Читать книгу You Can Say You Knew Me When - K.M. Soehnlein - Страница 14

At the end of my block—a little Mission District street called Manfred Alley—in a dingy storefront, was a knife-sharpening business. The faded sign in the window read THE STRAIGHT BLADE. The place was closed more than open, though on certain afternoons and weekends, the guy who ran it, Anton, could be found on the sidewalk behind an easel, painting scenes of everyday life on the block: punk-rock girls dragging their pit bulls toward Dolores Park, homeless men dozing on the steps of garish Victorians, elderly ladies in conversation, their shopping bags resting on the sidewalk. He sometimes sold these pictures, the paint barely dry, to passersby.

He also sold some of the best pot on the planet. For this reason, whether or not I needed knives sharpened, I visited Anton once a month—about as often as I frequented my other favorite neighborhood establishment, a full-service, two-chair beauty salon that shared its storefront with a pet store. Oddball businesses like these were a tonic for the shiny new boutiques and bistros taking over the Mission. When I first moved here, I was almost mugged at 16th and Valencia, but the only danger to find me lately was instigated by a guy driving a sports utility vehicle, talking on a cell phone and U-turning toward a precious parking space. He cut so close and fast to me, pedaling in the bike lane, that I lost my balance and crashed shoulder-first onto the pavement. I wound up in the emergency room.

A few days after my father’s funeral, I brought Anton the knives I’d taken from the attic. He buzzed me in and emerged from the back of the store, squinting into the streetlight behind me. It took a moment for the reflexive paranoia around his eyes to dissolve into his greeting, “Hey, brother.” In the eighties, he’d spent a couple years in jail on an LSD rap, and since then he was forever expecting the DEA to come walking through his front door, ready to bust up his operation.

The interior was neglected in a way that few businesses are anymore: unidentifiable clutter, mismatched furniture, light-faded news clippings taped to the wall. Not shabby chic, just shabby. Posters commemorated decades of free concerts and protest rallies in Dolores Park—VIVA LA RAZA, EMBARGO SOUTH AFRICA NOT NICARAGUA, TAKE BACK THE NIGHT, NO NUKES! Everything was curled and yellowed, sort of like Anton, with his tangle of wiry gray hair, his dingy clothes, his stale breath.

I handed him the velvet-lined knife case. “I want the full treatment, Anton. Cleaning, sharpening, oiling, tightening, whatever you can do.” He slid the heaviest blade from its slot and examined it through the bottom of his spectacles, letting out an impressed little whistle. “Sturdy stuff. Valuable. Ivory handles.”

“I’m going to give them to Woody,” I said.

“I dig that,” he said, nodding intently. I dig that was a tried-and-true Antonism, one he often used when I talked about Woody. Anton was very serious about digging the struggle of his gay brothers. He told me once he was thinking about changing the name of his shop because The Straight Blade sounded homophobic. I’d replied that we were living in an age of irony and he should keep it. The sign had stayed, but mostly, I think, out of inertia. Nothing in Anton’s world ever changed.

“Anything else today, brother?” Anton asked, one frizzy eyebrow arched.

“Some of your other product,” I said.

He flipped the sign on the front door to CLOSED and led me to the back room. Behind a stack of paintings was a locker, from which he extracted several freezer bags crammed with green bud, along with a scale and a couple of scoops. Singing the praises of each strain, he presented my options: indoor versus outdoor, low stem versus top leaf, sticky versus shake. I took the usual, a forty-five-dollar baggie containing an eighth of an ounce—organic, homegrown, sticky—nurtured in a sunlit glen amid the redwoods of Humboldt County. “Excellent choice,” he said. “Grown in bat guano.”

Ritual demanded that we smoke some of what I bought. I had spent a lot of time in this room over the years, listening to Anton’s tales. He was almost, but not quite, a friend. After a voluminous inhale, he asked, “So what’s new, brother?”

“My father died,” I blurted out.

“Whoa, heavy. Did he live here?”

“No,” I said. “New Jersey. Though he lived here once, like, forty years ago.”

“I’ve been here forty years myself.” He cocked his head and squinted. “Is that right? Yeah, 1959. Forty-one years. Hitchhiked from Billings.”

“You came here to be a painter?”

“No, no, that was later. There were three of us, see. All of us ranchers’ sons in Montana. We grew up herding cattle on motorbikes. We had plenty of room but nowhere to go. So we did what you did back then. Hitched to San Francisco.” He drifted off and began reloading. I guess I’d struck a chord; usually Anton packed only one bowl per visit.

“I just started reading On the Road,” I told him. “It’s weird. I’m looking at it as history.”

“It is, man. It’s historical. It was a migration, another gold rush, except we were panning for the truth. Kerouac, Cassady—that was something you could aspire to. You thought, I could be one of those guys.” Another staggeringly long inhale, and then: “Mostly we just wanted to be antisocial.”

“Antisocial?”

“Yeah-ahhh.” Extended exhale, a passing of the pipe. “See, there was this conspiracy of niceness. You wanted to subvert it, man. The cupboards were full—you know, prosperity—so, like, everyone believed it. Everyone believed the big story, the money story. You were supposed to be happy about it.”

Another Antonism: “the (fill in the blank) story.”

He shook his head. “You forget now, but World War Two was a tragedy. They’ve been glorifying it for fifty years, man. Back then, every one knew someone who’d been slaughtered. Kids in your school, the ones a few years ahead of you. So afterwards—well, like I’m saying. Everyone wanted to believe the big, nice story.” He smiled wide, a kind of mischief in his bleary eyes. “But some of us didn’t want to pretend.”

Back then, we all wanted to be beatniks. I registered Anton’s confused expression and realized I’d spoken these words aloud. “My father came here the same time as you. Did you know him? Teddy Garner?”

I could see the dulled mental machinery trying to pull a name from the clouds. “I’ve known a lot of folks in my day,” he said finally.

“He was only here for a year, 1960 to ’61, so the chances are pretty slim.” I raced through a short version of the story—Dad’s past, my uncovering of it—not sure how deeply Anton was absorbing it, but suddenly wildly optimistic, as pot sometimes makes me, that Anton might be of help. Stoned hopeful, as my friend Ian calls it. “I’m trying to do a little research,” I concluded. “To find out about his life. There are a bunch of people whose names are in his letters. Maybe you knew one of them.” Anton gave me a scrap of paper, a stray crimson brushstroke on one side, and I wrote out a list for him: “Danny Ficchino (aka Dean Foster), Ray Gladwell (female), Mike Kelsey, Don Drebinski.”

A short while later Anton and I stood outside of his shop, my fingers rubbing the baggie of dope deep in my coat pocket, my eyes adjusting to the dimming sky. The building next to his wrapped around the corner to Valencia, where a new three-star restaurant had recently opened. We could see the dressed-up crowd already gathering on the sidewalk, near the valet-parking stand, where swift, uniformed boy-men clutched car keys and kept away the junkies. Not long ago, this place held a secondhand furniture store and a women’s community meeting space.

“Not much antisocial behavior going on there,” I sniffed.

Anton just shrugged. “You think this place is changing because there’s valet parking on the block,” he said. “But I thought it was changing when you showed up.”

I could still taste Anton’s pot on my tongue as I made my way home, could still hear his voice in my head. Perspective is everything: The way a place is when you arrive is the way you want it to stay, the way you believe it’s always been. Anything new that comes along you see as alarming. It’s hard to remember that you’re just a visitor, too. It’s hard not to be bitter.

Stoned and hopeful, I put in a call to Brady. “I think I have an idea for a project,” I told him.

“Sweet,” he replied.

I knew Brady Liu from KQED, where he worked as an audio engineer. Years ago, when I started producing local programming for the station, Brady edited my segments; we went on to create City Snapshot together. In that stressful, light-deprived, budget-crunched environment, Brady was my better half, the only person I ever wanted to spend time with outside the job. We would get high in the alley after work and take long, detouring bike rides home, or go to indie-rock shows and drink beer and talk politics. We were unlikely friends in some ways: he was straight, outdoorsy, half Chinese and all Californian, the first person I befriended who’d been born and raised entirely in the Golden State. Words and phrases exotically dude-ish to me, like right on and rad and sweet (pronounced sah-wheat) fell naturally from his lips; he took it for granted that winters were for snowboarding and summers for backpacking, and of course you were a vegetarian and composted your organic peels. But under the mellow exterior, he was a true neurotic. He suffered greatly, my boy Brady, because he couldn’t, on one hand, live up to the ideals passed on by his (white) Buddhist-feminist-anticapitalist mom, who worked at a nonprofit in Berkeley; and, on the other, he didn’t have enough ambition to please his father, a gruff, task-oriented chemist with a long list of professional accomplishments for whom Brady’s decision to spend years in public radio was a waste of his talent. In the last conversation I’d had with Brady, he spent far too much time agonizing over whether shifting his voter registration to the Green Party was a valiant or a foolish course of action. “I want to vote my conscience,” he’d said. “But on the other hand, if I vote Democrat, I’ll at least cancel out my father’s vote for the Republicans.” It was on the subject of fathers that Brady and I had the most in common.

Which is why I was so surprised to find him lukewarm about my idea to build some kind of report around my father’s secret year in San Francisco. “So, like a personal story? Like a father-son thing?” he asked me on the phone that night. “Because, no offense, dude, but you’ve got to have a real angle for something like that to work.”

“That’s where the beatnik thing comes in. How he was part of this wave of people who came to SF in the late fifties.”

“Right on,” he said, then added, “though that’s also pretty familiar turf.”

“Yeah, of course, sure,” I said quickly. “You’re right. I’m still looking for the angle.” It had been a while since I’d floated a creative idea to Brady, or to anyone, for that matter, and I was breaking rule number one: Know your story before you pitch it.

“You might just want to give this some time,” he said. “Let the dust settle.”

“What dust?”

“Um, your dad dying? You might be, you know, too close to this material?”

I could hear him picking his words carefully. I felt transparent. “No, it’s not like that,” I said. “This has been a long time coming. I already have distance on it.”

“Well, let me know what you come up with. You know I can’t wait to start something up with you again.” Brady and I had always worked together effortlessly, the way automobile drivers merging into a single lane know when to pause and when to proceed, but over the past six months, we’d been on completely different paths. After City Snapshot, Brady, a station employee, jumped right into another show; as a contracted employee, I was let go. We had big hopes for our next collaboration—national hopes, This American Life hopes—once we, once I, figured out what shape this might take. Before we got off the phone, Brady told me how crazy-busy his life was, not just at KQED, and not just because he and Annie were looking for a place to live, but also because of a new side project, working with some guys I’d never heard him mention before, helping them set up a music website. “Streaming audio content. Indie stuff from all over North America. It’s very right now,” he said. “It could be huge.”

That next morning I woke feeling the weight of every bone, zonked-out from smoking too much of my new purchase the night before. Getting myself out of bed took some convincing. The world was expecting exactly nothing from me. I lumbered around my kitchen, spilling a bag of coffee beans on the floor, jarring my elbow on the countertop as I swept up the mess, later knocking my first filled mug across the table. I remembered AJ laughing when I knocked over my oatmeal. I was a one-man danger zone.

My apartment was only four small rooms (one with a couch and desk, one with a bed and dresser, a kitchen with a table, a bathroom with a good-sized tub), but I found endless distractions within these walls—one of my curses as a freelancer. That morning, I watched an hour of housewifey TV. I unpacked the luggage still parked outside my closet. I pruned and repotted houseplants, looking neglected after my time away. I made myself balance my checkbook, the pathetic bottom line reminding me that my last freelance job, producing a few promotional spots for the smaller of San Francisco’s two public radio stations, had ended before Christmas.

So I called Bob Flick. When I was hard up for money (that is, more hard up than usual), I took temporary assignments with a company called New World Transcripts. Bob was the manager there, a gregarious, efficient dork. I liked him, but I hated the work—transcribing videotaped interviews for various market-research firms, listening for hours to earnest consumers trying to put into words exactly what they sought in a cordless phone, a breath mint, a cheese-flavored cracker—but since I typed ninety-five words a minute, it was easy money. Bob said he would send some work my way—a new client who had combined shampoo and conditioner in one bottle. “You rinse out the first application,” Bob explained, “and leave the second one in.” Woo-hoo! Well, it was something to tide me over until my brother-in-law sent that ten-thousand-dollar check my way.

The clock read 11:50 when I finally remembered Colleen. Friday at noon was our standing lunch date. We would meet at Café Frida, in the Mission, where neither the food nor the coffee was especially good, but the boy-watching could be compelling: scrappy, shaggy-haired hipsters wearing tiny, ironic T-shirts, absentmindedly scratching their bellies while reading Noam Chomsky. We’d been meeting like this for over a year, ever since Colleen left her job as a graphic designer for Levi Strauss. These days she worked at a little South of Market shop run by a gay couple who made cheap, outlandish clothes, perfect for drag queens and club kids (and no one else, really). Colleen managed the store and promoted their events, though what she really wanted to do was design her own clothing line. One of the owners had a crystal meth habit and the other was prone to depression—we called them Up and Down—but working for them, she said, was better than answering to a chain of corporate department heads.

I rushed into the café, sweaty from the ride over. She rose to hug me. Her head was wrapped elaborately in a colorful silk scarf that hid her hair and made her features seem larger: her caramel-brown eyes more expressive, her lips wider, her slight overbite more pronounced. She gave me the once-over, taking in my three-day stubble, my ripped sweatshirt, my damp brow. “So you’ve given up hygiene for the new millennium?”

“And you’ve started chemo?”

“Ha ha.” She dropped back down into the chair. “I’m in Hair Hell.”

“Woody said it was very pink.”

“He got my message? I’ve been absolutely paralyzed without your advice, Jamie.”

“Pink can be cute.”

“This is not cute. It’s a disaster.”

“Cotton candy?”

“Duller than that. Orangey pink. Salmon. Tongue.”

“Labia?”

“Labia!” she screeched. “My hair is the color of my pudenda. This is so not-okay.”

“Can I see?”

“I will not flash my pudenda at Café Frida.”

Hair dye gone wrong was nothing particularly new for Colleen. Since I’d first met her, back when we both lived in New York, I’d seen her try out blue, green, red and purple, sometimes wearing it proudly, sometimes erasing the whole thing with platinum and starting over. Once upon a time it was a punk thing—she’d had a riot grrl phase when she first got to San Francisco, not long after I moved here, when she wore combat boots with vintage dresses and dated a girl who played bass for a band called Hillary’s Pills. For the last few years, working for the Man, she’d limited her color to streaks and stripes. The pink, she explained, had been meant as a reaction to all the neutral tones she saw everywhere in San Francisco: khaki pants, brown shoes, beige sweaters. Charcoal gray T-shirts, fifty dollars at Banana Republic. Not to mention a reaction to spending a week with her own family at Christmas. “My cousin, the sleazy lawyer? She had the exact same amber streaks,” Colleen explained. “That was the final injury.”

We settled on black, deep dark inky black. Sort of mod, sort of new wave, with chopped-up bangs so no one would mistake her for trotting out that tired old Louise Brooks bob. Colleen seemed calmer once we came up with a plan. Me, too. I was back in my world, a place where I was expected to solve problems rather than cause them.

“Here, Pinky, this will cheer you up.” I pulled a little bundle out of my backpack, hastily wrapped in magazine pages on my way out the door. Inside: my father’s vintage beer coasters. I knew she’d like them. Colleen was a collector of cultural detritus, but a picky one.

“These are beautiful,” she cooed. “Where are they from?”

“From my father’s house. And before that, San Francisco, 1960.”

“I’m such an idiot,” she gasped. “I haven’t even asked about the funeral.”

I worked up a series of tragicomic encounters—my father’s mattress, my aunt’s fur coat, my cousin’s tipsy confessions, the streets full of slush, my shoes full of slush, my head full of slush—beneath which I hoped Colleen could hear the truth: I wanted to put the entire trip behind me.

All of it, that is, except what I found in the attic.

“It’s Pandora’s box,” she pronounced after I summed it up. “Be careful. Some of those ghosts are going to have fangs. What does Woody have to say?”

“He probably thinks its sort of cute, you know? There goes Jamie, off on another tangent.”

“We hardly saw Woody at all while you were gone.” She looked away for a moment, her eyes moving toward the ubiquitous Ché Guevara poster. “We’ve got to rescue him from that place.”

“He doesn’t want to be rescued. He wants to get rich.”

“On second thought, let’s let him. He’s the only person I know who might actually make money off this dot-com thing.”

We finished our coffee and then wandered up 16th Street to the Castro, arms interlocked, pointing each other’s attention toward cute boys.

“What about him, the bald in the camo?” she whispered.

The bald in question was sauntering towards us, a shiny shaved head, a thin sweater shrink-wrapped on a hard torso, baggy camouflage pants drooping invitingly from narrow hips. A perfect specimen of what it took to be sexy these days. “What’s up?” he grumbled, his voice all bass.

“Woof,” Colleen whispered as we passed.

I turned to look back and found him doing the same. I snapped my gaze away: I recognized him. “I had sex with that guy. Years ago, when I was going out with David.”

“Who didn’t you have sex with when you were going out with David?”

“Um, David.”

I peered back again. He’d stopped in his tracks, idling in the middle of the sidewalk, daring me to come talk to him. I couldn’t even remember his name, but I remembered our athletic sex, which had begun like this, with eye contact on the street.

“Stop it,” Colleen admonished. “You know if you look again you have to talk to him, and that’s not okay.” She was right: One glance was curiosity, a second showed your interest, the third was a commitment.

Dish was central to my friendship with Colleen, which for all its longevity still had the soul of a sorority. And so when we parted company an hour later I was painfully aware that the only thing I hadn’t told her about from my time on the East Coast was my tryst with Rick. In the past, I’d have gone right to her with this kind of thing. She and I used to bond as sluts, trading our explicitly dirty adventures, happy when we could outdo each other. But these days Colleen was a huge supporter of my relationship with Woody. “Monogamy is the new promiscuity,” I had announced to her as things with him were growing serious. “Sexual exclusivity, in your thirties, gives you the buzz that sleeping around did in your twenties.” Colleen liked that Woody had reined me in. His jealousy, which often frustrated me, was charming to her. She wanted a Wormy of her own.

On this afternoon, I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the new promiscuity had started to feel a lot like the old.

I had a date to cook dinner for Woody that night. I overloaded my bike with expensive groceries and spent hours preparing. Pork loin, butternut squash ratatouille, wild rice pilaf. I had hoped to have the knives back from Anton, to present the gift that evening, but Anton had called to say that one of the handles was shot and he was waiting for a replacement to be sent from a dealer in Los Angeles. That was my first disappointment. My second came at seven o’clock—with the oven heated and the gas burners blazing—when Woody phoned to say he’d be late. He’d forgotten tonight was set aside to take the new guy at work, Roger, out for drinks. “I would skip it,” he said, “except he’s the only other gay guy we’ve hired. I feel like I should be there for solidarity.” From behind him, I could hear a volley of male voices chanting “Wood-man!” He begged me for an hour’s leeway.

I thought about what Colleen had said to me, wondering how I could possibly rescue Woody from Digitent when I couldn’t even lure him to dinner on time. A year earlier Woody had been the assistant director of Learn Media, a nonprofit that trained underprivileged teens how to use computers. The small, embattled staff spent half its time fending off a landlord who wanted them out so he could triple the rent, and half acting as surrogate parents for the troubled kids—sorry, at-risk youth—who came into their keep. Woody was doing all that plus acting as Learn’s self-taught webmaster. Two jobs for half the price of one: a recipe for burnout. I didn’t question his decision to make the leap to the for-profit world—time to give Saint Woodrow a rest, time to climb out of debt—and when he got hired at Digitent at a salary more than twice what he’d been making, I gathered together our friends for a celebration. But those dot-com dollars were casting a dark shadow. The hours were longer and the stress more pronounced, and all of it without the warm-fuzzy of teaching some kid from the projects how to use a PC. A month ago, I’d gone with him to Learn’s holiday party, where he was greeted with family-style hugs for the prodigal son and then forced to endure his former boss leading the crowd in the buoyant toast, “To all of us who haven’t been lured away by the boom!” When the room erupted in cheers, she added, “Keep fighting the good fight!”

“That was awkward,” I offered after we’d left.

“She knew exactly what she was doing,” he grunted. “She’s jealous of anyone who takes control of his life.” He spent the rest of that night in an uncharacteristically glum mood. The next morning, a Saturday, he was called in to work and stayed for hours.

He made it to dinner, well past nine-thirty, carrying a spray of red flowers and a bottle of Merlot way more expensive than our usual $4.99 Trader Joe’s special. It was his apology. I couldn’t stay mad.

“How’s the new guy?” I asked.

“Funny. Smart. Good style.”

“Is he cute?”

“Not as cute as you.” Plup went the cork.

I shook my head. “You don’t have to say that. I can handle you working with a cute gay guy, Woody.”

He poured me a glass and changed the subject. “I had to threaten one of the slackers today. He’s this close to being fired. I swear, he’s always stoned.”

I thought about how many hours I’d spent stoned since I visited Anton, hours I’d kept hidden from Woody, who rarely joined me in my favorite vice. It was my turn to change the subject: “Sit and start eating. It’s all getting cold.”

He flattened a cloth napkin in his lap. “You’re mad that I’m late.”

“Not after tasting this wine I’m not.” I sat down and held my glass aloft.

“Here’s to being back together,” he toasted. “And to true love.”

“Sure, here’s to.” I felt my face flush even before the wine went down.

His eyes were fixed on me. “Even after a year, that makes you uncomfortable.”

“No. Well, a little.” I started cutting my food. “Come on, eat. Tell me how it tastes.” He was staring, waiting. “I love you too, Woody. I’m just not so good with the words.”

“You write words in your journal all the time.”

“Speaking them is harder.”

“How about this,” he said. “Speak to me about your trip. Tell me something you haven’t told me yet.”

An image of Rick at the urinal flitted by like a sprite. I washed down the food with more wine. “Well…I found out that my high school fuckbuddy is married with children.”

“Eric-something, right? Was that a surprise?”

“Considering everything we did together, plus the fact that he went into the Navy after high school, yes.”

“It’s a mystery to me how you managed to have sex with boys in high school.”

“Sex wasn’t the mystery for me. Friendship was, friendship with other guys.” I paused. “This is what I was trying to explain to you, about why I got so interested in my father’s friendship with Danny.”

He wiped his mouth, then reached across the table, surprising me by taking my hand. “You know, I’ve been wanting to raise an issue with you.”

“Uh-oh. The I-word.”

He sighed. “Annie mentioned a friend of hers who lost a parent recently, and this person decided to see a therapist.”

I slid my hand out of his, tried to joke this away. “I cried at the wake. In the bathroom. I told you that, right?”

“Annie thought this therapist might be a good candidate. If you were looking.”

“Um, I haven’t even talked to Annie about my father.” In addition to being a good friend of Woody’s, Annie was Brady’s girlfriend. I cringed at the idea of them sharing a dinner like this one, trading theories about me and my issues.

Woody said, “Your friends care about you.”

I gathered up a forkful of the ratatouille. “You haven’t tried the squash yet.” I leaned in close and brought it to his lips. He frowned, then blew on it, and I felt the tickle of his breath on my cheek. I watched his eyelids lower as he chewed. His lashes so lush for a guy. His concentrated brow so elegant.

“I wish I was as good as you in the kitchen,” he said.

“Wormy, I know you’re looking out for me. But the idea of therapy makes me feel like this ugly damaged thing.”

“Baby,” he said, a smile returning, “you’re a beautiful damaged thing.”

We spent the rest of the meal staying away from the I-word.

After dinner, walking backwards down the hall, he peeled off my clothes. My T-shirt, ripe from hours in the kitchen, went over my head. He planted his lips on my chest, his tongue on my nipple. My weakness. He pulled me by my belt loops and then slid my pants down. I nearly fell into him, eager for his kisses. We hadn’t had sex since I’d returned from New Jersey. I’d been avoiding it. For months we’d been fucking unprotected. We’d been tested, we were both negative, we were monogamous; we didn’t need condoms to have safe sex. But I’d crossed a line with Rick: My lips had been winter-chapped, he could have been HIV-positive, that tablespoon of cum in my mouth could have been the instance of transmission. Now I was going to give it to Woody.

He pushed me onto my bed, pulled my cock through the fly of my boxers, wrapped his warm hand around it. In a moment he was down on his knees in front of me. I hooked my fingers under his armpits, tried to raise him back up. I needed to be the bottom tonight. He wasn’t having it. He was hungry, determined, inspired by half a bottle of wine. I watched his lips wrap around the head of my dick and slide down its length, his eyes closed, his eyelids like two gentle smiles, his blonde curls bobbing. I fell back on the pillow and stared up at the ugly light fixture over my bed.

Stop him. Tell him.

I can’t tell him now, not right here in the middle of sex.

Tell him now, before you give him AIDS!

Rick didn’t have AIDS.

You don’t know that.

Woody won’t get HIV from oral sex.

Are you certain? Really certain?

But that would mean I have AIDS, too—

The amazing sensation of being deep down Woody’s throat, my thighs tickled by his hot breath, my body held in place by the weight of him. He was servicing me and dominating me all at once. I don’t know that I’d ever felt so physically close to him and so mentally far away at the same time.

The physical won out. I didn’t stop him to confess. I squashed the conversation inside my skull: It was based on guilt, not medical information. The odds were against this being dangerous: I did not get HIV from a couple of seconds of aerated semen on my tongue. It’s only unsafe for Woody if I have HIV, and I don’t have HIV! I repeated this like a mantra, not sure where rationality ended and wishful thinking began—a familiar, unwelcome confusion that I could trace back to the late eighties, when penetration was new to me and AIDS truly was capital-letter deadly. This panicky mind-chatter went back to every time I’d read reports of a study claiming the virus might in fact be transmitted by oral sex; to every article claiming a new, more virulent strain of HIV had been discovered; to every time someone I knew seroconverted. I shut out the studies; I focused on all the anecdotal evidence to the contrary. I slammed the lid down on the cauldron and just breathed the humid mist of the moment. I gave in to Woody’s effort.

He lifted me farther back on the bed and then undressed. His long, lean torso—broad bony shoulders, broad flat chest, a slanting ridge of muscle highlighting his lower abdomen. Skin the color of parchment. His cock rigid without either of us touching it. I watched a crystal bead glistening at the tip drop to the floor, a filament stretching and vanishing. I would be on my hands and knees tomorrow, looking for the spot that sacred drop had blessed. He sucked me some more and I watched the elongated slope of his lower back, his ass raising up like a cat’s hoping to be scratched, more of that golden skin, gleaming exquisitely. And when he planted a knee on either side of my ribs and lifted himself up, and dropped back down onto my lap, and guided me up inside of him, I let it happen. I fucked him, as he clearly wanted it, the way we always did this. Bareback. I looked up and met his eyes and I told myself, It’s going to be okay, and then thrust up until he groaned and we found the rhythm.

I said to him out loud, “I’m yours.”

He matched the intensity of my gaze and held it and nodded his head, telling me: Yes.

He called the next day from work. I was sitting at my desk in my underwear, checking my e-mail, a mug of coffee cooling at my side, two dead cigarettes already in the ashtray. A tiny thump of a hangover persisted through the caffeine, less from the Merlot than from the lingering feeling that I’d not only fucked Woody the night before, I’d screwed him.

“I had an idea,” he said.

“As long as it’s not about therapy,” I said, “I’m game.”

“Have you done an Internet search for Danny Ficchino?”

That I hadn’t wasn’t surprising. I’d been a slow starter in the wired world, the last of all my friends to get an e-mail account. I was trekking to the library to do research when everyone else was swearing by search engines. This wasn’t the smartest attitude for a radio producer to take. True, I often found sources on library databases that didn’t quickly appear when using the ’net. But when I finally got screamed at by an executive producer for taking too long to put together a list of possible interviewees for a deadline-driven project, I learned that I needed to pick up the pace.

At home, I was still using a modem to connect. Woody had a T1 line at work, which was about a zillion times faster. “I’ll do it for you,” he was saying. “I’ll try PeopleSearch.”

“Search, people! Search!” I commanded, listening to his keyboard clacking.

In an instant, he had results: nothing under Dan or Daniel or Danny Ficchino, but almost thirty variations of Dean Foster. He forwarded the page to me, and when we got off the phone I looked it over.

Some of the names were clearly wrong—Roderick Dean Foster, Dean Smith-Foster—and I eliminated those immediately. Any listing with a middle name or initial—Dean Thomas Foster, Dean M. Foster—I cut as well; I figured since Dean Foster was an alias, it was unlikely that Danny would have made up a middle name. That left about eighteen to consider. Of those, five were in California, including three in Los Angeles and a couple in towns not far from San Francisco. I stared at the screen, at all the possible Deans. I debated whether or not to make phone calls first or send each one an e-mail. Both choices seemed presumptuous, invasive—somewhere between junk mail and stalking. I could mention my professional credentials, the possibility of a public-radio story, but how would I back that up? I couldn’t even convince Brady that this was anything but personal.

All but two of the entries had street addresses. That seemed best: I’d send a letter, a good old-fashioned winds-up-in-your-mailbox letter. Time wasn’t pressing; in the interest of not scaring him off, I could wait.

I jammed some of Anton’s pot into my pipe and spent the afternoon composing letters:

Dear Mr. Foster:

Forgive me for intruding, but I tracked your address down through the Internet and was hoping you might be the same Dean Foster who grew up on the West Side of Manhattan under the name “Danny Ficchino,” departed for California in 1960, and was once a friend of my father, Edward “Rusty” Garner. If you are not, please disregard this request. If you are the person I think you might be, I would like to speak with you.

Sadly, my father recently passed away after a long illness, and I uncovered your name and photo in his belongings. I understand that, owing to circumstances which I know next to nothing about, you have become estranged from the family, including your sister-in-law, who is my aunt, Katie Ficchino. I am writing to you not only to share the news of my father’s passing but to see about reestablishing contact. I have only the best intentions at heart. If you are interested, please contact me.

Very truly yours,

Jamie Garner

…which decomposed as the morning progressed and I got more and more stoned…

Dear Dean:

I have a hunch that you might be someone I’m trying to track down—Danny Ficchino. You were once my father’s friend, and your brother was married to my aunt, but for some reason, which no one will tell me, you dropped out of everyone’s life. This past month, my father, Teddy Garner, died, and I’ve taken it upon myself to piece together some of the missing links of his past. That seems to include you, Dean. Are you interested? I sure hope so, because even though all of this stuff took place forty years ago, it’s never too late to mend a fence. Don’t you agree?

Your sort-of nephew,

Jamie Garner

…until at last I was typing out the true, fucked-up heart of the matter:

Hey Danny Ficchino:

Yeah, you read that right. I know who you are, and I know you’ve been hiding from your relatives for a long, long time. I don’t know why, but I plan on finding out, so why not go right to the horse’s mouth? Who am I? I’m Teddy Garner’s son, all grown up and homosexual, which is a detail that’s only important because what I really want to know is if you and my father had some kind of teenage jack-off buddy thing going on way back when. And the reason I want to know is because he turned out to be a homophobic prick, and drove me away from him, which I find kind of interesting given the bisexual porn hidden in his bedroom. Maybe I’m a pervert, but that’s just the way my mind works.

By the way, Teddy is dead. So I’m the closest you can get to him now. They say I kind of look like him, though that’s debatable.

One more thing: you were white-hot when you were young. I’d have sucked your dick, for sure.

Cheers,

Jamie

I didn’t print any of these out. I didn’t send anything. I couldn’t. Not yet.

Anton was sliding the knife set across the glass counter, the blades gleaming, the handles buffed and creamy, the velvet brushed clean. “A thing of beauty,” he marveled, as if he had no idea how these shining objects had wound up in his shop.

I liked witnessing this side of Anton, the proud tradesman emerging from beneath the pot-addled painter and the paranoid drug dealer. I plopped down sixty bucks, more than I’d ever given him at once—for knives, that is—and said, “Better than new.”

As I turned to leave, Anton said, “Hold on.” He disappeared into the back room, returning with a newspaper clipping in hand. “The lady painter. Ray Gladwell. I knew the name was familiar.” He handed me the clipping, a review from a gallery show, dated about a year previous. There she was: a short, curvy woman with cropped, salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a dark turtleneck sweater and an ornate, metal necklace. Her smile told you she’d be the easiest person in the world to talk to.

“We were both in a show at the Berkeley Gallery, in ’68 or ’69,” Anton said.

The article reviewed a show of abstract landscapes at a gallery near Union Square. A transformer of reality into dream, Ray Gladwell is a tireless career artist, one of the last of the California-landscape generation receiving much deserved recognition. Sixty-five and finally getting her due—no wonder she was smiling (though she could just as easily have bitterness scarred across her face). The text said she lived on the Peninsula, south of the city. Assuming she hadn’t died in the past year, she was still alive, this woman who’d been my father’s—what? Lover? Girlfriend? Old lady? What would they have called it in 1960?

“Do you remember her at all?” I asked Anton.

“I remember thinking she painted like a man.”

I pulled from my father’s San Francisco box the break-up letter Ray had written to him, the one I’d first skimmed in New Jersey. I hadn’t noticed before how fragile the paper felt. The creases where it had been folded were splitting and frayed.

Dear Teddy,

This smothering fog is terrible for one’s state of mind. Outside it presses down, and inside I sit wishing I wasn’t so poor with words so that I might explain myself, your “magic girl” with too many tricks up her sleeve.

I believe in the freedom of the individual, whether that means I paint the way I wish, or I take a spin out of Mountain View without telling my husband (who sits in the next room, wielding his influence even though you never see him), or I spend the party with Kelsey without worrying that you’ve shown up. And again I remind you, you weren’t supposed to be there. Can’t you understand how that makes a difference? I am not as cold as you’d have me be.

Above all, this is about my life as the “second sex.” For a woman, love and dependence are the same thing, and so I don’t let myself get too far in love. You say you understand, but if you did, you would not have threatened me.

When you ran out, I called after you, but I’m glad you didn’t come back. Don’t come back, Teddy. I can’t change my situation, and you have a lot of living to do. You’d do well to forget my troubles, and cherish our good memories and tender nights, and years later you’ll look back on this and I won’t seem so monstrous.

If you see me at a party, smile and walk by. Smile for the past, and walk away for your future.

You are a fine young man.

She had signed it “Ray Gladwell,” as if there could be any other Ray in his life. Her handwriting was curvaceous, penmanship-perfect; she was a lady of the 1950s, schooled to handwrite notes with soothing legibility. How, then, did she wind up as a self-reliant adulteress, running around without explanation, sneaking past her husband, all in the name of freedom?

I wondered, too, about the threat she’d referred to. Here, at last, was a hint of Teddy as I knew him—bark worse than bite, but what a bark! That baritone voice, hard and resonant as steel as it conjured the fear of punishment, the force gathered up under his skin just barely held in check. He’d never raised a hand to me, but he scared me many a time. Ray had felt this, too, forty years ago, though she must have been a match for him: alluring, always in motion, calling the shots. You are a fine young man. Such a withering, patronizing thing to say to a lover! She’d broken his heart because it was good for him.

In a desk drawer crammed with unsorted photographs, I found a picture of my father that I’d snapped at the barbecue celebrating AJ’s birth. Dad stands in the backyard in his silly apron, wielding spatula and tongs, smiling toward me. The last good moment between us. Not a hint of the fateful argument to follow.

I placed the gallery clipping on the desk, next to this photo. Teddy and Ray. His aged face next to hers. Long before my mother, my father had crossed paths with this woman, had followed that winning smile into an illicit affair. Somehow, they’d found places where they could be alone—his apartment, a motel room, perhaps a locked bedroom at a party. They’d seen each other naked. They’d whispered into each other’s ears. They’d ignited something tender, and then, soon enough, it ceased.

I didn’t know of any woman who’d been with my father except my mother and a lady he dated after she died, who, like my mother, was named Shirley. She’d been at that barbecue, too. This second Shirley had broken things off after a few months. (Later, Deirdre read in the paper that she’d been killed in a car accident—so surreal, Dee said. She took Dad to the funeral, but he, already slipping, was mostly just confused by it.) That’s all I knew about my father’s romantic life. Ray Gladwell might be the last person alive who’d had sex with my father, who’d held his body next to hers, who’d felt him inside of her. The possessor of secret knowledge—if she even remembered that far back.

I knew I had to talk to her. But when I called the gallery and left a voice mail message saying that I needed to get in touch with one of their painters “for an interview,” my words emerged in stammers. Cold calls are my downfall; I find it difficult to be precise. One on one, in person, I’m fine. I interview people for a living. I can gauge the temperature of a conversation by facial expressions and body language. But on the phone I’m fumbling in the dark. And here again, I found myself unsure of why I was calling. Was this business or personal?

I was at my computer, transcribing the shampoo-conditioner testimony and, fortuitously, not stoned, when she called back. As soon as I heard the words coming from my mouth—“I’m the son of someone you once knew, Teddy Garner”—I had no doubt that this was personal.

“Yes!” she said. “Yes, I remember Teddy Garner! My God!” She was so enthusiastic, I could hear the exclamation points.

“I didn’t know if you would. It’s been forty years.”

“Forty years! Oh, jeez, I’m a fossil.” Her laugh was gleeful, but tinged with nervous energy. “How is he? Where is he?”

So then I had to break the news, and that seemed to upset her, and it left me feeling cruel. Here I’d just brought back a youthful memory, and then smack, down came the guillotine. I apologized, and told her a little bit about the circumstances: the “Alzheimer’s,” my grandmother taking care of him, his death in early January. I heard shame undulate beneath my words, and I wondered if Ray Gladwell could figure out from my description that I’d stayed away during his illness.

“So you found me through the gallery,” she said.

“I had your name.”

“Oh, you are sweet. He mentioned me?”

I made a sound of agreement. She asked me where he’d lived, what had happened to my mother, were there other children? She asked me if I was married, and I answered, “Well, I’m gay, but I’m seriously involved,” and she actually said, “Oh, wonderful!” which just about melted my heart.

“So you’re on the Peninsula?” I asked.

“Yes, in Mountain View.” Just like in the letter. Was she still married to the same man, all these years later?

“That’s a lovely place,” I said, not having any idea if it was. “Aren’t some of the older buildings rather charming?”

“The town center is quite nice. They’re fixing it up. But you still can’t find parking!” She had returned to finishing off her sentences with that lively burst of laughter.

“You know, I’m heading down there this week,” I said, the lie forming easily. “For work. Maybe I could visit you.”

“Well, sure! Great!”

I said I’d be taking the train, she offered to pick me up, and easy as that, we had a date. Her voice hung around long after the conversation, attaching itself to the newspaper photo of her, coalescing into a presence, a hologram. I felt elated, impatient to meet this artistic old lady with the checkered history who laughed so easily and thought my gay relationship was wonderful. I sent an e-mail to Woody that said, “I think she’s going to turn out to be my fairy godmother.”

“Jamie? It’s Deirdre.”

“Oh, hi. What’s going on?” My voice casual, as if we’d been in regular contact lately, though this was the first attempt either of us had made since I got back. I’d thought about calling her many times. The idea would strike, and I’d immediately determine why the timing was bad: I’m too tired, I’m too frazzled, I’m too stoned, she’s probably not home, she’s probably making dinner, I’m sure she’s already in bed, I’m just not in the mood, I just can’t deal with her this very second.

“I need to talk to you about some stuff—” Behind her I heard AJ whining for her attention. “Okay, honey just a minute,” she said to him.

“I’ve been meaning to call you, too,” I said.

“Okay, AJ, that’s it! This is a time-out. Mommy’s having a grown-up call.” She must have cupped the phone because the sounds grew muted. Then she was back, or rather AJ was back, saying hello and asking when I was coming for a visit and did I know his half-birthday was coming up, which meant he was six months from being six years old? I heard myself telling him maybe I’d come to his sixth-birthday party, and he asked me if I’d bring him a special present from California.

“Now you’ve got his hopes up,” Deirdre said, then took a deep breath. “Nana fell. She was cleaning out Dad’s closet and slipped off the chair. She has a fractured ankle. Practically a break.”

“Oh, no. Is she in the hospital?”

“She’s here, at my place, on the couch.” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial hush. “We told her about the senior housing, and she got really pissed off at us.”

“Meaning what?” I thought about Nana’s brand of pissed off, the frosty silence, the locked posture, the averted eyes.

“She keeps saying she wants to go back to Ireland.”

“Where families take care of each other.”

“Plus, the home we wanted to put her in won’t take her because she’s not perambulatory.”

“That’s no way to talk about your grandmother.”

I regretted the lame joke as soon as she spoke again. Her voice, so tense throughout the conversation, seemed to crack open, raw and throaty. “I swear, Jamie, it’s like Dad all over again. Having this older person dependent on me. I need a break.”

I’d never heard her complain like this, and it threw me into silence. She told me how the past ten days had been all struggle. Carly Fazio’s company had offered her a job right before Nana’s accident; now Dee was worried that they wouldn’t hold it for her. AJ had been getting picked on by some older kids in school and was acting out at home. On top of that there had been some legal trouble brewing with one of Dad’s neighbors. A year before, a tree from Dad’s property, that old oak I’d noticed missing, had fallen into the street. This woman swerved to miss it and wrecked her car. Andy had written her a check to cover the repair bill, but now she’d brought a lawsuit for further medical expenses plus emotional damages.

“Who is this woman? Do I know her?”

“No, someone new. Andy calls her the Angry White Lady.”

We chuckled together about that (who knew Average Andy had a sense of humor?), and before the conversation ended she apologized for dumping on me. I told her I didn’t mind. I had considered bringing up the money I was owed, but at the moment, it seemed crass to do anything besides listen. She’d given me the benefit of her confidence, which was rare enough not to risk spoiling.

The afternoon mail delivery brought a Visa statement: an eight-hundred-dollar plane ticket, a seventy-dollar car-service to Newark, a two-hundred-fifty-dollar cash advance (pot, groceries, knives), plus a thirty-nine-dollar overlimit fee. My noble silence on the phone suddenly seemed foolish.