Henrietta, Texas, 1961: It was a problem. I was a high-school senior, and the Code of the West said I had to do something. Here is the problem in your nutcase:

Robert Bell, a year my junior, had insulted my girlfriend Carolyn, publicly in the hall, stating that she was just a bitch. People had heard him.

“What are you going to do?” asked Molly Gill.

Well, simple. Honor dictated that I would have to go beat him up. However, that was kind of a problem, seeing as how he was tough, known to be scrappy, larger than me, stronger than me, and was certainly able to beat me silly. There was no doubt: I would lose such a fight. And, I was afraid, deeply afraid, it would be painful.

“What are you going to do?” asked Molly Gill.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Somehow, I had to brace him for it. Saying nothing was unthinkable. My memory still stung from a comment from Eddy Frank, two years previous.

One day, while loafing around, he’d asked me to spread my fingers wide. I did. They didn’t spread very wide, compared to his. He looked surprised.

“Why that’s a weakling sign!” he said.

Sourly, I said nothing. I already thought I weak, a sissy, a coward. I was afraid of lots of things. I was afraid of fights, having lost most of them. I was afraid of girls. I was afraid of what others thought, being sure that others thought poorly of me. It was only years later that I realized that others didn’t spend much thinking about me one way or another.

And now, if I didn’t attack Robert Bell, my girlfriend Carolyn, along with everybody in the entire world, would think poorly of me. A horrible thing. I asked her if Robert Bell had said that. She nodded.

“Yes,” she said, then put her hand on my arm. “Let it be. Leave him alone. He’s crazy.”

She was a wiser person than myself. And she knew he’d kill me in a fight. She didn’t want me hurt. I dithered.

“I don’t know,” I said.

But somehow an idea was coming to me.

Robert’s father was Leon Bell, the plumber. A large, wise, slow-talking man of kindness who’d somehow spawned a hellion. Robert’s mother was a woman remarkable for frazzled red hair, always looking somehow electrified.

Their family were creatures of habit, and somehow I knew, or possibly heard, that they always sat down to dinner at six o’clock. So at six, I was parked just up the block from their old, two-story house.

At 6:05, I knocked on their back door, which somehow I knew would open onto the kitchen, where sure enough they were all sitting around the table, the father, the mother, Robert the dangerous, and his little brother. I stood beside the table, and they all looked at me with curiousity. I nodded to the parents, looked my hardest look at Robert.

“You called Carolyn a name,” I said. “Don’t do that ever again.” Robert made as to get up.

“Let’s talk about this outside,” he said. His father gave him a withering glance.

“Robert!” he said. “Sit down.” I pressed my advantage.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” I said to the father, again turned to Robert. “Don’t do it again.” The look in his eyes was growing worse.

“Let’s talk about this outside,” he said.

I nodded to the father, to the mother. They said so long. I left.

That night, I slept poorly. Because it was likely that, the next day, I’d be beaten up.

All during the next day, I tried to avoid Robert Bell. I fetched one black look from him in a hallway, and in the early afternoon, getting my books from my locker, I couldn’t avoid him as he walked up to me.

“Don’t ever come to my house,” he said.

“Don’t call my girlfriend names,” I said. He thought for a moment.

“OK,” he said.

Henrietta, Texas, 1955: The Kiwanis Minstrel Show was coming to town, or at least to the high-school gymnasium. The basketball floor was covered with row on row of folding chairs, and ticket-sellers encamped at the rear doors.

I had an important job, operating the spotlight, and sat alone in the high bleachers. During rehearsals, I watched as a young schoolmate, Robert Bell, stuck a nail into the electrical circuit, so as to feel the jolt. Nobody stopped him. Who cared if he fried?

Just as the television show “Amos & Andy” has disappeared, and never emerges among the late-night reruns, so has the Minstrel Show disappeared. Of course the original ones toured the South once apon a time, and Lenny Sloan resurrected the “Three Black and Three White Minstrel Show” in San Francisco during my early answering service days. In fact, Lenny was my client, and now that I think about it, if I recall right, he still owes me money!

But back then, in my home town, this was the Kiwanis Club, masters of disguise.

My stepfather, Dr. Strickland, wearing blackface and a bow-tie that lit-up, he was in the show. My uncle, Dr. Hurn, with a bow-tie he could bounce up and down with his adams apple, he was in the show. Houston McMurray, our pompous town lawyer, was just perfect as “Mr. Interlocuter.”

Mr. Interlocuter was a well-dressed white man in the Minstrel Show. His job was Master of Ceremonies, and he would play straight man to the various pseudo-black actors as they delivered their gags. The entire chorus, in blackface makeup, would deliver songs, and background harmonies for solo singers.

In one skit, using a thick dialect considered very humorous, Dr. Hurn sat at a table, and at a knock on the door, admitted a patient, who in an even thicker dialect said that he was having woman troubles. The trouble was that his wife was pregnant, again, and he couldn’t afford to feed any more children.

The doctor gave him some pills which should stop the problem, but in the next scene the patient was back. The pills had failed, the fit had come on him, and the wife was pregnant, again, with yet another chillun.

This time the doctor took him behind a screen for an operation, and the man staggered out. But alas! In the next scene, the man, sheepishly knocking on the door, told the doctor that the operation had failed.

The doctor, now stern, said they’d have to “remove the cause of the difficulty”, and over the man’s protests, performed another operation behind the screen. The fellow was hardly able to walk from the room.

Even worse, in the next scene he was back and his wife was yet again pregnant. Now the doctor really had to think.

“Hmmmm,” said the doctor. “Appears we been operating on the wrong one!”

Ha ha ha ha ha. That one brought the house down.

After the show, when all the audience had gone, and the gymnasium was just an empty floor covered with folding chairs, there was great hiliarity among the actors. Grease paint was in their blood now. A flask was passed around. Some went down to the coffee shop to laugh and drink coffee. Dr. Hurn went to the hospital to do his rounds, still wearing his costume, bobbing bow-tie, and blackface makeup.

“Lordy!” said the nurses.

“My word!” said the patients.

My Uncle Doc, Dr. Hurn, he just bobbed his bow-tie, and didn’t say nothing.

Marina Green, San Francisco, 1976: My friend Dennis, who invented the Taxicab Theory of Life, had got himself a kitty. It was small and gray, with wide-open eyes, and it bounced and bounded around the tables and the chairs.

Dennis always lived better than I did. I thought it was because he got free money, but it may have just been that he had better taste. His father had created a metal-fabricating and manufacturing business back in Chicago, and after Dennis emerged from the Peace Corps he received checks, which I envied, though of course I’d already had my turn.

He drove an older BMW, and he had a small apartment, kept as neat as himself, right at the end of a short street that pointed straight at the Marina Green, giving him a view of the Bay, a block away.

We fell out, for several years. It was because of his cat.

He didn’t know much about cats, but he thought it was cute.

It was cute, as it pounced from hiding. In fact, he’d taught it a game. Dennis would walk from point A to point B in his apartment, as we all do, and the game was that the kitten would pounce from hiding and bite and scratch at Dennis’s ankles. Ha ha ha ha ha.

Very funny.

I actually didn’t like the game much. I’d gone over to Dennis’s to get his help in doing some Big Research for me regarding my plan to start an answering service. He did the Big Research for me, but in my ignorance, I put the numbers together all wrong and came to amazingly wrong answers. But when I started the answering service it worked out anyway, so perhaps my abysmal ignorance didn’t matter.

While Dennis and I discussed the Big Research, the kitten leapt and bit my ankles, which I didn’t enjoy all that much.

For one thing, the kitten was growing. Let us now pause in contemplation of the perfect words of Mr. Ogden Nash …

The trouble with a kitten is that
It soon becomes a cat.

Ogden hit his head right on a nail there.

A week later, when I’d returned to visit, after some coffee and conversation, I suddenly realized that the cat wasn’t around.

“Where’s kitty?” I asked.

“Oh, I got tired of him biting me,” he said.

“So where’s kitty?” I asked.

“I took him out and set him loose over at The Presidio,” he said. The Presidio was an vast and luxurious army base in a park-like setting in the northern corner of San Francisco. It contained miles and miles of woods and empty hills, criss-crossed with army roads. I was stupified by what Dennis had said.

“What??”

He looked at me in puzzlement, and repeated his words. I was outraged.

“You know he’ll die?” I demanded.

“Why, no,” Dennis said, “He’ll catch mice and things.” I couldn’t believe he was so ignorant, so, so … stupid!

“No, he won’t catch mice and things!” I said. “He doesn’t know any of those things. He’ll first starve, and then wander into a road and get run over.” Dennis looked at me in puzzlement. He couldn’t understand my dismay.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought he’d be fine.”

“Why did you do that?” I pressed.

“I got tired of him biting my ankles,” he said, “and finally I’d just had enough of it.”

“But you taught him to do that!”

“Well, I didn’t mean any harm.”

I stood up, grabbed my coat, and left in a fury. I then refused to talk to Dennis for about three years.

Over time, slowly, I realized he had, in fact, meant no harm. Caused harm yes, but meant none. He was just ignorant. He didn’t know.

So are we all, all the time, ignorant of this, ignorant of that. With a motion of the wrist, we wreck an automobile, bring destruction, even death. With an unknowing word, we crash vast castles of dreams for others. With a silence, we fail in our love for another.

Dreaming and fragile, onward we stumble, dangerous dwarves on the Yellow Brick Road.

Westbury Hotel, San Francisco, 1974: One evening, as I was working the graveyard shift with Henry So, the night auditor, I had the phone to my ear and noticed something very odd.

“Henry!” I called out. “Did you hear the angels sing?”

Henry, slim and dapper in his charcoal suit with vest, put down his Benson & Hedges cigarette, and said no, he’d not heard the angels sing. Actually, what he said was “Whaaaa?”

So I showed him, and I’ll share this wonderful secret with you, too. After all, it’s the season of love, right?

Here’s what you do. Pick up your telephone and hold it to your ear.

But don’t dial anybody. Don’t press the touch-tones. That will stop the angels from singing. You must just hold the phone very gently to your ear without touch-toning.

Listen very quietly. Listen very carefully.

You will hear the angels singing.

Westbury Hotel, San Francisco, 1974: When my mother lost money in the stock market, it became difficult for her to continue sending funds for San Francisco State.

Fine with me. I’d found the courses in Creative Writing both helped and interfered with my writing, so I dropped out, found the Apartment from Hell, and located a job as part-time night auditor at the Westbury Hotel, downtown just off Union Square.

Thirty stories of steel and glass above us, and in the lobby late at night I’d think, “What if the earthquake comes now?”

Showing me the audit, was the regular night auditor, Henry So.

He had a peculiar habit.

Realize that the night auditor works at the front desk. In all but the largest hotels, he’s the cashier who takes your money when you check out early in the morning before 7 am.

And what he does all night is to put the charges for the rooms on all the bills, and then to balance all the charges for guest accounts from the day. That is, the restaurant on the 30th floor has sent down the checks that guests signed, and those go on the bill. Perhaps the guest has sent clothing out for laundry, or for dry-cleaning which is for some reason called valet. Or perhaps the guest has charges from the one bar or the other bar, or from the coffee shop.

Each of these departments, for example the “laundry” department, sends their records to the front desk. The night auditor makes sure that the amount that housekeeping thinks was charged to “laundry” was really and truly charged to the guest accounts as laundry.

After that’s done, and the last bar is closed, then the night auditor makes sure that the total of charges on all the guest accounts equal the total of charges made today plus the amount that they owed us from yesterday.

If anything doesn’t balance, you figure out what it is and fix it. A proud night auditor will generally brag that he balances to the penny. I generally did. So did So, that is, so did Henry So, the regular night auditor.

He was fron Hong Kong, thin and angular, taciturn, always wearing a charcoal suit with vest, smoked Bensen & Hedges cigarettes which he considered a sign of great sophistication, and lit them with a gold Dunhill lighter from his vest pocket.

After he had balanced the night’s books, the last chore is to bundle up the long printed paper tape from the bookkeeping machine, which is a glorified cash register. Most auditors roll it up and snap a rubber band around it, but Henry So had a special routine.

Once the books were balanced, and only the tape was left, he’d pull a stool up to the counter, get his ashtray and light a Benson & Hedges with his Dunhill lighter. Then he’d set the cigarette in the ashtray and patiently he would fold the tape.

He’d make the first fold perhaps eight inches long, then the next fold exactly the same, and then each subsequent fold was lined up precisely with the last, so that when he was through, the tape looked as if folded by a machine.

I asked him about his background. I asked him why he folded the tape like that. Here’s what he told me:

“I learn night audit in Hong Kong,” he said. “Everyone speak English and French. I got to school, and I am very strong student. I say I am going to be night auditor, and so when I get job, first job, for two weeks only all I am allowed to do is fold tape.” He paused. I nodded.

“My teacher,” he continued, “he very strong night auditor. I wish to be strong night auditor. He say I must learn night audit just right. He say when I can fold tape, then I can learn night audit. So two week, all I do is fold tape. First night, I fold tape all any way, like you. He say I cannot be strong night auditor if I fold tape like you. So I fold tape. I fold tape just so. Finally, he teach me night auditor. Now I am strong night auditor.”

I asked him whether they used the same machine in Hong Kong as we did, in this case an NCR bookkeeping machine, model 4200. He said they did. He said he would like to work at Sir Francis Drake but that they used confuter. “I can not work Sir Francis Drake,” he said. “I don’t know confuter.”

Once I had learned the audit, since I was only the replacement night auditor, on two other nights I filled in as front desk clerk on the same shift, and so I worked those nights with Henry So.

We took turns taking breaks in Zim’s restaurant, the coffee shop in the corner of the lobby, where a repeating crew of regulars assembled every night. There was a lucid and intelligent fellow who held forth every night on politics and current events, and the regular waitresses, Henry, myself, Lonesome Chuck or Mr. Slocum the security guys, Earnest the janitor, and another handful of night-time eccentrics.

One was a woman who had no actual home. She spent every night in the Zims, and during the days she went to the Main Library, and spent the days there. (We know because one of our crew followed her one day to see where she went.)

It was on that night shift that I launched my bookkeeping business. Then I left the night audit to run the postering company, and then the answering service, and my road led to other adventures, and then one day in my boots and motorcycle helmet, I was walking across the street beside the Westbury, and was surprised to find Henry So, in his charcoal suit with vest, walking beside me.

“Hello!” I cried out. He was surprised as well, and we stood on the far corner, blocking pedestrians and catching up on our news of the last few years.

“I’ll never forget,” I said, preparing to leave, “I’ll never forget how you used to fold that tape, and how you told me how your teacher made you fold it for two weeks before he would show you the night audit.”

Henry So stared at me blankly. “What?” he said.

I told him again, how I remembered the way he folded the tape and how his teacher in the first hotel in Hong Kong had insisted that he fold the tape just so for two weeks.

Henry’s face cracked a big grin. “I told you that?” he asked.

I said yes.

Standing on the corner in his charcoal suit and vest, he laughed and laughed and laughed.

January 3, 2004, Mount Shasta: We’ve had storms of snow, swirling thickly, white-out visibility, and heaps on the ground up to my waist.

I’ve never seen such snow before. Growing up in Texas, some winters we’d see snow. A really heavy snow might be four or five inches. It would linger a few days, growing muddy and fading away.

A new year’s resolution is to exercise more. I’ve really been in luck on that one.

I’ve never shoveled snow before. Driving a trail from the back door to the office, to the gate, to the car, and then clearing the five-foot berm thrown up by the town’s snow plow.

Let’s just say I’m off to a good start on my exercise.

Because of the speed with which we moved, and the jumble of things to be done, some things weren’t. We didn’t get boots. We didn’t get snow tires.

Adrienne’s daughters Celina and Layla came a-visiting for Christmas, just in time to help visit Adrienne in hospital. Layla got out of town eight hours before the storm, but Celina and family were trapped at Econo-Lodge. The innkeeper graciously permitted them to stay over, at triple the rate.

They bought chains so as to escape down the mountain.

I couldn’t get chains and got something called “cables”, like chains but smaller and easier to put on. But on our new Ford Focus, with it’s front-wheel drive, they’ve been altogether marvy. Just drive along like anything.

That is, after an hour or two of uncovering the car from several feet of snow. Several days in a row. Actually, I kind of like shoveling the snow. Makes me pant, and the air is fresh and cold. My shoes were a problem; they wouldn’t do for this deep snow.

My friend Harvey, now gone, left a pair of boots. Somehow they came to me. Cowboy boots, with snake skin. I’m wearing them now, in the snow.

Me and Harvey, shoveling snow, my toes growing numb inside his boots. Ghosts and a fog of breathing, in the cold air.

Mercy Medical Center, Mount Shasta: Adrienne is recovering from the Komodo Kitty bite, or rather she’s recovering from the vile and pernicious bacterial infection, which, untreated, would have made her a dead person by today. It’s been pretty hard on her.

For one thing, Dr. Miller has installed tiny tubes inside her fingers which drip gorilla-cillin down into the infection, and she has these two valves which must be reset every hour. Drip on one tube, then drip on the other tube, then drip on the last tube.

Even on a Serta-brand mattress, waking once hourly for carburator adjustments does not make for a good night’s sleep.

And the lack of sleep is taking its toll.

Towards morning today, exhausted, life was looking pretty bleak. “I’m going to die, aren’t I?” she asked me.

I told her I didn’t think she would die, because in fact the hand is on the mend. I think it’s the wipeout from the powerful antibiotics and the lack of sleep that make her feel grim.

She’s also oppressed because she’s had about all she can take of being wrapped in plastic tubes, machines that beep, blood being taken, stinging veins, gastric turmoil, no appetite, and she can’t get her hair washed.

She just feels like she can’t take any more. And to make matters worse, we heard yesterday that Kaiser, from whom we have our insurance, was making arrangements to haul her in an ambulance down to San Rafael, for further tests, and another long hospital stint far away.

I have implored Dr. Miller and Dr. Gunda to persuade Kaiser to forswear this trip, if possible, but they’re warning her to prepare to travel. A large packet of copies of her x-rays was sitting on the bed. Gloom prevailed.

She was apologising for, as she described it, coming apart. I tried to reassure her that it was mainly the fatigue making her feel so overwhelmed, and I remembered something that happened to a buddy of mine.

His name was Tom and he ran an answering service near Ventura some years ago. He got smart and sold the business and bought a Grand Banks, which is a large and fancy powerboat, and last I heard he’d sailed off to adventures. If the Pirates of the Carribean didn’t get him, for all I know he’s sailing still.

But this story was back when he was an air-force pilot. As part of their training, they had to learn to survive, with nothing but half-rations and one sleeping bag, behind enemy lines. So to help them learn, they’d be dropped, pilot and co-pilot, way out in the boondocks, and they had to make it through the miles and the cold, and all without being spotted.

His co-pilot was a rugged fellow named Jim, and they made good time the first day, slept fairly well in some found shelter that night, and the next day got pretty lost and it turned nasty cold. After a long, a hungry, and an exhausting day, they’d finally rigged a lean-to for shelter, and there was no help for it but they’d need to sleep together for body heat.

Tom crawled into the shelter, into the sleeping bag. “Come on,” he said.

Jim paused. Tom lost patience.

“Come on, dammit!” Tom said, “We’ve got to rest.” Jim paused. He swayed. Tears ran from Jim’s eyes.

“But, but,” he said, “But that’s my side!”

. . .

I am delighted to report that the nurse just announced that reason has prevailed. Assuming no last-minute complications, Adrienne need not be hauled to Kaiser. Adrienne will be released tomorrow.

I kissed the nurse.

And Adrienne’s daughter Celina just arrived, to wash her hair.

Mercy Medical Center, Mount Shasta: I mean, bad kitty! Bad cat! It happened like this …

Adrienne was taking care of a kitty for some friends. The kitty’s name is Kitty, which is odd because when my brother David was a child, he also had a kitty named Kitty. That’s some kind of coincidence!

So as to prevent cat conflagration, we kept Kitty out of the house, which means he’s been batching it with me in my office, and hanging out in the garage.

The trouble started when he escaped a few nights ago.

He scooted under the deck. I failed to check immediately, and apparently he ran out into the driveway. He comes when Adrienne calls him, so I asked her to. She failed to find him beneath the deck, but found him in the street and picked him up.

She was about to place him back into my office, but she didn’t see our own cat Percy sitting there. When she began to put Kitty down, he figured that she was feeding him to Percy, and he freaked out and bit her very badly.

She came with tears from the pain. We tried to make it bleed more to get any germs out, and put band-aids on it. The next morning, however, it was badly swollen, so we resolved to visit the 5pm drop-in clinic, because it was getting worse instead of better.

They sent her to the emergency room, where she got an intraveinous drip with antibiotics, and some more to take, and we went home.

And it got far worse.

On her follow-up the next afternoon, they admitted her to the hospital, and an orthopedic surgeon inserted some thin tubes to get bacteria-killers down into her fingers, so she was very uncomfortable with a lot of tubes in and out.

Other than childbirth, she’s never been in a hospital, but she got to spend Christmas Eve there for her first visit. Running a high fever and dopey from morphine, she dozed fitfully through the night.

I told her that it wasn’t so much a family Christmas that had turned surreal, but rather that she was having an adventure, and that for her first visit to the hospital, she’d already made arrangements for her daughters to come and visit.

She was starting to feel better, and had finally dropped the fever this morning, but this afternoon when her daughter Layla arrived and we went to see her, she’d had a bad relapse, with raging fever, lots of pain and nausea.

I feel so sorry for her, though I’m grateful that our town has such a nice hospital with skill folk working there. Everyone has been very nice to her.

In the meantime, our traditional Family Christmas Dinner of Chinese Food will be held without her.

Bummer.