My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (21 page)

My phone started ringing at eight in the morning. But it was neither Tito nor Score; it was Missy. I let it go to voice mail, then instantly listened to the voice mail she’d left: “I am
so
sorry about last night,” she said, sounding legitimately distressed. “I can’t believe what I did to you. I used to date that guy Martin, and I was drinking, and I just got all—anyway, that was really fucked up of me, and I’m sorry. I hope I can make it up to you later this week.”

With that, my planned trip to San Francisco was canceled. I went back to sleep for several hours and had forgotten all about Tito and Score and my ride offer when my phone rang again in the mid-afternoon from an unfamiliar L.A. number. It was Score, calling from a pay phone. His real name, he said, was Hakim. He still wanted to get up to the Bay Area, but there was a problem—he couldn’t find Tito. They’d arranged to meet at Hollywood and Vine, he told me, but it was three hours later and Tito still hadn’t shown. I explained that my trip was on hold, and he said, “Oh,” with such disappointment and skepticism that I sat up straight. I could sense his train of thought:
Yeah, like some random white dude was really gonna give a seven-hour ride to a coupla hoodrats he’d met on the street.
His lost faith in me felt like a challenge worth rising to. Besides, what the hell was I doing hanging around L.A. waiting on the St. Pauli Girl when I’d likely have a better chance with any girl in any bar in San Francisco?

“Tell you what,” I said. “Fuck it. I’ll give you a ride to the Bay. Find Tito.”

But Score—Hakim—stunned me. He explained that he’d just met Tito the night before. How weird! The night before I’d thought of them as an inseparable team—Tito and Score, Score and Tito—the dynamic duo. Somehow in my drunken state, I’d believed that they’d been friends for years. I’d imagined them playing themselves as the swashbuckling protagonists of a road film called
Tito & Score
, which I hoped to one day write and direct. Now Tito was nowhere to be found. No matter. I told Hakim I’d pick him up at ten o’clock that night. “Where do you want to meet?” I asked.

“How ’bout the parking lot of the Verizon store? I think it’s, like, Sunset and … I don’t know.” He had a ’shroomer’s spacey affect. “Hold on,” he said. I heard him calling out to a passerby, “Hey, what street is this? Western? Okay, thanks.” He giggled into the phone. “Okay, Sunset and Western.”

“Cool. See you there.” I hung up and began crafting a text to Missy, working hard to seem chipper, and careful to allude to vague creative projects in the works with collaborators in the Bay, so that it would appear that I was bolting north not as a spurned suitor but as an impulsive globe-trotter whose artist lifestyle sometimes demanded last-minute travel.

She texted me right back:
Ill come with you! St pauli event in palo alto tues!!

*

A few hours later, I caught sight of Hakim in the parking lot before he saw me and Missy, while we were still at the light at Western, a quarter block away. He wore a camo backpack and had a small blue duffel bag hanging off one shoulder; in his arms, he cradled what appeared to be a lone, raggedy turntable, its cord dangling behind him like an untied shoelace. We were half an hour late, and he was searching the passing traffic with the hopeful but anxious and half-defeated look of someone who fears he’s been stood up. The light changed, and when I roared up beside him in my borrowed Jeep Liberty, he lit up with a gigantic, relieved smile. I jumped out and gave him a little handshake and half-hug, and we placed his duffel bag and turntable in the backseat. He hopped in on the other side, and the three of us got on the 101 headed north.

Hakim—smiley, somehow both shy and talkative, perhaps a bit blazed—told us his story. He was nineteen, and had grown up in a rough part of Las Vegas. He’d finished high school the previous June and soon realized there wasn’t much for him to do in Vegas besides get into trouble. He’d always loved DJ culture and underground hip-hop, and a dream had formed inside him like a hot, molten rock—he wanted to get a pair of Technics turntables and go to Canada and become a DJ. Why Canada? He’d once had a conversation with someone who’d been to Vancouver, and it sounded like a paradise—lush, racially tolerant, and highly cultured. He also appreciated its lax marijuana laws, and what he perceived to be its general laid-back vibe. Also, he imagined that there were fewer DJs in Canada than, say, L.A., and that it would be easier to break in as a young DJ.

Along the way, though, he had some stops to make. He wanted to visit a library in Oakland that he’d been told his grandfather had helped to open. He wanted to try to find some other relatives in the Bay Area who he hadn’t seen in a decade. And he wanted, eventually, maybe after a spell in Canada, to find his dad, who he’d never met his whole life, but who he knew lived in Newark, New Jersey, at an address he kept on a deeply worn and creased pink Post-it note which he pulled from his back pocket to show to me and Missy. “They call him Score, too,” he told us. “That’s kind of how I got the name.”

Hakim had left home nine months before and started his journey in L.A., where he’d been ever since, living on the streets for weeks, even months at a time, and then getting a room in a house for a month or two, when he could afford it. He’d been hustling CDs on the street and working as a canvasser for environmental groups. He was Internet-savvy enough to negotiate Craigslist for jobs and temporary sublets, but still had spent most nights sleeping in parks and on the beach, or in abandoned buildings occupied by squatters and crackheads. He seemed to simultaneously be a homeless street kid and an undercover reporter observing the lives of homeless street kids—he was full of keen observations and funny, affecting stories about other kids he’d met, like Tito.

After about ninety minutes of rapid-fire talk, we’d wound our way up the mountains on I-5 just north of the city and were headed down the long decline on the other side into the central California plains. Hakim produced an old Gang Starr CD from his backpack and asked me to put it on, and thirty seconds later he was in a deep sleep.

I kept driving. Missy smiled over at me, the blue, iridescent lights of the dashboard dials casting her in a soft glow. With her large eyes, button nose, and shining teeth, and her childlike kindness and innocence, she reminded me of Ariel from
The Little Mermaid
. There’s no feeling like gliding down the interstate through the desolate flatlands with a beautiful girl in the passenger seat, especially one you hardly know. The world was ripe and swirling with mystery and possibility.

Missy outlined her schedule for the week: she was working a tech convention at Stanford on Tuesday evening and a UFC match on Thursday at an arena in San Jose—her St. Pauli Girl costume was packed in a small green vintage suitcase way in the back. The folks she worked for had reserved hotel rooms for her from Tuesday night on, she told me, but it wasn’t clear from the way she said it if she was inviting me to spend the whole week with her or not. I was pretty sure that the work on my project in San Fran could be shuffled to the following week, since it had been made up in the first place. When we got to the Bay, I suggested, Missy could crash with me at my friend’s apartment, and I’d roll her down to Palo Alto the next day.

Soon her lids grew heavy and before long she was sleeping, too. I cranked the music up and opened my window to let in some night air, dank with cow dung and fertilizer but blissful nonetheless. We pushed north past Bakersfield. I kept peeking over to watch my passengers sleep. It felt like Missy was my wife and Hakim was our kid, though I’d only known them for five days combined. Still, on a drive like that you get a sense for how joyous it might be to have a family of your own.

*

Around three a.m., at a gas station outside Fresno, I stopped to refill the tank and grab some snacks. Hakim roused awake long enough to request a bottle of water and a granola bar, but by the time I came back out he was already asleep again. It was as if he hadn’t really closed his eyes in six months. After another hour, the highway widened and orange streetlights sprouted along the shoulder and the median, signaling that we were close to Oakland. At the tollbooth for the Bay Bridge, a woman in her fifties blasted soul music on a tiny radio and wailed along, almost oblivious to us as she took a ten-spot from me and passed back the change.

Hakim sat up and rubbed his eyes. We rose up onto the bridge, the whole Bay spread out before us, the buildings of downtown San Francisco clustered slumbering in the dark. Day or night, this vista has always been one of my favorite views of any city anywhere. I turned and said, “Welcome to San Francisco, Hakim.” He nodded, with a look in his eyes that I couldn’t quite identify but took for quiet joy at being one step closer to his destination: Canada.

But what would happen once he reached Canada? Missy and I had talked about it for a bit after he’d first fallen asleep. It’s appealing to imagine that if we can just get that one thing in our life to work out—if we can get the job we want, finish writing that book or making that movie, get the right girl or get to Canada—that everything will be solved, absolved, good to go for good. I slipped into that way of thinking way too often, I admitted to Missy, even though I knew that sometimes in life all of a sudden there you were—standing with your Technics turntables just across the Canadian border, and you’re not a new you, you’re just you, but in Canada.

It seemed, from the way Hakim dreamily talked of it, that Canada, to him, was not so much a place but a sensation he was seeking, a sense of being home. He’d alluded to his mom’s drug problems, told us that he’d come home from school some days to find that she’d hocked his CDs and Sega games at the pawnshop. Before leaving home, he told us, he’d essentially been responsible for taking care of his fourteen-year-old sister—the turntable he’d found on the street and set gingerly in the back of the Jeep was to be a birthday gift to her; she aspired to be a DJ like her older brother. Living on the L.A. streets, while full of adventure and interesting characters, was exhausting. The Canada of his imagination was a place where he could find community, maybe an established DJ to take him under his wing, and, above all, a tranquil home.

Maybe in Canada he’d find what he was looking for, I thought. Surely he would. He was friendly, if a little shy, bright, creative, not caught up in drinking or hard drugs. But it was a bit of a crapshoot—starting fresh in a new place where you know nobody is never easy. I’d helped Hakim get a few hundred miles closer to his destination but couldn’t even provide him with a home for the night. I’d scored a couch for me and Missy from some girls I barely knew, and I didn’t think I could show up at their place at five a.m. with a drifter I’d met the night before. More pertinently, I didn’t want to jeopardize the possibility of sucking face with Missy once we landed.

In the Castro there’s a dingy but always-hoppin’ twenty-four-hour diner called Sparky’s—ten years before, I’d spent some lost, lonely nights there, sipping OJ and reading novels in a corner booth till dawn. I remembered flirting mildly with the guys in neighboring booths, not because I wanted to hook up, but because I just wanted to feel wanted by anybody. It was a lame place to abandon a new friend, but I couldn’t think of anywhere else to drop Hakim off.

He grabbed his backpack and his little blue duffel from the back of the truck, and I offered to hold on to the turntable for a while so he wouldn’t have to lug it around with him. I gave him a
Found
magazine T-shirt and a couple of magazines and the bottle of water and granola bar I’d bought for him at the Roadside 76 station. I felt a sad wave crash over me, like a parent dropping their kid off at college. Hakim assured me he’d be fine. “Get outta here,” he said. “Go on. It’s late. Tell Missy it was fun talkin’ to her.” She was dozing in the passenger seat.

“Call me tomorrow afternoon!” I said.

He smiled. “I will.”

We hugged, and I waited till he went inside and found a seat—at my old corner booth, as it happened—then I hopped back in the truck and drove off through the silence and the stillness of the city, where only a rat scampered across the street and an old man stocked newspaper boxes with the morning edition. At my friends’ apartment in the Mission, me and Missy lurched quietly upstairs and headed for the couch they’d made up for us with fresh sheets and sofa cushions tucked into pillowcases. We sat a couple of feet apart. After a long drive through the night, when you finally sit down the world always feels like it’s still in motion.

I took Missy’s hand in mine, my heart pounding once, heavily, like the drunken wallop of a bass drum. She pulled her hand back a bit and whispered, “I think we should sleep head-to-toe.”

“What’s ‘head-to-toe’?” I whispered back, a sudden sense of dread squeezing my insides.

“You know,” she said sweetly. “Your head’s on one side, your toes down there.” She gestured with her other hand. “My head’s over there, and my toes over here.”

“Okay. Why?” I said. “My feet probably smell bad. Yours are probably worse.” This was me trying to keep things light.

“Then come on,” she said, “let’s go wash them off.”

She pulled me into the bathroom and we sat on the edge of the tub and ran some hot water. While our feet soaked, Missy explained that she was planning on trying to get back together with her ex-boyfriend Martin, and that she wouldn’t feel right sleeping head-to-head, toe-to-toe with me. “I’m afraid of what might happen,” she said, with a mischievous smile.

“What, I might gouge you with my toenails?”

The hot water rose to our ankles. Missy’s feet looked like they could’ve belonged to a porcelain doll; mine looked like they belonged to Bilbo fuckin’ Baggins. There was no real need to ask her why she’d decided to get back with Martin or at what point over the course of our drive she’d made the decision, but I did anyway, trying my best to stifle my disappointment.

“It wasn’t even like I decided,” she said. “I just fell asleep while we were driving, and when I woke up, it was like Hakim going to Canada, I just knew.”