San Francisco Noir

BRILEY BOY BY ROBERT MAILER ANDERSON

The Richmond

The first time Briley had his nose broken, he just laughed. And then, bracing himself for another surge of blood, dizziness, and memory, he let the skuzzy little bitch hit him again. Why not? He had been dodging his old man’s blows since he was old enough to see them coming, developed a tic as a toddler, twitched at birth, flinched in the womb. “That’s why the scrape doctor missed you,” Pop said, catching the flesh of his cheek, chin, side of neck, or temple. “Stand still and take it like a man!” But Briley never did. Bobbing and weaving. Skit. He had learned to become elusive, especially to himself. He didn’t stand in front of a mirror long enough to see his own reflection. It helped when he was stealing cars, scouting houses for a B &E, scoring drugs. Living with women who had only heard the word blow used as a figure of speech. Nobody got a good look at him. Not the slightest slanted-eye contact from his Chinese and white Russian neighbors in the outer Richmond or nod of recognition while grazing chips at Tommy’s Food and Yucatan, swiping day-old sweets from the biddies at Tbilisi Bakery, having a happy-hour heave-ho at Trad’r Sam’s in a backbooth marked Pago Pago. So now that the bridge of his nose had collapsed under the weight of her flattened palm, all he could do was spit blood and laugh.

He was happy she was the one. God knows she deserved the honor. He had hit her too many times to count, cuffings and jabs, sometimes straight on, knuckles tingling up the length of his arm into his teeth a metal taste that told him one more and you better ice them down-otherwise, you won’t be able to hold a crowbar tomorrow. Then he’d unzip his pants. Sometimes she would be unconscious. That made it better. Nothing to prove. Often he satisfied himself, wiping clean on the curve of her cleavage. Ripped her panties to feel the silk tear between his fingers. It kept her guessing when she came to. Deep down they both knew it didn’t make a difference either way. They weren’t the first. It would happen again. Nobody ever got it right. He couldn’t remember the last time they had embraced without a bruise. You can’t kiss a shadow or a memory, he had been told. It was hard enough to stare someone in the eyes and wish them dead.

Her eyes were like tunnels. No train coming. They had been blue once, but the beatings had darkened them as if they really were windows of the soul. And the speed they shot together sunk them into her head like a couple of billiard balls in the side pockets of a worn and tattered table. He didn’t enjoy looking at her. Nobody did. But when they had met, anonymous men at the Market Street Cinema stuffed money into her garter hoping to get a glimpse. She’d purse her lips and lean forward, bump and grind, making them feel special until the meter in her mind ran to zero, then it was onto the next toupee, leering Chinaman, aluminum-siding salesman. Twenty bought a Polaroid with her on your lap spreading herself, c-note for a nuzzle and a handjob, two and she flatbacked on a Murphy bed in her dressing room. Lately, there were no cash transactions.

Briley’s neck snapped back and his head hit the wall a double blow. Just like her to get something for nothing. Vision blurred. But he could see a flash of brass pulling away. She had loaded up for her Briley Boy-something more than a fistful of fingers. Fine. Let her have her fun. He was enjoying himself too. He spit a piece of his tongue onto the carpet in front of her like a cat offering up a gift from the garden. He continued laughing. Nothing was funnier. Not even their wedding.

She had said “I do” so many times nobody doubted her, regardless of the question. Saint Monica’s on Twenty-third and Geary wouldn’t take them. Neither would the Holy Virgin Cathedral, Joy of All Who Sorrow. No money for Vegas. So, Reno was obviously the place. Where else could she wear white? A ruffled rented tux, soon to be smeared lipstick. No veil. They stayed seven days at the Lucky Horseshoe until they were down to their last dime. Then she spun cherries for silver dollars in the parking lot. Hard luck. Jackpot. Enough for bus fare back to San Francisco. But she had developed a thing for a customer, some Detroit blizzard pimp giving her a tryout in the backseat of his snow-chained El Dorado. She didn’t want to leave. Briley convinced her. First with his fists, then with a hanger he heated over a Sterno can. Just like Dad used to do, across the ass so nobody could see the scars. She couldn’t sit still anyway. He bought two decks of playing cards and they each flipped solitaire in silence as drought-brown hills passed outside like legless camels. They rented a room above a nail salon on a treeless block back in the Richmond. Crumbling stucco and mold. They ate fog. The honeymoon was over.

Briley felt his leg splinter as she brought down her heel onto the inside of his knee. There was a strange pop, and it went goofy like a chicken leg. Wing Chun. He had paid for the lessons. Sammy Wong’s: laundry and self-defense. Dragon, tiger, lotus, monkey. Shirts: $1.29. Six kids and an amphetamine addict. He was certain she fucked them all; dragon, tiger, lotus, monkey, any way they wanted, pocketed the money and practiced evenings when he wasn’t around. Parlor tricks. If he could grab hold of her, he’d show her some real chop-socky. Not some Hong-Kong four-star double-bill. Americans had invented the bitch-slap. She wouldn’t forget it. Size is what mattered. Who wore the pants. Who swung the belt.

But Briley couldn’t move, and didn’t want to. He waved an arm in feeble defense of a lamp crashing across his shoulder. Ceramic explosion. Shards of clay cutting into his eyes, lids running red. Blood, not anger. Tiny helpless bursts. Just like the hamsters he’d had as a boy. Father foraging through the wire enclosure, hand full of shit and gnawed newspaper, coming up with a Vida Blue kick and a fur fastball. Splat. “That was because of you! Next time you’ll do as you’re told!” his old man would shout. Not likely. And the rodents multiplied like guilt, bad report cards, pornography, dirt under his fingernails. Dad left two alone: male and female. Breeding. He called their crap-covered coop the Garden of Eden, less like the Bible location and more like the strip club cross town where his mother was a “waitress.” Finally, Briley took the vermin to the toilet tank and watched them drown, whirlpooling away with a sudden suck. The stains stayed behind, above the bed, closet doors, wild ceiling caroms. Reminding him what he had done. No amount of scrubbing could make them come clean. Late at night, awake with one hand working his cock, he would stare at certain spots for hours, forming their faces, making sounds, having them do tricks. That’s when they became his pets. That’s when he named them.

Briley tried to focus on his current situation and surroundings, but all he could see was a square of static encased in cheap plastic with the word Zenith below a row of busted knobs. At first, the poor reception had appeared as a woman’s face, a beautiful woman with a complexion clear as milk, eyes bluer than a breezeless sky, contented smile, mouthing the phrase, Fresh from the start. She stood in a living room of an impossibly clean house, something out of Pac Heights, not Briley’s plaster and pressboard roach trap. The ashtrays were empty too, magazines stacked, couch crammed with fluffy cushions, and although everything seemed immaculate and impeccable, the woman was vacuuming. Then electricity. It came down like a thunderbolt. Briley’s head gave way with a sick crack and he jerked spastically amongst the wires and shattered tube. He wanted to say something, not an apology, perhaps an epitaph. Something more than the cackle caught crushed in his throat. She stood above him screaming, replacing the other woman, replacing the static and white noise. Replacing himself. Waiting. He heard sirens in the distance racing toward him as if there was something left to save. No need. The best thing to do was quit moving. He knew that now. Take their best shot. Don’t cry. Go to sleep. Be still.

KID’S LAST FIGHT BY EDDIE MULLER

South of Market

Danh woke up that morning excited. Today he was finally going to use the pruning shears. He’d learned about the technique at a lineup the previous week. Some guy was bragging how he’d done it to his ex-fiancée when she wouldn’t give back his engagement ring. Ever since, Danh had wanted to give it a try. Grab some rich bitch by the wrist and snip her clean, like a butcher scissoring a duck. There’d be lots of blood and screaming, but he’d just calmly pocket her fingers with the fat-ass jewels and be gone, quick as a hummingbird. Later, at Li Po, when it was his turn to buy, he’d toss a finger on the bar and say something funny, just for the reaction. After that, he’d be known as the craziest fucker in the crew. What to say when he threw down the finger? He hadn’t figured that part out yet, but it would come to him.

Hanna hiked up the shoulder strap on the briefcase and checked her wristwatch as she blew through the doors of the Jewelry Mart. She wasn’t going to make the 2 o’clock briefing with the caterers. She’d driven all the way across town to get a deal on the earrings for Katie’s birthday, and for a second she regretted it. But only for a second, since nothing made Hanna happier than buying wholesale. At the foot of the stairs, she hesitated. It took her a couple of seconds to remember where she’d parked.

Bud couldn’t remember why he was on this street. He was headed someplace, had something important to do. Back a couple of blocks he’d remembered, and his shuffle shifted into a determined stride. But then he started looking at buildings and street signs, recognizing places from long ago, and his head began filling with pictures and sounds from the old days and pretty soon he couldn’t recall what was obvious only minutes before. Damn it. Anger welled up in him, making it harder to hold onto a thought.

Bud turned around and looked back. Maybe he’d dropped the answer on the sidewalk. Had he come this way? Maybe Joan had given him a note, to remind him what to do. From his jacket pocket he pulled a wad of paper.

A hundred-dollar bill. Had she put it there? Yes, Joan put it there. He remembered that now. She’d told him he needed to go somewhere-where? The money was for when he got there.

I’m supposed to buy something. Goddamn if he could recall what it was. I had eggs this morning, he thought. He could still taste the yolks, that’s how he knew.

Hanna was almost to her car when the Asian kid appeared. She barely had time to gasp. He ripped the briefcase off her shoulder, but instead of running away with it, he trapped her arm between his ribs and biceps and grabbed her wrist. She started screaming when she saw the pruning shears. Instinctively, she made fists of both hands.

“Open!” Danh shrieked. “Open!”

Something slammed Danh’s left ear, hard and heavy as brick. To protect himself, he had to let the woman go. Another blow banged his skull. He swung the shears blindly, then took a third blow on the jaw, just below his mouth. Down Danh went, dropping the shears when his hands reached out to break the fall.

That last right hand was the best one Bud had thrown since he decked Lyle Cooley at the Cow Palace in 1958. He’d set that up with a left hook, which missed high but made Cooley bend at the waist. Bud came over the top with a punch that had every ounce of his shoulders, hips, and legs behind it-Cooley was lights-out for three minutes. Every second of that fight was clear as a bell to Bud, to this day.

The final punch in the flurry had hurt like hell; his knuckles had hit flush on the kid’s jawbone. Something might have busted. Bud instinctively flexed his right hand a few times, already feeling the swelling. His whole body vibrated. The fight had lasted about six seconds-the cleanest six seconds he’d experienced in a long time. He stood over the kid, left cocked, just in case the little fuck had some guts and wanted to fight. Of course he didn’t-he mugged women, for chris-sakes. The kid scooped something off the sidewalk and ran like hell, never looking back.

Bud turned, expecting to see his manager, Joe Herman, smiling at him.

“You saved my life,” Hanna said, trying to compose herself. “Or at least my fingers.”

Bud stared at her, trying to piece things together.

Hanna could tell right off the guy wasn’t all there. His clothes were neat and clean and his white hair was cut short, so she didn’t figure him for a street person. A line of blood had dried on his throat where he’d cut himself shaving. He was strongly built, handsome, seventy-something years old. But his eyes were glazed and suspicious.

“Were you a boxer?” Hanna asked.

“I still am.” Bud smiled, because he felt good.

“Yeah, I guess you are.”

She was already inexcusably late, but it would have been too rude to brush the old guy off-as if what just happened was merely one more example of life’s daily irritations, nothing more than a speed bump in her busy schedule.

“My name’s Hanna,” she said, extending her hand. “I can’t thank you enough for stepping in like that. Not many people would have done it-or known what to do.”

“Bud Callum.” Her hand felt like a leaf in his. “Good to meet you.”

“Should we stand here?” Hanna asked, looking around nervously. “Maybe he’ll come back.”

“Let him.”

Bud’s adrenaline was still pumping, making him feel twice his size. He’d rescued this beautiful girl and she appreciated it. She had gorgeous skin and a lopsided smile and everything about her said money. He may not have known where he was, but Bud didn’t need any extra clues to know this woman was loaded.

“What was your name again?” he asked.

“Hanna. Eastman.” She walked toward her car. “Can I drop you somewhere, Mr. Callum? It’s the least I can do.”

Bud couldn’t remember the last time he’d been driven in a car.

“Yeah, that’d be good. ’Preciate it.”

It made her uncomfortable, the way he stared as she called the caterer to reschedule. Maybe he didn’t like people talking and driving at the same time.

“That’s one of those special ones, huh?” he said, after she’d tucked the phone back in her purse. “It goes up to some satellite or something, right? Not through wires, not like a normal phone.”

“Right.” She felt a twinge of fright: Had this guy been away for the past twenty years? Just out of prison, or a mental hospital? How could you live in this city, today, and not have a cell phone?

“When I was growing up we had one phone in the whole ’partment building, in the hall at the top of the stairs. All the families used it, that one phone, if somebody was sick or needed to call the butcher or his bookie. Now everybody’s got a phone. Little kids got phones. This morning I seen a kid talking on one.”

Bud’s eyes lit up-he’d remembered something from that morning. Through his brain he chased the young girl with the tiny phone, hoping she’d lead him to wherever he was supposed to be. But, like the rest of day, she slipped away into a bunch of dim fragments.

“Are you from here?” Hanna asked.

“Yeah, I was born south of the Slot. Used to fight here professionally,” he said, marshalling thoughts into a familiar pattern, one that made sense. “Middleweight. I’m heavier now but not by much. I was right in the thick of it back then, fought all kinds of main events. The Civic, Oakland Auditorium. I was on the undercard when Joey Maxim fought Ezzard Charles here for the title. I fought in L.A. a bunch of times, but never back east. Here in this town, I was a big draw. I gave value-that’s what the promoters used to say. Those were the days. My days.”

He watched the city glide by outside the window. Every street seemed to be under construction, like the whole town was being rebuilt. Nothing looked familiar. Inside, the car was as silent as a tomb; he couldn’t even hear the engine running.

“Where can I drop you?” she said.

He felt defensive, like he was being backed into a corner. His mind raced, but didn’t get beyond the usual place.

“I fought Ray Robinson one time, can you top that? I beat him, too. Right up here at the Civic. Knocked him out in the sixth round. Set him up with a hook, made him bend at the waist. Then over the top I came with a big right cross. Bang! Just like that. The crowd went nuts. Local guy knocking out Sugar Ray, can you top that? I fought ’em all, one time or another. What a life I led.”

It went on like that for blocks. A litany of Bud Callum’s ring accomplishments, each opponent growing in stature, each bout becoming a greater life-or-death battle. Hanna didn’t know anything about boxing, but she knew she wasn’t hearing the truth. It sounded too much like the lies Uncle Bob told the other residents at the retirement home, before they’d had to move him to the assisted-living facility. Before they dared even speak the dreaded A-word.

Bud took his eyes off the street and peered at the woman. In profile, she looked like Nora. Same angular nose, same strong jaw. He was suddenly back in the apartment they had on Jerrold Street. He saw the kitchen curtains that she’d made and the ugly pink-and-brown speckled linoleum they both hated, and for a split second he smelled the burning remnants of the dinner he’d tried to make for her twenty-fifth birthday, when he had no money to take her out.

“You look like my wife,” Bud said.

Hanna blushed. “How long have you been married?”

“She’s dead.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, cheeks reddening. “Was it recently? That she died?”

“Tell you the truth, I can’t remember. I think it was a long time ago. She was beautiful, I remember that.” They fell quiet as traffic on Ninth Street surrounded them.

“Where can I drop you?” she asked, delicately.

“I guess I should go home. Can you take me?”

“Sure. Where’s home?”

“You know, where I live.”

“Well, actually, I don’t know. What’s the address?”

“I can’t remember right now. It’s around here somewhere.”

She drove back and forth on the grid of one-way streets South of Market for the next half hour, while he searched for a landmark he recognized. The problem was, he recognized everything as it was sixty years ago, and delivered a running commentary about what used to be there: the bakery where the homeless shelter now was, a nightclub that had been the glass works, the office building that replaced Coliseum Bowl, the combination boxing arena and rollerskating rink. He knows exactly where he lives, Hanna suspected. He just wants somebody to talk to. Like Uncle Bob. She wondered if Bud Callum knew there was something wrong with him.

“Mr. Callum,” she said, tentatively. “Are you seeing a doctor?”

Doctor. Medicine. Prescription. Drugstore. That’s where he was supposed to go: the drugstore. Joan had gotten him a prescription for some kind of medicine she wanted him to take. Oh Christ, he could hear her now, bitching about how long it took to arrange that appointment at the free clinic. They had a huge fight when he refused to go. There’s nothing the matter with me! he yelled. But he went. Joan was unstop-pable; she always won in the end.

Bud dug into his pants pocket. He still had the slip for the prescription. What about the money? She’d given him cash. A bill, one big bill-a hundred dollars. He couldn’t find it. Joan would kill him. Where had the money gone? It was right in his hand, he could see it.

“Did you lose something?” Hanna asked.

Suddenly, Bud was afraid. He wanted to go home.

“Sixth. I live on Sixth Street,” he said.

Bud didn’t want Nora to leave. He could tell she didn’t believe all the things he’d said, the stories he’d told her about what he’d made of himself, and how close he’d come to fighting for a title. She needed to know. Nora needed to know.

“Please,” he said, looking at her behind the wheel of the expensive automobile. “Come up just for a minute. I’ve got something I want to show you. Please. It’s been a long time, and I just-please.”

What’s the proper payback for someone who’s saved your life? Certainly more than she’d given so far.

“I’d love to, but-there’s no place to park.” It was automatic, the quintessential San Francisco excuse.

“There’s a space right there,” he said, pointing.

She’d never been inside squalor, only driven past. Everything about the building scared her: the creaking of the old warped floors, the stains and graffiti all over the walls, the neglect that hung in the dingy corridor, the misery she imagined behind every door. When she heard the muffled screaming of a baby, she thought she’d be sick. And the worst part was, she knew this wasn’t the bottom.

Bud lived at the far end of the second floor. One bedroom, a bathroom with a shitty shower. A hot plate, no stove. He kept it clean as a whistle.

Uncle Bob had four rooms, an ocean view from each, and a staff of nurses ’round-the-clock: eight thousand dollars a month.

“Wait here,” he told her. “You can sit right there if you like. I can make tea or coffee.”

“That’s okay. I can’t stay long.”

She sat at a small Formica-topped table while he went into the next room and rummaged around. A narrow band of sunlight cut through the window, slicing between buildings across the alley. Bud Callum came back with a scrapbook, which he set in front of her.

“Just look at it for a minute,” he said. “So you’ll know. You’ll know I wasn’t making that stuff up. You think there’s something wrong with me, that I’m ready for the nut house. But I did all that. Here, look. It’s real.”

She slowly turned the black pages, scanning a procession of brittle clippings that told the tale of Bud Callum’s rise. It was a hell of a life, a lot more dramatic than anything Uncle Bob had ever done. Looking at a big halftone of Bud throwing a punch, Hanna had to laugh. “My lucky day,” she said, tapping the picture. “At precisely the right moment, this guy came into my life.”

Bud smiled and went back to the other room. From the top shelf of the closet he pulled down his old foot locker and flung it on the bed. He started digging through it. Nora’s pictures were in there. Weren’t they? This is where he kept them, where they’d always been. She’d see the resemblance, once he showed her. Nora. He hadn’t looked at those pictures in ages. Or had he? They’d better be here. Joan better not have moved them, or thrown them out.

Hanna opened an envelope that had been set inside the scrapbook and slid out the contents: photographs of a dark-haired woman with shining eyes and sharp, pretty features. In some of the pictures she was dressed in a bridal gown. Bud was right-they did look alike. He was in a lot of the photos, too. After flipping through them for a moment, Hanna put them aside. She felt she was violating an intimacy. Also in the envelope was a section of newspaper, quartered. The San Francisco Examiner, dated June 11, 1951. An article gave details of a fire on Jerrold Street that claimed the life of Nora Callum.

Hanna quickly put everything back in the envelope, then placed it carefully in the scrapbook.

“Why are you crying?” Bud asked as he stepped into the room.

“Just looking at all this. You’ve had quite a life.”

“Stop crying,” he said. He hated it when people cried. He could understand crying at beautiful music or the finish of a great ballgame or a terrific fight, but he couldn’t stand it when people cried out of sadness or regret. It made no sense. Crying solved nothing. If something hurt, you stowed the pain and kept on punching. You just banged your way through it, that’s all. You banged your way through to the end.

“I have to go,” Hanna said, standing up. “My daughter’s having a birthday party and I’m supposed to be getting everything ready.” She couldn’t stop the tears. “My God, I must look a mess. I’m sorry.”

“Here, hold on.” From the rear pocket of his trousers Bud pulled a folded white handkerchief, perfectly fresh.

Hanna laughed, which made her cry more. Nobody carries a clean handkerchief, she thought.

She drew in a sharp breath, almost a gasp, as he cupped the back of her head in his huge hand. “Don’t cry,” he said. He dabbed the black streaks from her cheeks and she forced herself to look into his eyes.

“I’ll walk you down,” he said. “This isn’t the best building.”

Out front, as they approached her car, he said, “Thanks for listening before. I go on sometimes. And the ride, thanks for the ride.”

Before she knew what she was doing, she kissed him, half on the cheek, half on the mouth. Maybe she knew what she was doing. She wasn’t sure. “Thanks again,” Hanna said. “I’m glad I met you.”

She buckled herself into the Lexus and drove away. Bud went back upstairs to the room at the end of the hall.

He was re-stowing the footlocker when he heard the front door open.

“Who was that woman?” Joan called out.

He hated how she’d walk in and start talking, not even knowing if he was there. Loud, so loud.

“What woman?”

“Don’t start with me,” she said, entering the bedroom. “I saw her kissing you on the street. What’s been going on?” She eyed the mussed-up bed, which he always kept obsessively neat.

“Did you go in my foot locker?” Bud asked. “Did you take things out of my foot locker? I’m missing some important papers.”

“Bud, you hid those pictures yourself. Don’t change the subject. Who was that woman? Why was she in here?”

He hated her accusing tone, making him feel like a child being chastised. But she was all he had; without her he could barely negotiate a single day.

“I saved her,” Bud explained. “This guy was gonna rob her and I was across the street and ran over and I nailed him-three good shots, all right on the button, and she was so grateful that she gave me a ride home and then she came up and we talked for a long time, maybe an hour, about all kinds of things.” Bud brushed past Joan, reaching for the scrapbook. Had to put it away, before something happened to it. “She wanted to see my book, ’cause of the way I knocked that guy out.”

“Uh-huh. And did you remember to go to the drugstore? Bud? Did you remember to get the medicine? Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

Bud just stood there, holding the scrapbook, keeping his back to her. His face burned. When he didn’t answer, Joan came up behind him and reached into his trouser pockets. His knuckles bled white as he clutched the pebbled leather book.

“Goddamn it! You still got the prescription, Bud! What have you been doing! Where’s the goddamn money? You gave it to that whore, didn’t you? Saved her, my ass! You bought yourself a fucking blowjob, you son of a bitch! With money I gave you. Goddamn it! Is that how little you think of me? Is it? Look at me, you fucking idiot!”

Bud turned around. Joan was crying. Crying solved nothing. If something hurt, you stowed the pain and kept on punching. You just banged your way through it, that’s all. You banged your way through to the end.

“Budweiser, all ’round!” Danh shouted.

Even if he drank ten more he’d never tell anybody what happened that morning. Shit. Sucker-punched by an old fuck. He nursed his jaw, tossed the hundred he’d rescued off the sidewalk onto the bar, and chuckled to himself.

It was like his mother used to say, back home: Sometimes, Fortune doesn’t need a reason to smile.

CONFESSIONS OF A SEX MANIAC BY DAVID HENRY STERRY

Polk Gulch

Eleven o’clock Monday night I was standing in the nasty skank stink of a body-fluid-scented room trying not to pant as I basked in the glow of the Snow Leopard. She was decked out in black jacket and sleek black boots, the long of her straight black hair leading directly to the short of her barely-there black skirt that hid little of the loveliest legs I’d had the pleasure to gander in God knows how long. Coal eyes with glowing embers in the center made my breath synchopate, and I could almost feel her long red claws at the end of her paws digging into the small of my back.

I couldn’t quite pin down exactly what she was. Asian? African? Mexican? Italian? Spanish? She seemed to shape-shift as she sized me up from the lone chair in room 211 of Felipe’s Massage Parlor. There was no Felipe. No one was there for a massage. Behind her the wall was stained with what looked like splattered brain, and if you listened hard enough, you could hear the ghosts of ho’s past screaming.

My eyes enjoyed their tour of the Snow Leopard. The race-car curve of her neck. The flesh bulging out of her bra under the tight black shirt under the black leather jacket.

The cocoa-butter brown of all that smooth silk skin. The smile that was so tiny I couldn’t even tell if it was really a smile.

I was falling under the Snow Leopard’s spell, I could feel her Black Magic working on me, and I couldn’t stop seeing her straddling me, those thick red lips contorted with mad passion as she ravaged me like a crazy jungle cat.

Being a sex maniac has a way of clouding a man’s judgment. The doctor said I was a problematic hypersexualist. I said, “Doc, that takes all the romance out of it. Can’t I just be a sex maniac?” He told me I needed to see him three times a week. I never went back.

People have many misconceptions about what it’s really like to be a sex maniac. They think just because you’ll rut with any old skunkhumper when the hunger’s upon you, that you don’t crave the crème de la crème. I was the junky who was after the finest China-white high. Only, of course, I was a junky of love. And at 11 o’clock on Monday night, the Snow Leopard looked like the greatest score in a lifetime of scores.

Keep your mind on the job, my mind reminded me. I was a distribution specialist in the illegal goods and services industry. A master courier. A bagman. Not to be confused with a bag lady, who keeps all her possessions in a shopping cart and screams about how the aliens won’t stop probing her. There are, in fact, female bagmen. Being a postmodern sexualist myself, I don’t have a problem with the gender blurring. I was basically a high-end black-market messenger boy. I picked shit up. I dropped shit off.

People often assume that just because you’re a sex maniac, you can’t have a life. Wrong again. As with anything, there are all levels of function among sex addicts. I was never one of those grab-a-kid-from-the-schoolyard-and-keep-her-in-my-basement sex maniacs. I was a very high-functioning sex maniac. An ethical sex maniac. I was all about consent. I had rules. I didn’t mix business with pleasure. I took pride in my work. Being the best distribution specialist I could be. That’s just how Mother raised me. So when I was on the job, I showed up on time, I got my package, and I was on my merry way.

That night was supposed to be no different. Show up, get package, deliver. My boss, Chinese Willy, had made a big point of saying that he was giving this job special attention, like: If you don’t mook this job up, you just might get invited into the club to play some of our little reindeer games. All I had to do was get the package back to Willie’s by midnight. Cake.

That was before the Snow Leopard. When Shiva Shiv said the name, I laughed out loud. I stopped laughing when Shiva Shiv said, “What the fuck you laughin’ at?” in a voice dripping of curry and murder. The name rattled around in my brain the whole day. Naturally, that night the Snow Leopard invaded my dreams. She was half-cat, half-woman. I could smell the fertile sex as she kept changing back and forth, from cat to woman and back: whiskers and lips, fangs and fur, that rough tongue, claws and paws, breasts and wet flesh, all hungry jungle feline in-heat heat. She was tearing me to shreds, guts ripped open, and blood, my God, she was pounding me, eating my flesh and taking me right to the corner of Ecstasy and Death. I woke up in a cold sweat with a curtain rod for a johnson. I should have known right then and there. Dreams never lie.

So there I was, staring at the Snow Leopard, with her incredible flesh and her sex-red lips, and I could smell that smell from my dream. That in-heat smell. Or was that just in my head? Being a sex maniac has a way of blurring the fine line between reality and what you’d like reality to be.

Shut up! I scolded myself. Get your package, take care of your business, and be on yer merry way. I fondled the fifty Large screaming in my secret jacket pocket. Why doesn’t she say something? my mind asked me. She got up and paced like, well, like a big dangerous hungry cat. And I could hear the beat of the jungle drum. Or maybe it was just Busta Rhymes booming from the next room. Money, danger, and the distinct whiff of Snow Leopard shivered me from eyeballs to nut-balls to foot-balls: Adrenaline pumping furiously, I was jacked to the max and stone-cold sober.

I loved my job. I used to try to explain to people who’d never been in the illegal goods and services industry why it’s such a fun and rewarding line of work. Often when I was on the job I got what I can only describe as an evangelical feeling. Like this is what God wanted me to do. And on that Monday night, I felt like He, or She (I’m not gender-restrictive when it comes to my deities), had brought me to the Snow Leopard to change my life. I can’t explain it, really, except to say I was sitting there thinking that this job felt like one of those jobs where you look back from the future and you say, Wow, that was the greatest job in the history of jobs! But then I started thinking, No, maybe this is one of those jobs you look back on and say, I let myself drift, and that’s how I got this scar.

The more we didn’t talk, the more electromagnetic the air got, like two saturated clouds bumping and rubbing, the rumbling building as the lightning gathers. I wanted to get a good look at her, fix the constellation of her features in my head so at least I could have her star in my fantasies later. I reached for the light. This is what prompted the first word she ever spoke to me. Naturally, inevitably that word was:

“No.”

Spoken in the chilled voice of a seasoned predator.

It hung there in the air:

“No.”

I did not turn the light on. So we stood there in the dark.

“Are you in, or out?” she purred.

This was not in the script. When Chinese Willy is expecting delivery of his package at midnight, and it’s 11:13 p.m. and fifty Gs are flaming in your secret jacket pocket, you need to keep your priorities straight. My dance card was full. Or was this the call of the wild? That’s the problem with being a sex maniac. You can never really be sure.

“I like to know what I’m getting into before I get into something-”

“Look,” she shot back, those coal eyes glowing, “any minute now two big guys with automatic weapons are gonna bust through that door, and if you’re not in, you should get out.”

“I like to know what the stakes are before I go all in,” I said.

“You play your cards right, I’ll make sure lady luck blows on your dice.” She licked her whiskers.

“What’s the game?” I asked.

“Look, all I need is an ace in the hole,” she hissed, “and if you’re it, I guarantee the pot’ll be very sweet. But tic-toc, we’re on the clock.”

“How do I know you’re not bluffing?” I asked, ready to crawl through broken glass for her, but trying not to show it. “Trying to set me up for a big fall?”

“Tic-toc, tic-toc.” She blazed those cat eyes at me.

I folded with a sigh: “I’m all in.”

“I just hope you got enough hand-”

Before she could even get through the sentence, two very big guys with very automatic weapons busted through the door. She dropped straight down, behind the bed frame, while pulling out a petite little pistol. I unholstered and duck-n-rolled under the bed, firing as fast as my fingers’ll fly, taking down the very big guy on the left. First shot: right shoulder. Second shot: belly-blast. Third shot: left kneecap. As he fell he fired his Glock, bullets spraying around the room like his gun was prematurely ejaculating. When he hit the floor, eye level with me, I got off the shot I’m truly proud of, as I plugged a slug right over the mug’s noseholes. That’s when the big guy’s lights went out.

The Snow Leopard fired one quiet dainty shot from her petite little pistol. It slid with the greatest of ease through the left eyeball of the very big guy on the right. And that was all she wrote for him.

In the calm-after-the-storm aftermath, all I could hear was her cool kitty breath, hot on my neck, as we huddled under the bed, two very big guys sprawled dead on the floor in front of us in spatters of assassin-red blood.

Panicked screams from fleeing Felipe freaks now careened into the room. In a flash I turned, my gun at her temple, and I was face-to-face with the Snow Leopard, eye-to-eye with all that coal and fire, breathing her, that in-heat dream smell making me swell, and I knew I was losing myself in her.

Something hard poking into my ribs brought me back. Lo and behold, it was her little pistol. Suddenly I was love-drunk no more, smack-dab in the middle of an old-fashioned Mexican stand-off.

Maybe it was being under the bed. Maybe it was the red on the floor like a blood Rorschach. Maybe it was the thrill of the kill. Maybe it was just the Snow Leopard paying her debt. All I know is that those ecstasy-red lips were moving into mine, and suddenly hands were under shirts and skin was scorching under fingers. Before I knew what was what, she had me in hand, as cold metal pressed into my testicles. Made my nuts do the bunnyhop. As she worked me over, she dug those long sharp red claws into my chest, opening my flesh. Yes, there was pain, but it was good, as an animal-wild growl rose from way deep inside her throat, and there was much bumping and grinding.

I reached down to reciprocate. Surprise, surprise. There was something down there. Between her legs. Wait a minute, it’s my package, my mind said in surprise. I slipped it out and into my pocket. As I pulled the cash out of my secret jacket pocket, and as I slid the money into her hand, I moved her scanties aside with my gun and gave her the tiniest taste of all of me.

Right away she wanted more. Tried to shove me further in. But I wouldn’t let her have any more. I wanted to make her work for it. Which she did: teeth into my shoulder, claws into my back, this krazy kat was actually drawing blood. She quickly got me pinned on my back and started to have me for a late-night supper. Then she put her pistol tip on my lip and she sucked on both at the same time.

I confess, as a sex addict, the most gratifying aspect of the whole Snow Leopard experience was how she kept maneuvering me around so she could get at me better, bucking and howling, growling and grunting, groaning and moaning, fast, cuz she knew that bigger and larger trouble was most certainly going to walk right through that door at any second.

This is religious, I was thinking, it’s superhuman, interstellar, transcendental. Time was no more. The mind was no more. There was nothing else in the world, even as the universe rushed through me and into her, then back again. Estrogen shockwaved through my central nervous system and my johnson was transformed into a lightning rod that shot bolts as we skydived together off the top of the Golden Gate Bridge and floated, shaking and speaking in tongues together, landing back under the bed at Felipe’s, panting and radioactive in the afterrapture.

Like a stop-action movie she:

Stood

Rearranged

Cat-stretched

Walked toward the door to leave.

I struggled up and stood paralyzed, like a life-sized action-figure of myself, watched each event transpire, but somehow missed all the connecting moves, how she got from point A to B to C to D.

“Hey, wait a minute,” spurted out of my mouth with a disturbing level of desperation. “How can I get ahold of you?”

“You can’t,” she purred, just loud enough for me to hear, as she approached the door.

“Hold on a second, I wanna-” I didn’t say that I wanted to have her again, right away, and for the rest of my life.

“Yeah, I know.” She gave me this devastating, bored-on-jaded Cheshire half-grin, and I knew she was going to just disappear any second as her hand fingered the knob of the door and she was inches away from being gone.

“Hey, look, I just saved your life here.” I hated how limp and lame and tame my voice sounded. “I was your ace-inthe-hole.”

“Why do you think I blew on your dice?” She nodded ever-so-slightly, the door was opening now and she’d almost slipped all the way through it.

“I thought it was my boyish good looks and my winning personality,” I cracked back, hoping a laugh would buy me another minute.

“That’s why I didn’t kill you.”

The Snow Leopard’s grin spread, and after she left, it lingered for several moments before it slowly faded away.

Suddenly everything went back to regular speed, and the sounds of all the freaked-out Felipe habitues had a new sound added to them. Cop sounds. Sirens and intercoms and heavy steps headed hard down the hall, capital-T trouble, and I was out the window, escaping down the fire escape, and boom! walking up Geary, breathing the cool yet fetid air of Polk Gulch, the taste of Snow Leopard wet on my lips.

I tucked in. Took a breath. Checked the time. 11:38. How can that be? I was biblical with the Snow Leopard for all of eight minutes. Why did it feel like eight lifetimes?

Chinese Willie’s was five minutes away, and walking up Geary toward Van Ness, the deep peace of a job well done, combined with the high of scoring all that pure Snow Leopard, caused a highly satisfied sigh to slide out of me. In front of Frenchy’s Adult Emporium, where they’re always HIRING, Rasta Hat Man was taking a wee late-night nap on his sidewalk bed. I admire a man who can just curl up right there on Geary and catch a few winks. No pillow, no blankets: That’s discipline. An old blind brother in a ratty-tatty shabby old overcoat held a blindman cane, only it was all duct-taped together. I couldn’t help it, when I saw the old blind brother with his busted, taped-up cane, it really got to me. So I went over to the guy and I slipped him a sawbuck.

“It’s a ten-spot,” I said low, and the guy came over all humble and happy.

“Thank ya, sir, God bless ya, thank ya, sir, God bless ya.”

I like that in a bum. Gratitude. I hate these bums, you give ’em coin and they look at you like they’re doing you a big favor by taking your money. No, I want some genuine thank-you from my bum.

By the way, bum is the word of choice down here. Once I was talking to one of these superindustrious bums, you know the type, always hustling around a hundred miles an hour, busting their bony butts, they have a whole circuit worked out, cashing in hundreds of bottles a day. I love this guy, he’s always got a line of bottle-loaded shopping carts all tied together like he’s riding herd over a bum wagon train. I called him James Brown, seeings how he’s the hardest working man in show business. He got a kick out of that. So one time I was talking to James Brown about homeless-this and homeless-that, and the brother went off:

“Don’t call me no homeless, mutherfucker! I’m a bum! I don’t work but when I wanna work, I don’t kiss no bawsman’s ass, I take my own vacation, I make my own rules, I’m a bum, mutherfucker, and I’m proud. Hallelujah, I’m a bum!”

Okay, you’re a bum, Hallelujah. And every time I saw James Brown, there was some shoeless loser, some lower-class riffraff bum railing on this superindustrious brother from another mother, sticking a raw, puffy-bum hand out, screaming: “Why you don’t you give me some love? You owe me, you sell-out mutherfucker!”

It happens all the way from the outhouse to the penthouse. Some citizens work their noses to the bone, and some jealous leaching ne’er-do-wells are always there to knock them down a peg. Sweet misery loves her company, from Nob Hill to Polk Gulch.

People dis the Gulch, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s the only neighborhood if you’re really serious about being a sex maniac. The Haight’s too full of gentrified Gap-heads, gone-to-seed hippy hopheads, and runaway urchin thieves. The Richmond is a great place to go if you’re lookin’ for the slowest, most boring death imaginable. SoMa? Please! Those dot-con pseudo-hipsters deserve every scrap of misery they’ve heaped on themselves. I do enjoy North Beach on a sunny afternoon, but in the end there’s too many clueless tourists clogging up the arteries. Nob Hill is a travesty, teaming with all those vaginally challenged fashion victims. Hell, even the poodles get botoxed up there. And there’s nothing tender in the Tenderloin. The only loin in the TL is crawling with nasty maggots. I once saw some toothless loon cap his running mate over a Q-tip. Hey, I like Q-tips as much as the next guy, but only in the TL can you get terminated over one.

Because of its equidistant location between the Tenderloin and Nob Hill, you will hear the sisters sometimes call Polk Gulch the Tender Knob, which I quite enjoy. Here’s a little known fact: The word gulch comes from an Anglicization of gulchen, which means to gulp. When you consider how much has been guzzled and gulped in the Gulch over the years, it seems a perfect fit, doesn’t it? Don’t get me wrong, the Gulch is not for the feebleminded or the weak-willed. The Gulch will chew you up and spit you out if you let it. But if you have Game, you can get anything anytime in the Gulch. And you can get it for cheap.

The Gulch is where rough trade goes for a vacation. So you can bag a nasty little bit of fluff, like this girly hanging outside Koko’s, with the hiphuggers revealing pretty pink panties and FOXY plastered in cheap lettering across the seat of her jeans stuffed full of all that fine white flesh, she’s positively spilling out her too-small pleather jacket, and for twenty-five dollars and unlimited meth, chances are she’ll let you have an unlimited all-access pass to her hidden treasures until she’s not high anymore. And with the connoisseur-quality meth I kept on hand for specifically this purpose, that could last days at a stretch. Yes, she was rough, but sometimes I liked it rough.

But the true glory of the Gulch is that the very next second you’ll spot two touristy girlies shivering in shorts walking by with beautiful pale goosebumping gams, swathed in big I § SF sweatshirts they had to buy cuz nobody told them how freezing cold it is in SF. You’d be shocked how easy it is to sidle up to these corn-fed beauties (who are most of them looking to take a walk on the wild side in Baghdad-by-the-Bay, by the way) and take them for some paella at the Spanish joint on the corner, then end up back at my lovepad for some wine and some weed if they’re into it, which they almost always are, and all of a sudden they’re on my big round bed begging for one more to make it an even ten so they can go back and tell their cheesehead friends about how they § SF.

Across the street heading toward Polk, three of the loud brothers congregated around a lost-looking white man in a too-expensive jacket, they were waving DVDs in his face, screaming about how they could get any title he wanted. Then suddenly eight or nine of the loud brothers crawled out of Godknowswhere, surrounded the lost-looking jacket like a giant black widow spider, and swallowed it and its owner whole.

A tattooed post-teen with a hunk of metal through her lip and one stuck through her eyebrow clunked by next. I found myself wondering where else she was pierced. Sometimes those tattooed pierced freaky females enjoy a bit of punishment with their pain and that can be fun, riding that line between angel and devil.

More local color, Gulch-style, sashayed past in a ridiculous micro-mini and huge balloon breasts. She was one of these tiny passable Thai trannies. Very tidy. Truthfully, as a sex addict, I enjoy a passable trannie. Take it from one who knows, a hotty tranny’ll rattle your bones and make yer cahones dance like a couple of Mexican jumping beans. Because she wants to be a she more than any female. But I could only go to Trannie Land if she stayed a she. That’s just me. Maybe I was just not evolved enough to be comfortable with man-love. I wish I could’ve. I tried, believe me. My life would have been so much easier if I could’ve gotten off on men, cuz you can have man 25/8. Shake a tree in the Gulch and a ton of love-ready man falls out. Woman, even faux-woman, even bad woman, even the nastiest skagmeister skunkkunt, is often so hard to come by. I mean, obviously there are women everywhere, but it takes so much effort just getting in most of the really exceptional woman, it’s exhausting.

Next up on the Gulch hit parade was a disaffected arty sweet-sixteeny, all gangly angles and long colt legs, hoody ripped so her bra strap showed over the softness of all that untouched skin underneath, with all that attitude heaped on top. I just loved going up to one of these flouncing clomping angry grrrrls and saying, Hey, I know how it is, your parents suck, your school sucks, your teacher sucks, your friends suck, the whole world sucks, but I can show you how to escape into ecstasy, lose yourself to the pleasures of the flesh, primal scream all that bopper angst right out. You have all the equipment you need, but you have no clue how to use it, I can show you the whole thing in a couple of hours. Plus, you cannot believe how jealous your stupid sucking friends’ll be, and just how much this will piss your stupid sucking parents off.

Oh, I love this guy: He never wears a shirt, even in the freezing rain, he’s so wired and wiry, you can see every bone in his body, he’s like a skeleton wearing a skin tarp stretched too tight. He loves to run right in front of speeding cars. That’s his thing. And he never gets hit. I saw him cause three separate accidents, one of them a three-car fiasco. But he never gets so much as a scratch. ’Course, he is lean and lithe and wiry as hell, like I said, so he’s very hard to hit. But as I walked past and watched him, I wondered what he might’ve been, like maybe an Olympic hurdler or an NFL scatback or a Hollywood stuntman, instead of a death-defying crack casualty.

As I turned down Chinese Willy’s alley, the animal cried out inside me: I need more Snow Leopard! The pictures flashed back: those throat moans, cold steel on my boys, her squirming so she could have all of me. My open chest skin was stinging in the chill of the night, and I could still feel her digging into me.

It’s so gratifying when reality actually turns out better than fantasy. Chinese Willy, who’s actually Mexican but really looks, I kid you not, Chinese, was even fatter and happier than I’d imagined he’d be. If there’s one thing he likes more than getting his money, it’s getting his money early. So he was practically jovial as he counted all those potatoes at 11:52, instead of midnight. I watched him touching and fondling his cabbage, and suddenly I understood: This is his thing. The man is a cash addict.

Chinese Willy is an old-school gangster, which has its ups and downs. On the one hand, he’s hooked up with everybody and nobody can touch him, which meant nobody could touch me. On the other hand, he’s prone to irrational outbursts of ultra-violence that can really wreak havoc on a person’s skull. He loves all that vendetta malarkey, and he’s very big on LOYALTY and RESPECT. And he loves to break balls. His whole social hierarchy is based on the breaking of other people’s balls. It’s his way of saying he likes you. When Chinese Willy stops breaking your balls, that’s when it’s time to watch your back.

One of the odder things about Chinese Willy is that even though he’s actually Mexican, he surrounds himself with Chinamen, and he’s always bankrolling these high-end Chinese honeys so they’ll hang with him, and he even kind of talks like one of those old-timey Chinamen. It’s like somehow because he looks Chinese, he’s become a Chinaman.

“So,” he mumbled through a huge mouthful of egg salad, “how you like Snow Leopard?” He glanced sideways at Crack Harry, Shiva Shiv, and Knuckles, and when he did that insinuating vulgar guttural chuckle, that was their cue to do the same. Like they were all in on some secret that I wasn’t, the object being to make me feel like a big steaming heap of shit. But the beauty of being a sex maniac is that you could just not care less about any of this. It was just so much water off the back of my duck, while I maneuvered my way toward my next fix.

“Yeah, she was a real piece of work-”

“You say mouthful there.” Assorted grunts and belches and chortles erupted from Crack Harry and Shiva Shiv and Knuckles.

“Yeah, I was just wondering if I could get her digits, cuz I gotta proposition I wanna-”

Chinese Willy shut me down like I was the clap and he was penicillin: “No! You thank me for this. I tell now, you listen: You not wanna make fuckeefuck wit’ this clazy bitch! Right, boys?”

They nodded and grunted like the chunks of muscle they are.

“Naw, you don’t understand,” I plodded on, “I have an unresolved situation on my hands vis-à-vi-”

“Now you watch my lip: No!” Egg salad sprayed from the Mexican lips of Chinese Willy. “Stay fuck away from this clazy bitch!”

“With all due respect”-Willy loves all that all-due-respect business, you could feel his sphincter unpinch-“I’ve been working for you for five years, I’m always straight, I bring you a steady stream of new business, and I have never asked you for one single thing. This is all I ask. I need to talk to the Snow Leopard. With all due respect-”

I couldn’t even get the last due-respects out on account of the veins that were popping up on that huge Chinese-looking head, as “NO! FUCK DAMN YOU!” thundered from Willy, along with another fusillade of egg salad, a small particle of which flew all the way over the desk and landed on my vintage Warriors warm-up.

This always signals the end of any dispute involving Chinese Willy. It is a well-known fact that after the third “No!” from Chinese Willy, you continue a dispute at your own risk, as an irrational outburst will most likely result. Since I did not wish to have my cheek pierced by a staple gun, or my nose broken with Chinese Willy’s Ugly Billy (his billyclub of choice, a slender twenty-four inches of hardened metal, conventionally used for bashing fish in the head until they’re dead after you’ve reeled them in), I dropped the topic.

But just when I was ready to write Chinese Willy off as a classless thug, he peeled off five Large and handed them to me, even though he only owed me a G, and with great pomp and ceremony, he proclaimed:

“Okay, maybe you right. You don’t never fuck up. Not never. So maybe Chinese Willy take you for granted. But I do you favor here. Snow Leopard, she take no prisoner. This for you own good. You understand I no want to see this clazy bitch fuck you shit up?”

“Thank you for taking the time to help me, and I appreciate your generosity, which I am not even deserving of, but what the hell, I’ll take it.”

I pocketed the five Gs with a flourish, and they ate it up, loved that I was giving a tiny little shot to the man himself, as he laughed: “He got brass monkey balls, don’t he?”

Everybody made little grunty snorty sounds, and Chinese Willy continued: “I got pickup for you, noon tomorrow, Sophia’s, Butterball, he got thing for you, you take to Sweetmeat, he got thing for you, I need back here by 1:00.”

“You got it, bawss.” I smiled wide, and as I sidled out, Chinese Willy shoved a huge hunk of egg salad into his fat, happy Mexican face.

I practically skipped down the alley to Polk: It was barely midnight, I had four free Gs itching to be scratched in my secret jacket pocket, I didn’t have to work again for twelve hours, I was still throbbing from the Snow Leopard work-over, I could feel the cool air soothing the open love-wounds inflicted by the saucy minx I wanted to have every day for the rest of my life, and as I smelled her again, she jolted me to the bone.

Next stop: Eyeball. The queerest of queer ducks. He’s as tall as he is wide, somewhere between thirty and six hundred years old. Possibly the hairiest man on the planet, he’s got one of these Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers ’dos, slate-colored hair flying everywhere, flowing over the shoulders, burying the ears, drooping in front of the eyes, and avalanching uncontrollably down the front and the back. At a certain point the head hair meets and joins the beard hair, and it looks thick enough to contain entire meals. Which, at times, it does. Thicket of brambled monobrow. Hair sprouting out of knuckles, pouring out of shirt collar and sleeve, pant leg bottom. You could make braids out of the hair coming out of his nose. I’ve never seen Eyeball’s eyeballs. I don’t know that he actually has eyes. But here’s the weird thing: Eyeball’s the guy you go to in the Gulch when you want to know where to find somebody, and he never travels more than the fifty feet between his flophouse hellhole on Larkin, and Hung Wang’s, the filthy greazy-spoon dim sum joint he frequents on O’Farrell. It’s one of the great mysteries of life how this human hairball who can barely see, hardly walk, and never goes anywhere, knows everything there is to know about everyone in the Gulch. If you didn’t see it with your own eyes, you wouldn’t believe it. But this is how Eyeball makes bank. People pay him to tell them where to find what they’re looking for. It makes you think about miracles, how they’re everywhere, only nobody’s paying attention.

The thing about Eyeball is, he’s a cantankerous troll, and whimsical in the worst sense of the word. For example, one time you’ll come to him with the simplest piece of information, and he’ll charge you a grand for it. Another time he’ll give you the Governator’s cell digits for a buck. So I was a tad apprehensive about what he was going to charge me, but at the same time, I had four free Gs pulsating in my secret pocket, and with four Large I was confident I could find the Snow Leopard.

So sure enough, there he was, as advertised, Eyeball, buried somewhere under all that hair, stuffing his piehole with vile dim sum. Before him sat three plates pregnant with rancid rolls and skuzzy buns, grizzly gray meat and dumplings lying there like stillborn dog fetuses, and rice with little things that looked like dead insects sprinkled in it. Crumbs spread out in a half-moon on the floor around him, his hair/beard layered deep with bits of chow from meals present to years-gone-by. I loved to watch the man attack and subdue his dim sum. As I watched him ravage his food, it became clear: This is Eyeball’s thing. This is what he lives for. The man is a chow junky.

I didn’t want to interrupt him when he was in the middle of a big feed, he can be cranky as a mother bear when you threaten her cubs, he’ll take your head clean off if you’re not careful. I waited till he came up for air, then moved in, gentle but firm: “Hello, Eyeball, how’s life treating ya?”

“I got gout. Ain’t that sump’n’? Gout.” Eyeball shook his head, which made his hair ripple in waves of frayed gray.

Eyeball’s a mumbler. I always forgot that. Actually, it’s not that he mumbles so much as the fact that the food he’s constantly stuffing into his mouth serves as a natural muffler, making it difficult to hear more than about forty percent of what he says.

“Sorry to hear that,” I said, as I tried to figure out exactly what he had. Bout? Doubt? Gout?

“Gout!” Eyeball shouted, dim sum flying as if from a volcano. “Ain’t that a kick in the ass?”

Ah, gout! I didn’t even know what gout was. But it sounded like one of those things you definitely don’t want, like you never hear anyone say: Hey, everybody, congratulate me, I got gout!

I leaned as close as I could without invading his personal space, as my ears adjusted to his volume.

“Do you even know what gout is?” Eyeball snapped, cranky.

I wanted to chill his wig as quickly as possible, so I jumped right in: “No, I don’t, but it sounds bad. Can I get you anything for it?”

Yes, I did want to soften him, but I was sincere about getting him some meds if he needed them. That’s just how Mother raised me.

“Thank you, very kind of you to offer,” came out from under Eyeball’s hair. “Either my liver is producing more uric acid than I can excrete urinarily, or I have more uric acid in my bloodstream than my kidneys can filter. Apparently, the uric acid has crystallized in my feet, and it feels like Satan is punishing me for my sins by shoving white-hot knitting needles into my big toes.”

“Sorry to hear that,” I empathized with my feminine side.

“How’s Chinese Willy?” Eyeball grunted as he stuffed an entire dumpling into his mouth and swallowed it whole like a snake sucking down an egg.

“He’s fat and happy. So, listen, I’m looking for someone, she’s-”

“The Snow Leopard,” he said without missing a beat.

“Eyeball, you never cease to amaze me, how did you know that?” I was actually flabbergasted, although in retrospect I should’ve seen it coming.

“There was some nastiness at Felipe’s, no? Several brutes bought the farm at the hands of a coupla very talented individuals, one of whom is the Snow Leopard. The police are quite interested, by the way, so if you know anyone who might’ve been involved, I would advise them to lay low.” Insinuation oozed out from under that hair so hard you’d’ve had to be in a coma not to feel it.

“Thanks, Eyeball, I appreciate your concern. If I run into any such individuals, I’ll pass on that valuable information. So, where do I find her?” I tried not to betray too much of the ill and all-consuming lust madness that burned in me. I’m afraid I was not quite successful.

“You don’t,” he snorted matter-of-fact.

“No, you don’t understand, I have some unfinished business with her, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and-”

“This is not a person you want to find.” Eyeball said it like he was telling me without question that the earth is round and revolves around the sun.

“No, I do, I really do, see-”

“I don’t feel comfortable dispensing this particular information,” he said, as he wiped his mouth with his stain-besotted sleeve, “as I’m quite sure it will be extremely hazardous to your health.”

“Do you know where she is?” I asked.

“What kinda question is that?” Eyeball came over all insulted: “Of course I know where she is. I know where everyone is. What I’m saying is that I do not want to be responsible for the shitstorm that will rain down upon you.”

I got very serious now, and tried to find Eyeball’s eyes in all that hairy chaos. “Look, I appreciate what you’re saying, I really do, but I don’t care what a dangerous psychopath she is, I have got to get ahold of her. I’ll be responsible for the consequences. Trust me, I need this.”

Nothing came out of him. More dim sum went in.

“How much?” I persisted.

“Not for sale,” he insisted.

“Everything’s for sale.” I was the dog with a bone that wouldn’t let go.

“You can’t afford it,” Eyeball mumbled.

“How much, Eyeball, seriously.”

“Five grand,” he said, knowing I’d never come across.

I felt like the star of my own movie as I reached inside my secret pocket, extracted the five Large, and handed them to the stunned Eyeball, who had no choice but to say: “Over the tarot joint on O’Farrell, she owns the building, lives on the top floor.”

With a five-grand spring in my step, I headed happily to the Snow Leopard’s pad. I was really looking forward to breaking into her place. I was born blessed. Ever since I was a kid, there was no place I couldn’t break into when I put my mind to it. As a child I was always sneaking into people’s houses when they weren’t home. I loved being inside their lives. Snooping through their drawers. Rifling around in the back of their closet where they hide everything they didn’t want anyone to find. I was always drawn to the unmentionables. And I loved seeing one of these pillar-of-society types walking around town like they’re the head of the Committee for Moral Decency, and knowing that they have dirty magazines full of schoolgirls and Great Danes at home just waiting in their closets.

So when I walked up to the tarot joint on O’Farrell, I was thinking: Cake. It was almost 1:00 in the morning, so there was still quite a bit of street action. Stumpy Charlie and Tripod, his three-legged dog, teetered by. That chick I saw before with the tattoos stumbled by, she’d clearly found a fix and was happily self-medicated. Well, maybe not happily. A behemoth with a three-foot orange mohawk and chains connecting various parts of his anatomy like they were holding him together stopped in front of me, looked me right in the eye, and said with malicious intent: “What the fuck are you starin’ at?”

I love these guys that get themselves decked out in some outrageous Halloween-looking costume so everybody has to stare at them, and then when you stare at them, they want to rearrange your face. The begging-for-a-fight boys.

But me, I just could not have cared less, particularly not tonight. So I smiled easy-as-you-please and said: “I was just admiring your hair, my man.”

Because I was so easy with it, all the piss and vinegar drained right out of him, and he said, “Oh, uh…thanks…”

Then he clomped off to find someone weaker and more feeble to smack around.

There was a door next to the tarot joint that led into her building. Too obvious. The building next door was clearly the way to go, so I skeleton-keyed in lickety spilt, shot up two flights of stairs, out the back window at the landing, and grabbing a drainpipe, I swung around so I landed on the Snow Leopard’s roof, quiet as a love-monkey making a house call. I hopped down onto the fire escape and leaned way out so I could see inside the window of the Snow Leopard. Sadly, drawn drapes stopped me from staring into her lair.

A nobody’s-home vibe radiated through the walls and I could barely stand it, so close to being inside her cave, sniffing around her unmentionables, uncovering her underbelly, unearthing the sweet secrets that make the Snow Leopard tick. One foot on the fire escape railing, the other on her sill, I jimmied my handmade fenestrator in, guided the lock to the disengaged position, slid the window up, and slithered in like an oiled snake.

Surveying the place with my penlight, I couldn’t quite wrap my eyes around it. It was as elusive as she was. One huge room, the whole floor of the building. I could see what was probably the front door, around 150 feet away. Only the moon through two skylights provided light, and that came and went as nightclouds drifted by. Another door on the west wall. Closed. One more door on the east wall. Closed. In the back corner, one giant bed with four posts was covered in carved cats chasing each other up and down. Fur blankets piled high. No chairs. No table. No kitchen. No garbage can. No TV. No computer. No, wait. Next to the bed, growing up the wall, was a ten-foot bookcase with a ladder next to it. And what, pray tell, does the Snow Leopard read? my mind wondered to itself. You can tell everything about a person by their library. Or lack thereof. The Jungle Book. The Cat in the Hat. How the Leopard Got His Spots. Why Cats Paint. Taming the Tiger Within. How Large Cats Kill. The Leopard Hunts in Darkness. I smiled.

Inside one door: bathroom. Or rather a shell of a bathroom. A toilet. A standing sink. A claw-foot tub. A bar of soap. No beauty products. No medicine cabinet. No medicine. It’s like she was not quite human.

Behind door number 2: walk-in closet. Outfits hang on rods. All black. Hump-me pumps, kick-yer-ass boots, gouge-yer-eye-out stiletto heels, thin Chinese slippers, and one pair of spiffy spats. One dresser. Three drawers. Bras. Panties. Stockings. One pair of black panties. I picked them up. Wrapped them around my face like a gas mask and breathed in the secret scent of the Snow Leopard. Pavlov was laughing in his grave as that smell invaded my central nervous system and zapped my boys while blood pumped automatically toward them. I considered stealing them, but I didn’t want to piss the Goddess off. I’ll ask the Snow Leopard for them after I re-sex her, I thought.

Snap your fingers. Do it now.

The time it takes you to think about snapping your fingers is how long it took for her to have the muzzle of her petite little pistol in my earhole as I left her walk-in closet.

My first thought was: How did she do that? That’s my thing. Nobody gets the drop on me.

And yet there it was, her cold metal stub at the tip of my earhole.

The next thing was smell. That in-heat scent, that aural-sense memory that made my thing sing as the breath drained out of me in a long warm sigh.

And suddenly her face was in mine. Those burning-coal eyes sucked me into the sunspots in the middle and I remember thinking: How did I get to be the deer in the headlights? The monkey in the middle?

She just stared. Looked like a smile was hiding under her quicksilver face, but there wasn’t enough light in the room to tell, just little flashes of moon through the skylights. I kept waiting for her to ask: What are you doing here? Or: How did you get in so easy? Or: What is wrong with you? But nothing. While freakydeaky cracklyscary estrogen-testosterone-saturated atoms careened around her huge empty cat cave.

She leaned in sooooo slow. Just kept leaning. Closer and closer. A picture popped into my head: She’d bitten my lower lip off and it was hanging out of her bloody mouth and she slurped it in between her teeth with a hungry happy growl.

Her lips were right at the tip of my lips and the heat of her breath made it feel like there was a furnace inside her pumping vaporized sex into my mouth and down my throat, filling my lungs and pulsating into my chest, then spreading all the way down to my hips, which began humpdancing unconsciously into her, and the chemicals were changing in my brain, synapses firing, my heart rate erupting through the roof of my mouth, the flow of blood altered, redirected by the Snow Leopard.

I wanted to say: How the hell did you sneak up on me like that? Or: Are you mad that I’m here? Or: Who are you, anyway? But the cat got my tongue. The tense intense anticipation was killing me, and all the while I was madly aware of her metal rod flirting with my earhole. I simply cannot emphasize enough how this added to the life-n-death of the whole thing, knowing I was one itchy trigger finger away from having my brains turned into wallpaper.

The tip of my lip got the softest lick from her rough cat tongue as her other hand grabbed my package hard, knocking the air right out of me, while she shoved me back into the wall with a thud, her claws digging into my boys.

And then I understood. This is her thing: Getting guys by the balls. Literally. Her grind finding mine, she dug in, yes it did hurt, but at the same time, pleasure shot to all my centers, all at the same time. Pleasure. Pain. Pain. Pleasure. I couldn’t tell anymore where one ended and the other began. She dragged me back and forth fiercely, and I had never felt more alive in my entire life. She squeezeboxed me like a rhythm queen working overtime, working me over but good.

I was now waiting to wake up overheated and covered in cold sweat from this dream.

But no.

She pushed me hard, my back literally up against the wall. She shoved me down onto the floor, and plopped down on me, she had me pinned, straddling one boot on either side of my thighs, black skirt up over her hips, sucking on my tongue so it shivered me with freezing heat, and that little prick of a gun was always there, hard and cold in my earhole, my death at her whim a whisper away.

The Snow Leopard started making crazy growly hissing sounds, I could feel the pull of the moon from inside her, and I knew I never wanted to leave there.

She maneuvered herself open, pulled back her head and looked into my eyes, inviting me inside to ride her Ferris wheel to the stars. She took a deep breath, and a sweetness came over her face, it filled me up, everything softened and she melted me in places I didn’t even know I had places.

Then she grabbed me behind the neck with her free hand and gathered herself like a hurricane off the coast.

And then BOOM! she shoved down with all her might, with all those muscles, with all that leverage, all that wet and that swell, sliding down deepdeepdeep into the depth of her holiness, all the way to the bottom of the well, splitting her open like an atom, an explosion of heat blowing my mushroom-cloud heart all the way up.

More crazy roar big cat scratch fever screams as she rocked slowly, flexing in rhythm with the tide, tugging and grinding, pressing flesh on flesh, sweat beading out now, the sound of squishing liquid wet, ecstasy crawling from pleasure center to pleasure center up and down my tingling spine as she pulled me up higher and higher, while ripping into my skin. Is that sweat or blood trickling down my neck? my brain asked. Yes, it is, my body answered.

She was back in my face again, the Snow Leopard. I could finally see her, as a strip of moon filtered through her skylights, and she poured herself through my windows, and this is what took me to the edge of Lover’s Leap.

She nodded at me ever so tiny, she wanted to know if I was ready to jump off with her, to take the great plunge, and into her eyes I nodded, Yes, I’m ready, jump off and I’ll jump with you.

Funny what a person can get used to. When the muzzle of her petite little pistol first nuzzled my earhole, everything else in the entire world faded away, and there was nothing but the cold steel feel of that gun, death at the tip of her finger.

But by the time I heard the click of the trigger, I had quite forgotten, in all the excitement, that her petite little pistol was there at all. It took me a moment to realize what that sound was, to remember that her gun was indeed in my earhole.

How long was it between the time I heard that click and the time that bullet ripped down the tiny barrel of her pistol, barreled through the hole of my ear and into the fishy tissue of my brain? Couldn’t be more than a flicker of a blink, right? A heartbeat? At what point during its passage through my skull did the bullet take me from orgasm to death? I cannot accurately answer that question.

But as a sex maniac, I couldn’t have asked for a better death: coming and going in the same moment, at the hands of the Snow Leopard.