Plate's most ambitious novel to date. Doojie, a small-time dealer who lives in a garage behind a laundromat, witnesses a renegade cop shoot an unarmed Mexican, and soon he and his buddies are running for their lives.

Named a Literary Laureate of San Francisco in 2004, PETER PLATE taught himself to write fiction during eight years spent squatting in abandoned buildings. He is the author of many novels, beginning with Black Wheel of Anger (1990) and continuing through his seven neo-noir "psychic histories" of San Francisco, where he still lives and writes today.

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open the prison doors and let the dragons fly

Chapter One

Valencia Street was known in the north Mission by the name the cops had given it, the devil's quadrant. It was the center of the neighborhood, lined with second-hand bookshops, bodegas, Thai take-out restaurants, panhandlers, and check-cashing stores.

A lone Guatemalteco evangelist in a wash-n-wear suit was handing out prayer leaflets to the school kids at the Muni bus stop. Standing next to him were two dope dealers. I saw them as if I were a policeman staring through a pair of binoculars, maybe from the roof of the Wells Fargo Bank up the street. From somewhere far away where it was safe to gaze at petty criminals like them.

The taller dealer had a nervous tic in his mouth that he was trying to disguise by constantly smiling. His unlaced secondhand oxford shoes didn't fit him; ten dollars' worth of marijuana was burning a hole in his pocket. The other dealer, standing in his shadow and furtively looking the other way while pretending to stay calm, that was me.

The summer heat caused my blood to percolate, making me light-headed. The tension on Eichmann's face was contagious and sparked for me, as anxiety often does in friends, a family story that had nothing to do with him.

On a torrid afternoon months before I was born, my stepfather was released from prison and went over to his parents' house to have a talk with his dad. After hours of argument with the old man and the loan of two hundred dollars, he was last seen heading toward the tavern in Brisbane, a popular watering hole with the local bikers. He didn't know that my mother was at the bar waiting for him. She didn't know it either. She was six months pregnant with another man's child, a guy she hadn't seen in nine weeks. She was eighteen, an only daughter, and had kept the two trimesters of her pregnancy a secret from her parents and her friends. But she was at the juncture where she needed a husband or she was going to give birth to a kid out of wedlock. In Daly City, California, that was a no-no.

My stepfather, a loose-limbed dark-skinned man, walked into the roadhouse brimming with good cheer. After doing hard time in the correctional facility at Soledad, a cold beer was the next best thing to being in heaven. He stepped up to the bar and ordered a Budweiser. The place was almost empty; it wasn't even five o'clock. The only woman in the juke joint was a shapely motor-mouthed blonde who started talking to him the second he sat down on a barstool. He hadn't eaten a thing that day, but it didn't matter; he could fill up on beer.

From the start, they had differences that couldn't be mended. She was Jewish and he wasn't. He was on parole and found it impossible to get a decent-paying job with his record. He started drinking at a whirlwind clip and a month later he married her in a civil ceremony attended by half of her family. The bride wore a black velvet maternity suit with a Peter Pan collar. His folks didn't attend the proceedings. Ten weeks after that, I came into the world. The nurse who delivered me cleaned the blood and the placenta from my cheeks and said, "What a cute, sweet baby. See? He's not even crying. I bet he looks just like his daddy."

My mom didn't have anything to say about that. Her newly wedded husband was getting plastered at a bar. The nurse handed me to her, and as I lay in her arms, pawing her honey-colored tits to get some milk, I knew she wasn't feeling too positive about the situation she was in. She looked down at me with a deep abiding pain in her self-protective brown eyes, replying, "He doesn't look like his father at all." I wore the mark of a bastard on my pure forehead, the signature of a Jewish prince from hell.

And Eichmann? He was wincing in the harsh sun and fingering the bag of indica in his pocket. His customer was an hour late, a common and distasteful occurrence in our line of work. He grimaced at me, fretting, "You know what, Doojie? Fuck it. I don't think he's coming. Let's go home."

Chapter Two

I came from my grandma's apartment in Daly City, three miles south of San Francisco along the coastline. We lived in a crumbling stucco subdivision where the rooftops were crowded with satellite dishes that didn't work. I'd been with my grandpa and grandma ever since my mom left me with them. They were Old World Jews who argued in Russian about the merits of Isaac Bashevis Singer's novels.

My grandfather had an obsession with the writer Delmore Schwartz. Whenever he was losing an argument with his wife, he'd scream at her, "See what the goyim did to Delmore? See?"

Zaydeh used to take me to his room, sit me down on his army cot, and tell me things he never said to anyone else. When I was seven or eight, he gave me an order in his clipped, gravelly voice. "When you grow up, read Mayakovsky." By saying the name of the Russian poet, he was anointing me, giving me the family jewels, my fortune. I was supposed to take that name and use it like a dowsing rod to find something important in life.

My grandparents had nothing, absolutely nothing, just a bare bones Social Security retirement plan, and so when I got out of high school, I did them a favor. With ten dollars in my hand and a sleeping bag rolled up on my back, I said farewell to them and took a bus into the city.

I met Eichmann twelve months later at the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church on Divisadero Street. The church was a storefront self-help center down the hill from Haight Street, a soup kitchen where you could get a free vegetarian meal of stewed cabbage and corn bread.

While you ate the hot macrobiotic food, Coltrane's music was played for your spiritual benefit over a superb sound system. I forked runny cabbage leaves into my mouth as Coltrane riffed notes higher and higher until the boiled vegetable tasted like a magical potion sliding into my stomach. Since I didn't have any money, Eichmann felt a pang of sympathy for my plight, and he took me back to the carport.

Bobo had joined forces with Eichmann some months before that. Quiet and modest to the point of self-effacing, he was a short, raw-boned, dark-complected Mexican with the heavily defined muscle tone of a prison inmate, something he'd never been. You could easily picture him lifting weights in the exercise yard, with nothing but dead time on his hands. "I just look that way," he told me. Bobo didn't talk much about himself, only saying his family was from the East Bay, from the factory outskirts of Vallejo, a place he didn't recommend to anyone.

I never expected any miracles, and I never had any hopes of getting rich while I was doing business with Eichmann.

Six feet tall with the lapsed muscle tone and brittle self-confidence of a former amateur athlete, Eichmann had been going bald since he was fourteen and now that he was on the verge of his twenty-second birthday, it was high time he thought about doing something with his hair because it was dying on his head. Being older than me by two years, he was the big brother I'd never had and always wanted.

He was sitting on our thrift-store couch, saying to Bobo and me, "Let me ask you guys something. Are we making any money selling our product?"

The evidence was all around us.

Precisely stated, we were dwelling in a two-car garage behind the Del Rosa Laundromat on Mission Street. Eichmann homesteaded the carport a year ago when he was evicted from the homeless shelter at St. Martin de Porres for overstaying the twenty-nine-day limit. This was before his aunt threw him out of her Section Eight duplex on Mariposa Street. She said there wasn't enough room for both of them and that he should get a home of his own. But even if you had some cash, something Eichmann never had, it wasn't guaranteed you could find a spot to rent in the Mission. Housing was scarce as hen's teeth. When he found the deserted, ramshackle carport, he knew he was onto something good. If you came across a building that was abandoned in the Mission, and if it had a roof over it, and if no one was watching the premises, you had to take it.

The garage was a boon to us. So many people were homeless, I was glad to have four walls around me, even without the amenities of heat or running water. Eichmann had broken into the carport by shearing the rusting lock on the door with a pair of bolt cutters. The three of us were trespassers. The landlord knew what we were doing, but instead of calling the police, he kept asking us to pay a bit of rent. It became a game we played with him. To get the money, we sold microscopic amounts of marijuana in the street for exorbitant prices.

Our supply came from two brothers who lived on Potrero Street. Their prices were decent, no more inflated than anybody else's--wholesale was forty-five dollars for an eighth of an ounce. The quality of their product was questionable, though; it was awfully green Mexican sinsemilla, sometimes good, often not.

So far, we hadn't been able to pay the rent.

The problem was we didn't have a telephone. This made our operations sporadic, inconsistent, largely ornamental. Whenever we wanted to communicate with our customers, we used the pay phone next to Chita's Beauty Parlor on Eighteenth Street. And if we were ever to get busted, Eichmann was the one who'd get the stiffest sentence when we were carted off to jail. Naturally, he never got tired of reminding Bobo and me about it.

But a few weeks ago, our status changed. The fear got stronger. It all began the day Louis came to pay us a visit. At first, I thought the knock on the door was the landlord, a diminutive immigrant from the Philippines who permed his hair and didn't care if he was lending us an uninhabitable lodging--little did he know, he was never going to get any money for it. Bobo said to me, "Don't be so jittery. It's only Louis. He said he was coming by."

Just like the landlord, Louis had a single-track mind. But what he wanted from us was indica. Eichmann got the door open enough for our guest to bend over and enter the garage. When Louis staggered in, the door was slammed shut behind him, raising knee-high dust whirlwinds from the scuffed concrete floor. The portly black man smiled and crip-walked over to where we were sitting. He sat himself down on the edge of our couch and reached in his shirt pocket for a Salem cigarette.

Louis had been buying dope from us for months. As long as I could remember, I'd been selling weed to him. He was from the west side of Los Angeles, where he'd gotten injured working as a nurse in a VA hospital. Nowadays he was semiretired, existing comfortably on a variety of hard-earned federal employee benefits. Every time he came by, my spirits were lifted by his presence. Why, I didn't know. I just liked him. Not one to piddle with his time, he said, "I got some friends coming over and I want to entertain them with the good stuff, you know what I'm saying?"

Eichmann got up from his seat and wandered over to a cupboard and picked up a clear sandwich bag filled with eighths. While he did that, I studied Bobo. He was sprawled in a beanbag chair, cleaning his fingernails with the sharp end of a kitchen knife. At his feet was his breakfast, two vegetarian burritos with avocado and sour cream, an order of chicken enchiladas, a basket of corn chips and salsa, and two Dos Equis beer bottles. His lust for eating was matched by my permanent lack of interest in food. Basically, a good meal was better than an orgasm for Bobo. Eichmann came back to where Louis was sitting, and ceremoniously dropped the bag of weed onto the coffee table in front of him. "For you," Eichmann oozed. "Only the best. This here is the finest bud in the Mission."

Louis stared at the weed without any expression on his ebony face. He selected three eighths, lined them up on the table and compared them, lifting each one to his nose and sniffing at the contents. You could see he was ambivalent about our merchandise. I didn't blame him; it was appallingly bad.

"Fresh stuff. Totally fresh," Eichmann reassured him. "We just got it from the grower yesterday. The dude lives up in Sonoma on the Russian River. A total hippie."

"That right?" Louis commented.

Bobo clenched his fists. "It's good. You want to try some?"

"No, no, I'm in a hurry. I got a friend out in the Chevy waiting for me." Louis nodded at the choices he'd made. "How much you want for three of these?"

The question elicited a gap-toothed smile out of Eichmann. "I'm going to give you a bargain. Three for eighty-five each."

Louis's rheumy eyes went dead with incredulity. "Eighty-five an eighth? That's unbelievable. Either I'm going crazy or you are. What do you want, the keys to my car? What about my house? You might as well have them, 'cause you're taking all my money."

"That price, Louis?" Bobo said. "That's with the discount. You can't get it better anywhere else, and you know it."

Patient Louis did his arithmetic, reeling off the figures in his head. He had a stable income, but he needed to be coaxed along to part with it. He muttered, "Seems to me I can get it cheaper somewhere else. You know those girls on Capp Street? They've got some good smoke. They got that Hawaiian weed. Maybe I should give them a ring and see what's up."

His attempt to back out of the deal failed-Eichmann zoomed in for the kill. "Go right ahead," he said with velvet-covered primal menace. "But remember this ... doing business with us is a privilege." Eichmann's puffy face was glazed with the hard sell he was pitching. "If you want to do a little comparative shopping, go do it. We'll let you. Of course, if you leave, you can't come back again."

Bobo seconded Eichmann's sentiment. "Damn right, you can't come back. We ain't a store. This is a private cannabis club for the distribution of medical marijuana, members only. You sick, Louis?"

Louis was piqued, offended. "Hell, no. Do I look terminal?"

"I was just asking. No harm intended."

"Then I'll take them three bags," Louis sighed.

The tension in the room dissipated as fast as the air coming out of a balloon. Louis coughed up two hundred and fifty-five dollars and handed it over to Bobo, who pocketed the cash with glee.

Louis was about to leave when he turned around and said to all of us, "Doojie saw the shooting those cops did on Folsom Street, didn't he?"

"What's that?" I lisped.

"You know, the one with the Mexican and all that."

Eichmann glared at me. "Ah, what you're talking about?"

"The man that got shot," Louis retorted, getting ticked off at us for lying to him. "I got my ear to the ground. People are talking about it. The police are looking for witnesses who saw it."

Bobo gulped. "They are?"

Louis declared, "Damn right they are. They want to cover up what they did. Anyone who's seen it is in trouble. But don't worry, I ain't going to tell on Doojie."

I hated Louis for bringing up the shooting. Being a squatter meant we kept our heads low to the ground. Being a witness to anything was not good news--it was better to forget what you saw in the streets, because if you were in the wrong place at a timely moment, it could get you killed. A female police officer had tried to arrest a drunk in Clarion Alley the other morning. Because it was a heat wave, everyone was outside, drinking hard. The wino was half the cop's size, but since he was inebriated in the way alcoholics have when they want to practice civil disobedience, it was impossible to handcuff him. A crowd of black Cubanos and Salvadorenos began to taunt the police officer, but within a minute five squad cars were there to assist her. The moral of the fable? Simply and clearly, you never messed with anyone who had the legal right to wear a gun.

My grandfather had seen the Don River Cossacks go berserk on Jews in Russia, handing out beatings so terrible, he always warned me to mind my own business.

I said to Louis, trying in vain to lead him astray, "What the fuck are you blabbing about? I never heard of it."

He went livid. "Don't fuss at me, boy. You should be mad at the police. They're going to be hunting for you."