Nicky Five Aces
This was the spring of ’87 and I had just dropped off my last fare of the morning in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, the soft rot at the center of the fruit, a few square blocks where the prostitutes drift under the marquees like moths that lost interest in the flame, the dealers conduct their patient, unhurried commerce, the addicts fold themselves into doorways, and the merely poor try to look as though poverty were only a temporary arrangement. All of them out on the sidewalk like something set to simmer: junk sickness, cheap supermarket body spray and men selling their bodies in fractions. I drove a shuttle van the color of a swimming pool at midnight, an absurd, incandescent blue that made me feel, on good days, like a lighthouse, and on this one, like a target.
Ten feet from the van, something pinkish lay on the pavement, and I clocked it for a department- store dummy—bare, pale, discarded, the sort of thing that turned up in the Tenderloin the way seashells turn up on a beach, without apparent cause, without anyone claiming responsibility. Down here that’s not even an interesting Tuesday—someone’s always throwing something out onto the street. A naked mannequin was practically a welcome mat. Then the smell arrived before the shape did, copper and something else, something the body keeps in reserve for exactly this occasion, and past the blood I saw the rest of it.
She was elderly—seventy, maybe older—hair like white static arranged with a lingering, particular care, as if she’d dressed for something more than the impact. She had jumped off the building with enough conviction to open the back of her skull like a hatch, and a bone was protruding through the skin of her leg, blue-white as the flame of a just struck match. Her brains—and this is not the detail the movies prepare you for—were yellow, the pale, buttery yellow of custard, no drama in them at all, and they’d been splattered wide across the plate-glass window of an Italian restaurant, empty at that hour but for a row of small tables in red-checked cloths, each with its own carnation standing at attention in a bud vase, stiff and oblivious as a mourner who’s arrived at the wrong funeral, waiting on a customer base just reduced by one.
I was twenty years old and green as a new Benjamin. I got on the radio and called it in, and then just stayed there, because nobody tells you the protocol. Do you wait for the police? Animal control? Is there a form? In the absence of instructions, I did what I imagine most people do at the scene of something unbearable—you just wait—and the waiting does something to you that doesn’t wash off, ever.
She was blocking the sidewalk, and Turk Street, obligingly, continued to live around her, because nothing on that street stops moving, not even for the dead. A heavyset woman came first, two plastic grocery bags swinging, and at the sight of the body she made a small strangled sound behind her hand, swung the bags away from the body as though it might take something from her, and ran—fast, for a woman her size, the bags beating against her thighs like wings that had given up on flight. Two young men crossed over deliberately, almost eagerly, just to get a closer look, and stood over her laughing the way you laugh at something so you don’t have to feel it, trading small cruelties back and forth like passing a cigarette: she’s never looked better; that’s really gonna hurt in the morning—amusement as anesthetic, the oldest drug in the pharmacy. Then a man came out of the restaurant bearing a tablecloth of a white so bright it seemed almost ceremonial, laid it over her the way you’d cover a birdcage for the night, and began sweeping her brains off the concrete with a kitchen broom, unhurried, a man with a system—the window could wait until after the lunch rush.
Laughing, crying, fleeing, lingering, shouting, crossing for a better angle—it was the whole emotional buffet, help yourself, and none of it, not one gesture of it, resembled any other. We are, all of us, so relentlessly particular in our griefs and our jokes and our small, misplaced kindnesses—every nervous system wired different, patched together from different faulty parts. And yet watching that custard evidence of her being swept so carefully away, I understood the one thing that tied the whole crowd together, hers and theirs both: we are all, in the end, on the same appointment—food for worms, indistinguishable at last, our particularities returned to the ground like something only ever borrowed. I have carried her with me ever since—not her face, which I never saw, but the particular, cerebral yellow of her, and the white tablecloth settling over her like a curtain call—a surrender, and the carnations that went on standing at attention in their little glass vases, indifferent, as though nothing at all had happened, which, in the only sense that mattered, it hadn’t.
#
Nicky Five Aces. Brother. Twin. Father. Husband. Sportsman. He never bets on anything that eats and never caught a fish. Chasing the dream through Substack @nickyfiveaces. With much thanks to the staff at the Irvine Public Library, kind, helpful, overworked and underpaid.