The Mars Room(57)

When he heard the lie that I had to work, Victor wanted to take me salsa dancing after I got off. I said no, and after several rounds of his pushiness, I finally got rid of him.

A week later, Victor called me and said, “Romy, are you okay?”

I’m fine, I said. What business was it of his whether I was okay or not?

“I had this terrible dream about you.”

Whenever anyone dreams about you, the dream tells you about them, not about you. It’s their own private fantasy life and they give it away by announcing who they dreamed about. But Victor was superstitious and was convinced that he should be worried about me on account of his dream.

Victor died in a car crash shortly after that phone call, in the van we’d taken to Home Depot to get the sink.

He’d had the bad dream about the wrong person.



* * *



Shortly after Victor died, a neighbor, a young guy named Conrad, overdosed. I knew Conrad was a junkie. He sometimes helped Victor as an assistant, but it was charity on Victor’s part. Every day, Conrad’s sister came to our street and stood before the wrecked pile across from my place, where Conrad and his spooky mother lived. Every morning the sister called her brother’s name for the whole neighborhood to hear.

Conrad’s mother, Clemence, had knocked on my door when I first moved in, to tell me not to order any pizzas. I looked at her and she said, “You know those black vinyl containers the delivery boys carry? The pizza warmers? They bring in evil. You see those warmers, and evil is on the way in.”

After her pizza box warning, she started talking about J. Edgar Hoover and Jimi Hendrix, and all the other “well-known individuals” who had passed through the neighborhood and to whom her family was connected. She was vague and ominous about her super-heavy connections, these well-known individuals. Okay, lady. I excused myself and went inside. I rarely saw her and I didn’t see Conrad much either, but every day I heard Conrad’s sister call his name. Every day she stood on the sidewalk and yelled it. Then one day she did not, because Conrad had apparently died the night before. No more Conrad. Still it did not occur to me that the street was cursed, although I did feel a start, a kind of shiver, when I saw a delivery boy get out of his car with a huge black pizza warmer in his hands.

Not long after both Conrad and Victor died, I was at home, busy doing nothing until it was three p.m. and time to pick up Jackson, when I heard the neighbor next door screaming something over and over. It took me a moment to realize the word he was screaming was my name. I went out to see what he wanted. He was standing on the sidewalk with a towel wrapped around his hand, and the towel was raining blood all over the sidewalk.

“You have to take me to the hospital,” he said.

When I first arrived, these neighbors had tried to be friendly to me but I kept my distance. They were hard to look at. Shaved eyebrows, sallow skin, dyed black hair, black painted fingernails, a vintage black hearse. Victor did some plumbing work over there and said they kept a baby coffin in the kitchen for their canned foods. They had just bought their building, a fourplex, and were systematically evicting the tenants in order to raise the rent. They were goth slumlords. Two of their tenants had cleared out, but the family in the third unit was not moving. These tenants had nowhere to go. The husband was a diabetic and had just undergone a foot amputation. He was on crutches and insisted on driving himself to the hospital, and his leg got infected and had to be amputated higher up, at the knee. The wife worked cleaning houses, and had asthma and no sense of smell from the toxic products her employers forced her to use. They were poor people without documents, from Mexico, with three children. I knew all this because a few days before the goth neighbor was screaming my name with his hand in a bloody towel, the woman he was trying to evict asked if she could speak to me. I let her in. She sat on my couch and cried and told me about her family and their situation. She said the landlord was trying to evict her and her husband for being alcoholics. “We are Seventh-Day Adventists,” the woman said. “We do not drink.” I felt so bad for this woman that I looked up a tenants’ rights organization and helped her set up an appointment to speak to an advocate. She left and thanked me and I didn’t feel any better. Her husband was missing a leg. She had to live underneath these landlords who, she said, made unchristian sounds in the night.

The goth landlord was screaming my name because he’d seen my car on the street. He needed help and knew I was home. He had sheared off two fingers and a thumb with his own table saw. He had the severed parts in a garbage bag. I drove him to Kaiser Hospital in Hollywood, the Burger King of health care, running my horn through intersections along Sunset Boulevard, as the guy bled on the seats in my car, which was a drag because that was a nice car—my Impala. I was stuck with him in the emergency room until his girlfriend could get there from her job. They had him shirtless and tubed with IV pain medication. I was forced to look at his tattoo, a chest-sized upside-down cross.

“Got this to spite my brother,” he said, his words thick from pain medication. “He’s a minister.”

You sure showed him, I did not say.



* * *



Victor dead, Conrad dead, the goth neighbor with half a hand. His tenants facing misery, amputation, deportation, the streets.

Bad luck was all around me, although my neighbor and his table saw, that was more like karma. But maybe the worst omen was the veteran, all in black like a grackle. A shadow that crossed my path in the form of a man.