One Foot Off the Gutter Read Online Free PDF Page B

fantasies.
    It wasn’t fair, but that was la vida. Alice kept hassling me for money. She said the apartment wasn’t big enough for the two of us. She complained that she didn’t have enough money to buy groceries. She’d known what she was getting into when she married me; she knew the money wouldn’t be so great. I guess neither of us had counted on being so poor. When I told her most cops were as broke as we were, she’d cried. Alice didn’t want to hear that. In situations that were soaked with Alice’s tears and because of my inability to stop them, I thought Bellamy was lucky. He could talk and look at women without feeling like he was cheating on his mate. When it came to females, Bellamy didn’t have a regret in the world. He could live for the moment.
    â€œWanna get something to eat?”
    â€œNah, Bells. I’m not hungry.”
    â€œYou’re lying. You haven’t eaten anything today.”
    In Bellamy’s opinion, I was slipping away into a universe of my own making. I watched him monitor me out of the corner of his eye while I drove the car, narrowly avoiding
a dog in the cross walk at Twentieth Street. My personal life wasn’t any of Bellamy’s business, but he wasn’t aware of that.
    â€œWhat the fuck is up with you, homes?”
    â€œI don’t have an appetite. Is that a problem?”
    I stared out past the cracks in the windshield at the street. Then I shrugged with one palm held upward to indicate the speechless depth of my troubles. I turned my head forty-five degrees to the right and gave Bellamy a wooden stare. Capp Street receded behind us, and the broad glare of Mission Street greeted us like a long lost friend. We were always returning to the palm tree lined boulevard. That’s where the station was located. It was where we hung out. In that way, as beat cops, we were no different from the cholos and the assholes out there. I had always found the similarity disconcerting; to know how close I was to the bottom itself and how much I identified with it, did not reassure me.
    â€œWhen you look at the streets, the buildings on the sidewalks and the people hanging out the windows, what do you see?” I asked.
    â€œI don’t see shit,” Bellamy grinned. “What do you see?”
    â€œI see real estate.”
    â€œLike today?” Bellamy cut in.
    â€œLike every day on the calendar,” I intoned. “There are no exceptions and no holidays. Every day is real estate, and everyone has their place in it. If you think big,” I tapped my own sunburned, brown-spotted temple with a finger. “You become a rico . If you think small, you get nada .”

    Bellamy had no idea where the topic was going so he kept his mouth shut. What did he care about real estate? His personal geography consisted of the squad car, three or four bars in the Mission and Noe Valley, plus an occasional visit to the Golden Gate Bridge.
    In owning up to this, telling Bellamy what I did, a twinge of bitterness ate at the lining of my stomach. To be sure, I was existing no better than if I’d been on welfare. My life was being doled out to me, as if I were standing in line with a million people in front of me and a million more behind me with everybody waiting for some crumbs to fall into our hungry mouths.
    â€œWe’re cannon fodder,” I explained to him. I pointed to myself as an example, jabbing my own bulletproof vest with an indignant thumb. “We guard the real estate for every damn person you see on the street. There are a lot of buildings in this town. All of them belong to somebody. I want one for myself so badly, I can smell it on my hands. And you know what? My hands smell like blood. Do you hear me? They smell like they’ve been dipped in my own blood.”
    I put on the brakes for a bag lady dragging a burlap sack across Seventeenth Street. Her emaciated profile was thrown into black-bordered relief by