The Mars Room(12)
One night I encountered a group of guys sitting in the dark drinking 151 in Big Rec, older people I had never seen, from Crocker Amazon, which was something like enemy territory. They wanted to show me Polaroids of Eva. Is this your friend? In the photos, Eva was passed-out drunk and stripped of her tough-kid uniform, with a baseball bat between her naked thighs.
Eva fist-fought guys and won. She one-upped everyone with drugs and drink. These boys with their photos, they knew what it meant to have done that to Eva and they wanted me to see.
I never told her, and even thinking of what happened later, Eva a crack addict in the Tenderloin, the Polaroid photos with the bat was still the worst thing that anyone had done to her. She did plenty to herself, but that is different.
* * *
Some kids have a powerful drive to take drugs. They can’t help it. Eva was like that. The first time she stole Valium from her mom, we each took one and went to West Portal. I don’t feel anything, do you? she asked. No, not yet. Let’s take another. I still don’t feel anything, do you? A little. Let’s take another. Are you high yet? I’m not sure. We took the whole bottle and woke up several hours later with our faces warm from the surface of a sit-down Ms. Pac-Man video game at Round Table Pizza. We both stumbled home and slept for three days.
Not long after, I was at the bus stop on Laguna Honda, across from Forest Hill Station. It was midnight and the buses were on their late-night schedule, once an hour. There was one other person waiting, a man who offered me a cigarette and light, and then asked if I knew where he could get any pills. He was probably young—in his twenties, but at the time I didn’t think about his age. Anyone over eighteen seemed old to me. He knew how to talk to young girls, to flatter. I boasted that I could sell him some Valium. It was a lie. I was a twelve-year-old whose friend had lucked into her mother’s temporary supply. Still, I said I could probably get him some. Can I buy them now? he asked. I said I had to call my friend. He wanted to give me his phone number so I could call him after I spoke with her. Neither of us had pen or paper, and I secretly doubted I could get more Valium, but I was trapped in my lie. He took off his shoe. They were old-men-type shoes, suit shoes, and he used the black heel to write the seven digits of his phone number on the rough stucco of the retaining wall next to the bus shelter. I watched as this man, sweat-soaked on that cold night, scratched out his number on the wall with the heel of his shoe, so that I could call him when I got what he needed, and I thought, what have I done.
* * *
I usually wasn’t planning on getting wrecked until Eva knocked. One morning she arrived with two hits of something called Delcourt, which was acid and PCP mixed together. We each took one. That was in the summer after sixth grade, one more dull and foggy day with nothing to fill it, maybe play video games at Café Roma on Irving, get a piroshki, which was a donut stuffed with ground beef and American cheese, drink dirty socks ale called Mickey’s in the park, talk to the clerk at the comic book store, who told me what blue balls was (I was probably blue-balling him by asking).
To make that day different, we dropped the acid/PCP mix and walked the streetcar tracks all the way to Ocean Beach. We stopped at 7-Eleven on Judah. I bought a Butterfinger and took a bite and the candy bar turned to sand in my mouth. I thought, I hate my life. Later, we sat in a van in someone’s garage listening to Slayer, and Eva threw her head back and closed her eyes and I looked at her face and her long black hair in profile and was convinced the devil was in charge of the future, mine and Eva’s, and that nothing could save us.
That was before people started going to Anton LaVey’s house, where everyone worshipped Satan together as a group. It was in the Richmond, on the other side of Golden Gate Park. I never went there, but kids I knew did. You had to be from a conventional background to go full tilt into devil worship. My mother was an atheist and would have teased me if she thought I’d gone into religion, even a satanic one. The Norse, my future woodshop partner in Stanville, would have loved to get an invite to Anton LaVey’s house. But she is in prison, and Anton LaVey’s house is in the past. Anton LaVey is dead and his black house is gone, too, replaced by condominiums.
The house that interested me more belonged to a group of people called the Scummerz. Eva took me there. It was on Masonic, near Haight. A typical rambling old Victorian building with the bubble glass bay windows that rattled as diesel buses passed by going down the hill. The 43, headed toward Sears on Geary, where we would lie down on the beds in the furniture department when we were tired. I didn’t know anything about the Scummerz, who they really were or how long they had been in that large apartment. Inside, it had never stopped being 1969. Every room was painted with tennis balls. The balls were soaked in different-colored paints and then ricocheted around the rooms—walls, floor, ceiling, a spaghetti-strands riot of color that gave the place a sameness that was not at all calming. It was the scribbling of a brain in chaos projected up over the walls, a kind of ambient filth. Many non-family-related people lived at the Scummerz, all of whom were part of a family business selling purple microdot. A huge woman sat in the kitchen parceling the microdot with a butcher knife into glassine baggies. The microdot did not go to waste. She apportioned the bags, and if you were there to buy, you sat at the table and when she was ready she looked up at you and took your money and gave you your bag. The first time I went there, a shirtless boy with a sleepwalker’s vacated look stood behind her at the stove boiling water for macaroni and cheese. He was thin and lithe with hair as blondly colorless as lice egg casings. He had a concave area in the center of his chest, a divot that made him even more ghostlike as he waited for his water to boil. The sound his dry noodles made sliding from their box gave me a bad feeling. He opened the cheese and powdered it into the pot. He ate from the spoon he used to stir the noodles. He was barefoot, and his pants needed a belt. He looked about ten years old.