Chapter 6

The way out was not the way in. Godzilla had booted more boltholes than one. We waited quietly in a door with no number, until a black Mercedes spun into our alley, tires squealing. I saw the girl interpreter was driving.

The merchant was in back, swathed in a great coat, black cashmere to his shoes. Harlan got in beside him. I perched on the jump seat. The bundle of silk lay in my lap, warm and heavy as a sleeping child, tied with its raw silk companion in rice paper and scarlet cords. An end stayed open to show it was the same stuff; they had tied that last of all.

We parked at a yellow curb in front of Barclay’s Bank, while Harlan sprinted in. I sat facing How Sam Wah. Take my eye off that one for an instant, he and his silk might vanish in a thunderclap. Maybe it was faery treasure anyway, and fell to ashes in the morning.

No cops in sight. Glad of that, somehow. I get to watch Harlan count ten banded packs of ten one-hundred-dollar-bills, meticulously, from his big Italian shoulder bag into a nearly identical one belonging to the girl. Now we’re out on the curb.

“Could you recommend a local designer competent to work such silk?”

The old man drew a black address book from his breast, consulted it. The girl produced writing materials. His little book was all Chinese. But her note read (in English) “Seven Blows” and an address on Liberty Street. The black Mercedes and its occupants disappeared, not into thin air, into traffic.

The cabbie Harlan flagged knew Liberty Street, but it was map study time for me. By now he’d dodged and cornered onto Market, headed west. Our quest was turning into a cosmic scavenger hunt. Hustling south now on Valencia, I located Liberty. Its coordinates were—it was a cross between—Oh crud. No use trying to hoodwink Harlan; he had laser eyes.

“Is that too close to Castro for you?”

He said, “I’ll let you know.”

———

Imagine a narrow old Victorian, wooden second story on a stucco storefront; and between the two, reading right across in brass letters on a red lacquer panel, “Seven at a Blow.” Around the words perch big (about a foot long), brass, 3-D houseflies. Seven of ’em. The window, done up in P.T. Barnum lettering said, “Tim the Tailor.”

The coin dropped. “The Brave Little Tailor!”

“So it seems.”

A phalanx of striped sword plants stood guard inside the window, then there was a bench, a red tile floor, and a counter. The door jangled a bell in back.

Noises. Chair scraping.

Through an archway lay an airy workshop, sewing machine, cutting and pressing table, neatly cluttered tools of a tailor’s trade. But what rounded that archway looked less like a Castro Street tailor than Harlan did; he looked like Sinbad the Sailor. Barrel-chested, not tall but wide, he moved with the rolling swing of a storybook sailor, and wore old Sinbad’s big gold earrings. I guessed he was Hispanic or Mediterranean of some kind, and he wasn’t very young. Either one was hard to tell: he was the most exquisitely made-up person I have ever seen, so well done it was almost natural: shadowed, lined, and glossed into an icon of male vitality and Technicolor health. His hair (dark I imagined, but it might have been gray) was frosted gold.

Harlan’s recovery was flawless: “How brave are you?”

The man looked him over, intelligently, impudently, took in his last detail, finally leaning forward on the countertop to check his feet. When he straightened up again he said, “What did you have in mind?”

“We need a first-rate designer to copy her frock, or extrapolate from it—but full length, and in silk.”

Tim the Tailor evaluated my five-dollar Esprit mini: the same unhurried once-over he’d given Harlan. “Why?”

“For a wedding.”

“Yours?”

“Hers.”

“But not to you?”

“To my partner.”

I rested my silk load on the counter. A blue and white bowl beside the cash register held a pile of glossy ovoids, mottled appetizing shades of brown. Now I knew what those were, they were Chinese —

“Tea eggs,” said the tailor. “Have one.”

Harlan had one. I wasn’t sure he’d meant me, but I had one. Tim the Tailor had one. “You remind me,” he said, waving his at Harlan, who had handkerchiefed his hands and started to work on the knots of the silk package, “of the rich Arabs in Paris.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Prince Ibn Hobnobbi views all the collections, see, and smiles ‘How excellent, how fine,’ and I buy forty of this fashion in different color; but: you must make the few small changes: the hem must be to here—’ (pointing at the floor), ‘and the sleeve to here—’ (just below his wrist watch).” It was an LCD calculator job, Grand Prix race car game and all, on a gladiator-width black leather band. With studs.)

“I am Arabic,” said Harlan, softly satisfied. He helped himself to another tea egg.

That stopped Tim the Tailor dead, in sassy open-mouthed appraisal. “Well I hope you’re not offended—”

“No. Oh, no.”

“—They also want the necklines up to here—” pointing to his throat. His shirt was open to show off four gold chains nestling in the chest hair, a high school class ring worn like a charm on each.

“I’m not that Arabic.”

“But they’re ruining Paris: like rich Texans in a way; the finest houses for leather in the world are in Paris: so what do they show this year? Elegant, exquisite jackets with a goddamn fist and falcon hand-painted on the backs.”

Harlan flicked the last memento of tea egg from his fingers and unrolled the contents of our package. Tim the Tailor blanched, gazing from the shimmer of silk to the shimmer of Harlan in honest, unconcealed awe.

“How Sam Wah.”

“Quite well,” nodded Harlan primly. “And you?”

“No. You got around How Sam Wah: do you mind if I—”

“Not at all. As—I believe it was Samuel Pepys—once remarked: ‘Pretty thing, what money will do.’”

“I once offered that old—well, everything I could think of: money, drugs, rare erotic manuscripts—for that length of silk—”

“Perhaps he didn’t understand your language.”

“His English is as good as yours. He runs Sam’s Video out on Taraval. That’s his legitimate business, at least. He did the whole show for you? With the interpreter and—”

“Exquisite interpreter. Exquisitely fractured diction.”

“Number one daughter. She’s a psych major at Cal.”

“Why did you want it?” asked Harlan suddenly.

“I imagined I had the proper use. The proper use since moved back to New Jersey. That’s neither here nor there.”

Harlan’s murmur was pure reverence: “White silk pajamas, white silk dressing gown, white silk—”

“Oh you are a live one, aren’t you?”

“You don’t know who I am?”

“The lost Dauphin?”

Harlan snickered.

“The Twelfth Imam?”

I’d been peering up at the wall above the front door. A small, dark object hung there under glass. Curiosity triumphed. I climbed Tim’s waiting bench. Then I could see what it was. I hopped down and went out onto the sidewalk, out in the gathering evening. The conversation didn’t seem to require me. I felt an embarrassing advent of tears.

All down Liberty street, as it dropped east toward the Mission, I could make out those AIDS posters wreathing lamp post and telephone poles: festive, red-white-and-black. Half the ones out here were English, the rest Spanish. Defiant jaunty mourning bands. People were strolling the warm twilight. Guys, mostly. Lights were coming on. I saw Saint Francis’s city, gearing up to glitter.

Oh, he doth hang upon the cheek of night,

like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear—

Come on now, this won’t do. Breathe deep. Smell the salt air and the eucalyptus. Do some stretches. Slight pain in the gut still. Go inside past the jangling bell. Tim and Harlan have taken the silk in back; Harlan’s given Tim his card, and is digging VHS cassettes out of that bottomless shoulder bag.

Tim’s on the phone. “Richard. Me. Go downstairs—Well, tell him to stop. All right, so give the phone to Cody. (pause) Cody? Yeah. Okay. Go downstairs. (pause) Go into my room—my room. You there? Okay—”

“Long cord,” I whispered to Harlan.

He whispered back, “Cordless.”

“Look on my dresser. The blue glass—Yes. Run them over to the shop, would you, son? Well, tell Danny to hold dinner, or I don’t care how legendary he makes it, we won’t be there.” Then, apologetically to Harlan, “Just a block or two.”

Sure enough, in no time, a blond black-leather boy undulated past the front window with the stomping over-long stride peculiar to skinny young guys in motorcycle boots.

The blue glass was an old-time covered icebox dish. It was full to the top with pearls. And what pearls. Lumpy blue, bulgy silver, warty gold, long and narrow rose pink, not a one was white or round.

“Flawed pearls. My friend collected them. Now of course, they’re styled ‘Baroque’ and they’re not to be had, but then nobody wanted them. He’d been all over the Orient.

“He sold everything else, but not these. He spent the last months, while he still had use of his hands, drilling them. There’s another safety deposit full. I was left to find them a good home.”

I scrambled past Cody in a hurry, on my way back to the street. Cody was small and smooth and pretty, a little older Calvin minus Hobbes, trying so hard to look scary in his leathers, one ear bristling with silver death’s heads, axes, crucifixes. I fought off a dreadful urge to hug him, and stopped short of the front door, embarrassed to make another big bell racket going out. Harlan was saying, “Can you recommend a shop for vintage clothing?”

“How vintage?”

“’Thirties. ’Forties.”

“God, the vintage people do their buying in the thrift shops and flea markets. I had a friend in the trade, he’d take me buying sometimes. He had a list—Cody, dear, in the file cabinet, would you, under ‘Charlie’s Trap Lines.’ See? Pages of it. All ye need know. Addresses and what’s hot at each. A vintage buyer’s itinerary for the Bay Area—days of the weekly half-offs and the monthly flea markets—Charlie was organized. Little out of date, I’m afraid. We do seem to have an embarrassment of dead men’s riches—” That put me out the door, bell or no bell.

I was born in 1968. I suppose I must have bought the ’70s moonage daydream, and in some way, I still do.

If all the “holy” I know about comes from desert saints and Latin chant, all the “City” I know is San Francisco: not Rome, not Constantinople, not even Jerusalem. I am a citizen, a high-visibility member of that Babylonian merchants’ and sailors’ guild who stood afar, heaping ashes on their heads and weeping, when none were left alive to traffic in their wonderful stuff.

Alas, alas, that great city!

And the merchandise of gold and silver and precious stones and of pearls and fine linen and purple and silk and scarlet—

And cinnamon and odors and ointments and frankincense and wine and oil and fine flour and wheat and beasts and sheep and horses and chariots and slaves, and the souls of men—

And the voice of harpers and musicians and of pipers and trumpeters shall be heard no more at all in thee, and no craftsman of whatsoever craft he be shall be found anymore in thee—

And the light of the candle shall shine no more in thee and the voice of the bridegroom and the bride shall be heard no more in thee—

Alas, alas, that great city.

I didn’t have that one by heart. Like Rocky Raccoon, I got back to my room and found it in Gideon’s Bible. I just knew where to look, one page before the Holy City New Jerusalem.

Oh God, I’ve got no sense of proportion! I never could keep scripture and nursery rhymes and dumb rock lyrics separate! And the tears are coming, too fast to hold off now. This is the kind of thing I have by heart:

Granfa’ Grigg

Had a pig

In a field of clover.

Piggy died,

And Granfa’ cried,

And all the fun was over.

If I could only wipe away the tears from the eyes and see the working out of that great promise: No more sorrow, no more death, I am making all things new. Not just some things new, the safe respectable things, but all things new.

———

A taxi cruised up Liberty street, to Harlan’s summons, doubtless. I went back through the bell.

“There she is. What’s your size in 501s, dear?”

“Guys’ 28s.” Shock. My own voice.

“Sooper. We’ll need to part you from your dress.” Tim had this shelf full of new black Levis, tags still on, like at the store. He produced a guy’s size small white dress shirt too, and when I exited his changing curtain, traded my dress for a black velvet jacket (Harlan’s, from the scent,) and a silk tie draped around my collar. “Love it.”

There was Harlan, in the velvet pants and weskit, white shirt, open collar, pouting voluptuously at me like the King of the Cats. “So take me out,” he said. “Entertain me.”

He glanced above the door as we went through it, at the small round item under glass. “Something of interest?”

“Don’t be too entertaining,” Tim called after us. “We do expect your bodies in the morning—”

I whispered, “Purple Heart.”

“?”

“War medal. Wounded in battle.”

“His?”

“No name.” Crossing the sidewalk, I said, “You really think that stuff was woven for an Emperor’s concubine?”

“Does it matter?” He flashed this wonderful, cool bland smile. “Shopping for the stuff of legends, weren’t we? If it’s plain, verifiable history you want, get it from People’s Textile Cooperative 573, or IdeoComo, or anyone. I think we ought to celebrate. I, for one, would enjoy a supper commensurate to the occasion.”

“Okay.” Filled with a sudden overweening confidence in my ability to deliver legends on short notice, I ordered our cab across the Bridge to Berkeley and Chez Panisse. One of the three best restaurants in Paris is in Berkeley.

The food upstairs is every bit as fine as downstairs, and it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg and a reservation to get in; you eat right in the kitchen, where you can watch the food dance through the chefs’ quick hands and bask in the enormous sunny breath of ovens uttering calzones.

The bread was warm too, sweet euphoria-scented as the side of Tom’s collar. And the salad had orange and gold nasturtiums in it; the pasta had cream, smoked trout and scallops from the Great Barrier Reef, not your ordinary anonymous white flesh punchings, but with the whole little succulent nasturtium-colored animal attached. And Harlan ordered off the downstairs list what must have been the hugest Chardonnay in California.

I’m wondering what war yielded Tim his medal. Not sure he was old enough for World War II. With all the makeup who could tell? The point, I guess. He was certainly too old for Vietnam. Maybe it was someone else’s. I had a friend once.

I had a friend.

“The French—” Harlan eyed the glass hump in the bottom of our empty bottle somberly, “—have a name for that, they call it ‘the Mound of Despair.’”

Didn’t look too despairing: the image of surfeited luxury, more like. I thought he was going for seconds. And he was: seconds of the almond tart, a rendered gold essence of nuts and cream fit for the Twelfth Imam.

“‘Come home looking like the Pork Pie Faery at this rate,’” he said. “‘Can’t have that, now.’” Tom’s delivery. He had it down exactly. “Where do you run around here?”

“I don’t.”

“Thomas says you run.”

“Not around here.”

He drew a great breath and shut his eyes. Then he said, very carefully, “Where—does—one—run—here. Pardon. Not here, San Francisco.”

“Golden Gate Park?”

The eyes flicked open. “Are you asking, or telling me?”

“People—run—in—Golden—Gate—Park.”

He pushed himself slowly from the table. “Very well. We’ll both go there in the morning.” Then he grinned at me. “But this has been a day.”

“All that California in one place, huh?”

“I wouldn’t have believed it.”

I said, “Welcome to my home.”

Thursday, August 28

I said, “I’ve got no shorts; all that stuff is down at Stanford.” Should’ve stalled him? Wrong. He came out of the bedroom in his coal black jogging suit, and flipped the matching black jersey and shorts at me.

I put them on. Moorish palaces. My mouth began to water, and I didn’t want it to; it put me in a fury. Did he have extras? Was he naked now under those sweats? I’d be secretly peering for panty lines all day, didn’t he know.

The labels said “Hanro, Reine Seide, Pure Silk, Pura Seta, Soie Naturelle.”

Hanro of Switzerland makes expensive lingerie. If they make guys’ athletic stuff, it’s news to me. For Harlan maybe, anyone made anything. Maybe, like the poison tunics of mythology, they’d eat into my flesh, corrosive, unremovable.

On the bathroom counter was a little mother of pearl box of cloth-wrapped elastic hair bands; they were ink black, every one. All the cloth-covered hair bands I ever saw at Long’s or Safeway come in assorted kid colors—you know: red, yellow, blue—and when those all break, you’re stuck with the Girl-Scout green ones. Now here’s Harlan Parr, with unlimited black satin hair bands. Sure, I could use a hair band, but not one of those.

Have to draw a line somewhere.

We took the Rent-a-Sentra. It bucked and farted like an evil-minded pony, seaward to the park. Behind the Academy of Sciences we dumped it, and we ran the bridle paths down to the misty, thundering beach. Fog twined through the cypress and the eucalyptus. Dripped from the rhododendrons and the ferns. We rounded the Dutch windmill, passed the monument where Roald Amundsen’s brave little ship that made the Northwest Passage stood for sixty years, moored up to its plimsoll in sand. Passed the little green duck ponds and the bison paddock. Back to the car.

Harlan went under the hood (yet another equivocal view of his Hanro black silk rear), diddled the carb and got it to leave off farting. It still bucked.

I have the stomachache again.

Across town to the south and east, all the little inland valleys drowse behind their hills in as sheltered and unreal a hothouse sun as the remote Bermudas in the Ocean’s bosom unespied. A narrow old driveway sidles past Tim’s narrow shop: twin cracked ribbons of concrete snuggling in Bermuda grass. Harlan pulls in like he owns the place. The sign says closed, but the door’s open. Old Pirate Earrings is grinning at us from his archway. “Salaam, Effendi.”

Harlan acknowledges, does his mini-bow.

“I put in some research,” says Tim the Tailor, “among my younger acquaintance.”

“Yes?”

“I now know who you are. Or claim to be.”

“Which is more than I do of you,” says Harlan.

“True. But good God, are you sure you want me for—that flaming red-head creature in the video, that’s—”

“My partner, yes. Her husband.”

“Tommi Rhymer.”

“Quite.”

Sadly, “There are things in life I’ve missed.”

“Culturally deprived,” said Harlan.

“Now, now. But his outfit, the white silk coat, and the weskit, and the pantaloons, they look for all the world like they were worn to Queen Victoria’s wedding—”

“Don’t laugh. They were.”

“—by Prince Albert!”

“No one quite so grand, I’m afraid. The kidskin breeks are modern, the originals were all to bits, but the rest was tailored in 1832.”

“And the outfits on the band—”

“Modern.”

“Done in London?”

“Paris, actually.”

“Mr. Parr—do you ever have illusions that you’ve died and gone to heaven?”

“Frequently.”

“I feel as if I owe you some assurance of quality. I haven’t been pegging pants on Liberty Street all my life; my career was in theatrical costume; I have worked Broadway; I do have references—”

“The reference which led us to you should be adequate.”

“Sam Wah has a bizarre sense of humor.”

“I’m sure of it,” said Harlan. “So have I.”

The front bell clamored. “Yoo-hoo! Me! Valerie!”

We’d made our way in to the workshop. “—index my fees to the cost of raw materials,” Tim was saying, “thusly, whatever figure Sam Wah accepted for that fabric I will charge to tailor it, plus as much again for expertise and overhead and N.R.E.—”

“One quid fer ’ittin’ it wif a ’ammer, and firty fer knowin’ w’ere t’ ’it,” said Harlan.

“Quite.”

The woman bustling toward me juggernautical as a cable car has got an old green cashmere coat on, a little black hat on her ’50s poodle-cut hair, a huge black handbag, and three bulging string-bagsful of food, and she wants to hug me into the middle of it.

“And the pearls?”

“Considering their origin—”

“Can’t be sold,” said Harlan.

“But for full London publicity, plus agreement that, if the gown is ever disposed of, I have first option—”

“—Valerie Lagomarsino! I’m Timothy’s assistant. Are you the little girl I’m s’posed to measure? Oh Sweetie! You’re the bride!” (Tim’s left off negotiations for a quick plunder in her string bag, handing deli cartons out to an appreciative Harlan.) “Sicilian olives and Kalamata olives, marinated prawns and feta—” “Oh dear, this’s so wonderful; we’ve never had a wedding! He’s done Gilbert and Sullivan and Children’s Theater, and Renaissance Pleasure and Dickens Faire, but never a bride! Come on, you! Out of the cheese! I’ll cube it for you, honestly! And I’ve got toothpicks—my late husband always used to say—he was a doctor you know, and he used to say—Out! Oh, honestly!”

She recovered her groceries with minimal loss. In an apartment out the back (I gathered she lives there) I could hear her batting and clattering around, warbling old Broadway show tunes in a girlish voice. Tim and Harlan, meanwhile, had rumbled grandly up the stairs at one side of the shop on a mechanical lift: a scene from some bizarre old opera, two unlikely saints on a diagonal ascension into second-story paradise.

Valerie reappeared, her goodies cubed and tooth-picked into blue and white bowls. Some went out to the counter. She trotted the rest upstairs, stood tiptoe, yoo-hooed, and set them on the edge of the lift. Then gathering tape, pen, and measurement chart (a guy’s, I note, with inappropriate points scratched and the female equivalents marked in) she came to work on me. All I had on were Harlan’s shorts etc.; she measured over them.

“Hips, 38—”

“I do not have thirty-eight inch hips!”

“Well, it’s all right, dear, those inches happen before we know it sometimes. Bust, 38—”

“I do not!”

“Don’t get excited! Now look, here’s the end of the tape, and here’s Valerie’s thumb—”

“You’re starting at the wrong end!”

The doorbell clamored again.

“You’re starting from the wrong end of the tape! You’re gonna have me with a forty-eight-inch waist!”

She clicked her tongue at me and bustled out to the young guys at the desk. “Oh Sweetie! Hello there, we’re closed for the week, I’m ’fraid. Pickup only, no new stuff.

“Oh, he’s got a really big job. Something so exciting, I’m not s’posed to tell. Really famous people. When you come back, I’ll tell you all about it—”

“Hello below.” Tim’s black leather legs stood at the top of the stair. “Seventy-two minus forty-eight,” he said quietly, “is twenty-four, n’est ce pas? I can subtract, so long as she doesn’t change ends in midstream.”

I’m sitting here wondering what a sharp old buzzard like that could want with a really dumb cluck assistant.

Her old purse is sitting here too. I see familiar items sticking out the top. The plastic rosary case. The tiny black mantilla. The old Saint Joseph’s Daily Missal, utterly useless for following the Mass since before I was born. But I bet I know what it’s there for. The book bulges pregnantly, held to with rubber bands. Sure enough. Holy cards. All the usual: novenas to Saint Jude, Saint Anthony, the Little Flower, Our Lady of Carmel, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Saint Martin de Porres. Then the antique gorgeous lacey ones handwritten in Italian.

Then the funeral cards your Catholic mortuaries still hand out. Lots of recent ones. Pious pastel picture on the front, guy’s name and a prayer on the back. Birth date, death date. Young guys. Prayers to ease their trip through Purgatory. All from Most Holy Redeemer in the Castro.

I bet Valerie walks to 7:30 Mass each morning. Wow. Talk about “safe from priests’ and prelates’ rage.” With that saddlebag of pious intentions to pray through, no wonder an outdated missal serves her fine. Poor dude at the altar might as well be reading her the NASDAQ quotes. Talk about your Modern Church and survival tactics. I had to feel a kind of admiration. Nevertheless, I didn’t want a 48” waist.

“Hello Sweetie!” More young guys at the counter.

The lift is blocking the stair top, but I can still swarm up the banister, to an upstairs bright and vacant: only cutting tables, storage cabinets, other tailor gear. Valerie’s blue and white bowls hold toothpicks mostly, and Kalamata pits. I get the last three prawns, spaced with Sicilian garlic olives and feta cubes.

“—The Privileged Peasant or Twiggy goes to Afghanistan effect,” Tim says. “Sorry, am I dating myself?” They had my mini on a hanger and were looking at it. “Esprit is clever that way: everything cut from squares and rectangles. Those big bat sleeves are squares folded diagonally. Triangles actually, but I’m putting my seams up the top of the arm, so mine are squares.

“I don’t believe in seams one’s supposed to ignore. No patience with that kind of piety. Tim’s Law: ‘If you can’t hide it, decorate it.’ And,” he went on, “Corollary One of Tim’s Law, should you ruin it, transmute the damage to a central design concept. Amazing what debacles become triumphs of creativity.”

I wasn’t sure I found his philosophy of art a comfort.

“So I’ll run the trim up both sides of the seam—even better, there won’t be a seam. Leave it open and button it across with silk loops and pearl clusters, wrist to shoulder—then straight across the collar bones, and down that big V-back. I take it (to me) you are fond of white leather? Should hope, if your intended’s intending to get hitched in those britches. God, what an apparition. Hard on an old man’s blood pressure.”

Harlan dimpled modestly. Having never realized Tom’s video-britches were leather, best I can manage is the dry grins. Like an unobservant teenage twit.

“Now you (to Harlan) said, ‘same, only floor length—’”

“Ibn Hobnobbi.”

“Exactly. But I assume (to me) you take a stride; you didn’t want a straight skirt did you? Dropping that width straight to the floor’s like the old song about Mabel, ‘—nice to hug and she’s nice to squeeze, but you can’t get her hobble skirt above her knees,’ neither practical nor very rock’n’rolling—

“So, my skirt is a half-circle. Since the silk’s only a yard wide, and we’ll need a radius for the waist, you’ll still have your mini length in front, see, then it sweeps out wider and wider as it goes, to any length train you choose, no seam in back either, closed above with pearls and loops. A little risqué and a little military, little like your old dress, little like your husband’s coattails—unconstructed, unconfining, simple and sexy and bare, and all you need, is good legs, which you have in abundance, and a good tan back. Go lie in the sun, sweetheart, Ol’ Uncle Tim is gonna fix you all, all up.”

“Timothy!” Valerie hollered up the stairs, “Genji’s here!”

The guys rode down the lift, Tim still waving his arms at Harlan. I used the banister, thinking what an unexpected load of souls’ comfort there was to having this outrageous overbearing old character, so cock-secure in his talents, graciously willing to accept twenty thousand dollars to close his little business for a week and fix me all, all up.

Genji was a delicate looking kid, pretty, except for very bad skin plastered over with a coat of flat ivory makeup. Highly dubious the name was real, but he was Japanese from Japan; his fractured English was no put-on. “Levi’s” were “Revi’s” for him.

“I try it?”

“Oh, I insist.”

What Tim had done for him: altered a pair of 5O1’s, removing the button-fly off another and running it up the seat. The two sides were totally breakaway now, one long continuous button-fly, down the front through the crotch and up the back. Yuk yuk. Where Levi’s patch used to be, Tim put his own: two giant houseflies hitched to a pair of jeans and pulling, with the slogan Seven at a Blow.

Genji hopped around the shop in them, crowing “Ta-Da!”, “Banzai!”, and other such fitting remarks to the blushing amusement of two friends, ordinary young S.F. guys, who seemed shyly gratified someone was doing what he was doing, and relieved as hell it wasn’t them.

Wonder what could be his expectations: to have that super-fly unbuttoned for him as frequently as possible? Or was it “all for show and not for blow,” as the saying goes?

Pathetic, kind of, either way, like a poorly informed tourist, come looking for the fancy dress ball five years too late. His flat white Kabuki face made the oddest contrast to old Tim, with his perfect fashion makeup.

And Harlan, whose skin was flawless ivory anyway.

And Valerie. Her lipstick wasn’t on too straight. Her eyebrows were pencil, and looked like pencil. She was wearing base; it gave her peachy orange facial hair and an orange line in front of her ears—perfectly respectable middle-aged lady, in other words; nobody’d look twice. And me. A hole in the air. A brain with eyes. No matter what the makeup, nobody’d look twice.

———

On the way out, Harlan used Tim’s phone.

“Mr. Pfau—” I’m eavesdropping again. Papa has an engineer buddy named Ed Pfau. Obviously not the same. Then he giggled and said “Is it so. Raoul Falconer gave me yours also. You’ve a 356 Speedster you wish to sell?”

He cowboyed the Renta-Sentra south down Interstate 280, swearing mildly in Arabic.

The Pfaus have a rambling ’70s ranch house on a knoll, formerly prune orchard, above the freeway west of Stanford. They have four boys I used to play with, till they discovered girls weren’t guys. They all play guitar now and are into motorcycles, the Grateful Dead, other good things like that.

Harlan wore his brown cord pants and tweed coat with the leather elbows. He stood around the driveway, chatting up Ed Pfau in the very primmest British sporting fashion.

As he was getting out his checkbook, and about to buy the car, which was virtually rust free, perfect to restore, and all those other nice things, Ken Pfau (14) wandered through, spotted him, did an enormous double take, and split.

Harlan wrote the check.

Ken reappeared with Dave (17).

Dave seconded his identification. They went away.

Ed dug out the pink slip, spare parts, maintenance log.

Ken and Dave came back with Ron (19). Ken had an electric guitar. Dave had a tape recorder and a practice amp. Ron was paying out three long, bright-orange electric cords.

Very slowly, Harlan turned to face his public.

“Mr. Parr,” whispered Dave Pfau, “sir—”

“Yes?”

All were absolutely tongue-tied.

Harlan gazed gravely. “Which one do you want?”

The boys looked at each other, Dave whispered, “Solace.”

He asked for a metronome. They had a Casio toy synth, the cheapest one with auto accompaniment. He made a quick survey of available rhythms. I couldn’t have begun to set “Solace” over any of them. But he selected, turned the temp and the volume to the lowest click.

And played. “Solace,” all right. Only he had Tom’s vocal translated to a guitar part and was playing the two at once. Until the solo came. Here came the solo.

Music towered up from the middle of Pfau’s hilltop. The breeze died, and the freeway’s ocean roar grew hushed. From the dusty and rototilled orchard surrounding, two covered race cars, a parted out hulk, assorted motorcycles, and a tow trailer listened as attentively as ever ox and ass to angelic musicians. No jets whined down the landing pattern to SFO. No dogs barked. No birds sang. When it was over, he lifted his hand. All that sad glory slid back down the sky and vanished in the guitar pickup. He turned it all off. And I’m standing here, trying to hide the tears.

“That’s not the solo off the album!” gasped Dave Pfau.

Truer words were never spake.

“Why, you wanted it the same?”

“No, no sir. Only, God, that’s not same as anything, I’ve got all the concert—”

Harlan waited brightly for him to say “bootlegs.”

Dave messed his Doc Martens around in the gravel. “—I mean, it wasn’t that way on this tour—”

“Of course not,” said Harlan severely. “Its yours. One off. Record it yourself some day; I’ll remember you.”

“I’m not much good.”

“Get good. I’ll leave you to it.”

Ken and Dave and Ron went off with their prize to phone every guitar-playing kid in Santa Clara County.

Ed came back with the last of the parts.

Finally Harlan turned to me. “I understand you drive.”

“But of course.”

“Of course. You shovel this load of old codswallop back to airport rentals; I’ll do rearguard in case.”

The renta-Sentra put on its best show of bucking and farting. In vain. Thirty minutes saw us rid of it at SFO. Harlan signed it off, paid for it, grabbed my hand and cantered jubilantly out toward his new old Porsche in the parking. I cantered with him.

“Chez Panisse?”

“But of course.”

He’d sequestered his little car in a well-defended corner, and had to hand me in through the driver’s side.

“Thought you might—want to try—new things.”

“Oh, God no. My Americanism for today—” Having me settled, he settled himself, (tucking my hand he still held firmly in between the seat and his warm brown corduroy thigh), dug out his key, stuck it in the ignition—

—And froze. We both sat and thought about it. I felt, but avoided, his long slow look. At last he sighed. “My Americanism for today:” and turned the key “‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’”

So my hand stayed where it was, passively appreciative of the flex and dance of muscle as he heel-and-toed Ed Pfau’s bottle-green Speedster north up 101. At the first good cloverleaf, he took us round the whole thing, gearing down and standing on it, making the little Porsche squat and drift the turns, 360 degrees.

Papa’s driven old Porsches all my life. He never raced himself, just pit-crewed buddies like Ed Pfau. We used to go to Sears Point and Laguna Seca for the vintage races; his friends’d sometimes tour me round the course at speed.

Lots of talk, when I got my license, of putting me through Bondurant’s performance driving school. It was just talk, of course. I’m from the Bat-Out-of-Hell driving school strictly. But I know all the mannerisms. Over the city and across the bridge to Chez Panisse we go.