One of Primo’s eyes looked strange, and it didn’t follow the other one as he took in the arrangement of my living quarters. What little there was to take in. A small cooler in the front passenger seat. Six or seven books stacked on the floor in back. My day clothes — jeans and a red sweatshirt with a wolf design — folded on top of the cooler. A jug of water and a thermos. Remnants of last night’s dinner: cheese and peanut butter crackers. An open Buck knife on top of the books. The rest of my life, what there was of it, was in the trunk.
I’d been dining on 7-Eleven fare, bathing in gas station restrooms, couldn’t remember the last time I’d properly washed my hair, but there was a dim memory of a shower at a truck stop in Nevada. I hoped I didn’t appear as animal-like as I was starting to feel.
“Home sweet home?” Primo asked.
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“Nice,” he said. I didn’t think he was being sarcastic. He sounded, truly, as if he liked what he saw, as if he could see living there, or in a place just like it.
He glanced again at the cooler. “You got plenty of food in there?” My stomach growled, and I wondered if he heard.
“Yeah. Lots.” There had been easier lies.
The last bag of ice I’d bought had finally finished melting; a hunk of cheese floated in the water, wrapped in plastic but wet and slimy anyway, accompanied by a hard-boiled egg and a few mealy apples. I had been thinking about dumping out the water and throwing away anything irretrievably rotten as soon as the sun came up, or at least when it got light, somewhere out by the beach, where no one would see and maybe yell at me. Other than what was drowning in the cooler, I owned a half jar of peanut butter, some saltines, and a bag of jerky I’d been working on since Missoula. I had about sixty-five dollars left to my name.
“I don’t know,” Primo said. “You look hungry. I bet you’re hungry, aren’t you?”
Ravenous. Eat-a-whole-pig hungry. Hungry for food even more than for someone to talk to, though there was that too. “A little bit,” I said, and swallowed.
“You like donuts?”
“I like bacon and eggs.” Like my new name, it came out of nowhere.
He nodded slowly. “Knowing what you like is half the battle.”
“I’ve just been dreaming about bacon and eggs,” I said. And home, but I didn’t say that part. At home it was breakfast time. My mother’s kitchen, right then, smelled like bacon and eggs. Dad was eating, dragging a piece of toast through yellow yolk, telling her what a good cook she is.
Dreamt about but not missed. Not allowed to be missed. None of them.
Primo said he knew a place. Open early. Right by the beach.
I said, “Aren’t you working?”
“Yeah, but this is the quiet part of my shift. It’ll be a while before people start calling in.”
“Calling in where? For what?”
“The office. For their papers. If the kids don’t deliver them on time, or if they get stolen or wet or something.” And there was always something, he said, but to him it was job security. He was out here to fix these things, and he liked it. He was good at it. Talking to people and working with the kids. He liked to work. This work. And he’d been one of those kids once. He told me all of this without taking a breath. It made me happy, him liking his life like that.
I tried to picture him as a kid, and he looked exactly the same, only in miniature. Like a third the size he was now, but with exactly the same proportions and features: same shoulders, same hair, same scruffy mustache, same husky voice.
Primo smiled when I did. “Well, can I buy you breakfast? Or you want me to bring it to you in bed?”
It took about two seconds to weigh the possibilities. Maybe he was a serial killer or a Bible salesman, but I thought I’d have caught on by then, and truly, I was way too hungry to care.
“Yes, please,” I said.
The newspaper truck was really a huge van, all metal on the inside, with the engine cover in the middle next to the driver’s seat. There was no passenger seat. Primo told me he’d always thought the engine cover looked like a doghouse, with no door and a flat top. A doghouse for an aluminum dog. One who could walk through walls, who didn’t need a door. He had a cup of coffee sitting there, surrounded by an impressive array of donut crumbs. There was a metal divider, like a chain-link fence, between the front and the back, but it was open on the passenger side. Primo set a bundle of newspapers in the opening for me to sit on.
I asked what time he went to work in the morning.
“Two thirty. Except on Saturdays. I get to sleep in all the way till three on Saturdays.” He had a low, growly laugh.
“Wow. That’s early.”
“Yeah, it is. But it’s not so bad once you’re up.”
He loved being out there most mornings, he said, with the quiet, the occasional cop or taxi or garbage truck. There were the bums too, mostly on Geary, but not nearly so many out in the Richmond district as he’d see passing through the Tenderloin on his way from the plant. In the Tenderloin were those guys, and the pushers down on Golden Gate Avenue with their little glassine bags of white powder. The prostitutes stayed downtown too, he said, chilling around their claimed corners, all fishnet-stockinged and stoned. There had been a bunch of kidnappings and killings the past year or so, but they’d caught the guys who were doing it, they thought; at least the worst of it had stopped for now. He warned me about all the different kinds of trouble a person could get into in the city, told me which neighborhoods were best avoided, especially after dark, and congratulated me on picking a relatively safe one to pitch my encampment in.
I tried to process it all, to not look startled like some hick straight out of the backwoods, to act like I’d at least heard of some of these things. I did wonder how much getting used to San Francisco was going to take, and figured it was a lot. Maybe someone — like maybe Primo — could be my guide for a little while, until I got it. If, that is, he didn’t turn out to have a machete and a backyard full of bodies, or Bibles.
I had been waking up early too, out there by the beach where I could hear the waves crashing, for real and in my dreams. The sound was comforting but spooky. And there was that smelclass="underline" fishy and salty and dark. Since I’d had a chance to look at the ocean for real, it didn’t look the way I’d always imagined it — a constant blue, with the waves coming in row after row, steady and predictable. It was a lot wilder than I’d been expecting, and not always blue. I’d taken off my shoes and waded in a few times, but it was too cold to go any farther than about knee-deep. I wondered if it was cold on the other side too, where it was no longer the Pacific, but the South China Sea. The three words echoed in my head, in Mick’s voice. I wanted to hear them as much as I didn’t.
On our way to the restaurant, Primo made maybe a dozen stops, pulling up to corners to check on his crew of teenage paperboys. They were huddled in apartment-building entryways, folding newspapers and doubling rubber bands around them, or slipping them into plastic bags. I was amazed at how fast they worked, how quickly their fingers moved.
Primo orchestrated: “Make sure you get that one at Forty-Third and Balboa through the gate today. Mr. Puto is starting to give me heartburn.” And: “Just bag that one on Lake from now on. You know the one. I’m tired of hearing her bitch about wet papers.” The kids nodded, heads down and intent on their work. They’d heard it all before. “Later,” Primo said. “Do good.”