The Ruins of California (3 page)

“Did you fly through puffy clouds and watch the wings of the plane disappear and then reappear, clear and shiny?”

I nodded again.

“Your cheeks are so pink, Inez,” Cary said, reaching to touch my face with the tip of a finger. “And you look so much like your father. He said you were very beautiful.”

I must have blushed, because Cary paused again. “Hey. I have something for you,” she said.

She pushed away the fringe of a beige macramé shawl and reached into the front pocket of her jeans to pull out small envelopes of white paper, each about two inches square. There were five or six of them, all labeled diagonally in tiny red letters:
KER JACK CRACKER JACK CRACKER JACK CRACKER JACK CRACKER JACK CRACKER JA

“Prizes,” I said, a flood of excitement in my voice.

“Prizes,”
Cary repeated in a voice so gentle that it was almost a whisper. “I’ve been collecting them all week. Prizes that I didn’t open. They’re all for you.”

TWO

Telegraph Hill

H
e always did this embarrassing thing at the airport. It was one of his routines. “Inez!” he’d cry out theatrically, as though I were an old flame from whom he’d been separated at great emotional cost.

“Inez!”

His head shook in torment. His hands slapped down on his chest and throbbed above his heart. And then, when he wouldn’t stop the bad dramatics, I conjured a look that had taken me a couple of years to master: abject disapproval. It was a game we played. He overdid. I downplayed. I just stared at him—deadpan—and tightened my lips until they became a knife edge across my face. He advanced, seemingly oblivious, a complete fool, his arms stretched out wide for a hug. Oh, no. That’s when my lack of enthusiasm wasn’t feigned. My father didn’t bend down—he never bent, due to a bad back or possibly just something else inflexible about him—but threw his arms around the top of my head. My face
pressed into his heavy belt buckle and just a couple inches above the crotch of his low-cut jeans.

After what seemed an eternity, he pulled away.

“What’s this outrageous bag?” he asked, pointing down at the large pink suitcase. “Jesus, what a color!”

“The zipper broke on the one you—”

“All you need is a duffel,” he interrupted. He’d given me a camping duffel and inflatable lifeboat from Abercrombie & Fitch the summer before, hoping to encourage a sense of rugged self-reliance. “It looks like a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, Inez. Or like something you’d take on a charter-bus trip of the Hawaiian Islands.”

I forced a smile.

Cary shrugged. “Gee, Paul. I think it’s really neat.” She tried to catch my father’s eye. “Where’d you get that groovy bag, Inez?”

“Is it neat?” He faltered, temporarily at a loss. “Perhaps so. Gee, what do I know, right? I’m so out of it. Hey, Inez, you’re looking swell.
Swell.
”

I didn’t say anything for a while, just watched him lift the suitcase to the hatch of the small car and felt an old dread returning. He acted so glad to see me but at the same time seemed sorry I’d ever been born.

“Let’s go!” he called out. And in one fluid motion, he jackknifed his long, lean body and dropped into the driver’s seat of the MG. Cary waited beside her open door so I could climb in the backseat. Except it wasn’t a backseat, really, just a narrow ledge. When he’d first gotten the car, the year before, I was able to crawl right in. But now some gymnastics were required. I stepped backward through the door and positioned my bottom on the ledge before squeezing the rest of my body inside. As we rode along, my head bent down to avoid painful contact with the roof, my clodhoppers were wedged
up against the back of the front seats and one elbow was positioned on the ledge to steady me during my father’s great bursts of speed and frequent lane changes. Once, the year before, during a particularly exciting stretch of road, he swiveled his head all the way around to tell me that sometimes he wished he’d become a race-car driver, but now it was too late.

Cary smiled at me sympathetically. “How’s it going back there?”

She seemed a little younger than Marisa, as far as I could tell. Or maybe just softer and more vibrantly sweet, if that was possible. But, just like Marisa, she generated an atmosphere of intelligent passivity, of being a good-natured passenger in a Paul and Inez Ruin Weekend. The only other noticeable pattern as far as I could tell was that both women had dark hair, large eyes, small noses, and an overbite. But then, my mother had all those things, too.

“How is
Mrs. Craig
?” my father asked. “Any goose-stepping in the classroom?”

“Mrs. Craig”—he turned to Cary—“is really uptight. Right, Inez?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s an angry John Bircher who’s got Inez in her grips for third grade. She hobbles around on a wooden leg like Captain Ahab and has one of those bird’s-nest hairdos. And according to Inez she’s made the class memorize the names of Richard Nixon’s cabinet.”

“Oh, God!” Cary shrieked. “You’re kidding!”

My father watched me in the rearview mirror. “Inez, who is the secretary of health, education and welfare?”

“Robert Finch.”

“Hey!”

“Secretary of state?”

“Henry Kissinger.”

“
Herr Doctor Strangelove
, you mean.”

Cary giggled.

“Mrs. Craig is totally paranoid and always raving on about the commies. Right, Inez? Completely hysterical. Just like my mother. I don’t get it,” he went on. “It’s hard for me to get that worked up. Who needs more labels? Right, Inez? To me, hawks and doves are all birds, and politics is just a lot of wing flapping.”

My neck wasn’t in a position to nod, but I tried—strangely enthralled by his charm, almost hypnotized. My chin moved up and down a bit, and I hoped that he could see it in the mirror.

“Don’t vote,” he said. “
It only encourages them.
Right, Inez?” Then he lowered his voice to paternal tones. “Memorizing isn’t such a bad thing anyway. It’s how we learn stuff—”

Behind the MG an explosive rumbling quieted all conversation. From the slanted hatch window, I saw a dark cluster of motorcycles getting bigger, enveloping our car on all sides. There was a group of eight or ten men in denim and leather and World War II helmets spray-painted black.

“Harleys,” my father said.

“Far out!” said Cary. “The Hells Angels.”

At the very end of the pack, a skinny girl was wearing a crocheted halter top and black leather pants. She was sitting on the back of a bike, slightly elevated, hugging a guy with a skull on the back of his jacket. My father traced her with his eyes, then sped up—seeming to want a closer look.

“She must be freezing,” he said.

“Wow.” Cary squinted. “That bike is so beautiful.
So are they
.” My father kept his eyes on the girl. In the middle of her back, a thin ridge of spine disappeared under the halter band and strings, then rose out again.

“What do you think, Inez?”

A Harley was a kind of motorcycle. I’d guessed that much. The girl on the back must be the angel. But where was hell?

I
opened my eyes. The light was bright and sharp and fell in blazing shapes around me. My father’s studio apartment on Telegraph Hill was an airy white room, decorated sparely and simply. There was a brown corduroy sofa where I always slept, a couple of low white tables, a flamenco poster, and two guitars leaning against a redbrick wall. Another wall, floor-to-ceiling windows, looked out over San Francisco Bay and the island of Alcatraz. Bisecting the room was a deep red folding screen, and behind that, the vast expanse of Dad’s king-size bed.

Unlike Abuelita’s house in Van Dale, which was a forest of artifacts and souvenirs and yellowing snapshots collected over the years and never pared down, my father’s place was devoid of sentiment. No clutter. No framed pictures of family members. No treasured remains of boyhood or school days. No signs of his former life as a suburban dad or evidence of me or my mysterious half brother, Whitman, who lived in England. It took a little getting used to—the sterility of my father’s surroundings. While Abuelita kept things forever, as if, like a magic lamp, they might contain a genie of good feeling inside them, my father’s things carried no such hope. Objects were set out to be admired for beauty and contemplation: a single lily in a glass cylinder, a Japanese Go board, an ancient bird carved from marble. But when I looked at them, I felt sort of empty.

“Inez, you’re awake!” He loomed over me with a smile. His hair was drier and looser than when I had seen him three months before on Christmas Day at my Grandmother Ruin’s house. And rather
than the strained expression and three-piece suit he had worn for the holiday in San Benito, he was in jeans and a collarless white shirt and seemed in a cheery mood.

“Great music last night, wasn’t it?”

We’d gone to Alegrías, a flamenco club in North Beach. He went there every Friday night, whether I was visiting or not.

“Antonio is amazing. A real
manitas de plata.
” He mimicked playing the guitar, hunched over.

“Silver hands?”

“Yes! But if you say somebody’s a
manitas de plata
, it means he’s a terrible show-off. Like,
‘Antonio, you egomaniac!’
What a cat. He’s just amazing. Hey, listen, if I could play like that, I’d be a show-off, too.”

My father did play, but not like that. He’d lived in Spain after college and again when he was in the air force. He’d been stationed there and stayed—studying guitar in some dusty town called Morón de la Frontera that he still talked about. He’d been an outsider in a dark world that he never quite returned from. Flamenco captured his attention completely, struck him in a place the rest of us couldn’t reach.

“Pancakes?” he asked. “Or what about waffles? I have a cool new waffle iron. It’s German and makes these perfect waffles—crunchy on the edges and top, a bit softer inside. What are you in the mood for?”

During my previous visit, Marisa had spent the night and disappeared behind the folding screen in the living room, turning up the next morning in a white robe and wet hair. But this morning I saw no sign of Cary. She’d come to El Bodega for paella, the three of us waiting forever for our big bowls of saffron rice baked with clams
and spicy sausage and chicken. It must have been ten-thirty—way beyond my Van Dale bedtime—when we left the restaurant and ambled into the bizarre nighttime world of North Beach. In my purple windbreaker and knee socks, I passed men wearing baggy velvet caps, women in witch’s coats, panhandlers, winos, an array of beckoning shops selling army surplus, candles, posters, and incense. (Van Dale offered nothing like this.) One place had a storefront window featuring an enormous stuffed tiger with a cigar coming out of its mouth. An old amusement-park ride was displayed in another storefront—a large clown face with a deranged smile. “Hey, Cary, look!” my father called out, pointing to the black-light posters and long glass cases. “A new head shop. Check it out!”

At the corner of Grant and Green, we’d turned uphill and soon arrived at Alegrías, hidden behind a plain factory façade—no advertisement, no sign indicating it was an establishment of any kind. A man in a priest’s long jacket and white collar was standing out front.

“Richard!” my father called out. The two men talked for a minute or so, exchanging observations and jokes about Chairman Mao that I didn’t understand. My father handed him some folded-over bills, and we went inside.

Down a flight of stairs and around a dozen or more crowded café tables, we arrived at a corner table in the back where my father always sat. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I noticed that the room had been painted red since my last visit in the fall—walls, ceiling, stage, chairs, tables, floor. A waitress appeared instantly, greeting us with husky good humor, almost excitement, as if she’d been waiting all night to come and get my father’s drink order.

“There’s a table of women over there”—she nodded in one direction near the stairs—“who asked me if you were Gregory Peck.”

“A poor man’s Peck,” my father said, looking up at the table of women with a smile. One of the women raised her hand—the way Indians do in old westerns.
How.
Another bent her head coyly toward her straw.

Cary squinted in their direction and produced a contented smile.

A few moments later, all the chairs onstage were removed but one. A man carrying a yellow guitar came on. He was young, not quite twenty. He wore a white shirt and black pants and walked to the chair with a casual, untheatrical manner, as if he were arriving at a doctor’s waiting room.

“Antonio!” a male voice yelled out.

“Ay-ay-ay!” cried another man, with expectancy.

“Hombre!” my father called out, half serious, then laughing.

The guitarist didn’t acknowledge the calls—no bow or even eye contact. His pale face looked only at the floor. His hair was long and thick, swept back from his forehead. He rested the bottom of the guitar on his thigh so the instrument stood up from his lap. A few seconds later, he shifted the position of the instrument so it sat more diagonally against him, then hugged it closer, almost squeezing, and began to play.

The tune was slow, hesitant, mournful. It was called a
soleares.
The mother chant. The song of loneliness. My father had played them for years, as far back as I could remember. He’d sit for hours in our Menlo Park house on a black bentwood chair in the middle of our living room. A guitar was in his lap. His eyes were distant, almost as though he were in a trance. Sometimes, when he seemed less miserable and wasn’t playing guitar, he’d take me on the back of
his motorcycle if I promised not to tell my mother. I must have been five or six, clinging to him like a little ape. We’d drive to the water, to a harbor of some kind, and get off the bike and walk around. He’d point out different boats with different rigging and teach me how to tell them apart. A ketch, a yawl, a ketch-rigged yawl, a sloop. He explained where wind came from or how gravity held things to the earth, or how an airplane overhead could fly.

I remembered him sitting on the floor of the Menlo house playing with puzzles. He loved any kind of puzzle—dots and boxes, hex, rolling balls that dropped into holes, knots that needed unknotting, and iron chains that fit together perfectly into shapes that, once separated, seemed impossible to form again. In the mornings I’d sit in his lap while he read the newspaper aloud to me—Lee Harvey Oswald, Vietnam body counts, the Buddhist monk who poured gasoline all over himself and burst into flames. My father whispered and ran his fingers along the lines of the sentences until, one day, the letters on the page began to repeat in patterns that I could recognize.