She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me (14 page)

The owner hadn't really thought he could rent this property. He struggled to control his joy when I said, “I like it, I like it, I'll take it.”

“Price I quoted, rock bottom, it was a slip of the tongue, you'll have to clean up the shit around here. We don't supply cleanup.”

“With pleasure,” said Kasdan without pleasure.

“You'll have to…” The landlord's voice trailed off. A wistful property-owner regret crinkled up the skin around the eyes where smile lines might be located in a person who had taken up a different line of work. Instead, destiny had given him slum real estate. “You'll have to,” he said with greater conviction, thinking at high-interest, high-taxes, high-risk speed. Since this was a death-eyed loser he had in hand, it was a duty—these are the rules—to take him. Cat got his tongue, temporarily. The place was so hopeless, leaky, shaky—a falling-down outhouse that only regular inspection payoffs kept legal—that he couldn't think of how to pull something else from a stone asshole tenant.

He struggled and brought forth data. “You a private investigator? Self-employed? That's all?”

“My own little business, been doing it for years.”

“How about a first month, last month deposit?”

I performed the savvy used-car-purchase tire kick at a loose board on the walkway leading to the front door. “That stairway outside is gonna wash away we get some rain, I like to do a little fix-up. That's my hobby.” Then I shot him a ducking, sincere, money-little-tight-now grin.

Even Gabe Montana, real estate investor, had a heart. He himself had come up from troubles, come back from tight interest and untrusting loan officers. He hated to steal from mental cripples who should be parking their brains in the handicapped zone. Divorce was no excuse; happens to everybody. But he couldn't find his way to further squeezing of this schnookeroonie. Besides, Christmas was coming and the asshole looked like he wouldn't make it. “You'll take care of the gas and electricity hookup, PG & E, water runs a little rusty at first but they say iron is good for you, I meant first and last month deposit plus a cleaning fee is normal … plus damages to the premises.”

“We got a deal,” I said before he could think of anything else. “I'll move in gradually, starting tomorrow. I like the tall grass in the neighborhood, those fields. Reminds me of country out here, Mr. Montana.”

“Right. Right. Gives me terrible allergies,” said Gabe Montana.

“You a relative of the quarterback?”

“People ask me that. No. Maybe. People ask me that all the time. Probably back there someplace, Joe and me.”

“Love doing business with you, Mr. Montana.”

He cast his eyes downward. “Call me … Well, guess you better call me Mr. Montana.”

In case he had to get after me about little details like six minutes late with the rent.

I felt like a kid freshly graduated from vocational training, ready for the weekend garage sales, ready to furnish his first grown-up dwelling, except that in this case the Goodwill couch would be for the use of Jeff when he slept over. No, for me; Jeff could have the bed. Priscilla gave me some linens; nice of her. Alfonso sent me a barbecue dinner by the Flying Safari; also no advice; nice of him. That first evening the raccoons with their cajoling baby eyes came to stare at me, realized that my garbage was not going to be rich pickings—takeout courtesy of Alfonso was as good as it would get—and departed the immediate premises. They might come back to make sure, raccoons being as stubborn as new bachelors.

I swept up the shit and buried it, pending scavenger service. Hurt myself, I asked silent pardon of all the slum and field animals whom I had now displaced, paying modest yet exorbitant rent, burying animal detritus so the place could tend toward smelling okay. Urban renewal on the local level has its price. I was not at one with the universe, but I intended to survive here on Potrero Hill. I was home. Chateau Mope in the City and County of San Francisco. I hoped the waify, chewed-up field mouse bones were now just a fond memory.

Shelter a settled matter, I intended to get on with the rest of life, such as making a living and getting a haircut. I'd reserve getting my wife back for dreamland. Let's be practical. I made a little list: answer business calls, refresh client referrals, shop for food, pick a lawyer. I decided to proceed with care, doing only what didn't lay beyond my capabilities at this time.

Getting a haircut gives a person a sense that he's doing something, like other real-world life matters, it has to be taken care of, can't be put off indefinitely, carries some aspects of nuisance, frightens tourists, causes talk if not performed,
und so weiter,
as any great German philosopher might say. I drove to Jimmy the barber on Bush Street and said, “Cut it all off.”

Jimmy said: “All? Ugh.”

“I mean like a drill sergeant from when I was in the army.”

“Surely you have misspoke yourself, Mr. Kasdan.”

“A GI brush, Jimmy.”

Jimmy walked around me, circling the problem, appraising the territory. He preferred hair long, not that it was easier to cut, just that this was how Jimmy saw the hair situation in my case. As a trained barber-psychologist, he knew that folks are making a statement about life when they ask for an abrupt change in their vision of hair. “Drill sergeant?” he asked with distaste.

“You can think ‘swim team' if you prefer.”

“They wouldn't let me in the army, dear, but I'd love it, I'm sure.”

“Cut the hair, Jimmy.”

Jimmy sighed. “Roger, confirmed, over and off,” he said.

I settled into the chair, feeling strapped down and floating at the same time, like a space voyager sailing out, spinning, about to lose weight, as Jimmy made the vehicle swivel on its bearings. My arms were crossed tightly under the sheet. I was pulling myself together. I closed my eyes and Jimmy took the hint: no more discussion. Total attention was respectfully requested. Concentration. The Olympic chaos competition demanded efficiencies in the body: immune system check, diet check, random weeping check, hair check, whatever I could control. The uncontrollable would unfold in its own way. At least I could manage a firm grasp on my coiffeur until I got a grip on the rest of life.

I listened with something like pleasure to the lonely clicking of the scissors and the buzz of a clipper. Hair was dropping and ahead lay a new life in outer space. I'll be a drill sergeant, that's the drill. The red fault lights on the metabolic switchboard temporarily stopped their flashing and beeping. This time spent in Jimmy's chair was something like sleep, it was a state of meditative grace, in the deep philosophical sense it was the best possible haircut. Take it all away. It was almost enjoyable.

When everything is going and gone, try to enjoy what's left. I didn't consider every consequence. Severe family out yonder makes for severe consequences.

When I appeared with my hair cut short, Jeff burst into tears, crying, “Daddy,” with vast reproach. Who was I? He ran. Who was I now? I found him hiding in a closet, still sobbing. I put my arms around my son. The hot fists dug into my back and I could feel the tears flooding down Jeff's face onto his neck, the unsparing, rational hot tears of a child. What a stupid daddy, what a stupid time to look like a stranger.

I was living in a dream, which is a time furnished with self-pity and copious not thinking. I took Jeff to McDonald's. Extreme times require extreme temporary measures—let him suck the milkshake ooze from a fast-food nozzle.

In the mirror of the bathroom (ask cashier for the key, customers only, this is America), I didn't see a high school swimmer or army drill sergeant looking back at me. I saw a nerd with creased cheeks and a dusting of gray. All this loser needed was a shirt with a plastic guard for pens in the pocket and little notches in the short sleeves. Well, hair grows, like nails, even if you're dead and the body is shrinking. It'll do that; lighten up. I decided to cut myself a little slack here. I came back to where Jeff was making gurgles in his Monster-Good ChocoShake (appellation registered) and said, “It'll grow back. In a few months it'll be like it was.”

“What?” Jeff mumbled through a ChocoShake mustache.

Nothing will, nothing, it's just hair. Love means even the ChocoShake smell on a son's breath gives proof of life. But I said, “That straw is empty. The noise is driving me crazy. Give it up.”

“Some more?”

“No!”

Jeff grinned. Don't have to say it so loud, Dad.

To make up for the griefs of the ages, and also to reward that grin, those gap teeth which would need orthodontic attention and regular payments by the responsible father, Kasdan sought amid the noise of fast-food punch-out registers some way to express his interesting notion, survival. He was forming this resolution. He would tell Jeff about the raccoon family with their eyes surrounded by dark fur, Mr. Montana with his eyes surrounded by petty greed. He would promise that they could hunt through the old tires, discarded radiators, undulating grasses, wild weeds, and crushed yerba buena pungency behind Poorman's Cottage. When Jeff saw that he had a house, a kind of house of his own, for the two of them, he would feel better. In the meantime, just this once, Kasdan gave his son money to go to the counter for another ChocoShake oozing out of the Monster-Good machine like an endless brown soft-frozen snake.

And I stared at Jeff as he waited for the snake to curl into the container. From a distance I could see him losing the pretty baby look. It was just oozing out of him like the snake, and being replaced by the tough defiant exterior of a hurt boy, thanks to time and normal events. Jeff bore his prize back to his dad, remembering to ask for two spoons.

Chapter 13

I don't know what skunk lettuce is, but there's something behind the toolshed that smells as if it should be; maybe it's skunk cabbage (on Russian Hill, it would be skunk arugula with pesto droppings); and there are wild daisies and dandelions; and everywhere that filmy, veiny lank plant that sends up a whiff of licorice when I snap a tentacle. Maybe it's fennel. I hope it's yerba buena, which provided the original name of this village before it became San Francisco, filled in the marshes, greened over the sand dunes, and settled matters for the Indians.

Sometimes kids from the Projects came foraging like Native American ghosts in the urban fields and leftover hillsides near Poorman's Cottage. Probably the kids couldn't sleep for all the dope dealing and irregular bursts of gunfire; the hunters were junior high dropouts, DITs (dealers-in-training), learning to step lively over the minefields of the former Yerba Buena. When I snapped the lights on at odd hours of the night, they realized this light sleeper, somebody's runaway dad, wasn't a normal, responsible motherfucker. He didn't have any valuables. He probably had a gun.

Street-smart, urban-meadow-smart too (goes with the territory), they sensed rage in the tenant of the old haunted hut. Kept their distance. Surely a Glock, maybe an Uzi, tear gas, knives, and a mess-around temper. Since they slept by day, the kids seldom glimpsed the actual slumping person.

So they mostly left his turf to the raccoons. Shit, bears could eat that old never-sleep whitey, far as they were concerned. They kept pretty busy not going to school.

At night, when I was putting on the light, scaring off the Project kids and the raccoons, all I wanted was to deal with my insomnia. Dreaming should have interested me, but the dreams I offered myself were without egress. I could bounce off the walls better awake. I tried to read, but my eyes were too grainy with conjunctival road wear. Can't read, can't sleep. Can think as long as it's the thought polished by repetition and overuse, rolling around loose, banging against the skull and chest cavity, doing no good. Tread gone from my thoughts, too.

A Jewish beatnik private eye, former philosophy instructor, could be interesting at a certain time in a woman's life, when she was young enough, if the Summer of Love was near enough, if it was San Francisco and the weather was almost always good. But now she was a grown-up. She might like to find a job that could use her quick brain and focused attention. It wasn't her chief thought to find a classier man than this somewhat interesting one, but if that happened, she might not mind. Or she could just have friends, men and women, and love watching her son's progress. There was so much freedom and opportunity out there for Priscilla. She would lose it if she didn't use it. So now she would use it.

The point was: She didn't like it that so many important decisions had been taken away from her and made in the dark or on the slope of Mount Tamalpais when she was too young to know what she was giving up. Desire wasn't supposed to lead a person to loss of options. Priscilla wanted her options back; was that so bad? She didn't want to be unfair. She wanted to be fair to everybody.

Now was the time to be fair to Priscilla. Some of her coffee-in-the-afternoon friends, playground friends, also going through their discontents with marriage, described it as a Woman thing, an issue. Priscilla didn't care to separate herself from marriage as part of a movement, although she listened attentively to Meredith, who pushed her daughter on the swing and raged about lawyers (her husband) who got to have power lunches with no spit-up on their shirts. She could see Meredith's point of view. Priscilla pushed Jeff on the adjacent swing, smiled dreamily, said consolingly to Meredith, “Maybe, maybe,” not answering herself or Meredith. Maybe what? She would see; that was the adventure.

Lying on my back in the dark, listening to the rummaging of the raccoons outside, I had the satisfaction of knowing that my ideas, when I mouthed them aloud, were not being heard by anyone. They weren't even ideas. They were rummaging among fantasies, nightmares, dreads, scraps of memory, self-justifications, justifications of Priscilla too. Alfonso said: “Stop living her life.”