CHAPTER TWO
Alessio
South of Market
Unfortunately, wherever I go, I take me.
Yeah, a fellow con on the bus had handed me a pill. Rainbow colored, to attract the younger crowd. And yeah, I’d immediately swallowed it, washed down with the one bottle of water they’d shipped us off with, like now we were fully equipped to handle life, praise be to the water bottle!
And the three-day-old tuna sandwich.
What the powers that be didn’t know, or didn’t care about, was that we were regularly swallowing or injecting fentanyl in the halfway house, too.
So I was already fairly drenched in it by the time I got on the bus.
Meth? Fuck that. It was like a bland lump of raw dough when you really craved a T-bone steak.
I had no idea I was going to climb to the roof of that safe house.
I just did it. All the Tango and Cash I’d ingested the past month had given me a false sense of self-worth, and I needed to share my rage with the world.
I mean, fuck it! The founding fathers of our western world were drug users!
They grew stuff, sold it, used. We never would’ve made it without these alleged junkies and drug dealers.
The first attempts at prohibition were all about power and control.
If you want to have one God and church, you need to halt substances that make folks believe they can know God on their own.
So I got up there and raved. It was one of my specialties. Being a composer, a conductor, I loved to direct the masses. That’s how I’d started cherishing fentanyl. I needed to come down after the fireworks of bossing a symphony around.
“I don’t understand all the rage against drug use!
” I think I’d yelled. I don’t know—I was standing there dizzy, the crowded street below me teeming, sweating like a pitcher of ice water.
How can I remember what I said? “What do you think happens when you have an orgasm? It’s partially chemical, a drug.
You don’t want that? The ambition to become intoxicated is in everyone and ninety percent of us can do it without becoming addicted. ”
What was happening to the ten percent who couldn’t? I’d been wondering that all my life.
Then that guy. He was older, maybe forty, and a white guy, so he must’ve run the treatment center.
Thick silver-streaked hair combed back from sculpted features, his kindly, concerned yet loving face was the epitome of the county health care worker.
In the few seconds my brain flashed on him, I knew he was the real deal, the social worker truly invested in helping others, as infrequently as that really happened.
My brain tweaked when I reached for my wallet.
That pain. That constant, chronic, knifing pain in my hip. Oh, yeah. That had started me on my fentanyl journey. Thanks, Leonard Skinner. He was the one who had injured me, initially.
And I was going to kill him next.
I don’t recall at what point I passed out on the roof. Maybe right after I shouted, “Addiction isn’t a disease! It’s an adaptation. It’s the cage you live in!”
I swear I was out for five minutes. That’s how long it would’ve taken those guys to reach the roof, Narcan me, and have the social worker’s lush lips brush my earlobe.
His breath stiffened my nipples, my cock, even in my crashed state.
My limbs were all twisted and zigzag on the gravel, but this guy saying, “Alessio, come back. We need you,” teased that part of my brain that wanted to survive. So this was what living was all about!
In that second, I was all about the struggle to return.
“Alessio, we need you.” He paused. “I need you.”
While I knew that making it personal like that was a ploy, it did make me struggle even harder.
A good social worker, he was! When he asked me “How are you feeling?” I had to tell the truth.
Anything less would be a big obvious joke to this guy.
Truman Oakley, the crowd had called him. “Up on the roof! There’s your man!”
His man. Unlikely.
“I need out,” I croaked. After that stunt I’d just pulled, the police were likely to arrive in some shape or form. At least to see what POS outcast from society had leaped off the roof.
Of course no one knew what I meant, and they soon had me on my feet, one arm slung across each worker’s shoulder.
“Get me home,” I think I said. I had no fucking home.
I had my fellow fiends and cons and that was it.
I‘d clung onto my last home by a cunt hair, living off music publishing royalties while holding fentanyl festivities nearly every day.
Until my place became a fetid, seamy trap house, broken windows boarded with plywood, dudes passed out on the dead lawn.
The former living room was littered with burned bottle caps, tin foil, cornstarch boxes to be resold as the real stuff, and Pepto Bismol bottles well, just because.
Friends draped everywhere, glassy-eyed, or eyes darting as if trying to spot the nearest bumblebee.
I’d been writing a musical, so-called, but my house became a way station for addicted songwriters, boxers, and journalists. Just a watering hole where lions and lambs gathered under my flag of truce, refreshment of the soul. And in the end, some of us had been carted off to the Big House.
No, I knew they had called 911. They could not take me away. My parole would be violated in a hot minute.
In fact, now Truman said, “Let’s get you to the emergency room.”
“No ER!” I proclaimed.
They protested that no one would violate my parole just because I got high.
I knew they would, but that wasn’t the real core issue.
Now we were near the lobby that I’d raced past just a few minutes before in my zeal to proselytize from the rooftop.
I was crushed against the wall, swarmed by ghoulish extras in a Fellini film, men and women who’d been staggering around streets going “Rock? Powder? Rock?” just last week.
Hollow-faced chicks with fluorescent lips pacing streets cluttered with mouthwash and hand sanitizer bottles, swigged.
Terror stabbed me to imagine returning to that hellish scene, and I blurted out,
“Because I killed a guy in jail.”
The swarming crowd receded from us in a reverse zoom, and I stared Truman directly in the face. Why the fuck did I say that? What was it about Truman that brought so much honesty out in me? Why was I entrusting him with my life?
Recognition flashed in his perceptive caramel eyes. He looked to his Indian friend, and they nodded with that unspoken agreement that only comes from years of working together.
The EMT’s siren in the street stabbed my frontal lobe and I squeezed my eyes closed with the torture.
The pain zipped to my hip socket, collapsing my knees.
The two men hustled me to the back of the building.
Gratitude washed over me as the meat wagon siren and clattering voices receded into the background.
We passed a sort of lunch room where folks lounged, played chess, drank sodas. A dark room with beds, curtains covering windows. The bathroom, a spacious old-timey kitchen for the staff, and we were out the back door, a yard with a small lawn where a few dogs roamed around.
“Whose car?”
“My car.”
“Here.” Keys jangled. “Use mine. I’ll take the fall for it.” It was the gal who had looked at my driver’s license.
Truman told her, “Tell them he made a break for the tent city.”
I fell into the passenger seat of a late model Honda-type car. And who should be driving but Truman Oakley himself, his perfectly pointed nose in profile, his jaw set. I’d never seen a guy so determined, so sure of what he was about to do.
“Where we going?” I asked.
He didn’t answer for awhile. He sped as fast as he could down 16th Street, like he was heading toward 101. But pretty soon he hung a right onto Bryant.
“You going to San Francisco General?” I accused, looking for the door handle.
“Relax,” Truman finally said. “We’re going to my place.”
His place? His actual crash pad? Or did he have another treatment center?
I shifted in my seat, jittery as a cat hearing a mouse in the wall.
I knew this feeling well. I wanted more fentanyl.
“Why are you giving me special treatment? You saved my ass from the cops.” I ground my teeth that I’d used the word ass in front of Truman. He was so damn upstanding, so sincere.
Again, it took him awhile to answer. We’d passed the exit for the hospital and were crossing Cesar Chavez.
And his answer wasn’t really one.
“Who did you kill?”
I froze like a Nintendo 64. What in the name of Krampus was I supposed to say? I was jonesing, itching for more Tango and Cash, and this cabrón was asking me who I knocked off?
I took the hair tie out of my bun. We were supposed to shower last night at the halfway house so at least we didn’t reek up the treatment center.
Of course I hadn’t, being more interested in playing an inmate’s guitar.
Combing my hair with my fingers, I said, “Okay, we’re even.
I don’t tell you who I popped, and you don’t tell me why you’re singling me out for favors. ”
We climbed the ramps of Bernal Heights so fast, the undercarriage banged at every roller coaster landing. “But I’m sheltering you in my personal house, my place of habitation, at great risk to myself. I should at least know if you killed, like, your roommate.”
He had a point.
High up here where he parked, we had panoramic views of the city.
The homes were a mix of Victorian and Edwardian sprinkled with some newly-built condos.
The 19th century homes were painted intricately, rose, violet decorative trim standing out against base coats of blossom, bubblegum, and carmine.
One odd feature I’d never noticed was a few homeless tents made of random tarps set up under someone’s homey front balcony with floor to ceiling windows.
We’d never had that shit back in my day.
I hoped that wasn’t Truman’s house.