Peter Maravelis - San Francisco Noir

It was into just such a Sunday scene that Baby and I had walked.

We hadn’t gotten, nor had I intended to get, into this fad yet, but the time must have seemed right to Baby. She stopped walking before we’d gotten midspan.

Hey now, that looks like fun, she said, leaning over the rail.

It was true that under ordinary circumstances Baby would try anything, during which experiments I generally held her purse. We stood there, and as I tried to decipher the consternation evident on the features of all the faces around us-after all, I was thinking, if they don’t like it, why don’t they just move on?-Baby tugged at my sleeve and said, C’mon, Honey, let’s do it too. Let’s get jumped.

Don’t be ridiculous, I said. What’s in it for me?

Here, asshole, she said, and handed me her purse.

I held it and watched, still wondering about the appalled yet curiously fascinated expressions up and down the sidewalk, as she lifted a long leg up and straddled the wide rail. Once astride it, she hesitated. She could have been a little scared. After all, it certainly must have looked to Baby exactly as if she were about to kill herself. It looked that way to me. There were a bunch of happy people and a lot of trash floating out there, beyond the rail, but, even so, they looked very insubstantial against all that thin air and the tiny sailboats far below. Baby glanced sideways at me, and I couldn’t resist a smile, as if to say, Yeah, so? and she frowned and pouted, then stood up on the railing, defiant; and holding her nose with one hand and pointing up with the other, she executed a kind of timid hop, backwards, over the side. She fell about eight feet, decelerating all the way, then oscillated, coming back up a couple of feet, then down a few inches, up an inch. And there she hovered, as if dangled from a spring or rubber strap whose coefficient perfectly understood her mass; giggling and squirming.

Hey, she shouted, come on! It is fun! and she waved at me, as if she’d just run into a line of surf that looked inviting but might have been thought too cold for immersion. In spite of myself, I gave a little wave in return.

She hung there, two hundred fifty feet above the glinting ocean, but not far from a disheveled, vacant-looking fellow who, observing Baby’s classy entrance, rolled, wiggled, swam, and serpentined his way over to her, where he struck up a conversation. He must have been an old hand at getting jumped. The traffic was loud enough to prevent my overhearing their remarks, but as I stood there squinting, a very excited young woman came rushing down the sidewalk with one arm crooked under a clipboard. She wore a Right to Die armband just above her left elbow, its insignia a skeleton with one raised boney fist.

A great day, she effused, stopping next to me to make a mark on her papers. We’ve nearly made the quota.

I excused myself to her and inquired, What quota?

Why, we’ve nearly gotten it, she said, and held the clipboard under my nose. I could see that its papers were covered with figures and calculations, but they were meaningless to me. One number, written in digits larger than the rest, was circled heavily in red pencil.

Gotten what? I asked. What’s this seven five nine?

That’s how many we need, she bubbled. Seven hundred fifty-nine. And we’re only a very few short.

Oh, said I. Is this a petition?

You mean you really don’t know? It’s…well. Now that you mention it, it is a sort of petition…Her voice, already closely contested by the noises of wind and traffic, was suddenly lost in a great roar that went up from the crowd milling about the rail further up the sidewalk, at the center of the span. These and some of the people already suspended began to chant the numbers seven five nine, seven five nine, seven five nine .

My goodness, I heard the girl say. She pushed past me and pointed. He must be the one. We’ve done it!

Following her gaze with my own, I saw a man standing alone on the railing. He bowed deeply to the crowd beneath him, who cheered him loudly. After several fancy adieus on his part, consisting of additional bows, florid salutations performed with the hands, the blowing of kisses, and even a curtsy, I’d begun to understand, and shoved the girl with the clipboard away from the guardrail. The young man with Baby had his arm tentatively about her shoulders, and smiled as if beatified. Baby’s eyes, round and tense, caught mine. As another, louder cheer went up, her eyes smiled and she laughed outright at the consternation undoubtedly blatant on my own features. A third time the crowd cheered, and the man on the rail jumped. He fell as Baby had before him, and though his oscillations were more pronounced-he went down perhaps eight or ten yards, rebounded upwards two or three yards, went down again a couple of feet-his additional weight did not destroy the forcefield. The people suspended in its grip bobbed gently, like gulls on a swell. I made my decision. Glancing up the length of the bridge as I vaulted the railing, I saw that many of the bystanders, perhaps out of premeditation, perhaps spontaneously, had come to the same conclusion as myself. As we cleared the last bit of structure, I could see that the void was full of falling bodies, enough so that as Baby and I embraced, as I looked into her eyes-those lovely, mischievous eyes that did not retreat from the gaze of my own, oh, so foreverly-my fall was hardly interrupted. Our combined mass buckled the entire field on that side of the bridge and Baby and I, and nearly eight hundred others, minus the thirteen of us, survivors predicted by the harsh statistics of experience, fell toward our deaths.

And a victory, of sorts.

The Haight-Ashbury

Iused to buy drugs from Satan, a dealer who called himself Hal Satan . He was also a poet and performance artist, and Hal Satan was his stage name. He liked his stage name so much he decided to use it all the time. Besides, he eventually did so many drugs that the lines between reality and the creations of his own imagination blurred to the point where he couldn’t tell the difference between them anyway.

“I’ve been going to some twelve-step meetings lately,” Satan said. “With all the drugs and stuff, I’ve been feeling kinda broken and I just wanna get myself, you know…fixed. A lot of these people at these meetings may not be drinking or doing coke anymore, but they still have addictions of one kind or another. A lot of guys at these meetings are addicted to porn.

“Like this one guy who couldn’t stay out of peep shows. His every extra cent went to magazines. One week, he was like, ‘Well, I managed to get off the porn. I haven’t been to a peep show or bought a magazine in two weeks. But now I find I can’t keep myself from caulking parking meters.’

“‘What do you mean, caulking parking meters ?’ I asked.

“‘I mean just what I said,’ he replied. He was taking a caulking gun and injecting it into parking meters. And I thought, Jesus, how much more Freudian can you get than to take a phallic ‘gun’ and inject white goo into a little slot? ”

“You can see it on a lot of levels,” I said. “It’s like, in an attempt to stay out of peep shows, he had to go around sealing up all the coin slots.”

“Just the whole thing,” Satan said. “Well, a couple weeks later he’s at the meeting again, and he says, ‘Well, I managed to stop caulking parking meters but now I’m back on the porn again.’”

Although it was commendable that he was trying to clean up his act, the twelve-step meetings never seemed to help Satan. No matter how many he went to, he still managed to stay completely strung out. In fact, he frequently found himself doing drugs before he went to one, just to get through it. Eventually, he just stopped going to them altogether.