2 or 3 things I know about her

The doctor closed the suture in the old man’s arm. He winced, looking away.

“Come back in four weeks to take these out,” the doctor said, then handed me a prescription. “Make sure he takes all the antibiotics, and keep an eye on the stitches, if they get infected, bring him back, and we’ll give him a shot.”

“Oh, I hate needles.” Billie said, making a face, as he buttonned what remained of his right sleeve.

The doctor rolled his eyes as he slipped out through the curtain.

“What small shoulders. . .” I thought, as I helped Billie with his coat.

I held the curtain open for him as he smoothed his pencil moustache and adjusted his skullcap before proceeding through the emergency room.

“Who is this man?”, I asked myself.

Two hours earlier, as I rounded the corner of 16th and Webster in downtown Oakland, he stumbled into the street with two boys atop him. The screech of my tires sent the boys running. He steadied himself against my hood, stanching the blood from his upper right arm.

When I called a few days later, he said the suture was healing nicely. I offered to take him that Sunday to Jack London Square and he agreed.

It was a fine spring day, the Square was crowded, and we found a bench out of the breeze.

Soon Billie drew my attention to a man, whom I watched dart in and out of the crowd for a few minutes, then disappear.

“That’s how we used to take a man’s wallet.” Billie said, quite non-chalantly.

We returned the following Sunday, and the next.

When the winter rains came, we repaired to Esther’s Orbit Room. Over the brunch buffet, Billie told me about Oakland Army Base, which moved 9,000 soldiers a month through its gates during the peak of the Vietnam war, and the retinue of woman and liquor that filled 7th street and San Pablo Avenue in their wake.

He spoke of the clubs with exotic, far-away-sounding names, the Zanzibar, House of Joy, El Dorado, the Mug and Jug, the gambling shacks squeezed in between buildings, with doors so narrow, you had to turn sideways to enter, the music, the hustles, the Law .

But mostly he spoke of his lover, Rock, with whom he built a racketeering empire that stretched from the foot of San Pablo avenue all the way to the Berkeley city limits.

One Sunday we went to their former flag-ship, the Heartbreak Hotel. Amidst the broken bottles and used condoms, Billie recounted how one day in 1974, the pimps laid down a red carpet, put a crown on Rock’s head, and paraded him up and down San Pablo Avenue for an hour to the cheer of prostitutes who spilled out onto the balconies.

Wandering through the delapitated hallways, he ran his hands over the walls, searching he explained, for the entrance to the secret passageway, which gained one access to all thirty rooms and wallets therein.

I began to get a scent of another world.