When a Psychopath Falls in Love

by Herbert Gold

  Kasdan rested his eyes on smaller tables where the guys with the tattoos and invisible cock rings conferred with significant others (tears) and lawyers (indignation). Generally speaking, the men with the metal and perma-inked decor were defendants. The older ones who needed bandanas looped around their necks to steady their hands for the first coffee of the day could be either defendants or lawyers now in AA after release from suspension by the California Bar Association. The pretty teeny-tinies on spike heels with the new briefcases were the fresh-hatched Asian lawyers you’d better not call “girls.” The loner next to the unisex room, eating salty nuts and a dill pickle for breakfast – he’d brought his supplies in plasticine baggies – was a Russian immigrant planning to patent a cure for hangovers and AIDS. He had ordered his tea in a glass. San Francisco, once a desti­nation for White Russians fleeing the Bolsheviks, was now a prime settlement for others seeking what their Chinese predecessors called the Golden Mountain (translation: The Land of Uncertain Promises).

  One of the bandana guys, his hand steadied, was pouring some­thing from a small bottle into his second or third cup of black coffee. It could be considered medication. The skin of his face was pitted and eroded with fresh pink marks where someone, perhaps himself, had scratched his itches. Eczema is major to the one who suffers it, even if it’s caused by “issues.” The Roma was a place of routines. Even Harvey Johnson over there, brooding about his only son; even Dan Kasdan, wondering how he could redeem the lost years for Amanda. Even Ferd Conway. The Roma was a place of routines and not yet resolved issues.

  Harvey snapped his laptop shut with a clean, sharp, irritated click. Dan heard it all the way across the cafe because he was tuned to Har­vey’s critical judgment. He made the mistake of meeting his friend’s eyes. Harvey was mouthing the word stupid and Dan wasn’t sure whether he was saying his company this morning was stupid or he was stupid.

  Probably both.

  Dan’s shoulder twitched in acknowledgement without going so far as the actual event of a shrug. This was the only answer that occurred to him.

  Harvey, you’re giving me your Responsible Negro Leader look.

  But I gotta do, Harvey, what I gotta do.

  What I want to do.

  Fog-bound when the Roma opened before dawn, the sidewalk on Bryant haunted by night fauna, insomniacs and addicts and scurrying small animals breakfasting in the piles of short-order refuse, San Francisco turned bright, sunny, all-revealing – pretending to reveal all – by the time the defendants headed out into the day, along with their loved ones, their lawyers, the cops, and the staff workers at the Hall of Justice. The rats retreated into their rat holes with early morning snacks. Caffe Roma’s population, inspired by bagels, muf­fins, caffeine, and the clatter of others, exited sturdily onto Bryant, as from Lourdes, having entered with rheumy eyes and slumped shoul­ders. Now they could hope for victory in the contests of the day. Some would win, their slates temporarily cleared. The lawyers expected to win, no matter what, although at times it came to pass that they couldn’t collect more than their retainers.

  Harvey Johnson left the Roma, moving fast for a hefty guy. Didn’t want any friend to catch up with him.

  Ferd Conway put his hand on Dan Kasdan’s arm, asking him to stay awhile. Before they went ahead with the deal, he wanted to make sure they were on the same page.

  – 2 –

  When the rubber glove went snapping over his friend Doc Feldstein’s fingers, good old tired Marvin’s right hand, Dan Kasdan tried to think of anything else but the seasick procedure about to take place. Oof. Just another medical wiggle. Oof, oof again. Unfortunately, this internal wiggle was not a byproduct of rough water kayaking on San Francisco Bay with some young woman in need of impression by his fine prostate and general good health.

  Gray of head and beard where once his hair was dark and glossy, a licensed Spanish court translator-interpreter for smalltime miscre­ants when once he might have been a Foreign Service officer or a CIA operative in Latin America, Kasdan had gone all these years without killing a single person. Occasionally in the past, a woman may have felt spiritually wounded by him, but this had never been due to intention on his part. Kasdan himself, of course, had suffered wounds in the normal course of events (distracted from the Foreign Service exams by sloth, not cleared by the CIA because of Vietnam era pro­test). He hadn’t really wanted a bureaucratic career. Life, fairly long so far, showed signs of being shorter than he had expected. His dad had turned gray at age fifty, but thanks to Vitamin E, Kasdan had kept his genetic endowment of dark hair until age fifty-one.

  "Try to relax," Doc Feldstein advised. “Think of something else.”

  “Easy for you to say,” said Dan Kasdan, upper lip beaded with sweat.

  Prostate examination was one of those occasions when even an agnostic said, Oh, God, which happened to be the words breathed by Kasdan after his wordless Oof. Then distracted himself with: Well, at least it’s only one finger…

  He was trying to be a good father to the daughter he had met (been tracked down by) when she was nineteen. Better late than never, so you can make up for lost time, Dan, was what Amanda kept telling him during the months of their first acquaintanceship, emphatically using his first name. (“Do you have to?” he asked. “Should I call you Mister Kasdan?” she answered. But then relented: “Dad.”) It was to her credit that she searched for him; and then that love for a daughter fell upon him with its flood of consoling endor­phins. What the new life-adjustment came down to: It was now time to hurry with nurturing procedures. Amanda would have preferred to make his acquaintance during those dramatic days when layabouts like him met layabouts like her mother and listened to Bob Dylan on vinyl records; before herpes, before AIDS, before so many risks became really risky. And that should have been Amanda’s right. But Margaret Torres and Dan Kasdan had just bumped together, then cheerily gone on their separate meandering ways.

  “Just relax,” repeated Doc Feldstein.

  “Unh,” said Kasdan.

  “This’ll take another minute. If you tighten up, it’s no fun at all.”

  “My sphincter has a mind of its own.”

  “Dan, are you a man or an asshole?”

  “Right now... oh, unh,” said Kasdan, gasping a little, “the answer is obvious.”

  A victim of normal wear and tear was resting his chin on a medical table, his pants and his jockey shorts at his ankles. His yearly physical revealed that he was in pretty good shape, except. There seemed to be an accumulation of excepts as the metabolism burned along, occa­sionally glitching. A historical glitch had been the woman, Margaret Torres, who reappeared out of the mists of the several-years-long Summer of Love, informed him she was pregnant (“You were in such a hurry I forgot to tell you I’d gone off the pill”), and moved up north to Mendocino to raise the child with the two hundred dollars he’d given her for the abortion. Two hundred dollars wasn’t enough for washable diapers, cereal purée, much less the other baby crap, even in a coven of mutually supportive witches and worshipers of Gaia, Mother of Earth and Sea. Amanda, the daughter of Margaret and Dan, presented herself to her father nineteen years later with a stock of grievances, a boyfriend soon to be a husband, and Kasdan’s grand­child on the way.

  All this came as a drastic interruption in the regular course of a becalmed bachelor’s routines. “I hope it doesn’t bug you if I’m pissed sometimes because you abandoned me, Dad,” Amanda said. No, not at all, spices up my life.

  The veteran Spanish court translator with his dusty apartment on Ellis in the Tenderloin had expected comfortable diminishment, not passionate increase. A meteor just fell from the sky – two of them, Amanda, followed by Sergei.

  Is this pokery still going on? What’s Marvin’s finger looking for, an exit to the freeway?

  “Easy, easy,” said the good doctor. “I could do without the groans. Try to appreciate me, I’m an old friend.”

  “Finger’s not my friend.”

  “Nearly done now
, Dan. Just one little curve here, round the bend, okay?”

  Marvin used to keep a miniature television on the table for the patient to focus on (“Zone in,” he’d say, trying to be a California boy), but found that most of his prostate patients had no interest in the daytime soap opera zone. They preferred to rest their chins and grunt. The Age of Aquarius had come to this.

  Its survivor, Dan Kasdan, in his unassisted living facility, a dusty (because rarely dusted), musty (but no asthma yet) apartment in the Tenderloin, found solace in a surrounding terrain of alcohol, speed and crack, transvestite hookers, non-transvestite hookers, massage parlors, soup kitchens, southeast Asian families busy with first-stage America experience, and more homeless Vietnam veterans, it seemed, than there had been combatants in Vietnam. Not that he really needed solace. What did he have to complain about? It was within walking distance of the Hall of Justice. His life was a sausage which he survived, even if the ingredients were unknown. Nobody knew the troubles he’d seen; even he didn’t know them anymore.

  Of course, he stayed away from actual sausage; it was neither a low-cholesterol meat nor a healthy vegetable; mind wandering, as Marvin had advised.

  Occasionally, say once a week, Dan Kasdan and Harvey Johnson saved their pennies and poisoned their breath by eating (Harvey extended his pinkie and called it “dining”) at the Good Karma India-Pakistan Bountiful Buffet, where the cook’s cat wore booties which Mr. Krishna knitted himself. Past the lamb with curry, the chicken with curry, and the curry with curry, the cat went skidding after a panicky mouse like a speed skater, its bootie-clad paws fumbling at its catch. It decided to play awhile with the frantically peeping little creature; the cat boxed, leaped, and trapped the mouse between its bootied paws, having learned the trick of it. Supper could wait, mouse with curry sauce.

  Harvey, a detective who read the world news daily, commented that someday there might-could be peace and good karma between India and Pakistan, but never between cat and mouse. Also a fount of inside civic dope, Harvey passed on to Dan the news that Mr. Krishna’s real name was Mr. Patel.

  The cat had miscalculated its one-sided match. Sudden knockout; mouse expired; the bootie-clad domestic relative of lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars and pumas stubbornly continued batting it around, hoping for further play. Mr. Krishna said “Shoo,” and typical of a spoiled pet, his mouser ignored the command.

  Dan and Harvey observed the action. Dan tried for philosophy. “We make some of the same mistakes again and again, everybody does. It’s human nature. We’re recidivists. We’re animals.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said the plainclothes dick. He liked to chase perps in his workout suit because he thought it made him look attractively overweight, in addition to fearsome, in case a fine lady passerby happened be observing the hot pursuit. “I keep fit.”

  “So do I,” said Kasdan, his tone revealing him as a liar for an alert interrogator. “But age, getting older, it’s inevitable.”

  “Maybe. But that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

  You do that, Kasdan thought, and then said to his good buddy: “You do that.”

  Harvey was muttering disgustedly under his breath: “Recidivist, recidivist, try saying that three times fast.”

  Harvey was one of the bits of good luck in Kasdan’s life – a friend to whom he could speak aloud what he thought. Add that one to the discovery of a daughter, who had almost immediately given him a son-in-law who was a security guard in a full-service whorehouse and a grandson who was whatever this grandson would eventually turn out to be. His retracted life had been turned inside out due to a for­gotten incident with a Margaret Torres during the trailing ends of the Summer of Love. Neither Dan nor Margaret had understood that the Summer of Love would not last forever.

  All Dan’s friends were growing older. Harvey, who varied his rou­tines by sometimes going undercover in a body builder’s tight black tee shirt and black jeans – his stiff strut made him the most conspic­uous overage plainclothes dick in the San Francisco P.D. – had taken to patting his new paunch, complaining about diminishing poker skills, and now he announced, “When you get older, it’s harder to tell the difference between an oncoming fart and an outcoming shit. I still get it right most of the time.”

  “Mind if I don’t stand next to you, Harvey?”

  “Now that you’re a daddy,” said his pal, “you’re not really one of the guys anymore.”

  “A grand-daddy,” said Dan Kasdan.

  Oof. Done. It helped to let the mind wander rather than stick with the discomfort.

  Doc Marvin’s finger slid away. Doc Marvin was finished. Doc Marvin Feldstein wasn’t talking for awhile; he was disposing of his rubber glove; he was deciding to be straight with his old patient. Here and now, nothing else was called for. A matter of respect.

  “The biopsy was pretty definite. It confirms the PSA count. You’re too stubborn about treatment, Dan. Today....”

  “Today what?”

  “I think it’s growing. We didn’t need confirmation, but in my opinion it’s confirmed.”

  “We,” said Dan Kasdan. “In your opinion.”

  Marvin had pestered him, so he had consented to their little date for the finger-equals-seasickness procedure. He wanted to keep his doctor happy. No real surprises today.

  Marvin was droning on about Kasdan’s oncoming death without actually using that word, so that it hung in the air like a cloud of dust mites, while Kasdan gratefully took the offered bunch of Kleenex and did what a man does to make sure he’s reasonably tidy after doing his doctor the favor of submitting to an unnecessary procedure. Pedaled the medical waste can and disposed of the tissues. Always enjoyed opening a can with a foot on the pedal; a sanitary procedure plus a cause and effect mechanism, offering the consoling miracle of logic working at a distance.

  Now that he was on a roll, Marvin wanted to lay out the options. Dan’s condition could still be remedied. Statistics were invoked, but because of the intersections of proba- and possi-bilities, nothing was absolutely certain. Marvin tended to get formal at moments like this. “You’ll never again feel as good as you do today,” he added with a certain amount of sighing and hyperventilation that did nothing to lighten the occasion.

  “Pardon? Lost you there.”

  Marvin repeated his words with a sigh almost like a yawn, his eyes filmy.

  But Kasdan was pretty sure he could prove his friend wrong, or if not wrong, at least irrelevant. For sure he would feel as good as he did today. Harvey was right; resolute intentions matter. Harvey was frequently partly right. Kasdan understood that Marvin was making drastic predictions because his patient was a contrary son of a bitch who needed to be turned around by drasticity. Marvin appealed to the ornery side of his patient, his friend. Once more, wearily, nag­gingly, he explained about the prostate, the excess of it, popping out of the normal casing – slipped a kind of armor if you want to think of it that way – and growing; unfortunately, growing in a weed-like, messy, uncontrolled way (Marvin wheezed slightly in the effort to unpronounce the word ‘malignant’); and so what was called for was surgery, radiation, radium implants, eventual chemo likely, hormone treatments – in the field there was a certain amount of discretion and clinical difference of view about treatments. With the hormones, okay, they might lead to a fat deposit here and there, a little fattiness, nothing very obvious, maybe breasts swelling, but no real change in the soul of a man unless you count loss of interest in sex, which Dan’s dear devoted friend, the pompous doc, called ‘libido.’ But the alter­native...

  “It’s inevitable anyway.”

  “Likely to come sooner.”

  Kasdan grinned.

  Said his good friend: “This is no joking matter. What’s so funny?”

  “Maybe not for you,” said Kasdan. “But come sooner? I like your choice of words.”

  Marvin ignored insults from the career linguist. “Invasive,” he repeated, a nag, not letting go. “When I felt it with my finger.
..” Kasdan winced. Did he have to mention the finger again? “... plus the PSA count, the lab reports confirmed, reconfirmed... Dan! Are you paying attention?”

  “Every time you did that, once a year after fifty, right? And I heard the snap of your rubber gloves, and I said this is the part of my physi­cal I really don’t like, and you said every time, every year.”

  “‘If you liked it, I wouldn’t do it.’ I don’t have that many jokes, so I use the ones I have.”

  “You see?” Kasdan asked. “You try to make jokes, too. It’s not a sin.”

  Marvin looked glum. “Okay, okay, try to... Now you’ve got your daughter. Your grandson. You’ve got your retirement plan, don’t you? You want to stay acquainted with them, Dan?”

  Actually, despite what Marvin thought, Kasdan was measuring the situation, conditions, eventualities, even if his dear doctor and urology counselor had no idea of what he was thinking. It was not in the good doc’s repertory. Previously these thoughts had not been in Kasdan’s repertory. Previously, if he woke at night to pee, he went back to sleep without a care in the world except for an occasional twinge of conscience about something he might have done better. For example: he didn’t really have a retirement plan.

  The course of Kasdan’s personal life had so far been empty of murders. Personally, he had not yet killed anyone. Sure, there had been dreams, wishes to avenge wrongs, irritations which led him to imagine pressing a button that could make the creep who stole his parking place, his wallet, or his lady friend just disappear. Wishes don’t count. His own death was never the one he had in mind, but now his future had been washed in hot water and shrunk down to a tight fit. The lines of force, according to the good doc, called for a sense of urgency. Amanda might miss him if he were removed so soon after she had made his acquaintance.