You Can Say You Knew Me When (34 page)

That night, I picked up my search for Danny where I had left off: with his movie career. From my file, I dug out what information I had on Bellwether Pictures. My bank account was nearly at zero and my rent was past due, but I decided to use a bit of what I’d earned on that last transcribing job to send a money order to Bellwether, reordering videos for
The Criminal Kick
and
Surf’s Up in San Diego
. Then I e-mailed them a query that began,
This is a long shot, but perhaps you can help. I’m trying to get information on an actor…

I spent the evening labeling tapes and adding transcripts to my file, dusting off my desk, straightening up the apartment a bit. When I got off line, satisfied with my productivity, I found my voice mail indicator flashing. I sent out a wish: Woody.

What I heard instead was
Whassup, dude,
the voice at a familiar, runty pitch.
Check it out. I’m kicking it in San Fran. Palo Alto turned into a bad scene. You should page me. I’m on Haight Ashbury Street. I’m serious, dude. Page me.

Riding my bike home from downtown a few days earlier, I’d spotted a blonde-haired punk with a stuffed backpack exiting the bus terminal on Mission Street. From the corner of my eye it could have been Jed, but when I glanced back he was gone, and I pedaled away ridiculing myself for the hopeful flare this nonsighting had ignited. Now I felt myself hesitating to write down his pager number, ready to erase his message, when his voice slipped back in, like a hidden track on a music disc. With a faint exhale, he spoke in a tone so vulnerable he could have been curled next to me in the railcar again, the blinding fog encroaching:
Jamie, it would mean a lot to me to see you.

Maybe if Woody had called me back that night. Maybe if I had another paying gig to occupy me the next morning. Maybe if Jed’s voice mail hadn’t mentioned Haight Street, which under its sheen of upscale, Summer of Love nostalgia was a vortex of shopping-cart homelessness, gutter punks on speed, cops making arrests. Maybe if the next day hadn’t brought another downpour, I wouldn’t have returned Jed’s call and insisted he come over.

He needed a shower and clean clothes, so while he went into the bathroom I carried his now-familiar threads—the gray Dickies, the Rage Against the Machine concert jersey, the wife beaters and boxers—to the Laundromat. When I got back to the apartment, he was shaving—not his face, but his arm, dragging my razor through the white foam he’d slathered on his multicolored tattoos. The bathroom door was open, steam wafting out; a towel hung from his trim hips, clinging to the curve of his ass. The physical fact of Jed: another reason I’d answered his page.

His clothes weren’t dry yet, so he dressed in mine, a pair of button-fly Levi’s I’d outgrown that fit him perfectly and a thrift-store T-shirt whose logo read
STAGG PHYSICAL EDUCATION
. “This stuff is too small for me,” he complained.

“It shows off your muscles,” I told him.

“Dude, I look seriously gay.”

“Not seriously.
Ironically
.” I added, “Welcome to San Francisco, where all the guys look gay.”

He grumbled some more, but he didn’t change clothes.

His story—the version of it he gave me, anyway—came forth over the next few rainy hours. His
friend at Stanford
turned out to be a divorced professor, an acquaintance of his stepfather’s who’d been sucking Jed’s dick on and off for three years. Jed had spent a couple of days on his couch, until the prof, who was hosting a faculty cocktail party at his home, sent him away with two hundred bucks. Jed blew the money on a hotel suite, inviting his high school friends for some
mad partying
—mad enough, apparently, for Jed to lose his room deposit, which he’d paid in cash. He then went back to San Jose for a day and got into a fight with his mother, during which he outed the Stanford professor. At first she didn’t believe the story and wanted to tell his stepfather. When Jed convinced her, in explicit detail, that he was telling the truth, she demanded his stepfather never know.

In a rage, he fled to San Francisco. He checked into a South of Market hostel but was kicked out after getting caught smoking pot with a guy he’d sneaked past the front desk. He spent a sleepless night in a Travelodge with a couple of gay guys on crystal—he swore he didn’t do any of the drug or have sex with them, which I found hard to believe. Then he went to the Haight, where he
hooked up with this rad chick named Bethany
, until Bethany’s boyfriend showed up and found them rolling around on her futon. Jed slept that night in Golden Gate Park. With the prospect of another cold, damp, dirty night ahead, he called me.

I felt the urge to play big brother to him: make him quit this runaway life before he wound up arrested, beaten up, hooked on crystal, infected with an STD. But come on,
make him quit?
As if his life was a job he could simply give notice to, on his way to finding a better one? The truth is, I was more envious than alarmed. I’d been having my Kerouac fantasies, but Jed was living them: doing what he wanted and, despite his no-money-all-trouble existence, landing on his feet every time. I admired his knack for survival—one part charisma, one part manipulation, one part knowing when to cut and run.

“You should stay here,” I heard myself saying. “I don’t want you on the street, and I definitely don’t want you having crystal-sex in motel rooms.”

I expected him to rebel against my parental tone, even though I was playing the
cool parent
, but he surprised me with his effusive gratitude. It was a hint that he was more desperate, or scared, than I’d realized.

“What about your, like, boyfriend?” he asked. “After that scene with Bethany, I don’t need anymore jealous fuckers on my ass.”

“He’s not around much right now,” I said. Jed nodded slowly, parsing my deliberately vague words. “Besides,” I added, “you’re sleeping on the couch.”

“Where else would I?”

Was I imagining that he sounded defensive?

I cleared some shelf space in the living room for his clothes and CDs, and I freed Darth Vader’s head from the coat closet and set it up next to the TV, a sentinel to watch over his things. With the rain still coming down, we camped in all day, running through cigarettes and surfing the limited number of channels available through my basic cable package. When that got boring we put on Radiohead’s
OK Computer,
got stoned and analyzed the lyrics. We ordered pizza; Jed insisted, “It’s on me,” but when the delivery came he was short two bucks.

I thought it would be a chore having him around, like trying to housebreak a pound puppy; instead, he brought out the dog in me. The room filled with smoke, the dishes stayed dirty and we wiped our pizza-greased hands on our—my—pants. We arm wrestled (he won). We played Spit (I won). He was all assertions and hormones: “You’ve got no microwave, no Play Station, no cell phone and only a dial-up modem? This place is barely in the nineties.” I made a point of showing him my digital recorder just to prove I wasn’t a technophobe. When it was time to piss we stood side by side at the bowl, like at San Gregorio, hurling homophobic slurs at each other.

While he took a nap, I went to the kitchen, Saran-wrapped the last of that damn pink cake and left it out on the street for a homeless person. I thought about throwing it away, but that seemed like such a melodramatic thing to do—to throw a cake you made for someone you love in the trash.

Jed was up and out before I woke the next day. His backpack full of clothes was gone, and there was no note. When I paged him he didn’t respond. His CDs were still in the living room, so I had to assume he’d be back. But I wondered.

I hadn’t given him a key to the apartment, so I was reluctant to leave until I heard from him. I had the idea that I’d cook for him that night—even caught myself itemizing a vegetarian shopping list—but the expectation that he’d be
home for dinner
was laughable. In the light of a new day, my plan to be his temporary shelter was exposed for all its flaws. I hadn’t made him accountable in any way. We hadn’t communicated about anything important.

The phone rang.

“James Garner?” A woman’s voice, abrupt and forceful.

“Speaking.” I sensed immediately this was not a call I wanted to take.

“James, this is Eagle Credit and Collection. The current amount you owe us is $3,652.44. How do you plan to get that money to us today?”

“Excuse me?”

“We’re through with excusing you, James.”

“Who are you?”

“Eagle Credit and Collection. This is regarding the money you failed to pay to Visa. We bought that loan, and we want our money.”

Of course. I’d ignored the statements piling up. I’d failed to set up a payment plan. Now I had this antagonistic money collector in my ear. I tried to stall for time, telling her I’d need to check my files—“Why don’t I call you back when I find the paperwork, we can work something out”
—
but she was unrelenting.

“We’re not customer service, James. We don’t work
with
you. You owe us. Understand?”

“What you might want to understand”—I was getting louder, trying to mask the jitters—“is that I don’t have thirty-six hundred dollars.”

“We’ll need the name of an employer or family member.”

“Oh, right.” I almost smiled, picturing Deirdre giving this woman a piece of her mind. “This is dangerously close to harassment.”

“We haven’t even begun.” I could hear the glee in her voice. “I suggest, James, that you take us very seriously.”

“Take this seriously, bitch.” I banged down the phone, a knockout punch that felt victorious for about three seconds, after which I was simply left shaking. I’ve lived my entire adult life in debt. Bills get paid late, a little at a time.
I’ll die owing money to someone,
was my standard line.
How bad can it get?
Now I was afraid to answer the phone. I didn’t even have caller ID.

On my bike I pedaled fast in low gear, moving toward no destination, but with great force. The city landscape softened on either side of me; for an hour, the hassles and heartaches that had claimed me blurred beneath sweat and muscle strain.

I ran out of pavement, and breath, when I hit the Embarcadero. I looked out at the slate blue water, the sailboats lazing under the mighty Bay Bridge. The year before I moved to SF, a section of the bridge collapsed during an earthquake. A length of its roadway dropped, a trapdoor on a hinge, and a car went soaring into the sudden void, the driver killed in the course of a route he’d likely traveled a thousand times. Unbelievable that the ground can lurch without warning, can remove even the most basic certainty. We act on faith that when we wake to the next day of our lives and swing our feet from the bed, we have somewhere solid to land.

Back on my block, I discovered Anton hoisting a cardboard box into a cargo van. I pulled over. “Moving something, Anton?”

“Moving everything. They’ve priced me out, brother.”

“No!” I’d forgotten about this possibility.

“It’s official.”

“What can we do? Did you call the tenants’ union? Can we get the Board of Supervisors involved?” Anton was so closely associated with political causes that it seemed he himself was one. But I could hear how wishful this
we
sounded, as if a phone tree could be activated to rally his customers.

“Got myself an office on Seventh Street, near Market,” he said.

“That’ll be colorful.” It was hard to keep the gloom out of my voice as I pictured the street people thronging the subway escalator there, the scabby junkies nodding off at the skeevy McDonald’s on the corner, the piss that ran in dark rivulets from the sides of buildings to the curb. Where would Anton set up his easel in the midst of all that?

“The revolution always starts among the down and out,” he said. “That’s why the CIA introduced crack into the ghetto. It’s the control-the-poor-folk story.”

“Right on,” I said without vigor.

I spent some time helping him load the van, and when we were done he waved me into the store. “Big changes underway,” he said. “I’m going legit.”

“You’re not selling pot?” I asked.

“I’m gonna work with the cannabis clubs. Medicinal, dig? No need to go it alone when there’s a legalization movement happening.”

“What’s going to happen to all us poor stoners who rely on you?”

He handed me a bulging kitchen garbage bag, the size of a small pillowcase. I undid a twist-tie and peered in. It was crammed full of browned, crunchy marijuana leaves.

“You’re giving me this?” I asked, astonished.

“I’m only taking the
kind bud
with me,” he said. “Not this old shake.”

“I could smoke this ’round the clock for five years.”

“Heh, heh. I don’t recommend that. It’s very dry. Hell on the lungs, but good for cooking.”

I protested, but he wouldn’t hear it. “It’s a gift,” he said. “I’ve always dug you, brother.”

The one-block walk to my front door had never taken as long as it did that morning, as I pushed my bike with one arm and with the other lugged that criminally large bundle, looking over my shoulder every step, expecting the cops to come whirring down the street, sirens blaring.

A
reply from Bellwether Pictures was waiting when I got home. According to their outdated records, Dean Foster was represented by the William Morris Agency. I phoned Morris right away, announcing myself as an NPR producer doing a where-are-they-now story on
spaghetti Western legend Dean Foster
. The receptionist informed me that he hadn’t been their client for years, though an old notation on his file said that he was represented by an agency called Schwartz and Fields. When I looked them up online, I was surprised to find that they were not a talent agency, but a literary one. I sent them a request for information.

I felt myself closing in on Danny Ficchino. But for what? I was hardly an NPR producer. I’d cut myself off from Brady, who was better situated in the field than I was these days, and even if I hadn’t, I was no closer to that elusive
angle
Brady had prodded me for. I didn’t even have Ian’s website as an outlet, not until he figured out how to get his server up and running. Maybe nothing more would come of this search than a reunion, the rekindling of a fire long gone cold. Just another conversation with someone who knew my father. Danny Ficchino and Rusty Garner’s son, talking about the years gone by. Maybe that wasn’t so terrible.

It was dark outside the kitchen window, maybe eight o’clock, when Jed finally reappeared. I buzzed him in, stepping into the hallway at the same moment Eleanor, the old lady in the apartment across from me, opened her door. Her hyperactive mutt came sprinting past her and planted itself in the middle of the carpet, unleashing its machine gun yap:
rrr-rrr-rrr-rrr-rrr-rrr-rrr-rrr.
“Dinky, shet up!” Eleanor commanded in her Texas drawl, craning her neck to stare into my apartment, her fluffy hair like a lone cloud bobbing. The air was thick with the herbal aroma coming from my kitchen—a batch of pot brownies baking in my oven.

“Whoa, what’s for dinner, stoner?” Jed said.

His appearance at the end of the hallway ignited another round of fire from Dinky, another “Shet up!” from Eleanor. I saw curiosity on her face as she asked, “Is somethin’ burnin’?”

“New recipe. Middle Eastern. Very spicy.” I waved Jed past the dog and into the apartment.

Rrr-rrr-rrr-rrr-rrr—slam
!

I followed Jed into the kitchen. “You’ve been gone since I woke up.”

“I had a crazy day.” He was surveying the countertop, which was strewn with kitchen utensils, baking ingredients, and a butter-stained recipe printed out from the Internet. “Serious chemistry experiment going on here.”

“Why didn’t I hear from you?”

“About what?”

“About what you’ve been doing for ten hours.”

“You want me to spell out my every move?”

I shook my head no—though maybe that’s exactly what I wanted: a picture of what ten hours in Jed’s life were like. “Look, I don’t know if I made it clear, but you can’t use this place as a revolving door between drug deals or whatever you’re out there selling.” I saw that he was suppressing a smile. “Do you think this is funny?”

“You might want to light some incense before that lady calls the cops on you.” He was staring not at me but at something on the floor near my feet: the Hefty bag full of pot. “So who’s the dealer around here?”

“Shit,” I muttered, grabbing the bag and tying it shut. “This was a gift. I don’t know where I’m going to hide this. It doesn’t fit in any of the cabinets.”

“I have an idea,” Jed said. He walked to the living room and lifted up the Darth Vader head, revealing its open bottom, its hollow center. I handed him the bag, which he wedged snugly inside the molded plastic. My illegal stash disappeared behind those deep, black eye sockets, which looked both sinister and vacant at once.

Jed reached out and rubbed a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry about me, dude. I got a job. At a Starbucks downtown.”

“Starbucks? They’re the Evil Empire destroying café culture.”

“Whatever, dude. I used to work for them in San Jose, so I fully impressed them with my barista IQ.”

“You did?”

He nodded, self-impressed but inviting reassurance. At any given moment his expression held the possibility of truth and lies in equal measure.

“I used you as a reference,” he added quickly, “so if they call, you’re my brother.”

“Your brother who has a different last name?”

“Yeah, like, half-brother. And you hired me for this internship in radio. Isn’t that what you do?”

“That’s what’s on my résumé.”

“I told them all about how you showed me that recorder.” His voice carried a note of pride, a little heat lamp melting down my annoyance.

The timer began chirping from the kitchen.

I pulled the tray from the oven. The brownies were nearly the same shade as Darth Vader, an inky, glossy darkness. They smelled potent and green. My stomach stirred, activating the memory of tripping with Jed on the mountain—more a generalized disturbance than a specific image. I glanced over my shoulder and there he stood in the flesh, beaming gap-toothed trouble. In his hand he held one of the German knives, the big chef’s blade, prepared to dig in.

“They need to cool off,” I said.

He stepped directly in front of me, so close his puffed-up chest made contact with mine, so close that when I exhaled, his eyelids fluttered with the force of my breath. He grabbed my arm and pinned it behind my back, growling, “Your brownies or your life.” Trying to be funny, I guess, though in his other hand was the knife. The blade framed my eyes like a rearview mirror, the plummeting rearview mirror of a car soaring into the bay where the road has dropped away.

“You don’t need anything this sharp,” I said, taking hold of his wrist, easing away the blade. He dropped it on the counter. I held my grip; he still had my other arm in his. An equilibrium of restraint. Anything could have happened next, though I knew what I wanted, if he gave me the sign.

There was no safe place for his eyes to rest. When our eyes met, it was all but unbearable. I felt a jab of pressure against my hardening cock: his cock, pulsing. I telegraphed back my assent. He dropped his head, his forehead sinking into my chest. The sign.

I let go of his wrist and ran my palm up his spine and over the angles of his shoulder blades. My fingers clasped his neck. He let his head fall back. His eyes fluttered and shut. A small sound parted his lips, like a cry, but not so helpless. The sound of an ache about to be tended.

He had a beautiful ass and I wanted to fuck him, his ass so smooth, the skin so much firmer than my own, than Woody’s. I wanted to fuck him but he was nineteen and I was thirty-three, and I didn’t know who he’d been with and what he’d done, and I didn’t ask because we didn’t speak. I didn’t know if he’d ever been fucked before. I didn’t want to be his first, to be bound to him that way, though I wondered if maybe I should, because I would be kind to him, even as some part of me wanted to tear him in two, because he wasn’t Woody. I let him lead. I watched for his cues. What he wanted was to bury his face in my crotch, and for me to do the same to him, at the same time. We attached ourselves that way, taking from each other at once, another equilibrium, or the posture of one. We did this until we came, him first, quite suddenly, and me after taking some time, pushing and holding back, making it last because perhaps this was it, the one and only time we’d be here, naked, silent and needy, with no one to answer to. When we were done, he curled into himself, and I draped around him, drawing a circle from curved flesh and crooked limbs. We stayed that way for a long time, a tiny, humid island. He fell asleep, but not deeply at first. The room turned slowly, as if on an axis. I remained alert, wondering where Woody might be at this very moment, and if in some way I was still cheating on him, and if this thought was disloyal to Jed. Wondering when my heart became unknown to me.

We started up again in the middle of the night, fumbling in the dark, clandestine, all tongues and hands and grinding hips, rushing like soldiers in a bunkhouse. Half blind from lack of light, I questioned if this was a dream inside a dream. Spent, we collapsed away from each other. No tender cuddling. Eyes shut like it had never happened.

He woke me to a room already bright, rock hard and humping as if he hadn’t been laid in weeks, ignoring my squinting demand for more sleep. He sucked me until not just my cock but my entire body came alive, infused with adrenaline, fresh determination. I got him on his back, his legs forking into his chest. He secured his calves in the crook of his inky arm, offering me access to where I hadn’t dared go the night before, waiting in that position as I fumbled through the bedside drawer for a condom, but there was none, because Woody and I didn’t use them. “Don’t worry about it,” Jed said, so I didn’t, which meant, I suppose, that I’d stopped caring, for myself or anyone else. I asked, “Are you sure?” even as I’d begun the slide in, halting at the inner ring while he drew breath to ease the effort. In the patience on his face I saw that he knew what to expect. Who had taught him what this would be like? The professor at Stanford? A stranger at the Sea Foam, paying double to do it without a rubber? A boy his own age, a version of my high school love, Eric? He lowered his legs over my hips, and I inched forward, amping up the current that went from him to me, greedy for as much heat as he’d allow. His eyes stayed closed. I couldn’t take mine off him. The cotton-white light through the blinds swabbed us in a clinical hue. I measured him, counted blemishes on what had been flawless skin last night, compared the color of his chest hair to mine, the shape of his cock to Woody’s, my beaten-up man’s body to his carved physique. I took in as much as possible, a need for knowledge that pushed me toward dominance.

He stopped me suddenly. Discomfort had taken over his face. I tried different positions, but nothing worked, and I had to back away from what now felt like a failing experiment. When I pulled out we discovered that we needed to clean things up. In the shower, he asked if I was negative. “Probably,” I said. “What about you?” He didn’t know. He rubbed soap on my chest, looking up at me so tenderly it seemed that I’d done nothing wrong. I pulled him into a hug meant to be protective, so he would never know that all night long part of me wished to destroy him. Drying off, we traded awkward glances. If he’d been a trick, now would be the time to swap phone numbers and compliments on the way to the door. But he wasn’t going any farther than the living room, if even there.

I went to the corner for coffee, needing air, needing contact with the outside world to abrade the sensation of him from my body. I imagined my thoughts were obvious to people who passed me on the street, that I could be read like a front-page headline blaring the developments of the night.

Walking back, a coffee in each hand, steam rising in tufts through oval holes in the plastic lids, I noticed two things at once: a FedEx truck parked in front of my building’s garage, probably delivering the videos I’d ordered, and a pale-green boat of a car pulling in across the street, in front of the construction site, where parking was prohibited. It was Colleen’s car, with Colleen stepping from it now, dressed up for work. I slowed down, collecting myself. We hadn’t spoken since that night on the M
INI
platform.

When she saw me, she called out, by way of explanation, “It’s Friday.” Our standing date.

“It’s not noon yet, is it?”

“I’m going in earlier these days.” In rapid cadence she described a fashion show in Los Angeles to which her boutique had been invited and where they’d be putting their clothes onto recording artists recently signed to a major label. The event was coming up soon, and she had a lot to do.

“Sounds like the big time,” I said. “Up and Down must be pretty excited.”

“Could be huge for them. For me, it’s extra work without credit. I’m getting to design some of my own stuff, but they’re driving me crazy with the pressure.” She was staring at the two cups in my hands.

“I have someone staying with me,” I said.

“I should have called first.”

“Probably would have been better that way. Everything considered.”

She looked toward my building, wondering, I suppose, if I would invite her in. And I felt a deep, almost feverish need to do so—to be the friends we’d always been—but there was no way. Not with Jed up there, and the place ripe with the stink of baked pot. Not with
everything considered.

She said, “Last time we saw each other, I was really mad at you. And now, from what I’ve heard, I think you’re pretty pissed at me.”

My mouth contorted, but I said nothing.

She leaned in closer. “I just talked to Woody. Last weekend. I ran into him at this club.”

“What club?”

“I forget the name. House music, shirts off. That whole scene.”

“Woody had his shirt off at a club?”

She shook her head. “Jamie, I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”

“It might have worked out if it wasn’t for you.”

“I never meant to…I didn’t…Look, he’s worried about you.”

“He mailed me back my keys!”

“Everyone’s worried about you,” she said, taking a step backward as if to accommodate
everyone
. Before I had time to respond to this sudden expansion, an electronic version of what sounded like “Brickhouse” pierced the air, and she reached into her purse to pull out a cell phone. “It’s Up and Down,” she said, scanning the display but not answering. “I’m supposed to be there to pack up this delivery.”

“You got a phone.”

“Mostly for this trip to LA.” She wrote her number on a scrap of paper. “Will you call me, so we can talk stuff out?”

I nodded, convincing neither of us.

As she stood at her car door, I yelled across the alley, “Did Woody tell you how he answered his phone in the middle of having sex with me?” She waved as though she hadn’t heard and slipped into the car.

My apartment door was unlocked. I nudged it open with my shoulder. Jed and the FedEx guy—the same sexy guy who’d cruised me the last time—stood face-to-face, too near to be simply talking, as if they’d just pulled out of a grope. Jed wore a stealthy grin that vanished when he caught sight of me. FedEx, too, made a transformation from slinky to upright. “There you are,” he said, almost breathless.