Issue #13, Spring / Summer 1998
Voice Over by Rod Clark
Do ever we understand the strange tumble of things that carries us forward, even at moments when we have achieved a height that allows us to see a little of what lies beyond the horizon? And will we ever comprehend whether, in taking action against the slingshots of fortune, we truly engineer movement, or whether, by attempting to impose our will on the shape of what happens to us, we merely preserve the illusion that we are in control of our destiny, or whatever it is that lies in front of us like a jet waiting on a tarmac? And in fact, is it reasonable to suppose that anyone but a young writer, taking a break after the lunch hour in the spring of '73 over a cup of restaurant coffee balanced precariously on the black iron rail of the fire escape on the back wall of the second floor of a pizzeria in Madison, Wisconsin would wrestle, or in fact even feel the necessity of wrestling with such tangled and unreasonable questions?
And of course none of this, in the spring of '73, is the best canvas against which to answer the question your girlfriend is asking you on the same iron balcony with her arms folded against your stupidity and the chill: "Why are you going? Suppose you go to San Francisco in September and you can't write a damn thing there either?" To which, of course, you disdain to answer, because you know she thinks that writing is just a way for you to avoid the way things are, and because there isn't a very reasonable answer to give, but if there was it would run something like this:
"Because when I get home at four in the morning from the pizzeria I lie awake stinking of garlic, unable to sleep from all the caffeine, and I think about how I'm unable to write anything I can show anyone, not even you. And how if I can't write, my life has no shape that makes sense to me. So I've got to change the trajectory, and I can't do it in this place -- so I'm headed out west to where the Golden Gate is hinged to the earth and the land smacks into the sea."
So that, in short, is how I ended up on a sunny San Francisco afternoon in the September of '73, walking back to the $110-dollar-a-month studio I had just rented on Eddy Street, on my return from the Greek Steak house on the corner where I had just splurged on a tiny steak and baked potato, red cabbage salad, a huge square of Texas toast, and several bottles of Anchor Steam Beer, which wasn't very smart because I'd just paid a semester of out-of-state tuition for the Writer's Workshop at San Francisco State, and bought fifty bucks worth of cans and groceries and stuff from the liquor/grocery store down the block, and had maybe ten bucks and a jingle of change left to my name. I was supposed to be here for two years and what would I do when the money was gone? And yet, walking home by way of Turk Street, I had a weird feeling it would all work out. Suddenly, I was arrested on the sidewalk by a wonderful smell that came from a tiny hole-in-the wall shop with a window framed in wood. Inside I could see antique cigar molds on a bench where a little old guy was rolling cigars by hand, an example of his art smoldering between his lips. I entered quietly, and with polite but clunky college Spanish persuaded him to sell me a piece of his work, even though it would break my last ten dollars. He handed me a fragrant tan cylinder about five inches long the thickness of my thumb. With trembling hands I passed it under my nose. Ambrosia. "Muchas gracias," I told him. "You are an artist." "Si," he nodded, and smiled sadly. "For thirty years I have been making them -- and when I am gone, who will roll this beautiful cigar?" This man did not have much, I thought, and yet he had everything.
I was still a little wobbly when I reached my apartment building. I paused on the steps to light the cigar, revolving the tip slowly above the warmth of the match, allowing it to kindle in its own sweet time. There was a lot of screaming in the lobby as I entered. A very large, loud drunk was holding one of the building security guards by the throat and had him pushed up against the wall by the elevator. The guard looked at me with panic in his eyes.
"Do you want me to call the police?" I asked him. "No one's calling the @#%*# police!" roared the drunk, releasing the goon and charging toward me. "Watch the cigar!" I shouted in panic. "Watch the cigar!" As he slammed into me, I ducked and pivoted-sheltering the smoldering treasure with my body. Somehow he tripped over my ankle as I spun and slammed into the base of the newel post at the foot of the stairs. The drunk got up to his knees and looked at me incredulously. There was a bruise on his face, and a trickle of blood on his forehead, but he was not seriously hurt. "You nearly broke my cigar," I yelled at him. "There are thirty years of art and craftsmanship in this cigar!" Behind him the guard was still standing stiff and white-faced by the elevator. It occurred to me as I climbed the stairs to my studio that when economic circumstances permitted, I was really going to have to move to a more prestigious address.
That evening as I sat at my kitchen table, sipping instant coffee while I checked out the want ads, the building manager knocked on my door. "Uh oh!" I thought. "Here it comes." "I understand you had a little trouble in the lobby today," he observed, once we had made introductions. "It won't happen again, sir," I promised. "I was just trying to protect my cigar." "That's not the way I heard it," he replied. "I heard you decked that monster with one hand while smoking a cigar with the other -- so how would you like a job?" he asked. "What??" "It won't be as bad as you think," he explained. "You watch the lobby for us one night a week and you get your rent free. Keep the peace any way you like. Call the police from the office if you have to. There's a stick by the phone. The whole deal is all under the table - nothing on the books. Do we have a deal?"
We did indeed. The free rent deal also inspired me to get another rent-a-cop job to pay the balance of my expenses. Pay was low, but the evening work was light, and checks came weekly. By the time spring arrived I was working swing shifts for the Pacific Patrol Service in a blue blazer and tie at one of those sleek sun-kissed towers in Embarcadero Center at the prosperous end of Market Street. During the day I was plunging deep into the Writer's Workshop with mixed results. "I'veread all your poems, and I'm not quite surewhat you're up to," said Bill Dickey in that deep resonant purr of his, as he looked at me piercingly under those famous eyebrows. "Perhaps you need to take a few more... risks..."
Risks? I need to take more risks? I pull my life up by the roots and hurl it west where I live on rice and beans. Each night I fall asleep to the tintinnabulation of bottles crashing in the alleys of Eddy Street. In the morning I'm at school and in the afternoon and evening, I work guarding the golden rim of the west at the edge of the unswimmable sea. Writing is all I have left, and that's where you want me to take risks?
He was right of course. Moving west had not made me a writer. For that I needed another kind of courage. Then again, geography still haunted me. I was convinced I could finish this program, but what then? Was it possible to go back to a place that you had loved but gotten stuck in, and could you go back and get yourself unstuck, and change everything you had to change? And if you couldn't, would you get stuck again? And how many years could you keep on doing this sort of thing anyway? Migod - was I actually thinking of going home?
In the tower we protected, the roaming guard was always #1. #2 and #3 sat at the console desk. So if you were #1, and you were wandering, say, somewhere on the 33rd floor, they could reach you by walkie talkie by calling for #1, and you could reach them by calling for #2 or #3. So one sunny swing shift in the spring of '74, I was roaming on the roof, enjoying a rooftop cigar, contemplating the nature of security, and what Dickey had said about risk, and how wanting to write and everything had driven me to these heights of hope and uncertainty. Below me, as evening closed, the city lay gilded in the kind of glory that rarely lasts forever. Long bronze bars of light slanted in from the west, making the seven hills of San Francisco look like a fantasy by Maxfield Parrish. In front of me, the elongated pyramid of the TransAmerica building spiked up through the mist. Way down, past and below Coit Tower, Alcatraz lay in the harbor like a great stone ship dreaming of freedom. Behind and back to my right the Oakland Bay bridge, like some dark trailing umbilical, stretched back toward Wisconsin and all the rest. Far below at the mouth of the bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, that magnet of myriad jumpers, escape valve of manifest destiny, extended its single magnificent span linking the city with the northern coast in the western light.
It was about time to check in, so I decided to give myself a call on the walkie talkie "This is #1 calling #1," I broadcast. "Are you there #1?" "Yeah #1," I replied. "This is #1. Is everything okay?" "Hard to say, #1," I told myself on the smooth golden air, "I keep remembering a woman on the balcony of the pizzeria saying to me: 'Have you thought about the worst that can happen to you if you continue like this? Suppose you keep writing no matter what, and almost no one ever reads your stuff, and you end up like one of those guys who builds castles out of stucco and bottle caps in their back yards.' 'Well,would that be so bad?,' I asked. 'What the hell is the matter with that?'"
I puffed on the cigar and thought about having very little, and having everything.
There is a long static pause in the dungeons below. Finally a call crackled up anxiously from the secure depths. "This is number #2 -- Number #1, are you all right up there?"
"Don't worry #2," I replied, "I'm having a nice day, I really am. It's just that the walls of the pizzeria have crumbled away and all the world's in view. All the California I can see looks frightening and fine, and for the moment at least--nothing is falling into the sea."