The Angels of Catastrophe

by Peter Plate

  Paul confessed all this in a quick rush. It was a warm night and everyone in the slammer was getting loud and crazy. Prisoners were screaming and the noise traveled the long corridor from the felony tanks to the holding cell. Paul told his story like he was lounging in a cafe on Valencia Street drinking beers. Being in jail didn’t bug him. He was better at it than Durrutti. Penal hardened and more experienced.

  The last time he’d seen Paul alive was on a glorious July afternoon, pollen plagued and steaming hot; no fog anywhere. The sidewalks that day were swollen with French and Irish tourists fresh off the bus from the Mission Dolores Church. Durrutti had been trying to procure an ounce of sinsemilla, but a drought in the Mission had wiped out everyone’s supplies—even the semilegal medical cannabis clubs couldn’t come up with anything. In desperation, he’d gone over to Dolores Park, looked around and noticed the cops had driven the Salvadoreño nickel bag dealers out of the park.

  Moping around the Roxie Cinema on Sixteenth Street, he bumped into Paul Stevens eating lunch at Cafe Picaro. He was having rock cod and broccoli over a bed of white jasmine rice. Paul was modeling a hound’s-tooth check overcoat and smoking a cigarette in his left hand while he ate with his right hand. Durrutti told him what was up and Paul was glad to help. He said, “No problem. You need some fucking weed? C’mon, I know someone. What do you want? Mexican? Homegrown?”

  His connection was Scott Smith, who used to be the lover of the murdered San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Harvey Milk. Nowadays Scott was selling pot to pay the rent on his Seventeenth Street flat. Nothing too extreme, just a small enterprise. Paul informed Durrutti that Scott was having complications because he still had some of Harvey’s papers. Not that they were a problem for him; he liked having them in his house. But the public was clamoring for the stuff. A lot of institutions were interested in buying the dead gay liberation hero’s archives. Scott didn’t know what to do.

  Paul made a phone call to Scott and set up everything. “We’re cool,” he said. “Let’s proceed.”

  They paraded west on Eighteenth Street, going by Mission High School to the Castro District. Paul’s hound’s-tooth check coat flapped around his ankles as he walked. His legs were longer than Durrutti’s and he moved much faster. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days and his beard was coming out iron-gray, rendering the green in his eyes a lighter shade of blue. He said, “Did I tell you me and my boyfriend broke up? That was a pain in the ass. I don’t ever want to go through that divorce crap ever again. You invest everything you got into someone and then they throw you away like toilet paper. That ain’t right.”

  Durrutti was embarrassed by Paul’s confession and he stammered, “I’m sorry to hear this. What went wrong?”

  “You know me,” Paul said, glad to give his opinion. “I don’t hide my feelings. If I care about someone, they know it. If I’m ticked off at them, I snap and so we had a fight and he said that was it. Our fucking relationship was over.” Paul turned his head to appreciate a hummingbird in flight, zipping over the rooftops. “Looking back, I don’t think I was that hard to live with. Hell, I paid the rent on the apartment and when we went out drinking at the Stud, I paid for his beer. What a gutless wimp he was. I need a real man in my life. Someone I can count on when the shit gets weird.”

  Paul was selling weed too, but he wasn’t saying anything about it, typical of him. No one ever knew what he was doing, he was so secretive. Mister undercover. When they hit Scott’s front steps, he went rigid, the drug dealer in him coming out in full force. His body language became paramilitarized; shoulders hunched, hand out. He barked at Durrutti, “Okay, you got the money?”

  “Yeah. So what can you get me?”

  Paul tapped his foot, getting impatient. “Don’t be smart with me. I’ll get what I can get. What do you want?”

  “I’ve only got a hundred and eighty bucks here.”

  “That won’t get you shit. Nothing, really. Just some low-rent ragweed. It might get you some of that Mexican sinsemilla.”

  “Is it good?”

  “Of course not. What a dumb question. It’sjust cheap. That’s what you’re paying for. You’re getting a bargain price, just no quality.”

  Durrutti pondered his options for a millisecond. The price of a bag wasn’t worth what you got, but he was nervous and wanted to get high. This was his best bet. Defeated, he said, “Go for it.”

  “Give me the cash and wait outside, okay?” Paul examined Durrutti and grinned. “On the other hand, you’re gonna attract attention just standing here. When was the last time you shaved? Maybe you should take a walk around the block and blend in with the surroundings. Act like a civilian.”

  Durrutti shoved a wad of greasy one- and five-dollar bills at him. Paul stashed the cash in his coat, muttered something incomprehensible to himself and then he legged it up the long flight of stairs to Scott’s flat.

  Durrutti took a stroll around the block and watched an indigo blue dusk settle over the cars and the pedestrians at the intersection of Castro and Seventeenth Streets near Orphan Andy’s hamburger shop and the Twin Peaks bar.

  A few minutes later Paul stepped out of Scott’s door and clambered down the staircase to where Durrutti was sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk. In his hands was a spotty brown paper bag. He punched Durrutti in the chest with the bag, saying matter-of-factly, “Here you are, kiddo. I hope you like it. If you don’t, what the fuck. It was the only thing he had.”

  Paul’s wan face was dappled with sweaty lines, acne buried in his stubble and sleepless smudges under his eyes. Durrutti opened the bag and had a glance at the weed. It was as bad as Paul said it would be. Brown-green Sinaloa cartel pot sprayed with pesticides. Paul bundled his coat around him and swaggered a step down the sidewalk, turning to beam at Durrutti with a sudden mischievous light in his eyes. He mashed his chewing gum and blew a spastic pink bubble. “Let’s go to K &H Liquors. I have to get me some cigarettes.” Paul consulted his wristwatch, then coughed. “Shit, on the other hand, it’s later than I thought. I need to get back to the All-Star. Some people are coming over to sell me a radio.” He smiled again. “Days like this are a bitch, aren’t they?”

  Three weeks later he was dead.

  Hunt’s Donuts straddled the corner of Twentieth and Mission Streets advertising itself with a two-storied neon sign that had been broken for years. Floor to ceiling windows gave it the appearance of a fishbowl. Featuring cheap coffee and a wide selection of pastries, the doughnut shop was the home base of every minor league criminal in the Mission District, including Jimmy Ramirez. A slender, yellow skinned Mexican rigged out like a jazz musician in Sta-Prest green slacks, a sateen fedora, imitation Italian loafers, red lensed sunglasses and a droopy black leather coat, Jimmy wore a moderate pompadour and a fuzzy goatee. Sometimes he sold drugs, sometimes he didn’t. His bread and butter was moonlighting as a mechanic South of Market and as a lucrative sideline, he traded stolen car parts at flea markets in San Leandro and Watsonville.

  Jimmy’s partner was a black dude with a skyscraper Afro named Fleeta Bolton. Fleeta was prone to manic depressive mood swings and was more versatile than Jimmy when it came to making money. He hawked downers, burgled the nouveau antique furniture stores on Valencia Street and held a day job working as a sous chef in a chi-chi restaurant, the Foreign Cinema on Mission Street.

  Arriving at Hunt’s, Durrutti noticed it was half past noon. Except for the Salvadoreño ghetto cowboys who hung out there night and day, the fragrant bakery was vacant. Disappointed, Durrutti cursed under his breath. “Shit, I’m fucked.” He turned around and walked out the door, losing himself in the midday crowd as he moseyed toward the pseudo-Moorish spires of the El Capitán Hotel.

  In the industrial boom era after World War Two, the Mission District had been a honeycomb of residential hotels. The eastern corridor of the neighborhood had been laced with printing plants, warehouses, light manufacturing. All that had vanished, gone overseas to cheaper labor pools. The remaining si
ngle-room-occupancy hotels were getting burned down to the ground, arsoned by landlords wanting quick insurance settlements. The property was too valuable to let poor people live on it.

  The El Capitán was one of the few SRO’s left standing—the adobe brown building was an icon from the time when Mission Street had been known as the Miracle Mile. The hotel’s former grandeur was in its ornate facade, thrusting itself toward the sky, head and shoulders above the newer shops and prefab condominiums. Durrutti had been holed up in it for six months.

  After checking with the front desk for mail, he took a coffin-sized lift upstairs to his room. In mid-motion, the steel cage came to a grinding halt and got stuck in between the first and second floors. Standing alone in the complete darkness of the elevator, he felt the walls close in on him. He began to sweat, unable to calm himself. Here was a silence he’d never heard before—and with it came a fear of imprisonment. Fear had seeded him with claustrophobia. His breath came out of his mouth in asthmatic gasps and he banged on the walls and shouted for help. “Hey, goddamn it! Somebody get me out of here!”

  Spending time with Kulak had drained the life out of Durrutti. He didn’t know which was harder on the spirit, committing felonies or getting entangled with the cops. Both were difficult and not very profitable, neither were worthy of poetry or song. Twenty minutes later the maintenance man freed him, saying they’d been having problems with the lift.

  When he got to his room he kicked off his shoes and sprawled out on the lumpy double bed. He rested an arm over his forehead and stared at the ceiling, growing drowsy. His thoughts were a smorgasbord of bad news. A dead cop. A missing gun. Jimmy Ramirez. Kulak’s toupee. The Federal Building. Trouble was pulling him along; he was no better than a rabid, slavering dog on a leash. He fell asleep, dreaming of nothing.

  Chapter Three

  Someone banged on the door, disturbing his nap. He woke up, bathing in a puddle of his own sweat. Durrutti frowned, etching a single line at a ninety degree angle in his brow. He bawled, “Who’s there?”

  A reedy soprano answered him. “It’s me ... Arlo. With Jackie and shit.”

  “What do you want?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m trying to sleep, damn it!”

  “In the middle of the day?”

  Durrutti pouted. “It ain’t against the law, is it?”

  Arlo and Jackie were a dope dealing team of queens that had resided at the El Capitán for years. Arlo was a drop-dead gorgeous twenty-five year old pre-op tranny with silky long black hair from Chicago’s southside. She was always talking about wanting a baby, a child of her own. Jackie was ten years her senior, a six-foot-tall former Marine born in Guam who’d gotten drummed out of the Corps for breaking her commanding officer’s jaw. An unflattering wasteland of knife scars crisscrossed her high-cheeked face and she was as restless and angry as Arlo was bubbly and cheerful.

  “C’mon, baby girl,” Arlo crooned, sounding blissed out. She ran her fingernails across the door. “I was hoping you had some cigarettes. We ran out and we ain’t got no money.”

  Dope fiends were more persistent than the police when it came to getting what they wanted. More demanding than the Internal Revenue Service. If you had something, anything, they never left you alone. Not while you were alive. Thinking the twosome might help him find Jimmy Ramirez, Durrutti rolled out of bed and opened the door and herded Arlo and Jackie into the room.

  The couple promenaded into his boudoir nursing a pair of visible hangovers. Jackie was barefoot and nude under her honey-cream silk dressing gown. Arlo had on a red mini-dress, black stockings and orange suede fuck-me pumps with six inch stiletto heels. Durrutti settled them down on the bed—there was nowhere else to sit—and handed out Marlboro cigarettes like a proper host. Then he related the predicament he was in, not mentioning Jimmy Ramirez, the missing gun or Paul Stevens.

  Jackie’s pimply skin was grayed with exhaustion. She flicked a hank of hair off her scaly forehead by jerking her chin. Her button-hard eyes lasered a hole in Durrutti while he told his story. She snickered at him in hostile flirtation when he was finished. “What a pisser. A dead cop and the Feds are asking you about it. Some guys have all the luck. You know who snuffed that pig, don’t you?”

  Durrutti was wary, yet eager to draw her out. He stifled the excitement in his voice. The effort made his sphincter itch. “No, I don’t. Do you?”

  The former jarhead knew something—you could see the heat in her crumpled face, how she flushed, her blood jogged hot with the thought of a cop’s death. Jackie moved her lips, delicate compared to the rest of her. She offered a brutally false smile as she finished the Marlboro and ground the butt under her naked foot into the green shag carpeting. “If I do, I ain’t saying. Talking about it is foolish. I shouldn’t have brought it up in the first place.”

  The torrid Mission Street sun suddenly hit the El Capitán with a ferocity that cremated Durrutti’s eyes in their sockets—the temperature in his room felt well over a hundred degrees. His tongue was a corpse rotting in his mouth and he could think of nothing else to say.

  Arlo saw he was slipping into a funk and came to his rescue. She said to Jackie, half scolding her, “Tell Ricky what you know, you evil thing. Give the girlfriend a fucking break. The bitch needs your help.”

  The teasing in Arlo’s husky voice worked on Jackie like a charm. Ever the good husband, she lived to satisfy her wife’s wishes. She drew her gown tightly around her and said solemnly, speaking like a priest giving a catechism lesson, “Okay ... you know the Mara Salvatrucha?”

  Equivocating because he had nothing to gain by making an admittance, Durrutti replied, “No, I don’t. I don’t know anything about them.”

  “You don’t?”

  Durrutti faked exasperation. “No. If I say I don’t, I don’t.”

  The Salvadorean gang was fighting the other major clicas, the Sureños and the Norteños, for territory in the north Mission. The intersection of Nineteenth and Mission Streets by the check cashing store and the Sunrest Bar had been a war zone for two years. Placas were spray painted on every wall at the corner. Durrutti was semi-friendly with one of the Mara Salvatrucha soldados, a youth in his early twenties called Lonely Boy.

  “Well, word is,” Jackie said, “them dudes done it.”

  Durrutti let the news seep in. If the Mara Salvatrucha were shooting cops, he was in for a miserable future. Mission Street would become a tunnel of hate with no exit. The police would make him regret being alive. The three of them were quiet as the flies in the room swarmed around their heads. Arlo studied her lacquered fingernails while Jackie fiddled with her belt. Changing the subject, Durrutti said to Arlo, “You seen Jimmy Ramirez around?”

  “No. He a friend of yours?”

  “A friend? No, but I know he’s this skinny Mexican dude that hangs out at Hunt’s Donuts.”

  “Damn right I know him. We front him dope. Helps him to make some money. What do you want with him?”

  Arlo’s sharp wolfish face and her bright feral eyes blackened with mascara exhibited an overweening curiosity she couldn’t quite control—she was a virulent gossipmonger. So Durrutti smothered his own fervor in nonchalance: “Ah, nothing much.”

  Jackie snorted two blasts of derision through her mucus-ringed nostrils. “You’re a goddamn liar.”

  Making personality assessments wasn’t Jackie’s metier. Her emphatic tone sparked Durrutti’s inquisitiveness. Keeping his voice flat and saturated with boredom, he asked, “Why do you say that?”

  The ex-marine’s vocal cords imitated a car engine in need of a quart of oil. “You should see the look on your face. But what the fuck do you care?” The pay phone in the hall began to ring, reverberating through the room’s paper-thin walls. The ringing agitated Jackie and she got huffy. “I’m gonna tear that goddamn thing off the wall, it keeps making that noise.”

  The hotel desk clerk on the second floor took the call, then yelled out Durrutti’s name. His cry bulleted
down the hallway, shaking the cobwebs on the wallpaper and stirring the dust on the floor. Durrutti told Jackie and Arlo to sit tight, that he’d be back in a minute.

  To his delight, Jimmy Ramirez’s syrupy codeine drenched voice, smooth enough to melt the barbed wire off a prison fence, splashed into his ear when he picked up the receiver. The homeboy’s accented English deconstructed his name. “Ricky Durrutti?”

  “Is this Jimmy?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  “Me.”

  “And who are you?”

  “It’s me, Ricky.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so? Que pasa?”

  “Funny you ask. I’ve been looking for you. I need to talk with you, man. Real badly.”

  Jimmy was immediately paranoid. “What do you mean?”

  The intensity of his fear was like electricity, with all its energy directed at Durrutti. The voltage made his head hurt. He tried to deflect it by saying, “I just need to see you, that’s all.”

  Jimmy Ramirez lapsed into a more characteristic laid-back attitude and waxed ambiguous. “Yeah, well, not right now. I’ve got shit to do. You wanna see me, you gotta make an appointment with my ass.”

  “It’s important.”

  “How important?”

  “Like serious. I can’t say anything about it on the telephone.”

  “Yeah?”

  Durrutti attempted to remain stoic and failed. “Uh, listen ... you know anything about the cop that got popped?”

  A full minute went by before Jimmy said anything. Sixty seconds of malignant silence that had Durrutti questioning his own sanity. Jimmy replied, prevaricating through his teeth, “You shouldn’t be asking me shit like that. Maybe I do. And maybe I don’t. Who wants to know?”