The story about him changed depending who you talked to, ten years later or fifteen, in the Mission or the Castro, whether the day had been bright on the hills or it had hardly bothered to reveal itself, stayed hidden by the gray weather.
He thought his father was the first man on the moon, a boy of twenty might say, in an oversized lamb’s-wool coat that fell halfway to his bare knees, his face mostly its big green eyes under blue mascara. Such a sad delusion. Can you imagine thinking that while you were dying? Bradley, I think. Twenty-seven.
You’re thinking of his friend, who got the what do you call it, the moon clock, the space watch.
What watch? What are you talking about, the space watch? How many have you had, Moon Clock?
In another version, sugary and miraculous, Vincent Kahn was the happy long-lost father. His son was someone most people claimed to remember and a good few, older, claimed to have a friend who had slept with him.
At a bad party in the Sunset, in a stucco building that had just gone up—a forty-minute bus ride and for what—somebody with an unfortunate scramble of teeth leaned out over the balcony, holding his cigarette between middle and ring finger. The depth of the park across the way could be felt, the people the city had forgotten sleeping on cardboard in the groves of juniper. The green had a smell, the damp had a color.
A real beauty, a real slut, who wasn’t. He had a superhero jawline and this turquoise ring.
And did he ever say—
It wasn’t a real talking-about-your-dad–type situation, but he had class. Left a note with a little drawing of a whale saying A whale of a time, which Andy kept, which I know because I cleaned out his apartment. What I heard was that he went there, where is it, Missouri, Ohio, where Vincent Kahn lived. And Vincent Kahn took him in, but it had to be very quiet, a national hero with a gay son, can you imagine?
You’re telling me he’s still there, living some secret life with his long-lost astronaut father? I mean, does this story make you feel good to tell? What are your thoughts on JFK? He’s taken up papier-mâché with Marilyn in Bel-Air, right? Do you subscribe to the National Enquirer or prefer the thrill of buying it at the store?
Let him tell it, said a boy in a dewy drugstore lawn chair. Relax.
Believe what you want. Some people think he had it and died there, but I don’t know. I like to think of them cooking breakfast, talking the headlines. And if it went the other way, don’t you think it could be better? That at the end of your life you’re entrusted to somebody who only gets to know you then? There’d be none of the comparisons, when he was healthy he was this, people crying just because of how your skin looked. Your identity would just be your transition. It would not be such an embarrassment, having to die.
There’s a cheery little thought. Are there lightbulbs inside I could eat?
It doesn’t not make me happy to think about.
Who was his mother, then? Who has the son of the first man on the moon and doesn’t cash in on that?
You know, those guys could have whoever they wanted. I had an aunt who screwed a fighter pilot, they all started as that, the astronauts, test pilot, I can’t remember which, and she said, she got too drunk at Thanksgiving, “That’s a rough mistake I’d make again.” His mother could have been anybody. It doesn’t matter, for the story, who his mother was. History belongs to men, blah, blah, blah.
In another story, he shows up at Vincent Kahn’s door unannounced, a twink in the wrong place, and Vincent Kahn calls the cops. The police arrest him somehow, on inadequate grounds, because Vincent Kahn is the biggest thing that has ever happened to this town and they’re in his pocket. They humiliate him at the station, they make him cut off his hair with an old pair of office scissors. In almost every story, he has beautiful, famous hair. Kaleidoscopic, someone says. They sprinkle the cuttings over his county jail dinner and make him eat it, or they burn it like incense for the three days he’s there. The smell makes him gag, but every time he gags they blow a high-pitched whistle, so he learns to swallow it. After this, the story doesn’t know where to go, and it stops abruptly. Anecdotes like this, unbelievable cruelty in the hands of power, have become as dependable as syndicated television, and their entertainment value is the same, satisfying if you’re looking for confirmation that the world is stacked in the same way it was a year or five before—in this case, against you, against people who look and talk and feel like you.
I don’t need to hear this, says a man with a beard as neat as his sweater, pushing his cleared plate to the center of the table. Someone put on a record.
There’s another version, told less often in the city, and it involves a small town in the redwoods. Guerneville. Before the men from San Francisco started buying up houses there, it was pronounced with a middle e. They decided better without—a stately two syllables sounded more like how the dank place felt—and the locals, over the course of two decades, must have slowly agreed.
Most often he’s a little older, the person telling this version, than the person listening. Here it’s a host and his visitor, a generation between, all told in the time it takes to drive from the main drag to the gray ocean. Snaking along the river, which drowns an early swimmer every March, letting up on the clutch of the Saab that’s his pride, the driver takes the curves through the ancient trees, so dense that the rule, even at two in the afternoon, is headlights. The river takes its name from the Russians who settled it, who built wooden forts against the ocean and ran a pelt trade. Their rivals were the loggers, always American.
Anyway, says the host: the boy who believed Vincent Kahn was his father. For years he’d been writing to Vincent Kahn, something he was ashamed of, something even his best friend, who he lived with and knew everything, didn’t know. He was a strange case, no family, very charismatic, maybe something a little off with his mental health. The sort of person who is at every party for months on end, then disappears for just as long.
Is it always so dark like this? What was his name?
Just for the next stretch, then everything opens up completely. The way the land changes here.
The host waves a hand, steering wheel to open window, to indicate his broad feeling for this part of the country. The boy reaches into the buttery leather of the backseat for another sweater.
A letter comes, one day, from Vincent Kahn himself, neither confirming nor denying. He packs up in a matter of days, telling some lie about how he was driving to New York anyway and a stop in Ohio was basically nothing. The friend was very active—he organized, maybe you heard of it, that die-in at one of the last bathhouses to stay open, that nightmare in SoMa, the exact number of men who’d died in the city, numbered in greasepaint on T-shirts flat in the street. Also a real cook. The kind of person who thinks, Oh, Tuesday: I’ll just prepare duck for eight.
Around here the road rises, shaking off the old trees, and the river changes into something else, gaining salt and sand. Ahead is blond farmland, tawny cows at home in the serpentinite rocks that cradle it.
He has promised to call the friend, but nothing. It’s not unlike him—some people are oysters, some people are clams. I’m not this way, I’ve never done anything alone in my life. Three people know not when I have a cold, but when I think I might.
Beautiful, the boy says. It’s like it totally forgets what it just was.
Weeks go by, and then this package comes. Barely a letter, something like, I’ll let you know when I’m on my way. Sell this if you need to. I’m sorry. Inside is this watch, enormous and decked out with all kinds of dials. On the strap, sewn to the strap, it says, whatever, NASA. An Omega Speedmaster.
They crest a high curve, a turn decorated with white feathery plants that grow waving in green reeds from between boulders.
The friend is furious, a real moralist, very unhappy to be in the possession of stolen property, but keeps this to himself. He does not sell it for rent, he finds some subletter. Their whole friendship has been an Italian wedding, shouting matches, big declarations, a fair amount of pleading. The watch goes in the drawer of his bedside table, a year goes by. A test comes back positive. His was the type, by the way, where he wasn’t sick, wasn’t sick, wasn’t sick, then was sick. Anyway there are all the appointments and tests, no insurance of course, he’s a waiter, he’s twenty-six or twenty-seven. A month or two later he more or less loses his job, drops five plates he’d stacked on his arm for the second time, and to the two friends who come by it’s obvious. Pneumonia, the hospital, let’s go. They’re rooting through his room to find his wallet, he’s delirious in three sweaters, and in the nightstand they find the watch. He’s babbling that it’s from the friend, it’s Vincent Kahn’s, told me to sell it, and they’re brushing him off, trying to get an overnight bag together, but somebody looks at that label and starts to think. He’s French, something of a devil-may-care.
The windows are up against the wind now, and the driver barely slows to turn. If there wasn’t enough light before, now there’s all of it.
Long story short, while they’re at the ER, he walks down to a pawnshop, the place on Mission and Duboce with the neon arrow, you’ve seen it.
He waits for the boy to nod in confirmation, which he finally does, fingers of both hands curled around the tan pull-down handle.
And he’s fighting tooth and nail, because as it turns out, says the man at the pawnshop, this is a watch that was sold to the public. The French friend says what about the little tag sewn in that says Apollo 11, look how long the strap goes, obviously it’s meant to go over a space suit. The French friend’s English is bad, worse when he’s angry, and the guy behind the counter, a beautiful Vietnamese man, still works there, anyway pulls out a magazine where he says he’s seen the ad for this watch recently. He points out the similarities, and the friend points out the differences.
The boy’s knees are up on the seat now, his left hand tensed on the dash. The color on his face looks daubed there by a preschooler. They come up behind a Toyota, a family of four in coordinated neon windbreakers, license plate Idaho, and overtake it with a long, mean honk that bleeds into the next mile.
Commemorative edition, he keeps saying. Commemorative edition.
The driver takes his hands off the wheel to ape the gesture of the man at the pawnshop, hands raised as if holding two platters by his ears. The boy’s hand shoots to the wheel.
Commemorative edition! He acknowledges yes, the differences, the Velcro, the patch, but he asks the friend, and what can the friend really say, how can you verify? How can you prove it? No proof, no money. And this makes sense, of course. Fame like that, prestige, really we’re talking about power, it can’t just pass from one hand into the next. There’s no trickle-down. It’s nontransferable. It would only be truly worth something if Vincent Kahn sold it, and it would never be worth it to Vincent Kahn to sell it.
He got no money?
No, no, he got some. Be patient. He got the price of the watch, the one sold to the public, plus a few sniffs more, which of course means the pawnshop man had his suspicions. You can look it up, there are a few of them unaccounted for, the real ones I mean, lost to the black market. Anyway, with that money the three of them got a vacation rental back in town, I’ll show it to you on the drive back, this beautiful deck on a hill, a hot tub cut into it, a front room that was all found windows, just surrounded by trees. He could have spent it on more doctors, whichever fashionable eastern medicine, but he said no. They had these big dinners, of course he couldn’t really eat much, shaved truffles, oysters from Bodega Bay, I’ll take you. He made the shopping lists and wrote out the coursing in the mornings. When he sensed it was getting to be time, the end of two months, he had the idea that he wanted a going-away party. A hundred people came, formal attire. Someone brought fifty of those paper lanterns you get in Chinatown and they rigged them in the trees somehow. He had this thrifted Nehru suit, peach, and an orchid boutonniere, and he just held court on the deck in his wheelchair, kissing everybody goodbye. Anyone who cried he sent away. He was in bed by ten and they all walked to the river and sent—tea candles—down it in plastic—boats. I’m sorry, it always gets me. Brandon, his name was Brandon. We’re almost there. Isn’t that the most beautiful story you’ve ever heard? You’re not looking at me like that’s the most beautiful story you’ve ever heard.
They are approaching the last sign to be seen for a while, a three-way stop known for its accidents, people turning against the glare onto the coast road built the century before for mules. There is a piece of a bumper, there are the shards of a clipped side mirror.
He should have— I’m sorry, the boy says, but he should have been in a hospital. I don’t think it’s a beautiful story. I don’t care about the fucking tea candles. He shouldn’t have been sick to begin with. I don’t think it’s a beautiful story. Who was his family? What about his friend? Are you saying his friend never.
I’ve heard it both ways. He came at the last minute, he didn’t come. Had been in New York, disappeared to Mexico after, was sending back AZT, took a photo that mattered. You’ve seen it, that boy in a wheelchair who couldn’t hold up his sign, it’s half-curled in his lap, that protest down—
Here it is, superseding talk and feeling. It’s the last color, someone told this boy at the party, and if he didn’t believe it at the time, wanting to stay in his life and not imagine millions of others, if he didn’t believe it, he does now: that our thinking fails when it comes to this, when it comes to borders, water and sky that are the edges—that blue is the last color, in every known language, to be named.