Bloodsucking fiends: a love story

really couldn't afford. He didn't seem to be able to look away and walk on like everyone else. Maybe it was something you developed after a while. Maybe the constant assault of despair callused your compassion. A plea for money for food always made his stomach growl, and a quarter was a small price to pay to quiet it. The plea for eyeliner appealed to the writer part of him, the part that believed that creative thought was worth something.
    Yesterday he had heard a tourist tell a homeless man to get a job.
    "Pushing a shopping cart up and down these hills is a fucking job," the homeless guy had said. Tommy gave him a buck.
    It was still light when Tommy reached Enrico's on Broadway. He paused momentarily and looked over the few customers who were eating on the patio by the street. Jody wasn't there. He stopped at the host's station and reserved a table outside for a half hour later.
    "Is there a bookstore around here?" he asked.
    The host, a thin, bearded man in his forties, with perfect anchorman-gray hair, raised an eyebrow, and with that small gesture made Tommy feel like scum. "City Lights is one block up on the corner of Columbus," the host said.
    "Oh, that's right," Tommy said, batting himself on the forehead as if he'd just remembered. "I'll be back."
    "We are giddy with anticipation," the host said. He spun curtly on one heel and walked away.
    Tommy turned and started up Broadway until he was accosted by a barker outside a strip joint, a man in a red tailcoat with a top hat.
    "Tits, slits, and clits. Come on in, sir. The show starts in five minutes."
    "No, thanks. I have a dinner date in a few minutes."
    "Bring the little lady back with you. This show can turn a maybe into a sure thing, son. We'll have her sitting in a puddle before you leave."
    Tommy squirmed. "Maybe," he said. He hurried along until the barker two doors up, this one a buxom woman wearing leather and a ring in her nose, stopped him.
    "The most beautiful girls in town, sir. All nude. All hot. Come on in."
    "No, thanks. I have a dinner date in a few minutes."
    "Bring her -"
    "Maybe," Tommy said, walking on.
    He was stopped three more times before he reached the end of the block, and each time he declined politely. He noticed that he was the only one who stopped. The other pedestrians just walked on, ignoring the barkers.
    Back home, he thought, it's impolite to ignore someone who is speaking to you, especially if they call you "sir." I guess I'm going to have to learn City manners.
    She had fifteen minutes before she was supposed to meet Tommy at Enrico's. Allowing for another bus ride and a short walk, she had about seven minutes to find an outfit. She walked into the Gap on the corner of Van Ness and Vallejo with a stack of hundred-dollar bills in her hand and announced, "I need help. Now!"
    Ten salespeople, all young, all dressed in generic cotton casual, looked up from their conversations, spotted the money in her hand, and simultaneously stopped breathing – their brains shutting down bodily functions and rerouting the needed energy to calculate the projected commissions contained in Jody's cash. One by one they resumed breathing and marched toward her, a look of dazed hunger in their eyes: a pack of zombies from the perky, youthful version of The Night of the Living Dead .
    "I wear a size four and I've got a date in fifteen minutes," Jody said. "Dress me."
    They descended on her like an evil khaki wave.
    Tommy sat at a patio table with only a low brick planter box between him and the sidewalk. To avoid the titty bar barkers, he had crossed the street eight times in the half block from City Lights Bookstore to Enrico's and he was a little jangled from dodging traffic. He ordered a cappuccino from a waiter who fawned over him like a mother hen, then stared in amazement when the waiter returned with a cup the size of a large soup bowl and a plate of brown crystalline cubes.
    "These are raw sugar cubes, honey. So much better for you than that white poison."
    Tommy picked up the soup spoon and reached for a sugar cube.
    "No, no, no," the waiter scolded. "We use our demitasse spoon for our cappuccino." He pointed to a tiny spoon that rested in the saucer.
    "Demitasse," Tommy repeated, feeling reckless. In Indiana the use of the word "demitasse" was tantamount to leaping out of the closet in scandalous flames. San Francisco was a great city! A great place to be a writer! And gay guys seemed like pretty nice people, once you got past their