You Can Say You Knew Me When (20 page)

“What’s this about?” I asked.

“The King of the Beats on his hands and knees.”

Ian recited from Vidal’s book, playing to the back row, a tad aggressive for Saturday in the park. In August 1953, in New York City, Kerouac, not yet famous, and Vidal, already notorious for his explicitly gay novel
The City and the Pillar,
finished off a night of heavy drinking by checking into a room at the Chelsea Hotel. They showered together. They “rubbed bellies for a while.” Then Kerouac gave Vidal a “pro forma” blow job. Finally, Vidal flipped him onto his stomach and took him from behind:

Ian glanced up for a reaction. “He says Kerouac wrote about that night in
The Subterraneans
. Without the hot man-on-man action.”

“Yeah, I know the part he means.” I’d recently finished
The Subterraneans
, and I remembered the passage: Kerouac’s narrator, Leo Percepied, chronicles the night when he ditched his female lover for a “glamorous” author, “a perfectly obvious homosexual.” Kerouac gets them to the hotel room—and then cuts quickly to waking up on the couch. The fevered rush of events abruptly skids to a stop. The shower, the blow job, the sweaty locks on the pillow detailed by Vidal are reduced to a long dash on the page. Here comes the sex—there it went. A couple pages later Leo offers a hazy
mea culpa
for his “ludicrous fag behavior.” Even the freest voice of his generation apparently had his limits.

I wondered if my father, reading the novel while working shifts at the Hideaway, could read between Jack’s strategic dashes, could picture the debauchery underway inside the dimly lit hotel room of an
obvious homosexual.
Had that been part of his attraction to Kerouac? Or was it what killed the mystique for him?

When I voiced these questions to Ian, who was thumbing through
The Subterraneans
, he said, “I think it’s pretty obvious that two guys had sex here.”

“If you know to look for it,” I said. “Most of the book is about an affair between a man and a woman. This is just a tangent. Like spending the night with Gore Vidal was for Jack Kerouac, probably.” I let out a sigh so weary it made Ian laugh.

“Why so bummed out, my friend?” he grinned. “This is fun stuff.”

“My father once told me that he ran into Kerouac at a bar. But I have no idea if it happened. And even if it did, even if I could pull all these pieces of the puzzle together, I’ll never really know what any of this meant to him. I’ll never get inside of him.”

Ian said, “You’ve got to find this guy.”

“Danny Ficchino?”

“Yeah, him. But the other one, from the letters. The gay one.”

“Don. I’ve been trying. No luck.” I ripped up a chunk of grass, let the blades fall. “Am I wasting my time? If I can’t turn it into work, what’s the point?”

Ian lit a couple of cigarettes and passed one to me. Through the expanding gray plume I watched his eyes widen. “Why don’t you do something for
Better Example
? You could write an essay, or a script like you’d do for radio, about Kerouac, your father, whatever. We’ll make it work for the site.” He jumped to his feet, shaking them one at a time, hopping around in newfound excitement. “You could include sketches from your father’s notebook, and we could scan in some of the letters—”

“And I could edit the interview with Ray, and maybe other people who’d lived back then, and get their stories online.”

“Who needs public-fuckin’-radio? Do it yourself, man.”

Well, I still needed public-fuckin’-radio, but his glee was contagious. We left the park on a roll, ideas flowing. I got so excited that I had Ian take me to an electronics store, where I found a digital minidisc recorder that I absolutely had to have. Had to, for the interviews I would conduct. Had to so badly that I wrote a check I knew would bounce. Gave them my driver’s license number and everything.

We worked into the evening at Ian’s apartment. Starting took forever: deciding what to include, conceptualizing the pages. Ian had been reading a book on information architecture and was determined to forge a master plan before he scanned a single image or wrote a line of code. We decided to start with the photos from the attic box, the mystery of Dean Foster, and Ian went to work. A perfectionist side of him, unexpectedly patient, emerged as the mouse skated and the graphics blinked. I sat in an old armchair, the stuffing protruding through cat-clawed holes, writing text to accompany the images. The cat itself, a skinny black thing, circled around, demanding attention and disappearing after she got it. We smoked so many cigarettes that Ian’s roommate, Glen, complained that smoke was clouding the entire apartment. Ian promised we’d stop, but we didn’t.

It was after nine when an impulse told me I needed to check in with my boyfriend. I called the mobile unit.

Agitation colored his voice. “Where are you? Everyone’s already here.”

“Everyone?” Clearly there was some event underway that I was supposed to know about. I tried to access a memory of a plan. Blank.

“Brady, Annie, Colleen, Roger—”

“Roger from work?” Roger from N Is a Number? Roger from a bump in the bathroom?

“Jamie, we’re already eating. Where are you?” Ah, yes, there it was: Woody had accepted Annie’s invitation for dinner after I’d failed to respond to Brady’s. I was supposed to be there two hours ago.

“I’m at Ian’s. We’re having a creative explosion over here.”

He paused. I could hear the gears of contemplation. “So you’re totally stoned and don’t want to leave, right?”

“Kinda.”

A vacuum of silence. I asked him to put Brady on the phone. I told Brady I needed to keep the momentum going over here, did my best to get him interested in helping me edit Ray’s interview so we could use it for the site. Laid on the charm as best I could, knowing Woody would be less pissed off if I got Brady’s blessing.

I only got half of one. “Sounds awesome, Jamie. But you’re missing Annie’s pot roast. She never gets to cook meat for me, so she’s going all out.”

I said we’d already eaten. I said I’d call again later.

Throughout the conversation Ian had been at my side, signaling that I should go, but it had been so long since I’d felt this particular buzz, the one that comes only from making something, that I didn’t want to leave. I felt the promise that this work would focus me, get me out of the research mindset, help me find that illusive angle, not just for the website, but for something larger. “Was that a bad-boyfriend move?” I asked Ian.

“He’s your boyfriend. You tell me.” On his monitor, he had added a sepia tint to the picture of Teddy and Danny by the Chevy.

“That looks fake,” I said. “Trying too hard to be a documentary image.”

“It’s supposed to give it gravity,” he said, but after a moment of concentration he removed the tint and tried a different effect, a pale blue saturation.

“I’ve been thinking lately about how Woody and I met,” I said. “About that long anticipation, wanting him before I even knew him.”

“Wanting him because you couldn’t have him.”

“I remember feeling so—” What was the word for it, that barely contained sensation, nearly explosive though not destructive, an eruption into a new life? “So fucking
ripe
.”

“Well, you picked the fruit off that branch,” he said, talking through the mouse clicks. “Once you have something, you no longer have to want it. So you start looking around to see what else is out there.”

“I’m beyond looking.”

“Because you’re a slut,” he said, finally turning to face me. “A reformed slut for a couple of years now, but you’ll never be satisfied sucking only one cock. It’s a no-brainer.”

“It’s not a no-brainer. It’s a conundrum.”

“Change the rules. Open up your relationship.”

“Um, this is Woody we’re talking about here.”

“Shit!” A long ash had toppled off his cigarette into his keyboard. I lost his attention as he turned the board upside down, shaking out the dust. On screen, Teddy and Danny smiled from their blue world.

I left Ian’s after midnight. I didn’t call Woody. I was too wasted from a day of smoking and drinking to navigate my way through whatever scolding awaited me. I walked for a half hour, telling myself I needed air, needed motion, but where I took myself was to a South of Market bar called the Playpen, where the patrons were coated in a dim, scarlet light and the walls thrummed with music that sounded like dance-club repetition and hard rock all at once.

Men stood in clusters near the bar and the square support pillars, or sat alone on the benches that ringed a dingy green pool table. A television screen blinked images of hairless muscle mass, bulky body parts, the blurred thrusts of greased penetration. A short flight of steps led to a second bar, the air up there muskier, heavier with potential. A leather curtain in the back marked a doorway through which patrons passed all night long.

I thought about the danger of a room like that. Every man for himself, none to be trusted. STDs unleashed in swapped fluids, unfair payback for consensual sex. Or not. Because a room like that could just as easily be pure magic. Strangers communicating with hardly a word and still finding what they came for. I thought about my mouth finding flesh. The heat of contact.

I pushed my way in.

My eyes struggled to outline the crowd in the darkness. I saw someone bent in half, slurping. Someone else groped from behind. Silhouettes of bodies watching, waiting. I followed a fat ember, the flame-hot bowl of a pot pipe, to a set of lips. I moved closer, asked for a hit. He turned and blew herby smoke on me. I inhaled it, squinted at his face, saw a familiarity, even in the shadows. I took a hit, felt his eyes on me. Before I exhaled he was on me, mouth to mouth, trading spit for smoke. I hadn’t even been here five minutes.

As I pulled away, he said, “How’s it going, Jamie?”

What the fuck?
“Do I know you?”

“Yeah, it’s Abe.”
Right, Abe.
One of those guys I ran into everywhere and knew hardly anything about. An ex–New Yorker with whom I’d bitched at parties about California. A grad student in something health-related at Berkeley. A good friend of a guy who was a good friend of Woody’s. That Abe.

Abe was a reminder: You can’t court temptation in a South of Market back room and expect it to be a covert act. At least I couldn’t, after ten years in San Francisco.

“I’m supposed to meet a friend up front,” I said, moving away.

“Too bad.” Even in the dark, I knew what his face was telling me.

I got the hell out of there, already composing the e-mail I would send when I got home.

After I sent this e-mail I found a message waiting for me. Not from Woody; from an official-looking address I didn’t recognize.

I released the breath I’d been holding and let myself feel the thrill of discovery, of watching this man’s existence crystallize with each new fact (as Dean Foster’s had when I stumbled upon that database). Don had lived into old age, found a long-term lover, played a role in his community. I felt, too, the adrenaline tingle of pushing deeper into my inquiry—understanding that Don’s years in Los Angeles perhaps overlapped with Danny Ficchino’s. And yet all of this crashed up against something darker: disappointment, even loss, at the knowledge of his death. His seventy-two years no more than a paltry collection of facts.
No records in the archives. No survivors.

He was alive the first two years I lived here. I let myself trace a parallel history in which my father had never disowned his time in San Francisco and never lost touch with Don, so that when I moved here, I looked Don up, visited him and his partner in the Upper Haight, brought out my tape recorder. Sitting in their garden, listening to their histories, I took on the role of archivist. Of survivor.