Now the guy’s face lit up, laughing. He made an exaggerated sign-of-the-cross benediction in his direction. “Well, my child, I forgive you. Get your hand out of your pants, though, man. You look like a fucking pervert.”
Hector took his hand out of his pants. The Klonopin was pushing down on him now like a giant, velvety hand. Probably it would be okay for him to lie down for a little bit, to get twenty minutes of sleep before he got back in the car. So he did that, feeling hugely warm and calm and protected, unable to stop babbling to himself as he fell asleep.
When he woke up, a fat, gentle-faced Latina, probably Honduran or Salvadoran, was standing over him, gently shaking his shoulder.
“Sir, you have to leave the church now, it’s almost six o’clock, we’re closing.”
“It’s seven in the morning,” he said.
“No, sir, it’s six o’clock in the evening. You’re the last person in the cathedral. You have to leave now.”
Six in the evening! Holy shit. Hector stumbled his way out of the cathedral and onto the street. His car was gone. “Oh fuck me, no,” he said. He’d parked it illegally and it had been towed? He had no idea. He’d left his wallet in the car — or at the girl’s apartment? He couldn’t remember. He hadn’t a credit card or a dollar on his person and he really didn’t much give a shit. He looked back at the benches outside the cathedral, walked across the street, lay down on one, fell asleep. How much time passed before the same fat Latina was shaking his shoulder?
“Sir, you really can’t be sleeping in front of the cathedral.”
“Why not, it’s not a public space?”
“Do you want me to call our homeless outreach for you, sir?” She was taking her cell phone out of her bag.
Hector laughed. “No, I’m not homeless. I live in New York.” He didn’t see the need to elaborate, so he lay down again and passed out. How much time passed before the same goddamn fat lady was shaking his shoulder? This time when he looked up, she was standing there with two guys, two more Honduran-looking guys with crew cuts.
“Sir, you want to come to the cathedral’s shelter for the night and have a meal and a shower and a cot?” one of the guys said.
Hector gathered lucidity for all of four seconds. He was currently in no position to figure out this mess with the vanished car, how to get back to Palm Springs.
“Sure, why not?” he told the guy, who helped him up. He got inside a minivan that drove for a few minutes on the freeway until it pulled off into a side street, next to a cinder-block building. There was a big room inside with another big old cross on the wall looking down on about fifty men, all of them black and Latino, crashed out on cots, some massed in a corner on old couches watching TV or playing cards. The place stank. As soon as he walked in, in his soiled, too-tight white jeans and tank top, they started jeering at him. “Faggot” this and “maricón” that. Hector was still so wasted, he didn’t much care.
“Come on, man, leave me alone,” he said wearily to one of the guys closest to him who tossed off a maricón. One of the worker guys walked him back to the showers, where he stripped off his grimy clothes and stood under the stream, lathering himself, relieved to be getting clean despite the starkness of the cinder-block stall. He realized he had left the rest of the Klonopin in the car and had his first frisson of worry over how he was going to start feeling when everything started wearing off. Couldn’t he already feel, standing here under the lukewarm stream of water, the first stabs of depression and anxiety that always came with the crash?
The staffer guy came back with a towel and a clean, used T-shirt and pair of jeans, so big for him he had to hold them up while he walked. A horrible, sinking sense of abjectness — one he could usually fuzz over and modulate after every drug run with a mix of Klonopin and sleep — started seeping in. The worker brought him to a cot with a thin, beat-up pillow, and he lay down on it fetally, wondering if it had bedbugs. Five minutes later, the worker brought him a bologna-and-cheese sandwich on Wonder Bread on a paper plate. He took one bite and realized he was ravenous, that the last thing he remembered consuming was a protein drink twenty-four hours ago. He finished the sandwich in about four bites and lay down and said his usual prayer for when he finally went to sleep during a crash: “Por favor, Dios, ayúdame a dormir esta noche.”
When he woke up — eleven hours later, according to the institutional black-and-white clock on the cinder-block wall — the dude on the cot next to him said, “Fuck, man, all you been doing is crying and screaming and tossing around in your sleep like a crazy motherfucker.”
Where was he? What was that smell? Bit by bit, his mind pieced the past few days back together. The lost car. The abandoned apartment in Palm Springs. He was in a fucking homeless shelter in Los Angeles? What was he wearing? He wanted to cry, but not in front of the dude on the next cot. He thought that he could kill himself, that the whole thing had just gone too far this time to try to piece things back together. But how would he do it? He didn’t have any drugs or pills to do it with. Should he just walk out in front of traffic?
Then the whole “Ysabel Mendes!” moment came back to him. Oh God, not that again. No, no, no. Please God, no. The fucking kid.
He lay there on his side, crushed by the depression of the crash. His mind kept sorting out that he could do three things. One, he could kill himself, but that would take some doing with no drugs or pills around — he’d have to leave the shelter and go out into the streets and figure it out. Two, he could just stay here. They had no ID for him; nobody would ever come looking for him. He had effectively cut himself off not just from New York City and everything that had ever happened there, but Palm Springs, the half-dozen or so guys he’d had to his friend’s apartment before he got the text from the kid. He could just stay here and be a bum and be taken care of at the lowest level — cot, shower, bologna sandwich — make peace with these fellow bums, maybe be brought into their card circle or TV clique.
But there was a third choice, motivated by a dim grain of recognition that, just maybe, because of all the people he had actually helped years before, he’d earned a crumb of credit to be helped in return. He lay there and mulled over that extremely alien thought for several minutes. It motivated him enough, finally, to sit — and oh, that was a miserable effort — then to stand, holding up the too-big jeans, and walk over to one of the staffer guys, who was watching a wrestling match with some of the dudes.
“Can you make a call for me?” he asked the staffer.
The staffer — not the same staffer as the night before, correct? He wasn’t sure — looked up at him disinterestedly. “You got somebody to come pick you up?”
Hector nodded yes; it seemed like the easiest answer. Slowly, apparently reluctantly, the staffer pulled a cell out of his pocket. “What’s the number?” he asked.
Hector didn’t know it, he realized. “I need you to call 411 for the number,” he said. “I know it’s listed.”
“Are you serious?” the staffer asked. Hector was sure now the guy wasn’t the fairly nice guy who’d brought him in here the night before. This guy seemed like a dick. “It’s like a dollar-fucking-ninety-nine a minute to call 411.”
Hector suddenly had a long view of just how much subjugating himself he was going to have to do to take this third choice rather than kill himself or simply say nothing and stay here and rot. Was it really worth it at this point?
“I know, sir, I’m sorry,” he made himself say. “But I really need this person and I forgot her number.”