Peter Maravelis - San Francisco Noir

“Maybe if he’d ever been laid,” Satan speculated, “he’d only feel the need to drink ten or fifteen beers a day instead of twenty or thirty.”

Hal Satan was the token troublemaker of the poetry scene. He caused a disruption at every reading he went to. That was his shtick. Hal took off his clothes, let off fireworks, bit other poets, anything he could do to interrupt things. At 666 Ashbury, Hal threw some outrageous parties with like ten bands, three to four hundred people, and marathon poetry readings. He used to let me do readings and throw together rock bands that performed at these things. I remember one night this band I was in played, and while we were setting up, Hal Satan came into the room with a bag of black beauties as big as my head and started handing them out. Hal must have downed a dozen of the things. He was always getting into epic trouble. He seemed to feel some kind of suicidal need to live up to his name. His crimes were many. And they were legendary. Like take the following, for example:

The local poetry readings are peopled by a number of eccentric personalities and even stranger acts. This one reading I went to at the Chameleon bar provides a good case in point. It was there that Dan Faller debuted his latest conceptual piece: “Interpretive Dance with Axe.” It was a long parody of modern dance routines, which incorporated an actual industrial-sized lumberjack axe. Of course, Dan was drunk as a skunk when he performed it and many audience members gasped in real fear as he precariously swung the deadly device right in front of them. Sam Silent, who was MCing the reading, was tempted to give Dan the hook, but in the end his support for the First Amendment won out over public safety. Besides, he wasn’t really in the mood to piss off a drunk guy with a big axe. All the same, when the owner of the bar heard about the incident the next day, she made a new policy that said all axes have to be checked at the door.

Dan Faller wrote and read stream-of-consciousness experimental poetry that he sometimes made up on the spot when he was standing on stage. He was also notorious for having introductory monologues that were longer than his actual poems. He frequently did back-flips on stage, usually while under the influence of large amounts of alcohol. I always hoped I wasn’t there the day he snapped his neck. Dan had a voracious appetite for drugs that often steered toward the hard ones. One Saturday night at a party at 666 Ashbury, I saw him drop a hit and a half of acid and snort a quarter gram of speed at 2 a.m.

After his axe dance, Dan met up with Hal Satan, one of his partners in crime. Hal was already three sheets to the wind, and the two of them proceeded to get even drunker. They ended up closing the bar.

Hal decided to give Dan a ride home. They went out to Hal’s monstrous white Cadillac and revved up the engine. Then Dan made a dare with Hal, knowing that Hal couldn’t resist a dare, the more stupid and reckless the better. It was about forty blocks to Dan’s house and Dan ended up driving. For most of the ride he went about eighty miles an hour and ignored the traffic lights. Hal rode on the hood. He was naked and swinging the axe around for the whole ride like some drunken Asgardian lumberjack. By some obscene miracle, Hal made it all the way to Dan’s house without falling off and breaking his neck. Where’s a cop when you need one? They were probably handing out tickets for minor traffic offenses while this naked madman on a white Cadillac drove right past them.

Hal Satan once told me this lost-weekend story about him and Fat Carlo:

“We used to play this game called ‘blacks and whites’,” Satan said. “It was where all weekend he’d freebase coke and I’d smoke black tar. Well, this game of blacks and whites had started around 3:00 Friday afternoon and now it was about 3:00 Sunday morning. The steep back slope of Saturday night. Everything was soft and fuzzy, but in a good way, and me and Fat Carlo were walking through the Mission around Twenty-fourth and Bartlett, right in the heart of gang country, but we didn’t give a fuck because this was our town.

“Well, we’re just walking down the street when this little punk starts running us a bunch of lip. And we’re like, ‘Fuck you! Fuck off! Don’t give us any shit.’ We’re old-school barrio. So we think nothing of it and just keep walking.

“A couple blocks down I notice that something just isn’t right. I had felt no pain for almost thirty-six hours, but now something had disturbed the fluid in my junky amniotic sac. I can’t tell what’s wrong with it, but my shoulder just feels like shit. Carlo finally checks it and there’s blood all over the back of my leather jacket. Turns out, I’ve been shot!

“Now, I don’t want to go to the hospital because that could lead to certain, ah, legal problems. So Carlo shows me all the finer points of digging a bullet out of your shoulder with a pair of needle-nose pliers. After that, he patches up the wound in a way that will kind of disguise the fact that it’s a bullet hole. Then me and him go to the emergency room with some phony story about how I fell down in the kitchen or something.”

I remember running into Satan at yet another party in the Haight. He was telling me about how things had gotten dramatically worse at 666.

“My three other roommates are just smoking crack all the time now. Like the other night, I came home from work and there were all these low-rent crack dealers, like the ones you see selling on the street at Sixteenth and Mission, hanging out in my room, sitting on my bed. My roommate Rick smokes rock all the time, and so does this couple, Ed and Julie, who have the other bedroom. Sometimes I can hear Ed and Julie in there scheming all night long. Plotting these weird crimes for hours. Sometimes they even talk about robbing me, even though I have nothing of value left.

“We were all going to get a warehouse space together, but I’m not so sure anymore. ’Cause I found out that these people have had a problem with coke before. In fact, that’s why they’re out here in San Francisco. Evidently, my roommates burned some coke dealers back in Michigan and are on the run from them. And I mean burned them for like big bucks. We’re talking ruthless dudes, the kind who would kill them if they ever caught up with them.”

“No good,” I told him. “Some night these dudes in ski masks with AK-47s are going to kick in your front door and shoot everybody down.” I pointed my finger at his forehead like I had a gun in my hand and pulled the invisible trigger. “They’ll end up killing you just because you’re a witness.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Hal said squeamishly. “I mean, these people are into some really shady stuff. Like the couple makes their living fucking over johns in the Tenderloin. Julie does a little whoring every now and then. But she usually doesn’t actually have sex with the guys. Most of the time she gets them to give her the money first and just runs away with it. Her boyfriend Ed runs interference for her. He either slows the john down, or if need be, beats the crap out of the trick and steals his wallet. I mean, I liked these people at first, but they’ve turned out to be real criminals.

“Julie also gets money from a string of sugar daddies. Well, most of it comes from this one sorry-ass old guy who owns a chain of dry cleaners. He picked her up one night in the Tenderloin but he didn’t want to fuck her. The old guy just wanted to befriend her. Julie was real happy to have a new friend, and over the months she’s bilked him for thou-sands of dollars. Sometimes he gives her as much as fifty dollars a day for spending money. And he’s not the only one. Like last week, some other old guy gave Julie a Cadillac El Dorado. It’s too weird. I mean, this is how her and her boyfriend have been paying their rent.