Fogtown

A
T SUNRISE
on the last day of summer an armored car exited the freeway near the police station and rumbled down Market Street toward the Embarcadero. Inscribed in blue letters on the transport’s sides was the name of the company it belonged to: Brinks. In smaller red-inked lettering were the words: subsidiary of Pittston.

Fog was murdering the street. Blotting it out with a greasy haze that was no higher than a foot off the ground. The fashion boutiques and chi-chi restaurants that lined the avenue were ghostly white in the mist. The imported trees planted in front of the tourist hotels were forlorn and wet. The beggars, pickpockets, hookers, and bicycle thieves who habitually worked the sidewalks from dawn until twilight were no place in sight.

While waiting for the Social Security office to open, Mama Celeste watched the Brinks truck pass the Warfield Theater. A San Francisco Giants baseball hat sat on top of her dreadlocks; a faded knee-length purple smock hung from her thin, stooped frame. Dead leaves swirled around her feet and flirted with her orthopedic shoes. Her favorite Vietnam-era green army jungle jacket wasn’t doing much to ward off the morning’s chill.

Mama’s high-yellow face was a billboard of disappointment. It was the third week of the month and she hadn’t received her retirement check yet. The check was supposed to be in the mail. Maybe someone
had stolen it. Or maybe it had gotten lost. It was all a mystery. What the post office did. What the government did.

She threw a wry glance at the other retirees in the Social Security line. There must have been eighty people. Old men and women dressed in winter clothes because the San Franciscan summer was cold enough to freeze the marrow in your bones. The queue snaked past the boarded-up Saint Francis Theater, an abandoned movie-house that was being torn down for condominiums, and went around the corner onto Sixth Street. “What a bunch of fools we are,” Mama muttered.

The night before, Mama Celeste had been visited in her sleep by a demon. She had been in bed shortly after midnight. A foghorn was sounding near Point Bonita in the bay. She opened one eye and there was the demon, naked with wings on his back. His eyebrows were shaved. His hairline had a widow’s peak. His flinty orbs gleamed with a luminosity that made Mama think his presence was a prelude to death. Her death. She coughed and smelled brimstone. She was terrified. She wasn’t ready for the afterlife. She had things to do here on earth.

The demon passed wind, a viscous green-tinted cloud that scorched the wallpaper. He leaned over her, his chin chaffing her teats. “You virago,” he harped, “why are you so stubborn? You have to come with me. It’s time.”

Willing herself to be strong, Mama replied, “I ain’t going anywhere.”

The dybbuk had laughed uproariously at her defiance and then vanished.

Mama continued to stare at the Brinks lorry as it inched by the Social Security office. The taillights bled into the fogginess. Oversized tires swished against the damp asphalt. A line of smoke hissed from the exhaust pipe.

Out of nowhere, a Ford Taurus sedan careened onto Market Street. The car drunkenly crossed the yellow dividing line in the road. Instead of doubling back, the Taurus sliced in front of the Brinks truck and
clipped the front bumper. Recoiling from the impact, the sedan boomeranged onto the sidewalk, crashing into a fire hydrant.

The Brinks vehicle fared no better. The driver lost control of the steering wheel and bumped his head against the bulletproof windshield, knocking himself unconscious. The truck went up on two wheels and rolled over on its side with tires spinning, raising red and white sparks, and mashing a telephone pole. The pole caved into a Payless Shoe Store window. A salvo of glass shards ripped into the store’s awnings.

The guard watching the money in the back was thrown to the floor. The armor-plated rear door cracked open and piles of cash somersaulted onto the macadam. Stacks of brand new one-hundred-dollar bills destined for a bank scattered over the roadbed, blending in with cigarette butts, beer cans, used condoms, and cigar wrappers.

Bills lay in heaps on the pavement. Pushed by the breeze, money clogged the doorways of Bora’s Café and the House of Blue Jeans. Dunes of Andrew Jacksons rested on sewer grates. One-hundred-dollar bills decorated the sidewalk, along with used syringes, empty crack bags, and McDonald’s hamburger cartons. A column of black smoke rose from under the Brinks truck’s hood. One of its giant wheels kept turning.

Being a religious woman, Mama Celeste was convinced she was having a vision. The money had to be an omen. It was a sign from God, a message from Him to everyone. Judgment day had finally come.

From three blocks away, police sirens keened.

The cash and the pensioners were gone by the time the cops arrived at the scene of the accident.

By eight in the morning the police were frantic to find the Brinks money. The first reports of its whereabouts were not encouraging. No witnesses had come forward. Both Brinks personnel had been hospitalized. The driver was in the intensive care unit at St. Mary’s Medical Center on Hayes Street and was unable to talk. The guard was in a coma in the trauma unit. The guys in the Ford Taurus had
evaporated, leaving behind their car, which turned out to be stolen from a repair garage in Daly City.

Market Street cuts the city in half, running east from Twin Peaks down to the San Francisco Bay shoreline. From Twin Peaks you can see Mount Diablo thirty miles away in the East Bay, the blue and brown Sonoma hills to the north, and the Farallon Islands in the Pacific Ocean. A typical day on Market Street has at least one shooting, or if nothing else, a stabbing and an armed robbery.

The Allen Hotel sat in the middle of Market Street halfway between the Castro district and the Tenderloin. A hundred-year-old flophouse that had fallen upon less than prosperous times, the brick hotel was five stories tall. The security gate was useless, hanging from one hinge. The windows that dimpled its facade were fusty. An unemployed flagpole protruded from the tarpaper roof. Dance studios, art supply stores, cafés, and nouveau cuisine restaurants—new businesses that were central to the chamber of commerce’s drive to revitalize and spruce up the neighborhood—surrounded the boarding house and took the shine out of it.

A widow with no children, Mama Celeste had dwelled on the Allen’s top floor for seven years. Her room was furnished with an iron-frame queen-size bed, two folding chairs, a table, an oak chest, a woven straw rug, and a dozen watercolor paintings on the walls.

Mama was aggravated. Rummaging through the chest’s drawers, her salt-and-pepper eyebrows were knitted in a single line. Her iron-gray dreadlocks were pulled back from her lined, tallowy forehead with a thick red rubber band. Her printed frock, a twenty-year-old gift from her late husband, was shapeless from frequent laundering. Being half Jewish and half Puerto Rican, the rich color of Mama’s skin and her regal nose had been inherited from her father. Her bad feet and kinky hair came from her mother’s side of the family. They were from Warsaw in Poland.

Nearly eighty years of age, Mama was forgetful. Her memory waxed and waned. She had good days when she remembered every small
thing. She had bad days when the lights in her head were switched off. She misplaced items, and she was unable to remember where she’d put things.

For a split second, Mama didn’t know where she was. She didn’t hear the traffic on Market Street. She didn’t hear her neighbors fighting next door. She didn’t hear the mice scrambling under the floor. She didn’t hear the clock tick-tocking on the nightstand. She didn’t smell the mold in her room. She didn’t see the cockroaches skitter across the carpet. She didn’t feel the lumbago in her back. She felt and saw nothing. Then sensed what she’d been searching for, a Safeway supermarket shopping bag tucked underneath a tablecloth in the chest’s bottom drawer, and she snapped back to reality.

The bag was coated with grease spots and had a tear down one side. She pried it from the drawer and lugged it across the room and tossed it on the bed. The bedsprings squealed in irritation as she plopped down on the mattress beside the bag.

Light-headed, she went blank for a moment. Her heart pounded. Was she getting a stroke? Maybe she was catching a cold. That would lead to pleurisy, and then she’d end up in the hospital. Since she was alone, no family or anyone, who would come to her rescue? She didn’t want to think about it.

Mama had ended up at the Allen for the reasons most people washed up at a residential hotel—she had little money. A room didn’t cost much. It gave you the space to contemplate your life. It was also someplace to get injured in. If the weather wasn’t warm, your room was an icebox. The mold in the walls got in your lungs. You contracted asthma. The last stop was pneumonia.

Pneumonia’s earmarks were an orchestra. You were hot and cold at the same time. You were hypersensitive to the touch. Because you had a blistering fever, a trip to the bathroom was no less arduous than rappelling up a mountainside. The disease preyed on the isolated and sought out the weak. If you were old, it was a murderer.

Fishing in the bag, she extracted a bleached muslin cloth sack emblazoned with bloodstains. The thing was heavy and she grimaced
with the effort it took to get it out. Printed in bold blue letters on the sack was the inscription: Property of Brinks.

She opened it and turned it upside down. A stack of crisp one-hundred-dollar bills fell in her lap and onto the blankets. A dozen other Ben Franklins frolicked to the rug in a lazy poetic trail. Mama Celeste laughed as she stooped over to retrieve them. The money was manna from heaven.