Tales of the City 02 - More Tales of the City

boisterous tourists seated near the pool. He didn’t, though. He approached the young lovers with a toothy, imploring smile, holding a red rose in his outstretched hand.
    Now it was unavoidable. “Burke, have you got a peso or something for him?”
    Her companion didn’t answer. He was chalk white, and still as a corpse.
    “Burke, is something …?”
    His voice was scarcely more than a whimper, a pathetic trapped-animal sound. “Make him go,” he said.
    “Burke, he’s only a—”
    “Please, please … make him go!”
    The dwarf needed no encouragement. He was three tables away by the time Burke stumbled into the shrubbery and fell to his knees, vomiting. Mary Ann moved to his side and gently stroked the strawberry curls on the back of his neck.
    “It’s O.K.,” she said. “It’s O.K.”
    Seconds later, he straightened up and tried to regain his dignity. “Forgive me, please. I’m really sorry. I should have …”
    “It’s O.K.,” she said softly. “I can see how he might make you …”
    Burke shook his head. “It wasn’t him, Mary Ann.”
    “What?”
    “It was the rose.”

Douchebag
    O NCE A PHILIPPINE NIGHTCLUB SPECIALIZING IN bosomy chanteuses, the Mabuhay Gardens had mutated almost overnight into San Francisco’s only punk rock showplace. There, amid the dying palms and tattered rattan, Bruno Koski came off like a bona-fide heavy from an early Bogart film.
    The punks and punkettes eyed him with ill-disguised envy, lusting silently after his pitted complexion, his garbanzo-bean eyes, his casual air of native degeneracy.
    Bruno Koski was the real thing.
    Jimmy, the stage manager, recognized him immediately. “Hey, Bruno, what’s …?”
    “I’m lookin’ for Douchebag.”
    “You know her?”
    “Just tell me where she is, kid.”
    “Over there. Next to the amplifier. The one in the garbage bag.”
    Bruno glanced sullenly toward the sound equipment, avoiding the eyes of the assembled punks. Three of the punkettes were wearing Hefty bags, modified as ponchos with safety pins.
    “Oh,” amended Jimmy, seeing Bruno’s irritation. “The one with the green hair.”
    Bruno approached her.
    “You Douchebag?”
    “Yeah.” She was chewing gum viciously. Her hair, several shades lighter than the Hefty bag, was chopped off close to her scalp. She was wearing a button that said PUNK POWER.
    “My name’s Bruno.”
    She chewed even harder. “So?”
    “So I wanna talk to you.”
    “Nope. Crime is comin’ on.” She nodded toward the stage, where a gang of black-leather musicians was slithering into position for its next assault on the audience.
    Bruno glowered at Douchebag, but decided to humor her. He needed the little bitch, after all. He could put up with her for a few minutes longer.
    Crime was so loud he felt his brain was bleeding. The punks and punkettes turned spastic under the spell of the music, quivering like convicts in a hundred different electric chairs. The song was called “You’re So Repulsive.”
    At the first break, she turned back to him. “Outasight, huh?”
    “Yeah,” he lied.
    “You shoulda seen it when they had Mary Monday and the Bitches.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Shit, man. They trashed the microphones and tore up the tables and the stage manager freaked out … and, man, it was just deee-praved!”
    “Sounds like it.”
    “Course, that’s nothin’—I mean nothin ‘—compared to The Damned or The Nuns. I mean, that’s heavy metal … really scuzzy stuff. Some o’ that stuff makes you wanna really puke!”
    The cud-chewing mouth became too much for him. “Hey … get rid o’ that stuff, will ya?”
    She stared at him, unblinking, for several seconds, then removed the gum from her mouth, rolled it into a neat little ball and stuffed it up her nostril.
    She didn’t flinch when he outlined his proposal.
    “I just … trash her a little bit, huh?”
    “Yeah. She don’t live far from here.”
    “You’ll gimme her schedule and all? I mean, I don’t have to bust in, do I?”
    “Nope. We’ll arrange a time. You leave that to me, punk.”
    She beamed at that. She was a punk now. She was earning her punk credentials for real. “Hey, Bruno … like what do I get out of this?”
    “What d’ya want?”
    She thought for a moment. “I wanna start my own group. We need three hundred bucks.”
    “It’s yours.”
    “You know The Scorpions?”
    “Sure.”
    “It’s gonna be a group like that. Only it’s gonna be all chicks, and we’re only gonna