Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

  “That translate into a date?” I asked. This talk of supply and demand, which I’d bandied in talking about doctors, didn’t sound so good in describing Jake’s chances.

  “Now.” He said.

  “Now?”

  “They want to reschedule electives to make a slot for me in the OR tomorrow.”

  “Aw Jake.”

  He said, “Only I’m not going to have a fluke of surgery which is no one’s fault run my life. Jane’s twelfth birthday is Saturday and I plan to attend.”

  I hesitated a minute while my emotions debated my judgment. This birthday celebration: good for Jake’s soul, bad for his body. Good for the kids—maybe the last time they’d interact with him—bad for Jake. Bad for Amanda, who would foot the bill if this was self-destructive pigheadedness.

  Bad for me. Please, God, I said in my head, even though I had no truck with a providential God, please keep him alive.

  To Jake I said, “Two things—if you don’t mind a suggestion.”

  “Shoot,” he said.

  “Have the birthday celebration tomorrow, and have it in your hospital room. Cake and ice cream, balloons, presents, the works. They can reschedule an elective for the day after. I volunteer to help set it up. I also volunteer my sweetie.”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “Jake, if the hospital won’t allow it, I’ll use the administrator and your doctor as punching bags.”

  “Not my doctor, that wouldn’t do my chances of survival much good.”

  I said, “I’ll ask Amanda to charm them.”

  “You suppose she would?”

  I said, “She better, or I’ll use her as a punching bag.”

  I called up the discharge planner who had worked me up. She happened to be a psychiatric social worker by training, with a voice like Marlene Dietrich. I told her that Jake was clinging to his humanity, he would try harder to survive if he could celebrate his daughter’s birthday. I got a hitch in my voice as I talked to her.

  “Hey, fella, where’s the Golden Gloves contender?”

  I said, “He’s a cream puff. All goo inside.”

  She said, “Just for you, I will work my charms on his surgeon, who has a letch for me—I have the bruises on my fanny to prove it. If necessary, I will grab his ass and promise favors he has never received from an OR nurse.”

  “Doctors don’t do such things, do they?”

  She said, “Especially surgeons. Some come out of the OR randy as all heck.”

  I went in before they locked the patio doors and saw Jake. There was not one but two nurses standing in the doorway chatting with him. When they drifted away I said, “Who do you want at the shindig tomorrow?”

  He said, “Can you pick me up something for Jane?”

  “Sure. Maybe a locket?”

  “Yeah. —So, I naturally want you and Mary Clare, I want Bienvenida, the kids. Oh, and Jim Rutledge, if he’ll come. Tell him no gifts, just come in and eat some cake.”

  I told him of Mary Clare’s plan to go down and beard her father.

  “She mentioned that. She’s a world beater, ain’t she.”

  “She’s doing Zev a favor, giving him an opportunity. But he probably won’t see it that way.”

  “From what she’s said, he makes me look like not such a bad father.”

  “And you still have time to go from not so bad to really good.”

  He smiled and didn’t say anything.

  “Well, you do.”

  “I’m in the quintessential twelve step program, laddie: one day at a time.” He raised his hand and let it drop. “I’ll really be sorry if I can’t be around to goad you into creating the simple-pretty, but I gotta tell you, these last few days, I feel as if I’ve been staring Death right in the face. He’s not all that scary, Robert. You just have to let go.”

  “Don’t, Jake.”

  “Robert—I almost called you son: isn’t that funny?—Robert, I’m not going to pussy-foot around you because you’re trying like hell to avoid peeking under Death’s hood. You want to pretend you don’t know him when you know him better than most. You want to pretend he doesn’t exist until he creeps up behind you someday and sandbags you while you’re not looking. Won’t work. You’ve already seen his face and so have I—from different perspectives, admittedly.”

  “Don’t, Jake.”

  “Sorry, laddie. Talk to your old lady, she understands. If it hadn’t been for Meany, she might very well not be here, and she knows it. How do you think she can be making the strides she’s taken? But it started when she looked Death in the eye.”

  His voice was becoming tinny. He had to clear his throat a couple of times as he lectured me. And he just ran out of steam. He closed his eyes.

  “I’ll get the ball rolling, Jake. Tomorrow we’ll have a birthday party like they’ve never had in this hospital.”

  He smiled and nodded, his eyes still closed.

  I lammed it out of there as fast as I could without running.

  five

  I went into Howie’s office and told him I was dithering about Jake and the staff was hard at work but I had to get past the operation on Friday and was not much good until then.

  “What about your advisory committee meeting on Monday?”

  “I’m as ready as I can be. I could do it in my sleep.”

  He said, “The Chancellor’s going to be there, I’ve been informed.”

  I said, “So’s Stu Katz.”

  “What’s the most likely way to fuck it up?”

  I thought for a couple of heartbeats. “Chickening out. That, or Stu really comes after me before I’ve given the committee enough information to counter him.”

  “Go get ’em, tiger. And give my best to Jake.”

  Mary Clare had bought the locket for Jake and an angora beret and matching muffler from us. We were getting ready to go to the hospital when she did an unusual thing. She produced a joint and told me to take a couple of hits.

  “Where’d you get the weed?”

  “It’s been in the freezer since we moved in.”

  “I thought you were through with the stuff.”

  She said, “I am. This is for you. I don’t want you freaking out at the party. Just a couple of hits.”

  “What if the Melniks . . . ”

  She said, “They smoke. I’ve smelled it—on him at least.”

  I lit up and took a couple of lungfuls. Either I had been off it so long it was like smoking the first time, or it was incredibly good stuff. The freezing hadn’t reduced its potency.

  I said, “I’m lit. Everyone’s gonna know.”

  “Nah,” she said, “Only I will know.”

  I handed her the cigarette. She pinched off the end into the sink, put it in with the loose weed, and put it back in the fridge. “I might join you after the party, preparatory to fooling around.”

  The party went well, except the kids seemed like trained poodles, more intent on pleasing their father than enjoying themselves. Nurses kept dropping in and oohing and aahing over them, especially Jimmy, who held up quite well to all the female gushing. Amanda gave Jane a very grown-up shoulder bag that was of such classic design it went with the French blue hat and scarf. She modeled them all. She was, we could tell, going to be as beautiful as her mother, infused with some warmth from Jake’s genes.

  We left at a signal from Jake’s nurse, to give the family time to be alone before they were chased out as well.

  *****

  The operation went well. I wasn’t allowed to see Jake the day of the operation so I spent the day priming my crew for the advisory committee meeting on Monday. They were the most enthusiastic I’d seen them since I started. They said what they were doing was now more than just a job.

  That evening I took Mary Clare to Oakland International Airport to catch the last PSA flight to San Diego. Before we left we shared the last of the joint and made dreamy-silly love. Afterward, still feeling no pain, I told her that this joint was the first drug, other than al
cohol, I’d had since a certain event at which cannabis figured most prominently.

  “You wouldn’t care to tell me about it.”

  “It might spoil your opinion of me,” I said.

  “Who says it isn’t already spoiled?”

  “No one who just made love to me like you did could have a bad opinion of me.”

  She said, “I bet you tell all the girls that.”

  “I once smoked a lot of pot and drank a lot of alcohol and shot a man to death.”

  She blinked a couple of times, but the timbre of her voice didn’t change when she said, “Are you blaming it on the alcohol and pot?”

  I told her the circumstances. I couldn’t blame buying the gun on either alcohol or pot, that was plain foolishness.

  “Tell me how it happened.”

  I told her. I told her I would have waked up when the guy was prying the door open with his sheath knife if I hadn’t been loaded.

  “Did the police investigate?”

  “They did.”

  “Did you go to jail?”

  I said, “I was fined for not registering the sawed-off shotgun as a collector’s item.”

  “You didn’t have time, did you?”

  We were sitting on the edge of the bed, our flanks touching. She was making patterns in the hair on my thigh. “I have to get dressed,” she said. “Mind if I shower first?”

  We showered together, and continued the conversation. I kept wondering if it was the marijuana that had loosened my tongue.

  “Turn around and I’ll wash your back,” I said. While she had her back to me I told her how freaked out I was, the man’s face and neck peppered with holes, the blood and the brain matter.

  “Do I really need to hear about that? You didn’t mean to kill the man. Or maybe you did and you had justification.”

  I said, “The sheriff and the coroner thought I was justified. I didn’t.” I told her my best scenario for his trying to break in when I was in possession of my faculties. I would have turned on the light and stuck the shotgun in his face. He would have backed down.

  “And that’s why this has been such a big deal in your life?” She turned around and stood practically nose to nose with me, the water sending suds down her back and swirling into the drain.

  “It is a big deal. If I hadn’t been stupid on beer and marijuana, I would have been ready for him.”

  “And suppose he grabbed the gun so fast he yanked it out of your hands? Or suppose he would have been just as happy to die? I happen to know, because one of my boy friends was a detective, that most people who break into places that are occupied—they call them hot burglars or something like that—are ultimate risk junkies. The risk of getting shot is part of the thrill, and they’re the most dangerous thieves in the world. —Are you through?”

  “Talking?”

  She said, “Showering.”

  As we toweled dry she said, “I assumed this big deal was you’d raped a mentally retarded teenager, or you put a rock on the railroad track and derailed a passenger train, killed dozens. Shit sakes, Bobby, you’ve put yourself and me through hell for shooting a hot burglar? You motherfucker.” And she began hitting me. I grabbed her arms.

  “Hot burglar.”

  “Hot prowl burglar I think he said.”

  I said, “Who was this detective?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Am I gonna feel better when the buzz wears off?” I asked.

  “Am I going to quit being mad at you?” she asked.

  “Please.”

  She said, “This didn’t come from your shooting that dude, baby. Go see a shrink and find out what’s really bugging you.”

  “So, the chances are, I won’t feel better when the buzz wears off.”

  “Bobby, I believe you run on guilt. You have done the grown-up things you’ve done because the guilt pushes you to be this world-beater, to prove you’re really worthwhile. Someday your guilt is going to rear up and spoil something besides my disposition.”

  Now she was moving as if her buzz had worn off. “Hurry up and dress, please, or we’ll be late.”

  I didn’t want her to go. I guess I didn’t want her to be more mature than I, and she definitely was. Half dressed she grabbed me and gave me a kiss that took my breath away.

  “Do you still love me?” I asked.

  “I do not recognize your guilt as a legitimate cause not to love you. —Get your shoes on, Lucie, you’re a big girl now.”

  I looked down and realized I hadn’t put on shoes. I sat down on the bed and laughed.

  Demise Of The Divine Accident

  one

  Saturday. Waking up alone for only the second time since I moved back to Berkeley, thinking of the good things I wanted for Clare, then a huge void opened up inside, there’s no better way to describe it. I felt like the student who’d kept up with all his assignments during the semester and, came Dead Week, had no one to play with. All the grasshoppers were nose-in-books.

  Restless. The void inside was something to avoid at all costs, the abyss. I went to the dictionary and found very interesting things about the word, avoid, except anything about dealing with the internal variety of the word from which it mysteriously sprang.

  I climbed into my grubbies, eschewed the razor, hoofed it to the campus and across, the clock in the Campanile announcing nine as I passed beneath the plane trees of Sather Esplanade. I had an espresso and palm leaf at the Mediterraneum, glancing through a Berkeley Barb as I did. Replenished, I crossed the street to purchase, at California Book Co., a top-opening spiral notebook and a brace of ballpoint pens. On a quiet bench in Sproul Plaza I opened the notebook and got as far as writing the date at the top of the page when a woman in tight jeans and over-the-knee high-heeled boots passed by, leading an Irish wolfhound. She was quite tall and slender, like her dog. He was so tall, he would have stood eye to eye with a small boy, and I suddenly found myself wanting both a small boy and a big dog—maybe only a Scottish deerhound—and a backyard big enough for both.

  On the way to his zenith, the sun began bouncing rays off my notebook, so I moved under a plane tree on the esplanade that filtered the sun for as long as I felt like writing. It was, I recalled, the same bench I sat on as a student, eating lunch and listening to the noon serenade upon the Campanile’s Carillon. Nostalgia cranked open my internal void a millimeter wider.

  I uncapped a pen and wrote the words, ‘Otherness,’ ‘Squandering,’ ‘Wisdom’ and ‘Death.” I had intended to start my novel—I was convinced, now, it must be a novel—set in the Berkeley of the Free Speech Movement–People’s Park–Blue Meanies–Students for a Democratic Society–era. What the hell did ‘Otherness’ have to do with that?

  I wrote it in big, fat gothic letters, OTHERNESS, in the center of the page. Beneath I wrote, ‘What it was like to be one of the Others in Berkeley in 1964.’

  Actually, I’d been a necessary part of the Free Speech Movement, one of those who pushed back, giving the protesters something to revile, someone to shout epithets at, including “running dog lackey,” which I particularly liked, because they never finished the epithet, so I would finish it for them, with nonsense, like, “Of the Basque Sheepherders of Idaho.”

  I was infinitely more ‘other’ after I shot Ralph Delano Renwick in the Nevada desert. I didn’t really think of myself as other before then. I was one of Us, us being the University apparatus, the old-timers of Berkeley. I was of the Silent Generation. When my job degenerated into that of playground monitor, I became frustrated with—for me—the wastefulness of that occupation, but also frustrated with being made into one of Them.

  I remembered—still 1964—a friend picketing an auto dealer in San Francisco, getting arrested. That had to do with ending sanctioned otherness, civil rights and discrimination. It was before they picketed the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. Same year, same theme.

  Jesus, how time flies. Tricky Dick was running again, the convention held in Miami. Spiraling
Ag-on-new was to be his running mate—Stone Tongue, as Janice Lippert called him. In 1964 Tricky Dick was in disgrace, not only robbed of the presidency by Kennedy four years earlier, but the governorship of California by lovable, bumbling Pat Brown in the meantime. Proves you can’t keep a determined sonofabitch down forever.

  All I remembered vividly from those times were some anecdotes about student riots, plus a conviction that everything I read about them in the daily press and weekly journals was distorted. No brilliant thesis. Students were like any persons who reminded you that your rights could be stolen if you didn’t exercise them once in a while. The world was full of persons constitutionally able—any way you meant that—to take away your rights, and perfectly willing to try too.

  However much I admired the students’ spirit, I decried their tactics. I didn’t like how easily radicalized were students not that much better informed than the ones who’d gone on panty raids back in the Fifties. When the University President ordered me to cooperate with the FBI, I insisted they put me at the head of their list of student radicals. I had, I told them, joined SLATE, the first radical student group on campus. Then I turned around and helped them investigate the burning of the ROTC building, and, earlier, Kung Fu Louis, a heavy-duty judoka running around beating up campus cops. Ideology was fine, but I’d had my chestnuts pulled out of the fire by the campus cops more than once. —Not that I liked their tactics much, either.

  Centered at the top of the next page I wrote, THE WAY IT REALLY WAS, AND MUCH MUCH MORE: reminiscences of a playground monitor of the Sixties.

  Too cutesy for a title. I stood and headed home for lunch, having, as I trekked, an imaginary conversation with Jake, who was never far from the front of my mind.

  —How do you get started? I asked him.

  —Why ask me? he rejoined: ask a published author.

  —You write damned well.

  —If putting words down on paper damned well were the overriding criterion, Jake said, Hemingway would be the world’s greatest author and Theodore Dreiser would never have been published.