Viewmaster
By
Brian Ferdinand Stowell
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Brian Stowell
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Bush Anus Terribilis
2005
When I was a child, and that child I was is a mere ghost now, I used to look upon the world at large in the form of a hollow globe that stood on three spindly legs in various rooms in our old houses (it moved around a lot and so did we.) I’d start with coat hook Cape Cod, then spin to, say, the Middle East, and proceed to move my pointing finger along the slender vial of the Red Sea, an intoxicant pursed in the palm of Arabia, gripped by the lobster claw thumb of Somalia. These weren’t countries but creatures to my young eyes: monster puzzle pieces.
Then up my finger would go making circles around the birth canal of the Mediterranean as it presses out between the thighs of Europe and Africa. Into the vast ocean I would be released, my journey slowed by the enormity of those pale shades of blue and then quickened by the flowing black lines of the Gulf Stream. I would just miss a small sperm shaped island emanating from the great phallus of Florida, poised to impregnate all of the Caribbean. I had finally returned to my own country, the beast that belonged to me.
But my wanderlust is not satisfied, so I push the little morsel of dust accumulated at the tip of my finger and feed it to the Gulf of Mexico as it frowns open-mouthed, hiding the teeth of its submerged ridges beneath the saliva of the sea. I then timidly squeeze by the gross obesity of Texas and reach what I always knew would be my destiny and my final destination: California. It didn’t matter where in California; Adventureland, Fantasyland, Tomorrowland, anyplace would do.
The state, if you’re not familiar with it, is a long dinner table or a kitchen counter-top with salad bowl Central Valley in the middle; a table where everyone sits on one side, like the ‘Last Supper’ or an awards banquet. I knew it contained that mythical city where they made movies and TV shows. To my young ears it sounded like an occidental name for some exotic far-eastern kingdom, like Mandalay or Cathay. I would look on the map for Allay and never find it. I knew about the big gold bridge (though it looked tomato soup red) and even the name of the city it was in and I already knew then what I would learn from direct experience later – things are different in San Francisco.
When I was a young man, and that man I was is a mere ghost now, I often stared at Golden Gate Bridge, that portal for air and fog blown in from the ocean; it made promises it couldn’t possibly keep. I would rub my eyes to try and make it go away because I suspected it wasn’t real, just a brumous hallucination, a hypnotic vision straddling the two shores of sleep and complete wakefulness. In me it induced a sublime anxiety, as consuming as an obsessive love. If my soul exists and could take on the qualities of something tangible, I am sure it would resemble this bridge; a lyrate form quivering with the movements of earth and sky, wading in the shallows at the edge.
The bridge held me; over it hovered a cinematic ‘The End’ and the siren call of wind through suspension cables. Eyes closed, I’d listen for the orchestral reverie, my dream of moving parts. Then I’d hear it, the music playing, coming towards me in the sails. The tides of my breath, the measured intake and exit of air. Intermezzo. The sailboats get closer then farther away, blistered and purged by the wind. The whole bay is a waiting room for the unknowns of the ocean; the pacing back and forth of the water craft. Biding time.
The Golden Gate Bridge is a Deus ex Machina, a contrivance perhaps, but how else could one end a continent? Here we rest and begin.
Chapter I: To Be and Be
A perfect day would start something like this: I hear your footsteps on the front stoop. You fumble around a bit and then find the doorbell, which you ring only once. I open the door and I smile at you. It’s a smile so light, so breezy and broad that it practically peels the mouth from my face and sends my lips flapping, flying up into the full light of day. I say something inadequate to the moment like “Welcome, come on in,” but it doesn’t matter, because you understand me. Your russet locks trace soup ladle curves as they curl and dip into the tureen of your shoulders. Your breasts pounce un-tethered like plump birds of prey. You enter and saunter in such a way that your clothes can barely contain you; your garments seem as ready to fall crumpled to the floor at your feet as I am.
As you stand in the foyer with your angelic child (I have a thing for good-looking moms,) you say, “Oh, what a beautiful Italianate home you have.”
“Thank you,” I reply, as I motion for you to sit down. Your five year old is bound spiritually by your strict but fair rules of etiquette and physically by some sort of truss made of canvas straps that you hold firmly in your grip……
I’ve never had that day exactly; life is a calendar of longing and imperfection. And though I’d once planned on the days of my life accruing with the beautiful logic of the Fibonacci series, good days and bad days now climb and fall, climb and fall in exact correlation with my bank account, which never seems to get past four low digits. They are found in finite combinations with the other major categories of the quotidian – days until and days since, sunny days and days without sun; days without end and days that are over too soon.
Last Spring, a season indistinguishable from winter where I live, the usual mist condensed into actual pelting rain on several occasions; I was then reminded of the near tropical summer rainstorms of my childhood somewhere else. Once or twice during last year’s long extended season, the atmosphere prickled with electricity, sending veins of lightning coursing like effects through the apparatus of a movie madman’s laboratory. Great blasts of thunder, usually found only in the ground here, shook the air and everything caught in it. Such weather is rare; the gods above San Francisco are usually stoned and not so temperamental.
On April 4th I dutifully turned my clocks forward, welcoming the extra light courtesy of Daylight Savings, as though you could deposit the sun in a piggy bank or a beggar’s cup, as though it were a place with a drive-thru window.
I paid my taxes on April 15th, driving down to a late-closing post office south of the city to post my return before the deadline. I joined a miles-long line of cars waiting their turn to drop their envelopes into mailboxes in some procrastinators’ re-enactment of the Trail of Tears.
That was the day before Celestine left and I realized I’d made a terrible mistake, even before I’d found the used condom wrapped in a wad of tissue paper in her wastebasket, even before Porky had drawn me into his vortex of shame and scandal .
“Well,” she said, her head shaking slightly, involuntarily, “thank you Roy.” I waited for the next word out of her mouth but none came.
“I’ll call you a taxi,” I said, practically jumping for the phone, for something that could make it all better.
“Nope, all taken care of.” A horn sounded outside. “Oh, that’s him now. Well, goodbye, thanks again.”
“Here, let me at least help you with this.” I took Celestine’s suitcase and carried it down the front steps to the taxi, the trunk lid of which popped open even before we made it down the stairs. The cab driver wasn’t moving from behind the steering wheel, not until his backward gaze caught Celestine taking out a twenty-dollar bill.
“I want you to have this,” she said as she handed me the money. I’d obviously been indiscreet about my financial worries. I didn’t want her to leave thinking our relationship was all about money, even though it was my need for money that had brought us together.
“No, no, that’s not necessary, really.”
“Take it, buy something nice for the house, I insist.”
“Alright, that’s very sweet of you. Take care of yourself,” I said in my little Ming vase voice, the cracks artfully contrived. She waved me away. I returned to the house and opened up a cabinet in the dining room that connects to a defunct dumbwaiter; I stared down into the rabbit hole in which many bottles with little tags marked ‘drink me’ were cached.
On April 17th Porky was off and running with his mouth again, telling me things I didn’t want to hear and the very next day I became terribly shy and wondered what all these strangers were doing in my house. Then I lifted one of those bottles from the hole in the wall, placed it on the kitchen counter, where I sat before it, resting my chin against the bottle cap until it hurt.
Checking hospitality into the hospital
I run Golden Rules Bed and Breakfast in my home, catering to a public that surprises me with its ability to elicit my warmth and sympathy. I haven’t been accustomed to warmth and sympathy in my life, brought up by a man and woman whose interest in children was negligible and given that they produced ten of them, perverse. Being a hotelier has forced me to confront what has always been my biggest physical challenge, which is smiling. When I hear the phrase ‘unnatural acts’, I think of smiling at the top of the list of carnal no-no’s. Doing that with one’s mouth seems manipulative and is physically uncomfortable to me, as though someone takes the ‘V’ for Victory pose of fingers and shoves them into the corners of my mouth, then thrusts them upward suddenly – torture. I have no trouble laughing, but any facial display of sentiment below raucous good cheer and above solemn disapproval just makes my cheeks quiver.
Although I’ve never had much interest in, or been very good at, serving other people, my initial apprehension of strangers has given way to a professional anticipation of the arrivals and departures of travelers. I’m now kindly disposed towards them before they even walk through the door just because they’re staying with me. Most of them live up to this early promise by being pleasant and not too demanding.
Likewise, I’ve found that most of them are kindly disposed towards me. The good humor of people unhinged from their routines is seductive. Our lack of a shared history lends itself to a conspiratorial camaraderie; I help them to understand that we’ll be working together, that I share their burdens and safeguard their small claim on freedom. I bond easily with them and our intimacy feels real. By comparison, my other relationships, with people I’ve known for years, seem too complicated and difficult.
My house is an Italianate former brothel that lists to the side like the inebriated prostitutes that used to ply it – I’ve nicknamed it Lenora. It makes all sorts of noises that sound like bodily functions and goes through my money as if it were toilet paper.
The house accomplishes the subtle magic of projecting my presence in the world (though much of that presence is still Uncle Arthur’s) and this helps keep my guests in line, focusing them on the demands of tourism, not on tormenting me.
I inherited the house and business from my Uncle Arthur. Arthur believed in the hereafter and communed regularly with dead people. He helped me reclaim three of my past lives, Septimus, a Roman centurion and rapist of Britannic maids; Mimi, a fashion designer in Belle Epoque Paris and Jefferson, an African-American slave whose biography sounds suspiciously like that of Kunta Kinte on the TV show ‘Roots’. A fourth previous life, Aldaric, I discovered on my own as I waited in a Greyhound bus depot in Los Angeles. A psychic – Tamara Schwartz, psychic, LA – NY, Past Lives Retrieved, it said on her card – informed me that we had been monks together in 12th century Provence. I ended up sleeping with her and apparently it wasn’t our first time.
Per Arthur’s example, I have re-named each of my four guest rooms after this eclectic group of personalities (displacing Arthur’s own coterie of previous incarnations: Alcibiades, Princess Mokomo, Lord Dulcington and Smitty – so far at least there have been no repercussions for bumping them from the roster, but who knows what awaits me in the great beyond.) All this gets explained to the guests who then understand it as a genuine San Francisco experience that will be recalled with warmth and/or cruel laughter for decades into the future. As I’d heard Arthur say many a time, eccentricity is good for business.
Sexygenarian
I like playing host for paying guests because it gives me the opportunity to practice being with people I might never come into contact with or if I did, the kind of people to whom I might not be so nice. Celestine I liked right off.
There was something about her that piqued my interest as soon as I opened the door and she said, “Hi, are you Roy? I’m Celestine.” She was of a type I knew well, an independent, weather-beaten but pretty, youngish grandmother; likes traveling but isn’t a slave to it like some of those lost and wandering Nordic souls. She was warm and humorous, knocked around a bit by life, unmanned. She was around twenty in the early sixties when I was born.
I asked her immediately if she had driven here, as I do all my guests, because I try to forestall any unpleasant parking situations with the neighbors. I live in North Beach, a very congested part of San Francisco where automobiles are forced into an evolutionary struggle for survival that turns their owners into irate pawns. She hadn’t driven.
I sort of smiled and ushered in her and her small suitcase, bright backpack, sensible shoes, faded jeans, printed blouse, dangling silver earrings and that mane of silvery blonde hair – a lioness.
“Did you find the place alright?” I asked her.
“I’m here aren’t I?”
“Celestine, you really are here and I’m so glad to have you, sit,” I said in that overly familiar yet commanding tone that lets people know I will be the new, temporary and conditionally benign authority figure in their lives.
“Please,” I added.
“You’ve got a lovely home,” she said, looking around the Italianate living room as though she were star gazing. Here was a woman eager to be delighted.
“Thanks. To start off I’m going to have you fill out this registration card and then tell me how you’d like to pay.”
“Credit card, but I already gave the number to the guy who booked me in here. Tipton, I think he said his name was.”
“That’s just to hold the reservation, the agents don’t actually charge your card. I take your number again and give it to my accountant (the very same Tipton!) for processing.”
While she filled out the card, I continued pulling down the drapes in the living room that the parents of a set of two-year old twin boys had gathered together in bunches and then stuffed up onto the window sashes out of fear their children might hang or suffocate themselves. Hhmm….hadn’t thought of that. From all the evidence I’ve gathered, being two years old is no picnic. I can’t tell you how many surround-sound screaming fits we had during their stay. It made me wonder if there wasn’t anything more to life for me than preventing the double suicide of emotionally disturbed children.
I showed Celestine to Mimi, her room, but as I was about to point out the light switches in the bathroom, I could sense the couple in Septimus was checking out. I excused myself and rapidly made my way to the hallway, where the thirty-somethings from Connecticut were departing. They looked determined and then when they noticed me, annoyed.
Guestiness
Departure is always a tug at the emotions. You can feel the tension as guests who have an inkling that they should tip you try to run out the door with all their luggage, which has increased dramatically in girth due to their purchase of products, the bulk of which they could have gotten at their local mall. I hail them, but they are adamant about not giving in to weakness. They believe in clean breaks; I like to make our farewells messy.
“It was really great having you,” I say. He avoids meeting my eyes while he barely manages a ‘thanks’. She gives me a beaming, silent smile, her hair still wet from the shower. Once downstairs, she says ‘thank you’ to the wall before slamming the door shut. I’d asked her not to do that.
Tipping is the longed-for result of a performance art that I may never master. Like many Americans, I have always felt uncomfortable, even philosophically opposed to the custom. It’s the guests that I least like who I feel I deserve extra compensation from. And the ones I like the most, the ones most likely to tip, (though I don’t like them solely for this reason) I feel uncomfortable taking even more money from.
Flirtiness
The next morning I greeted Celestine at the breakfast table; she was a balm to the wounds that had already been inflicted upon me by thoughtless guests and my kitchen sink, which was horribly plugged and disgorging blackish clots the size and consistency of what I imagine dinosaur mucous to have been.
“Good morning Celestine, how did you sleep?” I asked.
“Good morning, Roy. I slept like an angel. This fruit is fabulous.” She was referring to my inspired fruit plate, which consisted of slivers and bits of colorful fruit arranged in geometric patterns. “It’s kind of like one of those Busby Berkeley movies. You know where they have all those chorus girls doing routines in a kaleidoscope?”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said. “I suppose if Busby Berkeley had been allowed unlimited access to seasonal fresh fruit while in solitary confinement at a particularly bleak prison, he would have made fruit plates like this.”
Celestine smiled and said, “Well, you’ve certainly brightened my morning, and I think I’m going to need it; it’s rather dark and misty out.”
“Yeah, but walking out in this weather is like getting a really great facial, best thing for your skin.”
She giggled and said, “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”
“Where are you off to today?” I asked her.
“I thought I might hike down to the wharves and walk over to Golden Gate Bridge. Do you think that’s too far?”
“Not if you’re a walker. With great legs like yours, I don’t think you’ll have a problem.” I was a little taken aback by my own forwardness. Her legs, a bit slack and age-mottled to be sure, but shapely, descended from her trim waist and flared safari shorts like prongs from a plug. She paused to consider my remark with her tongue pressed against the inside of her cheek and a steaming mug of coffee inches from her lips. She scattered the steam with her breath.
“I can see my legs are going to get quite a workout in San Francisco,” she said mischievously.
I said goodbye to Celestine, handing her a map, a plastic spoon and a container of yogurt for her journey, then cleared the breakfast table and focused my attention on the plumbing problem in the kitchen.
Indiscreet Plumbing, or Praying to the Porcine God
I knelt down before my sink and through the chemical haze of the storage cabinet underneath it, I saw a vision as war-like and glorious as the one Emperor Constantine beheld – the cross and the sentence ‘Under this sign you shall conquer.’ I see my own sign post of conversion: a thick wad of cash and the sentence ‘You must break the will of this house that seems bent, if not on your destruction, then at least on monopolizing every minute of your spare time.’
I called the plumber, my next-door neighbor, as I stood staring into the kitchen sink, which sat with its basin full of dirty dishes and the expletives I had hurled at it all morning. He came by later that morning.
“This doesn’t look good,” the plumber tells me. When has it ever?
“How come?” I ask.
“Well for starters…”
From my standing position I glance down to what looks like his decapitated body. I kneel to his level in order to show my interest in not getting fleeced.
“Do you see this, Roy?” he asks.
“Yeah, what about it?”
“You’ve probably been a real lucky guy up until now.”
Porky is a portly, infectiously good-natured Filipino-American man. His high spirits are reason enough for the affectionate annoyance rising in me. There are many times I’m grateful for men like Porky who are able to keep the world together with a corny joke and a bit of duct tape, but right now I am resisting this man with the power to let the waters flow, or not.
“See this elbow?” he waits for me to reply even though the elbow couldn’t be more obviously placed. “See how the threads are stripped here?” I nod. “This is where the leak is coming from. Now do you see this, this rusty, crappy black stuff all around the mouth of the pipe?”
“Yeah, that’s gross.”
“Right, it’s the creature from the black lagoon,” he says, looking like a kid on Christmas morn. “You got swamp thing in your pipes and I’m going to have to go through the whole system trying to find out where he lives.”
“That sounds expensive.”
“That’s right, it could get very expensive,” he says, delighted. I’m wondering how long it would take for a jury of his peers to convict my plumber friend under federal racketeering statutes.
“Well, can you please write down exactly what it is you’re going to do and give me an estimate of how much it’ll cost? When can you work on it?”
“Not today, maybe tomorrow.” He closes the pipe back up, literally throws his tools into a plastic bucket that is as distressed as his pants and sweatshirt and his eyes become stuck to a plate of the cookies I bought at the bakery this morning. “Have a couple,” I offer.
“Thanks,” he says as he grabs four on his way down the hall. “How’s your boyfriend?”
“Porky, Tip is not my boyfriend. I’m not gay!”
“Oh, I forgot,” he says gently, his mirth smoldering in the upturned corners of his smile, “See you around.”
“I’m calling you first thing tomorrow, Porky.”
Along with the house and business, I had inherited Tipton, the young man who had taken Celestine’s reservation and whom Porky was now linking me romantically with, from my uncle. Tipton is short, fat and balding. He is quick to take offense and politically right of center. He has the smooth, milky white skin of a housebound Caucasian infant and perfumes the air around him with an infant’s spitty, farty, pablum smells produced in folds of tightly closed skin.
Tipton adored and lived through uncle Arthur and upon the latter’s death, he took me up as his new unrequited love. I’d never been able to bring myself to ask him if he didn’t have just a teeny bit of resentment that I had gotten the house and business. He had, after all, taken care of Arthur during his recovery from stroke and all but run the business. And they’d shared a passion for opera and mutton-chop sideburns and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer among other things. But Tip seemed to have found his station in life, and life was theatre and like any actor of small talent, he found purpose in sycophancy.
I’ll declare now what I should have said first off: I’m not gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but people have to start getting realistic; I’m just not. I show up on everybody’s ‘gaydar’ but if people would just look more closely, really examine my life, the truth becomes self-evident.
I’m one of those guys who everybody thinks is gay because I’m sensitive and artistic and I like traveling and I dress fashionably. My body language tends to be, by American standards, a bit feminine: I cross my legs like ladies and Europeans do, I hug and kiss freely, my handshake is weak and I’m witty and good at decorating a room. Even my parents think I’m gay. During much of my life, they were pissed at me because they thought I was queer, now they’re pissed at me because I won’t admit it!
Star power
Celestine returned from her walk around 6 pm. I heard her climb the front stairs laboriously and fumble a bit with the key. She rang the bell just as I opened the door.
“Hi, I had trouble with the key,” she said. She was deliriously worn out and unburdened by shopping bags, a free woman. I showed her again how to operate the lock and she removed a cheromoya fruit from her apple-green knapsack.
“I thought you might enjoy adding this to your fruit palette.”
“Thanks. That’ll be the proverbial piece of resistance. How was your day?”
“Oh, I lingered in the neighborhood for most of the morning. Wanted to check out the Vesuvio and soak in all that beat nostalgia.”
“Were you a beatnik in your wild youth?”
“My youth wasn’t that kind of wild, it was more Shelley and Byron and Gothic romance wild.”
“Waiting for Heathcliff?”
“Something like that.” She paused after she spoke, her eyes locked onto something far away, a cue card perhaps and then she continued, “And then after Vesuvio, I set out on a wonderful hike. When I was walking through the Marina a man stopped me and asked if I was staying with you. I thought, God, this is weird. Turns out he’s a neighbor of yours and saw me leaving the house. Porky the plumber? What a character he is. Told me he was doing a job for this little 85 year-old woman who wanted him to work in his underwear because that’s the way her dear departed husband did. He told her he couldn’t do briefs but would work in boxers and a V-neck t shirt.”
“Welcome to San Francisco,” I said.
“Porky told me you’re having some plumbing problems. Am I going to be able to take a bath?”
“That Porky certainly is a talker. Yes, you’ll have no problem, it’s just the kitchen sink that’s plugged. I’ve had such a time with it this week.”
“Good! I desperately need to soak in a nice hot tub.”
I thought she could have been a bit more sympathetic about my plumbing issues but I had to allow for her long walk and advancing years. There are two types of senior citizens, those who have become so much more grateful in their declining years and thank you graciously for every little thing, and those that forget to be polite; they haven’t got the patience for it anymore. I briefly and prematurely judged Celestine to be in the latter category.
A Distinguished Lack of Complaint
After her bath, Celestine knocked on the door to my private apartment, basically just two rooms at the end of the downstairs hallway – the kitchen and the old dining room that Arthur had converted to a bedroom and office. She wanted advice on a place to eat.
“What about that place at the end of the block?” she asked.
She was referring to a restaurant on the corner that I pass by frequently. The patrons tend to be toothy and tall – an affluent crowd. Everyone in that restaurant is always smiling, as though you not only had to be rich to eat there, but happy too. Or maybe miserable people (or the miserably rich) were allowed to eat there but the restaurant had such a beneficent affect on all who managed a reservation that they found themselves smiling like idiots despite their better judgment.
I’ve thought about eating there. I often pass by the open door of the kitchen and it seems like a sane environment, not a lot of foreign curse words and the waitresses smoking by the door don’t seem stressed and close to breakdown. But I see that small dining room with those huge plate glass windows and I keep thinking ‘Darwin’ and ‘Smithsonian display case’.
“It’s a bit stuffy and overpriced,” I said. “Do you like Italian?”
“Love it.”
“Try Il Fornaio Caldo on Columbus, I think you’d enjoy that more. After you’ve gone out, I’ll get your wet towels and empty your trash.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I wrote a few suggestions in your book.”
Something inside me froze. I don’t have a suggestion box at my establishment because I don’t wish to dangle opportunities to complain in front of my guests. I do have a guest book where one is supposed to sign one’s name. In ‘A Room of One’s Own,’ Virginia Woolf wrote that ‘the best writing is distinguished by its lack of complaint.’ I have this written on the front of my guest book. Most find it funny and follow its dictum.
In the game of life, complaining can be a valuable survival skill. If Virginia, poor thing, had only learned to complain more she might not have stuffed her pockets with stones and flushed herself into the river Thames. Nevertheless, she exemplifies the kind of clientele I like to cultivate – people who would rather die than complain.
“Is there something wrong?” I asked.
“No, no, they’re just suggestions for other guests based on all the wonderful things I saw today. See for yourself, I wrote right below the entry of the distinguished ‘Sir Reginald Barfley the Third, of Puketon Manor, Stand-in-Upchuck, England.’
“Sir Reginald was a thirteen year old from Bakersfield, California with poor hygiene.”
“I’d better run and get dinner. Thanks, you’ve been fabulous.”
I grabbed a fresh set of towels and made my way upstairs to her room. She had made the space her own within hours of her arrival – flowers on the mantel, a few books and magazines on the tables. She had taped a picture to the wall – strictly forbidden, but in capitulation to my growing affection, lust even, tolerated. Like some illicit drug from the Summer of Love, her odor was in the air and I inhaled it.
Chapter II: His Domain
Early riser
At 6:15 the next morning, I awoke to the sound of tapping at the back of the house. I could see a smudged outline of someone behind the gauzy window panes of the door; my brain was barely functioning, but the equation Smudge = Porky got my attention. I got up to see what he wanted and there he was, vim to my vinegar.
“Porky, what on earth are you doing here?”
“I came to work on the plumbing.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“What are you asking me that for? You’re a friend, you’ve got a bad situation, I’m here to help you out. Early. First Thing. Top Priority.”
This sudden prioritizing of my needs above all others was unprecedented.
“Well, that’s great, it’s just early; I haven’t even put breakfast out yet. Did you have breakfast?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you want anything else?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, come on in. You can have some coffee and a muffin when they’re ready.”
Porky began his work down in the basement. He came up for food around 7:00, fiddled a bit with the pipes under the sink, quickly returned to the basement and then began tripping back and forth between the various floors of the house so frequently that his aim soon became obvious: he was here to encounter Celestine, plumbing heal thyself.
In that he would be frustrated however, as would I, because Celestine had vanished. For a guest to get out of the house in the morning without my awareness, means one of two things, either they left while I had nodded off or they had made great effort to leave without my knowing it. The reason for this is the previously noted squawkiness of the house; you come in late, it waits up for you and gives you grief; you try to be discreet, it starts banging like the piano player at the whorehouse it used to be. The house in fact responds to one’s every move with some sound or another in it’s own primitive language, much like the clicking tongues of certain ancient, isolated tribes of Africa. Celestine is that rare guest with the grace of a large cat whose sinews move it silently to its destinations.
I noted that Porky’s interest in my plumbing plunged once he was made aware that Celestine was out for the day.
“I have to go now,” he said, after working the carpets of my floors more than the pipes he had come to disembowel. “I’ll call you later.”
I went back to the kitchen to take stock of my supplies, made out a shopping list and called Tip to tell him I’d be out shopping. I then boiled some water and washed the dishes, establishing a routine I imagined performing for the foreseeable future.
Sacred space
Half an hour later I lean into the parking lot of the supermarket with my car, a sensible Japanese auto made the same year I didn’t graduate from college for the second time, driving to a spot furthest from the store entrance. There were plenty of parking spaces closer, as I arrived during the late morning lull but I’ve been trying to get more exercise and I never mind having a little slack space in my life. As the door of the supermarket gives way magically before me, it occurs to me how much I really enjoy coming here, it’s like a humble temple where no one has chased out the money changers.
I apply a lot of grand thinking to the supermarket; lives are lived here, careers are made and broken and there are times when the supermarket reveals itself to be a nest of sexual intrigue. The product packaging exhibits a level of artistry belied by its ephemeral nature, though it’s easy to miss because of its ubiquity. I often hear people in line for the deli discussing important political issues and the store’s advertising raises thought-provoking questions.
Of course, I tend to interpret even the most prosaic of questions as though they are of metaphysical import. When the attractive clerk at the check-out stand asks me ‘Did you find everything you were looking for?, the only possible response to this question starts in childhood, any sooner than that and I feel like I’m leaving too much out. ‘No, I didn’t find everything I was looking for; my life hasn’t been that easy,’ I tell her. ‘I wanted better looking lovers, where were you then? I wanted a powder blue 1968 El Camino; I never got one.’ Usually the Cashiers will say ‘Did you find everything you were looking for today?’ Does this mean they seriously think I could find everything I was ever looking for in one day? Their aggressive friendliness is jarring - Do they think this makes up for all those years when employees at the supermarket were physically distant and emotionally unavailable?
Now that I no longer abuse substances, the employees at my local supermarket have begun serving the same function that bartenders once did when I used to spend a lot of time at a local pub. It was a classic pub in the sense that the patrons all loved and hated each other. It was kind of back burner hate early in the evening that progressively became love as we increased our consumption of alcohol and drank our way into the night. Those days are over; I’ve mastered the pyrotechnics of bridge burning and find that my extra hours spent at the supermarket are much more healing and healthy (all four food groups healthy!)
It’s true that I probably spend too much time at the supermarket but it doesn’t begin to approach the hours wasted at my previous haunt, that skuzzy old bar, which I now pass with disdain because it hasn’t changed and I have, because it still wallows in its filth and I’m clean and sober.
The supermarket on the other hand embraces change. They’ve given the store a beautiful make-over, which it sorely needed because it had been lingering too long in the seventies and our lifestyles have changed so much since then, at least that’s what the supermarket’s advertising says.
I think there must have been an awful lot of people everywhere in this country who made an awful lot of money these last few years because it now seems that everything is getting so fixed up and so nice. I could do without the prices. I thought the economy wasn’t doing so well, at least that’s what I keep hearing but you’d never know it the way people keep spending hand over fist on new houses and sport cars and botox and everything. These days the lord giveth and giveth and giveth, apparently and doesn’t see the need to taketh away. That must be nice for some people, for those that actually own the ownership society.
Get real estate
Uncle Arthur’s bequest had saved me from the humiliation of being an American without private property. I know that certain public assets, like national parks and the Smithsonian, are held in trust for me but I don’t think I’ll ever see a dime from my investment with the government and too many of my other investments were in liquid assets of the type that keep company mascots like Jack Daniels afloat. When you’re a forty year-old native-born American and you don’t own real estate or some large boat or car, then you have serious credibility issues.
Before I owned one of my own, houses stood out as a symbol of all that could go right in the world. If I just owned my own home, I could stop being ashamed of all the crummy apartments and communal houses I had always lived in; I could ask girls over and impress them instead of leaving them disappointed and hard to get a hold of on the telephone.
Yet I’m now learning first hand what is meant by the phrase ‘house poor’. I’m dragging a ball and chain with me now wherever I go and it has crumbling foundations and plumbing that will cry me a river. Worst of all, I’m finding it no easier to get laid. As if to remind me of the real costs of real estate, Tipton calls me on my cell phone.
“Where are you, Roy?” he asks with the concentrated intensity of a commando behind enemy lines.
“I’m at the supermarket.”
“You’re still at the supermarket?” he says, in a voice that prepares me for hysteria. Something heavy must be going down at headquarters.
“Relax, Tip. Have you got someone?”
“I’m negotiating now,” he states, with a gravitas that suggests he’s putting the finishing touches on the Treaty of Versailles. “I think I’ve got them, they’d be coming in about half an hour. I’ll call you right back.”
Manic telephone calls from Tip puncture my days. Many people assume that when the house is empty I’m free to play but it doesn’t work that way. It may be counter-intuitive, but only when the house is full am I assured of my right to the pursuit of happiness, which these days means wandering through retail establishments hoping to get laid. When I’ve got a full house, all I need do is the chores in the morning and then my day is open. When the place isn’t filled to capacity, I’m chained to it because Tip is constantly trying to reel in some guests and I need to be there ready to show the empty rooms on short notice.
I go through my day knowing that at any minute I might be called back to the house to meet a guest. This can of course be highly annoying; dinner parties, heart to heart talks; the last home stretch of orgasm – all these things could be interrupted at any moment. To make this work, I often assign myself a role to play that heightens my sense of urgency. That day I was a world-renowned brain surgeon that has been called to perform emergency surgery for a third world dictator. It’s critical that the generalissimo gets back to his impoverished country in order to suppress the latest peasant uprising.
While waiting for Tip to call back, I wander over to the freezer section and start opening the doors, sticking my arm in to reach products that I quickly decide not to get. I enjoy the sensation of freezing air on my arm but I don’t think frozen food is a very good deal – you’re paying a premium for all that air conditioning. I like to leave the doors open for longer than I should and let the cold pour out into the aisle. Several minutes go by like this before Tip calls back.
“Ok, they’re going into Jefferson for three nights, $85 per night. They’re really sweet, English couple, I think you’ll really like them. They’ll be there in about an hour or so.”
“Alright, then I’m going to zip over to the co-op real fast before they….”
“Don’t go to the food co-op!” Tipton shouts. He’s a gay republican, of the Lincoln-Log cabin sort and he doesn’t like the lefty politics of the place. In his mind I’d go there and become indoctrinated in the checkout line, abandoning my guests for some smarmy Sandanistas. “Get home now just in case they’re early. You’ve still got a mortgage you know!”
That was unkind.
Confined Anarchists
I’ve started going to the food co-op again since they moved into a large, open industrial building. I’d stopped going because when they were located in that tiny little space near the housing project, all the help used to be so rude – anarchists don’t do well in confined spaces – but they must have all been sent to re-education camp or something during the move (Tip swears they have replaced all the former employees and that none have been heard from since) because they’re pretty nice now and genuinely helpful. Yes, one may laugh at the general air of self-righteousness. But where else would I find bulk chestnut flour? Who even knew someone spent the time pounding chestnuts to make flour? That can’t be easy and who but the Marxists at the co-op would appreciate such difficult labor?
But the supermarket is by far the greater influence in my life. Last year I had briefly contemplated growing out my fingernails in the style of Buddhist ascetics but was dissuaded when watching the troubled check-out clerk as she clickety-clacked my purchases on the cash register keys with the glossy lime-green, rhinestone-studded bayonets on the ends of her fingers. She’s a full-figured Latina whom I wouldn’t mind sleeping with, whom I would in fact love to sleep with. She has flirted with me, we flash each other coded messages with our eyes but her ardor cools noticeably once we’ve left the confines of the supermarket interior. I feel a bond with her because she seems to find smiling difficult too, at least she does when she’s behind the cash register.
I’ve seen her several times hanging out in the parking lot after her shift with a younger, less handsome version of the kind of guy I once wanted to be. I realize with self-reproach that I’ve never been the type of guy that hangs out in parking lots, a defining habitat of American teenagers since the 1920’s. It takes a particular kind of boy to patrol the asphalt, one with the ability to stop traffic, like a cop but with more obscene hand gestures and less formal dress – Marlon Brando. I got the smoking and the drinking down all right, but not the posturing, that animal presence.
After depositing the groceries into my car, I push the cart back up twenty parking spaces, feeling morally superior for having made the journey to return the cart to its proper resting place, the carriage corral where I expect to find others of the genus grazing. Most people are lazy and abandon their shopping carts haphazardly as though they’re just stalled bumper cars and the ride’s over.
I look unkindly upon the elderly woman who is also pushing her empty cart across an unreasonable distance of the parking lot. She seems bent on matching my every altruistic gesture. Earlier, in the store, she’d been behind me offering tearful thanks because I had thoughtfully placed the little bar that distinguishes one shopper’s purchases from another’s on the conveyer belt at the check-out stand. I sometimes wonder about people who are overly thankful for trifles; what sort of Hell-hole of incivility did they live in during their formative years that makes them so damn ingratiating?
As I drive from my parking space out of the lot she too approaches the exit and I surprise her by surging ahead, cutting her off in a reckless manner. I can see her look of dismay in the rear-view mirror as the colorful trinkets I have hanging from it sway with the violence of my maneuver and I realize I may be triggering her nervous breakdown.
There will always be an excuse for England
The English couple arrives a bit late. “Sorry,” they say in cute-as-buttons British accents. They’re the sort of travelers who wear their T shirts like heraldic blazons, each new city or theme park is another quartering, another mark of distinction and belonging. Judging from their casual attire, they had visited Carlsbad Caverns and a theme park in Florida where I’d once thrown-up all over several retired cartoon characters. She was freckled and bony with a big, lumpy bottom, as though she was an overly hugged toy whose stuffing had all been squeezed downward. He appeared less loved, with all his stuffing intact. I invited them in but they would only go so far before they needed prodding, thus our relationship became established early.
“Come on, come inside,” I said to them.
“Sorry,” they said again, as an apology for crossing my path.
“That’s it, go over there,” I said as I pointed toward the living room.
I seated them on the couch, and thinking to make a joke, I jovially blurted out, “So, what’s so great about Great Britain?” They appeared puzzled and then gave quick reflexive smiles that looked like part of some exercise regimen I might want to consider.
I gave them a pen and their registration card to fill out. She handed me a major credit card and I took down the number. He tried to hand me back the pen I’d given them but dropped it onto the floor.
“Sorry,” he said.
I handed them their key and showed them how to operate the lock. She gave me a questioning look.
“Sorry,” she said, “but does that mean we can come and go as we like or is there a curfew?”
“Sorry,” I replied, “but I’m not that much of a nanny; you’ll be on your own to do as you like, except for eating in your rooms and leaving the toilet seat up.”
The English substitute the word sorry for more appropriate phrases like ‘excuse me’, ‘not now’ or ‘piss off you fat cow’. But I wonder, with their promiscuous use of the word ‘sorry’, what happens when a situation arises where they must truly apologize for an egregious wrong? What could one plausibly say, I’m really, really, really sorry, honestly and deeply sorry? The English are an apologetic race; one can only assume they have much to apologize for.
I showed them to their room and then went downstairs. It was dark by then and I wondered where Celestine was. Tip calls to make sure that the English folks are happy.
“Did they show?”
“They’re here, all show and no tell. Talking to them is like pulling teeth out of snails.”
“Just be your usual charming self and remember how much richer they’ve made you - $255, for you it’s practically a leap to the next tax bracket.”
“Speaking of taxes, Tip, how are mine coming?”
“I’m still working on them,” he says with agitation. “I told you I’d have them and I will, don’t worry about it.”
“Ok, I’m just asking.”
Bad Cop/Badder cop
I give him the credit card number so he can charge it. With guests I pretend that Tip is just one of many anonymous agents busy in their cubicles hunting down the best prices for deserving travelers like themselves. Tip pretends that he actually is all those many agents working at Go-Go Travel, PO Box 1635, San Francisco, CA 19053. He’s Tipton the efficient and friendly civic booster, but also Clemente, the flaming Latino who “sthpeeksth like deesth with an Andalusthian leesthp” and Violet, the bitch who lies and responds to teary guests with stone silence and angry little questions like “So, you think I’m supposed to do what?”
Although the guests think we’re autonomous professionals who barely know each other, the truth is Tipton couldn’t be more intimately ensnarled in Golden Rules. He and Uncle Arthur had worked out a business model that had as its foundation the Good Cop/Bad Cop system employed so effectively by police detectives while shaking down suspects on TV.
It works something like this: A tourist talks to ‘Violet’ in the morning, she tells him about a fabulous B&B in North Beach and quotes him a price of $95 a night if he books for three nights, otherwise it’s $150 per. The tourist arrives later that evening at my house as a guest who then proceeds to tell me he and his wife will be staying only one night and that he spoke with Violet the travel agent and she said he could have the room for $85 for the night. I act really nice and say,
“HHmm, that’s not what Violet told me, but she may be mistaken, let me call her so we can straighten out the mix-up.”
The guest suddenly looks like he’s about to come down with Montezuma’s Revenge. He hadn’t figured on my being able to get a hold of Violet at 7pm.
“Hi, Violet? Ok…..Hello, Violet. Yeah, it’s Roy at Golden Rules. Good. Listen, there’s a guest here who is taking my double for one night and he says you quoted him eighty-fi – uh, huh….uh, huh….right. Ok, why don’t you talk to him.” I pass the phone to the guest, whose expression sours. He barely gets a word in because Violet’s feeling pretty mouthy and his face colors as it nods up and down. His whole body is rocking as he hangs up the phone. I act very sympathetic and say something like,
“Sorry for the mix-up, Violet’s pretty hard nose about that kind of thing. Believe me, if it were up to me, I wouldn’t have had a problem with it. But we have to stick to our agreements with these travel agents, and it’s pretty much their call.”
Thus I come out of the fracas unsullied and I actually pick up extra points as the nice (by comparison with nasty Violet,) innkeeper who has the best interests of his guests at heart.
Jesus Christ Super-Size
After dinner a few hours later, I pondered how best to spend my evening; I had bills to pay, calls to return, books that remained unread and various abandoned projects of a somewhat artistic nature.
Instead, I turned on the television and found religion.
God is everywhere it seems, and I wish the F.C.C. would do something about it. I can’t flip over those religious channels on Cable fast enough; they pass by in a blur of three thousand-dollar suits, mascara and tonsils at the back of big open mouths. People who send money to those tele-evangelists are dumb as dirt. And when they ask ‘What would Jesus do?’ the answer is immediately clear: change the channel!
And yet I didn’t. No, I sat and watched and was amazed at the size of all those Born Again Christians. They ran the gamut from pudgy to monstrously obese. I’d hate to be in the deep end of the baptismal font when they all dive in. The television Catholics, by contrast seemed half-starved, even when they were overweight.
It can’t be mere coincidence that Americans are getting fatter and more Christian at the same time. Every year we have to keep cutting a few more holes on the Bible Belt because the number of Americans who profess to have found Christ seems to be increasing right in sync with their expanding waistlines. Soon the numbers of the devout will be greater than the actual population, a seeming impossibility that would only go to show that His ways are truly miraculous.
Have you noticed that Jesus, like more and more of the characters on TV sitcoms and advertising has been putting on weight? Now that the consumer is King of Kings, we will gradually remake Jesus in our image until he has a hard time getting into a 42” waist God frock. Jesus Christ Super-size or Fat Jesus for the politically incorrect.
The fact that the geographical spread of conservative religious fatties and godless gym-toned liberals aligns closely with those of slave and free states before the Civil War doesn’t bode well for the future of the country. One can only let out the Mason-Dixon line so far before it starts ripping at the seams.
What happens when the Slaves-to-the-Second-Helping States declare war on the Gluten-Cruelty-Sugar-Free-Range States? The array of opposing armies would present an interesting picture of politically charged body types. People all over the East and West coasts are hitting the gym more frequently than the down home fatties in Southern and Mid-Western rural areas, who these days aren’t living off the fat of the land, they are the fat of the land. Bibles aren’t the only things they’ll be thumping – engrossed body parts will be bumping and grinding against one another in a mad, exhausting push for the front lines. Can you imagine the nightmare of trying to provide enough carbohydrates to an army of those roly-poly rebs? And those obsessive gluttons for punishment in the north would be falling all over each other to get into Andersonville.
Gone into the fashion dump of history are the blue and the grey. The South would model their uniforms on those provided to workers at one of our most successful fast-food chains and the North would wear tight sweats and tube socks and those chic little electronic devices that store more music than one could possibly listen to in one lifetime. Of course these days the south definitely has the industrial edge.
Tuck inn
After turning the TV off at ten, I made one more patrol around the house. Upstairs, the English couple were in their room doing something that required much zipping and unzipping. Celestine’s room was dark and the door was open, which made me worry just a bit. I emptied the trash from the shared bathroom and took it downstairs to the kitchen – Where was she? Do women of her age stay out this late? Should I be worried? I was worried, but should I be? I contemplated possible outcomes of Celestine’s day, concocting several grim scenes of violence and then morphing these into pornographic fantasies involving Celestine and the hot Latina at the supermarket.
Soon after, as I drifted off to sleep, I heard footfalls on the front stoop, the turning of a key in the front door lock and the creaking of the stairs as Celestine climbed them. For a few moments I became more alert and then suddenly fell asleep.
Chapter III: Lives Touched by Tragedy
I coaxed the English couple downstairs for breakfast around 7:30 and then sent them off in a direction that would get them as far away from England as one could get in San Francisco.
When I went upstairs to make their bed and tidy up their room, I noticed Celestine’s walking shoes outside of her closed door, indicating she was safely tucked into her room, and judging from the quiet, still asleep. I thought the shoes outside the door was a cute, old-fashioned touch. Had she years ago stayed in some pensione in Italy where the elderly proprietors shined shoes for their young Americana? They weren’t the sort of shoes that would take a shine but I was so full of my infatuation with this woman that I found myself wanting to please her at every turn. I took the boots downstairs, gave them a full scrubbing and filled them with sprigs of bougainvillea and ferns I had growing on the side of the house, before replacing them in front of her door. Then I went downstairs to make a fresh pot of coffee.
Breakfast runs from 7am to 9am, after that, if no one is at the table, I begin rapidly putting everything away. I will however leave the food and coffee out longer for some guests, if I like them and think they may be down shortly. I’d looked forward to chatting with Celestine over the breakfast table, so I decided to leave everything as is until she came down, no matter how late. I hadn’t seen her for a whole day, a significant amount of time in the life of a tourist, as one can see by the following Travel Industry formula: 1 Tourist Day = 2 Human Days = 14 Dog Days.
Unspeakable tragedies
I called Tip around 8 just to check in. He reported that the tourist landscape looked bleak but fingers crossed, he was hoping for a fresh kill before sundown. Business was bad – for everyone, not just us. Hotels were laying people off; small inns were closing. What a contrast with the years before the dot-com dreams went sour and the tragedies of September 11, namely the destruction of the Twin Towers, the attack on the Pentagon and the automobile accident that took out Uncle Arthur.
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