Beautiful, Naked & Dead by Josh Stallings

Author:Josh Stallings [Stallings, Josh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Hard-Boiled, strip club, bouncer, Crime, brothel, mob, stripper
ISBN: 9780615449869
Google: AsKjuAAACAAJ
Amazon: 0615449867
Barnesnoble: 0615449867
Publisher: Heist Publishing
Published: 2010-12-31T18:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

At midnight we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, Cass was asleep and I was in a drug driven haze. Somewhere around the Sacramento delta the lines between real and surreal had blurred. Fog swirled dancing in the beams of the headlights. Orange cables and girders dripped and bent at impossible angles, like a giant braided steel spider web it waited to catch low flying dreams. The bridge under our tires beat out a steady tip tapping rhythm counter punching to Iggy’s Afro Idiot CD. Where would I be without music? It had been my one true friend. From my first Stones LP, music always filled the empty void I swam in.

Through the fog and steel, jewels sparkled calling our names. The city lights drawing us in like so many sailors before us. Calling us to crash on their rocks, this city of sirens. San Francisco, with its historic promise of magic and wonder. Built to fleece the gold miners coming and going to the fields up north, back then it had more brothels than churches and more saloons than schools. Destroyed by earthquake and fire it rose from the ashes, bigger and grander than before. In the sixties it called the youth of America to crash on its rocks, what started in peace, love, and LSD ended with heroin and STD’s. In the sixties the kids took to the streets and said fuck you to the government. In the seventies the government took the belt to them, and we’ve been paying the price ever since. War on drugs, war on music content, war on all that was strange and different. The tragic truth is, start a war with your kids and you wind up with drive-bys and Columbine. Just like two plus two equals four, it’s simple old school math.

The Detroit beast cut through the fog, rising up over the near vertical streets, then swooping down past neat rows of meticulously painted Victorians. San Francisco was the closest thing to a European style city we had in the states, but its underbelly wasn’t elegant or quaint, it was pocked with strip clubs and junkies, pimps and sailors, drug dealers and dot com fast money artists. God I loved this city. The new media money may have caused the property values to skyrocket and driven out the artists, but it fed the world I swam in. The more money they got, the more sex, drugs and rock-n-roll they bought. And when the bubble burst my people bought their shit at five cents on the dollar, cash these soulless geeks needed just to keep the party going one more day.

Floating across Market Street I saw a skinny hooker stumbling up the sidewalk. Her blonde wig had slipped sideways showing the stubble of her shaved head, her arm was possessively wrapped around a drunk business guy sporting a goatee and a badly rumpled suit. Watching them, I knew I was home. Like Tom Joad said, “Wherever there’s a young girl selling herself

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