A guard came down the aisle to make a routine check.
“You ever had a bloomin’ onion?” Conan yelled at him. The guard kept walking. Conan yelled at his back, receding up the aisle. “They blow that sucker open, batter it, deep-fry it. Damn, it’s good. You can’t get that anywhere else. It’s copywrit.”
We passed a ranch house with a tire swing. A clump of shaggy California fan palm, otherwise known as the rat palm, the unofficial mascot of the state. A sign in the yard, Elect Kritchley Fresno County DA. Elect Kritchley.
In the left lane, a road crew was working, one man holding a sign for everyone to slow and move right.
“I made your shirt, motherfucker!” Conan yelled at the glass. The man could not hear him. Only we could hear him. “London, quiet down,” a cop said through the PA.
“We make those road crew vests at Wasco. You glue on the reflectors.”
I began to see white airy things moving past the bus window. They were all over the freeway. They didn’t rain down, but hovered and whirled. White and fluffy debris let loose from a cargo vehicle up ahead of us. I didn’t know what kind of debris until we passed the source, a truck that held many rows of stacked metal cages. In the cages were turkeys, crammed so that they had to bow their long necks. The wind was pulling out their feathers, which flossed the highway in white flecks. This was November. They were Thanksgiving turkeys.
“You better check on this one!” Fernandez was yelling again about her seatmate, who was leaning over sideways.
“Hey!”
The woman was massive. She might have weighed three hundred pounds. She began to slide from the seat. She slid until she was folded over awkwardly on the bus aisle floor. There was a commotion, people whispering and tsking.
“That’s what I call a snooze,” Conan said. “Out cold. Wish I could do that. Hard for me to get comfortable on transport buses.”
“Hey!” Fernandez called up to the front. “You got to come deal with this. This lady is having an issue.”
One of the cops got up and moved toward the back. He stood over the woman who had slid to the floor. He yelled, “Ma’am! Ma’am!” When that did not work, he jellied her shoulder with the toe of his military boot.
The cop yelled up to the front. “Nonresponsive.”
They call themselves correctional officers. Real cops would not consider prison guards cops, but losers at the rock bottom of law enforcement.
The one at the front made a phone call.
The other was about to return to the front himself, but he stopped and faced Fernandez.
“I heard you got married, Fernandez.”
“Get a life,” she said.
“Let me ask you, Fernandez. Do they have special weddings, like they got special Olympics?”
Fernandez smiled. “If I ever have to marry a retard like you, sir, I guess I’ll find out.”
Conan let out a hoot of approval.
“Retards like me don’t marry fat ugly prison hos, Fernandez.”
He went up the aisle and took his seat. He seemed to have forgotten about the woman who was unconscious.
Laura Lipp went to sleep, which meant she would finally be quiet.
We rode in silence, with a human mound slumped on the floor of the bus, half underneath one of the seats.
2
The trouble with San Francisco was that I could never have a future in that city, only a past.
The city to me was the Sunset District, fog-banked, treeless, and bleak, with endless unvaried houses built on sand dunes that stretched forty-eight blocks to the beach, houses that were occupied by middle- and lower-middle-class Chinese Americans and working-class Irish Catholics.
Fly Lie, we’d say, ordering lunch in middle school. Fried rice, which came in a paper carton. Tasted delicious but was never enough, especially if you were stoned. We called them gooks. We didn’t know that meant Vietnamese. The Chinese were our gooks. And the Laotians and Cambodians were FOBs, fresh off the boat. This was the 1980s and just think what these people went through, to arrive in the United States. But we didn’t know and didn’t know to care. They couldn’t speak English and they smelled to us of their alien food.
The Sunset was San Francisco, proudly, and yet an alternate one to what you might know: it was not about rainbow flags or Beat poetry or steep crooked streets but fog and Irish bars and liquor stores all the way to the Great Highway, where a sea of broken glass glittered along the endless parking strip of Ocean Beach. It was us girls in the back of someone’s primered Charger or Challenger riding those short, but long, forty-eight blocks to the beach, one boy shotgun with a stolen fire extinguisher, flocking people on street corners, randoms blasted white.
If you were visiting the city, or if you were a resident from the other, more admired parts of the city and you took a trip out to the beach, you might have seen, beyond the sea wall, our bonfires, which made the girls’ hair smell of smoke. If you were there in early January, you would see bigger bonfires, ones built of discarded Christmas trees, so dry and flammable they exploded on the high pyres. After each explosion you might have heard us cheer. When I say us I mean us WPODs. We loved life more than the future. “White Punks on Dope” is just some song; we didn’t even listen to it. The acronym was something else, not a gang but a grouping. An attitude, a way of dressing, living, being. Some changed our graffiti to White Powder on Donuts, and many of us were not even white, which becomes harder to explain, because the whole world of the Sunset WPODs was about white power, not powder, but these were the beliefs of not powerful kids who might end up passing through rehab centers and jails, unless they were the chosen few, the very few girls and boys, who, respectively, either enrolled in the Deloux School of Beauty, or got hired at John John Roofing on Ninth Avenue between Irving and Lincoln.
When I was little I saw a cover of an old magazine that showed the robes and feet of people who had drunk the Kool-Aid Jim Jones handed out in Guyana. My entire childhood I would think of that image and feel bad. I once told Jimmy Darling and he said it wasn’t actually Kool-Aid. It was Hi-C.
What kind of person would want to clarify such a thing?
A smart-ass is who. A person who is safe from that image in a way I was not. I was not likely to join a cult. That was not the danger I felt in glimpsing the feet of the dead, the bucket from which they drank. It was the proven fact, in the photographed feet, that you could drink death and join it.
When I was five or six years old I saw a paperback cover in the supermarket that was a drawing of a woman and her nude body had two knives coming out of it, blood pooling around her. The cover of the book said, “Killed Twice.” That was its title. I was away from my mother, who was shopping somewhere in the market. We were at Park and Shop on Irving and I felt I was not just a few aisles away but permanently sucked out to sea, to the engulfing world of Killed Twice. Coming home from the market, I was nauseous. I could not eat the dinner my mother prepared. She didn’t really cook. It was probably Top Ramen she prepared for me, and then attended to whichever of the men she was dating at the time.
For years, whenever I thought of that image on the cover of Killed Twice I felt sick. Now I can see that what I experienced was normal. You learn when you’re young that evil exists. You absorb the knowledge of it. When this happens for the first time, it does not go down easy. It goes down like a horse pill.