Flaherty first made a reputation for himself back in 1979 after the Dan White trial verdict. A former policeman, White had shot and killed the mayor and a gay Board of Supervisors member at City Hall. He drew a sentence of eight years in prison for the shootings, and a riot broke out downtown. Twelve police cars were burned to cinders on McAllister Street. During the rioting, some cops got too zealous beating up the gay boys who were demonstrating in the Civic Center Plaza. Specific police officers were named. Flaherty was one of them.
Eichmann was an altogether different type of headache for me. Before I met him at the St. John Coltrane Church, I’d seen him on Valencia Street, hanging out in front of the Roxie Cinema, selling used paperback books, half hoping to attract the restaurant traffic with his wares. But no one was interested. He slicked his hair back and wore torn jeans and Ray-Ban sunglasses. Dee Dee said Eichmann had a reputation for being antisocial, high-strung. Working with him was tedious; he was impatient with me, and his neurotic energy was difficult to accommodate.
I wouldn’t say we were ever friends; we weren’t. We might have been close, held together by my yearning for an elder sibling, for someone I could trust and count on, but there was also a distance between us that was never going to go away. Yet the influence he had on me was marked. There was something honest about his cheerful malice, the democratic way it was directed at everyone with equal opportunity. Eichmann wasn’t a bigot.
He taught me quite a few things, primarily about himself. Eichmann knew a bit of Yiddish; he’d studied the Talmud and as a kid he’d gone to synagogue to study the writings of the Jewish philosophers. He didn’t speak Spanish. The people we sold weed to east of Valencia didn’t understand English. The language barrier puzzled Eichmann, and whenever he wasn’t getting his thoughts across to someone, he had a tendency to lose it. I became critical of him over this. We were getting into trouble with other dealers like Dee Dee. Eichmann’s bad temper ruled his existence with an iron hand. Why? For the same reasons people have always had when they’ve been cheated out of the good life. They’re like animals mesmerized by a car’s headlights in the road; they freeze, they don’t know how else to react, and so they bite the first person who crosses their path.
A couple of days after our skirmish with Dee Dee, I went for a walk on Mission Street past the Krishna Hotel, Speedy Gonzalez Printing, Kong’s Bargain Center, Guadalupana Bakery, and Clarion Alley. I was thinking about my problem, and not getting anywhere with it. The junkies were assembled in front of Fida Market, the winos by the California Savings Bank. San Francisco was a provincial town as far as metropolitan cities went, but we had more than our share of urban conflict, West Coast style.
It had something to do with the topography of the area; the city was on a peninsula jutting into the Pacific Ocean, isolated from the rest of the continent, cut off from the rest of the country. In this place, you could do almost anything if you were willing to pay the price. When the Spaniards came here in 1776, they found the Ohlone Indians taking care of their own business. So they got rid of them. Whenever I was at Mission Dolores, watching the German and Japanese tourists swarm around the church, I tried to conjure up the ghosts of the Ohlone who died building the cathedral. Some of them were buried in the flower-choked cemetery next door. But I was only a dope dealer and I couldn’t get my own customers to pay me, much less raise the dead.
I went to bed that night and slept without dreaming. The next morning, the sunlight was so blinding and harsh, it seared the retina. I saw the smoggy brown sun through the holes in the garage’s roof. Then I saw it through the black and yellow depths of an oncoming migraine headache.
Eichmann was lying on the couch with his lady of the moment, a girl named Loretta who was on the nether side of twenty-one. She was buxom or stocky, depending how you felt about her, and she had muscular arms, melon-shaped breasts, a face that was sharp, feral, and intelligent. She was saying to him, “You want some coffee?”
“Nah, not yet. Let me smoke a cigarette first, all right?”
“You know what?”
“What’s that?”
“I had a dream.”
“About what?”
“We had a pet.”
“A pet? Here in the garage?”
“I don’t know where it was … just a big room and in the middle of it there was a black kitty with a blue ribbon around its neck. It licked my face.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Wouldn’t you like to have a pet?”
“Animals shed hair. We’ll get sick.”
“But wouldn’t it be sweet … a kitty?”
“The landlord won’t go for it.”
“Who cares what the landlord says?”
“I care. I hate him enough to care.”
Loretta had been with Eichmann for the last couple of weeks, spending nearly every night with us in the garage. When you’re young, everything is in front of you, including a mountain range of problems.
She removed her bra and looked at her breasts, inspecting the blue veins which traveled from her nipples to her neck, then pressed her tits into Eichmann’s back. She made an attempt to hug him, but Eichmann wasn’t up to the task of intimacy, especially if someone else wanted it.
Loretta wasn’t asking for much, just some basic affection. All he had to do was put his arms around her. However, it wasn’t that simple. Nothing was anymore, not since Dee Dee and Louis told us about the cops.
“Time to get up,” Eichmann spouted. “We’ve got a long day ahead of us.”