Hell's Half Acre

fourteen.

I LEAVE THE PARADISE SPA and walk up Geary to Jones. Enter the bar called Mao’s that is empty but not. The walls are painted with black and white murals of old world film actors. Charlie Chaplin. Fatty Arbuckle. Laurel and Hardy. They stare and stare and I feel surrounded. I go to the bar and an old guy with silver hair and little round eyeglasses comes over, puts a napkin in front of me. The empty barstools to my left and right are too perfectly aligned and a little creepy. I ask for ice water and two shots of whiskey but I am really tempted to demand a glass of hydrogen peroxide because my mouth feels wrong. It feels like it’s full of fucking cigarette ash. I suck down the water in a long furious swallow, drooling. The bartender has a lazy brown eye that wanders around loose as a marble while the other stares straight through me.

That’s gonna be eight dollars, he says.

I give him a twenty and tell him to go ahead and bring another shot.

Long day? he says.

Endless, I say.

The bartender shrugs and glances up at one of the overhead televisions. There are seven of them, I notice. On two screens are the same silent baseball game, the Dodgers and Braves. Three of the others are running old movies. Bette Davis howling and bug-eyed and completely nuts on the left. Jimmy Stewart peeping at his freaky neighbors to the right. And Laurence Olivier tediously dying straight ahead. The last two screens are gray and blank.

Are you Mao? I say.

Professionally speaking, yes, the bartender says.

Interesting name for a bar.

It’s all about mind control, he says. Propaganda, baby. The customers come in here like suicidal sheep and the televisions mesmerize them. The old movies make people melancholy and therefore thirsty. The baseball keeps them sedated. Think about it. Television and advertising and the power of mass hypnosis were completely unrealized before Mao and Hitler showed us a thing or two. Of course, it would be financial suicide to name a bar after Hitler.

I stare at him and he laughs, low and rasping.

The place is kind of empty, I say.

Yeah, he says. What the fuck do I know?

What about soft porn, I say.

Nah. He waves a hand. Don’t want the wrong element in here.

I shrug and swallow the first whiskey.

Pull up a stool, boy. You might as well stay a while.

I sit down and take slow, cautious sips of the second whiskey. I would hate to get drunk. I grin to myself and look up at the Dodgers game and see that the Braves are methodically destroying them. The players on the Dodger bench are serene, peaceful. The camera moves in on one young black player, a rookie who wears silver wraparound sunglasses even though it’s a night game. He stares out at the field as if he’s sitting in church and his face is frozen, cut from stone. The camera lingers and now I detect the faint twitch of artery or muscle below his jaw.

You said that the customers are suicidal, I say. The sheep.

The bartender nods. Yeah.

What do you mean by that, exactly.

Huh, he says. I’m not a goddamn psychologist and wouldn’t want to be. But it seems to me that anybody comes into a bar and sits by himself and sinks five or six cocktails one after another and never says boo to another soul well he’s got a gun to his head. He’s just taking his time about it.

I regard my own row of drinks.

Don’t take offense, he says.

I wouldn’t.

The bartender grins. Like I said previously. I don’t know shit.

You ever think about it, Mao?

Pull my own plug?

Yeah.

Once or twice a day, in the morning especially.

The morning?

What the hell. I’m sixty-four years old. I got arthritis. I try to jerk off and all I get is a fucking cramp in my neck. Thinking about suicide is the next best thing.

Right.

You want another? says Mao.

I shake my head.

Well, then. When are you going to eat a bullet?

The third whiskey sits before me, untouched. My stomach is gurgling for lack of food and the bartender is a madman. I think he should have called this place The Faustus. I think my skull is full of black ice. Mao begins to wipe down the bar with a rancid yellow towel. The stink of mildew. That lazy eye drifts by, unfocused. The fucking thing is making me seasick and I try to ignore it.

Were you ever married? I say.

Mao jabs one finger at the lazy eye. No, he says.

I shiver, unsurprised. That eye would be hard to deal with.

You? he says.

A long time ago, yeah. But she killed herself. Blew herself to bits.

Mao looks up. You serious?

Yes.

Then I apologize to you. That was some insensitive shit to say.

I tell him not to worry about it. I tell him that it was a long time ago, another lifetime. Mao nods and murmurs and graciously tilts his head to the left so that I don’t have to face the lazy eye. I tell him she was very brave, my wife. That she killed herself only out of the desire to sidestep a slow death. I am tempted to tell him that I don’t have arthritis, that I spend a lot more time daydreaming about various gruesome ways to kill myself than I do actually bothering to masturbate. I’m not quite sure if this is true, however. And while it has a nice ring to it, I don’t think such a confession would exactly put a smile on Mao’s face. Anyway. I am trying to cut back on these incidents of drive-by intimacy. I stand up and tell him thanks and realize I am a trifle unsteady. I am wobbling. The third whiskey remains untouched and I ask him to please raise a toast to the next suicide that walks through the door.

Outside and yes, noticeably drunk. I have no sense of direction, no sense of time. I am wobbling on a street corner in downtown San Francisco. Vision is unreliable and after six, seven blocks, I am fast approaching blackout but not yet illiterate and the street signs that loom fuzzy black and white along my periphery identify this corner as 6th and Mission and danger is everywhere. Don’t laugh but I think I’m being followed. I hear footsteps, echoes. I take a few steps and I hear the scrape of leather against stone behind me. I stop walking and the echo is gone and I know this is the paranoia of bad movies.

The nostrils twitch and I smell feces.

Cut away to handheld camera, delirium tremens.

I swing left and right now full circle and find the shitter, a runaway white girl sixteen maybe seventeen, a poor little crackhead crouched in blue doorway with bright yellow miniskirt bunched around her waist, leaving a wet black steaming coil of shit on someone’s stoop.

Daffy.

This could be a clip from 20/20. Lost children etc.

Probably her condition should trouble me, it should offend me or move me somehow. But I am too drunk and blind and preoccupied with my own problems to care about the public health and anyway it’s not my doorway. The girl has to poop somewhere and even now her lips curl into a yellow snarl because I am staring at her. From her point of view, I am a stupid drunk middle-aged pervert and I’m staring at her, I’m invading her personal space. And if I breathe a word to her, if I offer to help this girl or give her money or a word of advice she will surely bite me.

I stand with my back to her a moment. Drunk but not unaware. The shitting girl is exactly the sort of lost soul that normally I would be compelled to help. I have a touch of Travis Bickle in me, says Jude. The watcher, the idiot avenger. But I’m not half the psychotic cracker that Travis was and I like to think my social skills are better by a mile or two. Anyway, something possesses me to turn around and ask the girl if she needs help. She has finished shitting by now and I can smell it. Her face is cracked and yellow and what’s left of her brown hair is thin and stringy. Her eyes are black holes but I notice with a kind of horror how shapely her legs are.

This girl was once a beauty.

Five dollars, she says. Give me five dollars.

I fumble with my money and locate a five dollar bill. I don’t want to think about what manner of service she might provide for five dollars. And when she sees the money, her small teeth flash.

Hey, mister. Let’s go. I’ll make you feel alright.

I shake my head, confused. Because this isn’t going to help her and I don’t know what will. I try to think what Jude would want me to do. She’d want me to be kind to this girl. Take her to IHOP and feed her pancakes with blueberry syrup, then coax her life’s story out of her. Then go out and kill the father or brother or boyfriend who made her like this. But I can only imagine that. I can only give her the five dollars and turn away from her but she grabs at my arm, her nails raking the skin along my wrist.

I raise my hand to hit her, to drive her away, but stop myself. She falls against the wall, screeching.

Jude would not want me to hit this girl, I don’t think.

The death shuffle. I walk a mile, or so it feels. And I have no fucking idea where the hotel is. I mutter to myself about milk and fallen angels and pretty polly and the glory of Ludwig Van in a terrible British accent because in the adolescent reptile portion of my brain I want to be Malcolm McDowell when I’m drunk but I am generally not so clever or elegant. I am stupid and cruel and violent and lonely and aching and maybe it would be best to take a cab out to Berkeley and curl up between Jude and John Ransom Miller like a lost sibling and worry about my intentions tomorrow but I am drunk and like any droog what is full of piss and lacking the common sense to lay down his head and sleep or die, I want to fight or fuck someone.

I want to fight John Ransom Miller.

Dear Jude, where are you. I want to be perfect just like you.

I can hear the freeway, the rush and hiss of a thousand cars. The edge, I am coming to the edge of something and I wonder if I am near the ocean and now I raise my eyes to see the curved freeway overpass like the massive spinal column of conjoined twins and glowing against black sky are the big green signs that provide blunt directions to Chinatown and North Beach and suddenly I am scared of the government and I want to get inside. I want to get inside and in the distance a shadowy line of people waits against the white wall of a building below the freeway. Three vertical black words against the wall over their heads, with a crude black arrow pointing to the heavens. It takes me a minute to make out the words but soon I form them silently with rubber tongue. The End Up.

Fate, baby. This is my new destination.

Melt into the line outside the End Up. Become a falling leaf brown and gold falling anonymous to earth with thousands of others. Infinity is mine, for two seconds. Then spot a mesmerizing blond girl with wide brown eyes and sharp features, hip bones jutting through thin nylon skirt. Belly button and nipples and goosebump arms and meathead boyfriend. Wobble like a duck. I gaze up the length of the line, where two very muscular bouncers with gold jewelry and black baseball caps are methodically patting people down before they go inside. They are looking for drugs, probably. But this is no problem, as I’m not holding. I forget for the moment that I am carrying a gun.

I turn to the nearest person, a Latin kid with blue hair. What is this place? I say.

He regards me with pity, scorn. It’s like a rave, man. But better.

Wow.

The kid edges away from me, as if I have the pox. You better straighten up, he says.

What’s the rumpus?

You’re drunk, he says. And you smell like almonds.

I sniff myself, lifting one arm to my face. The kid is not wrong. I stink of almonds and I am about to say so but the lifting of my arm has apparently caused an unfortunate redistribution of personal mass which throws me off just slightly and I fall sideways into the blond girl with goosebump skin. She recoils in disgust and says loudly, oh gross and now the boyfriend leaps on me, beating me in the face and chest with stony fists and I am knocked backward, flopping into the crowd like an inflatable man and now fists come hammering down on me from all sides. Monkey in the middle. Something hits me in the eye that feels like a rock. Claustrophobia, numb panic. My cheek is gouged open by a sharp ring and the blood runs into my mouth and now someone lands a heavy fist in the back of my neck. This drops me to my knees. I’m trying to decide if I care for a fight and really I don’t. I’m too sleepy and my arms and legs are like boiled noodles but I can fight if necessary and so I try to push myself upright as a heavy boot sails into my ribs, maybe six inches north of the hole Jude left in me so many years ago and I roll heavily over the curb. I flop into the gutter on my back like an old dog that wants his belly scratched.

The commotion draws the attention of the bouncers and one of them stomps down the sidewalk, muttering into a headset. For one truly stupid moment, I think he’s coming to save me.

He’s not.

The bouncer crouches over me, cursing. He says some unkind shit to me. Then frisks me with big, unforgiving hands. He gives my testicles a brutal squeeze and I nearly vomit in his fucking face. He takes my money, all of it. He puts it into his own pocket, which seems grossly unfair.

But then I’m drunk, yes.

I am really very drunk and a drunk is not quite human. I have therefore forfeited my civil rights. I mumble at him to please fuck off anyway and he laughs. He finds the gun. He grunts with purely sexual satisfaction and leans down close and whispers, the cops are coming you piece of shit and I hope you sleep like a baby. Then unceremoniously bashes me between the eyes with the butt of my own gun.