Given World Read online

  “Deal,” he said. “Consider it done, Tink.”

  I didn’t say good night. It wasn’t night. I stood up and went back to my room, plugged in the Christmas lights, and got into my sleeping bag. I stared at the ceiling as the lights flashed on and off against it like a conflagration of fireflies. I listened to Primo gather the remnants of his not-so-secret life, listened to him stumble around in the dark out there and stash it all away.

  6. Kid on a Mission

  Frank had married young, a ballerina, but that was all over now, left in Dallas where the quarter-Mexican part of his mostly Italian heritage fit in, but not much else. He was dark and rangy, with long arms, long legs, the patience of a saint, and a heart murmur. Once the draft board classified him unfit for service, and the dancer classified him unfit for love, he developed a bad itch to be somewhere other than Texas. San Francisco drew him, along with a million other unraveled souls, but he didn’t come to San Francisco for the drugs or the easy sex, he came for the music, slinging a six-string Martin and a voice like Jerry Jeff Walker on ludes. He bypassed the Haight for a studio in the Sunset, where the streets were wide and quiet and the fog felt like a blessing after so many years of no-mercy-for-the-wicked (or the innocent) desert sun.

  He played for tips in the coffee shops a time, put together a band good enough to open for some of the bigger acts, played Kezar Stadium and Monterey and quit, at the tail end of ’69, at Altamont, when a too-high fan named Meredith Hunter got himself stabbed by a Hells Angel—four deep wounds in his back, one in his head—which may or may not have preserved the lives of a couple of young, petulant and exasperated Rolling Stones, threatening to stop the show, just stop it, if those cats didn’t cool their jets. They were wondering what was wrong with America. What had gotten into the kids.

  Frank was wondering the same thing. “ ‘Gimme Shelter’ my ass,” he said. He was talking to his drummer, who didn’t really know he was being talked to, because he was so high on angel dust he thought the stabbing was part of the show.

  A friend talked Frank into going down to the union hall to get his Teamster card, and by the time he met Riley, he had five years in, enough to be vested at the newspaper and with a permanent swing shift. It was perfect: two days in his own neighborhood, two in the Marina, and one in Daly City, where the fog was so thick it made the Sunset look like Ensenada. He was happy being single, being offstage, no real responsibilities except to get the papers off the truck and collect a few delinquent bills. The paper cost five dollars every four weeks, delivered through the gate. When a one-bedroom opened up in his building, he moved into it. Two hundred forty dollars a month. He got a dog at the shelter, an electric guitar and a Pignose amp at the pawnshop, and never turned the amp up past halfway. He messed around and wrote some love songs, put it all down and got to bed by ten. Went to school during the day and got his BA in literature. Wrote some bad poems. Made the dean’s list twice. Skipped graduation because he couldn’t picture himself in one of those black gowns. He knew he’d look a damn fool.

  Spot, a seven-month-old heeler mutt, slept at the foot of the bed, and when Frank tossed and turned, Spot yipped in his sleep, like he was saying “Cut it out.” Frank was grateful for the company. He stuck the framed photos of his ballerina wife away in a drawer when he heard she’d remarried, and one day pulled them out and took them down to the sidewalk. He leaned them against a lamppost and watched from his window as a woman pushing a shopping cart toward Geary stopped to add them to her belongings. She lined them up around the perimeter of the cart, on the inside, so it looked like a beautiful and tragic tutu’d lady was waiting (on her tiptoes) for a white knight to come and throw her bail. He started bringing the dog to work with him, figuring someone would eventually tell him to stop, but no one did.

  The kid rolled in from Wyoming, or one of those big empty states that wasn’t Texas. She got tangled up with Primo; tried, from what Frank could tell, to keep him from going under. That didn’t work out so well, but she stuck around after all the party candles went out. She’d been living in Primo’s apartment and managed to hold on to it until his wife moved back in, and afterwards lived in a bunch of different studios, mostly in the Mission, moving every year or so. Restless, Frank guessed. After they got to be friends he helped her move a couple of times, in his newspaper truck. The trucks were handy for stuff like that. Moving in. Moving out.

  Riley loved Spot. Brought him bones. Scratched his ears and between his shoulder blades until he made noises that sounded like words. Called him “silly dog” and kissed his cold, wet nose.

  Primo had gotten her a couple routes of her own in Eureka Valley, and she worked them for a few years—probably made a couple hundred a month. She’d be done by five thirty and then hang around—all the drivers knew where to find her—to help and get paid extra when other kids didn’t show up. She was good. She could throw a hundred papers in the straight blocks in about six minutes flat. All business. No time to bullshit. It was like she was on a mission; kind of hard telling, though, what it was.

  When she turned twenty-one, she finally got herself hired on as a casual, and Frank would see her working on the dock, loading the panel trucks and the bobtails and the semis with bundles of the daily news. She was still serious as hell when she was working, but sometimes after all the trucks were loaded she’d relax a little, hang out with the transportation guys, smoking cigarettes—sometimes a joint—and yakking. The others were a little in awe of her, tough as she was, first girl ever hired to work the docks, to drive. Maybe they expected her to cry once in a while. The job could be a bitch. They all felt like crying sometimes.

  Frank was there one early morning when she got a splinter the size of a toothpick under her fingernail, slamming down a bundle at the side of one of the old-plywood-lined bobtails. She shut down the chute for about thirty seconds, came out into the light where she could see what had stabbed her, pulled it out with her teeth, and went back to work. He was loading his own truck right next to her and watched her pull the splinter out. He knew it hurt; it hurt him to see it. She showed it to him later—that chunk of wood, and it was a chunk—which she’d stuck in her pocket, and the streak of red that ran almost to the cuticle. If you looked at it from the tip of her finger, you could see the hole it made. Fuck. Frank would have gone home. Let someone else load that sucker.

  He told her what he was thinking. “You should get out of here. Go home and soak that finger in something.”

  She looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “Why would I do that?”

  “Because you’re hurt?”

  “Nah. Nothing’s broken.”

  “Nothing has to be broken. They’ll let you go. They have to.”

  “I don’t want to,” she said, jaw set, eyebrows raised. He got it. He stuck around and helped her load the next truck, half expecting her to tell him to split, but she didn’t. She favored her hand when she could, and when the light from the dock crossed her face, he could see brief flashes of pain there.

  Later some of the drivers gave him a hard time. “Isn’t she a little young for you?”

  “I wasn’t hitting on her. I was helping her. Any of you assholes could have done the same.” They grumbled, walking away. Didn’t like being called assholes, but sometimes the truth hurt. And she wasn’t that young. And it’s not like he was so damn old.

  Another time she got jumped in the alley coming to work. Gave up her wallet and still got kicked in the head. She was bleeding like crazy—the way head wounds do—when she got to the plant, but just wadded up a handful of newspaper and held it over the cut ’til it stopped bleeding. It wasn’t a really big cut—didn’t need stitches or anything, just a butterfly—but the bruise around it was pretty scary looking. This time a few of the drivers tried to talk her into going to the hospital, but she wouldn’t. She took some aspirin, and after a while started whistling, because most of the money she had on her was in her boot. She wouldn’t even call the cops.

  “Five bucks,�
� she said, and shrugged. “He probably needed it more than I do.”

  There were other incidents: cuts, more bruises, falls off the dock or a slick bumper; Frank thought maybe she was a little accident-prone—some people just were—but she’d always put her head down and go back for more.

  Tracking her wasn’t easy. It’s not like she was either soft or hard, just . . . accepting, or something Frank didn’t have a word for. Zen. Maybe. Like a little monk, though he couldn’t see her liking the comparison, so he never said it out loud.

  He could tell she liked working the dock okay, but what she loved was driving the big trucks, the bobtails. Back then you didn’t need your Class C, just a regular driver’s license and a right arm strong enough to shift the gears. On Sundays they’d send her out with the overflow: the bundles that wouldn’t fit in the small trucks. She’d take the ones for the Avenues to a bank on the corner of Geary and Arguello, stack them against the brick wall all nice and neat, then go trade extras for just-made, still-hot bagels and hand them out when the drivers came to pick up their loads. It was nice, like a little oasis in the middle of the night; a place to stop and catch your breath, to find you weren’t totally alone out there.

  When Frank worked the Sunset, he’d see her truck sometimes—late, when she was done—at Ocean Beach or somewhere along Great Highway, the girl looking so small in the driver’s seat, forehead resting against the steering wheel, staring through it at the ocean while the sun rose behind her. Or not, since out there the sun didn’t always rise. Sometimes he’d stop and talk to her, but he learned to recognize a certain look that said probably best to leave her alone.

  Not everyone was comfortable around her. They’d always been an all-boys club, and letting a girl in meant something had gone haywire, seriously. She took some grief from a handful of blabbermouths, and mostly rolled with it, but a couple of times she went off. The way it looked to Frank was the ones she went off on had it coming. Even when she wasn’t taking down some joker talking about her ass or whatever, she had a mouth on her that would surprise a fellow, for real. He was glad she never got mad at him.

  There was one driver she got close to early on: Eddie, who everyone suspected and later found out for sure was gay. A fag, then. A homo. “Gay” wasn’t even a word yet, at least not one any of them had ever heard. Anyway, Frank would see them together a lot, and the thing he noticed was how often Eddie could make her laugh. It was nice to see, nice to know she could do that. Some of the guys referred to them as “the girls,” but Frank didn’t. Because he didn’t think it was all that funny.

  One morning she and Frank were coming in at the same time after last call, driving side by side on Geary. It was a warm day already and they both had their doors slid open. She had her whole left leg out the driver’s side, her foot up on the side mirror bracket—a total gangster lean. A car pulled up next to her in the turn lane, and the guy driving yelled through his passenger window: “Is that a good job?”

  “This is a great job,” she said. And she was smiling wide, bopping her head to some happy song inside it. She threw a paper to the guy through his window and took off waving when the light turned green.

  After they got back to the plant and checked in, she and Frank walked out together.

  Riley said, “You want to go get a beer? I know it’s kind of early, but—”

  “Early? We just finished an eight-hour shift.”

  They walked over to the M&M, drank a pint, ate some fries, and talked about the job, the clueless supervisors, the chance of rain on Sunday (rainy days were a pain in the butt). He asked her about Wyoming, and she looked puzzled for a second.

  “Oh. You mean Montana.”

  “Yeah, right. Montana, sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Easy to confuse those places, I guess, if you’re not from there.”

  She told him about the farm, the dog, her parents. “They’re pretty laid-back,” she said. “They’re really nice people.” She hesitated, gnawing at her lower lip. “I should probably write to them or call more often. I bet they worry about me, off in the big city. Especially my dad. You know how dads are.” For a second, she looked about twelve.

  “Why did you leave?”

  “It was time. I wanted to see the ocean something awful. I think I may have been a fish in a past life. Like a flounder. Both eyes on one side of my head.”

  “That would be interesting,” he said. “Make it kind of hard to drive.”

  She picked up a french fry and put it back down on the plate. Straight-faced, she nodded. “That’s true.”

  It was easy for her to make him laugh.

  He asked if she had more family, brothers or sisters. She made a movement with her head, but he couldn’t tell if it was a nod or a shake. She took a long drink of beer and said, “Have you ever seen a barn cat?”

  “Not that I can recall.”

  “Really? A guy from Texas?”

  “Not a lot of barns in Dallas.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  She told him how they jump, springing into the air like grasshoppers, or those tiny African bush babies she’d seen once on TV.

  “When you open the barn door,” she said, “it’s like the whole place comes alive. All these scrawny little cats climbing the walls or shooting straight in the air like bottle rockets.”

  “Did they have names?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “They still do, I bet. My dad names them all Slick or Slim. Or some variation, like Slick Britches or Slim Bob.”

  “He can tell them apart?”

  “Mostly. He’s like that. Pays attention to things he thinks need attention paid to.” She turned her head toward the window. Frank looked to see what she was seeing, but it was just another day on Howard Street: construction, double-parked cars, a guy passed out at the bus stop, still holding tight to an empty Colt 45 bottle. He figured she was probably missing home, which was perfectly natural. We all miss home sometimes.

  She insisted on paying. “A shitload of overtime last week,” she said.

  Eventually she had enough seniority to get her own home-delivery district, where she got to hire her own kids and teach them all the tricks she’d learned from Primo, and some new ones she’d taught herself. She ran a tight ship, and the kids did a good job for her. Later on, when she started calling in sick, hers was the best district to sub on, because you knew there wasn’t going to be any trouble. Just get the papers out to the corners, and the kids would do the rest. No complaints, no hassles, no showing up late or not at all. It was sweet; she kept it that way by treating them right, like adults, like human beings. And for a time it seemed like she’d found her spot, a place she could be contented, a place she felt like she knew what she was about.

  She and Frank met regularly for coffee during work, helped each other with down routes, killed time together at random corners waiting for complaints or last call. Sometimes Eddie would join them; sometimes one or two of the other drivers. She said they should form a band, call themselves the Vampires.

  Before too long, she was hanging around Frank’s apartment like she lived there, lying on the floor using Spot for a pillow; tooling around with the Martin (she knew a few chords, but got frustrated trying to make the changes); pulling books down off the shelf and asking Frank about poems, stories, certain words. She wanted to know what everything meant, and he tried to explain that most of the time there was no single meaning; a lot depended on who was trying to figure it out, and what they brought with them to the show.

  “The show?”

  “Yeah. The show. Life.”

  She liked that. “The life show,” she said.

  One time she asked him if he’d gone to Vietnam. She was playing his guitar, not looking at him; the question came out of nowhere.

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t have to go. And they wouldn’t have let me even if I’d wanted to.”

  She looked up. He read in her expression, How does that work?

  He tapped his chest. “My ticker. It’s a
little bit broken.”

  “Oh,” she said. And maybe it sounded like there was something in that small story she doubted, or didn’t like, or hadn’t wanted to hear, but he was probably hearing things himself, filtered through the unavoidable fact of all those other guys going and him staying behind. Probably.

  It was something, in any case, they didn’t talk about anymore.

  • • •

  The wheels started coming off slowly at first. Since bad behavior at the paper was more common than not, and people rarely got fired for any of it, those wheels took their time. First Riley became something of a regular at Hanno’s, a bar in the alley behind the plant. She had a few new pals by then who were pretty good drinkers, and it didn’t take long before her car—this incredibly beat-up Mustang—would be out there from quitting time at eleven o’clock to three or four in the afternoon, and sometimes later. Much later. Like going-back-to-work time.

  And there was a lot of coke filtering into and around the city; a lot of the drivers, including Riley, were snorting it pretty regular. Frank tried it, but he didn’t really enjoy it, and the hangovers were awful, jump-off-a-bridge depressing. He got some from her a few times before he realized he was trying too hard to like it. She wasn’t dealing, just sharing with a select few. Seemed like she bought in bulk, so she always had extra. Not pillowcases full or Colombian cartel lots, but plenty. The thing was, she was making pretty good money, like everyone else, and the only person she had to support was herself. And the hours didn’t help. If you wanted to stay up days and pretend you were normal (after a fashion), it helped to have a little bump, and coffee wasn’t going to do it. Aside from the illegality of it, and the cost, it could seem like a really good idea—assuming you could handle the aftermath.

  Except then it got to be more habit than play, and she thought it would be even better to try balancing one high out with another, like Jim Beam with beer backs, pills, and other kinds of powder, and pretty soon she wasn’t coming to work, or she was coming to work still high. They looked the other way for a while because she’d always done such a good job, but then one night some new supervisor, thinking he’s going to butter some butts downtown, yanks her off her district at four in the morning and sends her over to S.F. General for a drug test. Game over. Goddamn it.