Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [19]
In my family, ambitious women my age went down to Manhattan to get a life. They always had, always would. Before August, before Frankie, I’d expected to head south, too, stake out sleeping-bag space on Angie’s floor, be a dog walker for neighborhood gays, make contacts and get a break, find a job in something self-expressive like fashion or decor, where my height and voice would take me to the head of the line, scout an apartment-share I could afford and keep my eyes open for the Fabio of my daydreams. I’d expected to do all this out of desperation. Because I’d known that I didn’t fit into Hudson Valley any more comfortably than I did into the Asia of hippie mothers and Catholic missionaries.
Blonde like the Spider Veloce blonde was doable, but not my style. I put my money on Wyatt’s wish that someday soon I’d be rich and powerful as well as tall, pretty, free. The Golden State offered freaky-costumed freedom, and more; it offered immunity from past and future sins. Goodbye, Debby DiMartino. Long live Devi Dee.
So while I glide down I-80 from the thawing mountains past baking Sacramento to the perpetual spring of the Bay Area, while I negotiate the traffic surge of Berkeley and the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, while I count out traveler’s checks from my emaciated hoard to pay for a cheap room in a Tenderloin hotel, let me tell you how I got over Frankie. In California, many men saw in me the telltale hint of Burmese schlepping water jugs on their heads.
Some days in Chinatown, strangers claimed me as a fellow-lost. In a Chinese restaurant while I was stoking up on the all-you-can-eat, a waiter mumbled something in a soft, gloomy voice, then hovered for an answer I couldn’t give. In a McDonald’s, an Indian man who looked like a student blurted to me, “Wanna catch a new Amitav?”
Deep down I envied the Chinese waiter and the Indian student. The guys were geeks, but they knew who they were. They knew what they’d inherited. They couldn’t pass themselves off as anything else. No evasions, no speculations, no let’s-pretends. They didn’t see themselves as special or freakish.
The trouble was, I wasn’t a geek, a freak, a weirdo. I’d had a life and the chance at a Big Life, and lost it, temporarily. I told myself, For now why not be Devi the Tenderloin prowler, all allure and strength and zero innocence, running away from shame, running to revenge?
Who but a foundling has the moral right to seize not just a city, but a neighborhood, and fashion a block or two of it into home? When you inherit nothing, you are entitled to everything: that’s the Devi Dee philosophy.
My Corolla became my boardinghouse after two expensive nights in the Tenderloin hotel owned by a Mrs. Patel. Asia dogged me, enfolded me. Mrs. Patel’s Asia smelled of Lysol and rancid cooking oil. During the day I scoured the city for a cheap room. I drove from Presidio to Portrero, from Russian Hill to Hunter’s Point, parking the car whenever I liked a view or spotted a dog that needed petting.
Oh, how the city seduced me! I thrilled to the skyline’s geometry. Rectangles, cylinders, rhomboids, pyramids: all shapes belonged. And I loved San Francisco back, loved its parks filled with lovers, sunbathers, Frisbee tossers, loved its drowsy drunks let alone on streets, its nose-ringed schoolboys riding public buses, its skinny gray ridges stuck with pastel matchbox houses, its tangerine Golden Gate and sailboats in the Bay, its streaky sunlight on foggy days, its Day-Glo graffiti inside streetcar tunnels. WE FUCK HOGS. DUNIA LOVES JORGE. BEAT SENSELESS. CEE-DOUBLE-YOU. COPS WET THEIR PANTS.
I parked the car, and strode unfamiliar streets, tapping businessmen for fives and tens, starting small by picking up pennies and dimes, paying