The Good Samaritan: Short Story

THE
GOOD
SAMARITAN
BY STEVE HERMANOS
THE GOOD SAMARITAN 2
Copyright, Steve Hermanos

Contact the author at SteveHermanos@yahoo.com
www.HappyLittleBreakups.com/
www.amazon.com/StrangeJazz
THE GOOD
SAMARITAN
* * * * *
BY STEVE HERMANOS
Author’s note: This story was first published in Lullwater Review, Vol.
XVIII, No.1. The thematic elements of the story, and most of the action,
make up part of my most-recent novel, Happy Little Breakups, which will
soon be available through Scribd. My previous novel, Strange Jazz, is for
sale at Amazon.com.
At the bar sat a big Latino man whose starched white shirt stood out like a
lighthouse beacon in the Dog Patch, a dingy bar not too far from the Hell’s
Angels headquarters. The twenty or so drinkers were evenly split between
down-and-outers who had been clinging to this neighborhood for decades,
and squeaky-clean kids fresh from college seeking a relatively-cheap San
Francisco address.
I watched as the bartender, Ernie, poured a Budweiser, a bourbon on the
rocks, and a scotch on the rocks. He set them in front of the Latino man, who
arranged the three drinks in a line and began taking sips, seemingly at
random. It was house bourbon and house scotch, and at the Dog Patch, we’re
not talking boutique-crafted bourbon, and we’re not talking Johnny Walker
Black scotch. It was stuff better suited for cleaning gum off your shoe.
Drinking it was slow suicide.
I would classify the man as a Latino Yuppie and I suppose I felt an
affinity because if I were to put a label on myself, I’m a milk-chocolate
African-American Yuppie. I debated myself about whether I should advise
the guy to avoid drinking poison.
I turned to the pool table, where Toothless Mike sank a run of balls.
Swiveling to the Latino man, and indicting his drinks, I commented, “That’s

quite an impressive array of beverages.” A beat later, making the connection

to the George Thorogood song blasting out of the juke box, I said, “Hey!”
and the guy pointed his finger in the air and the chorus from the song
bellowed from the juke box, “One bourbon! One scotch! And one beer!…”
“I’ve never fallen that far,” I said. “It’s quite admirable!”
He chuckled, his big body nodding.
I continued, “Doesn’t the best friend wind up with the guy’s woman in
the song?”
“Yes,” was the first word he said to me.
“I hope that didn’t happen to you.”
He shook his head, no.
Toothless Mike sank the 8, and it was my turn to play. A few shots into
the game, Ernie was pouring more house bourbon for the Latino guy.
“Hold on!” I waved my arms like an NFL ref signaling an incomplete
pass. I told the guy, “At least drink something decent. You look like
someone who has to wake up in the morning.
His fleshy face and intelligent eye focused on me.
I arranged it with Ernie to scuttle the rotgut—free of charge—and pour
some Jack Daniels and Cutty Sark. Mere minutes later, after Toothless Mike
had banked the 8 ball and whooped twice like Michael Jackson in the “Billie
Jean” video, I took a stool next to the Latino man. Carmelo was his name,
and I got his whole life story.
* * * * *
He was a lawyer downtown, litigating worker compensation and product

defect cases. He’d just bought a one-bedroom condo over in Pacific Heights.
“I guess I should build equity,” he mumbled in an apologetic tone, seeming
completely shattered, staring at his triangle of drinks.
“You know, my parents never bought,” he said. “They had a few
opportunities.” He was from a not-so-great section of L.A. His father worked
for a security company and his mother was a maid for a rich family in
Beverly Hills. Once in a while she would arrive home with a nice stack of
lightly-used towels and sheets. He laughed at that, his whole body swaying.
Having been the youngest, early on Carmelo realized that everyone

around him was a cautionary tale. For as long as he could remember, his
brothers and sisters had been sucked into the vortex of babies, lousy jobs,
gangs, drugs, machismo, too much booze, and extremely poor reasoning.
School was easy, and he had some good teachers who were looking for kids
they could save.
It led to a free ride at Pomona—twenty-six miles from home and a wholly
different planet of manicured lawns, pretty buildings, and women who
looked like they had stepped out of Victoria’s Secret and the Sports Illu-
strated swimsuit issue. It almost blew his mind.
He shook his head. “White women.”
Now my mom was white and my dad was black. I grew up in Miami—
Coral Gables to be exact—where it wasn’t too bad, a land of privilege and
money. My folks let us do what we wanted, and I wound up a radio guy in
San Francisco, having worked in Chicago, New Orleans, and Philadelphia.
I’d dated white women all my life, black women all my life, Cuban girls in
high school, and Asian women as an adult. Dating usually worked out nicely
for me. I chalk it up to good parenting.
“Yeah,” I replied. “White women.”
Carmelo and I laughed.
But Veronica had dumped him that morning, resulting in his booze
wallow. She lived in the Marina on Chestnut Street, was an associate at his
law firm. He “fell in love” with her the second she stepped into the firm two
years ago. She was from Scottsdale, Arizona, and hence, complained about
the San Francisco weather.
“You married?” Carmelo asked. I told him I wasn’t. “You in a
relationship?” he asked. I laughed. That’s the word one uses—“relationship,”
to see if a person is gay or whatever. “Relationship” was neutral. He could
tell by my reaction that my little world orbited women. He asked, “You
happy?”
“Sure. I’m always happy. Pretty much.”
“Well then, what’s the secret?”
“How many drinks have you had?” I asked.
“Just these and the round before.”
“You got sixty or seventy bucks on you?” He made a noncommittal
shrug. I continued, “All right. Here’s what I suggest. I think we should go—

for an hour or two—to a sex club. Just check out the scene. I think it’ll take
your mind off whatever her name is—Veronica.”
To my suggested field trip he replied, “I don’t know.”
“The place is an adult Disneyland,” I said. “Meanwhile, this stuff”—I
indicated the array of booze staring up at him—“will do that, for a while.
‘But where are you tomorrow?’—to quote the band Steely Dan. Anyway, I
can just stay here and play pool and lose to that toothless guy. But I think
you’ll at the very least find it interesting. They’ll probably let us in dressed
like this, but sometimes they won’t. And you don’t have to do anything.
Don’t worry about that. We just watch. No one will touch us.”
He thoughtfully sipped the Cutty Sark. “It’s not a gay bar, is it?” One eye
squinted at me.
“No.” I assured him. “Lots of women. Some are really beautiful.”
He tilted up the shot and set the empty glass on the bar. “Let’s go.”
* * * * *
On the other side of Potrero Hill the club sat in a nondescript brick
warehouse on a dim street. Past the corrugated metal door, we paid fifty
bucks apiece (if we had arrived in costume or chosen to just wear a towel, it
would’ve been twenty), and descended to the basement. Almost immediately
the club had the effect on Carmelo for which I had hoped—it completely
took him out of his brooding. It was a panoply of leather-clad women
holding riding crops; bare-chested men in leather pants; naked men crawling
on hands and knees; a very beautiful Asian woman in high heels with her
hands cuffed behind her back; a large black woman in a gold mask. Odors of
baby oil, sticky non-alcoholic drinks (the club didn’t have a liquor license),
and sex.
No one paid much attention to us as we wandered from room to room,
though we drew a few disinterested sneers (in the parlance, we were
“tourists”). A fat, hairy white man crawled on the floor with a beatific smile,
a leash attached to his collar, the leash held by a tall woman in high heels
with a fine figure—and the face of a man. Another fat man stood with his
back to a pole, and another tall woman (this time it was a woman) in high
heels unrolled a bolt of blue cellophane around him. The sound of a whip

sizzled and someone cried out in pleasure/pain. A white man faced an eight-
foot X, his wrists and ankles cuffed and locked to the points of the X. A large
woman in leather pants and no shirt stood at a table, picking through a
collection of whips and horse crops.
Carmelo turned to me. “This is weird.”
“Bingo!” I replied.
We bought five-dollar Cokes, leaned against the bar and perused the
weirdness.
“There are more intimate rooms,” I said. “Let’s check it out.” We took a
step and then something caught Carmelo’s attention.
A muscular bare-chested black man with silver nipple rings passed—he
looked like a linebacker. He held a thin red leash attached to the red collar of
a white woman with a perfect Botticelli face, wearing a red leather bikini, her
hands cuffed behind her back. I had seen them before. The linebacker would
tie her, face down, to a bench and smack her with his hands or a horse-riding
crop, smack her hard, which she seemed to enjoy more than an obese person
eating a jelly doughnut, a football fan in overtime at the Super Bowl, or a kid
with a plate of candy.
But now the woman locked eyes with Carmelo’s. Her eyes widened, then
looked away, and she stopped as the linebacker kept walking ahead, which
caused the red leash to tug. She yanked her head, much like a dog standing
its ground (she couldn’t move her cuffed hands). Her eyes turned to
Carmelo.
“Stop,” she groaned.
“Wait a minute!” said Carmelo as much to her, as to the linebacker, as to
the Great Unknowable Void.
“What!?” said the linebacker. He seemed to be enraged (sometimes you
can’t tell if it’s real enraged or if they’re playing “enraged”—but it looked
quite real to me).
I just stood there, staring at the three of them. Slowly, as if in a dream, I
turned to Carmelo and said with a slowed-down, out-of-body voice, “You
know her?”
Carmelo looked her up and down as if he couldn’t believe what he was
seeing. Obviously he did know her. “What are you doing here?!” his voice
cracked. “Who?! Who is this?!”

The linebacker pushed Carmelo square in the chest, forcing Carmelo back.
“I’m Master Bruce! What are you?!”
“I’m—I’m—I’m her boyfriend.” Carmelo turned to the woman, “Ver-
onica, what are you doing?”
Linebacker snarled and stepped between Carmelo and the woman, put his
arms straight back in a V and fenced her in behind him. “You’re a wimp!” he
barked at Carmelo. “You can’t do anything!” He quickly spun to her. “Did
you tell him to come here?”
“No!” Her voice quavered. She was beautiful—great body, fine pro-
portions, curly blonde hair, green eyes—like someone out of a fashion
magazine, or perhaps Bondage Barbie.
“Come on, Veronica, get away from this guy,” said Carmelo, both hands
turned up in a gesture of lawyerly reason. In his starched white shirt and suit
pants—probably what he had worn to work that day, when Veronica had laid
the boom down on him, Carmelo’s mouth continued to hang open, and he
seemed disoriented confronted with bare-chested Linebacker who wore
nipple rings and leather biceps bracelets showing off his steroid-pumped
muscles. Behind Linebacker, Veronica stood on tip-toe looking at Carmelo,
but also leaning forward and tenderly rubbing her shoulder against
Linebacker’s shoulder blade.
* * * * *
To stop time for a moment, this was bad. Here I had tried to do a good
deed and look at this—Carmelo, distraught about being dumped that
morning with little explanation is now face to face with that explanation in
all its elaborate perversity. Veronica was a lawyer, and sometimes people in
high-stress jobs wind up at the pain end of a whip—ask Sigmund Freud,
don’t ask me.
ALL I DO KNOW is that Carmelo didn’t need to see this, and I didn’t
either. I felt like a ski instructor who loses one over a cliff. I wanted to be
anywhere else in the world but there.
* * * * *

“Stupid tourist!” Linebacker bellowed. “They shouldn’t allow tourists in

here!” He snapped towards Veronica and roughly pushed her ahead, and in
passing he glared at me—probably wondering if I were a lawyer too, or how
I fit into this scene, or maybe he was just marking his territory, growling, and
moving along—all grist for the mill, spark for the fire, steel for the rod.
For whatever reason, a person occasionally can’t keep his mouth shut. In
retrospect I do wish I had locked it and let the night roll on in whichever
direction it was going. Instead, as Linebacker passed, I sneered, “Asshole!”
He spun on a dime, and with a confused expression, as if he didn’t
understand the language, asked, “What did you say?!”
I just wasn’t liking the guy right then, and I wasn’t liking him even more
for his relationship to Carmelo’s ex. I nodded my head like a parent, “You
heard me.”
Linebacker charged at me with rage in his eyes, but Carmelo jumped in
between us. “He didn’t mean it!” Carmelo said.
Linebacker pushed Carmelo, then shoved Carmelo’s chest, shoved him
again, and Carmelo flopped backwards over a fat guy on all fours whose
limbs and body were wrapped in swatches of white shower curtain and duct
tape. Linebacker flew at Carmelo, and I flew at Linebacker. Veronica
screamed, triggering a chain reaction of screaming and yelling.
I was holding one of Linebacker’s arms, which squirmed free and he
landed a good shot to Carmelo’s forehead before I grabbed the arm again,
when a whip came out of nowhere and nailed me on the pant leg. I traced the
length of the whip to a transsexual in gold lamé and a giant black wig. S/he
was winding up for a second strike when I sprung up and jumped at him/her,
which didn’t deter the ten-foot bull whip from leaping at me like a piece of
sea kelp, wrapping my body till it stung my back like the mother of all
bastard bees. I yanked hard and the whip flew out of her/his hand. I glimpsed
half a dozen “slaves,” including Veronica, hands and feet bound in various
methods, screaming for help and hopping in circles. I dove down to Carmelo,
at the bottom of a pile of leather freaks, squeezed in down there and the
Linebacker was mushing his forearm against Carmelo’s head. We were being
expertly whipped from all angles, with a nasty variety of crops and whips.
“Stop it!” one of Linebacker’s accomplices yelled. Then the silver thing
glinted at me—the Linebacker’s nipple ring—and I grabbed it firm and

started squirming back out of the scrum. He screamed and let go of Carmelo.
I pulled Carmelo up and we rushed out an emergency exit, into an alley,
past a blow-job-in-progress. We quickly found my car and sped away.
“Wow,” I said.
Carmelo was staring ahead into the murky nothingness, a thin line of
blood was oozing from his scalp onto his forehead.
“You all right?” I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah. You?”
I winced with the pain of that one whip still stinging between my shoulder
blades. My knee hurt. My neck was out of whack. I needed to see my
chiropractor. I said, “I’m fine.”
“I could’ve gotten disbarred,” he said.
“For what?”
“For committing a felony. Felony assault.”
We drove along the silent street, and a few moments later I said, “You got
at least one good hit in. I saw it.” Carmelo was quiet, staring out the window.
I reached over and swiped at the blood on his forehead. “Blood,” I explained.
He humphed and turned to the window. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Wanna go back
to the Dog Patch? I’ll buy you a drink. A Corvoisier or Johnny Black.”
“No,” he said. “It’s late.”
It was only half past midnight, but I guess that was late for a lawyer. His
shirt was blotched with grime and torn at the shoulder. His pants pocket was
ripped off on front and hanging down like a ghost’s tongue.
I pulled up to his Lexus. “Look, I want to give you my card,” I said. “This
is a great town to meet women. I can introduce you—”
“No thanks,” he brought up his hands to cut me off. “You’ve done enough
for one night.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I made a big mess. I truly am sorry.”
He stared at the dusty dashboard, exhaling hard. “You know,” he said.
“Maybe this was some sort of completely-screwed-up catharsis.”
He opened the car door, and I put my hand on his biceps to stop him
from leaving. “Wait a second.” I reached in my shirt pocket and showed him
the little silver nipple ring. There was a streak of blood on it, which I wiped
on my pants. I placed it in his palm and turned on the dome light. He held it
between his meaty fingers. The ring glinted in the light.

He slapped it on the dashboard. “Nope!” He groaned as he pulled himself

out of the car.
“You earned it!” I persisted about the nipple ring. “A souvenir!”
He leaned down and looked at me. Re-emerging from his scalp, the blood
had trickled it to the middle of his forehead. “I don’t want a reminder of
tonight, thanks very much.” He shut the whiny door.
I idled to make sure that his car would start in this marginal neighbor-
hood, and when it did, I gave a little wave through the windows. He
pretended not to see me, and zipped away.
I never saw Carmelo again. But I have always thought that it was
especially nice of him, when he said, “catharsis.”
THE END


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THE

Copyright, Steve Hermanos

Copyright, Steve Hermanos

quite an impressive array of beverages.” A beat later, making the connection

He was a lawyer downtown, litigating worker compensation and product

Copyright, Steve Hermanos

Copyright, Steve Hermanos

Copyright, Steve Hermanos

Copyright, Steve Hermanos

Copyright, Steve Hermanos

“Stupid tourist!” Linebacker bellowed. “They shouldn’t allow tourists in

Copyright, Steve Hermanos

Copyright, Steve Hermanos

He slapped it on the dashboard. “Nope!” He groaned as he pulled himself

Copyright, Steve Hermanos

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