By Joel Deutsch

Wide-eyed, wired with insomnia, Daniel Silver barrels down the nearly empty 2 A.M Santa Monica Freeway in his gleaming onyx Camaro at nearly 90 miles per hour until he has to slow down for the gentle curve of the McClure Tunnel, which spits him out onto the Pacific Coast Highway, pointed north. he cruises up the PCH at a more moderate, if still illegal, 70, the sudden, salty chill of an onshore breeze through the open window raising Goosebumps on his bare left arm. All he’s wearing is a pair of khaki Dockers shorts, sockless sneakers, and the faded old blue pocket T he wore to bed.

A sweatshirt, also white, its front emblazoned with the call letters of the local NPR station to which he recently subscribed by phone during a summer pledge drive his first August living alone after 22 years of marriage, just to have someone to talk to, if only to confide the account number and expiration date of his Visa card, and to have something bigger than himself but smaller than, say, the Law or the Democratic party or America to belong to, lies neatly folded on the black leather passenger seat beside him,, no use to him there, of course. But given how disorganized he’s been lately, Daniel has to congratulate himself for simply having had the presence of mind to bring the sweatshirt along.

It’s the Friday night, now Saturday morning, of Labor Day weekend. Back in town, the heat isn’t as oppressive as early September can be, but it isn’t cooling off very much after sundown in his third floor apartment, either.

On his left, whitecaps twinkle like drowning stars. On his right, shadowy cliffs loom up just past the road’s shoulder. Occasionally, a pair of headlights approaches from one direction or the other and blows by him, but that’s about it for traffic. Mostly there’s nothing ahead, nothing behind. According to the orange analogue dial of the Camaro’s speedometer, he’s crept up almost to 80 again, and the speed feels good.

Entering Malibu, however, he has to slow down and come to a complete stop. A California Highway patrol cruiser is parked across his lane, its top light rotating, its driver’s side door flung wide open, and a uniformed cop is standing there with his hand raised, palm out, in the signal to halt.

Behind the cruiser, a procession of luxury sedans and high-end SUVs with a couple of stretch limousines thrown into the mix is emerging from the parking lot of a lavish ocean view restaurant.

As they bounce gently out of the driveway, some of the vehicles turn left and go north, headed , Daniel assumes, for multimillion dollar beachfront houses or exclusive canyon compounds. others turn right and go south, back the way Daniel’s just come from, where there’ll be a few more miles of the same kinds of destinations and then, for the rest, a longer drive back to similarly expensive but less far-flung domiciles in places like Pacific Palisades or Brentwood. Beyond the driveway, on the opposite side of the road, a second CHP cruiser blocks southbound traffic, its top light also rotating and another officer standing guard beside it, facing north. Daniel looks to his left and watches the southbound vehicles going past, but there are too many rolled-up smoked glass windows for him to see who’s inside any of them. . One thing he notices, though, are the red, white and blue bumper stickers that shout, from front or rear, or both, in huge block letters, FREE BOBBY BAIL.

Bobby Bail is a bizarre and ubiquitous public presence now, a sideshow freak kind of celebrity. Every day of his trial is being covered from gavel to gavel by Court TV, and every day he can be seen seated at the defense table,towering amidst his very expensive legal team, 6-foot-4 and gaunt in his black silk Italian suit, like an overdressed basketball player on a hunger strike, his dyed and receding black hair jelled and spiked as if he were half his age. Actually, back in high school, bobby was even worse at sports than Daniel, so the first time the hunger-striking basketball player image occurred to Daniel, he’d laughed out loud on his living room couch in front of the TV.

Bail had been Robbie Beiloff, then, not Bobby Bail. Daniel had been Danny, himself, but that was a name adjustment of a different order. The two of them had met when the Seventh Period gym class they were both in was supposed to be running on the oval track around the Fairfax high football field. It was a cold, cloudy November afternoon, threatening rain, and they’d found themselves sitting beside each other on the lowest plank of the bleachers, both having pleaded shortness of breath, pounding headaches, or something.

Daniel, like most of the other kids, was wearing the usual outfit of Keds gym shoes and white crew socks in need of a good washing, with baggy blue gym shorts and a random old white Hanes t-shirt, the kind he sometimes wore under his button-down regular shirt on a winter day.

Robbie, though he wore the same kind of footgear , socks, gym shorts and old t-shirt as everyone else, had also pulled on a gray hooded sweatshirt to warm himself against the chill, with the hood pulled up over his head. The hood gave Robbie a studious, even spiritual look and reminded Daniel of a monk’s cowl.

Robbie had produced a small library’s worth of paperback books from the bulging pockets of that sweatshirt, not a one of which 17-year-old Danny had ever heard of: The Way of Zen. The Myth of Sisyphus. Siddhartha. The Fountainhead. The Prince.

Robbie became his mentor. In the library or in the central plaza of the school complex or sitting after last period in those same bleachers while the varsity football team practiced, the two of them would discuss ideas, Robbie like a teacher, giving Danny reading assignments and provoking him to thought by means of a Devil’s advocate trick that Danny, sitting at the back of a huge lecture hall in philosophy 101 at Berkeley a year later , would realize had been Robbie’s version of the Socratic method.

Some lunch periods, Robbie would take him home to where he and his family lived in one side of a paint-peeling, cracked-driveway two-family half a block from the school, and have his mother make the two of them something to eat while they pored over passages from Sartre or Dostoevsky. The house was always clean enough, was Danny’s impression, although dark even at noon because of all the drapes being drawn and cluttered with abandoned books and newspapers in a way his own mother would never have permitted, not even between the Thursday visits of her Negro cleaning lady Mary,

“What the bologna means,” his father decoded from his end of the Friday night dinner table, “I’ll tell you. The bologna means they’ve got money troubles, and about that all I can say is there but for the grace of God go I.” He helped himself to another heavy-cut slice of beef brisket and transferred it to his plate with carving knife and serving fork. In the center of the pristine white tablecloth, the two white Sabbath candles flickered in their silver candlesticks beside the squat, battered silver cup his own father had brought to America from Odessa, the humble chalice still holding a drop of the sweet Concord wine he had used for making the Kiddush, the benediction over the fruit of the grape. “But the Wonder Bread?” he lifted an eyebrow at Danny, the suggestion of a possibly unapprovable friendship. “Are you sure they’re even Jewish? Do you know what congregation his parents belong to? ”

After high school, Daniel had lost track of Robbie Beiloff. It was a tumultuous time, and everyone seemed to be somewhere else. College, of course, but also India on a spiritual quest or Kenya in the Peace Corps or just stopped out of sight. Daniel heard all sorts of unconfirmed rumors about what had become of Robbie Beiloff. He was running a prosperous pot farm in the backwoods of inland Mendocino county. He had gotten together with a black chick from Oakland named Monica and they’d gone to Cuba to cut sugar cane with the Venceremos Brigade.

Eventually, Beiloff started being seen around Los Angeles again, and rumors began to mix with confirmable reality. He had changed his name to Bobby Bail. Hipper, racially ambiguous-sounding, just plain cooler than Robbie Beiloff. He was running a human potential movement called MTW, for motivate to win, where hotel conference rooms full of high-paying acolytes would sit dutifully at classroom-style desks while Bobby Bail lectured them for hours on the techniques of success, the espoused principles a heady concoction of Machiavelli, Dale Carnegie, cognitive psychology and purely blind faith, while ski-masked monitors patrolled the aisles with flexible rods slashing sleeping seminar attendees across the backs of their shoulders to snap them awake.

Then you didn’t hear about MTW anymore and people said something about Bail getting into movie production, on the money end, using funds amassed either from that venture or coke dealing or real estate. Year by year, rumor by rumor, Daniel lost interest, lost track. And now here he was, good old Bobby Bail nee’ Robbie Beiloff, on trial for some very serious criminal charges, his face on every other tabloid at the Safeway checkout line and right there on TV, for hours a day, never mind Andy Warhol’s riff about how in a mass culture future, everyone would get a mere 15 minutes of fame. Andy Warhol may have been capable of envisioning enough canvases silkscreened with images of Campbell’s Soup cans to hang on every wall from Montauk Point to Mill Valley, but he had not anticipated Bobby Bail.

the restaurant’s driveway disgorges the last revelers, and the two CHP cruisers turn off their top lights and speed away. Whereupon Daniel surprises himself by continuing straight ahead, north. He has made this middle of the night road trip plenty of times, and Malibu is where he has always turned around and gone back the way he came. But tonight, whether because he doesn’t feel tired enough yet, or out of a sense of adventure, or just because simple inertia has him in its grip, he stays on the PCH until it feeds into U. s. 101 and just keeps going.

A big 76 station with four service islands bathed in the dazzling glow of mercury vapor lamps suddenly materializes ahead on Daniel’s right, like an Ed Ruscha painting of just such an iconic Southern California apparition. He doesn’t remember having ever seen the station before. But then, it’s been years since the last time he drove this far up the coast.

Painfully cramped from sitting behind the wheel, running low on fuel, and beginning to get very hungry, he lets up on the gas pedal and slows down for a look. At the rear of the station, A few yards to one side of the cashier’s booth, stands a big white Mexican food truck, of all things. A lonchería, like the ones that show up every day of the week at factories, construction sites and office buildings, horns blasting La cucaracha, la cucaracha/ya no puede caminar, double-time, to announce their arrival.

Daniel has his own favorite, not a truck but a taco stand near his home, or near where his home used to be, a car wash with a food counter that sells the best burritos de carnitas he has ever tasted anywhere, a generous helping of succulent pork chunks and rice festooned with sprigs of fresh cilantro just before being wrapped in a warm flour tortilla, so that every bite liberates a blessing of pungent fatness cut with the counterpoint of the cilantro’s fresh, leafy scent.

He still stops there for lunch on a weekend now and then if he has an excuse to be in the neighborhood. He hands over the Camaro to an attendant, orders his food, and then sits down at an old, scarred picnic table beside the plate glass window that looks onto the car wash track, devouring the burrito, a two-handed job, watching his car glide down the wash tunnel while a crew of Hispanic men scurry around it like a courtly retinue , stabbing at the dirt with long-handled brushes, hosing down wheel covers and rocker panels, then moving ahead to wait outside while the car submits to a foamy detergent shower, an automated wiping by a thousand blue sponge fingers, a clear-water rinse, and a hot wax spray. It emerges like a newborn thing into the sunlight, dripping wet, and the men converge on it again with towels and chamois cloths, drying, buffing, blessing the delivery by a laying on of caressing brown hands.

What the hell, he thinks, turning in. A fill-up, a cup of coffee, a bite to eat, and then back home.

To be continued….

By Joel Deutsch

Daniel was the only customer at the station, so he had his choice of pumps. He pulled up beside one of the islands, got out and stretched. His arms and legs ached, and the air was damp and chilly. So as soon as he swiped his Visa card through the pump’s scanner and got the nozzle securely seated in the filler pipe and the pump trigger locked on automatic, he grabbed the sweatshirt from the front seat and tugged it over his head.

To get around to the food truck, he had to drive past the cashier’s booth where the attendant, a young man in his late teens or early 20s with lank, shoulder-length blonde hair, sat behind the bulletproof window. A muffled cacophony of heavy metal electric guitar and drums leaked through the louvered talk portal and the scooped-out gap of the money tray. The attendant glanced up, checking out the egregiously macho car and its incongruously middle-aged, bespectacled driver with his still-thick reddish-brown hair meticulously styled. Daniel was sure he caught a smirk, and wished he’d bought something a little more subtle to replace his aging Lexus when he’d had an intimation of some kind of changes coming over him, early in the year. He hadn’t known what those changes were, but he’d known something was happening, even if he couldn’t have said what it was. Something hormonal, maybe? There had been discussion about male menopause, lately, on the TV talk shows, and a feature article in Newsweek. Or maybe it was just the proliferating birthday candles and general mid-life disquietude. Or maybe there had just been discontents– no, Sheila always said, grant yourself agency, accept responsibility—maybe he had felt a lot more dissatisfied and disappointed in his marriage than he knew, or that he wanted to know.

Even one of those behemoth Subs that would loom up in a car’s rearview on the San Diego Freeway like a supercharged Bradley tank would have been better. But no, he had to get a fucking Camaro. From a fucking cop, no less.

Sam, Daniel’s father, had known all about car choices and image. He’d started out as a salesman of women’s sportswear before he bought out a floundering men’s clothing store on Los Angeles Street and parlayed it into a chain with outlets at every major shopping center from Northridge to San Diego and then, when indoor malls came in, at the malls.

“Let’s say you’re on a sales call,” Sam had said enough times for Daniel to memorize the riff, “and your customer sees you pull up in a Chevy. What does the man see, is what you have to ask yourself. A prudent businessman? Not on your life, pal. What he sees is a fella who’s not making the grade. A Pontiac, same thing, except then what he sees is a loser who’s shelled out a few bucks extra trying to pretend he’s not a loser. To make the right impression, you’ve got to move up to the right step in the product line.

“Of course,” Sam had admonished, “you don’t want to go overboard. Let’s say for some reason your customer is having a bad day, and he looks out his office window, and there you are, pulling into his lot in a snazzy new Fleetwood or a Coupe de Ville. does he think you must have something on the ball, because you’re driving a Caddy? That you must be a good, honest, successful businessman, the kind who inspires confidence? Nope. What he sees is a sharp Jew with a swelled head coming to yank the wool over his eyes, and he’s not gonna let that happen, no matter what you do when you get inside his office. Not if you give him a whole box of Garcia y Vega cigars, a bottle of Canadian Club, or whatever. Doesn’t matter. You lost him as soon as he looked out that window. That’s why I went with the Buick. Buick says solid, it says dependable, it says you’re doing well enough, thank you very much, and that’s that.”

Daniel reparked next to a dusty red mini-van and got out. On the far side of the lonchería, one end butted up at a 45-degree angle against the truck’s nose, sat a single-wide Gulfstream house trailer with louvered windows and a full-length yellow canvas awning. Though obviously not new—where light from the truck’s open service window hit it, Daniel could make out the brown drip of rust marks beneath some of the steel rivet seams in its aluminum skin— the trailer was in fairly nice shape.

Together, the food truck and the trailer enclosed the rear corner of the service station’s tarmac, and centered in the patio area thus created within their open embrace was a round white table with a furled red, white and blue umbrella, its seats attached to the ends of radiating support rods.

Between two of the seats, pulled up to the table in a wheelchair, sat a man wearing the strangest, most motley confusion of military garb Daniel had ever seen: Camouflage pants tucked into combat boots, a faded blue satin flight jacket, a green beret perched at a jaunty angle on his graying, pony tailed hair. A drooping salt and pepper pirate mustache gave his face a permanent scowl, and the small gray bush of a soul tuft hung off his lower lip. In the ear Daniel could see, he wore three silver studs, one in the lobe, the other two stuck through the cartilage above it.

The man was typing, two fingered, on a laptop, its screen aglow, beside which were arranged a takeout coffee cup and an aluminum foil ashtray, a smoldering cigarette resting in one of its corners. He was wearing fingerless black leather and mesh gloves, like the ones Daniel himself used for working out at the gym so as not to give clients a calloused hand to shake. As Daniel passed, the man looked up, expressionless, then took a drag on the cigarette, a swallow of the coffee, and turned back to HIS computer.

On the rear quarter of the truck’s side panel, emblazoned in red cursive script within gratuitous quotation marks, were the words EL DIABLITO. the little devil, Daniel translated, drawing on HIS two undergraduate SEMESTERS OF Spanish. Beneath THAT, in the same sweeping style, was the epigrammatic declaration, AQUí me quedo.” Here I Remain. The truck’s interior was lit by a hanging twin-tube overhead fluorescent fixture, there was no sign of anyone. Opposite the stainless steel counter was a grill, close beside it a wall-mounted rack of cooking tools, and next to that a display filled with cellophane bags of tortilla chips and potato chips, chocolate bars, and packs of cigarettes. At one side of the counter, near a large coffee urn, also stainless, with a black plastic spigot, was an old-fashioned chrome service bell. Daniel tapped it with one finger, but nothing stirred inside the truck.

Daniel was about to tap the bell again, harder, when he heard the door of the house trailer open, and he turned around to see a mestizo dwarf in a sleeveless undershirt, rumpled trousers and rubber flip-flops emerge to clamber down the two steps at the trailer’s door and come toward him.

“Right with you,” said the little man, scurrying bandy-legged behind Daniel and up a stepladder into the back door of the truck, reappearing inside, hastily knotting a child-size chef’s apron around his middle before hoisting himself up onto a high stool.

He couldn’t be more than a few inches over four feet, Daniel estimated; Daniel himself was anything but a commanding presence, topping out at a hair over 5’8” on a good day, but this was, well, this was short. The man’s upper body, the little paunch (paunchlet, Daniel found himself thinking) notwithstanding, looked fit and powerful. The limbs, especially short in the upper arm and thigh, were absurdly small, as if made for another body entirely, although, like his chest, they were also muscular. But the head was proportionate, and his face, despite the unusually broad forehead an oddly flattened- looking nose, and a set of teeth as crowded and crooked as Daniel’s were before he’d gotten braces in junior high, was close to handsome.

Daniel guessed the man to be somewhere in his forties: His black hair was thinning, and age lines spidered out from the corners of his sleepy eyes.

See anything you want?” the man asked, stifling a yawn, his voice a strange amalgam of mature weariness and boyish pitch.

The menu board on the wall above the grill offered the standard selections of chicken and beef tacos, enchiladas, and burritos. No carnitas, Daniel noted with disappointment, and no horchata, either, the sweet rice beverage he used to love sipping ice cold through a straw at the car wash. Just Pepsi and Diet Pepsi, iced tea or coffee. But the limited menu set his mouth to watering, regardless, and his stomach to rumbling.

Well, I’m sure as hell starving,” he declared, startled at the sound of his own hearty voice. “How about some coffee to start, while I take a couple minutes to think it over?”

“Shhh” the little man shushed, a finger to his lips, jerking his head toward the trailer. “Not so loud. My wife. The baby.”

“Sorry,” Daniel said, more softly. “I had no idea.”

“No problem,” amigo. When I get up and come out here to cook something, the smell doesn’t bother them. but the talking wakes up the baby, and the baby wakes up the mother. You know?” he plucked a Styrofoam cup from an inverted stack beside the coffee urn, filled it, and handed it over.

“Sugar? Cream?”

“Black’s fine,” Daniel said, taking a sip and setting the cup down.

“Coffee,” muttered the little man to himself, extracting another cup from the stack and holding it under the spigot. “Yes. Good idea.”

“Name’s Daniel,” Daniel heard himself say as he stuck out a hand on a sudden impulse. Normally, he wasn’t the kind of person who went around chatting up bartenders, waitresses and bank tellers, and certainly not pint-sized strangers at taco stands miles from home in the pre-dawn dead of night. But nothing was exactly normal anymore for him these days, was it.

Miguel,” said the other, the grip of his scale-model hand around Daniel’s fingers surprisingly strong.

To be continued….

By Joel Deutsch

Having inhaled the first of his two chicken tacos, Daniel slowed down and was disposing of the second one less voraciously. His host, grateful for the unexpected company, remained perched behind the service window, smoking, sipping coffee, and chatting, now that he was no longer half asleep after being rousted from his single-wide by the ringing of the bell on the lunch-truck counter. Looking for a topic of mutual interest, the two men had hit on the movies. The great American social leveler, Daniel thought gratefully.

“I used to love going to those big old theaters downtown, on Broadway,” said Miguel. “They get a lot of movies from Mexico, you know? But now I just rent the videos in Santa Barbara. I have my TV in there (nodding in the direction of the trailer), and the DVD player, and the satellite dish, everything I need.”

On Daniel’s side of the counter were lined up four red Naugahyde-upholstered bar stools with chrome legs, but Daniel remained standing. This was how he had been taking his meals in his own kitchen, all summer. he didn’t yet have a table to eat at. He had still not found the will to drop by one of the home furnishing stores on Venice or La Brea and get himself a couch, either, or a coffee table. All he had for furnishings were the new mattress and box spring set from a bedding place off La Cienega and the black leather recliner he had persuaded Sheila to let him salvage from the den. Now the big chair sat alone on the thin beige living room carpet, amidst unpacked boxes, facing the flat panel high def monitor and Surround Sound setup he had bought at circuit City. Although let him crank up the audio to a decent level, let the ancient Karnovskys down in 2B hear something through their ceiling, and he’d be getting a visit from the building manager, a formidable, shaven-skulled African American man who had introduced himself as Dr. Daddy doc when Daniel came to see the vacant unit, and then never mind about getting the air conditioner replaced.

“I prefer the Spanish movies, mostly,” Miguel said. “You know. Sylvester Stallone. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Bruce Lee. Bruce Willis. the first Terminator. That’s the best. They shoot him and shoot him until he’s just bones, metal bones, like a skeleton dancing in a cementario on el dia de Los Muertos. And still they can’t kill the dude. I’ve watched it five, six times. I like it so much ,I bought the DVD.”

“but Terminator isn’t in Spanish,” objected Daniel.”

At the Million Dollar Theater they’re in English , amigo,” insisted Miguel, mirth crinkling the crow’s feet of his Indian eyes. And the same thing on these videos I buy at the swap meet. Arnold speaks Spanish. Stallone speaks Spanish. And both of the Bruces, they speak Spanish, too. The chino Bruce and the gringo Bruce. Perfect Mexico City Spanish, like real chilangos.”

Daniel, getting it, laughed. This wasn’t turning out too badly.

“Speaking of movies,” segued Miguel, with a glance in the direction of the table, “you see that guy over there?”

“yeah,” said Daniel. “Why?”

“that’s Nick. Nick likes movies, too. In fact, he’s writing a script, he tells me. Every night, he sits there and drinks coffee and types on the little computadora he brings with him. Sometimes his battery dies, so I let him plug the machine into this long extension cord I have in the trailer.

“One night, I asked him, ‘Nick, why do you come here? Why don’t you do this work at home, where it’s nice and warm?’ The fog inspires him, he says. Me, I’m thinking maybe he’s a little crazy. Or maybe he’s a homeless. I mean, sleeping in that van of his, the red one with the wheelchair lift. Who can tell, these days? But he’s really interesting. A smart guy. He was a soldier back in Viet Nam and something happened to his legs. want to meet him?”

“No,” said Daniel, quickly, stiffening. “That’s okay. Don’t bother him.” There was something strange about the man at the table, something damaged or unwholesome or just plain wrong. “Seriously,” he underscored. “don’t.”

“Okay,” agreed Miguel, taking a deep drag on his cigarette and exhaling a rich blue plume of smoke. “

Time slipped by, coffee cups got refilled. When the two men fell silent, the only sounds were the clicking of the wheelchair man’s computer keys accompanied by an occasional smoker’s cough, and the infrequent whoosh of traffic passing by. From time to time, a car or truck pulled into the station, gased up, and left again. In this otherworldly space, Daniel found himself Telling Miguel his life, or at least the tellable parts of it.

Such as how, in high school, he had dreamed of becoming a musician. Funky Laurel Canyon, one cleft in the Santa Monica mountains west of his family’s tony enclave with its regimented rows of Italian cypresses, had started filling up with bluejeaned and gypsy-skirted singer-songwriters and rock groups. Everybody lived there. The Buffalo Springfield, Joni Mitchell, Cass Elliot, Jim Morrison, Frank Zappa, Crosby, Stills and Nash. On weekends, he would prowl the canyon's winding lanes on foot past a mmotley array of dilapidated cottages, nondescript stucco apartments and rustic bungalows, listening for the sound of a band in rehearsal or even just somebody’s stereo speakers blasting the music out an open front window. If he should stumble across some actual, recognizable rock star driving by or rummaging around the cold case at the Canyon country store for a six-pack or three, so much the better. Back home, he would repair to the sanctuary of his room, inspired, and spend hours hunched on the edge of his bed with his guitar.

And then there was the Dylan concert that December night in Santa Monica. He'd gone with Norm Waxman and Norm's girlfriend Susie in the red GTO convertible Susie's dad had bought her when she turned 16. Daniel and Norm both wore the standard faded Levis and blue chambray work shirts. Susie had on a denim miniskirt topped off with an embroidered white mexican peasant blouse and a handmade silver necklace she'd picked up at a crafts booth on the Venice boardwalk.

Dylan had played the first set all acoustic, sitting alone on a stool dressed in his familiar old Charlie Chaplin-as-Woody Guthrie railroad hobo threads, strumming a Martin or Gibson, Daniel couldn't tell which, that made him look like a scale model of himself, puffing punctuation into a harmonica that was held up in front of him by a neck brace.

The second set blew all that familiar, comfortable folkiness away. It wasn't as if Daniel was unprepared. He'd bought both of the last two Dylan albums the day they were delivered to the record store, and played them until the needle's gouging had made them sound as scratchy as if they were ten years old. He'd heard the new songs with their blues band backup, noted Dylan's hair getting longer and wilder and the outfits morphing from faux hillbilly to tough-kid rocker.

Still, neither he, nor norm and Susie, nor most of the other fans in the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium that night had taken in the transformation up close. Back then, you couldn't follow every step of a performer's evolution in his music videos on MTV or on the internet. So when the house plunged into darkness after intermission, and all that could be seen were the amplifiers' glowing red pilot lamps and the shadows of the players picking their way, wraith-like, over a tangle of floor cables and taking up their stations at the organ and the drums, strapping on the electric bass and the lead guitar, there was something like a collective holding of breath in the house.

Then came the crack of the snare shot and the eruption of the opening organ riff, and there stood Dylan in the spotlight, sideways to his microphone, no more the rumpled back-porch bumpkin but a stiletto-threat of midnight boogie, leather-jacketed, tousle-haired, the neck of a black solid-body Stratocaster thrust out at the audience like a loaded rifle, snarling how does it feel, ah how does it feel, to be on your own, no direction home, and Daniel, his perfectly conventional plans for college notwithstanding, heard himself called to the making of such music, felt the die of his future irretrievably cast.

He had gone up to Berkeley the following September and gradually managed to misplace that ambition like a tight, skinny joint of Thai stick that disappears between the Goodwill Industries couch cushions. Whereupon he had come home to L.A., chastened, a mediocre scholar and a rock dream failure,to register at the only law school that would have him, a third tier institution that had turned out more than its share of Los Angeles public defenders, County prosecutors, Superior Court judges and local politicians, as opposed to partnership-track corporate lawyers or Con Law professors at one of the more prestigious university law schools.

He told Miguel he practiced at a small Beverly Hills law firm, though he didn’t say that it handled whiplashes and fender-benders instead of transnational corporate contract disputes and entertainment industry litigation , that its hallways were covered with threadbare carpet runners, how lunch meant a Cobb salad at Hamburger Hamlet or Sichuan takeout instead of haute cuisine.

Certainly, he mentioned Sheila and their marriage, and that it was over, now. Why shouldn’t he? Although beyond that bare fact, he didn’t venture, didn’t disclose. Not so much out of prudence, which seemed to have flown out the window on this strange occasion, but more because, as Sheila would have put it, he was still processing the exsperience, still trying to make sense of it and figure out his feelings, which were anything but simple.

About Melanie, however, who was just starting her second year at UCLA, Daniel was more forthcoming, at least to a point. Proudly, he told Miguel how his brilliant daughter, his only child, gifted since early on with imagination, the storytelling urge, and a fluent way with language, had gotten herself admitted to an upper division creative writing program for this, only her sophomore year, on the strength of a trio of precocious one-act plays.

What he didn't mention was that all three of the plays were about her fraught experience of coming out as a butch lesbian in high school. Daniel, for his part, had not been exactly shocked. Melanie's manifestly unfeminine ways, her skinny body bereft of even a hint of feminine topography, and her rooster-strut gait had prepared him, and he had been as supportive as humanly possible, or so he thought .

But Sheila, to Daniel's surprise and Melanie's anguish,, had withdrawn first into denial and then into a state of brittle perturbation, nearly unable to speak to her daughter, let alone nurture her. Some new mental health theory she had fallen prey to had confirmed her maternal disappointment and displeasure, insisting as it did that homosexuality was a grievous warpage of the normal order and that gays, with proper therapy, could be cured of their sexual disorientation. The thing that perplexed Daniel was that this theory had emerged not from the fundamentalist bible belt of American culture or from the walled-off Medieval world of Ultra Orthodox Judaism, but from the teachings of a well-respected, quite secular psychiatrist in London.

For Daniel, loving father and committed liberal though he was, the period had not been without its tribulations. There had been long months of relentless feminist email invectives and, when Melanie still came home from Berkeley between quarters her freshgman year, more than a few fierce lectures about how it was men who had, far from creating civilization out of wilderness, as his kind liked to congratulate themselves for doing, had poisoned everything to the bone with their distorted patriarchal social structures, their gory schoolyard-mentality warfare, and the thoughtless way they had allowed their technologies to spew lethal and irreversible toxicity into the body, into the poisoned earth, into the suffering sky. There were times he had felt as if he'd been dropped by time warp into a rural Chinese village square during the cultural Revolution, bound hand and foot, sat on a rickety stool, and exhorted to self-criticize. In any case, his fatherly support had been all Melanie had had to count on, ironic as that may have seemed.

It was at the next and very unanticipated step in Melanie's evolution that Daniel began to fall behind, to feel his father's heart breaking, to see his only child drawing farther and farther away into an inscrutable distance. . Spring break, before heading off to Costa Rica with a girlfriend Daniel had never seen in person but who looked, in digital snapshots Melanie sent him online, like a painted human pincushion, a haloed grinning dragon on one bicep, a rainbow arcing above the word Gaia, for the Greek earth mother on the other bicep,, a spiked black leather collar around her neck and body piercings flashing everywhere, from eyelids to nostrils to tongue and God knew where else beneath her black t-shirts and jeans, which matched the shoe polish-color of the narrow Mohawk ridge that ran down the center of her shaven skull.

She was not, his daughter informed him, merely a lesbian. That had been a transitory delusion,a way station along the route to self-discovery. What she was, Melanie explained, was a man, a male born mistakenly, wretchedly, into the body of a female. From now on, she had explained among many other things in a very long email, the nickname Mel was henceforth to point not to her girlie name, but to Melvin. The correct pronouns were now to be not she and her but he, his and him. The half-octave lower voice Daniel had noticed and inquired about with concern in their last few middle-of-the-night phone calls over the lonely summer had been the result of biweekly testosterone shots, not an inexplicably lingering, unseasonable chest cold, as she had pretended. Her big-breasted girlfriend, she explained, was, in her heart of hearts, also a boy. "Fags with vaginas," is what the two of them liked to call themselves. As for going the rest of the physical way down the road to sexual reassignment surgery, the double mastectomy and the possibly functional, but more likely just cosmetic penis constructed out of the tissues of her (or his, Daniel had thought wryly)female privates, this his relentlessly transforming progeny couldn't say. Maybe yes, maybe no. One thing at a time.

Daniel had confessed that he was having trouble getting his mind around all this. That he couldn't start thinking of he as him, couldn't help missing the girl he thought she'd been. That he felt, he admitted, despite himself, more than a bit repelled by the whole thing, like the father of an Indian bride who is more than ready to pay off a cadre of hermaphrodite extortionists who have crashed the Mumbai wedding party and threatened to expose their ambiguous genitalia to all present, possibly causing more than one celebrant to upchuck his or her chutney. Since that confession, the emails had been few and far between, and her cell number had gone straight to voice mail whenever he called, his messages never eliciting a response. Finally he had simply stoppped trying. None of this did he tell the swarthy, affable dwarf into whose company he had fallen, but that ommission still left more than enough for him to talk about.

Hearing his autobiographical monologue spill out of him like small change escaping a torn pocket, as if someone else were speaking, Daniel, fascinated, watched Miguel smoke. The little man's stubby fingers were permanently splayed apart in the middle, the index and second, which grasped the cigarette, jutting off from the ring finger and pinkie to form a permanent V, in a way that reminded Daniel of how Rabbi Shapiro would hold up both his hands at the conclusion of the Saturday morning Sabbath service, palms outward. fingers spread just like that, in benediction. may the Lord bless you and keep you, may the Lord cause His countenance to shine upon you and bring you peace, before college and the Sixties, before all the ancient Hebraic myths, commandments and taboos had sunk beneath his coming of age like stones.

The cigarettes looked so huge in Miguel’s hand that, each time Miguel put a fresh one to his lips to light up, Daniel felt an absurd urge to confiscate it,, as if from a delinquent child. Periodically, Miguel tapped the ash into a heavy-looking pewter ashtray on whose broad rim was poised a cloaked figure Daniel at first took to be a strangely wasted-looking, brooding Virgin of Guadalupe, the ubiquitous Mexican patron saint, although the more he looked, the less sure he was of this.

Maybe it wasn’t la Virgen, Daniel considered. He’d never seen one anything like this. Instead of the usual benign, beatific countenance, the colorful robe, and the compassionate, open arms he remembered from the usual representations, this hooded female was Hollow-cheeked and spectral. Her hair, or what could be seen of it beneath the robe’s cowl, was a fierce, braided tangle of Rastafarian dreadlocks. Her facial expression was a thin-lipped grimace. And in one upraised bony hand, she clutched the shaft of an agricultural scythe planted butt-first beside the bare, gnarled feet of a crone twice her apparent age.

Pausing for a swallow of coffee after the Melanie story,, Daniel realized how one-sided their conversation had been, to this point. When did he become so goddam narcissistic, he wondered. All those years of interviewing clients,, conducting courtroom testimony, taking depositions. If there was one thing he knew how to do, or used to know how to do, it was drawing people out, whether or not that was even what they wanted. Sheila complained it was as if he were interrogating her all the time. And how Getting any kind of disclosure out of him, by comparison, was like squeezing water from a stone. Had just a scant three months of living on his own turned him semi-autistic?

“what?” asked Miguel. “Something the matter?”

The thought must have made him frown, Daniel realized. “No,” he said, emerging from his reverie determined to be a more generous interlocutor. “Nothing. I was just wondering what this thing of yours is doing out here in the middle of nowhere. This lunch truck. Down in L.A., you see them all over the place. But up here?” He waved his hand as if to signify a fast emptiness.

“I used to do this in Los Angeles too,” said Miguel, “ same as everybody else. I even had my own location. My own exclusive territory . right downtown, in front of the Ronald Reagan State office Building. Breakfast. Lunch. Supper. No competition. Not bad for a little enano from the streets of Tepito, you know?”

“Where’s that?” asked Daniel.

“Mexico City. A poor barrio. The poorest. Anyway, here’s what happened. After September 11th, it’s five years now, they put barricades in front of all those government buildings to protect against the terroristas. I had to park around the corner, or down the street, which means all of a sudden, I’m desaparicido. Poof! Gone! If the people look out the window, or they walk out the door, and you’re not there, they go and eat somewhere else.

“So again I was running around, like before I got the Reagan Building. The Valley, East L.A., South Central. I went to high schools. I went to factories. I parked outside bail bond offices across from court buildings. I even drove down to Torrance every day when they were building that new medical clinic near the big hospital. ¡Hijole! every place I went, it was like a lonchería parking lot. You can’t make any money that way. For almost two years I did this, and things just got worse.

“And then I was talking to this man I knew from the Evangelical church. Rigoberto. Not Mexican. Hondureño. A good guy. Rigoberto was working in a restaurant in Santa Barbara. One of the fancy ones by the ocean. Bring the truck up here, he tells me. No way, I tell him. I’ve been there. I know they have Taco Bell, they have Mexican restaurants. They don’t need me.

“but Rigoberto says where I have to go is not in Santa Barbara. He says I have to go outside, at the door of the city. At the border. He says every day Latinos come to work here, from Ventura, from Oxnard, even all the way up from Los Angeles, and every night they drive back home, the same way, on the 101. They don’t want to eat that Taco Bell basura, he says, and they can’t afford those nice restaurants with the water fountains and the mariachis. All they want is some real, normal Mexican food. La cucina auténtica.

“it still sounded crazy. I asked Rigoberto where am I going to live? where am I going to park this thing? who am I going to have for conversation, besides my wife?

“’I’m giving you an idea for your success, compadre,’ he says, ‘take it or leave it. But if you stay here, who’s gonna buy your gas and your insurance for this thing? Who’s gonna pay your rent? The Department of Homeland Security?’”

“Hell of a salesman,” this friend of yours,laughed Daniel.

“It’s the Evangelical church. That’s where he gets the power. The Catholic priests, all they talk about is sin and repentance and how you have to accept everything. You let life kick you like a dog, and then you go to heaven if you don’t bite back. But the evangelicals, they preach success. They tell you that Jesus loves you and He wants you to be brave and get ahead. Which is a big improvement, in my opinion.

“I thought about it. I talked to my wife. And then I called this immigration lawyer I know, Guzman, and we drove up here to look. You remember, these gas stations, they used to have a tienda de abarrotes, you know, a little convenience store, where you could walk in and buy something to eat, a cafecito, a pack of cigarettes? And now all you’ve got is that booth that’s like an ATM machine with a person inside.”

“yeah,” said Daniel. “I remember free air, full serve, and clean bathrooms, too. Any kind of bathrooms.”

“Well,” said Miguel, “this one has a bathroom, in the back. But that’s it.”

“Good to know, “ said Daniel, imagining the coffee running through him, feeling the beginning of fullness in his bladder.

“So I call the lawyer and the lawyer calls somebody at the oil company, and the oil company puts me on a lease. it’s almost like having a real restaurant.

“Why can’t you just get yourself a restaurant?” asked Daniel. “I mean, if that’s what you really want?”

“Without papers?” laughed Miguel.

“Oh,” saidDaniel.

“Yeah. Even for this, we had to put everything in my wife’s name, because she has citizenship. I work for her. I’m her employee. For a restaurant it would be even more complicated. And that’s okay. But I still miss my friends. I miss the city. I miss the futbol games on the weekend, in the park. they let me play on the teams with the little niños, up to 12 years old. I’m always the captain. I even missed driving around the damn freeways.

“But the customers came, and then the baby, and, pues, AQUí me quedo. Still here.”

“the sign?” Daniel asked.

Miguel nodded. “Before, it only said ‘El Diablito.’ If you look, you can see the paint is different.”

Out on the highway, something large backfired, exploding like military ordnance, loud enough that both men flinched. From the trailer came a baby’s crying, joined within seconds by a woman’s soothing Spanish murmur, the words indistinguishable. The kind of nocturnal call and response Daniel hadn’t heard under his own roof for a very long time, and nostalgia slinked through his heart like a tiny, unexpected animal.

“¿Que pasó, mi vida?” Miguel called across toward the trailer’s nearest window. But the baby’s crying died down, and its fading whimpers merged with a woman crooning something in Spanish, in a voice a register lower than Daniel would have expected, had he thought about it.

“guess it’s okay,” he said, dad to dad.

“Better go check,” said Miguel, climbing down off his stool. “Be right back.” He came out of the rear of the truck down the stepladder and disappeared inside the house trailer, and Daniel decided to visit the rest room. This time, going and coming back, he got a curt nod of acknowledgement from Nick. When he returned, Miguel was at his station again.

“Aren’t you ever afraid?” asked Daniel. “I mean, being open like this all night? with the cashier locked inside that bulletproof box, and no one to help you if something happens?”

“Maybe I’m not the smartest man in California,” Miguel smiled, “ but I am not the most stupid one, either.” He reached under the counter and produced a massive-looking, long-barreled revolver, which he slid across to Daniel. Daniel put out a hand, hesitated.

“go ahead,” urged Miguel. “Check it out. It won’t shoot you. I don’t keep a round in the chamber.”

The grip was cushioned with textured black rubber pads, giving it a dense, sensuous heft. Daniel gingerly turned the colt over — the name was embossed along the barrel—inspecting first one side, then the other, as Miguel looked on in amusement.

Daniel’s only previous contact with real firearms was target practice at the Arizona camp where his parents sent him for two miserable summers. he still remembered the shooting instructor, a crew-cut Korean War vet from Texas named Buford Hibbin, the mere mention of whose impossibly provincial moniker was enough to drive a barracks tent full of teenage Jewish boys from Westside Los Angeles into paroxysms of hilarity after lights out.

“Byoofuhrd! Byoofuhrd Hib-bin! Y’all come in for dinner right this minute, y’hear?” they would call out across the darkened rows of cots in bad falsetto generic Southern accents, each new rendition setting off a fresh eruption of giggles and guffaws.

“Elbows out!” Mr. Hibbin would again bark at them the next day, as they wriggled into Prone firing position on the parched August ground of the Mesa Roja target range, making tripod points of their bare, bent arms to steady Camp Pueblo’s arsenal of bolt-action Remington and Marlin .22’s. “I want to see those nipples pushing dirt! I want those asses flat as pancakes! ”

Since then, Daniel had never again fired live ammunition, just shot ducks revolving on target wheels or pop-up arcade-game gangsters with mechanical rifles on dates at the Santa Monica pier, nights of greasy fish and chips and watery Cokes, cool beach breezes, copped feels and kisses he had thought he was stealing. Even so, he knew enough from TV police dramas to turn the Colt around and present it to Miguel butt first.

“It’s big,” was all he could think of to say. And so it was . In Miguel’s Lilliputian grasp, the oversized six-shooter looked as huge as the shoulder-fired missile launchers Daniel had seen Islamist guerrillas brandishing for the cameras in Afghanistan or Chechnya or Iraq, he couldn’t remember exactly.

“it’s a .357,” said Miguel. “I’ve never had to fire it. If I did,I would have to stand with my back against the refrigerator so the recoil won’t knock me down.”

“then why don’t you get yourself something smaller?” asked Daniel, reasonably.

“Because, amigo, if I just point this at some crazy pendejo who thinks he’s gonna rob me, he takes one look and the gun is all he’s going to think about then, know what I mean?”

“Hope you’re right,” said Daniel, glancing at his watch as Miguel slipped the Colt back into its hiding place. 5:15 A.M. Finally, he was getting tired. Although not sleepy, exactly. He’d ingested too much coffee to be sleepy. But tired, yes. Definitely tired. Exhausted.

“Well, Miguel,” he said, pushing away his paper plate and crumpled napkin, “I think it’s time for me to start heading home now.”

Which was when a black-gloved hand thrust itself up beside him, holding aloft an empty white coffee cup as if it were the Olympic torch.

By Joel Deutsch

“Miguelito, my man! How about another hit of that optimal Joe of yours?”

Daniel looked down. It was Nick, of course, grinning up at him from behind his droopy mustache. What an outfit! The green beret was Special Forces. that much, he knew. But was it in Apocalypse Now! that he’d seen the tiger jacket on an American military guy in a Saigon bar scene? Or was it The Deer Hunter? Platoon, maybe?

Nick left the empty cup on the counter and lovingly patted one fat, knobby wheelchair tire. “Sorry if I scared ya, man. This baby is a regular fucking Stealthmobile. Silent but deadly. Like a good, lethal fart, y’know? She’s an Invacare T-4. Top of the line. Clincher tires, titanium frame, titanium axle, titanium rims, titanium fucking everything. Fifteen pounds, not an ounce over. Cost Veterans Affairs over three grand. Back in ’67 and ’68, when I did my tour, that kind of bread would’ve bought you almost two VW Bugs. Shoulda had this baby that night my patrol ran into Charlie. Fucking gooks wouldn’t have had a fucking clue. Never woulda heard me coming. Of course, then I wouldn’t need it now, would I.” he brushed off the palm of that glove on his camouflage pants and offered it to Daniel. “Name’s Nick, by the way, man.”

“Daniel,” Daniel reciprocated, whereupon, in a ritual choreography he hadn’t seen, let alone participated in, for something over 30 years, Nick fixed him with a meaningful look, rotated his grip, and bent their forearms upward in the old multipurpose solidarity handclasp, as if they were arm wrestling in the air. Peace, brother. Fuck the war, fuck racism, fuck Johnson, McNamara, Nixon, Kissinger, Wall Street, Madison Avenue, Rock Hudson and Doris Day and John Wayne, , and may the spirit shine on you and bring you all the sex, drugs, rock and roll and sheer foolish courage you’re gonna need to get out of this surrealistic deathtrap world alive.

The handclasp and the signifying eye-lock held steady for a couple of seconds too long for Daniel’s comfort, and he was just about to break loose when Nick let go of his own accord and, grabbing both wheel rims, rolled himself six feet or so in reverse with pumping, powerful backward jerks.

“See me okay?” he asked Miguel.

“Yeah, Nick,” said Miguel, stubbing out a cigarette. “I can see you fine.

“Good. Now dig this.” For a long beat, Nick’s face was a mask of concentration. Then, with a sudden, wrenching movement, one hand pulling, the other pushing, he tipped the chair backward at such a precarious angle that Daniel was sure he would topple over. But just at the crucial instant, Nick’s arms pumped, and the wheelchair whirled completely around, perfectly balanced in its gravity-defying tilt, the rampant tiger on the back of the satin jacket spinning past like a strobe flash.

Nick arrested his rotation and touched down, facing front, grinning.

“¡Bravo!” cheered Miguel, lifting his coffee cup in salute.

“Amazing!” exclaimed Daniel. He had seen neighbor kids pop wheelies on all sorts of bicycles. While strolling the Venice boardwalk past the sunglasses vendors, chainsaw jugglers and boom-box Karaoke acts, he had watched skateboarder kamikazes in a concrete play area on the beach fly upside down coming off vertical walls. But he had never remotely imagined someone doing a standing 360 in a wheelchair and settling back to earth with Olympics-quality grace.

Nick acknowledged the praise with a quick seated bow, and rolled back up to the counter. “Been working on that one all week,” he said proudly.

“How do you keep the beret on when you do that?” asked Daniel.

“Hairpin,” grinned Nick, tapping one edge of the hat. “And don’t give me shit about it. Hey, you mind handing me down the coffee, so me and Miguel don’t have to do the stretch thing again?”

“No problem,” said Daniel, passing the cup over.

“Thanks, man. With me way down here, and Miguel not having much of a reach, it’s kind of a hassle. Some pair we make, huh? A crip and a midget.”

“You can call yourself a crip, if you want,” Nick,” bristled Miguel. “But I’m not a midget. A midget is a freak in a circus. I’m a dwarf.” Brow furrowing, eyes unamused, he reached for another cigarette.

“Roger that, little buddy,” said Nick. “Dwarf. Right on. You got it. It’s just words, man. I don’t like to get hung up on words, but I can dig where you’re coming from.” he sipped the coffee, then held the cup out to Daniel. “Actually, man, I gotta get back to my work. Think you could bring it over there?” he asked, gesturing toward his computer.

“Sure,” said Daniel, taking the cup again. Nick executed a smart wheelchair about face and rolled over to the table, redocking himself like a space shuttle. By the time Daniel reached him, Nick had locked the wheelchair’s brakes, brought his dormant laptop back to life, and was lighting a cigarette.

Nick was smoking Marlboros, Daniel could see by the red and white pack on the table; his lighter was an old brushed chrome Zippo, the indestructible model virtually fetishized by soldiers in Vietnam and two wars before that, and by Daniel, as well. Back in the day.

Standing there holding Nick’s coffee, he thought about his own Zippo, the one he had carried around from 11th grade until the day he quit, finally succumbing to Sheila’s withering disapproval when Melanie was born. He recalled the lighter’s dull gleam, the chunky weight of it in his hand, the pungency of the fluid, the ratcheting of the serrated spark wheel against the protruding red nub of flint, the small, fat whup! Of detonation when the wick caught flame. The metallic ping of the lid snapping open, the hard and final clack of it slapping shut. He had never thrown the thing out, but had kept it all these years like a family heirloom. He wondered if he still had the Zippo somewhere, in one of those not-yet unpacked boxes on his living room floor.

“Just put it on the table, anywhere, man,” said Nick, typing a few more characters and hitting enter decisively. As Daniel set the cup down, he looked over Nick’s shoulder. INT. HOOTCH—NIGHT, he could make out, flush against the left margin. A few years late for another Viet Nam screenplay, he thought, rechecking his watch. It was edging toward six, now. Time to try that exit line again. Everything was starting to vibrate with caffeine super clarity like a shimmering digital video of itself.

“Nick,” he said, “I think I’m going to just split for home now and try to cop a few hours of sleep. Good meeting you, man. And good luck with the writing trip.” It was amazing, he thought, how easily the old hippie-era patois came back to him, just like that.

He turned, meaning to catch Miguel’s attention, wave goodbye and make his exit, but felt a sharp, restraining tug on the sleeve of his sweatshirt.

“Hey, man,” said Nick. “Don’t just cut out on me like that. Talk to me. I’m a writer. And writers are curious types. Give me a chance to get to know you a little. Sit your ass down for a while and shoot the shit with me.”

“I’d love to, Nick,” Daniel lied, “but the truth is, I’m not a night person, and I haven’t slept since yesterday. I have a long way to go, and I’ll be lucky if I don’t nod off at the wheel.”

Nick was unmoved. “Nobody’s a night person, man, until it becomes necessary for them to be a night person. And then they are. So maybe you weren’t a night person before. Maybe Miguel wasn’t a night person. Maybe I wasn’t a night person, either. But that was another time, man, another world. Another life, y’know? And now you’re a night person. So deal with it, is what I’m saying.

“Yo Miguelito!” he called over at the food truck. Give Daniel here some more coffee. We can’t let him get on the road half asleep, man! It’s a matter of public safety!”

Daniel’s nerves were already so frayed from the endless refills Miguel had been pouring him that it felt as if all it would take would be one more sip to wreak some serious neurochemical damage. “No, Miguel,” he countermanded. “No more coffee for me.”

And then to Nick, more firmly this time, “Really. Seriously. I’m not putting you on. I’ve got to get going.” He tried to pull his arm away, but Nick’s grip on his sleeve didn’t relent. He pulled again, harder, and this time succeeded in breaking free.

“Shit, man, I Just wanted to ask you a couple things, is all.” Nick was almost pleading. The shift of tone unsettled Daniel, felt creepy. Daniel thought he could detect moisture in Nick’s eyes, thought he saw the soul tuft quivering.

Nick flipped open his wheelchair’s brake levers and rotated around to face Daniel. “One question,” he says. All I wanna do is ask you one simple question. Would that be okay?”

“Okay.” Daniel blinked wearily, smoothing his sleeve. One question.”

“That’s the ticket,” said Nick. “Now just tell me this. How old are you?”

“My age? I’m 57,” said Daniel, wondering if Maybe his bedroom would be cool enough to let him sleep for a while. And he had to piss again, really badly. How long ago had he gone over to the men’s room behind the station? An hour? Two hours? Time was falling out of place.

“Same as me,” nodded Nick. “Right in there with the rest of us. Age cohort, they call it. Everybody’s the same age now, give or take. You, me, the President, the last President, Mick Jagger. Speaking of which, you seen that cat on stage lately?”
“No,” said Daniel. he hadn’t been to a rock concert since the old days up in the Bay Area. The Fillmore auditorium, the Avalon Ballroom, Winterland. It was not without keen nostalgia that he still could recall the light show montages pulsing on screens behind stages,, the electric roar, the press of bodies in the standing-room only audience, the sweet reek of pot smoke, and of course the music. He’d seen the Dead, the Airplane, the Butterfield Blues Band. He’d even seen chuck Berry, already historical rock canon retro at the time, open for Janis and Big Brother. Now he received a couple of popular music channels with his cable service, but never tuned in to watch the videos for more than a few seconds on his way to other destinations. He didn’t like how old it made him feel.

“Well, I have,” Nick said. “Just a few years ago. Wiltern Theater. I must be some kind of masochist, driving all the way down to L. A. for that. Depressed the living shit out of me. Ugly little pouty-mouthed fuck is still prancing around like a corpse that’s been embalmed with steroids. Jumpin’ Jack Flash, my fucking ass. More like Jumpin’ Jimmy Hoffa, or one of those other dead guys.”

That’s it? That’s all you wanted to know? My age?” Daniel knew that his annoyance was audible, and he was too tired to care.

“No, no, man,” said nick. “That’s not the question. That’s the question I needed an answer to so I could ask the actual question.”

“Which is?” Daniel bit, knowing he shouldn’t, but he was too weary to resist.

Nick plucked a smoldering Camel from the cluttered little ashtray, took a deep drag, crushed it out. From behind his flipped-up computer screen, he produced a half-empty pint of Johnnie Walker Red Label, poured a dollop into his coffee, then held the bottle out to Daniel.

“Thanks,” said Daniel, shaking his head no.

“Your loss, my gain,” said Nick, recapping the bottle, returning it to its hiding place and stirring the Scotch into his coffee with a plastic spoon. Taking a swig, he fixed Daniel with a prosecutorial look.

“The question, my friend, is did you ever serve? “

“You mean in the military?” checked Daniel, just to be sure.

“Bingo,” said Nick. “Well, did you?”

“I was in college. College and then graduate school.”

Nick nodded. “So they laid, what was it, a 2-S on you? The student deferment?”

“Yeah,” confirmed Daniel, in prudent revision, the actual story being a little more complicated. A lot more complicated, actually.

To be continued…

By Joel Deutsch

Within weeks after graduation, Daniel received a notice from the Selective Service system advising that he had been reclassified 1-A. Prime grade cannon fodder. The only way to get back his student deferment would have been to slide straight into a Master’s program in English Lit, Maybe get a teaching assistantship. Which he was fairly confident he could manage, despite a less than stellar grade point average due to willful and chronic truancy,, because he had forged friendships with some of the faculty, not all of them young, who identified with, envied, and fawned over their disaffected and often feckless countercultural students. His Shakespeare professor, who summered with his wife at San Miguel de Allende in a rented white adobe hacienda on a hill where he said he was working on a novel, had even become his most reliable pot source. All Daniel would have to do was knock on the door, and he’d be safely inside the academic cocoon again, sheltered from military conscription and within sight of tenure track career security, as well.

Inconveniently,, the thought of stepping onto that exercise wheel like a pedantic hamster to run in place, nibbling at morsels of Edam and Cheddar from the departmental feed hopper and sipping lukewarm Chablis from an inverted lab equipment water bottle, until his hair turned gray and his teeth fell out, did not appeal.

Daniel knew full well, of course, that exposure to the draft was the risk you took for rejecting such options out of hand. But saying No came reflexively to him, while he waited for something that, whatever it was, he imagined would fall upon him like an irresistible call to religious vocation.

Joining the steady trickle of draft-age Americans who were exiling themselves to Canada was out of the question, too. Sure, Vietnam was an odious and shameful military misadventure; about this, if not about Milton or Hawthorne or Faulkner, Daniel had done his homework. He’d read the New Yorker articles about the war’s genesis, watched the news, attended the teach-ins. He knew something about the sub rosa hand-off of custodianship from the French, and also about the paranoid catastrophic vision of the domino Theory, according to which, without American intervention, the world’s nations would fall to Communism, one after the other, until it leaped our buffering oceans and there were Chinese troops marching up Market Street and Soviet Red Army tanks massed in Central park. And he knew that on behalf of such a vision, a small, distant country in the throes of civil war, neither side of which had ever threatened the U.S., was being systematically devastated by bomb and bullet and burning jellied Napalm, and that American soldiers, sailors and Marines were being shipped home as corpses, more of them all the time. Daniel wasn’t willing to lend his body to the implementation of such a travesty, and possibly get it blown apart in the bargain. He couldn’t even see wearing a uniform and taking orders from someone like Buford Hibbin, the summer camp shooting instructor. The aversion to regimentation was congenital and longstanding; he’d been drummed out of the Wonderland Avenue Elementary School Cub Scout troop for refusing to give the proper salute one too many times.

But home was home, after all, and whatever kind of future lay in store for him, it wasn’t waiting in Vancouver or Toronto. so he let the whole thing slide, indulging himself in a little magical thinking, a little denial. Something would work out. It had to. What he allowed himself to worry about was closer to hand and more manageable, the problem of making a living.

The student loans and Grants, as well as the occasional checks from home, had all dried up, and it was pretty obvious that Bullfrog Karma, the psychedelic rock band he played rhythm guitar with, was going nowhere. Sure, the lead guitarist, Jeff, could play those solos that started out like Chicago blues, morphed into some kind of modal space raga, then came back home again, the lines rising and falling around quicksilver high note cascades and deftly placed feedback wails. Jambo the bass player knew how to lay down a good, funky groove, and Craig, the drummer, was solid enough, too, even if he did keep veering off into totally undanceable polyrhythms, because, he said, he was really a jazz drummer born at the wrong time and living on the wrong coast. On top of which Stormy, their chick singer, Jeff’s old lady, had it all. She could belt it out like a Broadway mama, get down low and gravelly like the Devil’s own sister, or break your heart with a pure, pitch-perfect contralto that seemed to emanate from an entirely different set of vocal chords, not to mention she had legs like a white Tina turner and a wild, gorgeous mane of blonde hair.

But for all that, the only bookings their perpetually stoned agent Frodo, neé Sheldon Klugman,, ever seemed to be able to get them were nickel and dime coffee house and bar gigs and the occasional gratis appearance at a free concert in Golden Gate Park, opening for the headliner band the people had actually come to see and dance to in their flailing, ecstatic way.

Eventually, the band collapsed. “Disbanded. Disbanded. Dis-BAND-ed,” Frodo had intoned repeatedly in mournful wonderment one night at the apartment Daniel shared with his girlfriend Kristin, passing the blown glass hash pipe to Daniel across the kitchen table over a half gallon jug of Red Mountain Burgundy and the three mismatched coffee mugs they were drinking it from. “That’s what it means, man. That’s why they call it that. Wow. Shit. I never realized that.”

Jeff talked his way into a job in concert promotion, married Stormy, bought a house in Mill Valley. Jambo went north to Mendocino to join an organic restaurant commune. Craig left town,, someone said New York but someone else said Boston. Frodo disappeared and eventually wrote Daniel a few months later from Cleveland, where he was working in his father’s luggage store. Frodo was dead, he explained. Just as well, thought Daniel, considering that there must be enough Frodos around those days, from the East village to Haight Street, to populate a small Frodo City somewhere like the Santa Cruz mountains. He had applied to podiatry school, and he was at one with the decision. Because how could anyone make the Dharma Journey with bad feet? “So I guess I’ll be a Bodhisattva of the bunion,” he quipped. The letter was signed Love and peace, Shelly.

And Daniel, rudderless, drifted. Until they fired him for reading behind the cash register, Richard Brautigan, ZAP Comix, Ian Fleming, Hermann Hesse, whatever came to hand, he clerked at Cody’s Books on Telegraph. He sold the Berkeley Barb on street corners. He took a civil Service exam and got hired by the Post Office to deliver mail on a route in a bad part of Oakland, quitting after one broad daylight gunpoint robbery and a tetanus shot more painful than the bite of the deliberately-unleashed Doberman that had torn a gash in the forearm he had raised to defend himself.

If not for Kristin, Daniel didn’t know what he would have done. she was a senior, an anthropology major. Her father, a Seattle psychiatrist, sent her a generous monthly stipend, which she willingly donated to the cause of their domestic solvency, the only drawback being the necessity to not let the good doctor find out that Daniel was living with his daughter, a deception that had its harrowing and amusing moments.

Then Daniel heard that Yellow Cab was hiring over in the City, and soon he was wrestling taxis up and down the brake-burning, transmission-stripping grades of Nob Hill and Pacific Heights, white-knuckled, no steely-eyed Steve McQueen behind the wheel of a growling Shelby Mustang in Bullitt, he.

“You should be in a profession like mine, guy, not wasting your brains driving a cab,” declared a New York advertising executive around Daniel’s age from the back seat as Daniel ferried him between meetings in the Financial District. He’d spotted Daniel for a fellow Jewboy, a smart but sadly misdirected one.

“Take me, for instance. Here’s my agenda for today: I go have a primo seafood lunch with this client down near Fisherman’s Wharf, right? Then, I meet with these other ones in their offices up in this high-rise with a view of the fucking golden Gate Bridge, for God’s sake. Then it’s back to the Miyako Hotel for a rub-down and some top-flight head from this Japanese masseuse, then it’s the sauna and the shower, and then I’ve got a dinner date at this romantic Italian place in North Beach with one of the models we used on the last photo layout shoot I did here in good old Frisco. I know people. I get people. That’s what I do. And I can tell you this, my friend, a smart guy like you doesn’t belong driving a taxi like some dumb schmuck who couldn’t do anything else with his life. You ever think about it? You ever think about advertising?”

No, Daniel hadn’t, actually, nor was he likely to. He went on driving a cab for a long time after that, years, his middle expanding from the diet of dashboard doughnuts and drive-through McDonald’s, his vague hopes for some kind of a life steadily slackening, until he read Dylan saying in a Rolling Stone interview that everyone was going to have to have their cards on the table by 1980. he wasn’t sure what Dylan meant by that; you couldn’t even assume the Trickster-bard to mean anything at all by such pronouncements, necessarily. But if you were so disposed, as Daniel was, desperate for prophecy despite knowing better, you could interpret them the way you’d parse a reading in the I Ching. The fox crossing the water, trying to keep his tail dry.

At about which time, used paperbacks of Gideon’s Trumpet, To Kill a Mockingbirdand histories of American and English common law began finding their way into the canvas Danish school bag on his front seat among the novels and self-help books he took along to read while waiting in hotel lines and the airport cab garage. Because law school was one of the things you could do when you admitted to yourself that you couldn’t do whatever it was you had mistakenly, in your youthful grandiosity, dreamed yourself capable of doing. At least it wasn’t advertising. And, after all, how many times had someone remarked to Daniel, usually someone of his own defiantly inarticulate generation, not at all meaning to flatter, something like “Wow, man, you sound like a lawyer.” So why not take it as a sign?

But that was later. Much later. Meantime, Daniel’s desertion from the Post Office had not discouraged the U.S. government’s interest in employing him, one way or another, and the order to appear for his pre-induction Army physical exam arrived one fateful day with the morning mail.

“So what you’re saying, Mr. Silver, if I understand these answers you gave on the personality profile, is that you can’t keep your hands off other men. Is that true?” Behind his desk, the Army psychiatrist was sifting through the questionnaires and tests Daniel had spent the morning filling out before lining up with the other potential recruits in his Jockey shorts along a hallway of the Oakland Army Induction Center outside the medical exam room.

Now he was dressed again, in ordinary-enough hippie-era street clothes– frayed Levis bellbottoms, buckle-sided Frye boots, blue chambray work shirt– except for the eyeliner, mascara and pink lip gloss that Kristin, who like all the young women Daniel knew, shunned cosmetics herself, had picked out for him at a University Avenue drug store and applied as skillfully as she could, after gathering his auburn Sampson mane into a ponytail and securing it with one of the handmade leather barrettes they had picked up at a crafts fair, then trimming his bushy mustache to reveal more of his upper lip. His lower lip already pouted nicely enough over the beard, she assured him, and kissed him full on the mouth, hard and long, just to see what it would feel like, whereupon she had to apply the lip gloss all over again.

“It isn’t like that, sir,” Daniel replied with an air of delicacy he hadn’t known he had in him. “that’s the furthest thing from my mind. I mean, I’m not some kind of animal who goes around just grabbing people. God knows I’m not cruising for a beating from some man in a uniform. If that was my thing, I’d be hanging out at the rough trade bars on Folsom Street, over in The city. It’s not that I can’t control my hands. It’s my feelings I’m afraid I just won’t be able to keep to myself. I’m like an open book. Everybody who knows me says so. and I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. It just wouldn’t be right.”

The best Daniel had dared to hope for was a psychological deferment requiring periodic reexamination to determine if he had gotten his mind right. but no, according to the forms a middle aged officer handed Daniel after a long wait on a bench with five or six other rejects, he was classified 4-F. Unequivocally and irreversibly disqualified from military service, forever.

“I don’t believe there’s any known cure for homosexual tendencies,” said the man, glancing from Daniel’s hirsute and prettified face to the paperwork and back again, with a look of distaste. So I guess all there is to say at this point in time is that I wish you the best of luck in civilian society.”

“thank you, sir,” replied Daniel humbly, shaking the reluctantly proffered hand, his heart racing with nervousness and jubilation. “I guess I’ll just have to get along the best I can.”

“If you don’t mind me saying so, son,” said the officer, “in the middle of that beard and mustache, with the lipstick and all, your mouth looks like a goddam pussy. That can’t do you much good out there.”

“yes, sir,” said Daniel. “Thanks a lot. I’ll remember that.”

When he emerged from the Induction Center, Kristin was waiting for him in the parking lot, leaning against their maroon and white wreck of a ’56 Chevy Bel Air, peering at a novel she’d been reading through the gold-rimmed granny glasses that made her look like a prim schoolteacher in a Western movie. When , beaming, Daniel held up his documents and pointed out the merciful classification, Kristin dropped the book and lifted him clear off the ground with a joyful whoop.

To celebrate, they drove over the Richmond Bridge into Marin County, the radio up loud, Kristen dabbing the lip gloss from Daniel’s mouth with Kleenex as he coaxed their oil-burning jalopy onward. At a little French restaurant in Sausalito right on the Bay, with a view of passenger ferries and sailboats and Alcatraz Island, they spent everything but the rent and gas money on dinner and a bottle of Bordeaux the indulgent sommelier had assured them was their least expensive and still palatable choice.
Two months later,, Kristin would leave for graduate school in Tucson, and Daniel would never see her again. But for now, they were the King and Queen of May, and someday, when enough people like them wanted the war to be over, it would be over. Simple as that, and the escargot in their bath of garlic butter didn’t taste bad at all.

To be continued…

By Joel Deutsch

“Good old student deferment,” reminisced Nick with a thin smile.

“Yeah,” said Daniel.

“And then they dropped that and went to the lottery system. Which makes sense, man, you know? Randomness is reality, not the other stuff.”

Daniel wasn’t sure what Nick thought he was saying, exactly, but he knew what he probably meant, and it wasn’t cosmological. It was something about privilege.

“Guess I just got lucky,” he said, feeling vaguely guilty. It was Nick’s tone that discomfited him, a shadow of irony, a weird vibe.

“I was delivering pizza back then,myself,” Nick said. “Staying stoned, hanging out, just going with the flow, like we used to say. My old man wanted me to do the school thing, get a degree. You know? But I just couldn’t make myself deal with all the bullshit.”

“right,” said Daniel, anxious to be gone and waiting for the opening.

“And so then here comes Uncle Sam, knockin’ on my door, and that’s all she wrote.”

Never mind the opening, thought Daniel. It was now or never. “Nick, I really have to split, or I’m just going to fall flat on my face. You take good care of yourself, okay? Maybe we’ll see each other up here again, one of these days.” He didn’t offer his hand, not wanting to subject himself to a replay of the solidarity routine.

Nick nodded, with the gravity of someone who has just understood something. “Later, man,” he said, and rotated the wheelchair back around to face the table and his computer.

Turning to go, Daniel glanced over at the food truck, meaning to wave goodbye to Miguel, but the service window was vacant, just as he had initially found it, its cold fluorescent glow fading against the gray developing dawn. Hollow and numb with exhaustion, he headed for the Camaro in its parking space on the other side of the beat-up van which he now knew to be Nick’s.

At the closest pump island, an enormous white Winnebago was gassing up. A plump young woman with sleep-mussed hair, in flip-flops, shorts and a pink sweatshirt with DISNEYLAND emblazoned across the front above the face of Mickey Mouse, was stepping down from the recreational vehicle’s side door, a coffee mug in one hand and the edge of an unfolded road map in the other. Behind her, in the doorway, stood a little boy about three or four years old, wearing pajamas, rubbing his eyes.

Alongside the next island over was a pickup truck couple to a two-masted sailboat on a trailer. A man in an International Orange nylon windbreaker, Levis and deck shoes, the sailor, presumed Daniel, stood before the cashier’s booth, transacting business.

Approaching the car, Daniel reached into his right pocket and fished out keys and cell phone. He had carried the cell along with him on his excursion, with the ringer shut off, mostly in case he needed roadside service. Now, as he pointed his keychain remote fob and pushed the button to unlock the Camaro’s doors, he flipped the phone open and checked its pale blue screen for missed calls and voice mail, although he hadn’t felt it vibrate once. Nothing.

Just who he expected to have tried to reach him over the past few hours, he couldn’t have said. Sheila? She didn’t even call him during the day, unless it was something they had to discuss about Melanie. Melanie, maybe? A middle-of-the-night post adolescent college student crisis? Sometimes Melanie seemed more mature in her way than he felt, lately,, himself, more clear about her life than he was feeling about his. Sure, she called now and then just to chat, but during the evening or on the weekend. And she emailed him regularly from her bedroom in the off-campus apartment she shared with an ever-changing cast of two, three or four roommates, frequently at exactly such night-owl hours, according to the time stamps on the messages he found in his inbox at home or on his office PC the next morning. But a 3 A.M. freakout call? Not likely.

And then there was Jacqueline, the new paralegal at the Law Offices of Barry J. Brackman, whose facilities did not actually include any private offices except for Brackman’s own, with its huge magisterial oak desk, Persian carpets and a window looking out onto the incessant traffic of South Beverly Drive.

Jacqueline, 36 (Daniel had accessed her information on the server) was magnificently blonde and, Daniel could easily see beneath the businesslike cut of the suits she wore to work, abundantly well favored physically, voluptuous without verging on the kind of cushioned female body type his father would have called zaftig. She had been a struggling pop musician, a singer who wrote her own songs and accompanied herself at the piano, but that career hadn’t flourished, so as she edged into her thirties, not making it as a singer-songwriter, not married, either, and losing her sense of direction altogether, a lawyer she had dated, ready to cut her loose for the inconvenient sin of carrying too much psychological “baggage,” had, over double Margaritas at the bar of the El Coyote restaurant, convinced her to train as a paralegal. For something to fall back on, as her parents had advised her in the first place.

All this Daniel had learned, not from her computerized personal data , but in conversation during the lunches they had begun taking together now and then at one or another of the cafes nearby, at Daniel’s invitation. Daniel paid the check and played the workplace confidante as she poured out her stories of bad luck and trouble. Recording deals gone wrong, a trusted lover-manager’s desertion, the toxic resentment of an older soccer-mom sibling, once an aspirant to the same kind of career herself, that her little sister should have gotten anywhere near to such a goal, even if no farther than to play occasional cabaret dates for rock-bottom pay or a cut of the door while she circulated demo CDs to agents and producers and uploaded stark, self-recorded digital files of her songs to her online home page, earning much emailed adulation and more than a few romantic or just sexual come-ons from males and females alike, but no other advantage. And then there were the none-too-subtle hints of darker soul-murk in days gone by, which Daniel divined from her repeated use of phrases like “making amends,” which were too formal for the conversational style of the times but widely understood to be from the canonical lexicon of twelve step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous, but about which he wasn’t yet ready to ask anything.

Right, thought Daniel. An emergency booty call from Jacqueline, stricken with a sudden realization that she just had to have him. Dream on, kid. Dream on.
realization that she just had to have him. Dream on, kid.
“HOO-AH!” Daniel was flipping the cell phone closed when one of Nick’s wheelchair tires slammed into the back of a leg, toppling him forward so fast that he barely got a hand out to break the fall, and still he felt his forehead slap the asphalt.

“HOO-AH! HOO-AH!” shouted Nick as he launched himself out of his seat onto the prostrate Daniel. The man had formidable upper body strength, all that wheelchair work , Daniel imagined, and the ferocity of the sudden assault was fearsome, no one having laid a combative hand on him since a hallway scuffle in tenth grade at Fairfax High. He tried to push himself up and throw off the boozy, flailing maniac as Nick’s punches kept raining down.

Whump! A hard one to his right-side rib cage that felt like it broke bone. “Hoo-ah!” A closed-hand smash to the left temple. Daniel could feel his brain ricocheting inside his skull. “yellow-belly cocksucker!” Another body blow, this one to the right kidney. Nick was holding him down with one hand and punching with the other, changing hands as the placement of blows demanded. “Let the Nick Zanettis do your fighting for you while you demonstrate with all the other spoiled little brats. Fuck you, man. Just fuck you! People like you are a blood blister on the brain of the fucking world.” More blows punctuated this harangue and followed it, and now the pain was coming from so many places that Daniel could not even localize it anymore. Did Nick have something in those remorseless gloved paws of his? And did he know, no, of course he couldn’t know, but did he possibly intuit, somehow, the part Daniel had so judiciously left unsaid, the actual reason for his military nonservice? No, that’s just paranoid, Daniel reassured himself as the blows kept coming.

With great effort, he finally managed to raise his chest a few degrees off the ground, giving silent thanks for all the bench presses he’d done at the gym after work to put off going home alone too the new apartment.

But then another weight crashed onto his back, and he collapsed again, and then all the weight rolled off him, all at once, in a commotion of struggle and grunting. Gingerly, Daniel rolled onto his side and looked. Miguel, sans apron, was sprawled atop a struggling, face-down nick, twisting one of his arms backward at an unnatural-looking angle, fierce determination on his flat-nosed, big-browed face, which Daniel, in the enormity of his relief, found suddenly beautiful.

“Get off me, you squatty little wetback mutant!” Nick grunted. “,You’re breaking my fucking arm!” In response to which Miguel muttered something lethal-sounding in Spanish through clenched teeth and bore down harder.

A gunshot shattered the early morning quiet, followed by the startled shriek of a baby. The mother in the Disneyland sweatshirt rushed back into the Winnebago, pushing her little boy ahead of her. The man in the orange windbreaker dashed the few feet to his pickup and disappeared behind it. The kid in the cashier’s booth popped out of his door like a cuckoo clock figure, stood gaping for a second, then popped back inside again.

“Okay, mister,” came a woman’s voice from behind them. “ that’s enough! Just lie still and keep your hands where I can see them. Miguel, why don’t you just get yourself clear of that fool, babe.”

Daniel looked around, and there she was, Miguel’s wife, framed in the lonchería window. She was definitely not a dwarf, not even a small Mexican woman. Not Mexican at all. she was Five-seven, at least, Daniel guessed, fair-skinned with long tresses of red hair, redder than his had ever been before the gray came in,, cascading to her shoulders. She wore an untucked green football jersey. The child, whose screams of alarm were subsiding into rhythmic sobbing punctuated by hiccups, was strapped to her back in a baby carrier of some sort. And in both hands, held out before her in regulation pistol firing form, she gripped the Magnum Miguel had shown him earlier, sighting down its long barrel in their direction.

“Shush, sweetie,” she reassured the squalling child without taking her eyes off them. “Cálmate, mi amor. Tranquilito. Mommy’s here.”

To be continued…

by Joel Deutsch

Aching everywhere, Daniel sat slumped on the couch. There was gravel ground into a gash on his forehead and into both raw, bloody knees. A huge lump swelled from one temple. There were bruises on his arms and shoulders, and every breath he drew cost him a stab of excruciating pain. Gingerly, he prodded one knee with an exploratory index finger.

“Don’t pick at anything,” the woman called from another room, as if she were reading his mind. “As soon as I put the baby down, I’ll be right in with my first aid stuff.”

Except for the cutaway mockup that had been used as the main set of an old TV series, Daniel had never seen the inside of a house trailer of any sort at all. The series had featured an eccentric Los Angeles private detective who lived in one, right on the ocean. His beachfront residence, or at least the back lot replica presented as such, had always struck Daniel as curiously spacious. Cluttered with the domestic chaos of bachelor living and a haphazard excuse for a home office, yes, but for all that, not anywhere near as cramped as he would have imagined such an abode to be.

This place, by comparison, was about as confining as a submarine Daniel had toured once with his parents on vacation in San Diego, but so neatly kept as to not induce even a hint of claustrophobia. In the dim light that managed to filter in through the nearly opaque black curtains snugged up against the few small windows, he looked around.

Off to the right, on his side of the trailer, was a galley-style kitchen equipped with sink, cabinets, stove, oven and refrigerator, and across from it was a four-person dining booth. Beyond that RAN a short, narrow hallway down which Nora, for that was the woman’s name, had disappeared carrying her baby—o those long, bluejeaned legs, that luxuriant blaze of hair– leading back to what had to be the bedroom and the bathroom.

The living room was wood-paneled, like a basement family recreation room from the time of his childhood. The couch, an old black leather number that was worn but not yet sagging, was against the wall opposite the trailer’s door, flanked on one side by an end table with a small lamp and fronted by a glass-topped coffee table.

By the opposite wall was an old recliner that matched the couch, similarly just short of decrepitude.

One rear corner was occupied by a TV stand with an old-fashioned 21” set atop It and a VCR and a DVD player stacked on its lower shelf. In the other corner, on a pedestal draped with scarlet cloth, stood a large version of the weird statue Daniel had noticed on Miguel’s ashtray, three feet or so tall, made of what looked like alabaster. It had the same sepulchral, skull-like visage, the coiled ropes of hair, the gnarled skeletal hands and feet, and the upraised scythe, but this one looked all dressed up for some kind of macabre dance: A jeweled ring flashed from every finger, it wore a plumed purple hat instead of a cowl, and large twin spots of what looked like rouge conferred a festive blush on its pale, bony cheeks.

Carefully arrayed before the statue’s base lay a cluster of what looked like ritual offerings: A partially-smoked cigar resting in a glass ashtray, an unopened bottle of Presidente tequila, a small pile of coins, and a fat black lighted candle in a chipped white saucer. On the wall a foot or two to one side of the statue’s head was a framed handbill or poster of some sort whose images and lettering were too small for Daniel to see clearly from where he sat.

Nora had laid out her first aid supplies on the coffee table, and was dabbing at his forehead with a gauze pad she had dipped into a small bowl of warm soapy water. The dabbing, gentle as it was, stung, and Daniel winced.

“Sorry,” she said, giving Daniel’s forehead a final pat and dropping the gauze into an empty Supermarket bag she’d set on the floor between couch and coffee table. “But this laceration has got to be cleaned out, or else you’ll be looking at a nasty infection. Trust me. I’m a nurse.” Using a tweezers, holding Daniel’s head still with her free hand, she began picking out the embedded bits of gravel.

Vacantly, Daniel stared down at the open brown paper bag with its two brown paper handles and the big red Ralphs logo on its side. Why “Ralphs,” he had always wondered? Why not Ralph’s, with the possessive apostrophe? When he spoke the word aloud, there was always an apostrophe in his mind’s eye, a reflexive correction. He ought to look it up online, he told himself for the millionth time. Google it. There was bound to be something about that on the Web. These days, there was something about everything. He remembered when not everybody had a computer, and if a person had one, it wasn’t hooked up to search engines, databases or email or anything. If you were a lawyer, or maybe a journalist, he supposed, you had a terminal sitting on its own desk in the office where you typed requests for information into Lexus or Nexus, and that was about it. And Lexus or Nexus were not going to tell you anything about the spelling of a supermarket chain’s name.

Although the tweezer’s probings stung, the operation had its upside; to Daniel, who, apart from handshakes and shoulder pats, had lately not been touched very much at all, the press of this woman’s steadying palm was distracting, analgesic, nearly sedative. And then there was the fragrance of her hair, the kindly concentration in her green eyes, the knowing, graceful rise and fall of her forearm. He was floating in a memory haze of better times. The boyhood comfort of being mothered when mothering was needed, the hopefulness of young manhood that, if you learned what women’s conditions were and then learned how to fulfill them, that at least a few precious crumbs of such comfort might, on occasion, be restored.

Sheila, unfortunately and paradoxically considering her choice of a helping profession, had not been the nurturing type. Throughout Melanie’s childhood, she had treated her daughter more clinically than maternally, her counseling style evolving over time through three or four variants of the interpersonal approach and then settling into a fervent devotion to the principles and techniques of cognitive behavioral therapy,. With the result that Melanie had learned early on to turn to Daniel, not to her mother, if it was simple human empathy and soothing encouragement she needed, instead of a lesson in how to recognize and catalogue her patterns of negative thinking so that a salutary cognitive shift might be induced. Whatever sins and follies a hard judge might ascribe to his marital and parental comportment, and whatever the stereotype of male lawyers might suggest, Daniel had not been the kind of work-obsessed, narcissistic and emotionally unavailable father even he had seen plenty of among his colleagues. Probably one of the few upsides to his late start. The kind of job that would have distorted him that way, he couldn’t have gotten even if he’d begged. Which left no one watching over him, of course, as he had watched over Melanie. but such were the tradeoffs, such was his personal river of spilled milk.

“All gone,” said Nora, relaxing her grip on the tweezers to let one last nugget of gravel drop into the Ralphs bag. “I’ll do something else here before I clean up your knees.”

“Thanks,” said Daniel, relaxing tensed shoulders, releasing held breath. “Mind telling me What’s up with that statue over there? Is it some kind of shrine?”

“that’s la Santa Muerte,” said Nora, setting the tweezers aside and rinsing the wound with another folding of wet gauze, this time soaked in clean water from a second bowl.

“Saint Death?” asked Daniel. “Seriously?”

“or La Niña Blanca,” laughed Nora. “The little white girl. Or la Negrita. The little black girl. Or Santa Marta. Or La Flaca, the skinny one. Prison inmates call her La Madrina. The Godmother. Take your pick. You know how the Virgin of Guadalupe is the official patron saint of Mexico, right? Well, Santa Muerte is the patron saint of the Dark Side. She’s the saint of the people who don’t completely trust the Blessed Virgin to sympathize with their kinds of problems. People who live risky or dangerous lives. Drug runners, for instance. But not only criminals. Taxi drivers. Prostitutes. Cops who work in the roughest barrios. Creative people, too. A lot of actors and poets and street musicians worship her. And wrestlers. La Santa Muerte is very popular with professional Mexican wrestlers.

she took another gauze pad out of its sterile wrapping and cut two strips of white surgical tape to make a bandage. “do you know what lucha libre is?”

Daniel shook his head.

“It’s like the World Wrestling Federation matches they show on TV,” she said, “ but even crazier. A lot more dangerous. ‘Free-style combat,’ is what it means, more or less. The wrestlers all wear these wild-looking masks that cover their whole heads and make them look like bank robbers on Halloween or something. They practically don’t even have any rules. It’s faked as far as who’s supposed to win, but it’s rough and dangerous, anyway. That part of it is real.”

She positioned the bandage and pressed down the strips of tape. “Let me show you something,” she said. She got up, went over to the corner with the statue, took the small framed poster off its hook, brought it back and, taking her seat again beside Daniel, gave it to him to hold.

It was a Spanish language handbill for a wrestling exhibition at an arena he had never heard of in Panorama City, scheduled for a Saturday night four years past. In the center was a picture of an empty, spotlighted fight ring, with text trumpeting the big event superimposed. ¡Sábado! ¡La battala más grande del año 2002! And down each side were photographs of the contestants on that night’s bill, facing each other across this middle space, each one with the wrestler’s stage name underneath. Daniel was able to translate a few: The Monster, the Angel of Death, Mr. Thunder. They were bulldozer-bodied men in garish hooded masks, a gallery of nightmare executioners. And halfway down the roster of these matched, musclebound opponents was a pair of dwarves, striking threatening poses. One of whom was called El Diablito.

Miguel’s mask—for Daniel, remembering the sign on the truck, knew it had to be Miguel—was fire red, with hellish-looking orange flames radiating out from the eyes and the mouth hole. His misproportioned body was much more developed and powerful-looking than Daniel would have imagined, and there was no sign of the modest middle-aged belly of the present.

“I was working graveyard shift at the County USC ER the night someone brought Miguel in after a lucha libre match with a concussion and a dislocated shoulder,,” said Nora. “That’s how we met. I was divorced from my first husband, no kids, and all I had going for a love life was this cute Bangladeshi neurosurgery resident who never even took me anywhere, if you don’t count the Norris Cancer Center cafeteria. He was really a sweet man, but he was from a traditional Muslim family, immigrants, and all his friends were the same. Everybody was constantly trying to set him up with a Muslim woman for marriage. He flew to Houston to meet one of them, and another time he went all the way to England. He said no one would understand him dating me. He was very affectionate, very sincere. But he was serious about that, and I didn’t have any illusions about us having a future.

“And then, with Miguel, I don’t know. It just happened. If you’d asked me back then if I thought I would ever be living with a man who doesn’t even come up to my chin…”

While she was talking, she had cleaned both of Daniel’s knees and begun tweezing gravel again.

“you mind if I ask you something personal?” said Daniel.

“depends how personal,” said Nora. “You have no idea the rude things some people think they can ask you.”

“I was just wondering about the baby. How does that work? I mean, is he going to be like Miguel?” Though of course he had wondered other things, as well. Wouldn’t anybody?

“Carlito’s not a dwarf,” Nora said. “Miguel is an achondroplastic, and achons—she pronounced it ‘á-kons’– have one dwarfism gene for stature and one normal gene. And I have two normal genes. Which put the odds at 50/50,and they turned in his favor. So he might grow up tall, or he might grow up short, but he won’t be like his daddy. Now, can I ask you something?”

Daniel, wincing at the prick of the tweezers, nodded.

“It’s about what happened out there when the police came. I couldn’t have just let him go, the way you did.”

To be continued…

by Joel Deutsch

A Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department patrol car swung in off the road, cutting its siren but leaving its light bar flashing. What a tableau they must present, thought Daniel. A muscular Mexican dwarf and an earth mother redhead, now holding the .357, which was registered to her, standing guard over a disheveled man who could have been the veteran of at least two different branches of the service and two different wars, with a dazed-looking bespectacled professional type thrown in for good measure.
There were two deputies. The driver was a trim, middle-aged white man with graying temples whose name tag said Garner . His partner, name tag Lee, was a sturdy-looking young Asian-American woman, korean,Daniel guessed. Clipboards in hand, they interviewed. Deputy lee talked to Miguel and Nora, Deputy Garner had Daniel. At one point, Deputy Garner arose from the seat he had taken next to Daniel at the table, walked over and asked Nick for his side of the story, but Nick just lay glaring up at him from the ground, propped up on his elbows with his useless legs outstretched before him at unnatural-looking angles, saying nothing.

Then, their interviews done, together Garner and Lee had lifted Nick up between them and deposited him, unresisting, into their patrol car’s back seat.

While Deputy Lee crammed Nick’s folded wheelchair into the pursuit cruiser’s trunk,, Deputy Garner picked his clipboard off the car’s hood where he’d left it and came back over to Daniel.

“So you’re sure you don’t want to press charges?” he asked, clicking his ballpoint repeatedly. “If I was you, I sure as hell would. You’ve got witnesses and everything. Maybe you need to see yourself in a mirror.”

“I don’t know,” said Daniel. “ I think a few hours in jail sobering up should be enough to teach him a lesson. I think he’s just a bad-luck Viet Nam vet with a drinking problem and maybe some other kind of substance abuse issues.”

“What if I told you he wasn’t really a disabled vet?” said Deputy Garner . “What if I told you he wasn’t even in the Army, ever?”

“Seriously?”

“It’s all bullshit, sir, pardon my French. This guy has been causing trouble around Santa Barbara for as long as I’ve been with the Department. Not to mention Oxnard, or Ventura, or San Luis Obispo, or any other place he has enough gas in that van to drive to when he “forgets” to take his medication and starts drinking. He’s what they used to call manic-depressive.”

“bi-polar,” said Daniel.”

“yeah,” said Deputy Sheriff Garner. “That’s it. “Bi-polar. And he’s supposed to take these meds. But sometimes he doesn’t. And then he starts drinking. And all hell breaks loose.

“what we have here is not a man who’s suffering from post traumatic stress related to military service. I can tell you that flat-out. He had polio when he was a kid. As I understand it, he not only survived it but regained his ability to walk, although this was with a bad limp. But now the polio comes back sometimes and he needs to use crutches or the wheelchair. Which you can see for yourself.

“And he’s not poor, either. Not by a long shot. His family owns Z-Man’s Pizza, up near the University. They’ve been in business for years. The place takes up half a block all by itself, and their parking lot takes up the other half. Even when the chains came in, like Pizza Hut and those, it didn’t make a dent. They’ve got a big house in town, they’ve got a rancho with its own vineyard up in the hills in Montecito, and a nice little yacht down at the Marina. Right across from Zenetti’s Seafood which, you guessed it, is them, too.

“For all the good it did this one, I guess,” said the cop, with a nod at Nick, sullen in the cruiser’s back seat. The father died a couple of years ago, and the business went to the brother. Both businesses. So like I say, we aren’t talking about a war hero who’s having a bad day. he’s just a troublemaker, living in the mother-in-law cottage in back of the family house on some kind of trust fund and acting up like this every once in awhile.”

Daniel smiled wistfully at the story.

“Change your mind, sir?” asked Deputy sheriff Garner. “Feel more like pressing charges now, maybe?”

“No,” said Daniel. “I’m pretty sure I’m going to be okay. So why don’t we just let it drop.”

“Your call,” sir,” shrugged Deputy Sheriff Garner , and produced a business card from his shirt pocket. “If you want to talk, here’s my contact information.” He got up, went over to the patrol car, where Deputy Lee was already waiting inside, got behind the wheel and pulled his door shut.

“We’ll get this guy’s van towed off the lot for you folks in a couple of hours,” he said to Miguel and Nora, firing up the engine and shifting into Drive.

“Wait, Don,” said Deputy Lee. Deputy Garner braked, and the patrol car, already nosing forward, lurched to a stop. “What, Myrna?”

Deputy Lee raised her hips off the car seat, pulled something from a trouser pocket and handed it to him. He looked at the object and then held it out the window.

“Whose cell phone is this?” Miguel and Nora just shook their heads. Nick didn’t even look. Daniel patted his pockets, got up from the table and came over, and the deputy dropped the cell into his upturned palm. Daniel flipped it open to glance at the screen, flipped it closed again. “It’s mine, he said. “thanks.”

“He was kind of lying on it,” explained Deputy Lee. “I forgot to say anything. Sorry. He was a real handful.”

* * *

Daniel, his head on a pillow, lay on the couch in the living room of Nora and Miguel’s trailer. Nora prodded and palpated, daubed on disinfectant, applied gauze and tape.

“That should feel better in a few days, maybe a week.” She got a glass of water from the kitchen, put it on the coffee table, sat back down on the edge of the couch and produced an amber plastic pharmacy bottle from which she shook two caplets into Daniel’s hand. “Sit up a little,” she directed, and passed him the glass of water and the pills.

“What were those,” he asked her after he swallowed.

“Just Vicodan. Nothing major. Now lie down again. You want a cover?”

And all the time he’d been seeing himself driving home. Very funny. “Yeah,” he said, letting his head fall back, closing his eyes and folding his arms across his chest. “That would be nice.”

There was the soft drift of some kind of quilt or comforter settling onto him, the cocoanut fragrance of Nora’s hair, then nothing.

To be continued…

by Joel Deutsch

Through the Camaro’s windshield, the housing tracts and strip malls of the San Fernando Valley spread out in a sunbaked, smog-veiled vastness. At intervals, isolated office towers thrust themselves up like fortresses commanding unboundaried sectors of a nomadic desert.

Whatever it was Daniel had wanted out of life, the Valley had not been it. The flatness, the sameness, the gigantic sprawling grid of post-war ranch houses on post-war real estate development lots, rolled-up copies of the Daily News on the morning driveways instead of the Los Angeles times, the chain restaurants, the auto dealerships and car washes and convenience stores, the midday depopulation of everywhere but the shopping centers and, later, the indoor malls. The calibrated suburban stasis of the wife, the house, the 2.3 kids, the cocker spaniel or the collie or the pound-rescued mutt. The full catastrophe, as Anthony Quinn’s dancing bear of a Zorba had called such an existence in the movie, which was of course set in a different time and a different place entirely, a rocky Greece of harsher edges than deeper shadows. But still. And what had he managed, actually, by way of escape? Not much, really, he had to admit. The wife, he’d had. The house, too. Although there had been only the one kid, by mutual agreement, and no dog, ever, Sheila being allergic. At least Silver Lake wasn’t the Valley. And now, all that gone, anyway. Sic transit.

He had the radio on. A disc jockey at the NPR station was playing a string of Brazilian pop songs, and the suavely incomprehensible Portuguese vocals and lilting, samba-inflected rhythms went some distance toward softening his frustration with the slow-and-go congestion on the Ventura Freeway. Even on a Saturday, even on the first day of a three-day weekend, even with gas prices nudging long-standing record highs, still they all came out, the sober compact sedans and the lumbering pickups, the stubby soccer-Mom mini-vans and the sleek stretch limos, the high end autobahncruisers and the rattletrap ghetto wagons, the whole perpetually mobilized Southern California fleet.

Daniel had slept like a rock, rising into consciousness only once, briefly, when the trailer’s door had allowed in a burst of daylight as Nora went out to man the lonchería, and again a few minutes later when Miguel, exhausted from a long, hard night and morning, dragged in and passed through en route to bathroom and bedroom.

When he awoke, still sore and smarting, it was past noon. Nora, having rested, bathed and changed into another of her oversized jerseys, a yellow one this time, had fixed him a proper breakfast of eggs scrambled with crumbly chorizo sausage, warm corn tortillas, and fresh coffee. While Daniel ate, she chatted with him across the counter, stretching out a foot from time to time to rock Carlito in his basinet on the floor beside her stool.

Carlito had cried his cry of hunger, and Nora had picked him up, lifted one side of her jersey and nursed. Daniel tried not to stare, looking away or straight into Nora’s face as they talked, relying on his peripheral vision for a blurred view of smooth, swollen breast held up to suckling mouth. Thus looking and not looking, he felt some kind of portal opening from the hermitage of his post-marital erotic limbo, felt the depressive anesthesia of exile beginning to dissipate. Which is to say, he felt his heart beat, his cock stir. Better days, he silently toasted this Madonna tableau, lifting the white Styrofoam coffee cup ever so subtly. Better days.

Finally, the Ventura Freeway became the Hollywood Freeway and veered southward out of the Valley toward the city proper. Just as Daniel came off his exit ramp onto Cahuenga Boulevard, the cell phone gave out with its rinky-dinky rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In. He had installed the ring tone a year before in tribute to hurricane-devastated New Orleans and never gotten around to replacing it, although it had long since begun to annoy him. Nothing against the old jazz-progenitor classic itself. But this synthetic digital version sounded less like the Second Line strut of a spirited post-funeral street procession than the fanfare from a first-generation video game that went off every time you wiped out another screenful of space monsters.

he turned off the radio and grabbed the phone from where it lay in the armrest bin atop a clutter of parking meter change, cordless shaver and unused fast food paper napkins, flipped it open and snuck a glance at the caller I.D., the number was unfamiliar, a Santa Barbara area code. Deputy Garner, already? Not likely. Miguel or Nora? He’d given them his home number, not his cell. “Hello?”

Within this cleft through the hills, Cell reception was erratic; the sound broke and stuttered so badly that he was unable to decipher a single word, let alone recognize the voice.

He passed the Hollywood Bowl entrance, with its electric sign announcing the final events of the summer season. This was the first year he hadn’t spent a single evening there, on one of the benches whose hardness gave no quarter against the flagging resistance of slackened middle-aged buttocks, a punishment which, if you hadn’t brought cushions, you managed to tolerate under the balmy night sky, cradled out of time, place and daily cares by the music. Not the jazz festival, the world music specials, the symphonies, the concertos. nothing. Sheila had bought season tickets, for which series, he couldn’t remember. She kept things like those tickets in a special drawer, with the glossy program schedules for lectures and concerts and whatever. Of course he could have bought his own tickets and gone to something at the Bowl that summer, but with no one for company, who cared. He wondered if Sheila was attending any of the programs, herself, and who with.

He asked the caller to repeat himself, and the caller complied, but the result was no more intelligible than before. He was just about to say try me again in five minutes when he emerged from the pass on Highland Avenue,, and the signal cleared up.

“It’s Nick, man. Nick Zanetti. Please don’t—“ Daniel, startled by the sheer nerve, and in no mood, no mood for this at all, snapped the phone shut and dropped it back into the bin. He passed Kodak Center, crossed Hollywood Boulevard on a green light, passed Hollywood High School. He was stopped for a red light at sunset, waiting for a chance to make a right turn, when the phone jingle-jangled the first few notes of “When the Saints Go Marching In” again.

“I’m trying to apologize, man. Just give me a chance.”

“Where did you get my cell number?” Daniel demanded. He saw an opening in the cross-traffic, nudged the gas, palmed the steering wheel clockwise with his left hand and headed west toward his new neighborhood. Across the street, a knot of Latino teenagers, boys and girls together, jostled their way out the door of the Burger King and hit the sidewalk. On his right, just beyond the corner of La Brea, a narrow-hipped, tousle-haired blonde in hot pants and heels, close to six feet tall and nearly flat-chested in a tank top, was posed with one foot on the curb and the other on the pavement between two parked cars, thumb held out, soliciting. Not just a ride. A ”sex worker,” as Sheila would say. Not prostitute, a term she had explained to Daniel was ineradicably tainted by hypocritical moral disapprobation, an obsolete, contemptuous name for what was actually an eternally oppressed skill-set sub-category of the working class.

“I heard when you told it to the cop,” said Nick.

A passenger in an old Toyota two cars ahead of him hurled a beer can or a soda can, empty, Daniel hoped, at the hitchhiker, who deftly batted the projectile aside with an agile and muscular bare arm, and flipped the bird to the rear-view mirrors of the departing tormentors, his or hers or something intermediate, Daniel couldn’t guess. He’d seen the categories in the online Personals ads he’d taken to surfing, dully, sometimes at night, sipping a beer. Trans man, trans woman. Pre-op for operative, or post-op. Top or bottom and other distinctions of anatomy and fetish. A whole lexicon, a whole new gender taxonomy had sprung up while he was out of the room, was how it felt.

“That’s some memory,” said Daniel. “Especially drunk.”

“Yeah,” Nick allowed, pride in his tone. “It’s definitely above average, that’s for sure. Look, what I wanted to tell you is—“

“Seems to me your memory isn’t that clear about some pretty big things, Nick, Daniel cut in. “like Vietnam, for instance. The cop told me you were never there.”

“Deputy Garner.”

“yes.”

“I can explain,” said Nick. “You just have to give me a chance.”

“You have more than that to explain,” said Daniel, his anger rising. “A fuck of a lot more than that. Like what you did to me up there, this morning.” In his mirror, he saw a white BMW pulled over to the curb, the blonde person getting into it. Good luck, he thought, thinking of lethal risk at the mercy of strangers, wondering if the person’s size meant they could take care of themselves if necessary, wondering what it was the two of them would do, in what kind of configuration, deciding it would probably be just the same old menu of services, by whatever orifices and organs were available, stock equipment or aftermarket. What a world, he thought. What a world. Compared to feeling misplaced within your very own body from childhood, which he understood was how it usually worked, mere Existential alienation seemed pretty trivial.

“I know,” agreed Nick, sounding rueful. “I know. That’s why I called you.”

“I can’t imagine what there is to explain,” Daniel said. “As far as I’m concerned, explanation is kind of moot at this point. But I’ll tell you what, Nick. I’m willing to let the whole thing go. No criminal charges, no civil lawsuit. Nothing. I’m willing to forget that the incident ever happened.”

“Yeah,” said Nick. “I know you are. They told me when they let me out. That was righteous of you, man. Massively righteous. “

“I have my reasons,” said Daniel. “But there’s one condition attached.” He was almost home. There, on the right, was Feedback Freddie’s, the guitar megastore. Enough collective wattage and decibels in those industrial -sized amps and gargantuan speaker stacks behind the display windows to suck all the electricity out of the Department of Water and Power and black out Los Angeles like Baghdad.

“Condition?” said Nick. “ Fine. Just tell me. I want to do the right thing. That’s all I want.”

“The condition,” said Daniel , hanging a right onto his block, “is that you cease and desist trying to get in touch with me like this. Completely. Just leave me alone. Simple, yes?”

The street was a mixture of a few surviving old bungalows behind parched, shallow front lawns interspersed with apartment complexes more or less like his, with every ground floor taken up for most of its width by a security-barred entrance to underground parking, its foyer just big enough for a row of mailboxes and an elevator door, crammed in at one end of the façade or the other like an afterthought.

Daniel turned into his building’s driveway, punched the button on the remote control clipped to his sun visor, and watched as the gate rolled aside on its track. Through all this, Nick said nothing.

“Nick, did you hear what I said? Am I being clear?”

“Yeah, man. I heard you. But there’s stuff I’d really like to explain. If I did, maybe you’d understand where my head was at when that shit happened, before.”

“the point isn’t what I understand or don’t understand, Nick. The point is that I feel secure that you understand the conditions of your getting off scot-free after committing acts that are prosecutable in criminal court and actionable under civil law, too.”

“I do,” said Nick. “I do. And I’m grateful. Seriously grateful. Sincerely grateful. But– ”

Good,” said Daniel. “then that’s it, Nick. Our business is finished. Concluded. I’m saying goodbye now.” He closed the phone, dropped it back into the armrest bin, hung his prescription sunglasses from the neck of his t-shirt by one temple, and rolled down the ramp into the dimness of the garage. Unbelievable, he thought. Crazy way to start a holiday weekend.

To be continued…

by Joel Deutsch

this is what It must be like to be dead, Nick remembered thinking, except that your head wouldn’t stick out of the coffin. And there wouldn’t be this giant hand squeezing your thorax and relaxing its grip, over and over, nor the chuff and wheeze of the compressor repeatedly clasping and unclasping the hand, as one of the nurses explained it to him. A machine of loving grace, he would think years later, when he saw the book of poems with that phrase in it, a book some college kid had left behind alongside his plate with its abandoned crescent of gnawed, hardening crust from the half sausage half anchovy he and his girlfriend had shared. Limping over in his stained apron to bus the kid’s table after the pizzeria had closed for the night, they having been the last two customers, he had skimmed through the book just out of curiosity. Computers like flowers with spinning petals? The kid probably thought that was really brilliant. Probably wrote an English paper about it for college, for some class where you could look out the window and see below you the ocean, the surfers, the sailboats. Nick supposed they had classrooms like that, in buildings at the edge of the mesa. He’d never set foot onto the campus. Maybe that was the poem the kid had read aloud to her while she, cute, absorbed, nodding, munched on a slice of the anchovy side, he had noticed from behind the counter. But that didn’t make sense. He’d seen the computer in the data processing room of the Bank of America branch where his father kept the family’s accounts, the same branch whose front window that girl had hurled a rock through at the anti Vietnam demonstration, the photograph printed as posters and silk-screened onto t-shirts you still saw around, now and then, here and there. The room was climate controlled and chilly, like a reverse greenhouse. Sure, the reels of tape spun. But they were arrayed in rows across the faces of panels stacked one atop another in floor-to-ceiling racks, not propped up on metal poles like microphone stands or something. Obviously, the writer had just made it up. He skimmed another couple of poems, then tossed the paperback volume into the garbage bin at the front end of the conveyor belt that ran the dirty crockery and flatware into the steaming open mouth of the dishwasher.

After the recess period where he and a few of the other boys had challenged each other to do a lot of show-offy things on the monkey bars, grappling and swinging forward and backward, hand over hand, as fast as they could go, he had felt sore, deeply sore, something besides just the usual burning shoulder muscles and blistered palms. And the next day, waking with fever, had been unable to sit up and get himself out of his bed. “Try to touch your chin to your chest,” Dr. Geraci had directed when he came to the apartment over their little trattoria on Vallejo Street, and he couldn’t.

That had been in June, just as the fog started pouring off the Bay up Columbus Avenue to blanket the neighborhood every morning. The rest of the summer, and months beyond, after the ride in the doctor’s own car over to children’s Hospital for the spinal tap, his father’s Ford being in the shop for repairs that day, he spent living in the polio ward there. thank god his breathing started working on its own again after a couple of weeks, because he couldn’t imagine being trapped inside the iron lung any longer than that, feeling the steady cresting and receding pulse of the pressure, watching the room behind him through a mirror attached to the rim of the enclosure above the airtight collar. It reminded him of the tom Mix comic book issue where Tom gets tied up by bad guys who knock his cowboy hat off his head, take his horse and his six-gun and shove him inside a hollow log and set it on fire, and it looks like he’s not going to be able to save himself even though of course he does, managing to bend his knees just enough to smash his way out with his bootheels. Nick had had nightmares about being Tom Mix and being trapped inside the log, unable to move, and had woken up so scared a few times that he’d braved his feeling of mortification to go into his parent’s room and ask to sleep with them until the morning came. And then there were the little kids on the ward screaming all around the clock except when one of the nurses was with them, talking, cooing, ministering as best she could to their comfort and maintenance. Sometimes he let himself cry at night, but as quietly as he could and always reluctantly, because who would wipe away his tears for him or help him blow his nose?

There were the hot compresses, which sometimes scorched his stiffened leg but took away the pain of the rolling cramps, too, and the whirlpool bath and the physical therapists working his atrophying muscles to the point of screaming agony.

And then the splints, and the leg brace, and the walking practice between the parallel bars, and then the metal crutches that clamped onto his forearms so he wouldn’t drop them. And finally he was able to take a few steps without the crutches, although the walking would never be easy again or look normal.

He was lucky, he knew. People had died. Children, teenagers, grownups too. His mother had told him about a family in St. Anne’s parish, out in the Sunset, where the disease had taken both the father and his five-year-old daughter, two months apart. It was the very next summer when they had everybody line up in the same gym, on the basketball court to get their sugar cubes dosed with the Salk vaccine, but he didn’t go then because Dr. Geraci had told his parents not to let him take the vaccine this first time but to wait for the second administration, instead.

When he finally began dragging his withered left leg back and forth across Washington Square to and from Sts. Peter and Paul, a year later and a grade behind, the old men would look up from their copies of the Chronicle and L’Italia and their discussions about the fishing business or their war memories or whatever it was they talked about, and just stare at him, without shame, the way his mother said they looked at women. Some would cross themselves. Others, their eyes narrowed with fear and repugnance, would spit gobs of old man phlegm onto the cigarette butts at their feet and mumble prophylactic curses.

As soon as word got around what had happened to the Zanettis, business dropped off at the restaurant, and no one booked the back room anymore for wedding receptions and anniversary parties on the weekend nights. the teenage crowd who had been coming by to visit with Nick’s older sister Claire or take her along with them to a movie down on Market Street disappeared. At church, nobody wanted to sit in the same pew with Lou and Sylvia and Claire, and later, Nick, except for Franco Trombetta and his wife Angela. Franco and Angela were childless, and together they ran the stall at the Wharf where Lou came every morning for his calamari, shrimp, fish fillets, and sometimes abalone. But that was the exception. Even after Nick was out of the hospital and learning to lurch around on the crutches, obviously survived and obviously no longer contagious as everyone in the neighborhood with two good eyes could plainly see, the restaurant sat practically empty, and no one except the Trombettas ever had them over anymore or came by the apartment.

Nick would fasten the crutches around his forearms, stagger down the steep flight of steps to the street door like a big, clattering insect, and make a circuit around the long block he lived on. Powell over to Green, a right to Stockton, another right back to Vallejo, then another right to bring him home. As he got better at the walking, he would go an extra block one way or the other, sometimes. He did this until he had memorized every number on every apartment entrance and shop door, and knew the tall Negro mailman, Mr. Dorsey, by name. the postman said to call him Carl, but Nick kept forgetting, and Carl would laugh every time he heard himself addressed with such formality by the game kid with the crutches and the crippled leg.

there was an art gallery on one block, and he liked to stop and catch his breath in front of it and peer into the window. The place puzzled him. The paintings on the walls didn’t look like much;, there was nothing he could recognize as a real picture of anything. And there were always men, sometimes women, too, hanging around inside, passing bottles of red wine back and forth and talking up a storm. The sweet-smelling smoke that filtered out through the mail slot in the door along with what sounded like jazz records had been pot, of course, he understood later. Beatniks, his mother called them when he mentioned it to her, and told him to just walk on by and mind his own business., but he kept stopping, because there was something so different about the place. Besides, the gallery came at the perfect spot for a rest, which he really needed by that point along his route.

One afternoon, as Nick took his exercise walk just before suppertime and paused by the gallery as usual, a man inside noticed him looking through the window and came out to join him on the sidewalk. A grownup, but younger than his father. He was wearing the kind of navy blue suit businessmen wore, although without a tie, as if he had gone out for lunch from some office and then forgotten to go back to work. Although he didn’t look quite right for a businessman. The suit was rumpled, and both side pockets bulged with books that stuck out of them. The wavy dark hair was badly in need of a trim, and the white shirt had a spot on it. The man pulled a pack of cigarettes from an inside jacket pocket, shook one out and lit it with a match, looking at Nick the whole time.

He was a slight man, sallow-faced, slender in the soft-bodied way of the lay brothers at school, as if it wasn’t muscles that were holding his body together but the clothes, like packaging. Behind a pair of black-framed glasses, his eyes looked as if they had bright, dancing minds of their own. He looked a little bit like Dr. Levine, at Children’s Hospital, those terrible few weeks, and Dr. Levine had been very kind and very comforting, so that was a nice memory, a nice association for Nick, and so when the man smiled and said hello to him, Nick smiled and said hi back.

The man said his name was Solomon, and to just call him Sol. Nick said he was Nick. Sol asked him about his life with the kind of interest Nick could tell was sincere, not the way most grownups who didn’t know him talked to him, except for Father Timothy, which made him feel special and safe. So he told Sol about everything. church and school, the family and the restaurant, even the polio.

“You know something, Nick?” Sol said when Nick had run out of things to tell about, flipping his smoked-down butt into the gutter with a snap of practiced fingers. “Would you mind if I told you my impression of you?”

“I guess not,” said Nick. No grownup had ever asked his permission like that. It felt a little strange, but nice, too. Respectful.

“I think you’re a very intelligent boy, for one thing,” Sol said. “and a thoughtful boy, too. And then I take a good look at you, and I think to myself, ‘that’s a handsome boy, and in a couple of years he’s going to be one very handsome young man.’ And that’s a pretty winning combination, in anyone’s book. Do you like girls, yet, Nick?”

“Not really,” said Nick. The question struck him as being a little silly. What boy his age was interested in girls? None, as far as he knew.

“Well,” said Sol, I suppose that’s natural. Although boys sometimes do have feelings about things like that, even then. It depends on the boy, I guess you could say. But I’ll bet you it won’t be long. How old are you, Nick?”

Sol looked him up and down, knitting his eyebrows thoughtfully. “Wait, let me guess. Eight. You’re eight, right?”

“Seven,” corrected Nick, flattered. “Seven and a half, actually.”

“then I guess it’ll be more than a couple of years,” said Sol, smiling. “but those years will go by very quickly. And I think you’ll have a lot of girls liking you. So you’d better get ready.”

Nick looked down at his crutches and his spindly left leg, which was more than an inch shorter than his right leg now. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think it’s going to be like that, probably.”

“Listen, Nick,” said Sol. Some men get by on perfect good looks and being athletic. Of course. If I denied that, I’d be lying and you’d know it. But a man with an injury or a deformation, you know, when something doesn’t look quite right, that kind of man can have almost a magical power over people and win their affection. You know who Franklin Roosevelt was? Have you studied any American history yet?”

“No,” said Nick. “I mean, we learned some history already but I never heard of him.”

“Well,” said Sol, “Mr. Roosevelt was a President of the United States. A great president. He did a lot of important things to help the people and many Americans, millions of people, looked up to him and loved him. And you know what?”

“What?”

Sol took off his glasses, wiped them with a rumpled handkerchief he produced out of his other inside jacket pocket, and put them back on. “He had polio,” he said. “That’s what. A pretty bad case of it. Maybe even worse than you.”

“Really,” asked Nick.

“really,” nodded Sol. So you just remember that, okay, Nick? Sometimes it’s the injured man, the damaged man, who turns out to be the biggest hero and gets to go on the most marvelous journeys and adventures.” Nick frowned. “it’s true,” said Sol. “I’ll swear to that on any holy book you want. The Old Testament. The New Testament. The Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita, The Mahayana Sutras. The Sears, Roebuck Catalogue. Cross my heart and hope to die. Isn’t that how you say it?”

The door to the art gallery opened, releasing a blast of saxophone music and smoke. “Sol,” said a bearded man in Levis and sandals and a blue chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. ”Roxanne just broke out a bag of her special brownies and we’re going to have us a nice little repast. You into that? You wanna partake?”

“Okay,” said Sol to the man. “I could use a little bit more of the sacrament about now. I’ll be right there.“ And then he turned back to Nick, “you remember what I said, promise?” but Nick was already several storefronts away, hobbling toward home, trying to absorb it all.

“What I’m gonna do, I have no idea, Sylvia,” Lou blurted out one night as he turned off the black and white TV after “I Love Lucy,” and just stood there looking at her on the couch as the TV picture shrunk to a small point of light and sizzled out like a doused flame. “Not one goddam idea.”

“Lou,” she said, softly. “Lou.”

“sorry,” he said. You know I don’t like to talk that way around you. But it just doesn’t get better. I keep waiting, but nothing changes. What I have to throw out in the garbage every night, leftovers and just plain uncooked, is enough food to feed an army. The veal, the chicken, the fish, the vegetables, the pasta old Mrs. Battaglia makes with her own hands in the morning. All wasted, everything but the wine. At this point, the way things are going, It’s a miracle I’m not drinking that up, myself.”

And then it turned out that Franco Trombetta had a second cousin by marriage, an older man, and that this cousin had a successful pizzeria in Isla Vista, right in the middle of the University of California Santa Barbara campus, and it was doing all right except his cousin was homesick for North Beach. Marco’s almost 70,” Franco explained, sitting at the Zanettis’ dinette table next to Angela after Mass one Sunday. “and he figured out he’s got enough to retire on, now. But not down there, he says. He wants to spend his old age in the old place, where he was a boy.”

Silvia served more strong coffee all around, sat back down next to Lou on their side of the table, and broke off a bite of one of the homemade chocolate almond biscotti Angela had brought with them. There were some other Italians there, said Franco, who had visited his cousin once. There were churches, maybe three or four of them not including the historic mission, Catholic schools if you wanted, everything.

“Pizza?” said Lou, disbelievingly, mashing out another of the Pall Malls he was chain smoking and expelling a great blue cloud, thinking of the fine dishes on the restaurant’s menu that were authentic enough to make a paisano, whether his roots were in Palermo or Naples or Rome, weep with joy, especially after a few glasses of the house Chianti.

“Pizza?” repeated Lou, reaching for the red Pall Mall pack on the table again although Sylvia put her hand over his to stop him. “You’re kidding me, right?”

To be continued…