Walt (5 page)

IX

A
t long last the
San Geronimo
arrived in San Francisco. Walt found his familiar shipboard routine suddenly at an end. He was assaulted by the presence of a modern city. An average residential block in San Francisco contains many times as many inhabitants as the entire island of Tristan de Cunha. Walt had no idea that such a population of humans existed as he saw in his first moment off the ship’s gangplank.

The sailors all had business to attend to ashore. They forgot about Walt in their hurry to do things and find things and sell things. Within minutes Walt found himself alone on the pier. Without noticing it, he had begun to sing along with the music in his head.

I had spent the last several hours riding the N Judah back and forth again. At the end of the line, Embarcadero Station, I decided to get off the train and stretch my legs for a while.

I walked down to the foot of Market Street, past the Vallaincourt Fountain and under the broken-off stubs of the Embarcadero Freeway. I turned right, walking towards the working docks instead of the hopeless tourist installations to the left.

I had not gone very far when I saw what could have been a male human. He was shuffling around, looking very lost indeed, and quite frightened too. San Francisco has a large population of homeless people, many of whom have severe mental health problems. It is a daily event to see these people wandering around. They are a fact of life in this city.

Two things about this person, however, attracted my attention. These are the reasons: first, he did not look at all like a street person. He was wearing several wool sweaters and knee-high rubber fisherman’s boots. He did not seem to be suffering from the privations that the homeless endure daily. Second, he was singing the Easybeats.

I do not really know why, perhaps I felt responsible somehow, but I approached this man. I spoke to him in the calmest words I could muster. I asked him his name, he said he was Walt.

There, it is done. Walt and I have met.

X

O
ur conversation lasted
far longer than it reasonably should have. I finally worked in a question about his interest in the Easybeats. Cryptically, and at great length, he described to me the nature of his ordeal. That information makes up the bulk of the preceding pages of this story.

I asked him how long he had been hearing the music in his head. As I have said before, I was not prepared for creatures quite as strange as Walt to answer my beacon. At that point I did not tell him that I was, in all likelihood, transmitting the signal that he had heard in his head all this time.

I took Walt down the street to Red’s Java House for coffee. I hoped that it would be something of a familiar environment for him. Red’s is built out over the water on piers. The drain from the sink goes through a hole in the floor and directly out into the Bay.

The crowd there is mostly longshoremen and visiting sailors, but a lot of frugal suits from the Financial District come there for the coffee and the cheap hamburgers that taste like vinegar. The walls are covered with posters announcing union meetings and other types of workingmen’s information.

Walt was in a state of shock. The coffee did not seem to help. I had no idea that he had never tasted coffee before.

Our conversation finally got around to his plans here. His response was simple: he had none. His response was exactly the same when I asked him about his place to stay. What I did next seemed logical enough at the time, but has never made sense to me since; I invited him to come stay with me.

After all, he was not really going to be in the way. My roommate had contracted Dengue Fever while traveling across northern Thailand by elephant and, after a period of bed rest in Delhi, had traveled to Salt Lake City to recuperate.

I did not think at that point to ask how long Walt might be planning on staying with me. As things turned out, it did not really matter.

After finishing our coffee, we walked up Folsom all the way from the waterfront to get back to my, our, apartment. Walt was terrified by the enormity of the Bay Bridge and the buildings downtown. I had a great deal of difficulty describing the purpose of Alcatraz before it became a tourist attraction. There were, of course, no prisons on Tristan.

Walt told me that the music in his head was getting louder and louder with every step. Conversation became progressively more difficult. By the time we crossed Fifth Street, I had to shout to make myself heard over the din in Walt’s head. I made a mental note to bring down the power on the transmitter.

As we walked on in silence I wondered what could possibly have caused my transmission in San Francisco to be picked up in the head of a lobster fisherman half way around the world.

I finally hit upon a theory. I remembered that certain radio frequencies are subject to a phenomenon known as “wave skip”. When this happens, the radio wave is reflected off of the Earth’s atmosphere and sent back down to the surface of the planet. If the angles all line up just perfectly, the signal can be carried thousands, even tens of thousands, of miles beyond the normal transmitting range of the radio source. This skip is most common with relatively low frequency radio waves. I had opted for a low frequency transmitter because I thought it would be more difficult for the Government to trace. The Government has some draconian ideas about the nature of broadcasting and who should be allowed to be involved in it. I was actually breaking the law by transmitting my innocent message to the stars. Laws, I have found, are by and large foolish inventions.

I was a bit saddened by the idea of the skipping waves. If the theory was correct, it meant that my signal had not penetrated the atmosphere at all. No creature in space could have heard my transmission, or so I then thought.

But at least it had brought me Walt. I supposed that my experiment was a success then. A being had picked up my signal and honed in on it, finally making contact with me.

The only question that remained was how Walt had been receiving my signal all this time. He did not seem to have any obvious antennae or anything like that. I shouted a question to him: did he have any dental work?

He proudly showed me a mouth full of fillings, caps, bridges, and unremoved bits of braces. A number of years before, an ambitious young Tristanian had undertaken a correspondence course in dentistry, since the island had no dentist.

Tristanians traditionally have excellent teeth, thus allowing their group to survive quite peacefully for generations without dental care, but, in this case, the twentieth century was not to be eluded. The young man, whose name was Brian, was determined to be a dentist.

Brian studied hard and made rapid progress in his course. He had only one problem. He found it extremely difficult to find real patients on whom to practice. Most of the island’s population were repulsed by the idea of the young man drilling into their teeth or doing other such things. Even those few farsighted individuals who thought it a good idea to have a trained dentist on the island refused to visit Brian professionally until he had received his diploma. Unfortunately for Brian, he needed to perform a certain amount of real dental work before he could officially graduate from his program.

Enter Walt. Although this time it had never been officially acknowledged, Walt had saved Brian from drowning just as surely as he had the overboard fisherman, and just as inadvertently.

Walt was excited when he first heard that Brian would perform free dental work on any volunteer who would agree to come forward before his dental degree was finalized.

On Walt’s first visit, Brian was disappointed to see that Walt did not require anything more than a cleaning. Not wanting to foul up his first opportunity to work on a real patient, though, Brian put three or four fillings in Walt’s teeth.

In another related paradox of Brian’s dental education, he could not sign a prescription for any anesthetics until he was certified as a dentist. Even after his graduation, if it ever came, it might take months for the first shipment of Novocain and laughing gas to reach the island. Brian believed that word of this lack of vital medication had spread around the island, thus diminishing even further his chances of attracting patients.

Walt never seemed to mind the lack of painkillers. Years later, as Brian became the elder statesman of Tristanian dentistry, he would recall that he never had a patient as stoic as Walt, and his paying customers, after the degree finally came, had all been safely medicated.

Brian discovered something else about dentistry that first day, the first time he put a drill to Walt’s teeth. It was not discussed in his illustrated dental textbooks, and was not a feature of the otherwise realistic dental dummies and models of teeth that were sent with each lesson. That very first time, Brian drilled far too far into Walt’s tooth and discovered blood.

Walt was not to be dissuaded. He returned to Brian weekly for checkups. That is twenty-six times more often than even the most scrupulous hygienists recommend dental visits. To put it another way, he received 2,600% of the dental care required to keep his teeth in top shape.

At every visit, Brian undertook some unneeded repair to Walt’s mouth. Walt now did not have a single tooth in his mouth that had not been filled or filed or capped or crowned or canalled in the roots or linked with its neighbors by elaborate systems of metal ropes and pulleys. Brian probably would have pulled all of Walt’s teeth for the experience of making dentures, but knew that to do so would be to destroy a wonderful thing. He knew that he could not justify, even to Walt, the necessity of performing elaborate oral surgery on false teeth. After all, if he wanted to do that, Walt could just leave the appropriate plate at Brian’s house, where all the work was done, before he went out on his boat in the morning. No, Walt needed his real teeth to continue being Brian’s walking one-man laboratory.

In any case, it should be apparent enough by now that Walt had enough antenna material in his mouth to rival Sutro Tower. The signals were picked up on the dental work and resonated through his perfectly-shaped head which rang with only the frequency from my transmitter.

I was struck by a feeling for which I had no name. I had horribly disrupted this man’s life, brought him from his home. Well, I rationalized, people came to San Francisco from all over the world for many stupid reasons. Walt at least seemed to be here on some sort of a mission.

XI

W
alking back up Howard Street
I decided that we should stop in at the Seventh Street Senior Social Center. Normally, absolutely no one under age 65 is allowed in the doors, but I know the doormen, S
ä
id and Arvin. Once in a while they let me in to observe.

There is an elaborate myth that the Center is some sort of club. The exclusive age rule conveniently keeps snoopers and tourists, and for the most part the police, away.

The Center, after all, is not what it appears to be. Publicly they are known for the senior nutrition programs and meager entertainments that are advertised or sometimes reported in the more charitable media.

The Center is located at Sixth and Howard, the epicenter of San Francisco’s skid row. Almost invisible in the masses of poor and drunks and diseased of all varieties are the huge numbers of indigent elderly. Before the Center opened its doors, these people were only occasionally seen shuffling around being easy victims on the days the Social Security checks came out; or perhaps in the corner store buying the cheapest forms of human sustenance available, occasionally with some slight attempt at spiritual reinforcement through a tiny flask of brandy.

In the eighteen months since the opening of the Center, the community had been transformed. Hundreds of old, really old, and beyond ancients lined the sidewalk each morning, waiting for the doors to open at noon.

For the admission price of two dollars, each person would be fed and allowed to stay for the duration of the afternoon. Lunch was always the same. Every retiree paying the two-dollar fee received a bowl of mashed potatoes with hamburger gravy and a bowl of creamed corn. The meal came with a spoon and a paper napkin.

The real action began after everyone had eaten. The doors were locked, latecomers be damned. The Center transformed itself into a gambling hall.

It surprised me, as it must have surprised everyone, with the possible exception of the owners, how much money these supposedly indigent old farts could come up with. Nearly every penny of their social security, retirement, and the last of their savings were withered away on keno and bingo and roulette.

The most popular game was, as far as I know, unique to the center. It carried the added attraction of being absolutely free to play. This was the Sleeping Pit.

The Pit itself was a round sunken affair, somewhat like a hot tub, but about three times as large. It was lined in soft green felt. A bench ran around the edge of the circle. The seat was made of a strange material which was just soft enough to conform to the shape of the person sitting, yet firm enough to provide comfortable support to the most arthritic pensioner for hours on end.

The game was simple. The first twenty-five customers to sign up after lunch were gently escorted into the Pit. Able-bodied young assistants were employed to make sure that the players were not injured on the inbound climb.

Once all the contestants were comfortably seated, the clock was started. The rules of the game were amazingly simple: the clock would run for one hour. Anyone in the Pit still awake at the end of the hour would win $1,000.00 in cash. This game had been played every day, including Sundays, for a year and a half now. In all that time, not one person had been able to stay awake for more than twelve minutes.

The old people were obsessed with the game. No one could figure out why those in the pit fell asleep while the rest of the patrons, playing bingo, say, remained awake and active. It just did not make sense.

Failing to see any reason for the continual losses, every single patron felt that all the others were weak willed and that he or she alone could win. Remarkably, regular customers still felt this was the case even after they themselves had fallen asleep ten or fifteen times in the Pit. The financial motivation was great, too. A thousand dollars would enable any of them to be able to pay the move-in costs for a real apartment that they could afford on their monthly checks instead of the horrible hotels in which they now resided.

And so, every single day, hundreds awaited their chance to be humiliated by the Pit. Fights occasionally broke out over disputes as to who had signed up when. Old people who had relied on each other for survival since arriving at some Sixth Street flophouse now elbowed each other sharply in the ribs and swung handbags violently in the mad rush to sign up.

By the time Walt and I arrived, the day’s contestants had been in the Pit for five minutes or so. S
ä
id led us down an alley. A door opened onto a passage leading to the Center’s office. The office was equipped with two way mirrors and elaborate video equipment, which gave multiple views of the Pit area.

More than half the contestants were asleep already. Walt watched in fascination. I did not realize at the time that he had never seen a television before. He also had no knowledge of two-way mirrors. The concept was very difficult to explain.

Having to explain to Walt what was going on lessened my ability to concentrate on what was happening inside the room. I always enjoyed watching the suckers fall asleep. They yawned. They stretched. Their mouths fell open. Many of them drooled. I could see the lines of care and worry evaporating from their faces. Many of them looked years younger. They all seemed to find a release, a kind of total sleep, a resting of the parts of the mind which were usually occupied with dreams and memories. I had suspected for some time that it was this escapist sleep as much as the lure of the money which brought in the crowds.

In another five minutes or so, all the old people were fast asleep. They would remain that way for the duration of the hour. For some reason, Walt looked disturbed. We went out into the alley, which connected Howard Street with Folsom Street, and continued walking.