I take the BART from East Bay to SF and get off at Powell. I’ve google-mapped the directions—down Eddy Street and up Leavenworth—and I’ll be there early.
I walk down Eddy against the traffic. A man, thin and toothless and greasy, shakes a palm at a passerby: “I needs the love, friend. Needs—” The passerby passes. Toothless follows.
“Fuck you motherfuck-fuck-bitch, man. The love. Just love.” Gone.
Toothless turns his song-plea to—me. I speed my stride, don’t make eye-contact. Down Eddy, down Eddy. Café Royale.
“Don’t treat me right. No love here. You ain’t never trea—scared?” He’s following me. “Ya scared mama?”
I don’t look at him, but he follows me three blocks, singing to and yelling at me. I’m his mother. Now I’m his classmate. Now I’m the police and the government, and I want to fuck him up.
I feel the back of my arm—something wet. He spit on me. He spit on me.
Now he’s gone.
* * * * *
Café Royale. I’m there—here—but it’s not a café at all; it’s a bar. And I’m not twenty-one. “I’m not twenty-one,” I say to the bartender.
He doesn’t look up. “I’m not twenty-one but I’m meeting some writers here and I’m early and is it—”
“Then don’t order alcohol,” he says, cutting a woman at the bar a wedge of brie. “Five dollars.” She pays him.
“Thank you,” I say.
The brie-woman, angular and about fifty, talks to me. She asks me lots of questions, trivial things, and I find her odd—in violation of the social code by which most everyone lives.
“How old are you?” she asks, her third question in rapid succession.
“I’m nineteen.”
“Nineteen and new here.”
I’m not sure why she would find those two facts unusual together, but she seemed to. “Yeah, my fiancé and I just moved here like two days ago.”
“Nineteen and engaged.”
“Yes.”
She tells me great, congratulations. Wonderful. She’s engaged.
“Cool.”
“To an actor.”
“Really, who?”
“He’s from the original Ovaltine family.”
“What’s he in?”
“He plays opposite Sandra Bullock. They’re shooting the movie now. He’s from the original Ovaltine family.”
“What’s his name?”
“Benjamin Curtain.”
I have my laptop so I google him right there, and nothing really comes up. I show her. “How’d you meet him?”
“In the Cloud World. Clap your hand three times, kiss your palm, raise your hand to great great skies, and pray for the clouds. Most people there are dead.”
Two crazy people.
“But if you do it right and you’re alive you can get in.” She raises her hand, and for a second I think she’s trying to show me. “Hello. Excuse me.”
The bartender turns to her.
“Excuse me, I’d like another piece of cheese.”
He cuts a piece—another wedge of brie—and hands it to her.
“How much?”
“Five dollars.”
“Is it the same size?”
“What?”
“Is it the same size as the last one?” She picks it up and examines it. “Should you take some back, or should I pay you a little less?”
“What?”
Her neck tenses. “Is it the same size as the five-dollar cheese I bought before?”
The bartender looks at me—I’m smiling—and coughs. “Sure. Zact same size.”
The woman says thank you and hands him five dollars. Her neck relaxes. She's wearing a pant-suit, I notice now, and it looks like she makes money. She takes a bite of brie and kisses her palm and rocks in her stool, singing to herself. No, mumbling. No, not to herself.
She's talking to Benjamin.
She's talking to Benjamin.
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