WHILE SHARONA SUNBATHED on the hotel roof with the baby, Stiv sat on the bed in their room and dry-shaved himself with a disposable razor. Having no mirror or shaving cream, he did it by feel, gliding the blade across his chin. Sweat glittered on his forearms. His big boned feet were pronated, the toe nails yellow and uncut. His eyes were glacier-blue and heated. He finished the task with a couple of bloody swipes at his neck.
He put his toiletries in the sink, got down on his hands and knees, and ferreted a tartan-red suitcase out from under the bed frame. He unzipped the case and removed two handguns. The first gat was a generic Saturday night special. The other weapon was a Colt revolver. He dusted off both guns with a handkerchief and put them on the window’s sill. His intention was to sell the Saturday night special.
Needing to pee, he lumbered out of the room and trod barefoot through the gloomy hall to use the communal toilet. The overhead water pipes were clanging. The walls swayed from the traffic on Market Street. The carpet was treacherous and he managed to avoid stepping on a gargantuan cockroach. Stiv went up a flight of wobbly stairs and almost collided with Jeeter Roche’s wife.
Gussied up in a floral-patterned muumuu dress and eight-inch white leatherette platform shoes, Chiclet Dupont had her business face on, replete with a titanic embellishment of mascara and rouge. She carried a notepad in one hand. A pen was tucked behind her ear. A clove cigarette was sticking out of her mouth. A Dell laptop in a Barnes and Noble book bag was slung over her shoulder. She was in the process of collecting rent from the tenants.
“Good morning, doll,” he said. “What’s up with you?”
The platforms gave Chiclet a ten-inch advantage in height over Stiv. She was courteous, but reserved: he wasn’t the only person having doubts about their relationship. She said, “The same as usual. I’m getting the rent money from everyone. You got yours for me?”
He was vague. “Uh, not yet.”
“You aren’t going to be late with it, are you?”
“No, of course not,” he said hastily. “I’m good for it.”
“I hope so. Jeeter gets weird otherwise and then he takes it out on me.”
Stiv played it smart and didn’t say anything about his money problems. Chiclet wouldn’t want to hear it. The mere mention of it would turn her against him. She didn’t like her men weak. But Stiv had a plan and he needed to meet with Jeeter. Was this an appropriate time to bring it up? He wasn’t sure—the dank passageway was so impersonal. But he forced himself to do it. “Tell me,” he inveigled, “you doing anything?”
“Why?”
“You got any weed?”
Chiclet looked down her nose at Stiv. “What for?”
“I want to get smoked out. I’m stressing something ugly.”
Getting high wasn’t a bad idea. But business took priority. Chiclet held up the notepad, letting frustration colorize her voice. “I can’t smoke no dope now. I’m getting revenue for Jeeter. It’s rent day, damn it. You know how he is. He watches every penny. And you better have your check for me soon.”
Stiv hated being hounded for the rent—he was no better off than a hamster on a treadmill. “Yeah, sure, later,” he said. “Give me a couple of hours.” He lifted his arms. As the elastic in his lime-green boxer shorts was stretched out, the motion caused the underwear to slide off his bony hips and drop to the floor. His pimpled buttocks were luminous in the hallway’s murk. He put a hand on Chiclet’s arm and said, “Listen.”
Literal-minded Chiclet didn’t hear anything. The hall was as silent as a cemetery. She said, “Listen to what?”
“No, no, listen to me. I want to see Jeeter.”
“What for?”
“I’ve got a deal for him.”
Chiclet wasn’t enthused. “We don’t need any more drugs, Stiv. We have everything under the goddamn sun.”
“It ain’t drugs that I’m talking about.”
“Yeah? What is it then?”
“I have something extra special.”
She was wary. “Oh?”
“Yeah. A piece.”
“A gun?”
“Yup. Cheap, too.”
Chiclet was solemn. She thought about Stiv’s proposal for a moment, running it through the corners of her mind. She saw nothing wrong with it, saying, “You’re in luck. Jeeter’s been looking for one lately. I’ll tell him you have something for him. Come on over in an hour. Can you do that?”
“Sure can.”
“You know where we’re living these days?”
“Near the Otis Street welfare office, right?”
“Right.”
Chiclet bussed Stiv on the cheek and said good-bye. She proceeded downstairs to deliver an eviction notice to a tenant on the fourth floor. Stiv watched her descend the staircase and touched the spot on his skin where her lips had been. Then he pulled up his boxer shorts and went back to his room.
Getting dressed was easy. Stiv leaped into a pair of silver-buckled engineer boots, his favorite T-shirt, and the motorcycle jacket, and then stuffed the Saturday night special in his waistband. Leaving the room was harder. He opened the door, slithered into the hall, shut the door, and bolted the lock. He checked it, did it again, and two more times after that. He took a couple of steps toward the exit and went back to check the doorknob a fifth time. His agoraphobia was getting out of hand.
Tearing himself away, Stiv bounded down the rear stairs to the ground floor and burst out of the emergency exit onto the sidewalk. Walking in the tepid sunshine to the Muni bus stop at Franklin Street, he finished a joint, the last pinch of what he’d taken off Richard Rood.
A turn-of-the-century F-line car from the Castro pulled up to the stop. Jumping aboard, Stiv looked around the overcrowded carriage. The only vacant seat was in a compartment by a quartet of armed transit cops with two German shepherd guard dogs, and he decided not to sit down. The train conductor’s disembodied voice wafted over the car’s loudspeaker: “Next stop … Civic Center.”
Rattling toward the Civic Center, the trolley pitched from side to side. One of the cops attempted to make eye contact with Stiv. He looked the other way and paid close attention to the street as it whizzed by the train. A Public Health Service ambulance was at the corner of Larkin and Market; medics were loading a homeless man onto a stretcher.
Getting Sharona pregnant had been a colossal accident. The stupid things you did when you were lonely were amazing. You’d sleep with anyone without a rubber on, so long as they were warm and breathing. And having a kid had become an error of monumental proportions. That became evident on the night the baby was born. Straight out of jail, Stiv visited Sharona and the brat in the welfare maternity ward at General Hospital.
Holding the pointy-headed creature that was supposed to be their son in the crook of her elbow, Sharona said to Stiv, honeyed and dulcet-toned, “I need to tell you something.”
The triumph in her voice made Stiv paranoid. “What is it?”
“You have to become a responsible parental figure.”
She might as well have been speaking in Hebrew. He said, “What in the hell are you barking at?”
“It’s like this,” Sharona lectured. “Are you going to be a daddy or a father?”
It was mumbo-jumbo in his ears. “Huh?”
“A daddy just hangs around. A father goes out and gets a job and takes care of his family.”
Sharona’s edict had been a major bring-down. Stiv had never met his own father, didn’t even know the man’s name, so what the fuck was she saying? He didn’t have a clue. Here he was, twenty-five years old, fathering a child way too soon. Now he had to step up to the plate for Sharona and the kid and deliver the things he’d never known.
The trolley shuddered to a halt at the Civic Center station and the coach doors opened. Stiv disembarked and muscled a path through knots of school kids, junkies, suited office workers, and Nicaraguan women selling food. The line of passengers struggling to get out of the station was lengthy. A surveillance camera embedded in a wall gazed unblinkingly at the crowd. Keeping an eye on two overweight Muni cops guarding the entrance, Stiv cut to the front, bestraddled a turnstile, and hopped over it.
A ticket agent shouted at him, “Hey! You didn’t pay!”
Stiv jogged across Market Street. Resurgent wisps of fog wreathed the eucalyptus trees and the hillside condominiums on Diamond Heights. A red, white, and blue zeppelin bobbled over the office buildings in the Tenderloin. The weekly farmer’s market was in progress at the Civic Center. Azure blue and orangeade yellow clouds hovered over the gray government buildings in the plaza.
The neighborhood where Jeeter Roche dwelled, the South of Market, was populated with live-work lofts, high-rise retirement complexes, shopping centers, factories, and warehouses. The writer Jack London had been born at Third and Brannan. The last comprehensive general strike in San Francisco had been organized here by the ILWU in 1934. The district had been a hub for book printing on the West Coast, but skyrocketing production costs had driven the industry overseas to Korea and Singapore.
The South of Market was also a haven for the city’s leather queens. Bars like the Brig and the Anvil on Folsom Street attracted large mobs on the weekends. Stiv had frequented the Brig; his streetwise scruffiness was irresistible to the leather daddies. One of them, a queen by the name of Robert Opel, developed a crush on him. Usually done up in a black leather vest and chaps and pale-faced with a bushy mustache that masked his sardonic mouth, Robert promoted an ego that took up a lot of room. He’d streaked the Oscar Awards on national television and had become a celebrity. He had a flair for making the people around him seem smaller than they were. The attribute left more than one person wanting to murder him.
History doesn’t repeat itself; it merely predicts what’s been done before. Robert Opel got involved with the wrong people and was shot and killed in a PCP deal that went south. A pimply-faced queen was busted for the deed. One day while going to a preliminary hearing at the Hall of Justice, the shooter escaped from the holding cell next to the courtroom. Dressed in a pair of orange county-jail overalls, he evaded the cops and vamoosed all the way to Florida before he was captured again. Stiv stayed away from the Brig after that.
Walking by the warehouses on Howard Street, he was aware that the residual effects of the Haldol had worn off. His head was clearer than it had been all morning. His hearing was more acute. His sight was stronger. His ability to smell was enhanced. It wouldn’t be long before he had another hallucination.
Hallucinations had a herd mentality. They ran in packs. You had one, others joined in to gangbang your nervous system. Stiv got a hint of things to come when he spotted the wraith of José Reyna on Tehama Street. The outlaw was gauzy, transparent in the sunlight. He was in the saddle of a white stallion. The horse, a muscular brute, reared up on its hind legs and neighed. José waved his sombrero. The poltergeist lasted for all two seconds, enough to worry Stiv.