The Second Elephant

by Kevin Newman

SAN FRANCISCO, 1981 The Summer of Love packed up and left a decade ago. The City is in a deep recession. Punk music is the soundtrack of life here. My girlfriend is a promoter for a chick band . She works out of a grey Victorian on the edge of the Mission District among the warehouses where you can make a lot of noise. My world is down in the Tenderloin. The State has opened the asylums and crazies are wandering the downtown streets, mixing with homeless vets booted from Golden Gate Park and boat people arriving every week by the planeload. My job is to get them indoors, then keep them there. It’s a fluid post in a strange world, where chaos is just below the surface, hopefully. An exotic dancer named Mimi keeps me grounded. She's not my girlfriend and this arrangement isn't working at all. According to the cops, a friend of mine has just flown off a rooftop. I don’t buy it. Bob the Mummy doesn’t either, and he would know. Those two spent a lot of nights on that same roof howling at the moon. Only good times. The secret behind his death could unravel a criminal conspiracy at the highest political levels. Millions of dollars are moving around but no one seems to see it, or wants to. His case now closed as a suicide, and a brazen killer is watching my every move. I need to chase down the truth at any cost. I have few friends left these days. He was one. I will not let his murder pass. Someone has to pay. Chapter 1. October Bob the Mummy is waiting outside the door of the Beirut Juice Bar early Monday morning in the Tenderloin. Nader has been serving me every Monday for a couple of years. He knows Bob. He is almost finished squeezing the second orange juice when I notice his eyes looking past me. In the mirror behind the counter I see clean dressed people moving quickly left to right on the sidewalk. Some are pointing. A dozen or so go by, not running, more like jogging. Some already have their cameras out, everyone in a happy-go-lucky mood. There must be a tourist bus parked somewhere nearby. When I hand Bob his drink, he is intently looking at my car across the street, invisible to the tourists moving around us to get a better view of something else. He tries to drink directly but the juice runs over his bandages. I carefully feed a straw through them to his mouth so he doesn’t have to fumble with his wrapped hands. By the time he can actually start sucking down on his juice, the crowd has grown around the marquee of the Golden Nugget Theater on the next block, yelling, snapping pictures, tourists hoping that something interesting is going to happen. A man is up there on the marquee whipping up the crowd. Bob speaks in a gravelly voice, “It’s Dan.” My stomach starts to sour. My name is Declan Kelly. I work in that building. I am barely awake and the day is beyond my control. I do not want to start my morning this way, not drawn into the Tenderloin Show, the Crazy on the Street one. Got to stay calm. I suck on my juice. I also carry a camera, a good Nikon F3, but not for gawking. I need a way to show friends who still think about me the world I have chosen, and the people who live here. We make our way slowly toward the man who is the center of the crowd’s attention. Bob the Mummy is so called because he always appears wrapped head to foot in dirty bandages. He moves stiffly and slowly due to problems with his knees and elbows. I buy him a fresh orange juice once in a while and I helped him get a safe place to live. Sometimes he guards my ten-year-old Toyota Corolla at a free parking place in the alley next to Bum Park. It’s usually wide open because of its proximity to the desperate men that rule the small piece of green. He knows them and they know him. The park, with a few beaten up benches and some ....

172 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 20, 2020