by Peter Plate
Instead of filing a trespassing charge and having the Mission police come and get us, the landlord hired a rent-a-cop. It wasn’t a legal move on his part, so we let him stand outside the carport for the remainder of the night, screaming at us in Chinese and Spanish. In California, possession of the property was nine-tenths of the law. He couldn’t do anything to us.
Then there was the issue of blood. Who was my father? My mother refused to tell me. You’d think he’d killed her, whoever it was. I felt like a vampire waiting for nightfall. I had someone else’s dreams, their skin, their knobby legs, their bad teeth. I belonged to someone I’d never seen.
Eichmann’s eyes grew fixed, staring over my shoulder. “Fucking hell,” he said. “Guess who’s here?”
Casually, like I didn’t mean anything by it, I half turned on the stool. A few feet away from us, Flaherty sat by himself in a booth. His face was convulsing with a spastic twitch. His long hair was shellacked with mousse gel and hung over his eyes in ropes. The narc’s complexion was shining white and hot in the bar’s orangeade light. There was a bottomless pit in his eyes, the mark of the undead. A cocktail waitress asked him what he wanted to drink, and without taking his eyes off me, he gave her his order. Flaherty’s hands were shaking, he was so tense.
I faded into myself, trying to get a grip on things.
During the Russian Revolution, my grandfather said he’d gotten a leave from the war front and found a train to take him home. It was night and he found a seat in the dark and fell asleep. Some time later the train pulled out of the station. When he woke up at daybreak, he was in a rail car filled with soldiers like himself, young, half-starved peasant conscripts, the sons of serfs, poorly trained and badly armed. The snag was, they were dead. He read the sign on the train’s window—even though it faced outward, he deciphered the warning—a medical skull-and-bones logo that said he was riding on a plague train.
That’s how it was being with Flaherty in the Elbo Room. The man was a disease. The cocktail waitress came back with a double whiskey and a Beck beer chaser. He laid a ten-spot on her tray; she mock-bowed to him and walked away. More people were entering the club. Flaherty seemed content to stay where he was; the drinks visibly relaxed him. Despite the lack of available seating, he was alone in the booth because of his fearsome presence and size. Nobody wanted to get near him. Eichmann muttered, “Fuck him. We can sit here all night if we have to.”
The second Eichmann made his pronouncement, Flaherty unholstered his pistol. Pulling out a loaded gun in a bar is only done by certain men. Some want to perform a robbery. Others are drunk and unsure of what they’re doing. In either case, some form of self-interest is being expressed. But Flaherty was beyond self-interest. He straightened out his hand and aimed the snout of the Smith and Wesson at my head. Eichmann said, “What’s up?”
I could have told him we were going to die and go to hell—he would’ve believed it. It was a place so similar to the neighborhood. Dee Dee and Maurice lived there. Papaya vendors sold fruit from two-wheeled carts under the shade of Mission Street palm trees; old men passed the afternoon at Los Portales Pharmacy waiting for their wives; the bells of Mission Dolores tolled on the hour, and black-and-white police cars were parked near every corner.
A woman in a spandex dress with Farah Fawcett hair saw the gun in Flaherty’s hand and went berserk, shrieking at the top of her lungs. There was an immediate stampede for the door. A young black woman jumped over a booth; she missed the table where Flaherty stood and sank one of her high heels into his chest.
He lost his balance and fell to one side; the Smith and Wesson slipped from his fingers as he was trampled underfoot. We lost sight of him in the mob, and without any further ado, Eichmann and I exited the nightclub onto the sidewalk, bursting into the street. The moist, autumn-chilled air was cool on our faces, making me smile. Eichmann marveled all the way back to the garage. “It’s an omen, Doojie. Our luck is improving.”
29
In September the palm trees on Mission Street turn brown as the days get hotter. During that September, Eichmann and I were asked by Mrs. Popolovsky to come and have dinner with her. While I was warmed by her invitation, I didn’t look forward to the meal. Eichmann was pleased his aunt cared enough to make such an offer. “Count your blessings. She wasn’t always this nice,” he said.
Ever since our last altercation with Flaherty, we’d been laying low. Accordingly, our enterprise was paralyzed. In this way, the narc had won a victory over us. We’d been able to retain our freedom, but we paid for it—I was afraid to go outside. Eichmann was philosophical about our status. “Look at it this way. We ain’t the only ones hurting. Nobody else is doing any better than us.”
It was true. The dope trade in the neighborhood had dried up in August. The simple selling of a nickel bag of weed had vanished like a lost folk art. The police were everywhere, cracking down on the Valencia Street junkies, busting heads, running people into jail. It was so much easier to stay in the garage and not deal with any of it.
But our home was under attack. The landlord was stepping up his campaign to reclaim the garage by trying to serve us with a three-day eviction notice for failure to pay rent. The process server, a lanky law student with horn-rimmed glasses, was coming by the carport four or five times an afternoon, seeing if anyone was in. The summons to court had to be delivered in person, so we made sure he never caught us. This escapade was in its second week, costing the landlord hundreds of dollars.
The stroll over to Mariposa Street was pleasant. Eichmann and I went down Seventeenth Street and stopped to have a look at the former police station, a sandblasted two-storied stone building spread out on a lot near Treat Street. At the turn of the century, the jail housed the Irish bootleggers in the neighborhood.
We got to Mrs. Popolovsky’s studio just as the sun went down over Twin Peaks. Diamond Heights, Corona Heights, and Buena Vista Park in the Haight-Ashbury were varnished black and glowing from a faint silver line of light left in the sky. Eichmann made a grunt. “C’mon, let’s go inside.”
The door was open and we went in. Eichmann accidentally tipped over the cat’s litter box, depositing its contents onto the shag carpeting. Mrs. Popolovsky was in the kitchen heaving a colander of steaming potatoes into a Tupperware container. The fold-out table by the stove was set with four paper plates. In the center of the table was the main course, a hunk of cow’s tongue on an aluminum tray. Eichmann’s aunt had gone old-country shtetl-style in planning her menu.
Loretta was beached on the sofa with her hands folded over her swollen belly. Eichmann looked at his aunt, then sat down by his girlfriend, giving her a kiss on the mouth. A fat black cat was sprawled out on the rug at his feet; it jumped onto Eichmann’s lap and he swatted it across the rump, sneezing furiously. “Damn,” he wheezed. “I can’t fucking breathe.”
I was wondering where I was going to sit when Mrs. Popolovsky came out of the kitchen to give her nephew a hug. Even when he was sitting down, she was no higher than his navel. “Eh,” she mumbled. “You’re getting thin.”
She pinched his stomach and Eichmann squealed, blushing. “Cut it out, will you?”
Loretta took one of Eichmann’s pudgy hands and placed it on her stomach—his face went still with disbelief and his mouth gaped, exposing the half-inch space between his two front teeth. Little Eichmann was moving inside her, his progeny. He hushed us and put his ear on Loretta’s belly. “He’s talking to me.”
He kissed Loretta again, nuzzling her neck with the four-day stubble on his face. “The kid’s going to be a stud, isn’t he?” he asked her, almost pleading.
If Loretta kept eating schmaltz on toast every day, her child would be as big as the Empire State Building. When she moved, she did it gingerly, taking her time, going as slow as a river that’d been moving for a thousand years. “Doojie,” she said, acknowledging me for the first time since I’d walked in the door. “Would you give me that bottle of water by your feet?”
The
men in Loretta’s life had been reduced to one of two things. Either they helped her to get through another day as painlessly as possible, because it was a guy who got her into this position in the first place. Or they didn’t.
Mrs. Popolovsky groaned and got up from the sofa, saying, “Oy, my bones. You little ones just don’t know,” and tottered back into the kitchen. The second she was out of earshot, Loretta turned to Eichmann and said, “I can’t stay here much longer.”
“What’s the matter, you ingrate, it ain’t good enough for you? What do you expect me to do about it?” Eichmann razzed. He pounded his hand on the armrest, trying to control his ire. The cat rubbed up against his leg and meowed. Eichmann put his hands over his eyes and said, “Can’t you make it shut up?”
“Forget it. Just answer me,” Loretta persisted.
“You know, honey, I’m trying to come up with a plan, okay? Give me some time, will you. These things don’t happen overnight. There’s logistics and things like that. But I’m working on it.”
“Give you some time? How long? Long enough for us to be homeless with a kid?”
Eichmann caressed the multihued bristle on his chin, sighing through his nose. “I’m focusing on a plan, but it’s not ready to unveil yet. It’s complex and needs to develop.”
“Well, you better hurry up because the baby isn’t going to wait for you to make some money. Why can’t you go out and get a job?”
Mrs. Popolovsky added a plate of hot cabbage to the tongue and potatoes steaming on the table. The three dishes made me think she was putting out a lot of food for us. When I was a kid, meals had to be rationed. Not literally, but almost. For instance, if I wanted two glasses of milk, I had to settle for one. I learned to create an arithmetic about eating; I never ate too much, and often not enough. The key was to stop eating before you got full. That way you had something to eat the next day.
Your body began to understand the physics of calculated deprivation and adjusted itself. You learned to think with a caloric clock, how much and when. Over time you needed less, wanted less. You became more emotional, always ready to get violent at the drop of a hat.
Loretta said to me, “So how are you doing these days, Doojie?”
Funny she asked. If we were evicted from the garage, where would I go? I couldn’t think about the future until I finished some unsettled business with the past. Since Doojie Sr. wasn’t my father, I had to find out who was. Until then I would go round and round in circles haunted by a ghost.
I’m sure my real dad wasn’t an outlaw like Doojie Sr. He didn’t buy and sell guns. He’d never been to jail a day in his life, and he didn’t hunt wildlife in America’s national forests. He’d never had a policeman strike him in the face with a nightstick. It would never occur to him to live in a garage even during the worst of times. He was an ordinary citizen with his head in the sand. I said to Loretta, “I’m fine. Just hanging out.”
“And how’s the garage?”
All I had to do was look at Loretta: This alone kept my mouth shut. I couldn’t imagine being pregnant and living with Eichmann’s aunt. I said to her, “The garage? It’s not bad.”
Eichmann wanted to go outside to smoke a cigarette. “Mema,” he said to his aunt. “Me and Doojie are going for a smoke. We’ll be right back.” We ducked through the kitchen into the backyard. Eichmann pointed at a hole in a rusted chain-link fence covered with oleander bushes. “Follow me,” he said.
On the other side of the fence was the crosstown freeway. We found ourselves in a small clearing strewn with bottles and cans overlooking the traffic. The southbound lanes were twinkling with the headlights of cars coming into the city; the northbound lanes were blazing with taillights leaving town. “That fucking cat my aunt’s got,” Eichmann lamented, stamping the heels of his oxfords in the dirt. “Every time I come over, my sinuses get stuffed up.” He found a rock and threw it onto the road’s shoulder, digging up a puff of dust. He said to me, “You seen Bobo?”
“No, he took his stuff and said he was leaving town for a while. He said he was sick of you, but that doesn’t come as any news, does it?”
Eichmann kicked the fence with his shoe. “How unremarkable can you get? I knew he’d cop out on me. I saw it coming a mile away. Well, he ain’t my friend no more. You’ll be next, I guess.”
Our conversation wasn’t getting off to a good start. Eichmann wanted to have a soul-to-soul dialogue with me, but he didn’t know how to initiate it. He watched the cars and waited for me to ask him what was going on with him. If I didn’t say something, we’d stand there for the entire night.
I’d lost sympathy for him. Over time, as if through osmosis, I’d learned to imitate him. Maybe I was as cold as he was. Sending me out to set up Dee Dee had been the last straw. What if Flaherty had caught me? Eichmann and I would remain friends, but in my book, we were no longer equals.
“What do you think of what Loretta said?” he asked me.
On subjects like that, if invited, I didn’t weigh my words. Loretta’s entire body radiated the architecture of a biological prison. Every cell was begging, Let me out of here. Eichmann was unable to conceptualize that. I answered, “You better do something quick for her, because she’s getting worn down. If you don’t help her soon, it’ll get funky. She needs you to get your act together.”
His scar twitched as he replied out of one side of his mouth like he always did when he was angry and trying to control it with aloofness. “What’s that moral crap supposed to mean?”
“Your girlfriend is asking you to step in and support her. She needs money and she needs a house of her own. That fucking baby is going to take effort.”
“It sounds bogus. Let me ask you something, Doojie. Who was in the garage first, me or you?”
“You were, right?”
“That’s right. And who got our business going, you, me, or Bobo?”
“You did.”
“Damn straight, I did. I took care of everyone. When you didn’t have a place to stay, I let you live there. Where do you get off telling me about responsibility? All my life, I’ve been dealing with the needs of the people around me. It ain’t nothing new.”
“But the baby is going to change everything.”
“Is that so? Why don’t you tell me about it?”
“You have to marry Loretta so the kid has a name, so it knows where it comes from.”
“You suck, Doojie.”
The look between us was a bolt of unfiltered tension. He knew exactly what I was saying. The rictus on his mouth told me I’d harpooned him. Commitment, that’s what Loretta wanted. A commitment from him to find them a decent place to live, and to get a paying job for himself. Loretta’s vision wasn’t sophisticated, but she had a grasp of the basics, something which defied Eichmann.
He picked up another stone and hurled it as hard as he could across the freeway, landing it in a patch of roadside ivy. Eichmann balled his fingers into a fist. Behind us, the skyline glittered with the lights of the Moscone Center, the MOCA, the office buildings in the financial district.
I was hoping he’d be honest and reveal himself to me, but the hatred in him was strong. He turned and raised his fists, feinting and jabbing, bobbing and weaving like a prizefighter. He had a crumpled, self-pitying smile on his mouth. “C’mon, Doojie,” he mocked me. “Enough of the bullshit. Put up your hands.”
He shuffled around me, taking swipes at my head with a series of left hooks, flicking at my chin with jabs from both hands. He was closing in on me, taking light punches at my arms and ribs. I backed off a step, and Eichmann hit me in the ear with another hook, then another jab. The same combination. Every time he swung at me, he dropped his arm and left his chest unguarded. When he moved in again, I’d slice to the right and nail him with an uppercut to his Adam’s apple.
I waited while he shuffled in close, his face a drooling mask. When he dropped his arm to deliver a hook, I slugged him with all my energy—he stepped through my windup and clouted me on the chin.
In a small feat of aerodynamics, I stayed dizzily upright, seeing emerald-green rectangles behind my eyes.
Eichmann went ashy with regret and put his hand on my shoulder. “Sorry about that, Doojie. I must be having my period or something. I don’t know what got into me.”
I wanted him to know I felt the same way—if I wanted to change anything, I’d have to forgive him. We went back inside, and during the supper we had around Mrs. Popolovsky’s cheery kitchen table, I kept saying fuck you to Eichmann under my breath like it was an incantation. Every time the old woman saw my bruised lips move, she raised her water glass and blessed us, cackling with gusto at the thought of Loretta’s unborn child, saying, “Mazel tov, my children! God is with you.”
30
Waiting out the landlord required several steps. You had to stay at home and hold the fort and you had to be quiet all day long—you never knew when he was going to ambush you. He might be in the parking lot’s driveway, or at the end of San Carlos Street sitting in his car. You didn’t want to be caught off guard. No squatter ever did. So I was pulling guard duty on the couch.
Bobo’s departure and Eichmann’s presence at his aunt’s left me in control of the garage. This was something to consider. Even if it was just a carport, the garage was worth a hundred thousand dollars; the real estate in the Mission was that valuable. To know this made me want to laugh and cry simultaneously. No wonder the landlord wanted me out, and no wonder I was fighting so hard to stay. California civil law said if I held on to the carport for seven years, I could apply for ownership by filing an imminent-domain claim.
I had six years to go.