Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn Page B

time of month or day, partly employed or just collecting one type of check or another to keep afloat. Margaret’s in it to make money, but she understands that sometimes she’ll get burned—Catholic charity meets the free market. If a guy’s on a bender, sliding downhill fast and unable to get out of it, locked in his room 24/7, incontinent, she will stop by, knock, look around the room, tell him she’s going to leave for a couple hours and that when she comes back she wants him shaved and dressed and she’ll take him to detox. If he can sober up for those twenty-eight days she will hold his room, she says, but if she has to put him out his room will be gone and he’ll never come back. Half the time it would work. The really bad ones would say, Put one foot inside the door and I call the cops. These were the ones who would stew all day thinking about one thing—how best to drink in comparative safety. Drunk but not crazy, they knew the law, and drunkenness, in and of itself, was no longer a crime. If she had to she would wait for this type to pass out, wrap his belongings up in a bedsheet and stash them in another room, take the keys off his sleeping body, drag the body by the ankles into the hallway, call the cops. No, no, I never seen him before, must have just snuck in to sleep one off, and they’d haul him away. Margaret understood how to deal with drunks, in part because she’d struggled with her own drinking over the years. She knew there was a point where it was useless to reason.
     
    In comparison to the rest Jonathan looks pretty good. Margaret knows him from parties at Ray and Clare’s over the years, and offers him a room in the house on Beale Street, rent-free in exchange for managing the place. Managing consists of keeping the bathrooms clean and collecting the rent, calling her in case anything breaks down or falls in. Once beautiful, this house, with a curved mahogany staircase, a statue of the blessed Virgin in a niche between floors, though the neighborhood itself has fallen on hard times. The Ashmont subway stop is nearby, and the trains screech and rattle at five A.M .
    Luther rents one room on the top floor. Four hundred pounds, in and out of institutions his whole life for one psychotic break or another, Luther assures Margaret that he doesn’t lose his temper anymore, that whenever he gets close he just takes out his nails and hammers them into the floor. Across from him is Alan, an amateur boxer, punch-drunk, jabbing and ducking his way up the stairs. On the floor below is Baxter—a real “bottom-of-the-barrel redneck type”—drinks the cheapest beer, tapes racist messages to his door. Jonathan looks like a first-class liberal next to him . In the beginning Jonathan and Baxter get along, throw back a few in the evenings, but soon they have a falling out—it’s said that Jonathan walloped Baxter, and that Baxter’s son came over and beat Jonathan good. Jonathan isn’t drinking heavily at this time, he hands over the rent along with a neat list of all the things he bought for the house, cleans the bathrooms, keeps his place tidy. He’s driving a cab and putting money away. So Margaret has to get rid of Baxter.
    Margaret tells me all this years later. At the time I know almost nothing about my father, nor do I care. Lots of people would be good for long periods of time, Margaret says, then pick up a drink and it was over. At first it seemed Jonathan could drink moderately, but within a few months he starts going downhill. He stops handing over the rent, stops answering her calls, avoids Margaret. Other things occupy her, she lets it slide. One month, three. Five. She blames herself, she should have been paying more attention— You don’t have the right to put temptation in front of people . Even so, eventually she takes him to court. It was hard otherwise to get his attention. He presents a list to the magistrate of the housing court, detailing, among other expenses, two thousand