Letters from Amherst. Samuel R. Delany

on the block gave Dennis ten bucks a day to watch his car; if the police came down the block, giving out tickets, Dennis would go into the shop and get him, and the man would drive his car off before the police made it to his spot. “And he don’t leave the store, sometimes,” Dennis explained to me, “till eight-thirty or nine sometimes.”

      At nine that night, with a Pakistani cab driver supremely indifferent to my muddled instructions about picking up a friend on 72nd and continuing down to 49th, I took a taxi down to the all but deserted commercial street.

      No Dennis.

      So I got out and let the cab go, wondering if he’d chickened out. I ambled over to stand in his doorway, thinking I’d give him half an hour to show up. Every five minutes or so, I’d glance up and down the street.

      After about ten minutes, I glimpsed a figure wearing a backpack, carrying a bed roll, and hurrying from the east. Through his scraggly beard, Dennis grinned at me. “Oh, man!” he said, hurrying up to me. “I’m glad you’re here. I kept thinking I was gonna miss you!”

      “I was going to wait,” I told him. “It’s okay.”

      “Fifteen minutes to nine,” he said, putting down his bed roll, “and I suddenly gotta take a dump in the worst way. I says to myself, oh, no—God, don’t do this to me now! But it was one of those that wasn’t gonna hold off. So I had to go over to Central Park and find a spot where I could do it.”

      “You okay now?” I asked him.

      “Yeah.” He grinned. “I think so.”

      “Let’s go to the corner and get a cab.”

      “They gonna let me into that motel, like this …?” Dennis asked, tentatively, picking up the roll again. Clearly he meant the dirt.

      “Don’t worry,” I said. “The place rents to a lot of truck drivers and working guys coming into the city. You’re a working stiff who just got off work and you’re going upstairs to take a shower.”

      “Oh …” Dennis said, without too much conviction.

      I didn’t blame him. But I knew it would pass.

      At the corner, I hailed a cab, loaded Dennis into the back seat, and slid in beside him. Ten minutes later, we walked into the spiffy, be-palmed and mirrored lobby of the Skyline, Dennis in his dirt-stiff jumpsuit, no-colored wool hat, and scroungy back-pack, with his blackened face and hands. Nobody stopped us.

      Up in our beige, Best Western double room, Dennis dropped his pack and immediately began to take off his clothes. “I wanna get into that shower, man,” he said, getting out of his perfectly foul, padded jump suit. “I gotta take my shoes off, man,” he grunted, reaching down from the edge of the bed. “I hope you got a strong stomach.”

      The high laced workboots, and the three layers of socks beneath them, came off—and out of them came a stench that, frankly, beats anything I’ve ever smelled before. I’ve put a good dozen homeless guys through their first shower in three months, in six months, in a year. But this was something else.

      “When is the last time you had them off, Dennis?” I asked.

      “I donno.” He shrugged. “Two months. Three months, I guess.” From which I assume he’d been wearing them, night and day, since mid-October. As I said, it was the end of February. The inner pair of socks had simply decayed around his feet.

      Dennis went into shower—but ended up bathing, first.

      Again, I’ve seen people take baths where the water turned gray from the dirt. But five minutes after he went in, I looked in to see how he was doing. He might as well have been sitting in a tub of India ink. Gray suds floated around the clutch of his bone-white ribs. Black trickles from his hair’s wet ends tunneled down his back. If you’d poured another bottle of ink over his shoulders, what ran from his grayish hair couldn’t have been blacker.

      He went through a second tub of water and a second soaping. Then he took a shower.

      Out in the room once more, toweling himself off, he said, “I guess I must be pretty clean now.” His big hands were still gray, as he turned them over to examine them. But it was as though the dirt, at least there, had become part of him.

      Next we sat down on the bed, and began to talk.

      Then we lay down.

      And held each other. For about two days.

      A couple of interchanges from it all:

      “How come I told you so much about me?” Dennis asked me, once. “I don’t understand that. I don’t know you. Yet, I can’t seem to stop talking about myself. I ain’t told nobody this much about me in my whole life—I didn’t even know there was this much about me to tell!”

      Once, in the middle of the night, he got sick—and threw up in the John toilet. I held his head, cleaned him up, put him back to bed, and rubbed his back till he fell asleep. (It wasn’t drink; we’d had no more than two beers apiece, but whatever had given him the shits earlier that night must have caught up to him.) Later he was feeling a little better, and we had more sex.

      At another point (day or night, I’m not sure), we lay holding each other in the dark room and watched, silently, almost in awe, a PBS TV show on the formation of the universe, with spiraling, flaring images of the forming planets, comets, and stars.

      At still another, squatting naked in the middle of the floor, beside the pile of discarded clothing (we’d agreed he had to throw at least half of it away, as is was too filthy and/or rotten through to salvage), Dennis unpacked and repacked his whole backpack: two rolls of toilet paper, some clean clothes he’d forgotten someone had given him several months ago, a cassette radio/recorder, some tape cassettes (Ray Stevens, Carly Simon, Crystal Gayle, Charlie Daniels, Moms Mabley, Pete Fountain …) some cooking pots, some silverware, a box of sugar, bunches of papers, endless folded up plastic bags …

      He arranged all of it, meticulously across the motel carpet, each item square with each other item, then, still naked, his grayish hair around his shoulders (although he is not, by any one’s notion, a muscular man, there’s no fat on him at all), he repacked it.