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Thirteen
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69 Thirteen The Streets San Francisco October 1960 I got drunk in San Francisco and fucked away all my money and then the Mexican burned the police car and we lost him. None of it was very hard to do. We didn’t belong in the city. We didn’t belong in a lot of places. Truth is, maybe we didn’t belong anywhere. But, what the hell, it could have been worse. Hell, I could have been back in Bean Camp, or Black Hawk Ridge. Jesus H. Christ, I could have been back in Crum. Later, in the army, I would come to understand that, yes, it could be worse. It could be much worse. In the alien darkness of nights in the city Wendell Klah and I walked the steep wet streets and tried to find comfort in our own company. We leaned in black doorways and blacker basement stairwells of hard-faced buildings that offered nothing more than the cold touch of brick and stone. The days brought nothing but fog and then rain and even the doorways and stairwells filled with a coldness that went straight to the bone, and to the heart. We stole ragged clothes from Salvation Army boxes and nothing fit and our steps dragged and our jeans sagged so that the cuffs wore against the grinding sidewalks, tattered, like kites left too long in the wind. In less than a week I knew that we both had assumed the anonymous and sightless attitudes of street people. Bums. We didn’t know how to make a living in a big city. We stole some more stuff to wear and then stole something to eat. We thought 70 about begging, but there was no way either of us could do that. We’d rather steal than beg. We knew it was only a matter of time before the systems of the city caught up with us. And then people might ask about a whorehouse and a police car and a tough Mexican with a flaming whiskey bottle and an enormous faggot with deep slashes across his ass. And we didn’t want to talk about any of that. The Indian and I walked the streets, mostly looking for the Mexican , but there was no way of finding him. We took newspapers from busted racks and read them through, but there was no mention of the police car or the Mexican. I borrowed the phone in a pizza shop and called the police, asking about the Mexican. The cop on the other end of the phone seemed more interested in finding out exactly where I was. I hung up and we walked away, quickly. But not before I stole a pizza. Once, we came across a soup kitchen run by the Salvation Army. We went in and stood by the door for a while, just trying to get the hang of the place. The lighting in the big room was uneven, different light bulbs hanging from the electric cords. The light drained down over rows of long tables and narrow benches that sagged and tilted. Silent men moved in shuffles past large kettles where steam drifted up and washed among them, men moving through fog to the benches, hunched over their bowls. We got in line and got our soup and sat on a bench on the far end of the room. The little man sitting next to me took his spoon and poured some hot soup down inside the front of his pants, holding his pants out from his belly and dribbling the soup in, a little at a time, letting the hot liquid splatter down inside his pants, soaking them, steaming his penis. When the spoon was empty he did it again, this time blowing on the spoonful of scalding soup before he dribbled it in. [3.237.46.120] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:40 GMT) 71 The Indian ate his soup and did not look around. As the little man dribbled the soup into his pants he hunched back and forth on the wooden bench, his mind not in the room. Then he made a little grunting noise, stiffened on the bench. In a few seconds he relaxed, almost folding forward onto the table. He never ate a single spoonful of the soup. He put the spoon down and left, soup dripping from inside his pants legs, the little man leaving a trail of soup out the door and onto...