Black Hole

by Bucky Sinister

  This is really good shit. I haven’t had anything this good since my friend Bruce who used to be a limo driver for Bill Graham was still around. God I miss him. AIDS, of course, like everyone else who was beautiful. My only saving grace was being a plain Jane. Just didn’t fuck enough to catch it. Bruce was a beautiful man who had an ass that looked like two cantaloupes in a pair of cutoff jeans.

  Where did you find this? It makes me miss drugs. My generation’s drugs. Quaaludes. Poppers. Real acid. That barrel-shaped-pill kind. Not that bullshit on paper. Orange sunshine. Now those were drugs.

  You know what we should do? I say with my best Jack Nicholson coke grin. We should get a party bus.

  Of course they agree with me. We’re high out of our minds, and we have time, money, and yet more drugs. Winchell has a credit card and a clean DMV record, and I have cash and the drugs. It’s perfect.

  THE BUS

  SAD MILES HOLDS a license to drive this thing. Turns out the man is a former muni driver. Makes sense, I suppose. Sad Miles. Sad-for-miles Miles, the bus driver. He doesn’t look happy when he drives, but he looks a little more alive, like he has a purpose again.

  Our little party grows at each stop. Harris orders stops at all his favorite bars, many of which no longer exist. Everyone who gets on is over sixty-five or under twenty-five.

  The old ones are classic old queens from back in the day. Well dressed, biting senses of humor. Expensive but ordinary haircuts. No tattoos. They look like they stepped off a game show from 1972.

  The young ones are like you’d expect. Perfect bodies. Eyes that light up with drugs the quality of which they’ve never had. Lots of cell phone pictures, themselves in every one, every picture a selfie. Their shirts come off quickly, and I don’t blame them. I guess if they didn’t look this good, Harris wouldn’t have invited them on in the first place.

  The bus is full. The music thumps. If there are twenty people on this bus, there are thirty conversations, coked-up plans and monologues and ideas, no one listening and everyone talking.

  There are more drugs on here now than when we started. At some point, there will be less. At some point, there will be peak drugs, when we have the most drugs we’re ever going to have here, bus or no bus. The smart party move is to bail out at that time and find a different scene. But I’m not here to party. I’m here to get high as fuck.

  I get the marble out of my stash and look at it. The little black ball that started all my problems. It is my problem. Maybe it’s the solution to my problems.

  I smoke it. I fire it up and hit it again and again. I don’t even give a fuck about being high anymore. I have to get back. I’m smoking with a sense of direction. Smoke it like it’s the only way home.

  The withdrawals hit as soon as I see him coming for me. The adrenaline rush doesn’t help; I’m too sick for it to matter. The sidewalk is like ankle-deep wet mud. A crowd of Vietnamese ladies runs for the bus down the hill, opposite of me. I’m a drugsick rock in the middle of a stream. I’m losing ground, being pushed backward. These women with their pink plastic bags mean business.

  I see him closing in. A giant skinhead in the standard flight jacket. It’s not a small jacket, but he’s too big for anything. His head is a swirl of bloodless white and tempered red. His eyes are black buttons sewn into his face. A vein like a cable runs up the side of his neck and talons across his temple. I know he’s coming for me.

  I have a .25-caliber Raven in my pocket. This may be it. I’ll have to wait till he gets right on me and empty the clip in his gut and run. I won’t make it far. Even in the Tenderloin, you can’t get away with this shit. I’m too sick to get away. I need money. I need my fix. Hell, I only really need my fix. That’s the only reason I need money.

  I’ve been here before. I’ve been here several times. Identical realties laid over one another like clear acetate sheets. This is where it always starts, isn’t it? What came before this? What was I doing right before I got here?

  Fearsweat soaks me. The sickness makes it worse. Everything’s slowing to a stop. The world isn’t going by at the same rate. Jones Street smells like dried and re-urinated-upon urine puddles, twice-peed stains in the cracks.

  He gets closer, like frames are cut out of the movie. He’s a slideshow of impending whatever it is he’s going to do. I’m getting stomped, most likely. Kicked with steel-toed boots into submission and then ground down between heel and concrete. I’m mostly worried about my teeth being crushed. Everything else heals. Teeth are fucked forever.

  I have to wait until he’s close enough to read the tats on his neck. I have to grab him and jam this ridiculously small gun in one of the few soft spots he has—right underneath the sternum and between the top two ab muscles, these tiny lead pieces will take the fight right out of him. I’ll take my chances with the law but not with this hulking monster.

  The uphill sidewalk steepens. It looks like a fucking wall covered in cigarette butts and blacked circles of old gum. I can’t move. Too sick.

  I’ve been here before. Big Mike. It’s okay. He’ll help me.

  Pinching on the arm. Grip so tight my fingers hurt. Ripping feeling in my shoulder. He turns me around, shoves me against a wall.

  His eyes are full of blood and murder, two tiny black pinpricks into his soul built from failure.

  He holds a sutured stump in my face that still smells of antiseptics.

  I’m supposed to do something right here, at this moment; I’m always supposed to do something at this moment, and I never remember what it is. This is where my life begins.

  I take out the twenty-five and shove it right in between his abs, notched for me to find by feel from hours of leg-raises and sit-ups. I squeeze the trigger, feel the firing pin strike the bullet.

  Time stops.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For starters, I should thank the influences you probably see: Philip K. Dick, William S. Burroughs, and Jim Carroll. I also should thank every single time-travel movie, from the shitty to the supreme, and also every questioning-reality film, from eXistenZ to Jacob’s Ladder. All of these films have holes in them, but so do donuts, and you don’t complain about the holes in those, you just enjoy the donut, right? If you take this book literally, it has problems, and so do you.

  Okay, now on to some help you probably didn’t know I had:

  When I came to San Francisco in 1989, I picked up a copy of Black Wheel of Anger by Peter Plate. I read it three times in a row. I had never read anything like it. I later saw Peter read at a Food Not Bombs benefit. He had memorized his prose and recited it for everyone. Peter lived in a squat so he could spend time writing on a typewriter by candlelight in hours he would have otherwise spent working for rent money. What money he did have went to printing his books, which he gave away for free. He’s San Francisco’s most underrated writer, who writes love stories for the unlovable parts of the city; its gutters, alleys, and vacant lots; and the forgotten people who inhabit them.

  There’s a lot of Jon Longhi in this book. His four books of short stories inspired the anecdote-fueled fiction I write with here. His first collection, Bricks and Anchors, was in a regular rotation read, and I learned to write one- and two-page short stories from it, when the term “short-shorts” applied only to pants and not literature.

  I’d like to thank Roberta, for watching this whole creative process while I was in the middle of a horrible cognitive meltdown; The Business, my weekly comedy show/partners, for giving me a consistent creative outlet and a safe place to write and create; Mick, for the weekly talks about art, the universe, and everything; my kettlebell friends from around the world that gave me rest from obsessing on a book; my Tuesday-night twelve-step crew, for reminding me that the dark moments always have a bit of humor; Bobcat, for a conversation about creativity and personal satisfaction he had with me that really lit a fire under my ass the more I thought about it; and Charlie Winton, for offhandedly mentioning he would like to look at a novel if I wrote one and for following through a l
ong time later.

  This book would not be possible without gentrification, which has been happening since I got here, but really, enough already. Pull it back a little. Slow it down. Please move to that plastic-bag island the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean. I hear the weather is great and there’s lots of parking.

  This book would not be possible without the horribly failed War on Drugs, in which no one gives a fuck about the victims. I can score a bag of dope about a half an hour from where I type this, but it would take me two weeks or more to get into rehab. We would rather fill our prisons at greater expense than give people treatment for what really ails them.

  I would like to thank every bullshit tweaker conspiracy I had to listen to while getting high; bad dreams I thought were warnings; misspelled tattoos; the massive misperceptions from detoxing; the overwhelming weirdness of the world on the third day without sleep; the delusions of grandeur Frankie Glitter Doll described after hours at the adult bookstore that sold used porn; the crow I saw eating a pigeon on Market Street; performance artists who stuck things up their asses in the name of any kind of statement; free poetry readings that were full of homeless savants and the mentally ill; the buses full of would-be artists, poets, and authors who came to San Francisco every summer and melted like snowmen in the harsh sunshine of cheap crank; punk bands that played loud in the warehouses of the Mission District and the cops who didn’t give a shit; zine culture and glue sticks and those Kinko Keys that Dave stole; the Ghost of Frank’s Depression that I swore was real; the smoking section at the Strand Theater; punk houses that always smelled like old socks and felt like home; the first dot-com era that now looks so small and naive compared to this one; the kindness of sex workers, ex-cons, and the insane who answered phone calls past midnight and were never shocked by anything I said; junkies who woke up stump-armed at SF General with nonconsensual amputations; bartenders that kept me after hours; and the donuts made in the twenty-fifth hour at the corner of Twentieth and Mission. I couldn’t have done this without you.