After two beers, when I had thoroughly soaked in the mood of the room and was feeling good, I thought it best to go back to my hotel before it got too late and the spell wore off.
• • •
Outside on the street the famous San Francisco fog had rolled back in. I walked leisurely in the direction of my hotel, listening to the foghorns blow somewhere out on the water I knew lay some distance behind me as the gentle slope of North Beach gave way to Fisherman’s Wharf. There were three of them and it seemed to me they blew in syncopation with one another, but perhaps my impression of this was influenced by all the jazz I’d just heard. It was funny . . . every once in a while I’d hear, see, or smell some little thing and it would hit me how far I’d traveled from home. I would hear a sea lion barking in the distance and it would dawn on me that I had come all the way across a continent and was now in California. I felt this way now as I strolled along the city streets listening to the foghorns.
I had made it about five blocks up Columbus Avenue when I reached into my coat pocket and felt the unfamiliar shape of something square and metallic. I pulled it out and found myself staring at a brass Zippo lighter. As my coat caught the light of a nearby streetlamp, I inspected its fabric a little more closely and a sudden realization seized me. I felt in the other pocket and was greeted with a small stack of greenbacks folded in half and held together by a silver money clip engraved with the initials J.A.B. A small shiver of dread passed over me, and I turned and instantly took off in a near run back in the direction of the jazz club. As I hurried along, I prayed I would be able to switch the coats without having to explain my mistake to anyone. I hoped I was not wearing a white man’s coat, as that could complicate the transaction.
Both of my prayers went unanswered. Immediately when I pushed my way back through the red upholstered door of the club’s entrance I glimpsed a man hovering in the front alcove, scratching his head and holding the coat I now recognized was mine. He was white; a young man, close in age to myself. As I drew closer I observed he was of medium height and build, with a vaguely olive complexion and genteel Roman features. A lock of hair fell over his furrowed brow and he frowned as he leaned his face down nearer to the coat, turning the garment over and over.
“Aha!” he said as soon as he caught sight of me and—moreover—the coat I was wearing. “And just in time! I couldn’t puzzle it out. Here I was, about to question whether I’d had too much drink.”
He smiled at me. His young face glowed in an open, easy manner. There was a curious sense of familiar warmth in it, and for a brief moment I lost my words.
“I’m terribly sorry,” I said, recovering. I shrugged out of his coat as quickly and delicately as possible, annoyed at myself for not thinking to remove it before I’d walked through the club door.
“You ought to be,” he said, still grinning. I noticed a faint trace of a Southern accent. “It’d probably be healthy for my liver if I did do some questioning on that subject.”
“I mean, for the mix-up,” I said. “It was an honest mistake.” I handed over his coat. He accepted it but made no immediate move to return my coat. Instead, he held both of them up to the meager lightbulb overhead.
“Would you look at that,” he said, squinting. “They’re remarkably similar. Except for the tiniest difference in the nap, eh?” I concurred, relieved as he finally released my coat to me. “What alerted you to the switcheroo?”
“I put my hands in the pockets,” I admitted.
“Oh yeah!” The young man snapped his fingers and abruptly plunged his hand into one of the pockets. As he produced the money clip, I felt a sudden sense of chagrin.
“Hey,” I said, unable to keep a harsh, defensive note from creeping into my voice. “It’s all there. You can count it.”
He chuckled. “No, no, no,” he said. “Take it easy! No one’s accusing you. I told the fellas I’ve been drinking with—see those guys over there?—that I’d pay for the next round. That’s why I came looking for my coat in the first place.”
“Oh.” I smiled, sheepish and relieved.
He looked at me, an expression of amusement lingering on his lips. He had the eyes of a brooding puppy; his irises were a deep, lush brown, while his eyelashes were very black and very long. I glanced away on gut instinct, as though I had looked at the sun.
“Say, I suppose I owe you a reward,” he said.
“Beg pardon?”
“A reward—you know, for bringing the coat back. When you lose something and someone takes the trouble to bring it back to you, it’s customary to give a reward.” His smile widened devilishly into a grin. “Will you accept payment in the form of a drink?”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Sure I do.”
I hesitated. I glanced over to where his friends were sitting. Three men sat hunched over in a booth. The sight of them made me uneasy, and an image of Rusty flashed through my mind.
“That wouldn’t make sense,” I said. “I’m the reason for the mix-up in the first place.” I gestured to the coat in the crook of my arm. “And besides, if I’ve returned your coat to you, it’s fair to say you’ve also returned my coat to me.”
“You make an excellent point,” he said. He took his coat, hung it back up on a coat-peg, and threw his arm around me. “In that case we both owe each other a reward; we’ll have to make it two drinks apiece.” He winked. “C’mon, you can help carry.” He propelled me in the direction of the bar. “I’m Joey,” he added.
Behind me I could hear the sounds of another jazz ensemble taking the stage and tuning up.
“Miles,” I answered.
“Where’re you from, Miles?”
“New York.”
We ordered a round of whiskey neat and carried the drinks over to the booth. His friends peered curiously in my direction. They were arranged—completely by accident, I suppose—in a sort of chromatic-gradation scale according to their respective coloring: on the far right sat a freckly towhead, the man in the middle was sandy-haired, and on the left was a brunet wearing glasses.
“Fellas, I’d like you to meet Miles, joining us all the way from New York. Fate, by way of wool coat, has brought him to us tonight.”
We slid into the left side of the booth, where Joey perpetuated their color wheel with his olive skin and dark locks, and I completed it in a way I’m sure they had not anticipated. They whistled upon his pronouncement.
“Long way from home, ain’t ya?” said the sandy-haired man. It wasn’t rude, but it wasn’t altogether welcoming, either. He begrudgingly scooted over to make room in the booth and the seat trembled with the force of it. He was not quite fat, but there was an unapologetic stoutness about him that suggested he was once an overweight child and that he had managed to channel his sizable mass into a role as a playground bully.
“I suppose,” I said.
“Over there is my buddy Eddie,” Joey said, pointing to the towhead and working counter-clockwise. “And Eddie and I have just met Bill and Donald here.”
“How do you do,” I said.
They nodded politely. There was a funny atmosphere around the table, as though I had interrupted something already in progress. I took a swallow of whiskey, the amber liquid catching the glow of the flickering candle that sat in the middle of the table. Joey watched the light on my face closely as I drank, smiling at me as though we were old acquaintances and he’d just remembered some of the reasons behind his great fondness for me.
He was, I realized, an extremely handsome young man. I looked around the table at the others. There was more of an age difference between them than was detectable at first glance. I’d guessed Joey to be twenty-five or thereabouts, and only Eddie, the towhead, appeared to be similar in age. As my eyes readjusted to the dim light of the darkened booth, I saw there were bags under Bill’s eyes and a certain puffy looseness to his jawline that suggested h
e was closer to forty. Donald, too, seemed older. The initial impression of youth he gave off was the product of a certain kind of fastidiousness, for he was trim, his dark hair was combed with precision, and his turtleneck and glasses had been selected with great care. His complexion was also smooth and well kept, but there were a number of minute telltale signs that gave him away: the tiniest crinkling at the outside corners of his eyes, a handful of silver threads woven into the dark brown around his temples.
“So, Miles,” Joey said, turning to me and carrying on our conversation as though we were alone in the booth. “Are you going to tell me why you’re carrying around jars of strange-looking bugs in your coat pockets?”
I felt my face flush. It hadn’t dawned on me that, while I’d discovered the contents of his pockets, he’d likely discovered the same in return. “My kid brother collects insects,” I said. “They’re for him.”
“Sounds like you’re a good big brother,” he said, smiling. Then he frowned. “Say, does that mean you kill the bugs, or do you let ’em live?”
“Cob—that’s my kid brother—when he finds an insect that’s already dead, he pins them to a board, but only if they’re already dead. There are tiny holes in the lids of those jars; I was going to try to bring them back to New York alive. He builds terrariums for them.”
The frown disappeared and Joey smiled again, evidently pleased by this answer. It was oddly touching that he should care about the lives of a few insects. There was something about Joey’s slouchy confidence and ease of manner that reminded me of Bobby. Yet, at the same time, there was an air of kindness and sensitivity about Joey that Bobby lacked.
Across the booth, the conversation was getting rowdy. We paused to listen for a few moments, and I inferred that Donald had been teaching Eddie to say something in French, a turn of events that had stout, far-from-francophone Bill incensed.
“Don’t listen to him!” he hollered at Eddie and pointed to Donald. “He can’t talk a lick of French; he only wants you to think he can. It’s all gibberish. Who knows what he’s saying? Go to Paris and repeat that to any Frenchman on the street and they’ll punch you in the nose.” Donald’s trim, compact body stiffened.
“Perhaps they might,” Donald said, smiling condescendingly at Bill and giving Eddie a wicked, lascivious wink. “But not because it’s gibberish.”
“Anyway, who needs Paris? Travel’s a waste of dough, if you ask me,” Bill said. “You come home with nothing to show for it. Unless you count automobiles—I just bought myself a cherry of a Ford,” he said, his mouth twisting into a boastful smirk. It was clear he’d been thinking of how to segue to this very fact for the better part of the evening. “It’s parked right out front.”
“Hold on, now; you have a car here?” Joey asked. Joey’s renewed interest in their conversation made Bill smile. He puffed out his chest with fresh optimism.
“Sure do,” he said.
“Well, why didn’t you say so?” Joey said. “What’re we doing, sitting here, when we could be out taking a spin?”
And just like that, with Joey’s charming white smile shining like a lighthouse beacon around the booth, it was decided. We finished our drinks and Joey cajoled the group into action. I racked my brain for a way to remain behind, for as much as I had taken a genuine liking to Joey, I didn’t care for the rest of them and I didn’t want to go along. The idea of getting into Bill’s car filled me with dread. I worried about being taken to a part of the city where I wouldn’t be able to handle myself. Everyone rose from the table and shuffled out the door. I followed reluctantly, drifting behind until Joey doubled back and threw an arm around me, herding me along.
“Ain’t she a beaut?” Bill said as we approached a very shiny four-door, two-tone red-and-white Ford Fairlane parked at the curb.
I composed a few excuses and tested them out silently in my head, but I cringed when I pictured delivering any of them to Joey, flashing back to the expression of betrayed disappointment I’d glimpsed on the young man’s face at the Hamilton Lodge Ball. I had only just met Joey, but for reasons I didn’t quite understand, I couldn’t stand the thought of seeing that same expression appear on his face. I would go along, I decided—for now.
I climbed into Bill’s shiny Ford, Joey on my heels and the whiskey and jazz from the club swirling in my head. The engine growled to life and we rolled down the windows to breathe in the cool, fog-laden night air.
We drove all over the city that night. It was a kind of alcohol-fueled informal tour, and the reason when I think of San Francisco now, I feel instantly light-headed and see a ghostly blur of neon from the all lights on Broadway and Geary. Someone—I can’t remember which of those boys now—cooked up the crazy idea that we should take the car down Lombard Street. It was one o’clock in the morning and the tourists who usually swarmed all over Lombard were absent, the unusual stretch of street looking like an abandoned playground. I can recall us hooting and hollering with terror as we crested the hill and dropped down into the stretch of redbrick switchbacks that are known to make up “the Crookedest Street in America.”
“Let’s do it again,” Joey cheered, once we had reached the bottom of the street. “Loop around, and let’s take turns. We’ll each try to go as fast as we can, and we can see who drives it best.” Had anyone else suggested it, I am certain Bill would’ve frowned and denied the request. But as I watched him turn to face Joey, proud of the excitement he had instilled in the beautiful boy that Joey was, it was plain that Bill was hungry to do anything that would produce more of that effect, and soon enough we were at the top of the hill again. Someone called out, “Chinese fire drill!” and we all jumped out, ran around the car clockwise, and jumped back in, this time with Joey behind the wheel.
Joey piloted us down the hill without incident, save for one little bump of the right front tire to the curb as he turned down the second switchback. He hadn’t driven it any faster than Bill had, but we all cheered him at the bottom; very likely our motivations were more invested in seeing his radiant face illuminate again than to congratulate him on his mediocre driving skills. After Joey, Eddie was given a turn, and then Donald. Donald took his watch off and the four of them passed it around in order to time one another, each of them trying to top one another’s speed. Eddie turned out to be an expert driver; Donald was not. I’m fairly certain there was a potted plant in some kind of Grecian-looking urn in front of one of those elaborate Victorian homes that didn’t wholly survive our misadventure that night. At one point a police car came trolling around, the officers peering into our automobile with disapproving eyes, debating whether to pull us over for cruising. It was clear they had their suspicions about a car full of men. We drove away for a little while, until Joey insisted we go back.
Bill’s interest in the activity dwindled along with his enthusiasm for each successive driver, and by the time Donald had completed his descent and returned us to the top of the hill, Bill was done with the business of letting other men put minor dings and dents on the great shiny body of his treasured Fairlane.
“Awright,” he said. “Enough’s enough. Let’s go see about a li’l house-party I heard about over in the Mission.”
“Wait a minute,” Joey said. “Miles hasn’t had his turn.”
“Miles doesn’t need a turn, do you, Miles?” Bill said, not turning around to look at me where I sat in the backseat.
“Suppose not,” I said. In truth, I hadn’t wanted one.
“See? Miles forfeits his turn. Now let’s get to that party.”
“He can’t forfeit,” Joey insisted. He was sitting next to me and reached over to squeeze my hand. I felt a strange jolt of electricity. “I want to see him drive it. Let’s just go down one more time.”
Bill sighed, and this time he did turn around. He gave me a good once-over, glaring at me from the front seat. His eyes found the place where Joey’s hand remained on my own, and then rested the
re. He pursed his lips in bitterness. I tried my best to signal my innocence, that he was mistaken about me, but he took little notice.
“Does he even know how to drive a car?” Bill asked aloud, as if I weren’t present.
“Only one way to find out,” Joey said, turning to me and winking.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Bill said. “Fine. Let’s get this over with. I can’t believe I’m putting up with this cockamamie idea.”
“Why don’t you want to let him drive?” Joey pursued.
“I think you know why.”
“What’s the big deal, Bill?” Donald asked. “Negros have been driving us around in cars for ages. One more night isn’t going to hurt any.”
Bill was pleased by the demeaning comment, for he guffawed loudly. “Hah. All right, fine; I give. Everybody out!”
We got out and switched places. But by then the atmosphere had changed. There was no giddy dashing about the car and joyous slamming of doors. We simply got out and marched in a somber circle. I climbed into the driver’s seat, aware of Bill sliding into the backseat directly behind me. The car doors clicked shut and Bill leaned over my shoulder, his hot breath spilling over my neck.
“You’d better damn well know how to drive, boy,” he growled.
“Look, fellas, I really don’t have to do this,” I said. I tried to make my voice as relaxed and friendly as I could manage.
“Yes, you do,” said Joey. “I’ve got my money riding on you being the best driver here.”
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