The Scummers

Ten

45 Ten Paradise Street Gentlemen’s Club San Francisco April 1960 I never learned to get out of a whorehouse the easy way. Maybe I should have gone to whorehouse school to get my manners polished up. I just never got around to it. But, all things considered, I went to some schools that were pretty much like whorehouses, and I never got around to learning anything much at those, either. So I was angry when I stumbled out through the door of the whorehouse, the side of my face aching from some fist that had come out of the darkness right after I tried to find the Mexican. I could hear the Mexican screaming and I thought they were trying to kill him. Turns out they were. They were trying to fuck him to death. It was raining when I staggered outside, one of those cold, miserable far late afternoons in San Francisco that brought the sky down to touch the street. I stopped at the top of the short flight of concrete steps and let the rain stream down my face and felt it blow past me and down into the bowels of the city along distant steep streets that ran far out of my sight in the grayness, an almost silent misty downpour that took away the light and closed in the distance. The rain soaked my shirt and ran down the loose shirttails. My worn, faded jeans picked up the rain instantly and I knew it would be hours, maybe days, before the damn things would dry. My boots were getting wet. Oddly, I didn’t remember putting them on before I came out the door, and I wondered if I had ever taken them off. I must have taken my boots off, I thought, else, how the hell could I get my jeans off? 46 But I really didn’t feel the rain too much; I was drunk. It was old drunk, tired drunk, started a couple of days ago, and I was in that stage where I was just trying to clear my head and force myself to see clearly. I held onto the door frame to steady myself, not wanting to trust my legs and my boots to the slick steps and the dark wet bricks of the tilted street. The Indian came out and lurched past me, staggering down the steps and straight into the middle of the street. He stopped, stood there blinking, naked to the waist, his glistening black hair shedding the rain down his back. He rubbed his chest, seemed surprised at the feel of his own wet skin. The tilt of the street confused him and in his stupor he thought he was falling backward. He tried to stand up straight from the surface, causing himself to pitch facefirst down the slick bricks. He hit the street, slid for a foot or two, and lay absolutely still. I thought maybe he was dead. And then he rolled slowly over on his back, his head downhill, the rain running up his nose. He was laughing. “Hey, Jesse,” the Indian yelled, still lying in the street, “you seen my shirt? I had a shirt. Damn sure did have a shirt, must have had a shirt . . .” His voice trailed off in the rain. Even at that short distance it was hard for me to see the Indian clearly, partly because of the rain, partly because of the rapidly failing light, partly because of the old-drunk whiskey still running through my veins. I wondered where the Mexican was. The Mexican had been down the hallway a couple of doors from my room. I had heard nothing from him all night. And then sometime later in the black of early morning I had heard the Mexican yelling. He was yelling in Spanish slang and I hadn’t been able to understand all of it, but the yells had been real and loud and long and high pitched and they scared 47 the hell out of me. I had gone looking for the Mexican. That was a mistake. I eased myself carefully down the steps and onto the sidewalk and lumbered into the street, starting to say something to the Indian. Before I could get the words out the whorehouse door blew open and the Mexican blasted through, twisting forward as he came, a brown human curveball. He missed the short...