My metabolism’s changed in the few weeks I’ve been in the city. Burning some serious calories now. Become a walking fool. I need new shoes. Going all the time like a speed freak. Afraid something’s going to catch up with me if I stop. I can sustain the pace as long as I remember to breathe, but I think I may be taking it too far. I’m losing weight. Need to eat a lot to keep up. Not possible in present circumstances.
Funny thing, I’m hardly drinking at all. Power walking is a different way of anesthetizing myself, flooding the zone with oxygen and endorphins. I go barefoot on the beach and then lace up for Land’s End, high step like a tomboy in her sneakers through the outer Richmond, where people are few. I love sighting the ocean from the top of Balboa and the wide end of Geary. I force myself to race up Cabrillo, the hills, instantly steep, past stucco houses built atop sand dunes in the twenties and thirties for working people, now sold to multimillionaires who pay in cash.
Today I head down 36th avenue, cross Fulton Street into the park, spill around Spreckles Lake, a little man-made, and cross to the majestic meadows, the outdoor home to great San Francisco bands of the sixties and seventies, and now to the magnificent free festival, Hardly Strictly Blue Grass, cancelled this year along with everything else. I’ve always adored that civilized celebration of the masses. Five stages of sound that never interfere with each other. Hundreds of thousands picnicking in the long meadow, drinking, smoking pot, acting kindly in close quarters. Unthinkable now. Hard to believe it ever happened.
Vince, ever the jazz purist, wouldn’t go with me, which I realized was a boon. He’d have been a lot of baggage. I like to go by myself. Slip into one stage and then another. I can make myself small, and I can charm people just enough if I want to. Last year a colleague from work, Celeste, insisted I join her little family, husband, Roddy, and two-year-old, McAllister. It turned into a disaster.
Roddy, a skinny rope of a man with carrot hair, was legendary for laying down his tarp very early on the Sunday morning at the Rooster Stage. He staked out a wide swath front and center. Celeste, McAllister, and I came six hours later, at noon, with the picnic and the booze. According to Celeste, nobody had to provide Roddy with weed.
It should have been a perfectly pleasant day as all the rest of my times at Hardly Strictly have been, but an altercation with Celeste and a pair of strangers turned the afternoon ugly.
For the first couple of hours, the adults chased after McAllister, equipped in rainbow ear protection muffs, on his looping toddle through the crowds, as bands I never heard of like St. Paul and the Broken Bones and the Infamous Stringdusters played tuneful romps that sounded as if they were geared for both toddlers and stoners.
By about two in the afternoon, after we’d eaten our deviled eggs and our pulled pork sandwiches, McAllister was out like a light. Celeste whispered to me that she’d given her son a double dose of Dramamine. “We’ve done it before,” she said, “he’ll be out until Patti Smith comes on. Then he’ll want to snuggle with me for the next hour.”
Meanwhile, the three of us finished the thermos of martinis and moved on to a fifth of Southern Comfort, which none of us really cared for, but Roddy said we were obliged to drink. “It was Janis’ spirit of choice. It’s a tradition. Once a year. After all, we’re sitting in the meadow where she played with Big Brother and the Holding Company, and she’d be playing Hardly Strictly if she were still around.”
There was no arguing with that. After Celeste and I got thoroughly smashed, we left Roddy with the sleeping boy and wandered off to hear Steve Earle, finding a cozy spot on a wooded hilltop above the Tower of Gold Stage. This is where my sense of time gets blurry. I have no idea how long it was before we were joined by two men, Ivy League types, both attorneys, both in their thirties, both black, both wearing too much cologne for my taste. One had binoculars strung around his neck, the other a camera with a very long lens. The guy with the binoculars was called Rashan, if I remember correctly, and the cameraman went by Richie. The four of us smoked a joint together.
In a little bit we paired off and I ended up talking with Richie. He pretended to have an interest in my work and suggested that it might help him with his job to take elocution lessons from me. He was a tease and I just shook my head when he started to make a move on me. It flattered me because he was a good fifteen years my junior and a nice looking fellow, but I knew it wasn’t a good idea. I do remember wondering if his cock was as long as his camera lens. I swayed back and forth to Steve Earle’s steel wool voice, particularly when he lofted the ballad, “That Old Time Feeling” over all of us.
Some time later—and, again, my recollection of time and sequence is dubious—I noticed Celeste making out with Rashan, as his binoculars slid down the hillside. The guy was playing rough, groping Celeste with one hand as he yanked on her hair. I watched his hand slide way down her pants and try to finger her.
“We should separate them,” I said to Richie.
“Why would we do that?”
“Her husband and two-year-old are right over at the Rooster Stage”
“But she’s over here. This is what we call consensual.”
“Thanks for your legal opinion. Look, she’s drunk out of her head,” I shouted.
“You are,” he said.
“Celeste,” I called.
By now Rashan was on top of her with one hand under her sweater, one down her pants.
I stood up. “You’re either going to get him off her or I am.”
“Why interrupt nature?” Richie said. “What’s your problem, auntie?”
True, I was old enough to be his maiden aunt, but I can be fierce when I need to be. I rushed over and shoved binocular man off Celeste so hard that he rolled a little bit down the hill. Then I yanked Celeste to her feet.
Drunk, woozy, and disheveled, she still managed to holler at me, “What are you doing, bitch?”
Rashan climbed up the hill with his binoculars and shot me a hard look. I like to think I stared him down. “What do you think you doing, you funky bitch?” he hissed at me.
“Fucking racist bitch is what she is. Wouldn’t mind no white boy pawing her girl,” Richie added.
Everybody was calling me a bitch at once.
I led Celeste, foul-mouthed and kicking at me, back toward her family. “You’re just a jealous old bitch,” she said at some point, keeping the theme going, “just a jealous old bitch that doesn’t know how to have fun.” Perhaps she was right, but I didn’t care to be complicit in a drunken rape.
I wandered off by myself, wondering why I had so few friends and if I was actually a racist. A bit sluggish from the drink and weed, I ended up at the Swan Stage. The sun had begun to set and spill a milky glaze over the enormous crowd. I found a perch a million miles from the stage and listened to what was left of Judy Collins’s set, amazed how pure her voice remained in her eightieth year. She finished her set with Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire.” I’ve always loved the song, particularly Johnny Cash’s rendition of it. I sang the last verse along with Judy, becoming a bit mawkish, I’m afraid, with tears slipping down my cheeks.
Like a bird on a wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.
The memory of that afternoon, like the memory of all things in which shame and confusion are involved, retained the quality of an open wound. I walked with the wound, like a baby cradled in my arms—a sensation I’ve rarely had as a childless woman—and climbed the hill to Stow Lake where I rented a boat for one hour and rowed for three. During the last half hour, as I hovered near Strawberry Hill Island, just past the waterfall, I called Charlie and told him that I am hungry again and, in a breathy voice, that I loved him.
He seemed to take the news in stride and chuckled and asked me where I was.
“In the middle of a lake,” I said.
“Hmmm,” he said. “Are you dressed?”
“Yes, for success.”
I prefer it when you’re undressed for success. So, how’s it going?”
“The verdict’s still out and I’m afraid it may be out for the duration.”
“The duration?”
“My natural life.”
“How long will you remain in the lake?”
“They’ll come and collect me if I don’t bring the boat back soon. But know, that no matter what happens, I love you.”
I checked out of the Seal Rock Inn this morning, after a sunrise walk and swim at the ocean. It felt a little bit sad to be leaving, having gotten in touch, during this period of isolation, with a full spectrum of my eccentricities. It’s good, I’ve decided, to know the extent of my weirdness, and to see my peculiarities as strengths rather than the contrary. Easier said than done.
I waited in line for a half an hour at The House of Bagels on Geary and chatted with the man behind me in line. He was an older guy with an intelligent face. His fading blue eyes looked like they’d seen a lot. Once in a while I encounter a random person that I assume is a fellow traveler, by which I do not refer to the term’s political usage, but to a simple sense of simpatico. I had that feeling when I first got to know Charlie.
The man in line spoke to me. “We’re crusaders, aren’t we? Our purpose is sustenance, and bagels are the means.” He had a whimsical lilt to his voice. “Don’t you think the old Jews in the Polish shtetls, the folks who invented these bad boys, would be amused to see all these gentiles spending half the day in line for high-priced bagels?”
“Indubitably,” I said, thinking of Roscoe, who enjoyed pronouncing that word.
The man wore a black face mask with the word doubletalk printed in white letters over his lips. I found that witty, just as I did the check I’d get from a former client, in which his name, rather than containing an honorific, concluded with persona non grata. I told the man in line that I admired his tee shirt, which in large, block letters read: I MIGHT HAVE BEEN BOUND FOR GLORY.
He nodded his thanks and said, through his doubletalk covered lips, “Glory is such a curious construct, part religion, part commercial commodification, part childless hero worship. Actually, I have more affinity with the ignominious.”
“You sound like an outlier.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “but I believe I predate the word.”
“With all due respect, the word goes back to the Middle English,” I said.
“Hmm.” He raised his eyebrows. “How erudite we are.”
“I’m just a word nerd,” I said
“Tell me about the origins of nerd.”
“It goes back to a Dr. Seuss book in the early fifties.”
“Go on. My late husband had a love affair with Nerds, the candy. He always kept a pack of watermelon Nerds in his shirt pocket where another guy would keep his Marlboros. I think it was his way of saying, I am who I am; get used to it.”
I smiled at the man and introduced myself. “I’m Pina. I have a late husband as well.”
“Oh, my, the things we have in common—dead husbands, bagels. What’s next, Pina? I’m Gerard. Don’t tell me you’re all in on poppy seeds.”
“They’re my favorite.”
“Get out. Where will this end?”
We inched closer to the front of the line and the smell of bagels roused my appetite. It didn’t help that my new friend Gerard was waxing eloquent about the little baked treasures.
“Ah, a warm bagel, fresh or toasted, cream cheese, a couple of strips of lox when I’m feeling flush, a sprinkling of capers, and very thin slices of sweet Vidalia onion—that’s as close as I get to wholesome since I had a man who loved me.”
I felt lucky to have a man who still loved me; at least I believed he did. “Delightful to meet you,” I said to Gerard, when my time came to enter the bakery.
“We will meet again, Pina,” he said, his blue eyes brightening. “Just watch.”
I bought a dozen bagels, a mix of poppy seed, sesame, and onion, along with two flavors of cream cheese.
“Sustenance,” Gerard said, as I left the shop with my large white bag.
Back in the car I thought of ripping a bagel apart and spreading green olive cream cheese across the halves. But I slowly chewed a whole, warm poppy seed bagel instead. It took a bit of discipline to not chomp into another. Forty-five minutes later I was standing at Charlie’s front door, my sole offering: eleven bagels.