Story #3. This one was written over the span of two days, again with little to no editing. At first, I couldn’t figure out how to end it. Then I did, but I’m not super confident, since it reeks a little of old time endings, kind of a knee slap/raised eyebrow thing. But, I just fished reading ‘Bagombo Snuff Box’, KV’s collection of 50’s era short stories, and they all sort of end this way, so I feel I’ve been influenced. How’s that for an excuse. As always, please comment, critique, call me lame.
If you went out the front door and walked a block and half to the north, you’d find the best sushi in San Francisco. He couldn’t ever pronounce the name of the place, so it became known as ‘Johnny Sushi’, which may have been racist, but he wasn’t sure.
When Jeff first moved to the bay area, it was the height of the dot-com-boom. At the time earning less than 20K a year precluded him from actually renting an apartment. For the first few months, he would travel up and down the coast of California on the Greyhound visiting other offices in his company, and crashing with colleagues. This worked fine for a while, but he found it difficult to sleep in the nude, as he had done since the eighth grade.
For a period of time, Jeff believed the Greyhound was where ‘real Americans’ could be found. He had a speech on the subject prepared for his boss, who would’ve preferred him to fly, and save the company some man-hour travel time.
‘If you want to get to know America, just take a trip on the Greyhound from Sacramento down to Santa Cruz,’ was part of the speech. Of course, after getting into a fistfight with a gentleman over the relative morality of sleeping with 14-year olds in Thailand, Jeff made the realization that Southwest Airlines was the Greyhound of the skies, and flew all over California much faster, and with more free peanuts.
On his first trip to San Diego, he suggested to his co-workers that they go to the beach. Having grown up in the most overcast region of the country, he was ecstatic just to see the sun for three whole days in a row, and felt he should take advantage of it. On the way over, he suggested, naively, that they pick up some sunscreen.
‘Nah, you won’t need it. The sun in California is really mellow,’ Troy said. No matter how much he grew to like Troy, this one sentence would make him always hate Troy a little bit.
Once at the beach, they laid out until Jeff felt a tingling all over his skin, and decided to hop in the ocean. After ninety minutes of jumping in the surf, Jeff realized Alexa had given him her keys, which were nowhere to be found. Having met Alexa the day before, he was slightly embarrassed to have so completely fucked up.
Weeks later, still peeling, he found himself back in Berkeley. He called a friend, Mel, and asked if he could crash for the night. It was a tight at her place. She lived in a vaguely cooperative ’space’ (for the six years he lived in there, Jeff could never understand why people didn’t live in ‘apartments’ and go to ‘bars’, but instead seemed to exist solely to go from ’space’ to ’space’), and her co-housers (roommates, you mean, he thought) were upset because she had missed the previous three week’s house meetings, and hadn’t cooked one vegan kosher meal.
‘Fuck it, c’mon over,’ she told him.
Mel lived in the converted basement of an old victorian in the part of Berkeley that is actually Oakland. You entered Mel’s room via a trap door in the mud room behind the kitchen, going down a ten-foot ladder. The only rule of the house Jeff was instructed to follow was to always close the trap door.
The first night there, Jeff and Mel picked up a twelve pack. They were two-thirds through it when they heard a scuffling, a scream, and a baby’s howl coming from the next room, where the ladder was.
Jeff, it turned out, had left the trapdoor open and Agnieska, the polish refugee roommate, had fallen through the opening with her baby in her arms. Remarkably, nobody was seriously injured, but as she screamed at Jeff in Polish and broken America about what a ‘bad bad bad man’ he was, he realized perhaps he should not spend the night after all.
That was the first night Jeff spent in a motel in years. On the west side of University, towards the highway, were perhaps eight or nine hotels ranging in class from a Marriot to the Pink Flamingo. Something about the Pink Flamingo spoke to him. Perhaps it was that is a motel and not a hotel. The ‘mo’ brought up lovely memories of the road and the time he spent roaming around the country in his old station wagon, with no specific destination.
While traveling he had once camped in New Mexico. Having driven from the plains of northern Texas in the night he missed the landscape change as the miles brought him into the West (always with a capital ‘W’, thank you very much) for the first time. When he was lulled awake by the sun, he stumbled out of his tent and we was for one of the few times in his life, speechless.
How could the Pink Flamingo Motel be any different?
When the police broke down the door of the room next to him, Jeff casually thought, ‘This isn’t really like camping in New Mexico at all.’ From then on, when in the Bay Area, he would alternate between staying at a slightly better Motel and sleeping under his desk, which was actually a folding table.
Between travels throughout the state, the low-income motels, and the spot under his table, Jeff was able to live, rent-free for nine months. In the process, he lost much of his temporary sanity. Never cooking his own meals, never being naked, and never having any SPACE (’holy shit, that’s IT,’ he thought) drove him a little insane.
One day, in a meeting with his boss, Jeff outlined his idea for staff recruitment. His plan, which consisted of buying an old ice cream truck, painting it psychedelic rainbow colors, getting a PA system mounted to the roof, and doing ‘drive-by’ campus visits, struck his boss as odd, and perhaps, not up to the caliber of Jeff’s previous work.
‘But it’s a fucking BRILLIANT idea Tom!’ Jeff cried into the phone.
‘Jeff, I’m just asking you, as your friend, are you ok?’
Jeff began to weep quietly into the phone while assuring his boss that everything was fine.
‘What the hell is going on out there?’
When Jeff explained the situation, Tom instructed him to take as much time, fully paid, as he needed to find a place to live of his own.
That night at the 3300 Club, a third-shift bar in the office’s neighborhood which thumbed its nose at the state smoking band, and had no issue with ‘guest bartenders’, Jeff met Robert. Bob. Bob lived across the street, and had been there since 1978. Thanks to San Francisco rent control, Bob paid about $500 a month for a top floor, four bedrooms, wood-trimmed victorian. Bob was a freelance photographer, meaning he liked to take pictures and didn’t have a real job. He afforded to live by renting out the other three bedrooms to ‘good people who needed some help’, and mentioned to Jeff that he had a room for $375. No deposit needed, no first and last month’s rent, just $375 a month, due whenever it was convenient for Jeff.
As they stumbled across the street to the apartment, Jeff stopped at an ATM machine. The daily limit was $200, but it was 11:50PM, so they waited 15 minutes, and Jeff took out another $200, handing it all to Bob with a teary hug.
‘Well, the thing is, I’m….well, we’re getting evicted. You see, the owners sold, and the new guys want to turn all of this into condos. I’ve been fighting it for three years, and the state Supreme Court is looking at it this month. We could either end up set for life, of find ourselves with 10 days to move our shit out.’
With a nine-day work trip starting the next day, this seemed perfectly all right with Jeff. After all, the best sushi place in all of San Francisco was just a block and a half away.
