You Can Say You Knew Me When (27 page)

THE END

There was one more page. A map.

Scrawled in pencil, the soft gray lines had been smudged blurry over time. At the top he had drawn a clump of buildings and bridges marked
FRISCO
from which dangled a route marked 101. From 101 a squiggle went leftward:
LION
’
S GATE ROAD
, 6.5
MILES TURNOFF TO CABIN
. Here the map bloomed into detail, out of scale: an illustration of the cabin and a couple of outbuildings (
SHED
,
ROTTING BARN
), an inverted V inscribed
MARY ON THE MOUNTAIN
, another marked
PLANTED MY FLAG
. A zigzagging string of arrows was bordered by the words
SOLO TRAVELING
. I traced this route to its end point, a
CATTLE GATE
leading to a
RAILROAD CAR
. Beneath all of this, spaced out horizontally, was
M
-
E
-
X
-
I
-
C
-
O
, Teddy’s never-reached destination. And beneath that—written not in ancient smudged pencil but in ballpoint-blue ink—was appended one extra word, followed by a question mark and circled:
JIMMY
?

This blue ink revealed my father’s adult hand—the font on the outside of attic boxes, on legal pads in his malpractice-suit files, on Christmas and birthday cards before they stopped coming. It was evidence that he had revisited his youthful chronicle at some later date. I imagined this revisitation: Rooting through the attic, looking for who-knows-what, he uncovers, by chance, this old sketch pad with these typewritten pages in the back. He pauses to sit and read. He studies the map he once doodled with his sketch pencil, and maybe somewhere in this process of reading and recalling, his mind lands on me, his son, in
Frisco.
He writes my name, but as a question, the unanswerable question that is Jimmy. Maybe here he allows himself to think about Don, about whatever intimacy passed between them; maybe this is when he circles my name. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Only one thing is sure: He returned the map and the typewritten pages to the back of the sketchbook, sent the sketchbook to its pile in a corner of the attic, banished his youth to its locked chamber.

My eyes were burning, wanting to spill tears. I gritted my teeth and held back, knowing the flood that would rage if I let it. I was instantly inside another moment: the aftermath of the HIV test I took following my crystal-sex weekend. The results came back negative, but on my walk home from the clinic I broke down in the middle of Market Street, the bawling thundering out of me. Some quality of astonishment unified that moment and this one. The way feeling lucky, getting what you wished for, can leave you feeling vulnerable as well, frighteningly aware of the random distribution of life’s offerings. The tremulous wake of the close call. What had it meant all those years ago to be spared infection, when it might just as easily have gone the other way? What did it mean now to uncover this testimony from my father, which seemed to verify my suspicions of his California past, when I might have been left unfulfilled, never knowing? Two years ago, those test results moved me forward, to Woody. These pages would lead me somewhere, too.

I found Lion’s Gate Road on a California state map, forty miles down the Peninsula in San Mateo County. A connecting road joined it to 101. Along its length, Lion’s Gate bordered a huge swatch of undeveloped public land, a land trust, tinted green on the foldout paper. Perhaps, amidst these thousands of acres, Chick’s cabin was standing. A ruin, ready to be reclaimed.

A map tells you where to go. A map with your name on it begs to be followed.

I would make a pilgrimage. I would find this hallowed ground. I’d drive the six and a half miles to the turnoff, follow my father’s path along the stream, maybe even spend a night in the woods as he did. I’d climb the mountains he had climbed and
plant my flag.
I’d do it because I could. Because he had circled my name like a destination.

I
told no one, not even Ian. I did not return Woody’s message.
Call me when you’re ready,
he had said, but I wasn’t ready, not for the talk that we needed to have. I had just enough in the bank to make a hundred-dollar transfer payment to a credit card. The yellow pages yielded 1-800-CHEP-CAR, from which I rented, with this newly available sliver of credit, a cut-rate two-door. It was just a couple of notches up from a bumper car, with tiny wheels, a tape deck and power nothing. But so what? Driving out of the city, blasting an old Elton John cassette through the whooshy speakers (everything else I owned was on CD), I inhaled this new momentum. A man with a plan! Elton sang of sweet freedom.

I took 101 South, guided by my father’s pencil-sketched map. Fifty minutes later I was deep in Silicon Valley, with signs appearing for San Jose, realizing there would be no exit for Lion’s Gate Road. All around me, billboards flaunted the esoteric spoils of the New Economy—B2B, DSL, SQL; more bandwidth, extra storage, stronger networks.
Save time. Make your world wireless. Grow your business faster. Do it faster.
Visions of Andy sequestered with his laptop, minting virtual money; of Woody in his cubicle, counting his stock options before they hatched; of all those faceless Dean Fosters I’d tracked down online, none of whom turned out to be my man. All of us trying to grab a piece of the better world promised by
connecting
.

One hand on the wheel, I struggled to locate myself on a real map. The gorgon’s blare of a truck horn snapped me back to attention, and I swerved to prevent a multivehicle pileup across multiple lanes of traffic. In the contorted rage on the face of the truck driver, I glimpsed the ghost of every near miss I’d been at the root of, the accumulated mistakes and missteps of my life, all the people I’d pissed off, and my skin went clammy. The afternoon sun was falling and I was already off track.

It took another fifty minutes and directions from a gas station to get me back on course. I found my way to the connecting route, then to Skyline Drive, and finally to Lion’s Gate. Like a tourist entering a church whispering, I lowered the volume on the tape deck. All my life I’ve feared the woods: the darkness at the base of trees, the squish of moss underfoot, the unidentifiable rustling that circles the periphery no matter where you stand. On my side of the road, an overgrown grade fell steeply away. I was certain I could spy wreckage down among the redwood trunks—contorted metal settling into the pine needles, rubbery baby ferns arcing out of demolished windshields. I navigated perilous turns carefully, all too aware of driving a subcompact in a world of monster cars. The opposite side of the road sloped upward and was lined with fences and residential gates—old-fashioned gates with chains and locks, and newfangled ones with imposing vertical bars and driver-side boxes into which you punch access codes. As I reached the 6.5-mile marker and no
turnoff to cabin,
no land trust, made itself apparent, I felt the last of my initial optimism deflating into foolishness. Forty years had erased Teddy’s landmarks and replaced them with gated driveways. There was no access code to 1961.

But then—one more twist of the road and the view opened up, the trees thinned out, the windshield shone with the colors of a late-day sky. Below me, billowy green hills, capped by the bristly silhouettes of conifers, arced for miles, abutting at the wide wall of the ocean, which looked flat as a ribbon, a two-dimensional soundstage backdrop. The water was pale blue, nearly silver, dissolving into the blue-orange sky. Behind a faraway rim of clouds, the setting sun was shooting out tendrils of pink fire. An art department’s idea of sunset.

The road was wide enough for me to pull over and park. Near as I could calculate, somewhere in all that nature before me sat the very land I was seeking. Teddy’s
endless greengreen hillsides.
I exhaled, felt my muscles relax.

When I stepped outside, the wind, stronger than I expected, blew off the bucket hat I’d been wearing and sent it tumbling over the roadside ledge. I peered down and saw it resting on a belligerent patch of thistles. I started toward it, stepping sideways, one foot, then the other. Then I felt the earth release, my ankle pivot. Down onto my hip I toppled, doubling over in a sideways somersault, sliding the length of my body, nothing to grab at except wild grass, which uprooted from the damp ground as I rolled by. A flapping of bird wings followed, a startled exodus. As my weight slowed me down, I sensed that I’d cried out; the air was reverberating with an alien echo.

The hat rested above me, within reach. I plucked it off the thistles, plopped it on my head, and was answered with a piercing sting across my brow.

I crawled back up the slope on my knees, achy, hat in hand.

In the fumey air around the car, I pored over the contents of my backpack (cigarettes, pot, lip balm, my father’s journal and my own), marveling at everything I had failed to pack (sunscreen, flashlight, pocketknife, water bottle, quarters for phone calls, address book with necessary phone numbers and, most important in this moment, a firstaid kit.) I tried to extract thistle ends from the raw patch on my forehead. I gave up and lit a cigarette.

Dusk was pressing down. The idea of trying to find my way into these woods tonight had been a whim; the idea I would actually find something there was starting to seem ridiculous. I could turn back and be in San Francisco in under an hour’s drive. Cut my losses; call Woody; have that talk. Maybe even, if all went miraculously well, spend a warm night in bed with him. (If he was in my position now, what would Woody do?)

The force that had impelled me here would not loosen its grip: Teddy’s dharma-bum-warrior prose, the tears I’d suppressed in the kitchen, that
JIMMY
beckoning from the bottom of the map. Above all, the simple fact of those yellowed pages in my hands, the way they spoke to the yearning that had been building in me for months. Why had I come this far, if only to retreat from a thistle’s sting?

I stubbed out my cigarette. There had to be a general store somewhere along the coast. I started up the car and continued forward toward the blackening sea.

In my ten years in San Francisco I almost never left the city. No car equals no day trips; thus no clue that Route 1 along this stretch of the coast is undeveloped, beautiful to behold in the setting sun but not conducive to shopping. I had to drive north to Half Moon Bay before I found a strip mall with a convenience store. Next door was Casa Adios, a Mexican restaurant whose sign announced N
O
MSG, N
O
L
ARD
, N
O
P
ROBLEM
. Through the windows, instead of the all-Latina service crew I’d find in the Mission, I saw a handful of youthful workers of various skin tones, each emitting a nonverbal, suburban ennui. Among them was a sexy white guy in a white work shirt, ambling between tables, soiled washcloth in hand. He was boyishly towheaded and freckle-faced, but his ears sported thick silver hoops and his right forearm was obliterated by a riot of inky scrollwork and scarlet flames.

I went inside and ordered. Up close, the tattooed busboy was compact and firm, with a ledge of ass filling out his gray Dickies. From my corner booth, I watched that ass move from table to table as its operator cleared away abandoned burrito heels and salsa-flecked chip trays. I couldn’t quite read his style. Grungy snowboarder? Small-town post-punk rebel? Except for whatever gel he’d used to spike his hair, he read as straight, and he was definitely much younger than me. Twenty or twenty-one, tops. He was being trailed by a manager, a middle-aged Latino in a button-up shirt with a loud, patronizing voice. I got this manager’s attention to ask him for help, but he had never heard of the land trust and wasn’t sure about camping. He suggested a room at the Sea Fort, a motel down the highway. Done with me, he barked at the sexy busboy, “Jed, you stuffed too many napkins in this dispenser.”

I looked over, caught Jed’s eye and smirked at his bossy boss, an offering of solidarity that was rewarded with a smile. Jed’s lips parted to reveal a gap between his front teeth, wider than the edge of a butter knife, just goofy enough to humanize his too-cute face.

At the pay phone in the rear of the parking lot, I attempted, unsuccessfully, to call the Sea Fort Motel. I fumbled for a cigarette, and then turned to follow the sound of a lighter being summoned into flame. Standing at the back door of the building was Jed, silhouetted in kitchen fluorescence, sparking up one of his own, looking my way. I wandered toward him, into the shadow zone behind the taqueria, alongside a Dumpster wafting out currents of charred meat and cilantro. “Got one for me?”

He had torn the childproof guard off his lighter, which he flicked for me. I did the thing I like to do when a guy lights my cigarette and I’m feeling daring: touch the hand that holds the lighter in order to steady the flame. A natural-enough gesture that’s also just at the edge of unnerving. A test.

In the peach-hued glow, his face seemed fleshier, the kind of softness that guys don’t entirely shed until their mid-twenties (which is different from the softness we take on in our mid-thirties).

“You know what the problem is?” he asked as he lowered the flame.

“The problem?”

“He told you Sea Fort? Dude, it’s Sea
Foam
.” He nodded and narrowed his eyes, as if daring me to disagree.

“You’re sure about that?” I asked.

“Fully. I’ve stayed there. It’s down the coast, more toward Santa Cruz.” His voice surprised me. It was pitched higher than I’d expected; something whiny, a touch panicked, about it.

“Do you know anything about the land trust in the hills? I was planning on camping there.”

“That’s private land. Day use only. There’s always the beach, though you might get busted by the sheriff.”

I was disappointed. Check into a motel after I’d worked myself halfway into warrior mode? “I don’t suppose there’s anything to do around here for fun?”

“Drinking.” He narrowed his gaze. “I mean, if you’re of age.”

I fought back a smile. “Uh, yeah, I’m over twenty-one. By a few years.”

“Figured; just didn’t want to assume. So, dude, listen—you’re not a cop?” I shook my head. “Sorry. Just gotta get that taken care of. Because, see, if you’re interested—” he glanced furtively over his shoulder toward the kitchen door “—I can get you acid, E, speed, coke, K and this new shit, kinda like GHB, but without the zonk factor. I don’t have any on me, but I could definitely hook you up later tonight.”

I laughed, short and sharp.

He deflated. “What?”

“Nothing, nothing. It’s cool.” I wiped off the smile, not wanting to explain how improbable this seemed: a guy like me and a guy like him having this conversation in the parking lot of Casa Adios.

He stamped out his cigarette and tried again. “I figured a dude traveling usually needs a little something. A bump, a chill, whatever. Right?”

“Right. But I’m mostly just a pothead.”

He looked at me intently for the first time, surveying me from my mud-caked sneakers to the thistle blotches on my forehead. “Dude, this E is the bomb. I did some, and
then
smoked a blunt. Yo, I melted
down
. That shit made me
crazy
.” His delivery was half sales pitch, half report from Wonderland. His trusting eyes stayed fixed on mine.

“How much for the E?” I asked.

“Twenty-five a hit.”

“You’re charging city prices. Capsules or tablets?”

“Capsules.” He bounced on his toes, jittery. “I could maybe do it for twenty. It’s seriously bad shit.”

Jed,
crazy
on
some seriously bad shit
—I wondered what that might look like.

“Dude, you do this E with your girlfriend, she’ll fucking love you forever.” He must have seen something in my eyes then, because he quickly added, “I mean, if you have one.”

“Yeah, I have one,” I heard myself saying, “but things aren’t going so well lately.”

“The Sea Foam’s kind of a fuck-your-secretary place.”

“Shit! I didn’t bring my secretary with me.”

We both laughed, the same laugh. It was effortless.

“Jed! Salsa spill at table two.” This from the boss, poking his glossy head out the back door.

“I get off at eleven,” Jed whispered, raising his eyebrows at me expectantly and rubbing fingertips together, signaling
cash.

I didn’t need the ecstasy and didn’t have the money to spare; it was also likely that Jed operated so low on the retail-drug food chain that what he was selling wasn’t
seriously bad shit
, but just bad. But I heard myself saying, “Eleven’s good.”

As he turned to leave, he said, “I’m Jed.”

“Teddy,” I replied, the name like a blue spark shooting out from crossed wires.

“Later, Teddy,” he said.

I opened my mouth as if to correct this error, but he had turned away. I watched him retreat into the cone of kitchen light. A genie sucked back into the bottle.

I drove south to the Sea Foam and checked into a room that smelled heavily of cleanser and faintly of whatever rotten odor the cleanser was meant to eliminate. I stripped off my clothes and studied my body in the mirror. I was lucky to have naturally broad shoulders; even without a gym membership they looked strong, balancing out the softness that had settled at my waist. My upper torso had some of my father’s thickness, but without his mat of rust-colored hair; my own chest hair whorled unevenly, and my pink nipples poked out, their innocence long ago sacrificed to sex play. The tattoo on my left bicep—a trinity of snakes, each swallowing the other’s tail—had begun to fade to greenish gray. My life experience was written on my body, a man’s body, when inside I still felt like a boy who could put off the big decisions indefinitely. No wonder I was planning to go back and meet Jed—with him I could rewrite the script, recast myself as younger and straighter, change my name. I dropped to the floor in my underwear, alternating between push-ups and sit-ups, driving myself to a satisfying exhaustion. In the shower I lingered over my cock—which, unlike the rest of me, was still as unruly and eager as its adolescent version—and I focused on the smiling apparition of Jed’s little package, the fat-free body and half-moon ass, the dark rings of worker’s sweat under his arms.