San Francisco Noir (29 page)

That night was supposed to be no different. Show up, get package, deliver. My boss, Chinese Willy, had made a big point of saying that he was giving this job special attention, like:
If you don’t mook this job up, you just might get invited into the club to play some of our little reindeer games
. All I had to do was get the package back to Willie’s by midnight. Cake.

That was before the Snow Leopard. When Shiva Shiv said the name, I laughed out loud. I stopped laughing when Shiva Shiv said, “What the fuck you laughin’ at?” in a voice dripping of curry and murder. The name rattled around in my brain the whole day. Naturally, that night the Snow Leopard invaded my dreams. She was half-cat, half-woman. I could smell the fertile sex as she kept changing back and forth, from cat to woman and back: whiskers and lips, fangs and fur, that rough tongue, claws and paws, breasts and wet flesh, all hungry jungle feline in-heat heat. She was tearing me to shreds, guts ripped open, and blood, my God, she was pounding me, eating my flesh and taking me right to the corner of Ecstasy and Death. I woke up in a cold sweat with a curtain rod for a johnson. I should have known right then and there. Dreams never lie.

So there I was, staring at the Snow Leopard, with her incredible flesh and her sex-red lips, and I could smell that smell from my dream. That in-heat smell. Or was that just in my head? Being a sex maniac has a way of blurring the fine line between reality and what you’d like reality to be.

Shut up! I scolded myself. Get your package, take care of your business, and be on yer merry way. I fondled the fifty Large screaming in my secret jacket pocket. Why doesn’t she say something? my mind asked me. She got up and paced like, well, like a big dangerous hungry cat. And I could hear the beat of the jungle drum. Or maybe it was just Busta Rhymes booming from the next room. Money, danger, and the distinct whiff of Snow Leopard shivered me from eyeballs to nut-balls to foot-balls: Adrenaline pumping furiously, I was jacked to the max and stone-cold sober.

I loved my job. I used to try to explain to people who’d never been in the illegal goods and services industry why it’s such a fun and rewarding line of work. Often when I was on the job I got what I can only describe as an evangelical feeling. Like this is what God wanted me to do. And on that Monday night, I felt like He, or She (I’m not gender-restrictive when it comes to my deities), had brought me to the Snow Leopard to change my life. I can’t explain it, really, except to say I was sitting there thinking that this job felt like one of those jobs where you look back from the future and you say,
Wow, that was the greatest job in the history of jobs!
But then I started thinking, No, maybe this is one of those jobs you look back on and say,
I let myself drift, and that’s how I got this scar.

The more we didn’t talk, the more electromagnetic the air got, like two saturated clouds bumping and rubbing, the rumbling building as the lightning gathers. I wanted to get a good look at her, fix the constellation of her features in my head so at least I could have her star in my fantasies later. I reached for the light. This is what prompted the first word she ever spoke to me. Naturally, inevitably that word was:

“No.”

Spoken in the chilled voice of a seasoned predator.

It hung there in the air:

“No.”

I did not turn the light on. So we stood there in the dark.

“Are you in, or out?” she purred.

This was not in the script. When Chinese Willy is expecting delivery of his package at midnight, and it’s 11:13 p.m. and fifty Gs are flaming in your secret jacket pocket, you need to keep your priorities straight. My dance card was full. Or was this the call of the wild? That’s the problem with being a sex maniac. You can never really be sure.

“I like to know what I’m getting into before I get into something—”

“Look,” she shot back, those coal eyes glowing, “any minute now two big guys with automatic weapons are gonna bust through that door, and if you’re not in, you should get out.”

“I like to know what the stakes are before I go all in,” I said.

“You play your cards right, I’ll make sure lady luck blows on your dice.” She licked her whiskers.

“What’s the game?” I asked.

“Look, all I need is an ace in the hole,” she hissed, “and if you’re it, I guarantee the pot’ll be very sweet. But tic-toc, we’re on the clock.”

“How do I know you’re not bluffing?” I asked, ready to crawl through broken glass for her, but trying not to show it. “Trying to set me up for a big fall?”

“Tic-toc, tic-toc.” She blazed those cat eyes at me.

I folded with a sigh: “I’m all in.”

“I just hope you got enough hand—”

Before she could even get through the sentence, two
very
big guys with
very
automatic weapons busted through the door. She dropped straight down, behind the bed frame, while pulling out a petite little pistol. I unholstered and duck-n-rolled under the bed, firing as fast as my fingers’ll fly, taking down the very big guy on the left. First shot: right shoulder. Second shot: belly-blast. Third shot: left kneecap. As he fell he fired his Glock, bullets spraying around the room like his gun was prematurely ejaculating. When he hit the floor, eye level with me, I got off the shot I’m truly proud of, as I plugged a slug right over the mug’s noseholes. That’s when the big guy’s lights went out.

The Snow Leopard fired one quiet dainty shot from her petite little pistol. It slid with the greatest of ease through the left eyeball of the very big guy on the right. And that was all she wrote for him.

In the calm-after-the-storm aftermath, all I could hear was her cool kitty breath, hot on my neck, as we huddled under the bed, two very big guys sprawled dead on the floor in front of us in spatters of assassin-red blood.

Panicked screams from fleeing Felipe freaks now careened into the room. In a flash I turned, my gun at her temple, and I was face-to-face with the Snow Leopard, eye-to-eye with all that coal and fire, breathing her, that in-heat dream smell making me swell, and I knew I was losing myself in her.

Something hard poking into my ribs brought me back. Lo and behold, it was her little pistol. Suddenly I was love-drunk no more, smack-dab in the middle of an old-fashioned Mexican stand-off.

Maybe it was being under the bed. Maybe it was the red on the floor like a blood Rorschach. Maybe it was the thrill of the kill. Maybe it was just the Snow Leopard paying her debt. All I know is that those ecstasy-red lips were moving into mine, and suddenly hands were under shirts and skin was scorching under fingers. Before I knew what was what, she had me in hand, as cold metal pressed into my testicles. Made my nuts do the bunnyhop. As she worked me over, she dug those long sharp red claws into my chest, opening my flesh. Yes, there was pain, but it was good, as an animal-wild growl rose from way deep inside her throat, and there was much bumping and grinding.

I reached down to reciprocate. Surprise, surprise. There was something down there. Between her legs. Wait a minute, it’s my package, my mind said in surprise. I slipped it out and into my pocket. As I pulled the cash out of my secret jacket pocket, and as I slid the money into her hand, I moved her scanties aside with my gun and gave her the tiniest taste of all of me.

Right away she wanted more. Tried to shove me further in. But I wouldn’t let her have any more. I wanted to make her work for it. Which she did: teeth into my shoulder, claws into my back, this krazy kat was actually drawing blood. She quickly got me pinned on my back and started to have me for a late-night supper. Then she put her pistol tip on my lip and she sucked on both at the same time.

I confess, as a sex addict, the most gratifying aspect of the whole Snow Leopard experience was how she kept maneuvering me around so she could get at me better, bucking and howling, growling and grunting, groaning and moaning, fast, cuz she knew that bigger and larger trouble was most certainly going to walk right through that door at any second.

This is religious, I was thinking, it’s superhuman, interstellar, transcendental. Time was no more. The mind was no more. There was nothing else in the world, even as the universe rushed through me and into her, then back again. Estrogen shockwaved through my central nervous system and my johnson was transformed into a lightning rod that shot bolts as we skydived together off the top of the Golden Gate Bridge and floated, shaking and speaking in tongues together, landing back under the bed at Felipe’s, panting and radioactive in the afterrapture.

Like a stop-action movie she:

Stood

Rearranged

Cat-stretched

Walked toward the door to leave.

I struggled up and stood paralyzed, like a life-sized action-figure of myself, watched each event transpire, but somehow missed all the connecting moves, how she got from point A to B to C to D.

“Hey, wait a minute,” spurted out of my mouth with a disturbing level of desperation. “How can I get ahold of you?”

“You can’t,” she purred, just loud enough for me to hear, as she approached the door.

“Hold on a second, I wanna—” I didn’t say that I wanted to have her again, right away, and for the rest of my life.

“Yeah, I know.” She gave me this devastating, bored-on-jaded Cheshire half-grin, and I knew she was going to just disappear any second as her hand fingered the knob of the door and she was inches away from being gone.

“Hey, look, I just saved your life here.” I hated how limp and lame and tame my voice sounded. “I was your ace-inthe-hole.”

“Why do you think I blew on your dice?” She nodded ever-so-slightly, the door was opening now and she’d almost slipped all the way through it.

“I thought it was my boyish good looks and my winning personality,” I cracked back, hoping a laugh would buy me another minute.

“That’s why I didn’t kill you.”

The Snow Leopard’s grin spread, and after she left, it lingered for several moments before it slowly faded away.

Suddenly everything went back to regular speed, and the sounds of all the freaked-out Felipe habitues had a new sound added to them. Cop sounds. Sirens and intercoms and heavy steps headed hard down the hall, capital-T trouble, and I was out the window, escaping down the fire escape, and
boom
! walking up Geary, breathing the cool yet fetid air of Polk Gulch, the taste of Snow Leopard wet on my lips.

I tucked in. Took a breath. Checked the time. 11:38. How can that be? I was biblical with the Snow Leopard for all of eight minutes. Why did it feel like eight lifetimes?

Chinese Willie’s was five minutes away, and walking up Geary toward Van Ness, the deep peace of a job well done, combined with the high of scoring all that pure Snow Leopard, caused a highly satisfied sigh to slide out of me. In front of Frenchy’s Adult Emporium, where they’re always
HIRING
, Rasta Hat Man was taking a wee late-night nap on his sidewalk bed. I admire a man who can just curl up right there on Geary and catch a few winks. No pillow, no blankets: That’s discipline. An old blind brother in a ratty-tatty shabby old overcoat held a blindman cane, only it was all duct-taped together. I couldn’t help it, when I saw the old blind brother with his busted, taped-up cane, it really got to me. So I went over to the guy and I slipped him a sawbuck.

“It’s a ten-spot,” I said low, and the guy came over all humble and happy.

“Thank ya, sir, God bless ya, thank ya, sir, God bless ya.”

I like that in a bum. Gratitude. I hate these bums, you give ’em coin and they look at you like they’re doing you a big favor by taking your money. No, I want some genuine thank-you from my bum.

By the way,
bum
is the word of choice down here. Once I was talking to one of these superindustrious bums, you know the type, always hustling around a hundred miles an hour, busting their bony butts, they have a whole circuit worked out, cashing in hundreds of bottles a day. I love this guy, he’s always got a line of bottle-loaded shopping carts all tied together like he’s riding herd over a bum wagon train. I called him James Brown, seeings how he’s the hardest working man in show business. He got a kick out of that. So one time I was talking to James Brown about homeless-this and homeless-that, and the brother went off:

“Don’t call me no
homeless
, mutherfucker! I’m a bum! I don’t work but when I wanna work, I don’t kiss no bawsman’s ass, I take my own vacation, I make my own rules, I’m a bum, mutherfucker, and I’m proud. Hallelujah, I’m a bum!”

Okay, you’re a bum, Hallelujah. And every time I saw James Brown, there was some shoeless loser, some lower-class riffraff bum railing on this superindustrious brother from another mother, sticking a raw, puffy-bum hand out, screaming: “Why you don’t you give me some love? You owe me, you sell-out mutherfucker!”

It happens all the way from the outhouse to the penthouse. Some citizens work their noses to the bone, and some jealous leaching ne’er-do-wells are always there to knock them down a peg. Sweet misery loves her company, from Nob Hill to Polk Gulch.

People dis the Gulch, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s the only neighborhood if you’re really serious about being a sex maniac. The Haight’s too full of gentrified Gap-heads, gone-to-seed hippy hopheads, and runaway urchin thieves. The Richmond is a great place to go if you’re lookin’ for the slowest, most boring death imaginable. SoMa? Please! Those dot-con pseudo-hipsters deserve every scrap of misery they’ve heaped on themselves. I do enjoy North Beach on a sunny afternoon, but in the end there’s too many clueless tourists clogging up the arteries. Nob Hill is a travesty, teaming with all those vaginally challenged fashion victims. Hell, even the poodles get botoxed up there. And there’s nothing tender in the Tenderloin. The only loin in the TL is crawling with nasty maggots. I once saw some toothless loon cap his running mate over a Q-tip. Hey, I like Q-tips as much as the next guy, but only in the TL can you get terminated over one.

Because of its equidistant location between the Tenderloin and Nob Hill, you will hear the sisters sometimes call Polk Gulch the
Tender Knob
, which I quite enjoy. Here’s a little known fact: The word
gulch
comes from an Anglicization of
gulchen
, which means
to gulp
. When you consider how much has been guzzled and gulped in the Gulch over the years, it seems a perfect fit, doesn’t it? Don’t get me wrong, the Gulch is not for the feebleminded or the weak-willed. The Gulch will chew you up and spit you out if you let it. But if you have Game, you can get anything anytime in the Gulch. And you can get it for cheap.