Barry? I mean why Barry?
I dont know, cuz hes a fucker, said Fred. And hes nice.
But Barry ? Hes, like, chubby and hes Mormon and I mean, I dont think hes ever fucked before. Why does she like him? We thought while we walked.
He plays drums, said Fred.
Whatever, I said, and we walked in silence. On a public mailbox I drew a face with my Sharpie. It was a mournful face, and next to it I wrote,
FUCK INTO THIS
BORN INTO THIS
At California Avenue, Fred went into the café at the Printers Ink bookstore to get coffee and I walked on to the court building. It was three thirty already.
I went to the seventh floor and checked in and then waited in a wooden chair for Janice. I wasnt high anymore but I was so tired I kept my backpack on when I sat. I was slumped to the side of the chair when she came out.
Okay, Teddy. I stood up. Nice shirt, she said. I had a red plaid shirt on and the pocket was ripped so it hung funny. She was fat, and wearing tan pants. When she turned, her ass was this huge ugly thing that was wide and flattened from sitting. In her office, I took my bag off and sat in the heavy wooden chair across the desk from her.
So, she said, and then was very still. Her face was like her ass, flat and wide. Her cheeks stuck out farther than her temples and they hung like the jowls of a Saint Bernard. Her skin was oily and olive-colored with splotches of red around her nose.
I didnt say anything. The walls were beige and the ceiling had those white squares with little holes in them. It was the most boring place I had ever been. Finally she asked me if I was high and I said I wasnt
okay, I said. Theyre just like big children.
They fucking smell, he said, and then the bell dinged and the doors opened and he walked out.
Crafts for the old people usually meant drawing with crayons, or stringing beads, or making cats eyes with yarn. At first I just sat and watched; their weak fingers had difficulty gripping things and some of their wet mouths hung open. On the third week I started drawing them. I had put in a lot of time in drawing classes, especially since the last arrest. In the evenings I didnt work with the old people, I would go to life drawing and portraiture classes at the Palo Alto Art League. It was just this cool old building that was actually pretty close to the Towers. My teacher, Mr. Wilson, was this wily old guy with a beard like a wizard who wore all denim, every day.
I started bringing my sketchbook and sketching pencils. I usually just drew the old peoples faces. I would draw life in their eyes even though many of their lights had gone out. I would capture their decaying skin with as much realism as possible. Wrinkles within wrinkles, blotches, hair in wisps. And their necks like fowls: bone protrusion, saggy-soft flesh, goiters. I drew all of the people on my floor many times. The orderlies didnt care that I hardly helped because they were worse than I was. They were all young, and argued in Spanish and laughed around the orderly station; and the guy orderlies would tease the girl orderlies, and they all would flirt; but when they dealt with the old people they were mean and cold, as if all the old people were animals.
Those are cool pictures, Brian said. They make me think of death.
Im trying to draw them with some dignity. It doesnt seem like anyone else cares, I said.
Its hard, man. Who wants to care for someone who has lost his mind and motor skills and cant take a shit without help? Thats why you have all these stupid assholes here, to wipe their asses for them.
But the orderlies dont care about these people.
No shit, because they have to wipe their asses and change their bedpans and listen to their insanity every day; we only have to be here twice a week. Imagine if you were here every day.
I hope I die before I ever come to a place like this, I said. Brian said I probably would because I smoked cigarettes.
I drew one woman more than all the others. Her name was Tanya. I liked her because of her smile and her eyes. That was all, she wasnt any smarter or more coherent than the rest of the old people. She just radiated kindness.
Id draw her in all different ways. Her face with its cross crinkles, like bunched cloth around her eyes; her mouth: wrinkly soft from so much smiling. Id draw her full-bodied; grinning in her wheelchair, sitting over the beads that she would thread and drop, which bounced, sharp-sounding, on the floor; or in the TV room, hunched in her sweater: birdlike, brittle, her chair angled slightly away from the television because she wasnt really watching. And her smile always like a childs.
One Thursday, during craft time, when they were all coloring with their crayons, I placed two of the drawings I had made of Tanya on the table in front of her. Tanya was working on a red house; the jagged red scribbles shot all over the page and into the blue mountain she had drawn in the background. When I put the pictures down she stopped with the crayon. The color was called Watermelon. She looked at my pictures. They were good; one was of her face and caught her warmth, the other was a picture of her in her chair, hunched and staring at nothing. She picked one up and then the other, and then she cooed.