South of Broad (27 page)

“That’s it! Now you’re a dead man.” He brushes shards of glass from his clothes and body. He jerks upright, red-faced and furious, and I take in his plain, unspectacular features as he adjusts his wrap-around sunglasses. If I am forced to describe him in a court of law, I’ll say his face is modest and plain and functional, just like a Honda Accord. I place the pistol against his forehead, but keep my good humor and wave to passersby to let them know I have the situation in hand. I remove his sunglasses and deposit them in my pocket. His brows are thick and march above his eyes like one large caterpillar. His eyes are brown, a similar shade as the car, and he is wearing a cheap black toupee.

“Your wallet, sir,” I order. When he gives me his wallet, I say, “Thank you for your extraordinary level of cooperation, Mr. John Summey. Ah! This must be the lovely Mrs. Summey. And your three handsome sons. And gee whiz, you’ve been a member of American Express since 1973. And your Visa card’s still valid. Though I must tell you, Mr. Summey, you’ve allowed your Discover card to expire. I’ll just keep your wallet for a month or two. By that time, we’ll see if you can quit stalking that nice young woman who lives across the street. She’s been seeing your ugly mug everywhere she goes. But now that I have your driver’s license and know that you live at 25710 Vendola Drive in San Rafael, you might be looking at my ugly mug more often.”

“I know the mayor personally,” he says. “I’ll have your badge, asshole. You’ll be looking at want ads tonight.”

“Hear that sound? That’s my teeth chattering. But you got it all wrong, pal. I’m no cop. I’m that woman’s husband, and I just got out of San Quentin. Got your car keys, Mr. Summey?”

“Yes, sir,” he says.

“You got any problems with me just letting you go? I promised my wife I’d kill ya. But you know how broads are? Sentimental as hell. I’ll tell her about your three boys, tug on the old heartstrings. See where I’m coming from?”

“Yes, sir.” He fumbles with his key, trembling as he tries to insert it into the steering column.

“I’ll mail you your wallet in a month,” I say.

“I’d appreciate it.”

“Now, Summey, we got to make the next part look good for my wife. I’ll need your help here. You’ve got twenty seconds to get out of here. Then I’m going to start shooting at your head. Two seconds have already passed.” I never saw a car outside of the Darlington 500 cover such a distance in such speed.

I return in a leisurely fashion to the doorway of 1038 Union where I once again ring the bell and again hear Anna Cole’s strained voice through the locked doorway. “You’re a bigger nut than he is,” she says. I can see her outline against the antique lace curtains that had once belonged to Trevor Poe.

“He was more difficult to get rid of than I thought,” I say.

“Why’d you kick out his window?”

“He refused to talk and I thought it might get his attention.”

“Leave now, this very moment, or I’ll call the cops. You’re obviously a lunatic. I don’t want to talk to you, and I don’t know what happened to your friend. If I did, I’d tell you. Just go.”

“Okay,” I say. “Thanks for your help.”

I turn again and walk down the short flight of steps and back onto Union Street, then hear the door open.

“May I have my dad’s gun?” she asks.

“No. You don’t believe in bloodshed or violence, remember? By keeping the gun, I’ll be helping you live a pious, liberal life. You can’t have the gun, nor can you have the stalker’s license plate number, nor his wallet, which is chock-full of information about his degenerate life.”

We stand facing each other in a hostile standoff, but she is thinking fast. “Would you like a cup of herbal tea?”

“No, I would not,” I say. “Do you have coffee?”

“I don’t like coffee.”

“I don’t like herbal tea,” I say. “Look, I’ve got to be going. Here’s your dad’s gun. Buy some cartridges for it. If that guy’s not a sexual pervert, then he’s missed his calling. Here’s his wallet. Send a copy of the driver’s license to the cops.”

“Would you like a glass of V8 juice?”

“Yes,” I answer. “I’d like that very much.”

I receive a shock when I enter the living room: she has barely changed a thing in Trevor’s space. She has placed photographs of her own Minnesota family on top of Trevor’s piano, where there had once been pictures of his best friends and the celebrities he met along the way. When I mention to her that she is in possession of every piece of furniture and work of art that once belonged to my friend, there is alarm in her voice as she explains, “I didn’t steal any of it. I rented the flat furnished, and was delighted to find it furnished by a man of impeccable taste.”

“Why would he leave all this behind? He loved every single piece of furniture, every book, every piece of silver.”

“I’ve no idea. He was evicted five months ago, I think. I’ve been here for three months. He had not paid a penny of rent for over a year. It killed his landlord to evict him, but Mr. Chao felt he had no choice. Trevor never told Mr. Chao he had AIDS. Never even told him he was sick. Mr. Chao broke down and wept when he admitted this to me, and he insisted that I keep all of Trevor’s furniture exactly the way it was. It still belongs to Trevor. I’m the caretaker.” Then she asks, “You got a name?”

“Leo King. I went to high school with Trevor.”

“He was in pretty bad shape when he left here, evidently. The neighbors talk a lot about him. They hate me because they think I stole his apartment.”

“Where are his photograph albums?” I ask. “I’d like to take them with me so my friends and I can study them.”

She opens a drawer and takes out the albums, then asks me curiously, “Are you married, Leo?”

“Yes, I am.”

“You’re not wearing a wedding ring,” she notes.

“My wife wants a divorce. The last time I saw her in Charleston, she stole it while I was taking a shower. I haven’t seen her or the ring since.”

“Children?”

“I’ve always wanted some. Starla never has,” I say.

“Starla?” Anna says. “What a strange name.”

“I think it’s from the Cherokee language.”

“What’s the translation?” she asks. “I’m interested in all things Native American.”

“A strict constructionist would translate it this way: ‘By the shores of Gitche Gumee.’”

“Another Minnesota joke.”

“Last one,” I promise.

“Thank God. Not one of them’s been funny. Tell me everything you know about Minnesota.”

“The Vikings. The Twins. St. Paul’s the capital. Minneapolis hates everything about St. Paul. And vice versa. The Mall of America. Ten thousand lakes. Paul Bunyan. Babe, the Blue Ox. Mayo Clinic. Lake Superior. Lampreys. Beaver. Loons. No poisonous snakes. By the shining Big-Sea-Water. The wigwam of Nokomis. Canadian geese. A million Swedes. Lots of Norwegians. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Lake Itasca. Lake Wobegon. And though I hate to say it because it seems to piss you off—Garrison Keillor.”

“Not bad, Leo. I’m impressed.”

“Good. You heard from the gander. Let’s hear it from the goose. Tell me everything you know about South Carolina.”

“Didn’t you start the Civil War or something?” she asks with some tentativeness.

“Very good. You know about Fort Sumter?”

“The Research Triangle. Duke University. The Tar Heels.”

“That’s North Carolina,” I say.

“It’s all the same thing to me. I’ve never given a shit about the South.”

“Strange. Minnesota is a constant subject of conversation in Southern drawing rooms. Listen, can I take these photograph albums with me?”

“Of course. What about all the other stuff?”

“What other stuff?”

“Over thirty boxes. I packed it all up and put it in a storage room down in the garage. His clothes. His personal effects. And his unmentionables.”

“We’ll send for the boxes. What are his unmentionables?”

“Some of it …” she begins.

“What?”

“Some of it is the vilest pornography I’ve ever seen. I don’t care if a guy is gay or not. Hell, I live in San Francisco. But some of that stuff could land you in the federal pen.”

“Trevor liked his porn. He called it his ‘foreign film collection.’ We’ll pick all that stuff up too.”

“I watched some of it. You don’t want to carry that stuff across state lines.”

“We’ll take our chances. Why were you looking at Trevor’s porn?”

“Curiosity,” she admits. “I thought it might turn me on. It had the opposite effect.”

“It didn’t do much for me, either. Trevor used to show it to me when I was out here visiting. Told me he was trying to entice me over to the dark side.”

Then a thought hits Anna, who has the type of expressive face that registers every message she receives from her interior. “Do you know the photograph that Trevor has in the bathroom? Is that Charleston?”

“Yes, it is. Mind if I look at it while you’re getting my glass of V8 juice you promised?” I walk down the long hallway before taking a right into the tiny toilet area, where I see the blown-up photograph of the row of sumptuous mansions that line South Battery Street. The houses glitter in the rich overtones of a perfect sun-shot afternoon. It always got a laugh from his South Carolina visitors because Trevor would shout to us through the closed bathroom door, “I always think of Charleston anytime I find my body urging me toward excretion.”

Taking the photograph with me, I walk back into the living room and tell the story to Anna Cole as I drink the V8 that she has spiked with Tabasco sauce and lemon juice. “May I take this photograph, Anna? It’ll give a big lift to the people I’m meeting for lunch.”

“Yeah, sure,” she says, but with some reluctance. “But I’m going to miss it. Which house did Trevor grow up in?”

I was going to tell her the truth, but I think that people often need the mythologies they create. “He grew up in this one. On the corner of Meeting and South Battery,” I tell her.

“I knew he came from a life of privilege.”

“You were right on the money,” I say. “By the way, Anna, can I write down all the information about your stalker? I’m traveling with two cops, and I’d like them to run it through the system.”

I copy all the information in his wallet, then thank her for her help and give her our address. “If you remember anything that might help us locate Trevor, you can find us there. Sorry about the guy’s window. I surprised myself there, and it must have scared you.”

“I thought you were a nutcase,” she agrees. “Do you know how weird all this is, Leo?”

“Tell me.”

“I’ve gotten two letters from someone who claims she’s Sheba Poe. Also, phone calls—but I can tell it’s a female impersonator. Can you believe that?”

“Save the letters. They’ll be collector’s items someday.” I rise to my feet and collect the albums and photograph. “Thanks for your help. Here’s the phone number and address of where we’re staying. Keep in touch, kid.”

On the walk down to Washington Square, I think about my encounter with Anna Cole, and her reaction to me as a Southerner. I never knew how strange a breed of cat a Southerner is until I began to travel around the country. Only then did I learn that the Southerner represents a disfigurement in the national psyche, a wart or carbuncle that requires either a lengthy explanation or cosmetic surgery whenever I would stumble upon the occasional Vermonter or Oregonian or Nebraskan in my journeys. I could grow testy when I met up with folks whose hostility toward the South seemed based on ignorance. I once compiled a list in my column about the reasons people seemed to hate the South, and I invited my readers to add to the literature of contemptuousness a Southerner might encounter on the road. My list was fairly simple:

1. Some people hate Southern accents.

2. Some fools think all Southerners are stupid because of those accents.

3. Some dopes still blame me for the Civil War, though I remember killing only three Yankees at Antietam.

4. Many black people I have met outside the South blame me personally for Jim Crow laws, segregation, the need for the civil rights movement, the death of Martin Luther King, the existence of the Ku Klux Klan, all lynchings, and the scourge of slavery.

5. Movie buffs hate the South because they have seen
Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, In the Heat of the Night, To Kill a Mockingbird
, and
Easy Rider
.

6. A man from Ohio hates the South because he once ate grits at the Atlanta airport. He admitted that he put milk and sugar on them and thought it was the worst cream of wheat he’d ever tasted.

7. Many women who married Southern men, then divorced them, hate the South, as do any men who married Southern women and divorced them. All men and women who married Southerners, then divorced them, hate their Southern mother-in-laws—ergo the entire South.

8. All liberals based in other geographies hate the South because it is so conservative. They refuse to believe that any true liberals could also be Southern.

9. All women not from the South hate Southern women because Southern women consider themselves far more beautiful than women of the lesser states.

10. All Americans who are not Southern hate the South because they know Southerners don’t give a rat’s fanny what the rest of the country thinks about them.

That column struck such a nerve in the community that I received more than a thousand letters pro and con, so Anna Cole’s reaction to the South was not unprecedented.

F
rom his first days in the city, Trevor Poe laid a claim as principal eccentric among the variegated tribe who frequented the Washington Square Bar and Grill. In all of its understated oddity and eclectic decor, it always struck me as a gauzy snapshot of the soul of San Francisco. Because of Trevor’s prominence as both a patron and a frequent performer, the place feels like a home away from home for us. Trevor had been given a window seat to welcome him to the neighborhood, and in many ways, he never surrendered that honorary table as he watched the great carnival of the city pass by in all the fey surrealism that North Beach has to offer.

When Leslie Asche—the greatest waitress on earth, in Trevor’s phrase—came to take his order, he pointed out the windows toward Coit Tower poised erotically on the summit of Telegraph Hill and asked her, “Darling, do you believe Coit Tower is an exercise in phallic symbolism, or a literal rendition of an erect penis?”