San Francisco Noir

by Peter Maravelis

  The local poetry readings are peopled by a number of eccentric personalities and even stranger acts. This one reading I went to at the Chameleon bar provides a good case in point. It was there that Dan Faller debuted his latest conceptual piece: “Interpretive Dance with Axe.” It was a long parody of modern dance routines, which incorporated an actual industrial-sized lumberjack axe. Of course, Dan was drunk as a skunk when he performed it and many audience members gasped in real fear as he precariously swung the deadly device right in front of them. Sam Silent, who was MCing the reading, was tempted to give Dan the hook, but in the end his support for the First Amendment won out over public safety. Besides, he wasn’t really in the mood to piss off a drunk guy with a big axe. All the same, when the owner of the bar heard about the incident the next day, she made a new policy that said all axes have to be checked at the door.

  Dan Faller wrote and read stream-of-consciousness experimental poetry that he sometimes made up on the spot when he was standing on stage. He was also notorious for having introductory monologues that were longer than his actual poems. He frequently did back-flips on stage, usually while under the influence of large amounts of alcohol. I always hoped I wasn’t there the day he snapped his neck. Dan had a voracious appetite for drugs that often steered toward the hard ones. One Saturday night at a party at 666 Ashbury, I saw him drop a hit and a half of acid and snort a quarter gram of speed at 2 a.m.

  After his axe dance, Dan met up with Hal Satan, one of his partners in crime. Hal was already three sheets to the wind, and the two of them proceeded to get even drunker. They ended up closing the bar.

  Hal decided to give Dan a ride home. They went out to Hal’s monstrous white Cadillac and revved up the engine. Then Dan made a dare with Hal, knowing that Hal couldn’t resist a dare, the more stupid and reckless the better. It was about forty blocks to Dan’s house and Dan ended up driving. For most of the ride he went about eighty miles an hour and ignored the traffic lights. Hal rode on the hood. He was naked and swinging the axe around for the whole ride like some drunken Asgardian lumberjack. By some obscene miracle, Hal made it all the way to Dan’s house without falling off and breaking his neck. Where’s a cop when you need one? They were probably handing out tickets for minor traffic offenses while this naked madman on a white Cadillac drove right past them.

  Hal Satan once told me this lost-weekend story about him and Fat Carlo:

  “We used to play this game called ‘blacks and whites’,” Satan said. “It was where all weekend he’d freebase coke and I’d smoke black tar. Well, this game of blacks and whites had started around 3:00 Friday afternoon and now it was about 3:00 Sunday morning. The steep back slope of Saturday night. Everything was soft and fuzzy, but in a good way, and me and Fat Carlo were walking through the Mission around Twenty-fourth and Bartlett, right in the heart of gang country, but we didn’t give a fuck because this was our town.

  “Well, we’re just walking down the street when this little punk starts running us a bunch of lip. And we’re like, ‘Fuck you! Fuck off! Don’t give us any shit.’ We’re old-school barrio. So we think nothing of it and just keep walking.

  “A couple blocks down I notice that something just isn’t right. I had felt no pain for almost thirty-six hours, but now something had disturbed the fluid in my junky amniotic sac. I can’t tell what’s wrong with it, but my shoulder just feels like shit. Carlo finally checks it and there’s blood all over the back of my leather jacket. Turns out, I’ve been shot!

  “Now, I don’t want to go to the hospital because that could lead to certain, ah, legal problems. So Carlo shows me all the finer points of digging a bullet out of your shoulder with a pair of needle-nose pliers. After that, he patches up the wound in a way that will kind of disguise the fact that it’s a bullet hole. Then me and him go to the emergency room with some phony story about how I fell down in the kitchen or something.”

  I remember running into Satan at yet another party in the Haight. He was telling me about how things had gotten dramatically worse at 666.

  “My three other roommates are just smoking crack all the time now. Like the other night, I came home from work and there were all these low-rent crack dealers, like the ones you see selling on the street at Sixteenth and Mission, hanging out in my room, sitting on my bed. My roommate Rick smokes rock all the time, and so does this couple, Ed and Julie, who have the other bedroom. Sometimes I can hear Ed and Julie in there scheming all night long. Plotting these weird crimes for hours. Sometimes they even talk about robbing me, even though I have nothing of value left.

  “We were all going to get a warehouse space together, but I’m not so sure anymore. ’Cause I found out that these people have had a problem with coke before. In fact, that’s why they’re out here in San Francisco. Evidently, my roommates burned some coke dealers back in Michigan and are on the run from them. And I mean burned them for like big bucks. We’re talking ruthless dudes, the kind who would kill them if they ever caught up with them.”

  “No good,” I told him. “Some night these dudes in ski masks with AK-47s are going to kick in your front door and shoot everybody down.” I pointed my finger at his forehead like I had a gun in my hand and pulled the invisible trigger. “They’ll end up killing you just because you’re a witness.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Hal said squeamishly. “I mean, these people are into some really shady stuff. Like the couple makes their living fucking over johns in the Tenderloin. Julie does a little whoring every now and then. But she usually doesn’t actually have sex with the guys. Most of the time she gets them to give her the money first and just runs away with it. Her boyfriend Ed runs interference for her. He either slows the john down, or if need be, beats the crap out of the trick and steals his wallet. I mean, I liked these people at first, but they’ve turned out to be real criminals.

  “Julie also gets money from a string of sugar daddies. Well, most of it comes from this one sorry-ass old guy who owns a chain of dry cleaners. He picked her up one night in the Tenderloin but he didn’t want to fuck her. The old guy just wanted to befriend her. Julie was real happy to have a new friend, and over the months she’s bilked him for thou-sands of dollars. Sometimes he gives her as much as fifty dollars a day for spending money. And he’s not the only one. Like last week, some other old guy gave Julie a Cadillac El Dorado. It’s too weird. I mean, this is how her and her boyfriend have been paying their rent.

  “But now they’re into crack. I already put everything I have of value into a storage locker. All I keep at 666 is a change of clothes and a couple of books, ’cause my roommates are really out there. Completely paranoid. I’m not allowed to answer the phone in my own house anymore, because they’re afraid it might be those coke dealers tracking them down.

  “And my roommate Rick has adopted all these weird projects. The other night he took all the doorknobs in the apartment apart with a screwdriver and then put them back together again.”

  The more strung out on drugs Hal Satan got, the more out there his poetry and performance-art pieces became. Everything he did in public grew increasingly confrontational and assaultive. He seemed to be committed to discovering the ultimate act of bad taste. Satan systematically attended and scandalized every poetry reading and open mike in the upper and lower Haight with the obsessive thoroughness of a psychopath hunting down every name he had randomly picked out of the phone book.

  His performances were legendary debacles. One time Satan did a reading at the Holy Grounds Café in the lower Haight. He read a snuff porn poem called, “Manifesto: Why I Have the Moral Right to Rape Whoever I Choose.” Even in a place as liberal as San Francisco you aren’t going to find an audience where a piece like that goes over as anything but a Hiroshima-sized bomb. While he was screaming the poem above the boos and jeers of the audience, Satan stripped off all his clothes and proceeded to burn off his pubic hair with a Bic lighter. By the time all his man-fuzz had gone up in smoke, the room was filled with a miasmal cloud whose
vapors were so foul it sent the entire audience staggering into the street, weeping and vomiting.

  Dan Faller and Hal Satan used to go on drug binges that included crack, acid, and heroin, all in the same evening. The two had known each other for years, and when they were high, Dan and Hal were like brothers.

  Well, one evening, Dan, Hal, and Sam Silent were drinking down in the lower Haight. It got toward closing time and Sam called it a night, saying he had a day job to go to the next morning. Faller and Satan sat there in the last-call haze, zoning out.

  Then Hal turned to Dan and said, “Well, let’s go. Let’s go party.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Dan said.

  “Yeah, I am. It’ll be just like old times,” Satan said. “Let’s go.”

  They went down to the projects, scored some crack, and went back to Hal’s apartment and smoked it. Then they went and got some more. And then some more. By 5 a.m., they had smoked a hundred and fifty dollars’ worth.

  “Let’s go get some more,” Satan said impatiently.

  Dan was lying on the couch.

  “No way, man,” he said. “It’s late. I’m fucked up. There’s no way we’re going to get any higher. I don’t want any more. You can go if you want, but I’m not leaving this couch.”

  So Hal got up and left.

  He came back about forty-five minutes later. Faller noticed he was covered in blood.

  “Goddamn it, the motherfuckers stabbed me!” Hal Satan screamed out.

  Somebody had knifed him in a bad crack deal. But Hal had still managed to score the goods. They had stabbed him, but he got away with his drugs and money.

  Dan and Hal tried to stop the bleeding by applying direct pressure and holding rags on the wound, but the blood just kept gushing.

  “This bleeding isn’t stopping, we’ve got to get you to a hospital,” Dan said.

  “Okay,” Satan agreed. “But let’s smoke some more crack before we go.”

  So they smoke some more crack, which of course just makes Hal Satan’s heart beat much faster, pumping the blood through his veins, and the wound just starts spraying blood. Red jets are squirting out all over the living room. It looks like a scene from Life of Brian, some kind of gory Monty Python skit. By the time they get to the hospital, there’s blood all over the inside of Dan Faller’s truck.

  Satan doesn’t have health insurance, so the only place to take him is General Hospital. General is like a cattle pen of urban horror. In a fetid waiting room reeking of feces and urine, skeletal patients huddle, wasted by illness and drug overdoses, along with bleeding homeless people and the victims of gang shootings. The place looks like a Red Cross triage tent from the Vietnam War. The nurse at the front desk is like, “Oh, you have to go over there and wait for three or four hours because you’ve only lost a hand, and this gentleman over here, who has lost his whole head, has been sitting here for an hour and a half before you arrived.”

  By the time Satan’s sewn up and they get out of there, it’s like 10 or 11 in the morning. The sun is up and shining, stinging their eyes, as Dan gives Hal a ride home in his truck. The blood stains all over the upholstery are already turning brown.

  “Well, don’t take me home yet,” Hal says. “Here, pull over at the Safeway.”

  “Why?” Dan asks as he turns into the parking lot.

  “So I can go by the money machine and take out more money to score more crack with,” Satan says.

  Two years later, Dan Faller told me what finally happened to Satan. Dan kept in touch with Satan all through his long decline, till almost the bitter end. Other details he managed to cobble together from a motley assortment of street connections, junkies, and local dealers. No one knows exactly what happened but it probably went down something like this:

  Evidently, Satan’s trajectory remained relentlessly downward. Over time, his various species of addiction had consolidated themselves into one overly gigantic monkey: heroin. It was the apex predator of the whole wild kingdom of drugs. Black tar took over Satan’s body and soul to a degree that put all the previous controlled substances to shame. Pretty soon smack was more important to him than oxygen or food. This was a town of burned bridges for him—no friends left, no doors opened to Satan. Homeless again, he got by on petty thefts and robbery. His habit ate away any scum of humanity that still clung to him. Everything went into the spoon.

  Satan ended up delivering heroin to street buyers. In exchange for a hit he worked as a gofer, a mule transporting black tar from pushers to loyal customers. Satan’s monkey was so big that his arms were covered with abscesses and staph infections. And that monkey got greedy, started dipping into the stashes it was carrying. Sometimes Hal Satan didn’t show up at all and shot up every bit of what he was supposed to deliver. Other times he just took the junkie’s money and ran. Any dealer will tell you: Angry customers aren’t good for business. Whenever he hit rock bottom, Satan displayed a rare talent for finding a trap door that led even lower.

  Over time he had burned a lot of dealers, and eventually his junkie karma caught up with him. Couple of heavies cornered him in an alley and shot him up with a combination of battery acid and PCP. That foul mix got Satan so delirious he wandered around Mission Street completely naked and smeared with his own excrement. Was totally out of it for over forty-eight hours. Had no idea of where he was. Eventually he crawled into a dumpster for shelter, passed out, and almost died. By the time some kids found him and brought him to the hospital, Satan’s arms were so gangrenous that the doctors had to amputate them.

  When he woke up in the hospital, it took him awhile to figure out what had happened. Fresh amputees experience ghost sensations of their lost limbs, feels like they’re still there, so he didn’t immediately notice that his arms were gone. What tipped him off was when he went to scratch himself. Couldn’t get his hand to reach the itch. First he thought they had restrained him. Maybe when the paramedics brought him in, he had been delirious and thrashing around so they’d strapped him to the bed. But when repeated attempts failed to eliminate the itch, Satan finally looked down and saw his gaping absence. His arms were history.

  Oh my God, oh my God, Satan thought. How am I going to wipe my ass? How am I going to pick my nose? And then, with an even more sinking horror, How am I going to fix myself?

  He’d been in the hospital a long time and the with-drawal and junk sickness was already coming on. In a junkie, the hunger for heroin can bring about feats of strength and determination not often seen in mortal men. Less than three hours after regaining consciousness, Satan managed to escape from the hospital.

  He ran straight down to Sixteenth and Mission and scored a fat bag of junk on credit and his last few dollars. The dealer looked like a pickpocket as he reached the crumpled bills out of the junkie’s pants, then Hal Satan ran off with the baggie clenched in his teeth.

  He made a beeline to a flophouse hotel about a half-block away and looked up Vampire Annie. They called her that because she could find a vein even in a pitch-black night. Knew how to locate the elusive opening in old junkie arms that were nothing but scar tissue. Annie had given more shots than a nurse, and for a little fee she cooked and shot up the disabled junkies and the ones whose hands shook too much to fix themselves.

  Vampire Annie did it right there in the gloomy second-floor hallway which stank of dirty underwear. Cooked that tar and shot up Satan in the neck. As soon as the rush came on, the amputee knew she’d given him way too much. That was Annie’s plan. Why bother to share a bag when you could have it all to yourself? All it took was a simple O.D. Who’d miss a broken-down scumbag like Satan? Some of the dealers he’d burned would probably even reward her. Give her free hits of black tar or a line of credit. Besides, Satan had asked for it. He wanted a fix, so she fixed him. Fixed him good.

  Euphoria burned out the crippled man’s head like a matchstick. Satan collapsed, and since he had no arms to break his fall, his head smashed into the hard floor with the full force of gravity, breaking his jaw
and knocking out three teeth.

  Five minutes later he was dead. Vampire Annie had closed and locked her door and was already shooting up the rest of his bag. And it was a big bag. She knew the cops wouldn’t even bother to ask any questions. Things like that happened all the time around there. The junkies had a saying: “If you overdose at Sixteenth and Mission, they don’t call an ambulance, they call a garbage truck.”

  Satan’s corpse was as blue as a healthy vein. But he died with a smile on his face. Because Vampire Annie had fixed him. Right in the jugular. He’d gotten that shot he wanted, needed, so bad. It’s the only thing that gives even a dead junkie peace. Satan may have been fixed, but now he was permanently broken.

  PART IV

  Flowers of Romance

  BRILEY BOY

  BY ROBERT MAILER ANDERSON

  The Richmond

  The first time Briley had his nose broken, he just laughed. And then, bracing himself for another surge of blood, dizziness, and memory, he let the skuzzy little bitch hit him again. Why not? He had been dodging his old man’s blows since he was old enough to see them coming, developed a tic as a toddler, twitched at birth, flinched in the womb. “That’s why the scrape doctor missed you,” Pop said, catching the flesh of his cheek, chin, side of neck, or temple. “Stand still and take it like a man!” But Briley never did. Bobbing and weaving. Skit. He had learned to become elusive, especially to himself. He didn’t stand in front of a mirror long enough to see his own reflection. It helped when he was stealing cars, scouting houses for a B&E, scoring drugs. Living with women who had only heard the word blow used as a figure of speech. Nobody got a good look at him. Not the slightest slanted-eye contact from his Chinese and white Russian neighbors in the outer Richmond or nod of recognition while grazing chips at Tommy’s Food and Yucatan, swiping day-old sweets from the biddies at Tbilisi Bakery, having a happy-hour heave-ho at Trad’r Sam’s in a backbooth marked Pago Pago. So now that the bridge of his nose had collapsed under the weight of her flattened palm, all he could do was spit blood and laugh.