It sells one shoe for a dollar each. One side of the room has piles of old left shoes, the right side has right shoes. Old men. Poor young men. The old shoe seller in a rocking chair putting the money in a Quaker Oats box.
That first roll of film made me happier than anything in a long time, even a good trial. When I showed them the prints, they all high-fived me. Carlotta hugged me.
Ben and I went out together several times, early in the morning, in Chinatown, the warehouse district. It was a good way to get to know someone. I’d be focusing on little kids in school uniforms, he’d be taking an old man’s hands. I told him I felt uncomfortable taking people, that it seemed intrusive, rude.
“Mom and Jesse helped me with this. They always talk to everybody, and people talk back. If I can’t get a picture without the person seeing me now I’ll just talk to them, come right out and ask, ‘Do you mind if I take your picture?’ Most of the time they say, ‘Of course I mind, asshole.’ But sometimes they don’t mind.”
A few times we talked about Carlotta and Jesse. Since they all got along so well, I was surprised by his anger.
“Well, sure I’m mad. Part of it is childish. They’re so tight I feel left out and jealous, like I lost my mother and my best friend. But another part of me thinks it’s good. I never saw either one of them happy before. But they’re feeding each other’s destructive side, the part that hates themselves. He hasn’t played, she hasn’t written since they moved to Telegraph. They’re going through his money like water, drinking it mostly.”
“I never get the feeling that they are drunk,” I said.
“That’s because you’ve never seen them sober. And they don’t really start drinking until we’ve gone. Then they careen around town, chasing fire trucks, doing God knows what. Once they got into the US Mail depot and were shot at. At least they’re nice drunks. They are incredibly sweet to each other. She never was mean to us kids, never hit us. She loves us. That’s why I can’t understand why she’s not getting my brothers back.”
Another time, on Telegraph, he showed me the words to a song Jesse had written. It was fine. Mature, ironic, tender. Reminded me of Dylan, Tom Waits and Johnny Cash mixed together. Ben also handed me an Atlantic Monthly with a story of hers in it. I had read the story a few months before, had thought it was great. “You two wrote these fine things?” They both shrugged.
What Ben said had made sense, but I didn’t see any self-hatred or destructiveness. Being with them seemed to bring out a positive side of me, a corny side.
Carlotta and I were alone on the terrace. I asked her why being there made me feel so good. “Is it simply because they are all young?”
She laughed. “None of them are young. Ben was never young. I was never young. You probably were an old child too, and you like us because you can act out. It is heaven to play, isn’t it? You like coming here because the rest of your life vanishes. You never mention your wife, so there must be troubles there. Your job must be troubles. Jesse gives everybody permission to be themselves and to think about themselves. That it’s OK to be selfish.
“Being with Jesse is a sort of a meditation. Like sitting zazen, or being in a sensory deprivation tank. The past and future disappear. Problems and decisions disappear. Time disappears and the present acquires an exquisite color and exists within a frame of only now this second, exactly like the frames we make with our hands.”
I saw she was drunk, but still I knew what she meant, knew she was right.
For a while, Jesse and Maggie slept every night on a different roof downtown. I couldn’t imagine why they did this, so they took me to one. First we found the old metal fire escape, and Jesse jumped high up and pulled it down. Once we were up the stairs and onto the ladder, he pulled the stairs up after us. Then we climbed, high. It was eerie and magical looking out onto the estuary, the bay. There was still a faint pink sunset beyond the Golden Gate Bridge. Downtown Oakland was silent and deserted. “On weekends, it’s just like On the Beach down here,” Jesse said.
I was awed by the silence, by the sense of being the only ones there, the city beneath us, the sky all around. I was not sure where we were until Jesse called me over to a far ledge. “Look.” I looked, and then I got it. It was my office, on the fifteenth floor of the Leyman building, a few floors above us. Only a few windows away was Brillig’s. The small tortoise-shaded light was on. Brillig sat at his big desk with his jacket and tie off, his feet on a hassock. He was reading. Montaigne probably, because the book was bound in leather and he was smiling.
“This isn’t a nice thing to do,” Carlotta said. “Let’s go.”
“Usually you love to look at people in windows.”
“Yes, but if you know who they are it is not imagining but spying.”
Going back down the fire escape I thought that this typical argument was why I liked them. Their arguments were never petty.
Once I arrived when Joe and Jesse were still out fishing. Ben was there. Maggie had been crying. She handed me a letter from her fifteen-year-old Nathan. A sweet letter, telling her what they all were doing, saying that they wanted to come home.
“So, what do you think?” I asked Ben when she went to wash her face.
“I wish they’d get rid of the idea that it’s Jesse or the kids. If she got a job and a house, stopped drinking, if he’d come by once in a while, they’d see it could be okay. It could be okay. Trouble is they’re both scared that if the other one sobers up, they’ll leave.”
“Will she stop drinking if he leaves?”
“God no. I hate to think about that.”
Ben and Joe went to a ball game that night. Joe always referred to them as the “fuckin’ A’s.”
“Midnight Cowboy’s on TV. Want to come watch it?” Jesse asked. I said, sure, I loved that film. I thought they meant to go to a bar, forgetting about his age. No, they meant the Greyhound Bus Station, where we sat in adjoining seats, each with a little TV set we put quarters in. During the commercials Carlotta got more quarters, popcorn. Afterwards we went to a Chinese restaurant. But it was closing. “Yes, we always arrive when it’s closing. That’s when they order takeout pizza.” How they had originally found this out I can’t imagine. They introduced me to the waiter and we gave him money. Then we sat around a big table with the waiters and chefs and dishwashers, eating pizzas and drinking cokes. The lights were off; we ate by candlelight. They were all speaking Chinese, nodding to us as they passed around different kinds of pizzas. I felt somehow that I was in a real Chinese restaurant.
The next night Cheryl and I were meeting friends for dinner in Jack London Square. It was a balmy night, the top was down on the Porsche. We had had a good day, made love, lazed around in bed. As we got near the restaurant, Cheryl and I were laughing, in a good mood. We got stopped by one of the freight trains that invariably crawled through the Square. This one went on and on. I heard a shout.
“Counselor! Jon! Hey, barrister!” Jesse and Carlotta were waving to me from a boxcar, blowing kisses.
“Don’t tell me,” Cheryl said. “That must be Peter Pan and his ma.” She said, “Jon’s personal Bonnie and Clyde.”
“Shut up.”
I had never said that to her before. She stared straight ahead, as if she hadn’t heard
