I stepped off the bus into the long shadows of the Tenderloin—the T.L.—as the sun set. Tourists staying at hotels near the Curran Theatre took cabs the three blocks to the theater to avoid stepping their dainty feet on these soiled city streets. They pulled their fur coats closer and darted glances at me and the other misfits roaming the area. I didn’t blame them. It was good people watching in the T.L.
In the space of five blocks, I strolled past a dude dropping his drawers and crapping in the middle of the sidewalk, a pair of junkies passing a crack pipe back and forth, and a hooker in a skimpy skirt hailing a Mercedes and leaning in his window so far that her sex was showing.
I wasn’t sure, but it seemed like a guy in a stocking cap might have been following me since I got off the bus so I backtracked to the Market Street bus stop and spent some extra time going up and down the escalators at Marshalls until I was sure I ditched him before I ducked into the Fancy Gurlz hair salon. Women with elaborate braids sat beneath pastel cone hairdryers. The salon reeked of hair straightener and cheap perfume and the ladies cackled at my appearance.
“You hanging with the sisters tonight?”
“What you want with your shiny brown hair?”
“You know the joint is slipping when they start letting white girls come in get their hair did.”
I ignored them and kept walking toward the back. They hooted and hollered until Darling, the owner, whose gloved hands were buried in a woman’s hair, spoke up. “Hush, now. Baby girl’s a friend of mine.”
I leaned over and gave Darling a kiss on her cheek and she jutted her chin back toward her office.
Darling and I had history. We met during a protest a few years back. A cop had killed a young black man who’d done nothing more than been in the wrong place at the wrong time when the trigger-happy rookie got scared and bam-o, dead kid.
Darling and I ended up in the back office of her shop after the protest, drinking bourbon and playing cribbage and trying to peacefully reform society. Soon, I learned that the salon was her love, her passion, but also a front. Her real money—the money that let her have a house on Russian Hill and in the Oakland Hills—was paperwork, the expensive and hard to get kind, such as fake IDs and passports.
Even without that, the salon was the epicenter of a vast social network I knew nothing about. Darling once told me that when World War III hit, the black people’s hair salons would still be standing, doing fierce business. I believed her.
Today I looked homeless, lugging my giant camping backpack as I walked all the way through the salon to the office door. Inside the top drawer of her desk, there was an envelope marked “G” that contained the other fake IDs I’d asked for and a stash of burner cell phones. I left an envelope with two grand to pay for my and Candy’s fake passports, ID’s, the expense of having Candy’s documents couriered to her, and of course for Darling’s trouble. Tucking the envelope into my jacket pocket, I went out another door. This one led down a flight of stairs, across a hallway, through another door, and up another set of stairs that led to a back door to the alley. Out in the fresh air I got my bearings and hurried to the next block. Off the main drag, I turned into another long alley and from there onto a small, quiet street. I checked the address on the slip Kato had given me. Yep. There it was. 345 Turk Street, across from the Tenderloin hood known as Forgotten Island. I’d read about it in the paper a few years ago. Forgotten Island. That’s what I wanted to be — forgotten, disappeared, invisible. That was a great reason to make this tiny strip of the T.L.— my new home.
A woman with ratty hair pulled back in a silky, stained scarf and a face caked with dirt and sweat scrambled up from the sidewalk in front of the building when I got to the stoop. She smiled, showing a few missing teeth.
“Spare some change?”
I stopped, my hand on the door. “You live here?”
Looking around at the empty sidewalk, she shrugged.
“What’s your name?”
“My name?” For a minute her eyebrows met in the middle as she scrunched up her face. I got the feeling nobody had asked her that for a long time. “I’m Ethel. Ethel Swanson.” Her shoulders seemed to draw back a little in pride when she said this.
“Well, Ethel. I’m Gia. Nice to meet you.” I gave her a quick salute and opened the door to go in. Ethel scowled and sank back down onto the stack of cardboard on the sidewalk.
Inside the building the bulb was burned out, but I was able to make my way by the dim streetlight shining through the glass front door. Something scuttled across the floor, but it was too dark to tell if it was a cockroach or a rat.
I pounded on the door to apartment A for about ten minutes.
“Who there?”
“I’m looking for Trang. Name’s Gia.”
The door creaked open a few inches and one squinting bloodshot eye peeked out. Strands of black hair stuck up in every direction.
“Okay, okay.”
Trang undid the chain and gestured for me to enter, but I had no intention of leaving the hallway.
“You got the money?”
I handed him another envelope with three thousand dollars in it. He counted it carefully.
“What’s up with the dark?”
He squinted up at the ceiling as if he had just noticed. “Damn. Burned out. I fix.”
I gave him a skeptical look. What kind of dump was I moving into?
He started to close the door. “Okay, come back in one hour.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I don’t have the key here. I gotta go get it.” He pulled on an Army green coat and locked his door behind him. “Meet me back here in an hour.”
“What?” he asked when I didn’t answer. “You want receipt?”
I turned to walk away. The piece of paper would’ve been useless.
Outside the building, that same woman, Ethel, sat huddled on the ground. She started to get up, saw it was me again, and slumped back down.
“Hey Ethel, why so glum?” I pulled a silver flask out of my bag. It was engraved with my initials G.V.S.—for Giada Valentina Santella. I took a slug and handed it to her.
She grasped it eagerly with dirty fingernails and tipped it back, gulping, her eyes on mine. I nodded and she kept going, finally coming up for air. She got up to hand it to me, but I waved her off.
“All yours.” The flask had been a twenty-first birthday present from my godfather and I’d gotten a good two years use out of it, but I wouldn’t need it anymore. Before I got up to hunt down more booze, I tucked a twenty into the pocket of her jacket and told her to go buy herself dinner.