The sun breaks through the rolling fog, illuminates a row of pastel Victorian frame houses on Haight Street. San Francisco is the most beautiful city in America and the city with the highest suicide rate. The jumpers from the Golden Gate all leap from the Bay side, looking back at the city, never out into the emptiness of the ocean. I stop on the corner of Haight and Ashbury and climb up on a streetlamp, one leg on the base, one arm holding the pole. Swinging above the passing heads, I yell, “Out of some subway scuttle, cell, or loft, a bedlamite scales thy parapets.”
Only a few people bother to turn their heads.
“Tilting momently, shrill shirt ballooning, a jest calls from the speechless caravan. Hart Crane.”
A white girl with blonde dreadlocks smiles and passes by.
I drop down from the lamp and move on into the throng of humanity flowing along the sidewalk. The sun disappears behind sea fog and instantly I’m shivering. The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. Mark Twain, aka Samuel Clemens, fellow southerner of note. I put my guitar down on a bench by a bus stop and dig a Patagonia vest out of my backpack. Across the street is a pretty, dark-haired girl with the gaunt frame and the haunted eyes of a junkie. She’s sitting on the sidewalk trying to sell a pair of high-heel shoes displayed on a box that says
Prada
in glossy navy against matte navy. She’s wearing a thin black cocktail dress, something out of
Vogue
, over a pair of faded jeans. Interesting combination. No coat in sight. Spanish canvas fisherman slip-ons with rope soles. She must be freezing. I’ve seen her around before, always selling something expensive. I pick up my guitar, sling my backpack over my shoulder, and cross the street.
“How much do you want for those shoes?”
She raises her head in slow motion and blinks. “At Bergdorf’s they sell for twelve hundred.”
“What sort of crazed fashion victim would shell out that many greenbacks for a pair of shoes that won’t get you across the road?” I squat down beside her.
“My mother.” A faint smile flickers across her lips, then her eyes cave in.
“You sell much stuff this way?”
Her eyes focus in on me for an instant. “I’d do better right outside Prada.”
“I think I could jazz up your marketing strategy.” I smile, try to keep her attention from dissolving.
“Yeah? How?”
“You watch.” I set my backpack by her shoes and sling the guitar strap around my back, tap one suede cowboy boot a few times in a basic blues beat, and start a song I’ve been writing since I got to San Francisco, loud and deep and full of soul:
You might trip, you might fall,
Might feel like you hit the wall,
But don’t ever let no man
Hold your spirit down.
’Cause you’re heading on to paradise
Can’t let no one spin you ’round.
If you were blindfolded, you couldn’t tell the difference between me and Robert fucking Johnson. I sound so black Harper must be right about the family gene pool. Maybe I’ll be discovered on the streets of San Francisco.
You may live in a palace,
You may live in a slum,
All men got something to teach,
Even a dirty old bum.
I repeat the paradise refrain, pull the harmonica out of my pocket, carry the chords through to the next stanza, then go back to guitar. A crowd has gathered. A few dollar bills float to my feet. The girl grabs them languorously, slips them in her bra.
Well, I’ll sing songs that’s weird to you,
I’ll sing from the Bible ’cause it’s all true.
You’re headed up to paradise, folks,
Can’t let no one spin you ’round.
Change cascades against the concrete, a few greenbacks waft in the cool mist, at least nine bucks’ worth of paper and silver as I start over from the top. Selling songs. Forty, fifty bucks a day if you’re ambitious, move around the city to stay in a crowd. I’m a troubadour. Very important in medieval days and the Renaissance. The messengers. Spreading vital information, news that stays news, with their mandolins.
“You can sing.” The girl finishes picking up the last of the change, puts it in her jeans.
“Muddy Waters seduced my great-grandmother.”
She laughs. Her teeth are in good shape.
I lift her up, cupping her armpits. “Save your mommy’s shoes for tomorrow. I’ll give you enough to score if you’ve got a place to take a shower and crash.”
“Fifty bucks?” She’s suddenly alert.
“I’ll top off what you just took of mine. I’m feeling generous.”
“I got a room in the Tenderloin.” She bends over and picks up the shoes. “Let’s go see an old friend.” She starts along the sidewalk.
“Where you go, I go. My name’s Cage,” I say to her back, putting my guitar down so I can pull on my backpack. Fully loaded, I jog to catch up.
“Cage. That’s a nice name. You sound southern.”
“Yeah. Raised all over the South. What do you call yourself?”
“Emma.”
“Jonesin’ Emma. You sure are pretty. What you doing out here selling yo’ mama’s shoes?”
“Better than selling myself.”
“That’s for sure.”
“Could you put them in your pack?” she asks.
“Yes, ma’am.” I stop and hand her the guitar and put my pack on the ground. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-two. You?”
“Thirty-nine in a few days.”
“No shit. You don’t look it.”
“That’s what they all say.”
“Ready?”
“Lay on, Macduff.” I slide my arms through the straps, center the pack on my back.
Emma hands me the guitar, starts down the street. “You’ve been to college. ”
“The hard road has taught me how to live.” I stroll along beside her. “The soft road has taught me how to love.”
“Where’d you go to school?”
“You’ve never heard of it. A little school on a Tennessee mountaintop.”
“Sewanee?” Emma is walking fast.
I stop dead.
“My father’s an Episcopal minister,” she says over her shoulder, turning onto Masonic. “Not that I see him much.”
I catch up. “I’ll be damned. My father’s a bishop.”
“Maybe God made you come over and play guitar for me.” She laughs.
“Providence.”
Emma is really striding now. She can’t have been a junkie for very long. Maybe God did send me here to save her.
“Where’d you go?”
“Technically I’m a philosophy major at UC Santa Cruz.”
“Really? So was my little brother. At Tulane.”
She stops listening. Weighted down with the pack and the guitar, I struggle to keep up. Finally after about a half mile, when she turns onto McAllister, I say, “This town has a fine public transportation system.”
“Yeah. It’s kind of far still.” Emma plumps down on a bus bench. I slide out of the pack, pull out a liter bottle I keep filled from water fountains.
I offer some to her. She shakes her head. I say, “You should always stay well hydrated. Best thing you can do for your body.”
She rolls her eyes and sticks out her hand, takes a tiny sip, and tosses the bottle back to me. Her knees and calves are rising and dropping like sewing machine needles. When the bus comes, she takes off the bench like a sprinter out of the blocks. I carry the guitar in one hand, my pack in the other. The bus is nearly empty. I sit across from her, the guitar on my lap.
“You know how to use that thing,” she says.
“I learned on the knee of B. B. King.”
“I don’t like the blues. It’s so repetitive.” She looks away and starts biting a fingernail, then jerks her hand from her face, slides the dress up to the top of her jeans, and digs out all the change. She pulls the dress down and drops the change in her lap, counts it. “Eleven dollars and forty-seven cents. That means I need, uh—”
“Thirty-eight fifty-three.” I hand her two twenties. “Knock yourself out.”
Heading east on McAllister, all the cars suddenly change from Toyotas and BMWs to Impalas and Cadillacs. Most of the pedestrians are black. We get off in front of some run-down buildings.
“Yesterday over there I asked a big black guy if he was selling ganj and he said no but we could smoke some and go in and buy some,” I say, scrambling to keep up. “So we walked over to this corner and he lit up a bowl and I thought, Man, there’s something shaky about this, so I ran away, and when I ran, I hit his elbow and I heard his pipe fall and crack on the ground.”
“That was hella uncool.” Emma walks in long, confident strides like a model on a catwalk.
“Yeah. He started chasing me, yelling, ‘That man stole my five dollars. That man stole my five dollars.’ I didn’t even have a five-dollar bill on me. So I just kept running and a cop stopped me about five blocks away. Undercover guy who happened to step out of a liquor store at that moment. A cruiser arrived with the black guy in it. They ran a check on my license and then they made me sit in the back of the cruiser. Then they interviewed the black guy. Between the cops they pulled together five bucks and gave it to him. Sent me on my way.”
“Those were nice cops,” Emma says. “Most are fuckers.”
There are small clusters of rapper-style black dudes in high-tops and baseball caps, sitting on the steps and milling around the courtyard in front of the main entrance. I ask Emma where we’re going.
“You’re hanging out on that bench over there ’cause if you go up inside, someone’s going to take your pack or your guitar or both.” Her eyes are clear for the first time. “I’ll be back.” Emma starts for the door.
“Will you be okay?”
She pauses, half turns. “The guy I’m going to see would kill anybody who robbed me and no one wants to rape me ’cause I’m a junkie. ”
I watch her walk up the steps. A couple of brothers nod and smile at her. One jumps up and cruises over to her. They go in through the front door. I walk back to the bus stop, uneasy now that I’m alone. Few white men would feel comfortable here. I collapse against the bench. I can’t remember the last time I slept. Not for at least forty-eight hours. My watch reads
4/10/99
. I dig a hotel receipt out of the pocket of my backpack. April 7. Seventy-two hours. Emma better come back soon before all the energy drains out of me and I pass out on this bench and get picked up for vagrancy and she loses an easy mark. I’ll gladly share my busking earnings with her. I’d like to hang out with a pretty Episcopalian for a few days. After fifteen minutes I begin to worry. I’m heading down the street to circle the block and see if there is some sort of back entrance when I hear her yell my name. I stop and she catches up.
“Tired of waiting?” She hasn’t shot up yet, still looks jittery.
“Just tired. I haven’t slept for three days.”
“Crystal meth?”
“Natural brain chemistry.” I yawn. “Where’s the doss-pad?”
“What?” She brushes hair out of her eyes, looks likes she’s about twelve for a moment.
“Your room.”
“Not far.” She takes the guitar from my hand and turns onto Laguna. The sun comes back out and I have to stop and take off my fleece. I follow behind her, watching her switch the guitar from one arm to the other, cradling it like a shotgun, and then we turn onto O’Farrell, a row of fleabag hotels with winos and hookers. On the steps of the El Dorado is some sort of purveyor of flesh, a black man-woman dressed up in a sequin gown like a Supreme.
“Howdy, Emma.” Its voice is deep.
“Afternoon, Tiffany.”
“These people living in this town have their own little network of freaks,” I say as we pass by the empty desk and head up a dark, malodorous staircase.
“Yeah?” Emma says.
“Even if you got them out in the mountains, you could never get the freak out of them.”
“Suppose not,” Emma says. Several flights up she opens a door and we go in a fairly big room with a window onto the street, a kitchenette and a bed, a desk, a wardrobe.
“You keep it pretty neat.” I set the guitar and pack down.
Emma laughs. “Other night I couldn’t score, so I shot some speed.” She gets her works out of a drawer by the sink, lays them on the counter by a little camping burner. “I couldn’t sleep and about dawn I was thinking about painting the place red like hell, so I mopped everything, even the walls.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Couple of months.” She pumps up the stove, lights it with one of those sticks with a trigger that sparks.
I don’t want to watch. “Can I take a shower?”
“Sure.” She doesn’t look at me, picks up a big spoon.
I cross the room and open a door. Maybe forty women’s dresses hang on a short rung, compressed by the vise of the walls. I glance at the labels—Issey Miyake, APC, Armani—then find the door to the bathroom. There are reasonably clean towels hanging from the shower curtain rod, a pile of fashion magazines by the toilet. I turn on the water, strip. When I take my boots off, the little room fills with a terrible stench. My feet are rotting. I forgot to air them over three days of pedestrian peregrination. I bang the frame and push on the tiny window for several minutes, finally manage to lift it a few inches, then I step into the shower, find no soap but a bottle of eco-friendly dish-washing liquid, and wash off days of sweat and grime. At dawn this morning I was at a Bible study service in Golden Gate Park. A hundred homeless parked their grocery carts in orderly rows in a lot nearby, like minivans around a suburban church. “May God hold you all in the hollow of His hand,” I pray aloud, scraping my scalp with my fingernails. The hot water washes away the last of my energy. I turn off the shower and hear loud pop music that I don’t recognize. Wrapping the towel around my waist, I go into the other room. Emma is spread out on the bed staring up at the ceiling. In my pack I find a semiclean pair of baggy drawstring pants and a sweatshirt. I walk slowly to the bed. Emma’s eyes are open. She glances at me from the other side of midnight, then her eyes go back to the wagon wheel lamp hanging from the ceiling. When I turn off the boom box, Emma makes no protest, so I lie down on the bed, careful not to touch her. I shut my eyes.
T
he locusts screech on and on. Nanny glides quietly in her chair. I wonder where Cage is, what he’s doing. The phone rings distantly in the house. Nanny starts to push herself up.