by Herbert Gold
Kasdan touched Sergei’s forehead. No fever, no chill; calm and a slow breathing. “Good boy, good boy,’’ Kasdan muttered, as if he would hear, as if he would understand, as if the words could do justice to Kasdan’s despairing love for the first offspring he had known since birth.
Mommy loves you, Daddy loves you, and as long as I live... Oh, if only you could remember in the years to come.
This was his America as Dan Kasdan found it. Care and remedy required cash or ready credit in case of trouble, and in the case of much trouble, much money. Kasdan knew where the cash could be found; Ferd Conway had it. Was it fair to say that Kasdan would be helping Ferd redeem himself, whether he wanted to or not? No matter; Kasdan was ready in this special case to leave fairness behind.
“Duh... Duh.’’
“Is that a word you’re saying, Sergei? Daddy? It’s a start, boy. Now try grand-duh-duh.’’
“Duh-duh.’’
“Good! Almost splendido!’’
Kasdan lifted his grandson into the air. The tiny buttocks squirmed. The czars of Russia kissed the behinds of their offspring, but Kasdan was shy about family love. He was new to it. He was only learning about dynasty. Nevertheless, he smacked his lips a little, meaning kiss-kiss, and Sergei wriggled as if he understood. Soon he might be screaming again, surely he would be screaming again, but just now, just now! When Kasdan turned the boy’s face to his, he found a heartbreaking gummy smile.
– 11 –
It was not easy for Dan Kasdan, lifer in the City and County of San Francisco legal services system, to be somewhat older than he used to be only a moment ago, as was the City and County itself, as were the visitors and the marooned, having bought their wars but now liberated from distress by medically-prescribed grass (formerly Maui Wowie) or optional brain-feeding LSD, speed, crack, or tried-and-true, old-fashioned, high-octane wines. The boys and girls still trickled in from all over to find Utopia last Tuesday or tomorrow. The Summer of Love persisted through many summers.
The communes mostly vanished. Kerista, devoted to polysexuality, all men and women fathers and mothers to all children, no longer had a telephone number. Crash pads were condominiumized and degroovied. Most of the flower people went home, or elsewhere, or moved on to middle age. Still, some didn’t.
Amanda, Dan’s daughter, child of Margaret Torres, grew up in Mendocino and Napa because fathers were a waste of Margaret’s time; but the child decided to dig up her father anyway and present herself (“I’m your daughter, here I am.”). The father proceeded from ignorance to astonishment to discovering that his daughter seemed to complete his life. Of course, a life was only completed when it was over.
Other children of the children who lived through daily revelations also came searching for ghosts of the past on Haight Street or, if they were less lucky, in the Single Room Occupancy hotels of Eddy, Ellis, and Turk. The Tenderloin was nearer to the Greyhound Bus Depot. A helpful Vietnam veteran might lead a tired girl there, having just seen her daddy – what was his name again? – only the other day; offering to carry the backpack, provide a briefing on the terrain and a place to rest up, honey. Mom had said, “I met your father... I think it was on the corner of Ellis and Taylor, the cafeteria there,” so it made sense that Pop might have stayed on to let his hit-and-run accident find him.
Little did these daughters from Stockton or Denver realize that the groovy jobs starring in porn films, as Mom did, had mostly gone to the San Fernando Valley or become ungroovy, due to the Mafia, AIDS, herpes, and excessive competition. Recently, even the dot.com catering jobs for parties had dried up. Perhaps that was why this young seeker of something was taking black coffee in a glass at Katie’s Meddle of Honor Tavern on Taylor, although a shot and a beer was the normal fare here. Perhaps she wanted to be alert in case her Pop happened to drop by.
Instead, Dan Kasdan dropped by. A beer in a back corner of the Meddle of Honor was the respite-seeking court interpreter-translator’s custom at the end of many days. If he did it every day, it would be called a habit, if not an addiction. Since he only did it three or four or five days a week, skipping now and then, it was more like a custom. On this traditional, customary afternoon, his table at the back and in the corner, the gangster’s seat, looking out, was already taken by a young woman. These were rare at Katie’s Meddle of Honor.
Katie called her bar the Meddle of Honor because president Harry S. Truman had pinned a Medal of Honor on her dress uniform pre-Katie, when she was still Karl, a sailor who had galloped around above decks, caring for the boys, during the Korean War. She still disregarded “incoming fire,” paid it no never mind, administered loving care and CPR when necessary to sailors on shore leave, and was also pretty shrewd about attempted entrapment from the Tenderloin Task Force of the SFPD. A good business lady, Katie tithed the Trannie Task Force, an association of former men and women, and did it with gladness, which was not always the case when dealing with the SFPD.
Katie, né Karl, liked to ride her pony from the back room to the bar proper; Kasdan enjoyed the pitter-patter of tiny hooves along with his refreshing brew. The Meddle of Honor, with its traditional San Francisco martini glass in purple neon signage outside and reflected inside, was singular in several respects; a straight bar with transsexual owner, a jukebox with Puccini and popular Italian tunes, a well-groomed pony occasionally trotting through the premises.
Generally speaking, runaways performed their rituals of hanging out elsewhere. Nevertheless, this flower throwback child, wispy dark-blond hair hanging lank as anti-dreadlocks, eyes heavily outlined by some kind of ghostly grease, was perched at Kasdan’s back corner table, one more late arrival auditioning for the movie to be titled “The Summer of Love Never Died.” (As yet, no camera or casting director on the scene.) The girl’s eyes were downcast, staring at a spiral notebook in which she might soon be writing: Mom, I copped a ticket to San Francisco, so I get to see the place where you put the orange robes on your back and met Dad and panhandled for the Hairy Krishnas... Years after earning her Medal of Honor, Katie was still living dangerously. Now she ran the risk of losing her liquor license for underage sale, not even bothering to ask for the photocopied and glued driver’s license collage.
“You don’t use a laptop,” Kasdan stated.
The girl looked up and grinned. “No connection plus no batteries.” Okay, maybe she was of legal age. “You don’t happen to have some batteries on you, do you, mister?”
“No.”
She waited a moment, offering a space for something flirty to move events forward. “You’re a live one, aren’t you?”
He anticipated the continuation of this conversation before he sat down. When the age difference came up (he would bring it up, preempting reproach, unlike other old farts), he would point out that in a hundred years he would be an alert dude of a hundred and fifty-seven and she would be a faded beauty. He also had the option of falling to his knees right now and asking, Will you be my widow? But he had always been cautious in the matter of true love. If he were a few years younger, theirs would still be an inappropriate romance. Old as he was... he might delay mentioning the daughter... old as he was, their romance was ludicrous, not merely inappropriate, and therefore all she needed was a sense of humor.
Do you appreciate the ridiculous, miss?
But before he could launch his lightning campaign in pursuit of a person who wanted to be caught, he saw the blue scars at the crook of her arms. She noticed his noticing and slid her hands up to her elbows. It didn’t make the marks go away. Kasdan came out of his dream. Sergei was more important than suicide sex. Amanda was more important than an evening in the company of trouble.
While he was deciding to drop a bill on the table, a five or a twenty – “Here, get yourself some batteries” – she was saying: “I get what you’re telling me. I really, really, really...” She stretched out her hand and took a fistful of his jeans because this would surely make him forget the dark blue elbow freckles. “... dig you.�
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“Sorry, sorry…” He pulled away, awakened, regretting.
She smoothed his pants where she had pinched them. “Hope springs eternal,” she said. “Or immortal.”
So he sat down anyway – no harm so far – and she shut the spiral notebook. No matter what else he did to her, she didn’t want him to read what she was writing in the journal of her voyage to San Francisco. Startled, she asked: “What’s that?”
“It’s Katie.”
The pony’s tap dance clatter parted the curtain to the back space. Katie came riding through, danced up to their table, asked, “You folks fine?” and didn’t wait for an answer. Of course they were fine. Katie rode to the only other patron at this hour, slumped at the bar in that late afternoon grief which precedes evening good cheer, and asked, “You fine?”
The pony snorted delicately. Katie’s bartender, fresh on duty, tattoos revealed, reached a lump of sugar across the bar, but Katie trotted away. “You’re spoiling her! She’ll get cavities!”
“But she’ll like me better,” the bartender shouted fondly, and then with tempered tone, “You bitch.”
Kasdan resolved to put his daughter and grandson out of mind for an evening. It was the right of an older guy to accept his fun, assuming that he deserved it, with the excuse that he would be gone forever sooner than others; not just the right but the duty of an older guy with a serious plan. Amanda had no right to judge him for what she would never know.
The girl, Petal, seemed to like him, no doubt for reasons that must have seemed good to her. Whatever her real name was, Petal was the name now and she was sticking to it.
“I told you mine, so what’s your name?”
He hesitated.
“Hey, you didn’t have a fallback? Make something up, that’s cool, just so I can call you something if you say something. Or I can just say Mister or Dude.”
“Dan,” Kasdan said.
“That’s a good one. So we’re in business, okay? Dan, Danny, Daniel, rhymes with Dude.”
It was nice to laugh. Kasdan didn’t do much of that. The body and spirit were lightened. “Petal... it’s not a rhyme just because they all begin with a D.” He enjoyed that he told her his real name, because why not? Was she going to blackmail him? Extort? For what? And she was sure it wasn’t his real name, even if it was.
He was still grinning until she said, “Danny the Dynamo Which Laffs,” and then he erased the smile. “You tweaking?” she asked. “Dudes who do stuff make me nervous even if personally, sometimes I can use a liftoff…”
No answer. Often his clients were tweakers, busy motivators using meth, ice, crack, coke when they scored and were trying to travel luxury-class. These clients were twitching, erratic, warning systems. After a brief exercise of pills years ago, he realized they weren’t the cure for his well-practiced distraction. The time he shared a couple lines of cocaine with a young woman who really wanted him to because he was sleepy, he was still sleepy afterwards but couldn’t sleep. The young woman gave up in disgust. He had been okay with that.
“So what do you use, Danny Dude?”
“For what?” Already he felt nostalgia for the memory of the laughter which had surprised him only a moment ago. He was lucky so far today, and it wasn’t even nightfall yet. He had heard men say, Got lucky in this joint, and now it happened to him, proving that he was a man with good luck like some others.
If he had been unlucky, Ferd Conway might have floated in, although Katie’s Meddle of Honor wasn’t the kind of upscale lounge or hotel corner which a man of Ferd’s distinction preferred. The one time Ferd had joined him there, he claimed to see pony shit next to a booth and advised Dan to find another venue for his moping. Ferd aimed higher.
Petal too was sunk in rapid thought. No accident of bad serendipity marred the occasion. It was a reward young people deserve, and what the young deserve can also serve as a special memory for the less young. Biological years, wheels, clutches were working the ganglia of Petal and Dan; synapses were colliding. Soon she would share with him what was on her mind.
Her mouth, small, fleshy, slightly protuberant at the middle, would be described as heart-shaped by a man who found her perfect; otherwise, he might think she should have her front teeth fixed. Kasdan liked her heart-shaped pouting mouth. If she were his daughter (she was not), he would send her to the dental school on Sacramento near Fillmore to see what the faculty or advanced students, under qualified supervision, could do about her front teeth. Without damage to that delightful heart shape.
“Your last name, Petal?”
“Smith or Jones, what do you prefer? This some kind of third-degree type interrogation? I reserve the right to remain silent, Officer Dude. Petal Johnson from Muncie, Indiana, how about that? My mom went home from the Avalon Auditorium and got her degree in Cosmetology. That part’s the truth – satisfied? She always told me, growing up with a single mom, she was first in her class, so why don’t I take up skin care?”
“I don’t suppose that’s a heritable talent.”
“Hair what? You bet. On Mom’s side, prob’ly. Never met my birth dad personally, whoever the asshole was, but he must’ve been a friend of Mom’s. She said she had zits at my age…” She sipped at her bar glass of black coffee. Katie’s alert bartender filled it because he didn’t want the customers to run on empty. The smell of burnt coffee appealed to Kasdan under these interesting circumstances. “… those little pink volcanoes, you know, on her nose? But I don’t, thanks to whoever he was, my dad’s skin. Plus, stay away from chocolate.”
“Now they say it doesn’t cause psoriasis –”
“Sore what-sis?”
“Acne. That was a thing people said because it tasted good.”
“It’s the American Way, Dude.”
“So you like chocolate?”
“Depends. You buying? The dark kind, not that milk shit?”
Katie’s Meddle of Honor was the rare tavern with a clock beyond the display of bottles, a relic of U.S. Navy discipline. Katie felt certain that her clients on watch here wouldn’t be deterred from their drinking by the round face with its moving second hand in the dusk near the Cabin Boy’s Room, No Handicapped Access, where her pony grazed. Sometimes Kasdan studied the clock to remind himself that his time on earth was limited. Good Lord, nearly six in the afternoon already, unless you were the sort who thought of it as six in the evening.
Dinner for two was on the menu tonight, maybe a chocolate pudding called “mousse” for dessert, because the lady liked chocolate and didn’t fear pimples. Whatever her heart desired, because Dan and Petal, like everyone, deserved a good break now and then.
“Don’t you think maybe I’m a little starved, you know, hungry for some spicy food?” Petal asked. “Something real?”
Romantic Dan Kasdan said, “Spicy, Indian,” and steered her by the elbow up Leavenworth to the Good Luxe Muhammad Dining Restaurant with its “Best Buffet in the Tenderloin Lunch Only $7.95,” although at dinner they would be ordering from the menu, not the buffet, and it was Pakistani, not Indian, and the Lunch Only Buffet no longer included Your Choice of Soda or Chai Tea. Nothing was too good for this Petal. (But not to overdo things.) The pinkish glow of Muhammad’s molded glass lighting fixtures reflected the pink of Muhammad’s Extra Special Melon Juice and contributed a purplish tinge to Petal’s cheeks. Kasdan hoped it also worked its magic on his own gray-flecked face with its long crevice indentations, deceptive laugh lines on a man whose laughter had been sparse.
She frowned over the epoxied menu bundle after a quick smile of advance appreciation, idly scraping her fingernail against a dried sticky stretch of tassel. Someone had been too eager to reach for his melon juice, causing purple tassel tangle when it dried. After Petal scraped it clean and crisp, she nibbled at her fingernail to get a preview of coming meal attractions, items crisp and curried, plus a possible creamed rice and raisin pudding to add sweetness to the repast.
A mural on the back wall of the G.L.M. Dining
Restaurant depicted the Riviera of Pakistan, a beach with women bathers in burkas, borne aloft rather than sinking waterlogged in the artist’s creative imagination; a complex of chimneys belching black smoke; and a mysterious windowless cinderblock structure with a question mark painted on it and soldiers in kepis patrolling alongside; all proving that industry can thrive along with godly vacations and development of the Pakistani nuclear deterrent.
Muhammad himself, founder of the G.L.M. Dining Restaurant, took their order. Although he wasn’t a Sikh, he wore a turban for additional ethnic atmosphere at non-buffet hours. He tapped a finger against his order pad, a proud Sikh-like dinner warrior. It wasn’t so much an impatient tap-tap as an eager one. “I’ll have the... Nam?” said Petal. “That fried bread thingie? And the lamb glop right here…” – melon-flavored fingertip pointing to a paragraph describing rare and exotic spices – “… but hold the garlic?”
“It comes with,” said Muhammad.
“Come without,” Petal said, her smile softening the command. The temporary Sikh was charmed; beamed; didn’t necessarily understand what she was saying.
Petal was hungry and Dan was glad. No mousse on the menu, but in her present mood of contentment with procedures so far, Petal was okay without whipped chocolate goo. She wiped up sauces with bread-like folds of flat dough. A hungry child ate like that. If Kasdan was destined to put his face close to her mouth, there would be mint, garlic, and curried lamb gravy smells, and cauliflower cooked and steamed, left over like roadkill from the $7.95 buffet lunch. Dan was okay with Petal’s potpourri. It inspired him to tell her the story of his Bolivian client whose wife tried to poison him with pumpkin soup, but was too parsimonious – “That means stingy” – with the rat poison, so he survived, due to insufficient arsenic.