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  Bob walked crouched over with both thick arms up to guard his head and neck. Even so, countless random impacts rocked and buffeted him: punches and elbow smashes, kicks to the knees and ankles. It felt like he’d fallen into a washer on spin-cycle.

  A blow to Bob’s temple left his ears ringing – someone snagged the front of his tee shirt and ripped it half-off from under his open Derby jacket. An anonymous hand slapped against his face, its nails scoring another gash on his already bloody cheek as he jerked his head away from the hand’s probing thumb.

  After a seeming eternity they were beneath the stage. Fat Bob looked up to see the Bar Sharks’ singer howling his message of anarchy into the microphone. Bob made the cut-off gesture to the singer, drawing his finger across his throat.

  “Shut it off, man,” Fat Bob roared, but his voice was unheard this close to the stacked speakers.

  The singer looked down at Bob for a moment, then smirked as he turned to the band and pumped his fist up and down, signaling for an even faster number. The crowd brawled even harder in response as the band sped up its tempo.

  Fat Bob scrambled onto the stage. The singer recoiled when he saw the bouncer’s eyes, and dropped his microphone to backpedal away. The mike hit the stage boards with an amplified thump.

  Ignoring the retreating singer, Fat Bob went straight to the sound system and yanked out the power cord. The music died in mid-note, giving Fat Bob a strange pang as silence descended. The band members mouthed catcalls at him (from safely out of reach of course) – but the audience growled loud in sudden frustration, like one beast with many throats.

  Fat Bob strolled to the front of the stage and snarled as loud as his throat-punch scarred vocal cords would allow: “The show – is OVER.”

  He stood there panting and quivering in excitement, grinning wider and wider as he watched the mindless faces of the mob gearing up to destroy him. A mob full of the very same people it was his duty to protect, technically.

  ‘Now I get to find out if there’s a Valhalla,’ Bob thought, waiting for the audience to start washing up over the stage, the edges of his vision going red and a keening beginning in the back of his throat as he readied himself to scramble back and forth kicking every face that offered itself to him in this human Whac-A-Mole game, lusting for it to go off . . .

  Then Kong pulled himself onstage, glanced once at the band members (who shut right up) and faced the audience next to Bob, arms folded and face imperturbable. Out in the crowd, Screwup appeared and worked his way toward them; he was bleeding with countless small wounds.

  “You heard him,” Screwup yelled. “This bar is now closed. You can go wherever you want, but you can’t stay here. Now police up your buddies and head on.”

  Somebody turned on the lights, simultaneously revealing both the club’s current devastated state, and its innate tawdriness. Everyone appeared as if awakening from a dream, no longer able to hide in darkness’ anarchic anonymity.

  The mob heart cracked, the spell of the crowd mind was broken as they looked around at all the injured and unconscious on the floor. Friend sought friend, calling out each other’s names as they gathered together their respective wounded.

  Chatter sneered and flipped the bouncers off: “Fuck off Fat Bob – uncool, you pussy.” He and his dog pack of skinz left along with the rest of the crowd filtering out through the wreckage.

  Bob Noxious left too, still attended by a couple of his Fuckette girls. Fat Bob noted that Noxious was carrying a couple extra pairs of Doc Martin boots in addition to the ones he was wearing. Fat Bob wondered if the weekend punks they’d belonged to had ‘voluntarily’ given up their Docs upon Noxious’s demand, or if Noxious had just looted them while their wearers were out cold.

  Dirk – the older European dude that operated the On Broadway – stood at the entrance to the Big Room, inspecting the damage to the trashed club as the audience members filed past him. Cutting corners on security apparently hadn’t been a big money saver on this particular show.

  The club itself was a shambles. Fat Bob wanted to have a heart-to-heart with singer-boy, but the Bar Sharks had already shucked out the exit with their equipment and bailed in their van to wherever their next tour date was.

  They found Roy out cold in a corner, buried under some overturned chairs next to the stage; he’d just been carted off to the hospital, still in a coma. The kid who’d stage-dived head first into the crowd had broken his back; he’d left in another ambulance, as well as a girl who’d punctured both her lungs rolling around on the floor amongst the broken bottles.

  Skid had gotten released from the E.R. with some pretty stylish embroidery adorning her face, and had sent up the message that she was waiting outside for Fat Bob – but Bob sent word back for her to head on without him.

  She was currently cooping with Dagger and them at the Polytech Squat, that asbestos-saturated shithole up by the Haight. Bob wasn’t in the mood to go out of his way to give Skid a ride home tonight, and couldn’t envision any other reason she might have to talk to him.

  Fat Bob and Kong sat at opposite ends of the main bar, both waiting to get paid. Bob clutched his beer like a baby’s bottle as he sat there with the rags of his tee-shirt still hanging down from under his Derby jacket. The blood had clotted on his cheek; he hadn’t gotten around to cleaning it off just yet. Several empty beers lay on their sides in an arc in front of him, like literal dead soldiers.

  Bob gazed down at his latest bottle of beer, twisting it back and forth in his scarred paw as he peeled off the label in strips. He had a nice little pile of shredded beer bottle labels in front of him, enough to light a funeral pyre for the bottles he’d already emptied while sitting here.

  Fat Bob felt blank. Numb even.

  Dustups, punch-outs, and brawls? It had always made him feel alive before this; it made up for the rest of his humdrum existence, made up for the fact that he knew thinking wasn’t really his forte.

  But tonight, all this had meant nothing. He’d come close this time, but he’d been cheated as always. Even this near riot had been no more than foreplay – he’d yearned his whole life for Gotterdammerung, for the final graduation exercise.

  He’d always envisioned Speedy being part of it when it happened, too: him and Speedy back-to-back laughing like fools as they faced overwhelming waves of enemies. Him and his brother together when the shit finally went all the way down.

  Screwup came out of the office, got a beer for himself from behind the bar and came around to sit on a barstool between the other two bouncers. The skinhead handed them each a wad of bills.

  Fat Bob thumbed carefully through his before sticking it in his wallet. Kong pocketed his without counting it, and left without saying good-bye.

  Screwup watched the big man until he was gone and then turned to Fat Bob, bending close and conspiratorial as if anyone else was still there.

  “You heard?” Screwup asked. His gaze scanned the bar, the openings to the other areas of the On Broadway, as if already feeling wistful nostalgia for the club’s imminent closing. “Cocksucking landlords. They’re taking it all away.”

  “Shit, once the On Broadway’s gone I’ll have to bread-and-butter it bouncing the fag bars.” Screwup looked quizzically at Fat Bob’s expression. “What, Bob? You got something against the gays?”

  Screwup shrugged, took a sip off his beer. “You’ll be looking me up then I bet – I can get us on at the Stud and the Manhole at least, and work is fucking work. Speaking of which, there’s gonna to be a show at the Tool & Die tomorrow night. You know, that gallery down on Valencia in the Mission? I need one more man to bounce the basement with me, and I was hoping you might wanna work it”

  Fat Bob stopped rotating the beer bottle and squeezed it for a second. Then his grip relaxed and he reached out with his free paw to give one of the empties a spin on its side.

  Rent was due in a couple of days, and his sister was going to give him major grief if he didn’t hand over every penny he’d made tonight
. Miranda didn’t give a fuck that Bob would be tapped once he paid his end.

  Money – that was all she cared about, the slut. You’d think her daughter Miya should have been enough of a paycheck for her. Miranda got hella AFDC and food stamps for Bob’s little niece.

  It made him sick knowing just how little was actually spent on the kid. If Fat Bob didn’t earn, he knew his niece would do without. If Bob didn’t stick around, Miya would be left alone with his snatch of a sister.

  “Why not?” Bob asked himself out loud, rallying his determination to work one more meaningless show.

  Chapter 6

  It took two more hitches for Speedy to reach the Bay Area. His first ride was uneventful, with a bunch of dreadheads in a VW microbus, coming south down 101 with a load of sensemilla that made their whole van reek of the dank. Their car stereo played ‘Sugar Magnolia’ on a seemingly endless loop, and he’d slept in the back of their pot-and-patchouli smelling van as far as Ukiah, safe as a wolf at rest among unshorn sheep. The kitten remained curled up snug in his armpit inside his field jacket, like a secret Speedy would never share with the likes of these haystacks.

  He caught his next ride in the same Denny’s parking lot the dreadheads dropped him off at, with a teenage kid in a Corvette on his way down to Fremont. The kid seemed to find Speedy fascinating, wanted to know Speedy’s whole life story. Speedy had no desire to hurt his feelings and so steered the topics toward more inconsequential things, like religion and politics.

  At one point during their conversation the kitten stuck its tiny face out of Speedy’s field jacket to inspect the current confines of its world. Speedy had stopped speaking in mid-sentence and looked down at it with a feeling like confusion, or wistful bewilderment.

  The Kid said, “Cute kitty.”

  Speedy grunted, surprised to realize that he had to include this vulnerable little creature in his tactical calculations for as long as it was dependent on him.

  The Kid looked closer. “It’s shaking, bro. Take it out for a sec.”

  Speedy did so, holding it awkwardly. The Kid pulled the Corvette to the shoulder of the Interstate and plucked the spotted kitten from Speedy with a practiced grip, rotating it about for a closer inspection.

  “A girl,” the Kid noted, placing her in his lap and scratching her behind the ears. “This kitty isn’t even weaned. How old is she?”

  Speedy shook his head, feeling like a fool.

  “Does she have a name?” the Kid asked.

  “No, I just got her.”

  The Kid frowned. “She shouldn’t be shaking like that.”

  The kitten was shaking, but then she’d been twitching around under Speedy’s field jacket off and on for the entire (short) time he’d had her. He’d just figured she was cold; he’d found himself keeping his field jacket jealously closed to conserve heat for her.

  The Kid held the kitten up again, twisting her around for a more thorough inspection. His eyes widened. “Shit, bro, these aren’t spots – they’re freaking fleas.”

  He held the kitten with one hand while plucking fleas off her head with the other. After a moment Speedy leaned in and started doing the same from her opposite end. It took a little while, but finally they had an emaciated brown kitten in front of them. She wasn’t shaking anymore at least.

  Speedy looked at the hand he’d been plucking fleas with. It was covered with dirty grease. The Kid examined his own equally filthy hands.

  “I don’t think your kitty is brown,” the Kid said.

  He handed the kitten back to Speedy, gunned out from the shoulder of the highway like a man on a mission and headed down 101 to the next roadside rest area.

  The men’s room was deserted as they took the kitten to the row of sinks.

  “Don’t you know how to take care of a kitty, bro?” the Kid asked as he put her in one of the less filthy basins.

  “I never had a pet,” Speedy said. And that much was true: the only creature he’d ever taken care of was his little brother Willy.

  The Kid shook his head disparagingly, then ran the water until it was the right temperature and held the kitten under it.

  “It’s my kitten,” Speedy said with all due politeness, feeling a proprietary urge.

  The Kid hesitated for a second but then stepped back with a sheepish little smile on his face, his hands raised to display his palms. “This industrial soap sucks. You’ll want to get kitty shampoo down the road.”

  Speedy soaked her, lathered her up tenderly with the gritty white powdered soap from the dispenser and rinsed her several times. At first the water drained from her brown and disgusting, but by the final rinse the water was clear and he was the proud owner of a snow-white little girl kitten. Snow-white that is, except for vertical orange stripes covering her face that somehow looked reassuringly like a 211 mask.

  “One more thing,” the Kid said, the sheepish grin back on his face as he took the kitten from Speedy.

  “Mama cats do this, to stimulate their baby’s bowels,” the Kid said in an almost defensive tone as he massaged the kitten’s pink little asshole with one gentle fingertip.

  The kitten mewed and the Kid pulled his finger quickly away as a putrid black explosion of liquid spewed from her butt-hole to spray the sink’s porcelain interior. The liquid stank bad enough, both men had to turn their heads away.

  “I don’t think she’s been eating too good,” the Kid said as he washed off his stinky digit.

  When Speedy put her back in his field jacket she fell asleep right away, and didn’t twitch or shiver anymore.

  They swooped through Marin, then through Novato, and then hooked east on 580 past that dirty old animal factory San Quentin. In the dusk, that human dog pound seemed to cast a shadow threatening to cut across Speedy’s path and blight his luck. Speedy knew everything that was going on inside the Q, but he refused to let prison’s eternal reminder down him. He was free for now, and that was enough.

  They rolled onto the bent-coat-hanger-looking San Rafael Bridge. A fog bank resembling a wide blob of congealed white grease was pushing around the corner of Angel Island and in front of the Belvedere Tiburon headlands; Speedy assumed the fog was coming in from the Pacific through the Golden Gate.

  San Francisco itself was no more than a patch of miniature buildings on the far side of the Bay. Behind the City’s miniature skyline, the fog was already pouring over Twin Peaks – the top half of Sutro Tower’s 900-foot height poked up from the fog, making the girdered Tower resemble a three-masted sailing ship, or a giant robot bent on destruction. The City’s Peninsula was still backlit by the sunset but grew ever more vague in the gathering gloom as the moon brightened overhead, and the lights finally came up in that distant cluster of tiny toy buildings.

  Ahead, partially blocked by Point Richmond, Speedy saw the foreshortened sulfurous light glow from the streetlights, avenues, homes and businesses crowding the flats and hills of the East Bay. The East Bay lights were still unobscured by the tongue of low fog now curling in like an aggressive French kiss to lick the interior of the Bay, but the fog front was rolling in all right.

  The freeway curved through the gap between Point Molate and Point Richmond. Like warts, hundreds of oil tanks covered the twin hills hulking to either side. Here also sprawled the dozens of oil refinery complexes that made the air and soil of Richmond a poisonous soup. Several of the refinery flare stacks had tongues of flame shooting up into the air out their tops, even at a distance their hissing roar sounding like the pipes of some giant, diabolic calliope.

  The kitten peeped her head out the front of Speedy’s field jacket when she first heard the distant gas flares’ noise, but apparently decided she didn’t like it. She burrowed deeper into the armpit of Speedy’s sleeve and hid in the security of his body heat; his already semi-familiar scent. Speedy reached in and scratched the kitten behind the ears like he’d seen the Kid do it. Then he zipped up his jacket to make her feel safer, realizing just how scary this vulnerable little creature must fi
nd his world.

  Once through the gap the freeway plunged through Richmond proper. Out the open window Speedy could smell meat being cooked on an open fire, directly to the north in the Iron Triangle. He could hear the mournful echo of a passing train from that direction as well.

  The Iron Triangle itself was a fun loving neighborhood known for mischievous shenanigans; an especially hectic patch of Richmond turf off MacDonald, so named for the railroad tracks that enclosed it on three sides. It was the Triangle that earned the body count numbers in the nonstop bloody rivalry between Oakland and Richmond for Murder Capital of the nation.

  Willy told Speedy once that Richmond was home to the real life inspiration for Rosie the Riveter. Now Richmond was a toxic waste dump arena, carved into a balkanized patchwork of jealously defended neighborhoods, and hostage to the eternal contest traded in life and death amongst its street thugs.

  After the freeway left Richmond behind the Eastshore descended to near sea level, between the wetlands of the Bay to their right and the lights and streets of the East Bay’s flats and hills to the left.

  When Speedy had been a kid, all the little communities and townships of the East Bay had been separate and discrete, with orchards and dairy pastures and unclaimed land between them. Even before he went in Speedy had watched the built up areas encroaching on the rural places, the whole time he was growing up. Now, while he was gone, the towns had finally melded and gelled into one continuous metroplex, squeezed betwixt the flatlands and eastern hills with no room left, like too many biscuits rising up in too small of a pan.

  They passed the Emeryville peninsula and the Bay Bridge connectors of the Macarthur Maze. Behind and above Treasure Island Naval Base to the right across the water, the lights of the westbound cars on the upper tier of the Bay Bridge and the eastbound cars on the Bridge’s lower tier moved like two strands of beads on a necklace being pulled in opposite directions.