Black Hole (14 page)

Fuck. What is going on?

I don't remember this part of the movie. I guess my brain is making it up as it goes. I'm curious but more curious about something else.

I walk out of
Kindergarten Cop. Total Recall
is playing next door
.
The smell of BO and lunchmeat hits me as I enter. Cigarettes, popcorn, and Pine-Sol. There's a soda pop stain on the screen; it looks like a horrible birthmark when it lands just right on the actors.

Jessica's here. I recognize her dreadlocked silhouette easily. I walk to the seat next to her . . .

Jessica?

You're such an asshole.

I know. I'm sorry.

Sorry's not enough.

I just want to make things right.

You say that but you don't mean it. You never mean it.

I don't understand. I don't know what's wrong.

Are you not paying attention to any fucking thing I say?

Look, I'm a little bit high, why don't you tell me again.

I can't believe I'm doing this. Okay. I told you I was pregnant, and you said, and I quote, “That sucks.”

That's what it was. I had gotten her pregnant. I probably said it sucks about something in the movie, or a trailer or something. I don't remember her saying that. No wonder. I don't blame her one fucking bit for not speaking to me.

I'm sorry. I didn't mean “that sucks” about you being . . .

SHUT UP
, a man yells at us. He stands up a couple of rows in front of us and turns around. He just keeps standing up. He's a mountain.

You shut the fuck up,
she spits at him.

Not cool. Not cool, Jess. Fuck.

The mountain crawls over the horizon line of seats, one row at a time. As big as he is, he was farther away than I thought. He gets bigger as he climbs over each row. A Grimace-shaped mound of flesh coming at us . . .

Oh, what are you going to do? Come back here and whup our asses? My boyfriend knows karate, asshole.

Fuck. I do not.

Flesh mountain is right in front of us and picks me up with one hand in my armpit, the other hand on my neck. I'm off the ground. I can't breathe.

Karate this, motherfucker
, he says, and he squeezes. I'm looking at Arnold on the screen. He's losing air on the unprotected surface of Mars. His eyes bulge, his lungs empty . . . I'm out.

I wake up. I'm on the duct-taped couch. My backpack is still there. My shoes, however, are gone. Fucking squatters. I smoke up and bail. I have shoes to buy.

THE MONSTERS ARE LOOSE ON MISSION STREET

I'M IN THE
Mission breaking in my new Adidases and making my way up to Liza's place, past the vegan burrito place across from Taqueria Murder—well, we call it that because some gangland shit went down in there in 1990. The vegan place is Gracias Madre, a horrible entryway into gentrified San Francisco.

The really insulting gentrification is the replacement of established businesses with yuppie replicas. The genuine barbeque places on Divisadero are shut down and made into yoga studios, and in the Lower Haight, the ironic barbeque place opens. The old-man barbershops are shut down and vintage clothing stores open, and later, the old-timey barbershop opens. When the cycle gets fast enough, the new-school fake Mexican food place opens across the street from the real one. The only hope is that the real one beats the fake one. In the end, gentrification comes down to who owns the building and who will pay more to rent the spaces. Even though it makes money, the taqueria will eventually disappear from the mission because the real estate doesn't make sense. We'll always have a Mission-style burrito, but it won't be the same.

Something's awry on Mission Street; there's something going on. The hipsters are moving toward Valencia, and the junkies are moving toward Sixteenth. The crazy guy who plays Hacky Sack with old beer cans scampers off and disappears down Clarion Alley. The old white guy who wears basketball jerseys and
screams random shit about being in the penitentiary disappears behind a door. Motherfuckers are running.

I should run, too, but I'm too high. My inertia keeps me going down to the corner of Nineteenth. I keep looking down there—is it a fire, a wreck, a drive-by? In the late '80s and early '90s, shit went down around here as the Norteños and Sureños got in an all-out war over the control of Twentieth Street. Nobody won. Honda Civics poked out Uzi snouts and sprayed at pay phones where
vatos
stood ground with pagers. Twenty years later, it's still neutral ground.

The adrenaline's flowing, but my blood feels thick, like hot fudge going through my veins. I'm floating down Mission. As the chaos increases, everything seems to calm for me. I see people screaming but I can't hear them. All I hear is the Five Stairsteps singing
Oooh child things are going to get easier, ooh child things'll get brighter . . .
A Latino mom runs by, carrying her child like a football, his mouth open in a scream I can't hear. A pudgy hipster in cutoff skinny jeans has lost his sense of irony; he jumps and scatters his way through the street between cars . . . It's a social clusterfuck down here, and I couldn't be more at home.

NSA Andy runs up the street in a hospital gown, torn and hanging on like the flag of a defeated army, somehow. His head is freshly shaved, and his eyes are big as Skoal cans. Where each arm used to be is a stump with crossed
X
's of stitching. He's screaming the
Gilligan's Island
song at full screech, no,
Petticoat Junction
. Wait, both.

Andy's lost it, for real. I don't think he knows where he is. Maybe he's stuck in a bad dream, running down Mission street in an unending night terror, running from NSA agents, CIA
spooks, FBI assassins, Greenpeace hit men, white-power survivalists, black panthers, tenderloin crack dealers, old bosses, the babysitter who molested him, all of his demons real and imagined, those from his past and those who never existed.

His eyes lock with mine, and the world tunnels into his face. He recognizes me, a friendly face in the crowd of chaos and mayhem. He smiles a desperate smile, distorted by his freakishly bulging cheeks. The distance between us closes until we are inches apart. The song stops.

Fix me
, he says, opening his mouth.

I think he's talking about his arms. A speech coils in my brain; I want to think of what to say, how to explain his arms to him, but then the junkie in me registers what's going on.

Tiny balloons are held chipmunk-style in his cheeks. Someone gave this man a mouth full of dope. Some heroin dealer took mercy on him, out of kindness or abject fear, and gave Andy a week's worth of dope. Problem is, how the hell is he going to shoot up? A monkey could fix with his feet, and a junkie could find a vein in a bowling ball, but this poor drug fiend is fucked as fucked can be. All this dope and no way to shoot it.

Aw, brother,
I say,
I ain't got no works on me. Just a pipe.

They took my arms.

I know.

They were going to take my legs next.

Now, I don't think . . .

They were going to cut me away until I was a brain in a jar, forever trapped in a dream, stuck in my own thoughts and never waking, on the shelf of an NSA freak like a trophy.

Sirens that sound off a Frankie Goes to Hollywood song.
Relax. Don't do it . . .

They're coming for you Andy. You need to get out of here.

Andy looks around.

Capp Street, I tell him. Go down Capp Street. If there's one place in the world you may not stick out, it's there.

Andy runs. It's a panicked fear that fuels him in a PCP-like fury. Cars screech and stop. The frightened villagers spread out, running from this monster that's come down off Potrero Hill in seek of . . . well, this monster just wants to get high. He just needs a friendly hand and a rig.

BACK AT LIZA'S

FUCK,
SHE SAYS
, you smell. Like bad, like fuck it.

Good to see you, too.

Come in. Get out of those clothes and in the shower.

I walk down the hallway, dropping clothes as I go. I can smell myself. It must be really bad. It's like an old lunch in the fridge that you can't smell until you open it. Both metaphorically and literally. I smell like an old lunch, a half-eaten sandwich with some kind of oil or dressing that turned.

I line up my drugs on the bathroom counter. Coke, remote, a marble, and a pipe. I turn on the water, let the hot water steam up the room a bit. I take a bit of each. A small bump of coke for each nostril. Just enough remote to keep things normal. A long, healthy marble hit.

The water takes off a layer of funk. It's right about to scald but just a tiny bit tolerable. I slow everything down and let it sink in.

In what feels like hours, Liza walks in, naked.

Drugs!
she squeals
. They're my FAVORITE. However did you know?

Liza hoovers the coke. Christ, she can disappear that shit up her face hole. She takes a full dose of remote, but when she sets it down, she knocks it over.

FUCK. Liza!

Jeez, I'm sorry. I'll get you more.

Fuck. I was all set. That was my personal stash.

Did you fuck around and get a habit?

What the fuck do you think? I've been hooked on that shit for months.

Well, let's get you cleaned up and get you some more. I know a guy.

She takes a giant marble hit. That, she's welcome to. She can smoke all of that shit she wants.

My guy will probably want some of these, too. He has money. Cash. Lots of money.

That's my girl. Now put the pipe down and get in here.

Like every good drug addict would, she takes one more hit. She sets down the pipe and gets in the shower.

Faded tattoos, some well done and some fucked from the get-go, cover her body like stickers on a guitar case. She has scars she can't remember the start of, piercings so old she's forgotten about them. She's missing an ear, an eye, and a lot of her scalp, but still, she's a beautiful lady, more than what I deserve.

THE GUY

WE'RE IN FRONT
of a warehouse somewhere off Third Street. I never figured this neighborhood out. It's an industrial area, one of the few areas of town that hasn't been made into a cute or up-and-coming area. It's still warehouses and cab companies and the occasional rave.

The warehouse used to be a bottling company; you can still make out the lettering on the side of the building. But the colored lights coming out of the top row of windows are a dead giveaway, as are the beats quietly thumping bass notes. What used to be a blue-collar warehouse is now a drug and party palace.

I stay close behind Liza. She's decked out like a sad doll. Sort of goth, but she looks more like a toy, like a Raggedy Ann, but sad. A permanent frown done with makeup to look like it's sewn on.

This is the place Eric was talking about. I can tell when we walk in. It looks like the receiving room of a funeral home, but with house music. There are the steampunks and the goths, the hipsters and the cool, and voyeurs scattered about who don't quite know what's going on. People are crying and feeling each other up, slight groping, like a family funeral with hugs that linger a bit to long and have maybe more hip grindage than you would want from your aunt.

We cut through the room to a hallway. It's lined with movie posters. They're going to be showing
Bicycle Thieves
,
Where The Red Fern Grows
, and
Old Yeller. The Champ
remake with Ricky Schroder.
The Outsiders
.
Never Let Me Go
.
Grave of the Fireflies
. Then there's the remixes, the three suicide scenes from the three
A Star Is Born
movies, the death scenes from the
Rocky
movies, and one that seems to be really popular, the Disney Death Film, a montage of all the cartoon characters from Bambi's mom to Simba's dad that die in the various animation features, plus a sequence of Wile E. Coyote dying over and over.

There's a line of furverts waiting to get into that one. Plushies. They're dressed in anthropomorphic animal costumes. They will pile up in there and furry fuck each other, some rubbing off on the other costumes, the others with action flaps that lift up and allow for actual fucking. It's a super sweaty mess of fat-people BO and jizz in there in no time; those costumes are hot inside. Hell, I can't fuck with a shirt on without feeling constricted and dangerously heated. I have no idea how they get it on dressed like a giant bunny.

There's a sample in the house music, Erik Satie mashups. Then comes Pachelbel's Canon in D. Albinoni's Adagio in G. Old music with sad new beats. “Eleanor Rigby” chunks played in loops. Procol Harum's “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” Music that makes you sad on a great day.