I spot Shanley standing in front of my building. He's conferring with a woman, taller than me, with short dark slick-gelled hair. I approach warily. Shanley introduces us. She's a detective, Hillary Lentz. "People call me Hilly," she says cheerfully, extending her hand.
I look hard at Shanley. "Found the rest of him?"
"Not yet.''
"I told you—come see me when you do."
He's annoyed. "Christ's sake, Kay, wasn't us cut him up. Give us a break. We're doing all we can."
Hilly joins in. "If we're going to find the guy who did this, every hour counts. This is someone you cared about, right?"
A good argument, so I relent, invite them up. In the elevator Shanley asks if I have photos of Tim. I tell him I have hundreds. He asks if he can borrow one.
"What for?"
"Posters. We'll plaster the Gulch, ask for leads."
"No one there'll talk to you."
"They will if they think about it. The person who did this could easily do the same to them," Hilly says.
Suddenly I remember how decent cops can be, how a job one would think would harden people often has the opposite effect. Dad was a softy, still is. I decide to trust them. I unlock my apartment door.
"Why keep it so dark? You gotta have great views," Hilly says.
"Sunlight hurts my eyes and the views are just as good at night."
They peer around. Hilly studies my decor. "No colors except the books," she observes. "Nice effect."
"It's not an effect. I want it this way. I'm color-blind." They stare at me. Shanley muses: "Color-blind photographer. Interesting. . . ."
"I shoot in black and white," I tell him. "You're thinking: 'I thought only boys were color-blind.'"
"Actually—" Shanley says.
"That's not color-blindness, that's red-green confusion. The inheritance pattern's different. Anything else you want to know?" '
"No need to get hostile."
"Guys!" Hilly shows her palms. "We got a homicide to deal with. How 'bout we work on that?"
I take them into my office, converted from the second bedroom, open a drawer of my flat file, pull out a box of prints. I show them only the formal portraits, not the more intimate shots.
"Good looking kid," Shanley comments.
"You liked him a lot," Hilly says.
"You can tell?"
"Definitely." She picks up my Angel Island portrait. "The way you photograph him here—it shows."
It feels good to hear her say that. For the first time since Crawf woke me, I think maybe I can handle this.
"This street name, Rain," Shanley asks, "what's that all about?"
"Just a name. He had this kind of . . . I don't know. . . inner sorrow, I guess."
"Poetic," Hilly says. "Who gives out these names?"
"'Someone starts it, and if you don't act offended others pick it up."
"Yours, we hear, is Bug," Shanley says.
"Great detective work. You investigating him or me?"
We go back to the living room. They want to know what Tim did. I gaze at them. Are they putting me on?
"He was a hustler."
"So we heard. How did you two get involved?"
"Involved how?"
"However," Shanley says.
I gaze at him. There's meanness there. Hilly, on the other hand, seems decent enough. Good cop/bad cop. I turn to her.
"When I started shooting on the Gulch, Tim Lovsey was one of the first people I met. We liked each other, started hanging out. I saw him maybe four, five times a week. Whenever I was down there, we'd have coffee or a drink. He called me yesterday, said there was something important he wanted to talk about. We agreed to meet at seven. I waited on Hemlock for over an hour. When he didn't show, I checked around. No one had seen him since the day before."
"What was on his mind?"
"He didn't say. I could be wrong, but I think he sounded scared."
"You think—"
"—there's a connection? Sure, otherwise I wouldn't be telling you this."
"What else can you tell us?"
Hilly, I observe, is taking notes.
"Not much. Couple weeks ago he told me he had fifty thousand stashed. You might want to look into that." Shanley nods. "What was that wound in his neck?"
"He was shot before he was beheaded."
"That's how he was killed?"
"Probably. Think it could've been a john?"
"I'd say that's a good possibility, wouldn't you?"
I stand. I've had enough of them. I give them the Angel Island print, which they like because Tim looks sexy in it and that'll draw attention to their posters. I promise to think hard and come up with his uncle's name. Finally I give them his address and hand Shanley the key. I don't mention that Crawf and I were just there.
"Let me know when you find the rest of him," I tell them at the door.
"Sure. Any particular reason?"
"I want to arrange a funeral."
I'm sitting in my office, shades down, studying photos I took of Tim. It's my way to recall him, honor his memory.
Suddenly I'm angry. He knew what he did was dangerous. At least twice we discussed the risks he took each time he went home with a stranger. I lectured him: sex workers are targets; the encounters are anonymous, giving confidence to johns who feel sadistic fury toward figures in their pasts. When the sex worker is chosen to represent that figure, he or she can end up the victim of a murderous rage.
I told him how often I'd read about slain prostitutes and about the series of homicides in Britain where the killer picked up his victims in gay bars.
Tim nodded. He knew about all that. It's dangerous too, he reminded me, to cross the street.
That was the only time I blew up at him. "Are you looking to get killed?"
He smiled at me, his special tender way. "You don't understand, Kay. Most of my johns are sweet. I tune in to the vibes. When they're bad, I pass."
"How can you tell?"
He shrugged. "You're on the street awhile you get a sixth sense for stuff like that."
I stare at a photo I took of him juggling rubber balls on the ferryboat to Sausalito. He wears a tank top and shorts, and his hair is mussed. I remember the day well, a Sunday. On the spur of the moment we decided to cross over for lunch. The water was choppy, the ferry left a churning trail, kites flew over Alcatraz, the Bay was filled with sailboats bent sharply to catch the wind.
There were kids on board and as we approached Sausalito Tim entertained them with his juggling act. He was terrific, kept four balls going. Later I asked him where he learned to do it. He said he ran away with a circus when he was ten.
He was joking of course, but he did have offbeat and engaging skills, was facile with close-up magic, pulling coins out of ears, then making them disappear. He could stick a knife down his throat, and, he told me, knew how to charm a snake. He wanted me to know he had a past, even as he refused to reveal it. Enjoying his mystifications, I played along, figuring sooner or later he'd tell me the story of his life.
I open the box that contains the nudes. I can hardly bear to look at them. Why, I wonder now, didn't we have sex? He considered himself bisexual, told me he'd had girlfriends and said he'd enjoy accommodating women if there were female takers for what he had to offer.
"There are," I assured him. "I see older women with young hunks all the time."
"Gigolos," he said with contempt. "I'm a hustler."
"Is that better?"
"Freer." He seemed certain about it. "No one controls you. You live the way you like. You hustle, make things happen, don't dance for anyone, do your thing."
It was from such conversations that I developed my notion of hustlers as free spirits and psychic explorers. A flawed perception perhaps, a romanticized view of a sordid way of life. But that was where my pictures led me. My eyes were my guide. I shot what I felt.
The phone rings. It's Shanley. He's calling on his cellular from Tim's apartment.
"Who else has keys?" he demands.
"Why?"
"Someone's been in here that's why," he says angrily. "Place is ransacked. Everything's fucking upside down."
I cry a little, then pace like a caged beast, then put on my shades and pull up the blinds and stare out at the city smothered in late-morning fog. Low-pitched horns moan from the Bay. A naval hospital ship, heading for Oakland, slips between the Embarcadero and Treasure Island. The ship is white, ghostly, and bears a huge cross which I know is red but which appears black to me.
I'm torn between grief and anger, and my anger, I fear, is gaining the upper hand. My mother shot herself when I was twenty, stuck my father's spare gun in her mouth, then pulled the trigger like a cop. That happened fifteen years ago and I still feel anger more than pain. I think anger's a way to hold on to someone who's died; if I can feel angry enough, memory of the person won't fade.
Noon. I'm trying to center myself. I keep thinking about Shanley's call. Between the time Crawf and I were at Tim's and the time Shanley got there, barely an hour passed. By then a lot of people found out what had happened. Any one of them could have broken in.
Except . . . Shanley didn't say there'd been a break-in; he asked who else had a key. So it must have been someone Tim trusted, or the person who killed him . . . since he would have had his own key with him when he died.
David Jeffrey—Uncle David's name flies into my mind. He's in the entertainment business, lives in Manhattan, is the only member of Tim's family who didn't disown him, rather took him in, and helped him come to terms with his sexuality. It was Uncle David who loaned him money to move out to San Francisco. He doesn't know that Tim became a hustler, thinks he's working here as a waiter. He also doesn't know where he lives, since Tim, moving often, kept a private mailbox at one of those wrap-it/ship-it stores in the Castro.
I pick up my phone, dial New York City information. There're two David Jeffreys, three people listed as D. Jeffrey, and, using alternate spellings, half a dozen more David and D. Jefreys and Geoffreys. I take down the numbers even as I know I won't place the calls. Too many names, too many times I'll have to ask: "Are you Tim Lovsey's uncle?" Better to let Shanley do that. But then, I remember, I don't really want to talk to Shanley anymore.
I go into my darkroom, process a couple of undeveloped rolls, mechanical work that keeps me busy. After I hang up the rolls to dry, I retrieve a negative strip from my safe—the one that contains my favorite of the Angel Island shots. I place the strip on my light-box, examine it with a magnifying glass. Seeing Tim this way, with the blacks and whites reversed, fills me with a mellow sorrow. I feel that this negative, being the piece of film upon which light he reflected actually fell, contains more of his essence than prints made from it.
Color blindness, which I once viewed as a curse, has turned out to be a gift enabling me to see the world differently than others. People think they understand color blindness: "Oh, must be like looking at black-and-white movies all day long." Perhaps it is. I have no idea. The concept of gray as a color doesn't mean anything to me either. I see black and white and shades in between, "a world cast in lead," as Greta Benning, my favorite high school art teacher, used to say. "Consider taking up drawing or etching, Kay," she advised. I tried both. All my life I wanted to be an artist, I just wasn't sure what kind.
When I started at the San Francisco Art Institute, it was with the intention of becoming a sculptor. Since sculpture materials are generally monochromatic, color perception isn't vital to success.
Everything was going fairly well, when, my second year, I took a course in studio photography. Within a week I knew I'd found my medium. My dad, responding to my enthusiasm, gave me his camera, an early-model Nikon. I started carrying it with me, shooting everything that interested me, often also using it as a telescope to see things when the rods of my retinas got saturated by brilliant light.
A camera around my neck didn't look nearly as odd as the handheld monocular most achromats carry. Soon it became a part of me—my tool, limb and shield. Since I couldn't see very well in daylight, my camera became my eyes; later, looking at my photographs, I was able to see what I had "seen."
Since I graduated from art school I've worked as a photojournalist for an alternative newspaper, a portraitist and, for five years, a studio and location fashion photographer. I've covered sports, rock concerts, political campaigns; photographed politicians, writers, dogs; shot spreads for Details, GQ, and Elle.
Three years ago I went cold turkey on commercial work, determined to devote myself full-time to personal projects. I'd always wanted to be a fine-art photographer. Finally, with a little money saved, I decided to take the shot.
I've been fortunate. Last year I published a book, Transgressions, the best of two years' worth of pictures in which I used black-and-white studio fashion lighting techniques to glamorize and thus counter-document the pain of battered women. The idea was to show the pride of women who, though beaten in body, were unbowed in spirit. Reviews were good though sales were not. The high priestesses of political correctness called me traitor.
The controversy helped get my pictures shown in New York. I exhibit and sell locally through the Zeitgeist Gallery. Having turned art photographer, I earn a lot less than when I did fashion work, but I get by, and most important, feel fulfilled.
My Polk Gulch project is different than Transgressions, executed not in the studio but, in accordance with Maddy Yamada's advice, entirely on the street. The working title is Exposures. Again I'm looking to glamorize what most people regard as sordid, but this time my technique is different: whatever glamour accrues to my hustler-models comes from within, not from lighting and directed poses. And the glamour portraits are only half my project; the other half is my documentation of transactions of the flesh. I've amassed hundreds of grainy images, shot candidly with available illumination at night, of my heroes interacting with johns, meeting, negotiating, driving off. The best of these, the ones I intend to use, catch the looks on the faces of hustler and john as their eyes meet; they inspect one another and forge the deals that lead to intimate acts unseen.
Three p.m. The fog has lifted. I put on my shades, grab my gym bag and walk down to Cow Hollow for aikido class. The dojo, Marina Aikido, is above a store on the corner of Laguna and Lombard, one of the most heavily traveled streets in the city. The instructor, a black woman named Rita Reese, is tough, sinewy, a former marine. Not too many mystical Zen-like utterances from her; she's more contemporary woman warrior than classic sensei.
I change quickly, then move out to the floor to stretch. Today our class has nine women, three men. There are a couple of high-school girls, several women in their thirties, and Justine, a lithe middle-aged woman with gray bangs, an advanced student with whom I often work out. I'm one of the smallest in the group: five feet four, 114 pounds. I make no claims to being a star martial artist. I attend because I love the beauty of aikido, the clarity, the concentration, the spiritual practice. My efforts to achieve mastery make me feel powerful. And, too, I enjoy the exercise.
"You're not concentrating, Kay. Claim your space! Blend your energy!"
Rita, so elegant in her hakama, the split floor-length black skirt that, being a black belt, she's entitled to wear, is a caring instructor. But today I'm not in the mood to blend my energy; I've come here to release it.
We pair off for freestyle practice. Justine and I face one another. We bow to show respect, that we hold no anger, that it isn't hostility that drives us, but love of sport and art.
Suddenly I attack. Justine grabs my arm, turns, throws me down. I don't fall well. It hurts when I hit the mat. Aikido is not only beautiful, it can also be very painful. Today I welcome the pain. I want to fall hard, again, again and still again, want to leave class sweaty and sore.
Again I attack. Again Justine throws me. Her moves are circular, balletic, her throws nearly effortless. Rita, I see, is watching us. Up from the mat, I check myself in the mirror. I look, I think, like a rag d
oll, broken and spent.
By the end of practice, my jacket's drenched with my sweat, my hips and shoulders are bruised. After we bow, Justine embraces me.
"Next time I'll attack, you'll apply techniques," she promises.
Rita approaches shaking her head, causing her braided cornrows to flick. I'm breathing hard. She brushes something out of my hair. "You're a punching bag today, girlfriend," she says.
I nod. She stares into my eyes. "I've seen you do much better. You seem vulnerable. Don't forget, Kay, on the mat all secrets are exposed."
I stare back at her, tears pulsing from my eyes. "I lost someone close," I blurt.
Suddenly she hugs me. "Oh, Kay, I'm so sorry."
I won't let this go, I decide, as I walk back up the hill. The light is dazzling; I blink even though I'm wearing heavy shades. You can't kill someone I care about, then chop him up and throw the pieces away like trash and get away with it.
Questions flood in: Who was Tim? Did he have enemies? Where did he learn to juggle and do close-up magic? Who's his Uncle David? Who's the mysterious girl he wanted me to meet? What did he want to talk about yesterday? Did he really have fifty thousand stashed? Who turned over his flat?
I want to know all these things because he was my friend and because, I've just decided, his life and death will be the subject of Exposures. I'll change my concept.
The book will no longer be about Gulch hustlers among whom he will be a featured player. It will be entirely about him, how he lived and died. I already have the pictures. What I need now is the story.
CHAPTER THREE
Tonight before venturing out I wait till magic time is over, until the failing light drains away the colors from the city, colors I know are there but cannot see. Then I enter the nightscape.
This evening Polk Street is the same yet different, crawling with cops, patrol cars parked on every block. No dealers are out, few street people. The human flotsam has retreated to the alleys of the Tenderloin. With the law so visible the habitués deem the Gulch unsafe.
The Magician's Tale Page 3
