The Serv-Well
Chemical Lust
It all starts with me coming home from my telemarketing gig,
off the BART station at eleven every night per always, and on up the Hyde Street wind
tunnel for six blocks to the Serv-Well corner liquor pusher for an overpriced quart of
milk at Ellis Street when a brother in front of me the size of a brick shithouse strolls
five, maybe six paces out into Hyde, then whirls one hundred and eighty degrees on a
dime at the sound of some shit talk and the bark of a forty-ouncer smacking off the
sidewalk; another brother a quarter of the block down Ellis throwing down the corner
liquor store gauntlet; two young men about to get it on in the heart of the one and
only Tenderloin and adrenalin ripples out from the intersection, pushing uphill,
rolling downhill and crawling toward the back of every alleyway evenly over a three
block radius and it’s all going down in front of the Serv-Well Market and I gotta go,
yesiree I gotta get myself right the fuck across this here traffic, right across this
here street and never in my life have I been so happy to see the gorgeous desolation
of O’Farrell Street while pistol shots don’t sound like they do in the movies (PA-CHEW! PA-CHEW!)
but are a pop popping percussion that leaks around street corners and boxes in my ears while
I hole in against a cleft in a brick wall only to find myself with an older, darker sister
with canyon deep wisdom etched in her handsome jawbone croaks out “awshit, fools is gonna
be dealin’ out they dyin’” right before taking a gi-normous hit off of a tiny glass pipe,
then gripping my shoulders while throwing her left leg around my waist and thrusting her
tongue deep into my tonsils, allowing her coke washed, E & J flavored crack-hale roll into
and overflow my sinuses leaving me heated, swollen and eager; leaving me wanting nothing
more than to pull this smooth slab of loving neuro-electric carboplasm, deep inside of
me until my wet has somehow consumed her wet but my ears pulse with the bastard cosmic
hum of the ether and the distant pop-pop-pop, which caresses me warm, safe and sexy in
the piss baked concrete smell of O’Farrell Street where I dream the creamy dreams of
the possible for a period of time I cannot measure, but
which only ever ends with me prone and alone in front of the stark,
steely gray judgment that is the entrance gate to my apartment building…miraculously with
keys, wallet and change somehow still in place…miraculously with my cock still dry and
comfortably secured inside still zipped up Levis…miraculously with the sickly orange
streetlight pall of O’Farrell Street completely abandoned, and every storefront bolted
down and tucked snug against each other till the coming daylight, including, I am quite
certain, my quart of milk safely ensconced within the Serv-Well market.