DÉJÀ VU.
Seven months after I first met Harper, the WNBR came off in March in San Francisco as planned. My second fresh-air tour of the City by the Bay wearing nothing but a smile, or what was going to have to pass for a smile, was gearing up to be much like the first except that I was told—told—that I wasn’t going to wear a jock strap of red body paint or any other color.
“I’m not?” I asked. “Since when?” I was standing stark naked on a lawn, ready to get behind a veil of body paint.
“We took a vote,” Lucy said. “No paint, not like before, but I’ll write For Jeri on your back in her honor.”
“I like the ‘For Jeri,’ but who’s the ‘we’ who voted?” As if I didn’t know, but I wanted it on the record.
“Harper, my mother, me, and Ma. It was unanimous among those of us who voted, in case you want to know.”
“Who didn’t vote?” I asked, picking up on a clue.
“My mother abstained, but she made a point of telling us that she wasn’t voting no.”
Lucy’s mother was riding too. A naked side-by-side bicycle ride with the mother-in-law? How much more San Francisco is it possible to get?
“I didn’t get a vote,” I said, looking at Harper, then at Lucy’s mother, Valerie, who smiled at me. Neither one had a stitch on. Val had turned fifty-five in June last year but looked thirty-five. Not your basic mother-in-law. She could be my younger sister. I tried not to look, but she was right in front of me, less than three feet away, so I wasn’t having much luck with that.
“You would’ve if it had been a tie,” Lucy said, “which it wasn’t because, like I said … unanimous? Yours would’ve been a straw vote, so who cares? Turn around, big guy. It’s so crowded here I can’t get around you.”
We were packed in like sardines, “we” being eighteen hundred riders of which about sixty percent were women, so that must’ve meant something, all of us crammed onto a lawn and a parking lot close to a Starbucks right on the Embarcadero. I turned around and Lucy wrote For Jeri on my back in dark blue paint.
The hair where the bullet had creased my scalp had grown in pure white. I had a white streak a third of an inch wide that Lucy said made me look kinda punk. In honor of this day I’d left it white, but otherwise I colored it. With all my scars and discolorations, it was getting more difficult to blend in, making some of my PI work harder.
Lucy was still writing on me when Valerie sidled an inch or two closer. “I haven’t had a chance to really say hi, Mort, but it’s so very nice to see you again.” She gave me a wicked smile.
I stared at her. “Bad girl. Now I know where Lucy gets it.”
She and Lucy both laughed. Harper bumped me with a hip and said, “Ba-boom.”
Right then a guy lit off an air horn, announcing the start of the ride. He lifted a bullhorn and told the crowd to keep up, stay together, don’t go wandering off unless you get dressed, that strays would be picked up by the police and thrown in a cell in San Quentin until the year 2035.
Funny guy, also naked, but it was hard to tell because he was sporting a uniform of body paint made to look like an SFPD police officer, which I thought was pushing things a bit.
We took off, which took a while. It’s not easy to get eighteen hundred people going on bicycles. Lucy, Harper, Valerie, and I ended up about mid-pack.
Half a mile north on the Embarcadero, there was Ma, right where she’d been two years ago. She flagged us down, risking being run over by fifty riders, and made us stand in front of our bikes off to one side while she got pictures.
In front of our bikes. Facing her.
We were about to leave when she blocked my way and said, “Not you. Hold still while I get a few of you alone.”
“Aw, c’mon, Ma.”
“C’mon yourself. Stand up straight. Smile, and don’t give me that ‘I’m-about-to-throw-up’ look, either.”
Lucy, Harper, and Val grinned, and Harper gave me a bawdy wink.
“Good,” Ma said. “Hold that smile. Got that one. Now say cheese and think pizza and beer.”
“Aw, fuck. Cheeeeese.”
Ma smiled. “I’m gonna retire that old poster and put up one without body paint, boyo. That red jock strap has been buggin’ me for two years. You’re gonna look like Burt Reynolds in that Cosmopolitan centerfold years and years ago—better than, actually.”
Well … sonofabitch.
I was gonna have to kill Ma.