“You do what you have to do, but you are not the only one—” My voice was shaking so bad it was hard to get the words out, but I kept going. “Goddamn it. I don’t care what you do out here. Just fucking come back when you’re finished. Satisfied. Fixed. Whatever.”
His head began to fall forward again, but he yanked it back up, and his eyes were still open, the good one looking at me.
“Deal,” he said. “Consider it done, Tink.”
I didn’t say good night. It wasn’t night. I stood up and went back to my room, plugged in the Christmas lights, and got into my sleeping bag. I stared at the ceiling as the lights flashed on and off against it like a conflagration of fireflies. I listened to Primo gather the remnants of his not-so-secret life, listened to him stumble around in the dark out there and stash it all away.
6. Kid on a Mission
Frank had married young, a ballerina, but that was all over now, left in Dallas where the quarter-Mexican part of his mostly Italian heritage fit in, but not much else. He was dark and rangy, with long arms, long legs, the patience of a saint, and a heart murmur. Once the draft board classified him unfit for service, and the dancer classified him unfit for love, he developed a bad itch to be somewhere other than Texas. San Francisco drew him, along with a million other unraveled souls, but he didn’t come to San Francisco for the drugs or the easy sex, he came for the music, slinging a six-string Martin and a voice like Jerry Jeff Walker on ludes. He bypassed the Haight for a studio in the Sunset, where the streets were wide and quiet and the fog felt like a blessing after so many years of no-mercy-for-the-wicked (or the innocent) desert sun.
He played for tips in the coffee shops a time, put together a band good enough to open for some of the bigger acts, played Kezar Stadium and Monterey and quit, at the tail end of ’69, at Altamont, when a too-high fan named Meredith Hunter got himself stabbed by a Hells Angel — four deep wounds in his back, one in his head — which may or may not have preserved the lives of a couple of young, petulant and exasperated Rolling Stones, threatening to stop the show, just stop it, if those cats didn’t cool their jets. They were wondering what was wrong with America. What had gotten into the kids.
Frank was wondering the same thing. “ ‘Gimme Shelter’ my ass,” he said. He was talking to his drummer, who didn’t really know he was being talked to, because he was so high on angel dust he thought the stabbing was part of the show.
A friend talked Frank into going down to the union hall to get his Teamster card, and by the time he met Riley, he had five years in, enough to be vested at the newspaper and with a permanent swing shift. It was perfect: two days in his own neighborhood, two in the Marina, and one in Daly City, where the fog was so thick it made the Sunset look like Ensenada. He was happy being single, being offstage, no real responsibilities except to get the papers off the truck and collect a few delinquent bills. The paper cost five dollars every four weeks, delivered through the gate. When a one-bedroom opened up in his building, he moved into it. Two hundred forty dollars a month. He got a dog at the shelter, an electric guitar and a Pignose amp at the pawnshop, and never turned the amp up past halfway. He messed around and wrote some love songs, put it all down and got to bed by ten. Went to school during the day and got his BA in literature. Wrote some bad poems. Made the dean’s list twice. Skipped graduation because he couldn’t picture himself in one of those black gowns. He knew he’d look a damn fool.
Spot, a seven-month-old heeler mutt, slept at the foot of the bed, and when Frank tossed and turned, Spot yipped in his sleep, like he was saying “Cut it out.” Frank was grateful for the company. He stuck the framed photos of his ballerina wife away in a drawer when he heard she’d remarried, and one day pulled them out and took them down to the sidewalk. He leaned them against a lamppost and watched from his window as a woman pushing a shopping cart toward Geary stopped to add them to her belongings. She lined them up around the perimeter of the cart, on the inside, so it looked like a beautiful and tragic tutu’d lady was waiting (on her tiptoes) for a white knight to come and throw her bail. He started bringing the dog to work with him, figuring someone would eventually tell him to stop, but no one did.
The kid rolled in from Wyoming, or one of those big empty states that wasn’t Texas. She got tangled up with Primo; tried, from what Frank could tell, to keep him from going under. That didn’t work out so well, but she stuck around after all the party candles went out. She’d been living in Primo’s apartment and managed to hold on to it until his wife moved back in, and afterwards lived in a bunch of different studios, mostly in the Mission, moving every year or so. Restless, Frank guessed. After they got to be friends he helped her move a couple of times, in his newspaper truck. The trucks were handy for stuff like that. Moving in. Moving out.
Riley loved Spot. Brought him bones. Scratched his ears and between his shoulder blades until he made noises that sounded like words. Called him “silly dog” and kissed his cold, wet nose.
Primo had gotten her a couple routes of her own in Eureka Valley, and she worked them for a few years — probably made a couple hundred a month. She’d be done by five thirty and then hang around — all the drivers knew where to find her — to help and get paid extra when other kids didn’t show up. She was good. She could throw a hundred papers in the straight blocks in about six minutes flat. All business. No time to bullshit. It was like she was on a mission; kind of hard telling, though, what it was.
When she turned twenty-one, she finally got herself hired on as a casual, and Frank would see her working on the dock, loading the panel trucks and the bobtails and the semis with bundles of the daily news. She was still serious as hell when she was working, but sometimes after all the trucks were loaded she’d relax a little, hang out with the transportation guys, smoking cigarettes — sometimes a joint — and yakking. The others were a little in awe of her, tough as she was, first girl ever hired to work the docks, to drive. Maybe they expected her to cry once in a while. The job could be a bitch. They all felt like crying sometimes.
Frank was there one early morning when she got a splinter the size of a toothpick under her fingernail, slamming down a bundle at the side of one of the old-plywood-lined bobtails. She shut down the chute for about thirty seconds, came out into the light where she could see what had stabbed her, pulled it out with her teeth, and went back to work. He was loading his own truck right next to her and watched her pull the splinter out. He knew it hurt; it hurt him to see it. She showed it to him later — that chunk of wood, and it was a chunk — which she’d stuck in her pocket, and the streak of red that ran almost to the cuticle. If you looked at it from the tip of her finger, you could see the hole it made. Fuck. Frank would have gone home. Let someone else load that sucker.
He told her what he was thinking. “You should get out of here. Go home and soak that finger in something.”
She looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “Why would I do that?”
“Because you’re hurt?”
“Nah. Nothing’s broken.”
“Nothing has to be broken. They’ll let you go. They have to.”
“I don’t want to,” she said, jaw set, eyebrows raised. He got it. He stuck around and helped her load the next truck, half expecting her to tell him to split, but she didn’t. She favored her hand when she could, and when the light from the dock crossed her face, he could see brief flashes of pain there.
Later some of the drivers gave him a hard time. “Isn’t she a little young for you?”
“I wasn’t hitting on her. I was helping her. Any of you assholes could have done the same.” They grumbled, walking away. Didn’t like being called assholes, but sometimes the truth hurt. And she wasn’t that young. And it’s not like he was so damn old.