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  Willy was waiting outside with a sack full of books. He started to tell them about how he’d bought ‘Hell’s Angels’ by Hunter S. Thompson, some new book he’d heard about called ‘Neuromancer,’ and Herb Caen’s ‘Baghdad by the Bay’ – but Miya interrupted him.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said.

  “There’s one inside Moe’s,” Willy said.

  “Speedy, can you come with?” Bob asked.

  After inspecting the restroom to make sure it was empty and safe, Speedy and Bob took their posts outside the door, ensuring Miya’s privacy.

  “You know I love you Speedy,” Fat Bob said, appearing unhappy. “But for now, I don’t think you should be teaching Miya any more stuff like that. I don’t want it crushed out of her just yet, okay?”

  Speedy reared back for a second, aggrieved that Fat Bob was defying him for the first time in their acquaintance. Speedy was being opposed here, and his first automatic instinct was to make Bob regret his impudence.

  Whoa up, hoss, Speedy thought, the sawed off heavy in his pocket. This is Fat Bob. Not just your best friend – pretty much the only friend you have left, the only connection you haven’t burned all the way.

  Speedy was forced to consider the truth of Fat Bob’s words and the precariousness of Miya’s situation. He had to acknowledge to himself just how much things had changed while he was away.

  “Nuff said,” Speedy replied.

  Chapter 19

  That evening the boys bought some more beers and drove to the East Bay Hills for some drinkage.

  The Hills themselves ran along the eastern rim of the valley bowl surrounding the Bay, from Richmond down through Berkeley, past Oakland, finally curling around into an inland-pointing knuckle on their southern end at Castro Valley. Appropriate portions of the Hills were traditionally wall-to-wall keggers on any given evening, Bay Area partiers taking advantage of the Hills’ privacy, the magnificent views, and the million escape routes if the cops decided to become a nuisance.

  Fat Bob wanted to go back to Berkeley and cruise Strawberry Canyon up near Cyclotron Road, or maybe check out Tilden up by Grizzly Peak Boulevard. The notion was vetoed when Little Willy pointed out that it was Equinox time, and the area would be plagued by pagans burning sage smudges to celebrate the passing season.

  They could have cruised up by the Caldecott Tunnel, or along Skyline Boulevard in Oakland if they’d wanted to push it. But Speedy wasn’t really looking for a party per se – he wanted privacy for his drinking tonight. A three man ‘Welcome home’ party as it were.

  The crew finally opted for the southern portion of the Hills down San Leandro way where they’d chilled so many times before – on Fairmont Ridge, uphill from both County Juvenile Hall to the west and Lake Chabot to the east.

  The Valiant bounced along the access road which ran the length of the crest, parked atop the beetling grassy knob of the Ridge, and they plopped their twelve-pack on the hood of the Valiant. Tonight, as Speedy had hoped, the old party spot was deserted – the cold wind blew alone, mumbling secrets to itself.

  It was station break on the car radio, and Mel Blanc was asking the listeners the eternal question: “Farms in Berkeley?” Then the Doctor Demento Show came back on, Ogden Edsl doing ‘Dead Puppies.’

  Little Willy stepped away from the car and looked to the north where he knew the old SF-31C Nike missile site still lay surrounded by barbed wire. There’d been a couple dozen Nike sites ringing the Bay Area back in the day. Each Nike installation was comprised of a geodesic dome on a hilltop, enclosing a radar dish used for target acquisition and missile tracking, with a ground-to-air missile launch site (lower down and a mile or so away) for physically knocking down incoming Russkie bombers.

  Willy remembered seeing all the ‘Speed Checked by Radar’ signs back when he was a kid, and naively assuming the Nike domes were the ‘Radars’ the signs warned about. He remembered the Cold War A-bomb drills from when he was in elementary school – everyone ducking under their desks and clasping their hands over the back of their necks, as if huddling down there could possibly help you survive.

  It hadn’t gotten any better of course. All those ‘600 ship navy’ squids mobbing Webster Street in Alameda proved what everyone knew: that World War III was still peeking over the horizon, the final showdown was inevitable. Hell, America and the Russkies had spent so much money on their toys over the years; they had to use them on each other eventually, right?

  Would the East Bay wind up a fused puddle of radioactive glass when it all went down? Maybe 99 Luftballons would drift over the Bay Area’s charnel house wreckage – hey, that hot German chick with the unshaven pits could chant his hometown’s dirge on MTV, if they were still broadcasting across the wasteland.

  Little Willy aimed a furtive glance at Fat Bob and Speedy. When contrails spanned the sky in various directions as both sides’ ICBMs commenced their suborbital murder runs, the only two people Willy could see himself scrambling to be with before the mushroom clouds blossomed was these two here in the car with him right now.

  “Purple needle-grass,” he muttered, changing focus and to look at the surrounding vegetation and visualize the structure of this specific ecology. “Bottle brush and acacia.”

  Willy started prowling the outskirts amidst the shrubbery, whispering the names of all the plants he saw, taking great gulps of his beer every few seconds. He was restless and jumpy even if the physical part of his withdrawal was over. Crack’s single mercy: the body jones was over quick after you kicked.

  Speedy stared after Willy, then bent and plucked a handful of the weed growing at his feet. “The only plant whose name I know,” Speedy said to Bob, chewing on one of the stems. “Sour grass.”

  “You know dogs piss on that, right?” Bob said with a humorless scowl. “That’s where the sour comes from.”

  Speedy alternated between chewing on his sour grass and sipping his brew as he and Bob leaned side by side on the hood, enjoying a view money couldn’t buy.

  Behind them to the east, beyond a line of piss-smelling blue-gum eucalyptus trees, Lake Chabot glittered in the moonlight. In front of them to the west sprawled the lights of the inner East Bay: down past Juvenile Hall lay San Leandro, San Lorenzo, and the low lit-up San Mateo Bridge spanning the Bay’s darkness to Foster City.

  To the right and far across the Bay, the lights of San Francisco glowed. Even at this distance the City was an ornate self important visual shout, as if Fogtown were putting on an ostentatious display to say to the world ‘Here I am!’

  San Francisco, with her humped clusters of building-covered hills; hills that shuddered and convulsed every once in a while, to the terror and dismay of all the self-important scurrying monkeys infesting them like fleas.

  San Francisco, the unattainable; the un-ob-tainable. Even though Speedy’d physically been born there only a block from Haight-Ashbury, he’d been born a few years too late to have been invited to the ‘peace and love’ party.

  San Fran seemed a million miles away and out of reach, not part of his reality at all. It was outside his weight class with its Bentley and Maserati dealerships, with the micro-mansions of the Marina District and ‘Snob’ Hill. Speedy had the smell of the East Bay on him instead of sourdough starter – Frisco wasn’t a door he could kick in, and he couldn’t monster stomp his way into its heart with iron in his hand.

  It was all good, though. Maybe SF called itself the City, but Oakland was the Town. Sure, they were polar opposites eternally staring across the water at each other, and ‘Never the twain shall meet.’ But between the two they somehow managed to occupy the twin poles on the compass of the Bay Area’s soul.

  Speedy knew this was the shore of the Bay he belonged on – the Oakland side. He switched his view to something closer to home; something within his reach: the East Bay.

  To Speedy, that view looked like a bag of jewels poured out onto a black velvet tablecloth. It was as beautiful and wide-open as a spread-legged woman, a sight to
give any thief a hard-on.

  For Fat Bob, the view made him feel claustrophobic: all those lit up cities and towns melted into each other surrounding the Bay’s blackness, with the encircling Hills like a Petri dish bowl from which there was no escape even though he was perched up here on the rim just now.

  Even though Bob had never left the Bay Area in his life, he could just hop on a bus or hitch a ride to anywhere, couldn’t he? Maybe some place exotic like Topeka, or Borneo? Some place where no one knew his name and he had no history. He could be anything or anybody he wanted to, away from here – he didn’t have to be a bruiser, a knucklehead berserker.

  No: he was what he was, and he was stuck here. But Bob knew it wasn’t the Bay Area that had him trapped. It was Miya.

  Of course Fat Bob could just abandon her to Miranda’s apathetic neglect; he could go anywhere in the world he wanted. But if he walked away, Miya would fall prey to the first short eyes Carmel invited through the door – just like Carmel had, when she was Miya’s age.

  So in the end, if Bob wanted Miya’s panties to stay up he had to stay. No matter how he might struggle he could never get away from the Bay Area – he’d always slide back down to the bottom where Miya (and Miranda) expectantly awaited him.

  The Doctor Demento Show ended, and the next DJ put on ‘Love Is A Battlefield’ by Pat Benatar.

  “So where’s Alvin and Remo?” Speedy asked, catching up on things, trying to get a feel for who was available to crew up with when he inevitably spotted a likely heist.

  “Dead. They got in a shootout with a bunch of crack dealers down on the Flats, past the Coliseum.”

  “How about Cookie?”

  “Doing all day and a night, man. ‘Life Without’ for 187, just sentenced.”

  Bob took a swig of his beer which Speedy copied, finishing his own brewski and tossing the empty in a long arc through the air. The Girls’ Juvenile Hall was a long ways downhill, but a friendly tail wind lofted and carried the bottle further, so that after long seconds it finally smashed against the razor-wire topped fence surrounding the facility.

  As if the noise of the bottle’s shattering impact had wakened them, the girls inside began screaming and cat-calling up at the distant men, crying out for beer and telling Speedy what they’d do if they got their hands on him. Some of the promises were quite imaginative; others he figured for physically impossible.

  Speedy raised a fresh beer in salute to his little caged sisters below before taking a swig off it.

  “Pretty rowdy bunch down there,” he observed.

  “Rowdier than us, brother.” Bob grinned.

  Speedy fished out the last beer and handed it to Fat Bob. Little Willy came looking for another brew, his clandestine investigations in the surrounding underbrush finished for the moment. Willy was swaying after pounding his own second beer – alcohol not being his drug of choice – and he didn’t seem too upset that there weren’t any more.

  “So what about you, Bob?” Speedy asked. “What’d you do while I was inside?”

  “Oh, pickup work mainly. Bouncing, body-guarding the high rollers at crap games and poker sessions, shit like that.”

  “You didn’t rob at all?”

  Fat Bob managed to appear sheepish. “Well, I did once, but it went bad. Very very bad. It was with Alvin and Remo before they bought it, down in Fremont. We got inside easy, I smashed the door into kindling. We cuffed everybody with those plastic bag ties the pigs use when they got a mass arrest, everything was copasetic. Alvin’s waiting in the car, Remo’s rooting around for their secondary stash, and I’m holding the marks at gunpoint.”

  “So this one kid, this I.P. Native fresh off the Rez I found out later, he hops up and comes at me with blood in his eye. He don’t care his hands are tied behind his back, he doesn’t give a fuck I got a gun on him – he’s a warrior like me. Man, Speedy, I’ll tell you, I fell in love on the spot.”

  “He starts kicking at me like some kind of rooster, booting me upside the head with these kung fu kicks I can’t even see they’re so fast. But I like his guts, so I’m trying to cut him a little slack, don’t want to lay him down too hard.”

  “Then he kicks the gun out my hand and he does this somersault on the floor, pulls his legs up and gets his cuffs under his boot heels to his front. He scrambles after the gun like he’s going to scoop it up off the floor even with his hands tied and pop me.”

  “I dive down on the floor to get it before he does, the other marks all thrashing back and forth shouting shit, and from the other room I can hear Remo asking what the fuck is going on. The Indian kid head-butts me in the face, man, breaks my nose, there’s blood all over the place, and then I get ahold of my gun and I shoot him dead.”

  Bob chug-a-lugged the rest of his brew and sat lost in recollection for a moment before blurting, “He was the only one of them with any balls, and I killed him.”

  “What about Jojo and Lucky?” Speedy asked, hurriedly changing the subject. He’d heard some bad rumors inside, he only wanted to confirm.

  Willy and Fat Bob looked at each other. Bob’s gaze was hooded, and Willy’s eyes were bleary from his unaccustomed beer buzz.

  “Well,” Bob said, “They tried to rip off some Mexican dealers and got caught.”

  Bob snagged Speedy’s beer from his hand without asking and drained it. “Those cocksuckers wrapped them up in chains and drove them up to the American River. The goddammotherfuckers dumped Jojo and Lucky in the River while they was still alive.”

  “I always liked those two fools, even if their balls were forever bigger than their brains,” Speedy said. He asked the question he really didn’t want to know the answer to: “Are we the last of the old bunch left?”

  “Pretty much,” Bob answered, not sounding all that happy about it either.

  Willy belched raspily, and then retched. He dropped to his hands and knees by the underbrush at the edges of the turnout, the same vegetation he’d explored so thoroughly earlier. He started ralphing, horrible liquid garglings, as he puked up the unaccustomed beer.

  With a sigh, Fat Bob stalked after Little Willy to squat by his side and commence patting him gently on the back with his big hand.

  “Get it all out, Willy,” Bob crooned. “Get all that nasty shit out, you worthless crack-head motherfucker.” Willy let out with another explosive ralph in reply to Bob’s snide encouragement.

  Speedy looked downhill at Girls’ Juvie far below. On whimsical impulse he clutched his sawed-off in his field jacket and wiggled it at them like it was a different sort of a gun. He wasn’t going for obscenity here, just giving a nod to the little sisters inside.

  The captive distant peanut gallery went as wild as if he’d actually grabbed his crotch; even from up on the Ridge he could see girls at the windows crying out for him to get his ass down there, girls’ hands black, brown and white beckoning to him from behind the bars as they called.

  He heard the loud barks of the matrons as they finally rolled into the girls’ dorm, restoring order in what had become a near riot among all these sexually deprived teenage bad girls – so close to males and alcohol, and yet so far.

  Speedy had a sudden sinking image of how this would appear to the matrons. Looking out the windows, they’d see three clearly moonlit adult pervs up on the Ridge, drinking beer and riling the girls with lewd gestures. He regretted his attempt at cuteness.

  “I think it’s time to go,” Speedy said.

  “Hey, Bob,” Speedy asked as they were driving down from the Hills. “How much money you think those dealer cocksuckers have lying around their pad?”

  Chapter 20

  They were in Alameda, a few blocks away from T.J. and Sergio’s pad, when Speedy asked, “Could you head down Buena Vista?”

  They drove past Littlejohn Park, past the spot where Speedy had car-doored the gangbanger earlier in the day.

  “Pull over,” Speedy said, looking up at Carmel’s house.

  Fat Bob followed his gaze.

 
“Oh, her,” Bob said, almost hiding a note of envy. “Well, I guess you gots to tap the tang.”

  “Thanks for the ride Bob,” Speedy said as he exited the Valiant.

  Fat Bob peeled out as Speedy climbed the front steps.

  The door to Apartment D opened as he reached the porch of her sub-divided Victorian, as if she’d been waiting for him; as if she’d known exactly when he was coming.

  Speedy drank in the sight of her as she stood in the doorway looking at him, dressed in her pink terry-cloth robe. She was the best thing he’d seen in a long long time.

  “Hey,” Speedy said.

  “Well met,” Carmel said, right back at him.

  Chapter 21

  Speedy hadn’t known quite what to expect from the interior of Carmel’s crib, her appearing so avant-garde and all.

  She had a cheesily taped together little car stereo tuned to 98.9 KQAK – ‘the Quake, Rock of the 80s’ – and DJ Alex Bennett had just put on ‘Careless Whisper’ by WHAM! The auto speakers made George Michael’s voice come across a bit tinny.

  Stuff was tacked or pinned to most of the wall surfaces: clippings and drawings and such. A string of Christmas lights was hung around the perimeter of the ceiling, the multi-colored bulbs pulsing merrily as a Twilight Zone sky. She’d painted and drawn phrases and designs on the walls and the floors, personalizing the rental with expressions of creativity that Speedy figured Carmel’s landlord might not have authorized.

  Carmel had a plank bookshelf resting on stacked bricks and boosted plastic milk crates, flanked by beanbag chairs. A lava-lamp was bubbling and boiling away on the top shelf, next to a portable TV with rabbit ears folded down. The bookshelf itself was unsurprisingly crammed with books, quite a few of them. Speedy figured Little Willy would feel comfortable here.