrete, his nights sleeping down here beside the building and smoking crack.  He is lean, the muscles of his arms well-defined along the bones, his skin stretched taut around them, like cellophane.  His face is gaunt, his eyes deep in their sockets, his cheekbones prominent.  Alex seems too big for his skin, like he has been shrink-wrapped, like he will burst from it.  He is intense and rarely laughs.  My jokes meet with a stony silence.

***

First, a later memory of Alex, after I have known him for many months:

There is a fight in the street outside.  Two drunks arguing over nothing.  The Phoenix sun weighs on their backs, oppressively, bending them, and they stew in it.  Violence is inevitable; I can only wait for it, try to pre-empt it or divert it.  I hear yelling and run outside, following a trail of blood through the parking lot and out into the street.

Two drunks going at it, I am told.  Someone separated the men, trying to cool tempers.  They thought it was over, were walking opposite directions down the street, when one turned suddenly and charged at the other, whose back was still turned.  Hit him hard in the back of the head and he went down, head bouncing against the street.

When I get there, the drunk is unconscious, bleeding heavily from his forehead.  He has urinated in his pants.  I try to clear the crowd around him, to make some room, but I am fighting against the tide.  Everybody knows what to do, has advice on how to revive him, but they are pushing in on us, suffocating us, yelling over each other.  Suddenly, Alex is there beside me.

“Everybody step back now.”  He does not yell, but his voice is unyielding.  We understand that dissention will not be tolerated.  We step back.

“Get me two wet, clean rags.  Clean, understand?”  His voice is calm.  I understand.  When I return, he has rolled the unconscious man on his side.  He takes his index and middle fingers together and makes a sweep of the man’s mouth, making sure it is unobstructed.  Blood and saliva ribbon out and pool on the ground.  Alex strips down to his undershirt and makes a pillow out of his work shirt, placing it gently under the drunk’s head.  By this point, an ambulance has been called.  Alex takes the rags from me and begins swabbing blood from the man’s forehead, leaving one to stanch the flow.  His hands move gently over the man’s forehead, like a brother’s.  The man is breathing steadily now, and the blood has stopped pumping so furiously.  Alex takes his hand and begins talking to him.

“I need you to squeeze my fingers.  Come on, a little squeeze.”

The man’s eyelids twitch.

“That’s right, come on, buddy.  Squeeze my fingers.”

There is an imperceptible tightening of the man’s hand.  A wiggle of the fingers.  We are approaching equilibrium.  Suddenly the paramedics have arrived.  They take control.  After a few minutes, the man begins to come to and the crowd slowly disperses.

Alex is walking away and I run after him.

“Alex, wait up a sec.”

He stops, but does not turn.

“Thanks.”

Now he turns, but his voice is cold.

“The only way to stop this…” he sweeps his hand broadly toward the street, “the only way to stop this…this…bullshit…”  He stops and collects himself.  “We need to take all these sub-humans and execute them.”  He stops again.  His fists are clenched and pumping.  “We’ve gotta take these sub-humans and their families and their friends and we’ve gotta put them all up against a wall and shoot them.”

He turns away from me and walks down the street.

But this is a later memory of Alex, the Alex who finally collapsed in on himself.  I have to imagine that Alex was not always so serious, so angry.

***

It was not long after I met Shanteria for that brief and happy moment that Alex came to see me during the soupline.

He looks like someone has hollowed him out.  He looks Alex-shaped, with open air inside.  His eyes are glassy.

“Shanteria’s dead,” he tells me.

“What?”

“They found her dead in an alley.”

I am silent.

“She was carrying my baby.”

I am still silent.

“They found her in an alley, and now they’re both gone.”

He leaves.

***

I see him again the next day.  His left eye is swollen shut.  His face is cut, skin peeled away in patches as if he had been dragged along the street.  But he is different, conscious again, not the automaton of the day before.

“Alex, what happened?”

He looks at me thoughtfully.

“I went out last night looking to die.  I decided that I would go see Shanteria, go meet my baby.  But I couldn’t do it myself, I couldn’t take my own life, so I got drunk and went out to get myself killed.”

He licks his wounded lips.

“I knew just who would do it, too.  I found my hook-up out there, and he was high and I was drunk, and I just walked up and punched him in the face.  Just like that.  I told him he was a jail bitch.  I told him he was a punk faggot.  Then I stood there, waiting for him to finish me.”

He stops, waiting for me to say something.

“And he did.  He wanted to do me for sure.  He beat me within an inch of my life and I loved him for it.  He had me on the ground, kicking me in the back, kicking me in the head and I was yelling at him, egging him on, screaming until I couldn’t make words any more.  And finally he took out his knife and I nearly shouted.  I offered up my throat—Please, I whispered to him, please.  But he wouldn’t do it.  He just left me there on the curb.”

His lips are cracked and bleeding and puffed up like sausages.

“I woke up this morning and realized that God himself had stopped that blade.  He gave me another chance, but it don’t feel that way.  It feels like a punishment.”

***

I read about it in the paper a month later.  Shanteria was murdered by a man named C_____.  He was the DJ in a bar down the block from my house.  C_____, it turned out, had been murdering prostitutes in our neighborhood.  He would bring them back to his trailer, get them high, sleep with them, and then strangle them—sometimes with a necktie, sometimes with a nylon strap he kept under his bed.  I saw him once, in that bar, behind the turntables.  He was thick and impassive.  The expression on his face never changed the whole night.

One day, C_____’s uncle stopped by his trailer unannounced and found a decomposing body on the bed.  The police later linked him to the deaths of five prostitutes in Phoenix, all within a few miles of my house.  They started checking places where he had lived before and found a similar string of murders in Oklahoma and Missouri.

C_____ murdered Shanteria.  He took her back to the trailer and strangled her with her own beaded hair extensions.  I can only hope that she never knew what was happening, that she was high and already removed from the consciousness of this world.

***

So Alex works construction, breaks concrete, gets high, goes to sleep against our building.  His face is a stony mask, and he talks of executing the sub-humans.  But I saw him that day, not too long ago.  I saw how gently his hands moved, how he made a pillow from his work shirt.

Banned Guests

In the office—where the illegals come to make phone calls back to Mexico and Guatemala and Honduras, where people sign up to use the showers in the afternoon—there is a desk.  Inside the desk, taped to the bottom of a drawer, there is a piece of paper that tells a strange story.

This simple piece of typing paper bears the heading Banned Guests, where guest is the official euphemism for the homeless.  I’m sure the origin of this term was altruistic, implying hospitality, implying leisure, but the word itself conveys little of reality.  It is so very genteel.

Randall is one of our guests at the shelter.  Randall is twenty-five, from Alabama, and has killed a man.  Randall looks like he’s eighteen, with his big smile and big ears and low scratchy voice, like brambles dragged along pavement.

Several years back, Randall’s twelve-year-old cousin was raped by a man in their neighborhood.  The next day, Randall took out his father’s hunting shotgun and went to the house where the man lived.  When he answered the door, Randall shot the man in the chest, knocking him five feet back into the hallway.  As he lay on the floor, trying to draw air into lungs that were no longer there, Randall put the barrel of the gun into the man’s mouth.  He served five years in prison and was released with fifteen years of probation.  The judge understood it as a crime of passion.

Murphy is one of our guests as well.  Murphy is a veteran of the United States Army, was a surgeon in Vietnam.  He is a full-time alcoholic, whom everyone on the street calls Wolfman, although he has no distinguishing features to suggest such a nickname.  If I had to guess, I’d say the name was self-applied.

Murphy spent some time in prison for aggravated assault against a police officer, which he assures me was all a big misunderstanding.  He didn’t understand that I was on a drunk, he tells me laughing.  The Wolfman currently works for a non-profit that helps the homeless get state-issued IDs and, correspondingly, jobs.

One time an old drunk attacked one of the volunteers during the evening soupline.  Murphy was sitting nearby when it happened.  He sprinted over, pulled the old drunk off the volunteer, and proceeded to break the old drunk’s nose, jaw, ulna, and radius.  We eventually had to drag Murphy forcibly away.

And so it is that Randall and Murphy are our guests, although I find it darkly amusing to use that term, as I imagine them sitting politely in the parlor, sipping on Chamomile tea and commenting on the weather.  Such a misuse of language, such a simplification, such an ellipsis of these lives lived.  I would prefer we simply called them Randall and Murphy.

Sometimes, though, even a guest can become persona non grata.  These Banned Guests find their names listed on the page of typing paper inside the desk drawer.  This list of Banned Guests dates back many years, long before my arrival at the shelter.  It contains the following entries, along with various reasons for expulsion:

Jose Marquez—issued three death threats against the staff.

Karen “the Plant Lady”—banned more than once, not allowed in bldg.

Petite Mexican Woman w/ Five Kids—keeps pushing her children down the stairs in the stroller; has been asked repeatedly to stop.

Laurel & Eddie—having sex in the bathroom for the 3^rd time!!!

Albert Hanley—tried to punch Eileen Wolcowski (a large and wonderful kindergarten teacher who volunteers regularly at the shelter).

Bernice Waters—attacked a laundry volunteer.

LaRonda Williams (large black woman with breasts hanging into lap)—spit on and punched a staff member.

Darla—threw her shoe at staff member, threatened to take off her clothes in the hallway, told staff member he was on the “Hell Express.”

Friday Poem: The Death of a Toad

Heavens to Betsy!  The Editorial Board just realized we haven’t had the Friday Poem over in a coon’s age!  How frightfully unreconstructed of us!  How dreadfully uncouth!

Please don’t tell the neighbors.  My stars!  We’d simply die!

***

The Death of a Toad

Richard Wilbur

A toad the power mower caught,

Chewed and clipped of a leg, with a hobbling hop has got

To the garden verge, and sanctuaried him

Under the cineraria leaves, in the shade

Of the ashen and heartshaped leaves, in a dim,

Low, and a final glade.

*

The rare original heartsbleed goes,

Spends in the earthen hide, in the folds and wizenings, flows

In the gutters of the banked and staring eyes. He lies

As still as if he would return to stone,

And soundlessly attending, dies

Toward some deep monotone,

*

Toward misted and ebullient seas

And cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia’s emperies.

Day dwindles, drowning and at length is gone

In the wide and antique eyes, which still appear

To watch, across the castrate lawn,

The haggard daylight steer.

Jan

Jan is fifty-one years old and looks like a 19^th century schoolmarm.  Her straight gray hair is pulled back into a loose ponytail, and she peers with pale blue eyes through wire-rimmed glasses.  She speaks very very quietly, very very calmly, as if she has always understood.  Her voice is soothing and hypnotic.

The police found Jan sleeping on a bench in a park in downtown Phoenix.  She had been wandering the streets for three days in flip-flops, and the sun burned her feet so badly that the third degree burns have now burst into pus-filled wounds.  Her feet are wrapped in bandages, no lace-up shoes for a while.

“This is the first time my mother and I ever fought,” she tells me.  “Our whole life, just once!  But I couldn’t take it, I couldn’t live with her any more.”

Jan was working on a Master’s degree in comparative mythology, she tells me, when her father got sick.  She moved back home to help her mother take care of him, then decided to take some time off from her degree.  After her father died, after she and her mother looked over his will, something happened, some argument.  She left home soon after.

“I’m not supposed to talk to her until after the court date,” she tells me one day, out of the blue.

“Court date?”

“Yes, they said we shouldn’t talk until after the court date.”

“What are you and your mother going to court over?”

“They said not to talk about it until after the court date.”

That is all she will say, over and over again, like Bartleby, and then silence.

***

I am in the office when Jan’s elderly mother calls.  She has been calling homeless shelters all over town, trying to locate her daughter.  When I tell her that Jan is safe, she starts crying.  She asks to talk with her, and I suggest that it is best to wait until after the court case is settled.

Her mother pauses.  “What court case?”

***

Not long after this, Jan says she is leaving the shelter.  She tells Fr. Paul, the director, that there is a problem.  One of the regular volunteers is trying to hurt her.

“How is she trying to hurt you, Jan?” he asks.

“She’s trying to poison me with her clothes.”

“I don’t think I follow.”

“She knows that black and green are the colors of poison.  She knows what they do to me when she wears them.”

Fr. Paul talks with Jan for a long time.  She tells him that the mafia is trying to kill her, that we are all in danger by taking her in.  She insists that the volunteer’s poisonous clothing will be the death of her.  She says Bart looks like an old enemy of hers, that maybe it actually is him, finally closing in after all these years.

She refuses counseling.  We can’t make her go.

Eventually, Jan decides to leave for Oregon, where she says her aunt lives.  Fr. Paul volunteers to drive her to the bus stop, then at the last moment asks me to come along for the ride.  Just in case.

As I approach the car, carrying the last of her bags, Jan tenses.

“I just realized something.”  Her voice is cold, her eyes narrowed.  “You look just like a cousin who’s trying to kill me—Buford!”

Diet 7UP

Clouds streak the desert sky and the setting sun illuminates them.  I watch as they gradually ease from a cottony gray-white into a bruised orange-purple.  I am sitting in the parking lot of the shelter where I work, waiting for the night’s soupline to begin.  Inside the building, final preparations are being made—someone assigning positions and giving last frantic orders—as the meal for six hundred is brought to a simmer.

Dusk is creeping now, but the 107° evening is overpowering.  Hundreds of people are milling in the parking lot, waiting for the doors to open, waiting for their evening meal.  Men and women sit on the benches under the shade tent: drug dealers, prostitutes, addicts, laid-off factory workers, runaways, legal and illegal immigrants, veterans of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the mentally and physically handicapped, the various lost and adrift souls of the American Southwest.  They all are here in our parking lot, waiting for dinner.

Now the churchbus men come down the street, calling for people to join them, to get on the bus.  Now the bus comes lumbering down the block, slowly trailing its ambassadors.  The churchbus men, who are all wearing the same red shirts, are calling into our parking lot—Who wants to be saved?  Who wants to have dinner with Jesus tonight? Someone in the parking lot has a transistor radio turned up high, and a hip-hop score plays behind the sinking sun.  Come on now, it’s time to talk with the Savior!  It’s time to say hi to Jesus! A few people get on, and the bus rolls down the block.

A man walks into the parking lot and approaches me with a warm two-liter bottle of Diet 7UP.  I recognize him—one of the hundreds of faces that passes through the soupline each night—but I can’t remember his name.  It’s on the tip of my tongue.

He doesn’t speak English, but through his gestures, through the word vaso, I understand that he wants me to bring him a cup.  I turn to head inside and he stops me.

Dos, he says, and holds up two fingers.

After a moment of rummaging, I return with two small paper cups.  He sets them on the ground ceremoniously and smiles at the hiss of carbonation as he undoes the cap.

He pours his small and mine large.  We raise our cups.

Salud, he says, and we drink.

We sip in silence, and I am careful not to gulp mine.  We drink this warm Diet 7UP like it is eighteen-year-old Scotch, contemplatively, respectfully.  When I finish, he moves to pour me more and I protest.

His eyes say Let me share this with you.

My eyes say No, save it for later.

His eyes say Who knows if there is a later?

So he pours again and we drink again.  After the second cup, he screws the cap on with finality.  I thank him and he smiles.  He heads toward the dinner line and waits for his meal.

Overhead, the clouds are exploding, filling the sky with unearthly color, hues and shades that have no names yet.

Friday List: iPod Genres

The Friday List is wondering what you’re up to this weekend.  You know, like, if you’re not doing anything.  But it’s totally cool if you’re already doing something.  Anyway, the Friday List has to take this call on the other line, so, uh, talk to you later I guess?

A Semi-Complete List (in Alphabetical Order) of the Musical Genres on the iPod of Daniel Angus Block—Noted Lecher, Sybarite, Lothario, and Troglodyte

Acoustic

Alt Country

Alt Folk

Avantgarde

Blues

Booty Bass

Brit Pop

Brit Rock

Cabaret

Dance Hall

Depression

Doom Folk

Dream Pop

Easy Listening

Electronic

Electronica

Electronica & Dance

Funk

Funk Rock

General Alternative

General Folk

General Pop

General Rock

General Unclassifiable

Genre

Hard Rock

>Head Hop<

Hip Hop

Holiday

Indie Broadway Musical

Indietronic

Jazz Piano

Lo-Fi

Mashup

Metal

National Music

Neo-Psychedelia

New Folk

New Wave

Porn Groove

Power Pop

Psychedelic

Reggae

Reggae Dub

Rock

Saxophone

Shoegaze

Techno

Transgressive

Unclassifiable

World

.

131

!K7

Raimundo

(Editor’s Note: This story appeared in a slightly different form in Current Magazine.  Caveat Lector–it is a bit longer than the stories that usually appear here.)

***

It looks like most of his ear has been severed.  There is a crowd around him in the street, and I push my way into the center.  He is leaning over, his hand to the side of his head, blood running through his fingers.  Gaudi is on the ground, cradling a broken arm.  I run back to the parking lot to find a car we can take.

***

I feel like I have always known Raymond.  He is one of the lost and ragged illegals who passes through the soupline every night.  He gives me his plate and I slop chili or baked beans or spaghetti onto the styrofoam.  Usually he is drunk and friendly, a slight hitch to his step, a crooked smile on his face, his eyes shot through with ruptured capillaries.  He feels familiar.  I am locking up the dining room after the soupline one night, my footsteps echoing off the cavernous ceiling of the warehouse where we serve our meals.  There is Raymond, asleep against one of the tables, his plate scraped clean beside him.

I shake him lightly by the shoulder.

He looks up, eyes hooded, formulating words in his head.

Este cabron…  Este cabron… He breaks into giggles.

He gets up and I walk with him out of the empty dining room and into the street, where the Phoenix heat is finally subsiding.  Boxcars lumber like elephants through the train yard across the street, and South Mountain looms behind them.

Estas chido con la raza, he says, and slaps me unsteadily on the shoulder.  With that, he wanders off into the cooling night, past people bedding down on the street, burrowing into seam-popped sleeping bags and ratty blankets.  There are campfires over by the train yard, and I can hear someone playing an old guitar and singing.

***

I begin seeing Raymond more and more frequently.  He is there for the soupline every night, and soon he starts showing up for the afternoon showers, for clothing.  He drifts through the parking lot outside our building, seeking shelter from the desert sun.  He lies on the benches under the shade tent, hand-rolling cigarettes and sleeping.  His face is young and old at the same time, new but deeply lined.  He is missing one of his top front incisors, and his pink tongue pokes through when he smiles, which is often.  Yes, he is an illegal, he tells me, but he has a job, a roofing job, gets paid under the table, but not enough for food, not enough for an apartment.  He is not like them, he wants me to understand.  He makes a sweeping gesture towards the street.  He is not a bum.

***

I have only known Raymond for a month when it happens.  I am sitting in the parking lot, waiting for a delivery, talking with people about nothing, passing time as the sun bakes overhead.  Yelling first, then three guys sprinting away from the building.  I head out into the street, past the main gate, and reach the epicenter of the crowd that has gathered.  People are standing in a protective circle around Raymond and Gaudi.  Gaudi is an illegal Raymond has taken under his wing, a young kid, scared and cocky, someone whose parents are back in Jalisco or Oaxaca or Aguas Calientes.  Raymond has blood on his clothing, all down his arm, and is holding his hand against his left ear.  When he takes his hand away, a large piece of his ear swings loose.  A chunk of the cartilage has been torn away from his head and is dangling by a small strip of skin.  Blood runs freely down his neck.

“Holy shit, Raymond, what happened?”

Gaudi’s face is pale, and he is doing his best not to cry.  He’s holding his arm in his lap; it is clearly broken.

“Guys, you gotta go to the hospital.”

They both shake their heads furiously—no hospital.

“We’re going to the hospital.”

***

We are driving, all three of us, side by side by side, in the pick-up truck.  It is about two in the afternoon, and we keep catching stoplights.  Raymond and Gaudi are talking rapidly in Spanish.  Every time we reach a stoplight, they both fall silent and sink down in their seats.  I can feel Raymond tense as we pass a police car.  He smells sour beside me, and there is the rusty scent of blood in the truck.  Their hurried discussion flows past me like water, until I finally recognize a phrase they keep repeating.

La migra.

“I’m not taking you to Immigration.  We’re going to the Emergency Room.”

But even as I say it, I realize the obliviousness of my comment.  They have no paperwork and are terrified I am going to blow their cover.  I won’t be the one deported if we get pulled over, so of course I’m not worried.  I ease off the gas.

***

Soon we are at the hospital.  There are two families in the Emergency Room, and neither looks like their situation is worse than ours, so I’m hoping we’ll get triaged to the front of the list.  I approach the nurse’s window to explain what happened.

“These two guys need immediate medical attention.  One guy has a good portion of his ear torn off, and I’m pretty sure the other guy has a broken arm.”

“Can you let them tell me what happened?”

“Well, neither really speaks English very well.  Do you have an interpreter around here?”

“She’s gone for the day.”

“I don’t speak much Spanish, but I can try to tell you what happened.”

“And what relation are you, sir?”

I pause.

“Family.”

She raises an eyebrow.

“I’m their cousin.”

She makes the appropriate mark on the intake form, clearly aware of my lie.  We answer questions for several minutes.  From time to time, Gaudi lets out a small whimper, then looks ashamed.  Raymond is still holding a wad of napkins to his ear to stanch the flow of blood.

“Do you think there’s any way we can get a doctor to look at these guys now and have them answer the questions later?”

“You’re only slowing down the process, sir.”

The questions drag on.  Finally a doctor comes to get us, and better yet, he speaks Spanish.  He tells us to meet him in the examination room after the nurse gives us copies of the paperwork.  As the doctor heads back through the swinging doors, Raymond nudges me and whispers joto under his breath.  He wants me to know he thinks the doctor is a fag.

As we head into the room, I glance back at the two families in the waiting room.  One of them is a husband and wife.  I can see their matching wedding bands.  The wife looks about thirty, and she is staring at me.  Sitting next to her husband, this woman is staring at me, openly.  When she sees me look back, she smiles and runs her tongue slowly along her upper lip.  It is surreal.

***

Gaudi has been taken to another room for his broken arm.  Raymond and I are sitting in the examination room.  A nurse comes in with more paper work.

“He needs to sign these,” she tells me, and smiles.

Then, in a quieter voice: “And I really think it’s so nice of you to bring them in.”  Right in front of Raymond, like he is a tree or piece of furniture.

As she turns to leave, Raymond blows an air-kiss after her and pretends to grope her ass.  It isn’t until now that I realize he’s drunk.

Estas pinche borracho? I ask him.

He gives me a simpering grin.  No cervezas, buey.  En serio.

A thin cord of saliva runs from the corner of his mouth.  Now that we are in the hospital he thinks this is all a joke.  There is no more danger from the police.  He is too drunk to realize his ear looks like a burst sausage.

At this moment, a paramedic pushes a stretcher by our doorway with a man lying on his stomach.  His hands are handcuffed behind his back.  Two police officers escort the stretcher toward the operating room.

Raymond sees this and blanches.  He starts to panic and makes a move for the door.  I block his path.

“Raymond, just calm down.  You don’t want to draw attention to yourself right now.”

Vamanos, buey.

“Just take it easy.  They’ve gotta operate on your ear.”

This gives him pause.  He starts looking around the examination room and, after a moment of searching, turns up a small scissors used to cut medical tape.  He thrusts it into my hands.

“Cut,” he commands me.  He pulls the napkins away and grimaces.  The chunk of cartilage falls loose, dangling by the piece of skin.  It starts bleeding instantly.  There are flecks of napkin all over his ear, clinging to the drying blood.

“Raymond, stop.”

“Cut, maricon.”

I take the scissors from him and put them back in the drawer.

Pinche puto, he mutters and turns his back on me, gingerly putting the napkins up to his ear again, cradling the hanging cartilage.

I sit and wait.  Raymond sulks in the corner, not looking at me.  After fifteen minutes a guy comes in with more paperwork.  Something about insurance for people who don’t have insurance.

“Just have him sign here and here,” he tells me.  “Oh, by the way, I really think it’s awesome of you to bring these guys in.”

The motherfucker.

“Do you have any idea when we’re going to see a doctor?  He’s still bleeding pretty heavily.”

“I’ll see what the delay is.”

As he is walking out, Raymond, still facing the wall, yells joto after him.  Everyone is a joto.

Raymond starts to pace around the room.  He is slowly regaining his sobriety.  He mimes growing old, walking shakily with an imaginary cane.  Then, in a flash of anger, he grabs all the paperwork and throws it in the garbage can.  I sigh and pick it out of the garbage and straighten it.

“Stop making a scene.  You’re gonna get yourself deported.”

He turns back to the wall, still mad that I won’t take part in the emergency surgery.

My eyes wander around the room and eventually come to rest on the poorly done tattoo on his forearm.

“Who’s Lupe?”

He looks at his arm.  Mi esposa.

“I didn’t know you had a wife.”

Aqui, no.  San Diego.

“What’s she doing out there?”

Viva con m’ijo.

“What’s his name?”

He smiles.  Raimundo.  The smile slowly drops off his face.  His is quiet for a moment.  “I come to Phoenix for trabajar.  Eight years.”

He stares at the ground.

“Do you ever think about going back to San Diego?”

A small chuckle, empty and cold.  “Maybe tomorrow, buey.”

***

I leave to go to the bathroom.  As I swing the door open into the waiting room, the woman sitting with her husband looks up expectantly.  No one else seems to notice.  I feel her eyes on me as I walk.  I look back over my shoulder, and she is running her fingers across her thigh, across her corduroy pants, uncomfortably close to her crotch.  I duck into the bathroom and splash some water on my face.

When I come out she is standing outside the door.  I freeze.  I walk past her, and she says nothing, silently following me with her eyes.  I can feel her breath on my face.  She stares at me all the way back through the swinging doors.

***

As I head back toward the examination room, an Air Evac team comes silently and quickly past me.  They are heading toward the operating room carrying a tiny stretcher with an infant on it.  The baby has an oxygen mask over its face.  The paramedics are all silent and masked, one at each corner of the stretcher, like pallbearers.  The procession leaves a funereal silence in its wake.

I pass Gaudi, who is sitting in the hallway.  He has a cast on his arm, and is staring blankly at the wall.  I wave to him as I pass and give him a thumbs-up.

“Soon,” I say.  “Soon.”

When I enter the examination room, Raymond is crying.  His back is to me and he is silent, but he is hunched over and his body is shaking.  He hasn’t heard me yet.  After a moment I put my hand on his shoulder, lightly, and leave it there.  He straightens and looks at me, trying to smile.

The doctor, at last, knocks and comes in, and Raymond is all bluster and machismo again.  It is a different doctor, a woman, and whenever her back is turned, there is pretend ass-grabbing and pelvic thrusting.

***

The surgery is remarkably quick.  Some of the ear is lost, the tissue dead, but the doctor stitches most of it back together.  It’s not pretty, but Raymond doesn’t seem to have lost any of his hearing.  The whole surgery takes thirty minutes.  We have been in the hospital for six hours now.

And with the discharge—more paperwork.  The desk nurse collecting this carbon copy opus is quite cheerful.  He smiles and makes small talk with us.  Occasionally, Raymond replies to one of his questions with a flurry of Spanish, all delivered cheerfully and with a grateful smile on his face.  He has just told the man that a goat regularly fucks his wife.

The desk nurse smiles apologetically.  “I’m sorry, I don’t speak any Spanish.”

Raymond and I collect Gaudi, who has been sitting docilely in the hallway, and suddenly we are done, after six hours in the hospital, we have been emancipated.  The three of us stagger out into the darkness, and drink up the night air.  That air—still laced with the heat of the day—it is revivifying, sacramental.

We are laughing and joking as we walk toward the car.  Suddenly I notice Raymond unzipping his pants.  Before I can speak, he is walking, urinating on parked cars as he goes.

“Raymond, what are you doing?”  I spin around, looking for witnesses.  We are so close, and he’s going to blow it.

He laughs cruelly as he douses these strangers’ cars with his piss.  He wants me to know how tough he is, that he was never scared, that he is a man.  He wants me to understand the disdain he has for these people who have sewn up his ear and reset Gaudi’s arm.

We leave the parking lot.  We are quiet now.  I ask them where they want to go and Raymond tells me San Diego and we laugh, but I know he is serious, that he wishes he could get out of this gutter, go back to his family.  And neither he nor I will ever say it, but we both know he no longer has any family in San Diego.

I drop them at their camp, near the shelter, and we are again in high spirits.  They tell me I am amigo nosotros and puro mexicano, and we shake hands and feel these bonds of friendship and loyalty so strong between us.  But it is a myth.  I will never know these hardships, I will never endure this despair, I will always be an outsider in their world.