Windward Passage

by Jim Nisbet

  Quentin made no response to this.

  “Let alone, Philip Roth.”

  Quentin made a delicate sound in his throat.

  “Know what I mean?”

  Quentin turned a page in his newspaper.

  “Take Sarsaparilla Candy, for instance, which she spells Sasparilla. Plodding along in the porn industry, she was getting by on her looks and a certain natural talent. She thinks, ‘Where’s the future in this? I’m going to turn fifty on my hands and knees?’”

  “That’s right about the age when you begin to suspect that if you don’t take the action as you find it, you may never find it again.” Quentin observed, not looking up from his paper.

  “So,” Tipsy continued, “having long recognized a need for makeups that won’t smear in the clench, Saspirilla goes out and starts her own cosmetics company. She calls it Gentilia. Sole proprietorship. She does a little research, finds a Korean company that has the knowhow, establishes a brand, gives it away free to her friends and fellow practitioners in the porn industry, works day and night, builds it up, takes it public—and voilà: five years later she’s a millionaire. Five years!”

  “A million bucks,” remarked Quentin, “the be-all and end-all of life.”

  Quentin knew the Saspirilla Candy story. Tipsy had worked for Gentilia, on and off, almost since its inception.

  “For the sixth time since 1995,” Quentin read aloud, “the House of Representatives has passed a bill recommending a constitutional amendment banning the desecration of the American flag.”

  “Where does that leave freedom of speech?” Tipsy queried.

  Quentin scanned ahead. “It doesn’t mention freedom of speech.”

  “After all, how could they?”

  “The bill reads, in its entirety, ‘The Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the Untied States.’”

  “That’s entirely consistent with throwing people in prison and torturing them because, quote, ‘They hate our freedoms.’”

  “Actually, I’ll go you one better than that.” Quentin folded his paper. “It goes right along with arresting people for using photographs of George Bush II for target practice.”

  “Whose picture should they use?”

  “Osama bin Laden’s—of course.”

  “Why not Thurgood Marshall’s?”

  “Now you’re thinking. But watch out that your brain doesn’t generate too strong a field. They have ways of detecting your thoughts.”

  “Then what?”

  “First, they will de-habeas your corpus. Next, they will allow an indefinite period of time to elapse before your process comes due. And while you’re hopping up and down on the griddle trying to keep your feet from getting burned, they will gut a half-century of environmental regulatory reforms and plant an oil rig every four miles between San Diego and Crescent City, right up the entire coast of California.”

  “But,” Tipsy raised a finger, “while ‘they’ are depriving the world of its natural heritage, China—the nation, not the boyfriend—having purchased Unocal and established it as an off-shore, non-taxpaying entity, will make its move on Chevron, having already put its moves on Shell, British Petroleum, Nigeria, and Venezuela.”

  “Hey,” Quentin observed, “capitalism needs elbow room.”

  “That’s probably one free market fluctuation certain prominent freemarketeers are willing to interdict. Or at least retard. But wasn’t it Marx who predicted that, once capitalism goes global, it will destroy itself? Everybody in Congress knows their Marx—right?”

  “In your mind, my friend,” replied Quentin, “a little knowledge makes for a dangerous opinion.”

  “No, really. I couldn’t give a hoot about Karl Marx.”

  “How could it be otherwise?” Quentin observed coolly. “You barely know who he was.”

  “But it’s an interesting idea,” she parried.

  Quentin unfolded his paper. “Do you really want to discuss Marx just to prove you’re a fully developed character?”

  “Yes,” she said emphatically.

  “But you’re preaching to the converted. I know we’re in a world of shit. Go convince somebody who thinks everything is fine.”

  Tipsy fidgeted. “Just contemplating that conversation makes my skin break out.”

  “Don’t call me. Call Gentilia.”

  “Not that skin. …”

  Later, walking on Potrero Hill, Quentin realized that, bad as they were, the national and international scenes had little or nothing to do with Tipsy’s skin rash. He wasn’t even so sure that her nervous condition had anything to do with her brother’s return to harness, as it were. It should do, though. While dope smuggling once had its romantic side for people like Charley, when what was being smuggled was marijuana and not yet cocaine, or hashish and not yet heroin, when it was the hipsters versus the squares and not narcoterrorists versus the Drug Enforcement Agency, when the whole thing wasn’t orchestrated and driven by some cockamamie CIA scheme involving purchasing dope from Jacobins in order to buy weapons for Ultras—and other inappropriate scenarios for an impenetrably mendacious foreign policy etc. etc.—, the salad days are long gone. They’re two generations gone. Maybe three. The picture of Charley Powell making one last run at fifty-four years old in anticipation of early retirement hardly made for appealing statistical analysis.

  Why, Quentin wondered, stooping to retrieve a roofing nail in a crosswalk, don’t people like Charley do desperate things for love instead of money? He tossed the nail into a tree box, wondering if a little rust wouldn’t do a bottle brush tree some good, nutritionally speaking. Because Charley’s too shy or damaged to come to terms with his emotional reality? On second thought, that nail was galvanized, coated in zinc to prevent it from rusting. Well, he thought, looking over his shoulder toward the tree from the far end of the block, people take zinc for their health, don’t they? To boost their immune system. And to damage their prostate. Between the devil and the deep blue sea. What do people and trees have in common? The Republican Party? Of course! It exists to snuff out both!

  He turned back. But if one were to grind up, say, Republican environmental strategy and sprinkle the result in tree boxes all over town, surely the trees would flourish?

  Am I under arrest? Are such thoughts metaphorically consistent with using an American ex-president’s face for target practice?

  One strives for consistency …

  Quentin, he chided, you’d think that a dying man would have better things about which to remonstrate.

  Well, he reflected, quite the contrary. One treasures the details, the fiddly bits of life.

  The roofing nail bounced out of the tree box and came to rest between two russet Krugerrands of neatly minted dog feces. Quentin hesitated. That nail will probably remain right there, intact, and this tree will get struck by lightning, in a town where lightning is rare, before somebody’s dog steps on it. The latter thought pained him, but he had to be careful about this. His compromised immune system left him wide open to opportunistic infections, every kind of cold and virus and even plant diseases.

  Quentin retrieved his fountain pen from an inner pocket. He paused to regard it fondly. Many’s the mortgage agreement … He tried to flip the roofing nail into the tree box. But the nail hit the trunk of the acacia and ricocheted off the curb and thence into the street where, immediately, the right front tire of a passing Ford Excursion (sage green, 6280 lbs., 14 mpg city, 17 mpg highway) gleaned the nail as if on cue. Vehicle past, nail gone. When the big SUV slowed before running the stop sign at the end of the block, Quentin could see that it bore a BUSH/CHENEY ‘04 bumper-sticker. A navy blue latex sack, ostensibly containing a pair of oversize testicles, dangled from its trailer hitch.

  “But,” Quentin maintained aloud, “I still don’t believe in karma.”

  He consoled himself with the thought that this particular bumper-sentiment presented an uncommon sight in San Francisco; not precisely rare, however, he percei
ved it as an accurate reflection of the “evolving” state of the municipality.

  One admires American democracy, Quentin paraphrased Stendhal, but the trouble with it is, one has to discuss it with one’s local Republican.

  Much more common in San Francisco, during the ‘04 campaign, had been the sight of 14 mpg SUVs with a John Kerry for President sentiment on the left bumper and NO WAR FOR OIL bleat on the right. How to suss that one? How about: In this country, there is no Left. Yes, Quentin didn’t say aloud, that’s why I’m walking by myself, and talking to myself. … You’d think a mortally ill man would have better things to think about. You’d be disappointed. The Mercedes is in the shop again, and that is altogether too stupid for a sick man to think about. That car is almost as much of a turkey as a Ford Excursion. Always has been.

  What is it a sick man is supposed to consider, anyway? Should he reread The Death of Ivan Ilych? No. The Magic Mountain? Please. Diary of a Mad Old Man? Maybe.

  Arrived at his house on De Haro Street, Quentin noted, as he engaged the bannister and the first of the 69 redwood steps that rose up the hill to his aerie, that his other dead car, a 1968 Datsun 510, on the concrete pad half-way up the hill, where it had reposed for some six months now, had accrued quite a volume of trash and eucalyptus leaves in its shadow. Originally black, now blistered gray by salt and sun, the car had over 400,000 miles on it, dating as it did from an era when Japan made cars cheap and hardy enough to take over the world—and, at 26 city miles to the gallon, decades ahead of its time. Now the 510 needed a clutch—its fourth—and China, to whom Quentin had given the car, didn’t want to pay for it. Or couldn’t. So, as an example of how his mind works, China claimed to be embarrassed to be seen driving such an old car. Quentin thought it was more about the manual transmission, which China couldn’t handle either. In any event, the hills of San Francisco eat clutches and brakes; it’s a law of nature. Quentin had paid $400 for the car in 1977, and clutches and brakes were the only things he’d ever replaced on it. Okay, okay, in the nineties he’d replaced the rubber belt by which the crankshaft drives the camshaft, back when there were still homosexual mechanics in this town, whose shops maintained immaculate waiting rooms with comfortable chairs and fresh flowers and All My Children on the television, with names like Gay Motors, Sweet Motivation, and Let Us Turn Your Crank.

  Maybe it was the eighties. The very early eighties.

  After three stops to catch his breath he gained the top of the stairs, where, after a fourth pause to allow the perspiration to at least partially evaporate, he let himself into the cottage, failing the while to dodge a line of mental patter he’d pursued a hundred times before. No doubt about it, in a town rich in quaint abodes, this had to be one of the quaintest. It couldn’t have been fifteen hundred square feet—in fact, as he happened to know, it was 1347—including the bathroom, which was on the ground floor, under the kitchen. However, since Quentin and China—the boyfriend, not the nation—had stopped sleeping together, the size of the place had become all too apparent.

  Before the railroad yards in the flats of Mission Bay were developed into a biotech complex, complete with a street called Stem Cell Way, the Bay Bridge had been visible from the kitchen window. Half of this marvelous wood-mullioned unit, seven feet wide and four feet high, two sashes of some sixteen 8 x 12” lites each, slid behind the other half, making for an always-astonishing blast of birdsong surfing a cold, eucalyptustinctured fog, as one did the dishes.

  Quentin had owned the place for forty years, since long before China made the scene, maybe even since before China was born, if of woman the little Caliban had been born. Yet another stub in the reality checkbook.

  China never gave anywhere near the damn about the view that he gave about being coy on the subject of his age. When and if he was home he smoked dope and watched his 36” flat screen television which, after protracted vituperation, China had insisted on hanging right on top of the view of De Haro Street to be had from the big window in the east wall on the first floor, adjacent the front door, from which one could see the gantries and spectral illumination of the dry-docks at the foot of 18th Street, for just one example, two miles away. Not to mention the sunrises. And moonrises! Quentin had managed to draw the curtains before China mounted the thing. Otherwise, all you’d see from the street would be wires, cooling vents, and a chassis of a color Quentin liked to call Storm Trooper Gray. The damask curtains between it and the window glass were much more pleasing to the eye, but, still, the setup rendered the spectacular windows useless. China didn’t care about quite a bit of other stuff, either. What did ring his gong were the ostensive results he was getting from a new trainer at his gym, complimentary gallon jars of nutritional supplements, and a turnip-shaped quartzite crystal he parked between the cheeks of his ass when the latter wasn’t otherwise employed, in order to re-harmonize his wracked prostate.

  In exchange for discounts on membership fees, the vitamins, and crystal tuneup, China was boffing the trainer. Not that Quentin cared. “Hey,” he could hear China shrugging it off, were Quentin foolish enough to bring it up, “every starlet does it.”

  Tedious, tedious, tedious.

  Quentin had always suppressed his bisexual streak, and it’s none of your business, thank you very much, but it was times like these that women like Tipsy started to look good to him, and he knew he was in trouble. Tipsy was his closest friend, she was intelligent, and she was good-looking, too, but she was a lush and, at this stage, that’s just about all that remained to that story. Personal matters like love and sex came a distant fourth or fifth with Tipsy. Even politics outranked them. Not only that, but Tipsy had a longstanding monthly champagne brunch and hotel-room nooner with a married doctor. Once, Quentin had made the mistake of asking her about the guy. “Well,” she confided at once. “After tipping and dismissing room service, right before we pop the cork on the champagne, he sets his pager to ‘Vibrate.’”

  “That’s enough!” Quentin had declared, showing her the upraised palms of both hands. And the subject was closed.

  What with one thing and another, Quentin had been sleeping the last six months on the upstairs couch, crammed against the west wall of the dining room, with stacks of books and the window wide open and the wonderful view of the sub-iconographic rooftops of biotechnology, enduring the soundtracks of old movies, the canned laughter of “situation” comedies, and the exhortations of shopping channels rising from the floor below, if and when China was home. But at home China wasn’t much of, lately, and when he was at home he was either loaded and belligerent or hungover and sullen, with passed out cold the only stop in between. China clung to a job wheeling cartloads of interoffice mail between the multiple floors of a big downtown law firm, a form of employment he’d maintained for something like four years with absolutely no intention of improving or advancing himself. His idle chatter consisted almost entirely of office gossip, of which he possessed a detailed surfeit, of which Quentin, by mere apposition, and despite a matured facility for tuning out his bunky’s prattle, himself possessed way too detailed a map.

  The punk couldn’t even cook.

  So what’s this about? Quentin asked himself one more time, as he surveyed the dishes in the sink. Downstairs, China’s unmade bed, heaps of clothes, his open gym bag, his poster of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger—”Married men love what I can do for them,” China would wistfully invoke the image, every night or day as he retired, “and it’s guaranteed to improve the nuptial contract. Arnie,” he’d blow a kiss, “call me.” The flat screen, the matchbooks with hastily scrawled phone numbers, half-consumed half-pints of brandy, the odd black beauty or triazapam caught between the sofa cushions—these comprised a world for which Quentin never had been able to muster a care. Yes, he had always been kidding himself about China. And it wasn’t that he hadn’t been aware of China’s miscellaneous but rather complete if equally concise list of shortcomings; it was perhaps that all of these banalities had finally added up to the man in his en
tirety, which, if sad, scarcely amounted to anything of substance, which left Quentin acedic and bored. And sex? Well, come on, darling. Quentin almost blushed. But his expression went wry even as his cheeks tinctured with shame. He knew any number of seventy-year-old queens who chased the young boys, went to their clubs and did poppers with them, even snorted methamphetamine to keep up with the demands of a strenuous sex life. In fact, you only had to know one of them. Gay or straight, it was an unusual man who could pull it off. The rest of them, the balance of them, just looked silly.

  He recalled four lines by Thom Gunn. How could he not recall them?

  Then dawn developed in the room, but old.

  …I thought (unmitigated restlessness

  Clawing its itch): “I gave up sleep for this?”

  Dead leaves replaced the secret life of gold.

  What’s the difference between a seventy-year old rake and one of fifty?

  Twenty years of dead leaves.

  He chuckled.

  And maybe a couple of teeth.

  His smile faded.

  Night sweats.

  The Man With Night Sweats—a Thom Gunn title.

  Toothless Rake With Night Sweats—a Quentin Asche title.

  Life can be so … circular.

  The right-hand pan of the balance has crashed to the desk.

  It’s time to go.

  Quentin surveyed the second floor. It was all one room. Even with the window open the musk of unwashed dishes in the sink would always linger above the far end of the couch. There were several boxes of books, which he would sell, if only to pre-empt China’s selling them. The modest assortment of clothing he’d been buying to accommodate his thinning frame would fit in a svelte suite of three valises, two of which he could lock in the trunk of the Datsun for the time being. He toyed with the idea of leaving the dishes, so that maybe China would appreciate his absence.

  “What’s that about?” Quentin asked the room indignantly. “I, yes I, am the one who’s going to appreciate my absence.” He glanced at the clock over the sink. He had a minimum of four hours before the first possibility of China’s appearance. He could be gone by then.