Angels of Catastrophe: A Novel

by Peter Plate

Ephraim had a split-level condominium on top of Nob Hill off California Street near Grace Cathedral and the Fairmont Hotel. His apartment overlooked the Golden Gate Bridge. Persian carpets covered the parquet oak floors in every room, excluding the master bathroom. A ferris wheel-sized crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling in the dining room. To cap it off, he had a live-in Salvadoreña maid.

  Thirty seconds went by before Durrutti answered Sugar. Thirty seconds of reckoning that left him mindless with jealousy. He could not compete with Ephraim Rook and he was painfully aware of it. Exercising emotional dexterity, his answer was disc jockey smooth, surging with fake hipness. “Nothing’s wrong with it, baby. I’m glad for you. All power to you.”

  The cocaine wouldn’t let her ease off of him. Male vulnerability, especially when it was done badly, made Sugar churn. “That’s a crock of shit. You’ve always had a hang up about Ephraim.” To prove her thesis, Sugar referred to Rook’s visit to the El Capitán Hotel, saying it was sordid. He didn’t disagree with her until she said, “You owe him an apology.”

  Saying you were wrong was one thing. Apologizing for it was something else. Nettled, he threw caution to the wind, tasting the rage that thickened his tongue. “For fucking what? I haven’t done anything to that doofus.”

  Sugar imitated a prosecuting attorney in a courtroom. “What about you saying I left him to have my freedom. You know that isn’t true.”

  Durrutti was stunned, betrayed. “He tell you that?”

  “He did.”

  “Did he tell you why I said it?”

  Pride shaded her response when she said, “Yeah, it was because of me and you. I’m sort of flattered. But you made a mistake in criticizing Ephraim. He doesn’t like you.”

  Sugar was a poor translator. She never could get it straight. She’d see a dead animal in the road and she would claim it was sleeping. She understated everything, including how much she cared for Ephraim Rook. Durrutti said to her with maximum weariness, “No, doll. He hates me.”

  “Well, you should be careful.”

  Her pious comment oozed with good intentions and it got under his skin. He knew how her mind worked. He was the patient and she was the nurse. “Did I ask you for your advice?”

  “No.”

  “Then keep it to yourself.”

  “Okay, I will.”

  He was more awake now than he’d been for days. He pressed his forehead to the soggy oatmeal wallpaper, closed his eyes and listened to her angry breathing. Neither of them said another word. Ten seconds later, she hung up on him, leaving the ocean roar of the dial tone in his ear.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The tiff with Sugar energized Durrutti. He threw on a pair of pants and a shirt and slipped back into the hallway. The carpet’s congealed debris crunched under his stocking feet as he wobbled toward the laundry room. The overhead lights were off and he couldn’t see anything, not even his own shadow. At the end of the corridor he stopped in front of Arlo and Jackie’s door and tapped five times on it.

  Jackie opened it, listing to one side, drunk as a lord. Her face was rouged, hiding her beard. Her waxy eyelids were streaked with purple mascara. Her hair was peroxided and done up in a dishwater yellow home perm. A chintzy crimson tourist shop geisha robe was belted around her belly. She weaved in the threshold with the Ruger in her meaty hand and said, tough and queeny, “If it ain’t Ricky Durrutti. With a face like hamburger. What do you need, little man?”

  Durrutti didn’t dally. He didn’t say anything about Zets. He hadn’t come to fraternize. He held out a ten dollar bill for inspection. “I wanna get some more sherms. Is that okay?”

  Jackie scrutinized the money with ginger respect, poked her head out in the hall and glanced in both directions. A water pipe in the raw unpainted ceiling was clinking. The hotel was quieter than a cemetery at midnight. She motioned for Durrutti to step inside, slurring, “Don’t take the gun personally. It’s just basic protocol. Like saying hello and good-bye.”

  The room was lit by a quartet of blue candles in a brass candelabra. The bed was spread over with pillows. What Arlo was doing on the bed knocked the wind out of Durrutti. Save for a pair of high heels, the beautiful she-boy was naked and her wrists and ankles were manacled to the bedposts. A white cotton scarf was stuffed in her mouth; an organdy silk blindfold covered her eyes. Her tattooed body glistened with Johnson’s baby oil; her cock was a circumcised log outlined against the tyrannical whiteness of her legs.

  Jackie traced the Ruger’s barrel around Arlo’s navel and said, “Me and her, we’re going through changes here. We’re redefining our marriage. She wants a baby? We’re working on it. So what do you want? I have two dollar and five dollar sherms. But if you’re looking for a more heightened buzz, I’ve got the new ten dollar deluxe. It’s the ultimate. Keep you high for a week.”

  Durrutti didn’t have to think twice about the alternatives. He wanted the top of the line. “I’ll take the deluxe.”

  He threw the ten spot at Jackie and the dope dealer lumbered over to an oak bureau adorned with a strip of imported Pakistani fabric. She cracked open the top drawer and pulled out the blue plastic Gap shopping bag where she kept all her dope and selected a sherm for Durrutti. The joint resembled a miniature zeppelin. Jackie looked at it fondly and vouched for her product by saying, “Myself, I don’t touch no dust. The shit makes you nuts. But if you into it, this be the best. It’s from Switzerland. They know how to do it over there.”

  She stuffed the sherm in Durrutti’s hand. “Have fun with it.” The transaction completed, Jackie strode to the door and reopened it with a courtly sweep of her arm. “I don’t mean to be rude to a valued customer, but me and Arlo, we’re in the middle of something personal. And right now, it’s on delay.”

  Durrutti did not tarry. “No problem, Jackie. See you later, Arlo.”

  Getting high in a hotel room by himself was a time-honored ritual. One that he’d often repeated. His carpet was a battle ground of match burns, a testament to the practice. He barricaded the door, wedging a chair under the knob. He sat down on the bed and put an ashtray in his lap and removed the sherm from his shirt pocket. He put it in his mouth and torched it, dragging the demon’s smoke into his lungs. He tried to hold the smoke in until the count of ten, but forgot what he was doing and when he exhaled, the top of his head came off in the same way you’d unscrew the lid from ajar.

  The floorboards began to shake, knocking over the clock on the nightstand and causing the ceiling plaster to flake. The bed frame collapsed on the floor, sending an army of cockroaches running in all directions. The window panes rattled. The carpet split in half with a long agonizing tear—Paul Stevens’s tousled gray head popped out of the scuzzy fabric.

  Where his eyes used to be, two shallow pits stared at Durrutti. Most of Paul’s teeth were ivory stumps; tendrils of matted hair clung to his skull like so much paper. His whitened ribcage gaped through rents in his skin. His toe-nails were three inches long, green and razor sharp. A filthy khaki Burberry raincoat was slung haphazardly over his shoulders. He stood up, tall and straight and flounced over to where Durrutti sat on the bed.

  A strange odor hung over Paul, similar to the disinfectant spray homeless men were doused with in the city’s emergency shelters. A packet of doughnuts protruded from his Burberry—good eats when you were homeless. He deposited himself on the mattress and crossed his withered legs, saying to Durrutti in his usual sassy voice, “What’s with you? You look like you’re gonna shit in your pants. Are you having a bad day? You ain’t scared of me, are you, you little pansy? God forbid. That’s all I need.”

  Durrutti was afraid of him, afraid of death, afraid of everything. Fear had him by the balls and was yanking him toward disaster. He was going color-blind; his saliva tasted like gunpowder.

  Paul helped himself to the pack of Marlboros on the nightstand, tore the filter off a coffin nail and ignited it with a wooden kitchen match. The blue-gray tobacco smoke spun itself around his meager body like a
cloak. He was in a good mood and he coughed and trumpeted with laughter. “Man, this tastes sweet. Hella good. I ain’t had a fag in a long time.” He hocked up a glob of pearl-yellow sputum and rifled it onto the rug. “My lungs need the exercise.” Then he regarded Durrutti with a somber expression. “Your face is wrecked. What happened?”

  Durrutti opened his mouth to tell him the details, but no words came out, just a single dry sob. He put his hands on his knees and looked down at the rug. A cockroach crawled on top of his shoes, waving its antenna. He tore his eyes away from the roach, worried the insect could read his mind. “I had a scuffle with Zets.”

  “That dumb fuck? He whomped your ass, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah, over by Hunt’s.”

  “That’s fucking criminal. It must’ve hurt like hell. Well, don’t sweat it. He’s a geek and he’ll get his comeuppance. You want to know something?”

  “What’s that?”

  “You think Mission Street is fucked up?”

  Durrutti admitted, “That’s a fact.”

  “It ain’t doodly squat compared to the afterlife. Got no palm trees there. No sexy boys. No junkies. No sunsets or fog. Ain’t no cigarettes or wine and definitely no goddamn weed, which pisses me off.” He stuck the cigarette in his mouth and gave Durrutti a squint.

  Durrutti was getting used to the sight of Paul when one of the few remaining teeth in the deceased’s mouth fell out and landed on the bed sheets. It nestled in the sheets, a gray molar with a cavity in it, gleaming innocently. Paul ignored it and said, “Now let me describe where you go when you’re dead. I’ll give you a preview.”

  Paul hotboxed the Marlboro like Lonely Boy had and began his narrative, flourishing the cigarette in the air to illustrate the high points. “It’s a great big cow pen with a dinky tin roof, see? On a farm out in the country. There are no other houses around. Nothing but a few oak trees on the horizon. It’s hot and there’s a zillion pesky horse-flies buzzing night and day.

  “You get there and you think, okay, I’ll be here for a little while. It’s just temporary. Everyone has their own stall with fresh clean straw. It’s a big pen with lots of folks in it. People that you know. Strangers, too. The women are on one side. The men are segregated from them. At night, you hear this ruckus in the distance, but you’re not allowed out of your stall so you don’t know what’s going on. A sign on a steel gate where the noise is coming from says KEEP OUT.

  “You keep telling yourself things will get better. But it’s getting fucking weird. The noise is louder by the day, making an awful racket. Meanwhile, your straw hasn’t been changed in weeks. The flies are eating you alive. New people keep arriving. The guys you came in with, they vanish one at a time. You ask somebody, ‘You seen Vernon?’ They say, ‘Oh, he went up the chimney.’

  “Then it hits you: you’re in a slaughterhouse. And certain unctuous assholes, who I will not refer to by name, call it eternal paradise.”

  The upbeat thing about angel dust is the high eventually wears off. A billion wasted brain cells later, you’re normal again. The downside is you don’t know when that will be. It might be in a few hours or in a couple of days. Time is silly putty. In a few instances, the effects are permanent.

  Durrutti’s field of vision was distintegrating into a matrix of snowy pinpoints. He called out, “Paul? I can’t see, man. I’m scared shitless. I think I’m going blind.”

  Paul said like a radio signal with low wattage, “Oh, yeah? That’s too fucking bad, bucko. I’ve got to go now.” He shifted on the bed and began to dematerialize. Atom by atom, he disappeared. First his head, then his torso and then the smell of the homeless shelter disinfectant. The last thing to go was the cigarette’s smoke; a wisp of it stayed in the room.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The day after the Fourth of July holiday was a mellow afternoon that made the neighborhood look good. The sun kissed everything with an inviting glow. Even the sight of Robert in the phone booth at the corner of Valencia and Sixteenth Streets was terrific.

  A blue serge suit hung from the snitch’s bony shoulders; his boat-sized feet were shod in Scottish brogans. His thinning hair was creamed back with blebs of gel, spotlighting his pink scalp. He scratched himself, nodding off. Maimonides and Durrutti were watching him from a table at Blondie’s Bar & No Grill.

  Valencia Street held no attraction for Maimonides. Too many cafes with nothing decent to eat in them. People were turning food into show business nowadays. The throngs of restaurant-hunting, upscale, high-tech professionals that strolled past him were a pain in the liver. Look how they dressed. Lousy shoes. Insipid haircuts. Just terrible. He wore a proper suit seven days a week, like a real cosmopolitan.

  Maimonides summoned up a smile and blew it at Durrutti. No one knew how much it cost him to smile, how much it taxed him. Thugs wore smiles for the same reason cops carried guns—to protect themselves. He said, “What a life. There’s only so much I can take of it. Let’s make Robert wait another minute. It’ll get him properly anxious. Then when he talks to us, he’ll be so fucking pent up, he’ll shoot his mouth off because he’s feeling inappropriate and can’t maintain his boundaries. Maybe we’ll learn something from him this way.”

  Durrutti didn’t get the battle plan. “But look at him. He’s so fucking high he won’t even be able to remember his own name. He’ll bullshit us.”

  “Precisely,” Maimonides said with erudition. “My job is to separate the wheat from the chaff. C’mon, let’s go see what the asshole is up to. I’ve been wanting to have a chat with the schmuck. ”

  At close range, Robert was a cosmetic holocaust. One of his gray eyes was filmy and covered with an opaque membrane; the other eye was jeweled with a gigantic sty. A streetlight shined on his caved-in cheeks, stylizing the imperfections in his weather-beaten face and giving each pock, hole and gouge in his skin a distinct signature.

  The three men made contact at the phone booth with Robert grunting a hello to Maimonides. He ignored Durrutti, which was fine by the Jew because he didn’t think Robert was worth a thin dime; the dour fuck-you scowl on his weasly face said as much.

  Robert didn’t waste a second getting down to the nuts and bolts of his business. Looking nervously behind his back, he hee-hawed and said with remarkable insouciance for a junkie, “You want a hot tip? Somethingjuicy? I’ve got news for you two. Headline-making news. This time you’ve fucked yourselves. You slobs have stepped in the doo-doo.”

  Disrespecting Maimonides was not what Robert was getting paid for. Ridiculing his employer wasn’t part of the contract. Mocking the man who gave you Ben Franklins was not wise. Maimonides grabbed Robert by his earlobes and ricocheted the stool pigeon’s eggplant-shaped head against the telephone box, softening his skull for him. He did this in a calm and unhurried fashion while instructing Robert to improve himself. “What the fuck are saying, you frigging gargoyle? You can do better than that.”

  Robert’s sty underwent a change in hue, turning a malevolent shade of red. Taller than Maimonides by six inches he wasn’t intimidated in the least. He shoved the geriatric ex-con away from him with his fists. “You dog fuck! You’re gonna get waxed!”

  Maimonides couldn’t believe the junkie actually had the nerve to touch him. He peered down at his coat lapels and swore he saw bacteria. Robert was going to give him a staph infection. His reply was nonverbal and melodic. Without showing any emotion on his own pallid and ravaged countenance, hejabbed a pair of stiffened digits into Robert’s groin.

  In outer space, no one can hear you scream. On Valencia Street, nobody cared. Robert’s desolate cry elicited no interest or concern from the nearby restaurant seekers. He was part of the background scenery. Maimonides gave the dope fiend a perfunctory slap in the face, leaving his fingerprints on Robert’s cheekbones—a stream of green bile jetted from the man’s pernicious mouth, spraying the nearby pedestrians as he yipped, “Ephraim Rook’s gonna get you guys!”

  Hearing that, Maimonides judiciously removed his hands
from Robert’s neck. Smarter that the snitch should remain alive and talking. He reached in his jacket for his smokes, dug them out and lit a Newport menthol. His idea of yoga. The interlude allowed Robert the dignity of zipping up his fly, which had come undone during the scrap.

  With no urging from Maimonides, Robert opened up with a salvo that left Durrutti spinning. It seemed Ephraim had contacted the junkie at Esta Noche on Sixteenth Street. Esta Noche was the West Coast’s premier Latino tranvestite bar. If you were into gender bending, it was the center of the universe. The racketeer had inveigled Robert to go for a ride with him in his Saab and then fed him drugs—high quality Dilaudid.

  Ephraim wanted to know all about Maimonides and Durrutti. He was doing research on them. Developing an analysis. A template for their destruction. Or so he told Robert. He was curious as to their whereabouts, what bars they frequented, who they associated with, where Maimonides bought his clothes and why Durrutti didn’t have a girlfriend after his breakup with Sugar. Ephraim wanted to put them under a microscope. He was going to invent a vaccination to wipe them out.

  “Rook loathes you fucks,” Robert regaled them. “He’s going around telling everyone how much he despises you two dweebs. He thinks you’ve disrespected him and he intends to punish you for it. He says the garbage must be cleaned up.”

  “So fucking what. It’s like déjà vu all the time.” Maimonides put his hands on his womanish hips and rued. “Ephraim don’t like me? He should kiss my butt and live to tell his children about it.”

  Robert wasn’t done yet. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand in a studied gesture. “Only a cretin would underestimate Ephraim. He’s going to do something about you jerks. I believe him. Rook’s got credibility and friends. That’s something you bozos don’t have. I mean, God, look at you fakes. You’re pathetic.”

  Maimonides bristled and kvetched, “Please, don’t tell me about Ephraim’s credibility. He’d pimp his own mother down the river in two seconds flat if he thought he could make a buck doing it. Oy, Robert, you’ve made me very unhappy. I didn’t need to hear any of this. It’s like things go from worse to worse. Somebody help me.”