The Magician's Tale

by William Bayer

  Why did I deprive him of so many clues which might have given him hope? Should I call him tomorrow, confide? Having been so candid with me, hasn't he earned my confidence?

  The truth, I decide, is that I still don't trust him, feel there's more to his story, yet another layer he didn't reveal. And, too, I'm out for bigger game than a reunion with a girl whose life David so radically bent. I want to complete Exposures, and to do that I must discover who killed my friend.

  The Bay Area News, being an alternative newspaper, is appropriately situated in a cutting-edge neighborhood—on Folsom in SoMa, surrounded by other alternative enterprises: a used record store called Psychosis, an erotic boutique called Marquis de Suede, a dance club called ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms) famous for its orgiastic fetish wear blowouts where the dress code is strictly enforced. There are stores that specialize in furniture of the 1950s, photographers' studios, numerous pubs including the infamous adjoining BoyBar and GirlBar (never the twain shall meet!), and a half-dozen basement and storefront avant-garde theaters.

  The News takes up the top floor of a four-story warehouse. There are only two ways up, freight elevator or fire stairs. I take the stairs.

  I came to work here straight out of the Art Institute willing to shoot most anything in return for pay. The wages were lousy, barely enough to get me by. I ended up sharing a ratty Edwardian on Cole Street with three News colleagues. But the work was fun, we were young, high-spirited, priding ourselves on breaking stories the mainstream press wouldn't touch. Even more we enjoyed smashing taboos, inserting obscene words into articles, praising alternative rock bands with names like Genitorture, and, for the hell of it, kicking the Establishment in the butt.

  Memories flood back as I mount the stairs. The stairwell walls are embellished with graffiti—a scrawled one-liner, Camille Paglia is smarter than Gloria Steinem, an obscene reference to Kierkegaard, a Dykes On Bikes poster adorning the landing. The blended pizza-and-pot aroma is also the same. I remember attacking these stairs with unprocessed film, trying to beat impossible deadlines. "Kay! Get over to the Clift. Mick Jagger's checking out." "Joey! Drive Kay round to the back of the Hall of Justice, we need a shot of the Trailside Killer in manacles."

  Most of my old newsroom colleagues have long since moved on. Because the News is the sort of place that burns you out, it's nearly impossible to work here past the age of thirty. But there're a few who've made the paper their home. One is Joel Glickman. He originally came out from Brooklyn for the Summer of Love, lived on the Haight, balled and grooved. He joined the News at its founding years before I arrived, and is still here a dozen after I left. In the meantime he's won a Pulitzer for his exposé of corruption in the city assessor's office. Since then he's received numerous offers, including one to be San Francisco bureau chief for Time. But Joel is happy at the News. Here he can do what he wants. He's even paid a decent middle-class wage, probably the only reporter on the paper who is.

  The spiky-haired receptionist peers at me. "How may I help you?" she asks.

  "Kay Farrow to see Joel Glickman."

  Her squint grows intense. "Is Joel expecting you?"

  I nod. In my day they weren't nearly so protective.

  Joel's office is a cubicle, but he's got a window. Even if the glass is streaked, that's a sign of status. His desk is piled with papers, his walls covered with old cartoons. His Pulitzer certificate, cheaply framed, hangs cockeyed to show how little he expects you to be impressed. Joel, now balding, drooping mustache and goatee tinged with gray, beams up at me through what look to be the same steel-frame grannies he was wearing when we met.

  "Hey, kiddo! You look great!"

  I pull off my shades, flaunt my shiners. "Little beaten-up, that's all."

  His forehead furrows. "Serious?"

  "Not as bad as it looks."

  I tell him I was jumped, and that the reason's probably connected to the purpose of my visit.

  "So what's the reason, kiddo?"

  I shrug the question off. "Still got good sources in the cops?"

  "A few," he says. "Most are afraid to talk to me."

  "Afraid you won't protect them?"

  He smiles. "They figure I'm being watched."

  "Are you, Joel?"

  He laughs. "Imagine how much it would cost and how paltry the pickings?"

  He's right. It would be exceedingly unprofitable, not to mention illegal, to keep Joel under permanent surveillance.

  "I may have a new cop source for you," I tell him. "She's working on something hot and ready to leak."

  "Interesting. What does she want?"

  "Her name in lights—when it's over."

  "Corruption?" Joel licks his lips.

  "No, so don't salivate. But it's a good story. I'm working on it myself."

  We go around the corner to the Transcendental Cafe, where, in my youth, I wasted more hours than I like to recall. The walls here have been laboriously papered with old tarot cards. The resident swami sits at the window table staring goggle-eyed into his crystal ball.

  We order herbal tea, then I tell Joel my story. I leave out the background stuff I got from David, but am frank about my own interest and Dad's involvement in the old T case.

  "I remember Torsos," he says when I finish. "Particularly that wacko inspector, what's-his-name, Hale—the one wrote all those lovely letters of self-praise. City's 'Top Cop' they called him. But there was something rotten in the cotton."

  Joel's smart. He knows there's more to the equation.

  "Okay, you're setting me up with Hilly. So tell me, kiddo—what do you get out of all of this?"

  "She's getting me some information out of police files."

  "That's illegal." I nod. "She must want this bad."

  "She does. Because she's a woman, because she's a lesbian, and because the guy she works with treats her like shit. Her partner's got his own reporter, by the way."

  "Who?"

  "Lubow at the Examiner."

  "Good man."

  "But no Joel Glickman."

  "No." Joel grins. "Surely not." He studies me. His eyes grow serious. He turns slightly so the light glints off his grannies. "This information—it wouldn't be personnel information, would it?" I nod. "About your dad?" I nod again. "Want to tell me more?"

  I hesitate . . . then decide to spill. Joel, after all, is like family. "Remember, years ago, I told you how my mom shot herself?" He nods. "That was the same year Dad took abuse for the lost T case evidence. I have this feeling there's a connection there."

  "Fine, suppose there is—why go back to all that pain?"

  "I've got to know where I came from, Joel."

  He measures me, nods. "Just wanted to see how much you care."

  He says he thinks the story's worth pursuing whether it connects to the original T case or not.

  "Just the idea," Joel says, "that there's this kid living that way up on Polk Gulch, then he gets killed and nobody cares, and there're forty, fifty other kids doing the same thing, taking the same risk—that's important in itself. I also like the subplot, that there're all these closeted rich guys—lawyers, stockbrokers, whatever—who swoop down in their cars from Pacific Heights and Marin basically to plunder young bodies." He nods. "Yeah, I like it a lot."

  We agree to divide it up—he'll pursue it as an investigative piece for the News while I'll make it the subject of my book. Meantime we'll pool our information, credit one another in our respective work, and I'll supply Gulch photographs for his piece.

  He thinks my calling Hilly at home is a mistake.

  "Once I start asking indelicate questions around the Hall of Justice, the big shots'll figure there's a leak. Hilly'll be suspect. They'll start watching her, maybe even tap her phone."

  "Aren't you being a little paranoid, Joel?"

  He shakes his head. "Uh-uh, kiddo. I've been through this too many times. People who blow whistles tend to get burned. We need a contact code, for her protection as well as ours."

  When he des
cribes what he has in mind the intrigue excites me: calls from phone booths, alternate safe meeting places designated A and B; chalk marks on a mailbox in the Castro when we want to meet with Hilly or she with us.

  "I also want you to buy a micro tape recorder. From now on, tape all important conversations. In a story like this there're always disputes. If you can produce a tape, ninety percent of the time you're off the hook."

  "I'm glad I brought this to you," I tell him. "I feel like I've been floundering."

  "I'm glad you brought it to me too," he says. "Just like old times, kiddo, right?"

  I walk him back to his office. He shows me pictures of his new live-in love, Kirstin, the Scandinavian Ice Goddess, showing off in a bikini on Stinson Beach. Also photos of his daughters, one enrolled in a post grad marine biology program at Scripps, the other majoring in English lit at Cal.

  Joel, I suddenly realize, is nearly fifty years old. Before I leave I photograph him at his desk, the mishung Pulitzer above his head. Whap!Whap! Another archetype for my collection: the Intrepid Investigative Journalist.

  Sasha Patel is not to be denied, his proprietary interest possibly explained by his having viewed my insides via X-rays and scans, not to mention his hands-on acquaintance with my anatomy. I always thought doctors were detached, that clinical fleshly contacts had no power to arouse. Such, apparently, is not the case. After considerable prodding on the phone, I agree to meet him at the Buena Vista tonight after his shift. But I make it clear this will be a one-off, that I'm not in a dating mode.

  I turn up after lunch at Marina Aikido, wary of combat but determined to get a workout. I show Rita my bruises. She agrees I shouldn't spar.

  "Just go through the motions today and the rest of the week," she instructs. "Keep it slow. Concentrate on form."

  I appreciate that she doesn't ask whether I've been battered by a lover. After class I describe the attack, and how, once on the ground, with my attacker on my back, I was powerless against his fists.

  Rita demonstrates some random moves I might have made. "Create a whirlwind," she says. But once thrown, she agrees, I could do little but take the beating. Except, of course, if my legs were free below the knee, in which case I could have kicked back against the base of my attacker's spine.

  Right! Why didn't I think of that? But then I remember: there were three of them, the second holding down my legs, the third my arms. In fact, I should never have fallen, and think the only reason I did was out of fear of damage to my camera . . . which they took anyway.

  "Next time don't try and protect it," Rita advises. "Use it as a weapon, a ball and chain. Merge with it. Let your energy flow into it. Remember, Kay, a camera can be replaced." She lightly touches a bruise on my cheek. "Shattered bones take time to mend."

  Walking home, on Union Street, I'm attracted by a poster in the window of a children's bookstore. RAINBOWS! it proclaims, and then: COLOR!COLOR!COLOR! Numerous books for kids are on display, all having the word "color" in their titles. Colors; Naming Colors; Know the Colors; Colors Everywhere . . .

  I study the window for a time, then enter the store. A friendly smile from the proprietress. I pick up one of the color books, leaf through. There are photographs of farm animals and swatches in the margins, which I assume match the colors of the animals.

  A second book contains plastic overlays enabling a child to create secondary colors by mixing primaries. Familiar words leap from the pages: "yellow," "magenta," "cyan" . . . all Greek to me.

  A third book also bears color swatches, along with exotic words: plum, mint, crimson, poppy, absinthe, azure, robin's-egg blue, aquamarine. The names of the colors dazzle me: hyacinth, lilac, quince, saffron. I savor the sounds: salmon, indigo, mocha, flax, ocher, Pompeian red, burnt sienna.

  There's a vast world here of which I have no optical knowledge. But I can dream, extrapolate, for there are words listed for the shades I do know and see. The whites, for instance, composed of all other colors: antimony, bismuth, oyster, ivory, zinc, Dutch, Chinese. The grays: charcoal, dove, gunmetal, mouse, pearl, plumbago. And, my favorites, the blacks or achromatics: bone, aniline, ink, japan, raven, soot, and slate.

  So yes, I decide, though there is an unknown universe here, there is also one I can distinguish quite well. The spectrum I know, the one of tones light and dark, is to me exquisite. I may not see the rainbow or know autumnal colors, but let no one say I cannot revel in the beauties of the world.

  Hilly loves Joel's contact code: "Secret codes, secret rings—brings back my tomboy days."

  We're sitting in a corner of The Duchess. Hilly's idea; she figures no cop will follow her into a dyke bar. It's smoky and noisy, but this time I don't mind. Now that we're acquainted there's no special need for quiet.

  "In my family," she reminds me, "I was the only girl, born between two boys. My brothers were my buddies. We'd fight and scrap. Now one's a T-man, one's a G-man and I'm a city dick. So see, Kay, the contest still goes on. I wanna zoom past them. I wanna be family champ."

  There's a special pungency in the air here, women oozing desire. I notice Hilly twitching. This hothouse atmosphere turns her on.

  "Check her out." She gestures toward a short-haired brunette standing at the bar. Her biceps are ringed by a coiled snake tattoo, her midriff is bare, she wears nothing but clingy Lycra shorts and a black leather halter bra. ''Hot, huh!''

  I shrug.

  "Gimme a break, Kay! Girl goes to the trouble of making herself yummy like that, you can't just not respond."

  I shrug again. "What can I do, Hilly? I'm just a vanilla square."

  "Hey, the culture's queer! Get with it, babe!"

  "Yeah . . . now about that stuff you brought me."

  She nods, unfurls her copy of the Bay Area News, extracts a sheaf of photocopy paper. "I couldn't get your dad's personnel file. That's held too close. And since he's retired it's over in dead records anyway, which means it's basically in a vault." She taps the papers. "What I do have is the confidential I.A.D. report on the Sipple fiasco—Waincroft, Hayes, Puccio, Vasquez and, of course, your pop."

  I hold out my hand. She passes the bundle.

  "Not pretty reading, Kay."

  "Life's not pretty either." I thank her, tell her to expect a call from Joel. "You'll like him," I tell her. "He's a '67-vintage hippie turned serious."

  She grins. "Sure you don't wanna stay, meet some of my buds?"

  "Thanks anyway, Hilly, but I've got a date with a man."

  "Ouch!" she says. And then, an afterthought: "Woof!"

  The Buena Vista is one of my favorite drinking holes, even if it's too often thronged with tourists. Something about the joint at the bottom of Hyde and Beach, where the Hyde Street cable car ends, that brings back happy memories of Art Institute days, meeting friends here on Sunday mornings, throwing back Irish coffees while arguing about sex and art. I like the neon sign outside, the way the letters are formed, the long bar with its tiled base, the bottles arrayed before the long beveled mirror. I like the ceiling fans and the earthy waitresses and the handsome bartender dressed in crisp white mess jacket. Best of all I like the alcoholic coffee.

  Sasha is waiting for me, occupying a round wood table by the window. I haven't seen him since the night he took care of me at St. Francis Memorial, when I was morphined up.

  Checking him out, I decide he still looks good, with his dark skin, brilliant black hair and large lustrous liquid eyes. A ladies' man, the nurses called him. It's pretty obvious why. It's his alluring smile, so charming and seductive. Also, I assume, so false.

  "You're looking good, Kay," he comments as I sit down. He reaches over, removes my shades, peers at the bruises around my eyes. He touches one lightly.

  "What do you want me to do next?" I ask. "Open my mouth and say 'Aaahhh'?"

  "Not unless you're prepared to strip to the waist," he warns. "I want to check your rib cage." Again he touches me. "Tender?"

  "A little."

  He grins. "I'll be tender too."

>   Quite the jocular fellow is Dr. C. Patel, though I must say I like his accent.

  "You talk like a Brit. How come?"

  "Because I am," he says. "Born and raised over there. My parents came from India, but I'm a British subject ... though most true-blue Brits consider me a wog."

  "What's that?"

  "A person of color. What you Americans call a nigger. Or 'one of our little brown brothers' when you want to show how sensitive you are."

  "Are you bitter, Sasha?"

  "Actually, no. I love it here. Home of the Free, Land of the Brave. I especially like American women." He shows me a grin so charming it could light the world. "And of course, you Yanks have the best medical practice in the world."

  I find it difficult not to like him. He's polished, smart, has a fast mouth . . . and always those gorgeous liquid eyes toward which any girl in her right mind would crawl through splintered glass.

  "Tell me something," he says suddenly. "Who is Kay Farrow?"

  I laugh. "My life story?"

  "A few high points will do."

  I offer him a few high points. While I do he gazes into my eyes as if smitten by every word.

  "Enough about me," I say. "Your turn now. You can start by explaining your interesting first name."

  "My actual name's Clarence. They started calling me Sasha in school."

  "How come?"

  He smiles. "Because I wanted them to. I was reading Russian novels at the time and fell in love with the name. Something moody about it, also romantic." He gazes at me. "Tell me, Kay—do you like to dance?"

  "I'm a crummy dancer," I say.

  "I'm sure you could improve."

  "Under your tutelage?"

  "Why not?"

  "I think I'll wait until my rib cage heals." I smile at him. "There's something you don't know about me yet."

  "Tell me."

  "I don't own a single dress."

  He laughs. "Jeans girl! Terrific! You do own shorts?"

  "Numerous pairs."

  "I love shorts and slacks, close-fitting garb." He wets his lips.

  "You know, Sasha—I just realized something."

  "What's that?"