One Foot Off the Gutter

by Peter Plate

  She quieted down while watering the plants. She liked watching things grow; the bushes had to be moistened, not too much and not too little. She wanted the garden to be in tiptop shape for her parents’ visit. They were coming up from La Jolla next week, and she was already feeling the strain of it. What could she do? Her mother had insisted the first week in October was the best time for her and Daf to come up to San Francisco.

  “Malcolm! Celeste! Where are you?” she called.

  A pair of dirty faced kids popped out from the other side of the garden. Before she could admonish them for wandering out of sight, the children ran up to her and threw their tiny arms around her legs, staining her immaculate white tennis shorts with their muddy hands. Malcolm buried his face into her crotch. Celeste circled around to Patsy’s rear, sinking her nose into the cleft of Patsy’s buttocks while grabbing her mother’s thighs with her stubby fingers. Patsy held the garden hose waist high and closed her eyes. A vague sexual tension rose from her navel. She enjoyed the sensation, but in the back of her mind, in the place where her identity was overshadowed by the visage of her aging mother, she knew her pleasure was incorrect.

  “Where have you been?” she asked.

  Malcolm stepped back and peered at her with a guileless expression in his brown eyes. Celeste stood off to one side, imitating her brother. Patsy kneeled down to talk with them at eye level.

  “We was playing,” Malcolm said carefully.

  “And where were you playing?” Patsy asked, looking to him, then at his sister.

  “Over there,” he said haltingly.

  His sister stole a glance at the abandoned building and didn’t say anything.

  “You know it’s a bad house. I want you to stay away from it.”

  Malcolm raised his head and asked, “Why?”

  “I don’t have a reason. It smells funky, I don’t know. Because I said so,” she replied. “I want you two to run into the bathroom and get washed up. We’re going to have a cold pasta dish with sun dried tomatoes. And if you’re good, and you eat everything on your plates, I’ll serve French sorbet for dessert. Won’t that be good?”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  The kids turned around and scooted through the opened back door into the kitchen. Their shrill bird-like laughter trailed after them, lingering in the Indian summer air before falling apart, note by note, in Patsy’s garden.

  With the children in the house, she could give her full and undivided attention to the pigeons next door. They’d been on her mind for some time now. She’d been meaning to do something about them. They were obscene, filthy, crippled and diseased birds that roosted on the fire escape of the abandoned building. They made their home on top of a cast off slab of plywood; evil tempered devils who dropped their offal on every house and tree in the neighborhood. The pigeons also defecated on themselves with equal and uncanny disregard. They were quite free and democratic with their effluvium.

  Then there were the physically challenged pigeons. Before Patsy moved to the city, she’d never encountered a pigeon with less than two legs. Nowadays she frequently saw one legged brutes hobbling along the sidewalk on Twenty-first Street.

  Once in awhile she saw a legless pigeon dragging itself over the pavement in a macabre dance of bravado and pathos, using its wings to navigate the asphalt while wearing an expression of hapless woe on its miniature face. It was hard to look at them. It was impossible not to.

  She’d already called the city’s building inspector’s office to find out more about the abandoned building next door. She tried to find out who owned the property, but the lack of information she received irked her. It seemed that nobody owned the place.

  Most of its windows were broken, leaving gaping holes. The chimney on the flat Edwardian style roof was leaning over to one side. An abandoned building was not only unsightly, but due to its proximity, it could also make the value of her own house go down. Her mother would not approve, but her husband acted like he didn’t care.

  Patsy had to wonder about the doctor. Her mother didn’t understand how she could tolerate a man who wore Guatemalan cloth vests and Birkenstock shoes. Patsy dressed in tight short dresses made from rayon or silk. The doctor wore his balding hair in a scraggly pony tail. Patsy’s Volvo station wagon was spotlessly clean. The doctor never washed his Volvo sedan. She told her mother the doctor adopted a casual approach to his personal attire because he lived in San Francisco.

  Her mother had laughed. “Don’t give me that hocus pocus, sweetie. The doctor is living in the past. Everybody in that city is. Don’t you know that?”

  four

  i wedged myself through the glass doors of the Mission police station, conscious of being overweight and sleepless and wearing a dirty uniform that had been next to my body for the last week. A blast of smoke hit me in the face, clogging my nostrils and compelling me to sneeze. Two rookie cops, apple cheeked and bright eyed with modified mohawk hairdos and dressed in crowd control overalls, walked by me, ignoring me in a way that I knew was false. The desk sergeant, a tall, thin cop nearing retirement age behind a decrepit computer terminal, lifted his eyes from the screen, quipping out of the side of his mouth:

  “What’s up, Coddy?”

  “You tell me, Gilbert. What’s the smell? It’s fuckin’ hideous,” I snapped, short of temper.

  Gilbert hunched the narrow spear points of his shoulder blades and grinned crookedly with a melancholy sigh. “Ah, it’s nothing. Some of the guys are out back in the parking lot burning shit. You know, that confiscated stuff left over from the last fiscal year. Some of it, we kept. What was left over, it’s out there in the fire.”

  The city and state cutbacks had forced the mayor and the police chief to hammer out a temporary policy in which rank and file personnel were allowed to re-supply themselves with confiscated evidence taken from the possession of alleged and convicted perpetrators.

  “Bellamy out there, Gilbert?”

  The desk sergeant’s gray face was already buried at the screen again; he jerked his thumb toward the back door without saying a word.

  I trudged down the antiseptic smelling corridor, as I had done five times already that day, heading towards the parking lot. I passed a dozen offices on the way. In every single yellow sandstone brick-lined room, cops were busy on the job. Some were poring over road maps; others were cleaning their weapons, wiping them down with solvent. A few were interrogating petty criminals scooped up from Mission Street earlier that morning. In the parochial atmosphere of the cop shop, every police officer, even the arrogant rookies, looked like angels to me. Everything was strictly business, nothing personal.

  I reached the end of the corridor, braced the release handle and pushed open the back door. Bellamy saw me and sang out:

  “Coddy! Come join the festivities!”

  Bellamy waved his arm toward the fire he was standing near. In between two squad cars and the captain’s mobile home command vehicle, a waist high pile of shoes was being licked to death by orange, pink and red flames.

  Gladdened by Bellamy’s invitation, I waddled over to the scene. I was self-conscious like a model on the runway, heeding the rookies’ eyes as they rested on my gun belt and waistline. I wiped away a few cinders from my chin and grimaced, “What is this?”

  Bellamy, ever sensitive to my changing moods, was chewing on a licorice stick to curb his appetite for tobacco. He gave me a candid, vulpine glance. A thoughtful, keen stare that was part wild animal and partly the reflection of a kid who’d graduated from a Catholic orphanage. Most of the rookies were silently watching him talk to me.

  “Remember that dealer we busted on Treat Street?”

  “You’re burning his shoes?” I was modestly incredulous, forehead wrinkling deeply. “That should keep you busy for a while.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Bellamy that he was doing anything wrong; he didn’t know what to say. My accusatory tone of voice dampened him. Both of us froze inside of ourselves. When one of us wasn’t happy, the misery
just oozed out of him in a dribble of frustration and the other was quick to feel it.

  I contented myself by staring at the fire. Sooner or later, Bellamy would snap out of it. Unlike me, he was the forgiving kind. The rookies were having a good time joking and throwing shoes at each other. A random shoe rocketed into the air a few feet above the burning pile, propelled by some mysterious combustion of leather and oxygen. The shoe sailed up into the fire’s smoke; the cops whooped and pointed their fingers at it.

  The smoke daubed the parking lot with a tint of blue that made the sun and Mission Street seem removed, beyond the horizon. I knew Bellamy wanted to get the silence between him and me over with. In deference to my greater age and wisdom, he had to let me take my own time to say whatever it was that had brought me out into the parking lot in the first place.

  Finally, I said, in a voice that did not belong to me, “You heard about that guy who got gunned down the other day?”

  I said it with a flip, I-don’t-care tone. Pleased as he was that I was speaking my mind, I could see by the expression on his face Bellamy didn’t want to talk about people getting shot. He’d been the target of select bullets during the course of his career as a police officer, and so had I. Every cop in the Mission had been shot at except Gilbert.

  “When I heard about it, I didn’t know what to do,” I admitted.

  The timidity in my voice camouflaged the loathing I was feeling. I wasn’t willing to say the victim had been a fellow police officer.

  “Don’t let it touch you, Coddy,” Bellamy advised.

  Catsup stains and smeared black cigarette ash begrimed my combat blouse. My heavy Sam Browne belt hung low on my hips under the bulge of my belly, weighed down by a gigantic, nickel plated forty-five caliber Brazilian-made revolver. The barrel of the revolver dangled to the top of my kneecaps. Even with a clean uniform I would have resembled a sack of potatoes; my muscles formed rocky lumps under the combat overalls.

  Getting shot wasn’t anything to laugh at. The prospect frightened me. The notion was bitter and painful. I stared at the fire and at the green, inexperienced rookies around it. Shoe polish-flavored smoke was wafting over the parking lot, shrouding the cop shop before spiraling high over Duggan’s Mortuary and the rest of Valencia Street.

  Bellamy put his hand on my arm to let me know I wasn’t alone, that he cared. It meant more to me than he could have possibly realized. I felt Bellamy’s hand was holding me down to earth, to some stable point on the planet where I was steady and ready to believe in myself. How much self-doubt had I consumed over the years? Only Bellamy could tell me and he wasn’t able to do it with words.

  five

  marvelous sunlight was pouring over the Mission. A light filled with shellacked intensity. Laminated panels of light that touched down upon the long rows of Victorians on Twenty-first Street.

  Most of the pastel colored Victorians were freshly painted, pleasing to the eye, and murder on the pocketbook. The Victorians looked like they came straight from the pages of the Sunday paper centerfold. Newly planted banana palm trees dotted the sidewalk in front of their cobblestone driveways. Redwood boxes filled with peonies, and trellises of jasmine and bougainvilleas decorated their doorways. Brand new cars were parked by the curb. In the middle of the block, surrounded by all of that mouth watering real estate, stood an abandoned building.

  It was a house no one cared about and that no one owned. In the healthy organism of private property, this derelict Victorian was a cancerous cell. The house knew its days were numbered. Since no one cared about it, destruction was inevitable; progress implied it.

  A hundred families had lived under its roof. A dozen babies had been born there. The old had passed away in those same rooms. The abandoned building remembered every one of them.

  There had been an immigrant Italian family that had come to the city from Chile to seek their fortune in the dry goods market. The Rossis were a large clan with several comely daughters. The girls were given away in a series of marriages by their dimwitted father. This drove their mother to the high wires of madness. The old man had never been a good judge of character. A crop of divorces by his daughters and the collapse of the business happened inside two years. After his wife died in the year of the great earthquake of 1906, the embittered immigrant sold the building to a Jewish family. He took a sailing ship back to Chile and was never heard from again.

  San Francisco was ruthless and unpitying: it had never been kind to the refugees who flooded its streets clamoring for a better life. People came and went in the Mission following the tides of ambition and the currents of misery that flowed from continent to continent around the globe.

  The Jewish family moved into the house with great fanfare, setting the neighborhood tongues to wagging. Prominent among the members of the foundling household were a brace of headstrong brothers who were involved in the enterprise of bootlegging whiskey. Their mother was a fragile woman from Odessa who always wore her red hair in a headache-inducing bun. Their father was a silent man who prayed and drank himself into unconsciousness every night.

  Most of the Mission had become Irish. The Chileans who’d lived there for a generation were moving to other parts of the city. The Mission was fast gaining a reputation as a place where immigrants went to make a start in America. The neighborhood delighted the whiskey smuggling brothers. They were full of ideas and dreams of wealth. Here was a natural outlet for their illegal goods. Everyone liked to drink, to forget the tribulations of cultural assimilation. Unfortunately, a majority of the policemen in San Francisco were Irish and they, too, happened to live in the district.

  The eldest brother kept getting arrested, going in and out of jail until he was found laying face down in the street with a bullet in his neck. The next brother was wounded during a shoot out with the police while trying to deliver a load of gin to a brothel. His ambushers dragged him away into the night, down an alley off Eighteenth Street near the union meeting hall and he was never seen again. The youngest brother died of consumption during a seven year jaunt at Folsom State Prison.

  Shortly after his death, the brothers’ mother and her silent husband packed up their belongings and moved to the Fairfax area in Los Angeles.

  Years went by and no one else moved in. The building was forlorn without the company of human beings. It had grown accustomed to the presence of people, to their talking, sleeping, fighting, and best of all, their lovemaking. When the Mission had been young, the building was still new.

  The abandoned house was springing leaks in its roof; the beams in the attic were rotting. The building was tired and sometimes it yearned to be razed to the ground. Other buildings on Twenty-first Street had gone to their demise that way, levelled by blows from the wrecking ball.

  Cobwebs stretched from wall to wall. Piles of dust had grown into sand dunes by the front door. Trucks rumbled up Twenty-first Street causing plaster to fall from the ceiling onto the floorboards.

  Each street had its own direction, an appearance that indicated what kind of people resided there. Twenty-first Street was transforming itself into something the abandoned building had never seen before. There was prosperity in the air.

  six

  bellamy and myself were cruising Mission Street in our patrol car. We were pulling a fourteen-hour shift. Bellamy thought he’d been sitting in the vehicle for years, maybe decades. The car was his life; everything he did was related to the squad car.

  “You got any matches, Coddy? I left mine at the station.”

  “Why don’t you get one of those plastic lighters. You can buy ten of them at a time. They’re cheap.”

  “I want a match, not a fuckin’ lecture.”

  The usual gaggle of junkies were standing in front of the Chinese cafeteria. They were bent into stone cold nods that exaggerated the earth’s gravitational pull. Heroin was a supermagnetic force field; sixty-four percent pure in the streets and getting cheaper by the moment. It was sending its users into outer space whenever it didn�
�t send them to the county morgue. Whatever else heroin did, I didn’t want to know about it.

  “Every day, I wake up, and I ask myself, is this the day the world is going to change? Is it gonna be different out here today?” Bellamy said.

  “Joke’s on you, partner.”

  I thought of myself as an anthropologist. I was sifting through the debris of the Mission, a social scientist who saw everything under a microscope, magnified under glass. The Mission was rife with illnesses that needed a vaccination. In a more sanguine state of mind, I referred to myself as a doctor with a gun and a nightstick. Our squad car was an ambulance; our hospital, a pair of handcuffs; Bellamy was my assisting nurse.

  A fleet of shopping carts belonging to some homeless men was corralled together with bungee cords at the corner of Eighteenth Street. The carts were stacked chest high with recyclable beer bottles, moldy blankets, second hand clothing, and other trophies that came from garbage dumpster diving. The cart in the middle of the corral had a baby German shepherd puppy nestling on top of a filthy pillow. The puppy lifted its square head and with its dumb liquid brown eyes, it watched us drive by.

  “Cute, ha? They make great attack dogs,” Bellamy said lazily.

  I leaned my head out the window, flinching against the harsh sun while eyeballing a junkie hitting up on the sidewalk. The guy was sitting comfortably on the pavement with his back to the window of a check cashing establishment. He could have been working on his sun-tan for all that anyone knew. The spike was poised over his clenched hand as he meditated on the long awaited moment of relief. Then he sunk the load into his wrist. His face went slack, loosening the deep furrows that ran from the corners of his nose down to his lips.

  “That’s a real beautiful sight.” I was offended, wounded to the quick by the stupidity of that junkie. The street, the sun, the other people; I hated them.