"Are you OK?"

"Yeah, that's all, thanks."

I thought she was asking if I wanted something to go with my coffee.

"No, are you alright? I saw you going over there."

The cafe tweenie was young, but then I think nearly everyone is young now. Her hair was spiked and her eyes were red rimmed. As were mine behind my RayBans.

I had gone into the cafe after depositing three cala lillies, a bouquet of spring flowers, and a conch shell on the sidewalk in front of the Pink Tarantula Salon. Some tweak had walked in there yesterday, said he had an appointment, pulled out a gun and shot Carmel twice in the face.

"I saw her yesterday. You know, she got me sober. She sat me down and said, "Your life's not worth a damn if you're fucked up."

"She was right."

I left the Brainwash, and stood on Langton St. as Channel 7 and 5 fought over electrical feeds. Their vans extended lascivious antennae toward the roofline, the disks on the end scanning promiscuously for connection with the Mother Satellite. Distracted cameramen focused on the front quarter panels of a dirty City car, trying to get a white balance. The murder is unsolved, which gives it value and currency as News.

Ginger Coyote, professional transexual, clickedy-clacked by on cha-cha heels, thankfully not recognizing me. She pulled a blue garlanded wreath, festooned with taffeta, from a plastic Walgreens bag, and plopped it in the middle of the impromptu memorial.

Memories stalk me South of Market. Here on Langton Street, across from the salon in Kathy Acker's flat, pouring liquid opium into espresso, prepratory to rehearsal for a reading. Carlos Hernandez sitting in his idling Jeep in the middle of 80 Langton, the gallery, hoovering blow and calling it performance art. I am racing down Folsom Street, headed toward Third, and the A-Hole, a punk rooming house, gunning my rust-bucket rickety 350 Honda for all it's worth. Carmel is on the back, leering over my shoulder. Once we cop, we roll lickety split back down Howard, an idiot's circuit.

George Epileptic had introduced us, and we developed a quick Platonic friendship around getting fucked up. We sat in a flat she shared with Doris Fish, in a giant pile of fabric samples, and she showed me her dog-eared collection of Australian punk zines, which did nothing for me, because I didn't know any of the bands, and the fun of zines is seeing your friends in them, the biggest fun being in them yourself.

She told me Aussie tweaks don't use cottons. I said, that's nice, slurping up the last viscuous drops of a quarter gram by pressing the tip of my unit into the chunk of Camel filter. We both got cotton fever, just the same.

We kept bumping into each other over the years, in different shooting galleries and dealer's hotel rooms, and then she got busted. The cops had broken into her apartment, had somehow known where her roomie's dope was hidden (in the P trap of the bathroom sink, for god's sake), and --- since her roomie was absent --- had arrested her.

We got loaded the night before her sentencing, cooking speedballs down at the recording studio I was calling home at the time. The court was threatening to deport her if she didn't go into a recovery home down in San Mateo. It seemed so draconian to us, as if they were going to pull out a scimitar and chop of her hand or something. I didn't see her for five years.

Long story short, I got clean. I started attending the big meeting downtown, Saturday Nights. The Recovery Rock Show, I called it. Hundreds of addicts, thick clouds of cigarette smoke, the line to the coffee a mile and a half long. Everybody looking like they shopped for clothes out of a 1974 Urban Stereotype catalog. Black dudes in maroon doubleknit pimp bells, with matching vests and wide brimmed fedoras. Women jamming their newly found rehabilitation tonnage into silver lame minis, maximum putana fishnets and glitter make-up accents. The white dudes walking around in blue denim Harley Davidson advertisements. In the midst of this Starsky and Hutch cattle call, I spied Carmel.

She looks remarkably clear and present. She is wearing black leather chaps, a black leather vest, a leather T and had dyed her long hair jet and put it into thick braids. What pale pink flesh she revealed was tapestried with spiderweb tatoos. She was a sight for sore eyes. I made my way through the throng and said Hi. We made small talk, and quickly came to the conclusion that we didn't have a lot in common anymore. This was OK with me, I had enough on my plate as it was, being preoccupied with the pernicious baby-talk cajoling voices trying to talk me into walking out of the surreality of recovery back to the full-time undeniable nightmare of my active addiction.

She stayed on the edge clean and sober, with the bikers, punks and all nighters, while I had kids and joined the human race for the first time. I saw her all the time, me with my gaggle of toddlers, she with her larger gaggle of pug dogs. Our clutches would mingle, puppies and babies, while we traded war storied, who had lived, who had died, who had recovered just in time to get diagnosed with the Plague. I got the feeling my kids made her nervous, which cracked me up, Ms. Outre Avante, flustered by some rugrats.

When my girls got older, I took them by the Pink Tarantula, Carmel's beauty parlor, to get their hair done. They loved it, the decor was definitely from the Planet of the Girls; Barbies done up with punky doo's, dayglo trolls, scorpions frozen in acryllic.

I was glad she was around, I was glad I was around. It makes me happy to see people I shared hypodermics with now walking in the full light of day, robust, vibrant. It speaks to hope, and I Dumpster dive the Urban Landscape constantly for that stuff.

Today is particulary sour. I fight the Who Dunnit urge, my tweak on the natch, as if knowing who killed her could bring even the slightest solace. All I can do for her today is remember her, and drop flowers from my backyard in the doorway of the Pink Tarantula.