Knucklehead, page 17
The dogs, who had been waiting for us at the love nest, were running wild around the strangers. They were well trained but didn’t look it. Zoe and Helo, the border collies, kept trying to herd the men; Grace and Luther, the pits, wanted to play that game that I’d come to think of as Tug-of-War for Realsies. The U-Haul men were not afraid of the dogs. But they knew they were being watched by all of us. They spoke very little, and when they spoke to each other they did so en Español.
I was armed. I always had a gun on me. It’s a good idea to get used to wearing a sidearm before the shit goes down and you really have to wear one. That wouldn’t be all bad. Holed up in our big house after Y2K, keeping the looters at bay, while my former superiors at Clay Conti hanged themselves because all their status and power had turned out to be just a few sparks in a wire somewhere. Didn’t sound any worse than anything else.
As we were finishing up the move, I mumbled some regret that we didn’t own a decent boom box. I had a fancy stereo (as we had all seen) but it would be nice, I said to no one in particular, to get a high-end portable combo cassette/CD player from somewhere. Even better, I said, to get one for not a lot of money. I was burning through the money. Being in love was expensive.
“I know a guy,” the one with the neck tats said. He was looking at me the same way he’d looked at our stuff. “Guy with a nice boom box for sale, cheap.” The air got really still.
“Yeah?” I replied. “Cool!”
“Ye, it’s real cool, mang,” Neck Tat said. He and his partner, the one whose eyes never held still, shared a brief glance. “It’s nice. Got the compact disc, got the tape . . . radio . . . all that. And it’s only—” one last appraisal of our stuff, which now filled the dining room in head-high piles—“hundred bucks.”
“A hundred bucks!” I chirped. Like a happy idiot. “That’s cheap!”
“Ye, cheap,” Neck Tat said. “Mira, meet us later, OK? So you can buy the . . . the thing. From my friend.” He did the upward chin nod at me. “Lemme get something to write on.” I handed Neck Tat a pen and a newspaper, and he jotted down the name and address of some hotel on Sixth Street.
Sixth Street is the shittiest street in San Francisco. It’s the strangest thing. Fifth Street is fine; a little seedy, but fine. Seventh Street too: a little funky, basically regular. But Sixth Street—at least around Mission, where this place was—is an over-the-top shitbox of danger and misery. It’s not just poor; it’s wrong. It’s like Calcutta if everyone in Calcutta were addicted to heroin.
I stared at the address. “I dunno . . .”
Neck Tat muttered something to Shifty Eyes, but all I caught was ese cabrón.
“See you there!” Sarah said from the doorway. I didn’t even know she was standing there. “What time?”
* * *
“It’ll be fun,” she said later, poking me with her toe. We were lolling around on our now-ruined bed. The fact of assembling our bed in our house had been too much for us and we couldn’t wait and we fucked on the uncovered box spring. I loved her, but to call that making love would be ridiculous. You ever have a lot of stray cats around your house? And at night there’s all kinds of cat drama? And you hear a bunch of yowling and garbage cans falling over but you can’t tell if it’s cats fighting or cats fucking? That was us. I still have scars. Bites, mostly.
“Fun!” she repeated. “A little adventure.” Sarah was like a tour guide through worlds located in places I’d thought I knew. My tiny Crocodile Hunter.
“Dude.” I grabbed her shoulders and flopped onto the box spring, taking her down next to me. “Sixth Street? Are you familiar with—”
“That’s classist,” she said, crawling around on me. “It’s just people. Maybe not so fortunate as some people”—a bite on my neck—“but somebody there has a boom box! With our name on it!”
“Our name, written in cooties. Other-people cooties.”
“We’ll do a cleansing ritual on the whole house in a few days. I’ve got sage in one of these boxes somewhere . . .”
“I don’t know. Why did that one dude call me a goat?”
She was straddling my stomach. I sat up and we were facing each other, me between her legs. She immediately started giving me a lap dance. “We’re nesting! It’ll be the first thing we get for our new house! Together!” She put her lips on my ear and whispered: “Together.” Her tongue went in and licked my eardrum. “Our.” Lick. “New.” Bite. “House.” Chomp.
Then we were having crazy monkey cat sex again, which we both assumed settled it.
* * *
After playing with the dogs and cuddling the kitties and playing with the kitties and cuddling the dogs, we got ready and hit the road.
We parked Sarah’s truck a couple of blocks away from the hotel and showed up on foot at 8:00 p.m. sharp. It was March, so it was pretty dark out.
They called this place a hotel—it had a little awning out front with The Whatever Hotel painted across it—but it wasn’t really a hotel. It was more of a hospice. A hospice for lives.
Neck Tat and Shifty Eyes—and a couple of other guys—were standing out front in a tight huddle. Even though we’d shown up right on time, all four seemed surprised to see us.
I greeted Necky with a rowdy “Ey!” and a bro-hug. “Yeah, hey, mang!” he yelled while pushing me off him. “You unpacking all those boxes?”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Let’s go in.”
Looking back, I don’t think that a normal person would have gone as far as the front desk. But I couldn’t wait to get all up in there.
We climbed two flights up a dirty, narrow staircase. Everything about the place assured me that no good was happening inside those rooms. All around us, people were ranting and squabbling and moaning behind thin doors. TVs blared. Babies screamed. It sounded like someone was actually having a baby in one room. We passed through a particularly foul patch at the second-floor landing. Why am I sure that’s what dead guy smells like?
We stopped in front of a room about halfway down the sour third-floor hallway. A grimy metal badge above the peephole read 314. The door wasn’t locked; Shifty Eyes just reached for the knob and opened it. And we all went in.
I still think about the moment we walked into that room. The few seconds it took to cross the threshold from the dim hallway into some small room nobody knew we had gone to, in the middle of a giant tomb, on the sickest, most dangerous street in the city—that moment lives in a special place in my mind. I was pretty sure that everything would be fine.
Inside my leather trench, I was rocking one 9mm Smith in a shoulder holster on my left side, and another already in my hand inside the right coat pocket. My baton slept coiled in my back right jeans pocket. Sarah had selected her Ruger .380. She owned others, but back at the house she said that the .380 was all she needed, and I believed her. That was a sweet little piece. It was almost the size and weight of a 9mm Ruger, but because a .380 cartridge is half the length of a 9 and only holds about half the gunpowder, the gun shoots with almost no recoil. Bullseyes were effortless. A year later I would miss that gun more than her. She also had her punching dagger, as always.
My mind was clear. I felt relaxed and alert, like I’d been getting 10 hours of sleep a night, which I had. I felt like I’d been doing deals in shady hotels my whole life. The Matrix wouldn’t be out for another four years. We were Neo and Trinity before anybody.
Someone behind us closed the door, and we all stood around for a moment in the tiny room, lit by a 40-watt bulb in a lamp on the floor. Sarah had gotten herself just beyond the edge of the crowd, and I was smack in the middle. The men looked at us, and we looked at them. Their eyes seemed to say, Why aren’t you afraid? And our eyes said, Yeah! Why?
Finally, Necky Green said to me, “You got the money? On you?”
“Yup! Hundred bucks!”
“Oh! OK.” Neckbone wiped his face from forehead to chin in one quick, hard motion. His fingers lingered on his mustache as he glanced around the room. Then he walked over to a nightstand by the ratty twin bed and produced the goods. It was basically like he’d described. A high-end Sony. Worth maybe $300 new. Somehow I doubted these guys had paid $300 for it.
Neckbone held the boom box up in front of me. With my left hand, I produced a tape from an inner pocket, popped it in, and pressed Play. Bust a move!, the boom box suggested. I nodded at Sarah.
I admit it: at that moment, I was the happiest I’d been in a long time. Years. She was right, I thought to myself. We needed to do this.
Sarah, using her left hand, pulled five folded twenties out of her jeans. She casually eased around the men with her back to the wall, handed Necky Green the money, and took the boom box from him by the handle. He counted the bills and stashed them. He was sweating. Shifty Eyes appeared to be in full REM sleep with his lids open. The other two men’s faces were blank.
Another pause, and then Darling Necky said, kind of loud, “Um—OK! Pleasure doin’ business with ya! OK!” And he looked briefly but intently into the eyes of each of the three other men. The two between us and the door stepped aside, and we walked backward past them to the exit.
“You too! Thanks! Bye!” I faced them and waved bye-bye with my left hand while Sarah got the door. Shifty closed it back, quietly, as soon as Sarah and I were in the hall.
We drove home listening to “Bust a Move” and set the boom box on the mantle, over the fireplace, where it stayed for months until one of us smashed it in a rage. We never talked much about that night. But I am sure that, if we had thought of it, we would have mounted that boom box on a plaque and hung it on the wall. Like a head.
Howdy, Neighbor!
Tuesday, March 21, 1995
Debra, her wife Camilla, and I walked six dogs around the block. Their two weighed almost as much as my four. People crossed the street.
“Hey,” Camilla said, “what’s up with your neighbors?”
I didn’t have to ask which ones she was talking about. There’s always one house on a block you would say that about. On our block that house was next door. If they hadn’t been there, it would have been us.
“Oh, them?” I laughed. “They’re murderers. Hell, I know better than that. I’m a damn lawyer. They are accused murderers. Suspected murderers. Alleged murderers. And not all of them. Just a couple. The rest are murderees, I suppose. Past, present, and future murderees. Allegedly.”
Debra wasn’t laughing. “Wait. Is the owner’s name Galang?”
“Think so. You’ve heard of this place? It’s an old folks’ home, right?”
“Assisted-living facility,” Camilla corrected. “Baby? Is that the place where . . . ?”
“Yup. Shit.”
“I thought so,” I said. “Most of the guys I’ve seen hanging around there look old, even for Asian dudes. There’s one dude there about our age. I think he works there. And then there’s Rita.”
“Rita Galang,” Deb sighed. “Aw, man. Wow.”
We had just rounded the last corner. Debra was staring ahead. Rita was standing on her porch, staring back.
Rita Galang was a big piece of work. A six-foot, 180-pound Filipina in a mumu and slippers and a huge mane of mad hair like a troll doll. That I did not find her even a little bit hot says a lot.
“The cops raided that place last week,” I said, lowering my voice. Rita was eyeballing us like she could hear, even though we were still almost a block away. “In the middle of the night. Like three, four cars. Parked all in my driveway with their lights flashing.” I scanned the empty street. “I think they’re looking at her for a murder. Maybe more than one.”
“They are,” Debra said in her regular speaking voice. It was hard not to shush her. “You know how every couple months someone’s arrested for murdering an old woman and cashing her Social Security checks for years with the dead body in their basement?”
“For reals? Dang. Those inmates or whatever are fucked.”
“They are. You steer clear.”
We walked a bit. “Sometimes I hear yelling in there. And when the cops were leaving the other day I heard one of them say, ‘. . . because if he turns up dead . . .’”
“He won’t,” Deb said. She was returning Rita’s death stare as we passed, which I did not care for. Staying out of trouble still seemed almost possible back then. “They never turn up. Her partner’s kind of known for that.”
“The dude?” I was still whispering, even though now we were back inside my house. “That one non-old dude?”
“Yeah, Michael . . . Labogin. That’s the one. He’s got a record.” She pointed her gaze down to me. “You stay out of those people’s way, alright?”
I shrugged. “I’ll try.”
Where the Wind Comes Sweeping Down the Plain.
Wednesday, April 19, 1995
I’ll admit it: for all my talk and planning, I was caught off guard. Bit up and sore after a long night of cat sex, house to myself after Sarah left for a morning hike, all I wanted was a little background noise while I drank my coffee. Instead, I turned on the TV and learned that It had begun. Someone cut a federal building in half with a truck bomb.
The raw violence of the thing. Over time, an event like this takes on a historical sheen, and the carnage gets fuzzy. Over the next year or 10 you put a reflecting pool where all the bodies were and write poems that call the dead “angels” and their premeditated murder a “tragedy.” But on the day of? The devil was in the details.
Victims were as young as three months, if you don’t count the fetuses. One woman, pinned under rubble and about to be crushed by more, got to have her leg amputated without the benefit of anesthesia. Then there were the piles of parts. That’s how the emergency workers sorted—literally—through the rubble on their hybrid rescue/recovery mission. They showed it on the news, for a little while. Piles of parts.
There was this foot. They recovered enough parts to build 168 people, plus a foot. They never figured out to whom that foot belonged.
Nobody knew anything, but the newscasters and commentators all agreed to assume that Arabs did it. And no one, absolutely no one, questioned that assumption.
I yelled objections at the TV.
“And so, Crystal, we would expect that any radical Muslim group claiming responsibility for the blast would do so within the next—”
“No foundation!”
“My first question, Mr. Deputy Director, is, of course, given the numerous number of militant Muslim terrorists suspected here, how does one begin the forensic investigation in a way that—”
“Compound! Assumes facts not in evidence!”
A hot blond chick reported that in a small town in Michigan a mob surrounded the house of the one Arab family who lived there and stoned it. A pregnant woman inside miscarried during the attack. I heard that story reported exactly once.
We lived in San Francisco. All of our neighbors were Filipino. I went on High Alert anyway.
There wasn’t much to do. There was food and water enough to keep us all fed and clean for a week. Weapons were deployed. Doors were barricaded; windows were barred and boobytrapped. All I had to do was bring the dogs into the house. Then I went back to the TV.
Sarah would be back in a few hours. Maybe we would take turns standing watch. I would take the late shift. I had always wanted to stay up all night with guns and guard shit.
Stigmata.
Friday, May 5, 1995
Just before he became That Guy Who Got Stabbed at Altamont, he was The Only Brother at a Stones Show. Most people don’t think about that, and it may have been lost on me too the day of the Ministry show. Or maybe I decided to go anyway because Ministry motherfucking rules.
Ministry is credited by some with inventing industrial metal. One definition of industrial would be: Very hard metal that incorporates industrial sounds and pure noise. Another equally valid definition would be: Music that activates the insane caveman part of your brain and makes cannibalism seem like an option. I was listening to a lot of Ministry.
Sarah and I were the only people at the Fillmore that night who did not have a neck tat. I was the smallest dude there. Out on the floor, second row, there were tiny rocker chicks, big skinheads, huge bikers, and us. I noticed that the skin standing immediately behind me was wearing a T-shirt that bore the image of a bald eagle perched on a baseball bat in front of an American flag. Nice. But then Al Jourgensen, the ringleader of the insane asylum that is Ministry, walked on the stage, and I forgot about baseball bat dude and presumably he forgot about me.
A low drone started up. A guitar. It got louder and louder and began to distort and pulse. It sounded how throbbing temples feel.
Uncle Al paced the stage like a tweaker, his face hidden beneath a cowboy hat and aviator shades. He was ranting. The chatter of the crowd got louder. Al babbled and yelled, but he didn’t have a mic; as close as we were, I couldn’t make it out. The drone was still getting louder. It was all the way in my head. Then two sun-bright spotlights hit the drummers—two fucking drummers—who unleashed a beat so over-the-top loud that it almost certainly cost me some hearing. Worth it.
Everybody’s head instantly started banging to the now-recognizable intro beat to “Land of Rape and Honey.” A sample of a speech started to play through the speakers over our heads—a call-and-response between Hitler and a massive crowd. “Sieg!” “Heil!” “Sieg!” “Heil!” This is also on the studio version. Ministry, the band members, are definitely not nazis. I checked. They are anti-nazi. Ministry fans, however, can be a different story. Irony is easily lost on people. Fortunately, the skins behind us did not take up the chant. We all, however, gleefully sang the chorus: “And in the land of rape and honey . . . you pray.”
Most bands wouldn’t have anyplace else to go after “Land of Rape and Honey,” but when they went into “Burning Inside” a roar rolled across the hall. We burned for a good 10 minutes, after which they brought it down with “So What” and turned us all into brooding sociopaths. Then came “Jesus Built My Hotrod,” which took things to a relatively lighthearted frenzy.
It was the last lighthearted moment of the evening. When “Hotrod” ended they went into “New World Order.” There would be no more cooldowns.
