Exit Wounds

by Charles McLeod

I was renting the attic room of an illegal boarding house, a condemned Victorian run by a mistress of the Chief of Police, but there’d been an argument of some sort between these two parties and the place had been raided and boards nailed over the windows and doors.

I tried to find my car, but I couldn’t find it. So I went down to the BART at Mission & 16th to look for my friend Terry, who sells fake drugs there sometimes. Sure enough, there he was.

“I knew you’d be here,” I said.

“Where else do I have to go?” Terry answered.

He was crouched down, cutting up a bar of soap with a penknife. The curled peels were landing on a page of newspaper he’d spread out over the ground. The hood of Terry’s sweatshirt was ripped off on one side, and it looked like he had a short, broken cape attached to himself. Schoolchildren were playing in the afternoon shadows, finding ways to wreck their Catholic plaids.

The air smelled of water and garbage. People ascended the escalator, pretending we weren’t even there.

“You could make yourself useful for once,” Terry told me. “Why don’t you start filling up these balloons?” From his palm, he shook out five or six of the little rubber things, but I didn’t feel like working.

“What are we going to call them when we’re done?”

“They’re ‘one-and-ones’—cocaine and heroin, all mashed up.”

“But they’re soap.”

“Now you’ve got the music going.”

“Do you happen to have any real drugs?” I asked.

“I will after I’ve sold these,” Terry said.

In the upstairs of a thrift store, I kept putting items in my pockets. I wanted everything, now that I had nowhere for any of it to go. One of those Guardian Angels in their tilted hats got right up next to me and crossed his arms, but I just stood there, staring at the metal shelves of goblets and ceramic junk.

“I saw what you were doing,” the Angel said.

“It all looks so lonely,” I told him. “I’m only trying to help.”

That morning, we the evicted had stood on the tall sidewalk of Texas St., waiting for the cuffs to snap on. There were ten of us in total, or fifteen, and certainly we had never been gathered like this before, blinking in the sun and horribly aware of one another, figuring out who had cigarettes and who did not. The policemen had brought hammers; they were ripping the shutters off the front of the house and turning them sideways over the windows. The mistress was wailing and being led down the steps.

“My truths, my liberties, my livelihood,” she pleaded. Mascara had stained her fake silk dress. Some in our group were prying at her fingers—I had thought we were trying to save her, but we were really only after her rings. When the policemen drew their batons, we scattered, spreading like pollen over the city.

Mission Street was miles long, and I’d been over every inch of it, from the Greyhound station at the foot of the Bridge out to Silver Avenue, where most of the shop signs were in Spanish. But I could never remember what stood where, the specific order of things, so I walked the blocks again and again, checking and rechecking, hoping some wide, precious idea might strike me, because I could feel myself getting older, the ports closing, the ships pulling up their ropes.


Past the door frame of The Audrey, I saw Parnell on a stool. He was nursing a port and shirtless, his black skin shining in the sun. On weekends, for work, Parnell painted over the track marks on his neck with makeup and did ventriloquism at children’s parties. His stage name, I think, was Sultan the Wondrous. His dummy’s name was Parnell.

The Audrey itself was a long, narrow bar; until the eighties, it had shared a wall with a garment factory, but that place had caught fire and its insides had melted, and it would never be rebuilt. Above The Audrey’s booths, you could see where the plaster had bubbled and pocked from the heat, the flames wanting more and more. It was an easy place to feel brave in, and this, of course, was what we were after, to be the survivors of some tragedy that could never have affected us, to live on and on, telling lies to strangers about having seen the ashes and tasted the soot.

Parnell, the real one, lent money on occasion. I was terrified of him, which he admired me for. In this way, the two of us had built a relationship based around debt.

“Your car got towed and I’m completely broke,” he told me. “It was Jenkins that did it, so you know.”

“Are you sure you don’t have any money?” I asked him. “Did you check in your shoes, by your feet?”

The Audrey was empty except for the two of us. Parnell just sat there and shrugged. “I’m drinking on vouchers the bartender made me. You can ask him yourself when he gets back.”

“Where did he go in the first place?”

“His dog’s dying. He took it to the vet.”

“Jenkins hit that ambulance last Saturday on Valencia. His wrecker’s all smashed to pieces now. How did the bartender make you those vouchers? No one would believe that, not a species on earth.”

“My pockets are empty. There aren’t any parties for months.”

“Not a rat or a badger,” I said. “Not a flea or an ape or a bird.”

Over Parnell’s back were tattoos that spelled out lines from the Scripture; I could make out the shalls and the haths and the wants. From the stool next to him, he lifted up his puppet. Its legs swung on their twined pulleys. The wood face looked just like Parnell’s own.

“I could do a show for you,” he said, brightening. “I could practice my routine.” Parnell stuck his arm into the guts of the dummy. The Audrey’s television was on, but the sound was off. Around a lawn diamond in a different time zone, players stood waiting, and here I was thinking of them, when they would never, ever think of me. Past the bar’s door a bus gasped, accelerating toward somewhere else. For a moment, it blocked out the sun entirely, and I could see, for the first time, Parnell’s eyes. He was flung on dope, just gone.

“You could have saved me some of what you’ve taken,” I told him. “That was a pretty selfish thing to do.”

“Help, this man has his hands in me,” said the puppet. “Help, help, help, help, help.”

“Would you tell if I took a beer from the cooler? Could I get behind there and back out?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” said Parnell. “The dog, it was shaking so badly. It was a big thing, a lab or a hound. The people around here, they’re just exit wounds. They’re just proof that something went wrong.”

I leaned over the bar’s counter, sliding back the cooler’s door. Inside were ice and endless varieties. The columned bottles were sweating, as though it was work just waiting there. There were so many kinds I couldn’t make a decision; I started taking all of them out, using my lighter to pry off their tops.

“God,” the puppet said, “grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

“What did he say?” I asked, finishing one bottle and picking up another.

“Nothing,” Parnell told me. “Not at all.”


At one point, toward the very end, when my actions had made me a larger monster and there were people literally hunting me down, I’d drifted east toward Nevada, though I had somewhere more distant in mind: Cheyenne or Minot or Moline, somewhere so far that if I finally got there, I might not be able to leave.

South of Fresno, I spent the night at a temple, the monks in their saffron robes. Would you believe me when I say I couldn’t speak if I’d wanted to? In the stone room where I spent the night, I was completely muted—the silence had been that great. I’d always thought there was a connection between misery and religion, but there on the night stand was the Buddha, plump and joyous and wise.

In the morning, this silence had lifted, and a younger monk led me to a garden at the center of the temple’s confines. Here were rows and rows of tomato plants, their fruit a buoyant red. The two of us knelt down close to the soil.

“You have to brush the aphids off,” the monk told me, “but you must do this without killing a single one.” In the dawn light, he guided my hand over the leaf of a plant, its little hairs like sticky wool.

“I can’t see them,” I said. “Or it’s a trick? They’re not really there?”

“It’s not a trick.”

“I want to be feeling what you’re feeling, I promise. But I’m broke and have miles to go.”

“We can give you money, if that’s what you’re after. Not much, but some, yes.”

I tried harder after hearing this. In my mind, though, the usual things came back: shattered glass and the mouths of alleys, sirens and plastic bags. A woman I’d married from fear, and abandoned for the same reason. The leaves tore my fingers, their insides leaking out.

“It would all take so much work to fix,” I said.

“It takes the same amount every day,” the monk agreed.


It turned out that Parnell did have more of what he’d taken, and in the bathroom of The Audrey I used his needle to dump it into my veins. When I came back out, the light had grown loose or aquatic; the shadows from the passing cars wove and swayed like kelp. I’d gone from something crooked and awkward to something polished and perfect, round and entirely smooth. I sat down next to Parnell. When I woke up, the bartender was yelling at me, his dog there beside him on the ground....