Taste of Tenderloin (4 page)

“
Perhaps I can help you
with something,” the young man suggested.

Luke thought fast. “Well,
you see, George usually helps me, ah, with takeout, you know? Maybe
you could take care of it for me?”

The young man nodded,
eyeing Luke carefully. “I see. By any chance do you have a card,
George’s card?”

A card? Oh, yeah, George
had given him a business card several months ago. Luke dug his
wallet out of his pocket and searched through it, his hands
shaking. Finally, he located the card, and with a sigh of relief,
he placed it on the counter by the cash register.

CORNER MART

O’Farrell &
Hyde

Groceries/Liquor/Take Out
Deli

The young guy turned it
over, then smiled. On the back of the business card, George had
carefully inscribed in upper case block letters:

O.K.

GEORGE Z.

The clerk looked up from
the card and nodded. “How much takeout did you need tonight,
sir?”

Luke slid a hundred-dollar
bill across the counter.

After pocketing the money,
the young man left the cash register and disappeared into the back
of the little store. He returned in a moment with a small brown
paper bag. He placed this in front of Luke, who glanced into it.
Inside was a plastic baggie containing a small amount of
coke.

“
Thanks, man,” Luke said
over his shoulder as he quickly departed the store. He paused in
the brightly lit entry, glancing up and down O’Farrell. Seeing no
one who looked suspiciously out of place, he turned left to head
back up toward Van Ness.

A hand gripped his arm,
stopping him in his tracks. Luke gasped, his heart leaping into his
throat.

But it was only a bag lady.
An old woman who was vaguely familiar. Yes, he was sure he’d seen
her before. Several times in the Tenderloin, over in the financial
district, maybe once out in the marina. He remembered her, not
because of her exceptionally disheveled appearance, but because of
a special aspect of her attire. She had the normal layered
appearance of the homeless—grimy garment piled on filthy
garment—but over it all, across her shoulders, she wore an indigo
scarf, not nearly as greasy and frayed as the rest of her clothes,
decorated with beautiful gold arabesque markings around its border.
It made her stand out from the usual grey and brown derelicts
pushing shopping carts. Up close, he noticed that her eyes were
unusual, too: one a faded denim, the other a rich
mahogany.

“
Wait, mister, I can help
you.” The strange woman interrupted his reverie in an accented,
gravelly voice. She appeared to be African, or Arab, or perhaps
Spanish.

Luke pulled his arm away
from the bag woman. How could this derelict possibly help him in
any way? As if privy to his thoughts, the woman peered into his
eyes and said, “I can help you with something you need most deeply
at the moment.”

He hesitated.

She nodded. “It is true, I
have the words.”

What did she mean?
What fucking words?
Despite being intrigued by the woman’s enigmatic language, it
was getting late and he needed some time to do a line or two and
give some thought to the men’s scent promotion before Lauren got
home. He turned away to head uptown, back to his car.

“
The new account…your last
chance.”

Surprised, he turned back
to face the woman’s almost mesmerizing gaze.

“
What do you
mean?”

The strange old lady did
not have the normal rank odor of her kind. She had no noticeable
smell at all.

“
I will write something
that will benefit you and the new account,” she said, “but in
return you will need to write something for me.”

Luke froze in place. Of
course she was delusional. How did
she even
know about the Daz L account, his slump, or, for that matter, what
he did for a living? Who the fuck was she? He wasn’t sure of any of
the answers, but he was sure of one thing: spotting the old lady
around in the past hadn’t been random. The woman had obviously been
stalking him. Now that he thought about it, he realized that maybe
he’d first seen her the same day as the disappointing loss of the
Asian Dawn account, the day his run of bad luck had started. Yes,
he was sure of it. Jesus. He needed to get away from her. In
addition to bad luck, she might be dangerous.

But when Luke tried to
move, he discovered her gaze held him spellbound. He couldn’t move
any of his limbs. It was almost as if she had somehow lassoed him
with an invisible rope.

“
Okay,” he finally
whispered, “tell me your words.”

“
I need to write them for
you in a special spot. Where words alter the future. Come this
way.” She half-turned, breaking eye contact and gesturing toward
the entry to a nearby darkened alley.

Oh, no. Not back in there.
Not this kid.

Luke’s pulse was racing,
alarms going off in his head. He could move on his own again, and
knew he should turn away. Run. Escape. But he was enthralled by her
voice and the cryptic sentence about the future; instead of paying
attention to instinct, he felt compelled to follow the woman into
the shadowy alley, expecting to be hit over the head at any moment.
Or stabbed. Or shot. Or something else terrible. On shaky legs, he
closely accompanied the old woman to the very back of the smelly,
dead-end alley, to a brick wall.

A streetlight from back on
O’Farrell flickered to life as if on cue and cut across the
darkness of the alley, dimly lighting up the wall. It was an
amazing collage of colorful graffiti: cartoon characters, tagger
names, polemic political expressions, crude pornographic art,
several catchy sexual expressions—JOSE SUCKS THE BIG JUAN and
DERON’S MOMMA STOOP FOR THE GROUP—and a blank spot. Right in the
middle of the kaleidoscope of graffiti was an empty rectangular
box, its perimeter denoted by a thin indigo border and gold symbols
marked in a pattern similar to the woman’s scarf. For a moment,
peering into the box, Luke had the sensation of falling, of being
sucked into deep space. He almost expected to see stars, galaxies,
and nebulae rushing by.

He blinked.
Whoa, get a grip, man!

“
Here, I will write,” the
bag lady announced, moving up to the mysterious box. She took out a
common fine-tipped indigo felt pen, popped off the top, then turned
back to him before she began to inscribe anything. “I write
something for you. But you must return
when
I call and write something for
me in this same box. It may not be for a month or two, even years.
But you must immediately come when I summon you and write. Do you
understand, Lucas Somerville?”

Jesus, she even knew his
name. He nodded and cleared his throat. “Yes, I understand,” Luke
said, unable to suppress the anxious curiosity in his
tone.

The woman turned and very
carefully printed out two lines:

RAZ L DAZ L

For the discriminating
gentleman.

Luke stared raptly at the
block for several moments.

Of course this was it. He
grinned inwardly. Just what he needed for the Friday meeting at
Double B & A. Incorporating Daz L’s name into the brand name of
the scent; the name’s memorable, the over-the-top-garishness
seeming to clash with the line suggesting refined good taste, but
actually fitting together perfectly. It resembled so much of his
best work, based on the contrasting of images and words. Luke loved
what the bag lady had written. Magic words. He looked into her
mismatched, strange eyes again and nodded his approval.

“
Okay, Lucas Somerville, I
will see you again here at this same hour sometime in the future.”
She made the pronouncement like a judge, her voice colder than the
bay fog that had slipped into the alley around them. “Do not make
me track you down.”

“
I will be here at this
same time whenever you call,” Luke said, glancing at his
wristwatch: 11:35 p.m., March seventeenth.

The woman slipped past him,
heading back out toward O’Farrell.

Luke remained in place for
a few seconds, wondering what had just happened. The rectangle with
the funny symbols around it was blank, deep space again. He didn’t
believe in crazy-ass stuff like magic. Still, he couldn’t hold back
a shudder as he followed the strange old woman’s footsteps back out
to O’Farrell Street.

After the enthusiastic
Friday meeting
at Double B & A,
significant events unfolded quickly. During the national tour, Daz
L became an overnight super-star, and almost immediately thereafter
the cologne brand name and expression appeared on billboards across
the country, right after debuting in every national magazine
from
Oprah
to
Sports
Illustrated
. Within six months, Raz L Daz L
was the most popular men’s fragrance in the U.S. The expression
“Raz L Daz L for the discriminating gentleman” became as lauded in
advertising promotional circles as “Where’s the beef?” West
Kingston Herbals, Ltd. became the largest employer in Trenchtown
and soon in all of Kingston, eventually negotiating to have Raz L
Daz L produced in two additional plants in Oakland and London to
meet the escalating world demand. A TV ad, conceived and directed
by Luke, appeared with Daz L standing between two gorgeous,
skimpily dressed models, grinning and declaring in his thick
Jamaican voice, “Hey, mon, Raz L Daz L da ladies.”

Soon after beginning the
initial promotion for Raz L Daz L, Luke was putting in
fourteen-hour days, often attending meetings in several different
time zones and countries in the same day. In addition to the
cologne, he promoted half a dozen other products, even a Saturday
morning TV cartoon with the voice of Daz L. At the end of nine
months, the singer’s account at Double B & A was making money
faster than the old U.S. Mint down on Fifth Street printing a new
run of dollar bills.

As the too-short days flew
by and demands on his time increased, so did Luke’s gauntness and
the deep bags under his eyes. He’d even developed a permanent
slight tremor in his hands. His appearance caused his friend Hubie
Jensen to press him about his health.

“
Hubie, everything is fine.
Busy and hectic, but just fine. Okay?”

“
And Lauren?”

“
Well, that isn’t working
out; Lauren’s still coping with her substance abuse problem, you
know?” That was a damn lie. Lauren was doing well in her recovery.
He told himself that she left him because she just had too much
competition. He had succumbed to his own hype and was using Raz L
Daz L. The TV ad implication was indeed prophetic: the ladies loved
it. But deep down he knew that his womanizing wasn’t the reason
Lauren had moved out. She’d gone soon after he’d brought up the
subject of breast enhancement. In a teary voice she had insisted
that he cared deeply about only two things: his job and
coke.

On St. Patrick’s Day of
2005
, Luke got an unexpected phone call.
The message chilled him to his core. “Tomorrow you will come to the
alley—”

Luke slammed the phone
down.

Jesus
. With the whirlwind craziness, he’d completely forgotten the
spooky old bitch. He was due back in the Tenderloin the next night,
back at that scary dark alley with its magical blank box and…what?
He didn’t know. It didn’t matter because he wasn’t going. No way.
He ignored the phone’s ring several times throughout the
night.

The next morning, Luke
called
in to his assistant at Double B
& A, planning to take off sick, stay at home all day and night,
out of harm’s way.

“
Glad you called, Luke,”
Jamie said. “Got this nutty phone call early this morning on your
unlisted private line. Sounded like an old lady, someone with a
husky voice, anyhow. Left a cryptic message.”

“
What’d she say?” he
whispered hoarsely.

“
Well, it doesn’t make any
sense to me,” Jamie replied. “But she said that either you write in
the box or she’d be erasing words. Weird, huh?”

He didn’t say anything for
a few moments, just stood there with the phone to his ear. His hand
wouldn’t stop trembling.

“
You still there,
Luke?”

He cleared his throat.
“Yeah, Jamie. Thanks. Don’t worry about the call. Probably just
some kook, you know?”

“
Right.”

No matter what, the old
lady’s deal had really worked for him. The words had indeed been
magical. He didn’t want her, whoever she was, doing anything that
would upset the momentum. No, he’d be there at 11:35 like he’d
agreed, write whatever she wanted him to in that fucking
box.

The fog was exceptionally
thick
, making the denizens of the
Tenderloin appear out of the mist on O’Farrell like apparitions.
Even with the collar of his blue herringbone sport coat pulled up
against the cold, Luke shivered as he quickly bypassed the ghostly
figures and approached the fuzzy yellow light of the Corner Mart.
There, waiting in the fog, stood the bag lady, peering at him with
her strange eyes. He had hoped that somehow she wouldn’t
show.