“A couple blocks down I notice that something just isn’t right. I had felt no pain for almost thirty-six hours, but now something had disturbed the fluid in my junky amniotic sac. I can’t tell what’s wrong with it, but my shoulder just feels like shit. Carlo finally checks it and there’s blood all over the back of my leather jacket. Turns out, I’ve been shot!
“Now, I don’t want to go to the hospital because that could lead to certain, ah, legal problems. So Carlo shows me all the finer points of digging a bullet out of your shoulder with a pair of needle-nose pliers. After that, he patches up the wound in a way that will kind of disguise the fact that it’s a bullet hole. Then me and him go to the emergency room with some phony story about how I fell down in the kitchen or something.”
I remember running into Satan at yet another party in the Haight. He was telling me about how things had gotten dramatically worse at 666.
“My three other roommates are just smoking crack all the time now. Like the other night, I came home from work and there were all these low-rent crack dealers, like the ones you see selling on the street at Sixteenth and Mission, hanging out in my room, sitting on my bed. My roommate Rick smokes rock all the time, and so does this couple, Ed and Julie, who have the other bedroom. Sometimes I can hear Ed and Julie in there scheming all night long. Plotting these weird crimes for hours. Sometimes they even talk about robbing me, even though I have nothing of value left.
“We were all going to get a warehouse space together, but I’m not so sure anymore. ’Cause I found out that these people have had a problem with coke before. In fact, that’s why they’re out here in San Francisco. Evidently, my roommates burned some coke dealers back in Michigan and are on the run from them. And I mean burned them for like big bucks. We’re talking ruthless dudes, the kind who would kill them if they ever caught up with them.”
“No good,” I told him. “Some night these dudes in ski masks with AK-47s are going to kick in your front door and shoot everybody down.” I pointed my finger at his forehead like I had a gun in my hand and pulled the invisible trigger. “They’ll end up killing you just because you’re a witness.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Hal said squeamishly. “I mean, these people are into some really shady stuff. Like the couple makes their living fucking over johns in the Tenderloin. Julie does a little whoring every now and then. But she usually doesn’t actually have sex with the guys. Most of the time she gets them to give her the money first and just runs away with it. Her boyfriend Ed runs interference for her. He either slows the john down, or if need be, beats the crap out of the trick and steals his wallet. I mean, I liked these people at first, but they’ve turned out to be real criminals.
“Julie also gets money from a string of sugar daddies. Well, most of it comes from this one sorry-ass old guy who owns a chain of dry cleaners. He picked her up one night in the Tenderloin but he didn’t want to fuck her. The old guy just wanted to befriend her. Julie was real happy to have a new friend, and over the months she’s bilked him for thou-sands of dollars. Sometimes he gives her as much as fifty dollars a day for spending money. And he’s not the only one. Like last week, some other old guy gave Julie a Cadillac El Dorado. It’s too weird. I mean, this is how her and her boyfriend have been paying their rent.
“But now they’re into crack. I already put everything I have of value into a storage locker. All I keep at 666 is a change of clothes and a couple of books, ’cause my roommates are really out there. Completely paranoid. I’m not allowed to answer the phone in my own house anymore, because they’re afraid it might be those coke dealers tracking them down.
“And my roommate Rick has adopted all these weird projects. The other night he took all the doorknobs in the apartment apart with a screwdriver and then put them back together again.”
The more strung out on drugs Hal Satan got, the more out there his poetry and performance-art pieces became. Everything he did in public grew increasingly confrontational and assaultive. He seemed to be committed to discovering the ultimate act of bad taste. Satan systematically attended and scandalized every poetry reading and open mike in the upper and lower Haight with the obsessive thoroughness of a psychopath hunting down every name he had randomly picked out of the phone book.
His performances were legendary debacles. One time Satan did a reading at the Holy Grounds Cafe in the lower Haight. He read a snuff porn poem called, “Manifesto: Why I Have the Moral Right to Rape Whoever I Choose.” Even in a place as liberal as San Francisco you aren’t going to find an audience where a piece like that goes over as anything but a Hiroshima-sized bomb. While he was screaming the poem above the boos and jeers of the audience, Satan stripped off all his clothes and proceeded to burn off his pubic hair with a Bic lighter. By the time all his man-fuzz had gone up in smoke, the room was filled with a miasmal cloud whose vapors were so foul it sent the entire audience staggering into the street, weeping and vomiting.
Dan Faller and Hal Satan used to go on drug binges that included crack, acid, and heroin, all in the same evening. The two had known each other for years, and when they were high, Dan and Hal were like brothers.
Well, one evening, Dan, Hal, and Sam Silent were drinking down in the lower Haight. It got toward closing time and Sam called it a night, saying he had a day job to go to the next morning. Faller and Satan sat there in the last-call haze, zoning out.
Then Hal turned to Dan and said, “Well, let’s go. Let’s go party.”
“You can’t be serious,” Dan said.
“Yeah, I am. It’ll be just like old times,” Satan said. “Let’s go.”
They went down to the projects, scored some crack, and went back to Hal’s apartment and smoked it. Then they went and got some more. And then some more. By 5 a.m., they had smoked a hundred and fifty dollars’ worth.
“Let’s go get some more,” Satan said impatiently.
Dan was lying on the couch.
“No way, man,” he said. “It’s late. I’m fucked up. There’s no way we’re going to get any higher. I don’t want any more. You can go if you want, but I’m not leaving this couch.”
So Hal got up and left.
He came back about forty-five minutes later. Faller noticed he was covered in blood.
“Goddamn it, the motherfuckers stabbed me!” Hal Satan screamed out.
Somebody had knifed him in a bad crack deal. But Hal had still managed to score the goods. They had stabbed him, but he got away with his drugs and money.
Dan and Hal tried to stop the bleeding by applying direct pressure and holding rags on the wound, but the blood just kept gushing.
“This bleeding isn’t stopping, we’ve got to get you to a hospital,” Dan said.
“Okay,” Satan agreed. “But let’s smoke some more crack before we go.”
So they smoke some more crack, which of course just makes Hal Satan’s heart beat much faster, pumping the blood through his veins, and the wound just starts spraying blood. Red jets are squirting out all over the living room. It looks like a scene from
Satan doesn’t have health insurance, so the only place to take him is General Hospital. General is like a cattle pen of urban horror. In a fetid waiting room reeking of feces and urine, skeletal patients huddle, wasted by illness and drug overdoses, along with bleeding homeless people and the victims of gang shootings. The place looks like a Red Cross triage tent from the Vietnam War. The nurse at the front desk is like, “Oh, you have to go over there and wait for three or four hours because you’ve only lost a hand, and this gentleman over here, who has lost his whole head, has been sitting here for an hour and a half before you arrived.”
By the time Satan’s sewn up and they get out of there, it’s like 10 or 11 in the morning. The sun is up and shining, stinging their eyes, as Dan gives Hal a ride home in his truck. The blood stains all over the upholstery are already turning brown.
“Well, don’t take me home yet,” Hal says. “Here, pull over at the Safeway.”
“Why?” Dan asks as he turns into the parking lot.
“So I can go by the money machine and take out more money to score more crack with,” Satan says.
Two years later, Dan Faller told me what finally happened to Satan. Dan kept in touch with Satan all through his long decline, till almost the bitter end. Other details he managed to cobble together from a motley assortment of street connections, junkies, and local dealers. No one knows exactly what happened but it probably went down something like this:
Evidently, Satan’s trajectory remained relentlessly downward. Over time, his various species of addiction had
