…in which she climbs onto her stand next to my desk, then lies down on my hand while I scratch her and she writhes for several minutes, her full weight on my wrist, and bites me if I stop, and if I withdraw my hand, plants her self between me and my computer monitor and walks across my keyboard until I return my hand to her stand so she can hop back on it and writhe some more, hurts.
“Fritz” is Fritz Leiber.
I had phoned Fritz this morning and told him I would be there at two. At about two thirty I got to Geary.
Fritz lives in the Tenderloin, about eight blocks from here. He’s terribly old and fragile, and it takes a while to see how tall this bent man used to be. He seemed delighted to see me and eager for the chance to sit and talk.
His place is tiny and packed with memorabilia. There was a venerable stack of National Geographics, the inevitable set of the OED, a stuffed Fahfrd and Gray Mouser, an oil portrait of his late wife, and many other things. I couldn’t look at much for fear of being rude.
He sat me in an armchair and offered me some coffee, but I really didn’t want any. We talked for over an hour. He told me about visiting Sutro Tower with a friend, being let in to ride its elevator and look out at the view by an engineer there who was a science fiction fan. He talked about the problems he was having with his eyes, (His manuscripts now are all written in very large longhand) Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, the fog horns that used to sound from Alcatraz. Fritz speaks slowly, with long pauses, either because he has lost his voice or because he has lost his train of thought. When I left, he took down my phone number.
He needed a typist.
I can still see Fritz leaning forward in his chair after I’d read out loud to him a fight scene he’d written in longhand. When I finished he would chuckle, slow and deep as a tolling bell, and rub his hands. The oil portrait of his wife, a beautiful, sharp-faced woman, canted her eyes sideways at us.
Another painting, this one of his famous father in armor as the Ghost in Hamlet, gazed soulfully over our heads. Father and son resembled each other so closely it could have been Fritz Leiber Jr.
Somewhere in that cluttered apartment were letters from Robert Howard and H.P. Lovecraft.
My first name was invented by the 16th century poet, Sir Philip Sidney for his long pastoral poem Arcadia. Presumably, it means “filled with honey.”
It got picked up again in the 18th century by Samuel Richardson, as the name of a virtuous teenage servant girl who spends much of the novel being sexually assaulted, kidnapped, and imprisoned by her upper-class, “importunate” employer. I took a stab at reading it when I was fifteen. A quarter of the way through, exasperated, I flipped to the end, learned the “happy” ending is that she marries the man and reforms him with her piety, and gave it all up as a bad idea. I wish I could say I was indignant as an incipient feminist whose keen insight cut brutally through the romantic conventions of the time, but I wasn’t. I just didn’t believe a word.
At the time I was born, the name my mother chose for me was at the height of its popularity, though I don’t think she knew that. It was her third choice. Her first was flatly and reasonably rejected by my father because, coupled with my surname, it would have doomed me to a lifetime of bad jokes. Her second would have made my full name sound like someone walking through slush. So she chose another name she liked, it worked, and now it’s mine.
It’s not exactly exotic. There was always at least one other girl with my first name at school. When I moved to San Francisco in my twenties, there was another woman here with both my name and surname. We never met, but we did keep stumbling across each other when we applied for library and video rental cards.
The advent of the internet revealed just how common is my full name. At one point, in my forties, I got a cluster of emails congratulating me on graduating high school and asking when I would come visit relatives in Israel. I wrote back, explained my location and age, and then, rather tentatively, asked how anyone with my Irish surname ended up in Israel.
The response I got was polite, amused and kind. Theirs was a shortened version of the name of a shtetl in eastern Europe, that, in turn was named after the French city from which its population had been driven after a pogrom — the same city that had given my family its name. So, the email writer observed, if our ancestors had not been relatives, they had been neighbors.
I believe I sent back thanks and an apology for my forebears.
I was getting sleepy in the late afternoon, so I decided a flat white was in order, and I stopped at a coffee bar. While the girl was fixing it, I asked her what a flat white was, and she recited almost word for word the same thing the waitress at a completely different place in Manly Beach had said the day before.
“But how is that different from a cafe au lait?” I asked.
She stopped and looked at me, wide-eyed and bit indignant. “It’s an Aussie drink!” she exclaimed.
“And it’s delicious.” I assured her.
She handed me my flat white, apparently mollified. “It’s the weakest coffee drink,” she told me. “The strongest is cappucino.”
***
What we learned at dinner.
If you’re in an Australian sushi bar, and at the end of your meal, you ask your young waitress for your “check,” she will look confused, ask you to repeat it, and then go confer anxiously with her boss about whether or not they really need to write you a check. The proper term is “bill.”
The first was just after I moved to California in 1986. My boyfriend, a software engineer, was following the Silicon Valley gold rush. Everyone knew why he was moving to the Bay Area, but when they asked me why I was going with him, I felt something more than “the weather and the sushi” was called for. I was in my twenties and had a degree in writing, so I would say “I want to work for a magazine.”
“Any magazine in particular?” they would ask. I only knew about one that was published in the Bay Area.
“Locus Magazine,” I said.
Yeah, right, a voice inside me would mutter.
I spent my first few days in Berkeley happily discovering the local bookstores — Cody’s, Shakespeare and Company, Dark Carnival and The Other Change of Hobbit. It was at that last store that I saw a notice on a bulletin board in the back. Locus Magazine was hiring.
One of the store’s owners, Debbie Notkin, noticed me writing down the information and came over. “I wouldn’t,” she said. “Charlie’s impossible as a boss.”
“Oh?” I asked, vaguely.
“You should talk to someone first. You should call…” She gave me a name and wrote down the number for me. “She can tell you all about what it’s like working there. Nobody lasts there more than a couple of years.”
I never called that other name. I called the number on the job notice and got an immediate callback.
The next day I sat in an armchair in Charlie’s living room. “You don’t cry easily, do you?” he asked, near the end of the interview.
“No,” I told him, truthfully. There was a slight, awkward pause as I considered asking him if he cried easily. A boss I’d had in Greensboro, the owner of a very successful restaurant, had been a nice man, but he’d cried sometimes. Usually it was after store meetings, when he’d mention something like the fact that we were using commercial cleaner instead of white vinegar while wiping down the tables. He’d burst into tears and say we were all ruining him, and we’d all gather around to tell him everything would be all right and we loved him.
I kept cagily quiet. Asking a question implying I had made my last employer cry would send the wrong message.
Charlie hired me, I agreed to come in the following morning, and just as I was about to rise from my chair, the hinges of one of the old fashioned, adjustable standing lamps nearby gave way. The lamp fell, bonking me neatly, but not painfully on the head. I refused to take it as an omen.
And so, I got my “dream job.”
Debbie’s prediction did not come entirely true. I lasted, not just a couple of years, but four. I did leave — as so many did — with much yelling and slamming of doors. But I was never, never sorry for having worked there.
Over a decade would pass before I got another “dream job,” one I liked as much as I’d liked working at Locus. That time, nobody asked if I cried easily and nothing hit me in the head during the interview. I stayed for twenty years.
The promised second storm has blown in and unlike yesterday’s, it is truly a storm, with everything beyond the western hills lost in gray and gusts of wind that make tree-tops pitch, windows rattle, and rain hit the panes like handfuls of gravel. It’s always the wind that makes a storm in San Francisco. Windstorms have been known to knock out the power city-wide, blow out windows, and turn the Golden Gate Bridge into an enormous, thrumming harp. This one is not at that level, but it darkens the apartment to where lights have to be turned on, and it makes me grateful to be inside.
During the Friday Zoom meeting our head librarian said the sidewalks around the public library in the Tenderloin are almost impassable with tents as the homeless do their best to “shelter in place.”
For me, sleeping late is 7:30 am. Michael, quite sensibly, is still in bed. Even the cat, who normally demands her breakfast before dawn, stays in the bedroom next to her radiator, and if I so much as peek around the door at her she mrrrs irritably at me without opening her eyes or raising her head.
A friend posted the figures on the numbers of those known to have the virus, and the largest number seems to be those not considered at risk, the young. This may be due to the false sense of security that comes from not being in the “vulnerable” category. Yes, some of the young went out and partied, but in our neighborhood at least, many of them offered to help by delivering food, running errands, volunteering to manage the lines at grocery stores, etc. They now may be paying for either foolishness or unselfishness. I hope the statistics on the severity of the virus hitting older folks harder stand up, and those young people suffer only a couple of weeks of sickness.
11:10 am
Both Michael and the cat are up now. The cat is on her customary spot on the sofa behind me, Michael at his desk, and rain is steady for the moment. The wind has died down, Grace Cathedral is broadcasting its service, and the shadows and the steady patter of rain are all tied together with the meditative rumble of an organ.
Like “courage,” leadership is a morally neutral virtue. Great people and despicable people have been “good leaders” in that they were adept at capturing the imagination of crowds, lining up people behind a good — or a bad — cause.
A rock song — and video — back in 1988 by Living Color sums up the pitfalls. “Cult of Personality.”
Paula was a tall, thin handsome women in her fifties, with aviator glasses and blonde hair pulled back to the nape of her neck. When she wasn’t at her desk she could usually be found sitting on the outside table near the printing office, smoking a cigarette and talking to either Saffy or one of the women in Accounting. I had always thought of her as strong and sensible, the last person I would expect to die as she did.
Once the shock wore off, I wouldn’t say I felt anything deeply. That would be presumptuous. I’d not known Paula well enough. What I did feel was regret that it was someone I’d liked so much, and the sense that learning about it made things not quite right.
In Portia’s office with its glass walls and firmly shut glass door, I learned what had happened. Paula had gotten sick with the flu a couple of months before, and could not seem to shake it. She kept coughing, kept getting sick and having to stay home. They told her to see a doctor, and she told them she had, would even describe in elaborate detail what the doctor had said and what kind of treatment she was undergoing. Her last day of work had been the previous Tuesday. That night — or some night later that week, I don’t know which — her husband had driven her to the hospital, where she died.
“She was a smoker,” Portia said, her large, limpid eyes looking larger and even more limpid than usual. “And it affected her lungs.”
“And she hadn’t seen a doctor at all!,” she added. “Her husband told me she hadn’t seen one in over a year.”
I don’t usually write poetry, and when I do it tends to be doggerel (hopefully comic) like this. I wrote this years ago, but I recently saw an exchange online that reminded me of it. Hope you are amused. If you’re not, sorry. I calls ’em as I see ’em. Herewith, “Song of a Thread.”:
Peace reigns upon the online sea
And all is copacetic,
For on the forum all agree,
Each poster thoughtfully says “B”
When they respond to the OP,
Some gaily and some solemnly
Some off-hand, some emphatic.
Yes, “B” says One
And “B” says Two
And “B” says Three and Four,
And “B” says Five
And “B” says Six,
Who knows how many more
Would’ve anted up their B
If Seven hadn’t wrecked the thread,
Gone on a wicked trolling spree
By coolly and deliberately
Posting a “C” instead.
Most are stunned by Seven’s gall
Some lurkers turn and flee
The errant “C” has cast a pall
That baffles posters, big and small,
Till Five, the bravest of them all
Steps in, and standing firm and tall
Replies, “No, Seven. B.”
Yes, “B” says One
And “B” says Two
And “B” says Three and Four,
And “B” says Five
And “B” says Six,
Nobody has before
In cold blood dared to disagree
And worse, then offered the reply
To Five’s polite correction mild,
An answer, brutal, mad and wild:
“No, I say C. Here’s why…”
Is Seven crazed, or just plain mean?
Some caution, “Wait and see.
As of yet, we just don’t know
If Seven’s deaf, or maybe slow
Let’s band together. That will show
Her that the answer’s ‘B.’”
So, “B” cries One
And “B” cries Two
And “B” cries Three and Four,
And “B” cries Five
And “B” cries Six,
In a united roar,
They all affirm the blessed B.
Surely that will penetrate
The skulls of any fools who prate
Of other letters, and they wait,
Only to hear. “No. C.”
Eyes narrow. Something’s going on.
Why does Seven insist
On answering? The lines are drawn,
So why does Seven not desist,
When other posters all persist,
With comments she could not have missed,
All saying that she’s wrong?
“It’s B” shouts One
“It’s B” shouts Two
“It’s B” shouts Three and Four,
“It’s B” shouts Five
“It’s B” shouts Six,
Who adds “and furthermore,
I think I’ve stumbled on the key.
On careful reading,” Six opines,
“The awful, hidden meaning shines
From out between your written lines,
You’re really saying…G!”
At last the truth is running free,
Now that it’s been revealed.
That Seven has, with wicked glee,
Tried to wreck the board’s esprit
de Corps not just denying “B”
But trying sneakily to shield
A “G” behind a “C.”
“Not G!” cries One
“Not G!” cries Two
“Not G!” cries Three and Floor,
“Not G!” cries Five
“Not G!” cries Six,
All join in to deplore
Extremism, foully, wickedly
Ignoring every patient plea.
Seven’s exposed for all to see
And plainly must be shown the door —
A G’ist saying “G!”
Peace reigns upon the online sea
And all is copacetic,
For on the forum all agree,
Each poster thoughtfully says “B”
When they respond to the OP,
Some gaily and some solemnly
Some off-hand, some emphatic.
I had an uncle whom I still remember as a sort of prophet. He had the beard and the fiery eyes and, like most prophets, he was considered slightly mad. A geek before his time, as early as the 1970s he hauled a “portable” computer — a rectangular slab the size of a large suitcase — to and from his no-doubt-thankless job connected to the EPA in Louisiana.
And well before then, what had truly made everyone shake their heads, was his opposition to Eisenhower’s Federal highway project in 1956.
“We all thought he was crazy,” I’ve been told.
American southerners across the political spectrum were likely to be enthusiastic about any effort at improving roads — which tended to be underfunded and badly maintained in poorer states like Mississippi, Alabama, etc. My uncle, however, could not be moved on the subject. This project, he said, would benefit mainly the highway, fossil-fuel and automotive lobbies and would result in even greater dependence on cars & trucks, more pollution. It would be far better to invest in a good rail system and public transit.
As usual, he was right. Trains were uncermoniously dumped as a pleasant and efficient option for cross-country travel, replaced by broad, bland, interstate highways that can make even extended journeys thuddingly monotonous.
And yes, I mean “dumped” rather than died out naturally. A railway historian at a lecture I attended described how, sometime in the sixties, entire carloads of railway passengers were told in mid-journey that passenger service had been discontinued, and they’d have to get out at the next stop and fend for themselves. The future for trains was strictly freight, no matter how much people liked using them.
I love road trips — but they aren’t really road trips unless you get off those pale interstates and explore. If they’re only by way of the major highways they are mere exercises in getting from point A to point Z using what feels like a long, white concrete tunnel with much the same view no matter what state or region you pass through.
Pam Troy 