judge anyone? If he wanted to starve, what could I do? These days, whenever we met, we didn’t get too personal, me and Skippy. Doing otherwise would have proven fatal. We kept our coincidental meetings brief and saccharine sweet.
I didn’t feel like mentioning the time he dared me to slap him during a week-long drunk, and then was surprised when I did. I didn’t remind him of when we’d balled on top of a wino’s cardboard mattress in the bushes at Dolores Park, getting the crabs as a result. And what about the time I flipped out and slugged his ex-wife over at her house?
There wasn’t any need to go into things like that. It would have manufactured more unwanted dramas. But I had to be candid: Skippy had gotten a scummy verdigris on his teeth from drinking an abundance of malt liquor.
twenty-three
I was having a dream that when I was a child staying at my grandpa’s house, I had to change his socks since he was crippled and couldn’t do it for himself. I’d peel the dirty things from his toes and exchange them for a laundered pair of hose, which I’d slip over his razor-sharp toe-nails. It was a strange way to think about a member of your family. When I woke up, I’d sweated clear through the sheets. It was daybreak and the bed was empty.
Frank was in the kitchen when I came in, putting away a meal of scrambled eggs, beans and steamed tortillas that made my stomach turn. I got myself a cup of coffee from the stove and cringed when I saw the sink. It was overpopulated with dirty dishes. Frank wiped his mouth with a tortilla, finished what was on his plate and looked at me.
“What’s with you?” I said.
“I was going to go see my mom.”
His parents had a slot in a trailer park in Colma, near where all the cemeteries were. They were a crusty duo, Ralph and Cheryl. Dad had spent twenty-seven years at the Southern Pacific rail yard near the garbage dump by Candlestick Park. Cheryl, thanks to her part-time job cleaning
houses, had been in Mount Zion Hospital with asthma over Christmas.
A trio of Pinkertons were standing at the front gate when I got to the DSS. They were waiting for Rocky, who was returning to active duty that morning. Inside, Beatrice saw me and cawed, “The Dominguez woman called again!”
The clerk was modeling a hideous green taffeta dress that would have looked ravishing on an organ grinder’s monkey. It was too much for me, and so I went to the restroom to smoke a fag.
If you’ve ever smoked a cigarette rapidly, it quickens your pulse. This gives you energy, and that’s what I wanted. While I did that, I took a hostile, non-affirming look at myself in one of the bathroom mirrors. This proved to be controversial. My forehead was scalloped with rills of eczema, and not for the first time.
In summation, this was the life I’d chosen for myself. So it wasn’t the greatest, but I’d done worse. Before I had gone to school and become a social worker, like many of my peers, I sold drugs on the street.
That isn’t quite accurate. Maybe I should rectify my error by admitting that I brokered large amounts of LSD from a series of apartments in and out of the city. I was always moving from one place to the next, storing the acid in a refrigerator to maintain the potency of the substance.
The money was excellent; I still miss it.
I distributed the hallucinogenic by riding around Chinatown, North Beach and Pacific Heights on my bicycle. A sexy chick in short-shorts, carrying two, three, four thousand hits. I had different varieties: purple double-dome, gun powder, blotter. The acid ranged in strength from two hundred-thirty micrograms up to three hundred-seven mics.
My customers represented a wide spectrum of individuals in the San Francisco-Oakland-Vallejo triangle. Financial district stock brokers trying to break up the monotony of sleepless nights, horny Navy sailors on furlough, East Bay debutantes who wanted to kick up their heels on the eve of a cotillion and unpublished
I didn’t feel like mentioning the time he dared me to slap him during a week-long drunk, and then was surprised when I did. I didn’t remind him of when we’d balled on top of a wino’s cardboard mattress in the bushes at Dolores Park, getting the crabs as a result. And what about the time I flipped out and slugged his ex-wife over at her house?
There wasn’t any need to go into things like that. It would have manufactured more unwanted dramas. But I had to be candid: Skippy had gotten a scummy verdigris on his teeth from drinking an abundance of malt liquor.
twenty-three
I was having a dream that when I was a child staying at my grandpa’s house, I had to change his socks since he was crippled and couldn’t do it for himself. I’d peel the dirty things from his toes and exchange them for a laundered pair of hose, which I’d slip over his razor-sharp toe-nails. It was a strange way to think about a member of your family. When I woke up, I’d sweated clear through the sheets. It was daybreak and the bed was empty.
Frank was in the kitchen when I came in, putting away a meal of scrambled eggs, beans and steamed tortillas that made my stomach turn. I got myself a cup of coffee from the stove and cringed when I saw the sink. It was overpopulated with dirty dishes. Frank wiped his mouth with a tortilla, finished what was on his plate and looked at me.
“What’s with you?” I said.
“I was going to go see my mom.”
His parents had a slot in a trailer park in Colma, near where all the cemeteries were. They were a crusty duo, Ralph and Cheryl. Dad had spent twenty-seven years at the Southern Pacific rail yard near the garbage dump by Candlestick Park. Cheryl, thanks to her part-time job cleaning
houses, had been in Mount Zion Hospital with asthma over Christmas.
A trio of Pinkertons were standing at the front gate when I got to the DSS. They were waiting for Rocky, who was returning to active duty that morning. Inside, Beatrice saw me and cawed, “The Dominguez woman called again!”
The clerk was modeling a hideous green taffeta dress that would have looked ravishing on an organ grinder’s monkey. It was too much for me, and so I went to the restroom to smoke a fag.
If you’ve ever smoked a cigarette rapidly, it quickens your pulse. This gives you energy, and that’s what I wanted. While I did that, I took a hostile, non-affirming look at myself in one of the bathroom mirrors. This proved to be controversial. My forehead was scalloped with rills of eczema, and not for the first time.
In summation, this was the life I’d chosen for myself. So it wasn’t the greatest, but I’d done worse. Before I had gone to school and become a social worker, like many of my peers, I sold drugs on the street.
That isn’t quite accurate. Maybe I should rectify my error by admitting that I brokered large amounts of LSD from a series of apartments in and out of the city. I was always moving from one place to the next, storing the acid in a refrigerator to maintain the potency of the substance.
The money was excellent; I still miss it.
I distributed the hallucinogenic by riding around Chinatown, North Beach and Pacific Heights on my bicycle. A sexy chick in short-shorts, carrying two, three, four thousand hits. I had different varieties: purple double-dome, gun powder, blotter. The acid ranged in strength from two hundred-thirty micrograms up to three hundred-seven mics.
My customers represented a wide spectrum of individuals in the San Francisco-Oakland-Vallejo triangle. Financial district stock brokers trying to break up the monotony of sleepless nights, horny Navy sailors on furlough, East Bay debutantes who wanted to kick up their heels on the eve of a cotillion and unpublished
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