You Can Say You Knew Me When (31 page)

We laid down on the floorboards and covered ourselves in the least vile of the blankets in the corner. There were long stretches of silence, both of us aware of the other not sleeping. Bouts of shuffling and erratic breathing. Failure to find comfort.

“Hey, Jamie?”

“What?”

“Do you feel your father’s spirit here?”

I concentrated, as if to tune in the astral plane. “Not here. I felt something by the Goddess.”

“That was the drugs.”

“Yeah, for sure. But this whole experience—meeting you, and you knowing all the places I was looking for—there’s something spooky about it. Something I should probably pay attention to.”

“Yeah, totally.” He fumbled for me with his fingers, found my hand, rested his on top of mine. “Just making sure you’re nearby.”

“You’re not worried I’m going to rape you?”

He pulled himself closer to me. He whispered, his voice as tender as I’d ever heard it, “All those guys I’ve done stuff with?”

“Yeah?”

“I never wanted to kiss any of them. Except you.”

He drew his weight along the length of my body, an arm clamping around me, his breath cuffing my neck. I couldn’t see, but I knew exactly where I’d find his lips if I wanted them and what they’d taste like. I remembered something about our kiss earlier that day: in the midst of the exhilaration, I’d briefly, involuntarily, compared him to Woody. I hadn’t known Jed’s age, but there was no mistaking he had the stabbing tongue of a teenage boy. His unruliness had been part of the thrill. Now I thought about how much life you had to live to communicate with a kiss the way Woody could.

I held him close without making another move. I laid awake like that for hours, suspended over the precipice of tomorrow. I waited until his breathing regulated, his grip relaxed. Until he’d fallen asleep and let me pass this test.

The sun intruded bright and early and sent us hiking to the car groggy, cotton mouthed, stiff backed. We found the flashlight on the seat next to a half-full water bottle, which we quickly emptied. At a restaurant on Skyline I sprung for breakfast: eggs and bacon for me, pancakes slobbered in syrup for Jed. I got the full history of his vegetarianism, which wasn’t any different from anyone else’s—the early influence of beloved family pets, a full awakening after seeing documentary footage of chicken slaughter.
It’s totally a moral issue, dude.
I mumbled something vaguely supportive in response, as if I’d never heard it put quite that way, and added a phrase about the Buddhist
respect for all sentient beings
, which I’d picked up from Kerouac. Newly caffeinated, Jed did most of the talking. He had a kind of prostitute’s etiquette, not asking about his john’s private life, and also a prostitute’s delusion, in the way he announced big plans for the future, most of which, like venturing to Baja to buy
a phat boat
, seemed unlikely in the short term. This was a guy who ran away from home lugging a two-foot-high Darth Vader head.

He said he had a friend at Stanford and insisted that I drop him in Palo Alto, just over the hill. We pulled into a shopping plaza. Against my sense that I would need to quickly put all of this behind me, I watched myself hand him my business card, heard myself say, “If you’re in the city, call me,” then felt the immediate regret of my gesture when he replied, “Dude, just keep this in your trunk, and I’ll get it from you later,” as he pointed to Darth Vader. I tried to refuse, but he said he wouldn’t be able to manage it on the train to San Jose, and besides it had been a gift from a
totally rad teacher,
and I should appreciate that it came with
intense emotional value
. In the end, I kept the black plastic hunk and gave him a hug good-bye.

I drove slowly out of the parking lot, one eye on Jed in the rearview mirror. I watched him approach a man in an overcoat emerging from the Safeway, watched the guy pat down his pockets and pull out a box of Marlboros, watched Jed take the pack from this stranger and put the begged-for cigarette into his mouth.

M
y day had begun at dawn, and as I hit the outskirts of San Francisco, morning rush hour was still gumming up the freeway. Not having a car for so many years has withered my driving reflexes. I’m hesitant when I should be confident and too easily inflamed by the aggression most drivers live by. I was coming down from two days of being high around the clock. Moments after screaming “Use your fucking blinker!” at someone who obviously couldn’t hear me, I caught sight in the mirror of my scarlet cheeks, my wild eyes, the strained tendons of my neck. The hideous face of road rage.

I peeled off at Cesar Chavez, a few exits early, which put me in Woody’s part of the Mission. It wasn’t yet nine-thirty, the time he usually grabbed the bus for his short commute downtown. I turned onto his block, imagining I might catch him coming out of his front door at precisely that moment and not knowing what I’d do if he did. I planted a seed: Whatever I saw when I approached his building would be my sign.

He lived in a tall, narrow apartment building with enough scrollwork around the windows and under the cornice to suggest the Edwardian era, a suggestion immediately undone by its grime-collecting stucco front and prison-bar entry gate. On either side stood a more attractive, more authentically Edwardian building; Woody had dubbed his
the middle child
. A middle child himself, fully aware of having been overlooked and underphotographed as a kid, Woody felt an affinity for his building. “We have to find some place equally ugly when we move in together,” I would say to him, “so you’ll feel at home.” Moving in together hadn’t been mentioned in a long while, not even as a joke.

Woody’s bedroom light was on. The sky had gone gray in the past hour and seemed to strip everything else of color, too. Gray sky, gray street, gray stucco, and one yellow rectangle of light, a shining frame within which I could see the flurry of a shadow. Not a shadow, a figure. Woody.

An empty parking spot across the street: I had my sign. Before I could lose my nerve I pulled over, got out, walked to his building, pressed the bell. After a moment, the gate buzzed. I hopped the four concrete steps to the front door, which opened on a steep interior staircase up to Woody’s flat.

He stood way at the top, wearing white boxer briefs and a white V-neck and gripping a toothbrush. Through a still-foamy mouth he said my name.

“Surprise,” I said.

He blinked tightly, as if clearing his vision of gunk, then said, “I’m late for work,” and walked out of view.

I climbed the stairs tentatively, watching mountain dirt crumble from my cuffs, inhaling my two-day body stink, hating that it had come to this: unsure of my status in Woody’s apartment. I followed the sound of water running from the bathroom faucet and found him poised over the sink, spitting. So much of him was exposed to me—his stringy calves, an ass emphasized by the cotton stretched across it, a crescent of flesh and a nub of spine above his waistband where the T-shirt pulled up. He stood, wiped his face, reached into the medicine chest to grab deodorant and sprayed a scent that was so completely his, some natural citrus-pine stuff, that it doubled his presence in the room. If he’d been trying, he couldn’t have seduced me any better. No mystery. No fantasy. Just the comfort of what I already knew. I felt myself getting hard—a woody for Woody—so quickly, so adolescent-eager, it made me grin.

It wasn’t until he was facing me that I saw he’d gotten a haircut.

“Your curls are gone,” I said. The sides had been buzzed short, the top trimmed to waves. It drew attention to his brow and jaw, the hard bones under his sunny face. It turned him older and butch-er. “You look like you should be coaching a team.”

He was scrutinizing me, too. “What happened to your forehead?”

I peered into the mirror to look at the still-puffy welts. “Thistle,” I said.

“This what?”

“This-
ull
. The plant. I’ve been off in the woods.”

“You went camping?”

“Sort of. It’s a long story that has to do with my father.”

“Of course.” His face conveyed a kind of willful neutrality, only partly masking something less agreeable beneath it. He slid past me into the hallway, his body torqued as though to avoid contact with mine.

“That’s why I didn’t return your message,” I called after him.

“Messa
ges
. More than one.”

“I’ve been away for two days. I just got back now.”

From the hallway he called out a question, but I didn’t hear it. My sights had locked on the orange plastic garbage pail wedged next to the toilet—on what I saw inside the garbage: a torn-open condom wrapper. Black foil resting atop a layer of crumpled white tissues. I didn’t recognize the brand.

“Woody?” I called out, still staring into the pail, looking for the dead soldier itself. I stepped from the bathroom, peered down the hall.

He was pulling on a pair of pants. “I said, were you out of town when the market blew up?”

“Blew up?” I pictured an explosion downtown—the weekly farmers’ market sent to smithereens, the millennium cataclysm striking at last.

“The stock market,” he said. “I personally lost four hundred thousand dollars.”

My mouth fell open and then filled with a nervous snicker. The idea that Woody had four hundred thousand dollars to lose was absurd. Until he’d bought that SUV there was little about his life to indicate excess—a powerful computer, a taste for expensive sneakers, the occasional bottle of forty-dollar Merlot—and much of that was on credit.

He grimaced, confounded by my laugh, and I felt myself shrink in front of him. “By the end of the day, Jamie, I’m not even sure I’ll have a job.”

“That sucks,” I mumbled.

Someone fucked you here,
I thought.

While Woody finished dressing, I looked at yesterday’s 72-point headline:

PLUNGE!
STOCKS TAKE STEEPEST DROP IN 12 YEARS

I skimmed the cover story. After a couple years of up, up, and up, the market had precipitously slid down and down some more But some
market indicators
were almost immediately rising again, and by last night, though the second largest drop of all time had been recorded, the business-page pundits were declaring optimism. This was merely a
correction,
they instructed, painting the entire phenomenon as not only inevitable, but welcome.

For a start-up like Digitent, kept afloat on venture capital and not yet spinning any of its vague potential into profit, the drop was absolutely unwelcome, an acknowledgment of widespread anxiety that no one previously dared to voice. Woody was being paid in large part with stock options, meaning that his value on paper was hefty with shares that he could cash-in six months or a year after the company went public. This business model had always sounded fishy to me, even in name, as if fair compensation for labor was the optional part. But Woody had been a believer; I don’t think I’d realized quite how deeply he believed until that morning.

“Have I told you about Magoo.net?” he asked me as we rode downtown. I’d offered to drive him to work, wanting more time before the Digitent vacuum sucked him back in. “They’ve been in talks to buy us out, but since we haven’t proven our value the whole thing’s on hold. Yesterday we instituted an immediate hiring freeze.”

“But that doesn’t affect you.”

“It affects a lot of the people I work with. All the consultants.”

Like Roger?
I pictured the two of them huddled in a cubicle, weathering the bad news. Or tangled up on Woody’s bed, Roger on his knees, erect, black foil, ready to be ripped, clenched between his teeth.

“So where the hell were you?” Woody asked. His tone conveyed no emotion, merely exhaustion.

“I went to this beautiful place down the Peninsula, full of redwoods and wildflowers, with these unbelievable sunsets. I saw bobcat prints, and I heard coyotes howling at night.”

“You’re gone two days and you turn into a nature boy?” The first lilt of warmth I’d heard in his voice so far.

“It was like the landscape wasn’t just something to look at, but something you could actually get inside of. And there were birds singing like crazy. So many bird sounds! We’d sit still and they’d just start talking and singing all around us—”

“You went with someone?”

For the second time in two days I’d slipped, as fools with secrets always do. I felt my mouth go dry, as if Jed was suddenly there in the car with us, poking his face between the seats to complain about the music. “I went to this land trust, this place I found out about, where my father had been. Where it seems that my father had sex with Don Drebinski.” I looked to him for a reaction. He was listening, so I went on quickly, “And I met this guy—this kid, really—Jed, who led me to this place I was trying to find, a railroad car that my father had slept in forty years ago.”

“You were with this guy for two days in the woods?”

At least I didn’t have sex with him,
I thought.
I mean, I did, kind of, but not in the railroad car.
“Hey, maybe you can answer me this,” I said, backtracking. “Do birds talk to each other across species?”

“Shit, did I forget my phone?” He was suddenly rifling through his bag.

I sensed him cooling off again, but I wasn’t going to give up; we were only a couple of blocks from his office. “Like a robin and a redwing blackbird—do they communicate? Because one of them’s going
peep
and the other one’s in the next tree going
ke-woop-ke-woop.
It sounds like they understand each other, but who knows? Then there’s the loud one that sounds like
kee-ree-kee.
But she’s a total bitch. No one wants to talk to her.
”
Hoping for a hint of a laugh from him, I met his eyes.

“I can’t believe I forgot my phone,” he said.

Digitent’s red-and-black light box hovered up ahead. I swerved into a handicapped spot and turned on the hazards. For a few interminable moments, their clicking was all I could hear. I took a gulp of air and said, “I’m sorry.”

“What exactly are you apologizing for?”

“Disappearing. Showing up out of nowhere.”

“Oh.” His voice no more than a chuff of air. “Seems like a bit of a stunt.”

“I missed you,” I said. “I have a lot to tell you.”

He stared through the windshield to where Digitent’s brushed-steel door was swinging open, drawing in the workforce. At last he cleared his throat. “I’ve got so much on my plate right now. I don’t know if I can save our relationship and save my job, too.”

“Come here.” I pulled him toward me, positioning for a kiss, but he maneuvered us into a disappointingly fraternal hug.
Pat, pat, pat.
I sent my hands down his back, pried up his sweater, reached under his T-shirt. My fingers grazed a familiar mole on his lower back, small and round like the flat bottom of a chocolate chip. A reference point on the map of his skin.

Woody’s hands, resting upon my coat, remained inert.

“Don’t,” he said, breaking away, opening the door, filling the car with cold air.

The phone was ringing as I tottered into my apartment lugging the head of Darth Vader. I dropped my bundle—the
boing
of hard plastic on linoleum—hoping it was Woody calling with some nugget of love he’d failed to deliver in the car, an
I missed you, too,
a
Yes, we’re still boyfriends
.

I was greeted with the deep, creaky voice of Walt van der Neuen. “Hello, son,” he said. “Got a minute for an old-timer?”

“Of course, Walt. How are you?” Was this a
booty call
from Grandpa?

“Truthfully, I’m being very good today,” he said. “Taking care of my responsibilities. Carter and I want to have you and your lover over for dinner next week. We could use a few twinks to liven up this house.”

I forced some levity into my voice. “There aren’t many places where I can still pass myself off as a twink.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

He named the time and date, and was already saying good-bye when I felt compelled to say, “I can’t promise Woody will come along.”

“If he doesn’t, you’ll be fending off the dirty old men by yourself.”

He said this with such good humor that I let the conversation end without further protest. It would have been ungracious, even unfair, to explain to Walt that sex with him had triggered Woody’s separation from me. Why were Woody and I so traumatized by infidelity when he and Carter had managed to fool around for decades, had even exploited their wandering eyes to widen their circle of friends? I felt so contemporary, so conservative. Maybe I’d bring Ian along. He’d fit right in.

I shoved Darth Vader into the hall closet and went to check my voice mail. I was out of town for only two days, but the world had rushed on: