Snitch Factory: A Novel (7 page)

“We’re in the driver’s seat, Hassler. Everybody knows about us. I can taste success, and you know, after all the shit I’ve been through, it’s going to be good.”

Gerald had been standing close enough for me to feel the electric, tactile charge of his charisma. His molten eyes, destructive eyes that had mesmerized women into doing
things they regretted, were scoping out the runs in my stockings.

“My strategy is priceless, Charlene. Do you want to know what it is?”

“Okay, shoot.”

“Give your clients everything you can. The rewards are in the long run, and they will be incalculable.”

“Where’s that going?”

“To the top, that’s where. Do you want to come with me?”

The memory, reheated like instant coffee, was a dream that’d kept me drinking for years with Frank, Hendrix, and Rubio.

 

It was about eight o’clock when I left Clooney’s. Hendrix took a cab home. The others were staying to watch basketball on the television in the bar. The stern, Calvinist shadows of Anderson’s Funeral Home across the street dwarfed me while the vodka and beer clashed in my stomach.

I turned around and started my walk home, turning up Valencia Street, strolling by the Bombay Bazaar, Casa Lucas Productos, Puerto Alegre and the alleys of Clarion and Sycamore. I swung back onto Mission where I ran smack dab into a jam. A throng of dope fiends from the Sunrest Corner bar, teenage couples, mariachi musicians, maybe a couple of hundred people were gathering near the Christian Science Reading Room, the An-Da Jiang Acupuncture Clinic at the corner of Nineteenth Street.

Four police cars and an ambulance were in the middle of the road with a fire truck. The police had gotten out of their cars and cordoned off the intersection with that yellow plastic crowd control ribbon they used while two Public Health Service medics examined a man laying in a pool of his own blood.

The gunshot victim was shirtless, sallow, sockless. Someone in the multitude said he had been popped in the head. Other witnesses testified he’d gotten it in the back. But one thing everyone agreed upon: the victim didn’t get shot in the face, which was something to cheer up about. Because if he had to die, his visage needed to remain intact, or there wouldn’t be an open casket at the funeral. In a Catholic neighborhood like the Mission, if that went down, the
tristeza
would never end.

I kept going, heeding the golden rule of Mission Street. Didn’t your mother ever tell you? It is best to steer clear of the weird shit, the demands made upon our faith in other human beings.

After checking out a few items at the corner bodega, first sniffing at the red chile hanging in bunches next to the spider webs on the ceiling, then at the gnarled onions and the garlic in their ancient cardboard boxes, it became apparent to me that I wasn’t hungry and that drinking had something to do with it. I went back out into the deserted street to my building.

By the time I got to the landing on the fourth floor, I was winded. A slob who was going to croak from a heart attack at the entry to her own dwelling. I thought of knocking, but before I had the chance to, the door opened a crack. Frank, looking anxious, was framed in the orange glow of a lamp on the floor.

“Where the fuck’ve you been?”

“I know, I know. I had to stay after.”

“Smells like it. Hey, did you see the police around the corner?”

“Yeah, I was there.”

“What happened?”

“An accident.”

A car was honking downstairs in the street, making my head pound. Frank put his muscular arms around my neck and said, “I’m happy to see you, booger.” He melted his mouth on mine. I knew what kissing was for: like any other arrangement, it’s what you do to get through to the next person when talking becomes pointless.

Our union, his and mine, it didn’t even have the faintest stink of compromise. This man was so tolerant of me; nearly anything I said or did was fine with Frank. On occasion, this had led me to gross speculation. How could I have a marriage with someone who wasn’t critical of me?

Domestic tranquility was a precedent for me because in the book of matrimony, my divorces had been sordid. Fattened by huge telephone bills, drunken nights at El Tico Nica and Doc’s Clock on Mission Street, and arguments arctic in their ferocity.

“Sugar? You okay?” Frank asked.

There are choices to make when you come home to your spouse. You could tell him about drinking vodka with Hendrix, how you listened to the man rhapsodize about his horniness. You could describe the day at work and what a fucker Eldon had turned out to be. Or you didn’t have to do any of that.

“Everything’s fine, Frank. Almost fabulous.”

“Why don’t you sit down. You want something to eat?”

“It can wait,” I replied.

“You sure? I was going to make rice and veggies.”

“With tofu?”

“And with zucchini.”

“What about mushrooms?”

“I was going to stir-fry it in lemon and ginger.”

“Nah, I’ll skip it.”

“Are you trying to lose weight?”

There were no secrets between me and him. I copped to it. “Yeah, I am.”

Frank was my junior by four years. I had trouble getting a handle on this; everyone was younger and taller than me. I thought my age made me clever; nothing exceptional, but I was beginning to see that wasn’t the case. Getting older only made you more zombielike to yourself.

But my third husband? His relative boyishness, nigh onto thirty-one, kept me clinging to the better things in life. It was a sensational idea to be around Frank because he spoon-fed optimism into me, and because someday, like the buffalo and the welfare recipient, my life, too, would turn over a new leaf.

T
wo years ago, while working through another divorce, I’d met Frank and I had taken up with him to rebound from that split. My second husband had sailed off in a squall of discount liquor, not even pretending to say goodbye. A woman in his life had been someone to purchase the alcohol, to keep him company while he drank and to use as a scapegoat when he was coming out of his stupor. He never liked having any witnesses after a binge. I had a knack for getting in the way.

I know it sounds bitter: that’s why I left.

Neither of my ex-spouses had made any claims on my money, knowing with their own savage insight that the wage of a social worker wasn’t anything to fight for. I was left with a nagging, unrepentant feeling like the blood in my vital organs had been desiccated. When you broke up with your mate, you couldn’t get that blood back. It didn’t recondense, didn’t reincarnate itself, and never passed through your arteries and capillaries again.

Frank had been married before as a teenager. He had a daughter and son. They were living in Los Angeles with their maternal grandparents and working in a Salvation
Army cafeteria. Sorry to say, we didn’t see either of them that much.

The night always brought out desolate thoughts in me, especially when I was in bed after one of your basic weekdays. I looked at Frank, and at his glistening, obdurate erection. I knew that it was time to turn out the lights. I leaned over and switched off the bedside lamp.

Some of the iciest people I’d ever met were social workers. Lavoris, for example. Someone who needed a personality transplant. She was glacial, advertising the characteristics of a freshly mopped public toilet. But Frank was not like her.

“Remember that manual we looked at? Go slow,” I said.

Frank got on his knees and assumed the missionary stance. He was the first man I’d ever met who could execute this position with any finesse or authority. He made it feel luxurious and I lifted my legs for him, splaying them, which was saintly of me, because only some women did that for their lovers. Then he speared me with his organ and I jabbed his buttocks with my feet.

I cradled him in my arms, feeling like I used to when I was a girl. Back then, I’d stare out the window at the full moon rising over the skyline and fantasize about being a heroine, a notable figure. I licked Frank’s ear and contracted my pussy around the base of his cock and said, “You’re a treasure.”

When we’d hooked up, dating and drinking in bars like the 500 Club or in Blondie’s on Valencia Street, it was the anniversary of my tenth year at the DSS. Maybe Frank had been attracted to my professional reputation; some members of the social services community said that I was a go-getter and deserved a medal for valor. Others said that I was a fraud.

But I wished he’d known me years ago, back when Petard was preparing me to assume the mantle of his heir. I was foxier then. I wore mascara, took black beauties, teased my hair, went out nightly, and was very popular at the DSS. At the time, my co-workers thought my rise was infectious, that Petard’s power had rubbed off on me. Even if I didn’t know it, that might have been so.

Frank was heaving. I had admonished him: slow it down, dumbo. But he couldn’t brake his manic rhythm. Sometimes, men seemed so lonely in their quest for affection, even when they were inside you. I’d give him another minute and that would be it. The wet, velvet walls of my slit robbed him of every desire in life except to jet up and down fast as he could. He pinned me to the mattress, nipple to nipple, blubbering, “Give me your hand. I’m coming.”

Theoretically, an orgasm was salubrious. But I had seen men get angry and weep when they climaxed. For some reason, I don’t know why, I thought of the waiting room. It was one of those associative connections where a sensation on the body instantly evokes a complementing recollection.

We’d been introduced, my future husband and me, at one of the public forums the DSS used to throw to talk about assistance-related child care, home nursing, adult education and geriatric facilities. Petard said these events would generate a healthy public image for us.

Frank had been part of an entourage of students from San Francisco Community College. I was charmed by their roguish innocence. Stunning to me, it really was. They were disarmingly gauche, decked out in Ben Davis jeans, Converse running shoes and Carhartt anoraks, resembling the thugs and purse snatchers that came out after dark to lurk around the McDonald’s on Twenty-fourth Street.

It was the month Gerald began to change his policies, arguing for a more conservative plank. He’d even attempted to institute a workfare proposal, sending out squadrons of pregnant teen mothers in Department of Public Works trucks to sweep the sidewalks. For a time, you saw them on Mission Street. Girls with distended stomachs pushing industrial brooms, uniformed in orange nylon welfare vests, rubber gardening gloves and white hard hats.

C
lients were surging out of the DSS, some running, others cursing, while several policemen formed a knot at the front doors. I yawned, not unduly surprised to see the cops, not even first thing in the morning. But one officer had his service revolver out and was aiming the barrel toward the ground. Rocky was running straight for me, more livid than any black man I’d ever seen before.

“Mrs. Hassler!”

It was critical, or he wouldn’t be coming at me, detonating right in my face and blurting with childish intensity, mewling, “Where have you been? Did you hear what happened?”

“I just got here. What is it?”

“Come with me.”

Before I had a chance to decline the offer, he uncharacteristically grabbed me by the sleeve and tugged me after him. Using his size as a wedge, Rocky dragged me past a rush of clients, more cops, a couple of addled medics and a group of uncommunicative social workers who were cross-eyed with terror attempting to get out of the building.

I saw Rubio. He yelled something at me, but I couldn’t reach him. The corridor was wall to wall with people; everyone
was trying to stay quiet. Simmons tried to make eye contact with me, but I lost him when the crowd pushed us ahead. Someone stepped on my foot, then gave me an elbow in the gut. I was straddling Rocky from behind, kept there by the mass of people coming after me. I shouted at him, exasperated, “What’s going on?”

He didn’t answer me and didn’t look back over his shoulder to see how flummoxed I was. Rocky just kept hauling me deeper into the murky unlit corridor. At a turn in the hall, he stopped to jaw with a white-haired, apple-cheeked cop. The policeman looked at the Pinkerton, then at me while Rocky raged, “Let us through, man!”

“You don’t have the proper authorization to enter the premises. I can’t do it. Got to follow regulations.”

The security guard unbuttoned his blazer and showed the police officer the bib of his dress shirt. I could’ve fainted and felt justified. His buttoned-down oxford shirt was covered with blood. But the cop didn’t care for the Pinkerton’s sense of drama. He and Rocky kept bitching at each other until the guy suddenly gave up, sighing, “It’s your trip.”

The security man growled, “Let’s go, Charlene. I want you to see this.”