Joshua Willey

February Stars

It was a bluebird day. All the islands were floating on the sparkling sound, orcas and porpoises crossed the bow, a slight norwester pushed the skipper’s curly blonde hair into her sunburned face, the skiff man said his cigarettes were tasting better than they had all season. “Let the skiff go!” the skipper shouted, so my gloved hand pulled the release and off it went, a glimmer of aluminum, tracing a long crescent across the inlet with the net churning whitewater in its wake. In a few places the cork line was snagged and pulled beneath the surface, but once the deck had cleared and the lead line sunk, all was righted. It was a shitty season. Fish prices down, fuel prices up. I went a month without a shower, but I didn’t care. I had Fuck Buttons. I had The Savage Detectives. I was moving to the Mission. Chase, this guy, I’ve been in love with him for a decade, I was moving there for him, kind of. I’d crash at a friend’s father’s place for a month, friend in India, father in China, get food stamps, drink coffee on the roof looking out at Saint Ignatius and the Golden Gate Bridge. Lucky worked at Mother Jones, applied for a Fulbright, copy editing. We’d tour the Mission. We’d buy pig hearts and eat them. He had a fine collection of plaid shirts and was very handsome. He knew all the old important names. Next thing I know I’m wrecked. The last thing I remember I was biking down Valencia on my way to work. The next moment, I opened my eyes in the hospital. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Anyway there is no Lucky, he’s just one of things you invent in Alaska, where is plenty of light, and plenty of time.

“Last set of the year right there” the skipper said before cursing the skiff man through her walkie-talkie for not hugging the shore close enough. We watched for jumpers, my deck mate and I. We plunged a little. We had different styles. She like to push it way down, slow and deep, then shake it to release the bubbles, which she claimed scared the fish. I liked to hit it as hard and fast as possible, to get that pop echoing offshore, which I liked to imagine startling black bears from their blueberry smorgasbords. Just picture the purple stained paws and whiskers. I don’t know that the plunging actually did anything, except maybe attract the fish, which of course was the opposite of our intention. But the skipper said plunge, so I plunged.

It wasn’t a bad haul. 10,000 pounds maybe. We went over to a tender--a crabber called the Nordic Viking--and took fuel after offloading the fish, sorting out the Sockeyes and Chinooks from the Dogs and the Pinks. We took off our raingear and hosed everything down. I made dinner (salmon with maple syrup, prawns with butter, brown rice with soy sauce, Mountain Dew) and we settled in for our run back to port, sleeping and taking turns at wheel watch. The skiff man woke me at two for my shift. I love wheel watch. Listening to conversations on the radio, the blue light of shadows cast in the midnight sun, the multicolored machinations of the depth finder, the mysterious omnipotence of the GPS, the radiant warmth of the diesel, the cheap coffee, the chewing tobacco, even the arrhythmic snoring of the skipper, a tattered translation of Don Quixote rising and falling face down on her chest.

We hit port at dawn and spent the day cleaning and winterizing the boat. Around ten that evening we finished, and I walked over to the cannery for my first shower in three weeks. There was nobody around so I took my time, singing, cutting my hair, and drinking an Olympia under the steaming stream. What transcendence; the first shower. Stepping out I felt ten pounds lighter, five years younger, I was moving forward, no doubt about it. Back at the boat, the skipper paid me off and we said goodbye, both of us eager not to get too emotional, and I threw my duffle over my shoulder and walked to Safeway. I bought a bag of snacks and a bottle of whiskey, a pack of American Spirits and a National Geographic. I sat on the curb waiting for the skiff man to come pick me up.

Under the influence of alcohol and amphetamine, we didn’t stop until reaching Laird Hot Springs. There we slept and soaked for a few days, marveling at the expanse of land around us after so long in the ocean, until the skiff man suddenly realized time was still passing and we struck for Vancouver. It was nearly the witching hour when we got in. Electronic music came thumping out of slow moving vehicles: Grime, Dubstep, maybe Dizzee Rascal. The blur of passing sirens. We bought fast food at a 24-hour joint, and sat across from each other in the florescent light, blinking. The clerk asked me about one of my tattoos, the date 10-24-2006, in Baskerville black, on my forearm. A montage flashed through my head at light speed but all I said was “a momentous day.”

The skiff man dropped me at the border. I don’t know what the future held for him; neither did he. His pickup disappeared in the dawn light. I could already smell the freshly plowed fields of Washington, the Oregon pines, the sun-soaked abstraction of California. The officer looked at my passport and welcomed me in. She didn’t question my haircut or judge me by my shoes. The dirt was steaming as I walked down the road, my thumb out. In no time I was in Seattle. I bought Monsieur Pain, put it in my back pocket, and boarded a train bound for Oakland. I sat near a woman with a young child. After a few moments of soporific rattling down the track they fell asleep with their arms around each other and I watched their steady breathing until my eyelids grew heavy and closed as well, and I started to dream.

I was a member of a multiple secret societies. The Family, the power hungry C Street fundamentalist Christian group. The Skull and Bones. The Masons. We held a secret meeting at the beach, which was not a very secret place. It was an urban beach. Development stretched all the way to the shoreline. Rows of multi-colored houses, streetcars, highways. But everything was abandoned. It was like a ghost city. The sand was littered with driftwood, seaweed, messages in bottles. At first I started reading them, but looking down the coast I realized just how many there were and how I’d never know all their secrets, and then conceiving of them as secrets, I began to feel guilty about reading them, as they weren’t written for me. Then again, maybe they came a little closer to fulfilling their destiny being read, even if just by me, I’m human, after all. And maybe there is one among the many which is written for me. Just then all the secret society members, some of whom were robed and even masked, starting filing onto a commuter train to go to a secret meeting after party at some bar with photographs of John Wayne and the Rat Pack on the walls, but I didn’t have the fare, so I rode my bicycle along with them a little ways, but they were too fast, and as they disappeared around the bend I turned and was soon running stop signs, headed the opposite direction.

The train got in at dawn and I switched to the BART and traveled under the bay and got off at the 16th Street stop. Mission Street was lined with trash. I walked up to 18th and turned right. Kept going until I hit Dolores Park. By then the sun was shining, but the grass was long and still wet so I sat on the concrete steps and wrote a letter to my father. I wrote slowly, stopping often to gaze across the park at the tennis courts and the Mission itself. When I finished I lit a cigarette. A Chicano guy in a plaid shirt walked up and said “Hey baby you got a lighter?” He winked at me and grinned. I blew smoke in his face as I handed him my black Bic. He walked around to a little nook between the stairs and some palm trees and smoked a bowl of marijuana, which smelled delicious mixed with the fragrance of cut grass. The smoke rose slowly and twisted between the palm fronds before getting caught on the whisper of a breeze blowing off the bay, or simply dissolving into thin air.

After a while he returned my Bic, needlessly brushing my hand with his, which was leathery and smooth and felt somehow clean, if clean can be such a tactile sensation. As he receded I noticed the day was really getting warm, and it might be hot by three. I rolled up the sleeves of my red t-shirt and the sun touched my shoulders and I pulled my pant legs up and the sun touched my knees. I slipped off my shoes and the sun touched toes. A group of women, five of them, came laughing up and sat nearby. One was wearing tight pink jeans and an old grey t-shirt cut so wide around the neck and at the arms you could see her bra, which was zebra-striped. They were an odd bunch as another was in a blue suit, looking like a bank teller, and yet another wore the minimalist American Apparel fare which had become so popular since 9/11. It’s as if the gravity of the political situation propelled clothing brands of greater austerity into prominence. The pink one produced a bottle of Southern Comfort from her bag and they passed it around, as unconcerned as the stoner about the park maintenance guys up the hill power washing the restrooms, or me, for that matter. They drank quickly and their talk grew frantic, hysterical. They bounced off topics, oscillated between levity and gravitas. But once they were proper drunk they got quiet, and I left them there, and walked past the wig factory and the avant-garde pornography production studio towards my friend’s house to see about a place to crash until I got on my feet, though I had doubts I would ever achieve such a state.

An extensive demonstration of students and teachers slowed me down. The state was bankrupt, so there were cutting costs, which included laying off teachers and increasing student fees. The scholastics claimed this to be not only unjust but unnecessary, as there was plenty of dough to go around, the budget just had its priorities bass ackwards. I don’t pretend to understand. A guy from San Jose walked up with a clipboard, complimented me on my hair (which I’d cut like a boy, short and asymmetrical) and registered me to vote. Halfway through he told me to register as a republican, said he’d get five bucks if I did and I could change it anytime, so I checked that little box, which felt strange and, yes wrong, like a serious disturbance in the force. I pictured poor Balthazar, with the sheep rushing around him, then I pictured Dumbo, with his little hat, and his friend, that little mouse, Timothy. There were people on stilts, people with drums and whistles, people with face paint. Folks came pouring out of the Burger Kings and the bodegas to watch them parade by.

My friend wasn’t home but her roommate told me where to find her. I left my bag and walked to this café without a sign, with broad wooden tables and straight backed chairs. It was like the Bauhaus coffee shop. No music was playing. Everyone was wearing black. There she was, against the wall, with a three ring binder, a spiral notebook, a stack of flash cards (conjuring Nabokov and high school Latin tests), and a red pen in front of her. She was a true believer in the power of what David Lynch called a proper “setup.” In the right space, with the right materials, all you have to do is show up, and the magic will well up and geyser forth. She bought me a coffee and explained herself, as well as she could. Remember in The Dead Father when the women ask the son to explain himself? It was more or less like that. I didn’t even try to respond, but smiled, and kissed her forehead. We walked back to her place and there was an old woman begging for change reading Clarissa on the corner.

It only took a week for me to get a job. I started canvassing, fundraising, dialoging they called it. I was very bad at it. I believed in what I was selling, I just didn’t believe in trying to convince anyone of anything. One day, I was riding my bike down Valencia, on the way to work, and suddenly I was waking up in the hospital. A shop keeper had seen me wrecked on the roadside and called 911. Remarkably, nobody stole my bike. A crazy walked the hospital halls at night. She came in and told me about Stability Theory, then about Sparsity Theory, which states that any given data set can potentially be adequate to produce conclusions if analyzed properly, because something in the relationship between any given data points will hold constant through other unknown portions of the set. The implications of this are actually astounding, but when he told me all I could think was wow, what is happening to my life?

They gave me pain killers. I took up television. I was sitting in Dolores Park and a Chinese kid on a tricycle wrecked right in front of me, bar none the worst trike wreck I’ve ever seen. He paused for a moment and looked around in sheer befuddlement before his face turned sour and he burst into tears, which brought his family sprinting to him from up the street. The way they picked him up and cradled him, holding him so close, demonstrated a type of love I’d never known, never even imagined. So strong, unconditional. A crazy walked up with a copy of Finnegan’s Wake, babbling but happy. Would I turn out like that if I didn’t spend my time trying to get a career and a husband and have kids and make the bed? Would it be better to babble in the park?

I quit the canvassing job, started working as a bartender at a jazz club. All the neon at night, it was hard not to like. I got to go to shows for free too. Saw some hard bop, some fusion, a classic kool quartet, even an old school New Orleans style ensemble. I went back to the alleged site of my accident to snoop around. Found some skid marks. Had I been doored by some Burberry wearing entrepreneur in a BMW? Maybe by an illegal who wasn’t about to wait around for the police to deport them. I could accept that excuse. I felt like a private eye. I tracked down who made the 911 call. A porno shop owner from Slovenia. He told me I was convulsing, as if I’d had a seizure. I took a few Percocet and scheduled an MRI and an EEG. The skipper wrote me a letter, asking if I wanted to come back for the next season. My dad never wrote me back.

Try as I might, I couldn’t get back on a bicycle. I walked home from the jazz bar, or took the owl street cars. The stars in February are enough to see you through any calamity, any uncertainty, any transcendental homelessness. It’s touching really, heartening, that something so simple can mean the world. I went running at first light. The bums are sleeping on the benches deep in the park. I take off my headphones and can hear the churn of 19th Avenue, still blocks away, and the roar of the ocean, which is even farther. A mist hangs over Marx Meadow. But there are higher layers of clouds, moving inland, moving east. It’s too cold for birds. Sometimes squirrels chirp from the trees. Some pedestrians look like they’ve been up all night. I cross Lincoln and run up Irving Street. The polished chrome of a bumper shining brightly in the dry morning sun beside the highway. I was making good tips and I saved up and in the spring I hit the road.