Michael Thomas Ford - Full Circle

by Michael Thomas Ford

  "Hello, Ned," said Jack.

  CHAPTER 31

  Since its opening in 1937, 1,218 people have committed suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. The first was Harold Wobber, a World War I veteran who, while walking across the bridge on August 7, less than three months after the grand opening, turned to a stranger, said, "This is as far as I go," and stepped off into the air. Since then, roughly every two weeks another person has gone over the side and into the cold waters of San Francisco Bay. It has been called a monument to death, a soaring structure whose beauty is irresistible to those looking for a symbolic and almost surefire (only 26 jumpers have survived the 250-foot fall) means of ending their lives. When in 1973 the bridge's death toll neared 500, there was fierce competition among would-be suicides for the privilege of assuming that dubious honor, and when that number came close to being doubled in 1995, the official count was halted in the hopes of preventing a similar frenzy.

  I never seriously considered a leap from the bridge. I went there because I needed to walk, and because standing on the span at night, you feel as if you're floating in space. The lights of San Francisco to the south and the Marin Headlands to the north form parallel galaxies, the Golden Gate a bridge of stars linking them together. Standing there, the water a sheet of black silk ripping with unseen currents beneath me, I understood why so many found it impossible to resist the urge to climb onto the narrow ledge beyond the waist-high railing. I imagined standing there, enchanted by the dizzying height and the whispering fog that caressed with ghostly tendrils and promised dreamless sleep. It would be difficult to say no, to turn and grasp once more the hard steel of the railing and pull oneself back into the real world. So much easier to just let go and fly.

  As I say, I felt no real impulse to kill myself, although I am not convinced that there is not some magic in the steel of the bridge that plants such thoughts in the mind if you linger too long while crossing. In me it simply magnified the feelings of loneliness with which I was struggling since seeing Jack again. I was, to put it lightly, taken aback. At first, I had even refused to believe it was really him, and not simply someone of remarkable resemblance. I'd gotten used to thinking of him as someone from my past, and to encounter him in my present required a shifting of focus, one I was reluctant to allow. We went to a coffee shop to talk, leaving Andy at Toad Hall surrounded by his many friends. Seated at a table, our cups untouched in front of us, Jack nervously straightened his silverware while I waited for him to speak. I didn't want to say anything, and wasn't sure what I would say even if I did. Although it had been only slightly more than two years since our last meeting, I felt as though a lifetime now separated us.

  "I bet you're surprised to see me," he said finally. I picked up my coffee and sipped it, my only response a slight nod. Jack opened a packet of sugar—his fifth since we'd sat down—and added it to his cup, stirring quickly. "Don't be mad at Andy," he said. "I told him not to say anything about me in his letters."

  "Why?" I asked. Jack leaned back in his chair. "I thought it might be too weird for you," he answered. I couldn't help laughing. "Too weird," I said. "Why? Because the last time either of us heard from you was before we went to Nam, and then—poof—all of a sudden you're back? Yeah, Jack, you might say that's a little weird."

  He lowered his eyes from my glare. "I know you think I took the easy way out," he said. "And maybe I did. But I can't change that now." "Is that why you're here?" I said. "You want me to forgive you?"

  "No," Jack said. "I don't expect you to forgive me. But come on, Ned, we were best friends for nineteen years."

  "I wasyour friend," I said. "I'm not sure you were much of one back."

  He looked up, hurt reflected in his expression. "You can't really believe that," he said.

  "You were always the golden boy, Jack," I told him. "I was the one who always got the leftovers you didn't want. And then when I finally found something I did want, you went and took that, too."

  "Andy?" Jack said. "Are you talking about Andy?" I didn't answer. I was growing more agitated by the moment, and it was taking all of my military training to keep my cool with Jack sitting across from me pretending he didn't know what he was doing.

  "Are you two lovers?" I asked.

  Jack leaned forward and touched my hand. I pulled it away.

  "I didn't even know he was in San Francisco," Jack said.

  "Oh, so you just happened to move here and end up as his roommate?" I countered. Jack shook his head. "I was already here," he said. "I was only at Wesley for about a year. Then I decided that whole minister thing wasn't for me, and I decided to go to school for psychology."

  "Psychology," I said. "Since when are you interested in psychology?"

  "I'm not a total moron," Jack said. "I had a couple of classes in psych at Wesley, pastoral counseling kind of stuff. They were interesting."

  "Why'd you decide to leave?" Jack smiled. "They kind of asked me to after they found out I was sleeping with one of the theology profs. Well, he was only a TA, but the actual instructor was about a thousand years old and let James teach most of his classes. Anyway, someone found out and told the dean. Next thing you know, I'm in his office and they're telling me that homosexuality is ‘incompatible with scriptural teachings.'" He said the last part in a gruff voice, knitting up his eyebrows and pointing a finger.

  "He said I had two choices. I could repent and go for therapy, or I could leave. I told him I was perfectly happy the way I was and walked out."

  "What about your parents?" I asked. "What did you tell them?" "Nothing," said Jack. "I just said I wanted to try something else. Then I found a school as far away from them as I could get, and here I am. I'm in the psych program at SF State. I was able to transfer a lot of my credits, so it's not like I'm starting over."

  I drank more coffee to buy myself some time. I felt as if I'd stepped through Alice's looking glass. Jack was actually in college. Plus, he was talking openly about being gay. Had he really become such a different person while I'd been away? Part of me didn't believe it, but I could sense no trace of deception in his words. Maybe he had really changed, I thought. Then I remembered Andy, and the anger resurfaced.

  "You never answered my question," I said. "About you and Andy."

  Jack reached for the sugar again. "Like I said, I didn't even know he was here. I hadn't heard from him since Penn. Really, I'd pretty much forgotten about him. Then one day he just showed up at this clinic where I was doing some fieldwork for a class." "He just showed up," I said, suspecting there was more to the story. Jack nodded. "Yeah," he said. "He was there for a counseling session. Something the VA sent him in for. I saw him in the waiting room. At first I didn't recognize him. But when he saw me, he broke out that stupid grin, and then I knew right away."

  "And then you moved in together?" "Not right away. I wasn't sure what his deal was. A lot of those guys come back from Vietnam totally fucked up and…" He stopped, looking at me nervously. "Sorry," he said. "I forgot for a minute."

  "It's okay," I told him, although inside I wanted to grab him by the neck and pound his face into the table for speaking so glibly about something of which he knew nothing. "So we had dinner and started hanging out a little bit," he continued. "I could tell he was still dealing with what happened to him, but he seemed more or less okay. At the end of the school year, I decided I didn't want to live in student housing anymore, so I looked for a place. I couldn't afford one on my own, and Andy suggested we room together. That was just about a year ago now."

  "And why didn't either of you tell me again?"

  "I don't know," Jack answered. "I guess it was pretty stupid. I just didn't think you'd want to hear from me or hear anything about me, so I asked Andy not to mention it." We were both quiet for a while, sipping from our mugs while people came in and out of the shop. I was trying to process everything Jack had told me, and I was getting hung up on one thing—the fact that he still hadn't answered my question. Twice he'd sidestepped it, which led me
to believe that he didn't want me to get even more upset than I already was.

  "Are you okay?" he asked, bringing me back to the moment.

  "Yeah," I said. "I'm fine. Just thinking about all of this."

  "I don't expect you to be all happy about seeing me," he said. "At least not right away. But I hope we can be friends again. We have a lot of history together." I nodded. I couldn't deny that he was right about that. The difference between us was that I wasn't sure whether or not I wanted that history to keep going. I'd put a lot of effort into divorcing myself from my relationship with Jack. Now here he was wanting to pick up where we'd left off.

  "I know I wasn't always the best friend," Jack said. "But I've learned a lot about myself, Ned. I'm not so afraid of who I am anymore." "You mean of being gay?" I said, half hoping the word might wound him somehow. "That's part of it," he said. "I couldn't have even said the word gay two years ago." "I remember," I said cruelly. "Is that something else your TA taught you?"

  "James was about as closeted as you can get," Jack replied. "He told the dean that I was the one who seduced him. He somehow forgot that he was the one who invited me to his room for a personal tutoring session on the Articles of Religion and then couldn't wait to get my clothes off. No, it was more living here in San Francisco that helped me get over the whole gay thing. It's hard to be here without loosening up. It's funny how fast people change when they move here. You'll see."

  "I didn't know I needed to change," I said.

  "Lighten up," said Jack. "I just mean your attitude will probably change. Some of that uptightness will go away." "I'm not uptight," I said, annoyed that he somehow thought he was more enlightened, or evolved, or whatever than I was. "Just because I don't have hair down to my shoulders and jeans that haven't been washed in a month, don't think you can sit there lecturing me."

  "I'm not lecturing you," Jack said. "Man, you really do need to mellow out. We should go back to our place and smoke some weed. Andy knows this guy who has the best shit." "No thanks," I said, reaching for my wallet and taking out some ones. "I think I should go." "Ned," Jack said. "Come on. Let's just talk some more."

  "I don't want to talk," I said, standing up. "I've got a lot to do tomorrow."

  "Maybe another night?" asked Jack.

  "Maybe," I told him. "'Bye, Jack."

  I walked out before he could say anything else. I hurried down Castro street, avoiding looking at the men around me. At 18th Street I managed to get a cab and surprised myself by telling the driver to take me to the Golden Gate Bridge. He looked at me suspiciously for a moment, as if checking for signs that I might be planning something he would read about the next day in the morning paper. Apparently finding nothing amiss, he started driving.

  I didn't arrive at the bridge with any plan. It had just popped into my head to go there. I vaguely thought maybe I would walk to the other side, although there was nothing waiting there for me. It was purely for lack of any better alternative that I ended up standing in the center, looking out at the night. Watching the lights of ships passing underneath the bridge, I was reminded of a story I'd heard from a World War II navy man—now a doctor at Letterman—while in the hospital. To distract me from the pain of one of the endless tests, he had, while peering into my bowels, regaled me with stories about the Presidio. Concerned more with trying not to soil myself than with listening, I forgot most of them instantly, but one stuck in my mind, a tale about a ghost ship that haunted San Francisco Bay. Its name was the SS

  Tennessee , and it had gone down in 1853. While serving on the destroyer USS Kennison , escorting convoys and submarines to various California bases during the war, the good doctor was on deck one night in November of 1942 when the ship passed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge on its way back to port. As the fog parted, he saw another ship passing alongside, heading in the opposite direction.

  "She was old," he said. "Not from our century. She didn't make a sound, but I heard the water moving, and she left a wake. And there were men on board, pale men who didn't say anything. They just stood there, looking back at us. Then I saw her name painted on the side—Tennessee. I thought I was dreaming, but later on I snuck a peek at the ship's log and there it was. I looked that name up later in the library and found out a lot of sailors have seen her over the years."

  I'd written the doctor's story off as just another legend that someone wanted to be true and so had convinced himself that it was. But looking down from the top of the bridge, I suddenly believed him. I could easily imagine a ghost ship passing through those dark waters, attempting to carry her crew back to the land of the living. It made sense, in that place of so many deaths, that souls would congregate beneath the mighty arc of metal that so many had said could never be built. It was a place of impossibilities, the least of which was that it might be a crossroads between earth and heaven and hell. Jack had appeared like a ghost, out of nowhere and without warning. Like the doctor staring at the foggy image of the past, I was looking over my shoulder at who and what I had once been. My choice now was whether I would run from that ghost or embrace it.

  CHAPTER 32

  "You come here to pray?" I looked at the man standing beside me. Tall and blonde, with curly hair and rugged good looks, he resembled Ben Murphy, my current romantic crush as outlaw Kid Curry on Alias Smith and Jones . His blue work shirt was open, revealing the smooth skin of his chest beneath, and he leaned against the bar with a casual air that suggested he was very much at home there. I couldn't recall having seen him before, but I'd only been to the Stud a handful of times.

  "Why would I come here to pray?" I asked him.

  He smiled, and I saw from the way his eyes moved slowly from my face to my crotch that he was drunk or high. Probably both. "This is a church," he said. "You didn't know that?" I shook my head no and took a pull on my bottle of beer. If he hadn't looked like Ben Murphy, I might have left him standing there and gone in search of someone with a better line. But his cleft chin and full lips kept me rooted to the spot.

  "You're standing in the sanctuary of an official Universalist Life Church," he said, raising his arms and indicating the whole of the bar. "In about an hour, this becomes a place of worship." He looked at me, shaking my head, and said, "What? You don't believe me?"

  "Sure, I believe you," I told him. "I believe that in about an hour, half of these guys will be on their knees, and the other half will be shouting hallelujah." He laughed, a rich, deep sound that made my stomach tingle. Then he leaned in, his leg touching my thigh and his face hovering only a few inches away from my mine. "You're funny," he said. "But I'm dead serious. They had this place declared a church so it can stay open past two."

  I didn't know whether to believe him or not (I learned later that he was right), but at that point I really didn't care if he was lying. I was picturing my fantasies about Kid Curry holding up my railroad car at gunpoint coming true. When, a long moment later, he asked me if I wanted to get out of there, I set my beer on the bar and followed him out the door.

  Don't judge me too harshly. Remember, this was 1973. We did this kind of thing then. We still do, I know, but in those beautiful days when everything seemed too perfect to be true, we made a life of it. And, as I said, he very closely resembled Ben Murphy. You can tut-tut all you like, but I wasn't the first man to take a stranger up on an offer simply because he looked like someone else, and I'm sure I won't be the last.

  We walked down Folsom, the infamous "Miracle Mile" of bars that existed to fulfill the dreams of San Francisco's gay men. It was July, the weather sultry, and many of the men we passed were wearing almost nothing. It wasn't unusual then to see someone giving head in a darkened doorway, or two, three, or more men engaged in foreplay outside a bar door, hands and mouths wandering over naked skin as they negotiated what might come next. The stale smell of the bars leaked out onto the streets, mingling with the scents of pot, sweat, and cooking meat emanating from Hamburger Mary's.

  "By the way, I'm Art," my new friend said as we
stopped to wait for a light.

  "Ned," I told him.

  "Well, Ned, where's your place?" Art asked me.

  "I'd rather go to yours, if you don't mind," I said. "Mine's kind of crowded."

  "Mine, too," Art said. "My wife is there."

  Again he smiled at me, and I didn't know if I should take him seriously or not. He put his arm around my shoulder and started walking down 12th Street toward Market. "Where are we going?" I asked.

  "You ever been to The Club?" he replied.

  "Which club?" I said.

  "The Club," Art said. "That's the name."

  "I've never even heard of it."

  "Well, then, you're in for a real special treat," he said, holding out his hand to hail a taxi. The cab took us downtown, into the Tenderloin, a neighborhood even seedier than SOMA and its bars. Girls in garish, tight clothes plied their trade under the harsh lights, and their customers lurked in the shadows, waiting and looking. I had no idea where we were going, and when the driver stopped in front of an address on Turk Street, I got out, still not understanding where we were. A sign over a black door said THE CLUB , but there was nothing to indicate what kind of place it was.

  "You're gonna love this," Art said as he steered me inside, where he handed over some money to a man behind a window and received back two towels. It quickly became clear, even to my naive eyes, what The Club was. Dimly lit, slightly damp, and reeking of sex, it was a bathhouse. I'd heard about them, but had never been in one, mostly because I found the idea of them slightly vulgar. Still affected by my conservative upbringing, I preferred the bars, where I could at least pretend I was there for something other than sex. A bathhouse, to my mind, was too brazen, or maybe desperate. I didn't mind looking for sex; I just didn't want to be so obvious about it. As Art led me down a corridor, I tried to avert my eyes from the naked men leaning against the walls and standing in doorways. Although I was far from being a virgin, I felt like some kind of unspoiled bride being led to her wedding night chamber. I sensed eyes on me, and was suddenly afflicted with almost paralyzing shyness. The idea that Art expected me to come back through that gauntlet wearing nothing but a towel terrified me, and I considered just turning around and leaving.