"Here. You want another hit?"
Jim's eyes widen, then blink.
"Nah."
Paul reaches to take the metal pot pipe from Ryan. He lights it. The flame is bright in the night on a golf course near the campus dorms. The date is February of 1993 on a Monday in San Francisco.
"Alright. I'm out of here," Jim says as he turns towards the lights of the boulevard and the fence between it and the eighth hole. He steps away from Paul and Ryan who are smoking the last of the hits in the pipe.
"Wait up!"
The three clamber through a whole in the metallic fence: Jim first. They cross the boulevard with street lamps lighting their steps and Jim can hear the crash of Pacific waves on Ocean Beach nearby.
They round the SFSU campus dorm building to the front entrance walking across the grass rather than the extra steps to the walkway and enter the lobby. Paul retires to his room and Ryan and Jim stop by the cigarette machine in the lobby.
"I'm getting Reds," Jim says. Ryan pulls out some one dollar bills. Both pay half.
In the room, the two smoke cigarettes listening to records, which line a middle shelf of one closet. The room is split in half, a fold out bed against each wall with a cupboard built into the wall side of the beds. Two closets tower in the room on either side of the door vestibule and a bulb with shade shines bad lighting from a high ceiling, further itching Jim's eyes in addition to the smoke. There is a knock at the door.
"Who is that?" Jim asks Ryan.
"How would I know?"
Ryan steps over from where he is seated in an orange easy chair by the end of his bed to the door and opens it.
"Will you turn that down?" the neighboring room tenant says and Jim hears.
"No," Ryan says, shuts the door and sits down again in the easy chair with his cigarette.
The neighboring room tenant knocks again. Jim answers the door rising from the edge of his bed to step over to it. On the way, he reaches with his right hand to the stereo on the shelf below the records in his closet to turn the music down enough so he can have a word or two with the neighbor. Then, the phone rings. Jim opens the door for the neighbor and Ryan calls out that Jim's older brother Matt is on the phone.
"Don't worry about it! We'll turn down the music," Jim says and shuts the door on the scrawny, medium height, gay man who talks with a lisp making a fuss over the music.
"Hello Matt!"
"Hey Jimmy. Listen. Paula got a phone call the other morning at 5am and she said it was you saying you were on acid. Did you make that phone call?"
"What!? No! I didn't make that phone call."
"I didn't think you did. Anyway, what's up?"
"What do mean 'what's up?' What phone call was this?"
"Somebody called our sister and said it was you."
"Well, I didn't make the phone call."
"Alright. Well, talk later."
"Alright. Bye."
Jim hangs up the phone. He looks at his roommate Ryan.
"What was I doing last night or the night before last at 3am?" he asks Ryan.
"Sleeping. We were sleeping."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
"My brother said that I made a phone call to my sister with baby the other morning at 5am."
"Oh."
Jim looks at Ryan and Ryan looks at Jim in the room with the music humming in the background from the speakers on a closet shelf. Then, Jim looks towards the closet and steps to turn off the stereo. The two go to bed, Ryan shutting off the top light switch by the door.
It crosses Jim's mind that his past in a New York City private school has caught up with him and that nefarious people were after him to destroy his character. He dreams fit fulldreams then awakes the next day, the two roommates having gone to bed at about 11pm the night before.
On the Tuesday, Jim is distraught. He feels as if he has lost something vital to himself: namely the trust of his family. He is walking out the front door of the lobby to the dorms where he stays with Ryan as a roommate on the first floor and looks into the sky ambling across the grass between walkways. The sun peers through a cloud and Jim squints. He thinks to himself or poses a question to himself or imagines a voice asking him a question about whether he wants "to get those people back or not."
"Do you want to do it?" the voice in his soul says.
"Yes. I'll do it," Jim mutters to himself adding: "But, I want Regan back."
Regan is a first girlfriend with whom he had relations in New York City and who told him of sodomy at the hands of boys from another private school in NYC after Jim leaves her in NYC for boarding school in 1990. For the next three days and three nights, Jim kicks Ryan out of the room who stays down the hall, locks himself in the room and smokes Reds: pack after pack. After three days, he quits cold turkey. He goes to AA where he finds a sponsor.
"I like your message. Will you be my sponsor?"
"I'm gay. Does that bother you?"
"No. That's alright."
The sponsor and sponsored sit on a curb at night after a meeting at a church in San Francisco. Members of the meeting file languidly out into the night milling and chatting under the arc-light street lamps of the parking lot, then disperse. 19th Avenue bustles nearby. Jim leaves for something to eat then back to the dorms after he receives instruction from his sponsor to read a Big Book chapter and take notes.
Jim meets the gay AA sponsor and other members of AA for coffee and billiards on occasion. On one such occasion, the sponsor and Jim are talking in a diner with other members nearby seated at a table. The two stand by the front door of the diner. Jim is about to leave.
"It is the desire of every alcoholic to learn how to drink. One day, there may be a cure for alcoholism where people can drink without causing harm to themselves or others."
"The 'Ice Man Cometh!'" Jim retorts.
"Yes. Exactly. But, as it is, we take our hats off to those who are once alcoholic: then learn how to drink."
"I see. Well, I got to get going."
"I think it's time we do the first step. How about next week at my place?" the sponsor says.
Jim's mother arrives in San Francisco the next week to visit. He thinks of that.
"OK," he says. "Alright. See you later."
"Don't forget to call me," the sponsor says raising his voice after Jim as Jim opens the diner door and walks out into the lit up parking lot at night.
The next day, at the student cafeteria for lunch: an African American man named Leonardo asks to sit at Jim's table. He carries a bible and places his tray and bible on the table as Jim nods. Leonardo tells Jim of his Pentecostal Church up the street where he attends frequently and Jim is intrigued.
"My grandmother was Pentecostal," Jim says to Leonardo.
"Oh, good! Then, you'd fit right in," Leonardo replies.
They agree to meet on Sunday for church, but as it is: cross paths during the week and read the bible together. Jim buys a KJV bible at a used book store. He reads the New Testament. His mother arrives the following week. Jim is attending both the Pentecostal church and AA when she arrives.
Jim's mother stays at a hotel. He picks her up in his red pick up truck that his dad had bought him in Atlanta two years previous when Jim was enrolled for his senior year of public high school. Jim had drove the truck across the country to San Francisco.
"I have to go see my sponsor today, mom. We're going to say the first step prayer."
"Alright. Let's go," she says now seated on the passenger side of the little red pick up truck.
Jim steps on the clutch and shifts gear as the truck lurches from the hotel canopy across from Golden Gate Park near Haight Street. They drive into the Castro District where the sponsor lives. Jim parks on a single lane, one-way street lined with three story brown stones and wood frame houses, trees and parked cars. He knocks at the address written on a piece of paper in his hand.
"Hi."
"Hi."
"I brought my mother. Can she come in?"
The sponsor looks out onto the sidewalk to see his mother standing in the shade of a tree next to the truck.
"No. I think it's best if you just came in by yourself. We're going to be saying prayers."
"OK," Jim says turning to his mom standing below the stoop on the sidewalk next to the truck. "Mom, you'll have to wait."
"OK," she says and she steps off down the block with sketch pad in hand seemingly to take a walk.
Jim enters a small, well-lit first floor apartment with antique furniture and upholstery that sickens Jim a little. The two kneel and pray the first step prayer. The sponsor takes Jim's right hand in his left hand and they kneel by an unmade bed to pray. The sponsor prays. Jim listens, not liking holding this man's clammy hand.
After praying, Jim says that he has to get going because his mother is waiting and the sponsor says 'OK.' The sponsor opens the front door to the small apartment and Jim steps out onto the stoop, looks across the street and sees his mother. The red truck is parked in front of the sponsor's stoop on the street in a tight spot. His mother sees her son wave and hears him call and they leave in the truck for lunch.
Later in the day, after Jim drops his mother at the hotel: he calls the sponsor from a pay phone in the lobby of the dormitories and asks the sponsor why he didn't let his mother in this morning.
"Did you masturbate before I got there?" he asks the sponsor over the phone.
"No!" the sponsor emphatically denies.
"Well, it just seems kind of suspicious that you wouldn't let my mother in and you had clammy hands."
"No. It was because we were going to be praying."
"I see. Okay," Jim trails off. They ring off.
His mother leaves San Francisco for back home overseas where Jim's dad is working. It is arranged that Jim will fly economy to Chicago for a limited family 'get-together' at Paula's house with the new baby the following month in April.
Meanwhile, San Francisco city lights illumine crosses over churches and Jim takes notice crossing his head and heart with the cross sign every time he sees a cross over a church. He attends the Pentecostal Church with Leonardo and begins to feed homeless people baloney and mustard sandwiches. Chicago looms and he boards the plane with bible in hand reading the New Testament the entire flight near the back row in economy.
It is a brisk, early April night in Chicago and his brother-in-law drives Jim in the front seat and his mother in the back seat to the house where Paula, Jim's sister, and Matt are waiting with baby. Matt is staying at a hotel down the street from Paula's house for the nights that he is in Chicago. It is early in the evening when they arrive at the house and the ride from the airport is tense with Jim in the front seat and his brother-in-law driving given the contending knowledge both have of one another about Jim's supposed phone call.
That night, sleeping arrangements are made and Jim's mother sleeps on the fold out bed. Jim is to sleep in the baby's room on a mat laid across the floor. In the middle of the night, the baby cries. Paula and brother-in-law are in their bedroom sound asleep. Jim wakes his mother on the fold out couch. She grumps telling him to go comfort the baby.
Jim switches on the top light in the baby's room, steps to the crib in the pallid, yellowish painted room with a hanging photograph or two, peers into the crib at the baby shrieking and notices the diapers need changing. He is revolted by the odor and brown stain and does not want to change it. He wakes his mother in the other room again and tells his mother that the baby's diaper needs changing: that the baby is crying.
"Oh. For God's sake!" his mother says as she uncovers herself, sits up at the side of her fold out couch bed and drags her slippers across the floor to the baby's room through the dining room with dark brown, stained, rectangular table and chairs for six people: one chair on either end.
She sits in the rocking chair next to the crib with baby in lap and reaches for the bottle putting the nipple of the bottle to the baby's lips. The baby shrieks louder.
"She needs her diaper changed: not food!" Jim tells her.
"Oh. Here. You do it," she orders and puts the baby back in the crib. Jim's mother leaves the room with Jim looking after her in bewilderment until she rounds the threshold into the dining room back to bed while the baby is screaming.
"Well ..." he exclaims to himself.
He picks the baby up out of the crib and puts her on the changing bed. He unfastens the diaper from the two pins, throws out the soiled diaper and cleans the baby's buttocks with a moist wipe out of a baby wipe container taking care to clean well while the baby is screaming. Then, he manages to fasten a new, clean diaper around the baby it being his first time changing a diaper. He places the shrieking baby back in the crib and explains to her what had happened.
"Well now. Why scream? It's your fault. You had a dirty diaper. You made a boo-boo. My mom didn't want to change your diaper. Your mom and dad are sound asleep. So, I changed them for you and you should be feeling better now. So, get some rest."
The baby stops crying and Jim is wide awake. He shuts off the light switch by the door, closes the door and is standing in the room with arms spread wide praying in tongues, as is the Pentecostal way. He takes care not to pray loudly so as not to disturb his mother and sister. It is his first time praying in tongues. He thinks that he is 'channeling' his grandmother's DNA in that his father grew up in Pentecostal Churches as a kid in Tampa, Florida. He thinks that the gene runs through the generations and though his brother Matt and his sister Paula don't believe in 'Jesus' and thus don't carry the gene: he does carry it. However, the DNA gene that he thinks is his grandmother's spirit is just that: a spirit, or so he thinks as he prays quietly in the small baby room during the wee hours of the morning in his sister's Chicago apartment.
The week passes and it is Sunday, the night before Jim boards the plane back to San Francisco to supposedly begin classes again after the break on Tuesday. Matt is holding the baby in his lap and sits on the now folded couch after dinner. Jim sits behind the desk in the corner.
"Shit, damn, fuck, piss, hell," Matt says to the baby propping the baby up with his hands in her armpits and her arms out wide hanging limply. Jim's brother-in-law appears from the back bedroom.
"Jimmy! Don't do that!" he says to Jim and scowls. Jim looks at him and says nothing. His brother-in-law steps back into the back bedroom and Matt and Jim look at each other.
"It wasn't me," he says to Matt. Matt laughs. Their mother sits nearby reading but looks up.
"Stop it! Both of you!" she exclaims.
"But, I got blamed," Jim retorts.
"I don't care."
Silence followed by tension filled the apartment as the nuclear family readied for bed, both Jim and Matt staying at the hotel in a room together at this point down the street from their sister's apartment house. The window in the hotel room is shut and Jim opens it. Matt is watching a pornographic film on the hotel cable pay per view and masturbating under his covers.
"What are you, fucking crazy!? Close the window! It's cold outside."
"It's stuffy in here. I'm leaving it open."
"Fucking asshole!" Matt says to Jim uncovering himself to step over to the window and shut it. He shuts it. Jim doesn't press the issue because he knows that his brother has a propensity to fight him, possibly because of sibling rivalry: perhaps not!
Jim is in San Francisco attending classes yet not doing homework; attending the Pentecostal Church having quit AA (but not using anything: not even coffee); feeding the homeless baloney sandwiches with mustard; 'preaching the gospel;' causing a disturbance in the dorms with his caterwauling about 'Jesus' carrying the bible everywhere he goes when unbeknownst to Jim, the dorm room phone rings and Ryan answers it. Jim is out of the dorms at that moment. Ryan is hesitant to speak with Jim's parents calling from overseas about Jim given Jim's demeanor as of late, but breaks down and says to his parents calling from overseas on the phone that there sure are a lot of baloney sandwiches around the room.
An old friend from NYC arrives in San Francisco with a surf board to visit Jim staying in an airport hotel two days before reaching Jim at the dormitories. Jim picks him up and they surf, neither of them catching waves as they are both novices and don't know how to ride short boards, which is what they have. The waves at San Francisco's Ocean Beach are usually six to eight feet high in April and May on sunny days with an afternoon northwest wind and clearing fogs in the morning.
Ryan, who is becoming more and more confused by Jim's behavior, stays in the dorm room with Pete (Jim's friend from NYC) and Jim and one night in the dorm room, they have a conversation about the boiling point of water. Pete is already suspicious of Jim and his behavior as he is still feeding the homeless baloney sandwiches, attending church almost daily and praying. What is even more noticeable to Pete is that Jim is not using any substances.
"The boiling point of water is 100 degrees," Jim says.
"No, it's not," both Pete and Ryan correct him.
"Then, what is it?"
They tell him.
"No, it's not! It's 100 degrees. Why are you so adamant in correcting me?" Jim asks them.
Ryan and Pete hush. The two look bewildered at Jim's wide-eyed stare and glint in his eyes. Pete leaves Jim in San Francisco within a day or two and the month of May 1993 passes with Jim fervently attending the Pentecostal Church's men prayer meetings and Sunday service. He feeds the homeless baloney and mustard sandwiches in San Francisco's City Hall park and pals with Leonardo having moved rooms in the dorm to down the hallway from where he was to with a new roommate: Paul's old roommate and Paul moves in with Ryan. The Resident Assistant is taking notice of Jim's bizarre behavior and suggests that because of lists that the office keeps, Jim cannot move rooms.
At this point, it is nearing the end of May 1993 and Jim's father arrives in San Francisco to collect his son and take him back to New York City to see a psychiatrist. Jim is avidly reading the New Testament, finishes it during the spring of 1993 and writes a long nineteen page narrative to his pastor at the Pentecostal Church, which he shows his father at the hotel across from Golden Gate Park near Haight Street where his mother had stayed two months previous.
His dad lays on the bed with nineteen typed pages in his hands, then looks at his son.
"Don't give your pastor anything," he says.
"Why not!? I'm going to give it to him."
Jim tells his dad how he thinks that his grandmother is 'channeling' through him, though he hasn't the vocabulary at that time to express the idea of the Pentecostal gene in his DNA. He thinks that his father will be proud that Jim is attending a Pentecostal Church having never really been to church before growing up and that it is a Pentecostal Church. Jim discovers that there is nothing farther from the truth. He agrees to his father's request to fly back to NYC and see a doctor. Jim is no stranger to psychiatrists and has a distaste for them nevertheless agreeing with his dad's request as it is his dad's request.
Jim gives the nineteen page paper to the pastor during the week, attends church on the Sunday, hears the message as if it is directed at him personally, says so to the pastor after the service and the pastor says that it speaks to a lot of people. Jim's dad and Jim go out for pizza on Haight Street at a place called New York Pizza, then head to SFO for the flight back to New York, Jim reading his bible in economy the entire flight with a curious passenger or two remarking on it to him during the flight.
In the small, NYC, studio apartment on the West Side of Manhattan during one of the first days of June 1993 at night, Jim is debating with his dad whether he wants to go to the doctor or not the next day. The appointment is the next day in the late afternoon on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and Jim and his dad are almost arguing about whether Jim will go to the doctor the next day or not when his dad throws a tantrum, as it appears to Jim.
"I rebuke you! I cast thee out Satan," Jim's father screams, trembling and pointing a finger at his son.
"Calm down, dad," Jim tries to reassure him.
"If you don't go to the doctor: you can walk out that door right now and never come back!"
"Alright. I'll go. I'll go," Jim says as he clutches his father whose body is quaking with anger, frustration, worry, angst and every terrible emotion known to man.
They prepare the beds and undress for a night of sleep in the studio apartment of a NYC high rise on the West Side. Pictures of family and friends and books that Jim's mother placed line book shelves along two walls with a large TV on the book shelf desk top at one end adjacent to the baseboard air-conditioner/heater, above which is a large window which overlooks downtown Manhattan with towering, lit-up buildings. It is cool in the apartment as the air-conditioner hums through the night and Jim lays awake on a fold-out couch thinking with trepidation of his impending doctor's visit the next day and what that will entail. His father snores blissfully away, it seems to Jim. He looks over in the darkened room with lights from Manhattan's skyline penetrating the shades at his dad's portly figure laying on his back snoring and wonders why his dad would throw such a tantrum.
During the afternoon of the next day, father and son are awaiting an uptown bus to 96th Street where they will cross Central Park on another bus with a bus transfer. The bus takes a long time and for the most part, father and son wait quietly at the bus stop on a cloudy day. Yellow cabs zoom by. Traffic stops at the light near the bus stop, then starts again. Traffic is light on Central Park West, a two lane avenue which runs north-south along Central Park from 59th Street to 110th Street.
"I'm thinking about divorcing your mother."
Jim locks eyes with his dad for an instant.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you."
"Why not?"
"Because she'll just keep calling you."
Jim's father falls silent and seems to surmise that what his son tells him is the truth, it seems to Jim. The bus arrives, they board, sit near the rear a few seats apart and the bus lurches forward towards 96th Street passing the Museum of Natural History on 80th Street and Central Park West; then onto Jim's old stomping grounds as a kid: 96th Street where the family lived for a time during the 1980's, moving out of New York City in 1989. Jim can see the orange of the old building where they moved to in 1983 on 96th and Broadway and remembers taking the bus across town every morning to a private school on the East Side as a kid.
Father and son sit across from the Jewish doctor behind his desk who is jotting a note when he looks up and asks Jim a question like do you think you might need to be hospitalized.
"I will reach down your throat, pull out your heart, tinker with it and put it back in better working condition than before," Jim says authoritatively to the doctor pointing his right index finger at him.
The appointment came to a close and Jim went to the hospital the next day accompanied by his dad to be injected and closed off in an isolation room for three days without his bible. When asked what he wanted while he was in the isolation room, Jim replies that he would like some company. An African American man in hospital whites sits in the room with Jim and says to Jim when the ward staff take his bible: to let them take it. He suggests to Jim that his hospitalization is due to 'religious differences.'
After three days in an isolation room and two weeks on the ward at Lenox Hill Hospital, one block from where Jim was in grade school, the doctor releases Jim. He walks out of the hospital on a sunny, mid-June day on NYC's Upper East Side, heads west down 77th Street from the main entrance of the hospital towards Park Avenue and sees an old classmate from his private grade school, which is on the next block. They recognize each other. Merrick, the classmate's name, is about to walk his golden retriever on a leash and is standing beneath the building awning of his parent's Park Avenue apartment on the sidewalk with a doorman just inside the heavy, old-fashioned glass doors. They greet each other and Merrick looks surprised to see Jim there. Jim imagines Pete has told everybody about him from his visit to SF.
Jim continues his walk south down Park Avenue to 72nd Street, then heads west across Central Park to his parent's studio. His mother had arrived by this point from overseas and both mom and dad are at the studio when Jim tries the doorbell with no money, no wallet and no keys in his pockets.
His father pulls from a shelf in the small studio apartment a bible which he had received in 1950 from his mother: Jim's grandmother who had been in a nursing home in Tampa, Florida for a few years and was not to die at 87 years of age until the summer of 1997.
Jim is given a choice as to whether he will go back to San Francisco or do something else undecided as of yet. Jim flies back to SF during late June of 1993, applies for a campus job painting rooms and secures it. He paints rooms with other students for the summer and meets a Japanese American girl by the name of Gerri. Gerri is jogging one evening as Jim is pulling his truck up to Font Avenue behind the dorms and parks. They enter an elevator together and it is an instant attraction.
However, Jim is ashamed to have sex with his knowledge of his first girlfriend's words to him over the phone when he left her in NYC for boarding school in Massachusetts: that she was sodomized by high school kids who had beaten Jim down in an apartment on 94th and 5th Avenue during April 1989. The day after the night of that party on 94th and 5th Avenue when he was beaten was a Sunday and Jim remembered receiving a phone call at the 96th and Broadway two bedroom apartment where he had been living with his mother, father and brother since 1983. The woman or girl on the other end of the telephone line asked Jim whether anyone was going to sue to which Jim remembered replying:
"No. No one is suing anyone."
It was during the fall of 1988 on 84th and Park Avenue when Jim was in the eighth grade that Jim and Matt, a classmate of Jim's from the private grade school on 74th Street and Park Avenue, arrived early at a party being given by some kids whose parents left them their apartment. Matt and Jim were the first to arrive and turned down an offer of oregano made to look like marijuana saying that it wasn't marijuana. The party was hopping in short order and eighth and ninth grade kids ran a muckthroughout the apartment when Matt and Jim were asked to leave and they did.
Standing on the corner outside of the building trying to decide what to do next, eighth and ninth graders started to file out of the 84th and Park Avenue apartment building and gather on the sidewalk. Jim and Matt stood among them when what appeared to be eight public school kids dressed in hoodies confronted the group Matt and Jim were standing amongst. Jim stepped forward dressed a lot like the public school kids and not like the private school kids dressed in overcoats and slacks.
"You are eight. We are fifty. We'll take you on," an eighth grader named Jim bellowed at the eight public school kids confronting what seemed to Jim a pussy in an overcoat trying to smooth things over with the public school kids.
"Don't listen to him!" the pussysaid to Jim pushing him back with his left arm.
Jim stepped back. Then, he noticed Matt walking down the block with two girls that they knew. He had heard them talking in the background that they were going to a restaurant and wait it out. He didn't follow them. Instead, Jim crossed to the center of Park Avenue and sat down on the median's garden bed wall to watch as swarms of public school kids chased and beat private school kids on Park Avenue. One public school kid approached Jim and said to him that they were not going to touch him because they didn't know what he was on. Jim had mentioned a gang in confronting the public school kids initially. Jim left the scene of the fight that night unscathed and headed home, but was to be beaten by the same overcoat wearing private school kids at a party on 94th and 5th Avenue in April of 1989. Windows were broken in the apartment on 94th and 5th Avenue because the private school kids whose party it was threw beer bottles out of closed windows when they saw that Jim had arrived at the party with Regan and some of his classmates. Regan had been the girlfriend of a friend of the kids at the party and was now dating Jim.
The lie that would be believed was that Jim made the phone call to his sister during February of 1993 when in San Francisco when he did not even know his sister's telephone number at the time, nor did he have it written down. Years of agony would ensue and nightmares haunted Jim until the year 2012 when Jim made preparations for revenge over the Internet by trolling anybody and everybody that ever crossed his path, including a City Hall in Maine where he lives to this day since 1997, the year of his grandmother's death and burial in Florida, which he attended and looked over the body in the casket promising at that time to make it square in the family.
It is square in the family as of Jim's magic 39th birthday in June 2012 with Jim convincing his mother finally through repeated failed attempts to convince her that what his sister Paula heard on the phone in February of 1993 at 5am was nothing more than a snippet from a malicious person on the other end of the line and that Paula deduced erroneously that it was her brother on the line when it was not: it was a girl's voice who had called twice at 5am to say that Jim was on acid and to not worry, that she was taking care of him. He convinced his mother finally that it was a horrible prank and swore to the most high that it was not him who made that call, laying his soul to perdition if he was lying.
Jim's eyes widen, then blink.
"Nah."
Paul reaches to take the metal pot pipe from Ryan. He lights it. The flame is bright in the night on a golf course near the campus dorms. The date is February of 1993 on a Monday in San Francisco.
"Alright. I'm out of here," Jim says as he turns towards the lights of the boulevard and the fence between it and the eighth hole. He steps away from Paul and Ryan who are smoking the last of the hits in the pipe.
"Wait up!"
The three clamber through a whole in the metallic fence: Jim first. They cross the boulevard with street lamps lighting their steps and Jim can hear the crash of Pacific waves on Ocean Beach nearby.
They round the SFSU campus dorm building to the front entrance walking across the grass rather than the extra steps to the walkway and enter the lobby. Paul retires to his room and Ryan and Jim stop by the cigarette machine in the lobby.
"I'm getting Reds," Jim says. Ryan pulls out some one dollar bills. Both pay half.
In the room, the two smoke cigarettes listening to records, which line a middle shelf of one closet. The room is split in half, a fold out bed against each wall with a cupboard built into the wall side of the beds. Two closets tower in the room on either side of the door vestibule and a bulb with shade shines bad lighting from a high ceiling, further itching Jim's eyes in addition to the smoke. There is a knock at the door.
"Who is that?" Jim asks Ryan.
"How would I know?"
Ryan steps over from where he is seated in an orange easy chair by the end of his bed to the door and opens it.
"Will you turn that down?" the neighboring room tenant says and Jim hears.
"No," Ryan says, shuts the door and sits down again in the easy chair with his cigarette.
The neighboring room tenant knocks again. Jim answers the door rising from the edge of his bed to step over to it. On the way, he reaches with his right hand to the stereo on the shelf below the records in his closet to turn the music down enough so he can have a word or two with the neighbor. Then, the phone rings. Jim opens the door for the neighbor and Ryan calls out that Jim's older brother Matt is on the phone.
"Don't worry about it! We'll turn down the music," Jim says and shuts the door on the scrawny, medium height, gay man who talks with a lisp making a fuss over the music.
"Hello Matt!"
"Hey Jimmy. Listen. Paula got a phone call the other morning at 5am and she said it was you saying you were on acid. Did you make that phone call?"
"What!? No! I didn't make that phone call."
"I didn't think you did. Anyway, what's up?"
"What do mean 'what's up?' What phone call was this?"
"Somebody called our sister and said it was you."
"Well, I didn't make the phone call."
"Alright. Well, talk later."
"Alright. Bye."
Jim hangs up the phone. He looks at his roommate Ryan.
"What was I doing last night or the night before last at 3am?" he asks Ryan.
"Sleeping. We were sleeping."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
"My brother said that I made a phone call to my sister with baby the other morning at 5am."
"Oh."
Jim looks at Ryan and Ryan looks at Jim in the room with the music humming in the background from the speakers on a closet shelf. Then, Jim looks towards the closet and steps to turn off the stereo. The two go to bed, Ryan shutting off the top light switch by the door.
It crosses Jim's mind that his past in a New York City private school has caught up with him and that nefarious people were after him to destroy his character. He dreams fit fulldreams then awakes the next day, the two roommates having gone to bed at about 11pm the night before.
On the Tuesday, Jim is distraught. He feels as if he has lost something vital to himself: namely the trust of his family. He is walking out the front door of the lobby to the dorms where he stays with Ryan as a roommate on the first floor and looks into the sky ambling across the grass between walkways. The sun peers through a cloud and Jim squints. He thinks to himself or poses a question to himself or imagines a voice asking him a question about whether he wants "to get those people back or not."
"Do you want to do it?" the voice in his soul says.
"Yes. I'll do it," Jim mutters to himself adding: "But, I want Regan back."
Regan is a first girlfriend with whom he had relations in New York City and who told him of sodomy at the hands of boys from another private school in NYC after Jim leaves her in NYC for boarding school in 1990. For the next three days and three nights, Jim kicks Ryan out of the room who stays down the hall, locks himself in the room and smokes Reds: pack after pack. After three days, he quits cold turkey. He goes to AA where he finds a sponsor.
"I like your message. Will you be my sponsor?"
"I'm gay. Does that bother you?"
"No. That's alright."
The sponsor and sponsored sit on a curb at night after a meeting at a church in San Francisco. Members of the meeting file languidly out into the night milling and chatting under the arc-light street lamps of the parking lot, then disperse. 19th Avenue bustles nearby. Jim leaves for something to eat then back to the dorms after he receives instruction from his sponsor to read a Big Book chapter and take notes.
Jim meets the gay AA sponsor and other members of AA for coffee and billiards on occasion. On one such occasion, the sponsor and Jim are talking in a diner with other members nearby seated at a table. The two stand by the front door of the diner. Jim is about to leave.
"It is the desire of every alcoholic to learn how to drink. One day, there may be a cure for alcoholism where people can drink without causing harm to themselves or others."
"The 'Ice Man Cometh!'" Jim retorts.
"Yes. Exactly. But, as it is, we take our hats off to those who are once alcoholic: then learn how to drink."
"I see. Well, I got to get going."
"I think it's time we do the first step. How about next week at my place?" the sponsor says.
Jim's mother arrives in San Francisco the next week to visit. He thinks of that.
"OK," he says. "Alright. See you later."
"Don't forget to call me," the sponsor says raising his voice after Jim as Jim opens the diner door and walks out into the lit up parking lot at night.
The next day, at the student cafeteria for lunch: an African American man named Leonardo asks to sit at Jim's table. He carries a bible and places his tray and bible on the table as Jim nods. Leonardo tells Jim of his Pentecostal Church up the street where he attends frequently and Jim is intrigued.
"My grandmother was Pentecostal," Jim says to Leonardo.
"Oh, good! Then, you'd fit right in," Leonardo replies.
They agree to meet on Sunday for church, but as it is: cross paths during the week and read the bible together. Jim buys a KJV bible at a used book store. He reads the New Testament. His mother arrives the following week. Jim is attending both the Pentecostal church and AA when she arrives.
Jim's mother stays at a hotel. He picks her up in his red pick up truck that his dad had bought him in Atlanta two years previous when Jim was enrolled for his senior year of public high school. Jim had drove the truck across the country to San Francisco.
"I have to go see my sponsor today, mom. We're going to say the first step prayer."
"Alright. Let's go," she says now seated on the passenger side of the little red pick up truck.
Jim steps on the clutch and shifts gear as the truck lurches from the hotel canopy across from Golden Gate Park near Haight Street. They drive into the Castro District where the sponsor lives. Jim parks on a single lane, one-way street lined with three story brown stones and wood frame houses, trees and parked cars. He knocks at the address written on a piece of paper in his hand.
"Hi."
"Hi."
"I brought my mother. Can she come in?"
The sponsor looks out onto the sidewalk to see his mother standing in the shade of a tree next to the truck.
"No. I think it's best if you just came in by yourself. We're going to be saying prayers."
"OK," Jim says turning to his mom standing below the stoop on the sidewalk next to the truck. "Mom, you'll have to wait."
"OK," she says and she steps off down the block with sketch pad in hand seemingly to take a walk.
Jim enters a small, well-lit first floor apartment with antique furniture and upholstery that sickens Jim a little. The two kneel and pray the first step prayer. The sponsor takes Jim's right hand in his left hand and they kneel by an unmade bed to pray. The sponsor prays. Jim listens, not liking holding this man's clammy hand.
After praying, Jim says that he has to get going because his mother is waiting and the sponsor says 'OK.' The sponsor opens the front door to the small apartment and Jim steps out onto the stoop, looks across the street and sees his mother. The red truck is parked in front of the sponsor's stoop on the street in a tight spot. His mother sees her son wave and hears him call and they leave in the truck for lunch.
Later in the day, after Jim drops his mother at the hotel: he calls the sponsor from a pay phone in the lobby of the dormitories and asks the sponsor why he didn't let his mother in this morning.
"Did you masturbate before I got there?" he asks the sponsor over the phone.
"No!" the sponsor emphatically denies.
"Well, it just seems kind of suspicious that you wouldn't let my mother in and you had clammy hands."
"No. It was because we were going to be praying."
"I see. Okay," Jim trails off. They ring off.
His mother leaves San Francisco for back home overseas where Jim's dad is working. It is arranged that Jim will fly economy to Chicago for a limited family 'get-together' at Paula's house with the new baby the following month in April.
Meanwhile, San Francisco city lights illumine crosses over churches and Jim takes notice crossing his head and heart with the cross sign every time he sees a cross over a church. He attends the Pentecostal Church with Leonardo and begins to feed homeless people baloney and mustard sandwiches. Chicago looms and he boards the plane with bible in hand reading the New Testament the entire flight near the back row in economy.
It is a brisk, early April night in Chicago and his brother-in-law drives Jim in the front seat and his mother in the back seat to the house where Paula, Jim's sister, and Matt are waiting with baby. Matt is staying at a hotel down the street from Paula's house for the nights that he is in Chicago. It is early in the evening when they arrive at the house and the ride from the airport is tense with Jim in the front seat and his brother-in-law driving given the contending knowledge both have of one another about Jim's supposed phone call.
That night, sleeping arrangements are made and Jim's mother sleeps on the fold out bed. Jim is to sleep in the baby's room on a mat laid across the floor. In the middle of the night, the baby cries. Paula and brother-in-law are in their bedroom sound asleep. Jim wakes his mother on the fold out couch. She grumps telling him to go comfort the baby.
Jim switches on the top light in the baby's room, steps to the crib in the pallid, yellowish painted room with a hanging photograph or two, peers into the crib at the baby shrieking and notices the diapers need changing. He is revolted by the odor and brown stain and does not want to change it. He wakes his mother in the other room again and tells his mother that the baby's diaper needs changing: that the baby is crying.
"Oh. For God's sake!" his mother says as she uncovers herself, sits up at the side of her fold out couch bed and drags her slippers across the floor to the baby's room through the dining room with dark brown, stained, rectangular table and chairs for six people: one chair on either end.
She sits in the rocking chair next to the crib with baby in lap and reaches for the bottle putting the nipple of the bottle to the baby's lips. The baby shrieks louder.
"She needs her diaper changed: not food!" Jim tells her.
"Oh. Here. You do it," she orders and puts the baby back in the crib. Jim's mother leaves the room with Jim looking after her in bewilderment until she rounds the threshold into the dining room back to bed while the baby is screaming.
"Well ..." he exclaims to himself.
He picks the baby up out of the crib and puts her on the changing bed. He unfastens the diaper from the two pins, throws out the soiled diaper and cleans the baby's buttocks with a moist wipe out of a baby wipe container taking care to clean well while the baby is screaming. Then, he manages to fasten a new, clean diaper around the baby it being his first time changing a diaper. He places the shrieking baby back in the crib and explains to her what had happened.
"Well now. Why scream? It's your fault. You had a dirty diaper. You made a boo-boo. My mom didn't want to change your diaper. Your mom and dad are sound asleep. So, I changed them for you and you should be feeling better now. So, get some rest."
The baby stops crying and Jim is wide awake. He shuts off the light switch by the door, closes the door and is standing in the room with arms spread wide praying in tongues, as is the Pentecostal way. He takes care not to pray loudly so as not to disturb his mother and sister. It is his first time praying in tongues. He thinks that he is 'channeling' his grandmother's DNA in that his father grew up in Pentecostal Churches as a kid in Tampa, Florida. He thinks that the gene runs through the generations and though his brother Matt and his sister Paula don't believe in 'Jesus' and thus don't carry the gene: he does carry it. However, the DNA gene that he thinks is his grandmother's spirit is just that: a spirit, or so he thinks as he prays quietly in the small baby room during the wee hours of the morning in his sister's Chicago apartment.
The week passes and it is Sunday, the night before Jim boards the plane back to San Francisco to supposedly begin classes again after the break on Tuesday. Matt is holding the baby in his lap and sits on the now folded couch after dinner. Jim sits behind the desk in the corner.
"Shit, damn, fuck, piss, hell," Matt says to the baby propping the baby up with his hands in her armpits and her arms out wide hanging limply. Jim's brother-in-law appears from the back bedroom.
"Jimmy! Don't do that!" he says to Jim and scowls. Jim looks at him and says nothing. His brother-in-law steps back into the back bedroom and Matt and Jim look at each other.
"It wasn't me," he says to Matt. Matt laughs. Their mother sits nearby reading but looks up.
"Stop it! Both of you!" she exclaims.
"But, I got blamed," Jim retorts.
"I don't care."
Silence followed by tension filled the apartment as the nuclear family readied for bed, both Jim and Matt staying at the hotel in a room together at this point down the street from their sister's apartment house. The window in the hotel room is shut and Jim opens it. Matt is watching a pornographic film on the hotel cable pay per view and masturbating under his covers.
"What are you, fucking crazy!? Close the window! It's cold outside."
"It's stuffy in here. I'm leaving it open."
"Fucking asshole!" Matt says to Jim uncovering himself to step over to the window and shut it. He shuts it. Jim doesn't press the issue because he knows that his brother has a propensity to fight him, possibly because of sibling rivalry: perhaps not!
Jim is in San Francisco attending classes yet not doing homework; attending the Pentecostal Church having quit AA (but not using anything: not even coffee); feeding the homeless baloney sandwiches with mustard; 'preaching the gospel;' causing a disturbance in the dorms with his caterwauling about 'Jesus' carrying the bible everywhere he goes when unbeknownst to Jim, the dorm room phone rings and Ryan answers it. Jim is out of the dorms at that moment. Ryan is hesitant to speak with Jim's parents calling from overseas about Jim given Jim's demeanor as of late, but breaks down and says to his parents calling from overseas on the phone that there sure are a lot of baloney sandwiches around the room.
An old friend from NYC arrives in San Francisco with a surf board to visit Jim staying in an airport hotel two days before reaching Jim at the dormitories. Jim picks him up and they surf, neither of them catching waves as they are both novices and don't know how to ride short boards, which is what they have. The waves at San Francisco's Ocean Beach are usually six to eight feet high in April and May on sunny days with an afternoon northwest wind and clearing fogs in the morning.
Ryan, who is becoming more and more confused by Jim's behavior, stays in the dorm room with Pete (Jim's friend from NYC) and Jim and one night in the dorm room, they have a conversation about the boiling point of water. Pete is already suspicious of Jim and his behavior as he is still feeding the homeless baloney sandwiches, attending church almost daily and praying. What is even more noticeable to Pete is that Jim is not using any substances.
"The boiling point of water is 100 degrees," Jim says.
"No, it's not," both Pete and Ryan correct him.
"Then, what is it?"
They tell him.
"No, it's not! It's 100 degrees. Why are you so adamant in correcting me?" Jim asks them.
Ryan and Pete hush. The two look bewildered at Jim's wide-eyed stare and glint in his eyes. Pete leaves Jim in San Francisco within a day or two and the month of May 1993 passes with Jim fervently attending the Pentecostal Church's men prayer meetings and Sunday service. He feeds the homeless baloney and mustard sandwiches in San Francisco's City Hall park and pals with Leonardo having moved rooms in the dorm to down the hallway from where he was to with a new roommate: Paul's old roommate and Paul moves in with Ryan. The Resident Assistant is taking notice of Jim's bizarre behavior and suggests that because of lists that the office keeps, Jim cannot move rooms.
At this point, it is nearing the end of May 1993 and Jim's father arrives in San Francisco to collect his son and take him back to New York City to see a psychiatrist. Jim is avidly reading the New Testament, finishes it during the spring of 1993 and writes a long nineteen page narrative to his pastor at the Pentecostal Church, which he shows his father at the hotel across from Golden Gate Park near Haight Street where his mother had stayed two months previous.
His dad lays on the bed with nineteen typed pages in his hands, then looks at his son.
"Don't give your pastor anything," he says.
"Why not!? I'm going to give it to him."
Jim tells his dad how he thinks that his grandmother is 'channeling' through him, though he hasn't the vocabulary at that time to express the idea of the Pentecostal gene in his DNA. He thinks that his father will be proud that Jim is attending a Pentecostal Church having never really been to church before growing up and that it is a Pentecostal Church. Jim discovers that there is nothing farther from the truth. He agrees to his father's request to fly back to NYC and see a doctor. Jim is no stranger to psychiatrists and has a distaste for them nevertheless agreeing with his dad's request as it is his dad's request.
Jim gives the nineteen page paper to the pastor during the week, attends church on the Sunday, hears the message as if it is directed at him personally, says so to the pastor after the service and the pastor says that it speaks to a lot of people. Jim's dad and Jim go out for pizza on Haight Street at a place called New York Pizza, then head to SFO for the flight back to New York, Jim reading his bible in economy the entire flight with a curious passenger or two remarking on it to him during the flight.
In the small, NYC, studio apartment on the West Side of Manhattan during one of the first days of June 1993 at night, Jim is debating with his dad whether he wants to go to the doctor or not the next day. The appointment is the next day in the late afternoon on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and Jim and his dad are almost arguing about whether Jim will go to the doctor the next day or not when his dad throws a tantrum, as it appears to Jim.
"I rebuke you! I cast thee out Satan," Jim's father screams, trembling and pointing a finger at his son.
"Calm down, dad," Jim tries to reassure him.
"If you don't go to the doctor: you can walk out that door right now and never come back!"
"Alright. I'll go. I'll go," Jim says as he clutches his father whose body is quaking with anger, frustration, worry, angst and every terrible emotion known to man.
They prepare the beds and undress for a night of sleep in the studio apartment of a NYC high rise on the West Side. Pictures of family and friends and books that Jim's mother placed line book shelves along two walls with a large TV on the book shelf desk top at one end adjacent to the baseboard air-conditioner/heater, above which is a large window which overlooks downtown Manhattan with towering, lit-up buildings. It is cool in the apartment as the air-conditioner hums through the night and Jim lays awake on a fold-out couch thinking with trepidation of his impending doctor's visit the next day and what that will entail. His father snores blissfully away, it seems to Jim. He looks over in the darkened room with lights from Manhattan's skyline penetrating the shades at his dad's portly figure laying on his back snoring and wonders why his dad would throw such a tantrum.
During the afternoon of the next day, father and son are awaiting an uptown bus to 96th Street where they will cross Central Park on another bus with a bus transfer. The bus takes a long time and for the most part, father and son wait quietly at the bus stop on a cloudy day. Yellow cabs zoom by. Traffic stops at the light near the bus stop, then starts again. Traffic is light on Central Park West, a two lane avenue which runs north-south along Central Park from 59th Street to 110th Street.
"I'm thinking about divorcing your mother."
Jim locks eyes with his dad for an instant.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you."
"Why not?"
"Because she'll just keep calling you."
Jim's father falls silent and seems to surmise that what his son tells him is the truth, it seems to Jim. The bus arrives, they board, sit near the rear a few seats apart and the bus lurches forward towards 96th Street passing the Museum of Natural History on 80th Street and Central Park West; then onto Jim's old stomping grounds as a kid: 96th Street where the family lived for a time during the 1980's, moving out of New York City in 1989. Jim can see the orange of the old building where they moved to in 1983 on 96th and Broadway and remembers taking the bus across town every morning to a private school on the East Side as a kid.
Father and son sit across from the Jewish doctor behind his desk who is jotting a note when he looks up and asks Jim a question like do you think you might need to be hospitalized.
"I will reach down your throat, pull out your heart, tinker with it and put it back in better working condition than before," Jim says authoritatively to the doctor pointing his right index finger at him.
The appointment came to a close and Jim went to the hospital the next day accompanied by his dad to be injected and closed off in an isolation room for three days without his bible. When asked what he wanted while he was in the isolation room, Jim replies that he would like some company. An African American man in hospital whites sits in the room with Jim and says to Jim when the ward staff take his bible: to let them take it. He suggests to Jim that his hospitalization is due to 'religious differences.'
After three days in an isolation room and two weeks on the ward at Lenox Hill Hospital, one block from where Jim was in grade school, the doctor releases Jim. He walks out of the hospital on a sunny, mid-June day on NYC's Upper East Side, heads west down 77th Street from the main entrance of the hospital towards Park Avenue and sees an old classmate from his private grade school, which is on the next block. They recognize each other. Merrick, the classmate's name, is about to walk his golden retriever on a leash and is standing beneath the building awning of his parent's Park Avenue apartment on the sidewalk with a doorman just inside the heavy, old-fashioned glass doors. They greet each other and Merrick looks surprised to see Jim there. Jim imagines Pete has told everybody about him from his visit to SF.
Jim continues his walk south down Park Avenue to 72nd Street, then heads west across Central Park to his parent's studio. His mother had arrived by this point from overseas and both mom and dad are at the studio when Jim tries the doorbell with no money, no wallet and no keys in his pockets.
His father pulls from a shelf in the small studio apartment a bible which he had received in 1950 from his mother: Jim's grandmother who had been in a nursing home in Tampa, Florida for a few years and was not to die at 87 years of age until the summer of 1997.
Jim is given a choice as to whether he will go back to San Francisco or do something else undecided as of yet. Jim flies back to SF during late June of 1993, applies for a campus job painting rooms and secures it. He paints rooms with other students for the summer and meets a Japanese American girl by the name of Gerri. Gerri is jogging one evening as Jim is pulling his truck up to Font Avenue behind the dorms and parks. They enter an elevator together and it is an instant attraction.
However, Jim is ashamed to have sex with his knowledge of his first girlfriend's words to him over the phone when he left her in NYC for boarding school in Massachusetts: that she was sodomized by high school kids who had beaten Jim down in an apartment on 94th and 5th Avenue during April 1989. The day after the night of that party on 94th and 5th Avenue when he was beaten was a Sunday and Jim remembered receiving a phone call at the 96th and Broadway two bedroom apartment where he had been living with his mother, father and brother since 1983. The woman or girl on the other end of the telephone line asked Jim whether anyone was going to sue to which Jim remembered replying:
"No. No one is suing anyone."
It was during the fall of 1988 on 84th and Park Avenue when Jim was in the eighth grade that Jim and Matt, a classmate of Jim's from the private grade school on 74th Street and Park Avenue, arrived early at a party being given by some kids whose parents left them their apartment. Matt and Jim were the first to arrive and turned down an offer of oregano made to look like marijuana saying that it wasn't marijuana. The party was hopping in short order and eighth and ninth grade kids ran a muckthroughout the apartment when Matt and Jim were asked to leave and they did.
Standing on the corner outside of the building trying to decide what to do next, eighth and ninth graders started to file out of the 84th and Park Avenue apartment building and gather on the sidewalk. Jim and Matt stood among them when what appeared to be eight public school kids dressed in hoodies confronted the group Matt and Jim were standing amongst. Jim stepped forward dressed a lot like the public school kids and not like the private school kids dressed in overcoats and slacks.
"You are eight. We are fifty. We'll take you on," an eighth grader named Jim bellowed at the eight public school kids confronting what seemed to Jim a pussy in an overcoat trying to smooth things over with the public school kids.
"Don't listen to him!" the pussysaid to Jim pushing him back with his left arm.
Jim stepped back. Then, he noticed Matt walking down the block with two girls that they knew. He had heard them talking in the background that they were going to a restaurant and wait it out. He didn't follow them. Instead, Jim crossed to the center of Park Avenue and sat down on the median's garden bed wall to watch as swarms of public school kids chased and beat private school kids on Park Avenue. One public school kid approached Jim and said to him that they were not going to touch him because they didn't know what he was on. Jim had mentioned a gang in confronting the public school kids initially. Jim left the scene of the fight that night unscathed and headed home, but was to be beaten by the same overcoat wearing private school kids at a party on 94th and 5th Avenue in April of 1989. Windows were broken in the apartment on 94th and 5th Avenue because the private school kids whose party it was threw beer bottles out of closed windows when they saw that Jim had arrived at the party with Regan and some of his classmates. Regan had been the girlfriend of a friend of the kids at the party and was now dating Jim.
The lie that would be believed was that Jim made the phone call to his sister during February of 1993 when in San Francisco when he did not even know his sister's telephone number at the time, nor did he have it written down. Years of agony would ensue and nightmares haunted Jim until the year 2012 when Jim made preparations for revenge over the Internet by trolling anybody and everybody that ever crossed his path, including a City Hall in Maine where he lives to this day since 1997, the year of his grandmother's death and burial in Florida, which he attended and looked over the body in the casket promising at that time to make it square in the family.
It is square in the family as of Jim's magic 39th birthday in June 2012 with Jim convincing his mother finally through repeated failed attempts to convince her that what his sister Paula heard on the phone in February of 1993 at 5am was nothing more than a snippet from a malicious person on the other end of the line and that Paula deduced erroneously that it was her brother on the line when it was not: it was a girl's voice who had called twice at 5am to say that Jim was on acid and to not worry, that she was taking care of him. He convinced his mother finally that it was a horrible prank and swore to the most high that it was not him who made that call, laying his soul to perdition if he was lying.
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