A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

Step

The West Oakland detox used to be a warehouse. It is dark inside and echoes like an underground parking lot. Bedrooms, a kitchen, and the office open off a vast room. In the middle of the room is a pool table and the TV pit. They call it the pit because the walls around it are only five feet high, so the counselors can look down into it.

Most of the residents were in the pit, in blue pajamas, watching Leave It to Beaver. Bobo held a cup of tea for Carlotta to drink. The other men were laughing about her running around the train yard, trying to go under the engine. The Amtrak from L.A. had stopped. Carlotta laughed too. All of them running around in pajamas. Not that she didn’t care about what she had done. She didn’t remember, didn’t own the deed at all.

Milton, a counselor, came to the rim of the pit.

“When’s the fight?”

“Two hours.” Benitez and Sugar Ray Leonard for the welterweight title.

“Sugar Ray will take it, easy.” Milton grinned at Carlotta and the men made comments, jokes. She knew most of the men from other times here, from detoxes in Hayward, Richmond, San Francisco. Bobo she knew from Highland psych ward too.

All twenty of the residents were in the pit now, with pillows and blankets, huddled together like preschool kids at nap time, Henry Moore drawings of people in bomb shelters. On the TV Orson Welles said, “We will sell no wine before its time.” Bobo laughed, “It’s time, brother, it’s time!”

“Stop your shakin’, woman, messes the TV.”

A man with dreadlocks sat down beside Carlotta, put his hand inside her thigh. Bobo grabbed the man’s wrist. “Move it or I’ll break it.” Old Sam came in wrapped in a blanket. There was no heat and it was bitterly cold.

“Sit there on her feets. You can hold them still.”

Cheaper by the Dozen was almost over. Clifton Webb died and Myrna Loy went to college. Willie said he had liked it in Europe because white people were ugly there. Carlotta didn’t know what he meant, then realized that the only people solitary drunks ever see are on television. At three in the morning she would wait to see Jack the Ripper for Used Datsuns. Slashin’ them prices. Jest a hackin’ and a hewin’.

The television was the only light in the detox. It was as if the pit were their own smoky ring, with the boxing ring inside it in color. The announcer’s voice was shrill. Tonight’s purse is one million dollars! All the men had their money on Sugar Ray, would have had. Bobo told Carlotta some of the men there weren’t even alcoholics, had just faked needing detox so they could watch the fight.

Carlotta was for Benitez. You likes them pretty boys, Mama? Benitez was pretty, with fine bones, a dapper mustache. He weighed 144 pounds, had won his first championship at seventeen. Sugar Ray Leonard was scarcely heavier but he seemed to tower, not moving. The men met in the center of the ring. There was no sound. The crowd on TV, the residents in the pit held their breath as the boxers faced each other, circling, sinuous, their eyes locked.

In the third round Leonard’s quick hook knocked Benitez to the ground. He was up in a second, with a childlike smile. Embarrassed. I didn’t mean for that to happen to me. At that moment the men in the pit began to want him to win.

No one moved, not even during the commercials. Sam rolled cigarettes all through the fight, passed them. Milton came up to the ledge of the pit during the sixth round, just as Benitez took a blow to the forehead, his only mark in the fight. Milton saw the blood reflected in everyone’s eyes, in their sweat.

“Figures … you’d all be backing a loser,” he said.

“Quiet! Round eight.”

“Come on, baby, don’t you go down.”

They weren’t asking Benitez to win, just to stay in the fight. He did, he stayed in. He retreated in the ninth behind a jab, then a left hook drove him into the ropes and a right knocked out his mouthpiece.

Round ten, round eleven, round twelve, round thirteen, round fourteen. He stayed in. No one in the pit spoke. Sam had fallen asleep.

The bell rang for the last round. The arena was so quiet you could hear Sugar Ray Leonard whisper. “Oh, my God. He is still standing.”

But Benitez’s right knee touched the canvas. Briefly, like a Catholic leaving a pew. The slightest deference that meant the fight was over; he had lost. Carlotta whispered,

“God, please help me.”