Hope This Helps
M. Stan Yow
5/28/2010
Fat Bob reclined against the green façade of Fast Buck Freddy’s and yawned, his mouth a quagmire of broken, missing and dirty teeth and halitosis. The rotten yellow stench of what he drank last night accentuating the tang of urine and rotten garbage that always seemed to hang over him like a ragged backpack.
He blinked his puffy eyes, looked around and let his mind remind him of where he was. Key West, of course. The end of the road. Bob had been waking in various locations in Key West for over nine years now. Sometimes it just took a minute to remember.
His first home when he arrived was a flattened cardboard box under a singlewide trailer parked behind the VFW that he shared with Scruffy and Preacher Steve. Scruffy was ok but the Preacher got on his nerves, bumming smokes, drinking malt liquor and then telling Fat Bob what an asshole everyone was.
Fat Bob had been on the road for a decade, at last count. He hitched his way to Key West because he was sick of freezing his ass in Oregon and the End of the Road sounded fitting against the backdrop of his mood. The Southernmost Point. You can only go so far down without learning to swim.
Amen.
He did not want to be homeless anymore. He wanted a job; he wanted to get his teeth fixed, to get his shit together. He didn’t even remember when it happened. All he knew anymore was that it had to do with his son. Robert Jr. was killed by his own mother, Fat Bob’s wife, over crack and whose turn it was at the pipe. Bob wasn’t there when it happened. He was five miles away getting arrested for attempting to score more dope. He always blamed himself for what happened even though he knows better. Some things are just going to happen. Some things are inevitable. Death, taxes, and crack cocaine.
Amen.
Things are looking much better now; Fat Bob will tell anyone who will listen. He has been off the pipe for three years one month and thirteen days. He will tell you that he went insane with the death of his son but he is getting better, better still if he could kick the booze.
Have you got a dollar for a vet?
Bob loves waking up on this side of the street with the early morning sun warming his wizened face. He loves the daily birth of Duval Street. The sleepy hose washing of the sidewalks. Last night’s revelry sprayed into the street and beyond. Power walkers and daydreamers. Bleary eyed tourists stumbling from overpriced and no doubt posh digs as hungover as Bob yet somehow more respectable, trying to squeeze every moment from too short vacations. Bicycles roll past quietly and Bob can smell coffee brewing. The air is scented with flowers.
You spare some change for a cup of coffee?
Thank you, brother. Enjoy your vacation.
Bob rolled a cigarette from salvaged butts with nicotine stained fingers so gnarled and scarred they resembled losers in an industrial accident and watched as the couple struggled with an oversized suitcase and three duct taped cardboard boxes on a dolly. The suitcase was as dirty and ragged as Bob felt this morning. It had no wheels. Newbies, thought Bob as they trudged past. He considered asking them for some change but they looked damned near as poor as himself and he just let them pass. How sad, he thinks, so desperate to escape whatever life they were living that all they brought with them was busted luggage and cardboard boxes. He gave them a week. Fat Bob pops the rollie in his mouth and lights it from a pack of matches. In a few moments, he forgets about the harried couple, stands up, brushes the seat of his filthy jeans and begins his search for today’s first beer.
Donna and Danny Skinner are late. They hurry down Duval Street without even glancing at the tourist shops with their kitschy merchandise such as fart themed t-shirts and pink flamingo martini glasses. The Skinners have an appointment. Danny shifts the dolly to his other shoulder as they step around a particularly odoriferous homeless guy rolling what looked like a joint on the sidewalk. Both of them had heard about the homeless problem in America but it was never much of a problem in most of rural Tennessee so a certain lack of sensitivity had to be expected, Donna Skinner supposed. Her and Danny had both been raised poor but not destitute and it was always taken for granted that people had to work for anything they had. Although they had never had much, they were both hard working Christian folks and had saved everything they could. Taking handouts was an alien concept. They had no children.
Although they never considered themselves in that way (they were both good Baptists for the most part.), they were a bit more intelligent than most of their neighbors back home. Instead of investing their hard earned money in Elvis figurines and Dale Earnhart commemorative plates they instead bought old comic books. Danny had been collecting since he was eight years old when his father bought him a Detective Comics issue with Batman in it. Danny still had that one, in near mint condition, wrapped in plastic, in one of the boxes he was pushing down the street.
Sometime in junior year, in their first year of dating, Donna caught the bug. For his high school graduation, one year earlier than hers, Donna presented Danny with one of the holy grails of comic collectors everywhere. Amazing Fantasy number 15, the first appearance of Spiderman. She had found it along with hundreds of others in mint condition in the attic of an ancient widow’s home. The venerated widow, although disapproving of the young lady’s interest in such a frivolous and boyish hobby, let Donna have the entire collection that had been her husband’s passing fancy during his college years.
The comic books were the reason for this trip to Key West. Combining business with the first vacation they had taken since the day they were married, they were meeting a private collector from Miami this morning at the La Concha Hotel in hopes of selling the entire collection. It would make them rich. Not Bill Gates rich but a couple of million to poor country folk was enough to stagger their limited imaginings. Donna held the door while Danny wrestled the boxes into the lobby. She was a good wife. Danny was so proud of her. He wanted to hug her but there was no time. They had an appointment on the third floor and they were late.
Timmy Gomez loved his job most days. Today was not one those days. He had only two tables to wait here on the rooftop of the La Concha but both were proving to be world class pains in his Jersey born ass. First were the Hungry Laughers. Although very nice people, polite and cheerful, the shabbily dressed duo were running him ragged. It was as if they had never eaten before. Timmy supposed that by now they had consumed about most of the items on the extended menu. There was food everywhere. On their table, on the two tables next to them, on the floor, everywhere. Conch fritters, mahi-mahi, coconut shrimp, cheeseburgers, and fries, lots of fries. Also, bottles of wine and imported beer, sweet tea, a couple of mai tais half finished and milk. Timmy wondered if they would ever leave. Extra napkins, cocktail sauce, a new fork when the Missus dropped hers. He had been up all night at his second job as a bar back in Sloppy Joes and was already exhausted and these people were killing him. Timmy knew that if they could even pay the tab that they would leave him a tiny tip, if any at all.
They did not look like big tippers.
The other table was, by far, the all time highest ranking member of Timmy Gomez’s Pain In The Ass Club. A gaudily dressed overweight boor who behaved as if Timmy was his personal servant and was such an obvious racist that Timmy wondered how the pig would look with a fork sticking out of the top of his toupeed head.
“Hey Chico, how bout some more hooch over here!”
“Hey Chico, who do I have to fuck to get a little service over here?”
“Hey Chico, go see if the mezicans in the kitchen fell asleep, or what?”
The drunker he became, the worse it was. Timmy could not wait for his shift to be over. One more shift at Sloppy Joes and he was the proud recipient of two whole days off. The first time in almost a year.
Although born in New Jersey to a British mother and a half Puerto Rican father, Timmy did look Hispanic. His boss, Angelina had encouraged him to affect a Spanish accent.
“Tourists tip better if they think you are Cuban, Timmy. A taste of the exotic and all that.”
Timmy hated stooping to that stereotype and actually had to practice his accent. There was no trace of it in his natural speech. Although he hated doing it, his tips had increased when the service he provided was Spanish flavored. This guy wasn’t worth it and halfway through the meal Timmy dropped the accent altogether. The jackass didn’t even notice and just kept up the “Chico” bit right up to the moment he walked out the door.
When Timmy checked the table, the guy had left only a few coins. Two dimes, six pennies and a nickel. One of the pennies was flawed with a double imprint of Honest Abe. The loudmouth racist even left ruined coinage. Bastard. The coin was old, 1908, probably made before there were standards set in place to make all money alike. Whatever. At least he was gone.
Timmy shoved the coins in his pocket and turned just in time to see the laughing couple get up from their table and head in his direction.
“Thank you for your patience with us, Timmy. It was a fabulous dinner. We left you a little something with the check. Hope it helps.”
Timmy imagined it would be very little indeed but said instead, “Thank you guys. You were no trouble at all. Enjoy your stay in Key West.”
“Oh, we will, Timmy. We most definitely will.” Holding hands and laughing, the hungry couple left Timmy on the rooftop with the demolished table.
With a heavy sigh, Timmy Gomez picked the leather pay envelope from the scattered remains and opened it. It took his mind a few moments to register what he was seeing. In addition to the outrageous tab that the couple had amassed, there were ten crisp 100 dollar bills along with a note, “Hope this helps.”, written on the tab itself.
Fat Bob had moved his bulk of stench down to within falling distance of the Margaritaville Café and was well into his third can of Steel Reserve. Business had not been good today. It was nearing sunset and he didn’t even have a tidy buzz yet. Bob had the brown paper bag to his lips when the smiling young man stepped around him. He didn’t have a chance to ask for spare change but a strange thing happened. The smiling Hispanic boy stopped, rummaged in his pockets, pulled out a twenty and some spare change and dropped the money into Bob’s upturned hat.
“Hope this helps.” He said and walked on down Duval with a bounce in his step.
Things are looking up, thought Bob as he gathered the change. He stopped and studied the penny with the curious double imprint. Bob’s mind flickered on something remembered from childhood.
Amen
He smiled brightly for the first time in years, slipped the penny into his filthy shirt pocket, stood up straight and walked on down Duval Street with a slight bounce of his own.
The End
