Authors: Edmond Manning
Before we even lose the light from our entrance, light washes in from the way out. Suddenly, we stand in blazing sunlight a few feet further down the beach. This latest private beach area remains mostly deserted because who would walk into a dark cave in the side of a cliff? That’s messed up.
He says, “Really? Cave of horrors?”
I say, “I have a low tolerance for horror.”
His exhale expresses everything he needs to say: that I am an idiot, and he should have known better, and of course, of course, of course. It’s a lot of communication for a single wordless breath, but we know each other now. We don’t need as many words.
Footprints reveal others tread this way, but only a dozen or two as opposed to the horde tromping through the overlooked overlook, which, come to think of it, may not be as overlooked as I assume. Maybe I come on off days. Huh.
Perry drops my hand and jogs into our private beach. This is the payoff for forgiveness, going somewhere completely new.
Twenty feet of sandy beach quickly transitions to another forty yards of treacherous tidal pools, more slippery rocks than sand. A few dozen feet out, on the rocky side of our cove, SUV-sized rocks stand around, bored, their backs pounded by the ocean. These are the teenagers of the rock world, not nearly as ancient as their grandparent pebbles nor as young as the infant cliffs. These teens have lived; they’ve seen a few things. They hump shoreward at a glacial pace, but nobody informed them that to reach the promised beach, they must allow themselves to be destroyed. But being destroyed is not always as awful as it seems.
After drinking it in, Perry returns to me beaming.
“King Bolinas wanted ten years from a single king?”
“Yes.”
I offer my hand, and he takes it.
“Doing what?”
“Picking up starfish and placing them back into the ocean.”
“I’ll tell this next part of the story,” Perry says, checking me with his hip. “The kings discussed this, but then a man with a cocksucking flute cried out, ‘I’ll go. Send me! Even though I have no fucking clue what you need for the next ten years, sign me up.’”
“Close,” I say, squeezing his hand as we stroll down the beach, looking for starfish.
Perry says, “I’m sure King Aabee regretted it wasn’t sewer work.”
I chuckle.
He says, “It’s a good thing that King Bolinas didn’t want ten years of fisting. Aabee may find himself on the hurtin’ edge of volunteering.”
I’m a little shocked. Perry hasn’t spoken explicitly to me, despite my own graphic descriptions. Not even when I pointed out a daisy chain of cocksucking clouds and encouraged him to find a few sexual shapes. But then again, many San Franciscans believe it’s a distinguishing characteristic that they can toss the word
fisting
into normal conversation and act cool with it because, hey, fisting happens. Even if they’re uncomfortable with this particular sexual expression, that San Francisco sensibility says, “play along.” And then one day, they don’t mind the presence of the offending word, and suddenly their hearts are more open, like an intention they made come true.
I say, “I’m fairly confident The Fisting King won’t make an appearance in this story.”
“Thank God. Check that off my worry list.”
Perry points to a purple starfish lurking in shallow water. Tomorrow or the next day, the creature will cease to live, nothing more than a cool exoskeleton, but right now, it’s alive. We wade in a few feet, fingers zinging across wet rock surfaces as we attempt to find sea legs against slippery stone below. He picks it up.
“Hold it for a moment,” I say.
To my finger pads, the starfish feels like I would expect: rock, cement-stubbly and grainy. The rocks around us feel like I’d expect a starfish: smooth and silky. We stroke the starfish together, reading its life in Braille.
Before I can protest, he flings it.
Oh. Damn.
There it goes, spinning, sailing through the air until it slashes a wave and becomes a surfer.
He says, “This is the favor for your friend, right?”
“Yes. I promised some beach time. I have faith in Bolinas.”
He turns to me, and his smile disappears.
“I’m trying, Vin. It’s not easy for me, doing this stuff. But I’m really trying.”
I jump the remaining two feet to Perry and kiss him deeply. Our kiss is forceful, the kind you might experience standing in the surf while an ocean leers from ten feet away. Our mouths now fit together perfectly, because although we have spent less than twenty-four hours together, we know each other more than those hours suggest. We escaped from prison together. He showed me his rage, and then we made love in the shower. I forced him into a life of crime, and yet he stayed. Hell, we own matching snow globes.
After a minute or two, we break, panting and grinning. Perry leans in for more, but instead I hug him and start speaking right into his ear.
“Gravely, the Found Kings discussed King Bolinas’s ten-year request. Only the kingdom’s finest investment bankers could determine how much of Bolinas’s grief represented tarnished gold and how much was shadow dragon. Their goal was not to argue down the ten-year request: they sought to uncover the deeper grievance those years embodied, and simultaneously create a smaller debt for Bolinas to forgive.”
I pull back to see Perry’s sad smile.
“Every king realized that more important than the number of years was that King Bolinas felt slighted. How could the kingdom function if its one true king felt unloved? Everything on land and sea ground to a halt as the kingdom debated how to restore faith in Bolinas.”
I take his hand and we continue our stroll, looking for dying starfish. I ponder all the times I lost faith in Bolinas, lost faith in someone because I decided their grievance was trivial. I refused to recognize what it represented, the buried gold unable to shine.
Perry clears his throat after I have been silent for a moment or two. “And?”
“After being so well heard, so well loved, King Bolinas cheerfully concluded that six years was enough. As you predicted, our friend King Aabee volunteered first. Some kings argued that he should let someone else carry this burden, but most everyone understood that when he said, ‘I will go. Send me!’ Aabee was unstoppable.”
“No offense, Vin, but he is a tool. Great story, but he’s wasting his whole life.”
Another starfish appears in shallow water, this one an orange-colored guy. Or girl. Or both, since they’re ambisexual.
I nod to Perry, and he fishes it out of the water. “Should we name it?”
“Chuck,” Perry says quickly, and then catches himself with an intake of breath. “Ex-boyfriend.”
I say, “There’s an old belief that every starfish cast ashore enraged the ocean with some slight and cannot reenter without the ocean’s forgiveness. If the ocean will not forgive, then someone else must.”
“Yeah?” Perry says, walking away from me. “Well, I forgive you, Chuck.”
He jerks but does not acknowledge his twitch to me. Whatever zipped through his body disappears; Perry’s already wading away from some slippery memory, careful to walk steady. Wish I knew more about Chuck. Let go, Vin. That twitch revealed enough.
He winds up—
“
Wait.
Instead of throwing Chuck, let’s wade out deeper and find him a good rock. If you pitch him, Chuck’s gonna ride back to shore on the next wave.”
We wander deeper into the tidal pools, evaluating the oceanfront real estate. If motionless, the water would lap our knees, but the ceaseless waves occasionally leap high enough to lick our inner thighs, so we leap in surprise, yelping and whooping.
After a big one, I yell, “Bad touch! Bad touch!”
Perry laughs and also starts yelling “bad touch” whenever the water licks his balls.
“Yo, Pear. I’ve got this great two-bedroom condo on this rock, plenty of light.”
Perry disagrees. “No view. Keep looking.”
“Do you think I could sell real estate in San Francisco?”
He says, “You’d get fired the minute you refused to show anything in Dolores Park because you don’t like the letter
d
. Plus, Chuck was thinking of some place with less light, more rock underside. Something wet but with a view. And good neighbors.”
“We have plenty of places like that over here in The Mission.”
“I thought you wanted to be a Realtor for Russian Hill.”
“Too many stairs. And for the record, I have no problem with the letter
d
. Mostly, I don’t like
k
, and I’m not overly fond of capital
M
.”
He says archly, “As a Mangin, fuck you.”
The obsidian black rocks fascinate me, overrun with miniature mussels, razor sharp edges on their chatty, wide-open mouths. These little clams gossip like millions of high schoolers, daring each other to jump. I bet they say to each other, “Those kids on the other rock don’t get pounded nearly as hard as we do.”
“No, not that one,” Perry says, snubbing my next suggestion. “Chuck should face the ocean.”
We find starfish fixed to the undersides of ocean boulders everywhere around us, point out various colors to each other. Orange, neon orange, red, neon red, purple, neon purple. Very few appear splayed in traditional star form, mostly slumping and legs curling, as if exhausted by the ocean’s assault.
I say, “Did you know starfish see out the ends of their arms? They have five eyes.”
“Gross. Gross. Here’s fine.” Perry deposits our orange friend against a slippery stone surface. “That’s disgusting. Is that even true?”
“Sure. I read a book about starfish. They don’t have eyeballs that blink or anything, they’re more ocular light sensors, mostly able to experience light and dark.”
He says, “I hope you realize I have no trust for anything you say. I mean, this five-eye thing could be true or there’s a five-eyed king coming up next.”
We stick around for a moment while our starfish friend gets a good grip. When neither of us can tug him free, Perry and I bid Chuck good day.
We splash each other in Chuck’s front yard, stand and face the smaller waves a few times. We’re not deep, and yet dry sand looks twenty-five feet away. I would describe this as another liminal space between one reality and another.
Perry moves deeper into the water, just a few more feet west, and stretches his arms wide.
I try to warn him, “You’re going to—”
But it’s already over: the wave soaks him up to his waist.
Perry howls with laughter and jumps around helplessly because his rubber waders are now completely full. It’s hard to glimpse the investment banker in this moment, the man who says to strangers, “Trust me with your money,” and they do.
He yells, “Bad touch! Bad touch!”
Perry fumbles to the shore, and water spills out the wader tops. He jogs to dry sand and falls on his back, lifting his legs up to empty the waders, which of course, soaks the top half of Perry’s body, leaving him sputtering for air.
Ha, ha! Ri-dikulous!
God, that was hilarious, a Charlie Chaplin move. I’m sure he did that intentionally, putting on a show for me. He drags himself out of the sand and rejoins me, more soaked and more sandy than when he left. I should warn him about moving quickly over slippery rocks, but not this second. I don’t want to kill the happy buzz he created. We resume our patrol holding hands and accomplish two more starfish relocations to ocean-view condos.
I’m thirsty. Fresh papaya and pineapple sounds delicious right now. My stomach grumbling says it’s time to advance the story.
I squeeze his hand and say, “Look around. I doubt that King Aabee would describe his time here as wasting six years.”
“Of course not. He played a magic flute.”
“Technically, it wasn’t quite a flute.”
“Uh huh. But it sounded like mint. And chartreuse, neither of which,
technically,
is a sound.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Oh God; objection withdrawn.”
“Now who sounds like a lawyer?”
Perry points to three greenish starfish mashed together on a rock. He says, “Starfish orgy.”
“Yeah, the whole apartment building is slutty. But you’re only viewing King Aabee’s story in one light. King Aabee was thrilled with his life.”
“
Thrilled?
”
I say nothing and let my face mirror his confused incredulity, forcing him finally to speak.
He says, “He wasted his life.”
I frown. “Wasted
how
?”
I skew my face as if I haven’t understood the question.
“Seriously?” Perry says with a certain sharpness, and suddenly this feels real, this conflict. “Ten years among the Lost Kings burned his whole youth. He gets back with wrinkles and gray hairs and he’s, like, spending his first year or two cleaning barns and fixing sewers? How many years did you say he spent in the sewers? Three or four? Then—”
I interrupt to say, “You’re kidding, right? While living among the Lost Ones, Aabee earned a PhD at university. He met his wife during those ten years, a beautiful archaeologist. She required a man who understood giftedness in its many flavors.”
“Oh, please. This morning you said he cleaned sewers and did crappy jobs. Didn’t you say that he couldn’t afford picture frames for his shitty apartment?”
“All true. Aabee was a graduate student when they met and fell in love down in the sewers. Remember my mentioning a luscious French woman? She researched ancient symbols in the lowest depths of our stone beginnings, and he shoveled away the waste of humanity, because this is what we do when we think our ancestors no longer serve; we shit all over them.”
Perry stares at me with frozen irritation. A wave crashes against his knees, tickling him again, softening his anger and sweeping the unpleasant feeling back out to sea. It’s just a story.
“Remember her cherry nipples? You didn’t want me to elaborate over breakfast. I tried to bring it up again on the bridge.”
“Yeah. Okay.” His face and tone express reluctance.
I love the classic “You Wouldn’t Let Me Elaborate” setup. Even if he demonstrated a higher tolerance for raunch, he would have eventually cried uncle; I had some extremely kinky stuff planned for Aabee and his wife.