Gods Go Begging

by Alfredo Vea

  “I had this guy, just last week,” began Newton Lam, “a young punk Sureño—you know, one of those lost kids from the gangs down on Thirteenth Street. This kid had about as much of a future as a flightless pigeon in Chinatown. Anyway, he’s got this girlfriend, a cute little chulita named Dorothy Lopez.

  “Now Dorothy goes to night school over at State and she gets this part-time job with a big architectural firm. They let her work around her class schedule and she could do her homework during her lunch hour. Our Dorothy is moving up.”

  A groan traversed the full diameter of the table. Too many stories began this way. No one really wanted to hear the end of this tale, yet no one would leave while it was being told.

  “She rents an apartment in the Richmond District and moves our boy in. She cooks for him, does his laundry, she even irons his gang clothing, Red shirts, red socks, even the guy’s underwear is red. She’s going places, and for some reason she wants to take the punk with her—God knows why—but our hero wasn’t going to better himself without a fight.”

  “Women are like that.”

  It was Freya, who had taken the seat next to Jesse’s.

  “Anyway, the fool starts to beat her. He beats her when she gets good grades; he beats her when she uses a word that he’s never heard—which ends up being a whole lot of abuse. The day she finished a New York Times crossword puzzle, he almost killed her. He beat her for twenty minutes when she trimmed off all that long Mexicana hair and had it curled at a beauty parlor. But the last straw was a tiny leather miniskirt. When she put that little thing on to go off to work with all of those male architects, it sent mi hombre over the edge.

  “So my man, ‘Wanderer’—that was his gang name, given to him because he once walked the five or six miles to Daly City, a legendary exploit in some circles—my man Wanderer pulled a gun and ordered her to quit school and to quit work and to move back to his Rancho Grande, his bitchin’ little house trailer parked behind Chewy’s Casa de Menudo.”

  “Ah, young love,” sighed Freya. “What I wouldn’t give to wake up in the morning to the smell of raw tripe.”

  “When she steadfastly refused to quit her job and her classes,” continued Newton, “the idiot shoots her twice, point-blank, in that beautiful, hopeful face.”

  “Oh, God,” groaned Jesse, “did we really need to hear this story? It’s just tragedy—plain old run-of-the-mill, depthless, heartrending tragedy; beauty slaughtered by mindless, numbing stupidity. Where is the irony? How could this story ever hope to meet our table’s lofty standards of Olympic ignorance?”

  Newton only smiled. The look on his face told everyone seated that there was more… more than just endless death for a lovely young woman and a life sentence served out in a room of frigid concrete and steel. There was more here than just the savage shattering of a promising future.

  “After the defendant was sentenced for murder, I was stopped in the hallway by a small woman—a dark, very Indian-looking woman. It was the defendant’s mother. I had only seen her once, at the arraignment. She never attended a day of the trial. With four other kids, she couldn’t afford to. She stopped me by pulling on my sleeve as I was leaving the courtroom. I remember that I looked directly into her eyes. They seemed so filled with compassion and grief, but that was only my imagination.

  “I took her small hands into my own and was about to offer her my deepest condolences when she spread her lips and spat a huge wad of spit into my face. I swear, she must’ve been saving up that sputum for a whole week. It took both sides of my handkerchief and one sleeve to wipe it off. Then she sneered at me and spoke a sentence I’ll never forget.”

  The entire table had grown silent. Every lawyer sat poised to hear the woman’s words.

  “ ‘There’s no justice,’ she shrieked. ‘I read about this guy over in Nevada—this man in Carson City—who kills a woman by shooting her twelve times, and he got twenty-five years to life, Mr. Lawyer. My boy only shot that little bitch two times and he gets the exact, same sentence! What kind of justice is that?’ ”

  A muffled groan made its way around the table. There was no gesture, no human sound to adequately express what they felt. The groan was more like a silent prayer, a benediction for the dignity, the delusion, and the dolor of motherhood. In her mind her son should have received one-sixth the sentence of the man in Nevada, having used that fraction of bullets to do the job.

  “I had this guy …”

  It was Chris, starting another story in order to break the spell of sadness. As expected, the mood of the table changed the moment those four magical, incantatory words were spoken.

  “I had this guy who was charged with bank robbery. He and his codefendant had been cellmates in Soledad Prison and had spent their nights trying to come up with an airtight, foolproof way to rob a bank. When they were released, they came to San Francisco to report to their parole agents and to put their magnificent plan into action.”

  The table of lawyers settled into their chairs, enthralled by the endless possibilities that this scenario presented. There were newly filled cups of coffee on the table. Even the gnat on the napkin seemed to be listening as his wings dried. Above the insect, Jesse seemed to have forgotten about the twelve jurors that were, at that very moment, deciding the fate of his client.

  “As part of their plan they bought a real junker, one of those big gas-guzzling Oldsmobiles. They bought a pistol, some ski masks, gloves, some magnets, and two sets of stolen California license plates. First they glued the license plates back to back so that all they would have to do to change plates is flip them over. They glued the magnets to the fenders, and the double-sided plates were held in place by the magnets. Pretty smart, eh?”

  No one answered. If these guys were really smart, Chris would not be telling their story at this table. Everyone knew that the robbers had been caught—that was a given—but no one knew how it had happened and how the two suspects had ensured their own failure. Therein lay the tale.

  “So, my boy is the wheel man. He gets in his car every day for two weeks and drives around the bank so many times that he can do it in his sleep. He knows that block: every parking space, every driveway, every rut in the road. He drives it in the daylight, he drives it at sunset. He drives around that block at two in the morning with no lights. Pretty soon he’s driving it with his eyes closed, counting out the seconds, stopping at stop signs and making the turns perfectly. My man was ready! This wasn’t going to be one of those amateurish, sloppy, drug-induced jobs that had landed him in prison four times.

  “So now comes the big day. It’s the shortest day of the year, so the bank is still open when it’s dark outside. My boy had checked the calendar and chose this day for the auspicious lighting conditions. He has thought of everything. Following their master plan, he dropped his partner in front of the bank and took up his position around the block. His buddy puts on his generic, secondhand ski mask, pulls out his untraceable pistol, turns on his stolen walkie-talkie, then saunters into the bank. In a few minutes, just as planned, he screams into the walkie-talkie, ‘Come and get me, man. Come and get me.’

  “Just as planned, my man jams on the gas pedal and starts his triumphal tour around the block. Now my man is grinning from ear to ear. This is going to be a walk in the park. My man is so confident in this score that he closes his eyes and counts out the stops and the turns just like he practiced.”

  The table was buzzing. Now the key to the story had been placed in front of them. There it was: the incredible hubris of a four-time loser. The potential for irony was staggering.

  “So now the gunman is running like a madman out of the bank, the alarm is ringing behind him. The wheelman is speed-shifting with his eyes shut. In his excited condition what he doesn’t realize is that he is moving at twice the speed of his practice runs. He makes the first turn all right only because the parking lot at that corner is empty. He runs over a few shrubs and a tricycle and steers that Oldsmobile right down the sidewalk toward the ba
nk.”

  “Oh, Christ,” moaned Jesse.

  “My wheel man is dreaming about what he’s gonna do with all of that money. He’s dreaming about drinking wine from bottles that have corks; he’s dreaming about buying a whore who uses deodorant and has all of her teeth. He’s even thinking about an ocean voyage over to East Oakland.”

  “He’s thinking big,” said Matt Gonzalez.

  “On the seat next to him the walkie-talking is squawking, ‘Come and get me, come and get me,’ the bank alarm is getting louder and louder, there are sirens in the distance and frightened pedestrians on the sidewalk are diving left and right to avoid his speeding bumper.

  “So my man arrives at the bank, throws open the door, and looks around but can’t see his partner anywhere. He gets on the walkie-talkie but there’s no response. Now he’s pissed. He thinks the bastard has run off with the take. So he steps out of the car and the moment his feet hit the pavement—boom!, boom!—a bullet slams through each ankle. Screaming in pain, he falls to the ground with his arms raised in the air. ‘I ain’t armed,’ he screams over and over before he realizes there ain’t no cops on the scene, not a single cop. There’s nobody around.”

  No one at the table dared to breathe or even swallow their coffee as they waited impatiently for the arcane denouement that must certainly follow. Chris paused a long moment to make his friends suffer, then began once again.

  “Here he is, lying on the ground, his ankles are bleeding profusely, the car is running, and my man thinks his double-crossing partner has made off with the take and shot him in the feet to keep him from following. As he’s lying there bleeding on the sidewalk, he begins to hear a faint whisper. He stops groaning a moment to listen and the whisper grows louder. Now he can just make out the words that are being repeated over and over again, ‘You stupid motherfucker.’ ”

  Now the table of lawyers was alive with that tension and human energy that precedes unrestrained laughter.

  “My man looks carefully around himself and suddenly realizes that his partner is right there next to him … lying just a few feet away.”

  “Under the car …”Jesse’s head fell back in amazed disbelief.

  “Under the car,” repeated Chris Gauger.

  Now the entire table exploded with laughter.

  “You mean to say,” said a breathless Matt Gonzalez, “that when the gunman exited the bank he was run over by the getaway car?”

  Chris nodded in the affirmative. “Smashed by a daydreaming fool who was driving with his eyes shut.”

  “The gunman was six feet from the door when he was hit. The car dragged him thirty feet. He was so pissed at the driver that he used his last ounce of strength to shoot him in the ankles. It seems that he had recognized the boots that they’d purchased for the robbery at a local navy surplus. There they were, lying in the street, their blood mixing to form a small lake, the ratpack of bills spewing red ink all over them. They see all of that ink and think they’re bleeding to death so they’re screaming like banshees. The guy under the car was still screaming, ‘Stupid motherfucker’ into his walkie-talkie when the police cars arrived.”

  The human energy burst forth in waves of laughter, filling the corridors and hallways that communicated with the House of Toast. Never a laughter of ridicule, it was rather the laughter of sympathy, of frustration at the futility of crime at the street level, at curb level. It was laughter at the perfect robbery.

  “My boy went to trial in his custom, motorized wheelchair. So did the codefendant. Those two wouldn’t even look at each other. They spent the entire trial trying to short out the other’s battery pack. They never spoke a word during the entire proceeding.”

  “Where are they now?” asked Freya.

  “They’re both in Folsom Prison now, campaigning righteously for wheelchair access to the mess hall.”

  All of a sudden the smile on Jesse’s lips faded. At the entrance to the House of Toast stood Manny Valenzuela, the bailiff from his trial court. The bailiff signaled to Jesse, who rose from his seat just as the little gnat lifted off from the napkin. The jury had a verdict.

  Calvin “Biscuit Boy” Thibault walked jauntily down Seventh Street, the Hall of Justice disappearing in the fog behind him. He was wearing a large smile and the new, used suit that his lawyer had purchased for him. It was a three-button, single-breasted Italian suit. This very morning he had bidden adieu to his time machine; he had rolled up the mattress and blankets of his jail bed and cast one long last look at the torn cocoon from which he had emerged. The entire jail had celebrated his release.

  He turned up Mississippi Street and made the long climb up to Twentieth Street. At the corner he cast a short glance to his right and caught a glimpse of what was once the Amazon Luncheonette. The street was cast in full sunlight now, the darkness of that night somewhat dispelled. Someone had converted Persephone and Mai’s lovely building into a drab laundromat. His eyes did not linger there long.

  Straight ahead was the hill that had once been his home. But now nothing about it was familiar to him. Now he saw with new eyes, eyes like a starlight scope, tuned to foreign spectrums. Now he saw what he had never seen before: roaming squads of fatherless boys, single mothers living on C-rations, marauding bands of tiny mercenaries proudly wearing their insignia of rank and assignment. On the side of the hill he saw the killing zone where four boys had gone down. Biscuit Boy gazed upon his own hill of birth and saw dimly what had once been his own impoverished life.

  Calvin smiled to himself once more. What had his lawyer said to him so often? When desire is stripped of humanity? Now he saw the truth of it in every corner, cupboard, and crevice of Potrero Hill. Desire was there, leaking from the drainpipes and heading for the ocean untreated. Desire was leaping electrically down the wires that dangled from all the rusting antennas that clotted the rooftops. Desire was being pumped into gas tanks and rammed violently into the chambers of cheap weapons. Desire was being smoked in crack pipes and injected into the crooks of arms.

  Humanity was hard to come by on this hill, but desire was everywhere. Calvin could never have suspected that naked desire was leering at him at that very moment from an apartment window on the hill. He could not have known that purest desire stripped of humanity was sizing him up, evaluating his strength, and moving into a position of strategic advantage.

  High up on the hill there were old friends beckoning him back, welcoming him back to his old world. Biscuit could see their arms waving, their cell phones and guns glinting in the sun, but he turned his back to them. “Where are you goin‘, man,” they screamed at him. “You can’t make it out there, even in them new threads. Is you crazy?” they yelled. “Is you out you brain? Ain’t nothin’ out there but the enemy.”

  His little brother Angelo the Pickle was up there, too, waving him away, telling him to never come back.

  Duá bé giao bánh bích quy. Biscuit Boy considered kickin’ back with the fellas, firing up a pipe full of crack cocaine, and tellin’ all the boys about his murder trial—about how he had walked scot-free. He glanced up toward the apartment of Princess Sabine. He knew she was at home. She was always home. A mental image of her naked body made him grin. She had shown her photos to every boy on the hill. He hesitated for a moment while Sabine’s face slowly dissolved into the face of beautiful Mai. Biscuit Boy raised his voice as he turned and walked away from it all.

  “If that there library over in Alexandria, Egypt, was still around here today, there sure as shit could be plenty of homeboys on the moon,” he called out to his old friends as he walked down Missouri toward Eighteenth Street. “Brothers on the moon.” He imagined a golden BMW cruising the lunar surface, the woofers of a boom box flailing vainly in a vacuum.

  Biscuit Boy never heard the bullet that sent him to the coroner’s office.

  When the padre heard the gunshot, it was broad daylight. The sound of a high-velocity round snapped him out of his meditations. He immediately laced up his steel-arched jungle boots and bol
ted from his hooch. The ancient book that had been on his lap tumbled to the ground. Triangulating echoes, he ran as hard as he could toward the source of the sound.

  He ran up Mississippi Street to Twentieth, and when he saw what waited for him there he let loose a cold howl of fathomless grief that could be heard by all on the hill. Every living human being on Potrero Hill was chilled to the marrow by the depth of sadness in the scream. Bones decomposing on the hill near Laos shivered in their root-bound graves when the cry reached them. Upon hearing the voice of a long lost son, the Mekong sloshed and swelled its recognition. Bodies buried in her silt trembled and rose surface-bound, as if anxious to hear the howl.

  Lieutenant Calvert, Padre Carvajal, Mr. Homeless, Vô Dahn found the Biscuit Boy shivering spasmodically and spurting blood on the sidewalk, his arms still clutching the large manila envelope of personal items that all released prisoners are given. Just this morning the padre had witnessed the exaltation at Biscuit Boy’s acquittal on all charges. There had been joyous volleys of gunfire all over Potrero Hill. There had even been a celebration at the homeless encampment. Now, this afternoon, happiness had suddenly transformed into mourning. There was blood on the boy’s new secondhand suit. His face was filled with the look of helpless disbelief that the army chaplain had seen so often.

  Strewn in a wide circle about Calvin’s body were paperback books and dog-eared pieces of notepaper. The paragraphs that he had written at his lawyer’s direction were bloodstained now, fluttering and tumbling off to join all the other windborne litter that was destined to embrace the gutter and curb. Calvin was bleeding profusely, breathing sporadically, and coughing up lumps of black bile onto the cement beneath his head.

  The bullet had entered at his neck below the jaw and had exited just beneath the right ear. The sidewalk behind him had been splattered with cartilage and hair.

  The chaplain knelt by Biscuit’s side. He had knelt just this way for the two beautiful women. He held Biscuit’s hand and bent down to brush his left ear with his lips.