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What do I do now? I’m standing in the livingroom of our illegal basement apartment, my limbs vibrating with the stallion-energy of methedrine (methamphetamine). I know! Of course! I run into my bedroom and take off the clothes I wear as a file clerk and quickly put on old jeans and a dirty sweat-shirt.
The night before there was a fire in the illegal attic apartment. Nothing of ours burned because we stashed our portable property in our cars, but our walls, floor, and furniture got soaked. So I start the clean-up in the bathroom, which took the most damage.
I toss charred boards and other debris through the black hole of the window into the black airshaft. Between crashes I can hear through the airshaft the soughing of traffic and distant lone footsteps, the nightsounds of Waller Street, on the edge of the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco. I’m struck by the contrast to last night when, before the firemen arrived, the airshaft contained a roaring cyclone of flames, and I and one of my roommates (Mike: six feet six, curly red hair, razor wit) threw pots of water from the filling bathtub at the board-snapping fire-dragon.
When I finish clearing debris, I sweep the bathroom floor, scrub the walls and floor, and then get down on my hands and knees and chase the least dirt crumbs into the tightest crevices, all the while roaming far into my thoughts. A voice from the livingroom yanks me back.
“Yeah?!” I call and stand up.
I’m expecting several different visitors but when I reach the livingroom it’s none of them. It’s Cappy, a friend and couch nomad (someone with a personal list of available couches who sleeps on the most convenient when he’s tired). He’s already standing inside the front door.
“Hi, man,” he says, a nicotine-stained smile spreading under a bushy handlebar moustache. “Heard about the fire. Man, you can really smell it.”
“Yeah and it’s cold too. Everything is soaked and it’s kind of…refrigerating the place. Hey ya want some tea?”
“Yeah.”
“The stove doesn’t work but I’ve got a hotplate,” I say on the way to the kitchen. “They condemned the building and turned off the gas and the electricity, but we figured out how to turn the electricity back on.”
“Are Francine and Mike still here?” he calls from the livingroom.
“Francine left town with Ralph last night,” I call out while searching for a clean pot. “They went to Fresno to stay with his parents. And Mike went home for a couple weeks before shipping out.”
Cappy is short, skinny, and hunched, with a spoon-shaped torso. He lives on candy bars and beer and an occasional can of beans and always carries a bottle of aspirin for the pain in his teeth. Without even trying, he beat the draft on malnutrition. I’m envious. At that time, late summer of 1966, I was nineteen and moving into the advanced stages of draft-obsession.
“I thought Francine’s husband’s name was Larry,” he says.
I step into the doorway of the kitchen to see his face as I tell him, “It is. Ralph is Larry’s best friend.”
“Oh, I met him.”
“She’s been sleeping with Ralph for a couple weeks now and she told me she’s in love with him.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“But I thought Ralph was gay,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say and look at the pot of water on the hotplate. I want to go into the livingroom and talk to him but I’m reluctant to be out of sight of the hotplate. I decide to trust myself to remember it and announce,
“He was gay.”
“No shit,” he says grinning as the soap-opera plot unfolds for him.
“I thought you might be Larry,” I say as I sit opposite him in a stuffed chair which like most of the furniture was culled from the sidewalks. “She’s been expecting him for a couple of days. They’re gonna send him to Vietnam, so he’s supposed to go AWOL and then run off with her. I think she used the fire as an excuse not to face him.”
“So I guess Mike gave up trying to get her back?”
“Yeah. He needed to get out of here too.”
Cappy reflected on the situation some more and then said, “Shit.”
He was a gifted story teller, and for sharing your dope or letting him sleep on the couch, he would tell a tale about the time he fled the FBI in a high speed chase through downtown Denver, or the time he hitchhiked to New York, met a chick in a coffeehouse, and two hours later was hitching back to California with her.
“You know a cat named Ziggy?” I ask.
“No.”
“Ya know Art and Howie?”
“Yeah.”
“Well they were just here and they asked me if this Ziggy and his wife could stay here and I said yeah and to thank me they shot me up with methedrine just before they left and I’ve been cleaning up the bathroom and my mind has been going like a squirrel in a treadmill and I think I’ve come up with the most basic question of western philosophy.” I was a philosophy major and my head was buzzing with theories most of the time but right now it was near exploding. “ ‘Is the glass half full or half empty?’ Yeah. That’s it! That’s what the philosopher asks. The scientist asks ‘How does this work?’ The mystic is just into the fact of existence not how or why something is there but that it is there at all. Ya see? Now the-truth-of-the-mystic-especially-the-Eastern-mystic-is-a copout-to-Western-Faustian-man-with-his-search-for-meaning-which-is-to-have-a-self-which-is-to-have-allies-and-enemies-something-to-defend-to-be-in-some-camp-either-that-of-your-own-ego-or-some-cause-substituted-for-it-that-is-a-substitute-ego-an-identity-now-identity-has-to-do-with-the-basic-archetypal-universal-duality-which-is-exponential-and-an-exponential-duality-proves-that-identity-is-provisional-and-relative…” I sniff. “Hey, something’s burning.
“It’s in the kitchen,” Cappy says.
I get up and go in there and see that the pot that held our tea water is black and smoking on the hotplate. I quickly unplug the hotplate and am about to grab the pot handle but catch myself and instead take up a threadbare dishrag and carry the pot to the sink and hold it steaming under the tap.
“Hey we’re gonna hafta wait some more on that tea,” I shout over the hissing.
Then, instead of his comment, I think I hear the door close. I turn off the tap and go to the kitchen doorway and see that the livingroom is empty. That’s strange, I think, he must’ve suddenly remembered some appointment. |
