The Quiet Limit of the World

CHAPTER ONE

1978

Ileft early on a Sunday morning so that I could avoid any traffic going through L.A. My parents stood on the concrete driveway in front of the one-car garage. My father gripped my hand.

Diego—be careful, my son.

A Spaniard, he’d never lost his Mediterranean accent despite years as a cook in London and Los Angeles. His eyes darted to my car, a 1973 Toyota Celica that I’d bought used, and I wondered if he knew what had happened in my last year in college.

My mother had tears in her eyes and handed me a neatly crimped grocery shopping bag, as heavy as a sack of potatoes. I’d watched her pack salami, cheese, a jar of olives, a bundle of mandarin oranges, and warm sandwiches wrapped in tin foil.

Schnitzel sandwiches for the drive to San Francisco, she said, with sauerkraut and senf.

Thanks, Mutti.

How an Austrian and a Spaniard stayed married was a family intrigue. She proffered a thermos with hot coffee. Don’t forget who you are, Diego. I choked up when she brushed tears from her eyes.

In the Spanish tradition, I would have been known as Diego Contreras Forsthueber, since the mother’s maiden name is retained for one subsequent generation. I kept it simple and dropped my mother’s family name—the Austrian side of me. My parents had met in England after the War and we had immigrated to the United States shortly before I started school. But even as a boy, when I was asked what Diego is in American, I’d reply Diego.

I won’t, Mutti.

Before it got any worse, I wanted to shove off. I hugged her, shook hands again with my Dad, and stepped wordlessly into the car. In the rearview mirror, I saw them wave as I drove down our street of single-story homes, pick-up trucks on blocks in driveways, the weekend ritual of repairs.

I turned right onto Beach Boulevard and could hear the Sunday morning bells from St. Pius V Catholic Church, where my brother and I had gone to school and where I’d been an altar boy. My older brother Hidalgo and I were both products of an Old World culture preserved in the United States by way of family and the Catholic school system. While my father would have encouraged me to learn a trade—to be a master electrician, for example—my mother loathed the trades and wanted me to be an attorney. I chose the arts instead and moved from the church choir to high school musical theater to film school and Lit, none of which had gotten me anywhere.

I turned north towards the freeway and told myself I was leaving my town, and religion, and my old life behind.

The steering wheel shuddered when I accelerated, but my tires hummed on a dry road. A railroad yard snapped past a row of warehouses. I thought I looked good in the Celica, with my trimmed beard and Army surplus jacket. The car had a customized paint job with wide orange and white bands fanning across the front doors like wings.

Just past the iron works in Downey, I noticed a silver Pontiac Trans Am with a red thunderbird painted on the hood pull up behind me, swerve from side to side as if aiming to overtake me in heavy traffic. But almost no one else was on the road. Screw him, I thought to myself. Let him overtake me. The Trans Am must have hung on my tail for at least two miles and my heart was pounding. But why should I get out of his way? I was as good as anyone.

When he finally roared past in a blur of silver and red, I saw a hairy hand hang out over the roof and a finger point upwards. A great start to a long day, I told myself. I tried to calm down.

A cluster of office buildings drifted into view. Looping through the downtown interchange, I glimpsed the red-tile roofs of USC—the college I’d attended, though my mother always went on about how my brother was a Stanford man and I’d only graduated from USC. At least I’d graduated; I tried not to think about my brother.

Instead, I thought about Yuki, my sometimes girlfriend in college. The freeway curved north along the perimeter of the city center, not far from Little Tokyo where Yuki taught me how to use chopsticks and where, in the parking lot of the Atomic Café, we’d almost taken things too far.

But not all the memories that cut into me were comforting. I drove by Los Feliz and the exit to Griffith Park. Thick columns supporting an overpass shook past and I remembered how a year-and-a-half earlier I had almost done it in. I’d been in school most of my short life up until then, and each steady step led to the next, though I’m sure nervous breakdowns and mental instability ran in the family. My older brother had been institutionalized twice, and the third time he would have been wearing a prison uniform if he hadn’t run away. For me, in my last year of college, uncertain of any prospects, spurned by one of the bridesmaids at a friend’s wedding, and after eight or nine martinis, I got behind the wheel of my car.

On the freeway back to my college digs in L.A., I saw where the road divided, the turnoff to the north, the turnoff to the south, and the pylons of the overpass marking the divide. It would have been so easy just to turn the steering wheel a fraction of an inch and hit the pylon straight on at eighty-five miles per hour.

Instead, I took the north offramp and circled back around, tempted by the pylon a second time and then a third until, sobbing and yelling blasphemies, I swerved onto the turnoff south.

I travelled hard the year following college. I spent eight weeks bumming through France and Germany, working the vendage, sleeping rough sometimes when I didn’t have the money for a hostel. After that night of desperation on the freeway, I told myself anything I experienced was a gift, a bonus, value-added, overtime, even moving back in with my folks. I worked a series of odd jobs that year, both in and out of the film industry, in and out of Orange County kitchens with my Dad, and tried writing a film script and a play. By the end of that summer, I’d been accepted into a graduate creative writing program at San Francisco State University.

With the thought of a fresh start, I was in a maniacally good mood as I drove up the I-5 that August. San Francisco would be my SoHo, my Berlin, my Greenwich Village. Never mind that the Golden Dragon massacre, a botched Chinatown shoot-up the previous year, was symptomatic of the City’s gangland feuds; or that older neighborhoods were in decline, with tensions from displacement and rapid change reflected in the city council, escalating between Harvey Milk, the City’s first openly gay supervisor, and Supervisor Dan White, a former policeman and fireman, leaving the beleaguered Mayor Moscone to mediate.

Instead, for me, a film and Lit major and recent college graduate, San Francisco was an oasis of culture in the California desert, as the George Saunders character Addison De Witt put it in the movie All About Eve.

But first I had to get there in a pale green four-seater that was good on gas but had a leaky radiator. Nothing a couple of cans of Stop Leak couldn’t fix.

By midmorning, I had climbed the Santa Clarita Pass and soared through the canyons near Pyramid Lake. I was my own man, I told myself. I had some modest savings, a couple of film scripts in a satchel that I might rewrite as plays, a boxful of books that I had read and reread since college: The Sorrows of Young Werther; Immortal Poems of the English Language, edited by Oscar Williams; The Complete Works of Shakespeare; and Mickey Spillane’s My Gun is Quick.

The back seat was piled high with my clothing, photo albums from my recent trips, and framed enlargements I could use to decorate a room. A couple of large travel posters were rolled up in a mailing tube. In the car trunk was an electric typewriter, along with a portable cassette player, pots and pans and cookware my parents had given me, and a set of dishes and utensils in case I had to supply my own in whatever new digs I would find. I also kept two jugs of water in the trunk in case the radiator was thirsty.

My car chugged up the Gorman Pass and the engine seemed to cough and hesitate. I downshifted, negotiated the steep incline in the lowest gear but noticed the needle on the temperature gauge inched into the red. Even though it was eighty-five degrees outside, I turned the car heater and fan to the highest setting and unrolled all four windows. I was broiling but drawing the heat off the engine seemed to help and the temperature gauge needle hovered back into the safe zone.

Winding my way through the Grapevine was even tougher on the cooling system. Steam started to hiss from the radiator. When I crested the top of the Tejon Pass, I pulled over to let the engine cool. I waited nervously for more than half an hour, told myself I should enjoy the view from the pass, and took a few deep breaths. When it was safe, I used a thick rag to loosen the radiator cap. Steam rose slowly like tobacco smoke, but at least it wasn’t a hot geyser of boiling fluid. I was able to pour in cold water from a jug and noticed the radiator was leaking again. I always kept Stop Leak with me and added two cans.

Back in action, it was time for some music and I inserted Jethro Tull’s Aqualung into the dashboard cassette player. I kept the box of cassettes on the front seat and it wasn’t all rock and folk, but Shosktakovich, Rachmanioff, Rimsky-Korsakov, Ravel, the great Romantics, some Baroque.

I drummed on the steering wheel as I shot past a dry lake near Buttonwillow. Clumps of sagebrush covered the flatlands and I thought of some of the good and bad dates I’d had in college. Most dates fizzled because I didn’t know who I was, or I was trying too hard, but angrily I always told myself it was because I grew up working class and didn’t have enough money.

I remembered taking a young lady from my theater class to see Jon Voight as Hamlet. I could barely afford the tickets, let alone gas for the MG Midget sportscar I’d borrowed from my roommate for my big date. Dinner at a Jewish deli had set me back, but it was worth it because she was pretty and she told me she liked theater. As my father put it in his inimitable way: You spend all your money on broads. No wonder you’re always broke.

Everyone has to have a hobby, I told him. You have your motorcycles . . .

My motorcycles are reliable, he retorted, which was a joke. Half the time my mother had to drive him to work because one motorcycle or the other was broken down.

I also liked to work out and burn off frustration by running hard or pumping iron. I was looking forward to a new routine in a new city. San Francisco State had a gym and I couldn’t wait to hear the clank of iron weights again.

I stopped for gas in Lost Hills. Even though it was only midmorning, the young girl standing at the cash register looked tired and bored. She was cute, probably a high school student who could only get hours on a Sunday morning, and she had bright green eyes and a light sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose. I wanted to see her smile and grinned: Lost Hills? Must be nice living here.

The girl looked at me, then looked out the window. Oil derricks pumped lazily on the flat plain.

There ain’t a hill around here, she said, but everyone that lives here is lost all right.

She didn’t smile.

I grew tired of listening to music and in the afternoon, on the long drive to the Gilroy turnoff, I unrolled the windows and let the warm air rush in, rush up against my body like hands. I sang some of the songs I’d learned in childhood. I’d grown up listening to old Richard Tauber recordings and belted out in a strong baritone voice Wien, Du Stadt Meine Traume and later, since my father had insisted I learn the songs of the Spanish Civil War, Si me quieres escribir. I had only the sound of the wind to compete with my voice and even sang the Andaluz exile’s lament Yo soy un pobre emigrante. The reservoir I drove past made me think of a Scandinavian lake. I’d never been to Norway or Sweden, but it didn’t matter. Almost everything in my background was a cultural mishmash.

I arrived in San Mateo in the late afternoon and decided to spend the night. The San Carlos Motel was a step above a Y-Tel Motel, where johns paid by the hour, but it would be cheaper than staying in San Francisco and I could drive the rest of the way the next day feeling refreshed. A couple from India ran the place. I paid in advance and the man took a key down from a hook on the wall and handed it to me. He poked a thin finger in the direction of the room. Check out time is eleven. No large parties.

I thought that was amusing because I was by myself, but the last time I’d stayed at the San Carlos Motel was only a year or so before, when six or seven of us had packed into a double room—two to a bed, two or three on the floor—to save money. We had driven up from USC to attend the Stanford game. The owner of the motel gave me a second look, and whatever grim smile he had disappeared. Maybe he remembered me.

The room had thin carpeting and a small bathroom to one side. The bed looked like it sagged in the middle—maybe from overuse—and the faded pictures on the wall showed a canal in Italy. A writing desk, a chair, and a television set were opposite the bed. The room had been aired out recently.

I’d passed a liquor store on the drive to the San Carlos. It was about a block away and I walked south on Walnut Street and bought a six-pack of beer and a bag of potato chips.

When night fell, I finished the last of the sandwiches my parents had packed, ate a few oranges, and opened a can of beer. I watched television. An old movie played—Waterloo Bridge, starring Robert Taylor and Vivien Leigh; a black and white film that made me feel miserable. I shut off the television and was on my fourth beer. I listened to the sound of traffic and decided to write a letter.

The motel only provided a few sheets of letterhead. I’d need to be brief and started to compose a missive to my former girlfriend—the Japanese-American woman I’d gone out with the previous year. Maybe I’d mail it, maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe she’d write back to me. Who knows? Maybe we’d even get back together. I started writing that I thought of her sometimes and that I was sorry things had ended badly. I explained that we had broken up because when you really love someone you only want the best for them and I knew I wasn’t worthy of her. I tore that up—it made me sound too noble—and I wrote a much milder version, stating simply that I was moving to San Francisco and that I hoped she was having a good year. I tore that one up as well. The truth was, we had broken up because I was too restless, too confused, and at times too angry to have developed any kind of stable relationship. I liked her but hadn’t felt any love for her until it was over.

I finished the last two beers and the potato chips. In the morning, I would drive the rest of the way into San Francisco.

The last short leg of the journey took me through San Bruno, then Serramonte, and past Daly City where houses, strung together like pearl necklaces, laced around the hills. A white and orange BART train ran parallel to the freeway and for a while I felt as if I were racing the train.

The five miles from Daly City to the campus went quickly; even with morning traffic I was at the turnoff within minutes.

I’d only seen the campus from a distance when driving through town on previous trips but made my way to the corner of Holloway and Nineteenth where I parked in a concrete structure. I handed over a tuition payment at the Bursar’s Office, then swung by the Division of Graduate Studies to touch base with my advisor. A young Asian woman was in the waiting area as well. She looked at me and smiled. She was stunning, with deep luminous eyes, a pert nose, and lightly glossed lips. Her long black hair cascaded to one side, with a strand falling in front of one eye. She brushed it aside.

I wanted to ask her a question, find out what program she was in, but stood in silence.

I kept thinking how beautiful she was. She might have been Filipino or Chinese, or maybe mixed. She was dressed in a short beige leather jacket, open in the front, set off by a cream-colored lacy blouse; black jeans and jet-black shoes completed the combination.

I was about to say something when the receptionist, a young man with pimples and an Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down, croaked out that she could see her advisor now.

I watched her pass through a hallway door. I waited, saw my advisor, and started thinking about everything else I had to do. Above all, I needed to find digs. I could afford another night or two in some El Cheapo Motel—a place more or less like the San Carlos—but before too long I’d need to find something more permanent.

I crossed campus. A few of the buildings had roofs angled like open cantilever bridges, but most of them were functional post-war buildings of poured concrete and glass. The Housing Office was in a grey slab of a building.

Along the narrow hallway a bulletin board was papered with notices: Roommate Wanted, House for Rent, Trailer Available, Live with Family Only Forty Miles From Campus—none of it seemed appropriate. Then, I found what I was looking for: Large Room for Rent. Furnished. Close to Market Street, City Hall, and All Amenities. I was curious what large meant in the heart of the city, but the rent was less than one hundred dollars per month, utilities included. Best of all, the notice read: Available for Immediate Occupancy. I wrote down the phone number.

The pinging of the Celica’s four-cylinder 1.6 liter engine V-4 was reassuring, whispering to me that the pistons were moving up and down and the car was carrying me uphill. Portola curved through the heights near Mount Davidson and I could see the panorama of the City, the white skyline in relief against the Bay, the dark stretch of water fanning out in the direction of Oakland. The day was crisp and cool, invigorating, and I told myself I could be happy here.

I followed Portola to Market then turned left on Larkin, driving past City Hall and Civic Center Plaza, with its neoclassical opera house on one end and beaux-arts library building on the other. I told myself that section of the City looked like Vienna; I thought of the Hofburg and the Kunsthistoriches Museum and the Rathaus.

I knew that just east of the palatial municipal hall modelled on the U.S. Capitol Building was an encampment of the homeless, and beyond that the Tenderloin district, a mecca for junkies and runaways and prostitutes.

But I wasn’t headed there. San Francisco would be my Vienna. The Vienna before the First World War wasn’t a mecca for junkies but for unknown artists and intellectuals who moved silently through crowds of the well-established and were on the verge of joining their ranks. Such was my dream.

Of course, there was a problem with this fantasy: San Francisco was a hard-edged American city with pockets of decay, a long list of social problems, and little intellectual ferment other than the angry froth of politics and resentment.

Eventually, I would learn that San Francisco wasn’t even one city; it was seven separate cities, each of which hated the others.

I circled back to Market and turned right on Sanchez. A short jog took me to the street I was looking for: Granger Street. I decided to reconnoiter and headed north on Granger, up a hill. The building where I might end up living was at the lower end of Granger, opposite a park. A few short blocks took me past the Painted Ladies, the famous varicolored Victorian homes. But to get there, I had to cross Haight and Page. As I looped back around and drove south to the bottom of Granger, I saw iron bars on windows, what looked like an old carpet rolled up and lying in a doorway until it moved, and brown shards of glass on the sidewalk.

I crossed Waller and the neighborhood seemed less blighted. The park was well-maintained and a young couple helped a child into a swing. I parked opposite the building and looked down the street. A laundromat was nearby, the streetcar line ran east-west a block away, and a bar and a bakery faced each other on opposite corners. The neighborhood would be fine.

A man in his mid-fifties trundled down the stairs and held the beveled door open for me.

Diego?

He introduced himself as Mr. Meriwether and as I followed him upstairs, he explained that he leased the top floor and then sublet individual rooms, including what had once been the living room. I knew that many of the old Victorian homes and post-war townhouses had been divided in that way. Less than a dozen years before, during the Summer of Love, a generation of seekers had descended on the Haight to find their own version of truth, and building owners with falling property values were happy to divide and conquer and rent to them. Many of the buildings had never been reconverted into single family homes.

We reached the third floor. Mr. Meriwether wore a yellow and green silk shirt that was too tight for him. His belly bulged out and I could see a line of pink skin. He also wore thick glasses and a mop of curly blond hair that was obviously a toupee. He inclined his head toward me and apologized.

Hearing aid, he pointed. You’ll have to speak up.

I hadn’t said anything. He waited expectantly.

Oh, I replied at last. Can you tell me about the room?

We were in the middle of the hallway and Mr. Meriwether stretched his arms so that he could point in both directions.

All the bedrooms are behind me, on this side of the hallway. Three in this direction and two in the other. There’s a shared kitchen and bathroom and phone privileges. He flicked his hand toward a rotary phone on a hall stand next to me. A notebook stuck out from underneath the phone. I don’t worry about local calls, but we write down our toll calls. The monthly service fee is divided and everyone pays for their own long-distance calls.

Sounds fair to me.

The front room is available. I’ll show you.

I followed him down the hallway in the direction of the street. Where the building ended, a common sitting area with magazines and a television was to the right. A private room was to the left and Mr. Meriwether unlocked the door, then held it open.

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