Snitch World

by Jim Nisbet

  “I can do something about that.” The older cop touched the phone and another image came up.

  Frankie doesn’t look too good in his mug shot either, Klinger thought, but at least he doesn’t look dead.

  “Know him?” asked the older cop.

  Klinger shrugged. “I know a lot of guys.”

  “You.” The cop showed the phone to Bruce. “Know him?”

  Bruce pretended to study the image. He squinted, adjusted the distance of his face to the screen, changed the angle of incident light. Then he shook his head. “Nope.”

  “That’s okay,” the older cop said, not bothering to conceal his scorn. He touched the screen on his phone, it went dark, he put the phone away, he addressed Klinger: “When you found out he was alive, you had to take him out.”

  This took Klinger aback. “Who was alive?”

  “The victim,” the cop said. “He could identify you. You and your accomplice.”

  “Accomplice to what?”

  “Why, to the mugging in North Beach,” the cop said.

  Klinger blinked. Then he nodded. “The mugging in North Beach …”

  The younger cop smirked. “He’s having trouble keeping his crimes straight.”

  “Don’t worry,” the older cop said, “you can’t snitch out a dead guy, and a dead guy can’t snitch out anybody.” He held up Phillip’s phone. “You can go to the death house with your head held high.” He pretended to pause. “Dignity intact.”

  “Well?” The second cop leered.

  “Won’t you?” the older cop repeated.

  Klinger could hardly hear them. She set me up and dropped a dime on me, he was telling himself. She framed me.

  “Don’t even bother to deny it,” the younger cop said. “An undercover guy saw you in here a couple of days ago with Frankie Geeze.”

  The older cop glared at his younger companion.

  Klinger and Bruce exchanged a look. Bruce slid his eyes down the bar. The two guys in flannel shirts had found something interesting to discuss, and they had turned their backs to the rest of the room. Klinger frowned. Were the same two guys in here the other night? On the one hand they looked like a thousand other punks. On the other hand, they didn’t look all that familiar. He frowned some more. Was that last night? This morning, even?

  “That doesn’t make any difference,” the older cop told him. “We got you on a surveillance tape at the hospital. Too bad. I can’t blame you for trying. It’s hell to go down because one guy gets himself killed while he and his buddy are just trying to make a living.” The cop made with a rictus smile, and his voice conveyed only contempt. “Simple hell.”

  “Yeah,” the younger cop pseudo-sympathized, while bluffing past his gaff. “Pretty tough.”

  The older cop used his thumb and forefinger to pick up Phillip’s cellphone by its diagonally opposite corners. The younger cop produced a padded envelope and opened its mouth, and the older cop dropped Phillip’s cellphone into it. The younger cop sealed the envelope, produced a ballpoint pen and made a note on the flap, then slid the envelope into the side pocket of his anorak.

  “Let’s go,” said the older cop.

  They each took an arm and steered Klinger out the front door, where a black and white waited in the rain, steam lifting from its tailpipe.

  Up the street idled another black and white, a third idled beyond the crosswalk, an unmarked car with tinted windows blocked the bus stop across the intersection. There was an ambulance, too.

  She’s in the unmarked car, Klinger thought, as the two cops expertly fed him into the back seat of the black and white.

  The old man had barely moved the whole time the cops were in the bar, not even to sip his drink.

  “His laundry remains,” he said to the row of bottles in front of the backbar mirror.

  Bruce, who hadn’t noticed, now walked down to the far end of the bar, rounded it, came back past the old man, and retrieved the large, wet shopping bag that contained Klinger’s recently purchased clothes.

  The two guys at the dogleg in the bar watched and said nothing.

  Holding it away from his legs so they wouldn’t get wet, Bruce walked the bag to a closet next to the toilets. As he opened the door the bottom fell out of the bag. Shit, said Bruce softly. He lifted the pile of wet clothes with the toe of his boot, into a corner of the closet next to a mop bucket. He dropped the bottomless bag on top of them, retrieved a filthy mop from the bucket, and closed the door.

  “His laundry remains to remind us of who he was,” the old man muttered thoughtfully to his drink. He took a sip. “I might have to revise my theory.”

  Bruce mopped up the water on the floor and swabbed the wet stool with the rag that hung from his waistband.

  When Bruce had replaced the mop in the closet and resumed his station behind the bar, the old man rattled the ice in the glass and pushed the empty across the plank.

  “Hit me again.”

  A Conversation with Jim Nisbet, Patrick Marks, and Gent Sturgeon

  Patrick: What book are we here to discuss?

  Jim: Sneetch World.

  Patrick: So we are sitting here at an undisclosed location in Hayes Valley, San Francisco, with Jim Nisbet, Patrick Marks, copublisher and proprietor of The Green Arcade, and Gent Sturgeon, who did the cover art.

  Jim: Fabulous cover. I love that cover. And I am a man of many covers—like Frank Sinatra.

  Patrick: Well, as you know, I have been a lounge singer and occasionally I will have someone come up and say, accusingly: “You only do covers.” So what’s so bad about Cole Porter and Burt Bacharach?

  Jim: But you have to give it up to Frank, he would always call out the author and composer of the tune. He would always give credit.

  Patrick: Snitch World—the title?

  Jim: I had an old friend who was a professional thief. He is now deceased. And he died on the outside. In fact, he never did time. He would see something outrageous on TV and he would shake his head, and say, “It’s a snitch world, man, that is all there is to it.”

  Patrick: The main character of the book, Klinger, also never did time—

  Jim: That’s true. All the people around him have.

  Patrick: The world of Snitch World seems to be a world of losers surrounded by gross criminality. The people who are seemingly successful, like the techies, are living a doubtful existence. It sort of mimics our world here in San Francisco, where we are surrounded by money and technology and you wonder who the real losers are.

  Jim: The losers are the people who used to live here. The blue-collar world that used to be San Francisco when I came here, in 1966. The longshoremen. Harry Bridges was still alive. There were railyards and a working waterfront.

  Patrick: You mention Harry Bridges in the book, do you remember?

  Jim: Yeah, I do. That guy Jimmy that Klinger meets on a bench in Washington Square Park—that is a true anecdote. I met this guy. He had on a blue blazer. His wife came tottering along with him and she sat him down on a bench on the northeast corner of the park, facing the sun and Coit Liquor. It’s pretty much like it went down. I tweaked it a little. I had the guy buy Klinger lunch and tell his story. The lunch is made up, but the story isn’t. He was a very interesting guy, like you used to meet all the time in this town. He said he came to San Francisco in a boxcar and the first person he met was Harry Bridges, who put him on the docks, and the next thing he knew he was getting his head busted, and having all this fun. He met his wife. He just said it was the most amazing place he had ever been. He never left. And after the war, the babies started coming, and he got into advertising and did well. He was retired and he ate lunch every Saturday afternoon at Moose’s. It was just a classic San Francisco character-slash-experience that I never run into anymore. I’m that guy now.

  Patrick: Oh boy.

  Jim: Except for the advertising and the money.

  Patrick: What’s the name of the bar they hang out in, in Snitch World?

  Jim: The Hawse Hole.
Remember when that girl asks, “What’s a hawse hole, anyway?” And he doesn’t answer the question. You looked it up right?

  Patrick: I didn’t. But I was going to!

  Jim: Hah!

  Patrick: Bad publisher.

  Jim: Well, it’s the hole on the bow of a ship through which runs the anchor cable or chain. There used to be a joint on Larkin …

  Patrick: The Gangway.

  Jim: Yes. The bow of the ship sticking out onto the street.

  Patrick: Remember that place on Powell Street with the whole damned boat from the nineteenth century—Bernstein’s?

  Jim: No, but Ferlinghetti tells the story, when he got off the boat, when he got back from France with all that Jacques Prévert in his seabag, and walked up Market Street and he said San Francisco was the goddamndest place he’d ever seen.

  Gent: He had the same experience a lot of GIs had.

  Patrick: My dad was the same way.

  Jim: All those bars on Market Street that went all the way through to Stevenson Street. And you got a shot with a half pint of beer for eighty cents.

  Patrick: Did you ever go to Day’s Bar? It was the biggest bar in the West. Supposedly someone bought the bar itself and sent it off to Nevada when they razed the building. Hey, let’s get back to the damned book.

  Jim: This is authentication. This is not a nostalgia trip, it’s a reality check. It’s kinda like Rebecca Solnit did that in that book when she went around to all those San Francisco locations, like the 6 Gallery, which was up on Fillmore, which is now a rug store. It’s not nostalgia, it’s checking what’s gone. In many ways, San Francisco was a hard town in those days.

  Patrick: We liked that.

  Jim: And you could be yourself here. A lot of stuff happened to me in those years that doesn’t seem to happen anymore. But like the night I ran out of gas out on Sloat and a drunk gave me the keys to his car. And said to be back in an hour or he would call the cops, if I didn’t come back to the bar. I had to go to hell and back to get gas, and put it in my truck on the Great Highway.

  Patrick: So is that Snitch World?

  Jim: Well, no, I think it evolved from that into the world Snitch World’s Georgie saw, where people would dime each other, drop a dime on their mother if there’s twenty cents in it. I don’t want to lay too heavy a metaphysical trip on the book, but it does seem to ring a few chimes like that. Things are more competitive. That solidarity that the Wobblies had going, where it would all go down. In those days, the newspaper—the newspapers, there were five or six of them—the cops, the establishment, all together were down on the guys that worked on the docks. They were completely willing to shoot them, bust their heads, put ’em in jail, and do whatever it took to keep them from organizing, to keep them from stopping work, from striking for better conditions, better wages. The entire establishment was against them. Then there was a time when it was a little more accepted, although Harry Bridges, because he was a commie, was always on the outside. And the vestiges of that are still around. I never knew Harry Bridges. He was around when I came here, it’s true. And he lived a good long time to put the finger in the eye of the establishment. Which is always there to have a finger in its eye.

  I knew a guy named Jim Hamilton, who died around three years ago, who was a longshoreman and who cowrote Cross of Iron with Sam Peckinpah and who turned me onto that terrific novel, by the way [The Willing Flesh by Willi Heinrich]. He did a documentary on Bridges, which I’ve never seen but which is apparently quite good. Jim was so modest and so past all that stuff. I said, “Hey Jim, you know, I watched Cross of Iron again a while back and noticed it was based on a novel.” And he said, “Oh yeah, that’s a tough book.” That’s all he said. Except later he said, “That book is all about class.”

  Patrick: We just watched Renoir’s Grand Illusion again. Talk about class.

  Gent: I just read The Red and the Black. Class.

  Jim: Oh god, Stendhal is fantastic. We could spend a whole night talking about Stendhal.

  Patrick: But we can’t get too far from Snitch World.

  Jim: I have the Norton Critical Edition of The Red and the Black. Their one of Chekov short stories is fantastic. It’s a selection, but it’s chronological and it’s just an unbelievable crescendo of achievement. Does Norton still exist?

  Patrick: Very much so.

  Jim: Good good good.

  Patrick: Maybe your next book could be from Norton.

  Jim: Let’s finish this one first.

  Patrick: So you want to talk about publishing for a little bit?

  Jim: Well, Old and Cold and Spider’s Cage just came in the mail. They changed the title of Ulysses’ Dog to Spider’s Cage. And they jacked the price: $15.95 for a slim-pickins paperback.

  Gent: Did I ever tell you I read Sandro’s book? [Sandro Veronesi’s Quiet Chaos]

  Jim: Yes, you did, and I remember how much you liked it. Did you ever give it to Lawrence [Ferlinghetti]? That was the idea. That’s a really good book.

  Gent: Yes, I gave to him but I never heard about it. That was really a good book. I was amazed by it, actually.

  Jim: When I first met Sandro, he had never written a book.

  Gent: He pulled something off that was quite extraordinary. We’ve sold a lot of them at City Lights.

  Jim: Oh, great—I’ll tell him.

  Patrick: It’s published by Ecco. Hey, Snitch World, ahem, is published by PM Press and The Green Arcade. What do you think of that?

  Jim: I think it’s great. I love having a martini with my publisher and my editor and my cover artist, who are my friends, and it just gets friendlier. And there’s no bullshit involved and there’s no New York involved.

  Patrick: But what about the dough, though?

  Jim: The dough is small. [All laugh. Dexter Brown, Jr., the dog, barks.] But, as my friend Alastair Johnston used to say, “The hand is always bigger than the money.”

  Patrick: I wanted to ask you about literary versus genre writing, you being known as a noirist. Don’t you think that writing is just writing?

  Jim: Oh yeah. But all genre guys say that. But hardly any writing is Richard Ford.

  All: U-uuuuu.

  Jim: You know, I ain’t got him from square one. I don’t get that guy. Except as a sleep aid.

  Patrick: You know I am expanding the Arcade a bit to have more fiction—hopefully not soporifics—and more noir.

  Jim: You have a lot of noir titles—you have a lot of great books in there.

  Patrick: In the old days of San Francisco, or maybe the medium-old days of San Francisco, the neighborhood around the store was called the hub. And actually, The Green Arcade was the Hub Tavern.

  Jim: No!

  Patrick: Yeah, baby.

  Jim: No wonder the vibes are so good in there.

  Patrick: So maybe the back of the store could be your Noir Hub.

  Jim: You have that urban theme thing going on—

  Patrick: The Noir Hub is the shadow cast by the Urban Studies section.

  Jim: You should be in marketing.

  Patrick: But like I was saying, it is kind of a contradiction saying “writing is writing” and then fencing off this area where the Jim Nisbet books go.

  Jim: Hey, fences were made for jumping. But you should look at the Black Lizard list.

  Patrick: You were a Black Lizard. I really miss the original Black Lizard. Tell me about it, the ye olde days.

  Jim: Barry Gifford curated this collection, brought back a lot of noir superstars, for lack of better term, beginning in the early eighties and it ran until 1990, when it sold out to Random House.

  Patrick: Jim Thompson was the biggie?

  Jim: When Jim Thompson died in the early ’70s, he was totally out of print, except for maybe The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280. As was David Goodis, as was Peter Rabe, as was Dan Marlowe—The Name of the Game Is Death. A great novel, just great. And there are a lot of them. Violent Saturday, you remember W.L. Heath? These cons show up in this little hick town
and try to be inconspicuous for a week while they case the bank. And then they blow the job and kill a pregnant schoolteacher—

  Patrick: I hate when that happens. Hey, speaking of school, did you hear they paroled one of the Chowchilla kidnappers?

  Jim: Oh my god, I didn’t think those guys would ever get out.

  Patrick: I think they should have let him out.

  Jim: Was he the kid?

  Patrick: He was the younger brother. The mastermind will most likely never get out. Like my friend Sin Soracco [author of Low Bite] once said, “About five percent of those in prison ought to be in prison.”

  Jim: Still, that was an outrage, burying that school bus. And wasn’t it the teacher who escaped through the top of the bus?

  Patrick: No, it was the driver.

  Gent: I’m surprised they never made a movie out if it.

  Patrick: They did, with Karl Malden. But there was a book. Not Richard Ford, who’s the other one?

  Jim: Tom McGuane. [All laugh]

  Patrick: No, the other other one.

  Jim: “McGuane’s the name; writin’s the game.” Yeah, that and real estate.

  Patrick: Hey did you hear McMurtry just had this big sale out thar in Texas at his book town?

  Jim: Is he done? He said he was done.

  Gent: I think he was just reducing his stock.

  Patrick: I wish I could have gone.

  Jim: His store in DC was fabulous. I sat and talked with him. It was very interesting. There was a larger store with a little living room, a couple couches and tables. And then across the street, the door was open, was a little building that had all the art books in it, and the door was open and no one attended it. And he would sit in the living room, surrounded by books, and sort of keep an eye—very casual. And I went in there and said hello to him. Was I published yet? I don’t remember. This woman from England came in and had this list of American novels that some friend of her had recommended that she pick up when she was in America. And it was an amazing list. And Larry McMurtry knew every book on it. Like that guy Steele. He taught creative writing at the University of North Carolina, Max Steele. I never read any of his books, but Larry knew them. McMurtry knew who the guy was and had read the books.