Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides [241]
On my third day in the Haight, I was in a cafe, eating a banana split. It was my second. The kick of my new freedom was wearing off. Gorging on sweets didn’t chase away the blues as it had a week earlier.
“Spare some change?”
I looked up. Slouching beside my small marble-topped table was a type I knew well. It was one of the underpass kids, the scroungy runaways I kept my distance from. The hood of his sweatshirt was up, framing a flushed face, ripe with pimples.
“Sorry,” I said.
The boy bent over, his face getting closer to mine. “Spare some change?” he said again.
His persistence annoyed me. So I glowered at him and said, “I should ask you the same question.”
“I’m not the one pigging out on a sundae.”
“I told you I don’t have any spare change.”
He glanced behind me and asked more affably, “How come you’re carrying that humongous suitcase around?”
“That’s my business.”
“I saw you yesterday with that thing.”
“I have enough money for this ice cream but that’s it.”
“Don’t you have any place to stay?”
“I’ve got tons of places.”
“You buy me a burger I’ll show you a good place.”
“I said I’ve got tons.”
“I know a good place in the park.”
“I can go into the park myself. Anyone can go into the park.”
“Not if they don’t want to get rolled they can’t. You don’t know what’s up, man. There’s places in the Gate that are safe and places that aren’t. Me and my friends got a nice place. Real secluded. The cops don’t even know about it, so we can just party all the time. Might let you stay there but first I need that double cheese.”
“It was a hamburger a minute ago.”
“You snooze, you lose. Price is going up all the time. How old are you, anyway?”
“Eighteen.”
“Yeah, right, like I’ll believe that. You ain’t no eighteen. I’m sixteen and you’re not any older than me. You from Marin?”
I shook my head. It had been a while since I had spoken to anyone my age. It felt good. It made me less lonely. But I still had my guard up.
“You’re a rich kid, though, right? Mr. Alligator?”
I didn’t say anything. And suddenly he was all appeal, full of kid hungers, his knees shaking. “Come on, man. I’m hungry. Okay, forget the double cheese. Just a burger.”
“All right.”
“Cool. A burger. And fries. You said fries, right? You won’t believe this, man, but I got rich parents, too.”
So began my time in Golden Gate Park. It turned out my new friend, Matt, wasn’t lying about his parents. He was from the Main Line. His father was a divorce lawyer in Philadelphia. Matt was the fourth child, the youngest. Stocky, with a lug’s jaw, a throaty, smoke-roughened voice, he had left home to follow the Grateful Dead the summer before but had never stopped. He sold tie-dyed T-shirts at their concerts, and dope or acid when he could. Deep in the park, where he led me, I found his cohorts.
“This is Cal,” Matt told them. “He’s going to crash here for a while.”
“That’s cool.”
“You an undertaker, man?”
“I thought it was Abe Lincoln at first.”
“Nah, these are just Cal’s traveling clothes,” Matt said. “He’s got some others in that suitcase. Right?”
I nodded.
“You want to buy a shirt? I got some shirts.”
“All right.”
The camp was located in a grove of mimosa trees. The fuzzy red flowers on the branches were like pipe cleaners. Stretching over the dunes were huge evergreen bushes that formed natural huts. They were hollow inside, the soil dry underneath. The bushes kept the wind out and, most of the time, the rain. Inside, there was enough room to sit up. Each bush contained a few sleeping bags; you chose whichever one happened to be empty when you wanted to sleep. Communal ethics applied. Kids were always