Fingerprints of You (25 page)

“My dad was a truck driver, worked seven days on and seven days off when I was growing up,” he said. “My mom was gone by the time I turned fifteen, got tired of his schedule. I didn’t blame her, though.” He dug his fingernail into a crack in the pleather headrest. “He was an asshole, really. Nothing much to speak of.”

The bus stopped again, and a large group of Latino kids were waiting on the corner: boys in black jeans and baseball caps, slick skin and dark eyes.

It was obvious the seats would be full, so Ryan got up and moved in next to me, placing the trumpet in his lap. “This okay?” he asked, and I nodded.

I recognized the moment, the closeness of our bodies, my father’s next to mine. His shirt sleeve brushed against me, and he smelled like sweat and the soap from the shower, the
white dented bar I used the day before, and I wondered if we smelled the same then.

“I doubt they have anything like this in West Virginia,” he said when we turned onto Haight Street. “We’ll have to walk from here, unless you want to transfer. It’s kind of a trek, but it’ll be a good way for you to check out the area.”

We got out at the corner of Haight and Fillmore and headed past Thai restaurants and record shops and pipe stores. We trudged up a hill after we crossed Divisadero and made our way past a green and empty park. Then the neighborhood changed, and the sidewalks smelled like pot and were full of stoners and rastas, Emo kids and artists with paintings set up on street corners, begging for change. The buildings were bright pink and purple, a kaleidoscope of colored storefronts squatting next to one another between bars and shoe shops, head shops and tattoo parlors that made me think of Johnny Drinko. Tie-dyes hung in the windows, and the traffic of tourists and local headies clogged the sidewalk. A group of skinny kids huddled in a doorway, selling glass bowls and hemp necklaces they’d laid out on a blanket, and a boy in a wheelchair sat next to Ben & Jerry’s with a sign that read
THIRSTY. CHANGE FOR BOOZE.
Eventually we arrived at Amoeba Music, a place I remembered reading about in the travel book, and I said so when we got there.

“Let’s go in,” Ryan offered. “I always like to wander in here before I play.” He smiled. “Inspiration.”

We checked my bag and his trumpet at the door and moved past metal detectors into the main room of the store, where skaters and ravers and hippies meandered up and down the aisles. Amoeba was an endless space filled with rows of CDs and movies and records and tapes, and the walls were
plastered with posters, the floors covered by stacks of music and films. It was gritty and crowded and hot inside, and I imagined me and Dylan and Emmy hanging out there every weekend if we lived in the city, standing in the aisle sampling albums through headphones hooked to display shelves, discovering new bands. A group of angsty Goth kids had staked out a corner and were sitting on the cracked concrete floor digging through a plastic bin of CDs, and a few rows down, toward the back of the store, I caught a lanky hipster giving another boy a wad of cash in exchange for a bag of weed.

Ryan came up behind me and nodded to a small stage set up in the side nook of the main room. “Stella and I saw some great music here,” he said, and I listened to her name hang inside his mouth. It was strange to hear him say the word so casually, as if he spoke it often.

I tried to imagine Ryan and Stella in the store listening to the music of small bands from the nineties, my mother with long hair and Ryan back when he was younger. Tighter pants, probably, fewer wrinkles carved around his eyes.

Afterward, we crossed the street and stood in front of a grocery store, Cal-Mart, with the parking lot behind us. “It’s a direct route to the beach from here,” and he nodded in the direction of the Golden Gate Park entrance. He put his case on the sidewalk and snapped it open.

A stack of music sheets lay on top of the horn, and I remembered the box on the mantel and the article marked in
Rolling Stone
. He left the case open and put three dollar bills inside to start it off. I sat on the curb while he wiped down the instrument with an old T-shirt and looked over some songs in the pile of papers. A damp fog had rolled in, and I buried my head in my sweatshirt and looked down at my Converse shoes
and then over at his: ratty Pumas, the white stripe brown with mud or booze. It made me realize his night shifts could have been exhausting, as he shuttled band equipment and served beers from behind the bar. I’d never been to a real music venue, but I imagined it was hard work, standing on your feet all night hustling for tips.

“Was it a rough night working the show?” I asked as he organized himself and set the sheet music back in the case.

“You know it,” he said, and he ran his hand through his hair, untangling the knots before he pulled it back into a low ponytail.

“But you like it?” I asked. “Working there?”

His response was automatic. “There’s nowhere I’d rather work than a place that supports musicians,” he said. “It’s hard work, but I love the energy of a good show, the way the crowd moves like one big shadow when a band rocks a perfect song, the kind of song you get lost in. When it’s hot like that and you know everyone in the room is in the same place, everyone digging the beats and the lyrics and the motion like there’s nothing else that matters,” he said, his cheeks getting red as he talked, “well, it makes the work worth it, you know?” He smiled, and I noticed the dimple in his left cheek. “I think that’s the key, finding a job that’s based around the one thing you love the most.” He shrugged. “Plus, meeting rock stars is always pretty cool. But what the hell do I know?”

I saw him differently then, working hard so he could pay the rent and work in a place surrounded by people who cared about the same things he did—music and art, I guessed. He was just like the way I imagined Dylan would be, the kind of man who would never hold a nine-to-five and never wear a suit to work, and I realized that didn’t make him a loser or
a slacker, that maybe it just meant he believed in something more than a big paycheck.

In front of us people wandered down Haight Street, and he settled his legs into a musician’s stance and began playing. He started with a slow song that sounded lonely, but then it shifted gears halfway through, and the notes moved like the rain clouds rolling in as one sound toppled over another like wind whipping down the sidewalk. Ryan played with his eyes closed, and I was thankful he couldn’t see me staring. The tempo kept increasing, and I could feel his heat above me as he blew into the horn, his cheeks tight and round, his face flushed and deliberate. The music ran in circles, the sounds quick and rushed, punching out into the street, and I watched as he tried to keep up with it, his fingers working hard, as if he couldn’t stop them. I could tell he was alone then, that when he played he shut everything else out. If I had walked away, he might not have even noticed, that’s how important the music was to him—engulfing and absolute. It was written all over his body, the way he swayed, and the way he never opened his eyes. I wanted to know what he was holding in and what he was shutting out, the emotions weaving through him like water, but then the song slowed down, and I knew it’d end soon when the notes started getting long and mellow and his shoulders loosened up. The last of it was tired and sad again, and when it finally ended I could tell he cared more about that music than I cared about anything, and that bringing me to see him play had been his version of a gift.

I hadn’t noticed when it started, but a crowd had gathered on the sidewalk, a small group of hippie kids and the boy in the wheelchair, a crunchy woman with a chocolate lab and a man in a corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches. When
Ryan started the next song, a few of them began dancing, and a teenaged boy emerged with a small drum. He sat on the curb with me, and when my father nodded to him, he began tapping the beat of Ryan’s tempo. The woman with the dog was twirling in circles, and two kids in zip-up sweatshirts were clapping with the drum. I don’t know when I stood up, but I was on my feet by the third song or so, swaying a little and nodding my head as Ryan kept us moving. He must have felt all that motion, because eventually he opened his eyes, his stare finding me as I smiled and nodded with the music. His lips were wrapped around the horn, but I could tell he was smiling back, his dark eyes meeting mine before he closed them again.

The group clapped a little when Ryan took a break from playing, some of them tossed money in the case, and a woman with pale skin and black hair stashed a pint of Jack Daniels at his feet with a nod. He sucked on the liquor in between songs, until it got too dark for him to see his fingers on the horn. In the end we counted forty-three dollars and packed up all his stuff. Ryan asked if I was hungry when we walked back toward the bus stop, but I figured he was kind of drunk, so I lied and said no, thinking he just wanted to head home.

“I usually work Sundays, but I took tonight off,” he said when we were back on the bus. It wasn’t very crowded, but he shared my seat that time and leaned against the window. “I don’t usually drink when I play, but since I don’t have to work . . . ,” he said, and I could tell he was embarrassed. “Plus, you make me nervous.” He looked out the window, where we watched a kid on the sidewalk bend down to pick up some change. “I don’t know why I said that.”

“My friend Emmy and I take bottles from Stella sometimes,”
I told him, trying to even out the score. “Vodka. Well, before the baby,” I said, and he nodded.

Across the aisle a man began talking to himself. Ryan was slumped in his seat with the horn case on his lap, and I wondered what he was thinking as he looked at the night crowd passing by us. But he didn’t say anything until three or four stops later.

“It was like a greenhouse back then, me and Stella. All the people we ran with were transplants, kids who moved to the city to grow into more important versions of themselves.”

I held my breath, knowing he was trying to tell me something significant. He took another pull from the bottle and squinted just like Emmy when she took too big a gulp.

“But the city was an obligation. It pushed itself on you and changed you into someone new, whether you wanted it or not. Stella was different when she left,” he said, his voice slowing down as he looked at me.

I nodded like I understood.

“We thought we were becoming better people, and building something important, when really we were just bonding over broken pieces, running from our pasts. Carter turned out okay after rehab. Tessa disappeared and went back home, I think, maybe went to college. But with Stella it was different.” He looked into his lap. “I thought it was her dad catching up with her, you know? The grief finally hitting home, wedging itself between us. But then she moved away before I got the chance to fix it.”

I wanted to touch him then, to put my hand on his arm, but I didn’t.

“Your mother was always good at running,” he said. “I thought it was a phase, the fighting and the secrets. I thought
we were still just getting started, and laying a foundation,” he said, and looked away.

I did the math and realized he couldn’t have known her for very long before the pregnancy. My mother lived in San Francisco for less than two years, a time frame that seemed too fast when I looked over at Ryan, still longing for answers.

In front of us someone yanked the cord on the bus, and we pulled over to the curb at the next stop. “Please exit through the rear doors,” the recording said, a woman’s voice.

Ryan didn’t say anything more after that, not until we got off the bus in the Mission and headed back to the house. I thought about the photos of my mother in the shoes, the Stella that existed before I came along and she had to move to Pennsylvania. I’d imagined her happy before the pregnancy, before she moved us in with my grandmother and a little happy still before she moved us out again. For me she fell apart when she had to support me on her own, a child she never asked for. But it wasn’t that clean or simple, because before she became a mother she was a girlfriend who wasn’t sure what she wanted. She was a daughter who’d lost her father. All that movement and sadness was too big to blame on me, and I realized my perception of Stella had been fragmented. And maybe he knew he was doing it or maybe he didn’t, but that’s what Ryan gave me that night, the understanding that my mother was more than I had recognized, and that I was not to blame for all the sadness I had seen in her while I was growing up. She had been self-contained, sealed shut, and Ryan was helping me split her open. All the way from California, I was learning who she was.

“Does she take good care of you?” he asked as we walked through the streets in the Mission past the
bacon-wrapped-hot-dog vendors and the homeless man with dreadlocks. “I mean, I can tell that
you
take care of you, but is she good to you at least?”

And the answer was immediate: “Yes,” I told him. Because I knew that as much as she moved around, she would always take me with her if I wanted to go. That as bad as things had been at times, she never made me feel I was alone. And I also knew that she was back home waiting for me to show up. Because that’s what good mothers do. They let you go. They wait. And then they take you back.