Chapter Six San Mateo Elliot's parents lived in a custom-built turquoise and white ranch style house at the end of a cul-de-sac up in the hills above the southern part of San Mateo. I liked going up there. The living room had plush, pearl gray carpet that smelled like it had just been installed and soft cream-colored love seats and a soft cream-colored couch, all with matching end tables and table lamps with three-way bulbs. The furniture in the living room was centered around a huge combination television and high-fidelity record player. Sliding glass doors opened onto a redwood deck with a panoramic view—north up past the airport to San Bruno Mountain, south down almost to San Jose and east across the bay to Oakland and Hayward and over the hills to Mt. Diablo. Beyond the deck there was a path of flagstones leading over to some jasmine bushes and a Cost-Plus waterfall. The kitchen was built around a gigantic two-door refrigerator full of all sorts of things I'd never seen outside a grocery store. My own parents, by way of contrast, had bought a house in San Mateo Village, like I may have mentioned, down in the flatlands by the bay, with the same floor plan as all the other houses in the flatlands; the same hard grass yards, with short, newly planted trees. Instead of carpet, we had rugs. Nothing matched. Nothing was new. And the only remarkable thing in the refrigerator was maybe a bowl of browned potatoes left over from one of my mother's pot roasts. There was nothing in the world my father liked better for breakfast than leftover potatoes from one of my mother's pot roasts, sliced razor thin and fried in sizzling bacon grease along with his eggs—two, sunny-side up. I adore my dad. He's dead. As I've said. The other thing I liked about going up to Elliot's house was his mother. She used to get a kick out of wearing skimpy clothes around the house. There was this one sheer white silk robe I remember in particular, with a sash she always had trouble keeping tied when she answered the door. They had a mat on the front porch with the word WELCOME spelled out in pieces of pink rubber held together with short lengths of wire, and there was a brass doorknocker on the door with the name "FELTON" etched into it. The doorknocker was actually a doorbell disguised as a doorknocker. When you picked it up and pushed it back down, it was supposed to go "Ding...dong!" But there was something wrong with the dong. It sounded like it had a piece of broken Popsicle stick stuck down inside it. The ding was okay, but the dong just went "thunk." I rang the bell, "Ding...thunk," wiped my feet on the welcome mat, and waited breathlessly for his mother to come to the door. Elliot never answered the door himself. His mother always did. I think it might have been some sort of deal they had. I heard her fumbling with the dead bolt. Moths fluttered around my heart like it was a three-way light bulb. The door opened a crack and I saw one beguiling green eye peeking out at me. She unhooked the chain and pulled the door wide open with a big whoosh, and the vacuum created by the door opening sheathed her thighs and the nipples of her breasts in sheer white silk for a second. When I looked up, she was looking at me with her head cocked, like she knew exactly the effect she was having on me. I melted. I couldn't help but melt. She was pretty from the top of her head to the tips of her painted toenails—short, fine, coppery-red hair, pouty lips, creamy red lipstick. Her mouth turned down at the corners; she looked perpetually sad. She licked her lips and I could see the wetness of her tongue and the shiny enamel on her teeth and could smell what her lipstick would taste like when she put it on. "Elliot's in listening to his weirdo music," she said and pointed toward the living room. Then she sauntered slowly down the hallway toward the open door of her bedroom with shafts of bright sunlight streaming through her sheer white silk robe, knowing full well I couldn't help but notice. When I got to know him better, I found out how Elliot had almost killed the football player. The football player had been drunk. He and some other football players had been drinking beer in the parking lot next to McDonald's. One of them tossed an empty beer bottle over by where Elliot was waiting for a bus. Elliot kicked the empty beer bottle into the gutter. That wasn't the right thing to have done. There wasn't any right thing to have done. One thing led to another. The football player took a swing at him. All Elliot did was duck. The football player lost his balance and cracked his face against the edge of the curb. Three teeth broke off at their roots. Blood puddled up. His eyes stayed open. He was trying to swallow. He looked like a fish. Elliot threw up. He went over and over it in his mind for months. He got obsessed with ways he could have kept it from happening and ended up making a vow to himself that he wouldn't ever fight anyone again, no matter what, not even to defend himself—next time he wouldn't even duck. He was as close to being an absolute pacifist as a person could reasonably be. The idea of hurting living things made him literally sick to his stomach. Being such a pacifist made Elliot do things differently from other people—like take out his aggressions, for example. A normal person would, you know, just hit a wall or kick a hole in a door or something, but Elliot had to resist such simple solutions for fear of wiping out whole civilizations of microscopic wall dwellers. That wasn't the case when it came to Dru Davidson. When it came to Dru, all bets were off. Elliot presumed that he and Dru would be getting back together any day. The way he saw it was that pretty soon he'd be making a name for himself as an actor or as an artist or as a guitar player and she'd come crawling back, make it all up to him in ways they'd never thought of before. They'd get married and live happily ever after in a house he was going to build for them on one of those huge outcroppings of rock that juts out into the ocean down around Big Sur. Then Elliot's imagination started falling apart. Dick Joseph saw Dru playing tennis with some Japanese guy at the tennis courts behind Burlingame High. Not long after that, John White saw her with the same guy at a party in Eichler Highlands and mentioned that he thought the guy might be in dental school. Elliot didn't believe anything Dick Joseph or John White or anyone else told him. He knew his darling Dru wouldn't be caught dead with no sorry-ass Jap, period, and especially not with no sorry-ass Jap who was going to spend the rest of his life mucking around in people's mouths for a living. What kind of a person would pick at putrefaction and decay and dig root canals all day? Would Dru want to share a life like that? No. What would they talk about? Plaque? Gingivitis? It certainly wouldn't be the sort of life she and Elliot would have together. Would some Jap dentist take her to Spain to see the sublime shadows and lights of El Greco? Would they go to the Prado to marvel at The Garden of Earthly Delights? Would they worship at the altar of Antonio Gaudi? Or listen to Segovia? Or Charlie Bird? Or Charlie Parker? Or Miles? Or Mozart? Would he read to her from The Book of Ecclesiastes or sing to her from The Song of Songs? Would she be his Cordelia? Would they live and pray and sing and tell old tales and laugh at gilded butterflies? Then, with his own eyes, he saw her arm in arm with the selfsame Japanese guy he'd been hearing about, and Elliot knew the guy. It was Jerry Takahashi. He wasn't in dental school. He was taking classes at the College of San Mateo—in Dental Technology. He wanted to make false teeth for a living. That was just the beginning. Not much more than a week after he'd seen Dru with Jerry Takahashi, Elliot saw her again, this time all snuzzled up to Steve Goldner by the front window of Sherman & Clay, looking at pianos. There wasn't anything extraordinary about Steve Goldner. He was a Jew. He worked in his father's jewelry store—he was a Jew jewelry clerk in his Jew father's Jew jewelry store! I have no reason whatsoever to believe that up until then Elliot had an ax to grind with the Japanese or Jews, either one (well, his father spent a year in a Japanese prison camp, but I doubt that had much to do with it). All I know is that from then on all Elliot thought about was hunting down Japs and Jews indiscriminately and hacking them to pieces with the machete his father had brought back as a souvenir from the war in the Pacific. This was at odds with Elliot's strict pacifism, however, and he ended up painting strange, disturbing pictures instead. At first the pictures were nothing but bloody piles of body parts, but they got more sophisticated as time went on, subtler, more refined. I think I was the only person besides him who ever actually saw any of the pictures. Elliot wasn't proud of them. They were necessary. They were therapeutic. I kind of liked them myself. I mean, however objectionable the subject matter, the pictures themselves were just plain pretty to look at. They were like Russian Orthodox icons; they were so gorgeous they almost glowed. One was all in dull reds and yellows and somber browns, depicting bodies being loaded into a row of fiery furnaces. That one he simply called, "Hitler's Ovens." Another, with the fragile outlines of a Japanese family vaporized like spider webs against one of the interior walls of a house in Hiroshima, he called, "Roll On, Enola." In addition to acting and painting pictures, Elliot played flamenco guitar and sculpted. He sat out in his backyard, sweating under a prickly red Indian blanket in the ninety-degree sun for hours, staring at a blank rock until some combination of dehydration and incipient sunstroke caused him to hallucinate something he could chisel into permanence. His backyard crawled with the gruesome little things. He called them his lobotomies. After his mother let me in the front door, I finished watching her saunter down the sunlit hallway and made my way into the living room—and there he was, Elliot Felton, rocking back and forth on a Persian prayer rug, listening to music with his eyes closed and his legs folded under him in a sort of half-lotus position. He was wearing a shiny green quilted brocade smoking jacket with black satin lapels. There was a yellow silk cravat tucked down the front of the jacket. He was smoking a meerschaum pipe. His mother made the smoking jacket for him for his seventeenth birthday. The pipe had the head of a bearded gnome carved into it. His father had brought it home from the property room at the FBI. He told Elliot that the pipe had belonged to some famous crook. I just watched him for a while until I felt myself start to chuckle so deep inside my chest it brought tears to my eyes. I didn't say anything—I just walked over and sat down across from him and listened to whatever he was listening to. It could have been most anything—Sketches of Spain, Segovia, The Magic Flute, Charlie Parker, Beethoven, Bach. That day it was Yma Sumac. People might not know much about Yma Sumac anymore. Not many people knew much about her then, but Elliot worshipped Yma Sumac. She was supposed to have been an Incan Princess whose voice had a range of around nine octaves, lower than thunder on the low end and so high only bats could hear it on the high end. Well, either that or she was some Puerto Rican chick from the Bronx named Amy Camus who spelled her name backwards and masqueraded as an Incan Princess. Whoever or whatever she was, however, Yma Sumac's voice did more things than any human voice I ever heard before or since, and Elliot flat-out adored her. He listened to her records so often he knew the words to all her songs by heart. Whatever Yma Sumac did with her voice, Elliot tried to do too. They sang duets together. While everyone else in America was singing along with Mitch Miller, Elliot was singing along with Yma Sumac. She'd growl like a jaguar and hoot like a howler monkey, and he'd try to match her syllable for syllable. He and Yma Sumac stalked each other. The living room was a Peruvian jungle. He peeked out from behind one of his mother's huge philodendrons, then pounced like a jaguar out from between the couch and the coffee table, tipping over lamps and crashing into a set of brass fireplace tools. It was funny. He was funny. They were funny—Elliot and Yma, an odder couple you never did see. His mother worried about Elliot. She was proud of him, but she thought he was odd. Quirky. She didn't think he fit in. We talked about him in their kitchen one afternoon. We were looking out the window at Elliot sitting under his Indian blanket. She was wearing a pair of tight white tennis shorts. Her legs were tan. Sunlight sparkled through pretty red highlights in her hair. "Elliot's always been...exceptional," she said. "Everyone's exceptional," I told her. "Yeah, but he's always been so—I don't know...difficult, I guess—even when he was little. He thought he could do things nobody can do. He thought he brought a bird back to life. It was just a sparrow, a little fluff of a thing." She stopped and seemed to be picturing him as a curly-headed little three-year-old with his baseball cap on sideways, then went on in a faraway voice: "It flew into the screen door of our house in Salt Lake—probably the first time the poor thing had ever been out of its nest. I'm sure it was only stunned, but Elliot thought it was dead. He picked it up and cupped his hands around it and blew into his hands and pretty soon the sparrow started chirping. He was so proud. He beamed up at me. His eyes were happier than anything I've ever seen. I said something silly, like, 'Now it thinks you're its mother.' And do you know what he said then?" she asked. The color of copper glinted in her hair. She wet her lips and there was a sad, baffled, smoldering sexual look in her eyes, like if I could come up with the right answer, she'd be grateful beyond words. "No," I said. "What did he say?" "He asked me...he said, 'Are you my mother?'" "Most kids wonder about stupid stuff like that," I said. "Sometimes I don't feel like I've been a good mother." "He never says anything bad about you." "I was so young." "You must have been," I said. During his last week of school, Elliot went home to get the gym stuff he had to take back in order to graduate and walked in on his mother and a Lebanese real estate agent having deliberate, consensual sexual intercourse on the drain board next to the kitchen sink. He told me about it later. He trusted me. I trusted him. The real estate guy's pants were around his knees. He hadn't even taken off his tie. That bothered Elliot more than anything else. His mother spoke to him only with her eyes. She pretended it wasn't happening. He got his gym stuff and went back to school. Elliot spent the better part of the next year in bed. He still hadn't gotten over Dru. His mother and the Lebanese guy had been the last straw. Every time I went up there, he hadn't moved since the last time I'd been there. He was always in bed. His room had sliding glass windows with drapes that didn't close all the way. There was a half-finished painting on an easel over in one corner, a bare bones rendering of the kitchen sink. The dishes were all washed and stacked neatly in the dish drainer and there was a fancy silk tie draped around the silverware. I sat on the edge of his bed. The ceiling sparkled where sunlight came through the crack in the drapes. His bed was a mattress and box springs on the floor. He flicked the ashes from a cigarette into a teacup. The cup had morning glories on it. The ashes sputtered. He coughed. Veins stood out at his temples and in his forehead. His skin was so thin I got the feeling he could see me with his eyes closed. With his eyes open, it hurt to look at him. He didn't know what to do. He was thinking about maybe cutting his vocal cords and playing flamenco guitar in the gutters of Madrid. He was thinking about maybe taking a kayak to the source of the Amazon River. I brought him a National Geographic map of Brazil. According to it, the Amazon River had several sources; some came down from Colombia, a few went over into Peru. "The sources all have sources," he said, looking more closely at the map, and pretty soon his head was shaking slowly and he was half-whimpering and half-saying "shit" over and over with long pauses in between like each time he said the word it was a complete sentence. "Hey, so, go up them all," I said. "Which one should I start with?" "Throw a dart." But he couldn't make up his mind, period, not about anything. He was close to catatonic. He just stayed in bed, smoking cigarettes. His skin turned yellow and his muscles atrophied and his fingernails grew long and his fingers turned the color of the empty packs of Camels strewn around his room. He didn't want anything from anyone. His mother thought it was her fault. She implored me with her eyes, what should she do, what should she do? What could I tell her? Then, one fine morning, without saying a word to anyone, Elliot got out of bed and joined the Special Forces before anyone had ever heard of the Special Forces and was going to be going to Vietnam before anyone had ever heard of Vietnam, and this time it was his father's turn to be proud. He'd known the kid had had it in him all along. He bragged about his son, the Green Beret, to his buddies at the FBI. Elliot's decision to go into the military crushed his mother. She thought he was trying to hurt her in the worst way he knew how. She thought it was a conspiracy, that Elliot and his father were in on it together, that they were punishing her, that they wanted her to die of pain and shame and guilt and sorrow and regret. Personally, I didn't get it at all. I pretty much just thought he was nuts—why an absolute pacifist would join the army, I did not know. "What are you going to do in the army? Grow up? Liberate people? Stop communism? Get laid? What?" "Special Forces," Elliot said. "Yeah? What makes them so special? They don't kill people?" "How will anyone know whether I kill people or not?" "What are you going to do, pretend?" "Maybe," he said. Then he smiled the way he had when I'd winked at him back in drama class. It had been almost two years since then. During those two years I'd gotten to know Elliot well enough to know that while I may not have known what the hell he was doing, he usually did. For one thing, he was going to get a lot closer to Bangkok than I ever had. Maybe I was jealous. Maybe he was brave. Maybe I was chicken. Maybe the army would be good for him. I couldn't think of anything that could have been much worse than what he'd been doing. And, besides, he'd already done it, signed the papers, taken the oath. He couldn't have changed his mind at that point if he'd wanted to.

Chapter Seven (Listen) North Beach Six months later, around Christmas of 1962, Elliot came home on leave. He'd just finished basic training and some other hush-hush CIA sponsored school at Ft. Bragg and was going to be on his way to Vietnam the morning of New Year's Day. His head was shaved. His ears stuck out. The leather band around the edge of his green beret made a red, painful-looking groove in his scalp. His face was tan. His nails were clipped. He had a few crisp, new ribbons above his shirt pocket and had already earned himself something of a reputation. The guys he'd been in boot camp with called him "Deacon Felton" or "The Deacon" or "Deak." He was the only Mormon in the elite, newly created branch of the military they called "Special Forces." None of the big Bible belt Baptist bruisers who were his comrades in arms had ever known anyone who belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and Elliot talked to them fearlessly about The Book of Mormon. He told them the whole story of how this Moroni guy, this sort of angelic fellow who glowed and walked a foot or two off the floor, told some New England dirt farmer by the name of Joseph Smith where to find some gold tablets hidden under a rock, along with a secret magic decoder device, and that the tablets explained how, shortly after the resurrection, Jesus came to North America and turned a bunch of naked savages into Christians. Elliot's army buddies took kindly to him the way people take kindly to the incurably insane. He used to do that with the real Bible in the cafeteria at Hillsdale High School. I remember this one thing he used to go around quoting all the time, from The Song of Songs: "Stay me with flagons, Comfort me with apples: For I am sick of love." People looked at him like he was nuts. We had dinner at Elliot's parents' house. It was New Year's Eve. I don't think Elliot's father knew about his wife's infidelity with the Lebanese real estate guy on the drain board in the kitchen, per se, but he knew something. Their marriage had deteriorated beyond recognition. They spoke to each other with icy niceness. "Could you pass the pepper, please, dear?" "Certainly, darling. Anything else? Salt? Parmesan? More salad?" It made you want to throw spaghetti in their faces. They wouldn't have noticed if you had. They would have ignored it. They would have politely finished their desserts with spaghetti noodles looped around their ears and spaghetti sauce dripping off the ends of their noses. Elliot and I finally managed to get the hell out of there around ten and took what was left of a half-gallon of Gallo Hearty Burgundy with us up to San Francisco, to Chinatown, to North Beach. I was twenty. Elliot was nineteen. His uniform was so new you could smell it. It was the same smell as the polish on his boots. The creases in his pants were sharp as knives. He had a tentative smile twitching at the corners of his mouth, like he couldn't make up his mind whether he was proud of the way he looked or embarrassed by it. It was the same way he looked when he used to wear his quilted smoking jacket. I half expected him to whip out his meerschaum pipe. What Elliot had learned in the Special Forces so far was that every Asian over the age of eight wanted nothing more out of life than to slit his throat while he was asleep. In Vietnam, for instance, according to what he told me he'd been told, there was a ten thousand dollar reward for every Green Beret anyone could get his or her hands on—just the hat, all by itself—ten grand for a hat. Half the stuff Elliot told me I still have a hard time believing. They had him imagining all kinds of whacko things. It was probably part of some sort of self-esteem program—like if just your hat is worth ten thousand dollars; the rest of you has got to be pretty valuable, too. I didn't think he would have fallen for it, though. I wasn't sure he had fallen for it; I never could tell whether he was just acting or not. All I knew was that there we were, on Grant Avenue an hour before midnight on New Year's Eve, with noisemakers gyrating in our faces and confetti sprinkling our shoulders and firecrackers going off like gunfire at our feet and half the Asian population of San Francisco jamming into us from all sides, and it suddenly didn't seem unreasonable that he'd gotten sort of jittery—which is not to say it still didn't seem pretty stupid. I mean, what he hell did he think? That someone was going to run up, grab his hat and go cash it in somewhere? He was scared, edgy, ultra-aware; a little paranoid, probably. The color had gone out of his cheeks. His eyes darted back and forth and he backed up into some kind of karate stance, like he was maybe thinking about trying to take on all of Chinatown with his bare hands. Then these two Caucasian guys in wingtips and three-piece suits came out of the noisy crowd, got on either side of Elliot and escorted him over into the alley behind City Lights. I couldn't hear what they were saying, but Elliot seemed to be agreeing with them. His head was bowed. His cheek twitched. He nodded and looked up at them and nodded again, and pretty soon the three of them walked up to Broadway and shook hands. The wingtip guys disappeared back into the crowd. Elliot marched like a toy soldier over toward the intersection of Columbus and Broadway. The light turned red. There wasn't any traffic. The streets had been roped off. But he stopped anyway. I caught up to him. "Ah, Elliot?" "Yeah?" "So, did we, like...know those guys?" "No." He shrugged and took off across the crowded intersection. "Hang on a second," I said, trotting along at his elbow. "Who were they?" He sped up. I grabbed his sleeve. "Knock it off." He pulled his arm away and narrowed his eyes and bared his teeth like he was maybe going to hiss at me again. I was thinking I might have to shoot him another quick wink. I guess just the thought crossing my mind must have calmed him down some. He glanced over his shoulder and said, "They're army intelligence." "They didn't look that smart to me," I said. Elliot smiled one of his twitchy smiles and stopped walking quite so fast. Then he told me in a halting, carefully worded, circuitous sort of way, that the Special Forces were so new and so elite and the training he'd just been through was such top secret hush-hush stuff that whenever any of them went out into the "civilian" population, plain clothes army intelligence officers followed them around. "To what? Make sure nobody steals their hats?" "Something like that, yeah," he said. Then he clammed up on me again, like I wasn't qualified, somehow, to be let in on what went on among men on their way to some little nowhere country on the other side of the National Geographic world. We ended up at the Jazz Workshop. Jimmy Witherspoon was there. I was too curious about what had just happened in Chinatown to care. I mean, come on, this was me he was talking to. I knew things the army couldn't have known. I knew all about him and Dru and about his mother and about his father. I'd seen him under his Indian blanket. We'd listened to Miles Davis. We'd listened to Yma Sumac! I'd heard him hoot like a howler monkey and growl like a jaguar. I'd seen him in his smoking jacket, I'd seen him almost wet his pants—so what was all this hush-hush army horseshit all of a sudden? What did he have up his sleeve? Maybe he'd caught Dru Davidson diddling some Vietnamese guy up by the Pulgas Water Temple. Or maybe he was a spy. But for who? Spain? Brazil? I couldn't figure it out. We had found seats by then. That was when I started noticing a girl in the row ahead of us—and whatever had been going on with Elliot out in the street took a back seat to the girl in the row in front of us. Her name was Virginia Good. Ginny. Ginny Good. My eyes hadn't adjusted to the dark. She was fidgeting in her chair. Her voice trilled and broke at the top of a giggle. She cocked her head and her hair touched her shoulder. Her hair was brown, lighter and darker brown, and curly and cute. It bounced up and down in thick, springy spirals when she tilted her head back and laughed. She had on a tight black dress, a black lace shawl and a string of pearls, but she still managed to look disheveled, somehow—like she'd come there fresh from riding a horse bareback along the edge of an ocean somewhere. Her shawl brushed my knee. When she talked she got her whole tiny, tough little body into it. The words tinkled like she was playing them on a piano. At one point, she got so adamant she had to jump out of her chair and stamp both feet on the floor like Jerry Lee Lewis. Great Balls of Fire! "That's not fair!" she screamed. Now, questions of fairness have always piqued my curiosity, I admit, but in fairness, what piqued my curiosity even more was that Virginia Good had the most perfect ass since Donna McKechnie. I was instantaneously in love forever again. The best I could figure it, Ginny was out on a date with two different guys at the same time. One of them was wearing thick, black-rimmed glasses. The other had a crew cut. They both had on narrow suits and ties, and although I'd still only seen her from the back, I presumed she must be pretty cute from the front, too—you have to be pretty cute to get two different guys to go out with you on New Year's Eve. I had on a white, button-down shirt and a light green cardigan with imitation leather buttons and was feeling sort of adorable myself. I accidentally stepped on the end of Ginny's black lace shawl. Then I kept my foot there on purpose. The next time she moved, the shawl ended up around my ankles. Ha! That got the ball rolling. We had to fumble around at my feet, trying to get it untangled. Our heads kept bumping. By the time we'd gotten everything back where it belonged, it would have been rude not to have said something to each other. The band was tuning up. Jimmy Witherspoon was clearing his throat. Elliot was slumped in his chair. I was eloquent, charming, shameless. Elliot covered his face with his ten thousand dollar hat. At some point in the conversation it became apparent that Virginia's dates were ticked. It was bad enough that they had each other to contend with, without some other asshole horning in. They joined forces against me and somehow got Jimmy Witherspoon on their side. I became the common enemy. Being the common enemy is a role I've always relished. With everyone ganged up on you, you don't have a lot to lose and if you win, hey. Besides, the guys she was out with were just a couple of snotty college kids, and as for Jimmy Witherspoon, he could go fuck himself, I wasn't old enough to get in there anyway. Someone should have checked my ID. The only thing that mattered was that Virginia liked me. I could tell. I had her laughing her ass off. She thought I was cute, too. I was. I was young. My heart was young. My veins filled with blood so fast I couldn't sit still. What did I have to gain? Plenty. What did I have to lose? Jack. I quoted long, surprisingly apt passages from Blake and Shakespeare and Allen Ginsberg—things I didn't even know I knew, things I'd probably picked up by osmosis from Elliot. I told her I was the smartest person in the world. I told her I knew everything there was to know. The guy with the crew cut asked me a trick question. He probably thought it was funny. "How many pinheads can dance on the head of an angel?" "Seven," I said. Ginny laughed. I was on a roll. Now, any fool knows that the last thing you want to do is encourage some twenty year-old drunk from San Mateo ten minutes before midnight at a jazz club on New Year's Eve, but Virginia couldn't help laughing. I was funny. The whole thing was funny. Jimmy Witherspoon was funny. The guys she was out with were funny. Her dates kept encouraging me more and more by getting more and more pissed off every time I made Ginny laugh—and by then she was laughing at just about everything. The more pissed off they got, the more eloquent I became and the more Ginny laughed. Somewhere in there, Elliot stood up, took off his hat and introduced himself. "Charmed, I'm sure." Virginia extended her hand. "Your hand's so little," Elliot said. "'Not even the rain has such small hands,'" I quoted. "That's E. E. Cummings," the guy with glasses chimed in. "No shit," I said. Then Elliot introduced me to Ginny and she introduced us to the two guys, and finally she introduced herself. Virginia. Ginny. Ginny Good. I stepped in and shook her hand. The boyfriends watched like cobras. "I'm going to kiss you at midnight," I slurred into Virginia's ear while I was holding on to her hand. I thought I was whispering, but Jimmy Witherspoon glowered down at me from the front of the stage like he thought I might have been talking to him. Virginia made her eyes big and gulped. Midnight came. First, she had to kiss the guys she was with. It was only fair. After she'd bestowed scrupulously equal little pecks on each of their cheeks, it was my turn. Ha! A spotlight lit up her face. It was the first time I'd gotten a good look at her and, wow, was she ever cute—tiny mouth, smirky, mischievous smile, confident body, clear, tan, healthy skin, a few freckles across the bridge of her nose—whoa, was she ever pretty. Her eyes sparkled an eerie, eerie, otherworldly blue. The spotlight went out. My head swirled with snatches of beatnik poetry and after-images of tables and chairs and musical instruments and echoes of whisky-drinking blues lyrics all jumbled together with Ginny Good's pretty face and her eerie blue eyes. At first it was just a tentative, sort of who's going to call whose bluff kind of kiss, with me mainly worried that I wasn't going to be able to get all the way through it without throwing up all over Jimmy Witherspoon's shoes. But then it turned into a big kiss. We both somehow managed to maneuver ourselves out of our chairs and were standing up, face-to-face, jamming closer and closer into each other. She was small and strong. She felt like a dancer. Her hands were under my sweater, tugging at my shirt, and I had her dress pulled up to the tops of her nylons and felt the hem of her panties under the straps of a silky garter belt. Then she was pounding on my chest and whispering into my ear, "We have to stop. We have to stop. My panties are getting ruined!" "So are mine," I said. The guys she was with were practically apoplectic by then, but what could they do? With Elliot sitting there, looking stern and menacing in his jaunty Green Beret and shiny black boots? Call the police? Get Army Intelligence over there? What? Then Elliot stood up again, bent over in his stiff uniform, and kissed Ginny himself—barely brushed his lips across her forehead—and I think he might have been crying. I couldn't tell. I could never tell whether he was ever crying or not. Virginia laughed like a four year-old kid. She let her hair fall in front of her pretty face, covered her tiny mouth with her tiny hand and said, "Oh, dear!" The next morning, Elliot was the one who remembered her name. All I remembered was barfing gobs of his mother's spaghetti up and down Broadway the rest of the night and, vaguely, that I was in love. I was picking him up to take him to the airport. It was late by the time I got to his house. He was out by the curb with his duffel bag, looking worried. "Hey, remember that girl last night?" I asked him, after he'd stuffed his duffel bag into the back seat and had gotten into the car. "Ginny?" He frowned. His mouth twitched. "Yeah, right, Ginny what? Did she say?" He didn't answer. Then, on the Bayshore Freeway, a little ways past Coyote Point, almost to the airport exit, Elliot turned toward me and said, "Good." "What's that supposed to mean?" "That's her last name," he said. "Good. Virginia Good. She's in the San Francisco phone book. On 45th Avenue. I looked her up." "Why?" "I don't know. To see if she was there?" "Think I should call her?" "I have no idea," he said. "She was kissing me like a son of a bitch. Wasn't she? I had my hands all up her dress, too, didn't I? She was sort of nuts, too. Wasn't she? Didn't she have scars on her wrists from trying to kill herself or some kind of weird thing?" Elliot made a little laughing noise out his nose. The muscles in his left cheek were twitching. He was grinding his teeth. He might have tears in his eyes. He didn't answer—just looked at me and shrugged. When he went through the gate at the airport, he looked at me and shrugged again in exactly the same way he had shrugged in the car. I don't remember whether we shook hands or not. We probably thought about it, but I don't think we did. Later that same day, at around six o'clock in the evening, I found a listing for a Virginia Good on 45th Avenue in the San Francisco phone book and gave her a call.

Chapter Eight Coyote Point "Helloooo...?" That's Virginia answering the phone. I can hear it any time I want. Her voice is calm and husky and faintly musical, like a cello, and there's always the same inquisitive little pause there at the end that makes it sound like she's going to be glad to hear from me—but then in the same sad, soft, emphatic voice, she says, "I don't want to talk now," and hangs up. Click. I looked at the receiver. It was one of those heavy, black, expressionless, rotary dial phones that used to be made out of something more like rubber than plastic. It was pointless to look at a disconnected phone, I knew that, but getting the phone hung up in my ear wasn't quite what I'd envisioned as the beginning of what I'd already made up my mind was going to be a lifelong undertaking. I pushed down the button to prove to myself that she had really hung up on me before she even knew who I was. When I let it go, there was a new dial tone. I was just about to call her back when I made the brilliant determination that she couldn't have come up with a better way of answering the phone if she'd tried. That she hadn't tried was what made it so perfect. She didn't want to talk, period—not to me, not to anyone. I was at least on an equal footing with all the other guys I imagined must have been calling her cute ass up nonstop, morning, noon and night. Why she bothered to answer the phone at all threw me at first, but then I figured, hey, why not? Whoever it was was bound to call back, or if he didn't, someone else would. She was cool. Aloof. Self-contained. Utterly desirable. Perfectly unattainable. That sort of thing used to get me every time. And thanks to her hanging up on me, I had time to think things through. You don't just call someone like a Virginia Good up out of the blue. No. You make a plan. Maybe write her a letter instead. And it wasn't too late! She'd hung up on me. Ha! She couldn't possibly have known who the hell I was. It was a reprieve. I felt like Dostoyevski. So I wrote her a letter, instead...and what a letter! It was inspired, it really was. Everything came together in that letter. I defined myself. I made myself up. I told her that I was a "writer" and that, as a New Year's resolution, I had decided to start keeping a journal and that, furthermore, since I met her on New Year's Eve, I had decided to write this so-called journal in the form of letters to her. I kept getting tears in my eyes it was such a good idea. Then, as long as I was writing the stuff anyway, I figured I might as well sign up for a night school writing class at the College of San Mateo. The class was taught by Gordon Lish. He's sort of famous now, too—or he was there for a while, anyway. He was fiction editor at Esquire in the seventies. Then he was an editor at Knopf, ran prestigious writing seminars and made some kind of a stir in the publishing industry in the eighties by suing Harper's Magazine. The books he edited were critically acclaimed stylistic bare bones masterpieces but never seemed to make much money—things by guys like Don DeLillo and Barry Hannah and Rick Bass and Raymond Carver and Harold Brodkey and Cynthia Ozick and Amy Hempel—and the five or six books he wrote himself enjoyed some critical success themselves but made even less money, which made it hard to show any actual damages when he sued Harper's for publishing an unauthorized handout from one of his seminars. I'm not sure how it all came about. Somewhere along the line, Gordon Lish had taken to calling himself "Captain Fiction" and charging all kinds of money to go to his seminars, and I guess it ticked him off that Harper's went around giving away what he had to say for the price of a magazine. Nor am I altogether sure what he got out of the lawsuit, either, but I think he won. All I know for a fact is that in the spring of 1963 you could get him for free if you were under twenty-one and for seven bucks a semester if you weren't. I got him for free myself--well, for the first semester anyway (and he was worth every nickel of it, too). The next semester I had to pay the seven bucks. The College of San Mateo was still over at Coyote Point back then. If you've never heard of it and don't feel like looking it up on a map, Coyote Point is this rocky bunch of red clay cliffs and eucalyptus trees jutting out into San Francisco Bay, just south of the airport. The classrooms were old army barracks left over from World War II. Gordon Lish stormed into one of the dilapidated Quonset huts with a leather satchel under one arm. He had his own literary magazine called Genesis West and hung out with guys like Ken Kesey and Gregory Corso. His hair was short and blond and thick; he was sort of short and blond and thick in general. The satchel under his arm had loose papers and books sticking out around the edges, as if it couldn't begin to contain all the wisdom he was eager to impart. His face was flushed. He was out of breath. His gray wool sport coat was rumpled. His tie was loose at the neck of a faded blue work shirt. He seemed pretty image conscious. He wrote his name on the blackboard. Big initials. Chalk chips flying here and there. I'm not an expert graphologist, by any means, but the way he screeched the "G" and the "L" across the slate made it clear that he wanted people to know he thought a lot of himself—and the way he scrawled the rest of his name showed that underneath all that initial bravado, he was as least as interested in making a buck as any self-respecting orthodontist might be. I thought that was a nice touch. If you want people to think you think a lot of yourself, you damn sure better have something to gain by it. He thought the stuff I wrote had "merit." He liked finding people he thought might write serious fiction someday. He was interested in... (Whoops. I have to leave stuff out here. I got in touch with Gordon Lish through his publisher to see if I could get his permission to quote a line or two from my copy of the forty-year-old mimeographed, coffee stained syllabus he passed out to the class. He said no. I couldn't use his quote. He declined to give me permission. Oh, well. It wasn't that great of a quote anyway.) ...No wonder none of his books ever made any money. Not making money was his criterion for writing serious fiction. I wish Danielle Steele had been teaching the class. Gordon Lish's dilemma was that on the one hand, he wanted to make big bucks, and on the other hand, making big bucks was anathema to the making of serious fiction. He seems to have solved it by charging all kinds of money to go to his seminars about how serious fiction shouldn't make any money. I was the one who got him started in the seminar business, as a matter of fact. When the second semester was over, the College of San Mateo didn't renew his contract, so I called Lish up and talked him into continuing the class as a seminar. I had to be pretty persuasive, but he finally agreed, and for a hundred bucks each—in the form of a check made payable to the Chrysalis West Foundation—three other of his former CSM students and I all went over to his house in Burlingame and read our serious, dreary, puerile fiction out loud to each other. That was his first fiction seminar. He's parlayed it into a moneymaking bonanza over the years. Back before I made Gordon Lish who he is today, the way we used to work it was that he would sit in my chair and I'd go up to his podium and read stuff about my idyllic childhood from the so-called journal I'd been sending to Ginny Good. He'd look up and beam sunbeams out his eyes at me and get all red in the face and tap the eraser end of a pencil on the desk whenever I got to something he wished he could have written himself. It was when Gordon Lish didn't tap his eraser that I got skeptical. What the hell did he know, the fucking asshole? Here he was, pushing thirty, and still nothing but a two-bit part time teacher at the College of San Mateo. I think the College of San Mateo felt sort of sorry for him. That was probably how he got the job. He had a family to feed. He'd come there fresh from having been kicked out of Mills High School for telling kids they didn't have to hide under their desks during atom bomb attacks. The local papers took up his cause—he was Mario Savio before Mario Savio was Mario Savio—and the College of San Mateo took a stand for free speech and freedom of expression and gave him a part time job. Personally, I think the real reason Gordon Lish got kicked out of Mills High School was for something as prosaic as not turning in lesson plans, but that wouldn't have gone very far toward calling yourself "Captain Fiction" and charging all kinds of money to hear what you have to say—so the story that got to the newspapers was that he got fired for telling his students that they didn't have to hide under their desks. Despite his ambition (and no doubt in large part because of his ambition), however, he was a great teacher—not a good teacher, a great teacher. If he'd been a good teacher I probably would have written a book or two by now—but what Gordon Lish taught us was far more important than how to write a mere book or two here and there: the difference between Apollonian and Dionysian, for example. Now, that's a great thing to have learned. Think of all the people who don't know the difference between Apollonian and Dionysian! I've long since forgotten the difference myself, but think of all the people who never knew the difference in the first place! I think it had something to do with Nietzsche. The other thing I know about Nietzsche is that he was the guy who said what didn't kill him made him strong. Ha! He was also the guy who was incurably insane the last twenty years of his life. What didn't kill the son of a bitch drove him nuts. Which would you rather be? Dead or nuts? Now that's a question with equally compelling answers, and ferreting out questions with equally compelling answers was what made Gordon Lish a great teacher. He even offered himself up as a sacrificial case in point. Nobody could tell for sure whether he was just a total fucking asshole or whether he was so strong and selfless he didn't mind people thinking he was a total fucking asshole if he thought somebody might get some serious fiction out of it someday. But the real best thing about Gordon Lish was that, when I got to know Ginny better, I could tell her that I was taking a class from a guy who had his own literary magazine and hung out with Ken Kesey, and maybe she would think that was slick, and maybe she would like me. That was the quintessential best thing. That was the only thing. All I wanted was for Ginny to like me. I would have done anything. I'd sent Ginny my brilliant letter at the beginning of January and had been dutifully sending her the entries I was making in the so-called journal every three days or so. Sometime in March, I got a post card with a picture of Coit Tower on the front and a note on the back that said: "p.s. I like getting mail." That was it. That was all the note said; a postscript to nothing. She didn't even sign her name. She didn't need to sign her name. The ink was green. The stamp was upside down. Her handwriting was small and round and loopy, with a tail at the end of the last "g" in getting. I read the post card over and over, front and back, searching for secret signs and hidden meanings. The tower was obviously phallic, and had to have had something to do with coitus, but all the post card really said was that she liked getting mail. So what did I do? Send her more mail? No. I called her up again, that's what. And this time we actually talked for a while—well, until she interrupted and said, "I don't like talking on the phone. You know, Jules and Jim, disembodied voices, and all that." "Yeah," I said, which of course, I didn't know, but I presumed she was trying to tell me that we should go out on a date. So I asked her if she wanted to go out on a date. And we did that. We went out on a date. It was a disaster. She was living in a converted garage out in the Avenues by the Surf Theater. The Surf Theater was where she saw all her foreign movies. I had never seen a foreign movie before in my life. Worse yet, I wore white socks, combed my hair every time I saw a mirror and sold shoes for a living. At Kinney's. In San Bruno. Ginny had never heard of San Bruno. She wasn't sure she'd ever heard of Kinney's, either, except she thought she might have gone to school with a girl whose father owned Kinney's Shoes, the whole chain, all the Kinney's Shoe Stores in the world. Then my new car didn't start. I'd been counting on my new car to impress the pants off her on our big date. It was an off-white 1955 Lincoln with turquoise and cream-colored leather upholstery, power steering, power brakes, push button windows and a push button antenna. I had just bought it. I'd traded in the pink '53 Ford convertible that had more than adequately served its purposes with Bonnie and Cyndi and the girls from the shoe store. This was the Lincoln's first real test. Nor can I say it completely flunked. It didn't start, I can say that, but who's to say that not starting wasn't the best thing it could have done? This is all getting too complicated. Okay, probably the best thing to do would be just to go back and show what the hell happened on this so-called date Ginny and I went out on. That's another thing Gordon Lish used to say: "Show it, don't tell it." (Oh, fuck, I didn't ask Gordon Lish if I could have his permission to quote him on that. Maybe he thinks he's got some kind of copyright on the phrase, "Show, don't tell." He probably does. I wouldn't put it past him.) I'm still not exactly sure what the hell that "show, don't tell" bullshit means, anyway—which may be the real reason I never wrote any books. Maybe it wasn't Gordon Lish's fault after all. Maybe he tried to tell me. Maybe I owe him an apology. Hey, yo! Gordo! Sorry, man. You're wrong about not letting me use your stupid quote, but you might be right about that show don't tell horseshit.

Chapter Nine San Bruno Downtown San Bruno was a picture post card of early sixties suburban America. The main street was crowded on either side with bars and restaurants and smoke shops and delis and stores—Lullaby Lane, Pet World, Rolling Pin Donuts, Woolworth's, you name it. Starting at the El Camino and going clear down to Artichoke Joe's, San Mateo Avenue was crammed with businesses all competing with each other—trying to get whatever nickels and dimes and quarters and dollars they could get of the two bucks an hour I made selling shoes. San Bruno Mountain loomed behind Artichoke Joe's. That's the hill you see when you take off from San Francisco International Airport—the one with the concrete letters poured into the amber waves of tall grass saying: "SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO THE INDUSTRIAL CITY." I fit right in. I sold shoes at Kinney's. I liked it. I was good at it. Chicks dug the way I handled a shoehorn. I remember this one little high school chick, in particular. Norma Arce. She was really tiny—a few inches shy of five feet tall, but with wiry black hair sprayed into stiff briary patches that made her look taller. She had bright black eyes and a small flat nose, with nostrils like a porcelain Bambi. Her forehead wrinkled up like hand-drawn seagulls when she raised her bushy eyebrows. She had already taken off her sandals and was sitting expectantly in the imitation leather chair when I came back with a stack of shoes for her to try on. I sat down on the padded shoe stool and walked it up closer to her. She inched one of her size four-and-a-half feet toward the gold pump I had poised between my legs. The skin below her knee creased into dark smiles. She wiggled her toes and giggled like it was going to tickle. I held the back of her heel, slipped her foot into the shoe and felt that snug little puff of warm air explode up the inside of my wrist. "Do you paint your toenails yourself?" I asked, pointing to her other foot. "Yeah." She smiled a shy, proud little gap-toothed smile. Then a frantic expression crept across her cute face. She bent over. Her disproportionately large, dark-skinned breasts plumped up inside her black lace bra. "Why? Did I mess one up?" "No, no. They're perfect. How do you do it, though?" "Do what?" "Paint your toenails," I said. "Do you do it standing up?" "Yeah." The muscles in her forehead relaxed. "With my foot on the edge of the bathroom sink, usually—or on the top of the toilet seat. Sometimes I do it sitting down, too, but my legs get all cramped up on me when I do it like that." "Do you put cotton between your toes?" "You have to. Otherwise you mess it up." She reached inside the scoop neck of her lilac-colored blouse and straightened one of the straps of her bra. "Have you ever had anyone paint your toenails?" "Like did I ever get a pedicure? No. They cost too much." "Did you ever want one?" I brushed my thumb along the edge of nail of her big toe—which really wasn't all that big. "Sure. Are you kidding? I could just lay back and relax." "Yeah, like eat pistachio nuts or Hershey's Kisses," I said. "Did you ever paint a girl's toes?" She looked at me carefully, right into my eyes, and squinted like she was trying to make sure I was going to tell her the truth. "No," I said. "But I never saw a girl's toes like yours before." I touched my fingernail against the hot pink nail of her cute little pinky toe. "For real?" she asked. "For really real," I said, staring directly at the bridge of her nose. "You want to know the most amazing thing, though?" "What?" She wet her lips with her tongue. "I have a car the exact same color as your toenail polish." "For real?" Her black eyes flashed. Her nostrils flared. Her bushy eyebrows came together. Her thick, liver-colored lips came apart. I could see her wet pink tongue glistening between rows of crooked white teeth. "Yep," I said. "A '53 Ford convertible." "Exactly the same? Are you serious?" "I am so serious. Why? You think I'm pulling your leg?" I tugged playfully at her Achilles tendon and smiled. Her skirt was short. Her legs were bare. She was wearing black lace panties that matched her bra. "Would I do that?" She smiled back, even though she had to have seen through my slacks that my dick had gotten noticeably engorged during the course of our innocent conversation. "I'd have to see it to believe it," she said. "My mother calls it hot pink. What color do they call that nail polish?" "Passionate, Raspberry, Parfait Au Lait." She splayed her tiny hand across her face and laughed and bent over again, farther this time, so far I thought I got a fleeting glimpse of the nipple of one of her breasts. "Wow. That's kind of a mouthful." I imagined what it would feel like to have the thick, liver-colored nipples of her breasts come alive when I touched them with my tongue, when I held them and kissed them and sucked them into my mouth. "The J. C. Penney lady said it was her favorite name of all the nail polish." "It's the prettiest nail polish I've ever seen," I said. "What's your name?" "Norma." "Norma what?" "Arce," she said. "Like the cola, but spelled all the way out." We drove up to the Chinese cemetery behind South City. She wanted the top down. That was fine with me. It was one of those warm, misty, tropical nights that happen once in a blue moon because of monsoons in Malaysia...but, wait. What about my date with Ginny? It was Saturday night. I stopped off at Grossenbacher's to get Ginny a bouquet of flowers. Grossenbacher's was the florist shop down the street from Kinney's. According to an arc of Old English letters stenciled across the front window, it was officially Grossenbacher & Sons, but everyone just called it Grossenbacher's, and there was only one son—a guy named Pete. I used to get a kick out of acting like Pete was my buddy. I'd wave to him on his way into Carlo and Jimmy's, the Mexican coffee shop across the street where you sat at the counter on chrome and maroon Naugahyde bar stools. "Hey, Pete!" I'd yell. "What's going on, buddy?" Then I'd watch him pretend like he was in a different dimension. Pete didn't want any buddies. Well, he did and he didn't; that was what I used to get a kick out of—watching him trying to make up his mind whether he wanted a buddy or not. Pete wore thick reading glasses from Woolworth's, the kind he could peer out over the tops of when he was lost in thought, which was almost always, or when he had something to say, which was nearly never. I was probably the only person in town he ever really sat down and shot the shit with on any kind of a regular basis, and even I had ulterior motives. Pete was close to sixty and bald as an egg but for a swath of close clipped salt and pepper hair around the sides of his head and a thick, salt and pepper mustache he kept trimmed the same shape as Stalin's mustache—probably just to piss off his father. His father was Mr. Grossenbacher. Nobody called Pete anything but Pete. He resented that. He resented it almost as much as he resented the sign on the front window. Sons? What sons? There was only Pete. His father was in his late eighties and was still fiercely loyal to the royal family of Imperial Russia. It should have pissed him off that his only son had a mustache like Stalin's, but it didn't. His father was senile. He'd never even heard of Stalin. He lived in a world of his own, a world of caviar and lorgnettes and fringed epaulets and Faberge Eggs—but if his father had ever heard of Stalin, it would have pissed him off no end that his only son had a mustache like the mustache of such a man, and that seemed to give Pete all the satisfaction a person could reasonably get out of the mere trimming of a mustache into a certain shape. Pete could tell you the best way to get anywhere in a fifty mile radius of downtown San Bruno, taking into consideration not just distance, but commute patterns, highway construction and the likelihood of dead animals in the road. Giving directions was Pete's favorite thing to do. You couldn't help but get the feeling that the minute his father finally died Pete was going to turn the place into a Texaco station, get himself a star-shaped patch saying "Mr. Grossenbacher" stitched onto a pair of pinstriped coveralls and sit around giving directions to lost tourists all day. I used to stop by and pick up flowers for Bonnie every once in awhile. Bonnie looked like Brigitte Bardot and had been my girlfriend on and off for a year or so. She used to go nuts when I brought her flowers. Which is what I mean about ulterior motives. Pete used to give me flowers for free, see—just things he was going to have to throw in the garbage anyway—and I'd maybe buy him a coffee over at Carlo and Jimmy's every now and then. The store was closed, but I tapped on the window with my car keys and Pete let me in. I told him I was thinking about maybe picking up some flowers. He didn't say anything but just gathered up some left over snapdragons and freesia and chrysanthemums and baby's-breath, wrapped them in a sheet of green paper, snapped a few red rubber bands around the end and laid them on the counter. I took out my money, like I always did. Pete said forget about it, I could buy him a coffee. Then I made the mistake of telling him that they smelled good. The last thing Pete ever wanted to hear about was flowers. "It's the freesia," he said. "The purple stuff." "They're pretty." "Flowers is flowers." "I like how they all sort of go together." "It ain't a professional job." "Thanks, I guess." "What do you mean, 'you guess?' You don't want 'em?" "No, no. They're fine." "So, what's that mean, 'You guess?'" "It's a quote." "Some quote. Who said this quote?" "A guy named Beckett." "Never heard of him." "He's Irish. He wrote stuff in French then translated it back into English. Did you ever hear of Waiting for Godot? It's a play." "I seen a play once," Pete said with a little nod and kind of a half frown which wrinkled his bald head. "At the Curran Theater...on Geary, between Mason and Taylor. A boat wrecks on a island and a old man lives there. Everybody works for him like a slave. If they don't do like he says, he hurts them with magic. It was a long time ago. Before they built the Bayshore. We went up El Camino. We could of gone Skyline. Skyline would have been quicker, but my father, he only knew just that one way how to get there." Pete stroked his mustache contentedly. "I'll let you know how she liked these." "You going to marry this girl?" "I just met her." "It's a new one? What happened to the other one?" "Bonnie? She's still around." "Why you want a new one, then?" Pete frowned again. "I can't help it. I'm in love." That stopped him. I don't think Pete had ever been in love. "So, this new one, where does she live?" he asked. "In San Francisco. Out in the Avenues...45th Avenue." "Yeah?" he said and looked over the tops of his glasses and came suddenly alert. "You know the best way how to get there?" Then, without waiting for an answer, he started telling me. I wrote the directions on a piece of paper. Pete adored it when a person wrote what he said down on a piece of paper. He beamed. He sparkled. He was beside himself with glee.

Chapter Ten 45th Avenue It was foggy out in the Avenues. It's always foggy out in the Avenues. Wind blew cold, salty drizzle into my face. My hair wouldn't stay combed right. I could feel it all pushed over to the wrong side and sticking up in back. I tried patting it down, but that just made it feel like it was sticking up all the more, so unless I wanted Ginny's first impression of me to be a cross between Alfalfa and Dagwood Bumstead, I figured I'd better get out my comb and try combing it—which wasn't really all that easy. I had these flowers, see, and there wasn't a mirror anywhere. There was a shiny silver doorknocker, however. Ha! I put the flowers between my legs, squatted down a little and got out my comb. The doorknocker was like a mirror in a fun house. First I was nothing but chin, then I had the longest, saddest eyes I'd ever seen and a tall, tall forehead, like a Pharaoh, and when I finally got to the top of my head, my hair kept sticking up in back, higher and higher, like it wasn't ever going to stop. Ginny pulled the door open. Her face was where the doorknocker had been. I was looking right into her eyes. She was looking right into mine. "Gadfrees! Gerry?" "Hi," I said, still all scrunched down with this bunch of snapdragons and chrysanthemums sticking out from my crotch and a long, white comb hovering over my head like I was maybe trying to do the Limbo and give myself a benign lobotomy at the same time. "Here. I got you these." I took the flowers out from between my legs and pushed them toward her chest. She didn't take them. She just stood there. She had on a torn red sweatshirt, a pair of worn out jeans with the cuffs rolled up and a pair of white, unlaced Ked's with no socks. Three yellow barrettes held her hair in an unruly pile on top of her head, and her face was so pretty and perky and pesky and smug that I barely heard her when she crinkled up her nose and cocked her head over to one side and asked, "Are you supposed to be here?" "I thought I was, yeah. Wasn't I?" "Gosh...maybe," she said and took the flowers. "You want me to make it some other time?" "Oh, dear! This is awful. Okay, I know what. Here. Take these back." She handed me the flowers again and I wished for the umteenth time that I'd never stopped off at Pete's. "We'll start all over. Come back in ten minutes." I drove down to Ocean Beach and listened to the radio. I don't know for how long exactly, but I know it would have been for longer than ten minutes. Then I pulled the car up in front of her house again. That must have been when I left the lights on. I knocked on her door one more time. I didn't care what the hell my hair looked like. "Come innnn..." She dragged out the word like she was singing some kind of kid's song, like we were still pretending I hadn't already been there. I tried opening the door. It was locked. I knocked again. "It's open!" "It's locked!" "It sticks!" It sounded like she said "instincts," like I was instinctively supposed to know some secret way of getting the son of a bitch open. "I think it's stuck," I said. "Bash it!" she yelled. I bashed into the door with my shoulder, but it still didn't budge. Then I turned the knob and bashed into it again and ended up sliding along like a surfer on a slippery little rug that almost sent me crashing into an umbrella rack and a stack of books on a little table under a mirror on the wall in her hallway. I expected Ginny to be standing there with a big grin on her face, but she wasn't. She was in her bedroom with the door closed. There was a sliver of light coming from under the closed door. A shadow passed through the light. I heard a drawer open. The shadow moved out of the light. A coat hanger rattled. A zipper zipped and unzipped. The slightest sound was amplified by my imagination. I could almost feel her putting things on and taking them off again. What sounded like a tube of lipstick tapped against what sounded like the top of a glass vanity table. An eyeliner brush popped out from an eyeliner bottle. I put the flowers down, looked into the mirror, and was distracted by the daunting thought that she'd probably want to order drinks. What if the waiter wanted to see my ID? I was still only twenty. Ginny had just turned twenty-two. I was a little over a year younger than her. She didn't know it, but I did. I also knew that as soon as I got her out to my car, everything would be fine. I had it all pictured. Once we got to my car, she'd ease herself down into the understated luxury of those leather seats, and I'd maybe run the antenna up and move the passenger seat back...and when she heard the comforting hum of all those little electric motors moving things around, the last thing she'd be wondering would be who was older than who. She might even sort of snuzzle up against the side of my neck where I'd had the foresight to dab a little more of the Old Spice I kept in the glove compartment while I'd been listening to the radio down by the beach. Ginny came out of her room wearing a red silk dress with tiny black buttons up the back. Her hair was thick and brown and curly. Bangs covered her forehead. She had to peek out from under them when she wanted to see. Her eyes were light, light blue...and green, and gray, and more amused than ever. What was so funny, I did not know. She took a long black coat out from the hall closet and handed it to me. My best guess was that she expected me to hold it for her. I held it for her. She slipped her arms into the sleeves of the coat and snuggled it around herself. Ginny pulled the door closed behind us, turned toward the street and finally saw my gorgeous white Lincoln for the first time. "Ooo, is that your car?" she asked in such a sweet little voice it almost sounded like she was cooing. Overwhelming pride swelled inside me. "Yeah," I said. "Why'd you leave the lights on?" I ignored her question, calmly opened the passenger door, made my way around to the driver's side, got in, came up with a mental image of how everything was still going to be all right, turned the key in the ignition, and actually expected the engine to start. But it didn't. I tried and tried, again and again. Pretty soon, all it did was click. "Maybe we should call Triple-A," Ginny suggested. "I don't have Triple-A." I shook my head. "Oh," she said. All the other things I didn't have rippled the surface of my fragile confidence like someone had thrown a pretty good-sized boulder into it. I didn't have anything. All the money I had in the world was wadded up in my pants' pocket, and I was three years in debt for this piece of shit car that sat there clicking at me—telling me things I already knew. I was a kid. I sold cheap-ass shoes at a cheap-ass shoe store in the cheap-ass city of cheap-ass San Bruno for a living. My hair wouldn't stay combed right. I was out of my league, in over my head, barking up the wrong tree—click, click, click, you dumb cluck—but the amazing thing was that Ginny didn't seem to mind any of that. She seemed to sort of like it, in fact. She probably felt like I did when I went out with someone like Norma Arce. Ginny knew nothing could ever really come of it, but she was intrigued. I was cute. I liked her. I made her laugh. What harm could it do? I wasn't the sort of guy she'd ordinarily have anything to do with. That made me extraordinary. Ha! We ended up taking Ginny's big black Buick Roadmaster—one of those ones that used to have five little portholes on the sides. She had the seat up as far as it would go and still had to stretch some to reach the pedals. There were notes written in felt pen across the dashboard: "Turn off Lights! Lock Doors! Remember Keys!" Ginny waved to the notes and laughed. "Don't pay attention to any of that. Mother wrote it. She thinks I have brain damage." We went to a restaurant called Ripley's. It was in North Beach. You had to go down some narrow stairs. There were red and white-checkered tablecloths on the tables and candles in glass goblets and a fog of cigarette smoke hanging in the air. When Virginia moved to San Francisco she went through one of those underground gourmet guides and made up an alphabetical list of restaurants to go to when she went out on dates. Ripley's was next on the list. I gave the alphabet a quick run through. Hey, it could have been Vanessi's. The guys she was used to going out with were "men" from Harvard and Yale and Stanford—guys who could afford to gamble the price of dinner at a fancy restaurant on the off chance it might get them into her good graces. She'd been a debutante. Her father grew up on an estate in Westchester County. They had a summer cottage in Newport. Her grandmother dolled out toilet paper from a locked cupboard, one square at a time. There was Frick money in the mix. The maitre d' seemed to have sized us up based on his impression of me rather than her, however, and led us over to a table by the kitchen door. That didn't last long. After exchanging a few fidgety glances with a Filipino dishwasher, Ginny stood up, took me by the sleeve of the burnt-orange Orlon sweater I was wearing—along with a really cool burlap-colored button-down shirt—and marched me over to an empty table against the far wall. I lit a cigarette, propped my napkin into a small tent and blew cigarette smoke through a flap at the bottom. The maitre d' spotted us. He looked toward the table we had vacated, frowned and started walking toward us. Ginny rolled her eyes and shooed him away. "He looks sort of mad." "Mad, schmad. He works in a restaurant, for God's sake." "I never went out to dinner much. The only place my parents ever took us was to Hedge's Wigwam. It was some fancy cafeteria-style place, up on Woodward Avenue, down toward Detroit." I gave directions with my hands. "There was a wigwam on the roof." "Is that why you've made your napkin into a teepee? Or has it become fashionable to order wine by smoke signals?" "Sorry." I moved the napkin onto my lap. "Don't be sorry, dodo. If you want to make teepees, make teepees. Recreate the whole battle of the Little Big Horn if you want, but if you're just nervous..." "I'm not nervous," I said nervously, a few words shy of telling her I wasn't quite twenty-one yet, either. "Have you ever read The Confidence Man?" she asked. "It's just confidence. That's all anything is. If you're confident, whatever you do's the right thing to do." "...and if you're not?" "Did you want to sit next to garbage cans?" "No, but isn't it okay to just let things happen the way they happen?" "Oh, how very Zen and boring." "I was confident New Year's." "I barely remember New Year's." "I kissed you. At midnight." "You did?" "Yeah. You kissed me back, like, sort of a lot. You don't remember any of that?" "Heavens, no. I have blackouts. I'm an alcoholic," she said brightly. "There was some sort of mix up, I know. I was supposed to go out with Ronnie and Charles showed up—or the other way around. I forget. It was all terribly confusing. We ended up all going together. That's the last thing I remember. Ronnie didn't tell me much the next day. And Charles still hasn't called. It's been ages." "The other guy's still around?" "Ronnie? Absolutely. Yes. Ronnie's not going anywhere." "What does he think about...you know..." I moved my hands at the wrists, trying to think of exactly the right words. "...you...going out with me?" "He says I'm like the Mona Lisa." "You're way cuter." "Thank you, dahling." "I don't get that Mona Lisa thing, though," I said. "Ronnie doesn't want to seem possessive. He says keeping me all to himself would be like keeping the Mona Lisa all to himself. Isn't that sweet?" "I guess," I said and made a dismissive little gesture with my left hand. "But, to tell you the truth, it looked to me like they both wanted you all to themselves. The only thing that kept them from killing me was Elliot." "Who's Elliot?" "My friend. The guy in the uniform? With the Green Beret?" I pointed to my head. "He's in Vietnam now. He's supposed to be some big pacifist. He wore a mask over his mouth for a while so he wouldn't accidentally kill any innocent gnats. Why he joined the army nobody knows." "That sort of vaguely rings a bell. I think I remember him...your friend...Elliot. I remember thinking, 'How romantic! Marching off to war.' This is getting a trifle absurd," she said in a soft, determined voice and called confidently across the room, "Yoo-hoo! May we see a menu, please?" One of the waiters showed up. Ginny ordered wine. The guy didn't ask to see my ID. She'd quietly taken over. It was like My Fair Lady. I was some uncivilized wretch she'd been given a once in a lifetime chance to study and refine. When the wine arrived, she tasted it, smiled and said something to the waiter in French. I thought, uh-oh, she was going to send the wine back for some reason, like maybe just to show me it could be sent back, which only would have led to another chance for someone to ask to see my ID—but she didn't. She did everything just right. Even the maitre d' came by to see how things were going. Swimmingly, or some such thing, Ginny told him, also in French. When it came time to order, I pointed to something in the mid to low price range. The waiter nodded his guarded approval. Then she started rattling off a whole slew of other things and the waiter kept getting more and more enthusiastic. "Bon. Tres bon. Magnifique!" Magnifique, my ass, all the money I had in the world would barely pay the bill and I'd just cashed my paycheck...well, fuck the car payment, this was worth it. What I'd pointed to turned out to be duck. The only other time I ever ate a duck before was when my father shot one, and then I had had to be careful I didn't chip a tooth on the birdshot still stuck in its flesh. The duck the waiter brought me had hot orange marmalade poured all over it, however, and I had no idea how I was supposed to eat the thing. If I tried to eat it with my fingers, it would have been like trying to eat a hot fudge sundae with my fingers, and if I tried using a knife and fork, the son of a bitch would have ended up in my lap—so I pretty much just made do with French bread dipped in hot orange marmalade sauce, and we took what was left of it and the rest of all the other stuff Ginny had ordered home with us in doggy bags. Virginia slipped her arms out of her coat while I held it for her. A spark of electricity shot through my fingers. She kicked off her shoes and asked me to unbutton the back of her dress. I lifted her hair. There were freckles on her shoulder. And a mole. I told her about it. "You have a mole on your shoulder." "I know. I have one on my fanny, too. Ooo, rub right there." I dug my thumb under her scapula. "Harder. Feel the knots? My shrink says I have neurasthenia." "Doesn't that hurt?" "No, it feels yummy. Down more...right there. Oh!" "I can't get any leverage." "I'll put on my jammies." She'd been saying odd little things like that all night, things that made her sound like a four-year-old kid. Jammies. Fanny. Namby-pamby. Yummy. Mummy. Tummy. Tum. Tum-tum. Gads! Gadfrees! Dodo. Doo doo. Yow! Yowie, zow! Well, she went back and forth. At the restaurant she'd had to be efficient. With other guys she probably talked like a four-year-old kid all the time, but with me that wouldn't have been practical. We never would have made it to the restaurant, for one thing, and if we had somehow made it to the restaurant, we wouldn't ever have gotten waited on and never could have ordered wine. But now that we were back at her apartment she could finally be more herself again. Ginny disappeared back into her bedroom. I put the doggy bags into her otherwise almost empty refrigerator—a bottle of ketchup, a jar of dill pickles, a couple of cartons of Chinese take-out, taco sauce. It crossed my mind that she went out on dates instead of going grocery shopping. The kitchen walls were shiny yellow enamel. Her mother had written all over them, too, only this time she'd had more room. The letters were gigantic: "TURN OFF GAS! TURN OFF LIGHTS! LOCK DOORS!" Back in the living room there were books and records stacked in lopsided piles everywhere. In one corner, there was a prayer shawl stretched over a plank of driftwood perched across a couple of cinder blocks. Ginny called it her shrine. On top of the shawl, there were five or six votive candles in bumpy red glass candleholders, a few pinecones, some seashells, feathers, dried flowers and three pictures the size of post cards. I didn't know it at the time, of course, but the pictures were of Virginia Woolf, Marcel Duchamp and Gurdjieff. I sat down cross-legged on the rug. Ginny came out from her bedroom wearing a long white flannel nightgown. The nightgown had tiny blue roses all over it. She was carrying a lit candle. She used it to light the rest of the candles on her shrine. Then she went into the kitchen, got a bottle of Beefeater Gin and two pretty good-sized drinking glasses, turned on all four burners of the stove and turned out the bright kitchen light. She put the gin and the candles and the glasses down in front of me, then went over and sorted through one of the stacks of records. I filled our glasses and thought it was sort of slick that a girl named Ginny liked to drink gin. "I feel like Bach," she said. "You don't look like Bach." She smiled the sort of smile the remark deserved. She liked me. I could tell. She put on The Magnificat, rigged up the record player to keep playing the same record over and over and, finally, plopped herself down in front of me. The room was aglow with a combination of eerie blue flames from the stove in the kitchen and reddish flickering flames from the candles. Under her nightgown, I saw a pair of white cotton panties. Her hair hid her face. She peeked out from under her bangs. We drank her gin and talked and touched each other's hands, and the shadows of our hands flitted across the rug and flew across the walls like prehistoric birds. It was like we were telling ghost stories, like we were kids in a cave. I told her about the Leapies. The Leapies were little green florescent things I made up when I was a kid. They looked like clothespins and never did anything but leap. That was all they ever wanted to do. They lived in heaven. I sang her the song: "La la-la...all is calm, all is bright. 'Round yon virgin, mother and child, Holy Infant, so tender and mild. Sleep in heaven, Leapies. Sleep in heaven, Leapies." "How darling! Someone should make up a psychological test of how you hear things! What a good idea! Freudian hears! Don't you usually like what you hear better than what people say?" "It's probably not a bad idea to know what was actually said sometimes, too." "You sound like a lawyer." "How'd you do that?" I touched the scar on the inside of her right wrist. I didn't exactly want to get into a conversation about careers. "With a broken bottle, I'm told. I was blacked out. Not very aesthetic, are they? Or effective. Tendons got in the way. You're supposed to cut up and down, not across." She demonstrated. "Live and learn, la la-la. From what I remember, it wasn't that exciting. Or noble. Warranted, maybe. Noble, no." She seemed to be talking to herself, nodding and shaking her head at the appropriate places. "I was at school. It was Christmas. I get funny around Christmas. I have since Daddy left. Roger knew that." "Who's Roger?" "My beau. Ex-beau. Roger Singmaster. I was at Sarah Lawrence. He was in grad school at Brown. His father's a partner in some big law firm. They live outside Philadelphia. His mother teaches French Lit at Penn. Roger was going to be a banker. He'd been going to be a politician but decided bankers had more influence. "He was charming and glib and confident, with intense dark black eyes and a shy, crooked smile—and the darlingest little cleft in his chin. We'd been dating for ages. We used to meet at a hotel across from Gramercy Park. It was all very tawdry. I had long luscious orgasms like melting Hershey Bars. Pigeons cooed on the windowsill. Mother adored him. We were supposed to get married. We were supposed to be in love. We were in love. Then I don't know what happened." Her voice trailed off then came back haltingly, talking even more to herself than ever, "He went home for Christmas. It's barely been a year. I stayed in the dorms. Everyone was gone. It was like Dickens. Empty hallways. Banging shutters—so I got drunk and took the train to Philadelphia and caused a big ruckus. His parents were conciliatory. His mother suggested that I might simply have been taking up too much of Roger's time. His father talked about 'the long term.' I threw a brandy decanter through the dining room window." She stopped. "Yeah? And?" I said. After a few blinks and a shivery start like she was half-asleep and woke up again, she went on: "The next thing I remember is waking up in bandages, with Mother's voice on the phone, asking whether I thought she was going to be expected to pay for the rug in the Singmaster's guest room." "What did he do? The Hershey Bar guy?" "Roger? Nothing. Went back to Providence." "You haven't talked to him?" "He's dating some boring Bryn Mawr psych major." "Then what?" "Then what what?" "What happened after you woke up in bandages?" "Mother had me carted off to some loony bin in La Jolla. They told her I was schizophrenic. Now she worries I'm going to blow up half the block every time I boil an egg." She nodded toward the notes on the kitchen wall. "I stayed with Auntie Rose in Laguna. Her house was full of Vedanta swamis. Do you know about Sri Ramakrishna? My cousin's a Vedanta nun. They have to be celibate, but all she ever thinks about is sex. Everybody goes around like Heloise and Abelard, aching for each other all day and all night. I wanted to be a Vedanta nun, but went to live with Daddy instead, and moved up here...and went back to school..." "...and met me." "...and here we are. I'm sweating like a sow." "Want me to turn off the stove?" "No. I like sweating." She fanned herself with the hem of her nightgown and I felt warm, humid air wafting into my face and thought about how warm and moist it would be an inch or so inside the elastic of those girlish little white cotton panties. We didn't say anything for a long time. Reflections of the candles flickered in her eyes. Blurred shadows crossed her face. Her appearance changed. Her hair turned long and silvery, and her eyes disappeared from their sockets, and her skin looked old and leathery, like a shrunken head. Then, right in the middle of the huge, scary fantasy I was having, Ginny took a deep, sharp, bone-chilling gasp of breath into her chest. "Ahhh..." like that. "What's the matter?" I blinked. "Nothing." She couldn't quite put it into words, but whatever it was wasn't scary at all, it was good, really good, extra good, amazingly good. Then she seemed to be trying to say something else, but still the words wouldn't come to her. She shook her hair away from her face and covered her mouth mischievously and laughed and looked at me, wide-eyed, enthralled, delighted, and finally whispered, "Gadfrees! You were glowing! You were like a god! Your hair was long and blond, and your eyes were shining like flames, and you were floating off the floor!" At first it felt like I just wasn't focusing right, but then it became clear that she really had changed—and this time what she had changed into wasn't anything I could have described if we'd stared at each other forever. I blinked again and squinted and made a conscientious effort to try to see what the hell was really going on. Virginia Good had somehow become someone or something I hadn't ever dreamed of before. Her looking like a shrunken head had been understandable, at least—afterimages, me being pretty drunk myself, and all that—but this...I didn't know what it was. A state of mind? The absence of a state of mind? I couldn't tell. Whatever it was, she was beautiful?utterly desirable and dangerous, like a bright, poison spider in a sparkling spider web—like a flower, a sublime, deadly flower. "Do you know The Rose?" she asked in a dreamy, faraway, tiny little girlish voice. Then she recited it to me in the same dreamy voice: "O rose...thou art sick. The invisible worm,? That flies in the night...In the howling storm:? Hath found out thy bed of crimson joy:? And his dark...secret love...Does thy life destroy." "What made you say that?" I asked. "Gadfrees! I was reading your mind. Was I? I was!" What she had turned into was spooky. Yeah, she was drunk off her ass, too, probably even more drunk than me, but there was more to it than that. Her eyes had changed. She was deranged. She had no conscience or guilt or guile. She was barely human. She was, like, mythological, surreal, fantastic, bewitching, like something or someone you might see in a painting—someone who'd put a spell on you, someone you'd fall in love with forever if you got the chance, someone you'd have to be in love with no matter what. The burners on the stove had been on for hours. The room was an incubator. Unexplainable chemical reactions were exuding from under her flannel nightgown, animal smells, feral stuff, musk...and in one great, blazing insight, I came to the inescapable conclusion that if there was ever a time to consummate what was going on between us, that time had come. I had to get her out of that silly little girlish nightgown...and what? Devour her? Eat her alive. Assimilate her. Get so close we couldn't tell each other apart. Know her. Get her inside me; get me inside her. Nor was it just my boyish imagination. Ginny wanted whatever was going on between us to get itself consummated pretty soon, too. It was like something really important was at stake, the continuation of the species, maybe, like if we didn't hurry up and fuck, baboons and orangutans were going to beat us out of our evolutionary place on the planet. "You were looking like a shrunken head," I said. "What?" She crinkled her nose and shook her hair. "You looked like a shrunken head," I repeated stupidly. "That's my soul. I have an old, shrunken soul." "That's not true." I waved my hand dismissively. "I'm not glowing. I'm not floating off the floor. And you don't have an old, shrunken soul." "I don't?" "No. You have a beautiful soul. Everything about you is beautiful. I love you." She blinked. The spell was shattered. Holy shit! What was I saying? What had I said? I love you? Had I said that? No. What self-respecting baboon would stop in the middle of ensuring the species its evolutionary place on the planet to say, "I love you?" Humanity's doomed. Orangutans rule. "What does that mean?" Her eyes were huge. The question quivered with so many nuances of mirth and pity and hope and disbelief I couldn't have come up with an answer if there had been one. Then it didn't matter anymore. She climbed over into my lap, and the candles were sputtering almost out and flaming up out of pools of melted wax as we rocked back and forth, kissing each other and hugging each other and undressing each other all at the same time until she finally tossed what was left of her nightgown toward the glowing kitchen and said, "I have little boobs." "You're perfect," I babbled. She took off her panties, and I got out of the rest of my clothes, and we half stumbled and half carried each other into her bedroom and got under the covers, touching each other, touching each other everywhere all at once, all the time, not ever not touching each other. Then the phone rang. Then it stopped ringing. Then it rang again. Then it stopped again. Then it rang one more time. It was a special ring. She had to answer it. It was Ronnie, the guy with glasses from New Year's. Apparently, from what I was able to gather from Ginny's end of the conversation, Ronnie had just eaten a can of garbanzo beans and something having to do with eating a can of garbanzo beans meant that he had to come over. "Now?" I asked. "It's an emergency," she said. Childlike mischief blazed in her eyes. Hey, I had kind of an emergency going on at that point, myself. But Ronnie's emergency took precedent. I started getting dressed. She didn't. She stayed in bed. Under the covers. Still sweating. Still exuding. No god damn baboon was going to beat her out of her place on the evolutionary ladder. It was a bit unbearable, if you ask me, but no matter what meant no matter what. The garbanzo bean guy got there. I turned off The Magnificat and told Virginia I'd call her and left with as much dignity as I was able to muster, which, under the circumstances, wasn't much. Then, motherfuck! My car still didn't start. I'd forgotten all about it. Son of a bitch! All the money I had in the world had gone to fill Ginny's refrigerator full of more doggy bags than I'd ever seen in one place before, and I still didn't have Triple-A. I had to go back up and knock on her door again. The garbanzo bean guy came out and gave me a push. My gorgeous white Lincoln coughed and sputtered and spit and finally started. I waved to the garbanzo bean guy in my rear view mirror and was on my way back to San Mateo again, telling myself that going out on a date with Virginia Good had been the stupidest idea I'd ever come up with in my whole entire life. When I got up to Skyline, I remembered Pete's directions and it dawned on me that I'd forgotten all about the fucking flowers. She'd forgotten all about the fucking flowers. The garbanzo bean guy probably found the fucking flowers on the table in the hallway and gave them to her when he got back from giving me a push. Fuck the fucking flowers, I wasn't ever going to get a girl any god damn flowers again in my whole entire life if I lived to be a hundred and three. When I finally got out of the fog and back onto the El Camino I started rethinking the whole thing. Maybe it hadn't been such a bad idea, after all. We'd hit it off for the most part, hadn't we? What the hell more did I want from a first date? We had our clothes off. We were in bed with each other. We were about as close as two people can get to fucking the fuck out of each other. I was god damn glowing, for Christ's sake. I was like a god. I was floating off the floor—until I remembered the part about saying, "I love you." That had been the stupidest thing I'd ever said in my whole entire life. I wasn't ever going to tell any girl I loved her again if I lived to be a hundred and three. Yeah, well, on the other hand, I mean, who knows, you know? Besides, she was drunk. She had blackouts. She probably wouldn't remember a thing. Turning into my driveway was a relief. I looked on the bright side. At least my gorgeous white Lincoln had made it all the way home. I hadn't gotten pulled over for drunk driving. I sat in the driveway thinking that the best thing to do would be just to add it all up—everything that might have been good about it or bad about it, smart about it or stupid about it, forgettable or unforgettable, lucky or unlucky, all of it—just add it all up and stick the whole shebang into that gigantic equation wherein whatever happens is for the best. I kept on writing Ginny letters. She wrote me letters back. We corresponded for another year or so. We talked on the phone and hung out with each other now and then. We got to be buddies. We saw Ingmar Bergman movies together. I took her over to Gordon Lish's house a couple times. Kesey showed up once—sporting a brand new red, white and blue cap in the shape of an American Flag on one of his front teeth. Ginny thought that was sort of slick, but for the most part, between March of 1963 and March of 1964, I pretty much just bided my time. She told me about different books to read and thought I might write a book about her someday. I told her I was going to write a book about her someday. She liked that. She wanted to be Zelda Fitzgerald; she probably was Zelda Fitzgerald. It's just too bad she never found anyone like Zelda Fitzgerald's husband to hang out with—someone who could capture her and captivate her and take her places and buy her things and keep her safe, someone who could love her forever no matter what. I tried, Lord knows. But I didn't succeed. Nobody did.