Dirty in Cashmere (9 page)

 

THIRTY-SIX

The news of my exploit had long legs. Saturday morning found me sitting in the basement of the Emergency Management Center on Turk Street. The building was a superstructure with a metallic exterior, tinted windows, and a swooping roof stippled by satellite dishes and transmission poles.

The basement boasted blue industrial carpeting, embedded ceiling lights, and beige walls, a sickly fifty- year-old white man in a lime green Brooks Brothers suit occupying the room's other chair. His fingernails were razed to the quick, the cuticles colored with blood. Frowning at his nails, he looked at me, still frowning, the runnels around his mouth deeper than a canyon.

“Ricky? I'm Bo Lackner. The director of the city's disaster containment unit. Thanks for coming. You've been highly recommended to us by the new mayor.”

He was prematurely brown-nosing me. I curled my lip. “I didn't do fuck all for him.”

“You predicted the defeat of his opponent. Your reputation is spreading. Everyone knows about your honesty and unerring accuracy. As an oracle, do you make predictions from a need to do good for society?”

His question was spot on. When I started dispensing predictions for Heller and 2-Time, my motives were selfish. I wanted money. I didn't understand the consequences of my actions. My interaction with Branch and the circles he traveled in, the corridors of power, allowed me to think in larger terms. The fire on Guadalupe Terrace showed me I had a responsibility to other people. That was part of my accursed gift. I had become an agent for change. I wasn't a politician. I wasn't a social worker. Those roles were pieces on a chessboard. I was the chessboard itself. I wore the cloak of prophecy. I no longer catered to the greed of men. I carried the burdens of the city. I was on my way to Jerusalem.

“Yeah, I do. But do you know Branch?”

“Yes, everybody does.”

“He wasn't pleased by the job I did for him.”

“Forget him. He's finished.”

“So what can I offer you?”

“We're facing a problem. All of us in Emergency Management are expecting more airborne contamination from the Fukushima disaster to strike San Francisco. If you predict when it will happen, lives can be saved.”

It was hot in the room, but I refused to shed my coat. The cashmere was a good luck charm, a talisman. It was a smorgasbord of spoor, smoke, and my filthy skin.

“You're gonna give me a job?”

“That is my intention.”

“To predict another wave of fallout?”

“Yes.”

I didn't want to hear any more. The stress of the situation was already getting to me. Yet if I didn't take the job, life would be hell for other folks. “Tell me the details.”

“More contamination will disrupt the city. Looting and shootings. Fires. Food shortages. The poorest neighborhoods, the Tenderloin and Hunters Point, will suffer the most. And since this is the most expensive city in the country to live in, with extra contamination, it will be even more expensive. For example, the cost of getting clean water will be prohibitive. A preemptive prediction can help everybody.”

“I predict events, but I can't quantify things.” I thought of 2-Time and Heller and their robberies. “I can't predict specific amounts of anything.”

“But that's perfect. This is our credo: it's life after Andy Warhol. Everything is guaranteed fifteen minutes of anonymity and the rest is surveillance for eternity. All we want you to do is track the fallout's path.”

I watched the air in the room. The rug under my feet smelled. I wasn't who I used to be, not even from a week ago. I didn't know who Andy Warhol was, either. Lackner crossed his legs, repositioned his balls, hiked a pant leg, giving me a candid shot of his hairless white ankle, an old man's ankle. I looked away before I got upset.

“Do I get a salary?”

“Of course.”

“How much?”

“Four hundred a month.”

“That's all?”

“We have a limited budget.”

“Any medical benefits?”

“None.”

“Why not?”

“You're being hired as an independent contractor, not as a permanent employee. You aren't eligible for benefits.”

“This job, how long is it going to last?”

“A week.”

Lackner was another version of Branch, yet with less finesse, demarcated by the quality of his clothing. But his attitude was on the same channel. I summed up the money in my pockets, a grand total of practically nothing. My head, tipsy from hunger, was lighter than a cloud at high altitude. My diarrhea was digging in its heels.

“I'll take the position. When do I start?”

“How about this afternoon?”

“I need to go to Oakland first.”

“Why?”

“To get some anti-radiation tincture. It's all sold out here.”

“Okay. When you return we'll start our research.”

It occurred to me that I'd made a pact with a dybbuk.

But where was Jerusalem? It wasn't at Eternal Gratitude. It wasn't on Market Street. It wasn't in Pacific Heights. Wherever it lay, loneliness was a thing of the past and 2-Time was in rehab. I longed for Jerusalem.

 

THIRTY-SEVEN

I rode the BART train back to San Francisco from Oakland, a Walgreens potassium iodide tincture vial secure in my shirt pocket. In the city I got off at the Montgomery Street station. I walked westerly on Market Street through the hysteria of the noon hour crowds to the Emergency Management Center. Trash minueted at the curb by Piper's Jewelers, World of Stereo, and the Psychedelic Smoke Shop. Feckless pigeons invaded my space, brushing past my face with an arrogant flick of their wings, letting me know they could take a dump on my head any time they wanted to.

At the intersection of Seventh and Market, where the Odd Fellows Temple, Travelers Liquors, Ho King Grill and the old Strand movie house stood together, the sidewalk was rich with junkies. Pedestrians eddied around me, adrift in dread about their lives. The billboards above their heads told them to buy life insurance. The cement under their feet exuded melancholia, the improbability of a viable future for themselves and their loved ones.

It was Eternal Gratitude's final day.

Rita had packed the triple-beam scales into a cardboard box cushioned with styrofoam peanuts. The bogus banner 2-Time had forged, naming the club as the best in the city, was in a garbage can by the counter. The phony Turkish carpets were neatly folded, ready for their journey to Goodwill. The sound system, the speakers, turntable, and amplifier, had been dismantled and stacked up at the door. The remaining Life stock, three jars containing one hundred tabs each, was in an iron strongbox. It was a low grade variety of the vaccine, virtually worthless on the market, the tainted strychnine batch 2-Time had purchased from the Tenderloin wholesaler.

2-Time himself was enthroned in a wheelchair and watching the Channel Two news on a portable television, live footage of the Fukushima debris streaming under the Golden Gate Bridge into the San Francisco Bay. The debris had unexpectedly coagulated into a solid mass off the coast near the Farallon Islands. Powered by offshore winds, it was migrating eastward to the Berkeley marina. A flotilla of Navy destroyers escorted it.

A close up of the radioactive waste showed car tires, refrigerator doors, plastic bottles, sinewy ropes of seaweed, water soaked boards, and birds sitting on splintered boat hulls.

The camera then panned to the panicking throngs on the beach at Aquatic Park a few blocks west of Fisherman's Wharf. Dozens of SWAT cops in riot gear were restraining them. The camera zoomed in: anguished faces contorted with horror filled the television screen. The cops waded into the crowd, herding people away from the beach and up the hill to Bay Street.

What a fucking mess, 2-Time thought.

 

THIRTY-EIGHT

By four o'clock Lackner and I were atop windswept Twin Peaks. Below us, the city stretched from the bay to the ocean. We could see everything from the piers at the Embarcadero to the shuttle buses in Golden Gate Park.

Lackner had given me his office files, radiation readings that'd been compiled over the last few months, but none of it meant more than an old phone book. I needed to be outdoors, to see the contamination.

“Take a look, Ricky, and make a prediction.”

I worked myself into a trance and first looked at the Tenderloin. The soup kitchen line at St. Anthony's Dining Room was two blocks long and direct from a 1930s Dor
othea Lange photograph. The sidewalks were congested with vendors selling books and clothes, hustlers pacing by the check-cashing store on Market. Up the street was the citadel-like Twitter headquarters.

I trained my powers on the Haight-Ashbury. Homeless crusty punks were powwowing in the Panhandle. They sat in a ring by the basketball courts, straight out of central casting from
Lord of the Flies
.

I focused my energies on the Mission. Salvadoreno cowboys in big hats promenaded down Clarion Alley. The regal New Mission movie house's marquee was an angel of grief backlit by the palm trees on Mission Street. Further away, UCSF's Mission Bay complex confronted the crosstown freeway overpass for supremacy of the sky.

“What do you say, Ricky?”

“Nothing good.”

I did a one-eighty and took in the city's westside. The Bank of the Orient and Wu's Healing Center on Clement Street bustled with customers. The Great Highway teemed with traffic running south to Fort Funston and north to the Cliff House and the Golden Gate Bridge. Ocean Beach was drenched in Fukushima waste. I was done divining.

“I've got enough information.”

“So what do you think?”

“It's bad.”

I stuck my hands in my pockets as more rain flogged the backside of Twin Peaks, white fog lapping against the condos on Diamond Heights. Despite my cashmere coat, I was chilled. My kicks were totaled, heroically kept intact with duct tape.

“How bad?”

Heller said it best nearly two weeks ago at Eternal Gratitude: “Ricky, you should be on anti-depressants, some kind that has a sedating component to it. You're the most stressed out person I've ever met.”

But I didn't need anti-depressants. What I needed was sleep. A hot meal. A reason to believe everything would be all right in a world beyond repair. Lackner believed I was in sync with his strategy. He was off-base. I decided to make him suffer for it.

“I'll tell you tomorrow, okay?”

“That's not acceptable. You're working for the city on the clock.”

“Then dock me.”

“But we need to know now.”

“Fuck you, man. I'll talk when I'm ready.”

I limped down the hill's slope to Crestline Drive, to where Lackner had parked his Ford Crown Victoria. Grudgingly, he followed. He opened the driver's door and got behind the wheel.

“I should make you walk.”

I vaulted into the front passenger seat. He started the car, turned on the radio. The jazz strains of Pharoah Sanders's “You've Got to Have Freedom” heated our ears as dusk, solitude's favorite hour, curtained the city.

 

THIRTY-NINE

It was closing time on Sunday at the Emergency Management Center. Lackner was in his office, fighting off a migraine headache. Everything he'd done had a reason, not to increase his mastery over the city, but to make it safe from danger. And he was furious at me because I quibbled yesterday that I couldn't commit to a prediction. Moreover, he'd received a text message from one of my previous employers:

LACKNER. YOU THINK RICKY BELLAMY CAN PREDICT RADIATION? DROUGHT? ECONOMIC COLLAPSE? WAR? AIRPLANE CRASH? NO, HE CAN'T. HE'S A LOSER. A ROGUE ORACLE. HE WILL FUCK YOU OVER. BRANCH.

I showed my ID card to the security guard at the front desk, then ghosted down a corridor to Lackner's windowless lair. I was two hours late for our summit conference. Two hours late for the answers I was supposed to deliver. I toddled past cubicle after cubicle while organizing my thoughts. What I had seen on Twin Peaks terrified me.

I knocked on Lacker's door, went in. He was entrenched in an overstuffed chair. Quick as a match lit in a dark room and dying just as fast, I deduced he would have a coronary for Christmas.

A deduction was the stepchild to a prediction.

I said nothing of it.

Knowing that Lackner would have a coronary let me see him in a different light. His spirit was already preparing to depart from his body. But my job wasn't to tell a grown man he might be dead at Christmas, it was the safety of eight hundred thousand San Franciscans.

“You're tardy, Ricky. Take a seat.”

“I don't want to.”

“Suit yourself. Now let's have your prediction.”

I perspired in my coat. The office's fluorescent lights sizzled. I was going to make a prognosis about time. That was queer. I was no clock.

“Okay. More contamination is coming day after tomorrow.”

“That soon? How do you know?”

No oracle had to explain himself. The future wasn't a schoolbook read by the many. It was a mystery known to a few.

“I just know. When do I get a paycheck?”

“You don't get one. We do direct deposit.”

“I don't have a bank account.”

“Fuck your bank account. Where is the contamination going hit?”

“It'll pass over the Tenderloin.”

I turned to leave.

“Ricky? How do I get ahold of you?”

I thought about the cottage on Guadalupe Terrace and larded my response with spite.

“You can't.”

I stormed out of the Emergency Management Center and zagged over to nearby Jefferson Square. The park was empty, other than a parrot arguing with itself in a eucalyptus tree. I seated myself on a bench. Black rain wept against my Zegna. The prediction I'd told Lackner had taken all my energy. I had nothing inside myself, just a tundra of vacancy. No hope. No anticipation. Nothing but a fist of fear inside my chest trying to sock its way into my mouth.

I'd never prayed for anything before. But now I said a prayer for the Fukushima disaster survivors. I mumbled a prayer for the homeless Iraq War veterans on Market Street. I evoked a prayer for the assholes I abhorred, 2-Time, Heller, Branch, Doolan, and Lackner. Then I prayed I was wrong, that more fallout wouldn't hit the city. I remembered 2-Time saying, “You're a hostility magnet, Ricky. All the trouble you get into is because you're not only working out your own shit, but everything that's happening to the people around you, too.”

I finished praying and left Jefferson Square.

I was gimping toward the projects on Laguna Street when I bumped into Vivian Raleigh. She still looked healthy. Obviously, she'd tested negative. She was tricked out in a paisley print rayon minidress and a full-length black leather trench coat, leading a terrier on a leash. The dog took one look at me and lunged for my pants. Vivian jiggled the leash and the terrier fell back.

She checked out my Zegna, aware of its costliness.

“That coat is fucking sad. Don't you know how to take care of your clothes? You're no better than a wino.”

“Thanks.”

“Didn't I see you the other night on Tiffany Avenue? I was at my boyfriend's place.”

“It wasn't me.”

The memory of how she took my virginity came to me in an unwanted rush. We'd been alone at a friend's house. I kissed her, tasting another guy's lips on her mouth, smelling his sweat on her skin. When we took off our clothes and I reached between her legs, my fingers discovered she was sticky with his seed. I wasn't the first man Vivian had fucked that day. We flopped to the floor with Vivian on top. She mounted me. No missionary position for her, no doggy style. Then, with a deft hand, she inserted me in her famished slit. Her breasts teased my nose, and her knees pinned my hips. I thrust upward once. Vivian pulled out as I ejaculated.

“It felt good, huh?” she crooned.

All I had to commemorate my first sexual joining with another human being—lasting fifteen seconds—was a puddle of semen on my stomach. I wanted to kill myself.

Vivian dismounted me, somersaulted off the floor, retrieved her clothes and stepped into her panties. She stared at my face, reveling in her power. Another virgin had bitten the dust.

The memory faded and I rebounded back to the present. “Hey, girl.” I smiled in pain. “It's good seeing you again.”

I walked on.

Opposite St. Mary's Medical Center on Hayes Street a young man in gym shorts—a double amputee from his thighs down, a contamination survivor in physical therapy—sprinted up the sidewalk on black carbon steel prosthetic legs. His artificial feet, two curved stainless steel blades, boomed against the pavement.

I shouted, “Go, brother, go!”

Without breaking his stride, he huffed, “Mind your own damn business.”