Washington and Cherry

On October 11th 2015 I was not doing so well. I was working as a shipping clerk for a family in Berkeley and they were not exemplar employers. In one of their places of business rows and rows of guns were stocked with the excess boxes and packing peanuts. They were there as part of one of the owners side business, maintaining guns for a select clientele of FBI agents, local cops, lawyers, and just general second amendment enthusiasts. There were shot guns, and hand guns, six shooters, colts, a snub nose, and the ground was littered with bullets. One of them was a 9mm shell chasing. I picked it up and put it in my pocket as I was sweeping. I didn’t know why then. I still don’t really know.

When on my patio in the previous days I’d take the shell out, roll it between my fingers, stand it upright on my garden table and put it back in my pocket when I thought I’d lingered on it for too long. My grandfather used to press these bullets himself when I was young. I remember being 8 years old in the garage of his house and he’d put us (my brother and myself) to work, filling the cylinders with powder, pulling down on the lever and pressing, from abstraction into reality, .357 Magnums. His work station was right next to an old toy of ours, a McDonald’s kitchen set. We pressed those bullets the way I’d later make burgers and there was no irony then. There doesn’t seem to be any irony now.

I thought about many things other than the bullet in those days. I thought about movies, I was a fan of noir at the time and would run double features in my living room with the lights off. I would run them on an obsolete big screen television with the volume up. I’d sit on the other side of a sliding glass door, under the night, smoking cigarettes and intermittently rolling a shell casing between my fingers and watching films, pretending I was in a movie theater in the 60s where/when that was still allowed.

I was watching the second feature of the night of October 9th. I was watching David Fincher’s 2006 film Zodiac. On the screen on October 11th 1969, Dave Toschi and his partner came upon the body of cab driver Paul Stine at the corner of Washington and Cherry in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. Regarding the date on my telephone I saw we were coming up on the anniversary. It had been 46 years since the murder of Paul Stine and a great deal had changed in the bay. Stadiums had come and gone, entire satanic cults blossomed, rents had risen, and a new industry had grown up around the remainder.

I put the bullet down and sent a text message to a friend of mine, we’ll call her Tina Las Vegas, a constant companion to me since high school. We were best friends in high school since we decided to go to our sophomore formal together. While our companions spoke of jet skis we spoke of Cuban revolutionaries. Later that year she would loan me Richard Harris’ biography of Che Guavara and become a trusted ally in this town we both grew to be skeptical towards. She would go to Berkeley before me while I bummed around Bakersfield earning my associates degree but we were reunited in the end and eventually became roommates on Haste St. in downtown Berkeley.

I’d be reticent to say we’d grown a part by this point as much as I’d say we grew up. We were working jobs that didn’t pay enough to maintain the modest lives we thought we wanted. But there were always moments we found to pass a few hours in each other’s company and this night I’d decided on an outing. On October 11th, at 9:55 pm, we would be at the corner of Washington and Cherry, and we would walk the path of a murder unsolved for 46 years.

We took buses instead of cabs to get there (I’m sure you can imagine why). One bus took us from Market St. almost vertical at times through businesses, then Chinatown, and finally into the repetitive representations of the best 1970’s housing had to offer. We off-boarded at around 7:40 and made a walk through the neighborhood. I’d read accounts in Robert Graysmith’s book about the Zodiac and seen many documentaries about the Paul Stine murder. The place didn’t sit with me like I thought it would. It was after 7 and the neighborhood as ostensibly dead. No one wandered the streets, no one came out to their mailboxes, only the random car would pass through at a slow speed on his or her way home. Either the Zodiac was still effecting this neighborhood after all this time or the neighborhood had changed.

I prefer to think, in a way, that the neighborhood had changed for the better. It being early-mid October brought out festively cut pumpkins, orange streamers, and plastic skeletons and head stones. It would have been macabre if it wasn’t so charming. I thought of 1969 and wondered if there might not have been one or more inappropriate pumpkins bringing dread tidings of the Samhain menace. We lapped the block making notes on the neighborhood, the Presidio golf course next to the park who wouldn’t let us use their bathroom, the Jewish Temple at the top of the block housing a congregation for Sabbath (October 11th fell on a Saturday that year), and the sheer number of natural hiding places afforded by the architectural trends of the day Small enclaves hid doors to basement apartments, driveways, and garage doors. There was a massive park which to this day is unlit after twilight.

We had some time to kill before the fateful hour and minute was to repeat itself and we had gathered as much data from the neighborhood as we could so we decided to avail ourselves of some local eateries. We decided on a Pho joint about 5 blocks away. I don’t know if it’s still there now, unlike the corner of Washington and Cherry I couldn’t find my way back on intuition alone. We ordered two bowls of soup, spicy for her, mine not, and talked of our lives such as they’d been at that moment.

We spoke of acquaintances buying houses, getting married, and adding souls to this world back in Bakersfield and decided that where we were, broke, desperate, and confused in San Francisco, cold on the trail of a 46 year old murder was exactly where we wanted to be and that the gallery of voices from home we ventriloquize to ourselves would be aghast at the admittedly dark and unorthodox use of our time. We finished our meals as live fish circumvented tanks all around us. Tina paid. I think she knew I was off worse than she was at that moment. She saw me. Instead of dealing with my bleak prospects as a shipping clerk, reflecting usefully on the most recent my most recent relationship and properly dealing with the pain of its termination, or devoting my mental time and energy to something more productive, I decided to do something else. She met me out of the blue to contemplate a cold case no one would ever solve. She picked up the check and asked me what else I knew of the other victims.

We made it back to the neighborhood by 9:30. I lit a cigarette and she told me I should quit. She always tells me I should quit. Not everything, just the stuff that wasn’t helping. That gave me hope for this particular outing. We talked about his first two victims. I told her about Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday. They were a young couple who were murdered in Vallejo, CA on December 7th 1968 on Lake Herman Road. They were targeted by the Zodiac after an evening date. A concert and a party followed by a parking. Faraday was shot first, behind the ear. Jensen was chased from the car and shot 6 times before the Zodiac stopped.

Tina and I were never romantic but I couldn’t help thinking of the younger versions of ourselves in Jensen and Faraday’s position. We would go to shows together in high school and after. We would go to parties and at the end of long nights we’d park my 1989 Dodge Ram in various spots around Bakersfield and talk about friends, life, and the roads that would one day lead us beyond. We took our roads from there, Jensen and Faraday would never again. I lit another cigarette and told her about the cab driver Paul Stine. He picked up the Zodiac at Mason and Geary in downtown San Francisco. Stine’s log book indicated the Zodiac asked to be dropped off at the corner of Washington and Maple in the Presidio but for some reason Stine drove the Zodiac a full block beyond his stated destination. When Stine put the car in park he was shot in the back of the head. The death of Stine touched me for personal reasons. At this point I had left work on my graduate degree in English from San Francisco State. Stine was driving the cab to subsidize his doctorate from SFSU. He was a guy with thick ass Buddy Holly glasses, a goofy smile, and a propensity for higher education and writing. One of the pictures of him I came across in my research was Stine taking a phone call for his first job out of high school at the Turlock Journal.

As I smoked and talked we kept an eye on the street corner. We didn’t want to seem shady. This was not the kind of neighborhood in which to be shady and we were sure the neighbors didn’t take too kindly to serial killer tourism. The spot remained empty for a while until 9:45pm when a cab slowed and stopped. My heart galloped a little. Two men got out and stood on the corner. I wondered if that cab driver knew where he was or if cab drivers in general share an unease over the death of Paul Stine. It is also entirely possible that the cab driver neither knew nor cared, we do live in the days of Lyft and Uber so… Tina and I regarded each other with what I can only describe as Cheshire cat smiles.

“Who are they?” I asked her.

“Do you think they’re here for the same reason we are?” she replied.

After a few moments of watching we thought about what to do next. There aren’t any social cues to read in this situation. Most people, I assume, would have no base of reference for approaching someone who happens to be standing in a belated crime scene. We approached them slow, yet pleasant. They identified themselves as Mark and Ricardo at first. We asked them how they were. They said they were fine. They asked us how we were. We replied likewise. Tina and I still smiled. They seemed apprehensive. Finally one of them asked, “So…what brings you two out here tonight?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, “what would bring someone to the corner of Washington and Cherry at 9:55 on October 11th?”

The gentlemen laughed, as did we. We had made the best of momentary friends. They referred to themselves as Zodiologists and they, like we, were there that night to walk the trail of the Zodiac. Before we’d even arrived, Tina and I wondered if we might meet anyone else. In a town so populated with protesters, burners, and any society in which to travel, we ran into people who were interested, as we were, in murder.

The night was dark or perhaps it only seems that way now. I don’t remember seeing a single star in the sky, nor moon. It was overcast, I think. But the pumpkins were out and glowing orange intermittently on either side. Mark was writing a book about the Zodiac as I recall. And he laid out for us the things we did not know. We crossed the street one block up and took a left on Jackson. We stopped in front of an old house that was somehow new. It was there, theoretically, but it had been given the same modernist face-lift popular in San Francisco. It was all angles and wood, concrete and plant life to make it look more like a home. Mark explained to us that we were standing on the spot where Officer Eric Zelms and Officer Donald Fouke stopped the Zodiac after he’d fled. He was allowed to pass in the end because he was not black. Initially the dispatch instructed the police to be on the lookout for a black man despite the fact that all three witnesses described the murderer as a stocky white dude with glasses and a crew cut.

Mark spoke of new evidence regarding the Zodiac reveled from this portion of the story, something heretofore unmentioned in any police report or cypher filled fancy. I don’t remember what it was but he has since written a book called Hunted: The Zodiac Murders. It’s pretty good. We walked together up to Spruce St. where a large retaining wall separates the neighborhood from a road and the darkened Presidio Park. We went through the same crack in the wall the Zodiac had 46 years prior. At this time of night the park is pitch black. In the October 13th letter the killer sent to the San Francisco Chronicle he wrote “The S.F. Police could have caught me last night if they had searched the park properly in stead of holding road races on their motorcicles seeing who could make the most noise.”

I think of that fat ass crouching in the dark of the Presidio. He mocks the police for their noise. I imagine it is in response to his own quiet. He sits in the dark, having passed two officers just moments before and more are on their way. The Zodiac is quiet, hiding, trying not to be seen. Eventually he wasn’t. He proceeded out of the park without incident. It’s a hard fact we know too well. He got away with murder. I think about the Paul Stine sometimes. I think about my best friend Tina and how it feels to have someone truly looking out for you. I think about Mark and Ricardo and all the Zodiologists out there and it gives me hope in a strange way. We may never know for sure who did this but since the SFPD gave up its investigation of the Zodiac in 2004, people like the Zodiologists will not forget. They’ll be walking the trail on October 11th, they’ll stop by Lake Berryessa on September 27th.

Tina and I said our goodbyes to Mark and Ricardo. They gave us a newsletter as a parting gift. It’s called Radians and Inches and as far as I’m aware it is in continual publication. We caught a bus back to the Embarcadero. We sat in silence most of the time. We left each other with a hug at the BART station and I made my way back to Oakland. I’d later find out that on October 11th 2014 a boy named Bryce Skidmore died in Alliance Ohio. He was 9 years old. I’m not sure why I mention it other than, given where I was on October 11th, it’s a strange coincidence.