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I moved to Marin and we naturally drifted apart, infrequently seeing each other. For the first time in his life, he was pursuing money and, compared to his heroic pursuit of political chicanery, it was squalid and he was inept. He drove a cab and, when a real estate boom hit the city, he went for the sucker ads on the radio for licensing courses, and the former recreational rent-striker became a real estate salesman—who never sold a single building. He didn’t abandon politics altogether, often sneaking into big Democratic Party powwows when they were held in the City, where he was about as likely to mix as he was with real estate investors. A trend in movies at the time was children born of the Devil. Jenny and Bernie’s son was a case in point. When he was three or four, I visited and was treated to a gymnastic tantrum in which they chased him like a squirrel until he wound up hanging by his hands from the top of a door. He couldn’t have been more oblivious to their threats and pleas if he had actually been deaf. He was a capsule concentrate of Bernie’s explosive energy with the impurity of a sadistic streak. At one point, he leaned on my knees and, while I tried to engage him in a conversation, he drilled a fingernail into my leg, staring into my eyes to savor the discomfort. A few years later, I was living back in the City and bumped into Jenny at the Tassajara Bakery. I was shocked at the change in her. She seemed stuporous with exhaustion and covered with a gray dust-film. That, and the devil-child pulling her arm taut, made the once appealing thatch of her hair now seem emblematic of her frazzled life. Not long after that, I bumped into Bernie – or rather, he saw me and pulled to the curb in his cab. We went to the Owl and the Monkey, one of a new Seventies generation of City coffeehouses. This one was just outside the Haight in the Inner Sunset District. “Do you hear what you’re saying!?” I asked, in disbelief. Nixon had just resigned and I was shocked when Bernie started defending him. (And this time he didn’t have the excuse of fearing hidden government microphones.) “We don’t know the puthpective fwom up theuh (perspective from up there)…” “The whole world thinks he’s a crook, even the right wingers, and you’re defending him?!” “Theuh (there) could be awoo kindth of weethenth (all kinds of reasons) why he had to do it…” “When we met, you told me you thought he was sending a message by having staff members with German surnames. Well, you were wrong about that, and you’re wrong about this.” Later, as he drove me to my basement apartment, the argument continued. I kept expecting him to snap out of it. But he didn’t. “It-th a diffewent wuhld at that levoo (It’s a different world at that level)...” We were still a few blocks from my place when we stopped at a light and I decided I couldn’t take anymore. “I’ll get out here,” I said as I opened the door. “Bye Bernie.” He leaned across the seat as I stood. The light changed. “But theuh awe tho many thing-th (… there are so many things) they have to conthiduh (consider)." I shut the door. A horn blared behind him. He drove off and I never saw him again. |
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