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Somehow the day began with Tom Waits growling, "some say under his coat, he
has wings..."
That day Sonia and I went to visit Jake at school, during his
lunchtime. We all went to a sort of doorway, his friends Surge and
Julie smoking, Jake eating, bent into his vulture-like hunch, his
facial expressions exposed without the sunglasses he usually wears;
Sonia and I loitering and listening to them. Then Jake went back to
school for 45 minutes, Sonia and I went to a cafe, and ate lunch.
Talked about destruction and beauty (fear of glorifying destruction,
fear of blindness), and the fact that I've never been hit, nor hit
anyone. No one will hit me.
Jake got out of school, and we walked along Irving, back up to 9th,
taking the N line to the beach. All along the beach, we were mostly
silent (except when Jake was explaining Maui to me... he had a way of
telling it that made me feel as though I were there). The air was cold,
and everything was blown about. The water-licked shore looked glossy. I
walked in the tracks left in the sand by a dog that had been walking
the opposite direction thinking, I am walking backward toward
extinction...
We walked up to the Cliff House, to the Musée Mechanique. Sonia and
Jake took me there because I'd never been to it before. There were
marionettes and pornography and little games, 50 or 100 years old, in
which you see executions for a quarter. There was one fortune telling
machine: an old painted mannequin with glass eyes and a cloudy crystal
ball which made me shiver in my own thin, warm skin.
One would think that everyone had given up on such old
displays and games but the Musée was filled, and people loved the
beautiful, odd, creepy things. Staring through the tiny eyeholes, boys
still lusted after women who are long dead now, slides of their bodies
flashing by. Pretty pictures.
We walked out to the ruins of the bathhouse, throwing stones into the
water. Sonia said she wished she could go out onto one of the ledges,
and just walk off at the end, into the water. I went out to the end and
looked down. It was murky, sea-monster water. I said I wanted to go to
Loch Ness, that I could watch the water there for hours, even if I
never saw anything. Just sit and watch with the myth caught in my mind.
Jake muttered that the reason that it's a myth is because it doesn't
exist. He was walking over the rusty pipes and the old pieces of brick
and walls, with the ocean before him and the sky extending up.
Everything around there has burned down. Playland, the old amusement
park. The Cliff House (the first three Cliff Houses, at least). The
famous Sutro Bathhouse, with its gigantic pool and suicide diving
boards. All of it.
We watched the ocean, the water meeting and forming odd lines like nerves in
the brain, twisting, vein-like. Thin, and spidery.
Later, we were driving back along. We passed the variety of trees next
to the Forest Hill reservoir. Jake said, "I own one of those trees.
Yeah, my father picked it up in a sweet real estate deal back in '76."
My mouth curled into a grin.
But there were times when everyone looked sad, and no one talked. And it was
all right.
"Down into the deep blue wine... I'd open my head and let out all of my
time..."
(Tom Waits, again).
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