Old and Cold

by Jim Nisbet

  FOURTEEN

  YOU SPIT OUT A TOOTH. THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN VERY OFTEN. YOU TRY TO get through the day without mentioning the teeth. It’s a sore subject. So many puns, so much money, and why not? A man can dream. Consider: Remuneration for a thing so facile! She’s home from work, one presumes. Not squinting against the light, like in the picture. Double-check the address, check. Her surname appended to buzzer lettered D, check. Now, how best to affect the hit? North Beach is a crowded, busy neighborhood. A lot of people know their neighbors, their names, their kids. She spoke to no one on the way up the street. Her arms were full of groceries, it’s true. Normal-looking woman. About thirty-five. No wedding ring. Pretty, after a fashion, sturdy, too. Gym, perhaps. Athletic, maybe. Despite a desk job? Not your business, the desk job, not your business, her personality. But what could she have done to bring down the boom? Not your business, what brought down the boom. Your business the boom, not the raison de boom, but the boom only. And only two days, now, left to lower it. Another day, at a minimum, without a drink. The way of the warrior. Can’t be helped. The piece is under a splice box adjacent the southern blast wall on the new, green Federal Building, which faces Mission Street, not far from the corner of Seventh. Retrieval mode, a good night’s sleep and, some lower-cased d deity willing, task accomplished by nightfall tomorrow. Might get a leg up first thing in the morning, but nightfall for sure. Most people who have jobs start at nine. So maybe, if they live in North Beach and work downtown, they leave by eight o’clock, at the earliest. Time to lose the Chinese newspaper, at the very least. But hold on and, beseeching the sinusoidal, it’s southward ho. Down the Montgomery steps, across Broadway to the Transamerica Pyramid. A little blood from where the tooth used to be. It made a soft click as it hit the sidewalk. Should have saved it? For what, eating lunch? A woman sat on the sidewalk, weeping. You’ve seen her before. She was weeping then. I want to go home, she was saying at the time. And so she continues to stipulate. Her musculature is still and recalcitrant, only the tears flow freely, a sign of powerful medication. You know about this medication, there was a time you were made to endure it as well. That time is past. You might render her advice on the matter, a shard of career guidance. But you are on a mission to Mission Street. And contract psychopathy isn’t for everyone. At the corner of Merchant Alley and Montgomery you discern a trash receptacle, hard by the Chinese Educational Center. Perfect. You fold the photograph into the Chinese newspaper and tear them both to pieces. The pieces go into the trash can, and you spit. A thread of blood in the sputum. The envelope, you retain. Southward. The westerly persists. Plumes of dust and scraps of paper transect your path. Your philosophical existence has degraded, the smart money comments, into a single-minded pursuit. Every once in a while, you remind the smart money, one must step back from the adventure and endeavor to procure a living wage. Why is it, the smart money ponders aloud, that you cannot be content with your destitution, like everybody else out here on the street? It is not my way, you answer simply. The way of the martini, is the reply. Having closely shorn this setaceous husk of all wants and desire, you maintain, to the point of depilation, might one be forgiven, for turning a vice into a necessity? So long as you pay your way, comes the reply, almost anything can be forgiven. One mustn’t entertain the thought of one’s martini habit becoming a ward of the state. Upper-case G God forbid. The state can scarcely afford you as it is. As regards the martini, I ask nothing from the state. All I ask from the state is that they build overpasses that do not crumble at a mere wrathful glance from the odd deity, upper-case or not. To get the pistol now, or to get the pistol later? That is the question. It never hurts to be possessed of a firearm when sleeping in public. Besides, how long since you left the pistol under the telephone splice box on the south side of the Federal Building? Months. Since the Case of Riparian Sam. That would be three months. Do you think it’s still there? How should I know? Best to check. If the piece is gone, we’ll still have two days to do something about it before the contract expires. Jesus Christ, I didn’t think of that. Should have gone straight there from Lafayette Park. But no, you had to bolt any number of celebratory martinis, and precipitate yourself into the clutches of a harridan into the bargain. How might she do you in, do you imagine? On the sly, you suppose, plutonium martini, like that. Not subtle at all, and much more expensive than your Social Security check could possibly be worth to her. Besides, she can’t do you in until after you marry her. Marry her? She hasn’t even proposed. Just you wait. And just how much trouble could that possibly be, after three or four of those large martinis with two or three of the very smallest olives? And—oh, I neglected to inform you of a germane observation: She stocks one quart, at least, of one hundred proof vodka. A quart, you say? A quart is plenty enough, to do a man in. Be that as it may, it’s certainly enough to make him say I do. Or yes, at the very least. That’s pretty thorough, not to mention insidious. I’ll bet she has a justice of the peace as a regular customer. Why not marry him? He stops with two martinis, and is very particular about their not being more than eighty proof, and is well-known for leaving the second one unfinished on the bar. More for me, then. Not the point. One Social Security check comes to a Mrs. Dunkeljaeger, 3953 Irving Street, Apartment B, San Francisco, etc. But another check comes to a Mrs. Riley Bertram Abernathy, 3953-1/2 Irving etc., while yet a third arrives eager to be endorsed solely by a Mrs. Beatrice O’Riley, 3953 Irving St. Apartment 4, San Francisco etc. Get the picture? Where are all these guys buried? In Colma, for the most part, in close proximity to Wyatt Earp. Not to Calamity Jane? That would be a little too appropriate. No matter, we’ve already decided to forego a return visit to Maxilla Salute. She’ll just wait. She knows about the appetite for the martini. Yes… When it comes to a choice between death or appetite, the latter wins every time. Besides, she’s like the movie business. You mean—? That’s right, she keeps any number of prospects orbiting their own corpse. West on Market. Oh no, please, skip on down to Mission. Market Street is too much like reality. You have a point. But Mission’s not much further removed from reality. But there’s the Cartoon Art Museum, and Yerba Buena Gardens, not to mention MOMA, and that incredible parking garage. Your taste in architecture and culture salients wins me over. One wonders why they bothered to put the goddamn motherfucking Disney Museum all the way out in the Presidio. They try to spread the culture, all else being equal. Besides, the daughter paid through the nose for the privilege. Down here it’s too expensive. Yes. You’re playing with the big hotels. Yes. Entities able to shift vast populations of homeless people in favor of a minority of the rich. That’s Communistic talk, brother. At least it isn’t Socialism. West on Mission to Seventh. It’s a wasteland. Them tall buildings abuilding will go a long way toward fixing that. After a certain size, the lids on their dumpsters are too heavy for one man to lift. Here we are at Fifth. There went the Chronicle. I hear you on that. And now Sixth. Approach with caution. The usual railbirds, taking in the sun. A pair, to be exact, right in front of the splice box. They look young. They know that guy in the green sleeveless sweater. He’s pretending to know them. They’re guarded. It’s all about cigarettes. Good. Can you make the wall? It’s only twenty-four inches, for chrissakes. They’re not even looking at you. Feel under the stainless box, a plastic bag up against the far stanchion. And there it is. Oh, says one of the boys. He’s sitting on the low wall with his back to you, but he’s looking over his shoulder. Your lunch? Already? It can’t be lunch, says his friend, accepting a light from the guy in the sleeveless sweater. Unless you’re on the night shift? He holds the cigarette so that it’s cradled atop forefinger, middle finger and thumb, and blows smoke up, into the westerly. And you realize that this is a trio of homeless homosexuals. They’ve both got sun-blazoned complexions, and their skin is remarkably clear, too, but the roseate evanescence of dissolution has already begun to suffuse the skin from below, plus a touch of the puffiness symptomatic of edema. No, you say to them, it’s a gun. A gun, the first lad b
rightens, what you going to do with a gun? It’s a tool, you reply reasonably, stepping down from the wall. You stuff the black plastic package into your belt. Think of it as a tool. I want it, the first boy says, upping the wattage of what no doubt once passed for great sex appeal. In the tenth grade, perhaps. In five years, or three, or even two, while he will not have outgrown it, it will look pathetic. Today, he looks ready for anything, and, rather than effusing a pang, as his partner one day would, his partner, who may perhaps have been a little older, a little more experienced, a little more of a pimp, smiled, already stoned, long since up for anything. Naw, you say, backing away just a step before turning west. I gotta go to work. No no, the second boy says, you don’t understand, he wants it, he really wants it. More nimbly than in years, and despite being now in the wrong direction, your sine undulates toward Eighth Street. The sun has set. The weight of the piece, though it weighs but little, is conspicuous in your waistband, though not as conspicuous as your pineapple shirt. This gives you a thought, and you continue down Mission Street, past Ninth and Tenth, until you attain the corner of South Van Ness, where stands the largest Goodwill outlet in San Francisco. Once inside, with a vector of purpose bordering on the monomaniacal, you purchase a fine example of a camel’s hair coat, of the sort that can double as a blanket under all but the most extreme conditions. But it’s the change of plumage that interests you more. The guy in the pineapple shirt who claimed to have scored a pistol under the splice box hard by the Federal Building may or may not have elicited some controversy amongst the rabble assembled there. By the hour, on the other hand, the hazard was excellent that everybody on that corner, as on most others, was already too far gone in their day to be retaining coherent gossip as regards a total stranger. Now to cases. Food? Food would wait for the morrow. Sixteen dollars remains of the twenty, camel’s hair being perhaps unfashionable and therefore cheap. As to accommodations, Maxilla Salute remained out-of-bounds and far away besides, too far to walk after a day of, by the count of one’s inner pedometer, between eight and nine miles of ambulation, as flies the sinusoid, which it doesn’t, and, anyway, at the risk of being husbanded and harvested, a risk too mortal by half. The mind’s eye casts about the neighborhood for a solution, some place safe to passout from stress and exhaustion. Not far from the Opera, the Symphony, the Ballet—sopor assured. City Hall, too, to be dormant in the tendrils of bureaucracy. There’s the Library as well, but too many homeless people already take advantage of the Library, it’s grounds are a kind of sanctuary. The United Nations Plaza, where the nation of homeless unites. The Church of Scientology, hard by. Just around the corner, it’s teeming with homelessness, crime, strife, despair, loneliness, and filth, not a cop in sight except on special occasions, like when the President’s in town, where Seventh Street cross Market and, voilà, you’re right back at the Federal Building, the greenest building on Uncle Sam’s long list of properties. And so you go west, and then, after a while, west and a little north. You cross South Van Ness on Mission to Twelfth, one block and across Market to Franklin, north a couple of blocks to Hayes. And then you do the Hayes Street hill, one of the steepest in town, because you’re crazy and enervation is good for your rage, you top the hill and persevere until you reach Stanyan Street, right next to St. Mary’s Hospital, whose emergency room you know well enough—altogether, another four miles, as the sinusoid flew, which it didn’t, for a day’s total of some twelve or thirteen miles, as the sinusoid flies, which it hasn’t. On the contrary. The pineapple shirt now smells like a rag soaked in xylene. Even the camel’s hair coat has taken on a pungent tang. The coat’s been way too hot, too, but you daren’t abandon it, for the nocturnal fog of San Francisco would frost your bollocks without it, and its damp dilute your marrow. The lost tooth is forgotten, though the gap left behind, your fourth, in the lower rank, provides a succourous crèche for your tongue, one that you count, thus: Clockwise, tongue in the first, once; tongue in the second, twice; tongue in the third, thrice; tongue in the fourth, four times. Thence, counterclockwise: tongue in the third, five times; tongue in the second, six; tongue in the first, seven. And so forth. Alternatively, one might start in the fourth with one etc. And one will. One has. Somewhere between the back of McLaren Lodge, to the south, and the Horseshoe Pit, to the north, bound on the east by Stanyan Street and the west, more or less, by Conservatory Drive, East, you crawl into the embrace afforded by the roots and lower limbs of a Monterey cypress, hard by its trunk. Somewhere out there stands a statue of Don Quixote, who at least had a friend, a horse, and a dream. You have neither the two nor the one. The fog soughs through the boughs of the cypress. And when you awaken in the morning, amid birdsong, the coat and your shoes are gone. It’s a mockingbird. Perhaps it is in love. Its song is ineluctably enthusiastic.