Like People in History

by Felice Picano

  "So this one late afternoon, I'm half-lost, wandering through the more isolated back alleys of the warehouse district of town, and I see this... It looked like a lion. A female lion. Not with a mane and all. But the biggest damn cat! Just walking around. I couldn't believe it. So I follow, like at a distance. And it walks on, sniffing here and there. No one in the alley. I turn a corner and it's gone. Then I see its tail just going in some doorway. Up some stone stairs. Very old-looking stairs, covered with, what do you call it? Verdigris! I'm thinking this must be a really old building! But it's hard to see it all, hidden among all these Danang-type wooden shacks and buildings mostly made of slabs of particleboard and aluminum. At any rate, I still can't believe a lion lives here, so I go up the stairs and into this dark doorway.

  "I find myself inside the temple. Gongs are going off, and the place reeks with incense, and there are candles and statues everywhere, and it's huge and smoky and dark and empty. Takes me a while to see there's no lion anywhere.

  "I'm about to go back out, when I spot this old guy in a yellow robe. We've seen these yellow robes all over the city, naturally, and since they're against us, we're never too happy to see them. This guy, however, is like really old! And skinny. Just a bunch of bones. He's just pulling up the yellow cloth around him when he spots me.

  "He stands up and comes over, asking me something or other, walking with difficulty. I see he's like really arthritic; his arms and legs are bent and the joints are swollen. Very pathetic the way he looks, the way he moves. Yet he's smiling and happy, and his old eyes are like really bright.

  "So I ask him if he saw the big cat. My Vietnamese is shit, but that much

  I know how to say: 'Where's the big cat?' He laughs. I tell him I followed the big cat inside. He laughs more, covering his toothless mouth with his yellow cloth. I'm about to leave, when he says it's him. He's the cat!

  "Obviously he's loony. But then so am I if I saw a lion wandering around the back alleys of Danang, right? So I say okay, and I give him a few piasters. And I say, 'Amida Buddha,' and I keep smiling, and I back away until I'm about out of that room. I turn to leave, and suddenly, I don't know, I feel something behind me. I turn around and... I don't know, maybe it was power of suggestion or hypnotism or the smoke and darkness, but I swear to you, Rog, I saw that lion inside that temple room. I didn't see that old monk anywhere.

  "I hightailed it the hell out of there! But for the next coupla weeks I couldn't stop wondering about it. These monks are supposed to, you know, gain powers. What if that rickety old man, who could barely move around inside that temple because of how ill and deformed he was, what if through the power of his mind, he became that lion, and in that powerful, healthy body, he walked the alleys of Danang?... You think I'm crazy, right?"

  "I'm totally blown away," I said.

  He looked at me from that other angle of his: wondering if I were serious or not.

  "I think that's the best story anyone ever told me," I said.

  He relaxed. "Well, it happened."

  "It's great!" I said, meaning he was great, which I didn't feel ready to say to him. "It's beautiful," I said, meaning he was beautiful, which I also didn't feel ready to say to him.

  "I told only one other person besides you," Matt said. "This Hawaiian guy I met in the VA down in San Diego." He looked suddenly stricken, although I did nothing to betray his lapse.

  He quickly covered it up. "I went there for some tests when I got back from Nam. Anyway, we got to talking about weird shit, and I told him what happened to me. Know what he said? He said I'd been given a sign. What kind of a sign? I asked. He didn't know, but he was damned sure that seeing a monk in his animal form, and recognizing that's who it was, had to be a sign. He told me it was a power sign. He thought I must have a special task. He used a word... like Karma, but..."

  "Dharma," I said

  "Right!" Matt said. "Special work I have to accomplish in this life."

  "That's wonderful."

  Matt looked thoughtful. "Full of wonder, yes. But maybe not wonderful-good. What if I have to do something bad?"

  "It must be your poetry."

  "It could be like meeting and connecting people up."

  "..."

  "It could be, like, meeting you," Matt said.

  I melted, as somewhere far-off a hundred guitars softly thrummed.

  "It says it's a Seurat!" Holly declared. Her arms were akimbo. Two dots of red flamed above her thin red-brown eyebrows. I'd never seen her like this: "If that's a Seurat, I'm Aretha-fucking-Franklin!"

  Tall, slender, with an almost pancake-white uncosmetized complexion, Holly Francis wasn't even close to resembling the Diva of Soul. She did, on the other hand, somewhat resemble another diva, La Sutherland herself, when she arises from her bed to woodenly sleepwalk in that second act scena of La Sonnambula. Holly's nostrils flared, her shoulders tightened, her small but shapely breasts fought to protrude through her argyle sweater. She was all woman! She was glorious! She was seriously pissed off!

  I removed the small, offending, admittedly well-framed litho from the wall and tucked it under my arm.

  "There! All gone," I said.

  It was Wednesday of the following week, before lunch. We were on the main floor of the store, in what must have been its precise geographical center. Of course everyone was staring at us.

  "I mean, if he's going to hang fakes," Holly continued, "he could at least do me—and the art department—the favor of making them plausible!"

  "Holly..." I tried to dampen her.

  "There's about sixteen damn Seurats in existence, for Chrissakes, and every one of them has been pored over and pawed over and monographed about a skillion times."

  "Holly..."

  "If he knew anything about art... But then why would an art dealer bother to fill his head with facts about art?"

  "Holly...."

  "What is he trying to do? Make a laughingstock out of me and my department? Is that it?"

  "Holly...?"

  "Is that what I've put a billion woman-hours into this department for? So this scumbag can mock me?"

  I said the obvious. "Holly, you're becoming hysterical."

  "You better believe I'm hysterical. Where is that fucker anyway? Faunce!" she screeched up toward the art gallery balcony. "Faunce! Get your fat ass down here now!"

  Two beats passed as every employee in the store and a few customers who'd come in—unwittingly thinking to buy a book rather than to enjoy an impromptu floor show—all suddenly pretended to be not listening to her.

  At length, Alistair appeared at the edge of the balcony and, dismissively waving a hand, shouted, "Can you girls keep it down? We're trying to do business up here!"

  It took six of us to hold Holly. Luckily a lady physician was nearby— in Travel, looking askance at the Balearics—and she prepared a tranquilizer in a stun gun of a hypodermic she kept at the ready in her Balmain purse.

  Several hours later, I was talking to Pierluigi on the phone in Manhattan. One of his spies—Andre or the Bitch of Bari—had told him of the outburst, but not what it was about. I was happy to expand on the problem. Especially since it was partly Pierluigi's doing, and especially since I'd warned him about it.

  "If you don't put a stop to this soon," I said, "your Albanian rose-red marble will be blood-red!"

  "You're the manager," he protested. "It's your job to keep order."

  "You should have thought of that before you appointed so many employees to their independent little duchies, then asked them to play KGB for you," I replied coolly.

  Dead silence greeted that. I'd done the unspeakable: I'd spoken the truth about Pierluigi's soi-disant "management principles," which resembled less Peter Drucker (whom he read on every jet trip) than Cardinal Richelieu. Criticized to his very marrow, I knew that Pierluigi would be deeply offended. So what? Fuck him, I thought. I can always get another job. Even so, I thought perhaps I ought to temper it.

  "Can't you see they're revolting," I joked
. "No one more than Faunce."

  Pierluigi sighed so intensely that if he had been anywhere near my desk, he would have blown every paper off. "You see how I am driven when all I want to do is be right by everyone?"

  I did, my best to ignore the twisted logic of that grammatical nightmare and asked, "What if someone buys one of those things thinking it is a Seurat? And brings it back?"

  A deep groan—centuries of Italic miseria within it—a moan, a sigh. "I will talk to him."

  I doubted that. But we all had our little roles to play in this charade, and I was playing mine.

  As though on cue, Alistair appeared at my desk just as I hung up.

  "I need a favor bad. I need you for a double date this Saturday."

  "Sorry. I'll be with Matt."

  He looked surprised. "That's still going on?"

  "Sure is."

  "This is early evening. You'll be home by eleven at the latest."

  "A true double date?" I asked. "This is 1974, isn't it?"

  "Come on, Rog. I promised Doriot. Her cousin's in town."

  "Doriot?" I stopped, "Who's Doriot? And who's her cousin?"

  "You know Doriot," he said, as though I were obviously joshing. He went on to mention her family name, which, while not Hearst or Coit or Van Ness, was somewhere up there. "Her cousin's Joy Kirkham. She grew up here, but she's been away for years going to school in Florence and—"

  "Girls?" I asked, disbelief I hoped clear in my voice. "You're talking about double dates... with... two girls? Girrlllls?! What are we supposed to do with them? Strip off their slips and make up like Mommy? Or steal their bras and go fly kites?"

  Alistair was insulted. "You needn't be so gay about it."

  "Alistair, the point is I am gay. Even if you've decided you're not.

  And I'm dating someone. Someone special and nice and beautiful... Girls?" I couldn't help asking again.

  "Well, I'm sure Paolo won't be insulted," Alistair said, and stalked off, muttering to himself.

  Good work, Rog, I told myself. You've managed to deeply, and no doubt irrevocably, offend both your boss and your cousin in less than fifteen minutes. Without a single pause or even a cigarette break in between. That has to be some kind of record!

  At dawn I awakened, needing to urinate. When I returned to the bedroom, the place looked like a battlefield of pillows and bed covers. The air was still and tight, cold too, with that non-humid-seeming yet all-pervading dampness of San Francisco mornings. Shivering, I closed the blinds more tightly—wanted no offending sun yet, despite its potential for heat. After last night, after any of these nights lately, I was so physically exhausted, I really needed sleep!

  Matt's large, solid body lay in the middle of the bed, rolled onto his stomach, one arm out, his head turned so that most of his face was visible—that face!—and three fingers entangled in his front curls. As though aware of my admiration, even in his sleep, he shifted, one edge of quilt dropping demurely off his chuck of shoulder. I leaned over and kissed the perfect skin covering such bone, such muscle, and pulled the cover back up. His somnolent reaction was to twist half around—exposing his left ankle and leg.

  The ankle! The leg!

  I told myself I would cover it up and look away. But as though contradicting me, a beam of sharp sunlight popped through my jerry-rigged window shade onto the ankle and leg. So, of course, I felt compelled to look.

  At first I saw nothing. Then I noticed what looked like a slight bump, not discolored, at a forty-five-degree angle to the verticality of natural skin wrinkles at his heel. As I moved my head, I could make out its other side, and now the marks of stitching were apparent, a wide, angled pattern of them. This had been a real bitch of a tear. I could imagine Matt's sudden pain, his fear of being hamstrung, unable to move forward, having to drag his leg like a dead thing behind. I kissed the scar.

  That's when I saw the other scar. I'd missed it, because it was so much smaller, less obvious, higher up his leg, halfway along his calf. Like the first one, it wasn?t discolored—as though the surgeons had worked hard to retain as much of Matt's physical perfection as possible—but its suddenness, cutting right across the back of his muscled calf, and its depth of cut and the lacework of broken little veins it held and the surprising doughiness of the skin and flesh around it all said it had been serious. Had been, might still be. I immediately wondered— Did it reach his sciatic nerve? And I drove the thought—and its potential for infinite physical mischief—out of my mind.

  I stared at that scar until I began to really shiver. Then I covered it up—no kiss, it frightened me too much—with the quilt and got back under the blankets.

  Matt rolled open a space for me and enclosed me within it.

  "Why're you so cold?" he asked, nine-tenths asleep.

  "Had to pee," I replied.

  "Hmmmmm. Stay in bed."

  "Okay, Lucia," Calvin said, "I've done a complete scan of the gang here at the magazine, and I'll tell you what I found out if you tell me what you've found out."

  "I only talked to two people," I replied. "Estelle and Jeffrey. Listen, Calvin, I'm head over heels in love."

  "We all know where your heels were last night, honey. What did Miss Madness recommend?" he asked, ignoring the second and for me only crucially important part of my answer.

  Jeffrey Teller and Mrs. Estelle Lambert-Duchesne were the other most frequently appearing free-lance writers in the magazine. I should add that I wrote articles under the sobriquet "Henrici," the name of J. S. Bach's most often used librettist for cantatas and passions.

  "Jeffrey's aiming for Paer or Mayr. Ever hear of them?"

  "Of course," Calvin answered. "Early nineteenth-century—wrote Italian opera. Paer's Leonora is allegedly a forerunner of Beethoven's Fidelia."

  Calvin had been raised from being her assistant to taking over from

  Estelle at the magazine when she was fired for incompetence—read: alcoholism. Cherkin, his boss, who published six other trade magazines— mostly about ball bearings and fish packing and suchlike unglamorous stuff—sometimes treated Calvin like "the house darky" and sometimes as though he were H. L. Mencken. According to Calvin, it varied, and could not be predicted—which drove Calvin crazy, given the iffiness of his own self-esteem. Moreover, in Calvin's psychic life, his boss often became Calvin's father—and that invariably meant trouble.

  "You're not listening," I said. "I just told you I'm in love. Any self-respecting homosexual would drop the topic, drop the dishes, drop the fucking Waterford crystal to discuss this."

  "Well, this self-respecting homosexual has things to do. A magazine to get out. Trouble to make."

  "Like hell!"

  I suspected that his own love life—never very good—was particularly bad or, worse, nonexistent lately, which might explain his hesitancy now. So I resorted to my last weapon.

  "If we don't talk about this now, Calvin, I will never, never, never, never listen to you when Harold or Bernard or Rastus or whomever the hell you are seeing does something terrible, awful, beyond words."

  This I knew would be difficult for him to resist. Although Calvin had grown up in the black (and—let's face it, since it was Grosse Pointe— white) upper middle class and had gone to cream-puffy Berkeley, he'd fallen not for some nice white boy, not even for an Oreo like himself, but instead for a black heroin dealer in Oakland, a guy who'd swung both ways—when, that is, he wasn't swinging at Calvin. A year-long on-again, off-again relationship ensued, in which Calvin had lost, some of his baby fat and all of his remaining innocence about—as he put it— "The Joys of Ghetto Negritude." He'd never become hooked on drugs or in any way involved with them, but Calvin had gotten emotionally hooked on butch African-American bisexuals whose beautifully modeled bodies were covered with knife scars, and whose large, vulnerable brown eyes lied without blinking, men who spent half their relationship in a jail cell and would as easily beat him unconscious for ten dollars as make love to him for hours at a time. All this I knew in the kind
of detail only a best gay friend and Sistuh could know.

  "Okay, Miss Borgia, you win." Calvin had thought over my ultimatum. "Tell me all about the eleven hundred and sixty-sixth alleged 'love of your life.'"

  "I'll do even better. I will actually allow you to see and speak to this paragon of beauty—not to mention good taste—in person. Brunch tomorrow. Your choice of dive."

  "Chile! This must be serious if you want Semiramide herself in all her gold lame garments to meet, greet, and you know, pass judgment!"

  "I have no fears," I replied grandly.

  So he let me talk about Matt for about twenty minutes, then he got in a few horrible stories about how awful Cherkin had been to him at the magazine. We were saying good-bye for the tenth time when he finally said, "By the way. Did I tell you what Miss Thing at the Opera did? He called up yesterday using this all-too-recognizable voice, and he asked if I needed the name of an opera."

  "Does bread need honey? Does... What did he recommend?" I asked.

  "Guess," Calvin said. "Go on and guess."

  "Don't tell me. Ummm... I know! Dildo in Anus!"

  "Then it's true," Calvin marveled. "All small minds do think alike."

  Calvin must have known die owner. Pleasant as the restaurant was, it had three tables in the picture window and we got the middle one. The view was reason enough for the place's existence: it looked north, straight down Divisadero to the Marina and the bay. The yacht club, the Presidio, the park, and of course the bridge dominated the view to the left. To the right were Russian and Telegraph hills, with Coit Tower just within view.

  "This is something!" Matt enthused as a tall young woman seated us. I wanted to tell her to put her eyes back in her head. The place was crowded, but she remained at our table, fussing with our silverware and napery, trying to catch Matt's eye, until she was forced to break her cool with "Cocktails?"