Roscoe gave me the cold shoulder for more than a week. Since I’d been neglecting him, he regressed, or at least pretended to. He designed his limited speech to disturb me. Top of the morning, he’d say at nightfall, along with Sleep well at dawn. His repetition of Roscoe wants a cracker was a particular irritant. I finally won him back with a few thimbles of rum and a hike. It was a little before sunset on a warm day for January. The parrot sat squarely on my right shoulder as we made the brief climb to the cemetery. Though rarely out of his room, Roscoe knew exactly where he was, and almost immediately quoted Victor Hugo: “It’s nothing to die, Charlie, it is frightful not to live.” That came from a tape of pithy phrases I made for him; his ability to find the apt spot for using them has always amazed me. Roscoe amplified the Hugo quote in an encore performance, stretching out the fry in frightful and coming as close as he could to whispering not to live. I felt like I was being scolded.

We started up Sonoma Overlook Trail, which rises gently through a small forest to an upper meadow. Unfortunately, on a warm weekday, it was more crowded than I’ve ever seen it. Since the pandemic began, everybody’s become a hiker. Now people were out to catch the sunset. We either stepped aside or took a wide berth around the masked and chattering hikers crowding the switchbacks that climb through scrub pines, oaks, and California buckeyes to a clearing with a view of the town and the bay beyond. Voices, some of which sounded amplified, came from every direction in the woods. I half expected Puck from A Midsummer’s Night Dream to appear, singing: Up and down, up and down/ I will lead them up and down.

I realized long ago that a man could make friends too easily if he walked a dog, which is why I’ve never had one. I don’t mean to sound like a misanthrope, or do I? All of which is to say, that if you want to go up trails inconspicuously don’t wear a parrot on your shoulder.

At the top of the meadow, I sat with Roscoe on one of the stone benches. I tried to get the parrot to come down on the bench beside me but he wanted to stay on my shoulder. The sort of people who have dutifully kept their distance during the pandemic—couples in their early forties; young families, even people my age—clustered close to us as soon as they noticed Roscoe. Fortunately, the bench is recessed from the trail and nobody pushed forward beyond the trail, so I felt safe from the crowd, if not comfortable.

Once Roscoe spoke up, people became attentive. After being deprived of live performance for many months, folks held their ground. I’d spent a week trying to get the parrot to talk and now, when I wanted him quiet, he wouldn’t stop. As the crowd inched closer, Roscoe offered a cautionary speech, punctuated with a chuckle between each phrase: “Hey boys and girls, don’t forget the protocol: mask up and keep your distance, as if your life depended on it.” People’s eyes shifted from the bird to me, trying to catch me at some subtle ventriloquism. To help folks relax I mumbled discreetly with my lips. I’ve spent some time practicing my fake voice-throwing, in order to deflect attention from Roscoe and to support Sally’s conviction that a genuine thinking and speaking parrot is worth less than a talking prop crafted with clever artifice.

Two high school boys, one with a hand-rolled cigarette fixed behind his ear, posed a flurry of questions to the bird: “What’s your name, dude? How old are you? Do you have a girlfriend?” The parrot responded a bit arrogantly, “The name’s Roscoe; I don’t give away my age; what makes you think that I’m not hip to the birds and the bees?”

People in the small crowd were really taken with the performance and many addressed their appreciation to me: “You’re really good, man,” and such. A young Latina, who’d pulled out her earpiece, said, “You should take Roscoe on TV. I mean it.”

I have made up for my neglect of Roscoe in the last week, hiding out in his room for many hours each day and night since Augie Boyer shook our world, presenting the conjunction of Jesus the waiter’s murder and Pina’s name. Roscoe may as well be my shrink now. When I told him that it is becoming harder for me to disguise my chronic depression, Roscoe nodded his head and responded: “I understand, Charlie.” I’ve talked about my sense of inadequacy with Pina, how she feels like a moving target with whom I can never become fully comfortable. I’ve also spoken about my phobia regarding the dead waiter and, in the days since the insurrection, I’ve detailed my fears for the nation, particularly given the climate of disinformation that continues to hang like a toxic cloud over much of the country. I even spoke with Roscoe about my ambivalence regarding my work with him. “It’s wrong to not openly celebrate the magnificence of your intelligence, Roscoe, and to pretend it’s me speaking rather than you. I’m afraid the world is not quite ready for you.”

Although I can tell he’d been listening, Roscoe remained silent. I doubted that he understood much of what I babbled about; that’s where I was wrong.

As Roscoe sensed that the small crowd wanted more from him, he secured his position on my shoulder and used it as a soapbox.

“As an outside observer,” he began, with me mumbling shamelessly along, “I must warn you against conspiracy theories.” Conspiracy came out sounding more like conspicery, and theories like harries. “Forty percent of Americans,” he continued “believe the horseshit propagated by our rogue president.”

The two teenage boys laughed hilariously, especially when the parrot stumbled over propagated. I gazed around at the others, whose expressions ranged from incredulous to sober, as if some were actually considering the wisdom of Roscoe’s words.

“These false ideas caused what happened at the capitol on January 6,” said Roscoe. I concentrated mightily on my lip-syncing. “Do not become one of the brainwashed. The world is not flat.”

I couldn’t have said it better, but this was not a script I designed for the parrot, but an extemporaneous speech he developed on his own. Even I found that hard to believe. People began to slowly disperse, believing that it was me who had spoken, and yet they offered their farewell messages to Roscoe rather than to me.

On our way down the looping trail, the parrot offered encouragement to whomever we passed: “Follow your bliss, bucko. Keep your eyes on the prize, sister.” I noticed that hikers smiled at the parrot but regarded me as if I were an odd man, perhaps a pervert.

When we were by ourselves, Roscoe spoke to me directly, “So what’s our plan, Charlie? How can I be best utilized? What’s the message and how do we get it out?”

As we got close to the trailhead, I began to formulate a response: “I think you’re onto something, Roscoe. The question is how do we develop one kind of message to help deprogram the brainwashed, and another type for healing those suffering from PTSD?”

I heard footsteps coming our way from below and stepped aside with Roscoe as I’d been doing all afternoon.

“Those are just the kind of questions I’ve been asking myself, Charlie. At least you have somebody to talk with.”

In the gloaming, coming around a curve, I made out Augie Boyer. He stopped a good ten feet from Roscoe and I, and leaned on his polished walking stick, his head adorned in a conical brown felted hat, a rakish pheasant feather rising from the ribbon. It was hard to tell whether the detective, under his curious brim, was emulating Robin Hood or Peter Pan. Boyer’s facemask bore an ominous haiku:

Nobody knows for sure

if Jesus died for our sins.

Why was he murdered?

“So this must be Roscoe. I’ve heard a lot about you, my dude. I’m Augie Boyer.”

“The crazy detective,” the parrot said, as I dutifully lip-synced.

Boyer grinned. “That’s very clever, Charlie.”

Roscoe piped up.“ He shouldn’t get all the credit.”

Now the detective pivoted in his Blundstones and dropped a hand on his hip. He wanted to watch Roscoe and me at once.

I stroked Roscoe’s head. “Don’t say anymore,” I told the bird, “or he’ll suspect you of murder.”

Augie Boyer narrowed his eyes on Roscoe. “That’s nonsense, my dude. You can’t be incriminated. So what have you heard with your marvelous parrot ears about the murder of Jesus?”

“Good to see you, Detective.” I said, trying to clear out fast. I took a wide berth around Boyer, and in my best parrot voice said, “Jesus died a long time ago. Many of the claims about him are contested.”

Back at the condo, Bobby Sabbatini called. Without salutation, he croaked in his artificial speakerphone voice: “Give us a poem, Char.”

“Posey,” I said.

“The one and own.”

I remembered that he was restricting his speech to single syllables so his software wouldn’t make him stutter..

“Let’s hear it Char.”

I recited the haiku I’d just seen on Augie Boyer’s facemask.

“Call that a poem, Char?”

“It’s by your buddy Augie Boyer?”

“Aug, Aug. ‘Fraid he’s lost his way with verse. He gives too much weight to the syl counts.”

The irony of that struck me and I couldn’t leave it alone. “Sounds like you’ve been juggling syls, Posey.”

“Hey, I got balls in the air, Char, balls in the air. The words . . . the parts of speech . . . blaze of verbs . . . the lims that show me how free I am. Those are my balls, and if I drop one . . . I play it as it lays.”

Sabbatini was starting to affect me like he did on the pulpit, back in the day. At his best, he could inspire an entire congregation to memorize poems and recite them. Construction workers, guys on highway crews who’d never read a poem in their life, were proudly declaiming E. E. Cummings and Gary Snyder poems. That was before Sabbatini got shot in the throat at Ginsberg’s Galley in Guerneville, his religious tavern, with its poetry karaoke device. The sniper was a member of First Christ River of Blood, a local church that felt threatened by poetry and Pastor Sabbatini’s following.

Speaking in single syllables didn’t fully mitigate the problems Sabbatini had with his software. He typed out his words and the app spoke for him in discrete plinks of sound that could not be bent or accented. The steady march of his single syllables lacked the fluidity of normal speech. It must be hard for him to hear his words issue forth without the emphasis and golden euphony that characterized them; in the past.

“I’ve called to see how you are, Char. I heard ‘bout the death in Son. How are you and Peen? How is your soul? Tell me how I can help. What’s new with the pear? Have no seen him on Twit.”

I wasn’t ready to have Sabbatini become my confessor. Later I would talk with him about Roscoe but first I needed the lowdown on his friend Augie Boyer.

“Augie’s hanging out over here in Sonoma, busting our balls about the death of some poor waiter. We don’t know anything more than we’ve told him.”

“Aug knows what you think you know, Char. He wants to find that which you know but don’t know you know.”

I had trouble making sense of that machine gun round of syllables and wanted to ask Sabbatini to repeat what he just said, but didn’t think I could stand to hear it again.

“Aug will hit pay dirt soon. You can bet on it, Char.”

Somehow that pronouncement didn’t give me comfort. I shifted the conversation to Roscoe and his remarkable abilities as a speaker but also as an intelligent thinker who can synthesize complex ideas. “Nobody believes it’s actually him,” I said, “with the high cognitive intelligence and sophisticated speech. I pretend that I am the ventriloquist and he is my dummy.”

“It does not mat what peep think, Char.”

“But I need to utilize him wisely, to give him a purpose. My daughter Sal—that’s another story—thinks Roscoe loses value if he’s perceived as a he is—a thinking and speaking parrot, rather than a clever construction. What people really want, she maintains, is artifice.”

“She’s dead wrong ‘bout that. Let the pear be the pear—you owe it to him. And, of course, Rosc has a purp, Char. The God of verse chose him. He’s here to be the voice of Son.”

“The voice of Sonoma.”

“Spell it out, if you must, Char, but teach your pear poems, and soon he will write them. Like Aug Boy, he can lead us to know what we don’t know we know.”

 

Days have gone by with little talk about my name being knifed into the back of a poor waiter named Jesus. I think both Charlie and I are pretending the whole business was a bad dream that we shared. I’ve made no attempt to contact Vince; the fragile truce between Charlie and me can’t sustain much more stress and, frankly, I can’t feature Vince as a killer; he’s always struck me as too weak-willed for even verbal conflicts. 

Charlie’s gone into a shell, spending most of his days and evenings holed up with Roscoe in the second bedroom, where he not only works with the parrot on who knows what, but attends daily Al-anon meetings on Zoom. Charlie seems more disturbed by his daughter’s addiction than by the chilling business surrounding the murdered waiter, and the horrid business of my name being associated with the killing. Last night at dinner Charlie said he’s found some comfort in the three C’s of Al-anon: I didn’t cause it; I can’t cure it; I can’t control it. Is there a lesson in that formula for me to apply?

Late this morning Charlie comes out of Roscoe’s room and tells me about the insurrection at the capitol. We sit down to lunch with the television on and watch it together for most of the afternoon. On the sofa we snuggle close and hold hands. What we’re watching is truly unreal. I have to remind myself that it’s a life event; the outcome is unclear. This is not the same as being at the movies—a place that Charlie and I have never been together. I reflect for a moment on this oddity and even say to Charlie how curious it is that we’ve been through so much together and yet have never held hands in a theater. Perhaps Charlie misunderstands me because he says what I’ve just been thinking, rather harshly, “This is not a movie, Pina. This is happening right now in our nation’s Capitol.” I know it is unseemly to have hurt feelings at a time like this, but I do.

We no longer speak. The indecent spectacle—a mass of white cretins breaking into and trashing the undefended Capitol during a joint session of congress to certify Joe Biden’s election to the presidency—numbs us, as loops of the same videos play and Charlie switches the channels between CNN and MSNBC. I watch him hold onto the remote control and think of how much Vince loved the device. I’ve never seen a woman hold onto a remote control device with the same urgency as these men do. It is as if they’re gripping their last vestige of power. One time, when the batteries went dead in the device and there were no replacements in the house, Vince looked like a broken man. Another time, as I watched him clutch the damn thing, I said: “It’s a good thing you have two hands, Vince, one for holding the remote and the other for grabbing your dick.” 

After switching channels endlessly and not finding what he wants, Charlie starts shouting at the screen: “Where are the police? How about the National Guard? When are they going to arrest Trump and Trump, Jr., and Giuliani for inciting a riot?”

We listen to the talking heads for hours. Charlie insists on switching to Fox News to see how the hard right is characterizing the event. When we discover that most of the talk is about Antifa infiltrators provoking the violence, Charlie roars again at the television screen before turning it off.

Misery loves company. I remember at age nineteen or twenty, when I was routinely depressed five days of seven—and I admit this now with outrage at my callowness—that I took some comfort in the tragedies of others—floods, earthquakes, political disaster—and even thought that if the whole world went to hell it would be a balm to me not to suffer alone. And I am ashamed to say that now, as Washington burns, I am enjoying, if not comfort, at least, a bit of distraction from my own insecurities. 

I meet with the kook of a detective, Augie Boyer, at his request, beside the plaque of the Revolutionary War veteran in the Sonoma Mountain Cemetery. When I get there he’s sitting on a large stone eating an apple, his facemask, dangling from an ear, a canvas briefcase at his feet.

He stands and tips his Giants cap; the red blades of his hair point in all directions from under the cap. Then he secures his facemask in place. “Augie Boyer. Thank you for coming, Pina.” 

As Charlie told me it would, Boyer’s facemask bears a haiku:

The old detective

needs a magnifying glass

to read the tea leaves.

He’s not sure what to do with his half-eaten apple. I should tell him to finish it, but I enjoy his discomfiture. He’d like me to turn away for a moment so he can bury the fruit in a pocket of his brown leather bomber. He’s a funny guy to be a detective. Charlie told me he used to be stout, but now he’s stringy looking, a vegan who stays away from French fries. He looks like the sort of dude who has a collection of vintage gum machines at home. Nothing he loves more than to feed pennies to the machines and spin the gears that drop gumballs. 

“Hope you didn’t have trouble finding the spot,” he says, holding the apple by its stem.

“No, I’m particular fond of Captain Smith’s monument.” I do turn away for a moment and, poof, when I look back, Boyer, empty-handed, is scratching his nose.

I nod to the two plaques commemorating the Revolutionary War veteran, who is said to be the only known vet of that war to be buried in California. One of the plaques is from the Daughters of the American Revolution, the other from the California Society Sons of the American Revolution.

“You know,” I tell Boyer, “I’ve stood here a couple of times puzzling out this guy’s dates. I’ve also done a bit of research on him. Born in 1768, he was eleven when he joined the Virginia Navy as a mate and served with his father on The Hazard. Apparently, he sailed around the globe eight times, including a voyage to Canton, China with a cargo of 63,000 seal and otter skins picked up at the Farallon Islands.” How I remember these factoids, I don’t know. Charlie would be proud of me. 

“I love that he went from the Hazard,” I continue, “to become captain of the Albatross, a merchant vessel, which was wrecked somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. How big a space in his psyche did the names of his ships occupy? That’s what I want to know. Captain Smith lost everything on the shipwreck of the Albatross, including his journals. Imagine what they may have told us. He died in 1846, down the hill in an adobe on First Street East. His host, Jacob Leese, General Vallejo’s brother-in-law, asked him if he’d consulted with himself about leaving this world, and he answered that he hadn’t.” I have no idea why I’ve told the detective all this—just to postpone the inevitable inquisition, I suppose.

 “Ah,” Boyer says, “You have enough on the captain to write a novel. You’re venturing into forensic archeology, here. That’s a field I wish I’d gone into.”

 “Why didn’t you?” 

“Oh, that requires a lot more education than a guy like me could stomach. Shall we take a little stroll?”

I nod and the detective leads me up Palm Walk to Laurel Lane, and then we follow Toyen.

“We’re going to visit the grave of an Italian-born stonecutter named Luigi Basagilia. As a matter of fact, I’ve done a little research on him. The guy never learned English. His foot was crashed in a quarry accident and he had three toes amputated. He spent the rest of his life sunk in a depression.”

“Why are we visiting his grave?”

“You’ll see. I’m sorry that you’ve been pulled into this case, that your 

name . . . ”

“Maybe this business has nothing to do with me,” I say. “Maybe it refers to another Pina. In Italy it’s not that uncommon a name. It’s a diminutive for Agrippina, Jacopina, Giuseppina, and, in my case, Crispina.”

“But in this country? Have you ever met another Pina?”

I didn’t bother to answer. At the stonecutter’s grave I wince as I see my name carved five times into the granite stone. It’s been rendered with a steady hand in wide looping letters, just the way Charlie described it on the back of the restaurant check.

“Somebody’s really got you on the mind,” the detective says.

“Or the name of someone else,” I counter.

“You have to admit he has a solid technique.”

“A professional stonecutter,” I suggest. “That should narrow your search.”

“If only. Do you know how many stonecutters are in Sonoma County now that everybody and his mother have a granite countertop? At first I thought the clean handwriting took your old boyfriend Vince out of the running, but it’s occurred to me since that he may have had an accomplice. Any thoughts about Vince in this regard?”

“He avoided conflicts at all costs.”

“Until he didn’t.”

 “You really suspect him of murder?”

“I think Jesus was his local dealer and that Vince may not have liked what he was peddling.”

 “What about my name?” I holler. “Why the fuck is my name mixed up in all of this?”

 “That’s the thing that’s got me stumped. Vince certainly seems to be obsessed with you.”

I imagine Boyer’s half-eaten apple turning brown in his bomber pocket. “Vince’s interest in me intensified only after I left him.”

“That’s the way it often goes—seller’s remorse.”

“I was never his property, detective, and if anybody did the selling it was me.”

“Point taken. And I take it you felt no remorse.”

“Only that I didn’t leave him sooner.”

“An exemplary character witness,” Boyer says with a wink. “But you don’t think he had anything to do with the killing?”

I shrug. “I have no idea how desperate these addicts get when they don’t find the heroin to their liking.”

“Or Fentanyl, as is more likely the case.” 

The detective pulls a joint in a tube out of his briefcase. “Hey, I hear you’re a smoker, Pina. I brought another doobie for you.” He pulls out a second tube and hands it to me. “The joint’s clean, been in the tube for two days.” Now he yanks out a little spritzer of disinfectant and aims it at my open hands. “Better safe than sorry.”

I slip the joint from the tube and allow Boyer to light it. He has a funny way of smoking; he tugs on his joint three times before inhaling deeply. After exhaling he says, “Go light on this, Pina, this is Forestville Fuckface, a supercharged Sativa that I’ve enhanced with kief. I like to say that it turns thinking into a spectator sport in which the smoker is both athlete and observer.”

“You don’t seem to be going light,” I say, before taking a full toke.

“Well, I’ve become an elite athlete at this sport.”

 I point to Luigi Basagilia’s gravestone. “How did you happen to find this up here?”

“Oh, this cemetery is one of my favorite stomping grounds. This place, more than any cemetery I know, tickles my forensic archeology funny bone, my FAFB,” Boyer says with a laugh. “In the old days when I was still a carnivore I’d come up here with a couple of meatball sandwiches and a bottle of Guinness and spend the afternoon exploring. The only disheartening thing about those times is that I discovered I had more in common with the dead than the living. This time I had a hunch that I’d find something up here. I wasn’t looking for your name, per se, but perhaps the knife. Something.”

“I see what you mean about this stuff,” I said after taking a couple of more tokes.”

“Yes, this weed turns into a kind of truth serum. Try and lie when you’re high on it and your nose will grow.”

”My nose is already long, detective.”

“You haven’t seen anything yet. Let’s try it out. Tell me a lie, Pina. Tell me that you think Vince is an honorable man; that you have an abiding love for Charlie’s daughter Sally; tell me that you haven’t thought of poisoning Roscoe, and that Charlie doesn’t repeat your name in triplicate when he’s being affectionate, just a couple of times less than the handwriting on the restaurant check and the carving on the tombstone.”

“I’m not going to tell you any of that,” I say.

“That’s good, Pina, your nose won’t grow any longer.”

“Don’t tell me you’re looking at Charlie for this crime.”

“Looking. I like that, Pina. It’s right out of NYPD Blue. Let’s just say my eyes are open.”

The strange man is beginning to frighten me. “How about me? Do you suspect me detective?”

Boyer pulls a yellow legal pad out of his briefcase, along with a felt tip pen. “Would you mind writing your name five times, Pina?”

“You really think I’d carve my name into somebody’s back, detective?”

Boyer strokes his chin. “Well, if you happened to have murdered the man, I’d say all bets are off.” He sprays the pen with disinfectant and hands it to me.

I shake my head, suddenly pissed to be wasting my time with this doofus detective and his charade. Nonetheless, I take the pen and write my name five times on the legal pad.

“Very interesting,” he says. “The backward slant of your signature bares no resemblance at all to the samples of your writing I’ve seen.”

“Where have you seen my signature?” I demand.

“Public records. I’m always interested in the phenomenon of people who are not a suspect but turn themselves into one. How much time did you spend, perfecting that backward slant, Pina?”

“I don’t have to talk with you. You’re not a cop,” I say, stepping away from Boyer.

“No, you don’t. I’m curious why you did.”

With that, I head back down Toyen and, turning back once, I see Boyer nibbling on his apple. 

Furious now, I walk down First Street West into town, past a couple of empty wine tasting gardens, and fucking tourists everywhere, waiting for the party to start. I notice a line in front of The Girl and the Fig—people lining up for takeout. That’s when I hear the voice: “Pa-pina . . . Pa-pina.”

Fucking Aubrey, the last person in the world I want to see. 

 

Pina came into the condo with two-dozen oysters and a big smile on her face. “What’s going on, Charlie? All this talk about Jesus. Have you gone and found religion?”

I didn’t have the heart to reveal what Augie Boyer had told me and, surprisingly, Pina didn’t press me about our phone conversation and what she called my freneticism. She knew something was up, knew that I had an upsetting thing to tell her, but we left it there, glowing between us like a steady campfire. I watched Pina at the sink. Her attention shifted to the oysters. She’d collected ice from the freezer and layered the bottom of a beer platter with it, and then spilled the oysters from their sack, crackling into a tin colander. My desire for her was tremendous; I wanted to bite her neck, to ravage her, really, as if her presence was endangered and I needed to act quickly. I watched her fetch a pair of oyster knives from the junk drawer and wave them at me. The specter of knives, even dull ones like these, sent a chill through me.

“Are you going to help with the shucking?” she asked in her flirty voice, her head turning to watch me watching her. I grabbed her by the waist and turned her toward me. After I kissed the corner of her lips and took a nibble of her neck, she aimed an oyster knife at me. “What’s on your mind, Mister? Hmm, maybe religion is a good idea for you.”

We shucked oysters together and my distress, at least momentarily, shifted to the fact that Pina opened them so much more quickly than I did. When I was halfway through my dozen, she said, “I’ll make a mignonette, while you finish up with those.”

I pulled out a bottle of Schramsberg Blanc de Blancs that I was saving for the next night, New Year’s Eve, and Pina asked if she could saber the bottle. It was a trick I’d showed her. She took a chef’s knife from the block and we went out on the deck. With macho force she swung the blade, achieved a clean break, and sent the top of the bottle soaring over the railing and into a hedge below. I stood by with a couple of champagne flutes to catch what I could of the bubbly gusher. Pina nodded her head smugly like a combatant who had conquered a difficult opponent.

After we toasted each other, I told Pina, for no reason but to avoid what I should be telling her, that Schramsburg was the California champagne that Nixon brought on his trip to China.

“And that’s supposed to endear me to it?” Pina asked.

“It was just an interesting factoid,” I said.

“Oh, Charlie, you are so full of interesting factoids.” Pina was still holding the chef’s knife, swinging it at her side; she looked ready to saber another bottle. Knives out were clearly the theme of the day.

After eating the sumptuous oysters we went to bed with the idea that we’d have an omelet after we enjoyed each other.

I don’t know how to say this nicely, but I fucked Pina especially hard, my afternoon of fear coalesced into carnal force. Pina didn’t seem to mind; she screamed with pleasure, her nails carving jagged lines into my back.

After love, I propped myself up on an elbow and faced Pina. It seemed as good a time as any. “You know, I had that meeting with Augie Boyer, the detective.”

Pina, facing me now, grinned as if my encounter with a detective was among the silliest things she ever heard. “Yeah, that’s what you were trying to tell me about on the phone.”

“He’s working on the case of The Girl and the Fig waiter that got killed in Boyes Hot Springs. Do you remember?”

“Vaguely.”

“It happened a month or so ago. A guy named Jesus.”

“Oh, that’s the Jesus you were talking about.”

The distance between Pina’s indifference to the killing and the fact that her name was carved on the victim’s back was too great for me to bridge. There’s no other way of saying it: I chickened out. I’d given the detective Pina’s number. He’d be calling her in the next days. Let him spill the beans. I did mention Augie Boyer’s idea that the killer might have been a disgruntled customer.”

Pina laughed. “The guy really didn’t like the service. What was he expecting—Jesus to multiply the fishes and loaves?”

I felt ashamed of myself for withholding the pertinent facts and went further astray by talking about how the detective had allowed his wife to give him a makeover, which I described with all the particularities I recalled. As I mentioned Augie Boyer’s spiked red hair and pirate hoop earrings, my tale turned into a farce.

“So is that what you want from me?” Pina asked. “To give you a makeover? Actually, I kind of like you as you are, Charlie.”

“That’s a comfort.”

“Don’t get too comfortable.”

That was a laugh—I felt so far from comfortable that I thought I might crack. That’s when the pounding on the front door started. I dressed in a hurry. The thoughts racing through my head were dizzying. Was this the killer at the door making the racket? Don’t open it. Was it the sheriff, or Augie Boyer having connected more threads to the web of the murder? The pounding stopped and I listened for footsteps. Whoever was at the door hadn’t yet descended the stairs. Pina had put on her kimono and was crouched behind me at the door. We’d become a pair of farcical figures, awaiting doom.

The pounding began again. “Open the door, Dad! I have a mask on.”

I exhaled deeply before screaming at the door: “Why all the racket, Sally?” I didn’t want to open it, but I put on a mask. I turned to look at Pina who shrugged, as if to say it’s your call.

“What’s on your mind, Sally?”

“Your dereliction of duty, Dad.”

“Stand back from the door, Sally, and I’ll come outside.” I opened the door gingerly. How had my daughter become a threat to me?

Sally stood against the railing at the top of the stairs and I could tell she was high. Very high. Her eyes shot to the right and then to the left as if the only vision she had was peripheral.

“What are you on, Sally?”

“’What am I on?’ That sounds so Fifties, Dad, like ‘Marijuana Confidential’ or something.”

“Except you’re not high on weed.”

“You’re very perceptive, Dad.”

I reminded myself of my Al-anon lessons. It was inappropriate to ask anything about Sally’s intoxication. I had another question for her. “Did you know Jesus from The Girl and the Fig?”

“The guy who got killed?”

“Did you know him?”

Sally’s response was not verbal. She did something she used to do when she was a kid, hiding her eyes behind her forehead in an if-I-can’t-see-you, you-can’t- see-me ploy. It was no longer cute as it had been when she was a child.

“Did you know him?” I repeated.

Sally glared at me, if such a thing is possible, with absent eyes. “What’s with the interrogation, bitch?”

“Do not talk to me like that.” It distressed me profoundly to see Sally like this. The fact that I couldn’t do anything about it disturbed me all the more. ”Tell me about Jesus.”

“The son of God or the dude from The Girl and the Fig?”

“Don’t be a smart ass.”

Sally sat down on the top step. “Jesus had his share of enemies.”

“How do you know that?”

My daughter sighed unpleasantly. “Dude not only sold drugs, he had a mouth on him.”

“What does that mean—he had a mouth on him?”

“What’s up with your curiosity, Dad? I came here to talk about how you’re wasting your Roscoe capital, and I end up getting ambushed with all this Jesus crap.”

“Tell me about his mouth.”

“What? You want to know about his mustache, for crying out loud.”

“Don’t fuck with me, Sally.”

“I don’t know—he just went off on people. He had no patience for stupid white people, which essentially means all white people.”

“Then how could he work at The Fig?”

“He needed the job for his parole.”

“So you bought drugs from him?”

Sally shrugged, which I took for a yes.

“Were you using when you first got down to Sonoma?”

She turned her head to the side and I chided myself for the interrogation of her personally. It was a complete no-no in the Al-anon playbook.

“What can I help you with, Sal?”

“I need money.”

So her visit had little to do with Roscoe. “I can’t give you money. I can give you food.”

Sally stood up. “If I don’t get money I’m going to have to sell my soul, Dad.”

“Your soul or your body?”

“You sell one you sell the other. Just give me a hundred bucks, Dad.”

I shook my head.

“Come on, Dad. It’ll be the last time.”

“It’s not going to happen, Sal.”

“I got some guys I got to pay.”

“I can help you get into rehab.”

“I need cash, Dad. That’s all I need.”

“We can drive to the county detox.”

“It doesn’t sound like you talking, Dad. What’s the matter, fucking Pina get into your head?” With that Sally turned and, like a pony, gamboled down the stairs.”

“Take care of yourself, Sally,” I called after her.

“Sure thing,” she shouted, and then after a beat, added, “Bitch.”

I walked down the steps slowly, without any intention of following Sally, my heart riven. It’s difficult not to blame yourself for you child’s waywardness, but it’s not a useful response. It was much easier with Sally living on the Lost Coast. Out of sight, out of mind. Of course I always had the suspicion that Sally was lost on the Lost Coast. I’d lost my family to addiction—first my wife to alcohol and another man, now my daughter. Where does my culpability lie?

I walked east on the bike trail and texted Pina that I’d be back soon. A runner, hyperventilating without a mask, dashed past me and I shouted after him: “What’s the matter with you? Are you too Republican to wear a mask?” He turned and flipped me off. Of course, my anger was misplaced. I sat on one of the benches facing north and called Augie Boyer. I hoped I could just leave a message, but the detective answered: “Charlie, what you got for me?”

“I was going to ask you if you had any breaks.”

“Breaks? No, I’m just plotzing along with my magnifying glass. What’s on your mind, Charlie?”

“I spoke with my daughter Sally, who, it seems, knew Jesus from the street.”

“She bought drugs from him.”

I took a long gulping breath. “Yes. She says he had a mouth on him and had it in for white people.”

“So was it a white person or gaggle of white peeps that had issues with Jesus? I’m going to want to talk to your daughter as well as your girlfriend, Charlie. From what I’ve ascertained, it appears like your daughter has been candy-flipping.”

“Candy-flipping?”

“In her case a combo of Fentanyl and crack cocaine. They used to call it a speedball back in the glory days of Chet Baker and the like. I’m sorry to tell you this, Charlie.”

“You’ve been tracking her?”

“Just watching the street.”

“It’s heartbreaking.”

“I can only imagine. I don’t know what I’d do if my eight-year-old Buson went astray. Tell me this, Charlie—does Sally get along with Pina? Is there any animus there?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a simple question, Charlie.”

I thought of Sally saying fucking Pina, not a half hour ago. Again, I gulped for breath. “You don’t think . . .”

“I don’t think anything, Charlie. I’m not paid to think. Take a look next time you see me—do I look like a thinker? No, I’m not paid to think; I’m paid for the pudding, as the proof is in.”

Augie Boyer, as is his way, left me with a haiku:

 The tooth of the crime

Is sharpened with grievances.

Save us from ourselves.

When I got back from my walk I sat Pina down and told her about Augie Boyer and about her name being written in multiples on the back of a restaurant check, but also carved into the dead waiter’s back. Pina’s mouth dropped open slowly, and stayed open. She began to shake and, sitting beside her on the sofa, I held her close. She mouthed why several times, an existential query she couldn’t manage to say out loud. The word hung on her lips. Of course, we both felt the terror—her name carved on a dead man’s back. I hoped against hope that there was another Pina out there and that this horror had nothing to do with the woman in my arms.

When she was able to speak, Pina asked about the victim; I reminded her of the news item we’d read in the Index Tribune about Jesus, and told her what I’d learned from Sal and Augie Boyer. Then I posed obvious questions: Was she aware of anybody that might be obsessed with her? Did she and Sally have bad blood between them? Was Vince using again? If so, might the dead Jesus have been his dealer? Noting that the waiter was killed a month ago, I asked when Vince moved up here from the city.

Pina responded in the negative to the first questions, but went silent when it came to Vince. She wiped her watery eyes with the handkerchief I handed her, and then licked her lips like somebody who was parched. “I think Vince is using again,” she said, finally.

“What makes you say that?”

“A hunch. I can find out.”

“What are you going to do, go undercover with Vince? Last time you ended up under the covers with him.”

“Don’t you trust me, Charlie?”

“Should I?”

“That’s for you to decide,” she said, and wiped what was left of the tears from her eyes.

“I’m worried about your safety.” That was partly true. I also imagined her coupling with Vince again.”

“Are you concerned that he might kill me?” she asked with a bit of dare in her eyes, “or seduce me?”

“I won’t dignify that with an answer,” I said, feeling disingenuous as soon as I uttered those words.

Pina smirked. “Whose dignity is it that’s at stake here?”

That struck me as a clever question, but I didn’t give a damn about the answer. I got up and walked to the far end of the room. When I looked back, I noticed Pina, again, mouthing the word why.

 

 

Today I am at loose ends, after giving myself a two-week holiday from my clients. Almost all of them seemed happy for a break. A person can only work so much on her frailties. The only client who’s seemed to regret the interruption is good old Aubrey, who’s actually made strides with his stutter. He’s had two recent setbacks, however: his mother died of COVID in a Berkeley nursing home, and then he got furloughed from his job. The man still has difficulty pronouncing my name. “Pa-pina,” he said during our last session, “can’t you make an excep . . . an exception for me? You’re the only thing that . . . that . . . that keeps me ce –ce-centered.”

I insisted that I needed the break. When I expressed sympathy for his mother’s passing for a second time, Aubrey said, “That woman was a ba-bitch, Pina. She always made fun of me, made fun of her own . . . her own son. Ba-bitch.” 

We were out of time, but that didn’t seem a good place to leave it. I asked Aubrey if he had any plans for the holiday. 

“I might do anything, Pa-pina. I’m a free man now. My mother, the ba-bitch, left . . . left me her how-house and her stock . . . stock holdings. One thing for . . . for sure, I’m not going to take shit . . . take shit from anybody. I will miss  . . . miss you, Pa-pina.”

After Charlie leaves to meet some detective in town, I decide to drive to the city. I’ve become a little homesick for San Francisco and have thought again about renting an apartment there, seeing if I can get Charlie to divide his time with me in the city. It’s a discussion I’ve been afraid to bring up as Charlie and I repair our relationship.

Musing about this upsets me and I respond with an odd homing instinct by taking the exit for San Rafael, the small city in which I grew up, and where I lived during my marriage to Marco. The problem is that I’d just as soon keep the ghosts of San Rafael at a distance. The solution, I decide, is to head to Fairfax and pick up a Reuben at Gestalt Haus. I turn onto Sir Francis Drake and suddenly I am all appetite. The Gestalt Haus Reuben is perhaps the best example of the species I’ve ever had. On marbled bread, with a glut of corned, Swiss cheese, and sauerkraut, it is so large that half of it could be today’s lunch and half tomorrow’s. 

But, alas, Gestalt Haus is closed and it appears that closure might be its permanent fate. When there is so much to grieve—345,000 deaths from the virus when I last looked—is it unseemly to mourn the demise of a watering hole, beloved to bicyclists and lovers of beer, sausage, and deli sandwiches, an establishment that bills itself with endearing humor as The French Laundry of Sausage? I think not. 

And now I’m left with the matter of my appetite. I walk the three or four blocks of the village looking for some takeout that appeals. Nada. Where the hell am I going next? Such pressing problems. I decide, finally, that a walk on Limantour Beach at Point Reyes might clèar my head. Before leaving Fairfax I call ahead to the Bovine Bakery in Point Reyes Station and order my consolation prize: two croissant sandwiches, one with chèvre and spinach, the other, scallions and comté. 

The drive from Fairfax to Point Reyes is filled with memories from my childhood and beyond that I am unable to steer clear of. I suppose that is to be expected at the end of a year that featured the Death March as its theme song. I drive past the one-block town of Lagunitas, the site of my first car crash. I backed away from the lone grocery store, without looking, and rammed an old man’s weathered pickup, as he was about to pull in. My friend Denise was with me and, though we were both sixteen, we’d each managed to buy a pint of Southern Comfort. After backing into the truck, I whispered frantically to Denise, “Hide those bottles under the seat,” and then climbed out of my car—an ancient Oldsmobile Cutlass that my father thought would be a good “learner” car for me—and apologized to the old man, who’d stepped from his truck and actually tipped his seed cap. “Young lady,” he said, “looks like we was both in the wrong place at the wrong time. The good thing about it is you managed to wake me up.” He laughed at his own joke and then bent over to consider his fender. “Don’t see any damage here worth enumerating.” He turned to my Olds. “Looks like you lost a taillight. You’re gonna want to have that replaced. Other than that it’s a matter of cosmetics, young lady, and I guess you know more about that than me.”

“So we don’t have to call the police?” I asked and held my breath.

“I don’t see why we would.” He tipped his cap again and, as he climbed back into the truck, said, “Watch out now. Next time it might be me backing into you.”

At that moment in my life, when I suspected anybody over the age of twenty of being an alien, the old man’s kindness brought tears to my eyes. 

Instead of driving home, Denise and I pushed off to a spot along Lagunitas Creek, where we managed to polish off one pint of Southern Comfort between us. I can still remember passing the bottle back and forth and practically gagging on the stuff as I wiped my lips on the tails of my summer blouse. The Southern Comfort was Denise’s idea. She said, “If it’s good enough for Janis Joplin, it’s good enough for us.” That sweet hooch, along with a long crooked joint, left us both sizzled and we were wise enough to save the extra bottle for another time. It was a warm August day and we went skinny-dipping in the creek, wishing a couple of boys would come along and join us. 

Now the winding road that passes through the redwoods of Samuel Taylor State Park reminds me of my family and the times the three of us camped in the park. My father grew up in Italy with a love for American cowboys. Camping was as close as he could get to the wild frontier. Conflating the wilderness with this particular campground, which always seemed to be filled with screaming teenage boys, took some imagination, and yet being less than a half hour drive from our home in San Rafael, made Samuel Taylor my father’s favorite spot. Back in those days you didn’t need to make a reservation; there always seemed to be an open campsite. My dad would come home from work on a Friday afternoon and say, “Pack your sleeping bag, Pina, we’re going camping.” My mother, a good sport in these matters, brought a tin of Folgers—she carried teabags for herself so she wouldn’t have to drink the cowboy coffee—and filled the Igloo with eggs, bacon, potatoes, and the ubiquitous package of Oscar Meyer hotdogs. I was responsible for making sure every piece of the camp cook set was clean. My father stacked a supply of firewood, which he kept under a tarp in the back of the station wagon. You were only allowed to burn presto logs at the campsite. I suppose that sneaking some cherry wood into our campfire was his way of being an outlaw. We also fished without licenses, though rarely caught anything. One time my dad landed a good-sized trout and it became part of our supper. He charred it on the outside and it was raw inside. I remember pushing hunks of it off my tin plate when he wasn’t looking and grounding them under my shoes.

My father wore his cowboy hat, an outsized black Stetson, on our camp outs. When I was young he looked heroic to me in the hat, but by the time I hit middle school, by which time my parents embarrassed me, nothing underscored what yokels they were as much as the black Stetson.

How many times did Marco and I take this road from Point Reyes Station to Limantour? It was our favorite beach. Today it is practically empty. Marco was a man who liked to hold hands. As I walk north along the beach, I feel the weight of my empty hand. Twenty minutes north I spot a pod of whales. The sight of three or four breaching gets me excited. I want to believe that Marco sent them, but I know better. I wish I had someone with me to share my excitement. That somebody would be Charlie. There is no bringing back the dead. That I’d choose Charlie, from all living beings, for company—that’s the way I phrase it in my head—is a genuine comfort and strikes me as a line from a marriage vow.

The whales must be feeding because they’re not heading north or south, just breaching in some kind of cosmic choreography with an occasional spout slowly feathering into the air. I can’t gauge their distance—two hundred yards or much further? How close must I be to see such particularities? 

I had questions along the same lines the other week when Charlie and I climbed to an open spot in the Sonoma Mountain Cemetery to gaze at the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. Being high above the lights of Sonoma gave us the illusion that we were closer to the planets than to the town. It was a cool night; we brought a blanket, a thermos of coffee, and a flask of cognac. With our bare eyes we could see the fat dot of Jupiter and the blurred suggestion of Saturn to its left. Then Charlie surprised me: he pulled a good pair of field glasses from a case in his pocket. With those the distance shrank; our vision became crisper and our imaginations more daring: Charlie saw all the rings of Saturn and I had no doubt that my enhanced eyes actually perceived the fluid dry-ice atmosphere of Jupiter, which Charlie kept referring to as the gas giant. He explained that both planets consisted of mostly helium and hydrogen, and that neither had a hard surface. I couldn’t understand how a thing could exist, especially such a huge thing, without a hard surface.

At some point I asked the distance we were from the planets and Charlie, like a guy who had studied for the quiz, said, “Jupiter is between 365 and 601 million miles away depending on our respective orbits of the sun.” 

I took a good slug of brandy and asked, “Well, how many miles away is it now?”

Charlie picked up the binoculars and took a long look. In his British astronomer voice, he said, “It appears to be 385 million miles away at the moment.” 

I demanded to know how the human eye could see something 385 miles away.

“We can hardly not see what’s right in front of us,” he responded in his arch brogue. “It gives you a sense of just what insignificant specks we are in the universe.”

Charlie poured himself a cup of coffee; I wasn’t sharing the cognac. 

“It’s a comfort,” I said, “to know that no matter how much you fuck up your life it doesn’t even register the tiniest blip in the universe.”

“Oh, Pina,” Charlie said, in his own sweet voice, “you’re always looking on the bright side.”

There is no cell service out as far as Limantour Beach, not that I wanted any. My phone doesn’t start dinging with missed calls for quite a few miles, and I don’t stop to respond to Charlie’s numerous calls until I reach Petaluma.

“Where are you, Pina?” Charlie shouts. “Where are you?”

It is hard to go from the solitude of the beach to Charlie’s frenetic talk. I do my best not to take it in, once he checks off the list of all the terrible things that could have happened that didn’t. I feel badly for whatever has made him so anxious, but he tells me that he can’t explain until we are together in the same room. He keeps asking if I am safe. I wonder if he’s had a nervous breakdown, and if so what’s driven him to it. He keeps talking some nonsense about Jesus being killed. I tell him that I will be home soon.

 

I barely remember Augie Boyer, although I saw him numerous times, years ago, at Bobby Sabbatini’s poetry church in Guerneville. Boyer, a stout, disheveled looking detective, had actually taken over the church for a short period after the attack on Sabbatini, but I’d stopped attending the church by then. Yesterday he called out of the blue about a month-old murder he was investigating, just outside of Sonoma in Boyes Hot Springs.

I’d read about the killing in the Sonoma Index-Tribune. The victim had been a server at The Girl and the Fig, a man called Jesus—a hard-to-forget moniker—whose surname, of Latino origin, I’ve forgotten. All I recall from the newspaper’s profile of Jesus is that he was a graduate of Sonoma Valley High, had overcome a drug addiction, and was leading a productive life along the straight and narrow. I can’t remember any mention of how the victim was killed or anything about the investigation. I assumed, in my ignorance, that the case was drug related. Pina and I had talked briefly about the murder, because they are so rare in this area; you see a killing occasionally in Santa Rosa or Fairfield, but not in Sonoma Valley. Neither of us could recall a waiter named Jesus.

Augie Boyer wanted to come out to Sonoma and ask me a few questions about the case. I didn’t see how I could help him, as I didn’t know the victim and had no connections in Boyes Hot Springs.

“Have you eaten at The Girl and the Fig in the last three years?” Boyer asked.

“Yes, of course.”

“Then maybe you’d recognize the victim. Perhaps he even waited on you.”

“Yes, but I don’t see . . .”

“Our mutual friend, Sabbatini, says you have an uncanny way of bringing clarity to difficult situations and, damn it, Charlie, I could use a little clarity after going around in circles the last few weeks. There are a couple of things I’d like to show you.”

I asked Boyer if he was working with the sheriff’s department and he laughed in a way that sounded as if that was an absurd idea. “No, no, I’m working for a private party.”

I agreed to meet him this afternoon in the square and he left me with a haiku that sent a chill:

Murder, Boyes Hot Spring:

strung up with black Rhino rope,

a dude named Jesus.

Meanwhile, I sent Sally the four videos of Roscoe I’d just finished editing this morning.

She responded quickly by email: “These spots are too generic. Where are Roscoe’s appeals to voters about the Georgia senate races? Where is his outrage re Trump pardoning his mob of criminal loyalists, about blocking the stimulus package and leaving millions of Americans to starve? Where’s the strategy, the political will, the urgency, the relevance? What you’ve made are feel-good ads, and feel-good is so twentieth century. Get a spine, pops.”

I decided to not respond and pretty soon Sally started to call. There seemed no reason to answer. Then the texts started flying and I turned off the sound. No way I was going to be terrorized by my daughter.

Walking to the square I got nervous—I remembered that the murdered Jesus had a history with drugs. Did Sally know him, know people who knew him? Anything was possible. Why else, I wondered, would detective Boyer want to see me?

I didn’t recognize the man when I got to the appointed spot in the park, but he came straight toward me. He’d either changed completely or I was thinking of another man. This guy had spiked red hair, wore platinum hoop earrings, and Ray-Ban aviators; he also appeared significantly lighter than the chubby man I remembered. The detective, if this was he, even appeared to have gained height, but his houndstooth Converse platforms may have accounted for that. The high-tops reminded me of Gita in her saffron Chuckies, and our brief tryst in San Francisco. She’s called a few times since but I haven’t picked up. If I’d only applied that strategy to the detective.

The guy wore a light tweed sport coat and pressed jeans, which, along with the hoop earrings, gave him the look of a pirate on his way to church. He stopped ten feet from me and I decided it had to be Augie Boyer because his facemask featured a haiku:

Winter evening—

 It is not a piece of cake

 To be born human.

“Good to see you, Charlie. Thanks for agreeing to meet with me.”

I nodded to Boyer.

“I know, how could you recognize me, Charlie? My wife Quince gave me a makeover. She wanted a little more edge from her man. What could I say; I adore the woman. I also lopped off fifty pounds, became a vegan, and jump rope every morning for forty-five minutes. Quince seems happy with the transformation, but I’m in perpetual mourning: I miss my hamburgers; I miss my baby back ribs. I woke yesterday morning from a dream of fried chicken, a platter of it with pork-braised collards.” The detective looked down at the ground like a man beset with grief. Of all things, he wore a display hankie in his breast pocket, monogrammed 5-7-5, the syllabic count of a haiku.

“I like your mask,” I said.

“It’s quite a bastardization of the original haiku by Issa.” Now he gazed at me intently. “But you, you look great, Charlie. Fit as a fiddle. Hey, that would make a decent first line for a haiku. Let’s see:

Fit as a fiddle

in the middle of the plague,

he counts his blessings.

“That’s my new thing—the speed-haiku. When we get to the end of the plague, I’ll be hosting speed-haiku slams, doing my best to promote the American vernacular. In summer contestants will be encouraged to wear their Speedos. I think it will be very popular with the post-Millennials. I bet they bring amazing velocity to their haikus, with vernacular that we can’t even imagine.”

It occurred to me that Augie Boyer had turned into a full-fledged nut case in the years since I’d seen him.

Sensing that he was losing me, he said, “But back to you, Charlie—I remember you and your daughter from the church. Sally, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.” Here we go, I thought.

“And now you have Roscoe. ‘Roscoe here.’ He’s a marvelous manipulation, Charlie. I don’t know how you get him to look so real. If you’d only get him to recite haikus, the whole world might start writing them.”

Little did this chump detective know that Roscoe could compose his own.

“Oh, before I forget, Bobby and Blossom send their fond regards, and Bobby wants you to know that your one-syllable idea for his talking machine has been invaluable.”

“Glad to hear it.” I led Boyer to a bench near the duck pond. Once we were seated, the detective unzipped his canvas briefcase and pulled out a photograph.     “Do you recognize him?”

“That’s Jesus?”

“Yes, before he was crucified.”

“He was crucified?”

“Well, I’m not sure about the technical requirements of a crucifixion. If you need to be nailed to a cross, then this Jesus doesn’t qualify. He was bound to two pillars in his family’s basement, with weighted jump rope, the same kind I use. Don’t tell anybody about that, Charlie, or they’ll come looking for me.” Boyer sniggered at his little joke. “But the poor guy’s arms were stretched out just like he was on the cross. You’d think they’d bring in the FBI to look at this as a religious killing—guy named Jesus strung up like that.”

“So it wasn’t the jump rope that killed him.”

“Nope, it wasn’t the rope.” The detective was in no hurry to tell me how Jesus died.

“So do you recognize him, Charlie?”

I looked again at the photo. “Matter of fact, I do. I haven’t been to The Fig during the pandemic, but he’s waited on me before.”

“Notice anything particular about him?”

“He was business like, not the overly friendly type server.”

“Anything else?”

I shook my head and gazed down at Boyer’s absurd houndstooth hi-tops.

“Was English his first language?”

“I believe so.”

“Have you seen him around town, Charlie?”

“Can’t say I have.”

The detective’s next question frightened me: “Do you have any reason to believe that Jesus had anything to do with your friend Pina?”

“Pina?”

“Yes, Pina.”

I expected him to say Sally, but not Pina.

“Have a look at this.” Boyer pulled a Girl and the Fig restaurant check from his briefcase. Nothing about it seemed remarkable. “Flip it over.”

I took the check and did just as the spike-haired detective said. The backside, in careful, looping handwriting, looked like this:

Pina

Pina

Pina

Pina

Pina

Pina

“Does the handwriting look familiar to you?” Boyer asked. He was watching me closely now. In shock after seeing the written repetitions, I simply shook my head.

“The handwriting is very deliberate. Very neat, wouldn’t you say? Almost fastidious.”

Again, I nodded.

“You can see that the writer strove to make each Pina identical to the others, which signifies I know not what, although it may underscore an obsessive tendency. Pina is not a common name, is it, Charlie?”

“No.”

“But it’s your girlfriend’s name. She lives with you in Sonoma and her favorite restaurant is The Girl and the Fig.”

“True, but I don’t understand the connection to the murder.”

“Maybe there is none. Maybe the customer, who Jesus waited on, just chose the word at random. Maybe the guy was thinking about another Pina when he doodled the name repeatedly.”

“Maybe it wasn’t a man. The handwriting looks like a woman’s.”

“You can’t tell these days, Charlie. It could be transgender handwriting, for all we know, but I’m betting it’s a man’s, a very special man.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, how did you end up with the check?”

Boyer rocked his head sideways and I watched his hoop earrings jiggle. “How did I end up with the check? A lot of schmoozing and, though you wouldn’t think it to look at me, a good deal of hard work.”

“I still don’t get the connection between the handwriting and the murder.”

“What if I tell you that Jesus disrespected this customer?”

“Is that what happened?”

“Could be.”

It began to feel like I’d fallen into a surreal mystery with Joe Pesci as the detective. Boyer looked at his watch and then pulled a lidded tube out of his pocket. “Hope you don’t mind, it’s my cocktail hour.” He shook a joint from the tube and lit it. After taking a few tokes, always blowing the smoke away from me, he said, “Sorry to not be able to share it, Charlie. That’s yet another casualty of the virus, what my friend Coolican calls peace pipe phobia.” The detective dropped his hot joint back into the tube, capped it, and slipped it all back into his pocket. When he noticed my surprise, he said, “The flame needs oxygen to maintain, just as my suppositions need some form of corroboration to stay kindled.”

“I don’t see how I can help with that.”

“And if I told you that the disrespected customer waited until the end of Jesus’s shift and followed him home to Boyes Hot Springs, and attacked

him . . . ”

“This is more supposition?” I asked.

“Except for the fact—and I don’t want to upset you, Charlie, because this is a very disturbing crime—except for the fact that the name Pina was also carved into the victim’s back.”

“That actually happened?”

Boyer nodded and lowered his eyes. “The handwriting match isn’t identical; the back version is roughly twice the size as the names on the restaurant check, and I think one has to make exceptions—again, this is very upsetting—given the difference of writing with pen on paper and knife on flesh.”

I stood up, not to leave, but in an involuntary response to the horror that Boyer described.

“I know how upsetting this must be, Charlie.”

I sat back down. “Why Pina?” I asked in exasperation.

“That’s what I want to know. I hear she’s a very attractive woman.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“I agree, it shouldn’t, but once in a while you get a sociopath who fixates on what he knows he can’t get.”

“Do you think Pina’s in danger?”

“If she were my wife, I wouldn’t let her out of the house for the time being.”

“You should speak with her old boyfriend.”

“Vince. Yes, I just met with him down at that food truck on Broadway, El Coyote. I knew that a Mexican food truck was unlikely to have vegan fare so I decided to emulate a Jewish fellow I know who won’t eat bacon in his house, but first chance he gets in a restaurant he’s talking BLT. Two carnitas tostadas with plenty of hot sauce later, I think I may be headed to an early grave. How are you with heartburn, Charlie?”

I ignored the question. Why the fuck did I have to listen to this joker go on about his digestion? “And Vince?”

“Yes, Vince. I met with him under false circumstances. Some times you have to do that. He doesn’t know what I told you. He sent some haikus into a contest I judge for 5-7-5 Magazine and I pretended he was one of the winners. Told him I wanted to meet him. Between you and me, Charlie, his haikus were for shit. But he’s the kind of guy that dicks like me dream about—all you need to do is flatter him. I told him that to make it personal we were collecting handwritten copies of the winning haikus, then I produced pen and paper, and he scrawled out his silly three lines. No way it was his Pina on the restaurant check. This quack has been knocking out cramped, illegible prescriptions for more than thirty years. And have you looked at his hands—knuckles twisted this way and that—that junkie’s got some serious arthritis.

“Yeah, I know all about Vince: his philandering; his fear and trembling as a doc; his subterranean journeys through the Tenderloin. I know how he wronged Pina in the past and how he took advantage of her recently after he got her drunk. I can only imagine how that made you feel, Charlie. I also know that he taunted you outside of the vegetable shack, and that you put him on the ground with a single punch; that’s enviable efficiency, Charlie.”

I could feel myself blush and wondered how Augie Boyer had found all this out.

“I took a distinct approach with him,” the detective continued. I let nothing out of the bag. The dude tried to flatter me, told me he admired my haiku book, Colloquial Man, which won the annual Seventeen Syllable Prize. I played a little speed haiku with him. The free-associations can be telling. Fed him the first line: He’s known as God’s son. Old Vince came back real flashy with, a messianic nightmare; I closed it out with: for nonbelievers.”

Boyer recited the haiku:

“He’s known as God’s son,

a messianic nightmare

for non-believers.

“Then it was Vince’s turn to commence. Man without courage, he said; I followed with, like an arthritic eunuch and he brought it home with, cries for his own soul.

Man without courage,

like an arthritic eunuch,

cries for his own soul.

“I started a final haiku for Vince: The woman I love; he came back quickly, was always too good for me; and then, in a switcheroonie, I asked him to finish it; the words must have been on his tongue: oh, how I miss her. You see, three speed-haikus tell you more about a man than a year on a therapist’s couch.

The woman I love

was always too good for me.

Oh, how I miss her. “

“So, what did you learn?” I asked, getting weary of Boyer’s hijinks.

“That Vince is a nonbeliever riven with guilt, but powerless to act, and that he’s sentimental about love, but incapable of it.” Augie Boyer pulled out his joint again and lit it. “My second martini. I’m incorrigible.” Again he blew the smoke away from me.

“So, what’s your next move, detective?”

“I’d like to speak with Pina, but I wanted to talk with you first, Charlie.”

“What do you want from her?”

“Just what you’d expect.” He holds his joint in the air. “To find out if she can think of anybody who’s obsessed with her.”

“Will you let me sit in with her when you meet?”

“You realize, Charlie, I have no legal means to compel Pina to talk with me. It’s a favor I’ll ask her, just as I asked you, but I believe it is to everybody’s benefit. By the time the sheriff’s department gets around to Pina, the killer might strike again.”

“You’re not going to play speed-haiku with Pina?” I asked, as a bad joke.

“I don’t see it as a game,” the detective said, slipping his joint back in its tube. “How about you, Charlie, you up for a quick round? Here’s the first line: The woman I love. What do you got?”

He was baiting me with the same hook he’d set for Vince. I spent some time thinking about the second line and Boyer finally barked at me: “It’s called speed-haiku, Charlie.”

“Has surprised me more than once,” I came back.

The detective said, “Why don’t you finish it, Charlie?”

With less deliberation this time, I said, “This winter alone.”

The detective recited the haiku:

“The woman I love

has surprised me more than once

this winter alone.

“Very nice, Charlie.”

Now this spike-haired creep was patronizing me. He opened his canvas case once more, pulled out a blank sheet of paper, and handed me a pen. “Would you mind writing it out, Charlie?”

For some reason I complied. I supposed I was now a suspect.

 

“Went through a rough stretch for awhile. That’s why you didn’t hear from me, Dad. The move from the Lost Coast was harder on me than I expected. I guess you could call it an identity crisis, you know what I mean. Or maybe you don’t know. Anyway I got a little out of control there. Okay, a lot out of control. But I’m getting my shit together now.”

It was a little after noon and Sally and I were sitting across from each other in the Taste of Himalaya’s tented outside space. My daughter looked fresh, sassy, and even well rested. Given what she said, I puzzled over the fact that she hadn’t asked me for any money in the last weeks. Did that mean she was dealing or making money in some other illicit way? I could ask myself that question and worry about it if I wanted something new to agonize about, but I couldn’t ask her. Years ago, when I went to Al-anon meetings because of her mother’s alcoholism, I’d learned a popular boundary-building motto: Why am I talking? I knew one woman who tattooed the acronym WAIT on the inside of her wrist. The idea was to not pepper your qualifier with questions, just to listen and observe.

I did notice, among other things, that Sally’s hands were beautifully cared for. She had a white-tipped French manicure and elaborate designs hennaed on the backs of her palms. Just before the waiter arrived with our lunch platters, I told Sally how beautiful her hands were.

“Thanks, Dad. I thought it was a better idea to focus on my hands than my face, even though my face needs more help.”

“Your face doesn’t need any help, Sal. It’s beautiful.”

“Like your unbiased. How about the gap between my teeth?”

“It’s charming.”

Sally flashed me a silly gap-tooth smile, and then we went at our food. I got into trouble almost immediately. For some reason, I’d ordered my Shrimp Tikka Masala spicy. Usually I have it medium and struggle with the piquancy, but now it was blistering. I guzzled much of my Racer 5 in an effort to put out the fire. When that provided only short-term relief, I tried tamping down the heat by stuffing hunks of naan into my mouth. Sally, who ordered her Aloo Bantu, curried eggplant and potatoes, mild, started laughing at me. My eyes were running; so was my nose, which I blew into my already damp handkerchief.

“Drink a glass of milk, Dad.”

I nodded but, when the waiter passed by, I ordered another Racer 5.

“So just to finish up,” Sally said, stabbing a cube of eggplant with her fork, “I lost my job at Whole Foods but ended up with a gig at Sonoma Market. From one supermarket to another. You’d think they’d share information about personnel. When I got the second gig, I kept thinking of your cliché phrases. ‘The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.’ ‘Never a twain shall meet.’”

“You sound like you landed on your feet,” I said, my mouth still afire.

”Yep, I haven’t snorted anything for three weeks; I’m not hanging out with any bad boys, and I’m going to virtual AA meetings twice a week. I have a sponsor named Eileen Goode. Isn’t that a great name for a sponsor?”

“That’s great, Sal. Next you’re going to tell me you found religion.”

“Nope. You’ve got to draw the line somewhere. There’s only so far I’m willing to go to stay clean.”

After she finished eating, Sally laid her hands flat on the table. I supposed that she wanted me to admire the hennaed medallions. They were lovely and meticulously applied.

I nodded toward her hands. “Who did the handiwork?”

“My friend from Whole Foods, Sarita. I traded her the rest of my stash for her trouble.”

“Share and share alike.”

“There’s another of those phrases. You’re like a repository of clichés from the Middle Ages, Dad.”

“I don’t think they go back that far,” I said and, dangerously, bit into another shrimp, which delivered a flash of tasty pleasure and an extended agony of picante.

“So here’s why I called the meeting, Dad.”

Again, I tried to douse the fire with beer. “You make it sound like we’re doing business.”

“We need to. That’s my point. I’m talking about Roscoe. Look, you need a partner. You’ve created an exceptional brand and you’re letting it flounder.”

I chomped down on the rest of the jumbo shrimp. Yow. “Brand? You’re talking like a Trump, Sal. Did you see the bastard wants his name on the vaccine? It should only go on the virus.”

“This isn’t about politics, Dad. The deal is you need to seize the day with Roscoe. You know carpe diem and all that. Another of your phrases from the Middle Ages. “

“That’s Latin antiquity, Sal.”

You realize you infested my childhood with your linguistic prattle.”

Infested?”

“That’s right, I’m a prisoner of the language because of you.”

For a moment it sounded like my thinking parrot speaking rather than my daughter. “You’re serious, Sal?”

“Serious as a heart attack.” Her head jerked back. “See, that’s you talking, Dad. I would never say that, serious as . . ..”

“You just said it.”

“You don’t get it, Dad.”

I opened and shut my mouth like a fish a few times; it seemed to temper the residue of chili.

“What are you doing, Dad?”

“Trying to breathe. And what exactly is your complaint, Sal: I’ve strangled you with used-up constructs, what Orwell calls dying metaphors?”

“Yes, with proverbs and platitudes and commonplaces.” Sally threw her hennaed hands in the air; she was doing a version of teenage drama girl at age thirty. “With bromides and buzzwords. With threadbare phrases, truisms, and shibboleth. . .”

“All that? Back to carpe diem, which, by the way, is from the Roman poet Horace; he died not long before Christ was born.”

“Don’t you tire of all that minutia running around your brain?”

“Beautiful word, minutia. Just like shibboleth. I’m glad to hear you use those words, Sal.”

“Enough. Can you try to stay on task, Dad?”

“Task?”

“We’re talking about branding. We’re talking about Roscoe. We’re talking about how to keep him relevant. Capiche?”

“Capiche? Sounds to me like you’re rocking the lingua franca now.” I swilled the cold beer around my mouth and wondered if chili peppers could leave lasting lacerations on my tongue and gums. “So what are your ideas for Roscoe?”

“Ideas? I don’t have any ideas. You’re the idea man. I provide support. I provide direction. Listen, Roscoe has a platform. With proper management he can accrue tens of millions of followers. Ask yourself what he can contribute to mankind.”

“That’s a tall order, Sal.”

“Would you expect anything less? These are serious times.”

My daughter sounded like she’d been watching executive training videos.   “And I remind you, as I will always remind you,” she continued, “that the success of our enterprise depends on the perception that Roscoe is an illusion. If it ever gets out that he’s an actual parrot, we’re sunk.”

“And why is that?”

“Think about it, Dad. Now that the virtual world has supplanted the actual, artifice is our only currency. What dazzles us about a magic act is not seeing how it’s done, but the illusion of its impossibility. You taught me that when I was a kid.”

“So it all comes back to haunt me.” I purposely spilled a little beer over my lower lip—it still sizzled where a large shrimp had seared it—and in so doing a little dripped onto the table.

“Dad,” Sally implored.

“Okay, let me get this straight. You want me to fabricate an illusion that something quite real, and spectacular for that reason, is illusory?”

“Exactly. I think you’re catching on, Dad. So can you rise to the occasion? I think we should meet here in three days and see what you have?”

“You want to reconnoiter in three days, Sal?”

“Stop, Dad. I don’t see why you continue to bludgeon me with language.”

“Because I’m on fire.”

With that, I slipped on my mask and left half of my meal uneaten.

“You should order mild next time, Dad. I don’t know who you were trying to impress.”

“You.”

“I know you too well for that to happen.”

I crept off feeling a bit like Rodney Dangerfield, and tipsy from the two pints of Racer 5. When I got back to the complex Pina was sitting on the stairs outside my condo, chewing on a bagel with cream cheese squirting out the sides.

“Hey, you,” I called.

She looked up startled. “Oh, you scared me, Charlie.”

“Why are you sitting there?”

“Waiting for you,” she said, watching me, big-eyed, as if I might object to her presence.

“Why aren’t you inside?” It had to be chilly on the cement stairs in the shade.

Pina stood. Her leanness melted into the railing and she wiped her lips on her sleeve. “I didn’t think I should go in without you’re being around, Charlie.”

I scooted up the steps and gathered her in my arms.

“I don’t know if you want me here.” Pina blew out an O of breath as if she were blowing a smoke ring. “Can I come back?”

“Nothing would make me happier.”

“Oh, Charlie.” Pina picked up the white bag at her feet.

“What’s in there?”

“Nine bagels. Well, eight and a half.”

“And you started with a dozen?”

Pina’s sheepish smile made me laugh.

When we got inside I spread a sesame seed bagel with cream cheese. It was as decent an antidote to my fiery lunch as I was going to find. Pina looked after her toilette and reunited with what I hadn’t lost of her property. Then she went to say hello to Roscoe and, from the next room, I could hear the enthusiasm in the parrot’s voice: “Pina, Pina, Pina, where you beena? Charlie is lost without you.”

Was I lost? Am I lost?

Pina and I walked across the street to The Patch to get some vegetables for dinner. She was shocked to see that the fields have been plowed under since she’s been here. The shed that sells vegetables will close soon until late spring. Gus, the old fellow who sits on a folding chair atop a fat pillow and weighs the produce, saw us walk in and said, “Charlie, did you hear what happened to the rooster?”

I told him I hadn’t.

“Gumbo got him. The very dog who’s job it is to protect the chickens from foxes and other creatures of the night, snaps the rooster’s neck. How do you like that?”

“That sounds biblical.”

“Well, it was light’s out, is what I heard,” Gus said, grinding what was left of his teeth, which is his habit.

The Chicken house, at the far end of the property, is a fairly recent addition to the farm. As a matter of fact, I’ve yet to see eggs for sale at The Patch. I could hear the rooster from my bedroom but his crows were distant and charmed me into thinking I lived in an actual country place. Apparently, Gumbo wasn’t charmed.

“I know how Gumbo feels,” Gus said. “I listened to that damn rooster all day long. I could have rung his neck. Maybe Gumbo read my mind. Hey, it’s a dog eat rooster world.”

I made a note to save that line for Sally.

Pina, surprisingly literal, asked, “The dog didn’t actually eat the rooster?”

“No, just snapped his throat. Nobody would eat a rooster.”

Pina, relieved, started to gather onions and squash. That and a few malformed potatoes were all that was left for sale.

I watched Gus rise off his chair into a hovering squat as he fluffed the pillow under his butt. “Had a lady come in here last week, Charlie. Get this—she passes gas like I’m not even here. Be one thing if it were a little toot, but this was a serious blast and noxious as can be. I must ask myself seven times a day, what are people thinking? Personally, I think it’s the virus. It’s got everybody distracted. My view: it’s either going to kill me or I’m gonna spend the rest of my life dodging it.”

“Hope you’re wrong, Gus.”

“Wrong? How can I be wrong?” Gus went back to grinding his teeth.

A voice, from outside the shed, called: “Hey, neighbors.” I turned to see Vince, standing in a small line. He looked smug in fancy striped pants, dangling a string bag as if he was on his way to a Paris street market. I’ve never been a violent man, but I wanted to slug him.

”Hear about the rooster?” Vince asked.

“Just did,” I said.

Pina tried to stay hidden behind the squash.

“Given all the old timers around here,” Vince said, still with the shit-eating grin on his face, “that rooster was the only dude in the neighborhood getting his at will.”

That was enough for me. I walked out of the shed and stepped close to Vince. He must have known what was coming because he stepped back, out of the line. I threw one punch, an improvised right hook, which squared up well on his jaw. He went down in a flash and rolled onto his side. A woman in line started screaming. “You can’t do that. You can’t do that. You can’t do that.” But I did, and wasn’t feeling any worse for it.

Vince made no effort to get up nor did I offer to help. He called up to me, “Loser, loser,” but I didn’t feel like a loser.

Pina had come outside. Horrified, she looked at Vince on the ground and me rubbing the sore knuckles of my right hand. “See you at home,” I said, not sure, after I’d become a bully, whether or not she would join me.

 

 

My metabolism’s changed in the few weeks I’ve been in the city. Burning some serious calories now. Become a walking fool. I need new shoes. Going all the time like a speed freak. Afraid something’s going to catch up with me if I stop. I can sustain the pace as long as I remember to breathe, but I think I may be taking it too far. I’m losing weight. Need to eat a lot to keep up. Not possible in present circumstances.

Funny thing, I’m hardly drinking at all. Power walking is a different way of anesthetizing myself, flooding the zone with oxygen and endorphins. I go barefoot on the beach and then lace up for Land’s End, high step like a tomboy in her sneakers through the outer Richmond, where people are few. I love sighting the ocean from the top of Balboa and the wide end of Geary. I force myself to race up Cabrillo, the hills, instantly steep, past stucco houses built atop sand dunes in the twenties and thirties for working people, now sold to multimillionaires who pay in cash.

Today I head down 36th avenue, cross Fulton Street into the park, spill around Spreckles Lake, a little man-made, and cross to the majestic meadows, the outdoor home to great San Francisco bands of the sixties and seventies, and now to the magnificent free festival, Hardly Strictly Blue Grass, cancelled this year along with everything else. I’ve always adored that civilized celebration of the masses. Five stages of sound that never interfere with each other. Hundreds of thousands picnicking in the long meadow, drinking, smoking pot, acting kindly in close quarters. Unthinkable now. Hard to believe it ever happened.

Vince, ever the jazz purist, wouldn’t go with me, which I realized was a boon. He’d have been a lot of baggage. I like to go by myself. Slip into one stage and then another. I can make myself small, and I can charm people just enough if I want to. Last year a colleague from work, Celeste, insisted I join her little family, husband, Roddy, and two-year-old, McAllister. It turned into a disaster.

Roddy, a skinny rope of a man with carrot hair, was legendary for laying down his tarp very early on the Sunday morning at the Rooster Stage. He staked out a wide swath front and center. Celeste, McAllister, and I came six hours later, at noon, with the picnic and the booze. According to Celeste, nobody had to provide Roddy with weed.

It should have been a perfectly pleasant day as all the rest of my times at Hardly Strictly have been, but an altercation with Celeste and a pair of strangers turned the afternoon ugly.

For the first couple of hours, the adults chased after McAllister, equipped in rainbow ear protection muffs, on his looping toddle through the crowds, as bands I never heard of like St. Paul and the Broken Bones and the Infamous Stringdusters played tuneful romps that sounded as if they were geared for both toddlers and stoners.

By about two in the afternoon, after we’d eaten our deviled eggs and our pulled pork sandwiches, McAllister was out like a light. Celeste whispered to me that she’d given her son a double dose of Dramamine. “We’ve done it before,” she said, “he’ll be out until Patti Smith comes on. Then he’ll want to snuggle with me for the next hour.”

Meanwhile, the three of us finished the thermos of martinis and moved on to a fifth of Southern Comfort, which none of us really cared for, but Roddy said we were obliged to drink. “It was Janis’ spirit of choice. It’s a tradition. Once a year. After all, we’re sitting in the meadow where she played with Big Brother and the Holding Company, and she’d be playing Hardly Strictly if she were still around.”

There was no arguing with that. After Celeste and I got thoroughly smashed, we left Roddy with the sleeping boy and wandered off to hear Steve Earle, finding a cozy spot on a wooded hilltop above the Tower of Gold Stage. This is where my sense of time gets blurry. I have no idea how long it was before we were joined by two men, Ivy League types, both attorneys, both in their thirties, both black, both wearing too much cologne for my taste. One had binoculars strung around his neck, the other a camera with a very long lens. The guy with the binoculars was called Rashan, if I remember correctly, and the cameraman went by Richie. The four of us smoked a joint together.

In a little bit we paired off and I ended up talking with Richie. He pretended to have an interest in my work and suggested that it might help him with his job to take elocution lessons from me. He was a tease and I just shook my head when he started to make a move on me. It flattered me because he was a good fifteen years my junior and a nice looking fellow, but I knew it wasn’t a good idea. I do remember wondering if his cock was as long as his camera lens. I swayed back and forth to Steve Earle’s steel wool voice, particularly when he lofted the ballad, “That Old Time Feeling” over all of us.

Some time later—and, again, my recollection of time and sequence is dubious—I noticed Celeste making out with Rashan, as his binoculars slid down the hillside. The guy was playing rough, groping Celeste with one hand as he yanked on her hair. I watched his hand slide way down her pants and try to finger her.

“We should separate them,” I said to Richie.

“Why would we do that?”

“Her husband and two-year-old are right over at the Rooster Stage”

“But she’s over here. This is what we call consensual.”

“Thanks for your legal opinion. Look, she’s drunk out of her head,” I shouted.

“You are,” he said.

“Celeste,” I called.

By now Rashan was on top of her with one hand under her sweater, one down her pants.

I stood up. “You’re either going to get him off her or I am.”

“Why interrupt nature?” Richie said. “What’s your problem, auntie?”

True, I was old enough to be his maiden aunt, but I can be fierce when I need to be. I rushed over and shoved binocular man off Celeste so hard that he rolled a little bit down the hill. Then I yanked Celeste to her feet.

Drunk, woozy, and disheveled, she still managed to holler at me, “What are you doing, bitch?”

Rashan climbed up the hill with his binoculars and shot me a hard look. I like to think I stared him down. “What do you think you doing, you funky bitch?” he hissed at me.

“Fucking racist bitch is what she is. Wouldn’t mind no white boy pawing her girl,” Richie added.

Everybody was calling me a bitch at once.

I led Celeste, foul-mouthed and kicking at me, back toward her family. “You’re just a jealous old bitch,” she said at some point, keeping the theme going, “just a jealous old bitch that doesn’t know how to have fun.” Perhaps she was right, but I didn’t care to be complicit in a drunken rape.

I wandered off by myself, wondering why I had so few friends and if I was actually a racist. A bit sluggish from the drink and weed, I ended up at the Swan Stage. The sun had begun to set and spill a milky glaze over the enormous crowd. I found a perch a million miles from the stage and listened to what was left of Judy Collins’s set, amazed how pure her voice remained in her eightieth year. She finished her set with Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire.” I’ve always loved the song, particularly Johnny Cash’s rendition of it. I sang the last verse along with Judy, becoming a bit mawkish, I’m afraid, with tears slipping down my cheeks.

Like a bird on a wire

Like a drunk in a midnight choir

I have tried in my way to be free.

The memory of that afternoon, like the memory of all things in which shame and confusion are involved, retained the quality of an open wound. I walked with the wound, like a baby cradled in my arms—a sensation I’ve rarely had as a childless woman—and climbed the hill to Stow Lake where I rented a boat for one hour and rowed for three. During the last half hour, as I hovered near Strawberry Hill Island, just past the waterfall, I called Charlie and told him that I am hungry again and, in a breathy voice, that I loved him.

He seemed to take the news in stride and chuckled and asked me where I was.

“In the middle of a lake,” I said.

“Hmmm,” he said. “Are you dressed?”

“Yes, for success.”

I prefer it when you’re undressed for success. So, how’s it going?”

“The verdict’s still out and I’m afraid it may be out for the duration.”

“The duration?”

“My natural life.”

“How long will you remain in the lake?”

“They’ll come and collect me if I don’t bring the boat back soon. But know, that no matter what happens, I love you.”

I checked out of the Seal Rock Inn this morning, after a sunrise walk and swim at the ocean. It felt a little bit sad to be leaving, having gotten in touch, during this period of isolation, with a full spectrum of my eccentricities. It’s good, I’ve decided, to know the extent of my weirdness, and to see my peculiarities as strengths rather than the contrary. Easier said than done.

I waited in line for a half an hour at The House of Bagels on Geary and chatted with the man behind me in line. He was an older guy with an intelligent face. His fading blue eyes looked like they’d seen a lot. Once in a while I encounter a random person that I assume is a fellow traveler, by which I do not refer to the term’s political usage, but to a simple sense of simpatico. I had that feeling when I first got to know Charlie.

The man in line spoke to me. “We’re crusaders, aren’t we? Our purpose is sustenance, and bagels are the means.” He had a whimsical lilt to his voice. “Don’t you think the old Jews in the Polish shtetls, the folks who invented these bad boys, would be amused to see all these gentiles spending half the day in line for high-priced bagels?”

“Indubitably,” I said, thinking of Roscoe, who enjoyed pronouncing that word.

The man wore a black face mask with the word doubletalk printed in white letters over his lips. I found that witty, just as I did the check I’d get from a former client, in which his name, rather than containing an honorific, concluded with persona non grata. I told the man in line that I admired his tee shirt, which in large, block letters read: I MIGHT HAVE BEEN BOUND FOR GLORY.

He nodded his thanks and said, through his doubletalk covered lips, “Glory is such a curious construct, part religion, part commercial commodification, part childless hero worship. Actually, I have more affinity with the ignominious.”

“You sound like an outlier.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “but I believe I predate the word.”

“With all due respect, the word goes back to the Middle English,” I said.

“Hmm.” He raised his eyebrows. “How erudite we are.”

“I’m just a word nerd,” I said

“Tell me about the origins of nerd.”

“It goes back to a Dr. Seuss book in the early fifties.”

“Go on. My late husband had a love affair with Nerds, the candy. He always kept a pack of watermelon Nerds in his shirt pocket where another guy would keep his Marlboros. I think it was his way of saying, I am who I am; get used to it.”

I smiled at the man and introduced myself. “I’m Pina. I have a late husband as well.”

“Oh, my, the things we have in common—dead husbands, bagels. What’s next, Pina? I’m Gerard. Don’t tell me you’re all in on poppy seeds.”

“They’re my favorite.”

“Get out. Where will this end?”

We inched closer to the front of the line and the smell of bagels roused my appetite. It didn’t help that my new friend Gerard was waxing eloquent about the little baked treasures.

“Ah, a warm bagel, fresh or toasted, cream cheese, a couple of strips of lox when I’m feeling flush, a sprinkling of capers, and very thin slices of sweet Vidalia onion—that’s as close as I get to wholesome since I had a man who loved me.”

I felt lucky to have a man who still loved me; at least I believed he did. “Delightful to meet you,” I said to Gerard, when my time came to enter the bakery.

“We will meet again, Pina,” he said, his blue eyes brightening. “Just watch.”

I bought a dozen bagels, a mix of poppy seed, sesame, and onion, along with two flavors of cream cheese.

“Sustenance,” Gerard said, as I left the shop with my large white bag.

Back in the car I thought of ripping a bagel apart and spreading green olive cream cheese across the halves. But I slowly chewed a whole, warm poppy seed bagel instead. It took a bit of discipline to not chomp into another. Forty-five minutes later I was standing at Charlie’s front door, my sole offering: eleven bagels.

 

 

 

We made a good fire on the beach just after sunset, scraps from other fires, small sticks, and tarry hunks that it took some time to gather. Pina went wild with industry as if she were native to wood gathering on a barren beach. We no longer wore masks and any delicacy about keeping our distance had passed. We’d yet to embrace, but once the fire roared we leaned into each other and faced the ocean. It had calmed since the afternoon. The tide was out as far as it goes, and the first stretches of water seemed like a distant continent.

“I’m famished,” Pina said, “I haven’t eaten all day. You know what I’d like,” she said, batting her eyes at me in a jokey way, “a hot meal on the beach. Anything, you know, just hot.”

I accepted the challenge, dashed to the pleasantly deserted if spooky Safeway, across the Great Highway, plucked out a small, sizzling rotisserie chicken, a pound of fingerlings, stick of butter. The all beef hotdogs appealed, with buns, jars of Dijon and sauerkraut, and a tall bottle of ‘spiciest’ pepperoncinis. I also got practical with tin foil, paper plates, napkins, and a six of Racer 5.

Pina had gathered more scraps while I was gone so we had a decent stash to keep the fire going a while. I opened a beer for her and offered the jar of pepperoncinis. “You wanted something hot.”

“That’s it?” She picked out a long twist of pepper and bit into the heart of it. Her eyes blurred on contact. “Ha,” she said, breathing fire at me. “What else do you have in the bag?”

Pina must have smelled the chicken; she looked ready to maul the sack like a bear cub. I pulled out the fingerlings and washed them in beer before preparing them with butter in the foil, finding a perfect spot for them in a belly of embers. Next came the hot dogs. I carved a pair of sharp sticks and affixed the wieners. We enjoyed roasting them, and smothered in kraut and Dijon, thick skin crackling, they were superb.

Before I had the chicken laid on a plate, Pina tore off a leg and thigh and went at it. I was happy to just watch her. After dispatching the leg and thigh, she tossed the bone in the fire and tore off a wing and a hunk of breast from the red rotisserie bird, which, along with all the other indignities it’s endured, appeared to have been assaulted with a tin of paprika. Pina’s fingers had taken on a greasy patina of red pepper. She glanced at me a moment. “You hadn’t known that I am a savage.”

“I had a clue.”

After we nibbled on the buttered fingerlings, Pina stood up and started stripping off her clothes. She said, “I’ll race you in. I need to cleanse myself.”

Her diction surprised me. Suddenly Pina sounded like an eighteenth century ascetic. I looked at her, naked in the firelight, her full breasts majestic melons above her slender hips. She shook her sweet ass at me, waiting for a response. I looked up and down the beach. There was no one within sight. A couple of distant fires sparked to the south.

I shook my head. “I’m not going in that November ocean; it’s witch’s-titty cold in the middle of the summer.”

Pina laughed deep in her throat. “Suit yourself, white boy.”

Yes, I thought, I am a white boy. I stood to watch her dash off toward the water. She ran forever, it seemed, and then I couldn’t see her anymore. A mist had risen over the water. I hoped she’d come back but it didn’t seem a certainty.

I’d gone off to pee and gather whatever fuel I could find, and I saw Pina running back from the water, no doubt cleansed, but wet and shivering, her feet and ankles caked in sand. I took off my green alligator cardigan, the one she loves to hate, and wrapped it around her as she kneeled at the fire. The sweater’s V-neck gave her a lovely plunging neckline.

“That sweater becomes you, Pina. You can wear it whenever you like.”

She grinned at me, her teeth chattering.

We spent the night together at the Seal Rock Inn. After showering together, we made love and talked half the night about distant things—by now everything that predates the pandemic qualifies as a distant thing—old relationships we’d had, even our childhoods.

In the morning I asked Pina to come back to Sonoma and she said she wasn’t quite ready yet, she needed a little more time alone. When I got home I spent some time with Roscoe. I haven’t decided yet what the next campaign with the parrot should be and don’t have much motivation for a new project.

Roscoe had the temerity to say, “You seem out of sorts, Charlie. What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?”

By late afternoon I descended into a dark place. Loneliness is something I tend not to suffer but since leaving Pina at the Seal Rock Inn this morning a wave of isolation washed over me like a fever.

I took a walk to town in the late afternoon just to see people and remind myself that I am of the same species. Who knew, I’d maybe run into an old friend. That wasn’t the case. It seemed like only tourists in town except for the locals, boisterous as ever, outside of Steiner’s Tavern. The establishment, which opened in 1927 amid the Prohibition, has dealt with the current prohibition of interior imbibing by lining up tables in the alley next to Earladi’s Menswear. I noticed an empty table and decided to treat myself to a pint of Pliny the Elder.

I hadn’t eaten since our strange meal on the beach last night. I’ve thought of that curious repast much of the day. How will I ever forget the night I lived with Pina at the ocean and watched her glow in the firelight after coming out of the sea? It was one of those rare times that you realize is iconic while you are in the midst of living it.

Now my stomach was reminding me of its presence but I couldn’t find anything on Steiner’s bar menu that tempted me. Not the Chili Cheddar Tots or the hot wings, certainly not the seafood cocktail, or even the Zucchini Sticks. I settled into the brash bitterness of the Pliny, which arrived in a tall Speckled Hen glass. The glass gave the guy sitting alone at the next table an opening; he clearly wanted to talk. He was a stout young fellow, not yet forty, in a handsome Pendleton tartan jacket and tweed cap. An Irish setter slept at his feet.

He leaned toward me over his table “Don’t you love the Speckled Hen glass?”

“Yes, they’re quite elegant.”

He held a glass of whisky in his thick hand; a short beer chaser stood dangerously close to his elbow. He’d already pushed aside the leavings from his chicken wings. “My wife and I filched a couple of Speckled Hen vessels aboard the Queen Mary II. That was our honeymoon trip back from London. They made a nice souvenir.”

“How was the trip?” I asked, glad for a conversation. “I always wanted to take a trans-Atlantic voyage. Don’t think I’ll make it on a cruise ship now.”

“Yes, a petri dish. We enjoyed it,” he said, modestly, pausing, it seemed, to remember it. “I found it exciting to not see land for seven days,” he continued, and I liked changing my watch an hour each day.”

“How was the food?” I asked.

“Quite decent. My wife and I had a table by our selves for dinner. We had the same waiter and same wine steward each night. Not only did we force ourselves to eat more slowly than usual, we pretended we were in love.” He grinned, a bit smugly. “On the other hand, the entertainment was strictly second-class. Not to sound snobby or anything, but it was really geared for the lowest common denominator. On top of that there was a preponderance of Germans aboard.” He took a considered sip of his whisky, and signaled to the passing waiter for another of the same. “Hope you’re not German. I don’t mind them in ones and twos, but when you get forty-five of them in a group, they get loud and they either have no sense that anybody else is around or they don’t give a damn. I mean they don’t spook me like they’re Nazis or anything, though they could be. Don’t get me wrong, the Chinese can be just as clannish, but at least they keep it pretty quiet. I try to keep my prejudice to a minimum, but sometimes it gets the better of me. I’m Gary, by the way, Gary Arnold, or you can call me Arnold, Gary, and the comma will be understood. On the other hand, you don’t have to call me a damn thing.”

“I’m Charlie,” I said, deciding it was probably wise to leave off my last name.

“How about you, Charlie, you look like you must be more virtuous with regard to this kind of bias. A little more evolved than me.”

“I’m older,” I said, and took a long sip of Pliny. Gary Arnold shot me a sideways glance. He wanted a better answer.

I relented. “Yeah, I think I still have the thing about Chinese drivers, that they’re a particular hazard.”

“Know what you mean. It’s the slant eyes, isn’t it?”

The comment made me uncomfortable, probably because I’ve been guilty of the same thought. As the waiter came through again, we ordered another round, and Gary asked for a hot link and sweet potato fries. I still could not link my appetite with the menu.

Once we had our order, Gary settled back in his chair and said in a quiet voice, “I’ve been going through a rough patch with my wife. She’s depressive. It comes and it goes, but when it comes it’s like a wet blanket over the household. I tell her that I’m not deep enough to get depressed. I’m a what-you- see-is-what-you-get kind of a guy. I think that that’s part of what depresses her—she takes a look at me and sees what she has. Last night I asked her if she’d be happier with another man, and she says, ‘You’re not so bad.’ Talk about damning with faint praise. Story of my life.”

Gary seemed as depressed as his wife. That’s the beauty of bar culture: people that you’ve never seen before spill their guts out. I’ve never been very comfortable with the scene, bereft, as I am, of the easy wit and jocular nature the popular patrons possess.

I nursed my Pliny as Gary inhaled his hot link and then bent over his dog. The smell of the food had roused him from his slumber. The beautiful creature stretched out its long limbs, unwound itself, and rose into a standing position, head high, majestic beside his master.

Gary gave an affectionate hug to the animal and fed him a handful of sweet potato fries. When the fries were devoured, the setter’s long tongue circled its snout. “Say hello to Charlie, Aloysius.” The dog nosed forward toward me. I petted him briefly and saw that he was ready to adopt me.

“Aloysius,” I said, that’s a good Irish name for a setter.”

Gary shook his head. “It’s actually Latin, although James Joyce was given it as his second middle name: James Augustine Aloysius Joyce.”

“That’s quite an auspicious moniker. Are you a Joycean?”

“No, no. I took a Joyce class in college. That’s all.” Gary smiles, wistfully. “Was an English major; I used to want to be a writer, but it doesn’t mix well with selling real estate. Hey, I’ll recite my favorite passage for you from Ulysses. Somehow it always gets a rise from Aloysius: ‘Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices, fried with crust crumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.’”

Aloysius whimpered during his master’s recitation.

“It’s as if he knows,” Gary said, “that it’s all about offal, his favorite.”

I thought of telling him about Roscoe, but decided against it. Instead, as Aloysius quieted, I offered my own confession. I suppose the two pints of Pliny the Elder had turned me a bit maudlin. “I’ve been going through a rough time with my girlfriend as well.”

“What seems to be the problem?” Gary asked. He rested his chin in his open hands, his elbows balanced on the table. Given his hulk, he made me think of the Buddha, the Buddha as confessor.

“The problem,” I said, unable to finesse the answer, “the problem is infidelity.”

Gary nodded his head. “On whose part?”

“Both of ours.”

“What? Are you swingers, Charlie? Good for you, at your age.”

“No, no. It was only once.”

“It’s never once, Charlie. So what are you going to do?” he asked.

“Ball’s in her court.”

“Do you want the ball to be in her court, Charlie?”

It was an interesting question for which I didn’t have an answer.

We both turned quiet and Gary stuffed the rest of his fries into his mouth, before downing his whisky.

“Really got to admire,” he said, “how an older guy like you stays so trim, drinking beers like that.”

“I don’t drink many of them,” I said, wondering how old Gary thought I was.

“Me,” he went on, “I’m kind of an anomaly, a fat guy who doesn’t sweat. They say that’s part of the reason I’m fat. The lymph nodes are hoarders; they retain water they should be flushing. Another thing about me—my farts don’t smell. Swear to God, Charlie. I almost wanted to ask my doctor about that. ‘Where’s my stink, doc?’”

In the annals of TMI from strangers this had to rank pretty high. I didn’t want to find out what was coming next, and yet, I wanted to tell Pina about this encounter with Gary Arnold. I thought it would amuse her, but I was going home to an empty house. The ball remained in her court. Last night I fed her when she was famished, but now I was going home to feed myself.

 

Charlie calls me this morning. I didn’t expect it. It’s been ten days since we talked. I’m happy to hear his voice. That’s what I feel at first before the confusion kicks in. Charlie’s sweet. There’s no bitterness in his voice. He’s tentative. I suppose, I am too. Things begin to feel normal while we talk about the news, and then Charlie goes off on Rudy Giuliani.

“Consider the Rudy trifecta, Pina. First he get’s played by Borat’s girl and starts to beat-off; thankfully Borat rushes out in his outlandish costume and stops him. Then the Rude does his horseshit press conference on the outskirts of Philly, at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, beside an adult bookstore, across from a crematorium. And he caps it off at another presser, where he doesn’t have a single fact to argue, and sweats rivulets of black dye down his face. It’s like the end of a bad horror film.”

“You sound like you really enjoy the Rudster, Charlie,” I say, and think back to watching the new Borat with Charlie, his legs wrapped around me on the carpet.

Charlie keeps talking and I’m glad to listen. He tells me about his friend Arrow painting Trump’s death in multiples.

“Like Andy Warhol?” I ask.

“No, no,” he says, “distinct serial deaths.”

He describes some of the ways Arrow kills Trump. I just listen. For a moment I think we might not get around to anything personal in the conversation.

“I miss you,” Charlie says, breaking the spell.

“Me too.”

“Hmmm,” Charlie says. “Hmmm.” He sounds like he’s lost his way. And when he finally speaks it’s in an altered voice: “Can we meet somewhere?”

He’s all business, like a boss about to explain why he’s firing you. Or is that just what the paranoid worm in my brain makes of his change of tone.

“Where would you like to meet?” I ask, forcing my voice to bloodlessness.

“Somewhere outside where we can be safe.”

The choice is mine, apparently. “Meet me at Kelly’s Cove. We can stand ten feet apart and nobody will bother us.”

We make a date for tomorrow afternoon, at the top of stairwell number five. I’m not sure if I’m going to show up.

The business of being a minimalist is beginning to wear on me. I have exactly one sweater, three blouses and three pairs of pants to my name. I wash everything by hand in the motel’s bathroom sink because I’m phobic about the laundromat. It’s a tedious business and the clothes, especially the jeans, take forever to hang dry. I’ve thought of calling Charlie and asking him to bring a couple suitcases of my clothes, along with my computer and stash of weed, but in the end I‘ve decided not to ask him for anything.

The other problem is eating. Although I eat well, I’m tired of the set-up. The motel boasts a mini-fridge and an electric teakettle, but there’s no hotplate. I’ve thought of buying one and cooking on the sly, but I know this temporary. I subsist on milk and cereal, ramen, raw vegetables and fruits, nuts and dried fruits, eggs, bread, cheese, deli meats, olives, tinned fish. Unfortunately, I’m at the end of my big jar of Greek caviar, taramosalata, but I know where to get more. I’ve figured a method for preparing soft-boiled eggs with two shifts of boiling water in a bowl. Yes, it’s a diet of privilege. I do know how to look after myself and feel no need to catalog on my liquid diet.

But the cost of living in a high-priced motel is unsustainable. This morning I spotted an apartment on Craig’s List. A junior one-bedroom, just a few blocks from here, 46th and Anza, 450 square feet, $2,290 a month, immediate availability. In this market, that’s a good deal. It’s only three blocks from the ocean.

I had to resort to some unseemly charm, covert flirtation, to get to see the place. The leasing agent was showing it this afternoon, and his times were all booked up. “It will be gone by the end of the day,” he boasted, ready to hang up.

“Then show it to me this morning,” I said, with honey-burnished elocution.

This tripped him up. He couldn’t quite end the call.

“Why? Why should I show it to you?” It sounded like he was posing the question to himself, but I took it as an invitation to explain why.

“Because you’re a decent man and I’m just a few blocks away.”

“Yeah, but . . .”

I slowed down my delivery: “I have all the qualities you want in a renter. I’m professional, discreet, and comely.”

It was the last two words that got him. I doubt he knew what they meant, but somehow they woke up the little man in him. He was ready for phone sex right then, and he put some giddy-up into his voice. “What time to do you want to meet, honey?”

Fuck you, you prick, I thought, but I wanted to see the place. “Ten-thirty.”

“That’s a half an hour from now.”

“Will you have to helicopter in?”

“I’ll be there. Bring a credit report.”

Up yours.

The leasing agent—blimp-like, somewhere between thirty-five and fifty—stands outside the building when I get there. He looks as wide as he’s tall, a very stout Mickey Rooney in a soiled khaki sport coat, perhaps size 64, boxy, over a yellow oxford cloth shirt with the top buttons open so that thick sproutings of blond hair above his vast chest tumble forth indecently. His feet swell out of his penny loafers. It isn’t hard to keep my distance. I pick up his aftershave from fifteen feet. It smells like the worst kind of sugared fart.

I remember Vince, during one of his daily jazz history bulletins, telling me about a singer built like this agent, named Jimmy Rushing. His nickname was the punch line: Mr. Five by Five. Why I retain this shit I do not know. But here I am standing across from Mr. Five by Five, only he’s not black or beloved for his voice, which soared over Count Basie’s band. This guy’s a putz, and, yes, I‘m being uncharitable. I’m not sure why; I’m not usually big on body shaming. The dude’s Mt. Rushmore mask doesn’t help. Is that code for Trump because the bastard fancies his head carved into the mountain?

In his big boy voice, the blob introduces himself, “Josh Rook.”

Crook, I think. “Like the chess piece?”

“Exactly.” He’s delighted with the association and nods his head a couple of times. He appears to no longer have a neck.

“Pina,” I say and step back from him. It’s involuntary, I fear.

“Pina, Pina,” he repeats. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that name.”

“Nobody has.”

The building doesn’t look promising. It’s definitely the ugly duckling on the block, which is otherwise made up of immaculate stucco bungalows from the thirties or early forties. I shouldn’t even bother with this.

The agent sucks in his enormous girth, trying to stiffen up and turn to business. “We can walk up. It’s only on the next floor.” He stands back, for me to go first, but I don’t want this sloth behind me, breathing on my neck. He goes first; that way I control the distance. Otherwise he could throw me down and sit on me. I don’t want to end up like some poor chick in “Silence of the Lambs.”

The problem with walking behind him is that he climbs very slowly, panting with each step. If I’d gone first I could have raced up and waited for him. Now I fear he’ll fall backwards or the earthquake will hit and we’ll both be done.

“Folks are swallowing up these apartments out by the beach,” he says, turning to smile at me. “Nobody wants to be in crowded neighborhoods nowadays.”

I agree but I’m not about to tell him.

Mr. Rook’s saccharine fart pong fills the L-shaped room, which is a disaster. Somebody with cats lived here and even with the carpets gone and a fresh coat of paint, the apartment is a feline morgue, and it’s dark—the three windows are narrow and slung low—while the kitchen nook, with creamed corn wallpaper and budget appliances seems like a reasonable place to blow your brains out. I have a flash of despair. How much am I going to have to pay for a decent apartment?

“With a little imagination,” the agent says, and actually winks at me, the fat fuck. “With a little imagination you can make this place . . .”

I turn on my heels. “Sorry, I don’t think this is the apartment for me.” I hurry out the door.

“We can make an adjustment on the rent,” he calls. His voice echoes in the stairwell. “Let’s take a little ride in my Audi.”

Charlie’s leaning over the ocean wall when I get there. It looks like he’s nodding to the waves. The water is choppy today with plenty of whitecaps. Charlie’s hair’s all tousled. I’m trying to decide if his eyes are closed. He’s so cute in his ugly green alligator cardigan. It’s from the seventies and he’s proud of it. He picked it up at the Church Mouse in Sonoma. I make fun of him every time he wears it and now I’m touched that he’s worn it today. He still doesn’t see me. I don’t give a damn what he came for, I’m glad he’s here.

“Charlie,” I call, “what you doing in that ugly sweater?”

He turns, a wide smile on his face. Sweet man. I walk up as close as prescribed and grab my own spot against the concrete wall, turned to face him.

Charlie raises his eyebrows. “I’m glad you decided to come, Pina.”

“What? I’m not late.”

He looks at his watch and shrugs.

I want to tell him about the grotesque man and the apartment I just looked at. I want him to know that I’m flexible about where I live and that I take responsibility for my wayward action, but before I have a chance to say anything to him besides Hey, he bursts out with: “I fucked up. I fucked up really major, Pina.

Somehow I find this news refreshing, but Charlie’s face has turned sober. He looks like somebody’s just given him grim news, which, apparently, he’s going to give it to me.

I try to help him. “How did you fuck up? Something to do with Roscoe?”

“No, with you.”

“Me? I’m the one that fucked up, Charlie.”

He bites his nails a moment. I’ve never seen him bite his nails. “I came to the city last week,” he says, and shakes his head. “I thought I might drop off a suitcase of clothes for you and your laptop. You know, with your concierge who’s not a concierge.”

I can’t see where this is going.

“But I thought I’d take a little drive through the city first. So I head to North Beach. Drive up Columbus Avenue. There are lots of people eating at these new parklets and I think, Why not get myself a plate of gnocchi. It’s sunny out, there’s a distanced table waiting for me. So I’m deep into my gnocchi. It comes with sourdough bread and a dipping bowl of olive oil with pepper flakes.”

I don’t know why Charlie is telling me all this or what the fuck his plate of gnocchi has to do with me.

“And I’m nursing a tumbler of dago red. Oh, I’m sorry I said that. I don’t know why I said that.”

”Hey, it’s okay, this dago doesn’t mind.”

“I am sorry. Anyway, the point is, I’m completely absorbed with my meal, when this homeless man, really a mess, comes up to me without a mask, and starts hassling me. Freaks me out. I mean, the guy’s breathing all over me. By the way, I took a COVID test a few days later; it came back negative the day before yesterday.”

“So that’s good news,” I say, wondering where his shaggy dog story is going. I’m getting a little tired of it and turn my gaze from Charlie to the horizon line.

“When I got out of the restaurant, I took a little walk up Grant Avenue just to get myself to chill, and when I finally got back to the car, there was a ticket on it and some motherfucker had broken into the trunk. Your laptop and your beautiful clothes . . .” Charlie drops his hands over his face.

“Gone,” I said.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Pina.”

My relief that this is the extent of Charlie’s fuck-up regarding me is palpable. The dramatic thing to do would be to display some remorse, but I’m not into being the diva. “Don’t worry,” I say, “I have everything backed up on the cloud, and I needed a new computer anyway.”

“I’ll buy you one,” he says, eagerly. “But some of your nicest clothes . . .”

“Guess who gets to go shopping.”

“On me.” Charlie sighs as if the weight of the world has been lifted.

I’m a little surprised by my equanimity. I worry about my computer for a moment, what hadn’t been backed up. The loss is negligible. I have no reason to extract damages from Charlie. Anyway, I want the man to be happy

He suggests a walk up the beach. I’m agreeable. I try not to get anxious. We hurry down brutalist stairwell #5. I kick off my Birkenstocks and have my feet in the sand. Charlie watches me. He either loves me or thinks that I’m crazy. I talk him into taking off his shoes; we hide them in a hollow beside the wall.

We start up the beach, walking in an out of the water. I’m in peddle pushers and Charlie rolls up his jeans. We stop to watch a family of sandpipers skedaddle across the damp apron.

“I read a story,” Charlie says, “in the Chronicle: Since the city has gotten quieter during the pandemic, the local birds are singing more quietly and they’ve added more nuance and lyricism to their songs. Here’s the part I really like: Baby birds learn songs from their parents’ example, and if they’ve been in the nest during this quiet period their lyrical vocabulary will have greater complexity when the world gets noisy again.”

“Isn’t that wishful thinking?” I say, even though I’m thinking wishfully.

“It could be.”

We start up the beach again and I turn once more to the razor edge of the horizon. I can sense Charlie watching me. What does he see?