America Was Hard to Find

by Kathleen Alcott

  The other line is another story totally, faces and postures as different as they come. One bearded man, a head taller than everybody—whom I remember as having some trail mix in his pocket that he kept offering the Guardsmen in a peculiar kind of taunt, saying, Time for a snack, boys?—is in the middle of a leap, has both fingers pointed and a knee raised almost high enough to clear a nipple. The woman behind him, masked in sunglasses and a cut-off pullover sweatshirt, is rooted in her feet and hips but with her torso flown forward and her curled tongue a millimeter away from licking one in the row of barrels. Shin’ya, a friend of my mother’s who once took me to Japantown and bought me wooden sandals so beautiful I could never wear them, is there in that line, too. Her inquiring look coming up through her lashes, her hair falling down a dress I would remember even if it weren’t for that photo—empire waisted and powder blue and always dirty around the floor-length hem. She was the one who helped me gather the flowers, that morning. My mother didn’t attend any protests by then, thought of them as a waste.

  I’m the boy, first in the line opposite the guard, with the chrysanthemums—they were white and purple—placing the stems in the guns. It surfaces every few years, the cover of some anthology. There are some secrets to the image, some undersides that would belie the message it sent of an American child demonstrating on behalf of other children, or maybe just a boy focused on keeping thirty of a million guns from going off.

  I was angry with my mother when I woke up that day, for reasons I can’t remember now, although I could provide you with a litany of possibilities and past offenses. The time she gave my cot to a fucked-up vet whose fetid piss I never got out, the money I’d set aside over months for the revised edition of Birds Over America that she took from my duct-taped wallet and spent on brown rice and vegetables for fifteen people I’d never seen before. Shin’ya knew this and had invited me for a walk and to this protest in a way that felt adult, not like she was obviating a mother-son conflict as a favor to both of us but like she took real interest in me as an individual. I wasn’t the twelve-year-old son of a woman whose politics she admired but a boy who could tell her what he’d learned, and while we walked in Golden Gate Park, she listening to me talk about the native and nonnative plants, I thought we might look like lovers. I was so emboldened by this that when we ran into a friend of hers, a man who said how long has it been six months and kissed her on the mouth, I accepted the mushrooms he offered shortly thereafter with a temerity that was unlike me. I was a kid who had once, when we had first arrived in the country, slept in a wolf costume mask for a week, comforted by the idea that in my sleep I would not be recognized. We ate them with some walnut bread Shin’ya pulled from her loose-knit white yarn purse—an object I would fixate on when I peaked—and a bar of chocolate the man, who introduced himself as Larry, a.k.a. Soft Serve, a.k.a. Cuttlefish, kept in his front pocket for occasions such as these.

  It’s certain you wouldn’t touch them, so I guess I’ll tell you how drugs like those bring about a kind of splitting, unrivaled in my sober life—a division of the world into what we can afford and what we cannot, what we wish to understand and refuse to consider. Colors deepened around me, yes, and I saw into the root systems of trees and how far down the stems of the lily pads in those turbid ponds reached, but more so I became aware of my ability to instantly accept or reject. I loved Shin’ya, her mouth that was parted in surprise or disgust more often than not, the cut of her dress, empire waist as I said, which made her movement seem invisible, not related to a body. Also the copses of eucalyptus and a toddler running across a sandy path with a ball held way aloft in his hand, also the Victorian greenhouse that housed the Conservatory of Flowers, because the oxidizing copper detail made sense to me, the depth and microscopic dynamism of it. Then there were the things I hated, occurring to me as enemies the moment I saw them: The stone archways that cut through hills, five degrees cooler and host to a library of urine smells. Larry, who asked me how I was doing, little man, how I was feeling, once a minute. I remember that I couldn’t look at my sweatshirt, something I’d worn almost every day for weeks—San Francisco is so much colder than it looks in photos—because the stains there, usually imperceptible, the coffee I’d started to drink and the plain chicken broth I sometimes had for lunch and the beer somebody’d spilled on me halfway through his argument with Annabelle, were suddenly vivid. Overlapping, layered by age and intensity, sallow and mottled and distended, they were a loud billboard of the things that frightened me about my life, how dirty it was, how much it was changed each day by how many different people. You’ll notice I’m bare armed in that photo, though everyone else has the benefit of some suede or flannel, and there’s a reason for that. I had abandoned that sweatshirt an hour before, making a sound of such relief that it delighted Shin’ya, and she followed me giggling as we ran from it. It was after that I picked the flowers, apologizing loudly to each stalk I picked.

  That we made it to that protest at all is a shock to me. When we first lined up I could not look at those men in uniforms. I believed that my thinking and seeing had been altered permanently, that I would always be the prey of arches and clocks, bearded men and mirrors.

  I don’t remember the photographer being there at all. What I remember is seeing the row of barrels, all at the same level, and they were marked very clearly to me as being on the wrong side of the binary that the whole world had become, a string of horrible mouths that were starving but refused to eat. I should say that at this moment my fear was at its zenith. Each of my ribs felt distinct, not part of a system, ready to collapse at any second. My underwear, which had rockets on the elastic hem, some bizarre bid to any remaining childhood my mother had chosen for me, was ruined with piss. It occurred to me then that there was something I needed to be doing, and I loped up to the first gun and removed a stalk from the ragged bouquet in my hand and slipped it in, making sure the petals were flush with the rim, and then I made my way down the line. When I ran out of flowers, a wrist with bells around it appeared with more.

  The image itself is so comforting that for a long time I wanted to believe what it said, that here was a boy making himself clear about the country he wanted, a child turning a weapon into something else. But if I look closely at it, the deliberate way my hair was arranged to block the periphery I was too afraid to see, the hipbones that shouldn’t have been exposed in that forty-degree weather, I know what was captured there was a plea, simple and private, to slide down that time in a way I could bear. I’ve never told anyone this, because I like the illusion better and I wouldn’t want to take it from the people who might have been moved by it.

  A part of me can’t believe I’m on my way back, and another knows it was inevitable. Have you ever spent any time in Northern California? It’s almost always too cold to swim, but people still arrange their lives around the ocean. That you’ll never read these letters has become a comfort to me. I can thank you for that, at least. I hope you’re sleeping well, dreaming easy.

  Yours,

  Wright

  2.

  SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, 1981

  Wright’s life in San Francisco revealed itself in a matter of forty-eight hours, coming to him like he’d called it by its name. He saw a boy in a crisp white shirt and apron and wanted to be him, so he forged a food service résumé, naming nonexistent restaurants and responsibilities with a certain pleasure, Debbi’s Late Nite, oversight of the midnight rush, Alliman’s Bistro, knowledge of a diverse wine list. He removed the wrinkles from his clothes by hanging them in the shower of the gym that had offered a free trial membership.

  The second restaurant he wandered into offered him a position. It was a wine bar with a small menu where people ate on a slanted, triangular patio, the servers always placing wadded linen napkins under the tables to keep glasses of coastal pinot gris from sliding off them. The manager, Judy, was first a cigarette and then the body that needed it, and she spent ten seconds on the piece of paper bearing his name but a mi
nute on his jawline and deltoids.

  “Fucking Anthony with the legs just quit,” she said. “Could you come back for the dinner rush? We have an opener but need a backup.”

  “Tonight?”

  “No, babe, in the year 2020. Wear some silver leggings. I’ll be the head in a jar, okay?” She immobilized her neck and deadened her eyes and began to speak in a kind of mechanized chirp. “This body was no temple.”

  Judy, the other waiter explained as the sun went down on Market, was a mostly lovable figurehead, there primarily to fill the duty of tasting the wines. He was sleek and compact, Braden, originally from Ohio, which he revealed in a whisper, and he did a practiced impression of her at the bar, the wobble of her fingers with the Camel Light, Is it corked, I dunno, lips smacking, I have a feeling it must be corked but I need another sip to know for sure. They were standing in the hall between the kitchen and the dining room, rolling silverware into napkins, the knives’ blades slipped between the tines of forks and then swaddled in an elaborate fold Wright could not get the hang of.

  “Congratulations on the nomination,” he said. Wright took a breath and a quick survey of Braden’s face and another set of steaming silverware from the plastic bucket.

  “What?”

  “Your résumé. It’s up for the Nobel Prize in literature. A rich, devastating fiction, they’re calling it.”

  “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry.”

  “Mostly the latter.”

  He was in Wright’s ear the whole night, issuing an instruction, averting catastrophe, handing him the tapenade or soup spoon he’d forgotten, calling Wright honey in a way that humiliated him. Later he remembered only this, the voice coming to his rescue under the strings of lights that laced the wild-vined terrace, how natural Braden looked, making his body small and light to land an entrée at a far table, then dense and thick to demand some missing order in the narrow window that led to the kitchen.

  Sitting at the bar afterward, in the shadow of the chairs piled on tables, Wright kissed him. In the long second before, when he was leaning in and taking Braden’s face in his hands, he told himself he would have kissed anyone who had shown him a kindness.

  Braden put a hand on each shoulder and pushed him away, humming a terse note like a machine malfunctioning.

  “Nothankyou,” he said. “I don’t kiss boys who are pretending to be straight.”

  Wright stood and untied the apron from around his waist, removing the Bic and the steno pad, and he rolled it on the bar and then made a gesture to indicate his departure.

  “Did you just salute me?”

  He laughed, though his lungs felt wet and nothing was funny, certainly not the way he was living his life, following any impulse and then balking when it would not embrace him. Braden patted the stool.

  “Planning on living in your car, babe?” he said.

  Braden pointed at his clavicle, circling his index finger in a tight clockwise rotation.

  “Oh god.” The little laminate ID necklace from the gym hung on its fluorescent green lanyard, showing through at his top buttons. “It was there all night? You knew just from that?”

  “Not quite. That and your Ford, which I saw you sleeping in on my way in this morning. I don’t know, it broke my heart. I couldn’t say anything. I had a feeling you’d walk off midshift anyway, especially after you almost spilled scalding consommé on that fairly charismatic baby.”

  He laid his head on the bar and Braden gave it a paternal ruffle. After they finished a bottle Judy had opened but forgotten, he offered Wright the room, walking distance if you could stand the hills, there was a reason men in San Francisco had such beautiful asses, rent he could make easily from a few weekend rushes, enough sunlight that it changed the feeling of the room, charged it. Like the presence of someone you loved sleeping in it, Wright thought, when he walked in, pulling loose cash for the deposit from his pocket right then.

  3.

  Braden’s personality was like a feature of the apartment—crown molding, bay windows, his hungover voice coming down the hall in the morning. “I feel like a goddamned aborted murder.” His cheerful march down the hallway, his singing in the afternoon and his culinary catastrophes, little bits of green onion that ended up flung far from the stove, remnants of yolk and demerara sugar that crusted in bowls in the sink. Around a mattress on the floor in his bedroom he had arranged a choir of antique ladders, peeling and leaning, and at the top of one a rubber plant he referred to as My Wife Doris. “Gotta get home to Doris,” he would say. “Gotta get home to the wife.”

  Wright furnished his bedroom as though it were his vocation, adding or altering something every day. He bought a lacquered wooden tray, Japanese, that he kept on his dresser, and on it every night, next to the moisturizer he had begun using and a vial of cassia oil he dabbed at his throat, he put his cheap rubber watch and the turquoise ring of Fay’s. Although it meant welcoming whatever draft or chill came in, he put his bed in the U made by the bay window, at its top the abandoned maple headboard of what had been a sleigh frame, and spread over its length a quilt he had splurged on, navy and maroon checked with cream.

  At the ends of the nights in the bars where they gave away their money, laying it damp and crippled by the gin and tonics, they sat for photo booth pictures, Braden always the star, Wright waiting after in the sulfuric smell for the strip to fall down behind the band of metal. He hung the highlights in his room with wooden laundry pins on fishing wire. In the undisputed favorite, Braden poured a beer onto an unknowing Wright’s head, filling the next frame with Wright’s cursing mouth and sopping hair and leaving Braden, in the last, alone and delighted, hands to his cheeks.

  That everything was new about his life, all of it the invention of a golden flash of time, did not feel strange or false because this was true of almost everyone he knew, boys whose families went exclusively unmentioned. They were, those buttoned-up people in pretty side-gabled houses, those Maries and Dons, those owners of station wagons and Kodak projectors, essentially only places his friends had once lived.

  He spent the first three months there waiting for the moment he would be asked, sometimes leaving the table at the bar or the low-slung couch if the matter of hometowns came up, until he realized that in saying nothing he was communicating a great deal. Braden was the only one who knew about Fay, and he asked very few questions, something that made Wright grateful at first and resentful later—why was it only living parents who were the subject of the conversational offhand, did your mother cook growing up, were you raised religious.

  Whatever anyone else assumed, a renouncement at Thanksgiving or the locks on the family house changed, was not, he felt, so different from reality, at least in visible consequence. It made him feel like one of many among them, those whose only life was the one that could be confirmed by others. The suede and denim layered against the fog, the gossip at breakfast, all the men he kissed, nearsighted or clean-shaven, deep brown or pale and blond, supplicant or adversarial, long and warm and alive.

  * * *

  October 3, 1983

  Dear Mr. Kahn,

  I know I said I wouldn’t call your mother again, and I’m sorry. It happens sometimes when I drink, that I pick up the phone, and it might not even be a sad thing—I just want to hear as many voices as possible, before I go to bed, as many places. I’ll call the late-night desk at the newspaper and ask what I might find in the morning edition, I’ll call the mechanic with a made-up problem and ask for an estimate. I think POPCORN might be the most beautiful phone number there is—the sound of that woman telling me the exact moment one minute becomes another makes me feel like a part of the world’s order. In any case, about your mom, she hung up the first time and didn’t answer the next. She didn’t seem to remember the conversations we’d had about you, the things she’d told me.

  It’s strange to be back in California, so close to my grandparents, without their knowing. I never returned the last letter they sent, just cashed the check. Although I
keep telling myself I’ll drive over the bridge the next time I have two days off, then I think—why? Why put any of us through that, the complicated lie of it? If there’s anything I love about this country, it’s the acceptability of calling shared blood an accident. I never knew my aunt, just how she suffered, at the hands of her family, because of who she wanted to fuck, and there’s no part of that I’m interested in—the neutral pronouns and mysterious descriptors I might use, when talking to my grandparents, to hide the fact that I like men. Is it possible it’s a kindness, not telling them?

  There was a joke among the members of Shelter, that if you wanted to join your dad needed to own homes in two climates. Randy was an exception to this, and my mother was fundamentally not. It occurs to me that a convincing performance of destitution, the trash fires and meals of stray cats, was possible for her and Annabelle, whose grandfather patented superglue, only because they had come so far from the other end. What’s funny is that who my mother became, ashamed of her parents’ wealth, turned Claudette and James further into the isolation their money had afforded them. They moved from Orange County, where at least there had been visits to the orchards, civic committees and whatnot, to a house on a hill in a town where they knew no one. By the time I got there, they had stopped taking new photos.

  The summer of the meat shortage and the oil crisis and the Watergate hearings was my first with my grandparents, and I was addicted to the television like some boys are to porn. Unrepentant Nixon voters with bumper stickers to boot, my grandparents started watching the hearings in support of my curiosity, perhaps thinking that it was in avoiding political conversations with my mother they had lost her. In the beginning Claudette, who usually relied on the housekeeper Miranda to boil water, made popcorn.