“Tilt your head back.” Her eyes point to the gutted ceiling, a ribcage of rotting wood over rusted pipes and bunches of multicolored wires. The room is roughly the size of a dorm, containing a two-inch thick bare mattress on a flimsy metal frame, a suitcase under a pile of clothes, a filthy hot plate and a greasy-haired kid slumped against the wall in a fetal position. One of the grime-frosted window panes is busted out, and there is a torn and faded Rocky Horror poster on the otherwise empty walls. It smells like moth balls.
Out-of-place loners stalk the hallways, glancing at us as they pass — a dead ringer for Jeffrey Dahmer clad in Salvation Army donations, a pudgy Middle Eastern man with a turban and a permanent scowl, a weary-eyed and ashy-skinned black woman in a nightgown. Down the hall a pair of tone-deaf junkies wail away on a guitar and a drum in a room with the door ripped off. Across from them is the community kitchen, where fruit flies dance over encrusted bits of Ramen and a mountain of dishware that would likely make mothers everywhere cry. The shared bathroom a few doors over is splattered with vomit, shit, piss and blood, spiders having made a permanent home in the rust covered shower.
“Thank you,” she honks, her nose clamped with a blood stained tissue. She is terribly gaunt and pale, her torso plastered with all sorts low-rent tattoos — tribal patterns, spiderwebs, bleeding hearts, knives, etc.
“I’m Dan.”
“Kib,” she says, turning to meet my eyes. I tilt her head back into position.
“How old are you, Kim?”
“Ibe twenny.”
“And what brings you to a place like this?”
“I lib ear.”
“A little too much coke?” She nods. “And that’s all?” She nods again. “And the crying?”
“Wooden you be?” She pulls the tissue from her nose, a small fleck of it catching on her nose ring. I gently grab her jaw and examine her stained nostrils. When she moves, you can see every bone in her body shifting beneath her pale skin.
“It looks like the worst is over…keep pressure on it for awhile longer.”
“So why are you here?”
“I came for the show,” I say, pointing towards the off-key wailing down the hall.
“Funny,” she says, dabbing her nose with her finger and examining it.
“You laugh or you cry.”
“Close the door,” she warns as I fish a cigarette pack from my pocket. “They’ll hound you if they see them.”
“Who’s the stiff?” I ask, closing the door and lighting two in my mouth.
“Thanks,” she says, taking the cigarette. “That’s James. He’s my…I stay with him.” She takes a drag and mulls something over. “I fucking hate him.”
She leans over me to ash her cigarette in the soot-stained sculpted tinfoil near my knee. As she coils back, she tries to kiss me, her upper lip still stained maroon. I jerk away.
“Sorry,” she says, lowering her head and sliding her hands between her knees.
“No big deal.”
“I just thought…”
“It’s OK…really.”
“Thanks for stopping by to help…I mean, I would’ve been fine, but…most of the people here don’t care…or they’re just afraid of each other.”
“I know what you mean.”
We sit in silence for awhile, working at our cigarettes and wading through the muck of our own minds.
“This place is Hell.”
“I know.”
