Peter Maravelis - San Francisco Noir

People dis the Gulch, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s the only neighborhood if you’re really serious about being a sex maniac. The Haight’s too full of gentrified Gap-heads, gone-to-seed hippy hopheads, and runaway urchin thieves. The Richmond is a great place to go if you’re lookin’ for the slowest, most boring death imaginable. SoMa? Please! Those dot-con pseudo-hipsters deserve every scrap of misery they’ve heaped on themselves. I do enjoy North Beach on a sunny afternoon, but in the end there’s too many clueless tourists clogging up the arteries. Nob Hill is a travesty, teaming with all those vaginally challenged fashion victims. Hell, even the poodles get botoxed up there. And there’s nothing tender in the Tenderloin. The only loin in the TL is crawling with nasty maggots. I once saw some toothless loon cap his running mate over a Q-tip. Hey, I like Q-tips as much as the next guy, but only in the TL can you get terminated over one.

Because of its equidistant location between the Tenderloin and Nob Hill, you will hear the sisters sometimes call Polk Gulch the Tender Knob , which I quite enjoy. Here’s a little known fact: The word gulch comes from an Anglicization of gulchen , which means to gulp . When you consider how much has been guzzled and gulped in the Gulch over the years, it seems a perfect fit, doesn’t it? Don’t get me wrong, the Gulch is not for the feebleminded or the weak-willed. The Gulch will chew you up and spit you out if you let it. But if you have Game, you can get anything anytime in the Gulch. And you can get it for cheap.

The Gulch is where rough trade goes for a vacation. So you can bag a nasty little bit of fluff, like this girly hanging outside Koko’s, with the hiphuggers revealing pretty pink panties and FOXY plastered in cheap lettering across the seat of her jeans stuffed full of all that fine white flesh, she’s positively spilling out her too-small pleather jacket, and for twenty-five dollars and unlimited meth, chances are she’ll let you have an unlimited all-access pass to her hidden treasures until she’s not high anymore. And with the connoisseur-quality meth I kept on hand for specifically this purpose, that could last days at a stretch. Yes, she was rough, but sometimes I liked it rough.

But the true glory of the Gulch is that the very next second you’ll spot two touristy girlies shivering in shorts walking by with beautiful pale goosebumping gams, swathed in big I § SF sweatshirts they had to buy cuz nobody told them how freezing cold it is in SF. You’d be shocked how easy it is to sidle up to these corn-fed beauties (who are most of them looking to take a walk on the wild side in Baghdad-by-the-Bay, by the way) and take them for some paella at the Spanish joint on the corner, then end up back at my lovepad for some wine and some weed if they’re into it, which they almost always are, and all of a sudden they’re on my big round bed begging for one more to make it an even ten so they can go back and tell their cheesehead friends about how they § SF.

Across the street heading toward Polk, three of the loud brothers congregated around a lost-looking white man in a too-expensive jacket, they were waving DVDs in his face, screaming about how they could get any title he wanted. Then suddenly eight or nine of the loud brothers crawled out of Godknowswhere, surrounded the lost-looking jacket like a giant black widow spider, and swallowed it and its owner whole.

A tattooed post-teen with a hunk of metal through her lip and one stuck through her eyebrow clunked by next. I found myself wondering where else she was pierced. Sometimes those tattooed pierced freaky females enjoy a bit of punishment with their pain and that can be fun, riding that line between angel and devil.

More local color, Gulch-style, sashayed past in a ridiculous micro-mini and huge balloon breasts. She was one of these tiny passable Thai trannies. Very tidy. Truthfully, as a sex addict, I enjoy a passable trannie. Take it from one who knows, a hotty tranny’ll rattle your bones and make yer cahones dance like a couple of Mexican jumping beans. Because she wants to be a she more than any female. But I could only go to Trannie Land if she stayed a she. That’s just me. Maybe I was just not evolved enough to be comfortable with man-love. I wish I could’ve. I tried, believe me. My life would have been so much easier if I could’ve gotten off on men, cuz you can have man 25/8. Shake a tree in the Gulch and a ton of love-ready man falls out. Woman, even faux-woman, even bad woman, even the nastiest skagmeister skunkkunt, is often so hard to come by. I mean, obviously there are women everywhere, but it takes so much effort just getting in most of the really exceptional woman, it’s exhausting.

Next up on the Gulch hit parade was a disaffected arty sweet-sixteeny, all gangly angles and long colt legs, hoody ripped so her bra strap showed over the softness of all that untouched skin underneath, with all that attitude heaped on top. I just loved going up to one of these flouncing clomping angry grrrrls and saying, Hey, I know how it is, your parents suck, your school sucks, your teacher sucks, your friends suck, the whole world sucks, but I can show you how to escape into ecstasy, lose yourself to the pleasures of the flesh, primal scream all that bopper angst right out. You have all the equipment you need, but you have no clue how to use it, I can show you the whole thing in a couple of hours. Plus, you cannot believe how jealous your stupid sucking friends’ll be, and just how much this will piss your stupid sucking parents off.

Oh, I love this guy: He never wears a shirt, even in the freezing rain, he’s so wired and wiry, you can see every bone in his body, he’s like a skeleton wearing a skin tarp stretched too tight. He loves to run right in front of speeding cars. That’s his thing. And he never gets hit. I saw him cause three separate accidents, one of them a three-car fiasco. But he never gets so much as a scratch. ’Course, he is lean and lithe and wiry as hell, like I said, so he’s very hard to hit. But as I walked past and watched him, I wondered what he might’ve been, like maybe an Olympic hurdler or an NFL scatback or a Hollywood stuntman, instead of a death-defying crack casualty.

As I turned down Chinese Willy’s alley, the animal cried out inside me: I need more Snow Leopard ! The pictures flashed back: those throat moans, cold steel on my boys, her squirming so she could have all of me. My open chest skin was stinging in the chill of the night, and I could still feel her digging into me.

It’s so gratifying when reality actually turns out better than fantasy. Chinese Willy, who’s actually Mexican but really looks, I kid you not, Chinese, was even fatter and happier than I’d imagined he’d be. If there’s one thing he likes more than getting his money, it’s getting his money early. So he was practically jovial as he counted all those potatoes at 11:52, instead of midnight. I watched him touching and fondling his cabbage, and suddenly I understood: This is his thing. The man is a cash addict.

Chinese Willy is an old-school gangster, which has its ups and downs. On the one hand, he’s hooked up with everybody and nobody can touch him, which meant nobody could touch me. On the other hand, he’s prone to irrational outbursts of ultra-violence that can really wreak havoc on a person’s skull. He loves all that vendetta malarkey, and he’s very big on LOYALTY and RESPECT. And he loves to break balls. His whole social hierarchy is based on the breaking of other people’s balls. It’s his way of saying he likes you. When Chinese Willy stops breaking your balls, that’s when it’s time to watch your back.

One of the odder things about Chinese Willy is that even though he’s actually Mexican, he surrounds himself with Chinamen, and he’s always bankrolling these high-end Chinese honeys so they’ll hang with him, and he even kind of talks like one of those old-timey Chinamen. It’s like somehow because he looks Chinese, he’s become a Chinaman.