by Peter Plate
It was a polluted, windy day in June. Fog was crowning Bernal Hill that morning. Summer sometimes feels like winter in San Francisco.
I spotted Flaherty near the emptied-out Bernal Dwellings housing project, a half-dozen vacant concrete tower blocks surrounded by fenced-off lawns of yellowed crabgrass. (Most of the people who used to live in the HUD projects had left the city because of the high rents.) Flaherty and his partner, a lean man with a potbelly, were roving east on Cesar Chavez Boulevard, reconnoitering the undocumented Salvadorenos looking for work in the painting store’s parking lot. Once in a while, an independent contractor would drive by and select a couple of guys, hiring them to do a day-job painting a house or landscaping a yard. Nobody was causing any trouble, no drinking or dealing, so the narcs let them well enough alone.
The district had been tense since the INS and the local police raided a bar called the Club Elegante on Mission Street, rousting over a hundred patrons. The Spanish-speaking families along York, Bryant, and Alabama Streets were keeping their children indoors to avoid a dragnet; they weren’t sending them to school. As a result, the neighborhood seemed deserted.
I was waiting for a client in the parking lot of St. Anthony’s Church, and I didn’t pay any attention to the narcs until they accosted the next guy they saw, a man at the bus stop. He was a twenty-five-to-thirty-year-old Mexican male attired in a pair of khakis and a plaid flannel shirt, an ordinary sight in the Mission. He wasn’t doing anything, just talking to himself and making agitated circles in the air with his hands, like he couldn’t stop his fingers from moving. Something about him got to me, something electric and unreadable, as if he were sending out a surge of jumbled radio signals. A subdermal tingling sped across the back of my shoulder blades, a warning my nerves always gave me when things were swinging out of sync.
The man took off his shirt, exposing massive clumps of coarse reddish body hair. He tossed the garment at a passing car. Partial nudity in the streets was a common story in San Francisco, and it was never pretty. There was something in the air that made people want to take off their clothes in public, and it wasn’t the sweet California sunshine. You could take your pick: family conflict, job loss, loneliness.
Flaherty crossed the street to confront the man, weaving like a rumba dancer through oncoming traffic. He yanked out his OC pepper-spray canister and without identifying himself or saying a word, he sprayed the Mexican, squirting him in the face at point-blank range. But nothing happened. No slowing of the vato’s movements, no fear.
I knew what Flaherty was going to do next. I knew it like I knew the scars on my legs. I’ve gone over what happened that day a hundred times and it always remains exactly the same. The details never change. How the traffic along Chavez Boulevard was crushed bumper-to-bumper back to Highway 101 southbound. The way the air was moist with a hint of early-summer rain, part of a low-pressure system over the Pacific Ocean. And how the sun wasn’t giving off any seasonal warmth, none at all.
Flaherty dragged out his Smith and Wesson as if he’d treed a grizzly bear. He cocked the gun’s hammer and drew a bead on the man’s legs. The other narc tripped on the curb, stumbled into him, and the pistol went off. A single shot rang out, echoing off-key in the street, making a sharp report. A dark red hole mushroomed under the Mexican’s left nipple, knocking his legs out from under him and sending him into the path of a sports utility vehicle.
The person behind the wheel was a young white lady from New Jersey. A lot of software and multimedia professionals like her were moving into the Mission, leasing the prefabricated plywood live-work loft spaces on Harrison. Out-of-staters with money to burn, they frequented the restaurants along the Valencia corridor, drinking Jagermeister and eating tapas and fighting in the street with the homeless people when the bars let out for the night. It was her first month in the city, and she wasn’t too happy about it. The rents were unreasonable, her salary wasn’t so good, and now this.
Flaherty grabbed the Mexican, and the man’s head snapped back on his neck. He took a step toward the narc, then he collapsed in a heap on the curb and didn’t move. I stood where I was, not knowing where to turn. I felt like I’d found a rattlesnake in my path. At a crossroads, you come across a snake, you go the other way. You try to run away. If you don’t, what you see floods over you, absorbing everything in its track.
When the Mexican got shot, his eyes were wide-open and conscious. He knew he was going under. I knew it too, as if it couldn’t happen without me.
4
At noon we heard a rap on the garage’s tin paneling.
Bobo had finished the main project for the week, off-loading our garbage. The task was no joke when you didn’t have a legal apartment. If you lived in an up-to-code house that had a nice landlord, the city picked up your garbage. But in our district, the police were arresting people for dumping trash illegally on the sidewalk. To avoid getting busted, Bobo siphoned our refuse onto the street like a guerrilla, doing it in the middle of the night.
Whatever we did, it had to be low-key. That’s how it was when you were squatting: You constructed a logic that orbited around fear. If you wanted to break the law, you had to give up something in return. Free rent had its own price—your peace of mind.
We didn’t know who was at the door. Outside of Louis and a few others, nobody else knew our address.
Bobo went over to the front of the garage and yelled out a challenge. “Who’s there?”
“It’s Dee Dee!”
“How did you know we were here?”
“Maurice told me!”
“That punk? How did he find out?”
“I don’t know! He just told me where you were!”
“Well, fuck him. What do you want?”
“Let me in!”
“I can’t do that.”
“C’mon, man!”
Eichmann said, “Ask him if he’s got any money.”
Bobo rasped into the crack between the door and the wall, “Hey, Dee Dee! You got any cash?”
“What’s it to you?”
“You want anything from us, you’ve got to pay us!”
Dee Dee was getting peevish, shuffling his feet in the driveway. “Let me in, will you? I don’t want to be standing out here all day! I wouldn’t come here to beg nothing off you guys! I pull my own weight! I got money!”
Eichmann whipped out a Swiss Army knife and said, “If he wants to do business with us that badly, let him in.”
Bobo heaved open the door and Dee Dee scooted under it into the garage. When he straightened up and looked around, our home seemed crummier than ever to me. Dustballs were climbing up the walls; the unwashed dishes by the hot plate stank of week-old chili con carne. A black widow spider round as a jellybean was crawling on the floor next to me. It moved past a discarded pizza container, a tennis shoe, and a Marlboro cigarette box, finally disappearing into a crack in the wall. We were slovenly, and having Dee Dee over as a guest somehow confirmed it.
“What do you want?” Bobo asked him.
Dee Dee quavered, “Aw, don’t be rude to an old friend. I don’t want much. Just a bag.”
“An eighth, huh?”
“Yeah … you got some good bud?”
“The best.”
Eichmann fondled his pocket knife and didn’t say anything. Bobo made Dee Dee comfortable on the couch, then pulled out an antique Howdy-Doody lunch box. He unlatched the lid, and presto: a dozen bags of indica. At the sight of the weed, Dee Dee got worked up like a child in front of a birthday cake. “So, what’s happening with you guys?” he asked. “I hear there’s a disturbance going down with the cops.”
When Dee Dee said that, I got annoyed.
Dee Dee was a con man and a rip-off artist who was legendary for pulling heists on his friends. A year and a half ago I was exploring an abandoned building on Twenty-first Street, and I found a derelict 1967 Buick Riviera next door—the east side of Folsom Park was a drop-off target for stolen cars that had been stripped. The Buick h
ad no tires and was resting on four cinder blocks in an unmetered parking space. Dee Dee was sitting behind the steering wheel with a tinfoil of dope and his cooker on the dashboard.
The rents in the Mission were already too high, so Dee Dee decided to dwell in the Buick. He stayed in the former luxury-class cruiser over the next winter and spring, long after the building I was interested in burned down to the ground.
Bobo never cottoned to Dee Dee, and neither did Eichmann. But money was money. Dee Dee poked his nose into every bag of weed we had, then said, “I want this one, okay? But I don’t know where you get off telling me this is the best indica on the market. Look at this crud.” Dee Dee held up the eighth. “It’s that tired hydroponic stuff. Why can’t you get some of the crippler dope that’s from Canada?”
“Do you want the eighth or not?”
“Of course I want it. I’ve got to have me some weed.”
“They’re ninety apiece.”
For a moment Dee Dee was silent. He noticed Bobo’s lunch, and licked his lips at the sight of a half-eaten burrito, two pieces of corn on the cob, and a short stack of homemade flour tortillas. The coffee table was cluttered with food and drugs.
“That’s outrageous,” Dee Dee said. “I can’t pay that much. You guys are going off the deep end with prices like that.”
“Just give me the money,” Bobo said. “I know you’ve got it.”
“Your dope is too expensive. It ain’t fair.”
“If you don’t want it, you don’t have to buy it.”
“You can’t be charging so high. It’s robbery. People ain’t going to respect you for it.”
“You done complaining?”
“No, I ain’t. This is funky. You guys are getting greedy.”
“Says who?”
“Says me.”
“Fuck you. You want the weed or not?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then leave.”
“All right, all right,” Dee Dee protested angrily, pulling out his wallet. He jiggled his tiny feet, irked. The floor lamp flickered in the background, profiling his potato nose. He shoved aside the Modelo beer bottles on the table and put his hand, palm down, on the bag of weed he wanted.
“You know what?” Dee Dee said. “I know why you’re being this way.”
Bobo’s shaggy head yo-yoed up and down a full twelve inches, his eyelids fluttering. “You do, huh?”
“Damn right I do, sport. Everyone knows about that shooting and Doojie. The cops are looking for people to interview. The smarter homeboys are getting bus tickets out of town until it blows over.”
Quick as a slingshot, Eichmann got up from the couch with the army knife flashing in his hand. He motioned for me to turn out the lights—I reached under the table and shut off the power strip that everything was plugged into.
Dee Dee peeped, “Hey, what is this? A joke?”
Nobody did anything until Eichmann said, “Hit the lights.” I flipped the power strip switch back on. Eichmann was standing behind Dee Dee, holding the knife to our adversary’s Adam’s apple. He crooned into Dee Dee’s hairy ear, “You want to buy some dope? Doojie, get his wallet.”
Dee Dee’s tired puppy-dog face bulged at the jaw in terror, and a second later a wet spot quietly appeared on his pants.
I snagged the billfold from his blue derby jacket and thumbed through it, pulling out a sheaf of brand-new twenties. It was a couple of thousand dollars. I crushed the bills in my fist, seeing if they were real.
Where I came from, I didn’t see a twenty-dollar bill until I was eighteen. Big fish eat little fish: It was ours now. Bobo began to chuckle, and Eichmann cracked an ironic smile.
Dee Dee screamed, “You can’t have that! It’s not my money!”
Eichmann thrust the Swiss Army blade at Dee Dee’s unshaven throat; a drop of blood dripped onto the collar of his rayon disco shirt.
“It’s not yours?” Eichmann asked. “Who does it belong to?”
“That ain’t your business!”
“Somebody is going to be very angry with you for losing it.”
“You’ve got to give it back to me!”
“Why should I?”
“It ain’t mine!”
“That’s your problem, not ours.”
This was just what we needed, an unexpected infusion of liquid capital. I re-added the bills to get an exact count of our take, and discovered my previous sum was wrong. There was more money than I’d thought—I had nearly four thousand dollars in my hands.
Dee Dee merited what he was getting. Baiting us about the shooting was the wrong tactic. We were doing something spiritually courageous in relieving him of his monetary resources.
The oblong contours of Eichmann’s face sparkled ivory and silver, bright with a fever I recognized as homicide.
“Don’t kill him. The fink isn’t worth it.”
“Who asked you, Doojie? If I want an opinion on the subject, I’ll find an expert.”
Eichmann jabbed the knife’s tip into Dee Dee’s scabby neck and said, “Hey.”
The little man squealed, “What?”
“You aren’t planning on talking, are you?”
“To who?”
“The cops.”
“About what?”
“That shooting.”
“Not me!”
“Oh, yes, you are.”
“No, man, I don’t do that shit! I’m a stand-up dude!”
“You don’t do what shit?”
“I’m not going to rat on you!”
“You’re not? Who said you were going to do that?”
“You did!”
“I did not. But let’s say you did snitch Doojie out … what would you tell them?”
“Are you trying to trick me?”
“No, it’s just for the sake of argument.”
“Ah, you know!”
“No, I don’t.”
“I’d tell the cops Doojie witnessed the shooting!”
“But you aren’t going to say anything about it?”
“No way!”
“Promise?”
“Promise!”
Eichmann pressed the blade hard enough to make the other man wail like a monkey in a zoo cage. He was cold as melted ice and there was no emotion in his voice when he whispered, “You got any more money?”
A crafty glint surfaced in Dee Dee’s nearsighted eyes. “No, you’ve got it all.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Sure, I’m sure. You ain’t calling me a liar, are you?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“I’m a lot of things, but a liar I ain’t. It don’t come natural to me.”
I had a hunch and I followed it. I got down on the floor, and before Dee Dee could do anything to stop me, I removed his moldy tennis shoes and peeled a pair of argyle socks from his blue-veined skanky feet.
A thin wad of one-hundred-dollar-bills fell to the floor. The sight of the money was nearly worth the price of smelling his toes. I added up the hundreds, a total of ten Ben Franklins.
Dee Dee bleated, “That’s it! You’ve wiped me out! You guys are going to be the death of me because I’m telling you, that money ain’t mine!”
Bobo grabbed Dee Dee by the scruff of his neck and dragged him over to the garage’s entry. He opened the door, saturating our cave with sunlight.
Bobo was set to toss Dee Dee and his shoes into the driveway when Eichmann hauled off and kicked our victim in the backside, snarling, “You ain’t welcome here, Dee Dee!”
It would have been amusing, but Dee Dee was a trickster, and treacherous. I had a premonition we’d be seeing him again.
In gossip-saturated San Francisco, every person’s private affairs were hung out like wash on a clothesline. I had to get away from it. How, I didn’t know.
Selling and smoking marijuana was an ingrained familial custom. It started when my mother left Daly City for the Lower East Side of New York. She holed up in a brownstone tenement on Avenu
e B, near the Norfolk Street address her parents stayed at when they first came to America.
She supported herself by cleaning kilos of Mexican pot for the guy who lived upstairs. His name was Harold and he was skimming seventy-five thousand dollars a year selling weed. To top things off, Hank Mobley, the jazz musician, resided across the hall with his wife and kid.
Eight years later she came back to California, conscious she was leaving a city filled with Jews and returning to a community where there weren’t any. This made her defensive, confrontational. She extolled the virtues of cannabis and urged her mom to try it.
The experiment didn’t work out so well. My grandmother liked the music her daughter got high with—early Led Zeppelin, the first and second albums when the band was covering songs by Willie Dixon and Otis Rush. Nice beat, she smiled. But the weed made her cough and she didn’t try it again.
Bubbeh’s drug of choice was black tea with hot milk, three times a day.
5
Flaherty first made a reputation for himself back in 1979 after the Dan White trial verdict. A former policeman, White had shot and killed the mayor and a gay Board of Supervisors member at City Hall. He drew a sentence of eight years in prison for the shootings, and a riot broke out downtown. Twelve police cars were burned to cinders on McAllister Street. During the rioting, some cops got too zealous beating up the gay boys who were demonstrating in the Civic Center Plaza. Specific police officers were named. Flaherty was one of them.
Eichmann was an altogether different type of headache for me. Before I met him at the St. John Coltrane Church, I’d seen him on Valencia Street, hanging out in front of the Roxie Cinema, selling used paperback books, half hoping to attract the restaurant traffic with his wares. But no one was interested. He slicked his hair back and wore torn jeans and Ray-Ban sunglasses. Dee Dee said Eichmann had a reputation for being antisocial, high-strung. Working with him was tedious; he was impatient with me, and his neurotic energy was difficult to accommodate.