Fogtown (6 page)

“Right.”

Chiclet bussed Stiv on the cheek and said good-bye. She proceeded downstairs to deliver an eviction notice to a tenant on the fourth floor. Stiv watched her descend the staircase and touched the spot on his skin where her lips had been. Then he pulled up his boxer shorts and went back to his room.

Getting dressed was easy. Stiv leaped into a pair of silver-buckled engineer boots, his favorite T-shirt, and the motorcycle jacket, and then stuffed the Saturday night special in his waistband. Leaving the
room was harder. He opened the door, slithered into the hall, shut the door, and bolted the lock. He checked it, did it again, and two more times after that. He took a couple of steps toward the exit and went back to check the doorknob a fifth time. His agoraphobia was getting out of hand.

Tearing himself away, Stiv bounded down the rear stairs to the ground floor and burst out of the emergency exit onto the sidewalk. Walking in the tepid sunshine to the Muni bus stop at Franklin Street, he finished a joint, the last pinch of what he’d taken off Richard Rood.

A turn-of-the-century F-line car from the Castro pulled up to the stop. Jumping aboard, Stiv looked around the overcrowded carriage. The only vacant seat was in a compartment by a quartet of armed transit cops with two German shepherd guard dogs, and he decided not to sit down. The train conductor’s disembodied voice wafted over the car’s loudspeaker: “Next stop … Civic Center.”

Rattling toward the Civic Center, the trolley pitched from side to side. One of the cops attempted to make eye contact with Stiv. He looked the other way and paid close attention to the street as it whizzed by the train. A Public Health Service ambulance was at the corner of Larkin and Market; medics were loading a homeless man onto a stretcher.

Getting Sharona pregnant had been a colossal accident. The stupid things you did when you were lonely were amazing. You’d sleep with anyone without a rubber on, so long as they were warm and breathing. And having a kid had become an error of monumental proportions. That became evident on the night the baby was born. Straight out of jail, Stiv visited Sharona and the brat in the welfare maternity ward at General Hospital.

Holding the pointy-headed creature that was supposed to be their son in the crook of her elbow, Sharona said to Stiv, honeyed and dulcet-toned, “I need to tell you something.”

The triumph in her voice made Stiv paranoid. “What is it?”

“You have to become a responsible parental figure.”

She might as well have been speaking in Hebrew. He said, “What in the hell are you barking at?”

“It’s like this,” Sharona lectured. “Are you going to be a daddy or a father?”

It was mumbo-jumbo in his ears. “Huh?”

“A daddy just hangs around. A father goes out and gets a job and takes care of his family.”

Sharona’s edict had been a major bring-down. Stiv had never met his own father, didn’t even know the man’s name, so what the fuck was she saying? He didn’t have a clue. Here he was, twenty-five years old, fathering a child way too soon. Now he had to step up to the plate for Sharona and the kid and deliver the things he’d never known.

The trolley shuddered to a halt at the Civic Center station and the coach doors opened. Stiv disembarked and muscled a path through knots of school kids, junkies, suited office workers, and Nicaraguan women selling food. The line of passengers struggling to get out of the station was lengthy. A surveillance camera embedded in a wall gazed unblinkingly at the crowd. Keeping an eye on two overweight Muni cops guarding the entrance, Stiv cut to the front, bestraddled a turnstile, and hopped over it.

A ticket agent shouted at him, “Hey! You didn’t pay!”

Stiv jogged across Market Street. Resurgent wisps of fog wreathed the eucalyptus trees and the hillside condominiums on Diamond Heights. A red, white, and blue zeppelin bobbled over the office buildings in the Tenderloin. The weekly farmer’s market was in progress at the Civic Center. Azure blue and orangeade yellow clouds hovered over the gray government buildings in the plaza.

The neighborhood where Jeeter Roche dwelled, the South of Market, was populated with live-work lofts, high-rise retirement complexes, shopping centers, factories, and warehouses. The writer Jack London had been born at Third and Brannan. The last comprehensive general strike in San Francisco had been organized here by the ILWU in 1934. The district had been a hub for book printing on the West Coast, but
skyrocketing production costs had driven the industry overseas to Korea and Singapore.

The South of Market was also a haven for the city’s leather queens. Bars like the Brig and the Anvil on Folsom Street attracted large mobs on the weekends. Stiv had frequented the Brig; his streetwise scruffiness was irresistible to the leather daddies. One of them, a queen by the name of Robert Opel, developed a crush on him. Usually done up in a black leather vest and chaps and pale-faced with a bushy mustache that masked his sardonic mouth, Robert promoted an ego that took up a lot of room. He’d streaked the Oscar Awards on national television and had become a celebrity. He had a flair for making the people around him seem smaller than they were. The attribute left more than one person wanting to murder him.

History doesn’t repeat itself; it merely predicts what’s been done before. Robert Opel got involved with the wrong people and was shot and killed in a PCP deal that went south. A pimply-faced queen was busted for the deed. One day while going to a preliminary hearing at the Hall of Justice, the shooter escaped from the holding cell next to the courtroom. Dressed in a pair of orange county-jail overalls, he evaded the cops and vamoosed all the way to Florida before he was captured again. Stiv stayed away from the Brig after that.

Walking by the warehouses on Howard Street, he was aware that the residual effects of the Haldol had worn off. His head was clearer than it had been all morning. His hearing was more acute. His sight was stronger. His ability to smell was enhanced. It wouldn’t be long before he had another hallucination.

Hallucinations had a herd mentality. They ran in packs. You had one, others joined in to gangbang your nervous system. Stiv got a hint of things to come when he spotted the wraith of José Reyna on Tehama Street. The outlaw was gauzy, transparent in the sunlight. He was in the saddle of a white stallion. The horse, a muscular brute, reared up on its hind legs and neighed. José waved his sombrero. The poltergeist lasted for all two seconds, enough to worry Stiv.

J
EETER ROCHE’S HOME
was in a refurbished twelve-unit Victorian apartment house in Stevenson Alley. Recently painted a pastel blue, the building had a
FOR SALE
sign on the front door. Stiv rang the bell and was let in through the security gate. Going inside, he had a glimpse of his reflection in the lobby’s mirror. His posture was that of a man who was ill at ease. Plastic frame sunglasses hid his eyes. His hips and legs were toothpicks, smaller than his chest and shoulders. His hair was slick and black. His complexion was gray from the Allen Hotel lifestyle. “You look like shit,” Stiv said to the mirror.

He went upstairs to the fifth floor. A potted palm tree stood sentry in the hall next to a window. The door to Jeeter’s apartment was ajar, and without knocking, Stiv slouched into the place. He tramped through a vestibule reeking with incense into an airy, spacious living room. Five dormer windows let in lukewarm light from the noisy alley.

The walls were packed with bookshelves; paperback novels spilled onto the floor. A Random House dictionary sat on the coffee table, along with a moth-eaten softback copy of Boris Pasternak’s
Doctor Zhivago.
Beached on a brown lizard-skin sofa were Jeeter Roche and Chiclet Dupont. Jeeter’s pupils were the size of silver dollars. Psychedelic mushrooms, Stiv guessed.

Jeeter savaged Stiv with a dismissive glance. Speaking in a queeny deadpan, the voice he used when relating to an inferior, he tapped
Chiclet on the knee with a nail-bitten finger and said, “What the fuck is going on? You didn’t tell me Stiv Wilkins was coming over. What’s up with that? You trying to get me all freaked out and shit? I am unprepared for this. I do not feel in control.”

Chiclet fidgeted, a twitch that was exaggerated by the two five-milligram Valiums she’d just taken. She was in the zone where she was getting high, but not fast enough, and protested with vigor. “I did too tell you, Jeeter, damn it. You weren’t fucking listening.”

Stiv removed his motorcycle jacket and swung it over his shoulder. His steel-toed engineer boots scuffed the hardwood floor. He hooked his thumbs in his belt loops, rested his weight on one leg, and challenged Jeeter with a snarl, “You got a problem with me being here? I can leave if you want.”

Jeeter’s eyes were dark with the promise of conflict. His forehead was punctuated with a rill of tension. His overdeveloped arms strained against the sleeves of a hemp-fiber yoga shirt. His feet were bare and missing two toes. He dropped the book he’d been reading, Bernard Malamud’s
The Natural
, and said, “No, man, it’s cool. I’m not sweating you. Just checking out what comes in the door, you know what I’m saying?”

“I heard that.”

“Damn right, dude. Have a seat.”

Acknowledging Stiv with a wan smile, Chiclet was curled up in the sofa’s pads. She was clad in a polyester imitation sarong and an orange suede halter-top, and her hair was dyed bright cadmium yellow. In the late morning light her unlined, pockmarked face was ashen from a lack of sleep. A tic was working overtime on her right cheek. She was busily picking at the scabs on her newly tattooed forearms.

The living room was equipped with a pair of overstuffed velveteen chairs, white woolen drapes, walnut bookshelves from IKEA, an ersatz Turkish carpet, and a solid glass side table. A boom box on the table burbled a report about the Brinks money case. The police were now saying that, pending further notice, information to the public would be limited.

Stiv brushed a book of Picasso prints from a chair, deposited himself in the cushions, and made polite talk. “Fine place you got here. Pretty swell.”

Jeeter’s face was puffy and pallid; his lips were scarlet red and glistened with saliva. He accepted the compliment with typical gracelessness. “I’ve been doing real well this year. Selling weed is booming.” He confirmed this with Chiclet. “Ain’t that right, honey?”

Chiclet uncrossed her legs and started to get up. “That’s right, Jeeter.” She adjusted her halter-top, giving both men a candid shot of her alabaster breasts. She said to Stiv, “You want something to drink? We’ve got filtered water, beer, and Pepsi. Or you want to smoke a joint?” Her flat eyes sparkled. “I’ll roll a fatty with this here primo Canadian bud we’ve got.”

Jeeter motioned for her to sit back down, holding his hand up, palm out. His muscle-bound body radiated excitement and disharmony. He said with a slur, “Later with the smoke. We’re doing business, darling.”

Chiclet flushed, the pocks on her cheeks lighting up with embarrassment. “Gosh, I’m sorry.”

Ignoring his wife, Jeeter riveted Stiv with a paranoid stare, giving his guest a sample of his prison glare. It was a grimace that he’d acquired during a six-year stay in San Quentin. He didn’t say a word, just looked bald and mean. Then he asked, “So you brought me a cheap piece? Something inexpensive?”

Stiv got cocky. “Yeah, I did. The cream of the crop.”

Jeeter said, “I’m pleased to hear that, mighty pleased. Show me what you’ve got.”

Parting his jacket, Stiv dragged out the Saturday night special from his belt. It was a chrome-plated .25 caliber eight-shot semiautomatic that could fit in a child’s palm. The grips were mother-of-pearl. The finish around the pistol’s muzzle was tarnished. The barrel had nicks all over it. The gun’s appearance let you know that it would blow up in your eyes when you put your finger on the trigger. Not worth more than twenty bucks in the street, its only virtue was in being concealable, which made it an excellent tool for crime.

Stiv said with a straight face, “It’s a beauty, ain’t it?
La mera mata.
The real deal.”

Hearing the Spanish, Jeeter brightened. “You’re bilingual, ain’t you?”

“I’m not,” Stiv said. “I’m from Oregon. From Portland.”

Jeeter eyeballed the pistol. His doughy features were impossible to read. There was no color in his cheeks and no zest in his eyes. You would’ve never known he was alive if it hadn’t been for his lips, which wouldn’t stop moving. He said, “Please, let me see that thing.”

Handing the weapon to him, Stiv said, “This is the finest you can get, guaranteed.”

Jeeter scoffed. “Don’t be ridiculous, Stiv. It looks old.”

“It ain’t.”

Hefting the gat, Jeeter aimed it at the floor. He aimed it at the ceiling. He aimed it at Chiclet. He aimed it at Stiv. Pointing the gun at himself, he pressed the trigger five times in rapid succession. The firing pin sounded no more substantial than a paper clip and there weren’t any bullets in the magazine. The bullets—slugs that were no bigger than a grown man’s thumbnail—would cost Jeeter extra. They were a dollar apiece and were in Stiv’s pocket.

Three vertical lines terraced Jeeter’s brow. There was a question mark grooved in his tightened lips. You could see the dollar signs in his bookworm eyes, how he was already angling to drive the asking price downward. He stuck his tongue out and blew a raspberry. “It ain’t hot, is it?” he asked. “I want a clean gun.”

All guns are born with a blank slate. The Saturday night special had a legacy. It had been used by a junkie acquaintance of Stiv’s to rob liquor stores in the Tenderloin, the last one being at Turk and Hyde. During the heist, the junkie, suffering from withdrawals, had panicked and fired several shots at the clerk. The bullets took out a Gallo wine display case. The robber’s face and the gun were captured on video—the police were searching everywhere for him and the weapon. So he unloaded the pistol on Stiv for ten dollars.

Stiv was getting desperate and lied to Jeeter without remorse. The truth would get him zip. Nor would it earn him any money. “It’s fresh from the manufacturers. Never been used for nothing. It’s virgin.”