by Herbert Gold
I was on my way to tell Karim yes, I’d do one more job to see what it felt like and to meet a few bills; just one for now, just to see, with no permanent commitment.
On the wide boulevard a sidewalk sale was closing down. An offbooks merchant with drooping mustachios was loading his used Lawrence Welk LPs and his new SKI CANCUN T-shirts back into the Chevy station wagon. He had a face that expressed bearing up under the injustices done century by century and day by day to all part-Aztec peoples, plus traditional tribal confidence that someday, someplace, someone would surely need to complete a used polka repertory or funny T-shirt collection (skiers swooping down a beach around a sitting-up sleeper in a wide-brimmed tasseled sombrero). In the great spirit scheme of themes, sun-warped and scratched Lawrence Welk didn’t sound any worse to him than any other Lawrence Welk.
I was uneasy about this visit to Karim. I drove slowly, trying to work matters through. Karim seemed to have convinced me, although I wasn’t convinced. I turned out not to be as right about people as I thought I was: Priscilla, Xavier, Fred Weinberg, now Karim. I still believed in Alfonso. But did I really need to protect Priscilla with immunity if she had gotten into some stupid, profitable, interesting connection with Xavier? I didn’t even know for sure, but I knew one thing about the lady. Having her best interests in my heart would be considered dire meddling. I was already a confirmed meddler of the dire kind. I put Dan Kasdan along with the others—Karim, Fred, Xavier, Priscilla, maybe even Alfonso when it all came out—in the category of folks who weren’t what they seemed to be.
A bongo crew was working its goatskins in Dolores Park. The audience of men holding their beer cans, doing beer can isometrics, was drifting in front of the crew, sinking into wet grass, moving as if they had to pee but didn’t want to break the rhythm by heading elsewhere. Some looked too blissful for mere bongos; they were deep into the day’s ration of reindeer dust. Even from the street, trying to get clear in my own head, I could smell beer, stepped-on grass, marijuana.
Then, no matter how slowly I drove, Karim’s house stood there on Guerrero, high and towered, with its wooden turrets, projections, and overhangs—jagged carpenter gothic decorations—a falcon perched on a branch near the gutter, red paint flaking from its beak; carved gargoyles with drool added later, probably a relic of communal flower-child squatting years ago. The driveway slanted steep in the sunlight. The house looked different today, its eyes blinded, shades pulled. I parked on the street (didn’t want to be blocked), hurried out and up the steps. My right big toe hurt sometimes, a little arthritic; this was one of the times. I bounded up the slope, twinging at the toe but wanting to seem as young and agile as if I were really agile and young. I was sure someone was watching. It wasn’t necessary to locate the shadow behind the curtains. Here in the Mission District, with its semitropical microclimate, the light of sun through palm trees made the neighborhood look like a Caribbean port, Port-au-Prince in a good decade.
Alfonso had changed his mind about the wire, but I refused to wear it. Alfonso and his buddies thought this was a mistake, but just shrugged and looked bored when I said I knew what I was doing. Most serious police errors come when a cop thinks he knows what he’s doing. Well, I wasn’t a member of any strike force.
Up the steep incline, set with stone, a rusty iron railing at the left side of the steps, I followed the rules and checked out the terrain. Karim wasn’t left-handed as I could recall, but someone who built the house must have been. No guard rail on the right. There were no longer farms in the Mission District, but sudden heat smells of compost wafted under the high eucalyptus and skinny palm trees. Branches stirred and let things fall. There were flying motes of light, dusty eye glints, a cloud of insects in a dense shrub shifting and tumbling in the air. I had never seen so many fireflies lift off in a hovering heap. The filmy bugs reflected the sun; not real fireflies, which didn’t exist in San Francisco. Chickens weren’t supposed to exist in San Francisco either, but I was sure someone around here kept them, maybe for ceremonies in the back room of the Botanica at 20th and Valencia.
It seemed that Karim managed to import his own climate from someplace else. A coo of doves from a dovecote sounded like the pulsing of a heart, but more shrill. The falcon with the glaring pink eyes stared down at me as I knocked. Falcons don’t float among palm trees. Wooden pink-eyed falcons don’t float anyplace. This falcon with its painted eyes was rotting on its perch and one day would come crashing through the branches. All I wanted in the whole wide world was to get back what I had lost.
I knew Karim had seen me. I rapped on the door to give him the satisfaction of receiving a polite social call. Okay, I’ve decided. No panic, but apprehension is a normal safety mechanism. Okay, just like everybody, I can find a use for money.
Karim opened.
Okay, in my abnormal way, I’m a normal person when it comes to wanting things, will you take that in?
Karim stepped smiling and nodding onto the porch. He closed the door behind him. It clicked hard shut. There was someone in the house he didn’t want me to see.
I always want to say something nice to people when I can, so I thought about saying to Karim, What a lovely clump of hair you have in your right ear. Instead I said, “Okay, I’m ready. I’m ready now.”
He didn’t seem in a hurry anymore. He was dressed in a dark pinstriped suit, with a vest and white shirt and a yellow tie, a Karim version of business-meeting attire. “You enjoy?” he asked, nodding at the falcon in the palm tree. “I’m planning external restoration, gardening plus, for my property. My bird will retain its character, I promise you—”
“Let’s talk inside.”
“Good point, an excellent point, my friend.” He extended his arms in the gesture of all-this-is-mine. He was stalling. Then he opened the door to let me enter and I sniffed something familiar, a tang like mint and sweat and anxiety. This was an item of interest I should have worked out before now, because it would have been a helpful inclusion.
I was sure Karim’s partner was upstairs.
“I’ll do it,” I said. “I can use the helping hand money sometimes provides. One more job, okay?”
“Oh dear, when you see how uncomplicated, my friend, I am proof positive you will choose to continue—”
“Once,” I said.
Karim beamed down at me. How can a helping hand, once taken, be refused? “Within your powers, dear friend, to come to an intelligent judgment. Please take that chair, it’s my favorite.”
Cologne left behind evaporated out into the heat of the room. No need for the man waiting upstairs to hide while we settled the preliminaries. Karim’s associate in this business was that old acquaintance of mine, wearing something like Sportsman, For the Guy Who Knows From Regattas—the assiduous investor, manly scent-enthusiast, and sharer of feelings. It seemed he diversified both his love life and his investments, financing a little trade in go-fast powder. It seemed he liked bringing me into his deals, himself moving out of sight, not wanting to confuse me, while once again his vinaigrette wafted into the stirred-up, riled-up air.
I should have known Xavier wasn’t just an Enrico’s terrace acquaintance for Karim. As Priscilla assured me, in his lazy way Xavier liked to keep in touch—would she settle for less than a man with an edge? The gaslit tradition of Aulde San Francisco included the fragrance of both coffee processing and the opium trade.
Xavier, depths I hadn’t wanted to allow him, just because I felt petty envy of his great teeth, long legs, lovely smile. And I gave myself an excuse for jealousy only because my wife was striving mightily to help him do what less-well-bred men often do on weekends, national holidays, idle afternoons, or just when there’s a fine woman in the vicinity and the impulse strikes them both.
“You can tell him to come downstairs, he doesn’t have to hide,” I said.
“That won’t be necessary. He’s comfortable up there.”
“This is strictly business.”
“We understand that. But not strict
ly—please, Dan! You’re a practical person, so I’m happy to reach this quality in you at last. Sometimes, isn’t it true, friendship can be both difficult and practical?”
“Xavier! Hey!” I yelled. “Come on down.”
He didn’t answer. Filling the silence were Karim’s warm and loving words. “He doesn’t want to. I think you hurt his feelings, Dan.”
Chapter 21
Blue-and-white trail-cruising landwhales lay beached near downtown Greyhound America just south of Market Street. Steam rose from a spout. The lot gave off motor oil and septic tank smells, plus eddies of troubled fast-food oxidation, ancient fish in cracked Styrofoam, errant small animals caught under wheels, crowds engaged in the worries of transport and inner flux. These days folks can travel Greyhound and enjoy all the comforts of home, but I wasn’t sure about some of those homes. Just ahead lay the depot itself, the proper place for my stupid job, delivering a stupid package to a not-very-intelligent locker for which Karim had given me the key. I didn’t know what was in the package because Karim said it wasn’t necessary for me to know just yet. I could guess. I could figure it out. I could also figure that someone had a duplicate key. I hoped it wasn’t Fred, my doctor and trusted pal, who had been putting his finger up my butt to test for rust on the prostate every year since I turned forty. If someone stuck a finger up there, I wanted it to be for a good purpose. Making me feel seasick didn’t suffice. This job gave me something like the feeling of prostate pokery.
The Greyhound building off Market Street was an experimental space lab for pimps, hookers, runaways, outpatients with no in-clinics, a clubhouse for State Aid to the Totally Fucked. The urban concept “bus terminal” was only part of the idea. Heavy-metal junkies, speed, crack, and ice freaks, smokers, drinkers, inhalers, injectors, and fed-up philosophers who had settled for their daily methadone ration glumly kept moving, waiting for a relieving fit of violence to break the monotony. There were child bag brides, not so much anorexic as evaporated by crack, willing to take commuters off into a shady corner for an expeditious blow job that wouldn’t delay their travel connections; moonfaced zombies on idiot chemicals; and the usual go-fast operators with beepers on their belts, talking into cellular phones or chattering at the ceiling, in case God was listening. At video machines, no-hip Southeast Asian kids, born not so long ago to mothers who only took off an hour from the rice paddies, now played at Western-style genocide with their new electronic toy guns, waiting out the months until they could get up to speed for the real world. It didn’t take long. A few veteran Thorazine cripples herky-jerked by, trying to make the moving parts of their bodies follow along in other than random order.
The crusaders bound for Jerusalem may have looked like these folks (I was too young for personal experience of their trek across Europe and the Middle East). Maybe the lineup at Lourdes or at one of various blessed waterfalls in Africa attracted a crew like the one I was joining, carrying a package and the key to a locker. I was carrying the package and key because it served the purpose of my good friend and doctor, Fred, and also of Karim; and Alfonso and the police; and, it seemed, Xavier; and then there was Dan Kasdan, who had an oral contract that his former wife would not be named in any way. Not all these purposes were in any better arrangement than the purposes of the normal population of the depot.
A smell of Deep-Fried Pig Belly McNugget Slimsies advised the Vietnamese and Cambodians that this was America, get with the program, learn to eat like regular folks. A doughnut stand sold doughnuts and mysterious pale, skinless, meatlike products. Refugees making a new life couldn’t be expected to know what kind of tree the McNuggets had been plucked from; hadn’t crossed the briny Pacific to choke their guts with alien stuff; didn’t trust what they smelled. If Xavier was here, even his Regatta scent would be overpowered. “Kin help yew,” said the hooker on the corner, an offer she repeated while her manager/trainer, Giants cap on backward, observed her technique from across the street. “Kin help yew? Hey, kin help yew.” I gave her an A for effort—garters showing, sticklike legs, a full adolescent bosom, perished eyes; she staggered when she tried to move toward me on regulation stilt heels. I held my silvery duct-taped package tight, the key in my fist. No, lady, can’t help me.
A woman I hadn’t noticed (must have been distracted) touched my arm and said, “You’re kind of cute in your own special way. Sir? I got lots more similar remarks if you liked that one.”
The loudspeakers announced departures to sets of twin cities, paired concepts. Stockton and Denver … Sacramento and Eureka … Transcon Express. These were destinations to please the most picky patron. Muffled by tunnels, buses began the mission into the outside world with deep earthquake creakings. A salvationist screamed into a battery-powered megaphone: “You! Abandoned by the Lord! Do you have a moment to change your life?”
On track, I thought. Just now I was looking to find Karim, Xavier, and a crew of plainclothes cops, none of them in evidence. My nose was in overload; couldn’t smell anyone I knew, not even Alfonso. I pushed into the waiting area. An unseen missionary with a squawk-box, licensed by Freedom of Religious Noise exemption laws, competed with official Greyhound destination announcements and his colleagues packing only a low-tech megaphone: “Join me on line with the quality Savior, brothern and sistern, Who asks whither you think you are fleeing in such a hurry with your bargain tickets … That’s Jeesus, and without Him, do you think you can ever, ever, ever git there?”
Where I was going, I didn’t need a ticket. I was like Jeff with my skate key tight in my hand. SAY HELLO TO MADAMA SOPHIA asked a sign above a former nuts-and-raisins stand. Madama Sophia, in return for this hello, would read my future in my hand. She sat nursing her baby, who, if I grasped the future correctly, would grow up to be a boy or girl. I kept the key in my hand, my package under my arm. I wished Alfonso would make himself visible. A black guy, a do-gooding peddler volunteering for the Tenderloin Self-Help Society, wore a merry row of condoms around his Bob Hope–Bing Crosby porkpie hat. “Condoms! Free rubbers! Get your free condoms now!” He was hawking them like a priest distributing hot-cross buns and paused before a pimp who said, “Yo, man, no use for them things. I got sharp sperm, they cut right through that rubber, swim right through that lube, man.” Neither of them was Alfonso. “Barrels right through, man.”
I didn’t want to drop my load in the locker and head away. I wanted to see results. I wanted to know if Karim was there watching, if the plainclothes guys were there—maybe the plainclothes women, if Alfonso was properly looking after his buddy. I didn’t feel easy with my ignorance. I stalled, still holding the package with a sense of clumsiness, as if my thumb were caught in a bottle. Something was caught and making me wince.
A person in a hurry or very careless had left a muddy Nike near Madama Sophia’s mitt camp. He had gone running so fast after his fortune or his bus, been chased so imperatively by his fate, that he lightened up by one foot. Maybe it was all he had time for. Sophia had predicted he could fly if he chose to, or he was trying to flee from crack brawlers or chattering geriatrics claiming attention, leaving this shoe as guarantee that he’d be right back. I headed in where the lockers were stacked, headed through the thickness of hot pork, frying grease, used air. A drunk lurched against me, too preoccupied to demand an apology but blew his green thick gasp of liver disease into my face. I wasn’t happy here. I could do nothing about the amplified instructions crackling from the loudspeaker (another bus for Sacramento, departure imminent) and the pathless trekking of terminal wanderers. There was no way to close down my ears or my nose. Here I was, standing in front of the lockers. I found my number.
This was my lucky day. I had remembered to load my pocket with quarters. I plucked the coins from my stash, inserted the key, looked around for company. None visible; some invisible.
I dropped the quarters into the slot for number 49, as instructed. They made a parking meter music going down. The key fit. Now I didn’t look around guiltily; I stared ahead guiltily and stu
ck the package into the locker and shut it and turned the key and that was the deal. No lightning struck me; today was still lucky. Now to get out of here.
After I’d gone twenty short steps, back toward Sophia’s palm-reading outpost again, curiosity got the best of me and I turned to see an old friend, not Karim, inserting his copy of the key into lock number 49. Dressed for a safari with Ralph Lauren, with his usual lounging grace, he made no compromise with the Greyhound environment in these premises. My husband-in-law was playing funny games with me. Not Karim. Not Karim. Xavier, the early-stage divorcée’s consolation. Congratulations, old chap, now we have the same beloved and duplicate keys.
“Hold it! Freeze! Hold it, hold it, hold it!”
They came from behind Sophia’s mitt camp. The palm reader must have predicted they would be there since she already knew all things, past and future. They brought their palms with them, their badges, their weapons.
“Hold it guy, don’t move fella, hold it!”
About a dozen of the depot-dwelling Greyhound people wearily took familiar positions, hands flat against the nearest wall, ready to be felt for guns, knives, or plastic bags of illegal substances. They looked bored to be bothered again, and then perturbed, peeking around, all their conceptions of race, color, hair style, and dress sent flying as the cops rushed the sportive, lounging, grinning, untattooed Xavier.
Xavier was entertained. A lock of hair fell becomingly across his forehead, emphasizing boyish and bemused and having a curious time of it, old chap. His scent made no effort to get through the terminal fry, dirt, and cleaning-fluid smells. He was standing with the package under his arm, ready to return to sender.
None of this seemed like normal procedure. I was wondering why Xavier didn’t wait for me to get out of Greyhoundland before he used his key, why the cops were circling him as if he were dangerous prey, what Alfonso was doing here, keeping us all company. He might as well have been a tourist from Stockton with his family’s Instamatic. The Greyhound folks didn’t seem to want to talk about the events in our vicinity since all discussion was quieted except for the continuing drone of arrival and departure announcements. In general, cops were taking over. Xavier was happy to see everybody.
