One Foot Off the Gutter (2 page)

It wasn't cold war paranoia. That type of dread was a glimmer of the past. This was new jack paranoia,
por mi vida loca.
It led me to explore situations I wouldn't ordinarily consider.

Hanging out with Bellamy in front of an abandoned building was one of those enlightened paranoid moments. There was something about the building that intrigued me.

I was searching for a home I could call my own. It was a common desire complicated by the fact that I didn't have any money. I wasn't getting any younger. Forty-seven at last count. All my life, since I'd left my family's weary homestead in Daly City, I'd dwelled under roofs that had belonged to other people. If I added up all those rentals, those apartments, hotel rooms, shotgun flats, and crumbling stucco duplexes with the long, broken driveways and laid them next to each other, I could've walked from San Francisco to the moon.

A tenant was an incomplete human being in my opinion. There had to be a path out of the wilderness of cheap rentals, dour landlords, lost deposits, and the everyday anxiety that wasn't even worth thinking about unless you had a plan.

And if there was a neighborhood in the city where unwanted buildings could be readily found, the Mission district was it. The Mission was the graveyard of San Franciscan real estate.

Bellamy scoffed at my idea of buying a house on a cop's salary; it was a sick joke to think about owning one's own pad. Bellamy was homeless, and he wasn't alone. There were plenty of homeless cops in San Francisco. The city gave us a badge and a gun to protect the citizens and their property, but a lot of cops never got paid enough to keep a roof over their own heads.

It was one of the less pleasing aspects about the job. The medical benefits weren't too bad, but everything else was questionable. I knew it used to make Bellamy feel bad, being homeless. Over the years, he'd gotten used to it. He was self-reliant; he'd known worse times in his youth. He had gotten used to changing his clothes at the station. He'd learned to wash himself in the bathroom sink when he thought he was smelling ripe. His personal affairs were conducted from the squad car; the back seat was piled up with his belongings. Dirty underwear, empty cigarette packs and fast food containers were strewn on the back seat floor, lending solid testimony to the establishment of a long term dwelling. With Bellamy living out of the car, it was difficult to transport prisoners whenever we made an arrest. The assholes we busted hated the back seat of the squad car.

 

I let Bellamy live in the car while I commuted on the Golden Gate transit bus from Novato. It was an arrangement that filled me with consternation. Novato was a suburban bedroom community where you could get an apartment for a reasonable price, supposing you didn't eat more than two meals a day. Thousands of police officers
from all over the greater bay area resided in Novato. The town had the rollicking atmosphere of an army base after sundown. Novato depressed my wife; Alice didn't fit in with the suburban cop wife lifestyle. She said Novato with its malls and beehive buildings filled her with discontent. In all honesty, I couldn't remember a day when Alice felt good about herself, me, or Novato.

Bellamy lived to make love one more time. He was single, forty, and mired in debt because of his hair transplant. He was waiting for the next woman he could ensnare in the web of his underdeveloped charms.

I had a different slant on life. I was starving to get a home for me and Alice. My mind raced along with my eyes following the same route, taking in the curtains on the second floor of the abandoned building. I wondered who owned the place. Despite years of visible neglect, it had to be a potential gold mine.

At least I knew what I wanted. That was more than Bellamy could say for himself.

Any number of things could happen now. But one possibility was certain. If we went into that house, it would be like cracking open Pandora's box. I don't know why I felt like that. I chalked it up to a cop's natural sense of intuition. Every cop had a built-in premonition for disaster.

 

Free Box held the revolver at arm's length, pointing the gun down at the street. Shadows were wrapping themselves around the buildings and the cars on Twenty-first Street like strands of cotton candy. Clots of junkies and winos were swarming near Bill's Whirl-o-mat at the corner,
cadging cigarettes and drinking tall boys buried inside brown paper bags. Free Box hadn't meant to be at the window when the squad car rolled to a halt in front of the house. But that was his fate; he was a magnet for inquisitive cops.

“Nobody still out there?” the girl asked upon her return.

He just hung his head, nodding, “Yeah. You got it.”

Free Box was convinced a thousand years had gone by. Just as he was about to give up, suspecting the cops were going to be parked in front of the house for the rest of his life, the squad car pulled away from the curb, moving toward the second world neon of Mission Street.

Not surprisingly, Free Box didn't feel relieved. He wasn't excited by their departure; he didn't feel much of anything. He turned around to look at the girl. Sooner or later, the police would return. They always did.

She laid her hand on his neck.

Cops were predictable in their travels. They moved in circles on a map that always drew them back to where they began. Once the police were on to something, they never let go. When they came back, he'd be there waiting for them. This building was where he belonged. He wasn't going anywhere.

 

 

 

 

 

 

t
he skyline on Twenty-first Street didn't amount to much; soft, eroded clumps of rooftops that fit neatly against each other. The cables and wires that crisscrossed the street hung as low as a full grown man's head.

Unemployed men were lining up against the walls of a burned out store front around the corner on Treat Street. The sidewalk in front of the store was a sea of bobbing heads. There were so many nickel bag dealers trawling the strip near Bill's Whirl-o-mat, the citizens walking by had to beat them off with a stick. Smoke was rising from the small fires burning in Van Ness Avenue homeless bivouacs. Heat waves were spiraling into the smoggy air from the five story dead eyed Bernal housing projects on Folsom Street.

 

Patsy looked at the roof of the abandoned building next door and frowned. She shook her head, flouncing her
blonde hair and resumed spraying the bougainvilleas with the hose.

She quieted down while watering the plants. She liked watching things grow; the bushes had to be moistened, not too much and not too little. She wanted the garden to be in tiptop shape for her parents' visit. They were coming up from La Jolla next week, and she was already feeling the strain of it. What could she do? Her mother had insisted the first week in October was the best time for her and Daf to come up to San Francisco.

“Malcolm! Celeste! Where are you?” she called.

A pair of dirty faced kids popped out from the other side of the garden. Before she could admonish them for wandering out of sight, the children ran up to her and threw their tiny arms around her legs, staining her immaculate white tennis shorts with their muddy hands. Malcolm buried his face into her crotch. Celeste circled around to Patsy's rear, sinking her nose into the cleft of Patsy's buttocks while grabbing her mother's thighs with her stubby fingers. Patsy held the garden hose waist high and closed her eyes. A vague sexual tension rose from her navel. She enjoyed the sensation, but in the back of her mind, in the place where her identity was overshadowed by the visage of her aging mother, she knew her pleasure was incorrect.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

Malcolm stepped back and peered at her with a guileless expression in his brown eyes. Celeste stood off to one side, imitating her brother. Patsy kneeled down to talk with them at eye level.

“We was playing,” Malcolm said carefully.

“And where were you playing?” Patsy asked, looking to him, then at his sister.

“Over there,” he said haltingly.

His sister stole a glance at the abandoned building and didn't say anything.

“You know it's a bad house. I want you to stay away from it.”

Malcolm raised his head and asked, “Why?”

“I don't have a reason. It smells funky, I don't know. Because I said so,” she replied. “I want you two to run into the bathroom and get washed up. We're going to have a cold pasta dish with sun dried tomatoes. And if you're good, and you eat everything on your plates, I'll serve French sorbet for dessert. Won't that be good?”

“Okay, Mom.”

The kids turned around and scooted through the opened back door into the kitchen. Their shrill bird-like laughter trailed after them, lingering in the Indian summer air before falling apart, note by note, in Patsy's garden.

 

With the children in the house, she could give her full and undivided attention to the pigeons next door. They'd been on her mind for some time now. She'd been meaning to do something about them. They were obscene, filthy, crippled and diseased birds that roosted on the fire escape of the abandoned building. They made their home on top of a cast off slab of plywood; evil tempered devils who dropped their offal on every house and tree in the neighborhood. The pigeons also defecated on themselves
with equal and uncanny disregard. They were quite free and democratic with their effluvium.

Then there were the physically challenged pigeons. Before Patsy moved to the city, she'd never encountered a pigeon with less than two legs. Nowadays she frequently saw one legged brutes hobbling along the sidewalk on Twenty-first Street.

Once in awhile she saw a legless pigeon dragging itself over the pavement in a macabre dance of bravado and pathos, using its wings to navigate the asphalt while wearing an expression of hapless woe on its miniature face. It was hard to look at them. It was impossible not to.

She'd already called the city's building inspector's office to find out more about the abandoned building next door. She tried to find out who owned the property, but the lack of information she received irked her. It seemed that nobody owned the place.

Most of its windows were broken, leaving gaping holes. The chimney on the flat Edwardian style roof was leaning over to one side. An abandoned building was not only unsightly, but due to its proximity, it could also make the value of her own house go down. Her mother would not approve, but her husband acted like he didn't care.

Patsy had to wonder about the doctor. Her mother didn't understand how she could tolerate a man who wore Guatemalan cloth vests and Birkenstock shoes. Patsy dressed in tight short dresses made from rayon or silk. The doctor wore his balding hair in a scraggly pony tail. Patsy's Volvo station wagon was spotlessly clean. The doctor never washed his Volvo sedan. She told her mother the doctor
adopted a casual approach to his personal attire because he lived in San Francisco.

Her mother had laughed. “Don't give me that hocus pocus, sweetie. The doctor is living in the past. Everybody in that city is. Don't you know that?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

i
wedged myself through the glass doors of the Mission police station, conscious of being overweight and sleepless and wearing a dirty uniform that had been next to my body for the last week. A blast of smoke hit me in the face, clogging my nostrils and compelling me to sneeze. Two rookie cops, apple cheeked and bright eyed with modified mohawk hairdos and dressed in crowd control overalls, walked by me, ignoring me in a way that I knew was false. The desk sergeant, a tall, thin cop nearing retirement age behind a decrepit computer terminal, lifted his eyes from the screen, quipping out of the side of his mouth:

“What's up, Coddy?”

“You tell me, Gilbert. What's the smell? It's fuckin' hideous,” I snapped, short of temper.

Gilbert hunched the narrow spear points of his shoulder blades and grinned crookedly with a melancholy sigh.
“Ah, it's nothing. Some of the guys are out back in the parking lot burning shit. You know, that confiscated stuff left over from the last fiscal year. Some of it, we kept. What was left over, it's out there in the fire.”

The city and state cutbacks had forced the mayor and the police chief to hammer out a temporary policy in which rank and file personnel were allowed to re-supply themselves with confiscated evidence taken from the possession of alleged and convicted perpetrators.

“Bellamy out there, Gilbert?”

The desk sergeant's gray face was already buried at the screen again; he jerked his thumb toward the back door without saying a word.

 

I trudged down the antiseptic smelling corridor, as I had done five times already that day, heading towards the parking lot. I passed a dozen offices on the way. In every single yellow sandstone brick-lined room, cops were busy on the job. Some were poring over road maps; others were cleaning their weapons, wiping them down with solvent. A few were interrogating petty criminals scooped up from Mission Street earlier that morning. In the parochial atmosphere of the cop shop, every police officer, even the arrogant rookies, looked like angels to me. Everything was strictly business, nothing personal.

I reached the end of the corridor, braced the release handle and pushed open the back door. Bellamy saw me and sang out:

“Coddy! Come join the festivities!”

Bellamy waved his arm toward the fire he was standing
near. In between two squad cars and the captain's mobile home command vehicle, a waist high pile of shoes was being licked to death by orange, pink and red flames.