Dirty in Cashmere (8 page)

 

THIRTY-ONE

At the same moment I ducked out of Branch's mansion the Honduran dealer, a vato loco by the name of Roberto Morales, hurled 2-Time against the back wall of a motorcycle shop off Market Street and smashed his legs with an aluminum baseball bat. He whipped the stick against 2-Time's knees, the ground eagerly rushing upward to embrace 2-Time.

Gritting his teeth to keep from screaming, crazed by pain and an inch from unconsciousness, a kaleidoscope of images funneled through 2-Time's brain, beginning with the eviction notice the landlord served Rita to vacate Eternal Gratitude. The club was shutting down for good.

2-Time expected the eviction, but he was taken aback by the self-loathing it caused. Without the club, he was nothing. Self-hatred was his middle name. No money was his game.

Mitzi had left the city and Heller in an exodus to her parents' house in Daly City to have her baby. She was also divorcing Heller. Still in the hospital, he wasn't contesting it.

In a television interview Babe Jones reiterated his campaign's position about the contamination: “I'm not saying the fallout isn't here, but I'm not going to say it's a threat to the people of San Francisco. The issue is still coming together and we'll have to play it as it lays.”

The ugliest tidbit was me. I had a gig in Pacific Heights. Selfishly climbing the ladder to fame and monetary gain, I'd forgotten my homeboy 2-Time.

Roberto Morales swung his bat again. The last thing 2-Time heard was a squad of parrots capering over Market Street, their lungs bursting with music. Then he heard nothing at all.

 

THIRTY-TWO

Le Central was relatively quiet and uncrowded, apart from the folks at the bar. Music was on the radio, Irma Thomas doing “Ruler of My Heart.” I sat across from Branch in a corner booth, staring at a clean white tablecloth, wanting to get the meeting over with.

“You're getting three hundred dollars for the job.”

“Three hundred, huh?”

“Do you have a problem with it?”

Branch's unvarnished antagonism forced the bullet to advise me, like it had so many times before, that when confronting a complete asshole in a business situation, stay loose.

“It isn't enough.”

“Don't haggle with me. I gave you that Zegna. I was overly generous with you. Come up with a prediction.”

“When?”

“Now.”

Part of me wanted to tell the truth. Another part said, forget it. The biggest quandary was the money.

“Give me some cash first.”

Branch inserted two fingers in his Gucci jacket, shook out an alligator skin wallet, extracted a trio of spanking new one hundred dollars bills and gave them to me. I stuffed the paper in my jeans.

“Now tell me the future, Ricky.”

“You won't like it.”

I braced my hands against the table's edge. This was it. Ground zero. The time had come. I couldn't waffle no more. I had to tell Branch something. Even if it was bad.

“Ronnie Shmalker isn't going to win.”

“Say that again.” There was a threat in his command, a challenge to defy him. “Indulge me.”

“He isn't going to win.”

Branch cupped his chin with his soft hands. In the bistro's light, his skin had the texture of an orange peel. He looked wistful. Quite bemused. Then his face changed gears, his mouth thinned into a poisonous slit.

“This is bad news. You fucked up.”

I had played my cards with integrity. I'd allowed Branch to see the future. And now I was about to have my ass handed to me for it. I chuckled in outrage. Branch chuckled too, enjoying my anguish.

“You blew it, Ricky. You were supposed to tell me what I wanted.”

“Bullshit. I didn't do anything wrong.”

“Yes, you did. You predicted the wrong future.”

In only two days my stature as an oracle had taken me from Market Street to Pacific Heights. In the last two minutes the whole thing had gone to hell. But what else could've happened? My rise had been too fast. I'd reached for honey, and I got stung.

I pushed back my chair, stood upright, brushed the lint off my rumpled cashmere coat.

“Kiss my ass, Branch. I'm out of here.”

 

THIRTY-THREE

I knew my prediction would send Branch and Doolan into a tailspin. A shade after eleven on Tuesday night, Branch clicked off the television in his office. The Channel Seven news had declared Babe Jones the official winner in the San Francisco mayoral race, calling his victory unexpected collateral damage for the reigning digital oligarchies.

Branch dug up his phone, punched in eleven digits and waited a moment. “Tommy? You awake?” He listened. “I don't care how ill you are, you're not dying. I don't fucking believe it. I'm always out in the rain. It's no big thing. What?” He listened again. “You need to do something about Bellamy.”

Doolan sat on a love seat in his minuscule rent-controlled Russian Hill condo drinking thimblefuls of liquid morphine in cranberry juice. Billy Boy Arnold's “I Wish You Would” was on satellite radio in the kitchen. Earlier that evening he'd discovered several lesions on his face. Tomorrow he'd have more lesions.

The contamination was spreading, colonizing his body, conquering his immune system. The oncologists at UCSF's Mission Bay campus said he needed chemo. They said he had a year? What a laugh. He wasn't going to make it to Thanksgiving.

He couldn't remember last when he'd slept with someone, but no one was going to throw him a fuck now, not even a mercy fuck, not with his lesions.

A news bulletin that afternoon claimed flotsam from the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster was expected to wash up on San Francisco's coastline sooner than its previously anticipated arrival. And infant mortality rates in northern California had spiked since the meltdown.

“Branch, you wanted an oracle.”

“Ricky was something new and innovative. Then I find out he's no better than a tarot card reader. What can you do about him?”

Doolan had a sip of cranberry juice. “Not a damn thing.”

The other day he'd participated in a raid at Hyde and Turk in the Tenderloin. Doolan and two plainclothes cops took down an unlicensed Life dealer. During the fracas, for an instant, he thought the police officers were Karl Malden and Michael Douglas from the 1970s television show
The Streets of San Francisco.

The sicker he became, drifting toward delirium, the more convinced he was that everything was a hallucination. The Fukushima meltdown never happened. 2-Time was an illusion. So was Branch. Rita and Eternal Gratitude didn't exist. Neither did I.

The good news was the slot opening up at the legendary Treat Street hospice. The place had a backyard garden with a fountain. A jacuzzi. They let you have daiquiris in the evening and cigarette smoking was permitted. Doolan was fifth on the waiting list.

He threw his telephone on the floor. Remote and disembodied, Branch kept talking. “Tommy, things are seriously messed up. I'm losing it.” Billy Boy Arnold's song ended, followed by the percussion of gunfire, three scattered shots from the Tenderloin in the rain.

 

THIRTY-FOUR

At sundown on Wednesday a street cleaning crew from the Department of Public Works, two middle-aged black men and a Mexican woman, all in fluorescent green vests and white hardhats, removed broken tables and mattresses from the sidewalk on Guadalupe Terrace, clutter that'd garnished the pavement for months. Spike and I monitored the threesome from her porch. I was antsy. Wherever the DPW went, cops were never far behind.

The female DPW worker wended her way up the lane to Spike's house, entered the front yard and walked over to the porch's bottom step, stopped there, put her hands on her hips and looked hard at the black girl.

“This is an abandoned building.”

“The hell it is.” Spike was on her feet. “I live here. Get it?”

“It doesn't look like anybody lives here, chica.”

The DPW lady tipped her hardhat and had a gander at me. “Hey, I know you.” The corners of her eyes crinkled with delight. “You're that kid they've been talking about on television. You're that oracle, aren't you? I saw your picture in the newspaper. In the fashion section. You were at a party. Some mansion and shit. Will you help me?”

“With what?”

“A prediction.”

“I can't do it. I'm not in the business anymore. I retired.”

“Please, baby. I'll pay you good.”

I calculated my net worth. The three hundred dollars Branch had given me was a pathetic memory. I was broke again. My recent notoriety had done zip to improve my income. Being an oracle was glorified sharecropping. It didn't put enough food in my belly and as everyone knew, an empty stomach tends to make even the most optimistic person rather cynical.

“I'll do it for twenty bucks. Nonrefundable.”

The DPW worker handed me two gummy tens. I gave her my unblinking and undivided attention.

“What's the problem?”

“My husband is stepping out on me with this other broad. Is he going to keep doing that?”

The question made me feel reborn. Something akin to a vestal virgin. For the first time in my career as an oracle, here was a task worthy of my hype, a prediction that wasn't based on someone's desire for material gain. This was a matter of the soul.

“Let me think about it for a minute.”

I closed my eyes. I held out my hands as if they were dowsing rods. I listened to the cars on Geneva Avenue. The BART trains going in and out of the Balboa Park station. A police helicopter sidewinding over Mount Davidson. The ubiquitous hum of the Hondurans' generator. I let the woman's vibrations drown me in a tidal pool of anger and self-pity, loneliness and melancholy, the million nights she'd been alone. I reopened my eyes.

“I have your answer. He's going to keep on doing it.”

“I knew it. I just knew it.” She let out a majestic sigh. “I want my money back.”

“What the fuck for?”

“I don't like what you said.”

Debilitated by my auguring, I broke out in a cold sweat. I dropped my hands, letting them slap against my thighs. My gift was a curse.

Branch had wanted to dominate the future. That put him in the same league as Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Richard Nixon, and James Brown. Now the DPW woman was coming on with the same vibe, albeit at a lower frequency. I wanted no part of that damn world. I crumpled the two tens in my hand and fired them at her feet.

“You can have your money.”

That was it. I was done. I wasn't an oracle anymore. Fuck the future. It was a waste of time. I signaled Spike.

“I'm leaving.”

I stumbled down the porch's rickety steps and limped across the dead grass to my cottage. The flies that'd been living off the garbage in the lane were disturbed by the DPW crew's clean up. They flitted everywhere. A bunch of them haloed my head, in love with my hair.

 

THIRTY-FIVE

I laid down on the kitchen floor and curled up inside my grimy cashmere overcoat. Manufacturing predictions was murdering me. With each one I made, I lost a slice of my spirit that would never return.

I'd had no vaccine in days because the drug was off the market—the feds shuttered all the clubs. I was having Life withdrawals. Cotton mouth. Hot and cold sweats. Spastic colon. Torrential diarrhea.

Spike told me debris from Fukushima was landing on Baker Beach, almost two miles south of the Golden Gate Bridge. The beach, traditionally employed for nude sunbathing, had been quarantined by Homeland Security until further notice.

I had a flashback about my mother before she died, the two of us in an empty room. I was walking on my tiptoes, doing it quieter than a cat burglar. Mom instructed me, “Keep practicing. You need to walk silently. That's how a poor man survives in this city.”

Silent as a ghost.

Doubting that I'd ever wake up, not caring if I did or didn't, I drifted off to sleep, the whitened outline of Frank Blake rearing above me, his puffy hepatitis C face dancing in and out of focus. “I killed you once, Ricky. I can kill you again.”

He was washed away by a wave of slumber before I could call him an asshole.

A stiff wind blew through the night on Guadalupe Terrace. A dog barked like someone had driven a stake in its heart. Then, the Hondurans' bungalow detonated into a fireball. The roof caved in and the windows buckled, followed by reeking clouds of burning vaccine chemicals.

I bolted to my feet, scurried to the kitchen window and stood still; the searing heat of an electrical fire scorched my nostrils. Zipping up my overcoat, I leapfrogged out the window and rounded the cottage to the driveway.

Three fire engine trucks and a police car were already parked by the bungalow, teams of firefighters were unwinding water hoses. The front wall crumbled, sucked into the fire's inhalation, forcing the firefighters to retreat.

I had a vision: the Hondurans were trapped inside. They were crouching in the laundry room, staying below the smoke.

The nearest cop noticed me, unholstered his service weapon and aimed the pistol at my nose. I looked at the muzzle of his chrome-plated .40 semiautomatic. The bullet in me thundered, don't let him shoot you.

“Halt right there, shithead.”

“But I'm here to help.”

“Yeah, sure. Now go fuck yourself.”

How do I tell a cop I have a bullet in my head that shows me the ways of the world? How do I explain I was shot by a vigilante for no good reason? It was a twenty-first century disease. But I'd survived and now I could see things like nobody else. I was a cartographer of human souls.

“I'm Ricky Bellamy.”

“The oracle?” The cop reholstered his weapon, turned to the chief firefighter and jerked a thumb at me. “This is that guy we've been hearing about.”

“The weirdo that's been in the newspapers?”

I nodded.

“What're you doing here, kid?”

“I know how to save the people in there.”

“You sure?”

How does a soothsayer explain he knows the truth? That he can perceive what is on the farthest side of darkness. That prophecy is a language which never errs.

“I'll bet my life on it.”

“It isn't your life you'll be betting.”

I judged the threat, decided I wasn't afraid. I put my mind to the task. I searched and searched the gloomiest corners of the spirit world until a sole image was fixed in my consciousness: the Hondurans.

“Follow me.”

We scampered to the back of the burning bungalow with me in front, trumpeting: “They're in the laundry room. Break through the door to the kitchen and you'll find them.”

The firemen hefted their axes, made short work of the door and disappeared into the flames. A tongue of fire ran up a nearby telephone pole.

Shaken by the divination's intensity, I was worried. What if I'd made an error? Those men would perish and I would go to prison. There, I'd fight to keep from getting raped. My dad never talked about it, but mom steadfastly maintained he'd been punked and turned out in the pen. Mired in my anxiety, I didn't hear the triumphant shouts rising above the fire's cruel roar. Three firefighters materialized from the smoke, pushing and shoving the two Hondurans toward safety.

“Fuck.” One of the cops gawked at me. “You did it.”

Without saying a word, I pirouetted on my heel and flounced down the street, the tatty Zegna coat hanging from my emaciated frame like the magic cape that it was. A hummingbird streaked past my shoulder, chased by five hypertensive crows. I glanced at Spike's place. I didn't see any sign of her.

Sunrise was an hour away. I wasn't looking forward to it. I was close to cracking up. The mental strain of this prediction had done me in. But there would be no respite for me. To the contrary. I was back in the saddle again. The days were going to move faster now. Hopefully, I wouldn't.