by Peter Plate
Chiclet reaffirmed her ignorance. “I ain’t acquainted with him.”
“Well, maybe you is and maybe you ain’t.” Richard cracked his knuckles and bruised her with a vampirish stare. It was an embittered gaze that x-rayed her inner nature and saw a vacancy sign. He said in an off-handed manner, “I got a special request.”
She wasn’t keen to hear it and affected a yawn. “You do?”
“I certainly do,” Richard said. “I want you to take off that bathrobe you got on.”
His demand sounded like it came from Mars. From an interplanetary source that was millions of miles away. Maintaining her composure, Chiclet stalled for time by killing the cigarette in an ashtray. Gongs were clashing in her head. Nausea liquefied in her stomach, and her hands were clammy. There was no doubt about it: the heel was going to have a go at her ass. She gauged the distance between him and her and glanced around the room for a weapon. A letter opener on the sink counter fit the bill, but Richard Rood saw what she was looking at and put it in the sink.
“Don’t be shy,” he beseeched her. “I ain’t got all day.”
“Are you serious?”
“Like a toothache, girl.”
There was no way out. She’d have to jump from the window to get away from him. The cops would find her on the sidewalk with her head cracked open. Nobody would blame Richard Rood. The coroner would trace all that Valium in her and call her death a fluke. Unbelting the robe, she shrugged the garment from her shoulders and it fell to the rug.
Richard Rood nodded approvingly. This was the first time that he’d ever seen a naked woman outside of a strip joint and the chick wasn’t half terrible. She had a swan’s neck, perky breasts with large nipples, and a filigreed silver chain around her tummy. He admired the muscular tone of her legs. He also appreciated her bush. It was neatly shaven, a perfect pyramid. Highly stylized, like his red suit. Exactly how he liked things. “Okay, good,” he said. “That’s all. Thank you.”
The adrenaline, cortisol, and other stress hormones in Chiclet’s bloodstream had killed the tranquilizing effects of the Valium. She was as sober as the day she’d been born. Crossing her arms over her breasts, she spat, “What do you mean, thank you? You ain’t gonna tie me up?”
“Nah.”
“You’re not going to beat me?”
“No, gorgeous, I ain’t.”
“You ain’t going to fuck me?”
“No. Pipe down. No need to get all excited.”
“Don’t get excited? Fuck off, you.”
Richard was swift to say, “Shit, girlfriend, I’m gay. If I want to hump someone, it sure won’t be you or any other woman. Not in this lifetime or in the next one. I definitely am not into that shit. I was just giving you a look-see, learning about this here female anatomy thing.”
The strains of “Stormy Monday Blues” by Bobby Blue Bland insinuated themselves through the walls from a neighbor’s phonograph. The scratches on the ancient vinyl were as loud as the music itself. Done with his business, Richard Rood shambled to the door and swung it open. The unoiled hinges squeaked in agony. His broad shoulders grazed both sides of the doorframe as he turned to give Chiclet a penetrating glance. A glance that said he was taking a hunk of her soul with him.
“You tell Jeeter I came by,” he said evenly. “Tell him that I want to talk.”
ELEVEN
IN JULY 1916 a bomb went off at a War Preparedness Day parade on Market Street. The procession had just gotten underway at the Embarcadero when the explosion ripped out a chunk of the Southern Pacific Building at the corner of Market and Steuart, injuring nearby spectators. Two local union men, Tom Mooney and Warren K. Billings, were arrested for the crime. Both claimed innocence during their trial.
The jury found them guilty and they were sent to prison. Then, after twenty-three years of confinement, the governor of California, a man named Culbert Olsen, pardoned Billings and Mooney. Forty thousand people attended a welcome home rally for Tom Mooney at the Civic Center. He died three years later at Saint Luke’s Hospital in the Mission district following surgery.
At Folsom State Prison, where Warren Billings served his sentence, there was a mural version of The Last Supper in the church chapel. A convict artist had used Billings’s face as a model for one of the twelve apostles seated at the table with Christ. When Billings got out of the joint, he became a watch repairman and opened a shop on Market Street.
Walking up Jones Street, Mama Celeste was hungry and made a straight line to Saint Anthony Dining Room. The queue into the soup kitchen was three blocks long, winding over to Golden Gate Avenue and then down onto Leavenworth Street.
Saint Anthony was a Catholic charity, the flagship in the city’s fleet of soup kitchens. Operated by priests in a subterranean cafeteria next to an abandoned bank, it fed thousands of indigents daily.
Joining the very end of the line, Mama Celeste jiggled up and down on one foot. Her bladder was full, a result of the tea she’d been drinking. Thinking about going to the bathroom was absurd. How fast folks were getting in line behind her, she’d lose her spot if she went somewhere to relieve herself. Mama had to make a choice. Should she go find a place to take a leak or stay where she was? She hadn’t had a bite to eat since dawn. Her empty stomach settled the issue and she thought no more about it.
Mama cast a side-glance at a clock in a storefront window. It was three forty-five. She did a rough head count—two thousand people were ahead of her in the queue. The soup kitchen clientele were mostly men and a few females, all lugging suitcases and rucksacks and pillowcases stuffed with their possessions. Some had dogs. Others had cats. A few had shopping carts.
The sun, tangoing in and out of the fog, flung a shadow over the street. Pigeons were squatting on a parked police van’s roof. A hooker in torn nylons was doing her makeup in the window of a Mercury station wagon up on four cinder blocks. A gaggle of black kids in knit caps and goose down parkas was at the corner. One kid reached in his pocket and a Smith and Wesson revolver, an itty-bitty nickel-plated.32 caliber gat, fell out and hit the sidewalk with a clatter.
Mama tucked the shoebox under her coat and stripped a gummy copy of the San Francisco Chronicle off the ground. The lead article on the newspaper’s front page was about the Brinks robbery. There was a photograph of the Brinks truck after the crash. The vehicle lay on its side, resembling a wounded buffalo.
An hour later Mama was ushered through the soup kitchen’s doors and herded down a concrete loading ramp by a burly security guard with a flashlight. The tunnel was moldy and unlit and she had a premonition of catastrophe. What her foreboding was about, she didn’t know.
A brown-robed priest with a tonsured hairdo escorted Mama into the immense dining room. A sea of badly dressed people ate at a hundred rough-hewn pinewood picnic tables. Thanking the friar for the personal touch, Mama said, “Bless you, father. I’m glad to be here.”
“You’re welcome, my daughter,” the priest replied. “This is the oasis of the Tenderloin. You come often?”
“All the time, ever since my husband died.”
“We’re glad to have you. Consider us your home away from home.”
Glomming a tray from a stack, Mama set the shoebox on it, and then collected a spoon, fork, and knife. A sanguine ex-con in a hair net gave her a bowl of instant oatmeal, a plateful of powdered eggs, orange slices, and a cup of instant coffee. The quartered orange slices scintillated in the cafeteria’s fluorescent lighting; the eggs were steaming, and the oatmeal was gelatinous.
Mama made herself cozy at a table laden with cartons of tomato juice, loaves of day-old white bread, baskets of apples, ketchup bottles, and saltshakers, and began to chow down. Spooning oatmeal in her gob, she peeked over the cereal bowl’s rim at the rest of the room.
The soup kitchen’s decor wasn’t anything to write home about. The concrete walls were painted prison pea green. The floor was fatigued linoleum tiling. There was a full-color oil portrait of Jesus Christ in his prime on the door.
Security guards in windbreakers roamed the aisles just in case a client went crazy. Pushed around by the cops, cheated out of their welfare checks by liquor store cashiers, and unable to stay dry because of the fog and rain, people fresh off the street were testy.
Eating and reading at another table was Jeeter Roche. The Allen Hotel’s manager was alone and modestly clothed in a puce-colored goose down vest and oversized Phat Farm jeans. A paperback, the novel Gabriela, Clove, and Cinnamon by the Brazilian writer Jorge Amado, was propped against a tub of margarine. Engrossed in the story, Jeeter forked powdered eggs into his mouth with the precision of an auto mechanic. His nearsighted eyes were fixated on the book. His lips were encircled with ketchup. He held a mangled slice of white bread halfway to his mouth. His receipt book was on the chair next to him.
The music of alienation played a hymn in Mama Celeste’s mind as she watched Jeeter eat. She didn’t know what to do. The dirtbag said he’d evict her and had to be confronted. There were several ways to go at it. Mama could leave him unmolested until they got outside and then lay into him. That would be the safe thing to do. Keep things private. Keep it discreet. Make sure there were no witnesses, just him and her. Another way was to have it out with him right here in Saint Anthony. Let the shit hit the fan. Putting her arms around the shoebox, Mama Celeste shot to her feet, the chair toppling to the floor. The ruckus caused every head in the room to turn and look.
Jeeter Roche saw her and put the slice of bread on his plate. Prison had taught him quite a few things. The crucial lesson was, don’t let anyone slip up on you from behind. The second lesson was even more elementary. There was a totem pole in life. Some folks were high on it. Others were low. But either way, you had to know your place. It was obvious that Mama Celeste wasn’t hip to this.
A monk making the rounds mistakenly believed the property manager had nodded off and tapped him on the shoulder. The brown robe stood at the table and said, not unkindly, “I’m sorry, lad, but there’s no dozing in the dining room. It’s against the house rules. If you need a good kip, take it elsewhere.”
“I ain’t sleeping, father,” Jeeter protested. “I’m resting. I’ve been working hard lately. I’m pooped out.”
“Have you been doing the Lord’s work?”
“Each and every day. You wouldn’t believe it if I told you, but the truth is, I do his dirty work.”
The obese priest lanced Jeeter with an unsparing squint. The cleric’s eyes were pellets of straw-colored clay; his shabby robe was rough and woolly. His fingernails were black with dirt. His breath was vile with port wine. “Whatever you do, son, contain your conceit, and always keep the name of Jesus in your thoughts.”
“I always do, padre,” Jeeter replied as the priest moved on to monitor the patrons at another table. “He’s in my receipt book. Him and all the other damn reprobates who owe me money.”
Trailing in the priest’s wake, Mama Celeste cropped up at Jeeter’s table. She put the shoebox on the tabletop and waited until she knew what she wanted to say. Jeeter Roche took advantage of her silence and kissed his lips with his teeth. He put his elbows on the paperback, made a steeple with his fingers and said, “Well, if it isn’t Mama Celeste. We’ve run into each other twice in one day. What a privilege. Care to sit down?”
Mama was too proud to be seated in his presence. “No.”
“You want something from me?” he asked.
She stated her claim. “You said you’d evict me.”
“Are you referring to us talking this morning?”
“Damn right I am.”
Gorged on fiction and powdered eggs, a meal fit for a king, Jeeter undid the top button of his jeans and settled back in his seat. “Don’t take things out of context, Mama. I said I’d have to evict you if you didn’t pay the rent on time. The law requires me to do that. It’s not my choice.”
Mama put her hands on the table. “Don’t feed me that saccharine. You said you’d throw me out.”
“That’s untrue. I never said that.”
“You know what?”
Jeeter hesitated. “Tell me, I’m all ears.”
“You’re a goddamn liar.”
Jeeter wasn’t happy to hear this. His credibility as a drug dealer hinged on his popularity. Someone calling him a liar wasn’t good publicity. Someone doing it in Saint Anthony was akin to murder. That was another thing he’d learned in the pen. What other folks thought of you was dire. But he was a landlord. He took people’s hard-earned money from them and they hated him. There were only a few things you could count on in life. There was the sun in the morning. There was the moon at night. There was the rent you had to pay until the end of time, and there was Jeeter at your door to collect it. It was a contrary position to be in. He said, “Mama, do you read books?”
Mama Celeste glared at him. Dreadlocks cascaded over her shoulders. “Don’t give me that flimflam. I read the newspaper and Reader’s Digest.”
“Me reading books smartened up my ass. If you don’t pay the rent, what am I supposed to do, pay it for you?”
Mama banged her fist on the landlord’s plate of food. “I ain’t asking you to pay nothing for me. I got money.”
Powdered egg bits rocketed off the plate and onto Jeeter’s goose down vest. Keeping his temper, he said, “Then what’s the damn holdup? May I remind you, that as we speak, you still owe me for this week?”
“I know that.”
“Then where’s your money? The rent is due.”
“You didn’t have to threaten me. I have rights, damn it.”
The acne scars on Jeeter’s cheeks pulsed with blood. He calmed himself by putting his hand on the paperback. He had an insatiable longing to return to the country the author had created. There were gorgeous women in it. Beautiful nights. Lovely flowers were everywhere. It had to be a better place than Saint Anthony Dining Room.
“Rights?” he said. “Wise up, Mama. You don’t have any rights. Nobody does. You have choices. That’s all you have. And you made the wrong one. I didn’t make you not pay the rent. You did what you did out of your own volition. That’s democracy.”
Democracy was a concept most folks didn’t understand. Like the dude Jeeter had sold thirty-seven hits of acid to last month. The guy was a friend of a friend. Seemed like a responsible adult. Paid cash, which was always good. Then Jeeter received word through the grapevine the dunce had transported the hallucinogenic across state lines and had gotten busted in Texas. The LSD had been blue-double-dome, 250 micrograms a tab. Not the finest product on the market. There was talk about it being speedy. But the bottom line was that the fellow didn’t have to buy the acid. He didn’t have to go to Texas with it. And it was his own fault if he was in prison doing eight years for possession of an illegal substance.
Mama Celeste rebuked him. “There are laws on my side.”
“Be real,” Jeeter ridiculed. “You know better than that. We’re talking about the Allen Hotel. What law? There isn’t any. If you want to keep a roof over your head, you’d better play ball with me.”
“You’re a rotten dog for saying that.”
Her condemnation of Jeeter Roche rang out across the dining room with the clarity of a finely delivered trumpet solo. A security guard built along the lines of a heavyweight boxer overheard them and came over to the table to find out what it was about. He got in between Jeeter and Mama and said, “What’s going on here?”
Mama stamped her foot. The shoebox jumped an inch off the tabletop. She put her hand on the lid to keep the money from flying out. “Not a damn thing. Him and me are discussing something. Mind your own business.”
The guard was taken aback by her miff and puffed out his chest. “This is my business.”
“No, it ain’t.” Mama was losing it and the sensation was delicious. “We’re having a private conversation, me and this creep. We don’t need you in on it.”
“You.” The guard waggled a hairy finger at Jeeter. “What’s your story?”
Jeeter relished
what he was about to say. He arched his eyebrows in feigned innocence, tilted his head, and pouted, “I don’t know this broad. Never seen her before in my life. I was just sitting here eating my fucking eggs and reading my damn book and she came up to me and started to bug me. Accused me of all kinds of shit, really hassling me.”
“That’s a lie,” Mama blurted. “Don’t make like you don’t know me, you bald-headed motherfucker.”
“Lady, enough already,” the guard said. “We can’t have you causing shit. It’s against the rules. This is the property of the Catholic Church. You can’t do that in here.”
The security guard swept Mama Celeste off her feet and dragged her away from the table. Pinning her and the shoebox in a bear hug, he hauled the old woman out of the cafeteria and up the loading ramp to the street, dumping her by the garbage cans on the sidewalk. Saint Anthony maintenance workers were hosing down the pavement, the signal that it was time to push on.
Slowly pulling herself together, Mama moseyed onto lower Jones Street. Every inch of sidewalk was packed with homeless men and women and their dogs and shopping carts. The burned-out hulk of an Oldsmobile without any windows and chrome was at the intersection. The hood was up, the engine gone. Huddled in a doorway was a cluster of Salvadoreño youths talking and drinking wine. Flocks of sea gulls rose and fell over the telephone lines.
As Mama Celeste strolled to Market Street, the wind chased bits of paper. The sun was bivouacked behind two black clouds serrated by the fog. She buttoned the army coat and glanced at the darkening sky. Her mien was distant. She had to find a bathroom quickly.
TWELVE
THE AFTERNOON MOVED ON, galloping toward sundown. The trees, buildings, and automobiles along Market Street were pink, gray, and black. In the smoggy distance was the Maria Alicia Apartments, a three-storied stucco low-income housing project. An SRO hotel used to be at the site—the Gartland Apartments—but it was destroyed in an arson-related fire in December 1975. Twelve residents died in the conflagration. Seventeen others were never found. People said the landlord did it, but nobody could prove it.