“The hole,” Crespo said.
“I wonder if that is enough,” Margaret said coldly.
“Don’t ground me,” Harper said.
“We’ll talk about it with your father,” Margaret said. She looked at Rebecca in the rearview and said, “You don’t know how many times I’ve wished for girls.”
“Girls. You’d like Cage and me to be girls,” Harper said angrily. “Except for Nick. Your precious one.”
“Nick is certainly more restrained than you.” In the heat of the moment Margaret forgot Dr. Spock’s injunction to never compare your children to one another.
“Nick is sweet-tempered.” Harper sprayed flecks of saliva. “Nick is perfect.” He pulled up the lock and pushed the long door open. “Nick is God.” Wind rushed into the car. “You don’t love me like you love Nick.” He held the door wide open with his leg. The edge nearly scraped a Volvo station wagon-load from Episcopal in the slow lane.
“Close the door, Harper,” Margaret shouted over the wind. She checked the traffic behind her, started braking, then looked back at Harper and wasn’t sure if she caught the last of a smile at the boys in the backseat as she swerved in front of the Volvo. “Shut the door, Harper.”
Harper glared at his mother.
“Please, pull the door shut.”
Harper turned to watch the yellow line along the shoulder and the grass bank that swept down to tract homes and a shopping center. Margaret was slowing the car down. The yellow line disappeared underneath the floor. She was pulling onto the side, had slowed down to fifty, when Harper removed his leg and leaned forward, stuck his hands on each side and his head out the door like a parachutist, turned his face into the wind, and let slip a rebel yell that would have impressed Cage. Margaret lunged over to grab him, but her short arms wouldn’t reach without letting go of the wheel.
Harper turned and looked back at Rebecca. With her shoulders slightly hunched she was leaning forward, with one hand on the seat by his mother’s shoulder. He could see down her dress, two perfect young breasts, the cup of the bra fallen forward revealing the two rings of darker skin. Harper gawped and swung back into his seat, pulling the door closed, in one smooth motion.
“Harper, you nearly gave me a heart attack.” Margaret checked the mirror, accelerated back on the freeway, deciding it was best to stay calm, think pragmatically. She thought he was bluffing, histrionic. Still, there was a moment when she believed he was ready to jump and a cry from her soul filled her with a strong adrenaline rush. In any event it was peculiar behavior and she decided right then to put him in therapy. Crespo and Trent thought it was the eccentric bravado of their hard-hitting hero. Rebecca was in love. Without conscious decision she had pulled the front of her dress forward, raised herself up a few inches off the seat, and tilted her shoulders to loosen her bra, giving Harper a glance at what he’d been trying to see all year. Feeling his eyes on her nipples made her tingle between her legs. Mooning over him since she moved into his neighborhood two years before, she described him in her diary as funny, cute, and nice. Now she would add brave, strong, and kinda crazy.
“Sorry, Mom.” Harper stretched his right hand open slowly, winced. “I think I need an X-ray.”
“Do you have your medical insurance card?” Margaret pushed the Century up to seventy-five. They passed a Monte Carlo full of upper-school girls smoking cigarettes who ignored them as Harper fished around in his wallet.
“Yes, ma’am. I’ve got it.”
“Good. I’ll drop everybody at Robert’s house and take you to Doctors’ Hospital across from the Hilton, where I’m picking up a tour. Maybe Trent’s father will examine you.” Margaret brushed her wind-swirled hair back into shape with one hand. “You may call your father from the emergency room.”
“Are you driving them around in the Century?”
“Don’t be sarcastic, Harper. You’ve seen the association’s van.” She touched his thigh. “I’m sorry I can’t stay with you at the emergency room. It’s always a long wait.” She thought of when Cage turned over the thirty-five-gallon vat of boiling water on his leg while removing crawfish, the time he nearly cut off his toe with a lawn mower. “I’m sure Dad will get there before the doctors see you.”
“It’s okay, Mama.” Harper heard Crespo giggling about something in the backseat. He turned and raised his eyebrows at Crespo and Trent, did his impression of Jack Nicholson in
The Shining
.
“I’ll swing by the hospital after the tour.” Margaret patted his thigh. She felt morose. Harper’s anger perplexed and saddened her. “I hope you haven’t fractured it.”
Rebecca leaned over the seat to look at his hand.
Harper clutched it in a loose fist, released it again slowly. “
Fu . . . udge!
”
“I’ll wait with him at the hospital,” Rebecca said.
Harper looked up, surprised, and blushed slightly.
“That’s very kind of you, Rebecca, but you should get home.” Margaret had long suspected that the girl had a crush on her son, though she wasn’t sure if Harper was aware of it. “Harper’s father will meet him.”
“It’s like a balloon now!” Crespo said.
“It’s broken. You’re getting a cast,” Trent said with the authority of an orthopedic surgeon’s son. “I told you that at two o’clock.”
Rebecca thrilled at the image of her beloved in a cast.
“Well.” Margaret cleared her throat. “We’re almost home.”
After a big green sign for Acadian Thruway, she angled the Century down the ramp toward a stoplight.
I
open my eyes into half-light. Something in my dream scared me but I can’t remember what. What is this room? Blank white walls. Institutional. Where am I? Am I in a lockdown? I yell out, “
Nooooo!
” Then I see my backpack and guitar on the floor in the red neon light glowing through the curtain and I remember the Tinker Bell junkie who brought me here from Haight-Ashbury in her black cocktail dress and the terror stops. I laugh. “Take hold, son.” I press the button on my watch, which lights up
7:13 p.m
. I turn on a lamp and climb out of bed. Her syringe is in a pan of water on the single burner, still warm, boiled not that long ago. There’s a full packet of yellow-brown powder. She hasn’t gone out to score. She must get money monthly from her parents, which runs out before the first, so she sells some of her mom’s clothes. “Yes, Dr. Watson, that is how it appears to me.” In an empty cupboard is a box of Kashi cereal, some soy milk in the minifridge. I wolf down three bowls in under six minutes. Now I am calm. I sit in lotus position on the floor and breathe through my nose, filling up the bottom of my belly, not moving my chest, slowly, as if through a straw. One hundred breaths. I like the way I feel now—light, at ease—so I dig in my pack for the lithium and take a couple, wash them down with some soy milk, and start to look for some socks before remembering that I threw them all away because they were stinking up the pack.
The clothes I took off last night are soaking in the bath. Emma is the tidiest junkie I’ve ever met. I drain the tub, turn on the tap, and rinse the clothes out, wring them dry, hang them from the shower curtain. I put my boots on barefoot, grab my Patagonia coat, and leave the room.
There’s a hunched old guy at the desk who looks like William Burroughs.
“Evening,” I say.
He looks up with no expression.
“Emma said you’d have a key for me. Room 411.”
“What’s your name?”
“Cage.”
“Get it when you come back.”
“Okay. Ciao.”
He looks back at a catalog of guns.
Wearing a bathrobe, the transvestite smokes a cigarette on the stoop. Stepping past her, I say, “Good evening, Tiffany.”
She looks up and smiles. With her wig crooked and her long lashes gone, the illusion isn’t working. “Hey, baby, take a walk on the wild side.”
“Hadn’t heard that in a while,” I say. “Can I bum a cigarette?”
“Sure, darling.”
I sit down beside her. It’s chilly, the stone cold and damp against my butt.
She lifts a pack of American Spirits toward me, one flicked out longer than the rest. “You’re from the South.”
I nod as she holds out a lighter, lean forward, and navigate the tip into the tiny flame.
“I got a ear for accents. The southern men I know, white we’re talking, are heavy drinkers. Yeah, I think they must drink heavier back there than out here on the coast. You like to drink?”
“I’ve been known to. What I’d like to do now is smoke some herb.”
“Burn a bone? Why didn’t you say so?” Tiffany pulls a little banana-shaped spliff from her gown pocket, hands it over. “Don’t be shy. Go on. Light it up. This is San Francisco.”
I start it off the end of the cigarette, pull in a deep toke, pass the joint, let it go.
“You know where I can buy some socks?”
“Hosiery? Condoms?” She blows smoke in my face and winks. “What you mean by socks?”
“Tube socks.”
She laughs, hands me the joint.
“Seriously I need some athletic socks. You know, a five-and-dime.” I hold the end in my fingers so her saliva won’t touch my lips.
“Five-and-dime,” Tiffany says. “Talkin’ in code, like you’re trying to score something.”
“You know a Walgreens or Kmart, a store with cheap socks?”
“Settle down, handsome.” She sucks in a toke and blows it out the corner of her mouth. “Corner of Gough and Turk, not far.”
I stand up.
“Go get your guitar and croon for me,” she says.
“My feet are cold. I got to get some socks.”
“I got all the condoms you need,” she says.
“Thanks for the smokes.” I head up the hill. My legs are springy, my thighs strong, my step light. I just needed a straight twenty-four hours to be good as new. The whole night lies in front of me. Endless possibility. All of human nature on display. All the races of the world washed up in this port city. On Gough I find a Rite Aid that sells tube socks in packs of three. I buy two packs and some Dr. Scholl’s medicated powder. Outside on the sidewalk, I take off my boots, powder up my feet, pull on a pair of socks, pour more powder in the boots, and pull them back on. Preventive medicine. I pass St. Mary’s, a Catholic cathedral, then stop in an empty Jefferson Square. The night is clear. I lie back on a bench and try to see the stars but the city lights let only a few show through the glare.
“Hi.” A guy in a business suit appears out of nowhere by my head.
I sit up quickly, leap up to my feet. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that.”
“I thought you were sleeping.”
“What if I was? What were you going to do?”
“Put your cock in my mouth.”
“Oh, you San Francisco boys. Not quite so many of you back where I come from.”
He laughs. “Where’s that?”
“Planet organic.” It’s too dark to see his face. Mid-fifties?
“I’ll pay you twenty bucks to let me give you a blow job.”
“My cock is worth twice that. It’s big and sweet.”
“Is it?”
“You’ve never licked a cock so big in your life.”
“Really? Can I see?”
“No money, no honey.”
He pulls out a wallet, takes out two bills, holds them out. I grab the cash out of his hand and sprint across the square, thinking, Don’t look back, they might be gaining on you. He never says a word. When I hit the street, I glance over my shoulder and see him halfway between the bench and the street, not moving, his head hanging down, so pitiful that I almost go back and return his cash. Ill-gotten gains. A shudder of creepiness shakes my body. I jog on down the street.
I swing by the El Dorado to see if Emma has returned. Tiffany has gone from the stoop. William Burroughs hands me the key without a word. The room is empty. For a few seconds I panic because I don’t see my pack and guitar and then I find them under the bed where I’d left them. I put my new socks in my pack, wet my hair and comb it back, early Elvis style, hold it down with a little hand lotion. Then I grab my guitar, fly back down the stairs, and drop the key on the desk. I tell the old man, “Got to put a little work in every day or you just can’t feel good about yourself.”
He grunts.
“Like you. Earning the daily bread.”
“I’d rather be on a range firing ten rounds a second.” He purses his lips together like an asshole.
“Very violent hobby. Don’t you golf?”
“Do I look like Tiger Woods?”
“No, you look more like the trainer in the ring corner who sponges the boxer’s face, slaps grease on his cuts. That kind of thing.”
His mouth flashes gold, rows of fillings, as he laughs.
“Whom do you imagine that you’re shooting on the range?”
“None of your business.”
“Remember, you can sin by thought, word, or deed.”
“That’s who I shoot. The fathers that fucked me up.”
“Therapy,” I say. “Later, gunslinger.”
I head out into the evening to ply my temporary trade. The Tenderloin is more crowded now. People are milling around the garish entrances to the strip joints, sex shops, and dive bars. I catch a bus on Geary east toward the Bay and stay with it as it turns north on Kearny. Watching the blocks flash by, I feel buoyant with eighty bucks in my pocket and Tinker Bell’s doss-pad. There are only a few mute, defeated, gray riders on the bus, so I start strumming Muddy Waters songs, singing above the engine noise. When I get off at Columbus, the old black driver says, “Son, you ain’t bad for a white boy.”
“Thank ya, cap’n.” I tip an imaginary hat, then swing off the stainless-steel pole over the three steps and out onto the street.
I walk up to City Lights bookstore and through the windows watch a handful of lonely people browsing the shelves. I stole a copy of the
Tao
the morning I arrived, put it back the same afternoon with a flower pressed in its pages. I try to think of some Ferlinghetti lines and I can’t, so at the mouth of the alley across from the front door, I lean against a post that holds street signs that say
END
and JACK KEROUAC and try to conjure up a passage from
On the Road
. I used to know so many.