One Foot Off the Gutter

by Peter Plate

  “Forget it,” Bellamy cautioned me. “The asshole ain’t hurtin’ nobody.”

  “Stay out of my face. If I want you to tell me what my priorities are, I’ll let you know, okay?”

  “Well, whatever. You’re the boss.”

  Bellamy opened a fresh pack of cigarettes. He’d already finished off one pack, and our shift wasn’t anywhere near done. Bellamy had told me that, confidentially, I was making him nervous and as a consequence he was smoking so much he was going to get emphysema inside a month. I told Bellamy to hang tough with the tension. He was adept at minding his own business. That wasn’t too difficult. He had his own problems to think about.

  “Hey,” he said to me. “You’re not mad at me, are you?”

  “Of course not, you ass.”

  “We’re still friends, right?”

  “Don’t ever question it, Bells.”

  I steered our patrol car past Siegal’s Tuxedo Shop, Queen’s Shoes, Discoteca Latina, The Eggroll Express, The Christian Science Reading Room, and Duc Loi’s Meat and Fish Company without a conscious thought in my head, having seen the seedy store fronts at least nine million times in the last year. I was more concerned about the state of our vehicle than anything else at the moment.

  The front windshield was cracked; all of the tires were missing their hubcaps. There was an enormous dent in the back left-hand door. The condition of the car was bad for public relations. But there was nothing me or Bellamy could do about it.

  Since the cutbacks in funding for police supplies, cops were obliged to repair and maintain their vehicles with money out of their own pockets. It was a bunch of crap. And because of the budget cutback, we never had enough gas in the tank. I couldn’t remember the last time the squad car had a full tank. If we went over our weekly ration, that was too bad for us. But Bellamy was a boon, a real diamond in the raw. He siphoned gas from the other police cars parked at the station. He never felt guilty about the practice; the other cops were doing the same thing to us whenever our backs were turned to them.

  It was a warm and moist day that smelled of bananas and beer. The sidewalks were jammed with black, white, and brown skinned families hurrying home from the nearby grocerias. There was something I didn’t understand about this. No one could ever accuse me of excessive insensitivity, but a panoply was unfolding right in front of my nose and I didn’t get it. The mom and pop stores that dotted the street used to be run by Iranians and Mexicans; then came the El Salvadoreans followed by the Palestinians. I felt like I was being overtaken, that I was going to be replaced by an entirely different kind of people. No better or any worse than me, just distinct and separate from what I knew. And I couldn’t accept that.

  “I can’t handle all these new faces. It’s like I’ve got to have eyes everywhere at once,” I said.

  “Don’t even try to do it, Coddy,” Bellamy quipped. “There’s too many people, and not enough time.”

  Children were scampering on the pavement in front of their parents, laughing and skipping, shouting to each other in pipsqueak thin voices.

  “These people got too many fucking kids,” Bellamy said. “Where do they get the money to feed them?”

  I worried about the citizens, whether they could take care of themselves in the street. There were so many assholes out there, running psycho. It was irrelevant if the citizens were rich or poor; worrying came with the job. That’s what cops had medical insurance for, to check into a hospital now and then because the worrying was bound to make you sick.

  I wasn’t fond of the citizens, but it was my sworn duty to protect them from the depredations of assholes. But if I was honest and if Bellamy was, too, we’d tell you most citizens were potential assholes. There was only a thin blue line of cops such as Bellamy and myself to keep the two forces from uniting and destroying the city.

  “Did I tell you I inherited Rod Jensen’s uniform, Coddy?”

  “Oh, yeah? How did you do that?”

  “After he died, his wife said I could have it. She came up to me at the funeral. She said it would fit me.”

  An asshole was somebody who stepped out of line, like that joker over there pissing in the gutter, right in front of those old Nicaraguan ladies selling the Watchtower. What aggressive freaks those evangelicos were. Seventh Day Adventists and Pentecostals; they were always talking to people in the street, getting in their faces, knocking on the doors to every house and apartment in the neighborhood. It was a wonder they didn’t get themselves killed. On top of that, they kept San Francisco from being one hundred percent Catholic like it was supposed to be.

  “Hold on a minute, Bells.”

  I angled the squad car into the lane nearest the curb. Bellamy turned on the bullhorn and shouted into his lapel mike:

  “Listen up, you sonuvabitch! Quit pissing in front of those old ladies or I’ll drag you downtown!”

  The guy shoved his penis back into his dirty trousers. He smiled inanely at the police car and staggered off. I pulled the squad car back into the flow of the southbound traffic. Bellamy settled back in his seat and watched the young girls on the sidewalk. They looked good to him, sweet as candy. But myself? I couldn’t escape from my own private notions about assholes.

  They were a strange breed. Unlike your typical old school hoodlum, this generation of criminals considered themselves superior to cops. You could see it in their eyes whenever you busted one of them. They didn’t want to submit to an arrest. With that said, things tended to get out of hand. A cop had to employ extra muscle to subdue a prisoner. But if a little blood was spilled, you could always count on a citizen to come charging up to spout some nonsensical crap about civil rights and police brutality.

  “I think I need something to eat, Coddy.”

  “It ain’t lunch time yet. You know that.”

  Civil rights: talk about some overworked garbage. Civil rights were a thing of the past; it belonged in the days of the horse and the buggy. Civil rights looked good behind glass in a museum. But in the streets, we were experiencing lucifer rising. The Mission was a zoo filled with psychopaths. Assholes were causing mayhem and citizens were always complaining, making our job longer than ever.

  “Look at these boys, Coddy.”

  At Bellamy’s invitation, my eyes flickered over the rear view mirror. Then I decided, what the hell. I switched lanes to stare down a car load of cholos in a ’63 Impala that had been chopped, lowered and painted an apple red flake. Those kids had been well schooled in the science of cars by their older brothers and fathers. The Impala was a nice ride. We nodded at them, giving them a mal de ojo from perdition when the Impala passed the squad car in the outer lane.

  I was still arguing with myself about who was worse, the citizens or the assholes, when I turned the squad car off Mission Street. The assholes had guns, but the citizens were backstabbing nightmares. They kissed your feet when you were talking to them. Then they turned around to stab you in the back with their civil rights.

  At least with the assholes, you knew what you were getting into. Everything started at the same spot: at the point of no return. In that way, assholes were consistent. They spoke the same language as cops. They followed the same code. Everyone was an animal. Everybody had their own territory. You stayed out of their way and they kept away from you. You had to quarantine them because you’d never get rid of them. Those were the golden rules.

  Bellamy was checking out a group of men standing at the corner of Shotwell Street.

  “Can you slow down for a moment, Coddy. I want to see what these guys are up to.”

  “Anything?”

  “Nah, they just looked suspicious to me, that’s all.”

  There was another way to look at the picture. There was always another way. Maybe all the assholes and the citizens were cops in disguise; maybe they were plainclothes officers working undercover without any hope of recognition. Maybe everyone in the city had the soul of a cop underneath their various disguises.

  “Let’s get a cup of co
ffee when we get back over to Mission Street. I didn’t get enough this morning.”

  “I thought you always drank more than your share of coffee, Bells.”

  “Coddy, you don’t know me as well as you’d like to.”

  As his partner, I thought that one over.

  So far, the day had been uneventful. We’d collared a quartet of crack hippies arguing over a lost bag of rocks. We had come upon them while they were crawling on their hands and knees looking for their dope. It was a common sight in the Mission; men and women kneeling on the pavement in the name of lost drugs.

  Bellamy found the bag in five seconds flat. It had been sticking out of the oldest crack hippie’s back pocket.

  The scenario was a far cry from the first time Bellamy had encountered a crackhead. An asshole had taken it upon himself to pull a gun on Bellamy over by Dolores Park. Bellamy had ducked behind the squad car, moving as if he was underwater, fighting off the fear. I had stood up to the assailant. I was beyond terror. My nerves were uncalibrated, hardened knots of misanthropy. I extracted my revolver from its holster and shot the basehead three times. Two bullets got lodged in the man’s ankles; the third bullet landed in a tree on the other side of the park. The asshole fell to the ground like a ton of bricks. Bellamy told the captain I had been real inspirational that night. Six months later, I received a commendation for bravery in the field.

  Today hadn’t been any different. I jumped out of the car and without wasting a second, I slammed my baton across the kidneys of the first crack hippie I saw. My philosophy was clean and efficient: knock one fiend down and the others will get the message right away.

  Someone had spray painted “fuck capitalism” on the abandoned Kilpatrick’s Bakery plant near Folsom Street. It was the dumbest sentiment I had seen in a long while.

  We rolled north on Capp Street so that Bellamy could have a chance to ogle the hookers by the Victoria Theater. The working girls usually dispersed when a patrol car drifted into sight, but it depended on who was in the car. Bellamy was popular among the whores. He didn’t mind kidding around with them, exchanging a few laughs now and then. The hookers made me unhappy, reminding me of pent-up longings that could be mistaken for lust. The women working the curb incited me to think about my wife, not that I wanted to. It wasn’t a sexual comparison or anything like that. But any time I sized up another woman, Alice came soaring like a bird into my mind, beating her wings and blotting out all the other females on the horizon of my fantasies.

  It wasn’t fair, but that was la vida. Alice kept hassling me for money. She said the apartment wasn’t big enough for the two of us. She complained that she didn’t have enough money to buy groceries. She’d known what she was getting into when she married me; she knew the money wouldn’t be so great. I guess neither of us had counted on being so poor. When I told her most cops were as broke as we were, she’d cried. Alice didn’t want to hear that. In situations that were soaked with Alice’s tears and because of my inability to stop them, I thought Bellamy was lucky. He could talk and look at women without feeling like he was cheating on his mate. When it came to females, Bellamy didn’t have a regret in the world. He could live for the moment.

  “Wanna get something to eat?”

  “Nah, Bells. I’m not hungry.”

  “You’re lying. You haven’t eaten anything today.”

  In Bellamy’s opinion, I was slipping away into a universe of my own making. I watched him monitor me out of the corner of his eye while I drove the car, narrowly avoiding a dog in the cross walk at Twentieth Street. My personal life wasn’t any of Bellamy’s business, but he wasn’t aware of that.

  “What the fuck is up with you, homes?”

  “I don’t have an appetite. Is that a problem?”

  I stared out past the cracks in the windshield at the street. Then I shrugged with one palm held upward to indicate the speechless depth of my troubles. I turned my head forty-five degrees to the right and gave Bellamy a wooden stare. Capp Street receded behind us, and the broad glare of Mission Street greeted us like a long lost friend. We were always returning to the palm tree lined boulevard. That’s where the station was located. It was where we hung out. In that way, as beat cops, we were no different from the cholos and the assholes out there. I had always found the similarity disconcerting; to know how close I was to the bottom itself and how much I identified with it, did not reassure me.

  “When you look at the streets, the buildings on the sidewalks and the people hanging out the windows, what do you see?” I asked.

  “I don’t see shit,” Bellamy grinned. “What do you see?”

  “I see real estate.”

  “Like today?” Bellamy cut in.

  “Like every day on the calendar,” I intoned. “There are no exceptions and no holidays. Every day is real estate, and everyone has their place in it. If you think big,” I tapped my own sunburned, brown-spotted temple with a finger. “You become a rico. If you think small, you get nada.”

  Bellamy had no idea where the topic was going so he kept his mouth shut. What did he care about real estate? His personal geography consisted of the squad car, three or four bars in the Mission and Noe Valley, plus an occasional visit to the Golden Gate Bridge.

  In owning up to this, telling Bellamy what I did, a twinge of bitterness ate at the lining of my stomach. To be sure, I was existing no better than if I’d been on welfare. My life was being doled out to me, as if I were standing in line with a million people in front of me and a million more behind me with everybody waiting for some crumbs to fall into our hungry mouths.

  “We’re cannon fodder,” I explained to him. I pointed to myself as an example, jabbing my own bulletproof vest with an indignant thumb. “We guard the real estate for every damn person you see on the street. There are a lot of buildings in this town. All of them belong to somebody. I want one for myself so badly, I can smell it on my hands. And you know what? My hands smell like blood. Do you hear me? They smell like they’ve been dipped in my own blood.”

  I put on the brakes for a bag lady dragging a burlap sack across Seventeenth Street. Her emaciated profile was thrown into black-bordered relief by the sun at her back.

  Bellamy leaned back in the front seat, pushed his riot helmet to the back of his hair transplant and scratched the persistent itch on his synthetic scalp. My paranoia amused him and nourished the sarcasm he needed to maintain his own sanity.

  “Feel any better getting that off your chest?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t. Everything remains the same. Just because I can talk about it doesn’t mean I can—”

  “Listen, Coddy,” Bellamy chuckled. “What the hell, huh? I don’t really give a damn. I hear what you’re saying. But me? I’ve got no complaints. I don’t even ask for what’s mine because I’ve pretty near forgotten what it was in the first place. Whatever it was we learned in school as kids about when we’d grow up, that doesn’t mean shit to me now. It’s just you and me in this car, and out there, the rest of the world. Real estate? Who the fuck cares? I’m a homeless cop.”

  seven

  i sat in the kitchen contemplating my vocabulary. I wanted to enrich my understanding of language. As a policeman, I needed to sharpen my oral skills. Starting alphabetically, I summoned up the first noun that came into my head. Anxiety: now there was a nice word. I rolled it around on my tongue, relishing what it meant and how it sounded. Anxiety had a clean ring to it; a word that never stood in one place, but always had the energy to travel. I admired that quality, the power to go places and do things.

  “What do you want to do this morning, Coddy?”

  Alice’s question hung in the air while she busied herself at the stove. She dropped four eggs into a frying pan crackling with melted safflower oil, sliced up three slabs of local sourdough, then threw the bread into the pan after the egg yolk batter.

  I thought Alice was asking about one or two things. She wanted to have a long, affectionate conversation with me and she wanted to make lov
e. Ideally, she’d prefer both; a bit of talk and a little fuck.

  If it was so easy to understand, why was it so hard to do? There wasn’t any conflict between us; we weren’t arguing or fighting, but I felt like a mountain separated me from Alice.

  “I want that French toast drowning in maple syrup. You got that?” I said.

  “You can put clove powder on it.”

  “I like cloves.”

  “Then give me your plate, and be careful, honey. It’s hot.”

  She loaded up my plate and put it back down in front of me. The steam rose up in my face in a sweet smelling, seashell pink-colored cloud. I stared down at the golden brown slices of bread, soaked in eggs, drenched in maple syrup. I picked up a tin fork, tore off a hunk of toast and stuffed it into my mouth. I chewed with quick, angry bites, gulping the morsel down my throat, greedily burping.

  “I got us a good bottle of wine.”

  Alice smothered a laugh and replied, “A good bottle of wine? Where did you get it?”

  “From Bellamy. Where else?”

  I ducked my head and proceeded to wolf down the French toast, hunkering over the chipped enamel plate like Bellamy must’ve done when he was a kid in the orphanage. Bellamy had said that in order to eat the food on your plate, you had to protect it with your fists.

  Life was precious; the wine I’d procured from Bellamy for a box of illegal Black Talon bullets would taste sweet on my day off. My first day off in three weeks. The breakfast dishes could wait. We were going to unplug the telephone and drink a bottle of wine.

  “Do you want your vitamins? I got some new ones for you,” she said.

  Alice was keen on pills; she made me take a multitude of assorted minerals and supplements, saying they would bolster my performance on the job and in our bed. If Alice wanted me to take vitamins, enabling me to outrun speeding bullets and nab fleet-footed robbers, I wasn’t averse to the proposition. I put the fork down on the plate, and gazed at Alice with a mask of total exhaustion written over the forty-seven years on my face. I said, “Get me the corkscrew, will you? And a couple of glasses for us.”