South of Broad (26 page)

“Seven of his high school friends flew in from Charleston yesterday to hunt for him. One of them’s just been named the first black police chief in the history of Charleston.”

“Nice story. Maybe if I was a cartoonist doing Mary Worth.”

I laugh and enjoy Herb, as I always did on previous visits. But he goes even further by saying, “You were the best town guide I ever had when I visited Charleston. But I already paid you back for that one. Your story might play in Charleston; it’s old news in Baghdad by the Bay.”

“You’re right,” I say. “Let me buy you another Bloody Mary, Herb. For old time’s sake.”

“You’re not telling me something,” Herb says. “What do you got? What’re you holding out on me?”

“It may be nothing. Big guy like you. Big city. Big names everywhere you look. You don’t need anything from a guy like me. I’ve got to be going now.”

Herb grabs my arm. “Before you go, I need to know the bone you were going to throw me.”

“Got to get it into your column, Herb,” I say. “Got to get a little special attention from you. Otherwise, I fly back South with it.”

“After all I’ve done for you,” Herb grumbles. “Hell, there’s nothing you’ve got I could use. The best scoop in your life wouldn’t make the last line in my column. We play in different leagues, Leo, and you’re smart enough to know it.”

“You’re a symphony orchestra, Herb,” I say. “I’m an ocarina. I got all that. But I’d never let a story walk out the door like you’re about to do. I need you, pal. You’re the best at what you do in the country, but I gotta go now, Herb. Enjoy your breakfast.”

“You’ll get one line tomorrow,” Herb says. “What you got, Leo? Better be good.”

“I need half a column.”

“You’re wasting your time. And mine,” Herb scoffs.

“Bye, Herb. Here’s a number where you can reach me.” I hand him a piece of paper.

“You’re playing me. You’re actually playing me, greenhorn,” Herb says, but with vague admiration. “Tell you what, Leo: half a column. But it better be great. If it’s not, you don’t get
bubkes. Comprende?”

“I speak many languages. Including Yiddish and Italian.”

“Spill it.”

“Trevor Poe is the brother of the Hollywood actress Sheba Poe. She organized the search. She came to Charleston to ask for our help.”

“You son of a bitch.”

“I was taught by a master. He taught me to always hold a few cards in reserve. Show them the hat. Never the rabbit.”

“How do I know you’re telling me the truth?” Herb asks.

“Two ways. First of all, I give you my word.”

“Not good enough, Southern boy,” he says. “Who do you think you’re dealing with, a card-carrying member of the Sons of the Confederacy?”

“I’ll ignore your slur on my background.”

Herb says, “Hot air sells balloons. Not newspapers.”

I remove the perfect stalk of celery from Herb’s Bloody Mary and bite off the leafy top of it. With that signal, a woman dressed demurely in a black leather jacket and silk slacks removes her sunglasses. She rises from a table near the end of the bar, and unties her Armani scarf. She unzips her jacket, and reveals a scant, silvery blouse, as flimsy as a sandwich bag. With a shake of her head, a cascade of golden curls falls around her shoulders. Her stride across the room, however, is purposeful, without the unstudied voluptuousness she brought to every role she played. The entire restaurant is mesmerized by this transformation of a woman who has been sitting in anonymity. The words “Sheba Poe” pass from table to table as she strides with her green eyes affixed on the appreciative gaze of Herb Caen.

“You got yourself the lead tomorrow, Leo,” Herb says as I rise to leave. “Done with class and brio, baby cakes.”

“I would like to introduce you to the legendary Sheba Poe, Herb. Sheba, this is the equally legendary Herb Caen.”

“I’ll take it from here, Leo,” Sheba says. “See you at lunch.” With perfect timing, she adds, “Baby cakes.” But to Herb Caen, she says, “I’ve lost my brother, Mr. Caen. I need your help.”

I
flag down a cab that delivers me to Trevor’s old flat at 1038 Union Street, on Russian Hill. More than half of his Charleston friends have visited Trevor in his well-equipped guest room that overlooks the everlasting busyness and traffic of Union Street. Trevor exploited his large gift for friendship by sharing his place with anyone who could prove an even tenuous relationship with his core group of Charleston admirers. We paid him back by treating him to overpriced meals in the newly acclaimed hotspots that opened with astonishing frequency in a city that lived for sundown. At the beginning, Trevor force-marched all of us to the Castro to show off the gay community. He took enormous pride in serving as a Southern ambassador to his gay demimonde. The South provided him with both cachet and color commentary. Over the years he introduced me to so many gay Southern men, from the Tidewater of Virginia to the Arkansas Ozarks, that I thought I could hang their accents out to dry on a clothesline, separated only by geographic idiosyncrasies and slurred syllables of every stripe. Though his high school classmates knew that Trevor had lived in Charleston for only a year before he lit out for the Castro and its unspeakable pleasures, we had to admit he had developed one of the most authentic Charleston accents any of us had ever heard. His brilliance at mimicking had served him well.

In his garden one summer, I remember him telling a convivial group of gay men from Chicago, “The gay men from the South are always the most fascinating members of our tribe. They are the best conversationalists, the most inventive cooks, and they hold their liquor almost too well, I’d say. And they are wicked to the point of criminality in bed. No party in this city is worth its salt without the inclusion of at least one gay man of negligible character and unquestioned provenance from somewhere in the old Confederacy. I’ve been severely criticized by gay activists with bad breath and British teeth for maintaining my friendships with all my straight friends from Charleston. But they bring me news of that stodgy, asexual world I left behind, where even the missionary position is considered a revolutionary deviation. They remind me that life is a smorgasbord, not just a box of Ritz crackers. And besides, these were my sandbox friends. Metaphorically, of course, but you never desert or dishonor the delicious boys and girls who played in the sandbox with you. Even philistines from Chicago, with your souls frozen by the winds off Lake Michigan, can understand the power of a friendship that goes all the way back to the sandbox. Or do you Midwesterners make your best friends in snowdrifts?”

Then Trevor winked at me with marvelous affection, and I winked back, locked in my colorless, unimaginative straightness. But I could laugh at everything Trevor would say or think or conjure. He always made me and his friends think we were living fuller, richer lives by simply dwelling in his romantic, overeroticized presence. He made Fraser feel like she was watching a Broadway play and Molly feel as though she were starring in one. Trevor brought out the protective side of Niles, the maternal side of Betty, the competitive nature of Chad, and the melodramatic part of me. Only Ike looked sideways at Trevor’s bravura performances, and the accent grated on Ike’s sensibility. “Lose the accent, Trevor. You ain’t from Charleston. You ain’t from the South. And, at best, you sound like a third-rate Negro houseboy,” he once told Trevor.

“My accent sounds like the tinkling of an eighteenth-century chandelier,” Trevor replied. “I’ve been told that by ladies with the name of Ravenel and Middleton and Prioleau, yard jockey.”

As the cab leaves me at 1038 Union Street, I have no idea if I will ever see Trevor Poe again or enter this charming space that has meant so much to me over the years. Cars whip by going much too fast; others jolt past driven by unsure-footed drivers tapping the brakes again and again, surprised by the steepness of the grade on Union as it makes its incursion into North Beach. I move up to the door and ring the bell, expecting nothing, but putting a Southern smile on my face if I am wrong. Sheba has written the woman letters and received no reply; neither has the new renter responded to a series of phone messages from Sheba’s secretary. The renter’s name is Anna Cole, and she’s a young lawyer from Duluth, Minnesota.

“Anna Cole,” I shout, calling up to one of the shapely bay windows that look out from the living room. “I’m a friend of Trevor Poe’s from South Carolina, and I need to talk to you. Will you please open the door?”

A nervous but flashy young woman opens the door with unnecessary ferocity and studies me through the space left by a lock and chain.

“What the fuck do you want?” Anna Cole asks. “Why’re you following me?”

“Ma’am,” I say, “I’ve never seen you before. I’m not following you. My good friend Trevor Poe used to live here, and I’m with a bunch of friends who’re looking for him.”

She looks past me with wild, distrustful eyes. “I thought you were the pervert who’s been tailing me for the past week. What’s with the ‘ma’am’ shit?”

“I’m Southern,” I explain. “It’s instilled in us at birth. Sorry if it offends you.”

“I’ve always thought the South was the weirdest place in the nation.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more. But I’ve never been to Minnesota,” I say.

Again, I arouse her paranoia. “How do you know I’m from Minnesota?”

“We did research on the Minnesota chick who got our friend thrown out of his home.”

“Look, George Wallace, or whatever your damn name is, I’m on edge here. I picked up a bad guy in my life. I’ve called the cops, but they can’t do anything until he rapes me and disembowels me and dumps me into the bay. And I did not get your friend evicted from this flat. He didn’t pay his damn rent. How’s that my fault?”

“You’re right, Garrison Keillor. It’s not your fault.”

“You’re stereotyping me, and I don’t like it worth a shit.”

“We George Wallaces tend to stereotype ice fishermen from Duluth who stereotype us.”

“I shouldn’t have said that,” she says. “I apologize. Now, please get out of here.”

“I need to find my friend,” I insist. “I just have a few questions for you, Anna Cole.”

“Oh, Jesus!” Her terror is real. “There he is. He’s in that ugly Honda halfway down the street. He’s ducked back down now. You can’t see him.”

She reveals a pistol that she is carrying behind her. She handles it inexpertly like a girl handling a copperhead for the first time—or a boy, for that matter.

“Do you know how to use that weapon?” I ask.

“I point it at his balls, I pull the trigger. And presto, no balls. How hard can that be?”

“May I borrow the gun, Anna?” I ask with great politeness. “I know how to use one. But if I succeed in running your friend off, I’ll insist you answer some questions about Trevor.”

She studies me as though noticing me for the first time. “Why should I trust you?”

“Do you trust that guy more?”

“You could rob me. You could rape me. You could kill me and the cops would say, ‘What a dumb fucking broad. She gave him her own gun.’”

“Yes, ma’am, that’s one scenario,” I say. “But I think I can get rid of him for you. I have a great imagination.”

“How does that help me?”

“Because now we’ll find out about your own imagination, if you’ve got one or not. We’ll also find out if you’re a good judge of character.”

“I don’t like your face.” She stares hard at me.

“I don’t, either. Never have.”

“I’ll be watching from the bay window,” she says.

With understandable nervousness, she slips me her small twenty-two pistol, which I notice is unloaded as I place it in my jacket pocket. I knock on the door again and she is clearly irritated when she cracks it open.

I ask, “Did you buy any bullets for this gun?”

“I don’t believe in violence or bloodshed or even the death penalty,” Anna Cole says with a spiritual certainty I find off-putting.

“What if your pervert kills me? Will you hope he fries in an electric chair? Or gags to death in a gas chamber?”

“I’d hope he’d get life with no chance of parole,” she answers.

“So you think he’d be better off making stop signs and license plates the rest of his life? You think he should take correspondence courses from a community college or enroll in a poetry course taught by some beatnik on Telegraph Avenue?”

“I believe that human life is sacred,” she says.

“Garrison Keillor.”

“Don’t you dare call me that,” she snarls.

“My wife is dying of cancer as we speak. Will you promise to take care of my twelve children if they are orphaned in the shootout on Union Street?”

“It won’t be a shootout,” she says. “You don’t have any bullets.”

“The pervert may have some. Do you promise to help support my orphan children if they need help?”

“Haven’t you ever heard of birth control down South?” she asks, then relents and says, “I promise to do what I can.”

“Now, Anna Cole, go to the bay window. Showtime. The latest installment of
A Prairie Home Companion
is about to begin.”

I walk across Union Street and head down the hill, passing the Honda without giving it a sidelong glance. But once I am past it, I circle behind it and write down his license plate number, and the fact that it is a brown 1986 Accord. As I write down this general information, I watch the man’s head rise up a second time. As I approach his car from the driver’s side, he disappears again, dropping all the way to the floorboards along the front seat. When I knock on the window to attract his attention, he lies motionless.

I knock harder. “Sir, open the window. I’d like to talk to you.”

“Fuck you, Officer,” he squeals to the floorboards. “I haven’t done anything. This is a legal parking space.”

“You’re scaring a young lady across the street,” I say. “Open the window, sir.”

“‘Fuck you’ still sounds good to me. Yep, sounds even better the second time,” he says.

I take the handle of the pistol and break a hole in the window. Then I kick the rest of the window in with my right leg, coming at it from an uphill angle. It is a large leg, and the window shatters in an immensely satisfying fashion. I’d once been a Citadel cadet, and I could play the tough guy.