by Peter Plate
A few minutes later inside the DSS, I stopped off at the receptionist’s counter and riffed through the day’s mail. The intake clerk, a flustered woman named Beatrice, was there, not doing anything. She said to me out of sheer boredom while studying her nails, “I saw your new husband the other day at Safeway. He was in the express lane. I had no idea he was so handsome. He looked like a gay porn star.”
Feeling catty, I replied, “Excuse me, but he’s not that new, and maybe he is gay.”
Lavoris came over to us, dangling a costly leather purse from her wrist. Where did she get the money for that quality of gear? Not from her salary, that’s for sure. She smiled and said good morning to Beatrice, shunning me. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I said see you later to the two of them and started toward my cubicle.
Rocky was at the far end of the hall, arguing with a young woman, censuring her, about what I couldn’t hear. The Pinkerton threw his arms up in the air; the gesture was the security chief’s signature that his temper was near its breaking point. What I heard next, I’ll never forget, because it set the stage for the trouble he and I would have later on in the week.
Two shots went off with an abrupt robust bang. The Pinkerton’s howl of woe was squeezed inside the twin reports. The clients jumped from their seats, and the Klaxons in the building started up, drowning us in a tsunami of shrill electronic beeps. Rocky doubled over, clutching his stomach and then he stumbled a couple of steps, backing up against the glass door to the children’s daycare room, knocking over a chair and bellowing, “I’m all right! I’m all right! Got my damn bulletproof on!”
Pinkertons came flying into the waiting room, locking arms together, sealing off the exits. The shooter was gone. One of the security guards made Rocky sit down, and he unbuttoned the wounded man’s shirt, revealing a green bulletproof vest. Two slugs were protruding from the center of the protective armor, exactly where Rocky’s navel was.
“Who was it, man?”
“Did you get a look at her? Could you identify her if you saw her again?”
“Jesus fucking Christ!”
I looked up. It was Rubio, breathless.
“What happened?” he asked.
A small crowd was surrounding Rocky: security guards, clients, Lavoris and Beatrice. The Pinkerton was conscious, very much so, talking a mile a minute, overwrought with the celebratory feeling that came from surviving an encounter with his own demise.
“Yeah, it’s not such a big thing. That woman, though, damn, if I saw her again, I could i.d. her. She was like, inches away from me.”
twenty-two
The Zeitgeist wasn’t the same without Harry Hendrix. It tore me down to see the vacant bar stool next to me without Harry and the eternal cigarette in his hand. The regulars from the DSS still got wrecked there nightly, but the partying wasn’t up to snuff without him. It struck me ironic that we used to talk in there about quitting the bottle.
“You gonna keep drinking for the rest of your life?” I’d asked.
“I don’t think so,” he hiccupped, nursing a Coors. “Not drinking is one thing. I could live with that, some day, and I’m not saying when. But turning into a program fascist and going to meetings is something different. I’m not into it.”
“The way I see it,” Frank interjected. “We’ve got to get you a lady. That will solve a lot.”
Hendrix was socratic about the largesse of this offer. “What do you mean? A hooker?”
“No, no, man. The real thing. Someone you take out to the movies and to dinner. A full-time lover.”
The concept interested the social worker. I saw lightning zigzag in his eyes, like someone had thrown a switch, illuminating the sexual darkness that was every single male’s plight.
“Frank’s onto something, Harry,” I said.
“You know what?” he replied out of the blue. “I’ve got a kid, a boy somewhere that I haven’t seen in a couple of years.”
“Is he with the mother?” Frank asked.
Hendrix stared at the bottom of his beer. “He sure is. They’re out in the desert, down south, near Palmdale, some hellhole like that.”
“Not Tehachapi. I did time there.”
Harry quizzed Frank. “You were in prison?”
“Ah, it was nothing.” Frank took a swig of beer, letting us admire his profile. “Receiving stolen goods, that’s all.”
Hendrix tried to extract a reaction from me by asking, “You know about this, Charlene?”
Great: Harry was going to lapse into his alternate personality; the crabby man who liked to feel sorry for himself. But Simmons came over to us, throwing his meaty arms around Frank and Harry, asking the three of us, “You heavyweights sticking around? Want another drink?”
I could see Simmons was asking us to stay with him. He was afraid of the withering silence that came with the end of each weeknight. Frank winked, “I’m staying, and so is Charlene.”
Harry smiled, uplifted by the invitation. He held out his glass to Simmons. “Get me another beer.”
Rubio was necking with a woman in the back next to the pay phone, moving to a REO Speedwagon song on the jukebox. Rumor had it Bart was getting some from the middle-aged bleached blonde, a veteran bar hopper who’d been at the Zeitgeist for years. Simmons said she was a DSS groupie. Rubio had his arm around her waist and he was listening to what she was saying, his face transfixed, eyes glowing. They swayed together, shuffling and giggling.
Hendrix glanced at them and said, “I’m glad to see the man’s having fun.”
It was what you’d expect Harry to say: affirming another fellow’s happiness. Simmons came back with three eloquent, inviting bottles of Bud. Frank took one and chugged it non-stop until it was a third empty. Hendrix read the label on his beer, then had a nourishing swallow.
“You know what?” he belched.
“What’s that, Harry?” I asked, taking the last bottle Simmons brought.
“You and your guy here are good people. I’m glad to know you.”
Frank raised his bottle in a toast, and I did mine. Harry brought his Bud to clink against ours; the sound of it sent a shiver down my spine.
“To friends,” Hendrix vowed.
Harry was gone. In his stead, like a portent, a hustler in a studded leather jacket came up to Frank in the Zeitgeist. The dealer, tanned and speeding with psychotic acne under his chin, got on a stool and said, “We need to rap, homeboy.”
Frank put his beer down and stared at it while the muscles in his neck bulged up, inflated with disgust. “What about?” he asked.
“Those five dime bags I loaned you,” the dealer said.
Frank looked at me with the hopes that I wasn’t hearing anything. His eyes met mine in a brief exchange which didn’t yield much for him. He said to his antagonist, “I told you when we did it, the other guy was going to pay for them. You were fronting them to him, not me. I was doing an errand. Didn’t he let you know that?”
The dude asked blandly, “What other guy? I don’t recall anyone else in on this, just you and me. Are you making shit up to get out of it? Is that how you do things?”
“Frank, what’s going on here?”
“Charlene, please.”
To the dealer, Frank explained in a husky voice how it was with him. “I don’t like you coming up to me while I’m with my old lady. What are we talking about? Forty, fifty dollars? Can’t it wait?”
The rat tapped Frank on the chest. “Don’t shine me on. I want the money. I’m calling in my debts.”
“Tomorrow, okay?”
“I know where you live, fucker!”
That did it for Frank. He half-turned on his stool and straight-armed the asshole into the bar top, knocking him over, kicking him in the mouth once, twice, three times. When the dealer tried to hoist himself upright, Frank pushed him to the floor, stomping on him, working the bar stool for leverage, and using it to bash his opponent in the ribs.
A friend of the man, a long-haired guy with a goatee, came up
to Frank, blustering, “Lay off! That’s my cousin!”
I jumped back, clutching my drink and my purse. I ducked when Frank crunched the longhair with a left hook, a right jab, then two more hooks, left and right, sending the man flying into a table. Frank was spinning around, ululating and frothing at the mouth, losing control, royally losing it. My husband kneeled down and stripped the leather jacket from the hustler, stood up and threw it over my shoulders. “Sure looks sharp on you,” he said.
The garment was rank with the speed freak’s odor. I tossed it to the floor and thought to myself, it would be smart if we never came back to the Zeitgeist.
On our way home slinking down South Van Ness Avenue, weighed under by three extra quart bottles of Budweiser, I said to Frank, “Next time, you want to get us killed, let me know first. Why didn’t you tell me that you needed some cash?”
Frank’s head was sunk into his jacket lapels, making him look vulnerable. His brawn was hidden, the sun was descending, and both of us were semi-drunk.
At the corner of Eighteenth Street next to the Whiz Burgers Drive-In, we encountered my second ex-husband. A short, thin man with golden curly hair, he was in the company of a mutual acquaintance, a tart with herpes. I said to Frank, “I don’t want to hear a word out of you.”
My ex-husband whistled, “Charlene?”
I played the game. I rubbed my nose, snorting, “Yeah, Skippy. It’s me. Long time, no see. What’s up? You look great.”
“You remember Rita, don’t you?”
Both of them were smiling so hard, their mouths were going to shatter. I projected a frosty stare at the pock-marked mink standing by his side.
“For sure. How are you doing, Rita?”
The gold-toothed girl had an excess of Revlon ultra-blush caked on her marred cheeks. She said hello, sort of. Skippy ignored Frank and took her arm in his and said: “I’m going to school. I thought you’d like to know that.”
“Oh, yeah? Where at?”
“City College.”
“That’s nice. What’re you into?”
“Art.”
He said it without being facetious. And who was I to judge anyone? If he wanted to starve, what could I do? These days, whenever we met, we didn’t get too personal, me and Skippy. Doing otherwise would have proven fatal. We kept our coincidental meetings brief and saccharine sweet.
I didn’t feel like mentioning the time he dared me to slap him during a week-long drunk, and then was surprised when I did. I didn’t remind him of when we’d balled on top of a wino’s cardboard mattress in the bushes at Dolores Park, getting the crabs as a result. And what about the time I flipped out and slugged his ex-wife over at her house?
There wasn’t any need to go into things like that. It would have manufactured more unwanted dramas. But I had to be candid: Skippy had gotten a scummy verdigris on his teeth from drinking an abundance of malt liquor.
twenty-three
I was having a dream that when I was a child staying at my grandpa’s house, I had to change his socks since he was crippled and couldn’t do it for himself. I’d peel the dirty things from his toes and exchange them for a laundered pair of hose, which I’d slip over his razor-sharp toe-nails. It was a strange way to think about a member of your family. When I woke up, I’d sweated clear through the sheets. It was daybreak and the bed was empty.
Frank was in the kitchen when I came in, putting away a meal of scrambled eggs, beans and steamed tortillas that made my stomach turn. I got myself a cup of coffee from the stove and cringed when I saw the sink. It was overpopulated with dirty dishes. Frank wiped his mouth with a tortilla, finished what was on his plate and looked at me.
“What’s with you?” I said.
“I was going to go see my mom.”
His parents had a slot in a trailer park in Colma, near where all the cemeteries were. They were a crusty duo, Ralph and Cheryl. Dad had spent twenty-seven years at the Southern Pacific rail yard near the garbage dump by Candlestick Park. Cheryl, thanks to her part-time job cleaning houses, had been in Mount Zion Hospital with asthma over Christmas.
A trio of Pinkertons were standing at the front gate when I got to the DSS. They were waiting for Rocky, who was returning to active duty that morning. Inside, Beatrice saw me and cawed, “The Dominguez woman called again!”
The clerk was modeling a hideous green taffeta dress that would have looked ravishing on an organ grinder’s monkey. It was too much for me, and so I went to the restroom to smoke a fag.
If you’ve ever smoked a cigarette rapidly, it quickens your pulse. This gives you energy, and that’s what I wanted. While I did that, I took a hostile, non-affirming look at myself in one of the bathroom mirrors. This proved to be controversial. My forehead was scalloped with rills of eczema, and not for the first time.
In summation, this was the life I’d chosen for myself. So it wasn’t the greatest, but I’d done worse. Before I had gone to school and become a social worker, like many of my peers, I sold drugs on the street.
That isn’t quite accurate. Maybe I should rectify my error by admitting that I brokered large amounts of LSD from a series of apartments in and out of the city. I was always moving from one place to the next, storing the acid in a refrigerator to maintain the potency of the substance.
The money was excellent; I still miss it.
I distributed the hallucinogenic by riding around Chinatown, North Beach and Pacific Heights on my bicycle. A sexy chick in short-shorts, carrying two, three, four thousand hits. I had different varieties: purple double-dome, gun powder, blotter. The acid ranged in strength from two hundred-thirty micrograms up to three hundred-seven mics.
My customers represented a wide spectrum of individuals in the San Francisco-Oakland-Vallejo triangle. Financial district stock brokers trying to break up the monotony of sleepless nights, horny Navy sailors on furlough, East Bay debutantes who wanted to kick up their heels on the eve of a cotillion and unpublished writers struggling to leave heroin behind them.
The clamor in the waiting room was coming through the walls of the bathroom. It was so noisy out there, you’d think it was someone’s birthday party. Not just a day when the clients got their housing vouchers and their GA.
Someone in a toilet stall began to make quite a racket herself, starting to smell the place up, prompting me to bury myself in a cloud of tobacco smoke. She must have wiped her tush with an entire roll of that brown institutional paper we used here. From the sound of it, she had to flush the toilet three times.
The stall door swung open and Eldon strolled out, more world weary than ever with a local newspaper folded under his arm. Upon seeing me, he got testy and took on the stance of a martyr.
“What are you doing in here, Eldon? Can’t you read the sign on the door? It says this room is for ladies only.”
“The toilets are clogged in the other bathroom. I couldn’t help it. What could I do?”
“I don’t care. Don’t do this again, or I’ll have to report you.”
“Sorry. Say, you going out to Clooney’s on Friday night?”
“Who told you about that?”
“Simmons did. He invited me to come along. We went last week, too.”
“You’re one of the gang. You should be pleased with yourself.”
That dig sank into his febrile mind. Giving me a cold shoulder, Eldon went over to the sink, turned on the tap, and using plenty of soap, he whipped up a lather in his hands.
I gave the rest of my cigarette the attention it deserved. But Eldon couldn’t leave it alone. I could see it in his face, reflected in the mirror at the sink. His lower lip was quivering. With anger? I didn’t know.
“Don’t you like Simmons?” he asked. “I’m not a scientist, but hey, I get the distinct impression that he rubs you the wrong way. Would you like to tell me what it is? I happen to like the guy.”
Not wanting to take the bait, I kept my mouth shut.
“He tells me you used to hang out with him, Matt Vukovich and Rub
io a lot more before you got married again. They say you’re funny when you drink. That when you get tipsy, you get into shit like white on rice. Didn’t you get eighty-sixed from the Chameleon on Valencia Street along with your husband? I think Simmons misses you. I know Rubio does. I like getting smashed with them, and Clooney’s ain’t such a bad bar. Kids, you know. Not too many assholes.”
About that night at the Chameleon. I don’t like drinking in public anymore; there’s always some cretin who wants to instigate combat. A dusted blue-haired punk rock junkie had been obnoxious to me at a poetry reading in the bar. Frank said to him, hold your lip, brother, or I’ll cave your head in. Frank loves literature and he is protective of me, like a husband should be.
Later that morning after helping one of Lavoris’s clients with a GA form, I found a memorandum on my desk. Someone had placed it there when I’d gone for another refill of instant coffee. I picked up the memo, nettled by it.
You must see me, it said. If you don’t, I’ll visit you. Signed on the paper, almost illegibly, was the scrawl of Gerald Petard.
Our führer’s signature was affixed to every paycheck that came out of Otis Street. Whether it was my wage or Mrs. Dominguez’s benefits, Gerald had his name on it. The directive in his message meant several possibilities. A recognition of our present impasse. A hope for reconciliation. Or just when you thought the shit was dying down, the threat of another imbroglio.
I crushed the note into a ball and threw it into the wastepaper basket. Petard was on the decline, tweaking and confused, losing vim. My strategy? Simple. Let him come to me.
twenty-four
The Pinkerton loomed in the doorway to the cubicle. I opened my mouth to tell him to wait there, to take his problems somewhere else. But nothing came out. Here we go, I said to myself.
The security agent did his job and was presumably mature enough to accept the consequences of his actions. He’d been through an ordeal; I couldn’t deny that. Somehow I remained unaffected by his suffering. Was I being cold-blooded? I didn’t think so.
