Beatdown Shot Hey there. If the multiple bylines haven’t already clued you in, I'm Mikel Reparaz; and I live in the greatest Goddamn city in the entire world. San Francisco is the place to be, my friends -where tolls are ubiquitous, the rents are astronomical and everyone -everyone- is gay. Even their pets. Especially their pets. Except me, of course. That may be why I don’t get invited to many parties. I’ll dispense with introductions rather quickly. Unlike the other mouth-breathing carpetbaggers who submit to this publication and are not named David Raffin; I am a Professional Journalist, and Raffin has apparently hired my racially ambiguous ass in order to give VN that air of authenticity that comes with having foreign correspondents. San Francisco may not be a foreign country per se, but it might as well be; a small studio apartment costs $1,000 per month, the act of merely parking your car carries weighty implications and possible fines, and the prevalent language is Vietnamese. Even the Mexican restaurants are staffed by Vietnamese. None of them speak English, either, and they tend to get testy when you do. Now, I’ve always been pretty liberal-minded on the subject of immigration. I think it’s great, what with all these Vietnamese and Laotians and Nigerians and Kyrgzstanis and what have you, giving the place a bit of diversity. Aw, hell, even the French Canadians aren’t so bad, so long as they use their own drinking fountains and stay at the back of the bus. I’m even lenient on the whole “If’n ya moves here, at least learn da langwich” issue. But when your job involves holding complex conversations with members of the public -many of whom do not speak fluent Chinese- one thinks it might be prudent to have more than a basic grasp of the English language. I’ll not bore you with particulars. Suffice it to say that about 65 percent of the people in this town working in service jobs -receptionists, clerks, landlords, information booth attendants at the @#$! mall - are difficult to communicate with, and tend to get surly rather quickly when one politely indicates that one does not understand their heavily accented muttering. But enough of that. The real benefit of having a San Francisco correspondent is giving you, the esteemed reader, a front-row seat to the devastation caused by our recent 5.2 earthquake. It’s horrible; the streets are filled with rubble. Power and bridges are still out. Old ladies are starving to death and being forced to turn on one another for food. There are no phone lines; nobody even knows if the Government, or God for that matter, has even heard of our predicament. There is no clean water. And the bodies; oh, God, the bodies are everywhere, and the stink of them shall never be washed away by any detergent! Oh, sure, they’re up and walking around, going about their daily business and staring at me funny as I stand in the middle of the street and claw at my face in despair, but they’re bodies nonetheless, and I can’t stand the sight of them. If ever there was a hell on Earth, it was here — in San Francisco!* You should know that my original computer was utterly destroyed by a falling gargoyle during the cataclysm; in order to write this column, I’ve had to improvise a machine using only some balling wire, and old record player and a 1952 Martinelli typewriter. I couldn’t figure out how to make a screen, though, so I have only my photographic memory and prowess as a copy editor to keep me from making egregious mistakes as I type this. The power source is a special device I have rigged that gathers the static electricity from a pair of perpetually mating cats, the only thing in this city more common than heathen foreigners. I am wondering when my neighbors -those who are still alive, anyway- will complain about the noise, which is not unlike that of a child crying out in pain, over and over again. Horrible. As you no doubt heard, thousands were injured and hundreds more killed during the destruction. I, like many others in this city, joined a volunteer corps for the purpose of finding survivors and clearing rubble. There are five of us in my cadre, culled from the best of the surviving young men from my apartment. There’s Curly, the leader of our group, a real rough-and-ready type who’s never afraid to walk into a restaurant with a lit cigar in order to give the President a piece of his mind. There’s Achmed, the towering Egyptian whose brute strength has been instrumental in clearing many a boulder. Then we have Bohemian Bob, the former street kid from the Haight with a deadly knowledge of explosives. Rounding out our group are Nguyen and Van, whom we don’t know much about because they don’t speak English; we think they may be from Brooklyn. Finally, there’s me. Oh, wait, that’s six, isn’t it? Well, shit. So anyway. The boys and I were sifting grimly through rubble the other day, hoping in vain that we would not find some dismembered horror that used to be someone’s rib cage, when I heard a cry go up not 20 feet away. The five — sorry, six of us … I guess can’t be all perfect like you … immediately ran to the scene. Thanks to a combination of Curly’s quick thinking, Achmed’s boulder-moving skills, several of Bohemian Bob’s well-placed demolition charges, Nguyen and Van’s tokenism, and my sheer manliness, we were able to clear the rubble around what turned out to be a protected chamber in a burned-out subway station, about 10 feet in diameter. It was then that we saw what had been screaming to us, driving our desperate hunt for a survivor, and it made us recoil in horror. It was a pair of mating cats. At first, Achmed and Bohemian Bob wanted to eat them, as food is so very scarce after the cataclysm and none of us had eaten in days, after the last cans of potted meat were gone. But just then I had an idea. “Wait,” I shouted. “This is perfect! Just look at all that static electricity! These mating cats are just the thing to power that computer I’ve rigged!” “What a load of crap,” said Achmed. “That monstrosity will never run; it lacks even a monitor. Besides, their mad cries of hot lovemaking will keep us up all damn night, and I had it up to my eyeballs with that when I had those roommates in college …” At this point, Achmed trailed off and we all shuddered. We had heard tales of Achmed’s roommates, and it chilled us all to the core. All those poor jackrabbits … “Never mind those evil chum-swilling whores, Achmed!” I shouted after I had regained my composure. “They were weak of mind and body, and irrelevant besides. If I can get this computer to work, I can tell the world of our predicament, and maybe the Government will send us aid money, or at least declare a state of emergency!” “Bah! This man of yours, this President Bush cares nothing for our predicament,” said Bohemian Bob testily. “He is content to merely sit and watch the world fall apart as he eats his American hot dogs and wears his American nipple clamps! We will die here, alone amongst the bulrushes, and these cats will die first!” And so we stood around arguing for some time, as the cats yowled on and on. Later I was told that while we were bickering, a young woman who had been quite obviously trapped nearby under a phone pole expired while screaming for help. Well, fuck, how were we supposed to know she was talking to us? Eventually, Nguyen and Van came around to my side — it was hard to tell, seeing as they just smiled and nodded at me, but I think they understood my arguments. Finally, Curly suggested that we cut the cats in half, and give one half to me and the other half to Achmed and Bob, but we all thought that was stupid and told him so. Except for Nguyen and Van. They didn’t say much at all. In the end, Achmed and Bob won out, and we all feasted like kings that night. Fortunately, though, the earthquake did nothing to affect the city’s mating-cat population, and so I just plucked a pair from the thousands on the veranda to power this infernal machine. But really, it’s just all in a day’s work for us San Franciscans. This sort of thing happens every couple of months, so we just take it in stride; hell, we like it. It adds a bit of color to our otherwise dull and monotonous lives. Now you people, on the other hand, are a different lot altogether. Man, what a bunch of fucking pussies you Olympians are. We get a 5-plus quake and just shrug and say, “huh,” after the table shakes for a second and the roof caves in, squashing our 2.5 children and mating cats. You guys get one and what do you do? You whine about it for awhile and cry in front of your shattered storefronts, and then you go out and you get some Starbucks or some other fancy-pants Seattle Shit Drink, don’t you! Bah! You still haven’t repaired the damage. I hear the 4th Ave. bridge is still closed; what the fuck is wrong with you people? Eeeeeuuuuwwh, you say the poor widdle sidewalk broke up? Luxury! You wouldn’t know a pair of mating cats if it jumped out and bit you, would you!? WOULD YOU!? I weep for your future. * With many heartfelt apologies to the estate of Harvey Kurtzman. We’re sorry. Oh dear God, we’re sorry. We stab our heads!** ** Even more apologies to Jhonen Vasquez. No, really. We mean it this time. Oh please, baby, please don’t leave. We’ll never talk to that other woman again, we swear!