“Mama … Mom … look, it’s the hippie who’s doing it with Erica Dyson!”
Whatever the pretext, they soon were moving. The university handed him his hat and forty grand. They clumped through the empty rooms, their voices reverberating. They didn’t toast any good times they might have had there. They left things behind, bags of discards and a forwarding address — his parents’ home, a failing motel in Las Vegas — and headed for NYC, an ill-defined trip. Home of eight major professional sports franchises and focus of a world’s derivative gaze. Unfortunately, Guy and his Institute for the Study of Sport and Society did not quite fit in with the steak-and-Löwenbräu ethos of Toots Shor’s. Randi wilted like the houseplants that hung over the rattling radiators. They headed back to the California coast.
Now, a scant two weeks later, Guy is tooling through the streets of Berkeley, the offering of a substantial portion of an excellent zucchini bread seated beside him, the high splenetic clatter of the Bug echoing against the houses on either side of the street. He skirts the campus now, onto Hearst Avenue, and then, spotting the snarl of worshipful traffic outside the church ahead, turns quickly north, heading up into the hills and the stilted apartment buildings that loom above their open carports like the cut-rate imitations of the good life that they are. The real luxury is found on the serpentine turns that this street, Euclid, takes as it approaches its beau ideal — remote and faintly forbidding inaccessibility — farther on.
He passes a wall on which someone has sprayed THE SLA LIVES. Is it an affirmation of the remaining entity or a memorial to the six who were lost?
On the other hand, he’s afraid he’s going to make something of a bad first impression. Not that this is anything new to Guy. But he’s really got to take a shit; the All-Bran has just scoured him out. You hear about people who decline to shit in other people’s houses; Guy is not one of them. Guy will eliminate whenever he feels the interior clamor. He will eat that last pork chop. He will tell you if you’ve gained weight. He will ask how much you make or what you paid for your house. He will provide an honest opinion of your attire. None of which constitutes the violation of a taboo, strictly speaking, but each has a tendency to make people feel uncomfortable; hence the famous “difficulty” for which Guy is renowned.
The Bayview Apartments. Casa Euclid. The Trollmont. The Oaklander. Grizzly Peak Residences. Albany Terrace Arms. He pulls in a couple of doors down from the building where Susan and Jeff are feeding the fish of a vacationing acquaintance. The latemorning air is still and very warm in the sun. He parks facing up the hill and sits for a moment, trying to remember which way he is supposed to turn the wheels; with his VW, it’s not merely for the sake of appearance. He decides he is supposed to turn them facing out into the roadway and works the wheel, audibly grunting. Then he gets out, and, after putting on the shoulder bag, carries the loaf of zucchini bread under his arm as he walks up the street’s oil-spattered margin.
He’s pretty excited about this.
Guy enters his destination via a dank and shadowy grotto where a rank of mailboxes is embedded in a stucco wall, and gratefully crosses into a sunny central courtyard around which the complex forms an open rectangle, bordered on its open side by spare greenery that separates it from its nearly identical neighbor. On this level are the carports, most of which are empty of cars this pretty Sunday but full of other things: beach toys and cross-country skis and cardboard cartons and stacks of newspapers and barbecue grills and cans of motor oil. Above the carports are the apartments, inscrutable behind the identical hollow-core doors and curtained windows that line the tier. He pauses on the uneven ground, looking for number eleven, then heads for a set of stairs that gives every appearance of having been an afterthought.
He knocks, employing the ridiculously lively shave-and-a-haircut theme. After a silent interval he adds the two bits. More silence. He turns and, leaning on the wrought-iron railing, looks down upon the courtyard. A Ford Pinto pulls into one of the carports, and a middle-aged woman emerges in a pants suit an acute shade of green, keys dangling from her hand, and stares curiously up at Guy.
“He’s away,” she calls, shielding her eyes with the hand holding the keys.
“Pardon me?” answers Guy, raising a cupped hand to his ear.
“I say, he must have gone away.” The woman has begun to mount the stairs. “His car’s been gone for the past few days anyways.” She points at one of the empty carports.
“I’m. Oh. Well.” Guy has no idea what to say. He feels out of his depth, a vertiginous sensation that precedes what he knows will be an inept improvisation. He reaches for his shoulder bag. “Maybe I’ll just leave him a note.” He nods, smiling with tight lips at the woman. Who snorts.
“If he knows how to read.” With that, she fits the key into the lock and lets herself into her apartment.
Guy removes the yellow pad and a pen from the shoulder bag. He gently lays the zucchini bread at his feet. What’s he supposed to write? Yabba-dabba-doo? Death to the Fascist Insect? Well, you know, we all want to change the world? He looks up and, unsurprisingly, sees the curtain move at the window beside Miss High-Wattage Green’s door. A good bet that his note will be inspected. He writes: “Was here Sun AM. Will try again. G.” He tucks it under the door, leaving half an inch or so exposed so that the woman doesn’t kill herself clawing it out from under there.
Back in the Bug he begins rhythmically contracting his sphincter, trying to stave off the inevitable. Plus give himself more sexual stamina and longer and more satisfying orgasms, to look at it in the long term. Primarily, though, he’s trying to keep the shit up the chute. Usually he can manage to make himself forget about it, but he can tell that today he is on the verge of a rude and unpleasant experience, and he is about to turn the key in the ignition and head back to Oakland when he sees the distinctive tail of the Pinto, like the thalidomide nightmare of European design sensibility, emerge from the driveway as the green woman turns sharply and takes off up the hill. He’s out of the car for one more try.
His note appears to be missing. He knocks. He knocks again, louder. He places his hand on the doorknob. He is feeling nakedly conspicuous and out of place here in this quiet apartment complex. He may as well act as if he belonged here, what the fuck. Besides, he has to get to a toilet right away.
The door opens when he turns the knob. Inside, a smell like that of a pet shop, vaguely aquatic. He spies the enormous aquarium that sits in a corner of the living room. The fish rise, fall, and dart in its soft glow, and he is drawn to them, comes near and watches the neon tetras and the angelfish and whatever else there are in there moving in loose and graceful formation inside the box of lighted water. He spots a toggle on the light ballast that fits over the aquarium’s top, and when he switches it, the aquarium becomes, under the scrutiny of a black light, a lunar landscape, the neon tetras a liquid metal as if forged from the sultry waters of their origin, luminous and mercurial, dancing above the brilliant and depthless gravel in the ultraviolet cartoon of his gaze.
Then he feels it, a hollow clunk accompanying the metallic shock of the thing’s making contact with the back of his skull, and a strange sensation of being probed, as if he were first to be examined by the instrument of his destruction, and also there is the oddly light grip on his shoulder as he is guided, backward, out of the living room and into the kitchen. He moves stiffly and takes tiny steps, feeling the terrain change from shag carpeting to linoleum. He is placed standing amid the cupboards before a small, round dinette table set in front of a sliding glass door, crudely curtained with floral bed sheets, that leads to a tiny balcony. On the dinette table is an army surplus gas mask bag, open, from which the butt end of a revolver and a pack of Tareytons protrude. A spiral-bound notebook lies open next to the bag, a capped Bic inserted in the twisted wire spine.