Homeboy

by Seth Morgan

  “Golden Gate Fields, Hollywood Park, New Awleens Fayyyrgrounds …” The fabled track names floating off his tongue, hanging in the racketing downtown forenoon like golden sonic globes. “Hiyaleeyah, Churchill Downs, Pimlico, Belmont, aannduh Ahhhhqueduct …” Hymie the Hat could have been the conductor on some horse degenerate’s fantasy rail junket.

  Hearing his name, Hymie turned smiling as though truly recognizing who hailed him. He wouldn’t admit his blindness, though he saw only shadows, as through gauze.

  “It’s the Barker.” Sometimes Joe flogged Hymie’s leftover forms from the Blue Note door.

  “Joe.” Still the short con smile, smooth and cute as a baby’s ass. Hymie held his palms reversed before him to ward off clumsy shadows. “You need a pony?”

  Joe told him he only needed to find Rooski this morning, who often cadged Demerols from Hymie’s migraine script.

  “Have I seen him? Yesterday afternoon the idiotski came tearing down Powell like a bat outta hell. Tripped over my wagon and spilled my forms all over the street. I asked what the hell was going on. He said he was in plenty trouble and could he borrow a few bucks to get off the streets. I told him no way, I work too hard for my money to put it on losers and lunatics. Next he hit me up for pills. What? You think they’re jellybeans, I said. Get outta here. Go to the Salvation Army with the rest of the bums. You see him, Joe, you tell him to stay outta my face.”

  “He’s in a little over his head,” Joe said. Behind him the cable car bell rang All aboard.

  “Funny. That’s what the other guy said.”

  “Other guy?”

  “Yeah. Come around bout an hour ago askin for Rooski. I could smell stogie tobacco, but no smoke … Say, what kind of trouble are you two in?” Turning, searching for a shadow in the tall columns of Market Street sunlight. “Joe?”

  Fuckin Tarzon’s all over me like a cheap suit, cursed Joe swinging off the cable car and running a block to catch the 15 Columbus bus to Fisherman’s Wharf. Noontimes Rooski often hustled bunk hash there and Joe planned to do the same in hopes both of catching him and collecting some dead presidents himself. Killing two birds with the one stone. But how’d Tarzon make the Hat?

  It gave Joe some kind of creeps whose crawling he tried to still by planning where to steal the hashish mix: All Seasons sage, butter, vodka. He needed a store with a restroom to mix them and a sandwich microwave to bake the flat cakes of ersatz blond Lebanese. He decided on a Kwik Fixx two blocks from the Wharf. He regretted the store was already a mecca for every grifter and garden variety shoplifter between Chinatown and the Bay. Like mercy, Joe preferred to dispense his larceny evenly around.

  The decision made, Joe relaxed. He smiled feeling the throbbing bus diesel knead away the backache he incurred combatfucking Kitty the night before until his hip gristles creaked like oarlocks. He tipped back his shaggy head against the window and dreamed himself within the blue underwater world of his private refuge, the aquarium.

  The moment he stepped off the bus, Joe spotted Pete’s Dalmatian, Daisy, hitched by old belts to her shopping cart beside the glass doors. The Kwik Fixx was her master’s first stop of the day. And Joe knew just what the irascible wino was up to in there. Back in the cosmetic section guzzling Rub-a-dub or Green Lizard, his affectionate cognomens for rubbing alcohol and Aqua Velva Lime. For “Squeeze,” Sterno to the rest of the world, he’d stop in Ace Hardware down the block. Pete liked kicking off his alcoholic days with the outre stuff; later he’d switch over to more conventional potables, usually Fleishman’s Tokay or, in his more villainous moods, Mad Dog—as Mogen David 20/20 was known to the doorway wine set.

  Although the convenience store was lax enough to be worked by several thieves at once, Joe preferred waiting until Pete had drunk his fill. He occupied himself meanwhile inspecting a Dungeness crab languishing in a pail of water atop the rest of the garbage heaped in Pete’s cart.

  “Stop molesting my menagerie!” came a blast of lime aftershave. At least one drunk in San Francisco had sweet breath today. “You and your Slavik sidekick are always meddling in my affairs.”

  “Rooski?” Joe yelped. He hadn’t expected help from this quarter. “You seen Rooski? Where?”

  “Tellin me how to eat my vittles down at the Sally,” bawled Pete. “If I never see that varmint agin it’s too soon.”

  “He didnt say where else he’d been?” One could stay at the Sally just one night a week.

  “What are you? The Mind Police? 1984’s over and gone, me bucko.” Pete’s slack growl and dangerous list to port signaled his total inebriation. Without a liver, the alcohol went as straight and surely into his blood as if he’d injected it. “But come to think of it …” Pete staggered, grabbing the cart’s handle for support. “The bawd alluded to him frequenting a cosmic galaxy.”

  The shooting gallery in Cosimo’s basement! The Troll’s dope lair. Of course that’s where Rooski would go to ground, there to run errands for the Troll and beg cottons from the other dopefiends. Joe frowned watching Pete mush Daisy toward Burger King for a spot of lunch from its bountiful dumpsters. Why hadn’t he thought of it sooner?

  Wrong question, he upbraided himself, running into the middle of Columbus to snatch a cab. What if Tarzon already had?

  THE TROLL’S

  Out of the rumbling ruby gloaming a stringy squincheyed bird with Dumbo ears and red hair fine as duckling down came winging around the corner of Post Street and ricocheted smack off a streetlamp into a mailbox.

  The gallon jug of Clorox bleach beneath one arm, intended to disinfect needles, rolled willynilly down Post Street—at the corner of Larkin it jumped off the curb and exploded against a Yellow Cab. The sack of lactose beneath his other arm, purchased to cut heroin, burst at his feet, caking his face like a mime’s. When the blood loosed from his brow by the thoughtlessly situated streetlamp mixed with the sweet white powder and trickled into his mouth, his tummy shouted: If this is what blood pudding tastes like, me for seconds!

  Flapping his arms like flightless wings, he vroomed straight through the beveled leadglass doors of Cosimo’s Billiard Parlor.

  Three old wops sat hunched over tiny cups, crinkling the bronze light with cigaret smoke, listening to Una Furtiva Lagrima grieving from an antique Wurlitzer. If they thought anything of this Central Casting dream of a rabid mooneyed vampire with a chalked face and bloody mouth contorted in a soundless yowl, they revealed nothing. Past the billiard tables he bounded, fluttering aged Italian travel posters and giornales draped on wooden spindles; through the empty storerooms he zoomed, raising dust devils in his slipstream. He came to a skidding halt at the locked basement door. For a moment he stood moaning lowly, wringing long freckled hands; then remembered and pressed the digital combination on the Simplex lock. The sixteengauge CECO door popped open, and he passed down the rickety wooden staircase to the Troll’s subterranean shooting gallery.

  Addicts called the legless man on a wooden platform the Troll after his practice of levying tribute from the dopefiends who used his premises and paraphernalia. A tenspot was his toll, more than twice the going rate, but the Troll’s was hardly the regular chippy joint that got raided every week—he was protected. What’s more, he kept on hand an endless supply of PlastiPak disposable syringes and plenty of bleach for flushing them, which alone in this age of AIDS excused the extortionate tariff.

  None knew how long the Troll had held court on his rolling dais behind the line of votive candles in the corner of Cosimo’s basement. His gray hair was long and matted and tied around his waist to keep from fouling in the platform casters. His breath rotted the basement air, his nails were grown into hard hooked claws; and his eyes, like those of any creature of the deep, were enfeebled by desuetude, vestigial, glistening in the dark like poisonous berries.

  Once tribute was paid, his phantom patrons repaired to Bunsen burners to perform the central ritual of their blighted existences
, afterward withdrawing into the writhing darkness along the walls, ranking side by side, enfolded in their junk spells like bats within their wings. Ssshh, no swoon so sweet this mean side of paradise.

  Until some whirlybird came crashing down the stairs and, missing the last three steps entirely, stumbled halfway across the basement before regaining his balance wildly windmilling his arms. Violently shaken from their nods, the shadows tensed. Could it be a crackling crackoid penetrating their sanctum? Then, seeing it was but the pest who was known to them all too well, they loosed a weary broadside of obscenities. One voice with a twang like a Jew’s harp put it most succinctly: “Rooski, you could fuck up a wetdream.” “Sorry … sorry …” The spellbuster tiptoed in a circle peering into the shadows going hush, hush with a finger to his bloodied lip as though the others, not he, were the cause of their own distraction. Soon they relapsed into their trances and the basement again was silent save the faint jabbering of the Troll’s portable TV.

  “Where the stuff I sent you after?” the Troll demanded.

  Rooski stammered, fumbling for an excuse, remembered the bleached cab. “Goddam cab knocked me on my ass, busted all the stuff. You want I should go out again?”

  “No,” the Troll said. “Maybe later. Now you stay right here.”

  No argument from Rooski, who was too sick for any more gofering just now anyway. The three codeines he’d copped with the Troll’s change and coldcooked and shot in the bathroom of Johnny Drum’s Body Electric Tattoo Parlor hadn’t touched his jones. Holding off the bonecrushers with codeine was like trying to rob Fort Knox with water pistols. Rooski shook like a pup passing a peach pit, the treacly brown smell of cookedoff heroin turned his legs to wet noodles; any minute now he knew he was going to shit in his pants.

  Then, from the tenebrous region beneath the stairs, he heard a familiar feminine hissing: “Please God lemme have this hit.”

  Rooski could recognize Belinda Batista’s voice anywhere. He’d heard it a hundred times screaming from the TV about how she’d like to eat this bimbo’s face off or grind that one’s ass up for taco filler or squeeze that bitch’s tit in a wringer. Her ring name was Belly Blast and she’d been captain of the Tinsel Tarts in Distress, a female tag team, until retired by her jones.

  Rooski knew she was having trouble injecting herself and sprang to her side. “I’ll do you, Belly. I’ll do you good if you lemme pound your cotton.” By which he meant add more water in her cooker and strain the residue from her cotton, something like percolating coffee grounds a second time.

  With black lambent eyes Belly Blast scrutinized the deranged scarecrow. Blood webbed her arms and hands where she had repeatedly plumbed for extinct veins. She held the syringe close to a burner’s flame. The barrel was black with blood. Even if Rooski could find a vein, how could he detect a register?

  “No es una problema, chiquita,” he said confidently, flashing a little chili chatter he’d picked up in the tomato fields of the Youth Authority. “I’ll fix yer neck.”

  Her hand flew to her muscular throat, eyes sprung wide.

  “You got it. Expressway to your skull.”

  The dark eyes hooded suspiciously, then dulled with resignation as she considered the alternative, drinking the bloody shot, and she sighed, handing him the rig. “Help me, Crazy Red.”

  She followed his whispered instructions: lie back, face the wall, blow on your thumb. Her cheek ballooned like a trumpeter’s; her jugular swelled like a highpressure hose. In a twinkling Rooski tapped a register. “Cut!” he whispered. Out popped her thumb; her breath escaped with a whooosh; the great artery slurped the barrel dry.

  “Sweets for my sweet,” Rooski softly crooned withdrawing the spent rig. He bent and quickly kissed the teardrop of blood at her throat.

  She lapsed into her native tongue, moaning from very far away: “Que bueno.”

  Rooski set right to work preparing his own injection. He was undeterred by the traces of blood in her cotton—in fact, he was pleased. A little hot spic sangre might liven up his own shot, shoot smoke from his ears. Ears that were just now flexing as he worked, rotating like radar dishes to scan a news flash interrupting one of the Troll’s gameshows.

  “… masked gunmen burst into Chinatown’s Golden Boar Restaurant during the lunch rush and executed two reputed members of the Wah Ching gang in a blazing fusillade, killing one busboy and wounding three other diners. Police say members of the rival Joe Sing gang are suspected …”

  Joe Sing and the Barker were old homeys, he remembered with pride as he drew up his hit. He fixed himself without even tying off. He was one of those wiry guys with veins forever; he could even fire at will into the rollers around his wrists and ankles. Before he’d withdrawn the point, his eyes were blurred and his features smeared like a melting wax mask.

  It was then a voice from the nearby shadows first spoke: “Hey, Scarecrow. You wanna sell a coupla them ropes?”

  The Barker! Rooski scooted around on his knees squinting into the dark. “Joe? Joe! You’re here!”

  “The more veins I lose, the more you got. You stealin mine?”

  Rooski still couldn’t see him. “They’re fixin to lay me low, Barker. What do I do?”

  “Dont worry. I got you.” The voice paused, then: “Why didnt you pull my coat? How come I had to get it from the Man?”

  “I dont get you, Barker …”

  A weary something tainted the voice like a parent scolding a child for forgetting his galoshes at school. “Your glasses.”

  Rooski’s rabbiteyes twitched, his cheeks fluttered. “I’m sorry, Barker. I feel so low I’d need stilts to walk under a snake … just too scared to tell you.”

  Joe emerged from the shadows and squatted in the undulant orange light of the burner. His slitted eyes stared at his crimey; then he spit in the basement dirt and shook his head, laughing softly.

  “You aint gonna sock me up?” twittered Rooski.

  “What for? It’s too late …”

  “Or yell even? …” Hope dawned on his goofy face.

  “Hush,” Joe said suddenly, holding up his finger. The ceiling shook with pounding feet; then fists thudded on the basement door. A muffled voice shouted: “The door’s double steel with nonrising hinge pins. Tell Lieutenant Tarzon we’re gonna have to bust it out of its jamb …”

  The shadows along the walls went rigid; several leaped upright.

  “Cool yer jets!” bruited the Troll, a Browning ninemillimeter suddenly in his hand. He waved it at Joe and Rooski. “They only want them.”

  “That’s why he didnt send you out again,” Joe hissed. “It’s part of his protection plan giving up dudes.”

  The Troll swung the automatic on Joe, leering livid confirmation in the murmurous blue video wash.

  Suddenly out of the darkness flew a boot kicking the Troll’s head, shooting his platform sideways with a screech of metal wheels, toppling the cripple in the dirt. The Browning clattered from his claw. Belly Blast leaped out of the shadows through which she had circled the basement undetected. She snatched up the gun. The Troll screamed horribly, flailing on his back, rocking his legless torso like an overturned tortoise. Belly squatted and with both hands thrust the automatic in his face.

  “Dont zip him,” Joe shouted, springing across the basement. “The Troll aint worth a bullet.”

  His voice was swallowed by a shuddering boom. Again—Boom. The basement door was being rammed. The jamb creaked and splintered, about to cave in. Police voices swelled and Joe heard Tarzon bark an order.

  Belly sprang to her feet. “We gotta book—fast. Get Rooski. We use the Troll’s own escape route.”

  Rooski was in a daze, and Joe had to grab him, push him across the dirt floor, kicking aside the Troll’s picket line of votive candles. Past his gibbering thrashing form they scrambled into the dumbwaiter whose door Belly held up, hissing for them to hurry.<
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  Above, a great shout arose as the whole door frame crashed inward, and the halfton slab of steel slid booming down the stairs, followed by thundering feet.

  Then they were in the dumbwaiter, its door shut, Joe and Belly hauling on its pulleys for all they were worth.

  “I never seen a dumbwaiter so big,” Joe huffed.

  “Joint usta be a mortuary,” gasped Belly. “They got embalmed in the basement and hauled up in this thing.”

  “They still get embalmed in the basement,” Joe quipped, then: “Why’re you helping us?”

  “That was Rick Tarzon bustin down the door,” she said, adding between breaths in a tone which forbade further inquiry: “We got a personal problem.”

  “Plus it’s good luck to help out nuts,” chirped Rooski.

  Between their climbing arms Joe saw a smile flash beneath her straight bangs and button nose. Then the dumbwaiter thumped against a ceiling and Belly hitched its pulleys around the cleats affixed to its interior. She threw open the gate and out they stumbled into a deserted topfloor room four stories above the billiard parlor. Out a window and up a fire escape they clambered, then off across the steep night roofs.

  The Red Light Abatement raid was staged promptly at eight. Baby Jewels and Sidney Dreaks met the crush of police and press at the Tender Trap’s door. In the glare of a dozen kliegs, District Attorney Faria preached City Hall’s commitment to eradicating fleshpots like the Tender Trap; while Moses, ignoring Sidney tugging on his sleeve counseling restraint, denounced the Mayor, the D.A., and the media for scapegoating him to disguise their failure to apprehend real criminals like the psycho who murdered Gloria Monday.

  The cops herded all the girls out and into the paddy wagons. Warrant checks were run on all the customers before releasing them. All receipt books and files were carted out. The doors were closed and posted with dire proclamations. For the final padlocking ceremony, Faria struck a heroic pose as though preparing to lock the very gates of Hell. But in all the hubbub and hoopla some nitwit cop had misplaced the goddam fivepound nickleplated padlock specially requisitioned for this civic charade. After much vociferation and confusion, a rookie patrolman’s lowly handcuffs were substituted.