Island of Divine Music (14 page)

On a cool November evening seven years later Penny stood before a Mexican bakery in San Francisco. A group of sugar skulls peeked from the windows of a hacienda made of dough or gingerbread. She knew enough Spanish to translate the icing on the building:
Dia de los Muertos,
Day of the Dead. It made her think of the six days when death had hung so close to them all, her mother sitting before the TV, her brother in some silent world of his own, her father when Paulie had joined the marines, and how unreal that time seemed now, after its passage, compared with the very real and daily reports of death from Vietnam, with the real problems in their lives. As she stood before the plate glass she imagined the baby and his mother peering from a window in a city made of stone, an ancient city carved into a cliff, leaning at the end of the world.

Penny had only heard from Jesús twice in those last seven years, and the last letters she’d sent had come back unopened. Mother and child had been on the move, mostly in the Rocky Mountain states and the Great Basin, in desolate towns full of work crews, oil fields, mining operations, dam construction. Penny didn’t know Jesús had taken up his drunk mother’s burden and, at the age of twelve, sneaked into taverns with her, dressed in her clothes, in order to take men’s money. He was a convincing transvestite,
a slim-hipped Latin beauty with scarlet lipstick and turquoise eyeliner, and it amazed him how easily these men, who spent months in danger and drudgery in order to mail money home to their wives, who spent all day sweating and moving machines with their callused hands, could be fooled into stuffing ten-dollar bills into his. And then there were the men who saw through the costume and called him a queer and paid to enter him from behind. For Jesús there was that sudden frightening violation with its attendant thrill of pain and its disgusting pleasure mixed with the pain. There was a debasement and acceptance of what is most dirty and wrong and deeply pleasurable about being a human being, that most basic giving over of himself to another. He was a queer. He was something men fucked and told jokes about and talked about lining up against a wall and shooting, ridding the world of them. One evening their cruelty nearly killed him, much in the way it had nearly killed his mother: he was stripped and sexually assaulted, then beaten and left for dead in a parking lot.

P
enny waited for the electric Muni to take her to San Francisco State College, where she taught composition writing as a graduate student. She had combed her long, wavy hair onto the kitchen counter of her flat in Noe Valley and ironed it straight. She had drunk two cups of coffee and shared two joints of marijuana with her boyfriend, Charles, who said that the straightening accentuated Penny’s vulnerable angularity and made her look like a ghost with sunken eyes and a Roman nose. Charles was a self-professed Yippie
and revolutionary trying to find the right organization to identify with, and he’d spent time in meetings with the SDS, Peace and Freedom Party, SLA, Weather Underground, Patriot Party, Diggers, and recently a Black Panther support group called the Motherfuckers, but he still hadn’t found the right fit. Penny didn’t tell Charles her class didn’t meet that evening, that she was going instead to a
conscious breathing
class taught by one of her exlovers, a past-life-regression therapist and parking-lot attendant named Frank.

Charles had a low opinion of most of the classes offered at San Francisco State through the Experimental College unless they had to do with revolution, and his impression of Frank and consciousness-raising in general was lower still. Penny didn’t vocally disagree with Charles, but a lot of reading and talk about the boundaries of consciousness, as well as recent experiences with marijuana and LSD, had made her feel receptive to an intuitive journey which seemed accessible through the simple act of breathing, and the course, after two meetings, was going well. Also, Frank was cute, and things just presented themselves to her lately when she practiced his breathing technique, the coincidence of a word repeated, a snippet from some song with special significance. The Mexican bakery display seemed a portent, a little message from God, reinforced by the synchronous appearance of the word
Idaho
floating past her feet on the side of a windblown french fries sack. Penny boarded the Muni and closed her eyes to concentrate on her breathing. She saw faces: her grandfather’s on the day he died, her mother’s the day of her parents’ divorce, her brother Paulie’s in the U.S. Marine Corps portrait on the mantel.

Death had passed over Paulie, but not without leaving its mark: he’d returned home that year dishonorably discharged and addicted to heroin. He was now living in a wino hotel south of Market, wandering to and from his methadone treatments at the mission and drinking quart bottles of ale with a couple of other vets on a park bench. His hair had grown out, and he was always dressed in an old military coat which reeked of booze and smoke and sweat. With his bushy beard and wild eyes he scared Penny and gave her the impression of Rasputin or Charles Manson in a Giants baseball cap and glasses. Whenever she saw him she wanted to flee his presence, to make sure he didn’t know where she lived, which was less than two miles from his hotel.

Jesús was less than a mile from her at that moment. He had run away and come to San Francisco, as had thousands of teenagers that year. One night he’d watched his mother stagger around the room in a red negligee stained orange at the armpits and then looked at himself in the mirror, his long black hair and feminine affect so much like hers, and the next morning he’d said his farewell and stood on the highway with his thumb out. He found his way to the city and ingested hallucinogens and made money for a month panhandling and turning sexual favors on the streets where his mother had done the same many years before, until one evening, when he stood on the bridge staring east toward the lighthouse on Alcatraz, he juggled the idea of jumping. There was a way to end suffering, and it really took no effort to achieve this, just a simple act of letting go, and there was something tremendously seductive in the music of that gesture of stepping onto the rail and dropping toward
the little island and the black water, something comforting in knowing that this was available to him, this means of breaking the circle of pain. And the pain was his beautiful mother dying slowly from booze and despair, her swollen face the day he’d left, and the pain was a man pressing too deep inside him, and the pain was the endless fields stripped bare and lifeless under the machinery of stupefied work crews, and the pain was the desperate children like him come to escape their lives in the city of love. The choice to live came down to a coin toss, a chance sign, a gull drifting above him among the bridge wires. If the bird flies to the right, I jump, he said to himself. To the left, I walk back.

Penny breathed deeply into her thoughts. She had the sensation of taking breath into the hidden places of her being, as if there were pulmonary recesses which housed memory, a grandfather falling dead, a beautiful child running on the beach, a brother whose mind was wounded by war, a darkly handsome father who’d left her mother for a woman near her own age. As she worked to let her body relax on the nearly empty vessel, staying aware of the spinning wheels on the rails and the whistling brakes, she saw, among the images of memory, a garish image of Jesus Christ from her aunt’s calendar. This Jesus had a wrestler’s muscular neck and a halo floating above his orange-brown hair at a slight angle, like a glowing UFO banking for a turn. A confectionary neon heart shone like a wild-cherry cough drop through his breast. Penny laughed and opened her eyes just as the streetcar stopped.

A young person with a dark face, with prominent cheeks and lustrous black hair falling across them in a feminine way, leaned
against a lamppost just beyond her window. Male or female in the loose blouse and harem pants, she couldn’t tell, but there was something beautiful and familiar in this person’s face. Through the glass their eyes met, and Penny’s heart jumped, and as the pneumatic door snapped shut and the car lurched forward she mouthed his name, and he nodded. Both of them opened their mouths and pointed as the train swiftly drew them apart, the one who had stood on the Golden Gate Bridge an hour earlier and decided against death by the direction of a bird’s flight and the other who’d returned in thought to that hidden mesa at the end of the world where a mother and child huddled under a blue poncho and waited for the shadow of death to pass over.

Mickey

M
ichelle Verbicaro, always called Mickey by everybody all her life, had an extra chromosome and a puppy with the same name as the president’s wife. She had a sister in college, a brother in the marines, and a funny older brother and baby sister who still lived at home. Mickey had the slightly Asiatic eyes, round face, and slumped shoulders of most people with Down syndrome, and she had thick, lustrous black hair which her mother kept trimmed in a bowl cut, and a laugh which was so contagious that an usher at the Oaks Theater in Berkeley often warned the projectionist to adjust the volume whenever Mickey arrived for a matinee.

One Saturday in the last month of the year, between the two turkey dinners, Mickey and Lady-Bird sneaked out for a walk while her mother was at the Lucky Store, and they talked the entire way about Mr. Santa Claus, who would be holding children on his lap at Hink’s and listening to them speak of whatever their hearts desired. Mickey’s heart had a big list, and this would be a special Christmas with the whole family there, and she had photographs of herself over the years sitting on Santa’s lap, but none since she’d reached
age fourteen because of a rule her mother had told her about, which she considered a dopy rule. She walked through her neighborhood of stucco houses in El Cerrito, past her Aunt Francesca’s and Nona Rosari’s and the homes of about seven other aunts and cousins, to the north edge of Berkeley.

It was a gray day with occasional showers, just Mickey and Lady-Bird’s favorite walking weather because nothing felt better when you were trudging along than a cold rain on your face. They made it to the top of Solano Avenue, where the theater was, and continued the only way Mickey knew to go, which was through the streetcar tunnel. This scared Lady-Bird so much that Mickey had to carry her. By the time they made it to the downtown Mickey’s feet were sore, so she took off her shoes and soaked her feet in a gutter which flowed with rainwater and hot-dog wrappers.

Mr. Santa Claus looked regal and thrilling at the end of the line of kids and parents in the opulent department store, but when she got closer she thought he’d lost weight and a certain spunk over the years. His eyes darted back and forth as her turn approached. He laughed without the big, throaty ho-ho-ho. When her turn came he put his hands up the way you let a dog know you won’t bite them if they won’t bite you, and his voice sounded like one of her dad’s friends’ at the card table late at night, kind of mean and impatient. No way, he said. You are too big and too . . . huge, in fact. This is for the little guys. You wanna break my kneecaps, Cookie? So solly. No can do. Please make room for the next customer.

Lady-Bird was licking her own pee-hole when Mickey came
out to the sidewalk, bawling, wishing she were as small as Lady-Bird herself. The two of them started for home and got a ride from her cousin Susan, who, among three other relatives, had been driving around for hours looking for her. Holy smoke, what happened, Mickey-Wicky? You’re soaked to the skin!

Mickey told her about Santa Claus, and Susan called Santa something which she’d never heard from a girl cousin, and she drove fast to Mickey’s house. Mickey’s mother’s eyes were like a raccoon’s when she ran up to hug her, and her mom and cousin were both crying with her and now and then saying mad things about Santa when her father, Joe, came home and said, Let me take care of this.

Joe had just left Spenger’s Fish Grotto, where he and the secretary from a local hardware store, Julie, had spent an hour with her hand on his leg talking about business. It felt good to have a legitimate reason to leave the house before his wife could ask him why he avoided her eyes and smelled of booze and scampi, and he drove to Hink’s and spoke with the manager, who called Santa from his chair to an office upstairs. Yeah? Santa said.

Bernie, the manager said, I’m sorry. Listen, Bernie, I thought you should talk with this gentleman.

Joe apologized before he told Santa that he’d apparently made his daughter, who was mentally a little slow, cry. Maybe it was the way he’d spoken to her?

Santa didn’t seem to know what he was talking about at first, but then he sort of remembered this huge retarded girl, all right.
Joe could smell the sour beer and mustard on the guy’s breath. I’m supposed to hold giant retards on my lap? Santa asked the manager.

Calm down, Bernie. The manager wiped his brow with a handkerchief.

Joe sized Santa up. Even through the cotton beard and padded velvet suit he could see that the guy was about ten years his junior, but Joe figured he could cut the suds-guzzling smart aleck in half with a couple of punches. I’m not your employer, he said, but if I was I’d kick your ass with your last paycheck right now.

Santa told him to perform an impossible sex act upon himself, and his black gloves at the ends of the furry white cuffs made fists. The manager, a nervous, balding man, stepped between them. Joe smiled and very slowly took off his sport coat and rolled his sleeves to the elbow. He held his chin up and smiled, and while his feet slid into the stance he’d boxed from years ago, his hands remained open, beckoning. Come on, he thought, give me your best shot, Fat Man. The manager convinced Santa that it was time for him to get back to work, but not before the man in the stuffed red suit had compared Joe to a part of the human anatomy used in excretion.

That guy is an embarrassment to Christmas. Joe put his coat back on.

He’s a nephew to one of the owners, the manager said.

Ah. Joe thought of his brothers, Narciso and Ludovico, one thick as a fence post, the other about as calm as a bantam rooster. I’m sorry. He’s going to get a candy cane up his ass if he’s not careful.