But I wanted to imagine a future with Robin. I hoped that the two of us would be doing something to get in trouble. I hoped we’d fuck like big bunnies all the time. Then I stopped that line of thought. Hope was for losers. Hopers are dopers, I knew that.
There was only Flood in the way of my future. Popping him would be as easy as taking the K.Farouk .38 from my pocket and firing it at the television face. Flash! Bang! Phfft!
Got him right in the wallet.
XV
Asmodeus Rising
Passers-by turned their bodies and skittered sideways through the knot of black men in leather coats on the sidewalk. The group of men had a microphone, and one of them was haranguing a little crowd of whites, blacks, and unemployed Mexican labourers in straw hats.
“This is fucked up! The white man lets his wife work because he is a faggot! You people hear what I’m sayin’ to you? A good woman should be at home, down on her knees in front of her man, takin’ care of her children. Bein’ a real woman! The white man is evil in how he looks on women. That’s right, that’s right! He goes to porno stores and spills his seed on the floor. He goes there to look at our black women, who are there whorin’ their bodies so they can put fine clothes on their backs. God is watching all this! God knows! The white man is poisoning and polluting the whole world and the people in it, but God is watching!”
A little of this goes a long way, Thomas Flood thought with professional disdain, listening from inside his limousine. He was one of Parousia’s street corner preachers, this angry young black man. Couldn’t think of his name. It didn’t matter. There was something about his aggressive technique that worked. The man had a gift. He needed training, but he would be useful when Flood brought his great Crusade north to San Francisco.
“We’ve seen enough of him. Let’s go to that hotel where you say Robin has been staying.” His driver’s name was Hopper, and he was chief of Parousia’s security force. He had located Robin Flood at the Hotel Napa which she’d been seen entering at odd hours, and leaving at even odder times.
Thomas Flood had evaluated the risk of paying a surprise visit to his daughter in these questionable surroundings — or even coming to San Francisco at all until the start of the Crusade — and decided that he didn’t care about the risk. He needed to see Robin for the good of his eternal soul.
Hopper pulled the limousine up to the front or the grimy Hotel Napa on Eddy Street and Flood jumped out quickly, dressed in blue jeans and a denim jacket with a baseball cap. He didn’t think any other disguise was necessary. He moved quickly through the smelly lobby and stepped into the narrow old elevator.
The door to her room was unlocked, and he pushed his way in. Music assaulted his ears. So Robin was here in this messy stinking hotel room in the Tenderloin. In the heart of vice. He saw a television on the floor with a hole in the screen.
Robin was in the bathroom singing to the music. Her voice was richer than he remembered. He called out, but she couldn’t hear over the music.
It wasn’t Robin. It was a black harlot sitting on the edge of the bathtub painting her toenails, naked as the day she was born. She had just gotten out of the bath. The mirror was still steamed over, and the dirty water was gurgling down the drain.
“Who’re you?” she said, so surprised she dropped the nail polish. Her taut breasts bounced with the movement.
Thomas Flood was stunned by her comeliness. This daughter of Ham is a temptress like none other since Rebecca, he thought.
He could feel Asmodeus rising and he blushed.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded, hands on hips.
“I’m looking for my daughter.” His throat was constricted.
“Well, you sure don’t look like my Daddy.”
“Robin. Robin Flood.”
“You’re Robin’s father? The television preacher?”
Evidently Robin had told this black whore bitch things that were private, after signing an agreement not to talk about him.
“I’m Robin’s father, that’s right,” he replied for lack or anything else to say — he couldn’t take his eyes from her dark tight nipples, the beauty of her breasts. Asmodeus cried out to be released.
“I’m Dollar.” She smiled when she understood his predicament.
“Why don’t I wait outside until you put some clothes on?”
“No, you can stay here. But if you want me to put something on....”
“I do.”
“Don’t look like your dick do, darling.” She laughed, sounding like a sinful child.
“Please. Put your clothes on.”
He backed out of the bathroom and stumbled over the broken television set, falling to his knees.
— You have set temptation in my way, Lord.
— Don’t do this, Flood. I will strike you down for this.
The black harlot came towards him wearing a white fur coat, open, holding her hands out to him, her big lips smiling, the hair between her legs shaved so he could see the puffy lips of her slit. Where the serpent lived.
— Do not do this, Flood.
— I burn, I burn!
XVI
The Blood in Buddy’s Eye
I was in a serious wicked mood because I’d been dumb. I’d always told myself that I’d keep it light when it came to girls. They had holes in handy places, but they weren’t people, not really. Just fucking holes who’d leave you.
But then I wasn’t a person myself. Nobody knew who I was or what I had inside me, and until I made them see I was capable of doing something dumb. Like falling for a lesbian who fucked my ass and took off with something of mine. What did she take? That girl took my heart. If I have one. (I guess I do, or I wouldn’t be feeling this way.)
Dumb. I didn’t like it. It made me gloomy walking through the Tenderloin. It was another one of those god damned perfect California days, but everything was grey and black and puke green to me. On the corner ahead a man was talking into a microphone and I went towards his voice looking for a cheap laugh. It was a preacher all right. An African-American gentleman in a leather coat, suit and tie. A couple of big kabloonas also in leather coats stood on each side of him holding big sticks.
I listened for a minute to his rap.
“The white man will die out because his genes are weak. The white man has polluted the world so much that it is now having an effect on the male production of sperm. That’s right! You won’t hear this information anywhere else but right here! The male sperm count today is only half of what it was 30-40 years ago, and you know what that means. This trend keeps up, there won’t be any human race! If Armageddon doesn’t get us first, then the white man’s pollution will get us later!”
I liked that idea a lot. I was almost cheered up by the idea of the whole world fucking and no babies coming out. Just in and out, in and out, and then, presto, one day, no more us.
I knew something was wrong at the Hotel Napa when I opened the door to Dollar’s room. There was a bad smell added to all the other odours the three of us had mixed in the bed.
I stood there just looking in before I stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind me. I was very quiet, holding my breath.
As a kid, you always know when something is hiding in a dark room. So you try not to breathe, you get down low, and you just listen. Then you can hear the monster breathing.
I got down on my knees and started crawling like a baby on the carpet, guided by the light from the street lamps coming in through the windows. The smell didn’t mean anything to me until I thought blood, and just at that moment my hand slipped on the carpet into something wet.
I held my wet hand up and tried to see what it was. Then I pushed myself up, using an end table and the wall, until I found the light switch. The monster didn’t matter now. My bloody hand prints climbed the wall.
Everywhere I looked there was blood. Even some splattered on the ceiling in a delicate spray. It was on the floor, the furniture, and the walls. There was a hand print on the window.
The television I’d shot was still on the floor.
When you go hunting rabbits, you have to skin them before you can cook them. I never liked that part, so I stopped going hunting. He hadn’t skinned Dollar, but her beautiful brown body was covered with her blood. She was on her back on the bathroom floor, her head jammed up against the toilet like a bird with a broken neck. I think her throat was cut, but I didn’t kneel down to look. Her legs were spread grotesquely wide apart, one of them propped on the tub, and there was nothing between them any more but bloody meat. The bastard had cut out her cooch.
That fucked me up. Miss Pearl Dollar cut up like a rabbit fucked me up. I always thought I was a don’t-give-a-shit kind of guy. I enjoyed pain up to a point — giving it, and I didn’t mind taking it. We all have to. But Dollar was a friend of mine. She had a fine pussy, and she was generous with it. A real slut and a good lady, despite her games with Robin.
That taught me a lesson — one of those you never want to learn this way. I had feelings I didn’t know about, hiding inside me, I was fucked up like never before. I sat down on the couch and there was blood there too, like the guy had started slicing her up there. Like they’d been sitting talking, maybe about the blowjob she was about to give him, when he sliced and diced her.
I couldn’t cry — what was that about, crying? Whining about the bad deal the universe hands you is not in Buddy Tate’s vocabulary. What I wanted was revenge, big time, like elephants stomping on heads bursting like cantaloupes and hydrogen bombs dropping in the swimming pools of richies: burn their villages and rape their women, swing their kids against hard objects.
I got the courage to look at her again. I thought that maybe whatever she saw last would be imprinted on her eyes. I bent down over her body, not caring about the blood I was slipping in, and put my live eyeball next to her dead one.
We eyeballed each other from different worlds. Hers were dark and scared shitless. They said, “please-don’t-cut-me-what-the-hell-are-you-doing-you’re-killing-me-and-I-don’t-even-know-why”. Mine were seeing inside her head, but then I realised her head had stopped, and it wouldn’t be starting up again. Mine was still going, but hers had stopped like a busted clock. I didn’t see anybody in her eyes, so I closed them like the cops do in crime movies. Shut those baby browns and didn’t cry.
I just sat there in her blood next to her, not giving a shit for what came next, until I began to feel like I needed a bath. I was smeared everywhere with her blood, and my clothes were clotted dark lumps when I took them off.
No disrespect to Miss Pearl Dollar, so I put a sheet over her and poured a tub to soak in. But I was freaked, and kept K. Farouk’s special .38 on the sink within easy reach. I just sank into that tub and spaced out. Put my feet up and started talking to Pearl like she was still there. Maybe she was, I don’t know...
“Pearl,” I said to the bitch, “you were hot — and now you’re not.” That’s how I saw it, on one level. I wanted her to say something back but I guess she wasn’t up to being teased one last time. I got serious then:
“Miss Pearl,” I said to her quite sincerely, wiping my eyes clear of soap, “I’m going to be missing you. I wish you could still talk, so you could tell me who did this to you. I’d drop the hammer on the mother-fucker.”
But she couldn’t talk. I wasn’t going to say anymore, because maybe I was getting a little crazy. But I could hear just fine, and what I heard was the door opening. I picked up the pistol and put it under a washcloth on the soap tray.
No point leaving the safety of the tub. I thought about rabbits.
My heart beat faster as the footsteps got closer. Each footstep pissed me off. I expected Jack the fucking Ripper, but it was the African-American preacher from the street corner who thought white guys were faggots with a low sperm count.
His face turned the colour of ashes in a burn barrel when he saw me sitting in the tub taking a splash while the blood-covered walls and tiles said to him there was an oozing body under the sheet on the floor.
“What the fuck?” is what he said. He reached into his leather coat pocket for something but I showed him the pistol and he stopped that. I was happy. How many times in life does it happen that you have the perfect comeback for an important question? When he saw it, he repeated himself: “What the fuck?” and stopped his hand. Showed it to me empty. He’d learned the drill somewhere.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him.
“What you did, white man. What you did! My eyes are not weak.”
“Fuck you, I didn’t kill her. I don’t know who killed her. Maybe you do — or you wouldn’t be here.”
“I’m looking for my sister, you red-headed peckerwood. My errant sister.”
“Look for yourself.”
He bent down, keeping his eyes on the pistol, and lifted the bloody sheet with two delicate fingers.
He started to barf big time. I guess he was discovering his feelings too. Choked it back.
“You know her?”
His face got worked up. His black-tack eyes got glassy.
“Her name is Latisha, and she is laying down there on the cold floor and you are calmly taking your fucking bath!”
His hands made strangling motions. “I didn’t,” I yelled at him, pointing the pistol. He stopped.
“You didn’t what, you albino cockroach?”
“Pearl was a friend of mine. She was a good fuck. I didn’t kill her. I thought maybe you did.”
“Your mother on a plate with rice, white boy!”
“Got no mother. What are you doing here?”
His eyes went dull. “I was called to clean.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Man tells me to go clean, I go clean.”
His voice was tight, just like mine. We knew what was wrong.
“Look, I got the gun. Who gave you the call?”
“Fuck you. I can’t say that.”
“It’s your sister that’s dead.”
“You killed her.”
“No, I just fucked her. She was my friend.”
“You son-of-a-bitch white asshole mother.”
I was sick of his shit.
“Get down on your knees if you don’t want to tell me who sent you. You’re gonna join your sister.”
“Careful now.” He had some spirit, but I was going to blow his ass away. I didn’t care.
He got down on his knees beside Dollar’s white-sheeted body. “Next to my ear. Right next to my ear, white boy.”
“Excuse me? I’ll shoot you any place I motherfucking please.”
“Let me pray then. Have some respect.”
“Pray that you tell me. That’s your prayer.”
I stood up in the bath water pointing the pistol at him. It was a powerful feeling, like being God.
He was muttering something under his breath like “blood”, just that word over and over, and then he lurched up at me saying it louder and it wasn’t “blood” he was saying but “Flood!” I brought the pistol barrel down on his head, his face hit the rim of the tub hard, and he folded back down like a jack in the box. I climbed out of the tub and stepped over him out into the room that was painted with blood.
Blood, blood everywhere and nowhere to hide.
When you don’t know what to do, go to bed, get under the covers, and pretend it’s all a dream. It usually is.
XVII
Blood Ritual
Robin Flood stood on her penthouse balcony high above the Mission District surveying her playground. Her gaze was directed to the left, towards North Beach in the distance, and then it slowly swept the horizon to the Bay Bridge. The paradise on a fault line built around the Mission Dolores was, to her, still a place of enchantment from an Arabian Nights fantasy. Especially as evening fell — purple streaks in the sky, the lights coming on — she felt that anything could happen here, that here she could play any role.
Slowly, languorously, she disrobed, and let each article of clothing drop to the floor — where it found
its own niche in the ankle-high sea of clothes, books, shoes, art supplies, photographs, and the technodetritus of music and memory that undulated and billowed through the rooms of her Bernal Heights penthouse.
She sat at her make-up table to assess the damage wrought by her over-the-top encounter with Buddy Tate, and to prepare for what promised to be an extraordinary evening.
The invitation propped against the mirror was on heavy expensive paper edged in what looked like dried blood. It said:
The Society of Spectacles invites your
participation in a Blood Ritual
9pm Tuesday
Atelier, 346 Saint Street, SF
And in the lower right corner, in reddish ink, Laura Aurora had written her name in flowing calligraphy.
Robin applied white eye shadow to heighten the effect her startling eyes created. She used lipstick to make her lips and nipples glossy. When she stretched her new tattoo twinged and she was reminded of Buddy Tate.
“Buddy Tate,” she said once to the person in the mirror, imitating his flat, vaguely threatening western voice. What she saw in the mirror was someone she didn’t know, someone who could fall in love with Buddy Tate.
The mirror saw through her and out the window.
She stepped out into the balmy evening in a black leather cape, soft on her skin like her high black boots. Beneath her cape she wore a short black vinyl dress, cut low in the bosom.
She walked down Mission Street without looking left or right, feigning obliviousness to the eyes she attracted. Tall palm trees were spiky against the bright night sky. The homeless were everywhere, sprawled in every other doorway. Entire forlorn families waited on street corners for a ride to nowhere. Cripples, drunks and beggars were sentient obstacle courses stretched out in odd patterns over the coloured tiles of the sidewalk. A Mexican motif predominated. They were the ‘helpless ones’ to journalists — an ever-expanding population abandoned like old appliances by the Republicrat Party in the mid-nineties, when things first started going wrong.
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