by Peter Plate
I’d gotten used to having Loretta around the garage; now that she was leaving for somewhere else, I was confused and irritated. My life was a Greyhound bus station: Friends were always coming and going. Having Eichmann’s baby—it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see where that proposition was headed. The thought of it canceled out any hope I had for the two of them—the future was standing still. They’d become parents, but what else?
Bright and early in the morning the family-to-be was at the curb. Eichmann’s arm was around Loretta’s waist; she was clinging to him so tightly, you’d need a chain saw to tear them apart. Eichmann’s lanky figure was azure in the heat waves rising waist high from the pavement. The closer I got to him, the more I recognized a great white shark’s murderous glint in his eyes. He didn’t know anything about what it took to bring an infant into the world, but he knew all about keeping other guys away from his girlfriend.
“What do you need, Doojie?”
“Nothing. Where’s Bobo?”
“I don’t know. He said he had to go out. I haven’t seen him for hours. Anything else you want to ask me?”
“Yeah … what’s with you?”
“Can’t you see? We’re waiting for a cab.”
“How come?”
“What, you think we’re going to walk over to my aunt’s in this heat? We’d croak halfway there.”
It was hot in the street, hot enough to broil your face and incinerate your bones. Loretta was so wan, she resembled a mole living under the ground year-round. She had on a pair of Ray-Bans, and a green rayon scarf was tied around her hair. Eichmann jerked his chin at her, then said to me out of the corner of his mouth, “She barfed when you were out.”
“She got the flu?”
Loretta hiccuped and said, “Morning sickness.”
This worried me. “Did it hurt bad?”
“Oh, God, it was awful—”
“Nah, it wasn’t anything,” Eichmann cut in, becoming insecure, taking control. “It’s going to be happening a lot. I’ve been reading up on it. She’ll get used to it.”
The big expert talking, the gynecologist himself. Loretta was silent, the damsel in distress cemented to the sidewalk, letting Eichmann represent her. He smoothed a lock of her hair curling out from under the scarf, wetting it down with a dab of his spit. I didn’t know what to say to either of them, so I kept my patter light. “You got a name for the baby?”
“What are you saying, Doojie? It ain’t even alive yet.”
“It’s alive all right, stupid ass.”
“You know what I mean.… The kid don’t have no identity. We don’t know if it’s going to be a boy or a girl. It might even turn out to be Mongoloid. How the hell do I know what we’re going to name it?”
A blue-and-white DeSoto cab turned the corner from Sycamore onto San Carlos, trundling down the lumpy street, honking its horn. The taxi rolled to a halt in front of us and the driver hopped out, an affable guy with a quick, knowing smile. Loretta gave him her duffel bag, then said, “Excuse me.”
Without any ceremony, she threw up on the pavement, splashing the cuffs of my khakis. Eichmann, demonstrating high-decibel mental strain, held onto the sleeve of her dress. “You all right, doll? You didn’t get any on your good shoes, did you?”
Loretta, uncomfortable with the eyeballing she was getting from Eichmann, the cabbie, and me, wiped the froth from her lips with the back of her hand. “Yeah, I’m fine. Let’s get going.”
Just then Bobo walked up with a brown-paper grocery bag in his arms. Not really comprehending what was going on, he innocently said to everyone, including the taxi driver, “Look at this.”
He opened the bag and we took a peek at some Colombian weed laced with lots of gold-green, red-haired buds. Then he noticed the dried spittle on Loretta’s mouth, and he asked her solicitously, “What’s the matter with you?”
“I puked,” she said. “And I’m going to Eichmann’s aunt.”
“How come?”
“I’m pregnant.”
Bobo was astonished. “You’re going to have a baby?”
“Yeah, I am.”
“Eichmann knocked you up?”
“He did. It’s insane, isn’t it?”
“Oh, Jesus, it sure is.”
After Loretta and Bobo had sex, the atmosphere between them had stayed icy. He didn’t know what to do with himself whenever she was in the vicinity. For his sake, it was just as well she was moving to Mariposa Street.
The cabbie opened a car door for Loretta and she slid into the backseat, saying to Eichmann, “See you in a few days, okay?” She gave her boyfriend a forlorn glance when the driver shut the door behind her, as if she was going into exile on another continent. While we watched, Eichmann kissed her good-bye through the window. He put a lot of juice into his smooching, hamming it up for Bobo and me.
The taxi drove off, peeling rubber all the way to the corner of Eighteenth Street. Eichmann turned to me, obliterated. His eyes were two melting pools of glue. You could’ve sunk a knife in his head and he wouldn’t have felt a thing. The bite mark on his cheek was swelling up, turning purple and green. He fingered the wound until pus came out of it. “You know what?” he said with disgust. “This has been a hellacious summer. You can quote me on that.”
26
A pair of crack hippies panhandled me for spare change at the corner of Guerrero Street near Doctor Bombay’s Bar. “Doojie! How about a quarter, even a dime!” This was the price of relative fame, being recognized by every junkie in the neighborhood. I handed out some coins, a dollar’s worth of nickels and dimes, and made everyone happy. Eichmann and I proceeded east on Sixteenth Street, walking slowly, and enjoying the drought-stricken, pollen-spattered San Francisco weather.
We entered a hideaway called Café Macondo, repairing to the rear of the establishment. The lighting in the place was dim, the coffee was strong, and the customers were sleepy. Eichmann bought us two cappuccinos with July’s food stamps, then we procured a table in a corner where no one could hear us. He didn’t waste a second getting down to business with me.
“You know Dee Dee is talking about us, don’t you?”
Dee Dee was like the Pacific Ocean; he’d never go away. Eichmann saw this on my face and was pleased with himself. He knew the merest mention of our enemy would cause me tsouris.
It was worth pointing out that Eichmann hardly ever started a conversation unless he could gain something material from it. I had to watch my step with him, verbally at any rate. Dutifully, I replied to his gambit. “Dee Dee? So what about him?”
“I heard he snitched us off to the cops.”
My partner was sprouting a goatee. Bluntly put, facial hair did not flatter him. The bandage on his bite-lacerated face was originally white, but it had turned gray, underscoring the fact that neither of us had bathed in six days. The romance with Loretta and selling dope was wreaking havoc on Eichmann’s mental health. Looking at him, I thought it was funny how you could get old on yourself without really knowing it.
Eichmann took a sip of his cappuccino, sending a plume of steam twisting around his bandanna, saying with evident satisfaction, “Dee Dee is setting us up to take a fall. I love it, I truly do.” He made a trilling noise in his throat, deep and doglike. It was the sound of a man who wanted revenge. I peered at him over the rim of my coffee cup, trying to figure out what he wanted from me.
“Doojie, we have to punish him.”
“How?”
“Guess.” Eichmann tugged the bandanna firm around his ears. He smiled with manic enthusiasm, highlighting his sleepless pigeon red eyes. He cracked his knuckles and rapped them on the table. “Take a guess.”
“Give me a clue.”
“Okay. Here’s one. Dee Dee’s still dealing, right?”
“So you say.”
“He’s got to know other dealers to keep his business alive. And the cops know this.”
“Granted.”
“Guess who he tells them he can get weed fr
om?”
“I don’t know. Who?”
“Let me put it this way. Dee Dee wants to make a deal with me.”
“You talked to him?”
“Yeah, the other day in Walgreen’s. I was in there checking out the magazines in the back by the pharmacy. He comes shuffling up to me from behind, hoping I don’t hear him. I turn around, ready to slug whoever it is, but there’s Dee Dee, staring at me like I’m his long-lost cousin.”
“What did he say?”
“He started out by asking how we were doing, if we were living in the same place. He made like everything was okay between us. I listened to him for a while, getting the idea he wanted something, then he asked me if we had any weed for sale. He wanted some, for himself, he said. But it’s a sting.”
“On who? On us?”
“That’s right.”
“What’s planned?”
Eichmann’s eyes went large and dreamy. He took another swallow of coffee and said with uncommon warmth, “You should see Dee Dee. He’s my wet dream. He’s doing so much speed, his brains are scrambled. The more strung out he gets on crank, the more he talks, getting indiscreet, sort of.”
“What good is that?”
“First, he tells the cops he can bring us to them. They tell him how they want it done. Dee Dee goes, okay. Then he goes out and blabs his mouth off about it to the first person he meets. That person talks shit to his friend, who sees me later on Mission Street and tells me. That’s how I found out. So by the time Dee Dee comes up to me in Walgreen’s and says he wants to get a bag of weed, I already know what the stool pigeon is up to.”
It was a low-grade conspiracy theory. If Eichmann hadn’t been so touchy, I would have laughed it off. A third of the junkies in the neighborhood had been on the police payroll as informants—snitches were a dime a dozen. Eichmann kept hyping Dee Dee to me, but I tuned him out.
Everybody in the café was reading or conversing, doing the simple things that I yearned to do. A rich curtain of cigarette smoke hung over the room, daylight was bleeding through the windows. Outside, a homeless guy had toasters, shaving cream, shirts, and used shoes set up for sale on the sidewalk. I said to Eichmann, “Who cares about Dee Dee?”
“Are you deaf? He’s getting the narcs on us.”
Flaherty was a dybbuk—a devil-spirit, my grandmother would say. Eichmann was a putz, a pain in the ass. He wasn’t even good enough to shine Meyer Lansky’s shoes. But Dee Dee was a golem, a monster made from a man who couldn’t live inside his own skin. A newspaper lay on the table by my empty coffee cup. The headline read, TWENTY ARRESTED IN A RAID ON THE THOR HOTEL. Even if Dee Dee was making a confab with the police, I was too deflated to deal with it, too damn weary. I said, “Okay … Dee Dee buys the weed. Then what?”
“The way it goes down, the cops are hiding in the bushes, and when we get there, they bust us.”
“You hatching something?” I asked carefully. No doubt, Eichmann had a retaliatory plan to dupe Dee Dee. I wouldn’t be sitting in a café with him if he didn’t, and he wouldn’t even be talking to me.
“Not yet. I wanted to discuss it with you first. What do you say?”
“To what?”
“Dee Dee is going to double-cross us. It’s not good for business. You give me the go-ahead and I’ll get things ready to fix him.”
“How?”
“I’m going to snare him in a trap. I’ll set some bait for him and flush him out. Then I’ll ruin him. What could be simpler? This is my show, my rules, and no bullshit.”
His show: That meant anything could happen. I should’ve told him, No, don’t count on me. With his record, who needed more of the same-old same-old? He was watching my face to see if I was interested in his scheme, and to see if he could ferret out my curiosity and make it his own. I kept my features impassive. Had it always been this way between him and me, this pushing and pulling?
I could feel myself coming under Eichmann’s sway. At the moment when I needed to stand up for myself, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t pull myself out of the quicksand of our relationship. I was too dispirited to resist him and I’d do anything to get rid of Dee Dee. I told him, “Do it, then.”
“I’ve got your okay to move on this? Think about it. It could get kind of hairy.”
“I know, but what other options do I have?”
Eichmann gave me a keen look. “If I have to tell you what your options are, then you don’t have any. None, really.”
“I thought so.”
“Are we still friends, Doojie?”
“Friends? Us?”
“Yeah … you and me.”
He was taking on a dangerous subject at the wrong time. Was it deliberate? I leaned forward in my chair, arranging my face to look innocent. “You tell me.”
“Doojie, we’re Jews and that makes us brothers. Right or wrong, nothing transcends blood. That’s why we have to stick together. Now, give me a hug.” He shifted in the chair, banging his knees against the underside of the table, grabbing me by the front of my shirt and pulling me to his chest. “Remember,” he admonished me. “We’re Jews until we die.”
His efforts to solidify our camaraderie were in vain. All the things he and I shared—the fraternity of squatters—had undergone a devaluation. What I’d seen on Folsom Street bound us together closer than a marriage, and the misery of it tore us apart.
I had the same feeling in 1992 after the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles. When everyone in the Mission heard the news and rioted, the officers in the local police department banded together—and every underdog in the city hated them that night. At the waterfront near the Embarcadero, a hundred cops tried to push back the looters in the downtown shopping district. Drag queens were coming out of the Tenderloin, robbing the liquor stores along Eddy Street after breaking their windows. People were driving in by the carload from Glen Park, the Western Addition, the Excelsior District, and the Haight to loot the fashionable clothing stores on Maiden Lane. Market Street was strewn with brand-new leather jackets from Wilson’s, lingerie from the Emporium, blankets and sheets from Stroud’s, mounds of broken glass, and two Kawasaki police motorcycles on fire. A white guy with waist-long blond dreadlocks jumped on top of a burning cop bike, screaming, “It’s Armageddon, man!”
I hadn’t liked what I’d seen, the police and the thieves fighting for control of the streets. I also knew nobody had a choice in what they did, not the cops or the looters; no one could avoid their destiny.
Eichmann and I finished our coffee in silence. Three minutes later he left the café to find Dee Dee.
27
A half kilo of hydroponic sinsemilla lay on our floor in raggedy quarter-pound sections. The marijuana was dull green, commonplace in so much of the homegrown weed these days. As a product, it was less than poetic, and all three of us were unhappy with it. To make matters worse, Eichmann started to pester Bobo, distracting him from his dinner. “Hey, guess what?”
Bobo rolled his tongue around a mouthful of food and said, “What?”
“I ran into Dee Dee.”
The expression on Bobo’s seamed face was memorable. It was the look of a man getting ready to make peace with his soul because he knew the end was not far off. Bobo put down the burrito he’d been gnawing on, a super vegetarian with Muenster cheese and braised tofu cubes wrapped in a whole-wheat tortilla, suspicious as to why Eichmann was bringing up the speed freak’s name, especially when he was eating. “What’s with you? What are you talking to him for? You know we can’t trust the fucker!”
Eichmann got defensive, and he lashed back, “We saw each other in the drugstore and had a conversation, okay? I didn’t ask him to come up and start talking to me! He did it on his own, got it? He’s got plans for us! You want to know what they are or not?”
“What’s he want?”
“What do you think he wants? The only damn thing we have. I’m going to sell him some dope.”
Eichmann was modeling a horseshoelike scab on his cheek. His eye
s were vacant as he absentmindedly picked his nose, sermonizing, “Hey, if he wants our weed, that’s what we’re here for. And I’ve got a surprise for him, the biggest one of his measly life, that’s for damn sure. Selling him dope? That’s the least of it. When we’re done with his ass, there won’t be enough of him to have a proper burial, the punk.”
Dee Dee told Eichmann to meet him on the Nineteenth Street footbridge in Dolores Park. Homeboys hung out there day and night; the dope traffic was so heavy, you couldn’t get across the bridge. The citizens who lived on nearby Church Street had organized themselves into an antidrug vigilante brigade—juvenile dealers were always getting arrested in the park and sent to jail.
Eichmann’s counterplot? I was the bait that would set the trap. I’d give the weed to the junkie while Eichmann and Bobo took him for his money. We were well versed in this type of activity; there didn’t seem to be any mechanical flaws in our tactical planning. Bobo would cross the bridge from Church Street, taking Dee Dee from the rear while I guarded the staircase to the landing. Bobo said it was a worthless strategy. “I’m telling you, we can’t do this with Dee Dee. You’re asking for pain getting anywhere near him. It’s going to backfire on us.”
Bobo couldn’t see it, but Eichmann was losing his marbles. The issues he was going through with Loretta were reducing his hardness, the lucidity he needed to keep his head above water. Eichmann said diplomatically, “We’ll be out in the open. He won’t pull any tricks on us. What’s he going to do? Nothing.”
“What bullshit,” Bobo said. He picked up the burrito with his fingers, tearing off a strip of tortilla with his teeth, letting it whip against his chin before he sucked it into his mouth.
Eichmann replied loftily, “Shut up. I don’t appreciate being undermined on the eve of a crucial event.”
There was an hour to go before I had to undertake my mission, so I laid down on my sleeping bag to rest. I fell asleep and dreamed I saw my father in the Twenty-fourth Street BART station selling potato latkes and flowers to the commuters at rush hour. The flowers were an assortment of wilted carnations and cost a dollar a bunch. The latkes were homemade and stuffed with onions and spices, served with applesauce, costing fifty cents each. “Latkes!” he sang. “Get your fresh latkes here!”
