San Francisco Noir

“Five grand,” he said, knowing I’d never come across.

I felt like the star of my own movie as I reached inside my secret pocket, extracted the five Large, and handed them to the stunned Eyeball, who had no choice but to say: “Over the tarot joint on O’Farrell, she owns the building, lives on the top floor.”

With a five-grand spring in my step, I headed happily to the Snow Leopard’s pad. I was really looking forward to breaking into her place. I was born blessed. Ever since I was a kid, there was no place I couldn’t break into when I put my mind to it. As a child I was always sneaking into people’s houses when they weren’t home. I loved being inside their lives. Snooping through their drawers. Rifling around in the back of their closet where they hide everything they didn’t want anyone to find. I was always drawn to the unmentionables. And I loved seeing one of these pillar-of-society types walking around town like they’re the head of the Committee for Moral Decency, and knowing that they have dirty magazines full of schoolgirls and Great Danes at home just waiting in their closets.

So when I walked up to the tarot joint on O’Farrell, I was thinking: Cake. It was almost 1:00 in the morning, so there was still quite a bit of street action. Stumpy Charlie and Tripod, his three- legged dog, teetered by. That chick I saw before with the tattoos stumbled by, she’d clearly found a fix and was happily self-medicated. Well, maybe not happily. A behemoth with a three-foot orange mohawk and chains connecting various parts of his anatomy like they were holding him together stopped in front of me, looked me right in the eye, and said with malicious intent: “What the fuck are you starin’ at?”

I love these guys that get themselves decked out in some outrageous Halloween-looking costume so everybody has to stare at them, and then when you stare at them, they want to rearrange your face. The begging-for-a-fight boys.

But me, I just could not have cared less, particularly not tonight. So I smiled easy-as-you-please and said: “I was just admiring your hair, my man.”

Because I was so easy with it, all the piss and vinegar drained right out of him, and he said, “Oh, uh… thanks…”

Then he clomped off to find someone weaker and more feeble to smack around.

There was a door next to the tarot joint that led into her building. Too obvious. The building next door was clearly the way to go, so I skeleton-keyed in lickety spilt, shot up two flights of stairs, out the back window at the landing, and grabbing a drainpipe, I swung around so I landed on the Snow Leopard’s roof, quiet as a love-monkey making a house call. I hopped down onto the fire escape and leaned way out so I could see inside the window of the Snow Leopard. Sadly, drawn drapes stopped me from staring into her lair.

A nobody’s-home vibe radiated through the walls and I could barely stand it, so close to being inside her cave, sniffing around her unmentionables, uncovering her underbelly, unearthing the sweet secrets that make the Snow Leopard tick. One foot on the fire escape railing, the other on her sill, I jimmied my handmade fenestrator in, guided the lock to the disengaged position, slid the window up, and slithered in like an oiled snake.

Surveying the place with my penlight, I couldn’t quite wrap my eyes around it. It was as elusive as she was. One huge room, the whole floor of the building. I could see what was probably the front door, around 150 feet away. Only the moon through two skylights provided light, and that came and went as nightclouds drifted by. Another door on the west wall. Closed. One more door on the east wall. Closed. In the back corner, one giant bed with four posts was covered in carved cats chasing each other up and down. Fur blankets piled high. No chairs. No table. No kitchen. No garbage can. No TV. No computer. No, wait. Next to the bed, growing up the wall, was a ten-foot bookcase with a ladder next to it. And what, pray tell, does the Snow Leopard read? my mind wondered to itself. You can tell everything about a person by their library. Or lack thereof. The Jungle Book. The Cat in the Hat. How the Leopard Got His Spots. Why Cats Paint. Taming the Tiger Within. How Large Cats Kill. The Leopard Hunts in Darkness. I smiled.

Inside one door: bathroom. Or rather a shell of a bathroom. A toilet. A standing sink. A claw-foot tub. A bar of soap. No beauty products. No medicine cabinet. No medicine. It’s like she was not quite human.

Behind door number 2: walk-in closet. Outfits hang on rods. All black. Hump-me pumps, kick-yer-ass boots, gouge-yer-eye-out stiletto heels, thin Chinese slippers, and one pair of spiffy spats. One dresser. Three drawers. Bras. Panties. Stockings. One pair of black panties. I picked them up. Wrapped them around my face like a gas mask and breathed in the secret scent of the Snow Leopard. Pavlov was laughing in his grave as that smell invaded my central nervous system and zapped my boys while blood pumped automatically toward them. I considered stealing them, but I didn’t want to piss the Goddess off. I’ll ask the Snow Leopard for them after I re- sex her, I thought.

Snap your fingers. Do it now.

The time it takes you to think about snapping your fingers is how long it took for her to have the muzzle of her petite little pistol in my earhole as I left her walk-in closet.

My first thought was: How did she do that? That’s my thing. Nobody gets the drop on me.

And yet there it was, her cold metal stub at the tip of my earhole.

The next thing was smell. That in-heat scent, that aural-sense memory that made my thing sing as the breath drained out of me in a long warm sigh.

And suddenly her face was in mine. Those burning-coal eyes sucked me into the sunspots in the middle and I remember thinking: How did I get to be the deer in the headlights? The monkey in the middle?

She just stared. Looked like a smile was hiding under her quicksilver face, but there wasn’t enough light in the room to tell, just little flashes of moon through the skylights. I kept waiting for her to ask: What are you doing here? Or: How did you get in so easy? Or: What is wrong with you? But nothing. While freakydeaky cracklyscary estrogen-testosterone-saturated atoms careened around her huge empty cat cave.

She leaned in sooooo slow. Just kept leaning. Closer and closer. A picture popped into my head: She’d bitten my lower lip off and it was hanging out of her bloody mouth and she slurped it in between her teeth with a hungry happy growl.

Her lips were right at the tip of my lips and the heat of her breath made it feel like there was a furnace inside her pumping vaporized sex into my mouth and down my throat, filling my lungs and pulsating into my chest, then spreading all the way down to my hips, which began humpdancing unconsciously into her, and the chemicals were changing in my brain, synapses firing, my heart rate erupting through the roof of my mouth, the flow of blood altered, redirected by the Snow Leopard.

I wanted to say: How the hell did you sneak up on me like that? Or: Are you mad that I’m here? Or: Who are you, anyway? But the cat got my tongue. The tense intense anticipation was killing me, and all the while I was madly aware of her metal rod flirting with my earhole. I simply cannot emphasize enough how this added to the life-n-death of the whole thing, knowing I was one itchy trigger finger away from having my brains turned into wallpaper.

The tip of my lip got the softest lick from her rough cat tongue as her other hand grabbed my package hard, knocking the air right out of me, while she shoved me back into the wall with a thud, her claws digging into my boys.

And then I understood. This is her thing: Getting guys by the balls. Literally. Her grind finding mine, she dug in, yes it did hurt, but at the same time, pleasure shot to all my centers, all at the same time. Pleasure. Pain. Pain. Pleasure. I couldn’t tell anymore where one ended and the other began. She dragged me back and forth fiercely, and I had never felt more alive in my entire life. She squeezeboxed me like a rhythm queen working overtime, working me over but good.

I was now waiting to wake up overheated and covered in cold sweat from this dream.

But no.

She pushed me hard, my back literally up against the wall. She shoved me down onto the floor, and plopped down on me, she had me pinned, straddling one boot on either side of my thighs, black skirt up over her hips, sucking on my tongue so it shivered me with freezing heat, and that little prick of a gun was always there, hard and cold in my earhole, my death at her whim a whisper away.

The Snow Leopard started making crazy growly hissing sounds, I could feel the pull of the moon from inside her, and I knew I never wanted to leave there.

She maneuvered herself open, pulled back her head and looked into my eyes, inviting me inside to ride her Ferris wheel to the stars. She took a deep breath, and a sweetness came over her face, it filled me up, everything