Fire in the Abyss

by Stuart Gordon

  Yet I was still not completely free of Fiorelli and the money he paid me that I needed; the dreams I had were frequently dreadful, and I was almost always in a state of dull fear that those who had imprisoned me and shot me might catch up with me again—and of the advice which Mery-Isis had given me I remembered nothing at all. I kept her completely out of my mind. But perhaps, though I had forgotten the Hawk, the Hawk had not forgotten me, for before the coming of autumn my luck changed again.

  One bright September day, dressed in style and with neat beard, yet depressed and thinking of jumping off Golden Gate Bridge, I was sitting in the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, eating the little cookies they have there, when I saw a handsome blond woman eyeing me from a neighbouring table.

  She was on her own and had the bold bearing of many women in this city where women are in competition with men for men, and where it is commonly believed that to miss the moment is to lose eternity. I quite liked the look of her, and nodded an invitation for her to join me, which she did.

  Within five minutes I knew that her name was Marianne Lofgren, that she was separated from her husband, had a twelve-year-old son called Colin, an apartment on Sanchez Street, and a job in the Bank of America at Twenty-fourth and Castro. She wasted no time at all. She said she knew she liked me, and asked me what I did. I told her bluntly, to which she answered that she didn’t care, but did I think it was healthy, and was I strictly gay, or was I bi?—and if the latter could I go for her and would I like to go home with her right now?

  And what did Gilbert say to this?

  You have it! Quid Non?

  So we went to her apartment with its wonderful view, and soon enough she was in a position to see all my scars, which disturbed her. “Aren’t a lot of people killed doing this S&M stuff?” she demanded. “I don’t mean to be judgemental but you could get something a lot better going for you. You’ve got real style, you just don’t have to get into that sort of shit, and I could do with a man around the house, and I’ve got this real deep feeling we’re just naturally going to hit it off and probably fall in love and maybe get married. So I suggest you call this Fiorelli guy and tell him to stuff his dick up his own ass because you’re quitting and moving in here, and apart from anything else that’ll be a real help to me, because of Colin, you know. I have to go out at some pretty weird hours and I sorta get worried about my boy. He’s sharp for his age but I don’t like the way he goes running out with those Chicano kids looking for gays to beat up in Dolores Park. I mean that’s not a good leisure activity at any age but for twelve it’s too much. He could use some positive male influence, and I know he’ll really take to you, because you’ve got like an air of authority, and as far as I’m concerned you fuck real good too. So how about it? If you don’t feel like being a house-husband, for a trial period or something, just tell me now, and no offence given or taken, we’ll shake hands and walk out of each other’s lives. But that would really make me sad because I have this real deep feeling about you and me. So how about it?”

  San Francisco! Yes, a truly amazing city!

  And yet again I smiled and said: “Why not?”

  “Great!” she said. “Feel like another line?”

  Thus I became a “house-husband,” and for some time all went well, except that, unfortunately, her son Colin and I loathed each other at first sight. He resented my sleeping with his mother, and had quite a talent for “accidentally” treading on my toes, and so on. To call him precocious is a huge understatement. I am glad only that, when he wasn’t out on the street, he was usually closeted in his room smoking pot and playing Atari video-games with any one of an endless succession of preteen girlfriends whom he squired with all the aplomb of which a young California Romeo is capable. I tried to communicate with him, but the best compromise we could reach after a few weeks of war was to ignore each other as much as possible.

  Marianne hardly noticed. She didn’t want to notice. She was determined to lead her own life, and didn’t want Colin in her hair. So, she persisted in pretending that he and I were the best of friends.

  As I said, she worked in a bank, as a Banking Services Officer. She was also a dealer in cocaine. For the most part she supplied executives at the bank, and other professional people. “I like to keep it clean, with a real good class of people,” she said. This activity explained what she had meant about having “to go out at some pretty weird hours,” while her own consumption of the drug had much to do with her high-strung, nonstop character. She never did her dealing at home—“I don’t want my boy to get the wrong ideas”—but always elsewhere. As for myself, I had no grounds to be critical: cocaine has its attractions, but I had already learned that it makes me greedy and much too argumentative, so I could take it or leave it, preferring the soothing qualities of marijuana when I wished for anything of the sort.

  So for some months, despite problems with Colin and a few other minor irritations, things went well enough. I was more than grateful for the haven, and found her attractive, as she found me, our fires being well-matched despite the many great differences between us. At weekends we would drive into the countryside, to Mount Tamalpais or Muir Woods or Stinson Beach, or further afield, to the wine country of Sonoma, south to the cliffs and forests of Big Sur, and once we even spent a week camping high in the Sierra. For a while I relaxed and found some happiness, as far as this was possible.

  For of course there was the problem of my past.

  Early in our affair I’d told her the tale I’d invented soon after my arrival in the city: that I was English, and that I had come to the States having lost my job in Britain, which she had accepted, knowing from the news what a state Britain is in. Also I had told her I was in the States illegally, that I had been shot and nearly killed in a mugging eighteen months earlier, losing my passport, credit, identification, and some of my memory. This she wished to accept, and my tale of memory-loss eased her mind with regard to my ignorance of many little things about the modern world known to any child of five. Nonetheless, there was much about me that distressed her, such as redundancies in my speech, and some of my political and social attitudes, which she called “neo-fascist,” and my “paranoid” behaviour in company with her friends—for after William Yeats Butler I was no longer so willing to play the double game of pretending to be a DTI, or chrononut. On Hallowe’en Night that year we went to a party where I met a man who claimed to have met two DTIs: as he went on I realised to my horror that he was describing a meeting with Mery-Isis and myself! He had encountered us in Buffalo during the months of her mission! Fortunately he did not recognise me, having apparently paid me little attention, being more fascinated by Tari, as most of them were. “She changed my life!” he said. I should have kept quiet, but I could not bear it, to be reminded of her, and lost my temper, calling him a liar and fool to believe such rubbish! There was an ugly scene: it was two days before Marianne would speak to me again, and only after that I realised I must try to be cool-minded about such situations.

  Yet the strain of duplicity grew immense, and so came the night I tried to tell Marianne the truth.

  This arose out of another upset. Marianne was an addict of historical movies of a sort which naturally upset me, which she could not understand. One night near Christmas she insisted on going to see a new movie called The Virgin Virago, in which Jane Fonda portrayed my Queen Elizabeth as a misunderstood radical feminist ahead of her time. Halfway through this abomination I stood and exploded with such loud anger and contempt that we were both told to leave, so that on the street outside we had a violent argument. “I’m beginning to think we made a mistake!” Marianne snapped. “I can do without that sort of childishness! What’s the matter with you?”

  There and then I knew I’d had enough.

  I told her, simply and directly, as we confronted each other on California Street, who I am and how I came to America.

  “My God!” she said, still angry, but taking it quite in her stride. “And I thought you were a
reformed gay crept back into the straight and comfortable house-husband fold! Why didn’t you tell me? Closet chrononut! I should have guessed!”

  Yes, no doubt I should have left her then, but I did not, for despite every difficulty I was comfortable enough, and she still wanted me in her bed. So we stayed together, I humouring her while she thought she was humouring me, and I spent many hours walking or in the Library while she worked in the bank. Then it was 1988, and I met the Slocum cameraman in Chaunticleer’s, which renewed my fears, and life grew problematic, for rioting broke out in the Mission district just down the hill from us. The riots were caused in part by U.S. Military suppression of popular movements in Central America, but more by white developers raising rents to levels which the predominantly poor latino population could not afford. There was arson and looting and killing. Amid it all an earthquake rattled every building in the city, and one night Marianne came home and said:

  “I need a break. Let’s go to Reno for the weekend.”

  “What about Colin?”

  “He’s okay. He’ll wreck the place while we’re gone and have a great time. Humf, I damn well deserve this!”

  We drove to Reno with threats of world war on the radio, and checked into a motel, and I found that KRONONUTZ were playing just down the street. I did not go to see them. The thought of them, of Tari, of my half-buried past—no, it was still too painful. So, we entered a noisy bright casino where people wasted money in frantic efforts to pretend the rest of the world did not exist. Marianne showed me how to work the machines, and gave me a silver dollar. I fed it in, pulled the lever… and met the Janus-face of Fate again:

  6*6*6*6*6

  Luck. Fate. Fortuna. I stood there and watched those sixes click into a row, each in turn against all the odds, and the bell went off, and Marianne shrieked with disbelief as the other gamblers all came crowding round, some of them telling me they’d been trying and failing for years to do what I’d just done first time. And that is how it was with Vulcan. We Eighty-Seven were the lucky winners of the Vulcan jackpot. Why? Well, why not?

  Yet perhaps—just perhaps—the Hawk had something to do with it. For once again my life was changed. We returned to the city richer by $102,000, and on the way back through the mountain night, after a long silence, I said to Marianne:

  “I want to go to England. I need a U.S. Passport. Do you know anyone who might be able to arrange it?”

  She braked hard and stopped at the side of the road.

  “Say that again,” she said in a nervous voice.

  I repeated what I had said, very carefully.

  Then she suggested something I had not expected.

  “Why don’t we all go together?”

  Impossible! I thought quickly, and said nothing. The money was already in an account which of course was in her name—all but for $10,000 in cash for spending. Yes, I kept quiet.

  “Humf, I want to go with you,” she said in that nervous voice, “and Colin too. I’m not blind. He’s turning into a brat and it may be his last chance. We all need something new. England may not be great, but we could go to Scotland, or Scandinavia. Now listen! I might know people who could fix the passport, but we’ll have to pay whatever’s asked, or they’ll cop out and turn us in and take both ways. It happens all the time. You’ll have to trust me. I still don’t know who you are or what you’re running from, but I’m in hot water too, with this coke thing, and I want out—with you. It was your luck, but my dollar, right? I mean you’re not exactly Jesus Christ, but we get along, don’t we… Humf?”

  I’m not proud of it. I let her assume what she would until one night she brough the Loomiss papers and said that the $30,000 asked had been paid. Also she showed me three air tickets, $20,000 in traveler’s cheques, and a new tweed outfit she’d got herself, for the English weather. She said that next day we would all go to the British Consulate for our visas, and that in a week we would fly to London. “I’ve put the rest into a short-term government loan,” she went on, “so it’ll work for us while we’re away.”

  That night, with Colin in his room locked up in drugs and stereo headphones, I paced for hours before deciding. $7,000 was left of the $10,000 spending money. I gathered it from its corners, packed a bag, made sure I had the Loomiss papers, then with difficulty awoke her from her Valium sleep, knowing I could not just sneak away.

  “I am going now,” I told her unhappily. “I am going alone. It’s the only way. You don’t believe what I told you, and I would bring you no happiness at all. It’s just a dream you have that we could last together. You have still got the money and the tickets, and you can still go to Britain with Colin, and I hope you find someone who’ll treat you better than I can. I’m sorry that I deceived you, but we must stop pretending now. It really is better this way!”

  We argued bitterly, then I left quickly, calling for a cab to the airport from a street-phone, knowing that she would not try to stop me because of what I knew about her cocaine dealings. It was necessary, but ugly, and I hated myself for it, for bad leads to worse when folk treat each other like that. I know it very well, and I hope very much that she has found some peace in her life.

  Thus again I tried return to England from America. This time, four hundred and five years after my first attempt, I was successful.

  The nonstop flight to London took just eleven hours. Arguing myself out of the depression caused by my act, I found the experience at first most frightening, then exhilarating, with the vast gleaming ice-capped curve of the planet to the north. Day came, and fled fast, and it was night again already when the old 747 came down the length of Britain from the Hebrides to London. I watched, and saw how the lights of cities and towns seemed never to end, as if no countryside at all were left. For the first time it came home to me: sixty million people crammed into this one little isle! What was I doing? A return to England had seemed to be my obvious necessity, the desire springing to mind as soon as the jackpot was won. Yet it was not a matter of reason, but of deep emotion, and perhaps treacherous. And as the plane heavily lowered itself down to the Heathrow runway, I was wondering if I had made a dreadful mistake.

  28. A Pint in the Sir Walter Raleigh

  Well, and so I found a land foreign to me. The weight of the first shock was such that pride alone stopped me turning tail in immediate flight back to California. Only after a few days I realised that California was quickly coming to seem as unreal to me as the England I’d left behind, though less painful to remember.

  For immediately, in the tumult of this overcrowded and angrily haunted city, modern London, I met continual disturbing half-reminders of my past before Vulcan. For several days, caught in a “culture-shock” that had me in utter spin, I tortured myself by seeking out the ghosts. My Queen was the first of these! After two days and nights I sought solace in a visit to Hampton Court Palace. Unable to bear the Slocum-claustrophobia of the Underground, I braved the bus system instead, and got utterly lost. At last I got there, and knew immediately the visit would be worse than the journey.

  The Palace was well-preserved; too well-preserved. In agitation I hurried through familiar chambers, hardly seeing the crowds and clumps of tourists at all: the ghosts were much more real. At length I came to a particular audience-room where I broke down like a child, seeing myself and Walter and Walsingham there in animated talk with Her Majesty. Smitten, I stumbled blindly to an embroidered chair in a roped-off alcove, and a uniformed attendant was quick to pounce.

  “’Ere, mate, that chair’s fer lookin’ at, not sittin’ on,” he declared. “You can sit in the cafeteria but not ’ere.”

  A little old lady was more sympathetic, giving me a Kleenex and asking me the matter, but I could not speak, and rushed away.

  That should have been enough, but I was fevered, feeling my pain to be no more than my duty to past loyalty. Next day I had my nose pressed up against the railings of Buckingham Palace. Queen Elizabeth II! My Queen’s namesake and four-centuries-distant successor!

&nbs
p; “So, you’re leaving me. Will you be back? I doubt it. I doubt you love me enough.”

  Over and over at Hampton Court I’d heard her words of farewell, sardonically whispered, and now here again at the Changing of the Guard, amid the bus-parties. I felt a fury rising. “Well, I am back!” I snapped aloud, not caring who heard, “But four hundred years late! This is not England, and this Queen Elizabeth is not my monarch! What am I now but Humf, a common man, and proud of it, and nothing to do with the likes of this!”

  Only then I realised that a Japanese party around me had drawn back; that one of them was photographing me amid my rant—and that their armed Securicor tour-guides were eyeing me most suspiciously. But in my fever I felt no alarm. “Fools!” I shouted, striding through them and away from that place. “How can you live like ghosts here? Why such shadowy faded half-life? Where is that exuberant glory that was England? How was it lost?”

  I ran through the traffic, nearly getting killed, and ran madly on through Green Park, only coming to some measure of sanity again amid the hordes on Piccadilly.

  Exactly one year after this I was on the great march south with my friend Red Robbie. It was a most strange year.

  As for the rest of it—the trouble I had with Immigration to get a four-week visa; the way I was cheated by the cabbie who took me from Heathrow to an absurdly expensive Chelsea hotel; my initial shock at London’s noise and enormity; the anti-Americanism I found; my visit to Eton College just after the bomb was planted there; and my futile search through a decayed industrial wasteland for the site of my old house at Limehurst—let it pass. Enough. A week of London was more than my emotions and finances could bear. On the night before I left, I sat in the hotel bar, voicing my complaints to a neighbour as drunk as I—a commercial traveler, so he said.