Lucky Bastard (26 page)

“Sorry for what, Holmes?”

“For getting you involved in this. For . . . for . . .” I almost say,
For poaching your luck,
but I’m too much of a coward to admit to that. “For making a mess of things.”

“Ain’t no mess, Holmes. It’s cool. It’s all good.”

I only wish it were.

I’m trying to think how I can fix this. How I can put things back the way they were. But Doug’s like Humpty Dumpty and I’m all the king’s men. I don’t know about the king’s horses. How they would be able to work a jigsaw puzzle is beyond me.

“Look,” I say. “You need to do me a favor.”

“Anything, Holmes. Just name it.”

I know he means it. It’s not just hyperbole. I could ask him to hit me. I could ask him to loan me his car. I could ask him to sing “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor while wearing a feather boa. He’d do it.

This realization doesn’t make me feel any better.

“I need you to go home,” I say. “I need you to get someplace safe, preferably away from any electrical wires or sharp objects.”

“I don’t understand, Holmes. I thought we were a team.”

“We are.”

“Then let me help, Holmes. Let me be your Watson.”

Which is sweet, in a weird, male-bonding kind of way.

Doug isn’t making this any easier for me.

Problem is, I can’t let him stay in the city or be anywhere around me, not if there’s a chance he could get hurt. And since I don’t think Doug would understand why I would want him to drink my urine, this is the only way to keep him out of danger.

“Just do it for me, okay?”

“Okay, Holmes,” he says, obviously disappointed. “Whatever you say.”

I feel like an ungrateful bastard, sending Doug away as a reward for saving my life, but I’ll feel a lot better knowing he’s off the streets.

I get out of the car and then lean back in to apologize again. Maybe even tell him the truth so he knows why I’m doing this. What comes out of my mouth instead is “And no speeding, okay? Pay attention at intersections. And no talking on your cell phone while you’re driving. And keep your eyes on the road.”

“What are you, my mother?”

“I just want to make sure you get home safe.”

“You want me to call you when I get home, too?”

“That would be nice.”

He shakes his head in disgust and drapes one arm over the steering wheel, looking straight ahead.

“And, Bow Wow?”

He looks at me with the exasperation of a put-upon twenty-one-year-old who doesn’t want to be bothered with my point of view. “What?”

“Thanks. I owe you. More than you can imagine.”

Then I close the door and watch him drive off toward Chinatown before he hangs a right on Bush, his lemon-yellow Prius disappearing around the corner.

I stand there pulsing with the high-grade luck of two different people, hearing couples argue and homeless people mutter, feeling heat release from the asphalt and car exhaust permeate my skin, smelling cheap perfume and stale urine.

Sometimes poaching luck isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, not when you can smell and hear and feel things you’d rather not experience.

I’m wishing I had someone I could talk to about this. Someone who would listen to me and nod in all the right places and offer me comfort and let me know that they understand. But even if you get married, unless it’s to another poacher, your partner is never going to really know you or comprehend you or be able to help you make sense out of what and who you are. So inevitably, you’re left with just yourself and your isolation and the knowledge that everything you do and experience is yours and yours alone.

You are a rock. You are an island.

Orson Welles once said that we’re born alone, we live alone, and we die alone. And that only through love and friendship do we create the illusion that we’re not alone.

I don’t have any love or friendship in my life. I can’t share this with anyone. No one who will understand what
I’m experiencing. And I’m thinking of another quote, this one by Mark Twain:

Grief can take care of itself. But to get the full value of joy, you must have somebody to divide it with.

I want someone to divide this with—the grief and the joy, the pain and the pleasure, the valleys and the peaks. Even if it
is
just an illusion. I’d rather have the illusion than the reality. But I’m stuck on this island of solitude, surrounded by this ocean of emptiness that stretches to the horizon in all directions, and I don’t even have a volleyball to talk to.

As I’m standing there feeling marooned and morose, a homeless woman walks up to me singing “Rock-a-Bye Baby,” which she stops singing long enough to ask me if I can spare any change for some food. Even though I know she’ll probably just use it for booze, I give her one of the few hundreds left in my wallet, hoping in some way it will help with her own illusions.

“Thanks, Jack,” she says with a smile in need of a toothbrush, then she walks away singing, “Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water . . .”

I watch her go, the nursery rhyme trailing behind her, and I find myself thinking about Jack and his ill-fated trip up that hill. True, even though he fell down and broke his crown, Jill came tumbling after, so he didn’t have to suffer alone. Another Jack, Jack Sprat, he couldn’t eat any fat but at least he had his wife to share his meals with and even
things out. And Humpty Dumpty, the clumsy oaf, he had all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, even if, in the end, their efforts were futile.

But no one’s tumbling after me. No one’s helping me lick my platter clean. No one’s coming to put me back together.

Mary had a little lamb, the dish ran away with the spoon, the farmer took a wife.

And I, like the cheese, stand alone.

I
’m standing outside the front door of 636 O’Farrell with an old, dirty backpack over my shoulder, holding a large mocha from Peet’s in one hand and the business card Barry Manilow gave me in the other. I’m hoping this won’t take long. And that I don’t end up drugged or tied up or kicked in the nuts.

It’s the little things in life that make me happy.

How I got here is in a cab, which is waiting for me across the street, the meter running with the promise of an additional hundred bucks if he’s still waiting for me when I come out. The last thing I want is to be walking around the Tenderloin at night, trying to flag down a cab while carrying two ounces of low-grade hard.

How I ended up with the backpack and the mocha from Peet’s is a little more involved.

Knowing I’d need something to carry the bad luck with and not having a spare backpack in my office or the time to go shopping at North Face, I offered a hundred bucks to
a homeless guy on Sutter Street, who would only part with his beat-up backpack for two hundred bucks and a large mocha from Peet’s. While I didn’t have a problem parting with the extra C-note, I tried to talk him into a venti mocha from Starbucks, which was right up the street on Kearny, less than a block away. But that only sent him into a schizophrenic rant on grandes and ventis and talls.

Since he refused to give me the backpack if I went to Starbucks and since I didn’t have any other options available, I went to the Peet’s on Montgomery and Bush. While I was there, I got a second mocha for me, along with a phone number from a cute little redhead with blue eyes and dimples. Then I grabbed the other thousand bucks out of my filing cabinet and flagged down a cab.

I drain the rest of my large mocha, then I put the empty cup in my backpack, glance once more at the address on the business card, and rap three times on the door.

When I knock, the sound echoes the way it does when an apartment is vacant, when there’s no furniture or personal belongings to absorb the noise, when it’s obvious that no one lives there, and I’m wondering if maybe I have the wrong place. I look at the card again and step back to double-check the address. Just as I’m about to knock again, the door opens and I’m looking up into the face of a tall albino man with dreadlocks and pale blue eyes.

“You have business?” he says, his voice thick with some kind of Eastern European accent. Maybe Czech. Maybe Romanian. Maybe Russian. I can’t tell the difference.

I never was good with geography.

I hand him my card, which I hope answers his question, because I don’t know the secret password.

He takes the card from me and gives it a glance, then flips it over and nods once before he steps back and stands to one side. “Come.”

Obviously he’s a man of few words, and with his dreads and his accent and his vampire-like complexion, he’s a little intimidating, so I do what he says and I step through the door, which he closes and locks behind me.

“Follow me,” he says, leading me toward the back of the apartment across scuffed hardwood floors and through empty rooms with bare walls, the paint cracked and peeling, the corners dark with shadows and mildew. The only decorations are window blinds, which are all dusty and drawn.

I wonder if the Albino and Tommy Wong use the same interior decorator.

I’ve never seen an albino before. Not in person. And definitely not in San Francisco. So presuming this guy doesn’t have a brother or an uncle or a celebrity impersonator, I’m guessing this is the alleged luck poacher Bow Wow said he saw down on Market Street. Though it still doesn’t make any sense why he would be poaching luck in the Tenderloin.

We end up in the kitchen, which is just as warm and charming as the rest of the apartment. No spice racks. No fruit bowls. No knife sets. Which I’m oddly thankful for.
No microwave. No toaster oven. No espresso machine. The only appliance other than the gas stove is a refrigerator that’s about half the size of your standard Frigidaire. I figure the only things stored inside are body parts or dead cats. Then the Albino opens the refrigerator door.

Instead of condiments and juice and nonfat yogurt, the shelves of the refrigerator are empty except for several red, stainless steel drinking bottles on the top shelf, while the refrigerator door and the bottom shelf contain dozens of clear glass vials of varying sizes filled with a liquid as thick and as black as used motor oil.

My mouth suddenly turns dry and my heart starts to pound so fast I could be a plump, juicy rabbit pinned to the ground beneath the open jaws of a predator.

I’m staring at a refrigerator filled with bad luck.

And I understand why the Albino has been trolling around the Tenderloin.

I’ve never met a bad-luck poacher before. I’ve only heard stories about them from Grandpa. They’re like Bigfoot. Urban legends of the poaching community. You’re never really sure if you believe in them until you actually see one for yourself.

Like now.

I’m a little awestruck and, to be honest, a little freaked-out. After all, this is Bigfoot we’re talking about, standing right next to me, all pasty-skinned and dreadlocked and sounding like the Terminator. Plus I know what happened to me when I poached bad luck just the one time. How it
felt. Cold and desolate. A pernicious infection. A malevolent sludge flowing through me that I had to get out of my system as fast as possible. Just five minutes was enough to give me the shakes and the sweats and make me vomit until I had the dry heaves. I can’t imagine what it’s like to feel that all the time.

I watch as he removes one of the stainless steel bottles from the top shelf of the refrigerator.

“You’re a Specter,” I say.

“I poach bad luck, yes. But am not apparition.”

I think he’s making a joke, but I can’t be sure since he sounds so serious.

“I’ve never met a Specter.”

“Would you like autograph?” he asks, closing the refrigerator and taking the bottle of bad luck over to the counter.

“Maybe just a photo,” I say, playing along. At least I hope I’m playing along. The last thing I want to do is get on the wrong side of a guy who poaches bad luck for a living.

He gives me a hint of a smile, so I figure I’m okay for the time being.

I watch him set the bottle on the counter, then he grabs a drinking glass from the cabinet.

“Are all Specters like you?” I ask.

“Like me how? Charming?”

“Well, no. Not that you aren’t. Charming, I mean. I was thinking more along the lines of your appearance.”

“Tall?”

“Not exactly.”

“Good-looking?”

“Albino,” I say, spitting it out. “I was just wondering because . . .”

“Because I look like ghost?”

“Yeah. Now that you mention it.”

“I don’t know any other Specters, as you call me,” he says, filling the drinking glass with tap water. “So I do not know what others look like. I only know me.”

He places the glass of water on the counter next to the stainless steel bottle.

“How long have you been poaching?” I ask.

“As long as I can remember.”

I always wondered if Specters begat other Specters or if they were anomalies, born with some kind of a genetic poaching defect.

“Was one of your parents a Specter?” I ask. “Or were they just luck poachers?”

“I do not talk about my parents.”

And that’s the end of that conversation.