San Francisco Noir

by Peter Maravelis

  At first the bridge authorities, publicly announcing that they were working on the problem, quietly turned off the fields once a week in the middle of the night at maximum flood, thereby plummeting the trash into the bay and sweeping it out to sea. But environmentalists and a couple of suicides soon got wind of this rather efficient practice and forced an injunction against it. Subsequently a special cleanup crew with unique machinery and techniques was designed and put into service.

  As soon as the effect on roadside detritus achieved notice, individual humans began to experimentally, then playfully, throw themselves into the forcefields and squirm around in them, gleefully avoiding the especially contrived retrieval devices that were cast after these less than hapless and not particularly despondent victims. These people made the additional discovery that one could actually “swim” a full circle—vertically, or in any other direction—like a looping airplane. Reports varied, but one likened the experience to writhing in a large volume of transparent gelatin, excepting, of course, the degree of fluidity and the magnificent view. Firsthand testimonies were duly monkeyed in the tabloids (CREEPS DOMINATE FIELDS was one headline I remember) with the predictable results that the authorities spent more and more time and money skimming the adventurous out of the forcefields. These policing efforts were soon overwhelmed and, finally, so popular had “getting jumped” become, every-body but the newspapers realized that, although throwing oneself with abandon off the bridge into its forcefields may be vulgar, it certainly did no one any harm. Thus it came about that on any given sunny Sunday, as the bridge teemed with automobiles full of onlookers, any number of people might be found wriggling or sunbathing along either side of the entire length of it, with a population bias on the western or “sunset” side. And the police more or less looked the other way. To have spent an hour or so “jumped” or “suspended” on Sunday afternoon became a socially acceptable pastime, especially among the young, whose avant guard jumped while drunk or stoned. Certain lengths of the span soon became popular hangouts for the besotted, while other stretches were more popular with the stoned. It became not uncommon for a jumpee to find himself floating in company with a suspended quantity of vomit, or among a slowly dispersing nebula of stems and seeds.

  It was into just such a Sunday scene that Baby and I had walked.

  We hadn’t gotten, nor had I intended to get, into this fad yet, but the time must have seemed right to Baby. She stopped walking before we’d gotten midspan.

  Hey now, that looks like fun, she said, leaning over the rail.

  It was true that under ordinary circumstances Baby would try anything, during which experiments I generally held her purse. We stood there, and as I tried to decipher the consternation evident on the features of all the faces around us—after all, I was thinking, if they don’t like it, why don’t they just move on?—Baby tugged at my sleeve and said, C’mon, Honey, let’s do it too. Let’s get jumped.

  Don’t be ridiculous, I said. What’s in it for me?

  Here, asshole, she said, and handed me her purse.

  I held it and watched, still wondering about the appalled yet curiously fascinated expressions up and down the sidewalk, as she lifted a long leg up and straddled the wide rail. Once astride it, she hesitated. She could have been a little scared. After all, it certainly must have looked to Baby exactly as if she were about to kill herself. It looked that way to me. There were a bunch of happy people and a lot of trash floating out there, beyond the rail, but, even so, they looked very insubstantial against all that thin air and the tiny sailboats far below. Baby glanced sideways at me, and I couldn’t resist a smile, as if to say, Yeah, so? and she frowned and pouted, then stood up on the railing, defiant; and holding her nose with one hand and pointing up with the other, she executed a kind of timid hop, backwards, over the side. She fell about eight feet, decelerating all the way, then oscillated, coming back up a couple of feet, then down a few inches, up an inch. And there she hovered, as if dangled from a spring or rubber strap whose coefficient perfectly understood her mass; giggling and squirming.

  Hey, she shouted, come on! It is fun! and she waved at me, as if she’d just run into a line of surf that looked inviting but might have been thought too cold for immersion. In spite of myself, I gave a little wave in return.

  She hung there, two hundred fifty feet above the glinting ocean, but not far from a disheveled, vacant-looking fellow who, observing Baby’s classy entrance, rolled, wiggled, swam, and serpentined his way over to her, where he struck up a conversation. He must have been an old hand at getting jumped. The traffic was loud enough to prevent my overhearing their remarks, but as I stood there squinting, a very excited young woman came rushing down the sidewalk with one arm crooked under a clipboard. She wore a Right to Die armband just above her left elbow, its insignia a skeleton with one raised boney fist.

  A great day, she effused, stopping next to me to make a mark on her papers. We’ve nearly made the quota.

  I excused myself to her and inquired, What quota?

  Why, we’ve nearly gotten it, she said, and held the clipboard under my nose. I could see that its papers were covered with figures and calculations, but they were meaningless to me. One number, written in digits larger than the rest, was circled heavily in red pencil.

  Gotten what? I asked. What’s this seven five nine?

  That’s how many we need, she bubbled. Seven hundred fifty-nine. And we’re only a very few short.

  Oh, said I. Is this a petition?

  You mean you really don’t know? It’s…well. Now that you mention it, it is a sort of petition…Her voice, already closely contested by the noises of wind and traffic, was suddenly lost in a great roar that went up from the crowd milling about the rail further up the sidewalk, at the center of the span. These and some of the people already suspended began to chant the numbers seven five nine, seven five nine, seven five nine.

  My goodness, I heard the girl say. She pushed past me and pointed. He must be the one. We’ve done it!

  Following her gaze with my own, I saw a man standing alone on the railing. He bowed deeply to the crowd beneath him, who cheered him loudly. After several fancy adieus on his part, consisting of additional bows, florid salutations performed with the hands, the blowing of kisses, and even a curtsy, I’d begun to understand, and shoved the girl with the clipboard away from the guardrail. The young man with Baby had his arm tentatively about her shoulders, and smiled as if beatified. Baby’s eyes, round and tense, caught mine. As another, louder cheer went up, her eyes smiled and she laughed outright at the consternation undoubtedly blatant on my own features. A third time the crowd cheered, and the man on the rail jumped. He fell as Baby had before him, and though his oscillations were more pronounced—he went down perhaps eight or ten yards, rebounded upwards two or three yards, went down again a couple of feet—his additional weight did not destroy the forcefield. The people suspended in its grip bobbed gently, like gulls on a swell. I made my decision. Glancing up the length of the bridge as I vaulted the railing, I saw that many of the bystanders, perhaps out of premeditation, perhaps spontaneously, had come to the same conclusion as myself. As we cleared the last bit of structure, I could see that the void was full of falling bodies, enough so that as Baby and I embraced, as I looked into her eyes—those lovely, mischievous eyes that did not retreat from the gaze of my own, oh, so foreverly—my fall was hardly interrupted. Our combined mass buckled the entire field on that side of the bridge and Baby and I, and nearly eight hundred others, minus the thirteen of us, survivors predicted by the harsh statistics of experience, fell toward our deaths.

  And a victory, of sorts.

  FIXED

  BY JON LONGHI

  The Haight-Ashbury

  Iused to buy drugs from Satan, a dealer who called himself Hal Satan. He was also a poet and performance artist, and Hal Satan was his stage name. He liked his stage name so much he decided to use it all the time. Besides, he eventually did so many drugs that the lines
between reality and the creations of his own imagination blurred to the point where he couldn’t tell the difference between them anyway.

  “I’ve been going to some twelve-step meetings lately,” Satan said. “With all the drugs and stuff, I’ve been feeling kinda broken and I just wanna get myself, you know…fixed. A lot of these people at these meetings may not be drinking or doing coke anymore, but they still have addictions of one kind or another. A lot of guys at these meetings are addicted to porn.

  “Like this one guy who couldn’t stay out of peep shows. His every extra cent went to magazines. One week, he was like, ‘Well, I managed to get off the porn. I haven’t been to a peep show or bought a magazine in two weeks. But now I find I can’t keep myself from caulking parking meters.’

  “‘What do you mean, caulking parking meters?’ I asked.

  “‘I mean just what I said,’ he replied. He was taking a caulking gun and injecting it into parking meters. And I thought, Jesus, how much more Freudian can you get than to take a phallic ‘gun’ and inject white goo into a little slot?”

  “You can see it on a lot of levels,” I said. “It’s like, in an attempt to stay out of peep shows, he had to go around sealing up all the coin slots.”

  “Just the whole thing,” Satan said. “Well, a couple weeks later he’s at the meeting again, and he says, ‘Well, I managed to stop caulking parking meters but now I’m back on the porn again.’”

  Although it was commendable that he was trying to clean up his act, the twelve-step meetings never seemed to help Satan. No matter how many he went to, he still managed to stay completely strung out. In fact, he frequently found himself doing drugs before he went to one, just to get through it. Eventually, he just stopped going to them altogether.

  “I realized that twelve-step meetings had become just another addiction for me,” Satan explained. “And since I’m trying to clean up my act and get rid of my addictions, I had to start somewhere.”

  Hal Satan was the only dealer I ever had who would deliver. A half hour, well, actually, forty-five minutes, sometimes an hour, after you called him, he’d bring by a quarter of generic green bud on his scooter. Just like Domino’s Pizza.

  Satan started out just dealing weed but he quickly diversified into all sorts of hard drugs. He wanted to be all things to all people. “Shouldn’t Satan provide all vices?” he reasoned. But keeping up with such a complex line of distributed substances made his already crazy and chaotic life utterly schizophrenic. The biggest problem was that he couldn’t stop sampling what he sold. “What’s the fun of being Satan if you can’t also enjoy the vices you hand out?” he once told me. The problem, though, with that line of reasoning is that Satan very rapidly became a total junkie. In fact, every time I scored drugs from him at his armpit of an apartment, I couldn’t help feeling that he was a perfect illustration of what it must be like to be strung out in Hell.

  Satan’s apartment was right down from the corner of Haight and Ashbury. The address, appropriately enough, was 666 Ashbury, and this had been a contributing factor to him adopting the name Satan.

  “Who else but Satan could live at 666?” he explained. It was hard to argue with that.

  The apartment was a garbage dump where a few humans coexisted with the vermin. The kitchen sink was long lost in a fossilized stack of dirty pots. A huge heap of beer bottles, greasy pizza boxes, and other trash took over an entire corner of the living room.

  “We clean the place once every three years, whether it needs it or not,” one of the roommates once joked. In the bathroom, the toilet seat had stuck to the bowl due to a gluey growth of mold and it could no longer be put up. Sometimes when you got a bag from Satan you had to flick roaches and other little bugs out of your buds.

  Nobody had washed the dishes at 666 in a long time. Very few of them were even still in the kitchen. Instead, they were on various surfaces around the living and bedrooms. Most of them looked like petri plates covered with medical experiments of mold and rotten food. The few plates that were still clean were used to consume drugs. The plates used to snort coke and speed off of, for example, were always licked spotlessly clean. Every piece of furniture in that apartment was so cratered with cigarette and burn holes that it looked like a map of the moon. The carpet was a grayish-black desert of ash. When you walked across it, little clouds of dust and ash rose up around your feet. There wasn’t a square foot of the place that wasn’t littered with garbage. The roaches in the place outnumbered the roommates ten million to four. In fact, me and some of Satan’s other customers took to calling his place The Roach Motel.

  Sometimes the Roach Motel looked like a scene out of Night of the Living Dead. Satan would get these drug zombies who’d camp out on his couch for two to three days at a time, not saying anything, only moving enough to keep themselves saturated with whatever drug they were consuming. There was a cannibalistic efficiency to their behavior. It was as if their humanity and personalities had been stripped away and all that remained was the mechanical core of their hungers and needs. What had once been human was now just a consuming machine, an engine designed only for eating. These zombie robots would stay with Satan until all the fuel he provided them was gone, and then they would shamble off into the night in search of more of the drugs that justified their existence.

  “Lots of the people I know are just a combination of feeding and needing,” Satan once commented.

  One of the roommates was a guy named Rick. His father had been a congressman or something and had died about a year before and left Rick a lot of money. Rick took this newfound fortune and promptly became a coke addict. His dealer was Fat Carlo, a massive lump of a man who must have weighed close to four hundred pounds. Every now and then, Carlo would wear a white suit, and it seemed like all he’d ever done was sell the white powders. After a couple months, Carlo got along so well with Rick that he moved in with him. Can you imagine the parasitic relationship that ensued? Over the course of the next year, the dealer performed a steady, almost magical wealth transferal which kept half the household buried in snow. Hearts about to explode. We used to say about Rick: “I don’t know what happened. One day my dad dies, and then I wake up a year later flat broke and without a nose.”

  Everyone from that household basically went insane. Take the case of the Human Waste. One night I was at a party and Satan was telling me about how squalid things were getting.

  “It’s so crowded and filthy,” Satan said. “The sickest person there is just a loser. Joey’s his name. We call him the Human Waste. I can honestly say, I’ve never seen a more pathetic person in my life. This guy’s thirty-five years old, grossly overweight, and fairly Neanderthal in appearance.”

  “Like someone moving backwards through evolution?” I asked.

  “Believe me,” Hal said, “he’s already devolved. In fact, there are already primates higher than him on the genetic ladder. This guy walks around with six inches of butt crack showing out the back of his jeans at all times.”

  “He carries around a regulation-length ruler to make sure that six inches of butt crack is constantly maintained,” I added. “If his pants start to hike up on him, he measures the butt crack and pulls them back down.”

  “Every afternoon, Joey the Human Waste comes home with a case of Rolling Rock, and by the end of the evening he has polished the whole thing off by himself,” Satan continued. “He may give away one or two, but every day he drinks at least twenty or thirty beers. I did that a couple times in high school, but we’re talking a thirty-five-year-old man here. And that happens seven days a week.

  “It’s not like he needs to relieve the stress from his job, because he’s unemployed. For a couple years there, he was working in the family business, but Joey was such a fuck-up that eventually not even his family could put up with him and ended up giving him the axe. Now he just gets by on unemployment, food stamps, and the checks his parents still write him.

  “On top of that, he never bathes. I’ve only seen him shower once
or twice in the three years I’ve lived there. Every night when I walk into the apartment, he’s plopped there on the couch, stinking the place up like a homeless person or a dead dog. Whenever anyone tells him he smells like a fresh turd, Joey just pretends he’s not listening.

  “Back when he was still working, it got so bad that one day his grandmother called our apartment. ‘Can you get Joey to take a shower?’ she asked us. ‘He’s really beginning to offend people down at the shop because he smells so bad.’ And this from his own grandmother!

  “But the most pathetic scene with Joey happened one night when everyone in the apartment was partying in the living room, which is his sole environment. Joey was shit-faced drunk as usual, and suddenly he gets up in front of everybody and says he has an announcement to make. Then he breaks down crying and admits right there in front of everyone that he’s never had sex before. Not once in all his thirty-five years on the planet. Never even been in love. I don’t think anyone’s even touched him except his mother.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Somebody shared too much. Somebody committed an over-share.”

  “Maybe if he’d ever been laid,” Satan speculated, “he’d only feel the need to drink ten or fifteen beers a day instead of twenty or thirty.”

  Hal Satan was the token troublemaker of the poetry scene. He caused a disruption at every reading he went to. That was his shtick. Hal took off his clothes, let off fireworks, bit other poets, anything he could do to interrupt things. At 666 Ashbury, Hal threw some outrageous parties with like ten bands, three to four hundred people, and marathon poetry readings. He used to let me do readings and throw together rock bands that performed at these things. I remember one night this band I was in played, and while we were setting up, Hal Satan came into the room with a bag of black beauties as big as my head and started handing them out. Hal must have downed a dozen of the things. He was always getting into epic trouble. He seemed to feel some kind of suicidal need to live up to his name. His crimes were many. And they were legendary. Like take the following, for example: