Dirty in Cashmere (2 page)

 

FOUR

I was in a daze that Tuesday afternoon as I tramped up Market Street to Eternal Gratitude. On one side of the street construction cranes towered over half-finished apartment buildings. Bevies of sparrows cavorted above the power lines. A billboard by a Whole Foods store asked:

DEPRESSED? LESIONS?

CONTAMINATION GOT YOU DOWN?

CALL THE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH 415-863-3486.

In front of me was a strangely familiar man, a heavy shouldered blond fellow in matching black Carhartt coat and jeans. I swore it was Frank Blake, the vigilante who'd shot me. I quickened my pace to catch up with his fat ass. But when I drew abreast of him, it wasn't anyone I'd ever seen before. My father's ghost jabbered inside my head, warning me to be careful. All around me the traffic in the street was a rising crescendo that threatened to overwhelm everything with its self-important cacophony.

“Ricky Bellamy! Just the man I want to see!”

2-Time jackknifed from his doorway stool, thrilled that I'd returned to the club because Tuesday was turning out as slow as Monday.

I was dragging my left leg. It bothered me today. The bullet was hurting, too. I chalked it up to the weather. The fog lay low, hepatic yellow rain clouds were on the horizon.

2-Time hustled me into the club, nudged me over to the counter. The air was dusty and I sneezed. “It's good that you're here,” he warbled. “We have serious shit to talk about.”

From her nook behind the cash register, Rita smiled at me, but not at her husband. Her head was angled, so that only I received the benediction of her upturned lips. “Hello, Ricky. How are you?”

I was matter of fact. “I'm hurting like a motherfucker.”

“Do you want something to help with that?”

“Shit, yeah. I need some medicine.”

“You heard him,” 2-Time mewled at Rita. “Show him the good stuff.”

Rita went to the basement to locate the high-grade Life, the kind that made your thyroid levels stay normal. While I waited for her, I surveyed the other products for sale in the club. There were handcrafted tabs from Mendocino. Tablets manufactured in San Mateo. There were some from Mexico.

“Listen, homey.” 2-Time propped himself against the counter, chewing on a toothpick. “I want to see how you tell the future.”

I focused on his face. 2-Time didn't cotton to how I stared at him without blinking. It unnerved him. He talked around the toothpick. “You've got a special talent. You need to use it.”

I stifled the compulsion to tell 2-Time to shut his mouth. I decided to flow with the flow, to see what happened next.

2-Time made his pitch. “I can do things for you to advance your career. I know people.”

I wasn't impressed. I knew people, too. Too many people. All I wanted to do was go back to Guadalupe Terrace and take Life until the snakes of pain in my head stopped slithering around.

“The future is money,” piped 2-Time. “But you have to have proper guidance to get it. Folks that can market your ass.” 2-Time laid the bait and set the trap. “I know a cat who can do it. His name is Rance Heller.” 2-Time's falsetto ping-ponged off the club's walls. “He's an entrepreneur. Top shelf.”

I was receptive to 2-Time's hype. If he thought I was an oracle, that was okay by me. “He wants to see me?”

“Hell, yeah. You're the kid who can tell the future. You should be on television. In Las Vegas. Even at the White House.” 2-Time worked his juju on me. “Rance is dying for you to meet with us.”

“I'm okay with that.”

“How about this afternoon?”

“Sure. That's cool.”

2-Time was pleased, but concealed his happiness behind a mask of indifference. I think he felt good to wear indifference on his face. Like a beautiful woman wearing exquisite makeup.

Rita came back to the counter. In her arms was a glass jar filled with sparkling white double-barreled tablets. “Here's the good shit. Only eighty for three.”

I frowned. “Eighty bucks for three tabs?”

“That's with the discount. Because today is customer appreciation day.”

“Fuck it.” I scratched my chin. “I'll take them.”

Rita shortchanged me half a tab, which was the club's normal policy. I gave her four twenties. I knew she found me compelling. She loved my terrible scar and my quiet manner, so unlike her husband. I palmed the tabs, turned around without saying good-bye and pulled my troubled leg toward the exit. 2-Time brayed at me from the counter: “I'll see you in a couple of hours, dude.”

I was at the bus stop, just standing there, when I saw Vivian Raleigh, the girl who'd taken my virginity. I hadn't seen her since I got shot. She saw me too and turned her moist brown eyes in my direction. How I remembered those eyes. When she was warm and loving, they were dark brown. Eyes that soaked in all the light surrounding them. But when she was alienated, they were pale brown. At this moment they were almost yellow.

Vivian had on platform shoes that gave her a six-inch advantage in height over me, sharply creased bell bottoms, and a belted coat. Her kinky black hair swelled in the rain. A symphony of expressions rippled across her sculpted, high-cheeked face. Fondness. Bemusement. Alarm. Indifference. Each emotion was buried under its successor. She spoke, out of politeness. “Hey, Ricky. Long time, no see.”

“I've been busy.”

“You look different. Smaller.”

By talking with Vivian Raleigh I'm exercising a personal tradition: seeking tenderness in the wrong people. Vivian slept with tons of guys after we broke up. It was an effective technique to get rid of every trace of me, not only on her body but inside her heart. I wasn't even a historical point of reference in her life. But me? I hadn't been with anyone since her. I'd been in the hospital.

“How'd you get that scar on your face? It's hideous.”

If Vivian hadn't heard about my misfortune, I wasn't going to broadcast it. “I had an accident. I'm better now.”

She gave me a toothsome smile that said she didn't believe me. I'd heard she was dating a big dope dealer and going to the Marinello Schools of Beauty. Serendipitously, my bus pulled up at the stop. I was grateful. It was nasty seeing her.

“I'll talk to you later, Vivian.”

 

FIVE

I journeyed down the hill on Geneva and turned onto Guadalupe Terrace. The steady, reliable hum of the Hondurans' laboratory generator seeped into the street. My neighbor, the skinhead girl, hailed me from her porch. “Hey, wait!”

I stiffened, kept walking. The girl bounded down the porch steps and across a desiccated front lawn, cutting me off on the sidewalk.

She was diminutive, in a plaid miniskirt, torn black stockings, oxblood Doc Martens, a soiled red T-shirt, cartoon tattoos on her arms. Her hair was shorn to the scalp, except for a shock of dyed red bangs that hung over her eyes, which were bright black and fixed on me. She held a perspiring bottle of Bud in one hand. She waved the bottle at me by way of a greeting. “Who the fuck are you?”

I looked down at my kicks.

“Ricky Bellamy.”

“Can you tell me why you look so weird?”

“I was shot by a goddamn vigilante.”

“That's wicked.”

I confessed in an asthmatic slur. “I almost died.” I hopped from one foot to the other. “What do they call you?”

“Spike.”

“You out here all by yourself?”

“Yeah. How long you been staying next door?”

“Three days. Since I got out of the hospital.”

“You got any parents?”

“They're dead. How about you?”

“Same.”

I envisaged Spike's destiny. Cosmetic school. Two kids and a spouse who drove trucks for a living. A tract house in Daly City. Laser surgery to remove her tattoos. It was a decent fate. No unnecessary drama. I was relieved.

I enjoyed talking to her, the monosyllabic repartee volleying to and fro between us. I rotated my neck to get a crick out of it. The bullet didn't relish the movement and protested. I winced hard.

Spike caught the gesture.

“What's wrong?”

“The bullet hurts.”

“What bullet?”

“The one in my head.”

“They didn't take it out?”

“No. It'd kill me if they did.”

She assayed me with newfound respect. “Harsh.”

Out of nowhere, I got nervous. The rehab specialists at the hospital said it would happen. That I'd feel occasionally uncomfortable. They told me it was a post-traumatic stress disorder. It was more than that. Getting shot? That just honed the fact I'd always been afraid.

“I have to go.”

I departed for my bombed out cottage. Once I was inside it, I settled down in the kitchen, a room that was more comfortable than the others, which were trashed with holes in the ceilings, walls, and floors. I lay down on my side and listened to unseen mice scurrying. My stomach was empty. I couldn't remember when I'd eaten. Not that it mattered. My appetite was nothing. Another thing that was nothing was 2-Time's scheme. I didn't want to be in Las Vegas. I wanted none of that. I just needed money.

I started to float away, my mind going to dark places. I watched the sky, shadowed by a cream cheese frieze of clouds, all of it framed in the kitchen window. I didn't trust 2-Time. Not one bit. 2-Time was a minor league con man. A snake in the grass.

 

SIX

I was leaving my place for the meeting with 2-Time and Heller when I had a seizure. I pitched to the ground and clawed the yard's dirt, my legs kicking the earth. My hands and feet tingled. An electrical feeling moved through my dick into my guts, over my chest and to my head, where it exploded into a cavalcade of red lights behind my eyes, making the bullet go bananas. Foam bubbled on my chapped lips. I screamed at God to help me.

“Where are you, motherfucker?”

Nobody came to my rescue.

A half hour later I lugged myself into Eternal Gratitude. Rita tooled out from behind the counter to meet me. She was in a green leather miniskirt, sleeveless blue silk blouse, black mules. 2-Time was right on her heels. Wearing the same yellow T-shirt caked with deodorant stains.

“Let's hit it. Rance is waiting for you and me.”

Rance Heller lived in a rent-controlled three-story firetrap tenement walkup on Woodward Street, a hundred yards south of the crosstown freeway. He and his wife Mitzi were among the few white people on the block, the rest being Samoans, Filipinos and Mexicans. He was well known, having sold used cars and Life to everybody in the area.

When 2-Time and myself arrived at Heller's crib, the first thing 2-Time did was introduce me to Heller and Mitzi. Heller was a lanky man with straight graying hair and a lush mouth permanently ready to crack a false smile. The disappointment he felt upon seeing me was naked. Any hopes he had of getting rich died on the spot. I was nothing but a scrawny kid with untamed, windblown hair. I was no seer.

Heller smirked at us.

“I'm glad you guys came over.”

Heller's mood deteriorated even further when his wife started flirting with me.
A short brunette profiling a spotty white complexion and darting green eyes that never settled
on anything, Mitzi burned with the self-awareness of a sexually charismatic woman, tilting her shoulders whenever she wanted to charm me, a gesture offset by how coldly she gazed at her husband.

We were seated in the living room. Smooth jazz was on the radio. George Benson playing guitar. Mitzi had on a sheer blue dress that made it plain her breasts were unencumbered by a bra. She challenged me, talking with the stretched out consonant and vowel drawl of most young people in the neighborhood.

“How come you never blink?”

I stared at her chest. “I was shot. I have a bullet in my head.”

Heller interrupted us. “That's how he sees the future. Now he's going to show us his talent. Let's start with a simple test. Ricky? Every week I buy a hundred bucks in lottery tickets from the liquor store at Fourteenth and Valencia. I've never won more than a single penny. Will I win next week?”

My response was decisive. “No.”

Heller's mood lightened. Now he was getting somewhere. If nothing else, I was a money saver. “That's splendid. I want you and 2-Time to come with me to the window.”

The three of us went to the window, which overlooked Woodward Street. Down on the sidewalk, several dudes loitered by a parked car. One of them, a heavyset Honduran, held a brown paper bag. Heller pointed him out to me.

“See that guy? He sells unlicensed Life. Every day he collects money from those other guys. So let me ask you. Does he have money in the bag now?”

I said what Heller wanted to hear.

“Yeah.”

“Can you predict whether he'll have money later today?”

“He will.”

“Will it be the same amount?”

“Maybe more.”

Heller exulted. Bingo. I was a goldmine.

2-Time looked at me with admiration. I had passed the test. I was a genius. Because he knew the fastest route to large amounts of cash was to steal it, and I was going to light the way.

A warm feeling oozed down my neck into my shoulders before coming to rest in my stomach where it fizzed with a pleasant sensation. But the good feeling rapidly dissipated into a spearpoint of nausea. Heller and 2-Time didn't intend to get me on television or into Las Vegas. Not even. I was a compass to help them rip off vaccine money.

“We done here?” I whined.

Heller preened. “Absolutely not. This is the start of a fantastic relationship.”

 

SEVEN

It didn't take long for Heller and 2-Time to expedite my prediction. At half past five on the same day, they veered around the corner onto Fourteenth Street. One minute, they were on Mission Street, luxuriating in the sun's dubious warmth. The next minute, they were in the shadow of the fortress-like Mission Armory, freezing their balls off.

“Wait up,” 2-Time hissed at Heller. “You're walking too fast.”

Heller kept his eyes on the Honduran in front of them—the cat in oversized jeans, a worn flannel shirt, Timberland boots, designer sunglasses, and carrying a large black canvas bag. Heller started walking faster. His heart pounded right next to the Glock in his coat pocket. He whistled a tune, something from Aretha Franklin, “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman.” Taking a deep breath, he filled his nostrils with unclean autumn air. He drew the Glock, letting it dangle by his side, close to his leg. Now he was fifty feet from the Honduran, a hundred feet from the next stoplight.

He was determined to make contact before the light. He had to. 2-Time was on edge, his nerves perpetually shot from angel dust. At any given moment, he could fuck up and spoil things. The proof was how he was doing business at Eternal Gratitude. How could anyone lose money on Life? Somehow, 2-Time had managed the impossible.

There was another problem, too. The robbery itself. Heller and 2-Time were taking down a Life dealer in their own neighborhood. They were shitting in their own nest. It wasn't kosher. People died for less.

Too bad, thought Heller.

The Honduran stopped to light a cigarette. Heller strolled up to him and jammed the gun in his neck, the muzzle biting several folds of flab. The Honduran cocked his arm, swung it, burying the freshly lit cigarette in Heller's left cheek, extinguishing the cherry.

Howling in pain, Heller raked the Glock's barrel across the Honduran's nose, pulping it, then backhanded him several times in the chin, building a tempo. When the tempo was where he wanted it, he snagged the bag. Heller executed a rapid about-face and collided into 2-Time, which almost caused him to drop the loot. He shoved 2-Time in the chest.

“Get the fuck away from me, you maggot!”

The two thieves hoofed it south on Julian Avenue. Heller hugged the stolen bag. The money rustling inside the sack made a seductive sound. It was music to his ears. Worth the hellacious cigarette burn on his face. He hooted over his shoulder at 2-Time, who lagged behind, “We're fucking rich!”

It was dusk on Woodward Street. The sky above the crosstown freeway was a bruised eggplant purple. In his walkup's bedroom Heller counted the money, the bills spread on the floor. A small hummock of used hundreds. Forty thousand bucks.

Heller was thankful Mitzi wasn't home. She'd sink her teeth into the dough so fast, it'd be gone by tomorrow. His next thought was less charitable: how and when to steal 2-Time's portion of the money.

The door opened. 2-Time slinked into the room, looked at Heller. There wasn't much to see. Just his buddy adorned with a righteous cigarette burn. The money was another issue. It lay on the rug like Christ in the manger, so perfect, virginal, and innocent. 2-Time was leery to touch the cash, afraid it was a mirage. He wiped his runny nose. “What is Bellamy's share?”

“Who?”

“Don't give me that shit. The kid, that's who. How much is his cut?”

“For doing what?”

“He led us to the money, in case you forgot. We have to give him, uh, a finder's fee, or whatever.”

“There's forty thousand here. Let's give him four hundred.”

“That much?”

Heller smiled. 2-Time was so cute.

Cheating me wouldn't be as cute. Not when I found out I was getting shafted. Heller wasn't too concerned. He was confident he could manipulate me. He thought I was so naive and stupid, it was laughable.