“We’re young and we have big plans and then life happens and we say… next year. I’ll do it next year. And then next year comes. And the year after. And before we know it we’re looking at our lives from the end and we realize we put too many things off… and there isn’t enough time or energy left to do them.”
His words hang in the humidity like the smoke from his cigarette and I, for once, don’t have anything to say. We sit there on the porch, me in what’s supposed to be the prime of my life and he at the end of his, and his words hang there and won’t go away. The breeze won’t carry them down the street and I can’t shake them because I know he’s right and that I could be doing more. I can feel the mosquitoes beginning to bite my legs and I know it’s almost time to leave. I have a train to catch and appointments that won’t wait, but I don’t want to go. I want to sit here with my friend and stay in this moment forever, slowly rocking back and forth on our chairs and listening to the wind blow through the trees. So I sit a little longer, and we watch the neighbor wax his car and make bad jokes about his hairpiece and I’m living in the moment so effortlessly that I’m not thinking about the fact that when I stand up and say goodbye that it’s likely for the last time. I’m not thinking about anything other than sitting on the porch with an old friend and shooting the shit, laughing and watching the world go by like we’ve got all the time in the world.
And then the moment ends.
I take a deep breath, holding in the tears as I say that I have to go and he smiles and I hug him longer and harder than usual and before I know it I’m in the car and we’re waving goodbye to each other as I pull off down the street and he disappears from view. I make it two blocks before I pull over and let out a wail so primal I can’t control the volume or the timbre and the tears come pouring out. I don’t even try to stop them, I just sit on the side of the road and cry until I can’t anymore. Then I wipe my face and sit there for a while, just breathing with my eyes closed.
Eventually, I put the car in drive and hit the gas. I have big plans and I don’t want to be late.
Flying makes me nervous. Getting to the airport, going through security, waiting to board, getting on the plane, waiting to taxi – each step of the process seems to increase my awareness that I’m about to step into a tin can with wings. This feeling culminates in the inevitable run down the asphalt towards what I only pray is a liftoff sufficient enough to pull us over the trees at the end of the runway, increasing my anxiety until I feel like I’m going to simultaneously rip the armrests of my seat off and have a stroke. My heart always feels like it’s going to explode until we’re at cruising altitude and only then do my hands soften their grip on the seat.
This particular time it might have been the drugs too.
I had spent the evening drinking beers and blowing lines at Jason’s sparkly new Mission condo his stock options had bought him while we brainstormed the best way for me to sneak half an ounce of molly onto the plane for Christmas break. As this was before all the increased security, sticking it in my underwear probably would have been sufficient, but as the evening dragged on and the pile of coke on the mirror shrank a rail at a time, the ideas got dumber and my paranoia got greater. Finally I just triple wrapped the baggie in condoms and sat it on the table, looking at it in satisfaction.
“You’re really gonna do it, huh?” he chuckled.
“Fuck it, first time for everything. Besides it’s only the size of a Halloween candy bar and if it’s in my ass I won’t trip about it. Dogs aren’t trained to sniff for E.”
“Yeah, I just wouldn’t tell anyone how you got it home.”
“Oh I won’t… at least until I’ve capped it all up and fed it to everyone. Then I’ll tell ‘em.”
“Fucked up man, that’s fucked up.”
“Yeah, well… it’ll make for a good story some day.” I said, trailing off into the pile of coke for another rail.
We did some more coke, drank a few more beers and got in the Benz, beers in hand. As soon as we got on the freeway, Jason handed me a bag and without a word I opened the glove box and took out a CD and prepared a few lines. He motioned for me to go first and I set the surface on my knees and did a line up each nostril. Looking back up through the windshield I saw that we were in the passing lane, flying past the few cars on the road.
“How you wanna do this?”
“Hold it with your right hand and grab the wheel with your other hand. Don’t worry I got it.”
I handed him the straw and grabbed the wheel. Four on the floor beats bumped as we screamed down 101 at ninety and Jason quickly snorted both lines before grabbing the wheel and accelerating, taking a pull of his beer once he got a hand back on the wheel. We repeated this scene a few more times, each time the music getting a little louder and the Benz going a little faster until we were at the airport, the coke and the beers gone. As we approached the terminal, I grabbed the half ounce wrapped in condoms, sat up off the seat, slid my hand down the back of my pants and shoved it up my ass with an uncomfortable facial grimace.
Upon sitting back down I realized that in the same pocket as my wallet and boarding pass was the bag of shrooms I was considering taking with me. It was only a quarter, enough for two or three people to munch on for Christmas Eve but because it took up so much space and we had steadily gotten more fucked up over the last few hours, I meant to leave it at Jason’s. Now I had a hundred odd hits of E up my ass and a pocket full of shrooms.
What to do. I opened the bag, shook a few caps into my hand and swallowed.
“Fuck it.”
“Dude are you fucking nuts?”
“Waste not, want not. I mean, at this point, what can it hurt on top of everything else? Here,” I say and toss him the rest of the shrooms. “Merry Christmas.”
Jason laughed, then reached in his pocket, pulled out a film container, and shook a four bar out and handed it to me.
“There’s your landing pad man, Happy Hanukkah. Good luck you crazy fuck, call me when you get to Baltimore.”
“IF I get to Baltimore you mean,” and popped the pill in my mouth with a smile. “I’ll call you if I need bail money.”
I grabbed my bag, gave him a hug and headed straight into the airport. An hour til takeoff – with any luck I’d be in the air before I started seeing trails… nothing to do now but roll through security like I owned the airport. No checked bags – just a carry-on, an ass full of E, a nose full of coke, and a xanax rapidly dissolving in a stomach full of beer and mushrooms.
No biggie.
No more Friday nights that bleed into Tuesday mornings.
No more champagne and beer with lunch. No more wine with dinner that turns into a giant pile of coke on the mirror with the morning sun peeking in through the blinds. No more four day speed benders that only end in a fistful of xanax, and no more thinking that a few more rocks at noon on Monday will somehow set me straight. No more dope, like, all the time.
No more bruises I don’t remember getting.
No more burned lips, no more nose bleeds and no more infections in my feet. No more sitting on the toilet with my head in the sink and heaving fluids from both ends while my body screams for the drugs I’m not giving it.
No more spending the entirety of a party in the bathroom. No more pissing in closets, spilling red wine on couches and no more puking everywhere.
No more holes in my wall from disappointed and furious women. No more friends unsure of what to do with me. No more nodding out at (and in) Christmas dinner, no more Thanksgivings I don’t remember, no more IOU’s to roommates for drinking all their booze so that I could fall asleep.
No more rolling papers, no more heavy duty tinfoil, no more rolled up bills, no more stems, and no more fucking needles. No more clouds of weed smoke, the sizzle of melting rock, or the smell of cooking tar. No more having a half-dozen reliable dealers on speed dial.
No more calling in hungover, no more calling in high, no more not calling in at all.
No more pillow sized bags of weed, no more mason jars of pills, no more baggies by the hundreds. No more scales, no more envelopes of cash, and no more safe deposit boxes. No more incoming calls from people who need things. No more financial relationships with everyone I know, no more manipulating people with money, no more wanting to set someone’s house on fire because they burned me for fifty bucks. No more thinking that money smells like well-cured pot and no more dreading the ring of my phone.
No more getting punched in the face by gang bangers. No more police pulling guns and telling me to show my hands before slowly getting out of the car. No more carrying felonies in the trunk.
No more being met by security at the gate upon landing, no more thinking that eating mushrooms on a plane is a good idea and no more trips East in full-on alcohol-induced panic attacks.
No more phone calls I don’t remember making, no more mornings where I have to be told what happened the night before, no more dread from reading my own garbled text messages.
No more waking up underneath coffee tables. No more waking up naked in someone else’s bed and having to ask if we slept together. No more snapping out of blackouts in mid-sentence while eating breakfast at Denny’s.
No more drunken bicycle rides screaming down Mission Street at 4 AM with no lights and no helmet, no more driving around town coked to the gills on a Tuesday night, and no more totalling cars by driving into stationary objects.
No more waking up with a bloody needle still stuck in my arm.
No more looking for the crack on my floor that doesn’t exist, or cooking old cottons hoping for another shot. No more drinking the dregs from beer cans the morning after (and no more drinking cigarette ashes). No more throwing away another pipe only to rip open the garbage bags at 3AM to use it again.
No more rushing to the corner store to get booze before last call and no more waiting around with the neighborhood bums for it to open again the following morning. No more walking the same two long blocks to 16th and Mission back and forth countless times in a day, no more leaning against a parking meter waiting for some kid to come and spit a few balloons in my hand while the cops roll by. No more copping pills at Turk & Taylor and no more hollering at the Mexicans at Eddy & Larkin.
No more thinking that jumping off the Golden Gate would greatly improve my situation.
No more smoking dust at Pac Bell, and no more doing bumps in every hotel bathroom in San Francisco while working days without sleep.
No more Xanax, Valium or Ativan. No more Dexedrine, Adderall or Ritalin. No more codeine cough syrup and vicodin from the doctor, norcos from friends, percocet and percodan from random bathroom medicine cabinets, oxycontin from the Tenderloin, demerol from the dentist, no more diluadid, morphine, or fentanyl from wherever it is that they seemed to appear from.
And no more thinking that these are things that everyone does.
The wildlife is out in full force this morning on Market Street, swarming up and down both sides of the street in ones and twos and threes. As I’m waiting for the green on Ninth a bum stumbles out against the light and steps into traffic without bothering to look, ignoring the cacophony of horns as he slowly shuffles to the other side giving the finger to no one in particular. When I cross to the other side I pop in the liquor store, grab a tall boy and crack it as soon as I step back on the street. I take a pull, wiping my mouth on the side of my hand and stare at an old gray-haired man through mirrored sunglasses, standing by the doorway of the store scratching off a two foot strip of lotto tickets, averting my gaze only after another long pull off the can. At Eighth I wait to cross with a woman pushing one of those little asian lady carts lined with garbage bags and half-filled with bottles and cans. She smiles at me and says “Good morning” and I nod acknowledgment and then I’m moving again, cruising down the sidewalk. I pass the fountain in UN plaza, noticing that it’s actually turned on today as a few street kids stick their heads and shoeless feet in the water. As I get closer towards Seventh, backpackers speaking Swedish climb out of the BART station alongside middle aged junkies holding canes moving so slow they almost seem to float up the stairs and onto the street. As I wait for another light, I see a man on the opposite side of the street wearing only jeans and flip flops and when the light turns and I step into the crosswalk he doesn’t move, just standing there looking up into the sky as if he’s waiting for something. As I get closer I see that he is crying and I look ahead to avoid eye contact. Passing the electronics store, a kid in a bright orange ski cap exits the front holding a giant boom box blasting electro-house beats before jumping on his longboard and sailing down the sidewalk in front of me. Two crackheads pass by me close enough to hear one exclaim, “He only sells twenties, you got ten, right? Right?” and then I’m at Sixth, waiting to cross with a diminutive white girl in oversized sunglasses and a sweatsuit, clutching her gym bag tight to her side. As soon as we get to the other side she breaks towards the strip club, the large Samoan bouncer holding the door for her. As I take another pull off my beer, I pass more crackheads standing in the shade of the buildings, the sun not quite high enough to drive them off the street just yet. Before I know it I’m at the rows of tables full of old men playing chess, intermingled with people selling costume jewelry and bootleg DVDs and books fanned out on army blankets. I find a place in the shade and sit down on the brick sidewalk, facing the action but just off the right of way by the Powell Street station railing. I set my almost killed beer down in front of me, pull out a small ziplocked eighth of outdoor and go about rolling a nice little cone. While I’m doing this, I look up and witness the closest tchotchky vendor engage a woman, the two of them doing a hushed back and forth that I’m too far away to hear. The woman looks both ways down the street before lowering into a crouch and dropping a few bills onto the blanket, the man snatching them up in a flash. Then he quickly reaches underneath a corner of the blanket, looks both ways for cops and holds his hand out to the woman to make the drop, except one of the round yellow pills falls out of her hand onto the sidewalk. Before anyone but me can notice, the woman snags it between her thumb and forefinger, palms it, and hurriedly walks past me and towards the BART station. When I look up at the man on the blanket he’s staring at me aggressively, so I hold up the joint I’ve finished rolling, crack a knowing smile, and silently cheers him with my beer before draining it. I see his features soften and I get up and walk away before he can say anything, walking past the old men engrossed in their games of chess. By the time I get to the corner of Fifth, I can feel the shift and suddenly I’m swimming in tourists, the wildlife of Market Street squarely in my rearview. I spark the joint, the smoke billowing behind me in the breeze and quickly lose myself in the Saturday morning crowd.
I don’t remember the first time I entered a brothel. All I remember was the churning in my stomach as each step toward the door took me closer to being inside. Over the years I made countless visits, the evenings blending together into one long night of miniskirts and eyeliner. I remember that each time I walked up the three brick steps to the gate, how the only light in the alleyway seemed to come from the soft yellow glow of the doorbell. How each time the moment between ringing the doorbell and the buzzing of the lock I always felt excitement, knowing I was about to step foot into one of the shadowy corners of the city most people don’t visit.
I never went inside for any reason other than to get my finder’s fee for bringing out-of-town conventioneers and uninitiated locals through the door, but I always went in because it was easy money and they wouldn’t give you the cash if you stayed in the cab. Late-night fares would sometimes ask me where they could get a rub-and-tug and when I told them I knew a better place I could take them, they always tipped heavy upon arrival.
And it was always entertaining to bring someone in. Upon entering I always sat on the small couch closest to the door, away from the girls, near the madam who sat watching a dozen screens worth of surveillance cameras. She was an older woman, somewhere between forty and sixty with long black hair, usually tied up in a bun and while I think she was Chinese, the fact that she referred to herself as Mama-san always made me wonder. She was very polite, and after I began to make regular appearances, she never failed to get up from her seat to bring me a cup of jasmine tea as soon as I sat down. It seemed like when I worked nights I saw her once a week, and after a while I just called her Mama and she just addressed me as “my friend.”
Each time I came in I sat on that same couch, sipped tea and watched the same scene unfold. The girls sitting in multicolored skirts and bikini tops and lingerie and heels would hop to attention, hands on their hips as we came through the door. The johns would stand in the middle of the room and drink them all in, some of them uncertain, others overly confident as they picked out a girl and she invariably led them through the door in the back. Sometimes the men would stand there drunk and overwhelmed, unable to make up their minds, and after a minute or two one of the girls would step forward, grab hold of his shirt and walk him towards the back before he could change his mind. When there was more than one man they always talked to each other about the girls as if they weren’t standing right in front of them, though I don’t know that all the girls could understand what they were saying. The men would remark on their hips, their breasts, their lips as if they were kicking tires at a used car lot. Occasionally one of the johns would pick two girls and they would giggle, grab an arm, throw it over their narrow shoulders and lead him towards the the back as me and Mama watched it all.
As soon as the men disappeared from view, the girls who weren’t picked would sit back down on the two long couches and get back to filing their nails, applying perfume, playing with their phones and digging through their knockoff designer purses while waiting for the door to inevitably buzz again. I remember sometimes as I sat and watched, a group of them would stare at me and speak to each other in Chinese or Korean or Thai before bursting into laughter, covering their mouths with their hands before quickly looking away. I always had to wait for the money, passing the time sitting and around drinking tea with Mama, watching the girls primp and preen. I never saw a girl working there that wasn’t Asian. Chinatown mobsters smuggled them over from China and other eastern countries by promising them jobs that didn’t involve blowing coked up hedge fund managers, turning them out the second they stepped off the boat. Which is why I didn’t have a problem taking their money. If it was a choice between my kickback going to Triads running chicks out of Asia or me, the choice was obvious. Most of the money I was making came covered in dirt anyways, so taking ten percent from a bunch of crooks didn’t cause me to think twice.
The money was always the same – forty dollars per guy, per visit. The business was all conducted in the back, each man laying out four hundred bucks once they had been escorted to a private room. While the men disrobed and showered, the girls would excuse themselves, drop the money to Mama, pay me and then disappear to the back. I remember lots of waiting while all this happened – sometimes five minutes, sometimes fifteen. I remember lots of small talk with Mama while waiting for the girls to come and give me my kickback. We talked of upcoming city events that were good for both our businesses while overweight men fucked the girls on the tiny black-and-white monitors in front of us. Neither of us ever acknowledged the images that danced silently across the screens, instead talking about the weather and baseball and our chances of making it to the playoffs this year.
Eventually, each girl that had been selected by my customers would reappear from the back of the house, walk over to me and without saying a word, slip the folded bills into my pants. Sometimes the girl would crouch down when she did this so that I wouldn’t notice her sneak up beside me until I felt a hand going into my pocket. Sometimes they leaned over me from behind, close enough that I could smell the cheap perfume they all seemed to wear, breasts brushing against my face as they slid their hands down my chest to pay me. I remember one girl brazenly squeezing my cock through my jeans, smiling at me as she walked away.
As soon as I had been paid, I never lingered. I always said thank you to Mama before heading for the door, knowing it was only a matter of time before I would be back with more men who would pay to fuck more girls who would hand me more money while I watched on the screens, drinking more tea to pass the time.
You pull up to the red light at Larkin and stop, the car pointed east towards the Broadway tunnel. Maybe you’re bored. Maybe you have a passenger, the kind that you can tell likes it when a cabbie hits the gas and drives like he’s being chased by the cops with no intention of pulling over. Maybe you’re driving one of the Crown Vics that used to be a CHP patrol car – the kind with the ballast at the corners for better handling in the turns at high speeds, the turbo, the extra horsepower, and no limiter chip on the engine. Maybe some twenty-two year old kid in a lowered Honda pulls up in the left lane and starts revving his engine because he doesn’t know any better. Maybe the radio station you’ve been listening to starts playing something aggressive while you’re waiting for the green and the unexplainable desire for speed begins to overtake the better angels of your judgment. Maybe you’re just craving a little flood of adrenaline.
Tonight it’s all of the above.
I start watching the traffic lights going the other way, waiting for the green to change. When the yellow comes the other way I look over at the kid in the Honda and smile, sit up in the blast off position, grip the wheel at twelve o’clock with one hand and tell the girl in the back to hang on. Then the cross traffic light turns red and I can feel my foot sliding off the brake and drifting towards the gas as I wait for the green that’s coming in less than a second.
And it comes. I punch it as hard as I can and in a roaring instant the cab flies through first gear, shifts into second and that’s when I push the pedal to the floor and don’t let up. The engine opens up and we’re accelerating so fast my body feels plastered to the drivers seat from the velocity, the girl in the back pounding on the seats and squealing faster faster. The kid is two lengths back as we hit the first tiny curve to the right as we enter the tunnel so I throw the blinker on to be nice and drift in front of him so that I’m blocking his lane.
50, 60, then 70 in a matter of seconds and I haven’t taken my foot up off the gas yet and I see the Honda change lanes and gradually come up on my right. We’re halfway through the tunnel at this point and I know from the time and distance that have passed since the light turned green that I’m doing at least 90 but I don’t have the time or the attention to look down and take my eyes off the road. The next slight curve is approaching and I want to get in front of the kid but he’s right next to me and coming up too fast and it doesn’t matter because I can finally see the traffic lights ahead at Powell gleaming red. I take my foot off the gas as he roars ahead, extending his middle finger out the driver’s window and as I begin to hit the brakes for the red it turns green and the kid takes off, swerving into my lane as he crosses Powell.
Lights from a cop car flash to life a half block ahead of me as the kid screams down Broadway and right past a sitting patrol car. The cops hit the siren and I see the brakes from the Honda light up as both cars pull over just past Columbus. As I’m passing the kid I slow down just enough so we make eye contact and he can see me waving him goodnight.
I am no longer bored.
You can’t set your watch by it, but it always happens. Sometime between seven and eight o’clock there is a shift and suddenly people are everywhere. The desolate streets of early morning joggers and day traders give way to sedan-clad commuters heading for the east bay, coffee-sipping secretaries in a-line skirts, elderly people at the bus stop, double parked delivery trucks, people on phones walking against the green, bike messengers flying through downtown, every one of them in a hurry. The City pulses and honks and breathes to life as I watch from the driver’s seat, wading through the madness of traffic and sound in search of anyone with an outstretched arm.
I can’t sleep with all the sirens and explosions and drunks wheeling up and down my block so I just lay in bed and listen to the sounds of squealing brakes, drunken revelers and the overhead bus lines crackle and hiss until it’s time to go do the job. For good luck and tradition, the first ride I give is free of charge, he asks if I’m sure and I say Merry New Year and from there on it’s radio calls from the Armory for a woman with freshly bruised thighs, watching the sky go red and purple at Twin Peaks as dawn breaks from the East, old friends spilling out of speakeasies and dancing in the middle of 16th street, then baristas heading to work nursing hangovers, beautiful girls in sparkly skirts and tighter leggings, cops frisking a shirtless young man as I drive past the Endup, a tired little girl who doesn’t speak until halfway home when she politely asks for tissues as her nose bleeds dark red onto her hand and down her arm, bartenders going home to sleep at noon, a pair of women wearing angel wings who leave a trail of glitter all over the seats, a mother who holds her child tight to her chest as we drive to 850 so she can pay half a month’s rent she doesn’t have to get her car back, out-of-town tourists from club to bar to hotel, snatches of people who should have gone to bed last year instead of seeing how long they could make their taut bodies jump around the back of my cab without sleep…
I fill up the whole front side of the waybill with fares and run out of room as more than fifty people crawl in and out of my back seat in various states of dress, inebriation and grace, as I ride the edge of that paper-chase high and sit on a bankroll an inch thick while trying to shake the impending exhaustion that comes as I pass the 24 hour mark. I drive on until the sun disappears over the water and then I know that the work is done and it’s time to go.
