San Francisco Noir

around your feet. There wasn’t a square foot of the place that wasn’t littered with garbage. The roaches in the place outnumbered the roommates ten million to four. In fact, me and some of Satan’s other customers took to calling his place The Roach Motel.

Sometimes the Roach Motel looked like a scene out of Night of the Living Dead. Satan would get these drug zombies who’d camp out on his couch for two to three days at a time, not saying anything, only moving enough to keep themselves saturated with whatever drug they were consuming. There was a cannibalistic efficiency to their behavior. It was as if their humanity and personalities had been stripped away and all that remained was the mechanical core of their hungers and needs. What had once been human was now just a consuming machine, an engine designed only for eating. These zombie robots would stay with Satan until all the fuel he provided them was gone, and then they would shamble off into the night in search of more of the drugs that justified their existence.

“Lots of the people I know are just a combination of feeding and needing,” Satan once commented.

One of the roommates was a guy named Rick. His father had been a congressman or something and had died about a year before and left Rick a lot of money. Rick took this newfound fortune and promptly became a coke addict. His dealer was Fat Carlo, a massive lump of a man who must have weighed close to four hundred pounds. Every now and then, Carlo would wear a white suit, and it seemed like all he’d ever done was sell the white powders. After a couple months, Carlo got along so well with Rick that he moved in with him. Can you imagine the parasitic relationship that ensued? Over the course of the next year, the dealer performed a steady, almost magical wealth transferal which kept half the household buried in snow. Hearts about to explode. We used to say about Rick: “I don’t know what happened. One day my dad dies, and then I wake up a year later flat broke and without a nose.”

Everyone from that household basically went insane. Take the case of the Human Waste. One night I was at a party and Satan was telling me about how squalid things were getting.

“It’s so crowded and filthy,” Satan said. “The sickest person there is just a loser. Joey’s his name. We call him the Human Waste. I can honestly say, I’ve never seen a more pathetic person in my life. This guy’s thirty-five years old, grossly overweight, and fairly Neanderthal in appearance.”

“Like someone moving backwards through evolution?” I asked.

“Believe me,” Hal said, “he’s already devolved. In fact, there are already primates higher than him on the genetic ladder. This guy walks around with six inches of butt crack showing out the back of his jeans at all times.”

“He carries around a regulation-length ruler to make sure that six inches of butt crack is constantly maintained,” I added. “If his pants start to hike up on him, he measures the butt crack and pulls them back down.”

“Every afternoon, Joey the Human Waste comes home with a case of Rolling Rock, and by the end of the evening he has polished the whole thing off by himself,” Satan continued. “He may give away one or two, but every day he drinks at least twenty or thirty beers. I did that a couple times in high school, but we’re talking a thirty-five-year-old man here. And that happens seven days a week.

“It’s not like he needs to relieve the stress from his job, because he’s unemployed. For a couple years there, he was working in the family business, but Joey was such a fuck-up that eventually not even his family could put up with him and ended up giving him the axe. Now he just gets by on unemployment, food stamps, and the checks his parents still write him.

“On top of that, he never bathes. I’ve only seen him shower once or twice in the three years I’ve lived there. Every night when I walk into the apartment, he’s plopped there on the couch, stinking the place up like a homeless person or a dead dog. Whenever anyone tells him he smells like a fresh turd, Joey just pretends he’s not listening.

“Back when he was still working, it got so bad that one day his grandmother called our apartment. ‘Can you get Joey to take a shower?’ she asked us. ‘He’s really beginning to offend people down at the shop because he smells so bad.’ And this from his own grandmother!

“But the most pathetic scene with Joey happened one night when everyone in the apartment was partying in the living room, which is his sole environment. Joey was shit-faced drunk as usual, and suddenly he gets up in front of everybody and says he has an announcement to make. Then he breaks down crying and admits right there in front of everyone that he’s never had sex before. Not once in all his thirty-five years on the planet. Never even been in love. I don’t think anyone’s even touched him except his mother.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Somebody shared too much. Somebody committed an over-share.”

“Maybe if he’d ever been laid,” Satan speculated, “he’d only feel the need to drink ten or fifteen beers a day instead of twenty or thirty.”

Hal Satan was the token troublemaker of the poetry scene. He caused a disruption at every reading he went to. That was his shtick. Hal took off his clothes, let off fireworks, bit other poets, anything he could do to interrupt things. At 666 Ashbury, Hal threw some outrageous parties with like ten bands, three to four hundred people, and marathon poetry readings. He used to let me do readings and throw together rock bands that performed at these things. I remember one night this band I was in played, and while we were setting up, Hal Satan came into the room with a bag of black beauties as big as my head and started handing them out. Hal must have downed a dozen of the things. He was always getting into epic trouble. He seemed to feel some kind of suicidal need to live up to his name. His crimes were many. And they were legendary. Like take the following, for example:

The local poetry readings are peopled by a number of eccentric personalities and even stranger acts. This one reading I went to at the Chameleon bar provides a good case in point. It was there that Dan Faller debuted his latest conceptual piece: “Interpretive Dance with Axe.” It was a long parody of modern dance routines, which incorporated an actual industrial-sized lumberjack axe. Of course, Dan was drunk as a skunk when he performed it and many audience members gasped in real fear as he precariously swung the deadly device right in front of them. Sam Silent, who was MCing the reading, was tempted to give Dan the hook, but in the end his support for the First Amendment won out over public safety. Besides, he wasn’t really in the mood to piss off a drunk guy with a big axe. All the same, when the owner of the bar heard about the incident the next day, she made a new policy that said all axes have to be checked at the door.

Dan Faller wrote and read stream-of-consciousness experimental poetry that he sometimes made up on the spot when he was standing on stage. He was also notorious for having introductory monologues that were longer than his actual poems. He frequently did back-flips on stage, usually while under the influence of large amounts of alcohol. I always hoped I wasn’t there the day he snapped his neck. Dan had a voracious appetite for drugs that often steered toward the hard ones. One Saturday night at a party at 666 Ashbury, I saw him drop a hit and a half of acid and snort a quarter gram of speed at 2 a.m.

After his axe dance, Dan met up with Hal Satan, one of his partners in crime. Hal was already three sheets to the wind, and the two of them proceeded to get even drunker. They ended up closing the bar.

Hal decided to give Dan a ride home. They went out to Hal’s monstrous white Cadillac and revved up the engine. Then Dan made a dare with Hal, knowing that Hal couldn’t resist a dare, the more stupid and reckless the better. It was about forty blocks to Dan’s house and Dan ended up driving. For most of the ride he went about eighty miles an hour and ignored the traffic lights. Hal rode on the hood. He was naked and swinging the axe around for the whole ride like some drunken Asgardian lumberjack. By some obscene miracle, Hal made it all the way to Dan’s house without falling off and breaking his neck. Where’s a cop when you need one? They were probably handing out tickets for minor traffic offenses while this naked madman on a white Cadillac drove right past them.

Hal Satan once told me this lost-weekend story about him and Fat Carlo:

“We used to play this game called ‘blacks and whites’,” Satan said. “It was where all weekend he’d freebase coke and I’d smoke black tar. Well, this game of blacks and whites had started around 3:00 Friday afternoon and now it was about 3:00 Sunday morning. The steep back slope of Saturday night. Everything was soft and fuzzy, but in a good way, and me and Fat Carlo were walking through the Mission around Twenty-fourth and Bartlett, right in the heart of gang country, but we didn’t give a fuck because this was our town.

“Well, we’re just walking down the street when this little punk starts running us a bunch of lip. And we’re like, ‘Fuck you! Fuck off! Don’t give us any shit.’ We’re old-school barrio. So we think nothing of it and just keep walking.