One Foot Off the Gutter (3 page)

Gladdened by Bellamy's invitation, I waddled over to the scene. I was self-conscious like a model on the runway, heeding the rookies' eyes as they rested on my gun belt and waistline. I wiped away a few cinders from my chin and grimaced, “What is this?”

Bellamy, ever sensitive to my changing moods, was chewing on a licorice stick to curb his appetite for tobacco. He gave me a candid, vulpine glance. A thoughtful, keen stare that was part wild animal and partly the reflection of a kid who'd graduated from a Catholic orphanage. Most of the rookies were silently watching him talk to me.

“Remember that dealer we busted on Treat Street?”

“You're burning his shoes?” I was modestly incredulous, forehead wrinkling deeply. “That should keep you busy for a while.”

It hadn't occurred to Bellamy that he was doing anything wrong; he didn't know what to say. My accusatory tone of voice dampened him. Both of us froze inside of ourselves. When one of us wasn't happy, the misery just oozed out of him in a dribble of frustration and the other was quick to feel it.

I contented myself by staring at the fire. Sooner or later, Bellamy would snap out of it. Unlike me, he was the forgiving kind. The rookies were having a good time joking and throwing shoes at each other. A random shoe rocketed into the air a few feet above the burning pile, propelled by some mysterious combustion of leather and
oxygen. The shoe sailed up into the fire's smoke; the cops whooped and pointed their fingers at it.

The smoke daubed the parking lot with a tint of blue that made the sun and Mission Street seem removed, beyond the horizon. I knew Bellamy wanted to get the silence between him and me over with. In deference to my greater age and wisdom, he had to let me take my own time to say whatever it was that had brought me out into the parking lot in the first place.

Finally, I said, in a voice that did not belong to me, “You heard about that guy who got gunned down the other day?”

I said it with a flip, I-don't-care tone. Pleased as he was that I was speaking my mind, I could see by the expression on his face Bellamy didn't want to talk about people getting shot. He'd been the target of select bullets during the course of his career as a police officer, and so had I. Every cop in the Mission had been shot at except Gilbert.

“When I heard about it, I didn't know what to do,” I admitted.

The timidity in my voice camouflaged the loathing I was feeling. I wasn't willing to say the victim had been a fellow police officer.

“Don't let it touch you, Coddy,” Bellamy advised.

Catsup stains and smeared black cigarette ash begrimed my combat blouse. My heavy Sam Browne belt hung low on my hips under the bulge of my belly, weighed down by a gigantic, nickel plated forty-five caliber Brazilian-made revolver. The barrel of the revolver dangled to the top of my kneecaps. Even with a clean uniform
I would have resembled a sack of potatoes; my muscles formed rocky lumps under the combat overalls.

Getting shot wasn't anything to laugh at. The prospect frightened me. The notion was bitter and painful. I stared at the fire and at the green, inexperienced rookies around it. Shoe polish-flavored smoke was wafting over the parking lot, shrouding the cop shop before spiraling high over Duggan's Mortuary and the rest of Valencia Street.

Bellamy put his hand on my arm to let me know I wasn't alone, that he cared. It meant more to me than he could have possibly realized. I felt Bellamy's hand was holding me down to earth, to some stable point on the planet where I was steady and ready to believe in myself. How much self-doubt had I consumed over the years? Only Bellamy could tell me and he wasn't able to do it with words.

 

 

 

 

 

 

m
arvelous sunlight was pouring over the Mission. A light filled with shellacked intensity. Laminated panels of light that touched down upon the long rows of Victorians on Twenty-first Street.

Most of the pastel colored Victorians were freshly painted, pleasing to the eye, and murder on the pocketbook. The Victorians looked like they came straight from the pages of the Sunday paper centerfold. Newly planted banana palm trees dotted the sidewalk in front of their cobblestone driveways. Redwood boxes filled with peonies, and trellises of jasmine and bougainvilleas decorated their doorways. Brand new cars were parked by the curb. In the middle of the block, surrounded by all of that mouth watering real estate, stood an abandoned building.

It was a house no one cared about and that no one owned. In the healthy organism of private property, this
derelict Victorian was a cancerous cell. The house knew its days were numbered. Since no one cared about it, destruction was inevitable; progress implied it.

A hundred families had lived under its roof. A dozen babies had been born there. The old had passed away in those same rooms. The abandoned building remembered every one of them.

There had been an immigrant Italian family that had come to the city from Chile to seek their fortune in the dry goods market. The Rossis were a large clan with several comely daughters. The girls were given away in a series of marriages by their dimwitted father. This drove their mother to the high wires of madness. The old man had never been a good judge of character. A crop of divorces by his daughters and the collapse of the business happened inside two years. After his wife died in the year of the great earthquake of 1906, the embittered immigrant sold the building to a Jewish family. He took a sailing ship back to Chile and was never heard from again.

San Francisco was ruthless and unpitying: it had never been kind to the refugees who flooded its streets clamoring for a better life. People came and went in the Mission following the tides of ambition and the currents of misery that flowed from continent to continent around the globe.

The Jewish family moved into the house with great fanfare, setting the neighborhood tongues to wagging. Prominent among the members of the foundling household were a brace of headstrong brothers who were involved in the enterprise of bootlegging whiskey. Their mother was a fragile woman from Odessa who always wore
her red hair in a headache-inducing bun. Their father was a silent man who prayed and drank himself into unconsciousness every night.

Most of the Mission had become Irish. The Chileans who'd lived there for a generation were moving to other parts of the city. The Mission was fast gaining a reputation as a place where immigrants went to make a start in America. The neighborhood delighted the whiskey smuggling brothers. They were full of ideas and dreams of wealth. Here was a natural outlet for their illegal goods. Everyone liked to drink, to forget the tribulations of cultural assimilation. Unfortunately, a majority of the policemen in San Francisco were Irish and they, too, happened to live in the district.

The eldest brother kept getting arrested, going in and out of jail until he was found laying face down in the street with a bullet in his neck. The next brother was wounded during a shoot out with the police while trying to deliver a load of gin to a brothel. His ambushers dragged him away into the night, down an alley off Eighteenth Street near the union meeting hall and he was never seen again. The youngest brother died of consumption during a seven year jaunt at Folsom State Prison.

Shortly after his death, the brothers' mother and her silent husband packed up their belongings and moved to the Fairfax area in Los Angeles.

 

Years went by and no one else moved in. The building was forlorn without the company of human beings. It had grown accustomed to the presence of people, to their talking,
sleeping, fighting, and best of all, their lovemaking. When the Mission had been young, the building was still new.

The abandoned house was springing leaks in its roof; the beams in the attic were rotting. The building was tired and sometimes it yearned to be razed to the ground. Other buildings on Twenty-first Street had gone to their demise that way, levelled by blows from the wrecking ball.

Cobwebs stretched from wall to wall. Piles of dust had grown into sand dunes by the front door. Trucks rumbled up Twenty-first Street causing plaster to fall from the ceiling onto the floorboards.

Each street had its own direction, an appearance that indicated what kind of people resided there. Twenty-first Street was transforming itself into something the abandoned building had never seen before. There was prosperity in the air.

 

 

 

 

 

 

b
ellamy and myself were cruising Mission Street in our patrol car. We were pulling a fourteen-hour shift. Bellamy thought he'd been sitting in the vehicle for years, maybe decades. The car was his life; everything he did was related to the squad car.

“You got any matches, Coddy? I left mine at the station.”

“Why don't you get one of those plastic lighters. You can buy ten of them at a time. They're cheap.”

“I want a match, not a fuckin' lecture.”

The usual gaggle of junkies were standing in front of the Chinese cafeteria. They were bent into stone cold nods that exaggerated the earth's gravitational pull. Heroin was a supermagnetic force field; sixty-four percent pure in the streets and getting cheaper by the moment. It was sending its users into outer space whenever it didn't send them to the county morgue. Whatever else heroin did, I didn't want to know about it.

“Every day, I wake up, and I ask myself, is this the day the world is going to change? Is it gonna be different out here today?” Bellamy said.

“Joke's on you, partner.”

I thought of myself as an anthropologist. I was sifting through the debris of the Mission, a social scientist who saw everything under a microscope, magnified under glass. The Mission was rife with illnesses that needed a vaccination. In a more sanguine state of mind, I referred to myself as a doctor with a gun and a nightstick. Our squad car was an ambulance; our hospital, a pair of handcuffs; Bellamy was my assisting nurse.

A fleet of shopping carts belonging to some homeless men was corralled together with bungee cords at the corner of Eighteenth Street. The carts were stacked chest high with recyclable beer bottles, moldy blankets, second hand clothing, and other trophies that came from garbage dumpster diving. The cart in the middle of the corral had a baby German shepherd puppy nestling on top of a filthy pillow. The puppy lifted its square head and with its dumb liquid brown eyes, it watched us drive by.

“Cute, ha? They make great attack dogs,” Bellamy said lazily.

I leaned my head out the window, flinching against the harsh sun while eyeballing a junkie hitting up on the sidewalk. The guy was sitting comfortably on the pavement with his back to the window of a check cashing establishment. He could have been working on his sun-tan for all that anyone knew. The spike was poised over his clenched hand as he meditated on the long awaited
moment of relief. Then he sunk the load into his wrist. His face went slack, loosening the deep furrows that ran from the corners of his nose down to his lips.

“That's a real beautiful sight.” I was offended, wounded to the quick by the stupidity of that junkie. The street, the sun, the other people; I hated them.

“Forget it,” Bellamy cautioned me. “The asshole ain't hurtin' nobody.”

“Stay out of my face. If I want you to tell me what my priorities are, I'll let you know, okay?”

“Well, whatever. You're the boss.”

Bellamy opened a fresh pack of cigarettes. He'd already finished off one pack, and our shift wasn't anywhere near done. Bellamy had told me that, confidentially, I was making him nervous and as a consequence he was smoking so much he was going to get emphysema inside a month. I told Bellamy to hang tough with the tension. He was adept at minding his own business. That wasn't too difficult. He had his own problems to think about.

“Hey,” he said to me. “You're not mad at me, are you?”

“Of course not, you ass.”

“We're still friends, right?”

“Don't ever question it, Bells.”

 

I steered our patrol car past Siegal's Tuxedo Shop, Queen's Shoes, Discoteca Latina, The Eggroll Express, The Christian Science Reading Room, and Duc Loi's Meat and Fish Company without a conscious thought in my head, having seen the seedy store fronts at least nine million times in the last year. I was more concerned
about the state of our vehicle than anything else at the moment.

The front windshield was cracked; all of the tires were missing their hubcaps. There was an enormous dent in the back left-hand door. The condition of the car was bad for public relations. But there was nothing me or Bellamy could do about it.

Since the cutbacks in funding for police supplies, cops were obliged to repair and maintain their vehicles with money out of their own pockets. It was a bunch of crap. And because of the budget cutback, we never had enough gas in the tank. I couldn't remember the last time the squad car had a full tank. If we went over our weekly ration, that was too bad for us. But Bellamy was a boon, a real diamond in the raw. He siphoned gas from the other police cars parked at the station. He never felt guilty about the practice; the other cops were doing the same thing to us whenever our backs were turned to them.

 

It was a warm and moist day that smelled of bananas and beer. The sidewalks were jammed with black, white, and brown skinned families hurrying home from the nearby
grocerias
. There was something I didn't understand about this. No one could ever accuse me of excessive insensitivity, but a panoply was unfolding right in front of my nose and I didn't get it. The mom and pop stores that dotted the street used to be run by Iranians and Mexicans; then came the El Salvadoreans followed by the Palestinians. I felt like I was being overtaken, that I was going to be replaced by an entirely different kind of people. No better
or any worse than me, just distinct and separate from what I knew. And I couldn't accept that.