First, I read your endorsement for a book of short stories. It was fixed to the shelf on a piece of laminated card. You’d written: Very gay, very fae.
Like much of San Francisco, the bookstore was situated on a slope. There was a painted sign hanging in the window that read: FREE THE PRESS. The man at the register wore a herringbone cap.
Outside, the sun streamed down the Macchiarini Steps. I walked down Broadway, past the vacant office complexes and towards the sea. At the throat of Pier 9, I found a bench and opened my new book. I read about a young girl who met each night with an assembly of her celebrity crushes, miniaturised under her pillow.
I returned to the hostel that afternoon. In the kitchen, people stood preparing instant macaroni and unpacking bags from Trader Joe’s. Fruit flies orbited the half-gone bowl of noodles I’d left on the counter. Somebody had taped a handwritten sign to the splashback:
PLEASE DISPOSE OF YOUR LEFTOVERS FRIEND
IT’S THE SUMMERTIME
My room was on the third floor. It had rainbow paisley carpet. Though all but one of the bunks were taken; the comforters mussed, various belongings strewn among the sheets; the only person in the room was a man with a coarse white beard. He laid in the bed above mine, his interlaced fingers resting on his stomach. His mouth was open as if to snore, but no sound came out.
The following day, I found another of your recommendations: a sociopolitical saga by a young critic. Good on millennial listlessness and the fallibilities of the West, you’d written. I bought it as a portent of a new self. I was going to Berkeley. I would read non-fiction and attend open mic nights.
There were no bookstores in Saint Joseph, Missouri, save for a kind of speak-easy where you could read while you drank liquor. There were also two Christian bookstores, which didn’t count. When I was growing up, I had to visit the library downtown if I wanted a book to read.
I walked upstairs and found the poetry section. People read on velour armchairs in various postures of homeliness. The bay windows were open while fans ticked overhead. Back home, people had warned me that California’s climate would be a shock to my system. Beverley at the Fruit Mart had warned me I’d sweat like a sinner in church. I hadn’t told anybody in town that I was going away for college, but my father had a big, proud mouth.
The next book I bought was a slim novel of Mexican realism. You wrote that it had entered your subconscious. There were two women with coloured hair standing behind the counter. I wondered if one of them was you.
North Beach wasn’t what I’d imagined. The Italian diner on Vallejo didn’t serve paninis like the guidebook said. I ordered a bagel with cream cheese and waited at the wrong counter.
The teenage boy behind the counter called out in a voice borrowed from his father: ‘Ay, lady, over here!’
All around, the streets turned from breakfast to lunch: white tablecloths, carafes of scarlet. I could see this being the place, perhaps one hundred years ago.
I bought a novel of manners skewering the racism of the literary establishment. The man in the herringbone cap was working again. I thought of asking him about you.
Afterward, I caught the bus to the Haight with my new book in my backpack. I visited a store that strictly sold tie-dye clothing. There was a manifesto hanging on the wall: X + LOVE = HAPPINESS. SOLVE FOR X.
I kept thinking about what would happen if I went missing in the city. How the clerks at the hostel would likely be the first to notice.
In the evening, I sat in the common room and ate a container of tuna salad. A portrait of Frank Zappa hung above the fireplace. There were young people everywhere, playing pool and eating beer nuts. The bearded man from my dorm sat across from me, though I’d deliberately picked a table by the window where I thought nobody would find me.
He was on his way to a commune further north. He kept saying, ‘Medicine.’ All I could think to do was nod. He dragged his stool next to mine and painstakingly unlocked his smartphone. He showed me a map of Mendocino County, jabbing his finger at the furry terrain. ‘To the mountain,’ he said.
I decided that if he asked to spend any more time with me, I’d tell him I had to visit a family member in hospital. He spoke like there was mucus lodged in his throat. When he opened his mouth, my instinct was to turn away.
I found an eleven-hundred page epic nestled on a corner shelf in the bookstore’s basement. You called it better than ‘Ulysses’. Beside me, two women had their gaze fixed on a segment of wall bearing the words I AM THE DOOR.
‘There used to be a Christian sect down here,’ one said to the other.
‘A sect?’ The woman asking the question had long dark tunnels for eyes.
‘Baby, a cult.’
From the edge of my vision, I watched them enter a sidelong embrace.
There was a young man at the register. I thought he looked just like the guys I went to high school with. His rangy limbs bent wildly on their hinges. When he mentioned your name, I bent to secure my shoelaces so he wouldn’t catch me reddening.
Walking through a park named after a baseball player, I thought of my life in books. In the beginning, there were inane, girlish stories. For a time, the headings in my journal were a mimicry of The Baby-Sitters Club: Jane on the Plane when we flew to Idaho to see Dad’s parents; Jane Gets Even when I emptied my cup of orange Jell-O on Twyla Foster’s head. I stopped writing when my thoughts grew too shameful, too unbending, to be transcribed. In high school: Austen, Walden, Fitzgerald, CliffsNotes. I wondered how I’d explain this trajectory to you if we ever met. I’d tell you that I was a reader at heart, only I’d lapsed. Perhaps you could help me.
Finally, I headed to the bridge. I alighted the bus outside the souvenir shop and walked to the vista. A high wind held my fringe skyward. The slope down to the Pacific was steep, but I felt that I could survive if I fell. A group of high school students were assembled in two rows on the cliff’s edge.
Pointing his DSLR at them, their teacher cried, ‘Say Golden Gate!’
When he was finished, I asked him to take my picture. He held my phone like a live fish, a breathing thing. When I walked towards him again, he was squinting at me, a cowboy in a parka.
‘I’m Hugo,’ he said. ‘Can I take you out tonight?’
That night, we went to dinner at an Italian restaurant. On the wall was a gargantuan facsimile of The Creation of Adam. Hugo ate pasta with tomato sauce and afterwards excused himself to the restroom to ensure his mouth was not tinted orange. He asked me what my vice was. He said his was apathy.
He taught at an international school out by the docks. That very morning, he’d had a disagreement with one of the residents of the street where the school was situated.
He told me that across from the school was a median garden, which a staunch group of locals regularly tended to. The median was unique, he explained. Chunks of Serpentine—California’s state rock—covered the ground. Hugo had been pilfering one every week to line up on the windowsill in his bedroom. But when he came to work that morning, he’d been caught pocketing a stone by one of the residents.
‘Maybe I’ll return them all one day,’ he said. ‘But not before you come over to see them.’
As he walked me back to the hostel, I noticed that the shop lights were still on. I thought of taking him inside but decided against it. It was private. It was the first day since I’d arrived in the city that I hadn’t visited the bookstore.
You’d read a lionised author’s comeback novel. A bombastic read exploring the intersection of ethics and scientific discovery. I knew this author. His most popular novel had been gifted to me by a woman whom Dad had briefly dated, though I’d never opened it.
Each day, I returned to my room with a new book to hide in the luggage compartment under my bed. I only ever read them for as long as it took me to eat my dinner in the common room. It was the acquisition, not the consumption, that thrilled me. I had never spent my own money before. The days I’d spent at Jack in the Box—working the tills, and then, later, the deep fryer—had amounted to this.
Hugo sent me a message: Come thru Chinatown tn. And then: I dig you.
I wrote back: I’m sorry, I can’t. My uncle is in the hospital back home. He’s a very sick man.
After this, he said nothing.
On my eighth day in the city, it occurred to me that your handwriting was oddly similar to mine. We both had a teacher’s blackboard script. But whilst my letters appeared juvenile, yours were bold and curvaceous. I’d been admiring how your endorsements were distinct from those of your colleagues. You incorporated offcuts of gift wrapping. You were clearly artistic—the kind of person who exercised care in things that didn’t matter.
I was buying a memoir written by a Two-Spirit academic, which you had described as echoic. I knew it was you behind the counter. Your hair was buzzed and tinted the colour of a Reese’s wrapper. You wore a t-shirt that read: FILTH IS MY POLITICS.
I handed the book over, and you said, ‘I just finished this.’
You were raising your eyebrows, admiring the cover like you’d never seen it before.
‘I read your endorsement,’ I said.
You snorted. ‘You make me sound like a politician.’
We were silent for a moment. Your barcode reader wasn’t working. You bent to adjust something under the cash register.
‘Have you read any of their other work?’ I asked.
‘No, I haven’t,’ you said. ‘But they were a professor where I did my undergrad. Do you want a bag?’
I nodded.
‘Yeah,’ you continued, ‘Now I’m, like, super dykey, but I wasn’t out then. I just looked for the queers in every room. Like I was trying to learn how to do it. How to be gay.’
You opened the paper bag by plunging your fist inside it and hollowing out the bottom.
‘You know what I mean?’ you said.
Under my arms, the fabric of my t-shirt was cold and wet.
I went to the bar beside the bookstore, where the cocktails were named after Beat Poets. I drank dark, prickly ale at a single table under the stairs. I wondered if this was where you came when you finished work. I wondered who you drank and slept with.
In two days, I’d be taking a bus across the Bay Bridge. I’d be in my dorm, which looked small online, and was sure to be even smaller in person. Where would all my books go? I thought. Would there be enough space for you?
Dad called, but I couldn’t hear him over the din of the bar. I asked him to repeat something three times. Finally, I realised that he was saying, ‘Take care.’
I saw you again some years later, at a book launch for a classmate from my undergrad. She’d published a memoir about navigating the world as a fat woman. She was the only person from my class who’d been brilliant right from the beginning. Even then, I had your voice in my head. I still thought of how you’d describe books. You’d have called this one: A white-hot hagiography of the body.
Your hair was brown, and far longer than it had been when I first met you. You wore a Hanes undershirt and cutoff shorts flecked with white paint. I did something that I don’t normally do: I approached a stranger and introduced myself. But of course, you weren’t a stranger; not to me.
You were working as co-curator at the GLBT Historical Society in the Castro. It paid like hell, you said, but you enjoyed the job. ‘That’s all that matters,’ I said. You frowned.
I was surprised when you agreed to go back to my place. I drove us there in my Explorer, the windows rolled down to the Chinese markets and the hulking waterfront IKEA. You surfed frequencies until you found a college station playing Meshell Ndegeocello. When we passed the climbing gym by the port, you said, ‘I fuckin’ love that place.’ There was so much to learn about you.
The two of us knelt at my coffee table and I opened a bottle of orange wine that I’d bought at the specialty liquor store on 51st Street. Instantly, I grew embarrassed of the drink, the pastel balloons on its label. I wanted you to believe that I was scrappy, that I drank PBRs and sat on sofas with my knees apart.
You declined a glass. You were trying out harm reduction. You explained that you had more alcoholic queer friends than you had straight friends altogether. ‘By a country mile,’ you said.
‘You have straight friends?’ I asked.
For the first time, I watched you laugh.
In the days following that night, I didn’t fixate on the encounter like I’d imagined I would. I was glad that you didn’t remember me from the bookstore. It was simpler that way. All I’d done was close the loop.
Sometimes, though, I remember how we fucked like wrestlers. How it was easy for you, but I broke the surface afterward with my jaw limp and my upper lip bulleted with sweat. And how at dawn I walked you to the front door, where the camel crickets were still gathered and reeling on the porch light.
You gestured to them, and said, ‘You should know how to get rid of those.’
Then you turned and walked down the stairs, your carabiner jumping at your hip.