Pestilential, adj

1. Relating to or tending to cause infectious diseases; producing or tending to produce infectious or contagious disease.
2. Morally harmful or pernicious.
3. Annoyingly troublesome; a colossal, unrelenting pain in the ass.

Basically a plague, a moral contagion, or an atmosphere so toxically, soul-rottingly foul that it makes the very air feel it’s been gang-raped by a committee of lesser demons and then left to fester in the sun.  Not merely bad.  Not merely evil.  Something that spreads corruption, contamination, or general human misery.  Also a person whose mere presence seems to lower the property value of the room.

Dragged kicking and screaming into Middle English around the late 15th century, derived from the Late Latin pestilentialis, which itself mutated from pestilentia (plague, unwholesome atmosphere).  Ultimately, it all boils down to the Latin pestis, meaning a deadly disease, plague, or destruction.  A long, noble lineage of words used to describe things that make you regret having a nose.

Thursday night in some dim-lit felony lounge off Mission Street, the kind of place where the jukebox only play Tom Waits B-sides and songs about dead hookers.  The air is thick with the perfume of spilled PBR, regret sweat, and the faint metallic tang of someone’s fresh tattoo infection.  I’m there because writing is a disease that requires cheap liquor and worse company, and tonight the disease has prescribed both.
She not so much slides as much as oozes onto the stool next to me like gravity owes her money.  Hair the color of bad decisions at 2 a.m., lips painted the shade of arterial spray, wearing a tank top that says “Let’s Fuck” in rhinestones that have mostly fallen off, much like her standards.
“I like you shirt,” I say, because that’s what I’m supposed to do.
“It likes you,” she says, looking me directly in the eye.  Because of course.
She smells like vanilla body spray trying heroically to cover the scent of three different men’s cologne and one pack of close cigarettes.  Her eyes are the glassy, predatory blue of a Great White that’s already decided I’m chum.
She orders a shot of Jameson and sidecar of desperation, then turns those eyes on me like I’m the last functioning cock in the zip code.
“You look like you write things,”  she says, voice raspy from too many Marlboros and not enough apologies.  I want to retort, “You look like you inspire massive regret.”  But I don’t.  So she continues: “Bet you’re deep.”
I tell her I’m shallow as a puddle in hell but I’ve got a library card and a drinking problem, which is close enough.  She laughs – sounds like a hyena gargling broken glass – and puts her hand on my thigh like she’s checking my pulse for later reference.
We talk.  Or rather, she talks and I nod while calculating the half-life of my dignity.  She sounds like Keith Richards’ older sister and has man hands.  She tells me about her ex who’s in county for something involving a chainsaw and a Pomeranian, about the OnlyFans tier she’s about to unlock called “Emotional Damage,” about how she once fucked the dead lead singer of Type O Negative (unclear if the alleged coitus was posthumous or not).  Every sentence is a small war crime against taste.
She leans in.  Breath like an ashtray soaked in peach schnapps.  “You wanna get out of here?  My place is only six blocks and the roaches are usually quiet this time of night.”
I look at her – really look.  At the track marks disguised as “artistic freckles,” at the way her pupils are doing the backstroke in whatever she’s on tonight, at the smile that’s equal parts invitation and eviction notice.  She looks very much like a mistake I would have made in the ’90s.  And something in me, some last scrap of self-preservation wired directly to the lizard brain, finally fires.
I stand up.  Slowly.  Like a man who’s just remembered he has bones.
“Go give somebody else AIDS, you pestilential twat,” I say.  Not loud.  Not angry.  Just clear.  Like Jesus would if he were in my situation.  The kind of clear you get right before the guillotine drops and you realize the blade’s already falling.
The bar goes quiet for half a second, the way rooms do when someone says the thing everyone was thinking but nobody had the testicular fortitude to voice.  She blinks.  Once.  Twice.  Then she laughs again – that same broken-glass laugh – but this time it’s thinner, cracked down the middle.
“Fuck you, Hemingway,” she spits, but there’s no heat in it.  Just the sad fizz of a firework that didn’t quite launch.
I walk out into the San Francisco night, which is cold and smells like urine and possibility in roughly equal measure.  My heart is hammering like it’s trying to escape my rib cage and join the witness-protection program.  I light a cigarette with shaking hands and think: That was the cleanest kill I’ve made in years.

N.P.: “Voodoo Child” – Tom Morello