by Peter Plate
Stiv didn’t like what he was hearing. Chiclet was making a strange face. It wasn’t her stoned-to-the-gills face either. The weaselly glint in her eyes was unsettling and his instincts told him bad news was in the offing. He lowered his voice to a profundo bass. “Who was it? For shit’s sake, Chiclet, what are you talking about?”
“This motherfucking black dude.”
He sat on the windowsill, leaving a smudge on the drapes. He didn’t know what she was blathering about, and he was uninterested. He had other things on his mind and the less he knew, the better off he was. Whoever it was, it had to be someone he owed money to. Stiv was in debt to everyone. No one person in particular stood out. Debt was universal with him. He said, “You got a name for this character?”
Chiclet finished off the joint. Blue pot smoke did an arabesque in her hair. She replied, “I thought he was going to make me fuck him.”
This got Stiv going. Chiclet wasn’t eloquent, not even on the best of days. But neither was Stiv. Between him and her, they had the glossary of a twelve-year-old. He asked, “Who was gonna ball you?”
“That goddamn knucklehead. He had a scar on his face.”
An alarm went off in Stiv’s head and penetrated the jellied depths of his exhaustion. He pieced together the equation. The visitor had been black. He had a scar on his mug. He telegraphed evil. The picture grew clearer and Stiv didn’t like it one bit. Uh oh, he thought to himself. The description fit Richard Rood.
Stiv’s initial impression of Richard Rood had been a revelation. He had wandered into Café Flore on Market Street in June during a storm. The streets had been flooded. The sewers were backed up. He stepped into the bathroom and there was Richard humping a sixteen-year-old white boy. He had the kid up against the toilet. The lad’s pants were around his ankles, his hairless legs were opaque under the bathroom’s twenty-five-watt light. Richard looked at Stiv, displeased with the interruption, and then continued to toil over the kid’s plum-shaped buttocks.
Stiv said to Chiclet, “Does Jeeter know anything about this?”
“He sure does. He got into a fight with the dude right in front of Martuni’s Lounge. Jeeter got his ass cremated.”
“He did?”
“Yeah, and that guy is looking for you like a bullet. Do you know what else?”
“What?”
“Jeeter’s freaking out.”
Stiv was gratified to hear this. “Why’s that?”
“You haven’t paid for your room this week or from last week, have you?”
He was evasive. “I’m not sure.”
“Well, anyway, he’s gonna evict you.”
Catching her eye, Stiv was matter of fact with his answer, like he’d been rehearsing it. His wounded face was impish in the candlelight. “Yeah, sweetheart, I know that.”
“You know?”
“I heard him talking about it with you on the stairs.”
“You did?”
“Uh huh. This afternoon.”
Chiclet hadn’t offered an apology for splitting when Stiv had a seizure after going down on her. She didn’t even mention it. She was more concerned about the rent. This allowed Stiv to see for himself what he was worth. He was nobody. He was a tenant who was late with his money. He was just another IOU in her ledger. The disinterested, torpid light in Chiclet’s eyes confirmed it. He asked, “Do you know the time?”
“It’s midnight.”
He weighed her response. Every minute that slipped away was another nail in his coffin. He had to get as far away from Richard Rood as possible. God only knew what kind of state of mind the madman was in. Stiv said in a tight monotone, struggling to keep his voice level, “I gotta go see my wife and kid. We can settle the money later. Gimme an hour, all right?”
“You promise?”
Stiv threw the motorcycle jacket over his shoulders and cast a jealous eye at the marijuana on the table. He lied through his blackened teeth. “Baby, it’s a done deal. You don’t have to worry about a thing.”
NINETEEN
IN THE HALL Stiv recognized John Coltrane’s theme “A Love Supreme” pealing from a room downstairs. Hot with a fever, his lungs hurt. The metal taste in his mouth was back, and he was having difficulty breathing. “This ain’t good,” he sniveled. Steadying himself, he put a hand against the wall. The floor was undulating and weaving; the corridor was going round and round.
The phantom of José Reyna entered the passageway. The dead outlaw’s shirt had been torn to ribbons. His chaps were covered with burrs. His holster was empty. His boots deposited a spoor of blood and dust on the floor. José was hauling a twenty-gallon glass jar with his head in it.
After driving a herd of stolen horses from Mount Diablo through the Central Valley into Southern California to San Diego County, José Reyna returned north. The police ambushed him and his band of renegades in the marshes at Diablo Creek. The temperature was 115 degrees in the shade that day. Insects weren’t chittering. Birds weren’t singing. The year was 1837.
José and his followers reined their horses over a precarious deer path to the creek’s bottom and passed through a grove of stunted black oaks. Their pinto mounts were shaky. José was limp in his saddle, mummified from the heat.
The cops lined him up in the sights of their Sharps rifles and opened fire, raking the trees with several volleys. The sound of gunshots traveled for miles across the flat valley floor. The first to fall, José was riddled with nine bullets in his chest. Two-Fingered Tom was the next to bite the dust.
Immediately their corpses began to decompose in the sun. The stink upset the cops to no end. Debating who among them was going to cut off José Reyna’s head to prove they had killed the right man, they were drinking heavily to celebrate their victory. The only officer in the posse who’d been acquainted with José—the sheriff’s deputy Wallace Haynes from Texas—was called upon to execute the deed.
José’s body, along with the corpse of Two-Fingered Tom, was covered with leaves. José’s youthful visage was peaceful, as if he were taking a snooze until the hoopla was over. Two-Fingered’s countenance in death was no different than it had been when he was alive. His lips were stiff with ridicule and his obsidian eyes blazed accusingly at the drunken killers. His squirrel gun lay in the yellow sand at his feet. His straw sombrero was scored with bullet holes. Flies swarmed around the blood drying on his legs.
Four policemen with hunting knives severed Tom’s hand, the one with the two fingers. The task consumed the better part of a few minutes. Then they went to work on his neck, cutting through the bone and gristle. Wallace Haynes decapitated José, hacking off the outlaw’s head with a Bowie knife. When he completed the chore, he went to puke in the bushes. José Reyna’s head was then dunked in a large jar filled with alcohol to preserve it. His sightless eyes stared blankly through the glass at the cops.
In later years law enforcement authorities said the head in the jar didn’t belong to José Reyna. It was the head of another member of his gang. Wallace Haynes ended his life in a mental asylum in Bakersfield. Hospitalized for dipsomania forty years after the battle at Diablo Creek, the former deputy told his doctors the bandit’s ghost was chasing him into the grave. Haynes passed away in the nut house, yowling that José Reyna was following him into perdition.
A year after the shootout at Diablo Creek, there was an exhibition at the Academy of Science in San Francisco. On the first day of the show, tickets were sold at a brisk clip. Since it was a weekend afternoon young parents had brought their children. Elderly pensioners were in groups of twos and threes. Out-of-town tourists fleshed out the crowd. A mustached man in bifocals and a wide-brimmed hat got in line and bought the last ticket. “It’ll be a while,” the usher told him. “The doors open at two.”
The stranger wore a maroon corduroy suit and walked with an exaggerated stoop. His black hair was longish over his ears. He eyed the stuffed animals in the nearby corridor; lynx, tule fox, and a saber tooth tiger. When the exhibit opened at the appointed hour
the ticket holders solemnly filed into the hall. “One at a time, folks, one at a time,” the usher sang. “Give the person in front of you a chance to behold a premiere.”
The gory spectacle confirmed what the daily tabloids in the city had been saying—it wasn’t for the weakhearted. A pretty woman came away from it in tears. A child screamed for his mother. The man in the bifocals waited patiently for his turn. It wasn’t every day that he spent five dollars on a ticket to a museum. Museums were dormitories for the dead; he stayed away from them as a rule. Finally the usher said to him, “Here you go, sir. You’re the final person of the day. Take your time and enjoy yourself.”
In the center of the room, which was painted a robin’s egg white, a human head inside a glass vessel reposed on a mahogany table. The specimen’s features were angular; his hair was raven black and coarse. His skin was cocoa-brown with smallpox scars. His blurry eyes had an amber luster in them. The jaded calm on his face indicated that he’d been though this before.
The usher said, referring to the jar, “Pretty cool, huh?”
Removing his glasses, the man laughed tiredly, cussing, “It’s a motherfucker, all right. Thanks for letting me have a look.”
The next morning the local newspaper received a letter to the editor. It said: “I went to see the exposition at the Academy of Science and I was very disappointed. The price of the ticket wasn’t worth it. Despite what the newspapers are saying, that I’ve been captured and killed, it isn’t true. That head in the jar? It wasn’t mine. I still have my cabeza and it’s attached to my shoulders. You gringos messed up. Yours truly, José Reyna.”
Historians write that José fled California and returned to Mexico where he lived to a ripe old age. The headless caballero strode across the dingy carpet in the Allen Hotel to the emergency exit window that faced Market Street. Holding the jar that contained his skull, the outlaw lifted the windowpane and climbed onto the fire escape, leaving behind the fragrances of alcohol, horse sweat, and summer’s pollen to die in the corridor.
TWENTY
THE LEGENDARY ‘60S SOUL SINGER Solomon Burke made a scheduled midnight appearance at Slim’s, a South of Market nightclub on Eleventh Street. Champion of the ditty “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love,” a pop hit made famous by the Rolling Stones, he was at present the reverend of a west side Los Angeles church.
The club was brick-walled; the audience was middle-aged and polite, black and white. The band, ten guys in tuxedos and one woman, filed out of the dressing room and mounted the stage. Rows of klieg lights, yellow and blue and red, lent a greenish hue to the sound equipment, the drum kit, the piano, a Hammond organ, a harp, and a synthesizer. A large chair with a red velvet robe placed over it was stationed behind a microphone.
The group broke into a spirited instrumental and out came Solomon Burke. He had on a bowler, fashionable Italian sunglasses, and a three-piece Edwardian suit and was enwrapped in a purple cape trimmed with ermine fur. He sat down in the chair and held out his arms to the audience and said, “Hello, San Francisco. Tonight’s the night.”
Evoking a spiritual, he sang in a quicksilver voice, “Raise your hands and come aboard with me.” As he vocalized, he handed out roses to the women in the front. It was a mass baptism. First he’d smell the rose and then extend the flower to each ecstatic recipient as he preached. “I know there’s problems out there,” he trilled. “I know there are marriages that don’t work and love affairs and things that go bad. But you’ve got to believe.”
He got out of the chair, all three hundred pounds of him, tossed aside the bowler, revealing an immaculately shaved head beaded with perspiration. He ululated, “Are you with me?” A horn player came over with a towel and wiped off his pate. He invited women from the audience to climb onto the stage and dance. The band’s horn section, led by the saxophonist, leaped into the crowd. Solomon Burke wailed, “This is for all the beautiful people here in the city. Don’t give up, y’all. Don’t give up on love.”
The foggy night had folks laying low and staying at home. The gray pea soup ate at your spirit: one o’clock in the morning was no time to be outside unless you were looking for drugs or trouble.
A crew of city workers in orange vests had confiscated a homeless man’s shopping cart on Market Street. The fellow, in his late forties and wearing a poncho made from a green garbage bag, was debating the workers on whether they had the constitutional right to take away his cart, which had all his stuff in it.
Richard Rood squatted in the doorway of the ACT-UP medical marijuana club and watched them argue. A leaflet stapled to a bulletin board at the club’s entrance said it was customer appreciation day. All grades of weed from Mexican cartel pot to Canadian indica were discounted 20 percent off. But the black-barred doors were locked. The windows were darkened. The store’s surveillance camera stared down at Richard with indifference. The place was closed until tomorrow.
His forehead itched. Of all the things he’d seen that day, the white dude Jeeter and his wife had been the most perturbing. For the life of him, Richard didn’t understand how a man could have sex with a female. A woman didn’t taste like a man. Didn’t talk like a man. Didn’t have an orgasm like one. Didn’t think like one either. So where was the chemistry?
Seeing that the Allen Hotel was two blocks away, cloaked in the fog like a fairy tale castle, Richard formulated a battle plan. The question was how to confront Stiv. Being precise by habit, he mulled it over and came up with two possibilities. He could get his money from Stiv or he could humiliate him. Maybe do both. In the lacunae of Richard Rood’s brain it was a matter of choices. Did he want monetary reparations from the man, or did he want to crush his ego? Either way, he was going to beat Stiv with his fists and turn the boy into mincemeat.
Before Richard Rood could finalize his plan, he heard a rustling in the bushes. Had to be a wino, or a junkie shooting up. Might be a homeless dude trying to get some rest. Maybe it was a hooker turning a trick. There were so many people living in the streets, nobody had any privacy. Folks were even camping out in garbage dumpsters.
Mandelstam was the last person Richard expected to jump out of the shrubs. The cop was overeager to get at Rood and ran smack dab into a garbage can, bruising his shins. He advanced on the black man, dragging the injured leg behind him. Richard knew he was a goner. A twenty-foot-high concrete wall was at his back. A windowless building was to his left. The cop was on his right. There was no place to go.
The policeman whomped him in the knees with the billy club and Richard, to his credit, betrayed no sign of discomfort. He masked the pain, biting his lip until it bled. Then his knee gave out and he capsized, one leg folding up under him.
Richard was seeing cops in his dreams nowadays. Yesterday he had jaywalked across Highway 101 at Vermont Street. He’d climbed a fence and had made it over to the other side and was about to hop a barrier when a Highway Patrol Jeep pulled up. A patrolman got out and demanded identification. Richard said he didn’t have any. The officer stated that he was going have to take him in to the station. There was a disagreement about that procedure and the cop tried to handcuff Richard. The next thing Richard knew he was on the ground with four or five civilians sitting on top of him. He looked out from under the pile and saw that people had stopped their cars to help the officer.
He said to Mandelstam, “What the fuck do you want from me?”
Under the riot helmet the policeman’s mug was tubercular white with two ruby spots on his cheeks. “That suit you have on. I hate it.”
Convinced that three-quarters of the nation was against him simply because of his clothes, Richard was irked. White folks loathed a proud black man styling his threads. He complained, “It’s a free country. I can wear what I damn want.”
“Not if I can help it.”
“C’mon, man. Lay off. It’s just a suit.”
“It’s obscene.”
“So why don’t you look the other way?”
“Don’t look at a man in a red suit?
That’s impossible, mister.”
The peckerwood cop had a chip on his shoulder taller than Mount Rushmore, a fuse shorter than a pencil stub, and no brains when it came to clothing. Richard Rood sought to counsel him. “Just let it be.”
“Let it be?” Mandelstam twirled the stick. “You’re out here wearing that shit and you’re telling me to let it be? That suit needs to go.”
When a dog sees a crazy person in the street, it knows that psychosis is infectious and runs the other way to stay out of harm’s reach. Human beings aren’t as smart. Richard said, “Hey, wait a minute, we’re talking about my vines. They haven’t done a damn thing to you.”
Mandelstam was inclined to differ. “The hell they haven’t. They’re driving me bananas. Take it off.”
“Take what off?”
“Take that fucking suit off.”
Richard thought it was a prank. “I beg your pardon?”
“Take the damn suit off.”
“No goddamn way. Are you nuts or what?”
The sidewalk was strewn with cardboard, shopping carts, bottles and sterno cans. A medical examiner’s van from the city morgue trundled up Market Street, which meant it was going to the Castro to collect a corpse. Above the cop and the drug dealer was a billboard that plugged the services of a car wash on South Van Ness Avenue. Mandelstam unholstered his Ruger, drew a bead on Richard, and said, “Do it.”
A gun pointed at your chest tests your mettle. It divides the boys from the men. It makes you understand that life is the only thing worth living for. Most people break down and cry. Some pee in their drawers. Others get their dander up and want to fight. Richard Rood was elegiac. He said, “Damn, dude, if that’s what you want, what can I motherfucking say?”
Humoring the policeman, he unbuckled his pants and slipped out of his jacket, pitching the garments on the ground. All that was left on him were a pair of canary yellow cotton briefs and his Timberland boots. The underwear’s waistband had lost its elasticity; the briefs sagged well below his navel. Richard’s knees were shaking; the hair on his legs was sticking straight out from the evening’s cold. “This is total crap,” he said. “What did I ever do to you?”
