Devil House(102)
As it happened, I traveled through San Francisco at least once a year for business. It was a reliable stop, and I usually spent several days in town. And so I looked at my calendar, and we talked briefly over the phone to set coordinates, and I began making plans.
4.
ON THE MORNING I WOULD DRIVE down to see Gage, I left my hotel early and took a long walk. When I’m in San Francisco I stay in Japantown; I ambled down Post to Fillmore and went left, in search of a coffee shop. I was a kid the first time I went walking around in the Haight; that would have been 1979 or 1980. To me, at that time, the whole place felt like Shangri-La in eclipse: I wore my hair long, and favored loose-fitting shirts in dyed cotton. The vanishing age spoke to me, and the one just dawning looked a little too cool to hold an invitation with my name on it.
Of my younger time in the neighborhood, I remember record stores offering drug paraphernalia behind beaded curtains; stores that mainly sold incense and Tibetan imports; movie theaters that had couches instead of chairs, and whose concession stands offered brewer’s yeast on your popcorn for an extra quarter. These places are all gone now; you can maybe make out the shapes they used to occupy if you squint.
I found a café where the menu was written in yellow and green chalk on an immense blackboard above and behind the front counter. My phone buzzed while I was thumbing through the Chronicle. It was Gage. He was in town; he had an idea. Specifically, what he said was:
couldn’t sleep. drove up. I have an idea, where are you at
* * *
IT WAS GOOD TO SEE HIM. Seeing old friends address nagging questions about which we sometimes otherwise feel uneasy: Am I the same person I was when I was young? Are my earlier selves still safe somewhere inside me? Is there a thread somewhere that connects the past to the present, or is everything more chaotic than we’d like to think?
Everything is not more chaotic. Our younger selves are still around, waiting for somebody to invite them out to play. Our conversation hit a manic note early and stayed there; it was intoxicating. We remembered monster movies, and we remembered the regal stature of Planet of the Apes, above any other media franchise for an easy six months. He dredged up a few details I hadn’t carried with me on my own journey—some game he said we played in his backyard that involved a moat and a defensive line of guards whose spears were tipped with poison—but there was, between us, a note of the real. I get paid to inhabit personae; it was nice to feel like I was easing into something whose outer existence could be confirmed by another living soul.
His idea, he said, had been that we’d go to Milpitas together, and I could show him the place from which I’d written to him when we were young, and he’d tell me about his own time there a little; and from there we’d continue to San Luis Obispo, and catch each other up on the events of the last—thirty-five years? Forty?
I had specifically left leeway in my schedule to extend my time; it takes years working a job that involves travel to learn what a gift flexibility can be. Why not, I said, it will be fun.
* * *
IT IS DISORIENTING to inhabit, even momentarily, any space that has played host to one or more primitive drafts of the self you’ve now become. There can be pleasure in this, as in a reunion. There might also be fear, dread, horror: soldiers seeing old barracks, freed convicts driving past the prison on their way to work. To have left a place once is to have left something behind; by staying away, you can have the question of whether you do or don’t want to see that thing again answered for you. But learning to stay away is a discipline; and I was reminded, as I set my navigation for the address of the duplex in which I had lived when I was seven years old, that the essential quality of any discipline is consistency in practice. It’s easy to undo the entire effort. You just have to relax.
And, in fact, I had no problem remaining calm as we rolled down the freeway to Milpitas in my rental car. Gage navigated from memory, peppering me with questions about the brief season I’d spent in the town about which he’d written his next book—the book he’d been working on, he said, for quite some time now. Was I there when they built the freeway expansion? Did I have any recollection of any local scandals? Had I known a guy named Anthony Hawley?
The only people I knew were kids, I said.
Yeah, kids, Gage said.
I had no sense memories of the off-ramp, or of anything we saw on our way into town—or, if I did, they were strictly general: a vague feel for the terrain, an odd variant of déjà vu that didn’t feel entirely trustworthy. It wasn’t until he saw the name of the street I’d lived on when I was seven and told me to turn left onto it that the jolt landed. Although our time as a family here had not been a happy time, I had good memories of the place; I’d known a few close friends. We remember our childhood friends with fondness.
He pulled up in front of the place. The streets in Milpitas are slow, and my rented Toyota didn’t really stick out. So this is monster theater? Gage asked me. Where’s your bedroom?
It’s in the back, I said, we can’t see it from here; and I flashed briefly on nights I’d stayed up late, watching movies I’d write letters to Gage about the next day. In the shelter of a glowing screen, after everybody else in the house is asleep, you can imagine yourself shielded from the hard realities of the outside world. Sometimes, if the movie you’re watching is good enough, you can even suspend disbelief entirely, and discern some mystical quality of protection in the doings of the good guys, and the bad guys, and the monsters.