by Peter Plate
“Gerald asked me to stay and help him through to the end of the fiscal year.”
“You’re serious? Is that how he put it?”
“Yes. We were drinking at Ton-jo’s, and that’s what he said.”
thirty-three
The weatherman on the television reported the state of California was in the clutches of an unprecedented drought. To add salt to the wound, he said it was coinciding with record breaking temperatures. The German psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich claimed the desertification of any terrain was caused by people’s calcified emotions. But I was elated to trundle south on balmy Mission Street bare-legged and in shirtsleeves during the month of February.
In some other part of the city, I never would’ve seen the fog barreling over the top of Ashbury Heights and above it, the sun shining like a red rubber ball. I wouldn’t have noticed the school kids at the Muni stop waiting for a bus. The evangelicas walking arm in arm selling their magazines. The beat cops huddling by the Wells Fargo Bank and the junkies from the Thor Hotel and Eula Hotel scoring dope in front of the Yangtze Fish and Meat Market.
I would not have seen the pig’s feet in the market itself, along with the tripe, the carp laying on beds of shaved ice, the giblets, the cows’ tongues, a pig’s head in a basket and the white-smocked workers going about their tasks dressed in knee-high rubber boots.
One of the butchers was wielding a green garden hose, washing away the blood, sleeves of pig skin and fish heads down a drainage hole in the brick-tiled floor. Korean women from Sycamore Alley and the Honduran men from the Leandro Soto apartments across the street were jostling at the glass display cases, haggling for meat, fish, poultry, intestines, brains, stomachs, and tails.
Behind them, holding a Neiman-Marcus shopping bag in the crook of his arm and wearing his Adidas trainers while straining to get a glimpse of the products, was Frank.
I stepped through the door and I walked up to him, putting my arms around him. I plunged my nose into his neck-stubble, kissing his jaw. Aroused by my passion, Frank murmured, “Hey, Charlene, what do you think? I’m gonna get something. You got a hankering for fried chicken?”
The palm trees and their fronds waved over the street. The heat waves rose off the roofs of the police cars parked outside, I knew this was as near to heaven as I’d ever get. So I said, why not.
thirty-four
A noncorporeal Hendrix appeared in my sleep and told me to meet him in a seedy cafe on Mission Street named John’s Coffee Shop. It was a dive where you could get juice, two hot cakes, one egg, two pieces of bacon or sausage for three dollars and fifty cents.
Harry was sitting at the counter and a waitress in a burgundy-colored uniform was wiping down the Formica top. He was the only other customer in the dump until I came in.
I slid onto the seat to his left, and without casting a single glance at him, I said out of the side of my mouth, “Look who’s here. How are you, bucko?”
“Hi, Charlene.”
He was wound up, gnashing his teeth, tense and edgy, how he’d always been. I signaled to the waitress that I’d like a cup of coffee with another one for my friend. I said with my eyes, give us a doughnut.
“Do you mind if I ask you a question, Harry?”
“Sure, feel free to. Say, how’s Frank doing? Staying out of trouble?”
“Ah, he gets into things. He says we need a vacation, but he’s cool. So like what happened? What did you do to get yourself shot?”
He didn’t even have to think about it.
“I’ve been waiting to tell you. I was too brusque. I can tell you that right now. There was this whole problem about him, the client not giving me enough information to make a claim. If it had been Simmons, the guy would have been told to get lost. But me, I got involved.”
“Did he have a legal address?”
“No, he didn’t even have a place to live. A sister’s address, but she’d kicked him out. That’s what was fucking me up. I was over my head on this one.”
The waitress came back with my cup of coffee, a plateful of doughnuts, and a glass of steaming milk for Hendrix. “This will do him nicely,” she said. “He’s already had several coffees.”
I smiled at her. A statuesque woman, good teeth, black-haired, brown-eyed with sinewy arms and no tattoos. Hendrix warmed his hands with the glass, his neck periscoped into a coat, pensive. He said to me, “This guy had nowhere to live. I wanted to help him, but he had to provide me with several things. He said he understood that. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. I’d seen him a couple of times during the preliminary interviews. You know, those five-minute scenes where the client introduces himself to you, and because you’ve already seen twenty people that morning, you don’t remember anything. If you did, your head would implode.”
“Drink your milk, Harry.”
“Let me finish this. Okay, so that’s when I made my first mistake. I was being asinine. I’d been seeing too many clients. I couldn’t recall on the spot a specific fact about the kid’s case, and I didn’t have it in his file. We’d made an oral agreement about something, and I thought I’d written it down. Without it, that alone was going to tie up the process for the next two weeks.”
“What did he do?”
Hendrix sniggered. “Take an educated guess, Charlene. He pulled out this gun, no bigger than my hand, and without saying hello, he pumped two slugs into me. I wanted to go, wait, you’re doing me because of food stamps? I just couldn’t believe it.”
I drank my coffee and munched on a doughnut. The coffee was lukewarm and the doughnut was stale, sugary. What could I say? Hendrix should have known better.
thirty-five
The tourists visiting San Francisco saw the gardens in Golden Gate Park, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Marin Headlands, the island of Alcatraz, Fisherman’s Wharf, and Ghirardelli Square.
It was like a foreign country to me.
A house had burned down to the ground on Treat Street; the tenants claimed the landlord did it. A thirty-eight-year-old black Cubano male prostitute, one of the original Marielistas, turned up dead by the railroad tracks in the east end of the district. Ten pine saplings had been planted on Harrison Street by the Mexican-American Chamber of Commerce. Eldon Paskins had gotten out of jail, as his bail had been reduced to the paltry sum of five hundred bucks.
I spied him after lunch, washing a section of the floor in the corridor. Eldon was on his knees. With my usual stealth, I came up from behind him, admiring his luscious buttocks.
He must’ve heard me when I stepped on an air pocket in the linoleum. Eldon screwed his head in my direction, and there was so much distaste in his bleak eyes for me, you’d have thought I’d been making love to his ex-wife on the sly.
We stayed like that for a second, neither of us moving. The bruises on his face were still healing from the throttling the Pinkertons had given him. His lunarscape complexion, the handmade prison craftshop belt he sported, and his hips, so womanly on an otherwise masculine physique, completed my take on the man.
“What are you doing, Eldon?”
It took him a second to realize that I’d opened my gob and that he’d have to respond or risk looking like a moron.
“The usual,” he grunted. “What’s with you?”
“Ordinary incidentals. Things are back to status quo. And you?”
“About the same. Getting my life, you know, in motion. Junk like that.”
To the janitor, progress was meaningless. With violence and stolen moments of romance, he managed to bear up in a universe that wasn’t predisposed to him. That we were living in a state of emergency; the banality of this was not lost on Eldon.
“How’s the leg?” he asked.
The sneaky fuck, thinking I was going to reveal anything to him. “What did you say? My leg?”
“Is it getting any better? I see you’re favoring it, and dragging your foot.”
I asked myself: why should I tell him anything? This fellow had been a friend, and if you tell
your sort-of-friends your dreams, you get hurt. To divulge the things I felt when I saw him, it was like giving him dum-dum bullets for his gun. I said, “I’m not bad. So what’s up with your legal bullshit?”
“Could be worse. That’s about the extent of it. What do you expect? That I’m happy things turned out like they did? Maybe I am. I mean, I’m back on the job again, but then I’ve got to deal with you, which ain’t funny.”
His unexpected bluntness punctured me, and I reshaped my feelings. My pulse was rocketing along with the shame in me. I said to him, looking him in the eye, “What did you want, a reward for your deeds?”
“No, but I don’t need your vibes, that’s for sure.”
“Tough shit. You lucked out big time, don’t you know that?”
He turned scarlet. “Don’t play games with me. You’ve got something to get off your chest, hurry up and do it. I can’t fuck around now. I’ve got trouble coming down the pipeline.”
“What do you want me to do about that?”
“You’d help me?”
“Possibly.”
The color in the custodian’s orbs changed like the water in an aquarium when the lights get turned on to keep the fish company at night.
“You know what you can do for me? The pretrial conference with my public defender and the assistant district attorney is coming up before the judge in a week. You can write a letter to the judge, asking him to give me minimum time for assault and battery with a prior.”
“You have a police record? For what?”
He hesitated before divulging, “Burglarizing a church.”
My pet project, Eldon. A man without a rudder. He was succinct enough to strip the enamel from your teeth. How could I stay mad at an asshole like him? The letter went into the mail that afternoon. I’d given it some thought and had written: Your Honor,
The defendant in question, Eldon Ronald Paskins, age fifty-four, a custodial engineer at the Department of Social Services in the Mission, and a resident of the Altamont Hotel on Sixteenth Street, perpetrated an injury upon my person.
Multifarious in its origins, the affair was regrettable. A victim of circumstances, Mr. Paskins should not be held responsible for conditions which exacerbated the tension between us and which led to his crime.
That he was chronically unemployed, and now has a job, should not be overlooked when you sentence him.
You may notice I never filed charges against him. I am of the opinion jail time would be wasted on him. I hope the court will exercise its intrinsic benevolence and show leniency towards this individual.
Yours,
Mrs. Charlene Hassler
Not surprisingly, my efforts failed to make a difference. My status did not impress the judge. And that’s what I have always said: everything comes to a halt, but nothing ever stops. Eldon was reduced to plea bargaining his way out of a sentence more stringent than the one his lawyer had counted on. I’m sure it was a proverbial kick in the nuts. Before the week was out, he was forced to take a deal from the district attorney’s office for a three-to-five-year jolt in San Quentin Prison.
I promised myself that I’d visit Eldon. The maximum security correctional facility he’d be in was located on the other side of the bay in southern Marin County. It was near the town of Larkspur and you could get there from the city on a Golden Gate Transit ferryboat. I’d bring him a carton of cigarettes, my brand, Marlboros, as a token reminder of what was on the other side of the penitentiary’s crumbling nineteenth-century walls.
thirty-six
Simmons decided to throw a party for himself that Thursday night at Clooney’s. On a lark, he spent money out of his own pocket to print up engraved invitations, sending them Federal Express to every employee at the DSS. Simmons didn’t have a motive for the celebration. His birthday had been in the autumn, so it wasn’t that. He said, “Who needs a reason? I just want to get out of my skull.”
There was a sea of social workers in Clooney’s by sun-down. I don’t know how Simmons did it. He was acquainted with every caseworker from Santa Rosa to Milpitas, with everybody that was within a hundred miles of San Francisco.
I was sitting with Frank at a table in the back. The jukebox had gone off after playing five James Brown singles in a row. In the silence you could see how drunk everybody had gotten in the last couple of hours. Rubio was falling down, pants unbuttoned, at the front door. People were blithely stepping over him while the dog that lived under the video machine slurped at his face.
Simmons had taken off his shirt, winding it around his head, turbanlike. His torso was childishly white and porcine. He was swinging a long-necked bottle of Bud in one hand and a cigarette was stuck between his lips. He was pleased by the turnout; everybody important from Otis Street had shown up.
Rocky had come with his wife and they were still there, knocking back highballs of Coke and rum. Even the regal Lavoris was present. She was sitting by Petard, nudging one of his gristly ears with the the tip of her nose. He stared at the television over the bar, watching a boxing match from Puerto Rico.
Nursing a gin and tonic, Vukovich got up from his seat and lugged himself over to the jukebox. He punched in some buttons and the festive strains of a tune by Sam and Dave filled the room. The music brought a smile to Matt’s lips and he twirled around in a circle, tripping over his own untied shoelaces, sloshing liquor down the front of his Dockers.
Frank appraised the empty bottles jumbled on the table in front of us. He was folded hunchbacked into a chair. His hands were wrapped around a perspiring bottle of Bud Light. He’d been tapering off in the last hour, having made the switch from whiskey to beer, a strategy that I approved of.
He flexed his shoulders, not moving his head. His lustrous sapphire-blue eyes were on me. It might’ve been the alcohol I’d been drinking, the nine daiquiris accompanied by fifteen cigarettes, but I saw Frank’s love for me under the thirty-one years of character armor on his face.
He said, “Babykins?”
“What is it?”
“I don’t feel so fucking hot. Will you help me to the bathroom?”
“Give me your hand.”
It was like this every time Frank got drunk. I put an arm around him, then extracted him from the seat. With a beery groan, he got to his feet and together we lurched to the men’s room.
The day Frank and I got married at City Hall, neither of us felt like slogging back to the funky Mission after the nuptials, so we retired across the Civic Center Plaza to the Starlight Room. We talked about our future, drinking Beck’s beer, dark for me, light for Frank. That night, he got sick on Market Street. Three weeks later, the Starlight Room was shut down and the entire building was razed to the ground.
Vukovich came up to us. He analyzed my husband’s pasty face and asked me with a lecherous burr, “Having trouble?”
“Yeah, I am. You mind getting out of my way?”
He was fucking smashed and I was hoping he wasn’t going to choose this occasion to come on to me.
“I’m tipsy,” Frank slurred.
“Hey,” Matt said. “Don’t toss your cookies on me. Here, let me open the bathroom door for you guys.”
What a comrade. Me and Frank slipped into the john, and before I could situate my hubby in one of the toilet stalls, he threw himself at the nearest sink. He got both of his hands on the bowl and presto: Frank puked a geyser of beer and whiskey, splashing the mirror, the floor and himself with an amber liquid that made it seem like he was urinating out of his nose and throat. I placed the palm of my hand against his forehead and held it there while he wretched his guts out into the sink.
I was trying to look my best that night. I’d gotten into a dress that had a pretty floral pattern, a cotton shift with a nipped and tucked waist. My legs were freshly waxed. The hemline, billowing out just above the kneecaps, showed off my calves and the place where I got shot. I’d washed my hair and pinned it, letting it sweep back against my temples, streaming down my back. My pumps were modest, if not seda
te, but new.
Rocky’s jaw had dropped an inch when he saw that I was wearing makeup.
It took an effort to make myself attractive. My legs were firm, my breasts weren’t sagging and the crow’s feet around my eyes were in remission. But I didn’t have any goddamn time for the task, for the massages, the facial peels and the hour-long baths.
Presently, I was looking better than Frank. I handed him a wad of paper towels and he scoured his mug clean with them. He was ghostly; having upchucked on an empty stomach, he had nothing left in him. He threw some water at his face and said to me, “Sorry about that.”
“I don’t care.”
“Charlene, I mean it.”
“You ready? C’mon, I’ll take you home.”
“You’re not mad at me, are you?”
“Honey, why should I be? You fucked yourself up, not me.”
“It’s a walk. You wanna call a taxi?”
Frank dragged himself to the door, too sheepish to face me. When he pulled it open, there was a curious gap in the music from the bar—offbeat because the jukebox had been going strong again. He stuck his head out into the hallway that connected the restrooms and the pay phone with the kitchen and the front. When Frank turned around, he was pure chalk.
“Whoa,” he moaned.
“What?”
“Keep your voice down. Someone’s sticking up the joint.”
“How many are there?”
“It’s only one guy. But he’s got everyone against the bar.”
I tiptoed over to the door, opened it. My view was partially blocked by the narrowness of the hall, but I saw Simmons, Rubio, Vukovich, Lav, and Petard with their hands up in the air. The barmaid was standing by the cash register.
The robber stepped into sight, a white guy in a crushed brown leather bombardier’s jacket, Rockport shoes and a baseball hat, holding a Colt Python. A man who wanted to upgrade his role in the psychodrama of the urban jungle. He reached over and removed Petard’s wallet from his pants, then stepped back.