On the Porches of California Street, Drinking Beer

I spent most of the summer after junior year on the porch on California Street, watching cars go by, smoking cigarettes and talking to the people who came and sat there as well, whomever they were. I drank lots of beer. I had a girlfriend who lived in the house, so I stayed over a lot of the time. While all the people I knew worked or went to summer classes or travelled, I did nothing in particular. I got skinny despite all the beer, because I never ate anything, and I knew a lot of girls, but I didn't fall in love. I was 20 years old.

Lump showed up most every day after he got off work, and he would always bring a 12-case of beer. For the whole summer, I was never buying. He worked hauling around bins full of clothing and other merchandise for the second-hand shop on First Street, and sometimes, in addition to the beer, he would bring items that he had found to show us, or to give away: belt buckles, rings, watches that didn't work, t-shirts, toy animals, and parts of cars or pieces of computers that had become obsolete and no longer had a purpose. He was shorter than I was, and he wore clothes that didn't fit. I don't think he was older than 25, and he kept his blonde hair cut short to his skull. He would have tended towards being lean and sinewy if he hadn't drank so much beer and whiskey, but it didn't seem to bother him.

He didn't come everyday, and neither did I. Sometimes I stayed at my place on Beach Hill, or I visited friends around town, or I drove up the coast to the City or down to Monterey for some reason or another, or I went back to San Carlos, though I never visited my parents. I don't know where Lump went when he wasn't there on that porch, but sometimes he didn't show up for a day, maybe two. But then, in the dead middle of July, he didn't show up for two weeks straight.

So when he came back, I was exceptionally curious about where he had been and I asked him. He said:

"I was in jail."

"I went down to the Yacht Club the other night. Have you ever been there?"

I hadn't.

"It's a shitty little dive on the Eastside. I was having a drink and talking to this chick. She was pretty cute, so I was talking to her a lot, kind of trying to make a move. So she gave me these pills. Well, I wanted what she had, you know? So I took them."

What were they? He shrugged.

"Whatever they were, I got pretty cheerful and started to buy a lot more drinks. I bought everyone in the bar a few drinks, and tried to get the chick to bang me in the bathroom. I guess she had a boyfriend who was there, and he got really mad. So I went around and bought everyone in the bar a few more drinks." He opened a beer and handed it to me, then opened another for himself. "Anyhow, I blacked out and when I came too, I was on the roof throwing beer bottles at the cops."

Remarkable! And what does one do, having found one's self in such a position?

"I kept on throwing the bottles! What the hell else was I supposed to do? They were looking to take me in!"

After a while, Lump stopped showing up for good, and then my girlfriend and her housemates

moved out of the house. Then that girlfriend and I broke up and I ran out of money just in time for school to start again, and I immediately nearly flunked. I turned 21 and grew a great big beard, and fell in love with Queenie. Sometimes I heard stories about Lump. He had died, someone said. He had moved. He had gotten a girl pregnant up in the City and had lost his job.

Then Sam told me that Lump had moved in with Lindy into a punk squat in the hills. Sam had been there one night. They had all been taking amphetamines. Lindy and Lump had crawled off to bed sometime hours before everyone else, but then at 4 in the morning, or so, there had been a bunch of screaming in their room. Suddenly the door burst open and Lindy came running out naked, screaming! Her feet were slashed to ribbons, but she was so high she didn't seem to notice. Then Lump came out, staggering after her, bleeding profusely out of his head, upon which a bottle had been broken.

They were taken to the Emergency Room and stitched up. What had happened, exactly? They could not remember, and would never afterwards be sure. Sam told me that Lump moved out of the place afterwards, moved out of Santa Cruz to who knows where. I moved out too, eventually, and I almost never go back.

But then this last summer, I did, and I drove up California Street to have a look. And there were people still sitting out on the porches, 20 years old forever, gazing at the cars that passed by forever and either laughing or scowling, smoking cigarettes and drinking lots of beer.

Birkensteiner's "Sailboat in Puget Sound"

It was late afternoon when Pat first sat down at the bar, and so the glow coming in through the window shades had filled the bottles against the back wall with splintered golden light. But soon the San Francisco fog rolled in over the Marina, and the whole sky, thusly subdued, made the shift into night quietly. He had come out with some friends from work, and he remembered as the night fell and the bar proprietor switched on the murky, colored lights inside the small, one room establishment, that he had not called to tell his wife where he was.

Of course, it wouldn' t be a problem. If he remembered correctly, she was going to some sort of political workshop and wouldn't be bothered if he stayed out. He dialed the number for his apartment on the phone in the hallway to the restrooms, and got his answering machine:

"You've reached Patrick and Callie Cocklelane," his own voice said cheerfully, requesting that he leave a message.

"It's Pat," he said, realizing as he spoke that he sounded hoarse. He cleared his throat. "I'm out with some people from the office, so I'll be home late tonight. But I haven't forgotten about tomorrow, so don't worry! I won't be too late." She had finally managed to convince him to go out furniture shopping with her the next day, to fill up their still relatively new apartment. He had been putting off doing any sort of domestic shopping or object gathering for several weeks, to his wife's supreme frustration and bewilderment. It was a matter of tense consternation around the Cocklelane marriage, and Pat was endeavoring reluctantly to amend the situation. The problem was very simple, really, though his wife thought it was not a good reason. Pat was just not ready for the place to become a home.

But, for better or for worse, it was a home. For the time being, at least. He didn't like living San Francisco. He was reluctant to "give it a chance," as Callie suggested constantly. He was homesick. Of all of his brothers and sisters, he was the only one to leave home and move across the country. Their absence from his life was difficult.

To make his troubled relationship with San Francisco more frustrating for Pat, the people he met almost always assumed that he, being young, was one of the wave of hippies that had flocked to the City to be a part of the "Summer of Love" scene. It didn't help that he had a big, full beard, and that he tended towards sloppiness in his clothes. And it didn't help either that his wife had undergone a swift transition to flowing clothing and multicolored shawls almost immediately after arriving, and that she attended things like political workshops and classes on organic food. Despite it being 1967 in San Francisco, Pat made an effort to stay largely out of the "movement's" way.

It was around 10 o'clock when a frumpy, older man shuffled into the bar and threw himself on a bar stool. "How's my painting doing?" He yelled to the bartender.

The bar tender looked at the man, and then up at the painting to which the man was pointing. It was a painting of a sailboat adrift in what Patrick imagined to be the San Francisco Bay. "It's still there," the bartender said with a laugh.

"Yeah, well..." the man grumbled and bought a beer. "It's a great painting. The kind that really flies off the wall at the right kind of place. Look at it!" The painter turned to Pat, and nodded. "You want a painting, Red?"

"I sure do," Pat replied, "I was looking for a nice forest scene, with some really nice trees and bushes and stuff."

"Oh, you're one of those nature people," the painter scoffed. "Far out man."

"You should take it to the Yacht Club," Pat said, "Or down to Fisherman's Wharf. Sell it to a tourist."

"You think I need advice on how to sell a damn painting?" The painter got red-faced and blustery. "You think a Birkensteiner painting would only sell to a bunch of stupid-assed tourists? I'll tell you what, there's a shitload of dumbass phonies who line up around the block for the chance to buy these damn things!"

Pat laughed and bought the man a beer. Birkensteiner turned out to be an artist of critical

acclaim, no money and mild fame. He could actually sell paintings, every now and then, and

managed to make rent in that manner. Most of the time, as was the case that evening, he provided entertainment in exchange for his drinks.

As they drank more and more, Birkensteiner began to step up his hustling of the bar patrons, until it was obvious that no one in the bar that evening was interested in the least in his painting. "If I took this thing over to the Groovy Grotto, it would be a different story," Birkensteiner grumbled. "Those phonies over there will buy anything!"

"Oh yeah?" Pat laughed. "Hey, listen. I got a car. I'll take you over there, and we'll see what they say, alright? See if you really can sell this thing."

Birkensteiner's eyes bulged and he became suddenly nervous. "Oh yeah? Yeah, you'd want to do that?" He looked around the room and then started to slick back his sparse gray hair. He was bald on top, and had a thick film of stubble coating his face. His clothes were loose and sewn unevenly, so that the two different sleeves fit around his arms differently and the pant legs were different lengths. Pat laughed.

"You don't want to go? I thought you said you could sell it to a phony," Pat said.

"We're gonna go, Red," Birkensteiner said, finishing his beer in one substantial sip. "Don't worry about that."

So Birkensteiner got the painting down from the behind the bar and they jumped in Pat's car and drove over to the Groovy Grotto where, as Birkensteiner had said, the phonies hung out. As they drove, Birkensteiner pulled out a crumbled mess of paper from his pockets and wrapped up the painting. Despite the crummy quality of the paper, after he had spent a few minutes fumbling with it, the painting looked almost professionally wrapped. Once they arrived, Birkensteiner went straight to the bar where he laid a twenty down and ordered an expensive cocktail.

"Do you know if Redondo Reginald has come by yet, to ask about his painting?" Birkensteiner yelled to the bartender at a volume that got the attention of all the people in the immediate vicinity.

"Who?" The bartender yelled back.

"Reginald! The art collector!" Birkensteiner yelled back, disgusted. "I'm Birkensteiner! He wants to buy my new painting!"

"He must be late," the bartender said, shrugging apologetically.

Birkensteiner scoffed. "Asshole," he said, shaking his head. "If he doesn't get here soon, he's gonna lose out on this work of art. I'm of half a mind to put it up for sale right here and now!"

"How much are you selling it for?" A nicely dressed young man asked, having overheard the conversation. "Can I see it?"

So Birkensteiner sold his painting, and then Pat and he went back to their other bar celebrate. The next morning, Pat woke up, fully dressed on his couch. It was noon and his wife, as she explained in a brief and impassioned note, was going to be away for the rest of the weekend.

Out Towards the Open Space

The news spread from dinner table to telephone conversation until it was known all over town with very little, if any at all, prompting from officials: a man had escaped from the mental asylum out towards the open space and he had not yet been found.

Robert called and told me, and we decided we should take a look around town. He swung by my house with Matt and Matt's little brother, John, and we went to the park and sat in the truck talking about the man. Where would he go? What would he do, now that he was out? Matt said that the man had escaped through a drainage ditch just outside the asylum. He might have been able to crawl into the sewers from there, Robert said. Would he come to town? How had he gotten out of his room, and then out of the building? A doctor had left the door unlocked, Matt guessed. It wasn't an asylum that was known for housing dangerous people.

We drove down Edgewood Road towards the city line where, due to the lack of buildings or civic use, patches of scruffy forest appeared and became gradually denser. If you went far enough the road became dirt and then stopped at a gate, and past that was the open space, where the Resevoir gleamed in the moonlight. Robert parked his truck on Crestview Road, right before the turn on Edmonds Street, where the road went down into a gully, down where the asylum sat in shadow and pale light.

"We should walk down there," I said and the guys agreed, though tentative. The road was wide and flooded with light where Robert had parked, but we were on the very edge of that light and just several yards further the darkness was vivid and nearly palpable. Still, if we turned around we would be within reach of the well-lit housing subdivision, so it was not so vulnerable a place to be, outside of our willful imaginations. But I didn't want to turn around, aside from those desires that sprang from silly fears of the dark. I wanted to see the man. I wanted to look into the dark and see if I could make out his face. It was hot out, summer having started, and we were all in t-shirts though it was after 10 p.m. In three more months I was going to move away from home and start college in Santa Cruz.

We went down the road slowly into the dark. It was silent, aside from the crickets, which became louder. The air was warmer there, and wetter, and I thought about the drainage ditch and the sewers and I felt like there were millions of eyes in the bushes. Robert wanted to go back, but I wanted to at least see the asylum. What sort of person found himself in an asylum, and what sort of person, having found himself there, escaped? Part of the building emerged from behind the trees. It was pale white in the moonlight. The shadows and the moonlight distorted the shapes of trees, making them into pillars, or the shapes of people without faces, or other things that there weren't names for. And I wondered, If you entered, was it possible to come out? I came around the bend in the road and saw the asylum. It was a big, old building, an antique structure, but sturdy. Its windows were all dark and it looked peaceful the

way houses do when the people inside are sleeping. I turned around and found that the guys hadn't followed me. For a few

seconds, I held my breath and listened to the night, the idea that I had been left alone causing my whole body to shudder with visceral fear. But then I heard Robert call out my name, and I went back and we left and made up excuses for why we hadn't gone further.

They found the man the next day. He had made it down to Boulder Creek. Why he went there, I'll never know.

The Mirrored Room

It wasn't until after they laid me off at the furniture store that I ever had the chance to spend the long, quiet, vacant hours of a work day lounging around my apartment. Kathy was still working at the fabric store then, and she, along with everyone else in our building and most everyone else on our street, was gone at work all day. The neighborhood, which was filled during the evenings and weekends with voices and laughter and all the general sounds of living, lapsed into a rigid, unmovable quiet during the workdays.

I spent my first day unemployed looking up jobs in a wild frenzy of anxiety and despair. My second unemployed day I spent resolutely drinking beer in the backyard and feeling sorry for myself. I went out at 10 in the morning and bought a 12 case, and then took three beers with me into the backyard. Maybe "backyard" is too nice of a word for the space. It was a long, narrow stretch of broken up pavement and patches of grass that existed, I can only assume, to be a buffer between our building and the nearly identical building next door. I brought out a lawn chair and set it up in the corner between the back fence and the smaller side fence that marked the very edge of our landlord's property.

I took the newspaper out with me and searched disinterestedly through the "Help Wanted"

 section in order to placate that anxious part of me that found unemployment unbearable. Satisfied with my attempt to find employment, I settled down to really enjoy my miserable, worthless wretchedness.

Gradually my anxieties faded and I was able to take in the day. A row of trees stood on the other side of the fence, to segregate the two buildings, and there were a few small birds flitting around the branches. I felt like I might be able to identify them if I tried. I had been a boy scout when I was a kid, and I had taken the bird watching merit badge. Focused as I was, and just slightly drunk, it took a few minutes for me to react when I heard the noise of someone descending a stairway from behind the side fence. I frowned, and jumped when I heard a door quietly shut just a few feet from where I was sitting.

I stood up, confusedly trying to decide what I had just heard. It was then that I noticed, to my

 dizzying astonishment, that my apartment building continued about three yards longer past the side fence. Grabbing hold of the top of the fence, I pulled myself up and peered over. There was another side fence, which marked the actual boundary of the property, and in the  small space between the two fences was a stairway, which led down to a door in the side of the building.

I went back up to my apartment and drank another beer. It was around noon, and I noticed from the window that a few cars were on the street. People, I guessed, were coming home for lunch and I was struck by the feeling that, if I met one of my neighbors in the street, they would be intruding on a world that had become completely my own. I went out and walked around to get a better look at the side fence. There was a small, neatly kept path that went along the side of the building, and I followed it. Examining the fence and building, it was clear that I never would have guessed that the side fence in the backyard was a decoy, camouflaged as it was in its simplicity. And along the real side fence was a small gate.

It opened when I pushed against it, and I walked over to the stairway and looked down at the doorway. I was sweating profusely, tantalized and willfully inventing all array of dangerous and scandalous possibilities. Ultimately I did not think I would find much of anything inside, mabye the building maintenance guys' supply shed, or something comparable in boringness. But I was unemployed and drunkish, and everything felt like a dream. But, barring something extraordinary to distract me, I would have had to spend the afternoon worrying about my momentum, which, I feared profoundly, was pointing downward at too steep an angle to rectify. I went down the stairs and through the door, and found myself in a long, empty hallway

 in which the walls had been allowed to rot with water damage and in which there were no light bulbs in the sockets. At the end of the hall was another staircase, this one leading up.

I followed it. Aside from the natural light coming through the windows, the passage was dark, and it smelled of old, rotten wood. The stairway ended at a door that led out onto the roof. It was bright and cloudy out, and from up there I could see patches of the bay in the spaces between the other, larger buildings. Situated perfectly in the center of the roof, and therefore impossible to see from the ground, was a small, freestanding room. Its windows were blackened. In a sudden frenzy, I hurried across the roof and tore open the door.

It was unlocked. Inside was a room with mirrored walls, in the center of which kneeled my landlord, dressed in woman's lingerie, straddled by a naked young man.