by Herbert Gold
“I guess that’s self-pity.”
“You said it, I didn’t.”
“That’s what it’s called.”
He sighed. “You’re still mixed up with that wife. A Boy in Love.”
“That’s not prohibited, Alfonso.”
“No. But Jesus, you admit it.”
In this barbecue courtroom I felt like the defendant, the one with the long hair and the tattoos. Alfonso decided to take a little enjoyment, sucking on a rib. Regretfully he put down the bone. “It’s called boring is what it’s called,” he said.
Was this the discourse Priscilla envied among male buddies? She was right to do so. His nagging made me feel better or at least alive, part of the world’s shared noise. Alfonso shrugged and made an ethical, moral, psychological, and therapeutic decision to let go another of the wet burps he generated through the greedy sucking of clotted grease inappropriate to our arteries. He didn’t intend to hold anything back. He was sore at me and that relaxed an experienced cop.
“Upside the head you toxic, man, y’unnastan what I’m sayin’?”
“Come off it, Alfonso.”
“Okay, miserable’s your job. But you do it overtime, you hear me now? How about some dining or some Q tomorrow?”
“It’s too early to be hungry already for tomorrow. I can’t think about tomorrow’s eats.”
Alfonso looked astonished. “I’m always thinking about it these days. You like Mongolian beef? Sounds kind of naked, but then again it ain’t. You don’t think about it? Usually Q or Chinese from the carton, I might be in a hurry, or that other stuff, dining, cuisine they call it, this being San Francisco. If I got plenty of time. I got to get you off your subject, buddy—think about it.”
“Thanks a lot, Alfonso.”
“I got the time. So how’s about some cuisine then?”
I smelled grass, new grass, and then I saw tufts stuck to his black high-top cop shoes. Even as a Pinkerton, he was still involved in investigations. I wanted to smile because I deserved congratulations, my nose working all right, smelling tufts of new grass, and my brain, adjacent to the nose, coming to conclusions about it.
“So?” he was asking. “Cat got your appetite? … Why not try to feel good about yourself, it’s the latest thing.” He stared, bug-eyed and angry with foiled friendship.
I thought I saw my chance to get to him in the way he wasn’t letting me. There weren’t any words and words were all we had.
“Alfonso, what can I do—I know this doesn’t help—about your troubles?”
“My troubles are over.”
“Come on, pal—”
“I said it’s over. He’s dead. That’s it.”
I started to speak but all I managed was a breath before he stopped me.
“Wanna be my pal … pal? Okay, I’m dealing with it and you can deal with it. It’s over. Just let it be.”
He bent to the littered paper plate. I kept the peace. I wondered if this silence was anything like standing graveside in prayer. Neither Alfonso nor I knew much about such things.
He let us both off the hook a little, he cut us down, he allowed that I had spoken to him. “Funny how misery can put you at the center of the world,” he said, “all by yourself there, but then turns out it’s a crowded place.”
Okay. That was a lot from Alfonso. I don’t know if I or anyone could be lucky for him, but how lucky I was in life with this friend, fresh tufts of grass on his shoes, no dogshit in evidence on this occasion. He had a further question for the defendant: “You still like to perform, don’t you?”
“Perform?”
He was embarrassed. When he blushed, there was a purplish color across his cheeks. “You know. Down there.”
I scrunched up my face, not even pretending to smile. “It’s not a performance.”
Alfonso sighed, rumbled, groaned. “I know. When it’s with her, it’s not an act. I know the feeling I’m sure you think you got. That feeling when you’re there with the woman, dark warm busy place, it’s not a test, not acting, performing, but you remember everything about being together and explosions happen behind your nose in your head when you’re remembering…”
He made it sound like a sneeze, but Alfonso really did know the difference. Normally he wouldn’t let on, probably wouldn’t let himself go through that thing, that process, field of traps, festival of disasters—love—again. To him I was living proof that his own procedures were the correct ones. But just because he was now immune to my disease, it didn’t stop the steady flow of consolation. “When you’re remembering how it was and how you think it always gonna be.”
I don’t have a very good memory, dear …
“What?” Alfonso asked. “You still here?”
“I’ve known you for a long time.”
“Yeah, you were the same guy I enjoyed different things with.”
“Now I’m different,” I said.
“You think that’s good? Different if you got to, but find a better way, okay? That’s the short version.”
I waited. He didn’t say anything. “So?” I asked.
“Okay, here’s the long version. There’s always a risk. You might get old, tired, pass on over. I guess we better look at that possibility. But my way of thinking is, there’s no hurry, okay, just no hurry, you understand what I’m saying? No hurry.”
Outside, bouncing off the cast-iron Fourth Street Bridge, came the high insect whine of a motor scooter, someone back from his vacation with a new toy. There was a stretch limousine with smoked windows, high school splurgers trying to act like rock stars, the eighteen-year-old version of the thirteen-year-old playing air guitar. There was the city straining at its seams in roadways against the moat of the San Francisco Bay and its estuaries. We’d all been here awhile now.
As Alfonso drove, he was saying, “Me personally, tell you what. Don’t want to perform no more, that’s a fact. I did my ex in Trenton that one day a couple weeks ago—now I don’t want to no more. She did me, was how it went. Thought we didn’t like each other.”
“I know how that is.”
“No you don’t. Kid gone. Kid gone.”
“What else, Alfonso?”
“You’re home. So get out this vehicle.”
Chapter 23
I wakened to a general stickiness and heaviness in the eyes. When I stood, I lost my balance and lunged against the wall. Motes floated in the air. My shoulder hurt and I thought, Is this a heart attack?
Then the dizziness subsided. Oh, it’s nothing, just getting old. Transparent fish swam across my sight. I watched them in all their slow grace. Not a heart attack, not a stroke, only what it is—clumsiness. I’m an older person. Nothing more. So that’s settled.
Having dealt with this trivial circulatory system matter, I wondered why there was a young woman’s name I couldn’t remember and also couldn’t remember why a vague message about her had sparked in my head. It hadn’t quite gotten through. Why anyway did I need to remember her name? (Green eyes, black hair, liked to play squash, wore cutoffs and an Ektelon T-shirt—not Cynthia, not Linda, something else.) Of course, not remembering the name of a squash partner twice a week, sex partner on her birthday once when she had broken up with a lover whose name I really didn’t have to keep in the meat computer file (better squash player at the Bay Club), all these missing puzzle bits are not proof of Alzheimer’s disease. They’re only a sign of memory loss. They merely indicate the meat computer gets overloaded. However, when someone asks my name and I look in my wallet for my driver’s license, that will be evidence to be taken seriously, unless I can excuse myself by claiming it only means I’ve had a few strokes, just a couple cerebral accidents, mere fender-benders.
Not dizzy anymore, but the legs felt heavy as I headed for the bathroom with sticky, heavy-lidded eyes. Not wonderful balance.
One hundred; ninety-three; eighty-six. I tested myself for Alzheimer’s by counting backward by sevens. Seventy-nine. Seventy-two. Okay so far. My brain may not have permanen
t tenure, but I can still find sixty-five, fifty-eight. Is that okay so far?
I peered into the mirror. Sticky conjunctiva, burdened lids—happens to eyes. The crease to the left and right of them seemed only a little deeper—I must be smiling, for these are called smile lines—but the eyeballs were mottled red, with bits of yellow muck oozing from the lids and sharp dried conjunctival bits in the corners, clinging to the lashes. Thinner lashes. Oh well, hot soaked cloth should take care of this, and baby shampoo swabbed across the eyelids, or some neopenicillin prescription if the body’s immune system didn’t rally to the rescue. Supposedly there are mites, almost invisible mouthy worms, clinging to the eyelashes and sometimes they go hog wild, taking over and eating hairs, generating mite spit, littering what had once seemed fresh and relatively clean in the center of my face. The mirror of the soul was greasy with mite dumps.
Makes a person feel out of whack, trivial as it is. I’ve noticed that some psychopathic street people also have conjunctival eyes, but some don’t, so there’s no rule about it. I began to suspect myself of wearing that peaceful-old-man’s slight smile, ingratiating and accepting, of continual mild depression. I was smiling too much at nothing. I was too welcoming. I wasn’t expecting anything good for myself.
A panhandler ambled, unsure, toward me on Polk Street, his hand with the Styrofoam cup outstretched but not fully operational. His mottled, gray-bearded chin waggled toward mine. His conjunctival eyes tried to blink some moisture on the seeing parts. He asked: “Are you one of them or one of us?”
I gave him a quarter.
“One of them gives us a dollar,” he called after me, and let the coin roll into the street where someone could pick it up for use in a parking meter. Since he didn’t have a vehicle, he needed folding money for mental transportation by Thunderbird sugared wine or amplified malt beverage.
Rejection by a wife seems almost normal, part of doing business in this ragged end of the century, but being put down by a homeless alcoholic was an insult. My pride wouldn’t let me run after him, waving dollars, though he might have been gracious about it. I didn’t want to risk further reproach.
My balance on earth is what dancing is all about, and my best memory of dancing is jumping out of an airplane, suspended by a military parachute, coming down fast with a pack on my back, high boots laced up, murder in my heart and the wind hiding the smells and sounds of hostile fire. If you landed in a tree, it would hurt. If you rolled the wrong way, you could break your back. Once, in a practice jump, I sprained an ankle and they followed the wartime practice of the period—morphine it, tape it, and now back to duty, soldier.
Occasionally, years later, I get a twinge in that ankle and remember it’s okay, but history marks the body throughout and inexorably. And it’s only a twinge of weakness, not a fall or break. I can still run, jump, walk, though I hate to look down from high places. More accurately, I don’t mind at all, but my stomach lurches and I get a sick taste in my mouth. When Priscilla said she no longer loved me, it was like looking down from a high place onto the distant earth and falling, falling, dying.
Maybe this occasional totter when I walk is only a touch of brain tumor. After an extra dose of coffee, or one of those good night’s sleeps that come out of the past like a visit from an old lover lady, or a day with scudding clouds and clean winds, or just some unmeasured, unmotivated, unnatural good feeling that surges through for no good reason, I like to stride and stretch my skeleton in fast hiking. The sleepy tottering is concealed. As long as I don’t see a mirror I’m twenty-two years old again, a paratrooper vain about his boots and his just rages.
I was running for the Polk-19 bus, down between Geary and Post, and I remembered running off the bus a few years ago, the bus down Columbus, when I spied Priscilla with her long stride, Jeff alertly bobbing in the pack on her back. Let me go, let me go, that’s my wife.
Okay, maybe I’ll not fight the totter if I’m tired or sad. Maybe I’ll give up to nostalgia, what was, what I think was, what might have been. I’ll need my nap and blink awhile at the pocked ceiling before I can rise from regret once more. Oh Lord, let me continue to walk in the world; if I have to die, let me die running.
* * *
We were sitting in the kitchen where Priscilla and I had often had our most interesting conversations, good or bad, and this was one of them. I wasn’t sure which category it would come to belong in, but I had an inkling. She was curious about the deal with Karim and how it all came down, this bus terminal transfer of athlete’s foot remedy. Sweetly she inquired, “Willing to be a snitch?”
“That’s not what it was.”
“Maybe I don’t understand these things, the menace of drugs in the fabric of Western civilization, outraged citizen private eye only doing what’s right on behalf of the common weal. So you’re not a snitch, not even Accessory to Snitch, you’re just a cool professional, dear?”
“It may seem simple to you.”
“On the contrary. But in the interest of full disclosure—” She took my hand, tugged a little, and led me into the sunny front room.
No immediate full explanation was required. For the moment I was engaged in registering Priscilla’s uncharacteristically silent visitor. Karim sat there in one of his nice tropical-weight linen suits, silk tie, topcoat draped, smiling reassuringly, nodding happily, offering a heavy little lurch forward in the chair in order to get up to greet me if this seemed called for.
“You know we’re friends,” Priscilla said. “You know I like the idea of broadening my horizons.”
“Friends,” said Karim with emphasis. “Like you and me, Dan.”
That’s so important these days. But I didn’t say this aloud. Karim kept smiling and smiling, wearing me down. He really wanted to be a winner when he started to play.
“That’s so important these days”—but when I finally spoke, Priscilla and Karim glanced at each other, not sure what I was referring to after my period of silent thought.
Usually first impressions decide whether I’m going to like a person or not. In Karim’s case, it had been not; but then there were second and third impressions, and now this, and I could see why he had won Priscilla over. The man took pleasure in his life as a man should. He saw something in me that I might want to find in myself. Since other procedures were lonely, turned out lonely, I was considering the example Priscilla was pressing on me. Hey Karim, it’s kind of lively in your vicinity.
From where he sat, defenseless in an armchair, natty and at ease and contentedly defenseless, he fixed me with the eyelinered eyes and waggled his heavy head. “I have been explaining, my friend, and to persuade. That has been my intention. Perhaps now you concur. Pris-ceela understands and so must you. This is America, which gives rewards for good work.”
The man doesn’t give up. “Sometimes,” I said.
“But oh, my friend, you have been difficult in your time of troubles.”
“That’s always my way.”
“Change your way, my friend. Such is my mission.”
I didn’t thank him for his example, his devotion to mission. Perhaps I should have thanked Priscilla.
She joined the party. “Everyone can see, dear, and especially I can see, how stubborn you are in your own really bullheaded way … Well, you were even motivated to the point of middle-aged fisticuffs. I hate to use the word ‘jealous,’ Dan.”
“You can use it.”
“Dear man. Xavier was a visa, that’s all. You know what that means?”
Karim stood up, saying, “Thank you, thank you, I really must—thank you so much.”
Time to go, time to go; he was still smiling and shaking his head, seeming to have accomplished something; waved at the door, Priscilla not accompanying him; and then he was gone. Discreet Karim, friend of the family.
Priscilla listened to his receding footsteps and then said again, “Visa. I don’t need it anymore. I let the visa expire. Hey, you ought to believe me. I still like you a lot and he’s just an expired �
� Dan?”
“What?”
“Pay attention.” When Priscilla turned sarcastic, or turned to justifying or explaining herself, she knew she was in trouble. Her clear blue stare would have been beseeching in another woman. Sometimes the only way she could make herself clear, since words only confused matters, was by making love. “I said I still like you a lot. Believe me when I say something.”
Chapter 24
If she comes back to me, I agree. If she doesn’t, I also agree. I try to be a civilized individual. The smell of tennis shoes reminds me of flowers; the smell of composted weeds in the bin behind my cottage reminds me of tennis shoes. A truly civilized individual would understand that she’s not coming back to me, and I do not so understand. I make do with composted flowers and old tennis shoes, exercising the part of the brain that picks out the good smells, not good sense.
Being herself kept Priscilla busy, fully occupied with the day when awake and actively realigning flesh, soul, and dream anticipation when asleep, making her way through the rhythms of the world, metabolizing herself like a healthy animal. I wanted to branch into that electricity, that directional beam; it seemed like a miracle to a person whose brain was mostly an olfactory registration device.
Life was more peaceful now. I hung on. I liked my nest, my lair, Poorman’s Cottage. Like a good householder, I swept it out regularly. How noticeably convenient it was to awaken after a bad night’s sleep, dreams of loss, sometimes spiteful dreams, and then to get busy distancing myself from them with a relaxing hour immersed in the newspaper and wars, fires, famines, crimes, the world’s general pain. I climbed into the newspaper like a warm bath. I learned to use a better grade of coffee at breakfast—Yuban instant—because it almost tasted like good coffee. I swept the twigs, leaves, dust, and animal droppings from my front steps, catching slivers in the broom. Someday I might buy tools and wood and replace those steps myself; someday maybe. I had plans for the future. I was enjoying the San Francisco autumn, which burst upon Potrero Hill with sudden dry heat before the winter fog and shortened days came to town.
