A Beautiful Cup
a novel by
Chris Patrick Morgan
SMASHWORDS EDITION
Copyright 2010, Chris Patrick Morgan
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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The Celtic Cross
There are numerous variations on the 10-card Celtic Cross tarot spread. For the purposes of this novel, the following layout and definitions are used:
1 This card represents what covers you.
2 This card crosses you for good or bad.
3 This card represents the base, or root, of the situation.
4 This card represents the past – what is behind you or what is leaving.
5 This card crowns you and could come into being.
6 This card represents the future – what is before you.
7 This card represents your fears and apprehensions.
8 This card represents the way you are perceived, and the feelings of others around you.
9 This card represents your own positive feelings, your hopes and aspirations.
10 This card represents the possible outcome.
The particular style of tarot reading can also be done with an 11th card, a “Key Card” that is selected by the querent at the beginning of the reading and comes to represent the question at hand. This 11-card method is mentioned in this book, but only practiced once. There are scores of other sorts of tarot readings which can be done, ranging from 3-78 cards in length – indeed, many tarot practitioners curse the Celtic Cross – but I have opted to use this reading because it is familiar to a wide audience and relatively simple to understand.
Chapter 1
Jacobins deplores that which is mundane and routine, so he creates routines to avoid other routines.
The alarm goes off at 6:45. The programmed timer on the stereo kicks in, the music beginning at a low volume and then rising, building, filling the room. Bad music. Loud, monotonous, thundering music. The lead singer disingenuous in his whining about how he hates his father. The CD cover lays on the coffee table next to the ashtray and a half-consumed glass of a Salvadoreno lager – the members of the quartet have the appropriately duotoned, dyed, unkempt hair, torn black T-shirts, and vibrant tattoos that look like they’ve been airbrushed on their collective eight arms.
Jacobins owns enough recordings by similarly inept, emotionally dishonest thrashers to fill a Hammermill box, and every afternoon at 2:45 he selects a compact disc, sets the timer for 6:45, and then drifts off into a sort of sleep on the ripped green sofa. The 650 discs he considers “good music” are arranged alphabetically in 13 neat metal CD towers beneath the livingroom window. He doesn’t see the point of waking up to Beck, U2, the Rolling Stones or some other band of quality. He has tried that before: on one such occasion, the CD player kicked in at 6:45, out wafted one of Keith Richards’ precious opening salvos, and Jacobins just rolled over, smiling, returning to sleep, incorporating Gimme Shelter into the soundtrack of his dream.
Bad music, on the other hand, will irritate him and drive him to leap up speedily, stomp across the dingy green shag and shut off the awful racquet. At this particular 6:45 on this particular day, the music is exceptionally bad. The singer shrieks “ARSEHOLE! ARSEHOLE! A BLOODY FUCKING ARSEHOLE!” repeatedly in the barely comprehensible Geordie sort of Northern England tongue, the drummer tries to figure out where he put the beat, the guitarist hammers away at the same A chord with furious intensity, and the bass – where’d the bass player go? Did he just sit this number out or something?
Jacobins sits up instantly, disgusted with the sounds. He hops to his feet and darts to the stereo in the corner, eluding the edge of the coffee table on which he has banged his shins on so many times before. Imposing calm and silence upon the room.
But the calm and the silence are short lived, as the music of city life intrudes through the apartment’s flimsy defenses. A music even less desirable than forgettable British quartets. Beeps, whirs and blares filter in through the moist, single pane window – the sounds of the traffic flowing constantly up and down Van Ness Avenue less than a half-block away. Above, seeping in through the ceiling, the sound of the Chinese-language television station blaring. From below, a thud and a crash, a scream and a wail – Mr. Kim’s son, not yet four years of age, has driven his tricycle into the wall once again.
But Jacobins has grown accustomed to the perpetual noise. These days, he has come to depend on it as a sign that he is actually still alive.
Jacobins lights a cigarette, uses the lingering match flame to light the droopy, purple, Dali-esque candle in the middle of the coffee table. He removes his vintage Joy Division T-shirt and tosses it on the corner of the sofa. From the closet directly opposite the window, he grabs the first clean shirt he sees – a red buttondown, slightly fraying around the edges. Jacobins’ wardrobe choices follow the colors of the rainbow. He’ll wear all of the bright garments first, since the bright stuff is the first stuff that catches his eye: the red buttondowns, the orange T-shirts, the yellow U.C. Santa Cruz sweatshirt with the ragged sleeves. Come one week from now, he’ll have shifted downward on the spectrum to the greens and dark blues. By the time he’s reduced to wearing all black, he recognizes the enormous and imminent task ahead of him: laundry.
Jacobins makes his way slowly down the hall, gathering up all of the kitchen-type items strewn about his living space: the beer glass (now empty), a North Beach Pizza box, a greasy paper plate with tomato sauce stains, and a can opener (he doesn’t know why that’s in the livingroom; no cans anywhere in sight). He pauses to turn up the lights using the dimmer switch in the hallway, illuminating his path. Six clocks are sporadically mounted along the wall. According to the clocks the time is ten minutes to seven, a quarter past three, 9:26, 11:11, and two of them have stopped working entirely, both frozen at exactly 4:04.
He moves past the two bedroom, listening for signs of life. Emily’s door: closed, decorated by a poster advertising the Carnevale in Venice – a fond memory of Emily’s from days and loves gone by. Her lights shut off and her radio left on, playing a new Fleetwood Mac song.
Eric’s door: closed, unadorned. His lights also shut off. And from behind the door, a woman moans, shrieks, and yelps deliriously. Jacobins shrugs and moves on. By now he has catalogued and committed to memory most of the yips and whinnies of Eric’s femmes du jour, but this woman’s particular resonance doesn’t register.
The woman succumbing to pleasure behind Eric’s door certainly isn’t Emily, who is sitting under the green fluorescent light at the kitchen table, thumbing through one of her many tarot books. Judging by the sullen look on her face and the heaviness of her head in her hand, she wishes it was.
“They’ve been at it since three,” she sighs. “They took the afternoon off. I never knew Caroline was so pretty. I think he’s going to fuck her until he gets a raise.”
Jacobins goes about the disposal of trash and the commencing of dishwashing, but then he pauses, weighed down by the gravity of Emily’s statement.
Caroline. Eric’s boss. Jacobins’ former boss.
“She’s married,” he says, turning Emily’s direction, whose jaw drops open, the previous subject matter having escaped her.
“Holy shit! He speaks! He speaks!” she exclaims, “Damn Jake, you haven’t said a word to me in three days.”
Jacobins shrugs, unscrews a Jack Daniels bottle and pours out a couple of doubles. “Sometimes I have to remind myself of the sound of my own voice. Ice?”
Emily refuses the cubes and resumes her self-described “annoying” habit of twirling her thick, black-dyed hair around her left index finger. Jacobins knows that Emily is having a bad day, because she wears her old engagement ring when she has a bad day in a vain attempt to remind herself that life could be either better or worse (depending on how she feels about her ex-fiance that day). They toast for no reason and pound their whiskeys as the bed jiggles and quakes on the other side of the wall, whacking against the molding, providing a rhythm section to the harmony of the passionate duo’s groans.
“Eric has no shame,” Jacobins shrugs.
“I can’t believe I put up with this shit,” Emily shakes her head and closes her book. “I wish I could afford to move.”
Jacobins pours himself a cup from the coffee maker he’d set on delayed brew at precisely 2:35 that afternoon. He tops off the Starbucks African blend with one more shot of the Tennessee mood juice, offering a cup to Emily, who declines, and then changes her mind and accepts. Again, they toast for no reason, and, while Emily nearly gags on his strong brew, Jacobins sets forth to gathering up her tarot cards, which are strewn haphazardly all over the kitchen table.
“You don’t have to do that,” Emily protests as Jacobins lifts her feet up from the tabletop, sweeping out the Nine of Cups and Ace of Pentacles from beneath her heels.
“I can’t help it,” he says.
“You are an absurdist neatnik. You go around cleaning up everyone else’s messes while the livingroom is a sty.”
“I hate messes,” he says.
“Sometimes I wonder if you were actually born in late August, or maybe early September. You act like such a Virgo,” she says, the astrological reference compelling him to take a glance at her black GOT PISCES? T-shirt.
“I don’t believe in astrology,” he shrugs.
“You don’t believe in anything.”
Undeterred, he assembles all of the cards neatly into a stack. On the other side of the wall, there is a sound of glass breaking – Jacobins and Emily concur it was a falling lamp – but it’s cause for only a brief break in the action, after which the lovers return to their frenzied dances.
“I must hand it to Eric, he got farther with her than you did,” Emily says, lighting a hand-rolled cigarette.
“I did nothing. She came on to me,” Jacobins protests his innocence.
“You’re both whores,” she says, following it up with a deep, longing sigh. “God, I need to get laid.”
Jacobins nods, leaning against a Lake Tahoe skiing poster unevenly tacked and plastered on the wall in the narrow kitchen. He shuffles the cards hustler style, magician style, on an imaginary table top in mid-air, with nary a card falling from his large, strong fingers. An act for which Emily scolds him.
“Oh, don’t get your energy all over those! I’ve got two readings to do tonight! Some boring married couple on Russian Hill wants me to tell them about their fruitless attempts to conceive. Jesus Christ ... will you give me those!”
Too lazy to remove her feet from the table, Emily leans over awkwardly and yanks the deck out of his hands.
“Great, I’ll be trying to explain why Senior can’t get it up and the cards will be covered with your loutish, deviant vibes.”
“My vibes? You had your damn feet on them, for Christ’s sake.”
“That’s different. They’re my cards. I can do with them as I wish.”
Emily sits up, rubs off the cards, and decides that the best way to remove his imprint from them is to throw a few down on the table, give him a guerrilla reading whether he wants to hear it or not.
“Well now you’ve tainted the deck, so it must be cleared. Prepare to be read,” she says.
“No.”
“I don’t know why you’re always so resistant,” she says. “It’s a good idea every now and then to listen to what the cards have to say. So what’s your question?”
Jacobins gives her one of his many varieties of shrugs and states, in an uncooperative manner, “why am I here?”
She flips over the top card with her right hand.
“This card represents what covers you: The Hermit. Well, that card is consistent with your silly Virgo mannerisms.”
Jacobins shakes his head and ambles out of the kitchen in a quest for his shoes.
“Get your ass back here!” she commands.
Jacobins ignoring her just leads her to raise her voice to a yell.
“This card represents what crosses you, for good or bad: Strength!”
In the livingroom, Jacobins digs out some Rockports from his closet, tucks his shirttails into his blue jeans and admires himself in the mirror above the television. His dark yet rapidly lightening hair is a messy bird’s nest and he hasn’t shaved in three days. It’ll do, he thinks to himself, pausing to erase the messages on the answering machine that he hasn’t bothered to listen to.
Emily continues yelling at him from the kitchen.
“This card represents the base of the situation: Four of Staves! This card represents what is behind you or what is leaving: Nine of Staves!”
Jacobins trudges down the hallway once more, past the lovebirds’ nest and past the frothing oracle in the kitchen, entering the bathroom at the end of the long, dim hallway. He snuffs out his latest cigarette in the ashtray atop the toilet and brushes his teeth.
“This crowns you and represents what could come into being: The Sun! This card represents what is before you: Queen of Staves! Your own apprehensions: The Ace of Staves! The feelings of those around you: The Lovers! Your own positive feelings: The World! This card represents the outcome: The Star! … Ho-ly shit!”
Jacobins rolls his eyes and goes to retrieve his coffee from the kitchen. Emily’s voice, filled with amazement, lowers upon his re-entering the room.
“Well, I’m not sure why you’re here, but this reading pretty much blows my mind,” she explains. “This is amazing. Look at all of these staves, and all of these magnificent major arcana. The four best cards in the deck in the four best places. Unbelievable. Unfuckingbelievable.”
Jacobins stands over her, sips his coffee, massaging Emily’s neck with his left hand, feeling her tension melt like butter, while the two of them eye the ten beautiful, ornate, lushly colored cards in the familiar shape of the Celtic Cross. It’s all Greek to him (Greek? Gaelic?), although he is familiar with the card pattern, having seen Emily do a number of these readings for friends and customers on the livingroom floor while he was lying on the sofa, attempting with futility to sleep.
Somewhat awestruck and dumfounded, Emily sucks deep on her cigarette and shakes her head.
“Truly, this has to be one of the most amazing spreads I have ever seen,” she says. “Very focused energy. Very driven. Optimistic. Not like you, if I should say so. The World. The Sun. The Star. Those cards couldn’t have pessimistic or negative connotations if they tried. And look at that Ring of Fire around The Hermit! The staves everywhere. The Sun. Marvelous. We must be moving into the heart of summer. Leo. Amazing. You’re heating up Jake. I can tell you have something quite spectacular in store.”
Jacobins scoffs, unwilling to reveal his hand. “Save it for later. I’m out. I’ve got some work to do.”
“I’m serious. This is amazing,” Emily insists, the cards upon the table immediately bringing her a jolt of enthusiasm, “These cards declare that you have some wonderful things to come. It’s quite an impressive, dare I say almost unimaginable, convergence of energy that I can’t even fathom. Here, let me explain this –”
“It’s all bullshit,” he retorts, moving away from the table, turning up the collar on his black leather jacket. “There isn’t anything amazing or marvelous going on in my life right now.”
“It’s The Star, Jake. The outcome. You can’t go wrong with The Star.”
“It’s all a farce,” he pokes at her. “Face it Emily, you’re a fraud.”
Emily knows that he is mocking her, but she isn’t afraid to give it back. She turns to him as he is leaving the kitchen. “And you, Jacobins, are a shithouse of exceptional stench.”
Jacobins pauses in the doorway, turns, eyes her with his expressionless face. He suddenly steps forth and takes Emily’s face in his hands, plants a beautiful soft kiss on her lips as her hands instinctively clutch the outsides of his wrists.
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it,” he says, looking deep into her stunned, wide brown eyes, which tear up from the shock. “At that moment, your lips seemed very lonely.”
Emily gazes at him longingly as he grabs his bag and exits. It’s the first time they have kissed in over 10 years.
---
“No cause for alarm,” Jacobins says to Mr. Kim at the bottom of the stairs.
Mr. Kim, the good-natured but somewhat scatterbrained on-site property manager, has seen far too many cop capers and blaxploitation films from the 1970s centered on grimy urban tenement halls, and believes the prime objective of someone in his position is to call the police at the first sign of trouble. The manager leers at Jacobins untrustingly before closing the door to apartment 101.
Jacobins decides to walk, which he always does. A brief inclination to drive enters his mind, and is quickly disposed. He hasn’t moved his green Toyota in a week. His car is parked right outside the front door, and Jacobins figures he will never get such a good parking space ever again. If he did decide to get in the car and drive away, he would surely return to Pacific St. and find Mr. Kim’s overgrown blue Cadillac occupying his precious spot, or Eric’s spotless black Lexus, or Emily’s rusty Hyundai, or that unknown gun-metal gray Volvo currently parked across the street, or the beat up Chevy jalopy belonging to the psychopath in 302. And, given the house’s proximity to the myriad of Van Ness eateries and retail spaces, the likelihood of finding a parking space anywhere within four blocks of Pacific St. at any time of day is pretty far-fetched indeed. Such is life in a city where there are 100,000 more cars than actual parking spaces.
And even if he did decide to drive to his evening’s destination, where would he park once he got there?
Jacobins also uses his good health as a justification for walking. Chances are that, at any given time during the 20 hours he’s awake every day, his blood alcohol content is far above the legal limit. Don’t drink and drive. He also finds walking is good for the digestive system. The more Jacobins walks, the less he farts.
He makes his way up the smooth, steady incline of Van Ness Ave. as the traffic persistently rushes past and overhead fog settles in, snuffing out the remaining sunlight on a cold July night. He zips his jacket to fend off the harsh, gray wind. It’s another one of those Mark Twain nights. “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer night in San Francisco.” Jacobins questions the correctness of his decision to walk several times over, but a shot from the flask of brandy in his inside pocket warms him up and raises his spirits. Laptop, Hemingway, and accessories stashed in his backpack, CD player in his left pocket: Peter Gabriel is dreaming of Mercy St. in his ears.
Long, swift strides. Jacobins passes the shuttered up Cal Fed branch and a man dressed in an Army surplus coat and ragged pants steps out from the shadows.
“Change?” the beggar asks, revealing no visible teeth in his mouth.
Jacobins stops, looks him up and down, reaches in his pocket and passes the man three quarters. The beggar shakes his hand, and Jacobins then comes to a stunning actualization.
He doesn’t hate anyone.
He pauses and does a quick inventory of his feelings. Nope. No hatred anywhere. None in his heart, head, fingers or toes. He is free of loathing for himself or his fellow man.
This realization worries him.
Anger, hatred, and loathing have been fueling his life for much of the past two years. He’s been mad at his ex-girlfriend, Maria, who dumped him on New Year’s Day while they watched a majestic sunset from Ocean Beach, while she was holding his hand, stroking his forehead and apologizing profusely. He’s been irked with Maria for making him move out of their pleasant, $1300-a-month, two-bedroom Outer Richmond abode. He’s been angry with Caroline, his former boss. Mad at her boss, and his boss, and all the way up the corporate ladder at First St. National Bank, because they were a bunch of poster children for the Peter Principle, a collection of corporate whores with small minds, a motley crew of idiots who never gave him a raise or a promotion or any hint of legitimate responsibility. He hated the whole rotten lot of them even more when they fired him. He’s still somewhat mad at Eric for breaking up with Emily, and, deep in his heart, he’s got some resentment left for Emily for breaking up with him ten years ago. And if he listens to any more of that ear-splitting, mush-headed, $1.99 alternative rock, he’s going to start hating his father and his remarried, St. Croix-inhabiting mother. He’s still annoyed at all of those idiots who voted for Nader in 2000, and don’t get him started on Republicans. And, like all but the most devout leftists populating the City by the Bay, he has reached the threshold of tolerance for continually being asked for spare change or extra cigarettes while walking the city streets.
If nothing else, Jacobins has used these perpetual sore points as motivation, or at least as a catalyst for strenuous emotional exercise. His job at First St. National Bank was useful for purging these ills – he hated it so much, hated his coworkers so much, that he would find himself focusing and tuning in to whatever menial, demeaning task had been set forth, and so anything he set to doing would be done with great efficiency and accuracy. Caroline, in fact, mentioned that efficiency and accuracy as qualities she would “deeply” miss around the office.
All he really missed about his old job at 1SNB was the opportunity to spend eight hours generating and purging his ill wills. Four months removed, he was running out of enemies, and running out of excuses.
Of course, if he’d ever mentioned this malady – this deep-seeded, in-grained need to loathe his fellow man – to Eric or Emily or another one of his friends, they’d have thought he was crazy. He rarely ever showed anything remotely resembling a temper. He rarely showed anything at all. Nothing ever seemed to shake his stoic disposition.
Jacobins lights a second cigarette and hands it to the beggar, whose dry, stiff hands quiver as he places it between his toothless gums.
This sudden dearth of anger must, in fact, be a good thing, Jacobins thinks to himself, continuing his steady progress up Van Ness Avenue, watching the endless procession of SUVs, sports cars, and 47 Van Ness buses flow past. Removing anger. Isn’t removing anger one of those necessary steps to achieving enlightenment?
That sounds right. In fact, this whole episode with the toothless, nameless and otherwise insignificant transient sounds like a spiritual breakthrough in the making. Jacobins searches the dark recesses of his brain’s library while waiting for the light to change green. He tries to recall all of the Buddhist texts he read back in college, but finds nothing definitive. He must have killed those memories with beer. He shrugs and continues on.
Jacobins passes several powerwalkers in tight spandex, passes another man laboring to push a shopping cart full of tin cans and beer bottles, passes an elderly couple in matching beige windbreakers strolling slowly and methodically, sweetly holding hands. Jacobins shows all of them the same expressionless mug.
It strikes him as a bit odd, this seeming lack of anger. Shouldn’t he be happy to be free of such an emotional burden? Shouldn’t he be smiling? Laughing? Wouldn’t this be cause for even a slight personal celebration? But Jacobins doesn’t smile. His swift, orderly, rhythmic gait remains unchanged.
Yes, it’s true: Jacobins doesn’t feel anger any more.
Jacobins doesn’t seem to feel anything.
He doesn’t remember the last time he did.
That frightens him even more.
---
“Was that Jake? Jacobins? Was that him?”
Caroline strains to look in the rear view mirror, but the tall, shadowy figure has disappeared from view. She wildly veers the Volvo to avoid a double-parked taxicab, driving with one hand, fixing her hair with another, nervously tugging and fussing with the buttons on her blouse. She grabs a rolling Coke can at her feet and tosses it over her shoulder, depositing it in the child safety seat in the back. Sniffing repeatedly, she tries to rid her nose of the burning sensation.
“I always liked him, you know. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed but he worked hard,” she says, her whining tinged with the slightest taste of sour grapes. “It broke my heart to have to let him go.”
In the course of her afternoon of wild abandon, Caroline hadn’t bothered to venture any further into the apartment than Eric’s bedroom. She would have been reminded that her current subordinate and fired, former subordinate were roommates if she had walked another 15 feet and seen Jacobins sleeping on the couch.
The silent and inwardly gleeful Eric doesn’t feel like disrupting her artificial nostalgia.
“Shit, I’m going to be late,” she grumbles. “I swear, Richard’s going to divorce me if I’m late one more time. I hate these god damn cocktail parties anyway.”
In the passenger seat, Eric fidgets with the car stereo, rubs his bloodshot eyes and chuckles to himself, too high to be terrified. He steadies his fingers just enough to reach over and stroke her soft, pale cheek.
“Just going back to the office, right?” she asks, gunning the engine to make a hasty left turn onto California St. and nearly colliding with a FedEx truck. She pushes away his amorous fingers and readjusts her troublesome bangs once more. The Volvo lurches to and fro, dangerously close to the centerline, runs several more red lights and nearly piles into the California-Van Ness cable car.
“We’re not going to discuss this, got it?” Caroline decrees, slapping away his hand a second time. “We’ve been doing this for a while now. You know the rules.”
“Rules?”
“We don’t talk about this tawdry little affair.”
“Oh, come on Caroline, since when did you develop a conscience anyway? You’re only slightly less corrupt than those Latin American dictators to whom the bank used to fritter away millions in bad loans. Whoa! Watch out for the grandma!”
“Damn pedestrians.”
Since the breakup of his engagement, Eric has engaged in this fling with Caroline on a haphazard basis. She’ll intensely descend upon him and dominate every moment of his life for a week or two every month. Eric enjoys the company, enjoys the sex. Caroline can’t function without either, as much as she pretends otherwise.
“Everything is as it should be right now. We’re sampling from the boundless platter of life’s delicious possibilities,” Eric assures her, in between sips of bottled mineral water. “And the lord have mercy, Caroline, you are like a three-star, three-course dinner to me.”
Eric reaches deep into his suit pocket, pulls out a small Ziploc, and tosses the bag into Caroline’s lap.
“Take it,” Eric insists. “You’ll need it to get through all of those boring speeches about future airport construction, all of the small talk from the city attorneys, all of that wine-induced discourse on how they’re gonna pants the environmentalists in court. What a bunch of dead weight.”
Caroline refuses his offering, at first, and then stealthily stuffs the cocaine in the outside pocket on her magenta sportcoat, her lead foot revving the engine as the Volvo crests Nob Hill.
“Yippee!” Eric screams out, reveling in the joy ride.
While the Volvo sits briefly parked along the now-deserted street in the financial district, Eric runs his fingers through Caroline’s hair and coaxes out of her a long, satisfying, good night kiss. Caroline hurriedly douses herself in Binaca and Chanel No. 5.
“I disgust myself sometimes,” she says.
“Desire will do that.”
“Thank God for desire,” she concludes.
He waits until the Volvo disappears around the corner, and then walks a block over to the garage, where his company car – his freshly washed and vacuumed red Ford Taurus – awaits him.
---
Jacobins stops on the corner of Van Ness and O’Farrell, across from the cinema, kitty-corner from the Mercedes dealer, and watches two stoplights’ worth of traffic fly past. He’s concerned about this sudden lack of feeling he’s feeling. And it also dawns on him that he doesn’t know where he’s going. He has no plans, no agenda. He’s just walking aimlessly. A few ideas come to mind – some bar hopping in the Mission, or maybe perusing the bookstore down by the Opera House – but he feels no desire or emotional attachment to any such options. Jacobins feels confused, disparaged. If he doesn’t know where he’s going, how can he know where he’s supposed to be?
A wave of hopelessness sweeps over him. A couple of amorous high schoolers stop beside him, draped all over one another, and through her braces the schoolgirl asks Jacobins the time.
“I have no idea,” he says. “Seven something.”
They scoff at him, mistaking his honesty for contempt.
Jacobins crosses O’Farrell and slowly passes the cinema, disoriented and growing somewhat depressed. The familiar landmarks on the Tenderloin’s edge all seem mysteriously foreign.
“Have I been here before?” he says out loud to himself. “Do I know this place? Where in the hell am I?”
He finds a familiar face outside the O’Farrell Theatre. The fat and balding security guard, an expatriate New Yorker dressed in a yellow slicker, smoking a cigaro and reading a romance novel. It occurs to Jacobins that a lapdance from Amber in the champagne room at the O’Farrell Theatre would probably kickstart his feelings. He remembers the intensity of her charged, wild red eyes. He remembers her supple, vibrant body moving over him, grazing him. He remembers how alive it made him feel. But the memory itself fails to generate an emotional response in the present. Jacobins shrugs and checks his wallet for the sufficient stash of $20 bills.
“Amber’s not working tonight Jake,” the guard informs him, looking up briefly, eyeing and scrutinizing as an assortment of Japanese businessmen file through the club’s brassy doors.
“Hmmm, that’s odd, she usually works here on Fridays.”
“It ain’t Friday, Einstein.”
Lost in confusion, Jacobins utters “E = MC squared.”
Jacobins wanders aimlessly down O’Farrell, through the squalor of the endlessly noisy and endlessly hopeless avenue, kicking halfheartedly at the loose newspapers and styrofoam cups blowing in the wind. He turns off his CD player and listens to the neighborhood sounds, hoping they will stimulate some sort of response. The endless yelling. The screaming. The wails. The desperation and depression in the voices of passersby. A prostitute on the corner of Larkin St. sizes him up, decides he’s an unsuitable john, and asks him anyway, dispirited, if he’d be interested in a date. Outside a dive bar on the corner of Hyde St., a female barfly runs into him, which startles him into a brief standstill, but it doesn’t startle her enough to keep her from dropping her pants on the spot and peeing on the sidewalk.
Jacobins turns his attention to the traffic. A fire engine races past, sirens wailing, top lights spinning red. Three 38 Geary buses packed to capacity speed past in quick succession. None of it means anything. The unpleasant smells of urine and dirt barely affect him. The luscious, precious aromas wafting from the bevy of Indian and Pakistani restaurants barely tempt his palate.
Jacobins moves silently through the Tenderloin’s theatre of the absurd and crosses the undefined, arbitrary, unmarked neighborhood borderline between the Tenderloin and Union Square, past the high-rise hotels and the malcontent tourists. Normally, these visitors are exceedingly mockable, since none of them had any idea just how truly miserable San Francisco’s weather can be during the summer months. Jacobins can always pick the tourists out: either they are underdressed and shivering, or they have succumbed to the elements and purchased one of those polar fleece vests sold in every booth and kiosk along Fisherman’s Wharf, black or gray with an ‘SF’ and an artistic representation of the Golden Gate bridge emblazoned over the heart.
But on this night, Jacobins simply eyes them as they scurry for taxicabs and awkwardly tote their shopping bags back towards their hotels. He can’t even generate enough sentiment to mock them.
“This is really messed up,” he says to himself, watching a cable car slowly work its way up Powell St. past the square.
---
“That was really messed up. God damn Death card.”
Emily sighs, slides shut the glass door, and sinks deeper into her excessively soapy water, closing her eyes and sipping from her glass of Chablis. Given her current financial constraints, these long soaks in oiled, gardenia-scented baths are about the only way to satisfy her Taurean need for luxury.
But even in the calm of the soft light emanating from the vanilla-scented candles scattered about the room, Emily can’t forget that look of sheer terror in her clients’ eyes when she uttered her standard line for the fifth card of the Celtic Cross spread, “This card crowns you and represents what could come into being,” and then promptly overturned the Death card.
San Francisco is a city that is simultaneously spiritually aware and spiritually clueless, and so it’s no great surprise that the market is oversaturated in astrologers, palmists, tarot card readers, I-Chingists, Reiki practitioners and pseudo-Buddhist hucksters. The once cordial Bay Area new age divination industry has become cutthroat, nasty, and not for the faint of heart. Emily advertises her services on the back pages of the weekly alternative readers as “Tarot on Wheels.” As far as she knows, Emily is the only practicing tarot reader who makes house calls. For the right price, she’ll even drive outside the 415 and 510 area codes. But she’s having minimal success keeping her business going, and the fact that the Death card keeps turning up in her readings doesn’t help when it comes time for collecting gratuities.
She could chalk up this evening’s business endeavors as another colossal disaster. Emily’s first house call was a pleasant and prosperous couple in their early 40s who had recently spent about $4.5 million to purchase a remodeled house on Leavenworth St. on Russian Hill. They were kind, polite, offered her green tea to drink and a silk zabuton on which to sit. Mr. and Mrs. Anderson were seeking some insight into their inability to conceive a child.
“We’ve been trying now for years,” Mr. Anderson explained, all the while consoling his silent and obviously distraught wife by rubbing her neck, “And lately we’ve been at it quite fervently. I’ve temporarily left my firm in order to concentrate on this endeavor. We’ve been quite systematic about it, with no result.”
Emily wiggled to and fro in her seat, trying not to reveal her impure and inappropriate thoughts: she was really turned on by the idea of regimented lovemaking, sex on a routine basis, orgasms as systematic and efficient as Mussolini making the trains run on time. She composed herself, somewhat ashamed at her nymphomania and her gutter-bound mind; after all, these two poor and sincere souls were pouring their hearts out to her, wondering aloud if having a child just wasn’t in the cards.
Emily passed them the deck and they selected the Queen of Pentacles as the key card. Emily would often add an 11th card to the 10-card spread, allowing customers to choose the extra card first, which would then take on a symbolic embodiment of the question at hand. In this case, the Queen of Pentacles, a.k.a. “the Mother Earth” card, was an excellent symbol of fertility. The Andersons were hoping that The Empress, the mother of all matriarch cards, would turn up somewhere promising. The Andersons spread out the deck across the pristine white carpet, and then reconstituted the deck using only their left hands before passing it back to Emily. A sense of desperation hovered in the air.
The cover card was the Seven of Cups, a card of wishful thinking and illusory success – an ominous opening salvo. The infamous blindfolded lady of the Two of Swords was a curiously encouraging crossing card, the miserly Four of Pentacles did nothing helpful at the root, and the quarreling Five of Staves was lingering in the past – a good card to have in the past, coloring that Two of Swords crossing with feelings of compromise and balance. Perhaps the couple had made some difficult career and life choices, and were struggling to adapt.
Then Emily got to the fifth card of the spread and up came the Death card. Mrs. Anderson gasped, and Mr. Anderson’s spirits plummeted.
“That can’t be good,” he bemoaned.
Of course, after completing the otherwise ordinary spread, which said little about the couple’s future parenting prospects and was heavily stocked in eerie or banal cards generally pertaining to the accruing of wealth – the industrious Eight of Pentacles as the outcome card; the Devil; a couple of pessimistic Sevens – Emily had to try to soothe their nerves and explain that the Death card, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. She tried in vain to convey the metaphoric meaning – how “death” itself should be interpreted as rebirth, transformation and freedom.
But there it sat. That starkly, oddly beautiful painting: the grim reaper riding a zebra with a scythe in hand, a flying flag imprinted with a black rose serving as a background. All of her attempts at explaining the potential benefits of discovering the Death card fell on deaf ears. Emily could see in the her clients’ hopeless eyes that she wasn’t going to get much of a tip.
The second house call was more of a typical, run-of-the-mill failure: a wealthy, overweight, slovenly man in Laurel Heights who only wanted sex. Emily wrapped that reading up quickly, not bothering to stick around and “work” for anything extra. In his reading the Death card turned up in the eighth place – the way he is perceived by others. Not a good omen. And he smelled bad.
The recollection of the night’s events compels Emily to gulp her wine violently as she watches her red-painted toenails wiggle beneath the spigot. She tries to meditate, briefly, but Eric, who barges into the bathroom, obviously three sheets to the wind, interrupts the silence.
“Hi Em,” he says, pleasantly, taking a piss directly on the other side of the glass. “Work OK tonight?”
Emily closes her eyes and submerges her head beneath the suds. Instinctively, she runs her left thumb over the smooth diamond still resting on her ring finger. It could have been worse, she thinks to herself. He could have asked for the ring back. He could have asked me to move. Was it out of pity or inner guilt that Eric let me stay?
The bathroom door shuts behind him and Emily resurfaces, rubs away the foam from her face and finishes off her wine.
“What a mess,” she says, out loud.
Emily continues the conversation with herself in her head, thinking about the fleeting glimpse she caught of Caroline as the two lovers stumbled past the kitchen, hastily exiting the perennially smoky apartment.
Caroline is everything I’m not: tall, blonde, buxom, proud, successful. She’s also a cokehead, but I’m an alcoholic, so I guess that’s a wash. Why should I be jealous? Eric’s really just a deviant, a charlatan with an impure heart. He sure made me feel whole though, made me feel alive.
Shit, what is the matter with me?
I’m thirtysomething years old and I live with a guy who broke my heart, and I live with another guy whose heart I broke ten years ago and still walks around catatonic, emotionless, like a sleepwalking zombie. But I need him around, I can’t live without Jacobins because he keeps the peace. If he weren’t here to maintain order I’d form a murder-suicide pact with Eric without asking him first.
God, I’m talking to myself again.
I need to get out of this house. Find a place on my own. Oh wait, the check to pay the car insurance bounced. Jake paid my July rent. Third month in a row that he’s done that.
I could always move home to Cincinnati. Hi mom, hi dad, no I don’t have a job or a husband or a clue what I’m doing with my life, and I haven’t found God yet. Can you throw out that Xavier student boarder and let me have my room back? That would go over really well.
I need to get out of my head.
I wish the Death card would leave me alone. It’s bad for business. The Death card, always the Death card. Except for that plush reading I handed Jacobins tonight. Best god damn spread of cards I think I’ve ever seen.
Jacobins, Jacobins, Jacobins. How does he work such magic? God, what a kiss. I’m a dupe for Jake’s spontaneous loveliness.
Get out, get out, get out of my head. Get out of this icy bath.
Emily’s bath no longer soothes the soul.
She quickly towels off, wraps herself in the plush white bathrobe that she’d swiped from the Westin Hotel St. Francis during a house call, and reminds herself that she needs to have her tattoo touched up – the maroon and black scorpion which traverses her right quad, tail on her right hip, pincers on the inside of her thigh.
Emily wanders aimlessly and barefoot into the kitchen, grabs an ashtray and the emerald colored bottle of cheap but not-altogether bad Chablis, and retires to her cold and clinically lit bedroom, where she’ll continue her nightly ritual of listening to all four CDs in her Nick Drake box set, half-heartedly masturbating and drinking herself into a stupor.
“Hey Em,” Eric knocks on her door, “did anyone call?”
She hates it when he uses that former term of affection. Disgusted, she removes the former engagement ring and hurls it across the room.
“I don’t know,” she replies. “I never use the landline any more. I think there were a couple of calls, but Jacobins erased the messages.”
“Figures. Damn it. I hate it when he does that.”
“Take it up with Jake,” she says, irritated with the interruption.
“I don’t want Jake to kick my ass.”
Emily turns up the CD player so that Nick Drake’s angelic yet troubled voice drowns out Eric’s grumbling, his haphazard stumbling up and down the hall, and the omnipresent sounds of Van Ness traffic. She lights a votive, pours out a glass of wine and sits on her floorbound mattress, contemplating repainting her toenails. But her compulsion and allegiance to her craft compels her to grab the deck of tarot cards by her bedside and shuffle them. She knows better than to do a reading for herself at this point, since negative energy breeds negative energy, and all she would wind up with is a reading telling her how negative she feels. But, for the hell of it, for a quickie gauging of her mood (her “karmic pulse,” so to speak), Emily shuffles the cards thrice and turns the top card over.
The Death card.
Emily shows the reaper her extended middle finger.
---
“Eric, this is Zig, it’s about 5:45 in the evening ... look Mr. Lynch, I couldn’t find your cell numberz, and I hate to call you at home ... listen Mr. Lynch, all pleasantries aside, we gotta talk. I’ve got some serious business-related issues I need to raise with you, concerningz both a specific sum of money I am due and the future of the thumbs on your hands, so I suggest you callz me back ...”
---
Jacobins’ minimalist meltdown continues.
He turns back at the corner of Powell and worked his way back through the chaos of O’Farrell to The Great American Music Hall, where he stands in line for an hour or so and buys a ticket for a touring band he’d never heard of. The famous red marquee reads:
TUESDAY
DRY SHAVE
Jacobins takes comfort in knowing that it is, in fact, Tuesday.
Dry Shave is a Los Angeles-based rockabilly/punk band, except that they can’t swing (the drummer consistently emphasizes the incorrect beats), which defeats the purpose of both rockabilly and punk rock. Jacobins stays for the entire 2-hour set, standing at the back of the lavish, ornate bordello-turned-ballroom, nursing a single bottle of Budweiser. The crowd is polite, yet disengaged – a combination of swing dancers dolloped up in 50s swag, too frustrated to dance, and a few mohawked college kids gently banging their heads. In the 30 seconds it takes for Jacobins to reach the exit, any impression the music may have made on him has vanished.
He wanders a block to the O’Farrell St. Bar, a pleasant local watering hole, where he sits on an end barstool and carefully imbibes a Guinness, watching the pool players and the patrons indulge in good humor. No one says a word to him, except for the sporadic apology when someone runs into him or steps upon his toes.
Jacobins leaves when the barkeep announces last call, contemplates going home but instead finds himself heading northward, up Larkin St., moving away from the action of downtown and toward Nob Hill’s posh residences. He probes his mind, searching for memories of sad events – his mother leaving his father; his grandmother’s death; Emily; Maria – but all he can do is remember how it felt to be sad, not actually duplicate the sadness within himself. He wants to cry, but can’t. He attempts to scream, and yet his voice refuses to rise.
He does a mental one-eighty and thinks of truly happy moments – the birth of his nephew; Emily snuggled in his arms in the morning; Maria’s hand gently running through his hair; Amber’s thorough and addictive lap dances – but again, just memories. No smiles grace his face. No laughs trickle out the corners of his mouth.
A few night dwellers trickle past him – a handful of homeless persons talking to themselves; an intrepid couple staring skyward, searching for the moon; a drunk and obviously spurned man, his dejected head hanging – but the streets atop Nob Hill are basically quiet. Jacobins admires the architecture, admires the quiet and the tree-lined streets, but, lacking any memorable or discernible colors beside the colors of night, he shrugs and wanders onward through the dip between the slopes, up Russian Hill and down the steep, dark descent.
He listens to some Pearl Jam on his CD player, a couple of songs, songs like Black and Once that, in past circumstances, had nearly driven him to tears. But he’s not drunk enough to weep, and the corresponding memories are unworthy of much merit – a long, glum night after Emily told him it was over; Jacobins listening to Pearl Jam on a jukebox in a 4:00 a.m. Los Angeles speakeasy; too drunk to see; his two obtuse lifelong buddies, Tim and Tom Karlovic, trying to console him and lift his spirits in the time-honored male tradition of soothing heartbreak, where the inconsolable one drinks himself to the point of sickness and his buddies point out what a slut and a whore and a cunt the inconsolable one’s now ex-love interest really was.
The memory of this particular incident, and the hangover the following morning, brings but an instinctive wince to Jacobins’ face.
Jacobins wonders if this is what loneliness truly feels like, wonders if he has finally succumbed to the disease of loneliness, allowed it to erode away any senses of hope or joy within his heart, allowed it to render him emotionally mute. On the flip side, maybe this condition of feeling nothing is, in itself, a feeling.
This is all too much for his Cal St. Northridge educated mind to comprehend. How long has he been walking? He actually looks at his bare right wrist, as if it will give him some guidance.
---
“Hey Eric, Zig ... it’s about 6:30 on Tuesday night, sorry to bother you at home again, but I still can’t find your cell phone number in this mess that is my desk ... hey man, I’m going to be up at Lake Tahoe managing some of my business affairs up there for the next couple of days, and so let’s get together and talk on Friday when I get back. I didn’t mean to be, you know, threatening or anything like that. I wasn’t implying that I was going to break off your thumbs if you didn’t pay me. I’m sorry about that ... quiet Zelda, I’m on the phone damn it! ... anyway, I’m not mad, I’m not mad! Let’s us get togetherz and talk, shall we? OK ... oh, I’m not mad Eric, I can assure you that Zig is not mad, OK, but it’ll piss me off royally if you tell me one more time that you didn’t get my messages ...”
---
Emily lays awake, staring at the opaque water stains on the ceiling, running her fingertips inside the fringes of her robe, along her skin, along the curvature of her left breast, and over the corners of the Death card, which is laying atop her belly button. She understands the astrological correspondence – the Death card, in fact, corresponds to Scorpio, the sun sign of her birth. But why does the Death card insist on popping up in all of her clients’ readings? Is she imposing her own negative energy on her querents, willing them to bring the Death card to the surface?
She is undoubtedly being mocked by her competition in the gossipy and competitive world that is the Bay Area’s Healing Arts industry. She can hear it in her head: Emily the charlatan. Emily the fraud. Unable to focus and distance herself. Unreliable. Untrustworthy. Why would a querent – a concerned customer – willingly fork over his or her hard-earned sheqels for such amateurish dreck?
Feeling discredited, Emily briefly contemplates calling up her old boss at the Medical Center and begging to get her job back.
The noise from Van Ness reduces considerably after 2:15, when traffic reaches its ultimate closing time post-haste. Nick Drake has played all four discs’ worth of songs, and Emily starts up the CD player once more, gently singing Nick’s melancholy lyrics in a whisper.
And for a moment she finds joy. Remembering his kiss earlier in the evening. His fierce grip. The oaf could break her neck if he wanted, and yet, within his clutch, she found (yet again) an overwhelming sense of safety.
Emily arouses her left nipple with her fingertips and allows herself the pleasure of memory: those mornings a decade ago in a grubby, ramshackle Northridge apartment, when Jacobins would convince Emily, with kisses and caresses, that staying in her lover’s arms would be far more enlightening and rewarding than hustling off to that 8:30 sociology class in Malibu she was always fretting about.
At this point her self-declared abhorrence of nostalgia kicks in. She snaps out of her late night daydream, sighs and reaches for the nearly empty bottle.
---
Jacobins reaches for the nearly empty flask in his inside pocket, drizzling the last drops of liquor onto his tongue. Alone in the deep night. Way into Wednesday by now. Well after 2:00 a.m., because the city is more or less asleep. Somewhat surprisingly, San Francisco doesn’t have the sort of late night fare or lifestyle one might expect from such a lively city. In general, the collective conscience that is San Francisco eats dinner between 7:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m., goes to the bars until the 2:00 a.m. closing time, and then retires after that, going home with whatever member of the collective conscience they had come across that night. After 2:00 a.m., the choices for dining and entertainment drop off considerably – a handful of all-night diners and coffee shops patronized mainly by the fringe dwellers, the night owls, the disheartened street poets, and a few large groups of good spirited souls (usually numbering 6-12 people, the persons all too hopelessly platonic with each other to ever feel hopeful, and too comfortable to ever feel sad). Jacobins himself is quite fond of Sparky’s, the all-night diner over in the Castro district, but that’s now a long ways away.
He contemplates returning to Union Square, where he could probably find Maura working the higher floors of the high-rise hotels. He still has a couple hundred in cash in his wallet and Maura would at least leave her mark, using her trademark combination of strategic hickey placement and memorized, erotic Sapphic odes. Again, it’s too far away. He’s fatigued and his feet ache within his ill-fitting shoes.
By now he’s reached the lower end of North Beach, almost to the wharf. He turns up Columbus, seeking out any place open at whatever the hell time it is. Jacobins concludes that his sudden lack of feeling corresponds with his nonexistent sense of time. He doesn’t wear a watch, keeping time purely with instincts. Other than the heavily clocked confines of his apartment – Emily has this fascination with timepieces, a few of them which are actually operational – he never really knows the correct hour.
Ever since he lost his 8-to-5 job at First St. National Bank, Jacobins has lived this bassackwards sort of life – sleeping during the day and wandering through the dark. And he never really sleeps; he just naps, never achieving that necessary state of dreaminess, never detaching his mind from his waking world. Without any sort of physical demarcation between one day and the next, he finds himself trapped in a perpetual, proverbial mental fog, unsure when Monday ended and Tuesday actually began. Time moves forward, then backward. One day runs into another. Three days pass and they seem like one. He changes the hour, the week, but every moment ends up amiss and drenched in continuous traffic noise.
This endless day has dulled his psyche around the edges. He can’t feel sad about something that happened yesterday, because he isn’t sure when “yesterday” actually occurred. How can he pick up and move on, how can he progress without the clarity gained from the passage of time? Without that sense of time, without the progression from birth to death, does Jacobins even exist, or is he just a ghost?
Of course he exists. And his feet hurt.
Pain. That’s a legitimate feeling.
OK, so Jacobins knows he’s still alive. The blisters developing on his feet reassure him of that. But he’d feel pain if he stuck his hand on a burner. That particular flavor of pain doesn’t count.
Jacobins can’t locate his emotions. Surely he can find them somewhere. In North Beach, of all places, in this famous quarter of San Francisco where bohemianism was perfected, where nightcrawling seems like it should be second nature, surely he can find somewhere to sit, to rest his feet, to lay his weary head against a wall and try to feel something. Anything. Anger. Fury. Passion. Jealousy. Envy. Maybe even love.
Chapter 2
“Good morning, A Beautiful Cup ... oh, ha ha, that’s very funny ... yes, I’ve heard that one before ... 10 or 11 times, actually ... I love you too, sir.”
Inga slams down the receiver, crosses her arms and sighs in Julio’s direction.
“Let me guess,” he says, leaning over the counter. “Some guy wanted to know the size of your cup.”
“It sucks when school is out,” she says, wiping down the espresso machine. “For the first time in my life I empathize with parents. I see now why they all wind up going insane.”
Julio shrugs, eyeing the newspaper, less concerned with Inga’s plight than the sudden inability of the Giants’ bullpen to hold a late-inning lead. Inga’s off in 10 minutes, and Julio will step up to the plate and try to foul off the morning rush hour crush until his cohort, the always-late Beverly, arrives at 7:15.
The morning and the cafe are reasonably still. A handful of espresso drinkers are lodged in the plush, deep chairs, reading The New York Times or typing voraciously on their laptops. The chair dwellers are dug in deep and there to stay – customers with strong allegiances to particular coffee shops get quite territorial. For an hour or so, it’s their table, their comfy chair. Arriving to discover someone sitting in their comfy chair would surely ruin their morning.
“Any trouble last night?” Julio asks, stirring the contents of his comically overlarge cappuccino cup, then leaning over the counter to find the volume control on the CD player hidden underneath.
Inga steps around the counter and collects the assortment of Tuesday newspapers scattered among the cafe’s empty seats, wiping down a couple of tables for the fourth or fifth time. “No problems. I didn’t need to call the police for any reason. A few barflies, but no leeches. Mostly kids. Young couples.”
“Oh, to be young again,” Julio laments on cue, removing his black Giants cap to reveal a rapidly graying head. “Staying out late, making mom and dad nervous. Takes me back 10,000 years in time.”
“That guy typing over by the back wall has been there for hours,” Inga lowers her voice, gesturing with a tilt of her head. “But he seems harmless enough. He didn’t say much of anything, and when he did he was polite.”
Julio takes a quick glance, quizzically arching his right eyebrow. Against the back wall, beneath the framed, grotesque, Hieronymus Boschian, acrylic rendition of the North Beach Jazz Festival, the unknown customer Inga speaks of types blindly on a laptop’s keyboard with his right hand, his eyes and attention fixated on a book in his left.