What follows are the openings of each story in the collection, which will give the reader a feel for the author’s style and a sense of the book as a whole.

 

 

Why I Write

          Much of what I write grows out of my fears.  I write them out.

          Once my three-year-old daughter had a nightmare.  Her room was filled with spiders and she was being chased by a "mean sandwich."  When my son was three he had a dream that he was being chased by angry socks.  So begins, I think, their autobiographies, their writing lives.

 

 

In Praise of Daylight

          I have always had nightmares.  Ever since I can remember.

          My first memory is a nightmare.  Except it was real.  I mean it really happened.  At least I think it did.  I was quite disturbed when my therapist asked me if it really had happened.  It seemed too much like a dream to him. 

          I don't know what drew me to the kitchen.  As I remember it, it was some crash, some sound that I traveled to the entryway.  Perhaps it was the slam of the door as my sister ran out of the house, down the alley, across Centinella Avenue, to the German baby-sitter we called Grandma Lewis.  Anyway, I wound up in the kitchen.  I was small.  I remember the countertops were above my head.  Maybe I was five.  Up to the right was the large sink where my sister and I had taken baths together.   The warm water, the soap, my mother standing over us, pleased no doubt with her handiwork, glistening film of soapy water reflecting the glare of the bulb above and behind my mother, an electric aureole.

          But this time my mother was sitting at the other end of the kitchen on the floor.  I remember registering how odd it seemed to see her at my own level, sitting with her back against the lower cupboards, sitting on the black and white linoleum like some little girl who had lost her balance, legs in a V before her.  She was weeping.  There was blood coming from her ear, a small steady rivulet of red ants descending her neck, dark on her pale skin, eyes awash.

 

 

Momento Mori

          My father, Arthur, held me to the light of Los Angeles filling the small kitchenette of the trailer we lived in with my sister and mother, while he faded quickly from drink, his liver and kidneys failing by the time I was nine months old.  Of course I don’t remember his eyes or his hands or the smell of alcohol and cigarettes or even his absences, when he went downtown to search for work in the bars drinking his best friend’s money.  My sister remembers the bloody rags mom carried to the kitchen as he hemorrhaged his last and it is blood that I see most clearly running down my mother’s neck in my first memory, with my stepfather, Bill, standing over her. The men around me as I grew up conspired to make a cage of cruelty for my heart.

 

 

Distraction

          I have always regretted not shooting my stepfather, Bill, when I had the chance.

          I guess I was about ten when he decided to teach me to shoot.  We were staying in a cabin that we occasionally rented at June Lake, in the Sierras, several hours drive from our home in Santa Barbara.  It was a large A-frame, with big open rooms.  My parents slept in the loft upstairs and my sister, the miniature poodle, and I slept below.  Bill usually went horseback riding with my sister, Janet, in the early morning.  They'd get up at six, which I seldom wanted to do.  I was afraid of horses anyway.  When I was three or four my mom and Bill took me to a pony ride at a local park.  One of my tennis shoes—blue canvas with a rounded toe and a white sole—fell off and I screamed all the way around the makeshift track until we got back to my parents.  My shoe was put back on my white-socked foot, but I refused to ride for six years.  I did manage to get up early enough for a ride one day at June Lake and I was given an old, tame horse.  The horse knew the trail so well he didn't really need to be guided by me, which was just as well:  He was big and wouldn't respond to my subtle pulling to the left or right on the reins as the horses did in the cowboy shows I watched religiously on Saturday mornings.  Now I was the rider and as we continued along the trail, I was trying to figure out what the fun was I was supposed to be having.  I watched the horse in front of me lift its tail and drop its digested hay a few inches in front of the nose of my horse, which is not something I had seen before and which held a certain fascination for the ten-year-old holding so tightly the saddlehorn of his own horse.  I don't remember any other part of the trail except the lifting tail and the round balls as they came through, and the opening quickly closing again, sliding shut around the released dung as it quickly dropped to the ground, green and steaming in the cool early high country air.   Not being able to see much before me except the now suspicious rear of the horse in front, I hoped my horse would remain calm, for I knew I was not in control.  We kept moving slowly steadily evenly, and when we had made a full circle—and this is the only other part of the outing I remember—at the sight of the stables my horse took off galloping.  I didn't know where it was headed or how to make it stop.  The horse came to rest in front of the stable and I was helped off by the laughing hired hands, who were used to seeing the horse do this time and again.  I had long before stopped trusting adults, so the humiliation I accepted without protest.  However at this point, I stopped trusting horses or any animal I couldn't handle.  I never got up early enough to ride again, and so my stepfather and sister resumed their early morning rides together.

 

 

COPS

          During the summer of 1971, when I rode my bicycle home from my job in San Francisco's business district, I would take Battery Street downtown, cross Market, ride up the six or seven blocks to Hayes Street, cross over Market again, and start the twenty-minute uphill ride to the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park and my apartment at Oak and Ashbury.  The ride wasn't as bad as it might sound, for although it was a steady climb, there were none of the steep hills that come to mind when you think of San Francisco.  Hayes ran through the Filmore District, the city's oldest African-American enclave, where I once lived in a powder blue apartment building called Egyptian Decor. 

          I had never before associated powder blue with that ancient civilization, but the building attempted Egyptian motifs wherever possible.  Most notable was the elevator with scenes of the pyramids and the Sphinx, palm trees and caravans, sand and a distant oasis, painted on paper and protected behind plexiglass, floor to ceiling.  The elevator doors and the floor button panel were painted an antique gold.  On Friday nights some of the tenants would take a leak in the elevator and my roommates and I would joke about the Nile overflowing.  Perhaps it was not the tenants but some of their visitors, for the apartment below us on the fifth floor was occupied by prostitutes.  For that reason we often heard cars going by honking their horns at two in the morning.  To get rid of these tenants the landlady cut off their electricity.  The women then hung a sheet out of one window, stretching to the next, announcing in big red letters their rent strike.  It was a clean sheet.  My parents visited me only once there and my stepfather refused to get out of his white Cadillac, while mom came upstairs to look at our apartment.

 

 

Hayes House

          When I was a sophomore at the University of San Francisco, my future wife, Jenny, lived in a white two-storey two blocks from our college, with four other young women, all juniors, three of them nursing students, the other a sociology major, Jenny studying psychology.  It was there I went, when Jenny and I were just friends, after my motorcycle accident in Gilroy, my knee bleeding and speckled with gravel from Highway 101.  Once we had picked ourselves up off the highway, I had taken a Greyhound bus with my then girlfriend Leslie, leaving the motorcycle at a gas station in storage.  Back in The City, I had seen her to her door at the residential secretarial school downtown, and then taken a street bus in my torn jeans, sitting quietly white with my fear, to Hayes Street to knock on my friends' door.  I was confident the nurses-to-be, who had befriended me for a year and whom I had helped move into the house, would know what to do.  In their shock they took me upstairs to the full bathroom, where they ran the tub half full and had me sit down in the warm water in by white briefs, and after soaking my knee for a bit cleaned out the gravel gently with a washcloth, spread disinfectant over it, and applied a large gauze pad on the wound, taping it with four long, thin strips of white adhesive tape, and sent me back to my dorm room to dream what I could.

 

Women in Love

          The war between the sexes D. H. Lawrence filled with cosmological dread Ken Russell burned into our consciousness in his 1970 cinematic adaptation of Lawrence's Women in Love, which opened in San Francisco while I was in my first term of my second year at USF.   Armed with compelling art direction and the passionate intensity of the script, Russell’s men and women fought one another, covering half of Europe in lush and frozen angst, trying to reach some common ground they quickly lost again.  The image of the entangled young couple found naked in the mud at the bottom of the drained pond of the country estate, early in the film, an image not in the book, stayed with Cherie and me, ignited us somehow as we rode through the unlit thoroughfare of Golden Gate Park back toward the school dorms, the trees looming dark with the promise of unknowing, our motorcycle faithfully weaving through them, the damp cold air of The City flushing our faces.

 

 

The Streets of San Francisco

         Back then, it didn’t take much.  I moved myself by hand into a flat on Oak Street, across from the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park, near Ashbury, one block down from Haight and Ashbury, already gone bad in the teeth by the summer of '71, a street of tired, strung-out hippies, the alcoholic homeless, dilapidated businesses, an occasional busload of tourists sliding past to gape in dismay at the rainbow clothes and shaggy hair.  I carried all my belongings across the Panhandle when I moved in with Curtis—a couple boxes of books, files of term papers, a stereo that closed up like a suitcase, a wooden crate of records, a couple of white, decorative, large square bricks and two two-by-sixes I used for a bookcase, a box spring and then a mattress, a large overstuffed green chair for reading I balanced overturned on my head and right shoulder, weaving my unsteady way through the unemployed and drug dealers who occupied the Panhandle.

    

         Our place had a large bedroom and a small one, very small.  Curtis shared the large, airy bedroom with our roommate, Paul, another friend of his.  Paul once threw a dinner knife at me because I was insisting that he keep his peanut butter off the table and in the pantry, like everyone else. That punctured my idea of order but I don't think I ever spoke to him again.  One day, after crossing the Panhandle, on my way to my college, from the street I could see a young man in his sun-flooded bay window of his second floor flat watering his plants, nude, his long penis a thing of casual pride.  Another time, I passed a woman sitting on her stoop on the same street, weeping, calling to me to help her escape the man of tears in the apartment above.  I talked to her a bit, in those days never good with tears, mine or anyone else's, but all my ideas meant leaving, while she meant to stay, so I went on to my classes in the history of economics, from ancient Greece to the Keynesian present, in the poverty of the past, Renaissance Italy and the history of colonialism in Africa, and in Restoration comedy, our failures we smile away. 

 

 

Michael

          I remember vividly my future roommate Michael's unconstrained delight as he unzipped the cover trousers of the Rolling Stone's Sticky Fingers album cover, opened up the pants to reveal the jockey briefs, and giggled, then ran his hand characteristically through his thick black second-generation Portuguese hair, muttering "Jesus, I can’t believe it!  I just can’t."  There was little in the world that Michael failed to transform through his unmodulated enthusiasm or disdain into the currency of his hip wonder and his old world aesthetics, in sharp contrast to the care with which I let each fact sink in, meeting each experience with studied equanimity, as if I would allow nothing to surprise me.  Perhaps that's what he liked about me.

 

 

The Mountains above Visalia

          Going up to the Sierras from Visalia, it is good to stop along the way, look back down the serpentine road to see how far you have already come, and gaze out over California’s Central Valley, stretching in the vague distance toward home.  The earth is an irrigated green, except for a huge mound in the east that retains its desert brown.  The desert seems to insist on that mound, impossible to cultivate, in order to remind you that the valley is man-made, self-conscious, meretricious.  Everything you wanted to get away from. 

 

 

New York, New York

          My mother had come to visit us in Seattle in the second year of my first marriage, in 1977, and I took her downtown to see Martin Scorsese's New York, New York, while my wife babysat my four-year-old niece, whom Mom had brought along from California.  On the way home from the movie, she broke down sobbing—big deep sobs, bottomless sobs.  She would not say what was wrong.  I was left to guess—in four years she would be dead and this and her other secrets gone with her.  Perhaps it was the epoch the film evoked so expertly both in its parody of the stagy sets of 40s musicals and the meanness underneath postwar life, the time just after World War II, when there was hope for change but things turned out the same.  Perhaps it was the dresses and hats, the big bands, the songs, the ascendance of bebop, with its intense obsession, which left so little room for others.  Perhaps it was the succession of the good men and mean men of the times Mom remembered that brought her to tears, perhaps history emptied her eyes, loss coursed through her as we slid home along the freeway that sits like caked makeup on the face of the green and blue city. 

 

 

Coming Home

          I have discovered that it is good to get away with your wife after seven years or so of devoting yourself to entertaining your children.  But it’s not that easy to get away—you have to find someone willing to take your children for the weekend and you have to be willing to leave them.  For us, for my wife and me, it isn’t easy to leave the children.  Our own parents left us before we were born—even when they were around they were absent, even when they took us on vacation with them, they left us to our own devices.