The Mars Room(13)

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Who were those people, the Scummerz, and where did they go? A lot of history is not known. A lot of worlds have existed that you can’t look up online or in any book, even as you think you have the freedom to find things out that I cannot, since I don’t have access to the internet. Google the Scummerz and you’ll find nothing, no trace, but they existed.

And if someone did remember them, someone besides me, that person’s account would make them less real, because my memory of them would have to be corrected by facts, which are never considerate of what makes an impression, what stays in the mind after all these years, the very real images that grip me from the erased past and won’t let go.



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The bar on the upper Haight where Eva’s mother spent her time was called the Pall Mall. They let kids in the bar and people bought us Love Burgers, which were just hamburgers, except you could get curry on the bun if you wanted it and that part maybe was the love, a sauce that stained your hands a bright pollen yellow. Outside the bar, you gave what you weren’t going to finish to Leatherman.

Remember Leatherman? A lot of people from the Haight would remember Leatherman if you asked them about him. Leatherman wore black leather pants, a leather shirt, a black leather hat. His bare feet were sooted black from the streets. He stood outside the Pall Mall, or wandered the park’s eastern edge, along Stanyan, a shoreline he sifted. It was littered not with shells but trash from the McDonald’s franchise across the street. Leatherman was rumored never to remove his leather clothes. He had not taken them off in decades. Once, as Eva’s mother stood with us outside the Pall Mall, we watched Leatherman scrounge in a garbage can. Eva’s mother said, “You girls know what’ll happen if he takes those clothes off, don’t you?”

We shook our heads.

“He’ll die.”

She exhaled smoke and flicked her cigarette into the street in a way I later copied, off thumb and pointer finger, a tiny gesture that made me feel tough.

Leatherman picked up her cigarette butt and enjoyed the last few puffs that Eva’s mom was rich enough to part with.



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Leatherman was not to be confused with Liverman, but no one who knows about both would do that.

Liverman rode the 71 Noriega. I saw him only once and knew immediately that this was the infamous person I’d heard about. A hard plastic form that looked somewhat like meat, like liver, was melted or molded to his head. It was the permanence of the thing, affixed to him, part of him, that made him a brutal sight. A thick, shiny slab attached where hair might have been, or a scalp. Someone said he was a Korean War vet. A veteran of some trauma, which had resulted in the gluing of this object to the top of his head.

The Shuffler was another occasional sighting. That was on the other side of the park, near the Baskin-Robbins on Geary where I worked in high school. The Shuffler walked at a normal gait and then suddenly his legs stirred into quick action, like he was a machine designed to buff the sidewalk, buff it with shoe soles. He slid and shuffled all the way down the block, paused, then went back to regular walking. It could have been a kind of disorder, a nerve thing, but it seemed like destiny. He was the man who broke into a shuffle on Geary, and then broke out of one.

Worked is a bit strong. We served ice cream and didn’t punch in all the sales on the register, took the stolen profits at the end of the night when we tallied our drawer. We hit the nitrous oxide tank that was used to fill whipped cream canisters. Mostly girls were employed there, and we let boys skateboard around inside the store, go behind the counter, help themselves to the nitrous tank, and scoop their own ice cream. We slopped water on the floor at the end of the night, to fulfill our duty to mop, after moving the clock forward, to close early. Place was run by kids, unsupervised, because the evening manager, a Scottish alcoholic named Helen, left early every day, after making the ice cream cakes, which was a specialized skill we did not possess.



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The man in the bus shelter on Laguna Honda who wanted the Valium, it was his pushy optimism that alarmed me, the insistence of writing down his telephone number on a wall with the heel of his shoe. He needed his drugs and was ready to do business with a twelve-year-old girl. He needed to believe her, when it was plain she was probably lying.



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Eva’s mom was white. Her dad was Filipino. Her mom was a heroin addict. Her dad was strict. He worked for a security service that had him posted at the entrance of the gigantic old Lucky Lager brewery in Bayview, which had closed down. We went there once, to get money from him. He crumpled it up and threw it at Eva and went inside the gates. A decade later, I was with some guys who broke into that place. My friends stole a bunch of equipment. One of them later returned with a rented backhoe, to take machinery that was too heavy to lift. Eva’s dad was retired by then. Eva was on the streets. Her mother was dead of an overdose. The Pall Mall was closed. The Scummerz were gone. The Sunset was transformed. The grocery store on Irving was gourmet. A girl I was friends with in high school worked the meat counter. People who looked like frat boys crowded the streets, wearing college sweatshirts and sipping health drinks out of giant Styrofoam containers. They even moved the old post office, which felt like a grievous insult. Everything got converted by money and I started to miss these grim places that offered no happy memories, but I wanted them back. The bars with sticky floors and French tickler dispensers in the bathrooms, like the Golden Grommet, which we called the Golden Vomit, for the old Irish men who slept in its doorway, waiting for it to open at seven a.m. I missed the lonely, unreliable streetcars, which now ding-dinged every eight minutes and were full of people in expensive shoes with careful hair.