Black Hole (22 page)

I have to wait until he's close enough to read the tats on his neck. I have to grab him and jam this ridiculously small gun in one of the few soft spots he has—right underneath the sternum and between the top two ab muscles, these tiny lead pieces will take the fight right out of him. I'll take my chances with the law but not with this hulking monster.

The uphill sidewalk steepens. It looks like a fucking wall covered in cigarette butts and blacked circles of old gum. I can't move. Too sick.

I've been here before. Big Mike. It's okay. He'll help me.

Pinching on the arm. Grip so tight my fingers hurt. Ripping feeling in my shoulder. He turns me around, shoves me against a wall.

His eyes are full of blood and murder, two tiny black pinpricks into his soul built from failure.

He holds a sutured stump in my face that still smells of antiseptics.

I'm supposed to do something right here, at this moment; I'm always supposed to do something at this moment, and I never remember what it is. This is where my life begins.

I take out the twenty-five and shove it right in between his abs, notched for me to find by feel from hours of leg-raises and sit-ups. I squeeze the trigger, feel the firing pin strike the bullet.

Time stops.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For starters, I should thank the influences you probably see: Philip K. Dick, William S. Burroughs, and Jim Carroll. I also should thank every single time-travel movie, from the shitty to the supreme, and also every questioning-reality film, from
eXistenZ
to
Jacob's Ladder
. All of these films have holes in them, but so do donuts, and you don't complain about the holes in those, you just enjoy the donut, right? If you take this book literally, it has problems, and so do you.

Okay, now on to some help you probably didn't know I had:

When I came to San Francisco in 1989, I picked up a copy of
Black Wheel of Anger
by Peter Plate. I read it three times in a row. I had never read anything like it. I later saw Peter read at a Food Not Bombs benefit. He had memorized his prose and recited it for everyone. Peter lived in a squat so he could spend time writing on a typewriter by candlelight in hours he would have otherwise spent working for rent money. What money he did have went to printing his books, which he gave away for free. He's San Francisco's most underrated writer, who writes love stories for the unlovable parts of the city; its gutters, alleys, and vacant lots; and the forgotten people who inhabit them.

There's a lot of Jon Longhi in this book. His four books of short stories inspired the anecdote-fueled fiction I write with here. His first collection,
Bricks and Anchors
, was in a regular rotation read, and I learned to write one- and two-page short stories from it, when the term “short-shorts” applied only to pants and not literature.

I'd like to thank Roberta, for watching this whole creative process while I was in the middle of a horrible cognitive meltdown; The Business, my weekly comedy show/partners, for giving me a consistent creative outlet and a safe place to write and create; Mick, for the weekly talks about art, the universe, and everything; my kettlebell friends from around the world that gave me rest from obsessing on a book; my Tuesday-night twelve-step crew, for reminding me that the dark moments always have a bit of humor; Bobcat, for a conversation about creativity and personal satisfaction he had with me that really lit a fire under my ass the more I thought about it; and Charlie Winton, for offhandedly mentioning he would like to look at a novel if I wrote one and for following through a long time later.

This book would not be possible without gentrification, which has been happening since I got here, but really, enough already. Pull it back a little. Slow it down. Please move to that plastic-bag island the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean. I hear the weather is great and there's lots of parking.

This book would not be possible without the horribly failed War on Drugs, in which no one gives a fuck about the victims. I can score a bag of dope about a half an hour from where I type this, but it would take me two weeks or more to get into rehab. We would rather fill our prisons at greater expense than give people treatment for what really ails them.

I would like to thank every bullshit tweaker conspiracy I had to listen to while getting high; bad dreams I thought were warnings; misspelled tattoos; the massive misperceptions from detoxing; the overwhelming weirdness of the world on the third day without sleep; the delusions of grandeur Frankie Glitter Doll described after hours at the adult bookstore that sold used
porn; the crow I saw eating a pigeon on Market Street; performance artists who stuck things up their asses in the name of any kind of statement; free poetry readings that were full of homeless savants and the mentally ill; the buses full of would-be artists, poets, and authors who came to San Francisco every summer and melted like snowmen in the harsh sunshine of cheap crank; punk bands that played loud in the warehouses of the Mission District and the cops who didn't give a shit; zine culture and glue sticks and those Kinko Keys that Dave stole; the Ghost of Frank's Depression that I swore was real; the smoking section at the Strand Theater; punk houses that always smelled like old socks and felt like home; the first dot-com era that now looks so small and naive compared to this one; the kindness of sex workers, ex-cons, and the insane who answered phone calls past midnight and were never shocked by anything I said; junkies who woke up stump-armed at SF General with nonconsensual amputations; bartenders that kept me after hours; and the donuts made in the twenty-fifth hour at the corner of Twentieth and Mission. I couldn't have done this without you.