81.

Kenny Goss knew Jaime’s upstairs neighbors too, and spent a lot of time around their back room, smoking dope and listening to rock ’n roll. They dealt some of the best marijuana in San Francisco. At the moment they were dispensing purple sensemilla from Santa Barbara, at twenty dollars an ounce, worth every cent so far as Kenny was concerned. He’d tried importing marijuana himself but the whole deal had gone terribly bad, and Kenny had found himself, at three in the morning, lying face up on the San Bernardino Freeway as traffic whizzed past. His car was somewhere nearby, upside down, after a brush with a truckful of people. Kenny lay waiting to be crushed. He was alert, and knew he’d die any second now. He’d given up on religion long ago, yet the Virgin Mary seemed to hang above him in midair, about ten feet above him if he was any judge. She just hung there, parallel to the ground, wearing a white robe, with a blue shawl edged in gold over her head and shoulders.

“Get up,” she said to him. Cars whizzed past. “Get up and walk to the side of the road,” she said in a clear calm voice.

“I don’t believe in you,” Kenny said.

“Get up and walk to the side of the road,” she said, and vanished. Kenny stood up and walked to the side of the road. There was a lot of traffic for this time of the morning. Here was his car, upside down, steam rising from the engine. And here came red lights flashing. Kenny walked down off the roadway and hid in the bushes. He wasn’t hurt, just bruised and a little dazed. When the cops started looking for him with flashlights he moved off, and finally found his way to a truck stop. It took him most of the day to find the CHP garage, where his car had been towed. He identified himself to the guy on duty and said he wanted to get his stuff out of the car. This took a little nerve, and Kenny was jangly as he went to his car, which was a total wreck. But he’d stored under the fenders two socks full of marijuana, about a pound. If the cops had found the stuff, he was walking into a trap. But he had every dime he owned tied up in the goddamned stuff, and he meant to have it. By some miracle it was still where he’d hidden it. Without glancing around, he pulled out the two fat socks and put them into the paper bag with his dirty underwear. Carrying his stuff he nodded and said thanks to the guy who held the big cyclone fence open for him. After walking two blocks with his heart in his mouth, he relaxed. They weren’t coming after him. It was while sitting on the bus for San Francisco, possessions on his lap, that he remembered seeing the Virgin Mary. A visual hallucination?

“Thanks anyway,” he said to no one in particular, and decided to get out of the dope business. Except, of course, as a consumer. Which led to the upstairs flat on Seventeenth Street. It was an amazing coincidence to find Jaime and Kira living downstairs, amazing and delightful. Their lives kept weaving together. Maybe it meant something.

Kenny’s own marriage had not worked out. Not Brenda’s fault. She’d apparently been waiting all her life for some man to come along, marry her, impregnate her every year or so, and beat the hell out of her to keep her in line. Otherwise nothing worked. Brenda would be cool and calm, the perfect housewife, and then she’d go crazy. Kenny worked at home, both his writing and his small rare book business, so he was around all the time, except when scouting books. Their apartment had been on Pine Street, between Leavenworth and Jones. Not a great neighborhood, but the place was cozy, three floors up, and Kenny felt comfortable. He had four children’s books out and they all brought in nice regular money, not a lot, but enough for Kenny to able to relax and let his wife stay home. This was fine with Brenda, but after she’d done all the cleaning and washing and vacuuming she felt the time heavy on her hands, and so would start drinking beer. Ninety percent of the time even this was fine. Kenny would be in his little cubbyhole writing or dealing with his books and she’d be in the kitchen, sitting at the table with the radio on, drinking beer and reading the paper. But sometimes she got lonely or something, and would come and talk to him. Not just talk, but talk and talk and talk, the words tumbling out like a mountain stream over granite boulders, or so he ironically told himself as he endured the torrent. Not just words, hard words. Brenda Feeney Goss was a Catholic girl, and she wanted her babies. “Listen, if it’s not my fault it’s your fault, and if it’s not your fault I don’t know whose fault it is, but somebody’s got to be at fault,” and on and on until he wanted to slap her silly, no, what he really wanted was to ball his fist and smash her face, breaking teeth, hearing her nose snap, seeing the blood gush. Oh boy. What a horrible soul. If there was such a horrible thing. Immortal soul. Stuck with the same personality forever. Thanks a lot, God.

Stupidly, Kenny had told Brenda all about his experience with the Virgin Mary. He was talking of the power of childhood, how the things we believe as children never really go away. She took it as a genuine miracle, and held his own faithlessness over his head. “Eternal hell, my friend,” she said to him. “And you’re taking me with you.”

“Oh, batshit.” But he had an uncomfortable feeling she was right.

“You notice the Virgin didn’t say anything about the grass,” she said another time, apropos of nothing. They’d both quit drinking and depended on their marijuana. But stoned she could be even worse, gliding into his cubbyhole like some gigantic cobra, hissing at him about anything she could think of. Never anything important. Kenny told her every which way he could that he was an easy-going guy, but you just had to leave him alone when he was trying to work.

“Work? You call that work?” All real work was done with a pick and a shovel, as far as she was concerned. “You can call it work if you want, but it ain’t work.” Contemptuous laughter bubbled out of her.

“Then how come they pay me for it?”

“Because you’re a criminal!” she yelled. Marijuana was supposed to cool you out, but apparently it had the opposite effect on Brenda.

He could have put up with the interruptions if she’d loved him. She didn’t. Once they were married she made it clear she found sex disgusting, except as a means of reproducing. They only real fun they had sexually had been while drunk or stoned. Then afterward she’d be relentlessly guilty. She wasn’t a good Catholic, either. She never went to Mass. Quite an irony for Kenny, because when Brenda finally did leave him, she ran away with a priest.

For months Kenny was depressed, though not so depressed he couldn’t write. When he sold his fourth book he moved to a flat on Arguello, a nice big one with two bedrooms, just in case he found a woman he could really love. He decorated the place himself, spending careful weeks going through the stock over on Clement Street and down at Busvan on the Embarcadero, picking out old wooden pieces and some very nice Oriental rugs pretty cheap. He kept the new place immaculate, nothing like his bachelor pads in the past. With Brenda gone he felt like he could safely go back to drinking beer, and did.

Upstairs over Jaime’s was a good place to meet women, but not the marrying kind, or even the dating kind. The unapproachable kind. The rich and beautiful kind. The Pogozis catered to the high rollers, rich young rock ’n rollers, rich young craftspeople, with nothing to do but try on jewelry and smoke dope. Karla Pogozi made jewelry out of 24-karat gold, heavy necklaces and earrings, while her husband, Vili, carved small animals and hash pipes out of ivory and rare woods. At any time of the day or night there were bound to be people up there, sitting around the back room. A great place to hang out, and Kenny did so a lot, even when he had dope at home. The company was always pleasant, the dope wonderful, the music hot. And the women who came through were delicious, in their leathers and silks. Too bad they were all taken. And too bad Kenny didn’t make enough money to afford them. But he had to be optimistic. He was a good-looking guy. Maybe one would adopt him.