I was commuting an hour each way to culinary school, working as a local hospital cook, and owed the landlord cash-only for the month at the apartment on the lower west side of the city. He meets me in his work van outside of the building. Three floors tall, it was founded on salt, the salt factory that doesn’t make so much salt, or the salt of the earth.
Directly across Main from us is a street taking you to the factory like the Chutes and Ladders board game. There are houses lined up there, beaten by time and antiquity and boarded up for lack of a certain salt.
The messy woman comes hustling from across the street. I leave the building, but she stops to talk to some people outside while I pass carrying my laundry for the Laundromat. I hear it through the train coming there a block down.
“They got none. I tried, but there were none.”
Salt and rocks. This is the end stop for many, but for others, it is also the beginning of a necessary story meant to be read in the present tense like this.
A man who calls himself Rebel sits outside the building late nights and sometimes throughout the town. I see him at the gas station riding his bicycle. It has saddlebags. He stops to ask for a car ride, a cigarette, or how I— or someone else—has his back. He and his old lady are off and on. Legally, he’s not allowed to ride a real motorcycle. He tells me when I leave my car lights on.
Sometimes, you can hear him out there, late afternoons or early evenings or middle of the night in the apartment building’s gravel parking lot. He emerges from the shadows of the basement apartment under the fire escape staircase like a rooster set to crow to the brick of it, and no one really there to listen.
A police officer and some lady with a clipboard and pencil tell me they’ve seen better days just outside my door, just seen better days. Visiting the neighbour, I think they are child and family services. The baby is new, and the mother won’t open the door.
I ask, ”Is there something I should be aware of?”
“No,” the officer says, shaking his head and scanning the floor. “We’ve just seen better days.”
I look down at the stained hallway carpeting in front of my apartment door and feel ashamed. There’s nothing to be aware of here, nothing to see, and here has always seen better days. The building has people swept beneath that carpet, and though I know I pass through now, amongst them still I enter.
Everything closes for lack of business in America a city at a time in the evenings, but not
here. A man is huddled in the corner of the landing between the third and second floors not long after the town lights go out who doesn’t know the building never closes. With a blue tarp around him and some snacks on the windowsill, some juice and Pop-Tarts, he opens his eyes.
I ask what he’s doing here. He mumbles something and I say, don’t be here in the morning. If it happens again, I call the cops.
You have to forgive sometimes. Sometimes you have to let one slide.
I sleep half a floor above him in my 1-bedroom, both of us, our eyes open somehow through the night, either because of the ambulance runs or the things on how I owe the landlord, how somehow he owes me, leading me downstairs to work every day, leading me to places I thought never existed, to a better future.
There are probably decades or more in the life of the building, like the line of the train that passes at two-thirty a.m. every night a block away, shooting cuss words across town, blaring them like a locomotive whistle.
It carries with it the homeless man with the blue tarp.
