Free We Were Kings by Thomas O'Malley Page A

by whom. But the cycle itself was unending, and he’d seen enough in his short lifetime already. He was sick of it and even more sickened that not only could he not prevent it but that he was, most often, its cause.
    He lived in a boardinghouse in the Fort Point Channel—the site of the Boston Tea Party—that a century before had been a hotel for bargemen and skippers, a first stop for nearly penniless immigrants just off the boat, and a meat rack for the rough trade from the dockland wharves just over the bridges. The place had a regal-sounding name—the Excelsior—but knowing the area, Cal doubted it had ever been regal. Cal mused on the name, thought of the poem by Whitman and almost laughed. He spoke aloud: “‘Who has gone farthest? for I would go farther. And who has been just? for I would be the most just person of the earth.’”
    He had a closet with a dozen shirts, five ties, and three suits, and his dresser was filled with clean clothes. He had lived in four hotels in the three years since Lynne had died and he knew better than to try to convince himself that this would be the last. It would do for now and he was in no rush to leave when there was no place he wanted to be. He’d been here for so many months that he’d earned the status of a long-timer, someone with no particular date by which he might leave and, most likely, no plans of anything better. His dreams of something better had died with Lynne.
    He saw the other long-timers in the hall on his way to the bathroom. Unlike the weekly or monthly stays—junkies and drunks and johns with their male and female whores, grifters and sinners and those fleeing the law or a con gone bad, people who still seemed to have some manner of urgency about them, a need to be elsewhere, a desire to get on living—the long-timers looked as if the living had been knocked out of them. They shuffled in the hallways and remained mostly still and quiet behind their doors, perhaps listening to a baseball game on the radio, some old band tunes, or the Friday-night fights; they barely looked up when you passed them and some seemed surprised when you greeted them with a good morning or a hello.
    He’d been here long enough to make the place comfortable even if he could never call it home. He had an icebox and a hot plate, and his heavy bag hung in the corner of the room near the window. By his radio, gleaming dully on a small end table, he had a reading chair, and should he have guests, although he never did—except for Dante bringing Maria over once—there was a small Formica table with a fold-down sleeve and two metal chairs with vinyl seats.
    With his towel and toiletries he walked down the hall to the bathroom and had to wait for another tenant, who sounded as if he were wringing his guts out, to finish up. When the door finally opened, he let the tenant pass and then stepped in and the smell assaulted him. Cursing, he placed his towel on the rack and his shaving kit by the grime-encrusted sink, glanced in the toilet, and stopped. He stepped out again. The tenant was halfway down the hall.
    “Hey,” Cal called. “You. Come here.”
    The man turned; he looked to be a year or two older than Cal and had about twenty pounds on him and a couple of inches. His curly brown hair was tight on the sides and high on top. He had a low, wide forehead and a constant squint. There were red-and-black-plaid slippers on his feet with the stuffing poking out of them.
    “You didn’t flush. Finish your business.”
    “What?”
    “I ain’t your mother. I’m not here to flush after you.”
    “What’s your problem, man?”
    “Everyone cleans up after themselves. That’s how it works.”
    “Fuck you.”
    “Come flush your shit or I’ll take it and smear your face in it.”
    “You’ve got a real big mouth for a little man.”
    “I’m not asking you again.”
    The man stared at him, frowning, undecided, and then he wavered, sighed deeply, and came back toward the bathroom.