Peter Maravelis - San Francisco Noir

“So,” he mumbled through a huge mouthful of egg salad, “how you like Snow Leopard?” He glanced sideways at Crack Harry, Shiva Shiv, and Knuckles, and when he did that insinuating vulgar guttural chuckle, that was their cue to do the same. Like they were all in on some secret that I wasn’t, the object being to make me feel like a big steaming heap of shit. But the beauty of being a sex maniac is that you could just not care less about any of this. It was just so much water off the back of my duck, while I maneuvered my way toward my next fix.

“Yeah, she was a real piece of work-”

“You say mouthful there.” Assorted grunts and belches and chortles erupted from Crack Harry and Shiva Shiv and Knuckles.

“Yeah, I was just wondering if I could get her digits, cuz I gotta proposition I wanna-”

Chinese Willy shut me down like I was the clap and he was penicillin: “No! You thank me for this. I tell now, you listen: You not wanna make fuckeefuck wit’ this clazy bitch! Right, boys?”

They nodded and grunted like the chunks of muscle they are.

“Naw, you don’t understand,” I plodded on, “I have an unresolved situation on my hands vis-à-vi-”

“Now you watch my lip: No!” Egg salad sprayed from the Mexican lips of Chinese Willy. “Stay fuck away from this clazy bitch!”

“With all due respect”-Willy loves all that all-due-respect business, you could feel his sphincter unpinch-“I’ve been working for you for five years, I’m always straight, I bring you a steady stream of new business, and I have never asked you for one single thing. This is all I ask. I need to talk to the Snow Leopard. With all due respect-”

I couldn’t even get the last due-respects out on account of the veins that were popping up on that huge Chinese-looking head, as “NO! FUCK DAMN YOU!” thundered from Willy, along with another fusillade of egg salad, a small particle of which flew all the way over the desk and landed on my vintage Warriors warm-up.

This always signals the end of any dispute involving Chinese Willy. It is a well-known fact that after the third “No!” from Chinese Willy, you continue a dispute at your own risk, as an irrational outburst will most likely result. Since I did not wish to have my cheek pierced by a staple gun, or my nose broken with Chinese Willy’s Ugly Billy (his billyclub of choice, a slender twenty-four inches of hardened metal, conventionally used for bashing fish in the head until they’re dead after you’ve reeled them in), I dropped the topic.

But just when I was ready to write Chinese Willy off as a classless thug, he peeled off five Large and handed them to me, even though he only owed me a G, and with great pomp and ceremony, he proclaimed:

“Okay, maybe you right. You don’t never fuck up. Not never. So maybe Chinese Willy take you for granted. But I do you favor here. Snow Leopard, she take no prisoner. This for you own good. You understand I no want to see this clazy bitch fuck you shit up?”

“Thank you for taking the time to help me, and I appreciate your generosity, which I am not even deserving of, but what the hell, I’ll take it.”

I pocketed the five Gs with a flourish, and they ate it up, loved that I was giving a tiny little shot to the man himself, as he laughed: “He got brass monkey balls, don’t he?”

Everybody made little grunty snorty sounds, and Chinese Willy continued: “I got pickup for you, noon tomorrow, Sophia’s, Butterball, he got thing for you, you take to Sweetmeat, he got thing for you, I need back here by 1:00.”

“You got it, bawss.” I smiled wide, and as I sidled out, Chinese Willy shoved a huge hunk of egg salad into his fat, happy Mexican face.

I practically skipped down the alley to Polk: It was barely midnight, I had four free Gs itching to be scratched in my secret jacket pocket, I didn’t have to work again for twelve hours, I was still throbbing from the Snow Leopard work-over, I could feel the cool air soothing the open love-wounds inflicted by the saucy minx I wanted to have every day for the rest of my life, and as I smelled her again, she jolted me to the bone.

Next stop: Eyeball. The queerest of queer ducks. He’s as tall as he is wide, somewhere between thirty and six hundred years old. Possibly the hairiest man on the planet, he’s got one of these Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers ’dos, slate-colored hair flying everywhere, flowing over the shoulders, burying the ears, drooping in front of the eyes, and avalanching uncontrollably down the front and the back. At a certain point the head hair meets and joins the beard hair, and it looks thick enough to contain entire meals. Which, at times, it does. Thicket of brambled monobrow. Hair sprouting out of knuckles, pouring out of shirt collar and sleeve, pant leg bottom. You could make braids out of the hair coming out of his nose. I’ve never seen Eyeball’s eyeballs. I don’t know that he actually has eyes. But here’s the weird thing: Eyeball’s the guy you go to in the Gulch when you want to know where to find somebody, and he never travels more than the fifty feet between his flophouse hellhole on Larkin, and Hung Wang’s, the filthy greazy-spoon dim sum joint he frequents on O’Farrell. It’s one of the great mysteries of life how this human hairball who can barely see, hardly walk, and never goes anywhere, knows everything there is to know about everyone in the Gulch. If you didn’t see it with your own eyes, you wouldn’t believe it. But this is how Eyeball makes bank. People pay him to tell them where to find what they’re looking for. It makes you think about miracles, how they’re everywhere, only nobody’s paying attention.

The thing about Eyeball is, he’s a cantankerous troll, and whimsical in the worst sense of the word. For example, one time you’ll come to him with the simplest piece of information, and he’ll charge you a grand for it. Another time he’ll give you the Governator’s cell digits for a buck. So I was a tad apprehensive about what he was going to charge me, but at the same time, I had four free Gs pulsating in my secret pocket, and with four Large I was confident I could find the Snow Leopard.

So sure enough, there he was, as advertised, Eyeball, buried somewhere under all that hair, stuffing his piehole with vile dim sum. Before him sat three plates pregnant with rancid rolls and skuzzy buns, grizzly gray meat and dumplings lying there like stillborn dog fetuses, and rice with little things that looked like dead insects sprinkled in it. Crumbs spread out in a half-moon on the floor around him, his hair/beard layered deep with bits of chow from meals present to years-gone-by. I loved to watch the man attack and subdue his dim sum. As I watched him ravage his food, it became clear: This is Eyeball’s thing. This is what he lives for. The man is a chow junky.

I didn’t want to interrupt him when he was in the middle of a big feed, he can be cranky as a mother bear when you threaten her cubs, he’ll take your head clean off if you’re not careful. I waited till he came up for air, then moved in, gentle but firm: “Hello, Eyeball, how’s life treating ya?”

“I got gout. Ain’t that sump’n’? Gout.” Eyeball shook his head, which made his hair ripple in waves of frayed gray.

Eyeball’s a mumbler. I always forgot that. Actually, it’s not that he mumbles so much as the fact that the food he’s constantly stuffing into his mouth serves as a natural muffler, making it difficult to hear more than about forty percent of what he says.

“Sorry to hear that,” I said, as I tried to figure out exactly what he had. Bout? Doubt? Gout?

“Gout!” Eyeball shouted, dim sum flying as if from a volcano. “Ain’t that a kick in the ass?”

Ah, gout! I didn’t even know what gout was. But it sounded like one of those things you definitely don’t want, like you never hear anyone say: Hey, everybody, congratulate me, I got gout!