Liars in Love Read online

  LIARS IN LOVE

  Ian Bull

  Intersection Productions, Inc.

  Studio City, California

  Copyright © 2018 by Ian Bull

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

  Ian Bull/Intersection Productions, Inc.

  4307 Vantage Avenue

  Studio City, CA 91604

  www.intersectionproductions.com

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Cover Design by Alexios Saskalidis

  Liars in Love/ Ian Bull. -- 1st ed.

  ISBN 978-1-948873-08-6

  Ian Bull has also written Reality Roadkill (A Love Story), and is the author of The Quintana Adventures, a thriller series published by Story Merchant, which includes The Picture Kills, and Six Passengers, Five Parachutes. The third book in the trilogy, Danger Room, will come out in 2019.

  You can read his blog, California Bull, enjoy his essays and find more of his writing, including free downloads, at:

  Ianbullauthor.com, and at CaliforniaBull.com.

  You can also email him and join his email list at:

  [email protected]

  To San Francisco, my first home, which lives within me.

  I've labored long and hard for bread,

  For honor, and for riches,

  But on my corns too long you've tread,

  You fine-haired sons of bitches.

  ― Black Bart, 1877

  PREFACE

  Liars in Love takes place in 1980. It is a time before the Internet, smartphones, email, texting, Google searches, social media, and dating websites.

  It is a time of coin-operated payphones and electric typewriters. People write letters and read newspapers. Cash is still king, and any information about you is on actual paper and kept in filing cabinets. Businesses, the government, and police departments are just learning to use computers. Cell phones are rare, expensive, and as big as bricks. Instead, people wear pagers on their belts like Star Trek communicators. That is considered advanced technology.

  It was a better time in some ways, and worse in others.

  In 1980, the art of conversation is not yet dead. Talking is how you become friends and convince people to fall in love with you. Being a charming talker and a lovable listener can give you an advantage over the next loser.

  In 1980, it is also harder to find out the truth about someone, and much easier to keep secrets. You can make up stories about yourself without getting caught.

  This story is about two such people.

  They lie, and they love, and it works for them…for a little while.

  CHAPTER ONE

  S am gets off the Muni bus at the corner of Ortega and 28th Avenue and walks past the green, yellow, pink, and purple houses, then stops at one painted burnt orange, with a black wrought iron balcony and red geraniums on the sill. Sam stares at the house, exhales, and darts up the cement stairs and rings the bell and knocks on the door, but no one answers. He walks down the steps and stares up at the dark windows.

  The front window on the neighboring purple house opens and a grey-haired woman in a bright Hawaiian housecoat sticks her head out the window. She has a black patch on her left eye. “They moved away a long time ago,” she says, shaking her head.

  “Mrs. Wilkenson, it’s me, Sam Webb!” He touches his chest as proof.

  She spits at him. “I know who you are, you hoodlum.”

  “I’m looking for Rose, do you know where she went?”

  “Are you deaf? I said they moved away!”

  “If you know where she is, please tell her I stopped by. It’s important.”

  “She and her boy are better off without you, you prison scum. Don’t you dare try to get back to together with her!”

  “I’m not, ma’am! We have some unfinished business is all.”

  “I don’t believe you! You’re a fake Casanova and you’ll ruin her life!”

  “I’ll come back when I’m settled and give you my phone number. That way she can reach me herself. Okay?”

  Mrs. Wilkenson shuts the window. Sam backs away and stares at both houses, a big man in a wrinkled blue suit that’s a size too small. The wind blows again, fluttering his suit and pant legs. He flips up his jacket collar and heads back towards the bus stop.

  Who is this sorry sap, and how did he get here? Sad though he seems, Sam is doing better than he was 24 hours ago when he was still a convict in the San Quentin Federal Penitentiary.

  Before we learn about more about Rose and Sam’s great dilemma, let’s go back one day.

  In 1980, San Quentin prison is already one hundred and thirty years old, and its medieval turrets make it feel even older, like some knight is going to shoot arrows at you from the castle walls. Every few years they drench it with yellow paint, but that just makes the soot from the air pollution more visible. They paint the inside walls of the massive five-tier cell block seafoam green, and the cell bars white, but bored prisoners pick at the peeling paint on the bars until the salty, moist air from San Francisco Bay rusts the exposed iron pale orange. The paint job is a cover-up, but the truth comes through: it's a prison.

  The red lines on the floor are the only honest color that tells the truth about where you are, because they command where you must walk and stand.

  The ceaseless noise inside the cell block reminds you of the truth as well, along with the smell of clogged toilets mixed with cold salty air. A six-foot-tall man can touch both moist walls across the width of his cell, and walk its length in three steps.

  But the biggest reality check is the bubbling tension between people: between white and black, between black and brown, and between guard and prisoner. It’s always simmering, until it boils over into violence.

  This is where Samuel Webb finishes his sentence for commercial burglary, a week after his thirty-second birthday. He stands six feet tall, with broad shoulders and the thick brown hair and blue eyes of the black Irish. He has a sly grin that curls up on one side of his mouth as he tilts his head at you, a look he perfected in his prison cell mirror. He also has a scar on the left cheek of his smooth baby face. It almost makes him look tough, and he tells people that a Cuban cut him with a broken glass in a bar fight, a bullshit move that enraged Sam so much that he knocked him out with one punch. That’s a lie, however; he got the scar as a kid when he fell off his bike and landed on a Coke bottle, but the lie about the Cuban is a better story.

  Sam is good at inventing stories about himself, because they help him endure the mistakes he's made. To survive his two-year stint for burglary, he couldn't see himself as just another failure in a loud, cold and wet prison. Instead, Sam imagined himself to be like the outlaw Black Bart, who did time in San Quentin for robbing Wells Fargo stagecoaches before becoming a poet, or Merle Haggard, who did time there for auto theft before making it big in country music. Sam decided he was the 1980s version of these men, a genius artist from the street who slipped up once and did hard time, but gained a lifetime of experience that forged his future greatness.

  Sam sold this persona nonstop. He wrote poetry for the prison paper, wrote country songs, and played drums in the prison rock band. His persona as the “joke-cracking burglar hipster artist” had just enough street cred that the other prisoners bought his hype.

  And today, Sam Webb is getting out of prison, on April Fool’s Day, 1980.

  Sam drums on his cell toilet with h
is sticks, knocking out a light salsa rhythm that echoes off the hollow bowl. His cellmate, Chuck, lying on the upper bunk, grunts a warning that he’s about to break Sam’s drumsticks again. Chuck is a monosyllabic angry biker version of Mr. Clean, who will attack after two grunts.

  “Sorry, Chuck, I got the jitters. I have to get my ya-yas out.”

  Corrections Officer Mark Garrett hits his keys against the bars. “Your time’s up, Webb,” he says. He’s a tall, thin, African American with a tiny pot belly that looks like he’s hiding a football under his pressed brown uniform. “You’ve baked long enough, time to pull you out of this oven.”

  Sam stands and hands his drumsticks to Chuck, still lying on his bunk. "Keep them, and everything else," Sam says, gesturing to his books and audio cassettes lining the lower bunk. Chuck takes the sticks and doesn't break them. That’s as close to a goodbye that Sam gets.

  “Step back, convict,” Garrett says, gesturing for Sam to step back six feet.

  “I’m not a convict, I’m a free man,” Sam says.

  “Only until the next time we see you,” Garrett says, sliding the door open. Sam tugs his blue cotton prison shirt flat, like he’s about to go on stage, then steps out on the red line. Garrett locks the cell behind him. “Walk,” Garrett says, and Sam obeys, walking the red line one last time.

  Hands holding mirrors come out of the other cells, so the men can watch. They see it’s Sam and they clap to celebrate his freedom.

  Sam throws his fist in the air as he steps through the metal door. “Elvis has left the building!” he yells, but that's more hyperbole. Sam must go through several steps before a true exit is possible.

  Step One is the prison property room. Green fluorescent bulbs light up rows of shelves with hundreds of blue bins. Officer Garrett stands by the door with Officer Koresh, his Caucasian double with his own matching football belly. They cross their arms and sneer.

  A female corrections officer, Sandra, carries a bin from the back and lifts it up on the counter, then consults a clipboard as Sam pulls out a plastic bag stuffed with clothes. "Those are the dress-out clothes you bought," Sandra says, nodding at the plastic bag.

  Sam rips it open. Inside is a wrinkled blue suit and a white shirt. “I bought this suit with three hundred dollars of my account money! You couldn’t keep it on a hanger?” Sam asks.

  “This ain’t Neiman Marcus,” Sandra says.

  Sam pulls out new brown wingtip shoes next. “You can’t wrinkle these, thank God,” Sam says, then pulls out a paper envelope from the bottom, which he rips open. Inside is a brown leather wallet with his California Driver’s License, and an Omega watch.

  “Hey, my watch doesn’t work,” Sam says, slipping the timepiece onto his wrist.

  “What do you expect, it’s been in a paper bag for two years,” Garrett says.

  “My father gave me this watch. It's an Omega Seamaster, they guarantee the battery for five years," Sam says, holding his wrist up.

  “The salt air gets into everything in here,” Sandra says.

  The next humiliation is in the changing room, where Koresh and Garrett watch Sam strip out of his prison blues and put on his new clothes. Sam must suck in his gut to button his pants, and his wrinkled suit jacket is too tight. “Guess I gained weight in here,” Sam says, his arms and chest bulging against the fabric.

  “You bought a suit that’s too small? What an idiot!” Garrett says.

  “You should have spent more time in the library building your brain instead of in the yard building your guns,” Koresh says.

  The last step is the exit room, where Sam sits across a metal industrial desk from Officer Tom McQuade, a kind middle-aged Santa Claus, but with shorter hair and a trimmed beard.

  "You earned eight hundred working in the laundry, plus you receive two hundred dollars in gate money," McQuade says, counting out ten hundred-dollar bills on the table. Sam stares at it, suspicious to touch it.

  “It’s yours. You can pick it up,” Officer McQuade says.

  Sam slides the bills in his brown wallet. “Just like Christmas. Thanks, Santa.”

  McQuade narrows his eyes, and his kind face hardens. "In their limited wisdom but overwhelming kindness, the parole board has granted you release six months early, which means you have a parole officer, Mr. Hal Weinstein. He was your probation officer after your first conviction and suspended sentence. He has made a special request to handle your parole case upon your release, and the board agreed."

  “He did?” Sam asks, with honest surprise. “Hal remembered me?”

  The guards laugh again. “He’s the only one who does. You haven’t had a visitor since you got here,” Garrett says, nudging Koresh.

  McQuade hands Sam a business card. “You meet him tomorrow, at the Hall of Justice on Bryant Street in San Francisco. Here’s the time and address. Is anyone picking you up upon release?” he asks.

  “Nope,” Sam says, then shrugs and smiles as if it doesn’t bother him, but it does.

  “Then you get an additional twenty dollars for bus fare,” McQuade says, handing over an extra Andrew Jackson from his metal cash box. Sam grabs it, but this time McQuade doesn’t let go of the other side of the bill. The two men lock eyes.

  “Two out of three convicts in California are incarcerated again within three years,” McQuade says. “Are you going to be one of those guys?”

  “No sir,” Sam says, and McQuade releases the money.

  “Officers Garrett and Koresh, please escort this man out of prison and drive him to the San Rafael Transit Center.”

  “Is that it?” Sam asks. “I can go?”

  “It is,” McQuade says, standing up. “Good luck, Mr. Webb.”

  Sam exhales with wide eyes as he stands. He grins at the three men, who just stare back.

  "Move it, loser, I don't like being your chauffeur," Garrett says.

  Leaving San Quentin is a shock to the system, like Dorothy stepping from inside her black and white Kansas cabin out into the paradise of color that is the Land of Oz. The prison is on a peninsula, so as Sam steps out of the last door and into a parking lot, the San Francisco Bay is on three sides. The water is silver and gold under a cornflower blue sky with towering green Mount Tamalpais in the distance. A cool wind hits Sam in the face and flutters his wrinkled suit. A loud honk makes him jump – the Golden Gate Ferry motors by on its way to dock at Larkspur Landing. He heard the same honk six times a day inside, and never knew what it was.

  Another honk shocks him back to reality. Garrett is behind the wheel of a prison squad car, and Koresh stands by the open rear door. “Quit staring and get in the car,” Koresh says.

  Sam is relieved to slide into the backseat and put glass between him and the real world.

  “Where am I going?” Sam asks.

  “Only you know that. We’re just taking you to the bus station,” Garrett says.

  “Can you take me there instead?" Sam asks as they drive past the ferry landing.

  “It’s always the bus station. Buy a ticket back here if you want,” Garrett says.

  “Got to follow the rules,” Sam says under his breath, but loud enough for Garrett to hear.

  The San Rafael Transit Station is a cement island in a parking lot next to an onramp for the 101 Freeway. There’s a row of benches and poles with bus schedules mounted on them and buses pull in and out between long yellow lines. Garrett parks the squad car and he and Koresh exit, but he doesn’t open the rear passenger door. With no door handles in the back seat, there’s no way for Sam to get out until Garrett opens the door for him.

  Sam hears the bus for San Francisco start its engine. Sam taps on the glass. "That's my bus! Open the door!" Sam says.

  Garrett opens the rear door but blocks Sam as he gets out. “I have a gift for you, Webb, something I give all my departing prisoners.” Garrett punches Sam in the stomach, knocking the air out of him. Sam hugs his gut as he falls back against the car.

  “I’m giving you a little extra, for your smart
mouth,” Garrett says, and winds up for another punch. Sam pushes himself off the car and hugs Garrett like a boxer, sucking hard to get his lungs to re-inflate.

  Koresh jams his hands between them and pries them apart. “People are watching,” Koresh says to Garrett, holding him in place.

  Sam staggers away. “You’ll be back in six months!” Garrett shouts after him.

  Sam climbs onto the bus and sits in the first seat. The driver closes the door and puts his bus into reverse. “That screw does that too often. Your fare is free,” the driver says.

  Sam nods his thanks while holding his gut. The other six passengers on the bus stare out the window to avoid looking at him. As the bus zooms past Mill Valley, Sam sits up straight, whistling to keep from wincing, and opens a thick black wallet that he was hiding in his lap. He is impressed by its contents. He takes out a few hundred dollars in cash.

  A few miles away, Garrett is behind the wheel with Koresh next to him. He pats his shirt, then rises out of his seat and pats the back of his pants.

  “Lose something?” Koresh asks.

  CHAPTER TWO

  T he Sunset District of San Francisco is a grid of stucco box homes built in the 1950s in rows for forty-eight blocks, stretching two miles to the Pacific. To break up the sameness, the developers threw in playful gestures onto each box house, like a castle turret, or a twisting Hobbit chimney or a little balcony under a French window. The owners then painted their homes purple, yellow or pink, to make them stand out in the grey fog that blows in from the ocean.

  Sam starts his first full day of freedom at the distant end of the Sunset District, at the Ocean Park Motel on Sloat Boulevard, across the street from the zoo. He takes the bus from San Rafael to downtown San Francisco, and then hopes on the L-Taraval streetcar and rides it to the very end of the line.