Street Raised Read online

  Dog-Eyes had pulled a fifth of Old Overcoat from his pocket and was offering Skid a hit. She stepped closer to him and was reaching out a hand for the liquor when he laid his other hand on one of her breasts.

  She kneed him in the nuts and screeched, “Asshole.”

  Dog-Eyes hunched momentarily, then hauled off and smashed the bottle against her face. Skid’s face was instantly red, covered in blood as the shattered glass tinkled to the sidewalk. Fat Bob gave a cry and sprinted toward the injured girl.

  A kid from Virginia named Ian charged at Dog-Eyes, who attempted a lumbering getaway. The sidewalk crowd surged after Dog-Eyes too, howling – Skid had lots and lots of friends.

  The pack rounded the corner onto Kearny after its quarry just as Fat Bob came up on Skid outside the Mabuhay Gardens next door. Her features were a red mask as she groped blindly with both hands for something to lean against. Bob couldn’t see her eyes.

  “I’m here Skid,” Fat Bob growled as he laid a paw on her shoulder. “I got it.”

  She sobbed in relief at the sound of his gravelly voice, and hugged him tight. She stank of cheap whiskey from the broken bottle. Bob broke their clinch enough to grasp her chin and examine her bloody face, and Skid’s eyes opened: both orbs were unharmed even if staring at nothing in particular.

  Fat Bob wiped his bloody palm on his pants leg and rolled to the end of the block, ignoring Skid when she plaintively called his name behind him. He reached the corner and headed down Kearny past the Lusty Lady peepshow palace, continuing down the hill to the corner.

  The crowd had Dog-Eyes cornered in the donut shop across the street, at bay against the counter – miraculously there were no cops there. Bob had a clear view through its plate-glass windows.

  A trio of skate punks surrounded Dog-Eyes, hacking away at him with the edges of their decks. As the rest of the crowd watched, the three thrashers hammered his head and shoulders in turn like workmen driving an old-time railroad spike. The storm of board edges and trucks impacted Dog-Eyes in a hail of mushy splats Bob could hear even as he stood smiling on the corner – Dog-Eyes sagged to the floor, still trying to cover up on his way down.

  The older Chinese lady behind the counter grabbed the phone and babbled frantically into it. The crowd now scattered as quickly as it had surged together, leaving Dog-Eyes huddled on the greasy linoleum floor.

  As the chattering vigilantes straggled uphill past him, Fat Bob stalked down into the donut shop. He stood over the perv and waited until the fool looked up at him.

  Dog-Eyes was a wreck: gashes crisscrossed his face and scalp, some of them to the bone; a piece of tooth clung to his split lower lip. He sprawled there blood-soaked; mouth hanging open and slack as he looked up at Fat Bob with the gaze of a broken thing.

  Fat Bob felt the urge to complete this punk’s destruction welling within him more and more, Skid’s bloody face rising in Bob’s vision and the trembling need to beat Dog-Eyes into paste almost overpowering. But this wasn’t the place nor the time, so he merely spat in the wretch’s face.

  “You got lucky,” Bob rasped softly.

  The Chinese lady stared after him as he be-bopped away. He could hear approaching sirens warbling in the distance as he hurried uphill to the On Broadway.

  By the time Fat Bob got back to the club Skid was gone, chauffeured by a friend to the E.R. for whatever stitchery she had coming. Kong had already moved inside and the ticket window was shut down.

  Smegmella, a local warm up band, was doing their sound check as Bob mounted the steep narrow flight of stairs into the gloom of the club. At the top of the stairs he swung to the right and pushed his way past a group of women on his way to the only slightly-better-illuminated main bar. Two of the women were making out with each other. Bellied up to the bar, Jello Biafra and Ginger Coyote were deep in conversation – seeing Jello made Bob wish the Dead Kennedys were playing tonight. As Bob walked past, Ginger threw her head back and laughed at something (undoubtedly obnoxious) Jello said.

  Smegmella began playing its set as Fat Bob made his first rounds; he checked the darkened Big Room first. A halfhearted pit had formed, swirling counter-clockwise in front of the floodlit stage. Two couples were having a piggyback battle with the girls shoving in good natured roughness at each other from atop their boyfriend’s shoulders. Several mohawker girls were skipping around flailing their arms in exaggerated mosh movements, while other people pogo-ed up and down.

  A skinhead bouncer named Screwup was standing in the corner of the room with his arms folded, looking like a shaved ape as usual. He was grim-faced and stony-jawed as he watched the pit and the rest of the Big Room.

  He saw Fat Bob approaching and gave Bob the thumbs up: everything under control. Fat Bob bounced on his toes in time with the music as he stood next to Screwup, both men scanning the crowd.

  “Who all’s working?” Bob asked, snapping his fingers to the beat.

  “Only four of us. You, me, Kong and Roy,” Screwup answered, watching Fat Bob out the corner of his eye.

  Fat Bob stopped grooving for a second. That was a hella small security crew for a Saturday night, especially to work a headliner band as ferocious as the Bar Sharks. Dirk Dirksen – the guy who booked the bands at the On Broadway – was trying to cut corners.

  Oh well, Bob thought with a pseudo-optimistic mental shrug. Everything would be fine as ever if he just did his part. The top dog was always right and Bob knew it wasn’t part of his job description to think.

  All the booths at the edges of the room were crammed with people, and the barmaids had their hands full serving them. In addition to the omnipresent blue clouds of tobacco smoke, the waxen stench of clove cigarettes filled the air, smelling like burning crayons.

  Fat Bob glanced up at the horseshoe-shaped balcony running in a half circle around the inside of the room’s second story. Chatter and his crew of skinz were sitting at one table: psychic clones with gleaming shaven skulls, red suspenders under bomber jackets and rolled up jean cuffs over Doc Martin boots. One skin was getting his ear pierced with a safety pin while his cronies passed around a bottle of amyl-nitrate, snorting at it in turn.

  A couple of Frisco Angels were playing drinking games up there too, bouncing quarters off their table and into their pitchers; a trio of gays looked on bemused as the hairy scooter tramps chugged their beers in fellowship.

  Fat Bob left the Big Room and swaggered along the U-shaped gallery that ran around the outside of it, weaving between the groups of people and nodding to all those he knew. Bob saw Bob Noxious with his Fuckettes in attendance; saw Beach Nazi and Rainbow too – but he didn’t see Roy anywhere.

  Fat Bob trotted up the stairs to the second-floor gallery that curved around the outside of the Big Room. He rolled to the end where the fire exit to the alley was. Sure enough, that’s where he found Roy.

  Roy was new, a buddy of Screwup’s. He was a wiry, egg-headed dude with short unkempt hair, always wearing a hangdog expression. Roy had the side door exit open and was talking to a girl standing outside on the ancient, wobbly fire escape.

  Roy turned his mopey face to Fat Bob. “Hey, Bob. This babe says she’ll suck our dicks if we let her inside. Whaddaya say?”

  Fat Bob looked at the girl. She was short and anorexically skinny, maybe fourteen years old tops. She had spiked hair, ripped fishnet stockings, and a spiked dog collar around her neck. Her mascara made her resemble a raccoon as she grinned back at Fat Bob, popping her gum.

  “I love cock,” she said, staring him dead in the eye.

  “Maybe in a few years,” he replied without sincerity.

  Roy groaned as Fat Bob shut the heavy door in the girl’s face. Fat Bob could hear her screaming something and hitting the door as he threw the bolt, but the noise was muffled by the fire door’s thickness. He couldn’t understand a word, but he had a pretty good idea of what she was saying.

  He turned to Roy. “No one comes through this door while I’m working.”

  Fat Bob continued his
patrol of the club. Smegmella had been playing for a while, and the Big Room was packed.

  Bob snaked his way through the jammed crowd, squinting in the gloom. He skirted the main pit, which was a churning mass of thrashers all engaged in the Huntington Beach Strut, ritualistically slamming each other in time to the deafening music. Occasional stage divers climbed up to posture defiantly in front of the band before leaping out into the audience to be caught and passed around above the crowd’s heads.

  There was a smaller girl’s pit to one side of the room where the action was a little less intense. Screwup was still there in the same spot with his back against the stage, watching over the crowded room for any trouble.

  Fat Bob kept moving, passing the restrooms on his way to the main bar. He kind of marched in time with the beat as he walked, totally into the music: grooving, baby – grooving.

  The two restrooms at the On Broadway were small, and each only had facilities for one person at a time. Even allowing for that, the line waiting to use the ladies’ room was way too long. A skinhead girl from New Zealand named Els beckoned Fat Bob over to where she was standing at the front of the girls’ line.

  “What up?” he asked the pugnacious Kiwi girl, who seemed relieved to see him despite her scowl.

  “That jerk Bash went in there with two sluts a long time ago. Do your bloody job, Bob.”

  “Right,” Fat Bob purred. He rapped on the ladies room door. “Come on out, Bash.”

  Silence, except for furtive rustling. Fat Bob unlocked the knob lock with his passkey and opened the door.

  Bash sat on the toilet with his pants around his ankles, his triple-mohawked head thrown back in concentration as a skinny bleach blonde knelt between his spread knees bobbing her head up and down on him.

  Another bleach blonde was on one knee at the sink as if praying to the lit Zippo lighter standing on the porcelain’s edge, smoking heroin off a sheet of tin foil she held over the lighter flame, sucking the smack smoke through a cardboard tube.

  They’d apparently obtained the cardboard tube by ripping all the tissue off the bathroom’s sole toilet paper roll, judging by the snow-like drifts of shredded two-ply littering the floor. All three were drenched in sweat and the tiny bathroom stank of the dragon.

  The girl sucking Bash turned her head to face Fat Bob as he opened the door. Bash slipped from her mouth with a ‘plop,’ and groaned in dismay. The cocksucker just goggled up at Fat Bob with her smeared-lip-sticked mouth open in surprise as Bash continued humping at the empty air involuntarily for a moment, as if still seeking her now missing mouth.

  Bash and the girl smoking heroin came back to immediacy, but all three now stared at Fat Bob with eyes blank in disbelief. The women in line outside crowded the open door, pointing and laughing raucously over Bob’s shoulder as the trio futilely tried to cover their business in the cramped bathroom.

  “Outside, you three,” Bob managed to growl as he stared adamantly down at the floor, refusing to even look at them. “People need to use the facilities.”

  “Fuck you, Fat Bob,” Bash said as he pulled up his pants and grabbed his leather jacket.

  The two blondes huddled behind Bash, twin Janes to his malnourished Tarzan as he puffed out his chest, swaggered to the door and swelled in Fat Bob’s face. Bob noted that Bash was wearing a ‘DESTROY’ t-shirt, with the swastika and the inverted crucifix – it made Fat Bob want to laugh out loud.

  “Fuck you Bob. You ain’t so bad.” Bash reached his right hand into his coat and started to pull out a revolver.

  Fat Bob grimaced in pleasure as he grabbed Bash’s pistol barrel and twisted it backward along with Bash’s trigger finger, which was conveniently caught in the trigger guard. Bash yelled and flopped onto his knees in a futile effort to relieve the pain Bob was inflicting on his trapped bent-back finger.

  “That’s it, you’re 86’ed,” Bob rasped, grateful for the excuse, eyes bright at Bash’s suffering. “You give me any more trouble, I’ll tear your finger off and put it in my pocket with the other souvenirs.”

  Fat Bob jerked his chin at the two bimbos, then at the front door; he didn’t move until they took the hint and led off toward the entrance stairway. Maybe they were girls, but he had no idea what they might pull out of their clutch purses if he let them walk behind him – he had more than one scar on his backside from having been that stupid times before.

  Bob allowed Bash to stand, but maintained enough torque on the pistol barrel to keep the mohawker hobbling hunched over like Quasimodo. Fat Bob walked Bash through the crowd to the top of the stairs, smiling with open pleasure the whole way. More than one person grinned right along with Bob at the mohawker’s predicament – Bash wasn’t very popular, and Fat Bob wasn’t the only one who despised him.

  Bash tried to balk when they got to the top of the stairs, twisting his hips and thrusting one foot against a lower step as if refusing to go any further. Fat Bob’s grin widened as he twisted the pistol (and Bash’s finger) back even harder.

  “Uh-uh,” Bob said.

  Bash cried out at the added pain but didn’t offer any more resistance as Fat Bob walked him the rest of the way downstairs to the entrance. One of Bash’s girlfriends held the door open for him while the other waited outside on the neon-lit sidewalk.

  “This is fucked up,” said the drug slut holding the door.

  Fat Bob removed the pistol from Bash's finger. “You can thank your boyfriend for that.”

  Bash straightened, stepped across the threshold and whirled back with his hand outstretched, palm up.

  “The piece,” Bash demanded.

  Fat Bob goggled in disbelief for a moment, and then shook his head as if in reproval of Bash’s silliness. Still, Bob humored the mohawker, emptied out the bullets and gave the pistol back to him.

  Bob shut and latched the door, dumped the handful of bullets in the trashcan by the entrance and headed upstairs to the Big Room. Smegmella’s set had ended and there was a temporary lull in the action as the Bar Sharks set up. Screwup was onstage helping the band finish placing and connecting their speakers, doing the sound check on their board. Roy was talking to a thin brunette in the downstairs gallery, as usual looking like his favorite relative had just died.

  People were milling about during this break in the music: drinking, smoking, and hitting on each other in the eternal mating dance. But their voices were a little too loud, the laughter a little too brittle.

  There was an energy in the air that Fat Bob wasn’t sure he liked all the way, leastways not when he was responsible for bouncing it. He sought out Kong.

  “It feel right to you?” Fat Bob asked the big ex-SEAL.

  “Nope.” Motor mouth Kong scanned the crowd like a hawk preparing to stoop as Fat Bob moved off.

  The Bar Sharks started their set. As the band kicked off its first number a major pit quickly formed in the Big Room. More and more people streamed into the center of the room, slam dancing into each other like maniacs to the chain-gun riffs of the band, high off the enraged gargling vocals of the lead singer.

  Fat Bob stopped nodding in time to the music as the expanding melee absorbed the girls’ pit instantly. Screwup leapt off the stage but was swept into the core of the mob where Fat Bob could no longer see him.

  Someone raised the already deafening volume on the sound system to aching intensity. The band played harder and faster. And the audience went berserk.

  Fat Bob peered around for the other bouncers, standing on tip-toe in a futile effort to see over the taller heads in the crowd. Roy was nowhere in sight and Screwup was still submerged in the seething pit. Kong materialized at Fat Bob’s side.

  In such close quarters, everyone in the pit was bouncing off each other like molecules in a pot of boiling water, pummeling and kicking each other while trapped non-participants were pinned against the walls of the room.

  A topless girl flailed those around her with a roofing-nail-studded gauntlet, shredding their shirts and slicing open their stomachs –
a pudgy mohawker punched her in the jaw, knocking her out cold. The mob of thrashers kicked her unconscious body to the outer edges of the pit to join several other limp, unmoving forms sprawled on the floor there.

  The band kept on playing.

  Thrown glasses, bottles and pitchers were shattering throughout the room, exploding against the walls. Fat Bob ducked as a flying bottle sailed past him to smash against the wall so close, the glass shrapnel cut his cheek.

  A tiny hot-eyed woman darted up to dab at the blood on Bob’s face with her fingers, then leered at him as she licked her fingertips and stroked her crotch with her other hand.

  “Blood,” she screeched in joy as she whirled away and the swirling mob swept her from sight. As Bob watched her disappear, he had no idea his own eyes were glowing just as hot as hers.

  Chatter and his satellite skinz were back-to-back picking up chairs and clubbing people with them. People were using tables as battering rams, cutting swathes through the mob and knocking other people down, crushing several against the wall.

  A kid climbed on stage and dove off, expecting to be buoyed in the arms of his fellow thrashers. Instead the mob of slam dancers parted playfully beneath him and he fell headfirst into the crowd which closed over him like a stormy sea.

  Fat Bob and Kong could see at least a dozen human forms lying on the bloody glass-strewn floor now, not moving as the mob danced over and on them. The two men looked at each other in unspoken communication: even by the rowdy standards of the scene, this audience was out of control.

  “We have to reach the stage,” Fat Bob yelled at the burly ex-SEAL.

  Without hesitation Kong bulled into the crowd, those steroidal arms of his tossing dancers to one side or the other like they weighed nothing. Fat Bob followed in the bigger man’s wake, leaning unashamedly against Kong’s even broader back.