Dirty in Cashmere by Peter Plate Page B

Seventh and Market, where the Odd Fellows Temple, Travelers Liquors, Ho King Grill and the old Strand movie house stood together, the sidewalk was rich with junkies. Pedestrians eddied around me, adrift in dread about their lives. The billboards above their heads told them to buy life insurance. The cement under their feet exuded melancholia, the improbability of a viable future for themselves and their loved ones.
    It was Eternal Gratitude’s final day.
    Rita had packed the triple-beam scales into a cardboard box cushioned with styrofoam peanuts. The bogus banner 2-Time had forged, naming the club as the best in the city, was in a garbage can by the counter. The phony Turkish carpets were neatly folded, ready for their journey to Goodwill. The sound system, the speakers, turntable, and amplifier, had been dismantled and stacked up at the door. The remaining Life stock, three jars containing one hundred tabs each, was in an iron strongbox. It was a low grade variety of the vaccine, virtually worthless on the market, the tainted strychnine batch 2-Time had purchased from the Tenderloin wholesaler.
    2-Time himself was enthroned in a wheelchair and watching the Channel Two news on a portable television, live footage of the Fukushima debris streaming under the Golden Gate Bridge into the San Francisco Bay. The debris had unexpectedly coagulated into a solid mass off the coast near the Farallon Islands. Powered by offshore winds, it was migrating eastward to the Berkeley marina. A flotilla of Navy destroyers escorted it.
    A close up of the radioactive waste showed car tires, refrigerator doors, plastic bottles, sinewy ropes of seaweed, water soaked boards, and birds sitting on splintered boat hulls.
    The camera then panned to the panicking throngs on the beach at Aquatic Park a few blocks west of Fisherman’s Wharf. Dozens of SWAT cops in riot gear were restraining them. The camera zoomed in: anguished faces contorted with horror filled the television screen. The cops waded into the crowd, herding people away from the beach and up the hill to Bay Street.
    What a fucking mess, 2-Time thought.

 
    THIRTY-EIGHT
    By four o’clock Lackner and I were atop windswept Twin Peaks. Below us, the city stretched from the bay to the ocean. We could see everything from the piers at the Embarcadero to the shuttle buses in Golden Gate Park.
    Lackner had given me his office files, radiation readings that’d been compiled over the last few months, but none of it meant more than an old phone book. I needed to be outdoors, to see the contamination.
    â€œTake a look, Ricky, and make a prediction.”
    I worked myself into a trance and first looked at the Tenderloin. The soup kitchen line at St. Anthony’s Dining Room was two blocks long and direct from a 1930s Dor othea Lange photograph. The sidewalks were congested with vendors selling books and clothes, hustlers pacing by the check-cashing store on Market. Up the street was the citadel-like Twitter headquarters.
    I trained my powers on the Haight-Ashbury. Homeless crusty punks were powwowing in the Panhandle. They sat in a ring by the basketball courts, straight out of central casting from Lord of the Flies .
    I focused my energies on the Mission. Salvadoreno cowboys in big hats promenaded down Clarion Alley. The regal New Mission movie house’s marquee was an angel of grief backlit by the palm trees on Mission Street. Further away, UCSF’s Mission Bay complex confronted the crosstown freeway overpass for supremacy of the sky.
    â€œWhat do you say, Ricky?”
    â€œNothing good.”
    I did a one-eighty and took in the city’s westside. The Bank of the Orient and Wu’s Healing Center on Clement Street bustled with customers. The Great Highway teemed with traffic running south to Fort Funston and north to the Cliff House and the Golden Gate Bridge. Ocean Beach was drenched in Fukushima waste. I was done divining.
    â€œI’ve got enough