Angels of Catastrophe

Most Americans pay taxes, vote, think of death as something they can take or leave. Lowlife in the street are another story. They know something the citizens don’t—every dollar bill is marked, every killing has a witness, and nobody gets away with anything.

The first thing Durrutti had to do was locate Jimmy Ramirez. Exiting the Federal Building, he conjured up a plan. He’d commence his search with a visit to Hunt’s Donuts and was confident he would find the man by night-fall. All he had to do was walk the streets and talk to people. Jimmy had a public profile; someone would know where he was. It would be a cinch. A breeze.

Walking with an awkward limp, a condition that had afflicted him since birth, he toddled south on Mission Street toward the doughnut shop, humping it past Lady Seikko’s Japanese Restaurant. He remembered what Kulak had said about Paul Stevens, him being the prime suspect in the cop’s murder.

Durrutti had met Paul four years ago while shackled to a modular concrete bench in the city prison’s holding cell at 850 Bryant Street. They were the only prisoners in the fly-smeared, blood-spattered, whitewashed pen. Paul was wearing a nurse’s medical smock, a pair of dungarees and tan desert boots. Tall and gray-haired with humorous blue-green eyes, his paste-white face was gaunt and covered with a weedy field of beard. He introduced himself by saying, “Don’t listen to any of the assholes in this place. Never do that to yourself. You gotta be careful because everyone in here is just a worthless fuck, swear to God.”

It made sense to Durrutti. He took Paul’s advice to heart and they started to talk. The hoosegow quickly filled up with parole violators, winos and burglars, the usual Monday night suspects. Booking was slow—the warders were the county sheriffs and they were moving only as fast as their union contract made them—he and Paul Stevens had plenty of time to get acquainted. Durrutti had been busted on a public nuisance charge and for resisting arrest after getting shortchanged by the cashier in a Mission Street taqueria. He expected to be treated with respect. When he didn’t get any, he usually ended up in jail. This was the fourteenth time so far. Paul said he was taken into custody for fighting with a cop by the Midnight Sun bar on Eighteenth Street.

Paul spoke a little more about himself, declaring how one summer a few years back he’d shot at a cop on Albion Street near the Valencia Gardens housing project. He did seven years in Soledad Prison for it. The policeman was John Bigarani, notorious for repeatedly attacking and beating Bob Kaufman, a union organizer and an outspoken poet. Kaufman had passed away penniless and sick in the streets at the age of sixty—no doubt helped to the cemetery by what Bigarani had done to him.

Paul confessed all this in a quick rush. It was a warm night and everyone in the slammer was getting loud and crazy. Prisoners were screaming and the noise traveled the long corridor from the felony tanks to the holding cell. Paul told his story like he was lounging in a cafe on Valencia Street drinking beers. Being in jail didn’t bug him. He was better at it than Durrutti. Penal hardened and more experienced.

The last time he’d seen Paul alive was on a glorious July afternoon, pollen plagued and steaming hot; no fog anywhere. The sidewalks that day were swollen with French and Irish tourists fresh off the bus from the Mission Dolores Church. Durrutti had been trying to procure an ounce of sinsemilla, but a drought in the Mission had wiped out everyone’s supplies—even the semilegal medical cannabis clubs couldn’t come up with anything. In desperation, he’d gone over to Dolores Park, looked around and noticed the cops had driven the Salvadoreño nickel bag dealers out of the park.

Moping around the Roxie Cinema on Sixteenth Street, he bumped into Paul Stevens eating lunch at Cafe Picaro. He was having rock cod and broccoli over a bed of white jasmine rice. Paul was modeling a hound’s-tooth check overcoat and smoking a cigarette in his left hand while he ate with his right hand. Durrutti told him what was up and Paul was glad to help. He said, “No problem. You need some fucking weed? C’mon, I know someone. What do you want? Mexican? Homegrown?”

His connection was Scott Smith, who used to be the lover of the murdered San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Harvey Milk. Nowadays Scott was selling pot to pay the rent on his Seventeenth Street flat. Nothing too extreme, just a small enterprise. Paul informed Durrutti that Scott was having complications because he still had some of Harvey’s papers. Not that they were a problem for him; he liked having them in his house. But the public was clamoring for the stuff. A lot of institutions were interested in buying the dead gay liberation hero’s archives. Scott didn’t know what to do.

They paraded west on Eighteenth Street, going by Mission High School to the Castro District. Paul’s hound’s-tooth check coat flapped around his ankles as he walked. His legs were longer than Durrutti’s and he moved much faster. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days and his beard was coming out iron-gray, rendering the green in his eyes a lighter shade of blue. He said, “Did I tell you me and my boyfriend broke up? That was a pain in the ass. I don’t ever want to go through that divorce crap ever again. You invest everything you got into someone and then they throw you away like toilet paper. That ain’t right.”

“You know me,” Paul said, glad to give his opinion. “I don’t hide my feelings. If I care about someone, they know it. If I’m ticked off at them, I snap and so we had a fight and he said that was it. Our fucking relationship was over.” Paul turned his head to appreciate a hummingbird in flight, zipping over the rooftops. “Looking back, I don’t think I was that hard to live with. Hell, I paid the rent on the apartment and when we went out drinking at the Stud, I paid for his beer. What a gutless wimp he was. I need a real man in my life. Someone I can count on when the shit gets weird.”

Paul was selling weed too, but he wasn’t saying anything about it, typical of him. No one ever knew what he was doing, he was so secretive. Mister undercover. When they hit Scott’s front steps, he went rigid, the drug dealer in him coming out in full force. His body language became paramilitarized; shoulders hunched, hand out. He barked at Durrutti, “Okay, you got the money?”

Durrutti pondered his options for a millisecond. The price of a bag wasn’t worth what you got, but he was nervous and wanted to get high. This was his best bet. Defeated, he said, “Go for it.”

“Give me the cash and wait outside, okay?” Paul examined Durrutti and grinned. “On the other hand, you’re gonna attract attention just standing here. When was the last time you shaved? Maybe you should take a walk around the block and blend in with the surroundings. Act like a civilian.”

Durrutti shoved a wad of greasy one- and five-dollar bills at him. Paul stashed the cash in his coat, muttered something incomprehensible to himself and then he legged it up the long flight of stairs to Scott’s flat.

Durrutti took a stroll around the block and watched an indigo blue dusk settle over the cars and the pedestrians at the intersection of Castro and Seventeenth Streets near Orphan Andy’s hamburger shop and the Twin Peaks bar.

A few minutes later Paul stepped out of Scott’s door and clambered down the staircase to where Durrutti was sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk. In his hands was a spotty brown paper bag. He punched Durrutti in the chest with the bag, saying matter-of-factly, “Here you are, kiddo. I hope you like it. If you don’t, what the fuck. It was the only thing he had.”

Paul’s wan face was dappled with sweaty lines, acne buried in his stubble and sleepless smudges under his eyes. Durrutti opened the bag and had a glance at the weed. It was as bad as Paul said it would be. Brown-green Sinaloa cartel pot sprayed with pesticides. Paul bundled his coat around him and swaggered a step down the sidewalk, turning to beam at Durrutti with a sudden mischievous light in his eyes. He mashed his chewing gum and blew a spastic pink bubble. “Let’s go to K &H Liquors. I have to get me some cigarettes.” Paul consulted his wristwatch, then coughed. “Shit, on the other hand, it’s later than I thought. I need to get back to the All-Star. Some people are coming over to sell me a radio.” He smiled again. “Days like this are a bitch, aren’t they?”

Hunt’s Donuts straddled the corner of Twentieth and Mission Streets advertising itself with a two-storied neon sign that had been broken for years. Floor to ceiling windows gave it the appearance of a fishbowl. Featuring cheap coffee and a wide selection of pastries, the doughnut shop was the home base of every minor league criminal in the Mission District, including Jimmy Ramirez. A slender, yellow skinned Mexican rigged out like a jazz musician in Sta-Prest green slacks, a sateen fedora, imitation Italian loafers, red lensed sunglasses and a droopy black leather coat, Jimmy wore a moderate pompadour and a fuzzy goatee. Sometimes he sold drugs, sometimes he didn’t. His bread and butter was moonlighting as a mechanic South of Market and as a lucrative sideline, he traded stolen car parts at flea markets in San Leandro and Watsonville.

Jimmy’s partner was a black dude with a skyscraper Afro named Fleeta Bolton. Fleeta was prone to manic depressive mood swings and was more versatile than Jimmy when it came to making money. He hawked downers, burgled the nouveau antique furniture stores on Valencia Street and held a day job working as a sous chef in a chi-chi restaurant, the Foreign Cinema on Mission Street.

Arriving at Hunt’s, Durrutti noticed it was half past noon. Except for the Salvadoreño ghetto cowboys who hung out there night and day, the fragrant bakery was vacant. Disappointed, Durrutti cursed under his breath. “Shit, I’m fucked.” He turned around and walked out the door, losing himself in the midday crowd as he moseyed toward the pseudo-Moorish spires of the El Capitán Hotel.

In the industrial boom era after World War Two, the Mission District had been a honeycomb of residential hotels. The eastern corridor of the neighborhood had been laced with printing plants, warehouses, light manufacturing. All that had vanished, gone overseas to cheaper labor pools. The remaining single-room-occupancy hotels were getting burned down to the ground, arsoned by landlords wanting quick insurance settlements. The property was too valuable to let poor people live on it.

The El Capitán was one of the few SRO’s left standing—the adobe brown building was an icon from the time when Mission Street had been known as the Miracle Mile. The hotel’s former grandeur was in its ornate facade, thrusting itself toward the sky, head and shoulders above the newer shops and prefab condominiums. Durrutti had been holed up in it for six months.

After checking with the front desk for mail, he took a coffin-sized lift upstairs to his room. In mid-motion, the steel cage came to a grinding halt and got stuck in between the first and second floors. Standing alone in the complete darkness of the elevator, he felt the walls close in on him. He began to sweat, unable to calm himself. Here was a silence he’d never heard before—and with it came a fear of imprisonment. Fear had seeded him with claustrophobia. His breath came out of his mouth in asthmatic gasps and he banged on the walls and shouted for help. “Hey, goddamn it! Somebody get me out of here!”

Spending time with Kulak had drained the life out of Durrutti. He didn’t know which was harder on the spirit, committing felonies or getting entangled with the cops. Both were difficult and not very profitable, neither were worthy of poetry or song. Twenty minutes later the maintenance man freed him, saying they’d been having problems with the lift.

When he got to his room he kicked off his shoes and sprawled out on the lumpy double bed. He rested an arm over his forehead and stared at the ceiling, growing drowsy. His thoughts were a smorgasbord of bad news. A dead cop. A missing gun. Jimmy Ramirez. Kulak’s toupee. The Federal Building. Trouble was pulling him along; he was no better than a rabid, slavering dog on a leash. He fell asleep, dreaming of nothing.