Chapter 16. Greyhound Soup

After midnight the Shadow People
are on the move and out of sight...

Major trouble did come along… in spades.

Jimbo had quit driving a hack and left town a few months after my stand-off with Juan Carlos. While passing through he stopped by for a few days. Jimbo was the only man I would allow on my couch by then. Having been at Pal’s all day, I had a load goin’. I’d just gotten home when Jimbo knocked on the door. It was an occasion for breaking out a bottle of Jack Daniels as we caught up on stuff.

“Say, you’re doin’ some writin’?” Jimbo pulled a sheet of paper from the roll of the Remington.

“I just pound out a few words here and there. Had a gig once.”

“You told me about Nicaragua. Not bad,” Jimbo read and added, “You oughta publish this shit. Make some money.”

“Say, speaking of cash. I have a day labor job I’m supposed to be at in the morning. They need a-half-dozen hands on the job and it’s good for about a week.”

“Shit, Max. Day labor? What about your back?” Jimbo was aware that I received a VA disability check for a back injury from way back but he knew nothing about the gut wound.

“That’s what my bottomless script for Codeine Tylenol is for.” I knew I could get through one day if the job wasn’t that hard. “Gotta crash now if you want to try it.”

Jimbo and I got to the job site that morning, two sheets to the wind, and were put to work digging out a nine-foot-deep hole through hardpan and boulders for footings. It was hot out of the hole and hotter in it. The booze was flushed out by sweat through our pores and the grime and dust of our labor. It was the hardest eight hours I had ever worked since I was a teen. All the other laborers slacked off when the foreman was out of sight but Jimbo and I swung our picks and shovels with everything we had in us.

John, the head carpenter on the job, approached us after we’d been paid, “You two want to come back tomorrow? We could use a couple of workers like you.”

“No way,” Jimbo started to turn the offer down.

“Sure, we’ll be here.” I interrupted.

Jimbo lasted a few more days in that hole and left for L.A. while I stayed on. The one week turned into two and two into three. I became a permanent member of the crew working on several job sites with John. Happily, for me I was in my own place for the first time in over a decade and had a regular paycheck. I was no longer subject to paying a weekly rate at the Virginia Hotel and no longer couch-surfing.

My place was a rundown hovel by anyone else’s standards. Nothing was up to par with the building codes. The roof leaked and the drain to the kitchen sink was permanently clogged by something too far down the line for a snake to clear it. If I used the kitchen sink, the grey-water dumped into a five-gallon bucket under the open drain. But it was my castle and I was going to defend it from there on. From then on until, along came a Trojan horse named Beatriz.

Bea had been shacking as a Care-Giver next door with my neighbor, Bobby, who’d suffered a stroke and couldn’t even wash himself. I was to learn through Bea that there was a whole industry in Santa Barbara of so called Care-Givers. I was to discover that this bottom feeding industry was run by Social Services but, from what I gleaned from Bea, it would have been more aptly called Care Predators. The people that were hired were paid a little over minimum wage but enhanced their paychecks by extorting; jewelry, cash, and whatever they could, from their victims. Of course, they siphoned off whatever they could get by with from the stock of pharmaceuticals prescribed to their wards. These parasites preyed on disabled seniors having no mental capacity or physical ability to object to their treatment. This was done so discretely I only had an inkling of what was going on next door.

Bea was among a group of these people that were orchestrated by Papa Joe. Papa Joe was an old-school gangster who had mentored kids from the West Side in his business enterprises for quite a while. He just figured this racket was a safer one than dealing coke and damned near legal although he didn’t shy from moving a few kilos of coke for personal use and sales among friends… his West Side Bangers. Papa Joe’s folks could be called a gang but they didn’t wear colors. No, they could be seen wheeling their wards to doctor’s appointments and welfare offices. They didn’t wear baggies or hoodies.  They dressed neatly in street clothes that covered their tats, drawing little attention to themselves and to make a good show at the agencies in order to insure that the checks kept coming.

The day was soon coming when Bobby had to be moved to a convalescent home and Beatriz would have to find a new ward. I shared the bath and hallway with Bobby so, with that link to familiarity, I had become friendly with Bea. She had previously introduced herself as Beatriz.

“Are you the Beatrice of Dante’s affection?” I kidded.

“You know Dante? He’s doing time in Soledad,” she answered, oblivious to the literary reference. “We had a thing goin’ years ago but, say, how’d you know about him?”

“It was a joke. Where are you going to go now that Bobby’s gone?” I asked, not wanting to know except to make conversation. She was wearing only a bath-robe and I was thinking that maybe I’d offer a bed a night or two for a little of that yabba-yum she barely hid under the robe.

“Joke? I don't get it. My mom lives in Santa Maria but I have friends,” she paused, letting the robe open ever so little to reveal some skin. She smiled a cute little whore smile… “Say, you look like you could use a haircut, I can cut your hair for ya’ if ya’ want.”

“Sure, how much? How much do you charge?”

“I usually get twenty bucks… but, I’ll cut yours for ten.”

“Whew, ten bucks.” I hadn’t had a female touch in a while and Master Libido encouraged me to get bold, “Ten bucks would get a sailor a haircut and blowjob in Olongapo.” I didn’t care how she responded to that suggestion.

“What’s Olongapo? Sure, I’ll blow your… what, longa-pole?”

She moved in with me that night. It didn’t matter one way of another to me at the time. Since I’d been jilted by Nadya it seemed that I would never get laid again if I didn’t take whatever came along. Remember Nadya? The affair with her started my blue balled experiences.

Bea was in the place but a few days when she began tidying up everything while I was at work. She acquired new sheets and a comforter for the bed. She even got pillow covers and little doilies for the ragged arms of the couch. She’d apparently taken most of this stuff from Bobby’s place, or wherever else she could plunder. But I didn’t mind it at all that she did all this domestication business. She even washed all the dishes in Bobby’s vacated apartment’s sink. This newfound activity inspired me to hook up a grey-water line out from the sink to a row of rose bushes in front of the place.

I began wondering about the girl, however, as we got to know each other. I knew of Papa Joe from my cab driving days. I knew of the coke dealing and how Papa Joe always had a group of young women hanging out at his house on the West Side, some of whom I knew to be turning tricks. A good graveyard cab driver in those days had to know where to find drugs or whores for fares and Papa Joe’s was a one-stop-shop for those purposes.

Santa Barbara was a curious little city in those days… just big enough to be called a city but run by a small town police force and city council. You could be sitting, after the bars closed, in a booth next to where the mayor had coffee and made deals at Carrow’s. In the booth on the other side would be the president of the local Bikers gang making other kinds of deals.

Besides the bikers, who controlled most of the drug traffic in the bars, Santa Barbara had two other gangs sharing territory in a couple of the Mexican taverns like Los Conchos or mixed bars like the Mecca: they were the West Side Boys and the East Side Boys. The Crips, or the Bloods, (not sure which) had a little action but most of the black community was moving to Lompoc or Oxnard in that period of transition for our fair town. Mexico and the local home-boys were taking over what they’d left.

I started to get the point that Bea was not an ex-gang member but an active West Side, i.e., a Papa Joe, girl. Sometimes, when on State street, we’d run into some of her pals from the West Side Boys and I’d catch her flashing signs. I could’ve overlooked it had I not been getting put-off by her mildly gansta appearance too; i.e., penciled in eyebrows and gaudy make-up. I’d accepted being seen in public with her though I caught her lifting a pair of ear-rings in one of State street shops. I called her on it after we left the store, “Hey, you want to get us busted?”

“It’s just shop-lifting, no big deal, white boy,” She sneered. “A misdemeanor at worst. I’d only get a month or two shacking up with a big dyke in County for that.”

“Yeh, well, I have a bench warrant out for me and I can’t afford to even chat-up a cop.”

I hadn’t completed the judge’s order to go to Zona Seca for the Juan Carlos show and I thought I would have had to do up to three years in County Jail if I was ever busted for anything. Needless to say, I stayed low key, figuring I would eventually straighten out that mess. I would regret mentioning my situation all too soon. But, regardless, someday never seemed to come around and I never did straighten it out until it was too late.

She’d been in my place a few weeks when I’d also begun noticing a few dollars missing from my wallet. My phone bill came and I found that she’d run up eighty bucks in calls to Sacramento, Santa Maria, Bakersfield and Fresno while I was at work… and that was in her first week. I didn’t say anything at first; but, when I started missing twenties and tens, I confronted her about it.

She shrugged her shoulders, “My cousin was in trouble. It was an emergency… a family emergency. I had to call around.”

“What about my cash? Every time I open my wallet a twenty or a ten is missing.”

“Oh, I took a buck or two for … you know, for household expenses. But I didn’t take no twenties.” she put on a belligerent face.

I was getting laid but loathed seeing her in my place when I got home after a hard day of digging holes and hauling timbers across the yard. No, Bea was not Dante’s Beatrice by any means. One night, a week after I caught her lifting bills from my wallet, she didn’t come home until after three. She stumbled in the door, stripped off her clothes and tried to get in bed with me. I pushed her out of bed and turned on the light. She had a black-eye, bruised arms and ribs, accented by a puncture wound from a knife on her shoulder.

“Where’ve you been. Who the fuck did this to you?” I demanded.

She was mute… Didn’t say a thing… very drunk… She tried to pull me back in bed. She was drunk alright… she knocked over a bowl of tomato soup I’d half finished before going to bed. I wasn’t sure what to do.

I held her by both shoulders, “You can sleep on the couch until you’re ready to tell me what happened.”

She squirmed out from my grasp and pulled a long knife out of the drawer. “You get away from me or I will fuckin’ stick you!”

I stood in front of her, lifted my T-shirt and, called her bluff.  I made her an offer, “Go ahead, do it if you have the guts.”

“I’ll do it, I swear. You’re fucked… you have a bench warrant… I’ll tell the cops you stabbed me first!” she put a hand on her wound.

“You’d snitch me out on a lie? For what?” I’d never felt so helpless. The idea was so vile and incredible I was stunned. She was drunk enough that grabbing the knife wasn’t all that hard.  I snatched it away, “You can stay on the couch tonight but you have to leave first thing in the morning.”

She passed out.

Bea was on the couch snoring loudly when I woke up. It was Saturday morning so I put on a pot of coffee as I always did and, after it brewed, I shook her awake. She sat up looking a mess with a sheet wrapped around her. Giving her a mug of coffee I asked, “Are you going to tell me how that happened,” pointing at her bruises, “or, where you were last night?”

I hoped that maybe she might be clearer about it by then and given me some answers. But she covered herself and put on that belligerent face again, “You did it. Don’t you remember?”

“What do you mean?” I pulled back the sheet, exposing her shoulder and fresh knife wound, “you came in at three all bruised up with that.” I said as calmly as I could.

“With what?” she glanced at her wound, “Oh, that.”

“Yeh, that,” I was getting impatient. Either she couldn’t remember or she was feigning a black-out.

“You did that.” She parried defiantly.

I couldn’t tell if she believed herself or not but I couldn’t let her stay, “I want you out of here by the time I get back. I’m getting you a bus ticket to Santa Maria and it’s sayonara baby.”

I bought a ticket at the Greyhound and went back to the place without stopping at Pal’s. It was a Saturday morning and I sorely needed a drink but wanted to get rid of her a.s.a.p.

She was gone when I got home and I was relieved because I didn’t need to deal with her any longer than possible. I hurried about, collecting her things and putting them in a spare piece of thrift-store suitcase I’d never used. I kept padlocks around for such emergencies and locked the door to the shared bathroom as well as the front door. You never know, she might have made a copy of my keys. Just in case she returned while I was out she wouldn’t be able to get in. Leaving the suitcase on the stoop, I pinned a post-it note to it reading; “Bea, I’ll be gone all day.  Your bus ticket is at Pal’s. I’ll leave it with the bartender. DO NOT come back here.”

I knocked on the door of my neighbor upstairs to let him know what went down and that he should call the police if she should show up. I took off for Pal’s for a well-deserved shot of Jack and more than few bottles of Bud.

I always stopped by the Farmers Market on Saturdays to bring some red gladiolas for Claire. These crimson flaming stalks colored up the bar and kept me in good standing with her no matter what.

“So, how’s lover boy doing with his little gangsta?” She wasn’t smiling. She was protective of me and any woman that she saw as dangerous merited her fair warning. Whenever I’d been on a roll for bad choices, she’d given me notice before each disaster. I hadn’t seen her this adamant about my choices since Nadya.

“Claire, if you can do this for me… can you hold this ticket for Bea if she comes in. I don’t want to talk to her if I’m here,” I passed the envelope to her; “know what I mean?”

“This calls for a celebration, Max.” she mixed a woo-woo for herself, passing a snifter of Glen Livet and a bottle of beer over to me, “It’s on me, buddy.”

I told her all about what had gone down the night before and how I’d bought the Greyhound ticket to send her off.

“Did you get a restraining order?” she asked when I finished.

“No. Don’t want to deal with cops, I still have a bench warrant for that Juan Carlos bit.”

“It doesn’t matter, you should get one anyway,” she was experienced with these things and I should have listened.

Bea had been at the place before I got back. The suitcase was still on the porch with the note missing. I should have stayed at the bar but how could I have known what would be coming down. I’d only been home a few minutes when she tried barging in the door.

“What are you doing here, bitch!” I stood, blocking her way.

“This is my place now, you’d better get goin’, Max! I’m having you arrested for raping and stabbing me,” she put her belligerent face on at full force.

“You’re joking. I already told a dozen witnesses about your scheme.” I pushed her out the door and closed it. Glass shards from the door’s window came flying in with the suitcase lodged in the window frame. She pushed in the door and I pushed back while trying to use the phone to call the cops.

She fell to the ground. Holding up her elbow with a slight scrape, she shouted back, “That’s spousal abuse, gimme that phone, I’m callin’ the cops.”

My neighbor, Jack, was leaning on the railing at the top of the stairs that went up the back of the house above the place.

“Don’t worry, Max, I saw everything. I’ll back you on this.” He was grinning, “Hell, every cop in town knows her action.”

She spun around and stomped away.

Thinking better of it, I put the phone down, pulled the suitcase out of the window frame, and shouted after her, “Hey, you left your suitcase!”

Spreading out on the couch, I fell asleep… proud of defending my castle and thinking that this was the end of it.