The Ruins of California Read Online Free Page B

Van Dale bedtime—when we left the restaurant and ambled into the bizarre nighttime world of North Beach. In my purple windbreaker and knee socks, I passed men wearing baggy velvet caps, women in witch’s coats, panhandlers, winos, an array of beckoning shops selling army surplus, candles, posters, and incense. (Van Dale offered nothing like this.) One place had a storefront window featuring an enormous stuffed tiger with a cigar coming out of its mouth. An old amusement-park ride was displayed in another storefront—a large clown face with a deranged smile. “Hey, Cary, look!” my father called out, pointing to the black-light posters and long glass cases. “A new head shop. Check it out!”
    At the corner of Grant and Green, we’d turned uphill and soon arrived at Alegrías, hidden behind a plain factory façade—no advertisement, no sign indicating it was an establishment of any kind. A man in a priest’s long jacket and white collar was standing out front.
    “Richard!” my father called out. The two men talked for a minute or so, exchanging observations and jokes about Chairman Mao that I didn’t understand. My father handed him some folded-over bills, and we went inside.
    Down a flight of stairs and around a dozen or more crowded café tables, we arrived at a corner table in the back where my father always sat. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I noticed that the room had been painted red since my last visit in the fall—walls, ceiling, stage, chairs, tables, floor. A waitress appeared instantly, greeting us with husky good humor, almost excitement, as if she’d been waiting all night to come and get my father’s drink order.
    “There’s a table of women over there”—she nodded in one direction near the stairs—“who asked me if you were Gregory Peck.”
    “A poor man’s Peck,” my father said, looking up at the table of women with a smile. One of the women raised her hand—the way Indians do in old westerns.
How.
Another bent her head coyly toward her straw.
    Cary squinted in their direction and produced a contented smile.
    A few moments later, all the chairs onstage were removed but one. A man carrying a yellow guitar came on. He was young, not quite twenty. He wore a white shirt and black pants and walked to the chair with a casual, untheatrical manner, as if he were arriving at a doctor’s waiting room.
    “Antonio!” a male voice yelled out.
    “Ay-ay-ay!” cried another man, with expectancy.
    “Hombre!” my father called out, half serious, then laughing.
    The guitarist didn’t acknowledge the calls—no bow or even eye contact. His pale face looked only at the floor. His hair was long and thick, swept back from his forehead. He rested the bottom of the guitar on his thigh so the instrument stood up from his lap. A few seconds later, he shifted the position of the instrument so it sat more diagonally against him, then hugged it closer, almost squeezing, and began to play.
    The tune was slow, hesitant, mournful. It was called a
soleares.
The mother chant. The song of loneliness. My father had played them for years, as far back as I could remember. He’d sit for hours in our Menlo Park house on a black bentwood chair in the middle of our living room. A guitar was in his lap. His eyes were distant, almost as though he were in a trance. Sometimes, when he seemed less miserable and wasn’t playing guitar, he’d take me on the back ofhis motorcycle if I promised not to tell my mother. I must have been five or six, clinging to him like a little ape. We’d drive to the water, to a harbor of some kind, and get off the bike and walk around. He’d point out different boats with different rigging and teach me how to tell them apart. A ketch, a yawl, a ketch-rigged yawl, a sloop. He explained where wind came from or how gravity held things to the earth, or how an airplane overhead could fly.
    I remembered him sitting on the floor of the Menlo house playing with puzzles. He loved any kind of