Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [29]
Between tapes Ham disclosed surprise number two: I had a job cocktail waitressing two weeknights and weekends at Steep Steps, the jazz club to die for on Folsom.
I felt very special that afternoon. I thought at the time it was because I hadn’t picknicked on Hot Peking Prawns before, hadn’t been held and shaken on a boat, floating on floating, so insulated from the city and from time, hadn’t ever made love through a quake big enough to knock cereal boxes off a galley shelf. Now I wonder if my feeling so special wasn’t because Ham was scared of me, or maybe not of me but of what he’d started. He needed to believe I was some kind of fallen princess, not a no-name street person living out of a car and soup kitchens. He should’ve known I never belonged in that pool. But that afternoon on the Last Chance all those questions could be put aside. Squint your eyes just a little, and I looked like a boat-worthy, Sausalito-worthy, jazz-worthy Californian. A good life had been given us, and it would go on and on, and it would get better.
Ham told me the next morning—I’d scrounged together a breakfast of cranberry juice and Wheat Thins—that he’d called in his chips and found me a job in record time because he couldn’t bear my sleeping in a car.
The Steep Steps job made it possible for me to move into a second-floor no-lease rental in a rooming house on Beulah Street off Cole. The house was a dilapidated Victorian with graffiti-tagged walls. CEE-DOUBLE-YOU, the kid got around. The stairs creaked; the hallways smelled of pot and the spices of the home of the brave. I was inching closer to the times, maybe even the block, of my flower-child Bio-Mom. I could only picture her as a teenager in batik and bell-bottoms. She existed outside time. I was already a lot older than she must have been.
My floor had an astrologer who read futures off a software called Disaster, a retired Belgian chocolatier and a Somali medical student who supported his wife and two kids, a bunch of sisters and an elderly woman by doing body piercing, body spackling, tattoo erasures and clitoridectomies. The ground floor had larger rooms and longer-term tenants, including a political refugee from a place he called Vanuatu (which I hadn’t heard of before I met this huge, bitter man), a preschool teacher and her harpsichordist lover, a Serbian photographer with a name that was all consonants and behind a door hung with an I MY ARSENAL sign a Vietnam vet who painted made-to-order signs for a living. BLOWJOB BETTER’S B&B, COLE VALLEY MILITIA: you couldn’t miss his work on Haight.
All my neighbors had come home to the Beulah rooming house from somewhere else. Vanuatu Man wasn’t the only refugee, and Loco Larry wasn’t the only war-maimed. Everything was flow, a spontaneous web without compartments. Somalia, Vanuatu, Vietnam, Belgium, India-Schenectady. Forty years ago it was a big one-family house, probably Italian. We shared toilets and kitchens. What counted was attitude. Faithandhope. I made that my daily mantra. Trust coincidence, aim for revenge. Faithandhope.
In this mood, I passed the collection bowl for Divine Intergalactica, xeroxed horoscopes and happiness charts for my astrologer neighbor, taught “Puff the Magic Dragon” to the small Somali boys and even let myself be waylaid on the stoop by Loco Larry, who picked up transmissions from morals squads and undercover agents. He could read their minds. He could smell entrapment, see purple glows around their fed heads. What was not to believe? Beulah belonged in a special-effects studio lot.
Three weeks into October, and I already could give guided tours of San Francisco’s homeless and high rollers. Cocktail waitressing never felt like my vocation, but because the club was stuck between