You Can Say You Knew Me When (18 page)

He kissed me quickly outside the restaurant, and then off into a cab he went, leaving me absolutely certain that, having exposed myself as a stalker, I’d not likely see Triple B again. He didn’t call in the next few days, and so, convinced that I’d destroyed my chances, I did something I’d never done before—I answered a
party-and-play
phone sex ad. I lost a day and a half smoking crystal in this guy’s apartment, while he continued to lure others over, a revolving door of sex hobbyists, a binge of lower brain-stem activity. The whole thing went zero to sixty in no time, then from sixty to a hundred. I guess that’s why they call it
speed
. I needed a week to recover, not just from the amphetamine in my system but from the emotional tremors of having thrown myself in so recklessly with this particularly avid crowd. All these years I’d been jokingly calling myself a slut. But I didn’t know the half of what was out there, or what I was capable of.

Woody did eventually call, after he returned from a family vacation, something he had told me about, something I’d stupidly failed to remember, and he wanted to see me again. Turns out that my dinner confession had tapped into his superstitious nature; Woody was very much a believer in
meant to be,
and learning that I’d nurtured a faraway crush only convinced him that we were destined to get involved. I was devastated. Thrilled and devastated. I could barely recall the details of my crystal binge—though a memory of asking for a condom while I was already getting fucked was clear enough. I needed a good couple weeks before I could get accurate results from the battery of tests offered at the city STD clinic. So I stalled Woody for time: a few chaste dates, a lot of making out, tension building within me as tenderness bloomed between us.

When we finally did hook up—our schedules cleared, my health in the clear—we locked ourselves away for the better part of a weekend. Our sex was probably the most highly anticipated of my entire life, and definitely the least disappointing.

From there,
this guy I’ve been seeing
transitioned into
my boyfriend,
and within weeks, talk of
falling for each other
started slipping into conversation. He was direct about what he wanted and what he didn’t. “Cheating is a deal breaker,” he told me early on, and without hesitation I said, “Cheating’s always been an exit strategy for me. And I don’t want out of this.” We were spending every night together, not just at home (I was busting out all my best recipes) but wherever we could find something new to do in the city. One weekend we biked to the Presidio and sneaked behind a
NO TRESPASSING
sign to have sex among the eucalyptus trees, the fear of being discovered heightening every sensation. One night he insisted we go dancing at the Stud, demanding, once there, that I reenact the first sighting, complete with an imitation of his cement-shoes technique. He could laugh at himself, and made it possible for me to do the same. That was new to me. I was learning how to be happy in my own skin.

There was a catch, though: I had career plans. This is back when my freelance pieces for
All Things Considered
had gotten me noticed, and I’d hatched a plan to move to Washington, DC. I hoped that putting myself in proximity to NPR’s headquarters would help me nab a coveted staff position. Despite the fact that our nation’s capital, with its theme-park federalism, has always sort of given me the creeps
—
Welcome to Governmentland!
—
I was ready to pick up and move. Résumés had been rendered, personal contacts had been contacted.

“I can’t believe I found someone so great just as I’m ready to leave San Francisco,” I told Ian one night on the patio of the Eagle.

“It’s no coincidence,” he said, chugging beer, surveying the crowd over my shoulder. This was back when Ian was most jealous of Woody—the days leading up to Woody’s “Noncompetitive Clause”—when Ian was digging into me at all times. “You only picked him because you know it can’t last,” he said. “Just like always.” I told him to fuck off.

But I suspected he was right. Woody never asked me to reconsider my plans, though he was unambiguous in his belief that San Francisco was the future—the future being the Internet, which was starting to turn our arty, sleepy city into a Mecca. Jobs were popping up like weeds after a rainfall. Dilapidated neighborhoods were blossoming with new enterprise:
Look, honey, they’re calling that decrepit warehouse district Multimedia Gulch.
People were arriving from all over the world to live and work in San Francisco.

I took my dilemma to Brady one afternoon, laying out the pros and cons. “Woody’s right, dude,” he said. “You have a rent-controlled apartment and a boyfriend. If you want to advance your career, figure out a way to do it here.” That very night Brady and I hatched the idea that became
City Snapshot.
Pretty soon I had a job I’d created for myself and a steady boyfriend I’d picked out of a crowd, pursued and won.

Flash-forward to June, last year: The program director at the station tells me, “We’re not going to renew your contract.”

Woody tells me, “This promotion means that I’ll be working longer hours.”

Deirdre tells me, “He’s going to die, Jamie. You need to figure out what you’re going to do.” Just like that, all of it at once.

And so here we were, now: Woody calling from his cell phone, saying, “Put on a coat. Meet me out front.”

“Right this minute? I’m working.” This was a lie. In truth I was stoned, and I didn’t want him to know.

“Just do it,” he said. “It’s a surprise.”

I looked up and down Manfred Alley. It took a minute to realize that the car horn honking from across the street was for me. Sitting behind the wheel of a silver SUV, double-parked, engine running, was my boyfriend.

“Hey, buddy, wanna take a ride?” He leaned out the window on one elbow, sugar in his voice, as if seducing a hitchhiker.

“Please tell me this is a rental.”

“Baby, it’s ours.”

I stepped closer. “You
bought
this environmentally hazardous status symbol?”

“Check it out. It’s got so much room in the back—”

“You could fit an entire car inside of it. One that gets better mileage.”

“Hello, I’m six-foot-four. Plus this one’s got all-wheel drive. We can take it up a mountain through a snowstorm. Do you like the color?”

“It matches your phone.”

He threw open the door. “Come on, before you start complaining. You need to take a ride. You need to feel the power.”

“Who are you? And what have you done with my boyfriend?” I climbed in—or, rather, up—and he aimed us into rush-hour traffic. The seats were slidey on the turns. I held on tight, paranoid that an accident was imminent, a baby stroller sucked under our enormous tires. SUVehicular Homicide.

“Drive carefully,” I panted. “And watch out for bicyclists!”

Watching the roofs of smaller cars pass beneath my window, I did in fact
feel the power
: the immediate allure of looking down from a perch onto traffic, onto police cars, even. As he drove, Woody explained that he’d gotten a tip from Roger about a website with a one-day sale on
pre-owned vehicles
and had convinced Digitent to front him the money. It was a steal, he said, in mint condition but half the price of a new model—far cheaper than the fuel-efficient car he knew I’d rather he bought. He’d bought it for
us
, he repeated.

We were on the road for a half hour before I realized with a shudder where he was taking us. He drove toward the Golden Gate Bridge to watch the sunset, but pulled off early, into the parking lot on the bluff above the very beach where I’d last betrayed him. I half expected Red Shorts to parade on by and flash me a too-familiar smile. Woody hopped out, and through tinted windows I watched him step closer to the ledge. In that moment, separated by glass and steel, I felt the opposite of power. The awareness of power drained away. A slow leak of some vital fluid.

“Getting those letters has been so satisfying,” Woody said, in bed, a few days after we’d first stayed up late reading Teddy’s words to Ray. For Woody, Ray’s package was a small treat, like a newly released video to watch before bed. A distraction after another exhausting day at Digitent.

But for me, the letters were a tease. A leap ahead on a path still coming into focus. “There’s probably more,” I replied. “There has to be.” My hunger had increased as it had been fed.

I started traveling on my bike through the city, solo, unplanned, exploring. I rode all the way out to the ocean, where the N-Judah streetcar line met the beach. There, on the site of the Hideaway, I found Java Beach, as Woody had tipped me off. I bought a coffee and scoped the crowd. The younger folks sported all of today’s
alternative
signifiers: nerdy glasses hovering over paperbacks, multicolored hair held back by barrettes, secondhand clothes. A small contingent of drawling, lion-haired surfers leaned back into their chairs, leathery legs stretched long. Some version of them had likely been here for many, many years, drinking beer at noon. There were no Irish old-timers except for one dingy-skinned fellow who looked like he hadn’t left the premises since the day the locals cheered JFK’s election. I hoped, in fact, that he hadn’t, that he was the line of continuity between then and now—
here’s my story, the angle I’ve been looking for
—and I was considering pulling up a chair to talk to him when he began talking to himself, his gestures indicating the workings of a short-circuited mind. Though it was difficult to imagine this place forty years earlier, with Teddy flipping burgers where now stood an espresso machine and glass refrigerator filled with bottled water and
energy drinks
, I was amazed to find even these traces. In a city full of disappearing history, this spot offered up the possibility of longevity, even permanence.

I fixated on the boy making coffee, who looked less hip than the patrons—gelled hair, teenage fashion (a huge Tommy Hilfiger logo on his sweatshirt)—and whose behavior defied an easily read sexuality. He gripped the steamer arm with a rag and slid it downward, wiping away milky foam, revealing a cartoon cat tattooed on his wrist. He giggled over his shoulder at the girl behind the register and spoke something that sounded like, but might not have been, “Do you think I’m too small for capoeira?” I wanted to know his life story, why he came to San Francisco, what he hoped for. It was so easy to project Teddy onto him. He caught me staring and did a double take, and soon after I drained my mug and fled, strangely unsettled.

I pedaled through the neighboring blocks, imagining I might find the place where my father had lived. I didn’t have an address, but I fantasized that some telltale sign would point me to an upstairs tenant’s apartment carved from a single-family home, with an exterior staircase for visitors like Ray Gladwell to tiptoe down after midnight, beneath which Mrs. Casey would be whisking her
infernal broom
. Though of course today, in this neighborhood, Mrs. Casey would be Mrs. Trahn or Mrs. Nguyen, and she probably had a job. I thought of that worker-boy at Java Beach. Did he live in this neighborhood, upstairs from a Vietnamese family who didn’t understand him, or he them, and didn’t approve of the comings and goings of his late-night visitors? Or did he live even further out, in Daly City, say, in one of the boxy developments stretched like millipedes along the coastal hills? Was it even possible, financially, to live in San Francisco today on a café salary?

I spent an afternoon at City Lights bookstore, the city’s best-known link to its bohemian past, huddling over history books and beatnik memoirs. Not beatnik—
beat.
By now I’d learned the distinction between the term used inside the subculture and the one that had been cast upon it by a derisive press. I started to piece together a better understanding of what San Francisco had been like in 1960 and ’61. It was a hinge time, a pivot between two countercultural waves, the beats and the hippies. Tour buses were already creeping through North Beach, allowing passengers to snap photos of bongo-playing, beret-clad poets. The artists themselves had begun migrating to what my father’s letter had called
fringe neighborhoods
, like the Haight.

But for every individual landmark still standing, there was an entire neighborhood demolished. Third Street below Market had been a skid row once known to all as Three Street. It was here that Jack Kerouac shacked up in filthy rooms, downed a sickly sweet booze called Tokay with the local winos and immortalized the experience in his pocket notebook. I bought a used copy of
San Francisco Blues,
the collection of poems that grew out of that notebook, and read them on a bench in Yerba Buena Gardens, the two-block landscaped park built up from bulldozed Three Street, surrounded now by a museum, a convention center and a mall. Kerouac’s San Francisco was “bluer than misery.” Maybe my father felt that, too. Maybe there was no great secret as to why he left San Francisco; maybe he just got lonely, felt the gnawing insanity of being alone and far from home. Sitting on that park bench, suspended between the prettified San Francisco of today and Kerouac’s long-ago cry from the heart, I could imagine those blues sending me packing, too.

I did what I could to lure Woody along on my excursions. “Take a day off, just one day,” I pleaded.

“Then who would bankroll your research and development?” he replied, the lilt in his voice masking a sharper accusation: I had begun borrowing money from him—first to make my February rent, then to cover bills, then for other expenses, like a new pair of sneakers, which he insisted on because the New Balance cross-trainers I’d been wearing since we’d started seeing each other had holes in them. My bank account was at rock bottom; my last paycheck from New World Transcripts had been spent before I earned it. But! I had ten thousand dollars coming my way; I would pay him back.