Swaddled in iron grey batting

“Every truth has four corners:  as a teacher, I give you one corner, and it is for you to find the other three.” - Confucius

I

Some of us had headed off to Berkeley in 1971, others to San Francisco State or other parts unknown.  But to anyone who launched from our fog-bound nest in Daly City, where we had developed and hatched together – anyone who escaped from that wasteland of ticky-tacky row houses that spread out like an Escher print below us as we looked down from Skyline Boulevard on our way to the City of Lights – anywhere else at all seemed like an exotic locale.

Daly City, backed right up against the southern city limit of San Francisco, was perpetually swaddled in an opaque, iron-grey cotton batting of fog– the kind of fog that stuffs your ears and finds its way up your nose, inciting headaches, neuralgias, and other ailments that the unafflicted (meaning people without a Daly City address) scoffed at as hypochondriacal. “Socked in,” we used to call it, forty eight weeks out of fifty two, all year, every year.  We shared with kids from Pacifica and Half Moon Bay, equally socked in, a brooding, indoor-bred introspection that people from sunnier climes would tell us to “snap out” of, although at least the kids from Half Moon Bay could surf. 

That was the Daly City curse, to be shrouded in a thick, penetrating mist all the days of one’s life, ever cold to the center of our bones, hair frizzed out past all reason, glasses misted over, skin clammy and sporting a pale blue undertone for chronic lack of exposure to sunlight.  You could always tell who the Daly City kids were at camp when we got into our swimsuits, skinny, and as grey-complected as the fog that spawned us.

My family owned a brick red, ticky tacky row house – one of those made famous by Malvina Reynolds in her 1962 protest song “Little Boxes” - bought for $11,000 in 1954, right on the crest above the valley that fanned out in a view extending all the way to the Mt. Davidson cross, when it wasn’t obscured by the grey cotton batting.  Off to the right was Colma, the town noted in Ripley’s Believe It or Not for being home to more dead souls than living.  Colma was composed chiefly of a patchwork of cemeteries – Jewish cemeteries, Greek orthodox cemeteries, Chinese, Korean, Catholic, and pet cemeteries - punctuated by monument shops, mortuaries, Mexican restaurants that were frequented by local gravediggers, and a few dangerously rickety houses.  A favorite Saturday late night activity was to meet at the Chinese cemetery with a bottle of peppermint Schnapps and drink the night away.  Other than that, the entertainment center of Colma was the bowling alley, occasionally patronized by local celebrities of a dark and stormy nature, including Hells Angels and small time Mafia figures, who shall by all means remain nameless, and us.

In my corner of the fog-bound nest, there were three of us.  First, there was Bob, a hyperactive, muscular, wild haired, green-eyed, freckled French Catholic, thrown out even from Riordan, the bad boys’ Catholic school (St. Ignatius was for the intelligentsia, Sacred Heart for the solid middle class).  He was a smoker, which marked him as a rebel, and he could make perfect smoke rings that would drift upward like Mobius strips, holding together despite gravity, by disjointing his jaw like a snake.

Bob’s father, an alcoholic, had been killed in a car accident when Bob was eleven.  He was drunk, and had been driving home from picking up Chinese food.  Moo goo gai pan was spread all over the front seat when they found the car pointed the wrong way on Alemany Boulevard, Bob’s father thrown out onto the asphalt.  His mother had remarried another alcoholic who maintained a quiet, yet incipiently violent, distance from Bob and his four brothers and sisters. 

And while Bob was a widely recognized favorite among girls, it was he and I who loved each other with a depth that transcended all of that, a depth that locked us together in a common, timeless understanding at the soul level, a level where you look in someone’s eyes and you know, and they know, and you both know that there are souls, and that you both have one, even share one, and that these souls will never die.  There is a long clear expanse of unknown in which you both live, and it is not empty. 

Bob and I went to Berkeley together, him with the higher SAT scores, me with the higher grades.  Mr. Ratto, our high school counselor, had told Bob flat out that he was not Berkeley material.  “Don’t waste your time,” he said.  “With those grades and your attitude, you’re kidding yourself.”  Two nearly perfect scores later, he was handily admitted to Cal, and we headed off in the same direction. 

Then there was Graham.  Graham was arguably the handsomest boy in school, with almond shaped eyes and a white hot grin that won him Best Smile in the year book, even though I’m sure the only date he had in four years was with me.  He had a thick, straight thatch of hair that he would toss back to reveal the widow’s peak on his forehead.  He was painfully shy, and occupied his time with photography, Camus, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and making steel drums out of oil barrels for Joe Morello.  Morello was the drummer for the Dave Brubeck Quartet, and gave Graham drum lessons in exchange for the squatty instruments, each one a unique inverted sea turtle of a drum, invoking with its tinny, muted sounds images of a sun-washed Jamaican block party. 

Graham was obsessed with finding exactly the right barrels.  When he found one, he would first wail away at it, working his right arm into a near state of extinction hammering out the bowl, and then finagle one of his friends, usually Bob, to drive him down to the beach (Graham wouldn’t learn to drive until he was at least thirty) so he could set the thing on fire.  He would sit for hours on end with a wooden mallet and a nail punch, imprinting the segments on the turtle’s back, then tuning each pentagon or rhombus or hex until the full spectrum of notes was latent there.  Morello, once a master drum maker himself, was going blind and could no longer get around.  So he taught Graham everything he knew. 

Graham’s mother was an alcoholic, and channeled the mother character played by Joanne Woodward in “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds” to a T; Bob was the first one to notice this fact.  Graham’s father would sit all day on their cracked vinyl fold out sleeper next to a load of unfolded laundry – we used to wonder if it was always the same load of laundry, or a different load each time – playing the mandolin, while Gerri went further and further into outer space, finally pacing and screaming and blubbering about Jack’s wasted life and his spineless lack of manhood.  Jack just kept right on playing the mandolin, although as the years passed he upgraded to the mandola. 

One night, when I was at Graham’s in the middle of making Gerri’s special fried rice recipe and Gerri was on her second tall plastic tumbler of Carlo Rossi, my mother called to tell me that our house had been broken into and vandalized.  Being a generous soul and not one to ever miss the excitement, Gerri insisted on driving me home.  Miraculously, we arrived unharmed, and Gerri, still holding the tumbler of Carlo, fell up the narrow stairs of our ticky tacky row house to survey the scene of the crime.  Every wall was smeared with raw egg and studded with bits of shell, the green and white velour sectional covered with ketchup, the mantel clock broken and stopped at 2:00 in the afternoon when the culprits had likely been there doing their dirt, our dachshund still sleeping off the package of hot dogs he had been fed to keep him busy.  My father, frozen, stood nonplussed in the middle of it all.  The police had just arrived, and my mother was mechanically telling them everything she knew, which was mostly just that she had come home to a wide open front door and a sleeping dog, and destruction.  What happened before that was a mystery.

Then, spotting my father, Gerri came into her own.  “You spineless excuse for a man, you limp piece of s--- nothing, standing there while your wife handles everything.  Isn’t that just like a man, you’re all the same, you disgusting b---s--- piece of c--- son of a b----. . .”  Expletives deleted.  After all, it was the '70's.

In those days they worried less about drinking and driving.  And that’s how Gerri came to be given the bum’s rush out the front door by the law that night, stewed to the gills, winding up in the iceplant on Skyline Boulevard just south of Joe’s of Westlake.  We think she was headed out for a bite to eat since I never got to finish making the fried rice.  When the police found her there, they dusted her off, led her around the divider so she was pointed in the direction home, and sent her on her way.  Although Gerri never came to call at my parents’ house again, she always had a kind word for my father after that.  But never for Jack.

As for me, my world was governed by a primal fear of life itself.  My parents had both been abused as children, then abandoned to fend for themselves.  Yet, in the end, they had landed on their feet anyway, and in each other’s arms.  They weren’t even alcoholics, like their own fathers had been.  And so their experience had told them that a person best forges a good life alone, by one’s own self, unfettered by the love or attention of an interfering parent, or even by a child; and that the world is a dangerous place, where children should be kept safe at all costs.  As a result of their custom-made worldview, I grew up not only ignored, but also locked up for my own protection, a depressing combination for me, at best.

I lived and matured in my void of no experience: a hard, narrow, hot vacuum where play and family and neighbor kids and everyday danger should have lived.  Home alone, on house arrest.  Into this vacuum, empty of skinned knees and snotty noses and friends, fear came to stay with all of its belongings, and didn’t leave my side until one day I decided to drive it away.

Each of us was thusly born from the ovum of our nature and the seed of our experience.  Graham, quiet and less adventurous by nature, stayed behind at San Francisco State; and Bob and I flew every day, back and forth, across the wide water to Berkeley, me without my parents’ blessing, still tied to Graham with the loose knots of familiarity.  And that is where, in 1971, my airdance to this rooftop began.

Prologue: In which Shelley Hobson gets back to where she once belonged

I never really intended to jump. 

Still, there was something about standing on the edge of air in the blackness of night, with the rounded, yellow toes of my well-worn boots cutting out two half moons against the dimly lit alley four stories below.  

As I swayed my attention shifted, from feet to ground to air and back.  For a split second, everything seemed perfectly crystal clear.

I teetered for a moment, leaning out, then back, playing with the concept of flight, recoiling from the certainty of landing.  It was the wind that captured my fancy, as it bubbled up the loose, translucent legs of my trousers, catching my wide, wild rainbow wrap and tenting it out behind me like a hopeless parachute.  Hair aloft, glasses fogged, arms wide, embracing nothing but cool, blameless air, I wondered if maybe gravity would reverse itself just for me,  just for a moment.

But as I swayed forward, the alley below at once snapped into foreground, in sharp focus.  Laws of nature only change for pretty girls and liars. I let myself lag back, cramping into a charlie horse as my calf hyper-extended and then coiled back to catch the graveled rooftop behind me.  Grimacing, I leaned to rub the knot out of my muscle, the knife pain leaving a dull ache behind, hot and unglamorous, not at all like the wind nymph I had aspired to be.

My arms no longer full of air, I could now feel that the fog on my glasses had come from hot tears that made feverish streaks from my eyes to my chin.  I contemplated how I would probably have ping-ponged back and forth from one wall to the other on my way down anyway, significantly diminishing the display value of my corpse.  I might even have caught on a fire escape and failed to consummate the air affair altogether – how undignified to set out to kill myself and then screw it up.  Considering the lateness of the hour, it might have been hours before anyone found me at all, and I would have had to lie there, broken and suffering among the rotting banana peels and discarded liquor bottles, until the garbage men tripped over me the next morning.

For a moment I sat on the edge of the chaise in the little rooftop garden, where I often sunned myself topless.  Sunny mornings were more frequent in the hilltop microclimate of Russian Hill than they were in other San Francisco neighborhoods, and I had taken to basking there, hoping that the man of my dreams would notice me from his high rise apartment and be compelled to find me. 

The love of my short, desperate little life was gone for good now.  My special love with the pale blue eyes ringed with black.  The only thing special about me.  Together with his jet hair and Mediterranean complexion, those eyes made him look like an ice-pick killer.  He possessed an emptiness that I couldn’t explain or penetrate.  This emptiness had crept up on me slowly, stealthily.  Because of it I had come to imagine over time, gradually, that I was the empty one.

That space of emptiness was where I had been standing that night as I teetered over the Hyde Street alley, getting high on deep drags of the emptiness of air, with a long clear expanse of unknown stretching out before me, relaxed and natural, inviting me to step out into the emptiness that was me.

Maybe my life was simply about nothing, after all.  If so, maybe it hurt too much to be worth it.

I finally lay back in the chaise, just for a moment, and allowed myself to get lost in the question, how did I arrive in this place, at this time, at this Shelley that I had become?  And when had I stopped knowing which of the voices in my head I should listen to, which I should ignore?

The population was small in my little world.  My sane voices lived there. And who were any of them, really?  My best girl, once the only clear horizon on the murky sea I daily navigated, had become a distant and indecipherable whisper, a flat grey outline against the cause she had given herself up to.  And the others?  They had their own lives, their own people now.  All I had left was me, and a tenuous connection with the dull, ever present monotone of Graham, moored by the filaments of a distant childhood.

My journey to the ledge had seemed like a long one, to be sure, considering.  At 22, five years is more than twenty percent of a life.  Twenty-two down, and how many to go, I thought.  And that frame of mind was what had to go, with me the one to send it packing - this much I knew.  Or maybe I was just too much of a coward to take - that - one - last - step -

I let the breeze gently brush the hair off my forehead, ignoring the mist creeping up off the Bay that promised to penetrate my hair and frizz it out beyond all recognition.  No one would see me tonight anyway – no lights on the rooftop to illuminate me in the blackness of night – only the lights of those still awake in the windows across, above, below, studding every corner under the hooded moon, little vignettes of life evolving, revolving, some known to me, others not.  Lives lived out on top, daily commerce below – Marcel & Henri’s charcuterie; Swenson’s ice cream parlor; the Rexall with its orange plastic sign, the same one from the fifties, all shuttered in the silence of night.  All of these served as the orchestra pit in which the overture was played for the cast that lived upstairs, punctuated like clockwork by the clang of a cable car bell. And Bruno was right next door, his faintly lit upstairs window within 100 yards of the chaise I was lying on.  How the hell did I get here, to this particular corner of the universe, lying on this chaise still weak in the knees from my air dance on the ledge,  to this place in my life?  And where would I go next?  I had to find the answers to these questions before I stood up again, even if I had to camp here on the rooftop until I found them.