The Subtle Art of Brutality

It lost a lot of sex appeal after it became commonly known to hose certain users, even after only one dose. The virgin drop, they call it. See if it wants you coming back for more or if you only rated a GMD. I saw a lot of unworthy users in my time.

Serious: I saw a junkie’s bulldog with the red-eyed stare once. Dead as the ideals of the old Democratic Party.

Still the drug persists. Cheaper labs, inexperienced folks cooking it up. Killing more. It has a rep worse than crack back in the ’80s.Worse than meth does now. It was a rep no one wants but still people risk it. People like this Benny Kolokios. So be it.

I have been heading south this entire time. Hammett Parkway all the way to fifth, right a block and then a left—southbound again—onto Regional Avenue.

Regional Avenue continues south and when I get to the Saint Ansgar River it becomes the Mannasmith Memorial Bridge.

Mannasmith Memorial is kind enough to take whoever is foolish enough to cross it into the mouth of the Burrows.

Because of its elevation and terrain, south of the river has a slightly different microclimate than north of the river does. It’s hotter. The prevailing summer marine layer helps. South of the river’s soil is much heavier in clay than north. Glaciers, deposits, ice ages. Whatever. The clay acts like pavement and absorbs the sunlight.

The way the faltering dusk carves its way through every brick and building down here gives rise to an image of what Dante and Virgil saw as they crested Limbo and entered Hell proper. A spread of land, studded with vile undergrowth and human beings who have been drawn here to suffer. Their own hands violating themselves or others. Sometimes both. I hate this place.

Business takes me here a lot.

But I light a smoke and exit off the bridge.

With the sun growing a deep orange to the west out over the bay, the Burrows is being fed another vehicle and its lost-soul driver for dinner tonight.

&n

bsp; 15

This is a mouth lined with jagged teeth, and I am stepping inside it.

The area of town known as the Burrows is just the gutter for another area of town known as Little Haight. As in Haight Street, San Francisco, California. I’ll explain.

During the ’60s San Francisco’s Haight Street was romanticized by the hippie movement. The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, they immortalized the street as a whole but especially its intersection with Ashbury. Therefore, it attracted that culture. Hippies, dirtbags, dope heads, shitbirds and the general free-loader class of humanity.

Now, decades later, the street is littered with bums, a new generation of wannabe hippies or authentic hippies so old they have no idea that their time is gone and over. So, essentially, just the bottom-of-the-barrel dregs of society. Outside of a deviant record store, a tattoo parlor or a sex paraphernalia shop these freaks would not be employable.

The area of Little Haight is the same thing, transplanted from San Francisco to fester here in Saint Ansgar. The Burrows are the streets, about thirty blocks tall and eighteen blocks wide where cops do not respond and wholesome people do not venture.

It earned the name the Burrows because it is where the rodents dwell in ramshackle hovels and clapboard fire traps. Groups of young and angry boys, teenagers on up to early twenties adorn the streets like fleas will crowd into spots on a mangy dog’s back. Most are high school-aged because once out of even a small excuse for a classroom, these punks find their way into prison or a six-foot long pine box.

Down here was the only affordable area to live in right after the Great Depression. North of the river was barely developed, and what was developed mostly belonged to the super-rich survivors of the crash or farmers. Now it is a bustling metropolis, but back then it was almost no help.

So the poor and wretched packed themselves in down here. Eventually those that could move out did so, and what was left still exists today. And that of course forms the hive of villainy that is stretching its claws up around me like the devil’s fists reaching up through a crack in the earth.

I venture on into the slums. Jeremiah would be pissed if he found out I was taking his car down here again.

Last time someone stole his stereo.

Grantham Blvd is a major artery running through here; not hard to get to. It winds for miles; widens in some parts and contracts in others. The apartment complex unfolds on the east side. Dilapidated. Fit for rodents and cockroaches. Or a wrecking ball.

I park in an open slot next to a burgundy ghetto sled with gold spokes in the wheels and a license plate reading BMPIN. Out of Jeremiah’s car. Gritty, dirty ice underfoot. I crush out my smoke on the BMPIN windshield.

A stern knock on the door and somebody stirs. Answers.

Read on Benny: front line dealer, thug punk, bully only because he has bigger guys standing behind him to push the threat, basic drug-addled shitbag. His meth mites must be biting; his forearms are covered in scabbed sores.

“Benny?” I say, looking over his shoulder. Listening.

“Yeah?”

He must deal out of his place. Anyone in this neck of the woods who, with a stranger knocking, doesn’t get alarmed must have a lot of strangers knocking.