She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me (2 page)

“What a help, buddy.”

“Shit.” He was softening a little and he hated that tendency of his character. “Look, I ain't perfect either. About my kid in Newark or Trenton, not even sure anymore where she took him. I'd prefer to be a better daddy. You got a chance to do so with your own kid.”

“Thanks.” We watched the former RN pissing on the gypsy's antipissing sign. Evidently she wasn't superstitious.

“What I'm saying,” Alfonso said, “is straighten up, is that clear?”

“Couldn't hardly be more so.”

“Don't fuck with me. Don't fuck with yourself more than normal. Don't show me that no-sleep old dogface no more—do it, will you, man?” Then, as if the question just happened to occur to him, Alfonso suddenly grinned and asked, “Hey, what made you think you'd get away with a dumbshit performance like that one?”

“Didn't think about it. Just decided.”

“Why?”

“I gave you the reason—wasn't thinking. Anyway, one punch—felt good.”

Alfonso sighed and, with his softest caramel rumbling voice, said, “Nice satisfying sore hand, and that'd be the end of it. Thought you'd get away with it?”

“Might.”

One more time: “What made you think … Okay, I know now. Wasn't thinking. It was the limbic system.”

“Pardon?”

Alfonso worked his heavy shoulders. “Now's not the time to educate you, pal—”

“I so stipulate, Alfons.”

“But if you listen carefully for a change, you know I'm saying ‘pal' and you not my pal just now. You a dumbshit asshole put himself in trouble and don't know how to get himself out of trouble he put himself in.” Thought, seemed to be humming to himself, rumbled. “Not properly you don't.”

I would stipulate to that, too.

“You in trouble now and heading for worser trouble.”

He went into his cornerboy talk to let me know he was less my friend than a cop who smelled a perp in the making.

From a boarded-up storefront that hadn't been occupied for years—a sign said
STARSHINE KARMA
, so it must have been a late flower-child vegetarian restaurant or giveaway center—came the same three notes of an amplified chord, shaking the timbers nailed across the broken glass. A growth of outdoor lint, cobwebs, and city dirt that had taken hold on the two-by-fours vibrated with the sound from within. A band was rehearsing. They stopped, they started; the same three notes of a strung-out C-major chord. The musicians were apparently adjusting the dials to louder, in case they made a mistake, and then even louder, scaring away the street person trying to take a relaxing pee in the doorway—he scurried off, dropping droplets on his knees, addled by years of heavily sugared Thunderbird plus three amplified notes of a C-major chord. Another victory for gypsy-lady clairvoyance.

The arts were thriving again in the Tenderloin. Alfonso was singing something under his breath and I said, “Huh?” Since I asked, Alfonso sang in the key of C major: “Teenage tragedy, lotsa kids are dead … It's about getting stalled on a railway track in daddy's car. Like you stalled, asshole.”

A friend could be mean sometimes. Meant he thought I was stupid sometimes.

“I guess when you see them in the clubs they thrash around, wear them geek leathers, studs, swastikas, cut-out crotches, everybody's stoned on uppers and Ecstasy combined … You know these nonmusicians, pal? In our day at least they looked good and you wanted to make it with the, ah, female members.” He asked slowly: “Still … do … don't you?”

“Got to deal with priority now. Plus goddamn you, Alfonso.”

He didn't take offense. He had experience handling inefficient behavior, his own and others'.

“He made like a complaint, asked about a court order, that type of shit. I said I'd talk to you.”

“You just did.”

“I still am. Now don't go hitting your wife's boyfriend no more.”

“Just one little punch now and then?”

“I
said
don't go around exaggerating. Get drunk like a man. Or is there someone here on the street might offer a touch of companionship?” He pursed his lips and surveyed the terrain. “No more spirit of adventure in your present state of mind, seems like?”

I was tuckered out, fit for nothing but swatting mosquitoes and pretty people and repeating my regrets to myself with the usual result in close concentration on the sounds of three
A.M
. on Potrero Hill. Now that mouthy person who had spent most of her life as a male and was beginning the adventure into her inner lady, with the aid of hormones, depilatory creams, Clairol, makeup, and one heck of a lot of optimism had swept up again and was listening to us. I caught her shaking her head and saying, “Some folks. I'm an RN, yet they hes-i-tate.”

Alfonso didn't mind my secrets getting told, plus a transsexual perspective on judgment. We're together in the world, see, and it may be unpleasant, but acts have consequences. Alfonso lived by that. I was a slow learner despite his efforts to educate me.

“Give it up,” Alfonso was saying. “Did you hear me? Give her up.”

“You don't know.”

Alfonso stood curbside at my vehicle. “Already told you maybe I don't know. I got a boy someplace too. I had a lady I liked. A lunge just get you in deeper shit.”

Alfonso helped me find police records, histories, little details a man in my career needed, but our friendship wasn't built on that. I had similar help from the DMV, the Social Security Administration, a supervisor at the IRS; we thought of each other as clients, small business part-timers. I remembered them at Christmas and they remembered me all the year round when I was curious about a few details concerning someone's goings and comings in the world. But record keepers didn't necessarily become friends like Alfonso.

“Let's get moving,” he said. “You ready now?”

“I guess.”

The lengthened skin of a road-killed rat lay stretched in the gutter, just ahead of the plumper corpse of a cat with bits of fur looking like trampled slush. “Must have been a truck took them both out at once,” Alfonso said. “Died doing what they suppose to do—rat running, cat after him.”

“What makes you think it's a him?” I asked.

“Don't plan to look any closer, my man. Hey, you notice Janey's horse—”

“Pony.”

“—was a boy or a girl?”

Chapter 2

I protect. People may say I go around losing my temper, but in general I do not, and I'll break the knees of anyone I catch saying it. I watch out for wives, kids, offshore accounts; folks bring me in to save their goods. I don't do hubcaps.

Heart and clients bedeviled by loss and regret is where I intervene.

At present I don't know what's going to happen to me or anyone. Dan Kasdan doesn't tell fortunes. Dan Kasdan preserves them.

And how I love my wife and kid.

Close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, pink cheekbones, tired pink-and-yellow eyes—these things make me look like a healthy, aging philosophy professor from a pretty good university; or maybe, if only I knew how to dress, like the vice president of a socially aware insurance company based in San Francisco. The look is not too far off. I'm a private investigator in the Bay Area, which includes Berkeley, Oakland, parts of Marin, even as far south as San Jose if you're willing to pay travel time. I use Murine, but it doesn't help the pink, and I forget to take my doc's advice to wash the eyelids with baby shampoo, scrubbing with Q-tips, because, oh, conjunctivitis isn't all that bad. And I hate to stare at my face in the mirror, which you have to do in that Q-tip deal or else you're going to jab a place that shouldn't be jabbed. It's tender in there.

With women, their business with mascara and Q-tips, they know how. I don't. I have sad eyes because I still love, am in love with, my former wife. This is an appetite that does not nourish.

Divorce carried all sorts of unexpected problems into my life. For example, I knew all about the famous San Francisco house fleas, but the mosquitoes surprised me. I left a couple of beer cans outside. The drought ended, it rained and rained, it dripped some more, which gave meteorology an idea—the clouds opened up, rainwater slopping into the beer cans left outside Poorman's Cottage on Potrero Hill. I doubt if there was much remaining flavor to the beer, but then the sun came back and—what do you know?—in those beer cans, unbeknownst to their proprietor, swam squiggles of anxious life, invisible mosquito larvae. And then what do you further know? The anxious squiggles ripened into humming, buzzing nocturnal biters. And just when I had finally accepted the high-pitched, nearly inaudible fleas, which after all can be controlled by regular vacuuming (Hispanic old lady, silent but mechanically adept except for changing the dust bag).

No fun to be bereft and hurt in the soul, plus itching lumps on the knuckles that clutch the sheet over the head in desperation insomnia.

To manage the mosquitoes I had to empty the yard of beer cans so that future mosquito generations would have no place to brood and breed, swim and prosper, before taking off on their whining nighttime missions around my ears and knuckles. Otherwise my cottage on Potrero Hill might turn into New Jersey, the Garden State, where I had recently pursued a father to remind him of his responsibilities concerning child support. (I told him I had friends whose names ended in vowels and we would always know where he slept. He told me to buzz off, like a mosquito. But then he thought seriously about the trouble I was taking with him, noticed the broken capillaries in my eyes, and wrote a check that cleared.)

“I come better with my chocolate bunny when I don't have to pay for the kids I left behind,” said the depressed deadbeat.

“Whyncha learn to come without you need foreplay involving the cash flow or afterthoughts?” suggested Dan Kasdan.

“Say what?”

“You said chocolate bunny,” I said. I wanted to put him at his ease by letting him know I listened. “That's cute.”

He seemed to recognize me not only as a person with close personal ties with the driver's license bureau and Social Security Administration, so I could always track him down, but also as a fellow sufferer, a kindred spirit, a human being. “I need money,” he said. “My chocolate bunny craves security. You and me, if we're not good-looking, we got to offer the ladies something.”

“Try getting rich and famous,” I suggested. “How about tall and handsome?”

He considered those possibilities, decided it was too much trouble and he wasn't cut out to be a star, all that public exposure,
People
magazine, the adulation of the multitudes—not for him. “My chocolate bunny likes presents,” he said.

“Your chocolate bunny?” When people keep repeating something, I've learned they want to be taken up on it. “So she's a black girl.”

The deadbeat beamed triumphantly, as if I weren't cut out to understand anything important, never would, only getting my way in business with reddened eyes and threats of violence. “It's a cute saying between us,” he explained. “I met her on Easter at the parade, she was wearing like a bonnet, have you heard of romance, Mr. Kasdan?”

“I'm more into tangible when I'm on the job.”

“Nothing more tangible than Linda, let me tell you.”

I just stared. I don't mind sarcasm or correction from the mark, so long as the check clears for the client and myself, and the future checks keep coming. “I'm a frequent flier,” I said. “You and your chocolate bunny don't work out an arrangement brings pleasure into your lives without taking essentials out of the mouths of your kiddies, I'll definitely be back. I like Jersey, the parkways. Trenton's a beautiful town. I enjoy my trade.”

The deadbeat father thought I'd be a little Jew with felt pens staining the pocket and a plan to graduate from private eye to CPA. Instead he saw a skinny fellow with grayish hair, pink eyelids, and a sad way of saying, “Pay up or you're a fugitive gets his hand caught in a car door. His knees. His neck. The worst kind, mister. And as a divorced dad myself, I have no sympathy.”

The deadbeat sighed. Obviously I didn't understand anything about the importance of Easter. “She should've married one of your kind. They love their kids. I guess it's because of all the persecution they brought on their own heads due to nagging, nagging, nagging.”

“Sorry if I repeat myself, asshole. But you're a little slow. Pretend you're a loving dad.”

Out of his stingy emotions he broke his deadbeat wind, yesterday's farts saved for my arrival. The deadbeat gave up.

This was the Resurrection and the Life. “From now on I'm Mosaic,” he said.

I looked at him and he looked at me. His expression was one I knew from other deadbeat husband/fathers.
You a pimp for my ex and I can't even say it?
Yup, that's what I was, pimping food, schoolbooks, and doctor bills out of this nice person who just wanted to live in peace with the world and his chocolate bunny, plus not pay his dues. That's how it was.

While he was staring at me, trying to kill me as best he could while unable to do so, I passed the time by not humming or cleaning my fingernails or consulting my travel itinerary. It was time to go, but I wanted to make sure he would remember me. It was part of the deal, making sure the client wouldn't need to send me back to Jersey. So I looked at him as if he were an invisible clot of bugs in the air. I could sit on him in a chair and not even notice, just scratching my butt a little.

The deadbeat seemed a little slow. I could either rev myself up by admiring his general insufficiency as a human dad being or pretend I was revved up, which would save time and spare me from tapping into my reserve stock of adrenaline. I wiggled my fingers into and out of a fist. Needed to be limber in case he surprised me. I didn't want to get totally dreamy and out of focus, and I didn't want to miss my flight, and I guess I was losing patience in general, another fault that comes with the irritations of age.