The next morning I bade my poignant, early farewell to Celestine, went to clean her room and found the used condom that to me at that moment resembled a penitent’s cowl.
I could feel several of my various personalities – charming, affable host; aging hipster; needy animal attendant – collapsing. The room was growing dark. Celestine had a booty call and I was still hanging on the line.
To dispel the gloom, I decided to do what my mother always did when she felt stymied in life’s deep shade – bake! I dragged out the heavy containers of flour and sugar, the artery clogging blocks of butter and the eggs which possessed properties that my mother could never quite get her head around – strength inseparable from fragility and the mucous that begets life. It had been a while, so I had to sniff the flour to make sure it was still good. I went a little beyond a sniff and snorted a gram of it up my nose.
It was no worse than the last few granules of cocaine I’d had several years before, provided by a good friend who was purportedly a drug dealer. We went out of our way to do the classic coke in the loo routine. We spent half the night asking each other if we felt anything yet. We never did. I decided that if he truly was a drug dealer, he was just about the sorriest, lame-ass drug dealer that ever was. And at that point I couldn’t say for sure that he was any better as a friend than he was as a drug dealer.
Vowing next time to free-base my semolina, I made tollhouse cookies with a few too many chocolate chips and when they were done I laid them out on cooling racks, where they sagged between the wire. But I considered them a success – they always seem to taste better when they’re a bit of a mess.
As my first batch of cookies were warming up in the oven, I went up front to find the wife descending the stairs with her children.
“Mmmmmm, what is that delightful smell?” she asked.
“Chocolate chip cookies.” At this the children became animated, as though the mere suggestion of a sugar high was fuel enough for the fires of mischief.
“May I bring some out for you and the kids?”
“Yes,” she said and then continued as she turned her face down to the children while wagging her index finger, “one cookie each.”
After removing the first batch from the oven, I briefly considered lacing a cookie with one or more of the household cleaning products underneath my kitchen sink and serving it to the husband. However it occurred to me that, given the level of hostility he seemed to inspire in other people, he probably already had the habit of using his young as food-testers. The kids were too cute to die as collateral damage in my undeclared war with their father.
Instead of poisoning his cookie, I decided to forgo giving him anything at all. I brought three cookies out and asked the mother what plans they had for today.
“My husband hasn’t decided yet. I would like to go to Golden Gate Park. My husband doesn’t want to go.”
My estimation of her husband plunged further. The guy doesn’t even like nature, I thought. I hate people who don’t like nature. What a cretin! What an asshole! As if on cue, the husband snuck up behind me. I turned to see him with folded arms staring off to his side, waiting for me to move. I didn’t move.
“You can’t leave San Francisco without seeing Golden Gate Park. There are the museums, the arboretum, the kids can see the buffalo herd, they can ride on the carrousel, there’s a windmill; you simply have to go!” I then enlisted the children in my campaign to annoy their father. “Have you ever seen a buffalo?”
I described what these great beasts looks like and the boy began shouting, “I want to see the booffoolo. I want to see the booffoolo.”
From behind me came a sharp rebuke from his father. The boy’s face gathered together in a pout and his forehead creased under the strain to crank out a couple of tears. After another sharp rebuke from dad, delivered while he pushed his way by me, the son was carried by the flow of his tears into that alternative world that children go to when they’re not getting what they want in this one. At that I addressed the wife, telling her to call me if she needed anything else. She held my eyes and gave me a warm smile as I read her lips saying thank you.
I sent more cookie dough to the ovens and cleaned off the breakfast table as I heard the family upstairs preparing for their departure. The parents were discussing something loudly as they brought their luggage downstairs. The wife handed me the room key and thanked me warmly for their stay. I shook hands with the children and thanked them for staying with us. Their little hands demanded gentleness and I longed for just such a demand in my life. Then the husband did something remarkable. He looked me in the eye, held out his hand, which I shook, and then he said thank you. I suspect the wife had put him up to this, perhaps their loud words had been about this very thing, but that was ok. I think that even adults can learn kindness if they just start practicing, even if someone else makes them do it.
I hadn’t heard a peep from the English couple and was hoping to avoid them. Around ten I was upstairs putting some fresh towels in the bathroom at the end of the hall, which I glanced down to see him peering over the banister trying to reconnoiter if the coast was clear. He gave a startled turn of his head in my direction and turned four shades of red as he flicked me one of those reflexive smiles that I no longer found intriguing. “Sorry,” he mumbled as he opened the door to his room. When would I come to accept that’s just an Englishman’s way of acknowledging my existence?
When they were ready to go they knocked on my door to give me the key, as I request all guests to do. They were embarrassed but managed profuse thanks and more apologies. I felt a fat tip coming and guided them to the door.
“We’ve left you something upstairs on the table. Sorry we were such a bother last night.”
“Oh, don’t worry about it. Life gets messy sometimes, believe me, nobody knows that better than me.”
In a pig’s eye
Porky came over after that, strangely quiet for him and did some running around the basement and lots of clanking with pipes and tools; they seemed to speak for him at those moments.
When he’d finished his work for the day and returned my plumbing to something just short of a state of grace, we sat down to talk about his bill. I asked him how much I owed. He wrote the figure wordlessly on a slip of paper and slid it face down towards me across the table like he was some aristocratic antiques dealer in London, selling off his patrimony and that of his peers but too well bred to money-talk.
“Oh, my,” I said, “God!”
“It’s a little late to get right with the Lord,” he said, smiling.
“I guess I’ve had this coming to me. I’ve lived a bad life.”
“Jesus doesn’t care if you’ve been bad, he knows what it’s like to be human but oooh, is God pissed at you,” he said, as he shook his head and smiled like a ten year old does when he says to his younger brother, ‘Boy, are you gonna get it when dad comes home.’ Then he chortled – not many people do that well; you need lots of bounce in your belly and your boobs.
“I guess this is where that turning the other cheek thing comes in handy,” I said.
“Yeah, kind of makes you wish you had more meat on your cheeks, huh?”
When I first took over the B&B, I switched to another plumber instead of using Porky as Uncle Arthur had. It was one of those reformist moves that afflict a person taking over any organization; you want to change everything and nothing is safe from your fidgety impulses. So I hired this guy that a friend had recommended, back almost two years ago when I still spoke to some of my former drinking pals. Clean and sober three years, he told me but I knew that underneath that cough suppressant odor emanating from his mouth there lurked something mashed, soured and distilled.
He was competent but the thing that bothered me was that all his plumbing looked so ugly. Ok, you’re not supposed to see plumbing, right? But everything he touched just looked bad, it’s hard to describe. Like he used too much of that white plastic tape and his solder
would bead and drip around the connections. I’m kind of fussy about how things look, even the stuff that goes on behind the curtain. I expect the garbage men not to leave things too disheveled in their wake and in that I’m perpetually disappointed.
By many measures Porky’s plumbing probably isn’t any better than that of any other Joe Plumber, but he at least knows how to make it seem like his work is superior.
The irony is that Porky, the penultimate slob, always does immaculate work. His plumbing has flair.
Just before he was to leave I put four cookies in a bag for him to take.
“Yep, that Celestine was quite a woman,” he said while he packed up his things. He placed an enormous, dripping wrench on the kitchen table. “She came here to see her daughter, you know. Too bad about her, a bit loco I guess. Well, life is full of heartache,” Porky said, again chortling. He beamed. “One of the finest times I’ve ever spent with a woman. Quite a lady.”
I dropped four more cookies into the plastic bag for Porky, then a few more and finally I emptied the whole container into his bag.
“Just have them all,” I said.
Porky had now achieved the trifecta of my humiliation. First, he had beaten me in the race across a woman’s mattress; Second, I owed him a king’s ransom in plumbing bills; Third, he knew things about my guest, someone under my roof and very nose, that I didn’t know.
Despite his dogged pursuit of her, it really hadn’t occurred to me that Porky was the male member that had won Celestine. Before he leaves, he asks me to give him Celestine’s phone number and address and I tell him I’ll have to think about it. Then after he leaves I’m hit with a panic that wrings my insides and the anxiety keeps building until I’m wound up tighter than a tourniquet on a bleeding heart.
It happens so fast that I have to wonder for a moment why I’m so anxious but almost as quickly I decide that I’d rather not think about it; that I just want to relax. I’m going through a stack of cd’s, looking for a particular one – my medication music – I choke back some prescription pills (though none of them was prescribed for me; they’re gleanings taken from many different sources), press play and voila – stress reduction, except for the times when that doesn’t work and at those times I fear to slip back into my old alcoholic ways of coping and not coping.
People have been telling me I should get more therapy, but I don’t know; I don’t like the idea of somebody running around with all this intimate knowledge of me. How could they spend all that time prying into my life and then not want to go and tell everybody about it? Sure they take an oath, ‘Do No Harm’, but that never stopped good ol’ Doc Mengele.
They tell you to let it all out, that to recall all those painful memories and talk about them at length is good for you. Personally, I think they tell you that because the exposition of one’s most painful and shameful experiences seems to be what people find most entertaining these days. When I’m telling something really juicy to a psycho-therapist, the look on their face tells me they’re going to wait till I’m done before they run out to get popcorn. The TV talk shows are filled with people spilling their half-baked beans, entertaining millions in the process, but I think watching Christians being mauled by lions would be a good deal more civilized and frankly, more humane.
I turned on the television.
Middle-age wasteland
I should probably stop watching television because I’m getting too emotionally involved. Unlike some critics who think television deadens the senses, I find that it cracks me open like a can of one of those new kinds of beers that taste great but have only half the calories.
The advertising alone is so well done now with all sorts of special effects and the consumptive premises are clever and entertaining. Some are even irreverent, though all within the bounds of corporate accountability.
I think it’s a positive development that advertisers have moved away from the Golden Age of the Advertising Jingle and now use actual songs that were, we suppose, originally written for some higher purpose other than advertising. Those songs from my youth, with so many sentimental associations, now help to cement my emotional bond with a vast array of companies and products. How they enticed all those aging Rock and Roll rebels to abandon their anti-establishment stances in order to become the court composers for The Man, I can’t imagine.
There’s this one commercial about a man my age utilizing the services of a telecommunications company. He’s being driven in a car and everywhere he travels the world aligns itself into a representation-simulacrum of the communications company’s trade marked logo. There’s a song being sung that seems to confirm the heart-achiness of life. The man is like the song, calm but driven. When he finally reaches the hospital waiting room we see a pregnant, beautiful woman we assume is his wife. Her existential angst turns to tremulous relief, cut to the man whose look of love and gratitude always brings a tear to my eye and a lump to my throat. They’re living a life I could have lived, I think.
Television commercials don’t appear to be peopled with those who have had difficulties with intimacy or other inter-personal issues or substance abuse problems, which means that the actors are doing a really good job since actors often seem to be the demographic most afflicted with these very things, though maybe not so much in these early stages, or what they hope to be the early stages, of their successful careers. Perhaps all those problems only come later with real celebrity and not just the vague recognition that those who act in television commercials receive.
Despite my suggestibility, television isn’t doing it for me right now; it only makes me long for some real person, somebody to touch in friendship or in lust. Instead, I’m touching a wound.
Sound retreat
I’ve retreated somewhat in the face of life’s skirmishes and I’m not really sure whom I’m still on speaking terms with. I’ve distanced myself from that group I used to connect with because we all shared addictive personality disorders. We’ve met over the years in bars and then rehab, in bars and then again in rehab, etc. but I felt I had to step off the see-saw, even if it meant they got a nasty bump on the way down.
Since I’ve stopped drinking alcohol and brought my pill-popping to a slow crawl, my gay guy friends have drifted away. I guess I’m not as entertaining as I used to be. And the women in my life seem as lost to me as the moment at hand.
My support network always seems to finish last in the ratings.
I have to call somebody, preferably someone with whom I haven’t spoken in a while in the hopes that they, unlike some of the acquaintances I’ve been relying on lately, will be genuinely glad to talk to me. I decided on Tina, whom I’d dated for a number of months I don’t even remember how many years ago.
“Hi, Tina. It’s Roy. Roy Moffet.”
“Roy – oh, my God! – you’re still alive. Why are you calling me?!
“I just wanted to say hello.”
“I told you I never wanted to see or hear from you ever again.”
“I was just wondering how you are.”
“I don’t want you calling here ever again. I’m still really angry at you. You really fucked up. Don’t ever call me again.”
“Oh, god, I forgot about that.”
I couldn’t believe I’d just done that. I’d called an ex-girlfriend just to check in and catch up and I’d totally forgotten that she was an angry ex-girlfriend with socio-pathic tendencies. We’d had a terrible falling out over a boozy, indiscreet dalliance of mine. Before leaving my apartment for the last time, she’d taken all my pants, cut out the crotch of each and every one and then folded them neatly back into the dresser drawers. At the time I thought it was completely crazy but from the vantage point of a few lonely years, it almost seems like an act of unbearable tenderness and solicitude.
Heart plumbing
‘I obviously need to give this more thought,’ I thought, ‘and not rely on spontaneity.’ My best bet, I decided after some further research, would
be Chicago Ellen; wise, patient, slutty, self-righteous Ellen – plumber of my heart.
“Roy, you sound so depressed. What’s going on?” Ellen and I had dated about six years ago and we have tried to keep in touch. “You’re not drinking are you?”
“No, it’s not that. I don’t know, I’m in a rut. And then this happens, my married neighbor sleeps with one of my guests in my own house.”
“Background?” she asked.“I had this older woman staying with me. My next door neighbor the plumber
noticed her leaving my house and then met her by chance in the Marina…..” Ellen interrupted me,
“Oh, the Marina, that’s asking for trouble. I used to meet all my sex dates there.”“What sex dates? You were going with me almost the whole time you lived here.”
“Well, I mean that last seven weeks or so after we broke up but before I moved back to Chicago. I was a real slut, probably just the trauma of breaking up with you. What’s his wife like?”
“Whose? Oh, ok, Porky’s wife is a sweet heart. That fucking bastard!” I was suddenly enraged.
“Sweetheart, it’s nice that you’re concerned for her but why are you getting so worked up about it?”
“He disrespected me! Not to mention his wife. Somebody should have told me – it’s my fucking house!”
“Roy, honey, if they’re hooking up for the night, they’re not going to tell anybody. I mean, think about it.”
“I don’t care, Porky should have been more considerate; he used my B&B as a No-Tell Motel and he knows that could ruin my reputation in the neighborhood. It could end up being trouble for me.”
“Roy, he’s hardly going to broadcast his infidelity.”
“Yeah, well, it’s more complicated than that. He’s also my plumber and I have a major plumbing problem. He’s been working on my plumbing like it’s water torture, you know, prolonging it and already I owe him a king’s ransom. And get this, he wants me to give him Celestine’s phone number and address so he can go visit her.”
“Are you going to give it to him?”
“I can’t just give him a guest’s information. That’s private. He expects me to help him commit adultery? I don’t think so. But then if I don’t give it to him, is he going to create problems for me?”
The delicate dance
It wasn’t my plumbing alone that made me reluctant to get on Porky’s shit list. The relationship I have with my neighbors is one that calls for great delicacy; my position in the neighborhood is quite vulnerable. I operate in a world of etiquette and caprice so intricate it would spin the head of the craftiest Japanese courtier. The neighborhood has its own language of gestures and looks that speaks volumes to me but is indecipherable to outsiders. Passing, seemingly innocent references to city hall or the police unnerve me.
When Mr. Caspek, the octogenarian with a shady Ukrainian past, who lives five doors up the hill, passes me while walking his German shepherd and smiles broadly, I know I’m being watched carefully. Closely. If this were only the old country, he says with his smile, if this were only then, I’d show you. If Bergen-Belsen had given out awards of merit to the staff, his would still be hanging proudly on the wall.
And the rotund gay couple, so nice, like ‘Nice’ is a resort they’re staying at and they’re on a really long vacation, full buffet; they smile constantly even when they don’t have very nice things to say and they don’t have very nice things to say often. Oh, to the untrained interlocutor they sound nice, but I know better. Like when I was repainting the house after Arthur died. He’d had it done up in five shades of pink and I wanted to butch the place up a bit before I moved in. I was cash strapped and painting it myself with the help of a revolving line-up of acquaintances, most of them recovering from one thing or another (one of them from house painting itself and he had slipped). I’d sold them on the therapeutic Zen of house painting. Well, the Balloon Brothers went to lunch on my house and went right for the jugular of my aesthetic principles.
“Arthur did such a nice job painting the house. Too bad it had to be repainted with the colors you’ve chosen, but you’ve done a great job.”
They had such a condescending attitude like, oh, you’re a straight guy so of course you don’t know what you’re doing and well, we’re the Balloon Brothers, we’re über homosexuals and we’ll show you how to decorate your house. Do—you—under—stand?
Unlike most straight men, I’m not cowed by gay guys who think they have a lock on good taste. Far from being the arbiters of taste gay men are all supposed to be, I find that many aspects of gay style offend my sensibilities. Castro Street is tawdry and those leather garbed men d’une certain age with their teddy bears and their droopy derrieres right out there for all to see. Wrong, wrong, wrong!
I got my revenge, though, on the Balloon Brothers, when they were repainting their parlor. I was walking down the sidewalk and their door was open so I peeked in. I tsk-tsked their paint job and then floored them with this gem of clarity: “You have to juxtapose; play the combinations of dark and light. That’s what artists do in their paintings to create depth. Paint the room in two colors and you’ll create depth. See how when I open the door my eyes are swimming around like goldfish in a bowl of water with nothing to focus on. Now if you paint the kitchen entry a brighter color, your eyes will fall on the brighter color and make the room seem larger because your eyes will read the colors as distinct spaces in and of themselves. Remember this because it’s really important: ONE SHOULD NEVER PAINT TRIM A DARK COLOR ON A LIGHT COLORED HOUSE OR WALL. SMALL ACCENTS ONLY.”
I was in rare form.
The gripe vine
Anyway, I have to be careful. You have a beef with me? Really want to stab me in the back and dig it in deep? Just call the Health Department when I’m having a really bad day and the place is a mess. They can shut me down in a New York minute. (Native Californians note: a New York minute elapses in the same time frame as a Santa Cruz hour, New Yorkers being about sixty times more likely to get their asses in gear when it’s necessary.)
Call the Board of Supervisors, the Department of Waste Management, the Department of Traffic and Parking, your local representative; the gripe vine runs thick and far in this town and nobody knows how to harvest its fruits better than the good citizens of San Francisco. Whine country, indeed.
You want to mess with my business? Destroy my reputation? Just get on the internet and start leaving nasty little notes on travel websites relating all your nightmarish experiences at Golden Rules Bed and Breakfast. Destroying me is that simple. No way for me to refute the charges; if I did try to answer them, I’d just end up sounding petty and desperate – which I’m not.
Dumbwaiter
I continued my harangue with Ellen: “She’s a senior citizen for Christ’s sake and she’s inviting guys back to my house. I was so nice to her. Oh, it pisses me off! I mean she was nice too but then she pulls this.” Ellen didn’t say anything so I continued. “Well, she was attractive, I mean I even thought of sleeping with her myself.”
“Are you lonely, sweetheart?”
At first I ignore her attempts to comfort me.
“Nobody communicates with me! All they had to do was ask my permission. I just wish people would be more considerate.” I sigh, my deflated ego is leaking still. “I’m so over that. I mean I don’t really care, it’s just that…… I don’t know…You liked me didn’t you?”
“I did, I loved you and I still do.” She keeps her answer short, leaving me a pause to gather myself and continue if I need to. She is the queen of quietude and I miss these tender moments of silence that she is so free with.
“Yes, I’m lonely. I haven’t been on a date in months, a lot of months. I’m embarrassed to tell you how long it’s been since I’ve had sex. I just can’t seem to get anything right lately. I loved you. I mean I’m not hung up on that or anything, that’s not why I’m calling, but I just wanted you to know.”
“That’s ok. I’ve made so many mistakes. I’ve been so self-absorbed.”
“More than anybody else we used to hang out with? I don’t think so.”
“James died. Did you know that?’
“No, I didn’t, I’m sorry to hear it. How? When?”
“You two kind of drifted apart I know, but I should have called you to tell you anyway. It was a while ago, I don’t know. This is what, April? God, It’s been almost a year. Has it been that long since we’ve talked?”
“I know, it’s stupid to have gone so long without calling, I’m sorry.”
“He died of a brain seizure or something,” I paused and considered what a downer of a conversation I had embarked on. So just to perk things up, I said, “I’m depressed. I haven’t had anybody to love in so long and I don’t understand why. I’m just disgusted with myself.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself, Roy. I think you’re a very sweet man and I’m a dog for not calling you on a monthly basis to tell you that.”
“Don’t apologize, I could have called you. Listen I’m going to go now, I need to go out for a walk and have a smoke.”
“OK, I love you sweetie and I’ll talk to you again real soon.”
I’m not an apologist for the tobacco companies, mind you, but those little cancer sticks may have been my greatest weapon against drink. I think some of these anti-smoking crusaders lay it on a bit thick. The huge billboard of a shockingly ravaged Sammy Davis Junior with a lit cigarette that haunted a black neighborhood in Oakland with only the words ‘They killed him.’ was a stretch for me. One was left to ponder, ‘They’ who? White people? Agents? Rabbis? Hookers?
Cigarette smoking is dangerous and it’s sexy and romantic because it’s dangerous. When I’m smoking, I feel like I’ve graduated from the school of hard knocks, that all the chips have been knocked off my shoulder and now I’m ready to kick ass. I feel like I’ve grown another penis.
I hadn’t smoked in a long time but it seemed like the best way to fend off an incipient craving for alcohol. I keep Arthur’s stash of liquor in the dumbwaiter where he left it but obviously one may question the wisdom of doing so. It is a temptation that could easily lead to a ‘because it was there’ justification. But alcohol is all around me out there, so I had to find a way of living with it in here. How many people can say they have contained their own personal hell in a space 20” X 24” X 18” and keep it under watch? It’s a daily reminder to me how far I’ve climbed and also gives me the exact dimensions of the hole I’ll land in if I fall back. AA would say that’s not OK, but AA can kiss my ass.
Chapter VIII: A Musing
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