His eyes flickered to me, faintly interested. “You got no choice, either?”
“Hell, no. the client says find a kid, I go looking. Not that it matters. I don’t have anything better to do.”
“Know what you mean. Nothing for me at home, either.”
“Where’s home?”
“My real home, or where I live?”
“Both, I guess.”
“Where I live’s up there.” He gestured at the ceiling, “Room goes with the job. Home’s not there no more. Was in Motown, back before my ma died and things got so bad in the auto industry. I came out here thinking I’d find work.” He smiled ironically. “Well, I found it, didn’t I?”
“At least it’s not as cold here as in Detroit.”
“No, but it’s not home either.” He paused, then reached for Mike’s picture. “Let me see that again.” Another pause. “Okay. He stayed here. Him and this blond chick got to be friends. She’s gone, too.”
“Do you know the blond girl’s name?”
“Yeah. Jane Smith. Original, huh?”
“Can you describe her?”
“Just a little blond, maybe five-two. Long hair. Nothing special about her.”
“When did they leave?”
“They were gone when I came on last night. The owner don’t put up with the ones that can’t pay, and the day man, he likes tossing their asses out on the street.”
“How did the kid seem to you? Was he okay?”
The man’s eyes met mine, held them for a moment. “Thought this was just a job to you.”
“…He’s my nephew.”
“Yeah, I guessed it might be something like that. Well, if you mean was he doing drugs or hustling, I’d say no. Maybe a little booze, that’s all. The girl was the same. Pretty straight kids. Nobody’s gotten to them yet.”
“Let me ask you this: what would kids like that do after they’d been thrown out of here? Where would they hang out?”
He considered. “There’s a greasy spoon on Polk, near O’Farrell. Owner’s an old guy, Iranian. He feels sorry for the kids, feeds them when they’re about to starve, tries to get them to go home. He might of seen those two.”
“Would he be open tonight?”
“Sure. Like I said, he’s Iranian. It’s not his holiday. Come to think of it, it’s not mine anymore, either.”
“Why not?”
Again the ironic smile. “Can’t celebrate peace-on-earth-good-will-to-men when you don’t believe in it anymore, now can you?”
I reached into my bag and took out a twenty-dollar bill, slid it across the counter to him. “Peace on earth, and thanks.”
He took it eagerly, then looked at it and shook his head. “You don’t have to.”
“I want to. That makes a difference.”
The “greasy spoon” was called The Coffee Break. It was small—just five tables and a lunch counter, old green linoleum floors, Formica and molded plastic furniture. A slender man with thinning gray hair sat behind the counter smoking a cigarette. A couple of old women were hunched over coffee at a corner table. Next to the window was a dirty-haired blond girl; she was staring through the glass with blank eyes—another of the city’s casualties.
I showed Mike’s picture to the man behind the counter. He told me Mike looked familiar, thought a minute, then snapped his fingers and said, “Hey, Angie.”
The girl by the window turned. Full-face, I could see she was red-eyed and tear-streaked. The blankness of her face was due to misery, not drugs.
“Take a look the picture this lady has. Didn’t I see you with this kid yesterday?”
She got up and came to the counter, self-consciously smoothing her wrinkled jacket and jeans. “Yeah,” she said after glancing at it, “that’s Michael.”
“Where’s he now? The lady’s his aunt, wants to help him.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. He was at the Vinton, but he got kicked out the same time I did. We stayed down at the cellar in the vacant lot last night, but it was cold and scary. These drunks kept bothering us. Mr. Ahmeni, how long do you think it’s going to take my dad to get here?”
“Take it easy. It’s a long drive from Oroville. I only called him an hour ago.” To me, Mr. Ahmeni added, “Angie’s going home for Christmas.”
I studied her. Under all that grime, a pretty, conventional girl hid. I said, “Would you like a cup of coffee? Something to eat?”
“I wouldn’t mind a Coke. I’ve been sponging off Mr. Ahmeni for hours.” She smiled faintly. “I guess he’d appreciate it if I sponged off somebody else for a change.”
I bought us both Cokes and sat down with her. “When did you meet Mike?”
“Three days ago, I guess. He was at the hotel when I got into town. He kind of looked out for me. I was glad; that place is pretty awful. A lot of addicts stay there. One OD’d in the stairwell the first night. But it’s cheap and they don’t ask questions. A guy I met on the bus coming down here told me about it.”
“What did Mike do here in the city, do you know?”
“Wandered around, mostly. One afternoon we went out to Ocean Beach and walked on the dunes.”
“What about drugs or—”
“Michael’s not into drugs. We drank some wine, is all. He’s …I don’t know how to describe it, but he’s not like a lot of the kids on the streets.”
“How so?”
“Well, he’s kind of…sensitive, deep.”
“This sensitive soul ran away from home because his parents wouldn’t buy him a moped for Christmas.”
Angie sighed. “You really don’t know anything about him, do you? You don’t even know he wants to be called Michael, not Mike.”
That silenced me for a moment. It was true: I really didn’t know my nephew, not as a person. “Tell me about him.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Well, this business with the moped—what was that all about?”
“It didn’t really have anything to do with the moped. At least not much. It had to do with the kids at school.”
“In what way?”
“Well, the way Michael told it, his family used to be kind of poor. At least there were some months when they worried about being able to pay the rent.”
“That’s right.”
“And then his father became a singing star and they moved to this awesome house in Pacific Palisades, and all of a sudden Michael was in school with all these rich kids. But he didn’t fit in. The kids, he said, were really into having things and doing drugs and partying. He couldn’t relate to it. He says it’s really hard to get into that kind of stuff when you’ve spent your life worrying about real things.”
“Like if your parents are going to be able to pay the rent.”
Angie nodded, her fringe of limp blond hair falling over her eyes. She brushed it back and went on. “I know about that; my folks don’t have much money, and my mom’s sick a lot. The kids, they sense you’re different and they don’t want to have anything to do with you. Michael was lonely at the new school, so he tried to fit in—tried too hard, I guess, by having the latest stuff, the most expensive clothes. You know.”
“And the moped was part of that.”
“Uh-huh. But when his mom said he couldn’t have it, he realized what he’d been doing. And he also realized that the moped wouldn’t have done the trick anyway. Michael’s smart enough to know that people don’t fall all over you just because you’ve got another new toy. So he decided he’d never fit in, and he split. He says he feels more comfortable on the streets, because life here is real.” She paused, eyes filling, and looked away at the window. “God, is it real.”
I followed the direction of her gaze: beyond the plate glass a girl of perhaps thirteen stumbled by. Her body was emaciated, her face blank, her eyes dull—the look of a far-gone junkie.
I said to Angie, “When did you last see Mike…Michael?”
“Around four this afternoon. Like I said, we spent the night in that cell
ar in the vacant lot. After that I knew I couldn’t hack it anymore, and I told him I’d decided to go home. He got pissed at me and took off.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think? I was abandoning him. I could go home, and he couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because Michael’s…God, you don’t know a thing about him! He’s proud. He couldn’t admit to his parents that he couldn’t make it on his own. Any more that he could admit to them about not fitting in at school.”
What she said surprised me and made me ashamed. Ashamed for Charlene, who had always referred to Mike as stubborn or bullheaded, but never as proud. And ashamed for myself, because I’d never really seen him, except as the leader of a pack joking referred to in family circles as “the little savages.”
“Angie,” I said, “do you have any idea where he might have gone after he left you?”
She shook her head. “I wish I did. It would be nice if Michael could have a Christmas. He talked about how much he was going to miss it. He spent the whole time we were walking around on the dunes telling me about the Christmases they used to have, even though they didn’t have much money: the tree trimming, the homemade presents, the candlelit masses on Christmas Eve, the cookie decorating and the turkey dinners. Michael absolutely loves Christmas.”
I hadn’t know that either. For years I’d been too busy with my own life to do more than send each of the Savage kids a small check. Properly humbled, I thanked Angie for talking with me, wished her good luck with her parents, and went back out to continue combing the dark, silent streets.
On the way back down Polk Street toward the Tenderloin, I stopped again at the chain link fence surrounding the vacant lot. I was fairly sure Mike was not among the people down there—not after his and Angie’s experience of the night before—but I was curious to see the place where they had spent that frightening time.
The campfires still burned deep in the shelter of the cellar. Here and there drunks and addicts lay passed out on the ground; others who had not yet reached that state passed bottles and shared joints and needles; one group raised inebriated voices in a chorus of “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” In a far corner I saw another group—two women, three children, and a man—gathered around a scrawny Christmas tree.
The tree had no ornaments, wasn’t really a tree at all, but just a top that someone had probably cut off and tossed away after finding that the one he’d bought was too tall for the height of his ceiling. There was no star atop it, no presents under it, no candy canes or popcorn chains, and there was certain to be no turkey dinner tomorrow. The people had nonetheless gathered around it and stood silently, their heads bowed in prayer.
My throat tightened and I clutched at the fence, fighting back tears. Even though I spent a disproportionate amount of my professional life probing into events and behavior that would make the average person gag, every now and then the indestructible courage of the human spirit absolutely stuns me.
I watched the scene for a moment longer, then turned away, glancing at my watch. Its hands told me why the people were praying: Christmas Day was upon us. This was their midnight service.
And then I realized that those people, who had nothing in the world with which to celebrate Christmas except somebody’s cast-off treetop, may have given me a priceless gift. I thought I knew now where I would find my nephew.
When I arrived at Mission Dolores, the neoclassical façade of the basilica was bathed in floodlights, the dome and towers gleaming against the post-midnight sky. The street was choked with double-parked vehicles, and from within I heard voices raised in a joyous chorus. Beside the newer early twentieth-century structure, the small adobe church built in the late 1700s seemed dwarfed and enveloped in deep silence. I hurried up the wide steps to the arching wooden doors of the basilica, then took a moment to compose myself before entering.
Like many of my generation, it had been years since I’d been even nominally a Catholic, but the old habit of reverence had never left me. I couldn’t just blunder in there and creep about, peering into every worshipper’s face, no matter how great my urgency. I waited until I felt relatively calm before pulling open the heavy door and stepping over the threshold.
The mass was candlelit; the robed figures of the priest and altar boys moved slowly in the flickering, shifting light. The stained glass window behind the altar and those on the side walls gleamed richly. In contrast, the massive pillars reached upward to vaulted arches that were deeply shadowed. As I moved slowly along one of the side aisles, the voices of the choir swelled to a majestic finale.
The congregant’s began to go forward to receive Communion. As they did, I was able to move less obtrusively, scanning the faces of the young people in the pews. Each time I spotted a teenaged boy, my heart quickened. Each time I felt a sharp stab of disappointment.
I passed behind the waiting communicants, then moved unhurriedly up the nave and crossed to the far aisle. The church was darker and sparsely populated toward the rear; momentarily a pillar blocked my view of the altar. I moved around it.
He was there in the pew next to the pillar, leaning wearily against it. Even in the shadowy light, I could see that his face was dirty and tired, his jacket and jeans rumpled and stained. His eyes were half-closed, his mouth slack; his hands were shoved between his thighs, as if for warmth.
Mike—no, Michael—had come to the only safe place he knew in the city, the church where on two Christmas Eves he’d attended mass with his family and their friends, the Shribers, who had lived across the street.
I slipped into the pew and sat down next to him. He jerked his head toward me, stared in openmouthed surprise. What little color he had drained from his face; his eyes grew wide and alarmed.
“Hi, Michael.” I put my hand on his arm.
He looked at me as if he wanted to shake it off. “How did you…?”
“Doesn’t matter. Not now. Let’s just sit quietly till mass is over.”
He continued to stare at me. After a few seconds he said, “I bet Mom and Dad are really mad at me.’
“More worried than anything else.”
“Did they hire you to find me?”
“No, I volunteered.”
“Huh.” He looked away at the line of communicants.
“You still go to church?” I asked.
“Not much. None of us do anymore. I kind of miss it.”
“Do you want to take Communion?”
He was silent. Then, “No. I don’t think that’s something I can do right now. Maybe never.”
“Well, that’s okay. Everybody expresses his feeling for…God, or whatever, in different ways.” I thought of the group of homeless worshippers in the vacant lot. “What’s important is that you believe in something.”
He nodded, and then we sat silently, watching people file up and down the aisle. After a while he said, “I guess I do believe in something. Otherwise I couldn’t have gotten through the week. I learned a lot, you know.”
“I’m sure you did.”
“About me, I mean.”
“I know.”
“What’re you going to do now? Send me home?”
“Do you want to go home?”
“Maybe. Yes. But I don’t want to be sent there. I want to go on my own.”
“Well, nobody should spend Christmas Day on a plane or a bus anyway. Besides, I am having ten people to dinner at four this afternoon. I’m counting on you to help me stuff the turkey.”
Michael hesitated, then smiled shyly. He took one hand from between his thighs and slipped it into mine. After a moment he leaned his tired head on my shoulder, and we celebrated the dawn of Christmas together.
BENNY’S SPACE
AMORFINA ANGELES was terrified, and I could fully empathize with her. Merely living in the neighborhood would have terrified me—all the more so had I been harassed by members of one of its many street gangs.
Hers was a rundown side street in the extreme southeast of S
an Francisco, only blocks from the crime- and drug-infested Sunnydale public housing projects. There were bars over the windows and grilles on the doors of the small stucco houses; dead and vandalized cars stood at the broken curbs; in the weed-choked yard next door, a mangy guard dog of indeterminate breed paced and snarled. Fear was written on this street as plainly as the graffiti on the walls and fences. Fear and hopelessness and a dull resignation to a life that none of its residents would willingly have opted to lead.
I watched Mrs. Angeles as she crossed her tiny living room to the front window, pulled the edge of the curtain aside a fraction, and peered out at the street. She was no more than five feet tall, with rounded shoulders, sallow skin, and graying black hair that curled in short, unruly ringlets. Her shapeless flower-printed dress did little to conceal a body made soft and fleshy by bad food and too much childbearing. Although she was only forty, she moved like a much older woman.
Her attorney and my colleague, Jack Stuart of All Souls Legal Cooperative, had given me a brief history of his client when he’d asked me to undertake an investigation on her behalf. She was a Filipina who had immigrated to the states with her husband in search of their own piece of the good life that was reputed to be had here. But as with many of their countrymen and -women, things hadn’t worked out as the Angeles’ had envisioned: first Amorfina’s husband had gone into the import-export business with a friend from Manila; the friend absconded two years later with Joe Angeles’ life savings. Then, a year after that, Joe was killed in a freak accident at a construction site where he was working. Amorfina and their six children were left with no means of support, and in the years since Joe’s death their circumstances had gradually been reduced to this two-bedroom rental cottage in one of the worst areas of the city.
Mrs. Angeles, Jack had told me, had done the best she could for her family, keeping them off the welfare rolls with a daytime job at the Mission district sewing factory and nighttime work doing alterations. As they grew older, the children helped with part-time jobs. Now there were only two left at home: sixteen-year-old Alex and fourteen-year-old Isabel. It was typical of their mother, Jack said, that in the current crisis she was more concerned for them than for herself.
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