Samhain Publishing Ltd, Ebooks and Books in Print

I’ve got to keep a clear head. I should know better. No matter what crap it turned out to be, I could never leave a movie before the end.

I was writing the new magnum opus when she left me. I have to finish it. But I’m stuck dallying with the musings and meanings, fiddling round on the gears of this great big godamighty steam shovel while the mine-fire rages out of control in the chambers of my heart and head and whole city blocks disappear in powder-trains of unforeseen self-destruction.

I don’t know why I kid myself, but it must be great fun to watch this. My 1948 Remington office-model typewriter sounds like a machinist’s shop. I’ve got it on the floor just now, balanced upside-down on a kitchen chair and typing like that. It’s just how I work, in times like these.

I’ve had this typer entirely rebuilt. It cost the earth, but money’s no longer an object. I only wish things were that simple again.

I always take the piss out of typewriters. This one gave up the ghost when I finished Blood of Eden, the one about Wife #1 and my poor dear Fachtna whose present circle of Hell must be unimaginable—

Let’s not mix tragedies. There’s always a second act. Bukowski knew that. My life is my life.

So I listen to what’s there: skateboard wheels madly bombing down Divisadero outside, the old black men playing dominoes at their card table on the corner laughing and signifying, shit-talking the gods themselves. Life continues despite.

The bright sunlight through my bottlebrush tree goes all green on the glowing scar at my left wrist. That scar’s got old now, faded. But since last night, it’s been throbbing and red.

My old friend Dracula just sent me an invite to his first gallery show over in the Mission. Paper-clipped to it was our former landlord Sabhu’s obituary. The obit made old ghosts with big guns ride out through the smoke of my memory, snarling and bucking off shots.

We were new here, once, with all the promise of the city and all its old potential blinding our eyes to the pickpockets stripping us clean. Dracula and I lived through the epicenter of a 9.8 personal earthquake and may only now look back with any perspective at all.

I’m still trying to remember how it was that July 4th, 1999, exactly happened. I wasn’t that drunk. Not to start with, anyhow. But in between the extremes, the actual point becomes utterly lost.

* * *

On July 4th, 1999, a star was born. A young girl’s innocence was stolen forever. A wicked man’s past finally came knocking at his door. And I just sat there in the middle of it all, bemused and going, “Ummm…”

So you see, class, the centre doesn’t hold either. I could tell you that my friend Frank was a musical prodigy who left his old life and his home town behind with more courage than I can imagine, to hitchhike into the city and seek the bright lights of fame simply because the voice in his head told him to do so.

I could tell you that I was an expatriate who once banged out tales of beautiful freaks and comic tragedies. I could tell you that when my dust settled in America, the lid went back on my typewriter most of the time because the voice in my head had grown silent. I could tell you that I turned my back on my career because I had nothing to say.

But even that goes wide of the mark. It’s the city. The city makes this all so hard to tell in order. San Franpsycho, the world’s biggest cereal bowl of fruits, nuts and flakes. Since Drac and I lived under Sabhu’s lash, I can’t ever see it the same.

It’s not “If you go to San Francisco, please wear flowers in your hair” any more. Please carry a credit card in your wallet and a Glock .9mm in a shoulder holster. Or maybe just skip it and go to Portland.

Sabhu did give us work, a roof and a place to hide, at a staggering cost to our souls we never had an inkling of when we put money down on a room at the St. Christopher Hotel for the first time.

I got on well there. I’ve always been a weirdness-magnet. People everywhere walk right up to me and tell me their stories. Lucky me.

The residents of the St. Chris gave me the best stories, the old dogs’ bollocks, the best laughs of the lot. They gave me a career. And a conscience.

I’m afraid I can get no further without giving the St. Chris its due. It broke my heart when I read last summer that the Housing Authority planned to gut her and rebuild. Only footprints are left in the drywall dust there now and ghosts so thick you could spread them like jam.

Sabhu didn’t take care of the building. When he took his big fall, the City was only too happy to call in its markers. The real St. Christopher Hotel lives on only in the hidden San Francisco of possibility and potential that lurks between the lines of the infestation now, in spots where yuppies don’t have the heart to look.

The new St. Christopher is still seven blocks from downtown at Fifth and Van Ness, in a neighborhood where artists and industry are still being forced out by pricey chain-stores and yuppie Lego play sets.

When I lived there, we had vacant lots and bars for a block ’round. The whole east wall of the St. Christopher was a Fabulist mural of beautiful airbrushed Aztec art wound through with wrist-thick wisteria vines. Now there’s a car-park shoved up against the wall so no one can see it. Kwon’s Deli is still downstairs, and the Hellfire Club is still around the corner. But both businesses have changed hands and lost their souls.

In the lousy St. Christopher Version 2.0, they made the old Nicotorium into the manager’s office. The old front office now holds the first-floor trash bins. Hard to believe the St. Chris used to be where you went when you’d been eighty-sixed everywhere else.

Hard to believe they used to chain down the bleedin’ toilets in that building. Hard to believe I once worked the desk there, up all night from things the States neither caused nor could cure.

Hard to believe with all my hours, Sabhu still squeezed money out of me for rent. But he never once asked to see my visa. (I used Mastercard.) Hard to believe Sabhu took his big fall only a few yards from the trash bins.
But some might still sense all that. Every junkie, whore and ne’er-do-well who ever went through the St. Chris left some sort of mark on it. The very walls sing a madrigal of buggered marriages and blown shots and playing-card houses tumbling in the breeze.

Our mad days at the real St. Chris were spent longing for peace and building nothing but more complex insanity out of war-torn pasts before the future learned to speak and sit up and walk. The primal ashcan fires of Skid Row gave us just enough light to write our stories on the scabrous walls of that smoky space between the glass of Heaven’s ceiling and the moss of Hell’s own cellar floor.

Summer ‘99 was the last I spent there. It was a dark and stormy psychotic episode, and it all still feels like it took place in just one day…