Second Street Heights, Frisco

The woman downstairs keeps bugging me for a portrait when she hears my crying through the floor. She’s an artist with a special interest in tears and what people look like when they’re shedding them. Undoubtedly, this is why she chose to shack up at second street heights, a 50 buck a month hotel, with five an hour whores in the basement and twenty five a manuscript private press writers in the attic. She’s probably inspired by the walls shedding plaster dust and the sunlight trying to break through the filthy windows in the morning. Yeah, she’s here because everyone always is crying. There isn’t much to do here when your eyes are dry. My room is a six by sixxer, with my mother’s old hotplate in the plug, and a bare bulb swinging from the coffee-stain ceiling. I sleep on an old mattress on the floor, with two white sheets and an army blanket that I purchased duty-free five years ago. They’re the only cleanliness here. It’s important to me that a bed be clean and warm, so once or twice a week I’ll run down to the coin-op on the corner in my shorts, my linen bundled in my arms, throw them in the washing machine, drop the coins and watch the spin cycle, then take them out sopping wet and heavy, move them to the dryer, drop the coins and wait on them until they’re done and I can remove them warm and dry and hold them close to my chest as I book it back up the street, take the stairs two at a time, throw it all on my bed and crawl in. It’s these afternoons that I fall asleep right away. I can honestly say that that’s the best thing in my life-a clean, warm bed. There isn’t much else, and that comes back, so I like to think I’m happier than anyone else in the building. I’ve at least found something that can knock me out peacefully once in a while. Now my friend K.O would tell you otherwise. (K.O from Kyle Orlan, he tells me, the Orlans being “a very wealthy family with some share in Texas oil profit”, and Kyle the bastard son, as his story goes). HE would insist that his girls are a legitimate source of both income and pleasure. He would look right at you and say “what more do I need?”, and give you a wry smile as he made a sweeping gesture over the red-light subterranean room, over all the women lying about, smoking cigarettes and gabbing the way women will. K.O’s so engrossed in his profession that he even tries to do business with his friends. He’s always trying to pass some new piece of ass off on me, for example, though I’ve told him many times that I’d rather be lonely. This evening K.O comes up to my room and says “special delivery to the Peter Gunn suite”, harping on the letters that the tenant before me carved into my door with a pen knife. I open it on his wide Italian face, ruddy and unshaven and seemingly full of yellowed teeth, caught in the dim glow of my one window, which is painted shut.

“Heyya buddy!” he says, making a move to step into my closet-like quarters, but reconsidering when he realizes I’ll trip on the mattress if I try to move for him.

“Lookin’ for some action tonight, eh?” he asks eagerly, the smile unwavering.

“No thank you, K.O” I say, as formal as I can. I don’t really want to hurt his feelings. “I’ll be going out tonight”. The smile flickers and disappears, replaced by a slightly protruding, meaty lower lip. His tone of voice changes, and he begins to quietly kick the doorjamb.

“Oh really kid, where ya goin’?” he looks up at me for an answer, but I honestly don’t have one prepared.

“I’m not too sure where I’m headed K.O, but I don’t have any money, so, I don’t plan on being INSIDE anyplace. Chances are I’ll just take a little walk down to the wharves, maybe a little swim...”. I hope he’s caught the reference to the shabby state of my finances, and I hope it still bothers him that I swim in the bay, on occasion. These are the two things I know can make him clear out, and when he starts throwing his Ad campaign around my room, which he does A LOT, I could throw up, and that’s a fact.

This time, though, I don’t even have to wait for his response, as her face appears behind his right shoulder.

“Excuse me, mister...Orlan...” she says. She’s very icy with K.O because he wouldn’t let the girls tell her their life stories and end up crying for her portraits. She bothered him for months about it, and tried to sneak around him; tried to catch the girls when he was out at the grocery store, buying necessities. His argument, one that he detailed for me this past summer when he was really upset about it, was that if “that god damned awful woman” got the girls feeling guilty about all their tricks and johns and business, they’d all pack up and leave him in the basement by himself. They’d all go live with her and be analyzed and painted and doted upon, and he would be broke and miserable and unemployed. So our artist of tristesse (she mentioned this “tristesse” to me herself once. I’m still not sure exactly what it means, but it’s French and it’s got something to do with this crying jag. Perhaps she’d mistaken me for an inhabitant of the attic, or “bohemia” as the loonies up there get a kick out of calling it). She stares at me intently over K.O’s shoulder.

“How are you feeling?” she asks, and K.O rolls his eyes before he turns and slowly tramps back to the basement. His footsteps resonate in the stairwell as I answer her.

“A bit down, and yourself?” her eyes light into this. She’s excited by my sour mood.

“Well, I’m alright” she says, her gaze flitting over my face. “I went to church yesterday down at saint Frances, and I’ve been working on some sketches of the priest there...a very...odd-looking priest, but...” here she paused and took a breath.

“But..I just came up because...not to be intrusive but...last night I heard you....well...”

I slam the door in her face, and after 10 or 15 slow seconds I hear her steps following K.O’s down the stairs. I sit down, pull on my scuffed leather workboots and lace them tightly. I leave my room unlocked and become the third person down the stairs within a half hour. The battered door out onto our quiet side street is already propped open with a cinderblock, framing a rectangle of spring dusk at the foot of the wooden stairway.

When I go out in the evening, which I often do, I usually don’t have a destination, although I always wander down Market street, because I like to see the bums S.F is famous for laying down their bedrolls in the doorways and in the park where they stand in soup lines on Thursdays and Sundays. There aren’t as many in the winter, but now it’s April and they’re coming back. Some of them still panhandle long past sunset, trying to score off of the swingers who come out to The Rainbow room and The Spot at night. There are so many of them that it’s a nuisance for people to give, but they seem to get along, and to always be eating, so they must make it somehow.

When I step outdoors, I can tell right away by the shadow that’s cast off of everything that the sky is cool and blue and cloudless. There’s still enough light hitting the basement window panes of second street that scattered shards of glass in the gutter are struck by it and glitter briefly. I have a vision of the bay in my minds eye. I see it’s cold, chopping waves. There’s bound to be wind sweeping off it over the wharves and north beach and howling around the solid stone of coit tower.

“Spare any change, friend?” an old man with a kind smile and a rattling soup can that’s been half-stripped of it’s label gazes up at me from a doorway. I tend to walk slowly, taking small, dragging steps, so I never conveniently miss them like other people do. It has occurred to me on occasion that the only difference between us is six by sixxer and a hotplate in a run down old hotel, so I’ll crouch down and explain the situation instead of breezing by.

“Look, I’m sorry. It’s been a hard month ...”. His face is open and understanding. Also sort of...blank.

“no worries” he says. And then; “nice night”. I gaze up and down the deserted street, at the pavement tinted dusk blue, and the streetlamps not yet lit, and nod my head in agreement.

“Are you staying here tonight?” I ask him.

“Beautiful.” He says, as if in a trance, and I don’t think he heard my question.

When I finally arrive at the intersection with Market street, the streetlamps have flickered and come on. I’m opposite the Rainbow Room, and I can’t reasonably go swimming tonight (my mind wanders back to it’s vision of the bay), so I decide although I have no money, to step inside and see what is happening this early, and wether somebody who’s got nobody wants to buy me a drink. It’s happened before. I’m not exactly ugly, so I tend to get lucky that way. I’ve always thought that the Rainbow Room’s neon is really something. There’s a flashing white, red and green martini above the door, with “Rainbow Room” beneath it in white script. , and inside it’s lit entirely by rainbow neon tubes running around the walls.Every color they make the stuff in, I’m sure. K.O insists that this is a fairy joint, but the two or three times I’ve been here before I’ve been picked up by women, so I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about. When I first moved to Frisco, about ten months ago, I felt inclined to trust the locals (and K.O was one, compared to me, as a newbie), but gradually I discovered that nobody here knows anything about anyone else. My greatest evidence of this is that I often spot a couple of K.O’s girls sitting at the bar, their hair and skin glowing and discolored, their shoes at the foot of their barstools, their smiles just as forced as they are back at second street heights, although they’re drinking, with other girls, not men, so at least they’re distracted, and they’re not on the job.

Sure enough, as soon as the door closes behind me, Cathy, K.O’s Japanese girl in a low-cut pink mini-dress, tight around the hips and thighs, perched on a barstool with her ankles crossed demurely, gives me a shy smile and a little wave, then turns her full attention back to her companion, a heavyset older man wearing chino pants and a black cable-knit sweater. He looks like money to me, so I figure she’s working and I leave her alone. We’ve never had much to talk about anyway. I don’t smoke, but on occasion we’ll encounter one another on the stoop and I’ll ask her for a cigarette just so I’ll have something in my mouth and therefore will have an excuse for not talking. This early in the night the Rainbow Room is practically empty. I only see Cathy, her “friend”, a young couple at one of the round tables, and a middle aged blond man apparently making the aqquantaince of a middle aged blond woman at the end of the bar furthest from me.. The Velvet underground is up a little too loud here and I’m watching the sound waves rattling the bottles behind the bar, making my vision grainy and mottling Cathy’s porcelain Asian face. I notice that she looks ill because of the neon green light cast over her stomach in the cheap pink dress, and the reflection onto her skin. After the door swings shut behind me the music pounds in my ear for a block or so.

The fact is, I spend a lot of my time walking. When I’m not asleep I’m occupied by my wanderings, with intervals of petty thievery and pawnshops that pay my rent. The porn shows further down Market Street are just opening now, and soon legions of lonely men will be purchasing tickets to spend the night with their hands in their pants. I’ve never bothered with these sorts of things, although I’m lonely too, and maybe someday I will be like them. Suddenly chilled, I turn off Market street, up the hill, and begin to circle back around to second street heights, my throat tightening with every step the whole way there, and my head pounding like there’s an iron rod through my temples. It’s around 8 o’clock and the coin-op is closed by the time I reach second street. I realize I haven’t had anything to eat today. I should’ve spent time with K.O to keep from thinking, although I don’t like him. I can’t even admit that to myself. Maybe I should take him up on his offer.

I pass the old bum stretched out in his doorway, not asleep, but not quite awake, with his blanket pulled to his chin and his bundle under his head, smiling and staring blankly up at the dark sky over the buildings. I quicken my pace to second street heights, then stumble blindly up the dark stairs, until finally I push open the door of my room and immediately collapse, fully clothed onto my cold bed, burying my face in my pillow, which still smells of detergent. I let out a whimper, closely followed by a heaving relese of tears, and I’m sure that everyone in this building listened, not just her, but all of them, with their ears to the ceiling, or floor, or nearest wall.