A Tenderloin Christmas Story

by Jim Nelson

I spent one Christmas Eve at The Castle—not Edinburgh Castle, but The Castle, the narrow neon-lit bar on Geary. That night the Korean owner had laid out a small feast for us, including a supermarket deli turkey, plastic tubs of macaroni salad and coleslaw, and a steamer of white rice in lieu of mashed potatoes. It's the kind of establishment that hires pretty young Chinese girls to tend bar, the kind of establishment where they ask you with slinky voice to buy them a drink. They pour it from a "special" bottle of top-shelf VSOP. Is it watered-down, is it dark tea, I do not know, but they are the only ones to drink from that mystical bottle. Ten bucks buys a measured slug of the magic VSOP and a few minutes of these ladies oh-so-pleasant company.

Rough and dour men sat two chairs apart, all of us ogling the hem of the bartender's silk gown when she bent low for a bottle of brew and when she tippy-toed for the name-brand tequila. A guy had dropped a five-dollar bill in the jukebox and was murdering the rest of us with his Fleetwood Mac fetish. Every so often one of us would peel away from the bar and load a paper plate with food from the back table. There was a big fucking knife to attack the turkey with, and by midnight the golden, juicy bird had been savagely reduced to a shredded cavity laying in a puddle of its own oily juices. I could relate.

Outside, my breath smoked in the bitter night air. Geary was rarely so devoid of traffic. The whiskey hadn't cheered me up like it was supposed to, and it wasn't even keeping me warm. I buttoned up my jacket and pointed myself back to my apartment.

The quiet of that rare night was interrupted up the block. Ahead of me a festive, squealing group emerged from an apartment building, landing on the sidewalk one by one with peals of holiday glee. I thought about jaywalking to the other side to avoid them entirely. Then I saw him, the Snarling Man, a man with teeth bursting out of his mouth and thick eyeglasses magnifying his enraged pupils. I'd witnessed him before in Union Square and down by the Powell Street station. He rasped and barked at everyone in his vicinity with a jagged, incoherent stream of hate. He injected himself right into the middle of the group snarling "bitch, cunt, fuck, fuck you, dick, bitch, nigger, fuck, fuck". He got right in their faces, snapping his teeth between each breath.

One of the guys... tall, wide, well-scrubbed... reached his fist back, threw it forward and cold-cocked the Snarling Man in the ear. He crumpled to the sidewalk into a fetal position, screaming his thick hate, the same words but now meaning "get away from me, please, get away". The well-scrubbed guy shouted something down at him "does it really matter what?" and gave him two straight kicks to the gut.

And they walked off. Some of them were laughing. Of course it was funny. Funny is when someone else gets his.

I dialed 911, standing a bit back from the writhing Snarling Man. I told myself to walk off and leave it be, what the fuck business is this of mine, the most they'll do is treat-and-release this nutcake. San Francisco's finest were there in minutes, two squad cars double-parking with their display of lights. The paddy wagon rolled by just in case. The ambulance arrived thereafter. Snarling Man tried to stumble off but three cops cornered him and worked to convince him to be checked out at General. I told the fourth I'd called 911.

"Well, really:, he said. "And what'd you see?"

"Some guy hit him in the head and then kicked him," I said. "He was with a bunch of others."

"Ah-ha." He bit his lower lip as though stifling a laugh. He raised his eyebrows to further the effect. "And, ah ... you didn't happen to catch what this guy looked like?"

I told him he was tall and wide at the shoulders, wearing an orange jacket and blue jeans. "They were just dumb fucking kids," I said.

"Ah-ha. Orange." He looked upwards, still biting his lower lip, a hammy comedian mugging for a camera that wasn't there. "Caucasian? Black? Hispanic?"

"He was white," I said. "Look, they all came out of this building—"

"Ah-ha. And, uh, would you care to guess how many people live in this building?"

Another cop joined us.

"Orange jacket, white male," he said to her out of that smirking, well-fattened face.

"I'll put out an APB, pronto," she said sarcastically.

"Look," I said. "I just wanted to make sure this guy got some help, okay? He's not right in the head."

"We'll take it from here, Colombo."

"Next time," the other cop said, "get a better description."

Next time, I thought, I'll do what I should've done, what every day in this fucking neighborhood tells me to do, and walk on home.

*****

The next night, I prepared a Christmas meal of microwaved popcorn and canned chili. I served it with a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck red, uncorked ten minutes early to breathe. Afterwards, I felt the need to stretch my legs.

All the bars were closed. I passed maybe four people on my dimly lit walk down O'Farrell. Cars were sparse. Police cruisers were making their rounds. The Tenderloin observes Christmas with a day of silence, but it's certainly not trusted in any case.

A vagrant was sprawled out on the middle of the sidewalk as though making a snow angel in the bare concrete. I spotted him over a block away. He lay in the hard light of a streetlamp. He did not move, and as I approached I wondered if this was going to be my first corpse in the Tenderloin. It was biting cold, I reasoned, enough to chill a drunk down to freezing. But he wasn't dead, merely immobile. His left hand clutched a plastic empty hip bottle of Popov's, while his other held a silk chrysanthemum leaf.

I stared down at him and sighed. My breath smoked heavier than the night before. What to do, what to do.

"M'rry Chrissma...," he burbled up at me with a boozy smile. His red fucking nose, cragged, and his pepper scruffy beard like spent steel wool. This was someone's brother. This was someone's son, for crissake's.

"Come on, buddy," I said, offering him a hand. He checked both of his, not sure which, then discarded the leaf and gave me that one. He still lay there.

"Get up," I said. "Cops see you they'll toss you in the drunk tank. You can't block the sidewalk like this."

He went limp and his hand slipped from mine. He smiled dumbly up at me from the concrete.

"You pass out and throw up and you're dead," I said. "Live like a rock star, don't die like one."

I tossed the Popov bottle to the gutter and took his hands. I pulled and strained to get him to his feet. I half-dragged him to the door of an abandoned store. I got him sitting upright, slumped. Frothy spittle dripped down into his lap. There was a moving blanket in the corner and I threw it over him. I stuffed a buck in his shirt pocket out of some harebrained idea I was helping this guy tomorrow and not just tonight.

"G'night, boss," came from the slumped grimy form.

I walked home and drank some more. Crazy fucking Tenderloin—you can leave it, but you can't quit it.

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