barf.
Clooney’s was filling up with its usual after-dinner blue collar customers. It was a signal that me and my boys should be heading out. The guys and gals who worked in the factories around South San Francisco by day didn’t like to drink with us social workers. But Vukovich had gone over to help Bart and Simmons was moping by the video machine, jangling the spare change in his pockets. Harry turned to me and asked, “You want another drink?”
Hendrix’s lips were moving; saying no would have insulted him. Those idle threats he made about leaving the city; the poor schmuck had nowhere to go. This was it for him, the Mission. I looked down at my watch. I should’ve been home an hour ago. “Sounds good to me,” I said.
The crooked smile on Harry’s seamed visage was worth every second of the sacrifice I would make. Cantankerous or not, it didn’t take much to please him. “Two vodka doubles with Bud chasers,” he told the bartender.
While we drank, Harry talked and I daydreamed about my first years on the job. According to Petard, my star had been rising along with his. At a private meeting, just between the two of us, he’d explained himself to me.
“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
Clooney’s was filling up with its usual after-dinner blue collar customers. It was a signal that me and my boys should be heading out. The guys and gals who worked in the factories around South San Francisco by day didn’t like to drink with us social workers. But Vukovich had gone over to help Bart and Simmons was moping by the video machine, jangling the spare change in his pockets. Harry turned to me and asked, “You want another drink?”
Hendrix’s lips were moving; saying no would have insulted him. Those idle threats he made about leaving the city; the poor schmuck had nowhere to go. This was it for him, the Mission. I looked down at my watch. I should’ve been home an hour ago. “Sounds good to me,” I said.
The crooked smile on Harry’s seamed visage was worth every second of the sacrifice I would make. Cantankerous or not, it didn’t take much to please him. “Two vodka doubles with Bud chasers,” he told the bartender.
While we drank, Harry talked and I daydreamed about my first years on the job. According to Petard, my star had been rising along with his. At a private meeting, just between the two of us, he’d explained himself to me.
“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
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