Black Hole (7 page)

What day is it? That's how you know the drugs are good. When you honestly don't know what day it is.

NSA ANDY

THE UNMISTAKABLE SMELL
of human shit hits me as I turn the corner on Valencia Street. It smells like shit that went bad, if that's possible. It's as if it's filling the street; I can't imagine the source. It's like when you're in a bathroom and someone has shit on the floor, or taken such a long shit that the top of it sticks out of the water like the Loch Ness Monster. That smell.

I could be high in the way that this would ruin my day. But I'm high in the other way, where I can deal with it. What I see, though, is too weird even to come from a drugged-out mind. This is so fucked up, it's a lucid bit of reality. Sometimes you're too high to deal with anything, and sometimes you're high enough that you can deal with anything at all.

There's a shitman trying to get into a vintage furniture store.

When I say shitman, I mean he's covered in shit; he's not smeared with it, but it's piled and clumped on him. To the point where I can't tell if he's wearing clothes or not, but I'm guessing not. It's like the Human Torch but with shit instead of fire. He looks like a six-foot-tall limbed turd with two eyes and a mouth.

There's a young hipster employee fending him off with a child's prayer bench, like a lion tamer's stool. Shitman's yelling crazy shit, wearing crazy shit, clearly shit-crazy. Apeshit. Batshit. Humanshit.

But of course I know this fucker. Somehow through all the brownness, I recognize him as a guy we call NSA Andy.

NSA Andy, story goes, used to be a codebreaker for the NSA. Damn good one, some kind of math savant, the type they
recruit. There's a flagged question in the SAT test, one you can only truly solve if you are in an elite class of mathematicians. Of course, people will get it by accident, but if you get it right, the NSA tracks you and evaluates your skills covertly. They watch your passwords, your PIN numbers, that kind of thing. If you have potential, they approach you.

So NSA Andy gets flagged and followed. They pick him up in the place where they find the kind of mathematicians they want: rehab. There are those who are good at math, but the ones who will create the next-level shit are damaged goods. They're insane or drug addicts or both. They're also the ones whose lives have fallen apart. They pick the math freaks who need a way out of whatever shit they're in.

For a while, NSA Andy lives the life. They set him up with an apartment that completely caters to his needs. They bring him food, coffee, drugs, cigarettes, and anything else he wants. All he has to do is solve an equation that is slipped under his door every morning.

There's a whole dorm full of these guys, each one working on small bits of one really huge math problem, none of them knowing what the others have. But good old Andy, he didn't sleep like everyone else. He had time to kill. The equations were delivered at five
AM
every morning. After they were distributed, he sneaked up and down the hallways, sliding out equations from underneath the doors, memorizing them, and re-sliding them back under the doors.

NSA Andy saw something while he was there, like a code or an algorithm for everything: government passwords, Vatican secrets, missile launch codes, muffin recipes, the secret formula for Coke, horse-racing trifectas, next year's Super Bowl score,
and the locations of the planet's uranium. It's all some complex code he developed and turned in.

Once the government had it, they needed to eliminate it from him. They put noise-cancelling headphones on him and played an MP3 of a series of words that erased the part of his brain that contained the code and replaced it with the lyrics to every sitcom theme known to man. Then, done with him, they released him back to the wild.

At least that's how he tells it.

Now he works endlessly to recreate the code; you see him scribbling away on the backs of flyers, with Sharpies on the blank sides of box trucks, with chalk on the sidewalk. All the while, he sings theme songs, trying to find the numbers once again, get things to line up right.

He's singing the theme to
The Courtship of Eddie's Father
with anger, purpose, and a dark helplessness.

The shit is new. Haven't seen him covered in shit before.

I get closer. A cop car and an ambulance pull up.

You can't get away with this on Valencia Street. Maybe in '89 or something, but the day a naked man can cover himself in shit and do his own thing in the Mission is over. What's happened to this neighborhood? Even Capp Street is respectable now.

I see that there's a layer of old, flaky, dry shit dusting in the air. But on top is an application of fresh, wet, glistening shit. He's been at this for a while.

The cops and the EMTs are arguing. Who takes this? Who wants a shit-covered man singing about his best friend at the top of his lungs? The hipster yells,
SOMEONE FUCKING TAKE HIM
. The prayer bench is getting heavy, I guess.

Some time goes by, and animal control shows up. This guy is
pissed as well.
Not an animal,
he says.
Fuck this
. The cop orders him to get him.
I don't take orders from you,
he says.

Now it's a four-way fight of who wants him least. Across the street, the smell hits a woman, who vomits her Tartine pastries on her Lexus crossover. That's going to fuck up the paint job. There are camera phones out; it's all going down on video.

The animal-control guy snags Andy's right arm with this loopy-pole thing they use to wrangle angry dogs. The Vietnamese guy from the liquor store comes out with a hose with a pistol-grip sprayer and removes the shit in a power blast, like Rambo in the basement of the police station, all the while smoking a Marlboro Red without touching it, the smoke around his head like Einstein's hair. And did I call it right or what? Andy is god damned naked. Still singing. That man never gives up.

BACK TO WORK

COPS ARE ALL
around MiniWhale when I show up. Ambulance. Fire Marshal. It's a city-paid party over here. What the fuck is going on? They're taping off the scene. Something big has happened. I thought I was done with the law-enforcement part of my day.

Sir, step back,
a cop says.

Sir? He looks like a kid. Cops keep getting younger, but I stay the same age. I see the young ones like this, want to ask if their moms know they're out this late. I want to tell them,
It's dangerous out here, young man, why don't you go on home?
But you can't talk to cops that way. I put on my most adult authoritarian face.

I work here. What's going on?

As the words come out of my mouth, I know I'm still high. Nothing like talking to a cop to set you straight on that. Pulse rises. Fuck, can he tell? Do I look high?

He calls the detectives over. They want to know all sorts of shit. Do I work there, what's my position, how long have I worked there, did I work with Eirean O'Malley. Why are they using the past tense?

What's going on?
I say, in my best indignant tone.

Sweat. A thin layer bursts and covers me like a malfunctioning force field.

They keep with their questions. It's making the drugs kick in harder. They sound like
Despicable Me
minions.

WHAT'S HAPPENING, GOD DAMN IT, I DEMAND TO KNOW.

Sir, you'll have to calm down a bit. We have some really serious news for you.

So they found Eirean in some kind of nasty dead state: gutted, ribs spread open, missing all the organs. Hollowed out on top of the air hockey table. No signs of forced entry. Inside job, or someone he knew.

I remember the blood on my face. Could I have been there for that? Was I that high that I don't remember eviscerating Eirean? Or did I witness it? Or did I get away?

Whichever way, if I was involved, the guy who did this or the cops will be after me soon enough. I need to bust out of here.

I should cry or freak out or something. But I'm still way to wrecked on this marble stuff to give a good god damn. They're talking and asking questions.

Sorry
, I say.
State of shock. Can we talk later?

The detective hands me a card.

The whales. It hits me; no one's been taking care of the whales. And then it hits me as well that no one will notice if the whales are missing.

Fuck, the whales.

Fuck the whales?
he asks.

No, oh fuck, what ABOUT the whales? . . . I need to get in there. I need to take care of those little guys, or they're all going to die. Today's the day we're supposed to transport all the whales to the other facility. It's okay; I won't need the rec room.

He waves someone else over to escort me in. I get to where the whales are and turn on the powered pallet jack.

You know how to use one of these?
I ask.

Yeah, used to work at Costco.

San Francisco's finest. Protecting our streets because it pays better than ten-pound jars of mayonnaise.

Together we load the whales. All twelve whales here. One point two million dollars worth of whales. They're going on the big truck. And I'm taking this truck and never coming back. Fuck the whales? Nah. Sell the whales.

Hey buddy, wanna buy a whale? Shhh. Not so loud . . .

Junior Blue gets a buzz on his phone. It's a text. He pulls it up. A link.
Holy shit,
he says, and he laughs.
Look at this,
he says, shoving the phone in my face.

It's Shitman-Andy. Shitmandy? The clip is already up on YouTube. It's going viral.

FUCK IT ALL

I HAVE TO
clear my shit out and get my stash and whatever cash I have. I'm not coming back. Burn the roomies for the bills, fuck 'em. They can sue me, come after me, call a cop—they're already looking for me. Fuck this.

Fuck this apartment, this flat, all the San Francisco rooms for rent—they're too small, they're not heated, there's mold everywhere. Six people to five bedrooms, sometimes more. No living rooms. Water heaters for two service three times that many. Thin walls, hollow-core doors, upstairs tap dancing neighbors. Tinderbox buildings one knocked-over candle away from a bonfire.

Fuck rent control. Fuck the guy who holds an eight-hundred-dollar lease and charges eight hundred bucks for each of the three rooms but calls himself an activist and an artist when he's not creative and lives a sedentary life. Fuck the old hippies with the great places they'll never leave.

Fuck the artists, the bands, and the poets for making this neighborhood cool and trendy and hip, for having poetry slams and DJ nights and galleries that showcase graffiti artists. First they come and give everyone else an excuse to show up, and before you know it, the rich fucks are moving in.

Fuck rich fucks driving up prices. If you refused to pay too much, the prices wouldn't rise like this. It's all your fault in the end. Fuck you and your desire to live in a neighborhood that won't make up for your lack of imagination or personality. Live somewhere else. If all of you move anywhere, the yoga studios
and artisanal cheeseries will follow. I promise. You won't want for a thing. Ever.

Fuck California with its liberal reputation and conservative governors. Nixon, Reagan, Schwarzenegger. Pete Wilson, who cut the CSU budget year after year and built more prisons with the money. Why does California get a rep for being full of hippies? It's full of prisons and crumbling schools.

I look around the room. What do I need to take with me? Nothing. None of this. I don't need it. It's all garbage. Flyers, posters, books I'm not going to read, thrift-store clothes, and garage-sale records. VHS tapes and a VCR. A tube TV that weighs as much as I do. Bookshelves I found on the street. One fifteen-pound dumbbell that I've tripped over more times than I've lifted. What was I thinking with that?

I stuff underwear, socks, and a few shirts in a garbage bag. I have the shoes on my feet, and I've been wearing these jeans for weeks straight anyway. When I get where I'm going, I'll get new shit.

I should've bailed months ago. Years ago. I never should have come here. I should have left the country right after high school. Fuck it. Fuck it all.

DAVE KITCHELL

DAVE KITCHELL'S HANDS
feel like bricks. They're cold, menacing, cable-fingered mitts. He has sharp calluses that pinch your hands when you shake his. But it's the inhuman hardness that really freaks me out. There's no fleshly give in his hands; they're too solid for that. If he held up his closed fists, it would look like he's holding an invisible bat.

Dave's a fearsome hitter. He bats fifth for the Giants. His average is low, but when he does make contact, it rarely stays in the park. He's adored by children, loved by the ladies, feared by opposing pitchers, and hated by the media. He's played longer than any current big leaguer, and his secret is that Big Mike has been selling him drugs for years.

Dave's body is a housing for a chemistry set. He's been on everything. Not just the ones you would assume, like steroids and amphetamines, but vanity drugs that work better than plastic surgery, and he chews mood stabilizers like they were Lucky Charms. He has an affinity for psychedelics and a particular appetite for military-combat drugs. I don't know how he cheats the league's drug testing, but he must be testing positive for everything.