She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me
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Authors: Herbert Gold
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Contents
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For Nina, Ari, and Ethanâ
on your own voyages now
Part One
Chapter 1
I stood on the wooden plank in front of Poorman's Cottage on Potrero Hill and stared at the raccoon that had knocked over my garbage can. Probably it was a daddy, like me, and standing up for its rights against this recent arrival with a coffee mug in one hand and a piece of paper in the other.
Alfonso had just demanded that I meet him at once. I was going to take the time to brush my teeth and stare down the raccoon and then I'd be on my way. I didn't have to jump because Alfonso said jump.
There had been a complaint. My friend Alfonso, police detective, sometimes covered for me, but in this case he was trying to get me to cover for myself. I might have to deal with it despite my inclination to wait for it to go away, like the swelling and scuff marks on the knuckles of my right hand, and continue spending my morning hours blinking in the sun and studying the rampaging Potrero Hill raccoon clans.
“You got to stop solving your problems by making bigger onesâ” Alfonso told me by phone.
“Why?” I asked.
“âand here's where I want to see you.”
“Why there?” I asked, but he had already hung up. Probably this was a duty shift for Alfonso and he was squeezing me in.
Alfonso liked to show me things, get me out of myself. Not being enough out of myself was the reason I had these hurt knuckles, this swollen hand, which was not sore enough to keep me from driving down to Ellis Street in the Tenderloin. I thought I had a picture in my head of Smiling Janey's Medal of Honor Tavern, but driving slowly up the street I couldn't find it. Then I remembered it was on Eddy, not Ellis, which meant I wasn't thinking at top form. I cruised like that, the street noticed, the transvestites yelled, the kids at the corner whispered and peeked. I stopped for a drunk in a motorized wheelchair; no legs below the knees and all caution to the winds. “Smoke? Smoke?” demanded a black seventeen-year-old running alongside my Honda; he then tried to make the sale more nicely, showing large square teeth that strangely reminded me of Priscilla's as he drawled, “Smo-oke, brother?”
Everyone's got aches in this life. My hand and heart would be eased by a purchase from the saleslad, but I was at a different place on the analgesia chain. I parked and hoped the dope dealers would keep the break-in folks away from my car.
In front of Smiling Janey's Medal of Honor Tavern a haggard giant with a tentlike dress and matching plugs of wax in her ears said, “I'm an old RN with five degrees, you got to treat me with respect.”
“I do, I do,” I said, edging past her, not wanting to keep Alfonso waiting while I discussed self-esteem with this person.
“Just because I used to be a man but now I'm a certified, registered woman is no reason to dis a person. My driver's license says female. All my new records. I'm a female woman.”
“Right, right, right,” I said.
“So fuck my birth certificate, hey?” she asked. “I'm an unfairly terminated RN with five degrees, so can't you spare a little time to hear how it happened?”
“Can't do that,” I said. “Busy.” But the person stood squarely in the doorway. I hoped to avoid shoving.
“Gave the kiss of life to save many a soul ⦠no matter what sex it happened to be, even brown or black, the kiss of life is one of the low-tech ways we still have to use if we take the Sacred Oath of Florence Nightingale, so let me tell you one thing, misterâ”
“Out of here,” I muttered.
The voice kept after me. “You may get tireder, older, and uglier, but make sure you guard your precious memories and, above all, your precious eyebrowsâ”
Further explanation surely would have come, had I waited for it.
Smiling Janey's was an old-fashioned gay bar that did not invite peering in from the street. There may have been tavern windows at another stage of its gender journey. In their place were redwood shingles, so that Smiling Janey's Medal of Honor resembled a woodsy cottage outpost here among the junkies, transvestites, Tenderloin cowboy ramblers, and General Assistance mumblers; among patrolling squads of Guardian Angels in their maroon berets and carrying their walkie-talkies; among the corner boys working their all-day, all-night hustle shifts; among the unarmed response teenage hookers who were careful to keep AIDS at bay with regular injections of crank or inhalations of crack; among the sifting of small, harried, busy East Asian immigrants between the unbusy, floating, abandoned souls of the 'Loin. Mutant kids off the Greyhound looked over the territory, saw it was different from San Antonio, found it to their liking. Somehow laundries, video rental shops, and palm readers made the rent. Next door to Smiling Janey's a gypsy who knew the future and the past had lettered on a box that stood at her doorway:
THE ONE WHO PISSES HERE AGAIN, ON HIM I WILL PUT A VERY BAD MALEDICTION
A sexist assumption; reading the past and future, she believed the perpetrator was a man. Probably he did do the deed and in due course would receive a very bad malediction, deservedly so.
The retired RN was watching me decide to enter the Medal of Honor. I had to take my medicine. The doorway was painted in glowing Cantonese headache pink, but there were no ferns or shiny-leafed plants as in a new Chinese business. I pushed through.
The bartender, who wore a row of earrings not just in the lobes but up and down the cartilage of his ears, smiled and didn't wince when he drew me a beer. I winced because the rings in the bartender's pierced nipples were catching in his T-shirt. The T-shirt said
SMILING JANEY'S MEDDLE OF HONOR
.
“Medal,” I said, inadvertently correcting the spelling.
“Don't I know that?” asked the bartender. “Quench up first and then Janey's out of the canâused to call the head.” I lifted the draft brew, which was evidently on the house. “Ronnie's my name, like the former president,” said the bartender, introducing himself. “Not that many things I got in common with that certain former president, other than hair color. Used to be Janey's, oh, ward, now I work for her. When she was in the navy, she won the Muddle d'Honneur, you heard that? Ask her to show it to you. There's a photograph, she got it laminated, she'll show it to you if she kind of likes you. Standing in front of Harry Truman, he was a previous president, too, a little fellow, you can see him pinning it on her. Janey was a beautiful guy before she became this terrific person. 'Nother splash?”
I shook my head. “Waiting for someone.”
“Alfonso? The dick?”
Like a good bartender, he tended to sympathetic understanding.
“That explains itâyou like African chubbies, am I right?” But he didn't pry. He spread his arms, announcing, “And I give you â¦
Janey!
”
She made her entrance out of the back room. She was indeed smiling, a six-foot-tall woman, careless of her weight problem, in fifties housewife dress. Janey had not been in the can; she had been watching for an audience to gather. She swayed, she sashayed, but not on her own feet. The bartender, Ronnie, had put quarters in the Wurlitzer and mariachi music squealed. The feet on which Janey sashayed were a pony's. It was a dancing pony, and Janey's feet almost touched the floor.
The pony seemed to wear a beard, a little fringe around the muzzle. I didn't know ponies grew these, even an exceptional Tenderloin pony. It pranced and its tiny hooves clicked to the mariachi sounds. The fringe of beard made the pony look a little like a nineteenth-century president, perhaps from south of the border. The music brought that thought to mind.
As a Medal of Honor winner, World War II or maybe the Korean War, and probably the only woman in the Tenderloin with this credential, or at least the only woman who was formerly a man and presently a naval cavalry heroine, Janey loomed closer on her steed with plump assurance, shedding strong smells of lilac and soap. She leaned down upon me. She had a right to smile. “How about that Alfonso?” she asked.
The pony reared its bearded head. Alfonso, also overweight, was lumbering through the door but not moving smoothly as usual, just concentrating on moving fast. “Son of a bitch!” he said.
The bartender with the rows of earrings said, “Don't believe I know how to pour that one, but I can do you a Brandy Alexander, big boy.”
“Stopped by a goddamn fire,” Alfonso said. “Couldn't get through the street, had to dump my vehicle and walkâshit, man, you are a burden.”
Janey reined up and away. She was clip-clopping back through the door into her office.
“You can't do like that, Dan, I can't let you do like that. Shit, man, that a horse under her? From her garden back there?”
Maybe pony stables weren't legal in the middle of the city anymore.
Alfonso's eyes were red-rimmed and enraged. He didn't have emphysema, yet he was wheezing. Compressed rage is worse than a lifelong cigar habit.
“Asshole! You think I'm going to let you do like this?”
What came out of my mouth wasn't what I meant to say. “You don't have a son!”
“Hey, I'd like to meet her,” the bartender said. “I bet she's adorable.” He was picked up by the early-afternoon action. Normally he wiped the bar, stood there sweating in his nylon panties, waiting for something to do, an occasional mixed drink to compose, a little gossip. Now the gossip was happening right before his eyes. When he said
her,
he meant Jeff, my son.
Alfonso kept his squeezed, red-rimmed eyes fixed on me. “I got a boy in Newark ain't seen in six years,” he said. “No need to tell you why, no need to 'splain. I know when it hurts. But you're not going on like this, pal, without you get yourself up on charges. Criminal you might like, but civil? And your license?”
“He made a complaint?”
“I'm not going to let you do like this, hear me?”
I thought I heard Janey in the back room, punching a telephone and murmuring in a low angry alto, singing to a beer distributor or a feed store a barkeeper's song of missed deliveries.
“So you might ask,” Alfonso said, “then what are we going to do, since you can't go beating up on the public no more?”
“He isn't the public.”
“Far as I'm concerned, he's a citizen. You got a sore hand there, pal. Come on now, a little hike to your vehicle, man, let's go.”
I followed him out into the flat white midday Tenderloin sunlight. Anger was still turbulent in him, the flesh heaving and sweating under the shabby plainclothes suit he wore on duty, and he didn't want to yell at me indoors. He couldn't even punch me up a little because he was my closest friend, whatever I was to him; and although I could tell it would be a pleasure for him to apply a touch of legitimate and necessary police brutality in order to emphasize his points, somehow it wouldn't be right. “You got to stop waltzing around with Karimâmake up your mind, man. You got to learn that cute Xavier ain't your real problem and lay off. About your lady there, all I need to say is, get a life.”
