The Magician's Tale

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The Magician's Tale Page 4

by William Bayer


  At the corner of Polk and Bush, I pause to examine a poster stapled to a power pole. It's my portrait of Tim, beautiful and bare-chested, the city gleaming behind. The image is mine, but the light values are not—the contrast has been pushed. Tim's skin has gone swarthy, making him appear a sunburnt soldier rather than an androgynous ephebe.

  The caption below is straightforward enough:

  TIMOTHY LOVESY (A.K.A. "RAIN") ') WAS FOUND MURDERED THURSDAY NIGHT, HIS BODY LEFT IN A DUMPSTER ON WILLOW ALLEY. TIMOTHY FREQUENTED THE POLK GULCH AREA. ANYONE WITH INFORMATION REGARDING THIS VICTIM'S DEATH AND/OR RECENT CONTACTS IS ASKED TO NOTIFY DETECTIVES SHANLEY AND/OR LENTZ, 270-7111. ANONYMITY GUARANTEED.

  I stand back, take a shot of the poster. Suddenly I feel a presence behind.

  "Not bad, huh?"

  I turn. It's Hilly, wearing dark slacks and a black leather blouson jacket much like mine.

  "Sorry, forgot to give you photo credit," she says.

  I smile, ask if she and Shanley have gotten any calls.

  She shakes her head. "We've only had these up since five. Took all afternoon to get them made." She grins. "The mills of the gods grind slowly at S.F.P.D."

  "You haven't found the rest of him?"

  Again she shakes her head. "I promised I'd call when we do. I meant it."

  I turn from her, peer south down Polk. Something in her gaze upsets me. Also, I don't want her to see my eyes.

  "Shanley told me Tim's studio was messed."

  "Yeah, like the shit hit the fan."

  "Tim was neat. He didn't have much stuff."

  "Whatever he had was tossed. Futon and bedroll slit, goose down churning in the air."

  "Money?"

  "If there was, it's long gone now."

  I turn back to her. "What do you think about the mutilation?"

  Her eyes are steady on mine. "It's s a goddamn shame."

  "Ever seen anything like it?"

  "No, but Shanley has. I've only been in Homicide since January. Before that worked sex crimes seven years."

  "Isn't this a sex crime, Hilly?"

  "Don't know that yet."

  I understand what she's saying, that without Tim's torso they can't be sure.

  "We're having a little problem," she says. "We need information, that's why we put up posters. But soon as we put them up people rip them down. Doesn't help the cause."

  I'm not surprised. Posters are bad for business. Life goes on; there're livings to be made.

  "Is that why so many cops are around?"

  "They're more like, you know, a presence."

  "Here today, gone tomorrow?"

  She shrugs. "There's a great big city to patrol."

  "And who cares about a murdered hustler, right?"

  She stares at me, offended. "You don't think we care?"

  "I'm keeping an open mind."

  "Got any suggestions?"

  "Me?"

  "Sure, why not?"

  Our eyes meet. Is she coming on to me? I check her ring finger for a wedding band. "Here's s one suggestion—get the uniforms off the street. You want to cover the Gulch, do it in plainclothes, otherwise none of the hustlers'll work and none of the johns'll come around."

  "Good idea. Thanks." She looks at me. "Do you live with someone . . . have a boyfriend?"

  "Not at the moment, no. "

  We walk a block in silence. There's traffic but not the cruising kind. I tell her a little about my project. I don't mention the hundreds of shots I've taken of johns.

  "I care about people," she says. I wait for the other shoe to drop. "I didn't know this kid, so I can't care about him as much as you. But I do care, I want you to know that." She stops, peers into my eyes, shows me her sincerity. "Shanley and me—we've got a heavy caseload, but I'm not letting this one go. We won't solve it picking up fibers and prints. The only way's with faces, descriptions we can tie to names. We need informants with good information. Otherwise. . ." She shrugs.

  "I understand."

  She smiles slightly. "I'm a lesbian. Better you hear it from me than hear it around."

  "That's fine."

  "Anonymous consensual sex doesn't bother me. As for sex for money—seems like a reasonable exchange. But hurting and killing because it gets somebody off—no, Kay, this dyke won't stand for that." She relaxes. "I saw your book last year, liked it, even stopped by the gallery to see the originals. Beaten-up women—in Sex Crimes they were my stock-in-trade. Took Polaroids of them all the time. Not like your stuff. In mine they looked"—she shakes her head—"kinda wretched. The way they looked in yours even with the bruises and black eyes, I don't know—they seemed like movie stars almost. Which got me thinking." She smiles broadly. "Enough flattery for tonight?"

  "Actually," I tell her, "I can never get enough."

  She laughs. "Don't know what your angle is on this hustling scene, but you've got contacts here." I nod. "Maybe you'll pick something up."

  "I don't know," I tell her. "I'll check around."

  She squeezes my hand. "Thanks !" She turns, strides off.

  I wander down to O'Farrell, then over to Larkin. Some of the Gulch action has moved here. I see several female streetwalkers but no hustlers. I recognize Silky, a mid-thirties black woman with huge lips, cornrows and a swagger.

  I approach. "Where're the guys?"

  She gives a twirl with her thumb. "Freaked out tonight, child. Try Van Ness."

  I take Myrtle Alley over to Van Ness, walking quickly, spooked by the lack of people lingering against the walls. Van Ness, an avenue with a center strip, doubles here as U.S. 101, a major route that cuts through the city.

  At the corner I look both ways. Cars and trucks speed by, the sidewalks are deserted. I start toward Civic Center, then catch a glimpse of a familiar form turning into Olive. I pick up my pace, follow him into the alley.

  "Knob!"

  It's him, I'm sure, though he speeds up, keeps his head down and doesn't turn.

  "It's me, Bug!" I yell after him, then start to run. He sidesteps into the portal of a garage. When I reach him, I'm out of breath.

  "Fuck you want?" he demands. His expression is surly.

  "Tim and me were tight. What d'you know?"

  "Fuck ask me?"

  "You know the Gulch, Knob. Cops think the killer's a john."

  He sniffs, then makes a gesture as if to push me back.

  He wants to intimidate me. I hold my ground. He's four inches taller and eighty pounds heavier; he could knock me over with a swat. In his eyes I see the calculation of a ferret.

  "What's the problem?"' I ask.

  "Don't like cops."

  "I'm not a cop."

  "So you say."

  We glare at one another. "I'm a photographer, Knob. Ever seen me without a camera?"

  "Taking pictures—that's what cops do."

  "Why?"

  "Catch people."

  "What kind of people?"

  "People with stuff to hide."

  "What kind of stuff?"

  "Married guys, like that. Who they are, where they live."

  "Like Baldy from last night?"

  "Who?"

  I find his dumb act pathetic. "The bald guy in the Mercedes," I explain. "The one you were talking to, the one who wanted chicken and wouldn't close."

  "Don't know what you're talking about."

  "Guy flaunts a car like that, he's asking to be noticed. Not that difficult to check out a license plate."

  Knob narrows his eyes. "Fuck you want?"

  "I want to know who's violent, who could've done this to Tim. I'm not a cop, but I'm going to start working with them if his friends here don't cooperate."

  "I don't know nothin'."

  I soften my tone: "You liked him. I know you did."

  I lie: "And he liked you."

  Knob considers that. He's not big on human sentiment. I press him a little more.

  "You're slinking around now because you're scared. And you're right. What they did to Tim, they could
do to you, to anyone."

  "Who says it's a 'they'?"

  For the first time he surprises me. "Okay, suppose it's one guy—does that make any difference?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Built-in risk, isn't it? Risk of the trade. Stop one there's always another, right?" I pause. "Or were you—" Suddenly I think I understand what's on his mind. "You're not planning on taking care of this yourself?"

  He snorts, pushes me. This time I yield; the push is real, not a gesture as before.

  "Tell me?" I plead as I stumble back.

  "Outta my way," he says roughly. He shoves me again hard. I fall to the pavement. He walks away.

  My knees are scraped. They smart as they rub against my jeans. If I hadn't needed to protect my camera I'd have used my hands to break the fall. My knees can take it; my Contax can't.

  This is the first time I've been hit since coming to the Gulch. I'm more shocked than hurt. Now the security I've felt here gives way to apprehension. It's been my illusion, I realize, that this place has grace. Yes, I've witnessed moments of unexpected gentleness, but basically, I know, the Gulch is a jungle.

  I pick myself up. Knob's gone. At least he didn't kick me, then stand around and gloat. I remember a book by a gonzo journalist who hung out with a motorcycle gang. He thought he'd become one of them. The day they turned on him and stomped him he learned he wasn't.

  Suddenly I feel a need to take pictures. But what is there to shoot? I stride back to Polk, start blasting away at the cops. Then I stop. These shots won't get me anywhere. If Tim is to be the subject of Exposures, I should capture the grief of his friends.

  I go into Walgreen's, purchase bandages and disinfectant, then limp my way over to the Hampshire Arms. The hotel, now seedy, has seen better days. Squares of the marble lobby floor are broken and the rough stucco walls are dark with soot. I approach the desk. A young man with bad skin is reading a comic book. He doesn't look up.

  "Doreen in?"

  He scratches a pimple. "Who?"

  "Doreen. . . . of Alyson and Doreen."

  "Room three-fourteen."

  I find the house phone, call upstairs.

  They're both in, too brokenhearted, Doreen tells me, to play the street.

  "Can I come up?"

  "Sure," she says, slurring her words. "Just give us a couple minutes to straighten the joint."

  I dress my wounded knees in the lobby, then take the elevator to three. I think it's more like straighten themselves, since, when Doreen opens the door; I find the joint in its usual disarray. The gals are wearing unisex underwear, not the frilly kind I'd expect.

  Doreen glances at me, then at herself in the mirror. She isn't wearing makeup and her wig's askew.

  "Hell with it!" she says, pulling it off. Her head, I see, is shaved. Her hands shake as she flings the wig across the room. Alyson immediately follows suit. Her head is shaved as well.

  "Don't feel all that girlie tonight," Doreen explains, voice a half-octave lower. The floor is cluttered with high-heeled shoes and boots, the air pungent with stale cigarette smoke, cosmetics and gin.

  "Night like this you just want to sit home and cry," Alyson says.

  The two of them plop down together on the bed. I take a chair, perching atop a pile of wrinkled tutus and lingerie.

  "I'm here to take your pictures," I announce.

  At first they're against it, don't like the notion of being photographed unmasked. But it doesn't take long to convince them.

  "When you show real feelings," I tell them, "dress-up doesn't matter."

  For the first few shots they assume mock-feminine poses; then they give it up. As I shoot they continue to drink straight gin, no tonic or vermouth, gulping it down like stevedores. There comes a point when I stop viewing them as she-males and begin to see them as they are: a couple of slim young skinheads who happen to have boobs, getting plastered because a friend's been killed.

  "Tell me about bad johns," I ask, framing Doreen against the mess in the closet.

  "What'd you wanna know?" she asks.

  "How bad does it get?"

  Alyson lets out with a hoot. "Dearie, you got no idea!"

  "They stink, some of them. You'd think they'd clean up for a date."

  "They call you names—'bitch', 'slut,' like that."

  "The c-word too. Not that we mind. It's a validation really."

  "Then there're the sickies." They glance at one another, click glasses, toss back great gulps.

  "Some like to beat up on you. Spanking's all right—but they gotta pay extra. A few'll get carried away. Couple times I've come home with black eyes."

  "When that happens what do you do?" I'm shooting now from the floor, framing them against the stained and ragged wallpaper.

  "You get out of there, honey. Fast as you can. A john out of control—that can lead to serious injury."

  "I had one last spring." Alyson falls back on the bed. "Good-looking, middle-aged, computer-exec type. Married, lived down the peninsula somewhere. We had a few dates. He seemed nice enough. Brought me flowers, talked about earrings. Told me he liked male pussy, that was his kink."

  Doreen hands Alyson a lit cigarette. Alyson props herself on an elbow, takes a long drag, then exhales in a stream.

  "One night he gets loaded. We're in this motel room on Lombard. Suddenly he starts bashing me around. We're all—us, women!—we're all whores, he says. He hates us, all of us. I feel his rage. I'm scared. I know I gotta get out before he busts me up. I try to calm him. 'Hey, George, it's me, Alyson. I'm a guy, remember. All this is make-believe.' I'm taking a chance; these guys want to forget you're a boy. But I do it anyway, meantime wipe away my makeup and peel off my wig. So there we are, two guys commiserating over what sluts women are, how they ought to be, like—now he's getting really vicious—exterminated, eviscerated! Finally he gets up to take a piss. That's when I make my break. I shake all the way home in the cab. I never saw old Georgie again."

  "Probably too scared to show his face," Doreen says. "Guy like that, we pass the word. No one else'll touch him."

  "I figure he burned his bridges down in San Jose, that's why he started coming up here. Now he's probably playing in Santa Cruz. Sooner or later he'll break some girl's arm or kill her. Guys like that only get worse. We release something in them. After that . . . well, you know the saying: You can't squeeze the paste back into the tube."

  By midnight Doreen and Alyson are dead drunk and I've shot out two thirty-six-frame rolls. I leave them snoring away head to toe on the bed.

  On Polk the cops are gone. There's hardly a person on the street. My knees are fine now; bandaged I walk well.

  I check the saloons. Most are empty. The Werewolf is closed and so is The Shillelagh.

  It's strange to walk here with no one about. It's as if this place has died. Perhaps this will be Tim's memorial —a single night of silence on the Gulch.

  I wander up to Jerry's All-Night Pizza, peer in through the window, notice a couple of regulars—Slick, an albino, and a kid named Remo who barely looks thirteen.

  I enter, approach. "Seen Crawf?" I ask.

  "Hear he left town," Slick says.

  I sit. Silence. Have I interrupted a private colloquy? The harsh fluorescent lighting hurts my eyes.

  I raise my camera. They tense, then relax as they remember who I am.

  "Just a few shots," I promise. "I want to catch the gloom and doom."

  Slick stares down at his coffee; Remo sticks out his tongue. Then, after goofing off, he offers me his profile.

  "I'm collecting bad-john stories," I tell them, still shooting. "Got any good ones?" That gets them going.

  The first tale is strange. Seems there's a doctor who likes to take kids to his office in Pacific Heights, where he subjects them to lengthy physical exams. As he does he whispers degrading things. "Bet a lot of cocks been down here," he says, peering into a boy's throat. "Now bend over and spread those cheeks." The culminating event is a prolonged inspection with a p
roctoscope.

  "Physical part's not so bad," Slick says. "It's the fuckin' humiliation gets you down."

  Slick's nineteen with white hair and stubble above his upper lip. He's scrawny, pale, his eyebrows and eyelashes so faint I can barely make them out. I can't read colors but Tim once told me Slick's irises are pink.

  At one time or another he and most of his friends have been hired by the doctor, who, after a couple of exams, loses interest and asks for a steer to someone new. Slick affectionately chucks the point of Remo's chin. "Wouldn't send you to him, kid. Not even for a cut."

  Remo's got his own story about a black van with blacked-out windows that took him, another young hustler and two teenage girls to a play party high in the hills of Marin. The van pulled straight into a garage, from which they were taken blindfolded to a basement and told to strip. They entertained a group all night, perhaps a half-dozen men and women. They were tickled with feathers, caressed and used, for which they were paid a collective fee of a thousand dollars and deposited terrified back on Fisherman's Wharf at dawn.

  There's an exuberance in the boys as they recount these adventures that reminds me a little of Tim—the camaraderie of veterans exchanging war stories at a bar.

  "That Marin group's sick, the doctor too, but what about the real bad guys?" I ask.

  They're nonplussed. Then little Remo states the obvious: "Go with one of them you don't live to tell the tale."

  Sitting on a high stool in my apartment living room peering through my telescope, I feel as though I'm in the crow's nest of a ship. The night is designed for surveillance: vistas long, horizons deep, lamps mere points of light. No blazing walls of sunlight to limit my vision. The night city lies naked to my eye.

  I check the Judge's windows, find them dark. . . as are most other residence windows at this hour. I swing the telescope toward the cluster of high-rises downtown; lamps burn in offices for the night cleaning crews.

  Swinging northeast, I catch the reflection of the moon on the Bay with the lights of El Cerrito flickering beyond. I observe a small but brilliant glow in the Berkeley Hills, perhaps a house on fire.

 

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