Taste of Tenderloin (13 page)

Dismissing any attempted
explanations of the remarkable transformation, Nathan chuckled
loudly as he left the room, still unclothed.

At the foot of the
stairs leading into the dingy hotel lobby, Nathan
paused and glanced left at Ferdie, who did not even look up from
the barred window at the front desk. The night clerk was busy
laying out keys for the first floor rooms, most of which rented for
hourly rates. That night, Friday, would be hectic, a constant
stream of women and their customers coming in from the street.
Nathan wondered why Ferdie bothered with the keys at all. Half of
the door locks in the old, run-down Reo—especially those on the
busy first floor—didn’t work.

He shrugged and deftly
dodged to the side to avoid being run over by an eager couple
hurrying in the opened doors of the hotel. The hooker led a
red-faced, fat john to the front desk, where the john dug out and
handed Ferdie a five-dollar bill and received a key in return. The
numbered keys did benefit the night clerk, in a way; they helped
Ferdie keep track of which rooms were in use.

Satisfied that neither the
couple nor Ferdie could see him, Nathan turned from the front desk
and stepped outside, shivering in the cool evening air and glancing
about.

Early Friday night and the
Tenderloin was already rockin’-n-rollin’. Jones Street traffic was
stalled-out bumper-to-bumper waiting for the lights to change over
on Geary. Horns blasted, people shouted, Muni buses belched out
diesel fumes, and the sidewalk was already littered with trash and
crowded with a representative sample of the city’s
underclass—recent immigrants, furtive sellers of hot goods and
special services, and even a pair of young children joyfully
playing tag in and out of the adults in addition to the usual
desolate and desperate human beings. A kind of nervous energy
electrified the atmosphere, giving it the Midwest tingle of a
hovering thunderstorm. The ‘loin was loud, smelly, dirty, and
congested with restless excitement.

All of this sound and fury
bombarded Nathan’s senses as he moved along, protecting his injured
ribs with his right elbow. It felt almost like something he was
experiencing for the first time, which was true in a way. He had
not noticed much of anything specific about the Tenderloin for a
long time, with the exception of the location of several liquor
stores. Not until the strange seizures and changes.

Unlike the previous two
evenings of just wandering around naked like an unseen, laughing
idiot, Nathan had something in mind that night, a destination and a
goal. Oh, yeah. He grinned deviously to himself.

Heading north toward Geary
Street, Nathan spotted Sweet Jane just ahead on the fringe of the
crowd with her back against a building front—a hooker from the Reo
who occasionally slipped him a buck or two at the end of the month.
She was playing her violin, something she sometimes did on the
street before work. Mostly classical stuff. At the moment it was
“When a Gypsy Makes His Violin Cry.” The majority of the mob
ignored her, but a few people stopped to listen, as did Nathan,
making a little island in the moving river. Sweet Jane, whom he’d
probably passed by hundreds of times during the past few years
without really paying close attention, played exceptionally well.
Her eyes were closed and a peaceful smile rested on her pretty but
lined and aging face. Nathan nodded. Another depressing story among
the Tenderloin’s many? Maybe, but he didn’t see it that way.
Listening to her play was like glimpsing a fallen angel flexing her
damaged wings, trying to fly and transcend her grim
circumstances.

“
Gotta go to work now,”
Sweet Jane announced, taking the instrument from under her chin and
shrugging her shoulders reluctantly at the disappointed faces of
the few who had paused to listen. She bent down and put the violin
in the battered case after scooping up the handful of coins inside.
Obviously the woman wasn’t playing for the pitiful change. Nathan
shook his head.

Continuing up the street,
he worked his way through the swelling crowd, enjoying his
clear-headed alertness. People paid no attention to his undressed
state. No one really saw Nathan at all as he shouldered his way
through the delay at the stoplight.

Finally, he reached his
goal: the open entry to All-Star Donuts on Post Street. He closed
his eyes and savored the rich smells that assailed his nostrils. He
had drunk no alcohol for seven days, his heavily medicated state in
SF Gen helping him avoid any of the usual withdrawal symptoms and
booze calls, but since hitting the street again he had experienced
an intense craving for sugar.

Nathan opened his eyes,
waited for a few moments, then strolled into the doughnut shop that
he’d picked so carefully. The half of the shop to the right was
completely dark; the stools, lunch counter, and tables were closed
for the night. Only the pastry display counter and cash register to
the left were well-lit.

The two clerks behind the
cash register gossiped in their nasal, sing-song native language.
Neither girl noticed the naked old man who slid to the right around
the dark side of the counter, and after a moment of pondering
choices, helped himself to a pair of raspberry jelly-filled
doughnuts from the aluminum trays. Then Nathan backed into the
dimness near the rear wall and ate both pilfered doughnuts on the
spot with impunity. Each of the white-iced pastries hovered
magically in the air in the long wall mirror before rapidly
disappearing from sight in three or four huge bites.

Nathan licked his sticky
fingers, unable to restrain a burp after eating the sweets too
fast.

The nearest girl must have
heard him; she turned suddenly, the frown on her face quickly
dissolving into a look of puzzlement.
So
much for the inscrutable countenance of the stereotypical
Chinese,
Nathan thought, chuckling to
himself as he left, his jones satisfied for the moment.

He wandered the rest of the
evening.

Finally driven inside by
the
chilling fog that rolled in from the
bay around midnight, Nathan waited patiently on the foot of
his
bed. The seizure soon hit again, the
events in the other place exactly the same as earlier at dusk, only
reversed in sequential order.

Unconsciousness…

Complete darkness, chilling
cold, alone.

A line of light appeared at
foot level, expanding as the stage curtain rose, the full glare of
the floodlights blinding, everything almost dreamlike.

Sickening disorientation,
dizziness…

Nathan once again sat on
the foot of his bed, completely drained of energy. He glanced at
the reflection in the cracked dresser mirror and nodded a sarcastic
greeting.

“
Glad to see you back, you
pale old fart.”

Then he slipped on his
raggedy grey underwear and climbed under the frayed brown Army
blanket, drifting off almost instantly into a deep
sleep.

Incident at Homeboy’s
Liquor Store

The next morning, Nathan
remained
stretched out on his narrow bed at
the Hotel Reo after he awoke. He tried to apply his once
world-class analytical mind to the peculiar situation at hand. What
was going on?

He seemed to be subject to
a special kind of seizure he could trigger at will after dark by
relaxing in the nude, and the seizure led to a remarkable skin
alteration. With his transformed skin, he could walk around after
dark with no one able to see him, or even aware of his presence.
Truly an amazing situation.

Of course it was quite
possible, Nathan admitted to himself, his elation flattening out,
that he had finally gone around the corner, that the booze had
gotten to him, and that he was suffering from some kind of
alcohol-induced psychosis. He wasn’t too different from so many
others wandering the Tenderloin, talking to their invisible
buddies. Just nutty old bums, except that he was a nutty old
naked
bum. But he didn’t
think that was really the case. People in the ‘loin were pretty
tolerant, but at the very least some indignant immigrant mother
would have drawn the line at his full nudity in front of her kids
and called the cops. Perhaps more importantly, his mind seemed
different since leaving the hospital, much sharper, his thinking
clear, his recall of recent events perfectly intact.

Nathan didn’t think he was
crazy. This alteration was real, not imaginary. Maybe an important
question to consider was why he had this special
ability.

“
Okay,” he said to himself,
frowning and sitting upright. “Let’s back up a week and take it
from the beginning.”

On Friday night, the
thirtieth
of June, he’d been cadging coins
up on the five hundred block of O’Farrell—still part of the ‘loin,
but a better class of apartment residents up there, most of them
employed. He’d almost managed enough panhandled money to swing a
half pint of Wild Irish Rose. It would get him by until the next
day, and maybe his SSI check, usually not delivered until the
third, would be on time.

That was when he spotted
the young white dude in a suit up at the corner near Homeboy’s,
glancing around nervously. A mark, if he ever saw one. Nathan
hustled right up, sticking out his hand. “Say, man, can you spare
some change. I ain’t ate all day.” A damn lie, of course. He’d
eaten well over at St. Anthony’s earlier that afternoon.

The guy looked startled,
spooked. Then, with a frightened shake of his head, he bolted,
darting around a parked Cougar that was idling in Homeboy’s white
zone, jumping in behind the wheel, and speeding away.

“
Jesus, what hap—?” Nathan
began to mumble aloud.

He was cut off, almost
jerked off his feet backward.

“
Fuck ya’ll doin’,
wethead?” a voice growled menacingly from behind him.

Choked by the tightened
collars of both his shirt and topcoat, Nathan managed to painfully
twist his head enough to get a view of his attacker.

His heart
stopped.

It was Black
Angus.

The huge man loomed behind
him in the mouth of an alley, his face contorted with
anger.

“
Yeah, you smelly ole
fool,” Baby Junior said as he stepped out of the shadowed alley,
moving close. Spittle splattered Nathan’s chest as the thinly-built
young man with a nasty fish hook scar on his cheek got right up in
his face. “See what you done?” said Baby Junior in an accusatory
tone. He stabbed his finger in the direction of the Cougar’s
departing tail lights.

Oh, man
, Nathan thought, staring at the speeding car, his heart
sinking. These two were crack dealers. The white guy must have been
a potential customer.

As Nathan turned back to
face them, his situation got drastically worse. Eug, another
dealer—and one of the craziest—was standing a step or two back in
the alley darkness. He casually flipped open a straight razor; the
blade glinted brightly in the dim light.

Big
trouble.

“
Ya’ll done scared off
bidness, fuckhead,” Black Angus said slowly, each word pronounced
distinctly. His face was deadpan, his eyes colder than black ice,
as he easily dragged Nathan into the alley, nearer his
razor-wielding partner.

“
Ole fool need his ass
whupped!” Baby Junior declared, like a judge proclaiming sentence.
He turned his face toward the third dealer, who was grinning back
humorlessly, exposing two gold-capped front teeth and nodding in
agreement.

“
I hear ya, bro,” Eug
replied, swinging the razor at arm’s length across his body as if
it were a scythe. The blade was a quick, lethal blur, the dealer’s
eyes hooded but bright with excitement. “Lemme give him a shave
afterwards.”

Nathan tensed up, but
caught like he was in Angus’s firm grip, he couldn’t possibly
escape. Mesmerized, he stared first at Eug’s weapon, then the man’s
equally evil smile.

At that moment something
smashed unexpectedly into Nathan’s face, knocking him backward into
the alley’s brick wall. He slumped down with a thud onto his butt,
pain making him see pinwheels of swirling red. The hurt centered in
the middle of his face; his nose was probably broken. Blinking away
the flow of tears, Nathan reached up, intending to wipe away the
blood that dripped from his upper lip.

A kick crashed into his
exposed right armpit, expelling all the air from his lungs and
causing a sharp, painful sensation between his ribs. The back of
his head slammed against the bricks.

Dazed, his head and body
wracked with pain, Nathan groaned loudly.

“
Here’s somepin else for ya
nasty ole raggedy ass.”

Again, Nathan’s head was
driven back into the brick wall by a glancing blow from a fist to
his left cheek.

“
Lemme cut the stinky bum,
Angus—”

“
Hey, you dudes,
cops
coming!” a voice
warned from the street. “Let’s do a Mo Green, ‘foh The Man be
bustin’ our sorry asses.”

Footsteps ran
off.

Nathan groaned
again.