Suitcase Part 1

© Mary Catharine Lemons, 12/30/2020 All Rights Reserved

We would talk into the darkness, the hollow tin cup of darkness, our voices like pennies, rolled, hissed and reverberated down into the hollow bowels of the San Bruno County Jail. It was 1989. There were just two sides of 12 rooms, separated by a long steely hall. Iron rooms, iron halls, tiny perfect cages for secrets to be passed.

I could no longer destroy myself. A judge had stayed my hand. And my brilliant junkie friend, Deborah Ellstat, had also been temporarily spared.

Lights went out at 10 PM and so we would lay on our bunks, me on the lower one, and tell stories well into the night.

This is a true story that Deborah Ellstat told me about her uncle.
……………..

David had one last play. One last mark to make.

They were setting him free, back into the world after seven years, and he thought himself more lucky than clever. He clung to that luck. The only problem was his sight was poor. His eyes had lost their keen knifelike glint.

They had given him an old suit to wear. And it smelled of must. He put it on that morning and he felt such shame in it. Wearing it. When he thought about his journey from San Quentin to San Francisco, mostly by bus, he became agitated.

The big guards on the gun tower were told to stand down. Someone pushed a button and opened the big gate. And he stepped out into the dreaded morning like a bird whose wings had been cut. Broken. No longer able to soar above but made to hobble out into the empty parking lot, with the wind picking up. He tasted the sea in the wind, and his hungry growling stomach started to churn.

He had a paper bag to hold his things, a wallet, $42, a comb, a watch, his old clothes that he could no longer wear from seven years ago, and a gold chain with a cross of Jesus.

He opened the bag to finger the chain and cross. Then he put it around his neck, slipped his wallet into his jacket inner pocket and walked.

The bus was there. And so he stepped up into it.

“Hey ese, are you going back to San Francisco?” said a voice with a Mexican accent from the back of the otherwise empty bus.

David turned.

A man about his age of 60 with cheeky eyes peeked out from beneath a checkered cap. His feet were up on the rail.

The fat Chinese bus driver yelled back at him, "get your feet off the rail!"

So the Mexican man kept them up there and laughed.

“So man! You got a cigarette for your cousin?”

“I ain't your cousin.”

“Sure sure. Listen man.”

He put his feet down and came over to him. Sat behind him sneering.

“Qué onda? I need a cigarette, man. I wanna celebrate. Nobody meeting me neither.”

David turned to look at his face. “Ya know I don't smoke. So why are you asking me? I never smoke. It's stupid.”

The bus driver started the engine.

“Hope you fellas know that I stop on Market Street. Don't go no further.”

“Ya yahweh know. Nobody comin. Get us outta this hellish place.” The Mexican man grinned.

The ride gave David a first chance to clear his mind. He knew that he had to remain very calm. Almost play dead inside the suit. Become an invisible man in the city. So no one would notice or suspect his mission.

Spanish David looked back at the white walls, the brick, the gun tower, the huge monstrosity of the prison fortress surrounded by sea. The bus lurched forward out of the parking lot up the grade, past the gravel pits, and onto the freeway ramp.

His mind dared to dream for a few seconds. A steak at that place on Market and Powell, Tad’s, ya that’s it, with the bright lights. He could hear the music coming from the arcade next door. A carnival sound. Maybe a dancing girl or just a peep show.

He stepped off the bus and it was still early.

He walked from Market Street toward the faded Elm Hotel on Eddy.

It was all very quiet except for the clanging and bashing and breaking of bottles from the corner bar. Trash pickup. The hotel keepers were hosing down the street. And it made the wet pavement shine like gold and silver.

“Can you pe? Can you pe me na?” she said. The young Indian face looked out from behind a mesh screen. Almost giggled. She looked him up and down. He may have been bleary eyed, but he knew she was laughing at him in his prison suit- too big in the shoulders.

“Yes. I can pay.” He pulled out a $20 and she snatched it up.

“Fill out this card. No visitors. Only you. No trouble. No noise.”

“Sure sure.”

He walked up the dark rickety stairs filled with dust. The smell of sweet poison filled the air.

Figures like ghosts were in the long halls peering out of windows toward the street. They scattered away like birds when someone throws a stone. The sun was like a small focal point. A round dim ball shrouded in cobwebs. And so David made his way towards the point of light at the end of the hall desperately trying to remember.

He counted the paces as he walked to room 412 at the end of the hall. 4th floor.  Yes. This is it. Or is it?

He turned the key. Stepped in. There was a bad smell in the room. Old cigarettes and spilled whiskey. He went to open the window. He looked down and for a moment and thought he saw a rather large red-haired woman sliding down the back side of the building.

Could George still be dealing from this hotel? David asked himself. If so then that was fat Valerie and she was still picking up the stash by climbing up to his window from the fire escape stairs.

He turned and went to the wall. There was writing on it. It said, "Cops are the snitches".

Nervously he began to tap and finger the smooth surface of the wall to his left. Tap tap tap. He waited. He put his head right up to it.

No sound. Is it possible I have the wrong room?

He squinted his eyes and looked at the wall. He paced the floor, his pulse quickening. He ran his brown small hands over every pock mark, every rivery rivulet, smooth patches became lakes. 

Knock knock knock tap tap.

He sighed.

Maybe this is the wrong room.

He felt a sinking feeling from inside his heart. Even though it was cold and dank he began to sweat. He loosened his tie, took off the second-hand coat. Threw it angrily down onto the bed.

His pulse was racing so he fingered the cross of Jesus and lifted it to his lips.

“I ain’t suffered seven years for nothing,” he whispered.

The sun was beginning to rise further up in the sky. Someone was playing a Grateful Dead song, "Shine on me, shine on me your love light, shine shine."

David moved the flimsy old dresser away from the wall. Then he moved the bed by shoving it a little at a time. He lifted a lamp from a small side table, moved it onto the floor by his feet. He turned it on with a click.  It made a cone of light.

Then he sat on the bed and looked straight ahead trying to remember. He rested his eyes on a bleary line that slowly came into focus. On the wall. He got up and tapped all around that line.

Tap tap. Then he stopped.

Yes. It was here. The hollow place. Right here.

He began to breathe heavily. My God is it possible?

He knew he had a day. Only one day. 24 hours.

He squinted at the wall and wiped sweat from his brow.

David had $22 dollars to his name. He would have to work very quickly. Be out by sun fall. If the person in the next room heard him, there could be trouble.

He picked up his gray coat, put it on, and walked out. He made his way down the creaking stairs. Someone was coughing, someone was shouting.

“I told you you ain’t nothin to me mother fucker. You a been a big zero man. Ya that’s all ya are.”

He moved into the street. He walked like a ghost. He tried to imagine himself as air. He did not look at the old black man rolling a cigarette on the stoop. He did not look at the group of slouching junkies on the corner, all nodding in slow motion.

“Now Georgie, ya can't beat me like that. I am only short two dollars! Ya gonna do me like that for two dallas?”
“You always short by two dallas and I ain't doing it. Now get outta here”.

“Georgie! Come on Georgie?”

“Hey Slim! Lend me a quarter so I can get my pint huh?”

An old drunk was passed out cold on the sidewalk directly in front of him. He quietly stepped over the body. No one seemed to notice.

David kept his eyes down. He walked into Woolworth's on Market at Powell. The cable cars met there and all the tourists were already lined up.

Dumb asses, he thought. Nothing to see.

He walked into the store. It was all lit up like a birthday cake, lights, shiny golds and silvers, freshly shellacked floors, polished mirrors.  Satiny objects twirled from the sky.

He suddenly saw himself in one of the mirrors and stopped. He looked old and defeated. A nobody man. A man that even if he wanted them to see him, he would never be seen. A ghost walking. A zero man.

He had a goatee with a soul patch. Gray thick hair, cut up to his collar. A long gaunt face, aquiline nose, small lips. His eyes were almond shaped and Roman. His skin, sallow. His old suit was too big. His pants trailed the dirty ground. His shoes were worn. His tie, dull. He was absurd.

He smiled. Into his reflection. And gave a little wink anyway.

“Here is to the zero man!” He muttered under his breath.

David knew a thing or two about carpentry. He could not buy a drill. But he could get a knife and a hammer. And he could afford a spade too-- with his last $20.

He made his way back towards the old Elm Hotel. A meeting place for murderers and thieves. A place where countless OD's went down. The lonely screamed in the darkness. The junkie shot up the heroin in the hallway bathroom. Crouched down in the dark. Looking for a vein. Just one more blue vein. A place at the bottom of the city, FOR the bottom. A lonely, haunted hotel in the heart of the Tenderloin. The once choice part of town now pounded down into the leanest piece of meat.

So he returned to his room. And he stuck the knife in the wall, using short angry stabs. Hacking away at the wall. He half expected it to bleed.

“Hey mother fucker what ya doin there? Huh?” came a disembodied voice from the other side of the wall.

Hack hack tear crack.

“Hey motherfucker stop that noise or I'll come over there and shove that hammer up your ass!”

Hack hack tap hack.

He had found the line where the hole in the wall began. Once he was able to strip away the plaster, the rest came crumbling open. Like a wound.

Hack hack ...

His heart jumped. His breath stopped.

He saw a musty handle of a suitcase in the rubble and powder. A small brown handle. He pulled on it. He pulled on it so hard that it came clean through and he fell to the ground holding it tight, the oblong shape crossing over him.

Like Jesus on the cross, but dreaming of golden and silver hours.

He laid prone like that feeling the weight of the thing for a long time. The heavy weight. He was breathing hard and his heart was racing.

Finally he sat up, placed the suitcase on the bed and popped open the latch.

The money was inside all right. Still neatly stacked and in tight rows. For the first time in seven years David was aware of his own pulse. He had been holding his very breath since the moment of his arrest. And holding his tongue. It had paid off. All that silence. All that clenching. All that ….

He fingered the bills. Took a stack out. Smelled it.

“Hm hm hm. I wonder if this money is gonna get me killed,” he said under his breath

His thoughts began to race.

Maybe all this money gonna send me right back to the can. Cops don’t never give up on the money. They might even be waiting for me right outside. They might be following me. How am I gonna get outta here with it? I could spend it in small amounts. Slowly over time. I could bury it again--somewhere new. How am I gonna cover up that hole in the wall? If they find that hole; they will know. Somebody will call the cops. They will start to look for me then for sure. What happens if it ain’t about the money, but all this time it’s just about something else? I gotta make a plan.

He stood up and pulled off a $100 dollar bill- stuffed it in his pocket. Then he wiped the suitcase down, removing all that white powder and dust. Then he laid down on the floor and held the suitcase across his body. The world was spinning above him as he lay there on that old dirty floor with the smell of urine and whiskey all around.

“A caballo regalado, no se le ven los dientes,” he whispered.

TO BE CONTINUED.