Grid #37.38.48.49 by Al McKee
Wonder if they know.
In the movie version there would be strong hints: a room in the house turning suddenly frigid or the daughter, as she closes the medicine cabinet, startled by a bearded face behind her (a face that isn’t there when she spins around). In the movie knives would rattle in the silverware drawer and the whimpering dog would chew through its leash and run away.
In real life, however, walls don’t weep unless the plumbing is busted. Probably the nice people who live at this tidy Cole Street address have no idea of their home’s dark provenance. Probably on Saturday nights the kids rent slasher movies and squeal and giggle, completely unaware of what that “CM” that’s carved in the basement beam stands for. Surely no one in the house has ever noticed the notation on the inside wall of an upstairs closet. There’s a trunk in front of it now, but if they pulled that trunk out and turned on the closet light, if they crouched down to squint at the black ink marks just above the baseboard, they could see quite clearly what a very weird guy—Lord knows what he was doing in the closet that day—scrawled for posterity two months before The Summer of Love:
“Charley Manson, April 1967.”
Every night at this time he waits until her breathing is steady and her feet have stopped twitching. He eases out of bed and silently dresses. He has done this so many times now that he can buckle his boots and zip up his jacket without making a sound. He slings a knapsack over this shoulder. It is packed with enough of his personal belongings that if tonight is the night he decides to keep going—he can.
Downstairs he opens the garage door quietly. The cool of the hour hits his face. He can smell how late it is. He rolls his heavy bike out of the garage and puts down the kickstand. Again very carefully he pulls shut the door. Then he walks the bike down the street half a block—far enough away that the sound of the engine won’t wake her.
At the intersection, he lets it rip. He flips on the light. Roaring full-throttle through Golden Gate Park, he imagines the squirrels and the nesting crows startled from sleep. There’s no traffic here. The road belongs to him. He rides, free as night, all the way to the Bridge.
On the San Francisco side he stops. With his motor idling, he looks ahead to the hills of Marin. The lights on the Bridge invite him to cross. He could if he wanted to. He has his knapsack with him and money in his pocket—he always brings money. By the time she wakes up he could be in Eureka. By the end of the month he could be in Alaska.
He checks his watch. Three a.m. He looks at the hills and the lights on the Bridge. His motor is idling.
Better get back.
Was that a hundred dollar bill that woman just slipped the street-corner poet? Might have been a fifty, but even so… Who would have guessed impromptu verse could be so lucrative? Periodically since July a slender, long-bearded, scholarly young fellow has set up shop at the corner of Haight and Ashbury with a small end table, a folding chair, an old Smith Corona portable and a hand-scrawled sign that explains succinctly the ground rules of his gig: “Pick a subject and price, then get a poem.”
Today people are lining up for it. Two tourists from Europe, a smiling old guy, the woman with the sizable tip, a pair of young lovers smooching as they wait… When my turn comes, I step up and say, “Can you give me a five-dollar poem on Women of the Haight?”
“A rare breed,” the poet says and bends to his work.
This is literature returned to its humble beginnings: pamphleteering in revolutionary Paris or Grub Street hustling in 18th century London. When the poet rips his sheet from the typewriter, pauses to make corrections with a ball-point pen and hands over the finished product to me, we are consummating an ancient transaction.
And the poem?
Okay… The poem is the concept. The poem is the folding chair and the tap-tap of the Smith Corona and the chutzpah it takes for a gentle young man to pit his ingenuity against all comers. As for “Women of the Haight”—it’s too long to reproduce in its entirety, but a typical line is: “Such song birds, the way they move they are art…If only I could have one, how lucky would I be.”
Yeah, well… What do you want for five bucks?
How about a souvenir from the 60s? How about a Jimi Hendrix t-shirt? Or a Bob Marley t-shirt? Or—hey: Che Guevara! How about some kind of drug paraphernalia? People did a lot of drugs in the 1960s—a jeweled roach clip or an Alice-in-Wonderland candy-colored hookah might be just the ticket. (For that matter a dime bag makes a wonderful souvenir). How about an underground comic book? Remember Mr. Natural? Remember Fritz the Cat? In the 60s you could pick up R. Crumb at your corner grocery. Now you’ll have to go to Booksmith to find him. Check out the Graphic Novels section. Or—Jesus!—the Theology section. Crumb just illustrated the first book of the Bible. (Well, there IS a lot sex in the first book of the Bible). Speaking of which, how about a plain old pack of condoms? Condoms were not used as widely in the 60s as they are today—most girls were on the pill then, and guys… well, guys weren’t that worried about it. Back then your only risk was pregnancy. Or the clap. In other words: no big deal. Still a plain old pack of condoms would capture at least the spirit of the 60s—free love and all that. How about a Janis Joplin CD? She lived around here. In the summer of 66 you might have seen young Janis Joplin sitting barefoot on the front steps of her apartment house at 122 Lyon Street—very likely with a cocktail in her hand. Janis died of a heroin overdose long before the CD was invented—but a Janis Joplin CD would still be a perfectly appropriate souvenir of the 1960s.
Is it torment or comfort to be gravely ill in such a beautiful place?
Some of the rooms in the UCSF Medical Center at the top of the hill on Parnassus look out onto dazzling panoramas. From some of them you can watch the wind troubling treetops in Golden Gate Park all the way to Ocean Beach. You can see across to the Golden Gate itself, to the Bay and the Bridge and the hills of Marin. But do you want to see? UCSF is famous for its difficult cases—its AIDS research, its ground-breaking surgeries, the excellence of its severe burns unit. Surely anyone in need of this level of care, does not wish to be reminded of that postcard world outside the window. Surely the beauty of normal life, now imperiled—perhaps lost forever!—is torture to the critically ill.
Or maybe not…
If you can set your mind on a contemplative track, if you can take a step back from your own calamity, there may be comfort in perceiving your misfortune as part of a single, ongoing storm—the same storm troubling those treetops in the park. Perhaps when you are this severely ill, the only comfort to be had is observing in the slow drip of the I.V. now at your bedside a reprise in miniature of the slow crawl of tail-lights outside your window as people, ending their normal day, drive home across that beautiful bridge to Marin.
Because of some glitch in the audio, the recorded announcement on the in-bound bus is: “Smart-asses to the Ferry Plaza.” Actually what the man is saying is “6 Parnassus to the Ferry Plaza” but the recording has lost a crucial syllable or two, and so, for once, all the wise guys and troublemakers that frequent this line are properly signified.
I used to ride the 6-Parnassus to work and came to know well its gallery of regulars. The fellow who searches each of his many pockets twice—and then three times—for the transfer he knows was never there. The fellow who steps aboard and coolly drops thirty-seven cents in the fare box, proceeding to the rear as the driver calls, “Excuse me, sir! Excuse me, sir!” The underdressed hottie heading downtown after a long night’s carouse, flashing punitive glares at anyone rude enough to observe her body parts. The loud girl on cell phone updating the bus on details of her disastrous rent situation. The ancient hippie lecturing at large on being stoned continuously since 1972. The man too drunk to notice he has wet his pants.
Sometimes when you are going to work, you can’t help wondering if the carefully balanced spreadsheets awaiting you at your desk do not mask a larger truth: that chaos is the world’s default setting; that however we labor to achieve an orderly life, we are, each of us, heading inexorably into pandemonium.
Smart asses to the Ferry Plaza! All aboard!