Abuse of Power - Michael Savage [21]
He’d felt as if he were only a step away from heaven.
On Friday, Jack and Tony walked to Pagliaci’s on the Wharf—one of their favorite restaurants—taking the long way, up Columbus Avenue. On the way, they saw an old familiar face—Johnny Evans, retired SFPD. They nodded hello as they passed.
“Married three times,” noted Jack when they were out of earshot.
“All brief wives,” muttered Tony.
“Brief wives once made the briefs rise,” Jack retorted. “Now they fill the court’s briefs with lies.”
Tony snorted a laugh. “A new mantra?”
“Not new,” Jack said. “Just haven’t thought about it for a while.”
“Well, go easy on the Rachel juice. You don’t want your ex-wife coming up on you.”
“True enough. It’s just that she’s been on my mind.”
“Because…?”
“I think it’s a default setting. Things come apart like they did the other day, it shoots me to my own blast zones—Iraq or Rachel.”
“Familiar turf, stuff you’ve already wrestled with. Lets you get your footing to process new trauma.”
“Something like that, I guess,” Jack said.
The more he thought about it, the more Jack realized Tony had a point. Any time something bad happened, he went to the evils he already knew. It made sense.
Columbus crested near a Chinese herb store where Tony bought a cure for prostatitis twenty years back. Small black pills. Took them for just four days. Never another ache. The instructions showed which herbs were in the pill and what each did in the body. The theory behind the cure was explained. The herbalist thought all prostatitis was first caused by an uncured venereal infection, a sort of latent gonorrhea. The pill contained a powerful antibacterial plant. It worked so well that Tony bought bottles for his friends, who were amazed by the results.
At the top of the hill, Jack and Tony both smiled inside at the view of the bay past Alcatraz to the green hills of Marin. It was one of those sunny but cool winter days where the water was “china blue,” as Tony often described it. This was one of the good touchstones, a place Jack visited to purge the negativity. It was like those old World War II newsreels, Why We Fight.
This was why. His home. It never failed to raise his spirits.
At the restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf, where old-timers who still knew where to get the best seafood still ate despite the touristy nightmare they called the “redneck Riviera,” Tony and Jack enjoyed a quick lunch. After a few glasses of wine, Jack became loud. Pointing through the large picture windows, he almost shouted at Tony. “Look, see over there, in Ghirardelli Square—that clock tower. Most clock towers, even our famous tower at Berkeley, they’re all derived from Giotto’s Campanile.”
He went on while Tony stared at him. “Think about this, Tony. Built in the fourteenth century and how many thousands of structures have been derived from his genius design. What do we have now? Web designers, fake artists, no new music of any value. What will the derivatives be from this wasteland?”
Tony nodded as he devoured his scungilli. He was used to Jack’s enthusiasms, and although he agreed with most of them, he had long ago decided that living well was, in fact, the best revenge.
The rest of Jack’s nights were mostly spent kicking back on the Sea Wrighter, listening to the gulls in the harbor and the gentle lap of the bay. Tony always seemed to have a new wine sample. One night he brought a bottle and poured Jack a glass, saying, “Try this … tell me what you think.”
Jack was a sipper not a twirler. Dry. Tannic. Ruby red.
“Good,” he said. “Better than that other one—what was it, a Gaja? Did this one cost five hundred a bottle, too?”
“Thirty-five bucks with my BevMo discount,” Tony said with a wry smile.
“Amazing. What is it?”
“It’s French, from Bordeaux. St. Emilion. From the airplane manufacturer’s estate. Ch