I don’t see her every day, or even every week, but she stops by the bar when she can, shows me her drawings, the old atlases she picks up secondhand — ones that show Zimbabwe as Rhodesia, Southeast Asia as Indochine. We do normal things, like go down to Divisadero for Philly cheesesteak lunch dates, or Valencia for cheap sushi or Vietnamese.
She sits in the backyard at the bar, sketching the skyline, the haphazard tree cemetery, the wild masses of flowers and vegetation that never seem to die back here, but only hibernate a few weeks in winter. Nothing like Montana, where winter lasts from October to May or longer, and when the spring Chinook starts to blow, you feel like the thaw has been your whole life getting there. (Some dad or some brother takes a little kid outside, and they stand in a brown patch of dirt and dead grass. “This,” the dad says, or the brother says. They take their boots off to feel, with their feet, the earth come back to life.)
We’re in Saigon Saigon one day when Lu asks about Slim, who he is, and my brother, how old he was when he died. She knows about Mick. Some things but not everything.
I’m pulling splinters off my chopsticks, arranging them in a pile by my plate. “I don’t know anyone named Slim.” I want to stick one of those splinters in my eye. She’s waiting, and I want to surprise her by doing that. But I’m too tired. “Mick was twenty-one when they lost him. Why are you asking me these things?”
“You know you talk to them in your sleep?”
“How the hell would I know that?” I get up, drop ten dollars on the table, walk out to the bus stop. She doesn’t try to stop me.
The next week, at the bar, she eyes me out from under the brim of her hat, astonishingly aware that there is a line dividing what we talk about from what we don’t, and that she has crossed it. I think I’m more disoriented by her awful cognizance than by her unerring ability to open up places that by all rights should have permanently, or at least officially, healed over.
“Why did you name your cat Mick, Lu?”
“He reminded me of Mickey Mouse. His little crazy ears…”
“You are such a fucking awful liar.” She doesn’t contradict me, but it does occur to me that maybe she isn’t lying. We stare each other down for as long as we can stand it. I will not for a second admit I could be wrong, and she knows that I know it’s a possibility. This is something new to me, being held to account by someone with her ducks, if not in a straight line, at least in a loose formation, and I am not good at it. I want an out, and this time she doesn’t have to give me one.
But she does. “He reminded me of you too. Those crazy little ears.”
“Fuck you, Lu. You and your cat.” I can barely talk, but screaming is a clear and present option.
She comes behind the bar before I can get away and grabs me by the arms just below my elbows, leans her forehead into mine and says, “It don’t mean shit if it doesn’t hurt, Cookie. Don’t let him go.”
“Don’t. Tell. Me.” I pull away from her and back up against the basement door. “How to remember him. You don’t know a fucking thing about it.”
She stands there with her hands still open, her eyes bright and wide. “I’m trying to help, Cook.”
I laugh, knowing it’s the cruelest thing I can do. “Now, that is fucking funny.”
She backs away, hands up in front of her now, unconsciously fisted in a boxing stance, almost a crouch, protecting her rib cage, her belly. “Hey,” she whispers, “it’s me, your stand-up guy. Remember?”
My teeth are clenched. “Fuck you fuck you fuck you so much.” My teeth feel like they will always be clenched now. Like this is permanent, this grinding pain.
I watch her go and try to find a way to blame her. Turn Janis up on the jukebox as loud as I can stand it, unhang the beer signs, and wash the filthy windows so actual sunlight can get in. My jaw aches. I don’t care. Take another little piece of my heart. I don’t fucking care.
• • •
Lu stays away for a short while and then sashays in one hot September afternoon like she’s been showing up at exactly this time every day. She brings me a burrito, with one bite out of it. I shove her quarters for the pool table.
“Rack ’em.”
She lets me win, but barely, and does it so slyly I can pretend it was an honest game. Then she slaughters me; takes no time to run the table and banks the eight with six of mine still out there. She lets me break the next one so she can reteach me how.
“Getting sloppy, Cook.”
“I didn’t have you here to keep me honest.”
“Is that what we called it?”
“Maybe.”
“What else you got?”
Nothing. I’m all out.
• • •
In late October, on a Sunday, I am watching half a block of the Tenderloin go up in flames on the TV. The wind has been blowing hard since yesterday, and now the fire is creating its own small storm. The sky is completely black with smoke, blocking out the sun. It looks like a bomb went off and we can smell it here, four miles away, and a drizzle of cinders is already beginning to fall on this hill. The fire trucks can’t get down the alleys, to get the ladders up to the windows and broken fire escapes. For some reason the fire hoses don’t fit all the hydrants. Something explodes. A water main breaks. People jump. Others are caught in the hallways and stairwells and their rooms and burn, for real.
Lu calls to tell me she can see it from where she is too, somewhere south of Market, in a bar. She tells me the job is gone and the little cat is gone and the little room is gone, and she just needs a small loan to get a bite to eat and maybe a tiny fix, to get well.
She says, “I didn’t set this one either, Cookie.” She tries to laugh. I try to laugh with her.
I say, “I know. Stay right there. I’m coming.” But when I get downtown, I can’t find her anywhere. There’s just a small pile of ashes on the sidewalk in front of the bar. I think this must be the last place she stood. I crouch down and rub some of that ash between my fingers, feeling for teeth, pieces of bone.
10. Nothing Like the Other Dogs
I finally get that God isn’t going to quit taking my people and leave myself wide-open. This time I do not even want Frank to attempt to glue me back together. I want whatever is the opposite and know just where to get it. Go looking for the Cajun (right where I left him) and make him take me down to Buchanan to see what the fucking attraction is. Smoke from a small steel tube until my lips blister. I can’t get high enough. Keep the job for a month, maybe two, but then just stop showing up. The owner (I hear) sends Andy to look for me, thinking maybe I’ll turn up at the back door at Harbor Lights, but that’s the last place I’m gonna go.
I move back into the flat on Capp Street, and every time the Cajun goes to hit me I step into it. The taste of blood is the realest thing I can imagine. I hate the dope — hate the high — but it’s cheap and easy, and I don’t have to remember anything or anyone.
The house comes down around us, more or less. Holes knocked through the walls, windows broken by anything handy to throw. We try to keep it down, and to the back of the place, where the neighbors aren’t so nosy or so uptight as the ones in front. The guy upstairs is a drunk, only, and minds his own business. Most nights we hear him come home late and an hour later hit the floor when he falls out of bed.
He isn’t going to say anything.
The people over the fence complain only when the Cajun gets out his saxophone and plays it in the yard. I don’t blame them. He sucks. Couldn’t play a scale to save his life, and thinks he’s John Coltrane. Sometimes they throw bottles, the neighbors do. The Cajun flips them off, throws the bottles back, and plays louder.