It’s been more than two weeks now since Charlie and I came back from a hike at Jack London State Park to find the condo vandalized. Desecrated may be a more accurate word for describing the condition of the apartment. The front door was left wide open and, before we walked in, we were assaulted by the smell of shit; a steaming pile of it sat in a frying pan on the stove, the burner dialed to low.

After dealing with the fry pan, Charlie raced to the second bedroom. I followed him in after I heard him scream. The parrot cage was in pieces on the ground, having been trampled, but there was no sign of Roscoe, save for a few stray feathers; this, of course, is what prompted Charlie’s wail of disbelief and grief. We later found the parrot perched atop the armoire in the master bedroom. Mute and terrorized, he shied from Charlie, who collapsed to the carpet in tears. I gave Charlie a moment before getting down on the floor beside him to offer comfort.

We discovered other damage in the apartment—the sliding glass door to the deck had been shattered with a hammer, and one of Charlie’s prized paintings, a gloved hand, by his friend Arrow Wilk, was on the ground; it had been slashed repeatedly with a knife.

We called the police as soon as we regained our wits and we were told not to touch anything until they came to dust for prints. If they wanted more, Charlie and I agreed, they could always dig in the dumpster for the shit-filled frying pan.

Two cops came within a half an hour of our call, a sergeant named-tagged Castillo, who introduced herself as Esther, and an exceptionally tall young dude, named Snopkowski. He didn’t offer his first name and I spent more than a moment fixated with his name tag and pronouncing his name in my head. Sergeant Castillo walked in first and had a quick look around the place. “There’s nothing worse,” she said, “than having your home defiled.”

Snopkowski wore a thin mustache that looked to be either too much or too little of an accent for his long egg-shaped face. He had a large camera dangling around his neck. Charlie stuck close to Sergeant Castillo, the two of them speaking in conspiratorial tones, while I followed Snopkowski on his photo safari through the rooms. We didn’t exchange a single word. I noticed that the tall lank of a cop grimaced, his little mustache bunching up, each time he snapped a shot. Did the resulting photographs somehow carry the mark of his disdain?

Once Sergeant Castillo established that neither Charlie nor I could account for anything that had been stolen, she exhaled expressively and pronounced the word vengeance. Did we know anybody who might “seek to extract it?” I found her phraseology beguiling; extraction was something that happened at the dentist or involving natural gas wells. Charlie and I faced each other and in a marvel of simultaneity, we each pronounced Vince’s name.

The sergeant’s face turned thoughtful. She had a sweetness about her—I think that must be the first time I’ve had that thought about a cop—and this impression may have been heightened by the fact that her face bore the significant scars of teenage acne.

Sergeant Castillo nodded. “We know Vince. He has a place in this complex, doesn’t he?”

“Number fourteen,” I said.

Charlie and I each detailed our history with Vince and his possible grounds for grievance.

Neither of the police officers had much to say in response. Snopkowski went off to take a few more photos and Sergeant Castillo began dusting for fingerprints. When the officers were finished their work, we were asked if it was possible for us to stay somewhere else for the next couple of nights, since the apartment was a crime scene.

I remember smiling at Charlie and saying, “We have no choice—we need to go on vacation.” Shortly after the police left, we packed two bags with clothes, our computers, and the traumatized parrot, and drove up the coast to Gualala, where we found, through Airbnb, a two-room cottage a few blocks from the beach.

Charlie heard back from Sergeant Castillo the next afternoon—they found Vince’s prints all over the apartment and would be charging him with unspecified crimes as soon as they could find him. At the end of the week Charlie got another call from the sergeant giving us the all clear to move back into the condo.

Apparently Vince remained on the lam. I imagined he was back in the Tenderloin, where Charlie and I found him many months ago, scuffling along the street, hidden among the homeless. I no longer recognized Vince as the man who charmed me into his life eight years ago. Did I recognize myself? That’s a question I posed most days as I walked alone along the beach. For convenience sake, I decided I was the first cousin of the woman I used to be, back in my Vince days. In my new incarnation I was wiser, less prone to histrionics, and more open to love. Even if those characterizations bore little resemblance to reality and were only aspirational, my choice of values cheered me and seemed a genuine improvement over my old cousin’s.

Charlie was able to make arrangements to have the Sonoma condo deep cleaned and the glass door to the deck replaced. In theory we could return home in two days, but I convinced Charlie that it would be good for us to stay on another week in Gualala. Our lives in the two rooms had taken on a certain grace. Minimalism has its virtues, and if Charlie still loved me after having to duck beneath my underwear—which I had drying on a line in the kitchen—to make a cup of coffee, I saw great hope for us.

Although Roscoe remained mute, Charlie felt he was making steady progress with PTSD exercises he designed for the parrot. “Roscoe understands everything I’m saying to him,” Charlie told me, “and we’ve now developed a system with which he can answer affirmatively or negatively. He will speak again; I know he will.”

I’ve been surprised to find myself rooting for Roscoe. If Charlie’s attention is going to be distracted by a bird, it might as well be one who speaks.

Last night, our last in Gualala, we got word from Augie Boyer that Vince was found dead in the garage of his San Francisco house. He’d affixed a hose to the exhaust of his BMW and ran it to the driver’s window. A needle was found beside his feet, along with a bag of powder. There will be an autopsy, but who cares what killed him.

After getting off the phone from Detective Boyer, and relaying the news, Charlie watched me closely to see how I’d respond. I could feel my face pucker with sadness. Strange to shed tears for a man, whose last act directed toward me was to leave a pile of shit steaming in a frying pan on the stove where I cook.

When he saw my tears, Charlie, without a trace of irony, said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

The phrase sounded so absurd that I couldn’t keep myself from laughing. Soon Charlie joined my hilarity, and it began to feel unseemly to be joking about the dead. After we managed to corral our laughter, I proposed a toast to Vince, who used to enjoy fine wines. All we had left among our provisions was a bottle of cheap Italian red. Somehow a six-dollar bottle of wine seemed fitting.

When we were adequately lubricated, Charlie told me the haiku Augie Boyer left him with:

What a way to go:

oh, sadness of the world,

 needle in the arm.

Charlie and I each took a stab at a memorial haiku for Vince. Neither of them is worthy of repeating.

In our two weeks away we stayed away from newspapers, although we gleaned a fair amount of news online. On the drive down we decided to play a game with the news, the kind of game Charlie likes best, without a winner or loser.

Many months ago when Charlie, a bit tongue and cheek, described games with a single winner as macho, I argued with him. “It’s not a game,” I said, “without a winner.”

“You’re such a product of your culture, Pina,” he fired back. “It’s all winners and losers, cowboys and Indians, the colonizer and the colonized.”

“We’re talking about Scrabble,” I said. “Why play if we’re not going to count points?”

“The object is to build the most beautiful words possible.”

“We might as well play collaboratively,” I complained.

“Worse things have happened. Think of it the way you’d consider a family jigsaw puzzle.”

“That’s why I hate jigsaw puzzles,” I remember saying in my bitchiest voice.

“What’s the matter with you?” Charlie joked. “I bet you suspect me of lacking a competitive gene, of having low testosterone levels.”

This was in the first weeks of our relationship when we made love at least twice a day, so low T would have been a difficult argument to make. Finally, I gave in and found myself enjoying Scrabble when intriguing words were what were valued, and you could continually dip into the sack of letters until you found the ones that you wanted.

The car “game” involved taking turns forming headlines out of the bits of news we’d picked up in the last couples of weeks.

My reason for not really liking this “game” was that just about every headline featured Republicans, who were supposed to be the minority party now. Charlie tossed out the first headline, I lobbed one back, and so on:

Texas Governor Blames Massive Power Outage on Renewable Energy

Cruz Flies to Cancun While His State Dives Into Deep Freeze

Texas and Mississippi Governors Lift Mask Mandates

Biden accuses Republican Governors of Neanderthal Thinking

Republicans Find New and Creative Ways to Suppress Voting

Republican Affirmative Action: Voter Suppression

Catholic Leaders Discourage Their Flock From Getting J&J Vaccine

Anti-Vax Republicans Will Keep the U.S. From Herd Immunity

Idaho Republicans Hold Mask Burning Party

Republicans Believe Science=Socialism

A Gilded Statue of Trump in Flip Flops Delights Conservatives

After Dr. Seuss Books Deemed Racist They Become Bestsellers

House Minority Leader Reads Green Eggs and Ham on Video

Charlie effectively ended the game with his final headline: Democrats Pass 1.9 Trillion Relief Bill

What fun could we possibly have with good news?

Charlie had planned our return to Sonoma around a stop in Forestville to visit Sally on family day in her rehab facility. I suggested that I could take a hike while he visited, but Charlie made a special pitch for me to come with him. “You’re family now, Pina.” Suddenly I had a family: a sweet man without a competitive streak, and a grown daughter who happened to be an addict, but then Charlie insisted on adding his mute parrot to the family. I discouraged him from bringing Roscoe, but he wouldn’t have it.

“It will cheer up Sally to see him,” he said.

“It will distract everybody else,” I countered, to no avail.

I must say that Sally looked good. We got a little time with her before the formal session began and she took us on a tour of the lush grounds. There were horseshoes, bocce ball, and a small basketball court. Sally seemed particularly excited to show us the small redwood grove where she came every morning to meditate before anybody else was up. When I told Sally how good she looked she shook her head and said: “This is the easy part, being here. The true test is when I get home and have to make smart choices.”

She seemed particularly concerned about Roscoe’s condition. She spoke directly to the parrot, but didn’t overdue it when she realized that nothing was coming back. Charlie told her that Roscoe had been attacked during a break-in, but he didn’t mention that Vince was the perpetrator. Charlie and I also agreed not to mention Vince’s death.

We joined other families who were beginning to gather in a widely distanced circle of chairs set-up in a meadow. A few people wanted to make a fuss about Roscoe, sitting atop Charlie’s shoulder, but the social distancing precluded that. I gazed at the families, noticing, or imagining I noticed, a very tentative hopefulness in the eyes of the parents. My heart went out to them. How many times had their kids been in rehab? I couldn’t help thinking of them as kids even though most of them were probably in their mid twenties or early thirties like Sally. Two of the group—men in their fifties, who were both Safeway employees, looked out of place. Sally had explained that their union covered a good part of the program’s cost. I wondered what it was like for those men being mixed in with all these kids who looked like they were at summer camp.

A counselor opened the meeting, greeting the families, before having each of the clients introduced themselves in AA manner and talk about their work in the program. One young guy named Eric introduced himself and then said, “It’s good to be back at Fresh Mornings. I know I’m not supposed to say that, but I always feel better when I’m out here. My counselor Rex says I need to figure out how to bring Fresh Mornings with me when I go back in the world.”

I watched Eric’s parents while he talked—the mother was teary, but the father had gone somewhere else. How many rehab family meetings had he been to? I decided that Eric’s father was thinking about the woman down the street that he wanted to bed.

Even though I saw it coming, I was surprised when Sally’s turn came and she said, simply, “Hey Everybody, my name is Sally and I am an addict.” She went on to note her regret about not caring for herself and for all the pain that she’d caused her father. Then, in a breathless riff, she thanked the staff and talked about the mass of notes she’d taken during meetings, all the personal writing she’d done—six notebooks completely filled—and how she’d come to see her addiction as a terrible itch that she was trying to teach herself not to scratch.

“It goes away,” she said, “I really believe it goes away if you stop scratching and just ignore it.”

Charlie and I exchanged glances. I couldn’t know for sure what he was thinking, but I had the feeling his thoughts were in concert with mine: that equating heroin addiction with an itch might not be the ticket to long-term sobriety.

That is when Roscoe shocked everybody in the circle at Fresh Mornings. He chirped a couple of times and then in full parrot voice, rich with nasal resonance, said, “Sally, please come back to Sonoma Valley.”

Charlie, being so thrilled to hear his parrot speak again, didn’t do a very good of faux ventriloquism to cover for Roscoe. The meeting broke into pandemonium, with clients and their families gesticulating wildly and mimicking the parrot. When things calmed down, Sally spoke, teary-eyed, “I am coming back, Roscoe, I swear I am.”

After another brief hubbub, Chet, the counselor running the meeting, said, “Can we please get back on task now?”

Roscoe, in a manner as sheepish as a parrot could possibly manage, said, “Forgive my interruption.” This time Charlie’s lips were fully tuned to the parrot’s speech; the circle of addicts and their family members seemed relieved.

We bid Sally a long goodbye, with virtual hugs and tears; along with promises that will be difficult to keep.

The drive back to Sonoma was quiet. Roscoe had returned to his tacit self despite Charlie’s efforts to engage him in conversation.

As we drove back into Sonoma, I surprised Charlie with an idea I’d been entertaining before we left on our retreat.

“I’m thinking I’d like to get a dog.”

“What?” Charlie said. “What brought that on? I’ve never heard you express any interest in having a dog.”

“I haven’t. But sometimes when I’m on the deck I listen to people talk to their dogs. They’re so kind to their dogs. So loving. When I hear them express their affection, I wonder if these dog owners are as nice to any humans. Then I think that if I was a dog owner maybe I’d become a more loving person.”

Charlie laughed. “You’re a very loving person, Pina. Anyway I can’t see you walking a dog three times a day.”

“Three times a day?”

Roscoe piped in with a command: “Pina, Pina, Pina, walk the dog.”

Charlie was delighted on any number of levels. “There you have it, directly from the voice of Sonoma.”

It’s true; Roscoe pretty much settled the question for me. When you have a wise parrot laughing at your ideas it’s clearly time to rethink them.

“So?” Charlie asked.

“So, I’m glad to be back in Sonoma.”

 

— The End —

     August 14, 2020—March 8, 2021