From: seaverw@columbia.dsu.edu (W. A. Seaver)
Subject: Point Blank
Organization: Dakota State University
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1992 19:08:51 GMT

Comments? Criticisms? Flames? The usual. As they say, "If so, why so? If 
not, why not?"

                            Point Blank
                            
The bus is two hours late, and I take the only seat left--a broken 
windower in the back, by the engine. Two-hundred degree heat blows 
down my neck, and the guy next to me's got a bad case of the DTs. 
He's also got some junk he wants to sell me. I open the tote bag at 
my feet to show him what's inside and tell him it's all I've got to 
pay him with. He doesn't speak to me the rest of the way.

I give him the slip and switch seats the first chance I get. We take 
a smoke-stop at a worn-out mom-&-pop outside Laramie, where I meet a 
girl from NYC & convince her jackalopes are real. No need for a 
smoke yet.

Before we leave, I relocate a skinny Quincy Jones clone who's near 
the front of the bus; he's got no carry-on, and I think he'd get 
along well with the DTs. Turns out I'm next to Miss NYC (her name is 
Donna). She's never seen the Wasteland before, and spends hours 
gazing in fascination out the window. I tell her there's nothing to 
see, really, but she keeps up. On the lookout for a jackalope, I 
guess. Her blond hair is cut butch-style, and she wears some 
horrible Spandex zebra-pattern pants, though she's taller than I am. 
Her father is chief of the Staten Island homicide dept, and I gather 
he's sent her this way to get her out from the middle of some 
domestic dispute. Pregnant sister, or something. I don't much care 
or listen. Her accent sounds like a severe speech impediment that I 
can't stand to listen to: she refers to her home as "N'Yawk." From 
the back, I hear Quincy Jones and DT arguing.

Smoke-stop at Elko, Nevada. This time I take advantage, as I'm 
getting more nervous the closer we get. While wandering around, 
Donna catches my arm; tells me she's found a nice isolated alley, 
and would I like to duck in for a quickie? (Seems to think my 
sitting and talking with her has indicated an interest on my part). 
I turn her down by explaining why I'm headed out to San 
Francisco: to find my ex-wife and make my peace with her. She 
understands but is hurt, I think. Probably doesn't get much 
attention at home, and makes up for it this way. Her tough luck; 
I've got my own probs to worry with.

After the stopover in Reno, Donna starts to ask me about Anne. I 
don't tell her much but the basics--how Anne decided to call an end 
to our Berkeley-based four-year marriage by crossing the bay and 
disappearing into the city with a jazz guitarist she'd met at a 
party a week earlier. and I came back to the Wasteland to make sense 
of it all. After a year, though, I still haven't, and so here I am. 
Donna tells me it must be a real drag, and plugs into her 
headphones. Tune in, turn on, drop out. I shift my tote from the 
floor between my feet to my lap, where I can clutch it and feel more 
secure with it nearer. The desert turns to wooded mountains, and the 
mountains tumble by. How obvious it is when you cross the California 
line: suddenly there are trees.

Half-hour layover in Sacramento to clean out the bus. They tell us 
we can leave our things on board meanwhile, but I take the tote 
anyway; I don't want to risk losing it. Start to rap with a cute 
eyeglassed Iowan named Beth paging a thick volume of Poe. I recite 
_The Raven_ and really turn her on. With only a couple minutes, I 
decide I'd much rather ride with her instead of Donna, but Beth 
parts ways with us here, toward Merced, to the South. I notice Donna 
giving Beth & me a _very_ unpleasant look. I'm irritated by her 
possessiveness, that I can't talk with other women. What makes her 
think she and I are together? It's only a few hours more; I reckon I 
can handle her that much longer.

Donna suddenly becomes very talkative again, filling up most of the 
trip to Oakland with pointless chatter, most likely an attempt to 
refocus my attention on her. My mind couldn't be farther from her, 
in fact. I need a cig real bad now--worse every mile closer to Anne 
& her new guy. Somewhere in the back of my head, I'm listening to 
Donna carry on about her wonderful huge coffee cup collection. 
Somewhat abstractly, I notice I've been stroking my tote, like it 
was some kinda cat. I make myself stop, and put it back on the floor 
for the time being. The darkside of my brain hears Donna wonder how 
a rabbit could possibly make it with an antelope. I finally pass out 
from sheer exhaustion, until we pull into Oakland a half hour later, 
four hours late.

I begin to take off, but Donna asks, panicky, why I'm getting off 
here, aren't you going clear into San Francisco? I tell her, yeah, 
but I've got a buddy's gonna let me crash at his pad in Berkeley. 
All Donna has to say to this is "Oh," and "You will write, won't 
you?" I say to her, "Sure," and get off the bus before she can 
commit me to anything else.

Ed is uncommonly generous for even a Californian in opening his home 
to me. He was our neighbor back when Anne & I lived on North Euclid. 
His new place is on Parker Street, only about five blocks from the 
campus. I like it because it's close to Telegraph Avenue and the 
Park, where most of my friends around here live. (Anne would never 
allow me to tell them the address of our pad; said they'd be bumming 
us for a place to sleep always). Ed and I met in the Park, back when 
he had no address. All his income came from odd jobs he did for a 
Hare Krishna copy shop. The computer experience he earned working 
with the Krishnas let me set him up with a job typesetting a street- 
corner Bay Area sex-scene mag I wrote for at the time. Then I helped 
secure the place above Anne & me, so he'd have somewhere to go 
besides the Park, though he still hung out there most days, pushing 
shoulders for this cause or that. He owes me lots.

Now he's eager-eager to pay me back. He tells me anytime I need to 
see the sunshine (Lovely Sunny Days; can you gimme hallelujah), I 
can have all I want. Tell him thanks, but just open up the Lord 
Calvert for the time being. We praise the Lord until the Lord is 
dead, and then we go tripping on down to Shattuck. We wander the 
street and rap with people we might have once known. Too many cops, 
though, so we head over to the Park and run into lots and lots of 
old friends, some of whom are _still_ mailbox-free. Someone starts 
passing a doobie, and before I know it, I'm sprawled out on the 
ground, too up to get up. I decide to just pass out where I am, 
while Ed yells "I've tripped, and I can't get down!" over and over 
till it's no longer funny. You're not supposed to sleep in the Park, 
but enough folks do it that the cops don't bother me. I come to long 
enough to slip my tote under my head for a pillow. Then I'm gone 
again. My first night back home, therefore, is spent in the Park.

The next day is a Friday, and Ed wants to check out a weekend White 
Sale up in Eureka. ("BerkeleyFriscoOakland, and you've gotta go to 
Eureka for sunshine?"). Just as well, because I plan to spend as 
much time as I can acoss the bay. I won't leave until I've found 
her.

BART takes me into the city--a crowded, noisy pre-weekend city, 
already bursting at the seams, and somehow packing thousands more 
weekend visitors into its rigid perimeters. The crowds don't daunt 
my confidence, however, and I head toward North Beach on foot (I'd 
take a cable, but a buck a shot is way too high, and eighty-five 
cents for the bus is too much, too). The Beach was Anne's favorite 
place to hang out, I remember, so the chances I'll find her here are 
pretty good. I straighten the strap over my shoulder and hug the 
tote a little closer.

Coit Tower is empty when I get up there, except a smarmy couple 
trying to get their whiny six-year-old to enjoy the view and forget 
about the cold Pacific breeze and fog he endlessly harps on. Anne 
sometimes spent the whole day up here, snapping breathtaking 360- 
degree panoramas of the city and the bay. _Traveler_ once paid a 
nice chunk for one of those panoramas of hers, back in the days when 
we didn't know what to do with the money but spend it.

Neither Anne nor her guy are anywhere near, it seems, so I take up 
the rest of the day dropping in my old haunts: City Lights (where I 
spend a couple hours just enjoying all that wood), Jack's ice cream 
shop (orange-chocolate-chip-mint double-dip my-my), and all the dim 
sum restaurants.

Come five, I head back to Berkeley. With Ed's pad deserted, and an 
entire pointless evening before me, I crank a roll of heavy-duty 
paper towels into an old Underwood I've found beneath some 
mouldering _National Geographic_ maps in the closet. Then, clutching 
the least dirty tablespoon I can find in the sink, I search the 
spice rack.

Forty-five minutes later, I'm not writing, but somewhere on 
Telegraph, pretty well strung out on nutmeg, and becoming quite 
disarmingly aware that walking is an endless series of maneuvers to 
catch yourself from falling. "Cool," I think, and fall onto a beggar 
sprawled in front of the head shop. "Piss off," or "Watch it, you 
jerk," are what I expect him to say, but he says instead, "Hey, 
gimme a quarter." "Press hands," I tell him. I hold my right hand 
out and he matches it with his. We press while I count aloud twenty- 
five seconds.

"There. You just did twenty-five seconds of manual labor for me," I 
say, and flip him the quarter.

I stumble across the street, avoiding an old woman running amok with 
her shopping cart down the avenue, and segue into the Mediterranean. 
A cup of espresso materializes upon the table I've suddenly appeared 
at, toward the back of the upstairs level of the coffee shop. Two 
other late espressos sit pushed to the other side of the little 
square table. Did others join me at some point, or have I drunk them 
myself? At the moment, my mind has fixed on seeing if the tiny 
espresso spoon will melt if held in the hot liquid long enough. A 
fly blurs in, lands on the cup's rim, sits there, slowly hazing its 
delicate, membrane-thin wings back and forth. I'm totally taken in 
with this fly. I see the tiny veins webbing its wings; the short, 
upright hairs lining the back and marching down its sharp-bent legs 
rubbing one another like lovers. Rainbows swirl in its compound 
eyes. Things stick out of its face that I'm sure do a wonderful 
mouth for the fly, but which for me would make it awful messy to eat 
soup.

Fly mood swing, and it's into the air, to land a few feet away on a 
woman's soft-sweatered shoulder. My attention shifts from fly to 
woman: the soft, short hairs trailing down the back of her neck; the 
faint curve of her shoulderblades; the fuzzy slope of her earlobe. 
In brushing the fly away, her head turns slightly, and her eye 
catches me. She pauses a beat, smiles and stands, and I wonder if 
this is really Donna, or just a three-espresso hallucination. In the 
snap of sobriety, I realize I've left home without my tote, and 
whatever I do, I've got to get back to it not later but NOW.
I bolt from my seat and head to the staircase, grabbing Donna's 
wrist on the way.

I've been sleeping on the convertible couch in the living room, so 
we belly-bump to the drone of Home Shopping Network. We don't 
exchange words for some hours, and when we do, she claims she 
tracked me down because the plasic Jesus she placed on her motel 
nightstand told her to. It says we're fated for each other, or we'd 
never have sat by one another on the bus. I tell her her Jesus is a 
liar: the only things threw us together were a broken seat and a 
weirdo drying out too much at once. If she wants me bad enough to 
follow me around, that's fine, but let's not mix divine intervention 
into it, OK? She's sullen, but accepting. Lot like the first time I 
broke her heart.

Donna does data-entry for KC Life ("A branch in New York?" "Go 
fig."). and knows her way around computers pretty well. Ed has a 
hot-rod toy owned by the sex mag, and she manages to pull a number 
of hi-tek stunts with it. One program she finds features a movie- 
like sequence of a volcano erupting from downtown San Francisco. By 
the end, the whole city is engulfed, and all I can think is There 
goes the Palace of Fine Arts.

I finally sleep around five in the morning, dreaming twice that I 
find Anne in the city. Her and I, one on one. And I don't speak; 
just bum a cigarette, turn around and leave. What the fuck for? I 
wake up feeling more discontent than ever.

I find about two-thousand dope bucks (what else?) Ed has in a rusted 
tomato paste can behind the soup bowls, and I liberate half. I ask 
Donna if she's willing to drop her life back home at a moment's 
notice. She says she is, if it means being with me. (More of that 
freaking phony sentimentality, but do you think I let it bother me?) 
I give the liberated cash to Donna, with instructions to find a 
drivable used car. "Then come here and don't leave the pad till I 
get back." "Ya can't steal yer best friend's money!" "Isn't that how 
he got it in the first place? Besides, like I told you, he owes me 
lots."

On BART, trying to read the letters page of an _Oakland Trib_ 
someone's left behind, my mind keeps wondering how soon I can ditch 
this chick once we're on the road. My own sanity won't let me drag 
her around very long.

Off at Powell Street, marching uphill, then cutting through Grant- 
-old beatnik territory (can you give me hallelujah). I hug the tote 
closer as I hurry through the busy, swarming masses of chinamen that 
push in on all sides. Washington Square is deserted of the woman I 
seek. Perhaps she's in the park down in the hollar, where the trees 
grow thick and moist--but she's not. I'm disappointed for a second, 
but finally decide it's not that important after all. What's done is 
done, and I doubt she'll come back to me now. I sit at the base of a 
tree and experience. Birds high above roam the branches, while a 
mid-life crisis man jogs his doberman past me. One way or another, I 
think, we're all just out for a walk.

Thinking of Ed's computer program, I go to the Palace of Fine Arts. 
I'd like to see it one last time before the volcano wipes it. A 
fountain there breaks the smooth pond into a spray of ten thousand 
tiny splashes. Couples picnic on the grass. Busses of Japanese take 
pictures. Red pigeons strut their stuff. I lie facing upward within 
the Grecian columns and hypnotize among the dome's facet pattern.

Marlboro 100s.

A keen olfactor trips an ancient memory and I flash to a long-dead 
marriage. Because I could never make her quit, our apartment, our 
car, everything about her reeked of Marlboro 100s. The memory of the 
scent follows her intimately. She's here!

I roll from the center of the dome to take cover, crouching behind a 
bush alongside a column. Some seconds later, they walk right before 
me, stopping in the center of the dome, where they awkwardly 
rubberneck up and yell trivialities. The court echos with the sounds 
the dome bounces back. I warmly think about the bargaining chip I've 
brought. My love offering.

I'd hoped to meet them separately; it would have been so much 
easier.

I stand.

        'Twill do, though. 'Twill do.

One hand quietly unzips the tote.

                                      Wonder if she's pregnant yet; 
she's gotten too heavy to tell.

His left side faces me; I pull the small revolver from my tote and 
aim at his temple, imaging a dotted line from one side to the other. 

Him first.

Waitaminit.

Doing him won't accomplish anything. Won't give me that electric 
thrill of real personal satisfaction. _Anne_, however... This's the 
one way--only way--to completely erase her from my life. I shift my 
aim from him to her. She faces me, still gazing upward and not 
seeing me, hands out to her side, her throat nicely exposed. A 
beautifully sacrificial pose. My trembling finger squeezes the 
trigger.

The hammer releases.

Falls forward.

Crashes home.

Their echoes cover the click. Quickly, worried someone might see me, 
I slip the pistol back into the tote. I'd leave it here, but my 
brother's gonna be pissed enough if he finds I lifted it from his 
hall closet. I also doubt he'd believe any burglar would steal a 
revolver, but ignore the dusty case of bullets on the shelf beside 
it.

They move on, arm-in-arm, and happy with their new life. I walk the 
opposite way, toward Montgomery Station; toward a neurotic teenage 
girl who wants to take me overland--her plastic Jesus riding the 
dashboard like a surferboy.

Ah, the power of suggestion!

I feel better already.

    (C) 1991 W.A. Seaver
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