Chapter 23: You Go To My Head | Long Left East
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Chapter 23
Church and 24th Street. Early the following morning. Kat and Cary and I hop onto a streetcar. We’re heading to Fisherman’s Wharf. Kat and I are both hungover. Somehow Cary, though he drank far more, is fine. Chipper even. I don’t know that I would ever have described him as chipper before this morning, but goddammit if he didn’t seem so. The look on his face like he isn’t in agony.
“What exactly is the point of your body waking you up even earlier when you’ve had too much?” Kat drawls out. She sits beside Cary, in front of me.
The streetcar makes its way up Church Street. Rows of tan and blue homes. Stucco walls and terracotta shingles. Roofs flat or angled toward the street. Southern magnolias and palms and cypress line the road, broken up by a Laurel Fig in triplicate just before the tracks bend between Chattanooga and Church Street. All calm, misty and muted.
“I think it’s a punishment,” I say. “Something cosmic.”
“You’re thirsty and need water,” Cary says.
“Oh shut the hell up.”
“Don’t be mad at me.” He laughs. “I told you my system. Half a glass of water between every drink. You’ll never be hungover.”
“Take your system and shut the hell up.”
“I think you may be worse off than me,” Kat says through a dull, painful chuckle. Her lips are uncharacteristically chapped, nearly cracked. It couldn’t have been that late of a night, I tell myself.
“I’m fine,” I say. “I’m just playing it up for my esteemed guests. Putting on a show for you.” I glare at Cary.
The streetcar descends into the tunnel below Market Street, heads toward the water. For a while we’re silent in the dark and lighted only by the cool, bright station lights at each stop. When we reach the Embarcadero, we walk up to the surface and transfer to a trolley at Market and Main.
The trolley is yellow and white and curved all around. Fog burns off by the water. The trolley looks much more impressive in the daylight. The city all around is alive and teeming, tourists like us making the rounds.
Inside, brown leather bench seats are not so well maintained as the exterior. The air is stuffy and warm in spite of the morning coolness. We sit in the same arrangement and just before the operator closes the doors, a balding man in stained clothes stumbles in and sits in front of Kat and Cary. I can smell the man from my seat. That warm and sickly smell of putrefied vegetables and untaken showers.
We don’t even make it to the next stop before the man turns around and stares at Kat. She and Cary both try to ignore it, looking out the window at the water and city, still beautiful in the half-baked fog, sun stippling through.
The staring becomes too much for Kat. She tells the man to turn around, discovers that the staring was in fact much more tolerable than she had realized. The man stands and towers over them. Screams a spittled stream of expletives, and the whole crowd on the trolley, as if trained for the moment, looks away and ignores it as Kat stares him down and Cary beside her also says nothing. I too do my best to ignore it. The stream continues on like a rapids until at the next stop the train hurls to a standstill and the man looses his footing, falls backward into the chair before him. The operator says nothing though he certainly hears the whole thing and it seems as though the stopping was harder than needed. When the tattered man gets up, he spits on the ground beside Kat’s seat and turns around. Stomps his way toward the front exit of the trolley. “Fucking bitch slut,” he screams. He stands at the front now. Stares out at the half-filled trolley. Beyond it really. Silence. Then he screams again as he steps off: “Get out!” He stumbles toward the financial district. “Get out!” The door closes and the trolley carries on. We all sit quietly, Kat staring straight ahead until we reach Stockton Street, the sun shining acutely over the thawing bay.
At Fisherman’s Wharf, we mill about. Sea lions arf melodically back-and-forth. We lean over the wooden railing, looking down at the creatures loafing on rotted wooden platforms. Cold and blue bay water bobs and swirls around them. As we stare, Kat and Cary find themselves in some argument, as they always do, and walk down the pier from me. I won’t be following that, I think. I glance at the shapes of them against the bay, blurred outlines held in space by waves repeating white in the sullen freeze.
Watching the enormous, blobbing creatures, my mind is elsewhere—again at the aquarium in Galveston. The memory recurring with some unknowably intractable syncopation. The sea lions then too were on display, trapped inside the glass pyramid of the aquarium. That was when I had become separated from my parents, I think. What does it matter anyhow? I push off from the wooden railing and scan for Kat and Cary. They speak near the side of a red and tired building. I try to gauge the extent of their mood as I walk over, whether the argument is still ongoing or if our day could continue.
“Had enough sea lion action?” Kat asks, looking over Cary’s shoulder.
“I think they were getting enough of me.” I smile blankly.
“What did we want to do out here?” Cary turns and asks.
“Good view of the bridge,” Kat says, pointing out beyond me. I turn and look, hadn’t even noticed it. Yet there it stands—red and towering where the sea meets the bay, segments faded in a uneven haze. A helicopter passes overhead, angled toward Marin. Then another.
“Well isn’t that nice,” I say.
“Do we want to go to Alcatraz?” Cary asks.
“I don’t know if you can get a ticket day of.”
“I don’t really want to visit a prison,” Kat says. “Why don’t we grab a snack and sit. Just watch the water.”
“Sure,” I say. “I’m happy with whatever.”
I pick at a small tray of nachos, neon orange cheese sauce over pale white chips and pickled jalapeños dotted over top. Smelling nothing but salt air. Yet another helicopter toward Marin, the emblem of some news channel on its side. Did the others? I can’t recall.
“Oh my God,” Kat says.
“What?”
“All those helicopters; I think it’s this.” She shows me her phone. “They think he killed himself.”
“It’s always the funny ones.”
I stare north then south down the coast. Small black dots circling above and past the rolling green ridge. But it didn’t happen this way. This came later. Kat hadn’t said that—this was in the summer with Marie. There are no helicopters—or, if there are, I never see them. Never hear them. They’re as mundane as everything else today, at least for a few hours longer. Go back to now. Go back to how it is.
“This is just making me hungrier,” Cary says after finishing his fries.
“Why don’t we head toward my office,” I say. “There’s some good places to eat over there. Little less touristy.”
“Do we just get on the trolley where we got off?”
“I’m not getting back on one of those,” Kat says.
“Why?”
“Were you not there?”
“It’s just one crazy person.”
“If it’s just a crazy person, why didn’t you do anything?”
“Were you there?”
“Let’s walk,” I interrupt. “It’s not very far.”
We walk down the Embarcadero until Kat gets a notion to see Coit Tower and so we cut across Bay Street and meander back toward Stockton. Down to Filbert Street. We hike up the stairs to the tower and walk up to the viewpoint, passing a small crowd of girls in pastels and bright colors on their way down. Talking, giggling of something I don’t and won’t understand. We peer out. Kat and Cary are still, lifeless toward one another. She looks one way, he looks the other. Their hands do not touch and they do not talk. We head down the stairs and down Filbert Street to Grant Avenue and onto Columbus—heading east. It’s lovely and for another transitory moment, I understand what keeps people here. Those fleeting peaceful times of cyan, sea, and street.
A small place on the corner—Comstock Saloon. A few blocks from the Transamerica Pyramid. We duck in. Tan walls surround a large wooden bar with an even larger, ornate wooden back of mirror and bottles and us. There always in its reflection is us—and if not us, me. Booths with green fabric line one wall and along the other are tables where you can look out the tall windows which run along it. The floor is a beautiful white and black tiled mosaic of hex and triangle. Freshly mopped. The astringent, welcoming scent of gin: juniper and ash. Or is it cleaning solution?
We take a seat by the window and the bartender, an older man in a black vest, slacks, and a white button-up, trots over with a few menus. Asks us what we want to drink. He brings back a beer, two gin and tonics. Lets us know to order at the bar if we want food.
Squeezing the lime wedge in, the acidic liquid runs along the tips of my fingers, burning the nail bed of my thumb where I’ve bitten it too close. We touch glasses by the window and look out like we had looked out all morning at shapeful things on the water. Now concrete, steel, and sky. After a while, Cary goes to the bar and puts in our order. We had arrived at eleven, right at open, and now, as the clock nears noon, tourists and the usual crowd of regulars trickle in.
“I don’t know what else I can say for the city so far,” I mumble, “but we’ve got a good amount of great bars.”
Kat nods.
The bar is pleasant. Seems even to have cooled the tensions between Kat and Cary. Yes, things are pleasant if we can just remain here, at this moment, which I know that we can’t. Pleasanter still to glance across the bar and out the other windows to see that pyramid of a building. From this angle the skyscraper is actually a pretty thing, just as David had insisted.
“The other day,” Kat says, “one of my students asked me if I thought Bellingham would get swallowed up by the bay. You know what I said to him?”
“What’s that?” I asked. Kat never talked about work.
“Keep in mind this is a biology class. I don’t know shit about this. I said to him: I don’t know, but I’m not sure I know if it matters either.”
She stares at me with sad, wet eyes shaded by the early afternoon light. It obviously means something to her beyond what she’s said, but what that is I don’t know. I say nothing for a spell. Then: “Cold.”
“He seemed genuinely surprised that I would say that. I was surprised I said it. I talked to him like I talk to you fucking people.”
“Why’d you say it?” Cary asks.
“That’s the thing. I don’t have any idea. I was just so tired from the night before. Maybe I wanted to say something that would shut him up.”
“Jesus, Kat.”
“Maybe we should get some water,” I offer.
Cary pulls out his phone. Stares at it. “I uh,” he says, “Brandon’s calling me? Looks like he already tried me three times.” He looks at Kat and I as though we might have some insight. “I’ll take it real quick.”
Cary answers the phone as he steps outside. We sip our drinks and watch him pace on the sidewalk, my eyes still on the pyramid behind him, the Bay Bridge just beyond.
“Did you ever get the impression that you couldn’t have failed college?” I ask.
“How do you mean?”
“Like it was all rigged to some extent. Like it’s easier than it used to be.”
She tilts her head side to side and looks up at the tin-patterned ceiling. “I don’t know that I ever worried about graduating, yeah. But I also went into a field I thought I’d like.”
“And you did?”
“I did. Even after this week.”
“I guess the way everyone talked about college growing up, I assumed it would be harder. When I was still studying film it felt like I just had to understand what my professors wanted to see and do that.”
“It doesn’t hurt that we’re not unsmart people.”
“No, I suppose it doesn’t.” I laugh and take another sip. “I know I’m not that smart, though. I went where I went.”
Cary rounds the corner outside, putting away his phone. He comes back in and sits down at the table.
“So, what did princess want?” Kat asks.
“He said he’s driving here.”
“What?”
“He said he saw we’re here and he’s driving here.”
“What does he mean he’s just driving here?” Kat asks. “To do what?”
The protective blanket of the saloon unspools. The pyramid dissolves. The Bay Bridge recedes—just one of many he would have had to cross to reach us.
“I don’t know,” Cary says, “that’s all he said. He seemed a little frantic. Said he saw one of our posts.”
“Jesus, is he driving down in that piece of shit car he showed us?” I ask.
“Unless he bought another one,” Cary says.
“I can’t imagine that’s likely.”
“Probably not. This could be fun.”
“I can’t imagine that’s likely either.”
“You don’t think this is a bit weird, Cary?” Kat asks.
“A bit.”
“Who just tells someone a thousand miles away that they’re coming to visit? Now. No questions asked.”
“When you put it like that.”
I down the rest of my gin and tonic, the last remnants of liquor draining through ice chips like clear capillaries until the flow slows into a smooth, melting drip.
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