You Can Say You Knew Me When (36 page)

The contrast of Ian’s heavy-booted manliness with our increasingly floaty vibe accelerated the trip for me. I became aware of the vapors that Jed and I were drifting into, while Ian remained tightly tethered to the world—telling us about his ongoing computer problems and his need for a new roommate. I felt nowhere near the intensity or euphoria of the E we’d taken in the woods, but there was something familiar about this: the glazed enthusiasm on Jed’s face, the way my focus rarely strayed from him, the fact that sexual attraction pulled like an undertow, one that had already knocked me over.

Ian announced we were going for a walk, and Jed pounced on this by stripping off his shirt and rummaging through a big pile of clothes I’d left out for him, mostly old T-shirts that I no longer wore. Jed wasn’t Ian’s
type—
too self-consciously tough, too much a peacock—but then again, it wasn’t every day a buff nineteen-year-old stood shirtless in front of him. I watched Ian be carried through a range of reactions: stunned, amused, lustful. But as the display went on—Jed pulling off a different shirt every minute, flashing his skin while he dug through the pile, then sliding on another one, puffing out his chest, saying, “Check this out”—Ian seemed to sour to the display. When Jed rejected a ribbed tank top with the same complaint he’d delivered to me the day before—“too gay”—I could tell Ian had hit a limit. There were plenty of things that Ian and I thought were
too gay,
but he wasn’t about to let Jed decide what they were.

“Enough with the fashion show,” Ian grumbled. “You ain’t all that.”

Jed, caught off guard, put on the same shirt he’d been wearing all day. One of his own.

The evening was warmer than the day had been. Night-blooming jasmine had erupted everywhere, its juicy perfume ambushing us as we trudged up 20th Street to Dolores Park. We sat on a bench at the crest, Ian dropping himself between Jed and me. I was adrift in the high, absorbing the gentle psychedelia of the view: dots of office light outlining tall buildings downtown, the slender ribbon of approaching cars on the Bay Bridge, a bone-colored rising half moon. As Jed started up one of his talking jags, all big plans for the future, I voiced out loud my recent idea that it might be time to leave San Francisco. “I was thinking about LA, New York, another city,” I said.

“Because you want to go somewhere or because you want to get away?” Ian asked.

“I’m ready for Baja,” Jed said. “Hot sun, cheap weed, sexy Mexicans.”

“Would that be sexy señors or señoritas?” Ian asked.

Jed scowled at him. “Don’t box me in, Party Nurse.”

“Sorry,” Ian said, not sounding sorry at all. I could usually keep up with his conversational aggression, but he had an unfair advantage: He was sober.

“Check this out. I was just reading about Mexico.” This was me talking. “About Kerouac and Burroughs and Ginsberg crowding into this dumpy apartment in Mexico City.”

“Mexico would be better off if the bohemians had left it alone. All they did was open the door to free trade and pollution,” Ian said.
“White boy finds the meaning of life in the Third World. Sells memoir to First World publisher. Throngs of tourists follow.”

Jed said, “Is Kerouac the one who wrote
Queer?”

Ian gave him a sidelong glance as I answered, “That was Burroughs.”

Jed nodded. “That professor leant it to me. That’s a fucked-up book.”

“What would have happened if my father actually made it to Mexico?” I wondered out loud. “I might never have been born.”

“Or you’d be born half-Mexican,” Jed said. “That would be rad.”

“This is about Woody dumping you,” Ian said bluntly. “It’s a no-brainer.”

Jed stretched his torso across Ian to address me: “Dude, we’d have a fucking blowout in Baja, and we wouldn’t need a lot of bank.”

Maybe the leaning across, the exclusionary gesture, was the final straw, but I could feel Ian stiffen even before he spoke. “You guys can plan your honeymoon without me. I’m taking off.” He faced Jed and said, “Listen, Junior, you be nice to my friend Jamie. He’s not to be toyed with.” The sentiment was sweet, but I could hear the warning it contained to both of us.

I walked a few paces with him, out of Jed’s earshot. Ian threw an arm over my shoulder. “Jamie, this kid is seriously hooked on you. Or else he’s using you. Either way, it’s a bad idea.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have fucked him this morning,” I said, expecting to grab Ian’s interest. But this information only deepened the crease on his forehead.

“His body, his attitude—I know how this works. I used to be a go-go boy, remember.”

“You weren’t a go-go boy for that long.”

“I know what it’s like to be rewarded just for being young and butch,” he said.

“He just needs guidance.”

“What about what you need, Jamie?” When I didn’t answer him, he gave me a hug and wandered off. I watched him stride across the very plot of grass where I’d first spoken to Woody.

A fuzzy wave of stoned intelligence:
My friends are worried about me because I don’t know what I need.

I had habits, but no organizing principles. Always, my life had been like this. My father’s needs were always terribly clear—order, regularity, a controlled environment—but he never spoke in those terms. I remembered a morning not long after my mother died, his first day back to work since her funeral, when he announced to me on his way out the door, “I expect you’ll have dinner ready by six,” which meant,
I’m hungry when I get home from work, and I’m used to having a meal waiting, and the woman I love isn’t around to cook it, and I need you to help me, my son, my eldest child.
Life kept throwing him off balance, but he only grew more rigid. His dead wife, his gay son, his pregnant daughter, none of these things made him more flexible, more open. The opposite occurred: years spent suing the hospital, entrenched in a sense of injustice, netting him next to nothing. His needs were so strong they overwhelmed my own, replaced them even, leaving me with only one way to define myself: against him. Against everything, really. A life lived in the negative.

Another wave, another memory: in the shower, age five, my hand reaching out to touch.
What’s wrong with you?
I remembered not only the original moment but the terrifying return of it on the mountaintop, naked with Jed. This time I did not repel the memory, did not break down under the power of it. This time I massaged it like a mound of clay, hoping to mold a concrete form with my unskilled hands. What emerged was a two-faced figure: the me who had, ever since, kept reaching out, waiting for a definitive
yes
. And the me who became just like him, the agent of countless rejections.

I
woke to the insistent ringing of the doorbell, a drill invading marijuana-thick sleep. I scrambled out of Jed’s dream-heavy clutch into yesterday’s underwear, banging my shin on an open dresser drawer. Limping into the hall, I pushed the intercom but got no reply. The bell sounded again—it wasn’t the street buzzer but the one outside my apartment door. Someone was in the hall. Maybe it was Eleanor with one of her typical, busy-body dilemmas, the transgressions only an old lady in the building has the time and inclination to discover:
There’s a big bag of trash stuck in the garbage chute! Is that your microwave blocking the storeroom door?

“It’s Leon.” Not Eleanor, but my landlord, Leon Hook, standing in the hallway. I opened the door to his weathered face, all thick whiskers under the brim of a Giants cap. Despite his pirate-captain name, Leon was possibly the least menacing landlord in San Francisco. So unthreatening, in fact, that I’d managed to forget I hadn’t paid this month’s rent. He got right to the point: “You’re three weeks late.”

“I’ve been meaning to call you,” I said. “I’ve been waiting for a freelance job to pay me.”

“You know I’m not a stickler about
on time
, but this is pushing it.”

“I’ll cut you a check right away. Do you mind if I postdate it?”

He frowned. “After thirty days I can legally evict.”

I thought of all the visitors to my apartment who’d commented how lucky I was to have a rent-controlled one-bedroom in the Mission; of all the times I glibly replied,
Yeah, but I’m stuck here until the day I die
, never conceiving that this place could slip through my fingers. An apartment this size, in this neighborhood, could be rented for twice what I paid. I thought of myself at Seventh and Market alongside Anton. Or across the Bay, trying to secure an apartment in Oakland without a car, without a job, with bills in collection.

Leon followed me to the kitchen while I dug out my checkbook, his eyes scanning the dishes piled in the sink, the brownie pan on the stovetop, the trash can full of pizza cartons acting as a dam against a treacherous mound of garbage. My rumpled appearance matched the disarray of the place. Without knowing exactly what time it was, I guessed it was too late for any regularly employed person to still be sleeping.

He said, “I called first, but your phone doesn’t seem to be working.” He pulled out his address book to double-check the number.

“Strange,” I said, feeling my pulse speeding up—the kind of anxious, adrenaline-fueled surge that, lacking an outlet, quickly dissipates into defeat. The spot where I’d whacked my shin throbbed.

Once he left, I picked up the phone and got three digits into Deirdre’s number when a recorded message intruded: “I’m sorry. Your service has been temporarily interrupted.” On my desk I found three months of unpaid phone bills and a disconnect warning.

I walked to the Roast, where there was a pay phone, occupied at this moment by a younger guy with a pager in hand and a skateboard against his leg. The only silver lining to this cloudy morning was that Jed had slept through Leon’s visit; Jed would have been one signal too many that something wasn’t quite right in Apartment Two. I looked at this kid on the phone and imagined him answering a drug deal, a call from a john. I thought of the days Jed had spent paging his way through the city before I let him in, and instead of worry I felt resentment, like this was his fault. I heard my father:
Trouble finds trouble.

A very sympathetic Pac Bell representative verified that, yes, $158.73 was ninety days past due, and, yes, I would have to pay a $295.00 deposit to reinstate service, plus another $13.00 fee, just to drive home the point that I was an idiot, though all I had to do was walk a check down to a payment center—“You’ve got one right there at Mission and 16th, James, just a few blocks from you”—and I’d be good to go within four hours. She asked if I had a cell-phone number, “Some way for us to get messages to you.” If I’d had a cell phone I could have avoided making this embarrassing call in public.
If you had a cell phone it would have been shut off by now, too.

I dialed Deirdre’s number collect. Andy accepted the charges. “Hey, what’s going on, Jamie?”

The benign sound of his voice threw me into a rage. “What’s going on is that you owe me nine thousand dollars and I’m out of money and my phone’s been turned off and my rent is due.”

“Whoa, take it easy.”

“I’ve been taking it easy, Andy, but I can’t figure out why, three months later, my money hasn’t gotten here.”

“I thought your sister explained. I’ve been managing your father’s portfolio—.”

“And losing it all in bad investments.”

“Aw, hold on.” I could hear his mood shift, harden. “That’s not fair.”

“I want that money tomorrow. Do you understand me? I wrote a rent check to my landlord today and I do not—repeat, do not—have money in the account to cover it.”

He cleared his throat. “That’s not really my problem.”

I unleashed a cascade of insults and accusations that didn’t stop until Andy held his checkbook up to the phone so I could hear the sound of a check being ripped from it, a check he assured me I would have by ten a.m.

I had burrowed so deeply into the confrontation it was a shock to turn around and see the café spread out in front of me, like snapping awake for the second time. I saw familiar faces from the neighborhood, several staring frankly in my direction. One woman I recognized from my building looked at me and then blockaded herself behind a newspaper. I would have done the same thing myself.

Spewing blind fury at Andy had been a rush, a release. But the next day, when I deposited his $9,000 and was informed that a personal check from a New Jersey bank would take
up to five business days
to clear (as opposed to, say, a money order or cashier’s check), I realized I should have been thoughtful and strategic instead of intimidating. My phone would stay disconnected and my rent check would bounce. I had only a handful of bucks to my name and no fury left to spew.

What followed was a string of empty, broke days during which Jed went to work—I’d given him Woody’s set of keys—and I sat around waiting for something to happen. Nothing happened. Nothing could: I was cut off. No e-mail, no voice mail, no channel of connection in an age of connectivity. I chipped away at the batch of magic brownies, small steady bites flattening my life into abstraction. The high became like the hum of a refrigerator—always there, disrupting the silence, even when you forget about it.

My actual refrigerator was empty of almost everything but condiments. I ate three mustard sandwiches before I ran out of bread. I ate mayonnaise off a spoon. The cabinets held only random baking supplies and items that had occupied the far-back corners for years, stuff I couldn’t remember purchasing in the first place but that I was now serving up for dinner: a can of honey-baked beans, a tin of smoked oysters, a bag of garlic bagel chips (expired). Jed came home from Starbucks with his pockets full of day-old pastries. The low-fat cranberry-orange scone went pretty well with the beans.

That’s a joke, actually, meant to cover up the argument we had. Spitting out a mouthful of beans after discovering animal fat on the label, Jed announced, “We should sell that dried-up weed, dude.” I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. “I could pack a bunch of dime bags and sell them to these kids I work with. Or have Bethany sell them in the Haight.”

“I’ll have money in two days. I’m not getting involved in selling drugs.”

“
Pot’s not a drug,
” he mocked. “You wouldn’t even notice if I took some.”

“You steal from me, your ass is out of here.”

“This is bullshit,” he said, smacking his plate, splattering more beans on the table. “Sitting around without money.”

“Go somewhere else then.”

For the first time since he’d moved in, I went to bed alone, and he stayed on the couch, where he was supposed to have slept all along. Through the wall I heard the underwater warble of television voices, the abrupt jumps of his channel changing, the frequent flick of a lighter. With my nose in a pillow that smelled of his scalp, and the empty half of the mattress calling out for him, I willed away the impulse to invite him back. Nothing allowed me to sleep—and then I was waking up to a silent apartment, to the fragment of a dream, Jed’s face diminishing like the dull bumper of a retreating car. My alarm clock read 3:11. I went to the living room. No sign of him or his backpack. I checked the marijuana stash. I suspected that he’d taken some, but as he predicted, so much remained in the bag that I couldn’t be sure. I slept for a few more hours, and when I awoke I paged him. No response.

It was now the fourth day since Andy’s uncleared check had arrived, and I literally had not a dime available to me. Jed was right; this was bullshit. I threw on clothes, gathered up a box of paperbacks and CDs and walked into the Castro. A couple hours of lugging my belongings among used bookstores and used-record stores netted me a whopping $32.14. I bought myself coffee and a bagel ($3.00), the
New York Times
($1.08), a pack of cigarettes ($3.50). I spent $8.25 on a movie,
Erin Brockovich,
which momentarily warmed me with the sentimental belief that underdogs do indeed triumph—
Sue the bastards; win millions!
But back in the cold, gray air, slipping two quarters into the palm of a ravaged junkie, I recalled my father’s lawsuit, a testimony to all the false hope placed in the hands of the legal system. I wasted another $1.50 on a large chocolate chip cookie that was meant to be some kind of self-reward, for what I couldn’t tell you. I went back home with $14.31 in my pocket.

Adding up what I owed—multiple credit cards, several months of phone bills plus fees, a month’s rent plus the one coming up, unpaid medical bills including emergency-room charges from when I was knocked off my bike, interest on the student-loan payments I’d deferred, money I’d borrowed from Woody—I saw how quickly I’d deplete my checking account of that $9,000. The remainder would be gone in another month, two at the most.

What if I didn’t pay up? I’d be evicted, my checking account seized, my credit rating obliterated. I’d be a vagrant with nine thousand dollars and a social security number. When the money ran out, I’d discover what was left of the welfare state, or I’d enter the underground economy, selling discards on the street, peddling dried-out dope, asking for change with a cardboard sign in my hands…Or I could leave San Francisco with Jed: hitchhike, take odd jobs and handouts, exploit the hospitality of strangers. Unless I’d seen the last of Jed.

I was alone. An aloneness more extreme than Woody’s enforced time-out, which was pressurized by a kind of hope: a problem to be solved in a finite amount of time. I had not solved it. Now I did not have a lover to fight for; I had a substitute lover I fought
with
. My friends had shifted their loyalties to Woody. My sister had shifted her loyalties to her husband. Death had stolen my mother. My father had hijacked my mother’s death and turned it into a cause. My father had aborted his youth and buried it in shame. My father had called out my desire and buried it in shame. My desire to know him, my glancing desire for him, was destruction itself.

Why not just simplify everything: stand at the edge of a cliff above the fogged-in Pacific and drop into the colorless void. Disappear. I could do it today.

I went walking. I wanted to cover distance—not only get out of my apartment, but out of my neighborhood, my routine, my familiar traps. It was too cold for the rushing air of a bike ride. Afternoon fog had settled, thick and wet. I wrapped myself in an old overcoat and threw on a wool cap. My head is the first thing to get cold. It gets colder when I’m stoned, as I was again. I put the collar up. A disguise.

I bound through the Mission taking streets that I didn’t usually take. Coming on an intersection from a new direction changes your understanding of a place; that alley you think of as a side street is now the main thoroughfare. I saw a painted billboard—an ad for cigarettes—I’d never seen before, the image chipped away to show the brick grid beneath. I noticed small businesses that had been around forever—a printing press, an auto body shop, a storefront crammed full of kitchen appliances—places that usually shrank from my awareness amid the bright placards and designer lighting of new restaurants, clothing boutiques, yoga studios. Looking past the gay guys in their snug jeans and the hipster boys in their saggy pants, I saw how many women made their way through the neighborhood doing the business of daily life. Central American mothers loaded down with laundry, kids at their heels toting detergent and bleach. Chinese grandmothers in floral headscarves wheeling produce in carts. An elderly white woman and her more elderly mother, their Irish faces set inscrutably, like Nana’s on her way to mass.

I pushed onward to South of Market, where wide, one-way streets were obstructed every few blocks by utility trucks ripping up the pavement, laying down fiber-optic cable or copper wire, whatever it took to increase the pace of commerce. On Sixth, which was to my day what Third had been to my father’s, the down-and-out crowded the sidewalks in front of single-room-occupancy hotels and bodegas, interrupting each other to hit me up for handouts. I meted out loose change and cigarettes but didn’t stop to talk. I felt the dread of knowing that this part of town was my only affordable option if I lost my apartment, not missing the hypocrisy that allowed me to romanticize the poverty of the Beat Generation while being terrified of the poverty around me today. Not missing the delusion that I wanted to align myself with beatnik poets, with starving artists, when I wasn’t one myself—wasn’t even a
Sunday painter.
I crossed Market, where a handful of once-glamorous theaters still lured in busloads for road shows of Broadway musicals, and crossed the invisible border into the Tenderloin, where the backstage doors of those same theaters reeked of piss. My distance from both worlds—the bland suburbanites clutching purses and playbills, and the staggering crackheads fouling the parking lots where those purse clutchers paid to leave their cars—left me nowhere. Not independent but isolated.