Dan Faller and Hal Satan used to go on drug binges that included crack, acid, and heroin, all in the same evening. The two had known each other for years, and when they were high, Dan and Hal were like brothers.
Well, one evening, Dan, Hal, and Sam Silent were drinking down in the lower Haight. It got toward closing time and Sam called it a night, saying he had a day job to go to the next morning. Faller and Satan sat there in the last-call haze, zoning out.
Then Hal turned to Dan and said, “Well, let’s go. Let’s go party.”
“You can’t be serious,” Dan said.
“Yeah, I am. It’ll be just like old times,” Satan said. “Let’s go.”
They went down to the projects, scored some crack, and went back to Hal’s apartment and smoked it. Then they went and got some more. And then some more. By 5 a.m., they had smoked a hundred and fifty dollars’ worth.
“Let’s go get some more,” Satan said impatiently.
Dan was lying on the couch.
“No way, man,” he said. “It’s late. I’m fucked up. There’s no way we’re going to get any higher. I don’t want any more. You can go if you want, but I’m not leaving this couch.”
So Hal got up and left.
He came back about forty-five minutes later. Faller noticed he was covered in blood.
“Goddamn it, the motherfuckers stabbed me!” Hal Satan screamed out.
Somebody had knifed him in a bad crack deal. But Hal had still managed to score the goods. They had stabbed him, but he got away with his drugs and money.
Dan and Hal tried to stop the bleeding by applying direct pressure and holding rags on the wound, but the blood just kept gushing.
“This bleeding isn’t stopping, we’ve got to get you to a hospital,” Dan said.
“Okay,” Satan agreed. “But let’s smoke some more crack before we go.”
So they smoke some more crack, which of course just makes Hal Satan’s heart beat much faster, pumping the blood through his veins, and the wound just starts spraying blood. Red jets are squirting out all over the living room. It looks like a scene from Life of Brian, some kind of gory Monty Python skit. By the time they get to the hospital, there’s blood all over the inside of Dan Faller’s truck.
Satan doesn’t have health insurance, so the only place to take him is General Hospital. General is like a cattle pen of urban horror. In a fetid waiting room reeking of feces and urine, skeletal patients huddle, wasted by illness and drug overdoses, along with bleeding homeless people and the victims of gang shootings. The place looks like a Red Cross triage tent from the Vietnam War. The nurse at the front desk is like, “Oh, you have to go over there and wait for three or four hours because you’ve only lost a hand, and this gentleman over here, who has lost his whole head, has been sitting here for an hour and a half before you arrived.”
By the time Satan’s sewn up and they get out of there, it’s like 10 or 11 in the morning. The sun is up and shining, stinging their eyes, as Dan gives Hal a ride home in his truck. The blood stains all over the upholstery are already turning brown.
“Well, don’t take me home yet,” Hal says. “Here, pull over at the Safeway.”
“Why?” Dan asks as he turns into the parking lot.
“So I can go by the money machine and take out more money to score more crack with,” Satan says.
Two years later, Dan Faller told me what finally happened to Satan. Dan kept in touch with Satan all through his long decline, till almost the bitter end. Other details he managed to cobble together from a motley assortment of street connections, junkies, and local dealers. No one knows exactly what happened but it probably went down something like this:
Evidently, Satan’s trajectory remained relentlessly downward. Over time, his various species of addiction had consolidated themselves into one overly gigantic monkey: heroin. It was the apex predator of the whole wild kingdom of drugs. Black tar took over Satan’s body and soul to a degree that put all the previous controlled substances to shame. Pretty soon smack was more important to him than oxygen or food. This was a town of burned bridges for him-no friends left, no doors opened to Satan. Homeless again, he got by on petty thefts and robbery. His habit ate away any scum of humanity that still clung to him. Everything went into the spoon.
Satan ended up delivering heroin to street buyers. In exchange for a hit he worked as a gofer, a mule transporting black tar from pushers to loyal customers. Satan’s monkey was so big that his arms were covered with abscesses and staph infections. And that monkey got greedy, started dipping into the stashes it was carrying. Sometimes Hal Satan didn’t show up at all and shot up every bit of what he was supposed to deliver. Other times he just took the junkie’s money and ran. Any dealer will tell you: Angry customers aren’t good for business. Whenever he hit rock bottom, Satan displayed a rare talent for finding a trap door that led even lower.
Over time he had burned a lot of dealers, and eventually his junkie karma caught up with him. Couple of heavies cornered him in an alley and shot him up with a combination of battery acid and PCP. That foul mix got Satan so delirious he wandered around Mission Street completely naked and smeared with his own excrement. Was totally out of it for over forty-eight hours. Had no idea of where he was. Eventually he crawled into a dumpster for shelter, passed out, and almost died. By the time some kids found him and brought him to the hospital, Satan’s arms were so gangrenous that the doctors had to amputate them.
When he woke up in the hospital, it took him awhile to figure out what had happened. Fresh amputees experience ghost sensations of their lost limbs, feels like they’re still there, so he didn’t immediately notice that his arms were gone. What tipped him off was when he went to scratch himself. Couldn’t get his hand to reach the itch. First he thought they had restrained him. Maybe when the paramedics brought him in, he had been delirious and thrashing around so they’d strapped him to the bed. But when repeated attempts failed to eliminate the itch, Satan finally looked down and saw his gaping absence. His arms were history.
Oh my God, oh my God, Satan thought. How am I going to wipe my ass? How am I going to pick my nose? And then, with an even more sinking horror, How am I going to fix myself?
He’d been in the hospital a long time and the with-drawal and junk sickness was already coming on. In a junkie, the hunger for heroin can bring about feats of strength and determination not often seen in mortal men. Less than three hours after regaining consciousness, Satan managed to escape from the hospital.
He ran straight down to Sixteenth and Mission and scored a fat bag of junk on credit and his last few dollars. The dealer looked like a pickpocket as he reached the crumpled bills out of the junkie’s pants, then Hal Satan ran off with the baggie clenched in his teeth.
He made a beeline to a flophouse hotel about a half-block away and looked up Vampire Annie. They called her that because she could find a vein even in a pitch-black night. Knew how to locate the elusive opening in old junkie arms that were nothing but scar tissue. Annie had given more shots than a nurse, and for a little fee she cooked and shot up the disabled junkies and the ones whose hands shook too much to fix themselves.
Vampire Annie did it right there in the gloomy second-floor hallway which stank of dirty underwear. Cooked that tar and shot up Satan in the neck. As soon as the rush came on, the amputee knew she’d given him way too much. That was Annie’s plan. Why bother to share a bag when you could have it all to yourself? All it took was a simple O.D. Who’d miss a broken-down scumbag like Satan? Some of the dealers he’d burned would probably even reward her. Give her free hits of black tar or a line of credit. Besides, Satan had asked for it. He wanted a fix, so she fixed him. Fixed him good.