You Can Say You Knew Me When (25 page)

“Why are you being such a bitch?” I was yelling now, nearly doubled over with the power of it.

From behind me the goateed guy spoke. “Do you need help, miss?”

I snarled at him, “Butt out, faggot.”

A bright beam of light washed across us, accompanied by the metallic grind of brakes and a tinny bell announcing the streetcar’s arrival: a yellow-and-green model, one of the decades-old cars brought in from faraway cities to jazz up Market Street. Usually I liked these trains, but this one appeared to me as an outdated toy, a gimmicky, cloying distraction.

“I’m getting on,” Colleen said, rushing past me, “and you’re going to wait for the next one. Do you hear me? The night is over for us.” She ran alongside the car as it pulled up.

The goateed guy inserted himself between Colleen and me. “You should leave her alone,” he commanded. I’d pegged him for a theater queen, a sissy, but here he was, gathered up like a linebacker. My protest strangled in my throat.

I watched him back away, climb aboard and find Colleen—her black hair, night-tossed, visible through the window. He leaned in, touched the back of her seat, sat down across the aisle. She didn’t look back to find me.

I didn’t stick around for the next streetcar because I didn’t have exact change for the fare, and the trendy-eyeglass guys, waiting to ride a different line, were watching me like I was dangerous and pathetic all at once. So I wandered down Market to a skeevy late-night bodega, where I used my ten dollars to buy a pint of Wild Turkey and told some thug blocking the aisle to “get the fuck out of the way”—then had to cross the street in the middle of traffic while he threatened, “I kill you, bitch.” Suit disheveled, face colored with fear and fury, I slugged from a paper bag and staggered toward the Mission. My dress shoes pinched, and when I got home I uncovered new, broken blisters.

I sparked a bowl—the last thing I needed; it just flattened whatever shred of reason I had left—and turned on the computer, looking for I don’t know what.

When I woke—mouth begging for moisture, eyeballs aching—I did believe for a moment that Colleen had tucked me into bed, that there had been no shouting, that I had not embarrassed myself. Then a slice of daylight through my window blinds brought back the streetcar’s beam, and I saw myself lumbering through that final hour, a derelict zombie in a wine-stained suit.

First question: Did I want to eat something or make myself vomit?

What I really wanted was the comfort of Woody. But it was only Day Nine.

I left Colleen a groggy, apologetic message; I called Ray and left one for her, too. That afternoon Colleen sent back a voice mail saying I had
freaked her out,
that I should figure out
what this hostility and internalized homophobia was all about.
I called again, got voice mail again—she must have been screening her calls—so I ate more humble pie, telling her:
You are better than I deserve
,
your forgiveness means everything, let’s talk Friday at the café. PS: My homophobia is externalized. I don’t hate myself, just all other gay men. Hahaha.

I didn’t hear from her again, and when Friday came, she didn’t show at the café.
Work is getting busy,
she said later, in another sent message, though she didn’t propose another time to meet, and weeks went by before we spoke again.

C
olleen’s wasn’t the only message I got that day. This, from Deirdre: “Good news and bad news. I sent you a check; you’ll probably get it tomorrow. It’s not the full ten thousand. It’s only one thousand. Better than nothing, right? Oh—I put the check in a package with some pictures and writing I found in the attic, which I thought you’d want to see. They were Dad’s.”

Right before she called I’d been staring at the minidisc recorder, wondering if I needed to return it to the store, which earlier that week had discovered my check was worthless and left me a threatening message. Deirdre’s check would cover the cost. I could worry about my other bills later.

I owned a contraption that allowed me to record phone calls (I’d used it with my previous recorder to tape interviews for radio shows). I dug this out of a drawer and connected it between my new recorder and the phone. I told myself I wanted to test the quality of the machine, but I also knew that Andy was behind the delay in my getting the money, and if I got him on the phone I wanted to hear him explain.

I still have the transcript:

She choked on her words, so I turned off the recorder. Andy was picking stocks according to tips he was getting in Internet chatrooms and from newsgroups, Deirdre said. He was buying and selling every waking hour, using Dad’s money. On most days he was up very high, but he was reluctant to sell off too much because everything was still going up, up, up. On other days he followed leads that didn’t pay off, which sent him scurrying to regain lost ground. He said he would slow down as soon as he met his goal: a new house for them. He wanted to liquidate a million dollars and pay the mortgage in cash.

My hangover squeezed my skull like a hat two sizes too small, and I wasn’t sure if I was furious about the risks he was taking or thrilled to see more money flowing into the family, some of it, perhaps, into my hands. “There has to be a middle ground,” I told her. “Tell him not to overdo it,” I ordered, and through her sniffles she said she would. I parroted words of warning I’d been hearing about the stock market lately:
“There’s no such thing as an elevator that only goes up.”

Day Ten. From the moment I woke, only one thing on my mind: Would I hear from Woody today? Was he watching the calendar as closely as I was? Or had he been swept into an affair with Roger, these ten days for him a blur of infatuation—sweet nothings e-mailed across the office, furtive midday make-out sessions in Digitent’s empty conference rooms, weekend-long fuckathons sprinkled in crystal meth?

I fled my silent apartment at noon and biked to the bank, depositing a one-thousand-dollar check with the signature of my day-trade-addicted brother-in-law on the bottom line. And then to the electronics store, paying them, with a money order, the price of the recorder, plus a penalty fee, punishment for my deceit. I lied through my smile at the crew-cutted ex-Marine store manager, spinning a story of money I’d been screwed out of by an unscrupulous client, which then had fouled up my payments this month, and how relieved I was to finally set things right with them. I pretended he believed me.

Next stop, Anton. Time to replenish the stash.

“How are those knives doing?” he asked.

“Sharp as can be,” I said, showing him the bandage on my still-healing thumb.

“Some people think it’s bad luck to give knives as a gift,” he said.

“Bad luck for the giver or the getter?” I pictured the velvet interior of the knife box, splayed open on my kitchen counter.

“Good question,” he said with a chuckle. “I try not to believe in superstition.”

“Everyone should be a little superstitious, Anton.” Superstition had once convinced Woody that fate pushed us together.

Anton led me into the back. As he filled a baggie for me, I told him about my encounters with Ray. For a moment I wasn’t even sure he grasped who I was talking about. My father’s voice intruded—
Marijuana is scientifically proven to kill brain cells—
and instantly I was hit with a vision of myself at Anton’s age: alone, wrinkled and burned out, living in the same small apartment, walls dingy from thirty years of smoke, piles of journals gathering dust, my handwriting increasingly illegible, even to me.

But Anton wasn’t just foggy, he was anxious: His building was being sold. The same family had owned it for years, rarely raising the rent. Now the parents were retiring and the kids were selling. New owners in a four-unit building would certainly mean a rent hike—for Anton nearly as catastrophic as a drug bust. In the
Chronicle
that morning I’d skimmed a story about the increasing number of San Francisco arts groups facing evictions for the very same reason; a week earlier the
Bay Guardian
had written of a downtown building that housed rehearsal spaces for five hundred bands also up for sale to owners likely to convert the space to lucrative offices. It was a time of changing hands.

Walking back to my building, staring at the foundation being poured where the old red house had stood, the vision I’d just had of my future worsened: Now I was homeless, the detritus of my life contained by a shopping cart, and I cycled through a psychotic rant about evil landlords, corrupt real estate developers,
you people who let this happen to me.

And then, back home, a message from Woody.

The shock of his voice in my ear, expanding into the air like scent, as if I could turn my shoulder and there he’d stand, near enough to touch.

His words: “Hi, Jamie, it’s Woody. It’s time to talk. And we definitely need to. Not just about the old guy in the park, but about anything else you might want to tell me. Think about it. Call me when you’re ready.”

No
Germy.
No
Wormy.
No
I missed you.
The menacing sound of
anything else you might want to tell me.
As if he knew something. This was not a message of reconciliation.

I hovered above the phone, trembling. My eyes went to the shelf where photos of my friends were lined up, among them several of Woody. In my favorite, he’s removed his shirt, and daylight reflects from his skin, nearly gold under a brush of fawn-colored chest hair. Behind him, greenery blurs into a generic outdoor background. It could be any sunny day. He could be any healthy, pale-skinned guy. But I remembered this specific afternoon, and him inside it: a Saturday picnic in Golden Gate Park, where we played a sweaty round of Frisbee and drank bottles of Mexican beer with lime squeezed in. Ian was there, Brady and Annie, Colleen with a date. The smile on Woody’s face in this picture seems to say,
Hurry up, so I can get back to the game.
But he doesn’t really mind stopping to pose; for a moment he’ll offer himself, self-consciously shirtless (
My chest is practically concave,
he protests when I praise his body), because that’s what you do for your boyfriend: You stop everything and indulge his desire for you. Later that day I rested my head on his belly, under a tree, and now I touched the photo as if I might bring to life the pliant warmth of his skin. It had been so long since I’d felt the real thing.
And whose fault is that?
I pulled my finger away, leaving behind a glassy stripe: The photo had been sitting undisturbed for months, and had long ago surrendered to dust.

I looked away, sickened by the idea he might be ready to break up with me, that he knew there were other infidelities. Maybe he’d heard about the stoned lip-lock I’d shared with Abe in the back room of the Playpen, Abe who was the friend-of-a-friend-of-Woody’s. Or maybe Colleen told Woody something about Newark Airport or the guy at the beach. But Colleen wouldn’t. Would she? I could easily be reading too much into his message. I saw, at last, why he’d instigated this separation: Time apart is time to think. Only now, out of time, did I get it. I’d squandered the last ten days spinning fantasies about his affair with Roger and feeling terrible about almost everything I’d done, but I had no insight, no clarity, no conclusion, beyond this: I was still in love with the smiling guy in the photo who had inspired in me the desire to capture an enviable golden moment. But were either of us the same as we were on that day?

Flailing, I didn’t call Woody back. And then something else caught my attention and distracted me. For days.

On the kitchen counter rested a spiral-bound sketch pad, the
pictures
Deirdre had included when she mailed me the check. I had yet to open it. A single word,
CALIFORNIA
, had been scrawled on its cover in what I immediately recognized as Teddy’s handwriting. Inside I found sketches of ketchup bottles, filled ashtrays, people conversing in three-quarter profile. Life inside the Hideaway, captured by the burger flipper on his break. A portrait of a woman’s face and bare shoulders: I knew right away these eyes were Ray’s. Other faces followed, one ghost after another. And then, a series of attempts, each from a different angle, of a guy whose high forehead and receding hairline contrasted with a certain youthful brightness in his eyes. A close-up brought out the shadow of beard on his jaw; another, from farther back, showed a cook’s apron over his plaid flannel shirt. None of them was complete, as if the sitter had eluded the sketcher.

I wanted an epiphany here, some revelation of who this older gay man, if this was indeed Don, had been to my father—the way I could see who Woody was to me in that park photograph. But the renderings in my father’s sketchbook were not only unfinished, but unskilled, beginner’s strokes that failed to convey meaning. My father’s eye had seen; my father’s hand had drawn. My father’s heart was not on display.

I remembered Deidre’s message that she was sending Dad’s writing as well. I flipped through the sketches and found, tucked between the last sheet of woven bond and the cardboard back cover, a folder stuffed with paper, thirty or forty lightweight, yellowing pages festooned in the choppy annotation of a manual typewriter.

In the Woods
by
Teddy Garner

March 21-March 30, 1961