DE HARO STREET EXTENDS NORTH, FROM ONE OF THE WORST housing projects in the city, up and over Potrero Hill and down to 17th Street, past the softball diamonds at Lazzeri Playground to the intersection of King and Division Streets, through what used to be a warehouse district. In the dotcom times—roughly the last ten years of the 20th century—you couldn’t rent unimproved space in that neighborhood for less than $80 per square foot per annum, even if you could find it. After the dotcom crash, however, the vacancy rate climbed to 30% in less than a year, and suddenly you could take your pick from any number of nicely turned-out commercial spaces at about $20 per foot. Owners and landlords began to offer incentives. They even sank to renting rehearsal space to bands again. I’m sure some of them cried.
In the dotcom times a pedestrian could get run over crossing any street in these flatlands, day or night. Lucre-crazed SUV drivers ignored stop signs, pedestrians, other SUVs, even cops, certain that the gold rush would wait for no one. A worker flagging a lane of traffic while his crew backed a cement truck toward a pour was run over and killed by a man driving an SUV, steering wheel in one hand, a phone in the other. Whatever he was talking about proved to be more important than another man’s life. Despite the presence of an entire construction crew, any number of other drivers, and the SUV’s female passenger, all of whom bore witness, the hit-and-run driver was never caught. The dead flagman left a wife and three kids.
Not two years later the flatlands at the foot of Potrero Hill had become nearly as deserted by day as they were by night, as exposed as an intertidal reef by the recession of the tsunami of avarice. Gold rush over, the locals started to poke their heads out again in order to enjoy their restored tranquility—to wit, we saw a man in a pink tutu and tights and yellow dance slippers accompanied by a mincing, perfectly coiffed pink Pomeranian, the only citizens in sight, as Lavinia made a preliminary pass down the one hundred block of De Haro, and I counted down a series of roll-up doors along a waist-high loading dock: 116, 114, 112, 110….
We circled the block for another look. The citizen and his dog had disappeared. A city is funny like that. You see something notable, turn a corner, never see it again. Across the street from the warehouse stood another, still with its loading dock; but its roll-up doors had been replaced by glassed-in office bays, its freight spur so hastily paved over that the street retained a phantom trace of rails. A vinyl sign dangled limply from the remodeled building’s stucco parapet, advertising the availability of raw space from 450 up to 45,000 square feet.
“Man,” I observed, “you might think that it looks like the seventies down here, it’s so deserted, but I might think it could be more like the fifties.”
“I’ve only seen pictures,” Lavinia said.
“Me, too.”
“Visions of the railroad earth,” Lavinia said.
I turned to look at her. The shadows moved off the dashboard and over her hands on the rim of the steering wheel, sculpting her face. It looked like a flight of pelicans limning a swell. “My favorite Kerouac piece,” I said.
She shook her head. “Mexico City Blues is better.”
“I don’t think so, but you’re not alone; Michael McClure called it the great visionary poem of the twentieth century.”
“Yeah, well,” she shrugged, “he’s probably never read The Sorrow of War, by Bao Ninh.”
“I’d prefer to call that novel an elegiac triumph, and to hell with visionary.”
“Curly,” she purred, “you are the only person I’ve ever met who’s read as many books as I have.”
“More,” I corrected her. “More than you have.”
“After you starve to death,” she cooed, “can I have your library?”
“I’ll leave you mine if you leave me yours.”
“Can’t do that, I’m sorry to say. Ivy pawned the whole thing one box at a time.” She softened her tone. “Don’t I have anything else you want?”
I shook my head. “This doesn’t look like a real address.”
“What would you know about a real address? You mean it’s not a toilet with a bed and a sink?”
“You slagging my crib?”
“No, I’m talking about your shitty apartment. When’s the last time a woman was in there?”
I gave this a moment’s thought. “About two hours ago,” I replied. “At least, it used to be a woman.”
“You know what I mean,” she insisted.
“Not counting my guitar?”
“Don’t be pathetic.”
“None of your business,” I replied pathetically.
“Don’t you know any female octopi?”
“I wouldn’t spend so much time with her, meaning my guitar, if she weren’t the real thing.”
“You wouldn’t spend so much time with her, meaning your guitar, if you had a real thing.”
“That,” I conceded, “might be a brush with the truth.”
“Anyhow, where people keep their stolen PA systems isn’t necessarily where they sleep.”
“And here I thought I was looking for my beloved brother.”
“You might still be looking for your beloved brother. Nobody is saying our bird is still here—if he ever was here. Did that landlord look cagey to you?”
“Lavinia, think about it. When was the last time you saw somebody look cagey who actually was cagey?”
“Um…. The last time I saw a picture of Little Bush on the cover of Time?”
“That guy’s not cagey.”
“On the contrary, my mouse, I think he put one over on everybody, including himself.”
“Speaking as a small rodent, I agree with you.”
“If only there were a little id to go along with it.”
“Like when Clinton was President? But hey, now that we’ve established our San Francisco political credentials, we didn’t come here to talk politics.”
“No. We came here to talk money.”
“What’s the difference?”
Lavinia took a left around the north corner of the block, on Alameda, and parked on the wrong side of the street.
“Will it fit in your car?”
“What, seventy-five hundred bucks?”
“I was thinking we might get the merchandise instead. Seventy-five hundred dollars worth of PA system could take up a lot of space.”
“That’s just what he owes on it,” she reminded me.
“…Mixing console, the wire snake, speakers, microphones and stands, a rack full of amps and preamps, EQ, a patch bay….”
“I forgot that you know something about this stuff.”
“Almost as much as you know about documentary videos.”
“Hey,” she retorted sharply, “Every time I sleep deeply enough to dream, I pay for that experience.”
“I hope you never have to go through another one like it. Sincerely.”
“Telltail was my friend.”
“I know that. Didn’t you hear what I just said?”
“She was just a kid. We—”
“Yes, yes, of course. Kids stick up liquor stores several times an hour in America. If this were a Moslem country, we wouldn’t have that problem.”
Lavinia stared at me. “You don’t feel my pain.”
I stared at her. “No.”
After a minute she said, “Let’s get this over with.” She pointed. “Hand me that piece in the glove compartment?”
“Piece?” I blinked. “Visions of the Railroad Earth?”
She gestured impatiently.
“No.” I shook my head.
She unfastened her shoulder belt.
“Lavinia….”
She leaned over the center console, opened the glove compartment, and removed a flat, black, automatic pistol. “Think you can open your door?”
I didn’t move. It wasn’t courage or even the lack of it, you understand—though I’m as pusillanimous as the next guy when it comes to guns. Everything is so obvious when it comes to guns. Everything’s all figured out already. There’s no leeway, no bargaining, no intellectual freedom. Guns kill people. That’s what they’re for. But it wasn’t precisely the gun that was bothering me. What was bothering me was that, as with guns, I now knew everything I needed to know about Ivy Pruitt and his ex-girl-friend, Lavinia Hahn. And what I knew about them was, they kept guns around. They liked guns. I didn’t want to get into it just then, at so inopportune a moment, into so sensitive a subject, but I was willing to postulate that what Lavinia regretted about the liquor store holdup was not that it had failed, or even that her girlfriend Telltail had gotten herself killed, but, on the contrary, that Telltail hadn’t been toting something more lethal than a BB gun. Now wasn’t the time to be getting into such quibbles, of course. Now was the time to be getting out of them.
Lavinia released the automatic’s clip and inspected it. A row of snub bullets glowed dully under the streetlight. She jacked the slide and a slug hopped out onto the leather upholstery between her thighs. “Ivy usually handles the ordnance.”
“Why am I not surprised to hear that?”
She jacked the slide again. The gun was empty.
“Haven’t you had enough of shooting?”
“I’ve had enough of having no protection from it.”
“Funny, I was just thinking that.”
She fingered the ejected shell into the clip and the clip into the hand grip.
“Where does this leave me?” I asked.
She jacked the slide, which chambered a round. Then, aiming the gun at the floorboard between her knees, she let the hammer down with her thumb and set the safety. All very pro. But now she closed her eyes and lay the pistol flat against the side of her face, as if to cool her raging intellect. “Protected,” she answered, “is where it leaves you.” She tapped the length of her finger alongside the trigger guard.
“That’s all this pistol is about?”
“That’s all.”
“Promise?”
“You sound like a little boy.”
“I feel like one.”
“A babe with a gun doesn’t make you hard?”
“Are you nuts? I have to have, you know, feelings for a gun.”
“Jesus Christ,” Lavinia hissed. “No wonder that guy fired you.”
“Hey,” I retorted testily, “I got fired because a bunch of Oakland cops arrested me for buying heroin from two Mexican illegals and smoking it with Ivy Pruitt, who is a repeat offender. I never go to Oakland. Put that fucking thing where I can’t see it and let’s get this sordid version of wage-earning over with. What caliber is it, anyway?”
“Don’t feel so fine, ain’t got my nine.”
“Oh, the famous nine millimeter, storied of song and verse amongst punks and fuckups.”
“It fulfills a great need between the .32 and the .38.”
“And to think I traded my singleshot .22 rifle for my first guitar. The only gun I’ve ever owned. A rabbit gun.”
“You never shot a rabbit, you ain’t no friend of mine.”
“Oh yeah?” I said. “How many rabbits you shot, Elvis?”
She didn’t answer.
I nodded curtly. “Where’s that leave us?”
“Fucking peacenik.” Lavinia opened the driver’s door. “Don’t forget your guitar case.”
“What for?”
“It worked once. Maybe it will work again.”
“Maybe you should carry it,” I grumbled, wresting it over the seat back. “As in, carry his ax, bear his children?”
“For a guy who can’t get it up, that’s thinking pretty far ahead.” Walking in front of me, Lavinia raised the back of her blouse to park the barrel of the pistol under her belt, in the crack of her ass.
“Hmmm,” I said.
“Don’t mix your metaphors,” she said.
We turned the corner and climbed a short set of creosoted wooden stairs. We weren’t exactly innocuous; a mercury streetlight laved our every move in a grayish blue. At the top of the loading dock a roof rat scurried along the splintered boards ahead of us and disappeared into a crack at the bottom of a roll up door. “Eek,” Lavinia said, without enthusiasm.
“Shoot it.”
“I don’t need the practice.”
“You can hit a rat with a handgun?”
“Sure. But if it’s carrying the plague, I want it to live.”
“Lavinia….”
“Yes, Curly?”
“Is a darkly pessimistic conception of mankind and the fate of the earth the other thing you have in common with Ivy Pruitt?”
“That and television. Until he pawned it.”
“A veritable spiral into hell.”
She nodded. “The intensity of it broke Ivy of two habits.”
“You and television?”
“Yep.”
“Which he replaced with the one big habit?”
“That would be correct.”
The door of 112 De Haro was big enough to forklift a pallet of flywheels through, maybe twenty feet wide and sixteen high. In the lower left corner of its metal slats a mandoor bore a faded sign.
BAY AREA ICE, CO.
112 DE HARO ST SAN FRANCISCO
POTRERO 2595
“Icing the Fleet Since 1946”
“What fleet?” Lavinia whispered.
“There used to be actual maritime commerce in San Francisco,” I whispered back. “We even had a fishing fleet.” I touched the date. “I’d say some guy came back from the war and started himself a business.”
“Which war?”
“World War II?” I suggested.
“Oh,” she said vaguely.
“He’s probably been gone a long time, too, along with this superannuated telephone prefix.”
Having already lost interest, Lavinia got down to business. “If we should accidentally run into any normal people, you’re still looking for your brother Stepnowski, okay? If we actually find him, we’re working for Sal Kramer, you’re the muscle, and I’m the brains. Stay behind me and try to look like a tough guy with an octopus tattooed on his head.”
“Beautiful,” I lied.
She knocked on the door.
“But if it’s so beautiful, why am I worried?”
She knocked again. “The only thing you’ve got to worry about is if Stepnowski really needs a guitarist.”
“What kind of music does he play?”
“Metal.” She knocked again, louder.
“Shit,” I hissed.
“Hey! Step!” Lavinia shouted.
“Lavinia—”
“Look.” She grabbed my arm.
We watched the door open about eight inches, as if by itself.
We waited.
Silence.
Lavinia nudged the door with the toe of her boot.
It creaked on its hinges, of course, until it opened halfway and emitted a draft from beyond, a musty darkness rank with rat scat and transmission fluid, one of my favorite cocktails.
“Hello?” Lavinia called tentatively.
No response.
“Hey,” I whispered, “nobody here. Let’s go get married.”
“That landlord guy might have called to warn him.”
“If he didn’t give us a bum steer altogether, you mean?”
She pushed the door wide open. Except for a slim parallelogram cast by the streetlight, illuminating a grimed and gouged concrete floor, we saw nothing. Lavinia pushed the door all the way open, until the slats in the roll-up door rattled slightly.
“Well,” I said quietly, “there’s nobody behind the door. Now what?”
Lavinia removed the pistol from her belt. “Let’s see if they took the PA system with them.” She slipped sideways over the threshold, out of sight.
“Man,” I hissed, “you are tenacity in tight pants.”
“Shut up and find the lights.”
I stepped over the threshold and changed the guitar case to my right hand, so I could pat the sheetrock beyond the door frame with my left. There was a switch plate. As I opened my mouth to speak, Lavinia abruptly gasped, the two actions uncannily simultaneous, as if the gasp had come from my own mouth. I turned to my right. The neck of the guitar case hooked the door and nearly closed it. Now, for sure, nobody could see anything. Lavinia screamed. I threw the case to the right and myself forward, away from the door. Three muzzle flashes strobed the darkness.