She Works Hard for the Money, an excerpt from "Bottom Street," a novel in progress

                When Johanna got back to her apartment after a hard night of turning tricks for her pimp boyfriend, Jimmie Culpepper, the rotten sonofabitch usually was there waiting for her.  He would immediately start running down shit that seemed to be mostly the product of his incredible egotism coupled with insecurity about his own sexuality.

“I seen you this evening bullshittin’ with that he-she, Kitty Corners,” he said sullenly, on this particular occasion.  “I told you to stay the fuck away from that tranny, but you go ahead on and hang with him anyway. You know he got a boyfriend in the vice squad. Nobody spoze to know about it, but everybody on the street know anyway.”

Johanna sighed, knowing immediately that Jimmy was going to work himself into a state where he couldn’t be satisfied without beating the hell out of her.  She wasn’t sure she could do anything to stop him.  Hours of sucking cock had left her weary, her jaws aching and her neck muscles stiff and sore. Oral sex—the primary stock in trade of the San Francisco streetwalker—had become the bane of her life. Getting the pasty-faced and hypertensive Michelin men who drove their Expeditions and Highlanders in from Walnut Creek to come in her mouth seemed more difficult every day, and Johanna couldn’t tell whether it was because she didn't really enjoy sucking them to climax or that they were too edgy and obese to get off.

        Whichever was irrelevant. She was burned out on the life and needed to get off the street, something that she mentioned to Culpepper roughly six times a week, but without any meaningful reaction. In fact, the more she talked about her unhappiness, the more Culpepper ragged on her performance and earnings.  When he started running down his shit, he made her feel so weary she could just lie down on the floor, curl up and go to sleep from a hideous weariness that seemed to creep into her very soul.

“Well, I like Kitty,” Johanna said, irritated that the first words out of his mouth that night were his chickenshit criticism. “In fact, I like her better than most of the other girls working the street. I enjoy talking to her. She’s pleasant and polite and even reads a book occasionally. I don’t care who she’s sleeping with. God knows, I spend my day fucking people I don’t even know, so I can’t criticize her for balling a cop or anybody else.”

She had never been able to really talk with Jimmie, not even from their earliest days together when she thought she loved him. He was too ignorant and ghetto to reason with. Everything she said to him he took as a challenge to his manhood.

His feelings toward her were clearly equivocal: Jimmy saw her as two tits, a hole and a heartbeat, good only for sex and a ready source of money. It would never occur to him that Johanna was an intelligent woman with aspirations to do something beyond spending the rest of her life giving blowjobs to strangers from the suburbs that drove through the ‘Loin in their SUVs looking for cheap commercial sex.

         And lately he had been fixated on Kitty Corners, a pre-op transsexual who was not only amazingly pretty, but also intelligent and well-spoken. Johanna was convinced that part of what Jimmie couldn’t stand about Kitty was the fact that she was smarter than he was. Way smarter.

         “Kitty's boyfriend is a cop in the vice squad, dumbass,” Jimmy said, annoyed by her defiance. “He busts hookers like you. When they doing pillow talk together, I bet Kitty’s telling him everything that goes down on the street. You goin’ to end up getting your ass arrested if you keep hanging around with Kitty.”

“Well, that would be a tragedy, wouldn’t it?” she said hotly, folding her arms under her breasts. “Then you’d have to go out and get a job instead of taking money from me.”

“Don’t start giving me no lip, woman,” Jimmy said, an edge to his voice. “I’m telling you to steer clear of that whore.”

“Well I’m telling you to fuck off,” Johanna said, feeling heat in her face as her anger grew. She felt uncharacteristically antagonistic, even though she realized she was dangerously close to crossing Culpepper’s red line. “She’s just another woman to me. I'll talk to her if I feel like it.”

“He’s not a woman,” he said, raising his voice and stressing the male pronoun. “He isn’t a she. He’s a fucking man in a dress, dumbass.  ‘She’ got a cock and balls!”

“So what?” Johanna said, sticking her chin out angrily. “So do you, and nobody would mistake you for a man!”

As soon as she said it, Johanna knew she had gone too far. She started to unfold her arms and raise them to protect her face, but it was too late. Culpepper, though hardly the “Rabbit” of his youth, was still snake quick.  In a rage, he hit her with a right hand that drove her back into the wall hard enough to knock the picture of her mother onto the floor, breaking the glass that covered it.

When she toppled forward, he followed with another right hand that dropped her onto the coffee table and then leaned against the wall over her, kicking her repeatedly in the side and stomach.

“You motherfucking bitch,” he gasped, spraying her with spittle when he finally ran out of steam. “You best learn to keep your mouth shut.”

She cringed on the floor, knees drawn up and arms wrapped around the broken coffee table, sobbing uncontrollably, while he rifled her purse looking for her daily take. Holding up the bundle of bills, he glared at her.

“And you best bring back more than this tomorrow, cunt, or I going to give you some more of what you just got, you hear?” he said, still trembling with rage, a large drop of saliva hanging from his chin.  Turning, he staggered out of the apartment, his legs still numb from the adrenaline rush he got from beating her, slamming the door on the way out so violently behind him that it sprang back part way open again.

She laid there for a while, sobbing, then pulled herself together, got up and began clearing up the mess Culpepper had made while kicking her ass. She could feel that some of her teeth were loose and the inside of her mouth was sticky and salty with blood.

“Big fucking man,” she said venomously. “Tough guy!  You really are a hard-assed mother fucker, beating up on a woman, you prick.”  She stopped and listened for a minute, thinking that she heard a sound in the hallway outside.  Crossing the room quickly she locked the door and put the chain on. With the door secure, she resumed her tirade.

“You can really throw a punch, can’t you, you chickenshit bastard?” she muttered, removing the broken glass from the picture and hanging it back up on the wall. She cocked her head as she looked at it, then gently straightened it to line up with the back of the sofa.  The act seemed to deplete what spirit she had left and she sagged onto the couch, her face in her hands, sobbing uncontrollably for a good five minutes.

When she ran out of grief, she got up and limped to the bathroom to throw cold water on her face.  Leaning against the sink she looked at her ravaged features in the mirror.  There was a dark bruise under her left eye that would be a nasty shiner by midnight.  Her lip was split on the same side of her mouth and a small scab was already forming from the blood clotted at its bottom.

“Oh, you’re gonna do well tomorrow, girl,” she told herself bitterly. “By the time that mouth finishes swelling up and turning black and blue, ain’t nobody going to want to pay you for the privilege of having the nasty thing wrapped around his precious cock.  You’ll be lucky if a John even slows down to give you a look, let alone wants to party. So big tough old Mister Jimmy is just going to beat the fuck out of you again.”

She straightened up and walked back into the kitchen for the waste basket. On the way she took the bottle of Jack Daniels out of the cabinet where the dishes were stored, poured a healthy glassful and carried it back out to the remains of the coffee table.  In between dropping chunks of glass into the plastic container, she sipped the whisky.

She had decided long ago that she had to get out from under Culpepper before he killed her. The question was, how to do it?  She couldn’t just walk away from the miserable motherfucker; he would track her down and kill her. She had decided that the most important thing in his world was to be able to control her like some personal slave. If she left him, she would take away the one thing in his life he could lord it over. He would never accept that.

So she had to remove Culpepper from her life; she couldn’t just remove herself from his.

She dropped a chunk of glass into the wastebasket with a crunch and took another hit of the whiskey.

The easiest way out would be to kill the son-of-a-bitch but she was an intelligent woman and knew that if Culpepper was to turn up with a bullet in his brain, she would be the first person the cops would suspect of murdering him. Who else would care enough to kill a failed purse snatcher turned unsuccessful whore-monger but the one woman who was weak-willed enough to be his whore?

No. Murder was out.  She had to find some way for Culpepper to kill himself.

She took another sip of Jack and thought about it, considering his weaknesses and strengths. There had to be some way to put him on a collision course with death, engineered so that he would walk directly into the reaper’s arms without implicating her.  What did he want more than anything else on earth?

Simple answer: respect. He wanted to be seen as somebody who saw an opportunity and took it. A big man. A wheeler-dealer. Somebody with a set of cast iron balls. What the Jews called a "macher."

       Secondary answer: money.  Any scheme that had a big enough payoff at the end would excite him in an almost sexual way. And if there was a way he could both gain a large sum of money while simultaneously appearing to be a man of destiny who grabbed opportunity by the short hairs, he would be unable to resist it.  He would walk right up the stairs of a gallows without so much as blinking an eye.

A tiny smile curled the corners of her ruined mouth, then grew into a grin that stretched across the bruised wreckage of her face.

That gallows thing had given her an idea. She sipped whiskey and pondered the possibilities.  By the time the glass was empty, she had come up with a plan: all she had to do was bait the trap properly.  If she succeeded, Culpepper would be gone forever and at the still relatively young age of thirty-two, she could actually start living her own life.

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Casting Call, an exerpt from a novel in progress

            Jack Morris looked up when Art Sullivan and the crew he had put together walked into the lounge of Citizens, the 24-hour coffee shop at the corner of 45^th and Clement.

            Sully had brought Alec Lemnos, the halfwit who once got himself stuck in a bus door. Morris rolled his eyes. Lemnos was so dumb people occasionally had to remind him to breathe. Morris couldn’t remember a crime Lemnos committed that hadn’t ended with him getting arrested. His only advantage as a criminal was he always got cut loose because judges found him incompetent to assist in his own defense.

            With Lemnos was Waldo Reminger, the guy the hookers on lower Jones had dubbed “The World’s Creepiest Man.” It was said that even Alice Bowman, the trailer trash crack whore people called “White Fang” because of her missing front teeth, had once told Reminger to take a hike.

            Morris wondered what it was like to be rejected by butt-ugly streetwalkers, even when you had a bunch of cash in your pocket. Must be hard on the self-esteem, he thought. Reminger was the only man he could think of who had been eighty-sixed from Moonlight Ranch. Twice; six years apart.

            “Hey, Jack,” Sully said, sliding into the booth beside Morris. “What’s shakin’?”

            It was typical Sully: walk into a casting call with a pair of stiffs and open with a line so lame it could fill an entire ward at a Shriner’s Hospital. Morris decided to play along; if he was lame enough in return, maybe Sully would leave and take his Munchkins with him.

            “Nothing but the leaves in the trees,” Morris replied, taking a sip from the bottle of PBR on the table in front of him. That response was paraplegic, he thought to himself as he put the bottle down.  If that doesn’t chase this loser and his buddies, nothing will.

            But Sully just looked at him and licked his lips expectantly. Morris realized that Sully was waiting him to follow up with, “What are you boys drinking?”

            Ordinarily, that was the procedure in a casting call. A guy wants to put together a crew to pull off some sort of crime, he asks somebody with contacts to hook him up with some prospects at a mutually agreeable site. And then the guy looking for help sets up the first round, maybe more if the prospects look particularly good; if they’re sensational, he might even buy dinner for everyone.

            Fuck that shit, Morris thought, pointedly taking another sip of beer and nodding the neck of the bottle toward Sully, as if trying to demonstrate how rude he could be.

            Sully’s expression melted from anticipation to barely concealed irritation as he realized that if he didn’t personally provide liquid refreshment for the two knuckleheads sitting across the booth from him, they would go thirsty. Eventually, he decided on the latter, reasoning that if Morris was going to breach low-life protocol, so would he. He waved the cocktail waitress Angie over and asked for a rum and Coke.

            “If you boys want something, you better order up,” he said, looking at Lemnos and Reminger innocently.

            “Naw, I’m good,” Lemnos said, oblivious to the fact that two people had now failed to stand him to a drink. Anyone else might have thought about changing the brand of their deodorant, but not Lemnos. He hadn’t thought about anything for years; maybe not ever.

            Reminger looked disappointed but he didn’t say anything, just shook his head. He was probably feeling too horny to be offended.

            Morris decided to cut the bullshit.  “Art, can I talk to you, privately?” he asked Sully, gesturing toward the alcove next to the jukebox.

            “Sure, Jack,” Sullivan said, scooting out of the booth to make way for Morris.

            When they were well away from the booth, Morris turned to him and pinned him to the wall with a forefinger on his sternum. “Excuse me, dickhead,” he said in a low but irritated voice. “Is this the best backup you could find? A fucking pervert and a moron? I said I was looking for a crew, not refugees from the Q Ward at Napa.”

            Sullivan allowed Jack to see a thin smile. “You’re lucky I could come up with these two dipshits,” he said, glancing at his companions. Both were looking at Jack and Art curiously, as if they were wondering why they hadn’t been invited to join the conference. “In case you don’t read the papers, asshole, there’s been a crackdown on the usual suspects in the Tenderloin.”

            Morris had been out of touch for a while, courtesy of a visit to Vacaville as a guest of the state. He should have been sent to Soledad, but he’d managed to spend most of his 24-month sentence at the Northern Intake Center next door to the state hospital for prison inmates in Vacaville. For a year he had messed with the heads of twelve corrections department headshrinkers, convincing them he was a psycho.

            But the staff split 5-4-3 on his exact diagnosis and couldn’t agree on a course of treatment. By the time he left, at least two of the psychiatrists were already planning to write books about his case and each was planning to identify him as a classic example of a completely different mental illness.

             Unfortunately, the papers of choice in Vacaville are the worthless home-town Reporter or the Sacramento Bee, which is nominally better, but focuses on news of the state capitol and nearby communities.  Morris hadn't seen a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle for months. 

            “So what? Crackdowns on crime in San Francisco are a nickel a dozen,” Morris said. “There’s a new one announced every election year. How does that keep you from finding some quality people for a crew?”

            “The really ace operators are victims of the new D.A.,” Sullivan replied. “He wants felony scalps and he told Tardy’s holdovers that they could either come up with them in a hurry or expect a pink slip with their next paycheck.”

            Leland Tardy had been the prosecutor in San Francisco for donkey’s years. Morris had always liked him: the guy, a coke-freak and pothead, was usually stoned each day even before he left for his three-martini lunch with Superior Court Presiding Judge Sheldon Simmons, and he was too paranoid about being shown up by someone on his staff to hire anything but dumb ass-kissers as lieutenants.

            Consequently, San Francisco had the lowest conviction rate in the state of California and less than five percent of the people who actually were found guilty of felonies there ever ended up in state prison.

            Jack Morris was one of those five-percenters but he didn’t hold a grudge against the D.A.. He had been sent to the joint only once in San Francisco, even though he had been arrested there 47 times in the space of ten years. He figured a two-year jolt was only fair, considering all the times he had walked.

            In any case, every crook in California knew the score: San Francisco judges and juries hated only one thing more than having criminals run free, and that was putting them behind bars.  The consensus of state prosecutors, police, sheriff's departments and even some criminal defense bar organizations was, San Francisco had the worst D.A. in the state.

          The paper's primary newspaper had said as much eighteen months ago after comparing Tardy to the prosecutors in 57 other counties. The staffer who wrote the paper's editorials dubbed the D.A., “Perennial” Lee Tardy, saying “he is always a day late and a dollar short when it comes to fighting crime.”

            “So what happened to Tardy?” Jack asked.

            Art shook his head. “He lost a step,” he said. “Actually, he lost more than a step. He lost an entire fucking staircase. Some kid named Robert Gentry, a senior deputy D.A. out of San Mateo County, decided to run against him last time. He was the first real candidate Tardy faced in six elections. Gentry was way smarter than those other fools, though: he lined up all the Democratic Party clubs in the city behind him on the QT. Had the black churches in the Bay View eating out of his greasy palm. And he got the Downtown Improvement League to put together one of those phony committees to send out hit pieces to every voter in town.”

            The Downtown Improvement League was a cabal of corporate wheeler-dealers that considered San Francisco personal property, much as they might a yacht tied up at the marina, or a private plane hangared at SFO. It totally dominated politics in San Francisco like a stilettoed madam with a cat-o-nine and an electro-stimulation rig. Carefully concealed behind the scenes, the League had cracked the whip in city politics since the administration of George Christopher.

            “Gentry also dredged up all the shit about that chick Tardy hired as his office manager,” he said, shrugging as if to suggest that the prosecutor might as well have stepped in front of an 18-wheeler in the middle of Highway 101.

            “You mean the lap dancer at Harry Twitchell’s sex club who couldn’t type or take dictation but was paid more than $100 K a year?” Morris asked.

            “The very same,” Sully said. “The one that gave Tardy blowjobs every day when he got back from lunch with the judge. It made the papers and that was all she wrote. Old Lee ended up with so few supporters he couldn’t have put together a decent poker party.”

            Jack went back to the original subject. “So, okay,” he said. “I understand that the heat is on. But how much heat? It’s San Francisco, for Christ's sake. Half the cops are on the pad and the rest can’t spell their own names without fucking them up. I still can’t understand why you couldn’t line up a couple of A-list operators. Why'd you bring these two schlemiels with you? Both are totally useless; what am I supposed to do with them, drop them in the roadway like cinderblocks to divert traffic when the cops are chasing us?”

            Sullivan looked amused. “Well, who in hell would you rather work with, hotshot?” he said, his tone mocking. “Cleary? He’d be a really good choice but he’s doing twenty-five to life at San Quentin for armed robbery, his second strike.”

            “Malloy? He drew an 18-month jolt in the county cooler for beating up his ex-wife the last time he got out of Folsom,” Sully said. “Rodriguez? He was in Soledad for two weeks last month before some chickenshit Sudeño wannabe shanked him over a pack of cigarettes. R.I.P. Armando Rodriguez.”

            Sully looked around Citizens melodramatically, as if he half expected to spot Christopher Walken or Brittney Spears sitting at one of the tables.

            “Funny, but I don’t see any of the top operators in here,” he said when he looked back at Morris. “I don’t see any of the second rank, either. Or the third. Jack, you're gonna be taking sloppy seconds no matter who walks in here holding my hand. At least these two guys are out of stir and still drawing breath.”

            Morris was beginning to get a headache.  He closed his eyes and gave his temples a little rubdown with his knuckles. He reopened them after taking a deep breath and hissing it out noisily, like a kid trying to gin himself up to cut class in the middle of the school day.

            “So what you’re saying is, you vouch for these two lettuce heads, right?” he asked finally.

            Sully grinned. “If I wasn’t ready to do the job myself, I wouldn’t be fobbing these two guys off on you,” he said, taking in Alec and Waldo with a wave of his hand.

            “I take it that means that you’re in, too,” Morris said, making it more statement than question.

            Sullivan nodded.

            “Hey, Jack,” Sully said suddenly, with a note of desperation in his voice and something like a plea for tolerance in his smile.

            “Even a dipshit needs work, right?  How else is the sorry sonofabitch going to learn how to stop being a dipshit?”

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