Vera hated doctors. “They’re a bunch of bloodsucking cunts and bastards,” she said. And she expected Ram to partake in her prejudice against the medical profession, which Ram feigned to do.
During their first months together, after they moved from Cedar Street and were living in the small, shingled studio on Murray, Ram contracted a bad case of the Asian flu. He was vomiting round-the-clock, dizzy, sweating, and running a high fever. He had hallucinations and convulsing chills as he lay alternately freezing and burning in the damp sheets, waiting for Vera to return from rehearsals and her afternoon roundelay at the cafes and bars on Meridian Avenue. When she left, leaving him with a pot of rose hips tea, she admonished Ram to do nothing until she returned home with his medicine.
When the door closed, signaling that she had returned, Ram could smell the medicines she had with her. From a used paper bag (the co-op where she had gone to shop had a policy of “no new fibers”; recycling was a dictum in Refugio that Ram saw writ large, like Lea Gusta Este Jardin? in Lowry’s Under the Volcano, like a wood plaque at a Chamber of Commerce visitor center that told you what kind of community you’d alighted in), Vera began to extract various medicinal jewels like a latter day Galen pulling out organs in front of his audience. “I told you I’d take care of you, lover. I told you I’d cure you. You’ll be completely recovered by day after tomorrow. Here, take this,” she smiled, loading a horse-cap with a yellow powder. “It’s raw goldenseal.” Ram swallowed the capsule, washing it down with another medicine, a granular liquid with bits of something grass-like floating on the surface. Next, Vera placed a stick of something rope-like in Ram’s mouth, looking almost as though it were an oversize thermometer, encouraging Ram to chew and suck on it. He did, and it had a sweet taste. “Raw licorice,” said Vera. She bounced into the kitchen and put water on to boil, returning with a concoction of cayenne and sassafras which she made Ram drink. His eyes began to burn and sweat beaded on his forehead as soon as he ingested it. “That’s a good sign,” Vera said. “It acts as an emetic; you’re purging the poison.” She then pulled a small jar of Tiger Balm out of the bag and began rubbing it on Ram’s chest, then gave him a plug of raw ginger and told him to chew it. This commenced another conflagration in Ram’s mouth that was followed by Vera’s command to chew another kind of root. This one was vile tasting and stunk worse than those little Italian cigars that Clint Eastwood smoked in the spaghetti westerns.
The next day, Ram lay in bed next to Vera, trying to control the chills that Vera’s ministrations failed to arrest and had, in fact, exacerbated. Before she left the house, Ram lied and said he was feeling better, believing it was the only defense he could muster against any more of her medieval medical practices. She kissed Ram goodbye and made him promise to stick to the program of the emetics, the horse caps and the sweet and stinking sticks. Twenty minutes after she left, Ram drove directly to a doctor and had him inject him with penicillin. When he returned home, he got back in bed and stashed his pill prescription beneath the mattress. When Vera came home that evening, she found him chewing the licorice root with a horse cap at the ready while he lay reading Jose Donoso. Vera sat down on the edge of the bed and put her hand on Ram’s brow. It was decidedly cooler than it had been a day before. “Feeling better, my love?” she asked. Ram nodded and winked at her. “You shouldn’t be such a bigot about what you call my witchcraft,” she said. “I told you I’d save you,” she laughed.
When it came to some cures, Vera could be downright lethal. But then, too, perhaps, Vera’s juju had had an effect on purging the poison, and the doctor’s injection, though also a remedy, was for Ram only a placebo. Committed to iconoclasm as Vera was, this Florence Nightingale episode of hers did more to endear her to him than Ram could say. There was great care and tenderness in Vera’s nursing, and it revealed to Ram, for the first time, Vera’s maternal nature, which she had told him of but, until then, had never displayed. “I’d like to have a child with you someday, I think,” Vera said, “but not now, not for a while anyway.” Ram took her to him, nestled her in the crook of his shoulder, and taking down a book from the shelf, read aloud to her for the first time that evening (which later, when things turned sour between them, would be one way which Ram could still express tenderness toward Vera) and so, with her snuggled in beside him and smiling delightedly as a child, Ram read: “My daddy had three brothers―Hubert, Bob, and Nate, and I’m named after one of them. Now, that Hubert, he was an over average man. It didn’t do no man no good to take a hold of him, so my daddy said. Uncle Hubert didn’t take no shit from nobody, colored or white.”
They turned the corner on 22nd and heard their names being called. Vera put her hand above her brow, Indian style, and scanned about for the source. She was even more nearsighted than Ram was, but unlike him, wouldn’t wear glasses or contacts. “I can see enough of what I need to see,” she once told him.
“Over there,” Ram said, guiding Vera’s shoulders so she was facing Miranda across the street.
“Ram, Vera, come on up,” Miranda called from the balcony. “John’s making cocktails and someone called for you, Ram.” Vera and Ram mounted the stairs and Miranda embraced them briefly. They entered the roomy apartment that Miranda shared with an English woman named Betty and her daughter Sasha, along with Miranda’s daughter Monica.
Standing at the counter, Devlin greeted Ram and Vera. “Hey,” he said, mixing the Tanqueray’s-and-tonics. Miranda and Betty encompassed Vera into their circle and the women began murmuring, punctuated occasionally by short laughter and groans. They were discussing female sexuality and the latest books and magazine stories on the topic, gesturing occasionally as words like “G spot” and “zipless” and “female eunuch” floated through the air. As the women grew more excited and animated, they became louder until it got to the point when they repaired to the back bedroom so their conversation could be conducted in privacy, leaving John and Ram to watch over the two little girls watching television and eating ice cream.
Before she closed the door, Miranda called out to Ram: “There’s a message for you on the pad next to the kitchen phone,” she said. “Some guy named George.” Ram thanked her and Miranda disappeared into the room.
Ram looked at John, and Dev shook his head and laughed through his teeth. “It’s almost daily now,” he said, “the mystery of the female orgasm and the stupidity of the men who don’t know anything about it.”
“Same thing in Refugio,” Ram said. “Twice weekly meetings at the women’s clinic and then a night full of abuse until Vera wants to get laid.”
John laughed and came around the counter with the drinks. “I guess we’re worthless. Anyway, here’s to us, Ram,” Devlin said, handing Ram a drink. They clicked glasses, drained half their cocktails, and John refilled them to the brim. “Here you go, Monica,” he said to Miranda’s eleven-year-old, handing her the silver shaker. “Keep us going when we start to run dry.” Monica rolled her eyes but got up and retrieved the shaker. She was used to it by now, having first been put into service at their communal home, Atcliffe, some years ago where one of her household duties was keeping the hash pipe lit.
“So, Ram, how are you?”
Now Ram rolled his eyes. “Okay, but I get tired of being the enemy.”
“It’s just a phase, Ram, just the current fashion. If they didn’t need us for something they didn’t have, we’d have been gone long ago.”
“Touché, but I’m not sure if I believe that. I don’t think they need us. It’s more that they want us but they don’t really know what they want us for other than sex.”
“Maybe that’s closer.”
“But then again, I might be wrong. Sometimes, what I think I know, I don’t know anymore. It’s always a challenge, especially in Refugio.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it’s a continual thing, a constant thing. Consciousness-raising is. I have to learn about all these things that I know nothing or little about, just to fit in, just to b
e on my way to enlightenment. I’ve got to know all about women’s rights, women’s bodies, women’s orgasms. I have to know all about indigenous people’s oppression in Africa, the war in Central America, prisoners I’ve never heard about who are unjustly jailed; food irradiation and Venusians and pagans. Every day it’s something new. Every day it’s a consciousness-raising, then a consciousness razing. It’s like an esoteric poker game or something. It gets me dizzy,” said Ram, shaking his head.
“Sst, sst, sst, sst,” John laughed, raising his drink, draining it, and shaking his glass until Monica refilled it. “It’s the same here in The City, Ram; when Miranda goes to her meetings, I make myself scarce until a day or two later. I hide,” Devlin said, laughing harder now. “I don’t need the fucking grief.”
Ram raised his glass, drained it, and turned to see John lighting a joint. “Let me make this call before I forget I have to,” said Ram, picking up a phone and the number transcribed by Miranda in her best Victorian-borrowed hand. He dialed the number. George Rogers picked up on the second ring.
“I’m in town, Peach,” said Ram.
George Rogers, a.k.a. The Dixie Peach, laughed softly. “Well, as I live and breathe,” he said. “The estimable Ram Le Doir. How are you, sir?”
Ram and Rogers conversed briefly, setting an appointment for 8 p.m. at McGreevy’s, an oyster bar on Union Street that Rogers had a special fondness for.
“Are we set then?” Ram asked.
“Like bowling pins. Set and ready to go. And you?”
“Packing. Locked-and-loaded, Peach,” answered Ram.
“Until then, Ram,” said Rogers signing off.
Ram cradled the phone and Devlin lit the joint, inhaling two deep tokes before passing it to Ram. When he did, Devlin went back to rolling and when he had two joints finished and the present one was smoked, he cracked the door to the back room where the women were and put his head in. “Miranda, Ram, and I are going for a walk. The kids are fine where they are, but we’re leaving.”
“Just go,” said Miranda. “We’ve got everything under control.” Ram could hear Vera murmuring a monologue and thought about saying something but decided not to. He put on his Levi jacket and headed out the door, waiting for John to follow him.
Outside, a sour-looking sun was descending through a smoke-hazy sky. There were fires in the North Bay, and the big one was still blazing in Marble Cone, 100 miles below Refugio near Big Sur. The sky was thick with ash particles in it and the air had an almost industrial feel as though belched by smokestacks. When John came through the door, he looked up at the sky and chuckled briefly while he buttoned his jacket. “Nha Trang,” he said. “1968.” Ram watched John, his eyes far away, dead and gone. Then he returned and smiled placidly. “Come on,” he said, “let’s walk.”
They were always walking, Ram and John were. It was how they’d spent most of their time together since their first meeting in London several years back. They walked and talked, for hours on end sometimes, discussing current affairs or books or film or music or history, trying to piece together what was happening and their respective places in all that was, and what it meant, and where it led. They talked of places they’d been together and what that was, talked of places they were going and what that might be, talked of their relationships with their women and how they fared in those respective climates. John rarely spoke of Vietnam, just as Ram rarely spoke of Jaime and the heroin days in Sagrada, but each of their respective horrors infused their thinking and provided an annealing bond of survival transmitted mainly through the eyes, and in an undertone, like deer communicating with one another picking their way to survival through a forest fire. On this occasion, as they walked through the hazy light heading into the Castro, they talked of their women and of their work, and although Ram’s feelings weren’t near as hopeless as Devlin’s were, he began to see, in their conversation, that the bloom was beginning to fade from those bright and hopeful days of his second homecoming, the prodigal’s return, the exile’s end.
Ram had believed Fran then. He accepted Fran’s version of what was coming and what had changed since he’d left, when he met Fran in Amsterdam that day and decided to come back to California. Ram believed it because he wanted to believe it, needed to believe it in order to have hope and confidence that what he was doing was worth doing. His initial success upon returning home helped him quantify that belief. But there were rumblings and quiverings; something was unraveling, peeling away, something was off under the blue sky and burning sun. A nerve was starting to throb and Ram could just begin to sense the tremor that summer. Perhaps it had always been so—although always seemed too fixed a state to describe it—and Ram has only been ignorant of it until now because he didn’t see how it affected him, or how it mattered. That’s what Fran would’ve said had Ram asked his brother about it—but in his time with Vera, even though it wasn’t she who had necessarily started it, or prompted it—Ram began to consider what had happened, all the events since his return to California, and saw it in a more critical light. He had recently begun asking himself what this was, and where this was heading.
As they descended the hill on Sanchez, Devlin lit one of the joints and passed it to Ram, who took two hits and passed it back.
“Who’s this guy who called?” Devlin asked.
“He’s a friend of mine. Met him a while back through one of the Endymion guys. He’s a book editor, from the south, Mississippi, I think. Miranda wanted me to get some coke. He’s got some. I’m meeting him at eight.”
“There’s a lot around these days. It’s becoming a big thing. How much?”
“Hundred twenty-five a gram. I’m getting one and Miranda wants one.”
By the time they reached The Dover, Ram and John were talking politics. They talked of the reelection campaign of Barry Bailey and whether he’d become Governor again. They talked of Deng Xiaoping and what was new in China. They talked of Jimmy Carter’s lust in his heart and they talked of politics in The City, of Mayor Tom Calonzo and his running battles with the Board of Supervisors. When their drinks arrived, Devlin asked Ram what he thought about Darla Van Amberg.
“Don’t know her. Who is she?” asked Ram.
“She’s the one who heads up the hookers’ union.”
“Oh yeah, I know who she is. I actually met her one night. It was at a party celebrating the opening of a bar called The Astoria, right around the corner from the house we were living in when we built the Endymion store here. She was with this guy and they asked us if they could join us at our table. I don’t remember much about that evening other than that the guy she was with turned out to be the Sheriff.”
“Tony Cameron,” John said. “Darla beards for him.”
“He’s a fag?”
“Uh-huh,” Devlin nodded. “Darla Van Amberg is Miranda’s latest heroine,” he said. “Miranda thinks she should run for mayor.”
“She wouldn’t stand a chance.”
“I don’t know, Ram. She’s pretty popular here. Lots of people are behind her.”
Ram looked hard into Devlin’s face, trying to divine whether or not he was being serious. But there was no sign of mischief there, no indication he was goading Ram to see how far Ram would run with the bait.
“You’re serious then?”
“Dead serious, Ram. She’s up to 15% in the polls. She says she’s going to decriminalize all victimless crime,” Devlin said, shouldering Ram. “We’ll be able to smoke pot legally on the street.”
“Nobody does anything about it when we do it now.”
“Yeah, but we’ll be able to grow it ourselves instead of paying $100 an ounce.”
“Okay, here’s to Darla Van Amberg then,” Ram said, raising his glass and holding up his hand until the bartender saw him and came down to deliver two fresh drinks.
They were talking about the Giants now, who finally seemed to have a chance at winning the pennant again. John said that he could get tickets if they made the playoffs. Ram said he’d like to go
with him if they did. When they finished their Mai Tais, they walked over to Market Street and took the bus up to Bernal Heights where John first lived when he came to The City from Boston two years back. They walked silently until they reached Precita Park where John pointed to a bench facing east. When they alighted, Dev shook out the other joint from his cigarette pack, lit it, and passed it to Ram. The light was beginning to dim. The air was heavy and musty-smelling. Devlin took the joint, inhaled, and gestured toward a house across the street.
“See that place there, Ram?” he said, indicating a large old Victorian two-story house with a basement underneath it. It was light green with fancy gray trim. Two motorcycles were parked in the driveway. A kid’s tricycle was on the porch.
“What about it?”
“That’s where Patty went down, Le Doir. Her and what was left of the SLA.”
Ram thought about that era and what, if anything, it seemed to signify. He thought of what he thought of earlier, of what it underlined, and what it amplified, if anything, of the tremor that caused it. He thought again of the bloom beginning to fade and how the Patty Hearst SLA episode was perhaps the first hard symptom that something in the air was changing. Besides the tragedy televised live of mayhem in the streets that was manifest in the sordid SLA chapter, there was something otherworldly about it, something vaguely un-American in it, something fantastical and largely theatrical; white boys and white girls from good homes and colleges gravitating to a black convict with a fake Latin name and a slick con game that seemed as though it were borrowed from a bad B movie, an Americanized film version of the Baader-Meinhof gang that only Rainer Fassbinder could have made. Cyanide bullets killing a black school administrator seemed to signify a collective psychosis. Then the SLA snatched Patty and claimed credit, offering to exchange her for food giveaways to poor people, which her haunted-looking father and verge of a nervous breakdown mother agreed was fair, appearing at news conferences and exposing the fact that despite their prestige and power, they were just like the rest of us underneath the expensive veneer.
Windwhistle Bone Page 20
