California Winter

I went to a party just after the Christmas holiday. Most people I knew had not come back to town after going to visit family, and it was raining that night, so I almost didn't go. The rain had saturated the streets, making the pavement slick and it wasn't until a pair of headlight came up behind me that I realized with a start that I had been driving 10 miles per hour. Twinkling red and green and gold Christmas lights cut through the chill of the night, decorations that people still had out on the lawns and the fronts of houses. The holiday never seemed so poignant as it did each year after it passed.

It was cold outside, and inside was nearly the same. It was a beach house, so close to the sea that you could hear the waves pounding against nearby cliffs as clear as anything, and during the summer and spring and warmer days of fall and winter it was pleasant enough inside. But even California got cold on the winter nights, and the house wasn't built to keep the warmth inside. A girl with dark brown hair met me at the door, asked me my name and then told me her's: Rachel. I asked if Greta was there, though obviously she was since it was her party. I didn't like walking into a stranger's house. And Rachel said yes, in there, and pointed past the hallway into the room where there were voices and music. She asked, how do you know Greta? I knew her from work, I said, and I followed Rachel into the party.

"Greta says they're going out of business." She formed each word as if she were tasting the sounds. I couldn't decide if I thought she was pretty. I nodded as I waited for her to continue, unsure if that was all she was going to say.

"Probably," I said after a few moments, shrugging. She also shrugged and said nothing but smiled, so I said, answering a question that she might have asked, "Maybe I'll go back to school, if they do."

Rachel nodded. Greta saw me and got up to say hello, and I saw that there were several other people from work there. I was told to get some food and sit with them and eat, and I put the beer that I had brought over into the fridge. In the kitchen the sound of rain drummed against the thin walls as if it were about to come through, topple the walls and take back the space for the winter night. I could see my breath. When I went back out to the living room, I found a spot next to Rachel on the floor. People were talking about the rain.
"I was afraid it was going to be another dry year."

"You know I let my garden die because of the drought."
"It still might be a dry year. A week of rain can't make up for three months of none."

"People in California are always shocked when it starts raining. It's the middle of December and everyone is staring at all this water falling from the sky, bewildered."

"It was almost 70 degrees outside the other day," Rachel said to me. "It was beautiful out. Sunny."

"I know that we're supposed to want it to rain," I said, "but how can you not enjoy it when it's sunny out?"

People in the group heard me and agreed. "I was back in Iowa for Chanukah, and we're getting record snowfall. Here, all I need to go outside is a jacket. And my sunglasses!"
"I was in Madison last week. The lake was freezing. It's incredible how cold it gets."

"Ridiculous," I said, "I'm from California, and the concept of a lake freezing is scientifically impossible."

"I'm from San Clemente," Rachel said to me with a small sigh. She seemed tired or distracted. "It's always perfect there."

That night I stayed over at the house with Rachel, and in the morning we went out for breakfast together. As with the night before, I found that there was little to talk about. What was between us was filled with silence. Not sure if the lack of conversation was awkward or not, I found myself talking more and more. She was pretty, I decided, but I wasn't sure. I found myself looking past her, abruptly not interested, but then not sure if I was, not sure if I should be. Was she not interested in me? I couldn't get a sense of things as they stood. When I kissed her our lips would touch but it would not feel like anything had transfered between us, and I would kiss her more trying to determine if I was missing something. For a while, I believed that if I could change my self to the point where a strong bond emerged between Rachel and myself, I would be happier with her than with any other girl. Things hadn't gone well with other girls. I was still talking to Queenie, though she had moved to L.A., thank God. I needed a change. When I arrived at work in the morning it was dark, and when I left work at night it was dark and so it seemed like there was no daytime at all, even though I could watch the pale yellow winter sunlight come weakly to life and quickly decline through the big window in the front of the cafe all day long.

After the new year, the rain really started. It came down in torrents, emptying the streets of all pedestrians. No one came to Soquel Village and, aside from the five or six regulars, no one came into the Mermaid Cafe, and my hours got cut. I could lie in Rachel's bed all day long, and I found myself doing so even after she had left for her job. The room smelled like oils and lotions that I identified as generally "new age-y," though she had names for them and descriptions of their homeopathic uses. The city's drainage system, having fallen into disrepair in the long dry season, was overwhelmed by the deluge and the streets flooded. Soquel Village went underwater one night, and the Mermaid Cafe shut its doors for two weeks while the city crews cleaned up the sidewalks. I started looking for a new job, but I didn't look to take classes. My attitude around Rachel became alternatively terse and manic. Still, she remained quiet, smiling, looking at me as if dreaming about something else or maybe not. I realized one day that we were running out of time to get to know each other. Very soon, unless there was that connection, I would lose interest.

The first night we met, I sat next to her on the floor and then danced with her and talked to her all night. When people wanted to dance, they turned off the lights and turned up the volume on the stereo. We went into the kitchen together to get more beer and talked about the rain. It was going to destroy her garden, she said sadly. She never made jokes, and never laughed at mine. We kept running out of things to talk about. She started to talk about her ex-boyfriend when talking about her trip home for Chanukah, but then stopped. But her mentioning him was enough, when added to my growing uncertainty about the lack of conversation, that I decided she wasn't interested. I went away and talked to other people and thought about leaving, when I saw Rachel talking to Greta. They looked at me, and then Greta looked back at Rachel and shrugged. "Maybe he's not, but who cares?" She said. I knew what that meant, and when I saw that Rachel was alone again I went over to her and found a way to kiss her.

So one day between spells of rain Rachel and I went walking along the beach and, tired of trying, I let the silence grow between us until I felt that there was no way for me to break it. The ocean fell violently against the shore, hissing, crackling, then roaring. The clouds coming in over the ocean were enormous and black with the weight of rain, but the air was warm and mild and there was no wind, the way it is both after and before the storm. I couldn't decide if I needed to tell her that I wouldn't be calling anymore, or if I could just simply not call anymore after that day, and I watched her move in front of me, bundled up in knit cap and fleece jacket and boots. I stopped and stood there and watched her, and she, not realizing that I was no longer following, continued to walk away.

The Testament of Jahzeel

One late night after a fight that neither he nor his wife would ever will themselves to remember, Jahzeel Medina Rodrigez Jr. left the small apartment that he and Maribella Francisco shared. He never saw his young son again, a small, effeminate boy to whom he gave his name and no memories, save the most vague impression: an outline inside of a doorframe. The scent of soil stained on cheap, worn out slacks. The thick smell of tobacco on hands large beyond large, like God's hands.

Devastated as she was by the desertion of her husband, the re-creation of the family without the father did, on the other hand, allow Maribella to win without having to say another word the long-standing argument between her and her husband, which had filled the home since before Jahzeel Medina Rodrigez the Third was flesh and only a dream. It was really maybe the only argument in the home that was rational at its root, rather than springing from jealousy, betrayal, loathing. Maribella had wanted her son to receive good education, and had wanted the family to make the changes necessary to facilitate it. Jahzeel Jr. had not seen the purpose, and had not wanted to change.

So in the days after her husband left, Maribella packed up all the clothes and few mementos that she thought she would need and got on a bus leaving the empty and eternally windy expanse of San Juan Bautista where her family and Jahzeel's family had lived for 35 years, and she went to her brother's wife's sister's home in Redwood City and asked with the first flair of audacity, which would prove eventually to be her success against a world that did not want her and her son, and had little reason to take either of them, if she and her little boy could stay there until they could get established. Maribella was 20 years old.

By the time Jahzeel was old enough for kindergarten, Maribella had been working as a nanny and maid for a family in San Carlos for nearly three years. The Hollis family lived on Garnet Street in the White Oaks neighborhood, in one of hundreds of once-modest homes that had become larger and more ornate as, over the past several generations, affluence had come into town. Despite being safely within that affluence due to her husband's money, Yvonne Hollis had grown up in Wyoming, in a family that prided itself on being middle class while being most definitely poor. Due to such an origin, she was unaccustomed to "help" around the house, and she was perpetually bewildered by the Maribella's daily presence. Maribella was therefore able to take certain liberties in her position: though by no stretch did she ever take advantage of the family, she did make a point of taking her son, whom she now called Freddy, with her to work each day. After several years of growing up around Mrs. Hollis and the Hollis' one daughter, a small shy girl named Fiona, who was just a month older than Freddy, coupled with Maribella's determined, untrained but persistent coaching, Freddy could speak with a perfect Anglo accent.

"Mrs. Hollis! Our children will be starting school next year!" Maribella said to her employer's wife one day in early March.

"I know," Mrs. Hollis exhaled. She was pensive about her shy, young daughter starting school and had previously vocalized to Maribella that she was considering waiting another year before starting Fiona in kindergarten. "She's just such a timid little girl. I'm worried about how she is going to adjust." Mrs. Hollis sighed again.

"It's just too bad that Freddy and she won't be going to the same school. They are such close friends," Maribella said, nodding knowingly. And that was all that Maribella said about the subject. The words stayed in Mrs. Hollis' mind all the rest of the day, and into the night, when she asked her husband about district rules concerning who can attend which schools. It was all decided based on what address was provided, Mr. Hollis told her with a yawn.

And so Maribella was able to enroll her son at White Oaks Elementary in San Carlos's wealthy school district, using the Hollis' address on his admissions form. With Freddy away at school most of the day, Maribella was able to establish a house cleaning business, which she gradually expanded into a fleet of three cars and seven employees, gradually becoming something of a pillar of the community on Middlefield Road in Redwood City, a neighborhood that the Anglos in San Carlos and Redwood City referred to as "little Mexico." 

Freddy grew slowly, his eyes large and nearly black and his dark hair as soft as down. He was as pretty as a girl, and was popular with his classmates. His loyalty to Fiona bordered on reverence, he was a fixture in the Hollis household and, were it not for his dark complexion and "Indian" appearance, he might have passed for one of the family. When he reached 7th grade, his classmates became suddenly acutely aware of the racial difference between themselves and him, and began to ask him endless questions. "Are you Spanish?" "Are you from India?" "How do you say 'fuck' in Mexican?" "Why are Mexicans always selling fruit on the street?" Freddy absorbed all these questions, and worse, with an almost uncanny resiliency.

During the summer between 8th grade and freshman year of high school, Freddy grew half and foot and his shoulders became broad. Though he remained lean, his muscles became developed and the veins showed on his arms. His face retained its prettiness, but took on the sharpness of a man's, attracting not the attention of women, but their fascination. The high school where he went was in Redwood City, Sequoia High School, and its population was split between Anglos and Latinos. And so the question among his friends and peers became much more pronounced, sharpened: who was Fred? What world did he belong to? The question became an outright obsession among several circles of girls, and the fire of their interest was fanned by the fact that Fred responded to their inquiry with increased inscrutability. His Anglo accent began to change, taking on the lightest inflection of something different. This continued for a year, and in the meantime his mother's housecleaning business began to suffer. One of the women whom she employed had been accused of stealing jewelry. Maribella, while trying to reassure the upset client, made the mistake of standing up for her employee. Though the necklace was eventually found- it had only been misplaced- rumors about Maribella's disrespect towards a client spread quickly as fire through a field of dry grass.

A senior named Harriet had been fighting with her boyfriend, March, and, in her impetuous and young frustration, she followed Fred when she noticed him leaving his Math class to go to the bathroom in the middle of the period. She stopped him by the vending machine outside, grabbed him and kissed him. Fred ran away, but the spectators in the windows were already talking, and at lunch March assaulted him as he walked through the quad, shouts of hostility and excitement ringing out among the walls of the school and in the trees as the larger boy rained a torrent of blows down on Fred, leaving him a few moments later crumbled on the ground.

Fiona found Fred sitting outside of her house, and she asked him what had happened and he told her. She went to the all-girl's Catholic school in Belmont. In the course of her entering her teenage years, she had gained only the barest amount of weight, as if she had been standing against her own growth. Her hair was still shock white and her voice was still barely louder than a sigh.

"I didn't do anything," Fred was crying. "I wasn't even anything to him." Fiona sat next to him and put her arms around him. Mr. and Mrs. Hollis typically stayed out until late in the evening with their mutual lives, but Mr. Hollis happened to come home early that day and found his daughter and Fred naked in her bed together.

He stood in the doorway for a few seconds, and then turned and shut the door. When, a few minutes later, Fred emerged, fully dressed, Mr. Hollis was waiting for him in the living room. 

"What happened to your face?" Mr. Hollis asked. "Did you get into a fight?"

"Yes," Fred answered with uncertainty.

"I don't think that it is appropriate," Mr. Hollis started to say, also uncertain. "I think that you should get out of my house."

Fred nodded numbly and headed to the door. Mr. Hollis followed.

"I don't want to see you around here anymore," he said sorrowfully. "This is really a disappointment for me, Freddy. I really don't know what to say. You and she are too young."

As he stepped through the door, the young man turned back and said in a clear, calm voice, "Don't call me Freddy. My name is Jahzeel."

Innocents Abroad

We had no money and nowhere to sleep, and it was a cold night outside so we lay in the car with our jackets as blankets. As I lay there, trying to be as still as I had to be in order to sleep, the uncomfortable cold quickly penetrated the jacket, then my t-shirt and jeans. My feet froze inside of my leather boots. Outside the windshield, the tree line towered over us, blueish white in the moonlight, as if under ice. There was a sign a little ways away from the car, which I kept reading over and over in order to distract myself: MT. TAMALPAIS, it read, and there was a list of hiking trails that went different directions into the dark. Kerry was sure the cops were going to come and wake us up and tell us to move before long, but he didn't seem to have trouble getting to sleep. I was most worried about the cold getting into my system, and I kept moving my toes and fingers to keep the blood circulating. It came to the point that I decided I wouldn't sleep at all, and then suddenly my eyes shut and then opened and it was morning again.

We had come down from Washington looking for San Francisco. It had been four days sin

ce we left and we knew that we were close, but we weren't in a hurry to find it and we were content to explore. We had come down Interstate 5 and then Interstate 80, through miles and miles of farmlands to Vallejo, then down to

 Richmond where we had found a bridge. Of course we did not know that there were more than one Bay bridges, so we had taken it and found ourselves in San Rafael. We had been wandering since. In a place called San Anselmo,

we hung out by the creek and met some local kids who were 18 like us, and they took us out of town to a river were we could swim. It was hot then, and Kerry used his fake ID to get us all beer and we had a great time, drinking and swimming and talking about shit. One of the San Anselmo kids was this girl, and Kerry and I couldn't get enough of her. She got into her swimming suit and I almost lost it. Her boyfriend and all the other San Anselmo kids weren't cool with us hitting on her, so it got kind of weird. It wasn't like there was going to be a problem, but the San Anselmo kids stopped talking to us as much and they started to give us the cold shoulder. That was fine, because there were plenty of people by the river. It was beautiful out, hot, and the sun was coming through the trees as a great radiant glow that got bigger and bigger as I got drunker until it surrounded me completely. Kerry start talking to this shabby looking older guy and his lady, who was a wasted bleach blonde girl with a black eye. Kerry was trying to get us some crank, and it looked like it might work out. The guy was really interested in Kerry's sneakers, and Kerry had some sandals he could wear, so it wouldn't be a big deal to get rid of them. But then the cops came and told us to clear out. 

We wandered back towards the town and found a place called Fairfax where there was a big park filled with people, mostly young. There were kids hanging around, and Kerry started to try and make friends to see if they had any pot. The whole town smelled like pot, we knew someone had to have some. People were friendly, but maybe we looked shady because we were drunk, or maybe the kids that Kerry tried to talk to were too young or too square. Because the cops came and started to give us dirty looks, and we decided to get out of there. We followed Bolinas Road up into the mountains. We found these big, fat, flat reservoirs that were as still and clean as the surface of a mirror. We went for a swim, despite the signs that said we shouldn't, and it was cold and deep. I swam out a little ways, until I was out from under the big thick old trees that grew on the bank, and I looked up at the moon, which was beginning to emerge in the darkening sky, and I thought that I could see other planets if I tried, and I called out suddenly, to hear my own voice.

"Wow," Kerry said. He sliced through the water and came up alongside of me, the still water rippling cleanly outwards, tiny waves. "The massive echo of you."

But then it was night and we were soaking wet. We managed to get dry, but we weren't ready for how cold it would be and we didn't have a place to stay. We had slept out under the stars the past few nights on the way down, but it was too cold for that. We parked in the Mt. Tamalpais hiking trail head parking lot and, eventually, I slept.

We left before 6 in the morning the next day and followed the road down the mountain, going down to the ocean. We could see it from the road, its massive pale blue sky colored expanse stretching out forever. It was hazy where the sky and and ocean met at the horizon and, if you stared long enough, you could convince yourself that they were of the same unbroken cloth. We could see the curve of the land as it came south, down to the mouth of the bay, and then I saw the Golden Gate. We were looking for some coffee.

There wasn't anything around. Kerry wanted to go south, but I pointed out that there was a town further west, along the water. He said we were only a few miles out of San Francisco. But I insisted. We came down to Highway 1, which would take us down to the Golden Gate, and Kerry begrudgingly passed the turn, continuing west. There was no street sign, and he thought we were going up a driveway, but then we hit another road with no sign and I said, 

"I told you."

And Kerry said, "This is a driveway."

But it wasn't. The road went around the bend and went past some farmhouses, which were painted in bright colors and had wood and metal sculptures in the front lawns. Then we were downtown in Bolinas amongst the old wooden buildings painted all colors and the streaming rainbow strips of cloth that danced and tumbled in the ocean wind.

And so I had finally arrived in Bolinas.

The Holy Ghost

All along the high wooden rafters of the roof, up among the old giant mute organ pipes, defunct, that sat in the balcony above us and that had long since been replaced with a new sound system, Father Swift's voice echoed, dry and high and quiet sometimes and then unsettling as the rushing wind all at once. I listened, or tried to listen. The church was cold and still, the people within it sitting in blue empty dimness, looking as if they were sleeping or crying or about to speak and say something important. The church was stone and wood, colorless primarily except for in the small stained glass windows that lined both sides of the long row of pews. Each window had an image from a different Bible story and the story that Father Swift was talking about was where the bird and fire came from the sky: Pentacost. I could listen to his words, and I thought I might understand but I wasn't sure. Pausing for a minute, he looked out, up from his book and said, "Blessed are our children, please come up and gather in His name." My mom looked at me and whispered that I should go up to him along with the other boys and girls, so I went slowly and he put his hand on me and said, "We pray for our children, Lord, that You keep them in Your Love and help us to give them a better world," and his voice was hard and soft, like a flame in the wind.

I went back to my pew, and Father Swift continued, "I want so badly to give my children that better world, sometimes I want to hear His plan. Sometimes I feel that I need to hear His voice in order to serve Him. I want Him to explain to me why I'm afraid. Why I have to worry about the state of the world, about our children's future, and sometimes in the search for His voice in the cacophony of the world, the certainty of His love can seem to be as

 uncertain as everything else. Forty-nine days after the death of Jesus, the apostles gathered together in the upstairs room struggling with of exactly that kind of uncertainty and fear."

The upstairs room. I had seen it, it was in the hallway that led to the church's nursery, where I was sent to play most Sundays during Father Swift's sermons. I was still too young for Sunday school. I asked my dad what was inside the room as we walked past the door one day, and he shrugged and he said it was probably storage. I asked if it was the room where Peter and the apostles were, and he laughed and said that that had happened in another part of the world, a long time ago. He said it was a story that we learned about because it taught us a lesson. He opened the door, and showed what was inside: dusty old bookshelves, mostly empty. A chalkboard. Fold up chairs left leaning against a wall.

Father Swift said, "Recently a woman came to me for counsel on her son. I have known her son for many years, since he was a child and was small enough for his mother to carry him to church events. So when she told me that her son was addicted to heroin, I experienced a personal sense of grief and shock. And not only did I have my own feelings to grapple with, but it was plain to see that the woman, my friend and parishioner for all of these years, she felt utterly alone and helpless in the face of her son's gradual end devastating decline. What could I tell her? How could I hope to give her any sense of solace, when I didn't know the first thing about confronting such a tragedy?"

I asked my dad one day if I was going to go to Heaven and he said he thought I would. I wanted to sure though, I said. And he said that no one was ever sure.

Father Swift paused and looked around. He wasn't as big as my dad, and at the front of the church in front of all those people he looked smaller, skinnier than ever. He said, "But I began to counsel the woman as best as I knew how. And I found as I spoke that I knew what to say. The words came to me, words that, it seemed to me, I had known all my life. It wasn't until a long time after that I thought much about those words that somehow came to me, because I was concerned with talking to the woman and giving her whatever comfort and guidance I could. In fact, it wasn't until I went home and began to tell Jill about the experience that I realized those words hadn't been my words. They had been God's words."