Tales From The Bay 1: Living In The Closet

“I don’t love you anymore,” she said.
She said it aloud, to his face, but it didn’t really hit him until the day the President sent planes to bomb the middle east. Like so many others, Henry had the war on his mind but had forced it to the back, the front being occupied with his own immediate concerns, like why she didn’t love him anymore. He had felt it, had almost known it, but when she said it and there was no denial for him to hide behind, he was surprisingly shocked.

Her name was June, his girlfriend for three years, and she had told him she didn’t love him two days before the initial bombing, saying something Henry didn’t totally follow about getting older and needing to make changes. He sat at the table and tried to think of something to say himself, but what was the point? If he was to sit there and ask why, why, he would fall into danger of losing his dignity along with her and the apartment and everything else that made him worth a shit. Besides, as surprised as he may have seemed with the dumb look on his face, he couldn’t deny that the last year had slowly splintered their life together into two separate lives apart.

There was also no denying the apartment was hers. She has found it, had furnished it, paid more rent than he did, paid all the rent when he didn’t have work, and it was five blocks from her job.  He went on-line for a place to move himself and found only one listing within the price range of his non-union painting job. It read as follows:

Cozy studio near downtown San Francisco.

Homey atmosphere. Very cozy.

Water part of rent. Cheap! And cozy!

Rent now = get move in special with free towel.

He made an appointment to see the place later that day and walked to the address on Bush Street to meet the landlord, Mr. Baclanova. He followed the older man up three flights of stairs because the elevator had fallen down into the basement, never to be seen again. Mr. Baclanova climbed slowly, wrapped in a long black coat he had buttoned up to his chin.

“I would have sold it,” the old man said, referring to the building. “But no one want to pay. My cousin Vladimir? He sell some rat nest for much money and I’m left with nothing. No one want to pay what it’s worth. For example, I got assholes who don’t pay no rent. You got job?”

“Stan’s Painting,” Henry said.

“Good. So many young people in this country lie around waiting to hand them good things. It is good you do real work, not idiot computers.”

They stopped on the third floor and Mr. Baclanova unlocked the first door in the hall. He turned on a florescent light that burned dull green from the ceiling, revealing a room with no windows and no space for anything but a chair. The glue and caulk were still wet where a sink had recently been built into the wall.

“This is a closet,” Henry said.

Baclanova held up one long pale finger and said: “No, this is studio,” he motioned down the stairs. “You can use bathroom on first floor anytime you like. There is also sink, which is brand new. If you do not wish to go downstairs, go in the sink. Up to you. But you must go to the roof and switch on the water to the sink if you move in.”

“It’s pretty small,” Henry said.

“Cozey, yes.”

Meanwhile, two doors down the hall:

Ana knew the ghost was back, she could feel it’s presence in the kitchen when the molecules in the air slowed down around her and the temperature dropped.

“What do you want?” she asked it. She had asked the same thing the last three times it had visited the apartment, getting no response.

Infact the ghost never spoke at all, choosing instead to rattle the pans in the cupboards and make the mirrors fog up. The closest Ana had come to actually seeing it was when she was in the main room and the dust particles in the air had parted around the distinct shape of a person.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

An icy breeze blew her hair into her face and she knew the spirit had gone through the door to the main room. There must have been unfinished business that pulled it back, who knew? Ana had started to believe the spirit haunting her apartment was a stupid one.

She left the ghost to it’s business and stepped out of the apartment to the hall where she found Mr. Baclanova and a tall white guy looking into the closet two doors down from her and Liz’s place.

“Has anyone ever died in my apartment?” she asked Mr. Baclanova.

“Don’t ask stupid question,” the owner said.

“So you don’t know.”

Ana looked at the new guy and asked:: “Are you moving into that closet?”

“Studio,” Mr. Baclanova said.

Ana watched the new guy look from her to the old man, assessing his situation.

“I guess I am,” he said.

Mr. Baclanova handed him a key in exchange for a deposit check and went down the stairs, leaving Ana alone in the hall with the guy moving into the closet.

“My name’s Henry,” the guy said. “What’s yours?”

“Ana,” she told him.

“Why did you ask if someone died in your apartment?”

“Because this ghost keeps coming in and it’s getting super annoying.”

She wasn’t in a habit of bringing strange men into where she lived but the white guy seemed all right. She beckoned him into the apartment, and when she got no sense of the spirit’s presence in the living room she brought him into the kitchen. Unfortunately it was no use, she could tell the ghost was gone.

“I guess it’s gone,” she said.

“You saw it?”

“You’ve never met one have you?” she asked and he shook his head. He was watching her with interest, not a false interest that hid some skepticism, but a genuine wonder that could except what she was saying. She decided that she liked him.

“They’re everywhere,” she said. “They usually leave you alone unless there’s something that keeps them here. They can linger forever if they’re stupid. This one’s hella stupid.”

“How do you know all that?” he asked her.

“My grandmother told me. She would see them a lot too. She said in El Salvador the ghosts made sense but when she got here they didn’t because they were all confused and they all spoke different languages.”

The door opened and Liz came into the apartment with Schutzer in tow. Schutzer’s pants were two sizes tighter than the average hipster jeans, cutting off the circulation to his legs and making him shuffle into the kitchen.

“I’m Liz. You are?” Liz asked Henry. She was much larger than Ana, big boned, some had said chubby, and her smile stretched from ear to ear.

“Henry,” Henry said.

“He’s moving into that closet down the hall,” Ana explained.

“Studio,” Henry tried to state, but he looked unconvinced himself.

“Is that right? And what do you do?” Liz asked him.

Henry shrugged.
“You know,” Liz reached back and pulled the Schutzer into the kitchen. “This is Schutzer. He’s German and he’s a chef at Touch of Taste, where Ana works.”
She smiled wide at Schutzer and Schutzer smiled wide at Henry who nodded back.
“I see. Well, I don’t do much of anything except paint office buildings, and, I don’t know. Not much I guess,” Henry said.
“Very nice to come to you,” Schutzer replied in his accent, shaking Henry’s hand before turning to Ana.“We’re getting a little pot. You come?”

Ana always felt a little on edge after a ghost visit, getting high was possibly what she needed. She followed Schutzer and Liz towards the door and Henry followed her.

At that moment, three doors down the hall:
Conner Phan had almost gone through all the back issues of Vice he had in the apartment. He didn’t read the articles, he just flipped to the fashion do’s and don’ts and enjoyed the photos of men and women going wrong while he smoked another blunt. He was marveling at the picture of an old man with a mullet dressed in a dashiki when a knock came from the door.
He left the chain in, opening the door enough to see the two girls from down the hall with two white guys he didn’t know.
“Who are they?” he growled and the chubby girl Liz gave him a full beamed smile.
“That one’s Henry, he’s moving into our building,” she said pointing at Henry. “And you know that one silly, he’s the chef from Ana’s work.”

“How you do now?” Schutzer said, putting his fingers through the crack of the door. Conner ignored him.

“You're some foreigner so you can’t be a cop. What about you?” Conner said, nodding towards Henry. “Why you moving into the building? To keep an eye on me?”

Conner closed the door slightly before Henry said: “I lived with my girlfriend but she broke up with me. That studio is the only place I can afford right now.”

“Oh, that’s so sad,” Liz said, putting a hand on Henry’s shoulder.

Conner grudgingly took the chain off the door and led the visitors into the main room of his apartment. They all found various places to sit on the couch between issues of Vice Magazine and ashtrays piled high with roaches.

“Can we get an eighth honey?” Liz asked Conner.

The way the chubby girl was always in a good mood irritated Conner. The sweet upbeat twang in her voice grated on his nerves, specifically the way she called him honey. But she was his neighbor and a steady customer. He swallowed the irritation.

“Fine, what kind?” he asked her.

“What kind do you want?” Liz asked Schutzer and the German nodded enthusiastically.

“Plane Crash if you do please,” the German cried happily.

“You mean Train Wreck you dummy.”

It felt good to let a little of the irritation out on the German, but the tight panted idiot just continued nodding enthusiastically, which irritated Conner more.

He weighed the marijuana out, exchanging a baggie for Schutzer’s money, then rolled a large joint in translucent paper. Everyone smoked except Henry.

“What’s your problem?” Conner asked him.

“I don’t do well on weed I guess. I get stupid.”

“That’s the point isn’t it?” Conner passed the joint on to Liz and leaned closer towards Henry. “There’s something about you. You're still giving me that cop vibe man. I wish you would have just smoked the weed.”

“I guess I will.”

“Too late now homie. The train wreck just left the station.”

Conner looked towards his neighbors to acknowledge his wit but Liz and the German didn’t seem to notice and Ana just stared, stone faced and unapproving. Conner took in Ana’s small perfectly round head, her big brown eyes that always looked slightly distracted and distant. For the first time since meeting her and living down the hall from her for five months, he found himself imagining what she looked like cleaned up, dressed in something sexy, or in nothing at all. Was she giving him a vibe? He had to admit he was confused, his mind filled with hipster do’s and don’ts and so deeply and utterly stoned.

He rolled a blunt of something called Lorax and smoked it all to his head to cool down the paranoia. Everyone in the room was stoned, except the cop Henry, but even he joined in on the silence and watched the light from the windows change across the walls as the afternoon turned to evening.

“I can’t believe the army’s bombing those people,” Liz finally said.

“We got to do something,” Conner told her. “Fucking Arabs got them weapons that they could put in a suitcase and send to Boston. Ain't no joke.”

“So we got to blow up the cities?” Liz looked over at Conner, meeting his red eyes with her own. “Those are women and children in those cities. What did they ever do to us?”

“I don’t want to even think about it,” Ana muttered, using the side of Conner’s nug cutting table to drag herself up from the couch.

Liz and Schutzer followed her to the door, the German shuffling because of his tight pants. Conner took Henry by the arm and held him back.

“I feel bad about all that shit I was saying man, about being a cop and what have you. I want to chill here for a minute and we’ll have a little smoke out.” Conner said.

Henry shook his head: “I’ve already told you that I don’t-”

“You got somewhere to go?”

Then white guy/possible cop paused, considering the question before coming to a realization that made him sigh and droop his shoulders even more than they were all ready.

“I guess not,” he said.

“How about some tea? You want a cup of tea man?”

His guest gave a weary smile before nodding and Conner broke to the kitchen and turned the burner on under the pot of shroom tea he had left soaking since the week before. While it heated to a boil he dropped four sugar cubes soaked with acid into the pot to give it some kick. He returned to the main room with two steaming cups and sat on the couch opposite Henry, watching his guest sip gingerly, little by little, before beginning to chug his own.

“This tastes, very, bad,” Henry said.

Conner nodded. He could tell the white guy didn’t want to appear rude or ungrateful, continuing to sip, visibly gagging at times. Soon most of the cup was gone and Conner watched closely, hoping he would see the cop’s reaction before he got too high himself.

When they were both finished Conner killed time before the drugs kicked in by showing Henry his vast shoe and record collection which took up all of the bedroom and most of the kitchen.

“I’ve been collecting these forever, since before I was a kid.” Conner pointed at the crates of vinyl and the boxes of Converse stacked on Nikes stacked on Reebok stacked on Adidas. “I know hipsters that would pay hundreds of dollars for some of this shit. But I don’t sell ‘em nothing. I like them, I like records. I like playing the records on my turntable and looking at the covers, you know what I mean?”

“I collected comic books,” Henry said. “My Mom threw them out a few years ago, one’s that were probably worth money. I wouldn’t have sold them. I liked having them, knowing they were there.”

“That’s what I’m saying. It’s some comfort shit.”

“My dad had a lot of records,” Henry said. “Jazz and rock mostly. I liked looking at all the black and white pictures of the guys in the studios smoking cigarettes.”

Conner had to admit that what was happening right there among his shoes and records was was starting to feel like a conversation between two friends.

“I got mostly hip-hop but there’s some old shit mixed in there,” he said. “I like finding the old shit that people sampled back in the day, you know what I mean?”

“Sure.”

Conner looked at his guest approvingly. Then he remembered that he had given Henry drugs without his knowing and frowned.

“There’s something you should know Harry.”

“Henry.”

“Yeah,” Conner scratched his temple, looking sheepish. “That was shroom tea.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I had it sitting since last Sunday. I added a chunk of acid to give it some kick too. I was still kind of wondering if you were a narc or of you were up to something, I don’t know.”

Henry looked at Conner for a break, a cue to laugh. When none came and Conner just sort of stared sheepishly, Henry stepped back with his body against the wall, away from the crates of records, swallowing hard and glancing around the apartment.

“Why? Why would you do that?” he asked. His eyes were wild, the pupils expanding into vast black orbs

“I had to know that you're cool man. Especially if you're moving in here.”

Didn’t he see the logic? Conner was irritated that the guy was making a big deal out of it.

“I didn’t want any drugs. I’m not in a good place right now!” Henry cried.

“I’m on them too man. Just gotta stay here and ride it out I guess. My bad.”

“I’m not in a good place right now!” Henry repeated.

He looked outraged, violated, like he might take a swing at Conner. But it was hard to tell what Henry’s expression actually meant since his face was already changing in front of Conner’s eyes, morphing and blurring at odd angles.

Forty five long minutes later, on the Couch:

The drugs continued to come on fast and steady. Henry was too anxious to move, he let the couch swallow him, and Conner was talking, talking, talking, for what might have been hours or minutes, who knew? Henry tried to make sense of what the little man was saying, but it became impossible to concentrate and tune out the colors and tracers floating off the lights and the corners of the room.

Conner was playing music on the stereo, hip-hop, and the rapper on the track was extremely aggressive, threatening Henry, telling him how small and insignificant he was. The voice seemed familiar before Henry realized it was his father’s, telling him all of his failures, which was disturbing but also impressive because he knew he was on drugs and that his mind was creating an elaborate illusion.

Minutes stretched to hours of multi colored shapes and melting walls with various shapes diving through them.

There was a siren blaring in from the street, overpowering the music from the speakers. Henry looked at Conner who was lying on the floor and didn’t seem to notice. Henry got up from the couch and looked down into the street outside where there were no cars or people, only mammoths with long overgrown coats that hung off their bodies and dragged on the pavement.

Henry fell back onto the couch, pushing his face deep into the cushions. The walls around him expanded and contracted as the building breathed and he realized it was alive, along with the Transamerica Building, and the Bank of America Building, and the Bay and Golden Gate Bridge; they were all breathing together as one living eco system.

That morning, on the streets of San Francisco:

Henry had to get to work, even though he had not slept and was still very much in the midst of a serious drug trip. Conner had disappeared at some point, maybe to the bathroom, maybe out the window, but Henry made the decision to leave the apartment when he realized he had lost track of how long the sun had been up.

He was cold and exposed on the street, deciding he could push through the day alright as long as he didn’t make direct eye contact with a human being or run into a mammoth. He had gone three or four blocks, passing doormen, and dog walkers, and commuters; before his drug addled mind realized not all of them were human. The sidewalks and alleys and nooks of the city were filled with ghosts that morning, the same one’s that had been described to him by the strange Latin girl with the big brown eyes.

The spirits came from different eras, some so far back Henry couldn’t recognize what time they belonged to. He told himself it was just mushrooms and acid and kept his eyes focused directly on the sidewalk in front of him.

He approached Market and the crowd of spirits grew thicker, closing in around him. He could feel them brushing up against his shoulders and heard their mutters, clattering all around him into one constant tone.

He was becoming truly frightened, starting to question whether the trip would ever end or if it would go on forever like what happened to Frank Jenkins who had a large amount of acid soak into his hand during Henry’s sophomore year. Frank still lived with his parents, spending his days wandering the roads of Henry’s hometown, looking for the invisible ninja that had visited him in high-school.

There were sounds blaring ahead. Henry found himself trapped among bodies, but those of the living, the ghosts seemingly frightened off by voices coming together:

“One! Two! Three! Four! We don’t need your fucking war!!”

There were thousands of people packed onto Market, many with signs suspended above them marked up with messages and peace signs and the President’s face with a Hitler mustache drawn on it. Henry could read the signs clearly, could understand their meaning in the moment, and felt a wave of relief from recognizing his own reality.

He had to walk ten blocks before he could find a clear lane through the crowd and continue his way towards work, the drugs finally starting to wear off to just tracers in the corners of his vision. When he got to the shop he was forty two minutes late, the third time that month. The garage was empty, all three vans long gone with crew and gear. The supervisor Stan was all that remained, tapping at his laptop in the office with two tobacco stained fingers. It only took Stan a few seconds to look up and tell Henry he was no longer needed.

Some time later, at the building on Bush Street:
Henry let himself into the closet and sat down on the floor. It really was a tiny room, smaller than the room Henry had grown up in. He wanted to stretch out and rest but the room wasn’t big enough, he had to lie down with his knees bent in front of him.

Besides being poor, spurned, burned out, and exhausted, he was now also unemployed. He decided to clear his mind by washing his face in the sink.

The water flowed out of the faucet just fine for a few seconds after he turned the handle and he was able to splash it on his cheeks. Then a surge of pressure groaned through the pipes and blew the sink off the wall, flooding the room with water.

The water was shockingly cold as it built up power and violently blasted Henry against the wall with the pressure of a fire hose, soaking the floor and flowing into the hallway. Henry panicked, but was still clear headed enough to remember Mr. Baclanova’s words from the day before about the sink water coming from the roof. He raced up two flights and out the roof door where he found a spigot and hose that ran into the building. He turned the handle to the left as far as he could.

When he returned to the closet he was relieved to find the flow of water successfully cut off but it had been too late, the tiny closet was now a micro swamp, occupied with an inch of water. Where the sink had been was a gaping hole with a rusted pipe sticking out.

Henry sat in the hallway, hungry, wet, and slipping in and out of consciousness. He had the distinct impression that his life had reached a turning point, or maybe not a turning point, more like a dip going directly down. He had no job, no girl, few friends since moving to the Bay Area, and now no place to live. He would have to call his folks and have them send money so he could catch a bus home. He would have to move back into his old room. At least it was bigger than that closet.

“Are you okay,” Ana asked, standing over him.

“I got dosed with drugs and my closet flooded.”

“Oh, you poor boy,” Liz said, coming up the stairs behind her room mate. “Things aren’t going too well for you right now are they?”

Henry shook his head, the water dripping from his hair.

“The guy in 5C is having a party for everybody that got arrested at the protest today. You should come with us Henry,” Ana said.

The Latin girl with the big brown eyes had remembered his name, which made him feel a little better. He got up off the floor and joined his neighbors.

An hour later, in apartment 5C:

Phil lived in 5C with his boyfriend Karl who happened to be about the same size as Henry. Liz talked Karl into lending Henry some dry clothes and once her new neighbor was freshly dressed in a tight baby blue tank top with snug jeans that fit him just about perfectly, Liz had to admit that he looked much better. He told her he felt better too as they stood in the kitchen together with drinks and she described her protest experience of arguing with some cute anarchists that wanted to destroy a bakery on 7th Street that she loved to buy fresh scones from.

“We’re not going to stop until this war is stopped!” a man by the bean dip cried out.

Phil and Karl’s apartment was already filled with people and word was that this was only a small portion of those that were expected to arrive, most everybody else was still being processed at a makeshift detention center that had been set up at one of the piers.

“I saw some ghosts this morning,” Henry told Liz and he looked over at Ana. “Thousands of them. But I was on a lot of acid and shrooms.”

“What kind of breakfast is that weirdo?” Liz asked him.

“The little Filipino guy that lives down the hall from you dosed me. He said he did it to see if I was a cop or not.”

On que, Conner entered the apartment with bottle of gin and began slapping palms and giving pounds to the people around him. Liz barred his way.

“What kind of person gives drugs to someone without their knowing?” she demanded, arms crossed.

Conner sucked air through his teeth and gave her a sheepish little grin.

“My bad,” he said. “It’s not no good, I admit it. But I never seen the guy before and suddenly he’s popping in and- I don’t know. I like the dude though.”

Liz tried to stay stern but the little man looked truly regretful, stroking his reedy little mustache and looking at the floor in shame.

“Plus that closet he’s supposed to live in flooded. Did you know that?” she added

Conner shook his head, gingerly stepping around her to get to Henry.

“I’m real sorry about giving you that tea man. F’real,” he said. “Did you hear the part where I figured it out? I was trying to tell you but you was tripping homie.”

“Figured what out?” Henry muttered

“Everything! The world, our place in it, the whole thing.”

Henry shrugged and Conner looked crushed, the wind sucked from his sails

“I don’t know,” Conner said. “I forgot it all anyway.”

Henry took a step forward and stared the shorter man directly in his eyes.

“You can’t do that to people. I’m alright now but I wasn’t this morning,” Henry told him.

“I know, I won’t do it again, f’real. You were cool though, you went with it. And I heard your spot got flooded too?”

“And I lost my job.”

No one knew what to say to that. Conner took the pause as an opportunity to pull a blunt from behind his ear and light it.

“Where you gonna stay?” he asked Henry.

“I don’t know. I guess I can ask my girl- my ex-girlfriend, I can stay with her until I find another place. It’s not going to be pleasant.”

“You stay with me homie,” Conner said, passing the blunt to Liz.

“I appreciate the offer but I don’t think so. Last night was trauma-”

“I’m not gonna dose you again man, I swear. That was a one time thing.”

“I just don’t think-”

“C’mon! We’ll play records, shoot the shit. We’ll smoke hella weed. We’ll have a good time.”

Conner slapped Henry on the back.

“It might take me awhile to find another place,” Henry said.

“However long you gotta stay man. Until you get back on your feet. Get a new job and then start looking for a place. You know.”

Conner grinned and while Liz was moved by his charity for their new neighbor she could tell that Conner was extremely proud of himself.

“That’s really nice of you sweetie,” she told him.

“Hey, you got to look out for your peoples,” Conner replied, and gave Ana a sly look that Liz found suspect and weird. “Sometimes we are all we got.”

Phil called for a toast at the top his of his lungs. Various people around the room raised their glasses and Phil talked of dark days ahead and the importance of community and the need for-

Liz tried to hear the rest but it was all drowned out by the chatter and laughter around her.

Later that evening, up on the roof of the building:

Conner poured cups of gin for Liz, Ana, and Henry. They threw back their liquor and while their throats burned they silently made their own personal toasts to the future:

Ana toasted to finding a balance between the two worlds she inhabited simultaneously, the one everyone existed in and was aware of and the one that was all around them that everyone ignored. Henry toasted to new courses in life, hoping he could accept change and his path wherever it led. Liz toasted to being accepted by the people around her while also accepting herself for who she truly was, which she hadn’t totally figured out herself yet. And Conner toasted to hopefully seeing Ana naked at some point in the near future.

The City continued to breath around them.

Join us for Part 2 of Tales From The Bay in June!

Love at first sight and Daniel Day-Lewis!!