Snitch Factory: A Novel (17 page)

I
t was the low end of the night, near four a.m. I didn’t hear any sirens, or the crack dealers pulling the grave-yard shift in the street. After soaking my leg in the tub, I was in bed, brooding. With all the turmoil I’d been through in the last nine or ten days, and after a decade of principled devotion and toil at the DSS, paddling against the current to get the job done, I didn’t have any money in the bank, not a penny.

“You’re not sleeping?” Frank asked.

“Nah, I’m just checking out some numbers. You know, adding up things.”

“Getting everything squared away?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you okay?”

I laughed and replied, “I’m superb.”

“We had fun tonight. Always do with you.”

It’s good to be married to you, he mouthed. I can’t complain, either, I told him. If you wake up in someone’s arms every day, the saints know, you’ll live longer. Frank let off a fart, rolled over and passed out cold. His face was a blank mask against the whiteness of the pillow.

I was drunk like a squirrel on springtime berries when
the telephone started up. My eyes sprang open far as they could, and I threw off the blankets, gasping hard. I fell out of bed and seized the receiver. I listened for a couple of minutes to what the other person on the line was saying. After he finished talking, I got up without disturbing Frank. I dressed in the bathroom, kicking aside a towel on the floor. I thought about taking a shower, but there wasn’t any time. I threw on a man’s sweater, combed my hair, and buttoned my jeans. I saw stars when I sat down on the toilet to put on my shoes, which wasn’t a good sign.

In the kitchen, I scribbled a note to Frank about where I was going, then looked out the window. An hour before dawn, the sky was black and red and the traffic in the streets was tame, relegated to the garbage trucks loading up the rubbish on the sidewalks. Walking alone to the Castro district before sunup was one method of confronting an impending hangover, a method that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone.

 

There wasn’t much to see on Seventeenth Street at five-thirty in the morning, other than the sandstone ramparts of the Mission police station. When I got to the Castro I turned around and looked to the east, to where the lights of Berkeley and Oakland were. The sugar cone peak of Mount Diablo was behind them. I walked past three-storied Victorians with long staircases, houses that made me wonder at how burglars got in and out of them.

Up a hill, Ralph K. Davies Hospital spanned across half a block on Castro Street. I wasn’t sure of where to go, but above the entrance to one lighted area in the driveway I saw a sign that read: emergency room.

The nurse at the front desk, was wearing a stethoscope and reading a paperback novel. She heard me come in the
door and raised her head, very tired. I tried smiling at her, but scotched it, knowing it was too early. After naming who I wanted to visit, I kept reminding myself: long as you kept the fear inside your brain where it belonged, as long as you contained the anxiety, you could almost manage anything.

She said, “One moment, please.”

The clock on the emergency room wall said it was five forty-five. I needed a bath and a cup of coffee. My breath factor was subpar and my feet itched. Because I was having so much fun, the nurse came back to the window before I knew it.

“If you want, you can see the patients. They’re both conscious, and they’re glad you’re here.”

I was handed over to an orderly, a swarthy guy who said he’d been a limousine chauffeur for movie stars. He told me to follow him down an antiseptic-smelling passageway to where the examination rooms were curtained off from one another.

Ralph K. Davies had one of the most elegant emergency rooms in the city’s medical system. All the equipment was relatively new and polished. The personnel were courteous and it was never crowded.

We stopped in front of the last room and the orderly pulled back the curtain, singing merrily, “You lovebirds have got company.”

 

A man and a woman were laying side by side in identical gurney beds. Gerald’s hair was lank and his chin was beginning a beard. I saw an intricate manifesto of pleading and demanding in his eyes. A pathological mechanism that said: don’t be angry with us.

Lavoris wouldn’t even look at me.

Draped in an institutional cotton gown, her hair loosened
and hanging below her shoulders, she seemed like a tourist on vacation. To her, being here probably was relaxing.

The orderly had informed me during our stroll, their hospitalization was the result of an accidental, marginal overdose. But now that Petard had me as an audience, he wasn’t hurting. Talking was like food to him.

“As you can see, Charlene, me and Lav are having a mini-crisis.”

“Why tonight?” I asked, perplexed at his timing.

“You clod, you think this was done on purpose?”

Petard stopped to glance at Lavoris, then he told me about the pinch they’d gotten into.

“I wanted a few drinks, that’s all,” he said, winding the spool of his thoughts. “But here’s why. I’ve had this weight problem for a while now. And when I try to do something about it, losing five, ten, fifteen pounds a week, I get skittish, and I can’t sleep, so I have a nightcap or two. But three, four nights will go by, and all of a sudden, I haven’t gone to bed in days.”

“You should stop drinking.”

“Don’t be vulgar. Next you’ll be telling me to go to an AA meeting, to go there and say hello, I don’t want to have fun anymore. Please don’t demean my intelligence. I’m not one of those people.”

The orderly was standing there, not doing anything. I asked him to get me a glass of water; I didn’t want him to hear what was being said. Petard, knowing that he had my attention, went on.

“The pace got to me. And it got to Lavoris, too. It’s been a damn horrid week, and we hit rock bottom earlier this evening. When we left everyone at Clooney’s, me and Lav stopped off at the Uptown on Capp Street, had several
rounds there. Then we went over to Esta Noche and watched a spectacular drag revue. We were getting more and more plastered, the conversation was getting more and more negative. People were introducing themselves to us. Guys I haven’t seen since high school. I don’t know how we got home.”

Lavoris spoke up for the first time. “We took a cab.”

“Yeah, we did, didn’t we? It was about three o’clock when I said, let’s take the pills and get some sleep. I didn’t want to stay up all night again. Sick of the shit I was, and still am, Christ.”

Energized, Petard showed me the capped pegs of his teeth. “We made a blunder. A fucking overdose is what it was. You can understand that, can’t you?”

What I wanted to say was, you can’t do this now. You’ve got to pull yourself together and get back to work. I identified those words in my mind, as clearly as I saw the warts on his face.

“What were you drinking?”

He curled his lips at me. “Only the best.”

“And the pills?”

“Run-of-the-mill Valium.”

I looked out the hospital room window to the halogen lamps ringing Duboce Park over a tangle of telephone wires. A melancholy car was going east on Haight Street. I looked again and saw my own reflection in the glass pane. I saw a woman who wanted some money in life and because of that, would remain intransigent, steadfast.

“What are you going to do, Gerald?”

“I’m not sure. Lavoris and myself could stay here and recuperate. Do you have any proposals?”

My boss had tried to drive himself over the edge. I would have been righteous to lambaste him and say: look,
asswipe, you can’t run away from the world, but he’d never get it.

“And you, Charlene. What do you want to do?”

Petard was probing my face with sun beams in his gray eyes. He was trying to find out what I was capable of. All my foiled longings were welded together in scar tissue, fastened to the underside of my bellybutton. The fabled hole of a female. He was raking me, searching for that secret ache of mine. I answered him with the only weapon left in my arsenal.

“I’m a social worker. That’s my job. I help the people who don’t have anything. What more do you want?”

“I’m not asking you to justify yourself. Aren’t you being defensive?”

“So what if I am? You’ve got short-term memory loss or something, Gerald. Don’t you remember what you advised me to do?”

“You mean, when I said you should leave the agency? I only said it for your own sake. You know that. And you know what?”

“What’s that?”

“I spread the rumor about you and the food stamps.”

“How I was fraudulently giving them away?”

“Correct.”

“To force me out?”

“Yes.”

I could’ve gotten infuriated with him and Lavoris, but it was too late at night, too late. Their psychological putsch against me had run out of steam. The mortified expression on Petard’s face told me his attempt to destabilize my place in the ecology at Otis Street was over. For now, he would leave me in peace. I made a diagnosis: his consumption of intoxicating substances and the mandate to force welfare mothers to sweep the streets had made Gerald mental. So I
finished with him, japing, “You’ve been a fucking jerk lately.”

“I know that. Hallelujah. Now what?”

“I’m going home to get some rest, is that okay with you?”

“Sure. And then?”

“I’ll see you in the office…maybe you’re not coming in?”

Nurturing, that’s what Petard wanted. That’s why he had asked me to come to the hospital. He’d wanted mommy. He replied, quasi-sincere, “I haven’t missed a day yet, have I?”

I bent over the chrome rail of the other gurney, stiffly pecking Lavoris on her derouged cheek. Her skin was clammy and she didn’t trouble herself with kissing me back. She muttered like there was gravel in her mouth, “Don’t tell anybody you saw us here.”

It was a perfectly suitable request. She wanted to keep her personal life where it belonged, behind closed doors and private. I said to her, woman to woman, feeling tired and powerful, “Lavoris, I’ve never ratted on anyone in my life.”

T
he sun was moving tentatively over Mission Street, not sure of where to go, no better than an unwashed derelict on crutches. A squat, elderly woman in bifocals had cornered me at the stoplight and began to tell me about what she was doing for breakfast.

“I won’t eat that Burger King Whopper no more,” she said. “It used to be ninety-nine cents. Now they want a dollar forty-nine. Anyway, I got to bring my own garlic from home. You like garlic?” she asked me.

I looked at how the morning light was shining kaleidoscopically off the lenses of her glasses and replied, “Yeah, I do.”

“I put garlic on my hamburgers because it kills the germs in the meat.”

She and I went past Salonde Belleza, Taqueria Cancun, the Seven Coins Nightclub, Red Tiger Liquors. I left her at the McDonald’s.

When I got back to dingy Lexington Street, I let myself into the apartment. I took off my shoes and socks, and made coffee for Frank, who was waking up. I brewed the bean with a drip filter, used two teaspoonfuls of the blend
he adored, and splashed a drop of milk into his cup. I put the cup on a saucer and brought it to him.

Our studio was small and the bed took up most of the room we had. The alarm clock radio went on. Frank, stretched out like a kitty under the covers, shut it off. He asked me rhetorically, as if it signified a meaning more permanent than religion, “Did you bring me some coffee?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“You put half and half in it?”

“Sure did.”

“I’m hungover enough to cry.”

“Then just drink beer from now on, you lightweight.”

“Where’ve you been? I got up to take a leak and you were gone.”

“Didn’t you get the note?”

“Yeah, but you didn’t say what you were doing.”

“More people were causing grief.”

“Did you set them right?”

“I doubt it.”

“Then why don’t you come back to bed? We can snuggle.”

My spouse lifted the blanket and fluffed the mattress. I put the coffee down on the floor, taking off my clothes. The night had been interminable; this was an invitation I couldn’t refuse.

While I drowsed with Frank’s hand on my breast, I watched the venetian blind slats on the window and reminisced about a man who’d come into the DSS two weeks ago.

He’d been carrying a supermarket-sized paper bag. He was an elderly gentleman in a three-piece suit, and he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring or any jewelry. He didn’t seem wealthy, but when he opened up the paper bag, he had a wide smile on his face.

Starting with the first row in the waiting room and without causing any havoc, he approached each client, young and old, woman and man, and began to hand out twenty-dollar bills. In an understated, graceful way, he started to get rid of the cash, telling everybody with a grin, “Be cool, there’s enough for everybody. I got you covered. I got some here for everyone.”

It was like you’d been waiting your entire life to hear that. Rubio saw me and shouted with more exuberance than I’d ever heard from him. “Charlene! Look at this!”

Pandemonium could’ve blown the place apart. In this, the worst of times. What galaxy had this person come from? I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was enough to make me go limp, catatonic. He kept dipping into that brown paper bag, pulling out fistfuls of twenties, going down the line. Kids with saucer-huge eyes stood by their mothers, sucking their thumbs, and he would pat them on their heads and say a few words of encouragement.

Take thirty rows of clients, twenty people in each; he was giving out anywhere between forty and eighty dollars per person—it adds up to some beaucoup money in a few minutes.

You hear of curbside inner-city philanthropists like him. They emerge on a seasonal or annual basis, coming out of nowhere. He was just a wizened darling with a gilt-edged touch.