Leave It to Me

by Bharati Mukherjee

I slapped the pay phone a couple of times with the heel of my palm.

  The teenaged attendant shook his head. “I know just how you feel,” he said. “Sometimes that phone don’t work so good.”

  I caught the spaced-out smile on his bronzed, benign face. A good mood is a good mood, even when chemically induced. I envied him. I said, as a joke, “Think I should sue the phone company?”

  “Why not?” the kid said. He picked a stick of beef jerky out of a jar by the cash register, and peeled its wrap partway. “What do you have to lose? Time’s running out on corporate deep pockets.”

  “My sister,” I volunteered, “wants me to get a life.”

  The kid took a meditative chew. “Cool,” he said.

  “My first time in California, would you believe?”

  He pulled another vile-looking stick out of the beef jerky container. “Hey, on the house,” he said. “Have a nice life. Have a nice day the rest of the day.”

  I sucked and chewed on the jerky as I got back on the highway. If the world has a finite supply of bad days and nice days, I owed it to myself to grab as many nice ones as I could. Go for bliss. Dump pain, pity and rage on somebody else. Pursue happiness: that’s the American way. Dial the Bay Area branch of Finders/Keepers the next chance you get. Muddy Clear Water’s conscience. Or, better still, make Bio-Mama pay for her shallow-pocketed maternalness.

  And when getting a life is your goal, why put off till tomorrow what you can do this nanosecond?

  Pursuing bliss, I took the very next exit ramp off the highway, and called San Francisco information for Finders/Keepers. “Nothing under that name,” the operator said.

  “Maybe I’m spelling it wrong,” I pleaded, “anything under Ph instead of F, Qu instead of K?”

  “I don’t show anything, ma’am. Check the spelling. Have a nice day.”

  Debby DiMartino died and Devi Dee birthed herself on the Donner Pass at the precise moment a top-down Spider Veloce with DEVI vanities (driver’s blond hair billowing around a clamp of expensive speakers, cigarette cueing imaginary music) cut me off in front of the Welcome to California Fruit Inspection Barrier to take the only open slot.

  Of course, the Fruit Inspector waved DEVI through and stopped my sensible Corolla with its New York nonvanities and went through its yeah-I-left-in-a-hurry-but-I’m-intending-to-stay-no-matter-what backseat jumble of clothes, cardboard boxes, garbage sacks, CDs and tapes. The Fruit Buster sniffed for suspicious odors and pounced on a plastic Baggie I’d been spitting orange peels and tossing banana skins, crumpled tissues and candy wrappers into the last three days. I have a fast metabolism, and back in New York I’d have shriveled the Fruit Buster with a hey!-you-metabolism-chauvinist! glare, but at the California border I cringed.

  I’m a disgrace to California, I deserve to be turned away. That was my last true Debby-thought, all wrapped up in ash, sackcloth and guilt.

  “Okay, cool,” the Fruit Buster waved me on, “I’ll dump this stuff in the right recycling bins.” He had two silver rings piercing his left ear rim, and an official cap perched on an explosion of black, bristly hair. He was Asian, but not Chinese. My time with Frankie and his Chinese-intensive labor force at FHP had made me intuitive about who wasn’t Chinese. Chinese was just the beginning. Frankie got scary specific: Chinese out of Singapore, he’d pronounce; Malay Chinese. Filipino Chinese, Sumatran, Javan. The Fruit Inspector was American Chinese; he probably wouldn’t have appreciated Frankie’s detection skills.

  I thanked the Inspector with smarmy gratitude, I was that touched by his laid-back California efficiency. I didn’t forget that he’d treated me differently from the blond in the top-down Spider Veloce. Humiliation by the broccoli police didn’t happen to blondes who lived inside their sound-designed universes, who ran through snow flurries with their long hair flying, whose cigarettes sent messages of assumed immortality. Of course I knew I’d been discriminated against, but nicely, so why not treat it as a learning experience? Hello California.

  “Whoa, no problem. Have a nice life!” The cool Inspector launched a perfect jump shot. Old Baggie of trash and guilt disappeared into the Dumpster.

  “Yo,” I shouted back, “you too.”

  Reborn, admitted, launched into clean, conquerable gravity-free space. Even the air felt young, innocent, healthy. A few fat midsummer snowflakes danced like spit on a griddle off my Corolla’s sizzling hood. Was it a cold day with warm sun, a New York April sort of day? Or upstate October, a warm day with icy winds?

  Devi arm-wrestled Debby. I was quicker, stronger as Devi; my intuitions were sharper, my impulsiveness rowdier. As Devi, I came into possession of my mystery genes. Thank you, Clear Water. And you, too, thank you, “Asian National.”

  And thank you, Baby Fong, and what the heck, Frankie, too, for forcing me to deal with my not being a real DiMartino. Like Angie, or like cousin Nicole. Nicole graduated from Hudson Valley Community, and she’s now assistant-producing for some crack-of-dawn cable channel and living with a painter in an illegally converted loft in West Chelsea. Nicole’s a true DiMartino. She can afford to be hooked on Danielle Steele and fairy tales, because she has a family, because she has a family history that’s corroborated by uncles, aunts, grandparents and cousins like Angie. She thinks of Cousin Gino, the only DiMartino who’s done time in a state penitentiary, as Jesse James with a Sicilian twist. That’s why I wouldn’t share my stupid, sordid past as Faustine with someone whose only ambition was to move up to associate producer so she could get a taxi budget.

  In my family, ambitious women my age went down to Manhattan to get a life. They always had, always would. Before August, before Frankie, I’d expected to head south, too, stake out sleeping-bag space on Angie’s floor, be a dog walker for neighborhood gays, make contacts and get a break, find a job in something self-expressive like fashion or decor, where my height and voice would take me to the head of the line, scout an apartment-share I could afford and keep my eyes open for the Fabio of my daydreams. I’d expected to do all this out of desperation. Because I’d known that I didn’t fit into Hudson Valley any more comfortably than I did into the Asia of hippie mothers and Catholic missionaries.

  Blonde like the Spider Veloce blonde was doable, but not my style. I put my money on Wyatt’s wish that someday soon I’d be rich and powerful as well as tall, pretty, free. The Golden State offered freaky-costumed freedom, and more; it offered immunity from past and future sins. Goodbye, Debby DiMartino. Long live Devi Dee.

  So while I glide down I-80 from the thawing mountains past baking Sacramento to the perpetual spring of the Bay Area, while I negotiate the traffic surge of Berkeley and the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, while I count out traveler’s checks from my emaciated hoard to pay for a cheap room in a Tenderloin hotel, let me tell you how I got over Frankie. In California, many men saw in me the telltale hint of Burmese schlepping water jugs on their heads.

  Some days in Chinatown, strangers claimed me as a fellow-lost. In a Chinese restaurant while I was stoking up on the all-you-can-eat, a waiter mumbled something in a soft, gloomy voice, then hovered for an answer I couldn’t give. In a McDonald’s, an Indian man who looked like a student blurted to me, “Wanna catch a new Amitav?”

  Deep down I envied the Chinese waiter and the Indian student. The guys were geeks, but they knew who they were. They knew what they’d inherited. They couldn’t pass themselves off as anything else. No evasions, no speculations, no let’s-pretends. They didn’t see themselves as special or freakish.

  The trouble was, I wasn’t a geek, a freak, a weirdo. I’d had a life and the chance at a Big Life, and lost it, temporarily. I told myself, For now why not be Devi the Tenderloin prowler, all allure and strength and zero innocence, running away from shame, running to revenge?

  Who but a foundling has the moral right to seize not just a city, but a neighborhood, and fashion a block or two of it into home? When you inherit nothing, you are entitled to everything: that’s the Devi Dee philosophy.

  My Co
rolla became my boardinghouse after two expensive nights in the Tenderloin hotel owned by a Mrs. Patel. Asia dogged me, enfolded me. Mrs. Patel’s Asia smelled of Lysol and rancid cooking oil. During the day I scoured the city for a cheap room. I drove from Presidio to Portrero, from Russian Hill to Hunter’s Point, parking the car whenever I liked a view or spotted a dog that needed petting.

  Oh, how the city seduced me! I thrilled to the skyline’s geometry. Rectangles, cylinders, rhomboids, pyramids: all shapes belonged. And I loved San Francisco back, loved its parks filled with lovers, sunbathers, Frisbee tossers, loved its drowsy drunks let alone on streets, its nose-ringed schoolboys riding public buses, its skinny gray ridges stuck with pastel matchbox houses, its tangerine Golden Gate and sailboats in the Bay, its streaky sunlight on foggy days, its Day-Glo graffiti inside streetcar tunnels. WE FUCK HOGS. DUNIA LOVES JORGE. BEAT SENSELESS. CEE-DOUBLE-YOU. COPS WET THEIR PANTS.

  I parked the car, and strode unfamiliar streets, tapping businessmen for fives and tens, starting small by picking up pennies and dimes, paying attention to the bases of parking meters, then lifting wallets from too-tight jeans, snatching purses off coffeehouse tables. The streets of California are paved with silver and papered in green; I could even stop for lattes when petty thievery made me thirsty. Some days I explored the city on borrowed bikes, the Dee System of pickup and delivery. This is the West, and I was claim jumping. From now on, life was a board game: Pass Go. Go to Jail. Looks and a body: that’s a Get Out of Jail Free card.

  It was the Haight I finally picked as my space. My space, my turf, my homeland. It was where I should have been born if the Fresno flower child had strayed no farther from home than Ashbury and Haight. But then I’d have had a different look and less curiosity about sex and transcendence. I’d have inherited the Haight Street I’ll-cross-when-and-where-I-want-and-at-my-speed posture of entitlement. I had to practice a camel-like imperturbability as I crossed the streets on red, while motorists waited.

  The Corolla-As-Motel-Room needed some getting used to. I wadded up dirty laundry to make myself a kind of sleeping pallet. For privacy I taped freebie weeklies to the windows. No cops hassled me, no creeps hustled me. What they said of the Haight, I mean the historical epoch, the mood I’d missed, I mean my bio-mom’s times and wants and needs and not the place, was still true. Do your own thing, do it proudly, and no one will bother you. Feel free, and you shall be free. I was a Cowbabe in Goodwill chaps riding a Japanese auto. Clear Water was never this free, this strong!

  The car was room, and board came from neighborhood soup kitchens. Faustine and Debby were brought up Catholics, but Devi followed her nose: the Hare Krishnas, Buddhists, Baptists, Black Muslims and some religions that entwined love and profit, charity and sex, faith and ecology, space and time, combinations I hadn’t stumbled upon upstate. At the Church of Divine Intergalactica, parishioners wore crowns of Viking horns and feathered headdresses, headgear meant to collect outer-space signals undetectable on normal wavelengths. I felt free; I was free. It just happened overnight; one day I was afraid and on the outside, the next day I was a kind of outlaw, on the side of other outlaws. Maybe I was programmed that way; it seemed totally natural to identify with dropouts, to step around cops, to look out for scanners and closed-circuit monitors. All that shrapnel on cherubic faces, all those brandings and tattoos, looked cool, though not for me. The Haight’s lesson was: Nothing in appearance or behavior need cost a drop of dignity. I didn’t look jobless and didn’t feel homeless. No sour odor of dim futurity.

  Stoop Man was the first neighborhood friend I made while I was scouting the city on my own for Bio-Mom. He had fruit and he shared it. We started with chatter about greenhouse gases and ozone layers. Stoop Man sat all day every day on the stoop of the triplex that housed the Church of Divine Intergalactica. He owned a set of seven signal-receiving headwear, one for each day of the week, Viking, Roman, Indian, Greek, Star Wars, biblical and Disney, all of them handcrafted from cardboard, velvet and tin.

  One morning in late September, he stopped me with, “Did you feel that one, sugar?” He was sitting on the lowest step of the stoop as usual, but that day he touched my elbow. He was wearing my favorite, the Queen of Sheba tiara.

  “Feel what?” I smiled at his fingers still on my arm.

  The morning stayed bright, but all the car alarms were going off. Pigeons went into panic, and circled the telephone poles.

  “The Earth move, what else? Sugar, your smile makes me feel good, and I haven’t been feelin too good for a while, you know what I’m sayin? Girl, you try being the Sultan of Bosnia, just try it for a day, get all your horses shot up, get all your sheep and goats barbecued by infidels, and pretty soon you’ll feel the way I do. Hungry and depressed, that’s how. Famished, you know what I’m sayin? What you reckon they be servin up at the Hare Krishnas for lunch?”

  Stoop Man became my ticket to soup kitchens. The street people accepted me as his girlfriend. That’s how he introduced me. “Say hi to my girlfriend, she touched down from another planet.” “Must have,” they’d kid, “she hasn’t the sense of an earthperson, that’s for sure.” The street people made room for me in soup lines. They tipped me off on which stores had hidden cameras, what time the Japanese and German tour buses came by (“The famous corner of Haight and Ashbury, the Cradle of Flower Power, ladies and gents”) so that I could do a little camera posing, chant my down-on-my-luck or my what-a-shit-country-we-live-in sob story and squeeze wads of sympathy cash out of fat-cat tourists.

  I made other friends, Duvet Man, who lived inside his goose-down quilt and managed to be at the head of every food line, and Tortilla Tim, who saved me from being knifed by a Mill Valley kid weirded out on crack, and a guy who reminded me of Wyatt. A lot of people reminded of people I’d known, like we’d all drifted west till we’d run out of land, and then’d started to mutate a little, like salmon on their way back to spawn, getting a little cruder, a little uglier, on the way to die. The guy who reminded me of Wyatt looked like Wyatt, and kind of talked like Wyatt, too. One time just as I was about to make a small buy, he hummed a warning from a doorway. “Neck size, narc disguised.” I took him to the backseat of the Corolla that September night, and spilled my guts. I told him about Celia Montoya, the counseling Circle, the telemarketing job I’d left so I could find one or both my parents. The rest could wait.

  “No parents? Some people have all the luck,” he said. He pulled a roll of breath mints from his pocket. “The name’s Gabe by the way, like the archangel.”

  “My name’s Devi.”

  “Like the goddess, eh? I had to learn all that Hindu, Jain, Buddhist shit at the U of T.”

  “Where’s that? Texas?”

  “Toronto, Texas, Tulsa, Topeka, Tempe.”

  “Wow,” I murmured. “A goddess!”

  “Tampa, Toledo—you shouldn’t need a private eye to track your Aged Ps.” He laughed. “Not if you are a goddess.”

  “I was thinking of starting with the Yellow Pages.”

  “Eenie meenie minie mo, et cetera?”

  “I was thinking I’d pick the very first or the very last name listed.”

  “Devi Aardvaark? Try Buzzards, Inc., in the Yellow Pages.”

  “Buzzard? Like the bird?”

  “If they ask, say Gabriel referred you. As in the archangel.”

  We hung together the next couple of days, not doing much, just staking out a square of sidewalk at the corner of Belvedere and Haight, holding up a sign, A BUCK FOR AN ANGEL OR A GODDESS, YOU NEVER KNOW, feeling good about the world, especially good about the dollar bills we collected, and then Gabe took off with the sign and the cash. He stuck a note on my windshield. Hope the Pls can help. Wish we’d met earlier. Just too fucked up.

  I looked for Buzzards, Inc., in the Yellow Pages. No Buzzards, but there was a listing for Vulture, Inc. I called and left my name on tape, then realized that I had no phone number for them to call me back at, so I hung up. Next I looked up the Church of Divine Inte
rgalactica in the phone book. The Stoop Man’s church was listed under D, as Divine Intergalactica Worship Facility. I called Vulture, Inc., back, and this time left the DIWF number on the agency’s answering machine.

  A whole week went by without any calls for me at the Stoop Man’s. I called the Vulture, Inc., number again, and kept calling until a human voice answered. “It’s Devi Dee again” was all I got in before the voice, a man’s, barked, “No solicitations, no market research surveys, no interest in freebie cruises or other prizes, so goodbye and thanks.”

  “And fuck you, too,” I muttered to the dead line.

  “All worked up, Goddess?” The Stoop Man snuck up on me on the sidewalk. He had on a beat-up, collapsible top hat and a satin-lined cape.

  “Is that what they’re calling me on the street? I’ll kill Gabe!”

  “Whoa! Bad nerves! You need something potent.”

  “So what’re you selling?”

  “Not selling. I’m giving it away today. The abracadabra of happiness.”

  “In pill, powder or vial?”

  “All of the above.” He flapped his cape, while he tap-danced in his running shoes. “Works like magic. How do you want it, Goddess?”

  “I don’t need magic,” I grumbled. “I need a detective.”

  Very early the next morning, while I was still asleep in my Corolla parked under a pigeon-free tree on a foggedup block just south of Haight Street, a film company showed up with a convoy of trailers. Frankie never told me what bullies film crews on location are. They push real people from their homes on real streets and think you’ll be happy being a part of some fantasy you’ll never see. This film crew operated as though location shooting were military conquest. Longhaired guys rang doorbells and ordered sleepy car owners to please move their cars because the film company had paid the city for permits to park their semis and their Range Rovers instead. They told store owners not to open, people not to come out until the all clear was sounded. Funky young assistants put up police barricades. A smart aleck rapped on my papered-over back window. “Hey, man, time to haul ass,” he commanded in his mellow way.