Herk and the Burger Queen

I’m sitting on the stairs outside of the old Victorian which may once have had charm but is now all faded peeling paintwork and graffiti and piss-smell, trying to make my case to a woman at ErosMassage.com, when I see Herk staring at me from beyond the gate at the bottom of the stairs. He is scratching persistently at the left side of his battered, old face, rubbing years of grime energetically into the matted beard that had been making a nest of his chin since long before I moved in to the place on Haight Street. I pretend not to see him. I look through him as if there was barely a gate separating me from the road below, let alone a mad tramp regarding me with squinty eyes.

“Look,” I say to Kim from ErosMassage.com. “It’s simple. Just find my number and erase it from your website.” Kim has a practical, motherly voice. It is not the kind of voice I was expecting to hear on the end of an erotic hotline.
“I’ve searched our entire database, sir. I can’t find your number anywhere.”

For going on two months, I have been receiving up to four calls a day from hesitant married men looking for illicit caresses. At first I was as confused as they were. After ten calls I decided I’d had enough, particularly since people in the market for erotic massages tend to want them between three and five in the morning and turning the phone off isn’t an option because I need its built-in alarm feature to wake me up every day. Usually the caller speaks in muffled tones so you can hardly hear what he wants. I imagine him in his slippers and plaid pajamas, shivering from a callbox, his pickup putt-putting quietly at the curbside about five miles from home.

Most of the callers hang up when I answer the phone. Some of them get as far as asking to speak to someone called Monica. When I grunt, “Who?,” my voice growling several octaves below most Monicas I know, they generally hang up on me. Only on one occasion, have I managed to keep the caller on the end of the line long enough to find out who Monica is and what I’ve been doing fielding her phone calls all these weeks.

Hank Junior was an uninhibited used car salesman from Oakland. He didn’t mind telling me that my cell phone number was listed under Monica’s name on the ErosMassage website. I thanked him and felt as sorry for the frustrated men who would have to find someone else to call from the lonely callbox as I did for Monica and all the business she was losing to big, bristly me.

When I call ErosMassage to complain about the problem, Kim can’t do anything about it. Despite a thorough and extensive search, my number, she explains, is nowhere on her portal.

“What do you mean it’s nowhere on your portal?” I croak, watching Herk move a scabby hand to itch the right side of his face. He has stopped staring at me and is busy unbuttoning his fly with his spare hand. “How come these people are calling me then?” The hiss of Herk peeing against the neighbor’s wall isn’t doing anything to undercut my growing agitation. Kim has no answer.

“I really don’t know, perhaps your number is listed on an old, cached version of the site…”
A stream of smelly, yellowish liquid is flowing past my front gate. Herk’s ablutions are accompanied by a song, a scatological but surprisingly tuneful rendition of “It Aint What You Do It’s The Way That You Do It.” I lose the end of Kim’s explanation but it doesn’t make any difference. As the acrid pee-pong assaults my nostrils and nerve endings, and Kim’s voice merges with the memory of a geography teacher I had at school who handed out detention slips wrapped around mini Mars Bars, it dawns upon me that I could be fielding Monica’s calls forever.

◊ ◊ ◊

Herk doesn’t know I call him Herk. He’s Herk because when he passes out on the sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon a few doors down from the house on Haight Street, I hear “herk, herk, herk” as I step over his snoring old body on my way to buy cigarettes. When he’s awake, Herk stares my way quite a bit, but I’m not sure he knows I exist. He doesn’t look at me, he looks past me. I am part of the street, a bit of human architecture, no more worth knowing than the tufts of grass growing between the cracks in the sidewalk.

I moved to the house on Haight Street a year ago, chiefly to get away from a souring live-in girlfriend situation. It was one of those situations where I think everything is fine, but she – Julia -- thinks otherwise. Take the Last Cappuccino, for instance. I order it to round off what is slated to be the Big Reconciliation Dinner. What I don’t realize is that a cup of overpriced frothy coffee can relegate two years of cohabitation and five years of friendship to the past tense. It’s one of those meals in which “gnocchi”, “more parmesan” and “the check please,” are poorly disguised code for “let’s break up,” “asshole” and “you never loved me anyway.”

When Julia returns from a re-composure trip to the ladies restroom, her third in half an hour, I realize that I have been staring into the froth of the prophetic cappuccino for close to fifteen minutes. She joins in. We stare at the Last Cappuccino as if the answer to everything is embedded in the cloud of wispy foam. I take a sip and she switches her gaze to the flagon of olive oil. I set the cup back in its saucer. We both stare at the cup again, even though the froth has gone and is now, I assume, decorating the hairs on my upper lip.

We must have been staring at the Last Cappuccino for a very long time, or at least, very intensely, because after a while, a perplexed-looking waiter comes over to our table. He frowns and asks if there is anything wrong with the coffee.

◊ ◊ ◊

Those first few weeks on Haight, I spend mostly in the Burger Joint across the street, where I eat quarter-pounders, suck my way through countless chocolate shakes and contemplate a return to New York. One afternoon, I’m sitting in one of the clinical, red plastic booths when I notice an old geezer staring in. His face is a gnarled, guarded tree stump. His hair is sprouting in nineteen directions. The nighttime doorways of Haight Street are imprinted on his filthy skin, but the women’s-cut denim jacket and jeans he wears are spotlessly clean. A waitress in a regulation baseball cap (red, “The World Is A Great Big Burger!” splashed across it in silver,) scurries out with a bulging Burger Joint takeout bag. Handing it gently to the trampy-looking guy, she smiles, and with a gesture as simple as tossing a quarter to a panhandler, she leans into him, wraps her arms around his scruffy neck and kisses him full on his thin, cracked lips.

From that moment onwards, I see Herk and his Burger Queen everywhere. Returning from my morning run in Golden Gate Park, I frequently find him padding around on the sidewalk near my gate, scratching, coughing and muttering to himself. She’ll pop in and out of her house, carrying a beer or a magazine, which she passes to Herk with a smile and always a kiss. Sometimes I see them together in the café around the corner, his whiskers wrapped morosely around a cup of coffee, her arms wrapped around him, shielding him from the glare of the morning sun.

Occasionally, I spot them further afield: wandering down Market Street, a cigarette stuck into the corner of his mouth, her Burger Joint cap slightly crooked on her head. I see them staring at the sea down on Ocean Beach, arm in arm, oblivious to the flying Frisbees and bouncing dogs.

The waitress from the Burger Joint can’t take her hands and eyes off Herk. She is always making adjustments to his appearance, like a fashion designer fussing over a catwalk model minutes before he steps out onto the runway. Despite the attention she pays him, I have never heard her speak to him. The only words I have ever heard her say to anyone are, “what’ll it be today, sir?” and “would you like fries or onion rings with that?” in a reedy, raspy voice that sounds like a gust of wind whistling through a mailbox. With Herk, she is all soft gestures and silent, expressive care. She doesn’t tell him she loves him; she doesn’t need to.

The Burger Queen is always good to Herk, but Herk isn’t always good to the Burger Queen. He shouts at her. He calls her “sloven” and “baggage” in public, two terms of endearment that you never hear people use in San Francisco or anywhere else outside television costume dramas involving surly Victorian butlers and heroic scullery maids, for that matter. She doesn’t say anything back to him. The abuse makes her appear a bit smaller, like a red-cheeked sparrow. It makes her frown into her cup of coffee and shuffle her feet.

◊ ◊ ◊

The calls from ErosMassage will not abate. I am losing sleep to all the lonely men, the mumbling early morning callers who are, for reasons way beyond my powers of comprehension, surfing a cached version of a second-rate erotic massage website. When the phone rings at five a.m, I cannot get back to sleep. I’ve taken to wandering groggily down the hallway to the front door, sitting on the top step and watching the yellow and gray San Francisco dawn seep over the tops of the old Victorians like cool honey. It’s on these mornings that I gradually become aware of two things: a nagging suspicion that my life is about as meaningful as a redundant listing on a dead Web-page, and that Herk wakes up every morning on the Burger Queen’s stone-hard but well-kept front porch.

◊ ◊ ◊

I must remember to turn off my cell phone whilst it’s charging at night. I must find out where ErosMassage.com is based, march in there and make the full extent of my incredulity and annoyance felt. I wonder if Kim is good-looking. I wonder if Monica exists. I wonder whether Julia has met someone else yet.

◊ ◊ ◊

One day I find Herk propped up against my shoulder on the 22 Bus. On the 22 Bus, people punch each other, crank up the volume on their portable stereos and fall asleep in strangers’ laps. I am sitting on the 22 on my way back from a date’s house one morning, with an old Joy Division song in my head and a blank feeling in my heart, as if the previous evening had happened not to me but to a vague acquaintance, when the bus starts shaking. From my vantage point towards the front of the bus, I can just make out a graying scalp and two hairless, sinewy arms hammering the side of the bus. The man is strong, although the pallor and boniness of his limbs suggest an anemic child. The bus driver opens the doors and Herk shuffles on, dragging a woman who I don’t recognize behind him.

The fact that the woman can neither speak nor support the weight of her own body is not as alarming to me as the realization that she is not the waitress from the Burger Joint. As Herk pauses to push some coins into the fare machine, he lets go of the woman, who crumples to the floor of the bus looking and sounding like a set of deflated bagpipes. She narrowly avoids an elderly Chinese woman’s enormous bagfuls of groceries as Herk picks her up and pulls her into a sitting position, two seats down from me. Then he takes his place between me and the woman, who has by this time passed out, her head slumped against Herk’s scrawny chest.

The bus wobbles down the road. Within a couple of minutes, Herk is resting his head upon my right shoulder, quietly rasping “herk, herk, herk,” with every fuggy expelled breath. I sit there, feeling almost normal. He doesn’t smell too bad. People do what people do: they pretend to ignore the stranger trying to ignore the sleeping couple, ignorant of the suppressed emotions tightening the atmosphere around them. A few minutes pass. The bus makes two stops. The couple sleeps on. Under the weight of his body, I can feel my mobile phone buzzing, buzzing, buzzing. I reached for the phone, but it’s in the top pocket of my jacket, under Herk’s head. The vibrate-tone must be as loud as a Boeing 747 taking off in his left ear, but still Herk herks away, oblivious. I try to shake him awake, but he won’t be woken.

“Excuse me,” I say into the grimy right ear, which nudges the air like a spring bulb poking out of the earth. He awakes in an uneventful way, as if used to constant interruptions.
The voice on the end of the phone seems to be that of a wisp-thin girl with dyed blonde hair and a pencil-skirt, a Pink Lady no doubt spilling from her hand as she squeaks into the mouthpiece. It’s Monica. Monica, the masseuse, she says perfunctorily, pronouncing “masseuse” to rhyme with “booze”. She got my number, she says, from Kim at ErosMassage.com.

“It’s like this, Toots, I need to get that cellphone from you.” She is not one for small talk.
I have never been called Toots before. Julia calls me Ducky, Sexy and Bingo (after her dog.) During sex, girls sometimes whisper things like Honey, Sugar and Baby into my chest, the open pores acting like giant, reverberating speakers between my skin and my head. One girlfriend calls me Handsome, but often says she is joking. Another calls me Steven. This is odd because my name doesn’t even begin with an S.

I tend to ignore the nicknames that girls give me. But there is something about being called Toots by a Pink Lady who wants your cell phone or your life that I find sweetly insane.
“Sure,” I say, causing Herk and his narcoleptic girlfriend to keel over as I wrench free and jump off the bus. “Why not?”

◊ ◊ ◊

In the morning, six hours before I am due to meet Monica for lunch during which, I have been informed, I will hand over my phone and receive five hundred dollars for my trouble, and one hour after being woken up by a caller who doesn’t ask for Monica but simply introduces himself by saying, “Look, I just want sex. How much does it cost?” I remember it’s trash day. With no room-mates about this early in the morning, I open the door, hulk two enormous black bins outside into the thin six a.m. light, ricochet them down the steps, yank open the heavy front gate and am greeted with an unexpected scene on the sidewalk below.

A woman is lying face down, spread-eagled across the sidewalk. With her toes almost touching the rust-bottomed bars of the front gate and her chin resting lightly on the curb, her forehead touches the tarmac between two parked cars, making a peculiar anatomical bridge under which a slimy stream of gutter water flows. Her damp dress is pulled up to her thighs, exposing clumps of lumpy varicose veins behind her knees like overcooked vermicelli. She is wearing the neon yellow overcoat of a road construction worker. A bruised banana, which looks as if someone else has placed it there, rests uneaten in her right hand.

Stepping over her to place the bins by a nearby tree for the trash collectors, I hear a munching sound to my right and turn around. It’s Herk: he’s sitting on the Burger Queen’s front steps, eating a banana and scratching his beard solemnly. A lifeless, tousled, sleeping bag gapes open a few steps above, on the Burger Queen’s porch.

I am just about to do what most San Francisco residents would do in these situations: ignore this distasteful tableaux-vivant and march inside, when I realize that Herk is not looking through me, as usual; he’s actually staring right at me, his raisin eyes pursed with criticism. Without so much as a flicker, he pitches the banana skin with Yankees perfection into one of the awaiting bins in my arms. I drop the trash in surprise, scattering the banana skin and bulging bags of tea-leaves, left-over goulash and soy milk cartons all over the sidewalk. A slopping coffee filter paper slaps the sprawling woman on the side of the head. She sleeps on. A tsunami wouldn’t wake her.

Instead of racing to pick up the trash, I compulsively reach into the back pocket of my jeans for my cellphone, as if to check out the caller ID on an incoming call, a worrying tic I seem to have developed lately. There is, however, no incoming call, just the interruption of Herk’s voice, screwing my affectation into a small ball and expertly tossing it, like the banana skin, into the garbage.

“She ain’t gonna call, so you might as well give up, kidoo,” he says, guffawing. He gets up, walks over and gently kicks the sleeping woman in the leg.
“Hey, get this, Marjorie, the poor kidoo thinks his li’l lady’ll give him a li’l break.” I don’t know what to say, so I try one of my most eloquent wordless ripostes: a look combining offence, boredom, mild amusement and impatience in a subtle but potent mélange. It doesn’t carry. Herk comes up close, brushing my shoulder with a filthy hand.

“Move on,” he says in a whisper, his burgery breath fingering my ear. “Move on, kidoo.”
Some hours later, I am sitting in The Burger Joint across the street, pretending to read the local paper and waiting for Monica. This is one Pink Lady I am curious to meet. However, I really have no intention of parting with my cellphone. Not even for five hundred bucks and a cheeseburger with a hooker. In truth, I am slightly nervous about how she is going to handle the news, but I expect we’ll have a joke about it, I’ll pay for lunch, and she won’t think it’s such a big deal. I place the compact silver phone on the table as a waitress whom I don’t recognize comes to take my order. “The World Is A Great Big Burger!”is festooned across her cap, beneath which a maze of rodent-brown corkscrew curls splay wildly. Buttons and badges and stickers and studs, all bearing the Burger Joint mantra, puncture her red uniform. You can only just make out the curves of her chest beneath all the publicity.

I hear the phone buzz aggressively on the tabletop.
“It’s Kim from ErosMassage.com. How are you? We’ve located your number on our Website and I’m happy to say we’re taking care of the problem right now.”
Strange. Kim’s voice sounds completely different – more squeaky and forced. “That’s terrific news, thanks,” I reply anyway.

“I am so sorry for the inconvenience we’ve caused you over the past few weeks and we’d really like to make it up to you somehow,” squeaks the falsetto on the end of the line. I debating whether to go right ahead and pop a mental Dom Perignon cork or ask Kim’s helium-tinged voice for more details about this extraordinary turn of events, when I look up and see a woman bearing down on me, with a bulky old-model cellphone clamped to her ear and a damaging grin.

“Sucker,” she says simply, dropping her phone into an orange suede briefcase with one hand, whilst wrenching my cellphone away from my ear with the other. Before I know what’s happening, my cellphone vanishes into the orange briefcase, the wobbling plastic antenna of her own unfashionable old model trapped outside as she slams the case shut. “Good. I’m glad that’s taken care of,” she says.

The woman thrusts a powerful arm in my direction and pumps my hand up and down vigorously. “Monica Belladonna,” she continues, plunking herself energetically into the booth next to me. Then, with long, Cruella de Ville fingernails, the color of which coordinate perfectly with the briefcase, but not with her outfit, which consists of a lime green pant-suit and blue snakeskin cowboy boots, she pushes a check towards me. The words “On Behalf Of Golden Velvet Enterprises,” stand out in staid black print underneath a sprawling, rococo-curved signature in purple pen.

“Here you go. Thanks for turning up today. It’s been a blast doing business with you, Toots.” I don’t know what I was expecting, but it’s certainly not this. I have no idea what to say.

“How…how many phones you got in there?” I dare at last, pointing at the briefcase, which Monica has emphatically shoved under the table between the blue snakeskin boots. “Bet you could give Verizon and Sprint a run for their money.”

I hear a loud squeak as the boots tighten around the briefcase, clamping it securely like steel tongs around a red-hot coal. The waitress, on her way to our table to take Monica’s order, scurries hurriedly back to the kitchen when my companion explains, with unnecessary aggression, that she has no appetite.

“You’re cute, Tootsy,” says Monica, turning back to me with a radioactive smile.
“Listen, though. I’d love to stick around and hear about your model airplane collection, but I got things to take care of, so I’ll just have to kiss your cute little Tootsy ass goodbye.”

Having lived around here for this long, my reaction should be to laugh out loud. This is such a classic Haight Street moment. I should savor every mouthful and put it all in a witty editorial for the local alternative weekly, sandwiching the story of Ms. Belladonna and her fabulous taste in footwear in between a droll account about the patients seen emerging from the medicinal marijuana clinic next door and a hilarious appraisal of the new neighborhood trend for cat-walking. (“Cats are outdoor creatures, but they do not take naturally to being dragged down Haight Street on a leash.”)

But now I’m seriously concerned about the custody of my phone.
“Look, Monica, you don’t seriously want this phone. I’ve dropped it on the ground often so it’s constantly playing up. It drops calls all the time.” Tinting her passion pink smile with a tiny tolerant sigh, the sort that might accompany the ticking-off of an upper-middle class teenager who has been caught sending video messages from his father’s new satellite phone to his friends in Geneva, Sydney and Dubai, Monica picks up the briefcase and unfurls herself to her full height. She’s very tall. Then, sniffing, she reaches down and ruffles my hair dismissively for a second before stepping away from the table and making for the door.

I lurch out of my seat, almost spilling Root Beer all over the Formica. This is too much.
“I’ll give you a hundred bucks if you give me back my phone.”
Monica isn’t even smiling now. She has this pitiful squint in her eye. At the counter, the waitress is looking grouchy, her hands folded across her militarily-festooned chest. Out of the corner of my eye, I see that Monica and I are beginning to attract the attention of several lunchtime customers.
“I’ll forward calls on to you – just give me your correct number and when people ask for you, I’ll be sure to point them in the right direction. I could even give out your number on my voicemail message if you like.”
“That’s sweet of you, Toots,” winks Monica, turning to address a middle-aged man who has just walked into the restaurant. “Next thing, he’ll be telling me it doesn’t do picture messaging.”

With that, Monica strides out, taking with her my sole means of connectivity to the outside world and leaving behind an overbearing whiff of tea rose and rubber. I slump back into my booth. There is nothing to do but eat my burger and try to make sense of the last five minutes of my life. Dismally, I realize the new waitress with the hyperactively decorated bosom has forgotten the extra avocado. It’s not entirely her fault. When the Burger Queen’s here, she brings it intuitively, so I don’t even need to ask.

◊ ◊ ◊

Finding a payphone on Haight Street is not easy. I walk many blocks with five dollars’ worth of quarters sweaty and bulging in my pocket, watching the face reflected in the windows of hair salons, music stores, smoke shops and merchants of indeterminate goods and services, become increasingly disheartened with every step. I come across one phone booth, but there are three people lined up beside it, all waiting to make calls. Much further down the street, there’s another public phone, but it looks like some urban cowboy or other has been using the receiver for lasso practice.

Eventually, back on my block, I find an unoccupied phone. The black receiver is battered, but disengaging it cautiously from its hook and placing it to my ear, I hear a dial tone and feel deliverance. When I yank the dull silver coins out of my pocket, slapping them down on the narrow counter by the phone like a drunk smacks down an empty bottle at a bar, I realize I have absolutely no idea who to call.

For some reason I can’t let go of the mouthpiece. A young mother wheeling a gurgling toddler in a buggy appears by my side. Rattling coins in one hand and jiggling the buggy with the other, she waits for me to surrender the mouthpiece patiently. But I don’t let go. I have to make a call. There must be someone to call.

I experience these moments of panic from time to time, but never yet without the soothing scrolling motion of my cellphone’s digital phonebook to alleviate the symptoms. I paw the sticky keypad on the public phone uselessly, wishing I could purloin the names and numbers of friends, lovers and ex-lovers arranged with alphabetical precision on the scroll-friendly back-lit screen of my stolen cellphone from Monica’s orange briefcase and place them under the scratched hood of this shabby payphone.

As a kid, remembering friends’ numbers was as simple as flipping through the pages of a comic book. In recent years, owing to the ravages of time, drink and an unhealthy dependence on digital technologies, I stumble even to remember my zip code. These days, I am woefully low on RAM.

Then, just as the panic is beginning to turn my mind into a frozen pond, I spot Herk. He is standing a few feet away shuffling his feet and looking up at me, smiling sweetly. He jams a red cap on his old, grey head. With the peak facing backwards and, “The World Is A Great Big Burger!” greeting passers by, he suddenly looks very young. “It Aint What You Do It’s The Way That You Do It,” he sings quietly to himself, unbuttoning his fly. I want to interrupt him. I want to grab him by his flapping lapels and ask, “Herk, where’s the Burger Queen? What’s going on with you two? Why do you act the way you do around her? Is she ever coming back?”

But I don’t. Listlessly I watch him splash a lamppost with piss, while to my left, the young mum is jiggling the buggy and rattling the coins with increasing vigor. I stuff a quarter into the slot and dial the only number still imprinted on the ragged Rolodex of my mind: Julia’s. The phone rings.
“Hello?” says a young, female voice at the other end.
“Julia please,” I splutter.
“Who?”
“Julia. Julia Baker.”
“We’ve got a James and a Zoe, but there’s no Julia here, I’m afraid.”

◊ ◊ ◊

There’s nothing like getting a new cellphone to make you feel like you’re making strides, moving on, cleaning up. I choose the latest model, a Nokia, as sleek as a smooth stone, perfectly formed for skimming. Aerodynamic as it is, this stone is skimming no further than my jeans pocket. I cancel my agreement with one mobile communications company and take up wantonly with another. From the depths of her massage parlor, Monica Belladonna is no doubt wishing me ill. I rebuild my phone book, an annoying but unavoidable process involving an apologetic group email message. The message reaches everyone but Julia, whose email bounces back with an “unknown recipient” tag attached.

◊ ◊ ◊

Early one morning, a few weeks later, my sleep is interrupted by the sound of my cellphone ringing. I reach for it in a stupor, but before I can say hello, the line goes dead. A minute later, the phone rings again.
“Hello,” I croak into my pillow.
“Dirk?,” says a doubtful female voice on the end of the line.
“I think you’ve got the wrong number.”
“Have I reached 415 776 7763?”
“Yes,” I say, “that’s my number.” I sit up in bed too fast, and all I can see are fat purple splodges dancing against a smoky curtain.
“Well that’s weird,” says the woman. “I definitely dialed the right number.”
The woman hesitates before venturing, shyly, “Are you with CyberStud?”

San Francisco, CA

September, 2003

Copyright 2003 Chloe Veltman