I smiled, relieved that she’d lightened the moment.
“You know, dear, some kids today are perfectly content to do without the surgery. They figure that gender is mostly in the head anyway, so why tamper with the parts that are specifically designed for pleasure? Why not let your head have the last word and leave your groin to enjoy itself? That way…if you were born female, say, like Jake…you don’t end up with…you know…some unfortunate, unfeeling—”
“Frankenpecker.”
Anna blinked at me in mild horror.
“That’s Jake’s term, not mine.”
“The point is, dear…to me it wasn’t about sex or pleasure or any of those lovely things. It was about identity. And completion. I couldn’t feel complete with what I’d been given. It just wasn’t possible. I imagine Jake feels the same way.”
“But Jake doesn’t want the surgery,” I pointed out. “He wants to ignore that part of himself completely. Doesn’t that seem like a waste to you?”
She shrugged. “We’re not Jake, are we?”
I took a sip of my sherry and stared out at the growing gloom, the darkening green of the sycamore trees. We were so quiet for a while that I could hear Anna’s mantel clock ticking in the other room, and, outside, the sound of children laughing in the street. There were more of them than ever in the Castro these days; the landscape was forever reshaping itself.
“So,” said Anna, suddenly chipper. “When did gay men start liking vaginas?”
17
The Cave
My buddy Brian at the nursery has such a passion for Native Americana that he’s made a ritual of searching for a local landmark called Ishi’s Cave. He takes the N Judah streetcar to Cole Valley, stocks up on trail mix at Whole Foods, and climbs the winding streets above the medical center until he comes to the edge of a forest. Strictly speaking, it’s not really a forest, just a big grove of eucalyptus trees planted by schoolchildren one Arbor Day in the late nineteenth century. But somewhere on the slopes of this city canyon lies a cave—no bigger than an igloo—that once sheltered the last Stone Age man in America.
Or so Brian believes.
I have my doubts about this, having joined Brian on one of his many futile expeditions. I think the cave is largely his excuse for telling Ishi’s story, which is all the more haunting because it’s a matter of historical record. Ishi, as you may know, was the last of his tribe. He lost his entire family to bounty hunters, then stumbled out of his remote California valley, sick with loneliness and grief, throwing himself on the mercy of the white man. This was 1911. There were trains and telephones and automobiles in Ishi’s scary new world. He was taken to San Francisco, where a kindly professor made him an exhibit at the anthropology museum. There he became a global celebrity; hoards of sightseers swarmed to the museum every Sunday to watch “the wild man” carve arrowheads and string bows. Ishi, obligingly, would sweep the floor afterward, and generally tidy up the place, then sleep in a small storeroom on the premises, not far from the reassembled bones of his ancestors. When the crowds got too much for him, he took to climbing the hill above the museum and sitting alone in a cave—that cave—as if to connect with the world he had lost forever.
The part about the cave is more local legend than established fact—a little too New Age-y romantic to be trusted. But it’s comforting to think that Ishi might have found such a refuge, however briefly. He died of tuberculosis five years after entering the modern world. The professor had promised his friend not to perform an autopsy (that procedure being contrary to native beliefs), but the professor was in Europe when Ishi died and had apparently neglected to leave instructions. Ishi’s brain was removed and shipped away for research. Its whereabouts remained a mystery until the end of the century when it was found floating in formaldehyde at a Smithsonian Institution warehouse in Maryland. After Indian activists lobbied fiercely for the brain’s return, it was finally laid to rest in the foothills of Mount Lassen, the homeland of Ishi’s people.
The burial spot, understandably, remains a secret.
“Okay,” said Brian, apropos of nothing, “this time I got it nailed.”
We were at the nursery—a week after I got home from Florida—and he was helping me load an especially weighty laburnum into my truck.
“Are we speaking of a lady?” I asked.
“Nah, man. Ishi’s cave.”
“That was my second guess.”
Brian gave the laburnum a final shove, then collapsed on the tailgate, gasping from the effort. “Seriously. I met this old hippie who says he stayed there overnight at the Winter Solstice.”
“No shit?” I sat next to him, brushing the burlap dirt off my hands. “Did he say what he was on?”
“Okay, fuck it. I’ll go on my own.”
“You’re going back again?”
“I’m telling you, Michael, I know where it is now. I’ve been looking too low down. It’s up near the rim of the canyon. Not that far from the road.”
“Where did you meet this guy?”
“He was blogging about it.”
Blogging about Ishi.
“He wouldn’t get specific with me,” Brian added, “but he mentioned enough landmarks that I got a pretty good idea where it is.”
There was this goofball quixotic gleam in my old friend’s eye that I’ve always found hard to resist. And given how little time I’d spent with him since meeting Ben, I couldn’t see the harm in tromping through that damned forest one more time.
I asked him when he wanted to do it.
“I dunno. Sometime in the next week or so. I wanna show it to Shawna.” He smiled sheepishly, rubbing his palm on the back of his neck, like an old lion with a pebble stuck in his paw. “I want her to see her old man’s not a total flake.”
Shawna had grown up on the Ishi story, but, like me, had grown jaundiced about that cave. I knew she’d be kind, whatever the outcome, but it made me nervous that Brian was banking so much on this Tom Sawyer fantasy of Injun Joe’s Cave.
“Maybe we should find it first,” I suggested.
He seemed to catch my drift and didn’t take issue with it. “What’s a good day for you?” he asked.
“How about Thursday. I’ve got a client in Parnassus Heights. It’s easy to get to the woods from there.”
“Cool,” said Brian, hopping off the tailgate.
When I was behind the wheel with the engine running, he leaned down for a final word. “Shawna’s moving to New York, by the way.”
Brian’s daughter, as you know, had already shared that information with me, but I thought it better to play dumb. “No kidding?”
“Déjà vu, eh?”
He meant his ex-wife, the one who’d left him—left both of us, really—all those years ago.
“It’s not the same thing,” I told him.
“No,” he said quietly, “you’re right.” He whacked the side of the truck as if sending a horse on its way. “Give my love to the hubby.”
Two days later, when Brian met me at my client’s house, he was decked out in cords and a multipocketed canvas jacket that gave him a semi-safari look. He’d brought with him a couple of rustic walking sticks, still golden with shellac, that he and Shawna had bought years earlier in a souvenir shop outside of Yosemite. Seeing me hunkered there in the rose bed, he held the sticks aloft and shook them like spears.
“Cave ho!” he hollered.
And I said, “Who you callin’ a ho?”
He laughed and turned to my assistant. “How’s it goin’, Jake?”
“No complaints,” said Jake.
“Awriiight,” said Brian.
(I can’t help but notice that Brian acts a little bit butcher with Jake than he does with me. Outnumbered by women and queers in the family circle, he seems to welcome the chance to engage, unapologetically, in a little masculine folderol.)
I grabbed my knapsack and turned to Jake. “I’ll be back in an hour or two. Take your lunch break whenever you want.”
“No
sweat, boss.”
The edge of the forest was four houses away, so we were there almost instantly, peering down into the gloom of the chasm. A week of hot weather had finally summoned the fog from the ocean, turning the ivy-hung eucalypts into a blurry old black-and-white movie. Amazing as it may seem, we weren’t far from the geographical center of the city.
I have to admit, those walking sticks proved useful. I’d forgotten how steep the slope was at this entrance of the forest. There was a crude trail, but it was narrow and crumbly, weaving through a nasty barbed-wire tangle of blackberries. Here and there, amid the thorns, late-blooming calla lilies poked toward the sky, but since I was playing Lewis to Brian’s Clark, I resisted the urge to do my Katharine Hepburn impersonation.
“It’s hard to believe this used to be a sand dune,” I said. “It did?” said Brian.
“All the way to the ocean. Old Man Sutro bought up this half of town with the money he made in the Comstock Lode. He wanted to call this Mount Sutro, but that didn’t work too good for a sand dune, so…he brought the trees in.”
“Well, you’re a font of information.”
I shrugged. “I’m a Southerner. I like that sorta shit.”
It’s interesting how I don’t mind owning my heritage when I’m in San Francisco; it’s only in Florida that it completely sticks in my craw.
“So here’s what I’m wondering,” I added.
“Yeah?”
“How do you have a cave in a sand dune?”
“O ye of little faith,” said Brian.
“Really, though.”
“I think it’s more like a rock ledge with…you know…a space under it.”
“What did the wise old hippie tell you?”
Brian ignored this gentle poke and kept trudging ahead. The path began to wind upwards again until we reached a paved road running along the edge of the canyon. We took the road up the hill for a while, then Brian stopped in his tracks and peered down into the abyss with the nervous, beady-eyed gaze of a terrier spotting a rabbit.
“That’s it,” he said.
“What’s it?”
“See that ledge down there? I think it’s beneath that.”
“And how are we supposed to get there?” It wasn’t a sheer drop-off, but the slope was steep and unstable-looking and riddled with briars.
“You don’t have to go,” Brian said. “I’ll scout it out first.”
“Sure thing, kemo sabe.”
So I watched from the road as Brian made his wobbly way down the slope toward his own private Holy Grail. Each time his stick struck the ground, it set off a little avalanche of pebbles and dirt. “Be careful,” I said nervously. “It looks shaky.”
No sooner had I spoken than Brian hit a patch of loose ground and landed on his ass, luging his way downhill into a thicket so dense that I lost sight of him completely. It sounds comical—it was, in fact, for a little while—but something told me not to laugh.
“Brian?”
There was no reply—and no sign of movement in the undergrowth.
I scooted down the slope with a growing sense of dread. “Jesus, Brian.”
Nothing.
I swatted at the briars with my walking stick until I could see him. He was still on his back, his face crisscrossed with fine red lines. He was not moving at all.
“Oh, fuck, Brian…oh no, Jesus…”
“Get a grip,” he said.
I made a peculiar sound that was somewhere between laughter and groaning, then crawled through the hole I’d made with my stick. “Are you all right?”
“Do I look all right?”
“I mean…can you move?”
“I think I hit a rock with my foot. It feels like I’ve been hobbled.”
That term meant only one thing to me—Kathy Bates in Misery, looming over James Caan with her sledgehammer—so I glanced down at Brian’s sneakered feet with considerable trepidation. Neither one, however, seemed to be lying at an unusual angle.
“It’s the right one,” said Brian.
I squeezed through the briars on my hands and knees to get a closer look. His ankle did seem to be swelling. I tugged his socks down gently.
“Ow! Fuck! Ow!”
“Sorry.” It was all too clear that even with my assistance Brian would never make it up to the road, so I took off my backpack and started digging through it.
Brian wrinkled his brow at me. “Don’t tell me you brought a first-aid kit.”
“Even better,” I said, holding up my cell phone.
I was about to dial 911 when I remembered that the medical center was only a few hundred yards through the woods, so I called Jake instead and explained the situation, giving him our exact location. I knew he would welcome this manly challenge, and he sprang to action like a commando. “Stay cool,” he said. “I got it covered, boss.”
“He’s running to the emergency room,” I explained to Brian afterward.
He was up on his elbows now, already looking embarrassed. “That’s not necessary. I’m perfectly—”
“Lie the fuck down,” I said. “Stop being such a guy.”
Brian obeyed with a grunt. The deep scratches on his face had started to run, forming a road map across his features. I fumbled in my backpack again.
“What’s that?” he asked as I started to dab at the blood.
“A Wash ’n Dri.”
“Jesus, you’re a fag.”
“I brought it for lunch. Do you want an Orangina?”
“I can’t drink it lying down.”
“Sit up, then. But do it slowly.”
He sat up and took the bottle from me. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. How bad does it hurt?”
“Bad.”
“Do you want a turkey sandwich?”
He shrugged. “What the hell.”
We both munched on sandwiches in silence while we waited to be rescued.
Finally, Brian said, “The cave should be right over there.”
“Fuck the cave,” I told him.
18
Close Enough
So there we were, curtained off from the world, waiting for a doctor. Brian was flat on a gurney, growing maudlin on painkillers; I sat next to him in a white plastic chair, hypnotized by the low hum of fluorescent lights. Our wilderness epic had somehow evolved into a minimalist play, a couple of actors working without props or scenery.
“Look at it this way,” I said. “We may not have found the cave, but we’re right next door to where the museum used to be.”
“What museum?”
“Of anthropology…where Ishi lived.”
He winced at this reminder of his disgrace and ran his fingers through his hair. The scratches on his face were turning dark and crusty. “You’re right,” he muttered, his eyes fixed grimly on the ceiling. “He must have swept the floors on this very block.”
I ignored his sarcastic tone. “Which means…we’re sort of following his footsteps…in a way.”
Brian grunted. “We never even got to the cave, man.”
“Well, how great a cave can it be if it’s the size of an igloo? It’s not like there was gonna be hieroglyphics. It’s probably full of snails and old condoms.”
I thought he’d be pissed at me for befouling his shrine, but he just smiled dimly at a private joke. “Doorknobs, actually.”
“Doorknobs?”
“Ishi’s two favorite things about…you know…so-called civilization were matches and doorknobs. So this guy…the old hippie…brought him a doorknob.”
“And did what with it?”
“Just left it in the cave.”
“Well, that’s kinda creepy.”
“Why?”
“I dunno…it’s so…me big white man, me bring you firewater and doorknob.”
“It’s a metaphor, dipshit. Or maybe a spiritual statement.” Brian rolled on his side and gazed at me in doleful resignation. “Or something.”
“You can find it later,” I said. “Don’t beat
yourself up.”
He shook his head. “It was gonna be Shawna’s going-away surprise.”
“Yeah, well…now she’ll have a crutch to sign.”
His eyes widened. “Crutch?”
“Cast…whatever.”
“It was her favorite story,” he said. “I wanted to give her an ending.”
The tears welling in his eyes caught me off guard. Brian may be the last of the sensitive liberals, but weeping doesn’t come easily to him—at least not lately. I figured it was mostly the drugs. I stood up and laid my hand gingerly on his messy white mop. “She doesn’t need an ending, sport. She’s just moving to New York.”
“It’s not that,” he murmured.
“Then what?”
“Just…stupid shit.”
“Brian…I need more.”
“Then take your hand off my head.”
I should have known better. I have a way of infantilizing Brian whenever he’s hurting, and he’s never been really comfortable with the comforting. I removed my hand and sat down again, angling the chair so I could see his face. “That better?”
He said nothing for a moment and then: “Do you think I’ve wasted my life?”
“Brian…c’mon…”
“I mean it, man. I’m almost sixty-fucking-two. I’ve got nothing to show for it but that lame-ass fucking nursery…and that was yours to begin with.”
“What about Shawna?”
“What about her? She’s a great kid, but…”
“But what?”
“Am I a loser for not marrying again?”
I took the shrink’s way out. “Is that how you feel?”
“I didn’t used to. I didn’t even think about it. Shawna was all I needed. The two of us were pretty much…home.”
“I think that’s your answer, then.”
“Is it?”
“Besides, you can always get married, if that’s what you want. You’re still plenty hot enough.” I smiled at him. “Just ask my husband.”
Brian returned the smile. “Your husband is a twisted little fuck.”
Michael Tolliver Lives Page 14
