I Cover the Waterfront

Nine months ago,  the woman in the mirror put it to me straight: Your money or your life.   I chose my life.  Since leaving my job almost a year ago, I’ve made no money and I haven’t yet thought of a plan to make any.  I know I should worry each month when another round of expenses further depletes my net worth.  But I don’t.  Instead, I concentrate on building meaning into my days.  I am not a calm person so I surprise myself being sanguine about the complete loss of income.  Could there be something new at work it in the worn sum of instinct and experience, quirks and neuroses that is me?

Today offers a perfect example.  I rise at 5 a.m.  Morning sun crawls up the back of the Berkeley hills.  In fifteen more minutes, it will crest that horizon and slide west out over the ocean.  The estuary that is my backyard will glint with chips of hard, white light.  I lie in bed listening to birdsong.   This is new.  When I moved here three years ago, my  loft did not look out on a line of green trees swaying in the morning breeze off the ocean where purple finches make their nests.  Now it does because I had the time to pester PG&E into planting them.  I open the drapes and the razor of light that was slitting the bamboo floor pools there as harmless and yellow as butter in a pan.  I cross the loft to the kitchen, a wonder of design and efficiency plopped down amid open space.   I make coffee and measure out food for a black cat named The Bee.  The signets of my spinsterhood are a stray cat and, I shit you not, a degree in library science. 

Bee’s bowl rings like a gamelan when the kibble hits.  I pour oily, dark French roast into a cup and add milk and sugar.  It is so delicious I smack my stomach and say ‘Ahhhh’ like a right proper idiot.  I will sit at my laptop for much of the morning answering emails, fiddling, and pushing a novel forward to something like completion.  It’s Friday, however, and lunch shines brightly at the back of my mind because Larry con amigos are taking me out.

My neighbor Larry lives just above and behind me along the railroad tracks.  He and his wife moved in maybe a year ago.  Larry is one of those people I've met randomly as an adult and with whom I share not DNA but a huge swath of emotional and nostalgic brain space.  We see the world through a shared lens.  The Italians call it simpatico.  I call it Freak Twin.  Even a partial list of affinities reveals the depth of our connection.  We’re both from the Midwest; we grew up in the neighboring states of Wisconsin and Michigan in the Eisenhower/Kennedy years.  Our childhoods were largely unsupervised and thus we developed a keen appreciation for Mischief with a big M.  The very thought of monkey business sets our eyes to twinkling.  We like the same paintings and music—both wildly eclectic in our tastes though we are secret romantics in our view of the world.  The Vietnam War was a landmark for us both—he as a young naval captain running a small recon boat up and down the Vietnamese coast; me in my early teens learning that the world was bigger and meaner than anyone had yet let on. 

Larry and his posse—Alan and Jack—have been meeting for lunch on Fridays since forever.  I am the first woman ever permitted to join them.  It’s an honor I do not take lightly.  These men have eaten in every greasy spoon, dive bar, noodle hut, chop house, diner, and pub in Oakland.  They know every burger, schnitzel, pho, Scotch egg, falafel, pizza, steak-and-eggs, Rueben, tuna melt, and sashimi in a ten mile radius.  They are the Lone Gunmen of the louche lunch.  I am discovering a new side of the city and myself in their conspiratorial company. 

We hit the road keenly alert to trash bars and anything with more than two police cruisers parked in front—the cops know where to eat.  We are almost sucked in to Art’s Crab Shack—the retro design and proclamation, ‘Since 1963’, exerting a powerful gravitational force as we drive by.  But inland heat has pulled a cover of fog over us and we are not just hungry but cold and hungry.  The men delve into a quick and rapturous pow-wow concerning the soup at the Claremont and we slide right past Art’s resolving to return some sunny day.

We bump into a booth—there is no one else in the Claremont Diner, a charming old dump wedged into a sharply angled corner I’ve passed countless times without thinking twice.  It is 11:45 a.m.  The waitress comes by with water and menus that read like tablets handed down to Moses—two columns of temptation inscribed with the orthodoxy of diners: ham and cheese, cheeseburgers, mac-n-cheese, everything that can be done to an egg, malts, shakes, fries, rings, bacon, blu cheese, fried chicken, pie, donuts, coffee, Coffee, COFFEE.  Larry observes that it is International Bottled Beer Day and we resolve to pay our props with a round of Anchor Steam.

As our waitress slaps the cold, beaded bottles on the Formica table top, she recites the day’s specials and is quizzed about the soup.  “Barley,” she answers to the blank stares of my booth mates, “and a cowboy soup of sausages and ravioli.”  The Gunmen look at each other with the alert excitement of children up to no good and call in unison, “Cowboy soup.”  They grin with anticipation and I think how much I like them.

I realize that, as a lesbian, I know very little about men; very little at least about their unguarded emotional inner lives.  These three men have let me see a private moment of friendship.  I have been let into the Bat Cave.  I wiggle with satisfaction and order the barley.  My first surprise is that the soup is indeed remarkable.  I should’ve trusted them to know what’s what.  There follows nuanced discussion about the source of the subtle but unmistakable zing in the cowboy soup.  Pepper?  Chipotle?  Red sauce?  With each conjecture another spoonful is lofted and lips are smacked in analytical rumination.  It is a mystery.

On the drive home the Gunmen call out dive bars and holes-in-the-wall as we pass if they merit, by dint of  endurance or decay, a visit on some future Friday.  I keep quiet, letting the men reveal themselves to me.  I concur with every suggestion noting only that I am especially in favor of a trial run if the word ‘bucket’ appears on the menu as a serving size.  When ‘spotting’ like this there is no adult in the car despite an average age of 60+.  Seen in stop motion through the eyes of memory, we are four kids in Red Ball Jets, seersucker shorts and sand-dusted tee shirts out on a lark, happy to be together casing a neighborhood.

It is now the blue part of the night.  The trees outside my big, factory window have lost their green and everything is drained of color.  Black night will come soon.  I am home writing in my kitchen.  I stop to close the window against the foggy chill.  Above me, the couple who live at the inner corner of my L-shaped building have lit their balcony with candles and thrown a white cloth over their café table which is simply decorated with a vase of white roses, the pink edges flickering in the candle light.  As I watch, first one and then the other appears, each is carrying a plate and has a wine glass hooked in his thumb.  The men laugh, making the dog do tricks for scraps.  I smile up at them and wave before closing the drapes and returning to my computer.  The Bee is pestering me to stop writing and turn on the TV so we can snuggle up on the couch.  In the wee hours I give in and we wrap up in a blanket to watch ancient episodes of The X-Files, grinning and purring like right proper idiots.