by Peter Plate
Picking up the bag, she had a sniff. It smelled of the felon’s cologne, an expensive brand. This made her insecure. Everything Slatts did rubbed her the wrong way. Like with the bathroom. Whenever she wanted to use the can, he was in there, doing his thing. It was obvious he had a yen for Robert. She’d seen him mooning over her husband more than once.
The doorbell went ding-a-ling, interrupting her thinking. Harriet walked to the peephole, squinted in it. Her junior high school flame, a stocky Mexican speed dealer named Zap Rodriguez, looked sideways at her through the glass. His red eye patch gloried in the menacing December sunlight. The rest of his face was as gray as night. A white Kangol cap was raked over his pointy ears. He had on a houndstooth suit jacket, leatherette flares, and a silver conch belt. In his pocket was a five-shot .32 Colt revolver. The gun was insurance. Just in case Robert was hanging around.
Harriet cracked the door a smidgen. Zap blossomed like an orchid upon seeing her. His good eye watered with joy. “Hey, mama, merry Christmas.”
There were two kinds of friends in Robert’s circles. There was the inner ring of felons and there was the outer circle of poseurs. Zap was a poseur. Wished he’d been in the penitentiary. Harriet dismissed him with a simple command. “You can’t be coming around here, dude.”
He wilted under her edict. His eye patch sagged. “Why the hell not? Ain’t I good enough for you?”
“No, you ain’t.”
“It’s like that, huh?”
“And Robert doesn’t care for you either.”
“You need to wise up to him. That chump is no good for you.”
“Says who?”
“I do. You can do better than that goddamn fruit.”
“Who are you calling a sissy?”
Zap thumbed his nose. “Your husband.”
The accusation was a slap in the face. “You’re talking shit.”
“I’m talking reality, baby. Everyone in the street knows what Robert does.”
The Mexican sounded just like her mother. Even down to his scolding. The men in orbit around her husband were badly damaged asteroids. They were from outer space and had traveled long distances to crash into his life. “Robert ain’t your concern.”
“Yeah, uh, uh, maybe he ain’t,” Zap admitted. “But he’s got that she-boy of his staying with you. That’s some foul shit if you ask me. You know what I mean?”
The sun flayed the patio. It had no mercy for anything that breathed, dreamed, and lived. Harriet couldn’t believe it was Christmas. The apartment was as hot as a pressure cooker. It was hot enough to commit homicide. Hot enough to kill a man just to watch him die.
Slamming the door shut on Zap, she double-locked it. The speed dealer was undaunted. He shouted from the hall, trilling with heartfelt exuberance. “Robert’s betraying you! I’ll mess up the motherfucker if you want me to, chica! Anytime! Just let me know, all right?”
EIGHTEEN
Christmas brought out the best and the worst in people. The holidays had inaugurated a spree of armed robberies in the Tenderloin. The police had roped off the Thai eatery at Sixth and Market after the recent shooting. The law was all over Market Street.
An electrified blues duo was taking advantage of the sunny weather to perform in the UN Plaza. The bassist was a young black woman in a burgundy windbreaker and jeans. The guitarist was an older white guy with gray side-burns. They played the Chicago gutbucket style popularized by Hound Dog Taylor in the 1950s. The audience was a throng of winos drinking short dogs, cops on bicycle patrol, and homeless men pulling carts of books, blankets, and clothes.
A sleep-deprived Slatts Calhoun lingered at a pay phone by Seventh and Market, garbed in a musty Santa Claus suit stolen an hour earlier from a Salvation Army volunteer. To go along with the costume he had on a fake white acrylic beard and a stocking hat. A tarnished blue .357 Smith & Wesson revolver—one of Robert’s things—was stuck in his belt.
Reaching into his pants pocket, he extracted a cloth billfold and withdrew a photo. The color print was tattered almost beyond recognition. It was a picture from San Quentin. Robert and a bunch of dudes from the Aryan Brotherhood were in the weight yard. Standing around with no shirts on. Everyone looked buffed except Robert.
Now that Slatts was out of the joint, nothing was the same as before he went away. The black guy from Hunters Point who used to sell him reefer had hepatitis C and was thinking of moving to Florida to get a liver transplant. Two brothers he knew, former Norteño gang members from Twenty-fourth Street named Andy and Jimmy Hernández, had enlisted in the army to avoid prison sentences. They were shipped to Iraq, where Jimmy was killed. Andy, the younger one, was wounded and now lay in hospital in Kuwait.
Slatts put away the wallet, lit a cigarette, his last one. He eyeballed the medical marijuana club up the block. Ever since weed became legal in the city, pot stores were everywhere. They were a venereal disease. It was impossible to get away from them. At last count, there were twenty clubs on Market Street. This one was a former bookstore wedged between a dentist’s office and a sandwich shop. It had porous concrete walls inscribed with graffiti, a tar paper roof garlanded with razor wire, a hostile surveillance camera, and a tinted window. An outdoors bulletin board had photos of snitches pinned to it. The place resembled a police station.
Slatts loped to the dope shop, stopped in front of the security gate. He struck a pose for the camera and buzzed the bell. Nothing happened. He waited a second and repeated the procedure. A Mexican hippie in paisley surfer shorts and a vintage Clash T-shirt came out to inspect him. “Well, well, if it ain’t Santa Claus. How the fuck you doing today?”
Keeping the gun concealed, Slatts said what came to mind. His first day out of the pen had been a hassle. Between Robert, Harriet, and the dog, everything was haywire. Slatts didn’t even have enough money to take the bus to the welfare office. As a bonus, the beard was making his skin itch. “I’m cool, homeboy. What’s up with you?”
“The same old bullshit. You got your ID for me?”
To gain entry into the club, a customer needed a physician-approved Department of Health identification card. Private doctors where handing them out at two hundred dollars a pop. Slatts didn’t have a card, no solid place to sleep, or any food in his belly. “No, I don’t. Can I come in and talk to you about it?”
The pot worker’s smile became a cynical tic. He was prematurely aged by the needs of dope fiends. “Hell, no.”
“C’mon, vato, give me a break.”
“I can’t do that, dude. It’s against the law. You’ve got to have a card to get in.”
“Listen to me, asshole. I want some fucking weed.”
“Too bad, home slice. I don’t give a shit.”
“Fuck you, man. It’s goddamn Christmas, you know what I’m saying?”
Slatts lost his cool in a delicious surge of adrenaline. It was time to introduce the revolver into the conversation. It would help move the dialogue along. He crammed the gun’s three-inch barrel through the gate’s latticework and hooked the dealer in the nose with it. Reaching in, he joggled the lad forward. Then he groped the kid’s shorts for the keys, found them, and unlocked the door.
Santa Claus was in the house.
Flaunting the heater, Slatts lurched into the retail room. His mouth was dry with excitement. This was better than winning the lottery. Cheap reefer was hard to find in the street. Not only that, it was usually low-grade crap. Another worker, a lithe tanned blonde girl in patched denim overalls and Birkenstock sandals, advanced on him. Her oval face was a flower, open and questioning. “May I assist you?”
Slatts manufactured a smile tempered by several missing teeth. “No, thanks, honey. Santa can help himself.”
The store’s damp stucco walls were layered with sepia-tinted Bill Graham concert posters. Two customers, an aged queen and a black man with one leg, were getting wasted on a divan. Ambient techno pulsed from a stereo. Slatts heard someone move and turned to confront a beefy longhair in tai chi cloth
es. It was the security guard.
“Hey, what are you doing with that gun?” The longhair had the attitude of a public bathroom. “We’re peaceful here.”
“Shut the fuck up. Nobody talks to Santa Claus like that.”
“Kiss my ass, motherfucker. I’m calling the police.”
The cops loathed the pot clubs and didn’t give a hoot if they were robbed. Slatts ignored the threat and studied the merchandise. The weed was in pastel ceramic bowls on a countertop. The menu was listed on a chalkboard. Medium quality green, mostly Oakland hydroponic, ran $45 an eighth, same as in the streets. Stronger grades, like Canadian indica, were $60 for three and a half grams. Mexican syndicate pot was cheaper but wasn’t worth smoking. The stuff was first cousin to napalm. Mendocino boutique bud was $450 an ounce. Turdlike pot cookies were $5 apiece. Slatts didn’t see what was so medicinal about the prices.
Leaning over the counter, he probed the cash register. To his delight, a wad of twenties and fifties danced into view. He pocketed the cash and some weed and backpedaled out of the store into the ebb and flow of Market Street.
Pillars of gold-colored sunlight coruscated at Seventh and Market. Pickpockets, panhandlers, and speed freaks moiled at Carl’s Jr. Bicycle messengers were dodging cars and delivery vans. A Muni bus seething with passengers lumbered toward Van Ness Avenue. Two homeless winos were in a liquor store’s doorway begging for money. Whirlwinds of leaves and empty nickel bags flirted in the roadbed. Doves and sea gulls orbited overhead.
A brace of cops had trashed a soup kitchen in the Civic Center. A priest from a church in the Excelsior district was cited and ticketed for serving food to the homeless without a permit. The officers sequestered buckets of brown rice and pinto beans, bags of whole wheat bread, sacks of apples and oranges, and loaded them into a police van.
The heat in the street was nauseating. The pavement burned like a match head. Slatts was dizzy and ready to puke, which was how he liked things. The revolver was in his fist, muzzle pointed at the sidewalk. The beard and costume were soaked with his sweat. A wino in a garbage-bag poncho yelled at him from an insurance office doorway. “Yo, yo, Santa, yo. Can you help me, brother man?”
Slatts flicked a wary glance at the bum and smelled trouble. His voice was colder than his mother’s pussy. “What the fuck do you want? I’m in a hurry.”
“My partner is sick.”
A white boy in an army jacket was prone on the ground. His sneakers had holes in them. His hollow green eyes were intent on a faraway paradise. He didn’t appear to be breathing. Slatts didn’t like it. “What the hell is wrong with him?”
“I don’t know,” the wino said. “We were just sitting here and shit, and the pecker keeled over. Maybe he had a heart attack or something.”
“You called an ambulance?’
“It’s on the way.”
Nobody was coming out of the pot store. Slatts breathed heavily. That was a good sign. He’d hate to have to shoot someone now. Dropping to his knees, he placed a finger on the unconscious man’s neck, feeling for a pulse. He didn’t find one. In its stead an electrical charge zinged into his fingertip. He knew what it was and jerked his hand away. Christ on a crutch. What a drag. The motherfucker had died on him. The electricity was his spirit, what was left of it. “Your friend is fine,” he said. “He’s just resting.”
“What should I do?’
“Keep waiting for the ambulance.”
“Is he sick?”
The interrogatives vexed Slatts. He was tense enough. “No, he ain’t. So relax, okay?”
He barely got the words out of his mouth when a black-and-white police car screeched to a halt at the corner. Two bulky officers in midnight blue combat overalls popped out of the cruiser. Their scuffed riot helmets were opalescent in the sun’s misty light. Slatts was incredulous. Talk about bad karma. This was a disaster. It was unbelievable. The dope dealers had snitched on him. The wimps couldn’t handle their own business. There was no honor among thieves.
It was funny how things never worked out. He was falling through a mirror into a black hole. Opening up with the .357, he discharged a round. The lonely bullet sped forward in slow motion, burying itself with a puff of dust in the pot club’s window. The music of breaking glass rippled in the hot air. Slatts did an about-face and vamoosed. He didn’t stop running until he was by the massage parlor at Ninth and Mission.
Zap Rodriguez made the rounds through the Tenderloin’s streets, delivering grams and dime bags of crank to his valued customers. He had on a brand-new goose-down vest, a blue chambray work shirt underneath it, belly hanging over white vinyl hip hugger flares. A tailor-made clove cigarette was in his puckered red mouth.
His first stop was the shoe-shine stand on Larkin and Market. After that he hiked five blocks to the bar at Turk and Jones. It was a hot day, and he took his time. Didn’t want to get no heart attack or nothing. Had an iced coffee in a Vietnamese restaurant. Smoked a spliff with the owner. He then hit the beauty parlors on Leavenworth. Done with that, he sold the remaining bags at a discount price to the Geary Street hookers.
He was by the public library when he saw a flashy white dude in a Santa Claus suit tear around the corner onto Grove Street. Zap knew who the guy was. It was hard not to. The motherfucker had more muscles than King Kong, more attitude than a plainclothes cop, and a smoking gun in his hand.
So that was Robert’s she-boy. Zap marveled. What a culo. The grapevine from the Mexican Mafia said the fairy was a mad dog. Would fight anybody, anytime, anywhere, over nothing. Just for the lark of it. Zap Rodriguez moved away in a big hurry, getting lost in a clot of office workers, junkies, and tourists. He had no interest in meeting Slatts Calhoun.
NINETEEN
A minor earthquake rocked the neighborhood the morning after Slatts robbed the pot store. The temblor broke the outdoor clock on the furniture mart building at Ninth and Market, leaving its hands paralyzed at quarter to nine. The night’s heat and fogginess had eloped into buttery smog. The street was a nest of shadows in the wicked sunshine.
Robert hightailed it to the welfare office on Harrison to put in an application for food stamps. On the walk there he stewed about how things were going at home. The truth was, shit was weird. He wasn’t having sex with Harriet or Slatts. Not since he got out of the joint. Was his battery unplugged? It was hard to say with Harriet. Eight years was a long time to be married to someone when you were twenty-four.
Apart from Slatts, he’d been true to her. It didn’t amount to a hill of beans. His marriage needed a psalm to heal it. And what about his relationship with Slatts? It had been smooth sailing in the penitentiary. Here in the city, it was on the skids.
In San Quentin he got three square meals a day—nothing to sneer at. Poaching game in San Francisco was getting old real fast. So was associating with Harriet and Slatts. Harriet had been disrespecting his ass, telling him how hard everything had been for her while he was in the joint. As if he didn’t know that.
Inside the food stamp office a pair of security guards—two Samoan men, one tall and the other short, both in gray Pinkerton company uniforms—blocked his passage. Neither of them had guns. Didn’t need them. They had muscles coming out of their ears. The first one said, “What do you want, dude?”
Robert was agitated. “What do you mean? This is the food stamp joint, ain’t it?”
“Yeah, so? You just can’t come through here, all unorganized. You’ve got to have an appointment and stuff.”
“But it’s an emergency.”
“Says who? Your mama?”
“No, man, I’ve got a wife and kid to feed.”
“Too fucking bad.”
The other guard gave Robert advice. “We ain’t running a nightclub. You want food stamps? You call up and talk to somebody.”
“Come on, you guys, gimme a break.”
The taller Samoan had shoulder-length jheri curls and gave Robert the once-over. His hard brown face softened. “You’ll be cool if we let you
in?”
Robert’s shiner was a magnificent lemon yellow. He said fervently, “I’ll be cool.”
The first rule in the welfare office was to say nothing that could be used against you. Robert’s eligibility worker was a lady by the name of Ruth Landau, a recent graduate from the sociology department at Stanford. She was red haired and buxom, done up in a leather maxi skirt, lightweight goose-down parka, waist-long rayon scarf, and hiking boots. Had nice laugh lines around her mouth. Her cubbyhole was swamped with papers. She got Robert a chair and drilled him. “How old is your daughter?”
He was poker-faced. “Seven. I think.”
“Is she in school?”
“Never misses a day.”
“And you’re her biological father?”
“Uh huh.”
“Where is she now?”
“With her mother.”
“Do you live at home?”
“Yeah.”
“And what about nutrition in your family? What’s your diet like?”
The topic was more to his liking. Robert warmed up to her. “It’s great. I’m a hunter.”
“You hunt? That’s odd.”
“I hunt game all the time.”
“In San Francisco?”
“Yes.”
“That isn’t possible.”
Robert cross-examined her. “Maybe for you. Not for me. I’m a genius. I can do it anywhere.”
“So you eat a lot of meat?”
“At every meal.”
“What kind?”
“You name it. Rabbit, deer, squirrel, duck, and possum.”
“Nothing from the supermarket?”
“Never.” Robert was condescending. “I’m particular about my meat.”
“What do you do for a living?”
“I do a lot of things.”
She did a root canal on his biography. “What sort of things?”
