Mallory's Camera

January's over. Thank God.

Max back from a weekend at Deep Springs talking as though he's already one of the L.L. Nunn Borg. He gave us an hour and a half recital in chronological order of everything that happened to him there, and all the people he met. I'm afraid I started nodding off halfway through – nothing to do with the story, everything to do with overwork & exhaustion. Suffice it to say, he loved the place but is adopting the rational "Que sera, sera" approach to admission. I must say if they pass on him, they will be missing out on a really enthusiastic ranch hand.

Am pals again with Bill & Heidi who I ran into at the Farmers Market. I'd dropped by Bill's spa store several days before to hit him up for a donation. (As though my life is not crazy enough, I volunteered to do fund-raising for Robin's school.) We ended up having coffee and chatting for over an hour. I watched the shadows come and go across Bill's blue eyes, tuned out on content and wondered whether if Heidi dropped dead tomorrow I could maneuver him into marrying me. This is some kind of rescue fantasy. Bill and Heidi see me as the doughty widder woman, fighting hard to rescue the ranch. This is in direct contrast to Marybeth who sounded appalled that I had snagged a day job when she called to tell me Susan's mother had died. "Well, that's just awful," she cooed. "You poor dear. Call me tonight and we'll catch up."

I wasn't about to call her that night. I could see her judgment in a big thought balloon gathering over my cell phone. Of course, it's relatively easy to be an ant as opposed to a grasshopper when you've inherited a million bucks from the largest plumbing business in the East Bay. Money changes everything.

Summer on Cannery Row has been a bust. Oh, we're making money. Some money. But not a lot of money.

Of course, neither has anyone else.

Louie Linguini's, for example, must be hemorrhaging green. Laminated menus lay ignored on the big plastic tables alongside the faux New Orleans staircase; the pigeons shit on them. Likewise the canvas umbrellas on the outside deck - a spectacular view for the cost of an over-cooked, over-priced fish taco - are dripping with guano. I should note for the record that the seagulls and pigeons hereabouts are ridiculously well-fed, surviving on a calorie-rich diet of straggling tourist fast-food droppings and fryer grease which fact is reflected in their poop, liquid and plentiful, falling from the heavens like white rain.

Why have the tourists abandoned Monterey? Why does the ghost of John Steinbeck not intercede with the Great Retail Gods in their discount warehouse on the foot of Mount Olympus?

( Warning: Looong & really incoherant... )

Had the dream again.

Airless apartment like the inside of a wax fruit. Candles on the table. Ritual blessing. The family gathered around me, older man – my father – in the black suit and starched white shirt, the older woman – my mother – in a wine-colored dress with her head covered. I’m not me. I’m someone else, a boy. An adolescent boy – the body I’m in moves uncomfortably. I have brothers and sisters. They move around me talking, but I’m at an odd disconnect from the others. Waiting. Because even in the dream, I know I’ve had the dream before. It’s a moment encased in a thick timelessness. And eventually, inevitably, it comes – the knock on the door. Men in uniforms. Short pants and gaiters. They speak an ugly barking language that I understand. You’re going to take a trip, they tell us. Where are we going? my mother asks. "Jerusalem," says one of the soldiers. And they all laugh.

And my family begins to collect the things they’ll need for the trip. All except me. I know it’s a trick. "You can’t fool me," I say. "I know what’s going on. And I’d rather be dead."

And the soldier who’s laughing the hardest says, "Who am I to stand between a boy and his ambition?"

And shoots me.

And I wake up…

Busy week. I took possession of the store space two days ago, had the locks changed and the PG&E account changed over to my name. Spent all yesterday driving from one discount floor emporium to the next, looking for just the right laminate tiling at just the right price. The look of a store like this is important – it’s got to have all the right BUY signals. Mannington Terracotta – my first choice – is fake Saltillo for $3.50 a square foot. Congoleum Ultima Key West – my second – has an interesting faux mosaic border in olive green and smoggy-day blue around a central tile that looks like worn temple paving for roughly the same price. On the other hand, Lowes in Gilroy is having a sale on generic stone vinyl for a buck a foot. The store is 422 square feet. You do the math.

On the venue today is an Excel spreadsheet with my main hot sauce inventory order to be faxed to Peppers first thing tomorrow morning, plus buff and polish of the Business Plan to be presented to the Senior Vice President of SBA at Monterey County Bank tomorrow morning. "Banks like to loan money to people who don’t need money," John Laughton advises me. So the pitch must be tailored to make me seem aggressive without being overly desperate.

In other news, Ed called midweek from France.

"Mister Ed!" I sang. "A horse is a horse, of course, of course. You never answered my email –"

"Oh, that’s right. You emailed me, didn’t you?" he said. His voice didn’t sound right.

"What’s up, Eddie? You sound stressed."

"Tony’s dead," said Ed.

"What?" I said.

"Tony’s dead."

Tony had been Ed’s lover for fourteen years. A tall, thin dark-skinned man with an elegant nose and a real core of flirtatious sweetness. I was shocked when Ed confided in me that Tony beat him up regularly; less shocked, some months later, when Ed confided that Ness – the Algerian porn star whom Ed left Tony for – had also started beating him. There’s clearly something in Ed that craves physical punisment.

"What happened?" I asked.

"He killed himself," said Ed.

Another shocker. Tony didn’t seem the type to kill himself. He was much too superficial.

The news cast an odd pall over the next few days. I hadn’t known Tony all that well but I’d always liked him, had reserved judgement throughout all those long conversations at the coffee bar with Ed when Ed spilled the untidy details of their life together. It’s best to say absolutely nothing when people dump on you. You don’t want to mark the conversation as having been had in any way. Because people invariably forget that they dump unless you remind them, and if you remind them they always resent you for knowing their secrets.

Then yesterday Jeannie called me. A long rambling conversation, she sounded distracted. Elizabeth, her mother, is deteriorating rapidly. She’d had to move Elizabeth to a new nursing home. I had to pry the Big News out of her. "So what about Tony and the job hunt?" I asked. "Has he heard from Norway?"

Note: Not the Tony who killed himself. Jeannie’s husband Tony is a biology post-doc at the Hopkins Marine Lab who’s been searching for a job lo these five years past.

"Oh my God. I totally forgot to tell you. That’s the big news. Tony got the job."

My heart utterly broke for a second. I can’t imagine a world where Jeannie is more than a ten-minute car ride or a phone call away. She’s like a sister to me, one of the few people in the world who’s totally in my camp, who loves me unconditionally.

And then there was the messy barbecue at Heidi and Bill’s last night which probably deserves its own entry though who has the time? Suffice it to say that Tom Ayres and his surprisingly pleasant, purple-Mohawked son Patrick, are practically living there now and that Heidi is out of control. She was wearing hot pants under her white Kiss the Chef apron, you could practically see the pubic hair creep at the top of her thighs and all throughout dinner, fixing Tom with that intense stare and that braying laugh, she kept opening and closing her legs. Unconsciously, no doubt. But still unnerving. Bill was obviously miserable. I drew him into the corner and started pumping him for business advice. He’s a nice guy, damn it. He deserves not to feel invisible.

When I left, Heidi’s legs were straddled far apart. She was staring at the sky. "Venus is the planet of love," she announced. "Can you see it, Tom? Oh, Patrizia! You’re leaving so soon?"

"Can’t leave Robin alone," I said brightly.

Tom was on his third tumbler-sized glass of straight vodka. You couldn’t expect much from him. Still, I thought his behavior was deplorable. He knew what was going on. He should have tried to deflect it.

Xena and I met the magic girl in the park. She was seven years old. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed. Traveling with her hippie parents in an old beat-up RV. The father smoked dope furtively, poking at the ashes of a dying campfire, glancing over from time to time while the little girl prattled. Short guarded looks.

"She's a nice dog," said the little girl, petting Xena. "Is she a puppy?"

"No, she's just a very small dog," I said.

"We're on our way to Mount Shasta," said the little girl. "It's a long trip. Five days."

"Don't you get bored?" I asked.

"No, 'cause we've got lots of MP3's," said the little girl. "And an MP3 player. Maybe a thousand MP3s. So I listen to them."

I nodded noncommittally.

"Lots of Beatles songs," said the little girl. "Every song the Beatles ever sang. I know all the words. Something weird happened just before we left."

"What was that?" I asked. The father was scoping us out again, that careful look that was not a look. The dope smell was pretty strong and I felt like walking over and scolding him: don't be such a fucking idiot, the cops patrol Veterans Park on a regular basis.

"I was sitting in my yard and a bird landed on me," said the little girl. "A wild bird. A crow."

"Wow," I said. "Crows are pretty smart birds. Usually they stay away from people. You must be pretty special. Were you scared?"

"No," said the little girl. "I talked to it."

"Did it talk back?"

The little girl laughed. "Birds don't talk," she said.

A disheveled blonde woman emerged from the RV with pot of something in her hand. The father called over, "Dinner's ready!" He said the little girl's name too but those syllables got lost in the breeze that was beginning to churn the ocean fog back up over Huckleberry Hill and down into the city basin.

"Gotta go," said the little girl. "You should try it. Sit very still. Maybe a crow will land on you."

Chummy crows are about the last thing I need right now. Feeling somewhat like a sacrificial goat being led to the altar, I'd made my appearance at the Cannery Row Company's headquarters earlier that afternoon, and on my lawyer's advice, signed the letter of intent for the commercial lease.

"It's non-binding," J__ L__ told me. "You have nothing to lose. This is very exciting!"

"Yes, it is, isn't it?" I said weakly.

"You know, you really have a gift for business, Patrizia," J__ L__ continued. "I think this venture will do very well for you. I'm seeing franchise possibilities."

Right. McHot Sauce.

Earlier that morning I'd cruised by Annie's. She's got an agent now, and either familial affection is strong enough to over-ride my generally spiteful and envious character or spiritual evolution has finally kicked in – I feel nothing but happiness and excitement on her behalf. Annie's a complete technophobe, of course, and will have nothing to do with computers. She types everything out on her ancient Olympia and then cuts and pastes her edits in like a second grade art project. The resulting manuscript was a complete mess so she hired a typist to the tune of $700 to make a perfect copy.

"Seven hundred dollars is a lot of money, isn't it?" she sighed.

"You know, Annie, I could give you a computer," I said. "It's so much easier to compose on a computer."

"Not for me, it's not," said Annie. "Just looking at those screens makes me sick. Forget about the Internet. That's just another control thing to make people forget they have bodies. The thing is if this book's a success, I can type the next one on garbage bags if I want to." She looked at me sideways. "You know, Patty – Ricky's got that house on Orcas Island. I know he'd be happy to let you use it. Lock yourself up for a month. Just write."

"No can do, Annie," I said. "I've got a fledgling business empire to manage."

We wandered down to the Capitola tchotchke stroll – a dozen stores selling ceramic mice and stained glass angels. I was after a particular button-down shirt I wanted to buy for Max, silk-screened with a portrait of Jim Morrison. He's Hot, He's Sexy, He's Dead. Fortunately or unfortunately, the store was closed. I ducked into another store and bought half a dozen silk Vietnamese hanging lanterns. See? People really do spend money on shit like this. I spend money on shit like this.

"Gotta watch that, Patty," said Annie. "That peculiar need to spend money in times of stress. That's dangerous."

"Hey, they were on sale!" I countered weakly.

"It's what I like to call elected stress," Annie continued. "As opposed to real stress which is when you have a tumor or a car crash."

"Janie's been writing me letters again," I said.

"I know, I know. She's worried about you. She means well."

"I know she means well. But the thing is reading those letters gives me acute anxiety attacks."

Later that evening I was out walking Xena and bumped into Heidi and Bill. Heidi was crying.

"What's wrong? What happened?" I cried.

"Brownie's dead," said Bill.

"She got hit by a car," said Heidi.

Brownie's the old brown stray cat that Heidi semi-adopted a few months back. A motley creature – burrs in her long coat, ingrown claws, a deformed hip that had obviously been broken years ago and healed without being properly set. Heidi had taken Brownie to the vet and combed out her tangles. A very sweet thing to watch Heidi hold the old brown cat and talk to her. Brownie resolutely refused to become a house cat; Heidi put bowls of food and water in the garden.

"How do you know?" I asked. "Did you find her?"

"She didn't come around tonight so we started looking for her," said Heidi. "And some people told us she lived in that house there –" she pointed at a blue and white Victorian. "So we knocked on the door. And you know what that that woman told us? She said Brownie was a mean old animal and she was so bashed up by the car that they'd had to put her to sleep!"

"That was a blessing, honey," said Bill. "Putting her to sleep."

"Brownie was the dearest little animal who ever lived," Heidi insisted. The character assassination was almost as upsetting as the death.

I ended up going over to their house and hanging out with them till midnight. Drinking rum and coke. "So what was going on with you on July 4th anyway?" Bill asked. "You were acting so weird and alienated."

"I get that way sometimes," I said. "I don't know why. The cosmic pinball machine goes tilt. I was raised by wolves. My emotional affect gets screwy."

I think our tipsy encounter session made Heidi feel better. We talked about journals – they were amazed and impressed that I'd been keeping mine since I was twelve. "Do you write every day?" Bill asked.
"No. Usually a few times a week. But sometimes I go months without writing. It's helpful for me – like practicing scales. Warms me up for my fiction and other stuff. And the other day I had the sudden flash – hey! this is a document that might even have some historical significance after I'm dead. Like Pepys' diary – what it feels like to be a woman in the declining years of the American empire."

"I wish I kept a journal," said Heidi. "But you know all I'd write about is stuff like Brownie."

"But that's a good thing," I said. "To loan your voice to the Brownies of the world. The defenseless little creatures just trying to live their peaceful lives."

She got tears in her eyes when I said that and I thought, well, good – I've given her something. She's such a feisty person most of the time, and that feistiness is one of the things I enjoy. I hated to see her so sad.

We did a big group hug when I said goodbye. I-love-you's all around.

"I don't know what we'll do if you guys ever move," said Heidi. "I think we'd have to move too."