I Will Be Complete Page 11
Here, one flash, by the lights of our building’s entrance, sprays of ficus leaves over us, Leo in the carrier, the man with the mustache looking down at him with surprise and tenderness, my mother glancing from them to me with an attempt to assess me, and me looking at my feet, which were bare on the wet winter pavement. I am not even here, I am vanished, there is no longer even a boy to feel anything.
I went back inside to watch TV. I never saw Leo again.
3829 JACKSON STREET
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
94118
THE NEW APARTMENT was the bottom two floors of a duplex at the Western edge of Presidio Heights. When I walked inside for the first time I knew it was haunted.
There is still something crisp to me about the layout, as if it’s a blueprint I had to memorize for a jury trial. The ground floor was where Mom and I lived. Below us was a generous and awful basement. The steep staircase led down to two dim, unused bedrooms facing a failed garden overgrown with dry weeds. There was a recreation room with a floor that seemed to slant slightly, and then, if you took a turn, there was an area that was not just unfinished but to my eye a portal to dark wilderness, a workshop cluttered with dirty power tools hanging aslant off peg boards. There were cardboard boxes soft with moisture and must, and the fluorescent lights hummed and flickered without really penetrating the shadows. Beyond the workshop, there was a doorway into a storage area that I never went through. When we moved in, I closed the door and twenty minutes later it was open. I wasn’t scared—I knew this was just a result of how the house had settled. But I also knew there was something in the basement that was old, patient, and much larger than I was.
The ground floor was social and happy, though, in part because my mother herself was happy—her investment was working out. It was time-consuming but worth it.
If you think about it, Pong had 100 percent of the video game market share. In a few weeks, I became the world’s champion Pong player. To be sure, there were only a limited number of moves you could make, but it would normally cost about twenty dollars in quarters to perfect them. I could play for hours for free, and the machine had a one-player option. This was handy since kids from school tended to come over just once and guests at my mother’s parties were too stoned to play well.
Mostly, I played single player when I was supposed to be doing my homework. I would look up and thirty minutes would have gone by, so I would make it sixty. Even when I wasn’t playing, I saw the bouncing ball when I closed my eyes, and I heard the beep or boop of the electronic ball in my dreams.
The machines my mother had placed filled up with quarters every week. She went to bars and restaurants and pizza joints in San Francisco, Marin, Oakland, and the South Bay. Mom and the owners of each place split the proceeds, which she picked up in the afternoons, when business was slow.
But going from bar to bar was a hassle, both for the time it took and because she got hit on so often. Mom stopped collecting her share herself, hiring a friend of Peter’s who—this was either a joke or not—used to make a living breaking people’s legs.
Peter and I went collecting together once. It was my first trip to Oakland. It was one of those painfully bright days, hot and airless. We went to many taverns. Peter was fastidious and washed his hands after every stop. He reminded me that when he’d had his nightclub, it had been clean and the clientele top-notch. As we drove around Oakland, we felt sorry for Oakland not being San Francisco.
One stop was on West MacArthur Boulevard, somewhere around Telegraph. There were motels here whose signs had incomplete words made from old plastic letters.
Peter left me in the car while he went into some terrible dive. I was instantly surrounded by hookers. They tapped their fingernails against the door, which was locked.
I looked straight ahead until they lost interest in teasing me. When Peter came out, he talked to them. I could hear him bantering, and as I focused on the huge sack of quarters in his hand, I had a horrible thought: he was going to use my mother’s profits to buy a hooker for me.
But no. He got into the car, alone, and we were off. He saw my expression, and he laughed. “Nah, kid, I wouldn’t want to do that to you. You don’t know where those snatches have been, they’re disgusting. You know what syphilis is? When you’re ready we’ll get you laid with a pretty girl who’ll be kind to you, answer all your questions, show you what to do, there are chicks who love educating young men. When I was thirteen I had to stand in line, my friend, and we’ll make sure that never happens to you.”
He explained how complicated sex was. There were emotional consequences to seducing a woman. “You aren’t even ready to hear the Rule of The Last One In,” he said, and then he told it to me anyway. The last guy to fuck a woman has control over her. She doesn’t even know it. It’s not something to manipulate unless you’re prepared for her to also hate you. It’s biology, it’s something feminism can’t tolerate, always be kind and don’t abuse it. Endgame.
That discussion is clear to me at the expense of another one that day. We made one last stop before we left Oakland, but I couldn’t tell you why. It was at a residential hotel on West Grand, across from Lakeside Park. We went in together, Peter made a phone call from the lobby to a room upstairs, then we rode in a rickety old elevator—you shut the brass, accordion-like gate yourself—to the third or fourth floor, and then we got out into a hallway that smelled like cough drops.
Peter made me wait in the hall while he went into one of the rooms. I don’t know who he saw or how long he was gone for. In the hallway, I became aware of someone staring at me.
There was a chair in an alcove, next to a table with a sad vase of silk flowers. In the chair was an old man in an old suit. He wore a hat. I looked away because he had no nose.
When Peter came out, we didn’t wait for the elevator. He acknowledged the man in the chair, and then took me at a jog down the staircase. When we were in the lobby, he whispered to me, “That guy? That’s what syphilis does to you.”
* * *
—
One afternoon, a truck backed up to the curb outside our apartment. It unloaded a Pong machine. It had gone on the fritz, as my mother said, and needed to be repaired. The screen did a lazy roll every few seconds. It was an easy fix. Until then, it would stay in the basement, in the recreation room. It reminded me of a soldier taken from a battlefield, awaiting triage.
In a rare moment when I went downstairs, perhaps to fetch firewood, I would see the glow of its screen, blind, rolling slowly, sending a shivering light across the ceiling. My night light.
It turned out that Pong machines were expensive to fix. Someone from Digital Games, or whoever had ripped them off, or whoever had their maintenance contract, let us know it might be cheaper to get a new tube. But it was unclear if that was true. The machine just stayed there until, a few weeks later, a truck pulled up and another Pong machine joined it.
* * *
—
I’m not sure how an artist came to live in our basement. Partly, it was the 1970s, and if you had a dinner party and a spare room, a guest might end up with you until the next party across town. Also, a little of my mother had never left the boardinghouse, so she was generous with allowing people to stay.
The artist’s name was George, just like my grandfather. I liked George. He was confused-looking and mellow and defenseless as a teddy bear, down to how hanks of chest hair poked through the holes in his denim shirts. I have photographs of him as part of a tandem Halloween costume, where a ski mask and some netting was supposed to make him the spider to a woman whom I don’t recognize as his fly. He’s too adorable, hardly convincing as a predator. Women were thrilled by how gentle he was until they realized how disappointing “gentle” was up close.
He was a friend my mother made outside of Peter’s gaze, and Peter was darkly amused by this. He was mean to George, casually making fun of him and th
en glancing at me when George didn’t react. George, Peter whispered to me, was a putz. He hadn’t needed to tell me that, but I also saw something unusual: George didn’t care what Peter thought.
George would get stoned, line up a grid of Strathmore sheets, and slash across them with pastel crayons, filling each with abstract shapes and patterns. Then he would separate them and stare until—ahah!—he would outline with black pastel the scenes that the colors suggested. My mother was fond of one that turned into a man driving a car, so she framed it and put it in her office.
His process was hilarious to me. I couldn’t believe the artwork in my old home was created like this. I tried to imagine my father telling the story about how the Fabergé chess set had been forged by a stoned teddy bear eating Necco wafers and chortling. It reminded me of how, when I was four, I used to sit in my mother’s lap and hammer at the typewriter keys and ask her to circle the words I accidentally typed. By showing off his process, George had kneecapped my ability to take his art seriously.
I am no longer the Stalinist hardass my twelve-year-old self was. But even that kid saw George’s method had integrity. I was reminded of a Gahan Wilson cartoon from Playboy with a girl regarding an artist in a quiet forest. He’s painting exactly that forest, only populated with monsters, with the caption, “I paint what I see, child.”
In art class I started drawing things like Ginger Rogers tap-dancing wearing a Christmas tree costume. I drew people with dead fishes on their heads, and costumed heroes coughing out paint splatters like it was a superpower. I did a detailed landscape of the Presidio, with a robot centaur who has driven a baseball bat through the forehead of a kid whose identity was only given away by the tennis shoes: they belonged to one of my bullies. It didn’t make things any better, but the hours of sketching gave me a place to park my misery.
* * *
* * *
—
My father took me to New York to meet Ann’s family. Now that they were married, I could, in his words, come out of the shadows and be counted. I liked Ann’s parents. But since I’d never been to Manhattan I didn’t understand what I was seeing.
My father did. Ann’s parents lived in an apartment on Central Park West in a co-op her grandfather had built in the 1920s. The view was of the park, best seen from a solarium where there were overheated plants dried out on the radiator. They had a maid and a cook whom they loved. The first night I was there, Ann’s father gestured with his highball glass toward a display cabinet filled with objects. One piece of old broken pottery was a gift from Moshe Dayan. Something else involved a memory of a wicked discussion he’d had with Golda Meir.
It was the house tour of my father’s dreams. He had landed safely.
* * *
* * *
—
Here’s how Peter lost my mother.
He told her if he didn’t have a thousand dollars by five o’clock, he was going to be evicted from his house. My mother brought him a check. He thanked her, he showered her with kisses, he told her how great she was, and then she went home.
That wasn’t his mistake. That was coming.
Peter loved entertainment and plays and movies and popcorn. Anytime he recommended something, it was because there was no finer example, he said, of whatever it was he happened to be talking about. He took me to see P.S. Your Cat Is Dead!, explaining that it would teach me that love is brutal. I wasn’t yet a human being if I hadn’t seen Pal Joey or A Thousand Clowns, and he had similar feelings about any film that he’d just thought of. There was a cinema in Jackson Square, a little rep place. “Watch this, kid,” he would say, “you’ll learn something about women.” Or men. Or business. Or this:
Auntie Mame, awash in 1958 color saturation, is about a polite and intelligent boy named Patrick, sent to his zany aunt, who lives in a sparkling New York City where every party guest is a prince or a showgirl. She teaches him how to live! live! live! When bad times come, they’re in the form of dour legal guardians or stock market crashes. Auntie Mame’s financial problems, of which she has a series, end happily because of her pluck, luck, and determination. She is generous of spirit and has a heart of gold, which makes how Patrick grows up—a stiff, conservative type ashamed of her—heartbreaking.
But in the end, he sees the error of his ways, and Mame, now a published author and a wealthy widow, reunites with the adult Patrick, and teaches his own son how to live! live! live!
I mistakenly told people I’d seen this as a child. I saw it for the first time recently, but it was familiar because I’d grown up in this movie. My mother thought she was Auntie Mame. And when we met Peter, she thought he was Auntie Mame. Anyone she met with a zest for life and disdain for convention was Auntie Mame, regardless of what else they did.
The next time I flew back from Chicago, my mother wasn’t there to meet me, again. The same stewardess was on that flight, and this time, there was no social visit with Peter. Instead, she rode with me right to my own front door and only let me go when she saw my mother herself.
My mother was apologetic—there had been an emergency. My room smelled sickly, like a hospital corridor. It was mostly empty. The night before, my mother had had a man over, and he had brought a friend who had kept to himself. She put him in my room. He overdosed on heroin, spraying the walls with blood and vomit and ruining my mattress. She was waiting for a new one to be delivered. I stood in my room, unable to really take in what this meant. Heroin was something far beyond my experience and no one in my mother’s circle had even referred to it. It was something doomed people used on the way down. My mother kept shaking her head in shock. “I don’t get it. He said he was the heir to the Coca-Cola fortune.”
Recently, a friend asked why it was so hard for me to understand that people are what they do. It was a concept so slippery I needed to write it down and stare at it like an advanced algebraic equation.
I get it at times and then I feel like the grown-up, frumpy, disbelieving Patrick who is ashamed of his Auntie Mame. If people are what they do, then there’s no room for the compelling bohemian stories of magic guiding your life. My mother didn’t think people were what they did. Instead, they were what they told you they did.
And that’s where Peter made his mistake. He thought my mother was stuck in that movie, and perhaps a little stupid. He didn’t understand the actual boundaries of what only seemed like naïveté.
After she lent Peter the money, my mother started to stew. She hadn’t heard anything from him about repaying her. In fact, he was spending more money than ever.
“Weren’t you about to be evicted?” she asked.
“Oh, that. I just had a bet that I could make you bring me a thousand dollars.”
My mother was horrified—she asked for the money back.
Peter shrugged. “I spent it on cocaine.”
Horror. Outrage. Phone calls. Hang ups. I wasn’t to talk to him again, flowers arriving, flowers thrown away. Maybe—there were so many incidents like this I’ll never know all of them. I’ll never know what Mom saw that I didn’t. I don’t know how bad it got. Did she see human slavery? What did she have to ignore? She would say she ignored nothing, but she had her eyes on a different prize. She would say, maybe, that because she was in business with him she couldn’t just stop talking to him. It must have enraged her, his cold-blooded awareness that she would forgive him.
Tabletop Pong machines were not durable. Screens went black; wires scraped raw; sometimes, like on a television, the vertical hold shot. And after too few months, no one was much interested in playing anymore, so restaurants and taverns asked Mom to remove the machines even if they did work.
There was a pizzeria on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley that drove my mother crazy. “They were complaining that no one was playing anymore, so I went in—they’d thrown a tablecloth over it, and were using it as a table!” She sighed in exasperation. “Well, no wonder no o
ne was playing, then. But could I get them to understand that? No!”
The investment wasn’t working out according to the projections she’d relied on. Every month there was less and less coming in.
Peter found her a diversion. He introduced her to his best friend, which was supposed to occupy her until the next investment opportunity. And that was where Peter fucked up. He forgot the Rule of The Last One In.
* * *
—
Peter said Trevor Blake had co-owned Arthur. He was a fashion designer to the stars, winning international prizes and showing on runways throughout the world. He did women’s wear, accessories, jewelry especially. My sense was of a guy who woke up late, took thirty messages from his answering service, smoked and drank coffee and talked on the phone for hours, sketching brilliantly, keeping tabs on his workshop, who then went out to New York discos all night.
This turned out to be true. Trevor was genuinely talented. His work was biomorphic, cork that could have been coral, or pewter chips that looked like the ridges of vertebrae. Just as Peter claimed, his clients really did include the Duchess of Windsor and Jackie O and a cadre of other moneyed socialites.
He was a handsome man, an Armenian Jew, heavy-lidded eyes, dark skin. He could talk all night long. In photos from the time, he wears too much jewelry, but wears it like worry beads, fingers running over ridges like he’s soothing himself. His eyes have a quality I don’t remember in person, but I see it clearly in the old black-and-white press clippings. Just like Peter, he is arrogant, and just like Peter he is amazed he’s getting away with something. Trevor, however, looks shamed, beaten down as if his success were a sign the world was easily fooled. But that blurriness might just be the cocaine.