San Francisco Noir

GENESIS TO REVELATION BY PETER PLATE

Market Street

It was ninety-six degrees on Market Street the day before Christmas. Holiday decorations graced the windows of the check-cashing store at the corner. Weary junkies in goose-down parkas congregated around the Stevenson Alley methadone clinic. Teenaged hookers wearing rhinestone-trimmed spandex capris and halter tops loitered at the Donut Star coffee shop. Pigeons drunk on heatstroke were falling off the telephone lines.

In the 1940s, Market Street had been a constellation of movie houses. Blue-collar entertainment seekers flocked there for the vibrant nightlife. Nowadays the avenue was a forest of abandoned buildings. Under the old Strand Theater’s marquee, homeless men and women had turned a fleet of shopping carts, suitcases, clothes, tarps, and strips of cardboard into a shanty fort.

A pale, unshaven twenty-four-year-old Slatts Calhoun, three days out of San Quentin Prison, stood near a pay phone at Seventh and Market. He was dressed in a Santa Claus suit stolen from a Salvation Army volunteer. To go along with the costume he had on a fake white beard and an ill-fitting stocking hat. A tarnished blue.357 Smith and Wesson revolver was stuck in his belt.

He reconnoitered the medical marijuana club up the street and cursed. Ever since weed became legal in the city, pot stores were everywhere. They were a venereal disease. It was impossible to get away from them. This one was squeezed in between a dentist’s office and a sandwich shop. It had a brick façade and a single barred window emblazoned with graffiti. A bored surveillance camera was mounted above the security gate. The place resembled a police station.

Slatts limped over to the dope shop, stopped in front of the steel gate, posed for the camera, and buzzed the doorbell. Nothing happened. He waited a second and repeated the procedure. A thin Mexican hippie in paisley surfer shorts and a vintage Clash T-shirt came out to inspect him. “Hey, Santa, how the fuck you doing today?”

Keeping the gun concealed, Slatts said what came to mind. His first forty-eight hours out of the penitentiary had been a hassle. One night he slept in a garbage dumpster behind the new federal building. Then he got into a fight with a hooker and was jacked by her pimps. He didn’t even have enough money to take the bus to the welfare office. As a bonus, the beard was making his skin itch. “I’m cool, homeboy. What’s up with you?”

“The same bullshit. You got your ID for me?”

To gain entry into the club, a customer needed a physician-approved Department of Health identification card. Private doctors were handing them out at two hundred dollars a pop.

Slatts didn’t have a card, no place to live, or any food in his belly. He rasped, “Yeah, well, there’s a problem, see? Can I come in and talk to you about it?”

The pot worker’s smile faded into a cynical tic. He was prematurely aged by the needs of dope fiends. “Hell, no.”

“C’mon, vato, give me a break.”

“I can’t do that, dude. It’s against the law. You’ve got to have a card to get in.”

“Listen to me, asshole, I want some fucking weed.”

“Too bad, home slice. I don’t give a shit.”

“Fuck you, man. It’s goddamn Christmas, you know what I’m saying?”

Slatts lost his cool in a delicious surge of adrenaline. It was time to introduce his revolver into the conversation. It would help move the dialogue along. He poked the gun’s three-inch barrel through the gate’s latticework and hooked the dealer in the nose with it. Reaching in, he yanked the lad forward. Then he groped the kid’s shorts for the keys, found them, and unlocked the door.

Santa Claus was in the house.

Brandishing the heater, Slatts moseyed into the retail room. His mouth watered with excitement. This was better than the lottery. Cheap reefer was hard to find in the street. Plus, it was usually low-grade crap. Another worker, a lithe, tanned blond girl in patched denim overalls and Birkenstock sandals, approached him. Her oval face was a delicate flower, open and questioning. She asked, “May I assist you?”

Slatts produced a smile tempered by several missing teeth. “No, honey, Santa can help himself.”

The store’s damp walls were festooned with sepia-tinted concert posters from Bill Graham Productions. Two customers, an aged queen and a black guy with one leg, were getting loaded on a ratty divan. Ambient techno pulsed in the back-round. Slatts heard someone move and turned to confront a beefy longhair in tai chi clothes. It was the security guard.

“Hey, what are you doing with that gun?” The longhair had the attitude of a public rest room. “We’re peaceful here.”

“Shut the fuck up. Nobody talks to Santa Claus like that.”

“Kiss my ass, motherfucker. I’m calling the police.”

The cops loathed the pot clubs and didn’t give a hoot if they were robbed. Slatts ignored the threat and examined the merchandise. The weed was in pastel-colored ceramic bowls on a counter top. The menu was listed on a chalkboard. Medium-quality green, mostly Oakland hydroponic, ran forty-five an eighth, same as in the streets. Stronger grades, like Canadian indica, were sixty for three and a half grams. Mexican syndicate pot was cheaper, but wasn’t worth smoking. The stuff was first cousin to napalm. Mendocino boutique bud was four hundred and fifty dollars an ounce. Turdlike pot cookies were five bucks apiece. Slatts didn’t see what was so medicinal about the prices.

Leaning over the counter, he probed the cash register. To his delight, a wad of twenties and fifties danced into view. He pocketed the cash and backpedaled out of the store into the ebb and flow of Market Street.

Columns of gold-colored sunshine haloed the roadbed at Seventh and Market. Panhandlers, speed freaks, and pickpockets milled at Carl’s Jr. Bike messengers dodged cars and delivery trucks. A Muni bus seething with passengers lumbered toward Van Ness Avenue. Whirlwinds of leaves and empty nickel bags flirted in the gutter.

The heat outside was nauseating. The pavement was hotter than a match head. Making Slatts dizzy and ready to puke. Which was how he liked things. The gun dangled from his hand, muzzle pointed at the sidewalk. His beard and costume were drenched in perspiration. A homeless wino decked out in a garbage-bag poncho hailed him from an insurance office doorway. “Yo, Santa, yo, yo. Can you help me, brother man?”

Slatts flicked a sideways glance at the bum and smelled trouble. His voice was colder than his mother’s pussy. “What the fuck do you want? I’m in a hurry.”

“My partner is sick.”

A white boy in an army jacket was slumped against the door frame. His tattered sneakers had holes in the soles. His cracked green eyes were intent on a faraway paradise. He didn’t appear to be breathing. Slatts frowned and hissed, “What the hell is wrong with him?”

“I don’t know,” the wino said. “We were just sitting here and shit, and the pecker keeled over. Maybe he had a heart attack or something.”

“You call an ambulance?”

“Yeah, it’s on the way.”

Nobody was coming out of the pot club. Slatts sighed. That was a good sign. He’d hate to have to shoot someone right now. Dropping to his knees, he placed a finger on the unconscious man’s neck, feeling for a pulse. He didn’t find it. Instead, an electrical charge zinged into his fingertip. He knew what it meant and jerked his hand away. Christ on a crutch. What a drag. The bastard had died on him. The electricity was his spirit, what was left of it. “It’s nothing,” he shrugged. “He’s just resting.”

“What should I do?”

“Keep waiting for the ambulance.”

“Is he sick?”

All the interrogatives vexed Slatts. Like he wasn’t tense enough already. “No, he isn’t. So relax, okay?”

He hardly got the words out of his mouth when a black-and-white police van oozed to the curb. Three husky officers in midnight-blue combat overalls jumped out. Their scuffed riot helmets gleamed in the torpid sunlight. Slatts couldn’t believe it. This was bad karma. The dope dealers had snitched on him. That wasn’t kosher. It was disgusting. The wimps couldn’t handle their own business. There was no honor among thieves.

Hefting the.357, he pressed the trigger. A lonely bullet flowered out of the revolver’s barrel and sped forward in slow motion, burying itself in the pot store’s window. The music of breaking glass rippled in the flat air. The cops scrambled for cover and returned the fire. A slug ricocheted off the pavement, catching Slatts in the wrist. The.357 went sailing into the bushes.

It was funny how things never worked out. Like he was falling through a mirror into a black hole. The cops dashed to the doorway, pushed aside the dead man, knocked Slatts onto his stomach, and handcuffed him in a pool of blood. An officer kneeled on the ex-con’s legs and brayed, “Merry Christmas, baby,” then shot him in the ear.

The blast loosened Slatts’s bowels. A jet of warm shit trickled down his thigh. A pillar of unsavory steam rose from the Santa Claus suit. The ground was painted red and pink with bits of his earlobe. The pigeons on the phone lines shrieked with indignation. A moody cloud passed over the sun.

The gods of crime were not smiling on Market Street that afternoon.

DECEPTION OF THE THRUSH BY WILL CHRISTOPHER BAER

The Castro

Jude opened her hand and the panic of blind horses seized her. The washcloth was marked with a bloody knot of red in the shape of a gouged eye. She sat naked on the edge of the bathtub and tried not to hyperventilate. She pushed from her head the uneasy idea that her blood on a white washcloth was the single source of primary color in a strange bathroom yawning black and white around her. She stared at the locked door across from her and counted to ten, and when the horses died away she took stock of her situation.

She was seventeen and it was a school night.

Her left arm was so bruised it looked like it belonged to someone else, the bruise running so deep she was sure she could smell it, as if the blood pooling in there had gone bad. Her legs were cold to the touch, her thighs rippled with goose bumps, and when she pulled her hands from her knees they left marks slow to fade. She wondered if it were true that fingerprints could be dusted from human skin, and made a mental note to look that up.

She had locked herself in this bathroom two minutes ago, not counting a few too rapid heartbeats, and by her estimation she could safely remain another four minutes more. Any longer and he might get suspicious and come to the door to ask in a soft threatening voice if she were all right, and she couldn’t bear that. She needed to exit the bathroom without prompting.

Already it had taken her twenty-two seconds to pee, another thirty-six seconds to run water over the washcloth and bathe herself as instructed, and it sickened her to realize she had been staring at the knot of blood for nearly a minute, trying to organize her thoughts into any linear progression that made sense. She had a sudden overwhelming sense that had there been a window in the room, she would be scrambling with torn fingers for the roof, regardless of the screaming black vertigo in her stomach that said she was tucked away in a corner apartment on the nineteenth floor of a downtown tower with windows that were sealed shut and a sleepy doorman out front, where no one would ever think to look for her.

Nonsense.

The voice in her head was her father’s, and she nearly glanced over her shoulder.

Animal urges, her father said.

Her father had often told her that some predators were comfortable only on familiar ground, and never strayed far from home. These were not the most skilled hunters, he said, but they were unpredictable, and dangerous as hell, because they hunted on impulse. Others followed the prey, shadowing the herd. But the smartest hunters roamed far from home, where the rabbits would not recognize them. He always laughed, telling her this. And he was right. It was more likely that she was still somewhere in the Castro, where she had been pretending to shop earlier in the day, because the man who waited for her on the other side of the bathroom door seemed the sort of predator who hunted near to home. And it didn’t matter. She had to first get outside, then worry about where she was.

The bathtub was long and wide as a coffin.

Jude fought off the childish urge to crawl into the tub and shut her eyes and tell herself that if she couldn’t see him, he would not see her. Her memory was splintered, so much so that she saw the landscape inside her head in the thousand and one reflections of a shattered mirror in the sun, and she had no idea how to sort the images, the sprawl of information. The first shall be last, she thought, and was briefly comforted to seize on something familiar, though she couldn’t remember if that line came from the Book of Matthew or Mark, or what it meant.

The sisters would not be proud if they saw her now, she thought.

Jude was in her senior year at Sacred Heart, a private Catholic school for girls that was so old the halls smelled of raw earth and, according to her father, boasted tuition fees that could only be described as obscene. Jude had once calculated that, taking into account her spotty attendance record and history of expulsions, her education to this point had cost her father in the neighborhood of a thousand dollars per day. She was forever restless and bored to the edge of psychosis by the curriculum, and she had a tendency to get into fights. Two years ago, in a dispute over a borrowed jacket, she had hit a Brazilian girl named Noel much harder than she meant to, damaging the other girl’s larynx. Only the fact that Noel threw the first punch had spared her father an expensive legal headache, but to be safe Jude had taught herself to be invisible ever after, to move through crowds of people without a ripple. She wished that a thousand people had noticed her today, but they hadn’t. Because she had been practicing. She had been a shadow, her hand slipping in and out of their pockets.

She would regret being invisible if she woke up in a box tomorrow.

Jude lived with her parents in Pacific Heights, sixteen blocks from school. And though she left the house promptly at 7:00 each morning, she so rarely arrived at Sacred Heart it was unlikely that anyone would notice if she disappeared for a week. She still wore the uniform most days, because it prevented her mother from getting agitated. When her mother became agitated she tended to go overboard with her medication, a too generous cocktail of amphetamines and painkillers that pushed her into episodes of such extreme paranoia that she once nailed shut the door to her bedroom and burrowed into her walk-in closet with a hammer and small axe and tried to dig a tunnel to a neighboring room that existed only in her head.

Jude wore the uniform because it soothed her mother.

The sight of Jude in the familiar outfit gave her mother the temporary illusion that the inside of her head was in order. And because her mother was a near bottomless source of guilt for her, Jude wore the uniform.

But she would have worn it anyway, because it was so practical.

By the time she entered middle school, Jude had discovered that if she moved her hips just so and let the tiny blue-and-black skirt flutter at her thighs, the men and boys in her immediate vicinity became hushed, compliant. She crossed her legs and sneezed and the man nearest her trembled and handed her a tissue. She crouched on the sidewalk to dig through her purse with her knees pressed together and hair blowing in her mouth and her butt just touching the heels of her black Mary Janes, and even the stoned hustlers and street artists stopped to ask if she were lost. She twisted her white shirttails into a bow that exposed an inch of bare belly and a college boy would buy her a coffee. And if she tugged her socks up over her knees, cab drivers offered her cigarettes and took her wherever she wanted to go.

She would give anything to be in the back of a yellow cab right now. She would ask the driver to take her to the one place that felt like church to her, the ruined baths just up the hill from Ocean Beach. She would close her eyes as they sailed through the sunset, and thank God she wasn’t on her feet, because she was so sore, so raw inside. The soft pink hidden flesh in what her mother perversely referred to as her special prize felt as if it had been flayed with a chunk of glass.

Again she looked at the washcloth, the smear of red against white.

This was not menstrual blood.

Jude had the altered internal clock of a long-distance runner and rarely had a regular period. She ran nearly seventy miles per week through the rain and mist in the Presidio, and trained with weights and worked out every other day with a tae-kwon-do master class, and this regimen combined with birth control pills and the amphetamines she skimmed from her mother’s cave had pretty much cancelled her cycle. This was the blood of trauma, and now it struck her that she would never forgive herself if she left even a drop of it behind.

Jude pushed herself up from the edge of the tub and crossed unsteadily to the sink, where she turned on the hot water. She rinsed the cloth with liquid soap and scrubbed it with her fingernails until the water ran clear, trying not to glance at herself in the mirror, though not because she disliked her body.

The opposite, rather.

She was aware that most of the girls her age, the ones she ever bothered to talk to, suffered intense body-image issues and eating disorders that haunted and consumed them. Jude had never known what to say to them, though she had tried to feel what they did, thinking it would be a useful emotion or psychosis to access. Her own body was a product of conditioning that Bruce Lee would not have scoffed at, and the genetic gift of a Thai mother and Irish father speckled with Israeli blood. She was long and lean with fine yellow skin and small breasts with large brown nipples that paralyzed men and boys without fail. Her stomach was flat and hard, though not yet the washboard she coveted. Thousands upon thousands of pushups had brought out the shadow of definition in her arms and shoulders, and although she considered her ass to be on the smallish side, it was tight and curved and fit perfectly in the palm of the pool boy’s hand, or so it had when she was twelve and shaped like a wisp of smoke and he was still unafraid to touch and pet and wrestle with her.

The pool boy was four years older than Jude, but small. He was just a whisper of bone and muscle. He had a pretty pink mouth and green eyes, long blond hair and the perfect sharp ears of an elf, and he seemed always to be tan, regardless of season. He was sweet and playful and Jude supposed she had suffered a temporary crush on him, and she used to hang around the pool in her red racing bikini and watch him while he worked. And sometimes she was able to lure him into the pool when he was done cleaning it, provided her father was not around. The pool boy was afraid of him, and rightly so. Jude’s father had terrorized him often. But when her father was away on business, Jude and the pool boy wrestled and chased each other underwater, skin bright and flashing, and sometimes the pool boy retreated from her with a bulge in his swimsuit and a look on his face that she found fascinating. Jude was strong even at twelve. And one day, without meaning to, she held the pool boy under the surface too long, she held him down until he struggled and freaked out, and only when he scratched open her arms with his fingernails did she realize what she was doing. When she released him, the pool boy withdrew from her, pale and gasping, and ever after had avoided her.

Jude knew why she had done it.

Her father had thrown her into the swimming pool when she was five and not yet a confident swimmer. He stood watching from the pool’s edge as she panicked and thrashed and finally went under. Her father had allowed her to drown, then revived her, and she was never sure if his intention was to teach her not to fear death or to remind her that he had the power of life over her. She had decided that it was both of these, and became wary of him. But aside from offering advice with math and soccer, her father left her alone until she was nine, when he drove her up the coast and made her hike through the woods in the dark until they reached the beach. He armed her with a knife and compass, then abandoned her there, telling her she had one hour to find her way back to the highway. He promised her that if it took her longer than an hour, the car would be gone.

And not long after her tenth birthday, he began teaching her to be a pickpocket. He allowed her to practice on him for exactly one day, in the relatively intimate space of his closet at home, before taking her for a ride on BART during the afternoon commute so she could try the real thing. He selected easy targets for her at first, then ever more challenging ones. The worst of these had been a burly, sweating man in a rumpled suit and tie with needle-bright eyes, who scratched at his arms and kept swiveling his head left and right. Jude had failed to come away with even a pack of cigarettes, but neither had she been caught with her hand in the twitching man’s pocket. And when she returned with empty hands to her father’s side, he gave a shiver of a smile and touched her face with one hand, and though she couldn’t yet verbalize it, she comprehended that he was telling her to choose her targets with care, that the burly man had been a junkie day trader of some kind, chemically altered and paranoid and therefore not a suitable mark.

Her father was pathologically reserved with praise and affection. He touched her so rarely that Jude could number on one hand the times he had kissed her forehead or patted her knee. But when he wanted her to understand something important, he touched her face. He took her cheek and jaw in the hollow of his hand and the world fell away. So when she was thirteen, Jude had been surprised and curious to discover that the sudden proximity of her body made him uncomfortable. She first assumed this had to do with her resemblance to her mother and the natural spin of echoes and nostalgia that entailed, then she read Nabokov and understood.

And since then she watched herself through her father’s eyes.

Jude looked into the mirror through his eyes and tried to grasp what it was about the curves and angles of her body that made her father uneasy. She stared at herself through the pool boy’s eyes, through the eyes of men she passed on the street, studying her body for its strengths and weaknesses and trying to see precisely what these men saw, to access the rush of desire they felt when confronted with her flesh. She tried to conjure their secret, violent thoughts, staring at herself until she grew dizzy and her image wavered and she thought she might fall into the mirror and drown.

But this was not the mirror in her bedroom, where it was safe to sink below the surface. She could not afford the chance that the image of herself naked and bruised in a strange bathroom would make her feel small, because when her four minutes expired she was going to kill the man in the next room, and she was afraid that if she felt small she might be unable to. Jude had to kill him not because he had so ravaged her with his hands and mouth that she bled, not because he had abruptly shoved her from the bed and told her in a soft cold voice that her pussy tasted of rot and to go wash herself, but because she knew he wasn’t finished with her.

Drugged and disoriented though she had been, she had noticed the pink cell phone on the mantle, the rollerblades in the corner. The red cowboy boots on an end table, the baseball glove in a box, the tiny black T-shirt nailed to a wall. These were trophies of past kills. And there was a faint smell in his kitchen that made her think of maggots.

She calculated that two minutes remained.

The washcloth was white again. Jude turned away from the sink and gathered the remains of her clothes, the plaid skirt and thin white tank top. She had chosen not to wear a bra today, a move she made breezily in the rosy light of her room a half day ago that now felt like a lifetime stuck in amber, and while she remembered being satisfied this morning by how snugly the cotton tank fit her, she was less thrilled about it now. And as she pulled it over her head, she could smell him. She shrugged this away and concentrated on the task of fastening her skirt at her hips. She only wished she were wearing her shoes. Jude felt more vulnerable when barefoot, which she supposed qualified as irony. She hazily remembered kicking off her shoes upon entering the apartment, and knew she had done so because she was aware that men preferred that she appear small. A vaguely defined business associate of her father’s had seized her and lifted her up once, without warning, in their kitchen when she was fifteen, his hands gripping her firmly and touching more of her chest than she liked, and he remarked that it was like holding a doll. His face had flushed brightly as he released her.

She had left her damp socks on the radiator by the window, and by then she had been truly dizzy, the room warped and turned sideways, the building tipping on an axis that wasn’t there. Jude remembered the man had removed her underwear without her help, and without asking if she minded, after she sat down, or collapsed, in a leather armchair. He had pulled the pale pink boy shorts over her thighs and down with care, not ripping them as she expected but handling them as if they were a captured butterfly he was reluctant to crush. She thought it inaccurate to call that moment a memory because she had seen it happen from a faraway overhead view, as if she had briefly vacated her body and climbed to higher, safer ground. She had no idea what he had done with her shorts after that, whether he had stuffed them into his pocket for luck, or calmly eaten them.

Jude had seen but not touched her white shirt on her way to the bathroom, crushed at the base of a wall like rejected flowers, splashed with blood and one sleeve torn from the body. The blood had puzzled her, because she didn’t remember spilling it. But now she saw another wide-angle bird’s eye shot of herself on top of him, rising and falling in slow motion and underwater light, and remotely she was aware that he was inside her and she saw that her nose was bleeding, not because he hit her but because some critical piece of wiring had come unmoored in her head. The disconnected wiring and foreign, splintered memories that came with it were the result of an unknown drug in a cup of hot chocolate that she had lifted to her own lips. These broken memories and disturbing out-of-body images of herself were never intended for her, because the hot chocolate had not been hers. She had taken the cup in place of another, and as she drank she heard her father’s voice telling her to be unafraid.

Jude had spent the day shopping, or hunting, in the Castro. The easiest pockets to pick were those belonging to tourists, and the easiest of these were the gay men in their fifties who came to San Francisco on vacation from Atlanta or Denver or anywhere that the same-sex culture was kept hidden from view. These men tended to be soft and unaware, with pink faces and eyes milky behind rose lenses. They were either very thin or shaped like pears and wore khakis or jeans that were too tight with new sneakers, and their T-shirts were always tucked in. They traveled in couples, one of them carrying a city guide, the other an umbrella, and sometimes they wore those Velcro travel wallets around their necks. They walked around the Castro with eyes so wide they might have been exploring the far side of the moon, and they were such easy targets that Jude generally made a game of it, following them for a block or two after she hit them and then slipping up to put their wallet or sunglasses back into their pockets. It had been raining today, but warm, and the streets smelled of urine.

And even though animal and human prey alike tended to huddle together and become more wary of others in adverse weather, and their pockets that much harder to reach, Jude had grown bored of her shadow practice and resolved to work the financial district the next day, where the men deserved to have their pockets emptied and where it was infinitely more difficult for her to be a shadow, especially wearing the uniform. And she had by now come to understand that her father had not taught her to lift wallets as a means of supplementing her allowance. The object had been to learn stealth.

Jude saw the man as she entered a coffeehouse called Last Drop, a long narrow place that had a cheerful plastic art deco-meets-The Jetsons feel, with Japanese nudes on the walls and funky details like barbers’ chairs. He was in a booth with two white girls. Jude scanned them as she crossed the room. The man had blond hair that just fell in his eyes. Long nose and a crescent scar on one cheek, narrow red mouth. He was thin and looked British, but that might have been a false echo of his clothes, a mint-green teddy boy suit and boots with pointed toes. His hands flashed silver as he made a point and Jude saw he wore rings on both thumbs. He sat in the corner with his back against the wall. He kept his hands and mouth at a safe distance that posed no threat, then lunged forward as he said something that made the girls laugh, and Jude saw his thin lips pull back for a heartbeat to show his teeth, sharp and white, as he palmed and disappeared the plastic envelope and flicked the crystals into the blond girl’s coffee cup while she laughed and wiped tears from her eyes.

The girls didn’t seem to notice.

Jude marked them in the space of one breath as nineteen or twenty, second-year students at the art institute or New College, who lived in a flat with three other people in the Haight. They had come to California after boarding schools in New Hampshire, where they had gone into the city on weekends and listened to Velvet Underground in their rooms and done a lot of ecstasy and experimented with being bisexual, though both were straight. The one with the tainted cup was pale and blond with fragile cheekbones and black eye shadow, Sylvia Plath gone to heroin. The other was rich-girl punk with a pierced nose and shocked blue hair, and they were both perfect targets for the man because they thought of themselves as streetwise but were not. They were rabbits in dark woods, and one or both of them would be hanging upside down with her skin removed before morning.

Animal urges, she thought. She would be the thrush.

Jude made her decision with little deliberation. The man offended and fascinated her to equal degrees. That the college girls might be spared a blood-soaked washcloth was an afterthought. Jude was bored, and she thought she stood a better chance against him than they did. And she thought it would be interesting to try.

She went to the bar and ordered a cappuccino, walking with the shadow of a limp. He wouldn’t bite if she was too obvious. It was only a sore ankle, and not even wrapped. She twisted it playing soccer, she fell off her skateboard. She paid for her drink and dropped a dollar in the tip jar for luck, watching the table out of the corner of her eye to be sure Sylvia didn’t drink from her tainted cup. Jude hummed, waiting for her drink. When it arrived, she turned and limped across the café, her eyes skating left and right as if looking for just the right table. She held the cup to her face and blew on it with her lips curved into a bow, circling close to the table. Her one fear was that he had already made his choice, and would be reluctant to deviate.

But she could give him a push.

Jude stopped a dozen feet from their table, and winced. She crouched on one knee, her cup balanced precariously, and while she examined the sore ankle, her skirt slipped up her thigh just enough to flash the pink boy shorts.

Two heartbeats and he called her over to the table, insisting she join them. The college girls regarded her warily, then the one with shocked blue hair shrugged and slid over, and Jude sat down among them. She looked across the table at Sylvia and gave her a shy, nervous nod of hello, then turned her attention to the man. Jude looked first into the crosshairs of his eyes, and she had to admit the man had something, a hypnotic pull. The eyes were a shattering blue, the ghost of a smile in the crow’s feet on either side, and now she saw his left eye was graced with a splash of brown and he was staring at her without blinking, staring into her as if he could stop her breath. Jude realized what he was doing, and she made a note of it. He was staring at her as if he loved her, as if he had lost her in the wilderness and found her again, and she imagined he had left a few bodies behind him in shreds with that look. Jude blushed and smiled, and sent Sylvia a telepathic smoke signal saying that if she ever laid eyes on her again, her soul would belong not to her, but to Jude.

Because she had made him deviate.

Jude took two sips from her cup and placed it on the table next to Sylvia’s, so that they sat side by side like twins. Then it was a simple matter of redirecting the girls’ attention with a trivia question about Elvis, one that had no answer, and reaching accidentally for Sylvia’s cup, and drinking from it, and making sure that he noticed. And now she stood in his bathroom, seven hours later, exhausted and marking time by counting her heartbeats and wondering what she could use as a weapon, while blood ran down her thigh.

Jude was bleeding, still.

Maybe it was her period, she thought. Her cycle was altered, and almost nonexistent, but it did come around eventually. She was starting to hope that it was menstrual, after all, because the other choice was that he had ruptured something inside her and she was hemorrhaging.

Jude reckoned she had ninety seconds to act.

There was nothing under the sink. Nothing in the narrow closet but a few ratty towels and spare toilet paper. The medicine cabinet contained only the most essential toiletries. Mouthwash and hair gel, a blue toothbrush in a cup, a sliver of soap. She reached for the mouthwash, rinsed her mouth and spat. She looked left and right, listening to her heartbeat. This building was constructed in the 1920s, before there was plastic. The towel racks were slim pieces of iron bolted to the wall. She gave one a tug and imagined she could pry it loose without tools if she were locked in here for a week. The toilet tank lid was an option, but it wasn’t very graceful, and she would need to surprise him. Jude turned to the tub and scanned the wall above it, her thoughts circling the concept of surprise.

She no longer knew where he was. He had been in bed when he dismissed her to the bathroom but now might be anywhere in the dark apartment, and the moment she walked out of the bathroom the advantage was his. Jude would call him to her, when she was ready. She would bring him into her nest. And now her eyes settled on a small round button set in the wall above the bathtub, and she was glad for the days before plastic, because that button was the end of a clothesline that she prayed was not rotten. She climbed into the tub and plucked the button from the wall, and the blood surged in her, for the clothesline was a sturdy nylon cord six feet long.

Jude pulled the line until she reached its end. She took a breath and gathered herself, then yanked it from the wall in a single violent twisting motion that burned both hands and showered her with plaster and dust. He might have heard that button pop, she knew. She needed to be faster than him, she needed to act at the speed of animal reflex. Jude prayed for her thoughts to race ahead of her body and let go of her. She would need to draw his eye when she called him to the bathroom, so without agonizing over it she changed her mind about leaving her blood behind. Jude pressed one hand to her bloody thigh, then slapped the wall, and now her handprint was the only source of primary color in the room. And as she stepped from the tub she heard in a back corner of her head not her father’s voice but her own, rattling off a list of everything in the apartment that she had touched, that would need to be scoured for prints. Jude looked down and saw that she had already twisted the cord around one fist, and now the other. She coiled them around and around until she had an appropriate garrote, then unlocked the door and pulled it open with great care, as if she were peeling back the sky and expected a fury of angels to flood through the narrowest crack.

She called his name.

Jude called for help and stepped aside, and waited for him to come.

WEIGHT LESS THAN SHADOW BY JIM NISBET

Golden Gate Bridge

Horatio:…think of it!

The very place puts toys of desperation

Without more motive, into every brain

That looks so many fathoms to the sea

And hears it roar beneath.

– William Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, iv

Baby and I were walking the bridge the day it happened. We had a beautiful afternoon-clear, breezy, plenty of sunshine, bright blue sky-though the traffic thrashed loudly. It was a Sunday, so we’d expected traffic, and all the pedestrians didn’t seem unusual either, at first. Knots of them congregated here and there at the rail, mostly on the western or panoramic side of the bridge, the side that faces the ocean. They pointed and hollered at the sights and at each other, as most strollers on the bridge were wont to do; for the bridge is an exhilarating place, with its soaring height and the constant bluster of salt wind and automobiles.

What was unusual-so it seemed to us-was the range of interest or concern common to every face we were able to see, and, as we looked over the rail, the really extraordinary number of people already caught in the forcefield beyond. Among the latter many were yelling and gesturing at the people still on the sidewalk, as if daring or enticing them to jump. Some were squirming around, practicing their backstrokes midair, and some lay still, in a meditative pose, or cupped a roach against the wind, suspended and quiet.

I should diverge a bit here, as some of you may not be from around these parts. A little over one year ago this particular bridge was a favorite place to go if you were looking to kill yourself. Its central span arcs 254 feet above the sea’s level, at which, because the bridge crosses the entrance to the bay at its most narrow stretch, there is always a powerful current, sometimes as swift as six knots, going one way or another with the tides through this natural venturi. Many bodies of jumpers were never recovered and, up until last year, out of some 700 recorded attempts, only twelve people had survived the plunge.

Upon jumping-whether west, toward the ocean and into the sunset, or east, toward the bay and into a view that commands half the city-if a body didn’t have a heart attack on the way down, the impact at sea level was almost certain to do the job; failing these, one could be swept out to sea and drowned, or die of exposure in the chill waters. Sharks, too, were known to lurk below. In any case, a suicide attempt from this bridge virtually contracted to be beautiful and deadly, a sure combination.

For some time there had been editorial campaigns, meetings, and committees about doing something to prevent these precipitous exits, but the taxpayer’s good money being short, and other problems more pressing within the municipality, and the lack of any effective preventive technique hobbled and bogged down any real progress toward airbrushing this stain off the reputation of the city’s most famous land-mark. The thrust of such prophylactic thinking some took to imply that any time Joe Blow so much as looked at the bridge, all other factors being equal, he must be nearly overwhelmed by an urge to kill himself. These people would have it that such malefic urges must occasionally torque at the breast of the most established citizen, as well as the least, and that such urges are an actual furniture of good citizenship. This eccentric opinion, unexpectedly amplified, moved those sensitive organs of citizenship, the newspapers, to reflect noisily that the citizen might prefer to be insured against the possible or at least facile realization of his own self-destructive impulsions.

Further speculation indicated that this beleaguered citizen, if not himself untimely deceased, may have lost to the bridge someone intrinsic to his social circle, a person handy, for example, at conversation, which, though thought to be excruciatingly dull while its perpetrator was quick among his peers, has since by virtue of its absence been noticed as somehow essential to the arrangement of chairs at dinner. Such a host and the citizenry in general might like to be relieved of this sort of nuisance by the knowledge that when they do happen to rest their eyes upon the bridge, they will see it hung all bristling vigilant with nets, pincers, inner tubes, inflatable vests, lifeguards, searchlights, hooks, pikes, concertina wire, rubber sacks, plastic shields, helipads, etc., in order that unseasonable defection might be reasonably inhibited.

Personal motivation manifested itself only in the most ephemeral ways, as speculation printed and broadcast, editorials, political gambits, research-grant hustles, and social-maze theory, until two entirely unrelated events rendered it simultaneously germane and academic. The first was the unfortunate suicide committed by a young woman whose senseless body, plunging from the bridge at nearly ninety miles per hour, crashed through the foredeck and hull of a small boat as it sailed out from under the looming structure. The boat sank in an appalling three minutes, and constituted a significant loss to its captain who, alone on board at the time, was rescued by a passing fishing vessel. His cargo, however, was not saved. This ironic chattel consisted of little wooden replicas of the famous bridge itself, manufactured in various sizes, by hand, in cottages up and down the coast, regularly collected and shipped by the captain to the city for distribution and sale as souvenirs. The accident set these little bridges adrift by the hundreds. Whole and in pieces, left to the whims of the sea, they littered the beaches, inlets, piers, and marinas of bay and coast for months, as to all who might come by them grim, miniature reminders of the infamous utility of the giant original. This incident provoked much discussion, of the order that something-anything-be done about the bridge’s ominous potential for death.

The second incident was the perfection and commercialization of a patented gravity forcefield. Within a year of its introduction, and less than six months after the dispersion of the little wooden bridges, the city government caused to be installed a forcefield network which controlled the entire length of the bridge. Along each side of the span, this marvel extended a sort of tube of weightlessness designed to catch and hold in suspension any individual or thing that might happen into its scope, until such time as the authorities might arrive to fish out the wayward article. Though in any case an effective deterrent, the collateral notion seemed to be that a potential suicide suspended in the invisible grasp of this device would be severely embarrassed by his public display, more or less as if he’d been clapped into the stocks in the town square with a large capital “S” painted on his forehead, and thus inhibited from renewing his attempt to end his life in so public a fashion. Accordingly, in a fit of legislated avuncular-ity, no penalty, beyond mandatory psychiatric counsel, was proscribed for a person chagrined in this manner.

From the very first day of construction and installation until well beyond the last, pickets who represented themselves as members of the “Right to Die Coalition” conducted peaceful demonstrations on or about the bridge. Their case was that suicide is a private act, over which no entity outside the individual can exercise judgment; that one should be as responsible to one’s own person in a self-destructive mode as in a constructive one; that this particular bridge was as good a site at which to perpetrate this right as any other, and, in fact, being far more effective than most, was admirably suited for it; and, furthermore, to legislate public suicide out of the public eye was merely to sweep yet another fact of life under some sort of moral rug.

The nearly daily scenes of organized protest were marred only occasionally. A young man, haranguing workmen not to aid in depriving the world of one of its most useful manmade creations, was carried away by the emotion of his appeal and made what the newspapers impatiently dubbed a salto da fe-a leap of faith. As might have been expected, two or three people, each apparently acting on the assumption, perhaps cherishing the hope, that he might be the last on record as having done so, flung themselves from the bridge during the final hours of construction.

In the weeks following the completion of “Project: Wait!”, much detritus collected in the two fields, for they were extremely sensitive, and just as indiscreet. The trash usually found along a freeway or sidewalk now floated alongside the bridge as well; this included the obvious beer cans, muffler clamps, and hubcaps-but the devices were so effective as to disallow the whimsical escape of so much as a cigarette butt, not to mention loose stones, newspapers, condoms, and rain, so that this famous bridge with its famous forcefields became even more famous for its asteroid belts of refuse.

At first the bridge authorities, publicly announcing that they were working on the problem, quietly turned off the fields once a week in the middle of the night at maximum flood, thereby plummeting the trash into the bay and sweeping it out to sea. But environmentalists and a couple of suicides soon got wind of this rather efficient practice and forced an injunction against it. Subsequently a special cleanup crew with unique machinery and techniques was designed and put into service.

As soon as the effect on roadside detritus achieved notice, individual humans began to experimentally, then playfully, throw themselves into the forcefields and squirm around in them, gleefully avoiding the especially contrived retrieval devices that were cast after these less than hapless and not particularly despondent victims. These people made the additional discovery that one could actually “swim” a full circle-vertically, or in any other direction-like a looping airplane. Reports varied, but one likened the experience to writhing in a large volume of transparent gelatin, excepting, of course, the degree of fluidity and the magnificent view. Firsthand testimonies were duly monkeyed in the tabloids (CREEPS DOMINATE FIELDS was one headline I remember) with the predictable results that the authorities spent more and more time and money skimming the adventurous out of the forcefields. These policing efforts were soon overwhelmed and, finally, so popular had “getting jumped” become, every-body but the newspapers realized that, although throwing oneself with abandon off the bridge into its forcefields may be vulgar, it certainly did no one any harm. Thus it came about that on any given sunny Sunday, as the bridge teemed with automobiles full of onlookers, any number of people might be found wriggling or sunbathing along either side of the entire length of it, with a population bias on the western or “sunset” side. And the police more or less looked the other way. To have spent an hour or so “jumped” or “suspended” on Sunday afternoon became a socially acceptable pastime, especially among the young, whose avant guard jumped while drunk or stoned. Certain lengths of the span soon became popular hangouts for the besotted, while other stretches were more popular with the stoned. It became not uncommon for a jumpee to find himself floating in company with a suspended quantity of vomit, or among a slowly dispersing nebula of stems and seeds.

It was into just such a Sunday scene that Baby and I had walked.

We hadn’t gotten, nor had I intended to get, into this fad yet, but the time must have seemed right to Baby. She stopped walking before we’d gotten midspan.

Hey now, that looks like fun, she said, leaning over the rail.

It was true that under ordinary circumstances Baby would try anything, during which experiments I generally held her purse. We stood there, and as I tried to decipher the consternation evident on the features of all the faces around us-after all, I was thinking, if they don’t like it, why don’t they just move on?-Baby tugged at my sleeve and said, C’mon, Honey, let’s do it too. Let’s get jumped.

Don’t be ridiculous, I said. What’s in it for me?

Here, asshole, she said, and handed me her purse.

I held it and watched, still wondering about the appalled yet curiously fascinated expressions up and down the sidewalk, as she lifted a long leg up and straddled the wide rail. Once astride it, she hesitated. She could have been a little scared. After all, it certainly must have looked to Baby exactly as if she were about to kill herself. It looked that way to me. There were a bunch of happy people and a lot of trash floating out there, beyond the rail, but, even so, they looked very insubstantial against all that thin air and the tiny sailboats far below. Baby glanced sideways at me, and I couldn’t resist a smile, as if to say, Yeah, so? and she frowned and pouted, then stood up on the railing, defiant; and holding her nose with one hand and pointing up with the other, she executed a kind of timid hop, backwards, over the side. She fell about eight feet, decelerating all the way, then oscillated, coming back up a couple of feet, then down a few inches, up an inch. And there she hovered, as if dangled from a spring or rubber strap whose coefficient perfectly understood her mass; giggling and squirming.

Hey, she shouted, come on! It is fun! and she waved at me, as if she’d just run into a line of surf that looked inviting but might have been thought too cold for immersion. In spite of myself, I gave a little wave in return.

She hung there, two hundred fifty feet above the glinting ocean, but not far from a disheveled, vacant-looking fellow who, observing Baby’s classy entrance, rolled, wiggled, swam, and serpentined his way over to her, where he struck up a conversation. He must have been an old hand at getting jumped. The traffic was loud enough to prevent my overhearing their remarks, but as I stood there squinting, a very excited young woman came rushing down the sidewalk with one arm crooked under a clipboard. She wore a Right to Die armband just above her left elbow, its insignia a skeleton with one raised boney fist.

A great day, she effused, stopping next to me to make a mark on her papers. We’ve nearly made the quota.

I excused myself to her and inquired, What quota?

Why, we’ve nearly gotten it, she said, and held the clipboard under my nose. I could see that its papers were covered with figures and calculations, but they were meaningless to me. One number, written in digits larger than the rest, was circled heavily in red pencil.

Gotten what? I asked. What’s this seven five nine?

That’s how many we need, she bubbled. Seven hundred fifty-nine. And we’re only a very few short.

Oh, said I. Is this a petition?

You mean you really don’t know? It’s…well. Now that you mention it, it is a sort of petition…Her voice, already closely contested by the noises of wind and traffic, was suddenly lost in a great roar that went up from the crowd milling about the rail further up the sidewalk, at the center of the span. These and some of the people already suspended began to chant the numbers seven five nine, seven five nine, seven five nine.

My goodness, I heard the girl say. She pushed past me and pointed. He must be the one. We’ve done it!

Following her gaze with my own, I saw a man standing alone on the railing. He bowed deeply to the crowd beneath him, who cheered him loudly. After several fancy adieus on his part, consisting of additional bows, florid salutations performed with the hands, the blowing of kisses, and even a curtsy, I’d begun to understand, and shoved the girl with the clipboard away from the guardrail. The young man with Baby had his arm tentatively about her shoulders, and smiled as if beatified. Baby’s eyes, round and tense, caught mine. As another, louder cheer went up, her eyes smiled and she laughed outright at the consternation undoubtedly blatant on my own features. A third time the crowd cheered, and the man on the rail jumped. He fell as Baby had before him, and though his oscillations were more pronounced-he went down perhaps eight or ten yards, rebounded upwards two or three yards, went down again a couple of feet-his additional weight did not destroy the forcefield. The people suspended in its grip bobbed gently, like gulls on a swell. I made my decision. Glancing up the length of the bridge as I vaulted the railing, I saw that many of the bystanders, perhaps out of premeditation, perhaps spontaneously, had come to the same conclusion as myself. As we cleared the last bit of structure, I could see that the void was full of falling bodies, enough so that as Baby and I embraced, as I looked into her eyes-those lovely, mischievous eyes that did not retreat from the gaze of my own, oh, so foreverly-my fall was hardly interrupted. Our combined mass buckled the entire field on that side of the bridge and Baby and I, and nearly eight hundred others, minus the thirteen of us, survivors predicted by the harsh statistics of experience, fell toward our deaths.

And a victory, of sorts.

FIXED BY JON LONGHI

The Haight-Ashbury

Iused to buy drugs from Satan, a dealer who called himself Hal Satan. He was also a poet and performance artist, and Hal Satan was his stage name. He liked his stage name so much he decided to use it all the time. Besides, he eventually did so many drugs that the lines between reality and the creations of his own imagination blurred to the point where he couldn’t tell the difference between them anyway.

“I’ve been going to some twelve-step meetings lately,” Satan said. “With all the drugs and stuff, I’ve been feeling kinda broken and I just wanna get myself, you know…fixed. A lot of these people at these meetings may not be drinking or doing coke anymore, but they still have addictions of one kind or another. A lot of guys at these meetings are addicted to porn.

“Like this one guy who couldn’t stay out of peep shows. His every extra cent went to magazines. One week, he was like, ‘Well, I managed to get off the porn. I haven’t been to a peep show or bought a magazine in two weeks. But now I find I can’t keep myself from caulking parking meters.’

“‘What do you mean, caulking parking meters?’ I asked.

“‘I mean just what I said,’ he replied. He was taking a caulking gun and injecting it into parking meters. And I thought, Jesus, how much more Freudian can you get than to take a phallic ‘gun’ and inject white goo into a little slot?”

“You can see it on a lot of levels,” I said. “It’s like, in an attempt to stay out of peep shows, he had to go around sealing up all the coin slots.”

“Just the whole thing,” Satan said. “Well, a couple weeks later he’s at the meeting again, and he says, ‘Well, I managed to stop caulking parking meters but now I’m back on the porn again.’”

Although it was commendable that he was trying to clean up his act, the twelve-step meetings never seemed to help Satan. No matter how many he went to, he still managed to stay completely strung out. In fact, he frequently found himself doing drugs before he went to one, just to get through it. Eventually, he just stopped going to them altogether.

“I realized that twelve-step meetings had become just another addiction for me,” Satan explained. “And since I’m trying to clean up my act and get rid of my addictions, I had to start somewhere.”

Hal Satan was the only dealer I ever had who would deliver. A half hour, well, actually, forty-five minutes, sometimes an hour, after you called him, he’d bring by a quarter of generic green bud on his scooter. Just like Domino’s Pizza.

Satan started out just dealing weed but he quickly diversified into all sorts of hard drugs. He wanted to be all things to all people. “Shouldn’t Satan provide all vices?” he reasoned. But keeping up with such a complex line of distributed substances made his already crazy and chaotic life utterly schizophrenic. The biggest problem was that he couldn’t stop sampling what he sold. “What’s the fun of being Satan if you can’t also enjoy the vices you hand out?” he once told me. The problem, though, with that line of reasoning is that Satan very rapidly became a total junkie. In fact, every time I scored drugs from him at his armpit of an apartment, I couldn’t help feeling that he was a perfect illustration of what it must be like to be strung out in Hell.

Satan’s apartment was right down from the corner of Haight and Ashbury. The address, appropriately enough, was 666 Ashbury, and this had been a contributing factor to him adopting the name Satan.

“Who else but Satan could live at 666?” he explained. It was hard to argue with that.

The apartment was a garbage dump where a few humans coexisted with the vermin. The kitchen sink was long lost in a fossilized stack of dirty pots. A huge heap of beer bottles, greasy pizza boxes, and other trash took over an entire corner of the living room.

“We clean the place once every three years, whether it needs it or not,” one of the roommates once joked. In the bathroom, the toilet seat had stuck to the bowl due to a gluey growth of mold and it could no longer be put up. Sometimes when you got a bag from Satan you had to flick roaches and other little bugs out of your buds.

Nobody had washed the dishes at 666 in a long time. Very few of them were even still in the kitchen. Instead, they were on various surfaces around the living and bedrooms. Most of them looked like petri plates covered with medical experiments of mold and rotten food. The few plates that were still clean were used to consume drugs. The plates used to snort coke and speed off of, for example, were always licked spotlessly clean. Every piece of furniture in that apartment was so cratered with cigarette and burn holes that it looked like a map of the moon. The carpet was a grayish-black desert of ash. When you walked across it, little clouds of dust and ash rose up around your feet. There wasn’t a square foot of the place that wasn’t littered with garbage. The roaches in the place outnumbered the roommates ten million to four. In fact, me and some of Satan’s other customers took to calling his place The Roach Motel.

Sometimes the Roach Motel looked like a scene out of Night of the Living Dead. Satan would get these drug zombies who’d camp out on his couch for two to three days at a time, not saying anything, only moving enough to keep themselves saturated with whatever drug they were consuming. There was a cannibalistic efficiency to their behavior. It was as if their humanity and personalities had been stripped away and all that remained was the mechanical core of their hungers and needs. What had once been human was now just a consuming machine, an engine designed only for eating. These zombie robots would stay with Satan until all the fuel he provided them was gone, and then they would shamble off into the night in search of more of the drugs that justified their existence.

“Lots of the people I know are just a combination of feeding and needing,” Satan once commented.

One of the roommates was a guy named Rick. His father had been a congressman or something and had died about a year before and left Rick a lot of money. Rick took this newfound fortune and promptly became a coke addict. His dealer was Fat Carlo, a massive lump of a man who must have weighed close to four hundred pounds. Every now and then, Carlo would wear a white suit, and it seemed like all he’d ever done was sell the white powders. After a couple months, Carlo got along so well with Rick that he moved in with him. Can you imagine the parasitic relationship that ensued? Over the course of the next year, the dealer performed a steady, almost magical wealth transferal which kept half the household buried in snow. Hearts about to explode. We used to say about Rick: “I don’t know what happened. One day my dad dies, and then I wake up a year later flat broke and without a nose.”

Everyone from that household basically went insane. Take the case of the Human Waste. One night I was at a party and Satan was telling me about how squalid things were getting.

“It’s so crowded and filthy,” Satan said. “The sickest person there is just a loser. Joey’s his name. We call him the Human Waste. I can honestly say, I’ve never seen a more pathetic person in my life. This guy’s thirty-five years old, grossly overweight, and fairly Neanderthal in appearance.”

“Like someone moving backwards through evolution?” I asked.

“Believe me,” Hal said, “he’s already devolved. In fact, there are already primates higher than him on the genetic ladder. This guy walks around with six inches of butt crack showing out the back of his jeans at all times.”

“He carries around a regulation-length ruler to make sure that six inches of butt crack is constantly maintained,” I added. “If his pants start to hike up on him, he measures the butt crack and pulls them back down.”

“Every afternoon, Joey the Human Waste comes home with a case of Rolling Rock, and by the end of the evening he has polished the whole thing off by himself,” Satan continued. “He may give away one or two, but every day he drinks at least twenty or thirty beers. I did that a couple times in high school, but we’re talking a thirty-five-year-old man here. And that happens seven days a week.

“It’s not like he needs to relieve the stress from his job, because he’s unemployed. For a couple years there, he was working in the family business, but Joey was such a fuck-up that eventually not even his family could put up with him and ended up giving him the axe. Now he just gets by on unemployment, food stamps, and the checks his parents still write him.

“On top of that, he never bathes. I’ve only seen him shower once or twice in the three years I’ve lived there. Every night when I walk into the apartment, he’s plopped there on the couch, stinking the place up like a homeless person or a dead dog. Whenever anyone tells him he smells like a fresh turd, Joey just pretends he’s not listening.

“Back when he was still working, it got so bad that one day his grandmother called our apartment. ‘Can you get Joey to take a shower?’ she asked us. ‘He’s really beginning to offend people down at the shop because he smells so bad.’ And this from his own grandmother!

“But the most pathetic scene with Joey happened one night when everyone in the apartment was partying in the living room, which is his sole environment. Joey was shit-faced drunk as usual, and suddenly he gets up in front of everybody and says he has an announcement to make. Then he breaks down crying and admits right there in front of everyone that he’s never had sex before. Not once in all his thirty-five years on the planet. Never even been in love. I don’t think anyone’s even touched him except his mother.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Somebody shared too much. Somebody committed an over-share.”

“Maybe if he’d ever been laid,” Satan speculated, “he’d only feel the need to drink ten or fifteen beers a day instead of twenty or thirty.”

Hal Satan was the token troublemaker of the poetry scene. He caused a disruption at every reading he went to. That was his shtick. Hal took off his clothes, let off fireworks, bit other poets, anything he could do to interrupt things. At 666 Ashbury, Hal threw some outrageous parties with like ten bands, three to four hundred people, and marathon poetry readings. He used to let me do readings and throw together rock bands that performed at these things. I remember one night this band I was in played, and while we were setting up, Hal Satan came into the room with a bag of black beauties as big as my head and started handing them out. Hal must have downed a dozen of the things. He was always getting into epic trouble. He seemed to feel some kind of suicidal need to live up to his name. His crimes were many. And they were legendary. Like take the following, for example:

The local poetry readings are peopled by a number of eccentric personalities and even stranger acts. This one reading I went to at the Chameleon bar provides a good case in point. It was there that Dan Faller debuted his latest conceptual piece: “Interpretive Dance with Axe.” It was a long parody of modern dance routines, which incorporated an actual industrial-sized lumberjack axe. Of course, Dan was drunk as a skunk when he performed it and many audience members gasped in real fear as he precariously swung the deadly device right in front of them. Sam Silent, who was MCing the reading, was tempted to give Dan the hook, but in the end his support for the First Amendment won out over public safety. Besides, he wasn’t really in the mood to piss off a drunk guy with a big axe. All the same, when the owner of the bar heard about the incident the next day, she made a new policy that said all axes have to be checked at the door.

Dan Faller wrote and read stream-of-consciousness experimental poetry that he sometimes made up on the spot when he was standing on stage. He was also notorious for having introductory monologues that were longer than his actual poems. He frequently did back-flips on stage, usually while under the influence of large amounts of alcohol. I always hoped I wasn’t there the day he snapped his neck. Dan had a voracious appetite for drugs that often steered toward the hard ones. One Saturday night at a party at 666 Ashbury, I saw him drop a hit and a half of acid and snort a quarter gram of speed at 2 a.m.

After his axe dance, Dan met up with Hal Satan, one of his partners in crime. Hal was already three sheets to the wind, and the two of them proceeded to get even drunker. They ended up closing the bar.

Hal decided to give Dan a ride home. They went out to Hal’s monstrous white Cadillac and revved up the engine. Then Dan made a dare with Hal, knowing that Hal couldn’t resist a dare, the more stupid and reckless the better. It was about forty blocks to Dan’s house and Dan ended up driving. For most of the ride he went about eighty miles an hour and ignored the traffic lights. Hal rode on the hood. He was naked and swinging the axe around for the whole ride like some drunken Asgardian lumberjack. By some obscene miracle, Hal made it all the way to Dan’s house without falling off and breaking his neck. Where’s a cop when you need one? They were probably handing out tickets for minor traffic offenses while this naked madman on a white Cadillac drove right past them.

Hal Satan once told me this lost-weekend story about him and Fat Carlo:

“We used to play this game called ‘blacks and whites’,” Satan said. “It was where all weekend he’d freebase coke and I’d smoke black tar. Well, this game of blacks and whites had started around 3:00 Friday afternoon and now it was about 3:00 Sunday morning. The steep back slope of Saturday night. Everything was soft and fuzzy, but in a good way, and me and Fat Carlo were walking through the Mission around Twenty-fourth and Bartlett, right in the heart of gang country, but we didn’t give a fuck because this was our town.

“Well, we’re just walking down the street when this little punk starts running us a bunch of lip. And we’re like, ‘Fuck you! Fuck off! Don’t give us any shit.’ We’re old-school barrio. So we think nothing of it and just keep walking.

“A couple blocks down I notice that something just isn’t right. I had felt no pain for almost thirty-six hours, but now something had disturbed the fluid in my junky amniotic sac. I can’t tell what’s wrong with it, but my shoulder just feels like shit. Carlo finally checks it and there’s blood all over the back of my leather jacket. Turns out, I’ve been shot!

“Now, I don’t want to go to the hospital because that could lead to certain, ah, legal problems. So Carlo shows me all the finer points of digging a bullet out of your shoulder with a pair of needle-nose pliers. After that, he patches up the wound in a way that will kind of disguise the fact that it’s a bullet hole. Then me and him go to the emergency room with some phony story about how I fell down in the kitchen or something.”

I remember running into Satan at yet another party in the Haight. He was telling me about how things had gotten dramatically worse at 666.

“My three other roommates are just smoking crack all the time now. Like the other night, I came home from work and there were all these low-rent crack dealers, like the ones you see selling on the street at Sixteenth and Mission, hanging out in my room, sitting on my bed. My roommate Rick smokes rock all the time, and so does this couple, Ed and Julie, who have the other bedroom. Sometimes I can hear Ed and Julie in there scheming all night long. Plotting these weird crimes for hours. Sometimes they even talk about robbing me, even though I have nothing of value left.

“We were all going to get a warehouse space together, but I’m not so sure anymore. ’Cause I found out that these people have had a problem with coke before. In fact, that’s why they’re out here in San Francisco. Evidently, my roommates burned some coke dealers back in Michigan and are on the run from them. And I mean burned them for like big bucks. We’re talking ruthless dudes, the kind who would kill them if they ever caught up with them.”

“No good,” I told him. “Some night these dudes in ski masks with AK-47s are going to kick in your front door and shoot everybody down.” I pointed my finger at his forehead like I had a gun in my hand and pulled the invisible trigger. “They’ll end up killing you just because you’re a witness.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Hal said squeamishly. “I mean, these people are into some really shady stuff. Like the couple makes their living fucking over johns in the Tenderloin. Julie does a little whoring every now and then. But she usually doesn’t actually have sex with the guys. Most of the time she gets them to give her the money first and just runs away with it. Her boyfriend Ed runs interference for her. He either slows the john down, or if need be, beats the crap out of the trick and steals his wallet. I mean, I liked these people at first, but they’ve turned out to be real criminals.

“Julie also gets money from a string of sugar daddies. Well, most of it comes from this one sorry-ass old guy who owns a chain of dry cleaners. He picked her up one night in the Tenderloin but he didn’t want to fuck her. The old guy just wanted to befriend her. Julie was real happy to have a new friend, and over the months she’s bilked him for thou-sands of dollars. Sometimes he gives her as much as fifty dollars a day for spending money. And he’s not the only one. Like last week, some other old guy gave Julie a Cadillac El Dorado. It’s too weird. I mean, this is how her and her boyfriend have been paying their rent.

“But now they’re into crack. I already put everything I have of value into a storage locker. All I keep at 666 is a change of clothes and a couple of books, ’cause my roommates are really out there. Completely paranoid. I’m not allowed to answer the phone in my own house anymore, because they’re afraid it might be those coke dealers tracking them down.

“And my roommate Rick has adopted all these weird projects. The other night he took all the doorknobs in the apartment apart with a screwdriver and then put them back together again.”

The more strung out on drugs Hal Satan got, the more out there his poetry and performance-art pieces became. Everything he did in public grew increasingly confrontational and assaultive. He seemed to be committed to discovering the ultimate act of bad taste. Satan systematically attended and scandalized every poetry reading and open mike in the upper and lower Haight with the obsessive thoroughness of a psychopath hunting down every name he had randomly picked out of the phone book.

His performances were legendary debacles. One time Satan did a reading at the Holy Grounds Café in the lower Haight. He read a snuff porn poem called, “Manifesto: Why I Have the Moral Right to Rape Whoever I Choose.” Even in a place as liberal as San Francisco you aren’t going to find an audience where a piece like that goes over as anything but a Hiroshima-sized bomb. While he was screaming the poem above the boos and jeers of the audience, Satan stripped off all his clothes and proceeded to burn off his pubic hair with a Bic lighter. By the time all his man-fuzz had gone up in smoke, the room was filled with a miasmal cloud whose vapors were so foul it sent the entire audience staggering into the street, weeping and vomiting.

Dan Faller and Hal Satan used to go on drug binges that included crack, acid, and heroin, all in the same evening. The two had known each other for years, and when they were high, Dan and Hal were like brothers.

Well, one evening, Dan, Hal, and Sam Silent were drinking down in the lower Haight. It got toward closing time and Sam called it a night, saying he had a day job to go to the next morning. Faller and Satan sat there in the last-call haze, zoning out.

Then Hal turned to Dan and said, “Well, let’s go. Let’s go party.”

“You can’t be serious,” Dan said.

“Yeah, I am. It’ll be just like old times,” Satan said. “Let’s go.”

They went down to the projects, scored some crack, and went back to Hal’s apartment and smoked it. Then they went and got some more. And then some more. By 5 a.m., they had smoked a hundred and fifty dollars’ worth.

“Let’s go get some more,” Satan said impatiently.

Dan was lying on the couch.

“No way, man,” he said. “It’s late. I’m fucked up. There’s no way we’re going to get any higher. I don’t want any more. You can go if you want, but I’m not leaving this couch.”

So Hal got up and left.

He came back about forty-five minutes later. Faller noticed he was covered in blood.

“Goddamn it, the motherfuckers stabbed me!” Hal Satan screamed out.

Somebody had knifed him in a bad crack deal. But Hal had still managed to score the goods. They had stabbed him, but he got away with his drugs and money.

Dan and Hal tried to stop the bleeding by applying direct pressure and holding rags on the wound, but the blood just kept gushing.

“This bleeding isn’t stopping, we’ve got to get you to a hospital,” Dan said.

“Okay,” Satan agreed. “But let’s smoke some more crack before we go.”

So they smoke some more crack, which of course just makes Hal Satan’s heart beat much faster, pumping the blood through his veins, and the wound just starts spraying blood. Red jets are squirting out all over the living room. It looks like a scene from Life of Brian, some kind of gory Monty Python skit. By the time they get to the hospital, there’s blood all over the inside of Dan Faller’s truck.

Satan doesn’t have health insurance, so the only place to take him is General Hospital. General is like a cattle pen of urban horror. In a fetid waiting room reeking of feces and urine, skeletal patients huddle, wasted by illness and drug overdoses, along with bleeding homeless people and the victims of gang shootings. The place looks like a Red Cross triage tent from the Vietnam War. The nurse at the front desk is like, “Oh, you have to go over there and wait for three or four hours because you’ve only lost a hand, and this gentleman over here, who has lost his whole head, has been sitting here for an hour and a half before you arrived.”

By the time Satan’s sewn up and they get out of there, it’s like 10 or 11 in the morning. The sun is up and shining, stinging their eyes, as Dan gives Hal a ride home in his truck. The blood stains all over the upholstery are already turning brown.

“Well, don’t take me home yet,” Hal says. “Here, pull over at the Safeway.”

“Why?” Dan asks as he turns into the parking lot.

“So I can go by the money machine and take out more money to score more crack with,” Satan says.

Two years later, Dan Faller told me what finally happened to Satan. Dan kept in touch with Satan all through his long decline, till almost the bitter end. Other details he managed to cobble together from a motley assortment of street connections, junkies, and local dealers. No one knows exactly what happened but it probably went down something like this:

Evidently, Satan’s trajectory remained relentlessly downward. Over time, his various species of addiction had consolidated themselves into one overly gigantic monkey: heroin. It was the apex predator of the whole wild kingdom of drugs. Black tar took over Satan’s body and soul to a degree that put all the previous controlled substances to shame. Pretty soon smack was more important to him than oxygen or food. This was a town of burned bridges for him-no friends left, no doors opened to Satan. Homeless again, he got by on petty thefts and robbery. His habit ate away any scum of humanity that still clung to him. Everything went into the spoon.

Satan ended up delivering heroin to street buyers. In exchange for a hit he worked as a gofer, a mule transporting black tar from pushers to loyal customers. Satan’s monkey was so big that his arms were covered with abscesses and staph infections. And that monkey got greedy, started dipping into the stashes it was carrying. Sometimes Hal Satan didn’t show up at all and shot up every bit of what he was supposed to deliver. Other times he just took the junkie’s money and ran. Any dealer will tell you: Angry customers aren’t good for business. Whenever he hit rock bottom, Satan displayed a rare talent for finding a trap door that led even lower.

Over time he had burned a lot of dealers, and eventually his junkie karma caught up with him. Couple of heavies cornered him in an alley and shot him up with a combination of battery acid and PCP. That foul mix got Satan so delirious he wandered around Mission Street completely naked and smeared with his own excrement. Was totally out of it for over forty-eight hours. Had no idea of where he was. Eventually he crawled into a dumpster for shelter, passed out, and almost died. By the time some kids found him and brought him to the hospital, Satan’s arms were so gangrenous that the doctors had to amputate them.

When he woke up in the hospital, it took him awhile to figure out what had happened. Fresh amputees experience ghost sensations of their lost limbs, feels like they’re still there, so he didn’t immediately notice that his arms were gone. What tipped him off was when he went to scratch himself. Couldn’t get his hand to reach the itch. First he thought they had restrained him. Maybe when the paramedics brought him in, he had been delirious and thrashing around so they’d strapped him to the bed. But when repeated attempts failed to eliminate the itch, Satan finally looked down and saw his gaping absence. His arms were history.

Oh my God, oh my God, Satan thought. How am I going to wipe my ass? How am I going to pick my nose? And then, with an even more sinking horror, How am I going to fix myself?

He’d been in the hospital a long time and the with-drawal and junk sickness was already coming on. In a junkie, the hunger for heroin can bring about feats of strength and determination not often seen in mortal men. Less than three hours after regaining consciousness, Satan managed to escape from the hospital.

He ran straight down to Sixteenth and Mission and scored a fat bag of junk on credit and his last few dollars. The dealer looked like a pickpocket as he reached the crumpled bills out of the junkie’s pants, then Hal Satan ran off with the baggie clenched in his teeth.

He made a beeline to a flophouse hotel about a half-block away and looked up Vampire Annie. They called her that because she could find a vein even in a pitch-black night. Knew how to locate the elusive opening in old junkie arms that were nothing but scar tissue. Annie had given more shots than a nurse, and for a little fee she cooked and shot up the disabled junkies and the ones whose hands shook too much to fix themselves.

Vampire Annie did it right there in the gloomy second-floor hallway which stank of dirty underwear. Cooked that tar and shot up Satan in the neck. As soon as the rush came on, the amputee knew she’d given him way too much. That was Annie’s plan. Why bother to share a bag when you could have it all to yourself? All it took was a simple O.D. Who’d miss a broken-down scumbag like Satan? Some of the dealers he’d burned would probably even reward her. Give her free hits of black tar or a line of credit. Besides, Satan had asked for it. He wanted a fix, so she fixed him. Fixed him good.

Euphoria burned out the crippled man’s head like a matchstick. Satan collapsed, and since he had no arms to break his fall, his head smashed into the hard floor with the full force of gravity, breaking his jaw and knocking out three teeth.

Five minutes later he was dead. Vampire Annie had closed and locked her door and was already shooting up the rest of his bag. And it was a big bag. She knew the cops wouldn’t even bother to ask any questions. Things like that happened all the time around there. The junkies had a saying: “If you overdose at Sixteenth and Mission, they don’t call an ambulance, they call a garbage truck.”

Satan’s corpse was as blue as a healthy vein. But he died with a smile on his face. Because Vampire Annie had fixed him. Right in the jugular. He’d gotten that shot he wanted, needed, so bad. It’s the only thing that gives even a dead junkie peace. Satan may have been fixed, but now he was permanently broken.