Chapter Twenty
“A rash escape, to lift
the spirits, can hit you
like a ton of brickbats.”
“Having a little flare-up, are we?
“No, maam, we’re good…”
“In denial, huh? Been here, done this…that’s why I’m doing this now.”
“Look, lady, our table’s already under mission control, alright?”
“See? Moody, restless, irritable…why don’t you kiddies come on down to the Dri Dock before it gets any worse? Recovery is but twelve short steps away. Coffee’s on the house.”
Flare up: knew the feeling—namely, the inner buzzsaw triggered when one gets down, but has no easy option or opportunity to get a good buzz back on. Madame outreach was an aging Janis Joplinesque flower child, these days patrolling the Marina neighborhood in roomy tropical print shorts and top, above drugstore shower clogs. Her card read Phyllis, Phyl to you, and she was a rosy nosed chain smoker who perpetually camel-brushed her waist-length graying strawberry hair.
Phyl knew her potential recruits like pelicans know their schools, seldom failing to troll San Francisco’s Bermuda Triangle for new business, particularly on parched, sunny weekends such as this. By title, she was head resident de-nabler for the Dri Dock, an alky rehab/support group based in an avocado green two-floor storefront several doors down from the Triangle—hugging close to the heat of battle, the belly of the beast, the battle of the bottle—tapping into the heavy action right here on Main Street USA/A. Good, sober planning: Willie Sutton would have toasted and banked on it.
“We’re down, we got it down. So howz ’bout we buy you a brew?”
“Sorry, but the only answer is total abstinence. I’ll leave you some of our literature. We’re non-profit and accept donations. Or you can even donate your car.”
“Check, granny—I’ll drop off the keys to my Lambo over there, just as soon as we kill this pitcher.
“Hmm, well, better do so before you end up wrapping that baby around a utility pole…catch y’all down the road.”
So near, and yet so hard—the Dri Dock itself was a step not taken lightly, and it had the four puked-out medial doorways each morning-after to prove it. Out front, clutches of dry drunks commiserated over cigarettes and black coffee, struggling to fend off their own flare-up periods, stiffly fighting themselves to a stand-off draw amid oddly timed bursts of forced laughter. Inside, ostensibly clean, hang-dog Dockers lounged around in silent, self-intervening headlocks, staring holes through their recovery magazines and bored games, bracing for the intensity of their relapsive urges, if not the regular weekly cameo appearance, er session, by Robin Himself.
The A/Adage: Once addicted, always addicted—thus age, creed or color did not appear to be at issue Dockside. Still, all presently on deck were somewhat older than the six pack of pick-up hoopsters pounding down mugs of draft Corona at the table from which Phyl had just spun away. And all six were clearly younger than Reese Paulen and me, headed for a future detox boot camp, nevertheless.
“Anybody here 28, or turning 29,” I asked one of the partiers, striking up some diversive conversation, not knowing why. Passing us was a tattoo-armed gym banger, chain choking two bloodthirsty Staffordshire mixes. Top heavy in a sleeveless stretch tank, he used much of his upper body strength to restrain the rowdy black and brown dogs, yanking to keep them away from a smiley, puffy sheepdog bounding ahead of us at the leash hands of a sundressed kind of gal.
“In your dreams, gramps,” sneered the seated power forward, as he toasted us with his salt-rimmed mug. “Ain’t even close tuz old as you.”
“You know, a lot of this bingeing nonsense starts in college,” Paulen noted, turning disdainfully toward the intersection.
“Like the frat brats in Boulder?” I asked, then holding my breath past a semicircle of nicotine fiends milling around a cast-iron smoker’s post. Still didn’t get the concept of those things.
“Precisely. If you ask me, it feeds a good deal of campus unrest and other shenanigans. Just a bunch of rutting little agitators…”
“Whoa, you mean in the athletic department?” I followed several steps behind as we reapproached Fillmore Street. “What I’ve read about Buffalo footballers and sexual harassment…”
“No, I’m referring to demonstrations against Israel.”
Could easily have called it lusher’s lane, this tipsy row of surplus plastic wood chairs and tables lining Town Tavern’s Greenwich side. Town was the Triangle’s shallowest corner—quick, easy hook-ups over the hiccups of wholesale, value-priced hooch. Where Northside and The Buoy Cafe were at least outwardly atmospheric, Town Tavern stood functionally formulaic. A stark, minimalist bar front under a nondescript second story of office suites, the Tavern seemed a bit more rough and tumble, a better fit for the younger, budget-boozer crowd, as well as slightly older lechers at the margins who fantasized about all these hang-out party girls going wild.
Such potential action chicks were sprinkled liberally about Town’s breakaway outdoor tables, tossing their long-tressed heads back in squealing laughter, smiling up at the clipped, peeling Tavern signage above. They were more pastel racerback tank types, cut-loose alumna of UC Davis, San Mateo, Sonoma and Chico State—filling out their T-shirts with distinction, nonetheless. Even doc couldn’t seem to get enough of it.
Also eyeing these and other trick bait strutting the corner sidewalks, caressing, sweet talking their cel phones, were the horn toady guys getting hungrier and thirstier by the round, in patchy pocket shorts, toe tapping their flip-flops to the speaker-fed sound of techno and some ludacrisly loud rap-hop. Feisty, tip-pinching waitresses skirted in and out of the Tavern, eager beaver primed to slake them all—with discount promos such as TankedOut Tuesdays, Wasted Wednesdays, SuperSuds Sundays and Sotto Saturdays like today.
Guzzling Dos Equis by the pitcher, sloshing boxed Cabs and Pinot Grigios, not to mention splitting Patron Shooters and Jell-O Shots while bagging afternoon rays, could turn any of these Townies a bit too frisky and raucous. Which is why we abruptly decided to cross over to Fillmore’s winier side, Paulen wanting to case the place where FatJack uncorked its empire.
“Against Israel?” I said warily, stank eyeing a crosswalk-crowding Toyota 4-Runner. Remember, listen more than talk…
“Yes, against Israel—more than once, I might add,” Paulen stuffed a wind-tossed Carnaval parade flyer into the trashbin, looking this corner store over, setting course. “Right in the middle of Norlin Quad. The latest one swelled all the way over to the Dalton Trumbo Fountain. Nearly as big as the 4/20 smoke-ins…”
“Wow, by UMC…” I instantly recollected graduate study lunches in the CU Memorial Center’s faculty cafeteria, feeling so intellectually industrious over spinach salads and Buffalo Burgers, readying for the twice-weekly transition from bookish pupil to servile teaching assistant for Professor Tennent—had to have been academic epochs ago.
“Times change, even in Boulder,” he said, as we approached the Bermuda Triangle’s scalene, quieter side. “And this whole Middle East situation has everything turned upside down.”
“Right within sniffing distance of Packer Grill yet,” I groaned, waving on a long-snout Excalibur that was already accelerating midway through the crosswalk.
The familiar deep purple roadster was manned by a stogie-chomping, self-styled former rock idol living through a Texas-sized trust fund, cruising the Triangle on a lone-star booty call—as he had been for way too many time-warped years. Still teasing out a wild, bushy mane, he was yet another transplanted Texas mess: that is, either a gaudy lunatic ranger reactionary, or ranting high tower escapee, desperate to disown W. and LBJ without DeLay. “I just remember noontime acoustic folkies six-string strumming out in the sun.”
No whisky brown storefront on this cross corner; here: FatJack’s was a wine shop, through and through. FatJack Central had its curiously vintage oenological attributes and a Gavin Newsom cache, just the same.
Anchor to a light gray apartment building, the flagship store bore a large, freehand FatJack crest and matching logoed vine brown awnings identical to those on its companion bar and cafés downstreet. Casually disheveled, quality nonpareil—with a sanguine sophistication about it all: The wine shop was having none of the sophomoric hi-jinx and drunken excess across the way.
“It’s been so sensitive in Boulder, even the esteemed Jewish Studies program has been loath to touch it,” Paulen added, peering around the shop’s Greenwich side. “Not part of the curriculum, JSC maintains—as though it hadn’t been happening at all.”
“Wasn’t that sand-head routine patented by the Holocaust deniers?”
“Careful there, Herbert,” he studied a side window displaying an Art Moderne-style poster for a champagne charity reception at the Four Seasons Hotel, garnished with curvilinearly arranged bottles of Tessas Cuvee Chardonnay. “In any event, it is not properly informed. Which is partly why I began researching all this Middle East business on my own.”
“What’s to research? You’ve got one holy land, and two lords, right? Ah, the combustible art of conversation, buckling my inferior frontal, igniting my dormant dorsolateral prefrontal cortex…
“Is that how you see things?” he snapped, rounding the corner down Fillmore. “Would that it were so irreducibly binary.”
“No, hey,” I stammered, straightening my back up, following closely in his wake. “I’m just sayin’…”
“Point is, those people were claiming that Israel is the bad actor over there,” Paulen said. “For the life of me, I can’t get past that, can you?”
Around the Fillmore side, storefront windows overflowed with photo blow-ups of hillside vineyards and grape presses, of a FatJack retreat in the heart of Napa Valley. Its spread of luxury cottages, hilltop dining and an award-winning spa comprised a companion photo collage, with open gift cases of Chandon Blanc de Noirs and Coppola Diamond Claret resting below it on tufts of equestrian-grade hay.
We daydreamt on, past a flower box of rose petunias, to a middle window uplifting us away to FatJack’s ski resort in Squaw Valley—lofty shots of champagne powder and chalet hearth dining over the top of Sierra Tahoe.
“Me? No…no way…” Then again, I could lay it on the earaches I was cultivating, his assertions howling through my outré auditory canals once more, vibrating the ossicles, thumping the tympanums, banging the malleus, hammering the incus as they galed toward my aching cochlear ducts and eustachian tubes…
“I mean, after all that poor country has been through already.”
“Uh, I don’t exactly think of Israel as poor…”
“I’m referring to the long years of suffering and strife. I just believe those bashers need to understand what’s ultimately at stake in the Levant overall.”
Paulen drifted over to another, far window layout of posters touting a range of wine clubs, backdropping a miniature semi-formal linen, stemware and silver table setting, along with British green painted wine cases, their gold typography suggesting custom corkage and cellarage services—Traina, Haas and Getty, to a fault.
Between the place setting display and another window—the latter with a wine country picnic motif overlooking Rutherford: red checkered cloth, wicker basket and an array of tumblers, goblets, corkscrews and sterling gourmet utensils. The shop’s entranceway was framed by burgundy-stained wine casks topped with premium price lists, brochures illustrating the breadth of FatJack’s northern California empire.
We peeped inside to rack upon rack of A-list wines: Zinfandels, Cotes du Rhône, Pinot Grigios and Cabernets to name but a few. Rustic wooden tasting tables were scattered about the store, suggestive of open-air markets outside Oakville and Yountville. Logoed wine wear and gear covered vined and lattice-wooded walls, further selling the total FatJack culture along with the viniculture.
“OK then, so what’s at stake there exactly,” I rallied some, scoping out a burgundy price sheet, quickly placing it back on the barrel head with a hopeless sigh of disbelief. “I mean, why the student protests?”
“Why do you think?” Paulen looked me up and down.
“How should I know?” The Levant? “But I’ll bet it had nothing to do with wining.”
“Actually, in one small way, it did,” Paulen digressed. “A shame Merlot is sooo 2005. Breathe me some hearty Pinot Noir.”
“Sorry, not much of a wino these days…” R-r-right, I’ve sort of pretoxed, prehabbed the progress-not-perfection route a hush-hush time or two on my own. So then how come my ears are now rattling my temporal bones, playing my tympanum like trap drums all over again? Deflect, deflect… “You drink much anymore?”
Yet before long, FatJack’s bouquet became overwhelming, the wine shop’s structure too fleshy and supple, its texture too complex and smooth, the overall nose trifle plummy, the tannins a bit too velvety from mid-palate to finish. Fruity and fragrant an experience though the store was, we were soon drawn away, back to immediate reality by the whirr of a speeding Muni trolley bus, if not the scratchy French language tape of a tourist Go-Car passing by.
I just hankered to catch some ball scores on Town Tavern’s wide-screen overhead television sets back across Fillmore. Several weighty, Darwinally selected mancave types were tossing dice cups; others were glued to ESPN SportsCenter on Town’s larger-than-life projection screens—crunching the over/unders, breaking it all down over schooners of Hefeweizen and baskets of salty corn nachos.
“So noted, Herbert…and define much while you’re at it,” Paulen moved toward the Springboard Pilates studio next door to the Tavern. “But moving on, nothing more to see here. I’ll meet up with you up the street.”
“Gotcha, be right there,” I pulled back for momentary relief. “Giants apparently are getting lit up by the Dodgers again anyway.”
“Sorry, baseball’s not exactly my game,” he glanced rather wistfully back over at FatJack’s Wines, as if laying out a spread of Camembert, baguettes and cherry noted Bordeaux for two somewhere along the Silverado Trail.
“So what exactly is your…game?”
“Hide and Seek, Herbert, good ol’ hide and seek,” Paulen shouted in my wake.
“Well I’m more a Tag, Your It guy myself…” Whoa…ewww uuufff…
This all happened so fast, quicker than a ‘Light My Fire’ chord change. We were treading past a women’s shop and letter white former post office turned Kinkoplex, on approach to half-block Moulton Street, when we heard the frantic male shrieks echoing up through the all-but-alleyway. One sneak peek around Kinko’s corner revealed a crumpled, battered body along the building’s sidewalk shadows. It looked to be an elderly man freshly splayed and bloodied, cold-cocked if not demised, unlikely to have screamed that way. But given the machine noise, stereo bar blast, Lombard Street biker roar and Fillmore Street snarl, his feeble moans wouldn’t have been heard anyway. Nevertheless, a middle-aged jock sniffer in full-dress Warriors gear did cut through, running up Moulton in yowling fury, nearly tripping of a stray length of double-gauge rebar near the curb.
“Sorry, mate!” That was when I got flattened by a burly Cal rugby type who was leading a storm of bar brethren across Fillmore—Phyl’s force included—who were merging with rustlers from a darkly bordering rawhide lounge. They all encircled the scene, consoled the hellacious screamer, scoured grimy parked cars and steel barred windows/doorways along an otherwise deserted Moulton Street, out toward the towering palms of Mel’s Drive-In. The blindside blow sent me stumbling into mind-altering shock and awww, that only worsened as I slowly rose, steadying myself against a heavily handbilled telephone pole.
Still, before going down so hard I had glimpsed the victim’s mug—which was frozen into a horrific trial sketch—thinking I’d just seen a face I couldn’t forget the time or place. Though appearing to have aged grimly into his 70s, he had me flashing back to that Lafayette Park face-off with his likes in 1978, a chilling late-night encounter that had dogged me ever since. Soon dusting off, I shuddered to recall how desperate and violent it could get down and out around here. With the crowd somewhat calming the man as he sobbed and succored the comatose body, word spread that the Warrior fan was attending to his own stricken father—that territorial imperatives and grouchy bear spray altercations were involved here as well.
“You all right there, Herbert?” Paulen sidled up, having stopped short, then sidstepping the entire affair.”You surely did get tagged, didn’t you…shall we move on?”
“H-hey, no problem,” I settled down for a moment, head throbbing from concrete contact as squad cars and paramedics arrived. “Didn’t feel a thing…” Except for the contrecoup concussive snap-back in my brainpan…I could but feel the TBI pressure mounting against my cerebral cortex, swelling the wrinkled cortical quadrant lobes, bulging each groovy gyrus and sulcus—laterally frontal to occipital, steaming down the double yellow corpus callosum medial strip. “I’m good to go…totally…” Straining to collect myself, all I knew was I didn’t like where this deal was heading, no matter what.
“So do you know that old-timer?” he replied, already stepping lively toward the Lombard corridor.
“Uh, I’m not sure I…”
“Because you do seem rattled, like you’ve seen a ghost. That what you’ve seen, Herbert, a ghost?” Paulen drew and speed dialed into his black Razr cell, eager to uplink a call. “Honestly, when did this area become the nastier part of the nicer part of town…”
“Sorta like what’s been happening up around Boulder’s University Hill, huh?” I parried, haze setting in, noting how numb doc appeared to be in the face of such physical violence. “You keeping abreast of those…developments?
“Can’t say, Herbert,” he said with a double-take, pressing buttons, no less attentive to my palefaced dubiety. “Haven’t a clue what you mean by that…”
Care for more?
Chapter Twenty-One. A familiar figure
summons haunting reminders,
as the talk turns gauzier, summarily
to bomb slingers and missile strikes…