Peter Maravelis - San Francisco Noir

“I realized that twelve-step meetings had become just another addiction for me,” Satan explained. “And since I’m trying to clean up my act and get rid of my addictions, I had to start somewhere.”

Hal Satan was the only dealer I ever had who would deliver. A half hour, well, actually, forty-five minutes, sometimes an hour, after you called him, he’d bring by a quarter of generic green bud on his scooter. Just like Domino’s Pizza.

Satan started out just dealing weed but he quickly diversified into all sorts of hard drugs. He wanted to be all things to all people. “Shouldn’t Satan provide all vices?” he reasoned. But keeping up with such a complex line of distributed substances made his already crazy and chaotic life utterly schizophrenic. The biggest problem was that he couldn’t stop sampling what he sold. “What’s the fun of being Satan if you can’t also enjoy the vices you hand out?” he once told me. The problem, though, with that line of reasoning is that Satan very rapidly became a total junkie. In fact, every time I scored drugs from him at his armpit of an apartment, I couldn’t help feeling that he was a perfect illustration of what it must be like to be strung out in Hell.

Satan’s apartment was right down from the corner of Haight and Ashbury. The address, appropriately enough, was 666 Ashbury, and this had been a contributing factor to him adopting the name Satan .

“Who else but Satan could live at 666?” he explained. It was hard to argue with that.

The apartment was a garbage dump where a few humans coexisted with the vermin. The kitchen sink was long lost in a fossilized stack of dirty pots. A huge heap of beer bottles, greasy pizza boxes, and other trash took over an entire corner of the living room.

“We clean the place once every three years, whether it needs it or not,” one of the roommates once joked. In the bathroom, the toilet seat had stuck to the bowl due to a gluey growth of mold and it could no longer be put up. Sometimes when you got a bag from Satan you had to flick roaches and other little bugs out of your buds.

Nobody had washed the dishes at 666 in a long time. Very few of them were even still in the kitchen. Instead, they were on various surfaces around the living and bedrooms. Most of them looked like petri plates covered with medical experiments of mold and rotten food. The few plates that were still clean were used to consume drugs. The plates used to snort coke and speed off of, for example, were always licked spotlessly clean. Every piece of furniture in that apartment was so cratered with cigarette and burn holes that it looked like a map of the moon. The carpet was a grayish-black desert of ash. When you walked across it, little clouds of dust and ash rose up around your feet. There wasn’t a square foot of the place that wasn’t littered with garbage. The roaches in the place outnumbered the roommates ten million to four. In fact, me and some of Satan’s other customers took to calling his place The Roach Motel .

Sometimes the Roach Motel looked like a scene out of Night of the Living Dead . Satan would get these drug zombies who’d camp out on his couch for two to three days at a time, not saying anything, only moving enough to keep themselves saturated with whatever drug they were consuming. There was a cannibalistic efficiency to their behavior. It was as if their humanity and personalities had been stripped away and all that remained was the mechanical core of their hungers and needs. What had once been human was now just a consuming machine, an engine designed only for eating. These zombie robots would stay with Satan until all the fuel he provided them was gone, and then they would shamble off into the night in search of more of the drugs that justified their existence.

“Lots of the people I know are just a combination of feeding and needing,” Satan once commented.

One of the roommates was a guy named Rick. His father had been a congressman or something and had died about a year before and left Rick a lot of money. Rick took this newfound fortune and promptly became a coke addict. His dealer was Fat Carlo, a massive lump of a man who must have weighed close to four hundred pounds. Every now and then, Carlo would wear a white suit, and it seemed like all he’d ever done was sell the white powders. After a couple months, Carlo got along so well with Rick that he moved in with him. Can you imagine the parasitic relationship that ensued? Over the course of the next year, the dealer performed a steady, almost magical wealth transferal which kept half the household buried in snow. Hearts about to explode. We used to say about Rick: “I don’t know what happened. One day my dad dies, and then I wake up a year later flat broke and without a nose.”

Everyone from that household basically went insane. Take the case of the Human Waste. One night I was at a party and Satan was telling me about how squalid things were getting.

“It’s so crowded and filthy,” Satan said. “The sickest person there is just a loser. Joey’ s his name. We call him the Human Waste . I can honestly say, I’ve never seen a more pathetic person in my life. This guy’s thirty-five years old, grossly overweight, and fairly Neanderthal in appearance.”

“Like someone moving backwards through evolution?” I asked.

“Believe me,” Hal said, “he’s already devolved. In fact, there are already primates higher than him on the genetic ladder. This guy walks around with six inches of butt crack showing out the back of his jeans at all times.”

“He carries around a regulation-length ruler to make sure that six inches of butt crack is constantly maintained,” I added. “If his pants start to hike up on him, he measures the butt crack and pulls them back down.”

“Every afternoon, Joey the Human Waste comes home with a case of Rolling Rock, and by the end of the evening he has polished the whole thing off by himself,” Satan continued. “He may give away one or two, but every day he drinks at least twenty or thirty beers. I did that a couple times in high school, but we’re talking a thirty-five-year-old man here. And that happens seven days a week.

“It’s not like he needs to relieve the stress from his job, because he’s unemployed. For a couple years there, he was working in the family business, but Joey was such a fuck-up that eventually not even his family could put up with him and ended up giving him the axe. Now he just gets by on unemployment, food stamps, and the checks his parents still write him.

“On top of that, he never bathes. I’ve only seen him shower once or twice in the three years I’ve lived there. Every night when I walk into the apartment, he’s plopped there on the couch, stinking the place up like a homeless person or a dead dog. Whenever anyone tells him he smells like a fresh turd, Joey just pretends he’s not listening.

“Back when he was still working, it got so bad that one day his grandmother called our apartment. ‘Can you get Joey to take a shower?’ she asked us. ‘He’s really beginning to offend people down at the shop because he smells so bad.’ And this from his own grandmother!

“But the most pathetic scene with Joey happened one night when everyone in the apartment was partying in the living room, which is his sole environment. Joey was shit-faced drunk as usual, and suddenly he gets up in front of everybody and says he has an announcement to make. Then he breaks down crying and admits right there in front of everyone that he’s never had sex before. Not once in all his thirty-five years on the planet. Never even been in love. I don’t think anyone’s even touched him except his mother.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Somebody shared too much. Somebody committed an over-share.”