David Diaz

“Why do you think I’m walking with a limp!” “Frostbite?” “Frostbite.”

A visitor came to town a few weeks back and, as will many, he put up in a local hotel. It is called the Shaw Hotel and it leans up next to God’s House, the short-lived rescue mission on State Street across from the west side of the Hotel San Diego, downtown. The visitor rented room 202 for about a week. He drank a lot.

One Monday morning at one o’clock, after a quart of Mad Dog 20/20 had lurched back out of his stomach, he left the upstairs bathroom of the Shaw Hotel, descended to the damp sidewalk, turned left on State Street, right on Broadway, and limped toward the liquor store at Broadway and Union, closest comer east. It was closed. He stood outside unconsciously wondering how he was going to get a drink. A taxicab blurred up to the curb before him and he stumbled for it. He could not open the door. The driver arched back across the torn seat and opened the door for the visitor, who fell in slowly, mechanically, sighing at each successful maneuver. The driver was enveloped in a reek of vomit and old booze, which in combination and under the circumstances suggested pickling juice. He wished the visitor would open the window.

It was a struggle, but the visitor managed to say he wanted to go to a liquor store, and in a voice of childlike dependence, he begged, “Will you please buy me four gallons of wine?” His foggy eyes swam everywhere, nowhere. The driver gasped and the passenger dimly realized his mistake. “Four pints of MD 20/20,” he said. The driver hesitated, but then assented. He turned right on Union, left on G Street, and when he parked at a bus stop at Fifth and F he took a twenty from the passenger and went into a liquor store and bought the booze. When he handed over the fifteen dollars in change and the bag of four bottles to the passenger, who had brightened considerably, the driver asked what his destination was.

“How much to go to Carlshbad?” slurred the passenger.

The driver radioed the dispatcher for the price. “It’s about forty miles,” barked the dispatcher. “Figure it out yourself.” Seventy cents a mile, times forty. “It’d be twenty-eight dollars, sir, and I’d have to get it from you in advance.”

In the harsh neon spilling into the cab from the street, the passenger appeared as an iridescent indigent. Scuffed black street shoes, bright blue polyester pants with the fly half unzipped and no snap or button to hold them together at the waist, a dirty white shirt and barely white jacket — all this combined to convince the driver his passenger would be a two-dollar fare. But surprisingly, buoyed by his fresh supply of Mad Dog, the passenger indicated he indeed wanted to go to Carlsbad. “I got a four hunnert and thirty-nine dollar a month apartment up there, ” the passenger boasted as he twisted open a bottle. He gulped down a fourth of the contents and then reached into his pocket for money. In the space of thirty seconds he had misplaced the fifteen dollars in change the driver had given him, and his wallet revealed nothing but a wad of twenties. The driver convinced the passenger to give him forty dollars, then he pulled away from the curb and headed down Fifth past the pom venders and the loser bars, past the skyscrapers and the glass-and-marble office buildings, past the empty parking lots. Before they got on the freeway the passenger asked if he might get in the front seat. When the car stopped he couldn’t work the door handle, so the driver leaned hack again, opened the door, then leaned across and opened the front door on the passenger side. The passenger eased in slowly and the cab turned north onto Interstate 5.

“Four hunnert and thirty-nine dollar a month apartment,” the passenger spluttered. “Gotallmyclothesupthere. You got forty dollars of mine, right?”

“Right. Don’t worry about it. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Four hunnert and thirty-nine dollars a month.” The passenger took another pull from the bottle and, fumbling like a baby, was unable to screw the small white cap back onto it. The driver took the cap from him and sat the bottle between the passenger’s knees. “Sounds like a nice place,” droned the driver, who was taking shallow breaths because of the stink. “You got people up in Carlsbad?”

“A four hunnert and thirty-nine dollar a month apartment. You still got my money?”

“Look, if you’re that worried about it take back this twenty. I’ll just hold one.” The passenger crumpled the bill and stashed it in his coat. He took another long, sloppy drink. The bottle was half empty now.

“Do you live in San Diego?” asked the driver. The passenger, head bobbing, muttered unintelligibly under his malodorous breath. “Are you working?” the driver inquired. Again, the passenger seemed only half aware of the presence of the driver and the question. “How do you pay for the apartment?” the driver asked bluntly, stepping up to the drunkard’s line of propriety.

To this the passenger responded through a murk of phlegm. “Got out of the Marine Corps in ’75,” he said, and as the words formed his face twisted into its First conscious, albeit grotesque, expression. “After eighteen years.” His dark eyes squinted and his checks rose, exposing jagged teeth, and the driver noted the scars on his face and the Fierceness latent there. The passenger looked capable of anything and the driver felt a fearful pang. He wanted to keep the passenger talking.

“Why’d you get out?” he asked as the car barreled under the Clairemont Drive overpass. The passenger’s face was turned away from him, and the driver observed that his hair was short, brownish, with a stiff wave to it. Then the passenger suddenly turned back, startling the driver.

“I had a lot of problems.” he said, his eyes focusing on nothing. He mumbled and the driver asked him to repeat. “I kept fuckin' up. man! ” wailed the passenger in a voice that needed the accompaniment of tears. “I just kept fuckin' up so bad!” He turned sullen, as if remembering this was something he'd been foolishly trying to forget. “So bad!” He took comfort from the bottle again.

“How old are you?” asked the driver. “Forty-four.”

“What was your rank?”

His face still twisted in re-cognition, the passenger absently repeated “Master ” several times. “Master. . . . Master. ..."

“Master sergeant?” The passenger was silent. “Well, how do you do, sarge?” the driver said after a short silence, trying to inject some levity. No reply. The passenger began to tip over toward the driver like some rotten, lightning-gouged old tree trunk, but the driver caught him with a forearm. "Don’t do that, “ he commanded, heaving the passenger back upright. He thought that if he was allowed to recline, a seat full of vomit was not far behind. “Let’s crack your window and get you some fresh air,” said the driver. He reached across to the handle. “There now.” In order to keep him talking, the driver asked his name.

The passenger turned mechanically, and with a demonic smile behind his choppy, grubby beard, he loudly replied, “Stiff!” The driver again felt ripples of fear as the word triggered images of cadavers to go along with the smell of formaldehyde. “Stiff!” the passenger repeated, stabbing the name into the night air. "Robert Stiff!”

The driver had always suspected that when his time to die was at hand, he’d be visited by death in some vaguely living personage. For an instant he thought Robert Stiff was death itself. The driver had to avert his eyes back to the road after realizing his gaze had been fixed on a blob of mucous stretched over the passenger’s mustache.

“Bob?”

“Yeah. Bob.”

“Bob. How you doin’. Bob?”

The passenger nodded and gulped Mad Dog, gripping the bottle with both hands and suckling it. The last ounce of the purple fluid splashed into his mouth. The driver took the bottle from him and put it under the seat. They rode in silence for a few minutes. At Del Mar Bob asked the driver about the forty dollars he gave him. "I gave you back twenty, “said the driver. “Oh, yeah, “said Bob.

Searching for conversation, the driver asked. “Were you in ’Nam, Bob?”

The passenger’s face contorted again and through a jumble of utterances the driver deciphered something about being too old for Vietnam, and surmised that his passenger wasn't fit to be sent there anyway. “I just kept fuckin' up. man!" Bob yelled again. Then, softly, “I was in Korea.” “Oh yeah? Did you see action?” It was the driver’s standard question for old soldiers.

Bob turned mute, as if withdrawing to an earlier time, then he sprang back with his Fierce look and raged. “Why do you think I'm wearing this beard? How do you think I got these scars?" The driver saw that Bob’s right eyelid was damaged in such a way that it never fully opened, giving him a permanent, lopsided, raffish squint.

"So you were in combat, in a battle?” Bob again withdrew. He shook his head slowly. He was hunched deep in the seat, his hands twitching in his lap. “Frozen Chosin.” he said.

“Frozen Chosen?”

“Frozen Chosin. I was with the Frozen Chosin.”

“What’s that?”

“Lake. Hundred miles across. We went in there and cleaned ’em out. Frozen Chosin.”

“It was pretty cold, eh?”

“Why do you think I’m walking with a limp!”

“Frostbite?”

“Frostbite.”

The driver had no idea that the Frozen Chosin was actually the Chosin Reservoir in central North Korea, just below Manchuria. In the winter of 1950 American forces were engaged with the Chinese in battle there, and were forced to withdraw to South Korea. There were heavy casualties. The temperature was routinely below zero. If Bob fought there, he would have been fifteen years old.

“Were you injured?”

Bob’s eyes pinched. His head shook.

“Got shot in the face,” he snapped, glowering at the driver. "My chin was laying on my chest. A hunnert and seventy-nine stitches! A hunnert and seventy-nine stitches.” he repeated to himself. Then, leaning back and looking straight ahead. "I was a POW for eighteen months,” he blurted, more to the empty night than to the driver.

“Did they treat you rough?”

Again the passenger turned inward, as if cocking. The meter sounded like a closing breech as it clicked past twenty dollars. The grooves in the freeway riffled the tires along, and the Botts Dots in the lane lines whizzed by the yellow fenders like tracer bullets. "Feel these hands,“ Bob ordered. He held out his left, palm down. The driver was loathe to touch him, but he obligingly rubbed the top of Bob’s hand. It was smooth, swollen, red, and cold. The nails were thick and broad. “They tear your fingernails off!” Bob cried. The driver winced. “Jesus,” he whispered.

They rode quietly for a few minutes. The passenger seemed to have reached the limit of his communicative capacities, content now to issue snorts and belches. In the yellow light streaming softly from the meter, the driver examined the passenger’s face. The scraggly beard, the full, teeth-torn lips, and the thick bridge of nose held no special significance. He looked like any of thousands of drunks. But the brown wavy hair, close-cropped, and something youthful in the skin — the driver whimsically decided he’d picked up the unknown soldier come to life, almost.

“Bob,” said the driver loudly, “which exit do we take?”

“Aghhhhhh,” gurgled the passenger. The Carlsbad exits were upon them. “Bob! ” screamed the driver, "what exit do we take?” Bob was quiet. “Bob! What’s the name of your street?”

“Casa de Lima.” Bob whined slowly in a thin, guttural voice. "Casa de Lima.” "Goddammit, Bob. Which exit is it?” “Aghhhhh,” Bob intoned, his head thrown back. “Casa de Lima.”

The driver took the Palomar Airport Road exit. On the offramp Bob asked for another drink. “Hell no you can’t have another drink, “yelled the driver. “You’re half dead as it is. Now where do you live?” “Casa de Lima,” said Bob from his stupor. “Casa de Lima Camino.”

“Casa de Lima Camino?”

“Casa de Lima Camino.”

The driver pulled off the road to check his map book. No such street was listed. He drove on aimlessly. He shouted at the passenger that there was no street by that name. Bob mumbled something about Casa de Lima being a motel. The driver stopped at an all-night 7-Eleven and looked in the phone book. No motel by that name. “Four hunnert and thirty-nine dollar a month apartment,” Bob murmured. “Yeah, sure,” said the driver, disgusted. He went in and bought two cups of coffee. “Don’t ever be a cab driver, ’’ he told the clerks. He came out and handed a cup of coffee to Bob.

The passenger held it too tightly and the hot fluid started to spill out of the cardboard cup. “Gimme that,“demanded the driver. He had to pry the cup out of Bob's hand, scalding his own. Cursing, he threw the cup out the window into the parking lot.

“Look, Bob,” said the angry driver, "you got two choices. I either call the cops and have them pick you up right here, or we go back to San Diego. Now which is it going to be? The meter’s running ” It had passed twenty-eight dollars. Bob sat oblivious and immobile in his drunkenness. "Which is it Bob?” prodded the driver. No answer. “You want me to call the cops?”

Finally Bob stirred. “Don’t call the cops,” he pleaded.

“Okay, if we go back I’ve got to get thirty dollars from you. Bob." The passenger sat silent. A clear stream of saliva slipped over his lip and dripped in a thick thread down to his pants. “Bob, I need some more money,” said the driver. The passenger made a feeble movement with his right arm, like a sleeping dog ineptly scratching with a hind paw. "I need more money. Bob.”

"I . . . can’t,” groaned Bob.

"Okay Bob, I’m going to reach into your pocket and get your wallet out." The driver felt in the passenger’s left coat pocket and found the fifteen dollars change from the four bottles of Mad Dog. He felt nothing in the other coat pocket. He reached into Bob’s left front pants pocket, found the wallet, extracted two twenties, replaced the fifteen dollars he’d found, and put the wallet back. “We’re going back to San Diego now. Bob,” said the driver, backing away from the 7-Eleven and into the vacant streets.

“Casa de Lima Camino,” moaned the passenger. “Four hunnert and thirty-nine dollar a month apartment.*’

On the on-ramp to Interstate 5 south. Bob again asked for another drink. Even though the sack with the three bottles was right next to him on the seat, getting one out and opening it would have been an impossible task for him. “I’m not giving you any more booze,” said the driver. “I feel bad enough, buying that stuff for you. You’re almost dead. Bob! You hear me?" He knew the passenger probably didn’t, so he went on.

“Dead, Bob. Another drink could kill you. You should see your goddam self. You’re like a vegetable. I won’t contribute any more to your death.” Bob’s head had bent back, and if his eyes could have seen anything they would have been looking right at the ripped sun visor. But the two filmy black orbs were useless, darting out of control back and forth in their shallow sockets, the eyelids locked open. He sat that way during the entire return trip. Neither man spoke except when the driver was nearing the downtown exits for San Diego. Bob could not tell him what street the Shaw Hotel was on. The driver radioed the dispatcher, who gave him the address on State Street.

The bars were just closing as the cab peeled off the freeway onto Front Street. Wobbly figures strolled the sidewalks. Police cars cruised slowly along the gutters. The cab braked in front of the Shaw Hotel. “Will you help me up to my room, please?” Bob asked in his child’s voice. The driver flipped off the meter, not answering. “It’s fifty-two dollars and twenty cents. Bob,” he said. He took seven dollars and eighty cents out of his own pocket and stuffed the money into Bob’s coat. "Here’s your change,” he said. The driver grabbed the sack of Mad Dog, got out of the car, walked around and opened the passenger’s door. Bob reached up and took hold of the roof, trying to lever himself up off the seat. With a sigh he gave up and let himself back down. He turned sideways and lifted his legs out into the gutter. Again he levered himself up with the roof, this time succeeding. “Frozen Chosin,” he said with the effort. The driver led him out of the gutter onto the sidewalk. He let him go in order to close the car door, but as he stepped away the visitor began to fall forward. The driver stepped back and caught him. He kicked the door closed, lifted the visitor’s left arm over his own shoulder, and hauled him through the door of the hotel. “Lift your goddam feet. Bob! ” the driver commanded as they started up the stairs. “Frozen Chosin,” Bob whispered. By the time they neared the top of the second flight, both men were panting. "Lift your feet. Bob,” the driver said.

The door to room 202 was just to the right of the stairs, and it was unlocked. The bare lightbulb on the ceiling was lit. The driver laid the visitor down on the bed, which bore a mattress with stained blue flowers on it and a sheet that was tangled and lying mostly on the floor. A dirty gray, striped pillow was rumpled against the wall, which served as a headboard. A gritty window looked out on State Street and the Hotel San Diego. A dilapidated dresser with a peeling mirror stood in one comer. The driver put the bottles down on the dresser. Aside from the naked bed, the only evidence of an inhabitant was a wrinkled grocery sack between the bed and the dresser. It was halfway filled with forms and official-looking papers. The driver bent down and looked over some of these. The visitor raised himself up partially and made a gesture of protest, but he instantly fell back on the bed, his lumpy chest peeking through his shirt. Most of the papers were discharge forms from VA hospitals and convalescent homes .“I’m leaving now," said the driver, “and I’m taking the booze with me.”

Bob raised up again on his elbows, finding the strength. “No, don’t take the booze,” he cried, puckering his face. He fell back down. His arms and hands shook violently out of control. The driver saw that the visitor would be in for a rougher time tonight without the liquor.

"Okay. I’ll leave you one bottle. The other two will be down at the desk. Goodbye , Bob." The driver descended the stairs just ahead of a man and a finely dressed woman who wore heavy blue eyeshadow. The woman slapped a key down on the desk with a pretty index finger and exchanged a knowing glance with the night manager. The driver set the bottles down and told the manager who they belonged to. The woman walked out the door and turned left, toward Broadway; the man she was with crossed the street and headed the other direction. The driver got in his car and eased past God’s House, which has been vacant for months.