That’s when I knew I was on my way.
FIFTEEN
“I’VE BEEN THINKING,” MY MOTHER SAID on the phone one day. “How would you like to have Grandpa’s Branch’s bed?”
It took me a moment to realize she meant that old mahogany sleigh bed, the one built by “slaves in our family.” The one Mimi had cried herself to sleep in.
“For good, you mean?”
“Of course for good. Tony and Jane both got family furniture as wedding presents, and you’ll never be married, so . . . you should have something. We can ship it out to you. Will it work in your new place?”
My new place was a Hobbity garden apartment set amid the roses and tree ferns of the lower Filbert Steps. The ceiling was low, but the bed would certainly fit, and its curvy lines and glossy wood would lend charm to the unembellished dry-walled room. The bed I was currently using was just a mattress on a frame.
“It would look great here,” I said. “I’d love it.”
It occurred to me that I had slept in this bed for the first time on a recent Christmas visit to Raleigh. I knew it could comfortably accommodate two, since I picked up the son of a local sheriff at the Capital Corral and Glitter Gulch, Raleigh’s new gay bar down by the railroad tracks, and brought him back to my childhood home. It was a risky act, but a thrilling one, and Mimi’s room had its own outside entrance through which my hot-blooded country boy could vamoose before sunup. It felt good to bring something of my new life into my old home.
“You have to promise me you won’t sell it if money gets tight.”
This was troubling to hear, but not out of the realm of possibility. She knew me too well. “I promise. Okay?”
When the shipment arrived in San Francisco it had to be unloaded on Montgomery Street at the top of Telegraph Hill and hauled down several wooden flights of the Filbert Steps. The bed came in four pieces, including the head and foot portions of the “sleigh.” Taped to the headboard was a collection of hand-hewn iron bolts and a dedicated instrument for tightening them. The unfinished planks that supported the mattress, which looked easily as old as the bed itself, had been freshly drilled with dime-sized holes so they could be wired together for shipment. I couldn’t help but see that as a desecration of sorts. I knew Daddy had hauled out the drill in the name of practicality, and you could not see the holes once the bed was assembled, but it still bothered me. It felt like a document that had been angrily initialed at the last moment. I wondered if it indicated how Daddy felt about shipping an heirloom to California for occupancy by his eldest son and God-knows-who.
IN LATE NOVEMBER of that year, a few months after my novel was published, my mother called to say that she and Daddy wanted to come pay me a visit.
“Just for a few days,” she said. “A long weekend. I can meet your friends.”
She knew I had a group of guys I was hanging out with on Telegraph Hill. For a while she had tried to convince herself I was “dating” Nancy Bleiweiss, my friend who was playing Glinda the Good Witch in Beach Blanket Babylon, but she seemed to have finally abandoned that notion and decided to see for herself what my life was all about while she could. “I would love that,” I told her. “I’ll make it special for you.”
I’d always enjoyed showing San Francisco to my parents. Over the course of the five years I had lived there, they had been treated to several versions of my Grand Tour: Muir Woods, the Cliff House, Chinatown, the postcard version of things. That would not be possible this time, given my mother’s fragility, but I could plan a little gathering of friends and show off Grandpa Branch’s bed in its new setting. Even the Edenic landscape in which my new apartment was nestled was an attraction in its own right. It had once been an enormous garbage dump that straggled down the hill past a rock quarry before a woman named Grace Marchant moved onto Telegraph Hill in 1949 and began a garden that would grow so lush and beautiful that it would officially bear her name after her death.
Grace had been a Mack Sennett bathing beauty during silent film days. Now she was a sassy, white-haired old lady who lived two doors down. She didn’t approve when, a year or so later, in need of a bigger apartment, I moved farther up the Filbert Steps to what she called “the wrong side of Montgomery Street.” Grace cherished her bohemian enclave on the lower steps with its dozing cats and plank sidewalks. She maintained that the steps got snootier the closer you got to Coit Tower. She teased me about one of my new neighbors, Whitney Warren Jr., a fussy old socialite closet case who threw parties for the likes of George Cukor and Princess Lee Radziwill and had opened his home in the past for large USO events. (“Well,” Grace said with a wink, “at least you’ll know when the fleet is in town.”)
I introduced my folks to Grace on their final visit to the city. We couldn’t have missed her. She was there in the garden, that Seussian landscape of tree ferns and fried eggplants and electric-purple princess trees, and she was yanking weeds with a vengeance in her big straw gardening hat. My parents were impressed that I knew this glorious creature. I pointed out Grace’s wonky old shingled house, which stood nearby, where the steps met Napier Lane. “It used to be a saloon,” I told them. “Back in the last century. They would drug men at the bar and drop them through a hole in a floor. When they woke up, they would find themselves doing indentured service on a ship to Shanghai. That’s where they got the term shanghaied.”
Daddy loved that story and looked to Grace for verification. “Is that true?”
She shrugged. “More or less. Your son, as you know, can be vivid.” She gave the old man a wink. “By the time I’m gone he can tell that story however he likes.”
There’s an obvious question here, and the answer is no. Grace Marchant was not my inspiration for Anna Madrigal. I had already created that character and her secret garden at 28 Barbary Lane several years before meeting the doyenne of the Filbert Steps. The truth is that back then there were many such homegrown eccentrics still tucked into the nooks and crannies of San Francisco. Hard to imagine, I know, in a time when quaintness is just another selling point on an Airbnb listing. I cringe when real estate agents today describe any property with wooden back stairs and a bit of shrubbery as “a real Tales of the City charmer.” There is nothing charming about those prices. And the people who might have lived in such a place once upon a time, myself included, could not even contemplate living there today.
While we were still down there in the garden, I led my parents down Napier Lane to a narrow path winding across the hill to the Greenwich Steps and another enchanted garden, this one tended by Grace’s daughter. In one way it was even more enchanted, because there was someone who lived there in a hidden lean-to just above the old seawall. I had stumbled across him one day by accident, and he invited me in for coffee. His name was Olin L. Cobb. He was a former merchant seaman, maybe in his late forties, roughly dressed and missing a few teeth. The term homeless wasn’t used much in those days, but Olin would have balked at it. This was his home; he had built it out of black plastic sheeting and packing crates. He had a cot and a few charming knickknacks. He used it to do “earthquake research,” recording in a log the behavior of small animals who came to visit. It was the lair of Bilbo Baggins. You would never have seen it if you weren’t looking for it.
When the Chronicle got word of Olin (not from me, by the way), they dubbed him “The Hermit of Telegraph Hill.” That was way off. He was extremely sociable, not a recluse by anyone’s definition. He proved it the day I took my dying mother to meet him. I had deliberately not told them where we were going, so my father muttered What the hell as I pushed away a curtain of shrubbery to reveal the lean-to. Olin had a fire going and looked up with a welcoming smile.
“This must be your folks,” he said.
My parents, though completely blindsided, mustered their graciousness in a way that warmed my heart. Despite their private social judgments about people, they knew how to behave in a remarkable variety of situations. When I introduced them to Olin, my mother said, “Lovely to meet you
, Olin. This place is so . . . cozy.”
“Coffee?” asked Olin.
“Uh . . . no thank you. I’m afraid my tummy won’t let me.”
Olin brushed off the only chair so my mother could sit down. Then he turned to my father. “So, Mr. Maupin . . . how are the horses and the hounds?”
I’ve never forgotten the dumbfounded look on my father’s face. He turned to me for an explanation. “Did you tell him that?”
“Hell no,” I replied with a grin.
It was true. I hadn’t.
Stirring sugar into his coffee mug, Olin took his time explaining things. “Well, you see . . . when Armistead told me you were coming, I went to the library and looked you up in Who’s Who in America. The fox hunting is right there under your name.”
“Well, if that don’t beat all,” said my father.
Olin had been a hit with my folks. As I drove them back to their hotel, my father was still relishing the afternoon. “You know, I spent fifty dollars to be in that book, and that fella back there is the only goddamn person who’s ever remarked on it.”
Olin was eventually driven out of his garden hideaway by too much publicity and the developers of a new condo adjacent to the seawall who didn’t want him to be part of their “million-dollar view.” I preserved the notion of Olin’s home in Further Tales of the City, though I moved it to Golden Gate Park and gave it a sinister inhabitant who was nothing like Olin. Steve Beery and I had scouted a perfect location: a gardener’s shed on the edge of the Rhododendron Dell.
Several months after Olin vanished from Telegraph Hill, he sent me a postcard (from Portland, as I recall, but with no return address).
It said, “Hello from Olin L. Cobb.”
I never heard from him again.
MY FRIEND DAVE KOPAY, who knew about my mother’s failing health, offered to throw a brunch for my folks on their last day in town. Earlier that year, Dave and I had ridden on the back of a convertible in the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade. We had waved to the crowd like athletes after a big game, which came naturally to Dave, a former running back in the National Football League and the first professional athlete to come out of the closet. We were an unlikely duo, to say the least, this sweet lunk of a jock and a storyteller who didn’t give a good goddamn about sports, but our willingness to be open about our lives in the public eye had made us brothers. Dave had even roomed with me briefly—nonromantically—in another house on Telegraph Hill. There were a quarter million people cheering us on at that parade, the first one to be held after Anita Bryant launched her ugly campaign. It was good for everyone’s soul, healing in fact, but I remember looking up at the people in the tall buildings along Market Street and thinking that any one of them would have a pretty good shot at us. The more the movement grew, the more we thought about such things.
The plan for my parents’ last day was for six or eight of us to meet with them at Dave’s house on Upper Market Street. I was proud of my friends and knew my mother would love them, and Dave would be the perfect poster child for selling homosexuality to my old man. For me (and for so many people across America) Dave was living proof that We Are Everywhere.
When he called me early that afternoon, he began by saying, “Oh, man.”
I assumed he was having trouble with brunch preparations, since it was really hard to picture him toiling over a casserole.
“Is there anything I can help with? It doesn’t have to be fancy, Dave.”
“You haven’t heard?”
“No . . . what?”
The terrible weight of this thing, whatever it was, hung in the silence between us.
“Harvey and George have been shot dead at City Hall. Dan White did it.”
Dave and I had been at more than one gathering with our cool straight mayor and our new gay supervisor. We knew them well enough to call them by their first names. Harvey and I headlined benefits together all the time. I had once introduced George Moscone onstage at the Castro and surprised him with a kiss on the cheek. I had seen Harvey and Dan White in the same chamber at City Hall when the Board of Supervisors voted on our new Gay Rights Ordinance. White had been the only supervisor to vote against that antidiscrimination law, claiming his constituents wanted it that way. Supervisor Dianne Feinstein had also expressed concerns, wondering aloud if the ordinance would, say, allow male schoolteachers to show up at school wearing dresses. In the end, though, she voted for the ordinance; and in the very end, it was her voice, cracking with horror, that announced the gruesome murders to the world. It was the Wild West all over again, and my mother, on her very last visit, had landed in the middle of it.
“Should we cancel the brunch?” I asked Dave.
That immediately sounded so shallow and stupid and, well, gay. I wanted to rephrase the thought, but Dave’s sensible nature prevailed.
“No,” he said. “I wanna be with you guys.”
I knew what he meant. I wanted to be with us, too.
I NEEDN’T HAVE worried about Dave making too big a fuss over brunch. In reliably jocklike fashion he had buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken waiting for us on his dining table. My parents had watched the news at their hotel, so there was a brief, sober discussion about the murders after they arrived by cab and met my friends. Then, for a while, at least, we more or less pretended that it hadn’t happened. No one there wanted my mother’s last day in town to be about that. It was sweet to look across the room and see her in smiling conversation with Daniel Katz, a cherubic twenty-one-year-old New Yorker whom I had already come to think of as my little brother. Daniel himself would be gone in four years, one of the earliest victims of pneumocystis pneumonia, and the person whose death inspired the first AIDS fatality in fiction, Dr. Jon Fielding in my fourth “Tales” novel, Babycakes.
As expected, my father and Dave hit it off immediately. Dave moved into a sort of jovial man-to-man mode, a style that came naturally after years in locker rooms with the 49ers and the Redskins. At one point he took my father into his bedroom to show him a Polaroid of a naked woman, a shot he himself had taken during a three-way with a straight couple, one of his favorite activities back then.
By that time the old man had been exposed to all manner of gay ribaldry, but Dave’s gallant effort at putting him at ease seemed to have quite the opposite effect. When Daddy emerged from the bedroom he pulled me aside with a frown. “What the hell’s the matter with that boy? Doesn’t he know he’s queer?” (He got a laugh out of me, as he had fully intended to do.)
As the afternoon wore on we got word of a memorial service for Harvey and George to be held down at Castro and Market. I wanted very badly to go to it, as did everyone else at Dave’s house. It was hard telling my mother, since we had planned on a quiet last evening together, and I think she had counted on it. She made a good show of saying that it was fine, that she was feeling tired anyway, that it had already been a wonderful day so I should join my friends and not think twice about it.
We all piled into Dave’s little black Toyota pickup. My mother rode in front with Dave, since that was infinitely more comfortable than the back, where half a dozen homosexuals and my father were jammed in tight for the short ride into the Castro. I looked on in mild horror as someone lit a joint and passed it around. When it came near my father, he said, “Gimme that goddamn thing,” then snatched it and took a puff.
“I’m surprised at you,” I told him, grinning.
“Well, I gotta do something. Your mother’s up front with that goddamn bisexual.”
He got a huge laugh from all of us, owning the moment completely, showing my friends he wasn’t nearly the stuffed shirt they’d imagined him to be.
I PARTED WITH my parents at the corner at Market and Van Ness, where they said they would catch a cab back to their hotel. They would be leaving for the airport early in the morning, but we pretended it wasn’t the last time for anything. My mother looked so brave and small in a silk headscarf she had donned to ward off the November chill. She smiled at me wanly as
if she were memorizing something, and then kissed me on the cheek, leaving a lipstick smudge that she wiped off with her thumb. My father, knowing how fraught the moment was, socked me on the arm. All his goodbyes were like that, but this time was different, and we knew it. I was aching with the weight of too much left unsaid. I hated myself for being so much like the old man in a moment that called for something big and true. I promised to call my mother as soon as they got back to Raleigh, then walked away with my friends.
The crowd that gathered at Castro and Market had grown too large for that space and began heading down Market Street, with hundreds of people joining it at every intersection. They were carrying candles in paper cups—a surging sea of candlelight, almost phosphorescent in its beauty, like plankton on a night tide. And I had never heard such silence. This was not a march or even a protest. It was a conscious act of love in response to a conscious act of barbarism. It was the very best of us made visible.
My friends and I merged with that tide and let it carry us into the Civic Center, where City Hall, the scene of the crime just eight hours earlier, now became the temple of our grief. As the plaza began to fill with mourners the silence somehow remained intact until a slender, stately woman walked across a stage, stood at a microphone, and began to sing “Amazing Grace.” She had not been announced, but the crowd recognized her voice with a single sigh. She had lulled me to sleep sometimes during that bittersweet summer before college when Clark and I were living at the beach, and he was extolling the virtues of pussy, and I had longed, all too fearfully, for a beautiful Navy diver in faded red shorts.