“A steak is a fine way to start the day,” Macklin says.
“Where’s Trevor Poe, Macklin?” Ike demands. “You said you knew.”
“I’m a dead man if Bunny finds out I snitched,” Macklin warns, his eyes on the room, watchful.
“No one has to know you’re involved,” Betty says.
“You bring my five thousand?” Macklin asks.
“We got it,” Sheba answers. “Where’s my brother?”
“The little faggot’s your brother?” Macklin asks. “Well, he ain’t gonna be much longer. He’s eaten up with that AIDS shit. Been to the Castro yet? That’s where all the candy boys hang out. When I really get hard up, I go mug me a candy boy up near the Castro.”
“What an inspiring life,” says Sheba.
“Racist bitch,” Macklin mutters.
“Black fucking bastard from planet motherfucking hell,” Sheba says. “I wouldn’t give you five thousand dollars if you delivered my brother in a top hat and golden cane.”
“Get Sheba out of here,” I order Molly. “Where’s Trevor, Macklin? And why do you think it’s him you saw?”
“I told you Bunny was crazy, didn’t I?” Macklin says. “But he’s also smart. Bastard majored in business at Florida State. Son of a bitch graduated too. But got hurt in the pros right away. Used his bonus to buy a run-down boardinghouse in the Tenderloin. He does a little of everything. I buy my drugs from an addict he sponsors. No one cheats Bunny. Guys that do have to grow gills real fast.”
Ike is writing down everything that Macklin speaks. “Meaning?” he asks.
“It’s hard to breathe at the bottom of San Francisco Bay,” Macklin explains.
“Back to Trevor,” Niles says, growing agitated.
“Bunny was smart enough to see he could make money from AIDS. When the candy boys started getting sick, he got up a plan to take their money.”
“The ones we came across were impoverished,” I say. “They might as well be homeless.”
“But they get welfare checks.” Ike turns to Macklin. “Just like you do, I suppose?”
“Yeah, but mine’s gone in a jiff. That’s why I think drugs should be legalized,” says Macklin.
“Christ, now he’s a social reformer,” Niles breathes.
Macklin ignores him. “Bunny knew he couldn’t talk body lice into living in his boardinghouse. But if he found enough candy boys with AIDS, guys on their last legs, no family, no friends, nothing but a welfare check coming in every month? He gets himself twenty candy boys and twenty welfare checks. He gives them a room, enough food to keep them alive, no way to get in touch with the outside world. You don’t have to major in business to see that’d make a tidy profit, after all.”
“AIDS patients die,” I say. “That’s the hole in that theory.”
“Yeah, they die. But he just goes out recruiting for a new candy boy. He gets another welfare check. Bunny’s got a partner in the welfare department whose beat is the Tenderloin. He’s the one that monitors all the checks over to Bunny’s place on Turk Street. Bunny gives the cat a kickback on every check. I told you he was smart.”
Niles asks, “How do you know Trevor’s living there?”
“After y’all offered me money to find Trevor Poe, I went to Bunny for some drugs so I could nosy around. Bunny already knew about some folks searching for Trevor. He took me to meet him, bragging about having him, you know. Bunny said, ‘Say hi to Macklin, piano man.’ He calls him that ’cause there’s an old piano in his room which the little faggot plays sometimes. ‘Hey, Macklin, you’re cute,’ the piano man said. ‘Men like you make me thank the Lord I was born gay.’ It made me want to puke.”
“That’s Trevor,” I say.
“That’s our boy,” Niles agrees.
“That goddamn Herb Caen article,” Ike says with a shake of his head.
Macklin says, “Yep. Bunny reads Herb Caen first thing every morning. He’s been keeping a close eye on you folks.”
“We need to have a meeting with just us, Macklin,” Ike says, taking a hundred-dollar bill out of his billfold.
“Where’s my five thousand?” Macklin demands.
“That’s when we get hold of Trevor. This is a down payment. Anything else you can think of that might help?”
“One: there’s a broken door on the roof of Bunny’s house. I’ve smoked a little dope up there with the janitor a time or two. How do I know you won’t just skip town when you get your candy boy?”
“Because we’re nothing like you, scumbag,” Niles says to him.
“I may go tell Bunny that I just talked to you,” Macklin says. “Maybe he’ll work out a better deal for me. A man’s always got to look out for himself first. That’s my business philosophy.”
“Bunny’d kill you in a flash,” Ike says.
Macklin considers the wisdom of this observation, and tells Ike: “Your faggot lives on the third floor. His door is painted blue.”
“Go drink a bottle of Thunderbird,” Niles says. “We’ll get in touch with you after the dance.”
Macklin salutes us and Joe Blow, then hurries out to face his sad, disheveled life.
“I’d like to help that guy,” Ike says.
“Put a bullet in the back of his head,” Niles says. “You’d be doing the whole world a favor.”
· · ·
Bunny’s house is a crumbling Victorian, two doors down from the Delmonico Hotel. We’ve passed by it dozens of times while delivering meals for Open Hand. The squalor of the Tenderloin gains resonance by the presence of these run-down houses that were once beauties. Its front door looks like the entrance to a small-town jail; all the windows are barred. There are no signs of life. The five-story house would fetch millions in Presidio Heights, but I wouldn’t have paid a silver dollar for it in the sad-faced Tenderloin.
Niles and I pretend to sleep on either side of the house, both dressed as homeless men in bad shoes, stocking caps, and scabrous coats from a Goodwill store. Molly and Sheba, looking well dressed and efficient, walk up the front steps and ring the doorbell. For a long minute, nothing happens. They ring the bell again. It hits a deep, rich tone that sounds clearly through the house.
The gigantic figure of Bunny appears at the door. Though pretending to sleep, I keep my eyes fixed on the doorway, the world made bizarre through a squint. Bunny is terrible-looking, deranged.
“What the fuck do you want?” he asks. He has a surprisingly high-pitched voice hiding in his gargantuan body.
Sheba has made herself up to be a plain, mousy woman, and she allows Molly to take the lead role. “Hello, sir,” Molly says. “We’re from the Ladies’ Auxiliary Guild of St. Mary’s Cathedral, and we’re doing a census of the entire parish. The bishop wants to make sure that the Catholic Church is doing all it can to meet the needs of its parishioners. We were wondering if we could come in and ask you a series of questions? We promise not to take up too much of your time.”
“Fuck you,” Bunny says.
“Are you Roman Catholic?” asks Sheba.
“Yeah, I am,” Bunny says. “I’m the fucking Pope, his own self.”
Phase two of our makeshift plan now rolls down the street in the form of a police car. What appear to be two San Francisco cops double-park across the street in front of a sandwich shop. Ike and Betty get out and look over at the two women interrogating the ex-Oakland Raider. Every single inch of them speaks the word cop with exhilarating conciseness.
“Should we invite the police over to speak with you, Mr. Buncombe?” Molly asks.
“How did you know my goddamn name?” Bunny asks, his eyes on Ike and Betty.
“The whole street is proud that a former lineman for the Raiders is one of their neighbors,” she answers.
“Who gave you my name?” Bunny asks. “I’ll kill them.”
Molly ignores the threat. “Your neighbors said you take in quite a few boarders. Could you give us an exact figure, Mr. Buncombe?”
“Who told you that?” Bunny’s
paranoia is gaining speed at a breathtaking rate.
“We just need a number for our records,” Molly says, writing down every word he speaks. I take a measure of the man from my reclining position on the street, and I think it likely that he can kill Niles, Ike, and me with ease and without breaking a sweat. He exudes a dreadfulness and the fragrance of an evil that seems to come naturally to him. I fear for the lives of our two women.
“Are you familiar with Operation Open Hand?” Sheba uses a voice that is affectless and untheatrical. “They think you’re taking care of some gay men. They’re very grateful to you, but wondered if you might need help feeding them.”
“I hate faggots, and I live alone here,” Bunny says. “Now, you two broads, make like nice cunts and continue on your way. For your information, we never had this conversation, and you never saw me. What are those two eggplants looking at?”
He shields his eyes from the sun with a hand the size of a dinner plate as he stares across the street. Ike and Betty stare back. I cannot tell if their fearlessness is something you learn to fake as a cop, or something natural that runs deep in their characters.
“Tell Open Hand that I hope every fag in the world dies of AIDS. Tell your fucking bishop that I hope he dies of AIDS.”
“Have you ever been a practicing Roman Catholic, Mr. Buncombe?” Molly asks.
Then, from somewhere deep in the rear of the house, we find the proof we finally need that Trevor Poe is alive, even if he is not well. We hear the sound of a piano playing, and it is not the beauty or the flawless artistry Trevor brings to the task of his deft musicianship that tells us we have come to the right place. He is giving us a sign that he knows we are there by playing a song that he made a centerpiece in all of our lives. Deep inside that decadent, deflowered Victorian house, the secret piano plays an old song, “Lili Marlene.” I see Niles sit up in recognition, and I watch the subtle changes in the expressions of Ike and Betty as they stand fast in their sentinel-in-the-night poses across the street.
“Why, Bunny,” Sheba cries. “You must own a player piano. Since you live alone, and all that.”
“Shut that fucking piano up,” Bunny yells back into the house, directing his voice up the stairs. “How’d you know people call me Bunny?”
“Everybody on the street calls you Bunny,” she says.
“Thank you for your time, Mr. Buncombe,” Molly says. “Both the bishop and the ladies’ auxiliary thank you for your time.”
The two women walk down the stairs, then go across the street and into the sandwich shop, passing by Ike and Betty, who are heading straight for a confrontation with Bunny. Niles and I limp our way into the Delmonico Hotel. Niles lays a fifty-dollar bill in front of the guy at the front desk.
“We’re going back to South Carolina tomorrow,” I say. “We wanted to say good-bye to some of the guys again.”
“For fifty bucks, you can say good-bye to the whole city, for all I care,” he says, kissing the money with overdone affection. Niles and I race up the first landing of stairs. Niles takes the stairs two at a time, sometimes three. When we reach the top floor, the door to the rooftop is locked, but the door breaks into three sections when Niles throws his shoulder into it. He reaches into his bag and arms himself with a hunting knife the size of a rhino’s tusk, then he hands me a tire iron. We sprint across the rooftops until we are directly across the street from the sandwich shop. Sheba comes out of the store flashing a thumbs-up sign, and we hear Bunny screaming at Ike and Betty. Ike is screaming back, and that does not augur well for Bunny.
Niles says to me, “I’m going down to get Trevor. Then I’m going to bring him back upstairs, out onto the roof, and take him over to the Delmonico and down to the street. If Bunny comes up the stairs, you’ve got to give me some time to get Trevor out of there. You hear me, Toad? You’ve got to hold him off. If you have to use that tire iron, don’t hold back. Hit him in the face. He may weigh four hundred pounds, but his jawbone’s breakable just like anyone else’s. Can you believe how smart Trevor is? ‘Lili Marlene’!”
“It was like he wrote his name in the air,” I say, still moved by the sound of the song. All teenagers develop a list of those totemic, signature songs that define their coming of age, but this was a bit different: the World War II song made famous by Marlene Dietrich became the clarifying song of our group because of the arrival of the Poe twins into our lives. As a team, Trevor and Sheba entered a talent show in the first month of school, and their winning performance of a song we’d never heard, “Lili Marlene,” was the talk of the town for weeks.
There is a cheap, flimsy door leading into Bunny’s house. Niles grabs the tire iron from me, demolishes the door handle with a single swipe, then kicks the door in. But the noise is loud, and Bunny’s profane yelling at Ike ceases in an instant. I hear Ike yell even louder to cover our illicit entrance: “I’m going to have to call me all kinds of cops, Bunny. I’m going to have cops crawling all over your house, you fat blimp.”
“Hurry,” Niles says to me. “We’ve got to get to the third floor before Bunny does.”
Niles sprints down the stairs at a pace I can barely keep up with, but my adrenal glands are pumping away as the pure terror of our situation begins to overwhelm me. The lawlessness of our actions hits me as an afterthought as I see Niles throwing his shoulder against a blue door on the third floor. When the shoulder fails to achieve the desired result, he kicks the door in, splintering its hinges, then he races inside. He lifts a skeletal figure into his arms like a child, and I hear him say, “I told you that sucking dicks would get you into trouble, Trevor Poe.”
“My hero” is the response I hear. Though it does not look like Trevor Poe, I would know that voice anywhere in the world. Then I hear heavy footsteps lumbering up the stairs.
“Hold him off, Toad,” Niles says as he races past me.
I take my position at the top of the stairs. When Bunny starts up to the third floor, I pray to the Old Testament God who gave David the strength to slay the giant Philistine, Goliath. I pray for the strength granted to blind Samson when he brought the temple down on the heads of Delilah and her cohorts.
When Bunny lifts his eyes and sees me, he says, “You are a dead man, motherfucker. Who the fuck are you?”
The ex-Raider is coming at me one step at a time, but with caution: I am wielding the tire iron like I know what I am doing. My answer surprises me. I scream back: “I am Horatio at the Bridge, you fat son of a bitch. And you, pal, shall not pass.”
“You are one crazy bastard,” Bunny says, still advancing. “Who are you?”
“Horatio at the Bridge,” I yell again. I have not thought about that lost, elemental fragment of my childhood for years. When I was a young boy, my father used to read poetry to his sons before we went to sleep. Steve became enamored with “Horatio at the Bridge” by Thomas Babington Macaulay, and he and I memorized parts of it. A stanza comes back to me as I face this gargantuan man inching up the stairs. I scream the stanzas and stop him on the middle stair. I appear deranged as I spit out poetry to him in that shameful house full of dying men. From the corner of my eye, I see several of them stagger out of their rooms to witness our drama playing out. I begin to recite maniacally:
Then out spoke brave Horatio, The Captain of the gate: “To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his Gods.”
I wish I had memorized more of the poem, but it makes little difference because that is when Bunny makes his charge. His mistake is trying to take my feet out from under me with his massive arms, which exposes his face, and I hit his right cheekbone with a short, deadly flick of the wrist. The tire iron rips into his face with a savagery that surprises us both. He stumbles backward, breaking his fall by catching onto the banister, which collapses under his weight. He falls into the stairwell, the right side of his face covered with blood.
That is all Horatio sees, because Hor
atio has begun some serious ass-hauling. It startles me how fast I can run when I think a four-hundred-pound killer is in pursuit. I can hear the sirens of police cars bearing down on the Tenderloin from points far and wide. Flying down the stairs of the Delmonico, I feel like something winged and fleet and uncatchable. Murray is waiting for me, and I leap into a door that Molly holds open. When the door closes, the driver steps hard on the gas, and we shoot away from the Delmonico and head for a hospital on California Street that Sheba has already alerted about Trevor’s imminent arrival. Niles holds Trevor in his arms, wrapped in a warm blanket. Sobbing, Sheba holds her brother’s hand. I hug him and kiss his cheek, too spent to speak.
“Did I hear you reciting poetry to Bunny?” Niles asks.
“Shut up, Niles,” I say, trembling all over.
“You’ve always been weird, Toad,” Niles says. “But reciting poetry to a psychopath …”
“I won’t let you say a discouraging word to Leopold Bloom King, the only one of us to be named after a fictional character in an unreadable novel,” Trevor says weakly.
“Shut up, Trevor,” I say hoarsely, getting my voice back. “I just hit a man with a tire iron. I’m a respected columnist for a decent newspaper, and I just hit a psycho with a tire iron. I could end up in prison being butt-fucked by weight lifters.”
Trevor says, “Sounds like heaven to me.”
Sheba laughs. “Some things never change.”
“I’ve missed your depraved wit, Trevor,” I say. “This has been terrible.”
“We’ll be back in Charleston tomorrow, Trevor,” Molly says. “We’re going to take care of you. We’re taking you home.”
On our last night in the city of San Francisco, we gather late in the Redwood Room in the Clift Hotel to perform the sacrificial rituals to mark our final hours as Californians. For more than two weeks our souls have belonged to and suffered in the most golden city in the most myth-intoxicated and most improbable of states, the one that shoulders an entire continent against the tides of the Pacific Ocean. The Redwood Room is always the final stop that Trevor insists upon as a last rite of passage when any guest of his leaves San Francisco to live out their sullen and lesser lives in duller towns.