Chapter 5
Mary was a big, tall girl. She had a beautiful face and reminded me of Mama Cass.
“What do you mean, I’m a big girl?” she laughed at Declan. “What do you mean by that?”
We drank more beers as Mary told us more stories. Mary and Declan and another of their friends, Max, from Ohio State, had gone on spring break to Hawaii their senior year. They went rafting on the ocean while they were out there. Mary laughed as she told us, “Declan and Max weren’t afraid of sharks because they told me that my butt was dragging deeper in the raft than their butts were, and I would be the first (and the last) to go, because I was a big enough meal for any great white!” She laughed. “Can you believe they said that!”
“The sharks would be full after Mary!” Declan laughed aloud with her.
After drinking for about three hours, we headed out with Mary to the San Pablo BART (Bay Area Rapid Transport) station. The train took us under the water of the great bay to the beautiful tip of San Francisco. In the city, we rode the cable cars to Chinatown and then down to Fisherman’s Wharf where we looked out over the bay at a moving barge whose deck for one moment held so perfectly the abandoned prison of Alcatraz. But Alcatraz escaped, slipping off the back of the barge, back to her isolated island rock perch, alone and cold. A yellow sailboat, glistening in the afternoon sun, came toward us from afar, cutting zigzag across the ever-widening gap between the barge and the prison. Alcatraz seemed so close to this incredible city, but the white-crested ripping currents and the supposed shark-infested waters, increased the distance by a lifetime. No one had ever escaped from Alcatraz and its ghostly walls, walls that now welcomed curious tourist travelers. I tried to look out from those walls one time when I was out there, as if I too were a forgotten ghost, looking past the choppy white water at the big hilly skyscraper city, dreaming of a day when I would run free again.
On the wharf I watched the countless, nameless, and sorrowful faces of the homeless pass us by; some of them with bitter determination in their look; some gazing at the dead space right in front of their eyes. We walked around them, tourists and businesspeople shunned them, as if ignoring God Himself. There were so many of them here; they all had such desperate and tired eyes; different faces all with such sad passion, all of them isolated in their own prisons, all of them seemingly so lonely, so forgotten. Why were they all here? Why not somewhere warmer? Or did they not know? Were they ill? Were they schizophrenics who fell off their medication and had just been abandoned by life? Maybe some had been people who had come here chasing a dream and had just run out of unstoppable West to move against, coming to a dead halt at the Pacific Ocean and finding nothing more but those icy, choppy waters. Some wandered aimlessly like driftwood now, abandoned by society. This had been the beat of Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise, who, in my mind, still paced the wooden docks around us asking for loose change. I imagined them continually traversing these aching city hills. And I thought on how this big, mysterious city with all of its ghostly chills had swallowed many. My eyes were an open movie camera recording the speed of life now; there was a living video unwinding before me. I watched the open-ended script tell its story, people darting everywhere while the homeless moved at a slower speed. There were thousands of stories to be told, all of them going off in all different directions, and I wondered in amazement how anything could ever have a common end.
Every life pulsating, walking on our earth today and all the way back to the beginning of time, all had these plot points, I thought, like a script, points that turned our living souls in certain directions, ones that ultimately set the beat of the rest of our lives. Like any living being, I could see all the points in hindsight, after deep reflection, after a great expanse of time, but why was it so hard in the moment to find them? To identify the one point that will change and define our very being, to see it in the now. Maybe this walk on the wharf was the turning point.
We left to go eat ice cream cones, and I immediately felt the pain of past months-gone-by kidney stones. I chowed down a giant salted pretzel with caked on mustard from a street vendor, and we drank more beer. At least we were eating right, I thought. Through all of the San Francisco street madness, Declan’s friend Mary continued with her endless stories. The chill in the air of this mysterious city still wrapped around us as we walked along, taking in everything. Mary’s voice was coming in and going out of range; it was all a part of a dream. I watched beautiful women in business suits on Market Street; I saw a small group of people on the corner at Union Square speaking French; a black man was playing an alto saxophone near the small park there; he looked just like the great wailer, The Big Man Clarence Clemons himself. He motioned to the tourists (who kept on snapping pictures of him) with the bell of his horn to feed his weathered open and empty sax case with their silver coin.
“I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” The sweet sound of the sax swooned in the swirling air around us with a background hum of Mary’s voice.
“If you want to take a picture, you’ve got to put some money in my case,” the sax player stopped his song abruptly and pleaded to the French tourists beside us. “Don’t any of you people realize that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch!” He looked over to us and then rolled his eyes in the direction of the tourists before puckering his lips again and blowing on the mouthpiece one more time.
Wasn’t this the first law of thermodynamics? How did the sax player know about this law . . . “No such thing as a free lunch?” I had learned this law in college physics, and it had to do with energy going from one place to another. Maybe he had learned it in physics too.
Lucas threw a handful of his loose change into the poor man’s case.
“God bless you, Lucas!” the jazzman tipped his hat to my friend.
From there, we took a bus to the center of town and then boarded BART again and headed back to Mary’s in San Pablo. I slept in the train. I heard Mary’s voice in my half dreams as I slept. These were the broken speed bump dreams that had been left there from our ride all of the way up the California coast. Colette was about 400 miles behind me now. Huntington Beach was gone. The distance was starting to settle in. No more dress shirts and striped fabric ties, I dreamt. No more disgusting break rooms littered with cigarettes and coffee cups. In the dream, the break room was empty. Broken images crashed in with Mary’s mumbling voice. A homeless man we had seen at the BART train station who sat huddled in a fetal position with a worn plaid blanket bundled around him changed into a giant caterpillar in a cocoon, Kafka-like, and I dreamt that I was desperately trying to wake up the caterpillar. The noise of the train was loud and coming in. Would we ever find our way under the bay?
Going up the stairs of the station back to our car on the other side of the bay, I thought of Colette’s song.
The candle
Needs oxygen to burn
Takes in everything to learn
To grow
The wax begins to soften
As the grains fall through the glass
Impressionable to something
When the wind quiets to pass
Or blow
Its candor
A plaid chair made of whicker
Soft light may always flicker
Although
The wax turns into liquid
Intrigued without a doubt
Impressionable as something
I tipped it to pour it out
To know
Its tallow
The rising tide is not forgotten
In a mold for twisted cotton
And so
The candle
Needs oxygen to burn
Gives us light in her return
And we grow
The four years since my college graduation had come and gone like a song through Billboard’s Top 40 charts. Everyone always said that the older you get, the faster the years go by. At eighty years old, a year is one eightieth of your life, whereas at four years old, a year is a whopping one-fourth of your life. Einstein talked about this. A train traveling at the speed of light doesn’t allow you to enjoy the scenery at all, and everything goes by in a flash, and when you get back to your original destination, those who saw you off are gone forever.
I wrote down in my notebook . . .
A life and a song,
The comparison wrong,
To view them from the outside we see,
That when a song ends,
It can be played again,
A life can’t be.
So maybe life was more like a movie script then. A song seemed way too short to compare it to.
It was late afternoon in San Pablo, and I began to notice that I was losing my hair quickly now. There were falling clumps in Mary’s rusted shower drain. I scratched my head and thought how beautiful Colette was. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever met.
I thought of her constantly. I wanted to physically touch her again; hold her hand and feel the warm rush of life in her. The light of God himself touched and highlighted the space she occupied; it was such a stark contrast to the impending darkness of the unknown that lay ahead. Ah, Colette—was there anything ever more beautiful? My heart remembered, trembled in the shower, how nothing could ever be more perfect than the night we saw James Taylor at the Irvine Amphitheatre. If I could have just that moment back, to live it forever, there would be nothing more that I would ever long for again.