Of course he was sorry. What else could he be but sorry? I was ready to give short endings a try. Why not? What the hell did long endings ever do for anybody? Big Bill was right. I felt his giant hand on my shoulder. I wouldn’t look at him. I looked instead at the sloping black dashboard, the tape deck, the missing cigarette lighter.
“I know you are,” I said. “It’s over. Now drop it.”
“You’re okay with this? You understand?”
“No and no. Of course not. It’s just too much, right now, all of it.
It’s stupid. I should’ve known it all already, whether or not you ever explained it. Somewhere in me I did know, and just didn’t want to.”
“I should have told you,” he said.
“Yes, you should have. But you didn’t, and it doesn’t matter anymore. So now what?” I said.
“Let’s walk.”
We walked down Cole, then west on Haight with a gentle breeze at our backs. Big Bill remained silent for the
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rst half block, but then he began making little peace offerings along the way.
“That used to be the Straight Theater
…
That used to be the Trib
…
That used to be I/Thou.”
To these offerings I only grunted, which was encouragement enough for Big Bill. “Jesus, the way times change. I still can’t believe there’s a McDonald’s right here. Boy, I should’ve seen that one coming a mile away. It’s a damn shame. Humph. You hungry? I’m kind of hungry.”
If crises drove the Millers to the open road, resolution made us hungry. And food always inspired in my family a spirit of philosophic inquiry, as was the case with Big Bill at the McDonald’s on Haight and Stanyan.
“Is it my imagination,” he wondered aloud, midway through his third Big Mac, “or have Big Macs shrunk? It seems to me they’re smaller. I can hold two in one hand—see, look at that. I didn’t used to be able to do that. Also, is it just me, or does everything taste like French fries now? Everything. The milkshakes, the pies, even the ice water tastes like French fries. Have you noticed that? So, do you guys have a special sauce? I mean, for your hot dogs? How does that work?”
After McDonald’s we went across the street to the grocery, where Big Bill bought a jug of Carlo Rossi sangria. We crossed Stanyan into the park and walked up Hippie Hill. At the top of the slope we sat in the grass and Big Bill unscrewed the jug and immediately took a long pull and passed it my way.
“Good stuff,” he said.
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, and took another slug.
“Oh, okay. Give it here.” I took the jug and drew a small sip. It tasted like diabetic grape candy.
“See? What’d I tell you? Annie and I used to drink this stuff back in ’67.”
He patted me on the back, and scratched the scruff of my neck, and
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nally mussed up my hair. “You’re a good man, Tiger. I’m proud of you. I’m really glad we’re doing this.”
“Yeah, this is great, Dad. The park, the wine. Maybe we can hop a freight afterward.”
Big Bill smiled. “You got that from your mother, too. The quick wit. Annie had a nimble mind. She was funny right up until the end.”
“I guess I missed that part.”
He kept calling her Annie, which I’d never known him to call her in life; it was always Ann, but then, that was 1967, Starship was Airplane, and the moon was still the
fi
nal frontier.
I listened without comment as my father began meandering somewhere between regret and nostalgia, recalling his Lower Haight days some more—before the fall of love, before Grace Slick was giving drunken blowjobs to microphones and puking onstage, before the Hells Angels were working securi
ty, before the junkies were epi
demic, before the ad moguls cashed in with their VW buses and Coca-Cola, and suddenly love was not free anymore, and hippies were a demographic. He explained how Willow met Annie, and how Annie met
Not-So-Big
Bill, and how soon everything was a little more complex. Annie got pregnant with William, and Willow got pregnant with Lulu. Yet in spite of all its complexities, life was simple because it seemed you had forever to sort it out, or a while, anyway.
And even as darkness set in, and the whole world—from Vietnam to Buena Vista Park—seemed like a great big
maybe
, and the word
we
suddenly meant a lot of different things, and the word
me
started popping up a lot more in everybody’s vocabulary, even then Annie and Willow perused maternity magazines together, exchanged paint swatches and childcare books. And when the babies were born there were outings to zoos and planetariums and Half Moon Bay, afternoons of peanut butter sandwiches cut into tiny squares, plastic bags of green beans, sticky strollers, baggy dresses, skinned knees, throw-up, hard-to-
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nd public restrooms, Kodak moments involving carousels and duck ponds and Pier 39.
But nothing lasts. Indecision is not a fate in itself. Just ask the Prince of Denmark. Eventually you choose. You act. You de
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ne your life. You, Big Bill, touched down in Santa Monica with Annie (or was she Ann by the time of your departure?) and eighteen-month-old William (destined never to be Little Big Bill), and in doing so, turned your back on Lulu. You chose to call Santa Monica home, 436 miles from Willow and Lulu, because, you reasoned, it had been home all along. You know how distance is, you know how jealousy works, you know how time erodes everything in this world, including memory, which is not made of meat, though it may as well be.
Everything may as well be. And you learned,
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nally, that it doesn’t matter how big you build yourself up, what you mold yourself into, how strong you think you’ve made yourself, love will kick your ass anyway if you give it the chance.
You made a great big mess of love, Big Bill, but who didn’t?
Big Bill had forgotten short endings altogether. He’d found his voice, at last, and the more he used it, the better he seemed to feel.
That’s the power of voices. I let his words wash over me, listened without listening, and thought about how the biggest truth in my life was a lie, but that didn’t make it any less real, especially not for Lulu, who’d been forced to live it all these years.
At some point I noticed Big Bill was slurring, and chutes and eddies began wending their way through his longer phrases, and his voice was starting to carry, but in a warm, gregarious kind of way, somewhere between the don’t-you-feel-good-about-7Up guy and Yogi Bear. And how do you not forgive that guy? It’s impossible not to forgive that guy. Finally, Big Bill wobbled to his feet and brushed off his ass. He took a deep breath and held it in, and when he let it out, he seemed to watch it rise invisibly into the ether.
“Good talk,” he said. “Good talk.”
With that he stumbled off toward the tree line, presumably to take a leak. About halfway there he lost his footing on the sloping grass and fell on his ass. He laughed as he bumbled to his feet, and I heard keys and change rattling in his sweatpants pockets. Resuming his journey, he began to sing, at least I think it was singing. After a minute or so, I’m pretty sure he fell into the bushes, because I heard him thrashing around in the brush and then the don’t-you-feel-good-about-7Up-guy
laugh.
Upon returning from his adventure, Big Bill took one last epic pull on the Carlo Rossi, managed to swallow most of it, smacked his lips, and looked thoughtful.
“You know,” he said, wiping his mouth with a bare wrist. “It’s funny the distance between looking forward and looking back.”
That was his closer. I’m not sure what all he meant by it, but it must have been a good summation as far as he was concerned, because it was the last thing he said. He lay on his back with his arms behind his head and looked up at the sky. He had a smile on his face.
There were twigs in his hair. He was humming under his breath.
Thank God he didn’t have a guitar.
My mind sought corners for refuge. I sat there beside him for a while, percolating, knowing I was poised on the edge of decisive action, but not rushing it.
Eventually Big Bill stopped humming, and within
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fteen minutes he started mumbling inaudibly. Soon he was snoring in apneic
fi
ts.
Looking down on him, I forgave him all over again. He seemed kind of childlike there in the grass. He had a red ring around his mouth from the Carlo Rossi jug. His Ray
Conniff bangs were pasted crook
edly to his forehead. I had to forgive him, because the truth is, I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Without the lie, the whole balance might have been disrupted. Lulu might never have been Lulu, I might never have been Will, and without all that pain, all the grunting, gas-inducing anguish of love and loss, what was left to gain?
It was a little nippy on the hill. If I’d had a coat, I would’ve covered Big Bill with it. But I didn’t have a coat. Besides, with all that rippling girth, he had to be warm. If I’d had a pen and paper, I might have left a note. Or if I’d had anything smaller than a twenty, I might have left him some extra cash. But I didn’t have any of that, and who was I kidding, anyway? Of course Big Bill would be okay. He’d navigated himself that far, he’d
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nd his way back to Sausalito. He might get a little cold, but nobody would fuck with him. Who was gonna fuck with the Incredible Hulk, even if he was sleeping? I did what I had to, and I’d do it again. I
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shed the keys from the pocket of Big Bill’s sweats and left him sprawled in the grass on Hippie Hill in the middle of the night. I could hear him snoring halfway to Stanyan. I’ll bet he had good dreams that night.
This time I didn’t knock. I stole quietly through the unlocked door.
Lulu was asleep on the hide-a-bed in the living room, bathed in the
fl
ickering blue light of the muted television. I kneeled beside her and watched the rise and fall of her breathing. I reached out to touch her hair when suddenly her eyes popped open.
“Shhh,” I said.
“What are you doing here?”
“Shhh.”
She sat up on her elbows. “You’re drunk.”
“Not so much. Shhh.”
But it was too late. Footsteps padded down the stairs. The light in the foyer snapped on. Willow walked in. She was in a robe, still in the process of wrapping it about herself.
“William, what on earth—where’s your father? What are you doing here at this hour?”
“It’s okay, Mom,” said Lulu. “Go.”
Poor Willow looked helpless and bewildered standing there in her bathrobe. “But what—where’s your—William, I—”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Everything’s okay.”
“But, darling, I—”
“
Mom
,” said Lulu. “Go. Please.”
Willow retreated, but not without hesitation, through the foyer and up the stairs.
I never took my eyes off Lulu. I kneeled there watching her glow in the blue light. I was looking for changes, looking to see her as though for the
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rst time in my life, expecting something or somebody new to be revealed in her place. I’m sad to report that Lulu was just as beautiful as ever, and that underneath her nightgown sleeves her scars were beautiful, too. These things I know to be true, because I longed for Lulu Trudeau, Lulu
Miller
, as achingly as ever. And the force that drew me toward Lulu, whatever you chose to call it, was the same force that moved planets.
“He told you,” she said groggily.
“Yeah.”
She searched me for answers. “Everything?”
“More than enough. Why didn’t you just tell me, Lu—about the baby—about all of it? Why did you let me torture you?”
She turned her face away so that I could see the little raised half circle on her cheekbone, faded pink and smooth with age. “I didn’t want you to have to lose what I lost,” she said. “Believe me, Will, it was better not to have known.”
“Either way, I lost you, Lu.”
“But you never lost hope.”
“I never had any,” I said.
Lulu cast her eyes down and faced the blue glow of the television screen. She looked so sad and beautiful with that light on her face that I couldn’t help but reach out and touch her. I ran my thumb gently across her scarred cheek, and I swept the dark hair out of her face so I could look down into those bottomless blue eyes—the only other eyes through which I ever saw the world.
“So now you see,” she said.
I cast my own eyes down, and they were burning. I closed them and they burned a hole straight to my heart. “Yes,” I said. “Now I see.”
And what I saw on the back of my burning eyelids was a future stretching out before me, and Lulu wasn’t in it, and quite suddenly the future seemed vaster than ever before.