All Things Must Pass

toilet paper
Trace missed the toilet. He jerked the soiled gray sweatpants down around his ankles but before he could make contact with the cold porcelain bowl his aggrieved stomach opened up and spilled the murky contents of his bowels all over the white linoleum floor of the hotel bathroom.

It was three o’clock in the morning. This was the third time in a week that he experienced an urgent need to rush down the hallway to the men’s room in the dark hours, sometimes sidestepping a hungry mouse. No matter how many mouse traps the hotel managers set out there was always a live, prowling rodent to be found. It didn’t help that the old hotel was situated above both an alleyway that was a favorite pissing spot for vagrants and a funky Italian restaurant with a questionable rating from the San Francisco Health Department.

Trace peeled off his soiled sweatpants and boxer shorts and tossed them into the green plastic waste can. He was naked except for a dirty tee shirt. He thought of jumping into the shower of the communal bathroom but the mold and mildew was more than he could stand. He dashed down the hallway to the room four doors down that he shared with Lisa. She was already stirring in bed when he returned.

“What happened?” she mumbled. Trace loomed over the bed – an aged mattress and box springs with no frame – and cleaned the excrement from his legs with a handful of fresh baby wipes. He tossed the dirty wipes into a trash bag in the corner.

“I shit myself again,” Trace muttered in disgust. He pulled on his last clean pair of underwear and lit a cigarette. He sat down in the wicker armchair and stared out the window at Coit Tower in the darkness.

“You’re detoxing,” Lisa said, sitting up in bed with a groan.

“How can I be detoxing if I’m still drinking?” He contemptuously blew a plume of thick smoke in her direction. She pretended not to notice it was deliberate.

“You’ve been self-medicating like crazy ever since you went off your meds,” she explained calmly and fumbled for her pack of Camel Lights on the night stand. “You’re drinking more than you’re eating so your stomach is bound to be upset.”

Trace went off his medications for manic depression shortly after leaving L.A. in September of that year. He had bottomed out in Los Angeles, losing his freelancer gig with a trade magazine that catered to the adult film industry after a dispute with the executive editor over a deadline. Financial calamity ensued and Trace lost his apartment and most of his personal belongings. The few artifacts of his life that he managed to salvage – boxes of books and his awards for writing – had been hastily shoved into a storage locker in Atwater Village before he climbed aboard the Greyhound for the long trip to San Francisco.

He had a lot of time to ponder his life during that bus trip up the coast. He didn’t like most of the conclusions he came to. He could not think of himself as a failure but merely another victim of the less than charming life of a writer, a trap that many fall prey to, a thankless existence of meager royalty checks and endless pitch meetings and dull assignments for dull magazines. Peaks and valleys, highs and lows, and unexpected strings of bad luck. He was once courted by the official magazine of a major air carrier to be the west coast editor but suddenly the market changed when the World Trade Center towers came tumbling down; negotiations for Trace’s talents came to an abrupt halt as the magazine struggled to find its new identity.

Five years after the events of September 11, Trace found himself staring down a homeless existence in Los Angeles. That was when Lisa, an old flame, opened her doors to him in San Francisco, the city of his birth, a cold, dark and often violent town. She lived in the Longview Hotel in the heart of North Beach. Once the notorious hangout for Beat poets and writers, North Beach was now a neighborhood of gaudy strip clubs, rowdy bars packed full of fishermen and vagrants and wanna-be poets, expensive Italian eateries, trendy coffee bistros, and dozens of low-rent residential hotels like the Longview.

Built nine years after the great quake of 1906, the Longview was once a famous bordello. Its current inhabitants were mostly down-and-outers — welfare recipients, waiters and bus boys, department store clerks, musicians, and retirees with too small a pension to afford a better place to dwell. The rooms were small – eleven feet by eleven feet – and Trace often felt trapped during the weekday afternoons when Lisa was at her job as a project manager for U.C. Berkeley across the bay.

Days after arriving in San Francisco, Trace’s depression darkened. He had stopped taking his medications because he felt they were robbing him of his creative capabilities. Earlier in the year he had churned out twenty-five magazine articles and sixty short stories but after the anti-depressants got into his system he was barely capable of writing a grocery list.

Lisa slipped him ten or twenty bucks every morning before leaving for work. He drank his breakfast at the cheapest bars he could find and usually had enough cash left over for a greasy hamburger or a grilled sausage sandwich.

By December, three months after arriving, Trace’s physical and mental health was deteriorating at a rapid and alarming pace. If he could write he could find work but the muse was dead or on life support somewhere in his head. Money was scarce and they could hardly get by on Lisa’s income.

“I’m forty-seven years old and I’ve been writing professionally for fifteen years,” he complained bitterly to Lisa one evening. “It’s all I know how to do and these days I can’t even write a goddamn porno script. I used to be able to fall out of bed and write one of those pieces of shit.”

After dinner Trace trudged down the hall to the bathroom and spilled the contents of his dinner into the toilet. This time he managed to hit the bowl. On the bathroom stall door a crude handwritten sign had been posted in response to Trace’s last bowel-blowing accident: PLEASE DO NOT MAKE DIRTY MESS IN BATHROOM. THANK YOU. MGR.

Trace read the sign and chuckled at the rudimentary English.

“I think I have an idea for a short story,” he informed Lisa when he returned from the men’s room.

“Really?” She brightened.

“Yeah. It begins with a dissipated writer who dies on the toilet of a flop house hotel in San Francisco.”

Maybe, he thought, I can write myself out of this goddamn mess after all.

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Published:
12.11.06 / 3pm
Category:
The Trace Stories
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