San Francisco Noir

by Peter Maravelis

  Bud dug into his pants pocket. He still had the slip for the prescription. What about the money? She’d given him cash. A bill, one big bill—a hundred dollars. He couldn’t find it. Joan would kill him. Where had the money gone? It was right in his hand, he could see it.

  “Did you lose something?” Hanna asked.

  Suddenly, Bud was afraid. He wanted to go home.

  “Sixth. I live on Sixth Street,” he said.

  Bud didn’t want Nora to leave. He could tell she didn’t believe all the things he’d said, the stories he’d told her about what he’d made of himself, and how close he’d come to fighting for a title. She needed to know. Nora needed to know.

  “Please,” he said, looking at her behind the wheel of the expensive automobile. “Come up just for a minute. I’ve got something I want to show you. Please. It’s been a long time, and I just—please.”

  What’s the proper payback for someone who’s saved your life? Certainly more than she’d given so far.

  “I’d love to, but—there’s no place to park.” It was automatic, the quintessential San Francisco excuse.

  “There’s a space right there,” he said, pointing.

  She’d never been inside squalor, only driven past. Everything about the building scared her: the creaking of the old warped floors, the stains and graffiti all over the walls, the neglect that hung in the dingy corridor, the misery she imagined behind every door. When she heard the muffled screaming of a baby, she thought she’d be sick. And the worst part was, she knew this wasn’t the bottom.

  Bud lived at the far end of the second floor. One bedroom, a bathroom with a shitty shower. A hot plate, no stove. He kept it clean as a whistle.

  Uncle Bob had four rooms, an ocean view from each, and a staff of nurses ’round-the-clock: eight thousand dollars a month.

  “Wait here,” he told her. “You can sit right there if you like. I can make tea or coffee.”

  “That’s okay. I can’t stay long.”

  She sat at a small Formica-topped table while he went into the next room and rummaged around. A narrow band of sunlight cut through the window, slicing between buildings across the alley. Bud Callum came back with a scrapbook, which he set in front of her.

  “Just look at it for a minute,” he said. “So you’ll know. You’ll know I wasn’t making that stuff up. You think there’s something wrong with me, that I’m ready for the nut house. But I did all that. Here, look. It’s real.”

  She slowly turned the black pages, scanning a procession of brittle clippings that told the tale of Bud Callum’s rise. It was a hell of a life, a lot more dramatic than anything Uncle Bob had ever done. Looking at a big halftone of Bud throwing a punch, Hanna had to laugh. “My lucky day,” she said, tapping the picture. “At precisely the right moment, this guy came into my life.”

  Bud smiled and went back to the other room. From the top shelf of the closet he pulled down his old foot locker and flung it on the bed. He started digging through it. Nora’s pictures were in there. Weren’t they? This is where he kept them, where they’d always been. She’d see the resemblance, once he showed her. Nora. He hadn’t looked at those pictures in ages. Or had he? They’d better be here. Joan better not have moved them, or thrown them out.

  Hanna opened an envelope that had been set inside the scrapbook and slid out the contents: photographs of a dark-haired woman with shining eyes and sharp, pretty features. In some of the pictures she was dressed in a bridal gown. Bud was right—they did look alike. He was in a lot of the photos, too. After flipping through them for a moment, Hanna put them aside. She felt she was violating an intimacy. Also in the envelope was a section of newspaper, quartered. The San Francisco Examiner, dated June 11, 1951. An article gave details of a fire on Jerrold Street that claimed the life of Nora Callum.

  Hanna quickly put everything back in the envelope, then placed it carefully in the scrapbook.

  “Why are you crying?” Bud asked as he stepped into the room.

  “Just looking at all this. You’ve had quite a life.”

  “Stop crying,” he said. He hated it when people cried. He could understand crying at beautiful music or the finish of a great ballgame or a terrific fight, but he couldn’t stand it when people cried out of sadness or regret. It made no sense. Crying solved nothing. If something hurt, you stowed the pain and kept on punching. You just banged your way through it, that’s all. You banged your way through to the end.

  “I have to go,” Hanna said, standing up. “My daughter’s having a birthday party and I’m supposed to be getting everything ready.” She couldn’t stop the tears. “My God, I must look a mess. I’m sorry.”

  “Here, hold on.” From the rear pocket of his trousers Bud pulled a folded white handkerchief, perfectly fresh.

  Hanna laughed, which made her cry more. Nobody carries a clean handkerchief, she thought.

  She drew in a sharp breath, almost a gasp, as he cupped the back of her head in his huge hand. “Don’t cry,” he said. He dabbed the black streaks from her cheeks and she forced herself to look into his eyes.

  “I’ll walk you down,” he said. “This isn’t the best building.”

  Out front, as they approached her car, he said, “Thanks for listening before. I go on sometimes. And the ride, thanks for the ride.”

  Before she knew what she was doing, she kissed him, half on the cheek, half on the mouth. Maybe she knew what she was doing. She wasn’t sure. “Thanks again,” Hanna said. “I’m glad I met you.”

  She buckled herself into the Lexus and drove away. Bud went back upstairs to the room at the end of the hall.

  He was re-stowing the footlocker when he heard the front door open.

  “Who was that woman?” Joan called out.

  He hated how she’d walk in and start talking, not even knowing if he was there. Loud, so loud.

  “What woman?”

  “Don’t start with me,” she said, entering the bedroom. “I saw her kissing you on the street. What’s been going on?” She eyed the mussed-up bed, which he always kept obsessively neat.

  “Did you go in my foot locker?” Bud asked. “Did you take things out of my foot locker? I’m missing some important papers.”

  “Bud, you hid those pictures yourself. Don’t change the subject. Who was that woman? Why was she in here?”

  He hated her accusing tone, making him feel like a child being chastised. But she was all he had; without her he could barely negotiate a single day.

  “I saved her,” Bud explained. “This guy was gonna rob her and I was across the street and ran over and I nailed him—three good shots, all right on the button, and she was so grateful that she gave me a ride home and then she came up and we talked for a long time, maybe an hour, about all kinds of things.” Bud brushed past Joan, reaching for the scrapbook. Had to put it away, before something happened to it. “She wanted to see my book, ’cause of the way I knocked that guy out.”

  “Uh-huh. And did you remember to go to the drugstore? Bud? Did you remember to get the medicine? Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

  Bud just stood there, holding the scrapbook, keeping his back to her. His face burned. When he didn’t answer, Joan came up behind him and reached into his trouser pockets. His knuckles bled white as he clutched the pebbled leather book.

  “Goddamn it! You still got the prescription, Bud! What have you been doing! Where’s the goddamn money? You gave it to that whore, didn’t you? Saved her, my ass! You bought yourself a fucking blowjob, you son of a bitch! With money I gave you. Goddamn it! Is that how little you think of me? Is it? Look at me, you fucking idiot!”

  Bud turned around. Joan was crying. Crying solved nothing. If something hurt, you stowed the pain and kept on punching. You just banged your way through it, that’s all. You banged your way through to the end.

  “Budweiser, all ’round!” Danh shouted.

  Even if he drank ten more he’d never tell anybody what happened that morning. Shit. Sucker-punched by
an old fuck. He nursed his jaw, tossed the hundred he’d rescued off the sidewalk onto the bar, and chuckled to himself.

  It was like his mother used to say, back home: Sometimes, Fortune doesn’t need a reason to smile.

  CONFESSIONS OF A SEX MANIAC

  BY DAVID HENRY STERRY

  Polk Gulch

  Eleven o’clock Monday night I was standing in the nasty skank stink of a body-fluid-scented room trying not to pant as I basked in the glow of the Snow Leopard. She was decked out in black jacket and sleek black boots, the long of her straight black hair leading directly to the short of her barely-there black skirt that hid little of the loveliest legs I’d had the pleasure to gander in God knows how long. Coal eyes with glowing embers in the center made my breath synchopate, and I could almost feel her long red claws at the end of her paws digging into the small of my back.

  I couldn’t quite pin down exactly what she was. Asian? African? Mexican? Italian? Spanish? She seemed to shape-shift as she sized me up from the lone chair in room 211 of Felipe’s Massage Parlor. There was no Felipe. No one was there for a massage. Behind her the wall was stained with what looked like splattered brain, and if you listened hard enough, you could hear the ghosts of ho’s past screaming.

  My eyes enjoyed their tour of the Snow Leopard. The race-car curve of her neck. The flesh bulging out of her bra under the tight black shirt under the black leather jacket.

  The cocoa-butter brown of all that smooth silk skin. The smile that was so tiny I couldn’t even tell if it was really a smile.

  I was falling under the Snow Leopard’s spell, I could feel her Black Magic working on me, and I couldn’t stop seeing her straddling me, those thick red lips contorted with mad passion as she ravaged me like a crazy jungle cat.

  Being a sex maniac has a way of clouding a man’s judgment. The doctor said I was a problematic hypersexualist. I said, “Doc, that takes all the romance out of it. Can’t I just be a sex maniac?” He told me I needed to see him three times a week. I never went back.

  People have many misconceptions about what it’s really like to be a sex maniac. They think just because you’ll rut with any old skunkhumper when the hunger’s upon you, that you don’t crave the crème de la crème. I was the junky who was after the finest China-white high. Only, of course, I was a junky of love. And at 11 o’clock on Monday night, the Snow Leopard looked like the greatest score in a lifetime of scores.

  Keep your mind on the job, my mind reminded me. I was a distribution specialist in the illegal goods and services industry. A master courier. A bagman. Not to be confused with a bag lady, who keeps all her possessions in a shopping cart and screams about how the aliens won’t stop probing her. There are, in fact, female bagmen. Being a postmodern sexualist myself, I don’t have a problem with the gender blurring. I was basically a high-end black-market messenger boy. I picked shit up. I dropped shit off.

  People often assume that just because you’re a sex maniac, you can’t have a life. Wrong again. As with anything, there are all levels of function among sex addicts. I was never one of those grab-a-kid-from-the-schoolyard-and-keep-her-in-my-basement sex maniacs. I was a very high-functioning sex maniac. An ethical sex maniac. I was all about consent. I had rules. I didn’t mix business with pleasure. I took pride in my work. Being the best distribution specialist I could be. That’s just how Mother raised me. So when I was on the job, I showed up on time, I got my package, and I was on my merry way.

  That night was supposed to be no different. Show up, get package, deliver. My boss, Chinese Willy, had made a big point of saying that he was giving this job special attention, like: If you don’t mook this job up, you just might get invited into the club to play some of our little reindeer games. All I had to do was get the package back to Willie’s by midnight. Cake.

  That was before the Snow Leopard. When Shiva Shiv said the name, I laughed out loud. I stopped laughing when Shiva Shiv said, “What the fuck you laughin’ at?” in a voice dripping of curry and murder. The name rattled around in my brain the whole day. Naturally, that night the Snow Leopard invaded my dreams. She was half-cat, half-woman. I could smell the fertile sex as she kept changing back and forth, from cat to woman and back: whiskers and lips, fangs and fur, that rough tongue, claws and paws, breasts and wet flesh, all hungry jungle feline in-heat heat. She was tearing me to shreds, guts ripped open, and blood, my God, she was pounding me, eating my flesh and taking me right to the corner of Ecstasy and Death. I woke up in a cold sweat with a curtain rod for a johnson. I should have known right then and there. Dreams never lie.

  So there I was, staring at the Snow Leopard, with her incredible flesh and her sex-red lips, and I could smell that smell from my dream. That in-heat smell. Or was that just in my head? Being a sex maniac has a way of blurring the fine line between reality and what you’d like reality to be.

  Shut up! I scolded myself. Get your package, take care of your business, and be on yer merry way. I fondled the fifty Large screaming in my secret jacket pocket. Why doesn’t she say something? my mind asked me. She got up and paced like, well, like a big dangerous hungry cat. And I could hear the beat of the jungle drum. Or maybe it was just Busta Rhymes booming from the next room. Money, danger, and the distinct whiff of Snow Leopard shivered me from eyeballs to nut-balls to foot-balls: Adrenaline pumping furiously, I was jacked to the max and stone-cold sober.

  I loved my job. I used to try to explain to people who’d never been in the illegal goods and services industry why it’s such a fun and rewarding line of work. Often when I was on the job I got what I can only describe as an evangelical feeling. Like this is what God wanted me to do. And on that Monday night, I felt like He, or She (I’m not gender-restrictive when it comes to my deities), had brought me to the Snow Leopard to change my life. I can’t explain it, really, except to say I was sitting there thinking that this job felt like one of those jobs where you look back from the future and you say, Wow, that was the greatest job in the history of jobs! But then I started thinking, No, maybe this is one of those jobs you look back on and say, I let myself drift, and that’s how I got this scar.

  The more we didn’t talk, the more electromagnetic the air got, like two saturated clouds bumping and rubbing, the rumbling building as the lightning gathers. I wanted to get a good look at her, fix the constellation of her features in my head so at least I could have her star in my fantasies later. I reached for the light. This is what prompted the first word she ever spoke to me. Naturally, inevitably that word was:

  “No.”

  Spoken in the chilled voice of a seasoned predator.

  It hung there in the air:

  “No.”

  I did not turn the light on. So we stood there in the dark.

  “Are you in, or out?” she purred.

  This was not in the script. When Chinese Willy is expecting delivery of his package at midnight, and it’s 11:13 p.m. and fifty Gs are flaming in your secret jacket pocket, you need to keep your priorities straight. My dance card was full. Or was this the call of the wild? That’s the problem with being a sex maniac. You can never really be sure.

  “I like to know what I’m getting into before I get into something—”

  “Look,” she shot back, those coal eyes glowing, “any minute now two big guys with automatic weapons are gonna bust through that door, and if you’re not in, you should get out.”

  “I like to know what the stakes are before I go all in,” I said.

  “You play your cards right, I’ll make sure lady luck blows on your dice.” She licked her whiskers.

  “What’s the game?” I asked.

  “Look, all I need is an ace in the hole,” she hissed, “and if you’re it, I guarantee the pot’ll be very sweet. But tic-toc, we’re on the clock.”

  “How do I know you’re not bluffing?” I asked, ready to crawl through broken glass for her, but trying not to show it. “Trying to set me up for a big fall?”

  “Tic-toc, tic-toc.” She blazed those cat
eyes at me.

  I folded with a sigh: “I’m all in.”

  “I just hope you got enough hand—”

  Before she could even get through the sentence, two very big guys with very automatic weapons busted through the door. She dropped straight down, behind the bed frame, while pulling out a petite little pistol. I unholstered and duck-n-rolled under the bed, firing as fast as my fingers’ll fly, taking down the very big guy on the left. First shot: right shoulder. Second shot: belly-blast. Third shot: left kneecap. As he fell he fired his Glock, bullets spraying around the room like his gun was prematurely ejaculating. When he hit the floor, eye level with me, I got off the shot I’m truly proud of, as I plugged a slug right over the mug’s noseholes. That’s when the big guy’s lights went out.

  The Snow Leopard fired one quiet dainty shot from her petite little pistol. It slid with the greatest of ease through the left eyeball of the very big guy on the right. And that was all she wrote for him.

  In the calm-after-the-storm aftermath, all I could hear was her cool kitty breath, hot on my neck, as we huddled under the bed, two very big guys sprawled dead on the floor in front of us in spatters of assassin-red blood.

  Panicked screams from fleeing Felipe freaks now careened into the room. In a flash I turned, my gun at her temple, and I was face-to-face with the Snow Leopard, eye-to-eye with all that coal and fire, breathing her, that in-heat dream smell making me swell, and I knew I was losing myself in her.

  Something hard poking into my ribs brought me back. Lo and behold, it was her little pistol. Suddenly I was love-drunk no more, smack-dab in the middle of an old-fashioned Mexican stand-off.

  Maybe it was being under the bed. Maybe it was the red on the floor like a blood Rorschach. Maybe it was the thrill of the kill. Maybe it was just the Snow Leopard paying her debt. All I know is that those ecstasy-red lips were moving into mine, and suddenly hands were under shirts and skin was scorching under fingers. Before I knew what was what, she had me in hand, as cold metal pressed into my testicles. Made my nuts do the bunnyhop. As she worked me over, she dug those long sharp red claws into my chest, opening my flesh. Yes, there was pain, but it was good, as an animal-wild growl rose from way deep inside her throat, and there was much bumping and grinding.