Alan Catlin: An Essay

Working on No Hope Street

Rereading Dr. Kelley White’s essential No.Hope Street I was struck by the universality of the  strains and stresses of being alive in the early 21st century.  Her landscape is an urban one where the children are maligned, injured, abused, and discarded in some of the most brutal ways imaginable. The ones that make it to adulthood often become abusers themselves; old too soon through drug use and alcohol consumption after years in broken families. It’s a kind of choose your own poison world, extreme in its Darwinian choices, where only the strong survive. Or is the wiliest? The lucky ones? But luck and guile can only take you so far when the leading cause of death is one form of street violence or another.  At one point White says,

even the post man wears ashes.

Receding apricot hair-proud mouth
she has the smudge.

A woman with close cropped birth hair
strides the sidewalk,
determined, arms swinging-
God’s thumbprint between her eyes.

Thin man, lips moving across naked gums,
eyes unfocused-
the dull gray mark.
(from “Unmarked”)

She sings the “Philadelphia Murder-a-Day Blues,” knows the “Interactive Homicide Map,” Philadelphia Mississippi Mud;” hates when a lamppost grows flowers. She has seen the results of the violence on “Killadelphia” streets. This is Bukowski territory. But Kelley is no Bukowski, she’s a pediatrician and she has worked in a clinic where the people she tends to are often like those we find in these poems. That she persevered, is still persevering on this job, shows the depth of her engagement in her subject. When she details a family history the includes a list of siblings dead in their teens, she knows who these kids were and how difficult it is to try and keep the last ones alive. There has to be some Hope on No. Hope Street or else how could she go on?  She sees the oldest siblings, who care for the younger ones, who are more mother than sisters in in her early teens. She knows fathers who fight for their kids, desperate mothers who will do anything to keep their kids safe and alive. But, yet, this is a place where there is a sign outside a church that says, “For Sale by Owner.”

As I read, I recalled stories from when I worked a version of No Hope Street in Albany, New York, that seemed right out of the pages of Kelley’s book. Recently, I read an obituary of a young man who lived directly across the street from us when our kids were adolescents. The young man who died was one of a family of six who babysat for our boys.  I don’t remember how old he was, barely mid 40’s, I think, and the obituary went on to name the other five kids; his five sisters, who predeceased him. He was the last one, the second oldest of the six. None of them had kids listed which might have been for the best. They seemed to be decent kids when they were young, but who know what happened later on? An obituary doesn’t provide much information, just the relevant immediate details. None of these kids seemed to be headed in a bad direction, as in no obvious signs of drugs or alcohol abuse. Their mother was always home and seemed normal enough, friendly, and sober, if a bit reclusive. Still, stuff happens. And now they are all gone.

And then there was the young man at the bar I worked in who was talking about his grandmother who just had a birthday. I must have asked how old she was as he mentioned her age. I thought, “damn she’s three years younger than I am.” He said something to the effect of, “Actually, she’s a great grandmother now, I’ve got two kids. Had my first one when I was sixteen. My mother had me when she was sixteen and granny had her when she as sixteen.”  Oh my. His daughter ought to be over sixteen now. I wonder…

Then I thoguht about the Extreme Art exhibit we had seen several years ago at The Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester that featured non-traditional objects made into art. Those objects would include, pharmaceuticals as in pictures made from pills, Elvis themed plastic bobbleheads and collectibles pasted on a pink Caddy. There was garden hose art, Kleenex, and tampon assemblies, junk salvaged from the ocean art, blood sample art and so on. The most relevant one, in terms of Kelley’s book, was a map of the city of Philadelphia in various colored crack baggies found on the streets of Philly.

I thought about having spent roughly half of my life, either working in that bar, or drinking, on a No Hope Street, that was perpendicular, one block over, from that stifling apartment we lived in for over three years, while we were in and out of grad school, and had six doomed babysitters. I thought about all those nights, I spent in a bar that stayed open to the last possible minute, four A.M., and how I closed it for twelve or thirteen years of Saturday Nights with a regular Monday and an occasional Sunday for comic relief.

Not there is much comic relief on a Sunday night at one or two o clock in the Summer when everyone who can be, who has a lick of sense anyway, is way out of town vacationing or sitting on a porch overlooking a lake with a twelve pack for beer on ice. Holding the fort takes on special meaning on those nights. After a while, it became painfully obvious that those people who were left were the dead end, no hope people: the ones on parole, out for the weekend from a Psychiatric Center, loners with nowhere else to go, and/or aspiring criminals. And in the winter… Well, then you can narrow it down to criminals and mental patients: the past, present and future ones.

Looking back my slightly edited version of No Hope Street, it is always dark. This formerly middle-class residential area is now for the downwardly mobile or seasonal, as in student housing with Sections 8’s closing in. There are three main buildings along the long straight road that contained them. The Hospital on one end, the bar in the center and, on the far end, the police lock up. The connecting rod is the cabbie, Uber and Lyft hadn’t been invented yet, so you were dependent on the guys who drove by and lived by the motto: “Don’t Drive Drunk, Let Us Do the Drunk Driving For You.” And they weren’t kidding. I waited on enough of those guys over the years, heard their stories and had a strong sense of how they operated.

There were several different taxi companies but they all seemed to be owned by the same people and had the same drivers. If nothing else these guys had unique personalities, plus an intimate knowledge of afterhours bars, houses of ill repute, and where the cops slept on the late shift. No one who drank and lived on No Hope Street seemed to drive themselves, for a host of reasons, most of them legal, so the taxi cab was an integral part of how things happened on the street. How else where they supposed to get to the Blocks that God Forgot once No Hope shut down?
Listen to a couple of Denny, the cabby’s stories he told me over the years”

Wimpy

 He's our twelve to seven dispatcher.
Nice kid, but he's got more trouble
than two people can handle and it's
too bad, he's got a real nice
personality.  If he was an asshole,
I wouldn't give a shit, but he's not.
He's got all sorts of other problems
at home.  They're both alcoholics,
if she's not drinking, and, he's not
drinking, it's all right. If he is
and she isn't, there's a problem,
which gets worse, if she is and he
isn't. Most of the time it's one
or the other. I don't know how
many Domestics they've had there
in the last couple of years but I can
say this: every cop in town knows
where they live.  I've known the family
for years: good hard working, hard
drinking, mostly honest folk, and he
sure, as hell didn't get that
nickname for being a sissy.
Not with his temper and his bulk. 
It was his appetite that got that name
hung on him, never did see a man
who could consume ground beef the way
that Wimpy can.  It's a tough break
he's facing this time.  I saw him
down on Central and he was incredibly
pissed.  After the cops split ,we went
to this club I belong to and let us in.
I've got a key so we can have a drink
any time we need one no matter what
time of day it is.  I say: "Wimp,
what happened?" "Shut your mouth and
just pour whiskey." He sure was fuming
overtime." Double it up, this time."
He said after a while.  I watched him
put it down, said, "Here's two more,
what's the problem?" He slid the tickets
across the bar, pounding the double down,
signals for me to pour two more.
It's not often you get to see four
major traffic tickets like these.
Running a red light.  Well, that wasn't
too bad, you could always just miss one,
it happens all the time.  I hear a couple
of hundred bucks still can make one of
those go away.  90 in a 30.  Well, what
jury in the world was going to believe
a family man was doing 90 in a 30? 
Sounds like a cop with an imagination
real early in the morning.  Don't worry
about that one.  Driving without a license,
a suspended license, actually.  That one
really hurts. I guess the DWI could be
the killer.  Used to be you could buy
one of those out too, but now you're lucky
if you can buy a reduction.  He'd be
in solitary in Albany County if he hadn't
grown up with the arresting officer.
If he gets out of this one it will
amaze me.  I've known him since he was
this high, good thing I never had any trouble
with him now that he's got shoulders
like this and a head full of steam
with nowhere to go.

 

Why I wear two wedding rings

 “I used to be a bartender too.
Did ten years behind the stick.
I'm an alcoholic, sure, but
I'm one of those guys who can
go six, seven days without
a beer and then start the weekend
on a Tuesday.  Tough on a woman.
Not that I haven't had a few.
Don't like them hanging around me
for a long time.  Gets on my
nerves.  After you've had them
a few times, they're always
wanting you do things for them.
Puts a big dent in my time.
I've got lots of better things
to do then wait on a woman.
Like drinking my next beer.
This is it, my last one,
how many is that, four?
I've been into counting them
since my DWI.  They can take
away my license forever if I get
another one.  It's tough to
drive a hack without one.
You're probably wondering why
I'm wearing two wedding rings,
right?  Well, I got a girl
I finally wanted to marry,
she's seventeen and a half
years younger than me. 
She was a nurse when I married her
but she wanted to drive hack.
I got her a job with another
company.  Ours was all backed up
with guys having seniority up
the ass but I had some pull.
Treated her real good, I did. 
Cooked for her when we were
both together, which wasn't often,
not with me working five nights
and her splitting nights and days.
We'd be home together maybe
one night a week, if we were
lucky.  Now, she says, she
loves this new guy that drives
hack with her.  I don't blame
her, you've got to do something
with all that free time;
a woman's got needs just like
a man.  I was in a bar last
week having a couple of cold
ones and this pretty young 
thing comes up to me and
asks about the double rings.
Well, it's simple, I tell her:
one is to remind me I'm still
legally married and the other
one is to remind me never to
do it again."

Poor Denny. He was always a few beers short of a cold pack. I probably knew him the best of all the cabbies. He hung himself.

The cops well. They are a special breed apart. The basic rule is the bartenders is fill ‘em up until they can’t hold anymore. The ones that don’t need arresting, the cabbies get, and sometimes the cabbies pay you back for the ones that you gave them the other night, puked in the back seat, or stiffed them for a fare, or worse stuck a knife to their neck and demanded all the money they had on them. All of those things happened, more than once, and boy, can those pay you back for that, in spades! They’d drop off guys that couldn’t get past admitting at the Psych Center and just say, “See, ya.”

I once paid a cabbie the fare plus ten dollars extra to take a guy to the Psych Center and leave him near the entrance and let nature run its course. But that’s another story involving The Book, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Matt’s Premium Beer on tap. Maybe another time…

It pays to be on good terms with the cops, Which isn’t hard because they’re usually good guys, guys you hang out with when they’re off duty. Guys you can drink shots and beers with and maybe smoke some loco weed with too. Hell, they might not even be off duty when you’re doing that stuff in the Bat Cave across the street from the bar.  You don’t argue with a homicide cop on duty who provides the weed and is carrying the biggest pistol you’ve seen outside of a Dirty Harry movie. Hey, he wants to smoke Cambodian Red, why the hell not? You have to be practical when you live on No Hope Street.

There are a million stories on No Hope Street. Listen to a couple by two of Albany’s Finest, since retired.

The Good Old Days: Pounding a Beat

 You remember that shootout
down on Delaware Ave: when was
that, ten, twelve years ago?
I was still pounding a beat then.
That guy had an arsenal
in there.  After an hour
of bang, bang shoot 'em up
there was so much smoke
down there you could hardly breathe.
That was one hell of a way
to spend a Monday afternoon.
Those were the good old days
before the APD Special Qualifications
training.  Half the force,
thinking they were safe,
were hiding behind the gas
pumps of the Shell station
across the street.  Not likely
you're ever going to see anything
like that again.

 

Sick Time

 It was one of those Mondays
I should have called in sick.
I'd been out until three drinking
and here I was pulling eight to
four still drunk, sitting in the Burger
King parking lot with a cup of V‑8
and two cups of black coffee
when the call comes in.  There's
an accident on lower Madison Ave
that needs a cop and I'm the guy
to do it.  I really needed this one.
The clown had jumped the curb
on the left side of the road,
totaled a mail box, veered off
to the right still traveling
at a considerable rate of speed
side swiping everything in his way
until he hit the fish store picture
window.  It was quite the disaster
for eight o'clock in the morning.
So here I am, barely functional,
in uniform, at the scene of the crime
and I can't decide whether to pass out
or to throw up.  It's hard to be
authoritative when you're about
to puke.  I mean, there were fish
everywhere stinking up a storm.
Fortunately, the guy was comatose
behind the wheel or I'd still
be hearing about him getting away on me.
Of course, they still rag me about
calling for assistance on a simple
property damaging accident but they
have to admit, I do catch the wild ones.

           
I made a deal, early on with the shift sergeant on the graveyard, that I wouldn’t call him for petty shit. That is, I would only call if I was in deep, over my head, absolutely fucked, world of hurt. We did business outside of the bar, he did a remodeling thing as a day job, and he had a keen financial interest in keeping me healthy and working. Besides, he knew I was one of those guys who foolishly prided himself on being able to take care of things on my own. I deluded myself that I could keep stuff from happening or getting out of hand, not always the same thing, believe me. Yeah, well shit happens. So maybe once a year I’d have to ask him to stop by with six or seven of his mobile units to break up the fun, fun that could be confused with a near riot or worse. Generally speaking, that’s where the third institution on the street got involved. 

On No Hope Street the equation is assholes enter bars, name their poison, and do their worse. Bartenders do their best to contain the madness, make the drinks, cope with the indignities of getting no respect, insults, and grief. And that’s just from his friends, the regulars, which may or may not, include the cops. The assholes, the largest tribe on earth though no one ever admits to belonging to it, well, that’s when life really gest interesting, that is, down and dirty, and all too often, bloody. My goal in life was to never having to visit another ER from injuries inflicted upon my person while on the job.

Generally, those were assaults. I learned early on, ordinary interns and ER personnel don’t want to touch you if they know an assault is involved, especially with facial wounds. In my experience, granted it was the 70’s and things may have changed, residents insisted on calling a specialist (plastic surgeon) to fix the wounds. Meanwhile I lay on a table bleeding with a very affectionate male nurse cleaning my wounds and bemoaning the damage to my, “Pretty face.” I decided he was the only one who cared what happened to me so I asked his advice. He insisted I get a plastic surgeon. I was losing my buzz fast so I figured it was the only way to get out of there in the immediate future. I also learned never to make small talk with the surgeon but that’s another story…. Every job I had prior to No Hope had at least one of those and I almost managed to make it to the end of the last one without an ER visit.  Almost doesn’t count though where Emergency Rooms are involved. That trip happened while I was doing a day trick when I nearly cut my finger in half on broken glass. And got crap later in the week for not working with stitches on my dominant right hand. It’s only the third longest scar on my right hand but it’s still pretty impressive.

One of my biggest fears was ending up in ER with the guy that assaulted you or was involved in the general mayhem that got us both a trip to ER. Luckily that never happened though I did end up on a bus ride home with a guy who tried to assault me on the day trick. Luckily, he was scared off. Not by me. I don’t scare people but by Randy, one of the regulars who was what they call a House Monitor, euphemistically, actually a disciplinarian at a home of wayward youth,( that is a halfway house to hell for badass kids one felony away from prison.) That was an interesting bus ride but by no means as interesting as the last bus from Albany or even the first bus from downtown which had all the people who missed the last bus on it.

Those were special folks. Armed and dangerous and twisted out of their minds. I did that for eight or nine years. It’s a long bus to and from No Hope Street passing more than few blocks that God forgot, that is, undeclared war zones with petty, and not so petty, criminals on them. I have waited on murderers  (some people you never forget) and when you see them in the paper, you can tell the cops what the killer drank.  Though it’s the one who didn’t make the paper that made the biggest impression.

It was one of those prototypical dead in the A.M. mid-summer Mondays and I could see the guy wandering around on the street through the picture window.  It’s a good idea to keep an eye on the street in between sips of your maintenance beer. You never know.

He was dressed in loose fitting athletic shorts and a sleeveless basketball style jersey. He walked by a couple of times before making up his mind to come on in.  I was the only neon lit alternative for miles so why the hell not? He was probably late twenties, maybe younger. It was an 18-year-old drinking age then so he was definitely legal. He ordered a Cuervo shot neat, hold the fruit and salt, and threw a twenty on the bar. I think he might even have said please, as I had the impression, later, that he was polite. I poured, made change and he said play it again, three, maybe four times. Later, I told the cop ten times just to piss him off.

The kid left the change and said good night and off he went up the No Hope Street Block.   That  change was a nice tip at that time of night and left a favorable impression. Little did I know, where he was headed, money wasn’t going to be of any use to him.

“Was he armed?” the cop asked me a couple of hours later.
“”No.” I said. ”If he had a gun on him his shorts would have been around his shoes. There’s nowhere to hide a gun in basketball jersey either.”
“Do you want to know what he did after he left here?”
“Not really. None of my business.”
“He went down the block and blew his girlfriend’s brains all over the apartment.”
“Not my problem.”
“I’m making it your problem.”
“Let me tell you how I look at this: I’m a bartender. I make drinks for people who are of age, have money to pay, and aren’t disruptive. He checked all those boxes. He was on foot. I saw him on the street before he came and on foot when he left. He didn’t have car keys. So, end of story as far as I’m concerned.”
“There are a bunch of evidence technicians and cops down there who are pretty pissed off. No one likes scraping brains off of ceilings.”
“I get that but that’s your job, not mine.”
“You should care more about what people do after they leave your bar.”
“Who says I don’t care? What am I supposed to do read minds now too?”

I thought he was going to come for me then. You can see it in their eyes. If they pause before they jump, if they think about it, means they won’t try to vault the bar, roughly ninety-nine times out of a hundred. The ones that mean it don’t think, they just do it. I never saw that cop again or heard another word about the murder. Hell, I don’t even know if the kid was arrested or killed himself while he was at it. I looked down the block and there were still a lot of spinning lights and stuff so I called Last Call for myself and got fortified for the wait until the first bus came just before six.

I can honestly say that being stuck in that bar during a freak snow storm in October with all the leaves on the trees and the limbs, that once held them, snapping, cracking, and breaking off, then crashing onto the ground, taking the phone and power wires with them, is an experience unlike any other. Except for one. Having to work on the following Monday, when somehow our bar is the only place in town that actually has power. There were no street lights, no traffic lights, just snow, broken everything, and it was an equally as freaky 60 degrees outside.

Following the dinner rush, the one guy at the bar, who was also a bartender, but one who couldn’t get to work, left at around eleven and I was very much alone. On a street of no hope, no dreams, and no street lights, just darkness everywhere, no traffic, no people on foot, nada is damned eerie. It was like being in a Twilight Zone episode that doesn’t end well. I waited on Rod Serling once and not long after he didn’t end well ,but it has nothing to do with me. I thought about that a lot over the next five and half hours.

Of course, the police station and the hospital had backup generators so there was that; the three institutions open and working. I confess, I cheated, I locked up early ( I was on a punch clock so it wasn’t like I could actually leave) and watched MTV sipping Bass Ale and despite the lights being down and the sign off out front, I was paranoid as hell. They make horror movies about stuff like this. Yes, it was quiet out there alright, but it wasn’t reassuring.

           

Blues in f

Near total darkness in the lounge,
filtered spots on the raised stage
burning low like the café table
candles, the ones on the empty
deuces, four tops, counters and
the brushed wood the piano player
balances drinks on, stabs out butts on,
between numbers, playing by rote,
each tune faultless as a dream,
full of passion and of death, life lost
in some tin pan alley gin joint or
an afterhours club that never closes,
always just a few feet from the end
of a highway with nowhere to go;
the bluesman got no more music but
the barman’s got the booze.