8
But not everything was right with the world. There was the solitary pedestrian on Hippie Hill beating his conga drum, for one. We’d just crossed Stanyan Street after maneuvering through the Haight-Ashbury district. I actually never thought to consider the Golden Gate Park loiterer or the fact that he was dressed up like Abraham Lincoln on drugs, stovepipe hat and everything, until Michael pulled up to my side and whispered his concerns into my ear.
“You hear him too, right?”
“Who, Abe Lincoln?”
“Susan doesn’t hear him.”
“What do you mean, Susan doesn’t hear him?”
“She doesn’t see him either. Joshua, I think he’s with the Lost Boys.”
I casually looked back at the presidential musician, still beating his gigantic drum. I couldn’t see his face straight on, but he was wearing leather gloves just like all the others. The horror wasn’t so much that he or they, whomever they were, could spring out to terrorize us at any given moment; it was the realization that I’d probably passed members of this hidden civilization countless other times without ever paying attention. Were they all out to get me or was it the select agenda of only a few of them?
“Let’s not disturb him then,” I said.
A few minutes later, as we approached the Japanese Gardens, I nonchalantly asked Elise if she saw or heard anything resembling a drummer (I could still hear his fingers beating away in the distance), despite the fact that I already knew what her answer would be.
9
“Can you ever forgive me for what I’ve done?” Elise said. We were in the west end of Golden Gate Park and my wife had cuffed herself to my arm as we walked past the Buffalo Paddock on John F. Kennedy Drive. Michael and Susan were hitched to the fence railing about thirty feet away. A brisk breeze picked up scents of bison pie and shifted it through our hair.
“As far as the east is from the west, so far has God removed our transgressions from us.” It was a quote from the New Testament.
“But what I want to know is, have you removed my transgressions?”
I carefully considered my response. On the other side of the fence, a bison snorted.
“Yes,” I finally said, stroking her hair.
“I’m glad to hear it.” She tightened her arms around me.
“Have you confessed to Father Williams?”
“I have. Several times. So often now that it’s getting embarrassing.” She thought about it. “You don’t believe in confessing to a priest, do you?”
“No, I don’t. We’re all priests in God’s kingdom. There’s no other intercessor apart from Christ.”
“And yet you’re a Catholic, because I’m a Catholic, because you love me.”
“What can I say? Catholicism has its perks.”
Elise kissed me. “Yes, it does. It’s just, I’m not so sure about that anymore.”
“Father Williams or Catholicism?”
“I guess. The sense of God’s presence in my life, or the realization that there’s any God at all in such a nasty, brutal world, and far more importantly, perhaps the need for corrupted religion in general.”
I didn’t know what to say. The bison snorted again.
“Has it ever occurred to you that maybe we’re all just molecules?” Elise said.
“It sounds like you and Elizabeth have been talking.”
“She had some good points. Why are you so absolutely certain of your belief?”
“Because nobody ever walks into a furniture store or eats a fine meal at ZAGAT, drives a Rolls-Royce, or stares out at the Golden Gate Bridge and has the audacity to claim the absence of a designer. Why should a bison or a redwood be any different?”
“Those last two may be very different.”
“They’re not.”
“Some very intelligent people would disagree.”
“God reveals himself through faith. The order can’t be reversed. And it’s my personal observation that the rejection of God is a matter of will, not intellect.”
“I wish faith were that simple.”
“Do you think I’m a simple thinker?”
“No, of course not.” She pressed ten fingers to my chest. “You’re anything but close-minded. What you believe is very important to me. And just between you and me, you could jog intellectual circles around Ellie.”
“That may just be the sweetest thing you’ve ever said.”
“What I don’t understand is how I could know something to be true and act in another way entirely. Much like the way I’ve been treating you.”
“I do not understand my own actions. For I do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” I quoted the scriptures again.
“The Apostle Paul?” she said.
“Same person. His Epistle to the Romans.”
“You know your literature. You could quote Homer or Milton or any one of those transcendentalists. That’s what I like about you. You follow an ancient code. You’re chivalrous. You’re the only chivalrous man I know.”
“Michael’s chivalrous.”
“Yes, but I’m not in love with Michael.” She tapped her finger on my lip. “I’m in love with you, silly.”
“That’s a relief.”
“It’s not true what they say, that Chivalry is dead. You’re not dead.”
“Can you promise me one thing, Elise?”
“Anything.”
“Will you keep practicing confession and worship, for me, and give the faith a fighting chance? The real mistake atheists make is not about God, but the human condition.”
“Of course.” She tightened her grip around my ribs. “I second-guess myself all the time. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s to not second-guess you.”
10
A little over an hour later Ellie’s signing event was over. She called Elise on her phone and then met up with us at the Civic Center where we’d heard that hundreds of San Franciscans had gathered to protest the war in Iraq. I kept busy clicking pictures of the feisty crowd with my Canon EOS 1D. A sea of signs and slogans rose above their heads. END THE WAR IN IRAQ NOW, some proclaimed.
“I love my city.” Elise sighed in my arms as we watched the scene unfold. “Remember when we protested the war back in 2003 with the Sisters?”
“How could I forget? Aunt Nancy successfully got the entire crowd to chant Hell no, we won’t go, and Patty spent the day strumming and singing Dylan songs on the ukulele.”
“Yes, the sixties were alive on that day.” Elise bit her lower lip thinking about it. “Let’s do it again.”
“Um, no, this is different. That was different. Elise, you have a younger half-brother that’s off in Afghanistan right now as we speak.”
“We support the soldiers, just not the politicians who willingly send them.” Elise tugged at my arm. “Come on. It will be fun. We’ll give Diane Feinstein a few good chants and then we’ll go, I promise.”
Ellie tightened her eyes just thinking about the fact that a war was raging in Afghanistan and Iraq…. right then…. as we stood there outside of Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office. “If we’d elected a democrat, none of this would be happening.”
“We did.” Elise reminded her. “We elected President Gore, don’t you remember? But the republicans would have nothing to do with the fact that a majority of Americans wanted him.”
“And in his place,” Ellie scowled, “they delivered the worst president in world history. It’s a proven fact.”
“I know.” Susan agreed, thereby encouraging her.
“How is it,” Michael glared at me, “that we’re two young handsome and successful republicans who ended up with a couple of Jimmy Carter loving democrats?”
“I don’t know about you,” I told him as Elise led me by the hand towards the hundreds of protestors. “But I’m trying to get my woman back, which means today I’m a democrat.”
“Damn right,” Elise said.
“Yeah, well I’m not protesting.” Michael slugged hands into
his pockets. “I happen to believe we have good reason to be involved in the Middle-East. I say we invade President Ahmadinejad’s desk next.”
A middle-aged woman carrying a sign depicting President George W. Bush with a Hitler mustache dropped her jaw.
“Yeah, you heard me,” Michael said. “If I make my own poster it’s gonna say INVADE IRAN NOW.”
She hurried past him and whispered something foul into the ear of one of her protesting friends.
“Don’t be such a sour-puss,” Susan said. “I went into the GAP with you. And besides, we’re the four Musketeers. Today we’re all joining the cause.”
“Have fun.” He wouldn’t budge.
“If you join the cause,” Susan leaned into his ear, “I’ll….” And then she whispered something that the rest of us couldn’t hear. Whatever it was, it must have been good. A hat would have spun around on his head had he worn one.
Michael rolled up his sleeve.
“Aw hell, find me one of those damn liberal posters…. let’s go. Karl Rove and Don Rumsfeld will never know. And besides, I didn’t get dressed up in these GAP jeans for nothing.”
11
“Amazing, isn’t it,” Michael held onto the prison bars, “how women have a way of changing a man’s theology.”
“I can’t believe they arrested us,” Elise sighed in my arms. She seemed to be enjoying herself. “All we wanted was less money put into the war and more into universal health care.”
“It’s because they’re a bunch of pigs,” Ellie said.
“Ellie, except for the Sisters, nobody says pigs anymore. They let that go in the sixties. And the only people arrested were the initial dozen or so protestors who participated in the Die-In on Diane Feinstein’s steps as an idiotic method of evoking deaths in Iraq.”
“And us,” Michael added, “once the police hauled them away a couple dozen others, which included our wives, decided it was in the movement’s best interest to usher even more bodies into the Die-In.”
“Pigs…pigs…. pigs….” Ellie chanted. Three other much older protestors, who probably chanted it back in 1968, joined her for five or six repetitions before finally letting it die, hopefully once and forever.
“I’m not supposed to be here.” Michael told a passing prison guard. “I’m not with them. I’m a Republican.”
“Well, well, well, look what we have here, an actual republican,” the black woman said. “We haven’t had a republican in this here cell since,” she thought on it, “1952.”
“Do you hear it, St. Peter?” I said it loud enough for the female prison guard to hear. “A rooster just crowed.” Disgustedly, I tightened the rims of my face. “How do you live with yourself?”
The female prison guard seemed well entertained by it. Just then Josephine was led by another police officer into the hall. And she looked pissed.
“That’s my lawyer!” Elise called out to the guard.
“It’s the day before my wedding. I’m running frantically all over the bay area trying to get last minute details sorted out while my flesh and blood sister’s off parading herself around town. So imagine my joy when I get a phone call from that wombmate of mine…. in prison.”
Elise opened her mouth to say something.
“Shut up,” Josephine interrupted her. She turned to the officer. “I’d gladly leave her here for the night, officer, except I need my maid of honor smelling good and looking fresh for my wedding tomorrow morning.”
“I take it the two of you are twins.” The officer tried to hide a smile.
“Yeah, but I was born first,” Elise said from behind bars.
“Only because it was a C-Section.” Josephine raised her voice. “I’m clearly the more responsible one.”
“It’s a little known fact,” I told the officer, “that Josephine came out holding Elise’s heel.”
“Mm-hmm, funny man,” the black female officer hid her amusement well. “Are you a republican too?”
“That’s what it says on my voting card, mam.”
12
We were let out on a misdemeanor.
As we stepped out into the evening light Elise opened her mouth to remind her sister that it was indeed a misdemeanor, a typical bay area routine in the infamous police officer-hippie relationship, and nothing more than a paper-cut in the criminal community.
“Don’t even talk to me!” Josephine wouldn’t hear of it. “I don’t want to hear from you for the rest of the day. Do you know how embarrassing it is bailing my twin sister out of jail only hours before my wedding?”
Elise lowered her head all the way to our ride home, where the Sisters were waiting for us in my Country Squire.
“Keeping the sixties alive,” I told Nancy and Patty as we entered through the back door. Three of the other Musketeers and Ellie snickered.
“Shut up, Joshua!” Josephine howled. “I don’t want to hear a peep out of you, either!”
Patty turned around to wink at me and Nancy smiled.
“Don’t encourage him!” Josephine caged her breasts with stiff arms. “They weren’t keeping the sixties alive. Nobody was keeping the sixties alive on my wedding weekend!”
“Yes-sum, boss,” Nancy started up the car. “That’s what an African American might have said to a Caucasian in Mississippi…when I rode with the Freedom Riders in the sixties.”
The sisters exploded into laughter.
SAN FRANCISCO, DAY THREE: CHARLIE & JOSEPHINE
1
“Good morning, sleepy head,” Elise smiled.
When I opened my eyes Aristotle was staring down at me, his nose only inches away from my own. All four paws were pressed to each side of my ribs. His sailboat ears were cold, unwavering, and emotionless.
“You’re right,” she said. “I think he does want to murder you.” She slipped her jeans on, picked up the bag that she’d packed and laid it down by the bedroom door.
“Good morning, sunflower.” I pushed Aristotle’s head aside to smile at her. He pawed at my arm and then skull butted me. Apparently he wanted to be the only sunflower in my life.
“I’ve got to go.” She sat on the bed. “Long day ahead, you know. Breakfast with Josephine and the girls, then hair at the salon, and finally make-up and photos at the hotel, but I was thinking. I know you wanted to begin things slow between us, and I won’t take this as a rejection if you say no.” She paused.
I kissed her on the lips. “I love that look that you get on your face when you think about stuff – the way you strain your forehead and crinkle your mouth.”
“What if we get a room tonight at a nice hotel, after the wedding is through, and you know, see how things go?”
“You mean you want to…conjugate?”
Elise laughed, hit my head with a pillow, said something in French, and then kissed me on the lips again. “Maybe…. if you should be so lucky.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“I have a feeling you’ll probably do alright.”
2
“So buddy.” Michael nudged me on the arm as I walked into the kitchen, stretching and yawning something terrible. “Looks like you had a rough night, if you know what I mean.” He rubbed his hand over my head to stress how messed-up my hair must be, and then said it, “with your messed-up hair and everything.”
Charlie danced to the music of Gerry Rafferty, Baker Street, as he cooked up a man-sized portion of bacon and eggs (mushrooms, onions, peppers, and a splash of hot sauce doused in the eggs), and pancakes smothered with strawberries, stopping only to mime Baker Street’s saxophone solo with his fingers. “It looks like you and Elise are getting along pretty swell.” Charlie grinned seconds before another Baker Street sax solo demanded his full and complete attention. “It’s ok. You can call me the matchmaker.”
I scooted out a barstool. Michael poured me a cup of coffee from the pot into a mug that depicted a fisted feminist symbol and set it on the counter. His depicted a single word, WOMYN, because feminists apparently weren’t rela
ted to men.
“It’s not what you think. We fell asleep together on the bed last night, and the night before, but that’s it.”
“Well, she stayed the night instead of crashing at the hotel with Josephine and her other bridesmaids,” Charlie said in the middle of his saxophone solo. “That certainly says something.”
“By falling asleep do you mean…” Michael cupped five fingers into a golf-like hole and repeatedly thrust an index finger into it.
“No Michael.” I took my first sip of feminist coffee. “And only because, if we’re talking about representative imagery, your finger is clearly far too small.” I pulled another sip of coffee. “In fact, you’d have to start the incline from all the way across the room…and it would never fit through a hole of that size.”
Mm-hmm, Michael said. “Drink your feminist coffee.”
3
The caterers, florists, and the chair people all seemed to arrive at the exact same moment. Arguments ensued. I gave a head’s up to the unmarried florist that I was moving my car. I didn’t really need to move my car. I just thought she was cute. She grabbed the spot before the chair people could swoop in on her. As I walked up the staircase banister for the groomsmen’s dressing room, the Sisters stood in the foyer arguing like a couple of marriage veterans.
“Why is there a stork in our backyard?” Aunt Nancy asked her sister. “We talked this over at The Emperor’s New Cookie. And I said we were getting a swan, not a stork.”
“No, you said stork, not swan. Stork. You said we were ordering a wedding day stork.” Aunt Patty crossed obese arms over her bosoms. “And it wasn’t The Emperor’s New Cookie. We discussed it at The Golden Egg.”
Wrong Flight Home (Wrong Flight Home, #1) Page 37