inside the car, I leaned over and kissed him on the lips, grateful. When I pulled back I was rewarded with one of his winning smiles.
“I really am sorry for acting like a maniac,” I said. “I’m just fried by the trip.”
“Not to mention that your father just died.”
“Yeah. That.”
He reached over and rested his hand on my thigh. “Whenever you want to talk about it.”
I nodded and put my hand on his.
We drove the freeway into San Francisco. Tendrils of fog moved across the night sky, made orange and spooky from city light reflecting up. It was the same wide sky Teddy Garner had witnessed forty years ago, drunken and lovelorn in the passenger seat of a convertible, at the start of an adventure that wouldn’t last.
5
At the end of my block—a little Mission District street called Manfred Alley—in a dingy storefront, was a knife-sharpening business. The faded sign in the window read THE STRAIGHT BLADE. The place was closed more than open, though on certain afternoons and weekends, the guy who ran it, Anton, could be found on the sidewalk behind an easel, painting scenes of everyday life on the block: punk-rock girls dragging their pit bulls toward Dolores Park, homeless men dozing on the steps of garish Victorians, elderly ladies in conversation, their shopping bags resting on the sidewalk. He sometimes sold these pictures, the paint barely dry, to passersby.
He also sold some of the best pot on the planet. For this reason, whether or not I needed knives sharpened, I visited Anton once a month—about as often as I frequented my other favorite neighborhood establishment, a full-service, two-chair beauty salon that shared its storefront with a pet store. Oddball businesses like these were a tonic for the shiny new boutiques and bistros taking over the Mission. When I first moved here, I was almost mugged at 16th and Valencia, but the only danger to find me lately was instigated by a guy driving a sports utility vehicle, talking on a cell phone and U-turning toward a precious parking space. He cut so close and fast to me, pedaling in the bike lane, that I lost my balance and crashed shoulder-first onto the pavement. I wound up in the emergency room.
A few days after my father’s funeral, I brought Anton the knives I’d taken from the attic. He buzzed me in and emerged from the back of the store, squinting into the streetlight behind me. It took a moment for the reflexive paranoia around his eyes to dissolve into his greeting, “Hey, brother.” In the eighties, he’d spent a couple years in jail on an LSD rap, and since then he was forever expecting the DEA to come walking through his front door, ready to bust up his operation.
The interior was neglected in a way that few businesses are anymore: unidentifiable clutter, mismatched furniture, light-faded news clippings taped to the wall. Not shabby chic, just shabby. Posters commemorated decades of free concerts and protest rallies in Dolores Park—VIVA LA RAZA, EMBARGO SOUTH AFRICA NOT NICARAGUA, TAKE BACK THE NIGHT, NO NUKES! Everything was curled and yellowed, sort of like Anton, with his tangle of wiry gray hair, his dingy clothes, his stale breath.
I handed him the velvet-lined knife case. “I want the full treatment, Anton. Cleaning, sharpening, oiling, tightening, whatever you can do.” He slid the heaviest blade from its slot and examined it through the bottom of his spectacles, letting out an impressed little whistle. “Sturdy stuff. Valuable. Ivory handles.”
“I’m going to give them to Woody,” I said.
“I dig that,” he said, nodding intently. I dig that was a tried-and-true Antonism, one he often used when I talked about Woody. Anton was very serious about digging the struggle of his gay brothers. He told me once he was thinking about changing the name of his shop because The Straight Blade sounded homophobic. I’d replied that we were living in an age of irony and he should keep it. The sign had stayed, but mostly, I think, out of inertia. Nothing in Anton’s world ever changed.
“Anything else today, brother?” Anton asked, one frizzy eyebrow arched.
“Some of your other product,” I said.
He flipped the sign on the front door to CLOSED and led me to the back room. Behind a stack of paintings was a locker, from which he extracted several freezer bags crammed with green bud, along with a scale and a couple of scoops. Singing the praises of each strain, he presented my options: indoor versus outdoor, low stem versus top leaf, sticky versus shake. I took the usual, a forty-five-dollar baggie containing an eighth of an ounce—organic, homegrown, sticky—nurtured in a sunlit glen amid the redwoods of Humboldt County. “Excellent choice,” he said. “Grown in bat guano.”
Ritual demanded that we smoke some of what I bought. I had spent a lot of time in this room over the years, listening to Anton’s tales. He was almost, but not quite, a friend. After a voluminous inhale, he asked, “So what’s new, brother?”
“My father died,” I blurted out.
“Whoa, heavy. Did he live here?”
“No,” I said. “New Jersey. Though he lived here once, like, forty years ago.”
“I’ve been here forty years myself.” He cocked his head and squinted. “Is that right? Yeah, 1959. Forty-one years. Hitchhiked from Billings.”
“You came here to be a painter?”
“No, no, that was later. There were three of us, see. All of us ranchers’ sons in Montana. We grew up herding cattle on motorbikes. We had plenty of room but nowhere to go. So we did what you did back then. Hitched to San Francisco.” He drifted off and began reloading. I guess I’d struck a chord; usually Anton packed only one bowl per visit.
“I just started reading On the Road,” I told him. “It’s weird. I’m looking at it as history.”
“It is, man. It’s historical. It was a migration, another gold rush, except we were panning for the truth. Kerouac, Cassady—that was something you could aspire to. You thought, I could be one of those guys.” Another staggeringly long inhale, and then: “Mostly we just wanted to be antisocial.”
“Antisocial?”
“Yeah-ahhh.” Extended exhale, a passing of the pipe. “See, there was this conspiracy of niceness. You wanted to subvert it, man. The cupboards were full—you know, prosperity—so, like, everyone believed it. Everyone believed the big story, the money story. You were supposed to be happy about it.”
Another Antonism: “the (fill in the blank) story.”
He shook his head. “You forget now, but World War Two was a tragedy. They’ve been glorifying it for fifty years, man. Back then, every one knew someone who’d been slaughtered. Kids in your school, the ones a few years ahead of you. So afterwards—well, like I’m saying. Everyone wanted to believe the big, nice story.” He smiled wide, a kind of mischief in his bleary eyes. “But some of us didn’t want to pretend.”
Back then, we all wanted to be beatniks. I registered Anton’s confused expression and realized I’d spoken these words aloud. “My father came here the same time as you. Did you know him? Teddy Garner?”
I could see the dulled mental machinery trying to pull a name from the clouds. “I’ve known a lot of folks in my day,” he said finally.
“He was only here for a year, 1960 to ’61, so the chances are pretty slim.” I raced through a short version of the story—Dad’s past, my uncovering of it—not sure how deeply Anton was absorbing it, but suddenly wildly optimistic, as pot sometimes makes me, that Anton might be of help. Stoned hopeful, as my friend Ian calls it. “I’m trying to do a little research,” I concluded. “To find out about his life. There are a bunch of people whose names are in his letters. Maybe you knew one of them.” Anton gave me a scrap of paper, a stray crimson brushstroke on one side, and I wrote out a list for him: “Danny Ficchino (aka Dean Foster), Ray Gladwell (female), Mike Kelsey, Don Drebinski.”
A short while later Anton and I stood outside of his shop, my fingers rubbing the baggie of dope deep in my coat pocket, my