You Can Say You Knew Me When (39 page)

He turned to ask me, “What are you doing in La-La Land?”

“A radio interview.”

I could have told him the truth, that I’d spent the past two months tracking down his Uncle Danny; I’m not completely sure why I didn’t. My plan had taken on the cloak of privacy, as if I’d be intercepting classified documents. Special Agent James Garner on a Top Secret Mission. Maybe I was afraid I would fail? Or that I would succeed, and in doing so tear away whatever dusty curtain enclosed this estranged member of our family?

They took to the dance floor immediately,
shaking it
to a new Janet Jackson song that sounded exactly like an old one. During a break, Tommy sidled up to me and asked if Colleen was available. “Why don’t you stick to hookers and leave my friend out of it?” I suggested.

“Aw, lighten up, I’m only kidding,” he said. “But seriously, she’s very attractive.”

I waited outside the rest room and cornered Colleen as she emerged patting sweat off her forehead. “We have to get you out of here. Tommy’s hot for you.”

“I know. It’s very flattering,” she said, all drunk giggles.

“Don’t encourage him.”

“Did you notice how big his hands are?” she asked. “I know you did.”

“If you sleep with him, my sister will accuse me of plotting to destroy the family.”

“How would your sister find out?” she said. “If he was just some random guy I met, and he wasn’t related to you, you wouldn’t be on a high horse about it.”

“Are you actually attracted to him? Or is there some other—.”

“We’re just
flirting
.” She twirled back to him, a cocktail already waiting for her in his big hand.

I left before they did, and went home to pack.

I woke up hungover, my throat raw from too many cigarettes—or else from something I’d picked up on my knees in the Tenderloin. In the bathroom mirror, mouth gaping, I peered down my throat, expecting a sore, a syphilitic warning sign.

Colleen pulled up in her Plymouth, clutching a cup of coffee. Dark glasses couldn’t mask her lack of sleep.

“You look like you’ve been up all night fucking,” I said.

“No comment.” The trunk held her luggage, a nearly bald spare tire and a container of antifreeze. I added to this my backpack, my recorder and a boxy gray valise containing nearly everything I possessed of my father’s: the original items from the attic, the letters he’d written to Ray, the sketchbook, the journal from the woods.

She steered out of the Mission onto 280 South, and I switched on public radio. The news show that had replaced the one I used to produce was in mid-report, telling of a San Francisco city supervisor who’d evicted an elderly tenant and her son, sick with AIDS, so that he, this elected official, could move into the unit. His aim was to establish residency in a new district in time for reelection—the kind of heartless scheme that had become regular news in the city. I waited through the report to hear from the sick son, but he wasn’t interviewed, and my producer’s instinct kicked in.
Interview the son! Talk to other people with AIDS! Talk about how the rental crisis is affecting people with AIDS!

Just past the San Francisco city limits, where the car dealerships and cemeteries of Colma brought to mind the drive from New York to New Jersey—urban and congested without being cosmopolitan—Colleen asked me for a cigarette.

“You quit a long time ago,” I said.

“All bets are off on a road trip.”

“Is this something you’re going to regret? That you’re going to blame on my bad influence?”

“Light it for me,” she said.

I watched her inhale and exhale, balancing the cigarette in her lips and the coffee between her thighs as she rolled down the window. “Head rush,” she said.

She flicked off the radio and popped a CD into a portable player plugged into the dash: Joni Mitchell’s
Court and Spark,
an album that was our morning-after standby when we first knew each other in New York and had been introduced to Joni’s music by older friends at the restaurant where we worked. “Down to You” was the album’s anchor, a hymn to strangers brushing up against each other on the street after fleeting, sexual nights. We used to sing along over coffee and cigarettes and the
Times.
I think she put it on as an invitation to broach the subject we were avoiding.

Might as well get this over with.
“So. You and Tommy?”

Something resembling affirmation passed across her face.

“I honestly don’t get it,” I said.

“Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had sex?” she asked.

“But you didn’t exactly approve of Tommy’s missing wedding ring.”

“That’s between him and his wife.”

“Promiscuity is the new monogamy?”

“Very funny.”

I let Joni’s melancholy voice fill my ears: words of loss, change, conviction
.
Colleen and I were going to be together for the next two days. I needed to de-escalate this conversation. “Okay,” I said. “The least you can do is dish up some details.”

She actually blushed as she geared up to speak. “Well, the first round was a little fast and furious—.”

“The first round? No wonder you look so hagged out.”

“He came fast.”

“He’s used to paying at an hourly rate.”

“Round two was for me.” The tone of her voice had dropped. Her eyes darted to me and away. “When it was over, he asked me about you. How you were doing.”

“Please tell me you didn’t say anything.”

“I said it was difficult to know.”

I sighed so loudly it was a whimper. “Colleen, you cannot keep gossiping about me.”

“Well, if you told your friends what was going on in your life, they wouldn’t have to ask each other for updates.” When I didn’t respond, she said, “Don’t be mad.”

“Don’t be mad,” I repeated with an ironic snort. I pulled another cigarette from the pack—the very pack Jed left for me so that I wouldn’t
be mad
. I’d written him a note that morning on the flip side of the one he’d left on my kitchen table:
I’ll be back in a few days. Wait for me.

Outside the window, suburbs had given way to the green slopes of San Mateo County. We would soon be approaching the turnoff for Skyline Drive, the route to the woods—Teddy’s woods, Jed’s woods. The site of these trees against this wide sky, the particular curve of the interstate here, the tinny sounds of early-seventies music, all of it transported me to the last time I’d been on this road, not as a passenger but in the driver’s seat.

“I should tell you a story,” I said and took her all the way from the pages that Deirdre had sent to Jed showing up in San Francisco and moving in with me.

She asked, “Have you fallen for this kid?”

Fallen?
Maybe. But into what? “There have been moments when he seems exactly what I need. He brings out something real in me. Something I held back with Woody.”

She frowned. “You never gave Woody enough credit.”

“Woody gave me too much,” I said. “He gave me credit for being more together than I am. More like him. More sane.”

“Is that a pose?” Colleen asked.

“Is what?”

“Because I’ve known you a long time, and I’ve never seen you as insane.” She kept her eyes straight ahead as she added, “Deluded, self-destructive, irresponsible, obsessive—.”

“You can stop now.”

“But not insane.”

“The point is, Woody and I—.” Actually, I didn’t want to make a
point.
“Look, it’s over. Let’s change the subject.” It was over. It was. I told myself again, knowing I had to make myself believe it. It. Was. Over.

We merged onto 101, passing through garlic and cherry country into the arid Salinas Valley: wide agricultural fields dotted with bent-over migrant workers; scattered towns, which at seventy-five miles an hour were little more than uniform subdivisions wrapped around gas stations and strip malls; the distant, burnished peaks that yoked the landscape. The batteries powering her CD player had died. The radio offered only evangelical fulmination and the music of an old-world fiesta. Fear and cheer.

“Read me something,” she said. Reading to each other was another of our New York pastimes. Back then we read mostly women authors: Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich. We once stayed up all night finishing off
The Handmaid’s Tale.
“Read me some of your father’s journal.”

She pulled over at a gas station, and I retrieved
In the Woods
from the trunk. I took the pages in hand and began. “‘Don brought me to this place because he needed to getaway—’. Wait, that should be two words:
get away
. ‘And I needed to see something of California beyond the sordid Frisco city limits.’”

She laughed lightly, repeating “Frisco” with mockery and wonderment.

Took me a few pages to harness my father’s rhythm; I had to ease into all the funny spelling and unpredictable punctuation. But soon enough I heard Teddy speaking before I spoke his words. His voice became mine, or mine became his. Hunks of clay mashed into something larger, subsuming the original pieces.

When I finished, she said, “He reminds me of you.”

“Come on.”

“Very black-and-white in his opinions. He puts these people on a pedestal, then the next day he’s denigrating them.”

“I hope he doesn’t remind you too much of me,” I kidded.

She fell silent—uncomfortably so for me, as I could have used reassurance—then said, “His macho posturing seems pretty familiar, too.”

“You’re talking about that night after Ray’s. About the way I acted.” She nodded. “I’ve apologized for that.”

“I know. I know. Just beware of who’s influencing you. That’s all.”

W
e hit Los Angeles during evening rush hour. The roads were packed to the point of stagnation, stretching our seven-hour journey to eight and a half. With the sun already down, we made a few wrong turns and lost our bearings. By the time we checked into our hotel, on Sunset in West Hollywood, we were cranky, achy, desperate for a bathroom. Colleen jumped into the shower; she was already late for a planned dinner with Up and Down.

I thought about calling Dean Foster, but the knots in my stomach let me know I wasn’t ready, so instead I walked to Santa Monica Boulevard and entered the first gay bar I found. In my wallet was a twenty-dollar bill that I’d discovered in a coat pocket before I left home. Expecting that Deirdre’s wire transfer would come through today or tomorrow, I figured I could afford a well drink.

“How’s it going?” I asked the bartender, a perfect specimen of style and musculature, but he didn’t answer, just waited for my order. This quickly became the pattern: I’d try for small talk with some guy, who would simply pretend I wasn’t there.
Simply
is a stretch; ignoring someone who has spoken to you requires a complex mechanism of detachment and dismissal. I looked out of place in this crowd, my shirt and my jeans too loose and grungy, my face in need of a shave. Fine for the Eagle, but not for WeHo.

I wandered into a gay bookstore, where most of the stacks were uninhabited but a crowd of guys stood shoulder to shoulder along the magazine rack near the back, their noses pressed up to skin photos. On a whim I searched under
F
, wondering if Dean Foster’s representation by a literary agency meant that he was a published author. Nothing. My gaze shifted left, toward the
G
s, where I found an edition of Allen Ginsberg’s journals, dating back to before he was a famous howling poet, to when he’d been Kerouac’s best friend and, as I quickly deduced from scanning the pages, Neal Cassady’s lover.

At the register, an androgynous, waify boy was serving up a retro-eighties look—asymmetrical, color-tipped bangs, a Duran Duran T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, a stack of black-rubber bracelets. He glanced at the cover and uttered, without inflection, “Ginsberg.”

“I’m studying the period,” I said. “Late fifties–early sixties.”

“Oh, the Beats,” he said wearily. “Total misogynists.”

“They broke a lot of ground for men bonding with each other.” I felt an almost animal need for some bonding of my own; he was the first person who’d acknowledged me in the last hour.

As he rang up the sale, he shrugged, unmoved, which I decided to take personally. “In ‘Howl,’” I insisted,
“
Ginsberg wrote about getting fucked up the ass by motorcyclists and sailors. No one was depicting that in 1955.”

“Have you seen
Queer as Folk?
” he challenged. I stared back at him coolly. “That’ll be $18.39.”

I had eleven dollars in my wallet—and no ATM card. Had I lost it? I remembered all at once a moment earlier in the week when, with no money to withdraw, I’d removed the card from my wallet and flung it at my desk. I could picture it banging against an ashtray and landing next to my computer keyboard, where it no doubt still was. For the benefit of Duran Duran, I patted down my pockets with a dopey grin before walking back to the shelf.

I slid the Ginsberg book into its proper place alongside Genet’s
The Thief’s Journal.
Genet, who had been a book thief. Ginsberg, who was once arrested for carting around stolen goods. Me, with eleven dollars to get through two days in LA.

I dug the metallic theft-proof strip from the binding and folded the Ginsberg volume under my coat. I exited the store with a brazen wave to Duran Duran. Behind him, a co-worker was flashing the overhead lights, ready to close up shop. I caught a snippet of the two of them debating who would straighten up the magazine rack.

My heartbeat had quickened in the rush of shoplifting. I walked a couple blocks trying to maintain composure, finally stopping under a streetlight outside a darkened art gallery. The prints in its window were full-color blowups of homo-pulp-fiction titles—
A Hardened Criminal
,
He Burns Through the Night
—suitably framed for contemporary décor. I smoked a cigarette and read a few pages of the journals, letting my nerves calm. All around me, gay guys in expensive jeans strolled and gawked, trailing cologne, while in front of me Ginsberg documented his creeping insanity, his pornographic dreams of making love to Cassady, his grimy hallucinations. I found myself wondering why I’d devoted all this time to Kerouac’s prevaricating prose when here was the openly gay Ginsberg blazing a trail for genuinely queer outlaws.

I looked up to see Duran Duran at the curb, unlocking his yellow, old-model Volkswagen Beetle. Our eyes met and he gave a faint nod of recognition. Then he cocked his head with curiosity, noticing the book in my hand, and his smile disappeared.

“Stealing from a community bookstore is fucked up,” he shouted across the domed roof of the car. “Why don’t you steal from a Barnes and Noble?”

A handful of passersby stopped and stared at him, and then followed his verbal harangue toward me. I darted my head around as if I, too, wanted to know what the fuss was about.

“Yeah, you,” he said. “You know who I’m talking to.”

My pulse raced again. Los Angeles was a foreign country, its cops notoriously rough. Getting busted here would be a trip to a Turkish prison. Duran Duran remained outside his car, shouting accusations with a jabbing finger. I tucked the book under my arm and strode away, up a side street that grew darker the farther I got. Then I broke into an adrenaline-fueled run.

Colleen—sitting on the bed with paperwork spread around her, a laptop open, a pen tucked behind her ear—greeted my sweaty-faced arrival with alarm. I tried to evade her questions with jokes, but she kept pushing. “I needed this book for research, but I stupidly left my ATM card at home,” I told her. “So I took it. And ran back here.”

“Christ, I can loan you money; you don’t have to steal,” she said.

“I guess I wanted to,” I said. Her mouth fell open. “It’s part of my midlife crisis.”

“You’re too young for a midlife crisis.”

“My father died at sixty. I’m more than halfway there.”

She grabbed her purse from the table and pulled out two twenties. “Here.”

“You don’t have to.”

“For tomorrow? Don’t you have an interview to do?”

“Thanks.” I folded the bills next to the ten and the single in my wallet and asked her, “About tomorrow? Any chance you could lend me your car?”

Her eyes expressed something like amazement. “Aren’t you here to give me back rubs?”

“Never mind. I was just asking.”

I went to the circular table in the corner, which had a phone on it, and dialed Dean Foster’s number. I hadn’t prepared my speech, figured I’d just wing it. His answering machine picked up: “Solicitors should remove this number from all lists. Professional inquiries may be left after the beep.” The voice was terse—neither the defensive tone of the man who’d replied to my letter nor the theatrical bellow of Robbie the Greek. But even without a barking dog in the background, Dean Foster’s desire to be left alone was clear. At the beep, I hung up.

Colleen watched me from the bed. “Who are you calling?”

“This guy I’m trying to meet. He lives in North Hollywood.”

A gentle sigh escaped her lips. “I’ll know in the morning whether I need the car. If I don’t, you can use it. Do you have your driver’s license on you?”

“Of course.”

“Do us both a favor,” she said. “Double-check.”

I stayed up late soaking in the tub, reading my pilfered book, while Colleen slept on the other side of the wall. I heard her call out in her sleep, a sharp, wordless moan. I waited for more, but that was all. A passing disturbance. For a moment I fantasized us as roommates again, back in our tenement apartment: one of us in the bathtub (located in the kitchen) and the other breathing the heavy air of dreams just a few paces away.

When I awoke, her car keys were waiting for me on an end table, along with a note reading, “Carry on bravely!” I smiled in recognition, remembering the elderly British woman who had been our upstairs neighbor in New York. She used to stop us in the hall to chat, a scarf over her head, her hands clutching at the buttons of her raincoat; every encounter ended with her chipper imperative, “Carry on bravely.” She had survived the Blitz in London, and this phrase always echoed with the ingrained fear of walking out the door into an assault from the sky. Colleen and I had made this salutation our own, though it had been years since either of us used it. Perhaps she felt some of the nostalgia that had overtaken me last night.

I phoned Dean Foster, and this time I left a message: “This is Jamie Garner, Teddy’s son. I wrote you a letter a couple months ago and was still hoping to talk to you. I got your number from the literary agency. I mean no harm, but I have questions for you.” I left the number of the hotel and hung up. There. It was done. If he never replied, I could at least say I tried. With a map from the front desk—a lousy map, short on details, as it turned out—I drove to North Hollywood, but could not locate the exact street on which Dean lived. I asked directions, got even more lost, and eventually found myself on a freeway, pointed toward the ocean.

Preparation is half the battle,
my father liked to say.
The other half is what you can’t prepare for.

I scanned the radio dial, unleashing a horde of obnoxious DJs provoking their listeners into arguments and commercials rife with faux-ironic humor and stiff, scripted repartee. My driving was as skittish as ever, and the regular updates on accidents and traffic delays didn’t help; I didn’t know the city well enough to avoid them. I finally landed on the commercial-free radio station, which eased my nerves and allowed me to see that Los Angeles indeed held some appreciable culture.

The day took me to Venice Beach, where I circled for nearly an hour trying to find a parking space that wouldn’t cost me. Even with Colleen’s money, I was pinching pennies, knowing full well that I could blow through fifty dollars without even trying. Venice was weekday-empty. Haze filled the sky. Intermittent gusts of wind kept the temperature too low for lying around on the sand. I’d imagined I’d see surfers, or at least some enticing flesh, but even the shirtless dudes bore a shifty street demeanor. So soon after my encounter in the Tenderloin I was leery of eye contact with strangers. Venice seemed to exist somewhere between New York and San Francisco: vaguely hippie like Haight Street, but with a more bruising energy. In that 1960 tourist guide sent to my father by Aunt Katie, the author had claimed that San Francisco’s
Beatnik Land
was in the process of relocating to Venice. No sign of the counterculture here, where the promenade featured little more than T-shirt kiosks and bootleg CDs at a discount. I watched a basketball game, fast-moving black and Latino boys who were graceful and intimidating all at once; their physical assertiveness as they barged past each other instigated in me the exact mix of fear and desire I could trace back to my first furtive glances at male flesh in the middle-school locker room.

A loose-limbed woman—tanned skin hanging like paper off her jaw, hair sun streaked and split at the ends, open mouth revealing lost teeth—sidled up to me for a cigarette. I make it a point never to say no to a fellow nicotine addict. After I gave her a light she remained at my side, peering through the fenced-in court, asking me questions—“Where you from? What are you doing here? Where you going next?” Finally she moved closer, her dry lips hissing in my ear, “Are you looking to score?” I didn’t know if she meant drugs, which seemed likely, or sex, hinted at in the way her collarless black sweatshirt drooped over a prominent clavicle, bony shoulder, the hint of flat cleavage. With little more than a grunt I walked away. From behind me I heard her agitated voice, saying something that sounded like, “You ain’t been a brother to me.”

I turned around, feeling a fight pulsing in me. “I just gave you a cigarette, bitch.”

She repeated herself. This time I heard it clearly: “You ain’t any better than me.”

I threw up my hands, surrendering. She followed me halfway back to the car, twenty paces behind, a frail, ghostly hellhound muttering recriminations.

Colleen returned around eight p.m., hours before I expected her. She threw her coat on the bed and announced, “I just quit my job.” She wanted a cigarette and didn’t care that we were in a nonsmoking room; the room was rented to her bosses. “Fuck them,” she growled. What had happened: An important delivery had been messed up—it might have been the very one she was working on when I stopped by the boutique—and though it wasn’t her fault, she took the blame because Up, who’d actually addressed the label, insisted she had given him the wrong address. They wanted her to drive across town to retrieve the missing garments, but I had her car and they’d rented a five-speed (Colleen couldn’t drive stick), so Up had to go himself. He spent his entire traffic-clogged trip screaming at her from his cell phone, calling her a saboteur. Meanwhile, back at the fashion show, Down was popping pills, growing steadily more slurry and absentminded. The fashion show’s lineup had to be rearranged to accommodate their delay, which put them in a bad light with the organizers and other designers. In the end they got all their outfits on stage, to great applause, and in fact the later slot proved to be an advantage—a more high-profile point in the program, right before a local favorite.

“There’s this press luncheon tomorrow,” she concluded, “which we weren’t originally invited to but now are, and I’m supposed to work all night to make alterations for a new set of models. That’s when I told them I quit.”

“Are you sure?” I said. “This could be big, right?”