Chapter Four
“Suffocating you…”
“Sorry, Gunther—not buying it.”
“Need some breathing room now, do ya?!”
He hoisted the can as if to toast, but instead began pouring with a vengeance. Regular unleaded washed down like Yosemite falls, green-yellow gasoline over his padded grey wool blend shoulders, quickly soaking through pinstriped broadcloth to the bone. He slumped under the cold chemical weight of this endgame, mumbling to himself, tossing aside the empty gas can, soon crouching to feel for another five-gallon container in a barrel-size black canvas duffle bag.
Dude pinned the second red can between his legs, no simple maneuver given that he had already chained himself by the waist band to a regal blue lamp post over on the northwest corner of Union Square. He then came up firing with a disposable BIC. Few passersby even seemed to notice this volatile, most incendiary situation, what with all the cross-clotted traffic, the motherboard flow of pedestrians, the general buzz of lunch-hour banter in downtown San Francisco.
But then I had clearer perspective, having idly locked on this ruinous dervish in a three-piece suit screaming, threatening, tap dancing around his duffel and despair like an arthritic sidewalk hoofer. He appeared to be a careworn late-20s juniorcrat, a quotidian auditor or systems analyst, a resume booster ploddingly making a careers of his benefits package. Yet here he was going off on a street corner, power lunching with an anti-theft CLUB pulled from his over-parked Daihatsu Charade. His ranting had already pierced the shrill alarm of an ice-blue and black Mini Cooper, the sudden thud of caving sheet metal, the shattering and splintering of safety glass.
This Crunch-buffed figure had rammed his red steel steering lock through the Mini’s pulverized windshield, twisted its wipers with bleeding knuckles, jammed a long, spindled note under its hood seam, then proceeded to boot in Alison somebody’s doors. “Bitch flat-out lied!”
“Come on, drop it, will you,” I had urged, from behind a dripping hydrant. For this alpha maniac was now flicking his lighter to the stony, unmoved passersby, pacing aquamarine like a caged orangutan amid aquamarine heaps of powdered glass. “Don’t be doing that to her. And for chrissake don’t be doing it to yourself…”
“Piss off, I’m dealing with my woman here,” he screamed, reeking worse than an East Bay refinery, menacingly waving his BIC with fire in his gray beryllium eyes. “Grow up, she says—like I’m some kinda’ fuckin’ chump.”
“Listen, you flame out and she’s the one who wins…” Aww, give it up, I muttered, scanning an increasingly restless plaza across Powell Street—as if I had any room to talk. What’s one more hopeless son-of-a-bitch going over the edge? Still, I couldn’t deny once seething with that flamer’s anger so long ago, being no less panicked by his rage.
The direct object of his attention looked to be a trim, tied-back blond whose gleaming blue eyes and jutted chin barely met his sagging lapels. Stabbing her hands hard into the trouser pockets of her own black pin-striped suit, the young woman took to standing on her bulging Coach briefcase for emphasis, then tiptoe stood her ground. “Look at my car! You’re paying, Gunner…” She scrolled her pearly iPhone X for AAA. “Paying full sticker price with treble damages!”
“It’s here in the letter, folks,” he scowled back, pulling an embossed #10 envelope from his vest pocket, waving it like damp legal tender out of a tumble dryer. “But OK for you, if this is how you want it, huh?” He wooshed the lighter before her eyes. “Goin’ down this way…”
“Spare me the spectacle, luv. You know for a fact we’ve done this scene before…”
Tuned in, amped up, I could hear it all so clearly, as though the entire overheated affair were on speakerphone—The Conversation all over again—even through the bus roar, the cold concrete street drilling, the shifting and sliding of steel trench plates. Besides which, I had seen seen how this Gunner guy had brazenly crammed his Charade into a yellow curb delivery zone outside Saks Fifth Avenue. Bad habit, overindulged powers of observation, I had drawn a laser bead on him as he shlepped his canvas duffle through Post Street traffic over to the Square, as if methodically setting up yet another anti-one-percent petition stand. Instead, the stand increasingly appeared to be his last.
“You lied to me, lied to me,” he cried, as a clanging Powell Street cable car momentarily crowded my sight and sound lines. By the time I had refocus, the guy was reaching into his huge black bag for the second five-gallon can.
“Negative, I never once lied to you!” She shook her finger at him as a swarm of day shoppers and trollers began to circle.
“Why’d you have to bullshit me, Alison,” he resumed pouring about himself.
“For God’s sake, Gunther, get a grip—this is downright embarrassing.”
My vantage point was now the left end of a wood-slat courtesy bench line with assorted tourists, who were craning for the sight of another Powell-Hyde Street cable car. This outbound stop was function of a little friendly reconnaissance, all due diligence in the authorial sense—momentary pause while scouting out misappropriated territory pending a fulsomely trumpeted arrival. That was when this high-noon showdown grabbed me, with it the clear chemical bite of reformulated petrol and other toxic inhalants unknown, all somewhat sweetened by the pancake aromatherapy wafting down from Sear’s Fine Food.
“Come on,” she continued, “you know you won’t go through with this. You never follow through with anything!”
“See there, folks,” Gunther said, playing to the thickening circle. “That’s the bitch who flat-out played me!!”
“Oh, stop it,” she shrieked. “You’re impossible, I tell you…and are really beginning to freak me out…”
Downtown for something of a showdown hoedown myself, I had also been trying to chat up a young homeless guy when I noticed her turn of mood. He was a huddled lump wrapped in a frayed blanket—stained and yellow, much the color of his own cankered skin. He figured to have been seated on the shade-chilled concreted long enough for piles to take hold, hunched over a coverless paperback, saying nothing, seldom looking up except to mind the plastic beer cup between his tattered hiking boots, ringing up each passing drop of spare change. Then again, his small longhand sign said it all: ‘I’m living with AIDS. Any little bit goes toward food, maybe even a room. It’s hard out here, thank you very much’. He never even noticed when I dropped everything to run like a choice-cut ambulance chaser in this Alison’s general direction.
“Gather around people, it’s light up time!”
“All right, that’s it, Gunner.” She spun around toward the intersection, catching just enough of her black-on-black pump heel in an old vent grate to send her tumbling to her knees. “No more TXTs, no more calls, hear…ewwph…”
“Say, are you okay? Can I help you there?” I reached down to grasp her elbow as traffic closed in on us from both the Post and Powell Street sides.
“God knows I’ve tried to be reasonable about this,” she screamed, over a swell of revving engines and horn rage. She then swung her strawberry blond head toward me, turned on me to be more precise. “Do you mind? Get your grubby mitts off…”
“Whoa, hey…” I eased back, spotting Gunther out the corner of my eye as he prowled about with his gas can, ranting over and over to the ever-gathering gawkers and rubberneckers how he was dealing with this woman here. “I’m only trying to…”
“Don’t you dare touch me…” She rose in demonstrable anger, brushing her hair back, dusting off the knees of her Claiborne pants.
She then scooped up her briefcase, pivoting to storm between hard-pressing sedans, hush quiet hybrids, smoky diesel delivery vans and clean-air articulated buses across Powell Street, with me flummoxed but closely in tow. We nearly got pincered between a Hyde Street cable car and clocked-out airport van.
“I really must be some kind of jerk magnet or something. You guys never cease to amaze me.”
“Us guys? I’m not exactly one of those dumpster fires nowadays…”
“Then that loser’s not your worry, is he,” she snapped, somewhat evasively, defensive shrapnel shredding through. “Save it for yourself, or for the Stein boys, our grabass politicians, or the stalker who just scalped his girlfriend. Or the swine who tossed his daughter off the Golden Gate Bridge. Talk about testosterone pollution—we should be calling in cropdusters to spread the Depo–Provera.”
“Now wait a minute,” I said. Once we cleared the intersection, traffic cemented the noon-hour gridlock in a snarly criss-cross weave. “I just thought you might need a little…”
“Okay, time out,” she heaved, eyeing me head to toe, from my down-market chinos to frayed blue oxford cloth to the scuff marks on my retread running shoes. She then set her wine cordovan case against the first trolly post across Powell. “Sorry about the tantrum, sir, but…”
“Me too, but hey, no problem,” I hastened, however caught short by her presumptive generational divide. “Seems you had your hands full over there.”
“Yes, well…” She refrained from looking back toward Gunner’s fiery performance art and Union Square—instead sizing me up, reaching some sort of summary judgment. “Look, I appreciate the gesture and all…”
“Don’t give it another thought. What’s that scenario all about, anyway?”
“Nada—just some old, spoiled leftovers that keep repeating on me.” The young woman looked to be a Marin bred Paltrow with a fresh, Gloria Allredy mind. She pulled and straightened the fine pinstripes of her double-breasted jacket, before stabbing firmly into an inside pocket, then handing me her business card.
“Sure…” I stuffed the new engraved eggshell card, which read, ‘Alison Paige-Warner, Attorney-at-Law’ into my shirt pocket without giving it a third glance. Hell, if she was this goddamn heartless, she had to be good in the dock. “But what about…you know…Gunther, there?”
“Listen, he won’t do anything further. Gunner’s never seen anything through in his life.” She picked up her attache, tapping her cell phone, checklisting herself for further damage. “Believe me, he’ll be TXTing, spamming my voicemail before I get back to the office…lotta good that T.R.O.s doing me.”
“R-r-right, well…” I peered back again where her eyes refused to go, still hearing him cry out, ‘Alison, lying Alison’ over the churn and grind of opposing trolly cables, the nearby thumping of asphalt whackers. “I’m Ken, Ken Herbert, nice meeting you this…way.”
“Pleased, Mister Herbert, call during business hours if you wish.” She turned to power walk her way up Powell Street toward Sutter, sneaking a glance over at Gunther with a quick wince and shudder, her pleated pinstripes flapping in the breeze. “I’ll pop for a thank-you coffee.”
“Hey, that’s not necessary, I…”
“Can you use the occasional cup, or can’t you?” 
CHAPTER FIVE. Inflamed
passions take center stage,
until a hotter ticket
hits the scene…
“Forget it, will ya, that’s the cops’ business…”
“But the whole thing looked familiar somehow…”
“G’wan, all those little bundles look alike. Who knows what kind of cocktail she was doin’? I’m talking about the real funny fentanyl shit going on around here.”
The police had ushered me along Moulton Street by laser light, forewarning it was none of my business. Yet scrubbed and sporting blue-on-gray Swoosh, I still couldn’t shake the bleak image of a young woman strung out, splayed that way, even now. In retrospect, I imagined the victim had been abused until she was blue in the face—internal blunt force trauma, to where even a naloxone shot to the bone marrow wasn’t about to bring her around.
“All right, alright, what’s the story?” But at the moment, I did still feel beholden to this dick, could have used a new freelance gig about then as well. “I’m all ears, I mean after our little TapeGate and everything. You know I still owe you for the no-play screwup on that Ramsey case…”
“No player? You can say that again,” Eisenhoff offered me a room temp bottle of Sierra Springs water across his desktop, a bumper sticker reading, ‘Best Tail on the Trail’ pressed under glass. “Unforced error—just like with that Rayale Caffe that was down there across the street.”
“Uh, how do you mean?”
“You did frequent the place, right?”
“Well, not frequent, exactly, but…”
“So you knew enough about it then, but still didn’t peg it right.”
“What was there to peg?” I asked, with a twist of the cap. To me, Rayale had just been a plan B since the shutting down of my caffeine routine uphill once MeccaJava Café had given way to yet another pricey fashion outpost for a red haute New York brand. “Cheap, bad coffee and strange sandwich concoctions. Weak wifi and music of the weirdest subterranean kind, for this part of town at least. So I guess Rayale didn’t have a prayer over the long haul.”
“How about the bunch that ran it?”
“What about them? Didn’t say much except the basics, take the order and frown,” I followed his gaze across Fillmore Street. “Kinda surly, guess that was just part of the vibe in there, but it’s long gone now…”
“That they could have been a sleeper cell for all you’d have known…”
Sedge ‘Sy’ Eisenhoff came off as a true second-story man, directly above a vacated pastry shop that never had a chance either. His agency fronted a full floor of offices, pole position, so to speak, due to the sheer longevity of its legacy lease or what he had on the owners. It was on a block that ebbed and flowed with the commercial real estate market, particularly at street level. Down with blanketed sleeping bags of fetal bodies on the sidewalks, in the doorways, where binge drunkards crashed inside bank ATM branchlets. Currently, Sedge’s bastardized Victorian’s neighbors between Filbert and Greenwich were a tipsy Vicky saloon, Indian restaurant, trendy taqueria and wine bars.
Across Fillmore, the storefronts were a boxy lot: beige on beige 50s style. Anchoring the largest was that gray faced, tour de force Euro bike shop, serving full-race coffee that could torch their Nanoflex kits and melt their Vittoria tires. Firing up on the four-barrel French Roast blend were a clutch of ralleye bound cyclists comparing carbon frames and Dura Ace groupsets on a classic post-war Citroen delivery van split into a wooden bench pop-up park. They were generations removed from the detective agency herein, which likely could better relate to hoggish Harleys or Duce Moto-Guzzis at best.
“I mean, the joint always did seem a little weirdly placed for the neighborhood, don’t you think?” Eisenhoff pushed back the sliding glass of his bay window, pointed over toward a squat, incongruously one-story structure mid block, just north of Pixley, another of those San Francisco ‘tween streets. “Like there was always something hinky going on…”
“Dunno, not that much weirder than the Vedanta temple over there on Filbert, with all those onion bulb turrets and ogee arches…”
“Except that job’s legit, especially since they dolled it up—been there forever, too,” said Eisenhoff, fixing us both past Ginsberg’s Howling sidewalk plaque, onto what remained of that shabby cappuccino brown caffe on a downward slope across the way, backed as it was by the fabled Matrix barn now called ‘White Rabbit’. “Same time, Rayale was rotting like old bundt cake until that new salad joint there worked it over.”
Whereas his place was more like a boiler room, with all the double blind, shoe leather trimmings. A florescent lit office, very 50s-60s, permed secretary, portrait on agency wall of former agency partner, Jack ‘Tracer’ Diggens, who was a real Mike Connors character with a Niven mustache and Chuck Connors cut of the jaw. Surrounding the founder’s oil rendering were expired wanted posters, voided mugshots, crimebeat articles and fading covers of Police Gazettes. Mounted elsewise were matted posters of Eastwood’s Alcatraz Escape and McQueen’s Bullitt, alongside numerous City Hall commendations, under the needlepointed slogan, ‘We don’t just tail ’em, we nail ’em’.
Yet I couldn’t help glancing off, toward the graphic salmagundi marshaled about deeper sidewalls, a virtual murderer’s row of celebrity and infamy. Who couldn’t train on framed mugs of Dillinger, Baby Face—Greenstreet, Cagney and Bogey, Eddie G. and George Raft—stills of Dragnet Friday, Serpico, Mannix and Magnum P.I.? I spotted autographed action shots of Cheech Marin and Nash Bridges, of Harrison Ford, Karl Malden and Michael Douglas. Then there were crinkling yellow cameos of Duryea and Spillane, Carver and Chandler, with Nick and Nora teeming in—sluiced me back to Gittes and the Mulwrays. Even Eisenhoff’s toothy gal Friday, Geldora Reno looked sleuthy as Ida Lupino hitting her mark.
“Well, maybe things had been a little slow in that caffe toward the end, all these craft coffees around here and everything,” I squeezed and sipped from the little plastic bottle like a baby rife with colic, feeling like an alien under INS grilling. “Actually, I hadn’t been in there for a long while…”
Sedge Eisenhoff himself was his sole surviving sidekick and partner in a shootout, wherein Tracer met his Magnum head on, .357 hollow point made. Trim and slick as Tracer appeared in his prime front-office shrine, Sedge seemed to have rounded off to a desk-bound common denominator ever since. Heavily into ensemble noir, a silver string tie offset his sartorial blackness: his Kojaked ankle boots and flared slacks to satin shirt, leather vest and wool waistcoat, albeit fastened and festooned in ersatz gold.
“Whatever, I happen to have a client who’s convinced Rayale Caffe was a front all along,” he leaned in, tossing a pushy ponytail back over his shoulder, time-worn pendulus to a graying horseshoe crown.
“Affront—you mean architecturally or…” I couldn’t help suspecting he was packing an ankle piece under that boot cut of his.
“No, genius, a front for who knows what,” said Eisenhoff, grabbing for his red-sashed Stetson, nitpicking its brim before the don. “But you never seemed to pick up on that, did you? See what I’m getting at?”
“Guess so—but what difference does it make now?”
“Listen to me, Herbert. I had long been casing that place with my 8x telescope and a security cam. It got so they were hardly ever open toward the end. Why do you think that was?”
“Could be because business was down. Maybe because everybody from Kinkos to the bike shop is selling better coffee these days, and nobody was eating their oily food anymore…”
A long tail of cyclists turned the corner below us from around the bike shop’s Citroen parklet, in a logoed lycra blur out Fillmore Street, velocitizing toward a twisty tour de Marin—Bermuda Triangle, Marina, bridge, Headlands on up to Stinson Beach. The high pedaling streak drew my eye across Pixley Street. I recalled the flapping, wind-tattered green and white canvas awning outside Caffe Rayale.
Open for business on and off, particularly toward the end, free wi-fi or no. Most activity that did evidence about the place had usually spilled out onto Pixley alley, to the tune of Michael Franti and Spearhead. Rayale baristas and cookstaff often teamed up for a little circular kick ball out there, hands idle as the caffe’s espresso pulls. But by now the renovated space was clean and green as a Palo Alto bistro.
“So what did you make of that?”
“They never told me anything,” I said, recapping the Sierra Springs like it was water torture in a bottle, careful not to spill on my off-brand plaid U-Tuck-It and chinos. “Matter of fact, those guys mainly didn’t talk much at all. Except this one skateboarder dude, from Santa Cruz—he worked some afternoons, making hummus salad plates and pulling capps. At night, he builds bizarre sets South of Market for sado-bondo video shows—real Tor/onion router stuff…”
“Ever talk shop? About the caffe business plan and why the oddball hours,” Eisenhoff pounced, cracking his own bottle with a snap of a Rolexed wrist. “About the mokes he worked for, why when Rayale was open, they just hung outside on Pixley there, all stank eye and cuffing smokes. What was up with that?”
“Likely just taking a break,” I wondered if I’d been missing some signs. “Could be a Middle East culture thing…”
“Exactly, an Arab thing. Maybe that explains why people weren’t going in there so much anymore, worrying about food poisoning or cyanide drinks. You know, all the terrorist crap going down.”
“Terrorists? C’mon, they just played kickball and Hacky Sack out there…”
Virtual stand off, an awkward moment of silence met with the retro clacking of a Selectric typewriter and humming of a fax machine. With that, I rose to huff off, taking my umbrage along with me. At least until the everyday reality of fiscal shortfalls forced me to sit back down beside Sedge’s desk. The PI was all business, and I remained all ears, no longer inclined or able to tune out his hard-boiled rigmarole, much less my growling gut reaction. I had no immediate idea what he expected me to uncover, nor what I would actually do to meet said expectations. I still to this day had nothing against those Rayale Caffe people, let alone anything on them.
Yet this clearly was a matter of billable time served, and an old stiff like me could easily have stood some more hours on the clock…and off the books. All I knew was I currently had a headful of vengeful torment and houseful of trouble well beyond Sedge Eisenhoff’s gold-on-black Lexus downstairs. So resolved: sign on—though I couldn’t so easily erase images of a young woman’s Moulton demise. Presently however, I was feeling more in need of a little revenue.
“Point is, you still gotta sharpen your senses, Herbert, better hone your craft,” Eisenhoff rose, tapping my shoulder, sizing my eyes. “Rayale’s what got me to thinking about all the other kinds of terrorist-like shenanigans goin’ on these days, then this new case came along. It’s got international intrigue written all over it.”
“International? I…”
“Look, terrorism could be popping up anywhere, right?” Eisenhoff rose, now spieling over my shoulder. “Well, I have this other assignment in the pipeline, about some Russkie operative with a mommy complex who’s gone counter rogue, MIA since they shut down the Consulate spynest over on Green Street. Sleepers creepers, real Polonium 210-Novichok stuff, if you ask me. But we’ll see where it leads.”
“Isn’t that Feds’ territory?” I saw this as way above my pay grade, not that I was getting paid much anyway. But figured I had better tune in, listen up anyhow.
“That don’t cut it with my client right now. He’s materially concerned—down low, if you catch my drift, same like with ol’ man Ramsey. So it looks like I can throw a little more action your way, Herbert. But you’ve really got to step up your game for this one…”
“And you think I’m up to something like…”
“Out of the blocks, anyway. Now let’s see how this one develops, case-wise. In the meantime, I could still use your eyes and ears. Yah, this goddamn hawkshaw labor shortage is killing me these days. So just mole around the neighborhoods, scope things out as we go…”
“Mole, scope—what things?”
“I’ll be looping you into the specifics,” Eisenhoff glanced again out his windows for any pumped-up rallye cyclists making rounding errors too near his car. But not before his expression conveyed that a dirty half ass-Harry on hand was better than bupkis in the True Detective magazine classifieds. “Think eyes and ears for now—peel those eyes, Herbert, perk those ears.”
“Gotcha, drift around now and then, keeping it on the down low, like you said,” I jargoned up some, what with the pep talk. “That, I should be able to handle.”
“Aces. Cause this client is damn important to me,” he dusted phantom traces of dandruff from his lapels. “Think he’s also handing me a domestic case, but I’m not sure about the violence part. He’s a big player overseas, Europe—France. Says he’s looking for his former galfriend, figures she’s out this way somewhere, wants me to help track her down. Basically a missing person deal, hush-hush, no pole posters or anything, pure shot in the dark. But we’ll hold fire on that for the time being…”
“Do my best, Mister Eisenhoff,” I stood, squaring up, thinking just what I needed, even more two-bit drama. “Minus the hummus and fritzy tape recorders, that is…”
“Make it a smartphone with a good camera, Herbert, get with the program already. Whatever you do, stay in touch, and remember—this is all major hush-hush, on the QT, like that,” said Eisenhoff, clapping his hands after a middleweight fist bump. “Yessir, business is picking up alright. Agency’s goin’ global, so hop to it—lean and mean, jelly bean..it could be well worth your while.”
“R-r-right—maybe I’ll get the one with the rose gold finish…lenses like crazy.” Under the circumstances, it was the least I could say or do. Would that it were true…
Care for More?
CHAPTER FOUR. Tending to some
business downtown, where things soon
take a fiery turn…
“I’m telling you, Alison, ain’t no goddamn joke this time,” he screamed, even though she had clearly made her deselection and was now nowhere in sight.
But over the pitched din of horns, sirens and cab calls, I once again tuned in to Gunther’s spiel. There he was, all cranked up, still pacing furiously, dripping in fire accelerant and bicycle chains. The final gas can lay dented and empty aside his rumpled canvas duffel. Although my moling and scoping had brought me to San Francisco’s downtown on other matters, I froze and turned back en route. I couldn’t help but rivet on Gunther again, along with his transfixed crowd—catching my breath, striving to remain somewhat upwind.
Gunner continued strategically staging his little psychodrama near one of Union Square’s busier corners, precisely centered beneath a quartet of breezy entranceway palm trees. By now, the Square’s platinum power shoppers and shopping cart people had begun fully encircling him, milling in and out without appearing to look straight on. Some even tried to talk him down from this; otherwise, a gang of baggy overgrown skateboarders curled and sailed his perimeter, baiting him with matchbooks in mid-flight. Smartphone cameras were catching it all, HD video and stills, Samsungs and i’s raised like this was LeBron at the post-play podium.
“That’s right, no givin’ in, Alison,” Gunner ranted on deliriously, appearing to scratch scattered bug scabs, vapors rising from his shoulders in the high afternoon sun. “Why the holy fuck should I?!” His long bike chain scraped back and forth, sparking against the sidewalk, unmuffled by even the steel-wheel rumble of passing cable cars. “I like her, I love her…I hate her!!” Yet she was still nowhere to be seen at the time.
The skate bangers’ taunts soon proved entirely unnecessary, as he decided to take it upon himself, though already beyond the pale. “You killed us, she killed us, understand? So I kill…for love…”
He waved his green BIC wand like across his chest, then lowered it to his groin and flicked. A full flame torched his legs and torso as the gathered circle gasped, shrieked, turned blindly away. While Gunther ignited, I simply froze, transfixed—halfway staring, halfway averting—as though glimpsing fresh vomit on the sidewalk, wishing it away as nothing more than spilled cioppino. But this was no flambé fantasy, nor could it be dismissed as Tarantino cinema of some Buddhist monk unknown. Gunner’s harrowing, Hadean screaming and wailing sealed that verdict most conclusively.
“Holy heaven, somebody get him,” a Scandian tourist cried over my shoulder.
“Lady, I’m afraid there’s nothing there to get,” I muttered, having edged in behind her, alternately shielding my Chronicle and grainy leather Gold-Pfeil bag before my eyes.
“Then get what’s left of him, for godsakes,” gasped a Saks matron in passing. “Open a hydrant, anything!”
“For-get about it,” said her shopping sherpa, as he pulled her along. “That guy’s just another whacko…real incel loser, if you ask me.”
Fourth degree, fade to black: by now, Gunther’s entire aura was vastly shrinking away, his nerve endings shot, tendons and muscles contracting, his limbs shriveling up into a barely forensic fist. He’d already been gagging and choking, steadily asphyxiated in the toxic fumes, the intense heat searing his lungs amid wholesale tissue disintegration. Flames had consumed hair, dermis, constricted vessels; granular, germinal epidermis down to the capillaries, the papillary and reticular layers. Scalded swatches peeled away from his charred hide, dangling like oily rags—raw, red-blackened gore bubbling like overboiled gristle, leather to the bone. His pressure-cooked carcass reeked of acrid petrochemicals and fetid pork. I was sickened by it, even over here. Fire can be terrible that way.
A clot of converging sirens pried through stalled downtown traffic like Baffin icebreakers toward Union Square. At long last, traffic eased, fire crews and ambulances arrived, shopping carts rolled on, as did the clack and glide of airborne skateboards. Facebook posts were climbing the walls; Instagram, WhatsApp,Twitter and Pinterest uploads were well on their way. Yet Union Square itself already began returning to what passed for normalcy once the inferno had scorched away any remaining humanity. Sleekly turned-out shoppers resumed platinum charging toward Tiffany, Bally and Neiman-Marcus with upscale diligence and dispatch.
Commodore Dewey’s monument saluted mid Square, billboards for Apple and Niketown smiled down on Gunther’s memory as his corpse shrank into a final fetal position, reduced to an embering heap of rancid skeletal debris to be hosed over by paramedics and hauled away. No lagging rescue sirens, no sidewalk samaritans could have been much help—not that I was any more valorous when it all hit the fan.
“Attention, people, let’s be clearing a lane here,” shouted a traffic cop, arms waving, whistles blowing all around, which were even drowning out the emergency sirens.
I finally had to disengage from the immolation scene to rather regain some semblance of sanity, focusing on the mission that brought me to Union Square to begin with. Still feeling light headed and nauseous, I plopped down on a park bench directly across from the St. Francis Hotel, preparing to meet my unmaker. I fished rough draft pages from my Gold-Pfeil, hard copy sheets creased and ruffled like a magazine left sunning on a Crissy Field beach mat, as well as a yellow writing pad and quite possibly incriminating correspondence. Getting and holding my ducks in a row, I cursed the afternoon breezes, not to mention my Luddite reluctance to more voguishly tap an iPad or Phone.
But too late, no time for lame laments, as hotel doormen and S.F.P.D. motorcycle escorts soon heralded the landing of the bird I was intent on dogging, now rolling down Powell Street, doubtlessly from some salutatory Nob Hill affair. Suddenly, a black stretch limo sliced through it all, traffic jam or no, casting aside taxis, airport vans, Ubers and Lyfts as if the lead car of a presidential motorcade.
The Lincoln Navigator had taken on two extra sets of windows and wings between its smoked glass cockpit and the abrupt rear crown of its Landau roofline. All five side doors opened on cue, a buff, burly entourage wearing charcoal slacks, tobacco brown turtlenecks and blazers choreographed a tight flanking maneuver that served to form an impenetrable corridor between the curb and hotel portico. Like the Secret Service on Five-Hour and anabolics, they plowed away everybody and anything it their paths, barking, “Thank you for your cooperation, people” with robotic authority.
Still, I couldn’t resist gathering up my probative caseload, then furtively plodding across Powell Street to mingle with the lit groupies, starstruck window shoppers and a slipstream of passing tourists all amutter in a clash of tongues. Struck hardest was another AIDed homeless guy, who was bowled over by a strategic knee, his blanket and paperback flying. His wobbly luggage cart, stacked and bungee strapped with doorway bedding, toppled like a ten-pin spare. “You’re welcome,” he whispered, then went about righting his sign and earthly possessions, disinclined and ill-prepared to utter a further plaintive word.
“Hey, watch out,” I growled, game face planted and attitude on, when a broad, closely cropped personal assistant pulled limo doors open further, well into my wheelhouse. So they upended me, my valise and a warmed-over sample Frappé in descending disorder, all teetering on the curb. “And look what your thugs did to that poor homeless Joe over there.”
“Coming through!” Yet another pair of aides, if not plain old bodyguards, pushed open the rearmost door all the more, forming a flying wedge for their still somewhat mysterious charge. Suddenly, a relatively stiff, rangy form emerged from the back seat, built-in bar gleaming, video screens glowing over his shoulder. With that, a crush of gawkers, cameras and autograph junkies vised in from every direction, spontaneously chanting, ‘Marion, Marion, Marion…”
Hotel security guards rushed out to reinforce the cordon, now by a hand-to-hand rope line against the gaping full-court press. A surly MUNI motorman took to yanking the bell cord of an inbound Powell-Mason cable car so hard its clapper all but blew through the brass, its riders climbing down for a closer view of the clamor: not seen since President Ford nearly got his, escaping Squeaky clean. Traffic bound for the St. Francis and beyond stalled behind the trolley clear past the Sir Francis Drake Hotel up to Sutter Street, some drivers blaring and screaming, others abandoning their cars—onrushing, autograph pens in hand. Emergency vehicles fared little better on their pullout, much to the milling Gunner crowd’s handwringing and disputation.
Staring up with invertigo at neon signage for the Drake’s Starlight Room, I rolled forward like a high school tumbler to a full frontal view of the phenomenon before us. James Marion Hassett, mega-selling legal thrillersmith, realigned his loden green wool blazer with his midnight blue turtleneck beneath a back cashmere overcoat. Two steps later, he hiked up his ample black trousers to reveal tooled buckskin-on-brown Tony Lamas.
America’s pre-eminent fount of commercial fiction rotated 180 degrees to fluff his lacquered, thinning gray pompadour as if reflected in a Saks display window across Powell. The celebrated author then adjusted his tortoise shell Alain Mikli shades, before turning like one of his stunning plot twists to greet the latest crowd of semi-literate Marionets, star sapphire and amethyst birthstone rings shining on his fat little fingers.
“Please, keep respectful distance now, people,” firmly pled a running assistant, as the forward edge enveloped Hassett, leading him like pulling guard up into the hotel foyer, swiping aside various flat-surface swag, scanning the tightly pressed crowd, as though for stalkers or rooftop snipers. “Mister Hassett is in for an address over at the Commonwealth Club, and he wishes his St. Francis stay to be most undisturbed, thank you very much.”
By now, Hassett had been escorted safely into the hotel, nodding and waving his way up the red carped staircase, through the gilded, scarlet canopied portal. Some boyish, buzz-cut handlers scurried about in his wake, bearing books. They held their short stacks closely to their Marion-logoed pullover sweaters, and scattered about the sidewalk, tossing new hardcover copies of ‘Verdict Street’ about the ropeline crowd like so many tee shirts at a Giants ballgame giveaway, selfies going off in a show of hands. One even dropped one on the homeless guy, which glanced sorely off his shoulder. “Here you go, folks,” they said en unison,“hot off the presses.”
“Whoa, real consolation,” I shouted, despite myself, over the hostile clang of cable car bells, irate blowing of shuttle horns and waning Marionet chants. “That poor guy supposed to use it as a pillow, or what?”
“Here, brother—read all about it,” said the nearest advance man, pausing to push a colorfully covered copy my way. “Remember, James Marion understands the pain of your struggles. He’s always fighting for truth and justice, right there in your all’s corner!”
“Hey, I know something about your bossman here, okay,” I blurted, clutching the book like an evidential dossier, save for a flier flying out of it, mapping a Bay Area bookstore touch and go signing tour, from Corte Madera to Menlo Park. “Maybe a whole lot more than you’d think…”
Which wasn’t to say I didn’t stand somewhat awestruck by the blitzkrieg spectacle of Team Marion’s latest North American book tour. The sneak glance at the novel itself found a bright red-orange and blue jacket, with sketched, shadowy imagery of Man under stress, Woman knuckled under his thumb. Blurbs front and back proclaimed ‘Verdict Street’ to be Hassett’s latest, perhaps greatest effort to date—destined, no preordained to for number one ranking on every bestseller list in the land, every land, let alone a large and small screen movie adaptation.
Front flap to airbrushed author’s rear jacket photo, the volume exuded genre dominance and slick, cross-market packaging. But further scrutiny of its liner notes, then a flip-through review of my tablet scribbling left me as heavy of stomach as light of head. I hardly noticed the small silver foil seal on the cover’s lower-right corner, was not certifying early NYT bestseller status, but that ‘Verdict Street” was already hitting the market at 25% off list.
From there, it was a numb, flustered nod to the street sleeper, who was sitting quietly, already paging through his robo-autographed copy, phlegm blue blanket pulled clear up over his head. I reeled away, down yellow wheelchair access corner curbing toward Post Street, traffic homing in again as I flogged my forehead with legal-rule tablet and hardcover thriller. I was plotting to storm through the intersection, along a well-worn Powell Street glidepath between posh St. Francis shops and Chinese lantern streetlights outside the cavernous old hotel.
But I got jammed by an idling Airporter, stuck in a holding pattern now that Hassett’s limousine had rolled on to gobble up a vacated white zone, freeing up the Hyde cable car and two blocks of constipated traffic. A directional cop froze me altogether in fretful place at the crosswalk, taking control of the clog with a shrill whistle and flailing arms. I glanced back between muttering tourists, Marion’s limousine, then at his celebrated new novel itself, with the blunt force reckoning that I couldn’t just let this all pass like so many abrading gallstones. Not when I knew some of Gunther’s demons, had once felt his desperate rage—had it in writing, at that.
Spinning around again toward Post Street, I caught a slimly familiar figure re-emerging from Saks’ shadows, apparently intent on minding her Mini until a AAA tow truck finally broke through. But not before stopping to snatch a parking ticket or two from under the windshield wiper of Gunner’s sand-tan Daihatsu Charade. I didn’t need any new smartphone to catch a glimpse of that.
Care for More?
CHAPTER SIX. Rumblings of
figures gone and tremors
to come really hit home…
“Wha? Wait, Snapchat or Instagram?! They’re blowing up? 150 likes within ten minutes, fifty comments? And face time on Periscope? They liked it? How many?! Ohmygod, that’s soooo perfect!!!”
“Sorry, could you tone it down a bit…” These kids today, with the selfies and TXTSPK—if they’re always on their phones, how could they possibly have minds of their own? Just more tasking/exploiting high-technical marvels for trivial means. Honestly, gotta get your scene out of that screen, girl—off those blamed de-vices, stress on the latter syllable.
“Tsk, what’s your problem,” she replied, way uptalking vocal fry, basically ignoring and turning her back to me, balancing her rose gold iPhone X atop a Starbucks Vente to go, in full FOMO mode. A slim-fit nineteener from Moraga or so, early Chabot College coed type, chestnut with a banded mare’s tail, sweats and tattered denim, twizzling about on beaded strap sandals to up her bars. She then maintained safe distance in an indented browsing space just outside Bookworthy’s aluminum-framed display windows. “Gotta go Gina…you the best!”
“You see, I’m in the middle of…” A clash of inputs…diastolic spiking, endorphins dropping like counterweights.
“You okay, mister,” the caller turned back to ask, packing away earbuds on her way across Chestnut Street to another BFF at Tacolicious. She looked at me as if I were south of SSI and Section 8, the breezy eucalyptus nose and sprays of shoreline salt and algae no longer able to mask my sweatful airs.
“No, seriously, I’m trying to process a…” Couldn’t hear myself think…
“So weird, ’cause it looks like you just seen a ghost…”
“Uh, more like a ghosted writer, if you see what I mean…”
She couldn’t see it at all. The iPhone coed didn’t know or care less that I was blowing up over purloined words. So there we left it outside Bookworthy’s, with her TXTing off to a Tex-Mex tête-a-tête. Speaking of fitful bars, two watering holes lined up conveniently, if not suggestively right next door. Still, face time was fleeting as my runner’s high, and I had no stomach for further feeding a peptic ulcer.
But hey, mobile new media, maybe that was the equalizer, the fast path to Publisher’s Weekly instead of Publisher’s Clearinghouse. I could have gone digital already, posted on Scribd; ebook, Kindled the hell out of it, thrown the whole mess up on Amazon or a selfie website: yah, apps, streams and downloads, no paper ventured, no migraines gained—boiling the whole publishing crucible down to simple likes and dislikes, clear-cut thumbs up or down.
Then again, I’d always been a step off and behind, hopelessly analogue, in a dead tree, hard copy kind of way. Paleo old school stubborn, and look where it got me, to the Hassett eyeful I just caught today, bone tired of paying it all so far forward. Still, too little now, too late for line edits or rewrites, when it looks like the plot and premise have already been packaged and shipped en masse.
I scanned inside the windows, to displays of crossword paperbacks, art piece puzzles of Cezanne, Edward Gorey and Diego Rivera. Nothing of diversional interest there, so I scouted out the hand-drawn freebie book signing notices and ‘Meet the Author’ sessions, mainly local self-help, minor Bay Area exaltation scribes. That’s when it hit me head on: a glossy four-color poster announcing Hassett’s personal appearance for a Danielle Steele fête, framed with a snippet collage of his past blockbuster book covers. But I could see no further than ‘Verdict Street’. Portrayed in that same bomber jacket and a Green Beret, he and mega-writer confrère were to be lauded with a reading/Q&A at the Commonwealth Club downtown in but two weeks time, tickets limited and going fast.
Parched, famished all right, but I’d already been shaken and stirred enough as it was. So I drifted further up fly Chestnut Street, late-day onshores blustering me along, past the darker recesses of the sleek Campus Club, then the Tipsy Pig and its long-buried phantoms of a one-time ferny CSB&G. Both were already rowdy and raftered with a happy hour crowd, the two pubs bookending a precious old 24-karat goldsmithery, strategically located for any boozy, knee bender proposals to either side.
No such luck there, either: reason enough to drag along by facial ID-rigueur therma-skin cell stores and eye, lash & lipstick salons. I negotiated a mannerly sidewalk obstacle course of baby strollers and crusty Marina roller walkers—of retrievers, muggy bulldogs and feisty Labradoodles as if fresh from a Mudpuppy makeover—their leash masters having finally shed some slavish black-on-black for more brilliantly colorful North Face and Patagonia. Nevertheless, I kept coming out on the dark, losing side of all that as well.
Still, this cultivated slow-lane congestion did fortify the commingled aromas of Chestnut’s gourmet ghetto. I inhaled not particulates, but the tantalizing essence of taqueria y rottiseria, of the Panotiq bakery across the way, of Hunan Mu Shu, Curry Mi Fun and Mushroom Vi Mein. Bank branch quietude cater-cornered at Pierce Street was broken by an aging sax player wailing solo under Citi’s foyer cover for pennies on the dollar. Trusty millennials stiffly passed him by, lots of downed, fleecy Un-Tuck-It twents robotically snot-nosed through their smart phones, stoplighting their runaway rug rats, heeling sniffy, leaking kennel-bred dogs.
By this time, my flabbs were growling for a Juicy Maca Chia Seed Protein Cacao smoothie, or maybe some garlic parmesan take-out from Lucca Deli. I fought off the urge to dine and dash from the sidewalk tables of a saucy Italian garlic pasteria. Or Blackwood’s American Thai Fusion Mieng Kum Kung and Pad Kee; Dragon Well’s Ma Po Tofu and Tea-Smoked Duck, post-Stanford and Cal cliques queuing across the way. But all I could actually dig out of my key pocket was enough for a caffeine fix and momentary breather at Peet’s Coffee & Tea.
There I had sipped and steamed, trying to sort out my latest disharmony, absorb and duly process it—to recall where I screwed up in the process that led to James Marion Hassett’s storied crib job. Swallow and wallow: Peet’s cozy sidewalk bench had provided a long, streaming view of Chestnut Street’s early evening traffic, along with variegated whiffs of strong, exotic coffees masking my aerobic odors, and piscine makings from Naked Fish Sushi next door. A striking roseate dusk had soon set in, igniting pastel facades, creating neon glister from the former All-Star Donuts sign, to the grand double-bill marquee of the renewly Deco Marina Theater.
“i7 quad core, 3.5 GHz?”
“i5 actually—2.5…”
By now, Marina District restaurants were bursting, bars earnestly firing up. The dinner crowd sauntered up and down Chestnut—smart, gold swipe or (Four) Square pairings alighted from Ubers and Lyfts in designer casuals and sleek, spectral color aprés-sports, faces aglow in their little LED screens, several ‘hyper-breathers’ N95 masked. When I wasn’t caffeine mesmerized by pinging, blinking parking meters, I glommed onto the theatrics of the dogs leashed to them: Yappy Shiatzus and Griffons went at it with reticent Corgis and Pugs, snigglin’ French Bulldogs hounded chillin’ Bernese and Aussies. Passersby paused to fawn over snoozing cocoa Labs and English Cremes like they were family firstborn.
But eventually Sumatra shakes, high-end, zero-day code hackers, those Facebook or Tinder scrollers all got to me. So I cut out between an edgy Vizla and Ridgeback, catching a scent of spicy Ahi, a bouquet of lotions and bath soaps—a mug full of breeze blown smoky alcoholic brine from the cave men in the primeval Marina Lounge. Shapeshifting through hopelessly knotted main-drag traffic, I dodged abandoned e-scooters, a petitioner and sign spinner, everybody sporting their obligatory New York/L.A. scowls.
I then migrated in through a motherboard of minimalist long blond tables perfectly arrayed with everything iThis and That. Handy touch Pads, small screen and large; Retina 4G phones and laptops galore: Sidewall counters were lined with multi-core desktops and HD monitors, all the way back to the Genius Bar. Browsing iZombies and screen slaves crowded around each hard wired display like so many Oxy addicts—caressing, toying with the digital iWare, vividly backlit wall panels smiling brilliantly down. For my part, it was high time to BS a little MacSpeak, angling to sneak a free e-peek.
“32 gigs or a terabyte?”
“This one’s 8—are you…” asked a smiley, red shirted young Apple polisher who had joined me at this laptop table.
“Interested? Definitely,” I replied touch-feeling the new MacBook Pro 16-inch laptop. Yah, interested in freebie checking my email… “Right now I was just hoping to beta check my site’s PHP and SQL real quick…”
“Uh-huh,” he sniffed, dubiously eyeing my sweat wear, up and down.“BRB…”
Soon as the sales tech was drawn over to an iWatch table, I tapped into my Gmail, wherein I found a message from the Eisenhoff Agency. The head dick wanted me to check in with him ASAP, about a ‘white-hot client and ballistic new case’. No sleeping on this gig, which still rolled in and out despite my Reese Paulen/JonBenet tape snafu in aught-eight. So there was nothing else to do but log off, peel out of the Apple Store, head back uphill to clean up for a potential after-hours meeting. Yeah, three S’s and slip into something more comfortable—but then I’ve never really fit that well around here.
Gritty darkness had descended before I turned a corner on Steiner Street, weaving betwixt some early bird louts on a drunken barfari and accompanying hotties struttin’ their young butts and loose cleavage my way. Here, the gourmet ghetto fanned out with a savory flourish: organic teriyaki to Vietnamese street food, Ace Wasabi’s Sushi to Izzy’s grilled steaks and chops—with wine and probiotic tea bars to wash it all down. So many cafes and eateries on one short block, opening and closing, lease by lease.
Then again, restaurant row went nowhere fast compared to that greasy feast across Lombard Street, just beyond Euro and Central Valley tourists chain smoking outside the Cow Hollow Motor Inn. This mis en scène was beaming like the Marina’s 1916 Exposition, only set circa 1957. Cinematic searchlights and gobs of neon flooded this leg of Lombard’s motel strip, Mel’s Diner packed with ‘American Graffiti’ buffs who longed for or never left the Eisenhower era. I cut through the fabled drive-in’s retro street rod rally, multicolor illumined palm trees shimmering over the pearl luster and metalflake of diagonally stationed, hand-rub lacquered classy chassis.
I speed-shifted around a sweet sixteen of cherryed out vintage Chevys and Fords: past a chopped & channelled ’32 Deuce, two-tone ’57 Chevy ragtop; checked out a souped up ’55 Nomad, red ’56 fuelly Corvette and a ’40 Ford coupe with those tiny chevron tailights. Pedal to the metal, four on the floor—other aging lookyloos popped their wheelies around Iskys, Duntovs, AFBs, line-bored small blocks, heads ported & polished, chrome-reversed wide whites and 4:56 Posi like they couldn’t re-believe. Tonight anyway, Mel’s Drive-In was haul-ass, hot rod heaven—just like the bad old days.
En route, I soaked in all the Gunk and naugahyde, tuned into the loudspeakered ‘Drag City’ and ‘Shutdown Volume 2’. Lording over the diner itself was a Star Wars billboard for the latest boxed set and video stream. Inside, a restaurant full of aging daddy-O duck butts and bobbysoxer dollies gorged on cheddar burgers and meaty fries, dug meatloaf platters or deep-dish chicken pot pies. Sucking giant double-malts, they bopped under the framed photo stills and memorabilia from George Lucas’s souped up 50’s flick, to a jukebox soundtrack, Memphis to Philly to Motown.
I’d grown hungry as hell by now, caught up in Mel’s nostalgia as the star-struck tourists strolling by. Was just as awash in the movie beams, search lights foiling and parrying through the gearhead glitter, platinum palm trees and candy-apple skies—all the way to Mel’s end. But then came the skid marks. Turning the corner around his dumpsters into the mid-block alley between Lombard and Greenwich, I met up with a dimmer backstreet scene. Here, flashing red and blue lights signaled something far more cautionary and grim.
“Just keep moving here, folks, nothing of your concern,” ordered the woman SFPD officer, waving off me and a couple of other shortcutting figures with a lightsaber of Luke Skywalker force.
Easily the darkest, most curious address on this one-block length of Moulton Street was this shabby, misplaced Victorian, and the scraggly birch-like tree it was hiding behind. The place rotted across from some Lombard storefronts’ backsides and a couple of rear offices, none of which ever showed any signs of life. A grimy single-story house better suited to west Petaluma sat brown-white and fading between a boxy new apartment building and nondescript over garage flat.
Torn, water-stained drapes fully covered the Vicky’s front windows, with several odd little tribal figurines left tipsy on one’s inner sill. Its solid windowless front door, a few rotting steps up, bore three deadbolt locks, which raised the question of whether nefarious drugs or worse were going down in there, or the bungalow was simply tied up in some drawn-out probate litigation, while its tasseled gingerbread trim, sagging festoons and rotted flower boxes wore further away. Still, it was a house with which I was a bit too familiar.
Now however, the issue was more felonious than that, at least as far as I could see in hasty passing. Down on a short concrete apron leading to the house’s useless garage door, in a dark dip strewn with doggy bags, crushed cigarette packs, shattered beer bottles and dried hurl, lay what looked to be the the splayed body of a lifeless young woman, face down and away. Squad car flashers and spotlights revealed a shadowy figure wrapped in splashy aquamarine.
I couldn’t much make those contours out any better, and the police were already sheathing the entire apron. But a quick second glance, and I shivered that what if she had once been a fresh, smiling face up at the house, a tenant in beset, tenuous standing—could feel it in my hormones and bones. Somehow this figured; though of course that was just idle projection. All I really knew was the evening was still young; but hereabouts, fields of gray begat tiny streams of red.
That was one way of putting it, but I didn’t want to go there, the scenario leaving a nasty taste in my mouth…
Care for More?
CHAPTER THREE. An appointment
with a private eye opens one up to
several local scenarios, wherein he is
pressed to keep his peeled…
Collateral Saturnage:
(aka) Smoldering in Place.
It’s hailing crystal ball bearings, onshores are rattling windows at 90 m.p.h.—flooding, more flooding everywhere. There’ve been better days these days, then again others a fair sight worse.
Lightning, thunder—thunder and lightning, none without the other, but here? Hillsides sliding like Peposo on the rocks, roadways sinking away: Extreme weather whiplash, alright—Biblical storms be comin’ in, a climatitous firehose of water, rainy season on Drano. Christ, it wasn’t supposed to be this way, this hard and fast, soaking land that had been so dry for so long. But the atmospheric rivers just keep overflowing—king tides shattering piers, casting a roiled ocean further and further into low-lying coastal neighborhood haunts, seiching a haphazard stormfront of sandbags, plywood, water pumps and tarpaulins.
By now the rains are teeming horizontally, tree branches, whole limbs blowing like Nevada tumbleweed down streets and streams, this creaky old house shifting and swaying to the tune of Loma Prieta ’89. Moreover the old queen Vicky had outlasted the 1906 quake as well, so there’s that. But it’s the current rumbling power compressor and generators, the incessant jackhammer pounding wall to wall despite it all, that is further straining her old-growth redwood joists on such a tempestuous San Francisco day as this.
CLICK. Anyway, where the hell was I? Oh yeah, coming out of that whole COVID coma, work and deadline worries still piling up like sandbags at the door. Wondering anew what I could say to her, to them all by now should they find me here—if those rancid bastards would come to flush me out again. But what’s done is mainly done and gone, yet what’s undone is redone in virtually unreal time.
So yes, yes! Be here and right now, a certifiable yes man, as gladhandily affirmative as everybody else around here. Serious business, get oppressively optimistic if you know what’s good for you, after being brutally negative for too long. Damn straight, forecast: brown turns to green, gray turns to blue: looks like rivers of rainfall receding inchmeal, with slivers of sunshine seeping through. Even while the immediate riverscape out this cracked bay window sends me reeling back into those immediately pre-pandemic days by comparison—just before it all. Funny how these things always seem to storm back around.
Hence revisiting the ‘Just Before Days’, starting NOW…and then…
__________________________________
JustB4Days
“Imitation is the seamiest
form of flattery…”
Then came a full frontal assault, smack in the grille—a black letter/gilt foiled, rejiggered slap in the face. Here I was, in the endorphin zone, having just come off the usual 5-K, a hill-aerobic, gale-blown slog through San Francisco’s greater Presidio, stately Pacific Heights on down—anything to drop a fleshy belt roll or two. Camphorous, peeling eucalyptus groves, olive-drab military history gone bright Spanish white and terra cotta: the route was usually hard-run balm for my atrophying body and increasingly aggravated mind.
“Spare…change?”
“Do I look like I have any money on me?”
“And I do? Just down from Paradise, lost it all. Am still waiting on a payout from some Victim’s Trust Fund that PG&E keeps jackin’ around. Yah, rugged country, and the next thing you know, there’ll be floods or earthquakes up there.”
But this homeless encounter now brought back memories of Spare-the-Air granular skies and cherry red-dot sunsets—of particulate matter from the infamous Camp Fire, mixing with residual vestiges of previous Tubbs and Nuns. My lungs still ached some from inhaling the effluvium of these seemingly inescapable Indian summer infernos, and a Kincade Fire had come menacing Napa-Sonoma all over again. The firestorms were largely byproduct of hellacious offshore winds downing power lines, exploding overtaxed transformers across the Bay Area come Labor Day, upshot of climbing temps, deeper brush and drought desiccated fuel beds; of bark beetle infestations, denser savannahs and chaparrals. Designated urban firestorms, they were byproduct of hellacious offshores downing power lines, of exploding overtaxed transformers, lightning arresters, sparky three-phase reclosers all across the wine country terrain.
“Uh, really sorry about that,” I looked away, edging to slip aside, again pointing to my ragged blue Asics running shorts and ancient Puma tee. I was thankful for the rising Air Quality Index of late, but that wasn’t tempering my sudden downward mood swing in the slightest. “I can imagine…”
“Oh, you can, can you…” This haggard street stander reached out from the torn pockets of an ill-fitting black trench coat, leaning forward sockless, in scuffed, brown wing-tipped shoes. “Well fire is greedy, you know. It takes everything, can happen anywhere, anytime. Fire’s terrible that way.”
“Matter of fact, I can imagine it. But have a good one, okay? Hope it all comes through real soon,” I nodded, moving on. For there were still so many horror stories like his—of Venturi swirls, fire tornadoes, high-velocity eddies and vortices slinging sparks and cinders, creating 100 m.p.h. thermal columns, hoovering combustible material as they rose, soon igniting acreage in vast horizontal swaths. Plumas to Paradise, vineyards to the Emerald Triangle: News accounts had mapped the spread of indiscriminate wildfire destruction—charred chassis, cherished heirlooms, spindly Walmart lounge chairs—hillside mansions to overreaching subdivisions and a valley of quondam mobile homes.
The worst such firestorm in California history, Camp had gutted the lives, precious lands and material treasures of locals like him, who fled extreme events with go-bags in the middle of the night, facing ferocious Diablo winds and ember flows, horrific hot-flash reckonings and door pounding evacuation orders by the municipal scores. This while evacuees choked on the toxic smaze from charred tiles and roofing, thick wood smoke spiked with torched polymers, viscid ash—a carbonic stew of flame retardant and spent fuels—spilling all the way down to The City. Nothing that a good atmospheric river wouldn’t liquidate, albeit minus the mudslides. Still, it made a person wonder where thousands of displaced victims like this guy would be sheltering through years of cleanup, recovery and missed compensation deadlines, having as I did some residual skin in that game.
Otherwise, it was grief and pain and pray for rain: Blame PG&E, rampant overdevelopment or climate change for these horrific fire seasons, power shutdowns and red flag warnings they bring. Not that a decent winter season and cooler temperatures hadn’t eased the infernal threat some lately, All the same, I was suddenly burning even hotter in the here and now.
“Unbelievable,” I gasped—oh, no, not this.
“That’s one way of putting it, to be sure…”
“No, I mean, this can’t really be happening…”
“Oh, but it can, sir,” she beamed, “went up just today.”
By the same token, replay of the NorCal conflagrations had further kindled my recollective cortex. Earlier flashbacks began amid second and third winds along the dune grassy flats of leaden Crissy Field, where long-scuppered thoughts surfaced like channel buoys on the choppy San Francisco Bay, merely a slivered beach away. Despite sucking in sand, long-tail ash and heavy salt-marine air out there, I chugged along powerless to deny an abiding endorphin addiction in any way, shape or form.
Top of mind was how Reese Paulen and I had blown up and out of our whole Anti-Buddies routine since 2008. I’d replayed step by labored step the way our Middle East peace train had gone off the rails. Rhetorically stalemated and polarized our own selves, we were getting cheered and hissed, shouted down and booed off debate stages from Mt. Holyoke to Humboldt State. There were the angry protest placards at Rutgers, sit-ins at Brandeis, counter/counter demonstrations at Columbia, trigger warnings and safe zones at Oberlin and Madison, the cross-bred bomb threats at UC Irvine and Westwood. We got accused of everything offensive—fake prophesy to cheap seats provocation—the third rail in action, as if militant downshouting actually helped the cause. In retrospect, better we’d never brought the whole thing up in the first place. But somebody had to try to find some common ground. And so we did, notwithstanding all the political pyrotechnics and geo-barriers, anti versus anti-anti crossfire ever upping the ante, at least until the donations dried up.
We had even tissued out a website, which would eventually have been hacked and trolled anyhow. Moreover we tinkered with a podcast, diddled around with the codings of a killer app, at least until the seed feed ended in a round-one TKO. That was about when our secular, well meaning discourse exited stages left and right. Sad to say, it was a long shot from the ’08 moment we were sprung from 850 Bryant Street after being cleared of felony charges, due to lack of incriminating testimony or smoking guns. In retrospect, odd what a guilty conscience can make a body do, and get done to, for that matter.
“But such an incredible hype job…”
“Big launch, for a big figure,” the woman tidied up a stack in passing. “Larger than life, wouldn’t you say?”
“Barely larger than lowlife, maybe. But the jury’s still out on that…”
“Sorry, I don’t quite…”
Jogging along Crissy, I had revisited as how Professor Paulen resettled in Berkeley with his daughter to found his Anti-Buddies Research Center with a MOOC component and seminars at the JCCs—despite so little having changed for the better anywhere in the Levant. Rather, Israeli-Palestinian circumstances had spun into an unremitting southern trajectory and standoff with no peaceable closure on the Mideast horizon. So much disputed territory, borders to breach and defend: I figured doc had his hands full, what with the Two-State Illusion likely never to materialize as envisioned for so long. I just needed to pot down those fractious voices in my head again—wishing the level best for the Middle East—that all parties might secure their sense of peace and place in this world. As if that were the last I’d hear of it, as if I couldn’t pretty much guess where it may well be headed, fact by ground.
Nevertheless, we did crack crab now and then to keep doors open on that, brainstorm some other heady projects, compare where we were at the moment and rue the past. At least that was how I could re-piece it all together in my ever-running mind. That is, anytime doc more or less popped back in. Beyond that, I had long come to grips with Dame Thornia’s demise, and the sui generis entrails that ensued. So by now I was content to cool down with recovery calm and good post-aerobic telomeres, head to toe. Then came this potboiled affront.
“Uh, nothing, no matter,” I said, focusing on what was in store. “Must just be your window display or… ”
“Yes, well, it’s his latest, you know,” rallied the studious sales clerk, who had sidled up to dust the new fiction table, center floor at Bookworthy’s, this literary staple of a Marina District that hadn’t suffered such AQI vapors since Loma Prieta 1989.
“Topping the lists already, is it,” I asked, having been faceplanted to the legal thriller section, my New Balance supinators on their old, worn-through heels.
“You bet, like a Saudi oil well,” she tidied up two high hardcover stacks, prominently front and middle on the display counter, which crowded out other New York Times best sellers like Exxon at a Gulf rights bidding war. “He just keeps pumping them out every year.”
“Seems too good to be true, doesn’t it?” I picked up a top copy of ‘Verdict Street’, flipping past its glittery gold-on-mean streets emblazoned cover to the ISBN and acknowledgement pages—lightly fingering through the aroma of black letter ink and bindery glue, cracking and creaking of its virgin spine—finding little or no consolation.
“Yes, it is almost Pavlovian automatic, like with all his others—such a commanding body of work…” She looked on with all due proprietary concern.
Bookworthy’s was by no means a megastore, but wasn’t a cozy little lit nook either—not insignificant in a day when such brick and mortar retail outlets scarcely survived the Amazon onslaught. Long wall shelves of fiction and non-fiction, of genre after genre sections for every decent taste including war stories and tell-all tomes. Beyond front window banners heralding James Marion Hassett’s latest, this voluminous fiction table was thick with his publisher’s thematic bunting, bookmarks and flyers.
Fortifying that promotional push were gushing Sharpie marker store picks, two strategically centered stacks, four more on adjacent floor display at the foot of a nearly life-size cutout of the writer himself, in a leather bomber jacket and Special Forces ballcap, justice scales prominently in hand. Otherwise, Bookworthy’s prime retail real estate offered racks of local to global periodicals, row upon row of home design, cookbooks, coffee table pictorials, bios/autobios, travel, romance and sci fi—of guides, gifts, posters, kitty calendars, clasped diaries, coffee mugs, studio greeting cards and sheeny wrappings. Nevertheless, mega-author Hassett currently lorded over it all.
“Uh-huh, how do you figure he keeps coming up with these story ideas,” I asked, barely stifling the urge to toss the formulaic 400-page legal procedural at Hassett’s cutout like some Dunk-the-Clown booth on an old Playland midway.
“That’s his pure genius, now isn’t it…” The clerk patted the renowned author’s cardboard shoulder, smile as prim as her pastel H&S separates and tight blond bun.
“Guess you could call it that,” I said, weighing the novel’s tactile heft with a jounce of the hands like a rangy reliever palming his resin bag.
“Sooo, find what you were looking for?” Seemed as if she sniffed a whiff of dissent on my part; either that or she finally caught wind of my poly latex saturation and low-grade bodily functions.
“Yes, ’fraid so…”
“Excellent, now you’ll have to excuse me,” she said in withdrawal, with a glance and nod toward the store manager/cashier, Mahler and Mendelssohn mood speakering about.
The opening grabber read, ‘Fields of green begat streams of red’. What kind of stale hack garbage was this?! Hmm, otherwise looked similar, title was almost a dead ringer, read awfully damn close, trail of my synopsis and teaser excerpts and pulls. Damn, look at that, a couple of characters were named the same. Even the cover image was straight out of my line of sight, fruit of my overworked imagination. He might as well have given me an ‘as told by’ co-credit, citation on the verso ISBN page, or at least a thank you or liner blurb.
So blindsided, so violated: There was little to do but slam the thing down like a towaway parking citation, and storm out of the store essentially empty handed, hoping not to trip its security alarms. Petty theft, backatcha—all the way out the doors. Negativity bias, cortisol flow: suddenly gone was the endorphin high. Old anterior cruciates were screaming for an MRI. I could feel the burn from my ligaments to lungs: Time to dial things up a notch, and all the rest of it…
Still I paused, and turned to fixate once more on the Hassett hype and idol worship, misplaced though it manifestly was. Christ, what possessed me to start down this road in the first place? Stumble through some hellish hard knocks, scheming about grinding a book out of it. Book, shit, great un-American novel, best seller bound, shopping the slop around like a Market Street meth hero peddling demented guitar licks with Orpheum and Shoreline sell-outs in his drippy custard eyes. Mailing queries, synopses and sample chapters back east, down coast—agent to agent, house to house—lot damn better I’d been faring my own self, so close to shredding the whole effort altogether, as if buying a skosh more peace of mind.
Really, all that Kinko copying and SASE two-way postage, thinking it was actually going to get me somewhere, basically giving the goods away, paying the freight for that warped, weighted hard-copy game, getting form rejections way too long after the fact, with nary a nibble or two. When I might as well have gone the vanity press route anyway, bought into the fees, false hope and self-delusional hokum —maybe fake a death or disappearance to scam some sales—along with the bored lit-major housewives, retired K-12 teachers and decommissioned brass.
Yet for all the non-responses and piled up stock reject slips, this sucker was different as I let it burn in. It was more personal, much deeper and more asymmetrical, even crookedly diabolical—this one stuck to my ribs.
Care for More?
CHAPTER TWO. Up the street,
Apple polishing, savoring some
some glittery cherries, then a
turn of a corner into the darkness…