The Subtle Art of Brutality, page 7
Now that he mentions it, his wife has the same stats as Delilah; color, build.
“He think you were lying?”
“I think so.”
“Your wife, seen through a window in passing, bears a resemblance to Ms. Boothe.”
“I guess so. Because he came back.”
12
“The same day?”
Bellview smiles and rubs his scalp. “No. A few days later.”
“Still asking for her?”
“I wasn’t here.”
I look to Abigail. “What happened?”
She’s holding the little girl. The toddler favors her father’s look but has her mother’s dark beauty. Abigail hands the daughter to her husband and looks at me. Pleasant.
“Well, that ghetto douche who thought I was that drug addict, it gives me chills.”
I can see faint, ghostly traces of the jeopardy she felt then. They surface as she brings the memories forward. Peruse any women’s shelter and see. Abigail’s traces aren’t bad by comparison.
“Well, it actually wasn’t much which is why we didn’t think too hard about it. Tyler went to the store, and while he was gone this guy shows up and bangs on the door. I didn’t know what to do but I didn’t want to be...oh, we were still new in the neighborhood and I guess I didn’t want the cops to come screaming to our house, lights blazing. I called Tyler and told him to hurry. Then I answered the door.”
“No cops?” People do stupid shit like this.
“No. Well, I should say I cracked it just enough to tell him I called the police—I’m so stupid, I know. I just didn’t think. The man, he looked drunk or something and he just barged into the house. I tried to shut the door but he was just so sudden—I screamed and he looked at me like he was trying to figure out who I was or something. I ran back to the baby’s room and that’s when Tyler got home.”
I look at him, he nods. “I called the cops on my way home. I pulled up, got out. I came inside and went right up to him. I recognized the car. On the phone, Abby said he was beating the front door so I just drilled his ass. Best punch I’ve ever thrown. He was out like a light. Then the cops came. An ambulance. He refused treatment. He looked like my slug sobered him up. He said he used to date Delilah and she cut off contact and he thought she still lived here. Thought I was her new man and I was lying to him. Thought Abby was Delilah.”
“Arrested?”
“Yeah. Disorderly conduct and some kind of possession by intoxication. I think they found a smidge of weed also. I heard the dispatcher come back with a warrant, but I missed most of it. They looked into burglary but the state law requires something that they couldn’t prove so they let it go.”
State statute defines burglary as entering or staying on property with the intent to commit a felony or sexual assault. There’s more to it, but if they couldn’t prove he barged in to rob, beat or rape Abigail it’d be a lost cause. And with him being intoxicated, it would be a defense that he, not in his right mind, thought Delilah was opening the door for him. It might not be a good defense, but it would be a decent kernel of doubt.
“He knew for sure Abby wasn’t this Delilah gal and he knew I could throw a punch. I also own a .40 caliber and a shovel.”
“I’d kill him next time,” I say. “One story: yours. You can make it whatever you want that way.”
He chuckles, maybe thinking I just made a joke. I did not.
“Catch his name?” I ask.
“Benny. Benny something. Last name was Greek, I know that.”
“Anything after that?”
“No. All quiet.”
“You’ve been a big help. Really.”
We exchange numbers and I roll out into fresh sheets of wind-driven frost.
Benny Something.
13
I joined the Saint Ansgar PD in 1974.
I was a patrolman, a corporal and then a sergeant. In 1982 we were blessed with a new chief and a city manager. With both of those worthless, spineless fucks came a shift from the ’70s beatdown-style to more professional stuff. They wanted folks with four-year degrees. They wanted folks who would write detailed reports instead of settling things. One of the first things they did was take away our saps. Then they changed the policy to forbid striking an active, aggressive perp with a flashlight. What kind of world were we coming to when you couldn’t beat someone with a four D cell flashlight?
I became a detective shortly after that. There was no room on the street for me anymore. I had the tricks I needed to get away with doing what I always did; but the microscope placed on us was something I could never get over. I was a detective for eight years. Partnered with Graham Clevenger for the last two.
In the car I call Graham Clevenger. The best man I know. The only man I know left in this city that has honest intentions about anything.
He was a rookie detective and he was placed with me for one reason: I was the best. Now, all these years later, he is the best. God bless Clevenger for it, someone needed to take my place.
He answers on the third ring: “Richard! How’s it been?”
“Good. I’m on a case. Wannabe missing persons. Can you do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“Can you scrounge up any reports taken on a Boothe, Delilah L., white female, date of birth August 29th, 1983? Reporting party is a Boothe, Darla K., white female, date of birth March 6th, 1954. Should be dated about two months ago.”
“Leo, huh? White girl, blah blah blah. Darla her mother?”
“Yup.”
“Not a problem.” I wait. We pass the time in silence the way we did for countless nights in the detective’s car. The hushed inhale and exhale. All of it fathomless.
I turn north, then east. I pass a spot where back in the ’80s there was a damn good home cooking buffet. The owner torched it for the insurance and was caught later in the year. His lies were terrible but his fried chicken and mashed potatoes were unequaled. The old place sat at the corner of 90th and Clemmons, which means I have five blocks to go until I hit the interstate onramp.
Navigation by food.
I feel the familiar freeze rolling up my spine and whip the car into the nearest parking lot, whose entrance is mercifully only a few feet in front of me. My foot mashes the brake and then everything blossoms to red in my vision. Blooms of crimson with burnt speckling like fire to celluloid bubble up and run to orange. The orange glows with hatred and yellow flares at their ends. Cold colors creep in as they always do; greens and blues and sharp daggers as runners of color cascade down across everything I ever knew.
Then one by one they go away. Moment by moment it clears up.
“Richard?” Clevenger’s voice comes from deep in a well a thousand miles away.
I clear my throat. “Yeah? Go ahead.”
“All right. Mom upset that her adult child took off into the night?” Clevenger asks.
“Yeah. She called her once since then—today—screaming about being pregnant and afraid of something.”
“You think she’s crying wolf?”
“Who knows. I told Darla to file a new report, but there are no specifics on any threat, just general yelling and whatnot.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Can you also run a plate for me?”
“I can.”
“Will you?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks. The plate is our state, vanity. Reads BMPIN. B-M-P-I-N. Belongs to a Ben something. Last is Greek.”
“Anything else while I’m digging?”
“Yeah. The Ben something was involved in a forced entry and an address over on Carolina.” I shuffle through a pile of papers and give the street number. “Can you send me a copy of that also?”
“I’ll take the rest of the day off from the murder investigation I’m on. No problem. Do you want a coffee also?”
“Yes. Black. With whiskey.”
“Fuck you.”
“Graham, you’re the best partner I’ve ever had.”
“It wasn’t hard. All I had to do was not report you to IA. Unlike every other partner you ever had.”
“Tell Molly I said hello.”
“Yeah yeah. Good luck. I’ll call when I have the reports. Your BMPIN car is registered to one Benjamin Kolokios, 12298 Grantham Boulevard, apartment 18D.”
“Thanks.”
“Priors on possession, B and E and misdemeanor theft, failure to appear, DUI, assault, assault, possession, public intoxication, failure to appear, DUI.”
I hear Graham click and shuffle through the online rap sheet. Looking for details. Then, “His charges...dope is all Big Fry-related.”
“Big Fry?”
“Big Fry.”
“Alright. Grantham Boulevard here I come.”
“If you’re going to kill him you better make damn sure this doesn’t get traced back to me. Got it?”
“They never trace anything back to you. You know why?”
Graham laughs, a dry but warm sound. “I know, I know. Because you’re one of the good guys.”
“Exactly.”
We say goodbyes. Grantham Boulevard is south of the river. In the Burrows.
14
A note on the Big Fry: AKA delicious freak, delicious fry, DF, BF, the dose, demon dust, demon, the devil, capital D, Jimmy Hoffa’s teeth, speed cunt, gray matter detonation, the virgin drop, the red-eyed stare.
The drug that, for a time, experts feared might just push both meth and crack out the door. It was designer, came about back when I was still on the force. Half speed, half hallucinogen. All horrible.
It’s similar to meth in that is causes a brain dump of dopamine. The brain never dumps like that again after the first chemically-induced time, which is why addicts get a taste for it so quickly. They chase the first high and will never re-achieve it. They spend the rest of their short lives ingesting harsh chemicals and sweating out solvents.
It’s similar to LSD in that another chemical in it causes hallucinations. They are not as intense as LSD-induced hallucinations, but still fairly constant.
It comes in a pill form and must be ingested that way. The hallucinogenic compounds, like LSD itself, are too sensitive to heat to be smoked. So someone has to press the pills. Pill presses are regulated here in the States by the FDA, so clandestine operations have to build their own or raid a pharmaceutical lab. Ecstasy producers in Europe pressed the Big Fry for a time. Eurotrash cocksuckers got the ball rolling and then ditched it when it became obvious the drug was a one-way street. No return business.
Gangs in Mexico picked up the slack. Every year during Spring Break the States get a big influx of date rape drugs—which are produced legally down there—and the Big Fry.
Why some shitbird clandestine chemist thought about mixing speed with tripping I’ll never know. But, then again, dopers do that shit all the time. It’s called polydrug use. Ask a cop qualified as a drug recognition expert; they’ll explain it.
The bottom line for this new Frankenstein’s Monster: cash. A new drug properly distributed brings with it a new cash flow.
It hit the streets. Cheap. Easy to find. Easy enough to make. Made the rave circuit. Corrections began pulling baggies and balloons of it out of inmates’ assholes upon entry. Schools started finding kids as young as seven whacked out on the shit.
Swept the nation. A-List dope, the Hollywood Oscar winner of drugs. Not so hard you’d be stigmatized as a serious junkie if you used it, not so light as to be some Mickey Mouse shit.
Then stories started surfacing. First a few, eventually a flood. People started calling it ‘demon dust.’ Then just ‘demon.’ Then ‘The Devil.’ Capital D.
Here, in our backyard: an elementary school teacher south of the river realized she issued a bathroom pass to some goofball fifth grader who never showed back up. Some female student, walking the halls with a pass saying she could hurry and take a piss and get back to class. Oh, the horror. The teacher wanted her back.
Teacher-lady got up to go fetch the kid. Later, when she was capable of speaking again, she said she was fully expecting to find the absent student dealing with her first menstrual period. Teacher-lady went in to the nearest little girls’ room. Teacher-lady started screaming.
The ambulance said the girl had suffered some kind of massive, internal-cranial hemorrhage. Maybe a freak stroke. The Perfect Storm of strokes, to be sure.
In the narcotics bureau we called it gray matter detonation, GMD. Like a lot of cop lingo, gray matter detonation weaseled out of the squad rooms and onto the streets. It seemed like just a few days before we started hearing criminals using our jargon.
Stroke or GMD, either way the little girl’s eyes were so bloodshot nothing else was recognizable. The Red Eyed Stare. No response to stimulus. Shallow breathing. Low heart rate. Still clutching a bathroom pass in one arthritic claw of a hand. She went in to dose herself. A fifth grader, dropping the Big Fry.
Her body was on autopilot. Reflexive. Emptied. Ruined. Forever.
The thing about the Big Fry is this: it works with brain chemistry in such a way that some folks genetically predisposed to a bad high would...get fried.
Permanent. Scramble. The drug, with the right genetics, will turn the unlucky user into a vegetable. Irreversible.
The lucky ones: stiff, six feet under. Unlucky, the red eyed stare. In between are some who don’t die or become vegetables. Any new user pins all their hopes on being in that elusive third class of folks. The smeared, we call them. The smeared have a bizarre brain chemical reaction that foils the drug’s ability to kill instantly. Instead, like acid flashbacks, the drug pops back up here and there. Just in bursts. Smears.
When I was assaulted, the hit was an overdose of Big Fry.
I’m not dead.
I’m not a vegetable.
I’m smeared.
Word on the street said it was a freak accident. The little girl OD’d. Could happen to any retard taking too much. That’s why fifth graders shouldn’t dose. But then other folks started getting the red-eyed stare. Became a spreading, not-so-isolated phenomenon.
The Big Fry.
It lost a lot of sex appeal after it became commonly known to hose certain users, even after only one dose. The virgin drop, they call it. See if it wants you coming back for more or if you only rated a GMD. I saw a lot of unworthy users in my time.
Serious: I saw a junkie’s bulldog with the red-eyed stare once. Dead as the ideals of the old Democratic Party.
Still the drug persists. Cheaper labs, inexperienced folks cooking it up. Killing more. It has a rep worse than crack back in the ’80s.Worse than meth does now. It was a rep no one wants but still people risk it. People like this Benny Kolokios. So be it.
I have been heading south this entire time. Hammett Parkway all the way to fifth, right a block and then a left—southbound again—onto Regional Avenue.
Regional Avenue continues south and when I get to the Saint Ansgar River it becomes the Mannasmith Memorial Bridge.
Mannasmith Memorial is kind enough to take whoever is foolish enough to cross it into the mouth of the Burrows.
Because of its elevation and terrain, south of the river has a slightly different microclimate than north of the river does. It’s hotter. The prevailing summer marine layer helps. South of the river’s soil is much heavier in clay than north. Glaciers, deposits, ice ages. Whatever. The clay acts like pavement and absorbs the sunlight.
The way the faltering dusk carves its way through every brick and building down here gives rise to an image of what Dante and Virgil saw as they crested Limbo and entered Hell proper. A spread of land, studded with vile undergrowth and human beings who have been drawn here to suffer. Their own hands violating themselves or others. Sometimes both. I hate this place.
Business takes me here a lot.
But I light a smoke and exit off the bridge.
With the sun growing a deep orange to the west out over the bay, the Burrows is being fed another vehicle and its lost-soul driver for dinner tonight.
15
This is a mouth lined with jagged teeth, and I am stepping inside it.
The area of town known as the Burrows is just the gutter for another area of town known as Little Haight. As in Haight Street, San Francisco, California. I’ll explain.
During the ’60s San Francisco’s Haight Street was romanticized by the hippie movement. The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, they immortalized the street as a whole but especially its intersection with Ashbury. Therefore, it attracted that culture. Hippies, dirtbags, dope heads, shitbirds and the general free-loader class of humanity.
Now, decades later, the street is littered with bums, a new generation of wannabe hippies or authentic hippies so old they have no idea that their time is gone and over. So, essentially, just the bottom-of-the-barrel dregs of society. Outside of a deviant record store, a tattoo parlor or a sex paraphernalia shop these freaks would not be employable.
The area of Little Haight is the same thing, transplanted from San Francisco to fester here in Saint Ansgar. The Burrows are the streets, about thirty blocks tall and eighteen blocks wide where cops do not respond and wholesome people do not venture.
It earned the name the Burrows because it is where the rodents dwell in ramshackle hovels and clapboard fire traps. Groups of young and angry boys, teenagers on up to early twenties adorn the streets like fleas will crowd into spots on a mangy dog’s back. Most are high school-aged because once out of even a small excuse for a classroom, these punks find their way into prison or a six-foot long pine box.
Down here was the only affordable area to live in right after the Great Depression. North of the river was barely developed, and what was developed mostly belonged to the super-rich survivors of the crash or farmers. Now it is a bustling metropolis, but back then it was almost no help.
So the poor and wretched packed themselves in down here. Eventually those that could move out did so, and what was left still exists today. And that of course forms the hive of villainy that is stretching its claws up around me like the devil’s fists reaching up through a crack in the earth.
“He think you were lying?”
“I think so.”
“Your wife, seen through a window in passing, bears a resemblance to Ms. Boothe.”
“I guess so. Because he came back.”
12
“The same day?”
Bellview smiles and rubs his scalp. “No. A few days later.”
“Still asking for her?”
“I wasn’t here.”
I look to Abigail. “What happened?”
She’s holding the little girl. The toddler favors her father’s look but has her mother’s dark beauty. Abigail hands the daughter to her husband and looks at me. Pleasant.
“Well, that ghetto douche who thought I was that drug addict, it gives me chills.”
I can see faint, ghostly traces of the jeopardy she felt then. They surface as she brings the memories forward. Peruse any women’s shelter and see. Abigail’s traces aren’t bad by comparison.
“Well, it actually wasn’t much which is why we didn’t think too hard about it. Tyler went to the store, and while he was gone this guy shows up and bangs on the door. I didn’t know what to do but I didn’t want to be...oh, we were still new in the neighborhood and I guess I didn’t want the cops to come screaming to our house, lights blazing. I called Tyler and told him to hurry. Then I answered the door.”
“No cops?” People do stupid shit like this.
“No. Well, I should say I cracked it just enough to tell him I called the police—I’m so stupid, I know. I just didn’t think. The man, he looked drunk or something and he just barged into the house. I tried to shut the door but he was just so sudden—I screamed and he looked at me like he was trying to figure out who I was or something. I ran back to the baby’s room and that’s when Tyler got home.”
I look at him, he nods. “I called the cops on my way home. I pulled up, got out. I came inside and went right up to him. I recognized the car. On the phone, Abby said he was beating the front door so I just drilled his ass. Best punch I’ve ever thrown. He was out like a light. Then the cops came. An ambulance. He refused treatment. He looked like my slug sobered him up. He said he used to date Delilah and she cut off contact and he thought she still lived here. Thought I was her new man and I was lying to him. Thought Abby was Delilah.”
“Arrested?”
“Yeah. Disorderly conduct and some kind of possession by intoxication. I think they found a smidge of weed also. I heard the dispatcher come back with a warrant, but I missed most of it. They looked into burglary but the state law requires something that they couldn’t prove so they let it go.”
State statute defines burglary as entering or staying on property with the intent to commit a felony or sexual assault. There’s more to it, but if they couldn’t prove he barged in to rob, beat or rape Abigail it’d be a lost cause. And with him being intoxicated, it would be a defense that he, not in his right mind, thought Delilah was opening the door for him. It might not be a good defense, but it would be a decent kernel of doubt.
“He knew for sure Abby wasn’t this Delilah gal and he knew I could throw a punch. I also own a .40 caliber and a shovel.”
“I’d kill him next time,” I say. “One story: yours. You can make it whatever you want that way.”
He chuckles, maybe thinking I just made a joke. I did not.
“Catch his name?” I ask.
“Benny. Benny something. Last name was Greek, I know that.”
“Anything after that?”
“No. All quiet.”
“You’ve been a big help. Really.”
We exchange numbers and I roll out into fresh sheets of wind-driven frost.
Benny Something.
13
I joined the Saint Ansgar PD in 1974.
I was a patrolman, a corporal and then a sergeant. In 1982 we were blessed with a new chief and a city manager. With both of those worthless, spineless fucks came a shift from the ’70s beatdown-style to more professional stuff. They wanted folks with four-year degrees. They wanted folks who would write detailed reports instead of settling things. One of the first things they did was take away our saps. Then they changed the policy to forbid striking an active, aggressive perp with a flashlight. What kind of world were we coming to when you couldn’t beat someone with a four D cell flashlight?
I became a detective shortly after that. There was no room on the street for me anymore. I had the tricks I needed to get away with doing what I always did; but the microscope placed on us was something I could never get over. I was a detective for eight years. Partnered with Graham Clevenger for the last two.
In the car I call Graham Clevenger. The best man I know. The only man I know left in this city that has honest intentions about anything.
He was a rookie detective and he was placed with me for one reason: I was the best. Now, all these years later, he is the best. God bless Clevenger for it, someone needed to take my place.
He answers on the third ring: “Richard! How’s it been?”
“Good. I’m on a case. Wannabe missing persons. Can you do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“Can you scrounge up any reports taken on a Boothe, Delilah L., white female, date of birth August 29th, 1983? Reporting party is a Boothe, Darla K., white female, date of birth March 6th, 1954. Should be dated about two months ago.”
“Leo, huh? White girl, blah blah blah. Darla her mother?”
“Yup.”
“Not a problem.” I wait. We pass the time in silence the way we did for countless nights in the detective’s car. The hushed inhale and exhale. All of it fathomless.
I turn north, then east. I pass a spot where back in the ’80s there was a damn good home cooking buffet. The owner torched it for the insurance and was caught later in the year. His lies were terrible but his fried chicken and mashed potatoes were unequaled. The old place sat at the corner of 90th and Clemmons, which means I have five blocks to go until I hit the interstate onramp.
Navigation by food.
I feel the familiar freeze rolling up my spine and whip the car into the nearest parking lot, whose entrance is mercifully only a few feet in front of me. My foot mashes the brake and then everything blossoms to red in my vision. Blooms of crimson with burnt speckling like fire to celluloid bubble up and run to orange. The orange glows with hatred and yellow flares at their ends. Cold colors creep in as they always do; greens and blues and sharp daggers as runners of color cascade down across everything I ever knew.
Then one by one they go away. Moment by moment it clears up.
“Richard?” Clevenger’s voice comes from deep in a well a thousand miles away.
I clear my throat. “Yeah? Go ahead.”
“All right. Mom upset that her adult child took off into the night?” Clevenger asks.
“Yeah. She called her once since then—today—screaming about being pregnant and afraid of something.”
“You think she’s crying wolf?”
“Who knows. I told Darla to file a new report, but there are no specifics on any threat, just general yelling and whatnot.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Can you also run a plate for me?”
“I can.”
“Will you?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks. The plate is our state, vanity. Reads BMPIN. B-M-P-I-N. Belongs to a Ben something. Last is Greek.”
“Anything else while I’m digging?”
“Yeah. The Ben something was involved in a forced entry and an address over on Carolina.” I shuffle through a pile of papers and give the street number. “Can you send me a copy of that also?”
“I’ll take the rest of the day off from the murder investigation I’m on. No problem. Do you want a coffee also?”
“Yes. Black. With whiskey.”
“Fuck you.”
“Graham, you’re the best partner I’ve ever had.”
“It wasn’t hard. All I had to do was not report you to IA. Unlike every other partner you ever had.”
“Tell Molly I said hello.”
“Yeah yeah. Good luck. I’ll call when I have the reports. Your BMPIN car is registered to one Benjamin Kolokios, 12298 Grantham Boulevard, apartment 18D.”
“Thanks.”
“Priors on possession, B and E and misdemeanor theft, failure to appear, DUI, assault, assault, possession, public intoxication, failure to appear, DUI.”
I hear Graham click and shuffle through the online rap sheet. Looking for details. Then, “His charges...dope is all Big Fry-related.”
“Big Fry?”
“Big Fry.”
“Alright. Grantham Boulevard here I come.”
“If you’re going to kill him you better make damn sure this doesn’t get traced back to me. Got it?”
“They never trace anything back to you. You know why?”
Graham laughs, a dry but warm sound. “I know, I know. Because you’re one of the good guys.”
“Exactly.”
We say goodbyes. Grantham Boulevard is south of the river. In the Burrows.
14
A note on the Big Fry: AKA delicious freak, delicious fry, DF, BF, the dose, demon dust, demon, the devil, capital D, Jimmy Hoffa’s teeth, speed cunt, gray matter detonation, the virgin drop, the red-eyed stare.
The drug that, for a time, experts feared might just push both meth and crack out the door. It was designer, came about back when I was still on the force. Half speed, half hallucinogen. All horrible.
It’s similar to meth in that is causes a brain dump of dopamine. The brain never dumps like that again after the first chemically-induced time, which is why addicts get a taste for it so quickly. They chase the first high and will never re-achieve it. They spend the rest of their short lives ingesting harsh chemicals and sweating out solvents.
It’s similar to LSD in that another chemical in it causes hallucinations. They are not as intense as LSD-induced hallucinations, but still fairly constant.
It comes in a pill form and must be ingested that way. The hallucinogenic compounds, like LSD itself, are too sensitive to heat to be smoked. So someone has to press the pills. Pill presses are regulated here in the States by the FDA, so clandestine operations have to build their own or raid a pharmaceutical lab. Ecstasy producers in Europe pressed the Big Fry for a time. Eurotrash cocksuckers got the ball rolling and then ditched it when it became obvious the drug was a one-way street. No return business.
Gangs in Mexico picked up the slack. Every year during Spring Break the States get a big influx of date rape drugs—which are produced legally down there—and the Big Fry.
Why some shitbird clandestine chemist thought about mixing speed with tripping I’ll never know. But, then again, dopers do that shit all the time. It’s called polydrug use. Ask a cop qualified as a drug recognition expert; they’ll explain it.
The bottom line for this new Frankenstein’s Monster: cash. A new drug properly distributed brings with it a new cash flow.
It hit the streets. Cheap. Easy to find. Easy enough to make. Made the rave circuit. Corrections began pulling baggies and balloons of it out of inmates’ assholes upon entry. Schools started finding kids as young as seven whacked out on the shit.
Swept the nation. A-List dope, the Hollywood Oscar winner of drugs. Not so hard you’d be stigmatized as a serious junkie if you used it, not so light as to be some Mickey Mouse shit.
Then stories started surfacing. First a few, eventually a flood. People started calling it ‘demon dust.’ Then just ‘demon.’ Then ‘The Devil.’ Capital D.
Here, in our backyard: an elementary school teacher south of the river realized she issued a bathroom pass to some goofball fifth grader who never showed back up. Some female student, walking the halls with a pass saying she could hurry and take a piss and get back to class. Oh, the horror. The teacher wanted her back.
Teacher-lady got up to go fetch the kid. Later, when she was capable of speaking again, she said she was fully expecting to find the absent student dealing with her first menstrual period. Teacher-lady went in to the nearest little girls’ room. Teacher-lady started screaming.
The ambulance said the girl had suffered some kind of massive, internal-cranial hemorrhage. Maybe a freak stroke. The Perfect Storm of strokes, to be sure.
In the narcotics bureau we called it gray matter detonation, GMD. Like a lot of cop lingo, gray matter detonation weaseled out of the squad rooms and onto the streets. It seemed like just a few days before we started hearing criminals using our jargon.
Stroke or GMD, either way the little girl’s eyes were so bloodshot nothing else was recognizable. The Red Eyed Stare. No response to stimulus. Shallow breathing. Low heart rate. Still clutching a bathroom pass in one arthritic claw of a hand. She went in to dose herself. A fifth grader, dropping the Big Fry.
Her body was on autopilot. Reflexive. Emptied. Ruined. Forever.
The thing about the Big Fry is this: it works with brain chemistry in such a way that some folks genetically predisposed to a bad high would...get fried.
Permanent. Scramble. The drug, with the right genetics, will turn the unlucky user into a vegetable. Irreversible.
The lucky ones: stiff, six feet under. Unlucky, the red eyed stare. In between are some who don’t die or become vegetables. Any new user pins all their hopes on being in that elusive third class of folks. The smeared, we call them. The smeared have a bizarre brain chemical reaction that foils the drug’s ability to kill instantly. Instead, like acid flashbacks, the drug pops back up here and there. Just in bursts. Smears.
When I was assaulted, the hit was an overdose of Big Fry.
I’m not dead.
I’m not a vegetable.
I’m smeared.
Word on the street said it was a freak accident. The little girl OD’d. Could happen to any retard taking too much. That’s why fifth graders shouldn’t dose. But then other folks started getting the red-eyed stare. Became a spreading, not-so-isolated phenomenon.
The Big Fry.
It lost a lot of sex appeal after it became commonly known to hose certain users, even after only one dose. The virgin drop, they call it. See if it wants you coming back for more or if you only rated a GMD. I saw a lot of unworthy users in my time.
Serious: I saw a junkie’s bulldog with the red-eyed stare once. Dead as the ideals of the old Democratic Party.
Still the drug persists. Cheaper labs, inexperienced folks cooking it up. Killing more. It has a rep worse than crack back in the ’80s.Worse than meth does now. It was a rep no one wants but still people risk it. People like this Benny Kolokios. So be it.
I have been heading south this entire time. Hammett Parkway all the way to fifth, right a block and then a left—southbound again—onto Regional Avenue.
Regional Avenue continues south and when I get to the Saint Ansgar River it becomes the Mannasmith Memorial Bridge.
Mannasmith Memorial is kind enough to take whoever is foolish enough to cross it into the mouth of the Burrows.
Because of its elevation and terrain, south of the river has a slightly different microclimate than north of the river does. It’s hotter. The prevailing summer marine layer helps. South of the river’s soil is much heavier in clay than north. Glaciers, deposits, ice ages. Whatever. The clay acts like pavement and absorbs the sunlight.
The way the faltering dusk carves its way through every brick and building down here gives rise to an image of what Dante and Virgil saw as they crested Limbo and entered Hell proper. A spread of land, studded with vile undergrowth and human beings who have been drawn here to suffer. Their own hands violating themselves or others. Sometimes both. I hate this place.
Business takes me here a lot.
But I light a smoke and exit off the bridge.
With the sun growing a deep orange to the west out over the bay, the Burrows is being fed another vehicle and its lost-soul driver for dinner tonight.
15
This is a mouth lined with jagged teeth, and I am stepping inside it.
The area of town known as the Burrows is just the gutter for another area of town known as Little Haight. As in Haight Street, San Francisco, California. I’ll explain.
During the ’60s San Francisco’s Haight Street was romanticized by the hippie movement. The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, they immortalized the street as a whole but especially its intersection with Ashbury. Therefore, it attracted that culture. Hippies, dirtbags, dope heads, shitbirds and the general free-loader class of humanity.
Now, decades later, the street is littered with bums, a new generation of wannabe hippies or authentic hippies so old they have no idea that their time is gone and over. So, essentially, just the bottom-of-the-barrel dregs of society. Outside of a deviant record store, a tattoo parlor or a sex paraphernalia shop these freaks would not be employable.
The area of Little Haight is the same thing, transplanted from San Francisco to fester here in Saint Ansgar. The Burrows are the streets, about thirty blocks tall and eighteen blocks wide where cops do not respond and wholesome people do not venture.
It earned the name the Burrows because it is where the rodents dwell in ramshackle hovels and clapboard fire traps. Groups of young and angry boys, teenagers on up to early twenties adorn the streets like fleas will crowd into spots on a mangy dog’s back. Most are high school-aged because once out of even a small excuse for a classroom, these punks find their way into prison or a six-foot long pine box.
Down here was the only affordable area to live in right after the Great Depression. North of the river was barely developed, and what was developed mostly belonged to the super-rich survivors of the crash or farmers. Now it is a bustling metropolis, but back then it was almost no help.
So the poor and wretched packed themselves in down here. Eventually those that could move out did so, and what was left still exists today. And that of course forms the hive of villainy that is stretching its claws up around me like the devil’s fists reaching up through a crack in the earth.
