by Dan Vining
“That’s all. She’s a journalist . . .” Then, without a breath between the words, he said, “So you were down there last night, too. I understand you were there for all three.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah, I was there.”
“I’m doing a follow-up on the Leonidas girls, tying it in. I talked to George Leonidas. He said talk to you, that you had something to say about it. A different angel.”
“Did you say angel?”
“I meant angle. Sometimes I’m a little dyslexic early in the morning.”
“Mr. Leonidas got it wrong. I wouldn’t be any help to you.”
There was a little pause. “I know you, Brother,” the man on the other end of the line said. He didn’t say it like the secret Sailor code that it was, more like they were old friends. They weren’t. They weren’t even new friends. He waited. He expected the silence.
Jimmy said, “I guess I could use some fresh air. Where do you want to meet?”
“How do you feel about church?” the reporter said.
Fresh air? It was like being in an auditorium-sized pool hall. It was a ballroom in a hotel on Cathedral Hill. The cigarette smoke burned Jimmy’s eyes and constricted his throat from the second he came in. It was like walking into a house afire.
But it was church. A pastor, a skinny man with a big, booming voice, was at a pulpit up front on the elevated platform with its white tacked-on pleated skirt. His voice was not just big but had a kind of authority, a kind of weight, a been there/done that intensity. He was talking about Peter, Saint Peter, and overcoming the past.
Jimmy squinted, looking for his date in the haze.
Duncan Groner was alone in the last row of hotel ballroom armless stackable chairs, against the wall, under an eight-foot-long mural of the completion of the transcontinental railroad, the driving of the golden spike. He had a fat, round, red eraserless pencil stuck over his ear and a long reporter’s notebook on the empty seat beside him. And, Jimmy would learn in a second, a buzz on.
The banner strung up behind the preacher said: Western States Roundup Alcoholics Anonymous. Yee-haw.
Groner gave him a wave over, moved his reporter’s notebook for him to sit.
“I thought San Francisco had a smoking ban.”
“They do,” Duncan Groner said. “They cut ’em a little slack. For the conventions. Especially this one.” He had a cigarette of his own in his hand, a Player, a thick, unfiltered, English fag, smoked down to the nub. In his other hand, he had a tall coffee in a paper cup. He swirled it around a couple times and took a sip.
“Thanks for coming, Brother. God loves a cheerful giver.” Groner’s face matched the gravelly voice, ears a little gnomish, flappable, a bulbous nose, a weak chin, droopy dog eyes. Here was another old Sailor. He looked to be in his sixties, wiry, lanky. He wore loud checked wool pants and a yellow short-sleeved shirt with a press on it. And tan-and-white saddle shoes. He looked like he should be at the horse track with a stingy brim hat pushed back on his head. Or the dog track. “God says the past doesn’t matter,” he said. He snatched up his notebook and flipped back a page. “Or rather that ‘the slate is wiped clean.’ ” He swirled his coffee again and took another hit. “God doesn’t even care if you’ve inadvertently polluted your shorts at one time or another.”
“Even advertently,” Jimmy cracked.
“Oh, Mother of God, a free-willer!” Duncan Groner said, loud enough for a woman six rows forward to turn. “Sorry,” he said. And lifted his coffee cup to her.
With a surreptitious slip of the fingers, he extracted a brass flask shaped like a kidney from his pants pocket. He kept it at his side, popped open the cap with his thumbnail, tipped it, and poured a dollop into the coffee cup kept down at his side and clipped the cap down again. And then he made the bottle disappear. For this, at least, he had the dexterity of a surgeon. He swirled the coffee again. Jimmy could smell the bourbon. A man twenty rows up turned and looked. Maybe he could he smell it, too.
Groner continued, “You have to accept that there is a Superior Being, a Higher Power, something greater than you.” He flipped closed his notebook. “What they don’t say is how can you not drink once you know that little piece of information.”
“I believe the answer to that is, God loves you,” Jimmy said.
“He doesn’t know me,” Groner said.
The reporter had what he needed for whatever he was writing, so they slipped out, retired to the hotel bar across the lobby. It wasn’t even ten yet. The bartender and a busboy went to restocking the bar after the two lone customers had been served, an old-fashioned for Groner and a Virgin Mary for Jimmy.
There wasn’t much restocking to do.
“I bet you love this convention crowd,” Groner said.
The bartender smiled hatefully.
Groner stirred his drink with his finger. “By the way,” he began, “George Leonidas isn’t buying any of it. No sale.” He lifted the drink to toast Jimmy and then all but drained the old-fashioned in the first “sip.”
“He thinks you’re insane,” Groner finished.
“That’s usually the intention,” Jimmy said. “With third parties.”
“Up here, we tend not to even try to explain things to third parties.”
“That works, too.”
“It never helps.”
“No, it never does,” Jimmy said.
Jimmy liked him. All Sailors were good liars, if they made it through the first weeks, months, without falling apart. You had to learn fast how to read each other and then trust what your instinct was telling you.
“So who’s next?” Jimmy said and bit his stalk of celery in half.
Groner let a half minute go by. “Maybe it’s you,” he said.
“Or you,” Jimmy said.
Groner laughed. “Is it that obvious?”
“What are you going to say about the Leonidas girls?”
“Mother of God, I saw their room,” Groner said and shook his head. “It was like an explosion in a Dubble Bubble factory. They slept in matching canopy beds. One liked Justin, one liked Clay.”
“That was probably last year,” Jimmy said.
“They change so fast.” The way Groner said the cliché, sour and sincere at the same time, made Jimmy wonder if the grizzled old cynic had been, of all things, a daddy once. “George had just bought them both a Kia. Two Kias. They came into the City in Melina’s. It was in the covered parking lot across from Pier 41. It had a hundred and eleven miles on it.”
“Did you find out why they wanted to die?” Jimmy said.
“You were there,” Groner said. “I wasn’t. What did you see?”
“In the moment, it was hard to get past the nakedness.”
“The assumption was they were loaded, but they weren’t. What they had in their stomachs was essentially a Jamba Juice mango smoothie. They’d each had one. One had some Midol in her blood. She was menstruating. Funny, you’d think the two girls would be in sync, but they weren’t. There’s always a detail like that. Maybe it’s why I do this.”
Jimmy said, “There hadn’t been any signs of depression? High drama?”
“Happy and healthy.”
“You said you were ‘tying this in.’ To what?”
The bartender came past. He pointed at Groner. Groner shook his head, though his glass was empty.
“In the last five days, there have been twenty-six suicides in the City. Usually, there are one or two a day. And more than half of them have been, as you say, the ‘high drama’ kind. Two off the Golden Gate last night, five minutes apart. Three last week. They usually get one jumper every two or three weeks. People are killing themselves spectacularly all over the city. Not the head-in-the-oven kind, alone in the garage with the Nova.” He sucked the bitters-dashed sugar off the cubes at the bottom of his rocks glass.
“That’s not what you meant when you said, ‘Who’s next?’ is it?” he said, and looked at Jimmy.
Jimmy didn’t answer.
&n
bsp; “Why would a Sailor be up there with them, whispering in their ear just before they jumped?” he said instead.
“First I heard of it,” the reporter said and almost made it sound like the truth.
Groner changed his mind about that second drink and, while he waited for it, asked Jimmy what had brought him to San Francisco.
Jimmy surprised himself with how much he said. About Lucy and Les. About Angel back home. About the boat ride over to Sausalito. About what he had thought had almost happened on the Golden Gate. About the park on Tiburon. About the two women who always seemed to be hovering.
It’s getting to me, that’s what he was thinking as he heard himself summarize the last days. There was too much death here, and it didn’t have anything to do with him, however much they tried to make it be about him, however much he seemed to be right there when the bodies dropped. Sailors had their own kind of agoraphobia and for their own special reasons. They never liked to be too far from the home port. They started getting antsy. Maybe it was time to go home.
“Go to her, this Lucy, talk to her, tell her people are worried about her, take her home,” he heard Groner say.
The Haight. Lucy wasn’t there. And the Skylark was gone. Maybe she’d figured it out on her own. Maybe she’d packed up and was headed south.
But he knew that wasn’t true.
He drove across the Golden Gate, blew past the spot where the dropped drinks had splashed into the oncoming traffic, where Lucy had stopped almost in the middle of the bridge, where Les had caught up to her. A couple was handing off their camera to another tourist for a shot of the two of them with the backdrop of the city, their backs against the low rail.
He took the first exit, dropped down into Sausalito. The baby-blue Skylark would be easy to spot, wherever they were, if he got lucky.
He didn’t get lucky.
He kept on, stayed on the road that swung around the pinched curve of top of the Bay. It gave him time to practice his speech.
Tiburon. He found them. The Skylark was right there in the parking lot of the picnic place next to the playing fields, in the row of spaces closest to the highway. He couldn’t have missed it if he wanted. It was sitting there all alone, like a big sign that said: Here!
So he had gotten lucky.
He pulled in and parked, found a place.
He watched them through the windshield of the Porsche. This time Lucy had brought Les with her. There was no sign of the others, the women, the helpmates. It was a sweet little scene. The sky was blue. The water was beautiful.
A little soccer player came running his way, right toward Jimmy. A boy six or seven with his shin guards over his socks, out of uniform, silky baggy pants and mismatched top. He had a set of keys jangling in his hand. Jimmy looked across the field. There weren’t any games on. (It was Sunday. They probably didn’t have games on Sunday.) But there were two or three boys at some distance and a few parents. (Lucy and Les were close by, but not right next to the parents and kids.) There was a chirp as the Tahoe two spaces away from the Porsche unlocked its doors.
The boy was impatient to get back to the field, to his friends. He yanked opened the passenger-side door and climbed in. Jimmy looked over, saw him rummaging between the Tahoe’s front seats.
He came out with a white squeeze bottle of sunblock, slammed the door, was already running back across the fie ld when he aimed the remote behind him and locked the Tahoe. California kids. Or maybe they were like this everywhere now.
As the boy closed in, a woman, who’d had her back turned away, standing, turned. Maybe she’d heard his voice. Maybe the boy had said something, maybe protested about the errand she’d sent him on, interrupting his play. “Here . . .” maybe he’d said, with an impatient edge to his voice. The boy was holding up the sunblock.
She took a few steps toward him, to meet him. She kneeled down.
It was all it took. She was far away, a hundred yards at least. She was across any number of gulfs, of chasms, of distances. Of time and space and reason. On the other side of possibility, across a wide field of coincidence and improbability. But it was all it took, the shape of her. The outline of her.
Her hair in the light.
The flash of white in the luster of her face, the teeth in her smile, the smile in her eyes . . .
As she knelt and finger-painted sunblock under the boy’s eyes, across his forehead, and down the line of his nose.
Mary.
NINE
The same song was playing on a dozen radios, all tuned to KHJ. It was an AM kind of night. The sidewalks were more crowded than the four lanes of the street, and the street was plenty crowded, weekenders in from the suburbs to see how the other half lived, to pretend to be something wilder than what they were. It was the middle of summer. It was an even warmer night than usual, riot weather, but there wasn’t any chance of a flare-up among this throng. The word was mellow. Moving along on the sidewalk, cruising out of the sound of one radio and then into the zone of the next, was like moving along inside the song, like walking with the singer, best friends.
It could have been Polk Street or MacDougal Street or South Beach, or even Fisherman’s Wharf, but it was Sunset Boulevard, the Sunset Strip. It was L.A.
It could have been now, but it was 1995.
It could have been a lot of songs, probably should have been “London Calling” or “My Sharona” or even the Carpenters and “We’ve Only Just Begun,” but it was Tom Jones and “It’s Not Unusual (To Be Loved by Anyone).” Another big pop lie.
She was with another guy the first time he saw her. She was Mary, her name was Mary, though it would take most of the night for him to find that out, to work his way through the jungle of playful protective coloration she threw up, to break her down was the way she always put it later when they were telling others about how they met, about that first night.
Jimmy and Mary.
He was with someone else, too. Most nights he was alone, particularly on the Strip. He lived nearby, a little house down below Sunset, below a restaurant everybody was going to at the time, Roy’s. (Now it’s the site of the House of Blues.) It was dead center in the Strip. It was close enough to the Chateau Marmont to walk over, which Jimmy did all the time.
The girl he was with that night worked as a secretary at a record label. She liked him more than he liked her. She brought him records, what they called “product.” The LPs (they were still making them, along with cassettes and CDs) always had a hole drilled through some corner of the cover, a sign that they were meant for promotion. She’d bring him boxes of them. When she realized she liked him more than he liked her, trying to change that, she started bringing him boxes of “cleans,” albums that weren’t punched, that could be sold or traded for whatever you wanted. She hadn’t figured out that Jimmy was different, different from everyone, and that he didn’t care about money. (And, because he didn’t care, he had a lot of it or could always get it.) She didn’t know he was a Sailor. It was the secret he kept from almost everyone.
The guy Mary was with was a director.
It’s not unusual to be loved by anyone
It’s not unusual to have fun with anyone
She was twenty-two; the director was thirty-eight. She was five ten; he was five eight. She was blond. He was blonder. Jimmy and the secretary, who had her arm threaded through his as they walked, were on the north side of Sunset, next to Tower Records. Mary and the director were across the street, going into a sushi place with a bamboo facade and glossy bright red paint around the door, making the entryway look like a garish mouth.
“Do you know her?” the secretary had said to Jimmy, when she saw him looking across the street.
The joke they said later, Jimmy and Mary, each taking a line in the telling of it, was that the director had looked back through the red mouth of that door and said to her, “Do you know him?”
Mary and the director had fought over dinner, and she had ended up walking away from him. From his white Jaguar sed
an specifically, with the director standing next to it, sake-drunk, the valet standing there, too. She’d walked away on up Sunset, headed west, pretending to be drunk, too, which she wasn’t at all. Jimmy had found her in Gil Turner’s, a bright, glass-fronted, classic corner liquor store near the end of the Strip. She was inside, at the counter.
He was alone by then, too, behind the wheel of the only car he had, an oxidized white ’68 Cadillac convertible, the punch line to some joke he’d forgotten. The top had long ago been knifed by vandals, so he left it down, at least once summer came. At the time, he thought he was just cruising, but he could admit later he was looking for her.
He parked. She came out. He set off after her. He caught up to her, walked alongside her. She was headed back toward the center of things. He didn’t say anything for a half a block. That section of the strip was dead, the block before the Rainbow and The Roxy.
“Let’s hear it,” she said, when she realized that he was just weird enough to walk along beside her silently, maybe forever. “Your clever first line.”
“I don’t have one,” Jimmy said. “I don’t have a clever last line, either.”
“Thinking ahead, are we?”
She was as tall as he was. And she had on flat shoes, dancer’s shoes. Capezios. She was skinny but not a model. She probably wasn’t a dancer, either. He thought of asking, but it sounded too much like a pickup line.
“You want these?” she said and offered him an unopened pack of cigarettes, after they’d walked another half block. She was setting the pace, not fast, not slow. Not an escape, not a stroll.
“Luckies,” he said.
“I don’t smoke,” she said. “I felt sorry for the man in the store.”
“That’s Gil. Himself.”
“I felt sorry for Gil.”
“He’s probably a millionaire,” Jimmy said.
“So millionaires aren’t worthy of our concern?” she said. Jimmy wondered if she was drunk, the way she chose her words. He’d learn soon enough that it was just her. Then, at least. The way she was then. She said, “I felt sorry for him because of the look in his eye, because he looked forsaken.”
