by Peter Plate
After parking the car and going inside to my office, I noticed the air conditioner in the building was puttering, struggling to come back to life. Simmons was limping down the corridor, arms slack by his sides, thin-lipped, making a bee-line toward me. My misgivings about him clicked on and began to signify. Even his greeting made me tense.
“What’s with you?”
“The same fucked up shit. I went over to Frances Dominquez’s. I hate those home visits, don’t you?”
“They give me gas.”
He was a caseworker who didn’t like to give food stamps to his clients. Simmons begrudged his caseload the piddly benefits they sought and I knew he disapproved of my tactics, but would he sell me out?
“Charlene, are we gonna see you tonight?”
“What for?”
“Play some pinball, drink some beer after work. At Clooney’s.”
“Is it only single men?”
“No, bring your husband if you want to.”
Simmons said adios to me and turned into another office.
Lavoris had tipped her hand, letting me know that my work was being investigated. Since I’d been fortunate enough to pick up on this tidbit at ground level, I could chart and monitor its tangent, gauging how my fellow coworkers treated me.
Someone was getting ready to rat on me; that was the dynamic central to the issue. My suspects were every other employee in the complex. It was so unfair. I never decried how they did their work, and I didn’t give a hoot about their lives, whether they went to church or worked at a pet shelter over the weekend. Yet, any one of them would roll over on me faster than a hummingbird could fly.
All because I was giving away food stamps.
If Simmons or some other social worker was going to fink on me, there had to be another element to complete the equation. With this viewpoint, I soared with paranoia. It gave me goose bumps and to be candid, I began to perspire in a few very personal places.
The stool pigeon was giving the alert and so naturally, there would have to be a hunt. The falsely accused wrong-doer would have to drop everything, pack her bags and leave town in a hurry. A mature woman dressed in a rabbit fur jacket, patent leather pumps, a boa that had seen its last hurrah and stretch leotards. A female with a face nobody recognized. Who was she?
I feared that woman was me.
ten
A panhandler was standing at the red light on Valencia Street, jingling a paper cup half-filled with pennies, dimes and quarters, and holding a hand-printed sign that said, “I’ve lost my African-American Express card.”
At that same moment across the block, a merchant in a pin-striped suit, with his hair askew, came flying through the doors of the Mission National Bank, screaming, “Stop them! Goddamn it…stop them!”
If looks could kill, this man would have been a contender for the championship of the world. Pimply, ugly, raw-shaven, his brown eyes were swimming in equal parts of anger and dread when he bounded down the cement steps of the bank to the sidewalk. He flung out his hand.
“Help! Police! Help!”
His luck must have existed in contradiction to his lack of handsomeness because a second later, a black and white stopped in front of him, laying some vicious, smoking rubber on the asphalt. A cop’s mug popped out of the passenger side window, shiny haired. He sized up the citizen and quipped:
“What’s up, bud?”
“There’s been a robbery!”
The young cop said something to his partner, the guy behind the steering wheel, then pushed open a rear door. The businessman in his Florsheim shoes climbed aboard, and the car jumped from the curb, executing a surgically precise one hundred-eighty-degree turn and disappearing into an aureole of gray smoke.
Two more squad cars spurted by the bank after them, heading towards the intersection; three other police vehicles turned the corner from Capp Street, following their trail. Now there were a half-dozen black and whites plowing north on Mission Street.
Every circus demands an audience and this interlude wasn’t any exception. The nickel bag dealers from the housing projects on Hoff Street, the papaya vendors, the homeless guys selling bus transfers at the corner, the kids from the continuation high school, everybody was legging it down the sidewalk to where the cops were.
I’d been over at La Cumbre getting some chips and dip, and I followed the crowd past the Sincere Cafe, the Altamont Hotel and Weise Alley, then onto Mission Street. At the next corner, squad cars were parked diagonally across Fifteenth Street. Police officers were milling in the street next to a car stereo repair shop. The man who’d gotten into the cop car at the bank was standing in the gutter, legs spread, arms akimbo, talking loud, braying, “That’s them, all right. I knew they couldn’t get away with it.”
A policeman queried him. “Are you sure about this, sir?”
“Heck, it’s not my fault. I know they don’t look dangerous, but they’re the ones that did it. I didn’t make them pull a stunt like that.”
“When did this happen?”
“The minute we opened the doors for business after lunch, the two of them came in.”
“Hey, bring me some cuffs, will ya?” another cop yelled.
I got the sensation that what I was seeing had been reversed; the circumstances had been pulled from the inside out. Four policemen were frisking an obviously retarded couple. A young man about five-and-a-half feet tall in his twenties and his pal, a woman in her late thirties.
The guy with a mouth like a loudspeaker was saying for all who cared to hear, “They did it, Christ, they sure did. They came into my fuckin’ bank. They’re the ones that did it.”
The male suspect was dressed rather skimpily in a pair of filthy Bermuda shorts, a white t-shirt with a crimson stain around the armpits and a backpack that two cops were busily tearing apart. He kept jerking his head with a compulsive twitch, repeating himself in a monotone.
“I didn’t do it…Everything’s gonna be all right…I didn’t do it.”
“You didn’t do what?” a cop asked him.
There was a godawful stream of tears on his companion’s face. She was a poor, gray-complected woman in a pink and white pullover blouse and pink capris, the kind of female leisure-wear that was popular in the sixties. The color-coordinated attire made my heart pound for her.
A policeman pulled her hands behind her back and without any bravado or mercy, he handcuffed her.
A wino in the crowd cackled, “Hey, can’t you see she ain’t goin’ nowhere?”
The cop who was cuffing her overheard the comment, flushed and raised his head, talking into his mustache. “Who cares what they look like, man? She just robbed a bank. You got that?”
“That’s right,” the banker crowed. “They walked in, and she was behind him. He had that knapsack in his hand. They marched right up to the counter, and they didn’t hesitate. They knew what they wanted.”
A roll of twenties was pulled from the young man’s pack. The policeman who found the cash looked at it with a bemused glare, holding it at arm’s length for everyone to see. This sent the banker into a paroxysm of self-righteous glee.
“That’s the money! That’s it!”
He stopped short when the cop extracted a fork out of the pack, sputtering, “And that’s the weapon. He threatened the teller with the damn fork, and demanded money.”
“I didn’t do anything…Everything’s gonna be all right…Just wait, you’ll see.”
The retarded woman was crying, shifting around in her cuffs, trying to get comfortable. A cop was holding onto her with one of his fingers tucked inside the elastic waistband of her capris. You could say we weren’t living in paradise, but no one was going to tell me a developmentally disabled man and woman had robbed the Mission National Bank on Sixteenth Street with a fork.
The two suspects were escorted to different squad cars. The female bank robber was deposited, albeit gently enough, into the back seat of the lead vehicle. Her pink and white knitted blouse was pulled up high ov
er her midriff, and she squirmed in her handcuffs, trapped against the plastic back seat, wriggling like a rabbit stuffed into a hutch.
Her partner was dropped off into the next vehicle. Cunning, I thought to myself. They won’t let the two criminals travel to jail together. Divide and conquer the disabled, and the normal will rule forever.
“Take ’em away!” a cop in a black riot helmet shouted, waving his nightstick.
I watched the face of the male robber in the police car window, his small head, raven hair and dilated eyes. He was rocking back and forth; not sufficient enough to call for immediate psychiatric referral, but enough to connote the depth of his agitation.
A sunburned junkie onlooker, five miles high on synthetic chiva, turned to me, unsure of who he was talking to and sagely noted, “You need more than a fork to pull off a bank robbery.”
eleven
There was a rustle of fabric at the cubicle’s entrance. I knew that sound and I was familiar with its repercussions. I put down my pencil, and Lavoris drank in my face with her insolent gaze. Without any preamble, she asked me flatly, “What do men see in you, anyway?”
She must’ve been smoking some good weed to get the courage up to ask me a question like that. And the way I was feeling, I wouldn’t have minded puffing on a joint myself. However, here was Lavoris, reminding me there were good girlfriends and there were bad girlfriends. The former was at your back whenever you needed her. The other would cut your throat when she felt like it.
“Guys see what they want to, Lav.” I flipped a hand in the air to let her know that my value was ineffable, that it couldn’t be quantified.
“Oh,” she said. “So there’s something to you besides your big ass?”
I could afford to be self-deprecatory. “Yeah, and you don’t have to look too far to find it.”
“How many times have you been married, Charlene?”
The tension between us felt like a labia ring that was one notch too tight, and it happened with neurotic swiftness.
“Lavoris, I’m working on my third husband.”
“Is Frank going to be the last one?”
“You bet he is.”
My marital life was common knowledge at the DSS; I don’t know why she was asking me about its status. Quite frankly, I knew Lavoris had never been married, and wasn’t capable of it. But I’d kept my nose out of her affairs.
“Listen,” she said. “Let me get serious here. Your old man? That Frank of yours has been seen trading food stamps for money. He went into the liquor store at the corner of Sixteenth Street, where that housing complex is, and tried to get cash for them, offering five to one.”
“How do you know that.”
“From this dude Carlos. He works there. What are you going to do about it, Charlene? Your own husband…and it’s going right by you.”
I don’t know what she read on my face. Maybe she saw insecurity, unacknowledged envy, a smidgen of resentment, the pathos of being on the fast track to nowhere in my thirties. Whatever it was, it was none of her business. If she wanted to turn this into a test of will power, fine. On principle, I’d break her pearly balls if I had to.
“We’re not going to see eye to eye on this, Lav. I said it before, you’re setting me up.”
Until the doors of the Otis Street complex were shut and locked, the courtyard abandoned and buried in debris, and until the windows of the DSS were boarded up, I wasn’t going to stop handing out food stamps. That’s what had cemented the antagonism between Lavoris and myself.
“You watch yourself,” she said.
With this recommendation, Lav pushed off, leaving me alone in the cubicle. I sank into the chair, thought about nada for a minute and then, knowing the atmosphere left behind by Lavoris’s temper wasn’t going to settle down, I got up and went outside.
While I demolished a Marlboro Light in the courtyard, the sun dappled its etiolated rays on the ten-storied towerlike walls of the record management building next door. Iron Mountain was the biggest file storage company in America. Millions of files were kept in that place. Even on a chilly day, it reeked with the odor of aging manila folders.
For every application made for welfare, there was a scrap of paper documenting the facts and the numbers, and all of it went into Iron Mountain’s vaults. It didn’t matter if the data was useless. Everything San Francisco residents said was put on file, verified with the police and district attorney’s office and secured inside the drafty warehouse.
“Hey, Hassler!”
A Pinkerton was calling to me. “You haven’t seen a tiny white kid wandering around by itself, have you, man? You know, wearing a parka and shit?”
I shrugged; no, I hadn’t.
twelve
The neighbors used to have a cocker spaniel when I was six. A bitch that lived in an enclosed porch at the rear of their home. That summer, after the spaniel gave birth to a batch of puppies, I skipped across the street to see them, sneaking inside the house through the unlocked back door.
The mother spaniel was nursing her brood on a maroon, hair-clotted blanket, keeping her babies out of the sun. And while they rested in the shade, emitting wet, squishy noises, I made up a game to play.
I herded the mother and her puppies outside into the yard through the doggie door that’d been installed for their use. Once they were out back, I squatted down on my haunches. Whenever the spaniel or any one of her brood tried to re-enter the house, I’d slam the stout rubber flap of the doggie door on their noses.
Doing this, the hours went by on a torrid July afternoon. If I’d abuse the dogs, the void in me would be lessened. The flood plain of my troubles would recede. If I could just transfer my problems to somebody else, that was my plan.
At five o’clock, their owner came around the corner of the house and frowned when he saw me sitting on the steps. His frown got blacker when he realized what I was doing.
“Chica, what is this?” he asked.
Me, I burst into tears, but didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to tattle on myself. I’d never confess; it was my secret, not his. My darkness, not his world.
Closing time found me zipping up my skirt in the women’s bathroom. There’d been a discharge on my panties. This was to be expected: I’d been eating lots of sweets lately. Cookies, ice cream, carrot cake, chocolate muffins. If I wasn’t cautious, I’d come down with a yeast infection. On my way out of the can, I bumped into Bart Rubio.
“Hey, girl!”
“Yeah?”
“You know I got my hepatitis C test results back.”
“Well, what were they?”
“Take a guess.”
“C’mon, give.”
“Negative.”
“Congratulations.”
“You gonna party with us later?”
“Maybe.”
“Why can’t you just commit yourself to it?”
“Okay, okay. I’ll see you in an hour.”
With Rubio gone, I was alone. The building had emptied out, as if someone had pulled the plug with everyone swirling down the drain. Some went to catch the bus home, others to get rides from their spouses.
So you can imagine my surprise when I entered the cubicle and discovered Eldon was going through my desk drawers. The idiot was so enthralled with his search, he didn’t even hear me come in. I settled back on my aching arches, motionless, intrigued, content to watch him.
The janitor’s white hair was luminous, near-blinding in the overhead light. He was rummaging methodically through the top drawer, the one below it and its successor with the zest of a man who knew what he was hunting for.
He wouldn’t find much. I could’ve stopped him and told him to conserve his energy. But I enjoyed watching him bend over my desk.
Eldon’s neck was crisscrossed with vintage acne scars. He wore a chambray work shirt, boots with soggy neoprene soles, and Wrangler jeans. I wondered what he smelled like between his legs, down there in the morass of his crotch. It had to be musty, with ghost ships
for testicles and a toothpick for a cock. He ransacked the drawers, jettisoning their meager contents onto the floor, and went through the wastepaper basket. Lastly, he perused the hill of applications on my desk.
I had to hold back a smile. I knew what Eldon wanted, but he was rooting about in my house. Should I close the doggie door on him, and listen to his agonized groans?
One day, he’d come to his senses and understand. It was me he desired; not the paraphernalia of my job or the trappings of my power, and certainly not my paperwork. What he wanted was an explanation of why he hated me. But he could never have that from me, never.
“That’s enough, Eldon.”
He practically jumped out of his boots at the sound of my voice. Every blood vessel in his lime-green eyes had contracted, methedrine-crazed, when he saw me. I read in his stare the superstitious putz had actually thought he’d seen a demon, a hobgoblin.
“Fuck, Charlene! Don’t ever do that again!”
“Excuse me. Next time, I’ll knock first, okay?”
“You took a few years off my life.”
I was delighted. That I could scare him so deeply made me feel better about myself. The same way a judiciously planned and executed foray of shoplifting improves one’s self-esteem.
“Eldon, what are you doing here?”
“What am I doing? Weren’t you supposed to go home already?”
“If I have to work around the clock, I’ll be here.”
“I thought the union made you go home at five-thirty.”
That was an impoverished riposte on his part. I could hardly contain my scorn. There were more clever things to say, but I decided to operate at Eldon’s level.
“Okay. Let’s take this one from the top. I’m here because it’s my office, you shit. What’s your alibi?”
Eldon winced admirably. “You should have left by now. It’s after six o’clock.”
About three years ago in an altruistic mood, I had personally intervened to get him off the dole rolls and into a training program, which resulted in his present job. That was all very cute and perky, but to find him fucking around in my office was galling. Why did he detest me? How obvious: I’d helped him when he didn’t want it, and this was the payback.