San Francisco Noir

by Peter Maravelis

  I reached down to reciprocate. Surprise, surprise. There was something down there. Between her legs. Wait a minute, it’s my package, my mind said in surprise. I slipped it out and into my pocket. As I pulled the cash out of my secret jacket pocket, and as I slid the money into her hand, I moved her scanties aside with my gun and gave her the tiniest taste of all of me.

  Right away she wanted more. Tried to shove me further in. But I wouldn’t let her have any more. I wanted to make her work for it. Which she did: teeth into my shoulder, claws into my back, this krazy kat was actually drawing blood. She quickly got me pinned on my back and started to have me for a late-night supper. Then she put her pistol tip on my lip and she sucked on both at the same time.

  I confess, as a sex addict, the most gratifying aspect of the whole Snow Leopard experience was how she kept maneuvering me around so she could get at me better, bucking and howling, growling and grunting, groaning and moaning, fast, cuz she knew that bigger and larger trouble was most certainly going to walk right through that door at any second.

  This is religious, I was thinking, it’s superhuman, interstellar, transcendental. Time was no more. The mind was no more. There was nothing else in the world, even as the universe rushed through me and into her, then back again. Estrogen shockwaved through my central nervous system and my johnson was transformed into a lightning rod that shot bolts as we skydived together off the top of the Golden Gate Bridge and floated, shaking and speaking in tongues together, landing back under the bed at Felipe’s, panting and radioactive in the afterrapture.

  Like a stop-action movie she:

  Stood

  Rearranged

  Cat-stretched

  Walked toward the door to leave.

  I struggled up and stood paralyzed, like a life-sized action-figure of myself, watched each event transpire, but somehow missed all the connecting moves, how she got from point A to B to C to D.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” spurted out of my mouth with a disturbing level of desperation. “How can I get ahold of you?”

  “You can’t,” she purred, just loud enough for me to hear, as she approached the door.

  “Hold on a second, I wanna—” I didn’t say that I wanted to have her again, right away, and for the rest of my life.

  “Yeah, I know.” She gave me this devastating, bored-on-jaded Cheshire half-grin, and I knew she was going to just disappear any second as her hand fingered the knob of the door and she was inches away from being gone.

  “Hey, look, I just saved your life here.” I hated how limp and lame and tame my voice sounded. “I was your ace-inthe-hole.”

  “Why do you think I blew on your dice?” She nodded ever-so-slightly, the door was opening now and she’d almost slipped all the way through it.

  “I thought it was my boyish good looks and my winning personality,” I cracked back, hoping a laugh would buy me another minute.

  “That’s why I didn’t kill you.”

  The Snow Leopard’s grin spread, and after she left, it lingered for several moments before it slowly faded away.

  Suddenly everything went back to regular speed, and the sounds of all the freaked-out Felipe habitues had a new sound added to them. Cop sounds. Sirens and intercoms and heavy steps headed hard down the hall, capital-T trouble, and I was out the window, escaping down the fire escape, and boom! walking up Geary, breathing the cool yet fetid air of Polk Gulch, the taste of Snow Leopard wet on my lips.

  I tucked in. Took a breath. Checked the time. 11:38. How can that be? I was biblical with the Snow Leopard for all of eight minutes. Why did it feel like eight lifetimes?

  Chinese Willie’s was five minutes away, and walking up Geary toward Van Ness, the deep peace of a job well done, combined with the high of scoring all that pure Snow Leopard, caused a highly satisfied sigh to slide out of me. In front of Frenchy’s Adult Emporium, where they’re always HIRING, Rasta Hat Man was taking a wee late-night nap on his sidewalk bed. I admire a man who can just curl up right there on Geary and catch a few winks. No pillow, no blankets: That’s discipline. An old blind brother in a ratty-tatty shabby old overcoat held a blindman cane, only it was all duct-taped together. I couldn’t help it, when I saw the old blind brother with his busted, taped-up cane, it really got to me. So I went over to the guy and I slipped him a sawbuck.

  “It’s a ten-spot,” I said low, and the guy came over all humble and happy.

  “Thank ya, sir, God bless ya, thank ya, sir, God bless ya.”

  I like that in a bum. Gratitude. I hate these bums, you give ’em coin and they look at you like they’re doing you a big favor by taking your money. No, I want some genuine thank-you from my bum.

  By the way, bum is the word of choice down here. Once I was talking to one of these superindustrious bums, you know the type, always hustling around a hundred miles an hour, busting their bony butts, they have a whole circuit worked out, cashing in hundreds of bottles a day. I love this guy, he’s always got a line of bottle-loaded shopping carts all tied together like he’s riding herd over a bum wagon train. I called him James Brown, seeings how he’s the hardest working man in show business. He got a kick out of that. So one time I was talking to James Brown about homeless-this and homeless-that, and the brother went off:

  “Don’t call me no homeless, mutherfucker! I’m a bum! I don’t work but when I wanna work, I don’t kiss no bawsman’s ass, I take my own vacation, I make my own rules, I’m a bum, mutherfucker, and I’m proud. Hallelujah, I’m a bum!”

  Okay, you’re a bum, Hallelujah. And every time I saw James Brown, there was some shoeless loser, some lower-class riffraff bum railing on this superindustrious brother from another mother, sticking a raw, puffy-bum hand out, screaming: “Why you don’t you give me some love? You owe me, you sell-out mutherfucker!”

  It happens all the way from the outhouse to the penthouse. Some citizens work their noses to the bone, and some jealous leaching ne’er-do-wells are always there to knock them down a peg. Sweet misery loves her company, from Nob Hill to Polk Gulch.

  People dis the Gulch, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s the only neighborhood if you’re really serious about being a sex maniac. The Haight’s too full of gentrified Gap-heads, gone-to-seed hippy hopheads, and runaway urchin thieves. The Richmond is a great place to go if you’re lookin’ for the slowest, most boring death imaginable. SoMa? Please! Those dot-con pseudo-hipsters deserve every scrap of misery they’ve heaped on themselves. I do enjoy North Beach on a sunny afternoon, but in the end there’s too many clueless tourists clogging up the arteries. Nob Hill is a travesty, teaming with all those vaginally challenged fashion victims. Hell, even the poodles get botoxed up there. And there’s nothing tender in the Tenderloin. The only loin in the TL is crawling with nasty maggots. I once saw some toothless loon cap his running mate over a Q-tip. Hey, I like Q-tips as much as the next guy, but only in the TL can you get terminated over one.

  Because of its equidistant location between the Tenderloin and Nob Hill, you will hear the sisters sometimes call Polk Gulch the Tender Knob, which I quite enjoy. Here’s a little known fact: The word gulch comes from an Anglicization of gulchen, which means to gulp. When you consider how much has been guzzled and gulped in the Gulch over the years, it seems a perfect fit, doesn’t it? Don’t get me wrong, the Gulch is not for the feebleminded or the weak-willed. The Gulch will chew you up and spit you out if you let it. But if you have Game, you can get anything anytime in the Gulch. And you can get it for cheap.

  The Gulch is where rough trade goes for a vacation. So you can bag a nasty little bit of fluff, like this girly hanging outside Koko’s, with the hiphuggers revealing pretty pink panties and FOXY plastered in cheap lettering across the seat of her jeans stuffed full of all that fine white flesh, she’s positively spilling out her too-small pleather jacket, and for twenty-five dollars and unlimited meth, chances are she’ll let you have an unlimited all-access pass to her hidden treasures until she’s not high anymore. And with the connoisseu
r-quality meth I kept on hand for specifically this purpose, that could last days at a stretch. Yes, she was rough, but sometimes I liked it rough.

  But the true glory of the Gulch is that the very next second you’ll spot two touristy girlies shivering in shorts walking by with beautiful pale goosebumping gams, swathed in big I § SF sweatshirts they had to buy cuz nobody told them how freezing cold it is in SF. You’d be shocked how easy it is to sidle up to these corn-fed beauties (who are most of them looking to take a walk on the wild side in Baghdad-by-the-Bay, by the way) and take them for some paella at the Spanish joint on the corner, then end up back at my lovepad for some wine and some weed if they’re into it, which they almost always are, and all of a sudden they’re on my big round bed begging for one more to make it an even ten so they can go back and tell their cheesehead friends about how they § SF.

  Across the street heading toward Polk, three of the loud brothers congregated around a lost-looking white man in a too-expensive jacket, they were waving DVDs in his face, screaming about how they could get any title he wanted. Then suddenly eight or nine of the loud brothers crawled out of Godknowswhere, surrounded the lost-looking jacket like a giant black widow spider, and swallowed it and its owner whole.

  A tattooed post-teen with a hunk of metal through her lip and one stuck through her eyebrow clunked by next. I found myself wondering where else she was pierced. Sometimes those tattooed pierced freaky females enjoy a bit of punishment with their pain and that can be fun, riding that line between angel and devil.

  More local color, Gulch-style, sashayed past in a ridiculous micro-mini and huge balloon breasts. She was one of these tiny passable Thai trannies. Very tidy. Truthfully, as a sex addict, I enjoy a passable trannie. Take it from one who knows, a hotty tranny’ll rattle your bones and make yer cahones dance like a couple of Mexican jumping beans. Because she wants to be a she more than any female. But I could only go to Trannie Land if she stayed a she. That’s just me. Maybe I was just not evolved enough to be comfortable with man-love. I wish I could’ve. I tried, believe me. My life would have been so much easier if I could’ve gotten off on men, cuz you can have man 25/8. Shake a tree in the Gulch and a ton of love-ready man falls out. Woman, even faux-woman, even bad woman, even the nastiest skagmeister skunkkunt, is often so hard to come by. I mean, obviously there are women everywhere, but it takes so much effort just getting in most of the really exceptional woman, it’s exhausting.

  Next up on the Gulch hit parade was a disaffected arty sweet-sixteeny, all gangly angles and long colt legs, hoody ripped so her bra strap showed over the softness of all that untouched skin underneath, with all that attitude heaped on top. I just loved going up to one of these flouncing clomping angry grrrrls and saying, Hey, I know how it is, your parents suck, your school sucks, your teacher sucks, your friends suck, the whole world sucks, but I can show you how to escape into ecstasy, lose yourself to the pleasures of the flesh, primal scream all that bopper angst right out. You have all the equipment you need, but you have no clue how to use it, I can show you the whole thing in a couple of hours. Plus, you cannot believe how jealous your stupid sucking friends’ll be, and just how much this will piss your stupid sucking parents off.

  Oh, I love this guy: He never wears a shirt, even in the freezing rain, he’s so wired and wiry, you can see every bone in his body, he’s like a skeleton wearing a skin tarp stretched too tight. He loves to run right in front of speeding cars. That’s his thing. And he never gets hit. I saw him cause three separate accidents, one of them a three-car fiasco. But he never gets so much as a scratch. ’Course, he is lean and lithe and wiry as hell, like I said, so he’s very hard to hit. But as I walked past and watched him, I wondered what he might’ve been, like maybe an Olympic hurdler or an NFL scatback or a Hollywood stuntman, instead of a death-defying crack casualty.

  As I turned down Chinese Willy’s alley, the animal cried out inside me: I need more Snow Leopard! The pictures flashed back: those throat moans, cold steel on my boys, her squirming so she could have all of me. My open chest skin was stinging in the chill of the night, and I could still feel her digging into me.

  It’s so gratifying when reality actually turns out better than fantasy. Chinese Willy, who’s actually Mexican but really looks, I kid you not, Chinese, was even fatter and happier than I’d imagined he’d be. If there’s one thing he likes more than getting his money, it’s getting his money early. So he was practically jovial as he counted all those potatoes at 11:52, instead of midnight. I watched him touching and fondling his cabbage, and suddenly I understood: This is his thing. The man is a cash addict.

  Chinese Willy is an old-school gangster, which has its ups and downs. On the one hand, he’s hooked up with everybody and nobody can touch him, which meant nobody could touch me. On the other hand, he’s prone to irrational outbursts of ultra-violence that can really wreak havoc on a person’s skull. He loves all that vendetta malarkey, and he’s very big on LOYALTY and RESPECT. And he loves to break balls. His whole social hierarchy is based on the breaking of other people’s balls. It’s his way of saying he likes you. When Chinese Willy stops breaking your balls, that’s when it’s time to watch your back.

  One of the odder things about Chinese Willy is that even though he’s actually Mexican, he surrounds himself with Chinamen, and he’s always bankrolling these high-end Chinese honeys so they’ll hang with him, and he even kind of talks like one of those old-timey Chinamen. It’s like somehow because he looks Chinese, he’s become a Chinaman.

  “So,” he mumbled through a huge mouthful of egg salad, “how you like Snow Leopard?” He glanced sideways at Crack Harry, Shiva Shiv, and Knuckles, and when he did that insinuating vulgar guttural chuckle, that was their cue to do the same. Like they were all in on some secret that I wasn’t, the object being to make me feel like a big steaming heap of shit. But the beauty of being a sex maniac is that you could just not care less about any of this. It was just so much water off the back of my duck, while I maneuvered my way toward my next fix.

  “Yeah, she was a real piece of work—”

  “You say mouthful there.” Assorted grunts and belches and chortles erupted from Crack Harry and Shiva Shiv and Knuckles.

  “Yeah, I was just wondering if I could get her digits, cuz I gotta proposition I wanna—”

  Chinese Willy shut me down like I was the clap and he was penicillin: “No! You thank me for this. I tell now, you listen: You not wanna make fuckeefuck wit’ this clazy bitch! Right, boys?”

  They nodded and grunted like the chunks of muscle they are.

  “Naw, you don’t understand,” I plodded on, “I have an unresolved situation on my hands vis-à-vi—”

  “Now you watch my lip: No!” Egg salad sprayed from the Mexican lips of Chinese Willy. “Stay fuck away from this clazy bitch!”

  “With all due respect”—Willy loves all that all-due-respect business, you could feel his sphincter unpinch—“I’ve been working for you for five years, I’m always straight, I bring you a steady stream of new business, and I have never asked you for one single thing. This is all I ask. I need to talk to the Snow Leopard. With all due respect—”

  I couldn’t even get the last due-respects out on account of the veins that were popping up on that huge Chinese-looking head, as “NO! FUCK DAMN YOU!” thundered from Willy, along with another fusillade of egg salad, a small particle of which flew all the way over the desk and landed on my vintage Warriors warm-up.

  This always signals the end of any dispute involving Chinese Willy. It is a well-known fact that after the third “No!” from Chinese Willy, you continue a dispute at your own risk, as an irrational outburst will most likely result. Since I did not wish to have my cheek pierced by a staple gun, or my nose broken with Chinese Willy’s Ugly Billy (his billyclub of choice, a slender twenty-four inches of hardened metal, conventionally used for bashing fish in the head until they’re dead after you’ve reeled them in), I dropped the topic.

  But just
when I was ready to write Chinese Willy off as a classless thug, he peeled off five Large and handed them to me, even though he only owed me a G, and with great pomp and ceremony, he proclaimed:

  “Okay, maybe you right. You don’t never fuck up. Not never. So maybe Chinese Willy take you for granted. But I do you favor here. Snow Leopard, she take no prisoner. This for you own good. You understand I no want to see this clazy bitch fuck you shit up?”

  “Thank you for taking the time to help me, and I appreciate your generosity, which I am not even deserving of, but what the hell, I’ll take it.”

  I pocketed the five Gs with a flourish, and they ate it up, loved that I was giving a tiny little shot to the man himself, as he laughed: “He got brass monkey balls, don’t he?”

  Everybody made little grunty snorty sounds, and Chinese Willy continued: “I got pickup for you, noon tomorrow, Sophia’s, Butterball, he got thing for you, you take to Sweetmeat, he got thing for you, I need back here by 1:00.”

  “You got it, bawss.” I smiled wide, and as I sidled out, Chinese Willy shoved a huge hunk of egg salad into his fat, happy Mexican face.

  I practically skipped down the alley to Polk: It was barely midnight, I had four free Gs itching to be scratched in my secret jacket pocket, I didn’t have to work again for twelve hours, I was still throbbing from the Snow Leopard work-over, I could feel the cool air soothing the open love-wounds inflicted by the saucy minx I wanted to have every day for the rest of my life, and as I smelled her again, she jolted me to the bone.

  Next stop: Eyeball. The queerest of queer ducks. He’s as tall as he is wide, somewhere between thirty and six hundred years old. Possibly the hairiest man on the planet, he’s got one of these Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers ’dos, slate-colored hair flying everywhere, flowing over the shoulders, burying the ears, drooping in front of the eyes, and avalanching uncontrollably down the front and the back. At a certain point the head hair meets and joins the beard hair, and it looks thick enough to contain entire meals. Which, at times, it does. Thicket of brambled monobrow. Hair sprouting out of knuckles, pouring out of shirt collar and sleeve, pant leg bottom. You could make braids out of the hair coming out of his nose. I’ve never seen Eyeball’s eyeballs. I don’t know that he actually has eyes. But here’s the weird thing: Eyeball’s the guy you go to in the Gulch when you want to know where to find somebody, and he never travels more than the fifty feet between his flophouse hellhole on Larkin, and Hung Wang’s, the filthy greazy-spoon dim sum joint he frequents on O’Farrell. It’s one of the great mysteries of life how this human hairball who can barely see, hardly walk, and never goes anywhere, knows everything there is to know about everyone in the Gulch. If you didn’t see it with your own eyes, you wouldn’t believe it. But this is how Eyeball makes bank. People pay him to tell them where to find what they’re looking for. It makes you think about miracles, how they’re everywhere, only nobody’s paying attention.