escape
It was definitely that slap. Whaaap! Something changed in my head. He’d never hit me that hard before. Of course he’d slapped Mom a few times. Bullied me plenty. Ellen not so much. Maybe that’s why she’s the sanest one.
He was ragging on me about college and I said I wanted to go to Phil’s school and he said it was a nuthouse and that’s when I said the thing about him fucking his lab tech. Blow Job Betty, me and Ellen called her.
Whaap! It happened so fast. He was in the Navy during the war. It was just the right amount of slap to totally wake me up and not injure me permanently. I immediately knew I was leaving. I’d been day-dreaming about it for years really. This was the moment.
I didn’t tell him. That'd make it much harder. I’d wait until he left for work. I let him think I was headed to just another miserable day at school, grumble grumble. He had his car, I had my bike. After he left me in his piss-assed dust, I wheeled it back into the garage and hung it up, pulled up my backpack from the basement, knew what clothes I wanted, toothbrush, everything.
I felt really excited. I got some food, candy bars, fruit and cheese and peanut butter, bread. I couldn’t find my canteen. Fuck it. I grabbed all the bills out of my stash, fifty or sixty bucks. It was a lot of money. I knew how to be careful with it.
It only took me an hour to get ready. I wrote the note to Mom.
“I’m hitching West. I’m really sorry to do this but I’ll be OK. I’ve been planning it. I have to do it. I will call you when I get settled. Try not to worry. I’ve got to get away from him. Love, Jim.”
I knew it was lousy. I just couldn’t get out of there fast enough. As I was walking out the door I remembered where the canteen was. Ellen had it hanging up in her room with some dried flowers in it. I nabbed it off her wall, knowing she’d understand.
I burst out of the house with this enormous energy. I felt so incredibly free. I was scared too, was I ever, but it was a beautiful day and I knew my route. Up to the main drag and then the highway. I’d hitched a couple times with my friend Phil. You just had to watch out for cops.
There was a lot of traffic on the roads and I got rides pretty easy. One took me all the way from Evansville to Peoria. I avoided the cities, something Phil told me. Get out of the South as quick as you can.
It rained and blew pretty hard in Nebraska but my poncho kept me from getting soaked above the knees. The weirdest ride was that drunk guy who picked me up outside of some little town. I shouldn’t have gotten in but I’d been waiting a long time and it was getting dark. He was super friendly, but started calling me Jesus, showed me a gun he had in the glove compartment, was screaming at other drivers and weaving through traffic at eighty plus. After that I felt pretty OK about standing in the dark and watching the cars whoosh by and ignore me.
A trucker picked me up about midnight and it was smooth sailing the rest of the way. Three more rides took me to the California border and I had to wait there a couple hours. Then some hippies picked me up in their VW bus. Damn if two of them weren’t doing it in the back when I got in. Loud. The driver passed me a J but naturally it just put me to sleep. In six hours we were crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, and then I was in front of Aunt Tillie’s and they were flashing peace signs adios.
It was late afternoon but Tillie wasn’t home from work yet. I sat down on her step and took a deep breath. Car exhaust, sea breeze and something else. I don’t know what. I always loved this town. Before we moved to Kentucky when I was eight, we lived across the Bay in Oakland and almost every Sunday went to Grandma’s house in the Mission for dinner. Tillie was always there, sometimes with her crazy friend Josephine or the pretty one Dorrie or someone else weird and wonderful. Grandma made stuff like borscht and chicken with fried potato latkes, maybe her amazing matzo ball soup. She always had some soda as she called it in the fridge for us kids, Ginger Ale most likely. Ellen and I would play with toys Grandma kept special for us while the adults talked or watched shows like Ernie Kovacs or What’s My Line? on the tiny black and white TV in the living room. Grandma’s third husband Morris and my dad would watch baseball or the fights. Morris was a burly, gravel-voiced old Jewish guy who smoked nasty cigars that made my nose itch but I kind of liked them anyway.
We often got dressed up and went out on the town to eat in some neat restaurant in Chinatown or Fisherman’s Wharf, maybe go to a movie or just stroll the crowded streets in the evening with all the other denizens. I felt very cool and sophisticated in my suit and tie and matching tie-clip and cuff links. Sometimes Mom would wear her chinchilla wrap and red lipstick. She’d order a couple very dry martinis and let me and Ellen have the olives. She let us have a sip too but it tasted like the worst medicine you ever had to choke down. We’d ride the electric buses with the lines overhead or maybe a cable car, feed the pigeons at the Legion of Honor, go to the zoo or be amazed at the weird fish in the Aquarium.
It all ended when Dad got in trouble with the medical board and the law for dipping into the morphine at the hospital. After a court ordered month of rehab in Texas we had to move where he could get a license again, a place not many doctors wanted to be, specifically a crap-ass little town in Kentucky. There we all learned first hand about rednecks and bible bangers and how the Civil War wasn’t over yet. Even when Dad started to make money again he managed to wreck things by fucking that lab tech. Nobody could tell Dad what to do. He was the big fucking boss of the world. I’d been thinking about my escape for over a year and finally I got my chance.
“Get the hell out of my house, you little bastard!” It was just what I wanted to hear.
Just a few months before, that friend of mine Phil got me thinking about Frisco again. He was my best and only friend except for Edna, my English teach. He graduated a year before me and now I only saw him when he came home from college. “Insane, wild, far out.” Those were the words he used to describe San Francisco. Different was all I wanted. Different than Kentucky, sweating your ass off half the year with a bunch of country club crackers and debutantes running the show. Tillie was Dad’s sister and she knew what a prick he could be. I figured she’d let me stay with her ’til I got on my feet. She’d always been pretty good to me.
I laid down on her step with my backpack for a pillow. I thought about all the things I wanted to do. Go to the zoo again, see the big ships at the Embarcadero, the boats and their catches down at Fisherman’s wharf, the Golden Gate Bridge. Maybe I’d meet some cool chick who looked like Michelle Phillips. She’d be working in one of those shops Phil told me about with the posters and the pipes and the beads. I’d be checking out the table with the massage oils and pick the one up I’d seen advertised in Playboy. “Warms and Lubricates.” The girl would be watching me with a little smile on her face.
“How’s this work?” I’d ask.
“Want to try it out?” She stood up.
“Wouldn’t mind.”
“C’mon back here.” She walked over to some beaded curtains covering a doorway and parted them as she looked back at me. I followed her. Inside was a mattress on the floor covered with a Paisley fabric. The room was hazy and smelled like incense and pot. The walls were painted all kinds of swirls of colors that seemed to vibrate as some sitar music played on the stereo. Another girl, a gorgeous redhead, sat in a big easy chair with a J between her fingers.
“Take over for me, will ya, Jasmine?” said the blond.
The red-haired girl smiled and passed through the curtain into the store. The blond plopped down on the mattress.
“Here. Take your shirt off.” I obliged and sat down next to her. “Lie down.” She put some of the oil on her hands. She ran them up and down my spine. I began to relax. “You have a good structure,” she said. “Are you a Libra?”
“Cancer.”
“That was my second guess!”
She dug her fingers in and I felt an electric tingle from the souls of my feet through my butt, climbing my spine up into my neck. I let out a long sigh.
“That’s it. What’s your name, Brother?”
“Jim.”
“That’s a slave name. I’ll call you Oak. Because you’re so strong.” Her hands gently squeezed my neck. All the tension was leaving me. I felt great.
“I’m Mountain Flower but you can call me Flow.” She reached around to my belt buckle and undid it. She unzipped my pants and pulled them off. “This’ll make it easier.” I heard a rustle of cloth. I looked up just in time to see her lift her dress above her head and off. She was naked and beautiful. She lay down next to me and lightly kissed my ear. “Cancers always open my heart chakra.” I turned towards her and we wrapped our arms around each other. I pressed my lips hard against hers and...
“Jim!”
I opened my eyes and jumped up. It was Tillie. “Jesus Christ! You scared the shit out of me!” she screeched.
“Sorry. I guess I fell asleep.”
“What in God’s name are you doing here?”
“I hitched.”
“From Kentucky?” She looked at me wide eyed.
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you call me or something?” She fumbled in her purse and then put a key in the door and opened it. The room was dark inside and she flipped on the light.
“I just couldn’t take it anymore. I had to get out of there.”
“Didn’t you happen to pass by a phone booth between here and Kentucky?” She threw her keys down on a table and took her coat off. She had on a purple leotard top and a loose dark skirt that came above her knees. She was pretty attractive for someone pushing forty, long dark hair, sexy Jewish eyes, nice body. “Jesus Christ!” She went to a cupboard in the kitchen part of the efficiency and took out a bottle of wine and a large glass. She filled the glass to the top, lit a cigarette and plopped into a chair. “Jesus!”
I stood there nervously.
“Well sit down for Christ’s sake.” She took a long pull of the wine and yanked her shoes off.
I sat down on the couch and put my backpack on the floor.
“Dad was...”
“That asshole! That son of a bitch!” She took a big drag on her cigarette and blew the smoke out hard. “Does he know you’re here?”
“He told me to leave.”
She picked up the phone and started to dial. “You’re not going to call him are you?” I felt that thing in my throat like when I was a kid about to cry.
She looked at me as she held the phone to her ear. “Hi. Listen I can’t make it tonight.”
“Something has come up goddammit!” She took another drag from her cigarette.“ It’s none of your fucking business!”
“Well then kiss my ass!” She slammed the phone down. “Jesus Christ! Men are all alike!” She mashed the cigarette in an ashtray and stood up. “Are you hungry?” She walked back into the kitchen.
“Yeah.”
“You’re starving aren’t you?” She rummaged through the cupboard.
“Well...”
“Shit, what’s the use. I’m out of everything.” She came back to her chair and sat down again, taking another big gulp of the wine. Then she kind of half smiled at me. “So you hitchhiked all the way from Kentucky.”
I grinned. “Yeah.”
“You idiot! And you figured I’d put you up?”
“I’m going to get a job.”
“And then your own apartment?”
“Yeah.”
“You and all the other fucking hippies. Have any idea what it’s like getting a job now?”
“I can work in a gas station or something. I did it last summer.”
She tilted her head back and laughed. “Oh you poor little lamb.” She picked up a foot and rubbed it. “We’ll have to go out to eat.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s OK. I don’t want to cook.” She rubbed the other foot. “You better like Italian.”
“That’d be great.”
She slipped a pair of sandals on her stockinged feet, looked in a mirror and flicked some strands of hair out of her eyes and then picked up her purse and keys. “Let’s go.”
It was early evening and the city seemed to be gearing up for it. I could see a lot of people in their cars were dressed up and probably on their way to some romantic rendezvous. The sun would still be up if you could see it through the clouds. I felt very happy. This was all going to turn out really well.
As we walked down the steep sidewalk I told Tillie about life in Central City, Dad’s rages, Mom’s pills, the booze, the scenes, the fights, the broken furniture. She listened quietly, asked a question here and there, let out a few choice expletives. I loved every second of it. Not only did I finally have someone who would listen and understand all the bullshit, but the air was fresh and clear and the city around us was humming with excitement and I was in San Francisco!
As we sat in this really cool old Italian restaurant we drifted to happy memories from when I was a kid, reading Mad Magazine together on the bus, a climb to the top of Coit Tower in the fog, a Giants baseball game, watching Mays or McCovey hit them out of the park. “Now those are the real men,” she always used to say. When our dinner came she let me have a glass of Chianti and no one asked how old I was. It made me feel like a real person at last instead of a fugitive.
When we got back to the apartment she fixed up the couch for me. Maybe it was the wine but she looked pretty good in her nightgown and robe. When I got in bed and turned out the light I half wished she’d come and get in with me. After I jerked off I drifted to sleep, dreaming of riding horses on the beach. Sometimes they’d gallop so fast they’d take off into the air and you could sail over the city. Other people seemed to be riding winged horses around me. They smiled and waved and then everyone watched as a giant tidal wave formed in the distance. It crashed before us but we took off and rode far beyond the city over the vast ocean under a sky filled with stars.
