Bobo placed a cup of coffee on the couch arm next to me and said, “Here you go, Doojie. This’ll help you to wake up.”
The Mexican was clean shaven, and his unruly coarse black hair was tied back in a ponytail. While I sipped the coffee, letting it burn the back of my mouth, he removed a doughnut from a paper bag and neatly took a bite, taking care not to get any crumbs on himself. Whenever Bobo was eating something, he fell into a trance, happy to be with himself. His colicky brown eyes were muddy with glee; the fjord-deep lines bordering his mouth softened.
Eichmann and Loretta had gone down to the Otis Street DSS office to apply for food stamps. I thought about Flaherty, eager to torment myself about him. First, I had to consider the geography. Lexington, San Carlos, and Capp Streets teemed with dope dealers and their clients, hookers and their johns, and nine million cops on patrol in their black-and-whites—I might see him this very day. Every time I went outside, my chances of running into him increased. Everything was mathematics, from how you tied your shoelaces to when you went to jail.
But business was business.
Bobo told me we had to visit these people he knew. I asked him, “What people?”
He shrugged, “I don’t know. Eichmann told me to see them.”
The next thing I knew we were walking up Mission Street. Everything seemed normal. The crack hippies by Lady Seikko’s Japanese Restaurant were roasting like chestnuts in the sun. In the mouth of Sycamore Alley, one of the slimiest strips of paved road this side of Oakland, festooned with syringes, empty nickel bags and blood-spotted toilet paper, a man in a wheelchair was hanging onto a parking meter with one hand, screaming bloody murder at the top of his lungs, claiming a hooker had stolen his money.
Bobo was three inches shorter than me, but he made up for the difference in height by wearing a pair of high-heeled light-brown Frye boots. His body language was dope dealer all the way, arrogant and riddled with cleverly disguised insecurity—showing no weakness, no hesitation, no loss of purpose, not for an instant. The sun was in his face, lighting up his pocked complexion. We were the only English-speaking nickel-bag dealers in the street and we stood out among the Salvadorenos like a pair of tugboats on the open sea.
Three black dealers were hanging out next to the Mission News porno shop. Two of them were on foot, and the third, wearing his hair in long, carefully tended braids, was riding a repainted mountain bike. Their clientele was an older junkie population, mostly recidivist Latinos who hung out by the Wang Fat Fish Market when they weren’t in the doughnut shop down the street.
One of the dealers resembled the pictures I’d seen in old Life magazines of George Jackson, the former Black Panther and famous prison writer. The kid had an aura, a you-can’t-take-me-down attitude. I was supposed to regard him as my competitor, but I admired him for his low-rent chutzpah.
The junkies? I did not respect them as much. Home for them was the Thor Hotel up the block. The Thor was a residential hotel, an archetypal Mission single-room-occupancy tenement straight out of the late nineteenth century—soot-stained eaves with a gabled roof that hadn’t been repaired since World War II. It was urban tundra.
Bobo tapped me on the arm. “See the punk on the right, sitting on the hood of the car?”
“You mean George Jackson?”
“That’s his name?”
“Yeah, it is. What about him?”
“He owes me some money.”
“Yeah, so?”
“I want it!”
“Let’s forget it,” I cajoled.
“How come?”
“I’m not feeling well.”
“Come to think of it, neither am I. Let’s get a burrito. C’mon, we’ll go to Pancho Villa’s.”
George Jackson didn’t know it, but I’d saved him from having to discuss economics with Bobo.
The route to Pancho Villa’s was another story. The sidewalks were jammed with Catholic schoolgirls, the Salvadoreno ghetto dudes in their cowboy hats, and the Honduran ladies selling mangos and papayas. Vendors were hawking bananas, Panamanian-made radios, mariachi cassettes, and computer software in Spanish in front of Libreria Mexico, Roxanna’s Beauty Salon, McCarthy’s Bar, and Ritmo Latino. Bobo was smoking a Winston cigarette and telling me about his diet.
“Enchiladas, tostadas, paella with that shrimp that comes from around here, carne puerco done up right over an open pit in someone’s backyard with a cold brew in your hand, there ain’t nothing finer than that. But I have to watch it, you know? The shit is getting out of hand. It has to stop.”
“Are you going to talk to a doctor?”
“What do you think I am? Lame? This is private. You’ve got to do it yourself. See, if you have problems with your body image, the way you look, it can ruin your state of mind, like permanently.”
Being health-conscious sounded exciting. To eat properly would be a fantastic improvement in my daily regimen. Consuming fruits and vegetables and protein. Drinking lots of water. But I didn’t like to eat, which was a family legacy my grandmother brought to America from Russia.
Bubbeh was eight years old when a pogrom swept through her neighborhood in Odessa. Many people, including members of her own family, were killed in the streets. A famine followed in the pogrom’s wake, and a neighbor concocted a meal of unhulled grain, immersing it in mechanical grease because there wasn’t any cooking oil. My grandmother ate a portion and fell ill, nearly dying. She feared food after that, and the tradition was passed on to me, subsequently becoming a cornerstone of my personality.
Several Nicaraguan ladies were hawking evangelist magazines in front of Walgreen’s. Bobo saw his reflection in the virginal windows of Nuria’s Bridal Shop and shuddered. We were supposed to blend in with the other people on the sidewalk, but I was dressed for shirtsleeve weather in a winter-campaign Army jacket. Bobo said to me plaintively, not even hiding his need, “Doojie, forget what I said earlier. Let’s get on over to Pancho Villa’s, man.”
“I don’t have an appetite.”
“Well, I’m fucking ravenous.”
“Why didn’t you buy a falafel or something when you went for the coffee?”
“I didn’t want no Lebanese food. I had some hummus last night. It was good and spicy. But I just want something down home, you know?”
“Then let’s go over to Whiz Burger.”
“It’s too damn far.”
The Mission Presbyterian Church’s bells were ringing on Capp Street, echoing unseen over the palm trees on the block. Two white women were talking at the Muni bus stop near the corner. I noticed them, not because they were being indiscreet, but because a drug deal is a drug deal. Unlike the junkies stationed by the Thor Hotel down the street, these women were dressed in Banana Republic blazers and stonewashed Gucci denim. I looked at their vitamin-fortified complexions, overlaying the pallor of short-term junk usage, and deduced they were suburban addicts from the East Bay, from middle class enclaves like Orinda, Lafayette, and Walnut Creek. You saw their type on Capp Street near the Victoria Theater trying to score coke and heroin from the hookers working the strip around the BART station. Bobo said, “You checking them out?”
“Yeah.”
“The older one owes me twenty bucks.”
“Where do you know her from?”
“Dee Dee.”
“Are you going to ask her for it?”
“Ah, I don’t know. Even if she has it, she won’t give it to me. It’ll be like trying to get water out of a rock.”
“It won’t hurt to ask.”
Bobo smoothed down his severely unwashed hair with both hands and sighed, “Okay, let’s hear what she says.” He stepped off the curb and pushed his way into the crowd, and I went after him. Anytime you were collecting money from people who didn’t want to give it up, visible control was the only protocol. I came around from the side and stopped. Bobo got to them first, extending his right hand in a wary greeting. The younger woman, a skinny brunette with a pierced nose, blanched when she saw the Mexican in his ancient Frye boots. She jumped up from the bus bench, but I murmured to her, “Please, wait a minute.”
The other woman didn’t get quite as rattled. Her iron-colored hair was pulled back into a bun under a black scarf, exposing a slice of her tanned, angular face. She wasn’t bothered by the interruption; on the contrary, she seemed to relish it. A fly zipped past her pert nose, darting toward Bobo, and he swatted it. I got the feeling this wasn’t the first time he’d asked her for money, not by a long shot. When she saw me cowering behind him, she sniggered, “Who’s your enforcer, Bobo?”
“Him? That’s Doojie.”
She laughed openly at me, exposing her costly dental work in a bitter smile. This got me miffed, and I guess it showed in my eyes. The other people at the bus stop, a couple of schoolkids and a mom with her baby, saw we were heading into an argument, the beginning stages of one, and they moved off. Bobo turned unpleasantly scarlet and took a gulp of air to calm himself down. “Forget Doojie, Colleen. Let’s discuss the debt you owe me.”
“I don’t owe you nothing.”
“You do, too.”
“Bull pucky, I do.”
Something was wrong and I didn’t know what it was. Colleen lazily roused herself from the bus bench and brushed past Bobo, muttering, “I don’t need this shit.” She deliberately careened into my arm, drinking me in with her wide-open milk-green eyes. Her face was so close to mine, I got a whiff of her deodorant and I saw the pores on her skin. Then I felt her hand touch my leg. “Mind your own business next time,” she said.
I never saw the knife she plunged into my left thigh, but the pain of it rilled up my spine. Bobo jumped Colleen from behind and wacked her on the wrist with his elbow, a deft move executed with a minimum of fuss, and she dropped the blade. The other woman bent over and picked it up. Colleen shouted something unintelligible at her, then made a dash for the green light at the intersection. Bobo got his shoulder under my arms, and dragged me away from the bus stop, huffing and puffing, and scolding me, “You fucking idiot, I told you it wasn’t worth asking her for it.”