A Halloween story, 2023

This is a bit longer than average, but it took awhile to tell the tale.

The Year of the Whore

San Francisco 

     It was late October when Pennywhistle Rudy and I busked tourists on Fisherman’s Wharf. I had sweated that summer away rolling logs to the carriage of a sawmill in the Salmon River Mountains then drove combine in the oat and barley harvest east of Donnelly, Idaho. When the warning snows came at Equinox, I headed toward the ocean. Rudy rode shotgun, figuring he had at least another month before his ski-guide gig began in the Wasatch Mountains. 

     He was a tootler of Irish and Mormon tunes and I wore a brown western hat so we were a natural for the streets. He’d lean back against a building, playing jigs and reels with a coffee can full of tin whistles and a sign reading “Penny Whistles. Three bucks.” My hat was at his feet. I sat in the shade, provided security, and studied human behavior. He kept the whistle money and I took twenty-five percent of the hat. 

      One Thursday afternoon Rudy was blowing “Shebegh Shemoragh” for the fifteenth time and it was all beginning to sound the same, so I wandered toward the wharf to score some bread and cheese. Wrapped around a power pole was a poster. On the following Saturday night, Halloween, the Hookers’ Ball was to be held in Longshoremen’s Hall, sponsored by COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), with the Pointer Sisters headlining, twenty-five bucks a ticket, all proceeds to go toward the decriminalization of prostitution in California.

     This party sounded awfully good to me, but I didn’t see a way to squeeze the ticket price out of the pennywhistle budget without Rudy popping a gut, so I appropriated the poster, found a pay phone, and dialed the number for COYOTE. 

     The answering voice sounded like she had a mouthful of maple-frosted Alice B. Toklas brownie. “What’s your pleasure?” I spun out my tale, that I was fresh out of Nowhere, low on liquid assets but relatively young, healthy, awfully willing, and wanting to be at the party. Was there any work to be done? “Sure, Cowboy. Report to Patricia, Longshoremen’s Hall, Saturday morning, nine o’clock.”

     Rudy wouldn’t buy the idea. He had half a dozen reasons why an entire building full of prostitutes was indicative of the cancer attacking the underpinnings of our civilization and, by God, he was not going to be caught at a sinners’ costume party. I accused him of spending a little too much time in Utah, told him that I was going to go for it, and asked if he needed a ride anywhere. He growled that he was just fine right where he was, thank you. I dumped the change from my hat into his coffee can and suggested that he purchase some fresh California fruit to soften the stick that was up his Irish arse, then drove up into the hills of San Francisco.

     Friday morning my pal Peter from the Whole Earth days and I woke in the truck to the blast of dual air horns from the candy apple roof of a new Peterbuilt conventional parked beside me. We had bedded down in the parking lot of Tower Records, smack in the middle of the Dave Dudley (Six Days on the Road) and C.W. McCall (We Got a Convoy Goin’) Pacific Northwest promotional tour. 

     Crawling out to walk off a charley horse and air out my pants, I choked down a Camel while Dave and his buddy posed around their hundred-thousand-dollar Tonka toy, waving at the passersby as though Italian waiters on the way to work in North Beach were itching to become shit kicking, hippy hating, long haulers.

     Breakfast was bread, flabby cheese and a beer on the tailgate. After an hour it sank into the Nashville Boys that North Beach wasn’t exactly on a truck route, that country songs and CB lingo didn’t pump the pulse of Baghdad-by-the-Bay and there was a good chance that the groupies in go-go boots weren’t going to show. 

     I fished an Idaho Fish and Game Hunting Regulations and carpenter’s pencil out of the glove box and asked the fellows for their autographs. Dave asked me who I was truckin’ for.

     “Mister Natural”

     “Is that an over-the-road outfit?”

    “Yeah. All over the road.”

     The rest of Friday was spent hanging around the marina, watching sailboat collisions, jogger fashions, conga drummers, and kite fights. I read a short work on socialist aesthetics by Ernst Fischer titled “The Necessity of Art.”

     The only woman in Longshoremen’s Hall at nine o’clock on Saturday morning was a short person in eyeglasses, looking as though she had written a treatise at Berkeley about the influence of Harry Bridges on the economic substrata of maritime transport. She spotted me and said, “Hello, Cowboy. I’m Patricia. Margo said you would be here. The fire department is going to be here any minute to hang our light show screen. Your job is to stall them because the screen is still in Sausalito. I don’t care how you do it but hold onto them for a half an hour while I go fetch it.” She got into a blue Volkswagen van and peeled out.

      Sure enough, down Bay Street came an entire parade of SFFD equipment, including a command-post utility truck, a medium-size pumper, and a hook and ladder rig complete with a driver for the ass end. When everything air-braked to a whoa in front of the Hall, I ambled over to the fellow in the command vehicle and told him the truth. He pulled out a pocket watch. “I’ll give you ten minutes.” I asked would it be OK if I admired their equipment?

    As he and I walked around the buffed and polished, perfectly machined chunks of American workmanship, I found that a careless roofer had purchased my ticket to the Ball. Sticking out of the lower sidewall of the right front tire of the hook and ladder rig was a big old nasty square-headed tarpaper nail. The tire was hissing. I pointed this out to the Captain. He got on his radio, ordered a service truck, and sent three of his guys into the hall to see what needed to be done. 

     I primped that afternoon in a laundromat in the Avenues, reading Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics while the machines sucked the grime from my best Roy Rogers on peyote costume. My hat reshaped into something that didn’t look as much like panhandler’s till and my boots took a fair shine. 

     The closest parking spot was a half-mile from the party. The woman at the ticket counter was a Tinkerbell with tits, wielding a day-glo wand and wine glass. I told her my name, that I was supposed to get into the deal for free. She flashed a tinkly grin, doused me with gold glitter and said, “Hi, Cowboy, I am Lottie Dah. Margo wants to see you. Down the hall, second door on the left.”

    Taped to that door was a black and white photo of a very fit woman standing on the summit of Mt. Whitney planting a flag that said “’74, Year of the Whore.” I knocked carefully. The sleepy voice from the phone call answered, “Come on down” and I entered a bunkhouse wet dream, the hookers’ dressing room crammed with immodest women in a moving catalog of underwear styles.

     The woman in the picture laughed, “Don’t be scared, Pard. I’m Margo St. James. You already know Patricia. This is Erika, Lola Lola, Candy Brown, Juicy Lean, Lucy Jean, Jennifer, and Dorothy. Dorothy is my Mom. You did a great job with the fire department this morning and I’d like you to take care of my mother tonight. I’ll make it worth your while. Most of the guys with cameras are going to be vice squad creeps, so you keep them away from her. You’re welcome to stay here while we get ready, but you look thirsty, so take this note to the bartender and we will find you in a little while.”

     Two beers later I was talking with a plumber from Daly City who was dressed as a hot water tank. Margo and Dorothy showed up, adorned alike in ball gowns and pheasant feather masks. Margo escorted us to a table by the wall then whisked away. Mom and I talked small, the school secretary from the coast of Washington and the hick from Spudland, plopped by coincidence into the whirlpool of a full-tilt San Francisco Halloween.

     The was plenty of people-watching. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence were there, ten guys in nuns’ habits and Eldridge Cleaver cock pants. A chubby lawyer rolled in glue and cornflakes and came as the heartbreak of psoriasis. There were a hundred variations on a theme of Moulin Rouge, a topless Irish accordion player whom even Rudy might have appreciated, a set of faux Siamese twins joined at the crotch, a man dressed as a dog leading a dog dressed as a man, and too many musketeers.

     The Pointer Sisters steamed up the room with their neutron dance. Dorothy and I rubbed parts during the slow dances. When the seedy cop in the Phillip Morris bellhop uniform approached us with his Roliflex, I shielded Dorothy and gave him the old If-you-don’t-leave-now-I-will-rip-off-your-arm-and-beat-you-with-it Idaho barroom stare.

     My date was a charming woman with some great ideas. Dorothy thought that no vegetarian likes to open a refrigerator and be faced with a drawer labeled “Meat,” so someone should market sticker material saying “Veggies” for the retrofit until the Amana folks fell in line with the new demographics. She thought ashtrays and cigarette lighters need not be standard equipment in modern automobiles and that Detroit had the technical knowhow to reroute some air conditioner coils into a small cooler where the ashtray once was. Dorothy knew refrigeration.

     At midnight Margo appeared saying that a van and driver were at the front door, ready to take Mom home to Marin County. She handed me a box that once held Manilla envelopes and asked if I would make sure that Dorothy and the box made it home safely. It would be my pleasure to see her home if the driver would bring me back to my truck. What was in the box? Margo leaned into me, kissed me on the earlobe, and whispered, “Thirty-five thousand dollars.”

    The woman behind the wheel was a smooth professional, probably a city bus driver, and I suspected she was armed. She glided the van through city traffic and over the sparkling bay while I sat in the back with the box full of cash on my lap and the hooker’s mother’s hand in mine. On the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais we pulled up to a cottage on a corner. I escorted Dorothy to the door, handed her the box, and we kissed ever so warmly and gently. She smiled. “I will write to you, General Delivery, Sausalito. Thank you for the lovely evening.”

     A week later a postcard arrived with a picture of Bellingham.

 

Dearest J.D.,

Under that chilly exterior of yours,

There is a volcano brewing.

Let it out.

Love,

Dorothy.

    I worked for Margo as her “Big Cowboy” off and on for the next few winters but never saw Dorothy again. I have her name tattooed on my left shoulder, just below Jelly Donut.