Like, what the hell was I going to do, long-term? One day I counted on my fingers and realized that I'd been screwing around in the city for ten months. It felt like both an absolute eternity and a series of fleeting moments at the same time. I had lived in the Financial District, Daly City, Haight Ashbury and the Tenderloin, had been through so much, known so many people and at the end of it I had little to show except better-honed street smarts and a parade of traumatic experiences to revisit at night. I had lost almost a year of school. I had been one of the youngest kids in my grade, and now - if I even managed to go back in September - I would be one of the oldest, still in the tenth grade and watching my former peers graduate a year ahead of me. I vaguely wanted to do something about it, but the entire situation was too enormous and too fraught with uncertainty to make any action seem like a reasonable option. I could find Derek and ask him to help me, but the county would throw me into a foster family or worse, send me back where I belonged. What school would I go to? What freedoms would I lose?
I stayed up at night worrying about wandering thugs and how old I was going to be when I graduated high school. If I had had the ability to appreciate the humor in that back then, I'm sure I would have laughed.
]]> Derek ran across me one afternoon in early July, when a fellow police officer was all over the news. I had been reading the headlines and thinking of him while an expectant unease had settled over the city; I wondered how tense things were in Oakland. I was eyeing the snacks at the Walgreen's on Sansome and Bush when he walked down the aisle; he didn't see me until he was nearly upon me. I watched him select a bottled iced coffee from the fridge. "Hi," I said.He looked at me. "Well, hi."
I half hoped he would do the job of ending my time on the streets for me, but he didn't. Look how thin I am, I thought, look how I don't really have a place to go tonight, but he didn't get the hint, and I was afraid to say something that would force him to make the decision for me. I could do it: I got raped. Twice. I could tell him about the pot I'd smoked. The fact that lately I had been thinking about what it would be like to climb on the railing of that big orange bridge, face the open ocean and the Farallons in the distance, and just let go.
"You're back on this side of town."
I looked at him for a moment longer and then shrugged, looking away casually. "Yeah, well. I didn't like it over there. Too much... you know. Golden Gate Park."
"Safety in numbers," he pointed out. "Where's your dog?"
"I left him there."
"By himself?"
"God!" I said. "No! I made some friends. He liked them better. It was easier without him, anyway."
Derek paused, and then hefted the drink in his hand, considered it, and put it back. "Why don't we go eat something."
*****
He knew this little Thai place on Mission. He was a regular, and he didn't have to wait for a table, though we'd come in behind two or three other parties. I ordered a Coke and red curry with rice, and we sat eating it in silence, looking out the front window at the businesspeople passing by. In the company of someone who wasn't homeless, I didn't feel homeless either, and I relished those moments, where I was safe and protected. I stirred a mound of rice into my curry.
"How are you eating these days?" Derek said.
I shrugged. "Well enough." Secretly I hoped he would press me; secretly I hoped that the result of this lunch would be me in his car, going to child services, never to spend another night in the handful of alleys I slept in. I wasn't brave enough to ask him to take me there.
"You look better."
"Yeah?" I said. It's all the eating out of trash cans, I wanted to say, but I didn't. "It's getting easier."
"It shouldn't be. The fact that it is kind of worries me."
I watched him eat. He didn't elaborate, and the curtain of silence that hung over the table became too much. I changed the subject. "Did you know him?"
"Know who?"
"The cop who shot that guy in Oakland."
He put his fork down and took a drink. "No. No, I didn't know him."
"Do you think he's gonna pay for it?"
Derek seemed uncomfortable, and suddenly I was, too. I had spoken to exactly one other person about what had happened; Bill had made reference to it once, and we'd had a conversation about race that I had been ill-equipped to understand. And yet the message had sunk in: The cop had killed an innocent man out of, if not malice, then flippancy. Like it was nothing. I watched Derek struggle to find the words. "What he did," he said at last, "could have happened to any one of us."
"That's encouraging," I said.
"No, I mean --" He looked at me, then, hard. "I mean everyone fucks up. Most of us don't fuck up that badly, but the potential is always there. And cops and doctors and pilots and senators, when people like that fuck up, we do it bad. We have to be careful."
I stirred the curry with my fork.
"I have nightmares," Derek said, "about fucking up like that."
Life went on in the city. One Sunday morning I was surprised by a bright parade making its way down Market Street. "It's the Pride parade," someone told me, and when I asked what they were proud of I got a scoff in return, but soon I figured it out. These were the first gay people I'd ever seen, I thought, and I watched, fascinated, as they went by in outrageous costumes, leather and feathers and painted faces. I wondered where they went during the day.
I stared, and then I looked around and approached the trash can. The wrapper had touched some sort of filth, but the hot dog itself, slathered in mustard and ketchup and onions, had made contact with only the side of a discarded soda cup, and it looked clean enough. I glanced around and pulled the hot dog out of the wrapper. It was almost whole - the child had taken a bite out of it, apparently, and decided that it wasn't for her.
Well, then, I thought, it was for me. It wasn't really like digging through the trash - it was just someone's unwanted leftovers that had happened to get set down in an unfortunate place. My stomach growled so hard it felt like it was turning over, and though I wanted to go take my food somewhere to eat in peace, I couldn't wait - I lifted it to my mouth and I took a bite.
"Oh my god," someone said, and I looked up. She was about my age, bottle blond and too thin in a fashionable way. She stared at me and held onto the strap of her purse as if I might try to grab it.
For a moment I was mortified. This was exactly the sort of reaction I'd been afraid of - the chief reason I'd stayed away from trash cans when I'd been hungry before. It was not so much the lengths I had to go to to survive that stopped me but the social consequences of being caught doing so. I had had sex for money and social standing, but I would no more walk down the street in fishnets and boots than I would dig in the garbage for food at midday.
I felt my moral code dissolving around me. And I stood up straight and looked her in the eye. And as she sneered at me, I took another bite.
"That's fucking gross," she said. "You're eating trash, that's fucking gross."
I did not have a retort available; a moment before I had rubbed it in her face, but now people were beginning to turn around and look. I shouldered past her and slipped through the crowd, trying to hold back a wave of embarrassment so strong I thought it might knock me off my feet before I had a chance to escape. I wondered what she would say about me to her friends, and when I reached a quiet place I sat down on a planter and struggled to stop crying. I was shaking. This was not what I had wanted. The hot dog had not been worth this, and for a moment I considered throwing it away, but instead I pressed it into my mouth and took another bite. It was still warm.
When I had finished, I crumpled the wrapper and left it in the planter.
]]>Blue skies and fierce wind welcomed me to the Financial District that Wednesday evening, and when I finally got there - "home" - the YMCA was closed and I had to look for a place to sleep. A security guard stood outside the garage on Drumm Street that I'd slept in before, and anyway, I had no desire to be monitored by Beth. I'd knocked on her door desperate for help only sixteen hours before, but the shock and the fear had dulled. I could still take care of myself.
Being in a familiar area was nice, but I traveled farther afield, to a little dead-end alley off Grant Street where the lee side of the dumpsters was unoccupied and quiet. Everyone had gone home for the evening and the streets slowly emptied as people left restaurants. I leaned against the dumpster and closed my eyes, exhausted but wary; I hadn't slept alone in a new place in quite some time, and I couldn't help but worry that what had happened to me the night before would happen again.
To my surprise, I had no nightmares, though my sleep was constantly interrupted by passing sirens and nearby footsteps.
]]> The next day I woke up early and had a shower, and settled into my usual routine, keeping an eye out for acquaintances I didn't want to run into. Derek was good at catching me off-guard, and though I knew that Beth usually went for lunch several blocks away, I looked for her, too. The swelling had gone down, but I didn't want either of them to see my face, and I walked around with my hood up and my hair half-hiding my eyes, but I could tell that few of the people who glanced at me on their lunch breaks and after work weren't fooled. A homeless woman on Market and Battery raised a hand when I passed and yelled, "Whoa, girl! You need to leave his ass!" I put my head down and kept going.I certainly didn't suffer from a surfeit of money, but I knew how to make David's twenty dollars stretch, and I ate as little as I felt I could get away with. I found a Starbucks with seating on Battery Street and sipped at a cup of coffee half-filled with cream and sugar for hours, making it last; I wore clothes three or four times before doing a wash. On Monday night, when I couldn't put it off any longer, I went to the laundromat on Polk Street and fed my clothes into the washing machine, and my fingers scraped the packet at the bottom of my backpack.
I was startled. It was David's methamphetamine. And then I felt my stomach drop to my shoes. I had been carrying it around without a thought since Wednesday - five days since it had happened, and in that time I could have been stopped and searched by the police, or worse, David himself could have come after me looking for the drugs. I wondered why his friend hadn't taken the package, and how much it was worth, and whether I could possibly sell it. I went to the little row of chairs and sat down, my heart beating heavily in my chest. I wanted to take the package out and look at it and weigh it in my hands but I was in public, and I knew I would be in a lot of trouble if someone saw me.
It took everything I had to sit through a wash cycle and a dry cycle, and I folded my clothes up quickly before stashing them in my backpack. I went to the McDonald's up the street, bought a cheeseburger and then slipped into the bathroom to have a look.
I didn't really know what methamphetamine was, but I knew it was serious stuff and that I could go to jail for a long time for even having it. I wondered why that hadn't stopped me from taking it from David in the first place. When I was sure no one else was in the bathroom, I locked the stall door and pulled the package gingerly from my backpack, and unwrapped the brown paper. There was a sandwich baggie inside, filled with what must have been half a pound of tiny white crystals.
I opened the baggie, wondering how you took it and what it did to you. I don't think I really intended to try it, or thought such a tiny amount would hurt me; I was overcome with the need to taste it, make sure it was real. I knew little about drugs but understood that they were expensive, and a quantity like this could make things okay for me for awhile. Maybe even buy me a room in a hostel if I managed, somehow, to find someone who was willing to buy it. I licked my finger and pressed it into the white crystals, and brought it back up to my tongue, expecting the drugs to taste like David's house had smelled: Horrible and chemical. Instead I felt a familiar tingling on my tongue. Shocked, I tasted it again to be sure.
It was koshering salt.
I began to laugh, relieved and disappointed all at once, and then, as what had happened dawned on me, I began to get angry. He had intended for that to happen. If I had run away with the salt, he would have been out a dollar, maybe less; he had sent me straight to his friend by fooling me into thinking I was delivering something important, and instead I had been delivering myself. I wondered how much David had been paid for that. More than the twenty dollars he had given me, certainly.
I left the salt in the bathroom atop the toilet paper dispenser. I'd play my own trick; maybe I would hear in the papers how the mysterious baggie of crystals found in a McDonald's had turned out to be koshering salt after a lengthy, expensive investigation.
That night, the nightmares came back.
]]>Early that morning I walked all the way to the one place I felt safe: The top of the cliff at Sutro Heights Park. I fell asleep, aching and throbbing, and was awakened a few hours later by a dog. It sniffed at the back of my neck and I could feel it prancing around in the sand. Blearily I mistook it for Leon, but when I opened my eyes I saw a black lab looking down at me with concern. It whined and wagged its tail once, uncertainly.
I felt like hell. I sat up and pushed the dog away, but it leaned forward on my hand to sniff my face. "No," I said, and shoved at it again. It turned and left the little clearing. Something hung in the edge of my vision, in the periphery of my attention, and without thinking I reached to rub it away.
]]> The moment I touched it I inhaled sharply and my eyes filled with tears; the pain radiated from my eye to my temple to my jaw, and at once I had a headache. After a moment I reached up and gingerly felt along the side of my face. I remembered a metal pipe making contact with the side of my head repeatedly, and feeling further up, I found crusty, dry material stuck to my eyebrow. I picked some away and held it out for inspection, and saw that it was dried blood.
The dog reappeared with an irritated-looking human in tow. It looked at me and then at its owner as if to say, See, I told you, and stood at her side, staring intently at me as if I might die at any second. "Oh my god," said the owner, a women of maybe forty. "Are you okay?"
There
were any number of things I could have done, but I was too tired to
run and too weary to make up a story. "How bad is it?" I said.
My voice quavered unexpectedly, and suddenly I was again ready to
dissolve into tears. I held it back.
The woman reached a hand out from where she stood, maybe six feet away, and then she came closer and crouched down. The dog followed. "What happened?" she said.
"How bad is it?"
She pressed her lips together so hard they turned white. "It's bad."
This told me nothing new. "Do you maybe have a pocket mirror?" But I could already tell she didn't; she was out for a run with her dog before work, and didn't carry a bag. She did, however, have a phone, and I sat still while she took my picture. She handed the phone to me for inspection and I stared at the grim-looking, teary-eyed girl in the photo. I looked like I'd been beaten. I had a cigarette burn near my ear - I reached up to touch it, and remembered the four or five others that had been pressed into other places, and suddenly they started hurting too. My right eye was almost swollen shut, and I had a cut on my eyebrow that appeared to have bled a lot; there was another one, not so bad, on the bottom of my eye socket. My jaw hurt and though at the moment I was pretty sure I still had possession of all my back teeth, it was too painful to test their stability with my tongue.
In all, it hurt worse than it looked, but it looked pretty bad, too. I laughed. "Not gonna be able to hide this, am I?" I handed the phone back.
"I'm going to call the police," she told me. She pressed a button on the screen and I saw her dialing: Nine. One. One.
I twisted around to get my legs under me, and was surprised at a sharp wrench in my side. I tried not to cry out. I had bruised something there, too. "I don't want that."
"But you've been -"
I looked around wildly, remembering something my mother had once told me. "Okay, look. You know what. Think about the worst thing that ever happened to you."
The woman stared at me.
"The worst thing. That you'd never want to live through again. And then you try to, you know, get justice and stuff, only the people who are supposed to help you get it? They make you relive it and they act like it's all your fault. And then the person who did it to you comes and you have to tell the story in front of him and then his lawyer pretty much tries to convince a big group of people that you had it coming -" I was rambling. As a matter of fact I didn't yet understand why someone wouldn't want to confront their accuser in court where it was safe; I thought it would be satisfying to verbally trounce his lawyer and put him away for life. But I didn't want the police to be involved. The night before I had tried to go to Derek, but now, less desperate after the passage of time and with the ascent of the sun, I needed time to decide what my options were. "I don't want to go through that. I just want to go home."
She had more questions, but I stood, painfully, and brushed the sand from my hair. She wanted to walk me home and talk to my mother, but I told her that there wouldn't be anyone there. "My mom will be at work," I said. I promised to call her immediately and to get a ride to the hospital and get tested for everything - and there was that lump in my stomach again, what if I was pregnant, what if I had AIDS now, or Hepatitis or scabies. My biggest, most immediate concern was whether I had picked up body lice again, and as I slipped away from the woman with the dog, up the hill into the green part of the park, I scratched self-consciously at the seams of my shirt.
My feet hurt and I wanted nothing more than to curl up and sleep again, but I walked east down Anza Street and then south to Balboa, and after several stops to rest I knocked on Beth and Derek's door again. As before, there was no answer, and their cars were still not parked outside. I had a dim recollection of Derek telling me, months before, to go to the Tenderloin precinct and ask for him, but it was so far away. I was attracting enough attention in Richmond; I didn't want to think what people would do in a nonresidential area.
I found a McDonald's and bought a milkshake, and ducked into the bathroom to take a closer look at myself. As I'd walked I'd picked the blood off, and found now that the cuts weren't as bad as they'd looked; the one on my eyebrow had bled a lot because of where it was, and the other was more of a bruise than a cut. I tore up some paper towels and patted the rest of the blood away. My right iris was ringed with red, and I stared at in fascination for awhile before taking my milkshake and leaving.
I was in all kinds of denial. Unprepared to process what had happened, I simply didn't; I just lifted the hood of my sweatshirt up, let my hair hang over the side of my face and wandered. I smelled like him, I knew, and once in awhile I caught a whiff, and with relief I remembered the YMCA on Steuart Street downtown. I could go there. I could find a cable car to ride that would take me to the Financial District, and I could go in and get myself cleaned up and sit down to think about what I wanted to do next. I had lost one of my bags but carried the other, and though Leon was with the other kids in Golden Gate Park, I thought I'd leave him there. He seemed happier there, and I certainly wasn't going back.
Another move, then, I thought, and as I walked down the street, I felt better. Downtown had been good to me. I knew how to survive there.
]]>A catalog of my injuries would be a
fitting addition to the narrative, and yet I did not have a chance to
examine myself for some time afterward. Without having stopped to
take a full accounting, all I knew for sure was that I hurt all over.
The obvious had happened, of course, and what was worse, he had not
stopped at satisfying himself, but had taken pains to ensure that it
was as horrible an experience as possible for me. I was running.
Upon further reflection I would realize that he had let me go, but a
rush of adrenaline spurred me forward: Run. Run. Run.
He might have been chasing me, for all I knew; I was certain if I
stopped I would be retrieved and killed, and though every breath and
every bump brought agonizing pain to my chest, I kept running. I
tripped over a sleeping bum at one point, who might have been a help,
but I couldn't think of anything but getting away. I finally
staggered to a stop, choking and coughing, at the 8th
Street entrance to the park, looking out on Inner Richmond and down
wide, bright Fulton Street. It was four o'clock in the morning.
I ran
across the street, less hurried now, and on the other side of Fulton
I stopped and looked over my shoulder. There was no one chasing me.
I walked on down 8th Street and came to Cabrillo and knew where I
was. The houses stood all in a row, quiet, all the windows darkened.
And I stood in the street, bound on all sides by my own private
oasis of horror.
I had not been, until that moment, so aware of the difference between myself and almost everyone else in the city. Certainly everyone within three hundred yards was lucky enough to be curled up in bed; probably the worst thing that had happened to most of them all day was better than the best thing that happened to me, and I sat down on someone's front steps and leaned against the metal rail and let it press into my shoulder while I tried to get a hold on myself. I was tired. I was dirty. I wanted a shower and a hot meal and a comforting pair of arms around me and the freedom of having someone else to take the reins for a little while. A song from a children's movie I hadn't seen in years eased itself into my head and though I couldn't recall the lyrics I remembered the subject and the tone: It was a soft, sad song about longing to come home.
I cried on the stoop, as quietly as I could; I didn't want to disturb the house's occupants, but then I thought that maybe I did and let myself cry a little louder. I didn't know where I wanted to be or who I wanted to be with. No one loved me. Everywhere I might go was new; relationships would have to be established, rules would have to be made, and in the meantime there would be an eternity of getting-to-know-you transition time while I fought to not fling myself desperately at the first person who showed possibility. It was such an impossibly long way to someone who might cover me with a blanket or tell me to put on a sweater, for God's sake, it was cold out.
I did not make the choice I did out of bravery or determination but because it was the easiest thing to do. I got up and walked the rest of the way to Beth and Derek's apartment on Balboa Street.
*****
They were not home. It was four-thirty in the morning and they were out, or else too deep asleep to get up and answer their doorbell. I pressed my finger into it until it hurt. From a story above, I could hear the faint ding-dong, over and over. Not even a light came on.
I thought if I got past the security gate I could wait on their front stoop but there was no way in. I rattled the doorknob but it wouldn't give, and empty, quiet Balboa Street was too open and too residential for me to be comfortable sitting down outside.
"Please," I whispered, leaning into the security gate. "I'm lost."
]]>I went at night. When everyone was asleep, even the dog, I got up and stepped over the bodies, some of them curled up together, some of them alone. I considered taking Leon but he was more their dog than mine now, and I thought he might wake them up, so I crept away without him.
]]> The night, like all the nights, was cold and somewhat damp. The fog was by no means constant in Upper Haight or the park, but it tended to roll in when the sun went down, and as I walked west toward the ocean it was given less to patches and more to an ever-decreasing contrast, the air thick and heavy like a Louisiana summer, and unlike one, so cold that my nose ran. The night was still and the park slept, and the infrequent street lights seemed to glow with a farther reach than normal.He slept near the intersection of Hagiwara and Bowl, David had said, not deep into the park or even without the occasional car, but I was on edge nonetheless; surrounded by vegetation, sparse light and an absence of traffic, I began to feel uneasy. This was a simple errand, a brief meeting with a homeless meth addict, and my mental picture of addicts involved drooling, stumbling, the sort of mental impotence that might follow a decade-long struggle with opiates. They weren't dangerous. Just sad.
Finding him was not as much trouble as I thought it was going to be. As a matter of fact, he was the one who found me. "Are you Clara?" he said.
I wondered how he knew my name; why if David was going to see him to tell him he would have sent me with the drugs at all. But by then it was too late.
]]>I am not sure my mother ever really loved me, but she spent my childhood helping me to develop tools that would spare me from the situation in which I found myself. It was the single most loving thing she ever did for me. "It is never your fault," she said. "Not if you were drunk. Not if you said no and then gave in. Not if you were dressed with your skirt up to here and nothing on your shoulders, not if you were walking in a bad part of town." You are not property, she said, no matter what anyone else may tell you, and I rolled my eyes, not wanting to hear it. It would never happen to me.
What she failed to cover was the topic of blame, how sweet and cathartic it feels to take responsibility for something that's happened to you. People have done it for thousands of years. Their sins explained away floods and earthquakes and stillborn children. Sodom and Gomorrah had it coming. The poor were slovenly, immoral people and deserved their millions of babies and the squalor in which they lived. It reassured the survivors: It will never happen to us. It calmed the victims: Next time we will try harder to be good.
I tried harder to be good.
]]> I should have stopped going, but I allowed Ivan to take me. Suddenly his livelihood was not only dependent on the supplies he would bring, but the company as well, and it was easier to just accompany him to the house than it was to tell him that I was pulling the plug on him. Ivan would fill his backpack with everyday household objects, something different every week but mostly pseudophedrine he got from who knew where. I didn't understand the significance and he didn't elaborate, until about a week after it had all begun, when I walked alongside him, knowing I'd be on my back within twenty minutes and dreading it so much I was afraid I would start crying if I thought about it a second longer.So I said, "He makes drugs there, doesn't he?" It seemed like the only logical explanation. Why else the secrecy and the erratic behavior? I had had my epiphany not a moment prior, and suddenly all had become clear. "He takes the stuff and he makes drugs with it."
"Jesus," Ivan said. "Not so loud." He looked around. "Yeah, he makes drugs. What did you think was going on?"
"What kind of drugs are they?"
"Meth."
"Oh." I didn't know anything about that. "Do you ever...?"
"No."
"Why?"
Ivan looked uncomfortable. "There's... you know, there's a line. There's getting high all the time and then there's sitting coked out in a wheelchair on Ashbury with no legs. It's like, once you cross a line there's no going back."
Reminded of all the lines I had crossed, I began to cry.
"God, Clara, what the fuck?"
I couldn't explain in a way that would make sense. I was standing on the sidewalk sobbing, and Ivan put his arms around me, less awkwardly than I expected. I remembered fighting Russell off the few times he'd tried to do that and cried harder, feeling like an asshole. Ivan knew what was wrong, or at least he knew part of it, and he sighed and pushed me away by the shoulders so he could look at me. "It's not that bad," he said.
"Like you would know."
"What, you just lie there for a minute."
This comment was too unfair to deserve a reply. I looked away angrily and brushed the tears from my face. "Why don't you do it, then," I said, too quietly for Ivan to hear.
To his credit, he did feel bad. I noticed it in the way he treated me after our visits. I could swear, during the act, to berate him up and down the street all the way back and run away, back to the Financial District in the shadow of the tall buildings where these things had never happened, but he would buy me something to eat and be so nice to me that I would feel terrible afterward, like I was wrong to take issue with what happened in that house. I began to feel like I owed him something, that the sodas and the cookies and the extra-nice behavior counted against a debt I couldn't hope to repay. So I did nothing. I followed Ivan into the house and he unloaded his backpack of batteries, and I waited on the bed for them to finish up business.
When David was done with me he went to his wallet and thumbed out a twenty-dollar bill. As I finished dressing he handed it to me, and I tucked it into my pocket, feeling dirty. He had never paid me before. "I want you to do something for me," he said.
I thought about telling him to fuck off, but I was silent.
"There's a guy I want you to find. And I want you to give this to him." He pulled the tiniest package out of his wallet, a lump of something wrapped in a bit of brown paper bag. "Don't open it. Don't tell Ivan."
Immediately, I knew what it was. I took it and put it in my pocket. It wasn't even a question; if I found another means of making money I might not have to do this other thing anymore. Quietly, David gave me directions.
If I'd been a little less naïve I would have known that that's not how running drugs worked; this was another thing I would come to blame myself for. David laid the trap and I stepped in it, and when a few days later the teeth closed around my leg I never even saw it coming.
]]>We had followed a conversation about the spirit of Haight-Ashbury to its natural conclusion and had been maintaining an easy silence during the walk down Oak Street. I was desperate for Ivan to see me as cool, too, and was trying to think of some clever conversation starter that might impress him.
Instead I said, "What is that house, anyway?"
]]> He looked at me and pulled a joint from his lips with his thumb and forefinger and gestured with it like a cigar. "Like I said. Don't worry about it. I run errands for him, he gives me money.""It's illegal, isn't it?" I said.
Amused, he looked down at me and I was suddenly reminded of how young I was, how little exposure I had had to this sort of thing, even on the streets. "Have you ever broken the law in your fuckin' life?"
"Just little things."
"Like?"
"Like trespassing. And running away. And shoplifting." That sounded like a pretty impressive list of crimes to me.
"Small fuckin' potatoes, kid."
I shrugged.
"Don't worry about what's going on today. I just needed some company. You're not the one carrying the bag."
Which naturally made me more curious about what was in it. When we got to the house, Ivan knocked a special way on the front door and the man opened it to admit him. "Stay here," Ivan said, but the man opened the door a little wider.
"No," he said, "her too. It's cool."
Ivan shrugged and I followed him him in. The house was a mess, dark and crowded with too much furniture, and a film of grime seemed to cling to the walls, the furniture - I rested my hand on the back of a couch and when I lifted it and rubbed my fingers together they felt almost slippery. Ew, I thought. It was like someone had been smoking for years without cleaning, but there was no smell of smoke inside - just a faint, chemical odor that made me a little sick.
I watched Ivan go into the kitchen and unzip his backpack. He pulled out a worn plastic shopping bag and placed it gently on the counter. A bottle of cough syrup fell out and landed on the floor.
"Whoops," said the man. He bent and picked it up. I came closer. The entire bag was filled with bottles of cough medicine, and I squinted at Ivan, who shook his head: Not now.
The man counted the bottles and, apparently satisfied, counted out a handful of bills for Ivan. Ivan reached for them but the man lifted his hand away, nodded at me and said, "Her too."
Ivan turned and looked at me like I might know what was going on, and then he looked at the man. "What? No. I bring you shit, you pay me. That's how it works."
"Not this time. I want her too, or you leave with nothing."
Ivan scoffed. "What, you want to buy her?"
"Just for as long as it takes."
"No," I said. They both turned and looked at me, and then returned to their argument.
"Jesus, David, she's fifteen."
"Look, either I take her in the bedroom for a few minutes or you leave with nothing."
He was bigger than Ivan, and older, and horrified, I saw Ivan turn to look at me.
"No," I said uncertainly.
"Clara, it's a hundred dollars."
"No."
"I bet it won't take him more than five minutes."
"Hey, fuck you, Ivan."
Ivan ignored him. "You hang out in the park with us and eat the food we bring back, don't you?"
"Yeah," I admitted.
"And we never ask you to do shit for us, do we?"
I said nothing.
"Come on. You can do this one little thing for me. Or else I go back with nothing and everyone asks me what the fuck, and I look like the bad guy because I fucked it up."
I looked at the man - David, Ivan had called him. He was shorter but more muscular than Ivan, beginning to bald, though he kept his hair long and combed back and greased. I couldn't tell whether that was intentional or if it hadn't been washed. His clothes were dirty. I had never wanted to do anything less in my life, but letting Ivan down meant losing his approval, and maybe even the safety of my living situation. I thought again about the preacher and his comment about the known evil versus the unknown. I wondered if he knew this sort of thing might happen.
*****
Ivan's remark about the five minutes had been a joke but it didn't take much longer than that. While he stood awkwardly in the kitchen, I allowed David to lead me to the master bedroom. It smelled less of chemicals but more like someone had slept with their mouth open and hadn't bothered to let it air out afterward; it had a humid feel that made me want to retch, and David's insistence on getting closer than he needed to made it worse. He wanted to kiss me. I wanted it to be done with. "Relax," he said, sounding almost surprised that I was blocking his hands. "Relax."
But I couldn't. I had had exactly one experience like this before, and it felt similar; it's not, I told myself, and held myself still on the bed though all I wanted to do was shove him away and run out the door. If you don't say no it's not, and when he'd finished and I was pulling my clothes back on I felt both better and worse, because I'd let it happen. I crept out the bedroom door to see him paying Ivan, who would not meet my eyes.
"Here," he said, as we walked down the street. He handed me twenty dollars. "He gave me some extra."
I took the money and tucked it in my pocket.
"He says he'll give me more if I bring you back," Ivan said quietly.
I said nothing for the rest of the walk, and neither did he.
]]>The
group absorbed me without remark and life got so easy that I wondered
why I'd never sought out other homeless youth before. My troubles
didn't end - I still went hungry now and then, and the nights were
cold and the police more hostile than had been my experience - but
they receded, and most importantly, I felt safer than I had in
awhile.
Part of the fun of belonging was the power I gained by proximity. I was the most junior member of the group and possibly less intimidating than even Logan, but when I lounged with the others on a street corner, leaned up against the brick wall while Francesca and Ivan dozed in the sunlight, I noticed that the people passing us by had a different flavor to their step: They were not merely annoyed, as they were when I panhandled alone. They were afraid.
"I want to fuckin' go to Santa Cruz," Ivan said from a supine position, his head on his lumpy duffel. A slouch hat he wore sometimes lay tipped over his eyes, its brim shadowing the bridge of his nose. He spoke blindly into the midday sun. "They got the best shit out there. Go up in the mountains and find some old guy in his log cabin and fuckin' inherit his acres and acres of weed and just smoke all day until the end of time. Maybe in fifty years I find some little asshole and take him in and leave everything to him."
]]>"You have to pay property taxes on that shit," Spencer said.
"Man, fuck property taxes. I'll move to Canada."
"Yeah, because they don't tax you there."
"Fuck yeah, that's what I'm talking about." He blew out his mouth like he was exhaling smoke, but he didn't have a joint lit at the moment - there were boundaries, I'd noticed. None of them smoked on the sidewalk or anywhere but on the move or in the park. On the sidewalk, a bum with a joint was fair game. As Francesca had explained it to me, they hated us hanging around here because some of the kids harassed the tourists and the residents, or their dogs got into fights, and the cops would find any reason to evict or arrest someone loitering around the shops. Logan wouldn't even let us hang out near her workplace. It was bad for business, she said, and that meant we could get her fired, but every so often I would sneak in and keep her company during a slow period. She only came back with day-old pastries for the group sometimes, but she gave me free food whenever I stopped by.
"What do you think he meant by sending me here?" I said one afternoon. I was half-leaned across the counter, sleepy and cold, making quick work of a custard tart.
"I don't know. He likes to call himself a shepherd. Maybe he's herding you."
"Fuckin' hilarious." (My vocabulary had, naturally, suffered during my exposure to the others.) I had to admit that it had worked, though. "Why would he do that?"
"Why does he do anything?" she said.
"You think he's crazy?"
"Probably." She poured brown coffee beans into a grinder and switched it on. She had to yell over the noise. "Ivan thinks he's a creep."
You could call the preacher a lot of things, I thought, but "creep" wasn't one of them. "Why?"
"Because Ivan's mind is always in the gutter."
"He's probably just like... ministering to us," I said. "Does he ever counsel you on anything?"
She smiled humorlessly. "All the goddamn time."
]]>Ivan's real name was Jonathan and he had been born in Oregon, but he had dark hair and a Tatar slant to his eyes that brought Charles Bronson to mind. None of the rest of us knew who Charles Bronson was - save Heather, who was old enough to have seen some of his films when they'd been released - but this gave Ivan a leg up on us, as far as he was concerned; he was forever making references to old movies and turning a pitying eye on us ignorant, uncultured children, whose lives the magic of film and Russian culture had not graced with such a heavy hand.
I disliked him at first, and gave him a wide berth because he seemed to belong to Tia, who really did seem to hate everyone, but he was careful and gentle and deliberate about peeling her away from him; could he not be into her? I thought. The group dynamics were hard to read and harder to verify, and things like this kept me on the periphery, uncomfortable and watchful, while Leon increasingly ingratiated himself in the circle, moving from Logan to Heather to Ivan, wagging his back end whenever one of them so much as glanced his way. I began to be jealous - Leon was my dog - but there was little to do about it except leave, and I hadn't made up my mind yet whether or not I wanted to stay.
Over the next couple of days they went off two or three at a time, sometimes bringing back food or money and sometimes nothing. I watched the arrival of the foraging parties with awe and envy; I could barely feed myself, let alone bring enough back to feed half the group or more. Everyone shared. There was a pizza, once, and it was the best thing I had ever tasted, I thought. The chewy bread and the spicy marinara sauce brought to mind my home in Daly City, where this had been an unremarkable and yet looked-forward-to weekly occasion; out here it was rare and I thought for the hundredth time how lucky I had been.
Ivan, or Jonathan, nodded to me on the fourth day, and I looked at him in surprise - me? I had rarely even spoken to him; he was a bit player, a peripheral character in the story of my life, and to be alone with him was... well, weird. I got up and glanced at Tia, who was pointedly ignoring the both of us, and together we walked east down Oak Street in the warm sunlight. He carried a backpack that was nearly full.
]]> "You ever tried weed?" he said, and pulled a joint from his pocket that had been rolled, out of sight, at some point earlier in the day. I had been preparing myself for this moment, but my reaction surprised me, because I did the opposite of what I had coached myself to do - when he handed it to me, lit, I lifted it to my lips and inhaled delicately. When I'd picked myself up off the ground, coughing so hard I'd seen stars, he was looking down at me and smiling attractively, mischievously in a way that made me hurt. I could see why Tia liked him. "Try again," he said. "You'll get the hang of it." And we walked down the street in broad daylight, passing the joint back and forth. I felt myself relax.
"Where are we going?" I said.
"On a long, elaborate errand."
If he had given me an address I wouldn't have known what it meant. I dropped the subject and enjoyed the mellow feeling of being high. I felt comfortable in my own skin, for once. Calm. "Is Logan high all the time?" I asked him after a period of silence had elapsed. The sensation reminded me of her.
Ivan looked at me in surprise. "Logan. No. She's... I mean, she does now and then but she's not on it constantly." He smiled crookedly. "She's had some times."
"Like what?"
"Like she's had things done to her. Really heavy shit." Logan, he told me, had not always been like she was. He had known her for most of a decade, when they lived on the same street in Hayes Valley and went to the same elementary school and inexplicably developed a troubled sort of friendship. Logan had always been in foster care but her placement had changed and she'd disappeared one day in the seventh grade, reappearing months later with a different look in her eyes. "The way she told the story, I believed her, because it was exactly the sort of shit she'd do. She wasn't afraid of anyone. Stand up to someone if they were giving her shit no problem. She was one of the few girls who got into fistfights at school.
"Anyway," he said, and then paused in that belittling way of his. "Are you sure you want to hear the story?"
"Yeah."
"Okay, well anyway, she said she'd been placed with these people and they seemed really nice. It seemed like it would have been the perfect place to live. The mom was like a regular mom, making her school lunches and shit, but the dad had this thing for little girls. I guess she was like eleven or something."
I had been raped too. I didn't see how it could change someone so completely, to the point where they mentally checked out of life. Maybe it had been more traumatic than my experience. Maybe Logan just reacted to it differently.
"It happened a lot. Like almost every night he'd come in there and make her spread her legs for him while she cried. He told her if she told on him they'd send her to a juvenile lockup and she'd be even worse off, so she put up with that shit for a really long time."
"Did the wife know?"
"She had no fuckin idea. This whole thing went on for months and one day Logan just fuckin snapped." He paused for effect. "She took a big old fork out of the silverware drawer after dinner one night and took it to bed with her. When he came in she stabbed him, like, right next to the dick. She said she was aiming for his dick but she missed. It wasn't deep enough to really hurt him, she said, just deep enough to piss him off. I don't know why she didn't use a knife. Too bad, huh? You got some giant-ass fucking arteries down there, if she'd had a knife she could have killed him. Bleed him out in three minutes."
I watched the traffic go by. "I don't think that would have kept her out of jail either."
"Anyway," he said, ignoring my comment. "He got the fork and he turned around and he fucked her with it."
I
stopped walking. The horror was palpable even through the cannabis
fog. Ivan turned to look at me, amusement written all over his face.
"You said you wanted to hear it."
"Was she okay?"
"Well, she's here, isn't she?"
I could not disagree with that.
"She's never been the same since. It's like something died. The guy got arrested, she got, you know, reconstructive surgery down there courtesy of the state and it doesn't look too bad if you ask me, but when they found her another placement in Hayes Valley a year or two later she was totally different. It was like she just checked out. Like being high all the time without being high."
I didn't know what to say. There were some things beyond words. Ivan seemed to pick up on my reticence and didn't say much until we arrived at our destination, a trashy house on the south side of the Panhandle. It gave me the creeps, or maybe that was the dregs of Ivan's story talking; either way, it was an uncomfortable place to be. The windows were blacked and the lawn was unkempt, overgrown in some places and dead in others. When Ivan knocked on the front door a man came out the side gate with a cigarette. He looked me up and down, appraising, but Ivan greeted him comfortably, steering him toward the business at hand as if I didn't exist. They left me outside and when he came out a few minutes later the backpack was mysteriously empty. "Don't worry about it," he said when he caught me looking. I glanced back at the house; the man stood in the doorway, and when he saw me watched he licked between his fingers, smiled and closed the door.
We
returned with a big box of dollar cheeseburgers and everyone ate like
kings. Through a mouthful of food I watched Logan, sitting, eating,
passive, and I wondered what the preacher's message was supposed to be.
Throughout my time on the streets I had maintained and nurtured a little-orphan-Annie identity - I was no eternal optimist, but despite the shoplifting and the panhandling and the lying I'd convinced myself that I was, overall, a pretty good kid. My situation was regrettable, heartbreaking, even, and my perseverance made me feel virtuous, as though there was some saving grace in having nothing. And because of the neighborhoods I chose, I was pretty sure that my age made me somewhat unique among the homeless; where were the other teenagers?
When I got to Haight Ashbury, I found out.
I had never seen them, not because they didn't exist, but because they had corralled themselves along the panhandle in a community that appeared to be composed of tightly-knit groups, some vestige of the Summer of Love (which I had yet to learn about, though Upper Haight and the Panhandle had a certain 1960s flavor). Everyone knew everyone else, as far as I could tell, and some of the teenagers drifted in and out of groups; a handful of homeless adults in their 30s and 40s and older bobbed around the periphery, and unlike the homeless population in the Financial District, relatively few of them were mentally ill, at least in ways that were obvious to me. Blasé, Logan introduced me around. She had taken me under her wing but neither of us were really sure why.
]]> After she closed up shop - the cafe, it turned out, was not hers, and she only worked part-time, though she was one of the few who actually had a job at all - she took me to the strip of park she called the Panhandle and turned me loose in her group of friends. The group was incomplete; the group was always incomplete, I was told. Tonight's members included Ivan, Tia, Spencer, Francesca and a woman named Heather who looked far too old to be hanging around a bunch of teenagers. All of them were older than I was.Spencer, blond like me but with curly hair, a sort of hippie Napoleon Dynamite, attached himself to me immediately. Logan was summarily relieved of her duties as my guide, at least for the moment, and she didn't seem to mind or even notice; she folded her legs beneath her and began talking to Francesca, a girl of about eighteen or nineteen with a strong South American accent.
"That's a cool dog," Spencer said. He reached out and tousled Leon's floppy ears, roughing him over and growling in the way men reserve for big dogs; he appeared to be making even Leon uncomfortable, or perhaps Leon was picking up on my body language. He wagged his tail uncertainly. When Spencer tired of the game he turned his attention back to me. "So Clara, you're... what, sixteen? Seventeen?"
"Fifteen," I admitted. This discouraged him not a bit, and he began asking me all manner of personal questions about myself - where had I come from, where had I gotten the dog, how much money did I have, how long had I been in the city. I tried to deflect them politely but there came a point at which I ran out of excuses, and settled back into fluent lying. I had come from east Los Angeles; my brother had been killed by a gang and they were coming after me next so I had to get out of town. "What gang was it?" he asked, and because I knew nothing about Los Angeles or gangs I gave him the first name that came to mind and hoped that it was correct: the Crips. He nodded as if that's about what he'd expected. I was sure he could see right through it, but if he did, he never said a thing. "You should be careful," he said. "There's a bunch of them up here."
I allowed that I was probably not well-known enough to attract attention in a city hundreds of miles away. "Anyway. I got the hell out of there and I haven't looked back since."
He was watching me, too attentive for my taste. I wanted to get away from him, but I was brand new to the group and didn't think I could afford to have someone pissed off at me - regardless, I had to shift the subject away from myself. "So what about everyone else here. What's their stories," I said.
He himself was nineteen and a few years ago he'd gotten sick of his parents' crappy upper-middle-class life in the Ann Arbor suburbs. "They were so fake. I mean, it just like made me so sad the way they lived. They weren't happy, they were just, you know, going through the motions, the same old tiresome shit until the day they die. I had to get away from that." He was the type who might have joined a commune in the sixties, but as this was the twenty-first century it wasn't exactly an option. I wondered how much marijuana he smoked, and reflected that this might be the reason for Logan's hippie-style, laid-back attitude. "It's like, I want to do something with my life, you know? And here I am. I'm doing it."
I waited for him to elaborate on exactly what he was doing, but he seemed to have finished the thought. I had few illusions about where my life was going, and to be nineteen and still sleeping in Golden Gate Park horrified me a little. I glanced over at Heather, tall, with medium-dark hair, who was talking to Tia with a lilt and enthusiasm to her voice that was reminiscent of someone half her age. Tia, younger, twenty-two at most and busy in Ivan's embrace, seemed somewhat irritated by the attention, a sentiment with which I could certainly sympathize. I could feel Spencer's eyes on me but I ignored him, watching Heather instead as she tried to be twenty, as if the wrinkles didn't matter. I wondered what was wrong with her.
"What's her story?" I murmured.
"Heather? I don't know, she's just like... Heather. She's like forty, can you believe that?"
"Why does she hang out with a bunch of people who are way younger than her?"
"Because we accept her," Spencer said pointedly. "It's not about excluding people who don't fit a preconceived notion of what our social circle should look like."
I shrugged. "It just doesn't look like Tia likes her, that's all."
"Tia doesn't like anyone."
He was right. Later that day, when I'd finally peeled myself away from him and went to talk to her, she looked at me with thinly-veiled amusement, as though I were a child who'd picked up a personality I'd found on the sidewalk and was walking around acting a part. I supposed that was fair - I hadn't represented myself with any modicum of honesty to anyone, and to my dismay the story about the gang was making the rounds; I'd even earned myself a nickname, less than two hours after I'd joined the little gathering in the Panhandle. Fugitive.
"Can you guys just call me Clara?" I said. Tia raised an eyebrow as though this was a particularly precious request; Spencer accused me of being uptight in a tone of voice that indicated that I was meant to be mollified, but instead I sat down stiffly and sulked. I had the right to be called what I wanted to be called, I thought petulantly; the group had absorbed me into itself but that didn't mean I had to make that kind of concession. I wondered if the key to belonging was, in spite of Spencer's assertion that anyone was welcome, to allow myself to be molded to their specifications. I scratched Leon's shoulders, deeply uncomfortable.
Trying to sleep that night, among the array of bodies curled or sprawled to where we'd relocated deep in the park, I wished the preacher was there. He had never intruded upon my sense of self, and he of all people could tell me what I was supposed to be doing with these people. I had the vague sense of having been herded, but somehow I thought he had a bigger purpose than that: That I was supposed to be discovering something. And I hadn't the slightest idea what it was.
]]>The walk to Haight Street was longer than I thought it would be. I had a very vague idea of the shape of the park, and I was even more unclear on where Haight Street actually was. "Start at the north edge of the park," the preacher said when I asked him for clarification, "and when you're at the northeast corner, go south a few blocks and there it is."
So Leon and I walked a substantial length of the park on Sunday before I gave up and turned back, limping on feet used to walking - but not that much walking. I had walked from this end of Geary to the other months and months prior, after I'd stayed my first night with Beth and Derek, and that was a total of about seven miles, I'd later learned; this, though by far a shorter walk, seemed interminable, and half because I wasn't sure what I was making the trip for. "What do you think he wants, buddy?" I asked Leon. He looked up at me with his wide pit bull grin and trotted ahead.
In the end I whistled and we went back to Sutro Heights Park and slept there. On Tuesday I tried again. I would always be able to find somewhere to sleep, I reasoned; I carried all my possessions with me and there was no reason that I should need to return to Ocean Beach at night.
I might have felt more optimistic had I known Haight-Ashbury's history and reputation. When I emerged from the park at eleven o'clock in the morning, all became clear: This was the runaway Mecca that both Bill and the preacher had told me about. There was a variety of shops and cafes, places to sit, everyone dressed in grungy clothing and dreadlocks and looking as though they had emerged, slightly damaged, from 1967. "Holy shit," I said.
]]> But what surprised me more than anything else was the proliferation of people just like me.As the preacher had mentioned, most of them were older than me - eighteen, nineteen, early twenties and with their shit only slightly more together than mine. They looked at home, lying on the sidewalks and propped onto capacious duffels, their own dogs - pit bulls like Leon, most of them - tied via harness and leash to bags or waists. Vagrants and dogs alike rested either oblivious to their surroundings or outright antagonistic to the passing tourists, demanding donations like a pack of seagulls at a fishing boat. Next to me, Leon lifted his head and stared intently at another dog, and I reached down to grab his collar.
We still had a walk, but I found the address I was looking for after a couple of blocks, and left Leon lying on the sidewalk as I went in. It was a cafe done up in a shabby retro style, made to look as if it belonged in the 60s, but it served exotic, expensive coffees that wouldn't seen the outside of Italy until at least thirty years after that.
I looked around. There were booths and tables, a coffee bar and various confections at the counter that didn't look appetizing at all, let alone worth the three or four dollars that the cafe was trying to charge. I wondered who would pay that much for a scone. The preacher hadn't told me what or who I was looking for, and I stood considering my surroundings I reflected on the way I had handled that conversation - I was so eager for something to do, and the preacher had seemed so sure that I would know what I was looking for, that I had never stopped to consider the possibility that I might show up on Haight Street and find myself needing another hint.
"Can I help you?"
The woman behind the counter was eighteen, maybe, and wore her red hair in long, carefully-crafted dreadlocks that she tied back with a blue handkerchief. There was something off about her eyes. She was a waif of a thing, painfully thin, and had the same gaunt, uncertain look as the homeless teenagers outside. Her tone suggested she was not as keen on helping me as trying to get my attention so she could get me out of her cafe.
"Uh," I said, and fished the receipt out of my pocket. "Someone gave me this."
She took it from me and looked at it for a long moment. "Well, that's here. Did they say what you were supposed to do?"
"Just that I was supposed to come here." I glanced at her name tag. Logan. That was a boy's name, but I thought it would be rude to ask. "I thought I would know what he meant when I got here."
Logan narrowed her eyes at me and then glanced away. "Oh. Yeah. I know who gave this to you."
"You do?"
"Yeah. I don't know why he'd send you here, though. I can't do anything for you."
I shifted uncomfortably.
"Did the conversation have a context?" she said.
I felt stupid. "I'm supposed to be looking for a feral cat."
"A feral cat?" Her voice, always, was flat, bored-sounding.
"He compared me to a cat. How I live. He thought about it for awhile and said that there was another cat I should meet. But this one was feral. I'm pretty sure he was talking about a person," I said helpfully. "I just don't know who."
She sighed. "Yeah. Okay. Look, if he gave you this address he probably means me, but I don't know what I'm supposed to do for you. I'm Logan."
"I'm Clara," I said.
"Good to meet you." She didn't smile, but lifted her hand over the counter just the same, and shook mine delicately. "Welcome to Haight-Ashbury."
]]>"You are like a cat," the preacher said. "You go to one house and they call you one name and feed you, and then you go to the next house and they call you a different name and feed you again."
"Yeah, I wish," I said. I had just told him about the new clothes, and added, during my narration, that Beth and Derek knew me as Natalie. I hadn't given him my real name, or any name, and he had never volunteered his. I leaned forward on the log and watched my dog eat half a can of food. I hadn't told the preacher about the twenty dollars that Beth had given me - if I did, he might stop bringing the dog food. "I wish I had more than one house feeding me. I wish the house that was feeding me didn't want to catch me and take me to the pound."
The preacher squinted at me.
"I mean they want me in foster care or something. You know, following your... metaphor. Thing." I waved a hand. "Never mind. Derek, he's a police officer. And he and Beth are all about having me somewhere, you know, like in a home. Which would be okay, but it's sort of a gamble. You know, what if it's like five other girls in a single room and I get picked on, or what if it's like chores all day or what if I get kicked around or -"
"Would you rather be out here than get kicked around?" the preacher said.
I stared at him.
"Ah," he said. "That's a 'yes,' then."
]]> "At least out here there's just a risk of it. And people leave me alone. If you run away from foster care they look for you and bring you back." I was pretty much an expert, I thought, having read two novels on teenagers in the foster care system and a handful of newspaper articles on the subject, and I wanted no part of any foster arrangement. As far as I was concerned, girls got raped in foster homes all the time.
"I see," the preacher said. "If I was in your situation I would rather have the abuse I could expect than the abuse I didn't see coming."
"You think there's something I don't see coming?"
"There always is. That's what life is."
Lately he had been doing less preaching, but he still hung around the area. I'd seen him in Golden Gate Park, but for reasons unknown to me, outside this little outlook we did not acknowledge each other beyond meeting eyes and looking away again. Not even Leon went up to him. He didn't seem to have a job, but he didn't look homeless, and he never smelled. Beyond the tracts, which I saw him leaving occasionally in creative places, he carried nothing with him. I could have asked, and he might have told me, but I preferred the mystery. I could pretend there was something ineffable and mysterious about him.
He glanced at me as though he'd thought of something new. "What?" I said.
"Nothing."
"No, what?"
"There's another cat," he said. "But this one is feral." And he wrote down an address on a piece of paper he fished from a capacious pocket and held it out to me.
I took it. "Height Street."
"Haight. Like 'hate.' Like Haight-Ashbury. You know, the hippies. Forty-five years ago."
I turned the piece of paper over. It was a receipt from Rainbow Grocery. "What is a cherimoya?"
"Don't worry about it. Go to that address."
It was like a quest. "When?"
"Anytime. Midday is best."
"Okay." I didn't know what I would find there, but suspected that I would know it when I saw it. Of course, if I had learned one thing I had learned that things were never quite that simple.
]]>In the end, though, I thought I'd do what I'd done the last time I found myself on Beth and Derek's couch, and crept off the couch in the early morning light, weary and half-asleep. I'd startled Leon, who rose to his feet with a soft bark, and it was only when I was trying to silence him that I noticed a light under the bathroom door. A glance at the living room clock told me it was five-thirty.
Leon shifted his weight between his front teeth, head tilted up; as far as he was concerned, there was still something to bark about. I yanked his collar. "No," I whispered, and pulled him into a sit. He licked my arm.
I wondered who was in the bathroom, and then I realized I was hunched over and tense, and felt ridiculous. I stood up straight. This was no escape from Alcatraz; Derek had told me months ago that he wasn't going to force me to do anything, and I had no reason to believe that he wasn't going to keep his word. I sat down on the couch again and pulled the blankets around me.
When Beth opened the door she was greeted by a gray grinning face about the level of her knee, the long tail wagging steadily. "Natalie?" she called, and I whistled. I had made peace with Leon's breed, but she, apparently, had not. He trotted over to me and laid down at my feet.
"Hi," I said.
]]> "Hi. You didn't sneak out this time. I thought you might.""Yeah," I said. "Well."
She nodded in the direction of the kitchen, and I followed her in. She held up the cereal boxes. "Chex? Or corn flakes?" I chose and she poured me a bowl with milk and sugar and made coffee. Leon's nails clicked on the linoleum while he circled for a place to settle. "You're really thinking about going in with him, huh?"
The crunchy cereal was just about the best thing I'd ever tasted, even better than the chicken and garlic bread we'd had the previous evening. I stopped to savor the sweet milk, and wordlessly, mouth full, I shrugged. "I don't know," I mumbled, swallowing.
"Better the evil you know than the evil you don't, huh?" Beth said. "Coffee?"
I thought about it and nodded. She poured some into a mug with a blue rearing horse painted on the side; it looked like it had been around since at least the seventies. "Wow," I said, turning it around on the table. "How long have you had this?"
"It was my parents'. They got rid of all their old stuff a couple of years ago." She leaned up against the counter. "That couch out in the living room was theirs. The captain's chairs and this table, too."
"They just got rid of it?"
"They wanted new things, after twenty, thirty years. And they offered it to us. At the time we were just married and while both of us had our own things, most of it was piecemeal." She looked out into the living room. "It felt like our first grown-up furniture. Not that it would have been different if we'd gone to a furniture store and bought things new, but inheriting it from my parents gave it a more... authentic feel. Like we were adults."
But you are, I wanted to say. It gave me a somewhat unsettled feeling, similar to how I'd felt when I'd walked out to Russell's living room to find him sobbing on the couch. That adults did not feel like adults was a scary thought. They were supposed to be the safety net. They were supposed to know how to fix things.
"What is Russell going to do?"
She looked at me. "Russell?"
"I mean Derek. When we get there. I mean... I mean, do I, like, get a choice?"
"Of where they put you? I don't know how it works." Beth looked down into her coffee. "I think you should go, though. How much worse could it be than what things are like right now?"
"Bad enough that I couldn't get out of it," I said. I took another bite of cereal. "I'd lose my dog."
"You would," she said.
This was suddenly not a conversation I wanted to have. I finished my bowl of cereal and got up. "Look," I said. "I can't do this right now. I can't. I'm not ready."
Beth looked startled.
"I gotta have time to think about it. I can't do it right now. It's just too much." It was also easier to decide to make another go of it when I'd had two meals in a row and a bunch of new, clean clothes. "I really... it was really cool of you guys to like... take me shopping and stuff. But I can't do it now."
Beth just looked at me, and I couldn't tell what she was thinking - was she upset? Disapproving? I wrung my hands. "I'm sorry."
"It's not me who's going to be at risk out there," she said gently.
"I have Leon."
"I hope that's enough."
She thought I was making the wrong decision. I glanced toward the back of the apartment; the bedroom door was still closed. It was important to me to leave before Derek could come try to talk me out of it, too. "I have to -"
"You have to go. I know. It's okay. Do you want to brush your teeth?"
I did, but.... Hesitating, I gave in. When I reemerged, Beth was ready at the top of the stairs, and together we went down, Leon behind us. I stood at the door and waited for her to lock up.
"Do you want a ride anywhere?"
"No," I said, and though I had been in a hurry to leave, I was reluctant to do so. If they had asked me to stay with them, I thought, I would have.
"Okay. Look. You know you should just come and bang on the door if you need anything, right?"
I hadn't, but I nodded.
"Wait," she said, and rummaged in her purse.
"Beth," I said. But I waited. It would help. Everything helped. She pressed a twenty dollar bill into my hand and then she got in her car, and Leon and I walked west toward the ocean, the morning sun warm on our backs.
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