ANNA CABANA Love, Death, and Art in 1970s San Francisco A feeling made me turn. Through the crowd and the store window I could see Pam standing on the sidewalk outside. She did not see me. People shifted and I lost sight of her. They shifted again and she was there, talking to a blonde woman. What the hell did that mean! A tallish, thinnish woman with long blonde hair. Was that the blonde from the platform? I swerved right, out of the doorway, into a corner of framed words: more Power to the People stuff. Pablo Neruda, something about Nixon and ITT and the oligarchs on patrician feet. My mind raced. What the hell did it mean? Who was the blonde? What had Pam been telling me, or selling me? She had stopped me on the street, made a point of telling me a story, made me believe it, but what other information did I have? Was she using me somehow, or was I now the paranoid one? By the time I wriggled through to the street they weren’t there. But going around the corner I saw a flash of blonde hair. I trotted toward Mission St., turned the corner, and almost ran into a surly-looking black youth coming out of a tavern. I went in. The dark, narrow place smelled of spilled beer. I didn’t have to look very hard. They sat together in the first booth. Pam was talking, but the blonde saw me looking at them and raised her index finger an inch off the table. Pam turned. “Is this her?” I said. “The one from the platform?” “Hi,” said Pam. Not enthusiastically. “You missed your haircut again.” I shoved in next to Pam. “I was there,” I said to the other. She nodded. Pam said, “This’s Valerie. She didn’t do anything wrong. She didn’t even know Anna. I had to talk to her before I told you.” I studied Valerie. “But why all the secrecy if you didn’t do anything? You saw what happened.” Tears welled in Valerie’s eyes. “She gave me a flower. She said, He’s not coming back, and she handed me the flower. A red carnation. The simplest, humblest flower. To me, a perfect stranger, but at that moment, the only person around her, the only other human. And then.” “She jumped? On purpose?” “Actually, she crawled . . .” her voice broke. We sat there, each back at that moment, each reviewing the scene in our minds. But Valerie had been in it. I touched her sleeve as it lay on the tabletop. “I screamed. And she... looked back at me. And then I ran away. I kind of woke up walking up Van Ness .” “It must have been horrible.” “So you see why I couldn’t give her up to the police,” said Pam. “Actually, I don’t.” I noticed that smell of her again, but it was more like yeast. “Don’t ask me to get involved,” said Valerie. Pam butted in. “Political reasons. These are people the authorities would like to... get hold of... that Valerie knows.” “I’ve been mixed up in some things.” Valerie was studying her thumbs, crossed over her gripped hands. She really was extraordinarily beautiful. Large, dark, blue eyes, cheeks and chin and nose and forehead all perfectly proportioned and finely molded. Julie Christie beautiful. Even crying and fear, which make most people’s faces look like a package of pink wieners, looked good on her. What had she done, and who had she known? I had been in town long enough to have met a sampling of characters tripping on some radical or moronic idea. They seemed mostly like eighth graders needing a pat on the head or slap on the hand. So who the flock had Little Bo Peep here gotten herself lost with? “You’re afraid of the police,” I said. “But if you don’t tell your story, you are the one who is doing an injustice. You’re putting an innocent man in jail.” “She can’t do it, man,” Pam hissed. “She walks in there, they never let her out.” At that moment I developed a violent dislike for her, so wrapped up in her romantic revolutionary delusions and the gothic, satanic conspiracy of they: Nixon and ITT and the Rockefellers (but not the Kennedys) and the generals and the CIA and Dow Chemical. Clearly, I needed to talk to Valerie alone. I said something bland, made quick goodbyes, told Pam I would see her later, and left. (concludes tomorrow) Read it all at wilshirelewis
Posted on: Fri, 19 Dec 2014 12:53:55 +0000
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