She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Two

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Three

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part Four

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Also by Herbert Gold

  Copyright

  For Nina, Ari, and Ethan—

  on your own voyages now

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  I stood on the wooden plank in front of Poorman’s Cottage on Potrero Hill and stared at the raccoon that had knocked over my garbage can. Probably it was a daddy, like me, and standing up for its rights against this recent arrival with a coffee mug in one hand and a piece of paper in the other.

  Alfonso had just demanded that I meet him at once. I was going to take the time to brush my teeth and stare down the raccoon and then I’d be on my way. I didn’t have to jump because Alfonso said jump.

  There had been a complaint. My friend Alfonso, police detective, sometimes covered for me, but in this case he was trying to get me to cover for myself. I might have to deal with it despite my inclination to wait for it to go away, like the swelling and scuff marks on the knuckles of my right hand, and continue spending my morning hours blinking in the sun and studying the rampaging Potrero Hill raccoon clans.

  “You got to stop solving your problems by making bigger ones—” Alfonso told me by phone.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “—and here’s where I want to see you.”

  “Why there?” I asked, but he had already hung up. Probably this was a duty shift for Alfonso and he was squeezing me in.

  Alfonso liked to show me things, get me out of myself. Not being enough out of myself was the reason I had these hurt knuckles, this swollen hand, which was not sore enough to keep me from driving down to Ellis Street in the Tenderloin. I thought I had a picture in my head of Smiling Janey’s Medal of Honor Tavern, but driving slowly up the street I couldn’t find it. Then I remembered it was on Eddy, not Ellis, which meant I wasn’t thinking at top form. I cruised like that, the street noticed, the transvestites yelled, the kids at the corner whispered and peeked. I stopped for a drunk in a motorized wheelchair; no legs below the knees and all caution to the winds. “Smoke? Smoke?” demanded a black seventeen-year-old running alongside my Honda; he then tried to make the sale more nicely, showing large square teeth that strangely reminded me of Priscilla’s as he drawled, “Smo-oke, brother?”

  Everyone’s got aches in this life. My hand and heart would be eased by a purchase from the saleslad, but I was at a different place on the analgesia chain. I parked and hoped the dope dealers would keep the break-in folks away from my car.

  In front of Smiling Janey’s Medal of Honor Tavern a haggard giant with a tentlike dress and matching plugs of wax in her ears said, “I’m an old RN with five degrees, you got to treat me with respect.”

  “I do, I do,” I said, edging past her, not wanting to keep Alfonso waiting while I discussed self-esteem with this person.

  “Just because I used to be a man but now I’m a certified, registered woman is no reason to dis a person. My driver’s license says female. All my new records. I’m a female woman.”

  “Right, right, right,” I said.

  “So fuck my birth certificate, hey?” she asked. “I’m an unfairly terminated RN with five degrees, so can’t you spare a little time to hear how it happened?”

  “Can’t do that,” I said. “Busy.” But the person stood squarely in the doorway. I hoped to avoid shoving.

  “Gave the kiss of life to save many a soul … no matter what sex it happened to be, even brown or black, the kiss of life is one of the low-tech ways we still have to use if we take the Sacred Oath of Florence Nightingale, so let me tell you one thing, mister—”

  “Out of here,” I muttered.

  The voice kept after me. “You may get tireder, older, and uglier, but make sure you guard your precious memories and, above all, your precious eyebrows—”

  Further explanation surely would have come, had I waited for it.

  Smiling Janey’s was an old-fashioned gay bar that did not invite peering in from the street. There may have been tavern windows at another stage of its gender journey. In their place were redwood shingles, so that Smiling Janey’s Medal of Honor resembled a woodsy cottage outpost here among the junkies, transvestites, Tenderloin cowboy ramblers, and General Assistance mumblers; among patrolling squads of Guardian Angels in their maroon berets and carrying their walkie-talkies; among the corner boys working their all-day, all-night hustle shifts; among the unarmed response teenage hookers who were careful to keep AIDS at bay with regular injections of crank or inhalations of crack; among the sifting of small, harried, busy East Asian immigrants between the unbusy, floating, abandoned souls of the ’Loin. Mutant kids off the Greyhound looked over the territory, saw it was different from San Antonio, found it to their liking. Somehow laundries, video rental shops, and palm readers made the rent. Next door to Smiling Janey’s a gypsy who knew the future and the past had lettered on a box that stood at her doorway:

  THE ONE WHO PISSES HERE AGAIN, ON HIM I WILL PUT A VERY BAD MALEDICTION

  A sexist assumption; reading the past and future, she believed the perpetrator was a man. Probably he did do the deed and in due course would receive a very bad malediction, deservedly so.

  The retired RN was watching me decide to enter the Medal of Honor. I had to take my medicine. The doorway was painted in glowing Cantonese headache pink, but there were no ferns or shiny-leafed plants as in a new Chinese business. I pushed through.

  The bartender, who wore a row of earrings not just in the lobes but up and down the cartilage of his ears, smiled and didn’t wince when he drew me a beer. I winced because the rings in the bartender’s pierced nipples were catching in his T-shirt. The T-shirt said SMILING JANEY’S MEDDLE OF HONOR.

  “Medal,” I said, inadvertently correcting the spelling.

  “Don’t I know that?” asked the bartender. “Quench up first and then Janey’s out of the can—used to call the head.” I lifted the draft brew, which was evidently on the house. “Ronnie’s my name, like the former president,” said the bartender, introducing himself. “Not that many things I got in common with that certain former president, other than hair color. Used to be Janey’s, oh, ward, now I work for her. When she was in the navy, she won the Muddle d’Honneur, you heard that? Ask her to show it to you. There’s a photograph, she got it laminated, she’ll show it to you if she kind of likes you. Standing in front of Harry Truman, he was a previous president, too, a little fellow, you can see him pinning it on her. Janey was a beautiful guy before she became this terrific person. ’Nother splash?”

  I shook my head. “Waiting for someone.”r />
  “Alfonso? The dick?”

  Like a good bartender, he tended to sympathetic understanding.

  “That explains it—you like African chubbies, am I right?” But he didn’t pry. He spread his arms, announcing, “And I give you … Janey!”

  She made her entrance out of the back room. She was indeed smiling, a six-foot-tall woman, careless of her weight problem, in fifties housewife dress. Janey had not been in the can; she had been watching for an audience to gather. She swayed, she sashayed, but not on her own feet. The bartender, Ronnie, had put quarters in the Wurlitzer and mariachi music squealed. The feet on which Janey sashayed were a pony’s. It was a dancing pony, and Janey’s feet almost touched the floor.

  The pony seemed to wear a beard, a little fringe around the muzzle. I didn’t know ponies grew these, even an exceptional Tenderloin pony. It pranced and its tiny hooves clicked to the mariachi sounds. The fringe of beard made the pony look a little like a nineteenth-century president, perhaps from south of the border. The music brought that thought to mind.

  As a Medal of Honor winner, World War II or maybe the Korean War, and probably the only woman in the Tenderloin with this credential, or at least the only woman who was formerly a man and presently a naval cavalry heroine, Janey loomed closer on her steed with plump assurance, shedding strong smells of lilac and soap. She leaned down upon me. She had a right to smile. “How about that Alfonso?” she asked.

  The pony reared its bearded head. Alfonso, also overweight, was lumbering through the door but not moving smoothly as usual, just concentrating on moving fast. “Son of a bitch!” he said.

  The bartender with the rows of earrings said, “Don’t believe I know how to pour that one, but I can do you a Brandy Alexander, big boy.”

  “Stopped by a goddamn fire,” Alfonso said. “Couldn’t get through the street, had to dump my vehicle and walk—shit, man, you are a burden.”

  Janey reined up and away. She was clip-clopping back through the door into her office.

  “You can’t do like that, Dan, I can’t let you do like that. Shit, man, that a horse under her? From her garden back there?”

  Maybe pony stables weren’t legal in the middle of the city anymore.

  Alfonso’s eyes were red-rimmed and enraged. He didn’t have emphysema, yet he was wheezing. Compressed rage is worse than a lifelong cigar habit.

  “Asshole! You think I’m going to let you do like this?”

  What came out of my mouth wasn’t what I meant to say. “You don’t have a son!”

  “Hey, I’d like to meet her,” the bartender said. “I bet she’s adorable.” He was picked up by the early-afternoon action. Normally he wiped the bar, stood there sweating in his nylon panties, waiting for something to do, an occasional mixed drink to compose, a little gossip. Now the gossip was happening right before his eyes. When he said her, he meant Jeff, my son.

  Alfonso kept his squeezed, red-rimmed eyes fixed on me. “I got a boy in Newark ain’t seen in six years,” he said. “No need to tell you why, no need to ’splain. I know when it hurts. But you’re not going on like this, pal, without you get yourself up on charges. Criminal you might like, but civil? And your license?”

  “He made a complaint?”

  “I’m not going to let you do like this, hear me?”

  I thought I heard Janey in the back room, punching a telephone and murmuring in a low angry alto, singing to a beer distributor or a feed store a barkeeper’s song of missed deliveries.

  “So you might ask,” Alfonso said, “then what are we going to do, since you can’t go beating up on the public no more?”

  “He isn’t the public.”

  “Far as I’m concerned, he’s a citizen. You got a sore hand there, pal. Come on now, a little hike to your vehicle, man, let’s go.”

  I followed him out into the flat white midday Tenderloin sunlight. Anger was still turbulent in him, the flesh heaving and sweating under the shabby plainclothes suit he wore on duty, and he didn’t want to yell at me indoors. He couldn’t even punch me up a little because he was my closest friend, whatever I was to him; and although I could tell it would be a pleasure for him to apply a touch of legitimate and necessary police brutality in order to emphasize his points, somehow it wouldn’t be right. “You got to stop waltzing around with Karim—make up your mind, man. You got to learn that cute Xavier ain’t your real problem and lay off. About your lady there, all I need to say is, get a life.”

  “What a help, buddy.”

  “Shit.” He was softening a little and he hated that tendency of his character. “Look, I ain’t perfect either. About my kid in Newark or Trenton, not even sure anymore where she took him. I’d prefer to be a better daddy. You got a chance to do so with your own kid.”

  “Thanks.” We watched the former RN pissing on the gypsy’s antipissing sign. Evidently she wasn’t superstitious.

  “What I’m saying,” Alfonso said, “is straighten up, is that clear?”

  “Couldn’t hardly be more so.”

  “Don’t fuck with me. Don’t fuck with yourself more than normal. Don’t show me that no-sleep old dogface no more—do it, will you, man?” Then, as if the question just happened to occur to him, Alfonso suddenly grinned and asked, “Hey, what made you think you’d get away with a dumbshit performance like that one?”

  “Didn’t think about it. Just decided.”

  “Why?”

  “I gave you the reason—wasn’t thinking. Anyway, one punch—felt good.”

  Alfonso sighed and, with his softest caramel rumbling voice, said, “Nice satisfying sore hand, and that’d be the end of it. Thought you’d get away with it?”

  “Might.”

  One more time: “What made you think … Okay, I know now. Wasn’t thinking. It was the limbic system.”

  “Pardon?”

  Alfonso worked his heavy shoulders. “Now’s not the time to educate you, pal—”

  “I so stipulate, Alfons.”

  “But if you listen carefully for a change, you know I’m saying ‘pal’ and you not my pal just now. You a dumbshit asshole put himself in trouble and don’t know how to get himself out of trouble he put himself in.” Thought, seemed to be humming to himself, rumbled. “Not properly you don’t.”

  I would stipulate to that, too.

  “You in trouble now and heading for worser trouble.”

  He went into his cornerboy talk to let me know he was less my friend than a cop who smelled a perp in the making.

  From a boarded-up storefront that hadn’t been occupied for years—a sign said STARSHINE KARMA, so it must have been a late flower-child vegetarian restaurant or giveaway center—came the same three notes of an amplified chord, shaking the timbers nailed across the broken glass. A growth of outdoor lint, cobwebs, and city dirt that had taken hold on the two-by-fours vibrated with the sound from within. A band was rehearsing. They stopped, they started; the same three notes of a strung-out C-major chord. The musicians were apparently adjusting the dials to louder, in case they made a mistake, and then even louder, scaring away the street person trying to take a relaxing pee in the doorway—he scurried off, dropping droplets on his knees, addled by years of heavily sugared Thunderbird plus three amplified notes of a C-major chord. Another victory for gypsy-lady clairvoyance.

  The arts were thriving again in the Tenderloin. Alfonso was singing something under his breath and I said, “Huh?” Since I asked, Alfonso sang in the key of C major: “Teenage tragedy, lotsa kids are dead … It’s about getting stalled on a railway track in daddy’s car. Like you stalled, asshole.”

  A friend could be mean sometimes. Meant he thought I was stupid sometimes.

  “I guess when you see them in the clubs they thrash around, wear them geek leathers, studs, swastikas, cut-out crotches, everybody’s stoned on uppers and Ecstasy combined … You know these nonmusicians, pal? In our day at least they looked good and you wanted to make it with the, ah, female members.” He asked slowly: “Still … d
o … don’t you?”

  “Got to deal with priority now. Plus goddamn you, Alfonso.”

  He didn’t take offense. He had experience handling inefficient behavior, his own and others’.

  “He made like a complaint, asked about a court order, that type of shit. I said I’d talk to you.”

  “You just did.”

  “I still am. Now don’t go hitting your wife’s boyfriend no more.”

  “Just one little punch now and then?”

  “I said don’t go around exaggerating. Get drunk like a man. Or is there someone here on the street might offer a touch of companionship?” He pursed his lips and surveyed the terrain. “No more spirit of adventure in your present state of mind, seems like?”

  I was tuckered out, fit for nothing but swatting mosquitoes and pretty people and repeating my regrets to myself with the usual result in close concentration on the sounds of three A.M. on Potrero Hill. Now that mouthy person who had spent most of her life as a male and was beginning the adventure into her inner lady, with the aid of hormones, depilatory creams, Clairol, makeup, and one heck of a lot of optimism had swept up again and was listening to us. I caught her shaking her head and saying, “Some folks. I’m an RN, yet they hes-i-tate.”

  Alfonso didn’t mind my secrets getting told, plus a transsexual perspective on judgment. We’re together in the world, see, and it may be unpleasant, but acts have consequences. Alfonso lived by that. I was a slow learner despite his efforts to educate me.

  “Give it up,” Alfonso was saying. “Did you hear me? Give her up.”

  “You don’t know.”

  Alfonso stood curbside at my vehicle. “Already told you maybe I don’t know. I got a boy someplace too. I had a lady I liked. A lunge just get you in deeper shit.”

  Alfonso helped me find police records, histories, little details a man in my career needed, but our friendship wasn’t built on that. I had similar help from the DMV, the Social Security Administration, a supervisor at the IRS; we thought of each other as clients, small business part-timers. I remembered them at Christmas and they remembered me all the year round when I was curious about a few details concerning someone’s goings and comings in the world. But record keepers didn’t necessarily become friends like Alfonso.