You Can Say You Knew Me When (9 page)

While we waited at the baggage claim, I rushed through a description of what I’d found in the attic, what I’d read on the plane. I told him how eager I was to know more about my father’s year in San Francisco and his friendship with Danny Ficchino, to satisfy my curiosity, but also because there might be something here for a radio project. I told him I’d have to visit New Jersey again, this time talking to my grandmother, and maybe even Aunt Katie, with my tape recorder in tow.

“Hey, I just got you back,” Woody said, resting a hand on my shoulder. “Why don’t you just take a deep breath. You’ve got a lot of important stuff waiting for you here.”

“But this is the top priority now.”

“Okay, okay.” He patted my shoulder where his hand had been resting, attempting to impart some calm. I have an easy-to-read face, I’m told—my moods are obvious even when I think I’m displaying neutrality. This must have been one of those moments, because Woody was responding to me the way I imagined him talking to the frazzled dudes at Digitent when they were in their twelfth hour of being radiated by their computer monitors. Then his gaze focused on my shoulder. “What is that?”

I peered down at a streak of encrusted spooge. “Fucking clumsy stewardess,” I hissed, trying to rub it out. “Great, now my shirt is stained.”

“It’s not that noticeable,” he offered. “I shouldn’t have even mentioned it.”

“Yeah, well, you did.”

I was overdoing it—the culprit’s attempt to deflect the evidence—and feeling hot in the face, on the spot. I took off on a lap around the baggage carousel, trying to regulate my breathing as Woody had suggested, trying to will myself a clear conscience. When I got back to his side, I mumbled an apology.

San Francisco’s airport was in the middle of an enormous construction project, building a new international terminal: scaffolding, cranes, dismantled concrete, big signs with yellow flip-letters redirecting traffic, all of it disorienting for a travel-addled brain. On this night the upper roadway had been closed to drivers. Curbside was pure chaos—no lines, just masses of people jostling wheeled suitcases past each other, competing for taxis. If Woody hadn’t shown up with transportation, I’d have been fending for myself. Once inside the car, I leaned over and kissed him on the lips, grateful. When I pulled back I was rewarded with one of his winning smiles.

“I really am sorry for acting like a maniac,” I said. “I’m just fried by the trip.”

“Not to mention that your father just died.”

“Yeah. That.”

He reached over and rested his hand on my thigh. “Whenever you want to talk about it.”

I nodded and put my hand on his.

We drove the freeway into San Francisco. Tendrils of fog moved across the night sky, made orange and spooky
from city light reflecting up.
It was the same wide sky Teddy Garner had witnessed forty years ago, drunken and lovelorn in the passenger seat of a convertible, at the start of an adventure that wouldn’t last.

A
t 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.