Junkie Love

Ziggy and Doreen

9

 

It had never occurred to me to ask why they were so desperate for a place when they came to me. I remembered the times I had seen Ziggy with his shirt off. His skin was pale as a fish’s belly and dappled with abscesses and scars from what looked like knife wounds.

This incident in front of the Double Eagle suddenly made urgent what, since the fire, had been a casual search for a new apartment. That afternoon I found a studio two blocks away at Page and Scott, and that evening, while Ziggy and Doreen were out, I loaded up my car and moved my things to the new place. I thought I got everything in one load but then remembered leaving behind my copy of Varieties of Religious Experiences.

I left the car double-parked with the engine running on Waller Street and made a quick room-by-room search and found the book. Then I was standing in the livingroom, trying to think of anything that could cause me to have to come back here, when I heard heavy footsteps outside approaching the door, coming fast along the deep crevice between the apartment buildings. I froze, thinking of Ziggy’s pursuers, then suddenly Mike was filling the room.

“Hey man. How’s it goin’?” he asked in his baritone and in his characteristic pose, head bent to the side against the basement ceiling.

He was one of my original roommates and a merchant seaman who, after the fire, made a family visit to Vancouver before shipping out of San Francisco . He dropped his duffle bag on the floor and looked around.

“Oh sweet Jesus, am I glad to see you,” I blurted. “You know Ziggy? Well, he and his ol’ lady have been staying here since you left. And it’s been a madhouse. Today I found out somebody is looking for him to kill him. I got a new apartment and took stuff over there and… hey, wait a minute. The landlord owes me money which he ‘says’ he doesn’t have. The new place doesn’t have a refrigerator. Will you help me steal this one?”

“Of course.”

The landlord lived upstairs and I don’t know what he thought of us taking the refrigerator but he had to know about it, because we banged it against the door and then the walls of the outside passageway. Eventually, we got the heavy end into the trunk of my car, but it was too long, and without someone holding it up, the protruding end tilted onto the ground. Mike was unanimously elected.

I drove the car two or three miles an hour, slow enough for him to waddle behind with arms full of refrigerator. Pedestrians and drivers were laughing and I was trying not to. Mike couldn’t spare the breath. Besides, he could be sensitive about his size.

Some black kids shouted at me, “Hey man, someb’dy tryin’ to steal the refrigerator outta the back of yoh cah.” They yelled at Mike, “Hey, hey man, how much you chawge foh that? I gotta house needs movin’.”

At Scott and Haight we had to wait like anybody else behind the stop sign for our turn to cross the intersection . Eventually we got to the new apartment and were grateful it was on the ground floor. We shared the new one-room studio for a couple weeks before he shipped out, then we lost track of each other.

I never saw Doreen again, but bumped into Ziggy about nine months later when I was desperate to buy a kilo of grass to impress a chick. I gave him a hundred and ten dollars after looking into his eyes and deciding, no, he wouldn’t rip off a friend, a teammate. Of course, that was who Ziggy would rip off first.

Inspite of what I told Amy, I never tried heroin.