Guest Blogger: Charlie Huston's Unholy Messes, Day One

[Ed.: Those who follow our Best of the Month picks may already know that we want to tell the whole world about Charlie Huston, author of the violent and funny Hank Thompson novels, the Joe Pitt vampire-noirs, and January's Spotlight Pick, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. In her review, Amazon's Daphne Durham calls Mystic Arts:

A wholly unsettling and exciting reading experience ... [with] all the makings of a perfect Charlie Huston novel--the down-but-not-out antihero, the outrageous supporting characters (each of whom deserves their own spin-off), the very bad situation involving money and violence, and the hilariously inappropriate dialogue that is Huston's signature--but with one surprising addition, hope.

And we're not alone. Stephen King's guest review for Amazon.com calls Huston's latest "a runaway freight that feels like a combination of William Burroughs and James Ellroy."

We're thrilled to have Charlie on Omnivoracious this week, sharing  "true stories about messes I've seen, helped clean up, and made." Get more at his blog, pulpnoir.com]

We lived in the hallway.

Not literally, but for all intents and purposes, we lived in the hallway.

The bedroom of our 204th Street apartment in Manhattan jutted into the ground floor entry hall.  The stairwell wrapped up and around the wall of the room.  One building down the street on the wrong side of Broadway, with a lock that worked only intermittently, our vestibule was and open invitation to anyone looking to duck out of the rain, escape a cold night, get respite from the sun, sleep on linoleum rather than pavement (I've tried both, and you'd be surprised how big a difference there is), or the occasional soul who simply wished to stick their head inside and scream a random obscenity or two.  But, truthfully, these incursions were relatively rare and minor annoyances. 

It was our neighbors who drove us most to distraction.

As one of the four tenants closest to the door, we were central to the building's community.  We could keep an eye on things, accept packages, ward off Jehovah's Witnesses by denying them access when the lock was working, hold keys for the super, and so on.  And even these simple errands and favors were little enough in the scope of things.

The problem was, you see, we lived in the damn hallway. 

Every time the pneumatic release on the door failed (generally five minutes after the last time it was fixed) the steel door would slam shut and rattle the floor under our bed.  Every time anyone, small children included, went upstairs, it sounded as if they were tromping inside our walls.  Every cell call made in the hall, every intimately whispered conversation, every bruising lover's quarrel, we knew the details as if they were our own thoughts.

And then there was Can Man.

How old was he?  Anywhere between fifty and eighty.  Tiny, bend and stooped, speaking an all but incomprehensibly muttered Spanish, Can Man labored from five in the morning to eleven at night.  With two wire laundry carts held together by scrap wood and more wire, he hauled loads of redeemable bottles (Yes, bottles, Can Man being something of a misnomer) up to his third floor apartment.

One.  Step.  At.  A.  Time.

One bottle-rattling, insanity provoking, step at a time.

Eighteen hours a day.  Everyday.  Excepting only Christmas, day on which were legitimate blizzards, and a brief three day period in which he was so sick a doctor was call to attend him and the entire building had settled into the belief that this was finally it, Can Man was dying.

He did not.

He emerged, after his brush with mortality, on the fourth day, and began hauling bottles.

The bottles went up to his apartment not to be horded, but to be sorted, places carefully into empty beer cases, reloaded onto the laundry carts, and brought back down the steps.

One  Step.  At.  A.  Time.

CLINK!
        CLINK!
                CLINK!

Over, alongside, and within our bedroom.

Or so it seemed.

To watch this man, and he is the only man I've ever met to whom I would genuinely apply the term wizened, to watch him tortuously shift his burden up and down the stairs one at a time, was to have your heat broken daily.

How had it come to this?  Did he have no family?  Where were the caretakers?  How long could he last?

A state of affairs that lasted about a week.  At which point one registered the fact that Can Man was beyond normal human considerations.  Yes, there did appear to be family.  A cousin, we were told, took the bottles in semi-weekly pick-up loads to be redeemed.  And friends.  The woman in the apartment across from ours cooked his means and passed the time of day with him.  Indeed, it wasn't just in the building that he was legend, it was throughout the neighborhood, and he was greeted and chatted up wherever he went.  When he allowed himself to be distracted from his task.  Endeavor.  Work.  Art.  Calling.  The collecting and redeeming of bottles.  His purpose.  That which separated himself from the rest of us.  He didn't lack for connections.  Nor did he lack for food, shelter and clothing.  But the bottles were the thing.

Was he initially driven by poverty into the trade? Or was it an obsession that had nothing to do with money?  Impossible to know.  And immaterial.  By the time I spent two years listening to Can Man dragging his carts up and down those stairs, spent the first few months of our tenantry believing that we would never adapt and be able to fall to sleep to the sound, or sleep through it in the morning, by that time he was so established in the routine that he'd have found it impossible to do anything else.  In any other way. 

So one morning I get up and there's something on the floor of the lobby: an empty IV bag, snake of translucent hose, a needle, and a curlycue of blood.

Something desperate and untoward seemed to have happened.  Yet, despite our proximity to the scene of the crisis, neither my wife nor I had heard a thing.  We'd been in the building for some time by then, close to the end of our stay, and living in the hallway didn't affect much any longer.  Breaking glass or gunfire were required to wake us at that point.  Looking at the detritus of emergency, my first thought was, "Oh s---, Can Man." 

CLINK!
        CLINK!
                CLINK!

I looked over my shoulder and there he was, a full load on one of his carts, slamming down one step at a time.  He arrived at the bottom and stood with me and stared at the mess.  We had a conversational shorthand by then, I knew his name (Juan) and he knew mine.  We could wish each other a good day, comment on the weather, he sometimes asked after my wife.  But we had no shared language that covered this.

I asked him if he knew what had happened.  He said something in a tone that indicated ignorance of the facts, shaking his head.

Something about the mess bothered me.  Its existence, I suppose.  Not that I begrudged the world another tragedy.  That's what the world does.  Does best, or so it seems some mornings.  But the mess, why was it there.  I mean, it wasn't much, but that begged the question all the more.  Why hadn't the EMTs or cops or whatever emergency personnel who had obviously tended to this matter cleaned up after themselves?

I shook my head.

Can Man shook his head, took a grip on the handle of his cart, and began to pull it toward the door as I stepped ahead of him to pull it open.

He waved a hand at the blood.

"A mess," I think he said.  Or, "Amen."

I'm Charlie Huston.  I wrote a book about trauma scene cleaning and family.  It's called The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death.  I'll be here all week telling true stories about messes I've seen, helped clean up, and made. 

Be well,
-c