“They’re comfortable, is all.”
Jack had never seen the gun. It was a.38 caliber Smith & Wesson Airweight, easy to conceal. Just five shots, but the kind of trouble I was likely to get into was the up-close-and-personal kind, and if I couldn’t get out of it with five rounds, I wasn’t getting out of it at all.
I stood and gathered up my single-strap messenger bag, putting it over my shoulder, when the newspapers on the counter caught my attention.
“Are you done with this?” I asked, indicating the Los Angeles Times Calendar section, its front page dominated by a profile of a young white hip-hop producer. “Can I have it?”
“Sure,” Jack said.
I slid the section of the paper into my bag, then walked ahead of Jack into the entryway, where my bicycle-it was my private transportation as well as my livelihood-leaned against the wall.
We emerged into the cool gray of June in San Francisco, me wheeling the bike and Jack holding the keys to his old Saab. He stopped for a moment, tapping a cigarette out of a pack, his first of the day. While he lit up, I looked downhill, toward the rest of the city. Jack’s studio was at the edge of Parnassus Heights, and the view was fantastic.
It’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t find San Francisco beautiful, and I couldn’t argue. I had been in San Francisco nearly a year. I had ridden every inch of its neighborhoods, the storied ones like Chinatown and North Beach, the quiet ones like the Sunset and Presidio Heights. Late at night, I had watched the lights of great containerships as they ghosted into the port of Oakland, across the water. I had seen this city in the rain, the sun, the fog, the moonlight, on moonless evenings illuminated by its own city lights. San Francisco seemed to pose for you endlessly, proving it could look beautiful under any conditions. People came from all over the country and paid exorbitant prices to own or rent a tiny part of San Francisco.
Only a philistine could stand on a hill, look out at San Francisco, and wish she were seeing the overheated sprawl of L.A. instead. But I did.
Jack had gotten his cigarette going; I could smell the fragrant-acrid smoke from behind me. I turned back to him and was just about to say, I’ll call you sometime this week, when he spoke first. “Hailey?”
“What?”
“When you say you’re going to get something to eat later, you mean later this morning, right? Not late this afternoon?”
“Yeah,” I said, baffled. “Why?”
“We had a lot to drink last night, but I didn’t see you eat anything. You’re getting thin.”
“Jack, my job burns, like, eight thousand calories an hour. I couldn’t do it if I wasn’t eating enough,” I pointed out.
He was not appeased. I said, “Something else on your mind?”
He said, “You treat yourself with a certain amount of disregard, Hailey. I’ve known you for six months, and how often in that time have you been injured on the job? First those stitches in your eyebrow, then that thing with your wrist-”
“That was an old break. The bone was weak,” I argued. “Look, I’m a bike messenger. I’ve been the top-earning rider for my service nearly every month since I hired on. I couldn’t do that without taking some risks. There’s a lot of competition.”
Jack closed his eyes briefly, then said, “You don’t want to be the most reckless bike messenger in San Francisco, Hailey. That’s like being the town drunk in New Orleans.”
“I didn’t know you cared.”
“You ever think about school?”
“I thought I mentioned that before,” I said. “I did a little school back east. It didn’t work out.”
“And you can never go back?”
“What’s with you today?” I asked him. “The thing I like most about you is that you’re free of all the middle-class rhetoric, and now suddenly you’re doing a guidance-counselor thing.”
Jack sighed. “I’m not trying to make you angry.”
“I’m not,” I said, relenting.
“Really?” He threw down the cigarette and stepped on it.
“Really. I’ll call you tomorrow. We’ll get together, I’ll eat a whole pile of food. You can watch.”
Besides, I hadn’t been lying when I said I was planning on having breakfast. Just not right away.
I didn’t own a car, which wasn’t supposed to be a problem in San Francisco. It’s said to be one of the world’s great walking cities-fairly compact, with temperate weather and beautiful neighborhoods. All true, but even so: forty-nine square miles. In my first weeks here, I’d chronically underjudged the time it was going to take me to walk places. Now, of course, I had my bike-an old silver Motobecane, very fast, with drop handlebars and paint rubbed off the top tube where someone had probably kept a chain wrapped around it.
I’d been a messenger for eight months, long enough to develop the cyclist’s long, flat ellipse of muscle in my calf-I didn’t have that even back east in school, when I’d thought I was in the best shape of my life. Now a short, easy ride brought me to my destination, the Golden Gate Bridge. Ever since I’d come out to San Francisco, it had become something of a habit of mine to come up here when I didn’t have any big plan for my day.
If you’ve driven in California and visited the Bay Area, the bridge you most likely drove on was the Bay Bridge. It connects San Francisco to the East Bay. It is heavily trafficked, double-decked, beautiful in an industrial way. But it isn’t an icon. The Golden Gate Bridge is, largely due to its location: It serves as a kind of borderline between the enclosed waters of the Bay and the open water of the Pacific, between the American continent and the rest of the world. It is open to cyclists and to pedestrians, many of whom are dazzled tourists. In its most mundane sense, it is the bridge between the city and the Marin headlands. But to twenty or more people a year, it is the bridge to eternity.
The Golden Gate Bridge is America’s foremost suicide destination.
The first suicide off the bridge was a WWI veteran who appeared to be out for a stroll until he told a passerby, “This is as far as I go.” That was three months after the bridge was opened; it was still in its infancy. Sometimes I wondered: If that man had stayed home and stuck his head in an oven instead, would it have changed the bridge’s destiny? Without his precedent, would the next person and the next have reconsidered, until it was understood that jumping off the Golden Gate just wasn’t done? There are other bridges in America that are as accessible and potentially fatal but have virtually no history of suicides, apparently because it just didn’t become a tradition.
Psychologists know there is a contagious aspect to suicide-not merely the destructive impulse itself, but also the where and the how of it. In Japan, they’ve had to close public attractions because they’ve become magnets for suicides. One person jumps into a volcano and more people get the idea. In other countries, the authorities intervene. In America, land of the individual destiny, not so much.
Cops who try to prevent suicides up here will tell you that they’ll see a pedestrian with that end-it-all look and ask them if they’re thinking of jumping. The pedestrian denies it and the cop has to take their word for it and move on. Then they’ll look back and the guy is just gone. It’s that quick. You don’t even hear anything. I know, I’ve seen it, too.
I asked a patrolman once how he recognized someone with the suicide look. He told me, “You’ll know it when you see it.” And I do. It’s in what they’re not looking at. Unlike the tourists, they’re not looking at the city skyline or the Marin headlands. They’re looking at the water. Or at nothing, because all their attention is directed inside, replaying the past and seeing the bleak endless nothing of the future.
That’s the thing I don’t understand: How exactly do they choose their spot? What says to them, This far but no farther? I’ve never asked a potential jumper how they choose their spot. It’s too flippant, and when I’m up here, I’m very, very careful. It’s probably the most careful I ever am.