by Peter Plate
“Yes, you do.”
“Doing what?”
“Being nice to her.”
Eichmann looked at Bobo, throwing spearheads of scorn at him. “Yeah? Tell me what to do, bright eyes.”
“You’ve got to be more tender with her, you hear?”
Normally, Eichmann would have laughed at Bobo, knowing he was talking through his hat. But this time, he responded to the Mexican in a low, homicidal undertone, hissing, “Shut up.” Eichmann wanted to acknowledge the accuracy of what Bobo was saying, but something in him refused to let it happen, and for good reason: He’d been constructing walls around himself ever since I met him. He couldn’t get through to Bobo, Loretta, or me. His whole body shook with agitation as he mumbled, “Don’t tell me nothing. I know more about women than you ever will.”
11
After our expropriation of Roy’s sinsemilla, we didn’t waste time maximizing our retail operations. The day after our visit to Ocean Beach, the dope was broken down into eighths—one hundred and twenty-eight of them—at the house of a girl we knew who lived behind the Valencia Street funeral homes. Her name was Randi, and she was maybe five inches taller than me; a baby lesbian who wore low-slung Ben Davis jeans and smoked cigarettes like a man. I had a crush on her that was going nowhere fast.
Bobo and I trimmed the buds with a pair of nail clippers. The task required dexterity and patience, the same traits you needed when you were an inmate doing art therapy in a mental institution. I wasn’t so great at it. I butchered the buds, making them cosmetically undesirable. Eichmann felt he had the right to scold me about my lack of productivity. “Hurry up, will you? We ain’t got all day.”
“I’m doing what I can.”
“Don’t give me that shit. What do you think I am, a cretin?”
“No, you’re not a cretin.”
“We’ve got to be out of here by four. Distribution is going to take all evening. Bobo, you almost done?”
“Give me another minute.”
“A minute you get. And by the way, everything’s been sold.”
“How’d you do it?”
“Our customers made presale orders.”
What did I think? We were moving up, cresting a wave. We’d come a long way in the past two weeks, fueling me with bittersweet hindsights about the previous summer. Back then, other dealers had been disrespectful of our enterprise, letting us know we were strictly cannon fodder.
Bobo had stolen a case of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup from a delivery truck at the Safeway near Thirtieth Street. If it weren’t for him, we would’ve gone hungry. As it was, my teeth were getting soft and my gums were going bad. We were hurting something fierce and so Eichmann got on the horn to Maurice, a dealer who owed us seventy dollars.
At half past nine there was a hostile knock on the garage door. Eichmann opened the gate, and Maurice ambled into our hovel, projecting his pseudocoolness five feet in front of him like an invisible force shield. It was obvious he was rolling in money. Slim and ethereal, he was decked out in red leather from head to foot, and it wasn’t discount third-world cowhide either. Maurice had on a custom-made North Beach Leather suit that must have set him back a grand or more. He strolled over to the coffee table and sat himself down in our beanbag chair, letting his eyes wander over the garage. He smirked at what he saw, remarking with a fleer, “You homies aren’t exactly living high off the hog, are you?”
For as long as I could remember, I’d been swallowing other people’s insults. I was a verbal garbage dump. It was phenomenal—someone who had more cash than you had to rub your face in it. No sense in letting things be when you could point out the differences, right?
“You come over here to pay up, dude?” Eichmann asked.
The question made Maurice chuckle heartily. His freon-blue eyes glittered at the absurdity of giving us our seventy bucks. He looked at me and shook his thinning pompadour. “Money, money, money, that’s all you pitiful fuckheads think about. I’ll tell you what … here’s some advice.”
“I don’t want your hot air. I want our cash.”
“Whoa, listen to him. Let me enlighten your ass.”
“What’s that? You’re going to say something brilliant?”
“I am. Check this … why should I give you the money? I use it better than you do. It’s wasted on you.”
Eichmann started to boil. “No shit?”
“When I see how y’all are doing, living in a garage, I feel like a character out of Horatio Alger.”
“Who’s that?”
“You ignorant sap, he wrote rags-to-riches stories.”
Maurice crossed his legs and settled back in the chair, mighty pleased with himself. A smug and contentious smile was glued to his thin lips. He unbuttoned his leather jacket, revealing an older-model Colt automatic in a nylon-mesh shoulder holster. He stifled a bored fake-yawn. “You should consider the money you gave me as an investment that’s still in progress.”
I didn’t know who Horatio Alger was and I didn’t care. At my grandma’s house, we only read the television guide, a paperback book of collected stories by Alexander Pushkin, Bernard Malamud’s novels, the earlier work of Cynthia Ozick, and anything by I. J. Singer. Maurice noticed the poisoned grooves around my mouth and eyes, how the hate on my face made me pale. He said, “What’s with the twerp?”
Bobo offered our nemesis an explanation. “Doojie’s upset because you won’t pay us.”
Maurice pulled out a five-dollar bill from his coat pocket, crumpled the note into a ball, and tossed it at me. The five spot caromed off my head and fell to the floor. My pride was so far gone, I had to stop myself from getting on my knees and taking it. Maurice snorted at me, “What? You don’t want it? Give it back, then.”
He bent over to retrieve his money, getting hinky and cursing under his breath. I took the opportunity to exploit his distraction by reaching into his holster for the automatic. My reflexes were good and my fingers were nimble; you put those attributes next to an ice-cold rage, and I was unbeatable. I had my fingers wrapped around the Colt’s checkered plastic grips before he could stop me.
Eichmann enjoyed the interplay that accompanied the turn of events, and he applauded me. “Bravo! Well done, Doojie!”
Maurice, no less theatrical than his enemy, narrowed his eyes, and affected a tough guy’s speech pattern, slurring out of the side of his mouth, “Give me back my gun!”
The price of punishing him for his bad manners wasn’t worth going to jail for. Maurice misinterpreted my resignation as an act of submission. His baby face lit up, regaining its peachiness. “That’s more like it,” he snickered, getting smart-alecky. “You ain’t got the balls to hurt me.” He got up from the chair and brushed a speck of lint from his red leather jacket, surveying the three of us. Then he snapped his fingers at me like I was his servant. “Give me the pistol.”
He’d stretched my patience as far as it could go without tearing. I pulled the trigger, and a bullet flowered out of the Colt’s muzzle with an orange burst. It zipped by Maurice’s ear, ricocheting off the floor, then up into the rafters, shaking the cobwebs. Dust fell on all of us, causing Bobo to sneeze. Maurice spun around like a top, flinging his arms in the air, mewling, “Don’t kill me!”
Eichmann took advantage of the commotion by slugging our guest in the ribs to pacify him. “Horatio Alger, huh?” A bleary-faced Maurice doubled up and landed on his side, winded. He wretched once, then collapsed into a fit of prolonged tubercular coughing. Eichmann squatted alongside him, relieving our foe of his Kenneth Cole boots, his silk Versace socks, and his cash. He briskly counted the money, yipping, “I’ll be damned! Look at this! Maurice has a hundred and ten bucks here!”
We didn’t discuss the backlash that would come from running off with Roy’s pound. We were being vigilant, but nothing had happened. Perhaps Roy was one of those Pacific Heights people who had so much surplus cash, he was dealing drugs to do something risqué. If he got his hands bloody, he’d move on to anothe
r sport, something less demanding, such as windsurfing. Eichmann had his calculator out on the kitchen table and he was hitting the buttons, tallying the numbers. He said to me with a concentrated intensity that could fry an egg, “We’ve got to sell this dope like pronto.” Then he proclaimed with no uncertain wisdom, “If we sell these bags at seventy-five apiece, that’s some beaucoup money. Are you ready for this?”
“Yeah.”
“Bobo? You?”
“Yup.”
“Okay, here’s the arithmetic. You guys, remember this. It’s important. Bobo, you got forty-three eighths to sell. You understand?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I got forty-three eighths, and Doojie … you get forty-two bags.”
“How come I get one less?”
“Oy gevalt, I don’t know. That’s how it worked out. Don’t ask me so many stupid questions.”
12
My sales route was a byzantine matrix that crisscrossed the Mission. I started on Shotwell, doubled back to Hampshire, then looped over to Dolores Street. Four hours later I sold my last bag to a long-standing acquaintance who told me Dee Dee was angry with us. The junkie was planning on making trouble. I acknowledged the warning, but my pockets were bulging with soiled five-, ten-, and twenty-dollar bills. Any fear I had about Dee Dee paled in the face of my earnings.
I met up with Bobo and Eichmann at the intersection of Twenty-first and Mission next to Si Tashjian Flowers. The sun was sinking behind Twin Peaks, leaving the street in muggy darkness. A papaya vendor was sitting on the steps of the Sanwa Bank across the street. Si Tashjian was closing down for the night, moving bouquets of cala lilies and rhododendrons on a cart into his store. People were shot so often at the corner of Twenty-first Street, it was the Bermuda Triangle of San Francisco. The air was heavy with a dissonance that insinuated itself into your muscles, making them quiver as if they were attached to a battery of electrodes.
Bobo asked me, “How’d you make out, Doojie?”
“Not bad.”
Eichmann piped up, “Damn straight. We’ve got the formula now.”
For once in my life, I felt self-esteem. But it wasn’t about making money. Something else was changing me. It was Eichmann and Bobo. I couldn’t believe how old they seemed. Eichmann’s prematurely receding hairline and his sunken, sleepless eyes made his face as prehistoric as the dinosaurs in the history books. Bobo slouched by his side, too tired to be anything except careworn. Whatever happened, no matter where I ended up, I didn’t ever want to feel as tired as they looked. Eichmann’s wolfish aura was making us too obvious in the street, noticeable even to himself, and so he suggested, “Let’s get back to the garage. We’ve got to put away the cash.”
“You have a hiding place for it?”
“Yeah, I’ve got a wall safe as big as Fort Knox … you fucking dumbo. I’m putting it in a shoe box.”
“What are we going to do after that? It’s too hot to sleep.”
“I don’t know. We can go for a walk and get some of that Indian ice cream at Bombay Creamery. You know that flavor they got? Lychee nut? It’s outrageous.”
“I want a chicken taco.”
“Then we’ll go to Pancho Villa’s.”
“Think they’ll be open?”
“If they ain’t, we’re going to starve tonight.”
It was a plan. We had a short-term goal in life and the means to achieve it.
We turned left off Mission onto San Carlos, as mellow as we’d ever been, passing a joint back and forth, laughing and reminiscing. The block of San Carlos between Twentieth and Twenty-first Streets used to have lots of empty Victorians; dilapidated, unpainted two-storied tenements worth millions of dollars despite the shaky earthquake-prone soil they sat on. Thinking about the real estate made me fantasize about having a house of my own someday. If I kept making money, I could get a place. Maybe not in San Francisco, but definitely in San Leandro or Oakland. Eichmann interrupted my reverie, saying, “Hey, what’s with those dudes?”
“Who?”
“Those mother humpers over there.”
Two hefty strangers were spreading out to block our passage. San Carlos was long and narrow; there was only one way in and one way out. Both men seemed vaguely familiar in the way most of the people on Mission Street did, just a bit scruffy and hard pressed, down on their luck.
“Who are those assholes?”
“Don’t ask me.”
They were drawing closer, maybe twenty yards away. If it weren’t for the telltale bulge of the radios, guns, and handcuffs under their down vests, I would’ve mistaken them for ex-cons straight out of prison. Flaherty’s spotty face emerged from the gloom, more hirsute than ever—I couldn’t believe it. Just when we were on the brink of getting over like champions, the cops had to come down on us. And there was no doubt about it, these characters weren’t out for a jaunt; they’d been waiting to meet us. A cramp deadened my legs, pinwheeling electrical bursts from my groin. Eichmann counseled, “Aw, forget them. They’re just trying to act bad. Whatever you do, don’t look at them.”
“I ain’t blind, man. What do you want from me?”
“Be casual.”
“Like they’re not there? Like they don’t exist?”
“Totally. Just keep walking and they’ll let us be.”
It sounded diplomatic to me and I was willing to give it a try. A détente was better than nothing. But when the other narc, Flaherty’s silent partner, pulled out his gun, Bobo howled, “Fuck that! Let’s get out of here!”
We zigzagged back toward Twenty-first Street; Eichmann cut in front of me, going to my left while Bobo sailed past me on the right. The streetlights bobbed up and down, dancing merrily as my shoes touched the ground.
“Hurry up, Doojie!” Eichmann screamed.
He and Bobo were ahead of me. The quicker I ran, the smaller they became, receding up the block. I made a picture of Flaherty in my brain and sent it down to my legs to make them run faster, but my feet didn’t respond. The first warning shot he fired twanged over my head. The second report blew out a streetlight, throwing half the street into blackness, showering glass on me, and covering my hair with shards. People were opening their doors and windows to see what the ruckus was about. The narcs kept coming, hot on my tail.
I’d been sprinting, not running, all my life. At first, it was to avoid my mom’s hand, and if it wasn’t her, it was my stepdad or my grandmother. Then came the teachers in public school, always liberal with their fists. Then it became everything the world had to offer me and I kept sprinting. The other narc squeezed off a round that shrieked the length of San Carlos Street—the bullet whistled by my leg, nicking the pavement. Before I could take cover, a mint-condition ’63 Chevy Impala turned the corner at a rapid clip. Flaherty saw the car and opened up with a panicked fusillade from his Smith and Wesson, obliterating the Chevy’s windshield.
The Impala’s driver gunned the gas pedal, losing control of the steering wheel—the Chevy veered left, jumping the curb and knocking over a dwarfed palm tree before plowing into a ground-floor apartment. The car barreled through sheet rock and timber, leaving a gaping hole in the front wall.
When the smoke thinned, the folks in the Impala climbed out of the wreckage unharmed, but completely bananas, terrified. The narcs corralled them on the sidewalk, forcing them to get down on their knees, then Flaherty punched the car’s driver in the mouth.
I said to myself, Doojie, if you get out of this one alive, swear you’ll never break the law again. It was an oath I’d made and broken a thousand times before. So I did it once more for superstition’s sake. Then I put my head down, tucked in my arms, and got the hell out of there.
13
I woke up that night not knowing where I was, and desperate to go to the toilet. I wriggled out of the sleeping bag and got to my feet. Nobody else was awake. Loretta and Eichmann were sleeping on the couch; he was snoring like a freight train. So I tiptoed past them, silent as a tomcat on the prowl.
In
the dark, dust sprites swirled around my ankles. I went around the couch and bumped into the hot plate, which I didn’t understand because the garage door was in the other direction. So I turned around and retraced my steps. By accident, I blundered into the beanbag chair. Someone was sitting in it, gently moaning.
I leaned over to get a better look and and got a shock that turned my hair white. A stranger with bloodshot eyes stared belligerently back at me. His translucent skin was punctured by a solitary bullet hole; blackened rivulets of blood decorated his flaccid chest and stomach.
It was the dead man; sweet musical hatred writhed on his broad, solemn face.
He asked me in a grating, pissed voice, “Why did Flaherty shoot me?”
What was I supposed to say? The Mission was a small neighborhood; some places were made for bloodletting, but nobody got away with murder anymore. Every time I passed Folsom Street, I thought about the shooting. An altar of plastic flowers, bouquets of carnations, single roses wrapped in cellophane, votive candles, white dominoes, bottles of vodka, and cans of Olde English 800 had been erected on the nearby sidewalk to commemorate the killing. I answered, “Flaherty fucked up. But what can I do?”
“You can say something about it.”
“Why? He did it. Isn’t that enough?”
He mimicked me, “He did it … but you saw what he did.”
“Yeah, so? What can I do about that?”
“You have to do something. Why don’t you admit that to yourself?”
“Because I’m covering my ass. It’s more complicated than you think. It’s like every which way I turn, I’m getting backed into a trap. You got any more questions, talk to Eichmann.”
“You trust him?”
“What choice do I have?”
Eichmann said if we kept peddling weed at our present rate, by the end of summer we would have enough money to vacate the garage. That’s what we were aiming toward. It was incredible to think about it. I’d been a squatter for too long, for centuries. There was one hitch to the program—Eichmann also said we had to do things his way. Bobo agreed; he could care less. But I resented Eichmann’s authoritarian methods. He fancied himself a Jewish gangster, the next generation in a vaunted legacy. Benya Krik, Meyer Lansky, and now himself. A gangster from the ghetto who robbed the shysters and fed the less-than-privileged. In the meantime, I was trapped in San Francisco at the height of tourist season, and there was little I could do. I gazed at the dead man waning and waxing like a police-bulletin poltergeist.
