My mother talked a lot. She narrated what she was doing, why she was doing it, what she was going to do next. In San Francisco, she was beginning to tell the story of her own life.
She was, by fate or irony or collision of time and circumstance, in a city populated with other folks whose histories were self-generated, too. She and San Francisco were a perfectly ill-fated match.
* * *
—
I loved Peter. Even at the time, I wouldn’t have said he loved me back, but he enjoyed grandstanding. He woke each morning by throwing open the windows of his bedroom and yelling, “I love you, my beautiful San Francisco.” If he had change nearby, and there were tourists, he would scatter pennies out the window.
After showering and doing his nails (he was obsessive about his cuticles) he would put on a leather coat, grab his leather satchel, and, after a leisurely morning coffee, drive to appointments at boardrooms or cafés or warehouses around the Bay. His Bullitt car didn’t run—it was parked up the block but it never got ticketed because Peter had an arrangement. Instead he drove a corporate car, a new Buick someone had given him to pay off a debt, and which he’d customized so the license plates said 007 LTK. He drove it impatiently and when I rode with him, he sometimes, just to upset my mother, drove on the sidewalk.
One night he came over for a dinner party and when he and I checked on the spaghetti, he introduced me to the method of throwing it upward to see if it stuck to the ceiling. This led to him throwing it directly at me, and within a minute, we’d covered the whole kitchen in spaghetti and sauce. The walls, the floor, us, covered in dinner.
Even he was surprised I’d participated in that. With sauce dripping off his face, he whispered, “There’s people ready to eat and we just fucked it up. What are we going to do?”
I said, “What do you mean ‘we’? I’m just a kid—you’re the one in trouble.”
That became a staple story for him. “This kid here, he pulled a Peter Charming on me. He’s treacherous.” Which thrilled me. Peter was grooming me to behave badly, and I was an excellent apprentice.
I stayed over at his house once and when he left for work, I hid cans of Spam in his pantry, his linen closet, the box he kept his dope in, and the pocket of one of his business suits. He retaliated by ambushing me after a dinner party with a cream pie. I felt like if I studied long enough I’d be his equal.
It was sometimes hard to tell when he was actually doing business, but that ambiguity suited him. He used the phone constantly, and he hated the phone. One night, someone put him on hold and in exasperation, Peter yanked the phone out of the wall and threw it in the fire. It exploded.
“Boom, it was like shrapnel, you have to see it,” Peter was explaining as he ripped my mother’s phone out of our wall. He bundled the cord around it and then threw it into the fireplace. My mother was trying to stop him, as he was talking over her. “Watch. Ready? Watch. No, watch watch watch.”
As promised, a wall of flames shot out of the fireplace. My mother wasn’t impressed. She was mad. She had to rent another phone now.
Peter announced that he had safety concerns. “Did you know,” he would say when visiting people’s parties, “how hazardous your phone is?” And then he would throw the nearest phone into the fire.
Once a week, my mother, Peter, Sue, and I went to the Washington Square Bar & Grill, a gossipy North Beach hangout, where we sat at a large round table with an ever-changing group. Margo St. James, who was organizing a prostitutes union, seemed moderately amused to discuss her job with an eleven-year-old. I met columnists for the Chronicle—Art Hoppe and Stanton Delaplane—and a couple of times Herb Caen waved but didn’t slow down as he crossed the room.
The restaurant was up the street from Comics & Comix, so if things got slow, Peter would hand me a ten dollar bill. When I came back, I would read the latest Avengers while waiting for my spaghetti. It turned out the Vision was actually the original Human Torch, a fact that I couldn’t get anyone at the table interested in, as the adults were flirting over me.
San Francisco, 1975, was built for dating. There was no activity, from shopping to exercising to taking the bus, that didn’t have quotation marks around it, as if everyone knew that whatever motions you were making toward working or eating or buying clothes were only cover stories.
My mother couldn’t go to Safeway without men ramming their carts into hers and asking how long to cook a chicken breast. Peter had his own routine. Every morning he walked downhill three blocks and sat in the front window of the Café Cantata with the paper folded back next to a café au lait. He spent his afternoons talking to women as they passed by. Drinks were at Perry’s and dinners at the Balboa Cafe, all within walking distance not just of each other but also his house. MacArthur Park, a bar with brass rails and ferns, was his most distant outpost, but Henry Africa’s would do as well. This is how he met what he called his newies. Sometimes he sent Sue in his place to bring newies back to the house for him.
Sometimes I met him at Café Cantata and he expounded to me about the world.
“Kid, when I turn forty I want to be known as the Silver Fox, so I’m going to pay my friends a thousand dollars each to remember that.” Or “Kid, stop cracking your knuckles and stop slouching, Jesus; the way you moan about your life, it’s like you know nothing about your people’s history. Have you ever read The Painted Bird? No? That kid had something to complain about.”
Whenever I stayed at the café long enough he gave me ten bucks to pretend I was his son. “See that girl there, with the black hair? Tell her your father wants to buy her a balloon and take her to Paris.”
* * *
—
Our apartment was four doors up from the Egyptian consulate. One day a boy and girl who lived there, roughly my age, were waiting outside. They’d just come back from Egypt and while they’d been gone their house had been vandalized.
“You know who did that?” the girl asked.
“No, who?” I asked.
The boy said, “Wait, wait.” And he looked around the bus stop for eavesdroppers. “Are you Jewish?”
I told a half-truth. “No.”
“Jews.” He nodded at me meaningfully.
I asked what he meant. Jews had wrecked his house?
“My father told me.”
“Which Jews?”
“How should I know? The ones who were in the house, of course.”
There hadn’t been Jews in their house. It had been drug addicts that a halfway house had boarded there—I’d read an article about it in the Chronicle. That night at the Washington Square Bar & Grill, I knew I had a story to tell.
“Hold on,” Peter interrupted. I hadn’t even gotten to the good part. “What did he say when you told him you were Jewish?”
I was confused. “I didn’t—”
“Fuck that. If a guy like that asks if you’re Jewish, tell him, ‘Fuck yeah, I’m Jewish.’ And if he doesn’t like it he can go fuck himself. You have to be proud.”
“I am proud. But I’m also not really Jewish.”
This made him apoplectic. Now another front in the argument had opened up. I was half-Jewish, and according to Orthodoxy, it was the wrong half. But Peter was having none of it—I was making excuses for not standing up for myself. He talked over me so that I could hardly make my point. If I’d told the Egyptian kid I was Jewish, I would never have heard his story.
“Why the fuck do you care what he has to say?”
I couldn’t explain. I kept trying to rephrase it. I wanted to know people’s secret lives; I wanted to hear contrary views; I wanted to be a fly on the wall. I knew two things were true: I wanted to be a writer, so I said writers interviewed people. Also, I didn’t want to piss people off. I didn’t actually say that part to Peter because I didn’t want to piss him off.
* * *
—
&nb
sp; My mother was driving me somewhere and she said, “I have to get my watch back.”
I asked where it was. She’d left it at a man’s house.
“What’s next? Your underwear?” It came out too quickly. It was like I’d hit her in the face. My mind was going in circles. Was there any legitimate reason an adult woman would take her watch off at a man’s place? I wanted to scramble backward, tell her I’d just been bantering.
Later, Peter pulled me aside. I’d really hurt my mother’s feelings with that “underwear” wisecrack.
“If it hurts her feelings, she needs to stop leaving her jewelry at men’s houses.” I was still puzzled by how the watch had ended up there, as I wanted all the evidence to add up to her only pretending to have sex.
Peter said, “Your mother respects you. She’s treating you like an adult. You have to react like an adult and respect her back. No judgments. Endgame.”
* * *
—
Soon after, my mother and I went to a party at Peter’s house. He didn’t bother leaving his throne—an overstuffed chair by the fireplace—to say hello. He seemed self-contained and impatient with me. “You should go read the new Odd Bodkins book Sue Blue has upstairs—check it out.”
“There’s a new one?”
“It’s great.”
When I collapsed on the couch in his office, I saw it was the same book as last time. He’d just told me it was new to get rid of me for the evening, which was fine—I reminded myself I didn’t like seeing him either, sometimes.
A minute later, my mother was upstairs. “We’re leaving.”
I protested, but she was already stepping down the stairs with outsized caution, her shoulders stiff as she shuffled through her purse for her car keys.
Then we were in the Mercedes and she was sitting upright. She gave off a furnacelike heat, and it was hard to look straight at her. I think she’d stopped blinking.
We were going to visit Peter, then we were leaving. I was good at finessing through reversals like that. I’m okay either way, what do you want, we’ll do it that way.
The way home was a straight line along Pacific Avenue. Every street corner had a stop sign that seemed to take my mom by surprise. I held on to my seat belt and looked out the window. I’d started learning when things were built because when I walked to school and saw a house that looked embarrassingly out of place, it always turned out to be from the 1950s, when nubby stucco and aluminum windows struck people as a good idea. I felt sorry for those houses.
We parked in front of our apartment building, where there were marble columns flanking the entrance, and the columns had acanthus leaves on them. My mother curbed the wheels. She turned off the engine. There were jets of fog rolling toward us. Looking straight ahead, she hissed, “Peter and his precious fellatio.”
* * *
—
Years later, my mother got stoned and started writing her life story. She told it from my point of view. It was called My Mother’s Lovers—and Other Reasons I’m Valedictorian! My character was a jaded eleven-year-old who can’t be bothered to remember his mother’s boyfriends’ names, and so he gives them nicknames like the Mad Italian Professor. When she read it aloud to me, I felt the same queasiness I did when she described an article she’d seen about mother-son incest taboos. In some tribes, sexual experiences like that were part of the growing-up process, she said, and wasn’t that interesting?
The real Mad Italian Professor, Cesare, was a graduate student. My mother had promoted him. I remember whenever he got angry, he absently twisted the hair of his eyebrows into Satanic peaks. Once he said Schopenhauer would have hated me. “Schopenhauer was a fool,” I said, though I’d never even heard of him.
That I was eleven years old didn’t matter; me saying that sent Cesare into a fit. This was okay. I was impressed he had no intention of being my friend.
* * *
—
My mother was frequently out most of the night. You couldn’t say she was at a party or on a date—she might start out in one direction and end up in another. I used to stay up, talking to myself and listening to the sounds of the San Francisco night. There were foghorns that struck me as mournful and a strange ticking I eventually realized was condensation dripping from a gutter onto a ledge. I watched The Tonight Show on a portable black-and-white set that I kept switching off in case what I’d just heard was my mom coming home.
Leo had a cat door. Sometimes I heard him scurrying in with a mouse, and I would get up and watch him spar with it until it was dead. One night, Leo jumped out his door, then back in. He meowed. He had that Siamese nuclear wail of a voice. I went to the kitchen in time to see him jump out the door again.
“You want me to follow you, boy?”
I opened the kitchen door. I was in my pajamas. Outside was a set of wooden stairs painted a pistachio color twenty years ago, now flaking and weather-beaten. Leo was on the flight leading up. He seemed to be waiting for me. I carefully left the door on its latch. As I went up the stairs, Leo paused on every landing for me.
He led me to the roof. I hadn’t known you could get to the roof. It was flat, with flashing around the vents and chimneys that poked through the surface. There was mist sweeping past us, little grains illuminated by the brilliant streetlights in front of our apartment building. But I wasn’t cold. The nearest foghorn let out a moan and a few distant ones seemed to answer. Leo walked along the edge of the roof, tail straight up, his kingdom four stories below.
There was no one else here. No one on the street, no cars, no pedestrians. I could see lights in the windows of houses near us, but no one was moving. I pretended it was just me and Leo in the empty city, two pulses attuned to the mysteries of the foghorns. If you were in this town, they weren’t exotic, they were part of your brain, and I understood why San Franciscans had an innate melancholy. It was why they liked jazz. Born to foghorns.
I felt a calling. I had to notice all the world’s wonders and sadness, and to report to someone somewhere how much there was left to lose. I felt extended beyond myself. Though I couldn’t say why, I didn’t want to leave this. I tried to trick myself into remembering it. I am remembering this moment now so it’s not lost, I thought, and if I remember myself remembering, it’s a moment that will never really disappear. Nothing is empty, nothing is really lonely, if someone is there to share it, even if the sharing was with my cat. I said, “Thank you, Leo,” like he had orchestrated it for me.
As I walked back to the apartment, the telephone was ringing. I answered it. I heard a quick voice—my mother’s? someone else’s?—and then confused noises. I was terrified.
“Are you there? Listen. Listen to this. Just hold on.”
Mom. I held the phone. Four-part harmony came up, a cappella. I’d heard it on the radio before—it was a song called “Operator” and it had a gospel insistence that was catchy. People on the other end of the phone were clapping along in a scattered, Pacific Heights white-person attempt at keeping time. Mom was breaking some kind of contract by calling me. She was supposed to enjoy herself without letting me know. I was supposed to be home, perfecting my loneliness.
When the song was over, Mom got back on the phone. “Did you hear that, darling? You know who that was?”
“No.” Annoyed.
“The Manhattan Transfer. They’re in Peter’s living room. Lots of love, Mommy has to go now.”
She hung up. She had called herself “Mommy.” This was to make herself feel young, at the expense of making me feel about four years old. I got back into bed.
I managed to be half-asleep when the party arrived at the apartment. Soon the liquor and music and laughter had reignited.
I shuffled out of my bedroom. Sometimes an eleven-year-old smartass lent an exotic presence to my mother’s parties. But I had a sense for atmosphere, and this one struck me as off-kilter. The lights were
low. I didn’t recognize anyone. People were locking themselves into our bathroom in pairs, and coming out exceedingly alert.
In the living room, my mother was sitting on a man’s lap. When she saw me, her face went livid. “Out!” she yelled.
I made it to my bedroom door, then realized that meant ceding my territory. I returned to the living room, where my mother was still in the man’s lap. Me standing there didn’t make much of an impact on him. He was blond, with a mustache and a half-smirk. If I meant to seem like a cop, he looked at me like he knew I didn’t have a warrant.
I extended my hand. “Hi, I’m Glen. I’m her son.”
“Georgio,” he said, but not as if I’d shaken him up.
“I told you to go to bed,” my mother said.
“Mom, I’m plagued by feelings of unreality.”
She stood, grabbed me by the wrist, and led me back to my room. “Go. To. Bed.”
“But I’m plagued by—”
“No, you’re not.” She swept me into my room and slammed the door.
I listened to the mysterious party sounds and I felt sorry for myself. Eventually, regardless of the noise, I fell asleep.
I woke up when I felt the weight of my bed shift.
There was a man sitting at the end of my bed. He wore a black leather jacket and a leather cap. “Sorry.” He stood. “I was trying to be quiet.”
There is every reason, when looking at this with contemporary eyes, to fear for my safety. It was 1975 and San Francisco, however, and expressing fear at the unfamiliar or threatening would have been inelegant. So I behaved as if this were normal. This didn’t mean I was safe, as terrible men have always taken advantage of those who attempt bohemian life.
“Sorry. Go back to sleep.” He looked apologetic, like the full weirdness of being in my room had just hit him. “I can go back to the party.” He looked at the door grimly. Finally, he said, “It’s only that your mother said you had the new issue of the Fantastic Four.”
I Will Be Complete Page 7