One Foot Off the Gutter Read Online Free PDF

I turned the squad car off Mission Street. The assholes had guns, but the citizens were backstabbing nightmares. They kissed your feet when you were talking to them. Then they turned around to stab you in the back with their civil rights.
    At least with the assholes, you knew what you were getting into. Everything started at the same spot: at the
point of no return. In that way, assholes were consistent. They spoke the same language as cops. They followed the same code. Everyone was an animal. Everybody had their own territory. You stayed out of their way and they kept away from you. You had to quarantine them because you’d never get rid of them. Those were the golden rules.
    Bellamy was checking out a group of men standing at the corner of Shotwell Street.
    â€œCan you slow down for a moment, Coddy. I want to see what these guys are up to.”
    â€œAnything?”
    â€œNah, they just looked suspicious to me, that’s all.”
    There was another way to look at the picture. There was always another way. Maybe all the assholes and the citizens were cops in disguise; maybe they were plainclothes officers working undercover without any hope of recognition. Maybe everyone in the city had the soul of a cop underneath their various disguises.
    â€œLet’s get a cup of coffee when we get back over to Mission Street. I didn’t get enough this morning.”
    â€œI thought you always drank more than your share of coffee, Bells.”
    â€œCoddy, you don’t know me as well as you’d like to.”
    As his partner, I thought that one over.
    Â 
    So far, the day had been uneventful. We’d collared a quartet of crack hippies arguing over a lost bag of rocks. We had come upon them while they were crawling on their hands and knees looking for their dope. It was a common
sight in the Mission; men and women kneeling on the pavement in the name of lost drugs.
    Bellamy found the bag in five seconds flat. It had been sticking out of the oldest crack hippie’s back pocket.
    The scenario was a far cry from the first time Bellamy had encountered a crackhead. An asshole had taken it upon himself to pull a gun on Bellamy over by Dolores Park. Bellamy had ducked behind the squad car, moving as if he was underwater, fighting off the fear. I had stood up to the assailant. I was beyond terror. My nerves were uncalibrated, hardened knots of misanthropy. I extracted my revolver from its holster and shot the basehead three times. Two bullets got lodged in the man’s ankles; the third bullet landed in a tree on the other side of the park. The asshole fell to the ground like a ton of bricks. Bellamy told the captain I had been real inspirational that night. Six months later, I received a commendation for bravery in the field.
    Today hadn’t been any different. I jumped out of the car and without wasting a second, I slammed my baton across the kidneys of the first crack hippie I saw. My philosophy was clean and efficient: knock one fiend down and the others will get the message right away.
    Someone had spray painted “fuck capitalism” on the abandoned Kilpatrick’s Bakery plant near Folsom Street. It was the dumbest sentiment I had seen in a long while.
    We rolled north on Capp Street so that Bellamy could have a chance to ogle the hookers by the Victoria Theater. The working girls usually dispersed when a patrol car drifted into sight, but it depended on who was in the car.
Bellamy was popular among the whores. He didn’t mind kidding around with them, exchanging a few laughs now and then. The hookers made me unhappy, reminding me of pent-up longings that could be mistaken for lust. The women working the curb incited me to think about my wife, not that I wanted to. It wasn’t a sexual comparison or anything like that. But any time I sized up another woman, Alice came soaring like a bird into my mind, beating her wings and blotting out all the other females on the horizon of my