American Purgatorio (22 page)

I scraped the green mush off my shirt, looked up, and of course by then the girls had gone. I was standing there, talking with Polino, and I heard this
“Hijo de puta.”
I turned around and the avocado man was back. He was standing by a telephone pole saying,
“Hijo de puta.”
To me.
“Hijo de puta, hijo de puta,”
making an obscene gesture at me with his hand.

Okay. The man was drunk. So okay, we tried ignoring him. We tried to carry on a conversation, but
“Hijo de puta, hijo de puta,”
he kept saying it, and I didn't know what it meant but this constant
“Hijo de puta, hijo de puta,”
whatever it was, was beginning to get to me. I thought I probably knew, more or less, what was right and what was wrong and what the man was doing wasn't right.

“Hijo de puta, hijo de puta.”
The man didn't stop, he just kept pounding away and finally it snapped, or I snapped, and I took a few steps toward the man, to chase him away or teach him a lesson. Sometimes you have to use might in the service of justice, sometimes you just have to
do
something. I was thinking this as the man ran up the street.

Okay. Fine. Except the man came back. And he kept saying, over and over,
“Hijo de puta, hijo de puta.”
And I was going to chase him again but instead of that I thought, I can say it too, and I did.
“Hijo de puta.”

And the man said it back.
“Hijo de puta.”

I said it, and the man said it,
Hijo de puta. Hijo de puta,
back and forth, and the man was holding a flashlight, shining it toward me in the broad daylight, and even though it was having no effect, I wanted my own flashlight, to shine at him.

And right about at that moment I realized that I could have stepped back. I could have stepped away and seen the situation clearly. I could have stepped away from myself and just quit, just let go. I could have done that, but I didn't. I felt that I was
in
this thing, that I was part of this
hijo de puta, hijo de puta
 …

Desire is hard to get rid of. Even twisted desire, or especially twisted desire, like a weed, keeps coming up. By this time a crowd had gathered along the sides of the alley and a fat guy with a flag decal on his jacket back was urging me to “make the sucker eat shit.” And I was inclined to agree. They weren't inciting me, but there I was, and there was this person, and somehow I felt trapped in the structure of this relationship we were creating.

That's when I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, another man, a short man, standing by a redwood fence. He was saying,
“Mira, mira,”
and I didn't see what he was referring to, or even think there was anything there to see. I'd seen everything I wanted to see, but the short man kept looking at me, and I thought he was talking to me, so I turned and looked around, and there was no way to know what he was trying to indicate, but what I saw when I looked made it all not matter. Walking up the street I saw the British guy from Kentucky.

It took a while for me to make the connection, a few seconds, and it might have been the beginning of hope, but I thought I'd had enough of hope. There was always hope and then inevitably the dissolution of that hope, and now I was just about done with hope. Except not quite.

I saw the man named Geoff, wearing a blue Hawaiian shirt, coming out of a sushi restaurant and walking alone up the street. I left Polino and the flashlight man, and followed Geoff, from a distance, following him around a corner and along a neatly manicured residential street named after a semiprecious stone. He crossed a street, walked into the next block, and went into one of the houses. I didn't see which house exactly, but there were only a finite number of houses on the block and I imagined I'd know it when I came to it. And when I did come to it, there it was, sitting in the morning fog, a one-story bungalow with the two familiar cars parked, one in the driveway and one on the street.

I didn't think of Anne because Anne was gone. I was thinking of the girl who wasn't Anne.

My favorite expression during my time with Polino was “Fuck it.” When something presented itself I would just, with my newfound habit, say Fuck it. Meaning just treat everything as something not to care about. To want nothing else. To hate who I was. Fuck my body and my hair and my teeth, and also my desires. Especially fuck them. But now they were fucking me. I could feel them coming to life in my body, and I mentioned before about how desire turns into hope which turns into anticipation, and for me, anticipation had become a force, like a thing at the end of a rope, pulling, and I could feel myself being pulled, through the membrane that separated me from hope, pulling me out of Polino's world and into something else.

That something else was the view of Linda's house.

I walked past the house several times on the sidewalk, like a pedestrian, casually sneaking looks in the curtained window. I stood across the street, under the weeping branches of a willow tree, silently watching, like an Indian, for her to emerge. And waiting. And as I waited I imagined her, which kept me waiting. When she appeared, watering the terra-cotta pots on the front steps, I felt in my body a longing. Not necessarily for her but for something that I wanted. I wanted it with the excruciating want of a child wanting, and what was excruciating was my belief in the impossibility of even getting near it. It was in my heart, this thing that I wanted so much, and what was in my heart was love.

There was the fact that I loved Anne. Which I still did. And she loved me. She had and she did. Love had definitely existed, and I was happy in that love. I was happy to love, and also happy to
be
loved by her. Although she was gone, my need or my habit or my desire for her still existed.

And you might say, “That's over.” You might say, “Move on and find someone else to love.” And that would be the correct prescription. Get on with your life, Jack. And it's easy to say that, but for me it wasn't so easy. I didn't want to move on. I didn't want to replace my love. And anyway, I didn't see how I could. Where would the old love go? Into memory? I had plenty of memories already. I didn't need more memories. I needed Anne. I loved her and she's dead and I know she's dead but I can't just turn around, see someone new, and love that new person. And yes, I might like to be loved again, who wouldn't? But I want Anne's love. That's the love I got used to, and having got used to it, I want it back.

Standing there, watching Linda, I start to imagine, in my mind, not a perfect person, because I don't need perfection anymore. I'm not perfect, but I want a person to give my love to. As if something inside me needs to leave my body and find an object outside my body. As I stare at the purple bougainvillea vine blooming over the door, more than seeing any one specific person, I imagine a generalized person, a woman. I conceive of a love for her. I imagine her imperfections and it's those imperfections that I see myself loving. And she, in my dreams, is willing to return my love. My fantasies, as I run them through my mind, over and over, become, not quite reality, but something I can live for.

6.

I'm excited about the prospect of … what? I don't know exactly, excited more by the emergence of desire than the possibility of that desire getting rewarded. I go back to the bunker where I live, find Polino spreading out his blanket, and because Polino is, at the moment, my best friend, I share my excitement.

I tell him about Linda, and about Geoff and Kentucky, but Polino has already heard about Anne, and this new girl, whoever she is, means nothing to him. He changes the subject, starts discoursing to me about the Donner Party, the people who crossed the Sierra Nevada, or tried to, but bad planning or unexpected weather forced them to stay the winter and starve. Or, if not starve, to eat their fellow travelers. He's going on about the winter of 1847 and partly I'm listening to the lecture and partly I'm thinking about the lecturer.

Polino is wiry and energetic, and it's not that he doesn't have ambition. I've noticed that in his choice of words, although there are the requisite catch phrases of the day, he also likes to experiment with words he doesn't know, or wants to know. The two books in his box are a ragged copy of
Hamlet
and a badly torn dictionary. Really half a dictionary—only the letters M through Z—and in the middle of his explanation of old-time cannibalism, as he describes the state of mind of the hungry families, he uses the word “lachrymosity.” And he stops in the middle of his speech. He's not sure the word exists, and of course in his tattered dictionary the word isn't there, and the fact that the definition of the word, if it is a word, is unknown to him increases his belief that knowing its meaning would change things.

So he's frustrated, and in his frustration looks around and sees me, sitting against the cinder-block wall, and he suddenly says to me, “This is my house, you know.”

“I know,” I say. “I appreciate your hospitality.”

“Hospitality?”

I can see what he wants is a little recognition. Although he's living a life of indolence he still has some flickering desire. He too wants to be seen, and although he's not willing to admit it, or do anything to bring it about, he's tired of the free and easy life of romance, which for him lacks any actual romance.

I'm not blind to his dissatisfaction. Although it's directed at me, I see it as stemming from something else, and I believe I can change that dissatisfaction. I'm feeling the anticipation of making contact with Linda and I want to pass on that feeling of anticipation. Having found a way out of my own tar pit, I want to pull Polino out. So I come up with a plan.

And the first thing I need to implement this plan is a goal. Sex is a good one, I think, so first comes the pep talk, a motivational sermon to get Polino going. I begin coaxing Polino into describing the girl he's been talking about, a blond beachcomber girl he's seen strolling along the beach. The thought of this girl gets him over his resistance.

That's the first step.

The second step is getting cleaned up.

I take off my pants and shirt, get Polino to do the same, and then, in my underwear, I wash the clothes in a public shower by the beach. Using some soap that had fallen into the drain, I scrub and rinse and wash, first our clothes, then my body and my hair and my face. Polino leaves his beard alone, but with an abandoned disposable razor, I cut the incipient stubble off my face.

Wearing only our underwear, we set our clothes out on the rim of a trash can to dry. People are watching us but we don't care, and partially we don't care, or at least I don't care, because I feel different now that I'm clean, or cleaner, and I believe Polino feels the same.

Grudgingly, he admits that he does. He begins to engage himself with the world of possibility, and the next step would be a haircut, but because I can't find any scissors or comb we brush our hair back with our fingers.

And then comes finding the girl. Which would be simple enough except that Polino, having lived so long as a hermit, has lost his confidence. He's lost belief in himself, in his own likability. But we've come this far, together, and so with our clothes dried, our hair combed, we go out into the world. We stand in front of a bar on Garnet Avenue and what we need, or what Polino says he needs, is a beer. But for that we need more money, so instead we buy a can of beer from a store and take up our position near the lifeguard station.

We see a girl in bikini and sandals, but she's not the right girl. Polino has very defined criteria for the person he's willing to share his beer with and so we stroll around, past people in restaurants watching waves, past surfer-themed bars, and motels with lawns like putting greens.

And then we find her. She's not blond, but that's okay. She's sitting on the public grass in cut-off jeans, braiding her hair, and when we sit with her she doesn't walk away. A conversation is started and we learn she's from out of town. She's got long black hair and Polino offers her his beer. I can see that all my motivational talk was nothing compared to a real living person, wearing a shirt several sizes too small, looking at Polino and listening to him, and seeming to be interested. Gradually I extricate myself, leaving Polino alone with the girl, talking and braiding and feeling the worm of desire.

I go back to Linda's house.

I stand across the street in the shelter of the same weeping willow, and from the protection of this vantage I start my vigil. Her car is still parked on the street so I wait. After about an hour and a half, when she finally does walk out of the front door, I'm not sure what I'm going to say. I've rehearsed it a thousand times but now when I'm confronted with the real object, slightly different and less malleable than the fantasy object, I begin to waver.

Linda walks to the driver's side of the maroon station wagon, takes her keys out of her pants—sweatpants that conform to the contour of her legs—and that's when desire, the enemy of sloth, sets me in motion. I start running. I've waited so long that now, before she gets in the car and drives away, I have to run to her. She looks up, sees this man running toward her, but she isn't scared. By the time I get to her and stop in front of her, I'm breathing more than I would like.

“Remember me?” I say.

Of course she does.

“I've moved to San Diego.”

“That's a coincidence,” she says.

She's wearing a T-shirt.

“Are you a surfer?” she says.

“A body surfer?”

“You've got a tan like a surfer.”

“From the sun,” I say. “How are you? Are you off to work?”

“To a class,” she says.

“A class in what? What subject?”

She just looks at me. Although the question never gets officially answered we find ourselves talking about the Scripps aquarium and Torrey Pines park and how the actual Torrey pine tree is structurally more like a fir than a pine tree. Our conversation bounces around but she seems to enjoy my somewhat overzealous attention. We talk for a while, standing at the side of her car, and then she says, “Would you like to get together, later?”