One Foot Off the Gutter

Table of Contents

 

 

 

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Angels of Catastrophe
Police and Thieves
Snitch Factory
The Romance of the American Living Room
Darkness Throws Down the Sun
Black Wheel of Anger
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t
he intersection of Sixteenth and Mission was known to us as a lawless quadrant. It was a matter of perspective. A belief that all things began encircled by the devil. A couple of policemen were standing at that corner. I could see them clearly, but distantly, as though I was far away on a high altitude. It was an old habit of mine, getting the detached view. In my eyes, the two cops had always been there practically rooted to the cobblestones. The smaller, younger one of the pair, not looking too comfortable in his own shoes, was viciously snapping bubble gum in his mouth. The other cop, dyspeptic, preoccupied and pigeon-toed, that was me.

Bellamy deflated his impatience in the same time it took to let the air out of a child's balloon. As I'd told him earlier, years earlier at the dawn of our relationship when we'd been different, all we had to do was remain calm.

He flexed his neck, then rolled it therapeutically several
times to the right and to the left. My left eye twitched where it always did when I wasn't getting enough sleep. Right below my eyebrow in the fleshy, puffy fold where there used to be smooth, unlined skin. It felt like someone had planted an engine under there.

My exhaustion brought to mind a memory that had little to do with where I was. Forty-three summers ago on a similarly torrid day, my mom and her boyfriend had pooled their savings, and went out and bought me a red and white bicycle. For my mother that summer was not only about me and a new bicycle, it was also about a romance with a tall, dark carpenter.

The bicycle was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me in the four winters of my life. Wanting to show off to the kids next door, I marched it over there.

I was savagely disappointed. The three girls and the two Van Dusen brothers were playing cards on a folding table under an umbrella in the backyard. They were sipping lemonade, talking shit, and they just couldn't be bothered with me or my bicycle.

A rift between wanting to please people, and wanting to beat them down; it's a characteristic I'm still paying for to this day. I saw myself swell up, hydrate, and burst, punctured by a deep, pervasive resentment. I picked up a rock laying in the dirt by the side of the driveway, a smooth, warm stone. I heaved it at the nearest girl, striking a blow on her cheek, bloodying her nose.

The Van Dusen boys jumped up from the table, sending their chairs sprawling. They picked up my bike, and they smashed it on the cement, bending the rim of the
front tire. The girls taunted me; one of them went to get her daddy. I stood there stuck in the middle of regret for my act and the desire to do it again. And because I had to make a choice, and because I didn't want to, the span between liking people and not liking them grew in me. Beginning with that summer and the bicycle at my feet, I started to become who I am.

I'm a veteran San Franciscan police officer. And Bellamy? When he got through with rolling his neck, we were going to take a ride to another part of the neighborhood, over to a place I knew about on Twenty-first Street.

 

 

 

 

 

 

i
t was a funny place, that street. Not that it mattered; not that anything mattered when it was this hot. He smelled the tinge of a distant fire; it fit perfectly into what he was seeing out the window. He thought it was the end, and as far as he could see, he was right. There was nothing worse than having a police car parked in front of your house. Nothing else made him feel as bad. There were rules and there were laws, but one thing was for sure. If you didn't have any money in your pockets, and if the police were interested in you, there was a problem.

Free Box looked out the window. He looked twice. There they were, those cops, down there on the broiling cement. He didn't move a muscle. He didn't breathe. Somewhere in between his mouth and stomach, his heart injected a spasm into his bloodstream.

He steadied himself at the window's sill, inhaled, and waited for the situation to change. One minute, then two minutes went by. He assessed the odds. He thought quickly.
His mind worked in several directions at once. Maybe the cop car would go away. Maybe not.

Sometimes a police vehicle was no more substantial than a mirage. It glided through the streets of the neighborhood like a ghost machine. But he couldn't afford to take any chances, just in case this cop car was for real. He was going to have to hold his breath until he got dizzy, until the cops went away. He'd have to play dead man until they left for some other destination.

The floor creaked and for a second, the walls swayed. They moved almost imperceptibly, just enough to make him experience a momentary loss of equilibrium. He wanted to shift his legs, but he didn't bat so much as an eyelid. The girl came up to him from behind.

“Who's out there?” she whispered.

“Nobody,” he said.

“If there's nobody out there, why are you standing here?” she asked.

The sun was lowering into the west, dropping behind Bill's Whirl-o-mat and La Bodeguita
groceria
. Dusk was a bad time to have an encounter with the police. There was something about the hour that made a conflict worse than it had to be, as if the moment was made for danger. The proof was right outside his front door.

He stared out the window. Plaster dust kept falling off the ceiling in intermittent waves. It had something to do with the passage of the heavy trucks going up and down the street all day long. He was dusted white by the plaster. His face and hair were coated with the stuff; his clothes had turned gray.

“I'm going downstairs. I'll be back in a minute.” the girl said.

The police car had come out of nowhere. There wasn't any reason for it to be parked by the curb simmering in a soup of heat waves. It was pure coincidence. But that didn't change his mind about its appearance. He tightened his fingers around the checkered wooden grips of the revolver until his hand ached. He blinked and watched the cops through the tattered chintz curtains hanging over the window. The pulse of his blood telegraphed a message into his skull, counting every year, and every memory, beating a signal into the tip of the finger bent around the trigger: don't move; not now.

 

A single empty wine bottle was standing in the middle of Twenty-first Street, standing upright on the blistered, scarred asphalt. I noticed it twinkling out there. I squinted through the windshield, turned in my seat and asked Bellamy, “Do you see anybody up there in that building, man?”

Bellamy sighed. “Nah. I can't see shit. I thought I saw someone up there on the second floor, but in this light, I don't trust my own eyes. There's nobody up there, Coddy. Let's split. Really, man, we're wasting our fucking time, and it's starting to tick me off.”

A sudden tension filled the squad car, one of a dozen that had happened during the day. I did not want to tolerate Bellamy's puerile behavior. I conjured up a poisoned glance and threw it across the front seat at him. Bellamy, the lamb: he winced and looked away.

“You're brilliant, you know that, Bells?”

Despite a demanding form of interaction that went far beyond any normal, orthodox friendship, I couldn't figure out my partner. I'd worked with the guy for six years, but there were some quirks in Bellamy's character that continued to vex me.

“You want a cigarette, Coddy?”

“Nah.”

Bellamy's face was a mosaic of grimaces and tics held together by a pair of tightly pursed lips nibbling on a toothpick. His pockmarked skin was filled with shadows that changed shape every time he clenched his jaws or opened his mouth. His thick gray, well combed hair fell over a bold forehead. The effect was like nothing I'd ever seen before.

“I got to keep looking good, Coddy,” Bellamy once explained. “If a man doesn't keep his appearance together, it's like signing his own death warrant. No one will touch you.”

I was inclined to agree. A hair transplant was better than being bald. But the fact of the matter was this: Bellamy's transplant made his face look lopsided, as if it had been squeezed out of a tube. The word around the station was that Bellamy got plenty of action from the ladies. I knew it was true; no one was more intimate with Bellamy than me. But even after knowing him for six years, I could not discern what women saw in him.

Bellamy looked at me with a moue of supplication glued to his mouth. It was not a pretty sight, Bellamy's queer smile. Whenever he tried to coax his mouth to give
up some expression, some animate response, the results were grotesque. He'd caught a palsy on his face a few years before and even though he'd fully recovered from the muscle atrophying virus, his mouth remained a little crooked. His upper lip did not move in conjunction with its bottom half, sculpting Bellamy's face into a neurotic mask. He was begging with that smile, making his torment palpable.

“C'mon, buddy, let's get out of here. Let's go to that bar I was telling you about. El Oso on Valencia Street. I'll buy you a beer. What do you say? They got this new girl working the joint. When you see her, you'll forget about screwing your wife for the rest of the week.”

“Later with the ladies, Bellamy,” I said. “We've got business now. Otherwise, I wouldn't be here anymore than you would.”

The night was supposed to a be a cop's worst nightmare. That's when the criminal elements came out to ply their trade on the streets, complicating my job with variables like coca, chiva, outfits, and strong arm. Most cops preferred to conduct their duties in broad daylight. But what messed up my concentration and my ability to act in a professional manner more than anything else, were the few minutes in between night and day. Dusk was when I started seeing things. Maybe I needed to eat more carrots; maybe I needed glasses, I didn't know. I was very paranoid.

“Coddy?”

“Yeah?”

“I'm getting cold.”

“So? Put on your jacket.”

The job guaranteed a healthy dose of paranoia. It was
one of the reasons I did my work with quality and competence. Fear is a tremendous incentive; never doubt it for a moment. Paranoia gave me a healthy, wary edge, and kept me alert and fastidious in whatever I did.