• 1978

Chapter 63

“Feeding one’s neuroses
can end up fueling
another’s psychoses.”

          “OK, people, let’s roll…”

          “And make sure to keep on the yellow line.”

          “Don’t hafta tell me ’bout followin’ no line…”

          Cat-night sweats went, talkin’ out the walk, mornings came on panther feet. But what I couldn’t seem to shake was gnawing, deep-pitted hunger—a craving for anything beyond pretzel samples and pass-around peanut bars, much less whatever Coleman stovetop surprises Sherry might have left over. There always seemed to be enough out-of-pocket change for a snack stand coffee buzz, though precious little for anything of nutritional consequence.

          More broadly, Aquatic Park had settled into a familiar San Francisco summer pattern of nights and morning fog, even in this severe drought year—local tan lizards catching the midday rays, under-dressed tourists freezing all day long. I wasn’t getting very far with the balky Volvo, but Eric maintained he was making mechanical headway with his Porsches, working up a mighty appetite in and under the rear, air-cooled hoods. Before long, we straddled his remaining two Porsches over three parking spots, and left Bruno dozing like a dog possessed in the white 912. I attitudinally downshifted into his red bomb on something of a lunch hunch with caution flags flying, and we ended up in this pit stop down here.

          “Takin’ ten, best have your cards ready, folks.”

          “Allow me. I’m carryin’ Diner’s Club.”

          “Yur carryin’ sumpin’, alright…”

          Better than it looked, Eric said, once we capped a return trip to the Tenderloin with a bumper tight parking spot near Turk Street and Hyde, not far from the Y Hotel. I wasn’t sure whether he meant the wheels, journey or the destination, but it couldn’t have been where a cautionary walk took us in short order. That was to a crabby sidewalk queue on Eddy Street, feeding into the doorway of a converted garage.   St. Zita’s Mission was a poor cousin to the far more crowded St. Anthony’s Dining Hall, and nowhere near the spiritual and gastronomical deliverance of Tinus Thrall’s. Still, this eponymous shrine to the patron saint of servants was a quicker, more facile in and out burger, with fewer sermons administered or questions asked, however greasier its skids.

          The sole price of admission was a free monthly lunchtime card, punched meal by meal, ostensibly non transferable upon registration, allowing for one guest per visit. These serial number stamped passes were calculated to qualify the charity operation for a lifeline of public sector grants and write-off donations, based upon foot and mouth volume. Even though the mimeoed meal tickets were traded and trafficked on the outside like SSI or INS green cards. Some of the mission’s clientele were simply in no mood nor capacity to sign anything, let alone a bare-bones questionnaire for their meal or reload ‘chip’ allotment—particularly some of the more grating unwashed around us. Yet that didn’t seem to cow Eric any; couldn’t say the same for his guest.

          “Listen up, we’ll take ten more,” bellowed a gatekeeper, working his frayed rope line. St. Zita’s staff and volunteers had this routine nailed, having been at their down-and-out serve and salvation business since just after WWII. “Douse your butts. Booze and dope stay outside. That goes for everybody.”

          “Hurry up and wait, worsin’ the damn army…” Spit a dipping, field-jacketed outlier immediately ahead of us, Klamath refugee from the tree hugger-lumber mill wars.

          “Yah, every swingin’ dick on the piss yellow lines,” said his transient sidekick, down from Weed, grizzly as Shasta’s peaks, stuffing a Mendocino roach between his ripped REI wool sock and right Wolverine.

          ‘There’s Nothing Like a Grateful Dead Concert’: That little maxim was silkscreened across the black windbreaker of a head directly behind me, which was likely transformative the first night he wore it to Winterland, especially under purple day-glo lights. But now it just looked slept in, barfed on, dead to the closing number and encore.

          Yet he was still up there, trippin’ in the balcony, sailing roses to Weir and Lesh as they snorted between ‘Cosmic Charlie’ and ‘Casey Jones’—scrounging coins and bottle caps for if and when the band came down from Marin’s mountaintops to replay nuggets from their MotherTruckin’ vault and reline their satin-patched jeans. Took a back slap from the Grim Reaper T-shirted swillpot over his shoulder to move him as the line resumed snailing along. 

          Beyond that, the whole cue was pretty, watchamacallit, grimy. Yeah, grime encrusting the sidewalk, transuding from the pores and coarse, stenchy threads of the entire procession.

          Bodily filth leached through stained denim and canvas, raw excretions oozed from frayed wool and nylon like acid rain through a shithouse roof. Even pigeons passed this stretch of Tenderloin by. St. Zita’s drew the infirm, urchins, bent, stooped, hooked, lost and generally desperate when more sanctified sanctuaries drew their blinds. But at least Eric and I had finally wormed our reeking way up toward pole position, a bit more upwind from the seamy pits and breaking wind—save for our own.

          “Hey, keep it close to the wall there, and no shoving,” ordered the doorkeeper, directing the wait line between yellow retaining gate railings and a row of overflowing garbage cans. “There’s enough for yas all.”

           “And make sure you folks double-check the schedule for designated treat times, hear? Adult men, A through H—2:30. I through P—3:25, Q through Z—4:20…”

          “What’s that, dessert?”

          “No, de-lousing…”

          For gritty, harder core, more unappetizing clients, St. Zita’s did offer the proverbial shit/shower/shave, not that their disinfecta was evidenced by the ambience overall. Still, the mission was all about bleeding hearts, Catholics knowing their charities, apostles of lost causes and tortured souls, plus a square-deal soup shed that served one of the fattest no-frills feedbags west of Hell’s Kitchen. To the famished downtrodden, it could be gastritic godsend; to the constitutionally unchristened, a no-strings, judgment-free sacristy. Then there were denial dolts like me, who couldn’t fathom how or why they had gotten themselves so deeply down-market over here.

          “Tighten up that line, people. Gotta keep the fire lane clear, and room for those comin’ out,” the doorkeep shouted, directing foot traffic, then waving our way. “C’mon, let’s move it—you two make ten…”

          “Trust me, it’s a real good deal,” Eric said, as we slipped in toward the former garage’s parking ramp. “If they ask, you’re my guest…”

          “Think I’d come here on my own?” I asked, looking back fore and aft. No Han Loon or Little Lucchio’s line here; I could only think, what would Moon, let alone Syd make of my current game plan and …trajectory, about a dead cat bounce like this?

          “Just stay close,” he nudged me ahead. “I got a system figured out.”

          “Am just casually observing, really,” I hedged, peering into the down ramp shadows. “Along for  curiosity sake, a little field study, might not stay at all…”

          “You come this far, you’ll stay,” Eric insisted, game facing some belching, full-bodied regulars making for the exit. “Once you’re in, you’re in.”

          “Even so, don’t expect to be eating…”

          “You’ll eat.”

          Stomach churning, I held tightly to the yellow railing as we shuffled down St. Zita’s concrete ramp, dank and distasteful as its steel-meshed entranceway was, even on such a clear, sunny day. I stayed a wary step or two behind Eric, who evidently knew his way around this operation. Was a time I’d have driven by, oblivious to a lost-cause asylum so far gone; now I came across as just another head of cattle prodded toward the graze. Kept mumbling that it was your own damn fault, dimwit—for walking such a tortured saturnine line, being so candy-ass comatose in between. Yet just when my thoughts turned darkest, the dim, damp ramp opened to one fluorescent blaze.

          Greeting us at ramp’s end stood two celestial blue-vested monitors checking ZitaCards and dispensing sloppy-seconds ‘chip’ tokens, strictly one per wino, wastre or ward. Along a cinderblock wall behind them was a chain of saintly kernels, framed like Stations of the Cross. The nearest courtesy of St. Francis of Assisi: ‘Grant that I may seek so much to be consoled as console…’.

          “So follow me, act like you know what you’re doing,” he said, having convinced the monitors we were inseparable as they punched his meal card and dealt us two chips.

          “Bit of a stretch, from the looks of it…”

          The room’s drooling chowhounds sat wrapped in their soiled street clothes, oily flammable polyester and layered rags—parcel twine belted, seams bursting for release. Sopping pits, sores draining, butts cracking, gums aching, kidneys failing, ulcers bleeding, suffering scaly scurvy, they sat steaming, boiling up, hunched over their lunch trays, slurping, forking around, spooning through the daily special.

          “Check it out,” Eric gestured, scoping out the serve line. “That’s where we make our move…”

          “On second thought, think I’m going to pass. ” By now, time for a grateful exit, an honorable discharge and Purple Heart, although curiosity did make me wonder what Eric saw in the place besides the tariff. “It’s SRO to the gills down here, and that line’s no end…”

          “C’mon, I know what I’m doing,” he beckoned me toward mid-room aisle. “And I’m working up a monster appetite. Just stay close, and vise grip your chip…”

          “You actually think I’ll want seconds?” I asked, inhaling the beer breath, nicotine residue, running pustules, abscessed bullas, fistula and carbuncles, zoorific bodily odors, row upon row—all rarefied under piercing, hard-white bulbs.

          “Who knows? But I’ll bet you’d go for a quicker route to some firsts,” Eric beckoned me slowly forward in sotto voce, fishing far into his pockets. “See, I heard out about how these little chips are more valuable than they look. ’Cause if you don’t use them for a second helping, like ten times, there’s this weird city human outreach office that will exchange them for a grocery voucher, to reward you for trying to help yourself positively and not overtaxing a vital public service. Turns out those $10 vouchers can be redeemable at most food stores, even corner package joints, no strings attached. It’s like turning in pop bottles without the heavy lifting…most of these stiffs use them for booze and smokes.”

          “Ten doses of this? Fat chance…and you’re trying to tell me city hall would put up with a scam like that, let alone the mission itself?”

          “You don’t get it—nobody checks, nobody cares, everybody gets paid on head count and repeat traffic. That’s how the system works. Yep, good ol’ Mayor Macaroni—this a great town, or what?”

          “Right, everybody’s favorite,” I said, breathing heavily, holding same.

          “But the beauty of the deal is what I came across over by Civic Center one day. Somebody had made up a bunch of fake St. Zita chips—total ringers, shit, who has the time to do that? Anyhow, found a bag of them in the Doggie Diner parking lot, so watch and learn…”

          Once in, the wait line snaked around St. Zita’s dining hall like an elongated paper dragon at a rainy Chinatown New Year’s parade. It seemed as though the queue was closing in, drawing up in tight guttoral grunts and growls from behind. I could hear them, feel them, brushing up against me as we shuffled forth, wheez-chested heavy breathing down my flannel collar. Sweat-through shirts and sweaters, chronically pissed-through pants—the sour stench seeped deep into my sinuses. Wrapping my palm up over nose and mouth, my breath was compost; a nosedive into my pits tested positively offensive, nearly as gamy as all this.

          These drifters, shoeless vagrants—discarded, some gangrenously dismembered—were largely mendecant to a man, derelict of demeanor, stripped of dignity or pride. Scraggly and tread marked, they were trying to dissemble their delusions under greasy thickets of gnomish brambled hair. Droopy, somnambulistic depth charges brooded beneath grimy ski knit or orange and black baseball caps, their sorry addictive stories betrayed, veiny-cheeked, sun-splotched faces down to toe-curled, heelworn, newspaper-lined oversized shoes. Really, identity crisis: how could the male of my species get this way—then again, how could I? 

          Winding, grinding slowly forward, a flank of famished, busted, seeping loners reeked of stale alcohol, vomit and despair. Mental casehardened varmints conned and schemed in venomous packs as if they had plans, some legit possibilities left between those dirt plugged ears. Stooped, crippled codgers with scabbed-over liver spots grilled themselves through cracked lips and shifting, downcast eyes.

          I could fathom coots like these, their bulb-snoot noses, cleft-stubbled chins and sagging wheelchairs. It was the younger ones, the gaunt, blood-eyed bastards who rattled me—at the volatile peak of their physical powers, still capable of doing damage—yet servile to some saltpeter Catholic charity like this. Ragged, frayed, unglued and tattooed, with textbook facial ticks and nervous disorders, clawing grass, stashes, lice and god-knew-what out of every crevice or cavity, they looked bent on working any angle.

          Then again, it was pretty tough to sympathize and condescend when you’re descending your own self. And why the hell did it seem they were all staring my way, fixin’ to get all up in my face—me here, stomach growling something fierce. That was about when Eric grasped my arm with blindside authority, leading us up past a roomful of lengths and bends, near the front of the food queue. There, he popped out a half-dozen of his bogus chips, offered them up, fore and aft, the lunch line parting, left-behinds too depressingly hollow-hunger weak and insentient to note much or care.

          “Say, where you goin’, boy?” Except one, a big, bearded one, at that. Must have stood six-foot six, his house mover’s upper body stampeding out of a burgundy STP tee shirt, grabbing Eric by the shoulder, jacking him up like an inside linebacker a scatback between the tackles.

          “No, wait, they’ve just been holding our place,” Eric gasped, scrunched at the collar, checking off me and the two stiffs behind us.

          “Pull that again, and you’re eating those chips, got it,” growled the grubby lineforcer, moving in one step ahead of us.

          “Not a problem, just a little misunderstanding, right,” Eric stammered, visibly flustered, straightening his fleeced denim jacket from the neck down, then passing back a last few chips to the waiting palms. “Much obliged guys…”

          “You all right? Working up a powerful appetite, huh,” I squirmed, handing him my valid chip as I kept two cautious steps away from the bruiser straight ahead. In any case, it was unclear to me whether Eric’s chippy little scam rang true, made any sense in the first place, or if it wasn’t the scheme so much as the source. Meaning, I had to wonder even more what the hell he’d gotten me into down here.

          “I need a smoke,” Eric heaved, apparently caught unawares by the backfire.

          “Yo, move it along…” Grateful as he was for the bonus chips, the crackpot once removed poked us to step up toward St. Zita’s serve counter, which was suddenly gathering steam. We made a final turn along a tubular metal tray railing, facing the unsavory reality of the lunch hour fare. I grasped a Formica tray despite myself, eyes burning, nasal passages clogged with bodily decay. My stomach somersaulted with the prospect of wolfing down whatever staffers were ladling out of their stainless steel bins and buckets.

          Yet I kept the chow line shuffling forward, aching instead for past S.O.S. helpings of army shit on a shingle, anything besides what was piling up behind those glass sneeze shields, apparently to Eric’s lip-smacking delight. Not that I could actually make out what everyday factotums and elder volunteers were commixing, but the nearest vats seemed filled with vegetables from food banks or Zita’s Sonoma farm, and a lumpy, bubbling sauce. On a kitchen wall behind the servers were mounted photos of guest helpers, from Mayors Alioto and Moscone to Families Dog and Dead to recent Giants ballplayers like Darrell Evans, Vida and Johnnie LeMaster—all of which faded behind a thickening smoky steam. We inched closer to the main entrée, pans of somewhere between turkey cacciatore and chicken fricassee, something starchy filling and fowl.

          “Come closer, where we can serve you,” said one smock-stained attendant, a name tag IDing him as a retired carpenter for hire. “Want I should sling this stuff, or what?”

          “No, let me,” I slid further along the railing as Eric proceeded to the coffee urns, hoisting my stamped cafeteria style tray for several slapdash dollops of the day’s special, a scoop of veggies and slice of white Wonder bread, delivered via scabbed and nail scarred hands. “Easy on the…meat…”

          “Fine by me, we got half the city to feed here today,” the server coughed, heat lamps above him filling with a steam thickening more and more into smoke. “With this hotdamn ventilation yet and the fans broke down…”

          “It always like this,” I asked him, as I moved toward the water and coffee urns.

          “Don’t know, city inspector was here just yesterday, signed off on the place. Even ate himself up a trayful of our pork and hominy stew…”

          “That ain’t all he filled up on,” cracked the volunteer sauce ladler next to him, waving away more smoke. “Left a whole lot heavier in the wallet…scammin’ just like the lot ’em around City Hall.”

          Curiously enough, the mere aroma from my food tray rallied me some, like an organic B-12 shot in the alimentary canal. St. Zita’s ambience seemed boosted, as well, with pastoral Napa-Sonoma watercolors covering the hall’s surgical scrub-blue walls, sprays of plastic flowers between the cheery murals—green hills flush with vineyards and Holsteins—visions of cleaner living for men who cotton to the agrarian life. Even feastly balloons and lowly piped-in choir muzak subtly lent spiritual buoyancy to the dissolute gathered, slender threads of divine redemption that nonetheless were commonly ignored.

          Trailing Eric as we cast about for empty seating, I noted little mealtime banter, few spirited debates or rejoinders, much less sermonizing or rejoicing at all. Row upon row, the hunched over lunch crowd was busy bolting as much of the mystery mush as they could in one sitting. Any hesitation only meant poaching one tray over, even before lining up their chips for more. To a man, they appeared fearful of the prospect that hoarded bread and white cake might crumble out of their every pocket. Mutt bags of everything else slipped and dripped inside twine-knotted shirts and jackets like there was no tomorrow down here.  

          I could see ennui and/or terror in their pocked, tick-flinching faces and backwoods beards—the faces of old-age desperation and regressive, overgrown striplings, amid cascading belches and synchronous farts. After gorging, slopping and chomping through brown, broken teeth, their momentarily sated stares turned merely vacant, as though each and every codger, mook and manchild were the only person in the room. They were here, but weren’t here—nobody was here—yeah, got it, mind over mendacity, block this place out, bolt this gruel down. Disassociate, disassociate—I know you are, but what am I? Keep a safe, sterile distance and studiously wish it all away. 

          “Hey, Mr. Chips,” said that house mover, closing in over Eric’s shoulder. “You got more a them?”

          “Me? Naw, flat out,” Eric shuddered, staring straight into his lunch, straining to keep it down.

          “Better be talkin’ straight, butthole,” he lightly slapped the back of Eric’s head, grabbed our white bread irrespectively, then turned to prowl over toward his tray, two benches away. “Or next time, you’ll be eating your phony chips.”

          “Gotta have me a cigarette,” Eric exhaled, surrendering corroded flatware to his food tray, reaching into his denim jacket for half a pack.

          “Uh, Eric, I don’t think you can light up in here,” I urged, resigned to spooning down another heap of fricassee—utterly, almost thankfully yielding to the pangs and growls, for it really wasn’t all that bad. “C’mon let’s just eat up and split…”

          Nevertheless, he lit up a Lucky short right on the spot, just when our attention was seized by a pop-up lay preacher one row to our right, apparently a bit too full of carbohydrates, coffee and no doubt himself. Then aarrewww, aaaarrrewwww… What happened moments later was all the harder to swallow, the timing of which left my head spinning, lungs clogging, my stomach crying foul. Before the elderly apostle could sit back down to his sliced angel food, alarms began screeching, smoke detectors beeping, St. Zita monitors ordering everyone to immediately vacate the dining room due to a kitchen grease fire and complete stopping up of the exhaust vents. A resulting cloud threatened to engulf the entire basement facility, with an overhead sprinkler system cocked to flood it at any moment. Aarrewww, aaarreww, aaaarrrewwww…

          Row by row, the lunch crowd was ushered out of St. Zita’s, directed to leave potentially contaminated food trays behind. All these scowling borderline guys, with their sapped, south of the border acuity, ramping up like bulls at the chase. This downtrodden carnavale of killer carnivores—the 5150s, 6160s, Section 8s, the Deep Springs dropouts, runaway felons and clearly certifiable among them, limped and lumbered to higher ground, drooping pear faces lathered with sauce and butter and stringbean marinade, tired eyes ringent with dire hunger unabated and untethered caffeine confusion, with no place else to go—Eric and me no less panicky mid herd.

          Scared shitless, sweating just as grossly, I parted company with Eric at ramp’s end—no telling what was scalding his pot by now. I just wanted separation, up and out, heading half starved along Eddy Street, while he remained to mill about St. Zita’s entrance, now coolly trolling for unused refill chips, settling for another smoke.

          Yet the sweep of more blaring red trucks from S.F.F.D.’s nearby headquarters on Golden Gate Avenue soon drew my frustrated glance above them to a rooftop at Leavenworth Street. Just what I needed to cleanse the palate: A fresh billboard, hot young couple toasting against a Mazatlan sunset, the headline reading, ‘Making Out Like a…’, its slickly graphic logo, Bandito Tequila.

           Hadn’t a clue where Eric was going from here, but I was another story by now…

Care for more?

 Chapter 64. Increasing hunger stirs 
food for manic thought, up to the 
point of mainlining away, with a 
little boost from Uncle Andy…

“Women can be a drag,
draining the brain pan—
setting it all afire.”

          “We gave our power away—placed it on a silver serving tray…”

          “How do you mean that, Corrine, figuratively or…”

          “Oh, no—most literally. First we pass it through our father-daughter bond. Then to our teachers. We juggle it like a hot rock until we can no longer bear the pressure. Then, bingo, we toss it to the men in our lives, for better or worse…too often, the latter.”

          “Fascinating, really fascinating, Corrine. Now…”

          “Frank, what I’m telling the women of America in my new book is this: Hey, we’re closing in on the 80s, and here you are still shackled to your Betty Crocker myths and delusions. That you must remain submissive, that you have no personal identity or worth. That domestic slavery, stifling relationships—yes, even hard physical abuse are better than facing yourselves and your aspirations on your own two feet. Wake up, sisters, that glass slipper is cutting off your circulation. The time to chuck it is now—smash it right against those walls around your soul and potential. Cast off the glass slippers for wings on your beautiful feet!”

          “You know it, Corrine!”  Women in crowd applauded.

          “Power to sheople, sister, right on!!!”

          “Naw, make that a leather boot up your butt, sister!”

         Not so lucky charm-wise: I’d come up frightfully empty once more—amid shadowy figures with mad intentions—hence back here again I was. A few more days had passed, and I was still in some kind of a fog—then there was the long holiday weekend. By default, I had gradually retreated to the Volvo and Aquatic Park for a spell—in and out, ’round and about, late wanderings still in play—fault lines spreading like stress cracks across window glass. Thankfully, re-parking remained tenable, skies had cleared here some, the sun warming me head to toe—at least until late day, July the 4^th. Gray-white soup began snaking through the Golden Gate toward sunset, cold cocking the Bay from Raccoon Strait to the Meiggs Wharf breakwaters directly before us. The untimely fog never touched Sausalito, steered clear of The City itself until just past dusk, but slyly blanketed the Bay about a quarter hour before show time. So anti-American, in a micro-climatological sort of way…

          This was when the fireworks began, not that it made much difference to the waterfront’s gathered masses. Because downtown movers and shakers had moved the rocket and pinwheel launchers out by Alcatraz Island in an effort to allay those short-fused switchboards at the Noise Pollution Resistance Task Force. How were they to know that mid-bay fog would squelch everything: the noise, the toxins, the fire—the works? It only happened most July 4^th holidays, shivering locals were heard to complain. Nonetheless, easily half the city poured out to Bay’s edge for politico declarations and a pyro-extravaganza.

          It was clearly a brilliant tactical move, this night sky celebration of independence radiating from a prison turned Indian stronghold turned tourist trap out there. The whole day was just sunny enough for the hordes lugging beer coolers without working up a sweat. Eric had even sponge washed his red, white and metallic blue German imports. Then that fog crashed the party, dousing the rocket’s red glare. Booming explosions were buffeted to earmuffled belches; splashy Comet Palms, flashy blue Salutes, tubular Fancakes, Horsetail Waterfalls and split-star Crossettes reduced to smoke screened fizzles of color, the gathered faithful reacting in kind, giving themselves a celebratory listen to the fireworks show. But that only led to the muddled here and now.

          “See folks? That’s exactly…talk about male chauvinist oppression!”

          “Yeah, well sit on this and spin, you dyke slut!”

          “Shhh, hey cool it, will you,” I mumbled. “This is going out live…”

          “Psst, Wes—bring up the band, fast,” said the onstage host, cue cards in one hand, Corrine’s hardcover book in the other, before turning back to the cameras and assembled audience. “So there you are, ladies, and all you modern thinking gents tuning in. We’re going to take a short break for these important messages. But we’ll be right back from trend-setting San Francisco with Ms. Corrine Comstock, and more of her runaway best-seller, ‘Conquering the Cinderella Complex’. Don’t touch that dial… ”

          “Right on, drown that feminag flat out!”

          “So sorry about this, Corrine. Like they always say, beware the hazards of a live remote,” Frank wheedled, trying to calm her, off camera and mike. “Wes, usher that lunatic away from the stage, will you please?!”

          They appeared to have it all covered, this network bunch: The San Francisco remote broadcast, direct from Aquatic Park with Alcatraz as a backdrop, and the most provocative, screen-cool personalities The City had to offer. Local marquee heavies from Patty to Getty to Magnin to Moscone and Milk, Willie Mac to Willie Brown, not to mention Werner Erhard and a videotaped feed by an ascending spirit from Guyana, a sanctimonious, though slurring Reverend Jones. One by one, these Bay Area A-listers toasted show mugs of libations unknown and otherwise kissed up to Frank Monahan—he of NBS-TV’s popular ‘Mugging with Monahan’ afternoon program—who so adroitly put them at on-camera ease over the course of two days, three million celeb-starved housewives tuning in.

          Beachfront rayniacs said this raree show was generating more Aquatic Park hubbub than Goldie Hawn’s ‘Foul Play’ movie shoot or when that Bicentennial Freedom Train rolled in along the old Belt Line tracks two years back.  

          Team-jacketed grips and gaffers up from L.A. had beached their porta-stage on the park’s promenade. Frank’s set was something of a makeshift shmoozer bar, facing the Maritime Museum’s concrete bleachers, so that over every padded raglan shoulder was a picture perfect Bay backdrop of heeling sailboats, renovated keel haulers and far-out fancy enclave, Belvedere. Mw/M’s video mages had spent full mornings positioning enough skrim reflectors, wind deflectors and metal detectors to forestall any potential disruption known to televised man.

          They fenced off host Monahan and his studio band, cordoned off camera and sound men, diverted Aquatic Cove swimmers and bought off a goodly portion of the assorted faithful ‘Muggers’ with apple cider samplers and middlin’ finger sandwiches. But when it came to the larger bleachers crowd, well this was tolerant, inclusive San Francisco—and who in Ft. Wayne or White Plains would know that Monahan’s vast studio audience was packed with groupies, shills, comps, plants and trade-outs, much less Aquatic Park’s lowest common denominator?

          Yet everything was jake so long as the swag and provisions held out. Moreover, the production crew had two truckloads of catered spread parked behind the bleachers on Beach Street, tucked between the humming power units and dressing/wardrobe vans. Applause signs and stage monitors kept all the glom-on audience lemmings pacified, along with free autographed copies of ‘Speaking Frankly With Monahan’, the host’s own memoirish monograph, each bearing a standard release form as bookmark, to be signed as needed. Show runners and stage managers even appeared to edit out any early-forming summer fog.

          It appeared that after nearly two days of fusty hacks, New Left headhunters and celebrated cigar-soaked hobnobs, a ballsy, bioenergetic feminist and her Cinderella complexes would level out the genderal waves like Aquatic Park’s curving Municipal Pier.  So why was Frank Monahan excoriating his make-up man, striking up his band; why were his director and stagehands pacing furiously about the set, cueing the audience to begin a ‘Let’s Get Frank’ chant as this live remote sent it to commercial break? The same reason staff security swooped down on the narrow blind crease we had just snuck in through with such idle, star-struck curiosity: edge of the bleachers, stage right—wherein Eric felt it necessary to reveal himself in no understated terms.

          “OK, pal—show’s over, let’s go…”

          “No man, not with that ranting dyke still up there on the stage hawking her stupid-ass book,” he shouted, as the security drovers cowpoked us away.

          “For you two mutts, it’s over, get it?”  The larger of two crew herders reached past me, grabbing him more firmly by the shoulder while the other jammed a hardcover copy into his thorax. “Here, take Frank’s autographed book for your trouble…before we take you for a little swim.”

          “Uh, Eric, maybe we’d better…” I reached for his elbow to pull us out of this waxing cameo.

          “What a pile, man,” he shook me off, yet followed along toward the Maritime Museum, still calling out the unmoved security guards. “These stinkin’ fascists can’t…”

          Yet they did—ushered us right out of the picture, 86ed us clear away from the bleachers due west to the foredeck of the senior center. That was when the show band suddenly hit a crescendo and Frank Monahan took his last cigar puffs and fake-bake layer of Sun Glaze Matte #3 before grinning into camera number one. And Corrine resumed liberating the Cinderellas of America with a flourish of her pink-to-red covered book.

          “Hell with it, Eric, we can still catch most of the show from here,” I paused to tune back in my own self.

          “Think I wanna listen to any more of that feminazi crap?!”

          “C’mon, it’s just another half hour or so,” I sensed some of my latent huckster instincts setting in. “What’s with the spinning dyke stuff, anyway?”

          “She’s just another castrating bitch with her horny whore bullshit,” Eric spouted, instead stepping further down the promenade, chucking Frank’s book into a garbage can. “She’s just beggin’ for it, no lie. What she’s really after is the big hose, man—cryin’ out for the ol’ nozzle, up either end. That’s what her jive’s really about.”

          “Yeah, well,” I begged off, creating space, though mindful of his auto mechanical expertise in a pinch. “You go on ahead, okay? Gonna hang a bit, sort of check your theory out…”

          “Suit yourself, I’m truckin’ back to my cars,” he shrugged, then headed across Aquatic Park’s flower beds for his Porsche parade. “Get Bruno to hike a leg all over it…”

          I stayed deckside, marginally within earshot of Frank and Corrine, near enough to catch her loudspeakered railings against submissive domestic bondage and stifled sexuality. Whatever Eric’s misgivings about her Comstock load, they couldn’t have been my sentiments—not by a long shot, right? After all, weren’t these my mother’s laments, didn’t ambitious interruptus plague her until the moment she soared with the angels? And that ‘Fear of Flying’ thing—wasn’t that what kept Moon in her holding pattern all this time, no matter how much lint I picked? But even if so, how would that anti-Cinderella there explain the likes of Sydney Mendel?

          I sure as hell didn’t have any answers, and wasn’t buying Eric’s. It was enough just trying to keep up with Syd, let alone endeavoring to psyche that one out. In any case, Corrine had pretty much shilled her complex to death up there, and Frank Monahan was kissing her off, waving bye-bye to the women and househusbands of America, diaper and deodorant spots hot on his heels. His parting guest was being whisked off stage by her lady guardivas, Frank and his network honchos hustling around the emptying east bleachers to idling limousines.

          Before those black-windowed Lincolns could take leave, show roadies were shooing Aquatic Park rabble away from the leftover spread tables. Roadies were striking the set, packing up floods and rims; keys, dimmers and shiny boards, vanloads of video and sound gear. Gofers hosed the cider-sticky bleachers down with industrial grade Rinso. Through it all, Frank’s house band continued playing ‘San Francisco, Open Your Golden Gate’ like tape-looped Muzak to the bitter finale.

          The Gate itself was opening up to early evening as I finally went the way of Eric and our motorcars. Aquatic Park’s lagoon had turned lotion smooth behind the Municipal Pier breakwater, a hyperkinetic squadron of orange-capped swimmers resuming their laps across the cove with Dolphin Club territorial chips on their shoulders.

          I curved around the promenade past napping, old-man nude sunbathers and backbench romantics, reconvening winos fighting seagulls for their turf. Alcatraz was Midas now, its ‘main street’ cell block blazing like Athens’ acropolis before the golden age of hydrocarbons and particulates. A reddening sky refracted off outer Bay whitecaps, back up here to Fort Mason’s cliffside colonels’ quarters. Below them, Aquatic Park’s snack bar glowed with a checkerberry glaze; shame it has closed up so early, as Corrine’s pitch and Frank’s skimpy whets had stirred up a powerful hunger.

          “I knew it,” Sherry crowed, pulling in behind my Volvo just as I crossed over to unlock its driver door. “I knew by the time we got back to town you’d be crashing here again.”

          “Didn’t plan it exactly,” I opened the Volvo and rolled down its window to air out a staggeringly stale interior—one which had yet to yield a missing Josh in the box, no matter how deep I dove. “But I’m kinda beat…”

           “All leavin’ us in your dust for North Beach,” she grinned her way out of their Econoline. “You look plenty beat, all right, so what happened?”

          “Uh, maybe another time…” Just what I wanted to hear. My stomach was bilious as it was, and my head was revolting even more. How could I talk about it all? Would I even dare?! Inbound fishing boats signaled the onset of another chilblained night in a car that. Then there was Eric over there, sitting side-saddle in the runt of his German litter, Oly in hand, gagging like a maggot over his metallic blue Porsche’s dysfunction.

          “Oh, I get it—nowhere else to go, so you end up watching TV live,” she cracked, as I held my breath and squirmed in the driver’s seat, fishing about in my door pocket. “Daytime TV, no less!”

          “Sorry,” I nodded, reaching for that screwdriver, a quick carburetor tweak in mind. “Captive audience.”

          “Uh-huh, women’s daytime TV, yet.” She badgered, over a cup of Coleman stove heated noodles, poking her fork toward me as I jumped out to pop the Volvo’s hood.

          “Couldn’t beat the price of admission,” I muttered and reached in to tap the twin SU cowlings, jimmy jiggle the throttle linkage, like that would spring the four-banger to sustainable life. “I mean, that Comstock chick was almost…interesting—something about complex Cinderellas.”

          “Oh I get it, Corrine’s cashing in on the enslavement theory,” Sherry sighed, leaning in against my fender. She had a rugged, no-nonsense self-assurance about her; maybe it was the fullness of her frame in that XL Cornell sweatshirt and denim. “Won’t catch me in crystal slippers, who needs the self-help crutch? Except maybe guys like you and Crash Caravan over there.”

          “No, she was saying how women can be afraid to reach out, go for it on their own,” I recalled. “Guess a lot of what she said was pretty heavy on the sisterhood line, but some of it, well…I’ve known women like that, don’t even allow themselves a decent sneeze…”

          “Bought in, huh? Listen, lots of women do have their heads in a sling, and drag their men along for the roller-coaster ride,” Sherry said dismissively in her full sandblasted voice, leaning in against the front fender. She had a rugged, no-nonsense self-assurance about her. Maybe it was the fullness of her frame in that XL Cornell sweatshirt and denim. But not me, that’s not my trip—just ask Clifford.”

          “Wouldn’t want to impinge on his trance time.” I straightened up from the front fender, wiping my screwdriver with a red tool rag reduced to plugging one of the sedan’s firewall holes.

          Glancing over past Eric, I spotted Frank Monahan’s crew packing cameras, light stands, mixing consoles and nautical miles of audio/video cable into massive blue equipment cases. Even the band had folded their instruments and sheet music, roadies were loading up the set and stage, section by pre-fab section, returning Aquatic Park’s trashed bleachers and promenade to the muckers, pigeons and gulls.

          “Anyhow, dunno about Clifford,” I straightened up from the front fender, wiping my screwdriver with a red tool, then door pocketing the tool. “But she sure triggered something in Eric. He wigged out, almost heckled her off the stage, like Mr. Pig Personified.”

          “Eric’s not man enough to be a male chauvinist pig,” Sherry snapped, looking over at his ailing Porsches as though they were carnival bumper cars, trying to shoo Bruno off the sunroof of his white rig, fumbling with a full key ring as he pulled a perimeter sweep of his fleet.

           “Couldn’t say either way…” This, as Eric took to letting Bruno lick his three days’ growth from the roof of the white 912.

          “Hmph, I’ve had him pegged all along,” she twisted and turned her long pony tail. “My father’s a circuit court judge back in upstate New York, so I know a cheap felon when I see one. But the SF cops did too, sniffing around the Porsches earlier this morning, leaving him be…heard them saying they were already too busy looking into a string of park killings, even one the other night.”

          “They said that straight out did they?” I asked warily, having instead pegged her as a farm girl, recalling that even with Seamus, face licking was beyond the pale, especially after the Setter worked over his undercarriage. Yet here Eric came.

          “I just blew it off,” she sized my mind drift up and down. “But Clifford freaked out over all the cops and commotion, so we headed up to Point Reyes for a bit.”

          Screeeeech…“Up yours, Charlie,” Eric yelled, crossing right in front of a brake slamming station wagon. The pier-bound Japanese crab catcher’s eyes lit up like rising suns. Eric just squared off and waved a 24mm open end at him, while his dog hopped up all over the Datsun’s honking front end.

          “That’s exactly how he was at the TV show,” I gasped at the sight of him staring down the stunned driver, as Bruno growled like a rabid coyote. “Screaming at that Corrine person, a million people tuned in.”

          “With a little luck, that fisherman will run him over,” Sherry said, otherwise ignoring Eric’s harangue.

          “So just slow your ass down,” Eric eased off the driver with a wave of his Snap-On wrench, motioning Bruno over to the park shrubbery to take care of some business, steaming our way. “I heard you two talking about me, sure as  shit…”

          “You’d know all about shoveling it, now wouldn’t you,” she delivered a killer stare as Eric rested against my curbside fender. “You and your petty theft autos.”

           “Anytime you want to see my pink slips,” he grinned at her. “Damn sight better than yours.”

          “You’ve got nothing I care to see, believe me.” She looked like she was cocking to throw her noodle bowl upside his sun-peeled forehead.

          “Yeah? Well, up yours, your fat ass bitch…”

           “Uh, guys…” Darkness may have been setting in, but things weren’t getting any cooler. Sherry, I couldn’t quite figure, fem or foe. But damned if she didn’t tear after Eric like Bruno after some ground squirrels over by the Fort Mason wall. And damned even more if I hadn’t gotten myself directly between them, fender to fender.

           “Besides, I have seen you, Eric,” she screamed, arching back, breathing fire across my opened hood. “You and Bruno in your stupid cars—the way you molest that hound of yours.”

           “I’m gonna stuff her dog-ass grill!” But Eric wanted physical, wild-eyed physical.

           “Eric, wait,” I said, trying to stall them off without getting physical. “She’s a chick, for chrissake…”

          “Clifford, get out here and defend my honor before I kick the hell out of you both!”

          “Eric, brother,” Clifford said, from up through the pop-top, before pulling on  his tunic as he vaulted from the van. “Mellow out, okay—let’s work on that tension, relax it right out of your spine.”

          “Come any closer, wimpo, and I’ll break your spine,” Eric spat back, twice pounding my fender.

          “Uh, guys, please, easy on the car—it’s not much, but all I have,” I said. “And gotta go…”

          With that, I dropped hood, locked up, leaving the three of them and Bruno scowling and growling, but ultimately little else. Clifford in fact looked to be making some headway with his neo-Ghandian approach, seeming otherwise harmless. Indeed, from safe distance, namely from across the drive by a pair of public phone booths near the snack stand, their whole showdown smelled of Kabuki guerilla theater. Or that might just have been the odor of heads and entrails from this morning’s gutted longjaw mudsuckers and brown rockfish, rotting away atop a plastic milk crate around the bend.

          In any case, I needed an out from all the sniping, reason enough to make that follow-up call, couldn’t put it off any longer.

          Hsssssst, pop… “This is Sydney. I’m off to L.A. right now on a sudden trip heap big business. At the sound of the tone, leave me a message of any length, I’ll get back to you soon as I can. Oh, and if this is Kenneth Herbert, pick up a long note I left for you in a parcel box below my mail slot, would you please? Didn’t know how to reach you, where are you this time? Get a real place and phone—find my box and get to work on that proposal…” Crackle, beeep… CLICK.

          Actually, calling them phone booths was being generous to a falsehood. Out here, Ma Bell didn’t provide truly respectable wood-clad, pebble-paneled chambers for discreet personal exchanges. No, she offered bogus open-air aluminum listening posts, which left coin poppers like me shouting their intimacies into the wind, fighting to get a word in with the next-phone caller spitting invectives mere inches away. Fortunately, I couldn’t think of anything of consequence to say.

          Hung up: No message, no Josh box recovery, no place, no phone—the neighborhood was turning hostile and my car had gone dead. And this proposal deal was so important she left it in her goddamn postal bin? L.A.?! Here I was stuck again, under a sputtering streetlight, when by all rights I could have been there. Dusted by her, who was down there, when common decency said she shoulda been here. And what was that…person doing up there, anyway? 

          I slammed the receiver and panned about a darkened Aquatic Park. Appeared that the antagonists had retreated to their respective vehicles, with no visible signs of bloodshed or further damage, even  though all that likely wasn’t over. Across Van Ness Drive, Fort Mason’s promontory dropped sharply to that khaki tan basewall, to shadowy thickets of shrubbery, ficus and wild, if not poisonous vines.

          Still, I could make out a sagging lean-to eyesore one third of the way up to an officers’ club’s loftier grounds. By day, the hillside’s untended tendril tangle lent a barbed wire DMZ resistance to the entire fortification; come nightfall it was downright forbidding. Things were stirring up there about the abandoned shed; I could hear them as I shambled back to the Volvo. Creatures were skulking about the shadowy greens. What, I didn’t care to explore, despite conjuring up grotesque iguanodons and gila monsters from the discomfort of my front seat.

          But now the whole scurrilous lot was coming to the surface, and the subspecies wasn’t reptilian; it was Carnivora Felidae. I could scarcely make them out: small, low-crawling felines emerging from the leafy underbrush. Timid cats, aggressive cats, scrawny cats, fatted cats—scraggly mongrel Persians and kinky tailed Siamese: feral, feculent, here they were, slinking down the hillside to a missing chainlink or two in Fort Mason’s retaining fence. Abyssinians, Prussian Blues, gray Certosinos, fierce Egyptian Maus, Scottish Folds, longhaired Balinese seemed to clot at the fence holes, pouncing down the park’s low basewall toward the sidewalk.

          There a large wooden platform sat on the hood of a paint-spackled ’73 Ford, cats marching to it in cordons like Treasure Island recruits. It belonged to a jute-shawled harridan who sat inside the Fairlane, spooning out cans of Puss ‘n’ Boots under a dim dome light. Must have been four cardboard cases, BBQ Chicken Parts to Liver ‘n’ Onions, stacked in the back seat. Her car radio spun big-band Artie Shaw, and the jumping cats just ate it all up. Fels Sylvestris, Pallas’ cats, margays, black-footed Sebalas, tiger-striped tabbies and coonies: They swarmed over scores of heaped bakery tins atop the plywood platform, purring something awful under the gauzy glow of a flittering streetlight.

          The old woman must have been some sort of pie-pan piper, dishing out cat food to every nick-eared feline stray in town. Rex, Manx—all kinds of slinking, snarling, half-starving lionines and grimalkin chowing down. Their numbers swelled to where it looked like they were closing in on me with toxic cat piss and spray at the ready. I double-checked my windows and door locks, cramming into my sleeping bag, their caterwauls threading through the Alex DeGrassi guitar tape and sourdine bickering from Sherry’s battened down Econoline van.

          I clicked on my Blaupunkt to drown all that out, catching KYA’s moldy replay of the Eagles’ ‘One of These Nights, one of these crazy ol’ nights’. Enough of that, all the way out here for meager cat scraps, like an answering machine message and plain brown letter. That and all the cats got me to thinking of Pags, of racing back to those payphones to give Moon a dose of where is and why for’s…dream on—too little, too late, lamebrain. Lag time, clocked out—what a hokey joke of a heartland homecoming that would be, the way things were today…

          Instead, I stirred about to peek up over the Volvo’s crack-padded dashboard until its gearshift lever stabbed my scrawnier ribs, chewing over the potential protein and carbohydrate content of those liver ’n’ onions cans, for the cats were eating better than I was. Some dark, smoking figures argued in passing—about what, I didn’t even want to know, instead peering over at the bright lights of Ghirardelli Square shimmering off Aquatic Park’s lagoon, the penetrating mid-bay sweep of that Alcatraz beacon. Dousing KSAN’s new Springsteen cuts with icy fingers, I picked up on harbor seals jumping, tides slapping against the distant breakwaters as the fog and plodding crude-oil tankers rolled in toward East Bay refineries.

          All and any calm was broken by that battered Dodge panel truck backfiring down the drive once again. So I burrowed deep into the Frostline, both bucket seats pushed way back, curling up loosely around the floorshift knob to take the heat off my ribs. My head propped up against the driver’s door armrest, I tried to tune out the sputtering panel van, fighting feline hisses and howls, arguing parkside drunkards, slamming car doors and foghorns reverb echoing from bridge to bridge—mull over when the cat lady might sing and leave her stand—or whether I instead might take myself another little corrective walk.

          A long KSAN airplay of ‘Darkness On the Edge of Town’ finally did me in. I dozed off, however fitfully, wondering whether I’d stay put the whole night through—what with everybody handling their 3 a.m. leak in their own peculiar ways. At least until I heard another engine firing up, real racecar-like, an alarm clock from Acheron. Had to be one of the Porsches there across the drive. Made me wonder between REM waves whether it was Eric, and what he could be up to. Which rusty 912 was he thrashing in and about tonight? And what was he doing with that dog…

Care for more?

 Chapter 63. Hunger for substance 
meets the patients of a Saint, 
while a foray for liquidity finds 
down payment overdue… 

“Stone cold detachment
only goes so far before
freezing a body in place.”

            “Where you been? Had me waiting damn near an hour!”

           “My lead’s broke down. Watch your step, gramps…”

           “Hmph, got a mind to turn you in, fella. What’s your driver number there?”

           “You got eyes. You people, man, same ol’  bigot bullshit…”

           I stood watching Syd’s cab flip a U-turn toward downtown hi-rises, then hoofed it in that general direction, irredeemably in kind. A vaguely familiar Dexter Gordon number, ‘I’m A Fool To Want You’, soon drowned out Tosca’s inner arias. A  sidewalk sax player sat beside an open case full of one-spots and small mounds of change just outside a Moroccan belly dancer deli and revue. I experienced the solo as best I could, worked at being with the melancholy it created, or she created, or I created, whatever. I glanced across Columbus at the enlightened glow of City Lights Bookstore and the colorful stained-glass beatnook called Vesuvio Café.

             North Beach held steadfast by its Bohemian bars and bawdy main drag despite a Chinatown invasion, even so far as having conferred landmark status on Carol Doda’s cornerstone lounge. Her blinking nipples lured me across lusty Broadway, candy-striped barkers promising explicit double exposure, with Carol taking on all comers. But I could or couldn’t have cared less, already hot and bothered enough as it was. Before I knew it, I’d boarded this green torpedo at Market Street, hell bent on riding it to the bitter end.

            Just needed to take a spin, clear my head, rearrange my priorities, see where I was without losing my choice Aquatic Parking spot. Given everything, I wasn’t up to another pretzel-legged crash and thrash in the Volvo, let alone even one more sweaty stint at the Hotel Y. So this once, I’d resigned myself to pulling an escapist all-nighter on San Francisco’s Municipal Railway. Indeed, from the moment I hopped this L Taraval streetcar, I was under MUNI’s sway, with nary a clue as to precisely where this tank was taking me—was just relieved to be along for the ride, unaware that it would bring  me here: to the scene of my snafued felo de se.

           “Whaddya’ mean, you people?”    

          “Half-dead honkies,” said the motorman, heavy on the former fullback side.“Y’all looks alike to me…”

          “How dare you…it’s that damn Moscone and his lefty supes, turnin’ MUNI into a goddamn African air force,” spouted a stooped old man leaning heavily on his cane. “Well, I got my pass here, so let me up.  I ain’t afraid of you bumptious…”

          “Get your shit-face away from my car.”  With that, the driver closed the trolley’s scissors front doors in front of the codger and dimmed the power and lights. “End of the line, I’m on break.”

          This wouldn’t do, either… Had I wanted a faceful of this, I could have stayed in Chicago Lawn. As it was, these two race cards had jarred me out of a retrospective place that had become more rather more comforting as the blocks rolled on. For after North Beach, I had some things to walk off, work out, give myself a good talking to, smooth out some differences, right some wrongs, more or less tweak at the margins. I soon resolved to take Syd’s measure, scrub off the snubs, train on separating her pro from her con—plow some new ground, take natural law into my own hands, maybe even wrestle with the prospect of drafting her pie-sky proposal—just a few little days away. Really, fight back the animal urges, wrestle with the demons, squeeze out the middle man, deal with beating around the bushes, be done with the vicious circles, all the high mindedness and lowbrow frivolities. Got yourself here, get yourself out and get the cheese, asshole: throw in about every other dog-tired, god-forsaken cliché with a deliberate, predetermined sweep of the hand.       

          That yamayamed out, I’d slid into the lone remaining single right-side seat ahead of several new boarders, its dark green oil-cloth cushion greeting me with a center spring just pointed enough to aggravate without actually pushing through. A drowsy, if not surly scattering of double-seaters and straphangers steadied themselves as the trolley shunted and listed like a seasick troop ship out Taraval, deeper and deeper into the neatly numbered avenues of the Sunset District. Counting the stops, lost in street after street of sherbet carton two-flats that dipped and rose through the avenue numbers with anonymous similarity, I soon found a bit of relief and release within the amber darkness, well into this rolling neutral zone.

           Like so many others in the city’s relatively antiquated public transit fleet, unit 1754 had arrived in San Francisco from Chicago, by way of St. Louis somewhere around 1957, back when these heavy metal missiles were trucked en masse to the only town warped and wired enough to still want them. Flush with Hetch-Hetchy hydroelectric power and intact rail lines, The City promptly refinished them all in creamed corn yellow and asparagus green, letting street grime and sea salt take it steadily from there. This 37,000 lb. dinosaur lumbered out Market, through the long, dank Twin Peaks Tunnel out to West Portal Station, speed fluctuating, lights flickering as its lone contact pole flitted and sparked along seepy, undulating overhead wires.

          The streetcar’s patchy fisheye ceiling lights, its low, narrow ironclad side windows and small tubular stainless steel safety bars delivered me right back unto childhood Sundays on the CTA. How my mother would drag me in from Willow Grove by train to visit our Southside Chicago Irish relatives, rather than spend another day after the bout before with my hungover Scottish dad. Could have been we rode this very same trolley down Halsted Street, me trying to wriggle my skinny little arm out through those window bars for even a whisp of a breeze on sweltering summer afternoons. Never in my fiercest nightmares imagining that we’d actually end up living back by Marquette Park.

           But, suuuure, that was then, long gone before this Saturn shit, way the hell before her and Her, here and there; had to be better out west, nowhere west to go. So I’d actually taken to this Green Hornet womb here more and more, rocking me away from the mind bends, out the rolling drop to the sea, with a quick little turnaround at 46^th Avenue, in the sandblown there and now. Might as well just have hung a skinny arm out through 1754’s window bars once more, grabbing a little cool ocean air, returning to the scene of the bloody screw job, see how far I’d come since then. Yeah, time to face this bleary watershed again—so as to reckon with a false start, get me a fresh set of downs.

          “Open this door, boy!”  The wobbly old-timer took to pounding on the streetcar’s front doors with his walking stick. “Mark my words, I will have your job if it kills me!”

          “You can kiss my black ass,” the MUNI driver shouted back at him between take-out burger bites, not giving the mouthy geezer a second glance.

           Not my problem, not my deal—what’s this got to do with me? I fidgeted in my seat as the old man continued pounding on the front doors, nevertheless wondering how San Franciscans could keep ripping the Honorable George Moscone—as if such carping would ever have gone on during Da (late) Mayor Daley’s reign in Chicago. No, enlightened, progressive, home of the United Nations, harmonious family of Man: San Francisco was supposed to be where to avoid this kind of crap. Then again, the Outer Sunset District was about as from that San Francisco as this San Francisco could get.

          “Pretty dense, huh,” I looked about the car to see that it was down to the driver and me.

          “Somebody outta cut the old fart’s pacemaker,” he skimmed through a Sporting Green, ignoring the codger’s fisticuffs and door glass-melting stare.

          “Meant this fog,” I rose in place, as the trolley’s rear floorboard generator cranked up with a jolt of idling power, and the ceiling lights flickered to bright, to where I could read the motorman’s orange safe-driving patches on his brown uniform sleeve.

          “It’s summertime in the city,” he said, glancing out through his small center-posted windshield. “Watcha expect?”

          “Uh, right,” I nodded into his rearview mirror, by now all but inured to the door pounding of a cretin blathering the lord’s name in vain. “Real piece of work, that guy…”

          “Just another drunken ol’ goat crawling out of the Irish Cultural Center there without his walker.” He caught my glance in his wide view mirror. “You stayin’ on or goin?”

          “Yeah, those micks, huh?” I turned toward the rear scissors doors, suddenly recalling that conspiratorial confab at the Abbey Tavern, wondering how Niall and Declan were progressing on their Poppy Day plotting these days, whether they were there in the ICC now, what with Battle of the Boyne Day closing in July 12th. Naw, had to have been the Stout talking, still can’t imagine they’d be bloody serious about pulling that bomb stuff off. “Thanks anyway. Got a Night Owl transfer, think I’ll just slip out the back.”

          Otherwise, who needed any more ethno-racial clashes and slurs hereabouts, the bald-faced bigotry and negritude? I stepped down onto Wawona Street, around the pounding tweedy elder and a pair of young headbangers in black AC/DC T-shirts and Ben Davis pegs, monster combs cunt notched like their leather spiked armbands, long-haired Motley Crue tangled and teased.

          But better to turn a cold shoulder to all that, into the algid ocean winds. A midsummer gray fog bank had piled in and fully blanketed the Outer Sunset tonight, on its way due east to Mt. Diablo. The misty porridge blurred cobwebbed streetcar wires, haloed picket fence light poles, shrouded cramped storefronts, clustered homes and apartment houses that tumbled down in softly rolling steps to the 48^th Avenue sand berms.

          Still, so bracing, reinvigorating: I tread pendently through a gang-tagged tunnel under the Great Highway, beneath a double-barreled speedway of streaming traffic, catching a breath at the even more grossly graffitied seawall, barely a moment’s solace before facing the penetrating reality that there was nowhere further to go. In any case, time for a breather, to get back on the horse, face your fears and all that disappearance rot, put a little distance between that screwy me over there in the parking lot and the decidedly re-me of tonight.

          Funny thing, that tunnel seemed more like a Fallopian tube, alien voices on echo, delivering me from the me who ran elliptical circles and the me caught chasing tails. But this rebirth canal looked more and more like tunneling to a miscarriage. For one thing, the sand wasn’t sugar white, it was gritty, grubby and gray, at one with the oatmeal fog cover and dishwater sea. Just as well, for the nearly 1.8 miles of breathtaking shoreline views that San Francisco families had once flocked to Ocean Beach for had been sliding like the Chute-the-Chutes ever since Playland shut down. By now, understaffed cops had written the strip off as an ugly wasteland; federal park police just let the toughs, drunks and crazies squat it at will.

          Over the seawall behind me, souped-up street beaters and primered Gimmy pick-ups drag raced up and down the full six miles of straight Great Highway. Ahead, gassed out road warriors scrapped with bored local punks and fishy migrant combers for prime beachfront turf. Depressed dumping ground for the city’s social debris: That’s what the downtown press called it, painting an eternal, infernal California nether beach scene—loud, fast and purposeless to the third degree. 

          Fine by me, I somehow welcomed the badlands, the dense otherworldly solitude about then. At least until I was divebombed by gulls, murres and puffins, wiping away a salt spray that got my dampness to sinking in, while howling gusts set my teeth to chattering, then chilled me to my bones. All the trashy driftwood wildfires, the van squatters cooking kelp and plankton, frying up rotted rockfish, or sea lion and elephant seal carcasses that had washed ashore: none of it warmed me up any as danker darkness took hold.

          “Score some bud,” asked a hooded-up dog walker in passing, as he choke chained a snarling terrier.

          “Here?” Whoa, stuckness—I froze up in place even further against the sea wall.

          “Up by the Beach Chalet. I’ll take ya, got me a righteous stash there…”

          “Sorry, not much of a drinker these days.” I steered my eyes out toward what was left of a narrow, wave battered wooden pier.

          “Naw, man, wrong bud…” He eased leash on the pit bull, which sniffed me real close, up and down, looked to be lifting a leg my way, instead lurching toward a free running cocoa Lab.

          “Gotcha, but either way, no Chalet.” With that, I buckled in the face of more pushback from high pounding waves, another skin ripping gale. So I scurried back through the tunnel—which was now more noticeably stenched with dead fish and garbage—resigning myself to a rebirth aborted before coming to proper term. Get a grip, size it up: still nothing settled, much less gained. Except for the empirical observation that my hypothetical field study was getting way farther afield.

           “It’s these damn hooligan delinquents and biker gangs…”

          “Then what’re you doin’ out this time of night?”

          “Gotta get outta the house now and then. Else I’ll go nutcase, blow my fuckin’ brains out.”

          “No way, Roscoe. I draw the line at suicide…”

          Reality check: a 50-cent brown mug of steaming coffee. In here, heating up, tired eyes propped wide awake, slumping at a window table looking out over at what remained of Fleishhacker Pool and the padlocked San Francisco Zoo. I had set sights on a burnt-wienie red dachshund sign for the Doggie Diner, but couldn’t get past the streetcorner racket along Sloat Boulevard, much less my draining pocket change and the urgency of nature’s call. Jack’s Ocean Beach was lively as hell at this late hour, beginning with the manic kids pulling wheelies up and down 46^th Avenue on their crusted dirt bikes, revving sans mufflers just outside the café’s front doors. Their smoky, moto-cross welcomes were symptomatic of what these grandpa-sweatered, newsboy-capped Sunset District elders were grousing about one table beside me.

          “A .38 slug’s gotta be better than some thugs scarin’ me shitless…”

          “So call up the cops on ’em then.”

          “Shooot, they’ll only come for my mortal remains. You know’s well as I this ain’t Mayor Christopher’s police force any more.”

          JOB’s Albanian-Armenian kitchen crew stood screaming at the Iron Maiden Kawasaki brigade through a take-out serving door. As I’d passed them en route to the men’s room, I couldn’t help but notice a yellowing ‘White for District 8 Supervisor’ poster halfway there. The Outer Sunset may have actually been Ella Hill Hutch’s 4^th District, but this was prime White territory nonetheless.

          A piquant air of souvlaki, moussaka and fetta omelettes filled the narrow, Mediterranean-postered hallway as I returned, for Jack himself was said to be Greek. Last-call neighborhood regulars forked spetsofai and pastitsio specials at tables, picking bifteki bell pepper out of their nicotined grins as I passed on my way back over to mine. Yet JOB’s menu ranged wider than that, grilling budget breakfast, gyros, burgers and dogs to the beach crowd dawn to dusk—none of which I could afford at any price.

          So I just nursed a couple of refills and turned away from the gunning motorbikes and off-shore gloom, annotating on a napkin as how people were tough, scraggly out here, windblown like the beach brush and ice plants, saline and shifty as the sea. Take the street toughs in black and brown out there, burning rubber, smoking butts and blunts, waving chains and blades—or the neighborhood old-timers spooked to death by them, drinking their shrinking days away.

          Land’s end seemed to sandblast the thrombotic hearts right out of them, sapped them of their warmer spirit while the salt spray corroded their pastel casas and overparked cars. At least until the fog lifted a bit in here as a waitress in upper-case orange plunge-neck and even tighter Calvins punched away jukebox tunes like ‘Spanish Eyes’ and Tony Bennett’s ‘Rags to Riches’ in favor of a quarter roll of Zorba-zesty Grecian numbers, Marika Ninou’s Rebetiko to Marinella’s Laiko Bouzouki.

          Song by song, stein-by-stein, by ouzo-anise carafes, JOB’s red velveteen-foil walls, blond paneling began throbbing, wagon-wheel light fixtures and balsam trellises rattled, plastic bouquets tipped and bobbed. Emptied center room tables made way for a wood grain linoleum dance floor. Customers hit the tile—feet tapping, hands clapping, couples whistling and trilling to the tunes. Old couples in matching leatherette jackets and brown polyester trotted out their dirlanda and syrtaki. Younger items in angora and doubleknits dipped and spun their free-form Ballos steps, a retired shipping clerk from Millbrae bounced up and down, Nisiotika style, with his silver permed better half.

          My scribbled notes evolved into the makings of a socio-study. That would do the trick—clinical distance and objectivity, methodological observation of this tribal ethnic group, identification with and validation of its customs, mores and norms. Construct a double-blind survey of its demographic segmentation—or was it stratification—whichever, controlling for biases, plus-or-minus margin of error. Had real doctoral material here, get me back on tenure track. Yep, I’d get right on it, that’s precisely what I would do…

          By now people poured in from nearby motels and hi-ball lounges to clap and stomp along. Still wet-suited surfers dripped in from the shoreline with their bitchin’ squeezes in tow, tossing down longneck brewskis near the café doors like they owned the place. Got so Jack himself joined in as house MC, spray tan and coiffed in a white perma-pressed short sleeved shirt and avocado slacks, springing for another round and It’s-It chasers on the house.

          With that, the entire all-hours café scene even drowned out the motorbikes, and was starting to jackhammer my already overheated nerves, spatula stirring my animal blood. Couldn’t beat the energy and revelry; still, it was all Greek to me. “Quite a bash you’ve got going here,” I said to Mrs. Jack, as I approached a stress cracked glass cashier’s counter near the front door, shelves filled with jerky, breath mints and assorted candy bars.

          “Gets this way sometimes,” she stiffened, spearmint gum crackling as she counted out the coins I’d given her for the couple of cups, merely a few pennies more than the exact change. “Even crazier when the fog clears out.”

          “Crazy, you mean like with that junior biker gang out there,” I glanced past the dancers through the café’s picture side windows. “Guess you don’t relish having to deal with them…”

          “Those punks aren’t that big of deal. Who you don’t want to be messing with are the surfers, especially around sneaker time…”

 

          With Panos Gavalas blaring on Jack’s jukebox, salt air and ocean winds pressing against JOB’s front doors, I shouldered my way out, past the young motorbikers and even younger skateboard acolytes in tropical shirts and baggies. Rip-tides were slamming against Ocean Beach’s seawall, waves roaring through the Great Highway tunnel as though it were a stadium bullhorn. Coastal fog cover was laying in heavier and damper by the hour, muffling the two-stroke Suzukis and Kawasakis, wicked late-night laughter and any faint clanging of streetcar bells. But I was just weary-wired enough to soak in every rev, whine and wine-fed eruption the Outer Sunset threw my way.

          A fresh paper napkin served to dab the mist from my eyes, so as to survey a flickering street-lit continuum of plainly pastel stucco apartment hideouts and steel-barred shoebox abodes. The cold, gray soup sizzled atop, dripped from overhead trolley wires, seeping through immobilized, if not abandoned vehicles up and down Sunset’s tediously gridded side streets. Would that the beloved bohemian former horse and cable rigged enclave called Carville still enlivened outside land dunes out here as it did nearly a century before. At least so I’d overheard on the outbound.

          Sheepskin collar up, I skulked back over to Wawona, aimless anxiety triggered further by the sound of car tires slipping and sliding along drizzle-slick streetcar rails. A green torpedo had been idling at the MUNI stop, but its door scissored shut, the driver suddenly clanging away up 46^th Avenue, back toward the trolley barn. Following his stuttering, bucking red dot taillights, I shuddered at the thought that MUNI was calling it a night, resigned that I now had plenty of time to plop down curbside and think things through—yeah, measure it all up, re-establish a beachmark, an Asian fisherman point of reference. I glanced back through the tunnel at roaring cold, dark Ocean Beach, heinous waves pounding over drifting sand, no cheese in sight.

          So I turned eastward on Wawona to the Irish Cultural Center—wondering if that cane-banging old lush ever stumbled upon a seemlier streetcar, whether those plotting blokes from the Rectory Tavern were in there right now, still sworn to SEMTEXing PM Callaghan this Boyne or Poppy Day, much less if I had the Scotch in me to out their bout. Same time, I wondered whether my Celtic brethren might afford me a good night’s rest—as they once did Scot-free in a hay-baled barn loft outside Skibbereen. Yet again, scootching across my geneal divide…

          Which was about when my gaze rose straight ahead through those webbed overhead wires toward Mount Davidson, the city’s highest peak in the distance, and that big, blocky 103-foot crucifix topping it off. Unreal, even in this thick, smothering marine layer, that white concrete cross lorded some 900 feet over the Outer Sunset with divine lighthouse authority and penetration. Up around it glowed a humongous foggy halo, even through the thicket of eucalyptus trees. Either that, or it was Saturn hanging its rings on the cross like a bucket hat atop a coatrack. 

          Maybe it was gnawing hunger or arrested shuteye, but I couldn’t tell whether that beatified aura was a prophecy or prognosis—only that I was out here beachside once more, facing my fears, hoping not to disappear this time. The brainstorming even had me Dybbuking about trading this foggy shillelagh altogether for a sunny ukelele outside Maui’s Pioneer Inn. At least until I got that I had to go find Dame Thornia’s cheesy amulet if I really hoped to square things.

           “Heads up, dude, boards comin’ on your left…”

           Then again, surf’s up, either way…

Chapter 62. A Rendezvous delayed 
makes way for one eventful femme 
remote, then come some catty 
confrontations with a curious feline edge…

“Café, society can surely 
be a rush. Unless it is 
a rush to judgment.”

          “You know, the Purple Onion and Hungry I, only now they’re topless-bottomless live hump, two drink minimum…”

          “Yeah, R.I.P. Smothers and Chad Mitchell Trio…”

          “Make that Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl—those true geniuses…”

          “Sorta thinking Kerouac, Brautigan, ‘Trout Fishing in America’…”

          “Fishing? What in the world would I know about that?”

          Lucchio’s was still digesting its long-suffering weekend crowd, as broader North Beach was coming fully alive. I had dawdled two wary steps behind Sydney across Columbus Avenue, eyeing up Telegraph Hill and Coit Tower, down to Broadway’s blazing skin shows and that spiking, ever-striking Transamerica Pyramid—pharaonic ivory against the clear night sky. In between were the Beach’s famed and infamously Beat bar/coffeehouses, Trieste and Mario’s to Roma and Vesuvio—lots of roguish beard growths and rakish berets—luminous City Lights Bookstore progressively presiding over it all.

          Syd dodged the taxicabs; I dodged the reasons I’d been hammerlocked by that mad impulse to face up to her again in the first place, much less accepting her off-hand invitation to dinner. As for the meal itself, there was no sense clinging to hunger on principle, whether the payoff was a combo platter or a la carte. And the ozone of garlic and coffee only dispatched me back to Catania’s stazione ferroviaria, where this whole espresso/caffeine fixation bedeviled a sloth like me to start with. So I drifted into memory mode along the way…at least until the mixed aromas fed us here…

         Tosca Café was this dusky sort of place back then where day met night all day and night long, where pupils dilated wide as cocktail olives , where eagle-eye met blind, yet with taste tests and a tempo so sublime. This was Syd’s notion of an après dinner cordial, and we were catching the place a smidgen before the full evening rush.

          Once my eyes finally adjusted, I coursed a veiled light scheme that barely accented the prevailing darkness with a low level whisper of green. Small emerald cup shades spoked around tarnished brass overhead fixtures. Soft indirect avocado lighting kissed a mammoth mahogany back bar, reflecting from its broad etched mirrors out past a long line of revolving padded stools. So I sandbagged some, fast scanning the jukebox, preferring to let Syd lead me into one of Tosca’s nearest empty booths, a cozy half crescent beneath an aged mural of Firenze. Its red, tufted vinyl was cool and first-cabin spongy—she pronounced it ‘cushy to the tushie’—as a sulky diva of a barmaid approached. 

          “Dunno, Syd, not quite up for hardcore caffeine right now…” But taking note on her serving tray, the waitress was in no mood for any such reticence.

          “Trust me, their capps are totally different, they’ll totally frizzle your undergrowth,” Syd nodded to her with wiggling V-ed fingers, then squeezed my forearm. “Remember, experience, Kenneth, that’s all that really matters.”

          “Naw, don’t see handling that now.” I wasn’t certain where this was heading, but chances were her rap would be no lighter than the ambience hereabouts. I tracked the waitress, who was trolling nearby booths and tables en route to her barstool, where she mumbled their order to a smooth-domed bartender in his crisp white coat.

          That variegating green pervaded Tosca—somber, languid, ranging from novena candle green to creamy shades of leftover pesto. It tinted the Venetian blinds of a cathedral front window, the delicate short stem glasses stacked five-high against the bar’s mirrors. Nippled bottles of Chartreuse, Tuaca, Ouzo, Campari, Pernod and Marie Brizard ganged around the fluted mahogany columns segmenting three smoke-filled panels. It patinaed the two chrome Victoria Arduino cauldrons lording four feet over the elbow pads at either end of the bar. It shone in the long lines of cappuccino goblets extending inward from the espresso machines, beneath two gleaming gooseneck seltzer taps and neatly stacked Cinzano coasters.

          The stocky Italian bartender turned to his ritually polished espresso machine and pulled two proprietary cappuccino glasses toward him. Pre-treated with two fingers of a cocoa powder, the stemmed glasses took three-quarters steamed milk and brandy, if not a dash of bourbon to the rim. He then spun a series of nozzles, and the cauldron began gurgling, hissing, fired up for ever more renowned Tosca capps.

          The master barista retweaked his steam valves until the gauges leveled to his liking. At that instant, he turned the main valve, shooting steam into small stainless steel milk pitchers through a narrow tubular spigot, frothing the house specialty with several boiling kilograms of pressure. Thick steam erupted from the cauldron, billowing heinously upward from the twisted chrome piping, singeing the burn spot on the Sistine muralled ceiling it had been curing since Tosca opened in 1919. Not that it rankled the stony, dark-suited sigñoritos hunched over the bar. They’d been smoking and spouting off here for nearly as long, as had the waitress shuffling back with our drinks.

          “Due cappuccine, five dolla,” she snapped, gesturing for me to remove them from her tray.

          “Five bucks?!” I suppose my question could be translated into modest outrage as I did so.

          “Fear not, moneybags—I’ve got this too,” Syd insisted, handing her a five-spot and single.

          “Grazie,” the spindly, darkly mascaraed waitress smiled thinly, scouting nearby booths before returning empty-handed to her barstool, laced carmine uniform weltering in her wake.

          “A bit rich for my blood,” I muttered, examining the curious non-coffee that came in no cup, but a glass. “Shouldn’t we at least get some whipped cream with this?”

          “Not to worry, it’s not your tab,” she tapped the back of my hand. “Just relish the moment, why don’t you…”

          “Yeah, well, that’s a little harder to do these days,” I said, checking out the place as if it were a reincarnation of Warner’s Cobweb Palace. “I mean, I lived better as a starving student…”

          “So who’s the cause of that,” she stirred, then provocatively licked her swizzle stick. “Look, it’s Francis coming in, and isn’t that Robert Duvall with him?”

          “Cause? I dunno, you tell me,” I sipped hesitantly about my steaming rim, pointedly ignoring the movie star turn passing discreetly by us toward a reserved rear corner booth.

          “You, who else? You’re not the effect of it all, you’re the cause, the source of what you experience. You’re the one responsible for it all. Get that, and your life will begin to work for you. ”

          “So in effect you’re not causal then, huh?”

          Slowly voices, grand choral voices, seeped into my head. I followed them along the parched, jaundiced paintings of fable operas, past a browned portrait of Puccini, down to a magnificent music machine against the bare lower wall opposite the bar itself. The Wurlitzer Cobra was a glowing phantom, a rosy rainbow of a jukebox with 45 r.p.m. opera its pot of gold. Selection title tags were so thoroughly faded, neophytes couldn’t tell Madame Butterfly from the Barber of Seville. But these Tosca devotees from decades past knew exactly where their sentimental favorites resided.

          Take some bruto Arturo with the wavy gray hair and side-mouthed cigarette crackling his knuckles at the Wurlitzer. It was to on his dimes, mio Dio, so he was going to punch its buttons—choosing Corelli, Tobaldi, Enzio Pinza. The old box clicked and flashed its grooved vinyl distress to where the mother country music dear to Tosca’s soul, magisterially muted the base drum pounding of a disco beat in the  dance club one floor directly below.

          “Don’t blame me! Besides, I figure it’s all upstairs with you. Too much book schooling’s got you living in your eggy little head, instead of in the real world like the rest of us…”

          “Hey, those sheepskins are about all I have left,” I lifted my glass slowly, the hot brown liquid scalding my lips. Still, Tosca’s cappuccino had a steadying effect, the booze part canceling any coffee residue and vice versa. Pity it couldn’t blot out the particular spiel at hand.

          “You’re resisting again, Kenneth. Ignore your problems and they only get worse. And if you don’t do the training, you’re headed straight down the crapper.”

          “Look, I don’t know where you’re coming up with that, but I’m not in the mood, all right?”

          “Fine, I get that,” she smiled her astral smile. “Now just be with that feeling…”

          “Be with it? What the hell are you talking about?! If you ask me, everything’s been a disaster area for me ever since I left Boulder and hauled you out here…”

           This wasn’t the direction, no this wasn’t where I was wanting to head at all. I took a breath, stared vacantly toward the long bar. Seemed like Tosca had grown older by the sip—that the place was aging even more than its North Beach regulars about then. Where its mottled ceiling wasn’t singed, it was water stained, yellowed with years of tobacco smoke, peeling at the seams. The greenish light only jaundiced the ulcerations, spreading on and about dingy, fading murals of Pisa, Venezia and lower Toscana—the smoke- filmed Pompeii and Santo Pietro severely tilted over the back bar.

          “I get that, too,” she coaxed, “Just get who’s the source…”

          “Damn—stop with that twisted bullshit, Syd,” I spouted, wringing a cocktail napkin. “All I know is, one little detour and it’s been a non-stop road to hell!”

          “That’s ’cause you’ve been chained to our… afternoon delight. Werner says a shared love experience is one of the few times we’re shocked into aliveness. So we put it on this emotional pedestal, and make it a standard for anything that comes afterward. The trap is, nothing can compare, see? Not with perfection, so one memory is your prison—that head of yours won’t let you really experience anything else.”

          “Aww, you’re sounding like some dial-a-shrink,” I hissed, sipping through my stir straw.

          “Don’t you think I’ve been there, too? I’ve just given up the mind fuck.”

          “Easy for you, maybe—when you’re the one fucking the mind…”

          “Oh, here comes the ‘Sydney done me dirty’,” she sighed, sipping lightly. “That I’ve steered you wrong and abandoned ship on your S.S. Life. Well, nobody ever does anything to you…”

          “Can’t buy that, Syd, not after you hung me out to dry…”

          “Only after you left me hanging out to die to begin with,” Syd caught herself. “But that’s history, right, water under the bridge. Point is, you can spend the rest of your life looking backwards, or take the helm and move on. Really, all I can tell you is accept responsibility, Kenneth—you’ve just got to do the training. However that’s not totally why we’re here, either.”

          Tosca had drawn a full measure of the North Beach café, thespian and cinema crowd, its rear dining salle now choked with such peculiarly dramatic, animated artistical chatter. Oh, the score was exquisite, the second-act choreography so cultured and esthetic. Sotterheim’s costuming was superb…you must hear the chamber orchestra’s new Mendelssohn Octet…how could they even think of seeing ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’ or ‘La Cage aux Folles’ with Kramen’s play opening at the Vertigo?

          “Water under which bridge exactly?” I groused, lifting my glass to down a good shot of cappuccino. “ Hmph, if I had $250 now, first thing I’d do is bail out my cameras—at least one of them, anyway…”

          “On another level, I get where you’re coming from, Kenneth. So maybe I can help.”

          “Sorry, but you haven’t helped much thus far…” I tossed back my head in frustration, keying on that Wurlitzer. That Arturo cat had crossed the pitted red and black linoleum to rejoin his cronies at the multi-stooled bar, notably to the tune of ‘Un Bel Di Vedamo’ by the recently departed Greek bel canto, Maria Callas. “Look, I appreciate your charity tonight, but maybe I should be moving on…”

          “I’ll ignore that unhelpful vursht, but no more bailing, hear,” Syd said firmly, signaling the diva waitress for another round, this time White Nuns. “Poor, poor Kenneth—you can pull that all night or we can work through this. Either way, the reality is you took me up on my invitation here, toots, and you aren’t going anywhere yet, capeesh?”

          There I froze, somewhat stunned by her fortitude. On another level, I almost welcomed it, much like the showers that hose down a humid summer day. After all, wasn’t that what turned my head in the first place, what purged Melissa’s tenderness, what dictated our initial bittersweet terms of engagement? I sighed and bounced my melon gently against the booth back, watching the waitress and bartender commiserate over their own double capps. My angst billowed and etherized with the espresso steam, lifting in veiled whisps to Tosca’s ceiling—before wafting up and dissolving into the dark.

          “What-ever…” I pushed deeper into the red vinyl cushions, following another updraft of espresso steam to the burn-spotted ceiling, picking up a new selection on the jukebox—something like Stignani’s ‘Carmen’ or Javier Solis’s ‘Granada’, as if I’d be one to know—at least until the hissing cauldrons drowned it out. Tosca’s old guard were being slowly displaced now, unseated by pawsome young couples and theater folk between acts. The buzzy, boisterous evening rush also spilled into surrounding booths, transforming the dour rear salle ambience to old-world gay cabaret.

          “All right, then,” she fixed on me, after scanning this fresh crowd about us, the room filling with evermore cigarette smoke, much of it mentholated or perfumed. “Now, let’s get down to geshefts…”

          “Syd, what do you want from me,” I grunted, trying not to jostle my kidneys, as I suddenly had to leak something awful.

          “No, the question is, what do you want for you? See, behind all your bitching and moaning is your avoidance of who you really are. EST lays out how nobody wants to face numero uno, we’ll do anything to dodge that—play any game, live any lie, run any song ’n’ dance routine…”

          “As in your ‘Dance Your Ass Off’ disco routine, huh?” While on the Wurlitzer, ‘Depuis La Jour’ slowly faded under a Licia Albanese aria of ringing bells.

          “Tsk, that was before I did the training,” Syd snapped, voice rising as she finished off her cap, pushing her glass toward the center of their round, green Formica-top table. “Anyway, EST showed us that it could be as simple as one item being so heavy duty that anything is better than facing it, no matter how miserable the alternative may be. So, what’s your item…”

            Compelling as it was, the backroom banter had almost imperceptibly begun to quiet. The flamboyant and finely tuned began turning, craning over their crescent booths, repositioning themselves around their chrome Moderne tables, nodding and whispering to one another as if something gauche were going on. And though the smoke had diffracted Tosca’s green lighting into a bruised avocado spray, I could make out beyond doubt that their hypercritical eyes were focusing our way.  

           “Christ, tone it down, people are starting to look at us,” I said in exasperation, peering around the outline of her head, up at the long-faded mural of the Piazza della Signoria in Firenze’s Palazzo Vecchio, where I once missed the train back to Basel while haggling over a new leather sportcoat, young giovanes nipping at my pockets for unspent lira. “Well, for starters, how about the meat grinder you and Moon put me through at your apartment door that time? ”

          “Tell you what, don’t fret over Moon, she’ll be fine and dandy. Just be worrying about your own self…”

          “Okay then, about the way you two chewed me over has upended me ever since…”

          “Good, so how do you feel about that?” she countered, craning slightly to see if Coppola, party of two happened to be taking notice.

          “I trusted you, dammit, threw my whole life away for our big plans. You said together we could do anything. I believed you Syd; I took that to the bank, for chrissake!”

          “Fair enough, thank you for sharing,” she replied flatly, turning to stare me steely in the eye. “But it’s time to cut the victim act. Beliefs don’t exist in reality, they’re a useless concept. And stop deluding yourself that others are running your life—it’s not Moon or me, it’s just you.”

          “I know, I know, that whole man-your-ship bullcrap,” I muttered, diverting my own self to check out Tosca’s celebrity booth. “I think they really have brainwashed you something fierce.”

          “No, it’s you who’ve been brainlocked…you’ve got to get out of that mental prison your brain has overthought you into. Werner says our minds are just like tape recorders, with humongous stacks of tapes—sight, sound, smells, feelings, the whole shmeer. All your brain can do is record your experiences and play them back…”

          “Funny, I always thought it was just three pounds of canned Spam.”

          “See? That’s what thinking does to you,” she nodded, apparently too busy accessing a rote answer to find any humor in my feint. “When in fact your mind is just a linear arrangement of those multisensory records of successive moments of now. Trouble is, you can’t always keep it under control. Sometimes your mind plays back what it wants, when it wants—whether the time is right or not.”

          “You mean like now…” I then played dodge-eye with the barmaid as she returned with two Nuns.

          “No, what I mean is the sole purpose of the mind is the survival of its being. So it’ll playback anything, do anything to defend its rightness—even if it takes destroying a physical being in the process. I finally got that the mind wants things the way they were, not the way they are. It is always looking for agreement, and will playback toxic tapes whenever its ‘rightness’ feels threatened. Which is why you went fleeing back to the Midwest with Moon. Your mind kept serving up those old tapes, forcing you into something you really no longer wanted. And the only way out of that tyranny is letting go of the shackles and fully experiencing the here and now.”

          “C’mon, that’s what you got for your $250?” I followed Syd’s methodical stirring of brandy, Kahlua and steaming milk.

           “Worth every penny, because EST shows the way out of that mind trap, to the enlightenment that you’re a reality apart from your mind. That you get what you get, and are on the hook for every single minute you have. It was so liberating, and my life’s gotten so much easier—just relax, accept the simple truth that you’re a machine, like we all are, and do what you do…absolutely amazing, get it?”

         ”Maybe so, but life’s a lot more complicated than that, Syd. I had obligations, believe you me…”

          “No more beliefs, remember? And get that you can flow with what comes,” she glowed, toasting her glass. “Admit it, Kenneth, your little old mind was busy fighting for its life, still is. But there’s nothing you can do about the past. So choose to totally redo your point of view. These are the powers EST provides you. That’s why Werner Erhard is such a genius!”

          “Or a cult fascist—didn’t I read where he used to sell vacuum cleaners?”

           “Encyclopedias, but that was in a former life,” she groaned, impatiently restirring what remained of her White Nun. “Look, I can only take this so far, Kenneth. Werner’s Anatomy of Mind concept gets pretty deep, but you’ve just got to do the training.  In fact I’m planning on signing up for some of EST’s graduate seminars, maybe I can get you in as a guest. Or if it’s the money, I could always lend you some more…

          “Hell no—the last thing I need is to get even deeper in hock…” That said, I excused myself to a men’s room plastered with wallpaper of Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe.

          “Speaking of which, it so happens I’ve since sourced a fantabulous new idea for my next painting,” she beamed, as I slid back into the booth, hand hiding some haphazard dampness about my fly. “It involves a commission for Bay Bank & Trust’s new headquarters—big bucks, something like $30,000…”

          “Whoa, sounds exciting,” I exhaled. “Gonna do it or what?”

          “Well, the competition’s ultra intense,” she pushed back deep into the rolled and pleated booth cushions. “That’s why I was so glad I ran into you. I mean, what are you actually doing these days?”

          “Me? Uh, some field study and, you know, longitudinal…research. Wait a minute, how did this get from my problems to your paintings?”

          “The way it works is artists have to submit written proposals to a selection committee—you know, laying out the concept, medium and all. The best presentation gets the gig.”

          “So what’s that got to do with me?”

          “You can do this. You’ve been through grad school, haven’t you, done some advertising?” she smiled, reaching forward for my hands. “Nobody does that if they can’t write proposals.”

          “Hold on, Syd,” I pulled back sharply. “I don’t know jack about art proposals.”

          “I know the art part, Kenneth. I just don’t know how to write it down right…me and my little crayons.”

          Booths and tables around us had filled to capacity with the evening crowd—lots of leopard skin leotards and feathered boas, accompanied by turtle-necked blazers and half-cocked berets. We could overhear snippets of brandy fed banter as Tosca aficionados picked at connoli, spooned over custardy tiramisu, lamenting how Beach Blanket Babylon had so irreparably sold out. Reviews and verdicts were already in on Sam Shepard’s new play, ‘Buried Child’ that just opened at the Magic Theatre. But their raves and accolades did not extend to Alex Horn’s Theatre of All Possibilities, what with media exposés revealing all the coercion and violence playing out up at his Red Mountain Ranch commune in Sonoma. A pop-culture wag one table away noted how this cult business seemed to be spreading like Sierra wildfires these drought-dry NorCal days.

          “Come on, how about one of your artsy friends here?”

          “They’re all visual artists like me,” she searched my eyes for an opening. “Can’t even write their own grocery lists, not a one…”

          “Syd, I don’t think…my head’s so scrambled right now, I couldn’t string two sentences together to save my life anyhow…”

           She reared sharply, looking disappointed as all get out, commencing to frown and reconsider her position, studying me like one of those handicappers at the bar, old studs chewing the rag over any thought that a mudder nag named Affirmed could actually win the Triple Crown. Then she went straight for my ingratus nerve. “Honestly, Kenneth, you’d think after some great food and après treats, a person would be a bit more cooperative…”

          “No thinking, remember,” I sighed, kneejerking as she pushed my cappuccino glass and small table candle toward me, nearly into my lap. “But I’ll need a day or so to get my head into the whole idea,” What the hell, I hedged, at least I’d be nearer, like in her physical sphere of…influence. Perhaps we could even talk about it more later tonight…

           “Oh, Kenneth, you’re such a dear,” she squealed, kissing her fingertips, then touching them to my cheek. “Two days, max, I’ll get you the proposal particulars. This is super important to me—and you could be working off some of that outstanding debt…”

          “Roger,” I heaved, emptily staring into my glass. “Another drink to toast our…”

          “Sorry, toots, but no can do,” she said sharply, glancing at her pink, jeweled Hermes wristwatch. “In fact, I’d better get cuttin’…I happen to be meeting someone a bit later on, previous commitment and all that…”

          “Hey, sure…I mean I get it, really I do…”

          We slipped out of our semi-circle booth, headed silently for the front doors, through chatter and tobacco smoke, past packed adjacent booths and dining tables of cultural gaiety and intellectual heft. Sydney tapped my forearm and suddenly broke over toward the waitress, smiling, small talking, getting her to scribble out a slip of paper as Syd settled up again.

          So I waited, buying time at the rainbow red Wurlitzer, skimming its yellowed, hand-written record selections. The dons had reasserted themselves at the jukebox with a Puccini parade, now deep into ‘Manon Lescaut’. Still, I could overhear some of a tiny roundtable forum on the latest rumors that Stephen Jones was challenging his father down in Guyana, calling him loopy for pulling more of those white-night suicide drills from his creaky pavilion throne. Claiming that the Jonestown plantation might actually be fronting a CIA operation for experimental MK-Ultra mind control—the whole thing spiraling who knew where…

          But before I could catch further details, Syd bounded out of the booth and pulled me away with a self-satisfied tickling of the jukebox’s crenulated buttons. We scooted arm in arm along Tosca’s pocked, checkered flooring. The place had come dramatically more alive since when we first entered, though the quaggy verdure was clearer as we neared the front doors and ogee arched front window. Both chrome espresso cauldrons still gleamed emerald, as did the cappuccino glasses lined up and down the bar.

          Tosca’s green shade chandeliers now cast rich cocoa shadows over the back bar and surrounding mahogany trim. The front barista stoked and tuned his machine like a concert calliope, steam curling his goatee on its way to the dappled ceiling. He stiffly topped off his capps with a nod toward two toppered Broadway strippers who’d dropped by between shows.

          “You angling for autographs, or what,” I asked, as she jotted on that slip of paper she had picked up at the bar, neither of us daring to look Coppola’s or Duvall’s way—that derigueur San Francisco celeb denial.

          “No, receipts, silly—for the IRS again. So I can write off our whole meeting as a business expense, like Daddo taught me,” Syd replied. She stuffed the slips into her bucket bag, suddenly pulling out a crumpled envelope through its leather drawstrings. “Oh, and before I forget, this is for you, some Regina Sue person phoned out of the blue. God knows where she got my number, but she said this mail delivery notice had come for you and didn’t know what to do with it. So she forwarded it to me.”

          “For me? Well, uh…thanks,” I said, all business, cramming it into my jacket pocket without a second glance, though recalling that I’d jotted her phone number down in Denise’s room. I instead peered back quickly before pushing open Tosca’s doors. “It’s probably nothing…”

          The green-yellow patina still imbued everything in here, from atavistic murals to shadowy huddlings,  to gleaming sacramental urns and hazy Venetian blinds—this doppio celluloid set-piece, the most Italianate of places I’d seen west of Turin or Tribeca. “So at least time for a little more North Beach?” I asked as we hit the teeming sidewalk.”

          “Sorry, turns out I’m too far behind schedule as it is—have to grab a…taxi!” Naturally, a yellow bomber screeched curbside on Columbus at Vallejo before Syd could fully get the word out. She climbed in, waving adieu through a rolled-down window. “Thanks so much, Kenneth, it was great. Call me in two days—where are you staying anyway?”

          “Uh, I’m not far away,” I stammered, left buttoning up and zoned out at the white loading curb.

          “Just don’t go disappearing again. Remember, two little days,” she said, cranking it back up to direct the hack out Columbus Avenue as the taxi rolled away. “Meantime, retrace your steps Josh box-wise—and promise me you’ll steer clear of that grisly park scene now…ciao!”

          Just like this whole evening, I thought, just like with Sydney herself. I shrugged and shook my head back up Columbus, Little Lucchio’s garlic erupting like Mt. Etna from deep in my gaseous bowels. Damned if Syd didn’t reopen the wound then leave it to puss away. And if I wasn’t one bit closer to her, how could I feel so reeled in? Was she writing me off altogether or simply keeping a boob close, an enemy closer—safely spirited away from family and friends?

          Yah, yamayama that. But I just didn’t feel like going tits-up like this all over again. Can, can’t—crazy cults, calculating cunts: I swore, one way or another, somebody else was going to pay—just had to figure out who…

Care for more?

Chapter 61. It’s off to the races, 
all but off his trolley—in 
this year of the wilder cats…

“With a rendezvous per 
due, bounding out of the 
frying pan, into the pyre.”

          “So where is it?”

          “Don’t ask me, I don’t…”

          “It’s got to be in there somewhere.”

          “I’ll look, I promise—I never even noticed it once while you were gone…”

          Proximity. That the Shell service station was so close to my Volvo’s breakdown proved strategically advantageous. Not only did the attendant lend me a safer gas can to carry a buck’s worth of regular, the purple-turbaned Pakistani just asked for my Colorado driver’s license as security. Then he pointed me toward his clean and orderly men’s room around the side, wherein to wash my hands of that mess.

          A surprisingly sparky battery, little priming of the SU carbs, a return of the can and I was off, turning left back onto Van Ness Avenue. This was more a path of least resistance than some sort of slippery slope, or abject slithering slope. In any case, I soon acceded to reality over that Golden Gate release, coasting back down past North Point into the underbelly of gloaming Aquatic Park. The Volvo squeezed back in nicely between Sherry’s Econoline and, curiously, the panel van that nearly ran me over up on Bay Street, Then I tucked in sorely to my sleeping bag. It wasn’t exactly Muir Woods or Mount Tam State Park, but wasn’t Marquette Park either—let alone Lafayette Park.

          “Not try, do, this is serious, flash. I’ve spoken with Josh lately and he says I shouldn’t open it until he gives me the go-ahead, only that it’s really important now.” 

          “Sure, but it is just a little box, right?”

          “Not just any little box, it’s my gift box,” said Sydney, unfolding her linen-thick paper napkin. “And Josh says we’ve got to find it, no matter what.”

          “Okay, so find it, we will, jeesh…”

          “I swear it was there before you housesat. But that’s not totally why we’re here.”

          Proximity talks. Comparatively clean washrooms in the corner Shell station, hot morning coffee at the pillbox snack stand: what the hell, it was only for a day or so, had to be but that. The nights were kind of rough and tumble—twist, wring, rummage and return—but rising sunshine made the new morning all the toastier in green, scenic Aquatic Park. Apparently plumb on the faultline between Feds and city metermaids, the drive still had no overnight or hourly parking enforcement, meaning the stay could be somewhat…open-ended.

          So momentarily settled, with downtime to spare, I even took to freshening up and exploring the area, taking leave of my ever-spatting park neighbors, striking out further by the day, never mind the nights. I soon found these breezy strolls allowed for a free running and refreshing of the mind. Hell, before long I could just about close my eyes and sleepwalk across the bridge, up the Waldo Grade through 101’s Rainbow Tunnel, kicking back on the porch with Tony and Aimee in Villa Mañana, sucking down abalone and Lagunitas, flying off non-stop to Lahaina, mahi-mahi breakfast at the Pioneer Inn—something tasty like that. This way, I could get there any time I damned well pleased—so long as I didn’t have to dodge a Dart or Javelin backing out from any number of flapping garage doors.

          This addled socio-reconnaissance eventually carried me southward on Van Ness—to where I happened upon a fire department ambulance idling out front of one familiar Chestnut Street apartment house, emergency lights flashing, paramedics wheeling their loaded gurney up though its rear lift. A small crowd had gathered thereabouts, and people were talking. Then again, these days, people were conversing all over the place: Frost was sitting down with Nixon, Lennon was chatting up McCartney again, Martin met with Lewis, Rowan with Martin, Gracie rapped with Marty, Cheech toked with Chong, Sadat was powwowing with Begin, White was mixing it up with Milk—not to mention the two of us right there.

          As soon as Syd spotted me rubbernecking over toward her place, she rushed over and said the bitchy crone upstairs had finally suffered a stroke, asked me where in blazes I’d been Dybbuking to and otherwise hiding out, hit me with this gift box business, claimed we had something fantabulous to discuss.

          “Discuss what?” But who was I to deny her, all things being unequal?  So before long, I had MUNI bused over to the Beach, already wondering why I was here like this right now, leery of the answer.

          “Yamayama…”

          “Sorry, I…”

          “Yamayama,” Sydney said. She’d met me here via a Veteran’s taxicab. “It’s what’s cluttering your head, what’s making you batty. Comes from flowing against your river.”

          “Don’t understand…”

          “Give up understanding, Kenneth, give up the big lie. Just give in to your natural river, its waters are irresistible.”

          “How do you figure that?” Think I came here to be called a liar?!

          “No, no—stop playing your phony roles, you know? So you can finally be with who you really are.”

          “What is this? I thought we…”

          “It’s soooo basic. Just take a good look at where you’re coming from, let people see the real Kenneth Herbert.”

          “Wait a minute, this isn’t more of that Universe Theater crap, is…”

          “No, nudnik, I was turned onto this through the JCC,“ she smirked, flapping out her lapkin, motioning for me to do the same. “Point is, everybody knows your can’t take control. Get that you have to de-control…”

          “Uh-huh, so it’s kind of a Jewish thing?”

          “It’s not a Jewish thing, it’s an everybody thing. But there you go thinking too much again, Kenneth…you’ve just got to do the training…”

          “Two more glasses of Amarone Pasqua, or a carafe?”

          Across the waitresses’s lavender T-shirt was ‘Little Lucchio’s’ in bright yellow lettering. The ‘cch’ in fact scripted at an upward slant to what must have been magnifico cleavage, for the logo rollercoasted like peak-to-peak skywriting in the Italian Alps. Not that it had anything to do with yamayama or de-control, but her shirt sure went a long way toward better grounding me—breaking through the clutter, if not clearing the head. My eyes followed its apostrophe to a small black plastic nametag, greeting that with a gratefully myopic grin. From there, I scanned a side-banded black ponytail to Theresa’s sanctified smile. At that point, any diversion would do.

          “Two more’s fine, make it your Valpolicella Pasqua this time,” Syd said curtly, handing her the half-empty glasses with oenothority. “Embrace the training, Kenneth. It’s like the weight of the world is peeled away…”

          “What training?” I tracked Theresa hazily as she slipped between scrunched tables, then behind a packed counter. We resumed breaking bread over our tiny table for two in Lucchio’s annex, one newly added step down from his original 16-stooled counter shiv of a grillroom. Most locals would kill for this front window table; for two at the counter itself, they’d throw in pillage and plunder. Forget first-borns should those stools free up side by side. “Can’t see as how I need any more training…” 

          “That’s because you’re an asshole, wallowing in your stuckness,” she zeroed in on me. “Which is why your life doesn’t work…”

          “Asshole? What the hell kind of training is that?”

          “EST, Erhard Seminars Training, get it? An awesome session that will turn you inside out and totally change your feeble little life. Everybody’s getting it—John Denver, Yoko, Valerie Harper, Cloris Leachman—all kinds of people. It’s amazing, you’re locked in a room with a whole bunch of other assholes—no watches, no sudden bathroom breaks. If you need to throw-up, you get a little bag. Just the master trainer and a few assistants, breaking down dumb asshole ideas and belief systems, teaching you to fully experience your experience…so that your problem doesn’t exist forever.”

          “Sounds like brainwashing to me…”

          “EST is not brainwashing, Kenneth, it’s more about creating spaces, safe places, where you can learn to free you, yourself,” she said, straightening the napkin over her pleated blue chambray blouse, blond hair trimmed back and tightly curled, rounded like a halo around her head, smiling with the wisdom of Maimonides. “But that’s okay, be with your resistance, don’t fight it. Everybody is skeptical in the beginning; by the fourth day—whammo, total clarity and ultimate truth.”

          “What, they tie you up for four days and do this to you?”

          “The training is spread out over two weekends, just down Van Ness at the Jack Tar Hotel.” She spooned the meal around her pastina bowl.

          I nearly choked on my Italian bread for want of more vino. Images of a Messina-bound train ferry reflected in the annex’s plate window, coach compartments filled with overextended Sicilian families and their five-gallon containers of homemade dago red. Earthy senoras would ladle it out like well water into paper cups until language barriers came tumbling down. The stuff virtually ate through the plastic jugs while the gabby Italians toasted us ugly G.I. Americanos. Where in blazes was that grape now? Syd’s trip was hard to swallow as it was.

          “All I know I didn’t grasp half of what you were talking about the last time we got together, and you’re not even that person anymore…”

          “Growth, Kenneth, personal growth and transubstantiation of your space. You could too could grow with the training…it’s the best $250 I’ve ever spent…”

          Theresa finally delivered fresh wine from her spinning tray, then struck a Michaelangelic pose to take our order. Syd pointed to saltinbocca as I muddled over the menu, Puccini’s La Traviata flushing through my ears. I settled on whatever I saw Lucchio frying up through the steamy sidewalk windows. Theresa smiled enigmatically and worked her way back counter to Lucchio’s wide open ranges, stage front in this little two storefront hive with its small, trashed-beyond-recognition neon sign and glass panels lettered ‘Rain or Shine, There’s Always a Line’.

          “Oh, I see, that’s what the scam’s all about. Well no thanks, sounds totally unreasonable to me.” But I was no different, for we had rather earned our primo seating. Long minutes before I had been grumbling about going cold turkey amid brisk Columbus Avenue winds, the chow line detainee in front of us passed back to small glasses of on-the-house Asti Spumanti. By the time that was history, we’d shuffled up within earshot of Rigoletto, and smack into another short round of ruby red. “I gave up mind control after army BCT, and they were paying me for that. You getting a finder’s fee for this?”

          “Of course not, what do you take me for,” she reared. “No, reasonableness is exactly your problem. You can waste your whole life trying to be reasonable, like so ‘right’ about everything…”

          We ourselves had mustered mighty appetites out on the sidewalk wait line. For Little Lucchio’s was everybody’s off-Broadway shrine, smack in the North Beach groin, where after-hours office grunts melded with local bohemes to queue sixty minutes for a twenty-minute meal. On such a clear night, they stretched a full block down Columbus Avenue, where skin show barkers could target their craving palates with far more carnal fare.

          Granted, good gnocchi and linguine alone were hardly enough to pull in so many discerning San Francisco nostrils, although the concentrated garlic wafting through Lucchio’s exhaust fans went a long way toward keeping them in line. It wasn’t just his spicy cuisine, it was Lucchio himself, and what he put his fawning customers through to get to it. The chef flirted, flogged their tastebuds, made patrons stand out there in the fog or rain and pay for the privilege, while plying them with gratis chianti. He fed us crass discomfort and near starvation, and had us eating out of his self-made hands.

          What we kept hearing was the dinnertime mantra, ‘it’s worth the wait, believe me’, from other famished line mates and, ‘ah that was good, pass the fresh air’ from the fatted cats picking oregano and sweet basil out of their sated smiles. A Puccini mini medley later, and I could finally see what the crowing was all about. It was enough to make me unbutton my sheepskin coat and forget trying to remember how the hell I ended up here.

          Once inside, we were transfixed by Lucchio, how he orchestrated his open-face kitchen as though catering to Symphony Hall. One raw paisano chopped a tray of carrots, broccoli and cauliflower. A stocky, bereted fry cook stirred vats of Mafaldine pasta, Sugo alla Genovese, and aglio & origano sauce. A heavy-handed contessa pounded the veal and beef tongue into tender submission.

          “Christ, what’s so damn unreasonable about being reasonable?” I soon smiled at Theresa as she delivered two platters heaped with saltinbocca, rigatoni and fresh vegetables. Before I could conjure anything clever to say, much less in Italian, she was off answering the ready clanging of Lucchio’s order bell.

          “So stop with being reasonable, just accept what really is,” said Sydney. On the wall over her right shoulder was a portrait of the Piazza St. Pietro, with a souvenir inscription by Pope Pius XII. “But nooo, same ol’ Kenneth, won’t take step one to help yourself. Honestly, what would be so wrong if your life began to work for a change?”

          “I’m working on it, okay? Working on it my own way…” I loaded up quickly on rigatoni, hoping to feed an impasse, sneaking an eyeful of Theresa filling her jugs from a rear-counter water cask. A shame Syd wasn’t heavier into jugs, I drifted—like her mother, like Cassie. Then again, sometimes my ex was so prepossessed by the burden of her endowment she couldn’t think about anything else. Still, here we were, here Syd be—lighter on the topside, but pretty much a handful nonetheless.

          Otherwise, behind the counter, that synchronized Napoli trio took a back burner to l’maestro’s grillwork. Lucchio was a stubbly Neapolitan immigrant who’d grown pasta portly from years of 14-hour days at the range. That he managed a free hand with eight burners fully blazing was a delicious sideshow of its own, yet his dagger-tattooed left arm’s main role was to herd all eyes center stage. It led the charge, set the tone—all the while periodically shaping his handlebar moustache and slightly curly pompadour. Spinning, thrusting, clenching: Lucchio’s left seemed the lightning rod for his spicy bravado, his brazen, sautéed sonata form. 

          “Actually, I’m surprised you had the guts to meet me for dinner at all,” Syd replied, buttering up a sesame roll. “Even if I am buying…”

          “I’m not quite that fat and dumb,” I sighed. The gilty wood framed papal lithograph about made me want to genuflect and pass the collection plate right there. “Pass the bread basket, will you…”

          “Well keep on with the way you’re going, you’ll end up dumber than a lab rat, and marking calendars.” She did so, smiling that perfect smile, sandpaper against raw slate. “But at least a rat will experience growth. If it has four tunnels, only one with cheese, it’ll always go there for the payoff. But move the cheese, it’ll find the new tunnel and go there. Not us. People will keep hitting the tunnel where the cheese was, even if it’s not there anymore. Werner says it’s because we think it should still be there. Want my veggies…looks like you could use the nutrition.”

          “Look, I’m perfectly familiar with rodent experiments, under more exacting empirical conditions than some hotel room down Van Ness,” I was not exactly savoring that imagery over dinner. “But no thanks, just the parmesan there…”

          Good thing Lucchio’s right was such a workhorse. That muscular arm sported the same rolled-up sleeve, and a hand that stoked flaming skillets of piccata, paccheri and veal parmigiana with the firing order precision of the patent black Ferrari he always parked directly out front. The galleon-tattooed limb stirred everybody ravenously senseless as he bathed his creations in gallons of Olio di Oliva, bellowing La Traviata as his grill went up in pungent flames. Precisely when the scaloppini seemed doomed to four alarms, Lucchio would turn it deftly, then ring his order bell. His swagger earned him a Bay-wide following and his companion Berlinetta Boxer, not to mention garlic goddesses like Theresa, who clutched his signature entrees to their ample bosoms, and dished them out with devoted, loving care.

          “Empirical, what’s that?” Syd handed over the shaker as if passing along remnants of a Dead Sea Scroll.

          “Observable, measurable experience…” I spread the flakes over a yellow pat of butter across a bread heel, then tossed back the dregs of my Amarone, dripping ever so indiscreetly on my denim workshirt.

          “See? Real experience beats egghead theories every time.”

          Given all this, who could blame a body for cowering patiently in the wait line wind for a cramped, wobbly checker-clothed table? Or better yet, a spot at the counter with elephant elbowed strangers as your next-stool neighbors, having others lined up 2-3 deep, drooling directly down your neck.  The deferred gratification made for unabashed tête-à-têtes and scintillating stranger-on-stranger small talk all around us. Lucchio’s aficionados devoured caciucco and calamari, toasting with Peroni Bier and beakers of Barolo Giacomo Contreno, napkin planning their North Beach evenings from here—be it a Mimi Farina benefit at the Intersection or Cal Tjader jamming at the Keystone Korner.

          “Spumoni?”  Theresa rushed over, anticipating that we might be ones to Bogart a table under such power-hungry turnover pressure. She hastened to gesture toward the counter, nearly nailing a sidewall console and its figurine of Giambologna’s Venus. “Or tartufo, only two left…”

          “Meh, meso-meso,” Syd snapped, pushing her plate assertively toward the waitress. “We’ll pass.”

          “E’ bene,”  Theresa sighed, winking my way, digitally counting the tip change in her black leather apron. She then turned her hip sassily away, leaving the dishes to some greased young soccer striker from Reggio, bussing for scraps and a kiddie portion of the server’s take, quickly clearing a table about to be stormed from several power-hungry directions.

          “Hmph,” Syd picked up her Noe bucket bag and the check, stiffing the waitress for a measly fifty cents. “Mamma Theresa there is definitely missing the cheese.”

          “I know the feeling,” I belched, pulling two dollars from my jeans, slipping them under the fold of my tomato-stained napkin, as if I could actually afford it.

          “But wasn’t that food fantabulous,” she gushed, as we wedged out through Lucchio’s door, around an onrushing duo of banker trainees, breaking for the counter past a party of North Beach poseurs, who themselves rushed our vacated table like so many Naples pickpockets at the stazione ferroviaria. Lucchio welcomed them all with a rousing ‘O Sole Mio’ and a half tin of olive oil over twin skillets of Vitello Sante, flames leaping up into hooded vents, more sizzling, enticing smoke pouring through his storefront fans.

          Pocketing her plastic gold, Syd smiled at all the starved, tongue wagging faces of a wait line at least a half block long. “I think I could just about burst a gut…”

          “Really? You think,” I asked, following her up across Columbus Avenue, trying to locate whether the heavier garlic breath was hers or mine. “What would your trainer say?”

          “He’d say ride with the experience to the fullest,” she said, zipping up her light brown glove leather jacket, eyeing all the pasta and antipasto in Molinari’s deli windows.

          “Right, just don’t forget to pack along a barf bag…” Waiting for the green light up at Vallejo Street, we could overhear several beat cops grousing as how Mayor Moscone was still squeezing the POA on back pay and hiring quotas as consent decree negotiations dragged on. And that it was payback time for their pet Supervisor Danny Boy—whatever that blue uni shoptalk was all about.

          “C’mon, asshole, let’s capp this off,” she said as the light changed and red light runners cleared the crosswalk. “We can go talk tartufo without the doxy distractions.”

Care for more?

Chapter 60. Best ESTimate: a 
perfect pitch of operatic proportions 
makes for getting rather jobbed…

“Harbor your grudges,
park at your peril—
wary of depth charges,
misfires double barrel.”

          “And so, my fellow San Franciscans, we prove once again that we are the City That Knows How…”

          “Surprised he could tear himself away from Willie Brown’s booth at Le Central.”

          “…The fundamental retooling of this vital pumping station demonstrates how my administration thoroughly supports the very best fire department in the nation…”

          “Or that he’s here cutting ribbons, when he’s usually too busy cutting lines in City Hall…”

          “Therefore I, Mayor George Moscone, hereby dedicate this estimable facility to the heroic members of the San Francisco Fire Department, for all and everything they do to save and preserve our great city with their honorable and indispensable service.” SNIP, SNIP…

          “Then stop with your OFJ discrimination bullshit, while you’re at it—no more ’74 court orders, mayor, POA rules…”

          “Yah, and stop sissifyin’ the whole damn police department—just Gainsayin’…”

          CLAP, CLAP, CLAP, Clap… I could overhear the scoffing commentary of a couple of firefighters who stood outside my car window, taking in this opening ceremony from vouchsafe distance, arms folded smugly across the chests of their turnout coats. The mayor and his entourage had descended upon Aquatic Park to celebrate the rebirth of SFFD’s venerable two-story, Spanish-style pumping facility, which in fact was originally born as the Spring Valley Water Company, way back when the Black Point it now occupied was barely upwind from belching smelters and woolen mills.

          Between the media scrum and Moscone’s microphoned tones, this bright morning’s hoopla couldn’t have been more snooze alarming if it had been amplified through Aquatic Park’s huge, long-silent speaker towers. Eyes opened, yet still half asleep, I wasn’t sure where I was, whether I had kept my stir-crazy promise to Sherry or made it past 3 a.m. without leaking. All I could even vaguely remember were heavy footsteps and devilish laughter, beer cans crashing against concrete, some sort of vehicular ignition and motion up the hill.

          TAP, TAP, TAP… With the mayor’s feted photo-op disbanding and those derisive firemen moving on, I wriggled out of my Frostline and like an ostrich blinked about. News crews packed their gear, Moscone’s team roared past in matching onyx limos up the Van Ness grade toward City Hall, and a stream of hangers on and event junkies passed between my shotgun side windows and the uric relief of Fort Mason’s base wall. I tossed my sleeping bag into the Volvo’s back seat and flipped on the AM dial to a Dr. Don Rose going long on KFRC, whistling and cackling his way into Andrew Gold’s ‘Thank You For Being A Friend’—no, rather thank you in advance for being a car battery on the mend.

          Avoiding the rearview mirror at any cost, I swiveled my head every whichway to work the pain and stiffness out of a cold, crooked neck. That was when I heard the fingernails over my shoulder, rapping against the driver’s door window. They were long, nibbled and dirty to the quick—might have been a plainclothes cop’s, could just as easily have been Clifford’s—in reality, they turned out to be Eric’s.

          “D’ja sleep?” He gestured with a swirl of the index finger to roll my window down.

          “Dunno, guess,” I mumbled, hesitantly doing just that. “Hard to tell…”

          “What? See sumpin’ weird, or…”

          “Who knows? I’m still getting acclimated to my…accommodations, whole night’s a blur,” I yawned, over my shoulder. “What time’s it, anyway?”

          “Goin’ on eleven.” Eric glanced in at what passed for my gear and provisions, assessing front seat to back.

          “Eleven? Feels more like three,” I moaned, contorting in the bucket seats, taking a gearshift knob to the kidneys.

          “Ain’t three,” he snapped, before sipping at a paper cup of black coffee. “I was up at three, man, you didn’t show up at all.”

          Morning after the night before: A pan of the larger scene revealed that those college underclassers had left a dumpster’s worth of throwaways all over Aquatic Park’s gentle knolls, everything from chicken bones to fish wrappings soaking in the morning dew. It was all park service grunions could do to clear the grounds before Moscone arrived, to little avail. And they were still at it as the mayor waved and left, snapping up litter with long-neck pincers, filling black plastic liners as if crowds wouldn’t return to trash the place all over again. Ranger uniforms in Smokey Bear hats surveyed the damage, joggers running circles around them up and down the sidewalks to either side.

          The shrieks and sassing of small children seemed to envelope the Volvo as tract families from Redding to Watsonville invaded the park with Normandy vigor and resolve.

          Air cover was provided by a squadron of tourist helicopters that strafed Aquatic cove, Fisherman’s Wharf, Angel Island and Alcatraz, while an armada of freighters and tankers chased cruise boats past Muni pier and its breakwater, crab baskets be damned. All this while orange-capped swimmers lapped and bobbed like seals across the lagoon, scout base back to their Dolphin Club in fifty-degree waters, South Enders rowing Whitehalls on by. If my windows hadn’t steamed over and my clothes hadn’t gone spongy, I might have holed up in the Volvo until these tour de forces retreated and an all-clear signal went out. Nevertheless, I remembered having places to go and other doors to darken before sundown.

          “What’s up with the coffee,” I asked, “need to drain a kidney and a jolt to get a jumpstart…”

          “Over there,” Eric pointed across the drive. “That little round snack stand. The old wop finally opened up. Head’s around the side of the place…but speakin’ of jumpstarts…”

          “First things first, cranking up the car can wait until after a little clean-up. I’m a soppin’ sweat hog in here.”

          “Whew,” he caught a whiff of the Volvo’s insides. “Yah, man, you might wanna 3s it all right. Got just the place…”

          “Toss the soap…”

          “Beg your pardon?”

          “I need soap, shoot me your soap.”

          “Whoa, it’s my soap…”

          “I’ll give it right back, soon’s I scrub my assets…what’s your problem?”

          Black Point Cove had long harbored its rickety, stilted boathouses and the massive canners warehouses looming above them, but by the early 1900s, popular Aquatic Park Day regattas and swimfests convinced San Franciscans that this prime beachfront nook could be put to better public use. Took a Depression to fully realize civic dreams, New Deal WPA moilers clearing, dredging commercial clutter from Hyde Street to Muni Pier, fashioning a sweeping new ‘park for the people’. Its prevailing style was 1930s Streamline Moderne, sleek and white, manifested in the pillbox snack stand and piss stop, clear around the lagoon’s stepped seawall to Victorian Park and the historic vessels at the foot of Hyde.

          Anchoring Aquatic Park at its axis was the ship-shaped Maritime Museum, looking like an evenly keeled little excursion liner, matching main decks fore and aft, identical curving steel-framed glasswork stem to stern, flags flying amidships over the bridge turret top. Bracing her to either side were stepped concrete bleachers and those two tall loudspeaker towers. Inside this main building’s portholes and mosaic-tiled veranda were colorful mythical murals of Atlantis and Mu, historical waterfront photos, seafaring displays of whaling guns, nautical charts, brassy rigging, lighthouse beacons and intricate scrimshaw. The lobby boasted a restaurant, an emergency hospital and hot showers.

          Well before this ‘palace for the public’ was designated a museum, however, it was christened in ’39 as a municipal bathhouse in the earlier day Neptune vein, and since had served as a nightspot, infamous private casino, Army anti-aircraft command post and senior citizens’ center. All this Eric explained to me as we followed the park’s promenade, towels and Dopp kits in hand, side by side with some railroad tracks roughly where a redwood Spring Valley Water flume used to be. What he neglected to mention as we approached the faux boat was that its bathhouse facilities had by now been relegated to the ship’s ground-floor hold. Neither did he touch upon the bilge that irregularly gathered down there.

          “No problem, I just don’t think it’s…”

          “Let’s go, before the hot water’s shot!”

          “I need it, I tell you…”

          “Selfish bastard…stuff your silly damn soap.”

          “Get the hell away from me,” I shouted, surprising myself with the territorial outburst.

          Maybe it was the lighting, the ambiance, but something roiled my plumbing the moment I encountered this place. A long mineshaft of a hallway beneath the west bleachers and main ship zigged and zagged past maintenance cribs and dissected boilers until steam shrouded everything in sight. And at first glance, this was so much for the better.

          Deep in the bowels, with all attendant noises and odors passing herein: Today, Aquatic Park’s bathhouse could easily have been mistaken for a smazy catacombs—a bi-directional bat cave with all manner of suggestive stalactites and stalagmites—dark corners and dank corridors nested with dim, hoary creatures of dubious intent. Men leaned and stooped, posed and postured on wooden benches, against concrete pillars, inside rusty dressing cubicles and open-front stalls—wiping, sopping, zipping and unzipping, generally discharging with damp smokes drooping down their stubbly chins.

          “Neville’s just a little prick that way.” The play-by-play boy leaned back against a post nearest the community shower room, right foot poised against chipped plaster and mold, Holiday Inn towel draped loosely about his speed-famished frame. He flashed his low-calcium nicotine grin, driving even the hang-loose habitués away.

          “Right.” I was casting about for Eric—suddenly nowhere to be seen—trying to convince myself that this was just like army basic training, only in the reject detachment: so eyes up, straight ahead.

          “Hey, throw me some asswipe!”

          As I turned away from the bathhouse commentator, I locked on this brown Tarzan swaying squat over an open bowl with the primal authority of a pastured quarter-horse come mating season, trenchcoat and loincloth heaped down over his combat boots, within arm’s reach in a pinch. “Cats never stock it…shit, anybody gots some newspaper?”

          “Hell with this crap,” I flared, clinging to my towel and kit. Got to get me to Marin County…but can’t go without a shower and shave, it’s marvelous Marin up there. But this was the Y Hotel on ’ludes and/or poppers, all these crazy all-night suckers just keep staring around. Any of them come near me and they get it in the gonads, swear to god.

          I edged over to the one decently lit corner not creeping with consenting adults. The glass dome and hatched metal case were dripping with condensation, glazing over a lone 60-watt overhead bulb like custard pie filling. Before me to the left sprawled a fully bundled stiff against his backpack and bedroll as though this was Juneau in January. The drifter tranced on a minor spectacle to our right, along a bleak, cream-tiled hallway approximately first down and distance, end to end. It looked to have once been a walk-through shower for sand-crusted swimmers and rudderless coxswains. But that would have been when normalites frequented the place—harried fathers, squealing, shivering children with plastic buckets and little inflatable rafts.

          Now, the only dinghies down here were swinging to another beat altogether—coked-up queens and cowpokes who blew through the fine line between the morning after and the night before. Some one of them brought along a boombox, pounding out mix-taped Parliament and Village People. The mucked, mildewed corridor had degenerated into a downscaly cruisebah: flush with scrawny thongs and g-strings, if at all—like the ones on the Riviera or Copacabana circa 1973—slick and stretchy, some mere straps that even pre-pubescent eunuchs could fall out of. Here they were as in-your-face as Adidas at the World Cup, as minimalistic as only gravity would allow.

          “Pssst, it’s over here…”

          “What’s that,” I snapped, refusing to look that way.

          “Your virtue, lover…”

          “That’s right, Hopalong, round-up time—bend on over…”

          The voices seemed shrill and tempestuous, oozing from the murky corridor like fluid from a grease trap. The full-blast shower room, overhead trampling across the bleaches, far-corner gasps and screaming: none of it could dampen their penetrating pitches. “Come and get it, Tex, franks on the fire…”

          “Hey, back off, I mean it, serious business,” I checked my flanks as I inched toward the showers. From the corner of my eye emerged a flash revelation of how out-of-hand things were getting in here, even this early in the day: Pole thin silhouettes going down on sweaty, barrel-gut hogs; the hulks bench pressing one another’s bulges, that third-world trio by the backwall in an Oreo embrace.

           “Tsk, promises…all’s I get is promises,” swooned one rover just too damn big to be that way. Aggressive, too—snapping me with a towel smack on the cheeks once I prepared to drop dropped my jeans, modestly shaken and stirred. “Too, too bad, Honey buns—I’m the best thing that’ll ever happen to you…”

          I shed shirt and towel, rushing full bore into the shower, tossing everything by the doorway but my soap rope, then lathered all over, fierce as a doused housecat. Eyes up, ahead all the while, I rinsed and grabbed by pile, racing out of the bagnio and scooped up my goods without pause, reconciled to air-drying, wet combing the grime out of my hair as best I could. Anybody up in Marin asked, I’d say I was working on a brawny California beard.

         Meantime my skin crawled and goose bumped out of the men’s bathhouse, soapsuds still dripping from my armpits, shirt and Dopp kit dragged closely behind. I stopped to catch a breath as a chilling Bay breeze strained through my thoracic cavity sharper than a fishgig through a sockeye salmon. Galled, rattled to prudish embarrassment, I internalized the whole steamy, seamy encounter—crammed and stored its rampant particulars in my thalamus and parahippocampal cortex, to be episodically qualified, quantified, so to speak, and/or purged at a later, quieter date.

          I shot across the fore deck and gardened knolls, past lean-green retirees handicapping the morning lines, pointing toward the Volvo with flying shoelaces and a runny nose. Lawn lizards had already begun staking out patches amid marble Bufano animal sculptures on the grassy grounds, deep-frying themselves with baby oil and Bain du Soleil, lean and leathery in skimpy reptilian briefs. These elder sundogs rubbed it into sagging lifeless skin, peeling away in deep reddish-brown swatches from yesterday’s exposure and light years of solar abuse.  

          “How’d I let you talk me into that fairy boat,” I shouted, on approach to Eric and his aft Porsche now temperamentally ranging somewhere between a cold shudder and blinding seethe, at once affronted and confronted—feeling set up once again,  regressing to the mean about it all. “And where the hell do you get off stranding me like that?!”

          “Not bad, huh,” he grinned, meeting me halfway to the bon-bon of a snack stand, for a black-no refill to wash down his glazed doughnut. “I was in there earlier, so…”

          “That place is a sewer hole, I was damned near accosted in there.”

          “Aww, put your shirt on, man,” he said, in full jeans and plaid flannel. “You’re courtin’ pneumonia like that. Coffee?”

          “No thanks, I’m wired enough after a scene like that.” I buttoned up fast as I could, checking over my shoulder for any rank followers.

          “It’s nuthin’, just your imagination running on overdrive,” Eric scoffed from the stainless steel counter, stirring sugar after all into his second styro cup. “But you should see it later at feeding time, a total  swap meet down there.”

          “All I know is this huge son-of-a-bitch nearly grab-ass violated me, hung up like a Budweiser Clydesdale. I liked to take him out right there, but didn’t dare wait around,” I rattled, as if mindful of how a frat party chickie must feel. “You go in there and deal with that shit, for chrissake?!”

          “Don’t bother me none,” Eric licked the rim of his coffee cup. “Guess it’s got to do with knowin’ where you stand.”

          “What’s that supposed to mean,” I tucked into my drawers, elbowed into my sheepskin jacket. “I know damn well where I stand…”

          “So what’s the beef,” he pointed toward the stand’s john, then led me toward the cars. “It’s a simple public convenience. You just man up, head in, go about your business. Do what you gotta do, keep your eyes up, hands to yourself… If you have a problem with that, use the little boy’s toity around there.”

          “Problem, me? No way,” I huffed, second thinking that bon-bon of a snack bar, as white and Deco Moderne as the rest of the park’s places, sweet and salty on a balmy post-Depression dime. “I know where I’m coming from, don’t you worry about that…”

             I looked at him, he looked at me—mutual wariness, M.A.D. as hell. Nevertheless, we proceeded to get to work on my Volvo, Eric pulling a ratchet and socket set from his white Porsche. I piled into the ailing sedan, yanking its choke handle, pumping the gas—a turn of the steering wheel locked ignition, and nada. Dead juice, Eric grinned, hit your damn lid.

           “Lot you know,” Sherry glared, whalebone combing her hair up through her van’s opened sunroof. “You and your rolling junkyard over there.”

          “Yah, like you and your flabby ass,” he said, squeezing the release lever, opening the hood…”

          Clock and tempers ticking, I blurted that it could be loose battery cable clamps. Eric argued that he could have the generator and voltage regulator out in five minutes“

          “No time, I’ve got to get up to Marin…”

          “Suure, like you’ve got a hot date with a hot tub…” Eric reached to apply socket to the nuts and bolts of my generator mounts. “What’re ya, scorin’ some blow?”

          “Christ no, just personal business, strictly personal,” I stayed behind the wheel, futily turning the four-banger over once more, reminding myself that Marin’s where Tony was, where the Chi-bro money was. WWWuurr. Uuuur. Ur…again, nada.

          Sherry broke our impasse by suggesting we push start the Volvo, calling to Clifford for some elbow grease. He emerged positively trancelike from his hammock, spooning a cup of fruity muesli, mumbling something about insatiable emptiness, dark passions and wilder ferment—this spindle of stray mental masturbation in a gabardine vest and black ball cap, with Kierkegaard symbology where the Giants logo should have been.

            Little existential help coming from there, Eric threw up his sockets, annoyance aplenty,  offering to shove the balky Volvo with his red 912, even though it was all uphill from here. We all did manage to muscle the sedan into center drive, wherein he revved his backfiring Porsche, U-yed in a cloud of oily exhaust, nudging his battered front bumper up behind the Volvo until it squarely rear-ended mine, horn signaling me toward my driver’s seat. Whatever, I fretted, ravens the size of butterball turkeys squawking menacingly from atop the light poles overhead, making me hatch my escape with borderline desperation.

          “Just get behind the wheel there,” he shouted out his window. “I’ll tugboat shove you uphill, then back off. When I signal, roll down and pop the clutch in reverse—make sure your key’s on.”

          “You guys really don’t have to do this.” Still I wavered, fearing and trembling out my driver’s window, checking the rearview mirror, picturing both cars careening bumper locked into the bay.

          “No sweat, man,” he plaintively raced his engine, intimidating lesser machinery as only a redlining Porsche could—even one this mangled.

          “So hell with it, go,” I muttered, having noted that nearly an hour had passed on Ghirardelli Square’s distant clock tower.

          Traffic stalled, the tourists and fishermen stopped dead in their tracks to catch this rattletrap sports car pushing an even worse off Volvo sedan, Sherry and Clifford cheerleading the way. First off, Eric nearly rode his bumper over mine, but then eased off and pushed me uphill about 40 feet, gunning his 912 before peeling aside. Beeping my horn faintly on a frantic roll down, I popped the clutch, and damned if the old bucket didn’t catch, kicking and sputtering as I shifted into neutral and revved for dear life. The lookyloos around us loved it, but I was fixing more on a voltage warning light that flared stubbornly red.

          “Didn’t I tell ya,” Eric veered quickly back into the vacated parking spot Bruno had been growling in and guarding like he was pure canine corps. “Now spring your hood again…”

          I did so mid-drive, my spot having already been filled by a pouncing Vega wagon. Eric darted over with his rubber-handled screwdriver, lifting my lid to bang and pry all over the engine compartment. I idled and peered under the hood slit as he jimmied in under the generator mount around fan blades slicing mere millimeters from his fingers. Then he grabbed the generator casing, jammed his flathead into its guts. That done, he nailed the voltage regulator something fierce, sparks flying everywhere—pounding as well on the twin SU carbs. Suddenly, that little round warning light went to black.

          “Whatdja do,” I yelled, cautiously upping the engine rpms.

          “Either I goosed your generator brushes or unfroze your regulator,” Eric grinned crookedly, having closed the hood and swung around driver’s side. “Or maybe just shorted out your warning light. Anyway, bring me back some of that Marin abalone or Lagunitas brew…”

          “Thanks, I do really owe you one big time,” I said in relief. “But I have to tell you, Eric, I don’t plan on coming back like this…”

          “Heard that before, hoodini,” he laughed over his shoulder, tossing his tools into the white Porsche’s rear jump seat. “You’ll be back, ain’t no breakin’ outta here that easy…”

          “Don’t count on it,” I also waved in appreciation to Sherry and Clifford—he who was already back into his hammock, dog-earing ’The Concept of Anxiety’ while Sherry stirred her Morning Thunder and stared Eric down. Horns blaring, fore and aft, I rolled closed my window and accelerated up the drive to Van Ness itself. Yep, no way, pal, not even looking back. Think I’m going through this BS again, you’re all loonier than you look. I’m gone, man—gonna put this nut farm behind me, sure as shit. Yah, decision, Clark and Division—I know where I stand, damn straight. You people are certified socios—you and your sick-ass Aquatic bathhouse, all that whizzing around at 3 a.m.…

          If only the Volvo didn’t nearly die halfway uphill past North Point Street. But clutch in, warning light off, I revved and popped it full pedal toward a right turn to Bay Street, the Golden Gate Bridge shimmering into view beyond Fort Mason. That stunning bracelet full of 24-karat charms: the beautiful answer, the escape route, the fine-print loophole out of this mess. San Francisco Bay sparkled, Marin glowed warm and green, and I was more than geared to head for the hills.

          At least until that goddamn red warning light flashed back on, and the Volvo began sputtering again, just as I reached the corner. But it wasn’t the generator or regulator so much as the needle on my fuel gauge, which had buried itself wide left of E. I coasted over to a walled-off Fort Mason driveway, noting the lengthy wait line into a Shell gas station across Bay Street. About then I realized that even if I’d carried a gas can in the trunk, there was no way I dared tackle Doyle Drive with the Volvo gagging like this—that the glorious Golden Gate looked to be a bridge too far.

          Still, something had to give and push onward. So I locked up and dodged traffic to trudge across Bay Street, teeming Shell station bound. Stepping off the center median with a head full of fumes and foreboding, I almost stumbled in front of an old dented Dodge panel van coasting into the left-turn lane, apparently headed for Van Ness north, probably just more tourists looking for Fisherman’s Wharf, if not a prettier Aquatic Park. Yet its horn heavy, fist-waving driver instantly meant serious business before waving me off—could have been due to all these painful gas lines out of the blue.

          Check and double check: but it did make me wonder whether one person’s bridge too far was another one’s far too near…

Care for more?

Chapter 59. Another day, another Beach. 
More specifically another night: two passing 
ships, trying to get it right…”

∞ STAGE THREE ∞

 

“Mobility-from can send
spirits aloft. But mobility-to
can bring landings neither
happy nor soft.”

          “So drop ship seventy case lots to SFO, ASAP…”

          “Yah, one day I’m booking Elvin Bishop at the Twelve Bar, the next I’m paying cover to catch him at Sweetwater. Working in hotel maintenance yet, but, hey, it’s San Fran and Marin—payin’ the price for paradise…”

          “Right, you just said to meet you here, that’s all,” I said, trying to speak over this traveling salesman one phone down.

          “It’s in the bank, Macy’s bought the entire inventory, 10% over dealer, sliding scale…” 

          “Sorry, had to take a last-minute sick day—sniff, sniff—know what I sayin’? Plus Jennifer’s speedin’ around here, trying to get everything together for a weekend blowout, and got me shakin’ my ass to get things ready. So let’s re-do next week…or cruise up for the bash even, we’ll do some toot out on the deck, you can catch me up on Natorious and all the freaks back there.”

          “Well, that sounds great, Tony, but maybe I can take a raincheck. See, I’m not so sure about getting out of The City, right now…things are kinda sticky.”

          “Purchasing? I need a telex on the L.A. order, TWIX for the turnaround—no, not re-routing, this is priority one.” 

           “Raincheck? Shit, it hasn’t poured here in ages. But give it a shot, sounds like you could stand to kick back, mellow out some, no lie. Anyhow, you’ve got my number…coming Jenn. Gotta split, man, stay in touch…say, you didn’t go askin’ for me by name around there, did you?”

          “No, Tony, no way. So how about we try it here at the hotel again…”

          “Whew, sure, Heebert, what are friends for?” CLICK.

           “Tony? Uh, no, I’m,” I said over my shoulder to a caller in waiting, hanging up after the fact with another harried, tie-pulled salesman cigarette breathing down my neck. Shake his ass? Sounds like All-night Tony’s whipped like Cheez Whiz up there in Marin.

          Ring, rinnnggg… But the operator called back post haste, tallying all due overtime before I could turn away from a bank of stainless steel pay phones, this stainless steel wall of coin-fed conversation, everybody within earshot of everybody else’s business, no matter what they said. I popped in two sandwich quarters, lest the operator reach out and touch me for more, then handed the receiver to the East Bay sales rep, two more cold callers having lined up behind him.

          Whatever its amenities, the San Francisco Hilton was no Conrad, nor Beverly, but more a bobbled, bangled Statler. It looked like just a big, nondescript concrete gray tower flanking the Tenderloin, basically a plusher traveling salesman’s roost built on spun polyester and padded tabs. I had just elevatored down from a personal tour of the upper floors, more specifically any room service carts left unattended in their dead still hallways. 

          This late morning, however, I wasn’t exactly spending the night, only more or less laying—rather hunching over spent breakfast trays left just outside the room: a castered server half full of cold Eggs Benedict, bacon slabs, nibbled croissants and a peach Danish, flip-top beakers of warm orange juice and tepid coffee. Ritz-Carlton, it wasn’t; but the price was right. I scarfed away like a Sub-Saharan Bedouin in a UN refugee camp, at least until footsteps echoed down the hall.

          Where else was I to go? The plan was to scare up Tony to somehow hit him up. But meal ticket Tony was a no-show after a two-hour wait and I had no expense account to cover the hotel’s Gazebo buffet grill. I’d already burned through much of my meager grubstake on Central Y overnights and buckets of cheap coffee, trying to disentangle the slip knot that my here-or-there, she-or-her conundrum had become. That all landed me the first empty black/gold leatherette throne chair in an intermittent row extending nearly the length of the Hilton lobby. Flumped down among a textile contingent from greater Cedar Rapids, I overheard shop talk on everything from Coit Tower to coitus interruptus under Carol Doda’s guiding hand.

          Simple-minded Midwest strategizing: maybe that was why I soon warmed to the whole chintzy scene, the marble-plated columns, mirror-tiled walls, red-orange low-pile carpeting and ice-crystal, cut-glass chandeliers, glass showcases with double-knit blazers and laser art, souvenir mug shops clear to the doors. The sales reps’ crass predictability enlivened the place, taking me back to no-nonsense, meat and mashers Chicago, somehow putting me at momentary ease. Tony Panescus worked here—not today though—and was Nate Grimaldi’s speed, always sort of a scumbag, yet familiar, fathomable, homegrown. And at this point, that slender thread bordered on a verifiable genetic link.

          “Have business here do you?”  This bull of a house dick in Hilton two-tone blue stood suddenly between me and an overhead TV monitor. A spit-polished star flared across his barrel chest, service revolver weighing heavily on his pelvic protrusions

          “No, just, you know, sorta waiting for a friend…” I sat up straight, barely put together as it was, straining to hear a Channel 4 midday news brief on the U.S. Supreme Court’s handing down of some Bakke decision on reverse discrimination and, more locally, another brutal Pacific Heights attack, this one in Alta Plaza Park—can you believe that shit…

          “Not one of those Moonie types, are you,” he dwarfed me with an up and down stare. “No soliciting or loitering, house rules…”

          “Soliciting? This whole hotel is soliciting,” I blurted, product of cold caffeine and fatigue, itchy in my tan oxford cloth shirtjack. “I’m probably the only one in this place not hawking something or other.”

          “OK, time to move on, fella,” the security guard insisted, tapping my worn denim at the knee with his walkie-talkie antenna. “Let’s go…”

          “Yeah, yeah,” I mumbled, following him to the lobby doors. “Loitering—what the hell do you think I am? Hell, I was puttin’ on the Ritz not that long ago.”

          “Uh-huh,” he handed me off to a doorman and several bellhops like a sack full of used linens and towels. “But you might just want to cozy up to a shower and razor, hear what I’m sayin’?”

 

          “Crank her over…”

          “Dunno, don’t think she’s getting enough…”

          “G’wan, let her rip…no stones, no cigar.”

          After considerable sole searching and auto surveillance, hitting the pavement for a place to shave and shower, I finally did light upon something of a prime situation. I’d run the San Francisco perimeter like a house-hungry realtor before finding it, just about all 49 square miles, plus or minus, mostly minus on the monetary ledger, before tentatively settling in.

          All I knew was I wasn’t gonna be just some palooka going down for the count again.  needed to take some half measures, baby steps, one ingrown toe in the pond—a temporary psycho-emotive furlough from current space and time. Respite was the idea, however fleeting, from the split decisions, the hard truths and consequences, to put a little distance between me and myself—Saturn ringing in my ears, still sorely missing that amulet. So here it was, sunny and breezy, conveniently positioned with breathtaking views of the bay. There were no leases or deposits; references weren’t required. I couldn’t kick about the rent, had no hassles with utilities, and damned if I wasn’t free to come and go as I pleased. It was in The City, but not quite in the city, with choice front yard location, location, location.

          Really, who could beat it, especially since my liquidity had already been substantially pissed away: No big bucks, no metered towaway zones, no Tenderloin congestion closing in. Steaming coffee wouldn’t be a problem, either, although the hot part of the shower might be a trifle touch-and-go. And even if any change of address might be somewhat iffy, the post office didn’t need to know. Nevertheless, laying down roots could be problematic, despite the fact that my Volvo warmed up to it right off. San Francisco called this area Aquatic Park, but my sedan just called it quits. So for the time being, I kicked the old Swedish clunker in the grillwork and called it more or less home, albeit with conscience and cognitive dissonance immediately taking hold. “No dice, must be my damn battery…”

         “Keep pumpin’, I’m bettin’ on a bum generator or the voltage regulator…”

          “Sorry, but I’m not much of a gambling man.”

           Aquatic Park began at the northern foot of Van Ness Avenue, its main drive curving down gently leftward to the Municipal Pier, which then proceeded to fishhook dramatically rightward out into the bay. At first glance, I had paused at the North Point Street crest, with salty bay breezes drilling my sinuses, mentally tape looping the circumstances that drove me here. I’d coasted down past the posh Fontana condo towers, into the park proper, turning around at Black Point—where the pedestrian pier began—finally conking out in an open spot halfway back up the lane.

          A parallel-parked motorcade of high-mileage rattletraps lined both sides of the WPA vintage cul-de-sac, and I saw no red curbing, so settled on in. A key lock of the ignition brought a measure of relief: no meters or towaway signs; fresh, bracing environs, beautiful neighborhood, top of the town. Still, there was something about the neighbors. 

          “So then maybe it’s the jumper cables,” said a rail thin, pencil-neck Rasputin named Clifford, between chomps on a slightly bruised Gravenstein.

          “Naw, they’re good. It’s the generator, I’m telling ya,” Eric Graffney insisted, straightening up from a heavy lean over my right front fender, his voice echoing between the Volvo’s windshield and opened hood. He was a curly dishwater haired wrench jockey with everything south-coast aspirational about himself but a cratered complexion. “Here, you got a screwdriver?”

          “Uh, there’s one in here somewhere,” I said, glancing about the car’s interior from the driver’s seat. “But I’m kinda trying to keep away from sharp objects these days…”

          “How ’bout the warning light? It on?” Clifford Noreaux looked into the car, just after my key turning and throttle pumping paid off, the dual-carb four-banger firing up and revving like a barnyard tractor.

          “No, but it might be burned out,” Eric said, having bounded around to the driver’s side window, looking in over my shoulder at the black padded dashboard.

          “Yeah, I know the feeling,” I said, slumping at the wheel as the Volvo backfired and died all over again, lacking a sustained spark.

           “I say let’s yank the whole damn generator while we’ve still got daylight,” Eric wiped his hands with a Gunky red shop rag. “ I have metric wrenches in my car…”

          “Which one,” asked a hefty young woman who had just climbed out of the van right behind us, stepping up to the breakdown with attitude and a small fruit bowl.

          “Say, I don’t know if…” Before I could dissuade Eric, he had already crossed the narrow drive to the middle of three Porsche coupes parked end-to-end in front of a white scout boathouse with its skiff-packed, wood piling-anchored dock jutting into the Aquatic Park cove.

          “Nectarine?”

          “Um, no…thanks,” I smiled at this earth mother, she with auburn hair to her waist. “That guy drives a Porsche?”

          “Eric? More like driving him bonkers,” she nodded, rather lewdly licking the nectarine she’d been slicing with her Victorinox knife. “I’m Sherry Fleener…”

          “Ken Herbert, pleased to meet you,” I tracked Eric as he finished wiping clean his hands, then pulled a Lucky Strike pack from his olive REI quilted vest. “Which one’s his?”

          “Take your pick,” she winked, shaking loose the bunching in her flowery muu-muu. “He owns ’em all.”

          “All three?” I watched Eric more closely once he lit up, then reached into the white Porsche—between the red Porsche and the silver blue Porsche—the one with the ‘And For This, I Went To College?” bumpersticker slapped over a crumpled left rear fender.

          “He’s got one more in a garage by Pacifica…where’s home, where you from?”

          “Midwest, Colorado…like that. What’s he doing with four Porsches?”

          “Movin’ ’em around mostly—fighting off parking tickets and tow trucks,” she motioned toward the front of the Volvo. “Me, I’m sorta together with Clifford there. The little gnome still futzing under your hood. Even though he’s way more mystical than mechanical…we’re from Schenectady.”

          “No offense, but he does seem a little weird to me,” I snapped, while still drawing a bead on Eric, and the wire-haired mutt with a sawed-off tail that was busting out barking from the dirty white Porsche.

          “No, he just gets a little too stuck in his head sometimes,” she said, still sucking her overripe nectarine, and scraping the hair back out of her eyes. “Now, Eric, he’s weird—not right off, maybe. But you watch…”

          “Well, I don’t figure to be around long enough to find out…”

          “Alright, let’s do it,” Eric shouted in return, flicking his butt, slamming his toolbox down onto the curb. “I’ll get this sucker running fur shure…”

          “But wait,” I said warily, stepping between him and the Volvo’s engine compartment. “No sense tearing down my generator if I can’t come up with the parts.”

          “So we’ll rig it,” Eric pressed, glancing away from me, searching skyward over a high ridge lined with stately frame military officers’s houses. “C’mon, we’re losin’ the daylight…”

          “No, really, that’s cool,” I said, leaning paternally against my hood. “I’d rather sleep on it, let the battery re-charge itself, try again in the morning…”

          “Damn, suit yourself. Try to help a dude,” Eric grabbed up his toolbox, catching his dog sniffing around a leash-free keeshond over by a brick semicircle of slat park benches. “Bruno, get back here!”

          Not that Eric seemed totally tuned anyway, those asynchronous eyes suggesting that his tappets weren’t all well adjusted. But what turned me more amber were the Porsches across the way—all three of them with sunroofs and slotted, steel-belted rim jobs—in a racy little row. The red job sagged rightward, headlight casings gutted and bumpers dragging nearer to the pavement than any demolition derby queen’s. His silver blue rust bucket sported Ohio license plates, pushed-in fenders and taillights dangling by mere ground wires. The white centerpiece was so ravaged by saltwater cancer that its fender wells chewed their way up past the window frames and rocker panels oxidized down into neat little rust piles with every slam of the door.

          “Hey, I appreciate the effort, really,” I  followed him across the drive toward his cars, sucking up somewhat as a remedial hedge against tomorrow. “Trying to corner the market on Porsches, are you?”

          “How d’ya mean?” Eric asked, shooing his Weimaraner mix toward the fleet.

          “Uh, nothing—just thinking you’ve got your own little Gran Prix pit stop going here.”

          “Don’t get you. These ain’t even formula cars,” he snapped, fighting his white driver’s door, then kicking it open in a cloud of disintegrating metal. “They’re all Porsha 912s. Four cylinders, better mileage.”

          “Yeah, right,” I watched him place his tool kit carefully under a folded down rear jumpseat heap of worldly possessions, then snatching a baggie of sunflower seeds from between the torn maroon naugahyde buckets. “Gas crisis and everything…”

          “Yo, Ken Herbert,” Sherry shouted, head and shoulders shot up through the pop-top skylight of her Econoline van. “Tea time!”

          “Bruno, jump up, you hear me?!”  The dog suddenly sprang from sniffing around a nearby flowering plum tree up the fastback Porsche to its open sunroof, where Eric spat sunflower seeds up like it was watermelon day in Dixie. So he sat, playing mouth-to-mouth seedy foosball with his hovering, drooly dog, tuning in Rastafarian on new-left Berkeley radio, peeling away ripped red upholstery in long, leathery strips. “Piss on her damn tea…”

          “But I’m game,” I said to Sherry, approaching their van after returning to close the hood and lock my four Volvo doors. “What’s his problem?”

          Her two-tone blue camper opened out to a sidewalk lined with poppy top acacia trees. Beyond, a putting green lawn sprinkled with romping children, guzzling louts and dozing lingerers—all tucked neatly in the late-day shadows of a high Fort Mason bluff green and thick with gnarled shrubbery and forward leaning shade trees. I ambled up to the side doors, keeping a watchful eye on Eric and his sunroof-straddling hound.

          “He’s just pouting ’cause I cut him off earlier,” she said, handing me a stoneware cup of chamomile.

          “Thanks—er, cut him off?”

          “No more Morning Thunder for him after he went ballistic on us…”

          “Sherry, give it a rest!” It was not a big voice, but firm nonetheless—coming from sort of a hammock arrangement inside the van. Clifford rocked up there, modified lotus, reading Voltaire. “Watch your temper and blood pressure…”

          “Sorry, but that still boils me…”

          “Jeesh, what is Eric’s story, anyway,” I sipped, having stirred in some brown sugar.

          “Aww, he just spends too much time with his dog…some trail mix?”

          “I’ll pass,” I scanned up along the ridgeline tangle of willows, ficus, cypress and long-needle pine. “He looks like some scorched-out beach bum.”

          “Eric? Gimme a break,” she laughed, breaking off some wads of sourdough, grabbing a marmalade jar from one of her pine-panelled van’s built-in racks. She was a stout, but not too beefy new-ager with deep dimples and smooth, rosy cheeks. “He’s a landlubber from Toledo, need I say more? Just drink your tea, it won’t keep you up all hours like last night. We could hear you tossing and turning, figure it’s time we got to the heart of your problem.”

          “Me? No problems,” I dodged, focusing more on the Marley bounding speaker to tinny speaker inside the van. “Everybody into reggae here or…”

          “It’s this pinko Berkeley station, KMRX,” she said, passing jammed sourdough bread chunks around. “This is the Third World Hour. They broadcast a ‘Best of the SLA’ last weekend, Bill and Emily and Wendy Yoshimira did call-in interviews. Then they replayed some classic rants by Stokeley and H. Rap Brown.”

          “Really,” I swallowed hard, conjuring up Yippie memories of Kunstler, Rubin, all the Chicago Seven riding old Judge Hoffman like a Jerusalem camel. “How long you guys been here, anyway?”

          “Couple of months, in and out,” said Sherry, tossing a banana to Clifford, still swinging in metaphysical concentration, staring up through the pop-top with little more to say. “We get the bug, off we go—north, south, wherever…what about you?”

          “Just until I square some things away,” I downed my herbal tea. “Really, day or two max…”

          Shadows soon reached deeply into Aquatic Park. Those Monterey pines and snarled bushes towering above us soaked up remaining sunset rays, from this grassy little commons eastward across the glassy bay. Fisherman’s Wharf shoppers and sightseers loaded back into their parked cars on both sides of the drive, chilled by the damp early evening breezes, quickly pulling away. Dwarf trees alive with wrens, sparrows and starlings fell suddenly still, yielding to the gurgling of sedulous pigeons and gulls. Squirrels and vermin unknown sifted down through the bluff side thicket. Bruno appeared to hear them, scrambling off the white Porsche roof to chase various pests up to Fort Mason’s tan steel-posterned concrete base wall, a fortification dating back to well before the WPA, even the Civil War. 

          “Over here, Bruno,” Eric bellowed through his driver’s side window. “I’ll kick your ass ’til it bursts, you hear me?!”

          “At least maybe your car springs won’t be squeaking tonight, keeping us wide awake again,” Sherry told me, scooping up saucers and cups.

          “No more tossing and turning, promise,” I smiled, liking her, headstrong as she was, with a little bit of Moon going on.

          “Sure, two to one you’ll be piling out for a 3 a.m. wizz pass like the rest of us,” she cracked and rolled her eyes across the way, pulling the Econoline camper’s twin side doors closed behind them. “Just keep your distance and aim straight—unlike some people around here.”

          To avoid that shaky prospect altogether, I slipped over toward the base wall to unzip and hose down a dark patch of shrubbery. By the time I re-emerged from the shadows, half the parking spots had been vacated and Sherry had battened their van’s hatches. So I cleaved my way into the Volvo for a second night of this front seat action, coaxing myself into the sedan, arguing its merits, fantasizing about Hilton hotel rooms—generally exercising my nerves, if not my options—another bout of road fever, totally roughing it, no stones, no cigar.

          Yet this was one of those cool, boundless nights—everything was underbrush and anything seemed possible despite the cost. Bridled waves slapped softly behind the Muni Pier breakwater, barely jostling the marker buoys and moored sailboats in Aquatic Park’s lagoon. Nearby nightlife spilled across the inner bay in coruscated pink and yellow lights, transforming the inky water into a rich, creamy broth, chatter and laughter passing me on sidewalks to either side. Dim, rattling hulls snuck in and out of the greater bay from Hong Kong and Hormuz under cover of foghorns, only to be flushed out by the sweeping Alcatraz Island beacon. And silhouetted in the foreground was Eric, still sitting in the middle of his three Porsches, washing down cigarette smoke with half-can slugs of beer. Bruno had coiled up behind the sunroof, low moaning for more sunflower seeds over the crackle of KMRX-FM’s call-in agitprop.

          There were stranger places to do this car trip, I rationalized, wrapping my sleeping bag about me, locking the Volvo’s doors again, sure and hard. I wriggled across the two front bucket seats, between armrests, around the floorshift and hand brake, finally jamming my feet firmly under the dashboard in the knowledge that the best I could manage between now and daybreak was a postural question mark. Giggly, beer guzzling college types scattered on nearby knolls, mixing with Eric’s high-volume radio talk show and muttering Chinese crab trappers into a penetrating audible olio.

          I hit my dashboard Blaupunkt for relief, tuning into ‘One of These Nights’ mid chorus, sending me falsetto reeling back to frigid, desperate high flagging along North Lake Shore Drive. Maybe this was sicko out here, but it sure was better than that. Now just do what you have to do to tamp down the inner fires, get everything back on track. So let your hippocampus sort through, decode those nasty old neurons. But I couldn’t say this retrusive cerebral grip wasn’t infecting my instincts, stirring my emotions all over again—the same fear, anger, rancor and discord, with confusion, oddly twisted pleasure ahead—that whole rackabones survival stew.

          I kicked at door panels and shifted about the front seats to tone down the oldies station, soon startled by the thumping of late-night joggers. A bleary parade of night crawlers then passed between me and the glow of Ghirardelli Square’s block-long sign, almost obscuring the fact that Aquatic Park had one more redeeming attribute, however ill advised—yah, getting in a mite closer to the action…

          She lived just blocks away, the Eagles reminded me of that—here, within walking distance of Syd’s place, how utterly bizarre. I pictured her laughing, cursed her, largely blamed her for it all. She’d make good by it, see it my way when I make my play, or else she’d have to pay. I then saw her groveling, naked and forlorn—feeding me nectarines under dancing California palms—fat chance of that. I so wet dreamed and schemed and plotted until the music fuzzed over and nightlights faded, and I could see no more. Except for spotting Eric, still smoking, swilling and staring out to the bay, tossing beer cans up through his sunroof, hitting the trash can in a reggae trance.

          I just quelled Van Ness Avenue’s ambulance and fire truck sirens by dialing in KMRX myself, if only out of idle, middle of the road curiosity. There I came upon a spirited Berkeley activists’ discussion of aid to the inspiring children of Jonestown, Guyana—of how they were truly destined to transform those jungle wilds into a utopian, perfectly egalitarian paradise on earth—if only Bay Area progressives would keep the faith and continue to support this vital cause in every way.

          I signed off rather uncommitted, just as the FM station’s phone pledges began ringing in, wrestling myself to sleep, hoping for a little mental downtime, some REM resolution of my festering personal issues. Or at least that I might make it past 3 a.m. without hitting the wall again…

 Care for more?

Chapter 58. Coming clean is an eye
opener to the dark, deeper scales
of manhood, making for the fits,
starts and sputters of an easy out…

 

“Coasting into panic mode,
past and present collide—
soon cutting both ways.”

          “Get those hands up…”

          “Left, the left!”

          “Quit your dancin’ around, stick and move…and lead with your right!”

          Like a tomato can’s corner cut man, I couldn’t leave the bruising wound alone. To hell with his Stetson and snakeskins, no way the cowboy Christian gets away with that. Brother Joe got his unjust reward for genuinely serving the Lord, walked God’s picket line for some blessed redemption, only to die on a scummy sidewalk with the final judgment of a blade in the back? And what about if I’d caused Joe’s demise by red-cape waving his tracts in the crazy cowboy’s face?

          That bluesy, punch-drunk old fart was the only friend I had here, for crissake, taken out by some god-less carpet bagging Jesus fraud. In one blinding moment, I wanted to strangle the righteoutinhorn, to knife him in raging earnest, to rush him amid his self-righteous screeds and carve his Beelzebub heart out right there beside that closed-up flower stand. But better judgment and my prefrontal cortex kicked in this time as I turned away and drifted south along Market Street, keeping that particular demon under wraps, at least for then.

          Instead, I fixed on Brother Joe, mourning him, revering him, absorbing him, making of him my saviour, my redeemer. I felt impelled to hold vigil at his altarpiece, retrace his very steps, devour warehouses full of testaments and tabloids on every blessed, lurid detail of his dreary little life. I wanted to hold his candle, carry his torch, lead his crusade up and down Market Street in his very same sandwich signboard and burlap wrappings, conning and converting every creeping glob of street scum as if being the missionary’s heir apparent.

          Most immediately, I visited Brother Joe’s likely haunts, if only to spread the dreadful news, maybe find out more about his nest and kin. First stop was Palace Billiards, climbing the former Graney parlor’s 37 steps as if the smoke-stained 24-hour relic were the Mount of Golgotha, delivering the word of Joe’s passing to a furtive slew of white collar and no-neck eight balls who couldn’t place—or didn’t know—him from Adam 12. This pilgrimage next led me back across Market Street, to where my message figured to carry a bit more immediate impact. 

          “Stop with the pitty-pats, work that hook and your corkscrew, why doncha…”

          “Yah, who do you think you are, Carmen Basilio?”

          “Little shoe skinner thinks he’s Carmen Basilio…”

          “Who’s Carmen Basilio,” asked one of the young fighter/hangers on, draped across the ropes.

          “That’s like asking who’s Ray Lunny. Sweet Carmine was only the champ in two different weight classes. He took the middleweight crown from Sugar Ray Robinson, beat his best candy canes in a 15-rounder. Yep, won the Hickok Belt in ’57—athlete of the year, no dancin’ around there…”

          “And he never would have lost that one Johnny Saxton fight if the Chicago mob hadn’t fixed it—goddamn Frankie Carbo and Blinky Palermo.”

          Who was Ray Lunny, I asked rhetorically, having lightened my footwork up to two grubby, grumbly old trainers in overripe sweats, ringside coaching a couple of sparring, aspiring Kid Gavilans. Bosworth’s Gym was a bright, ruggedly decadent arena over on Jones Street, which opened in the Roaring 20s,  flourished in the 40s and 50s on a rich regimen of raspberries and cauliflower. But today, it sweltered somewhere in the high 70s, afternoon rays broiling the place through an overhead skylight hardly smaller than that stained-glass marvel over the Palace Hotel’s Garden Court. Bosworth’s domed daylight reigned over two training rings dead center in the aging gym, its pigeon-pocked wire glass panels effectively bleaching out an already talcum white, albeit soiled interior.

          Both rings were bordered with identical red, white and blue Everlast ropes and turnbuckles, leftovers from the Bicentennial, with long fluorescent fixtures hanging from the rusty skylight cranking assemblies directly overhead. Each ring also sported a pair of these local lightweights—grunting, bouncing, jabbing with Golden Gloves ferocity and dark, hungry eyes, trash talking the fights of their young lives through rubbery mouthpieces and protective headgear.

          “Who was Ray Lunny? That’s like asking who was Verne Bybee,” snapped the taller of two staff handlers, tossing towels to his baby brawlers in ring number two. “And who’re you anyway? Lookin’ to go a few rounds?”

          “Uh, no, actually I was just asking around about a sidewalk preacher type named Brother Joe, know of him? Short, squat black guy, he was a fighter earlier on in Louisiana, worked his way out here years ago, so I thought he might have hung around here…” 

          “I dunno, the ol’ ham ’n’ eggers come and go,” the other groomer said, hobbling over from the first, left-side ring. “Most of  ’em are just purse swingers,,,so what the hell’s the difference…”

          “It’s kind of important,” I said, breathing in the sweat and calamine. “He was murdered a short time ago, over by the Old Mint. I’m just trying to help sort things out by him.”

          “Kissed the canvas, huh? Well, we sure don’t know nuthin’ ’bout that.” The taller trainer rolled a cigar butt corner to corner across his lower lip, turning toward his supply room. “Who keeps track? Been a whole slew of chins workin’ out through here over the years. If they could hack it, they’d be contendas, otherwise just more mule meat on the pile. G’wan, gotta stock some liniment and shower soap…”

          “Sure, I only figured maybe…” My thought tailed off and jaw dropped like cut crystal as my eyes followed him toward Bosworth’s office and supply room. The length of its front wall was lined with fading framed photographs of Ring Lardner vintage: could have Brother Joe been among them?

          I stepped around a three-row set of seat-worn bleachers for a closer look, at Speed Graphic blowups of Archie Moore, Floyd Patterson and Rocky Graziano, Ring Magazine flashbulb snaps of Basilio throttling Gil Turner, against crowd shots of shouting, chomping, stomping stoolies bloodthirsty for a Paret-Griffith kind of beating. Above, sketch portraits of Marciano, The Brown Bomber, John L. and Jack Johnson swung from the gym’s pillar posts and skylight stanchions, looming over the ghosts of shady managers and purse skimmers, of bolo thumpers fresh off the Greyhound, pounding the bags; of local creampuffs just skipping ropes. But beyond a rough-edged wall diorama of Louis-Schmeling at Comiskey came the main Bay Area event.

          DING, Ding, Dinggg: I could almost hear the timekeeper’s bell as all eyes focused on the slick, gray-headed PA announcer, puffing out his red silk cummerbund and velvet-trimmed black tuxedo center ring. “Ladies and gents, headlining tonight’s card, The Brisbane Buzzsaw versus The Pride of the Mission”. A gallery-style photo sequence captured some bow-tied, medicine ball of a referee named Jack Downey overseeing the gloves touch between lightweights Verne Bybee and Ray Lunny.

          The next showed a third-ranked Lunny dodging the iron-chinned Buzzsaw rushes that had already bested world champ Chalky Wright, sharpshooting back on Bybee’s button, even with his brittle little hands. Capping the set was a yellowed Civic Auditorium poster, trumpeting undercards the likes of Jacklick vs. Montes, Sullivan vs. Tarzan, Shiroma vs. Romero—hometown pugilistic heaven on the brink of world war. Lo, the sweetness of that local science…liken to bring out that mean streak in me.

          “Ya know, I do recall this punch-drunk street jake coming around shadowboxing sometimes, an old walkover from Market Street, think he said he lived in a flophouse out by Dogpatch,” said the remaining trainer, having sent his sparring partners off to the showers, now wiping down his ring’s canvas. “Just more mule meat, liniment on the brain. But if I come up with anything else, I’ll letcha know…”

          Working my way out, I could picture the gym on amateur night, Guadalajara cockfights likely more civil than this house between rounds. Fedoras, Panatella stubs, double-breasted vest coats, Wild Turkey half-pints winging from these low bleachers toward the ring, the referee sweeping the blood-stained canvas like a homeplate whisk broom, side bets and bouts breaking out in darker corners.  It appeared that every able body came to train at Bosworth’s in those days, with photos and news clippings as proof positive.

          Still, Billy Bosworth had been gone several long years now, and the gym couldn’t keep pace with his legend. Today, water-stained glass stress cracked in the skylight, plaster peeled like scabby poultices off support pillars. Overweight stiffs were set back on their heels by ragged punching bags, CYO kids pumped some rusty iron on creaking benches, slaphappy palookas bobbed and weaved around one another for $4 per hour—the entire exercise cadenced by a punctual tape loop of three-minute bells. Essentially losing this round, I took leave of what remained of Bosworth’s gym. I wasn’t quite buying its trainer’s jabs, but couldn’t land much of a haymaker in response.

          “Joe was better than that, you know—a genuine contender in his day.” I snapped my mind back more into a Rocky Balboa/Sugar Ray Leonard timeline, sneak sliding Brother’s signboard behind a towel bin. “Anyway, much obliged. Find out what you can, I’ll check in again right soon, okay?”

          “Yah, sure, you and your Brother Joe…meantime, don’t be takin’ no rabbit punches in the clinches out there…”

          “Denise is gone, up to Tassajara’s Green Gulch Zen Center or Synanon some place—still playing lost and found. What planet are you on?”

          “Uh, I’ve been around, was just stopping by to say hi…but, uh, how do you mean?”

          “I meeeann, we’ve been getting weird phone calls, then this overnight letter came…”

          “For me?”

          “No, for Ram Dass—here, you owe me another one…”

          Came away thinking maybe Bosworth’s trainer was right. Figured, backing another boozer, another loser—sure could pick ‘em, but then I’d long developed an eye for it, what with the ol’ man. One thing, deadbeats like that didn’t seem to ask much from a person on the come, but they sure take a truckload when they go. Surrender to the Lord—Joe did that, all right…off living his white cloud dream, still shoveling the bullshit—bless that wunnerful name of Brother Joe, bastard leaving me behind like this…screw it, had to go liberate the Volvo. Still, I had sunk deeper into that funk with every step toward the Eddy Street Garage, skulking down Jones, looking for the way, an angle, any acute angle out of this—a sign that struck a righteous chord, marshaling whatever remained of my resources, a trumpet that sounded the charge.

          Rather, I caught another billboard. This Foster and Kleiser special grabbed me at about Ellis and O’Farrell, perched diagonally atop a permanently shuttered hot-type printing shop, and what a heart-stopping work of commercial lithography it was. A brilliant Sonoran sunset amid the drunken Tenderloin squalor, cactus shadows dotting the foreground, a lone, sombreroed horseman galloped across the horizon, directly above the poster’s bold headline: ‘A Desperado’s Greatest Getaway’.

          The Bandito Tequila logo stuck in my throat like a wedge of lime by now, past images of Forrester, Blaine Advertising further blurring my present horizon—Michigan Avenue and the InEquity Center, taxis to the Art Institute and Orchestra Hall—Bob Gelvart making a killing, toasting Lacey Abbot-Tanzer and Larry Castalone en route to the corner office. A dash of salt for the walking wounded: that entire cooked-up Chicago scenario was now little more than a haunting peek at someone else’s parade.

          So I plodded over to the Eddy Street police garage, hands in my pockets, clutching my Wig-Wam sock rolled wad, resigned to springing that blasted car—not discover, devise, remember?  See that baby through if it kills you. But it’s tough out there, and don’t you forget it. Lighter by the tally of bail and storage a couple of days on, I drove west along Geary, back in the saddle, tuning into Dusty Street cueing up Boston’s latest, ‘Don’t Look Back’, desperate to get away from the Tenderloin, gnawseous at the prospect of sweating any more nights in and out of the Central Y.

          Hitting a string of timed green lights a couple of parking citation and jimmy-free days on, my mind drifted to great escapes even farther afield: Boulder, yeah…no, can’t go back now! Oregon, Seattle, that might work, someplace green and clean, real friendly—no crime, no foreigners, no fruits and nuts, nobody out for the big palm job. hit, not enough gas money for that. But anyplace, somewhere different, somewhere else. While the motor’s still running, while you still have a chance, ’cause that clock’s still running too. Go for it, Dyb, strap on those waffle soles… Yet reality soon hit me like a Park Presidio red light: fuel tank half empty, oil pan at least one quart low. That’s about when I flipped a right on Fulton Street, wheeling westward with Bill Graham authority on cruise control, opting to pay a little friendly visit, just flow with it, hadn’t one shred of an idea why.

          “Who the hell would,” I looked the envelope over, scribbled on as it was, front and back.

          “Don’t ask me,” huffed Regina Tzu, standing firmly in her doorway, like some after-hours bouncer at Studio 54. There would clearly be no welcome wagon from Denise Kharl here, no ease of re-entry, much less any overnight stays. “All I know is the bizarre crone making those phone calls was from another epoch entirely…”

          “Right, well thanks much and say hi to Thibeaux for me, will…”

          “He split back to St. Louis, stuck me with the rent, too…” SLAAMMMM.

          And like that, she was gone. I broke away from their Richmond District crib with mixed signals and emotions, steering out Fulton Street, turning into Golden Gate Park at 30^th Avenue, that Express Mail letter sitting like a claymore on my shotgun seat. Now, Spreckels Lake, with all its swans, geese and remote-controlled model yachts, seemed a perfectly placid place to detonate the envelope, so I pulled over along the lake’s boathouse side, KSAN tracking side two, ‘Wish You Were Here’ on the FM dial, hinting at yet another wall-busting Pink Floyd release, slated for later in the year.

          The letter bore a Prairie Crossing return address, little more legible than that chicken-scratching with my name. A measure of morbid curiosity had me fingernail shearing open the envelope flap, unfolding a two-pager on school-ruled tablet paper, with a short feed store-labeled note attached. 

          Signed by a Mrs. Ruth Nesmer, she introduced herself as a widow woman neighbor of Dellis Herbert’s, then explained as how she’d been helping my uncle as best she could through the sad ordeal spelled out in this enclosed letter. Crudely hand written by Dellis himself, with her clarifying annotations on the margins, it apologized for telling me this way, but only just found the Fulton Street phone number in his brother’s effects… effects?…didn’t know how else to reach me…for what?!…because so much had to be done…done?

          Deciphering Uncle Dellis’ scrawls as best I could, there was no massaging the message. His brother, my dad, had suffered a busted gut (per Ruth: a ruptured aneurysm on his aorta) all alone in the backyard house while his younger sibling was admittedly serving a little bout in the cooler after his latest weekender blow-up at the Prairie Town Tap.

          By the time Dellis had returned to the Herbert homestead, he found Ed on the kitchen floor, his corpse having exploded like a tire tube in the stuffy, sealed-up bower, blood and innards (Ruth: distended organs, intestines) all over the floor and walls, the stench somethin’ putrefied. After the county coroner left and they deterged, disinfected the mess, Dellis was in no shape nor mood to conjure up any semblance of a funeral, so he had the remains done (Ruth: embalmed), then hearse hustled his big brother off to the family plots. Sorry for the late and lamenteds, but somebody had to do somethin’ fast, Dellis signed off, you want any of his skimpy belongin’s back here? Ruth Nesmer had cosigned with her neighborly prayers and condolences—a wish you were here, underlined, adding a smiley face in good faith.

          Okay then, what was done was done…and gone. Had to be there to really appreciate the descent effort, folks, but thanks a sonly heap anyway for the kind thoughts back there. Job well done, so have a cigar, boy, shine ‘em on you crazy diamond. Right, just pull away, Scot free—like nothing happened that you could have actually helped anyway—wasn’t your doing, just like with Brother Joe. So why did I shoot out past Rhododendron Island and the Buffalo Paddock on JFK Drive, coast bound in an unchained reactive blur of unfree association—caught in the crossfire of childhood and faraway laughter, if only they all could see me now.

          The fog in the head, dig? There was so much more to assess and reassess, gotta have some air now…stuff comin’ at me from so many different direction, cracks in the cerebral walls. I steered past the equestrian field and golf course, skirting the earlier tri-strangulation of Rainbow Falls altogether, thinking this was just Brother Joe all over again, only hitting much closer to home back there, like a hundred-car trainload of soybeans and corn. What were the last words: It’s awful lonesome here sometimes, God’s honest truth…dratted stomach’s been actin’ up more… Dellis ’bout drivein’ me to drinkin’ again…I’ll send you a little somethin’, a guy’s gotta eat. Just stay in touch, son…after your momma’s gone, the two of us’s all that’s left…Yeah, only needed a couple of bills to get me back on my feet…just between us sour Scots, understand.

          Those bitter filial pills overshadowed the beauty of Queen Wilhelmina’s Tulip Garden, the splintered, ramshackle majesty of the Dutch Windmills. How did Syd put it, ever see anything so fantabulous? Still, I couldn’t bear to revisit that first glance sunset stretch of the Ocean Beach Esplanade, instead gunning along the Great Highway past a run-down Beach Chalet and the park’s soccer field, side glances fixed on the churning Pacific like a Panavision-mounted camera car. Right, how about back heading back home anyway, smart ass—Moon over miasma, that door still left slightly ajar at Forrester, Blaine—there’s always Chicago if all else fails…that’d be classic, crawling my way to the suffocating place all the bright, daring people leave…back to what? Wellen and Gelvart would be Bandito sniggering all the way to the cantina…big trailblazin’ genius, gonna kill ‘em on the coast…why you’d have nothing more to say until your dying day…

          No blazing sundown today, as frigid, mid-flood gusts overwhelmed all the way down Ocean Beach, fog building in, sand piling over a stony seawall, onto these southbound lanes of the Great Highway. I rolled tight Volvo windows to the pounding wind and grains, as if that were the root cause of my shivering. Never had I felt so at odds with what I saw. At least the due west escape route out of Chitown held such infinite promise; but here I was, with nowhere east to escape to and nowhere west to go. So what about south, Santa Cruz south, Big Sur south, Malibu south, Baja south, what the hell, the Bandito and whales did it…but is that it, the pride? If pride’s the only thing…hell, that’s only openers—it’s what you did and didn’t do here and there. The difference between being a cut-up and a fuck-up, only the joke was on you. Everyone, everything you touched went up in smoke, torched ’em all.

          That went on the length of the coastal highway thus far, these voices pounding me like breakers against that tide-riddled beach. I drown in them, losing my grip on this wily, desolate stretch of shoreline until it dawned that I was damn near blowing town again in a last-legs junker out on bail, with my cameras still doing time. I swerved, skidded into a windblown parking area across from the city zoo and old Fleishhacker Pool—about as far south as the Great Highway dared to go.

          Think about it, Melissa you’ve destroyed, walked her right to the brink of paradise, then hacked her to pieces, nearly sent Syd over the edge. Came riding in out of the west like Gabby Hayes, forcing mom to go under the knife to take her life—killed your own mother you son-of-bitch! Your own dad split open like a hot melon, exploded in his own bile because of you and how you weren’t there to help him instead of hitting him up for a grubby touch. That wasn’t enough, so you did Brother Joe in for grins—might just as well have personally stabbed your only stinkin’ friend in town!

          I screeched in between two seemingly vacated camper vans, then stalled the engine trying to jam into reverse. Trapped. I looked myself in the rear view mirror, and in the van’s reflective window. Sobbing, trembling, I punched the Volvo’s steering wheel, busting its horn ring and somehow firing up the FM oldies radio, quickly flipping off another Manilow ‘Mandy’ to Dan Fogelberg’s ‘Illinois’. Up the coast, down the coast, in, out—where was a life killer like you got to go? Everybody you touch you kill—everything near you just wilts and dies—you’re rat poison, radioactive agent orange… I fumbled with the Blaupunkt, but the music only got louder. Reaching into the side door map pocket, I pulled out a yellow handled Phillips screwdriver, fixing to stab the blasted radio into silence until it stopped me from shaking. Instead, I kneed it once in the push buttons and it squelched out loud. So what was left, you’ve destroyed everything else in your life, all that’s left is you. Why the hell not, nobody’ll know, nobody’ll care—it’ll be a big load off everybody. ’Cause god’s honest truth, what good are you to anybody?!

          I turned the screwdriver toward me, grabbing it firmly, drawing it to my chest. I poked lightly about my breastbone, to any fading echoes of ‘Mandy’s’ drums. I gripped the grooved plastic handle ever more tightly, fire in the brain, hands drenched and throbbing. Do it push, do it, motherfucker—do it, you selfish bastard and get this bullshit over with. Drive it clean through, no more wimpin’ out—push it, push it, PUSH IT!!! My head raced mercilessly as flailing waves broke over the seawall, against the failing shore, pressing me, cornering me, entreating me to take the final plunge.

          Voices, crescendos of taunting voices demanded I go ahead with it, that I do no less than what I’d done to everyone I’d known. There they were, all of them floating in on driftwood barges over ever quickening rip currents and sneaker waves. And all their brethren, disciples, cohorts and co-conspirators, an a cappella chorale: Do it, you devil, do it! Do it, chickenshit, push it clear through to the seatback and be done with it. Do the dirty deed like everybody says—aren’t you even man enough to get this done?!  There, ready, breath deep, count one, two—swallow your tongue and kill somebody… I felt a prickly pain in my chest, shot-like, a spurt of red dampness warming my skin…

          TAP, tap. “Xin Loi, lòng…’scuse!”  *

          “Get away from me,” I shouted through the window glass, over the resurging radio and some ungodly timed Beach Boys on the FM. Squelch, szzook, ssst, squelch… ‘…My way to sunny Californi-ay. On my way to spend another sunny day…’

          “Không, dùng ląi,” yelled a short, squalid figure, tapping more hotly on the side window, his gaunt, molish face trembling with horror. Layered in patched and overpatched raggins, he balanced a full potato sack on a shoulder pole. “Đó là rât xâu!  Công cų, nó sê giêt ban. Stop!!!”

          Dizziness set in, swirling images congealed, then dissolved between me and the vast, empty sea. I could feel the blood trickle, clot in my CU T-shirt, soak and stiffen my chest hairs. Rolling, mushrooming mescaline swirls bobbed behind my eyelids, grotesquely vivid and colorful. Seemed all the more redemptive voices were chiming in: mom, Moon, Aunt Eleanor, Dame Thornia, even dad and Uncles Dellis to Early—but maybe that was just me. Squelch, sst…‘water, water—get yourself in that cool, clear water…the air’s so clean it’ll take your mind away, take your mind awaaayy…’

          TAP, TAp, tap. “Xin vui lòng, vê nhà đi, pleeeze.” TAP, TAp, tap. The man looked Asian—Chinese, no smaller, maybe Cambodian or Vietnamese. He’d dropped two fishing poles to his side so as to rap the window bloody to get a rise from me, his round-brimmed straw paddy hat canting back to reveal an aged, salt weathered face.

          Damn radio had come back up, just like that. I finally turned my gaze his way, picking mindlessly at my sweater, winging the screwdriver viciously over my shoulder against the Volvo’s rear seat. I downed the window halfway and nodded. “Thanks, I’m all right, was just…”

          “Tôt, không có gì,” the fisherman snapped obediently, reaching down for his poles, carefully rebalancing his shoulder load. He then started down a low, crumbling cliff to the shoreline—lures, keys jangling, his rubber boots squeaking in the sand. “Cám on ban, tąm biêt, bye…”

          “I’m all right, Jee-sus…” I wailed, mortified, downright scramble-brained, but gratefully heaving nonetheless, nodding to this timely cut man for sparing me the TKO.

          ‘…Cool cascades of that clean, clear water…and the chaparrals flow to the sea, ‘neath waves of golden sunshine…’  Fuckin’ Beach Boys, everlivin’ stereo teenage dream: I cranked up my window and broke down like Mekong Delta rice paddies after the saturation bombings. I double-checked my door lock, pressed my aching forehead against the steering wheel and cried, moaned, trembled worse than a Memorial Day mourner on the National Mall.

         ‘…Police sources say the murder suspect was apprehended without incident. He was allegedly ID’ed with the assault in progress on the frame margins of security video captured by The Mint’s new external camera system. Speculation on motive centers around a turf conflict between Market Street’s so-called sidewalk evangelists. Further details on Newsradio 840, top of the hour.’

          An offshore fog bank had moved in markedly during my personal storefront, accompanying winds rocking the Volvo, whistling through its weatherstrip-worn windows. A diversionary retune of the radio dial brought a hint of welcome developments, yet I still needed some air and a bit of distance between myself and this steamy rig. That I got, a frigid, full frontal blast that dried up my drippy cheeks the moment I opened the car door.

          Yet my skies must have been clearing some, for I could soon see most everything now, and everything was foggy gray. Relentless winds pushed me back as I edged toward a low, crumbling cliff. They braced me, helped crust the blood blot on my Colorado T-shirt, plugged the prick cold, at once settling and agitating me, like the sheets upon sheets of frothy, furiously white-capped sea. ‘The air’s so clean, it will just take your mind awayyy…’

          Yeah, fuckin’-A California dreamin’ Beach Boys—Dick Dale and the Deltones. Righteous waves, transporting, transcending you from your landlocked Midwestern ways, your longing for paroxysms of paradise, an endless, heavenly California of the mind—riding those waves, soaking up that west coast sunshine, not freezing in this cold-cocked, soupy, dreary squall…

          I looked for the fisherman, who by now had vanished, as if he’d never happened by—just another shuffling loner along miles of seaweedy, gray-brown shoreline between ghostly Sutro Heights and Pacifica. Among the scattered, frizzled wind-combers, bundled up couples tossed sticks to their wet Labs and Samoyeds in the tide, as acclimated to the steady coastal battering as the shifting dune grass and sandblasted apartment houses out here, up and down 48^th Avenue. Deep sighs drew in salt spray, the aroma of sodden kelp, and stench of beached sea life picked over by monster gulls—all mulled in a thick, penetrating mist like pictures of the Salton Sea.

          I turned back to the Volvo with water and ‘Surf’s Up ‘Til I Die’ on the brain—where to go, already sucked in the undertow, stuck with the goods in a leaky brown paper bag. You wanted it, you got it! I shook my fist defiantly at the reflection in my car window, down here on the ass end of San Francisco, rust-gutted clunkers along dull, nameless Outer Sunset streets, grim fog blankets over Twin Peaks and Mount Sutro. Somewhere, the sun was shining, everybody was blond and bronze. Christ, there were even tree-lined places with porch swings, though I could no longer remember how to get there from here.

          But amid one long, lost-cause pan along The City’s backside, a huge, lording crucifix atop Mt. Davidson caught my eye, bringing to mind mom and Brother Joe, who somehow penetrated my aching axons and dendrites.  Crawling back into the Volvo, I flipped on the end of another radio newscast, a glib, gossipy item about the latest celeb sighting out here at Ocean Beach, of all places: ‘A certain mayor known to get down to business in his Alpha-Romeo with a young thing named Maggie, addressing affirmative action, were they, all in the lines of duty?’

           Then came the Doppler prognosis: ‘Coastal fog with patchy low clouds extending inland nights and mornings, partial clearing in the afternoon’. Sounded familiar, too close for comfort, but inevitable, just the same. You got it, I buttoned up, blinked and swallowed, casting up and down the beach for a smoke-filled, hard-rocking Alpha-Romeo. So shake it off, asshole—let’s get it on here…lace ‘em up, naw gloves off…and this time,  get it right. But first things first, there’s a whole other bag to fill…

* (ED Note: Punctuation not precise.)

End of Stage Two.

(Prepare to Rendezvous
with S/R 1978, Stage Three.)

“Loss of worldlies and such,
leaving another life behind—
      nothing much in its place.” 
 

          “So let’s just drop it, why don’t we?”

          “Negative, you’re already on the hook.” 

          “But I’m right here…hey, wait a minute…”

          Wrong on two counts: I had assumed room 718’s door pounder was intent on clearing the Central YMCA Hotel in the face of proximate fire danger—namely, a three-alarmer sparked by some immigrant spit-roast gone ablaze, which I’d spotted on a shifty little late-night…breather. Come morning, S.F.F.D. mop-up crews actually located the source in another Krupp Arms unit, wherein several Civic Center squatters had short-circuited a space heater they’d found scrapped behind Brooks Hall. As for that hallway clarion, I found only a mimeographed notice taped to the door numerals—an invite to a benefit prayer breakfast at Peoples Temple, featuring a blessing phoned in by Rev. Jim Jones himself, directly from Jonestown. On that, I didn’t bite, nevertheless did grab a paper cup of gratis Y lobby coffee and a day-old cruller on the way out, having left my little personals box centered on top of 718’s metal writing desk, which was hardly larger than the bible it held.

          “You need to step back, fella…let the man do his job…”

          “No, look, the door there, it’s ajar!”

          “Whatdya expect? This ain’t valet parking here…”

          But prior to that sub-continental breakfast, I had made a haggard, baggy eyed diversion to the men’s room one story removed, straightening up as best I could, safely beyond the watchful stares of who and whatever might be going down in the head on floor seven, even this ungodly early in the day. All through a quick, bloody shave and brush, I pretty much had this latrine to myself, disused as it was with corroded mirrors and basins, with upended bays and stalls of cracked, piled porcelain and unsprung doors. None of my concern, however, since I was focusing on a more problematic picture: stuck here in the Tenderloin, retracing the tracks of my car. A few fruitless laps around Turk and Leavenworth, and I spun off to Hyde Street. There, under a clearing sun, I at long last spotted my Volvo, though not before others had done the very same.

          “Hold on, just let me check,” I slipped over to the car’s left rear door, taking pains to peer inside, if only because the whole rig was hanging at an acute angle. “Shit, somebody’s busted in!”

          The sagging sedan was caught between two flashing construction signs outside Wally Heider’s recording studio, from inside which it sounded as though Carlos Santana was loudly laying down something new. PG&E workmen standing impatiently nearby explained that the utility would be digging under this exact spot to install a new higher-capacity power line in its vault, and that, one way or another, the old Volvo had to go. My more immediate, internal concern, however, was what appeared to be already gone. 

          “So, what’s the damage,” asked a patrolman perched atop an S.F.P.D. three-wheeled motorcycle, while continuing to concentrate on his paperwork.

          “I don’t know, a gold pocket watch—my Uncle Early got it from my grandfather, inscribed and everything. Plus a cable knit sweater from Ireland, the leather jacket I got in Firenze, a whole backpack full of shirts and underwear, hard to tell what else yet,” I fretted, surveying the rear seat and floorboards. “How the hell did they get in here without breaking anything?!”

          “Probably slim-jimmed it,” said the officer, scribbling away without once looking up. He set his citation book atop the cycle’s fuel tank and whipped out his notepad. “Not pricey enough to smash and grab. Anything else?”

          “Slim what? Well, at least they didn’t get my cameras,” I reached around to find that the trunk lid had not been pried open too. “Got to have those, they’re about all I have left…”

          “Yeah, that’s life in the big city,” the cop jotted down the items. “We’ll get this into the system, run a make on the local fences, see what pops…”

          “How about detailed descriptions, how’re you gonna know from anything…” I craned my neck to follow the upward pitch of my car, seeing Syd and the squareback at Ocean Beach all over again as I glanced back at a powder blue tricycle. “We’re talking about my belongings here, my grand dad’s watch, for crissake. What kind of police services is that?!”

          “Look, if your stuff doesn’t surface in about an hour, don’t be keepin’ no vigils, ’cause it’s probably halfway to L.A. already,” snapped the officer, nodding to the PG&E crew, itching to fire up their pneumatic drills. “Nuthin’ much we can do about that.”

          “So, am I at least off the hook?” I watched with faint hope as a City Tow driver winched the Volvo all the way up on his boom and double-checked the bumper chains.

          “Out of my hands,” the cop said, exchanging his notebook for the citation book, ripping me out a fresh one. “You’re way over limit in a towaway zone, and already on the lift. Just like once I’ve started writing you up, there’s no turning back, no exceptions. Here you go…”

          “Oh, great,” I spouted, grabbing the parking ticket. The thought of a remedial offer, Chicago-style, greased my lobes—until I realized I couldn’t afford that, either. “C’mon, I’m new in town and just lost my ass, isn’t there anything we…”

          “Careful, son,” the patrolman stiffened, likely figuring I didn’t have enough scratch to make this all go away anyhow. “But you can plead your case in traffic court. And the nearest city garage is only a couple of blocks from here on Eddy. Walking distance—you can bail her out in about an hour or so. The tow will set you back about $45. But hustle on over and cover, storage goes $20-$30 a day…”

          “Please, officer—that’ll totally clean me out,” I spouted, springing my camera bag from the trunk, before waving the Volvo good-bye, with the Stratocaster riff lowly streaming from Heider’s storefront studio getting drowned out by air compressor-powered drills. “How am I supposed to…”

          “Still got your cameras, dontcha,” he kick started the Harley, snapping his helmet’s chinstrap. After packing the leather-bound books into his black motorcycle jacket pockets, he revved, as if to all-clear signal the pavement-cracking PG&E crew, then pulled away. “Could always hock those…”

 

          “Like the sign says, we make sure you get yours…”

          “So can you take it down a notch, I’ll do four bills…”

          “Sorry, sailor, this is Canon gear, top of the line, can’t go one thin dime under $650. Next…”

          Left in vehicular limbo and cloud of concrete dust by SFPD’s uplifting hospitality, I scrambled about the Tenderloin for anything resembling an out. Problem was, my mind was crossfiring in so many different directions. There was this visceral spinning of wheels around Turk, Jones and Eddy; I couldn’t stand darkening the Y Hotel’s doors again, at least in this bright light of day. On a clinical level, I resorted to rationalizing the degraded humanity at every corner, along each dismal, drug-infested block in between. These lost, wretched souls couldn’t help it, remember—being so socio-economically deprived. Society did it to them, right? Prejudice, learning disorders and curricula devaluation, impaired nature/nurture, negative reinforcement, cultural discrimination, protein deficiencies. But wait a damn minute, some of these suckers ripped me off big time, could have been any one of the screwy buzzards…

          By Turk and Taylor, the bummer druggy deviance, the falling down boozy babble—those poor Vietnamese kids obliviously playing on grimy, glass granulated sidewalks like T-loin streets were paved with golden paddies instead of needles and a urine shellac—all of it was wearing on me, more and more. Through some pinball line of reasoning, thoughts inexplicably turned to my ol’ man, in his Sunday flannel robe, still half slurry asleep after a Saturday night binge, hung over, groaning and belching from shots & beers and tavern chili con carne, from spouting off for hours about his ball-busting boss and back-breaking sale orders—red-eye bitching about morning-after bird noise, lawnmowers and mom’s freezing him out with her after-mass radio. One of his midnight pearls did stick with me however, now hanging as it was around my unshaven scrag like a flaming Nigerian necklace: Never get to where you’re at the mercy of a pawnshop.

          Crossing Market at Sixth Street, I dodged panhandlers and various ragged curveball pitchmen in my circular polemical deliberation. Get on with it, walk it off. Nowhere to park in this town anyway, but it’s California and the meter’s running, gotta pry loose your wheels. I held on tight to my camera bag amid all the preying eyes: all you’ve got left, dodo, like what about your big pipedreams about making it as a photographer? They’re your ticket, not the fare. But lotta good that would do you if you can’t get anywhere to worth shooting? No pawn shops, remember?! Gotta get outta here, numbskull, this is getting seriouser and seriouser… Still, I was beginning to feel the weight of the surplus army canvas bag on my slumping shoulder, passing Chinese luncheonettes with their steam trays of chow fun and pork buns behind steel-cage windows, onward past discount shoe stores with sidewalk racks of left foot-only oxfords and slip-ons to deter light-fingered locals. Then there were more loud, hi-tack electronics outlets—leading to where much of that equipment tended to end up sooner or later anyway.

          “Step up, friend, how can we help you today,” said Dez Drexel, proprietor, puffed up on a couple of seat cushions, framed like a currency exchange kiter in a rear store pay window. He was chewing at a six-inch cigarette holder FDR style, two rows of four video monitors behind him, so as to zero in on every grubby inch of the place. He pointed up to a sign above the slot. “As the sign says, we’ll right your plight.”

          “Uh, something in your front showcase there grabbed my attention,” I gestured in turn over my shoulder toward where the shore leave Navy swabbie, who’d dickered for that Canon camera, marched empty handed out the door. “The Railway Special pocket watch, next to the Benrus Gazelle. When exactly did you get that?”

          “The Hamilton? Been collecting dust goin’ on a month now, if a day. Why, wanna make that little baby yours?”

          “Depends, does it have an inscription or anything,” I asked, through some cotton morning mouth of my own, studiously rubbing my stubbly jaw as best I could.

           Already so ambivalent about venturing into The City’s prime tri-light strip, I’ d shied away from bars, liquor/groceries and a series of signs bearing the drop shadowed or neon rendering of that four-letter word, ‘Pawn’, let alone ‘broker’. I had just about resolved to abort this tout before taking one more step forward/backward when I spotted Golden Bay Collateral & Loan—most notably, a pocket watch in its front window display that looked suspiciously familiar, down to the gold-leaf numerals and hair-cracked facing. Sneaking a long peek like a Baptist minister by the dirty magazine stand, I could feel the felonious heat from there. That and the GBC&L’s euphemistic veneer were just enough to pull me in the door.

          “Not likely, we only deal in legit provenance here,” Drexel said, rising slightly in lumbago pain and mild indignation, blowing smoke through the grated window, as if taking stock, weighing my valuations. “So what else you got for me there?”

          “Yeah, well, I do have these, and find myself in a bit of a…pinch,” I sighed, hesitantly opening the bag to reveal my photo gear.

          “Hmm, interesting, be right with ya.” With that, he stepped out from behind his security window, quick totting a long glass display case filled with radios, stereos, mini tape recorders, watches, and assorted estate jewelry. On the Old Glory muralled wall behind him were guitars, amplifiers, brass instruments and firearms—.22 and .45 pistols to deer rifles and semi-automatics, to name a sampling of his rotating inventory. By the time he reached me, I had spread my equipment out on the countertop. “All Nikon are they?”

          “F and F2, plus bayonet mount Nikkor wide angle, telephoto and zoom,” I replied, with proudly matter-of-fact crispness. “They’re my bread and butter, so this would just be a short-term arrangement to tide me over…”

          “Not bad merch,” said the broker, lifting and aiming each body, silver then black, snapping the shutters, focusing in and out on the lenses with calculating vision. “But I’m swimming in cameras, can’t go one thin dime over $250 for the whole bag…no wiggle room, don’t even ask.”

          “What? That’s highway robbery,” I spouted, glancing up at that ‘Right Your Plight’ sign. “This is top-of-the-line equipment, like you said, and in perfect shape. I’ve had them since new, with the filters and everything. Besides, you’re asking $650 for that single Canon and two lenses…”

          “No, that’s free enterprise, the all-American way,” Drexel snapped, poised to turn back toward his pay window. “You won’t get any better on this street, and your gear is safer in Golden Bay. But it’s your choice, you’re talking to a busy man here….”

          “Hmph, more like free fall,” I carefully repacked my camera bag, as if sending off a natural born child to foster parents. But I was loath to groveling into any other of these pawn shops, at the same time picturing spiralling car storage bills, which left little wiggle room to…jew him up, as it were. “Let’s get this over with…”

          “Now, there’s a sensible man.” The pawnbroker continued on back to his cash cage. “Just stick your camera bag into one of our client file boxes there, and step back to my window.”

          By the time I’d glumly placed my bag into one of GBC&L’s plastic containers and shuffled over to the pay wall, Dez Drexel was peeling off five crumpled fifties, filling out his serial-numbered claim ticket. “Here, don’t lose this…and you’ve got 30 days to repay and redeem.”

          “Don’t worry,” I yanked the money and pawn slip out of his sliding transaction tray, noting another sign, to the right of the pay window, which read, ‘No Cash, No Carry. No Carry, No Cash’—looking to see if my father was standing, brooding over my shoulder. “I’ll be back long before then…”

          “Where’ve I heard that before,” chuckled Drexel, putting up a lunch sign in his window. “We’re just glad to right your plight today.”

          “You sure there’s no engraving on that pocket watch,” I glanced away toward the front window. Counting, cramming the cash in my wallet, I realized the only way I was going to inspect that casing was to buy the timepiece outright, as in when I returned for my cameras.

          “What’re you insinuating, smart guy…that I’m some kind of Rod Steiger shyster dealing in hot merchandise,” the broker spitting out his cigarette holder, flipping his off-gray toupee. “Go take a shave…we’ll see what you have to say in 30 days…”

          “Get ’em behind you…”

          “Waddn’t there, didn’t do it!”

          “Shaddup, chico, behind you, I said.”

          Clocks were running, time was fleeting, and my wheels within wheels weren’t turning fast enough to keep up. I sure as hell wasn’t keen on hanging along Sixth and Market Streets. Although I did windowshop the pawn storefronts a bit further for pocket watch sightings, spotting a fobbed Bulova or two, but nothing else even close. Any further toward Mission Street, and I risked sinking into more ground glass and reptilian discharges, if not succumbing outright to the fumes. So I turned up Jessie Street, one of those clogged mid-veins splitting the block between main downtown arteries.

          WWWWWWWWWWRRRR. Two-thirds of the way toward Fifth Street, several young Latinos pushed past me at full gallop, vaulting dumpsters, scattering sun-stroked winos like so many Union Square pigeons. A baby blue SFPD squadrol and two patrol cars had converged on Jessie, directly behind the historic U.S. Mint Museum, effectively sealing off the remainder of the block. Yet they were scarcely in time to shut the street down all the way to Sixth, thereby allowing the youths to flee halfway to their Mission District barrio before I could re-collect myself and feel for my little pocket wad. Save one kid, for an officer managed to bag the weaker, stockier of the Latino litter—who couldn’t keep pace with the pack. This burly cop blocked and tackled him behind the old ‘Granite Lady’ at Mint Street, two other uniforms now standing over them, service revolvers drawn and aimed.

          “Owwwch, didn’t do nuthin’, man…” He was just an overgrown kid in a black knit Raiders pullover and gray Ben Davis pants, riding real low.

          “Shadd it up, I’m tellin’ you, and get them hands behind your back,” shouted the patrolman, knee firmly between the shoulder blades of the prone Latino, snagging his pony tail and hairnet, wrestling to slap cuffs on the suspect, who was squirming and flailing like a crab before the cracking. “You have the right to remain silent…”

          “Yo, dis loco, got the wrong hombre, comprende!”

          “Comprende this, punk. Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law…” What likely set the cop off more than usual was the sucker punch the kid threw at him on the way down, where the officer drove his scruffy face into the pavement.

          “Everybody else keep moving,” shouted his partner, pistol still trained on the youth, while scanning about for any more evidence of his colors. “Nothing to see here…”

          The two patrol cars shot off, sirens and lights full tilt, in pursuit of the other bangers, whatever—not my business, it wasn’t going to get me my cameras back to capture all this anyhow. I edged away from a dumpster I’d just ducked behind in the case of gunfire. Headed for Fifth Street, over toward Market, maybe I’d shoot the breeze with Brother Joe on my way north of the slot. Last I looked, the two uniforms were lifting the pudge, twisting his arms back even further, spitting on him, kicking his low-hanging ass into their squadrol, his work pants dragging against the mucky pavement as he thrashed wildly to make a break for it.

          “Looks like another drug burn to me,” said badge number 836, talking shop to his partner as badge 657 thwapped the kid sharply across both knees with a nightstick, before delivering a vengeful right cross to the bridge of his nose—all more Chicago style black and blue than I cared to allow. “Must be fourth this week, already. Either that or it’s gang-making season again.”

          “Umph, get in there, scuzzball,” grunted a carrot-topped 836, losing his cap as he pushed the suspect into the rear of the squadrol, slamming its steel-barred door.

          “Not me, mon,” the Latino kid sobbed through the door windows, blood streaming from his apparently broken beak. “It was that other…”

          “Shaddup in there,” shouted 657, as the wagon’s radio blasted anew. SQUAWK, SQUAWK, “All available units, Fifth and Mission”…SQUAWK… “Homicide still in progress, over…” SQUELCH… “Ten-four, over…” SQUELCH. “Everybody back, that means you, buddy, best to move on…”

          “Who, me,” I pointed to my chest, frozen in place while the small crowd was disbanding like normal looky-loos. “Yah, sure…thank your for your co-peration.”

          WWWWWWWWWWRRRRRRrrrrrrrr. But that didn’t seem to be the end of it, incident-wise. More sirens, police radios reverberated off surrounding buildings, by way of Market Street, off Mission—converging between here and the intersection at Fifth—as though encircling the Mint amid some sort of misplaced coin caper or reserve note haul. I slipped past the landmark building’s 100 year-old sandstone sidewall. Those sirens continued wailing off a nearby Provident Loan Bank, the Chronicle tower rang one bell as I reached Fifth Street and somewhat a larger, buzzy milling of midday sidewalkers. Only this time, the shrillest alarm came from a red and white fire department ambulance.

          “Vicious animal,” one woman shouted at a shadow in motion. “Look at him, a person’s just not safe anymore!”

          “Back, folks,” a baton-ready cop ordered, splitting the crowd to clear a path. “Give us some room here, will you please…”

          “Good for the fuzz,” sneered a retiree who had doddered up next to me, decked out in orange and black, on his way to a Mission Street bus stop, running late for another slaughter at Candlestick Park, what with the dreaded Dodgers in town, even with Vida on the bump. He gestured toward the departing squadrol, large foam finger on hand. “Damn spic hoodlums…”

          “But they nearly killed that kid in the process,” I replied, turning away from Jessie Street to Old Mint’s front side, this crowd tightening in as the ambulance approached

          “So what? Look what he musta done to that coon there,” the Giants’ fan snorted, motioning to the circle gathering about MUNI’s bus stop.

          “Help him,” that same woman screamed, pulling down on her flowery, wide-brimmed sunbonnet like dear Auntie Mame.“Somebody get that ambulance here before he…

          “Everybody just make way, give him some air,” said another patrolman, having raced over across Mission from the Chronicle building, more fully widening the path.

          “What…coon,” I blurted, still so thoroughly caught up in the Jessie Street police scuffle that the incident before me went unseen. But to this crowd, whether lunchtime workers or seniors waiting to board buses for the Peninsula, another victim was the main event.

          “Coming through—nobody, nobody try to move him,” shouted two paramedics who had just leapt from their ambulance, roof lights still flashing, doors left wide open all around.

          “Back, I said,” the cop ordered, wielding his nightstick. “Who saw anything here?”

          “Saw what,” I asked a retired stevedore on my other side, just belching out of a Cathay Tea Garden lunch, who was craning for a better look. He simply pointed a bit down Fifth Street, roughly out front of the Mint’s classic Greek Revival portico. 

          The circle drew back like prodded Holsteins as those medics dropped an aluminum stretcher beside a different victim. From what  I could step up and stretch to see, he appeared to be an elderly black man—awash in bloodshed, soaking in his own juices like raw calf’s liver, which oozed out a heinous back wound through a blue-gray raincoat and…green burlap wraps. The victim lay there in a grave, flinching heap, with perhaps two dozen gasping bystanders on deathwatch, no one moving or saying a word.

          “Joe,” I shrieked in recognition, suddenly following a blood spot trail that led from Jessie Street to the Mint front, pushing forward until a nightstick was thrust my way. “Joe, Brother Joe!!!”

          “Stop, you hear me,” another blue uniform pressed the stick firmly into my gut. “Know him, know anything about this?”

          “Uh, no, just talked with him over by the Emporium sometimes,” I cried, holding impulsively against the polished SFPD baton.

          “So get back before I run you in,” badge 743 said, then shouted over me. “Again, who saw what happened here?” The crowd remained stony silent, save for an occasional kibitzing murmur among strangers.

          The paramedics carefully slid a thin fiberboard under the victim’s limp legs and bleeding trunk before wrapping him in blue ICU blankets, lifting him level onto their stretcher. Even from this distance, I could search Joe’s bloodshot, dripping eyes for any signs of hope. They were but mackerel eyes in a Bayview fish fry, and his pained cocoa face beaded with sweat. “All right, all right, make way,” shouted the lead paramedic, as the team rolled the gurney past us toward the ambulance and its loud squawking radio.

          “Joe, Joe, remember me,” I beseeched, the medics wheeling by, barely within earshot. “The other day, Chitown, right? Keep on fighting, champ, you’re gonna make it just fine…”

          “Bless that wunnerful name of Jesus, bless that…” Joe’s frail voice trailed off, his blind stare jolted and fully froze, blood drained through seized lips as though some old fishwife had just yanked the hook. His empty face scrunched like spoiled morning grapefruit into the stretcher pillow as they lifted him to the ambulance’s rear bed. The paramedics closed the doors behind him, one staying in the van, hooking him up to its emergency hoses and hardware, while the other began driving off toward SF General Hospital, albeit with siren and flashers turned down.

          “You, you know something,” I turned to the sun-bonneted woman who, along with many others, was scrambling to a MUNI motorcoach, which was now pulling into the bus stop well behind schedule. “I heard you…”

          “That true, Lady,” asked badge 743. “What you got?”

          “The hell I do, I saw nuthin,” she said, waddling away, scouring her purse for exact change and transfers.

          “I heard you, dammit,” I raged in her tracks, staring into her veering eyes. “You fingered him, called him an animal! Do what’s right, for godsakes…”

          “Did you or didn’t you, Lady,” the cop shouted her way.

          “Got not one thing, I swear,” she muttered, lowering her voice as she boarded the bus, dragging Macy’s and Liberty House shopping bags behind her. “Just end up getting sued or something over that. Let the Good Lord sort it out… ”

          Onlookers scattered—traffic, stalled buses loaded and pulled away. I was one of the last to leave, having pounded the side of that southbound coach at the woman in vain, then watching policemen process the crime scene: blood spatter to footprints or fingerprints to Joe’s last scrappings of life. His ‘Come Back To God’ sandwich sign lay tipped end over, fully closed; his leaflets were scattered about. I wanted to move the sign, to save it, to wear it as some sort of badge of dishonor. To where? His candlelit vigils, his full 21-gun salute, a commemorative museum for sidewalk saviors working that road to salvation, hell bent for higher ground?  San Francisco’s finest shooing me off, I followed the post-lunch traffic toward Market Street as the Chronicle tower clock struck two bells, if only to retrace the preacher’s sanctified steps, maybe give a silent eulogy at his hallowed ground by the Emporium flower stand. Instead, the first thing I spotted upon turning the corner onto Market was that Cowboy Christian, who had taken over Joe’s very sunny-side sweet spot, just beyond a gleaming blue and gold light standard festooned with Gay Pride banners and basketed bouquets.

          “You bastard,” I yelled at him, although keeping safe distance this side of the flower stand. He simply smiled my way, straightening his Stetson, then waving a bible in one hand, while slashing his index finger across his neck with the other, small plains twisters in his eyes. “You phony son-of-a-bitch!”

          Swear I could have killed the god-forsaken devil right then and there. I caught myself fixing to adrenaline rush him like some sort of holy steamroller, but that was about when I spotted a new billboard high over Hallidie Plaza across Market Street. The visual was some boasting, toasting Pancho Villa character in desperado garb and a bandolero. Its introductory campaign headline read, ‘Take It For Nerves Of Steal’, the cantina cursive logo being, Bandito Tequila.

Care for more?

Chapter 56. One sudden blow after another, going 
down for the count, fleeing to a sea of woe, which ends 
up in a pointed panic attack and foreign intervention…

“Getting sidetracked can 
take its toll, depending on 
how afar and steamy the stroll.” 

         “No cash, no bash—don’t be wastin’ my valuable time.”

“Think I’ll pass. But lotsa competition here, huh?”

          “What can I tell you? This is still a wide-open town, I don’t care what they’re sayin’…”

          I’d wandered off from Union Square with the outlines of a stratification study and keen impression that the women grew taller and tougher out here in California. Having vanquished the vermin, St. Francis socialites had repaired to St. Francis, the hotel, to toast their moral victory with tonic and bitters. Leaving behind the bench sunning office clerks, dickering, bickering drifters spread out all over grass and bordering grounds. I myself gravitated through Geary’s theater district, back downhill on Leavenworth in search of the basics, not least my car. I’d even grabbed a few loose luncheon canapés and varietal veggies on the way, but couldn’t shake the pigeons. That fingered food carried me over near the Hilton Hotel tower on O’Farrell Street, where I came across this lady of the early evening, and what she had to offer.  Which had recently been decriminalized by City Hall, until Mayor Moscone was forced to change his everlovin’ mind on that by the political pols and polls.

          “Yeah, way I read it, the gospel according to Margo St. James,” I said, dated Clarion and Chronicle under my arm, side eyeing her sheer peignoir up and down, soft and rounded for a low 30s figure. The unabashed red pasties and G-string under thigh-length gauze, her flaming red hair were no less incendiary. “I read somewhere about the police chief and that Hookers Ball deal last fall.”

          “It’s professional sex workers, honey, we have our pride…and Chief Gain does happen to be into our scene.”

          “Right, like regards that, I thought maybe we could talk about feminism, the whole women’s power phenomenon,” I looked away, clinically speaking—for all intents and purposes anecdotally, if not empirically adding to my socio database. “You know, from your perspective…”

          “Perspective? Move along, Opie, I’m conducting business here.”

           There I left this nigh twisted transaction, with a pounding head and sinking heart, walking through a dimmer intersecting tableau of Tenderloin grit—Leavenworth to Taylor, Ellis to Turk. For several hours of  skirting voices, seeking answers and resolution, I searched in vain for the Volvo in question. Mid-blocks, or on most every corner, stood lots of vinyl hot pants, circulation cut-offs and purple velour mini-skirts, harlots wearing navel-grazing necklines and knee-high platforms, stuck in preening, provocative poses like imperfect Barbie Dolls on a wildcat-idled assembly belt. The Tenderloin was either hookee heaven or hooker hell, one-stop johns from the Hilton and beyond, trolling for more supple supply on demand, critically grading on the curves, looking out for cops on the take for bookable misdemeanor mischief.

          In my case, it was still more or less decision time, but this Socratic method was running me in circles as I shot things up and down the flagpole. Streets slick with oily spittle put the skids on any quick, clean resolution, not to mention downhill traffic from DWI Gremlins to storming graveyard-route tour buses. And the contact high from lids of Mendocino primo being chaffered on every other corner made my already wambly thought process little sharper. I had walked the whole scenario around and through ’Loin sleaze for several sole crushing hours, fondling tighter and tighter the hanky around my modest pocket wad, before resigning to one more night at the Central Y. Was just booking a reservation, whether actually opting to use it or not—clinging to an in, hole carding an out—still regressing to the mean.

          “I’ll sue! I’ll sue, you bastaaad,” ranted a walking wounded Tenderfoot halfway through the crosswalk, waving his plastic grocery bag like the scales of justice at a non-stop turning Bay City cabbie who nearly took him out, before speeding away. “Writin’ down your number right now, yah your crackbrain jig is up, you…you…”

         “Damned no-account taxi hacks, can’t trust them,” I steadied his course.  Turk and Leavenworth, Leavenworth at Turk: I scanned its four corners with a fisheye sweep, placing the likes of that redhead and her swinging pasties at every turn, but spotting no less treacherous path through the intersection. Across Turk, the Crazy Eights Club dealt a loudspeaker blast of Parliaments and goldy moldy Motown, funky brothers strutting in and out of red glass tiled entrance, catching their Afro reflections off pitted stainless steel doors. Eights’ neon highball goblets cast a rose or gimlet green glow over the entire corner in alternating five-second pulsations, beacons to a shot and beer trio jaywalking across Leavenworth, numb to their peril. Along those lines, I wondered how I could get so brain-drained thirsty at a time and place like this.

          “I dare you to split on me!”

          “I just did, and I’d do it again,” shouted a tight white flared blade. Pompadour caving, Hawaiian print shirt flapping out louvered swinging doors, he paused and turned back, finger waving, toward a voice shrieking from inside a cater-cornered rawhide bar. “With you, it’s Harvey this, Harvey that—I mean, you’re really Milkin’ it, Donald. Well, I’ve got some good ideas too, you know…””

          “But don’t you understand, Timothy, he’s our messiah,” replied that voice from the darkness. “Didn’t you see him at the parade, making that brilliant speech with the Gay Men’s Chorus behind him? Come back here, I tell you, we can talk this out…”

          “Hmph, he was like a movie queen on the back of a convertible,” the outsider huffed, slump shouldering his way back into the bar. “And you know what can come of that!”

          Jacque’s Strap had no front windows, club owners having boarded them over with black plywood. Mandarin orange floodlights modestly illuminating an athletic supporter-shaped logo, the bar resembled that one house in the neighborhood that seldom if ever raised its shades. Still, the swung open doors revealed a dark, low-ceilinged barroom pelted with purple and yellow strobes, generally middle-aged buckaroos bent elbowed, back to the bar, saloon style, eyes on the dance floor, rubbing thigh to thigh.

          Rather looking askance, I hadn’t a clue what that scene was all about, wasn’t at all curious, sociologically or otherwise. So I instead clawed the wind-blown hair out of my face and trudged over the remaining Turk-Leavenworth crosswalk to a far corner liquor/grocery. Get off the street, asshole, before they think you’re one of them. But the Y’s any better? You’re zonked, for chrissake, gotta eat something. So get the room, one more night in that goddamn room—no matter where the night might take you…

          A huge neon sign glowed blue blazes above the Toledo Market, six stories of torn curtained bay windows and laundry-strewn fire escapes loomed dimly atop that. Crowding the market’s doorway, leaning heavily against its steel grilled windows, was a hive of Tenderloin brothers, buzzing about the storefront after cash and carrying their hourly transfusions.

          Menacing as they first looked, the bloods lent an air of vigilante stability to the intersection, seeing as how San Francisco’s finest rarely ventured out of their squadrols to aid the ’Loin’s dizzy stiffs. Hookers even used them for patrol boys, to stare down roughhouse pimps and chase down deadbeat tricks. After a rasher of skank eye, those nearest the doorway allowed me into the no-credit, no exception package pantry. The Toledo was a junkyard market, six cluttered aisles of SpaghettiOs and kippered snacks, with caselots of Campbell’s cans and a whole wall of chilled malt liquor and tawny port. But it was thickest with mirrors—a supermarket, Walmart warehouse of mirrors. 

          Two Syrian ex-pats behind the counter had rigged them so they could watch every dusty inch of the Toledo from every conceivable angle: head-ons of their pretzel rack, overheads of the dairy coolers, floor shots of the pain relievers/toiletries, ¾ frontals of the Spam, canned ham and single-serve corned beef hash. The proprietors monitored it all like Houston ground control, leaving the ebb and flow of local commerce gridlocked in mutual suspicion and contempt. Accordingly, I shuffled over to the beverage case, clutching my handkerchief, catching my image from every unflattering angle, pulling out a 16 oz. cola.

          “Plus just one of your sourdough rolls there,” I pointed to a countertop bread case as I approached the Syrians, making clunky conversation to ease the transactional friction. “Big dinner out tonight—spare no expense…”

          “One thirty-five…” No smile, no smirk, little or no service: The taller of Toledo’s proprietors rang me up, barely taking his eyes off the mirrors. Those junkies over by the snack racks didn’t stand a beggar’s chance. “Bag?”

          “Yeah, why not,” I fingered through my pocket wad, feeling the hot, alky-ashed breath of a wino or two over my shoulder. Unrolling two singles off the top, I grabbed a nickel mint and the too small paper bag, rushing toward Toledo’s door. “Much obliged, I’ll be sure to spread the word…”

          The Syrians had already sacked up a jug of T-Bird for the oenophile to my rear as I negotiated the store’s doorway, eye on a departing mirror image, mind on getting away clean. I squeezed between a trio of off-track handicappers and a street sister in tight red velour and black boleros who swayed with authority toward the brothers in arms, one of whom reached down to pick up a handkerchief wrapped roll. “Hey, man, dropped sumthin’ there…”

          “Uh, yeah,” I stopped dead in my tracks, as the Toledo regular handed me my wad with bloodshot, linebacker eyes. Couldn’t believe mine, for that matter: How I could let my measly bankroll squiggle so mindlessly from my damn pocket?  “Thanks, you don’t know…”

          “Good karma, bro,” he nodded coolly, as I relieved him of the wad. “Try dishin’ it back sometime.”

          Dusk setting in, I calculated that it was back to the Y Hotel or bust, having left a few minor items in 718, already being down to roughly $86 and change. Slipping past the desk clerk to the elevators proved whispery smooth going; the room door, no such breeze.

          “Keyholed, some jerk jammed up my lock,” I spouted to the usual, wide-brimmed night clerk downstairs, cleaving through a packed lobby with a smiley face notice that had been attached to 718’s door handle, reading ‘See the Desk’.

          “Not jammed, blocked,” smiled the Carlinesque clerk, continuing to stamp his ledger. “Checkout time came and you hadn’t renewed. We had no choice…”

          “B-b-but my stuff’s in there…” I stabbed at my pocket anew to secure my bill roll. “What, you thought I’d skipped town or…here, let me…”

          “A person who racks up a $50 phone call is capable of anything,” he caught my eye, as if to forestall any notion I had to begin pounding on the counter, pointing me toward a small office down the lobby hall. “But sorry, 718’s already booked for this evening, and your personals have been boxed up in lost and found. We have a full house as of now, but you’re welcome to hit the waitlist.”

          “Come on, I’ve got to have 718. I’ve grown really attached to 718 and everything, where the hel…” I blinked, creature of habit, signing on—then turning away downcast into a lobby that seemed more like a rubber room with soiled Depends. Few of the gathered were regular tenants; even fewer were regular at all.

          Hunched, slouched, slumped, coiled: it was as though the ceiling were a huge hydraulic wine press, stuffing them down to knee level, squeezing them dry of any reasonable, hopeful life, leaving the pulp for some renderer who never showed. Among the Central Y’s lobbyists were the bent, the broken, older than young men—but too many were still young enough to know better. Most were just marking time, making piddly-ass dope deals over half-chewed candy bars and re-smoked butts. But what was the Y to do about it, pack them off in a West Oakland shipping container? How bloody Christian was that?

          Click, click, click, ding. Click, click, click… I glanced over to one small corner of activity, however, a bank of relic IBM typewriters, steel bracketed to a walnut-panelled wall. Chained to the casehardened frames were one-each orange plastic chairs; chain-smoking in the far seat was an inordinately peculiar little man. He paused only to pump another quarter into a timer box, laundromat style, buying another 15 minutes of drifting margins, chipped characters and unexpected returns. The vintage electric machine hummed like an overloaded cement mixer and aborted at will; but this baggy brown suited dervish was not to be untracked. He looked like he’d been hunting, pecking at the workforce since Owl Drug was perched on Powell Street, and the States Restaurant across Hallidie Plaza offered dancing and a floor show.

          Tanked on vending machine coffee, he pounded out letter after letter, folding and stuffing them neatly into pre-addressed envelopes. His stubby fingers sometimes overran the keyboard, or a type ball would jam with the falling ashes of his gnashed cigarettes. I sidled up to him to relieve some ennui—an encounter, as it happened, fraught with indignation.

          “Job hunting, huh,” I asked, figuring him to be at least comparatively productive hereabouts. “What’s the good word?”

          “Back off,” the typist sent up a Taryton smoke signal of annoyance, cranking his manual return.

          “I hear ya,” I nodded, straining to read what appeared to be a bare bones resume. “Am up against the same…it’s a tough town job-wise.”

          “Get away from me, I’m warning you,” his cantaloupe head swiveled violently, ashes flying, eyes flaring behind bi-lined safety lenses, chomping his cigarette to within a silly millimeter of its fire. Just as he turned back to the keyboard, his time ran out. “Goddamn queer,” he popped in another quarter and pounded away. “You after that crap, go up to the seventh floor!”

          “A Mister Ken Herbert, to the front desk, please,” shouted the night clerk, over the lobby wide murmurs and IBM hum. “We’ve had a last-minute cancellation on your room.”

          When I finally returned to 718, personals box in hand, the room’s door was ajar, and two clean towels had been placed bedside with a sampler bar of Camay. Nothing had changed otherwise, save for the fresh scent of Lysol and layer of Tenderloin street dust. I closed the door and window, but couldn’t bring myself to flick on the room light, nor to shed my jacket or untie my boots. I was here, yet wasn’t here—return disengagement—it’d be another ten hours in limbo, then out to my getaway car. Yeah, I thought, washing the sourdough down with Cherry Coke, really set me up again, another night in this purgatory palace, half the place sizing you up for an end run. What a big-ass go for glory, for the California gold—probably end up next to that horn-rimmed melon head, pounding out resumes to nowhere at a quarter a throw…

          Against all impulses, I lifted the towels like they were asbestos laced and shuffled downhall to the head. Pushing through its louvered door, I heard shushes and scurrying not wholly unlike that of cellar rodents moments before the lights come on, except for two prima donnas too busy wet-comb preening at the sinks to notice more poorly groomed intruders. I skirted that fuss and frizzle, much less the showers, holding my breath enroute to the toilet room, almost wishing I’d relieved myself in 718’s little basin. All four rust pinkish metal stalls appeared to be occupied, the farthest only partway closed. I felt like a ‘Let’s Make A Deal’ contestant.  Then came the audience participation.

          “Ohhhhh…”

          “Hush, giggle face…”

          “Shhhh…”

          “Yah, hush up, bitch!”

          With banter like that, I opted for the half-opened door, figuring that whatever lay behind it was the lesser of four evils. Wrong. Someone had left his mark: two rolls of streamed wet bunwad and a jackpot of screaming trots amid rancid graffiti: graphic bestial positioning and odes to indiscreet rim jobs, replete with numbers and times. Hell on the appetite, but no match for my gaseous insides, so I took to peeking under the remaining stalls. Trouble was, all were evidently occupied, although none of the feet were facing front.

          Beneath door number three, a pair of scuffled cordovan Wee-Juns pointed wall ward, rocking back on worn heels periodically before toeing in tightly to the bowl. The lurches were timed ominously to harsh, rampant wretching, dry heaving that tortured the lavatory with diaphragm rage, needle sleeves scattered about. No relief there, little more hope behind door number two. Those shower clogs weren’t walking anytime soon. They just swung several inches off the floor, trousers drooped down over them to the belt, toes curling, the whole mess swaying to rifled pages and a crescendo of heavy breathing.

          “Stop it, ohhhh, stop!”

          That left door number one. I’d just about pegged the gasping to this nearest, yet darkest of stalls, approaching it with gut-thumping apprehension. Not entirely unfounded, as a shard of light revealed suede Pumas with their drawers down as well, sneakers spread firmly on the floor tiles.

          “Oh, you banshee!” Only there were these buffed Italian boots hot on the Pumas’ heels, crowding up behind, scuffling back and forth relentlessly, with barely a rumple at the cuff. For a moment, I fixed quizzically on the four play. “Ohhh, goddamn it, ohhhh!”

          It registered soon enough that this door, this whole 7^th floorshow was some grim little fairy tale. I blew out of the latrine, visions of that three-act Greek tragedy searing my sensibilities, sourdough and Scandia bakery swelling my bowels, vowing to curb squat rather than return therein. Tearrrrr: I tripped over a wear hole in the carpet runner, kicking beer bottles and Fresca cans down the hallway with a 7^th floor high-volume medley of everything from Engelbert Humperdinck to new Johnny Mathis to Donny & Marie burrowing into my ears, door to door. After hitting a somewhat tamer latrine one floor removed, I slammed into 718, soaked with sweat and a sense of relief I couldn’t really stomach. But at least the room was paid up until tomorrow noon. Thus I shut the window and chained the door, bouncing off walls that seemed even muddier as the sun went down, with a pick-to-click preview of the Village People’s ‘Y.M.C.A.’ now echoing through the hall.

          At least I didn’t squat curbside, like that little Asian man across the way, smoking in front of the highrise as though it were a thatched hut back in the Mekong Delta. What was with that building, anyway? I’d overheard one of the Y lobby slugs say it was owned by some Nazi weasel holed up in a Hitleresque bunker near Tierra del Fuego. That he slumlorded over property all around the Tenderloin—and that Wiesenthal headhunters were after him for war crimes, the entire Western Hemisphere for back taxes. Y’s nightclerk had called the place Krupp Arms—somebody had even spray-painted same across its front wall in swastika red, matching the signage of a self-storage warehouse next door. Above that rose thirteen floors of sliding door windowalls and curving iron-railed balconies, an appliance store wall of wide-screen tubes, each tuned to a different docudrama, only the color was a trifle too vivid, the reception all too crisp.

          There on four, third from the left, two headbanging mainliners played shooting gallery and Motley Crue, trying their shaky hands at rubber hoses and hypodermic hepatitis, searching for that one elusive uncollapsed vein. Up on nine, second from the right, a slinky, stripped bare queenie pranced in and out of his sliding doors to a Chaka Khan beat, probing hisself between slugs of Cold Duck, tempting fate against a hip-high railing, as though someone would actually coax him down.

          Ducks! Hanging raw and dripping by the neck, soaking into beige carpeting and rice sacks, trickling down into lower balconies—barefoot children dancing under rose-yellow paper lanterns. Four-generation families circling Bhudda-style idols in one-room efficiencies empty save for flickering black and white TVs.

          I started to pull off my jacket and shirt, then decided to sleep in everything but my boots. Slipping between coarse sheets, I killed the light: darkness, except for a window shade slit of reflected flames apparently engulfing a turning spit across the way—Seamus, where was Seamus?! Rolling over, I rationalized it had to be more of a porcine corpus, curling up to scratch myself to sleep when my spirits sank to a newfound Manilow, the sound of ‘Mandy’ from 716, seeping in through 718’s vented door.

          Still, the Mandy lament did get me to thinking. Right, it was all Her fault. Damn, why’d she even come around? Snotty bitch with her foreign ideas, drove a wedge right between me and happiness, nice trick. Yeah, where was she now—make your own decisions, my ass! Shut up that stupid radio over there!!  Scratching, clawing, kicking at the covers here in the darkness, everything was getting coming into focus now,yet fading to black…Her timing was so obvious, how deep did the whole scam go? Sure, first step, get the whitebread chump out of the way. Her brother Lester bleeds his heart that he couldn’t live without Moon, but she was with this jerk in Colorado now. Not to worry, she says, I’ll take care of everything, that’s what sisters are for. So she gets poor, naïve Melissa to toss us together, then waylays me in no-man’s land. Then she nudges Moon to get us back to Chicago, well within her brother’s reaches, get her whole family on the case. Meantime, she’s yanking my chain to come out here again, leaving Moon vulnerable as an Idaho doe. I take the bait, and she stiffs me DOA, hightailing it back to Chicago to seal the deal, getting Melissa back in the Mandel fold, stranding me here in San Fransylum, panning for fool’s gold. Clear as cut crystal…nooo—this was way too sick and crazy for words…

          The mere, demented thought of it all petrified me like that haply roasting dog, right up to my own innards—cramps punching, gas once more swelling my bowels. Ears belfry ringing, my head roaring its reactive outrage by torqueing at the temples and brows. Suddenly, I was swimming in my clothes, with no calming beachhead in sight. Christ, what if Moon knew, was in on it all along? If she just couldn’t bring herself to make the clean break on her own? Now, she’s free and clear, no matter what she said, is probably back with him right this minute. Right, no wonder she could hang up the phone so easily. That Herbert, what a pushover, what a pathetic sap. As if you didn’t let it happen, as if you didn’t make it happen, Saturn and you…

          Man alive, I caught myself digging into the metal headboard, scratching nails over and over into deep, roughened grooves with rodents’ persistence—bucking and kicking to their squeaky, pestilent tune. So everybody got theirs, and you really got yours, sucker—good and long gone—stop it, stop it!!! I sprang forward, punched the wall, tearing at sweaty, crusty clothes and bedding. My head clamped further, steaming like the top pot of a double boiler. This pressure drove me out of the squeaky single bed altogether, over to 718’s small sink and mirror. I flipped on its dim shaving bulb, cowering in the sudden light, face a twisted fist of splotches and popping veins, eyes draggin’ bags. My hair was pressed flat and stringy, though I’d sworn it had fallen out all over the pillow.

          I pounded at the mirror in panic, stress cracking it across its gun metal frame. No, Moon would have no part of something like that, no way! Gotta call her, she’ll tell me, set me straight…she’ll cool it all out in a minute…

          Darting over to the wall phone, I screamed into the receiver to Central Y’s lobby. “Hurry, this is 718, I must place an urgent, person-to-person call to…”

          “Sorry, Mister Herbert,” the night clerk replied, “but I’ve been instructed to place no more long-distance calls for you, especially at this time of night.”

          “But I can’t wait until morning, please, I…”

          “Just following orders. Under the circumstances, I’m sure you can understand.”

          “Understand…bullshit!” I hammered the phone repeatedly against its receiver. Desperate rage burst in me like a bladder of ulcerous bile. I could feel my eyes swell and spin in their sockets, red and filmy, so that everything fuzzed over, shrinking and expanding to a constant cerebral throb. I kicked at a nearby writing desk, its chair, ripping at my clothes, then buttoning and belting back up again. Had to be, she must have rigged that, or Moon herself. Yeah, called the desk and told them not to let me call—oh, it’s so fucking obvious! They’re laughing at how that would make me crack, that’ll teach the asshole to dick around. There, was that a rat?! Damn desk clerk must have slipped it in, gray and slimy, squealing through rotten teeth and those stringy goddamn tails! I frantically pulled away at 718’s sheets and blankets, overturned the mattress in vain, cutting my finger on a spring hook, then sucking at the wound.

          Man overboard…I wrapped my right hand in a pillowcase, unable to raise the window shade. Suddenly, I buckled, collapsed in the corner with my jacket about my legs. About then, another round of shrill, Gestapo-like sirens quickened down Golden Gate Avenue, converging outside the Krupp Arms—this time, two S.F.F.D. engines apparently pulling up from their nearby station. For all I knew, it might have been a meaty spit fire jumping balconies.

          What in blazes, I sobbed, was I doing here again? Mom, help me please, get me outta here, make these rats go away. They’re bearing down on me, they’re gnawing at Seamus, he’s roasting on a turnspit! Then my forehead wrenched tighter, a bitter smile twisted my face as the red emergency flashers penetrated the pitch-dark room. But wait, she’s gone too, she was in on it with dad, I know. Them telling me Moon wasn’t good enough, too plain, splitting right on cue. Bet they’re all kicking back on their lazy front porch, spooning homemade ice cream under a full moon and breezy, shady maple trees. The gals all swinging away, laughing at you—Saturn orbiting out here in alien nation, livin’ it down at the hotel California, getting just what you deserve. Probably even Cassie joined in, long waiting to take her shot, and that redhead with the spinning tassels, too. Big joke, gotta hand it to ’em—they got all the marbles and you’re left holding the sack. They get real living and you just get life. Everybody’s got everybody, everything is everything is nothing at all…

          And you’re here in the isolation ward, a man’s world gone totally mad, so goddamn alone…go ahead, tell me that’s so divorced from reality, chump. No, don’t want to go on doin’ this all alone…where the bloody hell did I leave my car already…gotta get on up there and settle the score. But before hand, someone just kiss me and stop me from shaking…

          Instead, there came this pounding on the door…

Care for more?

Chapter 55. On the hook with 
abandon, friends at a premium: 
events take a fatal turn, driving a body to 
desperation, and an edgy reckoning or two…

“Whoa, who figured this,
more than one had bargained for—
step back, boy, reel it all on in.”

           “Then we have a nice Prinsess Tarta…”

           “No thanks, had my fill of tart princesses for a while…”

           “Napoleon Bakelse, it is good…marzariners for you?”

           “Uh, little too rich for my tastes…I’ll go with the whatchacallit…Kanelbulle? One of the smaller ones…”

           The whole ecumenical Hallidie Plaza sideshow had nipped from every angle to agitate and annoy me with the cumulative trepanning of a bayou infestation. Meanwhile Market’s boarded up storefronts beyond Fifth Street were degeneratively beyond the pale. So I looked to a banjo picker and some cable car tourists for reason, sound direction, a trail marker or touchstone, resigned to following a full-on, bell-happy Hyde Line trolley up Powell Street in search of whatever downtown reprieve might be had.

          My eyes dropped to the pigeon crusted bricktop sidewalk as onshore gusts turned building-hemmed Powell into a three-block dust-blown canyon. Gazing down to about knee level, I caught the dead hungry stares of a disarmingly nuclear family: mom and pop in their early 30s, one each son and daughter. Only this unit seemed trip wired with fatigue and fearful frustration. Their small scribbled sign read ‘We have no food, no home. Please help us if you can’. Some did in passing, but I admittedly glanced away from the tightly clustered family against all my sociological impulses by hitting a little too close to home for study…or personal comfort.

          Instead, I focused on the major label shoppers, skateboarding punks snorting sliced pizza, bewildered tourists Kodaking each other on idle cable cars, or leering into souvenir cluttered store windows—unable to avoid the winos finger-fucking Ma Bell’s pay phones for lunch money. Yogurt and cookie shops, two-buck fifty steak houses, a mini Hong Kong bazaar of tee-shirt, crud jewelry and camera boutiques: All told, the uphill slog across Ellis Street sapped me of resolve. Which was why the cool, white-tiled Kryler Commercial Building seemed so cleanly inviting, so quiet and unassumingly dignified in a foreign, Hepburn, postwar sort of way. Two blue awninged storefronts up from its open-mezzanined lobby was Scandia Bakery.

          Scandinavian, all right—the bright, humming place was set in four tidy rows, with two-seat place tables the length of its blond paneled walls. Sun bleached photos of Oslo and Goteborg skylines and secluded fjords covered the salmon trimmed sidewalls, each blow-up framed with blue and yellow bunting. Customers looped around past long glass display counters shelved with Ostkaka, klappgrot, tall spettekaka and layered apricot ganache, not to mention all those fruity, frostinged punschrulle. I covered the kanelbulle roll with the friendlier of two full-bodied blond counterettes, who then winked me over toward a six-pot, self-serve coffee bar.

           Scandia’s regular trade had long settled in with a smordegspaj of petites fours and a coffee cup, proceeding to fire up for free refills until natural selection forced them to remove and relieve themselves. Miraculously, nature called at a two-seater midway along the far wall; I aced out a Champagne velour medicine ball of a dowager about four-foot-eight. She was incensed at my rudeness, swinging her fox stole around her shoulders like a bullwhip, cheeks florid as Scandia’s cherry tarts. I ruefully watched her huff away, trying to figure out why she looked so familiar underneath that daffodil detailed millinery. Sure as chandelier earrings, she might well have been Dame Thornia’s spiritual sister.  Damn Thornia, she’s the one who started all this Saturn shit, could just about kill her for that about now. 

          I soon caught myself spooning deep grooves into a white china coffee cup, picking at my cinnamon roll, careful not to meet any leering, disparaging eyes. But then everybody resumed their preoccupation with refills and cardamom. Table upon table gyred with the countervailing centrifugal force of stir-crazy sippers and their glucosed stares. Some patrons sat Stockholm straight, others slouched like louche Parisian boulevardiers. Up and down these bakery rows, the frail and foreign munched and dunked wienerbrod the afternoon away: crusty old San Francisco moneypennies, Norlander glumwarts unfolding and refolding their tourist maps, German fraus exchanging Deutschemarks and pfennigs. The place was a Pan Am terminal during Holy Week.

          Other, tipsy wigged Indo-Europeans clawed flaky havrekaka, dipping into black de-caf, Saks and Macy’s shopping bags tucked neatly underfoot. Back further toward the display cases, spindly Argentine and Venezuelan couples soundly debated the merits of Allende and Peron, not to be outdone by the jabbering old Brooklyn Jews glorifying Golda while bad-rapping Menachem Begin. Bereted Adolphe Menjues with clip-on shades slumped at corner tables, drawing off lavender cigarettes, lofting smoke into Scandia’s stratospheric twenty-foot ceiling. No Norwegians, no Swedes, Fins nor Danes, however—only those two full-bodied, blue-smocked counter waitresses who served up the sugar and kept the lid on any arthritic spillage or refill aggression. Got so I was beginning to feel like I was back on the Hauptstrasse in Heidelberg…

          “The mayor wanting more taxes, payroll yet. Can you believe this clown?”

          “Probably figures to siphon it off to his City Hall cronies…”

          “Or to his little girlfriends, maybe to bankroll more Gay Freedom Parades…”

          “How he got White to buy in, I don’t know,” said the nearer of two old-line San Franciscans, sharing friable drommars the next table over. The starchy, gingham-vested gentlemen looked to be Cable Car Clothiers, circa 1947, this chap of the David Niven variety. “Must be that Sutro Tower frying his brain.”

          “Just wait until downtown interests get Danny Boy to back off on the business tax,” sneered the other, more tweedy Raymond Massey style, gray Alpine hat atop his bird’s nest. They must have been corporate retirees out for their ritualistic afternoon tea. “He’s got to pay off his campaign debt somehow…something, or someone’s got to give…”

          “Well, Prop. 13 will table Moscone’s whole crooked agenda.” His compatriot chuckled right properly, raising his napkin to clear frosted crumbs from his pencil moustache. “You can bet your George Christopher’s medal on that…”

          Scandia’s front windows were immense, constituting the bakery shop’s entire façade, a floor-to-ceiling streetscape on the compellingly odder world immediately crowding Powell, not least those waves of Japanese tourists. Thus grand strategies were conceived and brilliantly executed in the pursuit of a half-dozen forward tables.  Stake out, strike, solidify positions with folded newsprint or pocketbook, and fight to submission anyone who might claim jump whilst a body waited in the serving line—not unlike in snowy Chicago Lawn.

          From where I sat, such flaring territorial skirmishes and the scene outside were more than enough to take my mind off issues at hand. Fat, ill-shapen continentals shouldering Lufthansa and Royal Dutch satchels paraded up and down Powell Street, sucking Orange Julius by the plastic litre. Goateed Hindus and Pakistanis in maroon topees and purple turbans bowed to and sidestepped poor, crippled wretches shaking coin tins, haughty L.A. gays swiveled pink and puff-chested toward Sutter Street salons.

          Dykes in battle fatigues and Central Valley boys in Lavelle and LeMaster Giants jerseys marched entirely the other way. Darkly staring art students lugged poster-size portfolio cases, carefully avoiding the crew-cut hustlers and rustlers who bobbed and nodded outside Walgreen’s across Powell, trying to maintain a grip on their Marlboros and muscatel. Pumping and flexing in upstairs gym windows above them were muscle men of every persuasion. It all was set to a sound track of clanking Scandia dishware and clanging trolley bells.

          But before long, the caffeine and cable cars were my undoing. The latter creaked left and right past this larger-than-life window screen, rocking with tourists who fawned, gushed all over the green, red and yellow trolleys, hanging like zoo baboons from side grips fore and aft, more wild-eyed and waving than high schoolers in a homecoming parade. The riders were all such hayseeds, so out-of-town, so unabashedly Middle America. No, that wasn’t me anymore, this isn’t me…I didn’t belong there, don’t belong here like this for that matter… 

         A glacial chill spread over me, as I nervously gulped down my remaining kanelbulle and coffee. I’d just about had my fill of Scandia’s alder fik bitar as it was, Abba’s slower numbers now piping down from its raspy ceiling hung speakers. I jumped up, head ringing louder than the blue/gold cable cars, legs mushier than Palm Garden’s corned beef hash. I knee jerked my table, tipped a quarter cup of coffee into and over the saucer, in the process splashing some nearby regulars square, as others gasped and gnashed and downed their refills at this scandalicious little faux pas—messier than the spillover at Pearl Street’s McKyle’s.

          “For shame,” screamed the he-man of a fastidious duo who had been pawing over raspberry Napoleans at a neighboring table, dabbing his brow and slicked down hairline with a monogrammed violet hanky. “What are you, some kind of crazy pervert?!”

          “Pervert?!” I dodged a lemon rind his utterly disgusted she-man winged my way. “Don’t look at me, et vous…”

         With that, I beat a retreat out onto Powell Street. Yep, blow this Scandi scene before I stir any more Kaffe uproar, merge with the sidewalk flow. But pervert? Maybe maybe that’s what it takes to bail out on your life, shoot out here like a misspent mortar round, with nothing on the horizon but low coastal fog…no way dammit…stop it, now. 

          “Pork sausage and pineapple?”  She hit me up the moment I stepped out Scandia Bakery’s sweet shadow, a young woman in turquoise hat, leopard coat, red disco boots and strapped on rollerskates, balancing a tray of chopped-up pizza slices like a car hop at Mel’s Drive-In—a come-on from the takeout pizza place up the block.

          “Sure, why not…” No reason not to ease up, take her up on the offer, grabbing two small squares before she could wheel away. Price was right—not exactly comfort food, but it did lighten my outlook a notch.

          I stepped more lively up Powell Street now, to the whirring clack and clatter of trolley cables and pulleys, fighting off phantom flashbacks of what lay ahead up on the Hyde line—or at least what I remembered from the last time along the Jackson Street turn. I pushed across Ellis nearly 15 seconds into a ‘Don’t Walk’ flasher. This death wish drew bellicose beeps from a tour bus and two taxis, Yellow and Veteran’s Cabs. But hey, from the north corner of Ellis I could see legendary John’s Grill—Bogey and Lorre still chasing after the Maltese Falcon down the Greenstreet. Back down toward Eddy and Market Streets was a standing block load of disengaged cable cars just waiting to climb halfway to the stars.

          So, suck it up, soak it in, right? This isn’t Chi, this is Cali. It isn’t the Tenderloin, this is The City’s classic downtown. You’ve a little walking around change, you’re not a bum, you’re an alum, a social scientist, not some social deviant—act like it, already… 

          There you go, take a breath, and a good, hard look at those crazy old cable cars. Sure, the ringing, abrading little buggers once gripped and rode braided wire all over The City. By the late 1800s, San Franciscans could cable from Rincon up and down fabled hills clear out to Potrero and Golden Gate Park. By now, all that remained of Andrew Hallidie’s crosstown vision were these touristy Hyde and Powell lines, plus the longer, more locally packed trolleys plying California Street.

          At the moment, a constant hum of half-empty cars surround sound mixed with the beat of electronic store loudspeakers and honking of buses and deliver trucks. Traditional Powell Street storefronts once home to prime grottos and haberdashers presently reeked of Seiko watches, Hitachi tape recorders and Casio calculators. Boisterous slickos reeled in tourists from behind glass showcases; scarcely more cordial snippers beckoned from curbside flower stands. Yeah, cultural imposition, all right—rank differentiation applied: I paused at O’ Farrell to picture the tailors, jewelers and seamstresses who probably filled the stately, chalk white Elevated Shops Building, tuning out a newshawk over at Marquard’s Little Cigar Store stand who was loudly pitching an afternoon Clarion headline reading, ‘Patty Hearst’s Wedding Plans’, read all about it!  Then ‘What’s Going On In Lafayette Park?’, below the fold. But none of it was my concern about then, no time for reading into that…better to think like nothing the hell ever happened up there.

          Instead, I focused on the ground floor display windows of a mezzanine holdover named Minalli’s Beauty College. The accompanying Theresa Brewer and Rosemary Clooney tunes nearly carried me into an aged Hotel Stratford midway up the next block, then the comparatively gleaming white Villa Florence across Powell, my helium head swiveling at the serried contrasts, getting dizzy with concentric-zone theory, propelled on up to Geary Street—to where I nearly got clipped at the corner by a blaring, fuming 38-Limited MUNI motor coach.

          “Watch it, pally, you’ll be shittin’ bus tokens if’n you don’t watch out,” cracked a churlish little rogue squatted in a nearby emergency exit way down Geary, wrapped with his rat dog in a tattered tartan plaid.

          “Yeah, well, thanks—appreciate your…concern,” I said, startled out of a hypothetical haze. “Lost it there for a second, sorta slipping my mind…”

         “Tell me about it…but it’ll cost you an honest Abe. Gotta gimp,  cap’n, see?” He lifted his tartan to show his shriveled left leg, his napping salt and pepper terrier landing on all fours. “Dance for the man, Scotty, do him your jig.” With that, he whipped a harmonica out of his parka pocket and played a rough ‘Bonny, My Bonny’.

          Priced out, begging off with a quarter, I was more than irritated by his his haunting resemblance to Uncle Early, at least as I remembered from our family scrapbook. So I turned down Geary, passing a retail block scented with perfume, cologne and shoe leather, fuming Scotty?! That’s not my clan tartan, not my goddamn kilt…yer aff yer damn heid there, mate… Each glossy Macy’s and I. Magnin window displayed the stunning to outrageously chic fashions of Razik, Romeo Pomposite, Givenchy and any other design demigod who’d landed by way of the runways of Paris and Milan. But blowing in as well was a feral catwalk aroma likely foreign to the Champs-Élysées. Called street people these days, they’d appropriated doorway after un-trafficked doorway and nearly every spare inch of sidewalk, shaking down passersby at punchy intervals, making Geary more a raree midway than boulevard. It further set my mind adrift in a choppy seas…

           “Smile, friend.” Before I could fully recoil, this cross between a steam pumper fireman and interurban train conductor snapped my photo with a wooden box camera mounted on a single brass-trimmed leg. “Print goes in tonight’s mail. That’ll be two dollars fifty.”

          “No thanks, chief,” I moved on along, toward I Magnin’s Halston store displays. “I take photos my own self.”

          “C’mon, send it to your girl, your loving mother…” The grand popparazzi fixed to address a small corrugated mailer.

          “Christ, are you hitting up the wrong rube,” I huffed, as he followed me in step.

          “Too late, son, shot’s all ready to go in the soup…I’ll even make it a sepia for you…”

          “Don’t bother, she’d just return it to sender…and don’t be bringing my mom into this.” I tore past two Macy’s bag-laden shopping molls, almost tripping over a cigar-chomping, double amputee Kaesong vet selling Bic fine-points from a four-wheel furniture dolly. But that music…just beyond Magnin’s, a medleying from ‘Nature Boy’ to ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ grabbed me as I approached.

          “Say, better tie up that bootlace of yours, sport.” What made this next guy so remarkable was his perfectly tuned ear. He seemed to hear every sound, every note and nuance of his music and everything else around him—including my flapping leather lace.

          “Yeah, sure, thanks,” I propped my leg up on a hydrant, bow tying as he sang, ‘By the time I make Albuquerque…’ “How’d you…” But I stifled any pity patter about the toy piano man’s blindness.

          Lime green was his leisure suit, sweat damp and wrinkled, but hardly as soaked as his salmon shirt and orange-knotted necktie. He sat playing the toy baby grand on a duet of wooden milk cases, facing a tropical beachwear window display. He reveled in his music like Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder, but sang like Nat King Cole, sunlight star crossing his reflective eyeshades and the massive rings on every finger. He told that passing crowd between verses that he been tinkling the miniature keys since he was five, but sounded like he’d been playing it right out of the womb. The melodies he coaxed out of that little spinet were bone chilling in their power and range. How he could still stab that cramped keyboard with his gnarled fingers was a mystery to me, as was how he had venued on this busy streetcorner. Still, he couldn’t have sounded fuller had it been a concert Steinway Pianoforte.

          I was no less taken, yet could swear that honeyman was, in his own virtuoso way, counting the house shoe by shoes. I caught my ragged, swaying image in the store window, a reflection of my looking-glass self, taking stock of the block-long sideshow, segmenting the demography, stratifying the class distinctions, when that hellish voice barged back in: Freaks, all just goddamn bums and freaks. They’ve got nobody, you’ve got nobody. They’ve got no place, you’ve got no place. They’ve no job, you’ve got no job. But at least they’ve got grounds…

          “Aww, excuse me,” I said, almost stumbling over a woman next to me as I turned to move along for uncertain relief.

          “No, pardon me, I shouldn’t have snuck up on you like that,” she smiled, middle-aged platinum, quietly elegant in virgin wool, packing two red on black designer bags out of I Magnin’s corner marble palace.

          “Hope I didn’t damage anything,” I squirmed, having virtually spin blocked her into a motorized quadriplegic who played master level chess with the rubber-tipped pointer strapped to his forehead. “Help you with those?”

          “Oh, I think not,” she straightened her seams and pill box hat, gracious to a fault, the very picture of Mrs. San Francisco, down to her impeccable Pacific Heights posture and veneer. “But thank you for your concern—Prentiss is the name, Dianne to you…”

          “Well, I really appreciate that…maam.” The entire encounter smacked of Tipi Hedren’s entree in ‘The Birds’. “Mine’s Ken Herbert, quite a scene here, huh?” 

          “We make our way through it as best we can these days,” she sighed, with a wistful glance across Stockton Street at what remained of that grande dame of fashionable San Francisco dry goods. On its last silken legs, the City of Paris was creaking with downscale disrepair, from its iconic Eiffel Tower rooftop prow down through its stained-glass domed rotunda. “Gone from Liberty House to perhaps Neiman Marcus Texans, of all things. We can only hope that Beaux Arts masterpiece over there will sail through landmark status. Mother took me to marvel at their magnificent tree every Christmas of my childhood. It is why I dabble in a little retail myself to this day.”

          “You do?” I escorted the lady across Geary Street at the flashing walk sign, stiff arming a honking cabbie right turning off Stockton as if a professional courtesy. “Sure I can’t help you carry those bags?”

          “I’m fine, thank you, can use the exercise. And yes, I happen to own ‘My Sisters’ Keepers’—a lovely little antiques gallery/gift shop up there on Sutter Street,” she pointed ahead with white gloved hand, the smaller of her two bags waving in the open breeze. “Which I must return to directly before my associate suffers an acute panic attack. Nice meeting you though, Mister Herbert. You must stop by the store sometime. It’s quite… edifying…”

          “Oh, edifying, for sure, Mrs. Prentiss,” I nodded. “I’ll certainly keep than in mind…”

          “Until then, good day to you Ken, ” she strode fluidly up Stockton, shoulders straight and finished, bags in perfect balance.

          There I froze, as if just landing a luminary autograph, not knowing what to make of it, only that she was some somebody, deigning to a nowhere nobody like myself. But what stopped me even more were the two clown-striped characters soundlessly flitting about, toying with shoppers and strollers up and down a sweeping stairway off to my left. Guy and gal mimes they were, young and masterful, so confident and playfully polished. Though Shields and Yarnell might have been working the corners now, they were likely only street workshopping new material between network TV shows in L.A. on far larger stages. Whereas this demonstrative duo had already doffed tux jackets and tails by the time I’d decided to climb those sweeping concrete steps to the main terrace, robotically gesturing me to waltz along upstairs, so as to take in this open-air urban pause free and clear, in a sugar/caffeine glaze.

          Depending on the perspective, Union Square was a lush civic glory to behold, or a tantalizing parcel of commercial real estate going to waste, or a decaying molar amid a shiny gold retail crown. Reputably named for pro-Union rallies on the brink of the Civil War, this precious block of downtown real estate was now center masted by a hugely rising, phallic, composite capitaled column honoring Commodore Dewey’s triumph at Manila Bay. The square actually comprised slightly rising rectangles of manicured turf and paved esplanades, stretching over The City’s first underground parking garage.

          I drew in the resulting fragrance of flora and carbon emissions, before walking between a foursome of fully symmetrical palm trees, epaulets on this monumental parade ground. Sunny Union Square was 360-degree framed with San Francisco’s top-drawer cosmopolitan contenders: Saks Fifth Avenue, Tiffany, Bally’s joining the Macy’s-Magnin power grid. Giant billboards topped these bordering, largely classical-style buildings, colorful advertisements for TWA, BOAC, Pan Am, Qantas and Philippines Airlines that beckoned upwardly mobile shoppers to exotic reaches the world over. From here, I goggloed, a body could go anywhere. 

         Choice enough spot to sit about, kind of sort everything out, have a little  inverse Conversation, minus the mic and taping. Either-or, forward-back: either come to grips with this mess, or leave all that heavy lifting behind. Could do the decent thing and go back to Moon, or the sicko, selfish thing and try reeling Syd in here again. Hell, I could fly back to get gored again at the Gastof zum Red Ox, or sail ahead to Lahaina on the ghostly Mariposa or Monterey. Yeah, lotsa choices, good and hard choices, but choicer ones than the ones back there before. Still, I got to moving again, as this quasi-Saturnian conversation began getting buggy, statically short-circuited, like somebody in charge was all ears all over again.

          Union Square came that quickly upon me, the lovers, lollers and laggards, activists pushing recall petitions, apocalyptic flyers, marijuana initiatives and nickels of sensimilla and Peruvian red. Every cautious step seemed to clear a path like an Arctic icebreaker, splitting shoals of pigeons and their droppings: black pigeons, gray pigeons, mutant white pigeons with spaniel-like brown spots thriving on the fumes and whatever else might seep through to them. Guhwroog, guhwroog, guhwroog…

           Yet further along, my shuttle train of thought was derailed altogether by Union Square’s rockier rights of way. Behind trim, trapezoidal hedges congealed a layer of shifty human ballast—lethargic, half-bagged lowlife along park benches, under shrubbery, all rolled up in newspapers or filthy blankets, spent enough to squeeze the last drop of a stone dry Lucky Lager can, The more agitated trolled flowerbeds of crocus, narcissus and impatiens for toke, smoke and chuggables, which inevitably led some aggressive street lifers to that low-fenced lawn social over near the Square’s Post and Powell corner. Colorfully beautiful as this all was at first glance, imposing as was the massive, regal corniced St. Francis Hotel straight ahead, a few steps further led to its seamier seams.

          “Clink, clink…Ladies, may we convene the 74^th Yerba Buena Charitable Tea, hear, hear,” gavelled Madame Chairman of the St. Francis Society, with ladle taps against a cut-crystal punchbowl.

          Moments earlier, matrons from Ross to Hillsborough, dowdy debs from Presidio Heights, honored Sisters of the Sierra, Daughters of the Gold Rush and Barbary Coast had emerged arm in arm from the Carnelian Room, filing down the St. Francis Hotel’s canopied marble foyer. They passed undauntedly near where a pistol-packing Sara Jane Moore tried to take out an inflation-whipped Gerry Ford in ’75 (and would have if she could have shot any straighter). Nonetheless, it amounted to a right proper parade of taffeta, pinpoint oxford, cotton chambray, hopsack blazers and pleated chino. The Senior League auxiliary clicked tasseled flat and spectator pumps, stopping Hyde Line cable cars in their tracks across Powell Street, bound for a semi-annual fund-raising luncheon, today’s outdoor gala being held in a picket fenced garden under another swaying quartet of Union Square’s corner palms.

          “Ladies, if you please, we have a full docket,” the gargle throated chairwoman spoon thwacked her water pitcher. “We must attend to those less fortunate about us if we are to bloom ourselves…”

          This cultivated conclave was place seated by white-coated hotel waiters to wicker chairs and banquet tables with red and gold bunting, sterling silverware holding down the white linen cloths. Each name-carded table featured matching red/gold napkins and carafes of Napa chardonnay, to either side of Sierra ’49er goldigger sculptures in multicolored ice. The Japanese lanterns were a delicious, if not ironic touch, but nowhere near as captivating as the off-Julliard string ensemble atop an adjacent open slab stage.

Garnishing everything were brilliant sprays of hibiscus, mums, tulips and flaming camellia. But foremost on the agenda were mammoth trays of canapés, watercress, meaty finger sandwiches and frosted shortbread along the low perimeter fences, along with candle-heated tureens of bisque and consommé. Bounty, beauty and the feast—all in one comely garden party, for the better, more generous of intentions…not to mention for the taking. Guhwroog, guhwroog, guhwroog…

          “Thatta tune, momma,” sidled up a couple of Square pegs, smacking their grizzly lips at this culinary score, one a shirtless biker cast-off in cutoffs and a black leather vest who’d stormed over my way, just beneath an onstage violoncello. “Looky there, cold cuts…heinous spread, ain’t it? Ferget St. Anthony’s…even whole fuckin’ better’n Jimmy Jones’…”

          Wasn’t long before it was high tea time in every camp and crevice of Union Square, virtually its entire derelict, marble-loose menagerie rolling toward society’s corner, successive waves of rag-clad depravity whooping and snorting and picking, nibbling at the catered platters, others liberating entire lazy susans, salad tumblers and carafes. These raiding hordes took the matrons by oyster shell-shocked surprise, upsetting tables and dessert carts, making off with hands full of delectable spoils, some scatting back for seconds and thirds.

          “This will simply not do—not do at all. And we’ll have no more of it,” Madame Chairman gasped, wiping wine from her jowls and silk campshirt blouse, straightening her cloche hat while seeking to rally her panicked conclave, these mortified daughters and granddaughters of The City’s founding fathers and others so pedigreed. “Ladies, time has come we must draw strength from our heritage. We shall summon the resolve of our forebearers, take sustenance from our unyielding pioneer stock!”

          “Don’t havta do nuthin’, honey,” shouted a grabby, sleeping bag-wrapped squatter. “Just keep servin’ up the lunchmeat…ain’t ate ina week…”

          With that, the St. Francis Society rose en unison and indignantly stood their ground, tossing fromage plates, hors d’oeuvres, ambrosia and whole ice buckets of wine and ice water at these motley marauders, as if to keep the vermin at bay at least until some of Chief Gain’s powder blue patrol cars might bother to arrive. What followed wasn’t pretty; backlash never was. Union Square deadbeats and marginal denizens gave as good as they’d already gotten, however, chucking as if both sides had just taken in that new Belushi frat movie. I just remained aside, my armpits juiced up at the sociological sight, never having been party to such a spectacle before. Witness the empirical and sector theory potential of such status and role conflict, I reasoned—the Gemeinschaft-to-Gesellschafting regression of it all—while kept at clinical distance, as it were. In that respect, it couldn’t get much better than this.

          “Honest to God, what’s our city coming to,” muttered a seasoned, platter-juggling waiter on his way back over to the hotel, white coat splattered with bisque and wine. “Something must be done…” 

          “And vice versa…” Which was about all I could come up with at the moment without tipping my alien hand—otherwise quantative scoring the canapé trays.

 Care for more?

 Chapter 54. Wandering into the wilds
under the guise of sorting things out: it’s a return to 
 the Y and wherefores as many other things heat up… 

  
“Even help from safe
distance is likely to carry
body and soul just so far.”

          “No, everything’s great out here, really. You all right?”

          “I’m all right, but it’s awful lonesome back here sometimes—even with Dellis around. One day a guy’s got a family, next day everybody’s gone. That’s the god’s honest truth. But you don’t sound so hot yourself…”

          “I’m fine, just getting things together—a guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do, right?”

          “Getting a little too old to understand anything—and my dratted stomach’s been actin’ up again, with your mother gone and all. That painter gal cookin’ for you?”

          For a good, long while I had stood blindsided in the phone booth light, wondering what next until a mid-career liquid luncher tapped door glass repeatedly, Rob Roy in hand, gesturing me to make way for a hot sales call. From there, the Palm Garden Grill essentially cashiered me with a Glenn Miller Orchestral sendoff, Tex Beneke joining the one-time CU Buffalo in Miller’s last composition before his wartime plane went down over the Channel, something called, ‘I’m Headin’ For California’. Going out with a salute to the lunch counter, I caught a quick blast of Market Street exhaust, which snapped me back up to date, if not altogether to reality. From there, nowhere to go but up The Slot. So I pocketed my phone dime and swung away from the Grill, angling northward to douse an inner fire by wire.

          “Uh, no, not exactly,” I said haltingly, trying to recall the last time I had even seen or spoken with Uncle Dellis.

          “At least that other one fed you, didn’t she? A guy’s got to eat,” my father asked, between acid reflux pauses. “Found work, have ya?”

          “Um, that’s another reason I called. See, I’m on top of the job thing, alright. But it’s kinda tight short term…”

          “Well, s’pose I could drop you a little something in the mail, son. What’s the address there where you’re stayin’? Still at that phone number from last time?”

          “No, actually I’m kinda camping at a hotel right now—you know, putting down roots,” I hedged, double-checking a clock on a rear counter clock. “But I mean real short term, dad, that’s why I called collect. I’m at a Western Union office downtown. And there’s still some bank time back in the Midwest today.”

          “Son, can’t that gal in San Francisco tide you over in the…”

          “No, dad, you don’t get it,” I sputtered, fixing on the phone dial rather than any of the eyes on me around the wait room. “This is for dinner and a room tonight—strictly a loan until…”

          “Ken, are you really all right? What is going on out there,” he asked with rising alarm, but quickly biting his tongue. “Can feel my blood pressure jumpin’ already, so I’ll go moneygram you fifty. Just stay in touch, okay? We’re all that’s left, son, and a man’s got to know his kid’s safe and sound…”

          “Promise, I promise. I really appreciate it, dad, you don’t know,” I said, drained with relief. “Remember, their Market Street office—and you take good care of yourself, hear?”

          “Yeah, yeah, who for? Your Uncle Dellis and his barnyard? Like to drive me to drinkin’ all over again…bye, son…”

          “Your fritzy stomach, remember? And dad, best make it a hundred, things are a lot more expensive out here. Talk soon for sure.” Click. CLICK.

          Telegram Central was between Fourth and Third Streets, thick with mirrors, offering a single pay phone, from which I made this latest collect call. Not gleaming glass mirrors were they, but shiny sheetmetal panels in angle-braced aluminum frames, wall to wall, as if to reflect the anger, anguish, squirming and scheming of its desperate, last-ditch customers in waiting. So anybody who was nobody avoided them at all cost, staring instead at the floor, one another’s hand calluses, but primarily at Western Union’s bulletproof pay windows.

          A few plucky wastrels seemed oblivious to their circumstances, gyrating in every bit of visual blowback the shatterproof wall panels could provide—preening, posturing in their reflections like overgrown prepubes in some carnival funhouse mirrors—anything to kill this gnawing remittal downtime. Tattoos on their forearms, hearts and shortcomings on their sleeves, others sat huddled in waiting room corners, fetal positioned on hard-ass benches.

          This downtown office looked somewhere between a free clinic lobby and the deplaning area of a grounded fly-by-night charter outfit that had made one last unscheduled stopover. Hard foot pounding, finger snapping, gum popping, teeth grinding, bored sighing and deep groaning, with no insignificant outpouring of adrenal perspiration: The wire room wound tighter with each transmittal call-out. Even from behind the double-paned counter, the incessant clack and clatter of those teletype machines spewing their wee yellow tape penetrated like belt-driven dental drills, made all the more unnerving by a wall timer that kept reminding waitlisters how we were up against the closing bell.

          Got to where I could stomach the wait no longer, the clicking and dinging, the cold counter calls, all the sweat-drenched detainee drama of hanging on every message as if it were a next-of-kin notification. So I guesstimated Prairie Crossing main street to Market Street lag time and bolted for the remote buzzered doors to get some refreshingly foul air, proceeding to scurry about the triangular block a half-dozen times, checking out Western Union windows each lap around. The idea was to kill time and clear my own clacker and ticker, which by now were sending messages even Marconi couldn’t decode. This was it, what you wanted, what you traipsed out here for? You gave up everything for a moneygram waiting line? This is your idea of a sound decision, using your learned head? Making the big move, totally taking charge, you fathead, only on somebody else’s dime…

          Whoa, hold fire—that voice, that breathless, snarling voice crept into my skull again with a vengeance not heard since Marquette Park and Chicago Lawn, vehemence. I wanted to name it, to tame it, befriend it some but couldn’t even begin to pin it down. It steamrolled through me as I fretted along Market Street, up Grant to Geary, then back to Kearny down Market again, never breaking stride, struggling to override this hundred-car coal train of mind.

          Aged, off-rez Indians reached out to me from over their bent-over walkers, peevish Jehovah’s Witnesses whispered from behind laminated copies of Awake!, Chinese school girls giggled my way, bushwhacker brothers offered up small vials of opium oil from incensed card tables. I passed sidewalk shoeshine stands, duty-free shops and screaming discount footwear and electronics stores drowning out the Camaro-trolley collision up Market, outside the Hearst Building at Third Street.

          I shunned everything in knee-deep concentration, though not without noting all the downtown banks, all their funny old money—and that ragged old crow rattling the news boxes for any change that might drop his way. He was seemingly mindless of the two-star editions that front-paged a shot of Supervisor Harvey Milk grinning and gagging, pointing at the dog shit on his shoe, with the caption, ‘Milk’s Really Stepped In It This Time’: something about sponsoring new pooper-scooper ordinances at City Hall.

          That was about when I spotted more movement on the Western Union front; a fresh slew of grubbers played the tickers for whatever juice and whomever they could squeeze.

          “See, I’ve given up on the rock ’n’ roll gigs, really. Just need a couple of bills to get back on my feet, get things straight again. No, I’ve cut down on the boozin’. That whole losin’ streak’s over, I swear, really turnin’ things around. Bless you momma, what? I’ll write every day, you’ll see,” pleaded one rawhide, ragged flared hipster who looked like an underfed John Cipollina, working the payphone with stagy, winky pathos as I slipped into the waiting room. The moment he hung up, he turned to his Muldaur cookie and smacked, “OK, baby, the bag bit like a walleye, tonight we boogie…” And boogie they did, on out the door into the Market Street sun, likely toward the nearest liquor store, but not before checking out their road show in WU’s telegraphic reflective steel, firing up a blunt.

          “Herbert, Mister Ken Herbert,” called out the crew cut, short-sleeved counterman. “Window one, have your identification ready.”

          My turn. I stepped up with due caution to sign off for the moneygram, peripherally scanning the room for filchers or ambushers in wait, those mirror walls increasing their numbers exponentially to an infinite sum of connivance. Get in, get out—this wasn’t my trip, but just a minor, momentary stall. Christ, some of these leeches act like it’s feeding time here everyday at 2. Blood money, that’s what they were after, high-wire cash transactions from parts unknown.

          Well, not this stiff, I’d pay dad back for…sure. I hustled my ass out of the waiting room without a second thought or glance, clutching my greenbacks, discreetly counting the benjamins in the bright light of day. Ninety-eight big smackers total, minus Western Union’s take—all there was between me and…this, or them. Eight ball, side pocket: time for a bank shot into that chain bakery across Market Street for a muffin, coffee and change.

          One look at the display case price tags, and I swore off takeout pastry, settling for a medium coffee and cream. But that was more than enough to stoke me as I kicked myself down Market once more, counting off the blue and gold light poles, sidestepping all species of debris toward the Emporium. Truck horns blared, streetcars rang through my head, street life gaining on me from either flank. Hell, at least dad came through when it counted, when nobody else probably would. He’d give me his last dime—no ifs, musts or buts, no flaming hoops to jump through, no purse or apron strings attached. But then, gotta try calling her again, ring her back up. No. Better think this through. Gotta set things straight, right this ship, make things kosher. all around. Hmph, chicks—who needs ’em—carping, hassles, disappointment, that’s the bottom line. Try to please everybody, end up frying your lobes. Enough of that decision shit— duly refueled now, so there’s other bookin’ to do, people to see, people to be, goddamn right. But I knew what she was talking about, damned if I didn’t spot that ruddy face in this downtown crowd…like I’d just seen a face—I  can’t forget the time or place where we first…

          That voice, that indignant, table-pounding voice had tailed me, heartburn fierce as it had when I limped through the sauerkraut and cigarette smokescreen, splitting Palm Garden Grill’s brittle little Canary trees. I attempted to make peace with it, just as I had the past two nights, lying low inside room 718—distancing myself from junk food vendors and the latrine. Still, it kept breaking in, trouncing all over my brainpan well past 3 a.m. Somebody said something about mind control once, or was it biorhythms? I just couldn’t figure out whose voice it was, and how or why it kept getting jackhammer strong, caffeine depth charging my prefrontal lobe.

          “Amen, brotha, turn to Jesus. Bless dat wunnerful name of Jesus.”

          “No thanks, I…”

          “Time’z runnin’ out. Lift Jesus high, brotha. Take mah yoke up in ya and learn of sweet Jesus…”

          “Lay off, pops, I’m sorta concentrating…”

          “Cogitatin’, is ya,” asked, reaching to hand me a wrinkled parchment tan flyer. “Here, cogitate ova this here…”

          I’d barely crossed Fourth Street through a one-block blur, distinguished only by a fading red, white and blue crown atop an otherwise humble old Humboldt Bank Building. Greeting me at the corner hydrant was this rag pile hauling a sandwich board reading, ‘America Come Back to God’ in messianic red. Below that, in lower case black was simply, ‘But as the days of No’e were, so shall also the coming of the Sun of man be…’ What more was there to say to that? But a sudden gust flapped the board up off his stooped shoulders, detonating his raw oyster eyes in alarm. Yet the old coot shook it off, then pulled the sign down, re-cinching bowline straps tightly under his arms. His torn blue-gray raincoat bunched upward at the knees, revealing oil black workpants wrapped with green burlap for warmth.

          “Gwan, take one, read it over,” he regrouped, gray stubble on cocoa skin, grinning three teeth to the wind. “For you own sake, put ya straight…don’t cost no nuthin’.”

          “Uh, I’m really in a hurry,” I pushed away a handful of tracts heralding the Sacred Scriptures, the Great White Throne, the Great Open Air Judgment and Almighty Creator of Heaven and Earth.

          “Hold up, lawdy,” he sidled up to me, dragging his worldly sack. “Jus tryin’ to help, that’z all. Ya new here, friend?”

          “Who isn’t?” I averted my eyes to the candy filled display windows of a corner drug store. “Far as I can tell…

          “Not me, no sir. Bin here since ’43,” said the sidewalk savior, puffing along to keep in step past Market Street’s tobacconists, hosiers and dress shops. He had a mighty limp, as though bowl legged on only one side, which caused him to weave and list like the sail trimmer on a stormy sloop. “Come out from Mobile to build troop ships. How ‘bout youself?”

          “Colorado,” I snapped, annoyed that the old bastard could keep pace, glancing instead at another inbound green torpedo streetcar ringing a double-parked UPS delivery van to the curb. “Chicago area originally…”

          “Ah, yah, Chi-town. Sure, Hound Dog Taylor, Howlin’ Wolf…that what I talkin’ ’bout.”

          “J. B. Hutto and His Hawks…”

          “Whatchu know ’bout J. B. Hutto, boy?”

          “I know about ‘20% Alcohol’ and ‘Speak Mah Mind!”, I said, as if to fend him off, firm up my bona fidelities. “With Sunnyland Slim on the ivories…”

          “Den whacha bout Buddy Guy,” he coughed up a mouthful of pasty phlegm and spit toward the curb, another wind gust tilting his blue Cossack hat. He sounded 60, but looked 80 and climbing.

          “Little Walter’s, west Roosevelt Road…” Check, checkmate…

          “Bin dere mahself, bin dat vera place,” the street preacher rasped. “Joe’s the name, Brotha Joe. He extended his scaly hand and more leaflets. “What yourz?”

          “Ken.” Again, I shook him off, and gulped down my cream and sugar, so he passed them over to an onrushing Latina file clerk, late on the lunchtime return.

          “Ken, from Chi and Colorada—mah pleasure to meetcha,” he said, shuffling along to keep a short step ahead. “See, Iwaza boxer in doz dayz—light middle, boxed in Chi-town many’z a time. Yah, boxin’ ’n’ da blues—went 33-0 ‘til Big Benny Williams right crossed me into da thrd row. Havn’t smelt worth a hoot since. Couldn’t face da wife afta dat, so I just lit out dis way for work…iz betta for doz ol’ bones out here anyway.”

          “Really,” I replied, trying to shake him off like my coffee cup into the trashbasket, getting sideswiped by a Guns ’n’ Roses punk skateboarder.

          “But dat was ’fore I gotz da callin’. Ain’t no fighter no more. I’z a lover, lovin’ on Jesus. Yep, n’order to be wise, you first gotta be a fool, good Lord know…”

          I slowed to half steps while the old man caught a breath and re-cinched his signboards. He then leaned against a mid-block trolley wire pole, fine tuning the newspaper soles in his oversize oxfords, scratching his swollen ankles, before wedging into a thicket of afternoon shoppers and sidewalk skulkers eyeing them on for size. I found myself keeping pace, since I was heading south anyway, when it hit me again, this where you’re headed, roaming the streets like this derelict old Delta magpie? What the fuck’s with you? Yet oddly enough, I stayed with middleweight Joe like a ringside cut man, if only for the utter pathology along Market, the mean deviancy of the place. So snap to, keep clinical distance, some semblance of professional calm…

          “Lawdy, one day woke up from this dream,” Joe rambled, “wazon white clouds preachin’ to deez messa sinners. Waz readin’ mah sermon off’n da roll of a gold player piano. Felt lika king, been revelatin’ out here eva since…”

          He broke mid rapture, bracing for the crowds whirlpooling in and out of the Emporium. This behemoth of a half-block beige department store was mid Market Street’s final mercantile link with old San Francisco respectability around then, the last place a Cadillac Brougham or Mercedes saloon would dare venture unless metaflaked purple or pink. A sea of prospective apostles, though Joe could barely bait his line. Still, bulldog stocky, he charged into the swirls of limo matrons, wary strollers and schools of shopping bag slaves, pamphlets flying, sandwich boards waving fore and aft. Momentarily, he’d spin off the pedestrian eddies, then limp over to a trash basket to regain his bearings and just enough breath to bellow his next ‘Turn to Jesus’ appeal.   

          “Better ease up there,” I said, joining him between the basket and Emporium’s sidewalk flower stand. “Before you keel over or something.”

          “Me? Not wit Jesus by mah side,” Brother Joe wheezed, wiping a blue hanky across his brow. “I serves the Lord, He look afta me. Thas God’s way, praise be. Pray to Jesus…”

          “Hey Joe, watcha know,” yelled the florist, reaching out of his color rich, covered flower stand, handing the preacher a pink carnation for his frayed lapel. “Still shovelin’ out as much holy bullshit as you can, huh?”

          “See, boy,” he winked his cataract eye. “Lord keep lookin’ mah way, protects hizzown, dontcha know…” Then he rallied to shoot over just beyond the store’s entranceway to some of his spiritual cohorts: Sister Blain of the Harbor Light Mission and Emelia, a blind woman who had tooled her zither beneath Emporium show windows since Packards, DeSotos, Kaisers and Crosleys were all the doormen’s rage.

          “Take care of yourself,” I said, drawing up beside him one last time with unexpected concern. “Gotta go…”

          “Amen, brotha,” Joe smiled, as he reached down stiffly to pet Emelia’s pet Shepherd. He fed the guide dog several oyster crackers from his coat pocket, then struggled sorely back straight as he could. “All God’z children look afta dey own.”

          “Good talkin’ to you, my friend,” I grinned tightly, palming the tracts that went with Joe’s aching handshake.

          “Rememba, come to Jesus, join da Kingdom of Heaven, ’n’ you gonna reap his bounty. Hezon your side, Chi, he stay wit you when you own kin’ll turn you away.”

          “Oh, the jury’s still out about that, Joe, but I’ll read your material and keep it in mind.” I turned away toward the crosswalk to Hallidie Plaza.

          “Just stay clear dose devils ova dere,” the old man spittled, pointing across Market Street. “Dey think dey spreadin’ God’s word, but dey really just pruggers, blasphemin’ satans! I bin out here for years, tryin’ to spread the joy of the Lord. Dose kinda devils ruinin’ it all, gettin’ everybody mad at Jesus!”

          “Well, keep the faith, Joe,” I started across the yellow stripes in the diesel wake of a MUNI motor coach. “See ya.”

          “You come back, Chi, you come back ’n’ see me. Yessir, Brotha Joe’s here everaday, all right—servin’ da Lord, praise be—thisz a good town, you know…”

          Clang, claNG, CLANG. An outbound M-Line streetcar cleared the crosswalk, halting pedestrian traffic from both directions, me pulling up the rear toward a center island. Stepping off, tripping over a trolley rail, I glanced back at the still sunny side of Market, where Joe stood singing spirituals with Sister Blaine. Then he fished fistfuls of leaflets from his double-strength shopping bags, hobbling over to hustle up some more silver-haired matrons as they emerged from the Emporium’s majestic, galleried rotunda.

          “Go ahead, go ahead, reject the Lord Jesus. You’re the one’s goin’ to hell,” screamed that gad ten-gallon preacher on approach, menacingly waving his bible at passersby. “You’d better line up with God right now, you vile, sinnin’ heathens…not me, I’m with Jesus, I’m gonna be saved, all right!”

          The cowboy Christian shook and kicked his rattlesnake boots at the tourists, shoppers and gutter mortals, getting in my face some as I drifted toward the plaza’s cable car turnaround. Maybe Joe got it right, over consecrating with department store propers, not bible belting here on the shadowy side with demonic stares. Shade notwithstanding, since Jasper O’Farrell first plotted Market Street on a 54-degree angle in 1847, the high road had risen here north of The Slot, low road loading docks, jobbers and flophouses to the south. Not that the city engineer actually planned this de facto, sociographic downtown Mason-Dixon Line. The mercantile déclassé just gravitated over there, save for the Emporium’s lavish window displays, its atomizer fragrance of orchids, cymbidiums, Arpége and diesel fumes. 

          I dido handed the snaky prophet Joe’s tracts without missing a step. One look, and he manically rolled them into a baseball-size wad, batting them away with his bible. Then he thumped his testament and stared lightning bolts across at Brother Joe. Divine providence had an inbound streetcar shield the old middleweight from further fallout. Pruggery, huh…well, what the hell’s the matter with you—hanging with the losers. The old fart ditched his wife over a first-round knockout, sound familiar?  Better sit yourself down, fool, take stock real fast. Go get some more coffee pansy. You’ve still instant decisions to make…

          But wait a second here, you’re a sociologist—Sydney and Reno belt buckling to mind—you’re supposed to help derelicts like that. Just look at how Market Street is petri dishin’ it out will you? For one thing, what were the statistical probabilities of Brother Joe putting the skids to his losing streak, let alone of my losing mine? If nothing else, do it for Sunnyland Slim…

          I stopped to peer through Woolworth’s windows, in the general direction of the dime store’s long, stool-filled lunch counter, albeit with right hand firmly on my jeans’ front pocket—could have sworn I spotted a vaguely familiar face sitting in there too. Christ, I reflected further yet: for such a supposed ungodly town, this religious stuff was everywhere…

Care for more?

Chapter 53. A much sweeter, more 
continental-style interlude begets 
clashing social circles on the Square…

“Saturn is conflict 
               good and evil, darkness or light— 
             pick at your peril.”         

        “Lord Jesus, wash all my sins away with your precious blood on the cross. Wash away this wicked, rotten old Sodom and Gomorrah city of sin!! Fornicators did not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Y’all can’t hide, God knows all about you!”

         In and of themselves, the rants and roaring might have been spiritually bearable. Reverberating off the Flood Building and BofA fortresses, however, and that solid Emporium wall across Market Street, the din approached sonic, if not seismic overload. This nearly isosceles confluence shaped Hallidie Plaza into an urban amphitheatre to rival Red Rocks after sundown. The acoustics seemed so badass that falsetto and basso profundo buskers abandoned stairwells and shower stalls everywhere to come sing the plaza’s praises.

          Point was, I just ruminated my way in to listen and leer, wrestling with the notion that when someone is there for someone, that someone has got to be there for that someone in return when the tables turn, right? That’s the bargain, the transaction—that’s how the deal goes down. You earned the degrees, she earned the ski-racked Saab and Uni Hill pottery lab. Just like John & Paul, Rogers & Hammerstein, Lerner & Loewe…

          “Jesus Christ died on the cross for you filthy sex perverts, you dogs in heat! You better repent, it’s a fearful thing to fall out the grace of God, praise be—Satan all holdin’ you in darkness and rebellion.”

          Alongside the BART stair railing, where stiffs working and otherwise waited zot-eyed for surface MUNI buses to Noe Valley and Bernal Heights, a single snare drummer in wool vest and droop-brimmed hat set the beat for the entire chaotic ensemble. Beyond some SF souvenir button stands and displays of Hollywood look-alike lithographs camped a Dexter Gordonish sax man and Stratocaster longhair with his baby Pignose amp.

          So it’s that your place is back there, for crissake, not out here. Getting on with it, pulling the life together that you’d sorta planned with her all along—that’s why all the work, right? So what that you’d never actually talked it out, put it into words or anything? It was subtle, low-key, unspoken yet understood—like the whole goddamn relationship was and had been from the start…

          CLang, CLAng, CLANG. An N-Judah streetcar chased a K Ingleside up Market toward the Ferry Building, like it was rush hour in Rosebud’s day, scattering jaywalking shoppers to curbsides and pedestrian islands. Two old-timers rankled and recalled more courteous crewmen on the dearly departed Fillmore and Jackson Street lines: hell, they’d even hit the brakes for a wayward soupbone spaniel.

          “Go ahead, reject the gospel. Reject the word of the Bible. Reject the blood of Christ, reject the hand of God,” bellowed a dog-eared sidewalk preacher. “Be weak with your self-indulgent passion, be sinful in your corruption. You’re the ones goin’ to hell, to suffer in fire and brimstone, not me, praise the Lord!”

          That was it, the clincher. You’re gonna get your shit together this minute and settle this thing. You’re gonna swallow hard, make your damn decision and go with it. What time is it?! Where the hell’s a phone…

           Snap-happy tourists encircled the chilly Hallidie turnaround, waiting interminably for the next Wharf-bound cable car to rattle down Powell Street like a fresh pinball, then erringly boarding the Hyde Line through a haze of MUNI misdirection. The mere prospect of that bellish, groin-tickling procession of overloaded cable cars crawling past Union Square up Nob Hill was enough to thaw their impatience, while ransoming the visiting marks to the turnaround’s highest bidders. In this case, it was a propeller beanied, banjo-picking burnout from the tangled, vermined wilds of Golden Gate Park. Granted, a strung-out Gibson guitar could be murder on Buffalo Springfield, but what the banjo delivered was wholesale slaughter. Were it not for the muting effect it had on his accompanying voice track, that capoed carbine could easily have precipitated a cease-and-desist order from David Bromberg, much less Flat & Scruggs.

          Not that the picker’s painful expressions slowed a gratuitous feed into his water pipe-decaled banjo case: pocket change and better courtesy of the captive cable-ready audience. Nor did the blew-grass impact a Wild Irish trio squat and clapping in the now midday sun passing the brown bag bottle around. Their bruised, drippy lids followed the banjo player through his set, firing into choruses of Jerry Jeff and Country Joe, red sclera filling with flashbacks of Hashbury in the acid reign, then toasting with another tempting toke on the bottleneck.

          “I don’t care if you like my message or not, you’d better line up on the side of Jesus anyhow. God’s not just whistlin’ Dixie!”  Harping, all but preached out, the parson resorted to common carping. Such was the prime-time competition in Hallidie Plaza that its latest religio-ranger was losing market share to offbeat musical vaudeville, however influential his executive producer. But damned if this preacher was taking it sitting down. He couldn’t. Not in his pressed-ham Goodwill slacks with the shredded knees. Sullen, sober as he was, those were righteous muttonchops angling sharply up to his black, gold-sashed Stetson.

          “You might see me proclaimin’ in New York, New Orleens—wherever they’ve heard the gospel,”  he caught a second wind, nodding my way in passing. “God gives me the spirit of wisdom to see through false prophets all over this wicked, wicked world.”

          All that Jesus jive, in Hallidie Plaza? Even if the guy didn’t get crucified out here, he wasn’t long for this particular world. These were touch spiritual times, and tough times demanded tough, full-throated measures. If the leather lungs and embroidered rawhide vest didn’t grab them, or the blazing stars and stripes scarf, God’s new-generation messenger boy wasn’t above a little hype. So the pavement-pounding preacher beat his breast through milling shoppers, prostrate vagrants, chess masterbaiters, tourists in waiting—occasionally waving a coverless Gideon for punctuation. Still, he couldn’t keep pace with the cacophonic music, the glitz/trash merchants, souvenir peddlers, Afro sketchers, velvet Elvis—much less the clanging cable cars or loudspeaker a bit further down Market blaring, ‘T-Shirts, 3 for $1. Designer clothing, $9.99’. Anything to keep those tourista greenbacks in rapid circulation.

          And I couldn’t keep up either. Hallidie Plaza was more piercing than a rockfest portaloo, with the pissy odor of sweat, spilled wine and sliced pizza.  I finally spotted a clock in the Diamond Palace window, then sprinted across Market, searching for a quiet phone booth, bucking in my haste for the sting of a squealing cream and green hornet streetcar—the very sort of trolley that delivered me back unto childhood CTA rides down Halsted Street past the putrid, meat-packed stock yards to visit mom’s Southside kin.

           You’ve got a half-hour. Get on the horn. Wait—was that 12 noon her time or California time? Naw, couldn’t be her time, her time’s already history. Gotta be your time. Her time would have been…uh…10, no nine. Was barely up at nine. She’d know that, right? Gotta be 12 here. That would be four there, no three. But, hold it, what would she be doing home waiting for you at three in the afternoon, or two? C’mon, she’s got better things to do. Bullshit, she’s there. Get on the horn, hear?!

          I pressed further down Market across Fifth Street through the crowded cross flow, past a vacant six-story department store, looked to be a heavyweight in its day. Now there were derelicts in the doorways, rolled up in Chronicle Green sheets like stuffed grape leaves over flattened appliance boxes, and strange, infantile freelance window displays: Cardboard buildings with Styrofoam skies. Save for the signs, as each successive window bore captions—a downtown-at-Christmastime approach long past their expiration date—kindergarten creative, recanting their charming little serial fable, chapter and verse.

          But at least the comixy displays bought me some time, as mid-Market decayed into skid Market, scarcely prime for rehabilitation. I explored them, analyzed and decoded them, to no cogent end whatsoever against a meld of warm sun and cool breezes—my mental ping-pong match having frozen momentarily at 12-love.  Then, just as I began catching their lunatic drift, I came upon the Wilson Building—a Polk/Percy design inspired by Ravenna, Italy’s Basilica of San Vitale. The seven-story office structure had been a Byzantine beauty at 973 Market since the turn of the century; its colorful terra-cotta scrolling and tiling accented a roasted umber foundation. Yet Wilson’s luster had dulled some over the years, no more so than on the ground floor, right next to Hardy discount blue men/boys shoes.  Here, the Palm Garden Grill had been lushly planted since at least latter FDR days. Its corroded blue and while Bell Public Telephone sign instantly caught my eye—there would be no more dawdling and waffling, no more let’s see/on the other hands, or any other hyper-hypothesizing, for that matter: definitely time for the dime.

          “What can I getcha?”

          Moody mahogany everywhere I looked, scarred, weathered wood paneling: The time-worn peculiarity of the Palm Garden hit me square on, reeling most any still sentient passerby back to John Foster’s dullest intrigues, Ike’s heart attack, Kennan’s containment, Truman vs. Macarthur, bread-lined Hoovervilles, chicken pots, speakeasy flappers, Woodrow Wilson’s follies and Cal Coolidge’s cool. And the soup-spotted jake behind the counter looked to have lived through it all.

          “Uh, just a coffee, lotsa cream,” I said, sliding down onto a low revolving stool in the recessed, yet al fresco Palm Terrace luncheonette. “How old is this place?”

          “Older than your ol’ man,” cooked the waiter, pouring a brown, java-discolored mug. “That’ll be six bits, pay as you go…”

          Before I could pin him down, the counterman scooped up my dollar, rushing through large, louvered swinging doors, never to return. Two other white-aproned sawbones soon took his station, as if they’d been changing guard ahead of the noon rush for decades on end. I sweetened then hoisted the lukewarm mug that even railroad station cafeterias had retired with the advent of bare bone china. My sips were drown in the echo of slurped chowder special up and down the earlybird lunch line. 

          “Pass the tabasco, will ya?”   

          “Uhh,” I searched about a rusty chrome condiment rack for anything beyond Heinz 57.

          “Naw, that’s Worcestershire. Here, I can reach…”  So did the BLT gorger one stool over, dipping his sleeve into my coffee enroute to the Louisiana hot sauce. It was a blue denim work shirt with a San Francisco Examiner breast patch, guy must have delivered newspaper bundles off the truck since Hearstian days. He also had to be a regular, because his daily side of goulash and coffee were apparently on the cuff.

          So the Palm Terrace luncheonette portion had become something of a workingman’s purlieu over the years—at least here at the ten seat walk-up counter. Except, that was, for the actuarial jokester two stools down, or the contingent lawyer types back slapping behind us through even larger swinging doors into a dark, stube-style Palm Garden restaurant itself. It appeared the counter was initially conceived as just a quick-lick appetizer for the busy mid-Market mercantile trade, however gaseously unappetizing as it had become decades on.

          “It’s like another world here,” I said to the veteran newsboy.

          “Yep, the sugar?”

          “By all means,” I pushed the soda-crackered jar his way with a sweep of the backhand, caffeine ready to talk small while I still could. “Quite a scene, huh?”

          “Just as long as they don’t keep havin’ that fruitcake freedom parade traipsin’ by.”  The trucker sharply tapped the dispenser bottom against Palm Terrace’s Formica counter to shake loose any sticky granules. “Damn fairies like to be overrunnin’ this whole town, takin’ over City Hall ’n’ everything. That Danny White boy is the only hope we got left. But I’ll say they do keep the ol’ ink flowin’.” 

          “Yah, well—couldn’t tell you about that…”

          Ding, dinG, DING, DING. An inbound green MUNI torpedo stalled directly out front of the Palm Terrace, riding some misguided Mazda tying up traffic with an illegal left-hand turn. The streetcar clanged and swayed incessantly as passengers spilled out its accordion doors. Beep, beep, screeetch. A vintage ’53 Plymouth Cranbrook, irreparably dented, but peppy nevertheless zipped between the pedestrian island and curbing, then slammed to a halt in avoidance of an overwrought, overweight señora rushing to the trolley.

          This frame of Market Street thus frozen, I stared off between sickly twin-potted palms at the entranceway to the snarled street scene beyond. Braced by the wobbly, wicker-backed stool, I pictured longshoremen and boilermakers haranguing each other on the L Taraval as it stalled inbound toward the teeming Embarcadero waterfront, from bridge to spectacular new bridge, a China Clipper climbing overhead. Suddenly, mounted policemen would have whistled off the traffic jam to make room for military bands and block after block of marching uniformed sailors and foot soldiers over from the Presidio.

           Crowds would have thronged out there along Market Street for glimpses of these conquering heroes, who formed tightly in perfect squares behind their respective regimental banners. Ebullient San Franciscans flashed V’s to the passing parade; a brilliant sky radiated off placards, all of which bore the bold armistice letters, VJ. But snap to attention, Kilroy, time was a wastin’…where was this stuff coming from? And why did it make this late-born Kilroy feel so to home?

          I looked about me, transfixed as the torpedo rang on along. The Palm Terrace’s front counter tucked into its brown paneled alcove like card tables in an election day garage. Only its red-framed menu signs seemed to lighten the grease shellacked walls—several blackboards chalked with daily specials, others featured such hand-lettered entrees as tomato tripe or pigs knuckles and sauerkraut—all covering over a cracked, ivy-etched mirror over the cash register, running the length of the counter.

          My mind drifting once more, old ‘Terrace’ regulars sprouted sharkfin lapels, brass clip galluses and cocked pork pie hats. That Emerson radio over the steel flag register squawked some ditty by Teagarden or Artie Shaw, and the hep cat three stools over tapped his cleat-toed Florsheims against a black/white hex-tiled floor. C’mon dumplin’, it’s the Empress Theater’s Gable and Grable double-feature matinee for a cute little dish like you…hey, snap to, wake the hell up…

          “’Nother hit?” asked a white paper-capped griller wielding a glass pot of joe.

          “No, thanks, anyway,” I came to, one cup on an empty stomach being more than enough to re-solder my synapses. “But I could stand to use a phone booth.”

          “In the main restaurant, to your left,” said this oddly cordial new waiter. He seemed comfortably settled in his time capsule, telling a chowder head up the counter that the Palm Garden Grill in its entirety was one of San Francisco’s oldest remaining lunchrooms. It had even survived the 1906 Earthquake, so he said. To which a jaded suitcase jewel peddler was heard to reply, “Aww, bull snot—everything half interesting in this town is ’sposed to have made it through ’06. Next you’ll be sayin’ so did the Pyramid and that radioactive Sutro TV tower up on Twin Peaks.”

          “Thanks much,” I spun off the stool. Transamerica Pyramid, halfway interesting, I pondered, rolling a toothpick around my mouth, George Raft-style, as if in fact feeling right hunkydory here in an earlier life. Then I pushed through the weighty, swinging doors into another tick on the time continuum, somewhere between the League of Nations and Lend-Lease accords.

          Deeply tar and nicotine-cured mahogany prevailed even more so in here—from an arching back bar along the left wall to a glass paneled, inlaid tile steam table fat with pork shoulders, glazed hams and beef shanks sizzling under infrared heat lamps. Waist-aproned attendants in gravy splotched white uniforms ladled navy beans, turnip greens, okra and red cabbage from floating stainless trays—light on enthusiasm, but heavy on the instant spuds.

          This lunch hour line was an odd lot, at that: white collar, blue collar, yellow collar, frayed collar, no collar at all—churlish, demanding, hungry for anything but casual conversation or common courtesy. Flickering cup-shade chandeliers cast a thick pall over the dining room. Those dark wood-grained walls closed in on the Garden’s failing brass railings and marble tabletops like a stop-down aperture. Seemed its temperamentally rainy day habitues preferred it that way.

          I caught sight of a round, illuminated Belfast Beverage clock directly over the right-side cocktail bar, between stuffed bison busts and a yellow mural of the 1904 Knights of Pythias parade, replete with horseless buggies and buffalo bull-headed militiamen. Five to 12: the Palm Garden filled with a dull, smoky clamor, for here it was, countdown to noon. Chills rushing me, I slogged toward the vacant of two wooden phone booths to the far side of the bar, head pelted by tumbling dice cups and cymbal pealing dishware, nostrils and sinuses clogging as if I’d French inhaled a carton of Old Gold regulars.

          God, this place was salty, albeit in an intriguing Dashiell Hammett sort of way. I shuddered, sliding the booth’s door behind me, hoping for relief from some of the tobacco smoke, no such luck. My hands swelled and trembled, head bobbing on stormy seas as I kicked fully closed the accordion door—no overhead light bulb, either. Figured, making this call in abject darkness. Two to 12. I stood peering through narrow glass door panels, tapping my boot against the wooden booth frame, ears whistling like a steam locomotive at a cannonball flag stop. Deal with it, the bargain, compact, true commitment—these more precepts hailstoned my conscience in leaden bulk. Maturity, responsibility, adult expectations—balls, bowels?! Grow the hell up…

          My clear course further frayed and frazzled with each upward tick of that Belfast clock. Hard-earned love, respect, faithful companionship, tar babies! Wait a second here: model couple, emotional fit, umbilical cord—caring, whipped, tenderness, entrapment, fidelity, fear, family, freedom—what the whipped dick hell’s the matter with you?

          Once more, I focused out the door, picking at the booth’s pebbly metal panels, at the tiny, illegible graffiti between the bumps. Through the cigarette/stogie smoke and steam table haze, I could see Koblenz, Hamburg, Casablanca—could see clear back to Northside Chicago. I had my cameras focused on it, I was a camera, my eyes were Nikon F2s with haywire motor drives. Thinking selflessness, self-fulfillment, security, suffocation, challenge, peace of mind, household mire, fast-track career, grind, growth, breadwinner, bondage, study over, understudy, lofty art, grounded existence, existential freedom, Rust Belt, Sun Belt…wait, this was getting a little too crazy…

          There were no more havens, daydream digressions. Chicago: I could visualize the Twelve Bar and Billy Goat as I called out collect numbers to the operator, made all necessary connections. But those images quickly dissolved in the Palm Garden’s smoke and haze, to where I could picture my father bending elbows at the end stool of its amber lit mahogany bar. I could see him seated next to…Uncle Early, like it just yesterday, on some cold Friday evening after work sucking down Blatz draft and White Owls, the joint abuzz with further details about Pearl Harbor and the military draft. Those two were blathering away, buying desperate down time between daily obligations and tribulations, lost momentarily in the colorful Wurlitzer tavern lights, drinking themselves numb in the bitter darkness, dad momentarily blocking out his two-room Southside walk-up, fretting over any prospects of an inconceivably timed come-lately kid on the way. Here, there they were, toasting to Whiteman and the Dorseys, beckoning me to come over like a regular shot-and-beer palsy-walsy: generations twice restooled, as if rejoining for a nip to talk some sense into me. But not so fast…

          “Hello? Tsk, yes, operator—I’ll accept the charges…Kenny?”

          “Uh, yeah, Moon. I’m really glad you’re there…”

          “I said I would be, didn’t I? So I am—now, what do you have to tell me?”

          “Um…” Right, mind rushing through home life, happiness, domestication, pride, newfound freedom, new Saab wagon; emotional rescue, entrapment, enlightenment, firstborn, 50 ways…shape shiftin’, pride goeth, decision, non-decision decision, road forkin’ away…

          “Kenny, where are you? When are you coming? Are you in Boulder yet, or…”

          “Melissa, I…”

          “I’m paying for this call—out with it.”

          “I’m still in San Francisco…”

          “Tsk, oh, Kenny…”

          “Moon, listen, this is really hard for me,” I sputtered, twisting the coiled phone cord in my clenched fist. “I don’t know quite how to say it…but I won’t be coming back right now.”

          “You what?!”

          “I don’t believe I just said that. But I’m thinking it’s true. Don’t ask me why, but I’ve got to stay out here for now, sort some things out…”

          “Oh, my god. What in blazes is this about? What’s wrong with you, Kenny? You wouldn’t even have the guts to do something so haywire if I weren’t here backing you up! Don’t you know what it means?”

          “Yeah, I guess I do—the Saturn either/or decision stuff…still some unfinished business.”

          “Here I’ve been planning such a welcome home, with my father’s blessing and everything. He’s been so edgy lately, what with those bizzare neo-Nazis threatening to march up here to Skokie any day now. You’ve simply got to come back soon as you can…”

          “Please, Moon, don’t…I fully appreciate all the pressure you must be under back there, but no more ultimatum deadlines, OK?”

          Silence, the crackling of some party line conversation somewhere in Des Moines. “Pressure, me?! No, see, what this means is I never want to see nor hear from you with this yo-yo nonsense again,” Melissa said, with sudden, brickwall solid calm.

          “Melissa, please,” again, catching myself mid spill, family-wise. “I just can’t crawl back like a tail-dragging dog again…I’ve got to make this all right here first.”

          “Tsk, goodbye, Kenny.”

          “I’ll write you, I’ll explain everything…I promise!”

          “No, mister yo-yo, I’ve had it, can’t be minding you anymore,” she screamed anew. “I refuse to let you mess up my life this way one minute longer. I mean that with all my heart!”

          “Moon, let’s not cut off things like this, please understand that…”

          “No, you understand. Fully understand that you’ve just lost the best woman you’re ever going to have. But I’ve got to move on with my life.”

          “Melissa, I’m pleading with you to just give me…I mean, I’ll stay in touch and…”

          “Bye, Kenny—I’ll take good care of Seamus, for his sake. You do the same for yours…because I can’t imagine another woman ever actually putting up with you.” CLICK.

          Images of her, of her and Seamus in the mountains, cranking ice cream on front porch swings trammeled me. So quickly they dissolved in the Palm Garden smog. Suddenly all I could see was mahogany desolation, my dad and Uncle Early downing one last Blatz for the cab home, teetering out the swinging doors. I hammered the receiver, instantly re-popping in the dime for a local call. I whirled the dial oblivious to the numeric sequence, yet the number was up, just the same.

          “Hello, Sydney here, recordingly yours. But if you’d like to paint me a message, I’ll be sure to stroke you back…”

          SLAM. Double jeopardy anew. What was wrong with you, what the hell have you done? What kind of a man are you anyway?!  I looked up to see my father pass through his tavern’s doors, arm around Uncle Early’s shoulders, flipping his cigar stub into the wind. I kicked open the phone booth door to a Palm Garden packed to the railings—Ethel Waters seemingly reprising ‘Stormy Weather’ with Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra in the smoke-gyved air. And here I was, so infinitely, abysmally beside myself.

          Figured—what a fine time for the goddamn booth light to pop on…

Care for more?

Chapter 52. Resources hitting bottom, 
hitting up painfully back home, some 
‘brotherly’ advice prompts a sweet 
respite and Union Square confrontation…

“Bad mood rings Saturn. 
Planet says no pain, no gain— 
fear’s not far behind.”

          R-r-ringgg. “H’lo?”

          “I knew I’d find you there…”

          “Who’s this?”

          “Who do you think, Einstein? Sydney…”

          “Syd, what the…”

          “We need your driver’s license and coverage info, Kenneth—for the insurance claim.”

          “But how’d you find me here?”

          “First place I called…no, second. I’d hoped you’d have sense enough to stay at the Embarcadero Y. At least it has sort of a view.”

          “Embarcadero Y? Where’s that…” I pried open my right eyelid with thumb and forefinger, then craned my head up against the icy metal headboard.

          “Forget it, Kenneth. I sensed you were in for a stumble, but didn’t think you’d sink like a rock. Honestly, how do you think this makes me feel?”

          Morning was no kinder to room 718. It seemed more cell-like, its jaundiced walls and battered, gimpy furnishings made the mud brown door a designer nicety by comparison. And that lone cold-water faucet must have dripped much of Hetch-Hetchy Reservoir since midnight. I switched on the overhead light and immediately denied my surroundings like a social drinker rationalizes the day-after’s roll call of dead and half-dead soldiers. My head hurt just as badly—only it wasn’t so much my head as my hair, from the roots on out. Did it hurt because it was thinning or thinning because it hurt? I resolved to quantify the field on that one, sooner than later.

          “You feel? Maybe I’m missing something here,” I said, still marginally asleep, cross, cloudless sunlight narrowly piercing the stained shade and curtains like crusted marmalade. “But I’m the one looking out a brick wall and god knows what below.”

          “Hmph, if you think you’re going to lay some kind of guilt trip on me, you’ve picked the wrong mark…”

          “Look, Syd, it’s what, 6:30?” I scanned the cracked walls in vain for a timepiece, settling instead on a broken three-bulb ceiling fixture, wires dangling and empty of sockets.

          “Try 7:25, time to get yourself out of that sewer, that’s what. For godsakes, Kenneth, where’s your pride and self respect?!”

          “Went with money supply, and I was just about running out of gas. Figured this was the closest place around, and was more affordable than the St. Francis or Jack Tar Hotel, okay? What d’ya want from me?”

          “Nothing, not one little thing more than the insurance information. It’s just that you’re back and it’s back—and I’m hoping that’s just a bizarre coincidence.”

             “What’re you talking about?”

             “You know what I’m talking about—up there by the park…I’m well aware of your…fixations. Suppose those shmucks are listening in on this over there? I mean, you never know about people, am I right?”

           “Naw, I haven’t a clue,” I said, hope against hope, party line-wise—hmph, lot she really knew. “Dunno what to tell you about that, Syd…”

              “Anyway you’ve got me fretting I might have any responsibility for bringing you back to the scene of the crime, so to speak—you know, just in case. But somebody’s got to talk some sense into you now…”

          “And that be you? Last thing I heard was beat it, scumbag,” I groused, kicking the blankets off, flashing of backstroking in CU’s Rec Center pool. ”So why would you have any reason to…”

          “Okay, maybe I was a little harsh, but you were so lame then. Plus I suppose I was a little concerned, the way you left and all.”

          “Who are you calling lame? Really, I can’t see how…”

          “Because we’re all little ants on this planet, that’s how—just trying to get along and get by. Like Daddo always says, we’re all here for a good time, not for a long time, know what I’m saying? Don’t ask me why, but I just don’t want any hard feelings.”

          “Yeah, well, I’ve got some hard thinking to do, Syd.” I proceeded to fish through my wallet and feed her my Colorado license and liability info. “Now I’d best go before the desk clerk cuts me off again.”

          “Again?”

          “Yep, he flipped out midway through a long-distance call last night. Nearly cut Moon and me off in mid sentence.”

          “You and…Moon?”

          “Right, at least I owed her some explanation for this fiasco.”

          “Hmph, I hate to tell you what I think, Kenneth. One little slap on the kisser and you’re running back to her!”

          “So what concern is it of yours anymore anyway?”

          “You’re so godblamed predictable, it’s maddening. But I guess I figured all along you don’t have the balls to cut clean, and won’t be free until you do. Melissa’s still got you by your baitsim; she’s like a Sephardic herder that way. And you were coming to me, all Mr. Liberation. Why don’t you just leave her be?!  I mean, what a joke—one big, pathetic joke! And you wonder why I came down on you…”

          “What can I say, pot and kettle…to have and to hold, maybe you’re right…” What could I do but stretch out and scratch myself. It felt like little bed buggers were crawling everywhere.

          “There, see? Bucklesville, Kenneth—you two are sticking and clinging to each other like tar babies. Damned if I want any more to do with it, family secrets or not—don’t even care if you spill to Moon about that. And I don’t want to hear one more word from you unless you’ve done what you should have in the beginning!”

          “Syd, you called me, remember? And you’ve already told me we were history…”

          “And we are, in that respect…you can bet your keister on it. But if you want to be friends, you’ve got to set some things right…”

          “Look, like I said, I’ve got some major life decisions to make, and have to bail out of here by 10 a.m., so…” Christ, what was that crawling on the windowsill, looked big as a bullfrog.

          “Saturn decisions, huh? Good luck with that, flash. But if you ever cut the umbilical cord and get back on your feet, get in touch. By the way, drop that schoolboy sociology shtick while you’re at it. Advertising’s where the money is.”

          “I don’t know, everything is so bent out of shape right now…”

          “I mean it, Kenneth, dammit, grow up. And you’d better not vanish or blow town again back east. It’s not like you’re burning with friends these days.”

          “Bye, Syd, sorry I…”

          “Stop calling me that—and move out of that cesspool, will you? I freak out just thinking about knowing somebody who’d end up this way, or that people might hear about it. And you know how I hate freaking out…” CLICK.

          “Syd…” Click, CLICK.

          “She hung up, fella.”

          “Gotcha. So what do I owe for this one…”

          “Zip, local call. Let’s just keep it that way, all right? And don’t go forgettin’ about check-out time…”

          This phone action slapped me like subzero Skin Bracer, cheek to cheek, so I let out for the latrine, Dopp kit in hand. A glum, graggy hallway greeted me, strewn with soda cans, potato chip bags, vending machine sandwich wrappers and the odd contraband Bud can and Gallo jug. Steam billowed out the rightside lavatory doorway, carpet runners leading up to it squished under my Vibram soles.

          “In or out? Just close the doors, will ya?”

          “Got it,” I smiled sheepishly, pulling the swivel doors behind me as I edged into the hazy washroom. They converged on my hesitant fingers like cleaver blades, forcing me fully into an ablutive clot unlike anything I’d seen since army boot camp.  Nevertheless, I about faced toward the nearest washbowl.

          “Hey, take a number, friend,” sniped a foul Pole in a wraparound Best Western towel and shower clogs. Sweat beaded the length of his soaring forehead, down a crooked roadmap nose as he slid menacingly toward basin number one. “Find your own damn sink.”

          “Sorry, it looked clear,” I pivoted toward the pots.

          “You blind, or what? My soap’s right there on the shelf, sheeit.”  That his hotel-size deodorant bar was any different from anyone else’s was clearly beside the point.

          Eight more churlish, sobering faces stared down this bank of discolored sinks and cracked mirrors, hands jerking spring-loaded hot water faucets like the firing order of high-rev overhead camshaft. A last-gasp regular at basin five had rigged a chopstick-and-rubberband bracket to maintain steady flow, but apparently wouldn’t share his ingenuity, unless the price was right. Steam poured from the intermittently scalding faucets as all sinks hot flashed at once, obscuring further conflicts before they got beyond reason.

          I just shrugged and unzipped to a runny urinal. This gloomy morning agenda had already forestalled the day’s momentous decisions, but by now my pipes burned and bladder ballooned to where I couldn’t think straight anyhow. I was barely shy of a sodium starchy yellow quart when the scream froze me mid stream.

          “Yeoww, crabs—muthafuckin’ crabs!”

          One glance over my shoulder, and I stuffed unfinished business into my Jockeys like a shoplifter pocketing a Mister Goodbar. The aggrieved looked to be a hidden away AWOL leatherneck, inked to the elbows, naked as a Rodin, squatting in the toilet stall next door. He was nit-picking about his pubes and scrotum, and leaning full weight on the flush handle. “Bastaads crawlin’ all over me!”

          I didn’t wait for verification, dripping instead toward the shower room, shedding jeans and Buffs shirt, piling them atop my hiking boots. But the sight of two middleweight brothers sparring naked around the pink-tiled common shower was enough to send me redressing to a coldwater shave back in 718. Dudes must have been going the distance, I shivered, the scummy shower water had stopped up nearly to their shinbones. Some guys, I thought, give them a pinch and they’ll take a vial.

          Several sharp scrapes of a disposable razor, and my bleary face was a styptic pencil eyesore, clotted for the moment with tiny wads of toilet tissue I’d rolled off before the men’s room banshees broke loose. Wrestling into yesterday’s denim and flannel, I made off for the elevators, canvas gym bag and cameras in hand, shirking the tell-all mirrors, steadying myself for the main floor lobby.

          “Had a bit of an accident, Mister Herbert?” asked the desk clerk, buzzing open that security door.

          “What’ya working, swing shift,” I shot back, in no mood for nickel-and-dime needling.

          “Hilarious,” he said, scrutinizing his guest register. “Let’s see, no more insane phone marathons. So if you’ll just surrender the room key…”

          “Check out’s 10, it’s not quite nine.” I took note of the wall clock, just making a point. Fallout from the $40 call had yet to settle, and that ragging was tough enough. Yet here this Y’s-ass zookeeper was, on my case at daybreak.

          “Bear with us, won’t you,” the clerk winked, with a tip if his once dapper lid, glancing over to an eyeshaded sidekick—same blue vestment, no hat or hair to speak of, red-penciling his ledger. “Hotel policy under the circumstances, in the event you don’t return in time. We do have other guests here, you see…”

          “Seen enough, for crissake. Appreciate the hospitality.” I tossed 718’s key over the counter and breezed out toward the foyer, feeling the heat of oozing, glaucomatous gazes upon me until I shouldered through Central’s metal-barred double doors.

          Had to think, had to focus—line up the options, set up the score, make my own ledger, get a handle on the scenarios, take a good, long look down the road, figure out if it’s the one, the goin’ rate, numero uno:  My mind was suddenly  racing at Mach 3 the moment I hit Turk Street. I stepped around some brothers on the stoop there, under a ripped awning, out of sun’s harm—setting a little agenda of their own. All that remained of last night’s attempted rob and rape was a splattering of the haply woman-for-hire’s dried blood, not my type at all.  

          “Say bro, what’s shakin’? You  be scorin’ some oregano?”

          A stiff gust blew the tissue wads off my face as I trudged over to Leavenworth. I could feel the chill burn on a shot pattern of tiny skin nicks from my cheekbones to my chin. But I ignored them, and the distended voices, just as I blew off the first of many Tenderloin rope-a-dopes dealing their clove-cut weed, circumnavigated the jackals over at Mako’s Market, hoofin’ around the hydrant, paying tribute to the rose Thunderbird in some turgid tribal ritual involving catcalls, hand-to-hand cigarette butts and wine-stained brown paper sacks.

          “Bastuds took whole thing, took it all—left me nuthin’, sheeit,” a hook-backed old broom pusher spit as he rifled through the upper crust of a corner trash can, flinging peels, wrappers and dirtbags into a jam of horn-blaring cabs and delivery vans.

          C’mon, get it together, this is your life you’re talking about here—scene of the crime like maybe she really meant it, fool. You pissing that away, or what? Gonna let her slip away, just grind three years into the pavement like a dead Lucky Strike? Not getting any younger, you know, any hairier, not that many more friends.

          Turk Street closed in, four-story apartment buildings and SRO rat’s nests sponging up any sidewalk sunlight not claimedby boarded over parking garages and front-end and transmission repair shops. Case hardened Vietnamese children huddled in the piss-poor doorways, others scribbled on re-used coloring books behind iron security gates, or milling about bouncing grungy nerf balls, saucer eyeing the street life as though back in Tet and Chu Lai. Upstairs, their anxious immigrant mothers draped rinsed-out peasant garb on scissored fire escapes.

          “Pick it up, Sunburst, pick the damn thing up!”  Maybe eighteen going on 20, a bruised, bun-warming redhead dragged a layette and small TV set across Jones Street, with her runny nosed firstborn tugging a pink overnight case over the curb. “Hotel’s just up the block.”

          I couldn’t help but lift her overstuffed bag up onto the sidewalk, the little girl’s mother glaring at me like I was some kind of pedophile on the prowl. But the reflex gesture only reminded me of Boulder kids petting Seamus at Chautauqua Park, so too all the pumpkin bread abaking in the cabin kitchen, those steak sandwiches Moon would bring home from the Coach Light restaurant after picking wildflowers from the foothills to brighten the table. Then the talks, all night—Christ we could gab ’til sun-up sometimes.. What the hell time was it? Where was a fuckin’ clock?!

          “Hey, watch your step…”

          “Yeah, sorry.” I nearly trashed out the played-out grifter, a slow shuffling question mark in two gray plastic raincoats and a cockled bucket hat, Safeway bags wrapped around his newsprint soled shoes. “Say, you wouldn’t by any chance have the time…”

          “Ggrrr, you wannna hit?”  Eyes to the concrete, the old man wielded his walking cane like a squadrol nightstick.

          I skipped his swing as if jumping rope, and spun off up Turk Street before losing my Vasques from the kneecaps on down. Time, what the hell’s the time? All the fading painted building signs were for Tacoma Beer and Sal Hepatica, just like the music out of that ghetto blaster across the way might as well have been Teresa Brewer or Band of Renown.

          “Not to worry, baby, we’ll score some more at the grocery there.”   Some wiry old Mabel in a frosted wig and tourniquet jeans flashed her white vinyl purse like a MasterCard to her strangely intense matinee studly, who flivvered a stub of a Marlboro through his scraggly Van Dyke and slurred, “We outta smokes—no more smokes, no go!”

          Beyond Greco Grocery, Turk doubled down in spades. Even the airlift and boat people cringed behind barred gates, for the bloods be hangin’ out by dirty-dozen gin mills like the Chez Sands, Tradewinds or Coral Sea, hauntin’ refugee liquor/food marts up and down the block. And they decidedly ruled on the sunny side of Turk, struttin’ to Sylvester and the Funkadelics.

          No bullshit, I recoiled, not ounce of bullshit in three-plus years. Not during term-paper weekends, not even when she covered the rent. Totally without  contentions or conditions. So long as you didn’t dump on Moon she would back a guy 200%, topped with brandywine-berry turnovers, pouring some burnt cream and fresh organic cherries over it all, totally unreal…

          The brothers shucked and jived and roistered for position in the mid-morning rays, slipping little baggies and prescription bottles around like pieceworkers at a spasmodic conveyor belt. When a baby blue and white SFPD patrol car turned the corner, they broke away to shadowbox themselves or an after hours streetwalker too drag-ass to fight them off. The cops slowed to spar with them all through half-cracked car windows, picking up a little sugar on the side.

          “Lookie here, man, you stay outta my muthafuckin’ bizness. That coin filchin’s just too damn rude, dig?”  This cornrowed chiseler read down a frenetic semi-tough making for the corner newsboxes. But he picked the squirrel up by his motorcycle leather lapels, depositing him in a stationary trash container. Even the pigeons fluttered off from a greasy burger wrapper like this was a detonation in Londonderry or Belfast. Passing by charily, I happened to notice the lefty SF Lancer’s juicy tabloid headline: ‘White-Milk Affair Sours As City Toasts Gay Freedom Day Parade—politicos say they’re at each other’s throats’—something about lactose intolerance, as if that had anything to do with what was curdling down here.

          Chez Sands’ main beachhead was its cornerstone position on the Tenderloin’s porn row. Behind the video parlor loomed a Chez Sans, a second wave of magazines, pulp and postcard carnage, about as appetizing as nasal oysters up and down the sidewalk. Workingman’s special: ‘small butt’ dildos today only—the ultimate come-on being, ‘See a Flick With a Chick—Buck a Booth’.

          But I just begged that off and moved on, holding tightly to my kit bags, trying for the life of me to remember where I’d parked the Volvo. Instead, Moon orbited back to mind…everything was cool, everyday she kept things wired together without bitching, no psyching it all out—just got it done. No pouting, no alienation of affection—no fuss, no heavy scenes.She made it so easy, like when she steered me clear of Lafayette Park that time…what time was it exactly?

          “You been doin’ me like this for months, Levon. Ain’t buyin’ this crap no more!”  Stretch jeaned and spike heeled, some working girl stood about nine inches taller and outweighed her ponce by at least twenty pounds. She looked right down on him, but the hirsute little pimp in a pink jumpsuit tiptoed back against a parking meter to steady himself. Still, this Amazonian Wanda in shrunken spandex and cashmere tapped him atop his pomade-processed head to press her point. “Y’don’t be takin’ that off the top on me no mo…”

          Hardly receptive to more domestic strife, I stepped it up past more encounter pits and angled toward Market Street. Several blocks of firetrap bookstores and lunched-out grills, and Tenderloin recesses popped open like a photoflash umbrella to the blinding excesses of Hallidie Plaza. The energy and commotion was overwhelming after all that sensory depravation—an appropriate locus in quo to commemorate the cable car system’s founding father. Here, nothing stood still for long, save perhaps for the lengthy MUNI queues. Cable gripmen rotated Hallidie’s cranky little cars on the Market Street turnaround, sending thrill-hungry tourists back up the Powell and Hyde Street lines.

          Blaring autos and motor buses edged along Market, horning around the green and cream colored torpedo trolleys that had swayed and rumbled along these gleaming inlaid rail beds since DiMaggio played pick-up games around San Francisco sandlots. Directly below, streamlined BART trains subwayed silently enroute to Concord or Daly City, the outdoor escalators conveying passengers between the Powell Street Station and Hallidie Plaza chaos. Altogether, the scene was akin to a cutaway of some hobby shop ant farm, more often than not under ultraviolent light.

          Whoa, talk about a bloomin’ getaway… There, up on a colorful billboard atop the Bank of America building to my left was a larger-than-life advert for Qantas Airlines, picturing a golden sunrise tableau of Australia’s yawning, parabolic-shelled Opera House. The poster’s  boldface head was: ‘Escape to Sydney. A Harbour That’s Positively AUsome.’.  Speak of the Tasmanian devil, but what did that mean to me? Was it going to be bookin’ all over again, or playing that Fear card in my pocket? Either/or, god forbid neither/nor—there was no splitting the difference now, splitting headache or no.

          Then again, you wanted sociology, egghead, you’ve got sociology up the wazoo—a longitudinal and/or latitudinal field study—pick your poison. Really, theory or practice; foreign or domestic; lily white or worldly bright; publish or perish; penance or parish; zoom in, pull back?  Still, what a test case to behold and unfold here, empirically out of left field—no control group or demographic stratification, only a lab clock critically running on borrowed time. Not your garden variety walk in the park by any stretch of the imagination. Hell, if I just wasn’t so functionally double-blind, maybe I could even have tracked down my car.

          “Looking for something, son?” asked a grizzled work detail street sweeper, squinting up from clearing a plugged Market Street storm drain. “Always ready to help a fella here in the city that knows how.”

          “Thanks, but right now I just need to know where…”

Care for more?

Chapter 51. Amid praying to the 
heavens, negotiating a circus midway, 
outcomes are debated, a throwback 
milieu sets the dial tone…

“In or out, here or 
there, be wary of any 
malice in asunderland.”

          “This has gotten totally out of hand. I must ask you to finish at once…”

          “I know, I know…just a couple more minutes…”

          “Sir, you’re topping $30. I just can’t hold the line any longer.”

          “Get off my case, will ya? I’ll be through in a few!”

          “Make sure you come down to the front desk when you do…”

          “Yeah, yeah—anyway, it got so bad I didn’t know where I was. Couldn’t stay in the city—the whole place was spinning around and I didn’t want to be in the same town as her, let alone the same species. Night time was a total blur, went back and forth across the damn Bay Bridge three times before finally stopping on Treasure Island to figure what next…”

          “Tsk, poor baby…”

          “I was running out of gas, so I had to cool down somewhere,” I pulled a chocolate Do-Nut out of its cellophane pack. “So I headed to a rest area by Vallejo I’d crashed in once before. Froze my ass off, everything gyrating around the headliner, windows icing up. By morning, it began to hit me what a bind I was in…”

          “And who’s to blame for that?”

          “C’mon, I need that like a liver transplant. So I had no choice but to come back to San Francisco—been here, but not here, ever since. Driving around mostly, trying to dig out, you know, make up my mind—make the big decision.”

          “At this point, I wonder whether you’d even know a big decision if it hit you in the kabanza…”

          “Hey, gimme a break, Moon,” I nibbled at the fudgy frosted edges. “You know how convoluted this situation is. I mean, I’m really hamstrung. Took this room on Rivoli, up near Saturn Street, of all places—a sublet in a Victorian flat above the Haight I found on a UCSF bulletin board. Top floor, I could see the Golden Gate Bridge. The guy was going to Yosemite for the weekend, just said to pay him the rent and partial deposit on Monday. Had the place to myself, free trial, I’d unpacked the car and everything. There were these beautiful hillside houses, and the ocean, but the whole neighborhood had cleared out of town, even the stores in Cole Valley were like totally deserted, no street fairs, nothing. Got lonely as hell…she was the only person I knew around here. You can see why I never made it to Monday…”

          “So you called her first, I suppose…why are you telling me this?!”

          “Doesn’t matter, she wasn’t home anyway,” I sputtered, chocolate crumbs flying. “So I started driving around again, hearing all these blasted voices in my head.”

          What I’d neglected to mention was that mister sublet had turned away four solid prospects with cash in hand—and here he had his eyes on a rear-decked flat in Diamond Heights. He needed the rent split to move up there. Told me he had a soft spot for…Coloradans. Those aforementioned voices chimed in primarily via high-bias CrO2 Dolby stereo, as the guy’s slant-streeted pink Rivoli crib featured a McIntosh vacuum tube-powered audiophile set-up with ‘Voice of the Theater’ speakers. Why I kept wallowing in John Denver under these circumstances was beyond me, a ‘Rocky Mountain High’ tape of everything from ‘Leaving, On A Jet Plane’ and ‘Fly Away’ to ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’, and ‘I’m Sorry’…the whole treacly, pining cassette.

          This audible pathology soon had me carving a path around the block, Alma over to Belvedere Street, down to Cole Valley and back again, vowing to change my tunes. Aching images of Syd’s bedroom ménage a tragedy pummeled my head as I slide-stepped the hard city sidewalks like a night watchman coaxing his bunions, commencing to repack the Volvo a little more after every lap.

          The only paper trail I’d left behind were more deadbeat apologies taped to the living room record/bookcase and kitchen table. Slipping the guy’s door keys back into his mail slot, I coasted down Rivoli to clutch start the Volvo and its weakening battery, nevertheless hitting the radio to the untimely dirge of an Eagles’ sad-eyed ‘Desperado’. Speed dialing that away, I caught KSFC between Fleetwood tracks, drawing from its stranger-than-strange file that Peoples Templers had grown so paranoid about CIA infiltration that they were fishing around Russian, Cuban, even North Korean missions for potential asylum.

          CLICK. “Ah-hem, excuse me, but you must clear this line…”

          “Get off my case, dammit! I’ll be down in a minute, just let me finish here…”

          “Kenny, I’ve got to run, anyway…” 

          “Moon, please,” I said, hearing ‘Mandy’ playing softly in her background. “Just a second, it helps so much to talk to you…uh, where was I? Oh, yeah, I crossed the Bay Bridge back and forth so many times, the toll taker waved me through. Then I stayed in this stupid motel about a block from her old place. I needed something to hang this all on, you know? Retrace some steps, get some answers—driving around and around her old block, never hit the pillow before 4 a.m. Then the bucks started running thin, so I hit this dump. You wouldn’t believe it, a real snakepit, I swear…it took all my strength not to call you before this…”

          “Tell me about strength, Kenny. I’ve resorted to re-reading Erica Jong, even Kubler-Ross ‘On Death and Dying because of your spin-out. Tsk, I don’t know, you spend all our precious time earning two sociology degrees, then veer off on that advertising tangent—advertising! How sell-out can you get? Then this…I really worry about you and all the flipping around…”

          CLICK. “Sir, time’s up, you’re approaching $40 now, I’ve got to cut this off…”

          “One more minute, just one more minute, please,” I sputtered, kicking at the camera bag I had brought up from the Volvo. “Honestly, Moon, I’m trying to work through it, sort it all out…I’m wondering if maybe I’ve screwed up royally here. So what if you came out again, or…”

          “Maybe? Look, Kenny, if you really want to work it out, you’re going to have to come back to Chicago. I’m not chasing one more mile after you, I mean it! See, I’ve made some decisions while you’ve been wildcatting around. Number one is, I’m here to stay for now.”

          “Aww, you can’t mean that, I…”

          “You betchum. And if you do come back, you best be prepared to make a decision of your own, and sooner rather than later for your own sake. I’m talking about commitment here.”

          CLICK. “Fifteen seconds before disconnect, fifteen seconds…”

          “OK, OK, mister. What other decisions, Moon? What’s going on back there,” I rattled, visions of Lester Mendel winging in as the crow flies from his fallow fantasy farm. “Don’t tell me there’s somebody else hangin’ around…you know, like because of that special rela…”

          “Special what? Tsk, bye-bye, Kenny—safe trip, see you soon.”

          “Aww, nothing, but…” I caught myself—Mendel family, mother of all loose lips-wise. “Moon, wait, gotta straighten some things out first. I’ll call you by noon tomorrow, promise, I…” CLICK, fzzzt, CLIck.

          KNOCK, KNock. “Mister Herbert, open up, please. Come with me.”

          “Yeah, yeah…hold on to your drawers.”

          “Sir, must I resort to my passkey?”

          “Com-ing…” Who belonged to that tinny little voice? It was seeping through the odor vents in this mud brown door, with its Y’s men ten commandments peeling away like Red Guard handbills, above the chain lock with its missing links. Neither had I gotten around to telling Melissa that I’d eventually wound up in the Central San Francisco YMCA Hotel—suiting me to a T at that late moment,meaning T for Tenderloin. Christ, I could hardly remember how and when I got down here.

          “We don’t appreciate such fracases, you know…our guests aren’t …”

          “Are you shittin’ me?” I asked, opening 718’s squeaky metal door to this gaunt, George Carlin-looking staffer in a blue Y-insigniaed sweater vest. “This place isn’t exactly the Fairmont or Hilton—they’ve got better cockroaches than you’ve got guests.”

          “Present company accepted, I’m sure,” said the 50ish swishy desk clerk, straightening his Trinidad stingy brim fedora, stroked his graying goatee as he beckoned me toward the elevator. We were descending in a cable-slipping bucket before I could serve up a decent rejoinder. “But what would you know about  ritzy hotels anyhow?”

          “Seen my share,” I replied, feeling somewhat put upon by the dig. “Seen my share…”

          The Central Y was this huge, blocky brown brick tomb—complete with a monumental arching Doric columned portal—that had belonged to the Tenderloin of better days, if indeed the district had ever seen them. We hit the  main floor like a lunar lander, wherein I followed the clerk through a buzzer-locked steel security door and across a green tile floor, gone yellow with Glo-Coat, to his wire-caged front desk. All manner of aging cane swingers and early Emporium shopping baggers staked out black vinyl couches the full length of the avocado walled lobby. Everyone, everything looked so sickly lima green—it was either jaundice or the fluorescent lighting, these not being subjects in any course catalog I’d ever surveyed before.

          “Let’s see, you owe $42.80 for the phone call, tax included,” the clerk tallied, before turning to hang some vacated room keys onto rows of discolored brassy wall hooks. “Payable as of now.”

          “Traveler’s check?” I sighed, annoyed, fixing on the grosgrain ribbon band and canary side feathers of his raffia straw hat, half denying I was even in this place, let alone that I owed it forty smackers more—and was running way low on funds as it was, Syd’s reimbursement notwithstanding.

          “Cash…”

          “Crap, I can’t believe this is happening,” I squared things up, then turned to storm away, dropping my wallet on the worn tile floor.

          The desk clerk stood me off at his steel and glass security door, waiting a cool half-minute before buzzing the lock to let me out of the cashier’s counter. I stepped aside an arthritic mopper who’d handed the billfold to me as she scrubbed some heel marks with a scouring pad. Cleaning woman in a YM? I was in no inquiring mood here either, but did fix on her thickly calloused hands and gnarled fingers.

          The aproned crone wheezed and thanked me for giving ground, without so much as looking up. For an instant, she reminded me of my mother, became mom at the Rosens’ holiday festivities back in Willow Grove—reassuring that she would never actually desert her only son, would stick by me, even after I’d sentenced her to plot and soil. She’d stand by me, bless her soul, even way the hell out here.

          In an act of righteous cruelty, the Young Christian Men had once installed full-length mirrors directly across from each floor’s elevators—best face forward for rededicated, spit-shined scriveners and salesmen. But now, the mirrors reflected all the warmth and uplifting spirit of Travis Bickle minus the munitions and heat. I caught myself all stubbly and disheveled in the harsh overhead lighting, jabbing to cover my eyes and scurry into an upbound car.

          As soon as the elevator hit floor 7, I caught myself in yet another brutal full-length mirror, Cuisinart hair, itchy jowls, unbuckled at the flannel and denim waistline—damned if I really looked that puffy and pale. I fled down the dim, split-pea hallway back to 718, busting ATF-style into the spare, 8’x10’ room. I flicked on a light switch above its black, no-dial extension phone. A small, white shade covered the flickering 40-watt lamp nailed directly above the bed, a paint speckled, metal-frame single with casters grooved deeply into a secretion stained reseda tile floor.

          One more night, what was one more blurry night? Yeah, one thing at a time, take it a step at a time—totally on the ones. I tossed my keys and depleted billfold onto a tiny laminated wood-grain desk, complete with an obligatory Gideon Bible in the open drawer, and draped my plaid shirt over its hardback metal chair. That pack of Do-Nuts and a pint of chocolate milk would have to hold me over until morning. I devoured the sugary snack pack while reviewing Y commandments framed on the door: No yelling, no loud music, no drugs or liquor, no nude photos, no lascivious behavior, no smoking in bed. OK, anything so long as I didn’t have to hit the goddamn 7^th floor head.

          Unfortunately, that was like holding back the Raiders’ Black Hole. My head began seizing, racing in no discernible direction other than away from where I was. I paused to catch my breath, grab my nose, pressure squeeze my groin and dart down the hallway, across a dimpled turquoise carpet runner that clashed violently with split-pea walls and those red fire sprinklers clanking overhead.

          Each mud brown door yielded a life current unto itself: 715 a shortwave radio, 713 a past-prime TV. Electric shavers, blenders, window fans, space heaters and vaporizers hummed through successive door vents between 718 and the head, marginally masking belches, chain coughing, game shows, country singalongs and long lost regulars reduced to arguing with themselves. Sounded as though 711 preferred a one-man dialogue, faithfully recreating the rantings vis-à-vis his cuckolding former wife.

          “Hey, close that sucker behind you, a guy needs a little privacy in here,” a gargantuan old seaman barked as I rushed to push through the swinging bathroom door. His ham-shaped head was in a full mentholated lather, with one disposable razor strip over the top, like a figure-ground mohawk.

          “Uh yeah, sure,” I gulped, wiping the sweat from my forehead with my regulation issue white towel as I made for the nearest urinal. “Whatrya…”

          “Shavin’ my melon,” the sea lion studied me through the sink mirrors as I unzipped toward pisser number two. “Keeps the head clear, thoughts don’t get tangled up in the brush.” With that, he shaved carefully, back to brows, pulling his scalp taut with the other hand, steadying himself by propping his hairy beachball belly over the sink top. Barbasol clumps dropped down onto his beer-swollen abdomen, dripping slowly into the canyon of his navel. “Just like Kojak.”

          “Don’t cut yourself there,” I replied, flushing and shaking, zipping away from the pot, startled by a loud bang, followed by hornish, elongated gas passing. A center stall beyond the urinals opened slowly, some wiry middle-aged dockhand emerging, skivvies down to his steel-toed work boots, waving folds of bun wad as if bon voyaging the QE II. In his wake, I bolted for the door.

          “You’ll get your chance before you know it, Samson,” the shaver growled my way, licking errant lather off his chin with a swipe of the tongue. “Just you wait and see.”

          I made it back to 718 none too soon, skirting over to a tiny mirrorless wash basin on a far corner wall, albeit not far enough. Its single cold-water tap had long leaked into iron erosion of the crystallized porcelain, a rust stain the shape of an organic yellow turnip. Damn, the fat bastard was right, I groaned, picking and pulling at oily hair, catching my reflection in a side window reflection against a brick wall of the next building over. The room’s overhead light shone starkly in this corner, revealing spotty patches of exposed scalp, top and back. It was thinning, like I’d never noticed before.

           So chastened, I fetal curled up beneath a silt brown blanket and bedspread, reaching to kill the overhead light; a brief short circuit sizzle, and 718 went dark. Cold, stiff sheets chafed like a forced-march field pack on a mid-summer Fort Campbell afternoon. A wintergreen disinfectant flexed its industrial strength against pervasive bogs of errant excrement, losing to an olfactory stand-off between stadium troughs and the three aft lavatories of an Avianca DC-8. It was a stubborn, burning male odor up and down the hallway, as structural as the floor and walls, and traces of lingering weed and cigar smoke were freshly fragrant by comparison.

          Still, foul cigar smoke? Streetcorner reefer badness? I traced it all to the door vents, along with some mumbling out in the corridor, which soon turned heated and onerous.

          “Stuff it, cockbite!”

          “You’re gonna eat that stub, mudderfugger, no lie.” Sounded like the seafarer.

          “Yah, you’ll eat me first, bitch…” COUGH, cough…

          I squirmed and kicked in the squeaky springed bed, restlessly grabbing at its metal spoked headboard, unable to place that second voice, but disinclined to sniff it out any further. My clammy, clenching hands soon slipped into the bed board’s paint-chipped grooves, dug by so many frantic fingers before me. It felt as though each dirty nailed digit had dug in firmly, scraping back and forth with bitter grit. And I couldn’t even begin to account for the dark, rumbling, nightmarinating hours.

          “This wasn’t gonna happen,” I muttered out loud, rolling my head around the spongy foam pillow, ear to ear. She’s not gonna force me into this—nope, I’m not gonna blink again. Acidic images of our Golden Gate Park face-off poured over my surface resolve. You’re doing it, jerk. I’m back, so you’re coming back. She tapped that out loud and clear on my forehead. Shit, it couldn’t be her, she wasn’t my mother, right? Maybe wasn’t even her. No, it was them—that was it, them. Let’s see, one could, the other should. If Syd had come through, there’d be no phone call, right? Uh, uh, Moon was the one all along, just like I’d figured in the park…really. All told, it was getting awfully complicated.

          “Put that damn stogie out, I tell ya!”

          “Aww, kiss, kiss. Just come down to 703, girl. I gotsta a big La Palina for y’all…”

          “Kiss off, you suckin’ fag…”

          “You get the plot, honey…lights, camera, ac-tion.”

          The voices seeped now like propane fumes through 718’s door. I wound tightly in the covers and pictured Moon running Seamus in Chautauqua Park. No, Sydney, racing me up to her sunlit studio. No, Moon feeding me lentils and carrot sticks after classes, on Norlin quad. That was it, of course—there she was, would always be. This apparent battle line was just shadows in the dust. Sure, she was just setting up the big, heavyweight homecoming for her California bronco buster cryin’ for home, toolin’ in like some road-burned warrior. And she’d take me in again, forgiving me, feeding me, tossing scraps out to Seamus with the wrens and tree squirrels in our Boulder backyard. It was enough to send me unfurling myself from the bedding, leaping onto the cold linoleum floor. “Shut up out there, assholes. Can’t a guy get some decent sleep around here?!” BAM, Bam…  

          Who was that? Somebody slamming on my wall, one room over. I paced furiously, then shot back over to that window mirror. Popping on the light, I took one more quick, cruel look at a faceful of purple-eyed trepidation. But back to bed before my feet froze, before those voices broke through the mud brown door, before some woman screaming down outside that window shattered my sole remaining reality check until check out at 10 a.m. Hell, I’d be out of this hole by seven, at least; had some serious thinking to do before lunchtime. Heh, not to worry, Moon would still be getting me for a song—damaged goods, but maybe too cheap, nonetheless…

          “Somebody shoot that cunt if she don’t stop that screamin’ down there!”

          The buzzard bluster voice again, coughing, wheezing right outside my door. Who were these scuzzballs, what were they doing out there? What was I doing in here? This was insane, the whole left coast deal, the way it was closing in—stokin’ a Panatella you fat-ass morons. Aww, forget this shit, get on back to Moon first thing. I propped up against the headboard, cold metal numbing my spine. That woman’s screams continued to rattle the window, while jolts of red and blue neon peppered in from the hotel sign several floors below. I counted the light flashes as they filtered through water-stained gauze curtains—anything to keep from up and looking down there.

          Sirens converged on Golden Gate Avenue, out front of the Y; soon came one final, horrific scream, then silence. I really did want to look out by now, but my frozen toes still said flat no. Heavy morning, heavy decisions, had to bag some z’s—sink into these measly blankets, hell with the smell. Just keep counting the blue-red flashes, I blinked, tune out the police radios, sleep on it, it’ll come clear by sunrise.

          “Bout goddamn time they shut her up…”

          “Musta shoved a big fat dick in her yap.”

          “You’d know better than me ’bout that.”

          “Open invite, gurlll—you knowww whatst I like…”

          These exchanges were soon drowned out by paramedic sirens, fading to bullish hall farting and more distant tuber, emphysemic coughs. Then all units screeched away, leaving just the clicking, flicking hotel sign, a dripping sink faucet, roach and bedbug warfare, and some residual lunatic roaming the hall, pounding door to door. Could have sworn I heard a news bulletin from his fuzzy transistor radio, something about a new beastly attack up in Lafayette Park. Again, now? Wouldn’t you know it—but what the hell, not exactly my bailiwick, not my…leitmotif. Naw, just one more night here, what was one more bloody night?

          I furtively pillowed my ears, before thrashing, grabbing a handout card tucked under an ash-pocked night stand doily. It appeared to be some sort of feel-goodwill message, which I could barely make out with each flash of red-blue neon. Appeared to be double-sided, watermarked platitudes preaching to ‘Face Your Rage And Unlock The Cage’—with a flipside reading, ‘Face Your Fears, And They Will Disappear’.

          Aiming to spindle and mutilate the card into a dented trash basket, I instead stuffed it under the pillow, filing it away for future reference and/or bust-out defiance. Had to be better than pounding the Gideon until ringing, stinging wake-up calls come break of day.

Care for more?

Chapter Fifty. A rude awakening
augurs some quick and dirty clean-up, 
before mind-muddled kickin’ it in the ’Loin…

 

“She may be easy street, but 
can you make it on your own— 
meaning go it alone…”

          SQUEECH, SQUEEEEECH. “The left button, push it harder, I’m loaded with luggage and everything!”

          “Pushing it all the way—wait, I’m coming down…”

          I set aside an Examiner front-page piece on Peoples Temple developments down in Jonestown, how the U.S. Embassy expressed concern over further defections and Guyana hotel firebombings. How State Department officials wanted no part of Jim Jones’ rants, his rumored mass suicide rehearsals, even though the latest cables from Georgetown described a ‘community of armed, primitivized American citizens existing as a self-contained unit in a foreign land’. Sounded sort of like Marquette Park to me.

          So I dismissed the below-the-fold report, setting aside the bulldog edition to give Syd’s front-door buzzer button one more exasperated push before bounding down thickly carpet runnered stairs to greet her in the foyer. An airport van driver had helped her with several matching suitcases and taped cardboard cartons from Marshall Field’s and Crate & Barrel. I managed to lug most of her airfreight and carry-ons upstairs, while she tipped the Lorrie’s van man and checked her mail slot one more time. By the time she had carried a Vuitton overnight bag into 2C, I’d stacked most everything else on her foyer and kitchen floor.

          “Going weak in your old age, Kenneth?” She pointed toward her bed as though we were only halfway there.

          “What is with this stuff? I helped spread it all out atop the comforter-made Murphy.

          “From my parents, they’re so sweet—just some more goodies to keep me moving onward and upward,” Syd glanced about her apartment. “Well, looks like you cleaned up after yourself. Nothing broken, I take it?”

          “Uh, nothing broken…here, whatd’ya expect, Syd…ney.” Damn, I just still couldn’t bring myself to call her that. But this was hardly why my eyes zagged back toward the kitchen. Her galley was kosher clean, not even a water spot, the necklace and wild horse creamer hadn’t moved a speck. “Hey, missed you…”

          “Me too,” she said, following my cue, from avocado enamelware to Endusted breakfast nook, with white glove deliberation, running a finger across her prized Imari pitcher. “Not bad—so, what exactly have you accomplished since I left?”

          “Who, me?” I lingered near the doorway, as if to keep her focused on the alcove, surrounding appliances and countertops.

          “Who else, the trashman? How often have you been watering the plants? My poor hyacinth looks a little pale…”

          “I took care of it, all right. C’mon let’s sit a bit and catch up…”

          Sure, not to worry, she still basically loved me—like she said. Maybe she’s had some time to reconsider and realize what we had going. Why else would she have me stay here, right—just wanted to keep me under wraps while she and her mother sorted everything out…women! She went back like I did, then came to her senses just the same. It was meant to be the two of us taking on San Francisco—an unbeatable combination, just like we’d said from the beginning. She needed me, simple as that—just taking a little time to adjust. Look at what she’s getting, said herself once how none of it meant anything without me by her side. Well, here I was, gift-wrapped and postage paid, even with a couple of clangers to smooth over. I cast a passing glance in at her mother’s cheesecake photo images for moral and immoral support.

          “No, let’s hit the living room, I need to unwind and unpack—the flight was non-stop crunch time all the way out of O’Hare.” Syd pranced past me and the Murphy bed before I could pull out a chair at her kitchen table. She put the latest Karla Bonhoff album on her stereo, then plopped down on her tan sateen sofa, right next to a matching throwcover and crimson pillow. “What’s the matter, Kenneth, you’re sucking on your moustache again.”

          “Uh, watch it there, Syd…”

          “Here, take a seat, listen to me,” she searched, patting the seat cushions with a Poesque pulse. “It was mostly a fantabulous celebration back there, exhausting though, especially when my parents kept trying to fix me up with Bernard Zynich and his father’s Evanston gallery again. Chicago was all right, but not like here. Shoulda been with me downtown—I scored some classic creamers in Bucktown and Lincoln Park.”      

          “Great, maybe I’ll use one as my dashboard Jesus,” I sat guardedly beside her, stretching my arm up around her shoulders, again fretting that Moon had had a place at the Mendel table.

          “Verrry funny,” she tossed that crimson pillow, hitting me upside the head.  “Speaking of cars, how is Foxy? Clean and full, I hope…Kenneth, what is this?”

          “Um, it was late, Syd,” I stammered, pulling back as she stared a hole through a nearly white spot on the seat cushion, where the pillow had just been. “I was exhausted, spilled some soda. The light was dim and I guess I just rubbed too hard with some Fantastik. Didn’t want the stain to set–went too far the other way…”

          “You guess,” she spouted, trying herself to comb the spot away. “You guessed my beautiful new sofa to oblivion!”

          “Yeah, it sucks, I know. But that duvet there would cover it square…”

          “It’s not a duvet. And trouble is, my throwcover will have to mask it square,” she simmered—there went those nostrils. “I mean, it’s a place cover now—I’ve got to make sure it stays here. I hate having to do that, Kenneth, hate not being able to just casually toss it, to make it have to hide something. Do you know how much that freaks me out?!”

          “Easy, Syd…ney, sit back,” I blurted, owning up guest-wise as she readied to pace and fret. “We have to go over something about the Audi…”

          “What about Foxy?” she pulled away, pushing her throwcover into the sofa corner, then kneading it down over the cola spot as if prepping and panning pizza dough.

          “Well, everything was great until I went for your cleaning,” I recounted, in awe of all the baggage she’d carried along from Chicago, yet weighing that it still wasn’t as heavy as mine. “Had to park downhill on Steiner Street, and this brand new Mercedes wedged in front of me, so I had to back uphill. Ever had that happen? All the time I drove cabs, never got pinched in so damned tight.”

          “Hmph, happens all the time here, for godsake. Even handicapped drivers can get out of that kind of fix. So what did you do to my baby?”

          “Whew,” I sighed. If only Moon had been there to there to rub my aching head. “Well, I hit an oily slick spot backing up, and slid down into the Benz…”

          “Oh my god,” she recoiled further, as if I’d Raggedy Ann flailed her first born. “You’ve gone and wrecked two cars?!”

          “Naw, the Mercedes wasn’t even scratched, not even a nick in its rubber pads…”

          “Oh, sure, now the bad news.” Her eyes glowed VDT green, and she heaved deeply, keeping me at arm’s length. “My Foxy’s folded up like a Japanese fan…”

          “Wait, it’s only the grill and bumper—they’re a little dented, the parking light lens, that’s all.”

          “That’s all? I want to see this instant…no, I can’t even bear to look right now. Oy vai, you’ve wounded me, Kenneth, mortally,” she moaned, burying her face in the throwcover. “What were you thinking? How could you be such an ungrateful klutz?!”

          “Burned?! Come on, Syd, I’ll bet your dad’s insurance will cover it…”

          “I pay my own premiums, I’ll have you know. Good thing, ’cause you probably aren’t even insured. But at least you picked up my cleaning, right?”

          “Yeah, well that’s what made the whole deal such a bummer. That hag at the cleaners wouldn’t release your clothes, because I didn’t have a claim ticket. Can you believe that?”

          “What? I left if for you, Kenneth, under your wild horse creamer there,” she re-emerged, pointing toward the kitchen in disbelief. “How could you miss that? Now, what do you suggest I do about my appointment?”

          “I don’t know, you’ve got a closet full of clothes in there…should be plenty enough to meet with your…ecotect.”

          “Hmph, that’s not worthy of a response,” she bristled. “Makes me wonder what other little disasters you have for me…”

          “Nothing else, Syd, swear…”

          “Well, have you been doing anything productive here,” she snapped, as if rolling my show and tell around in her head like a priest confronted with the confessions of a serial abuser. “About your own life, for instance?”

          “Aww, it’s only been a week,” I mumbled. “It’s all so different out here this time. Sort of been lying low, acclimating—you know, checking the want ads, sorting things out…planning my approach.”

          “In other words, basically zippo,” she said, staring across her bachelorette in evident displeasure.

          “No way,” I spurted, rubbing together the calluses on my palms. “I went through your place like crazy —even found some dust you missed…”

          “So handy dandy,” she said, “but what’s your next move?”

          “I’ve just realized that things are up in the air. Still can’t figure out where the advertising deal fits. Was also thinking about doing a photo shoot of that famous horse lady up in Nevada, Mustang Maggie. Guess I’m still most turned-on by what you said that time, about pooling talents, teaming up. Figured I’d wait until you got back, we could hash it out…”

          “Oy, first of all, Wild Horse Annie’s the really famous one, but she died nearly a year ago,” Syd rubbed her temples with a shake of the head. Then she jumped up and turned toward the Murphy bed. She began rearranging her luggage and packages for a moment before pacing between the sofa and her wall of small-framed figure studies. “But you still don’t get it, do you. You’re living in the past, I’m telling you. You’ve got to erase that canvas and stop clinging to that one little moment we had. Look, I’ve told you exactly how I feel now—total truth. I’ve even tried to help set you up, but, zilch…”

          “You set me up, all right,” I blurted, photo spread too thin, silently cursing Studs and the Billy Goat. I just exploded, didn’t know where that came from at all. But there it was, grimy and slithery and ugly—a dogfish on a 60 lb. test deep-sea line, when angling for a postcard Marlin.

          “Just what do you mean by that,” she pounced, turning sharply toward me.

          “Your letter, the ‘wait forever’ stuff, like that,” I said. “I got the distinct impression you really wanted that dream. Christ, I didn’t just come back here for my health!”

          “Look, I dreamed that dream with a Kenneth Herbert who was strong, confident, working—ready to take life by the horns. Sorry, but that’s not the Kenneth I saw cowering behind Melissa Saversohn. That’s not the Kenneth I’m seeing right now.”

          “Whose doing is that? You’ve got some responsibility here. Maybe Moon was right, all you saw in me was her man, and that I was keeping you from making her a Mendel again. I mean, she told me about the family phone calls back there.”

          “What?! That doesn’t even deserve a response. I’m not playing your guilt-trip game. Not when I’ve learned we all do what we have to do, and I’m concluding you have a dodgy agenda of your own.”

          “So, what are you saying?”

          “I’m saying maybe you’d best get on with it.”

          “Syd always comes first, huh,” I shouted, voice crackling with despair. “This really sucks, you know that?”

          “I’ve got a million things to do, Kenneth, and we’re going nowhere. I recommend you go get your act together somewhere else.”

          “And do what, Syd?”

          “Stop calling me that, for one thing,” she said, turning away icily, rearranging her Murphy bed. “Find a place to stay, for starters, a base of operations, whatever…go figure it out.”

          “Sure, how about I just lie low, hang around like one of your little toy boys, for when her highness is getting bored…”

          She suddenly darted back toward me, grabbing my jacket and pointing about the apartment. “I’ve had it with this sorry crap. Here, I’ll help you gather your things, I want you should leave!”

          I pulled loose, then lamely attempted to embrace her. “Tell me about what you want, you spoiled little…”

          SLAPPP. She stiff-armed away and sailed one across my cheek.  “Like Daddo always advised me, I don’t back losers, Kenneth. So get out…now!”

          “Sure, whatever your pleasure, SYDney, whatever your majesty desires,” I gripped, shaken, clenched yet just prefrontal fisting against my thigh, like a demolition ball against a wall, some kitchen cabinet deliberations sorely repeating on me. Instead, I proceeded to cram my clothes and shaving kit into a Carson, Pirie shopping bag, shuffling toward the front door. “Oh, and thanks ever so much for all your help.”

          “I can only do so much for you, Kenneth,” she handed me a bank envelope. “From here on, it’s up to you…”

          “Tell you what, I’ll even take care of these old papers,” I heatedly scooped up that pile of rummaged snack wrappers and newsrags, filling the shopping bag to its whorled twine handles. “At least I can do that much for you.”

          “Fine, appreciate it. So, where will you go,” she asked, with a strange, sudden splash of concern.

          “Who knows? What do you care,” I growled, on my way out the door.

          “Just in case I have to reach you for anything, dammit,” she yelled, behind me as I headed down the hall. “Like for Foxy’s insurance claim, maybe…”

          “Try the Fairmont, the St. Francis—better yet the Ambassador East and West…”

          “Ambassadors, Chicago? Now don’t go doing anything rash, Kenneth. I mean, could you really go back like this, anyway?”

          “I’ll get you a number somewhere. If need be, then you can have your people call.”

          “People? Puleeze. But the way you’re going, the best hope is the Jack Tar Hotel or something, though you’ll probably end up feeling sorry for yourself at the Y,” she huffed, following me several steps into the hallway.

          “Whatever, I’m sure you’ll be too busy—you know, busy winning and all…”

          “I’ll do what I have to, Kenneth. Now I probably shouldn’t tell you this in parting, but what the hell anymore. Remember the little secret I mentioned to you that once? Well, just between us, what I just found out in Winnetka confirmed it, for sure. I’ve always deep down wondered about my mother’s attachment to Melissa Saversohn—beyond Lester, that is, and our recent to-do really got my curiosity up. So I pleaded headache, then rummaged through Faith’s drawers one day when they were all at shul. Lo and behold, I came across an old file folder in her vanity that had a letter from Hal Saversohn back when we all lived near each other in Skokie. Here he was thanking her for surrogate suckling his baby daughter, since Mrs. Saversohn was so frail and infirm postpartum, vowing he would never say a word about it to anyone else.

          “My mother, can you believe it? Talk about midwifing, loose, liberal Faith Mendel cross-feeding—earth mother as birth mother. Who knows how long she wet-nursed Melissa? There was a doctor’s guideline in the folder, the whole shmeer. I mean, I always knew Moon was like, same age as me—but my buxom mother, with so much goodness to go around. No wonder my parents warmly welcomed Moon into the family, and still care so much. The whole thing freaks me out, almost as much as Lester is without her. What can I tell you, it’s like her invisible bond with my mom. See what you stirred up, Kenneth? I’m figuring Faith won’t know what I know now, and bet Lester and Moon don’t know much about it at all. No doubt it could really tear her to shreds at this point. Maybe it’s something you should know, but then I’m sure you would never dare say a word either…”

          “Me? No way,” I said, continuing on my way toward the stairs. Oh great: truth or consequences, fair or foul? But what was I supposed to do with that? Even if it was true, why’d she have to go layin’ it on me? What damn business was it of mine?! Was all I could do to find some way to unhear it. “Thanks for the scoop anyhow—I’ll take it under advisement. But that’s not any of my concern about now anyway, you know, our ‘moment’ being kaput and all.”

          “Advisement—you do just that,” she stepped back in through her doorway. “Ciao, Kenneth. Take care of yourself, I really mean it…and don’t get into any more trouble.”

          “C’mon, you’ve got more important things to worry about,” I sulked in stride, not wanting to turn back around to give her the satisfaction of a trophy glance. Rather, I just listened to the slamming of her door.

          Again, the tightening band around my head as I descended to Chestnut Street, along with the aching eyes and vising jaw. I wandered about in the early evening sun, before recalling where I had parked the Volvo. Damn, if I hadn’t wrecked her car, if only I’d played the dry cleaning card, even listened to Moon’s railing—hell, if I’d turned back at St. Louis, for that matter. Were there no better choices? Had I wagered on a long shot that collapsed at the gate? Call me mister clown car without the benefit of paper cannons and greasepaint.

          Had to get out of here, out of here fast. These people were vipers, this place was a beautiful, creeping swamp—bitches gonna be ruinin’ my life. Kill the traffic speeding, stop with the fucking horns. Well, no way, ’Zay—this pigeon’s packing, this sucker’s making heavy tracks. I clawed into the sagging 122S, tossed the shopping bag toward the rear seat. Then I sealed myself off from the worst, with a carload of worldlies and head full of seeping hoses. My cheek burned, ears rang like St. Peters and wrists redlined at seven grand. Moon, Faith, Syd and the dry cleaning lady all strobed across a field of vision penned in by a wiper jam of parking tickets.

          I caught my breath and finally started the fouled-out Volvo, clutching the wheel with cold, clammy palms, lurching into Chestnut Street traffic like a MUNI bus way behind schedule. A shrill, unforgiving horn ripped my ears, nearly stopped my racing heart. Some gorgeous Marin-type brunette glowered at me from behind the wheel of that same silver Mercedes 240, all but melting the plastic membrane in the safety glass of my door window. She slammed her brakes with a spiteful look in her eye, harboring something of a grudge, as if somehow recognizing me in a bad karmic way.

          Before I could menace a fist in response, my reflexive cabbie move, she roared around me, tapping her siren-like car alarm, revealing fresh plastic cracks in her Corte Madera license plate frame. One of a kind or just one in the same: it was so hard to tell. Coasting warily up behind her toward the Van Ness Avenue red light, I fully expected her to flip me half a peace sign when she glanced back through the sedan’s rear window.  

          Instead, she smiled and waved, before shooting me a peace sign in full, no accounting for derision or Marin bliss. Never saw that one coming, whatever it was supposed to mean. We crawled forward, fourth and fifth behind a line of cars barely moving through the green light, pedestrian crossings a lag factor in the intersection overall. Gunning into clearing traffic, the Marinite turned her Benz leftward up a split-laned Van Ness with freewheeling authority in the northerly direction of what my throwaway tourist map showed as Bay Street and Aquatic Park.

          A quick Chestnut green went yellow by the time I reached the corner, unsure whether to swing left or right onto a teeming Van Ness Avenue. The hesitation cost me another red light, and the hard, hands-on honking of several vehicles to my rear. I glanced back at them, then Syd’s apartment building, before fixing on a corner liquor/grocery—one of those ubiquitous Bay-style ‘bodegas’—thinking how dry mouth thirsty I had become.

          But slow on the trigger, at a loss for direction and resolve: just one more out-of-town bugger hesitant to turn another corner. I  braced to haul ass into the arterial ups and downs—no time for juicing, had to blow off the Steams. Yessir, fixin’ to go parkin’ it and hash things out, no damn stopping me now—‘Night Moves’ tracking up on the radio. I looked about the intersection with a big cold gulp, mainly for some sign marker that wasn’t pointing directly downhill.

Care for More?

Chapter 49. A circuitous route 
ends in Tender, merciless quarters, 
Y’s and wherefores prompting a 
rasher of sticky, stringy calls…

“Manning the mother load,
swaddled in the female fold—
break a mold, pain untold.”

          CLICK, snap, pop, brrrtt. Brrrrtt, hizzzzz…bbrrrrttt, hizzzzzzz…bbbbrrrrtttt… “Hello?”

          “I have a person to person collect call for Ken Herbert, will you accept?” Hssssst…

          “Kenn…oh, um, he’s not here now…”

          “Operator, operator, let me leave a quick message, will you?”

          “Hsssst. “We don’t normally do that, sir. But keep it short.”

          “Thanks a bunch, operator. Hi, would you tell Ken Herbert when he returns that, uh, Bill, yeah Bill called from California. And if he’d call me soon as possible at (415) 931-4537. I mean, right away!”

          “Tsk, honestly…” Click. CLICK.

          Rrrring. Rrrrriinnggg. “Yeah?”

          “Kenny? You’re beyond belief, you know that? Expecting me to pay for this call after all you’ve…tsk, what’s going on out there?!”

          “Oh, Moon, you don’t know how great it is to hear your voice…”

          “What’s this all about, Kenny? Where are you? Denise’s place?”

          “Wheww, not exactly, but I couldn’t pay for a call where I am. At least, it’s just a station-to-station rate…”.”

          “How thoughtful…so then, where are you? And don’t you dare tell me I’m paying for a long-distance to her place.”

          “You don’t know,” I asked, with a modest measure of relief, and not only that the old phone charge ruse worked one more time. “She moved, whole new apartment and phone set-up…”

          “You ass…if I had any sense, I’d hang up right now. You’re gonna repay me for this if I have to sell your record collection!”

          “They’re long gone, Moon, just like everything else I left in Boulder.” I thought I detected ‘You Don’t Have To Be a Star, Baby, To Be In My Show’ playing in her background. “But that’s a whole other story…”

          Over the course of one blurred week, Sydney had earlier sealed her show deal, signed on for an introductory EST guest seminar and leased this stand-alone studio apartment on Chestnut Street, just off Van Ness Avenue. Pivotal moves, she recounted, before departing for Chicago with her folks on this fantabulous gallery day—one that had burst through the upper margin of her biorhythm chart like mercury through a Needles thermometer.

          Scenario was her roommates had all but dug a moat around their household relationships on Coastal Avenue, filled with lavender ’gators and Brandy Alexander Flamme. Syd in turn resented Edie digging our Boulder phone number out of her bedside address book and secretly snitching to Moon that one time. So this sunny walk-up bachelorette came along on a laundromat bulletin board, and the place had a garage accessing a middling Marina backyard. She had figured it was a perfect spot for to set up a ground floor workspace and make her stand. Reflecting upon the whole Edie and Diana show, I couldn’t have agreed with her more—on that count, anyway.  

          “What could I do, Moon? I had no place to go, she was splitting to Chicago for that Mendel family thing, you know? I mean, what the hell after what she pulled…”

          “No, I don’t know…and what did she pull now?”

          “Aww, this whole thing is such a mess. I’m, like, totally disoriented,” feeling as I did so discombobulated, thoroughly disillusioned and dismembered… “Gettin’ so I don’t know where the hell I’m at anymore…”

          “Tell me something I don’t know…”

          “No, really, one of the main reasons I took her up on this housesitting gig for her was I decided familiar, even this warped kind of familiar, was better than not…” To be sure, better than in another nearby rip-off Lombard Street motel, what with Regina Tzu having cracked down on Thibeaux Cauler.

          “Warped isn’t the word for it…what am I doing even talking about this on my dime…”

          “Wait, don’t hang up, Moon. I’m cut loose alone like this, sitting here staring out at perfect sunshine. I can’t stand it!”

          “Don’t dump that on me, Kenny. It’s snowing out my window and I’ve got my own problems here.”

          “Hey, I need to share with you how crazy your sorta-sister really is. I swear, she’s becoming a raving megalomaniac, know what I mean?”

          “The dime’s running out, Kenny. From what I can tell, maybe you two actually deserve one another.”

          “Moon, come on!”

          “All I know is I did what I could to keep you in Chicago, but you made your choice. Much as it hurts, I’ll get through, always do. And frankly, I don’t want to hear about any of this anymore. You left me stranded here, so I’ve got to go feed the animules and move on with my life.”

          “Melissa, wait. Can I call you again if it gets real bad here? My head is pounding, I mean if I need you to massage my forehead…it’s always better when we talk…”

          “Only if you’ve run out of priests and shrinks—and where you are, that isn’t likely. Promise me, only in absolute desperation, when you’re on your way back to Chicago…”

          “Oh, you’re Hail Mary. And Moon, you sure you aren’t involved in that Mendel family thing back there?”

          “Tsk, you beat everything. Bye, Kenny, good luck.” CLICK. CLICK.

          Dead cat rebounce: So there I was, propped on Sydney’s Murphy bed after an off-again, on-again, flipping and flopping  night of unrest. My melon swelled against the headboard, feeling like crawling crustaceans had ascended to the mattress, mites and ticks seeming to march in formation up over the curve of the spread. Which of course was ridiculous because her entire pad had looked to be stone, untouchably immaculate. Still, I couldn’t stop scratching, sweating and shivering all at once—even though there was a tremor of the ol’ divine tolerance in Melissa’s voice, despite everything here and there. Was she really not party to the big Mendel reunion?

          I didn’t much know where I was or why, but at least had the presence of mind to tidy up about the brightly sunlit place. I dumped my corner store-bought coffees, salami sandwich wrappers and Dinty Moore cans, jammed them down the kitchen garbage chute, then rolled my dirty laundry up in a pit-stained CU t-shirt, piling it in a corner toward the apartment door. But screw that! I wasn’t going to totally turn housemaid. What the hell was I doing here, anyway? When I bet sure as shit Moon was gettin’ back there the Mendel fold—and I’m lettin’ it happen, stranded out here while they’re probably all back mishpoching around.

          Yet heads up, handled and held: I did make Syd a housekeeping promise. So instead I grabbed a soda and sifted through the daily newspapers before tossing them out, too—yeah, try a little catching up on the local press, gloss over the classifieds, uncertain what ads I’d want, even where to begin. Chronicle and Examiner pages were thick with articles and columns on the recent statewide passage of Proposition 13; how San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors had passed a proclamation of revenue emergency, and Mayor Moscone was pushing hefty payroll tax increases to make up for a looming property tax shortfall. While Chron’s City Hall beat uncovered ongoing permit tussles over the Gay Freedom Day parade.

          A style feature profiled the Dan Whites’ picture-perfect new parenthood, and the couple’s exciting new food venture over at a Pier 39, bankrolled by heavyweight Warren Simmons, if not The City’s ‘Irish Mafia’. Herb Caen quipped about what this Hot Potato could do for the Supervisor’s political fortunes. Yeah, those blamed Irish gangs and their cahootin’.

          Stir crazy, her crazy: When I couldn’t house sit still any longer, I lit out for a little evening constitutional, revisiting a once too-familiar donut shop to feed my habitual craving. Lining up for a chocolate twist, I could overhear two lower Pacific Heights deadeners catching up over some glazed and house blend. Seemed they were slurping over the apparent drop-off in those Lafayette Park attacks these days. Where one rag layered elder thought the crazed killer may simply have changed his MO and blown town, his old cully countered that the bastard may have been locked up on some totally different rap, unable to get bailed. Hell, maybe he’d been made, and was lying low, or somebody had offed him back. But who cared anyway, they shrugged, garbage in, garbage out, right?

           I just grabbed my nutty twist and hit Van Ness full stride. Really, what did those cretins know? Had to be more to it than that. Just so long as they didn’t go asking me about it. All things considered, I took back to the streets posthaste, and then more housesitting…  

           Rrrring, rrrrinngggg. “Hello, Mendel residence.”

          “Kenneth? Sydney. I’ve been trying to get through for the past half-hour.”

          “Sorry, been out, Syd, getting some…air.”

          “I knew it! Leave you my apartment and already you’re roaming off course!”

          “Not to worry, just a little healthy exercise…”

          “Oh, please—anyway, reason I called is I’ll be back in two days, and I’ll need you to do a little something for me. Think you can handle that?”

          “Well, sure, I suppose…”

          “I need you to gas up Foxy, then pick up some dry cleaning at Dreyer’s on Steiner, just off Union. Turns out I’ve got a crucial appointment in Larkspur, and I’ll barely get back in time. You’ll be a dear and take care of that for me? I’ll cover you when I get in.”

          “Why not, nothing much else happening right now…”

          “What have you been doing there, Kenneth? Making any progress—and are you watering my plants? Extra car keys are in the kitchen cabinet. You’d better be watering my Ficus…”

          “Sure, gotcha…” There, she really does need me after all, can’t live without yours truly…

          “Okay, see you when I get back…be sure to be there, I’ll grab the shuttle at SFO.”

          “Which will be…”

          “When I get there, toots, when I get there. In the meantime, don’t break anything, hear. Ciao!” CLICK.

          Suddenly, two days later loomed like final billets inspections, worse than an orals defense of a fruitless sosh MA. I crammed and doted accordingly, Windexing her crib’s ubiquitous bay window, hand buffed her hardwood floor, dry wiped the upholstered furnishings her parents likely provided. I then 409’d the bathroom tiles and polished a mini breakfront filled with barnyard inspired pottery, hospital-cornered her Murphy bed and defrosted the box. Didn’t know where I found the essentials and adrenaline for it all.

          I did take pause that her new ivory dolphin pendant remained on the kitchen table, its chain wrapped around my wild horse creamer, but wanted nowhere nearer that. So I straightened up her butcher’s block, which was where I’d been stacking mail and newspapers. One last frantic sweep of any and all kitchen debris within arm’s reach stuffed down the garbage chute, and I was done and done. Then it was a matter of changing her stereo’s turntable from Blondie’s ‘Plastic Letters’ to some more Midwesterly Bob Seger, before extra dusting around the living room, not least her mounted, loin-busting figure studies. What kept me mopping and straightening about were a series of framed, yellowing half-tone shots of a young couple embracing on a secluded beach, nakedly fit as spicy Photoplay models, giddily in love. Tiny typed captions read, ‘Lovebirds On A Lark’—had to be her parents, and a Faith in her prime was even more than Syd had advertised.

          She’d proudly hung the folks out there for all to see: How oedipally complex was that, I thought, homing in, not knowing what to make of the parental pin-ups. But her mother was built like twice the woman with half the sass—enough to keep driving her daughter back to the drawing board figuratively speaking, if not to relative tears.

          Thus energized, I schlepped my laundry bundle down to the building’s ground floor Speed Queens with dishpan hands, then fired up Syd’s Audi Fox/Avant, ever so carefully negotiating its tightly beamed garage space. From there, it was lining up to top off at the Chevron, then over to the cleaners, where Dreyers’ proprietress refused to release items for which I had no claim check, could not even describe—particularly finery belonging to one of her favorite new young customers.

          Union Street being impossibly crowded, fair or no, I could only find a parking spot on Steiner. Nearly two blocks uphill it was, with a stunning view of the Marina and bay, beyond the plane landfilled District of chalky white and pastel stucco apartment houses—so much so that I missed a residual oil slick beneath the Audi.

          A neighborhood kibitzer clipping his topiary had already schooled me as I parked: chalk front wheels into the curb downhill, out for up. Crashing runaways, bub, you’re 180 degrees the wrong way there. Where you from, anyway, that California license plate doesn’t fool me one bit. But he jumped on me in earnest, clippers aloft, when I returned empty-handed, save for an afternoon four-star Examiner. He pointed out as how this showroom new silver Mercedes 240 with Corte Madera plate frames has squeezed into a vacant space in front of me, within an American Express Gold Card of the Audi’s front bumper, bookending a Brit green BMW R/100 bike with full aerodynamic fairing and touring cases that had wedged on in behind me.  

          No biggie, nothing to it for an ex-hack like me. Back and forth, to and fro went the exit drill, one nanoscopic inch at a time—easy up, disc brakes, no clutch riding, two pedals rather than three. Her Audi would lurch slightly forward, engine at low idle, then its driveshaft and differential would wind tightly and body frame twist smoothly as I torqued ever so gently back up to within parking ticket’s width of the BMW cycle’s chrome side pipes.

          Rev, shift, goose forward, brake slam, reverse again—jerk, lurch, gas, brake, brake gas, rock and roll, roll and rock. I plied the steering wheel in eighth and quarter turns back and forth, feeling like being stuck in the first plunging row of a Playland Bobs. Yet even Syd’s auto-tranny and power steering couldn’t save me from hitting that slick on the tire-smoking back-up, sliding down into the Benz.

          No matter my stomping floor pedals and yanking hand brakes, for the Fox lost all traction, and I was running out of legs and dexterity. Its rubber bumper guards spared the platinum sedan any significant damage, other than a triggered siren-like car alarm and cracked license plate frame. Foxy took it a bit harder on the grill and amber parking light, however, to the point where I feared its four logo rings had split roughly in two. The neighbor waved me off like a Speedway flagman, starting in with the I told ya’s and damn out-of-towners as I nursed the Audi back up grade—half brake, easy on the gas.

          He turned to screaming hit and run as I ever so gradually wedged out of the spot, fore and aft, shiftily rolling down Steiner Street and snaking around Union. But Foxy’s rearview mirror revealed the kibitzer didn’t appear to be jotting down any license plates numbers .

          Nevertheless anxiety raced through me like so much cold coffee, visions of cracked lenses, concave grill panels, cleft bumpers damping any scenic delights, be they bayfront sailboats or Union Street’s flowery, colorful storefronts, much less Union’s dramatic rise up Russian Hill beyond Van Ness and Polk. Local taxicabs honked around me, Orange and white Muni trolleys crowded in from either side, their power poles and overhead wires snapping and crackling, cross traffic cutting me off.

          These hills were steeper than Boulder’s, the traffic quicker and tactically craftier than Chicago’s; besides, I didn’t think either town would have claim jumped me like that on a friendly dry cleaning deed. After all the shouting, the horn blaring, the tire squealing—I oddly found some comfort upon returning to an apartment I had no business tending, but at least her place look as good as or better now than she had left it. So I garaged Foxy, electing not to check out her front end any too closely in the shadows.

          I instead grabbed my dried laundry and the evening paper, heading up to kitchen warmovers, and eggshell bachelorette walls full of front-end visuals largely more pleasing to the eye. Shortly after chowing down, then cueing up some folkie named Will Ackerman from Windham Hill, I proceeded to kick back, get tentatively situated, and spill my 16-ounce Coke on one of her plush new sateen sofa cushions.

          Brown cola on vanilla cream—aww, fantabulous. Sheeit, where was some spray Fantastik to sop up this thankless break of promise, this housesitting breach of Faith? But dammit, what were they all doing back there anyway, why was I here? Jacked on up, aced on out—set me to Dybukkin’ alright, pissed me off something fierce…told ya so. Yet for the moment I sat there panic-stricken and clueless, while the stain spread like caramel colored dread on a sundae, bloody sundae—way too close for comfort or cozy homecomings.

Care for more?

 Chapter 48. A homecoming of sorts 
leaves one out of sorts, resulting in 
tattered expectations and a differing 
of means and ways…

“Two becoming one
via sextile union can
still send one packing.”

         

          “Takes real bowling balls for a guy doin’ that…”

          “What about the apple? Look how he’s workin’ in that apple.”

          “Messy business…like, right there on the stage, in front of everybody…”

          Regardless of what I may have been thinking, undisturbed quiet wasn’t what Sydney had in mind. Where we could have paused to regroup and recoup in verdurous little Allyne Park, she insisted we hit the Street. Fair enough, except today, Union happened to be more than enough.

          There was this juggler for starters, surrounded just the other side of the Gough Street barricades by a detachment of unicyclists in raccoon war vests and Navajo headdresses. Jay Rensal commanded the Union Street Fair’s east-end sound stage between bands, a bulked up Viet vet in blue and white leotards who kept the music crowd bobbing in place like a Cheyenne rodeo clown tossing sample Skoal Bandit plugs.

          He did so by tossing three revolving 16-lb. Black Beauty bowling balls and a ripe apple ten feet aloft, rabidly chomping the Red Delicious each time it rotated around. The ooh-and-ahhing hoard encircled and rushed the stage, further pumped up by the roving unicyclists, who whooped with each near miss, getting juiced by Rensal’s spittled debris.

          “Talk about studly balls,” Sydney ushered me ahead, around the stage scene, with a sweep of her arm. “Si vous plais…”

          “Oh, I don’t know,” I bounced off a white picket fence, dodging a morsel of apple pulp like shrapnel from a stun grenade. “Was thinking more along the lines of that park back there.”

          “Kenneth, please,” she looped my arm. “Can we just soak in the moment?”

          “Sure, of course, Syd.” I brushed some juice droplets from my sleeve as we squeezed around the cheering crowd—some of whom were still abuzz over Mayor George Moscone’s earlier walkthrough here in his old neighborhood. I didn’t want to make waves, but also didn’t come all this way for vague and cursory dodges. Numb driving fingers and knotted guts demanded a more appropriate response. “What’s bugging you?”

          “So right away, something’s bugging me? Maybe I’m just a little show stressed and frazzled about now…and feeling kinda overdressed for a scene like this.”

          That juggler was not too shabby an opening act, framed as he was by big bay window Victorians and a restored sky blue Octagon House. The landmark with its small fenced side yard, was what remained of a pasture where daisy-tailed Cow Hollow bovines once grazed. From here, the crowd packed Union Street some six blocks to Steiner, though seeming to stretch clear out to Presidio treelines.

          The street fair was bordered on either side by poppy-top acacias and sycamores, ornate 2-3 story Victorians with an array of baying windows, madeover stuccoed Vicky botch jobs and much plainer box-alikes from the post-war era with wrought-iron balconies—all brightly multi-colored and pasteled.

          Quaint to cutesy to mannequin chic, Union was a sweet fondue of crafts stores, confectioners, cookie nooks, pie places, gelato/ice creameries and wine shops. In all, they carved up storefronts which had formerly housed tailors, milliners, tabacs, pharmacies and hardware stores—save for some grandfathered plumbers and dry cleaners. Little wonder there were so many dentists and periodontists drilling for gold in offices upstairs. On the other hand, it looked like some of these people flooding Union Street this weekend were better off without nail guns and SKIL drills.

          “The question is, what’s with you,” Syd asked, several steps ahead of me, window-shopping natural fiber sweater and stylish pantsuit numbers in side-by-side fashion salons. “Coming back out here like you are…all road rumpled, popping in on people unannounced—on my parents yet. That’s not the Kenneth I thought I knew…”

          “Hey, I figured I was invited,” I self-consciously straightened my Walgreen’s sunglasses and shook back my oily hair, then reached in to pull the pink envelope from my sport jacket’s liner pocket. “Lending moral support, like that…”

          “Spare me,” Syd leaned back, halting my arm. “That was only intended in the token, courtesy sense. I believed you had to be much too busy career-wise by now to actually schlepp back out here…”

          But for the moment, I found the crowd itself vastly more engrossing, my sociology chops training on visual symbology, the group dynamic along here. The flow was bi-directional, bi-coastal and everywhere in between, shuffling up and down Union to a mashed up beat of  jazz fusion, high-hat bluegrass, country honk and disco funk on sound stages, block by block. Variously gamboling along were troupes of tribal and flamenco dancers, then a lone beguiling redhead doing an Irish jig, with Celtic boombox accompaniment by a bloke who looked vaguely familiar from the inner Richmond bars.

          Yet for all the quiche, crab, ribs and mesquite in the air, this gathering looked more partial to feeding off itself. Modesto aggie lightweights oogled the untouchably hip maidens from Marin; football jerseyed Berkeley grads studied the cultivated sneers of the Top-Sidered Farmers from Palo Alto, or Phi Beta movers from the Ivy League.

          Humboldt mountain men stared down Tony Lamas designer cowboys from the Lone Star Café. Hard-wired Orientals in logoed racing jackets and Porsche wraparounds faced off sleek pompadoured lowriders from the Mission. Kicked back met kick-ass: beaucoup cut-offs, halter-tops, sundresses, designer denim and paisley patched dungarees. Bandstand stoners rocked out with curbside shot and brewers. Heavy metal headbangers overdubbed ghetto-blasted Rastafarians. Izod ’gators danced around clubby Oakland gangers.

          Bay Area natural fibers wove around L.A. Goldilocks and their gilt-chained boytoys. Dobermans snapped at Airedales. NoCal met fauxCal crossed SoCal and LowCal through the pedestrian snarls and bottlenecks, mostly because the main attraction was the traffic jam itself.

          “Never seen one quite this…big,” I gasped. In all, it did look to be a league smarter, faster than my own. “Half of San Francisco must be here…”

          “You think all these people are really from San Francisco?” Syd asked, dismissing a Gold Country Gauguin’s display booth of snowy Yosemite landscapes. “Nobody’s really from San Francisco anymore. Everybody’s from everywhere else around here. That’s what makes it so…magnetic.”

          “You mean this kind of deal goes on all summer?” I took into account the fair itself, trying to fight off any sense that although this festive crowd was squeezing us closer together, I couldn’t help but feel some distance building in.

          “Of course, Kenneth, everybody knows that each neighborhood has its own street fair, even though not are all this squeaky clean. Take North Beach and the Haight—or the Castro, yeow—and you do remember Polk Street, now don’t you?”

          Sandwiched between Union Street’s opposing gingerbread storefronts—with their resident art galleries, styling salons and pricey boutiques—were this weekend’s display stands, stalls, booths, tents, sample trucks, kiddie rides, tasting gardens and smoky grilled food courts. While everyday shops bespoke looks, looks, looks, in showy designer windows, street-wise, it was eclectricity, curb to curb.

          We said little past installations of hungry artisans and kitschmeisters, pitching: candle sculpture, ceramic mug sets, peacock feathered floppy hats, tooled vests, sheepskin slippers, porcelain teapots, earthenware place settings, embroidered bells, tie-dyed tees, tire-tread huaraches. Sprinkled throughout were Big Sur photographs, sandstone seals, soap sculpture, corduroy macaws, ceramic trivets, hand-carved dulcimers, white oak vanities, leaded glass terrariums, India-print serapes, copper kinetic waterwheels and Omar’s custom cuckoo clocks. But what stopped us cold were the pegboards of scrimshaw and cloisonné.

          “Yeah, well, everything seems so vibrant and colorful, so up here,” I fawned, digging deep into my khakis, springing for a carved ivory dolphin pendant Syd couldn’t bear to take off despite herself, once the Mendocino earth mother fixed its slender silver chain around her neck.

          “That’s so sweet of you, but I really can’t accept this,” she smiled awkwardly, blushing, nostrils flaring, rising to peck my cheek. “I mean given that I’m…”

          “It’s nothing, least I can do,” I interrupted, puffing up some dyad dynamics, what with this initial gesture of partial re-payment, taking the affection where I could get it. “Besides, wait’ll you see a wild horse creamer I scored for you at a Round-Up Café up by Tahoe. Speaking of rest stops…all that food is getting to me, and we’re only about halfway through the thing.”

          By this time, I’d aromatically ingested avocado crepes, croissant almandine, dipped chocolates, spicy hot knishes, albacore eggrolls, goat-cheese piroshkis, broiled beetburgers, deep-fried mahi-mahi, Louisiana hot links, rutabaga juice, cheese-dipped pretzels, lemon-flavored lox and smokey grilled ka-bobs. We topped all that off with a luscious sampler of champagne and strawberries, dispensed by a tux-tailed pianist playing a medley of show tunes from the bed of his early-50s Ford pick-up truck. With that, we chasséd toward some respite and repair.

          “Tell me, how was it for you back there in Chicago,” Syd focused more earnestly as we stepped up a mill-detailed wooden stairway into her haven of choice.

          “What can I say,” I muttered, gazing awestruck at the bi-way staircase parade, especially those two dollies in leopard body stocking and pink bridal train respectively. “A ton of sheeit hit the fan all at once…total park and wreck.”

          “Envisioned it would, didn’t I basically tell you that in Sausalito?” She rushed to secure a prime barroom table.

          “You said a lot of things then,” I followed cautiously as she laid territorial claim, somehow flattered by her undivided concern, her furtive brow and searching eyes.

          “So did you, toots, so did you. But that was then, this is now,” she said, primping her currently frizzy, Afro-styled hair.

          Union Street’s Deli Restaurant was a sprawling tawny port maroon and mayonnaise yellow Victorian complex essentially at the street fair’s 50-yard line. It was a delicious spread, all gingerbread and leaded glass—with several side boutiques and a sunny little front veranda facing today’s action like a corporate box at the title bout. Syd had adroitly grabbed a cozy bay window table, all right—front row center, looking out over all that, insisting we needed someplace bright and cheery for some catch-up. She ordered up a Chablis spritzer; I obligingly name-dropped a local Anchor Steam.

          “Now you were saying about Chicago,” she primped over her currently frizzy, Afro-styled hair as we sat in.”

          “It was pretty weird actually,” I continued, watching her straighten the plum velvet top and yellow sash about her shoulders and waist. “Just so grim, from the minute I hit town to the day I left.”

          “You mean the situation with Moon?” She then straightened her new pendant as she cast about the room for couture rips or reassurance, scouting schooner-and-stemware wielding social circles all the way back to a brimming al fresco greenhouse terrace.

          “For one, I suppose,” slumping in my gingham cushioned chair at the thought.

          “Yep, really…so how is Melissa doing, anyway?”

          “Huh? I’m surprised you ask…” I reached for a gratis chip basket.

          “Look, even if she and I don’t exactly relate the same way now, that doesn’t mean I no longer care…or our whole family for that matter”

          “Well, I dunno, we were still going around in circles the day I left,” I sipped my Steam, wondering about her strained sisterly concern. “She warned that I would self-destruct on impact out here…can you believe that?”

          In the main, this Deli Restaurant served up an oak-lined, ferny bar with vividly colorful Tiffany lamps and a sloping glass-panelled ceiling that refracted blinding sunlight into its ficus-filled dining area. The full skylights illuminated its carved oak back bar and wall panels to near radioactive luster. Antique dove cages and marble sconces stood vigil on front bar walls, along with brass-framed prints of vintage Audubon and Currier & Ives.

          A piped-around sound system tracked adult-contemporary numbers like ‘More Than A Woman’ by Tavares, ‘Baby Hold On’ by Eddie Money and Meatloaf’s ‘Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad’. After being rocked, jazzed, funked, salsaed, bluesed, reggaed, fiddled, crooned, banjoed, oboed and synthed out on the streetcorners, I rather welcomed a mellower beat. The groove was infectious, drawing the crowd’s unattached snippets of cross-cultural pollination fully into its hipstream. The tunes themselves had me nervously tapping my feet on the Deli’s hardwood floor, thrumming my fingers on its inlaid oak table and brass side railing, trying to figure out what was up her raglan dolman sleeve.

          “I’m sure dear Melissa still cares for you dearly, too…despite her cross-pressure realities. But she’ll likely make out just fine.”

          “I suppose, but what’s that to us, right,” I probed. “Besides, things only got worse from there. Watching my old friends wasting away, my mom dying—it was all too much.”

          “God, that’s awful,” she gasped, yet dodged some, as she grasped my hand. “I can’t imagine…just couldn’t bear losing my parents…”

          “Heavy duty—she and I were pretty close,” I sighed, traces of creamed herring and beef brisket swirling up my nostrils, calling up mom’s ‘push you’ appraisal. “But that’s back-there family stuff. The important thing is, here we are, right?”

          “That’s exactly what we have to talk about.”

          Slumping into the leather-backed wooden chair, I propped my chin on my right fist and gazed out the window to take in the sights outside. Beyond the fair flow, across Union Street, stood a painstakingly colorful row of Victorian and trowelled over storefronts bearing stylish clothes the likes of KoKo’s, BiBi’s, Lobos’ and NoNo’s—anything less chic having been fashion zoned out of existence by now. Behind them, balconied backsides of pastel apartment buildings stacked uphill to Pacific Heights like cereal boxes in a supermarket display.

           “Talk about?” I asked, turning back again as her eyelids dropped, a perfect seal as she hoisted her face majestically toward the opened skylight sun. “Meaning…”

          “Well, where to begin,” she replied, looking back down toward me, locking in. “Kenneth, I’m seeing you as someone who’s been running—a dybbuk slinking away, way too long for his own good.”

          “Hey, running’s good exercise,” I nodded, picking up on a couple of guys rolling from rawhide  dice cups, tossing back Heineken draughts and mustard pretzels at the bar. “Everybody’s into it, check out all the Nikes out there…”

          “That’s not what I mean,” she muffled, glancing about the bubbly, party-hardy barroom, so as not to draw undue attention our way. “All I’ve been hearing from you is how it was where you were. You had a good thing in Boulder and you left. You had a good thing in Chicago and you left. You had a great thing starting here and you low-tailed it out like an alley rat…”

          “Hmm, which is why I’m back here—not running now, am I?”

          “No, that’s why you left Chicago,” she replied, milky cheeks already reddening in the sun. “I want to know why you came back to San Francisco.”

          “Come on, Syd, what are you driving at? I’m here, ’cause, you know, we’re here…”

          I inhaled deeply of the vigor and exhilaration. How brilliant the scene’s colors and pageantry amid the sparkle of creativity, inside and out—the meaty charbroiled contrails and tanned, shapely celebrants: This was California, this was more like it! The 360-degree gratisfaction, no frostbitten limbed frustration, no grimy brown brick despair. Everybody from virtually everywhere I had even considered somewhere was here. All things considered, it was intoxicating even without the bar tab. I’d cut my losses, beat the rusty Midwest rap and finally, brilliantly arrived.  I resolved it was sunrise, a killer new day, all blue skies, goodie boxes and pony rides—even feelin’ kinda cocky not dorky, and yet…

          “Wait a minute, think I’m missing something.”

          “Our plans, Syd. That talk in your living room and Sausalito that time…combine and conquer, remember?” Either she was coying it, or this whole conversation was passing by like those Golden Gate Park commandos with the roller blades strapped on good and tight.

          “That was light years ago. Let’s focus on the present. Like what do you intend to do with yourself now that you’re here?”

          “One thing at a time, babe,” I urged, turning to prop my brown suede Adidased feet up on the brass railing. “Like you say, let’s just savor the moment—the food, the sunshine, all these outrageous people…”

          “Uh-huh, then what?”

          “Then? I don’t know,” I shrugged, sipping my beer, warm and slightly watery, not unlike my forehead about then. “I figure we’ll settle in and fly—just like we said…being who we really can be together here, whatever we want.”

          “This is your whole life we’re talking about. Not simply fly-by-night…”

          “Whoa, I’ve had it up to here with ‘whole life’ Saturnine crapola. The entire trip back there was one big either/or. No, my decision is made. My decision is you, Syd. You and San Francisco—all the potential, going for the gold together. I’m loaded up, ready to pull the trigger. So let’s roll, huh?

          There my question seemed to drop like an over-larded Munster blintz. I waited, and strummed, and counted the long line at a bank across the street, struggling with some new one-armed bandit-type contraptions called automatic teller machines, tallying the card holders back and forth, head by testy head, before she could muster a reply.

          “Let me get this straight,” Syd exhaled, at arm’s length. “You’ve blown off everything in Chicago, everything you worked for there, on my account?”

          “Well, it’s more like I did what’s best for us…” We didn’t move a lick otherwise.

          “Nope, sorry,” she said, the Deli’s house music doing a Commodores’ segue from ‘Easy’ to ‘Three Times a Lady’. “No way you’re gonna dump that on me!  We all do what’s best for ourselves in this world. You didn’t do anything for me, for us—you did that for you…100% self interest.”

          “Wait, now I’m confused. I went through hell-and-a-half to get back here. I needed to dig that hole for myself like a need a spinal tap,” I sputtered. “But it had to be done to give us a legitimate chance.”

          “Us, chance—oh, Kenneth,” she sighed, doing finger furlongs around the rim of her goblet. “That’s not how it is out here. That’s not how it is at all…”

          “How what is, for chrissake?!”

          “You know, life. What you’re saying is so Midwest. This is the wide-open Wild West here. People do their own thing, fend for themselves. You’ve got to learn to go it alone, the whole rugged individual trip—get weighted down with us’s and you drown…”

          “What’re you talking about?” I tugged at my blue oxford cloth collar.

          “My parents always tell me I’m responsible for my own self, and that’s a big enough bundle for me to handle. So how can I possibly be responsible for somebody else like you?”

          “Man oh man. All I know is we set a beautiful agenda, taking on San Francisco all the way up Nob Hill, then the world. Once it sunk in, I did all I could to square with the life I was leaving so that we could soar, free and clear. Damn, I could have sworn we were flying a two-seater, and now you’re talking solos. I mean, what the hell is happening here?!”

          “Hold on a sec,” she snarled, stirring her spritzer. “Who left whom right after that? You blindsided me, deserted me at the starting gate. Sniveling back to your mommy fixation, dumping me like I was a leper. How could I ever trust anything you say anymore?!”

          “It wasn’t that way, at all,” I pounded down on my beer mug. “I couldn’t just abandon Melissa in California. She would have freaked out. You know how basically fragile she is. I owed her better than that…”

          “Fragile? Oh, I see. Dumping all over me was kosher, though—you didn’t owe me any better than that.” She proceeded to suck on her spritzer until the stir straw caved in.

          “We’d have been doomed with guilt from the beginning if I’d just stayed,” I pleaded, suddenly aware that we’d become one of the Deli’s featured tidbits. “Besides, how was I to know at that point that we could be so involved. I was flipping out as it was…”

          “How were you to know? I nearly did myself in that very night. You were the most important person in my life then. But just like that, you fed me some wimpy BS about knowing your place, being at peace with your lot in life. You hung me out to dry like some cheap hooker, then called me right up again like everything was roses—you bastard you!”

          “You have no idea what I was going through.” Christ, not again. Out of nowhere, various neuro-psychology texts I used to skim through in Norlin Library shot top of mind. Graphic images hit me of a hundred billion spindle neurons spiked at once, each one making 1,000 or so hook-ups—all this synaptic and post-synaptic density getting totally out of control, taking me back to that crowbar in my head and roundabout fork in the road. “I was on fried auto pilot, a total tailspin when I left your place.”

          “Whatever, like I said, that’s history,” she nodded stiffly, electing not to yield. “But, god, how it’s haunted me what we could have had if you’d stayed.”

          “The climate was just all wrong then, Syd. I needed to straighten stuff out, clear the decks. Good things take time sometimes.”

          “Hmph, another classic Kennethism—I get plowed under and you make like the Farmer’s Almanac…”

          I reflected on whether there was a certain etiquette, a loosely prescribed anthropologic ritual for vignettes such as these. Two oh, so contemporary figures at a round, slightly wobbly café table, ostensibly with the sweet promise of blissful attainment parading before them, glimmering in their duonic minds’ eyes with full flavor and intimacy. Yet therein fell the screen, clean and painfully clear. The wriggler in question draws tightly around the table’s treacherous curve to within a short breath of the intended wrigglee. The laconic tippling of a wineglass, a two-handed grab of the anguished body’s palms, a compensatory display of sincerity and concern. Damn near knew that shifty melodrama line for line, just wasn’t bucking for a west coast engagement.

          I could feel her quick-release stare, so looked elsewhere. Important to her? This was my ocean beachhead, no further westward for to drive. I framed the Union Street dreamscape beyond two small potted pecan trees and a spiked iron fence, froze it there in time to poke, squeeze and savor, to dissect like a biolab horny toad. Meanwhile, couples cruised about my viewfinder: items, flared cord retinues and contingents with designer shopping bags and trendy safari rags—banana repped outfits with deep patch pockets. 

          Then came the blow-dried crews, the sun-blazed and beer blasted cronies in jeans from nowhere and T-shirts from parts and paradises unknown. Everybody here eyeing everybody else’s somebody else, yet nobody otherwise tipping so much as a maxillary muscle, remaining so poised and posed. I tracked them from the Deli’s gaslights to the mum, rose and carnation stand next door, before mustering some sort of a lame defense.

          “That’s not fair at…” Red flag blanching to white…

          “Tell me about fair, Dudley! Oh, now it’s all coming back how you set me up and cut me down…”

          “Set you up? C’mon, I died some back there, too, believe me…”

          “Well, I came this close,” she scowled, raising calibrated fingers to within unbearable tolerance of my nose. “But when my moment of truth came, I did what you lacked the balls to do. I chose me! Me and my art—you weren’t there when I really needed you, but my painting was. I dug down to my core and totally rearranged my priorities. It was right then that I got how important my work was to me. So I poured myself into my studio and toughed it out, getting so good nobody can deny me. That’s how I put myself to sleep at night, dreaming about things I could do next—totally driven, to where I barely made Seder. Plus I started taking care of numero uno, and now I’ve landed myself a show, a big first step, and nobody can take that away from me. I’ve even leased an apartment of my own…”

          “Hey, I think that’s all great, believe me, I…”

          “Listen to me, Kenneth,” she whispered deeply, relenting some. “I get what you’ve been going through, honest I do. But the clock’s been running, time and events just have this way of rolling by. And that started for me the minute you ran out of my door.”

          “Wait, I didn’t exactly run out, you know better…”

          “I’m not going to argue words with you. I just know what I know, how I’ve turned my life around. It’s important to me that you recognize that, too…”

          “I do, Syd, what makes you think I wouldn’t recognize your growth?”

          “Hmm, how can I put this,” she ventured, eyes rolling again up, back through the Deli’s cigarette smoke and cranked open roof. “It’s like you’re where you are now, and I’m where I am, you know?”

          “Uh, can’t say as I do actually,” I drew her eyes back to me, cringing, wondering what was next.

          “See, nothing personal, but how can you possibly keep up to speed with what’s going on with me now, when I’m up here and you’re…down here?” she leveled with her hands, palms up and down. “For one thing, I don’t go by Syd anymore. I much prefer Sydney.”

          “Aww, cut the bullshit Syd…”

          “It’s Sydney. Really, you must do that one thing for me,” she said firmly, squeezing my hand to press the point, leaning in closer to my sagging face with searching, seismographic eyes. “And now that I see you here, this way, the space and time between us comes clearly into focus.”

          “Anything else, you two,” the gum chewing waitress scooped up my beer stein and Syd’s goblet, dollar bills wrapped around her little fingers, making for a quick escape as I simply covered the tip and tab .

          “What…space?” I asked, wringing my cocktail napkin, though not without noting the embroidered falcons fluttering on the barmaid’s rear pockets. That was as she glided, tray aloft, toward the bustling oak-back bar in perfect synch with Springsteen’s new ‘Promised Land’. “We…”

          “Kenneth, please,” she clasped and chain swayed her new pendant. “This is very difficult for me, and you’re not making it any easier. Now I know you’ve come a long way, only that’s on you—a decision for your life. But I can say with as much certainty as I can right now that I just don’t feel there’s a ‘we’ like that anymore.  And I think that with everything so up in the air with you, it’s best if we really give ourselves a lot of room to grow, to evolve, explore our own personal potentials to the max.”

          “You can’t be serious, what…”

          “We’re talking major life transitions, hard decisions, often the best you can make alone,” she continued, beckoning me out the Deli’s crowded, wide open double doors “By the way, you know what’s funny? My mother says maybe I was just in a needy place when we had our little thing, and that’s behind me now. Faith can be so wise that way.”

          “Yeah, a regular Mother Superior,” I muttered, barely over the fading sound of the O’Jays’ ‘Use Ta Be My Girl’. “So what am I supposed to do with a hypothesis like that, pack up and haul my ass back to Chicago, or what?”

          “See? There you go running again, dyb. How typical of you, but we can’t have that, can we? I mean, now that you’re out here,” she led me down back into the street fair lanes. “Anyway, so you don’t come away from this empty-handed, I want you to know you’re welcome to housesit my place for a week or so—just to help you get a little more situated.”

          Time had rolled on by. The brilliant sun no longer chased back that mounding fog bank, which now penetrated the street fair’s western flank. A cold, damp wind bowled down Union from Presidio Heights, whipping astrologer flyers and sausage wrappers along the makeshift midway, and gutter dust into the eyes of the fair’s beholders, afternoon Westerlies jostling seashell and crystal wind chimes, playing through bamboo flutes.

          Sound stages were being struck; weary vendors folded up their displays for the day with routine economy. That involved hauling away everything fungible, negotiable and/or edible, heaping everything else into the dumpsters and porta-potties around every corner. Skyward floated the last of the balloons; unscooped ice cream leaked from curb gutter containers until the whole mess was swept up by day-labor cleaning crews who stacked tapped-out casks and kegs, stuffed any recyclable cans and bottles down trouser legs and into brown plastic bags. So clean, so freakin’ fast already.

          We walked arm in arm, ward like, back down Union Street. Scattered clusters of lingering fair freaks milled about closing stores and galleries, or filtered into Perry’s, the Bus Stop, or hidden off-street cafés. Some even peeled away the face paint, sent champagne splits shattering against lightpoles and fireplugs. Streetcorner by trash-piled streetcorner, the music just packed up and died.

          Juggler Jay Rensal finished strong with three watermelons and a Gravenstein, apple juice dripping all down his goosebumped leotard, firing back at somehalf-loaded nitwit, “I do my show like you have sex, pal—alone.”

          “Housesit,” I plained. “How the hell’s that supposed to work?” Since I was already trying to figure out how the love of her life had rearranged into her love of her life.

          “Just look after the plants, mail and things, fake out the burglars—everybody does it around here,” Sydney said, stepping around the twisty trunk of a dogged acacia tree outside Laura Ashley Welsh wear. “I won’t be there, of course, because I happen to be flying back to Chicago with my parents—could even have looked you up downtown at that exciting new job you just blew off.”

          “You’re what?!”

          “For their anniversary, and a postponed Shavuot celebration—a big, huge Mendel family bash, I mean everybody, the whole mishpocha—isn’t that fantabulous? Which reminds me, I must be going, since they’re doubling with me and my friend for dinner tonight, he’s a commercial ecotect,” she smiled proudly, beckoning me to shake hands on it. “But you should take me up on the offer. I figure it’s the least I can do, and am even pretty confident you won’t destroy anything. ’Cause I’m kind of concerned about you, Kenneth—your judgment, your…lapses—you know, all that’s gone on. And you don’t look so well. So there, see? You already have at least one friend in San Francisco.”

          Beyond Octavia Street, the wind rustled an otherwise dull, day-ending calm. Oh, wisps of distant laughter and traffic horns, maybe, but little more. Small wonder nearby heads turned, dogs moaned and melons came tumbling down when this apparently normal young couple turned the corner toward that Octagon House and Allyne Park: Some primped up chick patting this slumped over dudly, and all he kept screaming was…

          “No, you can’t do this!!!  No, no, no, no, noooooooooooooo…”

Care for more?

Chapter 47. A homespun gig, a 
hillside gaff, then strained connections 
make for an untimely, uninviting exit… 

∞ STAGE THREE ∞

“One mate means succor
the other spells glitz and dash—
place no sucker’s bet.” 

          “You have no idea what I went through.”

          “Well, no, I…”

          “Really, I nearly committed suicide over you.”

          “Sorry, I had no idea…great to see you didn’t though…”

          There wasn’t much getting past Denise’s place at Fulton and 25^th Avenue. En route to that ritualistic Ocean Beach revisit, I had spotted Thibeaux Cauler moving some garage furniture into a small Mazda pick-up, his growing dreads piled high under a crocheted Rasta applejack brim, earth brown dashiki open at the black Kung-Fu shorts. Before I could fully stop to say hi, he had me on the heavy end of an old arm-worn sectional, loading it into the dented truck bed.

          As we pushed and lifted, I caught him up on events Midwestern, including my coin-flip cloverleafing through his St. Louis. Cauler updated me in turn on Denise, who had fled Mexican drug tensions, only to spirit herself back to Ann Arbor for an exploratory summit with Warren ‘the porker’. Meanwhile, an OMing Regina Tzu was upstairs for the asking, although I scarcely knew what to say, given all that. By virtue of the helping hand, however, I did haul in Thibeaux’s offer for a night or two’s crashing in Denise’s room until I got situated, etc. It must have been the Moon’s pause/mom’s passing part of my story, along with some Heartland homerism, that sealed such a welcome deal.

          I had proceeded to wolf down a couple of deli-case salads from the Scandinavian place on Geary Boulevard that Moon and I had muddled through, the kidney bean-garbanzo combo going down much more smoothly this time around. A Dinkel Acker to go, and it was back to Denise’s for some rest and retooling, turning on her small Sony to a Friday evening local news review on KQED public TV. A post-headline recap and pledge pitch segued into a journalist panel roundtable focused on the recent tax-cut passage of Proposition 13, and increasingly bizarre developments in the local religio-political realm.

          Their lede centered on how the Peoples Temple congregation was turning more People v. Temple, that ever since SF Examiner and New West Magazine exposés on ‘nightmare’ beatings, child begging, fake healing and coercive, if not violent mind control, had prompted investigations from the D.A.’s office to U.S. Customs and IRS. Rumors were spreading that private dicks had been snooping around for defectors, what with escapee, Leon Broussard hitting town with his Jonestown horror stories.

          One on-air commentator pointed out that the flock’s benevolent nature had been visibly changing since the Peoples hierarchy had strung chainlink fencing around the Geary temple and fled en masse to Guyana—money, munitions, mind-altering drugs and all. Fearful relatives had begun protesting at the temple site, concerned for their loved ones’ well-being down in the jungle. They were pressuring the U.S. Embassy, Rep. Leo Ryan, even the local Guyanese authorities Jim Jones had long been bribing with cash, clothing and contraband galore—to probe the now robotic flock slavishly tending to the dirt poor and barren Jonestown soil.

          Then there was the reverend himself. Reports had apparently surfaced all spring of Jones’ erratic behavior, particularly after his mother’s December death. He’d badgered city politicos he’d helped elect for favors and relief, threatened lawsuits against the press in a manic phone interview. His few remaining loyalists were ordered to move PT’s financial assets to safer harbors, and he ignored court judgments to return Boy John to his rightful parents, the Stoens. Rumors spread of his bomb hoaxes, White Night scare drills, his waving a .357 wildly in paranoid alerts while faking being fatally wounded by lurking enemies. Whispers arose of poison punch sacrifice rehearsals amid mounting outside persecution.

          Who knew how much of this on-dit was true? But all told, it was quite a swirl of turmoil for an oily hick preacher from Indiana. In any case, harmony, People—did I miss something here, thought I’d parked such bile back in Chicago Lawn. So, better to kill the tube, to rest and freshen up as best I could for springing my little cameo on an unsuspecting Sydney Mendel.

          “But that’s beside the point now. I mean I didn’t think you’d actually take me up on the invite. I was just bulk sending out as many as I could, and you somehow got on my mailing list,” said Syd, disconcertingly sizing up my road-marginal appearance, at least one size shy of being situationally suitable. “Mass marketing 101, that’s all. But you know what I mean, since you’re in the big-time ad game now your own self.”

          “R-R-Right, mass mailing…” Beyond reeling, I had to wonder how she got wind of my FBC position. Must have been Moon to Faith, plus or minus Lester’s sideshow riff. “Kinda missed the gist of that from your note…”

          “Just common courtesy. But at least you have landed a good job there,” she pressed, a trifle wobbly on gold patent heels. “So how did you get the days off this soon? Really, when are you heading back?”

          “Actually, sorta took a leave of absence…”

          “You what?! Oh, that’s real choice, Kenneth…”

          “Yeah, was a tough one, all right, I agonized over…”

          “Sorry, you’ll have to excuse me, I’ve got cust…er, guests…”

          Skies had cleared considerably as I wheeled downtown, act cleaned up to my FBC level, blue oxford cloth and red striped tie included under the brown cord sport jacket. I even scored an uphill parking spot on Taylor Street, well within walking distance of the Sutter Street gallery where Sydney had installed her one-woman show.     

          Weininger Fine Arts was a newer, smaller house toward the outer edge of San Francisco’s gallery row, betting on new, local discoveries to catapult it into the long-established Sutter Street ranks. In this case, Weininger’s track lights were exclusively on Syd, if not its larger dollar commissions, and the second-story gallery had cleared its walls for a selection of her recent and current pieces. She’d titled her show, ‘Mighty Women At Work’, displaying the range of her creative process, conceptual sketches to tighter figure drawings to finished paintings—all hung in sleekly modern frames.

          An impressively large turnout of seasoned smock sniffers and captious aesthetes paraded tissue to canvas, many gilt-edged coupon clippers in cashmere jackets circling a plentiful wine and hors d’ oeuvres spread center hardwood floor. Already feeling awkward as a dowager’s towel boy, I had slowly gravitated toward the rear wall, near Syd’s photo portrait and calligraphed bio, watching her so confidently work the room, mumly grabbing a crystal cup of strawberry punch along the way. Beside a table of parchment guest books and glossy lay catalogues raisonne, I met up with Mendels, mère and père.

          “Why hello there. You’re Kenneth, I take it. I’m Faith Mendel, Sydney’s mother…”

          “Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” I replied tensely, hardly prepared to meet Syd’s mother superior under circumstances like these, not at all knowing what she knew or felt about clashes past.

          “Well, this is quite the surprise. Last I heard, you were back home in Chicago,” she said, her delicately sequined Marshall Field gown barely hiding her rounded middle-age curves. She offset small half-shell earrings with a tightly coiffed perm, a light brush of make-up and mascara being the measure of her successful maturity and motherly assurance. “In any case, I suppose it’s best that you’ve made the ungodly long trip alone this time…”

          “Uh, yeah,” I stammered quizzically. “But how did you…”

          “Motherly intuition, young man, a woman can sense these things,” she said, looking me up and down. “Besides that, you appear somewhat… road weary.”

          Patting down my sleeves and shaggy hair, I glanced away in retreat, toward a portrait of ‘Elisha’, Syd’s caption reading, ‘This wonderful lady I stayed with while I sat in at L’Ecole de Beaux Arts’. The semi-nude was a subtle tonal wash against stark drapings of velvet and blue, all but concealing a single yellow daisy. Beyond that, her show’s imagery, its porous juxtaposition of realism and borderline irrationalism, suggested a dimension, an attitude, she had somewhat closeted heretofore. Wasn’t Monet’s ‘Water Lilies’ at the Art Institute, but it all sure made an impression on me.

          Syd’s straighter paintings were like Moon over the cabin mantle, only better crafted, more delicate in contrast and hue. They rendered lithe, aggressive women in aerobic knots, who walked a balance beam between pure athletics and pandering seduction. Nice work, yet Syd maintained the intimate integrity of her divers, dancers and gymnasts with understated props and backdrops that elevated stark nudity to stunning au naturel. My pockets swelling, I immediately felt warped, somewhat a gutter voyeur for turning on instead of paying tribute, like some kind of pervert getting off in the Guggenheim.

          “So this guy’s what the fuss is all about,” said Bryce Mendel, stepping in, probing me with wary sideward glances. “Flying solo now, are you?”

          “Yes sir, sure am…nice to meet you,” I pumped his firm hand. “Incredible show, huh?”

          “No, it’s entirely credible,” her dad said, over the murmuring of the crowd, shaking his head of silver hair. “I can tell by the invoices and accounts payables, on top of what I’ve shelled out for her art school tuition.”

          “Wow, I’ll bet,” I said, looking around at the gallery gathering, not fully understanding how much his checkbook was involved here. I saw a room full of Howard Rosens, kindly putting my mom in her place here, which had me all but reaching for a dust mop.

          “But my little free-spirited girl’s well worth it,” he beamed, real laser-like. The sharp creases of his tailored navy mohair, rope-striped Paul Stuart suit cut me like a cleaver. “She’s quite a talent, wouldn’t you say?”

          “Never seen an artist like her, Mister Sav, er Mendel…” Mom, I could see rubbing canapé trays, stemware and elbows here; as for my dad, I couldn’t picture him here in the least.

          “Sydney’s the pride of our family, all right,” he snipped, grabbing my eye. “And I aim to keep her going and growing that way —all the way around, if you know what I mean…”

          “Sure as shootin’, sir…I…”

          “Of course you do, dear,” Faith inserted, tapping his hand. “We all do, don’t we, Kenneth? We all want the best for everybody concerned, and I mean everybody.”

          “Happy family harmony—that’s Mrs. Mendel’s department,” winked Bryce Mendel, slightly loosening his rolled, starched white collar and silk tossed squares tie. “So what’s your line of work back in Chicago?”

          “Sociology’s my field, but I was just getting into advertising…”

          “Ad game, is it?”

          “Yes sir,” I gulped, rather tightening my wide striper tie. “But I’ve put that on hold for the time being…”

          “On hold? That doesn’t sound like much of a career move to me.”

          “Better than the one before,” Sydney teased, ambling back up to us, delivering goblets of Chardonnay to her admiring parents, winking artfully at her mom. She was a city gal today, all right, in a plum velvet pantsuit with butter yellow sash and scarf, “A mass transit professional…”

          “Come again?”

          “She means I drove a taxi, sir,” I owned up, chagrined that she knew that too. “While hustling up the ad writer position. Checker cabs—LaSalle Street, Michigan Avenue to O’Hare, like that…”

          “Of course, take them all the time,” he chuckled, teeth gleaming against a fit Florida winter tan. “Don’t remember hailing you though. But then you only see the back of a hacker’s head…”

          “Bryce—really,” Faith chided, radiantly tanned as her solid gold necklace and locket. “And you’ll have to excuse my daughter, Kenneth, she still has some bags to fill. Dear, what say we get acquainted with the refreshments?”

          “Smoked lox and cheese trays,” Bryce smiled, as she wrapped his arm, pulling him away. “Twenty-six years together, the woman reads me like a road map…”

          I recalled Moon’s reverential remark once about going a long way to see the likes of a Sydney Mendel. But where was this veneer, this creative sophistication when we were sleeping bagging it in Utah? Who was she, all told?  Melissa, I knew: quilts and pottery and macramé—Earth shoes momma with basic co evolutionary, cohabitational braids. But this, these finished masterful visions in textured mattes and glaring frames: either I was something or she was simply slumming.

          My armpits rained acrid over that one; I felt at once bolstered and betrayed. What was up with her, anyway? I got that fetching invite, then torched bridges for the past 2,000 miles, for chrissake, only to cross the wire underdressed, underfed and underbred. What was I missing here? Did I misread something between the lines? Was this perfumed invite of hers heart to Heartland, or neither here nor there?

          All I could actually make out was every other canvas here seemed to mind fuck her more serious paintings to either side. I could picture her taunting her embryonic following, as in: ‘I’m this damn good, but guess again, peons, you ain’t seen nuthin’ so far’. How else to explain the chameleonic comic strip that played out between the lines of this fresh-faced exhibition? As she escorted her parental pals over the nosh, I set about to take in her artwork, frame by frame, with a measure of creative relief.

          “How utterly coarse…”

          “My sentiments exactly,” I said, as I moved beyond Syd’s figure paintings to a series of better working ‘Women At Work’. “Right on course…”

          “No, young man, coarse, ” remarked a matronly women in I Magnin evening dress and a wraparound shoulder stole, studying one of Sydney’s charcoal sketches like an oncologist a malignant X-ray. The arthritic old pudge folded up her bifocals and made for the nearest hors d’ oeuvres tray. “Unrefined, juvenile, devoid of nuance or discernible composition—a Diebenkorn, she’s definitely not. What is that object supposed to be there, a plumber’s helper?”

          “Hey, what do you know, granny?” I blurted after her. Honestly, it just slipped out, like a tax lawyer through a loophole. I’d just heard the coarse verdict and snapped, turning toward her stumpy little personage with a reflexive flip of my index finger. She spun in kind, appalled, and she wasn’t alone. Seemed as though the entire gallery gasped in chorus, nailing me to the frame-lined wall with wine-and-cheese consternation.

          Maybe my move was a bit outlandish, but no more so than this stretch of Sydney’s art. To be sure, she had delivered on her creative promise, but only the alter ego contrails of her provocateur nature could explain her handling charges. For every other pose of striking beauty, every other sketch and painting was an abstract visual abomination.

          These ‘Women At Work’ weren’t women at all, but trim, shapely bodies with beastly extremities. Plumbers with web feet and hands, oil riggers with serpentine tentacles, grease monkeys with rash red asses and simian sneers: The only things her acrylic menagerie had in common were intense working postures and monstrous jugs.

          Syd’s lady dentist was multi-fanged with gleaming drill-bit fingernails. Her barberess featured hairbrushes for hands and a trimming shears smile. There was Winnie the arch welder, Babs the buns baker, Wench the umbilical wrench. And her doctor even grossed me out with its jackhammer scalpels and open-heart skeletal bosom and stethoscope dangling out of no, not there.

          Sydney had rendered her grotesque subjects in minutely detailed work settings, then hedged with grim spectral backdrops and random overtones of apocalyptic shades. The cumulative result was a series of ghoulish wet dreams on a gullet of garlic bagels and stale goulash.

          “What in heaven are you trying to do, ruin everything,” she screamed, rushing nearly head over heels up to me, like a heat-seeking missile, from a go-between with her parents and some potential deep-pocketed patrons.

          “Sorry, Syd, I didn’t think her…was just sticking up for you, that’s all.”

          “Spare me the chivalry, Kenneth,” she pulled me aside by the lapels, near her painting titled, ‘Fiendish Physician’. “Do you know who that is? Mrs. Vivian Hossberg, of Doctor Abraham Hossberg. She is one of the heavyweight art benefactors in San Francisco. She’s best friends with Tessa Tyman—Tessa Tyman. I wouldn’t care if she called me a scumbag slut in Herb Caen’s column, if I could get her to buy one of my paintings.”

          “Whoa, gotcha, message received…but I still don’t see what right she has to rip your art out loud like that…”

          “Socialite makes right. Because she speaks with her pocketbook, dumkoff. Besides, some people have lower shock thresholds—that’s what I’m trying to tap into here, by confronting latent revulsion.”

          “Shock-rating. That’s a new one on me,” I muttered, shoving a show program into my jacket pocket. “Still and all, doesn’t your talent make right?”

          “What’s the matter with you, anyway?! They’ll think you’ve just come out of the hills, or something,” she fumed, handing me stemware from a passing tray, nostrils flaring, cheeks aflame. “Here, flash, nurse some vino, blend into the woodwork for now…and keep your faux pas’s to yourself, will you please?”

          “Sure, whatever…I’ll just…”

          “Look, I’ve got to link my parents up with Gene Weininger again. Daddo will get him to eat some more of the up-front costs yet. Then I’ll direct them back to their hotel, and make a grand exit. We’ll go somewhere and talk…”

          “Sounds good,” I sipped, beginning to edge toward gallery doors. “But who’s Tessa Tyman?”

           “Who’s Tessa Tyman?! She’s only one of The City’s heavy-duty philanthropists, in a league with Rhoda Haas Goldman and Cissie Swig. She and Bert Tyman own just about half of Market Street,” Sydney said, paging through one of her programs. “As for Mrs. Goldman, she just lead a Temple Emanu-El pilgrimage to Auschwitz, for godsakes. Believe me, there would be no arts scene here without such benevolence by the likes of the Haas family, Sterns, Cyril Magnin—even Micky Bender, son of a Dublin rabbi, a leading patron who supported Diego Rivera’s murals in the 1920s.

          “Irish rabbi…that, I never would have guessed,” I shifted the Volvo onto Pine Street off Leavenworth, heading nowhere in particular, but away from the downtown crush. “But what’s wrong with right where you are right now, free and clear. Mounting your own show, and everything…”

          “Which Daddo has had to pretty much bankroll; Weininger is just providing the space,” she sighed, removing her high heels, pulling light blue Etonics out of her Adidas daypack. “But it’s called priming the pump, only the opening volley in my San Francisco campaign. There are bigger fish to fry on Sutter’s gallery row—even bigger, fatter commissions to reel in.”

          “Daddy bucks, I see. Well maybe you can paint a stagecoach for Wells Fargo or something…”

          “God, read the arena, Kenneth, that’s not my path to glory, at all. I don’t know if you’re too dense to realize it, but my main turf is the powerhouse Jewish community, the Great Pioneer Families here, rooting back to the Gold Rush and Argonaut or Concordia Clubs. I mean, think about it, Blue Book yiches like the Lazards, Hellmans, Langendorfs, Fleishhackers and Zellerbachs. That’s real civic juice for you, mister sociology.”

          “Sort of a hierarchy of deeds, huh, I nodded like a studied lackey wingman. “So then what’s our master plan here?”

          “First off, I want to be a better artist than Ernest Peixotto, or Toby Rosenthal, the genius who painted ‘Elaine’ in the 1870s,” she reached down to the floorboard, lacing up her jogging shoes. “He stole the show with ‘The Trial of Constance de Beverly’ and wrapped San Francisco around his creative finger. Sure enough, win over my own Community—then the goys will follow before long…”

          Sounded like a plan, alright—time to go somewhere and talk, somewhere secluded, maybe—somewhere quiet and private where we could reconnect, jumpstart our reconciliation, proceed to plot out our…affiliation.  After waving adieu, cautiously, if not cordially, to the Mendels, I followed Sydney out of Weininger’s Fine Arts like a personal security goon. She had paused to leave her parents the keys to her Audi Fox, directing them back to their Nob Hill hotel suite, while I wheeled the Volvo around to the gallery building’s canopied Sutter Street entrance.

          Coastal fog had receded to the outer Richmond by the time we crossed Van Ness and Syd pointed me onto Franklin Street. I suspected she was heading us toward the green Presidio bluffs or beaches, maybe even Marin, as we roller coasted through sequenced green lights and these condo canyons along with imported roadsters and roof-racked Broncos and Cherokees.

          Marquette Park be damned, those were the wide-open spaces out there that I so sorely remembered when on Francisco Avenue, Chicago Lawn. How could that long, whipsaw road trip not have been worth the gas money: sky blue vistas, blonde riding shotgun, California dream coming true, after all. Western imperative, I was a man of choice, of destiny; I suddenly felt so fully alive. I could already feel my rising Oxytocin hormone levels, neuromodulating peptides gushing into my amydala and hypothalamus. Once past this rough patch, all the happiness, contentment, the hugging and orgasmic arousal—pair bonding ad infinitum…

          At least until Syd had me cutting out Green Street, where we circled Gough to Octavia and Vallejo, prowling for a precious empty parking spot here in Cow Hollow, finally lucking into a sudden pull-out near tiny Allyne Park. Thereupon I agreed with her the maneuver would have been much easier with my battered ol’ Squareback, this roomier though rotting Volvo being a dubious upgrade all around, bigger not being better about now.

          “Wow, so you’ve got it all figured out now, huh?” Enough with the oldies, I turned the FM dial from Stones’ ‘Wild Horses’ over to Mac’s platinum ‘Gold Dust Woman’, while I parallel parked in the shade of a dwarf redwood overhang.

           “You betcha, I’m making it my business…whew, where did you dig up this clunker, and what smells in here?”

           “Loaner from a friend,” I exhaled out my door window. “Business? I thought your were an artist…”

           “Some friend. But my art is my business, as if it’s really any of your business now,” she spouted, sounding as unsure as assured, leading me past multi-colored stick Victorian cash-cow homes, then a neighborhood landmark Octagon House, enroute to the palliative solitude and serenity of the…Union Street Fair. “What made you come back out here like this, anyway?”

 Care for more?

 Chapter 46. Strolling amid the street fair’s 
treats and eats, then pausing in a stylish 
watering hole to wash them all down, it’s
misreads and misdirections on the rocks…  

“Happy is a homebody 
until the open road calls— 
tearing out roots and all.”

          “I’m just saying at least he’ll be safer here…his tail feathering is even growing back.”

          “Safer,” I winced, “with the uni-bomb scare over on Northwestern’s campus?”

          “Tsk, that bomb package had ties to a Circle Campus parking lot, of all places. But it does make you wonder what is going on these days. Like, then there’s the neo-Nazi insanity down in your backyard, marching their hate-fest up here to Skokie, no less.”

          Stepped in it, stepped on it but fast. I had taken Nathan up on Roscoe’s Volvo, stripping my squareback of Blaupunkt, toolbox and Colorado plates, trashing its serials. I scraped the soot and bird shit off his rusty green 122s along Mowhawk street, cold cranking the sedan’s four banger, priming its dual carbs, tuning points and plugs so Nate could jumpstart the junker with his red workhorse Chevy Blazer.

          I’d cleared the beer cans, menthol butts and syringes off of the green vinyl seats, rigged the radio and test headed up Edens Expressway to jailbreak my dog, or at least assess the prospect of taking him along on the ride west. With Melissa doing job interviews and her father business tripping, Seamus was digging around their tiny chainlink-fenced yard. We broke free like Rusty and Rin-Tin-Tin, wheeling through Skokie proper to a nearby Niles open space park.

          “Was my backyard, Moon. Why do you think I’m getting the hell out of there again?!” I sputtered, loading the trunk, slamming the lid on my way into the car, uneasy that she’d finally caught on to that cankerous scene down South.

          “None too soon, if Seamus’s near-death experience here is any indication,” she walked me and some more of my effects from her dad’s garage to the leaky Volvo in her driveway.

          “It just happened. He’s a maniac—you know how he will get into anything,” I pleaded, prudently holding fire. “I mean, you’re saying I can’t take care of my dog?”

          “Track record, Kenny, track record…”

          A good run along the Chicago River’s North Branch, and we were teaming up like old Boulder times, working up a powerful hunger at that. My tastes ran to an Italian Beef shop on Golf Road, Seamus’s to some scraps about its garbage cans. But residual rat poison soon sent the Setter heaving and convulsing across the Volvo’s back seat. Only emergency stomach pumping at the nearest vet clinic could save him.

          Which it did—no worry, no charge, smiled a young, yarmelkahed Dr. Thileman—partial as he was to Irish Setters with such full feathering and high pointed crowns, sabbath and a North Shore tee-time soon upon him. I carted Seamus and his gastric medicine to Melissa’s yard in custodial shock, sweating out her return, much less her immediate reaction.

          “That’s hitting way below the belt, Moon.” I could have brained her right then and there, nevertheless realizing that once again, she probably was right.

          “It’s why you’d be better off staying up North,” Melissa sighed, latching the yard’s chainlink gate behind us. She held her nose and kissed me, seemingly resigned to my road trip.“So go get the Boulder stuff together, say hi for me and hurry on back. We’ve plenty to work on right here.”

          “Don’t I know it…”

          Topping the list was penning thank-you notes, then prying my father loose from his mournful Francisco Avenue flat. With mom buried in a Herbert family plot outside Prairie Crossing, he had taken sad stock of his place and time, deciding that his remaining days would be best spent as near to her as possible.

          One night, after we had the awkward ‘sorry I haven’t been much of a father to you’ reckoning and hopeless gen-gap reconciliation, I commiserated by saying I hadn’t been much of a son, for that matter. Feeling his pain, frightfully so, I suggested the move, seeing as how he was so utterly lost and lonesome here without her.

          Soon enough, he took early retirement, and mom’s token life insurance payout back to Prairie Crossing. With no small measure of relief, I helped him relocate to Uncle Dellis’s place. A small back-house addition afforded him some privacy and brotherly company, even if Dellis was still a feedlot wild and crazy guy.With it came a garage space for his old Merc, all but a mile or so from the cemetery.

          Thereupon we left the Francisco flat behind, Frankie Fuhrery’s cadres still goose-stepping lively in Marquette Park for a Skokie blitzkrieg—their Chicago Lawn otherwise fading to black. Dad had hit his golden years in inconsolable mourning, also bemoaning as how Chitown was so great ‘before the coloreds and all’.  Me, I just hit the road, vowing never to feel that damn abandoned my own self.

          “She came by, ordered it up. What can I say?”

          “No notice, nothing?”

          “No dice—she said everything goes…”

          Bustin’ loose, beelining down I-55, I had blown off Chicagoland at about Romeoville, feeling the morning buzz of RC Colas and a rush of freewheeling relief, picking up a stale AM set of Paul Simon’s ‘Gone At Last’, cross-fading into Boz man’s ‘Lido Shuffle’. I saluted Honest Abe past Springfield, yet nearly turned back at St. Louis before crossing blind faithfully past the Arch. Such was the realization that the road ahead could be a cranially divided highway, mile upon mile.

          Steer onto I-70 and let the Volvo roll due west with abandon: so much time to think, too much time to think. Yeah, manifest imperative and all that—but what the hell was I doing out here in another beat-out junker? How could I have stiffed FBC and those Michigan Avenue spreads for another sack of White Castle sliders to go? What was so goddamn bad about Chicago, anyway—cognitive dissonance no end…

And look how my last-minute flee fall had upended Moon. Or had it, did she really push hard enough to keep me there? And if not, what the hell else was going on with her these days? Is it an east-west thing, or a north-south…thing? Why is she moving things along so fast if she sees us pulling that North Side scenario…together? Aww, cool it, she’s like money—Lester notwithstanding, Mendel family or no. So eyes dead ahead, right on target, two hands on the jiggety wheel, fore not aft—stay in the present, look to the future, get the hell out of the past. The way this Goteborg heap was rolling across the straight plains, Kansas would be history before sundown, Rockies on the horizon before dawn.  

          More precisely, the Front Range shone rhubarb fresh from the turnpike overlook, Boulder Valley yawning and stretching to greet the day, sky clear and cloudless to the Continental Divide. I coasted down US 36 toward Pearl Street and Dot’s Diner for some breakfast and drip, the town and campus looking more peak-to-peak postcard than ever.

          Caffeine juiced, I placed a few friendly phone calls, but everybody kept asking about Melissa as their voices trailed off. Even Lawson Bennaker had left a door note on his old place that he was off to Steamboat Springs to mine those hills. I wandered around CU’s quad, but couldn’t muster the gumption to revisit the Sociology Department, let alone Paul Verniere, so simply milled about Packer, then University Hill a bit, to get reacquainted with the Flatirons tableau.

          Yet in this short time, traffic hadn’t gotten any lighter, the vehicles themselves any less showy and sporty, legacy homes weren’t any less gentrified. Cowboy Boulder was further disappearing in a cloud of poured concrete and trail dust as new developments spread like wildfire across the valley. One-time hippie outposts were being renovated into brickish banking or blue-chip brokerage branches all the more—so many trust funds, wire transfers, buyouts and inheritances to be corralled.

          More young moguls in; quaint counter-cult utopians out. Other-state schoolies and bicoastal coolies in; back country groovies and grubbies out. Champagne powder here, fringy frontier gone: unbridled valley fever at a high granite pitch. Who could keep up with it all now, sociologically or otherwise?

          Against that polished rocky backdrop, I rumbled up to the foothill cabin, silently hoping it would look smaller and trashier than I’d remembered. Instead, the place was homier and more welcoming, seemingly larger than our earlier life—got me to wondering if it would have been so storybook had we stayed. I parked out front, expecting to either pack up or unpack here for good—the latter prospect quickly dampened by the open-door emptiness of that backyard shed under clear, warming skies.

          “Nothing left, landlady just spread it all out through the weekend,” said Kathy, who had 9/10ths squattered the place, after she asked where Moon was and what she’d been doing since so sadly leaving town. “All gone, just like that…people were doling out the bucks left and right…”

          “I’ll bet,” I muttered, still trying to recompose a pretty picture of our move. My shoulders drooped like snowed-over pine branches—images of textbooks, stereo LPs, framed Euro photos, a 10-speed Motobecane, pup tent, camp stove, Army class-A’s, ice skates, fielder’s mitt, et al, dissolving before my eyes. But at least I still had my cameras.

          “A real barn burner, all right…sorry about that, but I never heard from you, so…”

          “More like a shed burner, if you ask me.”

          To her credit, Kathy invited me to catch up on events further over reheated potluck, compensatory, mile-high hospitality not easily kissed off after fuel stop upon rest stop of snack-packaged pumice. She cooked up a chicken-rice dish that was tandori tasty, but no Steak and Kidney Pie. We washed the crockful down with Texas milkshakes, then hashed over things pottery lab before and since Melissa and I left.

          Kathy let out her bibs some and explained how Moon had been so dedicated to the smooth running of the kiln and all, and how she was really missed over at the wheels. Busy, busy, busy: that was how Moon came across to her, so tuned into the Hill, that she was such an enviro-natural here. How busy, I asked, gazing around the kitchen nook as if the current hostess was either our guest or a Melissa stand-in. You know, she smiled thinly, busy, busy…bee.

          The entire situation was somewhat out-of-body, as if we had never handed the cabin over to this kicked-back earthenware pothead. Yet here I was, doing a guest shot with droopy bedroom eyelids, snooze alarms and busy signals going off in my head like civil defense sirens. Not that much had changed in the place, basic furniture-wise, and I remembered how comfortable naps could be on that sagging front room davenport.

          So there I crash landed, bidding Kathy an early good evening as she fleered her way into the bedroom—couching a loyal, good-scout night for myself, being a guest with much less. But not before asking if I could make a strategic collect call on our old yellow rotary phone…

          “Seven pounds, nine ounces…”

          “Wow, congrats…all are healthy, huh?”

          “Yeah, guess I got a halfback on my hands.”

          “Bear down Chicago Bears, Nate,” I said, mind flitting back and forth, between the Front Range darkness and that fireplace spot where ‘Waif and Grain’ used to be. “How’re your folks with it?”

          “Not so great, Heeb, not exactly into the scene. Lots more heartache than high-fives. But let’s just say I don’t think I’m totally out of the will.”

          “Then again, blood’s thicker, right?”

          “Who the fuck knows, I only hope it’s color blind,” Nathan groaned. “And this blows up a few days after I find out Spelsky crashed my ’Vette against a power pole on Plainfield Road. Cops found Chivas bottles all over the site.”

          “Totalled?” Sounded like something death-wish Curt would do, reason enough why we were never that tight a’ buds.

          “I’ll say, killed him. And Gary Rallimore was ridin’ shotgun. He’s in intensive care, hanging by a thread.” He paused audibly to sip and toke. “So you comin’ back with a trunkload of Coors, or…”

          “Holy shit, Rallimore too?” I gasped, then muttered on the down low, impulses gyro slap-shooting through my head, loss leader variety. “Uh, you know what, Nate? My stuff was all gone—sold out from under my ass. Really, I’ve got nothing here in Boulder anymore. So if it’s cool with you, I think I’m gonna ride the wild Volvo to the coast, work off some crosswinds first.” Did I just actually say that?!

          “Man, they’ll eat you alive out there,” Nate sucked in some more hemp. “But if you’re set on makin’ tracks, check this out. Remember how Gary’s ol’ man blew town on him and his mom years ago? Well, he’s a big shot lawyer out in the Bay Area somewhere. If you run across that asshole, hip him to the fact that his kid’s in really bad shape right now. Oh, and look up Tony Panescus, remember him from the Twelve Bar? Think he works at the Hilton downtown there, clue him in on Curt and Gary while you’re at it.”

          “Will do, Nate, time permitting, least I could do,” I stammered, pulling Syd’s invite out of my canvas pack. “Let me give you an address where you can mail me for the time being if need be, okay? And give my best to Gary and your folks.”

          “Artsy-fartsy’s address? That’s cool, keep in touch,” Nathan coughed. “Frisco, huh? Don’t get any on ya…”

          Early next morning brought a damask sunrise refracting off the Flatiron faces, directly into the cabin’s front room windows, a wake-up call that couldn’t have come soon enough. Road weariness and numbing Chicago-Skokie news shocks did little in the way of fostering a good night’s sleep. There were just too many disjointed, warm and fuzzy apparitions in the cabin.

          I tossed and turned under an Indian quilted comforter, cushions shifting, bobbing like river rapids’ inner tubes: seeing, hearing Moon baking, me studying, Seamus racing window to window, barking at yard squirrels, Pags rolled up in a snoozy ball on the sunny side sills. Still, I could smell the sandalwood, taste her cookies, hear the Setter howling as I played cassette tape-loopy Dusty & the Dusters and Fogelberg on the cinderblock and barnboard-shelved stereo, encored by John Denver crooning his ‘…Colorado rocky mountain high—I’ve seen it rainin’ fire in the sky’.

          Such dreams turned from sweet to sour by 4 a.m. sharp. I was spooked enough to pace between the parlor and my old study room like I used to before final exams. Visions, voices, everyday vignettes in the dark, neither here nor then and there. Parched prospects, torrents of mistreatment, rivers of regret, painful images of crack, black and blue, as if Moon beams still had a hold on our house. It was all I could do to bundle up and sneak my way out of the foothill cabin altogether, leaving behind nothing but a simply scribbled thank-you note to Kathy on the fireplace mantle, shivering at the thought that I would likely never pass through this door and porchway again. Still, catching my eye as I squeezed into the Volvo were the futuristic houses shining further up the range front, those spacey, geometric aeries that Sydney had said reminded her so much of coastal cliffside California, futures unbound.

          Down Uni Hill, Boulder was just too clearly beautiful this morning to miss a Dot’s Diner breakfast redux and picture window view of the Flatiron formation. But I devoured the fried yolks and homefries, grabbing a coffee refill for the road. Tooling back down Broadway, I newly regarded the brick-faced Pearl Street Mall, this cowpoke town now dolled up for the cotillion corral. How those mountains so majestically embraced the entire valley, wondering what would have happened had I never been sidetracked, had we never left, was there any way I could stay here on my own? These days, really? No dice…for what price utter chagrin and compunction? 

          Then again, what would have been the Boulder back-up? Slaving over property or soaring with more potential? Roofing more canyon houses, underachieving through a workaday gig on some 28^th Street loading dock, mindless roaming the Front Range, brain-dead moping around the Pearl Street Mall—seething, sweating out another sosh Ph.D. application; much as I loved the place, what was going to come of that?

           Rather a quick spin past CU made me feel more distanced from the sosh department than ever, only leaving an apologetic note for missing their Ph.D. acceptance letter deadline und Dean Cross’s slightly open office door. I was resigned to taking what I’d learned there and better applying it beyond theory, setting aside any further study until the real world stopped spinning as furiously as it was about now.

          So I cut over toward Columbia Cemetery, then down 9^th Street through Boulder’s even pricier Lower Chautauqua neighborhood, currently being bid up with outside money by all manner of sport and status climbers, bringing along their costly, rhinestone baggage from parts unknown. Same stimuli, similar response—and then there were the winter-long snow jobs. One last, lingering look at crisply sunny Chautauqua Park from Baseline Road, and there I left Boulder Valley, picking up some orange juice and a big bag of maple nut from the Green Mountain Granary, turning up the FM radio as I headed south toward the Denver Turnpike, Johnny Nash coming on with an oddly ironic ‘I Can See Clearly Now’.

          Trouble was, I saw myself far from grasping the bigger picture, which came no clearer at this Arvada Gas ’n’ Grub, where I’d stopped to refuel and ablut. Yet here I was at another pay phone, reversing the charges, if not any homegrown progress made back Chicago way.

          “Tsk, you there, me here—I can’t believe you, Kenny. Now, taking off again, back to California yet?! I sense nothing but trouble.”

          “Just some unfinished business, Moon. I left some stuff out there, and I’ve got to square it away. So hang in with me a bit longer…this is something I have to do, clear me some clashes, and it’ll be done…”

          “It’s that Saturn thing, I just know,” she hissed into the phone. “And you’re really stretching the rubber band, Kenny, when you already know deep down I’m the best thing that’s ever happened to you. I’m the only one who can save yourself from yourself. I’m serious, there aren’t many women who would put up with you like I do. This is where you belong, but so be it, stay in close touch.” 

          “Will do, like a glove, an Indy 500 driving glove.”

          “Uh-huh, going around in circles, ’bout to drive me crazy…” Click.

          “What studs?”

          “Studs Terkel…you know, the writer…”

          “Whattabout him?”

          “He pointed you out to me—in a news clipping…”

          “Did, huh—why me?”

          There was no stopping me out of Denver. Chances, choices: what was done was done. The losses were evident; now where were the gains? I coaxed the Volvo through I-70’s westbound tunnels and range climbs, its Solex carbs balking at the altitude and thinning air. Munching glorified gorp, downing nuts and raisins with swigs of bottled OJ concentrate, I began finding plenty more think time beyond Georgetown, about the CU doctoral misconnect, trading rarified research for the bottom-feeding field study, whether I liked it or not. So why not try a little journalizing down the road?

          Dizzying, head throbbing stuff to carry over the Continental Divide, all right; yet I had put most of that in my rearview mirror beyond the Moab exit. Just look straight ahead, focus on the future, eyes on the prize. I could see nothing but open road up to I-80 and big, blue skies all the way across Utah’s Salt Lake Basin, warmly recalling Syd’s stone wisdom at desert’s end, to the clear-channel radio tune of ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’ and ‘One Of These Nights’.

          A dead-of-night stayover in an Oasis, Nevada motel: dark thoughts of her Lovelock power grab still had me by the jewels. But come morning, I was off into a brand new day’s breeze through the Silver State—this Volvo being markedly clippier, not to say roomier, than the VW squareback left behind.

          Forget about the Midwest nightmare, home in on the sunny California Dream—take new-age San Francisco harmony over age-old Chicago discord any day. Never mind about that Wells squareback breakdown, I could feel the promise and energy coming just beyond the Black Rock horizon.

          Got so granola and coffee psyched up that I pulled off I-80 in Reno, wheeling past Virginia City’s Bucket of Blood Saloon, headed down 395 toward Carson City and beyond, intending to follow up Studs Terkel’s lead on Nevada’s champion of BLM cases and causes. Turned out I wasn’t the first to seek out Mustang Maggie, however, and she was neither flattered nor amused.

          “Because you are such a brave voice for free range horses, that’s why,” I smiled, digging into my camera bag at the Ponderosa pine-logged gate of her small refuge/ranch. “I thought it would be great to take some nice photos in your honor…”    

          “You did, did you,” she snapped, dressed in her leathery, pearl-buttoned cow gal finery, tying a slipknot into some old lariat line.“Who you with? Got a big-time press credential?”

          “Uh, no actually, not yet. But I’m heading to San Francisco, and I’ll bet I can get you in the papers there. You know, put your story out more, further help your efforts along with all the horses roaming Nevada…”

          “That’s what you all say. Get a legit credential and pony up, maybe we can talk. I’m not no Annie Oakley statue posing for tourists out here…”

          “R-R-Right, ma’am…I’ll do just that,” I stammered and shook her gnarled, turquoise-ringed hand. “Meantime, keep saving those wild stallions, okay?”

          “Easy for you to say, Huck. But what you got against the mares?”

          Wannabe writer blocked, brought up short, though undeterred, I filed that story idea in the remainder bin, then low geared for the golden glow of California. Sierra-Tahoe was every bit as beautiful and bountiful as I’d recalled from our first trip in—the blue lake’s algae pollution or no—and this ’66 Volvo proved slightly better at keeping up with the freeway flow. Here was Sydney pointing out the snowy caps, crystalline streams, the teeming rivers and wildly treacherous rockslides outside Truckee as though I had never turned tail out of the state—and perhaps I never had in my hemispheres.

          But the long, unwashed road and re-entry head trip had taken their toll by Auburn and Volcanoville. So the steep mountain descent dropped me into a ‘$10/per’ pink motel on a frontage strip outside Citrus Heights, which ended up being relatively reasonable due to its strategic location as surreptitious hooker Hilton for Folsom Prison and a nearby Air Force base. No Lovelock, yet little peace, even less quiet all through the night: however a sink and cold shower did enable me to freshen up for the final, climactic push.

          Sacramento and the Central Valley were bathed in the early morning sun, a little half & half, double sugar this side of Davis carried me to Vacaville’s 50s-era Coffee Tree—navigating Nut Tree’s toy trains, planes, playland animals and candy stands. By all rights, some whipped creamed apple-raisin-walnut pancakes should have jacked me but good for the triumphant return to San Francisco, especially with a couple of SacTown AM countrified banjo moldies like ‘Sweet City Woman’ and ‘Afternoon Delight’.

          Yet each bend in the I-80 lanes from Suisun/Fairfield onward rather filled me with apprehension and not a little bit of anticipatory dread. Go figure, trepidation in paradise upon reaching Vallejo’s vista point, which should have been grounds for celebration. Instead, this vision of bridges came too fast and reached too far, beginning with the suspender over Carquinez Straits. On-shore ocean winds now chilled, dampened the warm California sun, and a marine layer hung over the coast, spreading eastward to the Berkeley Marina.

          This wasn’t the brilliant Bay Area vista I remembered, as when first crossing the Oakland-SF Bridge, emerging from the Goat Island tunnel. No, and it sure wasn’t the dazzling, dynamic downtown waterfront opening for the ‘Streets of San Francisco’.

          Today, this gunmetal span was one creeping Friday afternoon traffic jam, Bay Bridge backed up through the maze, from the toll plaza to who knew how far south. Embarcadero piers fanned around the bayfront like oatmeal ladyfinger wafers about a tarnished tea tray, minus the glittery icing on top.  

          A thick, leaden fog layer hung over Everybody’s Favorite City, turning its white hot rolling hills into a grayscale pud of a place—a crock of bauxite/wet concrete rather than a pot of gold. The downtown skyline flickered beneath this hovering drop cloth of splotchy porridge like holiday tree lights through crêpe de Chine.

          Usually beaming ivory and pastel buildings now wore a pasty patina, yellow street lamps casting a dull glaze over The City’s narrow, hill-bound arteries. The Ferry Building appeared cut off at its clock tower; Transamerica’s Pyramid could barely be seen at all, forget about the Golden Gate Bridge.

          Beyond San Francisco’s Financial District, Telegraph, Russian, Knob Hills and Twin Peaks were reduced to varying shades of thin, moody slate. Angel Island and Sausalito barely registered around a wind-churned bay, empty, high-water outbound oil tankers crossing paths along the ships’ channels with low, laden cargo vessels slogging in, foghorns blaring, bridge to bridge.

          I finally bucked and backfired around the 101 South bend on threadbare tires—inner lane-locked, grill to trunk lid, until the Central Freeway off ramp. Monitoring a sunken fuel gauge, I turned the Blaupunkt FM dial from LTD’s dancy ‘Back In Love Again‘ to Led Zeppelin’s plaintive, echo-demonic ‘Kashmir’. Its dire intrigues, Zep’s haunting brass and string loops, carried me with the traffic flow out past Fell Street’s carnival colorful Victorians against ashen grey—the Volvo blown aside, tailgated until I was disoriented, could handle the strung-out Haight and Panhandle no more.

          From Stanyan, I cut over to what I recognized as Fulton Street, past groupie sacrifices at the black-gold Airplane house. Rather than getting lost any further amid Golden Gate Park’s white glass Conservatory—its fan palms, fuchsia gardens and Rhododendron Dells—I steered toward the finality and familiarity of Ocean Beach. Yep, just like Syd and I had months before; hmm, surprise, surprise—but should I have let her know I was on my way back to town? Meanwhile, my feet were getting colder by the block.

          Even from the distance of Park Presidio Boulevard, I could get my bearings with this straight-line shot to the sea, already visible from here. So it was balls out through the fog socked Richmond District. Just short of Denise’s place, I jumped at a Fulton green light, nearly coming to fender-to-fender blows with a deep purple Mercedes-Benz saloon wheeling right into my outbound lane.

          I honked in alarm, as Robert Plant doomsday wailed, Jimmy Page power chorded his twin-neck guitar, John Bonham pounded away. A white-sleeved arm quickly menaced me out the sedan’s left front window, flipping me the bird while continuing to cut in ahead of me with all the authority of a Secret Service detail.

          Yet a closer glimpse of the screaming driver revealed an even higher authority, bad mouthing me from under a khaki bushwhacker hat: Bill Graham, likely hustling up another mogul-rock Fillmore or Winterland gig, and here I was a newbie nobody, challenging his primacy, drawing his singular digital wrath.

         Hell of a welcome wagon, or was it some homin’ omen? This, while Plant moaned, ‘OOOOOOOOHHH yeah—let me take you there, let me take you theeerrrrr…’

Care for more?

Chapter 45. Springing on San Francisco, 
making the scene at a show of force, 
an unexpected cool-down awaits as 
The City proper heats up all the more…

∞ End of STAGE TWO ∞ 

“Mother is an angel 
felled by illness and pain— 
homemories remain.”

          “One in a million…”

          “Pure goodness and light…an absolute guardian angel called home.”

          “Yes, that’s for sure.”

          “Patience of a saint, that one. God rest her soul. Dear Muriel’s in a better place now…”

          Novena devotions and well-wishing abounded; still, she never had a prayer. We got the call barely hours before surgery, so dad and I rushed over to the Holy Sacrament waiting room to settle in for the long haul. But not long after mom went under the knife, her vital signs took a critical dive. Her heart succumbed to the anesthesia and thoracic trauma, and she flat lined in no time.

          From the moment a staff surgeon pulled off mask and mirror, loosened green scrubs on his way into the waiting room, life on and about Francisco Avenue was one dark, mournful blur. Wake at 63^rd Street and California Avenue, service at nearby St. Helene’s Church, funeral at a plot out in Prairie Crossing: We then decided to gather the adoring family for this remembrance celebration back here at the flat.      

          Assembled were many more relatives and friends from mom’s side, although I did catch a fleeting cameo by crazy Uncle Dellis. Parlor back  to the kitchen, Bridgeport to Willow Grove, sisters, aunties, nunks, neighbors, nuns, pew mates and cousins of varying degrees shared love and memories of mother Muriel, over sliced ham sandwiches, macaroni salads, cole slaw and spreads of indescribably delicious potluck dishes, candles burning on every table and counter—as the tears and tributes flowed from every direction.

           I barely knew these people anymore, yet could but marvel at the range of folk she had so humbly touched and/or enriched. Perhaps the only faces missing from this woolen coat, shiny suited ensemble were Kay and Arnold Rosen, tacitly uninvited despite their most generous encomium. While Melissa was quietly excused from duty for her own unassuming sake.

             “I’ll always remember how funny she could be,” said Uncle Liam, slapping ham slices to rye.“Like her Fibber McGee and Molly thing—how she’d mock Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve back then.”

          “Or that she was just as big a fan of the Goldbergs in those days,”  Auntie Florence added, handing him the mustard.

          Fibber who? These anecdotes from a kitchen klatch reminded me how unusually older my parents were when I came along. Mom had been sickly for so long, a family physician had advised her not to be risking pregnancy. Then came the war, the doctors’ draft, and another, an OB type, had taken over her case. And after some postwar regimen and treatment, he determined that a single childbirth was worth the risk, weaker sperm counts or no.

          So I often felt rooted in a different time and frame; I came along later, so tended to start things…later. Beginning early on, I’d fretted at the sound of every fire siren for Willow Grove’s volunteer force, that their ambulance was coming for my fragile, gray-haired mother. And on one holiday occasion, they actually did, responding to her head-cracking fall on some sidewalk ice—pulled me out of gym class, grade school to emergency room.

          It was a Christmas and New Years my father and I spent alone: woeful tree, eating out, saying very little to one another, save for visits to her hospital bedside. Otherwise, he habitually let her do the talking, except when major decisions arose, or he came home loaded to the gills.

          Thus the highballs he and some of the blokes had started tossing down around the funereal dining room table brought back similar bouts when the dour, reserved Scot in him would deign to drink and mix it up with Mom’s more ‘looby’ Irish kin (yeah, you know, gotta look out for them shifty micks…).  These were the lubed, lugubrious evenings when I begrudged him the most, mom keeping her distance, gesturing me to zip it—steeping tea, chain smoking and rolling her eyes.

          So now, as even the tipsy family laggards had staggered out under the weight of their laments and slobbering recollections, I went about snuffing the scattered candles, commencing the clean-up detail. Between trips to the kitchen and garbage cans, I kept tabs on my dad, still sitting there at the dining room table, sipping at some warm Meister Brau, looking lost as Tornado Alley after a twister had passed through. The night wearing on toward 2400 hours, I paused to ask him if there was anything I could get him, how he was holding up. But apparently my timing couldn’t have been worse.

          “Yah, bring you mother back to help me here, that’s what,” he slurred, tossing down the rest of his beer, slamming his pilsener glass against the snack cluttered table. “But you can’t do that, now, canya…”

          “Uh, no, dad—that I can’t do,” I busily scooped up the few potluck-smeared plates and platters the gathered hadn’t already so mourningly help remove. “But I wish more than anything that I could.”

          “Well, you sure had no trouble taking her away, now did ya, mister know-it-all.”

          “Come on, you know I was only…”

          “Only forcing me into a hair-brained scheme that killed her,” he cried, relighting his pipe. “My wife would still be here today you’d left well enough alone! And that’s the god’s honest truth!”

          “But she wasn’t well enough.” I stormed into the kitchen, arms loaded with a sinkful of dishes and party debris. “You heard what the doctors said, as well as I did. Something had to be done, dammit, that tough decision had to be made around here!”

          “Hmph, around here,” dad said, pouring another round of Brau as I returned to clear the table. “She was everything to me around here…what am I supposed to do around here now? Or around this damn neighborhood at that?!”

          “Why, from what mom told me, you should feel right at home in Chicago Lawn these days, especially in Marquette Park.” There I went, blurting again without forethought. “And maybe you should have figured that out when your were belittling her all these years.”

          “What was that? Is this about her and her blamed religion? I don’t know what she ever told you about me, son, but I’ve never meant anybody any harm by it. Only my way of needling a little, that’s all—spouting off a bit after hearing all the nagging and paying the bills. Just remember, a man makes decisions and takes the heat because he’s the one who has to make them. Maybe now you’re finding that out for yourself…”

          “Nevermind…” I plowed past scattered furniture toward the living room with a turquoise Tupperware dishpan. What the hell, go blaming this on me, for chrissake…

          I rationalized that maybe it was just the booze talking, to quell any further unwise-ass damage on my part. Whatever, the image of my father sitting there so hapless and hopelessly empty frightened me to the quick, although I wasn’t quite sure why at the time. I set aside the pan before tackling a parlorful of used goblets, napkins, dishware and ashtrays, seeking a refreshing blast of cold night air.

          What with everything going on, we hadn’t checked the mail for a day or two, reason enough to head downstairs for the front doors. A turn of the postal key opened a slot jammed with junkmail and several envelopes—condolence cards mostly. But then there was an oversized pink mailer that once again had been forwarded to me by way of Boulder. This one was postmarked from San Francisco, the return address reading, Sydney Mendel.

          “And you think this is the solution?”

          “Uh, yes—under the circumstances…”

          “I can imagine what you’re going through now, your mother, and all…”

          “I want to thank you for the floral piece, by the way.”

           Sydney’s card was actually an invitation to Destiny. That was the theme for an exhibition of her latest paintings, to be held in downtown San Francisco in the weeks to come—her Sutter Street gallery opening slotted for the end of the month. The mailer itself was a glossy coated white 18-point affair with vivid color reproductions of two recent works, nicely frame bordered and drop shadowed to the right.

          The front cover displayed ‘Rabbits At The Rail’, a dog track motif likely inspired by her Florida days, only with jackrabbits chasing a small mechanical mechanical whippet. Gracing the back panel, rather provocatively so, was her finished portrait of Marin’s Aimee Pellimore.

          Collated inside the invite was a hand-written note brooking my presence in no forgiving terms. Syd breezed on about how long nights by her lonesome in Athren’s studio, what with everybody back east, had yielded this career-boosting one-woman show. She’d said that everything else was going fantabulously for her out there, as though nothing had ever happened otherwise.

          She somehow knew I was working in advertising, wrote that I would drive a Mercedes one day. She wished I could make it to her gala opening—but understood I would be much too busy working on big-time deals. Still, Syd PSed that she had something ‘really juicy family-wise’ to tell me about that would literally blow me away sometime one of these days, whatever that meant.

          Her sign-off included a new return address, with a tiny sketch of the Golden Gate Bridge, the word, ‘Bygones’ passing underneath. Her entire package was scented and clearly sent from a different time zone, if not planet, one I was being welcomed, if not challenged to explore. She mused as how she had once envisioned us growing gracefully old together, no matter how long she’d have to wait. And how long ago that seemed by now.

          I had sort of expected a sweet-smelling invoice, but not an all-in voice like this. How, what—was this some kind of bunny trap? Nawww, why would she even bother? Best ever—wonder if she said that to all the guys. Still, I could not say Sydney’s invitation hadn’t grabbed my attention, turned my head 360 degrees around at dizzying rate, particularly that bodily scent. Off-guard couldn’t begin to describe my gut reaction; disembodied was more the guilt-unforsaken rage.

           “Yes well, we take care of our own here,” said Ralph Desman. “I just want to make clear the ramifications of a decision like this. I have, after all, gone out on a limb to open some doors for you, now haven’t I…”

           “Of course you have, sir,” I said, handing him my typed memo, formalizing things. “And don’t for a moment think I don’t appreciate your faith in me.”   

          “Then what in Hades is this all about, Herbert?” Desman drew one last puff on his Meerschaum, setting the pipe aside into an Algonquin Hotel ashtray. “As far as I’m concerned, you’ve been coming along swimmingly here on the 16th floor.”

          “I thank for that, really—which is what makes this so difficult.” I folded my hands, fighting an anxious urge to take the letter back. “I just have some personal things I must take care of, and it’s going to take some time…”

          “Very well, but a man carries his own baggage, wherever it is he goes,”  he rose from behind his desk, shaking his head in disbelief. “Tell you what, we’ll leave the door open a crack for you here. We’re always on the lookout for good long-form copywriters.”

          “Thank you so much, Mr. Desman, you don’t know,” I pumped his soft-form hand.

          “Check in with personnel, and clear out your office,” he seated himself, grabbing some storyboards for a :30 floor wax commercial. “But the desk and typewriter stay here, if you please. We’ll carry on nevertheless…”

“Will do, sir. All best to you and Forrester, Blaine. Hope to work with you again down the road,” I said meekly, closing a door or two behind me, for better or worse.

          “I’m doing just fine. Why is everybody so concerned about how I’m doing lately?”

          “Everybody?”

          “Yes, everybody. I got another call from Faith Mendel asking about me and catching up on things. Then Lester goes ringing me up again, all the way from his goofy farm like I’m on my deathbed, or something…oops, sorry about…”

          “That’s un-real, Moon…but the Mendels?”

          “Tsk, it’s nothing, past history. Anyway—how are you holding up?”

          “Me? Aww, not too bad, under the circumstances…”

          “Well, at least you’ve got your work to take your mind off your mother situation, and thank you for the dinero, by the way,” Melissa said, acknowledging a money order I had sent her, finally squaring my little debt. “That’s what’s so great about Chicago. What else is there to do here but work hard and build something good and solid?”

          I had skulked down through Pioneer Court, taking one long, departing glance at the Equity Center, office supply filebox in hand. With severance aforethought, I’d driven in, finding to my amazement an on-street parking place on E. Illinois in nearby Streeterville.

           Having packed the box into the back hatch of my ailing Volks, I drifted up to Michigan Avenue once again, with a newfound admiration for the august beauty of the Wrigley Building and Tribune Tower, all these other formidable downtown hi-rises—yet all I kept picturing was that fascinating pyramid on the San Francisco skyline. I buttoned up my new fleece jacket over to the Magnificent Mile, a cold, cold Chicago winter, springtime taking the long, hard way around, such a far chant from Aimee Pellimore and her sunny, mellow Marin.

          This friction precipitated an inboard debate along the way up to City front Plaza, voices rattling around my mucous runny melon like honeydew balls in marzipan. Not to overthink it, but what was with the quick decision—snaaap, really, autonomic fight or flight? Settled and settle or good to go? Going swimmingly, or afraid of sinking? Like taking chances, taking on the negative fears? Were you some kind of budding aesthete or just a common choke artist? Would rational reasoning or irrational fantasies rule the day; would it be sociology in practice or salesmanship in print—Skokie or the shock troops—bounty or baggage, can’t or Kant? Abject nihilism or Nietzchean service to the higher man? Nodding to Bob Gelvart or Parker Hodicott or Hal Saversohn?  This was giving me nothing but impassable headaches, as was Cheap Trick’s newest number, ‘You’re All Talk’ on the FM radio. It all but convinced me I had to spring from all this insanity, get far away—even to the Flatirons or the Bay. Gotta blow town, gotta clear me some paths, starting today…

          “Uh, about that, Moon,” I said hesitantly. “There’s been a little change there at Forrester, Blaine. I’ve kinda taken a leave of absence.”

          “A leave? Of your senses?!”

          “No, I’ve thought this through. It wasn’t an easy decision, but there were just some dynamics at the agency that…”

          “So, how do you figure that helps our cause? You’d better get up here so we can talk this out…maybe it’s not too late to take it back, don’t you think?”

          “No, it’s pretty a done deal now, Moon. I’ve cleaned out my office and everything …at least for the time being.”

          “Then how are we supposed to get our place, Kenny? I’ve registered for classes and it looks like maybe I’ve landed a day care job in Evanston. Things are really moving along here, so what are you going to do now? We’ve got to sort this out…”

          “Sort it out, my thinking exactly,” I pressed, already feeling the dark shadow of dubious infidelity cleaving between us. “First thing, I’ve decided to head back to Boulder and get my stuff out of the shed, after all. I can also get back on the road—you know, to clear my head.”

          “That’s crazy talk, Kenny. What could be so urgent in Boulder? Let it be for now, we can pick that all up later, once we’re settled in here.”

          “No, I’ve got to do this first. Christ, we never should have left Boulder in the first place. But now, there are some loose ends and things that need resolving out there, that’s all. Out and back, no biggie.”

          “What things? I know you, Kenny—better than you know you, and I know what you’ll do. This sounds like nothing but trouble,” she plained, ‘Love Is Thicker Than Water’, playing on her bedroom radio. “Tsk, there’s more going on here, I just know.”

          “So you’re saying I can’t handle this myself? I’m not just some cowering little snow-shoveling cash cow. I’ve got lots of abilities, potential—you don’t know…”

           Anyhow, friends and family: mom gone and dad alone. Dagger goddess or kinda plain? Heh, heh, come to think of it—not bad for a Southside cad: surf city, two girls for every boy. Naw, that was crazy high school talk—but what if there was a catfight over me, if they kill one another on my account? Nope, abate, switch—whichever, a guy falls in love with a woman because of how he feels about himself when he’s with her, right? What your mind wants in a grudge match with what your body wants—neither, or both? So would you be more sensitive or stiffen your spine, stoke your anger and frustration here or stifle it in freedom unbound? Aww, these women, always trying to tie down us rambler rover type, right? Peter Pan Principle, undying adolescence all the way, committing to not commit, feet as cold as the Hawk out here. Yeah, way to be, Dudley, take another fuck-up out of pity cash… 

           That thinking was really cold, all right, which had driven me to raise my core temperature over a couple of Hamm’s drafts down in the Billy Goat. There at the bar, I cast about at Royko, Kup, Ebert and the like: what was that about all the good people leaving Chicago—couldn’t tell that by here—so maybe it wasn’t the city, it was my situation, me being so subdivided and parceled out.

           Royko himself was still holding court nearby, grousing on about how his Daily News was shutting down so he had to jump to the Trib or Times. Yet better to stay in the same riverfront ‘roach motel’ newspaper building or storm the Tower than, say, bailing out to ‘the world’s largest loony bin’ in California. A half schooner in, I spun on my barstool as Studs Terkel himself happened by, stopping as if he remembered me somehow.

          I mentioned San Francisco; he spewed, don’t go feeding your neurosis in Sodom & Gomorrah. Irish, aren’t you, he asked. When I nodded, he handed me a small press clipping about this craggy old dame in Nevada who championed wild horses. Here, he’d spit aside some tip from his cigar stub, saying: go tell Mustang Maggie’s story, hack boy, try doing some good with your paper and pen. Then Studs plod deeper into the belly of the Goat.

          His challenge was enough to prompt another quick decision and phone call, but where? I downed my draft and drove north to the  Ambassadors, worming down into the tunnel between Hotels, East and West, a fluorescent ambient lit passageway lined with top drawer notions, millineries and haberdashers, and a bank of discreetly quiet pay phones. If the Ambassadors were swell enough digs for Led Zep or Jagger and the Stones to ruin things, they were plenty good enough for me.

          “Snow…cow…who said you were, Kenny…what are you talking about? Is it my fault, what did I do to…”

          “You haven’t done anything, okay? It’s me—there’s just inner tensions I have to work off, some things I have to face, to own up to if I’m going to be any good to anybody. It’s a guy thing, Moon—you just wouldn’t understand.”

          “Tsk, then come up here, explain it all. I’ve found this neat little coffee shop in downtown Skokie,” she pleaded, ‘You’re In My Heart’ playing on the background stereo. “We can talk stuff out, work through it together like always. We’ve got a good thing going, Kenny—don’t do something stupid, okay? Your problem is whatever you want, sooner or later you want the other. So quit turning corners on me, will you please?”

          “That’s not true, and I don’t need you mothering all over me now. I’m not going wobbly on you, either,” I blurted, loose lips all over again. “Sorry, Moon, I’m a big boy, this is something I’ve got to face on my own terms. I can’t move forward with a part of me left hanging out west, and the last thing I want to do is hurt you…we’ll talk before I leave, okay…”

           “What are you talking about? You can’t leave me here, just like that, Kenny, noooooooo!!!”
 

          “Great, I hit the bull’s eye and you’re shootin’ blanks…”

          “Hey, who says I’m shooting blanks?”

          “You gettin’ away all free bird, and I’m left holding the mixed bag. Fuck, my parents find out, it’ll like to kill them…”

          “So you going to give it up, or…”

          Oops, there I went, blurting again, tongue ahead of mind/brain, minus my prefrontal cortex. But distraction had set in, Melissa’s plaintive ‘nooooo’ still echoing through me like the haunting chord  after ‘A Day In The Life’. I had pulled out of Streeterville with a minor snootful, Stud’s Billy Goat challenge ringing just as achingly in my ears.

          Steering up Michigan Avenue, wringing any heat I could out of the squareback’s vents, I more fully appreciated the magnificence of this mile, all the way past Water Tower Place, the Hancock and Playboy’s Palmolive beacon on this cold, gray day. Besides working up some powerful cognitive dissonance, I hit the Gold Coast hungry as hell for some fat local fare. 

          Putting my my taxicab shortcuts to good use, I cranked up Chicago’s brassy ‘Call On Me’ on the scratchy AM —then cut over Clark Street northward toward Wanky Weiners’ corner Vienna red-hots stand. A double chili-cheese dog and fresh-peeled fries: I was in saturated cholesterol nirvana with ‘Rubber Band Man’ on the dial. At least until I hit a brake-breaking patch of rocksalt-eroded potholes on Mohawk Street, where the weary squareback’s entire front end broke from its frame.

          So there I parked and left the Volks just short of Armitage, facing a CTA ‘L’ ride to the South Side or freeze-ass hoofing it over to Cliftwood Avenue.

          “Whoa, I shouldn’t have said that,” I muttered, having moved the conversation from my breakdown to Nathan Grimaldi‘s paternal developments, barely over the blare of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’; he always was partial to Syd Barrett. “Sorry, Nate, that was totally out of line…”

          “Forget it, no chance of that anyway,” moaned Natorious, pounding down a long-neck Carling’s in the hazy discomfort of his patchouli-incensed front room. “She’s gonna squeeze me tighter and tighter.”

          “Then you’re going to be a dad, huh? Who knows, maybe he’ll be all-pro…”

          “Yah, like maybe it’ll grow up to be president,” Nate said, reaching to change the cassette deck to his ripped side one, Alan Parsons Project’s ‘I Robot’.” Sorry about your mom, Heeb, I still remember her chocolate fudge cookies—could do some right about now. But howz other things on the Southside lately?”

          “Uh, you know, still on the march—more or less.”

          “I hear ya—can’t hang with that Nazi shit,” Nate offered me a swig of his Black Label. “Sooo, you’re hittin’ the road again, after all…”

          “Yeah, call it my western imperative, you know, just like when we used to get loaded on the Beach Boys and trunked-in Coors,” I obliged, getting a little lighter in the cranium. “Got some things to iron out…”

          “In Frisco, right? What, you made your decision at Clark and Division?”

          “No way, you’ve got me all wrong,” I huffed, noting his sly reference to Chicago’s main northside intersection of homo and sexual outside Andersonville and its fairy boys. “Closer to Clark and Armitage, that’s about where my clunker squareback just finally bit the dust.”

          “Man, from all that chasin’ around. You and your Jewish chicks…”

          “Just like you and your brown sugar,” I picked up on an out-of-sequence cut jump from the Parson Project’s ‘I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You’ to ‘Day After Day’. “Anyway, I’m just aiming for Boulder, up and back…”

          “And you need some fresh wheels,” Nathan smiled knowingly, sparking the longer of two ashtray roaches. “Well, Roscoe did leave behind his Volvo rustbox, and I’m tired of moving it around. Why don’t you futz with it a little and take that sucker?”

          “You sure?” I hit an obligatory toke. “I mean, it would just be to borrow it—in Roscoe’s eternal honor. I’d be sure to get it back to you as soon as I’ve straightened all this out.”

          “Sounds crazy to me, Heebert. Can’t see what you think’s so bad about Chicago, except that advertising crap’s too crypto-fascist for my tastes. But there’s better money to be made on the northside here, lots of it. Yah, just gimme a Dago Beef with onions, Black Label and dime bag in my crib—I’m all diggin’ it in the Rancho Triangle and Lincoln Park.”

          “What can I say, Nate? I’m a destiny manifestarian—Colorado’s calling, let alone California…”

          “Just make sure they ain’t callin’ collect…”

Care for more?

Chapter 44. Raking over some home fires, 
taking to the road, that Boulder redux proves 
too little, too late. Then after some cautionary 
toll calls, a wanton westward thrust 
meets with mounting resistance…

∞End of ‘Chicago Suite’ ∞  

“A mother complex 
this time raging fore and aft— 
sure to drive one daft.”

          “Still under?”

          “Yes, we are attempting to better stabilize her vital signs. Temperature’s moderating, but we’re specifically desiring to get her blood pressure back up.”

          “It’s sounding like my dad should be here and in on this now…”

          “Might be best, for we are increasingly concerned about both her heart, and the possibility of a stroke.”

          I had arranged to visit my mother at Holy Sacrament Hospital, and meet with a physician or two at her bedside. There she lay, in a third-floor double room, one day removed from the ICU. Sedated as a captured cougar, she was barely recognizable, what with the oxygen tent, breathing tubes and intravenous drips, glucose bags and saline solutions.

          I saw no indication whatsoever that she knew me from the bedpan orderly, but I drew comfort from just being nearby for this short while. I gently tapped her tent frame, squeezed her veiny, liver-spotted hand just below the IV needle. But the beeping monitors, medicinal smells and ever whither hospital odor of excreted bodily fluids drove me to kiss her hand and turn away to follow her doctor out of the room. We paused in the meal cart and gurney filled hallway, where he counseled me on the calculated perils immediately ahead.

          “Stroke,” I asked, glancing back in upon her critical-to-grave clinical scene. “Who said anything about strokes?!”

          “During surgery, while she is hooked up to life support,” said the cardiologist, marking his chart. “Your mother’s circulation is both constricted and distended at certain tenuous points.”

          “So her pipes are as bad off as her pump. Have you told my father about all this?”

          “He was apprised of the situation as of last evening, but not since,” nodded the physician, walking me toward the elevators, evaluating my reaction thus far. “It’s like the old family car, machinery not well maintained tends to wear out in an untimely manner.”

          “You’ll keep us posted,” I asked meekly, barely over the background clatter of intercom directives and alerts.

          “Just as soon as we are prepping to operate…and we’ll do what we can for your mother.”

          “Here’s my office number again, doctor,” I handed him a corner slip of yellow legal paper. “In the event…”

          “Yes,” the doctor tucked the paper scrap onto his clipboard. “In the event.”

          Old cars—I could relate, having nursed my squareback into a German import garage down on 63^rd Street, the only metric repair shop within limping distance for some last-gasp patchwork: Any gasket and grease rack job that might enable me to wring a few more kilometers or miles out of the tired Volkswagen. Meanwhile, dad and I had commiserated over mom’s life and death circumstances: me assuring him that she would marshal all her Irish luck and pluck to fight her way back to health; he recounting all her pestering relatives who had rallied to her cause. Then came the insurance forms that needed filling out if his city employee healthcare was to cover this technically elective ordeal.

          Once we had seen tentative eye to eye over the kitchen table, he resigned himself to the back porch for a princely pipeful. He muttered that if he had it to do over again, he’d bring his wife home right now—that he’d never been cut open like this, didn’t want that for his better half no matter what.

          I instead made for the front room, just in time for ‘Mork & Mindy’ on the tube, which reminded me as how I had left so many of my books and other belongings in that Boulder cabin shed, stuff that suddenly seemed more important somehow. Next up was another ‘Streets of San Francisco’ rerun, the one featuring Detectives Stone and Keller combing Pacific Heights, Lafayette Park in particular, for some South Bay serial killer. Rang true to me, anxiously, adrenally so, especially a long shot of the park’s panorama walkway; had me squinting at the zoom-in for a lost Satalisman possibly surfacing alongside. The episodic shoot-out then made me wonder where Sydney might be about now, and whether she’d be taking that stroll with others or going it alone.

 

          “So you’ve got to keep this under your hat, professional discretion, strictly hush hush … ”

          “Well, sure, why would I spill anything, much less to whom?”

          “I’m only showing you because you’ve spent some time out there yourself.”

          “That I have, not a whole lot, but…let’s just say I got a taste of the place.”

          For this late in the winter, a brutal cold wave had descended by way of Manitoba and Saskatoon. I had piled off a CTA Michigan Avenue express at the Sheraton stop amid a busload of bundled-up white collar commuters, shivering under road-worn sheepskin in the face of what Chicagoans trepidly referred to as The Hawk. Green river, Pioneer Court and surrounding skyscrapers formed a wind tunnel of sorts, wherein lake-fed blasts gained frigid force and velocity, all but airlifting pedestrians along as it barreled down Michigan Avenue, tightening its icy noose around Streeterville at the ringent shoreline curve along Oak Street Beach. 

           I’d thrashed and re-stepped my way into the Iniquity Center, unbuttoning my warmest winter coat  in the elevator up to 16, where Andrea Dudic and most everyone else on the creative floor looked at me like I was there to raff through the trash baskets. Slipping into my office to trade sheepskin for sport coat, I followed Bob Gelvart’s fetching finger into his larger chamber, several closed doors downhall. There, he stood me before a large easel stand, preparing to flip over a charcoal paper cover sheet.

           “Ta da!” Gelvart uncovered the easel with a flourish, beaming like a fresh-faced cigarette sample pusher down on the Mag Mile. “My pièce de résistance…”

          “Whoa…” I was suddenly privy to Pantone colorful workups for a full-page ad, P.O.P. display poster and two-scored, six-panel brochures.

          “Only Lacey and Castalone have seen it—Larry helped me with the art,” Gelvart gloated like a newborn’s dad, stroking back his Vitalised hair. “Haven’t settled on the final killer headline yet. Am only at the rough stage, something like, ‘For Nerves of Steal’—still working on that.”

          “Well, it would just be the cherry on top…” Curiously impressed, I didn’t know what else to say at this point, but that it all was rendered so…handsomely.

          “The concept is Bandito Tequila—as the person, the legend. There’s this entire story built around an outlaw cat who once swept Mexico with his own brand of bootleg hooch. Riches, women, he had it all, until he was gunned down by revenuers near Guadalajara. His recipe died with him, until it was recently unearthed in an archeological dig—get it? Now we’re bringing that legendary rotgut back to life.”

          “Wow, what a tradition,” I scanned the blocked-in brochure copy. “Where’d you discover all this?”

          “Discover’s not the conceit,” Gelvart grinned mischievously. “Devise is more like it —right in here.”

          “How do you mean?”

          “It’s all a crock, that’s how. I dreamed it up on my Barco Lounger, one night when everybody else had cleared out. The idea first came to me on a vacation trip to Mazatlan—have quietly run with it from there.”

          “So, what about the product, the tequila itself?”

          “We’ll have a distiller cook it up,” Gelvart smacked. “Then the client can contract it out south of the border. See, the importer is based in Frisco, and the account side might actually handle it out of there. On paper, we’d do the Midwest launch, but my plan is to blow them away with the pitch, so that maybe we could land the entire national campaign. Think they’d go for it in San Fran? I’d go feel it out myself, but California and I don’t mix—I’d never get any work done out there.”

          “Dunno,” I tried to picture a snow job like this sticking around the Bay, at least as I remembered it. “Wish I could go back out there and see.”

          “So, why don’t you,” Gelvart replied, re-covering his pet project. “Because you really don’t seem totally on board here. And if you’re not cut out to be gunning for Phil Richmond’s office, what’s the point? You’ve got to want that office, speed. Me? I aim to own the place, and I’m going to see this campaign through if it kills me.”

          “Can’t say I haven’t thought about it, believe me,” I glanced out the window at a lake bordering on Zamboni territory. “But that’s water under the bridge.”

          “So why not truck out there and starve for a while,” said the more seasoned ad man. “You’ll catch on somewhere…”

          “Because it’s tough out there, that’s why,” Lacey countered, as she entered his office, today’s pantsuit finished in greener tones. “Take it from personal experience. Chicago tries to keep people here—the city works, then plays. San Francisco tries just as hard to keep people out. The Bay Area is all play, with a little work thrown in.”

          “Maybe that’s what makes it interesting,” Castalone added, joining in from next door with black turtleneck and gray wide-wale cord bells on. “Challenge-wise—kinda like New York on acid…just like Chicago’s the Big Apple on ’ludes.”

          “Sure,” Gelvart grudged, wearing his Second City pride on his double-knit tan raglan sleeve. “Just like New York is Chicago on bad smack. And it’s not Chicahgo, it’s Chicawgo. Isn’t that right, speed?”

          “Don’t ask me. All I know is I got mugged in New Yawk once…”

          “We didn’t collaborate, we fought for our homeland.”

          “But you sympathized. The Vilnius killing forests, pigs’ heads and bloody swastikas at Kaunas synagogues—admit it, Lithuania and Latvia were both in cahoots with the Nazis. And what about the Ukraine and Babi Yar?”

          “Agh, you’re a bleedin’ Jewess. You think you’re the chosen people, think you’re better than the rest of us!”

          “See you on Holocaust Remembrance Day, you retarded Gestapo goons…”

          There were some things I had to sort through again, items that demanded more furious vetting and assessment. I had hunkered down, caught up significantly on my FBC inbox, and so Archer Expressed south to Chicago Lawn. Head aspinning, vapor locked, all else around Francisco Avenue having failed, I shorted and sweatshirted up for another frosty jog into Marquette Park. I could see and feel my breath like icicle daggers along Mann Drive, largely deserted until I hit the lagoon’s backstretch over on the Kedzie Avenue side.

           Again, Frank Fuhrery’s crusaders had assembled about the Redfield Drive turn, outfitted in Luftwaffe-era parkas, drab green save for the requisite red armbands. The neo’s were apparently drilling for an upcoming procession honoring Hitler’s birthday, if not to push the button on Operation Skokie up Edens Expressway north.

          By this time, they had drawn further attention from some outlier White Alliance supremos, either Michigan militia types or more RAHOWA warriors with a Baader-Meinhof complex. Slowing my pace out of chronic socio-curiosity, I could detect the presence of another small contingent from the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture over on Pulaski, cautiously exploring the nature and dimensions of this increasingly notorious movement roiling the neighborhood anew.

          Facing them off was another cell of activists from the progressive Chicago Freedom camp, mouthpiece for whom being a slight, resolute woman from the Hyde Park ward, in a maroon U of C varsity jacket and pink pedal pushers, not giving one inch to the revolting putsch men before them.

          This entire scenario was getting uglier and old, the cross-group dynamic deadlock cold, to where I wanted to brain the lot of them with a big Iron Cross. But pre-frontally throttled, I sprinted away along Redfield Drive before the squadrols arrived—slowing around the lagoon, Kanst Drive and aviator monument at California Street, back to my parents’ flat. Once again, I couldn’t for the life of me believe I had Saturned back down in Chicago Lawn, and my head was scrambling further at the very notion of somehow belonging here, veritably or vocationally.

          A running mile ventured, but nothing gained in terms of clarity, I avoided everything except Mork and Streets of San Francisco on the front room TV: dad, dinner, even the daily mail. At least until word came down from Holy Sacrament that mom was prepped and in a holding pattern for the knife: Looked like godawful decision time had come once more.

            “She’s gone…long gone.”

          “But y-you said there was some time to…”

          “Time doesn’t stand still, son—even for you.”

          “Sooo, there’s no way I can…”

          “I gave you your chance, didn’t I? But I couldn’t sit still on a beaut like this. The young woman came along, loved the place, no dilly-dallying—settled the deal on the spot. Put it all down in cash within an hour. Like my dear, departed husband used to joke: ‘Are you good at making decisions? Well, yes and no’,” said Mrs. Tovello, on a snowy phone line. “Sorry, but she made a quick decision, try it some time.”(CLICK).

          One door left slightly ajar, another door slammed. I really didn’t know where I stood with Forrester, Blaine at this point, and maison Eugenie was back in the bottle. Then, another pressure drop and a sudden build-up of fluid in mom’s charred lungs pushed the pause button on her scheduled surgery—which, given everything, prompted me to hit a fast forward button of my own.

          Decisions, yeah, try it sometime. But what was I supposed to do about this now? Can’t live there, sure as hell can’t stay here, especially when I might have been a whole lot better off out there. Skokie, West Rogers Park—how does that square with the jerks circling around Marquette Park’s lagoon? Anyway, what good does a studio walk-up do if Moon’s baking a bun. Mom, dad—motherhood, fatherhood, for chrissake! God forbid, how’s that supposed to work if I can’t hold a job you’re not sure you’re even cut out for, speed? You want that corner office, even if it kills you? But what if you don’t want to be cornered by that office?! Are you writing your own script here, or just following one by or for somebody else? Do you have character, or are you just a pathetic caricature of your sad, sorry self?

          My brain felt like it was slapping back and forth against my cranial hockey boards. Really, time for détente, a little summit of the principals, a meeting of the interested minds—the party or parties involved—right around dinnertime, after a few hours at FBC, pounding out brochure copy, provided she was willing to meet me halfway.

          “So, then they said I could even register for summer session, isn’t that great?”

          “Wow, you’re really on top of it, huh?”

          “See, things are all coming together so fast for us here.”

          The halfway point was Vercelli’s, a thoroughly Chicago-style postwar-born pizzeria on Dearborn Street, just off Huron. The deep-dish delight was housed in one of the dwindling stand-along brick stick Victorians on the rapidly redeveloping Near North side, red/white/green striped awnings on its vertical windows, dormered attic crown cast in Sicilian flat black. Inside, the décor was rather retro Italian metro: stamped metal ceiling, checkerboard tile trimmed against mahogany-stained panel and exposed brick walls lined with framed prints of the boot heel and Sardinia. 

          We caught a table toward the rear, under a display shelf of culinary awards, roundball trophies and various Corsagna and Venetia kitsch from the old country. Among Vercelli’s Eisenhower-era anachronisms were diner-style chrome jukeboxes on every table; we were seated by a harried, white blouse on black-skirted waitress, to the stereo piped-in tune of ‘You Light Up My Life’.

          “All?” I glanced about at upper wall relic signs from Wrigley Field and Chicago Cardinals versus Bears.

          “I got my period, Kenny—end of that story…for now, anyway.”

          “Aww, Moon, are you all right?” Better late than…relief washed over me, like the day I drew an army assignment to Germany instead of The Nam. No honey trap here; time to hold fire—for now, anyhow.

          “Tsk, I’m fine,” Melissa sighed, with something of an empty smile. “But we could still use that extra bedroom, like for a study, or…”

          “Well, for sure, Moon, that makes sense all right…” A tighter fit, closing in, closing in way too close. I took a deep sip of the wine cooler our waitress had just dropped by. Some patron over at the bar had plunked more coinage into one Vercelli’s counter-top jukeboxes, flipping through the play lists, picking of all things a couple of numbers from that aging Paul Simon dirge-a-thon.

          “I mean, with the animules and everything…”

          “Yeah, everything…back,” I blurted, out of left field—that would be the Waveland Avenue side, as ‘Still Crazy After All These Years’ began tracking. “Gotta get back…”

          “We will, Kenny, we will get back to normal here real soon…just like we did in Boulder.”

          “No, I’m talking about heading back out west, getting my stuff in that shed. Out, like that…”

          “What? I told you, I’m not putting myself through that again.”

          “I know, I know. It’s mostly my stuff anyway. That’s why I’ll just go by myself…”

          “Tsk, I don’t like the sound of that, at all,” she said, stirring a sugar cube into her iced tea. “I’m thinking we’d better re-think that idea first, take in all the perspectives…”

          What made Vercelli’s pies so addictive was the buttery two inch-thick crust heaped with every imaginable topping, roasted red peppers to kalamata olives, then smothered with a gooey blanket of mozzarella cheese like snowpack on Piz Bernina. We had ordered a Primo Veggie, with the works: full-bore garden, only with feta and Romano on a nine-grain crust—all good and healthy, smiled Melissa.

          She was already spreading out a red linen napkin, so as not to stain her crème muslin tunic with chunky tomato sauce. She wore a burgundy paisley headscarf, Fay Dunaway-like, to match her ankle-length skirt. When she dressed this way, I callously pictured her years along sometimes, a bubbie in a shapeless winter coat and bubushka, not unlike my…mother, which reminded me to ring up Holy Sacrament.

          “Let me ask you something, Moon. Do you follow the news up there in Skokie?”

          “Just the local craft center articles,” she replied, as we split a field green salad with goat cheese and glazed walnuts, heavy on the blueberry-pomegranate vinaigrette. “You know I’m not a newsy kind of person.  Although dad did wrangle me into watching all four parts of the ‘Holocaust’ on his newfangled VCR. Horrifying miniseries, a real eye-opener—I mean, we never talked much about all that growing up. But why do you…”

          “Just wondering…you know, making conversation, changing the subject, so to speak,” I rambled, oblivious being better, ignorance for the best. “Forget about it, eat up—great salad, huh?”

          Still stabbing at the bowl, we were somewhat startled to see that waitress delivering drinks and a sizzling pizza pan much sooner than expected, particularly for a bustling early Saturday night; apparently we had arrived just ahead of the dinner rush. Melissa brushed off her offer to dish out two slices—professional courtesy of a kind. I just wished they hadn’t hit E3, and I didn’t have to try tuning out a ‘50 Ways…’ encore.

          “Who put this crazy idea in your head, anyway,” she asked, taking over the serving knife.

          “About the news?” I then downed some romaine with a splash of cooler, craving some sausage or pepperoni, accompanied by Simon’s blasted staccato chorus.

          “No, about heading back out west.” Moon expertly cut the small pizza into trim quarter slices, feeding me a sample bite across the table.

          “Me, I did—all by my lonesome, who else?” At least the tune changed to spoony Peter Frampton, but that didn’t stop ‘I Did It For Your Love’ from replaying through my memory track.

          “That’s what I’d like to know,” she frowned, placing two sticky quarter wedges methodically on our respective plates like she was back serving her steak and kidney pie in our Boulder cabin—those Coach Light meatier days, how long ago was that? “You’re not going wobbly on us again, are you?”

          “Wobbly? Me? C’mon, you know me, no chance of that…” I took to counting the tulip-bulb shaded overhead lighting fixtures, reflecting off that medallion copper ceiling, shadowing the long, now-packed room, ‘Baby, Baby Don’t Get Hooked On Me’ next playing, C6.

          “I never forget that our relationship has been built on no strings or expectations from the start. But I just feel this is an ill-advised venture, all the way around. I mean, we’ve got to keep you up on the balance beam, don’t we?”

          “Aww, it’s just something I’ve been pondering, Moon—purely hypothesizing. No need to get all bent out of shape over it,” I said, watching her tuck all that string cheese neatly around my pizza wedge, as I struggled to close the window on Simon’s ‘You’re Kind, so kind’, now coursing through my basal ganglia. “Besides, I’ve got enough on my mind, with my mom, and all.”

          “Tsk, don’t you think I understand how scary her situation is. I mean, it’s not like I never went through something like this with my own mother when I was a fifth your age. I just want to make sure you don’t go bananas over it,” she did the same with her slice, nicely tidy and…triangular. “So, when’s surgery now?”

          “If I only knew,” I sighed, picking off some eggplant and caramelized onions, mom seeping like low-fat balsamic into my head. “But great ’za, huh? But we don’t have to eat it all here. You’ll be wanting to doggie bag some of it with you?”

          No, you go ahead,” she said, sucking on a plum tomato, her knee rubbing up against mine. ‘Do You Know Where You’re Going To’ began tracking, J7. “I can make even better pies myself, remember?”

         I took her up on that, asking our passing waitress to sack me two remaining slices as Melissa and I finished off our drinks. I moved over to the cashier to cover the check, but Moon insisted on calculating, leaving the tip—sisterly holdover from her Coach Light Inn days. We emerged onto Dearborn Street through what by now had become a half-block wait line around the corner on west Huron.

          We’d found a tight little pre-rush parking space for her Toyota, and she offered to drive me back to where she had picked me up: the taxi zone outside Pioneer Court. I coaxed an extra couple of stops over on State Street, on the verge of becoming a mall, where I could connect with an Archer Owl bus to Chicago Lawn. En route, we caught up on some Seamus and Pags, how well the pets were acclimating under the circumstances, and that her father was genuinely taking to my Setter.

          I didn’t know whether that was good or bad news at the moment, being more preoccupied with how cold and windy it had once again turned here near Lake Michigan. I lingered with her a bit at the corner of Madison Street, across from Louis Sullivan’s tendriled black cast iron and terra cotta façade of Carson, Pirie, Scott, advising her how to swing around again at Dearborn, grabbing Ontario Street to the Kennedy Expy and Edens north back to Skokie. Part of me wanted to ride along with her, yet a slightly more assertive voice had me low tailing it south to Francisco Avenue.

          “You going to be okay?” she asked, turning down the ‘Have You Ever Been Mellow?’ as I leaned over to rub her shoulder. “I miss us…”

          “Me too, but I think it’ll all sort out—one day at a time…”

          “Tsk, this is all so weird and unnecessary, you know.”

          “Weird isn’t the word…” I kissed her softly, then opened the car door, resigned to slip sliding away, Primo sack in hand, to the sidewalk saunter streams, though not entirely sure why—looking for a sign, any sign: CTA bus stop would do.

          “Then tell me, Kenny, what is?”

Care for more?

 Chapter 43. An untimely passing, then the 
taking of an ill-conceived leave. Breaking 
the news of an abrupt change of plans 
hastens a breach with the dearly departed…

 “Blind by petty climb 
ambition can breed contempt— 
on ladders wrung dry.”

           “Opens up easily, does it?”

           “Easy does it, like a charm….”

           “That’s important, with my schedule and responsibilities now. Any other kinks or complications I should know about?”

          “Just routine stuff for one this age. Believe you me, she’s right up your alley…”

          “I-I-I’m not much into alleys anymore.”

          With so many things seemingly heading south of late, I’d decided to explore possible domiciles back up north—Near North, though it was. After six straight days of long FBC nights, I began my Sunday troll in and around Lincoln Park, then fanned out toward the Eugenie Triangle, on the old, homier side of Old Town. I was idea depleted, copywritten off, exhausted from all the traffic particulates, and a mite exasperated with the Ashland Avenue Express. So I slow crawled my ailing squareback eastward on W. Eugenie Street, along bare, tree-lined rows of workingman cottages and bungalows dating back to the rebuilding explosion in the wake of the Great Chicago Fire.

          Most were tidy two-story relics snug to the sidewalk with round pipe railings—no room for even a scouring pad-size front yard, and it looked as though extended families had owned them for generations. Then, beyond Orleans and Sedgwick, a tiny red ‘For Let’ sign popped up just short of Hudson Avenue, in the ground floor window of a strangely incongruous brown two-unit box, fully face front to the walkway, which appeared to be more a chopped up former storefront and upstairs apartment than any sort of single family home.  

          The landlady, Mrs. Olivia Tovello, was a bit cagey about the history/provenance of the place as she led me upstairs through a doorway to the right side of the facade. I could envision it being a carbonic neighborhood pop shop or gin mill turned Bugsy speakeasy with a second story love nest or card room in  the bad old days, as in Dillinger and his Biograph Theater showdown.

          Still, the upstairs digs were plenty promising for a small efficiency: front room looking out on some budding oak and elm trees, kitchenette about the size of a Fridgidaire and crockpot, with a half-ass bath fit for a Fieldcrest or Cannon King. Plus, the Sunday go-to-purgatory church was just down the street, she said in her floral print housecoat, pointing toward the soaring brick steeple of St. Michael’s Church. Taken together with a reasonable rent, it was just the ticket for a freestyle studley about town—much less someone like me—yet a little too tight for two…or more.

           “Well, you better move quick on this little gem,” she said, after explaining that she herself lived in the converted main floor one bedroom—with its smallish front windows where swinging doors or fruit baskets and Sealtest ice boxes used to be—so as to be on top of any sudden repairs. “I got other nibbles.”

          “Uh, I’ve a few things to sort out, have to shuffle some situations around,” I hedged, noticing slight rust stain traces on the crackled porcelain. Nevertheless, the place was prime for internal discussion, surprisingly so. “By tomorrow okay?”

          “Up to you,” shrugged the landlady, straightening her blushing pink hair net as she ushered me back downstairs. “It’s your funeral…”

           There I left things, albeit with mixed emotions, promising a follow-up phone call, widow Tovello saying, ‘yeah, yah’ through her own storm-windowed aluminum door. Driving back through the more poshy pre-Fire Old Town Triangle toward Lincoln Park and North Avenue, I figured that I liked her place and price enough to call it a day search-wise. So what was the point, right? Righhttt…

          But a hospital call from a pay phone near the Historical Society updated me that I had a radioactive family situation to deal with. Mom had undergone a complete battery of tests, and physicians have determined that she had a 55-45 prospect of surviving invasive surgery, that final pre-op decisions had to be made, in a life or death matter of time.

          With that, I pulled off in the squareback, heading for LaSalle Street’s sequenced greenlights and an expressway relay race southward to Chicago Lawn. But somewhere between the Dan Ryan and Adlai Stevenson, my Volks began showing fatal symptoms of its own. Never truly aligned, its front end started shimmying uncontrollably at these higher speeds, while the miles-worn fuel injection faltered worse than in Great Basin days. The bugger got me to Francisco Avenue all right, but who knew where from there?

          “We have to do this, dad,” I said, as we sat on the living room sofa, reading over a pre-surgery schedule I’d just picked up at the hospital. Mom was scheduled to go under the knife by week’s end. “We have to do this for her…”

          “Dang, how’d I let you talk me into…”

          “I’m only looking out for mom, for us, dammit!” I glanced at a Chicago Lawn throwaway, one of its front-page articles noting that the body in Marquette Park’s lagoon had been identified as from Englewood and that the youth’s killers were suspected to have ties to a bloodthirsty new Cobra offshoot of the old Blackstone Rangers…this one being none of my business…

          “She ain’t up to this operation, I’m telling you,” he scooped the bowl of his pipe and reached for some Prince Albert. “I know what she wants, I know what’s best for her. Here, you come back in out of the blue, mister college know-it-all!”

          “That’s got nothing to do with it, dad. This it just common sense…she doesn’t stand a chance any other way, I’m telling you.”

          “Well, we’ll just see what makes sense now, won’t we?” He fired up his pipe with a matchstick, lighting out for the kitchen and adjoining back porch.

          “Dad, c’mon, I…” My voice trailed off in the void, as I felt the weight of the decision I had pressed upon us. Another pointless glance at the local newspaper found a below-the-fold tint box sidebar that Frankie Fuhrery had won Marquette Park clearance for continued Neo-drilling, so long as his gatherings followed agreed-upon limits as to size, timing and provocative displays.

 

           “When in doubt, you dummy…”

           “No, hey, that’s way too rough…”

           “We’ve got the layout, we’ve got the art. But mostly we’ve got a deadline. So let’s dummy the sucker in.”

           Another long week began in Larry Castalone’s office, mustered around his design board, piecing together a workup on the first of Ritz-Carlton’s half-page ads. The junior art director had pasted up a screened halftone, dummied copy blocks and hotel logo, bordered with slim 1.5-point rule lines. All that remained was the headline, which precipitated this qualitative difference of creative opinion. He was thinking visual, ruffling his red curly hair in impatience, arguing for plugging in what we already had on hand. I was thinking verbal, however, and that meant dropping in one of my first-draft headlines on the Ritz café. Admittedly, I was loath to hang the fate of this stylish advertisement on my off-head jottings, but his Big Apple-rebound tenacity overruled the room.

           Outside my next-door partner’s office, the 16^th floor was relatively quiet early on, the latest buzz being that ChicagoOne had just bought into a revised bank campaign, full-page ads to counter cards, although details of the winning concept had yet to water-cooler wash over the department.

          “You see the message,” asked Castalone, sticking to his old-school process of press-on typing the LetraSet demo headline wording onto his layout, consonant by vowel.

          “That blue note?” I was a trifle chagrined that he was feathering in that ‘Café Society’ stinker. “What do you know about it?”

          “I’m the one who dropped it in your inbox,” he checked display text alignment with his sliding rule bar. “There’s some craptrap going around the floor about certain personnel, you and me included.”

          “What…craptrap?

          “Was getting some coffee Friday afternoon, you know? Happened to overhear Desman jawing with Phil Richmond before he shuttled back to New York…”

          “Hell, I never even got to meet the big dog before he…”

          “Well, Phil knows all about us,” Castalone said grimly, punctuating the provisional café headline with a burnisher and mallet. “Ralpharoo told him he was concerned about my pacing and production. Richmond told him to start reviewing designer portfolios again—see, what’d I tell you? It’s dog eat hound around here, and I’m about to be eating Rival…”  

          “Aww, maybe you misheard them or something,” I grumbled, “like, they’re just trying to keep you on your toes.”

          “No chance, Hemingway, and that wasn’t the half of it,” he rubber cemented a tissue overlay atop the hotel workup. “Phil had something to say about you. He said he’d been watching you from a distance. That he was questioning your professional comportment, whether you were cut out for this world, would be a true FBC team player—even wisecracked that grad school had let out, and who was dressing you these days.”

          “Huh, then why didn’t he say that to my face?”

          “That’s not how it works here. But it wasn’t just about dress code. Richmond also hinted that he saw you as an awkward fit right now. That Chicago’s demographics are changing and you’re a little too white-bread to adequately reflect that reality.”

          “He said that?!”

          “Can you believe it? He went on about affirmative action and equal opportunity, that he had a black copy wunderkind over at Leo Burnett he was looking to lure away once he returned from FBC’s New York conference.”

          “Well, that’s beyond my control, that’s for sure,” I muttered, wishing I’d quickly re-written that Ritz café headline. “I guess all I can do is keep my head down and working on what they’ve given me until I hear otherwise.”

          “That’s what I’m doing, but at least they’ve issued you an actual nameplate, mine’s still just in magic marker,” Castalone said sarcastically, removing the hotel ad workup, sheathing it with the tissue overlay, placing the bluelined mechanical board into a large intra-agency envelope. “I’ll pass this along to Parker Hodicott, with a little luck, he’ll sign off and kick it along.”

          “I’ll get back to the copy for those other pieces,” I deflated, ready for a visit to the coffee room myself.

          “Whewie, dressed for success again, are you,” asked Lacey Abbott-Tanzer, passing by as Castalone slipped out his door, bound for the other wing of the floor. The account exec snapped down on her diet gum, running her finger under the lapel of my only sport coat. “Early Robert Hall?”

          “Why do you ask?” Already steamed over the art director’s recounting of corner office events, I  wondered whether she was just abreast of this creative department undertow, or actively abetting it. “Can’t wait to boot my Cro-Magnon ass out of here, huh?” Couldn’t believe I just said that to her, here.

          “Not quite yet,” she smiled breezily, gliding Desman’s way. “Then again, a woman’s work is never done.”

          “Well, sorry but I have some ads and a pile of collateral to get back to,” I turned in the opposite direction, toward my closed office door.

          “That would be well advised,” she teased, over her red pantsuit’s padded shoulder. “But at least you might be pleased to learn that our ChicagoOne Bank revamping was a major hit with the client. And they really went for our hooky new tagline…”

          “You mean despite the bonehead blurting from a blabber mouth like me? So, what did you all come up with?”

          “Touché,” she paused, tossing me a copy of the bank’s marketing plan. “In any case, it turned out to be something quite clean and simple: ‘At ChicagoOne, You’re The One’.”

 

          “Yes, I just need another day or two to pull together the deposit, first and last, Mrs. Tovello, I’m hoping you’re willing to extend me a bit more time,” I said, pounding the IBM keys, phone cradled against my shoulder. “Of course, I know this is a gamble, however I want to start out on the right foot with you. Oh, thanks so much…” CLICK.

          The last of the ad copy for the Ritz-Carlton Hotel insertions was rolling through the carriage of my Selectric II, at least as good as I could get it at this stage, and I was fixing to hit Mr. Coffee again when my extension rang. It was late afternoon, and Melissa was on the line with some pointed questions and updates. Not that I had a great deal of spare concentration to draw upon, but proceed we did, the typewriter humming away like a low-grade dental drill. After exchanging wary pleasantries, I mentioned my shadow contribution to the ChicagoOne campaign.

          “But they do have to acknowledge where the slogan came from at some point, don’t they,” Melissa asked, as if attempting to read my facial expression over the transom. “So, where did it come from?”

          “I dunno, Moon. These things, they just pop into your mind. It’s almost mysterious, never know when—hard to explain…”

          “You mean, for an uncreative crafty like me…”

          “No, hey, that’s not what…”

          “Sure it’s not, Kenny. Anyway, good news,” she gushed. “I’ve already enrolled in a pottery lab here in Skokie. That’s not all. I’ve also come across a dreamy two-bedroom apartment in West Rogers Park, near Loyola. That way, we can be right near the lake and not too far from my dad, only a stone’s throw away, and my bubbie is getting on in years. So that’ll make him happy, too…we’ve been catching up a lot lately.”

          “Wow, that is…good news,” I clenched,  turning off the typewriter for better absorption. “Bet it’s real pricey…”

          “No, that’s what’s so amazing. Now that you’re making the big bucks, I’m sure we can handle it between the two of us. So you’ve got to get up here lickety-split so we can take a good look together.”

          “Lickety-split,” accent on the split, I fiddled with some white-out on a couple of sudden typos. “Well, I’m on tight deadline, Moon, but let me see if I can juggle my schedule a little. I’ll call you a bit later, how about that?”

          “Juggle away, Kenny, and let me know as soon as you can,” Moon said firmly, as if we were still in Boulder, and she was dragging me out of the sack for an 8 a.m. seminar. “Then I can set us up an appointment.”

          “Sure, Moon, I’ll get right on that, okay? Hi to the animules…”

          “Sooner than later, Kenny. We’ll be waiting…talk shortly.” CLICK.

          Two bedrooms—what’s with the two bedrooms? Ohhh, shit! I yanked a barely typed sheet for the Symphony ad, tossed it aside, then fed a new blank into the roller. Looked like she was telegraphing me that ‘late’ no longer adequately covered the status report. Making big bucks? Hell, here I was hanging by a thread, on industry minimum wage. We’ve really got to go over this whole situation, she and I; things are moving too quickly here, we have to hashover the scenarios, explore all the possibilities, gain some broader perspective. Make her dad and bubbie happy? All well and good, but Skokie, now? Just as such repercussions were sinking in like ice water in my eyes, came a quick triple-knuckle knock on my door.

            “Hey there, speed, how goes it,” Bob Gelvart opened wide, self-styled dashing in his brushed denim blazer over sleek Champagne sateen vest and slacks.

          “Where’ve you been,” I asked sullenly.

          “Gelevanting up the North Shore, where else,” he tapped my inbox, still piled high. “On location in a Kenilworth mansion for a Hendley Furniture TV spot—you know, the big-time national broadcast stuff—where the models and movie stars are. Play your words right, maybe you’ll get there some day.”

          “Wouldn’t know about that personally. But good news on the ChicagoOne front, right?”

          “The A-team was on the case,” he chortled, moving the box aside so he could plop his broad khaki beam on the corner of my desk. “Would you expect anything less?”

          “Winning tagline for the whole campaign, huh? Wonder where that idea came from,” I ventured, fishing for some sort of kudo or avowal.

          “Ah, ideas—they’re just out there, particles floating in the stratosphere. You just have to pluck them out of the air,” Gelvart said, folding a paper airplane out of my discarded sheet, sending it aloft, targeting my office window. “Anyway, the reason I stopped by was that I received a call from Parker Hodicott at O’Hare. He said his flight out of JFK was super delayed, and that he’s running late. He wants you to meet him down at the Billy Goat to massage some re-writes in an hour. You know, the Goat. As in Belushi, the Olympia Café—Cheezborger, Cheezborger, Cheezborger…”

          “Dunno…don’t watch much television, to tell you the truth…”

          “Who admits to it anymore, right? Well, I’m off—got a hot new campaign to get back to. Top secret, a real jaw-dropper. But stop by and bear witness to true advertising genius when you get the chance, see how it’s done at the Clio level…this baby’s going to win me a corner office…”

          “Will do, soon as I break…free.”

 

          “Just remember, their message is the message,” said Parker Hodicott, senior copywriter, numerous years in grade. “You’ll want to keep it tight, make it punchy, get your USP up front, because that’s the only thing they likely will bother to read.”

          “Tight, punchy,” I nodded, shuffling through my typed sheets like they were overstuffed precinct hit jobs.

          “Now, a little atmospherics can be warranted on these softer, more indirect institutional assignments—to bait the hook, but you must sell the proposition, hit marks consciously and subconsciously, reward them for their interest, rouse them to action, before they turn the page.”

          “That’s not what I’m doing here, or…”

          There was a windy chill in the air at the foot of North Michigan Avenue, but not so much in the weather underground. I had descended riverside esplanade steps to the bowels of Lower Mish. A continuation of Wacker Drive’s winding Emerald City aside the Chicago River, designed in the Roaring 20s for commercial through traffic, delivery vans to tractor trailers serving businesses along the way.

           A scenic route, it wasn’t, but it helped to keep diesel fumes under the showier wraps—the narrow two-way lanes of this dark, ever-clotted aqueduct-style artery were bordered by a series of thick concrete standards supporting the drive’s upper deck, nicked and gouged as they were by rigs backing in and out of tightly crammed loading docks. I’d seen most of it in my race-around cabbing days, although never quite connecting with the blazing neon signage just beyond a dim cavern below the Wrigley Building.

           “No, no,” Hodicott countered, skimming my rough draft for Ritz-Carlton’s weekender suites. “You’re waxing on, far too florid. You’re not conveying the client’s story for their glorification. You’re communicating their story to the prospective customers or patrons—that’s the bull’s-eye.”

           “So you’re saying this copy is all a bust…”

           “What I’m saying is, you need to pay-off an attention-snaring headline straight away. Shorten these sentences, streamline the syntax, try some fragments for pacing, fine-tune the cosmetics and modifiers. Cut out the colons and semi’s—this is paid advertising, not a dissertation. Marry your copy to the visual. Make it sing, but stick to your word counts, and close the deal with a meat cleaver of a pitch.” He ashtrayed his Lucky Strike, then slugged into his happy hour choice: Malort Manhattan, with a twist.

           “Florid, fat,” I wavered, deflating against the stiff green back cushion of my metal-framed chair. “And I thought my music reference stuff was body muscle…”

           Tucked between two blue and white support stanchions, amid the icy stalactites of a lingering Chicago winter, this blustery subterranean haunt’s wood-carved signage read, ‘Billy Goat Tavern, Est. 1934’. Greek immigrant William Sianis actually moved the place down here in 1964, from his Lincoln Tavern out on the west side. He was suitably goateed, all right, but the name change came earlier on, when a goat fell off a passing truck over across from Chicago Stadium and bleated into his bar. The goat became ‘Murphy’, heavy drinker that it was, and this tavern and its cart-pulling mascot burrowed in strategically between Sun-Times boxy riverside headquarters and the Tribune Tower, the latter in all its gothic glory.

           Little wonder that the place got plenty of ink from opening day, and quickly became underground zero for the newspaper crowd, spearheaded by columnist, Mike Royko, and various literary lions. More recently, the Billy Goat had gained backhanded notoriety nationwide, via John Belushi’s ‘Olympia Café’ sketch on a late-January SNL. Another neon window sign read, ‘Butt In Any Time’—so I’d done just that, sheathed copy sheets and red pencils in hand, into a packed, boisterous house going up in convoluted plumes of tobacco smoke.   

           I had met up with my copywriter superior at a red checker-clothed table midway along the Goat’s wood-panelled Wall of Fame, which served to light up the whole place even florescent brighter. I’d paused to soak in the nearly full-length wall, framed drawings, political cartoons, yellowing news article blow-ups and photos of ink-stained luminaries, from Colonel Bertie McCormick to Theodore Dreiser and Joe Medill, with a higher-brow tribute to Bellow and his Herzog.

           Before we dug into the rewrites, I ordered a per diem triple cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger—no fries, chips, no Pepsi, Coke before setting aside my laminated menu, souvenir material, to be sure. Parker settled on his regular rib-eye steak.

           “Long form is long form, all well and good. But if you want to pontificate, link up with Royko and his Slats Grobniks over there. FBC’s paying you by the boffo idea, not the word.” With that, the senior copywriter snuffed out his Chesterfield butt, finishing with a groan and sneezing/wheezing jag that sent him off to the head. “Never forget the adage, salesmanship in print.”

          Hodicott had pointed over to a table near the bar, where the acerbic political columnist held court, thizzoner now swapping spit heatedly with Sun-Times rival, Irv Kupcinet, as in Kup’s Column. As far as I could hear, the two opinion pols were debating eventual mayoral primary prospects for Daley darling, Jane Byrne—the Consumer Affairs head recently fired by labor union-besieged Michael Bilandic.

          Boss Royko argued that it would take more than a City Hall bombing and gravedigger strike to bury the current mayor in favor of a daffy woman challenger. Kup reminded him that Byrne was a niece of powerhouse Daley crony, Alderman Edward Burke, so there. I sipped at my fountain Coke and glanced about at Wall of Fame photo snaps and portraits of such notable news wretches as Dave Condon, Bill Granger and Edgar Munzel.

           Opposing walls held framed shots of horny Billy Goats on bar stools, cavorting behind bar tops with Sianis family and friends. One showed BG’s founder being ejected from Wrigley Field during the 1945 World Series—his goat deemed too odorus. Sianis supposedly cursed the Cubs, who hadn’t been back to the Fall Classic ever since. Even now, newer posters among the photos hailed Belushi, Murray and Aykroyd, rather than Tinkers, Evers and Chance.

           Everywhere about the barroom, news tips were being gathered, opinions challenged, smoke-filled deal struck, dirt surreptitiously exchanged. The rigor and romance of the journalism game: At once, the Billy Goat was alive with intellectual fervor, while drowning in mind-numbing alcohol and nicotine toxicity, morning edition deadlines be damned.

           “You all right, Mister Hodicott,” I asked, as he sat back down.

           “Parker to you, junior,” he cleared his throat, lighting up. “But it’s this damn stubborn virus, too many airport lounges, too much climate shift.”

           “So, you were back east for a meeting, or…”

           “Naw, I live back there, Connecticut,” he groused, stuffing his Chesterfields back into his gabardine, brown jacket liner label reading, ‘Hart, Schaffner & Marx’. “My whole family’s there, near Darien.”

           “But you work…here….”

           “Tell me about it. They’ve had me on this yo-yo routine for going on a year. Ever since the main office dumped half of the 16^th floor here in a Creative Review Committee coup. So I’m Mister Fix-It, and they fixed me up but good, right out of my cozy perch at Madison and 54^th—banished me to the midwest boonies here, saying I was better suited to traditional print than major broadcast anyway. As if I went to Yale and mastered in drama to red-eye shuttle a thousand miles back and forth every weekend.”

           “Hell of a crazy commute, you didn’t have a say?” I glanced up at the clock, showing late enough to where I looked to be spending another night on 16^th’s reception couch.

           “I’ve got a second mortgage on a clapboard Colonial and three kids in private school—what kind of leverage is that? Plus I have no idea what my libber wife is up to in my absence, besides burning through my paychecks, that is. So I hole up at a small hotel over on Delaware Place during the week and write whatever drek they tell me, knowing I’m disposable at a moment’s notice,” he lamented, as our per diem platters arrived. “You, too, can become a lean, mean writer or a big fat hack—the choice is yours. But if I were you, I’d get your ass out while you still can.”

          “Cleaver of a closing pitch you’ve got there, Parker…but I wouldn’t exactly say you’re overweight.”

 Care for more?

Chapter 42. Under the gun, under 
the knife: Then a new idea is revealed, 
while old ideas still fester, before a 
late meeting is thick with disharmony…

 ED: Scroll/Skim/or Skip (S/S/S)…

“Keen fear of failure 
dogged this climb from the start—
ink pen to the heart.”  
 

          “What are we looking at on the CPMs and CPTs on this?”

          “Hitting budget targets across the saturation buy… significantly beating the SRDS millines.”

          “You’ll get me those figures?”

          “I’ll have Media messenger them over to you by end of day, sir.”

          I fought to keep my eyes from floating over to the wraparound view, like so many ice cubes in the Perrier. My copy outbox was incrementally catching up with the inbox, to the point where FBC’s creative superiors had dragged me along to a key client luncheon with ChicagoOne Bancorp, specifically its marketing arm, amid interagency rumors that the city’s largest financial account might soon be under review. The adworld scuttlebutt had brought CD Phil Richmond scrambling back from New York, directing Ralph Desman’s bank team to beat a path over to ChicagoOne’s headquarters just off LaSalle Street on a progress/fence mending mission. Having picked up new blazer and slacks, I’d become marginally more presentable over the 13-hour days, to where Lacey and Bob Gelvart saw fit to expose me to the accounts presentable side of the business.    

          What I hadn’t anticipated in a Checker Cab ride through the Loop was that our exercise in client contact would take us up to the 60^th floor of ChicagoOne Center, the city’s tallest skyscraper inside CTA’s downtown elevated tracks—more specifically the bank’s penthouse-style conference suite. Before taking a sideline seat at the horseshoe table, I walked the full four-corner window wall tour of the cityscape like a sightseeing Effingham joskin atop Sears Tower. Yet a sunny west suburban view clear out to Willow Grove did give me perspective pause until bank Marketing Director, Theodore Sandley and two subordinates called this lofty meeting to order.

          “We will need to execute on the campaign collateral side, as well.” He shuffled through our status folder.

          “We’re already on that, Mr. Sandley,” Lacey nodded my way. “Including the display cylinders, broadside mailers, countertop cards and teller window P.O.P.”

          “I’ll also need to see your brand/message continuity on the entire creative mix…”

          “We’ll be prepared to present comps by week’s end…”

          “Keep me posted on pilgrim’s progress, Ms. Abbott-Tanzer,” said the Bancorp’s mid-career marketing director, collating his advertising reports and memos as we stood in unison the file out of the conference suite. “Forge ahead, people. Trust the lunch fare was to your liking. Now, better get good and better while the getting’s good, capische?”

          Bank on that, I thought, folding my linen napkin, along with any pretense to really grasping all the undercurrents of this high-power summit. An initial item on the agenda was lunch itself: Grecian salads, sirloin sandwiches au jus, mixed berry compote with gold foil-wrapped mints on the side. Pullman-style waiters plied us with French Roast coffee, silver trays of china creamers and honey pots; by the time Sandley tapped his water glass, the entire horseshoe was primed to herd the agenda along.

          I seconded successive refills, as several weeks of day-night marathons in the office had frayed my connective wiring. Speed reading client and account notes had taken its toll, not to mention brainstorming the hook and head, outlining the subheads and body copy, finding the tone and USP, juggling copy ‘voices’ between consumer durables and non-durables, straddling the line between denotative and connotative meaning, editing and word counting early drafts, revising and rewriting what bounced back in critical carmine red.

          More and more, I found myself wringing my brain like a Checker cab wash sponge, dozing off at the Selectric keys, pumping Joe DiMaggio strong and black, taking spooky mind-clearing riverwalk runs past Marina City and the Merchandise Mart, cat naps on the 16^th floor reception area sofa, back at it come the light of day—until my head felt like a porker on a platter, mentally disconnected from all bodily reality.

          At least the role up here was simply to listen and learn, pay close attention, take some valuable notes, pick up on the context and complexities of client service, which suited me just fine. I took my turn firmly handshaking ChicagoOne’s marketing honchos, enthusiastically blurting, ‘you’re the one’, agreeing that this could really be the Cubs’ year. Then I followed FBC’s unnerved team down to a taxi ride back to the Iniquity Center, in cab number 3167, no less. “Some hoedown, huh?”

          “Let that be a lesson to you,” Gelvart said, pointing a finger toward me. “Always be ready with an answer, make sure it’s the right one. And whatever you do, keep your off-the-cuff wisecracks to yourself.”

          “That’s right,” Lacey added, after gaining a read on a Ralph Desman deep in situational thought. “Communicate what’s on their minds, not what’s on yours.”

          Little else was said between Dearborn Street and Michigan Avenue, mutterings about testy cues and murderous deadlines, with a crucial legacy account on the line. It all was beyond my workload and pay grade, so when Desman suggested I return to my other inbox assignments for now while they retreated to his office for a strategy session, I bought in with a smile and post-test measure of relief.

          Closing the door behind me, I leaned back in my chair, propped feet atop the desk and dialed my little radio up to a medley of the Silver Bullet Band. Break in the action, a mindless moment to recharge for another round of sales sheets and brochures.

          Getting a little tedious, I thought, hardly advertising at its most Hollywood groundbreaking and glamorous. But this hacking was better than that hacking, I rolled the chair over to glance down over the Pioneer Court cab zone. I’d turned in my last trip sheet, so what was not to like, right—until Andrea at the reception desk rang through to my office extension, an emergency phone call from my dad and mom’s doctor.

          “You’re the son? Well, sorry, young man, but the tumors are rapidly metastasizing…”

          “So, what are you saying?”

          “That there’s not a lot more we can do for her that doesn’t carry serious risk.”

          “Well, what can you do?!”

          “We could go in and excise some lung, if her heart can handle it. Or attempt a major chemo or radiation regimen,” said her attending physician.  “Although I’m not sure she has the strength to withstand that, at all. We’d have to conduct full diagnostic testing first.”

          “You…we’ve got to try, don’t we?!”

          “Not according to your father…”

          Wellen’s team granted me emergency leave for the afternoon, and I grabbed a taxi to my parents’ place—Checker 3173, to be exact. Dad was already at the hospital, which thankfully stood but several blocks away. I quick changed into jeans and an Irish cable-knit sweater from the Dingle Peninsula, then cut across Marquette Park to Holy Sacrament. On the way along Mann Drive, I realized that no news updates had surfaced on the lagoon homicide; by Kanst Drive, it appeared that Frankie Fuhrery’s neo-Gestapo were back out drilling, so self-Reichously so, albeit with a smaller bootprint.

          Jaywalking against heavy California Street traffic, I tore into the hospital like a high school hurdler chasing a full-ride scholarship, meeting up with her assigned doctor outside the ICU. So briefed, I met up with my benumbed father in the waiting room. He was took pains to explain how mom had collapsed on the parlor floor into one of her pernicious coughing spells, only this one stealing her breath away, to an unconscious state.

          Paramedics had rushed her here to Emergency, where she’d been under sedation and an oxygen tent ever since, ER doctors gently advising how serious-to-critical her condition had become, that she was in no shape to be visited for time being.

          “Don’t want nobody cuttin’ into her,” my dad mumbled, as we sat hunched over on a vinyl-covered couch.

          “Her lungs are pitch black, dad. They’ve got to do something, or else…”

          “No, I said, not to my wife, they don’t!”

          “You can’t ignore this, dammit—can’t you see? My mother’s not going to make it any other way,” I fretted, squeezing his slumping shoulders, noticing as how he was bonier these days, as if having lost considerable weight.

          “Aghh, college boy,” he bit hard on the stem of his unlit pipe. “Think you know so much…”

          “Believe me, it’s our only hope,” I looked him in the eyes, which were now heavy behind taped-frame glasses. “You just have to sign the papers…”

          “I’ll do it, son, but it ain’t my doin’ no blessed how…”

           “More French-Vanilla coffee, sir?”

           “No thanks, I’m fine…”

           “Interest you in a canapé?”

           “I’ll pass…”

           “We’ll return shortly with your patisserie du jour.”

           FBC strategies had changed. The ChicagoOne account being as important as it was, VP and executive creative directors decreed that a senior writer from the corporate identity/institutional division descend from the 17^th floor to assume the overall bank campaign copy duties.

          That left some of Parker Hodinott’s smaller print advertising assignments flapping in the Michigan Avenue gales, beginning with a series of Chicago magazine and Stagebill program insertions for the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. So Ralph Desman pulled me off the collateral slag heap to take up the textual headline and deadline slack, unspokenly on a trial by fire or be fired basis, which had me backseat cabbing like an election day ward boss down the Miracle Mile to Water Tower Place.

           I entered a new, civilized, old worldly lobby with a bronze heroned sculpture and serenely spashing fountain. My creative charge was to draw theatergoers, orchestra patrons, polo chukkars and weekend trysters to the Ritz’s traditionally deluxe, if not dowdy, suites, clubby Greenhouse bar and legendary Epicurean alimentaire, at sky-high tariffs and rates.

          First up, the hotel’s Café, which brought me to this mezzanine lounge for some ambience and research, from a quiet, bone-white table overlooking the darkly crated, cross-braced John Hancock Center and a Chestnut Street abuzz with mid-afternoon traffic. Couldn’t hear a thing, however, other than the clinking of china and crystal, the soft rustle of palms and pastoral tapestries, and a corner tuxedoed piano-string quartet playing Chopin under crystal chandeliers.          

           “Your Raspberry Charlotte, sir,”  the white-coated waiter arrived with his sterling pastry tray, being so pleasantly presumptuous as to offer forth his personal choice. “Or you are welcome to try the Buche de Noel, perhaps La Cote Basques Dacquoise.”

          “Don’t mind if I do,” I grinned, setting aside my legal pad, by now filled with bullet points, scratch notes and peripheral impressions. “How about I go for that one there, and I think that’ll do it, no check, please.”

          “By all means, sir…understood,” the cheery waiter served me the small orange dish, then turned away, winking over to the maitre d’. “Hope you’ve found the salad and everything to your liking…”

          “I’ll put in a good word or two,” I dessert forked into the Tarte au Citron, devouring it and the coffee, leaving him something of a guilt tip out of petty cash. With that, I thanked the hotel’s marketing staffer on the way out, pocketing several Frango mints, assuring her we would have a review draft sent over in short order.

          But along with the Cobb salad and patisserie came the pressure. Outbound, I avoided the Center’s mall shops and highrise tower altogether, then shook off the Pearson Street cab line.  I was driven instead to jog lightly up Michigan Avenue, around the enduring, by now endearing Water Tower itself, along glittering storefronts such as Tiffany, Bvlgari, Bonwit Teller, Florsheims and Saks.

          Clutching my notepad like a tailback the rock, I shifted and dodged around clots of strollers, shoppers and the pickpocket scammers shadowing them all between Superior and Erie. Buses, taxis and all other classes of vehicular traffic echoed off Magnificent Mile highrises to either side, as I gasped, reached for an aha brainstorm of hotel ad head and taglines, coming up with nothing more than leg cramps. Look and feel was one thing; however I felt I should look for a little more background material on the Ritz Hotel heritage and historiography.

          Choking on fumes, distracted by stylish shoe salon and art gallery windows, I impulsively darted across Michigan Avenue’s early tulip bedded median, ducking into a disheveled little Brent’s bookstore with as much history as the history section itself.

          “Got anything on the Ritz Hotel in Paris,” I asked, out of breath from slipping through a horny backup around Grand Avenue, even though I discordantly knew from Desman that the original storied Ritz had nothing to do with the Four Seasons chain, which had leased the naming rights for their R-C Chicago.

          “Who’s askin’,” shouted a podgy, white-haired figure in rumpled blue blazer and red checked shirt, from an over piled oak desk in a rear-store den. It turned out to be Studs Terkel, just back from a late whitefish lunch, holding court before Big Shoulders literati at Riccardo’s.

          “I’m just a copywriter over at Forrester, Blaine—looking for a little background to flesh out these Ritz-Carlton ads I’m doing…”

          “Hmph, advertising—what’re you writing that crap for? I know from working, so what kind of work is that,” snapped the local treasure, star eminence of news, letters, theater, classical FM radio and the early Chicago TV days of Garroway and Kukla, Fran & Ollie, chomping on a cigar butt, still sporting his boarding house upbringing and blacklisted political pedigree. Studs always noted as how the U.S. Communists formed in Chicago, although he never quite boasted as having joined the Party. Today, he peered up from a Broadway stage-play adaptation of his 1974 book, ‘Working’, with reading glasses perched on the tip of his rosy nose. “Lying for a living, that damned ad game—an execrable waste of talent, enormous waste of time.”

          “Uh, I’m kinda new at this…was thinking about fleshing out the Ritz tradition thing,” I muttered, scanning up and down the European History shelves. “You know, getting off to a good start, making like I know what I’m talking about…”

          “We don’t carry any of that PR bilge here,” Terkel replied, as if Nelson Algren and Ben Hecht were still standing here with him in Studs’ Place. “And if you had any integrity as a writer, you’d get out of that racket like a bat outta’ hell.”

          “Just aiming to tell a better story…” I stood frozen in awe of the world-renowned author for a moment, then turned to head for the exit.

          “So tell a story, a real story,” Terkel replied, in a sharp, professorial tone he’d liberally honed since his early lawyerly days. “Get yourself straight, why don’t you? There are real, honest tales to tell out there, instead of  yackin’ yur yid over that crooked corporate drivel. There’s plenty of good you could be doing in this world, a young cove like you…”

          “Will do, sir,” I nodded on my way out, tin bell ringing on the front door. “Thanks much for your help.”

          I wanted to write that off as the overhang from too many Riccardo’s martinis, but Stud’s message still stuck like a Post-It note on my prefrontal cortex. Pulling up the sport jacket lapels, wrestling with a flapping necktie, I fought a chilling wind further up Michigan, cutting over the Tribune Tower crosswalk, traffic snarling from either direction, loping through Pioneer Court back up to my office, legal pad full of raw jottings and scribbles, yet without a clue what they would amount to upstairs.

          Andrea handed me a phone message right out of the elevator, with a two-hands choking gesture around her neck, and nod in toward the 16^th floor offices. FBC’s hallway was quiet and all but empty, doors closed, everybody busy doing their creative part, up and down the aisle. The first things I noticed upon entering mine were a new nameplate and overloaded inbox. Centered atop my typewriter was yet another new ad assignment redirected from Parker Hadinott, sleeved in a blue interagency folder, with a memo by Desman to arrange a briefing meeting with the client therein.

          A sinking feeling overcame me, the one where a body is slap bobbing in a sea of 50-foot Pacific swells. I tried to shore up with a phone call to Holy Sacrament Hospital, where nurses advised that mom remained in the ICU, that her condition had neither worsened nor improved since I last checked. No great relief there, so I felt compelled to answer the voicemailed call.

          “We really have to talk, Kenny…”

          “So let’s talk…”

          “No, I mean face to face. There are some things happening up here that we need to discuss.”

          “Uh, I’m really getting swamped here, Moon—you don’t know. Let me just get on top of this some before…” My mind was racing like Michigan Avenue traffic after a bridge hoist, staggering thoughts of 4 a.m. diapers and the cycle of life.

          “Before what? Before I have to call and leave you a message again…”

          “No, I’m thinking before I invite you downtown for a well-deserved night out…my treat, for a change…”

          “Just make it sooner than later, okay? See you soon, Kenny…” CLICK.

          Done. I began leafing through my inbox, only to find the top of the pile half stuffed with red-lined rewrites and revisions, clipped with a typed blue note memo reading, ‘Word to the wise, sharpen it up and step it up.’, left unsigned. Not knowing quite what to make of that, I dialed a quick client call, then gathered up the blue folder and my legal pad, leaving my office, such as it was, caffeinated wide awake. Andrea Dudic assured me she would take any messages—particularly parents’ wise—and I expressed down over to the Wrigley Building cabstand to loyally grab a Checker pointed south.

          As a Punjab Indian driver raced down Michigan Avenue, a rush of ad ideas hit me like a Ritz-Carlton Hotel tab: ‘Join Our Café Society’, ‘Come Rest On Our Laurels’—mindless slogans like that, going who knew where, nevertheless anxiously scribbled onto my notepad at a Michigan-Madison Avenue backup, just in time to enter a far more storied local shrine two blocks beyond.

          I’d considered myself lucky to even be delivering fares unto Orchestra Hall in my taxi days, let alone passing through its gilded foyer. Home to a top Five/tier, world-class symphony, the Daniel Burnham-designed brick concert fortress was about to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places. And as far as I could see, Andrew Carnegie had nothing on Theodore Thomas, the Chicago Orchestra founder whose name was inscribed in its magisterially friezed and filigreed facade. Bach, Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven nominally rested over the hall’s overarching ballroom windows; Bernstein had conducted here, as had Ravel, Copland, Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff.

          I was here to gain further input for a series of commemorative mezzotint ads featuring classic moments in recent Chicago music history—Sir Georg Solti conducting the Symphony Orchestra through Mahler’s Seventh, Rostropovich captivating Ravinia’s Festival with his cello performance of the Dvorak Concerto, for starters, Wilhelm Furtwangler notwithstanding. An Orchestra Hall promotional aide festooned me with photos, clippings and reviews, to where I hobbled out to South Michigan Avenue, head and hands full of copy possibilities.

          The FBC clock was ticking, and I needed a quiet place to get some of this material down on yellow ruled paper. Visualizing my office as an inbox piled with drudgework and headaches, I instead found refuge between two roaring lions a couple of blocks back up Michigan Avenue—one defiant, the other on the prowl.  The Beaux-Arts temple that was Chicago’s Art Institute seemed at first to be anathema to such solitude and concentration, but I found a secluded mid-afternoon table in its Museum Café where I could fashion some rough drafts of the symphony ads to follow the Ritz-Carlton Hotel notations. Nothing set in concrete, yet enough of a start to hack back to the Iniquity Center with a head of creative, if not redemptive steam.  

          Another day, another time: there was simply too much to absorb in this sprawling aesthetic wonder anyway—graceful wings rich with worldly historic epochal sculpture prints and textiles, otherworldly modern art in all its dazzling protean forms. Still, there was no escaping the Institute’s galleries of fine paintings, and its celebrated Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collections stopped me flat as a numbered litho print.

          I turned my Timex wristwatch face down, and began roaming among Monet’s ‘Wheat and Haystacks’, ‘Beach at Ste. Adresse’, Water Lilies and Giverny Poppy Fields, studying Manet’s Seascapes and ‘Philosopher, Beggar With Oysters’. I paused at Renoir By The Water, especially at his Two Sisters; was sent adrift by Cezanne’s Bays, memories unleashed by Caillebotte’s rainy ‘Paris Street’ and Toulouse-Lautrec ‘At the Moulin Rouge’, the pointillist wonder of Seurat’s ‘Sunday Afternoon, La Grande Jatte’.

          Closer to home, I felt the thrilling authenticity of such familiar imagery as ‘American Gothic’ and Nighthawks, no less awe inspiring than Da Vinci at the Louvre. Amid the classical artistic genius, all these profoundly creative masterpieces, my mind wandered to Syd’s studio, flashing on her impressive paintings to date, and all the masterworks she potentially had ahead of her. I wondered whether the sun was shining on her workshop, or if San Francisco’s winter and Athren Guildersol were still keeping her company there at night.

          In any case, time to get back to FBC. The next Checker in line hauled me back across the Michigan Avenue Bridge barely before the afternoon rush hours. The sun had popped out over the verticality of Pioneer Court, Tribune Tower gothically imposing as its ‘World’s Greatest Newspaper’ masthead; the Wrigley Building as naturally radiant as it was when ivory floodlit after dark, our Iniquity Center still soaking up all the riverside daylight between Michigan and the Lake.

          I snatched a message Andrea had left for me upstairs on the corner of her desk and stepped lightly, warily into my office. It appeared that the 16^th floor would be slaving well into the night on their ChicagoOne bank account, so I closed the door behind me and sat in for another overnight of my own. That was when I looked more closely at the blue message slip, two phone numbers with exclamation points: one for my father, the other Holy Sacrament Hospital’s ICU.

Care for more?

 Chapter 41. Homeward decisions come no 
easier, intra-agency pressures building by the 
day. Then a harried old goat bucks the trend 
and happens to turn a head…

 

Ed: Storm Warning…

“Loner to joiner
the thought of switching roles—
all but leaving one cold.”

          “Get outta here!”

          “Stay out of there!”

          “You don’t belong here…”

          “And you don’t belong here or there!”

          A skosh taxi downtime was needed to digest my Englewood encounter and chew over some fresh advertising ideas. I’d since placed an exploratory call to that Ralph Desman ad guy, so back it was to jogging along the asphalt paths of Marquette Park, jotting a trickle of lame ideas, pencil to scratch paper against tree trunk and light pole, itching for better and more. I rounded the lagoon near the park’s Kedzie Avenue median, putting that body bag and coroner’s van behind me.

          But there was no getting around this latest turnout, cornered over on the southern, overgrown Redfield Drive side of the grounds. Seemed that bunch I saw drilling the last time I ran here was back at it, only their brown shirts were T-shirt plain now, silk screened ‘White Power’ and swastika in blue, ‘It’s only a matter of time’ on the back side.

          The National Socialist Party of America, some 25 re-enacting storm troopers strong, was goose-stepping with authority, rehearsing for NSPA’s main event, particularly since state and Federal courts had recently begun green lighting their planned march on Skokie. District and Appellate judgments held that the north suburb could not enact ordinances to outlaw NSPA demonstrations within village limits, that these neo-Nazis were constitutionally entitled after all to go the extra mile to spill their bile. So the media were paying closer attention than ever to this fringy Chicago Lawn-seeded movement—lead story, front page, Tribune to TV nationwide—as were the ‘Serve and Protect’ squadrol boys in blue.

          They weren’t the only ones tuning in however. Nearly half of Skokie residents were Jewish, many Holocaust survivors or relatives of death camp victims, and residents were terrified and/or furious at the very notion of Nazis marching in their streets. Village board leaders had sued to block NSPA attempts the year before, passing permit restrictions and gaining injunctions to outlaw any such demonstrations, the ADL adding its own clout and lawsuit to the prohibition efforts of Melissa’s hometown.

          But then the ACLU stepped in, challenging village ordinances and other roadblocks as 1^st Amendment violations—that these incitation and present-danger claims amounted to illegal prior restraint—and legal dominoes began to fall.

          That’s when Jewish groups throughout the country expressed their support for and solidarity with Skokie residents, not least the Jewish Defense League. More militant JDL types converged on the village, organizing Hora folk circle dances in downtown Skokie, pledging to engage the neo-Nazis in violent confrontation if need be, and here they were on this mildly sunny day, taking it to the NSPA on its very own turf.

          “Chicago Lawn is our neighborhood, and you Jew landlords are the ones conniving to bring them jigs in here,” said one of the White Power elite through his bullhorn.

          “You’re in America, Adolph, not the Third Reich,” shouted a JDL spokesman, backed by a dozen or so operatives, plus a sprinkling of civil rights and hard-hatted union activists. “Freedom and property rights extend to everybody in this country, not just to you bigot pigs and your white-flight racist redlining.”

          “Go back to Skokie, go the hell back to Israel, you commie Jews, and take your Jew tricks with you!”

          “No, you Nazi assholes stay the hell out of Skokie.”

          So it went, Sunday in the park, this was not. Tempers flared, bullhorns blared, and the man behind the loudest of them proved to be NSPA’s holy herr in chief. A smallish, non-Aryan looking Chicago native, one Frankie Fuhrery, was a cartoon clownish Hitler impersonator with a bad combover, minus the square patch moustache to cover his quivering upper lip.

          He had made his early bones with the George Lincoln Rockwell Brigade, but was eventually jackbooted from the National Socialist White People’s Party over a fumbled power grab. He then led the NSPA in mouse-hole obscurity until setting opportunistic sights on a blitzkrieg march into Skokie last spring in full Nazi uniforms—this after Chicago had shot his city permit application down and out.    

          Though cursed, vilified and death targeted ever since, today his scant cadre of followers stood frozen at attention over his shoulder, arms clasped behind their backs, rehearsing for a full-dress rally come long, hot summer. They were mainly a uniformly mutty lot: Young long-haired greaser Jets and stoner park hangers, toolies and Fonzies looking for some reactionary action; older porkers with Meister Brau bellies and aching, achtung knees who should have known better, seething in stretched-out swastikaed undershirts, with nothing left to hide.

          All told, a party of casehardened spiritual cripples, fronted by a Reich Chancellor so stereotypically farcical he could have been a satirical mole planted by The Onion, Mel Brooks or Mossad. Still, they did have a point to make—Chicago lawn was changing, all right—and were sworn over Wolf’s Lair rubble to be seen and heard, to be true unyielding soldiers for ‘the white man under siege’.

          “Oh, we’re goin’ to Skikie. Take it to your shyster, hymie bank. Show you what it’s about.”

          “And we’ll be waiting for you at the city line,” replied a Yippie shaded, muscle shirted JDLer, pointing menacingly toward the closed ranks. “For every Vilnius there’s a Nakam, Litvak, never forget that…”

          “The block-bustin’, niggas comin’ over’s all your fault. Hitler had the right idea, BBQ the Jews!”

          “Gestapo goons like you lost the war, remember? Just like you’re gonna be going down in flames, no matter how much hatred you morons try to spew!”

          “Power, power, power to the white people,” shouted a small phalanx of neighborhood supporters who were tearing away from their little brick bungalows to weigh in on the confrontation—straight-arm salutes, and all. Who knew if any were former camp executioners or forced-labor guards in hiding? Nobody in Chicago Lawn was likely to say so if they were.

          “Death, death, death to the Nazis,” was the JDL megaphoned counter chant, something of a heckler’s veto, with the Stern force of a young battering Rahm. “To the Lithuanian stooges and Latvian death squads!”

          Once Chicago’s finest determined this un-permitted sectarian scrum had reached the boiling point, blue helmets waded in from their paddy wagons lining Redfield Drive, separating the factions, bringing order to the face-off with the tips of their nightsticks. The neo-Nazi unit gave parting salutes, then marched off in close-quarter formation past the tennis courts, along the lagoon’s southern path as CPD riot squads ushered the JDL contingent out of Marquette Park’s Mann Drive northern side.

          Der Frankie’s storm troopers were bound for their headquarters, a blockhouse former storefront with boarded over windows and fortified doors. Thinking in terms of out-group social dynamics and deviant collective behavior, I slowly followed their quasi-triumphal march out along 71^st Street with grim, morbid curiosity—couldn’t help myself—all the way to their ersatz little Reichstadt.

          In through the drab white brick façade, the block house’s signage reading war relics and army combat collectibles, came a fluorescent showroom of Third Reich memorabilia and devotional merchandise: Wehrmacht helmets, piped Luftwaffe uniforms, Iron Cross peak caps, Waffen SS collar patches and cuff bands, Totenkopf sleeve diamonds, Gestapo cruller boards, Allemagne field tunics, polished black leather belts, shoulder straps, jackboots and jodhpurs.

          Walls were plastered with Swastika flags, robo-signed photos of Goehring, Hess, Goebels and Mengele, oil portraits of Herr Hitler himself; framed blow-ups of goosestepping legions and Munich torch rallies in Agfa color and/or sepia tones; ‘Hitler is Goodness, the Fuhrer is God’, ‘White is Right’ and ‘Heil Yes’ posters unfurled over the doorways, Messerschmitt reproductions hung from the ceiling, along with Panzer artillery pieces, U-boats and V-2 rocketry.

          Brown-shirted staffers in red and black swastika armbands scurried about with Himmler efficiency, dusting gunnery shells, bayonets and truncheons. Other joyless Jerries refilled card tables with the latest White Power propaganda and racist hate-fliers, fresh off mimeo presses in the windowless back room, next door to their guns and ammo cache.

          The whole musty, glorified bunker was packed with gruff dabblers and disciples, heavy with excretions and tobacco smoke, to where a body couldn’t breath freely in their so-called Rockwell Hall. And I couldn’t help noticing the ironic Goethe quote they had wood burned over the exit door: ‘There is nothing more terrible than ignorance in action’.

          I crossed back over to Marquette Park, beside myself with the overheated hatred and hostility, trying to assess the ramifications of all this shit—which probably never would have happened in Willow Grove, much less out west. And when did this all start going down around here? Why did these backlash losers have to bring their dirty laundry into Chicago Lawn, anyway? What did that say about them? About my parents and their chosen neighborhood? What did this say about me, given I was once stationed in a former Nazi hospital turned Army HHQ outside Mannheim, complete with real swastikas chiseled into its bannisters? Wait, this couldn’t be about me…isn’t about Moon neither. It isn’t about us, can’t be about us! No, null hypothesis, no regression to some extreme mean. Aww, park…violence–pick your poison, pick your park. Make mine Golden Gate peace and love…save for Lafayette, right? Damn straight, don’t you wish…

          So much for sociological empiricism: I flashed upon the entire ugly gathering—the neo-nutsies,  counter-punch demonstrators, the locals trickling out to vent their pickled spleens—suddenly aching for an aseptic shower. Not my area of expertise, I shuddered, thankful Uncle Early and my father didn’t appear to be there among them all.

          “This yours?”

          “Yes, I came up with that when…”

           “You did this?”

           “Let me explain about how that one…”

           Limping back over to Francisco Avenue, albeit with a cherry cola pit stop at the California Street gas/con, I had rubbed a head spinning with Marquette Park’s conundrum-beats: that lagoonish body of water, opposing goon squads on the march—whether racial bleed-over from Englewood to Chicago Lawn would turn the Western Avenue battle line into a river of blood. The homefront provided little clarity, Mom bed resting again with cold compresses, dad puffing far away on his briar, glued to the kitchen radio news, farm futures and weather reports.

          I was scrambling to scrub down and head for the Checker garage when I noticed a name and phone number on the flap side of a Catholic Charities envelope atop the dining room table: The return call from that Ralph Desman guy, which led me to this quickie late afternoon meeting on the River North threshold to the Magnificent Mile.

          “Won’t be necessary…sociology background?”

          “Yes sir, two degrees worth—abstracts, thesis, even…contemplated a Ph.D., but…” I rattled on, eyes fixed on his turning of my stapled together sketch pages, how he settled on my Boraxo ad rough, with the headline, ‘It Goes Hand In Hand With The Working Man’.

          “Well, classroom sociology is light years away from what we’re doing here.”

          “Of course, I guess it’s light years away from a lot of real world things.” I caught my breath as he paused at a freehand door lock work-up, ‘Schlage. Lock Of Ages’.

          “However, it doesn’t hurt, and you do seem to have something of a way with imagery, and elemental feel for words,” said the assistant creative director of Forrester, Blaine & Carruthers, a top-drawer advertising agency worldwide. FBC dated to the Packard, DuMont and Chesterfield days; only blue-chips sat in at this table, coast to coast, and Ralph Desman had been dispatched from the New York office to beef up FBC/Chicago’s heartland presence, namely devouring the apple polishers over at Leo Burnett.

          Forrester, Blaine occupied four mid-level floors of the Equity Center, a 35-story gray/brown Skidmore, Owings-designed box rising between the Chicago River and buttress-topped, neo-gothic Tribune Tower. I’d parked a comparatively later-model 3199 in the cab loading circle out front of the Meisian modernist building, glancing across Michigan Avenue at the landmark Wrigley Building, white as the wrapper of a Spearmint pack, built on the manducating imperative of gum sticks and tooth decay.

          I spit shined my oxfords, got Windsor knotted, khakied up, then slicked down my hair while crossing the Center’s fountained Pioneer Court, stumbled through revolving doors to sign in at the security desk and ride an express elevator up to the 29^th floor. FBC’s creative department receptionist deigned to call back for confirmation, then sent me down a long, quiet, wood-paneled corridor to an office once removed from the corner suite with the fuller, finer Lake Michigan view.  

          My timid tap on the half-opened door brought a curt greeting and gesture to sit across from Desman’s massive oak desk. Propped beside it were several illustration-size portfolios; atop same were stacks of scripts, reels, comps and storyboards.

          His office walls were covered with matted campaign ads, framed commercial screen grabs, shmoozy photos of various industry luminaries and showbiz types at agency retreats, Manhattan openings and L.A. awards presentations—alongside posters from The Met, Whitney and Guggenheim, along with a Hamptons’ sailboat blow-up or two.  B’nai B’rith and Hillel citations were trimmed in gold leaf and velvet relief.

          Behind the cluttered desk stood shelves lined with gleaming Addys, Clios, embossed client accolades, network broadcaster honors and magazine publisher commendations. Seated before them was a somewhat distracted Desman, gray J. Pressed with a custard cashmere turtleneck, gazing out smoked glass windows upon his partial view of the highrises across the Chicago River, that rubber strewn waterway opening out to the blue Lake Michigan beyond. At least until he spun my way, skimming over pleasantries and past particulars, then tearing into what passed for my best spec material.

          “I’ve been working at it, Mr. Desman,” I said, tightening the Windsor I’d knotted in one of my dad’s recent birthday ties, concealed as best I could with the same outfit I’d worn up to J. Walter’s lobby at the Hancock Building. “And I know I can come up with more…”

          “Well, if that priggish bastard Everett sent you over, what the hell,” Desman said, handing back my ‘book’, with a sigh of resignation. “We have a  lot of collateral piling up that will require long-form copywriting. Think you’re up to it…Ken, is it?”

          “You bet, sir, I’ll give it my best…”

          “Then Ken it is, we’ll give you a shot,” he rose to shake my hand, scoot me out his door, so as to dive into some memos and reach down into his desk drawer to lube up for lunch. “Starting 8 a.m. tomorrow, base starting salary, plus per diem and standard benefits—I’ll clear it with the head honcho and boys upstairs. Welcome aboard, and get a good night’s rest…we have a lot of work to do.”

          Total fluke, accident of timing, simple supply and demand: That’s all I could make of this fast-acting development, but I needed the money and sure couldn’t argue with an opportunity to start fresh. I sallied past that preoccupied receptionist with a double tap on her desktop, then floated down the express elevator like cottonweed in a summer breeze.

          Skipping across Pioneer Court, I picked up a loading zone citation from under 3199’s wiper blade, but more importantly, a fat airport run from the curbside underwriter staring a hole through his wristwatch, overcoat flapping anxiously in the wind. A bear of a Cub fan, he fretted over missing a connection to Wichita all the way out to O’Hare’s departure level. I just flew along JFK’s express lanes riding the Checker’s rattling body panels and shimmying wheels, smiling with relief that this hacking hamster wheel might be coming to an off ramp before the next Wrigleyville homestand hit town.

          “Doesn’t sound like your field, but maybe it is. Anyway, it’ll help make for key money. Maybe now we can scrape together enough to get us a place.”

          “Right…gotta have key money for a…place…”

          “Sure, that way we can get things back to normal. You know, just to get us settled and reorganized around here. I never want to go through a move like that again.”

          “If you say so,” I said haltingly. “But let’s see how it goes first, okay?”

          “You’ll do just fine, Kenny, we’ve got total faith in you. And Seamus barks hi.”

          “Great, Moon. Well, I’d better get off before it gets too late.”

          Pulling a straphanger downtown on CTA’s Archer Express bus the next morning gave me plenty of time to hash things out. Yeah, mass transiting—from wild west rustbucket to rust-belt spoils, pretty soon maybe trade cab runs for cab rides, score me some decent threads…go from left brain to a little more right, visualize the verbal, verbalize the visual—less stuffy sosh, more sophisticated sell. Scrap the terminology and jargon, learn the lingo, can the dog-eared scratch paper and bring on the Selectric IBM. Forget the reeling, build yourself a killer reel. Look, listen, ask intelligent questions, pay rapt attention. Think bigger, picture brighter, cash in the per diems, dump the day by day.

          Really, throw Southside Marquette Park headbanging over for a more Northshore frame of mind. That’s the ticket: pay those bloodsucker meter maids off, turnaround the squareback, once and for all. Help mom get back on her feet; key in on that Moon mission, make sure everything gets rightly squared away. So wake up and smell the bus fumes, noodnik…

          Such drowsy phantasms and rainy daydreaming carried me through a couple of bus route transfers and a damp trudge across the Michigan Avenue Bridge, wincing at the tire whine on steel-grilled surfaces, freezing collar up on a plaid-lined trench coat I’d left behind long ago. Lake-whipped winds swirled through Pioneer Court—where Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable built Chicago’s earliest cabin structure in the 1700s—as I revolved through Equity Center’s doors, reporting to the security desk for a first day’s merging into FBC’s indubitably faster lane.   

         “We like to call it the Iniquity Center.”

         “Iniquity…that’s a good one,” I gladhanded, as we gathered about what appeared to be my assigned office, or at least the long vacated number into which a facility manager had  led me, clipboard and floor plan in hand. Desk, swivel chair, drawered console and bulletin board—otherwise the room was as blank as clean sheet of typing paper.

          “No, that’s a bad one, sport…as in wickedly bad…”  

          “Well, it sure seems to have its dark side,” I replied, looking out upon the glowing Wrigley Building across Michigan Avenue, and the cab zone I had trafficed in mere hours before. “I mean, window-wise.”

          Having navigated FBC’s personnel shoals upstairs, health plan to stock options, I was ushered into my own mid-floor office with deadpan ceremonial fanfare by that 16th floor receptionist, Andrea Dudic, who’d earlier blown me off. Before I could settle into an upholstered swivel chair, two fresh department colleagues popped in to greet and be known.

          Associate creative director Bob Gelvart—he of Northwestern’s Medill School, sat himself on the corner of my large walnut desk, tossing me an agency handbook of creatives’ workflow and protocols. Then Lacey Abbott-Tanzer, account manager by way of a Stanford MBA, piled client project particulars atop my inbox. Both smiled and probed as to where I’d been and how the hell I got in here.

          “Lock of Ages, huh,” Gelvart asked, tossing back his wavy auburn forelock as he flipped through my loose-leaf excuse for a ‘book’. “Playing off a Christian hymn over 200 years old—that’s your speed?”

          “Well, no—that was just off the top of my head, I’m kinda new at this…”

          “You mean the Rock of Ages, where Toplady sheltered from the storm?” Lacey Abbott-Tanzer added, a dimple-faced former Wolverine cheerleader, bright blond Greek turned quantic geek, in an incarnadine pantsuit. “How… quaint…”

          “Okay, people, that’s enough with the fraternizing,” Ralph Desman peeked into the office door on his way to the steno pool. “Let’s get down to work…”

          “Time to hit the gas pedal, speed,” Gelvart smiled, rebuttoning his brown corduroy jacket, as he escorted Lacey out to the long runnered hallway. “I’ll be looking for some rough drafts by lunchtime.”

          “They’re just testing you, man,” Larry Castalone said in passing. He was a recent art director hire, transplanted from Parsons and Cooper Union, now working up thumbnails, comps and storyboards in the office right next door, ostensibly my partner in organizational line. “I’m seeing it never stops here. Why do you think they stack those next-up portfolios outside my door?”

          I closed my door behind them, then paused to soak in the wicker-walled office, the Wrigley Building perspective out my window, on where I’d in fact come from, looking down on where I had just been. But, to work, sucking down some cold Mr. Coffee and tuning my brittle little radio into some new ‘City to City’ by Jerry Rafferty.

          Slow to start, I seemed to get the hang and style of things: mailers and sales fliers for Jorvan Hair Care, product sheets for Alcor-Smith water heaters, brochure copy for Roadliner bicycles, packaging for Starway Appliances, tech specification folders for Great Lakes Tool & Die. Copy drudge and grunt work, to be sure, but Gelvart seemed to be buying my submissions with only minor corrections and revisions, and the prospect of those per diem bennies were well worth the Archer Avenue commute.

          Shelf tags, display signage, table cards no end on drop-deadlines: Still, before long I was word-count fitting to Castalone’s layouts and designs, writing to his type wraps and overlays, digging into points, picas and justifying; faces, glyphs and fonts, factoring in the leading and kerning on his double-truck magazine inserts.

          So far, so fair enough: I was learning on FBC’s dime, making a bit of payback and folding money—and even spells of lousy weather didn’t rain down on my little parade, for it looked like I no longer had to wheel through it to keep a cab meter spinning, a trip sheet fat and full. Plus prolonged collateral concentration took my mind off everything else.

          “I’ve hoped and prayed for teaching, but if business is your choice—thank God there’s always good work in Chicago…”

          “Yes, mom, let’s see how it works out. The important thing is you’ve got to keep getting better…we need you more than ever around here.”

          Sad to say, her short-lived rally was headed south. I had returned to Francisco Avenue later than usual, after a week or so of non-stop pounding on my designated Selectric’s Courier typeball. Bob Gelvart seemed essentially content with my content, relieved to no longer being saddled with the peon assignments, free to pull together his surreptitious new campaign. Lacey Abbott-Tanzer continued feeding my inbox with client input, lightly red penciling my efforts on the margins, with notes and comments betraying a slightly sardonic side, proving helpful nonetheless.

          No kibbitz was good kibbitz on the Ralph Desman front, whom Larry Castalone conjectured was pumping down the Gelusil in anticipation of Executive Creative Director, Phillip Richmond’s return from a power pow-wow at the New York/Madison Avenue office. Per diems were as advertised, and I felt I was catching up with FBC’s pace and expectations, back of mind surmising that my mother’s improving vital signs pointed toward a steady recovery.

          “I’ll be just fine, son,” she coughed, lying still on the living room sofa, wrapped in several layers of blankets and comforters, floor model TV going, with the sound turned down. “I only pray this new job of yours will help clear your mind of the muddle you’ve brought back with you from out west.”

          “I don’t know, mom,” I sighed, straightening the face cloth on her forehead. “There’s plenty of loose ends on that front…things I’ve still got to figure out.”

          “Uh-huh, just remember, you need somebody to push you—shove you sometimes…one doting mother like me is enough.”

          “There is no mother like you—that’s why you’ve got to get back on your feet for us, real good and strong, okay?” I glanced over at the old Zenith console, ‘Streets of San Francisco’ starting up again with the aerial swooping over Chinatown and Fisherman’s Wharf, an episode featuring a cop chase through the Marina District, then more expat Troubles brewing in the Irish bars.

          “Like you say, let’s see where it goes. And another thing—if you keep being caught between two  angels, maybe you deep down don’t want to fly with either one.”

          “Aww, mom, don’t even be going there…”

Care for more?

Chapter 40. Ups and downs, meeting 
at the highest level while vital signs 
sink below. Then upper crust exposure 
results in a critical turning of the page…

“Fear is as fear does 
no one knows that better than— 
those who share the buzz.”

          “He said I could drop that stuff off, so when…”

          “He’s in L.A., post-production all week, what can I tell you?”

          “Then maybe you can get it to him when he gets back?”

          “Mister Everett’s very busy, but I’ll see what I can do…”

          “That would be fantabulous…have a great day…”

          “A…fantabulous day to you, too.” CLICK.

          Where did that come from? Did I really drop a goddamn ‘fantabulous’ on her? I could just picture the young Cosmo groomed receptionist eye rolling into her speakerphone. She was already unapproachable enough when I crossed from the 45^th floor elevator to the ad agency’s lobby to hand her my sealed manila envelope. Sighing, phone cradled on her bleu lumiere-mohaired shoulder, she’d set it atop an inbound stack of far more professional looking portfolio cases.

           With ample penalty box time between cabbing shifts and fares, I had library studied some bare-bones design aspects such as unity, balance and the 5:3 golden mean. I eased my mind off matters of inner turmoil by scribbling a few meager headlines and slogans, a little tyro copy, working up a number of spec advertisements for products like Pear’s soap, Schlage locks, Caterpillar tractors and Boraxo. Slow time taxi breaks in the nearest stoolie coffee shop found me penciling some display cursives, drop shadows and kerned type wraps—strictly amateur hour, but it was a lot more stimulating than clinical sociology research.

          Before long, a not entirely embarrassing folder of rough sketches and writing samples took shape. So I followed through with a nothing-to-lose phone call to that art director at the J. Walter agency; Dick Everett said to bring them on by. Which I was driven to do, wearing the only decent khakis, button down and V-neck I had packed, delivering the unmarked envelope to the 45^th floor creative department in the black, sleekly derrick-like John Hancock Building.

          This receptionist made me out to be an express delivery boy anyway, treated me no better when I mentioned Everett’s invitation, then shooed me out of her awards-filled lobby, back toward the down-bound elevators. Not that I expected anything to come of this effort, but I did feel 3167’s double-parking ticket on Michigan Avenue at Delaware Place might be something of an odds-on bet. Nevertheless, this follow up call two days later left me fidgeting like an acute hemorrhoid case in my parents’ dining room chair.

          Days spent doodling some advertising samples left me hacking more from the afternoon rush into early nightfall. The ideas seemed to flow best when I began jogging again, a half-speed regimen left behind in Boulder—getting that blood flowing, pumping those endorphins, firing up the circuitry, making unforetold cerebral connections. No foothills in these parts, however, no trails tailing off into vivifying backcountry canyons and wilderness: The closest thing to breathing room greenery in Chicago Lawn was Father Jacques Marquette’s Park, 323 acres of open space commissioned by social reformers when the town was still young and keen on fostering, nurturing its immigrants city-wide.

          Formal gardens, playgrounds, sports fields, propagating nursery, an 18-hole golf course and shelter, providing educational and social services to the congested neighborhood: Made sense to me, all right, even dad had long seen it as a decent place to sulk and smoke on its long, thickly shaded benches, merely a block away from home.       

          I’d started short with the running routine, stretching at the park’s California Street entrance, by its imposing Darius and Girenas statue, a soaring marble, Deco-style patinaed tribute to the Lithuanian-American aviators who flew their Bellanca CH-300 plane over 6,400 miles across the Atlantic in 1933, only to crash and perish 650km shy of their Kaunus destination. But that Lituanica monument dated back to 1935, and Marquette Park had come and gone a long, long way since then.

          “Back it off there, fella…”

          “What’s up with…” I stopped flat at the sight of what appeared to be either an accidental drowning or brutal crime scene.

          “Police business, nothing going on here of your concern…”

          “Okay, sure…is that a…” A body was floating like some dead, displaced sturgeon in the murky algaed lagoon water face-down, looked to be an afroed late teenager in red and black DuSable High School threads.

          “It’s nothing, I told you, just routine…so move it on along—now,” snapped the blue-helmeted Chicago cop, a rotund veteran on his countdown to submitting pension papers. “We got enough funny business going on around here without this…”

          “What’s so funny about…” I watched coroner staffers carried a gurney and body bag from their van parked on Mann Drive over to water’s edge, then hook fished the corpse out with a 12 foot pole, tagging and bagging it like a giant black bass. He had apparently been shot in the head, with multiple stab wounds through his jacket’s Panther logo.

          “Not funny, funny,” the patrolman tapped his nightstick impatiently, swinging it outward, as if to move me along. “Funny strange, haven’t seen the park this antsy since the whites slung bricks at King in ’66 on that open housing march, hitting him upside the head. Agh, but it’s just only the beginning of all that gang crap hereabouts, believe me. Neighborhood’s changing, what the hell we supposed to do about it?”

          I was well advised to oblige, leaving the scene that Chicago’s finest described as a gang trash dump from Englewood, likely by way of Ashland Avenue or Halsted Street, recalling the racially overcharged days of SCLC and SNCC. I picked up the pace on a narrow asphalt walking path between Mann Drive and the eastern ring of Marquette Park’s naturalistic lagoons, past bench loads of babushkaed and patchy greatcoated retirees and fenced-in playgrounds.

          Blood flooding my brain, up popped matters of a more personal bent: Was I a winner here, or was I a wuss? A thoughtful, sensitive man on the thorny, horny (crossroads) of a dilemma, or just a lost, mindless cad in a cab? What were you doing farting around with advertising doodles, where was the sociology in that? Such issues preoccupied me nearly all the way to a north-south avenue that basically split Marquette Park in two.

          Just this side of Kedzie I could once again see some sort of drilling on a playing field not far from the park district fieldhouse, the light of day revealing two-tone brown uniforms replete with dress caps, black leather straps and arm bands with insignias the likes of which I hadn’t seen since the engraved banisters in my Mannheim army billets—formerly a Wehrmacht kaserne. Yeah, I remembered reading something about these jokers last year in the Denver Post, but never made the connection to here in Chicago Lawn. Holy shit, didn’t they have some kind of beef with… Skokie?! Chills ran up my Broncos sweatshirt, down my CU shorts—it had never occurred to me to make that link before.

          I wanted to call Melissa, but how could I tell her that I had retreated down here to Anschluss south? Nope, didn’t even want to think about that, much less the resty bunch picketing up on Edens by the Skokie line—and who the hell did in that DuSable kid, for that matter? Instead, I peeled off, turning back on Mann Drive toward Francisco—high time to check on my mother anyway, higher time to hack away from it all.

          “Sorry, but we have nothing for you…”

          “I’m just grateful you took my call.”

           “Point is, it’s a start, but you could demo some more long-form capability—and maybe some broadcast. Like I said, a reel wouldn’t hurt.”

          “A reel…”

          This last part left me reeling, right there in the hotel lobby. After putting that Marquette Park rancor out of earshot, I had scored an Orange Crush at the corner convenience store and gas profiteer on California Street. Back at the home flat, mom was little better healthwise, while dad was tending to his archly Bunker mentality. So, penalty time served, I’d lit out for the Checker garage, landing 3192, a newer, less odorous taxicab that whisked me across town before the Dan Ryan could grind to a drive-time halt.

          North of the Ike, I fell into a healthy fare streak that flared for the next several days, yielding blue chip LaSalle Street parlays, sequential downtown-O’Hare turnarounds, Rush Street lushes who tipped like somebody else’s business. Blackhawks’ fans in full hockey war paint pounded my safety-shield glass with F-bombs to net the Stadium—out amid the ruins of 1960s’ Madison burning—before zebras dropped the opening puck.

          The after-hours scene was especially green, from River North over to Wells and Piper’s Alley. That North State Street to Old Town axis brought back so many Sixties sorties: to old folkie clubs like the Store, Quiet Knight, Mike Bloomfield’s Fickle Pickle, and the Gate of Horn. How we’d graduated to Mother Blues and the Butterfield Band at Big Johns—forget about the dinosaurs at Mister Kelley’s and Chez Paree. And yet I couldn’t help recalling where the even more spirited music action was happening about then, out where North wasn’t a State or Street, but a Beach.

          Snapping to, my meter spun like truck stop pumps, up and down teeming Lake Shore Drive. I was awed by the shimmering harbors and strands, the Playboy Building and Hancock towering skyline, as I delivered formal Lakefront liberals from the Gold Coast down Michigan Avenue to the opera house and symphony hall, noblesse oblige humbly mined.

          In all, I was on a strong winnowing streak despite myself, better able to be choosier when it came to streetcorner hailers, free to ignore the short haulers and shopping baggers, blow-off the bar brawlers and falling over drunks, and still fill some Moon-bound coffers. By tricks and turns, there was much more to like about this side of the Chicago River—not least the venerable Drake Hotel, where I was now placing this off-chance late afternoon call.  

           “Look, I’ll tell you what,” said art director Dick Everett, from his J. Walter office. “I hear FBC is looking for some collateral help. Why don’t you work up a little more on the package goods side, stretch it out  a bit. Then give Ralph Desman a ring—he’s an ACD over there. Tell him I sent you his way, and that we’re even for that voice-over gal he handed me two weeks ago.”

          “How can I thank you,” I kowtowed into the payphone, banked between a low-talking systems engineer and Manhattan-wielding VP-Finance in the hotel’s plush, seafarer-themed lobby—which overlooked the snaking lakefront drive and crystalline Oak Street Beach.

          “Just keep plugging away, meanwhile good luck in that hack job of yours.” CLICK.

          I skipped out across Walton Street to pull 3192 out of a loading zone, barely ticket-free, then steered into the Drake’s taxi line, aiming for an airport run from either the hotel or Playboy nee Palmolive Building across the way. In line ahead were some of the more enterprising hacks fronting for Hilton-grade hookers, dropping off the marks and johns, taking their tips in fat, perfumed envelopes, with the occasional carnal bonus.

          Instead, a half-hour wait and creep landed me two insulting sales reps slamming through my cab doors, late for the North Shore after a week of cold calls and mighty hot about it. Darkness was falling, with light rain at that, as we wove through slowing Lake Shore Drive, snarling waves to one side of four by four traffic lanes. A wall of soaring condo hi-rose to the other, looking down on a two-way ribbon of vehicle lights, shoreline and vast blanket of indigo water.                  

          The plaintive fares directed me off to Lakeview at Diversey Harbor, cutting through Lincoln Park on Cannon Drive past the Alexander Hamilton and Von Goethe Monuments, unloading them at a pub near Diversey Parkway, greasing me with one buck ten, bickering over the meter and bitching out my curbside door to a windy, heavier rain.

          Then I turned on my little radio to drown them out, hitting of all tunes, ‘Diamonds and Rust’, Joan Baez calling Dylan a pathetic wimp, which haunted me Syd-wise to where it struck me that I was a total whipped-ass failure unless I somehow made good on our San Francisco dream.

          At that downer note, I doused my roof light and gunned over to Clark Street, wipers smearing the windshield like Karo on hotcakes—dodging jaywalkers scrambling against the rainfall. For a moment, I felt like side-tripping up past the old Rainbow Gardens Ballroom at Lawrence Avenue, recalling that magic Sunday night when it had become the Kinetic Playground, and the bill was debut national tours by Santana, Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull, one after another, for sawbuck or so.

          Rather, a bright little coffee shop on the corner of Arlington Place caught my eye, rain was coming down in sheets by now, and a parking spot opened up three slots away.

          Time was right to shut 3192 down for a stretch, get back to scribbling some ads, but package what? No denying I’d relapsed into an old Vienna beef red-hot habit since returning, and wasn’t that far from Wrigleyville at the moment, so Hamm’s Beer and spicy mustard came to mind: ‘A Bear of a Beer’, ‘Fire-Breathing Dogs’—useless hack drivel like that.

          When I could bladder no more coffee refills, no more nearby table talk about ‘Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman’ versus ‘Fernwood 2-Night’, and back of napkin ideas dried up with a jittery counter-top spill, I covered my head with a tabloid Sun-Times and darted for the cab. The plan was to deadhead all the way down Clark Street toward the Checker garage—no drunks, no ski masks, no Dr. H.H. Holmes or gruesome Gacy types, fare-wise—go off duty, but that only lasted as far as the Old Town Triangle. This early spring rainstorm was intensifying, and a power trio of snappily dressed gents had sprinted over from Wells Street in drenched pursuit of a taxi, not so much hailing one as hurling themselves my way.

          “Chicago, driver,” said one of the three, peering in through 3192’s opened rear door, as they all stood shaking off the raindrops, then ducking one by one into the cab.

          “Chicago? Where,” I asked over my shoulder.

          “U.C.,” said the smaller of two tweed figures, shuddering in the cold and damp.

          “See what?” I asked, wiping clear a fogging windshield with a little cab gab, then flipping my flag.

          “The university, Sherlock,” the first added, popping his head through the shield’s small sliding window. “Hyde Park, take the lake side…”

          “Oh, gotcha, I’m kind of used to thinking C.U.,” I managed a smile into my rear view mirror as I left turned onto North Avenue, the fare settling into the Checker’s roomy, wallboard-stiff back seat.

          Nothing more was said through the plexiglass, although the passengers muffled comments to one another—a snicker or so salted in—between the two, that is, since the third man, more in gray, wide peak lapelled three-piece mode, had yet to utter a word. This wasn’t my idea of a fare worth stopping for, but at least we were headed in the right direction for the Checker garage.

          Far as I could see, they appeared to be in their late 20s, self-assured and selectively polyester groomed, in an Ivy League cognate sort of way. From there, I took my cue, piped down, eyes on the North Avenue traffic ahead, back over to Lake Shore Drive, then rounding Streeterville past Lake Point condo towers and Navy Pier.

           I followed a stream of contrailing southbound tail lights, changing lanes here and there, but otherwise steadying the Superba’s gas pedal on manual cruise control past Chicago Harbor. I tapped its dashboard with my fingertips to the clicking of the meter and slapping of windshield wipers, setting my mind free like I was back on Interstate 80.

          How the downtown skyline had grown in two short years; could Buckingham Fountain be that carved granite/marble regal and colorful? The Grant Park of ’68 Democratic Convention disturbances sat largely dark and quiet now, the whole world no longer watching. Blue police helmets and nightsticks, Yippies, Bobby Seale, Kunstler, Weinglass and Hoffman gone the way of Laugh-In and Hair. I floored it toward the floodlit Field Natural History Museum straight on, 1930’s era Shedd Aquarium no less dazzling to its left.

          Further out tree-trimmed Solidarity Drive, extending well into Lake Michigan itself, an accompanying Adler Planetarium and Northerly Island could barely be seen in the driving rain. Barely more visible was the civil aviation battened down along Meigs Field tarmacs and Burnham Harbor. No denying, the Windy City’s downtown lakefront was gorgeous and majestic, even on a dreary, Hizzoner-less night like this. But as the rain pounded, Drive traffic thinned some and my back seat riders more animatedly debated spiraling inflation, graph-busting interest rates and what Milton Friedman would do about them, I drifted off along the ink black Lakefront Trail.

          Oblivious to the festering housing projects eyes right, my mind revisited that morose post-Garfunkel album, ‘Still Crazy After All These Years’ Paul Simon moaning on about doing it for her love. Crumbling Prairie District tenements blocks set me to rather reflecting on Melissa, like running lights shimmering over the lake waters, and what we were going to do about the two of us, or three, as the case may have been.

          I could feel the crooner’s ‘Night Game’ dislocation and ennui well past the death-trap cellblocks of Robert Taylor Homes into Drexel and Kenwood, paralleling historic Prairie Avenue, rallying to the still fresh and fleeting freedom of Interstate 70 upon singing ‘Gone at Last’ under my windshield frosting breath. The very notion of stalling and settling here this way sent me shuddering into ‘50 Ways To Leave Your Lover’. No, that was too crazy, given how Moon was so good, so kind, treating me so much better than other humans did. If only I could have figured out what exactly was ‘Slip Slidin’ Away’.

          “Take the 57^th Street cut-off, driver,” shouted the passenger directly behind me, interrupting their non-stop geopolitical dissection of GDP deficits and Import-Export Bank trade imbalances through the Straussian Chicago School’s maroon-colored eyes.

          “Cross the park?” I asked, refocusing to survey South Lake Shore exit signs.

          “Affirmative, over to the U of C campus…step on it,” said his colleague, still not a peep out of the obscure figure hugging the right rear door.

          “Gotcha, ditch the scenic route,” I smiled into the mirror, minding the digital spin of my meter.

          Where once stood the vibrant White City of 1893 World Columbian Exposition fame, now sprawled the landscaped but shaggy beauty of Jackson Park. And crowning the south lakefront band of Rainbow City gems was that fair’s Palace of Fine Arts, which became the Museum of Science and Industry during Chicago’s Century of Progress International Exposition of 1933. Tonight, S&I glowed like thermonuclear Versailles despite the rainfall—that marvy tactile playground of trains, planes, coal mines and horseless carriages. We looped around East 57^th Drive and Cornell Avenue, across Stony Island Avenue into Hyde Park proper as could be.          

          Even after all the ensuing  years, the UC campus remained an academic mystery to me, as did the august university itself. Here was no run of the treadmill institution, Chicago wasn’t land grant, it was Rockefeller grant, full of Nobel Laureates and other resident geniuses, quietly, almost mysteriously set apart from the city at large, much less indigenous public school half-wits like me—an academic island renowned and celebrated by intelligentsia worldwide.

          But at least Northwestern had football and DePaul hoops to distinguish them in Sunday sports sections; all the Maroons had going with their gridiron was that fissiony business being reacted under the grandstand. Refuting the postulation that preseason pigskin rankings outclassed Mensa sheepskin benchmarks and key socioeconomic indicators.

          “Keep going, over to 58^th and Woodlawn,” the fares directed me. They were now dissecting runaway monetary policy and the profligate IMF.

          “That’s right, drop us at biz…”

          “There we go,” I pulled up to stately old Chicago’s modern steel and glass all-business school, pointing to a double-digit meter. “You fellows all together?”

          “No, this leg’s just the two of us,” they handed me a ten, the third passenger a fiver. “We’re splitting the cab with this gentleman…just keep the difference, friend. Driver, a receipt please, we’re expensing…”

          “Yeah, uh, sure…” I filled out a receipt, handing it back through the sliding plexi window.

          “Right…driver, I’m stayin’ on,” the quiet guy finally spoke, leaning forward into the window.

          “Where…to?” I faltered, noting that he was smooth, light-skinned black man, short-cropped Afro, beard salon trimmed.

          “Just keep going out Woodlawn. Catch Cottage Grove up to 60^th Street, then cut over to King Drive, hang a left at Prairie.”

          “O-kayyy,” I re-tripped the meter, studying this rider, anxiety setting in with the prospect of leaving the relative civility of Hyde Park, wombish home to presidents past and Hopeful future, to the meaner Chicago streets beyond the Chicago School. This was exactly the sort of fare I was looking to avoid, what made hacking one of the most stressful, perilous occupations in this workaday world. I couldn’t have felt more vulnerable had I been fare trolling the Robert Taylor Homes. “You all knew each other or…”

          “Let’s just say we were good-time buddies from way back,” the passenger grinned, facing closely forward to the shield window. “All the way back to about two hours ago.”

          “Pretty funny, ” I said flatly, gunning through a yellow light at MLK Drive, drilling through my mind on quick sliding the plexiglass over my shoulder in one slam of my palm. “Say, this is heading into Englewood, isn’t it?”

          “Bingo, friend…any problem…”

          “Uh, no…not that I know of…” Then why did I flash on Bobby Seal and H. Rap Brown, their ‘hate whitey’ Black Liberation—James Cone’s ‘Black Theology & Black Power’,

          “Good day for cabbing, rain and everything?”

          “Uh, not all that hot…” My heart began racing once we reached Prairie Avenue, and I busily wiped the fogging windshield with the sleeve of my old fleece jacket.

          I nearly blurted that all my trip money was in a floorboard safe I couldn’t open, but bit my tongue, figuring he likely was already hip to that whole taxicab deal. It was all I could do to downplay my shift’s take, and cram cigar box tips deeply into my jeans pockets, trying to get a read on whether he was merely penny-ante or acutely pathological.

          Prairie at 60^th Street turned out to be as dark and decrepit as a South Side ’hood could be, many of its remaining houses and apartments rotting and boarded up, behind broken picket fences, steel-gated doors, between weedy leveled lots of long stalled redevelopment. The fare poked his long-nailed index finger through the shield window, pointing me over across from a still lived-in two-flat brick tenement mid block, CTA Englewood Line elevated tracks rumbling through was passed for its back yard.

          The stretch was otherwise deserted in this relentless rain, which left me kicking myself for not shutting that partition window and locking up when Hyde Park was still in 3192’s headlights. That’s when I checked my rearview mirror, spotting a shiny chrome pistol the passenger had pulled from his suit vest pocket.

          Was this a cut and run, or even worse, a gun and run? Gang or bang? Colored pride or prejudice, or turf colors flying? Should I stay and pay or slam and scram? Was I gonna jump ship or end up in that Marquette Park lagoon?! Adrenaline was pressure pumping, and I gripped the Superba’s steering wheel like the helm of a sinking schooner, poised to duck and roll my way out the driver’s door.

          “Mind if I smoke?” he asked, cocking his Derringer-shaped cigarette lighter, pulling its trigger to fire up the Benson & Hedges 100 now pressed between his lips. “Been a long day for me, too, bro, was sunny when I left here this morning.”

          “Like they say, smoke ’em if you got ’em,” I sighed in relief, willing to suck up the tar and nicotine, hoping his pistol of a lighter wasn’t a dual purpose device.

          “But it’s been a good one for me, too,” he drew heavily on his cigarette, blowing rings around my shield window, motioning me toward a weathered yellow and black Buick Riviera, parked under the block’s lone working street lamp. “Like the man says, when it rains, it snows…”

          “Who needs that, right?” I pictured the salty plows and Chicago Lawn’s tactical, territorial furniture, making uneasy conversation.

          But those images were quickly eclipsed by recent news accounts on cabbies getting robbed and roughed up repeatedly in ’hoods like this all over the South and West Sides. As in gravely cracked skulls and sliced organs over little more than gratuitous pocket change outside a Cabrini-Green ghetto in the sky, its packin’ public housing thugs and crooked vertical cop patrols banging on their wire-screened balconies like locked-down lifers in a Stateville cellblock. Vinyl topped Riviera: really, had to be a pimp or coke mobile on the skids—I flicker scanned about for any banger accomplices lurking in the shadows.

          “Lotsa folk, yessiree,” he smiled, cancer stick bobbing in the corner of his mouth as he pocketed the lighter, instead pulling a silver money clip and thick roll out of his jacket liner pocket, peeling off a couple more bills. “Me, I’m in redevelopment my own self —this block’s one of my assignment projects. But got a little side action, understand? Couple more nights like this, and I’ll be trading in the Riv there, exploitin’ me a new Lincoln ride—diamond in the back, sunroof top, diggin’ the scene with a gangsta lean—can you dig it? Yessir, blow Englewood altogether. Where you live, man?”

          “Who, me? Uh, I’m just…visiting,” I said hesitantly, reaching for the twenty and five he dished through the sliding plexi window, anxious to make change when he gestured for me to keep it with a soul brotherly clasp of hands.

          I clumsily held back a smoky cough, exhale gladhanding like a honky shoeshine boy—weighing the odds that I might be de facto dodging a bullet. “Hey, you sure? I mean, talk about a gentleman and a scholar. Can’t thank you enough…”

          “No sweat, man,” the fare winked, over the clanky roar of a seven-car northbound L train, slipping out the right rear cab door into an easing rain.“That’s mighty white of you…”

Care for more?

Chapter 39. Extremists hold their ground, 
necessitating a meeting of other minds, 
and leap of smarter, secular faith…

 

ED: The following ‘Chicago Seven’ 1978 chapters
portray a rejourney to retreat/revisit; reckon/
rewreckon; rereap/reweep; restorm/restore; reblame/
reclaim; regroup/reconnect and rewrest/rewest, with
pre-sets throughout. But should these next seven Chicago
chapters not ring your sphere, pls. transit to Chapter 44.
____________________

“Comes end of school days
time to leave it all behind—
or so it might appear.”

          “That’s my chair there. Don’t you go messin’ with my chair!”

          “Got your name on it? I don’t see nobody’s name on it…”

          “Whose dresser’s this…stickin’ a damn dresser out here.”

          “See those brooms? On the garbage cans? You’re lookin’ at Fort Knox there, buddy…that’s mine, all mine!”

          For eye openers, the late winter storm dumped 8-10 inches over Chicagoland before squalling eastward toward Valparaiso and South Bend. But it’s what the blizzard left on Francisco Avenue that raised these territorial imperatives, plus the higher pressure my squareback put on established jurisdictions. Such a sight to wake up to: cars socked in up to their roof racks on either side of the one-way south, rear alleys faring no better, not a well-disposed driveway to be found. Then reality set in: either dig out and move the wet, heavy blanket or get plowed under even more by city salt trucks.

          Dad knew that routine from the inside out, so we shoveled free his old Mercury Montclaire come sun up, driving mom over to Holy Sacrament Hospital for her bi-weekly session, wherein clinicians pumped up her irreparably collapsing black lungs. By the time we returned, neighbors up and down Francisco had dug out their autos, and either re-parked them, or hardware stores’ worth of shovels, milk crates, implements, ladders, upholstered furniture, lawn chairs, shopping carts, and whatever else was handy in their place.

          The intent was to reserve the spots each Franciscan had painstakingly cleared, in essence spraying their intended car lengths of turf, yellow snow and all. God help anyone who dared to shunt aside their respective ‘dibs’ place markers or otherwise interlope in a Chicago Lawn neighborhood already under so much stress and change.

          “Hey, public property, you don’t own this street…”

          “Took me an hour to clear that spot, jack—move that end table and I’m comin’ down there…”

          Our space right out front of the building was long gone, occupied by a stepladder stretched out on a pair of kitchenette chairs. Any extra space my Volks took up hardly helped pave the way for our return—much less my out-of-state license plates—amid tight parallel parking of full-size Detroit cars.           All around us, rights were being challenged, snow shovels stolen; down the street fights were breaking out, heaps of debris scattered about like sticks and gloves at a Blackhawks brawl center ice. That overheated bickering two doors up effectively blocked the one-way street entirely, a rusting Ford Fairlane double-parked in the plowed lane while its driver played curbside chicken with an angry old former warehouseman leaning out his living room window.

           I feverishly cranked up the Merc’s heater fan as mom’s deteriorating lungs coughed up fresh oxygen, as if resisting the hospital treatment. Dad cursed under his breath in irritation, poised to begin leaning on his own car horn to ease the blockage, when a Dodge Dart next to us commenced beeping our way. But, miraculously enough, it was their neighbor from the six-unit brown brick building next door, Mr. Klaipedis, a widower for whom mom had long baked layer cakes and peanut butter cookies. He waved and gestured for us to back up some so he could pull out and give us his spot for her sake—this being the sunnier side of Chicago Lawn..

           Still, the roiling retro turf routine was wearing and weighing on me by the day—no Satalisman, no Sausalito dreamscapes here. Mom continued having her periodical coughing spells, dad on disability leave standing in the background, silently puffing his pipe like Sir Walter Raleigh’s ghost. I’d seal off from the smoke in my old bedroom, trying to sort things out, spinning 45s at maximum volume to drown out her daytime soaps—just like in earlier days, knowing these black R&B numbers would drive my father White City, big-band mad.

          I boogalooed to stax of Albert King, Duchess of Soul Erma Franklin, Lowell Folsom, and Tyrone Davis—flipping over to Gene ‘Rainbow’ Chandler, Wicked Pickett, Curtis and a slew of Dells, Bells and Drells until the portable stereo started skipping and my ears went numb.

          Then there was Mom’s tasty, poly-saturated cooking, ailments or no. A few added pounds around the belt line, and I was ready to hit the snow-cleared streets, work off some more debt. Let alone that CU had pulled me up off of the wait-list and offered a doctoral slot for the fall, explaining that the Sociology Department’s delay in notification owed to pending availability of full-ride assistantships. All I had to do was reply in the affirmative by a red-letter date—a drop-deadline which had passed and defaulted to the next candidate over a week and a half before. Nothing much my parents could relate to, so I took pains to lay this flagstone on Moon by anguished, after-hours phone.

           “Got a book?”

           “You mean like a how-to, I don’t…”

           “No, more like a have-done…showing your stuff, what you’ve come up with.”

           “Haven’t done one. That what you have there?”

           Given the CU snail-mail forwarding snafu, and that I’d just received my official laminated hack license downtown, the timing couldn’t have been better for discovering the release and remuneration of a Loop-to-airport taxi run. It mainly involved circuiting the hotels, Ambassadors to the Palmer House, Sheraton to the Conrad Hilton and Blackstone, cab lining for distracted or disoriented departees with valises, overnight bags, unwieldy suitcases and steamer trunks. I soon bagged this trip near Water Tower Place, a London Fog Maincoated, trimly bearded junior exec with leather attaché and matching portfolio case in hand.

          O’Hare, he said through the shield window, checking his Accutron wristwatch, United terminal, and step on it. Which I did, gunning the Checker out W. Ontario onto the plowed and salted Kennedy, beating the rush by a good hour or so, cutting over into the express lanes for added breathing room.  

           Who cared that the Superba’s front end shimmied, wipers smeared, heater died miles ago and frigid headwinds tunneled through every crack and seam in 3173’s cigarette-burned dashboard—for its meter spun on like a one-armed bandit. I could gather from the rearview mirror that my load was flipping through a spiral binder.  So occupied was he that little was said until out well beyond the Edens junction, near Rosemont, where I asked if he was in the ad game, and how someone like me might do the same.

          “Yeah, just proofing storyboards for a spot we’re shooting,” he said, scratching his jowl, turning a page full of small, compted-up TV screens. “That’s why I’m off to L.A.”

          “California, huh? Sounds…great,” I nodded into my mirror, green eyeing his black lamb’s wool turtleneck and herringbone sport coat underneath that unbuckled trench. Lots of bushy hair, shagged out; he looked to be about my age. “Nice work if you can get it. You’re a…”

          “Art director, J. Walter. And you can get it, but not without a killer book…”

          “Of art? I dunno about that…” I wheeled into O’Hare’s departure lanes.

          “Naw, we’re drowning in A.D.s. What shops are looking for these days are good copy types. You a wordsmith? Put together some knockout samples, a reel’s even better, see what flies …”

          “With who…where would I…” What a first impression I made, in my plain plaid flannel and jeans.

          “Here, take my card,” the passenger said, gesturing me over to the unloading zone at United Airlines’ gates, then overpaying through the sliding window. “Give me an expense receipt and keep the difference.”

          “You serious?” I truckled, darting out around the Checker’s passenger side to open his door, helping him with his carry-on’s. “Really…I don’t know how to thank…”

          “Ring me up if you’ve ever got something worth my time…”

          “Sure will, Mister…Everett. Give my regards to California—wish I were tagging along.” I pocketed his card like a lottery winner and goosed 3173 out of the red zone at the insistence of an airport cop whistle, rounding the departure ramp, wishing to stowaway with him. The only downside to O’Hare runs was its taxi pool, a dozen or so lane staging lot on terminals’ edge where unloaded departure cabs lined up to await feeding back down to arrival waiting zones, entering helter-skelter, leaving in orderly waves.

          Between the outbound sop and next inbound hustle lay the wait: could be a quick in and out, could eat up hours of fatback street action, depending upon the come and go of those breezing into Chicagoland and those keen on blowing town. Facing slow lanes, drivers inched up row by row, whiling away downtime playing cards, rolling bones, making book, running numbers, talkin’ point-spread smack, dealing weed and crack, and who knew what other chicane or sinister products of idling minds.

          I rather tuned my transistor radio into Classic Rock 95.7’s Chicago set—The Buckinghams, Cheap Trick and Cryan’ Shames to Illinois Speed Press and Mason Proffit, flashing me back on DJ’s like ‘Madcap’ Ron Britain and Dick Biondi or Chickenman. So creative still, it started me to scribbling addy little headlines onto the ruled pages of my classroom tablet, noodling and doodling as the cabs crept forward. Once pool movement stalled, however, I jogged over to a bank of snack-stand pay phones, placing another overdue call.

          “Where’ve you been, Kenny?”

          “Aww, you know, Moon, the snow…and my mom’s situation,” I shifted foot to foot, shading my eyes under a suddenly beating, melting sun, keeping close tabs on any row progress. “But I’m cabbing out at the airport now, gotta get back to making up more of that money for you…”

          “Tsk, you know that’s not such a big deal,” Melissa replied, quickly softening her tone. “What’s important is that we’re working on this together, right?”

          “Uh, yeah, sure…” I surveyed the cab pool for movement, glancing Chicago’s sprawling downtown skyline in the distant background.

          “So I’m still getting re-acclimated, but I’ve already signed up for a pottery program Skokie’s got going, and am even thinking about grad school myself—like, earning a teaching certificate…”

          “Right…grad school,” I flagged, noting some drivers shuffling about in the forward cab rows.

          “You’ve got to get over that CU mix-up,” she girded me. “We’re here now, so let’s persevere, Kenny. “Maybe you actually can apply to Circle, Loyola, even the University of Chicago—why not? You know I’m behind you 100%.”

          “Hyde Park? Come on, Moon, that’s Ivy territory…”

          “How about Northwestern then? We could get a place in Evanston, or Lakeview,” she chirped, firming her stance, ‘Have You Ever Been Mellow’ playing in the background. “In the meantime, just settle down, pull yourself together and we can start looking for real jobs…what are you doing down south there, anyway?”

          “Well, actually I’m sorta hung up out here at O’Hare right now,” I spotted the first several rows scrambling to their cabs like rallye crews. “Ooof, gotta split, Moon, it’s go time…they’re honking after me already…”

          “Just get up to Skokie soon as you can, okay? We’ve got planning to do, some major decisions to make. Oh, and one more thing Kenny—it looks like I’m running a little bit late…”

          With our wave finally called, I wound around O’Hare’s lower arrival level, pulling into the cab line for Continental and TWA, quickly snatching a fare from the long steel and glass terminal for the city’s near North Side, thankfully avoiding a measly short-haul to Schiller Park. Head clogged with Moon’s little afterthought, I was in no mood for music or tip-sowing patter.

          So I swiftly, quite silently delivered a middle-aged pharmaceutical rep just back from Omaha to her cottage apartment on Blackhawk; much throat clearing betwixt Harwood Heights and Irving Park, tired sighing between Diversey and a Milwaukee Avenue traffic detour—yielding a piqued fare, an off-peak gratuity. Fair enough, what with my brooding incivility, the trip did at least bring me back to my steady cab gravitation from grim South Side estrangement toward Chicago’s regenerating North Side. Namely all the way Uptown, where Chaplin once made movies, the Aragon Ballroom stepped so lively for my parents and Valentines were delivered with tough Tommy love.

          I rebounded in kind, jotting as I went, redistributing fares from River North to Rogers Park, filling my trip sheet with downtowns from Uptown, shopping jags from Lincoln Park to the Loop, skanky pick-ups outside Upper Broadway meat markets, swanky Lake Point Tower shuttles to the tangle of high-octane traffic, the sumptuous showrooms along the Magnificent Mile.

           I wheeled quietly through gentrifying brown brick neighborhoods tree-lined with cozy workingman’s cottages, stick Victorian duplexes and brickface, iron bay-windowed apartment buildings along the Ravenswood L tracks. I charted back past speakeasy, trolley car, horse buggy, Missus O’Leary’s fire to Fort Dearborn days. That left me with a full trip sheet and pockets for the day’s shift, popping in on this old suburban high school mate who had long ago tripped his way onto the North Side scene.

          “Two chicks? Man, I got enough trouble with the one…”

          “Naw, it’s not like that, Nate, but what can I say,” I puffed up with a calcified kernel of male prowess and pride. “Anyhow, now one of them thinks she’s got a bun in the oven—my bun, no less. The other is the creative type.”

          “Mad artist, huh? Shit, Heebert, but I know my bag’s got one goin’, and she’s reelin’ me in like a fuckin’ catfish…”

          “Figure on flushing it, or…”

          A pay call to a changed phone number found Natorious Grimaldi holed up in a ground floor flat of a not yet renovated three-story brick apartment house just off Armitage. He had been sharing the shady Cliftwood Avenue unit with an old college pal who’d brought his reverence for R&B from hometown Philly to the heartland, including compilation albums from WIBG’s Joe Niagara and ‘The Geator With the Heater’. Roscoe Porter had turned Nathan on to John R’s WLAC/Nashville, and the likes of the Bosstones and Duprees, which propelled Nate from Top-40 pop into the fabled Chicago blues world, right under his dripping white-bread suburban nose.

          Yet Porter, barely 30, had recently succumbed to downbeats, emaciation and a concocted overdose in some Lincoln Park hotel room—the Capris and Duprees on his cassette player. Cool as he was, I’d once heard him claim that there were just too many of us baby boomers, plenty of room for discards and throwaways—life was cheap that way. So there he was, apparently with no there there for him here anymore.

          “Hah, fat chance of that easy route,” Grimaldi said, sparking the stub of a blunt. He was still bummed out and disoriented over his business buddy’s demise, searching out another roomie for an apartment, as he was never one to go it alone. “And it ain’t no racial thing with me, either—no matter what the bitch says. Hell, I even took to her little boy like a big brother.”

          “With me neither,” I nodded, passing on the roach, as I nursed a warm can of Schlitz. “I mean, a religious thing…”

          “After all I’ve done for the cause, man—to go stickin’ me with that,” he inhaled deeply, which puffed up his round mongrel face all the more. “How’s she think we got to steppin’ out in the first place?”

          “I can relate, Nathan—on that, I can totally relate…”

          After some college and epiphanal acid, Natorious had bought whole stash into the Chicago Blues scene, supporting his habit as a grain-futures runner at the Mercantile Exchange. He partnered with Roscoe and a couple of Rush Street bouncers and their drug funds to open The Twelve-Bar, a north State Street blues club across from the old Sitz-Mark dive—that rickety jukejoint that once served our fake ID’ed cravings.

          Nate and Porter would scout true black haunts from Pepper’s Hide Out to Howlin’ Wolf’s Hideaway and other bluesy boogie-woogie lounges along south Cottage Grove and Stony Island, bringing the best chops he could to T-B’s low-riser stage with tabs, lines, lids, nickel bags and other greasing of guitar calloused palms. Word spread around the Ripple, chicken and chitlin’ circuits, and ‘Twelve’ took off like a Lightnin’ Hopkins’ solo, drawing Sleepy, Willie, Junior, Hound Dog, Sonny Boy and Freddie King north to the hottest little venue on this side of town.

          Its nightly gate: mainly hipretending white bred with beaucoup Benjamins, learning from the Northern Migration masters over three-drink minimums, under mixed smoky airs. With such true-blues headliners came rock star credibility, Mick and Keith slipping into T-B’s darker corners, wherein they’d sponge inspiration between trashing Ambassador East Hotel suites and sold-out stadium shows.

          Slo-hand might sneak in under false pretenses; Boz Scaggs would join in and late-night jam with Elvin Bishop or Siegel-Schwall; local rooks like Greg Stinson or Norm Wagner would squeeze in through packed houses, mail-order axes in hand, awed by their guitar heroes. I’d sniff around T-B’s heads and frets now and then, but never, not once with Melissa.

          “Bizarre though—you winding up with Jewish chicks,” Natorious  grinned, hot ashes burning down into his rumpled coral disco shirt and slept-in cord bells. “Didn’t I meet that Moony one once?”

          “Yeah, think so, at Wrigley, or Grocery Diana. But bizarre, how’s that?” By now, I was blinking through a contact high.

          “I mean, after us all calling you ‘Heeb’ since way back in high school ’cause you were such a fuckin’ tightwad…”

          “Maybe because there were no real Jewish kids in our high school. But that was just dumb teenybopper stuff a long time ago, Nate, in a universe far, far away…”

          “So then which way you gonna roll, Heebert,” he dragged, smoke curling up his nostrils like cotton swabs into a busted nose, up through his long, greasy black hair. “Either here or out there?”

          The ‘Twelve’ had soon vaulted Natorious to heavier hitter status in the larger music biz. So he and Roscoe moved into posh Gold Coast digs, close to the party-all-night action, yet a short walk to the lakefront and voluptuous Oak Street Beach. Nate bought himself a Stingray ’Vette and began promoting downtown concerts with no less than The Floyd, Rotary Connection and John Mayall—SRO all— set to rivaling Aaron Russo and Josh Gravanek in Chicago booking juice.

          But a string of washout b-side gigs left him in the promotional red, while the city slapped ‘Twelve’ with a liquor-license suspension over under agers and underpayment, under-the-table-wise. Took a while, but it eventually came to Nathan that he might have full-gainered into the blues scene a bit too deeply, which could so easily have cannonballed into Stateville, leaving deep pockets pal, Curt Spelsky to take over payments on the candy-apple Corvette.

          “Dunno, Nate,” I sighed, with a cumulative cough, tuning into that old Allman Brothers album he had spinning, tracking ‘One Way Out’. “Christ, my ol’ man is giving me all kinds of grief as it is. But what will your parents make of your deal?”

          “Don’t ask me, man. All I remember, Buddy Miles was over to our crib for New Year’s, turning us onto memories of his ‘Band of Gypsys’ gig at the Fillmore East—and I met this groupie of his with a ragin’ Afro. Somewhere along the way we started makin’ it, you know, and stayed shackin’—even while Twelve Bar got shut down and I crashed over here with Roscoe.”

          “Well, maybe it had something to do with hitting age 29, Saturn coming back to raise hell,” I gulped the warm, flat beer. “So, you plugging back into the music scene, or…”

          “No, man, been thinkin’ about starting some kind of remodeling business—working with my hands for a change. I mean, with all the renovation goin’ around here, maybe buy me a building or two while anybody still can. Forget about that Saturn shit. How ’bout you stayin’ in town, move in here? We could partner, clean up like bandits…”    

          “Not sure about that, Nathan,” I finished off my brew, Nate’s ‘Voice of the Theater’ speakers blaring, ‘Stand Back’. “Still got to work through some stuff…”

          “Like with those heeb chicks? If you’re so hung up between them— maybe you really don’t want to make it with either one…try workin’ through that, why don’t ya…”

          “What’re you talking about,” I rose, defensively edging toward the front door, head gone woozy with the contact high and guy talk. “That’s not even close…besides, you’ve got enough to worry about with your oven situation.”

          “Aww, who knows, maybe he’ll make me a fortune running for da Bulls or Bears,” Grimaldi fired up another roach, kicking back into his burn-marked sofa, gesturing me to hang out. “C’mon, we’ll head over to Park West, get us some burgers, just like in the hay days…I’m buyin’. We can round up the other Willow Grove renegades, Gary Rallimore, Steve Tripler—Chanky Desmond’s over in Bucktown now. I’d get Fat Roddy Rosnick and Marco Liele, but they got busted in Steinhatchee, Florida unloading their Colombian stash from a C-130. Guess they’re still doing time in Tallahassee…I mean everybody but Jackie, that is.”

          “I’ll need to raincheck it,” I said, recalling our breakfast buddies club, how we’d do our chick bitchin’ over burned toast and home fries, soak up undercooked eggs and lay out the day’s attack plans for getting over on the downtown suits—looking out upon Michigan Avenue skyscrapers with our big caffeine dreams, as the mornings ticked away. Then I remembered how Natorious and I got loaded one night long ago, and started leveling with each other. He said my problem was I was always sucking my way up the social ladder; I countered that he was into slumming his way down-rung. But no need for encores on that score. “Anyway, got to turn in my cab…”

          “Suit yourself, man. Just don’t let you tri-plex situation run you in circles.

          That was the plan, all right, deadhead south back to the Checker garage before nightfall. Let alone the sleet storm being forecasted on my transistor between WLS’s Rolling Stones set of ‘Winter’ and a bootleg pick-to-click ‘Beast of Burden’ off the dinosaur rockers’ upcoming album. Sure been a cold, cold winter, feet been draggin’ cross the ground : I shot down Lincoln Avenue, aiming to make up for the down and downer time, yet found myself meandering around Lincoln Park.

          En route, I caught a frantic, waving stiff who had stumbled out of Café de Melvin’s gated patio, hopping into my cab just as North State traffic ground to a halt. A commodities trader specializing in pork bellies, he’d packed it in for the week, and was off to Midway Airport for a puddle jumper to Council Bluffs. Before I could shake River North tie-ups and hit the Dan Ryan connection to I-55, he’d passed out in an overcoated heap, wing-tips up on the bullet shield.

          I kept my little radio down, thankful for an expressway interlude after the outbound load had slurred through his daily killings, nightly conquests and present misdirections, from the Kennedy to the Eisenhower interchange. Still, the Stevenson did set me to thinking. A lot Nathan knew about it, rolling out that ‘neither one’ crap. Well, the old gang never came across the likes of Melissa Saversohn—except for the one time, when I brought Moon to that dinner party at the Duvornic’s. Hang-loose Jackie had been one of the guys for so long, we could never figure her hitching her wagon to an anal case like Karl. But there he was, several Zinfandels into a three-course fondue, starting in with the Jew client he had at his little design firm who was kvetching over revisions, haggling down the fee like those bastards always did. That was when I reintroduced him to my dear Jewish friend, Melissa on our way out the door. I always loved Jackie like a brother, yet never saw the Duvornics again. It was the only time that kind of background noise ever really came up between Moon and me.

          But that was water over the spillway, this was different now, what were we going to make of our…current situation. In and out of fallback self-consciousness, up and down Edens: freezing my buns off, nickel and dime at a time. What did Moon mean, late? How late? Aww, but she’s there because of me, or them—or is she? She doesn’t really want to be there like this, or does she? Sometimes I feel like a Lothario on the come, then again I feel like a lummox on the run. Aww, what am I doing here, anyhow, dogging through all this retroactive bullshit with two degrees, for what? Is it separation anxiety or capture myopathy going on? What the hell about that?!

          I horn blared the fare awake as we pulled up to what remained of Midway’s propeller-vintage air terminal, and he hit me with a ten-spot tip before tumbling out of the cab—briefcase, overnight bag and all, stooping over to toss his canapés, some to the loading zone pavement, the rest against 3173’s creamy green rear fender. I looked away as if from roadside carrion, nevertheless hauling the windfall to a White Castle at 63^rd and Cicero, piling on cheese sliders to sponge up my stewing gastric acid.

          I jumped back on the Adlai 55, racing a smokestacked dusk to the Checker garage, spray booth washing the Superba, cashing out to a former all-city CVS tackle cum dispatcher who ragged me about keeping his trusty 3173 out so goddamn long, docking me one shift, namely tomorrow’s. But he wasn’t shrimpy DeVito, and I was no hair-trigger DeNiro, so it was all I could do to pocket my tip take and skulk out his office and garage’s open bay doors with other worries on my mind.

          Darkness setting in, I coaxed a cold, balky squareback through Archer Avenue’s industrial-strength squalor, fuel gauge sinking like the sooty sunset out beyond Argo-Summit and the Sanitary Ship Canal. I hit a steep discount gas station on Kedzie—pulling away due south. I tuned my Blaupunkt into a WVON set of Main Ingredient and Ohio Players, dialing me back to soulsville all the way to 67^th Street.

          There I left turned toward Francisco, noticing the bright quartz lights of Marquette Park sports courts. Too frigid for tennis, but several sweatsuited jocks were out shooting some hoops. The playground itself was packed and buzzing, however, not with kids but a gathering of older guys lining up, standing tall, in what appeared to be uniform rank and file order—must have had something to do with snow shovel brigades or litter patrols. Not that I could tell, what did I know about the damn park, or care? Nada, made me no nevermind—wanted nothing to do with the place, give me Chautauqua or Golden Gate Park any sunny day.

          So I cut down Francisco, only to scare up a parking space four doors this side of my parents’ place, curbside snow plowed aside and territorial hardware or furniture all but gone. Mom had kept some pork chops and mashed spuds, arising from her bed rest to warm them for me while dad was out on his after dinner walk. I carried my plate and an RC Cola into the parlor, set up a TV tray, then turned on the box. Up came the Orkin ending to ‘Mork & Mindy’, postcard green Boulder Valley all over the closing credits. I switched off to another channel, landing on a replay of the opening Bay Bridge sequence for ‘The Streets of San Francisco’…just like it was yesterday. Only the title for this episode was ‘When Irish Eyes Are Spying’—got me to wondering if it was about anybody I happened to know out there…

Care for more?

 Chapter 38. Making a key connection, 
coming across a cold body of water, 
expectations are tripped up, north to south…

“Home is the source for
warmth too cold to touch—
does it matter that much?”

           “Try Lower Drive…”

           “Wacky…just missed it.”

           “No, take the Upper, you bloomin’ idiot! Cut over East Wacker to Wabash, make a straight shot to Michigan, it looks clearer”

            After our sensitive Northside touch ’n’ go, things went south in a major way. I had helped Melissa sort and stack our truckload further, neatly lining a far side of the Saversohn garage. In the process, we hashed out where we stood, where we’d go next, what to do in what context and under what circumstances until my head felt like three pounds of ground round going reasty. Packed to its ripped, black dotted headliner, my squareback trundled along Edens Expressway toward downtown, where I fed into the Dan Ryan. South of Loop’s vast rail yards and massive printing plants paved the way for Archer Avenue, a long, industrial mishmash that diagonaled out to Midway Airport and beyond, toward my old ’burb.  Nearer in, Archer sliced through the late Mayor Daley’s Bridgeport neighborhood, settled by Irish canal workers, root stock precinct for the poll running and ward patronage that had defined Chicago politics since Da Mayor first emerged victorious from his humble bungalow. Archer then angled roughly past the International Amphitheater where he all but cuffed Abe Ribicoff at the ’68 Democratic Convention—Chicago Seven, and all that.

          I could still wince and wretch at the phantom stench of hog butcher stockyard slaughterhouses, past rotting warehouses, rusting ironworks and corroded radiator shops, then around Garfield, down the fender-to-fender aftermarket used car lots along south Western Avenue. The mercury was diving, clouds darkening like oil-stained concrete as I wavered toward the gridded, brown brick humdrum of ‘homey’ Chicago Lawn.

          But first, the Southside retreat triggered a transfer from the uptown taxi garage on North Clark Street to a larger, greasier, rougher barn down near Gage Park. During the first few marathon days, cabbing threw me for a Loop, and deep into it. Clark Street’s car number 3240 may have been a sweetheart, but 3173 out of this garage was a war beaten, tread worn, wobbling dog. Nothing Superba about this Checker, from its four rattling doors to a plain gunmetal gray dashboard full of cigarette burns and knuckle dents. Add in a slipping tranny, a smoke smeared windshield, and I was hacked off something fierce from the moment I flipped my first flag.

          Still, I gradually got the hang of it: delivering commuters from Union Station to the Prudential Building, rushing commodity brokers from their Lincoln Park condos across the LaSalle Street bridge to the Board of Trade, speeding hungover sales managers from near-North hotels to appointments at the Merchandise Mart, diamond studded tourists from the Conrad Hilton to the Magnificent Mile.

          Come nightfall, I’d work the Palmer House to the Playboy Building, Pick-Congress to the Berghoff Restaurant, Gold Coasters to the Symphony, suburban rowdies to the Rush Street watering holes. The measly trick was, run that meter, fake it on the best directions, small-talk them to death so they wouldn’t notice any dodgy roundabouts, slow time the red lights, then floor it and brake screeching hard up to the destination, tipping gratuities in your favor, by and large. Stuff each fare in the floorboard safe, tally your trip sheet envelope, pocket the rest as below-board payback cash: Pretty soon the hustle became routine, which left a little too much time for troubling thoughts like why here, now—much less waking hours for the old folks at home.

          But now and then I’d pick up a subdued Saul Bellow stranded on the Northside, an economizing Milton Friedman in Hyde Park, land some jokey Aykroyd or Bob Newhart trolling Second City between sitcoms, shuttle a fat and sassy Liza or a Lainie Kazan from the Ambassador East to West. Yet today, here I was, missing the down ramp to Emerald City, racing a daisy chain of draw bridges rising like crocodile jaws, Wells Street to LaSalle, Wabash to State Street toward Michigan Avenue, trying to beat a lake-bound tug and coal barge, en route to the glittery northern side of the green Chicago River.

          Breathing down my neck through the slid-open window of the taxi’s bulletproof safety shield was the commanding voice of Mid-America, syndicated radio’s premier newsragger. He was right of American Gothic, trusted daily on stations coast to coast as a smooth, conservative commentator who stood rock solidly for flag-waving decency and good Godly values. He may not have been a sly anti-Semite like Arthur Godfrey, but he sure was spitting hell-fire like Louis Farrakhan on the Nation of Islam dais, right here in my cab. Hello, America—stand by for that news…

           “Beat that goddamn bridge! I’ve got to get back here to Mather Tower for sound checks. You think I can just rip ’n’ read?!”

          “Doin’ best I can, sir…sorta getting reacquainted, just got back in town from San Francisco,” I said, as if that weighed on anything, tip-wise.

          “Frisco, huh? With all those left-wing losers and their crackpot anti-American ways,” the fare muttered, surveying traffic in every direction, penning some items in a reporter’s spiral notebook. “Christ blessed sake, where’s my Cadillac driver when I need him…”

          Instead, more of a tip-off. I couldn’t tell whether it was a Sudafed decongestion of traffic at Heald Square or bulletins on some mad-man jumper diversion on the Wabash Avenue bridge, but a sudden slowdown ensued, an air bubble in the East Wacker Drive bloodstream. It allowed me to slip over the Michigan Avenue span before its turreted operators could drop their crossing gates and crank up its steel-grated decks. I sped between the Wrigley Building and Tribune Tower, slamming brakes in front of the Sheraton Hotel with a triumphant toot of the horn for the beefeater uniformed bellman. “There, beat your deadline, didn’t we…who needs Caddies?”

          “How the hell else am I going to get out to my Learjet?” asked the load, exchanging note pad for  money clip from his blue gabardine breast pocket, unrolling a ten-spot and fiver, handing them through the shield window. “Takes the lord’s intervention to beat bridge jams in this goddamn Democrat town.”

          “Something for your Page Two, huh,” I grinned warily, as he palmed off the change. “Sorta like, Hailin’ Harvey’s lament…”

          “That’s clever—you a writer?” he asked, as that bellman opened the cab’s rear door.

          “Me? Not even close…” I waved in gratitude.

          “Maybe you ought to give advertising a try,” he slid out, bundling up his cashmere overcoat in a stiff lake shore wind, turning toward the hotel’s canopied entryway with nary a flicker in his hair-sprayed receding pompadour. “It’s got to be better than this…”

          “Thanks, Mr. Harvey,” I shouted in his wake.

          “Just call me Paul. Good day!”

          And that was the rest of the story…Good god and country. No time for answers, however, as the lead hack in the hotel cab line was honking me out of the loading zone. I shot up Michigan Avenue through log-jammed traffic turning left and right, grabbing a quick round-tripper at Ohio Street bound for the Hancock and back. Nicer up about the Water Tower and chic high-rises, all right, but I soon got flagged down on southbound Mag Mile, which took me to down to a furniture convention at McCormick Place, that flat, smoked glass behemoth on the lake front where I used to take in auto shows as a kid, not to mention a daisy-suited Mick Jagger on the Stones’ maiden U.S. tour. Pocketing a good expensed-out tip, I packed it in early, cheat rush hour bottlenecks and gravitate further southward from there.

          I exited The Dan Ryan Expressway, racial barrier that it was, at 35^th Street, passing near Da Mayor’s eternally modest, police guarded shrine in Bridgeport’s 11^th Ward, within whiffing distance of the stockyards, where the Outfit mob once ruled and whitey essentially still did.  Soon came the phantoms of Sox-Yankees pennant race heartbreakers at dark, dank Comiskey Park, Commander Bob Elson calling all the games back then—the old green ballyard on the brink of a ‘Disco Inferno’ Demolition night, that couldn’t win for losing against the Wrigleyville Cubbies.

          Tuning into Leonard Chess’s WVON-AM on my old transistor radio, I picked up DJ traces of Herb Kent the Cool Gent, ‘Mad Lad’ E. Rodney Jones, Pervis Spann the all-night bluesman and all the other ‘Voice of the Negro’ Good Guys. I found myself steering past the teeming projects, over toward 47^th and South Parkway amid the derogated graystones of ‘Black Metropolis’ Bronzeville.

          I regrooved on Saturday matinee shows at the Regal Theater, ushering dates from my beater ’51 Hudson Hornet, in through the variegated palace’s ornate, Byzantine lobby to what remained of its opulent Moorish-Eastern auditorium, where a starry, proscenium-arched Oriental stage once crowned the likes of Basie, Duke, Ella and Nat King Cole—the organ echoes of Tiny Parham and his ‘Voodoo Band’ next door, or Satchmo at the Sunset Jazz Café and Grand Terrace Lounge.      

          But I personally remembered us being blown away by The Iceman, Etta, Bobby Blue Bland, James and the Famous Flames electrically live, full houses going Pentecostal while I schooled the suburban debs on how hip it was that we were the only white faces in the place. Then we’d score some hot Otis; rasping, moaning Syl  Johnson; Eddie Floyd, Archie Bell and Joe Tex hit-with-a-bullet 45s at the Bop Shop.

          But that was then, before the Regal began rotting in corruption and fraud, and this was so…now. Today, the Impressions, Main Ingredient, O-Jays and vintage Chi-Lites were coursing the black radio airwaves—and South Parkway was all about being MLK Drive.

          Checkering past all that and some faint family history set me to saturninely ruminating over current-day circumstances and situations, even jotting some things down on my White Castle napkins. Taking stock, tallying up on my way to back the garage: By now, I was hustling up more, getting lost less, making some progress on the payback front—while fuller trip envelopes made for marginally better working cabs. But that was neither here nor there, accent on the there.

          Really, what was I doing back here? Left-wing losers? C’mon, what’re you doing mucking around in the past, where you’ve been—and where the hell are you goin’ with this and a graduate degree? What am I gonna do now, cab forever? Or retreat to Circle Campus and worship at the Jane Addams Hull House? Go back to Parcel Express or night shift at the factories? Yeah, out helping people or here helping yourself? Really, shouldn’t I be up there helping Moon? At least, dropping off some money, picking up Seamus and some more stuff—yeah, what about the dog?! But what about mom, doesn’t she need me more? And what about Moon—what do you owe her, owe us? What do you plan to do by her and hers? Is it settling down or just plain settling? And where does her father come from? What about her, and what about them—but what about me? Who says what’s wrong anymore? Who says what’s right? Who was I, who am I, who’m I gonna be now? Why ain’t I still in Boulder, or still way out west, having left so much festering out there? So where do you get off, where do you get on? Gonna take the high road or the weasel route? Do what’s easy or do what’s right? Gonna be a winner or gonna be a wuss?  It was all so goddamn confusing.

“Between motherland and
fatherland lies a no man’s land
of shrifts unplanned.”

          “We met her once, remember?”

          “Kind of plain gal, wasn’t she?”

          “What a thing to say, Ed, she’s not plain at all. Is she staying up there, or…”

          “That’s the plan, mom, at least for now…”

          “What about holidays? What would you do about that?”

          “Let’s not jump the gun here, right Ken?”

          My folks’ place was the main floor of a granulating brick two-flat on the 6600 block of south Francisco, just west of California Avenue past Mozart, a few doors off Marquette Road. Chicago Lawn consisted either of two-to-six unit apartment houses like this or block after row of detached brown brick bungalows. The southwest side neighborhood remained mostly Lithuanian-Latvian—aging rapidly, with just enough vigor and dexterity left to trim scouring pad-size front yards and stunted shrubbery. I still had one of two bedrooms there, same taffeta bed coverings, dusty wall pennants for the Bears, Blackhawks, Pale Hose and Chicago Cardinals of the Charley Trippi, Ollie Matson days.

          Over in the corner, near a lightless side window, sat my Monkey Ward phonograph, pop, rock and R&B 45s stacked like Marina City towers alongside it on a castered metal stand as though I’d never gone and outgrown them—which I’d realized of late I never actually had. Back then I’d play them full blast, to drown out WGN’s Wally Phillips and WIND’s Howard Miller on her kitchen radio. Yet even all this familiar comfort and nostalgia couldn’t quell the crosstown turmoil, wouldn’t spare me the gobs of hair lost in the cold, harsh shower, on the checked tile floor, as I grappled with the anxiety and reality of what I had come to back here.

          After that stint of non-stop cabbing, I’d finally found some time to catch up with my parents. We were presently in the front room, my ailing mother resting under several blankets on the clear covered sofa, dad and me hunched forward on opposing wing-back chairs, squeaking on plastic just the same. Above us on the wall was a large gold-color wood framed mirror, the image on which was of a frilly shaded table lamp in a ceramic Vatican motif, centered before a modest picture window.

          Outside, skies were dismally overcast, what with an Arctic Express storm front bearing down on the Windy City. Good day to can the taxicab grind, to clean out my squareback some, to explain the sketchy circumstances of my return to Chicago—including the ‘sisterhood’ collision and debris—otherwise to catch up with family matters like mom’s precarious condition, never anticipating that we’d be ranging any further into mine.

          “Then what about kids, school,” dad asked, resting patched flannel elbows on his disproportionately lanky knees, Scottish dour was as Dewar’s does. “What about that?”

          “I’m sure they’re thinking about such things, Ed, aren’t you Ken?”

          “Of course, mom,” I said, even though I hadn’t spoken with Melissa in two days—sighing in relief in higher mental moments, missing her not insignificantly in low.

          “And how about work with your hi-falutin diplomas,” dad pressed, as he reached down to the glass top coffee table for his pipe and tobacco pouch. “How you gonna work that out with somebody like her tying you down?”

          “We’re working on that, I’m tellin’ you,” I spouted, wishing he wouldn’t smoke right now, just like I used to wish he didn’t drink the way he did.

          “Aghh, it’s nuts if you ask me. We’ve had enough headaches with your mom and her bead squeezers,” dad threw up his hands, then scooped up his pipe stems and cleaners, as well, turning back toward the kitchen, stuffing his Spiegel work pants pockets. “Messin’ around with them shifty sheenies again…”

          It wasn’t always this way. In a previous, somewhat more expansive time, we’d led a greener suburban life, a younger Edward and Muriel Herbert had moved out of Chicago Lawn, due west to Willow Grove. He’d given up his city job to forge a better family future for the three of us in a side tract fixer-upper, hooking on with wholesale siding jobber amid the post-war housing boom.

          So I had room to grow and roam until the recession hit, everybody went back to basics, and siding went out of style, leaving dad out of a job and us out in the cold. He was getting on in years at 58, and chronic back spasms took on disability dimensions; still, with mom never particularly healthy, we needed his regular paydays. So dad sold our small house at a slight loss, taxes and all, then we retreated to their old neighborhood.

          He was able to jigger his way back onto Chicago’s patronage rolls through a ward boss pay-off by one of mom’s Irish cousins, securing a foreman position on the Streets and Sanitation pot-hole brigade until the back went out altogether, then landed behind a desk. But the requirement was, we had to reside in the city, more specifically in the ward where he would be expected to help turn out precinct’s Daley Machine votes every election day with committeemen’s ring-kissing loyalty.

          So rented, we did: This, even though Ed was really a Republican at heart, the resulting ambivalence only frustrating, grumping him out, wetting his whistle like the bad old days, as he marked time to a dream retirement back on a farm somewhere out near Streator or Earlville. City gal that she was, Muriel nee Fennigan didn’t really mind the return to Chicago Lawn and blocks south—some re-adapting years ago by now—and quietly dreaded the prospect of retiring to mid-state fields of pigs and corn.

          They were rather an unlikely couple to begin with: She a first-gen Irish Catholic with Kerry roots, proper extended family still over there; he an Ulster Prod naturalized. She grew up in Bridgeport, he on the farm outside Prairie Crossing—only in America, only in Chicago. Dad hit the big city in his battered old baby Overland, stepping out after a day’s labor in the stockyards to two-bit dance halls from Marigold Gardens and Moorish Uptown Aragon south to Woodlawn’s opulent Trianon, eventually sweeping mom off her feet at a White City Ballroom. Her brother-in-law was already deep into ward politics, and soon plugged dad into the Machine at Streets and San.

          I only knew about all this because he’d get loaded when I was a pup and yammer on about Chicago’s glory days, at least until he started in how the Toddlin’ Town was turning so dirty and…dark. Which was why I grew to love the suburban life until it was mowed down by occupational hazards like the business cycle, and I was a city kid barely out of middle-class high school USA. I’d come along later, what with mom’s fragile condition and the family doctor’s exhortations, and usually seemed to start things later than sooner ever since. Otherwise, we as a family never much talked about such matters of consequence until reaching some crisis point or bitter end.

          “What did he mean by that crack?” I groused, as I helped tuck her in tighter as temperatures fell and the apartment’s steam heat had yet to rattle on.

          “Oh, don’t pay him no nevermind,” she said, pulling her graying head up slightly, wearily, then plopping back down on her favorite embroidered pillow. “She seemed like a nice girl—Moon, you call her? All I know is my college boy needs somebody good who will push him a little. Not another soft-soap like me.”

          “Soft-soap nuthin, you know better than that,” I said, leaning further forward on my armchair—with a splash of pride as well, given that my parents’ education ended short of high school. “Sooo, how you doin’ mom?”

          “I’m just fine, Ken, getting better all the time. Am so glad you’re here,” she coughed, having been a chain smoker all her born days, sending me out for her cigarettes most of mine. Sometimes the spells got so bad, she’d splay out on the living room carpet, gasping like a beached walleye to catch her breath. I swore she would light up even if she had plastic oxygen tubes rammed up her nostrils.

          “Gotta hang tough, mom, we’ve gotta keep you going strong.” No denying, she was our leading lady, an angel incarnate, devoutly Catholic, with a large and small ‘c’. She was always my salvation, my softer side—never would have sniffed sociology without her—probably would have bordered on patricide here and there without her mediation.

          “Don’t you worry about me,” she rallied softly, clearing her throat. She was always small in size, now getting smaller, though still sharp as a Stock Yards’ cleaver, with a heart big as Burnham Park. All she ever wanted to be was a flapper/hep cat city gal, but dad dragged her out to the suburbs, ending Southside life as she knew it, her side of the family all sticking things out, from Bridgeport to Canaryville to Calumet Park.

          Seeing no escape from Willow Grove, she dedicated herself to holding her marriage and little family together. Still, fate and low-level family connections eventually delivered her back closer to home. “But son, there are some things I must tell you, things that we’ve never really brought up over the years or your dad would ever talk about…I mean, now that you’re getting more serious with…”

          “What things, mom, what kind of things…”

          “Well, for one, I’ve always had a latent epilepsy condition that fortunately hasn’t gone into petite mal seizure stage since I was a little girl. I have no idea if or how this might affect you, but it’s something you need to keep in mind, just in case.”

          “Seizures?” I shuddered. “I’ve never once…”

          “File it away, okay? You never know about seizures. Blood can leak in your brain, swell it up, and if the ICP doesn’t ease—well, God forbid, there’s grand mal or grade 4 Gleoblastoma. I’m only telling you what the doctor told me long ago, son, so you are aware—for your own good,” she whispered, turning on her side toward me, bending my ear. “And, Ken, there are a couple more you should know about your father, now with your new lady friend, and all. But not a word to him that I’m telling you this…”

          “What? That he’s a narrow miser who only comes to life when he’s loaded?”

          “No fair, son, there’s more to your dad than that, he’s provided for us, hasn’t he? But take his side of the family,” she became as stern as she could be, what with the cancer and heartbreaking deterioration. “Grandpa Herbert had actually changed their name from MacDumfery, I recall it was. You know, to Americanize it, right off the boat—I think he took it from the Irish composer, Victor Herbert. And you remember hearing about your Uncle Early?”

          “Sure, dad’s older brother, died in the war…”

          “He was an 8^th Armored Division medic gunned down as they fought SS snipers to liberate the Langenstein-Zwieberge concentration camp in April, ’45. He and your father were as tight as two boyhood corn shuckers can be, and it didn’t help that your dad had missed military combat because of his disc problem. I don’t know whether it’s lingering guilt over that, or bitterness over Early’s mop-up battle so late in the war, but my dear Ed still has that blind spot. Yet through it all, we have kept our little family together…and we’ll keep it that way—now, won’t we.”

          “Uh-huh, it was honorable duty though, wasn’t it? Uncle Early sure didn’t die in vain…and over 30 years ago, for criminy…”

          “If you ask me, Early was already broken by the war. His last letters were rambling and raving over what he’d seen and gone through. In one he wrote this strange rhyme about the death camps:

‘Jews in Poland, 
Jews in France, 
everybody goes there,
 wets their pants…’

 I think he would have been a shell-shocked ghost of himself if he had ever made it back home. But it goes deeper than that, son, even deeper than your grandmother’s Edinburgh disapproval of the Irish in me. There’s the case of your Aunt Eleanor…”

           “The one who was institutionalized?” I pictured my dear mother as a Christly child on Bridgeport’s Emerald Street, as a divinely beatified colleen one boat ride away from Killarney. “Don’t remember ever meeting her.”

           “We never took you, although your dad used to visit her every so often. It wasn’t just that she was put away, it was why…”

           But it didn’t take us long to realize that the old neighborhood our little family was returning to was rapidly changing back then. Gone were the Irish; the Ulsterites never were. Even long-time mainstays from the Baltic States were dying off and giving ground. Red lines were drawn sharply this side of Western Avenue, but that didn’t stop southwest-siders from fearing their Chicago Lawn would inevitably ‘fade to black’. Just like as how these days, the city seemed to feel more vulnerable and inferior than ever, having fallen to its knees upon Da Mayor’s sudden death, yet to right itself—with a machine toady named Bilandic in city hall, presiding over Beirut-like ruins.

           Our reverse migration hardly helped. The pearly White City that my parents knew and loved in their youth was now little more than some legacy lakefront museums and monuments amid high-rise slums. Daley’s power to ride herd over the segregated neighborhoods and serve North Shore business interests passed with him. And no amount of vote padding and shady restrictive covenants was about to stanch that Southside white flight and Afro demographic overflow.

          By now, it was all my father could do to walk off his residual angst and resentments between the California Street liquor store and nearby municipal park benches, tethered to our aging, infirm dog, Laddie—at least until that collie mix keeled over for good.                

           “Aunt Eleanor flipped out right?” I shook my head. “Died in restraints I overheard you and dad saying at the time.”

           “She was a beautiful young girl, the belle of Prairie Crossing, as your father tells it. He always says she brightened up the farm, even on the cloudiest winter days. But Eleanor had a mind of her own, and took up with the general store owner’s son. When Grandma Herbert found out, she stopped the affair then and there. She didn’t just put her foot down, but grounded her.

          “Then, when her only daughter rebelled and snuck off on dates with the boy anyway and started showing with child, that was the last straw. Your grandmother castigated her and threatened to end it with some chemical solution, Eleanor fought back, she locked her away in her room, padlock, and all. Poor Eleanor broke down under the punishment and strain, went into hysteria and became violently mad until she became a physical threat to herself and the whole clan out there, had the baby anyhow. So they had the poor thing committed, put the newborn up for adoption and signed her over to the state.”

           “Cripesake, she had a little boyfriend, so what?”

           “The Herberts were bible-reciting Presbyterians on the farm, Ken—even after your grandpa dropped dead tilling the fields. And I gather the boy’s name was Norman Browstein, see—his family adopted the baby and raised him. Way I heard it, eventually Norman took over the family grocery chain, and his boy died a hero on Corregidor in World War II.  Eleanor never got over it, and your grandmother always held that it was an affront to the senses of her strict Victorian upbringing to the day she died—which happened just hours after the Army delivered official news about Early. I’ll never forget her casket side by side with her beloved son’s flag-draped coffin. Neither has your father, much less your Uncle Dellis, that crazy younger brother of his who still lives out there in Prairie Crossing. Your dad gave up on religion over the years, but not the grudge over his family’s tragedies.”

           “So it was the Browsteins’ fault?! That’s crazy…”

           “Even when I did some housework for Kay Rosen out in Willow Grove that time,” she added softly, shaking her head with an impish smile. “It was interesting and different, with their high holidays and all. They were such wonderful people, Arnold always letting us buy on credit at his grocery until payday. Apologizing for his sawdust floors—and the lean cuts of meat he’d set aside for me—what a godsend! I almost felt honored to help out with their festive Judaic parties, and it was a relief to get out of the house and see how the other half lived. But you know full well how your father would seethe—saying Early gave his life so I could scrub those peoples’ sinks—bellyaching about how servile Irish I could be, even though we needed the extra money anyhow.”

           “Phone call,” my dad poked back into the living room, pipe waggling as he nodded my way. He was tall and scarecrow slender, but with thick farmer forearms to this day. “It’s for you…”

           I pulled away from mom as she wheezed and lit up a Salem Menthol, and bolted down their flowery carpet runnered hall to the dining room phone, picking up with an odd stab of trepidation, figuring who it must be. “Hello…Moon?”

           “Yes, Kenny, how is the situation going down there?”

           “Fine, we’re just going over some…things…” I coughed, glancing  toward the flat’s front door as my father shuffled out to the vestibule, mailbox key in hand.

           “Things?”

           “You know, family stuff—how about you?”

           “Still getting settled in…heard from Faith Mendel yesterday, even jerky Lester, of all people. When are you coming back up?”

           “What? Real soon, weather permitting,” I jabbered, peeking out the dining room windows, at the cloud cover darkening their hanky size backyard and alley. “Just let me work this end a little more and…”

           “What’s to work on, and how is your mother doing?”

           “Holding her own, Moon,” I said, lowering the volume. “But it’s kinda delicate right now…can I call you back?”

           “Sooner than later, okay?”

           “You bet, just a little later on—I’ll explain,” I whispered, my dad heading toward me with, sifting through bills and couponed junk mail. “Hi to Seamus…Pags, too…bye.” CLICK.

           “Forwarded,” he muttered, furrowing his striated brow, looking askance at the plain black telephone as he handed me a black/gold-on-white envelope. “From Colorado …looks like it’s from your fancy pants college…”

Care for more?

 Chapter 37. Old neighborhood stress and 
strife drive to a fortuitous fare to the air, then 
a return trip to notorious old habits and haunts…

∞ STAGE TWO ∞

Chicago Suite

“Past is prologue, or
antilogue, nowhere to hide—
shove it all aside.”
Thornia high-ku

          DING…DING…DING…DING…

          “Any priors?”

          “Huh? Of course not…”

          “What about diseases? Hooked on any dope?”

          “No…uh, coffee—maybe…”

          “You mental? Get blackouts, seizures—maybe some fits and spasms every once in a while. Ever choke on your tongue or piss yourself?”

          “Hell, no…not that I can…”

          “OK, let’s see here, set you up for pix and prints and prints…”

          DING…DING…DING…DING…DING…

          The retreat hadn’t nearly been complete. Yet, there it was: Napoleon’s army out of Moscow, Lee out of Gettysburg, Bataan and Saigon ’75 all over again, albeit on a smaller scale. Melissa had scooped me and my success trip, cramming the entire mess into my car with a little extra Thibeaux muscle. She’d then left an obligatory thank-you note for Denise and Regina Tzu.

          Over her abject objections, I’d taped my condolences to Sydney’s mail slot, on the back of a Lovelock Arms receipt I’d fitfully found under my floor mat—writing something weasel-word lame to the effect that we’d all be better off for this—a last, silent offering to any bruised egos and busted hearts. Morning fog lifted as we left San Francisco, but a low overcast set in over the bridge, along San Pablo. I blinked into the rearview mirror at Rodeo and Crockett, aching tail between my legs—tethered somehow still, gauging the evacuation on my emerging man-o-meter while Moon stared out the shotgun side window, crocheting away.

          Mental milemarkers like wuss, wimp and pussy-whipped had accumulated along I-80 East, that haunting ‘Shame on You If You Can’t Pass Through’ disco number Syd had sung to, ragging me on the turned-down radio until hourly news headlined another brutal overnight attack in Lafayette Park. Say what? Nooo…had to be a copycat or something—the hell with all that!  My shaken, sotto voce soon crossfire eroded a brooding, unspoken ceasefire by Sacramento, sniping and countermeasures breaking the truce altogether over the Sierra. Finger pointing and recriminations carried us through winter-swept Nevada.

          Spent ammo and road fatigue ended all that by Salt Lake and the snowbound Wasatch Range. Still, the die had been cast, a pattern had been established: Point, counterpoint; pull over for coffee, dish out the cognitive dissonance, pick at the sore spots like an oozing lesion, time and again, onto the next truck stop, as in:

          “How could you be so…ruthless,” I’d ask, milking and stirring as we thawed out our extremities.

          “How could you be such a goon,” she’d sip, face flushed as a kewpie doll. “Going off half-cocked like that.”

          “Don’t treat me like a little kid! And by the way, who the hell was that guy answering our phone?”

          “It was all I could do to keep you from messing yourself up even more.” Melissa would cover the check as I gassed up the Volks. “Anyway, grow up, Kenny. That was only a good friend looking in on our animules and stuff while I worked, okay?”

          “Grow up?! Keep this up, and I’ll be turning right back around.”

          “Back to what? Some fool-headed San Frantasy,” she’d rebundle under her bunny brocade, quilted coat, head to toe. “You’d think you’d know better than that by now…”

          So it went, by fits and misfits, snits and tarts, until our tongues cramped and throats burned over the sudden depth of our macro-relational woes: she seemingly torturing herself over her cocksure miscalculations, me wondering why I-80 was so much more uplifting on the westward leg. But from Little America on through Laramie and Loveland, strategic planning, logistical moves had begun to rule the road, slush and black ice taking a back seat to more reasoned than heated debate.

          By the time we had returned to Boulder, snows had cleared, but it hit us like an avalanche that some glacial changes were now etched in the Flatirons’ sandstone. Obligatory phone calls to the Coach Light Inn and Chicagoland had been made—W-2’s resolved, mom not doing any better. Upon first alert, friends and neighbors debated and dissuaded us over the distress move, until one of Melissa’s pottery pals said she could see me in a bigger city like San Francisco, with Moon staying put here where she belonged. This, even after Melissa declared that where I went, she went—for or against her better judgment—curiously determined to have and hold commitment-wise. Loyal to a fault was she, even though the fault lay elsewhere. I was instantly personal non-gratitude; but they continued to orbit fondly around their Moon.

          With that, a crafty, co-optivating kiln tender eagerly volunteered to take the cabin off our hands—ostensibly tend it for us—fixing as she was to move in before we could even begin to pack and ship. Moon fretted as how her bubbie might be leaving her just enough money to pluck down an earnest payment on the place to its Idaho landlord, but she couldn’t bank on that just yet.

          Besides, pensive chagrin was disintegrating into foreclosed humiliation, and the cabin had now felt haunted by what was before. No Ph.D. news was bad news from the sociology department and Boulder wasn’t getting any cheaper. So we boxed up most things in every dusty nook and cranny that would squeeze into the left rear corner of a consolidated eastbound moving van. The leftovers, mostly mine, were masking tape labeled and stuffed into the backyard storage shed lock, stock and gun barrel—save for ‘Waif and Grain’, which Moon had slashed and burned in the front room fireplace, for warmth and wrath on a cold closing night.

          Morning next, no friends, no phone calls, no confetti rapturous farewells: Dropped like the temperatures, for nobody knew (or cared to know) anybody who in their righteous minds ever left Boulder Valley—for a place like Chicago, no less. So we faced reality overload, doormatted the keys to Rocky Mountain paradise, dropped off forwarding addresses and pulled up stakes, a quick cut and run, in torn, tattered, remorseful silence, with John Denver singing to high heaven on the FM dial.

            “I just feel so uprooted,” Moon had said wistfully, as we loaded our respective cars with essentials and any valuables: Pags into her Toyota, Seamus piled into the back of my Volks. “Honestly, Kenny, what’s going on with us?”

          “Hard tellin’,” I replied before we each closed driver doors on our foothills Elysium and crept off like a funeral procession past Columbia Cemetery and Chautauqua Park. “Major missteps, major changes and chain reactions…”

          Such was the gut wrenching and soul searching that had propelled us out onto the turnpike, flagging downhill to Denver, Melissa stoically leading the way. But she signaled by Broomfield that we couldn’t really hit the road in earnest without a decent breakfast.  So our crestfallen dos-a-dos retreat wheeled into a pancake house just this side of the I-25/70 interchange for a split short stack and pair of over easies, toast on the cinnamon-raison side, bottomless pot.

          “Chains, reactions, what are you thinking,” Moon ruffled out our bronco-busting napkins, busily straightening the utensils and placemats as though we were still in the cabin kitchen on a Sunday morn.

          “Nothing,” I peered out the restaurant’s west-facing windows at the Rockies’ range, peak after snowy peak, shrinking into the corner booth from what lay beyond. “Shoulda left me out of this to begin with, Moon. Shoulda just left it all alone.”

          “But I went out there to save us, Kenny,” she cried, over the jukebox blaring of an immediately awkward R&B number, Maxine warbling, ‘…Love is good, love can be strong, we gotta get right back to where we started from’ like a disco Nightingale. “Give me that much credit, for godsakes.”

          “The best thing we had going was trust,” I sugared up some coffee, tuned out J-7, as the waitress spread around her tray. “Whew, talk about total destruction…”

         “I’ll tell you destruction.” Having knife cut our pancakes, Moon nervously buttered our toast—ever making motherly busy work for her tiny, nail-bitten hands. “Destruction is you staying out there and messing around with that conniving little…”

          “You don’t even know, Moon. It wasn’t that way, at all.” I knifed into the Log Cabin-drenched stack, mixing in the yokes.

          “Then why didn’t you come clean with me to start with?” She delivered her egg unto my plate, nibbling at her cakes. “Why’d you scream for the life raft in Golden Gate Park? Because you knew you’d be chopped liver out there by now, that’s why. Tsk, you had two beautiful sisterly women blowing up over you, haven’t you done enough damage already?!”

          “You finished? Let’s get outta here, okay,” I downed my coffee, hitting the head while she settled up, realizing I hadn’t thought of things quite that way. As we doggy bagged, walked Seamus and Kibbled Pags out in the parking lot, I took one last long breath of mountain air.  “Sure about this, Moon?  I mean, we could turn around and…”

       “We’re going back to Chicago, Kenny. It’s not a pretty picture, but at least we’ll face it together. Maybe sometimes you have to go back before you can go forward again.”

          Then we had quietly slid into our respective cars, and were off, though with very little settled. From there, it was all hand signals to Denver’s Interstate interchange. Seemed her Toyota kept veering east around the cloverleaf, while my squareback kept pulling to the west like a headstrong deerhound on a lapdog leash. Still, I fought the Volks onto I-70, following Melissa’s bumper-to-bumper lead away from Front Range splendor and promise. I dutifully followed her back to I-70 toward the flatlands, dialing as it happened to Josh Gravanek’s latest mid-rock hit-with-a-bullet: ‘Around The Bender’ by the Jilters, on Sky High 105 radio. It got me to wondering what was up with Josh’s box at Syd’s place anyhow.

          At first, the more she drew me eastward, the more I had resolved to passively resist—to where she became less an arrowhead than a target, I less a faithful drover than a looming roadblock. But stuff the defiance and dissonance, this road isolation was a tonic somehow, the eastbound interstate proving reliably straight and true. It gave me a buffer, the squareback a cocoon—time for calmer reflection and gradual pause, timeless suspension, a highway trance broken only by Moon’s periodic honking and Seamus’ bursts of barking after grazing livestock, herds of gophers and prairie dogs.

          AM radio ranged from Abba to Merle to Z.Z. in and out, up and down the dial, with an occasional ‘Goodbye’ and ‘Now That You’ve Gone’ oldie recorded by the big, brassy…Chicago up at Caribou Ranch just above Boulder—or Colorado Transit Authority, for all the tinhorns back home.

          I shook off those parting shots, settling in for the Great infinite Plains, this nine-hundred mile drainage ditch into the Mississippi Valley toward middlin’ Missouri—a declining path of least resistance. So much headroom for ruminating, rationalizing, my guardian angel waving, gesturing as she led the way with a resurgence of homespun confidence.

          The more I had filled my mind with this emotional teeter-totter, the more intriguing it became. Distance, triangular game theory, posing hypotheticals. Had I left my head in San Francisco, about what loose ends tend to portend: lost Satalisman, further threats and throes. Upon further reflection, it had all come down to indelibly clear alternatives—as in either, or propositions. Should have stood ground, did what’s best; should have stayed on, hell outta there: life was like that, right? Should have shrugged off Moon’s trusty drive west suggestion in the first place; should have blown Syd out of the water before I got in so deep—let alone Lafayette Park.

          I dug even deeper amid the long stratocumulated acres of combines, feed silos and towering ingrained elevators. Sociology aside, I harkened back to undergraduate philosophy: the greatest good for the greatest number Utilitarianism, or Free Will and Determinism. Hmmm, interesting. Fade in, fade out: perspectives, conclusions stacking up like hay bales, mile after mile, crystallizing, congealing, sweet as the truck stop custards and other snacks we shared on minimal rest and refuel pauses.

          Guess that was why I always got off on interstates like this—no hassles, no headaches, little indigestion—so ponderous, so empowering, minimal decisions in maximum space and time. Velocitized suspension of asphalt grounded reality: this super highway seemed such an infinitely irresistible loophole. The roadway had been so casual, so independent, so simply clear—four-lane, high-speed, twelve-volt peace of mind, minus the hog reports and top-40 radio. Velocitized suspension of asphalt grounded reality and jerkwater speed traps—no long, heavy promises and payments due: this super highway was such an infinitely irresistible loophole, keeping a lid on, letting things fly. Trouble was, that lofty yellow line groove had served to confound me even more over the miles, and only got me as far as down here.

          DING, DING, DING, DING…

          “It’s not much, Moon, but it’s a start, quick and dirty,” I said, capping the pay phone receiver from roaring, peeling garage traffic and the ringing of counting strips. “Looks like I’ll just have to pick up my permit downtown tomorrow.”

          “Um, sounds…okay, Kenny—but…”

          “A little quick and dirty, maybe—but I can’t be vegging out up there, gotta start payin’ back…”

          “Just get back up here before rush hour, okay? The truck came this morning, and our stuff was totally covered with some kind of blue cleaning powder, industrial strength. The driver said a drum of it burst en route, and they’re claiming it’s not their responsibility. Just what kind of special deal did you work out with…”

          “I’ll be right up…”

          DING, DING, DING, DING, DING…

          My interstate nirvana had degenerated into wheel-gripping tension once we bypassed Thibeaux’s St. Louis and plowed up the virtual length of Illinois’ corn country on I-55. Melissa took command around Romeoville, beckoning me toward the Stevenson and North Shore expressways without the slightest roadside or sidetrack hesitation. By the Sanitary Canal Bridge, Chicago’s industrial sprawl had increasingly sucked us in, truck traffic corralling our little caravan in a squall of soot and fumes.

          The big Broad Shoulders were still as gray and brooding as I remembered, miles of brown brick decay all the way to Lake Michigan’s south shores, downtown skyline excess rising in congested civic ardor and phallic compensation. Sears, Prudential, Hancock, Water Tower Place: the taller, premium architectural landmarks remained in place, but someone else’s memories now fetishized their towers. Everything was recognizable here, but nothing was sentimentally familiar. Yet I dutifully followed Melissa’s Toyota like a bugbeared grizzly cub through downtown’s Congress Parkway interchange, all but hanging on her bumper as the Kennedy Expressway clogged with a drizzly, early evening rush.

          JFK’s diagonal slice through Northside revival and outer ethnic neighborhoods slowly fed onto Edens Expressway. Just before the Touhy Avenue cloverleaf, a Cook County Sheriff’s cordon of flashing patrol cars escorted what looked to be an orderly, rather synchronous cortege striding along the northbound emergency lane, beginning to clog traffic again, before long clear back to Wrigleyville.

          It looked to be another Chicago-style labor dispute, maybe involving UPS or something; I couldn’t make out the bobbing placards. But we had eventually maneuvered past police loudspeakers, the clatter of heels, slogans and signage, into block upon block of tidy blond brick bungalows on the southern, Howard Avenue stretch of Skokie. There, was Melissa’s family home—a blond brick, ranch-style bungalow with off-white wood trim—small trim front lawn and parkway trees in line with the neighborhood up and down Howard Street.

          “Out of state license, is it?”

          “Yah, just finished grad school there…”

          “College boy, huh? So whatcha you doing way down here? You got trouble?”

          “No, just some…obligations.”

          “Yeah, yeah—wait, what’s the address? Suburbs? Can’t have that…”

          “Uh, only for the time being. Here, I’ll give you my folks’ here in town…”

          “That’ll do. Go pick up your temporary license,” said the stub Camel dragging dispatcher through his cashier window in a dank upper Clark Street carbarn. “Start tomorrow morning, I’ll give you number 3240 over there. Hit the bricks for the morning push, you move that heap like heinies on fire, hear? This ain’t no bullshit sitcom…”   

          I’d whizzed through the express lane for booth photos and fingerprints, been given some sort of priority points for citizenship and language comprehension. The whole idea had come amid the onset of a sleeting rainstorm that caught me with my car battery down, while en route to a northside parts dismantler for a discounted re-core. The first cabbie I could hail advised me that Checker Taxi was hiring any Chi-town moke who could reach the floor pedals.

          All I knew was Melissa had fronted all our moving expenses, and then there was a countless tab run west; needed ready money good and fast. So I scared up a cut-rate battery, installing it under the Volks’ back seat, then throttled down to city hall for a temporary driver permit. Just beating rush hour traffic, I soon rumbled back up Edens to Skokie—wipers slapping in tune with some vintage John Prine—to the Saversohn’s place, where I found our Boulder belongings stacked loosely just inside their garage door, Moon sorting through it all with a beset, mournful expression.

           “Now, what am I supposed to do with all this stuff, Kenny,” she spouted, blowing a whisp of hair out of her eyes, straightening up her coral-colored jersey and bib overalls. “The powder is getting like plaster…”

          “Be right there,” I said, ducking into her garage under Tribune cover, Seams jumping me as far as his dog chain would allow. “Had a little car trouble, though I did take the job.”

          “But cab hacking? You have a master’s degree now and…”

          “Gotta make some quick changes, Moon. Something’s gotta give…”

Saturning for transitory
re-entry to the Chi side…toward ’the
 Chicago Seven’ Chapters, circa 1978.
(FYI: reader discretion and the like.)

      Liberating as that I-70 road show may have seemed, there was no denying the creature bennies of power showers, balanced meals, Mr. Coffee and cable TV. Truth telling: I found myself cozying up to the place, a bit too much so for comfort. Talk about path of least resistance. As usual, Melissa was doing most of the giving, what with her father off on a business trip to Rockford and Rock Island, machine tool samples in his sales cases.

          He was made painfully aware of his daughter’s situation before leaving, however, directing us to separate bedrooms, pledging to weigh in upon return. In the meantime, Moon cooked, cleaned, unpacked and reordered our bundles and cartons, aiming to make me feel as ‘at home’ in her old home as possible as the week progressed. She pampered me, head to head, and everywhere in between, before stretching things full out on a den room sofabed.

          For my part, I kept close phone touch with my parents without letting on where I actually was yet.  Otherwise, I lounged around kitchen combing, paging through various paper want ads, kitchen raiding and walking Seamus for mutual relief. Sometimes I lost track of where I was, but she would remind me where we were, and better regrouping here than floundering somewhere out there. Yet I couldn’t help fearing we were going nowhere.

          “I suppose,” Melissa said, making for a coffee break in the kitchen nook. “But you’ve a little breathing room here, so why don’t you try for a social services spot, or a little substitute teaching? Then you could check out a Ph.D. program right here—like back at Circle Campus? I can get into daycare, a crafts studio or something…”

          “Get serious, Moon, that takes time,” I replied, taken aback as she poured us two mugs of Joe DiMaggio’s and broke out the CoffeeMate. “I’m talking about right now.”

          “I am serious. Use your head, Kenny, why do you think I came back here with you? Now we’ve got to get another place and everything…”

          “Everything?” My heart started racing with a caffeine push, although apparently not as fast as her mind.

          “Now that we’ve settled things, it’s time to off with the hang loose no defining us, don’t you agree? I mean, after all we’ve been through, here we be…”

          “Well…sure…I can see what you’re saying…” I sank deeper into my counter stool, tapping away at the Formica as the unspoken prospect sunk in.

          Outside the nook window was a backyard roughly the size of a badminton court, but well tended with dormant plants and flowers budding for an early spring thaw. Inside here, a bookshelf and china cabinet were neatly lined, yet appeared to lack a feminine touch. I couldn’t help but note framed photos of Melissa as an infant, one on her father’s lap, with a bit blurry image of a woman standing behind them with folded arms. Next to the fading shots of sundry relatives was a small brass menorah, the only sign of religious symbolism I’d noticed anywhere in the Saversohn household thus far.

          Not that I hadn’t been up here before, but that initial hospitality was pretty much limited to the living room. Moon and I had initially met in the student union, sharing a sunny outdoor table overlooking the cold concrete Circle Campus. We started right up debating folky singer/songwriters and American Lit.  I was talking James Taylor and Richard Thompson; she turned me onto Paul Seibel, Steve Goodman and Randy Newman.  I liked Tom Wolfe and Brautigan; she was into Sontag and Jong.  I commuted north, she came south—we’d meet after class at various spots, Old Town to Greektown, occasionally spreading our wings uptown on Lincoln and Broadway. Totally secular, nothing denominational—I’d come back from the army stint, she’d come off an overcooked marriage.

          When we completed undergrad, I applied to Boulder on a whim and a dare. Dream of hairbrained dreams, we were soon fleeing big, grimy Second City for some clean, clear Rocky Mountain air like so many heady Midwest refugees, with nary a second thought of theology beyond Ram Dass or Kahlil Gibran. But before taking flight, she had introduced me to her father, who greeted me warily at the Saversohn door, then sent us off to Colorado with daggers in his eyes. Now he was pulling his fleet car Buick Special into the driveway, home from the machine shop wars, apparently bracing to grill and drill me as to long-term intentions.   

          “She’s my only child, you know, and I’m grateful she will be closer to home,” said Hal Saversohn, setting aside his brief case, dispatching his daughter, sitting down across from me with a piping double mug. “Little angel, she has had tough sledding from the start, basically took care of us from the very moment her dear mother passed away, rest her soul.”

          “I know, sir,” I replied weakly, watching Moon retreat in a mortified huff to the garage for more sorting. “She told me about being the lady of the house, starting in junior high school. I guess that’s what makes her so special, huh?”

          “Yes, preciously special,” he took my measure like a lathe master with his micrometer. “So, man-to-man, what’s going on with you two?”

          “Intentions…well, we’re working that all out as we speak. This move has been a little…awkward…”

          “Tell me about awkward, son,” he sighed, yanking loose his necktie and rubbing his fully receded hairline. “I had to learn about this from Faith Mendel, of all people. She phoned me right after hearing from that spoiled wildcat daughter of hers. Apologized for the unforeseen turn of events between our little girls.”

          “Really…” Our? That kind of connection came as headline news to me, subdividing my perspective even further. In some respects, I recognized I was in the driver’s seat situation-wise, yet was ready and more than willing to relinquish the wheel. At once I felt wanted and wounded, roguish and repentant, free rein and responsible—virile, full of vigor, yet vanquished—sweating and hollow to the core. “Well, it’s not quite what you hear, believe me.”

          “I hope not, son, for your sake, as well as Melissa’s, read me? She’s been through enough already in her young life. And that’s not how a man treats such a fine young woman where I come from,” he tapped my forearm. “So I’m sure you’ll do what’s right by her.”

          “I’m getting right on the case to square all this away, Mr. Saversohn, right as rain. You needn’t worry one bit.” Hadn’t a clue what to make of that, but I couldn’t help but respect and like the guy. Still, taken together, these exchanges prompted my retreat to his den, then an extension phone call and speed dial decision, slamming down the receiver once Melissa softly knocked her way into the room.

          “It’s my folks, Moon,” I sputtered, “mom’s taken a turn for the worse…”

          “Sorry to hear that, Kenny,” she said cautiously. “I hope you passed along my best wishes.”

          “Yeah, actually it was my dad on the line again. And I’m going to head down and see her for myself…”

          “Good idea, just get back here so we can get to work on our plans and stuff.”

          “Right, well…this may take me a while…”

Care for more?

 Chapter 36. Back in the driver’s 
seat, hitting the streets, a return trip 
to the old family turf finds skeletons 
ultimately playing the tune…

  “A hunger for resolution
may result in further
upset and dyspepsia.”

           “Be my guest, the more the harrier …”

          “Hi, I’m Melissa Saversohn, Denise’s friend…”

          “Sure, fine—mi casa, su casa. Bring on the tour buses, there’s plenty of room in the Hotel San Francisco.”

          “Uh, Denise’s room is back and to the right,” I motioned to Moon, bypassing Regina Tzu’s spirited hospitality.

______________________________________________________

VaporBonus: Chapter 34 ‘prequel’…

Down time—cooling off period. A little situational shut-eye,
strategic turn about. But a bloomin’ sectarian twist of faith
has him all but scurrying for provisions and relative refuge,
trying to unknow the hearsay unknown. 

(If) you must: Chapter 33.5, otherwise…☟ minus key details…
______________________________________________________

          I had circled back to Denise’s place after my errand run, noggin as sodden as a Sligo peet bog. I’d blown off Dutch salads in favor of the conciliatory bagels and lemon-lime Calistogas, preoccupied with notions of what those Rectory blokes were actually cooking up, roots and all—and how I might swallow it or spill. Aww, probably was the booze talking, right? Just like it always was by my ol’ man.

           Conspiralling with that whole explosive mick trip was what I should otherwise say or do to reconcile with Moon, who had arguably transited from Mimas to Titan over the course of our heads-on collision. So well played, how she gained the upper hand with a full-blown diamond flush: Seemed I couldn’t break away, couldn’t stay away, either.

          Melissa had greeted me at the door moments before Regina Tzu returned from some of her Vedic vespers. A catnapped Moon quickly smoothed the waters with her organic, neighborly smile. She then said over our takeout bagelry snack that there was little she saw in Denise’s room that she hadn’t already painfully surmised—that Ms. Keiner didn’t belong here, either.  Moon knew her brainy grade school pal was on a recessive reel—that no assistantships, no further scholarships, no fellowships on earth could keep her from her duly appointed downs. 

          Denise had apparently chased her Wolverine gymnastic Vedonis out here to oblivion.  Naturally, he’d left her packing sand castles on some state beach north of Asilomar, before vaulting his way to Stanford’s fieldhouse.  So she was working through that, from a foam pad in the Richmond District to the retreatful shores and hillsides of Bahia, Mexico.  No big thing—even Regina Tzu, her ever-burdened and bothered silversmith roomie, aligned with Denise’s southern gravitational pull—razor sharp and sardonic as she presently was in her devotional black maxi-vest and flapping bell bottoms.  But this Thibeaux character…

          “Then what’s goin’ on here. I mean, like, where’s the scenario?” Thibeaux Cauler was clearly the oblique angle in Denise’s household triumvirate. How had she put it to Moon, the resident Rastafarian fuzzball on their woolliest of flings. “No sense gettin’ all stoked out about it, right? Han Loon’s got too much primo pork fried rice waitin’ for that…”

         Thus at Thibeaux’s invitation, we secured Moon bags in Denise’s room and piled into the squareback, bound for Chinatown, or wherever, leaving Regina Tzu to her own devices. I drew comfort from the diversion, although not nearly enough to quell the brain rage that seemed to be riding back in on that fog bank far down Fulton Street.

          “Yo, yeah—there’s somethin’ I’m supposed to be tellin’ you,” Thibeaux mused from center seat rear, elbows straddling atop both bucket seats. He was a spare, somewhat beguiling minstrel in hand-embroidered brown cords, a gold V-neck pullover and unraveling blue blazer. Slapping dramatically at his forehead, he nudged back his knit Afro scull cap, scrunching its rasty red, yellow, green and gold-layered bands to reveal a receding, close-cropped hairline. “Damn, it’ll come to me before we hit Russian Hill…”

          “Russian Hill,” Melissa balked, though not daring to look over her shoulder—hunger pangs having set in, fore and aft. “I thought we decided on Chinese.”

          “That’s where Han Loon’s is,” he replied, tugging at his tangled beard, then laying several long-fingered taps on my shoulder. “Just cut across Park Presidio toward the bridge, dig? So we can shoot up Lombard Street.” 

          “I heard the Russians and Chinese don’t get along, keep seeing red,” she cracked, as she jabbed my knee for some jerky response to her homespun stab at comedic relief. “Yuh, uh, ahh…” This time, I glared silently, checking my rearviews, lying low on the accelerator, skimming the traffic lights, as well.

          “Just do it, mah man,” Cauler urged, “before that fog snakes in here and freezes our sorry asses.”

          “Can’t have that,” Moon smirked, glancing over to me, as if gauging my vital signs, studying my shifts. She counted one-thousand-one to one-thousand-ten under her breath, then peered off again into the streaming Park Presidio traffic, at the overcrowded bus stops on most every block. “Now, can we…”

          Those vital signs were as obscure and constrained as the MacArthur Tunnel, as convoluted as the exit ramps curving off 19^th Avenue to Doyle Drive. I rode hard and heavy along Crissy Field’s bayside perimeter through the Marina, across Van Ness to the Russian Hill climb—peripherally eyeing Syd’s place, not to mention the wiles of Lafayette Park. I twitched, fretted, muttered and flushed—seemingly all at once—reactions radically out-of-synch with the overwrought trickle of conversation, not to mention the blur of beauty and bull run traffic passing by.

          “There, cut over to Union, then right on Hyde,” Thibeaux spouted, with palpable reprieve, breaking between his sing along with the second and third stanzas of ‘That’s the way of the World’ on KYA radio. He was a gritty little tenor, somewhere betwixt Richie Havens and Lionel Ritchie, but with an amphetamine timbre to his voice that paced the boomy tabula riffing on my seatbacks. “Gotta get me one of them penthouses up there on Leavenworth.”

          I throttled rashly through converging cable cars, Melissa holding fast to her seat until we rolled to relative safety down Jackson Street. “Tsk, really, Kenny—you…”

          “Like, with one of them wraparound sundecks lookin’ out over Alcatraz…hey, that’s it—on the corner—where they’re lined up out the door. Man, there’s even a spot…there’s never a spot up here,” Thibeaux shouted, nearly crawling over the seatbacks. “You folks must be real karmic…”

          “Ask her about it,” I grumbled, as I backed lamely into the parallel space along Hyde Street. I rocked six times before leveling out, nailing an orange Morris Minor behind us, then crunching the purple Ghia up ahead. “Too damn tight…”

          “Tight?! Kenny you knocked off that guy’s bumper guard,” Moon swiveled for and aft. “What’s with you?”

          “No problem,” I shut the Volks down.

          “But it’s just dangling there,” she insisted, after springing out of the wagon.

          “I said, no sweat, alright?!” Before I could lock off the ignition key, a radio news brief led with reports that beyond an IRS investigation into Peoples Temple finances, Jonestown defector accounts had recently alleged an increase in Jim Jones’ White Night’ paranoia scrambles—complete with faked deaths, punch bowl truth tests and firearmed formations—along with more toxic ‘sexual servicing’ marathons and ‘Revolutionary Suicide’ exercises. None of this had been verified, however, by either the U.S. Embassy or Guyana authorities. Details at the top of the hour…

          “Strange trippins’, ain’t that right,” Thibeaux echoed, crawling out Melissa’s door. “But everybody crunches everybody in this town. “Just sceeve’ em and leave ’em be…”

          Moon riveted me, but I stood gazing away vacantly across Hyde. Then I dawdled well behind as Thibeaux obligingly escorted her to line’s end. Han Loon was a simple won-ton and guy pan parlor of brimming local legend. A one-time corner grocery anchoring a squash yellow three-story Victorian spin off, this shoeshine stand of a storefront had sprouted into THAT secret little soy palace, which newly ordained natives suffered unbearably to hip their way into.

          “How long’s the wait,” Moon buttoned up her wool car coat, not nearly so euphoric as those now gaining on the door.

          “Hey, who knows,” Cauler grinned, tugging in on his lapels as a westerly gust tore up Jackson. “Ten, half-hour, maybe…”

          “Come on,” she groaned, “there must be a zillion Chinese restaurants here…”

          “Not this good, or this cheap,” he countered, “or stone uncomfortable.”

          CLANG, CLANG, squeesh, clang,clang… An indisputable perk to this streetcorner vigil was the clattering, whirring Hyde Street line—an irrepressible procession of tourist-thick cable cars that turned Wharfward at Jackson. Raving, arm-waving ninnies dripping off each succeeding car were enough to stem one’s gluttonous urges in short order. But the kicker was they were doomed to tourist greaseries as sure as if they had been crammed into paddy wagons, however close their brush with this neighborhood Mandarin mecca.       

          “Brown rice, after my bagel, that’s all I want,” Melissa muttered, a full party of three squeezing out the front doors and two self-styled New Age Asians slipping in. “Bet they don’t even have that. Honestly, it can’t be worth all the hassle. I’d never make customers wait like this at my Coach Light Inn back in Boulder.”

          But she seemed more hassled by me, and the way I’d shuffled aimlessly across the street. She spotted me circling the squareback like a smog inspector, picking up that bumper guard, setting it carefully on the Minor’s hood. I then wandered toward the third storefront up from the corner—was that a laundromat, or what…but spun back around.

          “Awww, where’s your sense of adventure, missy,” Thibeaux hooted.

          “I’ve had my adventure for today, thank you…”

          I finally legged alongside a creaking, turning cable car as if poised to jump aboard, but instead paused and tailed over to them as they matriculated to the head of Loon’s long, famished wait line.

          “What was that all about, Kenny,” she snapped as I returned. “You were sniffing around there like Seamus for a tree.”

          “Just checking out the bumpers…and stuff,” I answered, distant as that cable car climbing way up Hyde Street to the final Russian Hill ridge, then slipping otter-like down the far side toward Aquatic Park.

          “You’re the absolute limit, you know that?” Moon scowled, until Thibeaux split the different difference before him.

          “The fog,” he grinned, yanking down his cap in the breeze.

          “Beg your pardon,” she poked me in the ribs for some sort of rise.

          “It’s the fog…”

          “But there’s no fog over here! Kenny…”

          “No, man,” Thibeaux replied slyly. “The fog in the head, dig?”

          “Quick,” I said, “we’re next…”

          Han Loon’s corner table opened abruptly, a couple who’d choked on their fortune cookies finally caught the waiter’s pushy sneer. They looked to be art school émigrés with a severe tea fetish, and possibly the only reason they left at all was that Number Two Loon had sealed off the water closet with a solid stack of rice sacks.

          “Please,” the young, white-coated waiter beckoned.

          “Excellent, table one,” Thibeaux grinned. “I caught The Juice spellin’ here once.”

          “What’s excellent about spilling Juice?” Moon said, hesitating before Cauler could smoothly take her coat and seat her.

          “Not juice, Moon,” I sighed, slumping into the corner windowsill bench. “O.J. Simpson, the football player…”

          “So what’s football got to do with fog, already?” She could play that maddeningly obtuse card whenever she well pleased.

          We bellied up to a front table that looked directly out to the cable car turn, as well as that laundromat across Hyde. Once the waiter covered us with menus and tea, the cause of that lengthy wait became abundantly clear. For Han Loon’s consisted of no more than eleven bridge-size tables with red/gold vinyl chairs jigsawed into an impossibly narrow dining configuration. The only breathing room was directly overhead—rotating fans and fluorescent fixtured, smoke inverted dead space that capped off at approximately 18 feet.

          “Wrong fog again, baby,” Thibeaux clucked, while pouring Cameroon into their creamer-like china cups. “This fog settles in over the mind, affects the thinkin’. Stomps in on elephants’ feet, messes up the enephrins and receptors, if you catch my drift.”

          “Tell me about it,” Melissa scoffed, again fishing me for leers, nods, anything but brain-dead receptors.

          Nevertheless, my eyes wafted off into the cellish backroom kitchen, where three generations of Loons prepped about the hot, smoky cubicle like fire ants having at a sticky caramel bun. Then, another bell-beating cable car drew me once more to the squareback and laundromat—those Speed Queens and that battered, coin-filching pay phone. Wait a second here…

          “It’s a fatal affliction,” Cauler continued, tapping his index finger against his right temple. “Hits damn near every newcomer to San Francisco—clogs up the ol’ chimney—makes you lose your balance and perspective…even self respect, if you ain’t watchful.”

          “As in Denise,” Moon muttered. She followed my eyes across Jackson, spotting the Morris Minor’s driver as he soured and tossed his mangled bumper guard, kicked the squareback, then pulled away. “Or…”

          This wasn’t right, I stewed silently, glancing one table over to a nurse leafing through the day’s Clarion. The newsrag heralded a front page City Hall probe on how, barely weeks after their swearing-in ceremony, newly elected Board Supervisors were already busy drawing divisive lines—beginning with Districts 8 and 5. Christ, gimme some news I could use…

          “Denise, for sure! S’like regular normal people fall into this killer funk—just float on ’round with foghorns blarin’ in their ears. Hey, I know—happened to me soon as I got here from St. Loo. Ya’ ozone out and the days just truck on and you be hangin’ out with just you and your foghorns. Some folks never gets past it…”

          “St. Louis,” she warmed, finger ringing her tea cup.

          “Sure, that be Tara, baby,” Thibeaux grinned, between cooling sips. “The arch, Leclede’s Landing, West End Gaslight…”

          “We’re from Chicago originally, like Denise…”

          Hell with Chicago, I brooded.

          “Midwest, what it is,” he gushed, “Chi be cool, too…”

          “That’s not what Kenny thinks.” In truth, she appeared to be becoming too fretful to wonder what was tumbling through my mind. “He thinks it’s slow death.”

          It’s suffocation compared to here…

          “Well, at least there, not everybody’s shuckin’, coppin’ poses,” Cauler replied, drawing down his tea. “Either doin’ or getting’ done to. Why you think these chicks got me around? ’Cause they love my coily hairs in their bathroom sink?! Naw, I be just the handy man, unnerstand? Best to have one around. Denise got wasted one night and said I was like their liaison. Man, it’s more like three cc’s of Swine Flu vaccine or a humongous damn rubber. Me—I sees it more like their beacon in the fog bank. Those two chicks is so into chasin’ their tails, they don’t know what the hell really be goin’ down.”

          “So, what is going down?” Moon probed, however warily, as if thinking Denise couldn’t be…

          “No panic, sister. It be nothin’ like that,” Thibeaux shrugged. “They be way too flaked for my action. I just feels for ’em, that’s all, school ’em some on the R&B. And the crib’s basically copasetic, so sometimes I just crash on the couch.”

          Screw Regina Tzu, screw Denise! Gotta get out of this…lessee, Heider’s Balance— if  A mugs B and B cuffs A, then C is impelled to…aww, screw that, too…

          The junior Loon soon scooted over, sieving between nearby tables, teapot and pad in hand. “Ah, you order, yes?”

          “Now, Chin,” Thibeaux winked, closing his red vinyl menu cover, passing it over to Melissa. “In the now…”

          Now, for sure…so San Fran’s not my speed? I don’t belong, huh?  Then what about reaching my damn potential here?!”

          “Ewww, I don’t know,” she wriggled, picking at her front teeth with her half-chewed fingernail. “Just a little sliced chicken with the rice. Kenny?”

          “Kenny, KENny,” Cauler mocked, poking my menu.

          “No matter, really…” Christsake, I couldn’t help but stare at the laundromat. Especially given Han Loon’s red-tasseled décor, the mythical Mandarin gardens framed and plastered like Maograms all over the back wall. Those gardens…get out of these gardens…I can do anything outside here—sky’s the limit, dildo, anything less is just settling…

          “Wow, then allow me,” Thibeaux smacked, through his bramble beard, pulling my menu away at will. “Chin, let’s do the Cauler mix, what say? Start with the Sub Gum Yee Foo Won-ton, all around. Then, how ’bout some sides of Yang Chow Fried Rice, Sam See Chow Fun, Curry Beef with bean cake, Lychee Chicken and Mushroom Chow-Yuk—all right? Oh, and some crispy fried oysters with the won-ton.”

          “Yes,” Chin Loon beamed, scribbling furiously.

          “Is that as much as it sounds,” Melissa gasped, “we…”

          “Hey, baby, no panic,” he eased, flinging the menu back toward me. “I got some col-lat-er-alll…”

          Stop calling her baby, you…aww, what the fu…wait—things were all settled; now they’re not..I can do this, why else would I come back…yeah, over there…

          A quick, precision kitchen drill, and the won-ton was in the now, replete with wrapped chopsticks and those stubby, flat-bottom plastic spoons. As Thibeaux ladled the steamy soup and Moon hand wrestled her sticks, I cut one last glance at the laundromat, sprang from my bench, and suddenly was the wind. “Just whatever she’s having,” I muttered, darting out the door. “Back in a sec…” Moral dilemma, moral hazard, moral failing—dissonance run wild. No choice…got to do this… got to do this now…be the best I can be, gotta make this right before it’s too late…

          “Kenny?” Melissa dropped both chopsticks onto her plate in disbelief. She focused on me—as if to stop me in my tracks, remote control. She looked like a mother losing her first-born to pre-school, fearful and abandoned. “Must be feeding the meter,” she smiled awkwardly, fiddling with her sticks amid the noodles and water chestnuts.

          “What meter,” Thibeaux asked, watching her wrestle her sticks from the chicken fried rice. “Not in this ’hood, not here on lower Russian Hill  today anyway.”

          I raced broken field across the intersection, dodging the inbound cable car that lurched along Hyde Street, not to mention the Renault squeezing past its blind side. Moon watched me bereftly as I stood off the honking LeCar, kicking its front bumper before storming into the coin laundry. I watched her watch me, our eyes clashing defiantly across Hyde as Thibeaux motored on over his Chow Yuk. Then, contact lost—distance building between us as if through an extending zoom lens. It all played out before me as I reached for that pay phone. The vision became even clearer while I fumbled for nickels and dimes in my pockets. Make that call…you gotta make the call, asshole…dial the damn phone…

          They seemed to shout it a cappella in my ear: the old Vietnamese woman from her second story window overlooking Jackson Street; the Chinese kids chasing one another down the block, the Turk watching his Doberman hike leg all over that scrawny curbside tree. Operator, operator…push those buttons…reach out…make that call. Palms drenched, finger trembling, I popped the coins and played my tune. The phone call of my life rang repeatedly with no audible relief. Be there, be there for me, goddammit…be there for me one more time!!!

          “Hello?”

          “Finally! Thank God…”

          “What? Who is…”

          “Sydney—oh, Christ, Syd…it’s me!”

          “Kenneth,” she replied flatly.

          “Syd, listen. That wasn’t me talking before, you know that! I just did the spiel for Moon’s sake. You know, ease her down. I mean, I owe her that before…”

          “Before what, Kenneth, before what? There is no what.”

          “Syd, honey…we’ve gotta talk this out…”

          “God, you’re really sick, you know that?!”

          “Sydney, come on!”

          “Come on, nothing,” she raged. “That wasn’t how this was supposed to go, flash. You blew it royally, sold me out because you weren’t man enough to do the right thing when everything went down. And here I was, thinking you’re the one, a real tzadik, when you’re really just a little worm like Martin Kavalla. Who knows what the devil else you are capable of? Hmph, come on…if nothing else, you owe me—you owe me big time! And I’ve half a mind to bill you at the first of the month.”

          “What? Our plans, our future, we…I’ll do anything for our everlovin’ cause…”

          “Otherwise, just do me this. Get out of my life, okay?! And Kenneth? This time make it stick.”

          “Sydney,” I cried. CLICK. Bzzzzzzzz. The washers and tumble dryers rumbled in my head as I dropped the receiver. I inhaled a lint clot of clean clothes and stale detergent on my way out the door, to a cable car of laughing, waving tourists turning toward me off Jackson Street.

          “Look out, fool,” the grip man shouted, levering his car onto Hyde. The whirring and clacking cables chewed through my mind like tandem chainsaws, drowning even the steel-on-steel gnashing of the outbound car’s antiquated wheels. My gut wrenched tightly at the hot, thick odor of Chow Fun and Ginger Beef from Han Loon’s kitchen vents. How I avoided being nailed by the passing Pinto, I didn’t know.

          I glanced back past the laundromat to my Volkswagen. Might as well run, might just as well hop into that heap and split altogether. But another inbound cable car rattled around the Jackson Street curve, drawing me once again toward Han Loon’s, to the window where Melissa stared me down.

          “Kenny, what is it,” she asked anxiously, the moment I shuffled dead weight into the restaurant. “Sit here by me…”

          “Hey, man,” Thibeaux glanced up from his Chow-Yuk. “What’s shakin’?”

          “Nothing,” I grumbled, taking my place back on the window bench. “Had to call the VW dealer, make a service appointment, that’s all. But they were already closed…”

          “Tsk, here,” Moon sighed, knowing better, filling my plate with bean cake and Curry Beef. “You look like you could use some service yourself.”

          “Phone call, that’s it,” Thibeaux snapped to, as if coming out of a ganja fog, mushrooms dropping like flies into his Cameroon. “You had a phone call from your father. Regina Tzu gave me the message…”

          “Yeah, well,” I asked, watching him fingerpick them out of a much too tiny cup. Dad…calling? My dad never calls anybody…

          “Uh, let’s see,” Cauler frowned, before stabbing at my beef for inspiration. “Oh, right…it’s your ol’ lady, man. Something about she’s suddenly not hittin’ on all eight, understand? I think he wants you to call him, like right away…”

          “Really,” I melted, Melissa grasping my knee. Why the hell didn’t mom tell me about this when I called the other night?!

          “Would I lie ’bout somethin’ like that,” he replied. “Say, you gonna eat those fried oysters?”

Care for more?

Chapter 35. Another dubious decampment 
beats a path laden with past remorse 
and painfully present remonstrations…

∞ End of STAGE ONE ∞

 

 

“A pause that refreshes
could serve to re-stir some
moldering green stew.”

  “Cos no foul deeds go bleedin’ unpunished, ’tis why…”

  “O’ Jaysus, here’s t’ poor Dan’l McCooey—waz inn’cent as the dayz long, alrigh…”

   “T’was like kin—butta mere chil’, an’ the limey eegits beat ’im to a pulp in ’iz own hometown. Itz bin goin’ on abou’ a year now, don’tcha know—cheeses me off  like the way the’ treatin’ who the’ callin’ our Irish prisoners o’ war.”

   Shaken and stirred, I needed a break in the action/reaction, a moment’s breathing room to calm my neural commotion; if not a measure of intrapersonal conflict resolution amongst an outside deliberative body. Jet lagged and sandbagged, Melissa herself longed for some catnapping—a little emotional space and separation. It was me-time to regroup, to pause and reflect—to reconnect, and retrace tribal roots—couldn’t hurt to get more core religion, if only for a momentary spell.

  So I had quietly eased Moon into Denise’s place, hanging on to her old friend’s keys, offering to go back out and hunts us up something to nosh on. Not daring to test Regina Tzu’s hospitality with the meaty aroma of piroshkis or Macs, I fully intended to scarf up some Van Hermann’s salads on Geary Boulevard, or a couple of conciliatory cinnamon-raison smears and Calistogas from that bagel house. Instead, I diverted and reverted, fighting off more Saturn amulet research up in Lafayette Park, steering toward a little post-St. Patrick’s cheer in here.

If the inner Richmond was essentially what remained of a Mission-style Irish ghetto, the Rectory Tavern represented its sacrarium, the best blessed altar of Celtic spirits this side of Clement Street, and I couldn’t get past its hellish titian facade. For better or worse, convened along this padded railing was a low mass of devoted worshippers from the single digits of San Francisco’s numbered avenues, though the fold on hand most resembled a regular friary—playing the lottery, scribbling Racing Forms, paging through the Irish Herald, rolling the bones.

Parked along Geary, I had basically genuflected and shoehorned onto a black backed stool around the mahogany bar’s rearward bend, aside these two ruddy, shaggy, rugby-shirted hardnecks. Niall and Declan sounded as if being recently off an Aer Lingus red-eye, acclimating and commiserating over the jet lag, pint by cream heady pint. Bygone rucksack Vasques on the Ol’ Sod told me from their northern brogue that they were Ulsterites fleeing to the States, bitter Republicans backpacking their Troubles along with them. Could have been Provos, splintered OIRAs or IRSPs, over to plumb the U.S. shamrock pipeline for the Old Country cause. Although that was beginning to sound best case, at best.

“Ay, speet on ’em, Niall—an’ suure, lik’n th’ say, revenge tis a dish served sweet an’ cold,” said Declan, as they partook of their virgin mother’s milk, coming via Harp Lager and Guinness Stout. “But howayeh ’spectin’ t’ evin’ ’em back, mate—wha’ yer plan?”

 “Shi’e, tis too late t’ manky the Queen’s jubilee, alrigh’,” Niall replied, with a tip of the mug. “Mebbe can’t do annythin’ ’bout makin’ tha’ feckin’ gowl Paisley disappear from way ove’ here, either…”

“So how’d yeh figure t’…

 “Not t’ fear, gobdaw. I’ve heard that oul’ baldy Callaghan himself migh be comin’ across on official blame holliers some time this year. Saw o’ the telly the stupih spanner’s aimin’ for some commem’rtive fald’ral on Battl’ o’ th’ Boyne Day this summer, o’ somewhe’ b’tween tha’ an’ Poppy Day later in November. Boyne Day, boil o’ me bleedin’ arse—we’ll gi’ im somethin’ t’ r’member.”

  Nunnamybizness—not me, couldn’t be—eyes dead ahead: I swallowed hard on the down draft, soaking in Rectory’s raging ambience. The pub remained awash in aprés St. Patrick’s Day revelry, Guinness pennants and Bushmill’s bunting all about the place, harboring a snifter of overcooked CB&C. Its backbar was a high, hatched wall of Irish whiskey, rye and Heather Wine: Wild Geese to Glendalough Malt to Midleton Rare and Jameson Gold, Bailey’s, Irish Mist and a wee dram of Drambuie sweetening the arch-faced, beveled shelves.

Gracing the broader barroom were large, huge Tricolor flags, a coast-to-coast team of squadron of rally towels, from USF to Notre Dame and Boston’s Celtics framing centered tabernacle—from which flowed chalices of hopped-up holy water like Smithwick’s Ale and Beamish Stout with a Feinian touch, and patens of mini pretzels and crisps.

My eyes skirted about mounted photos of a Cork-Kerry football showdown, hurling in Dublin’s Croke Park. Lining the walls like Stations of the Cross were landscapes of Hags Head at sunset, the Rock of Cashel, rainy Lough Leane, sun-spotty skies over MacGillycuddy’s Reeks and the Gap of Dunloe. War lording over us stood framed sepiatone portraits of Colbert, Connolly, O’Hanrahan and even Michael Collins, freedom fighting guerillas ‘Punisher’ Dan Breen and Tom Barry, with a wretched, ink-stained wink to Joyce and Padraig Pearce.

“The Prime Min’ster? Comin’ t’ where?”  They sucked down their sacraments in unison.

“Ay, the very same lib-lab queerhawk wha’ just ordered more Britz troops into the North, t’ help gang up the RUC and UDR agin’ us,” Niall said, aiming to wash down a pretzel with another deep draw of lager. “Comin’ t’ San Francisco here, yet. So coul’ be we can whack his crook’d Cardiff arse whe’ the bollock’s bloody live.”

“Ou’ an’ em revoltin’ UFFer fuckers,” Declan lifted for a chug of the black stuff. “Y’ mean like a’ the University of Ulster hit?”

“Only bigga’ an’ bett’, mate—spot on target. Wha’ say we plant in ’nothe’ garden, this time the Britz’ pat’et’c Counsel General’s place. Itza posh gaff i’ the P’cific H’ites, no less…” 

 “Jaysus, up there? How i’ blazes yeh fancyin’ t’ pull tha’ twister off?”  Declan whipped out and tapping firm a crumpled back of filterless smokes.

“No’ me exactly, Dek, more like me an’ Ronan Corrigan, who jus’ happen’ t’ know Finnerty, who works w’ a bloke frum down Kerry way, runnin’ a storge barn here in town. Finn tis a hungry, undergrown’ chum by way o’ Armaugh, h’ is—who lost a cousin t’ the cause. Britz foot patrol plugged ’im in Derry. Yah, Ronan knows him personal…so ther’ y’are.”

  “God bless ’is seethin’ soul,” Declan finger scraped Stout head from his upper lip. “So I s’pose you be plannin’ t’ storm the spread or…”

  “No, stupih, oney a one off, nice an’ deadly clean—make the’ Poppy Day go bloody pop, crash the’ garden party, tha’s wha’.”

“O’ yis smashin’ ’im when i’ counts, eh? Wha’ a masta’ plan…”

  Oh, Christ, not Armaugh—don’t go dragging Armaugh into this, nothing wrong with Armaugh, ’cause dad’s kin’s from County Armaugh, bloody Scots-Irish, Jac—got that right…wait, that wasn’t to say I actually cottoned to the Prods for godsakes. So where the hell did that leave me?  High corner loudspeakers blared Thin Lizzy over the Rectory’s smoky pool and foosball tables behind us, Boomtown’s ‘Rat Trap’, some upstart numbers from no-names calling themselves U2.

It all had me reliving that Crosshaven folk festival full of Mickey McConnell and Christy Moore, scoops of local poteen, waking up in a dairy barn loft outside Skibereen—hitching and hoofing it over the Gap to pastelorful Killarney, meeting up with gladsome Kerry folk, mom’s people, sure and begorrah. Yet this brogual blarney here was presently steering me back more toward the drab bombed-out, boarded-up storefronts of Newry,  RUC gunpointers chasing me out of the Europa Hotel lobby 20 minutes before Bloody Friday rocked Belfast’s City Centre. Nasty business, that; nastier still right here: these guys had me re-waking to those furtive young IRA gun runners vanning me into their Bray hidey-hole all over again.

“Def’ny fair play an’ square, presheh ’em t’ smithereens,” Niall grinned, toasting his Harp, side-eyeing me with a suspicious warning glance—tossing some change into a bartop NORAID offertory bucket. “Who knows, mebbe oul’  Jimmy Carter’ll be ther’—tha’ banjaxed wanker preachin’ ’bout don’ givin’ no money t’ us Northern Irish. Well, God bless Dan’l McCooey, here’s to the Cause!!” 

 “Wha’ever, ’cept tha’ sound like jus’ y’ be spoutin’ off, Niall,” Declan gestured to the barkeep for two more jars, as they fired up a couple of Sweet Afton fags. “Yis talken ou yer bloody hat, alrigh…”

  “Oh, ya? Try me—done already scoped ’er ou’, learnt the ropes, mate. Tis a statl’y oul’ Tudor Revival job on a big gardened lot—prime for snookerin’ an’ sabotage. Meantime, Ronan an’ his rollin’ pin manage some movin’ lorries, we ca’ hook on w’ em. So shut y’ cake-hole an’ pull yer socks up, mate, let’s git o’ th’ yokes. Suure as Bloody Sunday, as God’s me witness, God save Ireland, God save all o’ it!”   

Whoa, incendiary sabotage—they couldn’t have been serious could they? Pray tell, I didn’t actually hear that, did I? Wasn’t really a party to all this? Aww, it must have been just the brew talking, or the brew taking it in. Anyhow, I wasn’t one of those blokes myself, right? Maybe I did bleed Tricolor on occasion, but rifles and bushwacking and things that go boom—no bloody way.

I for sure wasn’t running any rifles, wasn’t loading gelignite into baby buggies and blowing up bank branches or postal stations. Didn’t have that in me, did I, or did I? Could have been their way of talking about Gaelic football scrums at McLaren Park and the like, with something getting lost in the transliteration. Or maybe I was just hearing things, hearing voices, disembodied voices—yeasty voices, Yeats gone terribly mad. Had to have been the pints talking, if not just the bloody North. In any case, nothing brewing, nothing tapped: I couldn’t do anything about any of it anyway; had my own wrongs to right in the sour here and now, as in wondering what else Moon and Sydney had sorted and/or shouted out loud.

Still, the grudgy guff and gee-eyed pipedreams left me sipping my Courage in silence for the moment, down for the cause in theory, but scared increasingly shitless, bious and jaundiced—proud and petrified, tugged and torn, inherently borderline—feeling so halved and quartered, game skin mottled somewhere between green and orange.

Couldn’t quite tune them out, wasn’t about to turn them in— particularly for mere beeranting about some sketchy munitions planting. Guess I could grasp their passion, just couldn’t handle their playbook. Really didn’t need this pissing match now anyhow; but I sure as hell did need to hit the throne and bricks—reconfigure an aborted lunar landing, not to mention any personal cratering that ensued…

Care for more?

Chapter 34. This reframing and nod
toward reconciliation prompts an
awkward place setting, then a
heartburning turn of the tables…

         

 

 

“When caught between converging 
forces, it is seldom easy or thinkable 
to split the difference.” 

             “Sydney’s roost…speak or be spoken upon .”

          “Uh, Syd?”

          “Kenneth, fantabulous,” she cooed, “I’ve been waiting all alone here for you to call…”

          “Syd, we’ve got to talk…”

          “I know, I know, sweets. How did it go? I blew my parents away, but after some megahassle, I think Faith is behind us. That means Daddo will fall in line by tomorrow at the latest. After 20 some years, she can still work her overnight miracles. So, what about Moon?”

          “That’s what we’ve got to talk about…”

          “And I want to hear all about it, love…say, over dinner?”

          “No, uh—let’s make it soon as possible, okay? Like, right now…”

          “What’s wrong, Kenneth,” she asked edgily. “Where are you calling from? Sounds like there’s a blade at your throat.”

          “Please, Syd,” I gasped, “could we do this right away?!”

          “Hmph, I guess,” she said, reading what she could into my persistence, though not nearly enough. “It’s just that I was about to do my stretching. Oh, what’s the harm, can’t stay away from me, huh?”

          “Be there in a…flash.”

           I slid back into the squareback as if it were rigged with C-4 explosives. The closest pay phone we could find was beside Golden Gate Park’s Conservatory, and Melissa had a splendid view of the baiting. She looked bewildered there in the car, a basically gentle, caring creature suddenly driven to a two-bit ambush. I at once pitied, hated and needed her desperately. Christ, at least maybe my head would soon clear, like this afternoon’s unseemly skies.                           

          “Was she there?”

          “Yes,” I sighed, nearly flooding a fouled, very cranky engine, pulling away sharply from the stunning white Victorian Conservatory of Flowers, fairly tousling its colorful beds and full, lofty palms in a cloud of fuelly dust.

          I begged for every red light in sight, for a blow-out, a molten generator, disengaging differential—anything seriously disabling—something on which AAA could run a major tab. I’d have circled the park and Presidio until Labor Day if I could have coped with the glacial silence, if my attention span wasn’t shorter than a Van Ness Avenue yellow light. My mindless click of the radio brought up some new Paul Davis single, ‘I Go Crazy’. Potting that down, my only immediate salvation was the inevitable dearth of parking around Sydney’s apartment building. “Hopeless, as usual. We’d probably been better off taking MUNI…maybe we should just forget this whole thing… ”

          “There, Kenny,” Melissa pointed down Franklin. “That van’s pulling out at the corner. Well, is that close enough or…”

          Oh, right. I was looking to wear tire grooves into the pavement three blocks in every direction, and this Econoline camper gets generous four doors from Verdun. “Shall we,” I muttered, helping her out in a rush of downhill traffic. She apparently felt no urge to reply.          

          “Here’s her place,” I nodded, as we approached Sydney’s Victorian. “Pretty nice, huh? That amazing goldish gingerbread trim…”

          Again, silence. Melissa fussed with a creamy garlic smudge on her muslin peasant blouse, then fluffed her full-length whortleberry print skirt. She was facing off with her spiritual sister, her femme ideal; the place might as well have been all but ablaze.

          “This is wrong, Moon. You know that deep down,” I moaned as we crossed Coastal Avenue and angled beneath the sidewalk awning.

          “Which floor,” she countered, approaching the brass-trimmed front door.

          “We’d better take the elevator…” I waved and smiled weakly at Ivar, who opened the door for us, then quizzically eyed Melissa all the way up to floor number three. We were otherwise dead still, stepping out onto deep pile green carpeting. I led the way over to 316, like two battlefield casualties at a VA Medical Center, the brown jumpsuited manager rheo-levering his birdcage back down to the lobby.

          “Who is it,” Sydney sang, soon after I banged her polished door knocker.

          “Syd, it’s me, Ken,” I blurted, inserting myself between Melissa and the off-white door. Moon slipped stiffly to the right, several steps down the hall.

          “Kenneth,” Sydney flipped the deadbolts and opened with a flourish, peekhole covered with Edie’s sunset poster of Mt. Hood. “I didn’t know who was knocking! How did you get in here soooo…”

          Before she could move nearer me, Melissa cut between us, quicker than a point guard, hair and hemline flying with caped rage. I was stunned by her lightning aggression—so totally unlike her—as instinctive and territorial as a litter-protecting cat.

          “Moon, what,” Sydney gasped, pushing at her door reflexively, as though holding back some serial rapist. “What’s going on here?! Kenneth…” she snugged her white robe sash at the collar.

          “How could you, Sydney,” Melissa cried, peddler-wedging into the closing portal. “You knew where things stood…”

          “Wait a minute here, Moon,” she searched, gathering herself. “Pardon me, but the trip out here was your idea in the first place, and I thought I was bringing us all closer together… Kenneth?”

          I stood there, alright, two steps from the crash site, but nowhere to be found. What else could I do but hand her the belated gift of Josh’s box, having recalled it being under the VW’s rear seat?

          “I sent you off with trust, you spoiled little witch,” Melissa screamed, in a voice six times her size. “Just had to do it, didn’t you…couldn’t let it be, wouldn’t just leave me be!”

          “Witch,” Sydney countered, snatching the package, otherwise yielding slightly her press against the gold-colored door moulding. “May I remind you where you are? I think you’d best leave my home this instant!”

          Huh? What did Moon mean, leave her be? What was with this deal jumping so many steps? They now met toe-to-toe in the doorway. I could do little but plaster myself back to the foyer, bracing for a blindfold and cadre fire.

          “Don’t I mean anything to you anymore,” Moon shrieked, tears streaking the rouge traces on her chipmunk cheeks. “Haven’t you the slightest shred of decency, for godsakes? You’re worse than your brother. Just let me move on with my life, will you please? I’m only trying to move on!”

          “Decency, to you? What about me,” Sydney shouted coldly. “And what about Kenneth. It’s got to do with us now, not you…”

          “No, wait a,” I sputtered.

          “Shut up, Kenny,” Melissa snapped. “This is between Sydney and me! I can’t believe you said that, you miserable bit…”

          “Oh, kiss off, Moon,” Syd recoiled. “If you were 100% there for him, this wouldn’t have happened—just like with Lester. Shit, sneaking out here, little Miss Gumdrop. Well, grow up. I know better and so does he!” She shot a venomous glance at me, nostrils flaring—sizing me up, probing my frozen face frantically for support. “Tell her, Kenneth. Tell her you can do so much better than the likes of…”

          “Oh, and that would be you, I suppose,” Melissa replied, shaken to the spine by the depth of Sydney’s vitriol. “Yyyou…the princess who couldn’t change a panty shield without Faith’s help!!”

          “Leave my mother—that’s right, my mother—out of this,” Syd volleyed. “Hmph, wouldn’t you love to know she’s behind our decision all the way. That’s how much you mean to her, toots. Blood’s thicker than charity, even with Faith—no matter the milk of human kindness BS, no matter who all’s involved. So you’d better stop with the bad-mouthing my heartsick brother, and haul your dumpy tush out of here before I brain you one.”

          “Oh, Sydney, dear God,” Melissa wept madly, somewhat bedazed by what she had just heard. “And you make it sound like Kenny was really a willing part of this…”

          “I beg your pardon…” Sydney explored Moon’s draining face, then glanced once more my way. I was still standing there, speechless, mummified, overbite puckering, the last man standing along the Maginot line.

          “That’s right. Kenny, tell her how ‘together’ you two really are,” Melissa sobbed. “Go ahead, tell her what you just told me. You tell her, you…you…”

          “Kenneth?”

          They both turned to me—two spent shells begging sustenance from the sole surviving source. But that source was far more depleted than either of them could have imagined. “I-I-I just don’t know what to tell you, really,” I despaired, shaking my head as though a cutting, distant coma had muscled in—I didn’t want this, dammit, did I really make way for this? “I mean, what do you want me to say?”

          “Kenneth, come on,” Sydney urged, snapping her fingers thrice. “Our plans, our common goals…how the little clinger here is holding you back. Our future together, dammit! Kenneth…Ken…”

          “By all means, Kenny, let’s talk about the future,” Melissa rallied. A quiver borne of restirred panic pierced the firmness of her intent. It was as if, for the first time, she couldn’t read my mind before I spoke it. And what did Sydney mean, ‘human kindness, no matter who all’s involved’?

          “Hold it now, just hold it,” I exploded, flailing my arms like a traffic bobby in Trafalgar Square. A lightening throb split my cranium, fore to aft, wider than the rift between Beijing and Taipei. For the first time, I couldn’t read my own mind before I spoke it. Best to say nothing; but at the moment, my best wasn’t good enough. With a henchman’s misgivings, I set my tongue free for all to witness, however terrified that the three of us would swing from every word.

          “Sydney,” I sighed, “whew, Sydney—I’ve never met anybody like you. Anyone so strong and determined, so totally gifted. Several months ago, somebody like you could only be a dream goddess with golden wings and brushes, that I could only read about in magazines. Christ on a crutch, how could I not respond…”

          “You said I was the best thing that ever happened to you,” Syd cried, somewhat gilding the lily. “You told me that, Kenneth, in the park…”

          “Kenny? What park?!”

          “No, uh, maybe that’s what you inferred, but,” I groped, both beautiful faces fixed on me, fawns in the headlamps. “Figuratively…I don’t remem…did I actually say that?! No, I—what I’m trying to say is…well…you’re way up here…”

          I motioned above my head, then below my waist, with leavened palms. My face contorted slowly as I spoke, from reasoned control to turgid apostasy to dark, wrenching resignation—a sinking barometer indicative of the low pressure deep within. “And I’m like, down here, you know? Face it, you’re outta my league, so stop rattling my cage, alright? You can’t just descend and flash all your damn freedom and resources at me, pumping me up with hot air. It’s not fair. I’ll accept that I’m some regular slob who’s gotta get out there and scrape. I know my place, for Christsake! And all your potential and possibilities aren’t gonna change that one iota.”

          “Kenneth,” Syd gasped, slipping a bit more behind her door. “I’ve not once wanted anything but the best for you, believe me.”

          “Well, just don’t. Don’t want anything for me, okay? I’m just lucky to have a great woman like Moon willing to take it with me—as it comes—all the crap and any good that slips through. You’re not real; she’s real! She’s been there, keeping me glued together, not twisting me all outta shape like you!”

          I gazed fearfully upon them, burning to hold both, incapable of touching either. Their images blurred together, then poles apart—in and out—transposing like fluid cells under a molecular microscope to the tabour pounding of my brain. Sleek and earthy, blonde and henna brunie, blue eyes and brown—mystifyingly exotic, if not Ashki and Seph.

          “Leave me be, I’m telling you! Just leave me the hell alone!!” The more I released, the more the throbbing took hold: a quickening heartbeat in a loudspeaker stethoscope. Suddenly, SNAPPPPPPP…like a lightning strike to the noggin.

          “I didn’t want this,” I wailed, eyes sinking to the floral hall runner, “I never…you think I wanted any of this?!” Think I’m getting some kind of buzz here? You’ve no right to rip me apart this way—divvying me up like found spoils. What do you two want from me?! No, stop it—stop it right now. I want out, outta here where you can’t tear at me. Swear I didn’t want this, did so…Mother of God get me outta here…they’re vicious, hurting me real bad…don’t wanna stay no more…do too…wanna rest, a little nap…maybe some tea and toast, like before, mom, put on some of that singer you love—Vaughn Monroe, that Mario Lanza guy…crooning on our Silvertone radio…gotta, what’s that song they…that song…switch on ol’ Redhead Arthur Godfrey and Julius LaRosa…yah I Remember McNeil’s Breakfast Club, Hello America Paul Harvey’s ‘Page Two!’…no, bullshit, turn that godblasted old radio down!!!

          “Kenny,” Melissa shook me, “Kenny, listen, settle down. It’s all right, everything’s going to be all right now.” She hugged me and shot a menacing glance at Sydney. “Look, just look what you’ve done to him!”

          Sydney reeled, thoroughly shocked by the cave-in. She clutched her own terror-stricken face at what came of this game, turned and fled crying into her room.

          “Hey, what’s all the racket,” Ivar shouted, his elevator meeting floor three. “My other tenants—I won’t have this! You quiet down or I’ll call the police…”

          “Begging your pardon,” Melissa said firmly, doors flapping up and down the hall. “But I think it’s all over here.” Ivar stood firm nonetheless, his loudly colored macaw stunned squawkless on his shoulder, ball bat at his patch-pocketed side. “Come on, Kenny.”

          “Air…cool out,” I mumbled, “can’t breathe…gotta get some air now…”

          “That’s it, why don’t you go on down to the car,” she soothed, easing me warily into the elevator.

          “He okay?” Ivar asked, quickly giving ground.

          “Of course he is,” Moon replied firmly. “I’ll meet you out front, Kenny.”

          “Now, downstairs, out front,” I rambled, clawing the black birdcage metalwork.

          “Yes, Kenny…in a minute. I’ll be there soon as I take care of some things with her.”

          She waited until the barred door scissored closed, and marched into Sydney’s, leaving me with a warm, encouraging smile, albeit marginally contrived. Ivar stared through me until the elevator began its descent—a gruff, contemptuous look that seemed one finger removed from 911. If Sydney hadn’t banked all her charm and…chutzpah, the SWAT teams might have already arrived.

          Instead, once past the lobby’s crystalline chandeliers, its full gold-framed mirror and cornices, I was greeted by a brisk late-day gale, the kind that carried rain squalls in from the Farallons on afternoons less brilliant than today. It braced me like cold creekwater across morning growth—those wonderfully clear, tranquil mornings along the Continental Divide that now seemed so many meridians away.

          I tugged my plaid Woolrich collar up at the ears, then headed along Coastal Avenue on miscalibrated instruments. Pausing before a storybook next door Victorian, I inhaled the red fuchsia, the scarlet begonias vining through its wrought iron picket gate and fencing. An elegant blue/white-on-gray Italianate style townhouse, it was one of the few 1860s-era homes on this block that survived the 1906 earthquake, as well as the resulting firestorm that was stopped cold at Van Ness. Today, the Tolbert-Dolan House’s tiny front yard was lush with ferns and dwarf trees; still its enduring street corner splendor did little to stem my inner flare-up right about now.

           By the time I reached Franklin Street, ecdemic, screaming voices crossfired my skull so intensely as to physically rock me backward and cauterize the slingshot throbbing, left and right. Tell me, Kenneth…yes, tell her, Kenny…the truth, Kenny, lay it on the line…which is it going to be, Kenneth…decision time, Kenny…stand up, stay here, come home…you can do it all here…what in blue blazes are you doing here…you’ve got what it takes, Kenneth…you don’t belong here, Kenny…our plans, our future, Kenneth—I want…I need…you…no, I…you—focus, fool , if you’re chosen by the chosen people, choose wisely as you do…just don’t blow it again like you always do…gotta look out for number one for once, asshole… “Stop!!!!”

          Everybody kept pulling, prying, cracking open my cranium yanking at my whirling hemispheres with a gear greasy crowbar, splitting them like a stone chisel through modeling clay, a jackhammer blow from the inside out. Trauma, triage, Callosum compromised, drowning in cortisol, self-inflicted wound. Static synapses seared my pre-frontal cortex, crackled through my parietal lobes and limpic system like a plague of august fireflies and cicadas. Keep walking, go back, leave town, settle down—take Melissa, leave Sydney…dump Moon, hate…hug Syd, escape…go for…look out, that car…hell with that car…think, feel, flow with…drop it all for good…

          “Our Father, who art in heaven…Hail Mary, full of grace…”

          Those voices, where are those damn voices?! Kids, school prayer, church—that’s it, the courtyard, those blue Catholic uniforms…the nuns—black robes, the scapularies, catechism, CCD—ugly…chains, free, get free!! Honk, hoooonnnkkk…  

         “Hey, dildo, get off the damn street!”

          Honk you, car…kick your ass. Outta my way, man! Wanta get out but the skin wouldn’t give. Fight or flight, rewire into emergency mode. Nail that Plymouth grill…knock it to the water down there, to the hills. What’re those kids… basketball! In the gym…Center School gym, Coach Tyner, hoops, passing drills…homework to do…son there’s been a mishap…yeah, ma, I heard them…out walkin’ Laddie? Get…double dribble…this block…stuff the goddamn trucks, smokin’ down Broadway…funky neon Great White Way…garbage scows, filthy goddamn buses. Walking Seamus in the mountains, over the Divide…church organ, Sunday mass, communion, blue suit confirmation—no, ma…toothache, stomachache, eyes rollin’ back in my optical chiasmas to the searing Occipital Lobe, everything starting to look like a Braque Cubist-collagist refraction. Quit it…the pounding jackhammers, chainsaw log trucks, stinkin’ up Van Ness…smelly ass dopers in the donut shop…outta here, yeah, you! No, turn the corner, turn the page…too many buildings, cars…Transamerica Pyramid rising behind Russian Hill like a tire spike to my pounding steel-belting hippocortex…there, palm tree…in the mountains…get back to that cool and clear…gotta go back up and find that bloody Satalisman…outta the way before I swallow my tongue kill somebody!!!

          “Kenny! Kenny, over here,” Melissa waved, a bit more disheveled, at least so it appeared.

          The sight of her stanched the rapids momentarily, a makeshift dam on a wind-whipped reservoir. She jumped up from Sydney’s front stoop and ran to me, cloaking me to ease the visible vise grip across my brow. “Are you all right? Oh, you look like…come on, let’s get out of here, Kenny…let’s go right this minute.”

          “Flatirons, Seam…”

          “Huh? Sure, let’s go home to Seamus and Pags,” she said, stroking my neck. “We’ll get us all together again. Tsk, I must have been mad to let you come out to this. We’re going back to Boulder, Kenny…California isn’t for you, San Francisco isn’t your speed one bit…”

          I marshalled the base clarity to drive us over to Denise’s, such was the quick, ValioBenzoHalcion balm of Melissa’s presence. No labels, nothing said: I had trouble enough interpreting the gyroscopic tremors in my eyes—those pinwheel green and kaleidoscopic signs. Seemed she’d already resolved to leave me be until Colorado, if necessary.

          Lord, she’d never even seen me like this. But then, none of us had seen any of us like this. For her, it looked to be megatonnage, and no telling what all was rotting in my crisper. Yet she hinted she had seen shades of that Sydney before: the night Lester announced their engagement, the night Syd played leary shadchan and devil’s advocate at the Mendel family Seder.

          Weaving across Fulton Street into Golden Gate Park, I suddenly honked and cut toward a passing Fiat, swapping obligatory gestures, cursing through locked jaws, so as not to re-release those torrents, but just one lucid, tenacious thought. “So, what did you settle with her…”

          “Say again?” Moon replied, as if somewhat startled that I could remember back that far. She flipped on the radio, the Little River band singing, ‘…You’re there when I need you, lady. Let me take a look at you now…’.

          “With Syd,” I muttered, rushing to turn that AM volume down, neither blinking nor shifting my stare until we re-passed Rainbow Falls. “You said you had to take care of some things…”

          “Nothing,” she sighed, “absolutely nothing.”

          “I’ve got to know, Moon…”

          “Kenny, please don’t…it was just between her and me.”

          “That so,” I fumed, as we curved around Stow Lake to Park Presidio. “Well, nothing’s just between you and her anymore, it’s all glopped together in one big swirling sinkhole!”

          “Okay, okay…just relax,” she squealed, unsure at this point to what no-man’s land any more outbursts might take me. She stared through her side window, picking baby redwoods out of patchy fir and pine, seemingly fighting one emotion that never figured into her relationships: mild panic bordering on outright fear. “One thing I suppose you should know about dear, sweet Sydney is her first thought after you left the hallway. Did she worry about your condition, where you were going? No, she just came out, shot daggers through me and said, ‘If he’s not mine, he’s not yours…he won’t be anybody’s now…’ God knows I’m sorry, Kenny, but that’s the kind of ‘goddess’ you’ve been dealing with.”

          “I can’t believe she…she’d never…”

          “I know her, Kenny. You don’t know her at all…”

          “Oh, shit, Moon, why can’t everything just be like before,” I grimaced, accelerating up Crossover Drive along the vast Marx Meadow, veering toward merging traffic from Transverse Drive. I dreaded the notion that nothing really got settled in my mind, after all. Did Sydney actually feel that strongly about it, about me? Me? Somebody that dynamite, that strong—somebody that talented and loaded for bare? Felt like the top of my brain was thinking ahead in overdrive, while the bottom scrambled and struggled to catch up.

          “It will be, I’m telling you,” she soothed, leaning over to me as we rounded the 25^th Avenue curve. “Soon as we get ourselves back to Boulder…”

Care for more?

 Bonus Chapter 33.5: A sly, side diversion to  
the inner reaches finds any clannish refuge
pulled up short and shaken by the roots…

Or skip directly to Chapter 34 at your peril… 

 “Saturn’s action is to condense aqueous 
vapor and to excite tempests. When Saturn 
crosses the equator, the atmosphere 
is greatly disturbed.” A.J. PEARCE

 “Saturn aspecting Saturn tends to suggest 
a combination of individuals who bring 
out each other’s insecurities.”

           “…Airlines flight number 608 from Chicago with intermediate stops in Des Moines and Salt Lake City is now arriving at the B Concourse, Gate 35…Bradley Walker, Bradley Walker, please come to the white courtesy telephone, Bradley Walker…”

          “What are you doing here…tsk, how did you even know?”

          “I was just about to ask you the same thing…”

          “Well, are you going to take my bag, or do I have to drag it all the…”

          “Sure, Moon. Uh, so how was the flight?”

          “Well as could be expected…God, Kenny, what do you think?!”

          “I don’t know, hon…this whole thing sort of catches me, you know, by surprise.”

          Circuits activated, connections routed and fully linked: the instant Sydney went public with her mate accompli, Princess touch-tones tripped crossbars, overpowered relays, sizzled phone cables like detonator fusing from San Francisco to North Shore Chicago. Once Faith Mendel grasped the implications of her daughter’s latest border incursion, she lit up the Saversohn rec-room extension faster than pro-lifers on call-in talk radio. Therewith, Melissa’s dad signal-jumped microwave towers back across the Great Plains to Boulder, his shock and dismay trunking line-of-sight, transmitter to repeater to repeater—pre-empting party lines, aluminum siding solicitations, 911 if need be to voice his unmitigated support. This was his only baby out there.

          Trouble was, I hadn’t direct dialed with comparable dispatch. According to the damage-control pact, Sydney would ring up the folks from her place, and I would more or less conference in to Melissa from Denise’s. Only somewhere between the two, red light by left-lane red light, this emancipating little proclamation began weighing on me—emotional ballast, heavier than a ton of adulterated duplicity. Who knew that halo effect could have such a ripple effect? How could asana heaven turn into this yoga hell?

          About the same time, Mountain Zone, Moon recounted, she stopped baking long enough to hear, ‘darling, the clown’ll come around’ and ‘there, there, maybe they deserve each other’ from her father, with nary a clue as to the genesis of his outrage. ‘But, Melissa dear, you haven’t heard…’ finally frosted her, stickier than her latest cookies and buns. Then, when Edie had called her out of the San Francisco blue to shoot up a warning flare, Moon flew out of Stapleton International like Dutch Reagan out of early GOP primaries. The entire turnaround consumed six hours, if that: from Syd’s call to the searing voice message Moon let at Denise’s answering machine just before Denver takeoff to her touchdown at SFO. Witness the marvel of modern communication and space available transport under fire. Witness the depletion of current accounts.

          “Oh, Kenny—you are beyond belief, you know that?!”

          “Cool down, Moon,” I urged, wrestling with her convertible overnight bag, then wrapping my other arm about her tensed, shapeless shoulders. “It’s great you came like this, really…time you check out San Fran…why so sudden, I can’t figure, but…”

          “Are you being coy,” she replied, finding scant comfort in the immediacy of my embrace. “Or are you just being incredibly dumb?”

          “No, I mean it, babe. Maybe you’re right-on with this move, you know? We can sort everything out here and now…”

             “Bradley Walker, Bradley Walker, please check with United Airlines immediately regarding your baggage claim and Airdales, thank you.”

          “God, you are being dumb,” Moon said, dragging several steps behind me along the D Concourse in her precious woody clogs. “And how may I ask did you know my flight?”

          “I…uh…happened to call Boulder,” I winced over my shoulder. “Paul Verniere answered, of all people, said you were on your way. “So, what was he doing at the house?”

          “Oh, yeah…Paul,” she hesitated, rifling through her macrame purse. “Nothing, he was just looking in after Seamus and Pags and locking up… somebody had to…I’ll explain it all later.”

          Our forced march through the rush of ticket counters, standby lines, skycaps and rose-bearing Krishna seemed nigh on interminable. I fretted, she fussed, from the crab and sourdough bread stands along conveyor walkways shuttling us to Tier 3, Section G-18, where I was certain I’d parked the squareback. Or was it Tier 2, Section B-28… whatever, she paid.

          “Locking up, huh,” I said, dismissing Verniere altogether—rather a defensive move on my part as we finally chugged out onto Airport Drive. “See, the City’s welcome sign’s a cable car…George Moscone’s on there, the mayor clanging the bell…traffic’s not too bad. Better than Denver, or O’Hare…you leave the Toyota at the airport, did you? Look up at the hills there—where the fog’s rolling over. That’s because the ocean’s right on the other side, Moon…you’ve got to see the Pacific…ocean, bay—water, water everywhere…oh, you’re gonna love San Francisco, everybody does. Yeah, I’m getting more and more psyched you came out…hungry, Moon? Sure, after the flight, you must…Denise’s place is really nice, right across from the park…tell you one thing, it’s much better flying out here…gotta be. The drive’s a…oh, beautiful and all, but Nevada…”

          We were halfway up the Bayshore Freeway to Candlestick Point before word one came from the shotgun side, over the radio crackling of ‘Love Is Thicker Than Water’ by Andy Gibb. “Eat this, Kenny. Here, open—before your tongue implodes.”

          “Hmmm, terrific cookies,” I grinned, crumbs spraying across the windshield. “The best, like always…see? The ’Stick—Giants play there, big leagues…not right now, I mean…but they’re not that good these days anyway…” Christ almighty, how much did she know and when did she know it?!!!

          “They’re ginger pear. There I was, lining cookie sheets and stirring you two around in my mind when my father called…my fa-ther, Kenny—how absolutely mortifying! So let’s have it, what am I doing here? Better yet, what are you doing here?!”

          “Uh, depends on what you mean, ‘doing’, Moon.” Hell, I didn’t know. What was to do here? This whole thing was beginning to spin my beaters, too. Was I talking to her, or to her? I was supposed to know what was happening, with all this traffic merging right to left? It was enough just to keep a bead on the freeway—on those lane-grabbing tour buses up there, the ‘High Flyers from Solvang’, no less. “I’m sort of scoping things out, testing the waters, trying to set us up.” How did her fa-ther know so soon? Jesus, Syd! Lost in the slipstream and bus fumes, trapped between cruise and passing lanes, the squareback was rapidly losing ground.

          “Set who up?! You and who…”

          “Us, Moon, us…jeesh. Hold on, I’m going around this damn bus.” I gunned the Volks into the fast lane, lurching through Hospital Curve, past Potrero Hill’s cliff-hanging cottages, fighting off a hard-shimmying pull to the shoulder as a flip to the FM dial yielded a ‘Peacemaker’ track by Loggins & Messina.                         

          Downtown’s skyline unveiled around the bend, as though from behind another massive tormentor wing. Houses and highrises alike glistened under clearing skies, BofA tower to the Hilton Hotel on O’Farrell; banks of brilliant cumuli mounded above Treasure Island and the Bay Bridge towers, snowy against a clear, stunning blue.

          “Never seen anything like that, huh? I tell you, this place is as near to paradise as a city can get…” I punched and clicked off ‘Fly Like An Eagle’ on the Blaupunkt—where was that coming from? Since by now I was about as soaring and chipper as clipped shorebird.

          “So, which us is us?”

          “Come on! You see what I’m saying here, or what? Man, after Chicago and Denver, you’d think…”

          “I’ve nothing against Denver,” she said, staring toward me, yet several degrees northward, in the general vicinity of the San Francisco Mint… though she appeared to care not a Susan B. Anthony for the view. “You’re the one…the Rockies are much more to my liking. Even Chicago—I think the Lake Shore can be beautiful in the spring. Things are stable back there, solid. The important things…anyway, what do you expect me to think under the circumstances?”

          “Watch, I’ve got to cut over or we’ll end up in Oakland,” I sighed, scanning my mirrors: cluttered Buena Vista hill, the abandoned Hamm’s brewery, anything to avoid her silver dollar eyes. “Think? About what?”

          “Look, I didn’t come out here for guessing games,” Moon replied, pulling her flowered muslin collar tightly around her neck. “My father is wigging out long distance, telling me about Sydney’s edict. The phone pops off my shoulder and a whole morning’s cookie sheets ricochet all over the kitchen floor! Now you just tell me about us.”

          I followed 101 North’s lower freeway lanes as they wound past the Market-Van Ness triangle, then tailed off for the Fell Street exit. This drab double-decker stretch, no treat the first time I drove it, was hardly a breeze right now. “Believe me, Moon, it gets better. We’ll be at Denise’s in a…flash…”

          “Sure, fine—good thing Denise is out of town—you’d probably have hit on her, too…”

          “Hmph, let’s just get settled in, OK? Then we can talk all night.” That’s it, maybe buy a little time through Golden Gate Park. “Bet you’re up for seeing her place, you won’t believe her roommates—a crazed silversmith and…”

          “Kenny, you know how I get when things get weird. The airplane food was posterboard.” A bumpersticker up ahead read, ‘Don’t Get Mad, Get Even’. For Moon it could easily have gone, ‘Don’t Get Even, Get cookin’.

          “By all means, hon…I saw this unbelievable spot on Geary, near…”

          “I don’t need unbelievable, I need good, and fast.” Melissa should have been 225 lbs., but weighed in at a steady 98¼. Nerves gnawed it away. She called them her psycho-emotive tapeworms, something she conceptualized in Repressive Psychology 201, that summer she scrounged for an elective to nudge her through her BA degree.

          She didn’t exactly burn along the pre-professional track. Father was footing everything; her initial career move was a quick right to the altar with Lester Mendel. And now look where that got her—which she hinted she’d been doing mid-flight, from tea over Telluride to cocktail nuts over Livermore.

          “Trust me, at Van Hermann’s, I’ll bet we’ll get the full treatment.”

          “Trust you, huh,” she rubbed her elfin fists into her eyes. “That’s what got me into this slough in the first place.”

          “I think most of it’s in your head, really,” I said. Hell, what was I to know what was in her head? I hadn’t a clue what was in anybody’s head at this point—especially little Ms. Darling of the Phonewaves across town.

          Van Hermann’s was one of the few choice legacy eateries left standing among Geary Boulevard’s increasingly minor franchise fare, if by nothing else than the sheer force of its identity. A delicatessan—not kosher, not German—more your basic Hollander, down to wine, wooden shoes and neon windmills. Its storewide deli case disgorged smoked turkey, cheese blocks and tray upon tray of multicolored salads. Artichoke salad, celery root salad, carrot raisin salad: Salads for health, for vigor and happiness—mixed salads and Kaasplankje too rich, varied and caloric to deny.

          Dark ryes stacked neatly atop the counters, elephant salamis swayed from thick overhead hooks, leading hungry eyes to the menu board and dike-to-dike tulip garden murals, which framed the place in ersatz tradition and lore. While Melissa tiptoed past the salad case, I lost myself in the beer cooler, among the AASS BOK, Alten Munsters and Dinkel Ackers, struggling to gauge what in fact was happening here. What was she bound to accuse me of, and with whom? Although on that last point, there was little room for choice.

          I ordered Bal Gehakt with Mortadella on pumpernickel from a round, red-cheeked Hummelware maiden, and instead twisted the silver foil off a Dortmunder Ritter Brau—as I had so often in the musty stubes of Heidelberg.

          “What you having, hon,’ I asked, drifting over to pinch Moon’s waist, between modest crocheted drindle bulges.

          “Gonna dabble,” she replied, with a twinge of anorexic anxiety. “Some cole slaw, a fish cake and a little bit of Ambrosia. Oh, and maybe just a crème soda or something. Now, what did I tell you about meatballs, and those pickles, ugh…”

          “Six seventy-five, bitte,”  the cashier said, in a strept, wintergreen-lozenged Marlene Dietrich.

          “Uh, here,” I fumbled for my wallet.

          “Wait,” Melissa countered, “this’ll be Dutch…”

          “Awww, Moon, always the joker,” I gushed, sensing an opening. No joke. We each paid, and toted our respective plastic trays like strangers in a midtown Automat, over to Van Hermann’s small luncheon alcove, to a blue-checked corner table with matched Grolsch bottles, sprouting red silken tulips and crossed sandwich pick Dutch and American flags.

          “I’ll thank you to help me with my chair,” she said flatly, as she presumed a window view.

          “Great joint, huh?” I replied, settling in across from her. I bit deeply into my meatball sandwich, jaw muscles vising around the pumpernickel tighter than a metal compactor in a South City industrial park.

          Tough and getting tougher was the task of meeting Melissa eye-to-eye. So I instead browsed Van Hermann’s murals: canal-side picnics, wooden-shoed Hollanders in faux finished gardens; rotund Dutch burghers in their wein stubs, puffing long-stemmed pipes among kasks of sherry and tawny port. The sun-bleached paintings thrust me back on that overnight express to Amsterdam, with mammoth windmills sweeping the early morning sky. I wanted to share that so with Moon, but she never cared to look beyond the ‘here we be’. So anchored, so homey, so plodding and Midwestern methodical: Truth be told, it made me want to slit her bowlines but good sometimes.

          “How’d you find it?” she asked, barely tearing away from her chilled Ambrosia, save for glancing humbly at nearby patrons. “Oh, of course—you came her with her…”

          “Naw, I just passed by once.” As I gazed out Van Hermann’s front windows, images of her red Fox flashed by, Sydney waving from behind the wheel, on yesterday’s drive to the Cliff House. The slight misspeak made me wince. Our relationship had never been Harlequin, but at least it was honest. Strangely, that mere thought, those solid memories, shored my levees some in the here and now.

          “Really, you had the time, did you?” She shot a stare at me, then returned to the consumptive security of her cod.

          “Come down off it, Moon. What’s important is what’s happening…the damn potential. California’s not like Colorado, and for sure not like the Midwest. Anything’s possible here—this is the wide-open west, sky’s the limit! Hell, a person can do anything, be anything…it’s so fresh and dynamic…not cowtown or played-out rusty like back east. You know how I’ve been floundering—hey, not here, I can just feel it.”

          “So tell me, what is it you really feel, Kenny? Talk to me for once…”

          “I don’t know, maybe like breaking into something totally different,” I continued, washing down some courage with my Dortmunder. “Just because my degrees are in Sosh doesn’t mean…I’ve even been thinking of going it on my own.”

          “Doing what?! Like I told you before, there are things we need,” she pointed with her slaw-filled fork. “We’ve bills to pay…”

          “I’ll work it out, in time. Seriously, I think I could maybe clean up as a photographer or something. It’s so visual here, and all…”

          “Photography? Sweetheart, you’re confusing you career with hobbies. How are you going to cover your loans taking pictures? Now taste this cole slaw.”

          “Well maybe if you…I mean it could be a whole lot easier if you just got behind me on this thing, like…”

          “Wait a minute,” she said, pulling back the unrequited slaw. “This isn’t you talking, you wouldn’t come up with something this haywire on your own. It’s Sydney again, god!”

          “Naw, bullshit, Moon—I’m perfectly capab…”

          “You’ve already told me what an influence she’s had. Power, I think you put it. Tsk, you weren’t joking, were you…”

          “Believe me,” I said, ripping into some more Ritter Brau, as if late for the final strassenbahn to Taylor Kaserne, Mannheim for bed check. “Sydney’s got nothing to do with this.”

          “Oh, talk about ground bull,” she snapped, self-consciously stabbing at my Bal Gehakt. She was loath to raise her voice, a personal violation of her post-marital vows. She prided herself in her equanimity since the screamathons with Lester Mendel. Casual, dispassionate calm—that’s what she valued most about our relationship—keep it cool if it killed her. “Please, Kenny, I’m not nearly as dense as all that.”

          “Look, I don’t know what your father told you, or what whoever told him told him, but…”

          “Come on, you’d know better than he or I,” she hissed, pushing away her Ambrosia, the entire plastic tray. “After all, you got it first hand.”

          “Jesus,” I slumped, chugging the Dortmunder, then slamming the slender green bottle against Van Hermann’s artificial tulips. “Maybe we should get out of here.”

          “Tot ziens,” the cashier waved stiffly, muscling over to clear our florid vinyl placemats.

          “Yeah, you too.” I ushered Melissa brusquely out toward the squareback, parked two storefronts down. “Hell with it, we’ll take the scenic route.”

          We rolled stormily up Arguello Avenue, missing Denise’s by a good twenty blocks. I goosed the Volks up around Golden Gate Park’s arch, then onto Conservatory Drive to JFK—UC Medical Center and Twin Peaks mounting Parthenon upon Acropolis dead ahead. Moon stewed silently, peering down side trails, through dense park shrubbery, and out over Inner Richmond rooftops as I downshifted beyond the white Conservatory itself. I searched for signs to the Great Meadow, Stowe Lake, any refuge short of that feline pavilion.

          So entirely different, so much to absorb; yet nothing was said. Sometimes my mother would brood a whole morning away, staring holes out her kitchen window, scrubbing the oatmeal pot through to copper—particularly after dad’s all-night sieges. But then Melissa always had been more of an afternoon person. “Look there, past the Avenues. The Golden Gate Bridge, Marin…”

          “It’s not gold at all,” she said, tangling her purse strings. “It’s tomato soupy red, if you ask me.”

          “Uh, yeah. Crazy, huh…they call it International Orange.” For my part, I tussled with the curious shivers of pleasure from the attention, the odd ironies herein. Explanation, perhaps, why I’d bypassed the park’s museums, bandshell, and Japanese Tea Garden, opting for the precise spot I’d visited the day before. I could still see Sydney beside Rainbow Falls, weaving her heady dreams of power and payoff extraordinaire. Christ, was that merely 24 hours before?

          “Why are you stopping? Where’s Denise’s?”

          “We’ve got to talk, Moon,” I sighed, idling over curbside. “Got to hammer this out right now…”

          Couldn’t help myself, I parked between the very same white space markers, chalked my wheels the same degree curbward, then fought back a vicious little smile by smacking the corners of my wilding moustache. The exercise was not lost on Melissa, now more rattled than riled by a devious grin she’d never even seen from me until before.

          “So,” she said, finding little inspiration in either the Falls or large Sayerbrook Cross lording overhead. Or that small, whirling turtlepool Rainbow fed into—a baby whitewater rapids ruffling hand-fed ducks and swans—the entire tableau backframed by a Greco-columned façade. One of those dowdy drakes seemed to be telling her there was more gnarled here than some Australian Tea Trees.                          

          “Soooo,” I shifted in my seat to face her, back against my door. “I just want to know what’s going on in your head about what’s going on.”

          “OOOooookay.” Much as she had forced this confrontation, she appeared to welcome the uncertainty of it all like a Brinks crew welcomed a breakdown. “No big mystery—my father just said he’d heard from Faith Mendel that Sydney had called, ecstatic because she’d finally found this perfect man. And that Mr. Perfect was none other than Mr. You.”

          “What?!” The load was dropping with my jaw, and maybe—dammit, maybe all the promise, the potential, all the sunny daydreaming just wasn’t in the cards, after all. I peeked behind me at that memorial bench, foggy images of Sydney sitting there sketching, sobbing all alone. I turned to Melissa, here beside me—so immediate and perfectly reliable. How did she put it, the difference between life and hobbies? You don’t dump a natural straight for a few wild cards, right? “She said what?”

          “You heard me,” Moon copped an indignant posture she likely prayed she could maintain. “So, what exactly did you do to become my best friend’s Mr. Right?”

          “Uh…” I drifted off to Lindley Meadow, a broad fairway of kite entrails and picnic tables across the nearby bike lane and horse trail. Several young friends or lovers sunned there, grouped blankets and goosebumps, free and easy as the Pacific westerlies–whereas I was about to blink and buckle. “Let me explain…”

          “Spare me, please—you think I really want to know the sordid details?” she asked, then reconsidered. “Okay, let’s have it.”

          “All right. I saw Sydney standing back from the serpentine tree, palette in hand, smeared canvas at her side. I burned to reach out for her, but she dissolved in dripping gray. Upon further reflection, wow, two chicks, man—over me yet. Just like that tune. Surf city, two girls for every boy…unbelievable… But then reality set in. I clenched my face into a cynical sneer, biting my words like wedges of sour saloon lemons. “It’s just a big bunch of crap about nothing. We talked—you know how she talks. I guess she got way out of joint over it, that’s all. She’s so damn headstrong…”

          “No one’s that headstrong without encouragement, Kenny.” Melissa rebuffed my stare, looking instead to the kites and running dogs, as in Boulder’s foothills, like Chautauqua on brighter days.

          “Aww, come on, Moon. She’s your sister, or whatever, not mine. But goddammit, she’s basically a spoiled little brat who pushes until she gets what she wants! I suppose I was just humoring her, going along…didn’t want to jack around your closest…”

          “What are you saying? You’d ply her for my sake,” she shouted, picking righteously at the barrette above her left ear. “You must be…I really thought you were smarter than this.”

          “No, hey—of course not. Anyway, what was I supposed to do, tell her to kiss off altogether? That would have flipped her out for sure. I mean, she’s kind of desperate, you know? All hung up on her art and making it big here. What’s worse, she’s a lousy cook, Moon. A chick like that can bring out the worst in a guy.”

          “So I see…”

          “Believe me, she wishes she had half the ability you do. Like, around the house—no lie.”

          “You expect me to buy that,” she yielded some, though still fixated on the greens.

          “Hey,” I leaned over to her, sore, wind-swollen lips flapping to beat those duckbills. “You know I need somebody strong, stable—like you. I know it, too. Remember how you handled that jackknifed trailer? Compared to you, she’s papier-mache. You’ve got real chutzpah…”

          “What do you know about chutzpah?!” she shot back, pushing me safely left of the gearshift hump.

          “Moon, really…I just heard her say it once. Hah, about me, yet…”

          “Hmph, that is a laugh,” she shrugged, seemingly wanting for the life of her to believe I was coming clean.

          “We’re the team, you and me. Nobody can split that up.” I reached over once again to hold her. She quail trembled, drawing strength from my touch. “You’re my love, Moon. You know that…you know that.” I was not so fortunate. Another quick glance at the Leptospermum branches bore somewhat the weather prognosis: fog lifting for brief afternoon sunshine, but new storm system closing in on the Portal of the Past.    

          “So be it,” she said softly, nuzzling over into my shoulder. “But we’re going to settle this mess once and for all.”

          “Hey, settled it is,” I sighed squeezing her fleshy shoulder.

          “No, I mean bury it,” She pulled away sharply, facing me square. “Settle it in everybody’s mind. No misunderstandings, got it?”

          “Sure, hon…whew, what more can I say about this?”

          “Nothing to me, not one more word need you say to me.”

          “All right then. Let’s hit Denise’s, settle you in.” I fiddled with the shift lever, then fired the ignition, feeling I had just dodged a hostile round. On the radio, came some new solo Teddy Pendergrass.

          “It’s what you’re going to say to Syd,” she said, with sudden, unblinking resolve.

          “What?!”

          “We’re going to get together, the three of us,” she replied, fighting a twisted little grin of her own. “You’re going to call her Kenny, and now.”

          “No way, Moon…” Christ, I’d know her, what…four years? Never saw a smile like that before. “I’ll just send…”

          “Oh, yes. You two concocted this stew, and you’re going to gag on it. I’ll be there to make sure you do.”

          “For godsakes, we can’t do that! You don’t really…”

          “That’s the deal,” she pressed, patting my cold, pale cheek. “Otherwise, I’m on the next plane east, and you two can go back to scheming your little buns off!”

          “Have you any idea what you’re doing, Moon? The two of you will be history, for sure—and the families. Is it worth that, for Christsake?!  She’s the nearest thing you’ll ever have to a sister.”

          “Let’s go, Kenny,” she replied, without pause. “It’s your call. And don’t you dare let on I’m in town.”

 Care for more?

Chapter 33. Collisions occur in due 
course, without any insurance to 
assure some peace of mind…

“Beware of foreign 
entanglements that may 
sow a continental divide.”

          “Not your trip, huh?”

          “Not exactly, but you can just run me over…”

          “So, what was her story?”

          “I dunno, it was like she flipped out all of a sudden—far as I could make out…”

          Drizzle soggy outerwear and inflated bladders drove us into Apartment Three with giggly dispatch. After bathroom turns, we regrouped in the kitchen for bottled Sierra waters, noting on a refrigerator Post-It that Edie and Diana were off to the DeYoung Museum for a blockbuster exhibition. Sydney wasted little time repairing to her bedroom to shed the wets and make for the shower. I had no such recourse, so lingered in the hallway, where we conversed through the bathroom door—mainly discussing my arrangement over on Fulton Street, not least last night’s Buddha fest and blow-up with Regina Tzu Fowler.                          

          “Guess she is all caught up in that Eastern stuff…”

          “Make out, huh?” Syd purled out, freshly showered, white terry robe snugged at her waist, beckoning me into her room. “But come on, some of it’s not so bad. And better there than up in Lafayette Park, right? Heard another brutal…attack happened last night.”

          “Uh, wouldn’t know about that, but all she really seems to be getting out of her spiritualism is a bad case of misandry.” I looked away sheepishly as she toweled her hair before a white Deco vanity. “Still, she’s a friend of a friend of a friend, so the situation will work out for the time being. It’s a start…”

          “Market forces at work, flash,” she smirked, over her shoulder. “That’s what my Daddo would say—just a kasheh in supply and demand.”

          “Sorry, not my field.” I fixed on the matted pencil sketch of a voluptuous, thinly veiled middle-aged woman, akin stylistically to ‘Waif and Grain’. Beside it was a framed black and white photo of a young nude couple embracing on a secluded beach. Syd must have centered them over her mattress and bed frame since my last visit. In both, the woman’s breasts were firm and teardrop full, as if little time had passed between renderings. “Who’s that hanging over your bed there?”

          “My parents, who else…” Her robe fell like a Playland parachute to the polished hardwood floor, revealing in its wake the startling shapeliness of her compact frame.

          “They’re obviously not Catholics, huh…Syd, what’re you,” I blushed, twisting away to the family gallery, then backing toward the sun-drenched window well, stumbling into her wool and cashmere sweaters, stacked neatly on a new Bentwood rocker, Princess phone weighting them down.

          “This is my room, Kenneth,” she flashed that recondite smile—so casual, so free, toweling down to her tight button navel—oh, so very oblivious to the principle of cause and effect. “I’m changing my clothes…”

          “Uh, maybe I should wait outside,” I started for the sliding doors into the parlor, as if looking away from some subterranean screen test of Charlie’s Angels.

          “Wait…you should see this.” She began tensing, then stretching her arms. “It’s yoga, spiritual like that Eastern religion thing we were talking about, only more physical.”

          “No, really, I…” I spread the doors, freezing, squinting face forward into the sun-blazed living room, uncertain if I was relieved that Edie and Diana were outing for the day.

          “Sorry, but I don’t happen to be afraid of my body,” Syd exclaimed through the sliding doors. “What’s your problem?”

          “My problem is this doesn’t make any damn sense,” I shouted back, glancing out the bay windows, down at a gathering of nuns and uniformed children assembling row by row in St. Brenda‘s schoolyard.

          “What doesn’t, Kenneth? Changing clothes, limbering up a little,” she asked, touching her toes. “You’re the one not making any sense.”

          “Here…changing like this—now,” I sputtered, avoiding/approaching her supple, exquisitely tandem, swaying breasts. “It’s just not appropriate—think of Moon, your family…loyalties, for Christsake!”

          “Loyalties, coyalties, my tushie…lighten up, you’re just being an old-fashioned prude,” she straightened up, compact breasts bobbing like life buoys at sea. “Okay, Mr. Family Man, let’s look at this logically. “I did take an undergrad logic elective once, you know. Now, what did they call it? Like, if A is B, and B is C, then, C is A, right? So, if you’re close to Moon, and I’m close to Moon, then it follows that you and I should be close, too. Friend of a friend of a friend, like that. And as for my parents, they’re 100 percent behind everything I do.”

          “Syllogism, and that’s a pretty lame example,” I gasped. “It’s more like, if I respect Moon, and you respect her, then we both respect her…and each other.”

          “I do, toots, don’t you?”

          “Actually, Heider’s Balance Theory is more pertinent here. If two people interact with someone of mutual concern, the interpersonal and intrapersonal situation is either balanced or unbalanced, with the tension that so ensues. Well, then you’ve got Festinger’s Theory of…”

          “Ei, lighten up, professor. Everybody does touch-and-go’s these days. It’s harmless…and mighty healthy for you, mind and body, I might add.”     

          “It’s borderline pathological, that’s what…”

          “We’re like sisters, Melissa and me…sisters share things, she would want this. Why else would she send you out here,” she pressed, arms out, flexing her fingers. “Besides, who’s to say she’s not doing the very same thing right now?”

          “Hey, don’t even think that,” I stammered in place. “Why’d you have to say…”

          “Juust joking…honestly, no man worth his shlanger isn’t jumping all over a situation like this,” she prodded, slipping into a maneuver called the Fountain Stretch. “You know,  something tells me you have a black hat side. Really, I sense a little Vesuvio in you too, and I like that in a man.  So show me some of your black hat side…c’mon, Kenneth, grow up, show me what Moon sees in you…who on earth is going to know?”

          “Christ, I swear, I wasn’t bargaining for anything like this…”

          “If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be here.” She shifted to the Chest Expander pose directly before me, then into the Half Moon, throwing her arms and shoulders over her head, feigning a backward fall. “Oops…”

   ______________________________________  

Vaporlocked.
This heated scene will be revealed in
editions to come. Suffice to say, it is indelibly
‘game changing’, set to Miles Davis
 and ‘Trane, bearing on all that follows.
Only to be a case of passion interruptus,
by a roommate’s  unexpected return. So
please stay tuned for this, and in the
meantime, can,  you just imagine?
 ___________________________________

          “Uh, you don’t think she’d make trouble…”

          “What…trouble? Edie and I have this understanding. She and Diana together last Valentine’s Day. I’ve got pictures…juuust joking.”

          “I’ll bet,” I shrugged, fondling about as she isometric tensed her beading breasts. “If you’ve got incriminating photos of your own parents, you might have the goods on anybody.” I found myself scanning the room for surveillance cameras.

          “Begging your pardon, toots. But Faith and Daddo are proud that their brilliant artist daughter thinks they’re worth hanging. They’re actually pretty cool for their age—and they’re aging so gracefully, as well you could. In fact, I want you should finally meet them.”

           “Feel like I already have, quite intimately,” I said, feeling part Pacino, part Harry Reems—feeling my way up to revisit the overhead visuals, that yellowing photo print of parental splendor on a white sandy dune.

          “I’m serious,”she squeezed me for emphasis. “They’re very open, accepting people. Especially Faith, she’s my very best friend. We tell each other everything. Except of course one little thing I know she doesn’t even know I know. Anyway, they’ve always taught me that if you really want something, just go for it, and everything will work out for the best.”

          “Really,” I probed idly. “So…what might that one little thing be?”

          “Hahhh! Wouldn’t you like to know…”

          “Suit yourself. The whole deal sounds like a drowning lifeboat philosophy to me, anyway. You know, every man for himself.” I continued digitally connecting her bikini tan lines, as though some deliciously insoluble puzzle. “I mean, sometimes it’s not that cut and dried. Sometimes there’s so much to assess…and reassess…”

          “Oy, what am I going to do with you, Kenneth,” she burst, nostrils flaring as she mounted me like I was a rodeo steer. “One minute, I see you as this guy to fill some empty hours. The next, you’re like the love of my life, and I’m planning things!”

          Natural inclinations toward a mutual scrub down were dashed by Edie’s determined bedroom thrashing, the vacuum force of which kept flapping the cross-hall bathroom door. Syd pulled off like a queen bee off a worker drone and scooped up her robe, imposing a decent interval between showers, flinging me a Grand Hyatt guest towel from Boca Raton.

          I bided my time restudying those family portraits, gaining a new appreciation of Faith’s youthful beauty—an ageless Esquire Petty girl, her once vestal hunger for Daddo—the mother superior Melissa had so canonized for so long. I then mused over this ungodly phallic binge, my amazement at being here at all, as if some strange sort of transgenerational kinship bonding going on. Once Syd toweled by into the kitchen, I broke for the bathroom, overhearing Edie’s phone ramblings about a disappointing exhibition all day long, feeling her eyes searing darkly through her door. A quiet, barebones shower, and I slipped back to the sunny warmth from whence I came.

          “Sooo, what’s up,” I grinned puckishly, bath towel wrapped about my waist.

          “I’ve realized something amazing just happened between us, and you can’t say it didn’t,” Sydney stood by her bedroom window, practicing arm ripples and neck rolls in her halo white robe, then moving toward the rocker and her phone. “So here we are, we’ve got this shot. And we’d better damn well go for it, because together there’s nothing we can’t do. You just need a little kick in the confidence. So I have this friend next door? She works for a big advertising agency downtown. I’ll bet Val can land you an interview with your cameras, just like that!”

          “W-what are you talking about,” I said, pores expanding, pits itching to discharge. And whom are you calling?”

          “Now quit looking at me with those bedroom eyes of yours and enjoy some scrumptious mousse,” she picked up her Princess, pointing over toward a snack tray she had quietly set aside on her nightstand, to its dark chocolate pastry and limed Perrier. “Relax, let me take care of this.”

          “Take care of what?!” My underarms reached dew point. “Dammit, what the hell’s going on here?!”

          “Daddo always tells me to make the big decision,” she dialed, smiling at her family photo. “Then everything else falls into place. And if you lead with your head, your feelings will sort themselves out soon enough.”

          “All right, quit playing around…this is absolutely nuts!”

          “Who’s playing around? We’re talking about us here,” she said, phone call connecting after some loud long-distance clicks. “I’ve never been so happy, Kenneth…gotta share this with somebody…Daddo? Oh, Daddo, tell Faith I’ve some fantabulous news about the wonderful man in my life. No, silly, I don’t mean Bernard…”

Care for more?

Chapter 32. Far-reaching consequences 
hasten the arrival of due process, 
if not suddenly diverging interests…

 

“Idly parking in the park is no 
substitute for an illuminating  
walk and talk in the park thereabouts.”

          “I know this here…”

          “You ought to, it wasn’t that long ago.”

          “Isn’t this where…”

          “Yes, where we landed in your rusty scow—a landmark Sir Francis Drake moment, it wasn’t, that’s for sure.  Just ask James Winslow’s purse.”

          We wound silently by the Cliff House, down onto the Great Highway, below Sutro Heights Park, past a razed midway in the ankle of the Heights, once so alive with the innocent gaiety of the Bob Sled Dipper, Dark Mystery, Topsy’s Roost and Laffing Sal. On a weekend this grand, San Franciscans once cavorted among the calliopes and midway arcades. Locals gorged on It’s-Its and Salty Dogs, tossed it all on the Parachute Drop, rickety roller coasters and Chutes At The Beach; tried their hands at Playland’s shooting galleries and Whir-lo-Ball, or cut up to Sutro’s Baths to oogle the bathing beauties on its Silver Slide.

          But the fun ended in ’72, in low-grade condos up to Fulton Street, after hungry developers leveled the amusement park for a highrise complex that city planners mercifully whittled down. Strolling lovers and swimming mongrels currently pulled my attention like undertow over the seawall to a long, sparkling Ocean Beach. The distant swells, surf riptide rinsed in, clear down to The City’s southernmost shores, yet not far enough away from the Esplanade’s median strip parking, scene of that earlier sunset car door jimmy and purse grab.                            

          “Anyway, did your handbag ever surface,” I said, slowly turning her way.

          “Sad to say, that beloved purse is in never, neverland—never to brighten my day again.”

          “Still, maybe we should stop and check around. Who knows? Could be it’s washed up, or something…”

          “Washed up, alright,” Sydney said, arm out her window with a left turn motion. “Forget about my purse, already. God, you’ve got to learn how to move on from things.”

          When she veered off the highway into Golden Gate Park, the Fox’s armrest pressed more sharply into my rib cage, incidentally crushing those sweet rolls I had so hangdog pocketed. But beyond the broken down Dutch Windmill and Queen Wilhelmina’s tulip beds, I began to feel her centripetal force all around.                     

          “Well, maybe whoever took it needed money that bad,” I quibbled. “I’m just trying to be helpful…”

          “Hahhh, help? How about coming clean about what you’re really doing back here? That’s what would help.”

          “I’m, like, scoping things out—for Moon and me,” I rubbernecked the broad, breaking sea left behind. “If maybe I can put something together. By the way, don’t forget your little present there. She glazed you a real nice coffee mug—kiln-fired and everything…”

          “I see,” she glowered, fanning the dashboard heater. “You called me to help set things up for you and Moon.”

          “Well, yeah, sort of…”

          “I get it, the neighborhood welcome wagon…”

          “No, hey…I don’t mean it like…”

         “Sure, and why stay out here in the Richmond,” she turned on the FM radio to ‘Got to Give It Up, Parts 1 and 2’ by Marvin Gaye. “We can pile in at my place. Don’t forget the pets while you’re at it—just like all in the family.”

          An overgrown golf course diverted us up into thickening eucalyptus groves, Ocean Beach slipping away like the other side of a zipper pull around a jogging, banked curve. Syd goosed her Fox pointedly up John F. Kennedy Drive, through a heavily wooded stretch of secluded ponds, fly-casting pools, equestrian trails and scruffy buffalo grounds that opened gradually to vast Lyndley Meadow. Kite meets and volleyball picnics had already laid claim to the softly rolling links, along with a pan-European practice field of soccer, rugby, hurling and rounders.

          “Come on…as if you didn’t know why I came back,” I groused, snared by the remote-control model boat races and side action at Spreckels Lake.

          “Oh, now I’m supposed to be some kind of mind reader.”

          “Because, I couldn’t get away from you, that’s why,” I erupted, as she steered around a rhododendron island, center drive. “It was like I never left Sausalito, okay? I mean, I wasn’t even in Colorado. Everywhere I looked, there you were—in the shaving mirror, on the Flatirons, on the bedroom ceiling with your rah-rah success trip. What the hell am I supposed to make of that?!”

          All right, then,” she smiled, a smile as inscrutably out of context as the ratty bison in that over-grazed paddock we had just passed. “Now was that so hard?”

          “Oh, sure,” I muttered, out toward a little down-meadow lacrosse—albeit with a hint of histrionics, if not shards of hyperbole. “Moon kept jabbing me just to keep me focused on anything. I had the attention span of a fever tick.”

          Halfway into the park, where Marx Meadow met Portals of the Past, she horned by a bike rallye, then pulled over to an unforeseen break in the parking lane. Cloud cover had begun to clear out, leaving a stray ray to key down upon Lloyd Lake and its singularly well-landscaped shores. The emerging sun soon lit up the whole tree-framed garden like a subdivision nativity scene. It seemed the best of many nearby niches in which to nail all this down.

          “So why didn’t you just say so in the first place, Kenneth?”

          “Because it scares me shitless,” I spouted, loosening my collar and coat. “Because I’m basically fakin’ it, we barely even know each other, and because what I do know tells me we’re such different goddamn people…”

          “Speak for yourself—I feel like I’ve known you all my life. Besides, what if we are different? What’s so godawful wrong with that?”

          “Aww, give me a break, Syd. You’ve got everything going your way, alright? Compared to you, I’ve got zip. I’m seeing this place is one big sandbox, and maybe you can pay the freight and play. But I can’t even afford a plastic shovel.”

          “That’s total horsepucky,” she dragged an old paint-splattered London Fog from the back seat and uncoiled out of the car. “In reality, you’ve got a lot going, potential-wise. I’m beginning to think I believe in you more than you do.”

          Pausing before a small rushing waterfall, we took in this suddenly warm spring-like calm, the Pomeranian lapping water upstream, a gaggle of Chinese children bolting toward them from an extended family gathering down JFK Drive. Syd prodded me to skip several slickened step stones over to the lake itself, scattering overfed geese, gulls and mallards back into the naturalized wading pool. She smoothed the waters with some leftover cottage fries she’d bagged ever so discreetly from the breakfast table.

          “Let’s just say I know my limitations, okay?” I scoured the palms, eucalyptus, gnarled cypress trunks and hidden pools, plumbed the depths for what to say. “See, I’m coming from nowhere. No juice, no bucks. My ol’ man’s no highroller—that’s reality.  Someone like you just doesn’t happen to somebody like me. It’s about time we set things straight right now…”

          “Straight, shmate—all you’ve got to do is dump the negatives, focus on the positives. Adolph Sutro didn’t start with anything and it didn’t stop him. Neither did Josh or Daddo, for that matter.”

          Lloyd Lake’s paired swans paddled along, unruffled by the commotion; blackbirds, wrentits and white-headed sparrows flew in from bordering fir trees to drill the last few potatoes she had crumbled along the walk. I trailed her around the tiny lake to a decaying Roman doorframe standing alone against a backdrop of unruly brush. Bare survivor of the 1906 earthquake, this brick and marble portal had shown little improvement in fortunes since being donated to Golden Gate Park. It now encased a slab stone bench, angled perfectly toward the sunbathed waters. There we sat, peeling and picking at the rifted columns, skimming the graffiti scratches of those who had come before us, rather than catching one another’s eye.

          “Who knows, maybe that’s why I find you interesting,” she added, draping the splotchy maincoat across our laps, somewhat taken aback her own self. “I mean, as a…project.”

          “A project…”

          “Sure, a blank slate,” she rebounded. “That’s how my parents started out. Daddo went on to build a huge contracting business with his own two hands. But he’s the first to say how Faith was the key. Frankly, I’ve always sort of envied how far they’ve gotten together…total teamwork. Now that he’s sold the company, they can kick back and enjoy. She’s got Florida and her Winnetka greenhouse; he’s got his computer and stocks. Must be really gratifying to make it that way, don’t you think?”

         “How would I know,” I flushed, pulling out two scrunchy sweet rolls, one of which she declined. “My dad was too busy taking a fifth…aww, you don’t want to know…”

          “Of course I do—I want to know everything about you,” she said, zeroing in on, gauging my responses. “The truth of the matter is, in some ways, my parents have done everything for me. But in other ways, they’ve done not so much. Like, even though I worship Daddo, he was hardly ever around either.”

          “At least he was out paving your way,” I said, sinking at the thought of what she was reading into all this. “My dad just kept throwing up roadblocks. It’s my mother who’s done everything. She’s the one who pushed me toward college, for criminy. My mother’s an angel…”

          I jumped up like a commuter on a wet bus seat out from under the lap coat and poked about the portal, settling momentarily on its memorial plaque—obscure names and a Pine Street address that meant nothing to anyone for at least three generations. Dig down deep, she says… while way down deep my vital organs were freefalling to my feet.

          I felt well beyond being a pet project, yet somehow gratified she had put me in her class. Still, barely 24 hours into town, my welcome mat had already worn through to the tack strips. Blurry shadows, body blows. Regina Tzu had resorted to chucking things; this one to shelling me like a green pistachio with that crooked little smile of hers, while so blithely pulling daffodils from her hair. What the hell was I doing back here?! 

          “So is Faith…but I know I can do even better,” she blurted, as I mucked further around the spongy green turf. “And not with some workaholic engineer.”

          “Your father’s an engineer, too?” I nibbled at a squashed, frosted roll, repocketing the other.

          “Of course, by training—worked his way through,” she sighed, sailing her flowers to the swans. “My problem is, all I’ve kept coming across are ozone warriors like James Winslow Holcomb or wusses who’ve had everything handed to them, like my brother or Bernard. Now you come along with your storybook Boulder household and European photographs and holey underwear.”          

          “I’m not exactly out of that household, you know,” I tread lightly, sending up something of a warning flare. It fizzled.

          “May I remind you you’re here now,” she rose to shepherd me back to the car, pinching and pulling on my cheek, London Fog slung over her shoulder. “Totally of your own free will, at that.”

          “Yeah, free as the wind…” We dashed across JFK Drive, between bicycle pack and charted bus, wherein I caught the bite of split decision in the air.

          “Whew, I don’t about you, but I’ve got to get out of these clothes,” she said, unlocking, piling into her Audi wagon with a rearward fling of the maincoat, and we were merging away, KYA radio recycling Neil Sedaka’s ‘Laughing In The Rain’.

          Kennedy Drive being closed thereon for the usual Sunday roller derby and hormonal zoo parade, she detoured over and round about Park Presidio. En route, we sniffed the bucolic Strybing Arboretum, glimpsed an outdoor concert on the music concourse, got a taste of the Japanese Tea Garden, caught a cat show at the Hall of Flowers. Out crossing Fulton Street, she didn’t offer to pit stop at Denise’s, while I thought better of running into Regina Tzu the morning after.

          Syd’s only diversion off Park Presidio was for a chocolate praline mousse from Fantasia on California Street, followed by a quick, albeit circuitous spin through the Presidio itself. The Arguello gate led us down through the main post’s parade grounds and adobe heritage sites, headquarters and billets taking me back to Army days—from Fort Bragg conflicts to Mannheim’s kasernes. The Lombard gate fed us out to Cow Hollow, past the impenetrable Soviet Consulate and fortified upper Broadway mllionaire mansions, eventually delivering us in heady anticipation to a Pacific Heights yellow zone after six times around the block.

          Syd curbed her tires like water balloons down Franklin Street, nostrils flaring, poised to bail out faster than a test pilot over Mojave while I dwelled upon the better outlook on this side of town. Still, before she killed her engine, a news brief boomed out of her radio on the heels of Leo Sayer’s ‘You Make Me Feel Like Dancing’, more details about that other brutal attack overnight up in nearby Lafayette Park—something about strangulation and heavy objects—damned if I could say I actually knew anything about that. But with clear bay views, even brighter skies, it was off with the radio and ignition in short order. I bit my tongue, lipped my overbite and instead mulled over our immediate differences all the way up to her apartment, checking out the lobby’s gilded mirror, shunning varied signs of apprehension as I followed her out of Ivar’s birdcage elevator, anticipating a quick change by this artist before returning me to Regina Tzu’s.

          “Bet it was another homo-cide up there—if you know what I mean,” she gasped, keying open her front door deadbolts. “But it’s just awful, isn’t it? I mean, why do the boys have to hang out up there, anyway? They’d be so much safer staying in their baths and bars.”

          “Uh, wouldn’t rightly know about that…”

          “Really…so strange how this seems to happen when you’re in town,” she ushered me into her sun splashed flat. “Out plowing the fields at night, are you?”

          “Not my area of expertise,” I blinked, parrying the vicious news,  with an eye back up toward that path and missing Satalisman…blurry shadows, body blows… “What’s your alibi, anyway—all-night disco? And spare me any more jive about being so lonely.”

          “Pardon me, Kenneth,” she ushered me in, “but I never said I was alone…”  

Care for more? 

Chapter 31. Damp wear and inhibitions
fall away in an unguarded moment,
with passions stirring far and wide…       

 

 

“A full plate and flavorable 
visions may not necessarily
be food for thought.”

          “I guess it’s gotta be better here than that sunrise service stuff, huh?”

          “Look around you, Kenneth, what do you think?”

          “Sure beats a basement breadline, especially on Easter Sunday…”

          As day followed dawn, underpass begat news radio impasse, the varied denominational tableau along church, chapel, mosque, temple-leavened Geary Boulevard had us diving a bit more deeply into comparative religion, getting down to particulars, namely ours. 

          Beyond El Camino, the drop was precipitous, the scenario increasingly liquid all around. Geary Boulevard split off to Point Lobos, a cresting avenue lined with tidy bungalows, chalky apartment houses and a spray of swaying Canary Island palms. Destiny manifested itself at Camino del Mar, where we had curved breathlessly past crumbling cliffs and stooping Monterey pines down toward a prismatic horizon, sea level rising to meet us as if we were tailspinning into the drink.

          Sydney had wedged into a white zone outside some modest halfway hillside coffee shop near Merrie Way, cracking that she’d go to the ends of the earth for a good omelet. Before I could park my stomach, she was leading me hand-in-hand along wind-chiseled coastal cavities to San Francisco’s perdurable first line of defense against any invading hordes storming the white-capped Pacific blue. Apparently, the strategy out here had long been to brunch them to death.

          “But if you want to keep harping on your holiday religion, fine by me…”

          “Who’s harping? My thing’s the social sciences—query, qualify, quantify,” I said, as we entered a low-slung, nondescript white blockhouse of a land’s end restaurant through its gift shop doors. “Blind faith, rote prayers, sacraments, transmutations, testaments, clashing denominations—that’s all a bloody morass to me now.”       

          “Bloody? Ever heard of Chaucer,” Sydney perked up. “He’s one of the guys who kept saying Jews killed children to eat their blood—Christian children, yet. Ever hear of that disgusting condition called trichinosis?”

          “Uh, sure…some kind of gum disease or…”

          “It’s what Jewish people can get from eating blood and pork because that’s against Hebrew law. Catch my drift?”

          “Whoa, I never said…”

          “Just like with the phony Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Total BS, as in bloody slander, that’s what,” she continued, rinding down on a cantaloupe crescent. “Then again, the Last Supper was a Passover meal, so mox nix.”

           “Hey, I’ve no taste for blood, haven’t taken communion in ages.” I glanced away from my tomato juice, combing for the source of some incessant outside barking. “But even if Jesus was Jewish, that doesn’t make him any less iconic…”

          “Okay, so let’s dumb things down…take somebody like John Lennon,” she dabbed Ratatouille from the corner of her mouth with a color-insigned napkin. “Here, everybody thinks he’s god. But over there, he’s just another grubbing, wise-ass Brit.”

          “He’s more Irish, actually…”

          Teetering high atop a knobby outgrowth just south of Point Lobos, the once neo-classic Cliff House was a boxy, sawed-off remnant of its former self. Framed lobby sepiagraphs chronicled the twice fire-gutted degeneration, from horse and buggy outpost torched by a stranded schooner’s dynamite explosion in 1887, to a sprawling saloon for the silver-rich carriage trade to a spire and turreted French gothic chateau all decked out with tasty gingerbread—eight stories of galleries, observation parlors and grand dining rooms. That Gingerbread Palace burned down in 1907.

          I had paused before two photo blow-ups of that second, 1896 incarnation: One with a Wagnerian lightning storm over the Neuschwanstein-like castle, another with the entire baronial landmark ablaze like a nonagenarian birthday cake. I was staring wistfully as the next guy at the shot of a stunted Cliff House III when this handlebared host with sleeve garters and isosceles sideburns called for Mendels, party of two.

          “There, see? What’s the big, bloody deal?” Syd smiled, brushing him off with the tawny linen napkin. “And if it’s no big deal to me, why does it have to be such a big deal to you?”

          “Who said it was a big deal? It’s way beyond my pay grade, I haven’t ever thought that much about it…”

          “Oy, how could you live with a Jewish girl all this time and not think about it?”

          “It’s just never come up with us, all right,” I cranked hard on a pepper grinder over my pan fries and plump Lucullan creation. “So what’s your deal, for criminy sake?”

          Inside, the place was a repository of late Victoriana. We had followed two brass strips of tiny floor lights like hospital ward lines back toward the Barnacle Bar: a rush of cut glass, brass railings, Philodendron everywhere, and wine velvet love seats overlooking some white-capped rock formations and endless, roiling deep blue sea. Syd had pulled me away from the sweet, salty essence of midday Margaritas, up a scarlet flocked-foil stairwell lined with more framed tintypes, period illustration and yellowed reproductions of yesteryear’s news—all set in motion by a player piano piped out from the bar. We digested a short course in turn-of-the-century history before reaching the dining room. There, the Cliff House menu-gazette filled in any lorical blanks.

          “Easy, Kenneth…I’m beginning to tell when you’re flustered.” She returned to her omelet of choice: extra zucchini, eggplant slightly singed, rice pilaf on the side. “You wrap your mustache down over your overbite.”

          “Yeah? Just like when you get all fired up about something, your nostrils seem to pucker,” I slammed down the grinder, pursing my lips. “Point is, I didn’t come all the way back our here to wrangle over religion or idiosyncrasies like that.”          

          “Then what exactly did you come all the way back out here for?”

          She proceeded to read me up and down for an answer. Caught out of my current depth, I sought enlightenment from every feeding face in the main dining room, from red-vested waitresses criss-crossing the buffed oakwood floor with fresh fruit compotes, juice pitchers, corpulent omelets and steaming coffee. I searched the flocked, floral print wallpaper, the hanging planters and Tiffany lamps, the pressed copper ceiling in maddening detail. When that failed me, I plunged back into my food. “The omelets, what else?”

          “That so, “ she deftly fielded my punt, over the concerted hum of rotary ceiling fans. “Well, at least you could have ordered one a whole lot healthier than that.”

          “What, it’s a Denver-Plus,” I picked at my plate, separating the Bauernfruhstuck from the stringy cheddar from the peppers and Canadian bacon. “It’s got a little of every…”

          “Everything that will kill you. Don’t you know the lower you eat on the food chain, the higher your evolution,” she reached over to spear away my nitrates and shredded fats. “You really must learn to take better care of yourself.”

          “That’s Moon’s department…” I glanced away from her surgical stare, out the room’s floor-to-ceiling windows onto a wide-angle south coastal view.

          “Maybe, but Moon might not always be there, Kenneth.”

          “Yeah? Like when?”

          “Like…now.”

          The only downside to table twelve was that someone had to sit facing away from the massive oak-framed corner windows. I finally turned a full tourist swivel toward the barking, away from this eggplant inquisition. It earned me a 130-degree pin on the Pacific coastline, from Lobos Point south along the Great Highway Esplanade, mid-tide swells sheeting over Ocean Beach like rinse water over linoleum, clear down to Fort Funston and beyond. Directly before us, a westward panorama of ocean no end laid anchored by that tri-mound, white-crowned formation, a mere melon’s throw away.

          Gulls, cormorants and wandering tattlers swarmed over the wave-worn Seal Rocks, as did the occasional glide-by pelican, to challenge sea lions and elephant seals basking among the deep crags and kelp, some weighing upwards of 600 to 2,500 pounds. A thin front of grayish clouds drifted up from the southwest, the only easement in a sky and waterscape of engulfing blue—out by where the City of Rio once shipwrecked, near where the Frank H. Buck tanker was head-oned by a sinking luxury liner christened the cool Calvin Coolidge.

          “It’s funny, there once was even a little suspension walk bridge out to Flag Rock there, until it yawed upside down,” Sydney mused, as she cleaned up her eggplant with half an English muffin. “Actually, Point Lobos means place of the sea lions. Sometimes they’ll be totally silent out on their rookery. One seal, usually a stellar cow, will start yapping. Then one by one the bulls start barging in. It’s like when they’re migrating back from Ano Nuevo and Baja with their pups, the bulls strut all they want, but the cows really run the show.”

          “If you’re such an expert, what’s with the rocks, all that white stuff those rowdy suckers are lounging around,” I turned back around toward her—the dissected omelet, bloodshot tomato juice, strong coffee and slaphappy waves stirring my intestinal jetsam.

          “Looks like snowcaps, doesn’t it—like up in the Sierra.”

          “Uh, check again,” I squinted into the cyanine blind. “I could swear that’s crusted bird shit out there.”

          “Guano. Guess it’s all in how you look at things,” she applied newly issued plastic to the check at hand. “Like my classic nostrils—they don’t pucker, they gracefully flare…”

          “Right…maybe we should go, huh,” I muttered, scrounging for the tip, pocketing a couple of sweet roll appetizers, no longer able to elude stares from the host and impatiently famished couples crowding up behind me as we cleaved past cut glass mirrors toward the doors. “Christ, we’re even more different than I remembered, you and me…”

          A stiff wind and salt spray welted up as Sydney skipped out ahead undaunted down the surf-battered rear promenade, tourists riveted to the ocean splendor, mesmerized by the swirling tides. We dashed by the camera obscura, through a Musee Mecanique filled with oddball automated antique music boxes, player pianos, peep shoes, grip testers, nickelodeons and stand-up orchestrians—not to mention a gypsy fortuneteller character from the 1915 Pan-Pacific Exposition.

          She then pulled me around an outside totem pole, limning on the run a majestic Cliff House castle, the Floods, Stanfords and Crockers of gaslit San Francisco arriving in private broughams to toast the mighty masted clipper ships and crashing waves. Syd said she could just see Mark Twain buggying his way out here on one of his storied literary forays into the cold summer fog. How fun-loving couples later steamed out on the Ferries & Cliff House Railway, later still when the Cliff Line was an electrifying streetcar ride—before landslides derailed the cliffside route for good. Merely keeping pace with her led me huffing up past the Audi Fox and fragrant hotcakes to the steep, scabrous bluffs above Point Lobos Drive.

          Hacking for breath, coming up sausage, I eventually caught her atop some decaying steps on the far side of a formidable stone wall and outcroppings, a wind-twisted copse of ancient Montereys. The view from up here sent both our heads spinning, numbing us even more than the steady, grinding updraft gale. Battening onto my arm, she mapped out the shoreline from Drake’s Bay and Bolinas southward to Point Pedro and Devil’s Slide.

         Wintergreen coastal hills were already abloom with purple lupine, yellow lizard tail, cobweb thistle, larkspur as blue as the sea beneath it and what remained of the clear sky above. A red and white tug boat hauled two Humboldt county timber barges into the Golden Gate, steering me back to the gray cloud line shearing in from the west, inevitably to the champale pink flowers pinned so securely in her hair.

          “See, what did I tell you,” she said, having already gained her second breath, barely beading a sweat. The tiny wildflowers seemed braided into her loose spiral perm with piano wire. They played beautifully with her pink turtleneck and white cable-knit sweater, positively sang with her Argentine stretch pants. “Eat light, fly right.”

          “Don’t worry about me, okay” I coughed, drawing in deeply of a cool ocean updraft. Still, I felt a slight surge of promise and accomplishment out here on the brink—or was it just the refilled coffee?

          “So let’s shake it already…” She started down the weather-rent concrete viewing deck.

          “All right, already. Christ, this air feels like lead compared to Colorado.” I locked her arm with the sleeve of my gray sport jacket and held my ground, pores venting like trout gills underneath. “Anyway, you haven’t finished showing me around here yet…”

          “And you still haven’t answered my question.”

          “Question?” Full maw or no, I remained mid-morning cranky, but was getting increasingly cranked up like a turn-of-the-century horseless carriage by the whole spectacular setting out here—the churning wide-angle seascape, the telephotogenic coastal domains. If only I hadn’t left my cameras at Regina Tzu’s.

          “Kenneth, you’re being evasive…” Syd leered at me, then continued her coastal tour. She pointed out far beyond pounding aquamarine surf to the impervious bird sanctuaries of the Farallon Islands—several puffin-filled bumps on the distant horizon, a vista so clear it might have been Kaanapali. Some fully stacked container ships lured us back to Point Lobos, to a scarred, gaping cavity, nearly three acres of crumbling foundations filled with muddy sea water where the world’s largest, most fashionable indoor natatorium used to be.

          “So what’s this all about?” Stirred and stunned, all right—even though I was playing it too diffidently cool by now to cop to that.

          “Okay then,” she sighed, pointing about the ruins, which looked more like a worked-out stone quarry. “You’re the could-be photographer, so picture this long Greek temple façade with a grand palm-lined staircase leading down to humongous stained glass-roofed arching pavilions. Inside the bathhouse were seven public tanks—pools, really, with trapezes, swinging rings, water slides and circus acts. Hoi polloi by the hundreds in black bathing suits swam and splashed around the fresh-or-saltwater tanks for two-bits a pop. Hundreds more elevatored to upper balconies filled with art, knights’ armor, Japanese swords, exotic fish, treasures from ancient Egypt, stuffed jaguars and anacondas. Or they hit the amphitheatre for live opera and plays. Then everybody strolled down the arcade all dolled up to Cliff House castle for brandy and chamber music. With zithers, no less. Now is that San Francisco, or what?”

          “Hope the water was cleaner than it is right now,” I sniffed at the murky reflection in what remained of the pools, of immediately surrounding storm-ravaged cliffs that looked more like an abandoned strip mine.

          “Very funny, but they had constantly circulating ocean tides,” she nudged. “The steam-heated baths were designed by the man who engineered the main tunnel for the Comstock Lode, Adolph Sutro. He’s the same genius who built Cliff House castle.”

          Darkening cloud cover pared away half the southern sky as we roamed the parapet, and paused to look out over the Great Highway and surfer curled waves off Ocean Beach. Syd redrew the turreted observation towers, Haunted Swing and Firth Wheel that Sutro had built up here, then a barren stretch some 200 feet down, sketching in a coupe-clogged midway of carousels, rickety roller coasters, Chutes-at-the-Beach and skee-ball stands—a Playland of sandblown funhouses and salty dogs once crammed along the Esplanade as far as the twirling Dutch windmills of Golden Gate Park. All that remained of those caramel corn, cotton candy days were the plaster imitation outcroppings strung down cliffsides below.

          “Getting the larger picture here, Kenneth?”

          “Yeah, fake snow, fake rocks, some unsightly holes in the ground…” Really, was this the right move at the right time, or the right move at a bad time, or a wrong move at a good time, or the wrong move at just the wrong time—or any and all of the above? Time for some second-guessing, a little Sunday morning quarterbacking with time running out.

          “Wrong,” she yanked at my arm on Palm Avenue, separating my blue flannel shirt from the sweaty tackiness of my skin. “What I’m saying is it was one man’s energy, one man’s imagination that made all this happen. Adolph Sutro was a Jewish immigrant from Prussia who came here peddling tobacco and ended up one of The City’s greatest landholders, 24^th mayor yet. He created all this for San Francisco—brought scads of European culture here, finally gave his whole estate to the city, for godsakes. In fact, I hear his ashes are buried in an urn up here somewhere…”

          “Hmph, must have been a raging egomaniac.” I rubbed the nose of the right of two opposing stone cats greeting visitors at the Lion’s Gate into Sutro Heights Park.

          “So even if he was, look at where it got him,” she spun effusively. “Just look at what a difference he made! Charitable, too—I’ve heard he used to hand out gold coins on the streets downtown.”

          As we descended the stony terrace, circled around the cypress-swept hanging balcony, Syd recreated hydrangea-arched railings, paths lined with 200 Euro statues—Grecian deities, Mercury, Venus, Prometheus, Goddess Diana the huntress with her deer—explaining how she came out here time and again to pop a pressure cork in her early days, to draw strength from Sutro’s accomplishments, to drink in the cinemascopic beauty from Inspiration Point.

          She told how Sutro had transformed barren sand dunes into lush tapestry gardens, where he had built a modest cottage out to a grand country home caked with ornate gingerbread and classic sculpture—reputedly for his mistress. She hand painted a still life on a grassy terrace of the glass gabled white botanic conservatory greenhouse it once held, lush with exotic orchids, a hundred different rose varieties, and ceramic tiled walkways, mostly as long gone as Sutro’s chateau.

          “Okay, so it’s incredible,” I trailed her, as some light spritz showers set in. “What’s your point?”

          “My point is you can make that kind of difference,” she insisted, prideful tear welling in her eye.

          “Whoa,” I flushed, hoping it was just a raindrop. “I’m no mining engineer, and for damn sure not Prussian…or Jewish.”

          “What’s that got to do with anything? You can be as much a mentsh as he was —I mean, everybody’s got a little Jewish in them, a little chosen peopleness. I’m talking about balls-out ambition and will power. You can do this, killer, I know you can. Deep down, so do you,” she said, poking my ribs. “Why else would you have come back out here?!”

          The first wave brought the sort of thin, transparent clouds that yielded little more moisture beyond their visible means. But spritz turned to darker drizzle, and it condensed in short order to send Syd and me scurrying for shelter. She ran me around spindly, wind-shorn cypress, Montereys and Northfork Island pine, through the dwarf shrubs, santolina, blue gum eucalyptus and dragon trees that framed a grassed-over arbor Sutro’s villa had called home.

          I chased after her, sport jacket over my head, past cracked birdbaths, stubs and stumps of deistic statues shipped painstakingly around Cape Horn. We paused together to weather the worst of it under a shaggy Canary Island date palm, laughing, whirling away the water, flapping around like wild ducks. Syd conjured grainy apparitions of black-clad parasoled couples hustling their bustled and high-bottom shoes into the conservatory, Sutro himself, stroking his bushy white mutton chops, signaling from his porch rocker with the smoke rings of his private label panatella.

          “I’m just saying I should probably set my sights a little lower right now, that’s all.” What the hell did she mean by that?!

          “Nonsense, look at Adolph. He was one of the first visionaries who saw how everything starts here and rolls east like the sea—winter storms, potent new ideas, the future of the world. Presidents came to visit him, great artists like Oscar Wilde partied at his soirees.”

          “Yeah, well, the what happened to this palatial spread of his, anyway?” A peered over at jutting sandstone-set parapet and Dolce Far Niete cantilevered balcony, terraced with salt-tolerant scabosia, geranium, alyssum, yellow santolina and red-hot poker, like a gun turret nobly disarmed.

          “Don’t know for sure,” she said. “I think the bathhouse turned into an ice rink, then got torched by developers, and everything else got bulldozed down—none of it Adolph’s doing, mind you. But nothing lasts forever here…”

          “Sounds like Josh Gravanek’s Das Kapital folly to me,” I breathed deeply of the bracing sea air onrushing the promontory, rustling a nearby juniper tree.

          “Oh, it’s nothing at all like Telluride. Josh is another ambitious Jewish genius who’s built himself a fabulous empire, and you can bet that Das Kapital will rise again from the ashes,” she snapped, before catching herself mid-paean. “Which does remind me, I still haven’t heard from him about what’s up with that little package of his, ’cause he instructed me not to futz with it until he gave the okay. So hang tight on that. But enough with the history lesson. Let’s focus on here and now. Your future, your destiny, the vision that brought you back.”                

          “Uh, it’s a bit more complicated than that…” Whoa, too much, too soon? Or too little, too late to turn anything around, shipshape-wise? Blue-sky visions? Seemed more of a high-pressure storm center; a nimbostratus occlusion was somehow setting in before our very eyes.

          A tapering of the fast-splash drizzle, and we dashed to the old well house, an elaborately milled egg-white gazebo that had somehow survived the estate’s overall disintegration. We shook off excess droplets and perched momentarily on the ledging as the meager shower largeky passed. Great for the rosarium, English ivy and fleabane, Syd said, bad for the flowers in her hair.

          She wrung out her spirals, then briefly distracted me with stereograph mirages of the colorful tapestries Sutro’s gardeners would bed about his grounds: intricately inlaid orchids, camellia and exotic flowers from Australia and South Africa contoured with topiary, Veronica shrubs and ornamental hedge maze. But I couldn’t take my eyes off her, snapping my own mental pictures as we dashed into now horizontal rain, through Lion’s Gate on our way down Lobos Drive to her car.

          “Sooo, talk to me,” she shivered, soaked to the skin, squeegeeing in against her vinyl bucket seat.

          “Talk? About what,” I muttered, mopping up with my coat sleeve and belting up as we backed into curving traffic and drove away. I found myself stealing off into eroded hills, where electric trams and Sutro’s private railway trains used to thrill San Franciscans strolling around this bend in their black-cloaked finery, out looking for weekend escape from their daily straits. “Except to say thanks for the great breakfast…”

          “That’s what you get for early birdin’ it with me,” she chided, wheeling around Point Lobos Avenue, downward onto the Great Highway past this present flat-topped Cliff House declension and Playland’s plaster rockslide. “Let’s just say you owe me one…”

       Care for more?

Chapter 30. A scenic spin into 
Golden Gate Park prompts a free-spoken 
mind meld on parallels and differences…

 

“When there’s hell to 
pay the morning after,
pray to the heavens for relief.”

          “Let us exalt together…”

          “Celebrate!”

          “Let us affirm together…”

          “Glory be!”

          “Let us love together. Brothers and sisters, stand up and embrace each other this morning!”

          “See? It’s not my church exactly,” she beamed. “It’s not your church exactly.”

          “Amen to that,” I said, as Sydney Mendel and I hugged ceremoniously, then released. “But I had enough religion last night, and don’t exactly feel spiritually expressive this blessed early in the day.”

          “Shush,” she said, reaching to embrace others around us in the benches. “This is more like the Church of the San Francisco spirit, Kenneth, elation that can’t be dragged down.”

          It was more like the Church of Perpetual Motion. Aisles overran with ‘family’, bright worldly banners flapped up against the sky blue cathedral rafters, from the arena decibel force of horn-loaded loudspeakers suspended high above the altar. Below them, a full-dress dancing choir stepped Motown style with electrifying gospel. Row after row of rocking pews and aisles clap danced to the guitar and organ powered soundtrack, all worshipful, mistified eyes following the roundly dashikied figure bouncing like a colorfast sing-a-long dot back and forth across Dawning Redemption’s ceremonial stage.

          “Get close to one another, nobody be coming down on you this morning. Don’t nobody be puttin’ you inna that cage out there, keepin’ you from feelin’ free, thinkin’ free, actin’ free,”  bellowed Pastor Tinus Thrall. “’Cause we gonna blow that nasty cage away this morning…gonna set all you songbirds free, yes we will…”

          “I thought you said you weren’t a morning person,” I whispered over to Syd as she shook hands demonstrably, fore and aft.

          “How could you not be on a glorious morning like this,” she beamed.

          “Ask me this afternoon…”

          Truth was, the 5 AM rollout couldn’t have come early enough. I had tossed about from midnight on, agitated by the drainpipe splatter of a passing rainstorm, by fuzzy-headed images of Denise Keiner and Melissa giggling on the porch swing when she once briefly visited Boulder, and what Latin moods Denise must have been swinging on by now.

          This, after an earlier, obligatory all’s-well call to the Chicago folks at home, then a base-touching call to Moon—the latter which found another muffled male voice seemingly answering and slamming the phone. But harder yet to sleep through were apparitions of Regina Tzu rattling arms full of sabers down the hallway, kinetic chanting, tossing beatific candles through Denise’s bedroom door. Got so I had to trouble her for a stopgap hall pass and take a hike to clear some things out headwise.  

          Before long, a chipper reveille call from Sydney for directions, and I was quietly whisking curly little hairs aside, scraping my face with a throwaway razor and brushing as best and quickly as I could. I crawled back into my road clothes and waited all ashiver outside in the dark to be driven away from all that, for I could barely even remember where I’d left my squareback by now. Even at this ungodly hour, it was never too late for the rowdy night riders on passing MUNI buses, never too early for the sulky, solitary dog walkers dragging their varied mutts along shadowy Golden Gate Park overgrowth across Fulton Street.

          Before I could finish nibbling at the last of Moon’s grubstake, Syd’s red Fox was honking around 25^th Avenue, scooping me up at the bus stop, headed across town on Fulton.  I’d planned to deliver Josh’s box and Moon’s thank-you gift right then and there, but wasn’t about to fish them out of the squareback in the pre-dawn shadows—leaving them buried under the foldover rear seat, where the agricultural inspectors wouldn’t have spotted them on I-80 West, whatever they happened to hold. So after a sleepy hand grasp, I was resigned to simply retracing the how’s but not why’s of the long road trip back out. While I then disavowed my overnight accommodations, she recounted the high-grade disco fever at ‘Dance Your Ass Off’ on Columbus Avenue.

          Down drizzle slick Park Presidio, she began prepping me with such pre-dawn wisdom as, this wasn’t Boulder, where it wasn’t who you were but who your parents were that mattered. Here, it was where you lived and breathed, as in nowhere near the fog belt. Before I could weigh that hypothesis, she had turned east on Turk Boulevard over to O’Farrell Street, moving on to how she wanted to scope out this church we were off to, intending to paint its pastor and tableau. And how its Easter sunrise service was just unorthodox, nondenominational enough to suit a Catholic and a Jew.

          We soon settled on a parking spot outside a fenced-off former taxi garage, a pink spray of sunlight beginning to pry over East Bay hills. And here we were, covering our blind sides through the Tenderloin. Just a block or so more, she’d cautioned, amid the leering Saturday Night afterlife, and make sure we keep our hands on our pockets and bags.

          “I mean, what are we doing here this time of day, anyway,” I asked, smack in the middle of Dawning Redemption Cathedral, swivel headed as I was.

          “Actually, I probably shouldn’t be here any time of day,” she replied breathlessly, glancing about the raucous flock and rafters, taking note of perspectives. “But I’m thinking that with someone like you here, we can do these things.”

          “Lordy, you all will get your share of troubles, because your past keeps gettin’ in the way of your present, and you can’t be actin’ on your future!”

          “Right on!”

          “So you keep gnawin’ on all these negatives instead of workin’ on the positives—even though the positives are there in fronta you alla time…

          “Well, I’m tellin’ you to forget the past, disposa all those negatives. Forget where y’all comin’ from, ’cause you’re here now, yes you are!”

          Sydney had known we were closing in on the place when a block-long blight of steel-grated storefronts gave way to a brief redevelopment clearing, then Dawning Redemption’s mobile unit, as it were. Just outside the church itself, a bluegrass bible revival had gathered around this flat-bed GMC truck, the funkified jug band atop it firing the brimstone of all these stray disciples who’d crowded about the truck, luring in drunk-dry winos and sore, damp loiterers with church-sponsored coffee and pastries all around.

          Dawning Redemption’s cathedral was essentially a recommissioned vessel adrift in a polluted sea of shooting galleries, encounter parlors, sticky floored bijous and gun-controlled groceries. About the only thing keeping it afloat was its robust skipper. Reverend Thrall had painted the former Unitarian temple a heavenly blue throughout in the pre-Haight Sixties, and drawn capacity gates weekly ever since. That streetcorner mob had sung their way into a standing room service already raising the cathedral roof, Syd and me following closely behind.

          “That’s right, we gonna storm out them gates. Come down, gates! ’Cause you see, life’s too short. There ain’t no time betta than this time, ’cause you ain’t got no otha time than this time.”

          The reverend and his holy backfield had briskly herded latecomers into the three section abreast pews, which provided all the leg and kneeling room of a refugee smuggling rustbucket bound for freedom in stormy seas. Thus fully boarded, the congregation was gathered right here where Tinus wanted them: lost, hungry, ready to bare and barter their souls.

          He tucked his leopard toned dashiki into flared black double-knit slacks and prowled his pulpit as far as his mic cord would take him— treaded sandals laying rubber, jowls gilling, chromed Aviators steaming, tailings of a purple do-rag flying out from under an afro-beaded skull cap. Choir loft spotlights star crossed him from one end of the stage to the other. The DR Choir was rousing, a Redemption Jazz Combo cookin’ hot. But the Pointer-stepping ensemble singers and higher power trio or no, Tinus could have easily spread his cadent gospel without the wire.

          “People be talkin’ about the sweet bye and bye. Well brothers and sisters, you in the sweet bye and bye, in the sweet here and now!

          “See, we just got one lap on the track. So y’all betta not live you lives like you gonna come back to the starting gate, ’cause I ain’t so sure you gonna be comin’ back!

          “And even if you do, might be y’all come back worse than what you are right this minute!”

          “Hear what he’s saying?” Syd nudged me. “So sociologize this, why dontcha.”

          “How could I not hear what he’s saying,” I said, ignoring her malapropaganda.

          That sobering message had Tinus Thrall cueing his multimedia mixers on the down stroke, one console monk popping red iron pills, dimming the rafter lights; another in the rear loft projecting a large-screen slide show high over the reverend’s shoulder. Floor-to-ceiling celluloid images scrolled by, a milky, acidy Kodacolor kaleidoscope of kids, kittens and flowers, followed by grainy, overblown snaps of Malcolm, Martin and Medgar, of Selma, Stokely, Angela Davis, Harvey Milk and the Kennedy boys.

          That sunburst-robed Redemption choir eventually descended, set in motion stage right with some ‘Sweet Bye and Bye’, doing a syncopated shuffle worthy of the Famous Flames. Tinus sold the entire show with a modified Brown cape-of-faith routine, a colored pinwheel key light haloing him due left of the pulpit.

          “And don’t you be worryin’ alla time ’bout what other people do and got. Or what they don’t got. ’Cause they got theirs—you gotta get yours.

          “That’s right, you responsible, you bein’ accountable for your own self! Ain’t nobody doin’ to you, only you’re doin’ to you. So stop doin’ to you and start doin’ for you this mornin’!”

          “Ain’t that the truth,” she nudged again, repositioning the small primrose carnation in her Saksy Champagne silk headband. “Are you getting all this down, professor? But you’d be a lot better off if you had your cameras with you now, am I right?”

          “All I’m getting out of it is a morning-after headache, to go with my caffeine brain clamp,” I replied, scanning the church’s exposed oak beam ceiling, seven-bulb shaded chandeliers, wall sconces of orange, green, red and yellow flora, while groping for a connection between the sermon and the slides. “And even low-speed Agfa color isn’t up to handling this sensory overexposure. Better that I left them at Denise’s.”

          In due chorus, the cathedral lights flared up, Redemption gospel singers broke loose by virtue of some harmonic organ chords into an uptempo ‘Ain’t Gonna Lay My ’Ligion Down’. Row after row cast those shackles aside for Thrall, the flock’s odd diversity shining through—Asian, Latino, pink, black, whitey and every mix in between—at least for the moment. Aspiring Hunter’s Point congregated with denominationally slumming Pacific Heights. Brown hugged yellow, kissed black, embraced white, in an anonymous, unself-consciously innocent sort of way—shoulder to shoulder, arm in arm, the chord change setting pews blissfully asway.

          Sydney herself wrapped around a neighborhood woman-san, a spindly brother in lavender tunic and urn umber spandex, two spinsters in splashy fruitbowl bonnets and island mau-maus, and a 300 lb. soprano draped in a papaya patterned serape and crown of purple pansies. Saber-tooth combed Afro painted ladies, black jogging-suited Leroys and messianic flower children hooted and stomped, wailed, whistled, clapped and clung—bussed cheeks, rubbed necks and slapped bottoms as if they had actually departed their station, transcended this fruitless plane.

          Wild-flowered straw hats, flowing tribal scarves, Aztec-inspired serapes, Pacific Island frou-frous, lily lace shawls, buttoned-down corduroy, hemp-tied talisman robes standing room together in one celebratory freedom train to salvation. Collecting the fares were an all-pro squad of offensive linemen extending long-handled baskets up and down the aisles.

          “Stand up to youself so you can be standin’ up for youself—once and for all. Stand right up and be somebody in this big, wide world!

          “Create youself a scandal. That’s right, let’s all create a scandal together, a scandal of happiness and love.

          “But you gotta start it—right here, right now. Reach out and touch somebody’s hand, make this a better place, if you can. Let’s sing it together, people!”

          “Now that is deep. Amayyyzing, huh? No holding back,” Syd smiled, hooking my arm. “If that doesn’t put you in synch with the big guy, I don’t know what…”

          “Yeah, amazing,” I muttered, rubbing my temples. “Think we could split pretty quick or…”

          “Oy, Mr. Sociology, there’s just no inspiring some people…”

          “Guess I’m just not one for crowds this early in the morning. Plus, there’s no damn oxygen in this place.” Weak-kneed with all this intimacy, I was shaken even further by the ushers’ expressions when I stiffed their baskets.

          “If you don’t feel comfortable in this crowd,” she snapped, quickly covering my offertory shortfall. “Maybe you really only want to study people like yourself in cushy Boulder.”

          The music deafened, if only to stay a decibel ahead of the chants and foot stomping. Arms, straw, lace and fur flew in all directions, and the heat was definitely on. We tripped over several stubbly Tenderloin curb dwellers who had squeezed into their pew’s end after the starting chimes, me catching a euphoric back of the hand across my chin. An usher directed us through a side door, and there we left a throbbing Dawning Redemption service spiritually sensitized, yet somehow still mangily mortal.

          Reverend Tinus continued rocking center stage with his microphone, rolling with the furbelows and glissandos—blessing, right-on smiling at his collection team, grinning mutton chop to peppery mutton chop as the choir and flock launched into ‘…Make this world a better place, if you can’ as a tearful, delirious finale.

          “What’s that smell,” I asked, as we squeezed around a long, bedraggled line forming outside two rear cathedral doors.

          “It’s for the free lunch kitchen they open right after the service,” Syd said offhandedly, getting the picture down for later painting, jotting some notes on her DR program. “They have shelter beds down there for the real down-and-outers, too.”

          “Reminds me of how hungry I am,” I sniffed, tracking the aroma of something pullety down a crowded flight of arrow-marked stairs. “I mean, after all this strenuous… religion…”

          “Trust me,” she pulled me away by the forearm. “You never want to get that hungry.”

          Our conversation maintained a religious tone well out of the rotting Tenderloin, then the full crosstown length of Geary Boulevard. Sydney questioned the reactionary nature of Roman Catholicism in the face of an ultra modern St. Mary’s Church, which lorded over Cathedral Hill highrises like an inverted washing machine.

          I noted the proprietary Red Chinese temples and Japantown pagodas on the Hill’s windward downside in rejoinder. Such discourse quickened past Peace Plaza, Syd marveling at Tinus Thrall’s charisma, his reference to scandals and the sweet-here-and-now, while I dwelled upon his mongrel flock. It began expanding to a Judeo-Christian exchange on the Jesus thing in general, and crosses bared and borne in particular. How thorny was the messiah crucifixion scenario, and how the whole Jewish carpenter miracle was so hard to swallow. This latest dose of her free-form directness left me dumbstruck at least to Fillmore Street.

          Because what turned my head was what followed closely on the heels of a presently potted down music shrine, roughly one-third of the way out the Geary Expressway into the Western Addition. There, in the shadow of, yet dwarfing the hallowed Fillmore Auditorium stood two large, grimy religious assembly halls, side by side. The first, more majestic church proved to be Korean Pentecostal. The second, an even grittier, mausoleum-like former satanic Scottish Rite of Freemasonry sanctorum—once named for a founder of the Ku Klux Klan—seemed a bit too mystical to nail down.

          “It’s sort of like Dawning Redemption, only without the Sunday sunrise service,” Syd said haltingly. She’d recently had a new in-dash cassette deck and surround sound speakers installed in her Fox, and busily loaded a Joni Mitchell tape, eyes caroming between the Pioneer player and Geary Underpass’s outbound surface lane. But not before she had speed dialed past a bottom-of-the-hour news radio headline of another brutal overnight assault up at Lafayette Park, side-eyeing my way.  “Not that again!”  No way, I winced in silence, not my thing… Fortunately the ‘Hejira’ album came up strong, a long distracting track called, ‘Coyote’.

          “Then why didn’t we go there,” I dodged, slightly turning down the volume, easing into Joni lyrically bounding between a lonely studio and some idyllic upland ranch. I then craned away to note a scattering of rather animated revelers outside the tomblike church conversion over across Geary, the one with maximum steel bar security, a strange, crooked roof cross and minimal signage, something about ‘Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ Denominational Brotherhood’.     

          “Sorry, wing nut. I read where most of them packed off to some South American jungle a few months ago,” she backed off and gunned ahead, rejoining the medianed Geary speedway west of the underpass, climbing Presidio Ridge past Divisadero toward the Masonic Avenue tube. “They were reportedly on the run from a slew of investigations of guns, drugs and money shenanigans.”

          “Great, we miss a service with decent hours, plus a lot more breathing and leg room…”

          “That’s not the half of it. I hear the whole sect is your basic worm farm. Believe me, there’s good charisma like Tinus’s and bad charisma, like trying to poach from Dawning Redemption’s flock. Namely Peoples Temple, which is headed by some weird hick preacher from Indiana by way of scamming through Mendocino County. Now Reverend Jim Jones has everybody in town kissing his feet, City Hall on down.

          “Typical city politics, if you ask me, he’s even got Mayor Moscone and Willie Brown in his back pocket by delivering ghetto voters on a gold collection platter,” she continued, accelerating past a fuming Asian tour bus. “But then New West Magazine ran this exposé last summer claiming that PT was a nightmare cult full of sex, drugs and mind control. That Jones was more into separating followers from their valuables than bringing the faithful together, with a lot of nazi beatings and brutality to boot. Rumors were flying like crazy even before I left for Europe…”

         “Nazi—even out here now?!”

          This and the album’s ‘Strange Boy’ track, which Syd shuffled to, silenced the religious debate past a Christian Science between Steiner Street and Park Presidio, not to mention the hulking ice rink-turned-rock Mecca known on countless live albums as Winterland.

          From there, we papered over our differences amid a rolling Geary Boulevard blur of neighborhood synagogues, Sikh temples and Islamic mosques, fundamentalist storefronts, heavily shrouded sacrificial sects, churches of Natural Grace, Perfect Liberty, God in Christ, Household Faith, Divine Mahi Kari, the Star of the Sea Parish, and Vineyard Christian Fellowship that seemed to be sprinkled along this broad, bleached-out commercial corridor.

          Passing the multicultural blur of drug and food chains, of mom & pop, gramps & granny ethnic bakeries, Irish bars, Russian and Asian cafés, print shops, mattress discounters and corner cleaners of inner and outer avenues, we green lighted all the way out to the breathtaking ocean sweep of Point Lobos and El Camino del Mar.

          All along, we were rolling in uplifted spirits through Richmond District clutter, across the once Pueblo Lands of San Francisco, by this time, with more ‘Hejira’ reel to reeling on the deck, strains of ‘traveling in some vehicle’ to ‘sitting in some café’.

          “You were talking about that pastor guy who was in the news,” I asked, at about the Russian Holy Virgin In Exile Cathedral—the one with the huge gilded onion bulbs on top. I nonetheless curiously ricocheted like a paddleball back to that Fillmore-Steiner Street scene. “What… rumors? He’s from the Midwest. It’s just a church, like all these other…”

          “Wrong, Peoples Temple is something else. Something pretty twisted and corrupt, way beyond your old-timey religion—not about gospel music but singing the blues. I’m serious, God knows what really goes on in there…”

          “But how’s their food?”

          “On the rubber greasy side, far as I’ve heard…”

          “Yeah, well, where we off to now?”

          “The dawn of pure creation—the end of starvation as we know it today…all so totally to die for…”

Care for more?

Chapter 29. Brunch with a view does 
wonders for the appetite and attitude, then 
a scenic stroll proves more peptic to the soul…

“Be careful that what you
might ingest is not taken
in proverbial jest

“Whose number?”

“Take your pick.”

“I’m really not much of a numbers person…”

“You’ve no choice. It’s crowded here, because everybody’s doing it. Come to San Francisco, lose your limitations, find your limitless self—the latest rage.”

That said, Regina Tzu rose with a flourish, headed for the kitchen once more. Funny, everywhere silver, yet it was either finger food or these slippery wooden sticks. I repositioned them clumsily in my left hand, cradling them between thumb and index knuckles, where they proceeded to collapse on me at first stab, brown rice and chickpeas flying like popping corn over bowl’s rim.

 I glanced fitfully away, hoping she was preoccupied with a teapot that was steeping out loud. Instead, she returned, nudging a side dish of bean curd my way, noting that she had ground in a little mugwort and tarragon to zip it some. I could but nod and feebly poke about. That’s when I noticed the crack worn, leather covered book further down table. Anything to stray off topic.

 “Sooo, what are you reading there?”

 “Meditations of Lao Tzu, if you must know,” she said, nibbling at a goat’s cheese cube with her puffy, pouty lips as she flowed about the dining room, lighting candles, stopping with the paint can-sized mortar beneath her shrine. Flames set, she lowered the light dimmer and poured two cups from a steeping silver teapot. “It’s quite spiritual. Spiritualism’s my life. I also practice dynameditation, mantras in motion.”

 “I thought silver was your life…”

 “Silver’s my other life,” she said, offering me one of two blue and yellow enameled cups. “We all have multiple lives, do we not? How about you?”

“Me? One’s plenty, believe me…”

“I see. Well, I feel Lao Tzu has a sensual quality, as well. But don’t go getting any iniquitous ideas.”                      

“Amen. Not to worry about that…”

“Understood then. So finish up there, if you can,” she replied, setting aside the tea tray. “I also have some nice kheer and raita chilling for dessert.”

“That involve these chopsticks? Or can I take a rain check on that?”

Eyes rolling, Regina reached over to my right, picking up her book. What I at first dismissed as an aggravated mole or freckle turned out to be her tiny amethyst nose stud ignited in the candle glow. This alone snatched my attention away from any more chopstick jujitsu. Then she commenced reading aloud from Lao Tzu:

‘One who knows man is intelligent;
one who knows herself has insight.
One who conquers men is strong.
One who conquers herself has steadfastness.’

Why she did so, I could not decipher, simply nodding and setting the sticks neatly aside. “Amen,” I said awkwardly. “That was, uh…”

 The truth of Tzu, of course,” she said devoutly, closing, plopping her book on the table, a bit too near my forearm for existential comfort. “Now, time for divine dessert. But first, we must hug.”

 “Must what?” I shifted in the chair, jaw dropping into my Mattar Paneer. There she stood beside me, smiling tightly, bejeweled hands outstretched. “Uh, I don’t think…”

“Come,” she insisted, between bursts of throaty, tongue-on-palate chanting and solmizing, cheekbones aglow. “We understand, temporal not, iniquity not…it is spiritual, and it is written.”

“Uh, nothing personal,” I muttered, nervously folding my napkin, otherwise sitting stony pat. “It’s just that things are a little confusing now as it is, got me kinda sorting it out. You know, a friend of a friend of a friend deal. And experience tells me…”

“Friends’ friends, huh? Sounds awfully profane to me,” she continued beckoning. But now, now—you don’t have any experiences that don’t have you in them. Lao teaches us whoever you actually are is the source of your experiences.”

“Begging your pardon, but I really better not.” Begging off being the better part of chivalry, not wanting her within sniffing distance of my road aroma, much less getting jabbed by all her angles and barbs.

 “Really?! You’re not looking at reality at all. You’re looking at a picture in your unsanctified brain…just a reflection of an untrue real that you blindly choose to actualize.”

“Say what?” I pushed my chair back, rising slowly from the table, chopsticks flying like a splintered ball bat, yet another surreality setting in. “Maybe I should hit Denise’s room and clean up…”

 “What is it, then, my cuisine? My vestly aura?” She glared at me, flushed redder than the candlelight, rings and wrist and bracelets flashing like roadside detour signs.

“No, hey,” I finished my tea. “It’s been terrific—I’m just a little…”

“You come into my home, partake of my bread,” she shouted, chandelearrings fanning, nose jewel on fire. “I meant a purely innocent embrace, a universal expression of gratitude. Are you a non-believer? You’re a spiritual Pyrrhonist, that’s what you really are.”

“Whoa, believe me, I believe.” I jumped up, edging toward the hallway, toppling a smaller baby Buddha on the backslide. “You’ve got me all wrong…”

“No I haven’t, you’ve been staring through me from the moment you came in here. I feel positively violated,” she screamed, silver jewelry clanging like an early warning campanile. “You’re porcine, infemous, just like all the rest! ”

“No way, I didn’t mean to…” Infemous? I froze in place, feeling innocent as charged, with no suitable line of defense.

 “Lao says the door of the Mysterious Female is the root of heaven and earth,” she recited, over the ringing of the parlor phone. She glared once more, spinning with Versace runway poise to answer the call, albeit with a deep parting shot. “It lingers in whisps, use it without haste, you philistine, you plebian…twit!! I’m Bryn Mawr honors, I’ll have you know…”

 I knew not what to make of that, the radical spiritual turn, the inflammatory condemnation: I just wasn’t at all prepared for such a pivot. Was she talking classless or classlessness? Was it my persuasion, or was it just me? I was caught flat-footed in rank stocking feet, by a host who was holding me to some standard higher than I’d been beholden to before. It was a harmless, hospitable hug, after all—something to do with your hands. I reached dazedly for the chopsticks, tapping them against the tabletop like Charlie Watts at his drum kit —keeping a shaky snare and trap beat, a top hat solo on the rice bowl while trying to visualize her rear flat configuration—until the chantress came tolling back in.

“Seems it’s for you, one of your friends of friends,” she said coldly, pointing me toward the rear hallway. “I’d prefer you took it in Denise’s room.”

“Sure, no problem,” I said, somewhat relieved, yet feeling somehow hung-up over this disorienting little encounter, hoping she wouldn’t hang up at her end before I found my way to the extension phone. I set aside the chopsticks and pocketed Denise’s note as Regina kinetically Omed her way around the dining table to re-lid and remove her tureen and rice bowls, raising the rheostat to full amber lighting.

There I left her, shuffling down the worn hall runner past the bathroom, thick with incense and Airwick, a mix of musk and myrrh—with racked Vishnu towel sets and shiva nosegays, scatterings of Co-Evolution Quarterlies and hardbound SriT’s, lots of herbal balms, balsams, lotions and moisturizers, and a curious number of kinky, tightly curled black hairs about the sink basin. I passed on that, zeroing in on a calligraphed poster, ‘Function of the Non-Existent’ from the ‘Canon of Reason and Virtue’, framed upon the hallway wall—across from one named the ‘Path of Kalachakra Initiation’—just this side of Regina’s bedroom.

 A quick peek in there revealed a round futon covered in Tibetan comforters and a scattering of ruffled madras skirts, crocheted sweaters and brocade muslin blouses. A dressing console was awash with biorganic crèmes and polishes, gem-set silver bands, brooches, chaplets and chatelaines, enameled nickeline boxes, its mirror draped in red silk scarves, lame floral sashes and yellow boas.

Her drawn window curtains seemed almost Kabul style—red, blue, green, with gold embroidery and little dime-sized mirrors. Pillows and pouches of myriad fabrics and South Asian origins were scattered like pre-teen teddy bears all over the namda carpeted floor. Sorting out all that Hindu-Buddhism stuff carried me one door down into Denise’s rearmost month-to-month sublet bedroom, for better or worse.   

“You can pick up any time back there,” Regina called out impatiently down the hall. “Phone’s on her nightstand…”

“Yeah, got it,” I replied, entering  Denise’s space all the more advisedly, almost as if singlehandledly approaching a petty crime scene, cold and empty handed.

“And no going on so long this time!”

“I hear you.” Closing the bedroom door behind me, I met with early evening darkness. But a flip of the overhead light switch, and Denise’s room afforded fallback breathing space beyond the call. Hers was essentially Regina’s room minus the Hindu bangles and swag, her decor leaving old cabinetry, woodwork and cinderblocks to their own devices, with a simple foam pad instead of a foot-high futon. Except for her digital clock radio atop a rickety dresser, she looked to have left the rest of her space to the imagination—save for a framed photo signed by that guy named Warren I overturned, lying as it was face down.

I stumbled across a maroon area rug covering the hardwood floor, headed for the bedside phone. Denise had left neatly stacked clean bedding and Dharma throw pillows, likely borrowed from Regina Tzu. Moon said her childhood friend had sublet the room, after finishing a Women’s Studies program at Old Blue. But from all appearances, she never quite took full physical possession, which left me to wonder whether anybody in this town slept in a regular bed. Then again, I could just picture Regina declaring that if I wanted regular beds, I should go to Vacaville or Vallejo.

 A flash skim of Denise’s note found her apologizing for the sudden departure, otherwise welcoming me to San Francisco, with her intuitive vision that I would synergize instantly, and that Melissa would join me just as fast. Oh, and that her roommate could be spiritually demonstrative, and seriously sensitive about it.

As I braced to pick up the phone, I could but wonder why Moon had steered me toward this arrangement exactly—had so easily let me talk her into deep sixing Boulder, for that matter—second thoughts, cognitive dissonance creeping in and out. Such reflection was no more comforting than my road tarred image in that closet door mirror once I sat down on the pad, but at least this wasn’t a platinum Princess phone. “Hello?”

 “Where are you?” 

 “Uh, in town, out on the Avenues,” I said, stuffing Denise’s note in my flannel shirt pocket, waiting for an extension phone click that was slow to come as a security deposit refund check. “At a really good friend of a friend of Moon’s…” CLICK.

 “What was that,” asked Sydney Mendel. “And what are you doing here, Kenneth, in the Richmond, of all places. And who is that person answering the phone?!” 

“Moon’s friend, Denise’s roommate,” I said warily, unclear whether that click was legit. “Point is, I’m here to take my shot, like we talked. With Josh Gravanek’s package no less, plus I’ve a gift for you from Boulder. I think its one of Moon’s hand-glazed mugs. I called to drop them off before, but Edie said your whereabouts were unknown…”

“Oh, great,” she spouted. “But what did you expect? This isn’t cow town Colorado, Kenneth. Don’t misread me, it’s amayyyzing that you’re back and all. But you can’t spring on a person like good neighbor Sam. See, I’m coming off a Passover Seder at my cousin’s dome up by Sebastopol. Then I had an earlier engagement, and I’m off again in five minutes or so. Timing is everything here.” 

“Nothing, I didn’t expect anything, just a little welcome wagon maybe,” I probed, glancing at Denise’s wall hangings: unframed, bearing images less of spiritualism than soul. Tacked loosely, mostly off plumb, were concert posters of the O’Jays, Village People, Earth, Wind & Fire smiling down upon me in this hour of social strife. “Just seems you had time before…”

“How’s that again?”  

“The letter, you sure had time to write the letter in you studio…” Crap, why the hell did I say something stupid like—trying to grab it, pull it back in. Little wonder I sought solace in the foxy Ohio Players pin-up with that naked chick bathed in bee manna. Always better to use honey than vinegar.

“Just a thank-you note—for Moon and you, that’s all—yeesh,” she groaned, rallying some. “Call me in the morning…5 AM, okay? We’ll go to sunrise service, then have brunch, it’ll be fantabulous.” 

“Sunrise? Uh, I was sort of hoping not to be stuck out here with Ms. Mystical here all evening.” I turned Warren back over and clicked on Denise’s clock radio to check for time settings, catching a news report: …There are signs of movement in settling some SFPD discrimination suit, amid insider tittering that a pretty young activist ‘sister’ had been spotted more than once around the mayor’s chambers, and was she party to the negotiations? Supervisor White has voiced his and the POA’s counter concerns, rumors swirling that he was still chafed over his deal-breaking Youth Camp defeat after supporting Harvey Milk’s gay rights ordinance. Stay tuned, details at 11. 

“Sorry, early morning’s the best I can do…” 

“But 5 AM? I dunno, Syd, didn’t come out here figuring you’d be laying a predawner on me…”

“Kenneth, you called me, remember?” CLICK. CLICK.

Care for more?

 Chapter 28. An early wake-up call 
augurs an entirely different spiritual
awakening, and deliverence to
some hollowed-out ground…

 “Enter the realm at your pleasure 
and peril, never overestimating
the element of surprise.”

          “She’s not here, and why are you?”

          “It’s a long story…any idea where she might…”

          “Who keeps track around here? It’s Saturday night in San Francisco. She’s a social animal, what can I tell you?”

          “So pass along a message, can you? I’ll call back soon as I’m able…”

          We’d taken it one plotting, prodding step at a time. Melissa and I hashed things out over morning yokes and rashers at Dot’s Diner, its huge front picture window facing squarely toward the Flatirons’ snow-clad slabs. We sent Seamus running wild over Chautauqua Park, chasing his own paw prints, no horseshit, while we chewed on the thornier issues and Dot’s doggy-bagged buttermilk biscuits. Some of our territorial deals were struck up by Chautauqua’s lodges, amid the bustling dining hall and guest cottages, the ski duffels, puffy goose down, the waxed K2s and Rossignols of an early Texas Ski Week, while climbers shinnied up and down Front Range walls like fire ants on a sugar cone.

          Moon had helped me mail résumés out to every clinic and counseling center within snowball-throwing distance of Boulder; whereupon we fairly settled on my quick return should any other prospects arise.  Days later, we trudged past Pioneer boneyard en route to more haggling over household details, with Sinkburgers at Herbie’s Deli, wondering why they’d covered famed beatnik art and Robert Redford’s janitorial jottings with those ugly pine boards.

          Packing Gouda and Monterey Jack wedges from Don’s Cheese and Sausage Mart, we soon test drove my bucking squareback up Flagstaff Mountain, past those palatial dream aeries stilted on the hillsides like huge spaceships ready for lift-off—rich, multilevel California-style showcases, light years ahead of everybody. At the Summit, we weighed the many high-minded positives of staying put in the People’s Republic of Boulder after all—especially on an afternoon this clear, when Kansas nearly came into view.

          Nevertheless, before long, we’d walked the Pearl Street Mall delving into more specific two-way logistics while the VW fuel injection was being fine-tuned and a couple of retread tires replaced. I eventually even relented some, working a number of nights waiting tables at her Coach Light Inn, making up some car money on slim gratuities. A closing night of happy-hour Grenache in the Hotel Boulderado’s stained-glass lobby, followed by splitting lactose-free soy-asparagus-tofu quiche dinner at Nancy’s blue house Restaurant, sealed things for better or for worse.

          After a passionate Fogie’s ‘Flatlands’ album send-off, Moon awoke to help me load the squareback for the exploratory trip to the coast. Her grubstake included a goodie bag full of fruit, handfuls of diced veggies and her home-baked goods–everything from date-raisin-blueberry scones to tuppers of peach cobbler and steak-and-kidney pie.

          Provisional phone calls made, key numbers exchanged, she kissed and sent me off with a howdy and eternal thank-you gift for Denise Keiner, as well as a little sisterly give-her-my-best something for Syd.Shaking her pretty head in dismay, Moon joked that while her Lester relationship was somewhere between arranged and deranged, ours was going from harmonic to unhinged. But seriously, in the process of packing, I did discover Josh’s package, wedged beneath the folded down jumpseat. Half the size of a shoebox and considerably lighter, it could have held anything within its plain brown wrapping. Eye candy, nose candy, contraband of any other kind: was it blow, would it blow? So I didn’t dare open, much less mail it—reluctantly carrying the sucker along with all due dispatch and deliberation, packing it safely away from my camera bag.

          I then proceeded to drain a meager checking account, fill up the Volks on discount regular, wave sweet bye-byes to the homefront and ambivalently, apprehensively, put happy Boulder in my rearviews. Truth be told, I couldn’t keep from double-checking the mirror frames all the way to I-70 West, weighing the peril of disrupting things thereabouts.

          Snug in my old army parka and CU scarf, Vibram-soled hiking boots wrapped in washed out grease rags, I had clenched the steering wheel with holey black leather gloves—chugging up past the Davidson Mesa overlook, pausing for one last glance down at Boulder Valley as though seeing it for the first time, if not the last. Catching a milder break between blizzardy snow storms, I soon tunneled through the early Rockies on I-70’s center route, emerging into a stiff headwind that on some dizzying mountain canyon stretches seemed to swirl into a spanking tailwind. Clear climbing up to Frisco and Vail, virtually coasting from Eagle down through Glenwood Canyon into Rifle and Grand Junction, I tuned and retuned into Kristofferson, Emmylou Harris and Luckenbach Waylon and the Boys as they flared and faded along the AM dial.

          “I got the phone number down right, right? Is Melissa there with you?”

          “Right. No, not yet, Edie—but she’s on the way, won’t be long. Meantime, she gave me a little gift for Syd and you all. See, I’m just the delivery boy…”

          “Uh-huh. Well, soon as Melissa gets here, you bring her on by.”

          Moon’s renowned carrot cake and a Thermos of mini-marshmallow cocoa had carried me across Utah’s Green River, as did a Salt Lake City radio station that was heavy into Marshall Tucker. A lengthy set of ‘Take The Highway’ through ‘Long Hard Ride’ rode shotgun with me through Fishlake Forest and over the Wasatch Range. I soon picked up route 28 along the San Pitch Mountains and Uinta Forest’s Mt. Nebo hills, sun shining like the Temple spires over Provo and Utah Lake. ‘Fire On The Mountain’ was popping in my ears as I disquietly approached SLC to link with I-80 West, bracing for another untimely mechanical pit stop, but no such dismal misfortune recurred.

          Praising higher powers, I’d buzzed along the Great Salt Lake and through its desert once again, paying no mind to the vapid imagery, the endless ore trains, let alone Syd’s cryptic Yiddish rock garden. Hoping against hope, I whistled through Wells, gassing up again at Raley Jorgen’s, crossing Nevada in the radio-inactive dead of night. I dodged varmints, fought mental discontinuity, drafted behind semi-big rigs to save a few gallons, stiffed Elko—munching on Moon’s grubstake, washing it down with truckstop coffee, avoiding Lovelock like the grippe, with no dead-eyed, packin’ hitchhiker in sight.

          I crapped out through Reno, froze up over Donner, finally crashing down in a pink stucco motel somewhere between Auburn and Rocklin that by the raucous night and next light of day turned out to be hooker heaven by the hour. Not a problem: the room was cheap, sun was up, balmy palm trees were emerging and Denny’s dollar breakfast outside Roseville was just over-easy, bottomless cup enough to set me coasting through Sac Town and the San Joaquin Valley.

          Beyond Vallejo, I was in awe once more of the vista point’s sweep of San Pablo and San Francisco Bays. I could feel the power of that dramatic, overarching perspective all the way down in the slow lane past Hercules tank farms, Berkeley’s studiously cluttered foothills, Oakland’s worldly container shipyards.  But speed and tension began building through Yerba Buena Island’s tunnel, over Bay Bridge lanes leading to that first full-on view of The City’s stunning skyline and the trim ivory and pastel neighborhoods on green background hills, the vast blue Pacific Ocean beyond. Overtaken by an articulated Transbay Express bus, I was freaked as much as fired up, here again out on the edge, mindful of perhaps minus one sure lifeline I’d carried the time before.

          Jive 95 FM was meandering through some bootleg ‘U.S. Blues’ live and a sampling of Warren Zevon’s new ‘Excitable Boy’ album, something about ‘Werewolves of London’, as I had hit the westernmost cantilever of the gray Bay span—traffic, tempo, everything accelerating on the upper-deck feed, a toll cheater or two racing on by. Ahead, downtown highrises glistened all sleek silver and white in the clear, brilliant sun, a jet stream of cars and small vans banking around the double-deck Embarcadero Freeway, which hemmed in the bank and mercantile towers like a road-scarred front bumper on a Corniche or Silver Cloud.

          I’d checked off noontime on the Union 76 digital time tower, as Ferry Building clocks chimed in. A widely studded fleet of in-and-outbound vessels, tugs to tankers and tour boats, briskly plied the beautiful blue-green Bay, before a charm bracelet of finger docks and uniformly enclosed working piers all around the waterfront—hmmm, now what about that little lucky charm? At first, gape-mouthed glance, this was a San Francisco far more spectacular than I could have even hoped to remember across Nevada, much less while waiting dinner tables at the Coach Light Inn.         

          One pushbutton down, KMEL had segued into a new Steely Dan set, beginning with ‘Home At Last’, while I snapped to and merged into the southbound 101 flow—tensing, pulse quickening all the more—lagging right, fighting lane jumpers, blaring tailgaters and muscling semis until catching the first vaguely familiar exit sign past downtown clamor.

          An elevated Central Freeway cut across Civic Center Plaza and Hayes Valley, revealing downtown’s backsides, dropping me like a depth charge onto Fell Street’s signally synchronized ups and downs. An off ramp left me facing the reductive uncertainties of the Western Addition, the Victorian-laced Panhandle, the oncoming green garden beauty of Golden Gate Park.

          Dialing in a sneak KSFX track off the Starship’s upcoming ‘Earth’ album, proved particularly timely as I’d turned up Stanyan, street map in hand, to make a quick left onto Fulton, the Richmond avenues unfurling before me, all the way to the sea. Port side, lush Golden Gate Park foliage exhaled the tribal stirrings of a Southeast Asian jungle. Shotgun side, the dark, strong-box audacity of the Jefferson Airplane mansion seemed party to some ritual groupie sacrifice behind the flat black walls of their surrealistic castle, inwards of the faux mahogany columns, gold trim and celestial blue portico fronting this weird warren house. 

          But it wasn’t the acid rock, Slick plastic fantastic atmosphere and pointed little hedges that were knotting up my stomach about now; it was the venue all around. This wasn’t stately Pacific Heights out here. Then again, I wasn’t exactly primed for a Lafayette Park rendezvous quite yet anyway—however I may have been redrawn to that Satalismanic scene.  Instead, Inner Richmond streets comprised a relatively flat grid of numbered streets—bare, cluttered avenues to my right unfurling like a gridiron flag in pastel tidy, two-flat uniformity, wall to wall—an essentially treeless, unneighborly concrete foreboding about them, despite the park unfolding across on the green side of Fulton all the way. A bleached out anonymity and alienation had set in west of Park Presidio, accumulating by the numbers.

          This Outside Land of former sand dunes, of sprawling City and Odd Fellows Cemeteries, wasn’t the San Francisco I daydreamily recalled; this was The City on the outs, nowhere in particular, only with tempting glimpses of the Golden Gate Bridge towers up north and the park’s Marx Meadow to the south as referential road markers. No amount of sunshine could elevate or enliven this low rolling terrain, or pry open its drawn window blinds to shed light on private vices, here where a race track and rousing ‘Beertown’ once raised hell and high water. Nor could the broad Pacific Ocean lapping way out there at Fulton’s end, where Sydney’s purse had ebbed as well.

          “Excuse me, excuuuse, me. I am still waiting for my call…” The acute voice insisted from an anteroom.

          “Sure, sorry about that,” I said squinting at the telephone dial in the discolored foyer light. “Just be sure to give her this phone number, okay?”

          “Alone there are you? Then who’s that voice?”

          “Nobody you would know, Edie. Nobody I know, for that matter,” I muttered. “Just please be sure to give Syd this number, tell her I’m back in town…”

          “I’ll see what I can do.” CLICK.

          The numbers had been piling up, if not quite adding up. Moon said that Denise had told her to look out for a turnip-colored house, the one with the bay window, toward the end of the block. Trouble was, the shoebox walk-ups along here all pretty much looked the part, with only slight variations of hue and shading, block after block. I had hit 24^th Avenue and began scoping out addresses like a December mailman until spotting the two-unit stucco job.

          Parking along this side of Fulton being full garageway monte, I instead swung a heedless U-ey in the Crossover Drive intersection to grab a bus stop-nipping spot across the street. Patchy groves of fir and Monterey Pine trees, the occasional baby redwood, lined Fulton’s southern flank, and I soaked in the balmic eucalyptus, squelching classic Airplane’s ‘Today’ on the Blaupunkt, before hop scotching traffic over to Denise Keiner’s place, lugging my camera bag for safe keeping. That’s when a tall, gangly shadow had slipped halfway through the no-man’s land between 4840’s iron bar security gate and its double dead-bolted front door.  

          “Hi, I’m a friend of a friend of Denise’s,” I had said, after easing off the doorbell and exchanging names. “Just in town, was supposed to crash here for…”

          “I’ve heard, I’m aware, you’re the…person from Boulder, the social science Scorpio,” Regina Tzu Fowler had snipped, looking me up and down, holding fast on the landing between the doors. “Denise left a note for you. But she isn’t here…”

          “Uh, really. Well that’s OK, I can come back a bit later…”

          “No, Denise is gone, out of town. Don’t know when she’s coming back,” she’d flicked the tumblers on her black iron gate, motioning me to swing it open. “But she said if it was for Melissa Saversohn, it was fine. So entre-vous, only minus those ungoldly…shoes.”

          Regina had led me through the left of two front doors into her foyer, jangling like a dog-tagged choke chain, yet finishing school graceful as Givenchy models down a Paris runway. She was a naturally attractive former catalog deb whose current accouterments flared and flowed like the reflective, tinseled ornaments on a UNICEF Christmas tree. Billowing above her kung fu slippers and ankle bracelets were purple and gold brocaded harem pants, leading to a tangerine ribbed sweater and color-beaded black crocheted vest. Around her narrow waist was a Sahibah-engraved silver belt with trim, ornamental gold chains, coordinated with the jewels on her extremities in strange, indecipherable ways.

          She beckoned me like a devout Nepalese Sherpa toward her parlor, wherein thick sorrel window drapes obscured much of the room’s detail, save the Hindu wall hangings, etched brass platters and mandalas, the smiling ceremonial renderings of gurus unnamed. On a small Burmese wood table between two far corner satin floor pillows was this plain black extension telephone. Off kilter, essentially on impulse, I’d asked to make that quick cross-town call.

          “Just so you know, I am not in harmony with this arrangement,” she sniffed, relieving me of the receiver, laying a saffron doily over the phone.

          “Well, hey, I’m no Zodiac killer nutcase or anything, am only staying a few days to get settled,” I hobbled about the parlor’s Persian style carpet. “What about your call?”

          “Time will tell. But when it comes when it comes…something I shan’t control.”

          “R-r-right. Sooo, where’s Denise off to?”

          “Mazatlan, I believe—on Vedanta retreat somewhere near La Cruz,” Regina replied, edging back toward the hallway, strawberry hair sneaking out from under her black beret.”

          “Huh, wonder why she didn’t say anything to Melissa about…”

          “It was sort of sudden. Her I-Ching revealed it was time to clear her passages. Denise has become a virtual ascetic of late, striving to redirect her symbiotic flow. And of course she feels the need to distance herself from Warren…”

          “Really,” I followed her, obligingly so, eyeing the red and gold foil Great Secret Dakini and Shakti/Shakta posters peppering the hallway. “Who’s Warren?”

          “Some swinish sexist who tracked her down out here from Ann Arbor. A paleo disaster in pressed denim who’s been messing with her mind every hour on the hour ever since. But you’re not that type yourself, are you?”

          “Who me?” I trailed warily, caught up in the timbre of her polished metallic anklets and armwear. “Not a lick.”

          “No, you just have this preoccupation with den mothers, am I right,” she opened two French doors, India print sheets packing their small square glass panels. “I’m familiar with that type, too.”

          “Mother what?”

          To our immediate left was a small bedroom that appeared to have been converted into some sort of crafts space. Cement blocks and boards constituted work benches clutters with burners, scrap metals, cigar boxes filled with gemstones, jewelry baubles and fragments, engravings and tubular coiled settings in various stages of assembly. As far as I could tell, tools spread about like instruments in a front-line combat triage unit included soldering guns, picks, pliers, polishers, burnishers, hand drills and small propane torches. Padlocked safety deposit boxes held who knew what precious metals and molds. I could smell the residue of melted solder, the odor of borax and alcohol solutions, turning away with a slight burning in my eyes.

          “That I call my silversmithery in there, silver’s my life,” Regina brightened, pointing about the windowless, fluorescently lit room, then straightening a small rubied barette on her lower locks. “Naturally, I do the hot and magic sorcery down in my garage lab. Other than that, don’t need much, just work and replenish, work and recharge.”

          “No lie? Hey, dedication, that’s…amazing,” I said, pupils dilating upwards of Kennedy half dollars as I followed her along the dark pine paneled hallway. “So, you said Denise left a note?”

          “Here,” she ripped it from her vest pocket, drolly handing it to me. “Special delivery, just before fleeing to Mazatlan. She says she’s sorry she missed you, hopes this helps you get situated.”

          “Why Mexico?” I unfolded a quarter-creased sheet of lavender stationery, noting the slapdash pen script, holding it close, like a ticket to the last ship out. “Marin’s not good enough, Yosemite?”

          “Don’t ask me, likely not far enough—she wanted away from Warren in the worst way, or maybe she’s fighting seasonal affective disorder. She’s just a roommate; I’m not my sister’s keeper.” Regina gestured for me to sit in one of six mismatched chairs at a large oblong table as we entered the flat’s dining room. “But I think she said she saw a flier on the Tassajara Bakery bulletin board. Next morning, she was gone, off to find herself, for all I know. Have a seat, why don’t you, make yourself comfortable. I’ve some dinner going in the kitchen there.”                                  

          “Uh, that’s all right.” I rested my palms on the wicker back of a brown Krylon-sprayed dinette special. “I’ll just hit me a Burger King…”

          “In San Francisco? You’d be lucky to even find a measly McDonald’s, and Clown Ronald had to fight neighborhood opposition to the death to get that.” She had stopped cold in her tracks, gem-crusted wristlets, anklets, belt chains and earring clusters big as chandeliers ajangle as she turned incredulously my way. “You want Burger King, head back to Vallejo. Otherwise, sit yourself down. I have something a little more microbiotic in the oven.”

          “Been there through Vallejo, thanks.” Sit I did. “So just ring the dinner bell when you’re ready, I’ll be glad to help you with the dishes and…silverware…”

          “I’m sensing gratuitous hostility in your humor, especially for a houseguest I don’t even know, much less one now dependent upon my hospitality…”

          “No, hey, just…” Before I could think up a congenial rejoinder, she spun in through the swinging doors to her kitchen. So I tried to pick up on the surrounding vibe.

          Her dining room itself was much the Delhi bazaar, at least that was how I envisioned she envisioned it to be. Regina had already set two bright straw place mats, stoneware rice bowls and small china teacups across the ochre yellow India print clothed table from one another, amid a scattering of Byzantine brass trivets, silver bell chimes and candlesticks—the two tallest of which she had already lighted. Across the room, a beryl-blue antiqued breakfront held Cost-Plus dinnerware, goblets and random volumes of Bhagavad-Gita, Canon of Reason & Virtue, Function of the Non-Existent and Tibetan Book of the Dead.

          Surrounding walls bore Krya Tantra calligraphy scrolls, mounted Shiva silkscreened fabrics, photos of Vishnu and Sri Ramakrishna, posters of Practicing Placidity and the Schematic Triad of Ternary & Trinity. A Grand Lama detailed, taffeta clad lampshade covered the amber bulb fixture, which was hanging like a blasphemer’s noose over the table.

          I soon smelled something peculiar from the kitchen doorway, bookended by a fat brass Buddha and large imari vase of dead daffodils. The tahini spicey aroma soon jabbed my nostrils like an uppercut, driving my watering eyes toward the dining room ceiling, four orgeat sheets suspended in maharaja tent-like swoops, peaking to that gold-shaded center light. Shiny animalistic silver baubles hung from red satin ribbons, a mythical menagerie that swayed like clock shop pendula as she tread twice more through the kitchen door—with brown rice, then came the ivory chopsticks.

          “Your horsemeat burger’s coming right up,” Regina sneered, setting the bowl on a ceramic-handled trivet mid table, a grilled octagon with stubby tiger paw feet. “Want fries with that?”

          “Touché, hostile humor, I get it,” I averted from the minutely graven sticks, pushing back my oily hair, trying to rub away facial stubble. “Can I help you there…”

          “Implication being I’m not up to the task?” She disappeared back through the louvered kitchen doors. “Not necessary…”

          “Just wondering about the silverware,” I looked about the table and battered, angle bracket-braced credenza against the wall beyond it.

          “Silverware?” She returned with a large, oven-scorched orange tureen, setting it on the trivet, removing its cover with mitted hands. “Very funny…”

          “Well, what’s this?” She handed me a large black plastic spoon.

          “Just some warmed-over Mattar Paneer and Navratan Sagaloo.” Her harem pants billowed like pantaloons in full sail as she sat across from me, ladle-stirring the tureen, then cranking a grinder of sweet basil over the pot. “I’ve added some curry and tamarind to revive it, a bit of miso, too. Help yourself to the rice.”

          “Uh, great,” I sneezed at the powdering, going Calcutta pushcart straight up my nose as I filled my earthenware dish. “This flat spoon’s cool, or…”

          “Cool? Try correct, heathen.” She served herself with birdly portions, easily picking at it with her chopsticks with extravagantly long fingers, skank eyeing the aversion I was exhibiting toward mine. “Conflict with your sticks there?”

          “Nope, I’m okay, got the hang of it,” I fumbled, trying to position and re-cock them without a second glance, only these tools had a manual all their own.

          I picked as best I could around the entrée’s edges, further casting about the walls, less casually than causally, not wanting to come across as mountainfolk. Corner right, a shrine of sorts: poster calendar of the Golden Gate, superimposed between the bridge towers being the benign, gold-toothed smile of Siddhara Deva Roswanu. Centered beneath that was a thick magenta novena candle, rising from another Burmese wood stand. To either side were small shadowbox sculptures of Vishnu and Shiva, silver braided garlands draped halo-like above it all. This, I gleaned from tiny parchment tags hand lettered and affixed to florid detailed silver scrolls. “That’s some devotional shrine you’ve got over there… almost like a church…”

          “Hmm, Burger King, forks and knives, churches.” She flapped her dyed cloth napkin, no masking her disdain. “What exactly is your trip here, anyway?”

          “I dunno, guess I’ve come to take my shot.” I dug as best I could into creamed vegetables, reddish brown atop my half-filled rice bowl, self-conscious as a Japanese tourist, pushing the bean curd to the side, like I did as a kid my crème corn. Over Regina’s shoulder, schematic posters of the Kama Sutra and Path of Kalachakra Initiation covered the opposing, speckled ivory wall. “You know, make a dent in this town.”

          “Well take a number, Jethro…”

Care for more?

Chapter 27. After a spiritually spicy 
dinner, things heat up over just as 
exotic Eastern desserts, until a cross- 
town phone call breaks the spell…

“Love and luck are
where you find them. So take
it all as it comes…and goes.”

          “Chicago?”

          “Not Chicago…too brassy.”

          “How about Fogie, or a little Rory Stoneman…”

          “There any Joan Armatradding?”

          “Who?”

          Chicago Transit was too horny, Minnie Ripperton too heavy-hearted, and I backed off on Joan of Arms.  So Rory, it was, side two of his breakout album, ‘On The Cusp’. Time for a few moments safely downshifting, a little whiff of the wide-open spaces, with some music to fine tone the mood. Regrets were tendered, warily accepted by Melissa under the archway threshold into our cabin’s front room, where she had withdrawn to stroke her snoozing tabby, stoke the fireplace and load up my record changer for a mid-range stereo system that dated back to USAEUR’s PX days.

          I stayed put heedfully at the kitchen table, spooning mouthfuls of vegetable and crouton thickening soup, washing it all down with marshmallow hot chocolate. Perfect—fresh carrots, tomatoes, cauliflower moistly softened by the salty consommé stock, poured through me like overheated barium, loosening the grip of besieged thought.

          That was the Moon effect, radiant warmth outwards of a thirty-foot radius around her toasty kitchen—glowing hearths, warm, disarming smiles—an overall comfort level that never failed to get me humming, with the simple flick of a range-top burner. Who wouldn’t feel positively fat, cushy and settled with gourmeta cooking like this? Licking Swiss-blend cocoa from my mustache, I pushed aside the résumés and incoming rounds of official brown envelopes, yet finding my fingers wandering over to the fragrant baby blue number that Moon had left half-folded on the table in her disconcerted haste.

          I opened the letter as if disarming an explosive device, scanning down quickly should Moon have her fill of watering our jungle of window plants. Sydney did indeed open by setting the scene of a drizzly night in her studio, expressions of gratitude for miles traveled and time spent in companionship and good cheer in the new year. She then rambled on with see-saw emotion, about glorious weather before the meager rains came, touching upon recent return trips to Hippo’s, Villa Mañana and Sausalito, particularly to the Halyard for scallops bouillabaisse and Manila clams by sunset, then painting a lonely picture of the Academy Institute after dark.

          I read and misread what I could into her tracing paper scribbling, but there was no mistaking her post script: a remittance reminder wrapped in red Valentine hearts. While the body of her letter had triggered my imaginations, her PS rather gave me the chills, not least because of a mention that she could not find that small box from Josh Gravanek, and could it still be somewhere in my car?  God forbid, check it later—I refolded the note neatly as Moon had left it, then spooned the final croutons out of my cooling, congealing consommé.

          “I also put on Seals & Crofts and Fogie’s first, for old timey sake,” she said through the wall, “but I don’t think they’re going to drop right on this player…”

          “Hang tight, I’ll take a look.” I was reminded that she always had trouble with my balky Dual turntable—maybe it was a German thing—thinking her choices could have been worse, like Carpy Gold or Joni Blue.

          “Tsk, it’s the spindle or something,” said Moon, shuffling back into the kitchen on rabbit furry slipper feet with the steeping whistle of her teapot, pouring herself a cup of Mellow Mint. She noted the movement of Syd’s letter, saying little, as if wondering whether the horse she had wagered on was coming up lame already. In short order, she headed for the bedroom. “I’m needing a little nap…”

          I slid back from the table and turned belching into the front room, shooing Pags off my stereo receiver. Avoiding the squareback driveway mess altogether, I instead jiggled with the turntable’s control levers, then re-stoked the embering fire. The sun was breaking through a winter sky, hovering over Front Range peaks like a Coleman lantern on a campsite limb, keying through upright window casings on the hearth mantel, unavoidably on the painting above.

          But better knowing the artist now, her visions and process, the creative chaos of her studio, I felt more familiar, more simpatico with ‘Waif and Grain’—somewhat separating the subject from the work itself, appreciating both, on distinctly different levels.

          I then glanced about my framed Euro photographs, noting perspective and technique, wall by wall, as though I had never viewed them before. Not bad, not for nothing, no Cartier-Bresson but plenty of rawbility to build on—did Syd really think so? Between and among them thrived shelves of Moon’s pottery, ceramics and macraméd planters, the hand-woven celestial wall hangings, prompting the nitpicker appraisal that she could craft, but she could not art.                                    

          Out the front windows, I could see shadows beginning to set in over the foothills and Flatiron slabs—Boulder’s Mt. Rushmore, that majestic matching set of pitched granite anvils, there to shield the Rockies from eastern advances, yet ineluctably losing that enviro-battle. Following tire tracks up Cliff Street, I could see little snowmelt as of yet, renovated cottages and other cabins still blanketed all the way to the greenline and range wall, scattered deer hoof marks dappling the ermine drifts, coyote paws hot on their trails.

          Above them, palatial, futuristic aeries stacked up Flagstaff Mountain like frosted Christmas presents in a winter wonderland, looking out over Boulder Valley and as far east as Nebraska on clearer days. Something to shoot for all right, they made me think of Marin County spreads—stature, views, bragging rights, everything but the Pacific Ocean, that magnificent deep blue sea.

          In all, the scene outside our cabin was Rocky Mountain storybook, with Rory Stoneman’s backing cut making it melodically so. His ‘Homeland’ album jacket bore a dedication to Gravanek Management, liner notes stating that it was recorded at Josh’s Das Kapital Studios. Side two, cut four was ‘Hard Road Home’, his biggest hit to date, lamenting the loss of the head of a emotionally fatherless household, with layered, moaning guitar licks. How did they put all that together? The Scrammers, the Raffters: how did the whole wise-ass Chicago bunch get that damn far? How in the world did they get up here from there? And that Josh cat’s curious little box, what did Syd actually know about it all?

          Before I could even begin to fathom that, Seamus seized my attention with a full-stand barking jag against the backyard fence gate. Message sent, the Setter flopped down once again on the rug mat of his shed-matched barnwood doghouse. As I returned to the bakery sweet kitchen to fill his bowls with Science Diet, Pags resumed curling up on the warmth of my stereo amp, Rory bridging into his plaintive refrain.

          “I’m heating up some strudel,” Moon said from the bedroom as I slipped Seamus’s food and water bowls out onto the cabin’s small kitchen porch, slamming the door shut behind me as the Setter hit them hard and fast. “Grab it out of the toaster oven, okay?”

          “Got it…damn.” I pulled her stoneware plate from the toaster oven, singeing my fingers, shaking it off in the process of delivering two steaming slices of apricot-apple strudel to our bedroom quicker than room service at the Hotel Boulderado on homecoming weekend. “Coming…hot off the presses…”

          “Yum—had a hankering…couldn’t help myself,” Moon smacked her lips and reached for a slice and napkin as I trayed up bedside. “Sooo, what about those blow-ups of yours, Kenny, what on earth were you thinking?”

          “Aww, I don’t know, it’s just this pressure all of a sudden,” I said softly, sitting on the edge of our garage sale four-poster, barely over the squeaking of bedsprings, crooning of Rory Stoneman into the groove out as the turntable changed to ‘Summer Breeze’. “Got stuff coming at me from so many different directions…”

          “Do tell,” she scooted over beneath three blankets and two comforters in a back bedroom that never warmed up to a weak central furnace, leaky windows or that faraway fireplace. “What do you mean different directions?”

          “Move over,” I chattered, sliding in and under covers beside her, setting the replica Coca-Cola tray between us, picking at strudel crust in synch with Moon. “I’m kinda wondering about prospects here in Boulder, more grad school or…whatever…”

          “Take a breath, Kenny, we’ll work it all out in short order,” she soothed, munching an apple chunk. “I mean really, where could we have it better than we have it right here?”                 

          The nap after snack break was invariably Melissa’s idea, product of her inexorable linking of food and love, her weekly instance of carnal assertion after a job well done. Our cabin bedroom, western sunlit with a side window take on the Front Range and foothills, was the picture of cheeriness, softly muted by kitty cat curtains that oozed cuteness and feline fetished overkill. She maintained that slightly subdued light helped the ivy insinuating itself around the room like…Latino Christmas lights.

          I often needled her on bright afternoons that she shouldn’t be so shyly prudish about her body. By now she was dead bed center, pillow propped up by a calico throw cover she had crocheted two winters before. The unvarnished replica bed strained as I piled further in, not that she actually carried the weight of what she ate—not an ounce of truth in that.

          “I dunno,” I shivered on, the patch quilt blankets and warm pastry slowly taking effect. “Maybe that where we should be aiming for is California. I mean, like, San Francisco is this incredible center of energy…”

          “Energy? I thought you said it was whacko city. I remember you telling me you’d heard the place drives everybody crazy.”

          “When did I say that?”

          “Tsk, I don’t know…in the car or something,” she finished off her strudel, balling up the paper napkin, setting it on the tray. “Maybe your friend Paul mentioned it…”

          “Verniere?! When the hell…” ‘Summer Breeze’ not exactly taking the chill off things.

          “When he called, I guess…what’s the difference?”

          “Nothing, not one iota,” I huffed, reaching over to drop the tray to a thick oval rug buffering the cabin’s wavy, knotty wooden floor, dropping that angle for the moment, as well. “Anyway, even if it is, maybe that’s what makes The City so alive with diverse possibilities for somebody in my field. And they’ve got restaurants up the yin-yang.”

          “Oh, wonderful,” she snapped, pulling the comforters up over her head. “Thanks for thinking of me…”

          “What? You’ve told me to broaden my horizons, haven’t you?”

          “Oh, I see, so you’ve found me work in some chow mein parlor, huh? And me, with my Lit degree.”

          “Naw, c’mon…you’re missing the big picture here, Moon.”

          “Big picture, where’s that coming from?” She poked her head up from under the covers. “Wait, don’t tell me, I can hear Sydney Mendel talking a thousand miles away…”

          “Yeah, we explored it some, she mentioned some things,” I dismissed, glancing away from her glare, out the rear window view of a snowy Front Range tapering northward. Seamus had chowed down and returned to a little doghouse nap of his own. Beyond him, larger hoof tracks looked to be from a neighborly full-rack bull elk known to charge down from the foothills for scraps and varmint prey. “But the point is, what would we have to lose by checking it out?”

          “I don’t know, you tell me,” she plained, looking about the room and cabin at large, not exactly encouraging any more of this. “Only leave me out of any search party phase. I would just as soon stay put here and keep some money coming in…sooo, what else did dear Sydney…mention?”

          “Um, nothing much, just that the sky’s the limit out there, not merely getting by.”

          “Getting by? What did she mean by that? Anything more she come up with?”

          Seals and Crofts, side one, played through without much notice, the turntable dropping Fogie’s ‘Flatlands’, a debut album that always had extra sensory resonance with us, beginning with one MDA-enhanced New Year’s Eve. I rolled out of bed, stepping over her tunic and coveralls, shedding my own jeans and gray wool pullover, to tumble back under the blankets and comforters beside her. When the Dan Man sang of god-blessed cornfields, of vast, fertile golden prairies left behind, I wrapped Moon’s soft, rounded shoulder and pulled her close.

         A long orchestral cut rhapsodizing the crooner’s Rocky Mountain epiphany inspired me to peel pack the covers just far enough to reach over and cup her splayed left breast ever so softly, dwelling even in this light upon the pale, near translucence of her skin. During an acoustic interlude, I kneaded her nipple between thumb and forefinger, like a stray dab of pottery clay.

          She rolled away, then back into me, giggling like a candy-striper, that writhing, girly mischievous little gyration of hers that to this day set me asweat in dissonance before sweeping back into the fold of her good graces, causing me to release, clench my fingers and grope anxiously as a foster child once again.

          “Opportunities-wise, friendly small talk, that’s all. You know I would never even think about…” I dodged, then parried, Josh’s box, or Syd’s concern over its absence, rattling away in my mind. “Just like you must have had with Paul Verniere…”

          “It was a neighborly phone call, to coord…” She stopped herself, eyes momentarily to the plaster-cracked ceiling. “I mean, he was concerned about how you were handling your doctoral status situation. Then he stopped by once to help with a little shoveling.”

          “Hah, I’ll bet,” I searched her shifting expression. “Then what about the Lester calls, huh? How did that all go?”

          “Totally out of the blue, going nowhere, I tell you,” she countered, a smite uneasy with the carnal contact. “Sort of like when your ex, Cassie called you, okay? Is anything ever coming of that?”

          “Nada, Moon—Christ, you know full well,” I said, caught off guard. “So then who was it answering the phone when I called last Saturday? With a mouthful of food, yet—who the hell was that?”

          “Oh, must have been Aaron, a friend looking in on the animules while I was at work,” she blushed. “I do have friends here, you know. Like, at the pottery lab. There are other people in our world.”

          “Yah, all those wheels turning, all that handiwork…”

          “C’mon, Kenny, you really do have to get over that insane jealous streak of yours.”

          Cabin fever was setting in. I coursed down a blue vein under the covers, down her smooth, soup-swollen belly to a deeply recessed crescent, furry as an Angora feline. A final Fogie trilogy on the cursed lure of more distant gold tracked through my KLH speakers from the front room, an epochal dirge on the fateful chase from Columbus Circle to Lahaina Bay. Somewhere near Fogie’s Kalispell verse I re-staked claim, shearing my open hand under her baby blue lacies, between her legs like an opener slitting a love letter, lightly rimming her labia to warm, welcoming dampness, fully stretching fore digits to delicately tickle her swelling clitoris.

          Fogie’s sorrowful affair in Laguna Beach found Moon in turn finger-stepping down me to cup, then scratch my scrotum—lightly, tenderly stroking for oxytocin effect—no nut-wrenching, greedy Lovelock power grab, always more self-consciously tentative than tenacious, as though feeling her way around the shift knob on someone else’s control console. Nevertheless, I hardened fast, while his closing, mournful ballad, ‘Looking for a Lover’, served to further ease the friction.

          Fogie only knew what we were thinking, but the passion suddenly, rather unexpectedly picked up. With late sun seeping through the curtains’ cat patterns, covers flying and Danny sailing for Maui’s Pioneer Inn, all wariness and reserve were surmounted, embraces tightened, she gently guided me in. Expanding, contracting: I thrust firmly, she moaned, jostled trimly, bed springs creaking like the overhanging branches in a suddenly strengthening Chinook wind. A bit too long, but none too short this time: rounds forcefully fired, though still amid relatively modest skirmishes at best.

          I rolled off her, and she pulled the covers back over us to our chins. Fogie singing safely back to the golden prairies, Seamus barking at the kitchen door, I reached down under the bed for mop up. Therewith, we nodded off, sexually sweaty arm in arm, snuggling for pheromone scents, a stained, crusty Motel 8 towel stuffed between us, dopamine and opioids aflow. Then again, the background tune could have just as easily been ‘Afternoon Delight’, albeit a far, tamer cry from Lovelock or Polk Street, USA.

          “Nicey-spicy, huh?” That was what I always heaved at moments like this.

          “Nicey-sorey,” she sighed, scanning me more than usual for further signs of mutual gratification. “What say you?”

          “Awesome as always, Moon,” I replied, shifting my gaze toward the former bunkhouse ceiling light.

          “Still nothing like a little home cooking, huh?”

          “Absolutely, you bet! But what about, for sake of argument, I send out the mailings, do the interview here,” I sighed, stroking her stomach like fingers skipping over a soft satin throw pillow. “If it pans out, great. If not, I could maybe go out to San Fran, set us up. When things get rolling, I’ll bring you all right on out. I’d be doing the legwork, no risk, no sweat on your part whatsoever. In the meantime, just hold the fort, keep an eagle eye out for any Sosh department updates, and send me any good résumé responses. See, that way, we’d be working it from both ends.”

          “Ah well, I suppose my pal, Denise could put you up for a little while…seems like half my friends are out there now, anyway,” Moon ventured, rubbing her cheek, glancing at me ambivalently, striking a firmer deal, as if thinking safe house, walling me off as best she might under iffy circumstances such as this. “But first things first, Kenny…the interview I’ve hustled up for you at Faine Clinic. Let’s just take this one step at a time.”

          “Right, Moon, totally. One at a time…”

          “…Or a basic caseworking position. I just want to get out there and distinguish myself.”

          “I understand completely, Mister Herbert. But what with these darn budget cuts…”

          County snow plows cleared through lanes, and nature had otherwise taken its course by morning next. Melissa negotiated the sand-coated Longmont Diagonal, minus one waiter-designate, well ahead of Coachlight’s luncheon rush. I struck driveway paydirt by mid-day, frenetically shoveling and heaping Seamus-sprayed snow in yellowed piles along a neighboring slat fence—make-work under the winter gun with more Red Zinger steeping in the kitchen at squareback’s end. Some serious rocking and wheel spinning, a steamy sponge bath, and I freely fishtailed out to that appointment, the clock counting down. Then I dialed into a haunting ‘Shame, Shame On You If You Can’t Pass Through’ of all numbers on Denver AM; Syd might as well have been singing backup, Darna Karl on the upright keys.

          Between plow drifts and snowmobiles strangling downtown side streets, blowers digging out around the Mall, I left myself little choice but to slide into a no-win parking situation halfway into Hotel Boulderado’s loading zone. I pulled a two-minute drill past county buildings, briefcase in hand, leaping over some menacing little middle schooler boarders and snow dishes, still coming up several minutes short at the buzzer. No corrugated cardboard company here; the interview took place in a plain, single-story stone satellite building just off Pearl Street, a social services/mental health clinic, at that.  Good ol’ resourceful Moon, this couldn’t have been a better local prospect.  

          I nervously mopped away forehead sweat and smoothed tie and lapels with newfound verve all the way into the director’s office. Doctor Frederick Hilliard kindly deflected my late spiels, driver’s remorse and other raisons d’ tardiness with an empirical assessment of Melissa’s charms—as in how she smiled so beautifully and seated him unfailingly near the ladies room.

          “I just want more than anything to get out there, be the best I can at field work,  actually help people…”

          “Of course you do, Mister Herbert,” said the director, looking up and down my CV with spyglass attention to detail. “What was that topic you said your master’s thesis addressed?”

          “Uh, ‘Linear Causality in the Effect of Visual Symbology on the Group Dynamic’, sir.” I blew a whisp of hair out of my eyes, focusing on his framed sheepskins, so haphazardly unaligned on his wall.

          “Grounded in counseling, in FYC and APS, are you?”

          “Basically,” I fudged, searching my curriculum database in random memory, to little avail. “I mean, you know, the fundamentals…”

          “Yes well, Faine Memorial Clinic would be delighted to get you in here, Mister Herbert, but the funding just isn’t there at present. Fact is, Boulder County has simply worked out many of its problems lately, or weeded them out, so to speak, albeit in true economic Darwinian fashion…”

          “Yeah, attack of the rampant trust funds,” I muttered, fidgeting like a hostile witness on the prosecutorial stand. “Wonder how long that sky-high tranquility trendline will actually last…”

          “Beg your pardon?” The clinic director looked up at me with upper bifocal acuity.

          “Oh, nothing, I…”

          “Well…Ken, is it,” he asked, setting aside my résumé. “You also happen to be in that awkward over-under position, qualifications-wise. You know, in addition to an MS, your really should have your MSW—better yet, a Ph.D.”

          “Don’t I know it, sir, and I’m working on that right now, believe me…”

          “Quite frankly, you don’t strike me as the caseworker type.  Have  you considered Biz Admin for fast-track entry into HR managerial ranks?”

          “Guess I haven’t quite gotten that far in the thought process…”

          “But of course if you should really wish to clean up around here, you might try your hand at construction. I hear gas fireplaces and skylights are going through the roof these days…”

          “Got the picture, Doctor Hilliard, and I’ll certainly take that under advisement…may just give it a shot…”

Care for more?

Chapter 26. A long-haul return journey 
to the promised land finds welcome
wagons circled and firing back… 

“It’s when you fear 
you’re spinning wheels that 
things can spin out of control.”

          “I really don’t think this will do it…”

          “It’s got to…what else we…just goose it, will you? Now…”

          “Why don’t we just pull it out…”

          “Didn’t I say no more chains?!”

          Chains, but no monkeys. Much of what Melissa had wired me went for bus fare back to Colorado, but that wasn’t the half of it. When a little car storage money was factored in, plus some comparison shopping was done on the cost of commercially towing the Volks to Salt Lake City, there wasn’t much margin left for sensible moves.

          The Trailways ride proved to be an avalanche dodger, if there ever was one, beginning with the Elko station. After a buckskin brace of casino hoppers had disembarked, the only two open seats were toward rear coach, side by side, that snubbing hitchhiker highwayman proceeding to trap me tightly into the window 36A. He said little, soon spreading wide, snoring like a bearded grizzly; I clutched up, head against the cold glass, just about singing ‘…And I feel the warmth of gun, whenever you’re near’. So much for pick-me-up travelin’ tunes…

          But thankfully he piled out at Wendover, saying that with a little luck, he’d catch me somewhere between there and Reno some day—just my luck. What looked to be an LDS off-shoot polygamist then smiled devoutly into  vacated 36B, as if just back from a sect wedding weekend at some hideaway Nevada church motel. In SLC, we exchanged the pedo-prophet for a dopey snowboarder with his ballooning down ski jacket.

          Hours on, the dark, swaying bus plowed around every black ice switchback, through every Rockies’ rubble slide, felled pine tree and snowdrift between Steamboat and Idaho Springs, the boarder’s over decaled, mid-wide Burton cutting into my extremities at every winding shift and turn. The closest call seemed to be a near collision with rowdy drunken, goggled ski bums sliding, fishtailing toward us in an open bed pick-up truck outside Berthoud Pass. All along, the driver’s intercom happy talk centered on vehicles going over the guardrailed cliffs, past buses getting snow blindingly stranded up amid these peaks, passengers perishing from hypothermia and worse…‘hold on tight, folks, clutch for your life’ until lower Mt. Vernon Canyon/Idaho Springs emerged.

          Melissa had dutifully met me in downtown Denver at dawn, with more pointed questions than answers, mainly centering on routes taken, much less liberties tacitly suspected. But my ears were still popping, I stank to high dudgeon, and the immediacy of the squareback breakdown quickly aced out other, perhaps more delicate concerns. Moreover, long-range weather reports warned that a massive storm system was slowly bearing down by way of Alberta and Saskatoon.

          Midway between Westminster and Broomfield, Moon’s own turnpike conclusion was that the only practical means of pulling out of this dive came via hookchains left in our backyard shed by former tenants.

          Not that it hadn’t already occurred to me, but by Louisville, I was groggily voicing concern for her trusty little Toyota’s drivetrain—by the freshly breathtaking Boulder Valley Overlook was considering trading in my broken down Volks to Raley Jorgen altogether for the homey, snow-capped majesty before us. She wouldn’t hear of it, however, saying as we wheeled up to the cabin that the whole cursed trip was her doing in the first place, and that we still needed the second car.

          “This isn’t going to do it, Kenny…”

          “Ewwph…got a better idea?!”

          “Let me pull it out,” Melissa said back to me from out the driver’s side window. “Just like we did in Nevada—that wasn’t so…”

          “You can’t pull it out,” I shouted from behind the squareback, pointing ahead. “Look, it’s too narrow to pull it out.”

          “So we’ll lever the chain around that tree…like a sideways tow truck…”

          Let’s go make it work, she’d said earlier on, and we had better get cuttin’ at daybreak because snow was a’ comin’. So we did. Neighbors agreeing to watch over Seamus and Biggs, Melissa took the wheel, driven by her relentless optimism. We eschewed steeper mountain passes and perils in favor of the northern route, picking up I-80 at Laramie for the long haul across Wyoming. Our ride was comparatively uneventful, the little Toyota’s heater actually effective, Moon reminding me that, after a steering through the Nebraska trailer jack-knife on our initial move to Colorado, these upper Rockies crosswinds were kid’s stuff.

          Her mood remained buoyant through icy Rawlins and the tree-gnarled Red Desert, her first trip ever over the Continental Divide. I mostly picked at Tupper containers of home-baked cobbler and casseroles she’d packed for the ride, and gazed past her, grateful nevertheless for somehow missing the snowy creeked, wild deer splendor and drama of the mountains further south.

          We chatted on about my earlier journeys west, especially the most recent, about these endless stretches, all the shaley new oil rigs, what to expect come Nevada—what California was like, what I thought of San Francisco—and how I got along with her pal, Sydney. Where was I during the phone lags? Did I give our game plan some thought along the way—school, work, income-wise? More often than not, we marveled at the vast blue skies of Wyoming’s Highlands, otherwise dabbling at the unsaid edges, papering things over with single-ply Charmin by the roll.

          After coffee at Little America, we pumped breaks down Parley’s Canyon into Salt Lake City, aiming to hook up with my Volks, we had focused on strategy and tactics, namely more detailed logistics vis-à-vis hauling it back. Moon was always the better planner that way, all but ignoring the Salt Lake and Flats, as though they were merely hollow Boulder Valley spaces east of Crossroads Center. I kept checking roadmaps, highway markers, vital signs, fading Top-40 radio signals—anything but the rock gardens Sydney had littered with cryptic Yiddish lingo.

          We hit Wells, Nevada under a clouding, moonless sky, greeted by an impatient Raley Jorgen and a squareback he’d moved further into his side lot. I introduced Melissa and explained as how the eastbound Trailways bus from Elko had basically blown right through town, greasing his outstretched palm with a little extra compensatory storage cash, just grateful he hadn’t junked and compacted the heap altogether. Having hooked and chained between her trailer hitch and Volks’ forward frame, we gassed up, snacked up, joed up and pulled haltingly out of town under cover of darkness.

          I drove the automatic Toyota, she steered my neutral geared heap cautiously behind, by fits and starts, goose and brakes, over Pequop Summit and Silver Zone Pass, links and frames straining, finally getting the hang and pace of it by Utah’s welcome sign.

          From Wendover east, we had furtively crossed the Great Salt Lake Desert like a blinking, teeth-and-chain-grinding wagon train in ragged retreat—bumpers kissing, links stretching, or bucking back and forth. We limped slowly into SLC as the sun rose over Wasatch-Cache, drawing blessedly little pre-rush hour attention.

          Volkswagen dealer technicians soon detected a dead pressure sensor, blaming the minor fuel injection failure on age, roller coaster altitudes and fluky California gas formulations. Then again the dollar damage could have been worse, and we could have easily been intercepted and impounded by the Beehive Highway Patrol.

          We’d ridden that bit of relief all the way across Wyoming in tandem, Moon leading the way in bundled up, heater-fed comfort, waving back, keeping track as I nursed the sub-zero squareback several lengths behind. I fought frostbite and high country crosswinds and side-slide drifting, legs covered with an oil-stained lube blanket, feet wrapped in ragged towels and shop rags, the frigid siege lifting only in frequent coffee stops, where she coaxed me along with visions of heartwarming soup stews, fondues and hot cider by the cabin’s fireplace.

          Storm clouds gathering north over the Seminoe and Shirley Mountains pushed our sleep-deprived pedals further from there. At long last, we beeped and saluted each other’s tenacity and teamwork through Fort Collins on home. Boulder then greeted us with a 24-hour dump-a-thon, this valley-burying blizzard of almanac proportions, effacing the foothills like bottled White-Out, chapter and verse.   

          “Right, ruin Seamus’ favorite tree,” I gasped, back against the Volks, lifting up on its rear bumper while my rambunctious Setter barked for attention in the fenced back yard. “No way, Moon. And we’ll never get out by Friday, either.”

          “Why not? The mailman’s getting through…”

          “He’s got a four-wheeler Jeep…that’s his job!”

          “So this is our job, right?”

          We had slept through most of it, haphazardly parking our little caravan like squad cars rushing a hostage house, Melissa directly out front of the cabin, a bit on the shoulder, me backing the Volks onto a truncated grassy patch that passed for our driveway. Unloading the bare essentials, we piled into the kitchen as skies darkened menacingly and winds mowed pine and aspen down over the Front Range with roof-raising velocity. She steeped some Sleepytime tea as I scrubbed off layers of road grime, breaking out a few stale scones for the dunking.

          After a groove-worn album side of ‘Tapestry’, we made for the bedroom, diving under three blankets and two comforters, coldly going soporous for the duration. Snowdrifts up, mercury down: then we had awakened to Bemidji West.

          “Try it again, gradual traction—just don’t gun it…”

          “Tsk, and you’ve got a whole heavy motor over your wheels,” she said craning out the driver’s window, over the engine noise and spinning tires. “They just need a little…”

          “A little muscle, that’s all…now!” I spun around and pressed my shoulder hard against the tailgate. As she double clutched, I heaved, the squareback lurching forward just enough for me to slip and fall face down into a spot I’d shoveled in the snowpack.

          “Chains, Kenny,” Moon shouted, braking to keep the Volks from rolling back over me.

          “Give it a rest,” I sighed, looking up, beyond the car, that rolling mail truck—to the snow-sheathed Flatirons and buried palatial aeries rising above the foothills toward Flagstaff Summit. For a moment, I could see clear to Sausalito and the sunny green Arcady of Marin County. “Maybe wait out a little…”             

          “Why are you being so bullheaded about it,” she shut down the Volks, jumping out to help brush off my road worn sheepskin and denim.

          “Bullheaded? Who’s being bullheaded?! Not me…”

          “Whatever you say, Kenny. I’ll go fetch the mail.”

          I took to scraping more snow and ice off squareback windows, watching Melissa walk a narrow path I’d shoveled like it was a highwire or balance beam, steadying herself against her freed-up Toyota before vaulting to our tree mounted mailbox. So small, wrapped up in an oversize olive drab parka from my army days: still a bundle of purposeful energy, even after what we’d just driven through.

          The sun had begun breaking out of the cloud cover, but this snow blanket stuck around, University Hill stirring ever so slightly under blinding layers of white. Greenbelts seemed beside the point, streets like ours were irrelevant, trees flocked around bushes, over fenceposts and woodpiles, spiderwebbing the entire neighborhood, if not all of Boulder Valley, into awed and/or yawning submission. Traffic froze, schools closed, even Pearl Street Mall was immobilized. Joggers and hikers went into extended hibernation; 4x4s stood buried up to their roof racks, garages up to their key locks. The primary means of travel across town was by cross-country skis.

          Upper tree limbs creaked and drooped precariously, skylit roofs sagged under the scantly liquifying load. Hapgood’s place here still looked like an early warning station on Baffin Bay. But any usual sudden thaw promised to refreeze into massy icicles and stalactites overnight, rendering this entire winter wonderland a scene out of ‘Ice Station Zebra’.

          “Not a whole lot here,” Moon said, her vinyl boots squeaking and crunching across the tiny front yard’s snowcover, barely leaving a trail. “Mostly for you.”

          “For me? I pried open the cabin’s front door for her, porch roof cricking under a flurried foothill gust. “What? From the Sosh department or…”                                                                             

          “No, from the finance office, and Uncle Sam…oh, and here’s one for the ‘Herberts’,” she shuffled in, handing him all pieces, save one. “It’s from Sydney.”

          “Uncle? Must be final payday,” I grabbed it, avoiding the blue envelope with the San Francisco postmark like an election campaign flyer. A dripping tuft of snow dropped into the porch entryway with my slamming of cabin’s front door. “Christ, I’m freezing here…”

          “C’mon,” she waved me back into the kitchen with the orchid-perfumed letter. “I’ve some of my special beefy-vegetable consommé going on.”

          “Again? How come you made so much of that stuff,” I racked our coats, then seated myself at the round kitchen table, kissing my final G.I. Bill check, setting aside the rest. But there was no ignoring that perfume: why the hell would she be writing to us now?

          “Cold insurance. Got to keep us healthy, Kenny. You can never get enough soup this time of year,” Moon stirred the large stainless pot she’d scarfed from work. “I’ll do some cocoa, too…”

          Her Toyota Corona remained a model of mobility, parked skillfully on the low berm between Cliff Street and our postcard-size yard—arguably too delicately to move. She was snowed in, anyway, this time on the wrong end of the Longmont Diagonal, as far as she and disposable income were concerned. Instead, it left her with a bit too much time to mix, and stir…and read.

          “What’s that about,” I sniffed, as if masking any tic of regard. Instead, I stared down, sizing up the pot, which suggested she had been cooking for more than two.

          “Sydney thanking us for all the hospitality and travel help,” she read, so at home there at the range, granny glasses perched on the tip of her precious little nose.

          “Really, how come so soon,” I asked flatly, staring down into a pile of my sandalwood colored stationery—heavy with goals sketched broadly and generally defined, light on concrete experience and accomplishments—the makings of a résumé in need of padding.

          “She always surfaces a few weeks before her birthday, just like clockwork,” Moon sniffed. “Listen how she’s writing this on a foggy night alone in her studio. She goes on, then…hmm, this is strange. She asks if Lester’s been in touch…”

          “Well, has he?” At this, I jumped to my feet, restlessly dragging a garbage bag to an outside can, pausing through the kitchen door, status checking my squareback and what little had re-emerged of the driveway. But the snowpack held ground, melting slower than appellate litigation. Slamming the screen and quad-windowed doors after me, I scooted back to the table, towel-snapping her dimpled behind.

          “Um, yes…a short time after you left,” she calmly taste-tested the veggie consommé, folding in more cloves. “Twice, actually, trying to sound interested and friendly-like, complete with holiday cheer.”

          “Oh yeah,” I studied her, from the madras tunic to the coverall jeans. “Interested in what?”

          “Don’t ask me,” she puzzled over this compounding interest. “I just wished him well and told him I had a zillion things to do.”

          “That all?”

          “Of course that’s all, Kenny,” she shot me a glare. “What do you think?”

          “No-thing, not a thing,” I dodged, “except I think it’s about time I heard something from the department…”

          “Tsk, these things take time, you said that yourself…”

          “Hmph, you can bet Paul Verniere’s heard confirmation. Christ, it’s like they’re going to wait-list me, or something.”

          “Um, I believe he has, as a matter of fact,” she stirred in a dash more oregano.

          “How the hell do you know that?!”

          “He told me when he called,” she said, turning burners down. “Like, last week… he just wanted to see how you were holding up.”

          “How I’m holding up?” I probed, folding and stuffing envelopes, proofreading addresses. “What’d you tell him?”

          “That you were on the road, biding your time, what else?” A final taste of the soup, and she was ladling two bowls. “Speaking of which, the restaurant should be back open by tomorrow or so, and I happen to know we’re short a waiter…”

          “Forget it, Moon, not a chance,” I fumed.

          “It’d just be part-time, Kenny,” she served the steaming bowls and croutons, then retreated to the range for some cocoa. “To get us over the hump.”

          “I didn’t put myself through all this to bus tables, okay?”

          “You haven’t totally put yourself through it, at all,” she caught herself, bit her tongue, two mugs of hot chocolate in hands.

          “And what exactly do you mean by that?!”

          Crap, I fretted, where the hell was that letter from the Sosh department anyway? One way or the other, but it just can’t be the other. Not after all those grueling classes in Ketchum Hall, all the after-hours research in Norlin Library—trudging across the quad for the socio-communications electives, ducking into Packer for a quick salad and Mountain High yogurt.

          Campus images ran across my neo-cortex like a contact sheet of 35mm prints. How I would bike furiously past the Pioneer stoneyard, late for a seminar on nonviolent social movements, hooded poncho flapping in the morning rain. Sunning near Old Main between summer school proseminars on conflict management and collective behavior, studying Social Strat and Stats in the shade of breezy aspen trees.

          C’mon, the evening concerts at Macky Auditorium, noontime swimming and skating with a mountain view at the Rec Center. You’ve gotta see it my way, Dean Cross, gotta make the right call, let me stay. Send me that acceptance later, for chrissake, what’s the goddamn hang up here? I’ve made it this far down the academic career path, but you know I’m nowhere without a Ph.D. Really, dump my sorry ass now, Wallford, and I don’t know what I’ll do…aww, snap to, yo-yo, keep your damn cool…      

          “Meaning nothing, just our team effort,” she backed off, returning to the table with cocoa and marshmallows, her voice betraying untoward disappointment and concern. “It’s only that this school-job transition of yours costs money, you know? And it turns out that trip really hits us hard.”

          “So who’s fault is that, Ms. Traveler’s Aid?” I pounded the table, reaching for the mail once again, ripping anxiously through the envelopes. “Like I said, no waiting tables…”

          “I know, I know,” she sipped some chocolate. “But we’ve got to do something about…”

          “You want money?! Here…” I stood up and threw the government check at her, pushing the others aside, then burning my lips with a taste of some cocoa. “No damn restaurants, I’m telling you. I’ve got a master’s degree now, and too much blessed potential for that.”

          “Potential? Tsk, this is rent money, at best. It’s reality time, Kenny—we’ve got bills,” she replied firmly, slipping the endorsed check into her coverall pocket, well familiar with its amount. “Anyway, if it wasn’t for the Coach Light Inn, I couldn’t have landed your appointment. So to have and to hold, Kenny, to have and to hold…”

          I shuffled over to the rear kitchen window to stem the annoyance, catch my breath, swallow my acidic pride, feeling like a Wild West wrangler and New-Age Boulder mellow man all at once, missing the mark at both ends. Staring out beyond our barnwood shed, I could spot Seamus running about the back yard like a zoo hyena before feeding time. Beyond him, Boulder Creek and the crevices of Four-Mile and Sunshine Canyon Roads cut through a serrated Front Range line stretching well past the valley, bound for Estes Park.

          There was no forgetting long-hair summer treks up to Nederland and Ward, trout fishing outside Fraser over spring break—god, even that bizarro New Years in Wylies’ chateau—or simply ten-speeding around Pearl Street, up and down Broadway. Truth was, everything that happened since the day we first drove down into Boulder Valley couldn’t have gone a whole lot better, been cooler and more beatific—at least until 1978 rolled around and this creeping unease, this hazy squall began setting in.

          “Tell you what,” I exhaled, turning back toward Melissa, holding tight. “Let me just get my resumes out to all these companies and counseling centers, Denver even. I’ll give this interview my best shot…then we’ll talk, okay? Who knows, maybe I’ll even have heard from school by then.”

          “Deal,” Melissa parried, stabbing at her thin vegetable soup with measured relief. “And if all else fails, there’s always Chicago…”

          “Never, don’t press it, Moon—not a goddamn chance in hell of that,” I erupted again, in further chills and sweat, reaching over grab her up and shake her until her clogs flew off—inadvertently grazing her across her forehead, a slight glancing blow, fitfully so. “I mean, don’t even think it. We didn’t come out west to be crawling back east to that…pure suffocation.”

           “Stop it, Kenny! I was joking, just kidding, god,” she cried, stunned but quickly breaking loose to recompose herself, steeling to regain some control over this red-line situation. “But you must admit we’ve scrounged and sacrificed like this long enough.”

          “Naw, it’s just been you, Moon,” I snorted, annoyed that she could even think of some lame retreat to gaudy Chicago, no less alarmed at my visceral, so physical reaction.  This wasn’t me. Where was this coming from?  I stuffed my keys back into my jacket pocket, pricking my finger with the jagged stem where that cheesy little Satalisman used to be. “You’ve done it all.”

          “You should know better…”

           “Aww, c’mon, I didn’t mean that,” I sputtered, muzzy on the back foot. “You’re just missing the bigger picture…”

           “What bigger picture, Kenny? Whose bigger picture, at that?”

Care for more?

Chapter 25. Some reconciliation
and tenderizing help to thaw
foothill drifting, clearing a
fresher path…

“If you’re bound to hit 
          the road, don’t be surprised
          if it hits you back.”

 

  “I’m guessin’ $90 parts and labor, at least…” 

   CLICK, CRACKLE…“Your two minutes are up, please signal when…”

  “Crap, I’m outta change, operator, can we reverse the charges?”

    “I’ll accept, operator…Kenny, what in God’s name is going on? Where are you?”

    “Uh, Wells, Nevada—blew my damn…”

    “Could be maybe the pressure pump, mac…”

   “Thanks, fuel pressure…whatever. The mechanic here says he thinks it’s shot. Can’t be my fuel pump, just replaced that sucker on the way out,” I shouted over power wrenches and fill-up lane bells into a pay phone way too near this service station’s open bays. “Gonna need more money, Moon, for bus fare and the repair.”

    “Bus fare, what for…”

    “It’s a long story. Just wire it, okay, to…”

   “But we ain’t even got no import parts like that around here, mac,” said the mechanic, scribbling up a work sheet at his gasket and plug cluttered service counter. “Maybe Elko does. Mize well send it over to the Commercial Hotel there.”

  “Elko Commercial, got that, Moon? And go do it right now…”

  “Tsk, you’re asking mission impossible, you know…”

  “This wasn’t my idea, remember? And I’m freezin’ my buns off out here!”

 Come morning my squareback was rife with disco dance club flyers, two overpark/underpay SFPD tickets and a 24-hour tow-away notice of vehicle abandonment. And then there was that tire. Flat as a Salt Lake beachball, the right front Firestone, jammed up against the curb—a yellow truck zone as it turned out, hence the double citations, time stamped Monday, 8 a.m. I scissors jack changed if for a cord-bare spare and soon was on my way out, by way of four ten-dollar bills Moon had advised me last night she’d rolled up in a Coach Light Inn napkin and stuffed deep into the door pocket prior to my leaving Boulder: Just in case.

Before then, after a combo pizza and pleasantries, Sydney and I had spent the remainder of Sunday evening at her place, keeping safe, uneasy distance. She unpacked her travel bags to Heart and Patti Smith’s ‘Horses’ accompaniment on the KMEL Album Caravan. I refluxed anchovies and otherwise idled in the living room, listening to Diana do a Sondheim medley on her piano—‘West Side Story’ to ‘Pacific Overtures’ to ‘A Little Night Music’. Between numbers, I side eyed Edie as she watched ‘Rhoda’ and ‘Alice’, sandwiching in a top-of-the-hour KCBS radio news tease, ‘Cronyism and discord in the ranks: The mayor, Chief Gain, and how he was rainbowing the hell out of San Francisco’s Police Department’. Whatever the hell that meant…

Crack of dawn, I had once again crawled out of the broom closet, bid Sydney adieu and some gratitude through her liberally ajar bedroom door. She was gracious, in a sleepy, oblique sort of way—handing me a Ghirardelli souvenir bag of cold pizza and day-old sourdough, warning of cold and storm fronts, against nodding off behind the wheel, sending along her best to dear Melissa while relaxing the on-road debt for now. Thanks again, flash, she yawned, rolling off her down comforter to contort into some après-sunrise stretches, somewhere between the lotus and perfect posture. Take your sweet time, she added, think about what you’re all about—you’re the only one who can.

With that, I closed her door taking one long, last and lasting appraisal. Edie sent me off with a ‘Tell her hi, be strong’ to Melissa, whom she had be-sistered though Moon’s series of phone calls; then I beat a circumspect retreat downstairs. No dramatics, no excess of gallantry—I just felt like I had left her there, safe and comfy, like a frontier scout his squaw, just in the prick of time. Ah, but maybe it was all for the best, a couple of quick spins and it was over, nothing serious, nobody was hurt, nobody got burned. Job well done, simply doing a good friend a favor, showing a friend’s best friend a little friendly hospitality…

One last futile search for that Satalisman, hopefully minus that brutish run-in, and I was riding off into the wilds all Eastwood and Sundance, leaving with rhinestones on my saddle and lodestars in her eyes. Trouble was, tall-in-the-saddle was no match for the rust-frozen lug nuts that had left me flat sore and swearing to high heaven on that yellow truck zone curb.

St. Brenda’s steeple bells had struck high noon before I could chug through the Broadway Tunnel on my way around Embarcadero Freeway’s downtown double-decker, up to the Union 76 clock tower and Bay Bridge approach. I craned and pined all the way across the transbay span, bemoaning another gloriously spring-like day and the radiant mini Manhattan skyline so worldly rich in excitement and promise. Hang dogging halfway out my car window, I took in the cool sea breezes and svelte, stately profile of the Golden Gate Bridge, the blue Pacific beyond. I couldn’t get enough of it all, gazing over my shoulder, nearly sideswiping a cement truck while scanning North Bay hills for Sausalito’s promenade and a skyline I just couldn’t shake.

Figured, I’d brooded, sucking in a busload of diesel fumes and some granulated debris from a dump truck dead ahead: I came into San Francisco on the high road, the sunny upper deck of this silver span, with The City and bay unfolding center lane. On the way out, I got the low road, the bargain basement bottom level with all the gas tankers, garbage haulers, then an eyewash of cargo cranes and decaying, drydocked freighters, not to mention downtown Oakland. To the vanquished went the spoiled: that ate at me clear past the Carquinez Strait’s ghost ships, where I could no longer find even the faintest trace of Bay Area bounty in my rearview mirror. Radio tuning into the Dead’s ‘U.S. Blues‘ scarcely eased the separation anxiety.

  “Fine, just be sure you return to Boulder in time for the appointment, Kenny,” Melissa had said the night before, a long-distance operator re-clicking through the call. “At least it’s something solid, and I went out on a limb setting this up…”

“I know that, Moon, I know,” I’d lowered my voice, turning my back to Sydney, who was whistling ‘Go Your Own Way’ while she unfolded her designer rags. “And I really appreciate it, believe me…”

“It’s your interview, Kenny, you’ve got to take it from here. Just make it back in time to prepare, OK? It might be good for us. Besides, the cabin heater sounds terminal and Seamus is driving me batty.”   

“Doing what I can to get back soon as I can,” I’d whispered. “See you soon—yeah, me too…bye…”

Still, Berkeley’s KRE-FM signal had faded in undue course, so I gave up trying to re-dial some bootleg Tower of Power, and tuned into AM oldies, midway through ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’. I gunned the Volks up Interstate 80 toward Vallejo—yeah, like I was in a big rush to get back for some HR trainee slot at a corrugated carton scoring/folding company, direct mailer division. When maybe I could be shooting for so much more than that…

That scenario chewed my colon well beyond Fairfield and the exit for Vacaville prison; here it was so green and balmy, and Moon was hung up on burned-out furnaces. Well, best to bask in the intriguing memories and precocious moments out on ocean’s edge, for from here on, the mainland and all its speedbumps would be expeditiously closing in. A patchwork triple play, Seekers to Weavers to ‘Moondance’, provided little melodic diversion. However, another KCBS teaser spot trumpeted a second installment of the TV news series on unrest in San Francisco’s diversifying police department, and Supervisor Dan White’s heated reaction—representing as he was the auld sod neighborhoods. But case closed—what was that to me now?

Right out of the gate, this drive was breezy, fast-lane California to flat-out Sacramento; from there on, it would be hell on wheels. Good for us, for our own good, for my own good—the general good for everybody concerned? Looking out for a loved one or two: that was Moon’s role to play as she saw it. Look at it through her eyes, I tried, cruising as best I could at a sunny, San Joaquin Valley clip. Self sacrifice gave dear Melissa her sense of self. Better that than little Ms. Matisse, probably back in The City climbing her dreamy white sandbox walls this very minute, stroking up a creative storm with her pencil sketches and Grumbachers—no unfinished business there, right? Nothing but a high-speed hemorrhoid in goose down and cashmere.

An even harsher revelation had hit somewhere near Auburn Dam: The higher the climb, the deeper the dive, if it was 65-degrees and sunny at Citrus Heights, figure 35-degrees and gloomy at Clipper Gap. So I ass-ended a wind sock of filibuster velocity and volubility about 3,800 feet up I-80, which earned me a piss and coffee break at some truck stop/tourist trap tucked behind a pine-clogged outcropping on the western brink of Tahoe National Forest.

“Got chains,” asked an over-the-road driver one counter stool down. “It’s nasty up past Emigrant Gap.”                   

“Chains? Not even snow tires,” I said, after he passed me the sugar and creamer—one I wasn’t so certain Syd had yet added to her collection.

             “Suit yourself. But I wouldn’t be caught dead heading up without ’em. The CHP might tag you, if the monkeys don’t stick it to you good.”

“Monkeys?” I stirred and sucked down some lukewarm swill. “I’ll keep an eye out…”

Besides this sage advice, the westbound trucker had picked up my raspberry twist and joe. Sad to say, it turned out to be right on the money, semi-heavy snows whipped by grizzly cross gusts that made Interstate lanes slicker than a glazed dipped in polysaturated donut oil. Then darkness befell, mercury and barometric pressure dropped over any lingering bright spots. Taken together, this was too much for a caffeinated, sun-kissed neophyte fresh out of the palm trees—even one with a pocketed Yosemite Sam creamer.

I had either dodged the manic chain monkeys or was deemed a lost cause not worth their time, also finding CHP cruisers too busy with bigger game. My tires spun and slipslid through Soda Springs, amid snow laden pine woodlands, then the full-throttle creep over Donner Summit, which is where the squareback showed first signs of misfire sputtering.

A skied-out gasrat outside Truckee wanted about $10 a running minute to rig some fuel filter bypass, a sawbuck more once he saw we were actually dealing with VW injection. Piss on it, I closed up the rear engine lid, Reno was all downhill from there, but then so were the proper authorities. Twelve miles short of the Nevada line, a highway patrolman sirened me over to the shoulder, trooper hat and badge gleaming in his flashing red lights, black calf-high boots squeaking, crunching under his every step.

“Pretty rough sledding over the summit,” he asked, as I cranked down my window with shivering hands. “Where’s your chains, son, did you see the alert?”

“No…uh, sorry, officer…from out of state…” Just the thought of that summit made me avalanche phobic, bracing for a white-out wipe-out with drifts piling up over the mileage markers, hungrier than Sarah Graves at the snowshoe party.

“They don’t have snow there in Colorado?” He sniffed around the car, then circled back to my driver’s side door. “And what about that right tail light? Let’s see your license and registration…”

“Sure…tail light, huh? Bulb musta blown…gotta get that fixed…” I cranked up my window, watching him in my rearview, cooking my heels as he radio checked me in his cruiser, then marched on back, tapping my glass.

“This citation for the light and tires ought to give you some motivation,” he handed me back my paperwork and tore off a (warning) ticket from his pad. “Can’t run so slack here in California, son, better hightail it back to the Rockies.”

Roadside larceny, Golden State Gestapo: the CHP followed me from Bocal near to Verdi, sending me off with a blink of his headlights. The whole affair blinded me rage-wise on the way toward ‘the Biggest Little City’, that and snow the slushy smear of my worn out windshield wipers. There was no appreciating the pure white Tahoe hills, the crystalline flow of the Truckee River. I kept rather thinking about all the railroad wrecks in those ancient wood framed train shed roadbeds along Sierra ridges, the orderly cease and desist of California splendor where Nevada’s craggy scrub brush began. A gentle decline and clearing blacktop were little compensation for a 12-degree windchill, the squareback’s accelerating dyspepsia—something with the pipes, the heap seemed to be bucking and farting.

Those hot lights of Reno’s skyline and promise of cheap casino food had led me to Roulette Row, and a little side street Squeeze Inn hole that served up thick, thunderous chili over franks, burgers, fried chicken and minute steaks, on cottage cheese casseroles and custard cups—atop flapjacks, waffles and hash browns for the played out casino crowd. Chili everywhere, caked on the floor by the jukebox where two played out blackjack junkies had collided with their Super Bowls. I went with a ‘Mad Dog w/Velveeta’ and coffee, tapping on the counter to a Glen Campbell-cum-Vic Damone beat, all gassed up and topping off for the road, lubed right down to the crankcase and bowels, citation and Raider belt buckle-free.

 So I had shot out of Reno like recooked beans, past fringe gambling houses, while-u-wait wedding chapels and divorce mills—the Volks adjusting to relatively lower, flatter elevations, humming right along. Cranked up on a big gulp cola, I coaxed what I could out of the rusty heater vents, dialed in a Reno classic rock station and hit I-80 East full throttle. An Allman Brothers blast carried me through a neon-fed Sparks tangle, leaving greater Reno’s casino hotels, motels and garish, widespread luminescence in a puff of sandy snow. Giddyup, head ’em out, like the truckers slinging road muck at my windshield as they passed on by. Less piercing, more manageable were the lodging marquees and gasmat signs casting a rosy glow over nearby Virginia Mountains, Allmans’ ‘Trouble No More’ putting it all in 60 m.p.h. perspective.

Off in the northern distance, I could spot the Trinity Mountains, Seven Through’s lava beds and Black Rock Desert under a clearing ¾ moon and shooting stars. Snow-dusted Humboldt hills and Brother Greg’s Sweet ‘Melissa’ helped me turn a blind eye through the hot sheet motels of Lovelock, not least that gripping interlude at the Rodeo Arms. Yet I couldn’t help but flash on the sweet bouquet of Syd’s cheeks and thighs, pressing my lips and nostrils like a full-bodied apertif.

Hmph, really smooth—she must be relieved to have washed her hands of me by now. A real trooper—a regular Joan of Arc the way she dealt with my distress call and quick split decision after treating me to a weekend like that. Whoa, Kenworth flatbed breakdown up near Rye Patch: I focused, eyes on the miles upon miles of flat, winding road, rearview mirroring the gaudy neon and odds-on eyesores. From there on, the surface of Mars…

Save for the cowboy country ranchland and snow fences; Syd’s motherly East Humboldt hills had soon given ground to new barbed wire, trailer courts, auto graveyards, self-serve gas marts and toxic disposal sites that lined frontage roads into Winnemucca. Everywhere grub and gaming, glittery lights like Shoshone smoke signals on the wide-open central Nevada horizon: I hastily paused at the Dirty Bird casino/grill for a warming pit stop and take-out coffee to thaw my hands.

On the edge of town, I even offered to pick up a roadside hitchhiker on the way out—if only for a little friendly relief—and he looked to be a local slots slave drained of quarters, roughly my age. Yet the longhair peered in through my steamed up windows and gave me a thumbs down with all the camaraderie of that shadow man up in Lafayette Park, as though he knew from lemons when he saw one. Pulling away, I thought I’d heard a pistol shot, a whizzing scrape across my car roof, but wrote it off as only more fuel injected backfire. So I goosed the sputtering wagon onto I-80 East once more, an interminable two-lane stretch along the Humboldt sink, stuttering up over Galconda Summit at a 40 m.p.h. clip. It coughed and bucked, gagged and wheezed through the parched, dusty ranges of Battle Mountain, long dormant gold country on the brink of a new open-pit mining rush that promised to get this barren side of The Silver State booming again, poisonous mercury waste or no.

 Rolling on and off the shoulder as semi-trailers and sedans horned by, I buttoned my sheepskin up to the collar, blowing into my hands to keep them from freezing to the steering wheel. Nevada could have used a bullion bonanza to finish off this length of Interstate—had to be the only narrow, winding bottlenecks left in 80, coast to coast. A little four-lane, a lot of two, in haphazardly contracting segments: Add punishing crosswinds over Emigrant Pass, ill-timed blasts of sagebrush and tumbleweed ripping like high, hard fastballs across my bow, nuclear mutant gophers, prairie dogs, coyotes and God knows kamikazing toward those wobbly tires. Third gear, down to second and counting, pedal to my rust pocked floorboard—the gustier the wind, the colder it got, feet numbing frigid, with no heartwarming radio beyond static C&W to be heard.

  “Hell, by the looks of it, I’da never left Frisco,” continued the aforementioned garage mechanic in the immediate here and now.

   “Who says I’m from San Francisco?” I held up my end of the engine lid.

  “Sez so on that souvenir bag in your rear seat there. Anyhow, if I was you, I’da had this thing looked at in Reno…”

 “It didn’t peter out in Reno, it petered out here…”

  “Dunno, engine back here under a station wagon floor,” asked the mechanic.  “And fuel injection on yet…how old’s this foreign heap, anyway?” 

“Uh, Sixties, late Sixties…” I checked out a fresh ding in the squareback’s roof.

“Whew, wouldn’t know where to start, mac. I mean, if you just had a fuel pump like regular people…”                                                                       

Got so I had all but pulled over to an emergency turn-out in fuel rejected, backfiring defeat, resigned to taking a screwdriver to the butterfly valve, a ball-peen hammer to the pump and gas-fouled plugs. Flipping off an inbound trucker who had airhorned me onto the shoulder, I shielded my eyes from hi-beam headlights in  either direction for mile upon moonlight mile.  Yet downroad, just short of Dunphy and the shadowy Tuscarora Mountains, my Volks seemed to rally, fuel was feeding and firing in top-dead-center order again.

Swigging more Coke, swimming in the fumes of unspent gasoline, I re-entered the eastbound lane with new-found confidence, coasting smoothly into Carlin, tunneling through the Independence range, ready to roll the dice on a bare-bones Elko fill-up in preparation for an all-nighter to Salt Lake City.

Soon Elko’s main drag was blinking neon ablaze, from the Hotel Pequop to Buckskin Billy’s Cowpoke Poetry Bar to Stockmen’s, ‘Where Players Are Winners’. But against my fears and better judgment, I blew by the closed Volkswagen dealer, doubling down on this heap and the odds on making it to SLC, maybe shoot the wad all the way to the Pearl Street Mall. A little more gas, a lot more take-out joe, and I was blowing by the Elko County Seat like a Pony Express rider with trust deeds in his saddlebags and firewater in his veins.

Sure enough, the squareback had responded with fuel-injected horsepower the little four-banger hadn’t mustered since before its odometer turned over. I was inhaling devil’s food cupcakes, washing them down with powdered creamy coffee, tuning in to scratchy Merle Haggard and Charlie Pride on the dashbox, card counting my blessings out of town. Nothing but broccoli-top scrub, range fences and white triangular cattle guards on the comparatively straight arrow leg to Willup and beyond. At least until I-80’s next rise and the East Humboldt mountains came into view, gradiently proving to be the Deeth of me, in the silhouette of an 11,300 foot Hole In The Mountain Peak. From there on, my Volks reverted to its gagging, bucking ways, dying altogether—last gasp, fierce final throes, under a railroad viaduct on the outskirts of Wells, coasting on fumes here along Business 80 into Raley’s Gas & Garage—coming up to closing time, just around the bend.

“But I s’pose you could always go check it out directly with the VW dealer in Elko when you go get the part,” said Raley Jorgen, proprietor and mechanic in residence. “They’d probably know what’s up for sure…”

“Thanks, been there, tried that. Then again, what choice do I have now?”

 “Next bus west comes in the morning, 7:45…stops over at the Ranchero Hotel…don’t miss it, only one each way a day,” Raley said, wiping his hands with a Gunk rag. “Oh, and I’d keep a look out for the highwaymen—and I don’t mean them folkie types. It’s the Wild West out here.”

“OK leaving my car here?”

  “Fine by me, clunker ain’t goin’ nowhere, and we got wide-open spaces in these parts,” Raley moved the greasy globules between his fingers into his palms for easier wiping, nails looking to not have been cleaned out since Ethyl turned to Super Unleaded and tires blew away their tubes. “Let’s just push it over next to the Gremlin with the Illinois plates…dunno when they’re coming back for that job. Guess I can always sell it for scrap,” Raley tossed his rag into a grease bin. “And hey, we might be the boonies, but at least no Californy earthquake’s knockin’ buildings over in Wells, Nevada…” Would that it were forever so…

“Ranchero,” I filed away the scrap part. “Cheap rooms or…”

“Middlin’…decent grub in the coffee shop though…downright neighborly slots. ”

“You sure the bus stops there?”

 “Just hang tight, mac, she just sometimes runs a little behind,” said Raley, handing me his business card. “And keep in touch, real close like…”

              Wells itself was a crusted skillet of a town set against the rolling, snow-peaked Humboldts and shallow nearby lakes, just another Nevada gas hop and pit stop with gambler motels up and down its old Route 40 main street. It had some lodging chains, a Western Tires, payoff country stores and casino/pharmacies—but no import car garages, much less grease gunners who gave a hoot about a broken down German job like mine.

Thus Raley’s plan, it was; I locked the squareback, buttoned up, grabbed a couple of things, then hiked it a half mile or so down strip, taking one frigid step at a time. Just beyond some modular storage sheds and a bucket slots saloon, El Ranchero stood in all its brickface, two-story glory—including Wells’ sole official bus stop: Ranchero’s casino/coffee shop.

I settled in for a cheeseburger, no fries, served up with a crooked smile by a pink-aproned cowgirl with .45 caliber eyes, carefully tallying my shriveled bankroll over a couple of machine-brewed refills. After greasing Annie Oakley’s trigger fingers, I collapsed into a cold vinyl lounge chair over in the adjacent Ranchero Hotel’s lobby and nodded off, one drowsy eye on a Peterbilt cattle truck idling out the picture window, where signs noted that bus was scheduled to load.

Train whistles, traffic noise, howling coyotes, money-losing cowboy drunks: I slept through it all, awakened only by the morning’s last Trailways call. Springing for a one-way ticket at the hotel counter, I wondered why the night clerk let me be there in the lobby Stratolounger, learning El Ranchero was already holding a full house, what with a man camp of wildcat ropers roving through town.

Water under the overpass, I thought, as the half-empty motorcoach pull away from El Ranchero’s sizzling red neon signs. The driver honked to several craggy old cowpokes bowleg shuffling past spare, saggy brickfaced storefronts into the coffee shop for over-easys and steaming decanter of joe. One long, perplexing look at my crippled Volks, and I pressed back deeply into the bus seat, nibbling at crusty sourdough with litterbox breath. Elko was in my crosshairs, nothing much else to focus on enroute besides a ribbon of two-lane tedium, 100-car coal trains and a vastly tiered, overcast winter sky.

So I just sorted and counted roadside billboards, realizing how everything was virguled in Nevada: hotel/casinos, restaurant/casinos, druggist/casinos, bakery/casinos, hardware/casinos, gun shop/casinos, pawnshop/casinos, city hall/casinos, gambling den/casinos, bailbond/casinos, jailhouse/casinos, funeral parlor/casinos…all bets covered, day-to-day life on the come.

Seemed Nevada really was a big smoke-filled seduction that way, one long fling with disaster: They welcomed you at Wendover, won you over at Wells, wowed you at Winnemucca, licked you at Lovelock, reamed you at Reno, vomited you out at Verdi. Just an idle rearview thought in passing—but a couple of quick stops, and the Elko all those ad signs had trumpeted appeared on a drab, Independence Mountain-hemmed horizon.

I coaxed the driver to drop me off at the VW dealer on the edge of town. First stop, the service desk, describing my misifiring squareback like a caller into Click and Clack: No dice, a fuel pump was one thing, but they couldn’t tell what else failed without doing an electro-diagnostic on the entire fuel injection system. ‘Try the bigger Volks outfits in Reno or Salt Lake City; pick your Mae West, fella’. Didn’t know what to make of that, so I trudged through the hoarfrost to stop number two, boxcars in my eyes.

       

   “Here yet?’

  “Not yeeeett…”

   “You’ll call it out when…”

  “Do a bear dump in the woods? I’ll call you, I’ll call you.”

   The Commercial Hotel was Elko’s Alladin, Sahara, Tropicana and Caeser’s Palace all rolled into one pile of plastic chips, with a monumental polar bear standing two stories tall over its red neon entrance. It also housed Trailways’ bus stop, and even more importantly a Western Union desk, within an ever clamoring, quarter slot-filled lobby. This was where I was pacing, in no mood for the clerk’s smarmy, catbird smiles. She stood reading the ticker as it ticked off some losing streaker deadbeat’s Moneygram lifeline, just not my own. Overlooking her was that backwall rogue’s gallery of western legends and rapscallions—not to mention wayward, down-cycle celebrities, fringe rat packer rejects from the Reno-Tahoe lounges.

  I’d burned some clock studying the framed wild mustang herds, and bio profile on White King, that monster polar bear out front, and how it had been bagged in Alaska, ultimately propped up all 10’4” high in a clear glass-aluminum cage, like a King-Kong albino.

 Of no less fascination was the taxidermed wolverine in a Plexiglas box over her shoulder, antler racks hanging everywhere, but I couldn’t help fixing on that telegraph clerk. I studied her moves and mannerisms as she ripped and read tickertape, pasting it sickly yellow Western Union forms. How she sighed loudly with boredom in her cleaving violet velour sweater, taking a hit of soda, a drag on her butt, oblivious to us desperate, tapped-out stiffs hanging on her every call.

When anxiety and anticipation started flushing over me, I ran for the tables—just looking, thanks. Lining the smazed casino were row upon row of Bally three-eyed bandits, all-day sucker zombies of every demographic sub stratum draining their paper jackpot cups, nursing rum colas on slot-machine elbows. Center room, cards, craps, Monte Carlo and 21 bars ruled the floor over a thick mat of played-out Keno slips.

Once burned with Sydney, I stayed away from the sinkhole wheels and bones, avoiding Commercial’s dealers, rumrunners and at-large moneychangers, yet checking out its scanty panty waitresses with the cowgirl hats and fishnets, sliding tips and numbers into their fringed, black bustier-style leather vests. Before long, the piped-in calliope Muzak got to me, as did the spasmodic bells, buzzers and sirens of spinning, flashing slots like the inside of a pinball machine; the barkers calling out 4 and 6-spot pays, house bouncers lassoing inept card counters, cottontops chewing their Keno crayolas in frustration, watching soaps on 21-inch screens until their bladders burst—the whoops of victory and howls of defeat, the entire fruit roll, green felt, Bloody Mary-stained carpet spectacle—finally drove me back empty-handed to the lobby. That’s about when Ms. Moneygram gave me the call.

From there on, it could have gone either way. Cash in hand, I rubbed my scrubby growth, mulling things over: Westward to Reno for a car-part gambol or Salt Lake City eastward with the whole damn heap. By Trailways’ measure, the first, best choice was its red-eye Denver-bound bus. Better off towing to SLC than throwing the dice with Reno, I doodled on my napkin over a refill in the Coffee Corral, but there was only one cost-effective way for the Utah choice to go off without a hitch. That was to go with a hitch, realizing full well where that led—second thinking about maybe aiming Reno way, maybe I shoulda never left…Frisco.                                                                                       

 Care for more?

Chapter 24. Digging deep, weathering 
chain reactions: matters tighten up, relationships
get more complicated, things get a little out of hand…

 

“The big idea, the 
longer view—don’t 
let it get the best of you.”

          “Sooo, Aimee was your first figure study, huh?”

          “At the Institute, nosy. Faith was my very first.”

          “Your…mother…”

          “You should see her pin-ups. The mother of all mothers.”

          Angles and configurations, I was still trying to get a handle on any homological scenarios. But further prurient curiosity and concentration escaped me altogether once we rejoined Nicasio Valley Road, then Sir Francis Drake Boulevard to Route 1 near Olema—no CHP shakedowns in sight. From there southward, we took the coastal route: Dogwood, hints of Bolinas, Stinson Beach. Barely secluded ocean strands, dizzily switchbacked turns, cliff-hanging S-curves, organic dairy farms and sprawling quarter horse spreads. Shoreline 1 was one long scenic blur of rustic and tidal beauty, expanding even more dramatically as we rose toward the Panoramic Highway hump, from which we could see clearly back north to Point Reyes and Drakes Bay from a string of narrow turnouts.

          A peripheral lightheadedness, a swivel-necked giddiness set in at the Tamalpais viewpoint, a full perspective on the entire Bay region that rendered me speechless along the winding, redwooded descent into Mill Valley and its little shake-sided, arts & crafts-style charmers, down through Tam Junction, under the 101 freeway’s Wm. T. Bagley Bridge to this jaw-dropping walk in bayfront Sausalito, parking outside a landmark produce grocery mere footsteps away.

          “It just goes to show how incredibly special the Bay Area is,” Sydney said, soon as we began strolling along the Bridgeway promenade, San Francisco’s skyline coming more fully into view. “You’ve got the most exciting city in the world over there, and, like, a rural paradise 15 minutes over the Gate. It’s even more spectacular the further up you go, like by Sebastopol, where my cousins live—they actually have a dome up there.”

          “No lie? Those meters in force today, or,” I scouted around for meter maids—so far, so good. There was no missing Sausalito’s other surroundings, clustered cabins and cottages haphazardly spilling down its hillsides in Mediterranean tiers to the village’s waterfront tourist row. Across Bridgeway, I spotted a wiped-out old salt sitting, shivering in the cool shade of a palm tree, and pondered if it could have been Villa Mañana’s Mr. Wiggs.

          “It’s Sunday, lighten up,” she pulled me along, pausing at the promenade railing. “Just look at this all, will you? There are so many possibilities, so much going on…and so mild climate-wise. There are no snow storms in these hills…a little blowing, maybe, but…”

          “Uh-huh, kinda small town, if you ask me,” I said, peering up and down the walk with a trace of defensive resistance, jacket slung over my shoulder. “I mean compared to, like, Chicago or something.”

          “Chicago? There is no comparison, class-wise,” Syd pointed beyond Sausalito’s sloping, cluttered-to-green Banana Belt ridge toward the Golden Gate towers, glowing redder with every glance. “Take that gorgeous bridge—a picture of grace and simplicity. If it was in Chicago, they’d have done it in gaudy chrome and car-lot searchlights.”

          “Oddly enough, it was built by a Chicago engineer,” said a blue-vested valet pacing in wait to dislodge a Bentley from the fused wood piling parking deck of the dockside Trireme Restaurant, packed with larger numbers: 320s, 450s, 733i’s. “Says so right on the commemorative plaque up there by its gift shop.”

          “Really? Chi-guy came up with that?” I asked the valet, who suddenly sprinted to the racing green British saloon as its graying broker-owner emerged from the dressy, showboat-themed Trireme, with a raven-haired trophy on his arm. “Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright?”

          “No, but Wright did do the Marin Civic Center—amazing, too,” Syd huffed, diverted momentarily but undeterred, steering us eastward, toward central Sausalito. “But moving right along…” 

          Not quite stateroom class, nowhere near steerage, the Halyard was a boxy, two-story converted fishery a bit east of Trireme, jutting out well into Sausalito harbor—just the sort of reborn eye-sore at which local trendies threw bundles of cash, developers on down. Diners digested a three-sided view of the bayfront; Halyard’s back bar crowd enjoyed even more. A young helmsman between crews ushered us rearward, past redwood burl tables pleny with platters of lobster, scallops, cracked crab and anchovy salads.

          Syd guided me along a spar deck of inlaid redwood paneling and bowline-hanging planters, beyond sunburst leaded glass lightboxes tucked between gargantuan ferns and cordotum, which cast a red lobster glow across the nautical dining room. A commodore suited waitress picked us up at sliding glass doors leading into The Xebec, an aft deck bar with full sailing decor, seating us a small mid-row table beside an open-windowed affray.

          “Ringside seat, no?” Sydney asked, as we pulled our stools nearer into the round, hatch-size table, knees aknocking. “What I’m saying is there are no limits to what you can accomplish here…it’s not like Chicago that way, or cowtown Colorado, for that matter.”

          “Chicago what way?” I picked up immediately on San Francisco’s skyline across the bay, a foreground sprinkle of yachtsmen, listing, heavy heeling into the lingering sunlight, jibs and mainsails reflectively ablaze.

          “C’mon, you know as well as I the Midwest is pure suffocation.” She’d ordered us a couple of café au laits, then dug into a breadstick basket. “Why do you think all the good people leave there?”

          “That’s not the Chicago I come from,” I said, getting unexpectedly defensive, taking in the broad sweep of Richardson Bay and the city front far beyond. “I just left because of the harsh winters… and the muggy summers…and the…”

          “Hey, I come from where you come from, remember…”

          Rail side, we were greeted by the light wash of a sleek 40-foot sloop gybing aimlessly before the promenade, its crew saluting in yellow foul weather gear. I actually found the spray comparatively bracing alongside deep winter images of speed skating on Nederland’s mountain reservoirs, or ice floes locking up Lake Michigan freighters. Here, sailboats cross-hatched the waters in mid-season form, a tight late-day racing pattern rounding the mark between Sausalito and the Headlands shadow, heeling in toward Marin’s Corinthian Yacht Club as if clambakes, Tanqueray Coolers, party balls and fireworks awaited them.

          Framing the promenade, yacht clubs and rest of Richardson Bay were the cloistered, villa and condo-crazed enclaves of hilly Tiburon and Belvedere, the starkly unspoiled green coves and canyons of lee side Angel Island—the outer stretches of Treasure Island, Alameda and Oakland’s cityscape peeking up behind, Bay Bridge spans and cantilevers threading it all together. An outbound container ship fog horned gnatty pleasure craft out of its channel, drawing my eye rightward to Alcatraz, which rose from center bay like steeple-less Mont-Saint-Michel at maximum tide, the island’s cell blocks and prison laundry crumbling in the salt air as though unearthed Sicilian ruins—that rotted incisor in dire need of capping in an otherwise captivating smile.

          “Just look at all that. Funny, like I said, the whole peninsula as this humongous erection,” Syd mused, stirring sugar into her coffee with a Stella d’ Oro breadstick. “With San Francisco at its head, constantly getting off. Know what I’m saying?”

          “Couldn’t tell you,” I blanched, as she stirred mine in turn, tossing her soggy breadstick over the railing to the seagulls. “Though it does seem like a great place to visit, but it’s got nothing to do with me.”

          “It’s got everything to do with you,” she snapped off another salty stick like kindling, staring me X-ray through. “Honestly, what do you want to do, be a professional student all your life—sucking up to deans and chalking blackboards?”

          “Maybe not, but first, I’ve got some holes to dig out of.” I drank a stiff jolt of sweet, milky java. “Got a career to build up…”

          “Are you telling me you don’t want to be all the best you can be? That’s what this is all about here…that’s what everybody I know is doing…”

          “Well, maybe that’s the difference between you and me,” I said, licking my lips, a bit on the salty side. “You and your pals are free to play in your sandbox, chase your dreams. I’ve got obligations …I owe people.”

          “You’re as free as you want to be, flash. And the only person you really owe is yourself,” she said, again banging her knee against mine. “C’mon, you just loaded up your head with all this ammunition, now’s the time to aim and pull the trigger. It’s the difference between getting by and getting over, don’t you understand?”

          I reconnected with that container ship this side of Angel Island. The high-riding Matson freighter’s blue-banded smokestacks of a high-riding Matson freighter conspired with low wispy fog to carry my eyes along San Francisco’s teeming waterfront across the bay. From downtown’s skyline and wharf to the cream cheese hued mansions Syd coveted, which were stacked like palleted dairy cases up and down the length of Pacific Heights, over to the craggy wooded bluffs and dense urban forest of the Presidio to the Golden Gate Bridge: All this was packed tighter, more seamlessly than the quick highlight edits of a year-end network newsreel, rolling out like an IMF bar graph of the Americas in the aggregate.

          Greeting that Asia-bound container ship just inside the gate was a band of over-the-limit fishing boats hounded by hovering swirls of hungry seagulls. As the churning trawlers gathered steam to shake them, the birds gained reinforcements—a swooping, squawking waterspout that all but enveloped the laden boats like sand flies over a freshly beached sea lion. This compelling little drama lured me all the way back to Crissy Field, the Marina Green, Fort Mason piers, ultimately to downtown San Francisco, by now popping out like a flaming matchbook against the clear twilight sky.

          “Yeah, but…”

          “But nothing, your mind is like a muscle,” Syd replied, shifting and upper body stretching in her seat. “You’ve got to keep bulking it up with new challenges, flash. California’s the big workout, and the Bay Area’s a totally mental place. If you can cut it here, you can cut it anywhere.”

          “Christ, I can’t even cover what I’ve already done back in…”

          “What? You’re saying you don’t want to reach all the absolute potential you can? You sound like some kind of prisoner out on The Rock or something.”

          “That’s easy for you to say. You seem to have plastic to burn…”

          “Hmph, it’s as easy as you want it to be. Just do what you do best and get it out there for people to see, that’s what I do,” she said, as she framed the skyline with painterly outstretched hands. “Like, if I were you, I’d stash the books and break out my cameras in a heartbeat. Create my brains out…if you’re doing what comes naturally, intuitively, people pick up on that energy like crazy. All you need is a good eye and your equipment…put Annie Liebovitz to shame. ”

          “Right, that and a blank check from Kodak …”

          “It’s all a matter of attitude, total positivity,” she scowled, breaking off more breadstick. “You’ve got to decide whether you’re gonna be an additive or subtractive personality—simple as that. Look at Josh Gravanek, for godsakes.”

          “The music promoter? What’s he…”

          “I’m up at his Telluride spread for New Year’s, flipping out over how this shlub started in the Midwest with zilch, no real talent but beaucoup energy. And he’s grabbed L.A. by the noogies, wrapped the whole record business around his little finger. Beverly Hills mansion, the whole works.”

          “Yeah, bully for him, so…”

          “So at least you’ve got some talent. Use that and your smarts, and you can forget about classrooms and a glorified little shed overlooking Boulder. You can move up here and look out over the edge of everything…all you have to do is reach out and grab it. I sense you can do this, Kenneth, you can do anything you want.”

          “Yeah, well, his ranch burned down, didn’t it—at least, that’s what I read in the Denver Post…” Not without notice was that she actually remembered my name, although too formally so for my flannel tastes.

          “Hah, if I know Josh, he’s probably already rebuilding it in spades by now…”

          “Whatever…the whole thing sounds pretty selfish to me.”

          “Selfish, my heinie—this is nothing less than self-preservation. You’re missing the big picture here, Kenneth. The trick is to decide what you want and go for it—grab on and hold tight, like Josh and Aimee have. It’s a competitive, eat or be eaten world out there, so you’ve got to do what you do best. That’s the only way to real happiness. Anything less is just settling, going through the motions, and you’ll never be truly happy doing that. Neither will anybody around you if you do—just ask my sorry schlemiel brother.”

          The bay turned slowly indigo now, downtown’s radiant white-gold towers casting high-rise reflections around the city front, a bracelet of dazzling gems, ranging from the Transamerica Pyramid’s pointy headed boldness to the square-headed prominence of Embarcadero Center and B of A headquarters, floor and flood lights glimmering alabaster in the embering daylight, red avigation/clearance lights blinking cherries on top. Coit Tower and Nob Hill hotels contained some of the rampant vertical corporate growth—stood stubborn topographical sentry over office buildings crammed side-by-side, new Manhattanized construction cranes crowding the Financial District fringes. Beyond them, San Francisco regained its free-rolling scale, this shimmering hologram of a city, this self-anointed West Coast bastion of insouciant style and grace.

          I turned away from the brilliance like bloodshot eyes from a solar eclipse, surveying Xebec’s happy hour clamor, Halyard’s early dinner horde through the smoky door glass, people far prettier and much less hungry than I, reeling in choice servings of sea bass and Shrimp Louis, their off-season tans glowing in the table-to-table candlelight. The concerted low-grade flame reflected off brass rigging and navigational devices, flickered off polished kevels, pulleys and anchors, teased highly strung rudders and mooring lines, setting each starfish and abalone shell into deep sea motion. My head was filling with ambiguous prospects, sensory overload, gut stirring like the inner harbor’s swaying topmasts, the bay wake slapping at the rocks below. I suddenly felt seasick moving and shaking, just the same.

          “For my money, that’s where all your hostility is coming from,” she continued. “You’ve got to use all that pent-up frustration as a motivator. If nothing else, you owe it to your dog…”

          “What are you talking about, hostility? And I’m not frustrated,” I snapped, homing back in on my coffee cup, something to do with my hands. I looked away, back into Halyard’s candlit tables and mounted grapnels, brass compasses, strung hawsers and martingales. “Seamus’s got nothing to do with…”

          “Pu-leeze, Kenneth, this isn’t sweet little Melissa you’re talking to here,” she cranked back my attention, mugging with her Stella like a Havana Panatela, before stuffing it in my cup. “I mean, get with the program, you’ve gotta set goals. I know about your Saturn Return meshugahss, so make that inner turmoil work for you too. Just like I’m always telling myself that if I don’t continue to evolve as an artist, I’ll end up washed up and alone like Darna Karl to keep me painting—whatever works, see what I’m saying?”

          “Now, that sounds frustrating,” I replied, not caring to give Saturn and the lost Satalisman a second thought, instead casting about the deck for some avenue of escape. “No, actually, that sounds just plain weird.”

          “Of course I know in the back of my mind that once I team up with the right person, we’ll take over that town, and move up here to Marin,” she said, brushing back her ringlets. “I mean, do you know what it’s like to not be absolutely ravishing in San Francisco. It would help if I didn’t look more like an everyday stenographer.”

          “Hey, come on, I don’t think you look like a…” I finished off my au lait, much as she already had, with breadsticks all noshed down or overboard.

          “You don’t,” she asked searchingly, as she beckoned me back through the Halyard. “Then what do you think I look like?”

          “Huh,” I squirmed, especially when facing up to the fact that this little cherry bomb across from me was paying again. “I don’t know, I’d have to think about it…”

          “You just do that,” she said, as we cleared the Xebec back into the main dining room, sniffing the baked Salmon Tartare, while I was hungering for the car. “You just think all about it…real careful like.”

          Once outside Halyard’s clattery gangway, we walked its plank onto the promenade and over to Syd’s Audi, first grabbing a couple of orange juices from that relic produce grocery. We flipped a U-ey onto Bridgeway, Syd hell bent on providing a quick motivational tour of Sausalito’s wraparound hillside showplaces, a bit of nautical slumming by the bobbing seaplanes, teredoed rustbuckets, renegade houseboat communities and rowdy claptrap clogging its estuaries.

          But about then, stomach contractions and hunger pangs overcame us, whereupon she directed me to turn back around on the median strip near the Bay Model Center warehouse, goading me on to beat the departing Red and White ferry to The City. I drove ahead like the cab hack I once so briefly was, guesstimating our chances from here across a broad, forbidding bay, blowing off Village Fair souvenir shops, peeking about Sausalito’s patchwork of picket fenced mariner cottages and stilted hillside homes as we throttled up past multi-level modern complexes spilling down outer bay view cliffs like a rockslide—never losing sight of the Fox’s rearview mirrors.

          A slow clot of traffic led us up a steep, winding road toward the Golden Gate, Syd motioning me around some dawdling out-of-state station wagons and compacts. The radio play of bluesy Mark Naftalin at New George’s dropped off in the tunnel under Waldo Grade, around weeded over old military emplacements this side of Tennessee Valley. His Butter-Bloomfield guitar riffs re-surged as we ramped full throttle onto Highway 101 south, force merging between an airporter van and Winnebago Chieftan, Chevy Vega hitched behind, across from Vista Point.

          Once KTIM’s signal faded, Syd tuned through KRE, KYA, KSFO, KSAN, KOME, KYUU, up and down the radio band. She paused at KSFD’S newsbreak—that Peoples Temple was now embroiled in a child custody tug-of-war between the defector family Stoens and Jim Jones in Guyana, deadline showdowns looming, details at 7. She then dialed on from the report. Meanwhile, I fixed on the bridge’s north tower—all 746 feet, 44,000 tons of steel plates and 600,000 rivets of it—glowing in the bi-way headlamps like a gilded Deco stepladder to the stars.  

          The Audi’s tires hummed over the bridge’s deck seams and grated panels when she push buttoned to KMEL’s Album Caravan, and an eerily timed Journey preview track, ‘Lights’, from their brand new album, ‘Infinity’, Steve Perry debuting as lead singer.  Then she urged me forward with an eye to the ferry boat crossing mid bay beyond Alcatraz Island, going on about how this was the future, the creative center of the universe, everyplace else being just history. I leaned into the steering wheel, lost in the gently bowed deck, the south tower, the harp string support cables—a Singapore-bound Pan Am China Clipper climbing steadily above the bridge, Carnival cruise ship steaming in below, ‘Infinity’ next tracking to ‘Wheel In The Sky’.

          “There, the right lane’s opening up,” she pointed, over the three-lane hump, on approach to the amber-lit Toll Plaza, reaching over to toss paper and coinage into the collection basket. “I’ve got it covered.”

          “Bull’s eye, Nice shot.” I punched it on the green light, wheeling through the neoned plaza. “Sign you up with the Nuggets…”

          “Make that Golden State Warriors, and step on it,” she peered like a longhaired pointer, tracking the Red and White ferry below.

          Around the 101 curve, well down Doyle Drive and through Presidio shadows, I began getting the bigger picture. Racing along the bay front, clipping pylons, gaining noticeably on the Sausalito ferry, I caught a glimpse of the incredible totality of this place. Over there to the left, God’s green paradise; over here, The City was ablaze, all ermine shoulders and white gloved open arms, Sutro Tower overlording on Twin Peaks beyond. The idea was every bit of it, the timeframe was now; this wasn’t trig or applied statistics, didn’t take some Ph.D.

          The headlong epiphany churned forth like the sandy surf undertow lapping Crissy Field, chilling me around the Marina curve, steadily surging like high tide up the full length of Lombard Street’s motel row as Journey played ‘Feelin’ That Way’. Seven futile spins around Syd’s block couldn’t shake the rush. Neither could the white loading zone two streets down we desperately settled for. Lingering starlit bay views, the Sunday night aroma of broiling sirloin, pumped me up even more all the way back to her place. The prospect of a hot seafood combo pizza hand delivered from North Beach lifted us up three full flights of stairs.

          Suddenly this all seemed so right somehow, I chased Syd’s honeydew derriere up to her apartment, dragging my sheepskin coat along. I felt somewhat San Franciscan, though didn’t really know the meaning of the word. Imagine all the people, living out their dreams—grab and hold tight. It made no logical sense whatsoever, of course, which was why it made such intuitive sense. Hell, if somebody this good and gifted figured I could cut it in San Francisco, who was I to deny or doubt her? The sheer potential of it all swelled tightly against the zipper of my jeans as she tumbled her triple-locked door.

          “We did it, flash, beat that ferry cold,” she smiled, high-fiving me to the distinctive ringing of her phone. “Probably LaDolce Pizza calling to take our order right now.”

          “Telepathy, totally mental,” I puffed, keying on her on the way to her room and Princess phone. “We’re really on a roll.”

          “Sydney here, we’ll have an extra large combo with…huh? Sure, toots…hold a sec,” she slipped from laughter to chagrin, handing me the phone, raising her fingertips to her lips.

             “Kenny? Where’ve you…tsk, I’ve been calling all day…”

 Care for more?

Chapter 23. A rapid turnaround results
in systemic breakdowns, and portents
of stalled ambitions, daydreams
hitting a bit closer to home…

“Out of town, out of 
mind, can bring encounters 
of a most peculiar kind.”

          “Left…right…”

          “Brake…heads…”

          “License and registration, please…”

          El Menudo’s Chuletas and Tostadas lying heavily on the gullet, I had over slept in, closet-wise. Scrambling out to make an overdue Moon call, I could hear that Sydney had already tied up her Princess line, and neither of her roomies had yet cracked open their bedroom doors. So no phone, no call, no such luck on the Front Range front this sunny Sunday morn. Nevertheless, second things first: Any thought, any nagging urge I had for a quick solo side trip up to Lafayette Park for another Satalisman search was quickly nixed by Syd as she fired up her Fox, two convenient parking slots down the block.

          Instead, she sped us over to my squareback—no tow-away there thus far—whereupon we transferred her Samsonite road show into the Audi. Soon helping us lug the bags and boxes from her building’s loading zone through its chandeliered lobby, resident manager Ivar Krile motioned us to pile it all into his black wrought iron elevator. Stooped and diminutive as he was, the Uzbekan émigré squeezed us all into his cramped little birdcage. Saying little on up, he hustled us out to Syd’s third floor hallway over the buzzing of his lobby call button—but not before scanning her for a belated Christmas gratuity. Later, mon ami, she winked, waving him down as she directed me to schlepp the load into her room, being particularly careful with the small brown-wrapped package she’d been so insouciantly carrying for Josh Gravanek—wondering aloud why he’d even asked her to hold it in safe keeping until hearing from him or one of his…people.

          Then Syd called Aimee Pellimore to catch up, which resulted in an offhand invitation to Marin. Delegation being the better part of valor, Syd insisted I join her, behind the wheel, of course, on a road trip to Eden on the edge. She rode shotgun like a dismounted drover, guiding me along Lombard Street’s motel row up onto Doyle Drive, calling out the bay and headlands, warning me to mind the little 19-inch tall yellow plastic tubes—four inches in diameter, manually placed at 25-foot intervals by rolling truck crews—that were the only margin of safety between us and oncoming traffic traveling at least as fast as we were.

          Squeezing through the free-direction toll-plaza slots, we soaked in the grandeur of the Golden Gate. Syd swivel-gazed upon the overpowering sweep of it all, from the Oakland Hills on out to Land’s End and beyond, as if viewing this dramatically scenic panorama for the very first time. I in fact was, and could barely keep track of other vehicles speeding by on moveable lanes, craning to follow the tanker and container ships passing beneath the arching 1.7 mile long bi-way span, hooking my neck even further to peer up at the soaring International Orange bridge towers.

          This epic sea and skyline view kept fixing our over-the-shoulder gazes all the way up El Camino Real’s Waldo Grade, grabbing us again once we breezed through Highway 101’s rainbow tunnel, adding Sausalito’s cliffside cribs and Richardson Bay houseboats to the foreground mix. But no less compelling was the Marin County landscape unfolding beyond the coastal hills to our left—from low-lying Bridgeway wetlands to the commanding heights of Mount Tamalpais. Strawberry, Mill Valley, Tam Junction, Corte Madera, Larkspur fanned sumptuously about winter green peaks and valleys—all too much to absorb while keeping a wandering eye on now Redwood Highway’s northbound flow.

          Mellow mountains and major water under clear blue skies: Even the specter of San Quentin guard posts and cellblocks couldn’t fuzz our buzz. KSFD’s AOR playlist squelched out some as we exited onto Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, a spin of the stereo dial picking up a KTIM-FM segue from Jorma Kaukonen’s ‘Hot Tuna, Double Live’ bootleg to Sweetwater Maria Muldaur. Sydney covetously pointed out the estates and manses of Kentfield, Ross and San Anselmo, waved off the funkiness of Fairfax, rhapsodized over the one-horse, west Marin lure of San Geronimo—so far, and yet so near.

          I was no less taken with yet more remote redwood beauty when she steered me onto Nicasio Valley Road—at least until we rounded a narrow curve near the Lucas Valley turn off, straight into a dense bosk of fir and pine trees, and the uniform glare of caution flares and a gumballed welcome wagon.              

          “Colorado DL, is it? But the registration says San Francisco,” said the CHP road blocker, running a roving safety inspection like a Medellin ambush.

          “Uh, it belongs to her,” I pointed Syd’s way.

          “In accordance with California Vehicle Code, we are conducting this random inspection as a means of determining whether drivers like yourself are complying with minimum state standards regarding the safe operation of a licensed motor vehicle. Would you mind stepping out of the vehicle, please.”

          “Unreal,” I grumbled, poised to spring out of the Audi as a second highway patrolman called in my license for outstanding tickets and warrants. Couldn’t help but puzzle over why she was taking me on these side trips anyway, why I was sheepishly going along…

          “This is my doing, officer,” Sydney leaned over toward the driver’s side. “It is my car and I’ve asked my visiting friend here to take the wheel.”

          “Now, why would you do that, ma’am?”

          “You see, I’ve just had my purse stolen, including my license, so he’s generously helping me with a very important errand,” she smiled, holding back my arm. “Plus, I’m having my period, and I do get a little hot flash crampy without my Midol—which was also in my purse. So you wouldn’t want me behind the wheel that way, would you?”

          “Umm, no ma’am,” he grimaced, steaming up his chrome Aviators. His partner then returned with my clean DL. “Everything seems in working order here—we needn’t cite or impound your vehicle. The California Highway Patrol appreciates your cooperation. So you folks have a good day.”

          “Thank you, officer,” she waved affably. “And you keep an eye out for my purse, will you? Tooled leather with rainbow rays.”

          “That true?” I accelerated cautiously out of the road stop.

          “Wanna find out for yourself?” she chided, settling back into her bucket seat. “But even my mother doesn’t use Midol any more.”

          From here on, the road to Aimee Pellimore’s led along rolling green hills, scattered shady groves, Holstein grazing pastures and horse farms—two narrow lanes dotted with cheese stands, pumpkin fields and the oddball wooden sculpture. I dodged a quartet of oncoming cyclists in a roadside bike lane as we left-turned onto Rancho Road, just south of Nicasio and its bladdery Reservoir. Winding up into a more thickly forested ridgeline, we cut onto a fire road dotted with steel private driveway gates and roller cattle guards. Syd pointed to a small wood-burned sign reading, ‘Rancho Ridge’ and ‘Villa Mañana’, and a simple, rusty metal cross-bar, which she instructed me to swing open with authority as she cranked up some Jim Kweskin Jug Band on KTIM stereo. While I still had mariachis and Abraxas timbals and congas dancing in my head.

          Mañana’s trail, narrow as a double-yellow line, rutted up through ferned pine and redwood, following a shallow creekbed between two smooth, busty hills—thinly green from rainy season shortfalls, but sparkling just the same. She snickered at scores of calendar-clean Guernseys grazing, satisfied tails asway, against a brilliantly cloudless sky, then gestured toward a fir-ringed swimming hole. Framing it all was peeling white rail fencing, around the curve of which surfaced the former Rancho Ridge creamery-post office, now a crafts shack, coveralled counter artisans milling all about.

          Some forty yards beyond the lone, sagging storefront, a second Villa Mañana marker was nailed under a buckshot-pocked dairy sign, arrowing us another quarter mile up the way. Counting off brightly painted milk cans, waving off a growing litter of car-crazed golden labs, we soon steered through a single-lane split in the fence rails, ‘Villa Mañana’ and ‘Trespassers, meet your maker’ mounted to either side—sort of like a private label Bohemian Grove.

          Sydney reached over and beeped Foxy’s horn around a clump of spruce trees, filigree and ostrich ferns rising over a heavily algaed pond, from behind which emerged this maroon and marigold farmhouse. She then motioned me toward a slightly lean-to two-car barn, brown Saab wagon and pink, black polka dotted Citroen 2CV inside. Neither rundown nor fully restored, the Victorian homestead just looked lived in and inviting.

          Aimee and her matching Gordon Retrievers sauntered through the screen door of a wraparound, plant-rich porch, welcoming the familiar Audi wagon beneath a lone, largely cascading parasol palm tree. Their greeting was demonstrative, as were the photographs framing the foyer and front room—an equal-opportunity rogue’s gallery of intimacy, more profuse than El Menudo’s, baring like measures of hide, not least the nude beach foraging for mussels by a covey of young women au naturel.

          “Aimee and I shared a Telegraph Hill walk-up while we were art students,” Syd noted, having introduced me as her ‘driver’. “She was my first Institute figure study, was majoring in…”

          “Printmaking—intaglio and stone lithography,” Aimee finished her thought. “Nice meeting you…hope your meter’s not still running…”

          “Uh, no, nothing like that,” I said, toying with the dogs, whose collar tags read, ‘Id’ and ‘Ego’. “I’m just repaying a favor…”

          “I’ll bet…” She grinned, winking slyly at Syd, shaking back her dishwater blonde mane.

          “She won an award from the prestigious Legion of Honor Foundation. Didn’t you, Aim,” Syd gushed, stepping in to point out charcoal paper etchings of earth-toned figure studies mostly covering an inner parlor wall.

          “That was a while back, Sydney,” she said, of the two, more fully developed all around. “So much has happened in my life since then. How about you?”

          Syd proceeded to recount Europe, bemoan Gulf Coast Florida, avoid Chicago, shrug off Boulder and revel in Telluride and Aspen. She explained how her travels and travails had reinvigorated her creativity, reinformed her painting to where she couldn’t wait to toil away in her studio. She stretched and flexed and contorted while extolling the yoga discipline she had maintained throughout most of her journeys, sipped at a anti-oxidant juice blend Aimee had laid out in a ceramic service set on a wormwood coffee table before a woolen throw-covered, overstuffed sofa.

          I sat with them and nursed a citrus juice cup as well, sneaking peeks at more framed half-tones—mainly women who were working their way up the nude chain. Intriguing all the more was a four-color blow-up of these two by the swimming hole, strategically hugging, full-on lip kissing, nipples on point, caressing the only stitches of clothing between them: skimpy bikini bottoms in corresponding and stripes and hues.

          Tearing away from that graphic imagery, we soon toured the remainder of the farmhouse, two stories of expertly recaned and refurbished furniture, garnished with Aimee’s matted block prints and indigenous bric-a-brac from as far off as Humboldt County. A room-by-room exploration of hardwood and gingerbread trim brought us back to the rambling, wickered front porch. There, Syd and Aimee calendared and coordinated upcoming gallery openings down in The City, while I transposed Seamus and the Gordons now racing over to the mossy, algaed pond, mulling over who might have so competently staged and exposed that juicy color photograph.

          But of rather more interest was Aimee’s accounting of her migration from backyard guest house to big house, however smacking of a self-styled spin on events.

          This involved winning over a land poor, fifth generation drunken bachelor with Max Yasgur delusions, subletting a one-time bunk house-size outbuilding to use as a getaway studio space. Soon her family’s L.A. law firm dummied up a buy-out/leaseback package the strapped old man couldn’t refuse. Before long, they froze payment after she accused Mr. Roland Wiggs of rear window voyeurism and sexual harassment, which he denied, and threatened to tell the Feds about a few backyard sensimilla plants.

          Then he started an ill-funded and fated eviction proceeding. Her lawyers hit him with a cross-eviction and ongoing legal action that resulted in deputy sheriffs escorting Mr. Wiggs off the property, family belongings in tow. Meanwhile, Aimee moved from the glorified shed into the then shabby Victorian, and lured Barry, her man friend, to come up and help her with some surface restoration, Grandpa Pellimore funding the pet project from his Pasadena demesne.

          “I needed more growing space for my studio and screen printing and everything, but couldn’t totally give up The City,” she said, herself having been raised in seaside Orange County. “Then I found this deal in the Marin Sun classifieds. More visual inspiration, less wear and tear. The Tarot cards told me it was right.”

          “So, did the ol’ perv actually do it?” I asked, noticing that Aimee was a shade taller than Syd, more fetching yet. And how could she be so tan so early, or late.

          “Do what? The peeping tom routine?” she munched a kale chip. “What do you think?”

          “What do I know?” I said, allowing as how I couldn’t blame him. “I’m only along for the drive.”

          She said she saw Villa Mañana as her manifest destiny, some generational imperative—besides which, this was Marin. I just envisioned an uncanny resemblance between Aimee Pellimore’s profile and Sydney’s description of a younger, firmer, more modest Faith Mendel. But then Aimee tugged impatiently at her tight khaki safari shorts and flowery halter top, explaining her guests away with a stringently tight schedule of TM, Women’s’ Assertiveness Training and the seven schools of yoga. With that, Sydney hugged her dearly, they shared moist, marshmallow kisses and promised to stay in close touch; then she dragged me toward the car.

          “Shangri-La, huh,” Syd gushed, waving back to Aimee as I steered the Fox down trail, leaving the bounding Gordon Retrievers in the golden dust. “And excuse us, if we’re a bit demonstrative.”

          “Yeah, somethin’ else. So who took that shot of you to by the pond,” I probed, a mite voyeuristically myself. My head spun with wonder: What was with these two? The affection, all the pawing and grab-assing. Was it the nature or the nurture? The climate or the culture? The creative artsy bond or the bucks—big bucks, sudden bucks, free flowing, footloose bucks?

          “Barry took it, He’s the wuss in the picture next to ours, in the tawny sleeveless, huaraches and draw-string O.P.s…does lots of Transcendent Convening and Primal Encounter, keeps to himself back there.”

          I tried to pursue that angle or tangle, and Aimee’s motherly resemblance on the ride down, but Syd couldn’t see it. Anyhow, this was too glorious a setting for Oedipal psychobabble like that. Overflying gulls and scattered outbuildings were too white, surrounding hillsides too freshly green, drought or no. Here it was, mid January, with springtime already at hand—warm and softly breezy, that dash of sea salt in the air—life so easy and…free.      

          “Yah? Where’s this Barry guy now?”

          “Still living in the guest house, where he belongs,” Syd dismissed, turning on the radio to Elvin Bishop’s ‘Travelin’ Shoes’. “Point is, Aimee’s where she belongs. This delicious bite of paradise came along, she went for it. And to her credit, ended up with the whole enchilada.”

          “I thought she said he helped her rehab the Victorian and…”

          “He did, that’s why she hasn’t raised his rent all that much.”

          “Gotcha. So they still going together, or what?”

          “They’re still casual friends. She’s going with the Lagunitas hunk who leads her assertiveness program. He’s her spiritual beacon and casual paramour—he’s into the whole mind-body unity Gestalt, one mean long-boarder, too…”

          “Casual…mean…yah, well the weather’s sure cooperating, huh?”

          “This is California, flash, there is no weather here, only degrees of clear or unclear…with some patches of fog and rain.”

          “Yeah…unclear patches, all right…”

Care for more?

Chapter 22. Tête-à-tête at the water’s 
edge harbors stirring dreams and visions 
that may sound well beyond his depth…

“Venturing into alien 
lands can land you in a 
heap of troubling sideshows.”

         “You’re here, you’ve made it…isn’t that miraculous? Folks, give Mr. Herbert a roaring round of applause…bravo!” 

          “Well, I don’t think that’s necessary or…”

          One of the other crooked things Sydney had in mind was negotiating what she called the Vulvata Triangle—everything flowing through it—for a little fill-up and wipe down. Problem was, the service station/car wash basically sat arrow point in a slanted, angular then curvy convergence of several major lower downtown arteries, and a labyrinth of stunted side streets embrangling the resulting wedge. So we muddled about the one ways and dead ends of Chase, Colton, Colusa Streets, the narrow, little more than alleyways of Jessie and Plum—Syd grousing that she still hadn’t gotten the hang of Vulvata’s labia, even after all this time, but here we be.

          Heatedly humming along with some dreamy Peter Frampton on the deck, she pointed out the towering U.S. Mint, and where Mel’s drive-in used to roll in American Graffiti days, wheeling into a gas station/car wash. Eventually, the power sprays, vacuum hoses and spinning brushes of a good auto scrubbing seemed to calm her some, the chamois toweling of a half-dozen wash slaves even more so. Topped off and turned out, her sparkling red Fox was equal to the task of navigating the bends of South Van Ness and Mission, the parallel march of Valencia and Guerrero. Syd aimed for Mission Street, the longest, perhaps most variegated thoroughfare within The City limits—Embarcadero down to Daly City, an ethnical world away. We caught a well-lit spot just off Sixteenth and Capp, deep into the Mission District itself, within guarded walking distance of…this. 

          “But of course you’re not really here, now are you?”

          “Huh? I…” The onstage interrogator caught me off guard.

          “No, the real Mr. Herbert is nowhere to be found, now is he? Nosiree—folks, let’s hear it. HISS, BOO, BAH!!! ”

          “Hey, wait a minute…” Whatever calm and good cheer I had brought to this encounter was dissipating, blow by blow.

          “Invisible, non-existent—how do you feel about that, Mr. Herbert?”

          “Whatdya’ mean? I’m right here,” I said, squeezing about my chest and shoulders.

          The 16^th and Mission bank branch had closed long before—victim of too many armed withdrawals. A chainlink of custodial office spaces had cubicled off the nondescript four-story building’s main floor, Universe Theatre occupying a former mezzanine-level parking garage. To get there, we hiked up a long entrance ramp that smelled of residual exhaust fumes though the interior lot had been de-carmissioned for a year or more. At the landing, yellow lines still marked the broad concrete floor, oil drips staining the center of each empty slot. But a bumper swath of spaces nearest the ramp turn-in was an orb of repurposed fervor. Universe’s stage proved to be little more than a dozen loading dock risers framed by a bolide crowned, planetary-themed proscenium and dark star-studded tormentor wings that more than lived up to their name.

          “So you say, but how are you feeling about yourself?”

          “Just fine, thanks very much, so…” Actually, I felt more like Billy Carter at an AA orientation.

          “Face up, Mr. Herbert, you’re being evasive.”

          Curvilinear about the platform was a gallery of gymnasium bleachers numbering some fifteen rows, filled to the steel-girded rafters with a cheering, clapping crowd. Hosting the theater’s audience, a strike team of three Universe Players prompted and prodded like floor managers on the Tonight Show. Two cadmium orange and blue jumpsuited proctors flanked a mic-wielding woman in a full-bodied, cosmographic gown—Texas varsity cheerleader of a team down four TDs and a field goal in a driving panhandle rain.

          She commanded the spotlight in this outwardly emypreal theater; that was a given. Not so apparent at first blush was that the Universe performance would become this confrontational or combative—the first of many blushes, as it happened. I ended up top of the evening’s docket courtesy of Sydney’s eager wheedling, pointing my way during the show’s introduction, with a poke in the ribs at the call for participants, to an involuntary push of the shoulder.

          “No, really—if you’re looking for heavy problems or something,” I fidgeted at a center-gallery podium, shading against the spotlight, yet unable to take my eyes off the Saturnal sphere, center tormentor left. “You’re tapping a dry keg…”

          “We’ll be the judge of that. So you’re saying you are at peace with yourself…”

          “Peace? I suppose…peace, love and all that…”

          “Whistling in the dark, Mister Herbert—what right have you to be at peace with yourself, might we ask?”

          Whistling, darkness: that was precisely the problem. The houselights had dimmed and a hot key light caught me tripping up to a shifty little rostrum, as Ms. Universe’s greetings turned to a grilling out of sorts. By this time, I could barely see her, much less her on-stage confederates; the gallery crowd around me was little more than a murmury, tittering penumbra.

          “Right? How do you mean…” I was trying to pinpoint which voice was coming from where, as if they were toying with the balance slider on a quadraphonic P.A..

          “For instance, what do you do for a living, Mr. Herbert. What are you contributing to society?”

          “Uh, student, just graduated masters…sociology…”

          “Master’s degree, sociology…really…shall we grovel, professor?” Shall we bow before your brilliance, before the grandeur of your title so bestowed?!”

          “Whoa, hold it a sec…” I could only tell that this one came from the bleacher row above and to my left—not that I dared turn around and faced him off.

          “No, you hold it, Mr. Herbert! Would you mind telling us exactly how the world will benefit from your mighty master’s? Or how any of us might gain from your knowledge when, rather than putting it to work, you’re flitting about San Francisco, neither here nor there?”

          “Where are you coming from, Mr. Herbert?”

          “Colorado, I’m from Boulder actually…” This next volley could have sprung from any which way, this side of the stage—in the Manchurian Candidate sense of the word.

          “You mean you were born in Colorado, your parents live in Colorado?”

          “No, they’re in the Midwest. My girlf…housemate’s in Boulder, with my dog.”

          “Let’s get this straight, Mr. Herbert. You’ve got family back east—and a…housemate in Colorado.”

          “You could put it that way, I guess…” At this point, I was chewing on my answers like a hostile witness before a grand jury leaning toward an indictment.

          “Well then what in Hades are you doing here in San Francisco, Mr. Herbert? How are you helping anybody in San Francisco? How are helping yourself?”

          “No, hey, it’s not what you think, I’m just, you know, discovering your beautiful city …” That’s it, back fill, try meeting them halfway on their own terms and turf.

          But truth to tell, I didn’t know what was hitting me, still couldn’t even see from who or where. The questions and barbs were coming so quickly now I lost all sense of direction. Beyond Universe’s onstage team, the gallery was sprinkled with Theater plants, hence this surround sound of rapid-fire inquisition. Blindsided, on my heels, I swabbed sweat beads from my forehead with an Urnie’s paper napkin, the heat of that spotlight eased only by chill breezes crisscrossing through the parking mezzanine’s largely vented sidewalls. Otherwise, no relief was forthcoming from a smiling, yet stonily silent Sydney, one row up, not even close to having my back.

          “What we think is not the issue, Mr. Herbert, but what you think…and it can’t be that good for you back there if you’re shacking up out here.”

          “Yes, you’re the person you ultimately have to live with, however much you may scramble and scheme to avoid that nasty little reality.”

          “Shacking up? No, I’m just passing through, doing a favor, OK? Just between gigs…”

          “That’s not how it looks, Mr. Herbert. What it looks like is you’re running away, hiding from something.”

          “What are you running and hiding from, Mr. Herbert?”

          “From yourself, Mr. Herbert? Because you sure look that way to us.”

          “You look lost, Mr. Herbert. Lost to the world around you, lost to yourself.”

          “I’m not lost,” I huffed, anticipating more verbal onslaughts, the scattered, phantom voices pressing further from beyond and around the searing spotlight. “I’m right here, but I’ll be damned if I know why…”

          “You’re a mole, Mr. Herbert, burrowing head first into your grim little hole. Making a little mole hill when you could be making mountains.”

          “Really, burrowing all the way to oblivion, never again to see the light of day, never again to face the truth.”

          “Mole hole, mole hole, MOLE HOLE!”

          “The hell,” I growled, trying to identify the surrounding random voices forming one shrieking schoolyard razz, fixing to throw down with the shadows, gloves or no.

          “S-s-say what?” I stammered, fielding another woman’s riddle from the port side, at the very moment I’d turned starboard.

          “Who are you, Mr. Herbert, who knows what you are? Who is the real Mr. Herbert? What are you doing with your learning and credentials? What have you really accomplished in your life?”

          “Doesn’t he look lost, folks? Let’s hear it—hiss, boo, bah—HISS, BOO, BAH!!”

          “HISS, BOO, BAH! HISS, BOO, BAH!!! HISS, BOO, BAH…” The entire crowd chanted a cappella, laughing on cue.

          “I’m getting outta here,” I sputtered. It was my first notion of just how many subjects inhabited this Universe, if not how well they had me pegged.

          I pushed my way off the bleachers, down the ramp toward a spare, half-lit lobby before realizing I’d left Syd behind. So back up ramp I clambered, hearing more orchestrated laughter and applause. The Universe crowd had already served up a slender, sheepish young brunette for the spot-lit slaughter. Seemed she’d recently divorced, moved to The City by way of Texas, psychosnipers wasting no time tearing her down, haranguing her for running out on life, for choking under the simple strain of her simpleton destiny. They charged that she was the flighty, self-serving arachnid upon whom no one could ultimately depend. I could see her standing there, shuddering under the same heat and light, emotionally soldered to the podium, then rumpling into a heap of sobbing taffeta, the mental mortar fire continuing, drowning out her frail, frantic shrieks. But Syd met up with me at the ramp top, chidingly shaking her head.

          “What the hell was that,” I spouted.

          “Wasn’t it great…”

          “Great? And where the hell were you?!”

          “Relax, it’s just theater, an immersive, participatory theater piece they do…totally harmless,” she said, pulling me back down ramp toward the lockbox chamber-turned-lobby. “The idea is to test if you can deal with it, flash, to see if you can stick it out and overcome the challenge. And since here we are, fleeing down the off ramp, it looks like you can’t…”

          “Hey, I held my own, OK? Those people are certifiable…” I pulled open the heavy old bank doors.

          “This one’s pass-fail, professor, no grading on a curve around here.”

          “Damned if you didn’t set me up again…”

 

          Long as it was, Mission Street constituted a dipstick for San Francisco’s multi-grade crankcase. From roughly 12^th Street south, it shifted from barren light industry, small family-run factories and sundry warehouses, to the giraffe palm-laced heart of ciudad Latino, to Army Street on down. The one-time Woodward’s Gardens, Mission Miracle Mile, blue collar Mickville had turned rarified barrio, Los Estados Unidos Mejicanos-North, where taco/burrito shops unseated more and more corner taverns as Irish migrated to the south bay and East Bay counties. Where agencies became agenzias and Guiness Stout thinned to cervezas fria such as Tecate and Carta Blanca. Espanol was lenguaje de la fuerza, Chicano the flavor of culture, dinero the engine of neighborhood commerce. And tonight, the Mission District’s dipstick notches read full and borderline overheated.

          Hermanos in leathers, equal parts pachuco polyester, in work-out Adidas in all stripes and colors, perfectly trimmed Latino lovers lined up for El Capitan Theater’s early evening screening of subtitled ‘Zoot Suit’. Others strolled ramrod straight in their retailored sharkskin, defying the chill breeze to jostle one hair of their razor cuts, much less their senoritas’ Spanish Sassoons, moving to the tune of canned salsa and brassy banda loudspeakered from unending produce markets and discount stores.

          Only the parade of revving low-riders could sway their killer stares—metalflaked ’53 Buick, ’62 Olds and ’73 Monte Carlo loaded to their chopped rooflines with fuzzy mirror dice and tuck ’n’ rolled naugahyde or velour. Scraping Mission Street pavement in low crawl, they leaped and bobbed on the strength of hydraulic air suspensions, of surplus Pesco pumps and valves—strutting their shocks, cut coils, dropped spindles lighting up their wheel wells. Primo rides bounced up and down, fore and aft to the in-dash stereo throb of War’s ‘Don’t Let No One Get You Down’, ‘Verao Vermelho’ by Santana, some uptempo cumbias. Sydney stiff-armed a pearl flaked ’56 Rocket 88 to get us across Mission; I myself could have watched this dual-quad, cruiser skirted, chrome-plated, pin-striped, pimpmobile parade all night. 

          Having coaxed me to her car, we were soon entangled in 16^th Street traffic. Syd stewed behind another gaudy procession of Bajito y Suavecito bombs hopping side to side, feeding onto southbound Mission. She pounded the Fox’s steering wheel in frustration, I pressed my nose against her windshield, still in awe of these rolled and pleated stallions, their hand-rubbed metal oxide and gold spoke wheels. This was Saturday night showtime and no amount of honking and headlight flashes from some shrimpy little Audi was about to unmake their muscle carnaval scene, goose them unduly past the bodegas and macho taquerias of their adopted turf. Not tonight, not after forty hours plus straightening late-model bodies and fenders for the collision insurance man. I nearly headered the dashboard as Syd swerved around a boss ’48 Chevy Fleetline, then a ’62 Impala 120 VDC pancaking all four corners for an audacious left-hand turn with ceremonial blasts of its glass pack. Taken altogether, I was back to my cherry ’56 Bel-Air, another whole lifetime ago.

          Bound for Valencia, she cranked up her own stereo, Joan Armatrading style, showin’ some emotion, soon cutting and sliding into a green parking zone, pointing to a narrow, dimly cast restaurant between a credit jewelers and rent-to-own furniture store. It in fact shared wrought-iron security grillwork—draped like black Catalan lace—with the Heart of Hearts Joyeria, far more than ambience in mind. Dos Equis banners framed the restaurant’s façade, a fluttery, rojo and verde neon sign simply glowed, El Menudo. Still, I was more concerned with looking out for the flashing lights of any baby blue and white patrol cars in hot pursuit.

          “Getting a little late for the holiday decorations,” I said, as we entered the packed restaurant through a dark carved, Spanish Colonial-style front door. A bullish anfitrion in broad black chinos and 7-10 pin embroidered bowling shirt directed us to a rear corner booth.

          “It’s always like this, all year round,” Syd glanced about gleefully, handing me one of two laminated menus once we reached Booth Ocho’s curved red vinyl cushions trimmed with brass-plated centavo buttons, her cadet blue and crème varsity jacket squeaking on the slide in. “That’s what makes the place so great, best Mexican food in town…gracias.”

          “De nada, honey,” said a gold brocade-bloused camarera in stiletto bootlets, dropping off a basket of nachos. “Pollo Adobo Yucateco’s es especial. Coctels? Vino Rioja?”

          Syd opted for a penafiel; I played it safe with a Coke. El Menudo’s cantina pall stirred with the steady, low-watt blinking of mini Christmas tree lights—these red, blue, yellow and green sparks were reflected in long, swirling strands of silver brush tinsel, which snaked about the full parameters of the restaurant’s pink and black flocked walls. It clung like bayou moss to cerveza signs, laquered tortoise shells, chrome bowling trophies and musty, bronze foil pinadas. The lights coiled around menu stands and tequila decanters and day-glo crushed velvet paintings of toreadors and Aztec goddesses.

          But it stuck most tenaciously to the antlers—prized five-point racks and mounted heads of Mendocino County bucks that fed upon the environmental sensibilities of uptown patrons from every conceivable angle. Not that it bothered management: They knew San Francisco’s best little Mexican restaurant had those bleeding hearts by the venison burritos.

          After all, liberal morality was no match for El Menudo’s Chile Relleno either. Thus assured, the owner brandished his 12-guage exploits on every square inch of remaining ceiling and walls. So the flashing tinsel threaded around framed glossies of Jaime and his Roadmaster, Jaime and his Wagoneer, Jaime and his ¾ ton Ranchero—all dripping in freshly peppered carcasses, Mister Menudo and his companeros grinning against the grillwork, with Dos Equis and doe tails in hand. And he couldn’t have made the graphics more riveting with floodlamps or neon arrows.

          “You let them beat you at Universe,” Syd asserted, after taking the liberty of ordering for us both upon the waitress’s return with jalapeno salsa and drinks. “You know that, don’t you?”

          “Hell, anybody would have snapped,” I dug in, accepting her ‘trust me’ on the food, if not her review. “That was a twenty-on-one ambush up there.”

          “I didn’t,” she said, coyly chomping on a loaded-up nacho. “I wouldn’t let them take me down with something like that.”

          This and Jaime’s carnage chronicles easily sapped the pep from my palate. Even strolling neighborhood mariachis and a steady juke box blare of Iglesias, Hermanos Huerta and Edie y Los Panchos failed to reset my appetite. Sydney appeared oblivious to Jaime’s blood lust, however, having eagerly ordered us Chuletas De Puerco and Flautas, some Tostadas de Chorizo for two. Before I could translate my Boulder-cultivated indignation into conversational espanol, la camarera brought an icy round of Noche Buena Indio, courtesy of Jaime himself, with a wink toward Sydney, whom he’d evidently served before.

          “Aww, muchos gracias, señor,” she toasted the pompadored propietario, now tallying a greenback wad at his front counter register, tapping his Tony Lama’s to the tambora and tarola of a favorite Yucatanic jarana. “So what’s a few deer when you can feast like this amid non-stop Feliz Navidad, right flash?”

          “Yeah, well…” One of the booth’s centavo buttons began jabbing me in the clavicle, in effect prodding me into some major tostadas. “Anyway, when was it you didn’t snap there?”

          “Oh, about ten months ago now. James Holcomb suckered me into it, but I prevailed.”

          “So, what does that make you? Queen of the Universe?” I shifted enough so that the button now pressed in on my seven cervical vertebrae.

          “No, just somebody better adjusted than a certain sociology professor I know.” The centavos didn’t seem to be bothering her one little bit.

          I chewed on that rib and the copious platters we were splitting through three hefty, savorous courses, some bunuelos and half a cerveza before finally questioning her methodology. “OK, how did you get through the grilling?”

          “Simple, I used a little passive resistance—just agreed with everything the crowd threw at me,” she scoffed, wiping cream puff from my chin with her red and gold napkin. “Kept saying, ‘yep, you’re right’ and ‘can’t deny it’, ‘you really have me pegged’—stuff like that.”

          “What? They must have jumped all over you…”

          “No way, I kept absorbing the hits, neutralizing their attack—sucked the impact right out of it to where they just started agreeing with my agreeing, falling in line, trying to usher me away from the podium.”

          “Come on, you expect me to believe that would have worked with those maniacs?”

          “You don’t get it, do you,” she countered, preparing to wash down some flautas with a touch of the Noche Buena. “Wise up, that all’s a big goof up there. Universe Theater’s just a shtik, like gestaltic tea leaves or reading your palm. So I shtiked them right back.”

          “Well, if you ask me, one of these days, somebody’s gonna come along and not take that crap so well,” I sputtered, strikingly annoyed that she was bringing the likes of Dame Thornia into this. “They’ll get humiliated and rankled enough to burn the damn place down. You know what follows gestalt in the dictionary, don’t you? Gestapo…”

          “Takes one to know one, flash,” She smacked, taking up with more bunuelos. “But good luck, there are nasty little cells like Uni all over town, just itching to ply your mind. It’s how affairs are conducted in San Francisco…”

          “Affairs? What affairs?”

          “Matters, interactions—in some ways, it’s like backgammon…no, more like chess. Either you’re a knight or a pawn. Whiz at chess, are you?”

          “I’m not even much at checkers,” I took a bit deeper swig of the cerveza, to douse down some heartburning salsa. “Played my share of poker though…”

          “Trouble is, I’ve already seen you at cards.”

          Really, what more could I say to that? We finished up and Syd signaled for the check. With it came some kind of handbill, which she folded over and handed me to hold for later, as if it were some sort of promotional discount offer or something. After settling up and sharing flirty pleasantries with a bolero-vested Jaime at the front counter, she beckoned me out on to Valencia Street, through the negra Knotty Alder and iron doors.

          A cool, heavy mist had congealed over the Mission by now, haloing crime-stopper street lamps that betrayed dopers and hustlers and gang bangers of very prescribed colors who sought the territorial safety and anonymity of darkened doorways. Before we could reach the Audi, a small candlelight procession surfaced up the block, their frail flames flickering in the amber-gray film. Most marchers appeared to be barely older than adolescentes, yet were neatly, almost uniformly dressed. Chanting ‘Take back the streets’ and ‘God save the Mission’, they also recited Spanish gospels. As best I could read their placards, the message was, ‘Jovenzuelos Para Jesus’, so I thought it best to move on.

          “Yeesh, such a fuss over a prost Jewish carpenter. Here’s the keys, flash,” Syd tossed them my way as we reached her car. “I’m beat, why don’t you drive…” 

          “You sure?” I opened the doors, letting her saw man aside ride, and gave her El Menudo’s handbill as we buckled in. “Where we off to? I still have to get hold of Moon…”

          “Fire Foxy up, we’ll take it as we go,” she unfolded the flier. “That is, if you don’t get us lost in the process. Just stay away from that circus on Mission Street.”

          “What’s it say,” I revved the Audi gently, adjusting its rear-view mirrors, then pulled out into traffic before the marchers reached us mid-block.

          “Lucky us, some kind of political propaganda about property taxes,” she jibed,  balling up the sheet, tossing it over her shoulder into the back seat. “Some silly Proposition 13…”

          “Doesn’t sound like a lucky number to me…”

 Care for more?

 Chapter 21. A day trip into God’s 
county proves to bring an eye-opening
encounter with idyllic, unbridled destiny,
then the dockside stuff of golden dreams…

“School scenes or slapdash sightseeing 
may harbor visuals that can be 
far too penetrating for words.”

          “Just remember—downhill, turn them in…”

          “Down, in…”

          “Uphill, turn them out…”

          “Up, out…gotcha…”

          Parking just off Chestnut Street was a lesson in the harsher inclinations of Russian Hill topography, in acute and obtuse challenges to the physical plane. Foreigner’s ‘Long, Long Way From Home’ reverberated out of Sydney’s dashboard stereo as we prowled Jones and Leavenworth Streets in search of a reasonably proximate parking spot. To what, I wasn’t sure, but sweeping vistas of the bay bridges, Alcatraz Island and Telegraph Hill kept me gawking like a Kansan conventioneer while she cursed her way up and down auto-crammed neighborhood arteries.

          We rocketed faster than a runaway semi up a concrete ramp into a klatch of costly apartment houses climbing further up Russian Hill. She finally landed this mid-block squeezer with a descending view of the Fisherman’s Wharf tourist ghetto—rear load shifting, small easels and canvasses tumbling from her back seat, our heads jerking forward as if we were first car on the Bobs, roller coasting to a turnstile stop. Then came this back and forth tutorial on curbing the Audi Fox.

          “That’s parking in San Francisco,” she said, key locking her steering column, yanking hard on the emergency brake. “If you don’t chock your wheels right, the meter maids will ticket you, sometimes even tow your rig away. Murder is one thing, but parking ticket income keeps The City afloat.”

          “Yeah, well, I guess I’m OK on flat ground over by your place, huh? At least until I can blow town…”

          “Never can tell. And worst case the brakes fail, your heap breaks loose, takes out some traffic and a storefront or two.”

          “Filled the master cylinder before we left Boulder.” I helped her straighten up her fallen belongings, scooping up my jacket and the Urnie’s bag. There we left things, with simultaneous slamming of her front doors. “Where we off to, anyway?”

          “Famous last words on the brake front,” she simpered, toting several blank canvasses and a pair of fresh smocks. “But prepare yourself to be…institutionalized.”

          I was just grateful to alight on solid ground, however slanted my stance and pronated my steps. Boulder had its hills, all right, but here my toes felt like they were pushing through the tips of my hiking boots. Still, I was stunned by this sloping panorama of hills, islands and wind-whipped bay around them. Streets let up and downhill from here, vehicles large and small struggling accordingly. Homes and condo/apartment buildings wedged into the Russian Hillside, all decked out—straight-roofed no matter how steep the angle—so that foundations fronting at garage level often ass-ended three stories up.

          Syd pointed out the most striking, palatial of the digs—the ones with sculpted little gardens and roof deck pools. Halfway back down Chestnut Street, a swarm of Hondas, Vespas and ten-speeds were chained up to bike racks on both sides of a grandly chiseled, Romanesque portal, violet clematis adorning its mosaic tiled spandrels: the otherwise ivy-vined entrance to the Gateway Institute of Art.

          “This is my school, professor,” Sydney boasted, as we passed through the shadowy, arching entryway. “Dates back to the 1870s, founded by leading artists of the West. Even has a major fresco by the legendary Diego Rivera in here, depicting the industrial working man, showing the building of a city. Art and labor, architects and engineers to steelworkers.”  

          “He was a commie, right?” I squinted into a concentrated patch of sunlight.

          “What are you, an FBI plant?” she shot back, leading the way.

          “Well no, but…”

          “The don’t go flashing that kinda badge around here. It was 1931 and GIA was willing to deal with any controversy for the sake of art—of social critique and artistic rebellion. We’re talking a Deco masterpiece in a noble institution, okay?”

           “Uh, sure…nice courtyard,” I yielded, probing no further on that front.

           “It’s positively Florentine,” she pointed out a blue and yellow tiled fountain that served to focus student activity center yard. Cloistered walkways framed the gushing, carp-filled fount, lanes clogged with specious artistes, flyer-saturated bulletin boards and a running exhibit of splashy paintings—rough, abstract-at-best images of satyrs, lightning bolts and unicorns. “I’ll admit, these pieces aren’t all to my liking, but you can’t knock the 99.9% pure undergrad energy. Let’s go fuel up on some java…”

          A main hallway tunneled beneath the Institute’s central building, a red-tiled block of poured concrete busting with tall, angled windows and skylights. Suddenly, it opened to a sun-drenched terrace filled with milling students, muralled walls and rusting metal sculpture fusions of rakes, hoes, worm gears, chicken wire and ulcerated mufflers—in essence, Mister Wizard on Wowee. Beyond, a bay panorama, bridge tower to cantilever, a dead-on view of Alcatraz, the Richmond-San Rafael span and East Bay refineries, a fleet of tanker ships sprinkled all about.

          I paused to soak this all in while Syd handed me her supplies, then stole into the sprouts and granola café. They were a curious lot, these could-be Calders and Matisses, furtively debating aesthetic sensibility while bagging midday rays salted with chill ocean breezes. Content seemed not nearly so important as mode of expression—adolescent, Freudian interpretation, sophomoric rantings and purges. These were not tidy exercises in pat intellectual progression but intense, animated clashes in which histrionics held sway over the linear empiricism I’d just nominally mastered at CU.

          What was the point of logic, after all, among dabblers and dilettantes who wrapped themselves in pinks, purples, orgeats and turquoises? In bush pants, berets and bandoleros? Paisley and pompous in black humor and bright, candy-striped hose? Sassy, overweaned brooders, I thought, who pursued emotional deviation so devoutly they couldn’t see their frivolous folly for the sun and deep blue sea? But Glimpsing Berkeley across the bay, I quickly checked my academic bias, wondering whether a social science graduate really had any stronger claims to pertinence. Before I could answer that, Syd returned with a tray of take-out coffees.

          “Isn’t it so stimulating here,” she glowed, hustling me up some steps toward her studio space. “Can’t you feel the creativity?”

          “Gotta tell you,” I struggled with the smocks and canvasses, balancing the Urnie’s bag precariously on top. “I just see a bunch of flakos taking themselves way too seriously…”

          “Hah—pot, kettle, doc. It’s high time to sharpen that pointy little head of yours.”

          As we reached a second landing, I gave up any hope for a witty retort. Still, I was quick enough on my feet to notice the bare bodies baking on sundecks all about Russian Hill. “Hell of a view—for January, that is.”

          “That’s where I’ve gotten some of my best figure studies,” she sniffed, waiting for me to push open a metal fire door. “An alum bequeathed a mounted telescope to the roof. The inscription claims it’s where he gained his most valuable insights.”

          We passed several secluded exhibitions of landscape photography and watercolors before treading down a long ramp leading to the ground floor sculptorium. There, the chaos of color and raw innovation overwhelmed me—like a moiré pattern on a jumpy TV screen. Within white cinderblock walls, graffitied to pale a New York subway car, young stonecutters finessed soggy mounds of clay into their peculiar visions of life and limb. They toiled amid half-finished forms, skids of bulk casting body and random clumps of aborted plaster that stuck to the slab floor like milky cow chips on cold winter mornings.

          Shipping crate shelving stored the plastic-wrapped evidence of convictions abandoned and concepts disapproved. Still others served as work tables, coated with dried clay and spray paint—covered like everything else with a two-inch thick dusty crust. A mongrel aroma of clay and resin turned to sweet sawdust and varnish as Syd guided me through the wood studio, rotary saws singing and clamp presses bracing a multitude of unfinished forms. Cassette players crossfired nascent Blondie and aging Velvet Underground across the cluttered workbenches, but all that music died the moment we entered the metal sculpture morgue.

          Two heavy steel doors masked a dank, garage-like stall seared by fire-tipped acetylene torches dueling in white-hot creation. Goggled demons in red bandannas and army jump boots aimed their flaming nozzles at the end joins of a four-foot tubular coil, which joined other scrap metal into some abstract extrapolation of a jet-lagged time machine. Their torches reflected off welding tanks and grated benches like Vader’s death rays, and cast startling light on a scattered menagerie of twisted iron creatures—grotesque gallstones in perpetual passing.

          “Christ, where you taking me,” I yelped, over the crash of a mis-brazed coil and slamming of lockers.

          “Just hang in a bit further,” she beckoned. Another iron door sealed off the inferno and accompanying fumes, delivering us to a short, sunlit stairwell leading to the whitewashed wooden variety. “There…”

          Syd opened a padlocked door, the back of which was triple thick with years of paint splatter. But that blanched by comparison with the floor and walls beyond. “My studio, welcome to my world.”

          “Whoa,” I gasped, eyes burning. It looked like an Earl Sheib spray booth after a labor dispute. A deep breath yielded a free-floating aroma of lacquer, wood stain, shellac and enamels.

          “You’re impressed, right? The whole baby’s mine.” No need to flick on ceiling lights, as the room was sunnier than a New Age solarium in Santa Fe.

          “Hard to say, this isn’t academia, it’s more like an asylum,” I shook my head at yet another study in apparent chaos. “I’m more used to demographic tables, print-outs, nice straight desks—a little chicken scratch on the blackboard, but…”

          A Rorschach test as wall coverings: The only things orderly about her studio were the windowpanes—square-framed floor-to-ceiling panels that saturated the room with available rays. They opened to a narrow Mediterranean balcony; elsewhere, they angled up to the white broad-beamed ceiling, to yawning skylights cranked by long, swaying pull chains. The windows so prevailed that even her paintings came on second glance.

          “Careful, you’re speaking of the place I love,” Syd held up paint-caked coveralls and a frayed Castagnolo cyclist hat. “The Institute has long been a hive of Abstract Expressionism and the Figurative Movement. Harry Jacobus studied here. David Park, Mark Rothko and Diebenkorn have taught in these same classes. This isn’t Moony arts and crafts, flash—this is all about serious fine arts in all their forms. Ansel Adams and Edward Weston were photography instructors here, Dorothea Lange, too. Know who else was a student? Annie Leibovitz…”

          “In-credible…” These names barely registered, but I wasn’t letting on. “Um, so how do you manage this? You’re not even enrolled here anymore, are you?”

          “Let’s just say the head of the department is an avid admirer of my work…”

          “Must be a rabid admirer…” I downed some coffee, cream and two sugars, then helped her crank open some windows.

          “It once belonged to Athren Guildersol,” she gestured, opening the French-style balcony doors. “He was San Francisco’s leading painter in the post-earthquake days. A refugee who came over from Holland, was one of the early faculty pioneers. This was his personal studio until he croaked. Then the school boarded it up for, like, 50 years. Now undergrad assistants are even assigned to tend its memorial balcony and garden. The space has gone to honor students ever since the refurbishing, only to those showing ‘unusual promise’.”

          “Meaning you…”

          “Shucks,” she bowed and winked, slugging at her to-go coffee cup. “No denying genius…”

          The small, sun-warmed balcony overlooked a side yard garden of azaleas, tulips and peonies, not to mention soaring sunflowers and strategically scattered contraband with five-finger leaves. Center bed stood a stone seagull sculpture atop a green patinaed metal pedestal, with a commemorative plaque reading ‘Albert Tobler’ at its base. Beyond, Fisherman’s Wharf warehouses spilled to the shoreline, where a blue and white container ship steamed in, stacked to the masts with shiny new Datsuns.

          “How do you get anything done with a view like this,” I roamed back into her studio, to its nose-smack of fresh acrylics and oils, clumps of the chromatic spectrum squished like butter pats about the floor, fixtures and walls.

          “How do you get anything done in the Rocky Mountains? Discipline—organization and dedication are all just as important as native talent.”

          “That so…” To me the space looked like Galveston after hurricane season.  Finished canvasses stood lined up like LP record jackets in one corner. Walls not covered by pushpin sketches and canvasses in all stages of development was caked with inert color, while her ironstone-tiled floor was paint saturated to deep, muddy amethystine.

          Here, Jackson Pollack met early Jasper Johns. Stools and ladders alike bore a common color-crazed glaze as though they had not been cleaned since Guildersol’s wake. Work tables and sagging overstuffed furniture, folding chairs, rag bins and file cabinets: nothing escaped the variegated spray, save for the huge rolls of rice paper, Mylar and acetate under splatter sheets of plastic. Yet more scattered than color were the tools of her toils, and everything seemed to be in the cans. Ajax cans, thinner cans, turpentine cans, Pepsi cans, Krylon spray cans—Gold Classic oil pints and quarts sealed with wax paper or open and dried solid as a snowy Sierra trail. They were everywhere, hidden behind matte boards, ganged atop piles of charcoal paper and vellum sketchpads. And everywhere the cans were, they were crammed with soaking brushes.

          Syd went on to explain her system between sips: She bunched her spotters and red sable Grumbachers in Planter’s Peanut cans, her squirrel brushes and Langnickel fan blenders in 16-ounce Oly cans, her Robert Simmons acrylics and French Bristle Filberts in party-size Pringles tins. She’d scarfed restaurant supply soup cans from the school cafeteria for her Chung Kings, Morilla #595 sky washes and Goliath white sables.

          “What are those squished-up silver tubes all over the place,” I snipped, grabbing one, and a fistful of burnt sienna. I gazed as well upon unspent tubes of viridian, vermilion, cerulean blue, madder carmine and titanium white wasting away about floor and tables. “They look like played-out toothpaste, just lying around, drying up.”

          “They’re my oils, and they’re not all drying up,” she tossed me some paper towels, then danced toward a coat rack, which instead held her array of paint-smeared palettes. She grabbed one randomly and pushed it at me. “See? It may look like slop to you, but to me it’s order—the remains of a skin tone I worked three hours to get right. Maybe these tubes aren’t 100% used up, but they were there when I needed them. Whenever I need them again, I’ll get more.”

          “Christ, what a waste…” I pulled several more paper towels to dry my hands.

          “The whole process is a waste. Drawing, painting, sculpture—it’s all a waste, but that’s okay,” she asserted, setting the palette aside an easel with two unfinished, yet already identifiable figures, which looked to have been abandoned in haste. “I mean, what’s creativity? It’s bringing order to chaos, right? How can that not be wasteful? Anyway, even thinking and analyzing can be a waste of energy. What’s it solve, just confuses things even more. Actually doing is infinitely more productive.”

          “Hey, it all begins with thought, doesn’t it,” I asked defensively, drinking heavily from my lukewarm paper cup.

          “Art is spontaneity,” she maintained, pointing toward her sketches and canvasses. “It’s feeling more than reason. Once I crank up, I don’t stop—maybe for hours, maybe all night. At that point, the last thing I worry about is what’s left in a damn paint tube, even if it’s Bellini or Blockx Belgian. When it comes to inspiration, paint’s cheap.”

          “That’s why thinking, writing is so much cleaner, and exact,” I rallied, balling up the paper towels, hitting a jump shot into the trash bucket.

          “So who says verbalizing the human condition is any more effective than visualizing it? We’re both observing, interpreting. I just happen to believe that I can touch, affect more people with one painting than you can with a hundred boring dissertations. Art, vision—that’s what fires people, flash, not quotes and footnotes!”

          “An oversimplification if I’ve ever heard one,” I huffed, backpedaling toward a bluejay on the balcony railing to toss my cup in the bucket.

          “For that matter, I believe you could do so much more for mankind with your photography than with all the sociology in the world. If that’s what you really want to do—help people, help them understand—do it with your camera, not some dumb theory or study. You’d have so much more potential that way.”

           Syd led me through a process of pencil sketches, rubs, watercolors and oils that charted her advancing mastery of the human form—bold, brilliant renderings of dancers, gymnasts, still figures and mild erotica. She was even better than Melissa’s portrait, which I now shorthand thought of as ‘Moon Glow”, showed, her talent and style verging on intimidation.

          “This is what six years of study here and in Europe will get you,” she glanced over her shoulder at the large canvas-in-progress presently on her easel. “You won’t believe what’s next…”

          “Is that…” I looked more closely at the two unfinished figures, one squatter, the other tall. “Your roomies?”

          “Yep, I’m calling it ‘Muttie and Jeffrina’.” Point made. With that, she tossed her cap and coveralls onto the lumpy sofa. “Plus I’m already tissueing some ideas for my new body of work, kind of an Olympics thing. C’mon, let’s hit the lounge. We’ve still got our gyros to wolf down.”

          “Why not just eat out on the balcony,” I pointed, clutching the Urnie’s bag I’d set on her workbench. “Toss some scraps to Tobler’s memorial seagull, or the real ones squawking in that palm tree over there.”

          “Pig out in front of Athren? Have some respect.” She grabbed the bag from me, feeling it for any remaining warmth. “Besides, the lounge has a humongous deck with a beverage bar. I’ve got it covered, dinero-wise. We can check out that amazing ‘commie’ Diego Rivera mural on the way.”

          “Naw, come on, right out there, quick and easy. Then I can try calling Boulder.”

          “Try that again? Please, again with the respect.” She gestured to a small concrete planter box flush with peonies at the far corner of the balcony. After we closed the windows and all, she led me out of her studio, preparing to lock the white door behind us, then held up. “Who do you think I was sleeping with just before I left for Italy? Oops, which reminds me, I’d better water dear Athren down good before we go…”

 

           “Looks like a choice ride to me.”

           “That’s for them, not for us.”

           “But I’m kinda them, aren’t I?”

           “Not with me, you’re not.”

           Rivera’s Depression-Era mural laying heavy, pitas and hummus heavier yet, we soon developed a taste for something sweeter; although baklava was nowhere to be found on her Institutional grounds. So Sydney wheeled us over to Union Street, and a fresh produce grocer at the Mason Street corner. I car-sat her idling Fox while she picked through bins full of off-season fruit, chatting with the counter clerk like a lobbyist at a committee hearing. She bounded across bus and delivery van traffic with a pink plastic bag full of organic dessert: green grapes for the gastro, Gravenstein apples, their green-red spotted roughage being good for the teeth; tangerines, good for the soul. Strapped back in, she gunned up Russian Hill, my knees pressed firmly against the Audi’s dashboard. We were headed for some obligatory sightseeing, one grape at a time.

       Upon reaching the hill crest, I ventured a look at the sweep of San Francisco Bay from here, how glassy, boxed apartment buildings dipped down Union Street to North Beach then back up again toward Coit Tower and Telegraph Hill— like this was the oilcloth backdrop you took the snaps against, not a neighborhood in which people actually lived. Ahead of us, a carpet of city north rolled out from Swensens’ famed ice cream corner down all the way west to Cow Hollow, the Marina, then the Presidio treeline and the sea. But Syd instead hung a hard right onto Hyde Street, meeting up with Rice-a-Roni placards affixed to the rear end of an outbound cable car.

           “Look at that, bulging with tourists, creeping along like they own the place,” she flared, leaning on the horn, railing at a slow rolling trolley that, along with an opposing inbound streetcar, was all but blocking our way.

           “Sorta do, don’t they?” I was too taken with the anachronistic cable car itself to start complaining. Bell clanging, waving riders strap clenching and hanging off the sides: The trolley swayed and bucked slowly along. That it still existed at all was miraculous; that it still actually functioned absurd. “Well, I for one could stand a climb aboard.”

           “Hold on tight, I’ve got something more important to show you.” She shot around the trolley through a sliver of wiggle room between it and the inbounder. “We’ll hit Lombard later, there’s lots of other crooked stuff to see going on here”

           In any case, I could hardly catch a freeze frame of The World’s Crookedest Street as we darted along the stretch of Russian Hill townhouses and tennis courts past Filbert and Greenwich, glean barely a snippet of sinuous Hydrangea beds hemming a congested stream of snaking, braking autos inching downward to Leavenworth. “How…later?”

           “Blasted cable cars,” she honked and horned her way down Hyde to Bay Street, where she swerved around another of the bell-ringing jewels, into an oncoming lane of gargantuan tour buses. “I swear, half the people who live along the Hyde Line would just as soon let them roll right down into the Bay.” 

           “Tell that to the straphangers on that thing.” I didn’t press it, nor could I bear to keep track of her racy maneuvering, instead fixing straight ahead on the clamoring Hyde Street Pier at the base of this brakedrum-burning hill, with ghostly Alcatraz Island structures above and beyond.

          Syd aced into a leveled off truck zone on North Point Street, then revved sharply before cutting the ignition, as if announcing our arrival. “There, that wasn’t so bad. And it’s just past delivery time, so we should be home free, parking wise. Unreal, you must be a lucky charm after all.”

           “Um, wouldn’t exactly go that far,” I pried my fingers from the handgrip, fruit bag trapped between my feet—that lost Satalisman painfully re-orbiting to mind.

            We stepped out to a row of several Hyde Street cable cars waiting to roll down to some sort of a turnaround—a Lazy Susan, Syd called it. At line’s head, we found a MUNI gripman releasing to send his trolley clacking across Beach Street, bell ringing loudly, settling onto the roundtable, where he proceeded to dismount and tug at the car’s forerail, while his conductor pushed likewise at its rear. A half-block queue of tourists encircled this revolving ritual, cheering the crew on, to the accompaniment of strolling fiddlers and banjo players. They’d play anything for a few nickels, and these pigeons seemed to be particularly fare game—perfectly captive until they could pile aboard a downtown-bound car, coughing up their cigarettes and coinage.

           Sydney led us past two blocks of sidewalk artists hawking everything from sandals to scrimshaw from clothes racks, pegboards, card tables and tailgates. The crafts were fair to mediocre, and the crafties themselves were consistently weird. Yet their freedom of spirit and expression was hardly lost on me. I envied them some, especially the photographers, even though they offered nearly stock shots of boats, bridges and foggy skylines, as if their works were stamped out at some low-rent processing plant with only token exposure and cosmetic variation.

           “See there? That’s what sells around here,” Syd said, as we stop-started along the display stands like dog walkers on a tree-lined thoroughfare. “Sad part is, some of these hacks are really talented. But all they want to do is sit in the sun and gouge people. It’s like they’re afraid of success.”

           “It’s a living, I guess…or maybe they’re just afraid of themselves…”

           “Sociospeak for yourself, doc. But visualize what you could do here,” she nodded, toward an array of colorful depictions of Victorians on Alamo Square, downtown skyline in the background. “I mean, you could be a real photographer  really clean up. That is, if you could figure out the right film to load.”

           As the display stands and tourists tapered off, she skipped down a curving, crushed stone pathway to the bay. The winter warm sun ducked over a distant hill, leaving January’s chill in the late afternoon air. We stopped at bay’s edge, the water still and glossy this side of an arcing breakwater pier thick with rollerskaters and huddled fishermen. Orange-capped swimmers breast stroked in wide concentric circles as though warding off a heat wave. The hardier among them swam laps from the pier to a Maritime Museum collection of schooners and paddle wheel ferries.

          Outside the breakwater, dying breezes stranded sailboats, and the late sun ignited Sausalito and Tiburon windows like vacuum tubes in an old Crosley floor model radio. Even the crabbers and seagulls folded up shop for dinner, along with the two-block long drag of curbside artsy-craftsies. Only the swimmers and swooners remained, as well as the odd psychopeddler hawking his latest mind-blowing revelations.

           Syd fended off some annoying orange tunic-clad Moonies—even their phony bouquets—for she seemed content with where this fresh-eyed mood was taking us. Nonetheless, it did set me to wondering what the hell she was thinking. I quickly attributed her behavior to grateful hospitality; on the other hand, after Lovelock, who knew what was up? In any event, she denied all distracters and detractors, save one: a giggly redheaded flower child with a rasher of quick-print salvation who jammed her yellow brochures into our palms with the sure-handed snap of an all-conference QB.

           “Universe Players,” Syd read aloud. “Says they’re putting on a performance session tonight, free admission. We’ve just got to go!”

           “I dunno, got my stuff to get together…” Thought being, maybe I should have been catching one of those cable cars back to my Volks about then, taking another look for Dame’s Satalisman.

           “Aww, let’s go for it,” she urged, likely sensing a revelation or two of her own—as in let’s see where the sucker might take him, or the sucker might be taken by them. “I already did once myself. It’ll do you good.”

           “Naw, think I’ll pass on…” My eyes were instead drawn to a corner SF Clarion news box, more specifically to a bulldog edition headline that read, ‘Investigative Series: How Cultish Redwood Valley Hi-jinx Portended The City’s Peoples Temple and Guyana. And where the movement was going from here’.

           “No overthinking, remember,” her eyes lit up like Tiburon’s windows. “I’m ready for a new memory, we’ll even hit El Menudo for some epic tostadas and salsa.”

           Resolved. Nix the tourista trip. It was Saturday night in San Francisco—her first one back, my first, period. For better or worse, it looked like we were gonna make a full-on local scene together, and do it in the Mission.

 Care for more?

 Chapter 20. Matters headed south, soon
comes an appointment with consequences,
 more than a theater of the absurd. Something
 else to chew on in the dark of night…

“Waylaid on the road
to salvation, best to give
it a second thought.”

           “…Who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses…”

          Sydney having hastened to take a further ablution turn in the flat’s only full bathroom; I’d drifted back into the parlor, settling on the piano bench, tinkling the keys like a five year-old at kindergarten play break. While sifting through the Gershwin and Cole Porter sheet music heaped atop the glossy black Steinway, I found this distant recitation catching my ear—muffled invocation, a callow, discordant prayer chorus echoing through a schoolyard just below the bay windowcase at piano’s rounded edge.

          “…and lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil, amen.” 

Comatose—yeah, no, kinda remember now. I was fumbling through my key ring because its was digging into my leg again, and I was just rolling around on that cheesy cot of theirs, trying to finally wrestle down some decent sleep. That was when I felt the broken clasp and stem, and yanked the ring out of my rumpled jeans…

Rifling through the ‘humongous’sucker: I fingered past car and cabin, lab and locker keys—a nail clipper, fringy leather fob from Cheyenne Frontier Days, Moon’s crocheted anger management totem with Seamus’s tail fur woven in. Yep, everything in place save for that blessed Saturn talisman; damn, for sure it was there at Hippo’s when I was feigning a bankroll reach to cover the burgers bill—could feel its ceramic rings. But was it still fastened when I was combing blindly through my ring for the squareback’s door key as Syd harried me to unload her stuff, chilly as the night had become? Thought so anyway…

          An antsy muster of blue plaid uniformed gradeschoolers in all shades and shapes parroted late morning prayers, fidgeting, grabbing themselves, eyes wandering, feet shuffling, snickering at one another as they mangled ‘Hail Marys’ and ‘Act of Contritions’, yet maintaining five tidy rows. Their tiny, stumbling voices oversize echoed about the game-lined asphalt quadrangle, rimmed with coarse, stubby hedges, boxed in on three sides by a holy trinity of four-story school buildings, a wafer white cluster of parochial classrooms, play halls, convent quarters and devotional chambers.

          Anchoring the Broadway Street flank of this imposing, nearly one-block cloister, beyond a comparatively nondescript rectory, was a massive Romanesque cathedral, with a gabled roof and louver windowed tower, cornering at Van Ness Avenue. Crammed in along this near side was a line of secular condo and apartment buildings, not least the four-level mid-block address from which I could overview the whole Gothic-style Catholic complex, perched as I was in this rear window-well on floor number three.

Not that I’d really been taking Dame’s amulet seriously or anything, but had become a bit more attached to it since Thanksgiving—not superstitious exactly, just mindful of her ‘special need and heed’ warning, let alone any looming bad fortune from losing it. Then closer examination of the broken clasp in a sliver of hall light under the closet door got me to figuring the peculiar little enameled planet could have broken off when I was shaking out the tangled key ring up there—had to be…and it would likely be long gone by dawn. So in a panic, I guess I rolled out and grabbed Syd’s spare keys off the doorway table, then retraced steps back up to Lafayette Park. Wheezing in a sleepwalking fog, I scoured the dimly lit path we had trod, searching its cracked asphalt and bordering bushes with the hope of spotting the amulet. Pissed off no end that I’d let her drag me up there, yet somewhat drawn to the park’s kinky clamor and consummation, I blearily tried to square it as a matter of sociological duty—even Ph.D. program saving case study material, not some godforsaken sicko urge. Or if nothing else, I was just walking off more stroganoff…

          “Okay, everyone, let’s firm up our rows more smartly now, shall we,” prodded a more diminutive, stone-faced nun, with her wire-marm eyeglasses and first sergeant firmness. “Time for catechism classes to begin. Children, we are not proceeding indoors until our little formation is perfectly straight?”  

           Across the yard, a main arched doorway the nuns were aiming for was topped with a ceramic Blessed Virgin, trimmed with Castilian brown Biblical Madonna, lamb and fowl creatured medallions and intaglios. Coordinate arcaded window arches featured baby Jesus faces and tiny stone tablet renderings of the Ten Commandments and Stations of the Cross. Between them stood deeply ribbed terra umber pilasters crowned with divinely ornate Vatican-touched capitals. Lording over it all was a wraparound entablature, scripturally adorned friezes and architraves, gilt-dentiled, lancet arched cornices up top that looked like embroidery on a priestly robe. Nothing like a little Catholic righteous discipline and decorum right about then.

In any case, no lucky charm, no little ceramic Saturn Return to be found. But there seemed to be no losing the salacious shuffling and shifty silhouettes, daredevil cries and whispers in the terrace shadows above. At least until one hellacious scream came from somewhere near what must have been the picnic tables and tennis courts. Giddy dancing and prancing turned to lurking, clashing figures panic scrambling, decamping something fierce…

I hazily recall being hunched over, feeling around the shrubbery for Dame T’s talisman about then, when a lone dark figure came out of the trees, barreling down the park path, dimly illuminated only by the amber streaks of distant Washington Street lights. Straightened up, dizzy and disoriented, I saw he was a burly load alright, no more jerkin’ around. There was a collision up there, toe to toe, face to flushed, sweaty face, the blurriest outlines anyway, hardly seeing eye to eye…

Nevertheless, I saw him, he saw me: Then after some incidental manhandling like some frenzied subway sumos, I found myself winding up ass-ended into the brambly bushes, as he tugged down on his ball cap over curly brown hair, bull rushing downpath toward Octavia Street…

           “Flash, where are you now?!” Sydney’s voice gained as she sprinted toward the parlor, towel drying her hair.

           “Just checking out all the noise,” I replied, continuing to peer down to the schoolyard, diametrically opposing her sliding dining cum bedroom doors.

           “Oh, that’s St. Brenda’s, quite the spectacle, isn’t it,” she answered quizzically, glancing back through to her bedroom, tabulating two and two without displaying her bottom line. “Funny though, my faith worships individualism, but they seem more into crowds. They do that shtick every morning, weekdays starting at 8 a.m. They’re our local roosters…”

           “Brings back some memories…” Wracking through a little Curacao Blue Moon hangover…Me, I had just up and brushed off my clothes—hearing more cries and shrieks of horror, sirens already wailing—getting the hell out of there, lucky charm or no. At least that was how I recollected it back here—lying low, zipping lips on it, comatose speaking and all.

           “Good ones?” She cinched up her white terry bathrobe. Prayers were potted down as the nuns and children crossed themselves and began filing into class. Then the church’s cherished Italian Ruffatti pipe organ rang through the yard, rattling the school’s brown, waffle-hatched windows floor upon floor.

           “Cum se cum sa,” I grunted, with a so-so rock of the hand, wondering why she had to hang that car door-lock rap around my neck. Me, of all people…why me?  Then again, I set aside my boyhood clashes with top-down priestly and parish authority, with fiery images of Sister Eleanor and fourth-grade Catechismal drills, the scene below delivered me momentarily to one wistful weekend in Torino. How European a city this was for mainland U.S.A., only with brilliant sunshine, rather than driving continental rains.

           “Beautiful buildings, that’s for sure. Look at how the sun beams off the curbstone cathedral’s stained glass windows and apostle statues. I’ve been told that art stuff was all made in Ireland. You might like to know Brenda’s school started in 1888 with the Sisters of Blessed Charity from Dublin. It’s been a center for San Francisco’s Irish community ever since. I hear Mayor Moscone went there, too.  My roommate, Diana told me the whole story when I moved in.”

           “No lie,” I said self-consciously, somewhat taken aback by her knowledge. I edged away from the window-well, as if dabbing in the holy water and crossing myself after high mass, then rounded the Steinway to brush morning dust off its ivories. “So, whose piano?”

           “Diana’s very musical, that one,” she followed me around the Steinway, brushing morning dust from its ivories. “She and Edie have lived here forever. C’mon, you can meet them, let’s cut through my space. But not a word about my stolen purse, okay? They would just freak…”

           “Gotcha…er, nice place,” I batted away the bath towel she swung in my face, only to spot a living room wall photo, apparently of the two roommates. It was a blanched double exposure of sorts, a broad-beamed figure in black lingerie and party mask ghosting over a slender seated nude blowing a long silver flute, who was playing to sheet music spread across a pink throw-covered mattress. “Bit overexposed maybe…”

           “You like it, hmmm? Found it a few months before I left for Europe,” Sydney noted, once we passed through the sliding doors back into her bedroom. “We split it three ways. I get a break ’cause my room’s smallest. Edie and Diana are real sweeties. Kinda distant sometimes, but the two of them have grown inseparable.”

           “Like you and that painting? It’s the only one hanging on your walls…about the only thing in here that isn’t white.” I took fuller notice of the oil in progress, a shapely rear-ender with an oh-so-casual flip of a shaggy blond head over her shoulder.

           “Isn’t she gorgeous? That’s my dear, dear friend, Aimee Pellimore, up in Marin. Oy, I’ve got to finish the work by spring—for her birthday,” she said, lopping her towel onto a set of porcelain hooks as we paused before through the opposing door into the hallway. “Yep, back to my studio it goes. It’s at the Art Institute, that’s where all my color is—but I’ll show you. See, my whole life is color—my work there, my tastes, my whole wardrobe behind that closet door. So I like to keep everything as white as I can here. A blank canvas—source of pure inspiration, centering, you know?”

           “I just associate it with shoveling snow drifts.” I peeked into that now vacant bathroom, still strung up and steamy, just the same. “Which I’d better be getting back to…”

           “Not in San Francisco, you won’t,” she smiled, leading me toward the kitchen. “Out here, you can leave the chains and shovels behind. Let’s see if we can grab a bite to go…”

           On closer scrutiny, the kitchen fit their spacious flat like a one-car garage on a Grosse Pointe spread. It wasn’t much wider than the adjacent utility room, or all that much brighter, yet was considerably longer, and warm. Scored pots and skillets hung from pegboards; dance club and kitten magnets held scribbled notes and recipes to the avocado panelled refrigerator door. A tall, elbowed vent duct led from and Easy-Offed Roper range, somewhat eclipsing the lone, placemat-size window. What it didn’t obscure was covered nicely by Edie, still hunched over the slowly draining sink. Diana had joined her, lanky and dripping in a rouge-red bathrobe and shower bonnet.

          Damp hand prints hinted that Edie had straightened up long enough for Diana to reach around her flowery mau-mau for some serious hug time, only to release her as we drew near. The long and short of it was, only Diana’s gangly arms could have fully reached around that housecoat, for Edie was built as stoutly as a Baltic powerlifter. Busy hands back on kitchen counters, they turned like Hummel figures to greet us.

           “Ladies, this is my dear new friend, fla—Kenneth,” Sydney smiled thinly, sliding past cooling bread loaves to tap a glass of bottled water from a corner dispenser. “He’s all the way from Boulder—that’s in Colorado. Flash, meet my fantabulous roommates…”

           “Kenneth,” they chimed, glancing at one another like sisters superior. The squatter of the two added, “so you’re what was rattling around here last night.”

           “Uh, dunno about that, but…”

           “Doors, and coughing in the middle of the night’s what I heard,” Edie said. “Speaking of which, you did hear about the murder up in Lafayette Park.”

           “Can’t say as I…”

            “Morning news said the guy was beaten with a stick or something. They say it happened around 3:30 or so, newshounds were all over the scene by dawn, calling it a rage killing in a hookup spot. Police haven’t commented yet, but mighty gruesome stuff, huh?”

           “Edie’s a big honcho downtown at BofA,” Syd offered abruptly between sips of Crystal Geyser, handing me the glass.

           “An admin assistant, actually—in the Best Practices Department,” she looked askance at Sydney, then turned my way. “And you?”

           “Impressive, I just finished grad school, a master’s program in…”

           “He’s a good friend of my dear friend, Melissa Saversohn,” Syd blurted again, grabbing the glass for a refill. Good enough to drive me all the way back to The City. You know, friend of a friend of a friend—yadda, yada, yadda.”

           “How friendly?” Edie asked flatly, as if sizing me up for an orange ensemble .

           “Live-in friendly,” Syd overrode me, gratefully so, as I drank up and handed her the glass. “But they’re not engaged, or anything—right, Kenneth?”

           “Well, no—not exactly, or anything,” I instead diverted to Diana, who was now quietly slicing her bread loaves. I couldn’t help but disrobe her mentally, that double exposure snapping like a camera shutter across my frontal lobe. “Smells great…what kind of…”

           “Diana’s our in-house baker,” Syd toasted her with a half glass of brand label…water. “Bet you’ve been baking your little buns off, hon.”

           “All day yesterday, Sydney…took some sick time,” Diana said softly, wielding her carving knife with boulangerie pride. “Did a date-nut and four 9-grains. We’ve frozen half, gets us to payday.”

           “Besides that, she’s an actuary for Pacific Life Insurance, can you believe it,” Syd added. “Next step, law school yet. Incredible…”

           “So you’re co-habbing, are you, Kenneth, getting it on the cheap,” Edie stared my way, like a heavyweight free-weight medallist at an eighth-ranked contender. “Where’s this Melissa person? Is she here with you, or…”

           “Uh, Ken’s the name, actually. And she stayed put in Boulder, work and everything,” I cleared my throat, tracking her warily as she planted her sole-worn bunny slippers before the Roper, to stir a pot of simmering oatmeal. “That’s why I’m heading back there ASAP—right after I phone her to…you know, hash out the return trip.”

           “But not too ASAP,” Sydney winked, with a nod toward Diana and all that bread. “We’ve some places to go here, things to see and do first—right, Kenneth? So we’d better get shakin’.”

           “Knock yourselves out,” Edie smiled stiffly, clearing the air but not the tension. She shot me a quick glare, then gestured Diana to her side with a case-hardened rise of the brow. “We working girls will hold down the fort, keep eyes and noses peeled for that psycho killer from up at the park.”

           “Yes, until later, Sydney,” Diana smiled blandly, offering us some 9-grain slices on a paper New Years party plate. “We still must hear all about your devil-may-care holiday travels.  Incidentally, do those happen to be your keys on the front table?”

           “Not that I can remember,” Syd squeezed Diana’s chilly shoulder, Edie fixing on my fleeting eye. “But then, I’d already popped a little ’Lude before coming in the front door—you know, after such a long road trip.” There we left them, co-stirring the oatmeal, one curious duad, indivisible.

           “Best practices, huh? Pretty heavy chick,” I sighed, playing pocket pool with my key ring as we retreated to Sydney’s room to gather up some of her carry alongs.

           “Ah, don’t let Edie rattle you,” she sneered, shedding her robe to merely tangerine bra and panties without missing a beat. “She’s just raggin’ because her lumberjack boyfriend won’t come back from Oregon and sweep her away from all this…now where did I leave those keys…”

           “Like she said, maybe on that table.” I tried to remain conversationally cool in the face of this nubile, flawless flesh, otherwise brushing aside her key quest, circumspectly so. “But can’t say as I’d blame the guy. I mean, how does Diana put up with that crap?”

           “You kidding me? Dear Diana gets off on Edie’s domination dance. She’d never admit that to herself, the submissive sack—and here she’s wanting to become a lawyer,” Syd asserted, with a searching little smile. “Sooo, you were comatose in the closet all night, right?”

           “Must let her music do the talking, huh?” Try as I might, there was no missing the small, delicate bumblebee tattooed just below her navel. My grip tightened on the 9-grain paper plate as I wondered what Diane and Edie might have seen of me. “But comatose—of course, what do you think?”

           “All right then.” She casually reached for a cranberry pullover, wriggling into creased Vanderbilt jeans—apparently knowing all too well the virtues of erotoshock therapy. A blast of her hairdryer, dab of lip gloss, grab of backup keys and a mini Gucci purse: she was ready for take-off. “See, I buzz in and out of here and leave them to their own devices—mainly the latex variety. Just mind my own toothbrush, pay the rent months in advance. A little pit stop, and we’ll fly…”

           “Roger that,” I said, now trying to figure what she really thought, what she knew, was actually making of all this—otherwise keeping mum and numb. Instead, I snatched up Syd’s pearly Princess phone the moment she hit the bathroom, for a quick cash call back to Moon—a little Western reUnion for the road. Yep, just punch in some 303 numbers and brrddt…brrddt…brrddtt…

           “Speaketh…” The gruff, muffled voice had a half-chewed mouthful, saying a mouthful.

           Speaketh? CLICK. I hung up moments before Syd returned for her bag. Who the hell was that?

 

           “Ciao, Mario!”

           “Bambina mio, come va…dove sei stato?”

           “Roma, Venezia, Milano,” Sydney beamed, as we reached a fully decaled and postered service counter, Gran Prix imagery and busty Snap-On Tools calendars wallpapering all around. “Ah, the Galleria Borgese, the Pinacoteca di Brera, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Mario. The marble in Carrera—cosa marmo grande!”

           Wasn’t all that far; the weather wasn’t that bad, at all. Syd had assured me she knew her way around, and my chances of getting a weekend non-metered parking ticket were next to nil. A brief stop at the squareback for my shaving kit appeared to validate her nil hypothesis. So there we left it for the time being, electing to go about some of her homecoming errands on foot. All I knew was I wanted to steer clear as possible from Lafayette Park, at least for now: never happened, nothing up there, nothing to do with it, none of my business, never wanted to see that bloody face again—deny, deny, deny.

          I rather breathed freely in the spring-like Saturday morning, a sparkling skyline over Russian Hill that seemed crowned by the pointed upper stories of Transamerica’s Pyramid beyond, tagging along as she stopped at a neighborhood bank branch to exchange traveler’s checks and tap her rainy day savings account—explaining away an expired driver’s license for required picture ID. A nearby locksmith duped a set of her emergency apartment keys; her road-soiled clothes were headed straight for the dry cleaners. Next up, a long red and gray repair garage with twin overhead doors: one emblazoned with a large Alfa-Romeo emblem, the other half-opened, with Ferrari’s black-on-yellow stallion. Straddling both, in bold drop-shadowed script, was the name, ‘Mario’s Monza Garage’.

           “Si, sicuro,” replied Mario himself, a swarthy middle-aged gumba in yellow pit crew coveralls, clomping about the service/parts compartment in leather-strapped sabots.

          Framed photos suggested his father had been a champion pioneer race driver on the Formula One circuit before opening this shop, while his son was now waist-deep in Castrol gear grease, oli per transmissioni and manifold high-performance automobili tradition. With a shake out of his curly hair, he reached over to a pegboard panel filled with tagged vehicle keys, next to a signed color shot of Giancarlo Baghetti, then handed her two spares on a fuzzy rainbow ring. “I’m bred to tune Maseratis and they bring me Fiats to de-smog. Pero, su, L’auto va bene…”

           “Bene, grazie, see you first of the month,” she smiled, turning to me, in near whispers, leading me further into Mario’s garage. “I slip him a little Italian, he gives me a little break on the day rate. That’s how it works hereabouts, flash. One hand spritzes the other—a delicate balance. You just have to tip it in your favor…”

           “Check,” I said, struck by the winner’s circle-painted cleanliness of the quartz-lit service bay, the array of Lamborghinis and GTEs alongside those cheesy mini imports. Metric tool chest consoles lined the garage’s Gran Prix muralled walls, which took me back graphically unto racing pilgrimages to Hockenheim and Nurburgring.

           “Voilà, check this out,” she countered, directing me around a green Spider Veloce to her fire red Audi Fox/Avant wagon.

           “Nice wheels…uh, about your driver’s license, want me to…” I removed a hot wax detailing flier from under her windshield wiper, setting it atop a steel brake fluid drum beside the Spider sports car, on which a young Team Mario mechanic was busy adjusting tappets.

           “You ride shotgun, I’ll take my chances.” Syd belted in, started the Fox, revving through a few seconds warm-up, then wheeling for the doors with a cheshire smile. She slowed at the front counter, rolling down her window. “Grazie, Mario, tab it, OK? But ease off the highway robbery!!!”

           “First of month, Bambina,” he shouted, wiping his mitts with Gunk hand cleaner. “We go to caffe. Sacripantina…I buy…”

           “I’m thinking Zabaglione or Zuppa Inglese with a little Marsala. We’re good, ciao…” With that, she rolled out and we were fast into traffic, cutting off an irate cabbie, swinging around an idling MUNI bus, turning out onto Polk Street, headed for her favorite Greekateria across Broadway. “It’d cost me five times as much at any other garage—for storing a German car, yet. I just kept stopping by, pencil sketching Mario behind the wheel of his favorite vintage Bugattis in full racing drag. He can’t get enough, frames them at home. Let’s get us some real eats.”

           “What about this 9-grain here?” Never one for seat belts and harnesses, I held tight to the armrest with one hand, clutching my dopp kit and the paper plate I’d stuffed into it with the other.

           “Pigeon feed. We’re doin’ gyros or something…I’m famished.”

           A parking spot, right out front Urnie’s, midway along a solid block of liquor/groceries, coffee bars and curio shops. Unbelievable, she said, stepping up to take a number for a couple of pita sandwiches, extra hummus, sprouts. I ducked into the shop’s john for a quick brush and flush; she met me at the front door with a dripping bag of Grecian delights.

           “Coulda just settled for a Big Mac or…” I juggled the pitas along with my Dopp kit as we drove off for who knew where.

           “Not around here you won’t,” she said, buzzing through a yellow light, turning left toward the Broadway tunnel. “There’s barely one McDonalds in the whole city, if that. Closest thing are the Doggy Diners out on the avenues. People actually march in protest every time some fast-food chain tries to buy their way into town. I’m talking militant, hanging Ronald the clown in effigy.”

           Syd downshifted through the long, dark tunnel to Chinatown’s edge, then left-turned illegally into the tight-knit clamor of North Beach. Broadway’s skin dives were a blinking red blur, we sped through Columbus Avenue espresso, garlic and antipasti vapors like a contraband cigarette boat out of Biscayne Bay. This could all wait, she insisted, cutting between a flower power Corolla and Westfailure Microbus as we passed a bandana of a crowded park whose sign read, ‘Washington Square’. Punching up Journey’s ‘Wheel In The Sky’ on her FM radio, she pointed out the angelic white twin steeples of St. Marilyn and Joltin’ Joe—yet another of those blessed grandiose Catholic churches.

          “Kinda pushin’ it a bit, don’t you think? I mean, with your license situation…”

          “Not to worry. You’d have to commit hit-and-run murder for the cops to pull you over for a mover in this town. Anyway, we’ll do some sightseeing stuff later. We’ve got real places to go first,” she hugged the middle lane, reviewing her frizzing hair in the rearview mirror, then motioned left toward Graffeo coffee roastery. “Their dark roast will curl your fingernails.”

           “Later? When later?” I tightened the grip on the warm Urnie’s bag between my legs, nervously nibbling at the smashed 9-grain slices in my shaving kit. KSFR cross-faded to Heart’s ‘Barracuda’, while I was still trying to remember where that Lady Thornia astrology place was situated around here when I blew through over Thanksgiving break. Damn, still have to find Dame’s Saturn charm somehow—being it was her very last one, I shuddered, as if my luck depended on it. “I’ve got to phone Moon, get my trip back to Boulder squared away.”

           “C’mon, how could you not want to see more of this beautiful place? Besides, I thought you just tried,” she smirked wittingly, hooking a left turn off Columbus just short of Fisherman’s Wharf, aiming for a Chestnut Street climb up the lee side of Russian Hill. “If it hadn’ta been so short, I’d bill you for the long-distance call. Tell me, what was that all about?”

           “Wrong number…”

  Care for more?

 Chapter 19. Attitudes trump latitude.
A difference in outlook leads to
some brasher, blurrier visions…

“Upon rising to the Heights,
be ever heedful on your 
way back down.”

  “Yep, cards, licenses, the whole shebang…gone…could have happened anywhere. But we need to replace them, like pronto…

  “Not at O’Hare…no, not at Midway, either…

 “I’m not in Chicago! I sort of got…diverted back to San Francisco. Yes, I did give Lorraine your Mitzvah envelope. But then my flights got cancelled—Colorado blizzards, and everything…so I rode out with Melissa’s friend—yes, boyfriend. No, nothing’s going on!”

Wait, where was that voice coming from, why was it so goddamn dark?! I scraped the hair out of my face, trying to sort out where things were around here. Was this a crypt, a cell, or what? No, no respectable cell would be this dank or small. All I knew was I wasn’t back out on the road again, because my tank was too empty, head was too weary, my gut too calorically full. And the last thing I actually recalled was scouring the upper reaches of some place called Lafayette Park.

 

 Sydney had suggested we walk off last night’s gratis Hippo’s carbo loads, the flaming exotic burgers and celebrity table spotting. We trudged up past pastel apartment boxes along Jackson Street, then by the hallowed Haas-Lilienthal House. Grey on gray and sprawling—a 24-room Queen Anne Victorian came complete with witches-cap turrets, spired open gables, creamy white gingerbread and 13-foot ceilings. H-L’s sitting and drawing room windows overlooked a stately carriage house garage and iridal floral gardens: In all, an old-growth oak and redwood paneled spread dating back to 1886, monument to imported grocery money, built on a spacious lot beyond all neighborhood scale, long before the wall-to-wall nondescript apartment buildings crowded in. It was an architectural heritage museum once rimmed by other Victorian mansions, now a lone yawning, anachronistic manor house and grounds amid surrounding concrete and asphalt mediocrity. Still, not too shabby, she noted, for Jewish pioneers who had immigrated wholesale from Bavaria.

  We darted across Franklin Street, between barreling packs of time-sequenced traffic, then huffed up a Washington Street incline that made Boulder seem like eastern Colorado. Winded at Gough, I paused, turned to watch a company of fire engines rushing up Washington far behind us, to a flickering blaze above the Van Ness Avenue crease, emergency lights flashing like the radio antennae atop jumbled Russian Hill towers, and the downtown Transamerica Pyramid and megalithic brown Bank of America highrise just beyond them—an optical illusion/occlusion, to be sure.

But Syd instead pointed out the sumptuously dressed bay windows and gilt-edge marble tiled and planter filled lobbies that lined either side of Washington hereabouts, then the palatial Crestview Building’s bricktop apron and black canopied entryway. Breathing heavily, I could nearly taste the pine and pressed wood fragrance of myriad fireplaces.  Meanwhile she waved and whistled to the valets and doormen, pulling me though Gough Street’s uphill traffic, pointing to snippets of the indigo bay down to our north, before coaxing me up the rounded staircase of Lafayette Park itself. By then I was puffing like a two-pack-a-day smoker, as she was aerobia unbound. The middle path of a terraced park side led us along a further breathtaking vista, panavision camera tracks on a Coppola noir film set.

“Have to get you in better shape, cowboy,” she smiled, barely missing a beat as she called out the scenic high points, bridge-to-bridge. “I thought everybody in Boulder was super fit.”

“Moon’s cooking,” I coughed, playing catch-up on a curved path, trying to re-coordinate breathing with gait— Hippo and Polk Street refluxing, pressure mounting about the eyes. “And been spending more time hitting the books than the rec center.”

“Oink, poor porker baby,” she mocked, casting her gaze past some gnarly overhanging tree branches, out over the night view beyond Washington Street. “Ever seen anything so fantabulous?”

The sweep was compelling, all right. From this fissured asphalt walkway, we could look out over a dark blanket of city lights unfurling broadly to the bay and Marin County backdrop. Past Washington Street’s august wall of white, gargoyled baroque mansions and grand coral stucco mid-rises rolled lower Pacific Heights, Cow Hollow, Fort Mason and the Marina, twinkling like gemstones on a field of black satin and amber sashes.

A long, luxury cruise ship steamed in under the Golden Gate Bridge, likely back from Yucatan, the running lights of tugboats and sundry party craft swarming around it—welcome wagons in full speed and sail. Foghorning them off was an outbound oil tanker riding high and empty, bound for another Middle East payload of light, sweet crude: Boulder’s Flagstaff overlook, only with an added window on the world.

Just behind all that ship traffic, the moat-like bay churned before flickering hillside lights across the wide, open Marin Headlands—those dreamy, palatial playhouses spanning from Sausalito to Tiburon and Belvedere. We tracked the festive cruise liner as it floated like a trout fly on a Rocky stream toward Alcatraz. Container ships pressed slowly past it near Angel Island, freshly stacked from the quartz-lit docks of Oakland, on a Far East bearing for Asian ports of call—so many places I’d never even given a second wandering through, though now beginning to wonder why.

“I don’t know, Heidelberg wasn’t so bad, I mean from the castle’s parapets…” I was being a bit arbitrary at this point, although slightly distracted by some scattered rustling up over my shoulder.

“Puleeze, not even close. I think this is sublimely Greco-Roman,” she trumped unfazed, leading us further up the overgrown bush-lined path. “See, the peninsula’s like this magnificent penis, with San Francisco here as its head. And The City’s in constant climax, you know? Neverending climax—ewww, my panties get all sticky just thinking about it.”

“You mean metaphorically speaking, right?” I blushed, looked away, fracture mapping the intersecting surface cracks and stress risers in the asphalt at our feet, the path darkening further under cover of eucalyptus, pine and cypress trees.

“Metaphysically is more like it, accent on the physical…but what do you think?”

Didn’t know what to think, that rustle quickening up in the shadowy trees and shrubbery behind us, that appeared to grow thicker and more tangled, with a deep undertow of muffled moans and groans as we went. Still, this landscape straight ahead did shake loose some architectural details from Army days roaming the Continent; Syd astutely filled in the rest. Between us and the view much further east now stood a majestic salmon-colored highrise, at least by ‘Roaring 20s’ standards. Ten stories of gracefully aging elegance with dead-eye perspectives on San Francisco Bay northward to the wine country, courtesy of ornate Moorish balconies. Its crowning wraparound penthouse—topped with sculpted vases and a garden-framed rooftop pool—must have looked out arched window cases clear to the Oregon line.

I by turns stood in awe of the regal blue and silver Lincolns, Cadillacs and Mercedes sedans circling the co-ops’ red-brick driveway. Jaw-dropping even more were the uniformed doormen polishing brass handles and kickplates under crystalline carriage light, then tending to patrons such as the Schilling Spices clan, who emerged exquisitely dressed for the symphony and opera. Still, all that seemed pedestrian compared to their neighbor one Washington Street address west.

“Ahhh, the good life, picture perfect,” she beamed, her misty eyes focused out ahead.

“Yeah,” I blurted, looking her way, playing along, blinders on for the moment as well. “Just gimme a 200mm, a wide angle and bagful of Kodachrome.”

“Try Ektachrome 64T or Fuji Velvia, flash, for better print hues and saturation. If you’re going to be a serious photographer, you’ve got to be up to speed.”

“Who says I’m gonna be a serious photographer?”

“C’mon, you’ve got to think visually,” she mimicked the aiming and snapping of a camera shutter without pause. “This place stokes the creative fires without even trying. A person like you could be so productive here.”

“Oh, right,” I resisted, staring out over the panoramic ridge view, yet unable to filter out the heavy footsteps and breathless, bestial thrashing going on over our shoulders.

“That’s up to you, if you want to be who you really could be.” While she was not even blinking an eye, as if nothing peculiar were happening up there.

Just the other side of 2006’s fountained circular courtyard and meticulously trimmed gardens sat a solid black fleet of Rolls, Jags, Lams, Testies and Rovers splayed in an exotic crescent, as though delivering unto a capricious soiree or geared for a midnight scramble for the jetport and Montreaux. Apparently, this was a typical evening in and around the mansion, not unlike it had been since Adolph Spreckels built the the classical Beaux Arts landmark in 1912-13.

Son of a sugar tycoon, he dedicated this Francophilic palace to his striking wife Alma de Bretteville, a climbing ne-er-do-well beauty with French aristocratic pretensions, raised out on a Sunset District farm plot, who was barely half his age. The 55-room chateau had long hosted gatherings of the artistic and literary elite, toasting this glittering opulence and unsullied views of the bay. But Adolph eventually kicked, some said syphillis was involved, then his sweet Alma departed this elevated plane in ’68—their heirs since converting the confection of a family mansion into four full-floor luxury suites.

“I call it the Sugar Shack,” Syd beamed, licking her lips. “Before Alma latched onto Adolph Spreckels and became his chatelaine, know what she was? A common artist’s model, that’s what.”

“Figures…” I was beginning to get annoyed by all the commotion in the dark upper reaches of Lafayette Park, where those moans and murmers were increasingly spiked with flares of randy laughter.

“When ol’ Adolph croaked, she took it all over, linked the mansion up with the Palace of the Legion of Honor—Rodins, the whole hi-brow aesthetic scene. Then she boogied between here and a French villa. What a lifestyle, huh?”

“Can’t imagine…” I said, not without a measure of awe.

“Plus a lot of the movie ‘Pal Joey’ was shot here, Frank Sinatra and everything.”

“Yeah, the Rat Pack,” I said, watching a pair of dim varmints scurrying along the mansion’s facade, then crossing Washington Street, vanishing up into the parkside above us. “Looks like all that’s left are the rats, big ones.”

“Oh, get a grip—they’re just some friendly neighborhood raccoons.”

Surely the shack had seen more decorous days. Though largely shrouded in tall, thick hedges, its scrolled iron gates were chipped and rusting. Flood lights revealed cracks and crumbling fizzures around its rinceaux, its medallion cornices and Tuscan pilasters, water discoloration up and down its Utah limestone arches and columns like tea stains and sweet tooth decay. Nevertheless, windows on all four stories of this massive sugar box shone bright and lively. I couldn’t begin to imagine what was going on inside them tonight either, much less what was going down in the woodsy wilds above.

Lafayette Park itself was nearly 12 acres of terraced green spaces first set aside in 1867 by City Attorney Samuel Holladay, who built his Italianate mansion and gardens on this robber baron ridge, which became a political and literary hive for the likes of Leland Stanford, Brete Harte and Samuel Clemens. Real estate magnate Louis Lurie bought the whole plot, and sold it to The City in 1935, which landscaped the acreage and tore down Holladay House a year later, soon adding several tiers of paved paths, picnic areas, playgrounds and a couple of park-top tennis courts. Sunny and wholesome enough in theory and civic-minded intent, but these days Lafayette was exhibiting a somewhat shadier side. For curiouser than the Spreckels’ floor shows was more rustling that crept upon us from the rear—shadowy shuffling about and more wicked laughter in the bushes and shrubs above, plumes of hash and ganja wafting down.

“So didja ever see Pal Joey? I have, three times.” Syd seemed to utterly disregard that the demonic laughter was turning into shemanic cries and hemonic shrieking about the twisted overgrowth and underbrush up there.

“Can’t picture it,” I glanced behind us uphill again, where that pitch darkness flickered with smatterings of Zippos and candlelight, set to cross thread of tribal tunes. “But have you ever checked out ‘King of Hearts’? Moon drags me to it at least once a semester.”

“Allan Bates, of course. Who do you think you’re talking to, mister,” she parried, as we passed on a dew-damp slat bench. “That one about loonies taking over the bin.”

“Right, kinda like this here,” I said. Further up the foliage, the sightlines got better, but the sounds got weirder. Thrashing among the dark groves and bushes intensified, solitary forms lurked, with no apparent reason or resolve, fondling the flora, the fauna, themselves, maybe one another—rather aberrantly, disquisitionally so. “What the hell’s up up there anyway?!”

A bit scruffier and overgrown, the lofty park had by day become sun and bareskin worshipper territory all year round. Come nightfall, more thickets of brush, clusters of pine, cypress and swaying palm trees harbored all sorts of chance encounters and resulting consummation. Hence the groaning trysts and quick trick gaiety amid dormant flower beds. Common sense said best to turn the other cheek and move along this triple-junction, geo-shifted asphalt path in guarded, forward-looking denial, however uncommon the consequences.

“You mean up by the swings and picnic tables? They’re just your friendly neighborhood…raconteurs.”

“But it sounds like all guys night out again—strange suckers, at that,” I said, growing more flustered and disoriented. “This another one of your barnyards, or what?”

“Yeesh, we’re talking San Francisco,” she said dismissively, drawing closer. “Some things are just different here. I mean isn’t it incredible, so positively progressive. See no, hear no—live and let love, that’s what makes the town so cool…”

“Yeah, well, how about live and let’s leave…” It had me checking my pants again—thanks be no rocketry, only the usual requisites, with a distant ‘Afternoon Delight’ ringing in my ears. While my wallet wasn’t exactly burning a hole in my pocket any more, keys were cutting into my thigh. So I fidgeted them around for reassurance until they became entangled in my side pocket, to where I pulled the cluttered ring out, brittly shaking its fob and bibelots back into place. I then reburied the cluster deep into my jeans—keys that they were to my getaway.

In any event, once we heard some ghastly carnal screams, time had come to skirt the unruly shrubbery and make tracks. Easing downpath to Octavia Street, we crossed Washington between the sugar mansion and a row of boxy, three-story stucco and brickface palais. Octavia here was a one-block Lombard-in-see-minor oddity of a side street, an inverse egg cup of an artery, curving gently in and outward, with three stepped concrete median islands greenery garnished, top to bottom. Full, bushy Sycamore trees lined its long middle strip, obscuring a vista that unreeled all the way down to water’s edge and beyond.

“But it can be tough on a single woman. Look at all this beauty, especially at night time. So many times I want to stroll about and enjoy spots like this.”

“Yeah, so—you’re close enough to it, aren’t you?”

“Maybe, but a woman doesn’t dare roam by herself after dark—even with another gal pal. There are just too many crazies skulking around the edges here ,” she sighed, tightly pulling closed her jacket. “Sometimes I just need a real, strong man to turn to—to do things and feel safe with—to really dig The City with, you know?”

“Don’t ask me, I’m just passing through…”. I thrust into my side pocket to paw my key ring, just to be sure.

“It’s just that I feel so penned up at night sometimes. Wary of the nutcases coming out of the woodwork.”

“I’ll bet…getting a little chilly, huh? Freezing my noogies up here…”

“Well, can’t have that now, can we? Let’s make our way down to Franklin, so we can go unload my stuff from your clunker.”

“It’s your trip, I’m just along for the drive.” I pulled back, holding tightly to my keys, for there she was, baring her breast again without a blink of the eye. Seemed she could be so brutally frank—no reserve, no self-consciousness whatsoever. It rattled me, all right; but after years of a reticent woman, also intrigued me just a skosh. “Just get me back to my car.”

“Hah, as if it’s any warmer in that heap. Speaking of cold, know what once in that mansion down the block there,” she pointed down Jackson Street toward Laguna. “Nazi Germany’s Consulate. Nazis, can you believe it? Hun bastards blew town just before the war broke out. Probably went crawling back to Heidelberg.”

Taxis and towncars gunned up and down the red brick lanes, rubber krinkling and crackling like studded snow tires on dry pavement. We skipped along Spreckels’ stone retaining side wall, noting the escutcheons and garlands on it corroded balcony balustrades, then that panorama opening wide near Jackson, past even more chateau-style mansions, a descending olio of apartment house, shop and traffic lights down to Fort Mason—that cruise ship slowly passing Alcatraz on a now glasswater bay. A turn of the corner back toward Van Ness Avenue carried us along the towering back wall of Spreckels’ square half-block estate. Even taller hedges atop the fortress-like retainer hid a rear mansion indoor pool, massive solarium, sloping gardens and grounds lording over lower Pacific Heights congestion like a master’s house over fashion slaves.

Heady, nearly giddy was our mood now, what with all this storybook opulence—buffeted only by the siren and emergency flashers of a powder blue S.F.P.D. squad car rushing up Octavia in the direction of Lafayette Park, paramedic ambulance not far behind.

“So you really think I could score with my cameras?” I glanced over my shoulder, more morbidly curious than visually mused.

“Sure. I saw the prints on your cabin walls,” she poked me back her way, as we paused at the Gough Street stoplight. “You can do whatever you want here.”

“Don’t know about that, I mean compared to your Hippo ‘Hipster’ painting and portrait of Moon.”

“Waif? That’s nothing. You should see my studio…”

 

 “It’s a long story, Daddo. I’ve explained it to Faith, she’ll fill you in…

  “Now, about my credit cards? Greato! And, well, a new down comforter would be nice. And I could use some new Birkies…sandals, silly—ask Faith…”

I now eyed a razor crack along the far floorboard—actual, natural…light. Mired in the sleepy funk of strange, non-sensory surrounding, I poured out of a stretcher-width aluminum cot and low crawled to blindingly rude new morn. The slit widened to a daylight inferno as I opened the door, snapping me to my feet faster than an off-key reveille. Steep lightwells ignited either end of a long white hallway, lined with fine-arts posters and unframed paintings in various stages of emergence, and several wobbly end-tables topped with not-so-fresh cut flowers.

These overnight accommodations, now an ink-blot cubicle over my shoulder, seemed a mini abyss in light of all this sunshine. A quick hit in an adjacent, sort of peculiar little loo-only lav room, and I was slowly zipping down the hall. Between the lightwells were four opposing open doorways, each a vessel of activity feeding the principal artery in this congested, neo-Victorian flat.

Spit straightening slept-in clothes, I shuffled softly along the hall’s threadbare Persian-like runner, first encountering a darksome, narrow kitchen and a broadly girthed figure softly cursing a sink full of last-night’s dishes, perfectly eclipsing a soda-cracker-sized inner window—the only light in the room. I peeked up ahead through a half-closed door into a steamy bathroom, panty hose and pink shower curtains veiling a tall, slender soprano.

Herein, a draping coppice of undergarments and housecoats dripped down into a clawfoot bathtub. Hot curlers and hairdryers tangled with cosmetics bags and pump sprays, stray dental floss winding around mouthwash bottles and maxipads, tortoise shell brushes aplenty, toothpaste tubes squeezed and uprolled dry. This all taking on the trappings of some undergrad panty raid, I licked and finger wiped a forced, cotton-mouth smile over toward Sydney’s room.

The further I ventured, the meaner the morning light—particularly upon entering a curved, Steinwayed living room saturated with the incandescence of twin bay windows. The mahogany baby grand piano broached them, beckoning me to tinker the keyboard, though I knew nary a note. Instead, I turned to peek through sliding parlor doors, spotting Syd nervously tightening a white terry bathrobe about her neck while finger twirling a coiled white Princess phone cord.

I caught a quick shot of her lotus and stretching on a faintly periwinkle futon, her loaded wardrobe valises hanging precariously behind her on suspended clotheslines, sweater bags and shoeboxes stacked neatly on the hardwood floor, a city life suspended for months at a time. So clean, already so perfectly scrubbed and clean…so bright, squeaky clean…

“Yes, I promise to be more careful—guard against the shortcomings of others like you’ve always told me…I mean, if only he’d really locked his car doors…

“You know best, Daddo. So you’ll help get me my new plastic right away? Yes, call you soon as they come. Big love and smoochies…hi to Lester, while you’re at it. Tell him I’m back here and situating. Me, too, bye-bye.”

She sprang from the lotus position like a startled Pallas cat, then darted toward me, ruffling her frazzled hair to make it fuller. It was her Linda Kelsey look, or rather, a Sandy Dennis variation on the Dyan Cannon look. But it kicked ass then, just the same. “There you are, kiddo. When did you wander out here?”

“Only a few minutes ago,” I said, through coated tongue, morning mouth run a-muck. “W-w-what’s the story?”

“What’s the story with you? Lost track of you a little after midnight…”

“Just sleeping it all off, I guess…much as I can remember.”

Her room matched the parlor’s high, plaster-cast ceiling and tall bay windows, stirring off-white walls and woodwork into a searing sunlit frenzy. She blinded me with whiteness, and I sought relief in the periwinkle, her rainbow wardrobe, an unfinished portrait of a striking semi-nude gymnast in page boy and partial Danskins facing her futon—the room’s sole wall hanging to be seen. She refolded back into lotus position on her futon, then motioned me down to her side. “Just called my parents. Daddo ragged on about how careless I was, but is already taking care of my cards.”

“Aww, maybe your purse will turn up,” I said, unable to shield my eyes against the brutal morning, trying to decipher what I’d overheard. My eyes instead roosted in a sickly lemon tree outside her windows.

“Don’t hold your breath,” she sighed, staring through the scales on my lids. “Not with the hang-loose S.F.P.D. on the case.”

“Never know, sometime do-gooders find hot stuff in the trash—months later, even.” I couldn’t stare her in the eye on this point, rather settling upon that solitary unframed canvas.

“Dream on, this isn’t cowtown Colorado,” she sniffed. “So how did you sleep in the servant’s room back there?”

“Like I was comatose,” I rubbed an overnight growth, fishing about my work shirt and pockets, keeping my breath at bay. “But so much for California dreamin’. I leave a cozy Boulder cabin for a glorified broom closet.”

“Don’t press your luck, flash. It just so happens our ‘broom closet’ is in one of San Francisco’s best neighborhoods. I mean, you could be down in the Tenderloin.”

“I’ll keep that in mind back over Donner Summit…”

“All in good time,” she tapped my leg. “So, you noticed my roomie on the way out?”

“Little on the porker side, muttering in the kitchen?”

“Hmph, that’s one of them, Edie. Oh, know what? She said she heard on the KSFD news this morning that there was a violent attack in Lafayette Park last night—some guy maybe died up there…”

“No…way,” I said hesitantly. “Guess that explains the sirens, huh?”

“Actually, police suspect it happened a lot later, like the wee small hours,” Syd said, as if casually assessing my still-disheveled state. “What was that you said about comatose?”

 Care for more?

 Chapter 18. Confronted with memories
parochial, figures of contrasting dimensions,
their race is on to even more uncommon ground…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Venturing into areas 
previously unknown can be 
a raw challenge to the senses.”

          “It’s you…”

          “No, it be you—huggy hug!”

          “Been too long, Eugene—you’re looking fantabulous,” Sydney beamed, as they spun out of their embrace like ice queens sticking a 10.

          “You lookin’ simply scrumptious, honey…”

          Bearing unready witness, looking askance, otherwise standing silently aside: I hadn’t a clue what he saw in her at the time, but was certain I looked even more out of sorts my own self. Grizzled, rumpled, road tar nose to toes, yet here I was, arm-in-arm with Ms. Superlative, who had rallied from the close quarters of our Interstate-80 incarceration—black leotard and red ski jacket no less dozed in, still and all a diva at her premiere. Sydney led me like a guide dog down Polk Street from the Balmy Palm, where we came upon…Eugene. An Afro blood in tangerine and turquoise jumpsuit, he’d bounded over to us from behind a tin foil faux Kwanza tree like Ziggy stardusting Mick Ronson center stage at the Palladium.

          “Sooo, how’s every little thing at the Institute, Eugene?”

          “Oh, I’m not toolin’ with no schoolin’ no more…” A pink aegis pin shone above his left patch pocket, the name, Pinkertons in bold script just below it.

          “But your figure classes…no more modeling?”

          “Hell with school, honey child,” Eugene air-kissed her, smiling obliquely my way. “All that matters these days is that you be lookin’ good. Speakin’ of lookin’ right, how goes it with you and Mr. James Winslow…”

          “James and I are history, Eugene,” she sighed, wiping a sly, dry tear from her eye. “Europe’s been my muse lately—you know how it is…”

          “Too, too tragic,” he squeezed her shoulder, sneezing to the side, then scoping, sizing me up and down. “So it’s back into the studio for you.”

          “Isn’t it always,” she replied wistfully. “Oh, this is Kenneth, he’s…with me…”

          “Nice to…” At that point, I could have been a mail storage box, rather gratefully so.

          “Puleeezed,” he hugged her once more, winking my way. “Mister straight and true now, is it?  Guess we can’t be too purrr-snickety these days, now can we…”  He then scooted off toward the honking of a lookyme Riviera’s car horn, and the makings of a driveby tryst. “Gotta run, ciao-zy!  Later for youz two…”

          By all appearances, the further down we walked, the further down Polk Street got—down, but certainly not deserted. Tops dropped, windows cracked, tape decks blaring: traffic snail cruised in both directions, a feisty parade of four-stroke motorbikes buzzing between and around trolling Fiats, Ghias, Mustangs, the odd Valiant and occasional MGBs. Nevertheless, a chill gust kicked up near Sacramento Street, tossing candy wrappers and weekend edition newspaper pages like Nevada tumbleweed, carrying along the eau de cheesy garlic from a corner souvlaki pizzeria, setting store signs swaying like tin pan metronomes. That signage ranged from gyros and liquor stores to musty second-hand shops, high-laced platform booteries and greasy bacon-and-chiliburger grilles. Clearly, here was no Main Street, USA; this be no pristine Pearly mall.

          “That’s my dear friend, Eugene. He’s a regular crosser chameleon, really gets around,” Syd said, turning us away, down Polk. “Eugene’s been an illustration student at the Art Institute…on partial scholarship. So he’s doubled as a figure model on the side, posed for me lotsa times, and I for him…”

          “You…have,” I said, noting that I hadn’t seen so many guys together since army boot camp, and even there, not so many guys like these.

          “Sure, for his whole class sometimes, too. It’s all part of the artistic process—creative vision, collaboration, liberation…know what I mean?”

          “Well, yeah—not that, precisely, but I get the gist…”

          “No gist, genuine innovation, what art is all about,” she said, with a sweep of her arm. “Seeing things differently. You’re not afraid of that, are you?”

          “Hey, no way—why would I be…”

          “You tell me,” she scanned me, head to Vibram boot heel. “Because that’s not the vibe I’m getting from you at all.”

          Across Sacramento Street, Polk’s storefronts ran more to bounteous flower shops, big hair salons, glam and leather boutiques, if not skin and leather bars. Not fringy cowboy buckskin so much as Brando-on-a-wild-Duoglide black sort of hide, along a mane drag with some heavy bends in the road. Outside Kiko’s Bar, all the young dudes were brandishing the news, passing around the doobs, crooning to deafening dance beats with defiant, devious ’tudes—all under a smiling sliver of a mild mid-winter moon over Suffragette City, a Queen’s latest ‘News of the World’ promo disk counter-tracking out of a mid-block velvet lounge.

          “So, what do you really think of PolkStrasse, flash?”

          “I don’t know, this whole scene seems kinda bizarre…”

          “Well, your bag is sociology, and here’s some big-league sosh on a platter.”

          “Sorry, not quite my area of expertise,” I said, being rattled to the bone, trying to keep clinically cool about it, putting on a straight, stoic face in the face of this movable, ritualistic sextravaganza.

          “Oh, get your head out of your manhole, professor. There’s a whole real world to scope out around here.”

          Vintage New York Dolls, Kool and Donna Summer, Lou Reed’s ‘Sweet Jane’ and Iggy’s ‘Sweet Sixteen’ amped forth from glitter meat markets to either side of Polk, reverbing off open-air cattle stalls and ubiquitous mirror balls. From each pick-up window came the furtive and flirtive catcalls, wolf whistling and hound dogging, met with chiding lines, roving winknods and lusty eyelocks, drowning in stiff waves of hair gel and spiked cologne—reefer and fruity liqueurs filling the air from there.

          “Ain’t no peace in the barnyard, huh,” Syd continued, leading me along—pushing, prodding, testing my tolerance, or limits thereof. “But PolkStrasse’s always on like this.”

          “It’s on something, all right—given the grab ass and rubbing limbs,” I said, a smoochy, hand-holding item Cadillacing past us in matching suede and chains. “Lotsa hovering around like vultures…”

          “Oh, loosen up, will you? Just showing you what’s up. So get in the groove—that’s how it flows here in farm land.”

          “Think I’ll take a pass…” I grew more perturbed at the leering, naked stares, all these joy boys on parade—like the overheated leather flame winking from the doorway of an antiquated bookstore. “Have never come across such a case of normative…variance like this.”

          “Afraid it’s contagious?” she asked. “But keep up with gobbledegook like that, and you’ll get yourself plowed under here for sure. Then again, isn’t that what friends are for?”

          A slim young blade in tight pink tanktop and gym shorts blew kisses to us, Richard Simmons-style, from atop a covered trash bin as we passed one of the last legit, old-line businesses from better times, before Polk Street took its lascivious dive. Charring Cross Coffee and Tea Shop had been importing bulk beans and leaves from the world over since the turn of the century, its display windows chock with antique scales, grinders and brew pots. This was a venerable, veritable museum of caffeine through the ages, with a roasted aroma to snap eyes open and crank brains over a block away. Little wonder we bopped in to grab a quick, resuscitative pop. Alas, this local institution was perking along against the neighborhood’s march of history. And there was no starker proof of that than the bawdy outfit right next door.

          “How does it feel to be in the minority? So out of your lily Boulder comfort zone—or are you?”

          “What do you think,” I reminded myself that I was just dropping off a load. “But no big deal, I’ll be hitting the road back soon enough.”

          “Not before we mosey down into Polk Gulch a spell,” she snuggled up to my warm sheepskin sleeve. “Saddle up for a walk on the wilder side.”

          “Christ, what’s your story, anyway?” I anxiously wanted out, yet found myself sociologically aroused by Lovelock sensations while intrigued by these peculiar tribal norms—as though morbidly surveying a crime scene fatality out the corner of my eye.

          “Oh, shush up…this is San Francisco.” Turf boosted, Syd asserted her singular territorial primacy here, but not without a faint trace of her own fear and dread. “We’re talking freedom of expression here.”

          “No, we’re talking utter deviance here,” I replied, hair and hackles raised—betwixt, befuddled, never having experienced anything like this infestive scene before. I was feeling outnumbered, overrun, unable to shake the ambient ringing, fight off the low-level anger that I shouldn’t even be here, a lower-grade fear that I clinically should—Bloody Friday Belfast cave job all over again, even more so this time around. “What say we hit it back to the car…”

          “Relax, flash, and stretch some—a little shock therapy might do you some good.”

          “Shock…or shlock?” I glanced down, avoiding the catty stares and size-ups of a couple of chatty teeny hustlers. Apparently lubed on poppers and Harvey Wallbangers, they boogied their wares out front of side-by-side hummus take-out and heady smoke shops, next door to a standing room, disco-juked gin mill.

          “Un je ne sais quoi, darlin’,” shouted down a middle-aged rascal from the bay window of one of the three-story mock Victorians lining either side of Polk Street.

          “Et je ne sais quoi encore,” yelled another vixen from the fire escape of a more plainly modern architectural mixed breed, cross-talk largely typical along this strip—the both of them looking more than old enough to know better.

          “Think of it as putting your egghead theories to the test. Or are you afraid of taking your ivory tower bigotry head on?”

          “Hey, not to worry. Like you said, I’m into the social sciences…no bigotry here, okay? I know who and what I am…”

          “Then you should have no problem, right?”

          Rue L’Amour was the Gulch’s premier adult book and flick store—consenting adult, that was, stated so on the door sign—with depth and breadth splayed graphically across its front window displays, leaving little to even the most fevered and fetished imaginations. In through the funhouse doors, bookracks were a half-dozen rows of gratuitous obscenities. And the high rear counter with the chain-smoking resident moneychanger glued to security monitors in a ‘This Bud’s For You’ visor seemed de riguer—the type of coughing barker who couldn’t cut it any longer on Broadway, and was four months arrears at the SRO hotel. Rue’s chromy two-way mirrors were as paranoiac as the next sexporium. Even the backroom bijou rumbled with a swell of typical irregulars hiking up their drawers and snorting in and out of Passion Playhouse’s heart-shaped portal.

          No, it wasn’t Le Rue’s front cover or first glance that exceeded the MDR of voyeurism; it was the inner contents. Electrically speaking, there were too many plugs and not nearly enough standard sockets. Indeed, there were barely token U/L-approved sockets, and those were largely fig-leaf garnish, pandering to any lingering shred of old-fashioned straight and narrow buried deeply in its clients’ alter libidos.

          So beyond all the conventional tricks and angles, Rue L’Amour positioned itself uniquely in the porn arena with the latest market segmentation: men only, mano-a-mano—even more precisely, pumped-up bloods or young, white, curly-haired men built either like linebackers or lead guitarists from certain British seaports—many of whom preferred ewes, Afghans, steeds and one another to any #9 dreamboat or Layla on earth. These books, mags, rags and tapes uncovered the young boy beat with stunning saturation. More specifically, the few women depicted were but incidental cheerleaders at a cockfight, pinned in the far corner like a hardware store calendar of rural New England. Le Rue’s S&M leatherette must have been scored from some big-and-tall shop. Its dildos came mostly in baby blue, surrounded by pegboard display racks of Boner Bracelets, erection creams, power pumps, crocheted cock socks and draw-string scrotum sacks.

          “Enough of this,” I steamed—provoked, though unsure whether morally or physically, hoping for the former. I’d always had a problem with emporniums of any kink or predilection. The knot of Catholic conscience would grip my cranium the moment I turned risque page one—as though Sister Theresa were flogging me with her catechism ruler and the iron cross of her rosary beads. “I’m heading out…”

          “What’s the rush, buckaroo,” she said, deep into the gala holiday issue of  ‘Adam’s Angle’, turning the four-color magazine’s fold-out around faster than a pinwheel. “A little male panic setting in, or afraid you’ve got a rocket in your pocket?”

          “Hmph, threatened nothing…I can just do without the raunchy plumbing manuals, thank you.”  My eyes veered toward an ink-bearded Anita Bryant wall poster with a red circle line sur-printing it.

          “Excuse me, but this isn’t run-of-the-mill pornography,” she said, with ‘freeze, sucker’ in her eyes. “It’s harmless, and a lot of this borders on art, you’ll see.”

          “What…art?  Why…”

          “Some porn does happen to be art, I’m telling you, sex is art. This is every bit as pure as the biblical Madonna or any Da Vinci—which is maybe why I find it so appealing…”

          “More like appalling—c’mon, you don’t really buy that, do you?”

          “Oh, don’t I? Listen, the human body is a beautiful thing, whatever it’s doing. And any sociologist worth his sheepskin should know such things…one who fancies himself a photographer, yet.”

          “Beautiful, in your barnyard sense, I suppose,” I snapped, shrinking from their images on one of Rue’s fish-eye security mirrors. “Look, you’ve made your point. Live and let live, all that jazz. But I think I’ll stick with my Colorado case studies and abstracts…it’s safer and saner that way…”

          “No, live and learn—it’s called tolerance, professor. That’s why everybody should spend at least a year in San Francisco.” She rifled through the sexcessively graphic magazine, then tossed it at me, shrugging toward the counter clerk, not above checking herself out on the chromey two-way panel. “God, you sound like such a petrified Republican!”

          “Hey this has got nothing to do with me,” I gently smoothed the mag’s cover, replacing it on the shelf of luridly revealing skin and fetish rags, face down, only to follow her out Le Rue’s blush red, S-baffled front doors. “I’m about outta here, and for goddamn good.”

          “Where’ve I heard that before,” she groaned, pulling up her jacket collar to eau de Brutish breeze. “But you’ll never make it dressed like that around here, anyway.”

          We rejoined bobbing, throbbing foot traffic, debating whether to head up PolkStrasse or down. But our attention was quickly drawn to a mid-street situation brewing two car lengths deeper into the Gulch. Apparently, the flare-up centered around a fat broker john and his baby-faced boy toy, coming to unmet terms of engagement through the open window of a sawbuck green Mercedes 450SE.

          “Nuff said,” I grumbled.  The sound of ‘Afternoon Delight’ caught my ear, theme song to a passing red-and-white checkered truck.  Manned by a crew of waving volunteers, it had CarnaVan stencilled on the side panels, as well as subhead slogans suggesting some sort of dirt-cheap stewpot food operation catering to street minions citywide.

          “So maybe PolkStrasse is getting a bit raw around the edges,” she gaped about the broader spectacle with hungry, road weary eyes.  “Guess that’s why Castro’s the new gay land of milk and honey.  That’s where their classier action is hanging out more now.”

          “Cuba?”

          “Like City Hall says, hands off—just hold back and keep a lid on things,” snapped a nearby S.F.P.D. officer to his partner walking the beat. Both were standing off in observer mode, caught between copping to and copping out, not looking at all happy about it. “Whattdya expect with flamin’ Gloria Gain as a police chief—sociological cop, my ass. No wonder so may PD brass are bailin’…” 

          “Damn straight, sarge, it’s like with our damn baby blue squadrols,” said the other uniform, palm slapping his nightstick. “What the hell good’s gonna come of it…”

          “Well don’t worry, it’ll be seen to—just you wait and see…”

           “I think I’ll have the Nude…no, the Monte Carlo!”

          “Just make mine a regular…”

          “Aww, add a little spice, get more adventurous in your old age, doc. Try the Stripper, or the Cannibal—how about the French Connection?”

          “Thanks, but I always do the jumbo regular back at Tom’s Tavern…”

          “Jumbo? Then go for their amazing Liberation—avocado-bacon-pomegranate. C’mon, flash, on me…”

          We had fought a minor headwind back up Polk Street, cutting over to Van Ness as the Strasse turned ever friskier, but not without checking on my overloaded Volks Squareback enroute, bumper to bumper, glovebox to tailgate. That breezy resistance and a modest incline left little breathing room for further debate on the ‘sex is art’ pornography score, much less a sidewalk tutorial on the comparative virtue of the biblical Madonna vis-à-vis Marilyn Chambers—or Jack Wrangler wedged in, for that matter. The only thing Sydney and I worked up along the way on erstwhile Auto Row was a powerful appetite, carried over from a lunchtime foray into the fructose-caked orchards of Nut Tree Village this side of Sacramento, seemingly days and I-80 miles ago by now.

          Van Ness Avenue offered forth Sub sandwich franchises, pricey steakhouses and bodega-style liquor/convenience stores on both sides of its broad, bushy median-split north-south lanes. Tantalizing as the prime rib and sirloin aromas were, however—even as gassed and famished as we had found ourselves—there were no lame pangs about eating a horse. Not when we could trot across heavy avenue traffic and feast on Hippo. “All right then—what 
say a Stroganoffburger,” I relented, going global, figuring she figured it a due over hauling her demanding ass all the way out here, with nary a clue as to how she could pay for it. “Well done, with fries, OK?”

          “With a side of your magic French Fried Mushrooms,” she nodded to me for pre-approval from around a mammoth, circus cartoonish menu, instructing a wet-combed, red-vested waiter who stroked a razor-thin moustache that made John Waters look like Dennis Hopper. “And a couple of boysenberry shakes, you game?”

          “What can I say…your call,” I shook my head toward the stagy waiter who, having vainly sung the praises of their Bippyburger Special, was scribbling and Hippo-gliding over to the huge copper-hooded kitchen counters, center room.

          “Oh, but make mine strawberry-banana, hon,” she called to the waiter, flipping through the extra wad of traveler’s cheques she’d plucked from one of her suitcases when we stopped by the car. “Oh, look over there—yeep, be cool about it. Can you believe who that is?”

          “Wait,” I wrestled the unwieldy red and white menu back to my Hippo logo-illustrated placemat. “Can’t see over this blasted thing…”

          Where once stood a Mohawk gas station and abandoned Safeway, now thrived this circus-carnival of a hamburger wonderland, which had fed the gourmet imaginations of ground-round devotees from all around the Bay since the early 1950s. Hippopotamus offered upwards of sixty burger specialties that In/Out and the Golden Arches couldn’t begin to cook up in their wildest deep-fried dreams: Huge Streakerburgers, Cannibalburgers, Grassburgers of the headiest kind filled those billboard-size menus.

          All such beefy creations were served in a fanciful bigtop mis en scene, to a delicious zoo of aficionados—ranging from opera and symphony patrons to celebrities to tourists to Hashburger hippies, suburbohemes, birthday partiers and après student types like us—basically anybody who relished where this freshly ground meat met the street. Sydney gadded me into the floodlit pink and orange palace, under Hippo’s wavy crème awnings, glad-landed us a cozy table near the front, beneath a portrait of the founder riding his favorite pachyderm.

          “There, third booth over from that Cubist-style portrait of the Hippo—which I painted, I’ll have you know…” Her eyes widened. She explained that large spotlit oil rendering had been her first San Francisco commission—brush strokes for gourmet burgers and shakes. Her ‘Hipster’ was an already beloved pachy of overlapping brown-white rectangles and circles hidebound against a flour-textured field of sandy green, crimson tophat on its head, square snout locked around a single red rose, cerise ascot overwrapping its tail. “What think you?”

          “Unreal.” I hiked myself up some for better view, denim squeaking against the pink naugahyde tucks and rolls of our window booth seats, which otherwise overlooked the teeming Pacific Avenue side parking lot. What more could I say, without betraying my aesthetic inadequacies? Better to move on… “Really cool, so what else?”

          “It’s O.J., silly,” she whispered, pointing across room with cupped finger and hand. “Holy Moses, I think he’s with Elliot Gould.”

          “Wonder if he’s still doing NFL games on TV.” But I was more taken with Hippo’s colorful cartoon décor. Posters, long wall murals, framed illustration comic strips, display panels stuffed with T-shirts, caps, bibs, balloons, keychains and assorted other souvenir bric-a-brac—all under a red/white striped canvas tent ceiling, calliope carnival music piped over the prattling crowd. “Or jumping over rental cars…”

          “I read where they’ve just wrapped up shooting a killer sci-fi conspiracy flick called ‘Capricorn One’. Now…right over there—kicking back, chowing down just like everybody else…only in San Francisco. He once starred for Galileo high school just up the street, can you believe it?”

          “Great, but what I can’t believe is that Hippopotamus logo everyplace, with the red bandana and bow-tie on her tail,” I glanced about the sprawling room as our winking, theme-humming waiter delivered our fried mushrooms and shakes. “Or those little girl Hippos muralled everywhere else, and little boy Hippos in red spotted neckerchiefs… jeesh, there’s one with a chef’s toque and everything…”

          “You should see the bathrooms here,” she straw drew some milkshake from a tall logoed glass. “Hippo head’s grinning when the toilet lid’s down, mouth’s wide open when the lid’s up. They’re over near that sign for the Monkey Inn—Hippo’s even got a hot little singles bar going back there.”

          “Naw, I’m OK, can hold it in for now,” I tried out a fried mushroom, while keeping an eye on the Hippo salt and pepper shakers, let alone the Hippo creamer.

          “Yoy, in the corner booth,” pointing with her fork as she stabbed for the appetizers. “Herb Caen and Mayor Moscone. Bet they’re doing the Bearnaise and Welsh Rarebitburgers.  I mean, you’d figure they’d be at Ernie’s or LeCentral. Can just imagine what juicy political tidbits they’re feeding each other over that sangria pitcher…”

          “Probably carving up some Republican, huh?” I flapped out my Hippo napkin, the waiter arriving with our double-grilled burger platters…whoa, humongous…

          “Republicans? In San Francisco?! I wouldn’t bet on that…”

Care for more?

Chapter 17. Awakening in a closet, coming 
out to a breathless money call, he finds leaving 
San Francisco can be no mere walk in the park…

“It’s often harder to take 
a pounding when you’re in 
stranger surroundings.”

          “Could have been worse, they might have grabbed my overnight bag with the spare keys in it.”

          “Uh-huh…”

          “And at least they didn’t get my passport and traveler’s cheques.”

          “Yeah, well—that’s for sure…”

          “Or god forbid, my new portrait brushes…or pill wheel…”

          “Your pill whe…”

          “Oy, what if those creeps had gotten the little package Josh Gravanek gave me to hold?! Don’t want to blow that connection up again…”

           Our crosstown retreat was conversationally spare, save for Sydney’s animated directions. She pushed on the squareback’s meagerly padded dashboard through San Francisco’s outer Sunset, directed me up Highway 1 to the dimly lit Crossover, around the dark shadowed curves of Golden Gate Park, which left us blinking in the face of oncoming headlights on By-Pass Drive all the way out past the Redwood Memorial Grove to Fulton Street’s residential congestion. That was where she pointed us not toward the downtown skyline, but straight ahead up Park Presidio Boulevard into a Gen. Douglas MacArthur tunnel, through the olive drab thicket of the Presidio Army base.

          I muttered concerns about getting trapped in the Golden Gate Bridge lanes as Syd guided us around the ramp on to the amber glow of Doyle Drive, the northernmost rim of San Francisco reflecting across an indigo Bay. What we were doing way up here was beyond me, but she insisted that going this extra mile or so saved us the ‘oodles’ of further time we’d lose in Civic Center traffic jams. Hence I soldiered on down Route 101, following the Richardson Avenue diagonal, scanning mirrors, red light after yellow traffic light, along Lombard Street’s neon-soaked motel row.

          There Syd paused amid her hyperactive nocturnal sightseeing narrative long enough to motion us into a right turn, back southward down Van Ness Avenue, as if to square the long, scenic circle. I was busy nudging through car jams, coaxing the gas gauge, cramming my Blaupunkt radio back into its dashboard bracket, when she spotted a parking place opening up just a quick left turn away on Clay Street, directly under a bright utility light—little more than a block from…here.

          “But the shlubs did make off with my wallet and plastic…”

          “That stinks out loud, all right…”

          “Oh they filched my new mooie creamer, too.”

          “Mooie…what mooie?”

          “The creamer I lifted in that Bucket’s Truck Stop, after I gave you a dime for the pay toity,” Sydney said, tapping my hand with her swizzle stick. “Damn, it was going to be the latest addition to my kitschen collection…”

          Come to think of it, I did recall tapping that kidney before leaving Nevada, my road-wracked bladder soggier than a carwash chamois. Syd must have scarfed the bovine-headed creamer as soon as I passed Bucket’s slot machines on the way to the head. She had to have slipped it into her Pony Express-size purse while I waited out a couple of over-the-road Peterbilt warriors in the men’s room, counting off wall shelves flush with rusty horseshoes, long-line insulators, Indian print artifacts, years old Silver State license plates, oatmeal canisters and jelly bean jars—all trimmed with chintzy orange, red and blueberry bead strips.

          Finally coming out dripping and re-zipping, I could see her still sitting there in the red metalflaked vinyl booth, all smiley and stirring her coffee something dizzy, daydreaming out tinted jalousie windows over I-80 and the snow-capped Virginia Range. Amazing as hell that our chubby, plaster-haired cowgirl waitress didn’t notice the missing creamer as she slapped her coffee bill down on our plastic gingham covered tabletop. Instead she snapped her bubble gum at me for not ordering a chicken-in-a-basket lunch special, then waddled back over to nibbling at Bucket’s wilting salad bar. Anyway, since Sydney paid, I just played pliantly along, filling the Volks’ tank with off-brand regular for the summit climb and coast down to the coast. But that was then, and this was…now.

          “I suppose I can live without Elsie the cow,” she sighed, sagging in her deck chair. “What I can’t bear is carrying on without my favorite purse.”

          “So just get another one, right?”

          “Don’t you see? There isn’t another purse like that one—anywhere, anyhow…”

          “Gotcha,” I stared into my frosted mug, centering it on a ring-stained Kahlua coaster. “Guess I didn’t study it that closely.”

          We had left the squareback locked and luggage loaded, bucking the odds, hoping for the best against any further break-ins. Having fished some of those remaining valuables out of her overnight bag, Syd claimed that this was a somewhat safer side of town—that she actually lived but a few blocks away, and often strolled Pacific Heights arteries like Clay Street on nights like this without particular fear or disfavor. Clearly, it was a beautiful Friday evening over this way, ocean winds having subsided, late-January thermometers rising, stars shimmering in vivid constellations all across the city skies.

          She’d led me along by the elbow, stressing how much she had missed the bustle of Van Ness Avenue’s theaters and showrooms, the towering skyline of Russian Hill co-ops and penthouse condos up ahead. My mind even drifted away momentarily from the quick turnaround drive back home to Boulder, from chugging through the winter wilds between spring-like California and the lee foothill side of the Continental Divide. At least until we turned a street corner, head on into the likes of all…this.

          “And there’s only one person who could craft me such a gorgeous masterpurse,” Syd continued, peeling off her down jacket, scanning about for familiar faces.

          “Who might that be?” I sat there rather more disoriented and circumspect.

          “James Winslow Holcomb—a dear, dearest friend of mine. He hand tooled the whole sunray ensemble. James is incredibly talented, I met him at a gallery opening when I first came to San Francisco.”

          “So get him to make you another set, why don’t you,” I asked, somehow relieved that she was relating about relating to some other guy.

          “Oh, he’s evolved out of his leather phase. He’s down in Big Sur now, rolphing Esalen workshops or something. See, James Holcomb is light years ahead of everybody, a real psychic adventurer—a tall, blond Adonis built like Grand Coulee Dam—from Carmel Valley, at that…”

          “He your ol’ man?”

          “Don’t I wish,” she said wistfully, casting her eyes over to a corner spot. “We came here on my birthday. He gave me the purse and wallet, all gift wrapped in Chronicle pink section pages and ski-waxed twine. Then he took me to his parent’s chalet at North Lake Tahoe for the weekend…safari-rigged Land Rover, no less.”

          “Sounds pretty storybook to me…” I bumped knees with her under our tiny cocktail table as I opened my sheepskin coat.

          “Hardly,” she sipped unfazed, though in thinly veiled regret. “Haven’t seen or heard from him since…guess I must have been his ethnic fling.”

          First thing I had noticed upon turning that corner was the curbing, not the designated zone markings evident so far, but ones painted with an indigo overcoat, stenciled SFPD emblems in lavender and amethyst. Unfathomable fluids rivered down the gutters beneath them, ground glass glistened in the sidewalk, along a block-long run of hair salons, shoe studios, resale clothing boutiques, heady smoke shops, fleshy bookstores, flower and hummus/gyros stands. But mostly came the disco throbbing clubs and bars.

          Flitting in and out, dancing about us were streams of young studs, primetime players, preening older cats, Megadeath runaways on decaled skateboards—popping, snorting, passing around the clips and buds—reefer and patchoulie in the air. Sydney had bounced back admirably by then, recommending a hard-earned cordial at the hot spot of her choice. I suspected her preference was some sort of twisted joke, but decided not to give her the satisfaction, biting my tongue when she said it would do me well to check out life ‘down on the farm’.

          Point being, we had matters to settle, acknowledgments to make, damages to assess, belongings to disgorge, accommodations and routing to ascertain. After days of close, cold steerage, it admittedly was time to find a neutral, if not simpatico corner in which to break the ice. Turned out the PolkStrasse haunt was down near Sacramento Street, its bamboo-framed neon signage reading, ‘The Balmy Palm’.

          “Come and gone—that’s San Francisco for you. There just aren’t that many good men around here.”

          “But this joint is full of guys…” I was still trying to figure out how she could even consider retracing her first steps back here of all places after months away from the Bay.

          “I’m talking about eligible he-men, flash,” she said, sipping her banana daiquiri through a long green plastic straw. “I love ’em to death, they’re my kind of people. But they don’t exactly do it for me, if you catch my drift…”

          “Uhhh, can’t say that I do…” With that, I drew deeply from my Heinekens draft, a brew a body could find about as maltly tasteful as Colorado’s Banquet Beer.

          “Either that or there are too many women around this part of town…”

          “Too many? I can’t see any women in here at all…”

          Speaking of action, the Palms—for short—was by this hour leaning toward fully potted. It was a period café languishing between two eras: an exclamation point of time when escapism and eccentricity still prevailed—albeit with a big, bushy question mark of a future, limp with lasting changes in the wind. On balance, Palm seemed to roll with those ch-ch-changes, maintaining a classic Casablanca cure-all for terminal anxiety: pure, unadulterated resignation and abandon.

          Decadence peeled off the olive green/wicker trimmed walls; ennui flickered in the cracked claret light columns at either end of a three-arch mahogany bar back. It seeped from the bottle-scarred wet bar, and dusty decanters that were jiggered vigorously into Pina Coladas, Sloe Gin Fizzes and potent Jamaican Coffees. But most of all this seamy decay rose in thick waterspouts from these tightly clustered rattan tables, sucked up into an ill-starred ceiling by eight four-blade overhead fans that sparked and shuddered in hazy asynchronous discord. A first take from the swinging plantation doorway was no less cautionary than looking into a hurricane’s bloodshot eye. No fraternal Pearl Street tavern in here, clearly more Rick’s than Rocky’s.

          Sydney had led me over to this dark corner table on a fabricated terrace railed in like the aft deck of the S.S. Paradise. She figured on escaping the turgid squall of booze-laced cigarette smoke. I looked to avoid the two gaudy blades who winked and brayed at me as we passed before a drafty open window on the way further into this sirens den of…divergency. Damned if I wanted to take the table right next to them.

          What kind of signal was that? But I settled for a fixed stare in precisely the opposite direction, bent on maintaining that this was her idea, that this Palm would not be swaying my way. Funny, army troop ships, Grafenwohr-scale target ranges shot to mind, obscure targets in the darkness with some Godzilla drill sergeant shouting, ‘wanna get your swingin’ dicks outta’ basic, hit them targets!’  Then again, what a potent socio treatise could come of …this.

          To wit, ever so slowly, liltingly, two olive-skinned panthers captured another nearby table, hunched over a hand-rolled Bugler, French inhaling its flaring smoke, the clingy duet commenced to fondling one another under the candlelight. Christ, were they actually…he roamed her black stretch jeans like everybody’s business right there, while the she of them popped the buttons on his baggy safari pants—only to grab suddenly at his rumpled madras lapel. She pulled him so sharply toward her that the flame singed his scar and bramble mustache. Though he gagged on his Amaretto, there was no denting her playful, drop-forged smile.

          Beyond them, edgy, coked-up hitters manned and spooned in far corners, mirror-eyed port of callboys gnawed swizzle sticks at the bar: a full house at the Palm was a rendezvous with deviancy at any moment’s flirty notice. The darker the table, the murkier the prospects: Blame it on the foreign beers and tropical aperitifs. In some campier cases, blame it on the Bossa Nova, as with the pair of elder studsmen prancing and grinning away on the parquet dance floor like Martha Rays at a Polident convention.  House tracks ranging from the Velvet Underground to Pearl Harbor and the Explosions to KC and the Sunshine Band: Not for the sociological faint of heart, this…not even in the abstract.

          “Bridges crossed, bridges burned—it’s been a long trip. But I’m back in town, and ready for action,” she shifted, boring in on her Daiquiri. “I mean, it could be a lot worse, I could be stuck in Chicago, fending off Bernard Zynich.”

          “He your ol’ man?”

          “Hah, doesn’t he wish,” she said, tapping her blueprint straight teeth with her swizzle straw. “I grew up with Bernie, he’s the son of my parents’ cribbage partners. They own Hirsch-Zynich Galleries in Evanston, and have been displaying my work since I was in junior high. Everybody’s been trying to get us together even longer than that…figuring we were a perfect match, dowry and all that.”

          “Sounds serious to me…”

        “Serious? Bernard is slow death by suffocation. He’s short and stocky, and I am like, his object d’art. Really, he’s never been anywhere. The only thing he’s sure of is that he’ll take over the family gallery some day. He’s the perfect boitshik. His every waking hour is geared to just that, and it still scares the hell out of him. Bet he’s waiting for me in Chicago right now, ready to propose.”

          I didn’t dare ask, instead going, “So he’s the one you’re leaving in ruins, huh—like, after the Adonis tooler?”

          “My parents thought I was on my way there from Florida,” she smiled mischievously. “Thank god Lorraine’s and Josh’s invites came in the mail my roommate here forwarded to me. So as soon as I got to the Tampa airport, I started running back and forth between the ticket counters—agents must have thought I was Goldie Hawn or somebody. Finally changed my mind and itinerary, from Chicago to Denver, connecting flights at O’Hare.”

          “Wow, drama…on the lamb and everything…”  Hell, why’d she have to be laying all this on me, particularly given what little was left of my dime?

          “Bernard’s probably calling Florida and San Francisco every fifteen minutes right now—I’m his life’s goal, his Venus d’ Milo and Guggenheim grant, all rolled into one—and he’s nothing if not persistent. But if there’s one thing I have more trouble with than death and boredom it’s suffocation. Don’t get me wrong, he means well, but he smothers me with his worship trip. I used to put up with him because he’s really kinda funny. But I can’t marry the shlemiel, he gets to driving me up the wall back there.”

          “Totally…understandable…” Mighty full of herself, I thought, as she siphoned off my relational reserve tank. Guess she figured me for a safe harbor. Poor little artist, suffers so…can’t hang onto the man she wanted, can’t shake those who won’t let go.

           “Sooo, you might say I’m in between horndogs at the moment…there, that’s what you get for poking around.”

           “Didn’t know that I was…” Seemed I was learning more than I wanted here, sooner than reasonably expected. Melissa once said that Sydney feinted and jabbed at anyone who started getting too close. Yet here she was, on the ropes and singing like yesterday’s contender. It was flattering, unnerving—I reflected on Moon telling me many cheeky anecdotes involving her former sister-in-law as we explored ‘Waif and Grain’ before the cabin’s fireplace one blizzard night. She was always so self-effacing about her portrait. Gotta call her, first thing before I hit the road back to Boulder.

          With little immediate hope of conversational detente, my smoky eyes again drifted off, trolling the undertow of this baldly queerest of cabarets. Distant, earthy—exotic looks, erotic moves, subtropical, faraway places, escapist sailing away—that I could not deny, nor that I’d ever been any place so appalling, at the same time so clinically appealing. The Balmy Palm had a tropical air that even the night’s re-stiffening, grassy breezes couldn’t shake from its limbs. Clothes horse latitudes comprised aloha shirts, safari shorts, festive draw-string beach pants and tire-soled huaraches—all brazenly loose on skin taut and tanned, hot flashes of zirconium buckles, ear gear, copious layered chains.

          Cheek to cheek, pockets swelling, fused at the hips, grunt, grope and grind: close-cropped items stretched the parameters, rustled The Palm with typhoon force, clutching buns, rubbing thighs, reading the next guy’s partner with long, naked leers, lots of flying flaps and flares. Loner idols just danced with themselves, thoroughly lost in the moment, as if the music itself didn’t matter by now, could have been Mantovani or Don Ho, Zappa or Manilow, so long as it moved them at a deafening pitch. They were stopping only by the munchie bar to hose down with Dos Equis and Mai Tais. Close those front windows, and you had St. Lucia in the spring, the Keys, Fire Island over Labor Day, Papeete all year round.

           The sweep of a waitress’s floral sarong soon carried me off across the bar’s sand-padded main floor as she filled an order for two Blue Moons. Syd’s first thought was Planter’s Punch, until she recalled Curacao being James Holcomb’s favorite. The stacked blonde waitress was a sight for smoke-strained eyes, all right—from most angles a real woman, any woman other than the Palm’s fauxmale clientele, and this suddenly moony-eyed cargo here testing what little remained of my composure. But I lost the waitress mid room, in the thick cigarette contrails rising to the club’s dark, starry ceiling.

          Whether The Palm itself was coconut, date, Royal or Canary seemed beside the point; how any tree could survive in here was anybody’s miasmic guess. What mattered were the length of its gushing trunk and fanlike leaves, the dead-on fullness of its talipot skirts. Hot on the tail of their sultry blonde token waitress, so bossy and genderally bearded, my eyes quickly jumped to a faded South Seas mural that projected an entire side wall into 1920s New Guinea. I panned to the veranda, a pink pastel sky backlighting beach huts and palmyra palms that danced like dandelions in early May.

          Stratocumulus mounds tufted the sunset, soaking up vapid contrails of an incoming steamer. The air was warm and heavy, mangoes sweetening on scattered trees. This clinking, tinkling—was it wind chimes, ships bells, coins pitched on a broiling sidewalk? No, it was nearer than that, no farther than that…no, both. This sassier of Palm’s two waitresses shoved a pair of stainless steel sherbet cups before us, gavelling one with a spoon—mine strawberry, hers tangerine.—making us pay dearly—more precisely, for the moment, already flat walleted me.

          “Doesn’t this place just grab you,” Syd boasted, with a quick payback wink. “I mean, did you ever…”

          “Not hardly, not even in my wildest…” I searched for a rejoinder, but there was so little I could muster to say. Instead, I fixed on a far side wall, above a festering shipwreck of a foredeck bordered with interlaced bamboo shoots. Off center, out of kilter, hung a sepia-tone blow-up of the gold rush steamship Central America, a sidewheeler that sank in a hurricane in 1857. Not only did it carry scores of San Franciscans, but a multi-million dollar payload of gold bricks and double eagles—the stuff of vast fortunes and those who made them, buried 8,000 feet deep off the coast of South Carolina. Beside that was a photo composite of a mushroom cloud over Bikini’s Atolls, the Enola Gay superimposed, leaning the other way.

          “I can’t decide whether its the ambience or the habitué. The overall vibe is almost therapeutic, medicinal in here, don’t you think?”

          “Not exactly that easy to swallow,” I muttered into my sherbet cup, anxiously avoiding any possible stares. The only medicine needed here was a Dramamine tab or two, what with some sea queasiness setting in. “Guess I’m not quite ready for a scene like this.”

          “C’mon, get with it and take your medicine.”

          “Yah, well, just a little stuffy in here, that’s all, ” I coughed, “maybe we should be moving on…”

          “Stuffy? I call it real. The midwest, WASPy Colorado, now that’s what’s stuffy. Wait, stay put, it’s showtime!”

           A hawkish bartender in yellow sweat pants and Kona Hawaiian shirtwaist suddenly offed the jukebox switch, clipping Bowie’s ‘Hang On To Yourself’ number faster than P.G.&E. unplugged overdue accounts. He then completely doused Palm’s house lights, so that a foil-wrapped spot haloed the club’s small stage, framed in bamboo slats and thatched, seashell-laced palmetto fronds. Dead center stood a flat black Boesendorfer upright; into that milky circle skulked Darna Karl.

          Even the alabaster-cheeked knockout and his grabby escort snapped to rapt attention from their têt-a-table next to us. Darna was a lanky clothes pole redhead with closet hanger shoulders propping up a bone-tight orchid gown, which dusted the tops of her size 13 pumps. That lone spot kindled the silverflake in her awkwardly large shoes, blowing them even further out of proportion—snowshoes on Kareem awkward—as she lurched toward her stool.

          She one-handed a cognac bottle from the bartender, never once pulling her other fingers from the alto piano keys. Her personal drumroll persisted as she spun down on the matching black stool, wedging the Courvoisier bottle between last night’s snifters. She scratched her right calf, running loose, frost-white nylons up to the kneecap, then planted those gleaming shoes on her bass pedals.

          Already in place above the keyboard were a half-carton of Reidsville-grade Pall Malls, a Kaiser-Fraser hubcap ashtray and several disposable lighters. Atop the piano were a karafe of pink carnations and five specimen bottles designated for the nickel, dime, quarter-on-up donations that kept her in smokes and cognac. Darna nodded and mumbled incoherently to the room, her Mary Kay red-tipped butt dropping another hot ash into her charred lap as it bobbed between full, cold-sore lips. But the sign above her said everything: ‘Can’t you saps read? My name is Darna. I play anything but requests’. And so there was no overlooking the notice, she’d nailed it between the melon breasts of a Gauginesque maiden muralled along the back wall: the girl with the fruit basket on her head—to match the waxed bananas, pineapples and papaya collecting dust in a piano top basket. So handsome, wholesome, and then some.

          Darna Karl had no cleavage to speak of; many of the beater gym rats seated at stage-side tables had more. But the chanteuse bared beaucoup eyeliner, rouge and mascara troweled on cheekbone deep, and could still do a scratch-throaty number on the full popular songbook. She blew three smoke rings into the spotlight haze, transforming it into a huge conical umbrella. A lusty belt of cognac, and she rasped into ‘Stormy Weather’. Ashes flickering, cognac dripping—Darna flowed like a Wurlitzer once she got rolling, from ‘Misty’ to ‘Summertime’ to ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’.

          Before long, dewey-eyed stiffs stumbled up to fill her snifters, light her smokes, line her jars—not that she’d acknowledge them with so much as a nod. If this cross between Johnny Ray and Anita O’Day had little time for requests, she had even less for lip service, whatever the pleasure or proposition, instead sneering to the room’s delight as she jammed that Courvoisier bottle between her legs.

          “Isn’t she amazing,” Syd beamed, with parts awe and halting admiration. “James told me she’s been here for like, a dozen years.”

          “Looks like she’s been everywhere a little too long,” I said, waving more smoke away. “Ready to hit it?”

          “What’s the hurry, Farmer John, itchin’ to plow the back 40?”

          “Hilarious,” I bristled, “about as funny as a hemorrhoid.”

          “Word is she used to play the Fairmont, the Top of the Mark,” Syd sat pat. “She’s a lot younger than she looks…was a Julliard prodigy or something.”

          “Must have been many cognacs ago…”

          “Guess it’s all downhill from Nob Hill,” she cracked, through a wry yet slightly nervous smile. “I’ve painted this tableau in my head so many times. Just cringe at the thought of actually going through it.”

          “Why’s that?”

          “Because she sorta freaks me out. ’Cause here’s this super talented person and she’s down the chutes, and I don’t know why…”

          “You mean why it couldn’t happen to you?”

          “Why it couldn’t happen to anybody,” she said, leaning forward.

          “Maybe it can, but only if you let it, right?” I asked dismissively, eyeing the bouncer-I.D. clamor at Palm’s swinging doors.

          “Whew, I can feel her voice right down to my clit,” she blurted, at a fleeting moment between numbers. Once Darna gained a head of steam, there were no breaks—nothing was going to Shanghai her standards songbook hit parade. “Can’t you?”

          “Me? Not quite. Question is, can…she…”

          The marvelous Ms. Karl was a quart low on Courvoisier, two butts shy of a full hubcap, and specimen jars ahead when Sydney claimed she could no longer be held accountable for her own erogenous zones; so we decamped, and pounded sand toward the shore. That parting shot of Darna, nose to the ivories, moaning ‘All Of Me’ through a half-lit Pall Mall, smoke snaking over her flaming hair, torched singer that she was, burned like a branding iron into my memory, down to my marrow, as Syd led us through a maze of tables and the Palm’s latecomer-jammed doorway. Curiously, I found myself picturing the photographic aspects once she medleyed into ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’, thinking oh, to have my cameras and some Tri-X film for the ASA pushing and printing…

          “So, gunned up your tail pretty good, now didn’t it,” Sydney poked my shoulder as we hit the doors.

          “Pretty strong stuff, alright,” I wheezed, checking my pockets, catching a snootful of Maui Wowie just outside.

          “Damn straight, it’s good for what males you.”

Care for more?

Chapter 16. A stroll through the depths 
leads them to the Heights—although there, 
matters prove to be far from pacific…

“Smooth landings 
can come with some 
rougher patches, buster.”

          “And purple…it’s got some of that in it…”

          “Purple…”

          “Yes, purple! And these amazing red and orange-like rays streaming out of a radiant sun on the horizon.”

           “Sun, got it—purple and sun.”

           “Oy, James has such an incredible way with sun rays. Never seen anything like it.”

           Back then, once Nevada had finally ended, the blinding beauty began. California conceded a little borderline spillover—the lesser third of Lake Tahoe, some lower range forested hills—but otherwise gerryrigged the topographical splendor like a Carolina Congressional seat. Before long, drab, middling mountains thrust dramatically frosted skyward. Stubborn gray overcast turned baccarat blue. Tall pine thickened and ran indelibly emerald. Dull snowpack suddenly sparkled like granulated sugar. Everything else just sped up and gained attitude.

           Snorting Trans Ams, 280-Zs and Turbo Carreras blew past my balky Volkswagen Squareback in tight formation, racing-striped lemmings with ski racks, loaded for Squaw Valley and Boreal. The Truckee River gushed quinine clear alongside, over eel-smooth boulders, under felled tree trunks and melting snow flows, meandering north and south below as Interstate-80 viaducted up with the blue jays through Tahoe National Forest.

By Truckee itself, I had surrendered to the bus lane, waving off pesky Rabbits and Pintos, struggling to keep pace with wagging U-Hauls and the freight train plowing along a far mountainside rail shaft left standing from the Gold Rush days. Relief had come momentarily at the state Agricultural Inspection Station, where we spotted that Oakland HVAC van being strip-searched while Sydney sacrificed two overripe Florida mangos to the uniformed produce guards.

           Wiser drivers than I hunkered along I-80’s narrow, stormfenced shoulders, drifts choking orange ‘dipsticks’ up to  their red reflectors, thick and slick from daily thawing then refreezing. Snow monkeys strapped on tire chains at the base of craggy, steeply canyoned Sierra walls. Cars with far better traction dodged shot patterns of rocky sediment cut loose by crosswinds and concurrently freezing and melting snows, by waterfalls pounding down green-gray rock channels to either side.

The squareback rather more faltered than fishtailed, tractor-trailers blasting relentlessly as they locked us into dead heats upwards of 5,000 feet—me double clutching and downshifting, Syd coaxing, rocking forward like a baited quail. Eventually, we rose above streaked window glass, frozen extremities and isolated cloud pockets, up to heavenly wraparound ranges and white-capped Sierra lakes.

          “So, missy, where was this?”

          “I told you, out at Ocean Beach.”

          “No, I mean, where was it…”

          “Right on the front seat. Honestly, what a perfect way to end such an exhausting trip. You getting all this down?”

          Fuel injectors sputtering, gas pedal slammed, the Volks bucked northerly alpen crosswinds above 6,000 feet as we wound around Donner Lake, its ripples reflecting the frosted peaks and alabaster crevices that sealed it off from greater turbulence. Upwards of 7k, the winds were relentless, battering twisted pines, tossing stone rubble and bull boulders across the slow lanes like so much rocksalt. I dodged the slides by bumper car veers and turns, falling into a dead heat with a three-trailer Intermountain Express, the both of us downshifting full throttle to maintain strains of forward momentum.

          I was silently cursing Syd and all her baggage when she pointed out the majestic mountaintop vistas up and downrange, to a road sign reading 7,239 feet above sea level. She marveled at the pioneers who had rope hoisted and lowered wagons and all over whatever pass they could scout out and surmount—whatever it took to make their weary way into the paradise called California. Just thinking about that, and towel wiping clear the windshield, had me working up a powerful appetite, to be sure.

          Atop Donner Summit, a historical plaque hashed up any sudden hunger pangs in short order. I noted that the stranded Donner Party had originated in Springfield, Illinois in October, 1846 to traverse the Sierra bound for the promised land, running some 30 days late out of Hastings cutoff, getting trapped in 15-foot snowdrifts, basically starving to death. Sydney countered that two-thirds of the women survived, only one-third of the men. I ventured as how the snowshoe party desperately butchered their cannibalized kin, stripping dead members of their organs and flesh—even proactively killing a couple of young Indians for their innards and hides. She said that one Sarah Fosdick had watched her harebrained husband die, eating his tongue as his heart roasted on a stick. From there, everything was a refluxed, gut-thumping downhill rush, with whitewater rapids patched into the scenario for some extra-sensory saturation. I-80’s six-percent downgrade wound us past ice streaming mountainsides, backed by dense stands of gnarled birch and wintergreen valleys, where ghostly pioneers still circled their battered Conestogas.

          A frigid yet slushy draft jetted further up through the floorboards with every snow buried milemarker and drifting curve. Sugar Bowl, Soda Springs, Emigrant Gap, Dutch Flat exits blurred into an ear-popping, wheel-grabbing brakefest goosed on by the airhorn blasts of that now stampeding Intermountain Express. It blew the squareback off altogether, left me with a snootful of diesel fumes, before plowing three trailers deep onto a designated runaway lane, hatches flapping open, cases of house paint graffiti spraying across the scattering snows.

          “Let’s see, leather with purple, front seat, Ocean Beach. Yep, think we’ve got it covered…”

          “S’cuse me?! What do you expect to find with just that,” Sydney said presently, pounding on the San Francisco Police precinct countertop. “Listen, officer, it was my absolute favorite handbag ensemble. I had all my everything in there…”

          “Do you really expect to find anything no matter what I write down,” asked a pudgy, preoccupied Sunset District station desk sergeant. “It’s probably washing out to sea in a storm drain by now.”

          “With your cheesy description,” she huffed, rolling her eyes my way, “who’d know the difference, even if it was?!”

          Still, I couldn’t have helped but warm up to Syd’s initial California enthusiasm. Her nostrils fogged the streaky windshield as she blew kisses wild-eyed to a roll call of providential sightings: the first towering redwoods of Placer County, the red ore-rich foothills above Gold Run, that first lone palm tree outside Auburn. Below 1,500 feet, skies cleared, windows and roadways thawed amidst a time-lapse seasonal shift. Bougainvillea lined the freeway, Sierra earthtones brightened to Sacramento’s soft-white and pastels, palm trees ganged Kona thick, everything not yet paved either blooming or lushly green.

          San Joaquin Valley’s furrowed black flats and Syd’s FM sing along soon delivered me unto a dreamy ether space of springtime California. Candied fruit bowl frappes at the Nut Tree primed us for a rolling feast of small label vineyards, of pear, plum and apple orchards, which enveloped I-80 well up through the verdant Holsteined hills of the Coastal Range. But the green-on-green truck farms outside Vacaville gradually gave way to the tank farms of Vallejo. I grew uneasy with quickening traffic, towering power lines and overall East Bay sprawl. By the Carquinez Bridge, there seemed no turning back at all. Sealing things was the disco taunt Sydney radio dialed and belted to: ‘Shame, shame on you if you can’t pass through…’

          “Got your phone number here in the report,” sighed the desk sergeant, lowering his reading glasses, rubbing the bridge of his blotchy red, vascularized nose. “If anything turns up, we’ll be in touch…”

          “I can’t wait for that…I’m a busy person. How do you expect me to…”

          “Look, missy—we’re doing all we can,” he said, tossing her crime report onto the In pile.

          “Hah! Tell me about it,” she squared off, glaring at him, up there behind the blue and gold-crested bench. “And just what am I supposed to do in the meantime?!”

          “This is Everybody’s Favorite City, ain’t it?  Go enjoy the hell outta the place.  Oh, and you might wanna be callin’ in your credit cards…”

          When we had finally passed down toward San Francisco Bay, the churning, windshield-flooding expanse ringed from Mount Tamalpais south to San Bruno Mountain, back around to the Diablo Range. Traffic had swirled into I-80 from all directions, Berkeley and Oakland ripped by, marginally recognizable mind-sets on some progressive third world tour. Breezing along the Eastshore Freeway, I caught a first broad view of The City—a fearfully jeweled crown bobbing atop all that water, trivializing everything that had come before.

          The Bay span cantilevered us into the Treasure Island tunnel, an amber-tiled fallopian tube from which we emerged mid bridge. San Francisco zeotroped through the suspension cables, unfurling over its storied hills, awe-inspiring far beyond its physical scale. Tightly clustered downtown highrises glowed golden against a nectarine sky, waterfront lights refracting in iridescent rays about the ferry and freighter cross-hatched Bay—all so much more dazzling than the fog town I had recalled from the previous Thanksgiving weekend’s impulsive joyride.

          Sydney had pointed me onto one of the pretzeled upper peninsula thruways, spurring me rib by rib as we raced the sunset across town, timed traffic lights ushering us up over steep, compact hills, along the colorfully Victorian-lined Panhandle. I dodged around right-turners and double-parked vans, backfired on to JFK Drive past the lush gardens, groomed meadows—the pools, palm groves and bike paths—of Golden Gate Park. She was recounting a nearby buffalo pasture as I spun out onto the Great Highway, just as a flaming beachball sun sank beyond Ocean Beach, out on the perfectly linear Pacific horizon.

          Syd shot from the Volks, coaxing me toward The Esplanade to narrate this perfect introduction from Land’s End. In breathless bursts, she celebrated our long overdue arrival, pointed out Seal Rocks, the Beach Chalet and Murphy’s Windmill, framing this fiery marine twilight as if her easel and palette were at hand. In all candor, I was momentarily entranced by the ocean, the sunset, the sudden promise of a totally foreign place: Not confining like a craggy mountain front to be scaled, but the level, cinema-scopic infinity of the sea.

          Still, gaping at scattered couples, the surf-and-sand pasted children, I steadied myself against a seawall in the bracing wind, silently brushing away the cool, salty ocean spray. Once grains dislodged Syd’s contacts, she beckoned me back to the car for her eyeglasses and boar’s bristle hairbrush, promenade street lights cutting into the settling darkness as we dashed through clotted traffic to the median parking strip. There we found the squareback’s shotgun-side door slim-jimmied open, her hand-tooled leather purse and matching wallet gone with the late, carmine embering light of day.

          “Think we should have mentioned my radio?” I now opened the steel-reinforced front door of S.F.P.D.’s Western Station, bringing up my Blaupunkt AM-FM, which was ripped halfway out from under the dashboard. Dangling by several yellow wires and a stubborn black antenna cable, it looked to have been left behind by car looters beating a hasty escape.

           “What’s the point, they didn’t get your radio,” Syd snapped, zipping up her ski jacket, straightening her wrinkled vermilion leotards as onshore winds whipped more powerfully across Sunset District avenues.

           “Kind of a downer, huh?”

           “No, still an upper,”she rallied, somewhat rattled nonetheless—suddenly putting on a happy face, wrapping the arm of my sheepskin coat in the deepening darkness. “San Francisco is always on the ups—rule numero uno, no matter what. So let’s go, cowpoke, I’ll show you some ropes…”

Care for more?
        
Chapter 15. Polking around across
town, a scene heretofore unseen, coming face
to face with the local ‘farming’ community… 

 

“A safe bet on the
surface may net myriad
hazards deeper down.”

          “I want it back.”

          “Sure, I totally understand where you’re coming from. It’s just a basic surface manifestation of what you perceive to be her impertinence and ingratitude, but…”

          “But nothing, tell that little bitch to spin on it.  I want my belt buckle!”

          Back then, this had proved to be a drab, Bloody Mary of a Lovelock morning early on, the first indication of which lay at the throwaway Bud-strewn doorstep of neighboring 5B.  Right off, Sydney had attempted to break the deafening gloom by japing that she was washing her hands of me for her own damn good.  Western Nevada’s rugged highway landscape soon degenerated into a slough of pre-fab tracts, sprawling trailer parks and auto graveyards, a sud-African township sort of wasteland a series road signs had designated Sparks.

          Shadowing all that was Reno, its high-rise hotel towers disappearing against the mountainous overcast like stacked coinage alongside some nickel slots, muting the lurid everglow of reinforced concrete strongboxes emblazoned Sahara, Circus-Circus and Sierra Sal’s. Bonanza III sized up as the fattest come-on breakfast spread in the Grand canyon of downtown casinos—even though it displayed notices warning patrons to duck under the blackjack tables, out of the line of gunfire, in the event sudden disagreements broke out.  Two-dollar Eggs Benedict hastily washed down, Sydney and I emerged from B-III’s blazing, carnival-lit foyer to find a not dissimilarly hostile wager had been placed by this rudely familiar van.

          “Knew I’d catch up with you jerk-offs before long,” raged the HVAC contractor, Raider’s cap sailing, butt crack galore. He had wedged his van behind the squareback on a nearby side street of chili parlors and pawnshops, in front of a mid-block parking lot filled with rent-a-cars, fleet loaners and San Joaquin Valley excursion buses. “My buckle…now!”

          “Hey, what about my sunglasses?”  She menaced the contractor with a plastic cow’s-head creamer she had lifted from the Bonanza buffet table, as was her compulsion. “And what about my honor?!”

          “Yah, you gonna stick up for the little lady or what?”  Bed rolled against the parking lot’s chainlink fencing were four hole cards and a queen kicker—a mere token of Reno’s discards, migrant gamblers who had thumbed in from Vegas with the odds at their backs, but stalled flat when the warm Ripple and incorrigible casino advantage slapped them down to sprinklings of tent encampments all about town.

          “No buckle, no shades,” the Raider fan sneered, twisting her Vuarnet frames to the cracking point. “Psychobabble this…”

          “Look, you’ve got your position; she’s got her position,” I sputtered, still flustered from the night before. I guided Syd briskly into the car, wherein she wasted little time downing the passenger window.  “So let’s all of us cool off and discuss this like rational human beings, shall we—find ourselves a measure of common ground?”

          “Don’t give me rational, pussy face,” the contractor lurched toward the car and me. “Just give me the goddamn buckle.”

          “Shit, let’s kick his sorry ass back to Oakland,” said the tallest, bulkiest of the brood, hurling away shared piles of heisted table clothes and hotel blankets, revealing a flush of stained double-knits and shredded shirtjacs, as he and his fellow rounders rose groggily to the occasion.

          “There you go, Sir Galahad,” Syd pounded the door with her creamer. “Now you’re talking’”

          “You bet, sweetheart,” the wildest card moved on the contractor with a gaping, tobacco-stained grin, spitting yellow phlegm and chunky wine, hotel toiletries and place settings jangling from the patch pockets of a grimy beige leisure suit.  His partners shored up his flanks in a bum’s rush of Bally’s caps and tangled, rabidly toothless glares.  The queen mother just stayed hunkered down to crop in loose change and casino chips day-touring bettors tossed into her trashed roulette wheel.

          “Awright, quit fuckin’ around and gimme my…” The contractor screamed, stopping cold as the low-rollers swarmed him.

          “My pleasure,” Syd pulled the gleaming Super Bowl XI souvenir buckle from her purse, tossing it to the rag lady, who proceeded to stash it under her gyroscoping wheel.  “There, rationalize that.”

          “OK for you, honey” the Black Holey Raider spit, cornered five feet from his open van door, snapping her sunglasses at the nose bridge.  “I’ll be measuring your asses down the road…”

          “Christ, what were you thinking,” I retreated around into the squareback altogether, cranking it over amid the dust of sudden scuffling. “First Denver just cheated his team out of the NFL playoffs with a goal-line fumble, now this.  Talk about Orange Crushed—he’ll ambush us, I just know…”

          “That’s what I’ve got you to protect me for, isn’t it,” she asked, motioning me to tail the taxi idling in front of us out into traffic. “Like, maybe you can understand him to death.”

          “It’s called conflict management, all right?  Was just trying to defuse the situation.” I sped past pink and white instant wedding chapels named Cupid’s Nest and Blushing Bride, then even quicker off-the-rack divorce dens. “Trouble is, I haven’t exactly come across anything that unmanageable in Boulder.”

          “Welcome to the real world, flash.”  Syd drifted off into long blocks of dime casinos and honeymoon motels, towered over by mega-billboards for Don Rickles, Flip Wilson, and the John Davidson Revue. “That’s the kind of people you’ll run into everywhere out here…’cause you’re not in namby-pamby academia anymore.”

          “Well, I know one thing.”  I merged the squareback fitfully onto I-80 West, paring through a dense spread of liquor shacks, truck stops, trailer courts and low-rent casinos engulfing greater Reno’s environs.  Its all-hours squalor gradually played out across westernmost Nevada’s drab gray hills, to a scattering of hermitic strongholds bedizened with longhorn skulls, mortar-crusted range rocks and skeletal metal sculpture contorted into grotesquely personal gestalten. “We don’t need to be buying off lowlifes to get you back home in one piece…”

          “Tell it to my Vuarnets,” she shook her plastic Holstein at me to press her case.  “Really…I resent the sexist implications of your sudden macho attitude. Especially when you weren’t all that macho to begin with.”

          “Maybe I resent the implications of your harum-scarum act,” I floored the wagon up I-80’s Sierra backside toward Verdi, wincing at the windshield slush from a passing Mercedes SEL, wiping non-dairy spray from my chin as a sapphire blue Jaguar saloon cut us off.  “The truth is, I can’t stomach derelicts like that.”

          “Hah!  But wait a minute, you’re a sociologist.  I thought people like you were supposed to help derelicts like that!” Syd squinted through lifting cloud cover to the promise of snow white and evergreen foothills, the Truckee River surging in alongside.  “No wonder everybody says social science is the pits of academia. But at least you should try to be good at it!”

          “What?  I can’t help it, all right? I hate their filth, their binges—their rotting goddamn mouths. Jeez, why the hell would you want to encourage them,” my voice raised, the Volks already struggling, as a platinum Turbo Carrera blew too closely by. “Believe me, I’ve got no plans to get tangled up with such lost-cause grimeballs in any way, shape or form.”

          With that, she tossed her creamer and sleeping bag against the tailgate door, then flipped the Silver State a singular goodbye. “Good lord, I’ve got to get you to San Francisco.”

Care for more?  

Chapter 14. Climbing the summit,
cruising through the valley, they
find things accelerating as they
coast clear to the coast…  

“Stray from a chosen path
at your peril, lest unforeseen
influences take hold.”

Back then, Sydney directed me along neon arrows to the largest and lowest number on Lovelock’s motel row: a roughrider nine-dollar overnight with space heater and optional soft-core porn.  I kept the squareback revving while she negotiated for what purported to be the Rodeo Arms Motor Lodge’s last available unit, a week-long cattle auction now hitting town.  Second to the end on Rodeo’s eastern wing, 6B melded that bovine essence with ethyl fumes from the Two Stiffs Selling Gas station next door.  A damp-seamed tank of furnace oil blocked most reflective fallout from the $9 sign, and everything else about 6B but the door.

          “There you go, now which room’s mine?”  I dragged her valise and heaviest suitcase into the coldly single room.

          “Which one’s yours,” she chuckled, as she hustled the storm and windowless wood doors closed behind me.  “This is it, flash.  You think I’m wasting my hard-earned gas money on two dumpy rooms?  Really, the way this trip’s been going, we’ll probably need a transmission overhaul by Sacramento.”

          “Huh?!  Nooo way…” I gazed around the oversize closet as soon as she hit a wild palomino lamp on the night stand: Plenty of vinyl and plastic phlox, a closed-circuit Motorola suspended from the ceiling—19-inch provocateur to the junior double bed jammed against the back walls, just below a framed parchment of the Rodeo’s house commandments. “I’ll be out sleeping in the car.”

          “Brrr, get your tush back in here, will you please,” she said, through the twang of ripped screening as I bolted out the doors.  “My Chanel has got to be better than seeping fuel oil.”

          “Look, nothing personal,” I shouted over the gear wail of a downshifting Bekins mover, watching her fussily open and re-zip her down jacket.  “I’d just feel more comfortable…”

          “Oh, grow up,” she squeezed halfway into the bathroom, as if wriggling into tumble-dried panty hose, combing out her tangled blond hair—long and flossy tresses compared to Melissa’s luxuriant brunette jungle.  “We’ve already spent the night together in the car, haven’t we?  Did anything uncomfortable happen in the car?!”

          “Well, no…but,” I shut the door back behind me and spotted a house phone beside the bed.  “I’d best call Moon.”

          “Wonderful, Festus the manager will be thrilled to hear we’re riding double in here.”

          “You don’t understand,” I stammered.  “Under the circumstances, I just think it…apropos.”

          “Apropos,” she scowled, means testing the bed with her tight, steel-belted radial behind.  “Well, I think it’s an insult—to Moon and me.  We’re family, get it?  Family!  Anyway, I thought you just talked to her in Willup.”

          “Uh, not exactly,” I said, shoulder blades flat against the door.  “In fact, all I got was a message that wasn’t even for me by name, but something about a party.  I’ll be damned if I know what…”

          “Can’t imagine…maybe it was a work thing.  Or maybe dear Melissa’s dabbling in local lore.”

          “Huh?!  How can you say a thing like that…”

          No telling what the Rodeo’s premium suites had to offer, but 6B gave me recall, wall to wall.  The same grainy plaster, a far-too-familiar corner heater lobbing lukewarm sprinkles against an arctic sea: All Lovelock lacked were the dirty yellow chest-high drifts.  I never anticipated that that long, sickening New Year’s haul some years before would ever repeat on me.  Yet here it was, anchovies one morning after the fact—stale, awful Cheetos and beef stew by the can in that grim New Jersey Turnpike motel.  Crash-landed in Pennsauken, suckling up to Roberta’s rolling waistlines, hurling Dinty Moore’s entrails across the bed sheets with a noggin full of snow-blunted dismay.  My head hadn’t felt this icy hot and helium light since that warped east coast drive-a-thon quite some time ago.  And I surely had no more stomach for it now.

          “Juust kidding, yeesh…” Sydney pulled back the discolored bedding, then took the pillows to task. “Well, TV anyone?”

          “C’mon, dammit!  Family or no family, this isn’t what my relationship is all about.”

          “Oh, don’t flatter yourself…” She peeled down to a blue sleeveless body sock, then line bored under the covers.  “The sooner we turn in, the sooner you get me back to California.”

          An overstocked cattle truck stampeded up Business 80, steers moaning in a crush of ribs and hooves, the Rodeo Arms trembling down to its box springs until a gasoline tanker counter-rumbled along.  On the other hand, it could have been my chilblains and high-beam glaucoma, or the increased fluttering in my lower alimentary canal.  I peered evasively about this walk-in cooler; however much it smacked of Jersey, she was clearly no Roberta.  I hedged and sighed and stroked a two-day growth, feeling raw and torn as my undershirts, refracting her curious glare.  Damn, if she didn’t know all too well I couldn’t doze upright another night.  Even more galling was that what I saw as some monumental fidelity test, she could so easily dismiss as simple rest.

          “Good god, either I’m totally repulsive…or Moon has you whipped something fierce.”

          “Hey, come on, it’s not like you’re repulsive or…”

          “Oh, that’s a relief,” she rolled over toward a framed rotogravure of Lovelock’s nightlife in a flap of Hereford brown covers and horsefeather pillows. “Well, stay in your clunker, sleep in the bathtub, for all I care.  I’m just trying to help things along.”

          “Je-sus…”  I locked the doors behind me, then cleaved into the bathroom to dispense with some sugar and caffeine.  There really was nothing to this; don’t flatter yourself, just like she said.  I could hear her humming under the scraping of the bathroom ceiling fan, which unleashed a barrage of suddenly cherished imagery in the varicose mirror.  Melissa baking banana bread, Melissa by the fire sipping Celestial tea, Moon over mountain views of July Fourth fireworks up and down the Front Range:  Where the hell was she?  What fucking party?!  A flush of the toilet, and the images swirled coriolically away.  I punched at two corroded rubber machines, then killed the light, comforted by the realization that there was nothing Sydney could possibly see in the stubbled face I’d just left in the half-cracked mirror.

          “O the Sisters of Mercy they are not departed or gone…”

          “Aww, don’t be singing that,” I edged into a room dimmed to the pink glow of a water-stained lampshade.  “Why must you be…”

          “I don’t know, just thought it apropos…”

          “The hell…” I deployed night vision as best I could to flesh out her blanketed form: an old army trick—backstabbing, home-wrecking army—duty rostering, field stripping my marriage away.  Curious how Sydney and Melissa shaped up so differently, though more or less the same size.  Moon was soft and renaissance rounded, that rose petal skin, all that succorous cushioning in a shapely compact form.  Covers aside, Sydney was firm and toned like Celeste Wylie, like a designer label marathon trainer.  With Moon’s face and a little more Faith, she might have been under contract to Paramount or MGM.

          “So tell me about Leonard Cohen,” she tracked my approach by the linoleum-dulled clunk of petrified boots. “Soon as you get out of those revolting clothes.”

          “Right,” I sighed, peeling down reluctantly from jeans and chamois shirt to a pitted CU gym top and worn-through Looms.  “After you tell me about that Utah tantrum over your sunglasses.”

          “Sisters of Mercy they are not departed or gone.  They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can’t go on…” She burrowed singing face-first toward the wall as I tumbled in, mattress caving like an aqueduct, pushing us together, center spread.  “You first…”

          “Enough, for Christsake!”  I turned away from her as though we had been carrying on like this for years.  “No big thing, OK?  It just dredges up Fayetteville, North Carolina.  I was a married draftee.  Cassie and I lived off post with two cars, yet—our place sort of became Fort Bragg’s artsy anti-war central.  Maybe it was the conflicting pressures, Maybe it was the bad pay, bad formations—but mainly my bad haircuts.  So the holidays came, and we decided to split up.  We made the surprise announcement at our New Year’s Eve bash.  She fled at midnight with this Cat Stevens-kinda gypsy to St. Augustine, Florida—went a little crazy like that sometimes… think it had to do with her being adopted or something.”

          “Hmm, fuzzy parentage?  Say no more…”

          “That and the fact that she finally got around to telling me she had had an abortion when she was a freshman in high school.  Anyway, a bunch of us headed up to New York.  Roberta played an old ‘Suzanne’ tape all the way through Virginia.  Every time ‘Sisters of Mercy’ or ‘So Long, Marianne’ came on, I cried my eyes out.  The plan was non-stop driving shifts, but we got so wasted, we had to lay over in Jersey—a hole sort of like…this.  Then a black guy, Cornelius, got everybody wrecked, and things were all over the map, sexwise.”

          “Really…”

          “Hey, not me—I just sat there, bawlin’ and passing out.  When we finally got to Darrell’s writer friend Wilson Trescott’s loft, we all got gun-mugged by teenage junkies on his second floor landing… midmorning, 12^th Street and Avenue B.  I never want to go through anything like that again—worst night of my life.  But why am I telling you this,” I flopped back over, drilling an optical hole through 6B’s plaster-cracked ceiling.  “Moon doesn’t even know.”

          “But what about your marriage?  Two people can’t end things just like that…”

          “We did.”  I sensed uneasiness, as if the room seemed somehow cheaper than it already was.  “I shipped out to Europe, did the divorce papers long distance. She had some hotshot feminist lawyer, pro bono…but I didn’t want anything from her, anyway.  Only began hearing from her again when the gypsy ran off.  That’s when she finally admitted she knew I’d never meant to lay a hand on her.”

          “Well, no kids, no harm, I guess…”

          “Not that I’ve even known of…”

          “My, sounds lovey-dovey…so much for the holy vows of matrimony.”

          Tremors from 5B portended a late-night caucus of the shorthorn and bullwhip delegation, regrouping to bid up some numbers.  What sounded to be a small posse of ranchers busted through its door with cases of clinking long necks, bouncing off walls like penned brahmas, cranking up the country and piped-in TV.

          “Sooo, what about Utah,” I asked nervously, over the crumbling of drywall and wailing of Willie and the boys.

          “Say again,” she shifted, as if searching her memory bank for men she’d ever known actually bald-face crying.  Closest she seemed to get was Martin Kavalla, or Lester when he was all of eight years old.

          “Your shades, remember?”  I felt exposed, like tainted shellfish.  “C’mon, we had a deal going here!  You’ve been digging everything out of me, and giving nothing in return…”

          “Alright, already…here’s the…deal.  It wasn’t so much the sunglasses,” she said sleepily, oblivious to the shattering of beer bottles and coughing rodeo hoots next door.  “Besides, I got his Super Bowl buckle, stuffed it in my purse while he was busy fiddling with his mirrors.  It’s what the creep did when he pulled away from your car that really burned me.  The pig bastard ran his grubby hand right down my pants.”

          “He what?!”  Figured as much, the sleazeball seemed the type.  I was unsure whether to feign territorial outrage in such unfamiliar territory, or plain and simple indignation.  “Well, he didn’t exactly force you to ride with him, you know…I mean, if you’re talking personal responsibility and all that.”

          “Oh, so you’re saying it was my fault.  He had a real heater, which is more than your junker does…”

          “Yeah, and lucky for you he didn’t use it.”

          “OK, flash,” she rolled back over quicker than a keno ball out the tumbler, plunging her small, steely hand through an ample tear in my shorts.  “Tell me whose fault this is…”

          I felt her frostbitten fingers grab directly for my scrotum with all the tactical authority of an occupying force.  She squeezed tightly, almost triumphantly, ripping my underwear to the seams, a sudden burning testicular ache compelling me to grunt for terms.  Turf seized, she slid her glaze-nailed fingertips along my coarsening scrotal sack, smooth as a spatula, then rode the blood rush up my throbbing penal artery.  Strumming her fingers, cupping her palm, Sydney tickled and teased the full length of my lightening response.

          I otherwise stiffened in flat-out adrenal shock, numb to rumbling cattle trucks, squeaking bedsprings, the vibrato-framed rotogravure.  Blinded by blinking gas signs and lip red neon arrows, I drowned in the sum fragrance of leaking fuel oil and Chanel No.5, caught here in the throes of downtown Lovelock, rather as embarrassed as aroused.

          I soon surrendered dog-tired to 5B’s roughshod Merle Haggard and crashing throwaway Buds, Syd quickening her power stroke, ‘Sisters of Mercy’ humming right along.  Nodding, fading—call Moon, stall Moon—breach of promise, if not grave alienation of affection: The only thing between me and a painfully welcome night’s rest was the meaning of all this ‘flash’ crap.

          Quite predictably, the answer came to me…just like that.

Care for more?

Chapter 13. Buckling up does not
necessarily make for a safer journey.
Instead, it augurs a tawdry face-off
in gaudy surroundings…   

 

 

 

“The slightest hint of
 breathing room can escape
you once personal contours 
start closing in.”

Back then, what was gained in gas money was lost in light of day.  Sydney and I picked up some apples, powdered Donettes and chocolate milk at the IGA, then chugged out of Willup ever so warily, negotiating its strip mine of chuckwagon diners, ranchero motels and low-octane service stations with high-test prices—common highwaymen lying in wait, divvying the interstate take.  Once we passed a slab cemetery of surface crypts climbing its boot hill, Willup gave way to darkening semi-desert, with dust fed winds soon kicking in. This business loop ambush merged back onto I-80 just beyond Keno Bill’s, tapering from there into twin split-lane ribbons, which tailed off into some 400 miles of time-drag topography that collided head-on with one’s pioneer urge to press westward.

          “Hell of a game, craps,” I groped for some face-saving opener that straddled clear resentment and modest appreciation for her easing the downward pressure on our travel dollars.

          “Whatever works,” Sydney sniffed, cratering the skin of her mealy McIntosh, all fingers and thumbs. “My other passion is Baccarat. It’s so fast, so continental…so chemin de fer.  Like, crystal salons overlooking the Plage de la Croisette—I just love the dynamic. But you know what I mean.  You’ve been over there…I saw your photos.”

          “Yeah, been there, but not there…not even close.”

          At best, central Nevada was an undue course of cole slaw between the sirloin tips and prime rib of western America.  Beowawe, Willup’s poor relation several miles downroad, slowly set the table for further reflection and reassessment: mine on what this venture was costing phone wise; Syd’s more than likely on how it stacked up against airfare. Trailings of the Shoshone Range fed alluvially to the basin bottom, wizened hills that pulled like undertow at this gray, spackled sky.  Beneath them, a stubborn sheet of snow daubed broccoli crown sagebrush, barren rock formations and liver-spotted plateaus. Beyond I-80, the only perceptible movement came by white-frosted tumbleweed careening off range fences, or huge coiled copperheads dead eyeing ground hogs, squeezing out the last bit of sun to warm up their outcroppings.

          Barely easing 80’s tedium was a succession of road service gambling ghettos fronting as actual towns. Valmy, Galconda, Mill City, Winnemucca: All seemed to sneak onto the horizon under cover of low-profile mountain ranges, gaudy speed bumps tipping their hands with a prop wash of soaring gas signs, junked pick-ups, storm-torn house trailers and propane tanks tossed about wind-trashed pastures like rolls of used up bar coasters. The towering neon signage even leached out the gold-baby-golden glow of Battle Mountain.

          “Such a waste,” Sydney hiked up the sleeping bag, as if envisioning the Great Basin from a shade-drawn seat at 32,000 feet.

          “Roger that…”

          “I’m serious, there must be something more you want out of life,” she began rifling through my glove box, mostly maps and greasy rags.  “You could be doing so much better than this…”

          “Better than what?”

          “Than waiting for some eggheads to determine your future. Than crapping out in Nevada and calling poor Moon flat broke, that’s what.  She deserves a damn sight more…”

          “Me?!  You’re the…anyway, I can’t see how that’s any of your business.”

          “I’ll give you a hundred and forty-three reasons how.”

           Beyond the ground rock trailer parks and abandoned Sinclair stations, a night fallen I-80 reverted to white-striped sashes across endless square miles of barb-fenced rangeland. My headlights strained through buckshot highway signs, which pointed to networks of narrow gravel turnout roads tailing off toward skillet shallow valleys and stunted background hills.  Well shy of Imlay, the void became so overwhelming one’s imagination ran wild: Mule-size jackalopes grazing the scrub brush;  frosted tumbleweed careening off white triangular cattle guards that conjured a surreptitious range war on a Sergio Leone scale; giant Cephalopods and Vampire Squid battling ancient octopi and Ichthyosaurs in a long-vanished Triassic sea, its vast bed now little more than dead space for kraken fossils and burning visions down the pike.

          “Say, how about some tunes?” I plied the dashboard radio, spooked enough already by Regina’s misrouted message from Moon’. I flipped past local country stations, continuing to track the slow lane, a natural zoo of gophers, weasels and varietal vermin playing chicken with the squareback’s front wheels from the Brillo brush lining I-80’s outer shoulder.  Midway down the dial, the Blaupunkt went clear channel, pulling in sundown static snippets of AM powerhouses on the skip from Del Rio to L.A., deep-freeze warnings from Casper and Calgary, a Boise superhits seque into ‘Blues For Baby And Me’.

          “There, a little ol’ traveling music…Gon-na go west to the sea,” Syd sang.  “It’s not George Benson, but Elton’ll do.”

          “I guess—except too bad he’s turned into a butt farmer.”

          “Beg your pardon…”

          “You know, like an official size and weight tail gunner.” I coaxed the radio’s skip signals with diminishing returns.

          “Say that where we’re going, and you’ll know from tail gunning,” she spouted, tearing back into the snack bag, stuffing a Donette in my face.

          “C’mon, it was just a figure of speech” I mumbled.

          “Really, where is this coming from?  I’ll have you know, some of my dearest friends are…tail gunners!”

          “That right,” I stiffened, crumbs, powder flaking down to my jeans.  “Not that it’s any of my business or any…”

          “What an incredibly retarded thing to say.  This—from a sociologist, yet!”  She commandeered the radio.  “Maybe we’d better tune you into one of those redneck stations, while we’re at it.”

          “Jeesh, it’s common vernacular…”  Figures, ’hag and a bitch.  “Talk about no sense of humor…”

          “Hmph, Mr. Enlightenment here,” she slapped at the radio’s fuzzy speaker, and the cold air blowing in all around it.  “Does Moon know you talk like this?”

          “Guess we’ll have to call her and find out…” I clicked the Blaupunkt off altogether.  A creamy fourth-quarter moon had somewhat brightened the vast indigo sky, betraying stray wolves and coyotes chasing wild mice through twisted fencing, behind sagging, stripped-out gold mine shacks and Rorschach rock pilings.  Dispatched just as abruptly was the roadway romanticism of Taupin and John.

          “That won’t be necessary,” Sydney said, reconsidering out of the blue.  She tracked a shooting comet on its glidepath over Star Peak, which delivered her wistfully up to the wingtip lights of a westbound 747.  This whole thing must have lifted Lester’s stock significantly, and probably even did wonders for some bozo named Bernard.  “Just spare me the homophobia, will you please?  Like Daddo says, everybody’s got a little prejudice down in us somewhere. That for most people, it lies dormant for a lifetime.  But if it’s triggered, latent bigotry can seep out real ugly like.”

          “Well, would that we could render a quantitative analysis of that…”

          “So do it, prof—but are you talking about the prejudice or the bile?”

          “Whichever, I suppose…”

          Past Rye Patch Reservoir, I-80 slimmed back down by two lanes and a median.  There had been other two-way stretches since Wendover, yet this seemed the longest, and most foreboding.  Mangled road signs and piercing yellow flashers marked the construction detours as temporary, but rust and dry rot spoke like tree rings.  Soon the squareback’s misaligned headlamps ignited marble eyes all over the sagebrush.  Oncoming high beams vectored toward us, searing our own, blinding me to my three-gauge instrument cluster.

          Exploratory passes around slower taillights met with blinking parries by opposing semi-trailers doing the same.  Before long, white line fever broke into a siege of grill-splat consumption, shadowy desert varmints of all shapes and hoof-paw configurations feeding the shoulder pathology.  I could scarcely tell whether they were nuclear permutations from a game preserve to the south of us, or walking Darwinian fossils from the dead lava beds to the north.

          “Reclining Faith,” said Sydney, apparently less intimidated by encroaching wildlife than fascinated with the contour of the hills.

          “Reclining what,” I asked, the dark roar of a Utah-bound 18-wheeler throttling past my ear.

          “That mountain over there,” she pointed toward a rolling formation road signs labeled the Trinity Range.  “It’s so perfectly elliptical and jelled, the top’s a nipple all aroused.  The way that moonlight’s hitting it makes me think of my mother’s left breast, like when she’s kicking back on the lounger.”

          “Your…mother…” I braked sharply behind a weaving horse trailer, then grabbed for the chocolate milk—still cold as everything else in this forced-air freezer. “On a lounger…”

          “Sure, she still has an incredible bosom—large, beautiful papaya—uppies, no less.  God, I could kill her that she didn’t pass them on to me.  You should have seen her when she was my age.  But then you will, once we get to San Francisco.”

          “Sorry?”  I could have sworn I had just spotted Gable out there ropin’, rustlin’ Misfits and Norma Jean.  As a diversion, I recalled reading a magazine expose piece on all the wild horses roaming across Nevada and stuff, about how this one old woman led a battle against heavy-handed BLM roundups.  Yeah, bring that up; change the subject all right…damn, too late…

          “I’ve got a full photo spread Daddo took of her when they were just dating,” she said, relieving me of the hardened milk carton.  “They’re all over my walls, along with some sketches I did in art school.  She was my first figure study.  Fact is, Faith is my best friend on earth—we tell each other absolutely everything.”

          “Christ, I can’t even imagine,” I squinted at the dimming instrument cluster, then fiddled with the radio anew—imagination, curiosity all aroused.  What on earth possessed her to bring up such a thing?  “It’d be like seeing my own mother…”

          “Aahhh, don’t think so,” she smiled, craning over her shoulder, still marveling at the mound.  “But I do happen to know your tastes run to big-breasted women.  I know scads of interesting things about you…”

          “Yeah?  For instance…”

          “That you’ve also got some sort of thing for Leonard Cohen…and that you go totally psycho sometimes, and take it out on your dog.”

          “Aww, you don’t know…squat.”  I squelched the radio static one last time, cursing Moon, rubbing my eyes, clinging to road reflectors, seeing double everything along the yellow lines.

          “I know you better than you’ll ever know, flash,” she tapped my right hand.  “Like, who else sings ‘Sisters of Mercy’?”

          “W-w-wait, Moon told you about New Year’s, too?!”

          “Course, that’s what happens when you leave us hens alone.”

          Just as the shadows and apparitions most closed in, when an increasingly clouded moon doused the desert underbrush and turned the Trinitys and Buffalo Mountain into bleak, faceless forms, some distant lights began scrolling up on the black horizon. Red blinking antennae and water towers in turn sparked a pink-orange-purple phosphorescent glow: the 24-hour neon aura of Nevada’s next gas and gambling trap.

          “Coffee…gotta do a little coffee.” My noggin bounced off the red vinyl headrest, and I bowed lead-eyed before a shrine of 100-foot oil signs.  “And thaw my feet…”

          “Coffee, nothing…we’re calling it a night.”

          “No way,” I picked up on a mileage-exit sign for Sulphur and Tungsten.  “Fifteen minutes in this rest stop, and I’m ready to roll again.”

          “My treat, already. Where in bloody blazes are we?”

          “Signs say Lovelock,” I grappled with a figure study of the hypothetical sleeping configuration. “Bet the rooms are rip-off city…”

          “Mox nix…and who said anything about rooms?”

Care for more?

Chapter 12. Road worn, psychically torn,
some overnight fireworks lead them to
an unanticipated power surge… 

 

“Even if you gain a seat
             at the table, you may find 
            that the tables are turned.”

“Tell her I’m broke in Willup…”

“Hit me.”

           “And that Lawson’s out busting cokeheads. That it’s $142.50 and I barely have it, and I don’t want Ms. Rembrandt here to know. And tell her I don’t like where this is going one bit…”

          “Hit me again.”

          “Sure, Randy, is it?  Oh, wait.  I have a message for you from Melissa, too.  Everything’s going according to plan. And as soon as she’s finished working this awards luncheon, she wants to talk to you about the party…”

          “Push!”

          Back then, I had shot out of Bonneville like Challenger I, wishing that our land speed record were toppling as precipitously as my miles per gallon. Gunning up from the Salt Flats, I felt for several vicarious moments the wild abandon of Mickey Thompson, the death-wish recklessness of Ohio Art Arfons’ ‘Green Monster’ jet car, of Craig ‘Spirit of America’ Breedlove at 600 m.p.h. Sydney was not nearly so inspired, however—and the squareback wasn’t buying it at all. First, its fuel line knuckled. Soon the injector nozzles clogged up; then the fuel pump burst and froze.

          After blowing smoke so valiantly across the Nevada border, we were suddenly limping and sputtering on three fouled cylinders west of Wendover—Syd riding me the entire way to Palisade. We finally hit the wall outside Willup, shutting the Volks off altogether at a main drag gas station/casinette framed by an all-hours grain and gun shop and a boarded-over Western Tire. After a 100-mile overnight parts trip to Elko, the nearest Nevada outlet with an electric fuel pump in stock, I killed some down time here with sucker blackjack and this desperation call back to Boulder. “Ouch, you mean Ken…”

          “No, I think she specifically said Randy, I’m pretty sure.”

          “Fine, forget about it!  Damn, how can I be losing on some other guy’s hand…”  CLICK.  I had been bleeding red and white chips ever since returning on the Elko bus.  I’d stand pat hand after hand, waiting for a suede-fringed cowgirl dealer to pull a long overdue break and push. Probability theory, linear regression, law of averages, plain and simple luck of the draw: No dice, gambler’s fallacy, nothing seemed to work. Meanwhile, a hot streak of novice card-counters passed stool to stool, uncannily insuring soft hands, late surrendering hard. I just sat there with nary a clue, picking at old frayed green felt amid fan belt pulleys and tune-up kits, hitting too often on ten-value upcards, holding on fives and nines, as Wild Card Annie’s mechanic husband ran up a heavy repair tap next door. I finally resorted to betting on the stiff to my immediate left, not that it yielded any more of a pay-off.

          “Cleaned your clock, did they,” Syd soon met up with me midway between Grifter Gas’s gaming tables and the nearby public phones.

          “Yeah, yeah,” I groaned, “gotta settle up next door…”

          “Already did—all $142.50. Put it on my Gold Card.”

          “Really wish you hadn’t done that,” I returned to the table, picking up my depleted chip pile, pushing away one last losing draw.

          “Oh, like I’m supposed to wait here until a nit like you delivers?”

          For her part, Sydney’s plan had apparently been to Mastercard into a marginally decent motel room, to crease sheets and defrost her extremities through this pit stop at the Willup Motor Court. But she eventually caught fire in another casino next door—at a stingy, double-zero sort of roulette wheel geared to draining tourist drive-bys and relieving Willup’s seniors of their COLAs and disability disbursements with bankable regularity. She broke house rhythm via a silk-and-ivory panache gleaned from San Remo, doubling up on the corners, hedging by the dozens and columns. After cashing out, she rode her blazing hand down here to Grifter’s to spring the car.

          “I can’t believe you don’t carry any plastic,” she said, as we slipped between emphysemic Annie’s keno tables and a long rank of front-loaded slots.

          “Credit cards?  I don’t even have any credit—only overdue loans.” I negotiated floor displays of anti-freeze and multigrade oil, opening twin steel doors for her into the repair garage.  “But hey, that doesn’t mean I…Moon and I won’t repay you right off.  I’ve seen to it she already knows…I mean, I could probably fire off a Moneygram right this very minute.”

          “You just talked to Moon?” she asked, some quarter slots behind her firing chain-reaction whistles and sirens, making a dowdy former saddle stitcher’s day.

          “Uh, not exactly, but…” I was still wondering how even a snow brain like Regina could confuse names like Ken and…Randy.”

          “My, busy little fingers, haven’t we…”

          With that, she directed me out of Grifter’s fully gassed and lubed, back to The Busted Bronco: Willup’s largest family-style casino, billboards for which had been plastered like jumbo Burma Shave signs as far back as Silver Zone Pass. The Bronco shared a large corrugated steel shed with the business end of a Gamble’s catalog store and day-night IGA. Its coffee shop let to a roll-your-own art gallery of Doc Holliday, King Fisher, Mysterious Dave Mather and Calamity Jane—pretty as watercolor wanted posters—interhung with velvet cattle ropers from the Remington school. Trimmed in homebred horsehide and wagon wheels, the gallery opened forth to the teeming rawhide casino itself.  Therein, Syd herded me over to table number two.

          “All right, what’s your sign?”

          “Green—twenty five, can’t you read?  Press it…” Sydney said, nudging my elbow, shortly after we settled in with her fresh stack of chips.  “You going to make your point, or not…”

          “I’m trying, believe me, I’m trying…” One last shot for the road, she’d prodded, leading me from the coffee shop’s enormous stuffed white mustang to the heavier of Bronco’s action.

          “Twenty on the hard four,” shouted a retired range rider over his Early Times.

          “Back line,” Sydney shouted, adroitly slidehanding a major portion of her stack.  “Double down…”

          “Hands up, gentleman…lady…”

          Players wedged in around the craps table like porkers at the trough—riding the grinders, laying last-second hop, whirl and horn bets as if I actually knew my point from a waiting number. The boxman knew better, so did table three’s dealer and stickman. The latter slid a fresh tray of cubes toward me with a pick-any-two sneer and nod.  “OK, high-stakes, rip ’em good…”

          “Yes, roll with authority, speed,” Sydney said, thrumming her remaining chips.  “This one gets us to Treasure Island.”

          “Twenty-five bucks—totally insane,” I blew my cupped left hand unconvincingly before letting fly off the backboard.

          “It’s my money you’re betting, flash,” she said, upon release.  “And I happen to have faith in you.”

          “Seven misses,” the stickman barked instantly, his dealer cropping my bet away, plus most of the table, with the exception of Syd’s and that of one snickering old wrangler around the bend—the sort who might start shotgun sniping from the rooftops if his luck ran any worse.

          “Terrifique,” she smiled, hauling in a new load of chips.

          “Terrific?!  I just lost us twenty-five more,” I said, as the dice tray moved one shooter down amid a clockwise chorus of groans.  “And how the hell did you…”

          “By betting the backline, weren’t you paying attention?” She scooped up her two colorful stacks, motioning to the few whites I could still call my own.  “Grab those, before they take them for another half-ass bet…”

          “Backline, what’s…”

          “The don’t-pass line,” she aimed me toward the cashier.  “I bet fifty you wouldn’t make your point.”

          “You bet against me?!”

          “Pass-miss, for-against—what’s the diff?  We won, didn’t we?  Enough gas money to get us to Golden Gate Park.”

          “But how could you…”

          “After seeing you at blackjack, it seemed like better odds,” she cashed out at the window, finishing off a rum-touched Pepsi into the gallery. “I learned that little trick in Europe. Could have played it any number of ways—free odds, big eights—Daddo says that I’ve a great head for numbers—for an artist, anyway. But of course my favorite action’s the come-don’t come…”

          “Yeah, that’s just great.”  I grabbed some house mints, then fumed through The Busted Bronco’s front doors.  “You still pegged me for a loser.”

          “So what, that cowboy geezer did, too” she waxed, pulling up along side.  “Point is, you and I were a real team in there…”

Care for more?

Chapter 11. Coming up empty,
he hits the road again, but she is
decidedly steering the way…

 

 

“Be wary of a westward
trip, lest you trip over
stones far too hip.”

   Remnants of an earlier ice age began filling the squareback’s forward windows as we pressed westward along I-80, the southernmost of over 2,000 square miles of perhaps the most brackish water on earth. The Great Salt Lake swelled in short order to within inches of the well-leveed roadbed, seasonably vaporizing fresh mountain stream water into a corrosive mineral brine that left its chalky basin ring for miles around. This was all that remained of prehistoric Lake Bonneville, a vast inland sea, which once extended as far as Nevada and Idaho, reduced through post-glacial isolation to some six trillion stagnant tons of sulphur-stinking, ice watery salt. These days, it was Deseret’s Riviera.

“Tell you one thing, Moon’s the gutsiest woman I’ve ever known,” I said then, somewhat the personal epiphany—slipping this in, making it plain. “Kindest, too.”

“So put her up for a Medal of Honor, already,” Sydney replied, from the depths of her sleeping bag. “I realize full well Moon’s always been incredible, even with my brother.”

“What?!  I hear she was a total wreck with Lester…to the bitter end. She was still an emotional basket case when I met her…”

The lake’s Monte Carlo languished on a distant eastshore salt lick, an abandoned, largely gutted pleasure Palace—once a Coney Island of the West—now teetering on the end of an undulant boardwalk that long ago led to far better times. Casualty of some zealous after-hours hellfire and damnation, it was currently beset by rotted, long-listing sailboats that couldn’t have sunk in this water had they been the Bismarck or Andrea Doria. One charred, battered funhouse, ghostly remnants of its roller coaster, and a gaping slat loose pier: Save for patches of roadside service, here was the end of western civilization as Utah construed it for the next hundred miles or more.

“Now, wait a minute. I’m the first to admit Lester’s a jerk-off…I mean, now that he’s beached with my folks in Florida, they’ll probably never get him to leave.  He’s even more of a klutz than my ol’ beau, Bernard. But he didn’t do anything to Melissa, OK?  I guess, in his own dumb way, he only did what he thought he had to do for himself at the time.  Turned out to be the mistake of his life—maybe hers, too.  But whatever misery Moon’s suffered since then, she’s heaped totally upon herself…”

“That’s not her story.  She says she worked her tail off to help build Blintzberg’s.  Many’s a night she’s cried how she did all the prep and ordering while he was out schmoozing the parties. Then suddenly, he didn’t have any time for her at all.”

“It’s called networking, flash…the only way anybody makes it in the catering business.”

“You make it by making it with the customers?!  Sometimes when Moon’s down and moody, she still refers to her nemesis as sweet little Janis with the hot cross buns…”

The windshield began clouding, side windows were already fogged over in the colliding heat and cold.  Sydney wiped clean a crescent with her pink angora mitten; straining eyes right to catch specs of movement, any faint traces of wild buffalo and black-bellied plovers on the distant tip of Antelope, Salt Lake’s largest island.  She settled for flocking geese, sandpipers and brine flies until I wiped all of that away with broad, mannerless sweeps of a Wylie-monogrammed purple towel.

“Point is, dearest Melissa knew all about Lester when she married him,” Syd bristled at the distraction, more at having to defend her brother. “Besides, he says she drove him to it, kept trying to change him—like that ever works.  He says he wanted a marriage and Moon mostly wanted a partnership—probably could plug anybody into that.  She was always worried about losing the business or her home; she ended up losing both.”

“Yeah, your brother saw to that when he walked her through the divorce. But selling their business out from under her, and putting the proceeds right down on 20 acres near the Smokies. To this day, she hasn’t gotten over that one.”

“Think he has?  Janis deserted him after two months on the farm.”

Outward of Magna, the lake paled to a white on gray on tripe monochrome that defied all dimension and time.  Breaking cloud cover was to sandbars as snow banks were to shrimp-pelleted beaches and salt marshes in this rising sun-blanched continuum, which spread far beyond a spinal midlake causeway toward the surrounding Promontory and Hogup Mountains. For Syd’s part, the windows now could have iced up all around.  “Anyway, I’ve told poor Moon myself she was nuts to let Lester off so easy. I’d have nailed his skinny little keister to the barn.”

“You know she doesn’t have it in her to do anything like that,” I resented having to rehash her brother, at all.  “Lester knew it, too.  No wonder she ended up with zilch when he cashed it in…talk about irresponsible.”

“Oy, what about Moon’s responsibility…to herself?!  At some point, a person has to look after numero uno in this world. Daddo’s taught us that since we were little kids.  Anyway, how do you think they got launched in the first place?  My parents did everything they possibly could to help make that marriage work. And they’ve got the cancelled checks to prove it.”

“I wouldn’t know.  She just said it was Lester’s money.”

“Lester’s money,” Sydney scoffed. “They’ve always adored her, like another me—if not more.  The whole thing tears them up to this day. And it does Moon, too.  I don’t care what she tells you.  Given all that’s happened over the years, we’re still the only real family she’s ever had.”

“Yeah, well, it makes me no never mind.  I just know when my marriage bombed, the last people I wanted to see were her folks.”

“Your…marriage…”

Steam rose from the dead, shallow water like window voile, swirling with drifted snow to further peroxide the low background hills. Claw tracks along Salt Lake’s thin shoreline mudflats seemed magnified in their unchallenged isolation, as if this were one last province where the Pleistocene reigned.

“But that’s pretty sure not to happen in this case,” I continued, backfire overshooting a rusted fastback Marlin. “Moon thinks you and your parents are the greatest, too.”

“Uh-huh, but her man always comes first.  Like with this trip—I know she wants it to be for your sake as much as mine—maybe open you some new doors. Is that your thinking?”

“My thinking?  Damned if I know,” I drifted. “Especially after the ol’ Sosh faculty squeeze play—and then talking to Lawson…”

A Triassic mood-set was soon dispelled by the sobering Lakeside Mountain range and dull roar from a Wyoming-bound ore train slicing Salt Lake along the Lucin-Ogden causeway. These dismal wind-worn hills sponged in the lake’s southwestern reaches, shadowing mixed shoals of terns, herons and cormorants growing fat on a diet of brine shrimp and grub flies—the only life worth living in waters bordering on double-digit sodium chloride.

“What about him?”

“He thinks I should be up building on a piece of land or something, instead of wasting my time doing…this…”

“Oh, like just subdivide off brain-dead onto some quarter acre to breed.”

“Huh? No, he just meant, you know, settle down…”

“In good old lilywhite Boulder…”

Beyond the otherwise dead interior sea, Utah’s greatness turned to dust. If nothing else, steamy farina water masked the desert’s barren floor, hinting like a fan dancer that there at least might have been something more fruitful just below. The Lakeside Range demonstrated with the bluntness of a vice raid that this bleakness knew no bounds.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, no-thing,” she sighed. “Maybe you just need a little more cultural diversity, that’s all.”

“Hey, I’m as diverse and liberal as the next guy.  I’m a sosh major, OK?”

“Yeesh, I can’t believe you’re still thinking like such a…student.”

Interstate 80’s unwavering westward lanes seemed to hit bottom just outside Low, a sandblown pit stop that looked out on this vast parsley sprigged chalk garden barely cloaked in a fresh skin of snow, which the salt was largely eating away upon contact. Rimming the flat, glossy sand was an acne-scarred ridge of mountains, rotting tyrannosaurus teeth, casting a Plutonic pellicle over a firing range landscape long frozen in natural neglect.  More mesmerizing yet were the closer distractions, as in counting the telegraph poles and barbed wire fence stakes hugging the shoulders.  Then came the deep, desperate skid marks, slicing and angling into bloody, feathered decay—picked over by crows big as dromedaries—my forehead soon dropping to within several oily hairs of the Volks’s steering wheel.

As we approached the Salt Flats themselves, Syd found me dozing off altogether, to where she couldn’t tell whether the squareback was balking again or my foot was slipping off the gas.  “Hey, pull over,” she said, “this is something we’ve just got to do.”

She shed the sleeping bag like so much snakeskin, rolling out the car door before I could slide to a full halt along the breakdown lane.  Head falling to horn ring, I glimpsed her bounding out onto the hoary Bonneville lakebed as if Aldrin or Armstrong on Apollo 11, her disco boots going anti-gravity as she beckoned me.  “Come on,” she shouted, “you can’t see anything in there!”

The periwinkle sun now lit up this crusty sand like Zambonied stadium ice—steaming snow patches, shadowing craters, weed pods and wheel ruts into an abraded span of wasted terrain—which only riveted drive-by attention to the rocks. Abhorring nature’s vacuum, sensory starved interstate travelers had long taken to rearranging clumped rubble and sediment into a few choice words—verbiage via stray stones—creating a debris-mail message center that spoke volumes about the boredom logged on this long psychological toll road.  I followed her, between conscious lapses, out the corner of my eye. Blond waves flouncing, red ski jacket flapping in the winter wind: She scurried from note to note, pilfering gitrock letters from ‘Busting Butt for Bakersfield’, heisting sandstone serifs from ‘Vicky Vagina from North Carolina’, barely denting the literal acres of stone drivel that defaced western Utah like graffiti in fresh cement.

“What’s to see,” I grabbed my sheepskin jacket, spun out the driver’s door into the teeth of an onrushing mail truck. Righting myself, I tread lightly onto the chalkboard, its half-frozen sand crunching like Styrofoam beneath my frigid hiking boots.

“Here, I want to have a word with you,” she beamed, side kicking surplus dolomite, directing me through dense scrawls of lewd limericks and senseless shorthand.

“Dyb,” I scraped sand out of my eyes.  “What’s this?”

“It’s, like, Yiddish,” she took pride in authorship, quickly composing more letters of piecemeal breccia and adamant.  “And you’ll want to follow along, flash. People say I’m damn near psychic about these things.”

“Really…well.  I got my fill of that nonsense over Thanksgiving.”

“So I’ve heard,” she smirked, “I want to hear all about that…”

“Oh, it was nothing, totally absurd,” I spilled unexpectedly with little prior restraint, sidearm skimming excess verbiage.  “Blew Boulder for the long weekend to clear my head, took 80 west all the way to Frisco, winding up on Broadway near those old beatnik places.  Soon as I parked, this Cara person handed me a flyer for some nearby astrology center under my windshield wiper.  It started raining like crazy, so I ducked upstairs.”

“You mean North Beach…” Syd scurried about for formative stones, slapping my hand as I cocked to throw away more.

 “I guess. Anyway, the rest was too bizarre to go into…” I juggled my car keys, fingering a blue-red ceramic charm that dangled precariously from its silver clasp.

(KNOW MORE/KNOW LESS: Here, Return to the Homepage
 for the Saturn ‘Session’ in full, or simply read on…)  

“Sure, Pattern on the Trestleboard, a sociologist should know these things.” She stooped to round off a descender on the word she was fashioning in the stones. “Incidentally, that is one humongous key ring you’re slinging there—you a janitor on the side or something?”

  “Yeah, well not quite,” I spelled and counted letters under my breath. “Anyway, right when I got up there a rocksalt voice thunders out from behind two Malaysian screens about this Richard guy’s straying from his lesson plan. I peek around the black screens, and there’s this shriveled old woman perched atop a winged wicker throne. Her unraveled wig kept creeping up her forehead as she frowned, exposing her own matted hair. She had these wire-rimmed bifocals dangling off her right ear, and her bright red lipstick smeared to the left. but when she started talking, I found myself sitting down on her lumpy ottoman to listen up…”

“That so,” Syd final kerned her word, which gradually took on the heavy dullness of lunar basalts as the sun ducked behind fleeting mélanges of blue-gray clouds. “Listened, to what?”

“Some happy horseshit about Saturn, this whole spiel about how it’s the second largest planet in the solar system, and that Galileo first discovered it has four icy rings, the two big outer ones split by a 2,200 mile gap called Cassini’s Division. She rattled on that Saturn makes one complete revolution around the sun every 29.458 years—only three times in a person’s life. She said it takes that long to pass through all the signs of the Zodiac. Which means it takes 29 years or so to return to where it was the moment you were born.  After a nasty coughing jag, she warned that Saturn Return can end up good or bad, depending on whether a person’s prepared to pass from childhood to adulthood—like in my case, whether I was ready to become a man at 29.”

“Well,” Sydney mocked, “what’s the verdict, doc, are you?”

“Give me a break…anyway, I’m laughing that off when she grabs my knee and says I’d better pay heed, because my first bout with the ringed one was layin’ for me around the bend. That it happens to everybody, and most people don’t have a clue what hit them.  And how some horrible things can happen when you get to 29, not to mention 58, or god forbid, 87.  She carried on about how Saturn forces you to reflect and challenges all your assumptions. Then she handed me this goofy…talisman she called it, and soaked me $20.  I go, what kind of scam is this?!  The whole deal weirded me out, so I paid up and got my ass right back on the road home.”

“There, that about does it,” Sydney kicked an errant comma across some free verse from Thoreau. “Check that out…”

“Dybbuk, what the hell’s de-book?”

“You could look it up sometime” she proofread carefully. “It’s a term I heard my bubbie say once, about Lester—comes to mind for some reason as I think of you.”

“Uh, great. Now, what say we just go…” Cloud cover thickened, the chilling westerlies picked up and eraser dusted the Flats. “This stoneyard is giving me eyestrain.”

“OK—but I can’t believe you didn’t stop here before,” she shivered, walking me back toward the car, stepping gingerly between multi-color rock gardens of tired Lightfoot lyrics and biblical notations, into the second and third stanzas of ‘Ode To The End Of The Earth’.

“Drove through at night, that’s why…all hopped up on Mountain Dew.” I looked back at a sand devil swirling like a dark wooden top over her creation, until she tugged at my jacket to reclimb the shoulder toward the car. “Question is, how did you see it…don’t tell me you rode a Greyhound…”

“Don’t be silly,” she said, hair brushing the rose in her cheeks, gesturing for me to open her door. “Daddo drove…”

Care for more?

Chapter 10. Breakdowns in
communication mean dealing with
some brash bucking of the odds…

“Making for the open road,
differing doors can creak open,
manifesting a much heavier load.”

         “Dope? You Mr. Rock Solid dealt his way through law school?”

          “Lawson was a tight end at UCLA with a blown-out knee, all right? But he wasn’t going back to Nebraska for anything. So he lawyered himself up, and now he’s up in Center Creek, busting cokeheads all over Lassiter County…and he’s still a good friend.  Damn, I’ve got to free up these pedals…”

          “Tight end—great, just a big dumb football player.  Some friends you’ve got…and what exactly are you doing down there?”

          The wages of disinformation had begun consuming us over blueberry buckwheats and red-pepper poached eggs in some fringe anti-Christian café.  Small talk bounded from covert phone calls to my selectively recalled saga over the Divide.  Sydney answered my positive spin with a breakfast polemic that continued on out Salt Lake City’s T-square predictable side streets, well beyond its flat, tree-patchy, snow melting environs to where drive-thru liquor marts met the fairgrounds and quick-sale motels.  Little else of consequence was said back onto Interstate 80, where incoming tri-jetliners strafed over on approach to Salt Lake International’s 35-North, drawing Syd’s dissonant sighs and muttered cravings for airline food.  Thereabouts she pulled the sleeping bag back  around her ski sweater, scrunching up, bracing her knees against the dashboard for a long drive west with the conviction that whatever I was up to was not likely to generate any more heat.

          “Yeah, well, Moon thinks Lawson Bennaker is aces, too.”  I yanked back and forth on the compact’s pedal cluster, one eye on the highway, as we neared an industrial park construction site beyond the airport.  Right when it appeared, and I had freed my brake pedal, the accelerator sunk to the floor.  “Damn, now it’s stuck.”

          “Hmph, I can’t believe that’s what she really thinks…look out!!!”

          One of the site’s gravel haulers had gathered a head of steam up some makeshift access road for its ramp run onto the interstate, spitting snow, hitting the shoulder at roughly the same time my squareback stampeded that way.  The grossly mismatched vehicles converged on I-80’s breakdown lane like cornet and Sousaphone players at a Rosebowl halftime show.  I swerved sharply, sidling up parallel to the blaring dump truck for an instant, then bounding desperately toward the median strip, a gaper’s clot of startled traffic braking several car lengths behind.  The trucker peeled off nimbly rightward, powershifting down 80 West with angry horns, leaving my stalling Volks to rollerskate onto an inner shoulder, along a slushy slick backwash of leaking landfill.

          “You OK,” I heaved, clutching the steering wheel as my car ground to a halt and died, its load of Sydney’s baggage shifting, then resettling sharply back and forth.

          “Magnifique,” Sydney wriggled upright in her seat like protozoa in a Petri dish, just far enough to straighten her hair and black leotards.  “Now, I’ll thank you to get me to the airport.”

          “Well, at least my throttle cable’s loosening up,” I goosed the gas pedal while avoiding the passing stares of surging traffic. “Say what?!”

          “I said I want you to drop me back at the airport.” She twisted the rearview mirror toward the passenger seat, licking traces of cherry red lipstick off her fine front teeth.  “You don’t think I’m going another mile in this deathtrap, do you?”

          “Sure, fine,” I cranked the wagon, glancing over my shoulder, buckwheat heartburn setting in.  “That’s the way you want it, you wrestle all your crap into the terminal.  Far as I’m concerned, I can’t wait to phone Moon and get back to Boulder…”

          “Moon—yes…phone…Moon,” Syd paused.  She followed my glance aft wagon to her scattered luggage as the last standing suitcase toppled in the sidedraft of a passing Greyhound.  Then she poked my shoulder, suddenly bursting into a smile.  “Got-cha!  I was just jo-king…”

          “I don’t see what’s so damn funny.” I fuel injected the engine, pressure tested the brakes.

          “All that academia’s zapped your sense of humor or what?”  She twisted the mirror toward me once again, tapping my knee, then slithered back down into the sleep bag.  “C’mon, let’s quite spinning our wheels here and get rolling again…”

          “What say we stick with your airport plan…”  Suddenly I hated this. And I wasn’t much into her act either. That I knew—intuitively, intellectually—her thermal reactor temperament and gyroscopic ways; it roiled up like grease-fried sausage.  I even hated myself for being here with her, then hated myself more for baggin’ on her so fast—damn, where was this all headed?!  Wasatch snow peaks and Temple Square shadowed my side mirrors as I accelerated onto I-80, to the heavy horn of an onrushing Monte Carlo.  I did want to call Melissa and ask her straight out how she could get me into this shit.  Better yet, how did sister superior here wheedle Moon into getting me into it?

          I picked that sore all the way out past the low-lying Stansbury Mountains, backdrop to the dingy quarries and salt plants west of Salt Lake City, a thicket of tall, pencil-thin smokestacks coughing anthracite gray billows into an already hazy sky.  Red pepper, blueberry syrup: the whole thing left a dry, brackish taste in my mouth.  Still, I pressed ahead in silence on Melissa’s behalf, fidgeting with the squareback’s balky gas linkage, stealing an occasional glance at this bindle of headaches rustling beside me, drawing up into her fetal mode. So help me, I came this very close to reaching over and full-speed shoving her out the door.

          “Why don’t you just kick it into cruise control,” her voice muffled through alternating layers of rayon and ruffled feathers. “It’s a straight shot from here to Nevada…thing seems to have a mind of its own anyway…a whole lot more than a heater.”

          “Cruise control?  Don’t press your…” I bit hard and retreated into the rearview mirrors.  “Think it’ll be OK now…”

          “Better be. You have my precious life in your hands,” she re-braced her knees against the glove box. “Broadsiding through the Rockies was bad enough, but that last little move was too much, even for me…”

          “You knew about the spinout up by Steamboat?  But you were snoring worse than my father does about then.”

          “I can snore with my eyes open,” she said, snaking her hands up out of the Frostline bag toward her brow.  “Can even turn my eyelids inside out and bend my fingers over the tops of my knuckles.  I can do all sorts of twisted things when need be…” Whatever else, she acted as though she knew this terrain like the back of her hand.  Dead flat, runway straight: just jam a broom handle through the steering column and brick down the gas.  Strange part was she knew Melissa knew the basic terrain, as well—throw friends together, stir in the stock. Yet school had let out, and here we all were. Curiouser and curiouser: As Brigham Young’s Deseret dissolved in her door mirror, this seemed to placate yet perturb her no end.

          I hastily averted toward the sooty salt piles, the snowy, butchered hills that tapered down by steam shoveled gradients into the broad abject emptiness of Great Salt Lake Basin.  Syd responded by drawing up the strings of her sleeping bag.  With each mile marker, sniffs of acknowledgement met with nodding resignation. Things she didn’t want to talk about sideswiped things I didn’t want to hear, but something had to give, so I plowed through the impasse.  “Hey, I’ve seen worse.”

          “That some sort of compliment?”

          “No, I mean spinouts, close calls…like, with Moon.  When we first caravanned out to Boulder from Chicago, I was leading us along I-70 in this heap; she was pulling a U-Haul with her Toyota. Halfway through Kansas, we hit this hellaceous ice storm—about four inches thick, glowing in the road lights. But Moon was going along great, flashing me with her brights…”

          “What, no CB radios?” she resurfaced, from the crew neck up.

          “Right, roger that,” I snipped, resisting her resistance, then signaled to pass a laboring potash hauler with the care and deliberation due this half-thawed stretch of interstate.  “Anyway, we were crawling along, crosswinds pushing us lane to lane.  Before I knew it, some semis roared by, hemming us in. Soon as the last one blew past, I checked my mirrors, and she was jackknifing in the backdraft. All of a sudden, her left rear snow tire shoots off…whole wheel bounced across the median strip in front of an oncoming motor home. I was sure the trailer was going to flip, but she steered the whole rig under control somehow, then skated off to the side. I pulled over, chased the wheel while she dug out her tools and jacked up the Toyota—fully loaded, yet.  It was incredible, she did the whole damn pit stop herself…Moon can be amazing that way…”

          “I know better.  Melissa is more like a little nestling in this world, a precious hummingbird who needs protection above all,” she replied, surveying the littoral landscape up ahead. “That what you’re aiming to be, Kenneth—her fill-in father protector?”

          “Naw, that’s not the Moon I know.”

          “Hmph, call that great?”

          “Sorry?”

          “That…lake,” she idly pointed through the wing vent, burying her nose.  “When next I open my eyes, please make this be Tahoe…”

Care for more?

Chapter 9. Lunarscape dead ahead,
with some coarser things perhaps
better left unsaid…

 

“Crossing a higher rubicon
may bring saints in
creeps’ clothing…”

                   “Listen, regular guys do things with guys. Women do their things with women…know what I’m sayin’?”

“S-sure, I think so…but what does that even mean?”

“That women might do things with the guys sometimes. But I’m telling you, regular guys just don’t go doing women things with women.  And what about Moon, how is she…”

“I’m doing this for Moon. A direct personal favor. She owes me big-time this time, Lawson, I’ll tell you that.”

Back then, Boulder’s bank thermometers had dropped steadily, a three-point barometric swing greasing the atmospheric slide. The midnight blizzard eventually muscled its way over the Front Range like a high hurdler chasing endorsements—erasing roads, cramming down fissures and canyons, drubbing solar collectors, ripping entire rooftops off houses far into the valley before delivering the vast unspent bulk of its arctic throw weight upon the Kansas and Nebraska plains. Boulder calcified in the space of a 3 a.m. toss and turn.  Stapleton Airport closed quicker yet, prompting Sydney to phone coldly from Lorraine’s: “Morning, shmorning…what are we going to do about this?!”, as if my groggy cognitive powers extended any farther than the cabin’s snow-caulked window panes.

 Wouldn’t fly in such weather if Her Life depended on it, she concluded. But apparently it did—and she had to get back—simple as that. We negotiated knee-deep over the details, from Chautauqua Park to the priceless split-level aeries she kept appraising upon climbing Flagstaff hill. Melissa finally had to break the deadlock via patched together conference call, marooned as she was at the Coach Light Inn, out there on the Longmont Diagonal, with mountain skies brooding anew.

  ‘’Greyhound?!  It’s Sydney,’’ Moon insisted, as if sipping cocoa, splitting omelettes at Dot’s Diner, or munching carrot sticks in the Cabin there with us.  ‘’She’s family, remember? So pack up her stuff in your car—and leave poor Seamus for me in his doghouse. You’ve got nothing better to do around here right now, anyway.  Make nice and behave yourself, Kenny—maybe some more road time and a little travelin’ music will do you some good. And call me the minute you get to San Francisco. and I’ll take care of the rest.”  Therein she left things flowing, but not before godspeeding Sydney with a qualified verbal wink and nod.

“Awww, why didn’t you stay put and get to real work—scrape something together around here like everybody else. No shit, this is where it’s happening. Think about it, Herbert—a guy has to build his nest first, and then the birds’ll come flocking.  Anyway, if you’re looking for gold, you’re a century too late, and if you’re just off truckin’ to Hashbury , it’s been done to death. I know, I’ve been out there.”  

“What, birds?  I’m giving her a lift…just a few days, max,” I said.  “Fact is, I don’t want to be doing this at all, Lawson. But it’s way beyond that, believe me.” The hour-plus it took me to load Sydney’s cargo had paid off in greatly enhanced traction down the road: none too insignificant a factor, given the refreezing turnpike plow path into Denver.  She yawned near Larimer Square that she had pulled a telephonic all-nighter with Faith across the time zones—and that if any city could put her to sleep, this be it.  She then wrapped herself in my downfill sleeping bag, leaving a wake-up call for anywhere west of the Bay Bridge toll plaza.

At first I was beside myself—humming, revving, prodding her with AM oldies, honking fraternally to the snow-laden big rigs hauling slabbed beef to Denver packing houses. Still, Sydney’s deep sleep had proved more remedial by the mile, snuffing any static when Interstate 70 headwinds blew us all but back to Rocky Flats, or when my slushy misread of the Route 40 turn-off led to the Stanley Slide Path at 11,000 feet and gusty avalanche whiteout of Berthoud Pass.

She snored brazenly away as I pressed into blinding storm columns stacked up along the Continental Divide, then broadslid around a backcountry switchback between Tabernash and Steamboat Springs.  Long ultradian down rhythms even laid her out through my free skid in Wasatch side winds below Parley’s Summit, rear view mirrors filled with the airhorn glare of a gaining Freightliner.  If only her REM waves could have carried us beyond the Wally Basom Memorial Rest Area.

 “I dunno, Herbert…don’t hear from your for aeons.  Then you call me collect like this, from Utah—Plygville, of all places.”

“Uh, sorry about the damn Tabernacle music…really, Lawson, been meaning to touch base.  Anyway, we’re not talking major bankroll, just a little friendly back up. See, I blew this pressure sensor coming through Emigration Gap. After this, I’m down to basic gas money, and Moon’s tapped out ’til mid-month.  Something else goes, I’ll be nailing up a mailbox in front of the thing.

The rest area had claimed to overlook Salt Lake basin. But with the zero pre-dawn cloud ceiling, I could scarcely tell.  I’d sputtered into Basom Memorial heavy of lids—eyes swelling, ears popping, feet freezing as I parked and collapsed over the steering wheel.  Just then, Sydney unzipped the sleeping bag to periscope steaming cars, fuming semi’s, the icy ten-foot stalactites dripping from visitor center rooflines, no suspension bridge in sight.  With that, she laid claim to the driver’s seat, but the choking Volks wouldn’t restart for anything, not even Her.

Kicking free of the patched green sleeping bag, she had lit out for aid, first pounding on the van next door.  A bearish HVAC contractor in an Oakland Raiders cap and jacket offered to push start the wagon, if only I’d come to.  Sydney saw to that with a vengeance, then vamped her way into the escort van—jouncing, clapping to stereo country all warm and cushy as the truck shoved my lurching squareback down a steep, winding grade to Salt Lake City.  She was clearly pleased with her little hustle, until the Raider fanatic motioned me with linebacker eyes to follow his snowy wake spray toward a downtown repair garage, then looked to prove handier than she had bargained for by possibly running a clammy end-around into her leotards.

 “So what about that artist you’re carting around?”

“Gold-plated pain in the ass.  Still, I can’t ask her to pay.  A regular guy can’t do a thing like that, right?”

 “Yeah, you’re real aces, Herbert. But Utah, the San Francisco Gay Area with some feminist fatale—damn, where’s it all headed?”

“C’mon, can I count on you?  A little friendly cover—like maybe a Moneygram, if need be, just in case. And we’ll cover you right back. I mean, don’t leave me beholden to this one…”

Sydney had bolted from the dented, duct-taped van as soon as we reached a foreign repair shop off State Street, screaming something awful about karmic kickbacks and paybacks. I offered the Oakland-bound contractor an obligatory fiver, but she wouldn’t hear of it, refusing to discuss the matter until after a decent breakfast, if at all. Before she could rescue her new custom Vuarnet sunglasses, the Raider faithful had fishtailed away, snow splattering us several short blocks from Temple Square.

 “Backup, Herbert…deep backup…”

“Positively last gasp, Lawson.” This ensuing phone call was pure spur-of-the-moment, a little personal AAA, long-distance reassurance that my disoriented flyer westward was cleared by ground control, which was answered with a ‘Don’t Californicate Colorado’ sneer. Lawson Bennaker had been that since the early days in immigrant landing, orienting Moon and me to Boulder even as he himself grappled with moving away—specifically to an up-country deputy sheriff’s badge after four times failing the Colorado bar exam.  “I swear, I’ll even send you a postcard.”

“Save me the quarter.”  CLICK.

“Morning, sir, may we help you find your way,”  smiled a matched set of peach fuzzy young Mormon cadets in shiny black suits, as I folded open the glass and aluminum door.  Steadfastly beaming, the baggy duo pinned me half in, half out of the phone booth.  They were but two of myriad walkie-talkie cadre patrolling the walled-in compound, skulking about sacred gardens, behind larger-than-life statues of founder Joseph Smith and the Latter-Day Saint who performed the real miracles: Brigham Young.  “Did you know Lord Jesus is thy savior?”

The booth stood alone between a visitor center and the six-spired Temple itself. It was plainly targeted for ongoing surveillance by the post-missionary god squad as they assembled tour groups near Eagle Gate, or whisked naysayers and spiritual infidels off the South Temple grounds. I averted the cadets’s probing stares by tracing this incessant choir music to the Tabernacle’s 11,000-pipe organ and sanctified silver dome.  “Please, sir, will you be joining our tour?”

“So, what’s this about,” Sydney sprang from the nearby visitor center, almost as quickly as from that van, her critical fascination with its aggrandizing Christian murals and dioramas having apparently crumbled under the cumulative weight of their biblical theme.

“Was, uh, calling a friend of mine,” I muttered, just bleary and unshaven enough to fear banishment out of hand. “Then these two…”

“What…friend,” she parted the cadets with a wave of some color brochures and reprints from ‘The Book’ and ‘Doctrine and Covenants’. “Honestly, only in a place like Utah. I’ve seen all I want to see. Now I know why I never stopped in before. Can’t even find a decent soda around here without getting a local sponsor and signing your life away. ”

“Ah, excuse us,” I said, with audible relief, following Syd along scrubbed, snow-cleared walkways out the medieval Eagle Gate, the cadets devoutly sniffing our trail. “Anyhow, Lord Jesus didn’t much save Gary Gillmore from a Utah firing squad last year, now did he?”

“I’m so used to being where people look so young,” she said over her shoulder, morning fresh from ablutions in the center’s convenience, fully reassembled and realigned. “Here, even the teenyboppers look like cretins. Must be the sacred underwear, and those loopy drop-rim eyeglasses that they wear.”

“Awww, could be the sour Scots in them. And I know a little something about sour Scots—the single malt, clannish tartans, lumpy haggis and all, ” I said, as we left Temple Square altogether, not least its pious, gray-blazered Orrins buzzing around, hatching their persecuted little plots. Two elder guides delivered us over toward the Church’s soaring steel-and-concrete monuments to Mormon abstinence and enterprise. Deacons and disciples alike had been passing the golden plates ever since Brigham Young’s tormented converts first lugged their handcarts over the mountains, to where most of downtown was now under title, with plenty more highrises and shopping malls in the divining stage. The guides eagerly ushered us out of Mormon Central—grinning, blessing, still hauling the hod—the more weary among them cursing under already liquored breath.

“This whole scene is so pompous, and with the proselytizing—not even the true biblical faith, don’t you think?”

“Me? What do I know? Religion doesn’t do much for me nowadays,” I dodged.

“So you’re one of those agnostic heathens, or what…”

“No, just have a little suspension of misbelief,” I said, peering over to a massive library-like building across Temple Square from the cathedrals. “Though I hear they’re finally admitting blacks this year. And they’re supposed to be good with the whole genealogy thing.”

“Hmph, plus they have this nasty habit of proxy baptizing Holocaust victims.  But catch this…” Sydney began reading from a reprint as we headed for the Church-owned State Street Garage. “’Men are that they might have joy.’  You know what that means: women, plenty of them. This Smith guy said God himself told him to do harems…and it still goes on around here to this day with all these plain ugly jack Mormons. No wonder they call themselves, ‘More, man’.  The whole Utah scene’s so incredibly racist and sexist.”

“Damn, my car better be ready…”

“Intriguing concept, though,” She tossed the handouts into a Tabernacle Choir-sponsored trash can. “People over a hundred years ago building this whole religion thing around that.”

“Around what?”

“Plural spiritual marriage, sister wives—you know, holy polygamy…”

Care for more?

 Chapter 8. Navigating saline Utah
 in nothing flat, lives are plumbed
more deeply, relationships reviewed…

 

 

 

(Know more/know less:
Ditto to the preceding chapter.
Again, read now or need later.)
____________________

“Saturn comes a callin’,
bearing take and give,
its re-entry aiming to 
hit you where you live.”   

           “Anyway, you were saying, Moon?”

           “Just that he’s been such a yo-yo lately. It’s getting so it’s about all I can do to keep him in the middle of his ups and downs.  Sometimes, I think his grad school gig is the only thing that keeps him from coming unglued. And it’s only gotten worse since his birthday…”

          “Really?” Sydney asked, back at Melissa’s kitchen table, leafing through ‘The Joy of Cooking’, pulled randomly from that overhead bookshelf. “So, how old is he?”

          “Just turned 29,” Moon sighed, over the steam kettle whistle for some milder Celestial tea.  “Around that time, he was getting so hyper, said he just wanted to hit the road, drive until his head cleared. It was Thanksgiving break, and I remembered what you wrote me last year about an astrologer who did your charts. So I told him, go to San Francisco or someplace, see somebody like that—couldn’t hurt.  All I knew was he was about to drive me up the wall around here.”

          “Ah, Saturn Return—the Big 2-9.  Crossroads time—that, I’ve heard plenty about, ’cause you know, we’re not that far away from it ourselves,” Syd glanced up to a small framed color photograph of a close-cropped familiar face in civvies, leaning against the famed Abbey Road stone wall. “Anyway, good thing I was out of town.  So did he?”

          “Wouldn’t say, one way or another, even got sort of Scorpio secretive about it.” Melissa poured two fresh cups of Mellow Mint, then spun back to her chipped tile counter tops as though they were prep tables at the Hotel Boulderado.  “The sad part is, I had figured our relationship was secure enough for the New Year’s thing. I figured he figured it, too.”

          “Not to mention Celeste and Jimbo…”

          “Don’t remind me.  I mean, we were all adults, and everything. I thought Kenny and I were of like mind that trust and sharing are the most important ingredients in keeping two people together, growing stronger…as long as the relationship is built on love.” Moon momentarily diverted to putter with the kitchen branch of her domesticated jungle. “I’ve prided myself on that with him—particularly after the fiasco with Lester.”

          “Oy, Lester,” Sydney sifted through some post-holiday bakery from an old Coke tray Moon had already set out in the center of the round kitchen table  “He joined us in Florida, you know…coming down from the farm to grace us with his presence. Now there’s a real basket case for you. I’m almost ashamed to admit the schlemiel’s my brother…but he is, no matter what, so…”

          “Well, he’s not for me anymore…” Moon busily pruned a thicket of onion bulbs, avocado starters and hothouse tomatoes, rooted in a rusting kitschy collection of rusting cocoa and coffee tins.  “I’m not at all interested in double jeopardy, especially with Lester Mendel…”

          “I told him I might see you, Moon. He asked me to wish you well, and tell you that he still cares very much. Says he might even try to call you sometime, yadda, yadda, yadda…”

          “Wouldn’t want to hear it if he did,” Melissa said sharply, now making for the refrigerator on kitchen cruise control, wiping her hands on her blue daffodil-print peasant dress.  She opened the brown enameled icebox, her crocheted sleigh and Kringle decorations slipsliding on their door magnets with the sudden centrifugal force.

          “I suppose,” Sydney sighed, plucking away at some messy fruitcake with her hot pink nails.  “I just still can’t see what really happened to you two—how the hell he let you get away.  For that matter, neither can Faith—it eats her up inside, like a major loss in the family.”  She seemed to dwell for a spell on the cluttered fertility of the kitchen—inventive yet organically practical— much like her mother’s at home, domestic skillsets Faith would never let her ever-so-gifted daughter deign to pursue.

          “That’s because you never saw the shout-a-thons,” Melissa pulled out a scuffed Tupperware container and Saran-wrapped plate of chopped vegetables. “Much as I miss you and your folks, I’d never want to go through that again.”

          “You’re still family, Moon,” Sydney insisted, downing a thin sliver of prune Danish, then rising to rinse out her tea mug in the web-cracked porcelain sink. “Remember what Faith always says, ‘water seeks its own level…’”

          “I know, I know…‘and people should be so wise.’” Moon arranged a platter of pre-chopped broccoli and carrot sticks into neat concentric circles, topped with some slightly overripe cherry tomatoes.

          “Trouble is, who knows who’s on the level anymore.” Syd then moved on the refrigerator herself, reaching in for a glass of apple juice, sizing up some Pearl Lager and a cluster of tin foiled remains. “Or who’s taking on water.”

          “I just know I’ve got a nice thing going right here.” Moon dipped back into the fridge, pulling out the tin foiled wads. She peeled back their silver wrappings, revealing various trimmed swads and slices of broiled prime rib, New York cut and filet mignon. All were courtesy of the Coach Light Inn; she smuggled them home nightly, like a mother redbreast feeding her nest.  “No matter what I say, more often than not, he can be so sweet and grounded. It’s something you can get real hooked on…”

          “Yes, sounds pretty saccharine icky to me.”

          “But it’s not just me.  Kenny’s had his fill of relationship combustion, too.” Everything else on Melissa’s daily menu she either stewed, baked, or cultivated herself—not to mention her pantry stash of canned preserves. Truth be told, she’d been covering rent, holding this household together by wits and grit longer than she dared recall. “He even got into it with his ex, Cassie, when she called him Christmas Eve.”

          “His ex still calls him,” Sydney sipped her unfiltered juice, glancing out the rear kitchen window toward the northbound lay of foothills—tapering winter-worn serrations stretching to greet a mounded cumulonimbus cloud formation brooding down by way of the Arapahoe timberline. “And you put up with that?”

          “It’s not my place not to. At least he and I understand each other about these things.  He’d feel the same about anybody in my past. Besides, she’s no threat, believe me.  In fact, I answered the phone, and she’s sort of real uptight and needy, sounded like a kid crying in the background. Then Kenny got on the phone and ripped right into her—yelling to never call him again, hanging up—washed his hands of her, just like that, didn’t want to hear a word she said.  Took me a whole plate of raspberry Madeleines to settle him down.” Having diced the steak cuts and dished out a finger bowl of soy tahini, Melissa beckoned Sydney back into the front room.

          “Incredible…he’s damn lucky you’re such a great cook…” It was all Syd could do to slam shut the refrigerator door, and follow Moon and her fresh platter into a cosy, sun skimmed parlor.

          “But I’m just as lucky,” she gently set her snack plate onto the shaky legged coffee table between the fireplace and sofa, flashing the blue stone and polished pewter setting on her left ring finger. “All along, he’s been doing the same thing for me. Look, he even gave me this star sapphire beauty. Sometimes he seems to good to be true.”

          “Yeah, well—I’ll have to take your word on that,” Sydney said tartly, again floored, befuddled by that Christmas tree, but then looking beyond it out the cabin’s lee side window case, to the Setter out there barking in the yard.  “But what is with your dog?”

          “Oh, he’s always cranky the day after a bath.  Actually, Seamus is more Kenny’s than mine.  I’m still basically a cat person…me and Pags.” She shooed her big, fat tabby off the overstuffed sofa.  “I like to rag Kenny than an Irish Setter is a subconscious manifestation of the flaming Celtic beauty he lusts for in his heart of hearts…”

          “That what he is, Irish?  Sydney plopping lotus-like on the saggy couch, marveling at the platter before her, dipping a carrot stick into the tahini. “Catholic, too, I suppose…”

          “Only part way—I think his father’s, like, Scotch…” Melissa instead leaned over to the fireplace, rolling up some yellowing sections of the Daily Camera newspaper, slipping them around and under the smoldering fireplace log.

          “As in boozer hound, huh?”

          “Tsk, his dad has had a little problem in the past, but…”

          “Well, I guess that explains the whole Christmas shmear. “Moon, Moon, I don’t mean to intervene, but when did you get off on this tangent—nice little Chicago Jewish girl like yourself?”

          “Truth is, I’ve had enough with nice Lesterlings, the whole blessed arrangement,” Melissa said, while no doubt trying to sort through some alien stirrings she felt at the bar mitzvah readings, not having been a religious body for so long. “Besides, I’ve got a lot invested in Kenny now…and it’s getting a little late in the game to be nit-picking around. I’ve got to make this one work…”

          “Sure, but maybe you’ve invested too much…just like with my brother.”

          “It’s not like that, at all.”  She eased over to re-stoke the fireplace, then ignited two frankincented mantle candles. “Kenny doesn’t try to control me like your brother did.  If anything, he gives me too much leash sometimes…”

          “Do tell,” Syd leered, nimbly fiddling with the top buttons of her sweater before stuffing her icy hands in her sweater pockets. “Now that, I want to hear about…god almighty, what is banging around out there?”

          “His tail…cute, huh?”  Melissa described an 18-inch black plastic length of plumbing pipe wagging where Seamus’s tail should have been. It was a cast—more a splint—drilled full of holes like a machine gun muzzle, shielding the tail from everything a frenetic Irish Setter might whack it against, but mostly to prevent him from chomping it off.  Thin strips of mercurochromed cloth suspended the tail inside this tube like the hub of a bicycle wheel, though Seamus made a habit of contrarily biting them away.

          “The vet had to shave his feathering when he set the tail,” she added, turning her attention to a giraffe-necked sprinkler on the corner windowsill. “It’s broken in two places: cracked coccygeal vertebrae and crushed hemal arches, something like that. The pooch nearly lost 20 inches of the most beautiful flowing tail I’ve ever seen.  By the time we got to Blaine Clinic, it was drooping like a funeral hanky—gangrene had nearly set in…”

          “How bizarre, a dog with his own tailpipe…too bad it doesn’t come with a muffler.”  Sydney turned away to peer out the cabin’s front windows, taking in the foothills, caught swivel headed once again by the Flatirons’s white granite slabs, jutting out like pitched anvils from the leading edge of the range. “Moon, dogs just don’t break their tails—this much, I know…”

          “It was an accident, a couple of weeks before Christmas,” she doted momentarily over a string of tender ivy cuttings in planters she’d crafted of pottery and macramé, hanging from ceiling hooks over bricked-up bookcases and a pair of re-stuffed chairs. “Kenny called me at work, totally hysterical. He said they had been wrestling around out front. He picked Seamus up and body slammed him…guess the dog came straight down on the tail—snappo.”

          “Snappo?  Great, now you’re telling me Mr. Sweet Understanding beats up his dog.”

          This, coupled with another unavoidable reconsideration of Melissa’s Christmas tree—all-American fairytale, from the Bethlehem star topping down to the stable scene base, from the hand-made wreath and all those miniature angels to the hand painted nativity figurines amid layers of tinseled, popcorn-strung flocking: Where was it all headed, for godsakes?  She then focused on Moon, and could scarcely imagine what Faith would make of her beloved ‘daughter-in-arms’ now, much less later on.

          “It was just some harmless rough-housing, Syd.  He’s not like that at all,” Melissa proceeded to follow her standard watering route, from filigree to rubber tree to wisteria and sunflowers. “If anything, maybe I’ve used too much tenderizer on him.  Made everything a little too laid-back, for a little too long.  He might have to get out there in the world pretty soon, but he seems so skittish…Kenny’s not much of a go-getter for his age, or planner aheader.  I’m even a bit antsy about it myself—don’t know what he needs more, a doctorate or a good boot in the tuckus.  But that’s our job isn’t it?  Let them be men.”

          “Here, use my platforms…do a little disco number on him.” Sydney smirked and pointed to her well-polished deer leather boots.

          “You know what’s kinda funny,” Melissa set aside the sprinkler. She began chewing what passed for her nails, then tugged at the ash brown wavelets along her temple, revealing a not insubstantially hairy underarm. “The vet said he started the plastic pipe technique when a rancher called him out to treat one of his prized bulls.  I really shouldn’t be talking like this, but the bull somehow managed to fracture his…you know, shvontz. So Seamus’s tail has become kind of a running joke around here because Kenny is not exactly chopped liver that way himself.  I tell him, see what’ll happen if you don’t shape up?”

          “Sooo, big in the boxers, is he?  Not like my little pisher of a brother,” Sydney cackled, ruefully concluding that Melissa was even more resourceful now than when toting Lester’s load.  “That’s what this is all about…you went and got yourself a John Holmes…”

          “Tsk, no—honestly…” Moon blushed, tying back the fullness of her hair, which seemed to comprise at least half of her body weight, food fetish or no.  “Actually, he’s into Jockeys, and pretty self-conscious about it.  He once told me how Cassie was a 37DD and hated them because of the special-order bras and how they got in the way of everything. Said sometimes he knows exactly how she felt.”

          “Well, that’s certainly not my personal problem, you can ask Faith,” Syd lamented. “So he’s hung and doesn’t strut it?  What are you trying to say, dear Kenny’s going light in the Levi’s?”

          “Don’t be silly!  He just happens to have a scattershot kind of sex drive, what with the studying, and all,” Melissa spouted, caught with a fistful of tahinied cauliflower by the ringing of the phone. “And, like, lately he sometimes doesn’t last all that long, you know?”

          “Flash Gordon, huh?   Well, that’s even worse than a pisher,” Sydney stared off into some recent fleeting pleasure. Still, she kept returning to the far wall photos: mounted halftones and color aspects of Napoli’s arching Porta Capuana, the Kappelbrucke Bridge in Lucerne, pyramided wine casks in Bad Durkheim. “Mark one for the Aspen neurologist.”

          “On the other hand, when he does, I’m sore for days,” Melissa smiled, rushing for the side room study. “But e-nough about me.  I want to hear all about your jet-setter doctors and tycoons…or at least about Bernard. Be right back…”

          “Pu-lease, don’t ask…it was just another romantic flame-out. My clock’s still running, same as yours.” Syd tracked her, numerous other color photos leading her gaze about the living room like landing lights, not least the time exposures of Martigues and Montmartre. At the same time, hill-bent sunlight now skewed in upon ‘Waif and Grain’ from just above Flagstaff Summit, igniting her signed portrait of Melissa, even more starkly headstrong, brown hair unfurling Godiva-like to her waist. At any rate, Sydney’s erstwhile wedding gift was now the fulcrum to an otherwise tidy, garage sale-variety décor. Guess that’s how she saw it, giving her painting its due, as damn well it deserved. “As for Bernard, he has all the excitement of a rabbi-arranged marriage.”

          “Unbelievable,” Melissa hissed, dropping the phone, waving her Xeroxed work schedule in frustration. “That was the restaurant. Regina, our other hostess?  She called in with the downhill flu—three-day variety. I have to pull double shifts through the rest of the weekend…starting in half an hour. We’ll just have to finish catching up Monday, or so.”

          “Moon, dear, I have to be getting back to San Francisco by then.” Syd slumped against study’s doorway, gearing for her final approach to the coast. Up to her lymph nodes in poinsettia white Christmas, she glanced over her left shoulder, and there was more: a hand-held color streaking of candlelight carolers in Trafalgar Square, a night time-exposure of the Heidelberg Castle. Nothing spectacular, nothing she hadn’t seen before. She probably just didn’t expect to see them here. “Where did you get all these photographs?”

          “Oh, they’re Kenny’s,” Melissa said in passing, a magenta streak through the kitchen into the rear bedroom and back again, clock radio blaring, her mind likely racing to re-order her immediate priorities. “Took them when he was in the army over there, but he doesn’t do that much anymore…he pretty much leaves the creativity to me.  Tsk, he will really wig himself out by tomorrow night if I’m not around here. Besides, I’ve been thinking about a little attitune-up party for him, hoped you could stay…”

          “Sorry, dahling, California calls,” Sydney reassessed the varied continental shots, visibly comparing them to her portrait—no contest—ultimately returning to Trafalgar, sight straightening its regal blue-matted frame before floating her way aft cabin to the bathroom, pausing at the kitchen porch door for a read on the darkening skies. “Nature does, too.”

          “That unctuous job—the last time Regina pulled this, she was stranded up at Winter Park for a week,” Melissa shivered, palm pressing her hostess uniform on the kitchen table. “Incidentally, the weatherman says a real monster is headed our way…”

          “Brrr, no lie,” Syd flushed, returning to the kitchen door, distracted by Seamus’s latest flare-up and the station wagon backfiring its way into the cabin’s unshovelled driveway.  She smoothed out, rebuttoned her alpine sweater up around her neck, before gathering her tooled leather purse, then clicking its brass flap clasp. “I think I hear him now.”

          “No, I mean a storm,”  Melissa rushed to open the living room door, hangered green and brown uniform in hand, greeting the lone figure hulking across the front yard.  “Kenny, Regina did it again. I’ve got to get over to the restaurant right away. Help us get Syd’s luggage out of my car, then maybe you can show her around town or something…”

          “Aww, Moon, I’ve really got a lot to sift through here,” I lugged a boxful of texts and papers into the study, a manila envelope flying off the top.

          “I understand totally,” Sydney picked up the letter marked G.I. bill, handing it to me once I dumped the box onto the side room floor. “I’ve got to get over to Lorraine’s, anyway. She’s such a godsend to put me up.”

          “Really. He’ll run you over, anytime you’re ready,” Melissa donned her pea coat from a doorway hook, kissing my chin.  “Won’t you, Kenny…” Already she was being escorted off the porch by a cold, stiff wind now roller bearing down over the foothills.

          “I guess,” I turned to Sydney, though not exactly seeing her eye to eye.  “Uh, you’re flying out, right?  Might want to call and reconfirm…”

          “No need. I have this incredible travel agent in San Francisco. She cast my whole itinerary in stone. Reserved and pre-boarded all the way, on real airlines, not like that puddle jumper I got stuck on out of Aspen.”

          “You know best, Ms Worldbeater, just flow with it.” Melissa blew here a kiss. “Kenny, her bags…”

          “All I’m saying is Stapleton can freeze up in a heartbeat when the weather gets like this.” I crammed the VA envelope back into the file box.

          “Not to worry, flash,” Sydney smiled, grabbing her ski jacket, motioning out toward Melissa’s car.  “Like Moon says, let’s just flow with it.”

Care for more?

 Chapter 7. ‘Thar she flows…’ 

Know more/know less. (No point going into how
 what was said here can be recounted. Suffice to
say it rings transcript true, however verbatimely it
may be. So, Saturn these pages now, or you’ll
 surely Return to them later to discover why…) 

______________________

“Once ascendent, Saturn 
transits orbits vastly 
beyond one’s own.”

            “I mean, I’d heard about their Hollywood Hills spread, but this…”

            “God, California, Telluride—I can’t even imagine. And to think Josh used to hustle around for spare change and pot…”

            “Really, if I knew he’d be that kind of catch. I mean, he was such a zithead nebish in high school,” Sydney huffed, seated at the kitchen table, randomly straightening the snap buttons of her embroidered pink alpine sweater and hand-pressing her side pockets, after tugging at a snow-white turtleneck under that.  “Anyway, it was just too close a call altogether. And I’m getting way too old for such drek.”

           “Tsk, I saw on the news it was an inferno up there,” Melissa replied over her shoulder,  stirring a ladle there by the stove. “Did everybody finally get out alive, or…”

           “Who knows? Oh, this one little tootsie went totally psychomanic, tried to push her way out a plate glass window. Caught a chunk up the length of her arm—just missed her ulnar artery, but she bled out like it had sliced it right through…”

           “Ulnar what?”

           “Oy, don’t ask me. Luckily, Josh had invited some of his L.A. doctor pals—all these freaky orthodontists, uro-proctologists and maxillofacial reconstructionists—a stretch limo full of those.  They all kept kibitzing, ‘check out the flexor digitorum, man.’ ‘Pack off her flexor Longus Pollicis,’ like that. You know me—I finally pulled this Westwood neurologist hunk aside to translate. Ulnar and radial arteries…instant death…that’s what he said, anyway—before hitting on me to ski out the week in his Aspen condo.”

           Back then, holiday excesses were evidently coming home to roost. With the le’chayims and mazel tovs behind them,  Sydney and Melissa played catch-up all the way back to our cabin. Syd’s autumnal pilgrimage to the Jeu de Palme and Firenze, her post-Kislev ennui on Florida’s Gulf Coast sand: She painted a landscape of worldly lassitude that drove her back westward out of sheer social deprivation.

          “I even called Josh and his bimbo wife, Gret-chen to wish them happy holidays,” she explained. “He said, come up and join us New Year’s Eve for a little get-together. It was either that or shmoozing my parents’ vacation friends. How was I to know?”

          Sydney allowed as how one of those stretch limos scooped her up at the local airstrip, then caravaned to upside Telluride, a buckskin hostess dispensing cordials and four-channel demo acetates from the console bar. Gravanek’s Rockies getaway turned out to be a 1,200 acre mountaintop ranch, the little gathering a conclave of the current Midwest-to-Malibu rock music axis and its professional retinue that place set into the hundreds. Seemed that in the short time Sydney had lost touch with her geeky old school irritant, Josh had parlayed his stable of heartland mush-rock tavern acts into major record deals and a refurbished seven-building compound with working stables, luxury bunkhouses, one serious open-beamed banquet lodge and two 24-track studio barns. He’d branded it Das Kapital, and his marquee horses all recorded there now, not to mention much of L.A.’s twangy cause celebrities and some British pop-chart heavies too bloated to mention.

         She recounted ruefully how Josh had cast aside a Wharton MBA and his father’s Chicagoland paint store chain for a world of illicit music, illegal substances and nefarious associations; and how he’d double-barreled his father with the news, at his wedding reception, to that goyeh, yet. Still, here he was, cutting the checks, calling the tune: silver platters of rarebit and venison, Taittinger’s by the magnum opus to wash it down.

         “But at midnight, it all blew up in his smug, bearded little mug,” she added.  “An ammo dump or something—machine guns, the works—out behind the stables. Turns out Josh had a posse of paranoid roadies dealing coke on the side. Nothing he’d dirty his hands with, of course—he just scooped his off the top. Word went around they torched the thing over divies and back pay. All I know is the buildings went up one after another, while the Scrammers—his bad-boy hair band, no less—kept playing their greatest hits with a stage full of swirling floods and pelting strobes, timed to overhead footage of their east coast tour.

          “By this time, the lodge is total panic, tootsie’s silicone bleeding to death, mounting this grade-A tirade at the gutless producers and A&R types running right over her to get away.  Before long, Josh jumped onstage, totally crushed—like when I dumped him at the Ravinia Festival—trying to calm everybody down, while his next act, the Raffters started in on some heavy metal. Nothing you could really dance to, of course…but I kept thinking how easily this could have all been mine. That’s when the neurologist piled me and my things into one of the escaping limos with some groupies—which proceeded to spin out in the snow and nearly get broadsided by a volunteer fire truck. I glanced back, and a third of Das Kapital was like ‘Gone With The Wind.’  Took me a whole week in Aspen refusing to ski to settle down. And there was no way I was going to follow him to Newport Beach,” she sputtered, snapping pearl buttons, gesticulating out of her deep sweater pockets,  animated forearms collapsing like empty sleeves across the table. “So tell me, what did you guys do?”

          “Whew, I guess not a whole heckuva lot, I guess,” Melissa slackened.

          By comparison, what was there to tell?  Christmas had been a takeback, at best—wrong colors altogether and a few too many sizes too small. Heretofore, Moon and I had both flown to Chicago for the holidays: I went home and did Xmas as best I could; she went home and…didn’t. But this time, we stayed in Boulder, final exams and all. Melissa quipped she knew there was trouble when the tree lights kept blowing cabin fuses. Thereafter, it was a yule of cool courtesy, an emotional impasse uneasily bridging this awkward spiritual gulf neither of us had ever quite experienced before.

          Admittedly, I spent as much energy fashioning a black hole in our holiday wonderland as she did struggling to fill it.  She strung her hand-spun stoneware decorations, slaved over her plum pudding and kidney pie; I locked away in the small study with my class notes.  She’d call friends to spread holiday cheer; I’d call home, then sulk—determined to be at least as miserable as I knew I’d made my ailing mother by not coming in. Melissa hummed Christmas carols and breathed spontaneity into prearranged presents—determined to at last leap the breach between candles and crèche, which had apparently pained her every December, long as she could remember.

          “Well, our Christmas was sort of interesting…a little too much tryptophan, maybe,” she said, once again tending to her stovetop.

          “Christmas tree, decorations,” Sydney asked indignantly, pausing to take in the kitchen with a curiously smitten shake of the head, admiring the culinary arsenal on display. She then fixed again on her sorta sister, stirring honey into her freshly poured cup of Red Zinger tea.  “What about Hanukkah, Menorah lightings? Really, what about ‘Dreidel, driedel, I made it out of clay’?  Moon, we’ve just got to talk.”

           Clearly, this kitchen was Melissa’s true milieu. Tangled among the copious ivy undergrowth were wall racks of copperware, baking pans, cutlery, chopblocks and gourmet gadgets galore carried over from her Lester days. Cramped though it was, she’d made room for an ingratiating corner nook draped in cherry blossom wallpaper.  Above the round oak table where she now busily unfoiled some of her cranberry-banana bread was a clear lacquered maple bookshelf lined with Spirulina, ‘Diet For A Small Planet’ and sundry whole grain and vegetarian tomes, leaving little doubt food groups loomed largest in the personal pie chart she labeled creativity.

          Sydney lingered over the cluttered fertility of this sky-bright kitchen—so inventive yet organically practical—much like Faith’s at home.  Her mother and a long motherless Melissa had viscerally connected that way from the start, as though they were devoted homemakers-in-arms, the one thing she repined she and Faith might never be. “Sooo, you were saying about Christmas?”

          “It was nothing compared to New Year’s,” Melissa sighed. She fanned some viscid sliced bread into a neat semi-circle on the tea tray between them, then ushered Sydney into the living room.  Once there, she set the tray down on a wobbly coffee table, then embraced her guest firmly, playing her back ribs like a cithara. “But let’s not…oh, hell, you know you’re the only person I could ever really share this stuff with. You and Faith will always be my saving grace. I miss that about you, Syd…”

           “Awww, me, too.  And we’ll always be there for you through this. You know that.”  Slightly taller, firmer of form, Sydney sealed her sentiment with a caressing of her erstwhile in-law’s behind. “Love your ring, too…”

           “Whew,” Melissa said, contacts set afloat in her welling, full moon eyes. She proceeded to light some newspaper beneath a half-gone Presto-log while Sydney soaked in the front windows’ sunny, smothering Flatirons tableau. “Oh, and I got it from Kenny for Christma…for the holidays…bluish-black star sapphire in a pewter setting—very special, one of a kind.”

           “Especially for a one of a kind like you,” Sydney mused, eyes drifting to the corner fireplace, focusing on her painting,  ‘Waif and Grain’, but not straying far.  “Mounted above the mantle, yet. I’m so flattered I’m getting goosebumps. Either that, or I’m freezing to death…”

            “That was, um, Kenny’s idea,” Melissa topped off their teacups, then seated herself on the tamil throw covered sofa, undercurling her print skirt-wrapped legs.  She quickly began nibbling on some mismatched pastry scraps, heavy on the fudge.  “He even said it deserved center stage.  Here, sit down, this will warm us until the fire gets going.”

           “He said that?” Sydney sight straightened the portrait’s frame, color critiqueing the natural illumination of her acrylics and oils. ‘Waif’ cried out for more muted lighting, she seemed to chafe, joining Moon on the sofa.  As if at least her work had assumed its mantle of domination, as damn well it should. “So…you were saying about New Year’s…”

          “Where to begin,” Melissa swallowed a bakalava morsel and tapped Syd’s knee. “When we first came to Boulder from Chicago, the only place we could find that would take pets were these boxy apartment complexes east of town—‘immigrant landing’. Jim and Celeste soon moved in next door with their cocoa Lab.  Everybody became pretty good friends—even the animules.  Then, about the time Jim finished a history doctorate, his grandfather died…he’d founded some big Boston shipping company, or something. So they put part of Jim’s inheritance toward an overgrown A-frame on a dog-leg mining claim up by Ward—just before I found this cabin.  Celeste quit the law library and sailed all her Tupperware out the apartment windows. Been up there with their hippie slaves, redoing the place ever since.”

           “Wait, you found this cabin all by your lonesome?” Sydney cupped and blew the steam from a heavy, hand-spun tea mug, noticing some makeshift Tupperware planters on the windowsills. “Little go along, follow the leader Moon?”

           “Rode by one day, on the way to my crafts studio, saw this packed-up U-Haul out front,” Melissa picked at some cranberry-banana. “The landlady moved to Idaho, is just happy to have tenants she can trust. I put down a deposit, right then and there…sometimes I picture us actually buying the place from her.”

           “Finally taking charge, girl!  Just like when I found my little San Francisco place…on the way to the gym, that is.”

           “I suppose…any-hew, our first looksee at their new house was New Year’s Eve…I couldn’t wait.  Naturally, it turned cold as blazes, must have been 70 m.p.h. crosswinds blowing snow all over the roads.  But we finally got up there, going about three m.p.h., looking for an A-frame.  Only now it was an M-frame.  They’d added on this whole new space, with huge chalet windows looking upon the Peak-to-Peak Highway. Celeste and Jim greeted us in matching purple silk jumpsuits—monogrammed yet.  Inside, their place is beautiful stained wood, with all these…tetragonal and scalene triangle windows and skylights, they said.  Here, we’re in jeans and sweaters, toting potluck zucchini salad and legume-mushroom casserole, but they’re doing this elegant Scandian-style rack-of-lamb dinner—fancy wines, crystal, and everything.  I felt like I should have been serving them, not sitting there watching the deer and snowshoe hares chase by.”

           “Yeesh, stop with the selling yourself short, will you,” Sydney warmed up to the fire and flaky sweet pastry. And kiss the ground you weren’t watching scrawny adolescent rock groups wrapped in boa constrictors like I was…”

           “Well, I wouldn’t be too sure.  After dinner and some cognac, we all went into their new…cedar-lined salon, they call it…all kinds of abstract sculpture and custom-framed nature prints. Celeste fluffed a bunch of oversized floor pillows and afghans around the circular fireplace while Jim lit up this huge leaded glass ceiling mural they’d commissioned—like, recreating the sunset Gunnison meadow where he first proposed to her.  Sooo, we got into that for awhile, and Celeste started in how preppy predictable Jim is, and how oddly predictable Kenny could be. She’s from Santa Barbara, and has always been able to ride Kenny pretty good, because she’s a bit taller than he is, plus a cross between Farrah Fawcett and Elke Sommer.

           “A little wine here, little weed there, and before you know it, Jim pipes in his jazz collection. This is where it starts getting strange. Just before midnight, we all went down to see the sauna lounge. Soon as this Mel Davis music came on—Spain something—they got into a pagan dance ritual, slithering out of their satin—all of it. They’re contorting around in matching G-strings with the Wylie family crest and ermine trim. Then they beckon us with them into the sauna, on these long velvet-like cushions. Jim hugged me, and Celeste wheeled in a silver cart of Champagne and trim white lines. Tsk, I like to have died,” Melissa cringed. “I mean, they were always such button-down homey types. But, well, the setting was so loosey-goosey, and I never thought Jim was that boring…scrawny, maybe…then Celeste moved on Kenny, looping a towel around his neck.”

           “Miles Davis…Sketches of Spain will do that to you every time,” Sydney sighed, unbuttoning her sweater some, revealing more of the tight black leotards she had worn since Aspen, an après-ski variation that clashed so distinctively with her brown leather calf-high boots.  She then lost herself for a moment in a side wall photograph of Baden-Baden’s Roman baths. “And all I got was juvenile, played-out rock ’n’ roll, and some weird little package from Josh Gravanek to schlepp back to San Francisco as a special favor to an old friend…”

          “Well, for an awkward moment, everybody sort of scoped everybody else out, like we were getting ready to jump out of a plane, or something. I looked over at Kenny, his eyes were down to his chin. Honestly, compared to me, Celeste is Suzanne Somers. So Jim is massaging my shoulders, and I decide to kick off my clogs. Celeste still has Kenny lassoed with her towel, dancing him around the sauna.

          “But this time, she predicted wrong. Kenny exploded, pulled the towel away and threw it to the floor. Never seen him like that; it was all so mortifying! Then he grabbed me, knocked over the Champagne cart, mumbling like a madman, something about sisters of mercy…I don’t know to this day. Jim and Celeste absolutely freaked!  They scrambled into their purple robes…Jim sputtering on about the Bronco’s Orange Crush defense, trying to talk Kenny down. Instead, he dragged me out to the car, screaming about how perverted they were. I’m apologizing every step of the way—we were supposed to stay over, for godsakes. I’ll never forget them standing at the front door with their Lab, Spoofles, meekly waving their purple towels…still haven’t worked up the nerve to call…”

           “So what was it?  The coke…”

           “Didn’t do any,” Melissa poured more Zinger from a chunky stoneware teapot with tiny glazed Cheshire cats bounding handle to spout. “He has a hard enough time with coffee. Oh, and the wind was really blasting on the way down. I finally snapped the tension by asking him point-blank what the big problem was, and where he got off manhandling the Wylies that way…”

           “Manhandle the Wylies?! What about embarrassing you…” Sydney grabbed and shook her by the arm. “Still always exhaling more than you inhale, aren’t you…never a sliver of a thought for yourself!”

           “Tsk, whatever…he raged on about how he wasn’t free enough for this, couldn’t compete with that. I told him that was his problem, not theirs—that the whole thing was just a little horsing around among good friends. And if he couldn’t handle it after all this time, he had a lot more growing up to do than I thought. About then, the snow was kicking up real good, and he slid off a switchback into a three-foot gully. Must have been four-thirty before a Blazer came by with running lights to winch us free…I could have sworn I spotted a bobcat and some brown bears closing in. Not a word of this to anybody, swear?! He’d positively brain me…”

           “Moon—swear, already, but he’d have to go through me first,” Sydney’s eyes strayed to the side wall once more, to a long-lens compression of olive groves against the ossifying lava trails of Mt. Etna.  “What kind of putz are you tangled up with anyway?  What was his problem?!”

           “Putz—honestly. Anyhow, the next day, he was atoning like crazy, blaming it on finals burnout. I don’t totally buy that, but…”

          “Men!  Give them half a chance, they’ll ruin everything…”

Care for more?

Chapter 6. This conversation continues,
getting more personal and intimately 
revealing before Mr. Wrong(?)
stumbles in, storm clouds
looming over the hills…

“Saturn forces you to finally
cut all this childish crap
and man the boat.”  

       “When Thou sendest him away, Thou dost contend with him.”

        “This is a blessing before he reads the Haftarah, from the book of the prophets…”

        “Blessed oh Lord, our G_d…Who has relieved us of responsibility for this boy.”

        “Says right here in the program.  See, the Haftarah follows the Torah…the Torah’s the Law in our world.”

         As best I can recollect how this all went down, Sydney Mendel had blown in from Telluride via Aspen well behind schedule, the trailing wind of an abrupt change in weather that had dusted the Rockies’ Front Range with two to four more inches of overnight powder, and snarled Stapleton Airport traffic for miles and hours.  My charge—with Melissa’s backseat guidance—was to return the three of us to Boulder via U.S.36 before the morning slid away.  Syd’s excess luggage strained baggage claim.  Her mood ranged from stormy to frantic to rapt, depending upon stop-and-go progress toward her special visitational surprise: a distant cousin’s only son’s bar mitzvah, which the partially plowed turnpike delivered us unto with precious few minutes to spare.  My best hope had been to sit by with the Toyota’s motor running, these holy recitations drowned out by some old eight-track Buddy Miles.  But there would be no such salvation, Sydney being Moon’s former sister-in-law, this being Melissa’s car, if not her surprisingly uneasy reckoning.

 

            “I’m still trying to figure out what’s that black thing all strapped around the kid’s head and arm,” I shifted bun to bun on the polished wooden bench.

            “Tsk, that thing is his prayer tefillin, professor,” Sydney replied sternly. “Those little leather boxes bound onto his head and arm contain Shema and other biblical passages, to harness his intellect, emotions and actions in service of G_d. Wearing it and reading from the Torah’s all part of how he officially becomes a man—see, donning the tefillin, the whole glorious ceremony, bestows upon Aaron the responsibilities of being a Jewish adult.”

            “Hey, sorry…but it’s not like I’ve ever been in one of these places before,” I caved, “it’s not exactly my area of…expertise.”

            Sydney’s special surprise had taken us to Boulder’s then southeastern fringe at the time. At the time, El-Bethel was a small, white brick solid temple standing its relatively level ground amid a rolling mesa crop of protestant prim ranch houses and mid-rise college dorms, several blocks removed from turnpike’s end.  Inside, the temple exuded an air of solemn strength and implacable unity greatly beyond its physical dimension—a synagogue growing stronger and fuller, more resolute by the day, devoted to casting a much larger imprint on the community at large.

            Pews, window coverings, walls and woodwork were uniformly beige, shades of a junior high school auditorium or so.  Yet singularly radiant was the pulpit-crowning Ark—a broad, miter-arched, inlaid gold repository harboring the Law of Tefillin, its outer surface venerating God’s kinship and the Exodus from Egypt in colorful mosaic panels.  Before the Ark and a tall brass menorah stood El-Bethel’s teddy bearish, sparsely bearded rabbi, and a pubescently fleshy youth who had just wrestled mightily with, and read from, the Torah scroll, one arm all but tied to his side.

            “This is a happy day for me, the happiest day of my life,” Aaron Kavalla closed a hand-tooled Haftarah cover, smiling toward the  community cantor just finishing ‘Avodat Hakodesh’.  Once Rabbi Hirshhorn, who’d guided through the tefillin and prayers, handed Aaron his seudat cup, the bar mitzvah boy stepped bashfully beside the red velvet-draped bimah to unfold a yellow tablet sheet and spread it across a small podium.

             “He’s a rat,” Sydney hissed. “That’s what he is.”

             “I have now passed from the world of childhood to manhood.  I can bear the holy burden of our religion,” Aaron read from scribbled notes, fussing with his black leather tefillin straps and prayer boxes as his eyes repeatedly searched the synagogue, row by row.

            “If  the shirking bastard had any decency, he’d be by his son’s side…”  She whispered her running commentary between Melissa’s and my shoulders, leaning in from one pew removed.  “Martin Kavalla could be here giving the Father’s Blessing and laying the tefillin.  But the creep never took responsibility for his kid in the first place. That’s why he doesn’t have the balls to show up now.”

             “What parents do for their children is more important than all things else,” young Aaron choked up, tugging at his Hershey brown suit and the white silk tallis tasseled about his shoulders.  He smiled toward his beaming mother—seated front row, center—then zeroed in on the motionless rear doors.  “I think the most fitting reward and token of gratitude I can offer is to fulfill this commandment: To honor thy mother and…thy…father…”

            “What makes it even worse is the putz won’t cut the cord and give Lorraine the divorce she’s been begging for since he ran out.  So he’s, like, making an agunah out of her because it’s the same as if he won’t give her a get.”

            “Gotcha,” I nodded and tsked toward Moon, as if I actually knew what this unfamiliar life force was talking about.

             “It’s tragic, that’s what it is.”  Sydney clearly was still grating over the bumper thumper that had backed us up near Broomfield.  “Here Aaron’s struggling to become a man,” she said, as the congregation rose to bestow its collective Jewish blessing.  “With such a miserable weakling excuse for a father figure.”

             “Man?  The kid’s what, thirteen,” I said out the corner of my mouth, sneaking my own peek at those temple doors, then an uneasily silent Melissa.

             “Shhh, now he’s folding up his Aliyah notes…” Syd grabbed my shoulder as though she had known me just long enough to know I should have known better.

              I didn’t know from Moses.  The entire morning had been a spiritual occlusion—a tie-knotting, tire-spinning race against the mortal plane that landed me three rows away from sacred ritual so foreign to what little I had retained of my Herbert family religion, I was still groping for missalettes and kneeling pads more than halfway through the Torah. Sydney stifled me once more when the rabbi began extricating young Kavalla from his prayer tefillin.  I sat coldly mystified throughout the unwinding of those black leather spiral wraps up his forearm, those slender coils from the teen’s left palm and middle finger, the meticulous final removal of tiny phlylacteries from his left bicep and forehead, then their gently replacement into a plum velvet pouch.

             By the time Aaron shed his blue striped tallis, I was likening Syd’s shoulder grab to divine intervention, wisdom and insight imparted through a brightly Burning Bush.  That much, I granted her, but not in so many words.

            “Aaron specifically requested to do the orthodox tefillin thing, just to prove that he could,” she smiled.  “Isn’t this a fantastically creative religion?  So sure footed and innovatively challenging—yet so simple, beautiful…simply beautiful!  Don’t you think it’s simply beautiful, Moon?”

             “On a certain level,” Melissa allowed, muffling her response.  “But it’s been awhile…”

              “Can we start the seudat mitzvah now,” young Kavalla grinned, straightening his gold laced yarmulke, leading the rabbi down El-Bethel’s center aisle.  With that, his mother and the small Shabbat congregation rushed to congratulate him.

             “Seudat?” I held pat for some direction.

             “Banquet,” Moon said discreetly.  She looped my arm as we followed Sydney closely out the synagogue doors.  “You know, the reception….”

           “What…you’ve never told me about such things…I’ve never even thought of us this way.”

           “Inspirational, positively inspirational—a 3,000-year-old ritual, I might add,” Syd zipped up her cardinal red ski jacket as we turned down a long canopied corridor, open on one side to chilling foothill winds, which led to the temple’s satellite reception hall.  “He’ll turn out good, that one—his mother’s seeing to it.  Not like his lecher old man…”

             “So, where is this Martin guy,” I pulled earlobe-length hair out of my snowblown eyes.

            “Tsk, Houston’s what I’ve heard,” Melissa cinched her sand tan wool dress-up coat tightly about her narrow waist.  “I’m sure he has his reasons…”

            “Rats don’t have reasons,” Sydney snapped, as we squeezed through the hall’s compact doorway.  Her cheeks flushed brightly under her rouge as she glanced quizzically at Moon.  “Only excuses…”

            The seudat gatherers filed in along two rows of folding metal tables, some pausing to resorb Hanukkah candles and festive bunting that still filled wide expanses of the hall’s okra-tile and acoustic paneled cinderblock walls.  Simply set, buffet style, the table stretched to a three cross-table spread of catered nosh before a modest assembly stage, centerpieced with a huge cut glass bowl of sparkling punch, small ceramic menorahs to either side.  This is to where my eyes drifted, as the casual, relatively youthful congregation pressed Aaron Kavalla’s flesh in the receiving line.

             “What I meant, Syd,” Melissa said softly, “is that a lot of time has passed…”

             “Sorry, a man just doesn’t desert his loved ones,” Sydney stepped in front of me to make her point.  “Especially not to chase some floozie half his age.  It’s beyond me how Lorraine has managed.  She had to move out here from Evanston just to get through it all.”

            “She’s got to be one tough lady, all right,” Moon led me nearer to the man of honor, within whiffing distance of the nosh, seemingly still floored, small world-wise, that the Mendels had other family living in Boulder, albeit down towards Table Mesa.  “Maybe a little too tough?”

             “Oh, on Martin—poor baby,” Sydney huffed.  “As if a woman can be too tough these days.”

             “Uh, is that stuff for anybody,” I asked, as anxious to butt out of this conversation as I was to hit those tables before everything had been spread too thin.  A forward third of the line was already poring over fat platters of Nova lox and holishkes; deep dishes of whitefish and cucumber salad; asides of shav, challah, gefilte kishka and kashen varnishkes; a sweet finish of Lokshen kugel, rugalach, plus assorted blintzes and varenikehs.  I white-bread knew not what to make of any of this.  Then again, it all looked so delish, and I hadn’t eaten anything since Stapleton’s B-Concourse vending machines.

             “I’m only saying these things are usually more complicated than they appear,” Melissa said.

             “Not when it comes to marriage,” Sydney dug into her down jacket for Aaron’s bar mitzvah cards.  “That’s where the complications end…like they should have with Lester…”

             “Now, now—let’s not start that,” Moon backstepped to let Sydney lead the way toward the Kavallas with two more silver embossed money holder, upping the ante on a small booty of gift talmuds and fountain pens.  “But you know better than anyone that I speak from experience here…”

             “Aaron, you little mensch you,” Sydney interrupted, tweaking the bar mitzvah boy’s cheek, then embracing her long-lost cousin.  “Lor-raine, you must be so proud…”

            “Sydney dear, you did make it in,” Lorraine Ridich-Kavalla smiled, a plain, rather zaftik brunette in motherly pink and pearls.  “Faith called and said you were stranded in some avalanche or….”

            “Not quite, but she and Daddo apologize to death for the no-show.  Florida’s just so ridiculously far away,” Sydney pulled out and handed them two silver embossed money holders.  “You recall Melissa, don’t you?  Turns out she’s been living right here in Boulder, too.  This is her…friend.”

             “Of course,” Lorraine’s smile tightened, Aaron tapping his foot impatiently beside her to a soundtrack of Dan Fogelberg, now crooning, ‘Part of the Plan’.  “Melissa dear, we’ve never heard from you or…”

             “Lester’s not in Colorado, Lorraine,” Sydney abruptly ushered Moon and me toward the buffet. “You know him, he’ll never cross the Mississippi…”

            “Pleased to meet you. But if you don’t mind, I’m headin’ for the eats,” I shook Aaron’s hand damply and nodded toward the platters.  I also craved a moment to digest this first full morning’s rasher of Melissa’s spiritual sister, her artsy world-beating genius role model goddess of freedom and light, this high-speed car chase in ski togs with the cinnamon midwinter tan. Fighting off some fresh-brewed acidity, I went whole hog for the spread—sampling some kreplach and knishes, piling on the more safely familiar fare: a plateful of corned beef, deviled eggs and spinach squares, a little lemon-honey cake and two shmears of prune strudel.  I loaded up on punch, then spotted Moon staking out three chairs directly across from seats reserved for Lorraine and Aaron’s bobbeh.  A few breathless swallows of sparkling loganberry, and I was already searching for the doors.

             “Just look at them,” Sydney sighed, joining Melissa, seating her to her left.  “And tell me Martin Kavalla isn’t a cubic shlub for running off.”

             “Cube…damn.”  I angled up to rejoin them, sensing an opening, my plate folded over like a pocket pita.  “Moon, that reminds me I promised the dean’s office I’d finalize class evaluations and clear out my cubicle before Monday.”

             “Kenny, we just…”

             “Really?” Sydney added, flapping her napkin.  “Sucking up on Saturday, are we?”

            “No choice, Dean Cross is busting my noogies as it is,” I figured all of us could stand a digestive break.  At least over on campus, I could rebury myself in more empirically recognizable terrain. “Besides, I’m sure you two have plenty to talk about…”

            “But the car…you’ve barely eaten,” said Melissa.  “You know how you get when…”

             “Keep it here.  I’ll hike over for my clunker, down this as I go,” I brush kissed her hair blossom-scented hair, then buttoned my gray corduroy sport coat.  “So not to worry.  I’ll see you guys later at the house, OK?   Say, how’s about I get you two some punch and stuff before…”

             “We’ll manage,” Sydney replied frostily.  “By all means, leave the gals to their hen party.”

Care for more?

Chapter 5.  A snowy trudge across campus,
and this post-holiday tête à tête is missed, as is a
sisterly meeting of the minds… 

“The influence of Saturn is 
the most lasting and malignant of 
all planets. Mars may be compared to a fever…
while Saturn resembles a temblor, a consumption” 

Degrees of effort, degrees of elevation: Seething resentment fanned into throbbing parietal rage as I tore up Broadway, ears ringing high mass over snowmelt-surging Boulder Creek, past priced-out storefronts once home to carobesque, ideologically pristine little haunts I seldom frequented yet somehow sorely missed.  Where the hell was the old Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics when a body needed it?  I turned heedlessly up Arapahoe—cranking down windows, Seamus banging rock-hard against the station wagon’s rear sidewall, then ricocheting up to the driver’s seat, what with the rear jumpseat being habitually folded under.

“Get back there, dogmeat!”  I veered suddenly curbside, before a humming realty office, smack where my favorite grainy co-op used to be.  I headlocked the face-licking Setter, twisting Seamus’s neck, biting the dog’s crusted left ear before thrusting his howling 45-pound frame rearward against the tailgate.  “Get back there,” I screamed, “go makin’ a horse’s ass out of me…”

Seamus whimpered painfully, but stayed the distance—Irish Setters being crazy, but not stupid.  This morning had started routinely enough: I’d taken him up for some sunrise exercise, past the Turnpike vista point before school—cutting it close, but with the knowledge that any resulting time/schedule press paled by comparison with a Setter 24 hours unrun.  The plan was to cruise along a gravel ridge road overlooking Boulder Valley and its full Rocky Mountain backdrop, albeit with the nagging notion that I could have stood some jogging my own self.

The dog would eat my squareback’s dust at a 25 m.p.h. clip, sprinting himself silly enough to be essentially comatose until morning next.  Except for today, of all days, Seamus strayed.  Just as I slowed, calling him in—zam, he was off into a horse pasture, rolling around in a dung heap, rubbing it in real good—ears, feathering, everywhere.  And I’d just scrubbed him down day two days before.

I had towelled Seamus off some, but didn’t have enough time to take him home.  So I was forced to leave him stew in the student parking lot, vent windows cracked wide.  Still, a couple of hours really fried things, with that sun-broiled  McKyle’s’ pit stop only intensifying the Squareback’s equine stink.  There had been no escaping it.  Even amid Cross’s questions, Seamus was this long titian blur across my field of vision, mad dog bounding over the hilltops, tail dragging sorely between his legs: Fractured coccygeal vertebrae, fifth caudal segment, crushing hemal arches, chipping the articular and mammillary processes, vet’s bill painful all the more.

I’d even shamefully, witlessly blurted that sorry diagnosis between Spearman’s rho and Kendall’s tau.  So now I shuddered, slapping fiercely at my throbbing right temple, then cut left up 7^th Street, well into the foothills—this endearingly grubstake corner of old Boulder roughly mountain cradled from Chautauqua and Baseline north to the deep, damp slit into Boulder Canyon.  Tight, cottage-lined streets stuffed their way up against the greenbelt like a throw rug under a drafty door.  From there, the foothills and Front Range reigned au naturel, making these heaped together little houses precious far beyond their material worth.

Snow lingered long on University Hill’s uppermost streets, drifted into leaf-packed gullies and trail beds, tufted between wind-gnarled trees and bushes coolly shaded by the Front Range wall, thrusting abruptly skyward a short block or so away.  This near the greenbelt, small was beautiful by public decree: cabins, squatter shacks, in some cases, glorified sheds were being restored, contemporized, only modestly built out as space and City Hall permitted.  You yielded to bounds established when these odd lots were pick-ax mining claims; the pay-off was a backyard of lodgepole pine and snow-capped splendor stretching to Rifle and Durango.

 While this climb cleared my sinuses, the aural ringing wouldn’t cease, my whole head blowing up like a Jiffy Pop bag.  A sharp pain crackled across my forehead—cranial muscles tightening with torque wrench force, fronto-insular cortex pressure—sudden shakes and tremors I had never, ever felt before.  Plowing through jellied snowmelt, I notched each street and bell toll incrementally deeper into the steering wheel, until my thumbnails bruised and knuckles ached and the top of my head began steaming like the sun off nearby rushing creeklets.

All because I couldn’t seem to reconcile revolving grudges about the unevenness of my playing field: merit vs. moneyclip, the monetocracy always trumped—about out-of-state Porsche roadsters, ‘Happiness Is Owning The Means Of Production’ bumperstickers, and my fetid litter box of a Volkswagen misfiring badly onto Fir Drive.  Much as I loved Boulder, I couldn’t shake the painful synapses I had snapping up here, atop The Hill which was lording over the valley and beyond.  ‘Twas a privilege to live in Colorado, all right—revocable at any time.  And for some reason, I was growing more and more anxious about cooling my heels in Boulder’s academic waiting room.  His snout out the side vent, ears flapping in the breeze, Seamus’s incessant tail banging only steamed me that much more.  What the hell is this shit?  This isn’t me, at least the me that’s supposedly supposed to be by now…

I slid to a stop in front of 519 Cliff, splashing slush and gravel toward a peak-roofed former miner’s cabin with a swaying porch swing that faced the frontal peaks like third row center in an IMAX theatre.  It was Jeremiah Hapgood’splace in 1861, still said so above the door, and had taken on a tiny room or two and even tinier barn wood outbuildings over the years.  The yellow-brown shake cabin had two tall, narrow window cases looking out toward Flagstaff Summit, and a crooked brick chimney sending white smoke streams up through the overhang of a 150 year-old elm tree.  Seamus yelped and clawed out the nearest half-cranked car window, to the relief of all but a scattering of ground squirrels.

“Sorry about the…ouch!”  I tossed the Setter a few remaining stale Milk-Bones, then hit my head on an icicle cluster dripping crystalline from the low, slanted porch roof.

“Kenny?!  Oops, better go, Syd…but, oh, hearing your voice, you don’t know.  Me, too…see you tomorrow.  Be safe, byebs…Kenny, how’d we do?”

“I’m out,” I snapped, brushing off my clothes, as I stumbled through the front door, catching the plaited scent of musk and burned pine. “I’m totally blown off and sent packing…”

“Wantz to hear all about it!”  Melissa ‘Moon’ Saversohn, housemate, beamed at me and dropped the phone.  “Big thing is, you’re out.  Now we’re really cookin’, aren’t we…” She rushed toward me, small and delicate, yet strategically turned, her very presence begging preclusive embrace.  But she suddenly stopped cold to crack a parlor window.  “Oh, not again…I do hope you wiped your feet.”

“This morning yet, right before orals.”  I stomped snow and worse onto the cabin’s hardwood floor, then motioned menacingly out to the yard.  “Setters are lunatics, I tell you.  And I don’t care what the vet says, he’s not doing it to mask his scent, he does it just to spite me! So help me, I could have killed him right then and there …”

“Kenny, you didn’t,” she checked the side window for signs of life, Seamus darting and digging and banging away.  “Tsk, why do you still take him anywhere near those pastures?  He’s a hunting dog, you know he’s gonna roll in it by nature.  Whew, if you went to class like that, they probably couldn’t wait to sign you out.”

“Booted out’s more like it,” I caught another whiff, up close and personal, as if downwind of a Porta-Potty dump truck.  “They say they haven’t made any decisions about the fall, but it turns out they have made their damn decisions—courtesy of Grammersly and Verniere.

“But you’ve been doing so well.”  She angled for some safe approach, finally tiptoeing to hug and kiss me, fresh smock or no.  “You say Grammersly…and who?”

“Paul Verniere,” I  quick released her for closer scrutiny. “You know, at the graduate Christmas party.  He says he remembers you…”

“Oooh, of course…from San Francisco, nice enough guy…”

“He’s a departmental weasel—a Franco-Italian weasel!”

“Hmm, come to think of it, I think he was kinda comin’on to me a little bit,” she fled back into oven-warmed kitchen, waft with the natural sweetness of scratch baking.  “Sorta over-the-line for my tastes.  Great car, though…”

“Aww, he’s aready beat it to hell,” I ripped through the morning’s mail for anything marked university business, coming up with the first notice on my student loans.  “The latest is Cross has already handed him a doctoral slot, gift wrapped and guaranteed.”

“And how do we know this,” she asked, returning with a plate of maple-frosted squares.

“Verniere just told me so himself, over at McKyle’s.”  I devoured two corner slices as though they were iced with Demerol.  “Then he had the gall to pick my brain about orals….”

“So maybe he was just running his gums…”  This, her generic term for redlining one’s mouth with the clutch quite disengaged.  “ He is a semester behind you, isn’t he?  And you said yourself word’s not due for another month.  See, this is all in your cabanza again…it’ll all work out, just watch.”

“Yeah maybe, but I never said he was a class behind…”  I gazed out upon the still snow-strated Flatirons, spirits sinking with the sun.  My eye cast about the parlor at collages of framed pictures—a trail of distant continental images, with no avenue of escape.

“Um…guess he must have told me at that party,” she set aside the tray and moved toward the embering fireplace.  “Anyway, didn’t we say no more laying blame on other people?  New Year’s resolution?  And we’ve got to get a grip on this crazy competition thing of yours.  Everything’s been going along just fine, Kenny, we’ve got it socked here in eden.  This is just you thinking too much again—it’s all in your imagination.  Now, how about a little celebration for once…let’s just flow with it.”

“If you say so,” I heaved hard, ringing out, as though she held her nail-nubbed finger firmly on what infrequently passed for my safety valve.

  “Oh, and speaking of San Francisco, guess who you finally get to meet?”  Thus relieved, she rocked back on red wool socks and beaded moccasins.  Hill-bent sunlight skewed in from just above Flagstaff Summit, rose tinting the high dusty ceiling, torching a Circaean oil portrait of herself above the mantle, strikingly headstrong against a meadow of wild fescueand oleander, riding a magic mandarin orange comforter, thick brown hair spilling down winsomely to her waist.

‘Waif and Grain’ variously moved and embarrassed her to tears, as though it were a persona she’d never actualized, could never hope to be, a persona on loan from the heavens.  It was the undeniable fulcrum to an otherwise tidy, garage sale variety décor.  “She’s been upcountry skiing over the holidays…coming in tomorrow morning.”

 “Moon, please, no houseguests…”  To this day, I shuddered each time the painting snatched my eye.  I was loath to acknowledge it—less because of style than actual substance.  ‘Waif’ was someone else’s Melissa, earth mother as centerfold, a personal loan I wasn’t fully prepared to square away.  Still, on occasion the unfading promise of the portrait stirred me more than the earth itself.  “I’ve had enough Frisco for one day.”

“This is Sydney, remember—family,” she insisted, slide stepping toward me with the bakery tray.  “She won’t be staying here, anyway.  She’s got other people in Boulder, you know.  In fact, she says she’s already planned something special for us to go to.  Kenny, where are you…”

“Company’s coming,” I muttered, wolfing down another maple square, turning for the door.  “Better go out and hose everything down…”

Care for more?

 Chapter 4. In the service of an
entirely different kind of service,
markers of manhood are laid bare.

 

“Even Saturn’s Virtues
are dreary.  And its vices are
particularly unpleasant. Because they
operate through the emotion we call fear.”

         “Sticky? You left the Bay Area for…Boulder?”  I watched a regiment of long-suited joggers file down mall after a rally at Frank Shorter Sports, forerunners of the valley’s endorphin revolution. “Happened to take a little trip to Frisco myself, over Thanksgiving.  Seemed pretty big time…sort of like the mother lode of raw empirical data. Couple of people showed me some ropes, and everything. I mean, I probably wouldn’t plant a flag there or anything…”

            “Big-time hassles.  I was subbing and stuff, closing in on the big 3-0, and things were closing in on me,”  Paul Verniere pulled down his Aviators, wiping clean the chrome lenses.  He then swept his arm around toward the campus and sloping winter peaks back-dropping every artery and building in between.  “By the way, don’t call it Frisco, and don’t kid yourself.  Boulder is Walden Pond compared to there. The people and…hell, just open your eyes, man.”

         Other than a sprinkling of grizzled Pearl Street mainstays, only the banks and brickface remained.  Frontier storefronts still bore pioneer nameplates the likes of Boettcher, 1878 and Browning, 1890—but everything else on the mall was yesterday’s news.  Walls had been sand blasted, wood beams stripped and exposed.  Designer jeans and leather basked in display cases once saddled with tack and rodeo wear, common housewares had upscaled into track-lit earthly goods.

          A Pearl Street where hot, dust-spitting Jimmies and Power Wagons once went axle to straight axle for cruising rights had by now been feasibility studied, climate compensated, traffic diverted, pedestrian engineered, cluster illuminated, environmentally integrated, energy efficiencied and assessed to the hilt—then swarmed over by come-latelys too new to know any different.

            “C’mon, Everybody’s Favorite City?”  I was taken aback by Verniere’s candor, fixing to toss down a major slug of Lucky Lager.  “It seemed so worldly and incredibly alive.  I mean sometimes Boulder does make me a little stir crazy.”

            “Listen, San Francisco can make you certifiably crazy…I’m dead serious,” he spoke through another, more modest splash of Grenache, wringing the stem of his glass.  “That City of mine’s a rubber room with a view these days, 49 miles square. Trust me, it can suck you into situations way beyond your control.”

            “Rubber…suck?  Jeez, I can see captivating maybe, but…”

            “Besides, you’ve got it socked here, right?  Great dog, righteous ol’ lady, happening little dream house up on The Hill.  Me, I’m stuck out there in flatsville valley, overlooking the picturesque Crossroads loading docks.”

            “Aw, you’ll work your way up there eventually.  Housing’s a right of passage in this town,” I swallowed, over the roar of a snowblower casting the last slushing drifts aside. “We started out by 28^th Street, too…uh, how did you know about…”

            “What can I say?   Guess it’s the outgoing Franco-dago in me.  Must have been at the department’s Christmas party, remember?  You brought your…wife…Melissa, is it?  Such a nice gal, of the Hebrew persuasion?  She told me all…

            “Moon, my…housemate.  Guess I forgot she came along…and the Hebrew thing I can’t say much about.  I mean, it hardy ever comes up.”

            “Forgot?  Maybe you were too busy hitting on Grammersly…”

            “The hell…”   What…stuck, I thought, flitter glancing his way.  What hassles, what situations?  What Hebrew persuasion?  Something about this guy didn’t jibe.  He was a little too open, a little too closed–a little too needy, a little too set—a little too youthful, a little too old.  In some untoward way, I wanted to hear more about Paul Verniere, I just didn’t want to hear it from him.  Why Sosh?  Why here?  Why was this guy reading Camus and Dos Passos, when he could have been hung up on Garp and Castenada like everybody else around town?  And what was he hiding in all those damn pockets? “Anyway, nothing’s socked now that my program’s over.  Cross and Terrent were really noncommittal about my doctoral acceptance.  How did they put it?  ‘No such determinations had yet been made regarding any of our candidates.’  Just before Grammersly came up with her ‘extinguish’ crack.  This is so totally out of nowhere, I don’t even begin to know what’s next.  God forbid—downtown Denver—maybe some internship or miserable counseling center.”

            “Wow, actually go out and take on the ills of society.  What a methodology…”

            Across Broadway, long, lazy wooden benches stretched sidewalk-to-sidewalk, hedge rowing a half-block of barren flowerbeds and saplings smack down center mall, where dueling traffic used to be.  It was now prime resting ground for the over studious undergrads and understudied laggards soaking in the cabin fever-breaking mood of the day.  Kick back and explore the people exploring the gran criterion bike shop, organic bakery/smoothies bar, the sheepskin fleecers and synthetic jazz clubs.

          Everybody high and trail-mixed and colorfully down filled, spacewalking along the snowy mountain background, reaching a dreamy state of happathy, seeking out mythical Morkins behind every young Green Ash and Linden tree—as if such creatures ever actually landed east of Studio City, California.  Still, I found myself pining for old shitkicking, pool-shooting Art ’n’ Arnie’s up there on the corner—a cowboy dive any tenderfoot could get himself honorably snookered in—before some Chicago deep-dish pizza franchise booted their rowdy asses up to Nederland and Ward.

            “Anyway, without the Ph.D. program, there’s nothing much around here for me,” I added, before downing my Lucky in earnest.  “It’s like teaching…get your credentials and work construction.  I didn’t sweat out a master’s to nail tarpaper and shingles.”

            “Aww, hang in there, it’s well worth the wait.  My mother’s always told me a good education can buy you things, or freedom from things.”  An upstart breeze must have stirred my essence, prompting him to back an arm’s length from the table.  “Although I must say it makes me glad I’m locked in for this fall.”

            “Got that right…wait a minute, I thought you’re graduating this spring…”

            “Yes, finishing out the master’s I started at San Francisco State,” Verniere said, hands now free to gesticulate, boxing things neatly as he spoke.  “I’m talking about doctoral.”

            “How the hell can you have a lock on that?  Nobody…”

            “Grammersly told me so, at the Christmas party…she said she’d already discussed it with Cross.”

             “No way,” I spouted, snatching my Lucky bottle.  “Just this morning they said…”

            “Who knows,” Verniere asked, with a sweep of his arm.  “Maybe you should have been hitting on her…”

            “Oh, right.  Next you’ll be telling me they’ve already granted you an assistantship.” I nervously drained my longneck brew.

            “Don’t need it,” he smiled, shaking out his cutback curly black hair, a serpentine ring setting glistening in the sun.  “A little granny family trust is there so long as I use if for self improvement. My job’s the GPA…ready for another suds there?”

            “Uh, no thanks,” I pushed my bottle away, barely stifling the ire.  Hmph, another damn trust buster.  “Well, that’s just great for you…I really mean it…”

            “Yessir, fresh new intellectual horizons—besides, gotta stay here in mountopia, nested with all the adoring young chickadoos, right?”  Verdiere beckoned the waitress, who had patrolled their corner like a minesweeper since the opening round.  “Mellow out, Herbert, I’ll get two more going here.”

            “No, really—I’d better go…got some errands,” I correlated my timing against Boulder Bank’s pedestal clock.  Either it was striking at twenty after the hour, or this little reality check was all of a sudden compression ringing, ear to ear.

            “I hear you,” he replied quizzically, gently tapping the waitress’s hipbone as she squeezed between tables, full tray.  “Listen, we’ll do this again real soon, hey?  Maybe you can fill me in on the orals portion while it’s still fresh.  I mean, did they cover Path Analysis or Epistemological Curvilinearity, shuck and jive like that on the orals portion?  I’ve got it coming up in June, and all…and you are the teachers’ pet rock, aren’t you?”

            “In my dreams.  But I really don’t hang out much on Pearl Street anymore…”  I rose, striving to keep civil distance from the Margarita party one table down.  No such luck.  My cavalier parting wave caught that pivoting waitress squarely across her Golden Buffaloes, which sent her tray sailing, gimlets, and all.  More startled than she, I centrifugally crashed the neighboring party, specifically their refilled pitcher.

            “Hey, real smooth, jerk-off!”  A McKyle’s’ regular of rodeo proportions rose like a Trident missile launcher, glaring at me, blotting Margarita from his butterscotch leather sport coat with the overhang of a white linen tablecloth.

            “Sorry…aww Christ…”  I dabbed his shoulder with some Kahlua cocktail napkins.

            “Suit yourself, Herbert,” snapped Verniere, backing his chair further away from all the drips.  “Whew, where have you been, anyway?!”

            “My goddamn dog,” I muttered, righting stemware, helping the waitress apply more napkin compresses to the frosted party of four.

            “Dog?”  He sniffed.  “That’s horse manure, if you ask me.  And here I was, going to take you for a spin in my Targa.”

            “A long story…guess it’s the tipsy Scotcho-mick in me.”  I sponged at my own checkered plaid flannel and jeans, then vaulted over McKyle’s’ wall into the path of a custodial crew changing clustered glass-globe streetlights.  “Uh, sorry… Hey, catch you later, Paul, OK?  And thanks for the brew.”

            “Sure, Herbert, sorry about that,” Venire sneered, waving his right, jade-ringed hand—narrow, porous face nay shaking behind those cold, reflective shades.  “CU down the road…”

Care for more?

SaturNext:

 Chapter 3. An angry acknowledgement,
then a bloody Sisyphean ride home. 

 

SATURN RENDEZVOUS.™

What Goes Around, Storms Around.

____________________________________

#BOCOSTRONG
With all due sympathy and respect:
However, this tale is from an earlier, pearlier time…
____________________________________________

Boulder, Colorado: 1978

Should have seen this coming—damned if she didn’t say it would…and I couldn’t begin to shake it if I tried.

No, not here, not yet: I’d simply ventured downtown to bemoan, bemingle, walk off some vexations, lose myself like some stress-tested lab rat in the crowd—just not exactly this way at all.

“C’mon, you’re not that busy, Herbert.  Haul your lazy ass over here…”

“Uh, think I’d better pass,” I pulled up in a prefrontal dither, “aww, hold on a sec.” Then came one clumsy hurdle  over a thigh-high railing.

Back then, seeing a guy like him right now was giving the lye to already tired eyes, but here we collegially were. Sure, judgment day happened to fall amid one of those balmy January storm breaks, about which eastern slope Colorado had always kept so mum.  Four to six inches of fresh powder one day, mostly gone by the next, with the next storm gathering to blow over the Front Range: This latest soft snowpack had already melted across much of Boulder Valley, these lower elevations currently being strafed by warm Chinook winds.  Shallow drifts dissolved from the foothills and Chautauqua like carbonated foam, barely clinging to the Flatirons’ lower facing and lee shadows for purely seasonal effect.

Such garnishing was no match for the mile-high sun, a cerulean cellophane brilliance that radiated clear over the Continental Divide, generating the very same giddy, fissionable Rocky Mountain energy so exalted in verse and song.  By this time, everybody in beautiful Boulder had grown to hate Denver for the unwanted attention—the singer, that is.  Tried-and-true Bouldernistas never could much bear the city all along.

Still, not more than an hour or so before, though seemingly aeons ago, I had staggered out of red tile-roofed Ketchum Hall, angling across campus past Old Main, the University of Colorado’s revered brick Victorian pioneer cornerstone, sloshing through snowmelt, dodging busy ground squirrels and white tufts that fell feather light from the bare branches of birch and elms.

My earliest impression of the school was, take the Rockies away, and you had every other State.  But before long, I couldn’t have taken to the mountainside campus more if it had been Cambridge with a mountain view.  I felt especially so on days this crisp, this clean—mild mid-winter days better spent outdoors than in—best frozen forever in place and time.  Reason enough why I went woozy at any hint of budget cuts or faculty ambivalence.  Then again, it might have just been the altitude, or that I had stayed too breathlessly long in my car.

“There, sit yourself down, my man…”

“Uh, careful, Paul, you may not want to get too close…my headache might be catching.”

The only real headache of consequence in the late-70s Boulder Valley I had just steered through was rampant, problematical growth.  As Denver sprawled up the Route 36 corridor, breathing room between the two cities narrowed to where local space vigilantes had all but circled their welcome wagons at the Turnpike’s summit rim.  Precious greenbelts tightened, building permits abated, sewer and gas caps were locked down.  Federally funded research centers monitored the atmosphere from their hillside labs, environmental activists blizzarded the valley with hellish impact statements.

A bitter bumper sticker backlash pitted native against nouveau-native against newcomer—the battle cry, ‘Think Globally, Act Neighborly’ giving way to the NIMBYism, ‘Get In, Get Yours—Then Baby, Bar The Door’.  Despite everything, still they came, from every direction, settling up and down the glorious Front Range.  By now, even a sociologist on the make like myself struggled to keep up with all the changes, much less the turbo coupes and full-dress 4x4s blowing workaday pick-ups and station wagons better than mine off area roads.

For what once was the hippest little college town on the underground/counter-culture trail between Mad City and Berkeley was now a univerCity being Morked and Mindified in network primetime, coast to coast, and trending toward irretrievably, commercially cutesy cool.  Boulder’s founders turned over in their Pioneer cemetery graves as modest brick and frame cottages and bungalows burst out all over with skylights, barn wood dormers and rainbow leaded-glass lofts, turning over and over again at mile-high multiples.

With old Boulder thus engaged, most resource-rich newbies pushed new Boulder’s upper limits northward and into wild, mining-claimed, combustible mountain canyons, the rest just spread eastward across the valley, coalescing with Lafayette and Longmont.  But nowhere was Boulder’s new frontier more evident than in the dead center heart of town.

“Nonsense, don’t be so schizo…”

“No, I’m serious,” I said, having just coasted beer-bound into an alley spot off Spruce street, in the cool shadow of a simple blue frame house that had been reconfigured into this fave little feminist restaurant with by-reservation-only cuisine.  Near enough to Pearl Street, I figured, near enough to Nancy’s dumpster so that no one would pin that ungodly odor on my car.  “So, what’re you reading there?”

“Just about the cranking up of protest rallies and demonstrations in Qum, Iran now, for Godsakes. The Middle East, man, that’s important business over there,” Verniere said, dog earing a page corner, closing his Harper’s magazine. “If it weren’t for the oil, they ought to blow the whole of Arabia up.”

“Just keep gas prices down.  That’s all that really matters…”

Along with the local cowboys and common townsfolk went such quaint notions as covered wagon coffee shops and musty dry goods stores.  So the planning commission and a bandwagon of downtown boosters went high concept: Pearl Street as playground.  I had scurried up Boulder’s new kiosked, landscaped, red bricked-over main drag past Aquarian bookstores, goose down outfitters, wood-carving galleries and backcountry bookstores—some four blocks overall, short on everyday mercantile practicality, long on yogurt and Rocky Road.  Serious shoppers fled to crossroads centers; everybody else came here to juggle and gawk. I certainly hadn’t come for the shopping today, much less for veging around to talk shop.

“Well, today’s the big day, am I right?” At least that’s what Paul R. Verniere was apparently up to, having emerged from the dark recessed doorway of a hardware provisions store turned watering hole, wine glass in hand.

“How’s that,” I asked stiffly, drawing up to a low wall framing McKyle’s’ brimming sidewalk patio.  Verniere had made me uneasy since fall-term registration, when he snapped up the last late-morning Social Stratification Proseminar seat.  Even now, standing there all loose and wiry in those tailored twill bush pants and well-travelled leather bombadier jacket, he and every stitch about him begged one question or another: Like how he was a year or so older, yet a little bit baccalaureately behind even me, or why he seemed to be evading or escaping something. Which is perhaps why I thought about this curious fellow grad student rather routinely—Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 8:05.

“You know, the O.K. Corral,” he moved quickly to nail down a front corner table, overlooking a bare honey-locust sapling and some snowy flower crocks.  “Orals week and all…”

“Don’t wanna talk about it…”  I vaulted the patio wall, albeit against my better judgment, grabbing a seat safely downwind, averting to survey the scene.  Certain people said I looked less like a grade grunt than a red-shirted point guard, but you couldn’t tell it by me.

The Pearl Street Mall had been something of a spectacle right from the ceremonial ribbon cut—grand local theatre in an increasingly theatrical town.  Shakespearean fencing, storefront rappellers, tribal bellydancers, carpet skiing, flag-bearing fan dancers: today, the show went on, albeit minus the ranchero and harabe hoofers, but numbing just the same.  This Friday afternoon, the parade consisted mostly of post-holiday bargain hunters sidestepping student malingerers bagging finals, who drifted around ski helots between free lifts to Eldora or Copper Mountain.

“No really, what dya know?” Verniere beckoned a blonde pony-tailed waitress in an overstretched CU sweatshirt.  “Another Grenache, hon, and whatever for my friend here.  Just run me the tab…”

“Beer—anything but Coors,” I said, in the wake of her zero-tolerance 501s.  Sniffing about for more orders, she was already trolling back under McKyle’s’ logo-emblazoned patio awning to the bar.

“Interest you in grabbing her by the Buffalo horns, hey,” Verniere asked slyly, as he tabled his Mastercard. “Yessir, I could see jumping her bones, latch onto those flotation devices…”

“Yeah well, I’m not really much for devices these days.”

“Anyway, word’s had it in the faculty lounge that today is your orals Armageddon,” Verniere pressed, rays glazing off the chest of his orange Tubes top as he set his wine glass atop a tattered Foreign Affairs Quarterly.  “So, what’s the scoop…”

“You’d really like to know, wouldn’t you,” I erupted.

“C’mon, wouldn’t you?”

McKyle’s tucked narrowly between a crystal/fossils bookstore gallery and a brand new Falafel Phil’s, its SRO patio positioned favorably for a spectacular mall-against-the-mountains scenario that made for marathon tabs.  After a wintry week of storms, a day this perfect fairly vindicated the whole controversial downtown concept.  Strolling folkies even set a melic, placidly uterine subtone to it all.

“OK, you’ve got it.”  Hardly becalmed in the least,  I grabbed my Lucky Lager from her tray as the waitress swayed by, then licked the head out of my mustache on the down draft.  “So Ketchum’s second floor was like a Star Chamber, all right?  They’re grilling me on Data Analysis for must have been two hours…”

“Really—like what,” Verniere sipped intently.

“You know, the heavy statistics and stuff,” I vented, although guardedly filtering out various specifics and details.  “Multivariate Factor Analysis, Logistic Regression—putting me through the wringer on Correlation Coefficients, Probit Analysis—everything from Pearsonian r to Kendall’s tau.  It was brutal, almost like academic mind control or something.  And I’m just not that into mind control, you know?”

“Whoa, who is anymore, right?  But I’ll wager a sawbuck you did just fine…”

“Are you kidding?”  Lucky loosening my tongue, I proceeded to describe how my grand design on academic tenure had been reduced to random purges.  Tracking error, warped disk: Frantic cramming and desperate all-nighters had only left me with a weakened beam.  The three-chair sociology faculty committee had in turn left me with the impression that they had recently examined far too many substandard deviations from the mean.  After a while, it got so I started drifting intellectually toward the lone seminar room window, fixing out on a narrow clip of the snow-veiled Flatirons, all but jailbreaking out of the chamber altogether.

“Know the feeling, but it couldn’t have been all that bad, could it?”

“Who knows?  The way Professor Cross was grilling me, clearing his throat at painful intervals…”  That would have been Wallford Cross, Ph.D., a slight, Cream-of-Wheat Skinnerian who had levered into a department chairmanship via the National Science Foundation pipeline.  “It was gradual torment…he finally suggested I ‘go forth in the world and…distinguish myself’.  Can you believe that?”

“I hear you, but what about Terrent?”

“Ol’ Uncle Emlen?  Forget about it…”  Even Blanchard Professor of Applied Sociology, Emlen Terrent, my advisor and best post-graduate hope, had sniffed and shifted in his rumpled tweed and cords, seemingly far better prepped for a mid-year Champagne luncheon at the faculty club.  “The three of them had already snapped shut their folio cases by the time I stood up.  They couldn’t get out of the room fast enough…”

“So maybe it was pro forma, probably means you’re a shoe-in,” Verniere said. “Sounds to me like your imagination is working overtime…”

“Oh, yeah?  Then when I tripped over their newly endowed chair, Helen Grammersly said, ‘that was distinguish yourself, not extinguish’.  All the way out, I’m tryin’ to figure how I’d gone in there with all the answers, and come out with a ton of questions.”

Truth was that very flood of questions haunted me down Ketchum’s hardwood hallways, as I scored each nick and telltale scar from preceding student bodies whose operose methodology yielded a similarly null hypothesis.  I’d whistled past a front lobby bulletin board as high on horizons as it was low on real-world opportunities: thumbtacked full of travel here, study there—apply now, not to worry about applying it later.  But as Dr. Terrent always said, everything came in time, degrees of effort in positive correlation with degrees of elevation.  I chewed on that and half a stale, pocketed Milk-Bone all the way across the quad.  “Extinguish, my ass—who the hell does she think she…”

“Ah, well, Grammersly’s doctorate is from Berkeley,” Verniere scoffed, tossing back a goodly portion of his second wine—not exactly Pacino he , but no Jeff Goldblum either.  “Everybody’s a smart ass there.  I know, was a Cal Bear undergrad myself.”

“I don’t care where she’s from.  No snotty skirt’s gonna…wait, you’re from Berzerkely?  I thought…”

“Crazier yet, San Francisco, why do you think I came out here?” he toasted. “Things can get real sticky there. And when they do, they stick to you.”

Care for more?

SaturNext: 

Chapter 2. This conversation continues, questions
are answered, more are raised—
Colorado meets California over the Divide…