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The Tenderloin Method

Court Haslett

Ref. No. 1004012my
Length 56,000 words

Summary

Sleeper Hayes, an ex-hippie, inveterate gambler, and music-obsessed alcoholic rambles through 1977 San Francisco in search of a friend's missing brother. Armed with only his sense of humor and a gambler’s intuition, he encounters a wide cross-section of San Francisco, from corrupt cops to society page debutantes, from alcoholic D.A.’s to Chinatown gangsters, from political powerbrokers to psychotic bookies. The stakes are raised even higher when Sleeper’s ex-wife becomes ensnared in an unrelated predicament. It’s up to Sleeper, with his convoluted philosophy, that fuses gambling and song lyrics, to resolve these dilemmas and stay alive

From The Book

1.

I don’t believe in God. I believe in luck. I don’t mean merely that I think luck exists. Any chucklehead knows that. I mean that I feel the same way about luck as others do about religion. I have faith in it. I study it. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that I worship it.

My friends tell me I’m being nonsensical. Either someone or something doles out the luck or there are only random, indiscriminate events that necessarily defy faith.

Logic. I never cared for it.

Any real gambler will tell you that luck has meaning beyond wins and losses. If you’ve ever had a winning horse DQ’d, hit the over on a half-court shot, or watched a game winning field goal bounce off the goal post, you know it too. At least if you’re a good gambler you know it. Luck can offer insight into your life, if you’re listening. Mediocre gamblers have skill. Good gamblers listen.

Graham Greene wrote that he would never lose his faith in coincidence. Even though he was taking a shot at religion rather than offering an actual credo, here are a few supposed coincidences I have absolute faith in: teams of destiny, horses for courses, hot pitchers, cold craps tables, jinxes, curses, fixed fights, fat envelopes, swinging on 3-0, that stalling never works in basketball, the two-minute drill always does in football, and no matter the sport, defense wins championships but it doesn’t cover the spread.

As for not believing in God, what can I say? Maybe if they’d taught Sunday school differently it might have taken. Like if they’d let us wager on the outcomes. Gimme Job at 10-1, or I’ll take David at 100-1. What would the Vegas line on Noah have been, a 1,000,000-1? And how about the money bookies would have made on Jesus? No underdog covered more times than that guy.

Then again, maybe the whole betting angle would have gone stale once everyone figured out that God always wins.

Actually, I didn’t have a strong opinion about the Big Man either way until a year ago when I set out to help a friend find her loser brother. You’ve heard people say that something put the fear of God in them. Well, my search put the fear of Godlessness in me. It’s not much of an argument, I know, but it’s all I have.

What, you got something better?

2.

February 1977

“Phases and stages

Circles and cycles

Scenes that we’ve all seen before.

Let me tell you some more.”

Willie Nelson, “Phases and Stages”

When the wheels of this story started rolling, I’d finally reached my desired station in life: complete and total withdrawal from society. Timothy Leary told all of us hippies to “turn off, tune in and drop out.” Ten years later, it seemed only I took him seriously. A few years ago, about the time Nixon resigned, I officially quit trying to belong to something bigger than myself. Orthodoxy and I just didn’t mix. I should have learned this lesson from either the time served in my father’s congregation or my three years in the Navy. Being a slow learner, though, it ultimately required three marriages and the rigidity of the counterculture movement to really hammer the point home.

People: not for me.

I wasn’t passive with this sliver of self-knowledge. I sought out a tolerable way to exist, requiring as little human interaction as possible, that also allowed me the freedom to gamble, drink, and listen to music. Tack on the occasional drug binge and this seemed an insurmountable undertaking.

Then luck intervened and I was listening. My old hippie friend Jake inherited an apartment building in the Tenderloin from his slumlord father. Jake knows nothing about money and even less about fixing locks or boilers, so we struck a deal. For the cost of a tiny one-room studio and a microscopic salary, he got an apartment manager he could trust. In return, I could maintain the vices and lifestyle I desired. This was a no-brainer for Jake since anyone else he hired would have worse issues than me. At least he knows I won’t kill anyone.

The bar isn’t set too high in the Tenderloin.

My expectations weren’t set very high either on that Friday night last February, the night I was drawn back into the world of other people and their ridiculous problems, the world from which I had successfully extracted myself. I was sulking after losing a tough parlay earlier in the night. I backed the Bulls over the Jazz, figuring Pistol Pete would labor after their overtime loss against the New York Nets the night before. I didn’t think the extra playing time would tire him out; I was counting on New York nightlife to do the trick. My hunch panned out and the Jazz lost to the Bulls 110-92. Even better, I considered that game the riskier half of my parlay. All I needed now was for the Warriors to beat the Sonics and I’d collect a slick $100. I considered it a lock. Though out of sync most of the year and barely over .500, Golden State was playing their best ball of the season. They’d won four straight, including a dismantling of the league-leading Nuggets. Rick Barry was on one of his hot streaks, Phil Smith and Jamaal Wilkes were blossoming into superstars, and Al Attles traded away George Johnson to give more minutes to Robert Parish, their gangly but talented rookie. They had the pieces to win another championship. The question was whether they could gel as a team like they had two years ago when they won it all. I became emotionally attached to the Warriors during that title run since it was one of two thing—the other being Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks”—that got me through the painful split with Maggie, my third wife.

After watching the Warriors play uninspired ball all night, I feared I’d violated the basic rule of gambling: never bet with your heart. A cold-shooting Barry managed only six points against the tough defense of Bob Love and the rest of the team looked lethargic. Nevertheless, with six seconds left and the score tied, the Warriors had the ball and a chance to win. Unfortunately, Barry’s ego, both his greatest asset and his Achilles heel, cost us the game. Instead of realizing he was struggling and pounding it in to Parish or kicking it out to an open Wilkes or Gus Johnson, he forced up an off-balance twenty-footer that wasn’t even close. The team’s deflated body language after that told me all I needed to know about the outcome. I didn’t even stay at the Jug to watch overtime. My parlay was dead.

Back in my room, I lit up a joint and put on “Phases and Stages,” by Willie Nelson. Willie’s voice—conversational but not simple, emotional but not melodramatic—always settles me down. It’s a seen-it-all voice that’s looking for more. Most importantly it is a style that’s all his own. He could have stayed in Nashville and written dozens of more hits for other people. Instead, he moved to Austin and wrote about whatever the hell he wanted. Most recently he made two concept albums: “Phases and Stages,” chronicling his divorce, and “Red Headed Stranger,” a western epic on vinyl. They were both my style of record. Quiet. Personal. It was the same with most of my favorite artists. The smaller, more private works are always more powerful to me. You can have “Whisky River.” I’ll take “It’s Not Supposed To Be That Way.”

I laid down and replayed the game in my mind, always trying to learn something from my mistakes. I was having to do these reassessments all too often lately and the nice score from the Super Bowl I was living off of was almost exhausted. I needed another set-up like that one. Too many people thought the Raiders didn’t deserve to be there, that they benefited from a couple fortunate breaks. First, by squeaking by the Patriots on a questionable pass interference call and then by beating Pittsburgh who was without either of their starting running backs. The experts considered them lucky, as if that’s a bad thing. Seemed more like destiny to me, so I hopped along for the ride.

Things turned for the worse since that win. I couldn’t get a handle on either college or pro hoops. I wrote off my confusion about the NBA to its merger with the ABA before the season. As for the college game, I still had time to figure it out before the real betting started in March. The question now was whether this was a mild slump I was in or the start of a prolonged cold streak.

Anna knocked on my door around midnight with the answer.

“My brother’s missing,” she lamented and fell into my recliner, the only piece of furniture in the room other than my bed. She fell into that a few times recently, too.

“He’ll turn up. He always does,” was all the sympathy I could muster. I never liked him much and Anna knew it.

“I think it’s different this time. I can feel it.” Anna is an atypical tenant of mine, though they are all fairly idiosyncratic. She’s a sculptor who lives off of a small settlement from PG&E after a loose electrical wire in Golden Gate Park electrocuted her during college at USF. Living in the Tenderloin allows her to rent a one-bedroom apartment as well as a small studio in the basement. The accident left the skin on her right shoulder, neck, and jaw slightly disfigured. Anna never complains about it and I liked her for it. Our relationship is sporadically, if unenthusiastically, romantic at times and I liked her for that too. She’s strong and muscular, a by-product of her work, but her demeanor and features, namely the small pug nose and freckles, are decidedly feminine. Her walnut brown hair was pulled back in a bandana, and like the rest of her clothes, splattered with plaster and paint.

Her brother couldn’t have been more different. Spoiled, fat, and loutish, Phil is a stockbroker for E.F. Hutton and, from what I can tell, loses other people’s money for a living. He often drops by the building to borrow money or weed from Anna, though I get the impression that smoke isn’t his drug of choice. Unlike Anna and I, whose bad habits were formed in the ’60’s, Phil is a poster child for the disco era.

“How do you know he’s missing and not just, you know, missing?”

“He called me this morning around 2 a.m. wanting some money. After the usual back and forth I told him I could maybe give him $25. When he came by he gave me a framed photograph of the two of us as kids. Really sweet, right? Sound like Phil?”

“Not really,” I admitted. “I still think you’re jumping the gun.”

“That’s not the end of it. I was worried, so I stopped by his work today and he wasn’t there. Nobody’s seen him or heard from him and today was payday. Again, sound like Phil? Why would he bum $25 off me and then not pick up his check? Something’s not right.”

“Drug addicts aren’t always that reliable you know.”

“Yeah, I know.” She gave me a look.

I ignored the bait and replied, “Lets just give it a few days.”

“Okay, but you’ll help me if I don’t hear from him, right?” Every bone in my body screamed no.

“Of course.”

3.

“Little red wagon, little red bike.

I ain’t no monkey but I know what I like.”

Bob Dylan, “Bucket of Rain”

Three days later Phil was still missing and I could no longer avoid Anna without doing irreparable damage to our relationship. Any other friend I would have told to go find him yourself. Not Anna. I don’t think Anna and I have a future together, nor believe her to be my one true love. In fact weeks often go by without so much as a word between us. We are loners by nature and have the good sense to know it. Yet we are different in one fundamental way: she still cares about the world and I don’t. My view of life is somewhere between Maurice Bendrix’s in the “End of the Affair,” who told God to leave him alone forever, and Robert Frost’s, who said he could summarize everything he knew about life in three words, “It goes on.”

I apply one or the other maxims to most circumstances I encounter. “Leave me alone” is clearly the driving force behind my near seclusion from society. I guess you could call it the wimpy, bratty flipside to Timothy Leary’s nobler call to dropout. Classify it how you want. It works for me. You want to borrow money to pay rent when I know you’re sticking it in your arm: leave me alone. You want me to protest against some South American dictator you know nothing about: leave me alone. You want me to pay for dinner, bring you flowers, and vote for the E.R.A.: definitely leave me alone.

I use Frost’s observation to process and accept the onslaught of tragedy and ugliness I see everyday in the Tenderloin and on the news. When my transvestite tenant stabs her cheating boyfriend then jumps out the third story window: it goes on. When a friend takes a bad dose of acid and loses his mind, job, and family: it goes on. When the Zodiac killer randomly murders five victims around the Bay Area and is never apprehended . . . you get the idea. The question for me is not why would you stop caring, it is how can you continue?

Anna isn’t like that. Her light hasn’t been extinguished and I doubt it ever will be. I can’t just pass it off as naiveté either since she’s lived in the Tenderloin long enough to become jaded. She’s been mugged, witnessed drug overdoses, and broken up more than one domestic dispute. Yet somehow she’s spurned cynicism. If Phil were my brother, I would have said adios long ago and never looked back. I wanted to tell her just that, to go on without him, but I knew she wouldn’t understand. She would look at me like I was speaking Russian. Too damn nice for her own damn good.

Considering any time I ever spent thinking about Phil was how to avoid him or any place he might be, I didn’t have a clue where to start looking for him. His apartment was as logical a starting point as any. Phil lived only fifteen blocks away on Nob Hill. What a difference that hill makes. I headed east on Eddy, then north on Taylor until I reached California, where I stopped to catch my breath. I paused and took in the sites—the Fairmount Hotel, Grace Cathedral, and the Mark Hopkins—like any tourist would. The grime and chaos of my surroundings seemed miles away, not blocks. Even the air felt fresher up here. I shook my head and carried on. Life’s inequities don’t really bother me. I figure a swanky apartment on Nob Hill costs its owner more than just money. If they don’t mind the toll, why should I?

Phil’s place was a couple of blocks north on Washington. It’s a large nondescript building from the thirties with forty or so rental units. I walked the three floors and let myself in with the spare key Anna had given me. I’ll say this for Phil, he didn’t spend the money he borrowed from Anna on home decor. Both rooms, each visible from the entryway, were nearly barren and the walls were as white as the day he moved in. At least this search wouldn’t take long. I started in the living room, which contained only a desk and couch. I flipped the pillows onto the floor and slipped my hand down the back of the couch as if I was looking for lost change. I felt absurd, like an actor playing a detective in a movie. Is this really how a policeman would look for clues? Needless to say I didn’t find anything, not even a couple of quarters. The desk was equally unrevealing. One drawer was stuffed with bills—I’d go through those later—and the rest were either empty or crammed with dirty clothes. Unless I found a map from Phil on the refrigerator with a big red ‘X’ signaling his whereabouts, this exercise was pointless. Anna would have to call the police, something she should have already done.

I half-heartedly scanned the bedroom, then decided I had earned a beer. For once Phil didn’t let me down. The only item in the refrigerator was a six-pack of Anchor Steam. I grabbed two and sat back down on the couch. Old Chronicles were scattered on the floor. Out of boredom I rifled through them and scanned the headlines from the past couple months. Gary Gilmore was shot to death by a firing squad in Utah. President Ford left office and pardoned Tokyo Rose. President Carter entered office and pardoned Vietnam draft evaders. Locally, the New World Liberation Front detonated another bomb, this time under D.A. Freitas’ car. The Bay Area was still in a drought and the City was considering rationing water if we didn’t get some rain soon. The Reverend Jim Jones of the Peoples Temple was given the MLK Humanitarian Award by Glide Memorial. Governor Brown spent the night in a Western Addition project to see what life was like for the have-nots. I turned to the Datebook. “Roots” was the highest rated TV show ever. Fleetwood Mac’s new album Rumors was on top of the charts. The Canadian Mounties, of all people, busted Keith Richards with 22 grams of heroin and 5 grams of cocaine. Freddie Prinze killed himself. No more Chico. Just the Man.

I picked up the Sports section and noticed it right away. Any gambler would. Phil had circled a team in every game on the basketball schedule and written numbers beside them. Large numbers. Could he really have been betting thousands of dollars a night on basketball? I stood up and went to the pile of newspapers in the kitchen and pulled out all the sports pages. Each one had the same markings.

Given his addictive personality I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that Phil gambled. I just thought this commonality between us would have surfaced earlier. He probably dismisses me as an aging hippie that can’t possibly like sports, much less bet on them. I get that kind of prejudgment a lot, even though I don’t exactly look the part anymore. True, my kinky, rusty-brown hair, is still pulled tight into a short ponytail like when I moved here as a screwed-up 25 year-old in 1966. But that’s about all that’s left, stylistically, of my hippie past. Recently I swapped the tie-dyes and bell-bottoms for a Navy-issued peacoat, sweatshirts, and a skullcap.

This fashion change better represented my current ambivalent worldview. I couldn’t be prouder of what we set out to do in the ‘60’s. However, unlike those who didn’t live here then, I don’t romanticize the entire era. Before the Summer of Love, San Francisco was a special place. There was freedom, experimentation, and community. More importantly a unique energy surged throughout the whole city. We knew we were part of something different. The Summer of Love was the beginning of the end. It attracted the wannabe’s, the posers, and the vultures. By the time Watergate ended and our soldiers came home, all that remained were hard drugs and anger. The only way for me to survive honestly was to acknowledge the era’s demise, try and preserve any lingering idealism, and move on.

Still, I’ll be damned if I cut my hair or give up my copy of Europe ‘72.

4.

“Can you surrey? Can you picnic?

Can you surrey? Can you picnic?

Come on and surrey down to the Stone Soul Picnic.”

Laura Nyro, “Stone Soul Picnic”

Only a few bookies in town took down bets that size and I know them all. Gambling is mainly broken down geographically and often by race. If you live in the Western Addition you either bet with Jetty Jenkins or Ray Searcy. Chinatown is handled by a number of guys, but the big book was Ducky Tse. Ricardo Torres runs the Mission. I wasn’t sure about Pacific Heights. I suppose they use Dean Witter or Merrill Lynch.

Tenderloin gambling goes mainly through two tributaries, Marvin Satterfield or Dmitri Kostopoulous. If you are black then Marvin is most likely your guy. The Greeks take all the other action, including mine. I could bet with any of their hand books at a number of bars around the Tenderloin including my local, the Brown Jug. Sometimes the hand book is the owner, sometimes it’s a bartender, and other times it’s just a guy on a barstool. All the bets eventually wind up in the hands of Dmitri. I liked to walk my bets down to him personally at his restaurant, The Acropolis Café on Eddy, near Mason. Even though they actually serve decent food there, it doesn’t matter one penny to their bottom line if they ever sell one plate of hummus. Their money is made upstairs in the private card games, bookmaking, and fencing operations. Dmitri runs a decent book, handles good size, and prescreens most of his clients in order to avoid the heavy-handed tactics necessary for collecting from deadbeats. Even when I get on a good run he takes my bets graciously. I liked to think he laid off my action during those stretches, but I knew better. Like any good bookie, he just waits for my luck to sour.

I walked east on Eddy Street to the Tenderloin’s Greektown, all two blocks of it. In addition to the Acropolis, there is the Minerva Café, the Athens Café, Mike’s Greek Café, and the heart of the Greek community, the Hotel Zee, owned by Vasillios Glimidakis. Nothing happens in Greektown that Glimidakis doesn’t at least tacitly approve. Dmitri was sitting in his customary back booth eating a plate of chicken and rice with his cousin Sixto, his right hand man. Of the many confusing things about life, high on my list is how Dmitri is always eating whenever I see him and yet his small potbelly never grows. In fact, nothing about Dmitri, including his light brown hair, his long, vaguely feminine eyelashes, or his gold necklace with a Greek Orthodox Cross, ever seems to change. After the normal pleasantries I asked if Phil was his client. He wiped his mouth with his napkin and eyed me for a time just beyond comfortable before finally asking, “You playing stupid?”

“Not an act.”

More uncomfortable staring.

“So Bold Forbes didn’t win the Belmont last year?”

“Belmont? What the hell, I paid you six months ago.” Even though I loved Bold Forbes—how can you not love a Derby winner from Puerto Rico?—I tried to beat him with a couple of long shots, Great Contractor and Best Laid Plans. I didn’t think there was any way Bold Forbes could last a mile and a half with his sprinter’s breeding. The only way he could win was if he got both a golden trip and a perfect ride by Cordero. Guess what happened?

“Were we talking about you or Phil?”

“Phil bet with you?”

“Ah hell Sleeper, get the fuck out of here. I thought you were on the level.”

An unsettled feeling crept into my stomach. I asked again, “Did Phil bet the Belmont with you?” Dmitri did more of that staring I was growing pretty tired of. When he took off his glasses I prepared myself for a lecture.

“I size people up pretty good, right?” I nodded my head. “Good. I sized Phil a loser the second you brought him in here.” My gut tightened some more. “But I took his bet because he was a friend of yours and any friend of yours, etc, etc. You know how this ends right?” Another nod. “It seems like the only one I sized wrong is you. But now I think I got it right. You don’t hold your liquor as good as I thought. Am I on the right track?”

“Right track, wrong train.” I was riding some top-notch mushrooms last June. I don’t remember most of the whole month, much less introducing Phil to Dmitri. “Give me the rest of the story.”

“You and Phil lost. You paid, he didn’t. I gave him a chance to win his money back and like I said, he’s a loser. Haven’t seen or heard from him since. I was kind of hoping you would bring it up first.”

“I had no idea. How much?”

“Enough.”

“Any idea where he took his business after that?”

“I got a couple guesses. Try Satterfield or Jimmy Chen. More likely Chen if you ask me. I don’t think Phil would blend in over at Jonells too good.” Jonells was a black club that Satterfield operated out of.

“Been hearing this Jimmy Chen’s name more and more. What’s his deal?”

“He’s up and running for a year or so. Got a piece of Chinatown but he’s trying to expand. He’s where all the losers wind up now. It’s tough to make it with straight deadbeats as your clientele unless you’re ready to flex some muscle. He’s making a pretty good go of it, though. Makes a man wonder if the world is changing.”

“No need to wonder about that.” I stood up to leave. “Sorry about the Phil thing. I’ll get your money.”

“From him?”

“Once I find him. He’s gone AWOL.”

“Sorry to hear that,” he deadpanned and started reading the paper again.

“My window still open?”

“Sure.”

“Then I’ll take the Warriors two times tonight.” Golden State had bounced back against the Hawks without Barry, who got banged up in the All-Star Game diving for a loose ball. The paper said he was due back tonight. The Bucks had surprised some people this season with their new up-tempo offense installed by first year coach Don Nelson, but they didn’t have the horses to run with a real high-scoring team like the Warriors.

“The line is minus -10 now. Still want ’em?”

“Make it three times.”

Pieces of last June started to come back to me. My mother passed away in May and I went on a binge after returning from her funeral in Missouri. Even though my three siblings still lived in St. Louis, I am the oldest and was therefore responsible for getting her estate in order before and after she died. Staying sober during the entire process kept me from grieving properly. It was different when my father died. I was in and out the same day, just long enough to disappoint him one last time. I skipped his wake altogether. If you can’t say something nice and all that.

Mom left us all she had, a couple thousand each, so June was kind of a blur. I started the month with whiskey and ended it with psychedelics. I remember betting sentimentally on Best Laid Plans in the Belmont thinking it was a message from Mom. Read that one wrong. Must have come from Dad. Funny I can remember the race perfectly but can’t remember Phil being around. I guess even tripping I repress memories of him.

I walked to Jonells to talk with Satterfield. For some reason it took me a full year of living in the T.L. to figure out why it was called Jonells. I always assumed it was named after its owner. Then one day I was drinking at its horseshoe shaped bar and spotted the street signs through the dusty window. Satterfield and I are on good terms even though the Greeks are my primary book. He wasn’t there but his second in command, Quentin Bassit, was. Q. told me a similar story to the one I heard from Dmitri. Phil laid down a couple losing bets and was cut off. I asked him if he put the squeeze on Phil. He said no and I believed him.

Looks like I’d be paying Jimmy Chen a visit.

I went upstairs to my pal Nelson’s apartment before heading out. Nelson and I first met when I moved to San Francisco in 1966. We both worked at the Roosevelt, a work hostel on Sacramento Street. For eighteen hours of work per week, twelve of us got free room and board. The rest of the thirty rooms were reserved for tourists, most of them foreign. I knocked on his door after hearing he sold joints for fifty cents. Thus began a long and hazy friendship.

Nelson dealt weed in order to support his own use, which was as much medicinal as recreational in nature. A bus crushed his feet as a teenager on the south side of Chicago. Ten years, six surgeries, and three different painkillers couldn’t do what a cane and dime bag could: make life livable.

Years of nearly constant smoking slowed and slurred Nelson’s speech. Some people wrongly mistook this for slowness of the mind. It’s true his logic isn’t always straightforward nor his delivery articulate, but his take is always unexpected and enlightening. I consider him my personal, stoned, black Buddha.

I first witnessed his genius not long after meeting him, when he told his wife of less than a month to move out because she yelled at him. Couldn’t he just ask her to stop, I asked. He explained that the point wasn’t whether she would stop, it was that she started yelling in the first place. I knew right then that he understood human nature. In gambling it’s called cutting your losses and it’s much, much, much easier said than done. Most of us are programmed to rationalize our mistakes instead of admitting we’re wrong.

Being wrong didn’t matter to Nelson. Being happy did.

His advice, I know, wouldn’t work for everyone. If you’re the conventional type then his steadfast belief in sterilizing the very rich and the very poor probably doesn’t spin your top. Nor would you believe his claim that he and Iri, a Russian cab driver we know wrote the outline for what became the SALT treaty. But if you’re a confused societal misfit looking for weed, a fresh opinion, and a laugh then Nelson is your guy.

Nelson loved reading philosophy. I told him all the philosophy I need is in lyrics to pop songs. It sounds shallow, but I’m serious. Song lyrics constantly run through my head no matter the situation. Nelson didn’t buy my idea of music-as-philosophy so I offered to match any philosophy he could name with a song. Existentialism: “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere,” by Neil Young. Libertarianism: “Do What You Want, Be Who You Are,” by Hall and Oates. Des Cartes: “You Don’t Know Me,” by Ray Charles. Nihilism: “Folsom Prison Blues,” by Johnny Cash. Thomas Aquinas: “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City,” by Springsteen. Nieztche was tough. I finally settled on “Didn’t I Blow Your Mind,” by the Delfonics.

I sat down on his couch, took a drag off his pipe, and waited for the Warrior game to start. Nelson’s workday, which consists of selling weed from 6 to 7 p.m. every night, was over. Nelson is slightly overweight, has a medium-sized Afro and wears Malcolm X glasses. His caramel complexion is dotted with small freckles on each cheek. As was his custom, he was wearing a button-up sweater and corduroys. Nelson is simultaneously the hippest and nerdiest guy I know.

The volume was off on the television and “Stone Soul Picnic” by the Fifth Dimension played on the turntable. Nelson, as usual, tried to trick me.

“They sure know how to write ’em don’t they?”

“Yeah, Laura Nyro sure does,” I countered.

“Damn, you’re good Sleeper. How you know so much about soul music?”

“Same reason you know so much about obscure, white singer-songwriters.”

“I saw her down in Monterey in ’67 when she claimed she was booed offstage. I was there and didn’t hear no booing. Tell you another thing she got wrong. I never heard no brother say they were gonna ‘surrey on down’ no place.”

“I never heard any white person say it either. They covered another one of hers. You know that one?”

“Wedding Bell Blues,” he scoffed, offended I even asked.

Normally we would have gone on like this all night, swapping music trivia, but tonight I needed his advice on my dilemma. I recapped everything that happened so far.

“You and Anna, huh? I had no idea. You’re sly, Sleeper.”

“It’s not like that. We’re basically friends.”

“No such thing as basically friends. Either you are or you aren’t. Why you putting yourself all in her business if you’re just friends? Sounds to me like Phil deserves whatever he got coming.”

“It’s complicated,” I tried.

“No it ain’t.”

I knew he was right. I always maintained that the only thing complicated about life was how it all started. The rest is pretty cut and dry.

We sat in silence as Bill King announced the Warriors’ starting line-up. No Rick Barry. I looked on the bench and saw him in street clothes. Motherfucker. Who injures himself diving for a loose ball in an All-Star game anyway? Even without Barry, we should be able to beat the league-worst Bucks, I convinced myself. Then I remembered we needed to win by 11 points and a little nausea crept into my stomach.

“Complicated my ass,” Nelson snickered under his breath.

Make that a lot of nausea.

Copyright 2010 - 2011, Court Haslett (Expires April 13, 2011)

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Author Reference Number	1004012my
Author Name	Court Haslett
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