“For who?” Again the shake.
“Two-Toes! Sammy Two-Toes,” Sal squealed. “That guy’s bad news, Pookie. Doesn’t know his place. Doesn’t understand the order of things.”
“You’re running errands for your gimpy bartender?”
“Yeah. He ain’t what he seems, Pookie. That guy has me over a barrel. I been covering for him because he knows my old lady—threatened to tell her about my visits here to Mabel’s for services.” Sal stifled a little grin, he was so pleased with himself for explaining his presence at Mabel’s at the same time he was throwing the heat on Sammy.
“You let a skinny gimp like that get the drop on you? That’s pathetic.” Pookie loosened his grip on Sal’s coat, allowing the douche bag to settle to his heels on the sidewalk.
“Yeah, he’s more of an operator than he looks like. When he first came to me he told me he coldcocked a cop and walked away from a work detail at the jail. For all I know, his name ain’t even Tiffin. Check the records, two years ago or so. Try Tuffelo. He was in on a drunk-and-disorderly, but he knocked out a cop and ran.”
Pookie let go of Sal’s coat and stepped away. Sal watched the big cop’s anger shifting, scanning for a place to settle, like a street mutt looking for a fight.
“You go after Two-Toes, who knows, you collect your due and you teach him a lesson about clocking cops,” Sal said, gilding the lily.
Pookie pocketed the blackjack, shot the lapels of his overcoat. “He at your place tonight?”
Sal checked his watch. “Not anymore. Closed. But I got his home address in my book.” Sal patted his coat over the breast pocket.
“Give it,” Pookie said. “And Sal, I find out you’re lying to me, I’ll write my name on the street with your brains.”
Sal shuddered, pulled the black address book from his coat pocket. “Well, don’t let the kid fast-talk you, Pookie, and don’t let him get the drop on you. He’s quick for a cripple.”
“Yeah, don’t you worry about it.”
6
A Sweet Disaster
It was two in the morning and they were the only ones left in the joint. She was up on her knees on the barstool, elbows on the bar, her face about two inches from Sammy’s, who was leaning over from his side of the bar. They’d been like that for a half an hour and hadn’t noticed the place clearing out.
“You like dogs?” he asked.
“Yeah. You?”
“Yeah. You got swell nostrils.”
“Thanks. I like yours, too.”
“Your eyelashes are first-rate.”
“Can you even see ’em?”
“Kind of. I memorized them from before.”
“You’d better walk me home now.”
“I’ll pack a lunch.”
Sammy took a bottle of gin that was three-quarters full from the well and filled it to the top with Rose’s lime juice, and the Cheese packed it in her pocketbook for the walk home. She stumbled on a turned heel as he was locking the door and he caught her by the waist. That’s when the first kiss happened. It was the kind of kiss that he wanted to wake up to and keep refreshing periodically until he got one long last one, salty with tears, in his casket.
They both came out of it a little lightheaded, but safe, as there was no open flame to ignite their breaths.
“How far?” asked Sammy.
“Not far,” said the Cheese.
She led him in a somewhat wobbly way down Grant Avenue a few blocks, then, arms around each other, up Greenwich Street, where the stairs began.
“How far?”
“Not far.”
Up the stairs of Telegraph Hill, switchback, another set of stairs, a few steps on a path, more stairs. At a hundred and fifty steps or so, Sammy leaned against a wooden rail and tried to catch his breath.
“You said not far.”
The Cheese thought it was cute that he believed her.
“Not far from here,” she said. She booped his nose and started up another flight of stairs, pulling him behind by one hand. Another hundred steps and they were almost at the top. He sat down on the wooden stairs. Moonlight filtered through pine trees. He threw up a little. Just a little.
“Almost there,” she said.
“I should tell you,” he said. “I’m in pretty good shape. I work out every day. Nearly every day. It’s just, well, I’ve been drinking.”
“You can use my toothbrush when we get to my place.”
“Aw, you don’t have to do that,” he said. She was nice.
She pulled him to his feet, then up another hundred and a quarter steps until they walked out into the clearing of Pioneer Park, overlooking the entire city. On a clear night you could see Oakland, Alameda, and Berkeley across the bay, and since the war the Bay Bridge even had lights on it. Coit Tower stood like an enormous concrete phallus above them.
“You live there?” Sammy asked. “I’ve never been up here.”
“Just a little farther.”
Down the other side of the hill wooden stairs zigged and zagged back and forth, joined by paths between gardens maintained by the people who lived in houses perched on the hillside, cozy cottages and modern Deco apartment buildings, none very tall, all wound up in trees and flowers and gravity, looking out on the bay. She led him down a path, through a gate, and to a low door leading into the very bottom floor of a triplex—what looked like the entrance to a storage area.
“Here we go,” she said.
He had to duck to get through the door. She flipped on a light and presented her digs. The whole place was painted bright sunshine yellow, even the floor, which was plywood. It was one room, basically, with a single window in the front that looked out onto one of the hill’s gardens. A bed by the wall, a sink and counter with a two-burner cooker, and a small refrigerator, the motor on the top buzzing away like it might give out any second. At the end of the bed, a door was open to a bathroom—a toilet and shower pan in a plywood closet. On the wall opposite the bed was an old couch, an end table with a lamp on a doily, a coffee table with some movie magazines—and a radio with a record player in it. The floor extended only as far back as the end of the couch, then the plywood stopped and bedrock and hard-packed dirt, painted yellow, started to slope up with the hill. Sammy spotted something green sprouting near the couch.
“The landlord gave me a great deal,” said the Cheese.
“It’s nice,” said Sammy. “Cozy.”
“Have a seat,” she said, waving to the couch. “I’ll light the burners and it will get toasty in here in no time.”
Sammy took off his coat and sat on the couch. She set the bottle full of gimlets on the coffee table and pulled a couple of glasses out of her pocketbook as well.
“Are those from the bar?”
“Nope,” she said. “Pour us a couple, will ya?”
“That back part? That dirt?”
“Yeah, this was a crawl space. Landlord put a window in for me, so it’s not bad during the day, but it was a little spooky at night, so I painted the dirt yellow.”
“Yeah, really brightens it up.”
“The landlord said I could dig out a sunroom back there if I want to. I thought I was going to have to tunnel out a nursery once when my period was late.”
As she was heading back to the couch, he grabbed her by the arm and pulled her down next to him. “You’re not so tough,” he said.
She pushed him back. “You’ll find out how tough I am if you try to kiss me before brushing your teeth, buster. There’s a toothbrush and a can of Pepsodent by the sink.”
He stumbled to the sink, pasted and brushed, and midway through looked over at her with an insane toothpaste-foam grin. She laughed into her drink, spilling a little down her front.
“I’ll get that,” he said. He spit, rinsed, spit again, then executed a controlled fall across the room with a giant step over the coffee table that ended with him more or less lying in her lap, faceup. The Cheese managed to keep her drink intact.
“How’s it going,
Toots?” he said.
She kissed him lightly to test the taste. “Minty,” she said. “And don’t call me Toots.”
He took her drink from her, set it on the table, and then pulled a slick wrestling reverse that put her on her back on the couch, him on top, smooching the ever-loving daylights out of her. She held her own, though, reversing on him, and slickly kicking off her shoes in the process.
They commenced making an “mmmmmm” sound as they kissed, as if they each had discovered something delicious and needed to hum about it to the other, all the while trying to remove each other’s clothing without coming up for air—until Sammy was stalled in a struggle with her bra and she pushed him back to give him a hand.
“It doesn’t look like it should be that tough,” he explained, noting with a kiss that most of her was already spilling out the top when he’d started.
“It’s French,” she said. “They designed it like a zoo—you know, keep ’em in, but give everyone a good look at ’em. Ah, I can’t get it, help.”
She rolled onto her face to give him a good shot at the hooks in the back. “Free my people!”
“I will. I am the Harriet Tubman of your breasts.”
She rolled back over, her people now free of their bonds. “Well, now let me show you the underground railroad.” And she pushed him down until he was backing partway onto the floor, pushing the coffee table back as he went. He resurfaced under her nearly removed dress.
“Hey, this doesn’t look like Churchill at all. More like Rasputin.”
“That’s not the birthmark. To the left.”
“Oh yeah. Would you look at that!”
She wove her fingers into his hair and directed his attention to the proper historical figure, and so it went. Crazy, desperate, drunken lovemaking—wanting and having each other all at once, building a world together—to get close enough, deep enough, fast enough, slow enough, hard enough, soft and tender and strong and sweet—and only the two of them in it. They made their way from the couch to the rug to her little bed, where they fell away from each other, breathless for a bit, glistening with sweat, both naked now, except for Sammy’s one sock on his bad foot.
They listened to each other breathe for a while, staring at the ceiling—the look on both their faces of having been suddenly hit by a truck, but with fewer broken bones. She rolled out of bed and padded to her pocketbook on the floor by the couch, and he watched her go, thinking she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, ever would see.
She took a packet of cigarettes from her purse. “You want one?”
He nodded. He didn’t smoke a lot, but he smoked. Everybody smoked.
She lit two on the burner of her little cooker, snatched a candle from behind the sink and lit it, then set the candle on the drain rack and shut down the burners. “We probably won’t need these.”
He agreed with a nod. “Warm,” he said.
She turned out the light and he could just see the contours of her body lit orange by the candle. Aw, shit, he thought. Okay, that was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
She fit a cigarette into his mouth, sat down on the bed, and leaned back against him.
“There’s an ashtray under the bed.”
He felt around and retrieved a cheap aluminum ashtray that advertised a hardware store.
She nodded toward his single sock. “You really only got two toes?”
“Nah, I have the normal number, but I only have feeling in two of them. I made the mistake of telling Sal that when he rolled a beer keg over my foot. That’s when he started calling me Sammy Two-Toes.”
“What a jerk.”
“It was by accident. He is a jerk, but the keg was an accident.”
“Lotta guys would be sore about the nickname. You’re a pretty good guy, aren’t you?”
“Ah, he gave me a job after the war. What good’s staying sore gonna do?”
“You can take your sock off, you know. I’m okay.”
“Maybe next time.”
“Next time?”
His face collapsed like a little kid who just dropped his ice cream in the dirt.
She laughed, took his cigarette from him, and butted it along with hers in the ashtray, then slid the ashtray back under the bed, climbed up on him, and rode him back onto the only pillow.
“So there’s going to be a next time?” he asked.
“Oh yeah,” she said.
And they were off again. Oh yes, there were trains and tunnels, rockets blasting off, torpedoes clearing their tubes, pistons and cylinders, oil rigs pumping, bridges collapsing, stars exploding, galaxies expanding, and a squeaky part that sounded like angry mice. He was Romeo and she was Juliet, he was Heathcliff and she was Cathy, he was Tristan and she was Isolde, he was Ahab and she was Moby-Dick, she was the Titanic and he was the Iceberg, and they liked that so much that he was the Iceberg for a while and she was the Titanic. She was Snow White and he was the Seven Dwarfs, he was the Scarecrow and she was the Flying Monkeys—it was an epic and divine disaster they acted out in that little crawl-space apartment, taking breaks to breathe, and drink gin and smoke, and they even dozed off together toward dawn.
As the sun was coming up, he pulled on his pants and wrapped a blanket around his shoulders, and she slipped into a robe and led him out her front door to the little garden on Telegraph Hill. They sat on a railroad tie that terraced the garden and looked out over the bay—watched the silver of the Oakland Bay Bridge turn bright pink with the dawn. A silver seaplane, a Pan Am Clipper, slid out of the sky and onto the bay like a great pelican and settled into its taxi to Treasure Island. Even though it was still chilly out, and a low fog hung on the water, the rising sun was warm on their faces, although the brightness was less than welcome to their oncoming hangovers. They tented their heads together as the sun broke the horizon, and, sore and exhausted, they began to laugh, and they laughed until they collapsed into each other’s arms, each holding so tight they lost their breath, holding back sobs of joy, for they had found it: safe harbor.
A guy can say some pretty stupid shit on a morning like that, and Sammy started to say it, but she put her finger on his lips to shush him.
“Shhh,” she said. “Sammy, you know those people in the movies who can just stop their lives to fall in love, chase after being in love like they don’t have anything else to do?”
“Yeah.”
“We’re not those people. I have to get to work.”
“Okay,” he said. “But—”
“I know,” she said. “Me too.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Do I smell like gin?” she asked.
He sniffed her shoulder. “I think you smell like fresh-baked cookies.”
“I’ll have to shower and put on a lot of perfume.”
“Okay. I’ll call you.”
“I don’t have a phone. Go home. I’ll see you.”
“Okay.”
He went inside, put on the rest of his clothes, then stood in her doorway getting languidly smooched before she shoved him on his way.
He limped down the hill and found the kid sitting in the doorway of his building, smoking a cigarette.
“You shouldn’t smoke, kid. What are you, seven?”
“What business is it of yours? It ain’t a whole one. Some mug walkin’ by dropped it. Ya dirty solenoid.”
“That’s not a thing, kid. A solenoid is a car part.”
“No it ain’t. Whadda you know?”
Sammy was feeling kindly disposed toward the kid, toward everything. “Yeah, what do I know? Look, kid, what I said about not taking messages, maybe you can do that today. From now on, someone comes by, take a message. I’ll owe you for the last one.” Sammy fished six bits out of his pocket and handed them to the kid, who snatched the coins out of his hand and squirreled them away in his ratty overalls, then gave Sammy the hairy eyeball.
“What’s your angle? You going soft on me? Turning into some kind of pushover?”
“Proba
bly. Go to the pictures, kid. Wake me at three, okay?”
“I might and I might not. I might have business.”
“Do your best.”
Sammy went up the stairs to his apartment, where he crawled into bed. As he fell asleep he could smell her on his arms and he smiled.
7
The Tenderloin Ain’t Just a Piece of Meat
The kid knocked me awake and was waiting in the hallway when I went out to fetch the newspaper.
The kid handed it to me. “Two bits.”
“That’s not part of your job.”
“Two bits for waking you up. I’m throwin’ in the paper for nothin’ because I read it already.”
The paper wasn’t folded into normal sections, but rather looked like it had been spread out for puppies to poop on, then gathered in a rush to cover the tracks.
“Crash ain’t in that rag, anyways,” said the kid. “That Herb Caen guy at the Chronicle is probably covering it up. Commie bastard.”
“What crash?”
“One of them flying saucers crashed. I heard it on the radio.”
“I told you to keep your crummy ears off my radio, kid.”
“Not your stinkin’ radio. We got our own now. Uncle Clement give it to us.”
“Clement? What line of work he in, pope?”
“He does a little popin’, but mainly he plays the ponies. Jack-of-all-trades, that’s what he is. Anyway, they said on the radio that a flying saucer crashed in New Mexico. Roswell.”
“That’s a place,” I told the kid. “I know a guy from there.”
“No you don’t,” said the kid. “So, half an hour later, this air force guy comes on the radio and says that it was a weather balloon.”
“It was probably a weather balloon,” I said. I went to the counter, where I throw my change when I come in, and grabbed a quarter. “Here. Now scram, kid, I got a date.”
“At this time a day? You ain’t even gonna put your time in on the heavy bag? You’re gonna go soft, ya cream puff. Go ahead, give it a shot. I’ll bet you can’t even put in a good ten minutes, with me coachin’ you. When the Martians get here you’ll fold like a furlong.”