by Peter Plate
One thing, maybe two things, about my clients that I didn’t understand. They complained about what they had to go through. Why all the peevishness about getting fingerprinted? At least they didn’t have to take a drug test or undergo retina scans. But if that’s what it took to get food stamps, what was the problem?
There was a firm knock at the cubicle door, and Mrs. Dominguez tramped into my office, showing gusto. I directed her to a chair, watching her settle on its cushion, adjusting herself like she was going to take a belated plotz.
Frances was dressed in an oversized Vietnam jungle army coat and a red babushka was knotted under her chin. Her high cheekbones were well-toned for her age, fertilized with Nivea moisturizing lotion, which I could smell from behind my desk.
I waited until she was comfortable before doing anything. The ink pad and blotter, easy-wash napkins and paper towels were on my desktop. Near these items was a blotter sheet that had her surname typed on it in sans-serif lettering.
“What is it you want me to do?” she asked.
She laid her hand, palm up on the desk. She was prepared to have it amputated, to have it severed from her wrist, if that meant she would receive one hundred and fourteen dollars worth of food stamps each month.
“See the ink pad?” I said. “I’m going to dip each of your fingers into it, and then, see that blotter paper with your name on it?” I pointed at the shining white sheet of paper with the fragile red lines. “That’s where your prints will go. That’s all I have to do.”
“Is this necessary?”
“It’s the law, Frances. I can’t do anything about it.”
Mrs. Dominguez questioned me with an obsidian black gaze, trying to figure out what genus of insect I was. But she let me pick up her hand, and I guided the thumb, the index finger, then every other digit onto the ink pad. I made sure she got enough ink on each fingertip, so we wouldn’t have to repeat the procedure twice.
“Have you done this often, Hassler?”
“Lately, yes.”
I took each inked finger with the know-how that comes from genuine craftsmanship, and I pressed them into the spaces on the blotter sheet. Her thumb left a smeared inky print on the paper; the whorls on her index finger looked like a Rorschach test pattern. I was conscious of Mrs. Dominguez’s body odor, similar to the mildew and the dust balls in her living room. I didn’t like our close proximity, but it couldn’t be helped. Out of nowhere, she got personal with me.
“You like the work you do, Charlene?”
“It has its merits,” I replied evenly.
“You help people?”
“Once in a while. It takes an effort.”
“Like with me?”
“Yeah, like with you.”
Fingerprinting never took a lot of time. If you knew what you were doing, it was a cinch. I said to her, “There, that’s not so bad. See? We’re finished. Clean your hands, and use those napkins. They’ll get the ink off.”
“Hassler, you want to have a cup of coffee with me?”
Simmons had poked his shaggy head into my cubicle, extending an unwanted invitation. The more I did for him, the more he wanted. He was a looter who’d take me for everything I could give him. Simmons liked to play cards on the weekends. One time, he beat me out of sixty-five dollars and I didn’t get to pay the electric bill that month. I waggled my arms at him, miming with my hands, not now, I’m with a client.
twenty-eight
In the Mission, between Sixteenth and Eighteenth Streets, you had nouvelle cuisine Breton, Italian and Vietnamese restaurants. You had indigents eating scraps out of the garbage cans on Valencia Street. Then there was Pancho Villa, the taqueria where most caseworkers took their dinner. Vegetarian burritos, pork enchiladas, carne asada, chile rellenos—at prices that enabled us to eat every day.
It was hectic in there. Folks were standing in front of the counter, eyeing the meat on the grill, the frying onions, the bubbling vats of beans, rice, and chicken. A dozen men and women in red aprons were serving up meals of tacos, carne puerco, guacamole and tostadas. In the dining area, a five-piece mariachi band was weaving in between the tables, playing guitars and accordions, singing a corrido. A security guard in a blue windbreaker was at the door, thwarting spare-change artists from coming in and hitting on the patrons.
I was sitting at one of the tables, gnawing on a corn chip. Rubio, Simmons, and Vukovich were hunkered over platters of beans, rice, tortillas, and pitchers of beer. Rubio tore off a piece of braised meat, threw it on a flour tortilla, then said to me, “Dig in. Aren’t you starving?”
With a mouth full of rice and green salsa, Vukovich smiled. “She’s dieting, decreasing her caloric intake.”
“For Frank,” Simmons added.
“I’m not hungry,” I protested.
“Want some beer?”
I didn’t see any harm in that. “Give me a glass. A clean glass.”
“Hey, guess what?” Rubio announced. “My friends called me up and I got some smoke. Anybody want some?”
“What friends are those?” I asked.
“People in the Haight. You wouldn’t know them.”
Simmons scanned the tables and the other diners wolfing down their fast food meals. “What’cha got?”
“Indica. Eighty an eighth. It’s from Canada.”
“Eighty?” Vukovich squinted. “Isn’t that steep, Bart? I mean, we’re your friends.”
“You think about it,” Rubio said.
“Has anybody seen Petard this week?” Vukovich asked.
When me and Rubio refused to dignify the question with answers of our own, Simmons guffawed, “That rip-off? Fuck him.”
I drank the beer, getting a warm spot in my stomach. I was unwinding after a harsh day. I watched the three men eating and for fun, I asked Simmons, “What’s your dad do for a living?”
He didn’t look up from his plate. “This a poll? He was in the Marines. A jarhead lifer. A sergeant.”
“Rubio, what about you?”
“My dad’s in prison in New Mexico. He’s been there now four years, for larceny.”
“Matt?”
“He’s a retired cop down in San Bernardino. You ever been there? He lives with my aunt. How about you, Charlene?”
“My mother said he was a hoodlum from New York. I never knew him.”
Vukovich held up his taco to postulate. “Social workers are the cream of the gene pool.”
“We’re a bunch of fucking bottom feeders,” Rubio said. “Who wants this enchilada? I can’t finish it.”
Simmons pushed aside his plate, wiped his lips with a paper napkin and said, “I’m done. Let’s get out of here.”
Everybody got up at once. Matt tucked in his flannel shirt. Rubio took a swipe at his hair. Simmons lit the stump of a cigar. We went outside into the street, mingling with the Salvadorean crack heads and the speed vegans from the East Bay suburbs. By a vote of three to one, we decided to go shoot pool at Clooney’s.
The four of us had walked no more than ten paces when a black and white squad car zoomed through a red light, pulling up short in front of the newsstand at the southeast corner of Sixteenth and Valencia. I looked around me and didn’t notice any criminal activity, which made me curious. Being a born spectator, I stopped and glanced at the two cops getting out of their car. One of them had a shotgun. Rubio, Simmons, and Vukovich were on the same wavelength as me.
Watching the police at work in the streets was entertaining. It didn’t cost you a cent and it was superior to anything you’d ever find on television. But something was odd. The cop without the shotgun gave all of us social workers the once-over. When he saw Simmons, he clicked on his lapel microphone and said audibly, so we could hear it, “Got a suspect. White male, heavy-set, about forty. Fits the description.”
Then his partner came up from our side, leveling the shotgun at us, and growling at Simmons, “Put your hands where I can see them and get up against the car.”
Simmons was flabbergasted.
He held out arms in supplication and said, “Hey, what’s the deal? Me and my friends here, we were just coming out of Pancho Villa’s.”
The guy with the shotgun gave Simmons a blow across the shoulders, knocking him off-balance. The police officer who’d called in the report reached for the DSS employee and applied a wrist lock. He pivoted him around and then slammed him down on the hood of the squad car. “Put your hands together behind your head!” the cop roared, kicking Simmons. “And spread your legs!”
“Sir, what’s he done?” Rubio asked.
Me and Vukovich didn’t say anything. I knew Rubio was holding some of that smoke he’d been talking about. I got a whiff of the sinsemilla in his pocket like I was a german shepherd narco dog. The cop handcuffed Simmons and was emptying out the contents in his wallet. I was glad there wasn’t any money in the billfold because I knew the policeman would take it. The shotgun bearing officer motioned for myself, Rubio and Vukovich to move away from Simmons, and get up against the liquor store wall where he could observe us more easily.
Matt Vukovich seemed to be handling things, but Rubio was getting uptight. There were a few junkies by the phone booth at the corner, taking in the novel sight of a middle class guy like Simmons getting jacked up by the police. The other people, the college students dressed in thrift store clothing, the downtown workers in their suits, the drag queens stopping into Esta Noche for cocktails, just kept walking like we didn’t exist.
I pressed my back up against the grubby, posterscarred glass siding of the store as the policeman laid out each of Simmons’s identification cards on the car’s hood. He thumbed through his driver’s license, credit cards and his social worker’s right-to-practice certificate.
“What did I do?” Simmons groaned.
Rubio barked, “Yeah, what did he do?”
Vukovich said to me, “ I got to go pee, Charlene.”
I gestured to the shotgun wielding policeman. “Ask him if he’ll let you.”
“Officer, I’m getting tired of this shit!” Rubio screeched.
If we were going to jail, I wanted to get on with it. Three minutes later, the cop got off his microphone and uncuffed Simmons. He let the social worker get up from the hood and handed his wallet back to him, saying, “Here you go, sir. Didn’t mean to inconvenience you, but you fit the description of a suspected rapist. Good night.”
Simmons straightened up, ashy-faced, rubbing his wrists. The two policemen, with no more concern for us than if they’d taken a crap on our shoes, got in their squad car and rolled up the windows. Vukovich, knock-kneed from a full bladder, went to find a bathroom. This left me to watch Rubio run after the cops when they drove off. He was shaking his fists at them with spittle flecking his mouth. “That’s it? Good night? Hey, fuck you guys!”
twenty-nine
Lavoris had returned to work with aplomb, and without bearing a vestige of the thrashing she’d received. If anything, she looked finer than ever, styling a hair-do that rose off the crest of her head like a skyscraper. We chatted briefly before opening. We passed a cigarette between us in the courtyard, and watched the people go by. I was compelled to ask her, “You all right?”
She didn’t even bat an eye, letting me know that she’d never be honest with me. Lavoris’s competitive spirit wouldn’t let her risk the chaos of intimacy.
“Of course. I remain my serene self.”
“I’m serious, Lav. That wasn’t something you can take lightly.”
“Don’t push at it.”
“I’m not. But you can’t deny it. You got shook up.”
“Why are you concerned?”
“Is that so disturbing?”
We could have fired up some unpleasantry right there, the two of us. I was acute about such things as damage. It’s part of my job and a facet of me. I saw something flutter in Lavoris. What it was, I didn’t know. Maybe the edge of a newly healed wound, a scab that wasn’t visible to the eye. I didn’t press her to find out. That wouldn’t have done much for either of us.
I asked myself for the second time in four days, where did my youth go? And the answer was the same: it was like a dope deal that had gone awry. I couldn’t show any remorse about it.
Lavoris said that back in the old days, shortly after Petard had installed her in the Heald Business College night school, readying her for the DSS, he used to tell her things.
“What a cabron,” she recounted. “Gerald told me he was going to be important, that he’d be influential some day. He said he wanted me to be with him.”
“Did you believe that?” I asked her.
I was afraid to look at Lavoris, not because I’d see anything that was harmful to me, but rather, because I’d find a self-destructive, delusionary light in her eyes. To think that Petard would’ve taken us anywhere was a joke.
“You know I did,” she confessed.
I didn’t reveal to her that he’d charmed me with a synonymous tale of wealth and power. Like a sultan and his harem, Gerald had impregnated every one of us with his aspirations.
I was humping it through the corridor, getting back to my office. I felt as though someone was watching me, a feeling parallel to the carjacking I was involved with last month. I’d taken a county vehicle over to Potrero Hill to see a client on Wisconsin Street. I had parked the car on a slope and went inside to have a talk with the lady, who was sitting around a rickety kitchen table with her relatives. A Samoan family of four brothers, three sisters, and their children.
We had an acceptable conversation; there was a chance she’d qualify for aid. I said my farewells and when I went outside, these two brigands toting matte black FALN rifles asked me for my keys. As they drove off in my car, tooting the horn, leaving me in their wake, I saw the lights of Alameda’s shipyard on the bay and further off, San Leandro and Hayward.
Eldon came up beside me, interrupting my reverie. The custodian was sweating, stinky. His demographics: emotionally disturbed, medium weight, platinum hair, dynamite armpits. Just what I needed. If I was lucky, he’d give me a migraine headache.
“I’ve got to talk to you, Charlene!”
“Pardon?”
“I said we have to talk. Get it?”
“What for? I’ve got things to do.”
“I got a notice I might lose my job. Did you have anything to do with it?”
“Wake up, it’s me, Charlene Hassler, social worker. I don’t have anything to do with procedures like that.”
“Don’t give me that bull. You know what it’s about.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
“You sanctimonious fuck, lying through your teeth to my face.”
He said this with such conviction, I knew we had moved on to a higher ground. A frame of reference where paranoia was the greater power. From there, anything could happen.
I had learned years ago that in some instances verbal discourse never solved anything. I did my arithmetic, put two and two together, positive this was one of those conditions. I glanced over my shoulder; none of the security guards were around. Disquieted by this, I tried to rationalize things with Eldon.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know about it. But there’s nothing I can do.”
“That’s convenient.”
“Please, there must be a way we can talk about this. Will you come to my office?”
“What’s there to talk about?”
“We can go over the notice. See if we can reinterpret it. Stuff like that.”
“Reinterpret it. What’s that supposed to mean? Are we talking the same language here?”
“If you don’t like it, you can always fill out a request to have your case reviewed, and if you aren’t satisfied with that, you can go see the senior supervisor, and he’ll have a look at it.”
There should have been some Pinkertons in the vicinity.
“You sure you didn’t know about this?”
“Yes, absolutely. You have no idea how many people I’m seeing from one week to the next. It’s gotten to
the point where I can hardly recall who the fuck I am. Why would I want to screw around with you, and your two-bit job? I’m too goddamn busy.”
“Don’t give me that malarkey.”
“This is going to drive me insane. For the last time, I don’t know what the problem is. Stop making me repeat myself, okay?”
“Sure, sure.”
“I’ve told you what the options are. What more do you want?”
“An answer.”
“But why me?”
My question was left strung out in the space between us, his shoulders close to mine. Eldon unzipped his jacket with a mechanical downward cleaving of his wrist. Rocky entered the waiting room and I panicked, fuck, man, do something. I’d seen too much in the preceding days to have this happening.
And that’s when the janitor went postal on me.
The police said Eldon’s bail was set at fifty thousand dollars. The weapon was a .25 caliber semi-automatic Beretta that he bought for a hundred ninety-eight bucks at High Bridge Arms on Mission Street. At least, that’s what he told the cops.
I don’t remember getting dumped into the ambulance. Just the details in the minutes before that stayed with me: the gun when Eldon pulled it out of his jacket, as if he were surprised to find it there. How the pistol looked when he trained its nickel-plated barrel on my knee.
Before I could laugh at the shittiness of it, Eldon pulled the trigger. The Beretta’s muzzle emitted a blue and orange flame and a wisp of smoke. A bullet was ejaculated into the air, moving fast and black like a bumble bee. It struck me in the calf and instantly, I knew it was a superficial flesh wound, not a perilous injury. Over time, you learn to judge these things. I would live, and somehow that made it hurt worse. I put my hand on the gash left by the bullet before it sank into a wall. Eldon was standing over me, enabling me to regard the pores on his skin. I didn’t see a hint of fraternity in his eyes.
A lack of self-esteem was written across the janitor’s ruined face. I saw it when I toppled over, hitting the floor. I witnessed it when the Pinkertons flung themselves on him, two of them and then three more, an avalanche of them, wailing on Eldon, beating him unconscious.