“Oh, yeah? Where at?”
“City College.”
“That’s nice. What’re you into?”
“Art.”
He said it without being facetious. And who was I to judge anyone? If he wanted to starve, what could I do? These days, whenever we met, we didn’t get too personal, me and Skippy. Doing otherwise would have proven fatal. We kept our coincidental meetings brief and saccharine sweet.
I didn’t feel like mentioning the time he dared me to slap him during a week-long drunk, and then was surprised when I did. I didn’t remind him of when we’d balled on top of a wino’s cardboard mattress in the bushes at Dolores Park, getting the crabs as a result. And what about the time I flipped out and slugged his ex-wife over at her house?
There wasn’t any need to go into things like that. It would have manufactured more unwanted dramas. But I had to be candid: Skippy had gotten a scummy verdigris on his teeth from drinking an abundance of malt liquor.
twenty-three
I
was having a dream that when I was a child staying at my grandpa’s house, I had to change his socks since he was crippled and couldn’t do it for himself. I’d peel the dirty things from his toes and exchange them for a laundered pair of hose, which I’d slip over his razor-sharp toe-nails. It was a strange way to think about a member of your family. When I woke up, I’d sweated clear through the sheets. It was daybreak and the bed was empty.
Frank was in the kitchen when I came in, putting away a meal of scrambled eggs, beans and steamed tortillas that made my stomach turn. I got myself a cup of coffee from the stove and cringed when I saw the sink. It was overpopulated with dirty dishes. Frank wiped his mouth with a tortilla, finished what was on his plate and looked at me.
“What’s with you?” I said.
“I was going to go see my mom.”
His parents had a slot in a trailer park in Colma, near where all the cemeteries were. They were a crusty duo, Ralph and Cheryl. Dad had spent twenty-seven years at the Southern Pacific rail yard near the garbage dump by Candlestick Park. Cheryl, thanks to her part-time job cleaning
houses, had been in Mount Zion Hospital with asthma over Christmas.
A trio of Pinkertons were standing at the front gate when I got to the DSS. They were waiting for Rocky, who was returning to active duty that morning. Inside, Beatrice saw me and cawed, “The Dominguez woman called again!”
The clerk was modeling a hideous green taffeta dress that would have looked ravishing on an organ grinder’s monkey. It was too much for me, and so I went to the restroom to smoke a fag.
If you’ve ever smoked a cigarette rapidly, it quickens your pulse. This gives you energy, and that’s what I wanted. While I did that, I took a hostile, non-affirming look at myself in one of the bathroom mirrors. This proved to be controversial. My forehead was scalloped with rills of eczema, and not for the first time.
In summation, this was the life I’d chosen for myself. So it wasn’t the greatest, but I’d done worse. Before I had gone to school and become a social worker, like many of my peers, I sold drugs on the street.
That isn’t quite accurate. Maybe I should rectify my error by admitting that I brokered large amounts of LSD from a series of apartments in and out of the city. I was always moving from one place to the next, storing the acid in a refrigerator to maintain the potency of the substance.
The money was excellent; I still miss it.
I distributed the hallucinogenic by riding around Chinatown, North Beach and Pacific Heights on my bicycle. A sexy chick in short-shorts, carrying two, three, four thousand hits. I had different varieties: purple double-dome, gun powder, blotter. The acid ranged in strength from two hundred-thirty micrograms up to three hundred-seven mics.
My customers represented a wide spectrum of individuals in the San Francisco-Oakland-Vallejo triangle. Financial district stock brokers trying to break up the monotony of sleepless nights, horny Navy sailors on furlough, East Bay debutantes who wanted to kick up their heels on the eve of a cotillion and unpublished writers struggling to leave heroin behind them.
The clamor in the waiting room was coming through the walls of the bathroom. It was so noisy out there, you’d think it was someone’s birthday party. Not just a day when the clients got their housing vouchers and their GA.
Someone in a toilet stall began to make quite a racket herself, starting to smell the place up, prompting me to bury myself in a cloud of tobacco smoke. She must have wiped her tush with an entire roll of that brown institutional paper we used here. From the sound of it, she had to flush the toilet three times.
The stall door swung open and Eldon strolled out, more world weary than ever with a local newspaper folded under his arm. Upon seeing me, he got testy and took on the stance of a martyr.
“What are you doing in here, Eldon? Can’t you read the sign on the door? It says this room is for ladies only.”
“The toilets are clogged in the other bathroom. I couldn’t help it. What could I do?”
“I don’t care. Don’t do this again, or I’ll have to report you.”
“Sorry. Say, you going out to Clooney’s on Friday night?”
“Who told you about that?”
“Simmons did. He invited me to come along. We went last week, too.”
“You’re one of the gang. You should be pleased with yourself.”
That dig sank into his febrile mind. Giving me a cold shoulder, Eldon went over to the sink, turned on the tap, and using plenty of soap, he whipped up a lather in his hands.
I gave the rest of my cigarette the attention it deserved. But Eldon couldn’t leave it alone. I could see it in his face, reflected in the mirror at the sink. His lower lip was quivering. With anger? I didn’t know.
“Don’t you like Simmons?” he asked. “I’m not a scientist, but hey, I get the distinct impression that he rubs you the wrong way. Would you like to tell me what it is? I happen to like the guy.”
Not wanting to take the bait, I kept my mouth shut.
“He tells me you used to hang out with him, Matt Vukovich and Rubio a lot more before you got married again. They say you’re funny when you drink. That when you get tipsy, you get into shit like white on rice. Didn’t you get eighty-sixed from the Chameleon on Valencia Street along with your husband? I think Simmons misses you. I know Rubio does. I like getting smashed with them, and Clooney’s ain’t such a bad bar. Kids, you know. Not too many assholes.”
About that night at the Chameleon. I don’t like drinking in public anymore; there’s always some cretin who wants to instigate combat. A dusted blue-haired punk rock junkie had been obnoxious to me at a poetry reading in the bar. Frank said to him, hold your lip, brother, or I’ll cave your head in. Frank loves literature and he is protective of me, like a husband should be.
Later that morning after helping one of Lavoris’s clients with a GA form, I found a memorandum on my desk. Someone had placed it there when I’d gone for another refill of instant coffee. I picked up the memo, nettled by it.
You must see me, it said. If you don’t, I’ll visit you. Signed on the paper, almost illegibly, was the scrawl of Gerald Petard.
Our führer’s signature was affixed to every paycheck that came out of Otis Street. Whether it was my wage or Mrs. Dominguez’s benefits, Gerald had his name on it. The directive in his message meant several possibilities. A recognition of our present impasse. A hope for reconciliation. Or just when you thought the shit was dying down, the threat of another imbroglio.
I crushed the note into a ball and threw it into the wastepaper basket. Petard was on the decline, tweaking and confused, losing vim. My strategy? Simple. Let him come to me.
twenty-four
T
he Pinkerton loomed in the doorway to the cubicle. I opened my mouth to tell him to wait there, to take his problems somewhere else. But nothing came out. Here we go, I said to myself.
The security agent did his job and was presumably mature enough to accept the consequences of his actions. He’d been through an ordeal; I couldn’t deny that. Somehow I remained unaffected by his suffering. Was I being cold-blooded? I didn’t think so.
“Hassler? You got a second?”
“Yeah, Rocky. Come in, please. Here’s a chair for you. Sit down.”
A reflexive, self-protective voice in my head told me to gather my wits and my nerve because the man was festering. I plucked a fag from the pack on the desk, lit it and threw the match to the floor. It expired on the carpet like countless numbers of its predecessors.
“How’re you doing, Rocky?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. How’s your wife taking it?”
“Irene, she didn’t like it. We got into it, and she says I got to cut this stuff out.”
The Pinkerton was wearing a new blazer, not a bad fit. Maybe he had a tailor do it for him. He had a plaster cast around his belly; the thing was riddled with get-well messages from his friends.
“I think you should listen to Irene.”
“Gosh, thanks for the advice.”
His black face was frozen like an unplowed field in December in dire need of being thawed out. He hunched his still-considerable body in the seat, meaning to present a smaller target.
“C’mon, Rocky, Let’s not be like this, okay?”
His eyes coruscated in their pouch-like folds. Certain things that couldn’t remain hidden any longer, that didn’t have the ability to camouflage themselves and that couldn’t stay out of sight, were starting to show through in him.
It used to be that people who had trouble with their lives were an invisible feature of this nation. You never saw them, or heard about them. Now they were everywhere.
Like the man on the news who’d stolen a tank from the National Armory in San Diego. He’d driven the armored vehicle through a bunch of residential streets, plowing up lawns, tearing up trees, smashing cars parked in their driveways. He took it down the freeway, chased by nearly thirty police cars. The final segment of the clip showed the tank stalled on an embankment; dozens of helmeted cops were swarming on the turret.
Rocky said, “The chick that shot me? She was so fucking close I could smell the lavender oil in her hair.”
“Who was she?”
“The police asked me that yesterday. I had to tell them I wasn’t certain. I’ve seen her somewhere before. Around,
you know? But she could be some girl who looks like somebody else, if you catch my drift.”
The Pinkerton had launched into the anecdote as though he’d begun the sentence in his head. His jaws were moving even before the words started coming out of his mouth.
“You know, I really wanted to blame you for what happened to me. It would have been juvenile, but warranted, too. It would have been logical.”
I was taken aback. “Why are you telling me about it?”
“It felt like the right move.”
“Do I have to hear it?”
“Don’t fucking whine. They’re your clients.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“It was one of them that done me.”
“How come I never have any problems with them?”
“That’s because you brown nose everybody.”
“Give me a break, and take responsibility for your own life, will you?”
“Well, well, did they teach you that in group therapy?”
“Hey, where do you get off with this? Go fuck yourself.”
It was the wrong request to make. The Pinkerton rose to his feet and never taking his eyes from my face, he staggered over to my side of the desk. For one ludicrous moment, how his arms were extended toward me, I thought he was going to hug me. Instead, he put his hands on my shoulders.
“You’re a chickenshit for saying that, Charlene.”
I threw my cigarette at him; it bounced harmlessly off his cheeks. His face was close to mine. I got wind of his potent breath, a destroyer. I tried to catch his eye to mention something to him, something that might appease him. I forgot what it was in a blur of indigo. Inside my own skull I heard a sawing din that was getting louder.
“You’ve been running the show long enough, Hassler. You and the other wimps.”
He was pushing me back, inch by inch, against the dividing board wall, forcing me out of my chair. I tried to get up, but the wall behind me was giving way. Then the entire section collapsed, and I went crashing into a neighboring cubicle where a group of caseworkers were having a meeting around a conference table.
Rocky fell on me, cracking me on the arm with his cast. His ankle got snagged on an aluminum shelf, and he whinnied with fright, releasing his grip on me. I got out from under him and rolled over to one side. The caseworkers were jumping like kangaroos from their chairs. Someone ran out the door to get help.
“It’s Charlene!”
“Call security!”
My breasts were mashed into a pile of papers; Rocky was crumpled in between the table and a chair. A lady from Medi-Cal yowled at the Pinkerton, pointing a horrified finger at him. In me, there wasn’t the strength to move. Social services personnel were crowding around the table; unfamiliar voices filled the room.
One of my co-workers, I don’t know who, said with alarm, “Charlene’s injured! She needs a doctor!”
Another voice, a tough woman’s voice snarled, “Not Hassler. She doesn’t need anything. Who’s in charge here, anyway?”
I had to marvel: that was Lavoris. I heard her coming, high heels clicking authoritatively. She bent over to take a gander at me. Satisfied that I wasn’t dead, she turned around, blazing at the Pinkerton.
“And what got into you?”
Rocky rested his chin on his chest, mute.
“She can have you arrested,” Lavoris said, looking at
me. “Are you going to do that, Charlene? Have the police in on this?”
It hurt me to talk. “I want an explanation from him.”
The Pinkerton grunted, “You pushed my buttons.”