I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us.
— Hamlet, III.i.121
Willie was headed the wrong direction.
He was supposed to be going north, but he’d missed the right turn at the bottom of Tunnel Road and was now headed south. The wine hadn’t helped him in finding his way; he was jittery, stressed out. He was always stressed after spending time with Alan and Mizti, but his stress was now doubled by the weight (though it was just over a pound) in the trunk of his father’s Audi, and trebled by what he was about to tell Robin.
He finally navigated a meandering route to her street, found a parking space around the corner from her apartment, and sat behind the wheel. He wanted to smoke.
He got out of the car. It was going to be a chilly night in Berkeley, damp with the fog. He looked up and down the residential street. Empty, but for two students shuffling along with backpacks down the street away from him.
He got back in the car. The duffel filled with contraband was in the trunk, but he still had the last bit of Lebanese in his green backpack. He opened it, took out his pipe, loaded it, and looked up and down the street one more time . . . completely empty. He lit and smoked furtively, blowing smoke out of the cracked-open window. Immediately he felt the edge of his two hours with Alan and Mizti fade away, wafting up the street and dissipating over the hills like the fog. He took a second large hit . . . too large, as the smoke expanded beyond the bursting point in his lungs, and into his throat. He tried to hold it in, with one small cough, then two, but couldn’t control it anymore, and the smoke reached up, yanked his uvula, and then exploded out of him in great racking coughs, filling the car with smoke. At the exact same instant he saw, coming across the street toward him and smiling, a friend of Robin’s, one of the F$¢K Reagan gang, the black guy . . .
Tony . . . Tommie . . . Terry? Shit.
Still coughing, he reached over to stash the pipe in the glove box and open the passenger’s side window to let some smoke out. By the time he turned, coughing and smiling, back to the driver’s side window Tony / Tommie / Terry had passed by, without noticing him. Willie saw that he was listening to a Walkman, bopping his head and dorking out and singing “Walk This Way.”
He dorked his way down the sidewalk, heading away from Robin’s apartment. Willie hoped, for the poor brother’s sake, that it was the Run DMC version of the song.
Willie figured he’d tempted fate enough, and he had a pretty good buzz on. He opened the car door, realized he’d left his backpack inside, retrieved it, and slid in through the always ajar security gate of Robin’s building. Up two flights of stairs, navigating around several bicycles and an old used mattress in the hallway, he knocked and entered without waiting for an answer.
Robin was on the phone. She smiled and waved as Willie entered. “Willie’s back. I’ll call you later, okay?” She laughed. “I know. Yeah, okay. Bye.” And she hung up the phone. “Darcy,” she said, in reference to her neediest friend from high school. Willie didn’t even want to know what bad-boy biker, what sidewalk artist, what itinerant, spitting punk rocker, had ruined Darcy’s life this week, so he didn’t ask.
Robin came over and kissed him lightly. “You want to go get some sushi or something? It’s almost eight o’clock. I’m starving.”
Eight o’clock. He ran some quick math in his head. He wanted to get to the Renaissance Faire before everybody crashed for the night. If he made his connection tonight instead of waiting until tomorrow, he’d have some cash beyond the eight bucks in his pocket.
“I’m kinda broke for sushi.”
“I could make some pasta.”
“Here’s the thing,” said Willie, and he leaned awkwardly against the table by the front door. Robin’s lips went as tight as plastic wrap around a lemon.
“What’s the thing?”
“I have to run an errand for my dad. Taking some stuff up to my aunt in Sebastopol.”
Robin’s brows furrowed. “What?!” Sebastopol was a two-hour drive. “What kind of stuff?”
I should’ve thought this out a little more.
“Some jewelry and old letters that he found cleaning out his mom’s garage.”
Better.
“They’re in my dad’s car,” he added, gesturing toward the street to indicate he’d borrowed it and to keep her from asking to see the jewelry.
Willie had told Robin a little lie or two in their years “together.” Of course their entire relationship was based on a big lie, but it was a lie of omission, a mutual agreement to look the other way. This felt different: a ploy; a subterfuge; a deception. It could blow up in his face a dozen different ways. Robin knew his dad and his aunt well. They were friends. She had their phone numbers. They had hers. But he made his lie, stuck to it, and comforted himself with the knowledge that he wasn’t doing it to cheat on her. He was doing it because — the politics of victimless crimes and national drug enforcement aside — he simply couldn’t stand the abject humiliation of having only eight dollars to his highfalutin name.
Robin was obviously a little ticked off. “Okay. Well, don’t hurry back. I mean, drive safe.” She went back to the couch, sat heavily, picked up a book, and started reading.
“I’ll be back tomorrow. We can spend the rest of the weekend together.”
She looked at him coldly. “Okay.”
“I should be able to make the delivery to my aunt tonight.” King of the Fools . . . flag over his tent with a joker on it. “And then I probably won’t be able to get out of having breakfast with her in the morning.” Friar Lawrence. Everybody knows him. “You know, that diner she loves to go out to” — he hit “go out” slightly so that she wouldn’t try to call at his aunt’s because they’d be out — “I’ll be back by noon. One at the latest. I promise. And” — and now he was making shit up left and right — “my dad promised to pay me a little bit for the delivery, too, so after I get the car back to him I should be a little more flush. I’ll take you out to the Buttercup Bakery for brunch.”
This obviously scored a point. Robin smiled at him, but still it was chilly. “Sounds nice.”
“Okay.” He walked to her and gave her a peck on the cheek, which she accepted. “Love you.”
“Love you, too,” Robin said, already looking at her book again.
“See you tomorrow. Love you,” Willie said again feebly as he slunk out the door.
Willie stood outside the door in the hallway for a moment after it closed. He thought about going back inside, saying, “You know what, my aunt can wait, let’s go get that sushi.” But he really didn’t have any money for sushi. He could go back in and say, “You know what, let’s have that pasta,” but that would seem like he’d decided he wanted her to cook for him. Shaking his head at his own spinelessness, he walked quietly and slowly down the stairs, back out into the fog, and stepped into the car.
Willie rammed the Audi into gear and peeled out of the parking place, scattering a flock of pigeons from the street. He raced around the block, down Haste Street (aptly named, he thought). He stopped at the corner of Shattuck and Center to grab a $1.50 slice of pizza and a Coke, then headed down University Avenue and onto Interstate 580 toward the Richmond / San Rafael Bridge and the Renaissance Faire.
Couldn’t be more than an hour to Novato. I’ll be there by ten. Plenty of time.
He wasn’t on the freeway five minutes, and had just finished his slice, when he passed a sign announcing the next exit as CENTRAL AVENUE — EL CERRITO. He cocked his head. Then he frantically dug into his hip pocket, pulled out his wallet while driving, one eye on the road, and found the slip of paper. It said, in a bold script, Dashka, and there was a phone number, and then added as an afterthought:
c/o Kate Whitsett
5700 Central Ave #205
El Cerrito
Willie threw his head back against the headrest. He looked at his watch. He listened to the voice in his head, then the voice in his heart, and then the one in his loins. He wanted to think of Robin, he tried to think of Robin, but instead the image that came to his mind was Mizti, and the sweet smell of pot in her hair, and then of Dashka, not a picture image but a sense memory of touching between her legs for the first time — oh my god. He looked at the paper again; Kate Whitsett was intriguing as well.
He said “shit” aloud, and at the last possible second, swerved onto the Central Avenue off-ramp.