“I’m afraid I have to let you go. Business has been lousy lately, as you may have been aware. I’m going to have to run the place single-handedly for a while if I want to break even.” He shook his head and laughed. “Even then, it’s not likely.”
“Wait a minute,” Raleigh said, following him at last. “Let me go? You mean, just like that—cut me off?”
“Like I said—”
“Come on, you can’t even give me a few hours a week? Pete, this job is my security! I’m counting on it.”
“I told you, I’m deep in the red. I wish I could give you some kind of severance pay, but this isn’t exactly a corporation. Of course, you’ll get the usual discount if you want to buy anything.”
“Yeah, right,” Raleigh said, slapping at a stack of magazines that stood as tall as Pete. They toppled and slithered over the floor of the office.
“There’s no call for that,” Pete said.
“You could’ve at least warned me, man.”
Raleigh raised his hands to go after another stack.
Pete stepped in front of him. “All right, here’s your warning. If you don’t get out of here, I’m calling the cops. I don’t need a vandal in my shop.”
Raleigh spun away from him and pushed out of the tiny office, rushed down the aisles of packaged flesh. Behind him, Pete muttered about Vandals, Goths, barbarians, mutants, the beginning of the end.
It felt good to slam the door and shove past the first trench-coated customer of the day.
An hour later he was still stalking the street, pissed off, in another world, and not a cent richer. In fact, he was already five dollars closer to eviction from his Tenderloin studio.
He curbed his anger and bought a pork bao from a dim sum place; the red meat was rancid, so he hurled it into traffic and went back demanding another. The cook came out from behind the counter with a carving knife, while two screaming Chinese women tried to hold him pinned against the wall—what was known in the area as Hong Kong persuasion. He tore free, but their shouts followed him down the street.
Get yourself together, man, he told himself, examining the holes the claws of the women had left in the shoulders of his T-shirt. Make yourself presentable, because you need a job in a hurry.
He headed toward Market Street along peep-show row, ducking into every adult bookstore that he passed. In most of them the scene was so depressing that he didn’t bother offering his services. Men were browsing but not buying. He knew a few of Pete’s competitors, but all of them told him straight out that business was sick. Flesh was a luxury item these days.
By the time five o’clock rolled around, he was no closer to finding a job, and he was forty dollars short on the rent. He knew that he’d be up all night retracing his steps, looking for night-shift positions, but he had the feeling that things would be just as tight.
Standing at the window of his one-room apartment, he watched the neon come to life below him. Bums moved like pigeons in the street, picking through trash bins. Three generations of a Vietnamese family poked through bushes for aluminum cans, bottle glass, anything they could recycle. The grandmother picked up a wad of soiled rags and dropped it with a start.
What you need (he told himself) is to get out of the slums, move into the suburbs or the financial district. Get yourself a haircut, a change of clothes, a telephone number of your own. Make yourself some money.
“Yeah, right. Just like that.”
He examined himself in the mirror. Uncut hair, three-day beard, gray T-shirt slowly fading to black.
“I need money to make money,” he reminded himself. “And where’s that gonna come from?”
In the mirror he surveyed the inverted room. It looked bigger in there, full of promise. He considered the black guitar case, the ghetto-blaster that needed new batteries, the cheap stereo.
“Time is money, and time’s a-wasting.”
He opened the closet, hauled out an old cardboard suitcase, and started to pack his things.
“Hey, kid, wanna buy joints? Crack? It’s good stuff, no shit. Acid? I got everything. Hey, you want Easy? Special today—Easy comes cheap, kid. Tell you what, I’ll let you try it free of charge. If you don’t like it, let me know. I got plenty of other stuff, something for everybody.”
Raleigh kept walking, but the man hung close to him, following him up Sixth Street. He must have seen him go into the pawnshop with the grocery cart full of goods; and now his hands were empty.
“I don’t have money to waste on drugs,” he said.
“First time’s free, baby. You look like an Easy kind of guy. And Easy is something I got plenty of.”
“Nothing personal,” Raleigh said, “but fuck off.”
“Yeah, Jack. You know where to find me.”
Raleigh had checked out of his studio that morning and moved his stuff into the Civic Center Hotel. It was half the price of his old place, but crowded, cramped, and noisy—like a prison, a dormitory, or a motel. The window in his coffin-sized room had a view of a littered rooftop, fifty other windows, and a tattered, illegible billboard. He had enough money in his pocket to pay for a month’s rent, if he did all his eating at Jack-in-the-Box. He wouldn’t be buying any new clothes, though.
He cut down an alley. He didn’t know this part of the city all that well; maybe he should look for work around here. Hell, he had skills, didn’t he? He didn’t have to work in the same old skinshops all his life, right? He could stack boxes, do lifting, deliver papers—
He looked up suddenly, confronted by half a dozen silent figures huddled near a chain-link fence. They were as surprised as he was. One of them dropped a gray plastic bag, creating an explosion of dust like mushroom spores. He started to take a wide detour around them, avoiding meeting their eyes, and they moved back to clear the way even further. There was something familiar about the way a few of them moved.
They hopped.
As he stiffened, craning to look back at them, shouts came from the far end of the alley. A cluster of teenagers stood there, yelling at him.
No, they were yelling at the mendicants. Raleigh heard the bums scuffling away behind him, kicking tin cans and broken glass as they fled, maimed and ungainly. The boys came running toward him. He expected them to ignore him as they went after their unhealthy targets, and a detached bit of Darwinian reasoning flashed through his brain like a sound track lifted from a science program: “Stronger and more cohesive social groups now purge the streets of the sick and dying fragments.” You’re slow, you blow.
They started flinging rocks and hunks of masonry; switchblades scratched the air.
My God, he thought. They’re the ones cutting up the street people.
Raleigh ducked and dashed to one side, desperate for cover, but two of them veered in his direction and knocked him down. They bashed him into the wall, kicked him in the ribs. He felt their hands dig into his pockets after the wallet, and when he screamed at them to stop, screamed for the police, he saw a fist come down clenching a slab of brick that looked like a petrified heart. He didn’t feel it hit.
The pain, when it came, hit him like a strong dose of acid. He didn’t know where he was: he just lay there and let himself ache. It felt like there was grit in his wounds. Maybe a few ribs were broken. He opened his eyes and saw the dark alley, lined with cars now. He thought of the people who had parked next to him, and wondered what they’d thought of him—if they’d noticed him at all. Only another wino sleeping in the gutter. Just another junkie.
He tried to move, but the pain made him moan. He sank back down.