Not Dead Yet

by Herbert Gold

  I tried to drive carefully. My effort was not successful. Suffering a drastic sudden impulse to telephone my wife, I parked near a pay phone on a steep San Francisco hill. (“And another thing I wanted to say…”) I neglected to pull the hand brake and curb the wheels. The Fiat started to roll, me frantically chasing it. A pair of compassionate gay men saw what was happening and drove their automobile in front of mine to block the imminent catastrophe at an intersection. When I visited them later with money and flowers, they blushed modestly, and one said, “Always glad to be of service, anytime.” I promised better motoring care in the future.

  I was looking not to find my way, but to find a way to look for it that kept me alive; that is, kept me awake and not a danger to others. Maybe I could learn to enjoy my misery because it was another approach to the interesting world out there.

  I curbed my wheels on hills. I paid attention. In a time of bad fortune, I reminded myself of my good fortune in life.

  Back in the beatnik flat above North Beach where I had lived before Melissa and I met, unable to sleep, I followed my own course of insomnia treatment—giving up sleeping. San Francisco permits year-round night wandering without galoshes or an overcoat even if the head was abjectly lowered and the shoulders hunched until I reminded myself: Raise head. Unhunch shoulders. You're not dead yet. The four directions were each different: north to the Bay, Aquatic Park, and Fisherman's Wharf with its sea smells mixed with decaying crab and fish head pungencies, awaiting scavengers, attended by furtive rats but no tourists at three in the morning; south toward Nob Hill and chic hotels, especially the Fairmont with its all-night brasserie, welcoming jet-lagged tourists along with pimps and their girls reaping the rewards of after-work Rest & Recreation (eggs, pancakes, a kind word or two, plus Mission Control debriefing); east into North Beach, where a few drunks might still be stumbling among the homeless in doorways, shooting up if they were lucky enough to cop their drugs; west toward Polk, formerly the gay main street, now replaced by Castro, but still housing a few traditional bars, such as the White Swallow.

  Tonight I chose Polk. There would be company, runaways selling drugs or themselves, gray wolves cruising for boys or drugs, a depressed midway of night scavengers prowling in the eerie glow of neon and fog-shrouded streetlamps. Besides the men's shop called The Gray Wolf, servicing aging Polk Street trollers, and the White Swallow bar, Hard On Leathers, and Travel Agency for Trips, there was a selection of twenty-four-hour adult bookstores catering to every marketable specialty. Transvestites and transsexuals waited for something to happen. At the intersection of Polk and Geary, female vigilantes from the Jewish Lesbian Gang watched over the traffic, looking for roaming homophobes to beat up. After a stroll among nature and nurture, I planned to take breakfast at the all-night, sometimes most-of-the-night, diner at Polk and Pine. It was designed to resemble a car on a train crossing great, true hearted America and issuing lonely hooting calls over the plains. But then again, I wasn't sure about many things, including where to have breakfast.

  Many of the men in doorways with a red glow on their faces, ardently inhaling whatever they were smoking, stood with the lowered head and hunched shoulders I had forbidden for myself. They may have thought they looked like James Dean, but they didn't. As I went by, a young man moved forward from under the canopy of a spiritual bookstore, asking, “So how are you this evening?”

  I didn't correct him. Four A.M. is no longer evening. It should be called “night.” He wasn't looking for linguistic pedantry, and I wasn't looking for what he was offering; I was looking for fresh-squeezed orange juice. At that time on Polk in San Francisco, unlike at four A.M. in my home town of Cleveland, a diner stood open nearby for fresh-squeezed orange juice, coffee, doughnuts, and muffins, and behind the counter, her legs wide, a heavy-lidded Cantonese woman waited with tongs for muffin-lifting and a baseball bat for head-bashing. She was seriously balding and had dyed her scalp to match her shopping-bag-pink hair. I sipped juice, warmed my hands on a mug of coffee, took pleasure in my moroseness. Alcohol-comedown beveraging was in progress at a table where another night wanderer muttered at the spillage from his own or a previous customer's mug. Despite our gray-flecked beards and discontented faces, there were significant differences between us. His coffee was black, mine had milk in it. The diner glowed: tiles, formica, mirrors, flickering fluorescent tubes, a different version of great, true-hearted America. Most of the other men—there were no women customers—were on stools at the counter with U.S. currency peeking out of their shirt pockets (drugs on offer) or red bandannas hanging from the back pockets of jeans (sex on offer, individual specialty signaled by whether it was the left or right pocket that displayed the bandanna.)

  The red-bandanna guys thought I was a gray wolf, but I was merely an insomniac night wanderer. The U.S. currency guys must have thought I was a busted alkie because I showed no life. Sipping juice, sipping coffee, giving up on sleep, waiting for dawn, I didn't know what I was. This was mildly consoling. At least I was ready for alternatives.

  Elsewhere, my children were asleep and my wife was cuddled asleep or awake in a way my entire body remembered with a shiver. With someone not the father of her children. Not me. So how was I this evening? Not great.

  One persistent young man, a double-threat conglomerate, both a red bandanna hanging from the left back pocket of his jeans and money peeking from his snap-button shirt pocket, smiled and moved closer. An unsnapped pink button flashed a glimpse of chest; his eyes crinkled like a Marlboro cowboy's; he knew how to jump-start a friendship. “Howdy, dude,” he said, “so don't you deserve someone to be an excellent pal this evening?”

  No, thanks; orange juice and coffee were just fine.

  Stoked by distraction and memories, also half a bran muffin, and having walked the length of the street, I noticed that the sky was beginning to brighten. Pigeons were following their nighttime snacks with early-morning breakfast on pizza rinds left at curbs, and now the dawn pink shimmered in the fog and two scavenger trucks were grinding at the intersection and my legs were tired. The rats scurrying underfoot didn't fear me; they scurried only because they were in a hurry to get to the pizza, takeout chow mein, and with luck, a baby pigeon, before their colleagues buried their own snouts in grease or feathers. There was enough for all, but rats don't stop to think with generosity. This Styrofoam container right here might spill out the last noodles on earth.

  I climbed the hill toward my apartment. I might be able to sleep. Later in the day, I wanted to be awake, lively, and emanating cheer-ismo for the children in their mother's house.

  Night again, another night, unavoidable, very tired, breathing shallowly but making the rational choice—go to bed. I dropped into sleep, followed by a stomach-churning dream, which of course led to the abrupt end of sleep. I sat up with a start. The nightmare I could not abide was the one where the woman who had taken my arm with love, filled my arms with warmth, was telling me that our two sons and daughter were not my children. In real life she didn't tell me this, but I heard her saying it in a nightmare and leapt awake, nauseated, sobbing. It wasn't so, I knew it wasn't so, and yet the nightmare declared it to be so. We had slept in each other's arms, seized each other on Mount Tamalpais, laughing and sliding on weeds and fallen eucalyptus leaves, devouring each other. I had swaggered around, declaring her a statistical miracle. So how could our history be erased? If it was—the logic of nightmare—these children who resembled us both, ideal mixtures of Ashkenazic Jew and Anglo-Scottish WASP, were… But of course this was only a nightmare, as I knew, of course I knew, and was attacked by it anyway.

  It was still another night filled with the sleep devils. Better to wake and walk. The city offered another night of gloom for my enjoyment.

  This time it needed to end with breakfast at the all-night brasserie in the Fairmont Hotel. I was hungry for an omelet, blueberry pancakes, or corned beef hash, like a business traveler from Japan or Germany. The time-zone victims might look less haggard and red-eyed
than the fellow who lived less than ten blocks away. Divorce is not the moral equivalent of jet lag, but like jet lag, this pain doesn't last forever, unless it does. I assumed I could outlast my misery and nightmares if they were serving fresh blueberry pancakes.

  I walked down Russian Hill and up the slope of Nob Hill, passing a New York Times box, and decided to use my quarters here. It was dark and cold, a winter fog hanging heavy. I inserted my coins, opened the box. A tall man with a little goatee stepped out of the darkness, opened a briefcase, showed me a pistol, and said politely, “Put your wallet in here, sir.” Another man, short and broad, stood behind him.

  What went through my mind was: Odd that he didn't hold the pistol in his hand. What followed was: If I let go of the newspaper box, I'll forfeit my quarters. What followed—no, the three thoughts were simultaneous—was: Run.

  I grabbed The New York Times and took off without warmup at a speed that had once snapped my Achilles tendon. This time the only damage was an insult from the two polite robbers: “Asshole!”

  My muggers seemed to be too lazy to chase me. A few blocks away, I flagged down a police car. I was sure I would recognize the robbers. The cops put me in the car, and we toured the neighborhood. No luck. Later, the cops brought a sheet with photos of black and brown men: four with goatees, four without and short. I was sure I would pick out the right guys. I couldn't. No smart witnessing. The cops told me the “Mutt and Jeff bandits” had, an hour before our meeting, broken the arm of a stockbroker headed for his office. Brokerage firms need to prepare for the New York opening. Due to the time change, they are early risers, walking down Telegraph, Russian, and Nob hills like spirits of the night in business suits. My two would-be muggers were known as Mutt and Jeff because one was tall and the other short. Perhaps they didn't chase me because they were tired after beating up a broker, stripping off his clothes. Could I please, the cops asked, help them out?

  I still couldn't choose among the photos. “I pride myself on my powers of observation,” I muttered.

  “So try again. Make a stab.”

  “The short one had an ass as big as all outdoors.”

  “Ha-ha,” said the black cop with no humor at all except the irritated kind. “You're not trying.”

  I tried again. I failed. The two policemen who crowded my flat the next day were as disappointed in me as the muggers had been. Not only had I failed to keep my marriage going in a time when many failed, but also I failed to identify the Mutt and Jeff who interrupted my quest for healing all-night blueberry pancakes.

  The night of my mugging was a night without rest, but there will always be more, won't there? I missed my dreams of loss; metabolism took over. With sunlight, the miracle of alertness returned when I played softball with my children in the schoolyard across the street from their mother's house. “Just pitch! And don't throw the bat!”

  So regular it seemed endless was the supply of nights. I awakened from the memory dream of holding my wife in my arms during a time when all the world, and especially Bob Dylan, The Band, Joan Baez, and the taste of love, were young. Surely they were, maybe I wasn't, but seeming had been sufficient unto that day. On still another night, I arose from my bed and headed for the brasserie at the Fairmont for those delayed blueberry… well, to change my luck, maybe something else.

  I passed The New York Times box at Clay and Taylor and wondered if Mutt and Jeff had ever been caught. There was dew on the box; there was a fresh stack of papers; but I decided not to dilute the pleasure of my oncoming pancake treats with a bath in world disasters. After making my way through the ornate, glowing, dimmed lobby, clerks and security guards sleepily on duty, I found company in the brasserie, a little group of German travelers applying beer to their jet lag, and the usual pimps with their girls enjoying R&R after an evening's work well or at least adequately done. Like them, I was a night scavenger.

  But I could still surprise myself. “I'll have the French toast and a pot of coffee.”

  “Good choice,” murmured the waiter, dutiful, but tired of saying the same thing to everyone. Little did he know that my blueberry pancake plan had gone astray.

  “And the orange juice, is it fresh?” Todd (according to his badge) didn't good-choice me, so I wouldn't know if he had heard until the juice arrived or didn't.

  The girl at the next table was pale and made paler by the slash of lipstick across her mouth. She was gazing beseechingly, worshipfully, at the sharp dude with the rings and the cowboy hat who was turning his high beams on her as if she were a favorite child, which at this moment she was. His other girls were still out somewhere, or had not lived up to quota, or possibly they had done everything right but this member of the stable, in her rotation, was due for an elegant predawn dining experience. The dude noticed my noticing him. “Hey,” he inquired, “what the fuck you lookin’ at?”

  “Your hat. I like the hat.”

  He turned his high beams on me. We were instant buddies. “Stetson, man, with the buffalo-fuzz trim, on my trip to Dallas. Tole them what I wanted at the Cowboy Rancho Shop-pe—write down that name.”

  I could understand how he made friends with lost girls since he was already making friends with a lost middle-aged man.

  Another thought occurred to him. “You lookin’ for anythin’, big guy?”

  “Naw,” I confessed falsely, “just breakfast. But Stetson, I'll remember that.”

  “You do.” Then he turned and patted the wrist of the Sharon or Debbie or Julie-Mae from the Greyhound station. She blushed, Todd arrived, she bent, blushing, to her… Good Lord! My blueberry pancakes! We scavengers of the night were all in this together, it seemed. And when I had expected a staredown, a threat, something ominous after meeting the eyes of my neighboring fellow breakfaster, he gave me nothing but a fraternal offer of haberdashery info.

  I lingered over my coffee. There wouldn't be frost outside, this was San Francisco, but there would be a humid, damp San Francisco predawn chill. Todd, the good-choice waitperson, returned with his silver pot and his next dialogue staple: “Another splash?” I nodded. He refilled my cup.

  Wise good choice because then another night-world distraction from marital blues came to fill the hour. There was a loud scraping of chair. Abruptly it seemed as if the Fairmont lights flickered and dimmed without a generator picking up the slack. A wrathful chair scraped, then another chair, and a table lifted and thumped down; the scattered night diners drew away, except for those who drew closer to the excitement. The Germans were alert and happy. Gott im himmel, here was fun and turmoil that was actual, not on television. The outcall girl had found her inner vixen. The slash of lipstick looked like a wound, but her eyes were undaunted behind mascara hanging loosely from her lashes. She found her inner vixen's oratorical skills, too. “Fucker!” she screamed, and elaborated, made more precise: “Mother fucker!”

  Then the innocent child hooker metamorphosed into an avenging child hooker, flinging her plateload of sliced syrupy blueberry pancakes at her protector. Perhaps out of respect, not yet an entire all-out battling child hooker, she held back the plate itself, at least pending further developments, only spattering blueberries and syrup on the no longer smiling pimp's Stetson. “My hat!” he howled.

  He should have removed it for early A.M. dining. He didn't take the insult to self and haberdashery well. He reached across and grabbed his ward's hair, yanking her down to the floor in front of his splayed legs, but by this time rapid-reaction-force Fairmont security guards were on him, two of them, grabbing him by the arms, shoulders, perhaps even an ear—it happened so fast—while he roared, “Racists!”

  One of them was laughing while definitely pulling him by the ear and the other frisked him, looking for gun, knife, or razor, and the ear guy was saying, “I'm blacker'n you, ass-hole, no fighting, you're eighty-sixed from the Fairmont Hotel.” Disgustedly he emptied the man's pockets of a couple of glassine envelopes. “Get the fuck out, no shit, or you're in worse trouble, brother.”

  This wa
s a reasonable hair-pulling pimp with a damaged Stetson. He decided to go quietly, which was best under present glassine-envelope circumstances. Meekly the girl followed, as he knew she would, all passion spent. Her storm passed. Neither she nor her escort wanted any serious interruption of their relationship. The Germans at the next table were saying things in German to each other, and although I didn't know German and therefore couldn't read German lips, it seemed to be on the order of, “We always knew San Francisco was a party town.”

  As I passed the table of delighted Germans, who were enjoying the tried-and-true beer, steak, and eggs remedy for jet lag, a strong scent of ketchup and cigar smoke followed me. Salt, tomatoes, illegal Cuban Upmanns, all sorting themselves out in my own alert, amply caffeined state. The brief scuffle meant nothing, yet must have meant something. The security guards kept the glassine envelopes as a nice perk.

  On the walk home, lifted by social events, breathing deeply of the fresh-air scent of early-morning, red-streaked skies, I passed a San Francisco Chronicle box next to the New York Times box where, on another occasion, I had declined the offer to be mugged. The one-star edition displayed a boxed headline with a black outline at the top of the front page: ZERO MOSTEL, ACTOR, DIES.

  I remembered watching the play by Ionesco in which Zero's immense but agile body miraculously seemed to transform itself into a snorting rhinoceros, bristling with tusks. In the audience Melissa and I hugged each other to stop choking with laughter, the Heimlich maneuver of lovers sharing joy. The news made me feel as if I had wrapped my hand around broken glass. Having given so much pleasure, Zero Mostel now ruined the night, interrupted mere depression with grief.

  At my apartment, putting on an LP but turning the speaker volume down so as not to wake the neighbors, I played a side by John Fahey, known as “Blind Joe Death,” the guitar bard of underground beatnik Berkeley from the time when a woman came along to make me laugh and Zero Mostel came to make us laugh together.