FICTION
I woke up to the sound of junkies fighting again. I was almost used to it. I looked at the time on the tiny window on my closed phone. Close enough, and it wasn’t like I was going to get any more sleep with the ambient junkie noise. I grabbed my keys, clothes, shower kit, and towel to go wash up. Carefully locking my room behind me, I headed up the hallway toward the gym-style bathrooms. Sinks and toilets on one side of the central wall, shower stalls on the other.
I showered and got dressed in the stall. My building was not the type you walk back to your room wearing only a towel in. I’d never tried it, but I knew it would be a great way to get… I don’t know what, but being vulnerable there was not a good idea.
It was Thursday, my Monday, and I was ready to go to work. Days off were pretty hard for me because I was very poor and there wasn’t a lot of money for luxuries like food. Monday meant the best meal I was going to have since my Friday. I didn’t eat breakfast because I’d eaten my last nothin’ dog — a piece of bread with ketchup and mustard since I didn’t have any more hot dogs — and headed to the bus stop via the back door because I owed the front desk guy rent.
I liked the bus. It was basically comfortable and basically safe. I liked to sit as close to the driver as I could because sometimes while fooling with their wallets and bus passes, people would drop money. Yesterday, I’d spent most of the day on the bus and the subway. I had a bus pass, so rides were free, in a way, and it beat staying at home. God, how had home become a room in a hostel-turned-crackhouse for me? I don’t even do drugs. Not even back in college.
On the bus, I pulled out the Book of Hope. It was a small black notebook with my former university’s logo custom engraved on the front. Back then, it was the Book of the Future, but life has a way of turning the future into a distant memory, far away and impossible. At the beginning of the book were things like interview tips and school project ideas and plans for after I graduated. Flip through the pages and you’d find my plans for my own actual house without roommates because my job was going to be awesome. I planned to have a modest car for commuting, and put all my extra money into vacations and gear like bicycles and camping stuff. I was going to volunteer. I was going to have an awesome single life before settling down and maybe finding somebody to start a family with. Now all I care about is my next meal. The future ain’t what it used to be.
Yesterday while I was on the subway, I wrote down some things I would have again when I had enough money and my own place. I’d have so much food! I would have a pantry full of cans and cans of food, stuff that would never spoil. I would get fresh vegetables from farmers market again! What I’d written down was “enough food” but I knew that what it meant was getting home from work and having choices of what to eat. I wouldn’t miss nuthin’ dogs.
It wasn’t always this way. I’m smart and my parents loved me. But halfway through my junior year at university, my parents and little brother were killed in a car wreck. It turned out that my parents were pretty deep in debt, and after the dust settled with insurance and everything else, I had $900 in the bank and a pair of suitcases. I guess I should have found an attorney, but I was nineteen. What I found instead was a relationship with a charming psycho; then I found my world getting smaller and smaller and smaller. By the time I should have graduated, my life was intolerable. I knew I was going to die in this relationship, and I knew that psycho would kill me if I tried to leave. I remember laying in bed with my shoulders and neck aching with tension and dread logicing that if I was going to die, it might as well be aimed at freedom. And hey, maybe I’d even get away.
It turned out comically easy to get out. If I’d known it was going to be that easy, I’d have left a lot earlier and taken a lot more with me. When I had the chance, I took a car and a backpack I’d squirreled away and ran. I drove as far as I could on a single tank of gas and then sold the car for next to nothing to somebody who wasn’t too worried about the title and took a bus the rest of the way to the city.
It’s not easy to start over when you have nothing. I had no safety net. No $900, no pair of suitcases. My backpack had a change of clothes, some protein bars, a water bottle, a library copy of Andy Weir’s Artemis, the Book of Hope, and exactly $134. Selling the Lexus got me an extra $1,000, but $1,000 goes quicker than you expect when you’ve got no income and no safety net and no refrigerator.
The bus driver announced my exit. I pulled the cord and got off, walked half a block to Lou’s, a low-rent beer and pizza dive. I was really looking forward to sneaking a calzone with sausage and bell peppers. My stomach growled as I turned the corner. Lou’s looked closed, which it absolutely should not be. It was one of those food-as-an-afterthought places where people drank Bud Light at 9 a.m. The lights were off, the door was locked, the checkerboard curtains drawn tight. Oh, and there was a handwritten sign on the door: “closed for further notice.” Lizzy, the morning girl, must have written that. What was going on?
I checked my phone. I’d gotten a prepaid as soon as I landed in the city. I would never let myself be so isolated ever again. It had 33 minutes on it, so I called Lizzy, the only work contact I had in there. She answered on the first ring.
“Oh my god,” she said, her voice high and excited, “did you hear what happened?”
“No,” I said. “I saw your sign.”
“Oh my god,” she said again, “ok ok ok, you know how Lou is nuts?” I made a sound. “Well, he got arrested Tuesday night for robbing downtown Lou’s at gunpoint!”
We worked at the Paper Street Lou’s. Downtown Lou’s wasn’t actually downtown, it was just closer to the center of the city. Lou robbed his own place and got arrested? Can you get arrested for robbing yourself? My stomach dropped. Tomorrow was supposed to be payday.
“Do you know if we got paid?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“Nope,” came the cheerful response of somebody who didn’t depend on that money to buy hot dogs. “When he was arrested, the cops found some organized crime ties. Everything’s shut down hard.”
Oh no.
I hung up and went around back in hopes of getting in to make my calzone. No luck. Everything was locked up tight. Geez. Did it get worse than this? I was absolutely out of money, but I could have survived till tomorrow on calzones. But now my paycheck had evaporated, I had no calzone, and I’d eaten the last of my food yesterday, not counting ketchup and mustard back in my room — a room I couldn’t even get back into without passing the front desk guy who knew I owed rent. I had no friends, nowhere to go. So I got back on the bus and I went in circles.
As long as you don’t make trouble, the bus driver doesn’t really care if you hang out on the bus. I kept quiet, minded my own business, and kept my eyes peeled for discarded donations. After five hours and four circles of route, the guy across from me got up and left eight dollars on the seat! I snatched it up quick and waited a few more exits to get off at a grocery store. Just because I was rich didn’t mean I wanted to spend twice as much for the same stuff at a corner store. I bought a package of hot dogs, some bread, an apple, and splurged on some relish and a store-brand protein bar. You always get store-brand. They’re totally the same thing and way cheaper. Heavy with groceries, I was kind of excited to get home to make a hot dog!
I still had to wait for the front desk guy to pass out. He would, but I had to kill an hour. That’s why I bought the protein bar. I was hungry, and wouldn’t be able to wait for the hot dogs without getting something else in me. Back on the bus, I munched the bar and sipped my water and started to feel better.
Ok, maybe this wasn’t so bad after all. Lou’s was kind of like a pizza place, and all the pizza places knew each other, right? I could get a new job tomorrow by going to a pizza place that knew about Lou! And I had hot dogs to look forward to! Ok. No problem. I could manage this.
To pass the time, and because I was feeling hopeful, I opened up the Book of Hope. I wrote down “pizza places know each other. Get a new job at a new pizza place tomorrow!” And I started to imagine myself going in and asking to talk to the manager. I’d explain about Lou, and that I was good with pizza and salad and changing kegs and I could start right now. I made a list of pizza places I knew about, and even wrote down some I noticed out the bus window.
I flipped back in the Book of Hope to just five weeks ago, to just before I’d stolen the car and left.
“I will be loved, not owned.” I’d given an entire page to that sentence. “Remember: nothing is worse than not being yours.” That thought was its own page, too.
Still hungry, but sure the front desk guy would be passed out, I got off the bus to walk the two blocks back to the dump I called home.
I’d been gone all day, avoiding the place. And all day is a lot of time, plenty of time for all kinds of disasters to happen. It’s enough time, just to pull an example randomly from the air, for your building to burn down.
That’s not entirely accurate. It wasn’t burnt down exactly. Most of it was still standing. I guess I should say it was burned up. My building burned up. I guessed some of the junkies had a meth lab that blew up. Or maybe a couple idiots just let a cigarette going and fell asleep or something. Who knows. But I could see into my room from the outside, so I didn’t have a place to stay any more. My change of clothes had been in there. My mustard and ketchup, too. That sucked. I was homeless now. I mean, I owed back rent, but I had a key and could sneak past the front desk guy here. But no one would give me a room without money, and I had only the change leftover from my hot dog purchase.
Great. Now I was actual homeless instead of just about to be homeless.
There were no cops or fire department any more. It was a dump that nobody cared about where people nobody cared about lived. Nobody was there. I went in to go look. Probably everything had been picked over, but maybe I could find some canned soup or something. I mean, it was wrecked, but not wrecked.
I walked through what had been the wall into my room. Everything was damp, but smelled like campfire. My bed and bedding looked unharmed, but soaked. Maybe I’d look for some dry blankets since I got to be homeless now. My change of clothes were ash. My ketchup and mustard too. Good thing I had relish, I guess. Not that I had anywhere to cook my hot dogs now that the communal “kitchen” was no more. I guess it’s a good thing hot dogs are made of 100-percent artificial additives and only sort of need to be cooked.
I decided to keep on looking. Stuff was about to get really bad for me, and any asset I could find might be the difference between… Well, I didn’t know what, exactly. I just knew that if things looked bad before, they were desperate now.
I went room to room. Everything was soaked, even rooms that didn’t look like they had any fire damage at all. I went back to my room and wrung out my blankets and hung them on the door. I figured I might find a bag I could throw them into and they’d dry eventually. I continued my search. None of the rooms had much more than my room did. Some of them had a ton of trash and detritus. One room had what I thought for sure was a dead person in the bed, but it turned out just to be twisted blankets and garbage.
I found myself in a corner room with two missing walls. The room was in absolute shambles, but there were a bunch of cans on the floor! Score! I gathered them up, but quickly realized I would need something to carry them in. I had my backpack, and despite being homeless and jobless, I wasn’t quire ready to give in and ruin my backpack with burnt-smelling stuff. I switched from looking for food to looking for bags, purses, or backpacks. The corner room was deluxe, it had an extra room with a door connecting them. It was missing a big portion of its exterior wall where it had fallen into room. But laying under the wall was a backpack. A basic black Jansport pack like from junior high and it was pretty stuck under there. But I knew a decent backpack would be super useful going forward, so I decided to get it. It was full and difficult to unwedge from its home. But it was sturdily made and I got my shoulder under the wall so I could push it up a little bit, and I got the bag out.
I’m pretty glad I did, too. That bag was full of money. So. Much. Money. Bundles of $20, $50, and $100 bills. The bag was crammed full of more money than I had ever seen other than in the movies. This asset was much better than the canned food, but it was also much more dangerous. The money belonged to someone, and when money’s involved, everybody turns into the mafia. I put the new backpack into my old backpack, and began to carefully get out. This bag made me a target, and did not want to be found with it. I decided some canned food might actually be handy after all, if only for cover, so I grabbed an armload of it and got out of the building. I walked unmolested to the bus stop where I left the food and boarded. This bus would take me toward downtown, and I felt like being in public was a good idea.
I was jittery for the twenty-two minutes it took. Every time the bus picked somebody up, I eyeballed them and got ready to run. Nobody cared about me. They just went about their business. But the downtime on the bus gave me time to think. I began planning.
I dug into the new bag, still inside my old bag, and pulled two twenties out and palmed them. Nobody was watching, but I kept the money hidden. Once downtown, I got off the bus and hailed a taxi.
“Where to?”
“The Greyhound station.” I didn’t know where it was, but I figured a taxi driver would.
“From downtown? That’s gonna be like twenty bucks, kid.”
“Here’s forty.”
“It’s your money,” he said. “Get in.”
I got in.
I had no idea how to tell if I was being followed. I didn’t even try. I didn’t think anybody had followed me from the building, nobody cared about me on the bus, and then I was in just another taxi. The driver kept to himself, and that was good. I was stressed.
He dropped me off at the station and offered me change, but I told him no thanks and he took off. Inside, the board said the next bus to the regional hub would pick up in fifty five minutes and tickets would be sixty two dollars.
I went into the deserted bathroom and locked myself in a stall. I began counting the money. I decided not to trust the bands that encircled every bundle, but counted each bill individually. I kept counting and counting. My heart beat faster and faster. By the time I was done taking every bundle out of its backpack and putting it into mine, I counted $19,960. Twenty thousand dollars, including the forty I’d paid the taxi driver.
My vision blurred. Twenty thousand dollars. Twenty thousand dollars. It wasn’t like I was set for life or anything, but Maslow and I both knew my physical needs were set. I could eat anything I wanted! I could buy some new clothes. I could go anywhere. I could maybe finish my degree. I could have the future back.
I went back out and paid for my ticket from a bored cashier. I walked across the street to the obligatory all-night diner and ate an actual meal. It was the only actual balanced meal I’d had in five weeks. It was the best ham and eggs anybody has ever tasted. I ate every bite. It made me cry a little bit, sitting there in the well-lit booth eating breakfast food that somebody brought to me in exchange for money, like normal.
I paid just like a person who wasn’t in extreme poverty, and then went out to catch my bus.
This bus was taking me to the regional hub where I could decide on a final destination. I waited until we were firmly on the interstate before I dug the Book of Hope out of my backpack again. Once at the regional hub, I could go anywhere, but I didn’t know where yet. My belly was full for the first time in forever, and the bus was mostly empty, warm, and safe. Nobody was fighting, but a teenaged couple were giggling together a few seats behind me. Anybody who says money can’t buy happiness has never been hungry or homeless or hopeless. Two hours previously, I had been destitute. One bizarre turn of luck and the dogged determination to free a backpack, and I was on a bus back to the future.
I clicked open my pen and began starting over.