Taste of Tenderloin

Taste of
Tenderloin

By Gene O’Neill

Winner of the 2009 Stoker
Award for Excellence in a Collection

Apex Publications

www.apexbookcompany.com

Published by Apex
Publications at Smashwords.

This collection is a work of
fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in these stories
are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

Taste of
Tenderloin

Copyright © 2009 by Gene
O’Neill

Cover art © 2009 by Steven
Gilberts

Introduction © 2009 by Gavin
O’Neill

Cover design by Justin
Stewart

All rights reserved,
including the right to reproduce the book, or portions thereof, in
any form.

“Lost Tribe,” “Bushido,” and
“Bruised Soul” original to this Collection; “Magic Words” first
appeared in
Dark Wisdom
#10, 2007; “Balance” first appeared in Cemetery
Dance #55, 2006;“Tombstones in His Eyes” first appeared in
The Grand Struggle,
2004;
“The Apotheosis of Nathan McKee” first appeared in
Unnatural Selection
,
2001; “5150” first appeared in
Horrors
Beyond 2
, 2007

Apex Publications,
LLC

PO Box 24323

Lexington, KY
40524

www.apexbookcompany.com

www.stevengilberts.com

This collection is for my friend
and colleague, Brian Keene.

He has championed my cause as a
writer. This blows his public persona: Brian Keene is a good guy,
deserving of his success!

Table of
Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Lost Patrol

Magic Words

Tombstones in His Eyes

Bushido

Balance

The Apotheosis of Nathan McKee

Bruised Soul

5150

Afterword

Bios

Acknowledgments

A special thanks to Jason Sizemore
and all the staff at Apex for their complete professionalism and
dedication to putting out the best book possible. Also a tip of the
hat to Steve Gilbert, an artist who is able to catch the spirit of
a book without giving anything away. And last I'd like to thank all
the readers who buy my books, enabling me to continue pursuing my
obsessions.

Introduction

I miss you. When I wanted
the city, you gave it to me in blood and history. You were much,
much bigger than I was. To walk your streets takes courage. To live
in your belly takes a reverent respect like all good surfers have
for the ocean; they know she can pound them into submission at any
moment. In the veins of your alleys we are only a heart pump away
from terror. In your rich heart, anything can happen. And happen
fast. I’ve seen your young Asian armies kick a black man into
unconsciousness in the middle of a busy street, busses held up to
watch. I’ve stepped over your chalk murder outlines on the way to
work, disorienting at six in the morning. I’ve loved your
peripheral motion, your androgynous hunters, and your sad cherubs
on the building faces, missing an eye, or some teeth, or both
wings. I left you and your abusive pinwheel of violence and
glitter...but I miss you.

I miss your juxtaposition
of tenements and tourist hotels, the homeless rubbing up against
the Financial District, your 60 liquor stores and swarming
population of children in their little uniforms, your drugs,
prostitutes, and strip clubs constantly taunting the patrons of the
Theater District, your Little Saigon and abandoned banks, your
methadone and public library, your transsexuals, transgenders,
transvestites and museums, your bars and your bars and your bars,
your dive bars and your merchant seamen that loved them, your
broken wheelchairs and cable cars, your studios crammed with Asian
refugees and your gay riots, your impossible parking and police
bribery, your bohemians and religious rescue missions, your drug
shootings and those fantastic Vietnamese sandwiches. And I love the
true lies about your beautiful name; that bent tiara.

My dad doesn’t drink or
smoke or gamble. As far as I know, he doesn’t frequent massage
parlors. He’s a guy who generally doesn’t have a lot of patience
for bullshit. And the Tenderloin has more bullshit per capita than
any neighborhood in the city. So what is it about this fifteen- by
seven-block radius that makes him set eight short stories inside
its perimeter?

I think it has something to
do with the living past of the hard-boiled 1920s that hangs around
the Tenderloin, refusing to slip quietly into the annals of
history. The neighborhood is still very much alive with the ghosts
of the gambling dens, billiard halls, boxing gyms, and
speakeasies
of
Dashiell Hammett
, who
lived at 891 Post Street--the apartment he gave
to Sam Spade
in
The Maltese Falcon
. Walking the
streets of the Tenderloin, it’s easy to feel Walter Tevis on your
right and Nelson Algren on your left.

My father likes faces with
character. He likes soulful, damaged people—at least on paper. In
real life, he doesn’t like anyone. Which is, perhaps, another
reason why he likes the Tenderloin. It really is the most anonymous
place on earth. You could bust into the corner store in a gorilla
suit and pink tutu, riding a unicycle, and no one is going to look
up from their shoplifting. You don’t really have to engage with
anyone; just bear witness to the spectacle of hard life. Also, and
maybe most significantly, my father respects endurance, something
the residents of the Tenderloin have in spades. You don’t really
understand this, what this means, until you see it for yourself.
Strap your wallet to your thigh and come on down.

—Gavin O'Neill, San
Francisco, 2009

Lost Patrol

Dense fog crashes down on
the Tenderloin like a wounded cloud.

Wet,
penetrating, chilling.

On your knees,
you scramble into the shelter of the cardboard
tent at the dark end of the alley around the corner from Jones and
O’Farrell. You hug yourself and listen intently. Nothing unusual
about the night noises of the city around you, the foghorn out in
San Francisco Bay a recurring mournful bellow.

Still, you’re unconvinced
that something hasn’t followed you back here again and is lurking
somewhere in the thick mist.

A trash can rattles at the
end of the alley, and you hear a cat screech
.
A moment later, a furry blur
streaks by the front of your tent.

You are unable to suppress
a shudder of relief.

Carefully, you slip the
recently purchased half pint of Wild Irish Rose from the pocket of
your field jacket and unscrew the cap. In three long pulls, the
bottle is emptied. The cheap whisky burns all the way down,
bringing tears to your eyes. After a moment, you slump down on your
grimy blanket, reaching inside your shirt and squeezing the
medallion on the chain around your neck for comfort. In a few
minutes, the medicine begins working, the warm, euphoric feeling
slowly spreading out from your gut to your extremities, washing
away the dread and tension.

Relaxed, you are able to
slip off to sleep
.

After PFC Shane McConnell
had
been at 3rd Platoon Base Camp on the
Pokey River for a little over four months, he made his first real
patrol mission with Second Squad. He’d been out a half dozen times
the past month and a half on day-long search and destroy sweeps
this side of the river, but there were never any NVA units or VC in
the surrounding area east and north along the river. It had been
kind of like Advanced Infantry Training Regiment back in the states
at Camp Pendleton. The S & D training had been just about as
mind-numbingly dull.

But this present patrol was
the real deal; it was why they were stationed there.

They had first picked up
supplies at the airfield. Then, loaded down like Himalayan sherpas,
they had crossed the river on a bobbing pontoon bridge near the
tiny village of Duck Soup. From there they had humped along a
steep, winding trail on the other side, and soon disappeared from
airfield view into the thick jungle. Second Squad’s primary mission
was to hump various supplies and ammunition to a special operations
unit across the river. The unit contained a never-specified number
of detached 3rd Force Recon personnel who reportedly lived with and
led three or four clans of fierce Hmong tribesmen, marauding from a
secluded sanctuary high up in the jungle-covered
mountains.

They met at pre-arranged
drop sites, the location and route changing with each patrol. The
longest ones kept them out three nights, but each at least required
an overnighter. Half the squad carried extra small arms ammunition,
medical supplies, and grenades in their backpacks; the other half
packed 60mm mortar rounds wrapped in old used socks with the
bore-riding arming pins safely double-taped down.

At their first break, Shane
plopped down next to a guy named Ward, a college dropout who
everyone called Psycho because of his rambling, emotional,
complicated, and often bizarre beliefs and theories about almost
everything. Shane felt the guy’s convoluted intellectual opinions
sometimes had a kind of compelling relevance to the craziness of
everyday life in the Crotch, as the grunts called the corps. It was
from Psycho that Shane had first heard the DOD-sanctioned
explanation for why U.S. forces were even being deployed in
Vietnam: the so-called Domino Theory, indicating that if South
Vietnam fell to the communists, other countries of Southeast Asia
would soon topple, too. Psycho thought it a visually dramatic but
“damned flawed theory,” not well supported by the socio-political
or historical background of the region. “No way, man,” he
explained. “Thailand, known as Siam for most of its history, has
been an independent kingdom for over a thousand years. Most of
Burma was independent and unoccupied for just as long.” He talked a
lot about U.S. forces really being in Vietnam to protect long-term
colonial interests established by the French across Indochina, a
complicated and rambling geo-political argument that he apparently
supported, although Shane was never positive about that.

“
Hey, man,” Shane asked
Psycho after catching his breath, “how come they don’t just fly
this shit in by ‘copters?” They were both resting on their packs,
cams damp with sweat. “Seems better, more efficient, than using us
ground-pounders. And for sure much easier on our frigging
backs.”

Psycho grinned cynically.
“Yeah, you got that right, Mac. But Captain Van Zant says that
there isn’t enough good level and cleared ground for a drop zone
where we’re headed up in the mountains. Which is complete bullshit.
It doesn’t take much to clear away growth for a small ‘copter pad.
But I think the real reason is that we cross too far west, beyond
where we’re actually supposed to be, you know.” He added in a much
lower voice, “Brass doesn’t want any choppers over there dropping
supplies to Force Recon advisors who aren’t even over there. You
get my drift?”

“
You think we’re actually
crossing over the border of ‘nam?” Shane asked, unable to mask his
doubt.

Psycho shrugged, then
nodded. “Yeah, I definitely do. We’ve got to be slipping into Laos,
maybe sometimes even the northern tip of Cambodia, when we hump
just a couple of days farther south from here.” He paused, studying
Shane’s skeptical scowl. “What? You never looked at any of those
maps pinned up in headquarters? Checked the scale? Got curious
about the estimated location of our drop points?”