One Foot Off the Gutter Read online

  Table of Contents

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Title Page

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  twenty-one

  twenty-two

  twenty-three

  twenty-four

  twenty-five

  twenty-six

  twenty-seven

  twenty-eight

  twenty-nine

  thirty

  thirty-one

  thirty-two

  thirty-three

  Copyright Page

  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.

  One Foot off the Gutter

  was a game played by children

  in San Francisco’s Mission district

  between World Wars I and II.

  one

  the 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.

  two

  it 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 i
n 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.

  It wasn’t cold war paranoia. That type of dread was a glimmer of the past. This was new jack paranoia, por mi vida loca. It led me to explore situations I wouldn’t ordinarily consider.

  Hanging out with Bellamy in front of an abandoned building was one of those enlightened paranoid moments. There was something about the building that intrigued me.

  I was searching for a home I could call my own. It was a common desire complicated by the fact that I didn’t have any money. I wasn’t getting any younger. Forty-seven at last count. All my life, since I’d left my family’s weary homestead in Daly City, I’d dwelled under roofs that had belonged to other people. If I added up all those rentals, those apartments, hotel rooms, shotgun flats, and crumbling stucco duplexes with the long, broken driveways and laid them next to each other, I could’ve walked from San Francisco to the moon.

  A tenant was an incomplete human being in my opinion. There had to be a path out of the wilderness of cheap rentals, dour landlords, lost deposits, and the everyday anxiety that wasn’t even worth thinking about unless you had a plan.

  And if there was a neighborhood in the city where unwanted buildings could be readily found, the Mission district was it. The Mission was the graveyard of San Franciscan real estate.

  Bellamy scoffed at my idea of buying a house on a cop’s salary; it was a sick joke to think about owning one’s own pad. Bellamy was homeless, and he wasn’t alone. There were plenty of homeless cops in San Francisco. The city gave us a badge and a gun to protect the citizens and their property, but a lot of cops never got paid enough to keep a roof over their own heads.

  It was one of the less pleasing aspects about the job. The medical benefits weren’t too bad, but everything else was questionable. I knew it used to make Bellamy feel bad, being homeless. Over the years, he’d gotten used to it. He was self-reliant; he’d known worse times in his youth. He had gotten used to changing his clothes at the station. He’d learned to wash himself in the bathroom sink when he thought he was smelling ripe. His personal affairs were conducted from the squad car; the back seat was piled up with his belongings. Dirty underwear, empty cigarette packs and fast food containers were strewn on the back seat floor, lending solid testimony to the establishment of a long term dwelling. With Bellamy living out of the car, it was difficult to transport prisoners whenever we made an arrest. The assholes we busted hated the back seat of the squad car.

  I let Bellamy live in the car while I commuted on the Golden Gate transit bus from Novato. It was an arrangement that filled me with consternation. Novato was a suburban bedroom community where you could get an apartment for a reasonable price, supposing you didn’t eat more than two meals a day. Thousands of police officers from all over the greater bay area resided in Novato. The town had the rollicking atmosphere of an army base after sundown. Novato depressed my wife; Alice didn’t fit in with the suburban cop wife lifestyle. She said Novato with its malls and beehive buildings filled her with discontent. In all honesty, I couldn’t remember a day when Alice felt good about herself, me, or Novato.

  Bellamy lived to make love one more time. He was single, forty, and mired in debt because of his hair transplant. He was waiting for the next woman he could ensnare in the web of his underdeveloped charms.

  I had a different slant on life. I was starving to get a home for me and Alice. My mind raced along with my eyes following the same route, taking in the curtains on the second floor of the abandoned building. I wondered who owned the place. Despite years of visible neglect, it had to be a potential gold mine.

  At least I knew what I wanted. That was more than Bellamy could say for himself.

  Any number of things could happen now. But one possibility was certain. If we went into that house, it would be like cracking open Pandora’s box. I don’t know why I felt like that. I chalked it up to a cop’s natural sense of intuition. Every cop had a built-in premonition for disaster.

  Free Box held the revolver at arm’s length, pointing the gun down at the street. Shadows were wrapping themselves around the buildings and the cars on Twenty-first Street like strands of cotton candy. Clots of junkies and winos were swarming near Bill’s Whirl-o-mat at the corner, cadging cigarettes and drinking tall boys buried inside brown paper bags. Free Box hadn’t meant to be at the window when the squad car rolled to a halt in front of the house. But that was his fate; he was a magnet for inquisitive cops.

  “Nobody still out there?�
� the girl asked upon her return.

  He just hung his head, nodding, “Yeah. You got it.”

  Free Box was convinced a thousand years had gone by. Just as he was about to give up, suspecting the cops were going to be parked in front of the house for the rest of his life, the squad car pulled away from the curb, moving toward the second world neon of Mission Street.

  Not surprisingly, Free Box didn’t feel relieved. He wasn’t excited by their departure; he didn’t feel much of anything. He turned around to look at the girl. Sooner or later, the police would return. They always did.

  She laid her hand on his neck.

  Cops were predictable in their travels. They moved in circles on a map that always drew them back to where they began. Once the police were on to something, they never let go. When they came back, he’d be there waiting for them. This building was where he belonged. He wasn’t going anywhere.

  three

  the skyline on Twenty-first Street didn’t amount to much; soft, eroded clumps of rooftops that fit neatly against each other. The cables and wires that crisscrossed the street hung as low as a full grown man’s head.

  Unemployed men were lining up against the walls of a burned out store front around the corner on Treat Street. The sidewalk in front of the store was a sea of bobbing heads. There were so many nickel bag dealers trawling the strip near Bill’s Whirl-o-mat, the citizens walking by had to beat them off with a stick. Smoke was rising from the small fires burning in Van Ness Avenue homeless bivouacs. Heat waves were spiraling into the smoggy air from the five story dead eyed Bernal housing projects on Folsom Street.

  Patsy looked at the roof of the abandoned building next door and frowned. She shook her head, flouncing her blonde hair and resumed spraying the bougainvilleas with the hose.