The Casino Payphone (Part 1)

I sat on a park bench on Millionaire Row with empty pockets, with an empty stomach, and with a pair of walking shoes whose soles were as worn-out and tired as was my own. On the corner of Park Avenue and Elm, where the most affluent money grabbers bedded down a hundred-years ago in the mansions lining the pristine green grass of Wick Park, I waited under the scorching August sun with sweat streaming down my unshaven face and dripping from my chin. My puke-green tee-shirt hung from the gallows of my neck, stretched at the collar and torn in places, the way dead men swing from trees with x’s in their eyes. An expression of pain, exhausted and stripped of pride, must have hung from my face the same way. A hundred years ago I would have been chased out of this neighborhood. Today, I was just another degenerate drug sponge spotting up the landscape around the Northside of the city.

In a half-circle of decretive benches surrounding a watery park-fountain, where two sidewalks come to a point in a neatly manicured swab of concrete and landscaping, I waited, hunched at the spine and gnarled from the inside with impatience. My eyes were set on a solitary red payphone at the edge of the Flower Shop parking lot, catty-cornered and across the street from where the wood slats of the park bench burnt my bare and malnourished legs where they spilled from the green canvas cut-off shorts I’d pulled this morning from the dirty clothes pile on the floor of my rented room down the street.

I pushed myself into a proper sitting position with open palms flat on the bench. The beauty of freshly cut grass went as unnoticed as the speckles of pollen on a bumblebee’s ass, and the yellows and oranges of blooming flowers meant nothing to me as I sat for hours on that bench, day after day, shifting my weight from leg to leg, my thighs cramping in spasms. My arms wrapped around myself, I feverishly rubbed any exposed flesh. Healthy people do not sit shivering, freezing cold in the triple-digit-heat of the hottest summer on record. Healthy people don’t carry used needles around in their sweat socks either… and they don’t live off Ramen Noodles, stale bread, and whatever’s in the condiment section on the door of their refrigerator. They go to work and get a good night’s sleep.

I haven’t been into the office in months, I thought. I can’t show my face there looking like this.

I peered down where the neck of my shirt hung open. My malnourished ribs and the bones in my face protruded from a deficiency of sandwiches and meat that didn’t come from the value-meal menu of a local drive-thru. A permanent sour smell stuck to my skin. Like the smell of bong water after it’s soaked into the carpet and has been forgotten about for a while. It seeped out from my rotten insides, where any life left in me at that point was decaying, in that, the second-worst summer of my whole puff.

A wave of nausea ripped through me and I doubled over, holding my stomach and allowing my expression to twist into the pained and open-mouthed grimace I’d make if I were passing a brick into the toilet. I moaned and rocked forward and reeled back until my cramping stomach subsided. Then I sat up and lit a cigarette just as a man in a rusty red Mustang pulled up to the payphone across the street and pumped a few coins into the slot.

I slowly straightened myself with discipline and focused my attention over the misting waters of the fountain, through the rusty iron poles of an old park sculpture, and passed the fire-hydrant painted black, red and white to look like a penguin (the nearby University’s mascot), and I stared at the bright red back of the payphone. When I heard the man hang up the receiver, I stood up, listening for more, but didn’t hear anything else.

The engine must be too loud.

By the time I crossed the street and trotted to the payphone, the Mustang had already pulled from the parking lot. I listened to its muffler growling up Elm Street as my finger searched around in the coin-return for anything shiny. Nothing. Fuck.

“Can’t sit there… anymore,” I muttered under my breath as my eyes jumped across the street to the park bench.

 “My legs… I got to walk the cramps off.”

Loose stones crunched on the asphalt as I made my way to the tall brick dorm buildings of UCLA… that is, the University on the Corner of Lincoln Avenue, on the northern edge of downtown Youngstown, Ohio. My rented room was one block north of the college campus and was two blocks in a different direction from the payphone in the Flower Shop parking lot. Dopesick on the sidewalk, I plodded south. The neighborhood dropped off in all directions leaving the Wick Park area, which remains well maintained due to its status of being on the National Register of Historical Neighborhoods.

 Past the old Penguin Pub and the University Red & White grocery store, behind which, peeling paint and plywood on windowless shells of two-story homes stripped of aluminum siding and copper piping littered the streets going eastward from the sidewalk I was stumbling down.

Exhausted, I shuffled my limp legs over the cracks in the sidewalk, where grass had grown through and the curbs were crumbling into the street. The neighborhood to one side of me was rotted and falling apart, as was I, exhausted and broken down inside and out, like these vacant, boarded-up houses that lined so many streets in Youngstown, before gentrification would take over and all that abandonment would be torn down to let the greenery of nature take over and beautify the city again.

I slung my dreary eyes to the opposite side of Elm Street, as if I were gazing across the road-of-life at an existence that was foreign to the tar pit I had made of my own life. On the other side of Elm Street was the quaint and well-maintained Dorian Books building. Then the manicured lawns and the clean white paved paths weaving and snaking through the grass to a spattering of uniform brick buildings, all five-stories high with pointed peaks, that the kids who attended class at the campus just a two-minute walk across a freeway overpass lived in.

Across the street, the buildings were noticeably newer, having been constructed within the past five years as the campus, dedicated to cleaning up a city that’s taken its share of punches, encroached into neighborhoods far past the state of ‘decline’ and well within the definition of ‘blight’. The pristine condition of the campus buildings across the street were a sharp contrast to the hopeless vacancy present in both my current life, and in the neighborhoods that lie behind me as I plodded across the street toward the clean, toward the new, toward hope and undefined potential, knowledge and youthful idealism. Exactly what was on the clean side of the street was foreign to me, since the dorm buildings hadn’t been there when I went to school here years ago.

“That’s it,” I said, under my breath. “After today, no more. I’ll get a dozen cans of soup, some ravioli, eat it cold. Lay in bed. Sweat it out. Three or four days, I’ll be through the worst of it.”

Easy as crossing the street, I thought.

“This one right here to get me well… and that’s it. Whatever money I make today I’ll spend on food to get me through the sickness, so I won’t have to leave the house.”

I was mumbling to myself, so immersed in my thoughts and awash in withdrawal that I was unaware my lips were moving. Dressed in dirty, torn clothes on a frame of transparent flesh over bones, I staggered down the street. I was stricken, sick in the mind and the body. An addict, seeking asylum in the myth of a strengthening backbone. A vagrant whose lips move to the ears of no one, closing in on the escape route, the life-rope. An affront to the locals who carry books and wear clean socks and who’ve showered at least once in the last few days. The open sidewalks and clean parking lots, the plats of grass with sitting students reading under trees were welcoming to me, freeing in their possibilities. The paved paths that ran through the grass and connected all the dorm buildings all lead somewhere new that I’d never been. Maybe someday I’d walk those paths, just to see where they went. On the clean side of the street, things will be different, I thought.

I could taste the change I wanted.

But as I got closer, I found that an iron fence barred me from entering the area around the new dorms with the yet unfollowed paths and the pretty young girls in the grass. The fence ran the length of the sidewalk and separated the clean side of the street from the rest of the dirty city, and from bums like me.

No matter, the student’s dorms were not my destination. I was going to walk onto campus, toward normality, toward respectable society, toward a pool of people intent on bettering themselves, furthering their future. I was only going to find a water fountain, then a bathroom sink, where I could splash myself a faceful of the cold stuff. At the end of that fence, another fence began. A taller chain link fence, running the length of the freeway overpass.

“From here on out it will be different,” I thought, crossing over the hurried flow of freeway traffic below. “Crossing this bridge over the chaos, to the clean and respectable, signifies crossing a line for me… a new beginning… this is where I turn it all around.” I mumbled to myself.

And I was not wrong.

It would only take me a few seconds to turn around. The entrance to the campus proper was right after the freeway bridge, and the security guard stood up and took notice of me approaching like a half-dead zombie emerging from the woods. He hovered there in his little booth and raised his chin at me. I acted as if I hadn’t noticed him and walked a little closer, paused, looked both ways for traffic, then crossed back over to the dirty side of the street, as if that’s what I’d been planning on doing all along.

I’d tried for the clean side and was denied, so I turned away from Campus Security and crossed back over the freeway overpass, over the line of chaos I was hoping to put behind me, and headed back the way I came, back toward a life in chains, toward the blindness of my decisions and the stench of my own bottom… toward the defective payphone I’d been supporting my habit on for weeks now.

Imagine having to gather twenty dollars in change from the coin return of a payphone, thirty-five cents at a time, before you could feel like you weren’t going to either puke down your shirt or shit in your pants. It was a sharp contrast to the meaty paychecks I’d been accustomed to while working at the office I was too emaciated to show my face at, or the money I was making at the beginning of the summer, when I held four different jobs at once, and a solid clean-date.

When I got to the payphone at the end of the Flower Shop parking lot, I pushed my finger into the coin return and a deep pile of change jingled and shined as I scooped it out into my palm. About one in every fifteen people made a long-distance call, and the coins would fall directly into the change return after hanging up. It was a crap shoot whether the person took their change back, which they’d do if they noticed the difference in sound, as it fell into the coin return instead of into the guts of the payphone. This was a sad slot machine in an abandoned casino with a coin return lever for an arm to pull, and whether it paid out or not, I’d still come out the loser. The house always wins when it’s a dopehouse you’re in.

(Continues...)