We slowly, carefully and abortively made our way back to downtown Tijuana surrounded and bombarded by people trying to sell us things that we did not want to buy.
We had already got what we’d come to Tijuana for. I had my arm around Vida. She was all right but she was a little weak.
‘How do you feel, honey?’ I said.
‘I feel all right,’ she said. ‘But I’m a little weak.’
We saw an old man crouching like a small gum-like piece of death beside an old dilapidated filling station.
‘Hey, a pretty, pretty girl!’
Mexican men kept reacting to Vida’s now pale beauty.
Vida smiled faintly at me as a taxicab driver dramatically stopped his cab in front of us and leaned out the window and gave a gigantic wolf whistle and said, ‘WOW! You need a taxi, honey!’
We made our way to the Main Street of Tijuana and found ourselves in front of Woolworth’s again and the bunnies in the window.
‘I’m hungry.’ Vida said. She was tired. ‘So hungry.’
‘You need something to eat,’ I said. ‘Let’s go inside and see if we can get you some soup.’
‘That would be good,’ she said. ‘I need something.’
We went off the confused dirty Main Street of Tijuana into the clean modern incongruity of Woolworth’s. A very pretty Mexican girl took our order at the counter. She asked us what we wanted. ‘What would you like?’ she said.
‘She’d like some soup,’ I said. ‘Some clam chowder.’
‘Yes,’ Vida said.
‘What would you like?’ the waitress said in very good Woolworth’s English.
‘I guess a banana split,’ I said.
I held Vida’s hand while the waitress got our orders. She leaned her head against my shoulder. Then she smiled and said, ‘You’re looking at the future biggest fan The Pill ever had.’
‘How do you feel?’ I said.
‘Just like I’ve had an abortion.’
Then the waitress brought us our food. While Vida slowly worked her soup, I worked my banana split. It was the first banana split I’d had in years.
It was unusual fare for the day, but it was no different from anything else that had happened since we’d come to the Kingdom of Tijuana to avail ourselves of the local recreational facilities.
The taxicab driver never took his eyes off Vida as we drove back to America. His eyes looked at us from the rear-view mirror as if he had another face and it was a mirror.
‘Did you have a good time in Tijuana?’ he said.
‘Lovely,’ I said.
‘What did you do?’ he said.
‘We had an abortion,’ I said.
‘HAHAHAHAHAHAHAVERYFUNNYJOKE!’
the driver laughed.
Vida smiled.
Farewell, Tijuana.
Kingdom of Fire and Water.
Our desk clerk was waiting for us, agog with smiles and questions. I had an idea that he drank on the job. There was something about how friendly he was.
‘Did you see your sister?’ he asked Vida with a big false-teeth smile.
‘What?’ Vida said. She was tired.
‘Yes, we saw her,’ I said. ‘She was just as we remembered her.’
‘Even more so,’ Vida said, catching the game by the tail.
‘That’s good,’ the clerk said. ‘People should never change. They should always be the same. They are happier that way.’
I tried that one on for size and was able to hold a straight face. It had been a long day.
‘My wife’s a little tired,’ I said. ‘I think we’ll go up to our room.’
‘Relatives can be tiring. The excitement of it all. Renewing family ties,’ the desk clerk said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
He gave us the key to his mother’s room.
‘I can take you up to the room if you don’t remember the way,’ he said.
‘No, that’s not necessary,’ I said. ‘I remember the way.’ I headed I him off by saying, ‘It’s such a beautiful room.’
‘Isn’t it?’ he said.
‘Very lovely room,’ Vida said.
‘My mother was so happy there,’ he said.
We took the old elevator upstairs and I opened the door with the key. ‘Get off the bed,’ I said as we went into the room. ‘Off,’ I repeated.
‘What?’ Vida said.
‘The Mother Ghost,’ I said.
‘Oh.’
Vida lay down on the bed and closed her eyes. I took her shoes off, so she could be more comfortable.
‘How do you feel?’ I said.
‘A little tired.’
‘Let’s take a nap,’ I said, putting her under the covers and joining her.
We slept for an hour or so and then I woke up. The Mother Ghost was brushing her teeth and I told her to get into the closet until we were gone. She got into the closet and closed the door after her.
‘Hey, baby,’ I said. Vida stirred in her sleep and then opened her eyes.
‘What time is it?’ she said.
‘About the middle of the afternoon,’ I said.
‘What time does our plane leave?’ she said.
‘6.25,’ I said. ‘Do you feel you can make it? If you don’t, we’ll spend the night here.’
‘No, I’m all right,’ she said. ‘Let’s go back to San Francisco. I don’t like San Diego. I want to get out of here and leave all this behind.’
We got up and Vida washed her face and straightened herself up and felt a lot better, though she was still a little weak.
I told the hotel ghost mother good-bye in the closet and Vida joined me. ‘Good-bye, ghost,’ she said.
We went down the elevator to the waiting desk clerk whom I suspected of drinking on the job.
He was startled to see me standing there holding the KLM bag in my hand and returning the room key to him.
‘You’re not spending the night?’ he said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘We’ve decided to stay with her sister.’
‘What about your snoring?’ he said.
‘I’m going to see a doctor about it,’ I said. ‘I can’t hide from this all my life. I can’t go on living like this forever. I’ve decided to face it like a man.’
Vida gave me a little nudge with her eyes to tell me that I was carrying it a little too far, so I retreated by saying, ‘You have a lovely hotel here and I’ll recommend it to all my friends when they visit San Diego. What do I owe you?’
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Nothing. You’re Foster’s friend. But you didn’t even spend the night.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘You’ve been very friendly. Thank you and good-bye.’
‘Good-bye,’ the desk clerk said. ‘Come again when you can spend the night.’
‘We will,’ I said.
‘Good-bye,’ Vida said.
Suddenly he got a little desperate and paranoid. ‘There was nothing wrong with the room, was there?’ he said. ‘It was my mother’s room.’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It was perfect.’
‘A wonderful hotel,’ Vida said. ‘A beautiful room. A truly beautiful room.’
Vida seemed to have calmed him down because he said to us as we were going out the door, ‘Say hello to your sister for me.’
That gave us something to think about as we drove out to the San Diego airport sitting very close together in the back seat of a cab where the driver, American this time, did not take his eyes off Vida in the mirror.
When we first got into the cab, the driver said, ‘Where to?’
I thought it would be fairly simple just to say, ‘The International Airport, please.’
It wasn’t.
‘That’s the San Diego International Airport, isn’t it? That’s where you want to go, huh?’
‘Yes,’ I said, knowing that something was wrong.
‘I just wanted to be sure,’ he said. ‘Because I had a fare yesterday that wanted to go to the International Airport, but it was the Los Angeles International Airport he wanted to go to. That’s why I was checking.’
Oh, yeah.
‘Did you take him?’ I said. I didn’t have anything else to do and my relationship with the cab driver was obviously out of control.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘He was probably afraid of flying,’ I said.
The cab driver didn’t get the joke because he was watching Vida in the rear-view mirror and Vida was watching me after that one. The driver continued staring at Vida. He paid very little attention to his driving. It was obviously dangerous to ride in a cab with Vida.
I made a mental note of it for the future, not to have Vida’s beauty risk our lives.
Unfortunately, the cab driver was very unhappy with the tip I gave him. The fare was again one dollar and ten cents and remindful of the experience we’d had earlier in the day with that first cab driver, I raised the tip-ante to thirty cents.
He was startled by the thirty-cent tip and didn’t want to have anything else to do with us. Even Vida didn’t make any difference when he saw that thirty cents.
What is the tip to the San Diego airport?
Our plane didn’t leave for an hour. Vida was quite hungry, so we had something to eat in the cafe. It was about 5.30.
We had hamburgers. It was the first time I’d had a hamburger in years, but it turned out not to be very good. It was flat.
Vida said her hamburger was good, though.
‘You’ve forgotten how a hamburger is supposed to taste,’ Vida said. ‘Too many years in the monastery have destroyed your better judgement.’
There were two women sitting nearby. One of them had platinum hair and a mink coat. She was middle-aged and talking to a young, blandly pretty girl who was talking in turn about her wedding and the little caps that were being designed for the bridesmaids.
The girl was nice in the leg department but a little short in the titty line or was I spoiled? They departed their table without leaving a tip.
This made the waitress mad.
She was probably a close relative to the two cab drivers I’d met that day in San Diego.
She stared at the tipless table as if it were a sex criminal. Perhaps she was their mother.
I took a closer look at the San Diego airport. It was petite, uncomplicated with no Playboy stuff at all. The people were there to work, not to look pretty.
There was a sign that said something like: Animals arriving as baggage may be claimed in the airline air freight areas in the rear of bldg.
You can bet your life that you don’t see signs like that in the San Francisco International Airport.
A young man with crutches, accompanied by three old men, came along as we were going out to wait for our aeroplane. They all stared at Vida and the young man stared the hardest.
It was a long way from the beautiful PSA pre-flight lounge in San Francisco to just standing outside, beside a wire fence in San Diego, waiting to get on our aeroplane that was shark-like and making a high whistling steam sound, wanting very much to fly.
The evening was cold and grey coming down upon us with some palm trees, nearby, by the highway. The palm trees somehow made it seem colder than it actually was. They seemed out of place in the cold.
There was a military band playing beside one of the aeroplanes parked on the field, but it was too far away to see why they were playing. Maybe some big wig was coming or going. They sounded like my hamburger.
We got our old seats back over the wing and I was sitting again next to the window. Suddenly it was dark in twelve seconds. Vida was quiet, tired. There was a little light on the end of the wing. I became quite fond of it out there in the dark like a lighthouse burning twenty-three miles away and I made it my secret talisman for ever.
A young priest was sitting across the aisle from us. He was quite smitten by Vida for the short distance to Los Angeles.
At first he tried not to be obvious about it, but after a while he surrendered himself to it and one time he leaned across the aisle and was going to say something to Vida. He was actually going to say something to her, but then he changed his mind.
I will probably go on for a long time wondering what he would have said to my poor aborted darling who, though weak and tired from the ways of Tijuana, was the prettiest thing going in the sky above California, the rapidly moving sky to Los Angeles.
I went from the priest’s interest in Vida to wondering about Foster at the library, how he was handling the books that were coming in that day.
I hoped he was welcoming them the right way and making the authors feel comfortable and wanted as I made them feel.
‘Well, we’ll be home soon,’ Vida said to me after a long silence that was noisy with thought. The priest’s composure vibrated with tension when Vida spoke.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was just thinking about that.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I could hear the noise in your mind. I think everything’s all right at the library. Foster’s doing a good job.’
‘You’re doing a good job yourself,’ I said.
Thank you,’ she said. ‘It will be good to get home. Back to the library and some sleep.’
I was very pleased that she considered the library her home. I looked out the window at my talisman. I loved it as much as the coffee stain flying down.
Things are different at night. The houses and towns far below demand their beauty and get it in distant lights twinkling with incredible passion. Landing at Los Angeles was like landing inside a diamond ring
The priest didn’t want to get off the plane at Los Angeles, but he had to because that’s where he was going. Perhaps Vida reminded him of somebody. Perhaps his mother was very beautiful and he didn’t know how to handle it and that’s what drove him to the Cloth and now to see that beauty again in Vida was like swirling back through the mirrors of time.
Perhaps he was thinking about something completely different from what I have ever thought about in my life and his thoughts were of the highest nature and should have been made into a statue… perhaps. To quote Foster, ‘Too many perhapses in the world and not enough people.’
I was suddenly wondering about my library again and missed the actual departure of the priest to become part of Los Angeles, to add his share to its size and to take memories of Vida into whatever.
‘Did you see that?’ Vida said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
This has been happening ever since I was eleven,’ she said.
The stewardesses on this flight were fantastically shallow and had been born from half a woman into a world that possessed absolutely no character except chrome smiles. All of them were of course beautiful.
One of them was pushing a little cart down the aisle, trying to sell us cocktails. She had a singsong inhuman voice that I’m positive was pre-recorded by a computer.
‘Purchase a cocktail.
‘Purchase a cocktail.
‘Purchase a cocktail.’
While pushing her little cart down the sky.
‘Purchase a cocktail.
‘Purchase a cocktail.
‘Purchase a cocktail.’
There were no lights below.
Shine on, O talisman!
I pushed my face against the window and looked very hard and saw a star and I made a wish but I won’t tell. Why should I? Purchase a cocktail from pretty Miss Zero and find your own star. There’s one for everyone in the evening sky.
There were two women behind us talking about nail polish for the thirty-nine-minute way to San Francisco. One of them thought that fingernails without polish should be put under rocks.
Vida had no polish on her fingernails but she didn’t care and gave the women’s conversation no attention.
From time to time the aeroplane was bucked by an invisible horse in the sky but it didn’t bother me because I was falling in love with the 727 jet, my sky home, my air love.
The pilot or some male voice told us that if we looked out the window, we could see the lights of Fresno and were 3½ minutes away from the lights of Salinas.
I was already looking for Salinas, but something happened on the plane. One of the women spilt her fingernail polish on a cat ten years ago and I looked away for a moment to wonder about that and missed Salinas, so I pretended my talisman was Salinas.
We were about to land at San Francisco when the women behind us finished their conversation about fingernail polish.
‘I wouldn’t be caught dead without fingernail polish,’ one of them said.
‘You’re right,’ the other one said.
We were only three miles away from landing and I couldn’t see the wing that led like a black highway to my talisman. It seemed as if we were going to land without a wing, only a talisman.
Ah, the wing appeared magically just as we touched the ground.
There were soldiers everywhere in the terminal. It was as if an army were encamped there. They flipped when they saw Vida. She was increasing the United States Army sperm count by about three tons as we walked through the place, heading towards the van in the parking lot.
Vida also affected the civilian population by causing a man who looked like a banker to walk directly into an Oriental woman, knocking the woman down. She was rather surprised because she had just flown in from Saigon and didn’t expect this to happen on her first visit to America.
Alas, another victim of Vida’s thing.
‘Do you think you can take it?’ Vida said.
‘We ought to bottle what you’ve got,’ I said.
‘Vida Pop,’ Vida said.
‘How do you feel?’ I said with my arm around her.
‘Glad to be home,’ she said.
Even though the San Francisco International Airport acted like a Playboy cybernetic palace wanting to do things for us that we were not quite ready to have done, at that moment I felt that the International Airport was our first home back from Tijuana.
I was also anxious to get back to the library and see Foster.
The Bufano statue waited for us with a peace that we couldn’t understand with its strange people fastened projectile-like upon a huge bullet.
As we got into the van, I thought there should be a statue for the Saint of Abortion, whoever that was, somewhere in the parking lot for the thousands of women who had made the same trip Vida and I had just finished, flying into the Kingdom of Fire and Water, the waiting and counting hands of Dr Garcia and his associates in Mexico.
Thank God, the van had an intimate, relaxed human feeling to it. The van reflected Foster in its smells and ways of life. It felt very good to be in the van after having travelled the story of California.
I put my hand on Vida’s lap and that’s where it stayed following the red lights of cars in front of us shining back like roses in San Francisco.
When we arrived back at the library the first thing we saw was Foster sitting out on the steps in his traditional T-shirt, even though it was now dark and cold.
The lights were on in the library and I wondered what Foster was doing sitting outside on the steps. That didn’t seem to be the correct way to run a library.
Foster stood up and waved that big friendly wave of his.
‘Hello, there, strangers,’ he said. ‘How did it go?’
‘Fine,’ I said, getting out of the van. ‘What are you doing out here?’
‘How’s my baby?’ said Foster to Vida.
‘Great,’ she said.
‘Why aren’t you inside?’ I said.
‘Tired, honey?’ Foster said to Vida. He put his arm gently around her.
‘A little,’ she said.
‘Well, that’s the way it should be, but it won’t last long.’
‘The library?’ I said.
‘Good girl,’ Foster said to Vida. ‘Am I glad to see you! You look like a million dollars in small change. What a sight!’ giving her a kiss on the cheek.
‘The library?’ I said.
Foster turned towards me. ‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said, then turning to Vida, ‘Oh, what a girl!’
‘You’re sorry about what?’ I said.
‘Don’t worry,’ Foster said. ‘It’s for the best. You need a rest, a change of scene. You’ll be a lot happier now.’
‘Happier, what? What’s going on?’
‘Well,’ Foster said. He had his arm around Vida and she was looking up at him as he tried to explain what was going on.
There was a slight smile on her face that grew large and larger as Foster continued, ‘Well, it happened this way. I was sitting there minding your asylum when this lady came in with a book and she—’
I looked away from Foster towards the library where its friendly light was shining out and I looked inside the glass door and I could see a woman sitting behind the desk.
I couldn’t see her face but I could see that it was a woman and her form looked quite at home. My heart and my stomach started doing funny things in my body.
‘You mean?’ I said, unable to find the words.
‘That’s right,’ Foster said. ‘She said the way that I was handling the library was a disgrace and I was a slob and she would take it over now: thank you.
‘I told her that you’d been here for years and that you were great with the library and I was just watching it during an emergency. She said that didn’t make any difference, that if you had turned the library over to me, even for a day, you didn’t deserve to be in charge of the library any more.
‘I told her that I worked at the caves and she said that I didn’t work there any more, that her brother would take care of it from now on, that I should think of doing something else like getting a job.
‘Then she asked me where the living quarters were and I pointed out the way and she went in and packed all your stuff. When she found Vida’s things there, she said, “I got here just in time!” Then she had me take it all out here and I’ve been sitting here ever since.’
I looked down at my meagre possessions piled on the steps. I hadn’t even noticed them.
‘I can’t believe it,’ I said. ‘I’ll go tell her that it’s all a mistake. that—’
Just then the woman got up from behind the desk and strolled very aggressively to the front door and opened the door without stepping outside and she yelled at me, ‘Get your God-damn stuff out of here right now and never come back, not unless you’ve got a book under your arm!’
‘There’s been a mistake,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know and you are it. Farewell, creep!’
She turned and the front door closed behind her as if it were obeying her.
I stood there like Lot’s wife on one of her bad days.
Vida was laughing like hell and Foster was, too. They started doing a little dance on the sidewalk around me.
‘There must be a mistake,’ I cried in the wilderness.
‘You heard the lady,’ Foster said. ‘Damn! Damn! Damn! am I glad to be out of the cave business. I thought I was going to get TB.’
‘Oh, darling,’ Vida said, breaking the dance to throw her arms around me while Foster started loading our stuff into the van. ‘You’ve just been fired. You’re going to have to live like a normal human being.’
‘I can’t believe it,’ I sighed. Then they loaded me into the van.
‘Well, what are we going to do?’ Foster said.
‘Let’s go to my place,’ Vida said. ‘It’s just around the block on Lyon Street.’
‘I can always sleep in the van,’ Foster said.
‘No, there’s plenty of room in my place for all of us,’ Vida said.
Somehow Vida had ended up driving the van and she parked it in front of a big red shingled house that had an ancient iron fence in front of it. The fence looked quite harmless. Time had removed its ferocity and Vida lived in the attic.
Her place was nice and simple. There was practically no furniture and the walls were painted white and there was nothing on them.
We sat on the floor on a thick white rug that had a low marble table in the centre of it.
‘Do you want a drink?’ Vida said. ‘I think we all need a drink.’
Foster smiled.
She made us some very dry vodka martinis in glasses full of ice. She didn’t put any vermouth in them. The drinks were done off with twists of lemon peel. The lemon lay there like flowers in the ice.
‘I’ll put something on the stereo,’ Vida said. ‘Then I’ll start some dinner.’
I was shocked by losing my library and surprised at being inside a real house again. Both feelings were passing like ships in the night.
‘Damn, does that vodka taste good!’ Foster said.
‘No, honey,’ I said. ‘I think you’d better rest. I’ll cook up something.’
‘No,’ Foster said. ‘A little logger breakfast is what we all need now. Some fried potatoes and onions and eggs all cooked together with a gallon of catsup on top. Do you have the makings?’
‘No,’ Vida said. ‘But there’s a store open down at California and Divisadero.’
‘OK,’ Foster said.
He put some more vodka in his mouth.
‘Ah, do you kids have any money left? I’m flat.’
I gave Foster a couple of dollars that I had left and he went to the store.
Vida put a record on the phonograph. It was the Beatles’ album Rubber Soul. I had never heard the Beatles before. That’s how long I was in the library.
‘I want you to hear this one first,’ Vida said.
We sat there quietly listening to the record.
‘Who sang that?’ I said.
‘John Lennon,’ she said.
Foster came back with the food and started cooking our dinnerbreakfast thing. Soon the whole attic was filled with the smell of onions.
That was months ago.
It’s now the last of May and we’re all living together in a little house in Berkeley. It has a small back yard. Vida’s working at a topless place over in North Beach, so she’ll have some money to go back to school next fall. She’s going to give English another try. Foster has a girlfriend who is an exchange student from Pakistan. She’s twenty and majoring in sociology.
She’s in the other room now cooking up a big Pakistani dinner and Foster is watching her with a can of beer in his hand. He’s got a job at Bethlehem Steel over in San Francisco at night working on an aircraft carrier that’s in dry dock being fixed. Today is Foster’s day off.
Vida is off doing something or other and will be home soon. She doesn’t work tonight either. I’ve spent the afternoon at a table across from Sproul Hall where they took all those hundreds of Free Speech kids off to jail in 1964. I’ve been gathering contributions for The American Forever, Etc.
I like to set my table up around lunch time near the fountain, so I can see the students when they come pouring through Sather Gate like the petals of a thousand-coloured flower. I love the joy of their intellectual perfume and the political rallies they hold at noon on the steps of Sproul Hall.
It’s nice near the fountain with green trees all around and bricks and people that need me. There are even a lot of dogs that hang around the plaza. They are of all shapes and colours. I think it’s important that you find things like this at the University of California.
Vida was right when she said that I would be a hero in Berkeley.