Will Baer - Hell's Half Acre

The next morning, I headed for the nearby Denny’s to get a bite and some coffee while I waited for the next Greyhound north. I took a stab and asked my waitress if she had ever known a girl named Maggie, who used to work at the Painted Lady.

Sure, she said. I know Maggie. She went up to San Francisco after the Lady burned down, got a job at some little bar. She sent me a couple postcards.

That’s nice. Do you remember the name of the bar?

The waitress grinned. It was called Mao’s, like the Chinese dictator. I remember because I used to love those Andy Warhol paintings.

I’M STARING AT THE BACK OF A CAB DRIVER’S NECK. The thing is, I’m not used to being around people. I have been living on the edge of nowhere too long. I’ve been asleep for years, it feels like. My sunburned hands twitch like birds. I crush them together, force them to be still.

This is heavy traffic and nothing more.

Downtown San Francisco, or thereabout. I don’t know the city well, but it looks to be composed of wrong angles. It’s one of those cities where two streets may run parallel for a few blocks, then cross each other. The streets are not to be trusted. I need to relax. I’m an ordinary passenger in an ordinary yellow cab, waiting in traffic. I’m on my way to a hotel called the King James. Upon arriving in San Francisco, I experienced a rare moment of trouble-shooting cool and called a dozen hotels asking for a guest named Jesse Redd until I got a hit. The receptionist who answered the phone was a young girl named Holly, apparently new on the job, and I had managed to flirt with her just enough to wrangle Jesse Redd’s room number out of her.

The mind wanders, forward and back. Jude was never my girlfriend in any conventional sense of the word. I met her in a hotel bar in Denver almost seven years ago, less than a week before Christmas. I had just been released from a state hospital with my head shaved and my emotional infrastructure rewired. I was an ex-cop but my judgment was poor. I mistook Jude for a prostitute and invited her up to my room. She relieved me of all my cash and didn’t give me so much as a handjob in return. I barely copped a feel before the horse tranq she’d slipped me robbed me of my senses. I woke up some twenty-four hours later in a bathtub full of ice, and one of my kidneys was gone. She’d targeted me before I ever walked out of Fort Logan, having helped herself to my med records and shaky psych profile.

It sounds complicated but it amounts to boy meets girl and girl steals his kidney. Boy wants his kidney back. Boy wants to kill girl. Boy catches up with girl and decides he likes her. He just might love her. And so he doesn’t kill her. He becomes her partner, and pretty soon boy and girl get along like two ducks flying high in a washed blue sky. I called her that sometimes, when I was feeling daffy.

Give us a kiss, I’d say. Give us a kiss, duck.

It annoyed the hell out of her. She reached for sharp objects. And eventually those two ducks fell to earth and I found myself in a world of shit, a world where I didn’t think twice about holding sponge and bucket while she amputated a future senator’s hand. Jude and I were together for just over a year.

I remember the strangest things about her. I remember she played with matches when she was nervous or bored, lighting one after another until she burned her fingers. She favored a black raincoat on cloudy days, and wore nothing under it. She liked to flash me in elevators. She trimmed her pubic hair into a narrow, shadowy wing. She had a tendency to bite but never broke the skin. She was a trained killer but still she was afraid of spiders. She brought me ice cream when I was sick, and she spent a lot of money on fantastic hats. Jude never did anything lightly. She could be washing the dishes, making spaghetti sauce, playing a video game, or painting the bathroom red. Or fighting a guy twice her size. She did everything with the same delirious gum-chewing mania. In the bedroom she was reckless, she was all over the map. The sex was exhausting, hilarious, fragile, and scary. And sometimes, as I closed my eyes at night I wondered if she would kill me in my sleep.

I last saw her in New Orleans. Late morning and Jude was brushing her teeth. Blue around the lips. The drone of pipes and ultraviolet light. Her back against the sink. The shadow of wet hair in the mirror, black with traces of chemical red. One arm dangling, she wore a blue shirt unbuttoned. Thighs and belly bright with oil and sun. Trickle of blood down one knee where she had cut herself shaving. Dead flowers in a teacup on the television behind me. I stood in the doorway, on the threshold. I was holding her suitcase, which I’d found in the living room, in one hand. It felt heavy.

What’s this? I said.

Hazy silence. She turned her head, so I could see the pink scar.

I’m leaving you, she said.

Where will you go? I said.

Don’t follow me, she said.

Why?

Flicker of hurt in her eyes, like moth’s wings.

You, she said. You disappeared long ago.

The yellow cab heaves to a stop. The slow turn of the driver’s face, white and sickly.

Twenty-two fifty, he says.

What?

This is it, man. The King James Hotel.

I turn to the window, my nose against glass. I am still in San Francisco. The mad shamble of downtown humans. Towers of glass and stone and fingernails of sky, blue and white. Long shadows and swirl of dust and trash. The driver begins to cough and choke without stopping. The slushy noise of ruined lungs. He has emphysema and this actually makes me crave a cigarette, maybe two.

Don’t follow me.

Bittersweet, yes. Pale with sorrow and heartbreak and soft light. Also complete and utter bullshit. That tender farewell bathroom scene is a load of something stinky, it’s bad fiction. The other version, the truthful one, has me living for weeks in the attic above our rented flat in the Quarter. I was busy talking to myself and slowly going bugshit crazy. I was a busy little toad. I was plotting the murder of three men whose proper names I didn’t even know, whose whereabouts were impossible to say. I barely knew what they looked like and I was so far from finding them they might as well have been living on the other side of the sun.

Thoughts of revenge will eat the brain away sure as cancer.

I should have just been happy we were alive. It was a small miracle, really. Four men had entered our apartment. One of them lay crippled on the floor, groaning. The two white guys had raped my woman, savagely. They had finished in under an hour, and now they lounged about, smoking cigarettes. One of them was raiding our liquor cabinet, the other had flopped down on the sofa to watch TV. The black dude was taking off his pants, stopping to fold them carefully. These guys were taking too long, and being very stupid, and I knew that a window was opening. I just wasn’t sure how to climb through that window. I kept blacking out, which scared the shit out of me, because dimly I was aware that I was sporting a serious concussion, and I could feel the blood seeping inside my skull. Each time I blacked out could be my last. And I was tied down so securely, I could barely wiggle my fucking toes. I hoped Jude had an idea about that window. The black man put aside his pants. He rubbed his gleaming skull for luck and lowered himself onto the bed.

Jude opened her eyes. She managed to smile.

Let me use my hands, she said. It will be so much nicer for you.

I was in the hospital for a week. My doctor told me I would have blurred vision for a while. He said that the bleeding around my brain had stopped, that scar tissue would soon form, and that I would likely have headaches the rest of my life. Otherwise, I would recover. He asked if I could identify my attackers, did I want to file a police report. I declined. I asked about Jude, but he shook his head. He knew nothing about the woman who brought me to the ER, only that she had paid my medical tab in full. I went home in a taxi.