Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK 59 The Shapeshifter I was sitting in the Ambush one afternoon enjoying the crowd. It had been running hot and was still ramping up for Saturday night. My legs spread, my engineer boots propped on the boot rail of the meat rack, I felt hot. I was nursing an Oly, my favorite beer, when I felt my foot being moved. A dark-haired man with a short full beard and mustache was licking my left boot. He was on his knees directly in front of me. He looked up at me with big brown eyes, the whites showing under his dark irises. “May I clean your boots, sir?” “Clean ’em up good,” I ordered. Great pickup line! He looked familiar. I thought I had seen him gathering empty beer bottles around the bar and stocking cold ones on ice for the bartenders. Bottle boys, they were called. His dark complexion brought to mind the exotic Mediterranean dives in Marseilles or Tangiers. His accent was French. I thought of a younger, thinner, more handsome Peter Lorre, lurking not around Rick’s Place, but the Ambush. Then he was gone. So much for my boots. I saw him at the bar, talking to Larry Beach, the bartender. Larry looked in my direction. I’d last seen Larry in his Langton Street apartment on the floor with his legs over my shoulders. He had prepared an excellent meal of fresh clams steamed in white wine for the two of us. Larry scowled a dirty look, retrieved something from under the bar, and handed it to my would-be bootblack. The bottle boy came back. “Bear Grease, sir?” He held out a round tin of non-polish boot dressing for oiled leather. His sinewy hands had already started massaging my foot through the boot. They seemed almost double jointed in their dexterity. “If you do it right.” It’d been awhile since my boots had been properly dressed. The last time I had done it myself.Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK 60Jim Stewart His hands worked on my boots, massaging my feet through the leather. Finished, he cleaned his hands on a red bandana pulled from his right hip pocket. Those talented hands slowly started up my legs while gently rubbing the top of his head in my crotch. I pulled out a couple of dollars and handed them to my new bootblack. “Get us a couple of beers,” I said. He was back in a minute with a couple of Olympia longnecks. I nodded to the space on the meat rack next to me. As he hoisted his tight ass up onto the well-worn wood, I noticed his keys hung from the right side of his Levi’s. Mine hung from the left. I had a feeling we were headed for a hot night in The Other Room. We finished our beers and went back to my place on Clementina Alley. I was right. Luc instinctively knew what The Other Room was for. Luc was a moveable feast. Like truffles, a musky scent of mys- tery hung about him. One day, not too long after we met, he wanted to go to a little hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese restaurant called Cordon Bleu, on California Street. We got in the pickup and headed north. “I was in Vietnam, once,” Luc said, as we watched well- groomed gents window shop on Polk Street. We stopped for a light. A small framed antique oil painting displayed in an art gallery window caught my eye. It depicted a pair of crossed hands bound with a leather thong. Circling the hands was half a halo. The whole looked part of a much larger work that suggested St. Sebastian. “Hot,” I said as I looked at Luc. He too had spotted the painting. He crossed his hands above his head and rolled his eyes heavenward in homage to the beautiful soldier-saint shot full of arrows. The luminescence of the skin on Luc’s delicately strong hands did indeed look like they might belong to a third-century martyr. My Nikon waited. The light turned green. “So how did you end up in Vietnam?” I knew the French had been routed from Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Luc would have been about eight at the time.Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK Folsom Street Blues61 “When I was 16 my father was killed in an auto accident. My mother emancipated me. I dropped out of school in Switzerland and decided to travel. I went to Thailand, but ended up on a jungle boat tour that strayed into Vietnam. We were shot at but I learned to love the food.” I did some fast mental calculation. That would have been a couple of years before the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, and the start of the American buildup of the war. Maybe it was possible. I spotted a parking slot on California and maneuvered the truck into the tight space. We got out and headed back to the Cordon Bleu. It really was a hole-in-the-wall. It was long and narrow, with the door on the far left, and a large window on the right that allowed you to see the entire interior from the sidewalk. Inside was a long counter, with stools mounted on the floor, along one side. It seemed a smaller, scruffier version of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. It was nearly noon. The sun was out. Behind the counter, flames leaped up as chicken fat dripped on the fire below the grill. It was a sideshow for the diners. We spotted two stools with a man sitting between them. He saw our dilemma, slid his plate and water glass to the left, and gra- ciously gestured toward the two stools now together. We smiled and sat down. A tiny gray-haired woman behind the counter asked us something in a lingua franca I did not know. It seemed a mixture of Vietnamese, French, and maybe English. Luc smiled, nodded his head, and replied in kind. He turned to me. “Do you want the five-spice chicken? It’s really good and a good price. It’s always their special.” I did. Luc replied to the woman behind the counter. She grabbed two oval platters from a stack under the counter and scooped what looked like dirty rice onto each. Still holding both platters in one hand, she turned to the grill behind her and, using a pair of tongs, lifted two grilled half chickens off the back of the grill and placed one on top of each of the rice platters. The chickens were small, a bantam breed, but the breasts were large. A dozen or so grilled chicken halves remained on the back of the grill. On the front of the grill, soft white chicken skin puckered as it stretched Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK 62Jim Stewart over the cooking birds. It slowly began to blister and shrink and then hissed when the chicken halves were turned over by a tiny aged man. The woman turned back to the counter, set the platters in front of us, and, as if by magic, produced a small wicker basket with sourdough baguettes which she set in front of us. This all in less than a minute. She asked Luc something. “The,” he replied and then turned to me. “Do you want tea?” “Yes.” The woman understood my yes and set a small steaming vitreous-china pot and two small handless cups in front of us. The smell of oolong tea mingled with the rich five-spice aroma that infused the tiny space. The chicken was delish. The sweet star-anise reigned. Cin- namon, cloves, and lemony ginger supported the licoriceness of the anise in an exotic fusion. The place, the food, and our host- ess, conversing in pidgin French and chattering in Vietnamese, all combined to take us on a trip, while we never left the narrow confines of the hole-in-the-wall. I was whisked off to some pre-war Saigon side street, seduced, and died a little gourmand death in a city once known as Paris of the East. If fusion be the food of love, eat on. A denouement of beer-battered fried bananas sprinkled with sugar rounded off our repast. The sun was still out as we left the Cordon Bleu. “Let’s take a drive over to Marin County.” “Let’s.” I continued west on California to Divisadero, then north to the Marina, where I picked up Highway 101 to cross the Golden Gate Bridge. I glanced down at the old Civil War fort, Fort Point, far below at the south end of the bridge. Vertigo, I thought, where Jimmy Stewart once jumped into the bay to rescue Kim Novak from a fake suicide. Once over the bridge, we headed west, out by the old World War II bunkers on the Marin Headlands. They were the bunkers Jack Fritscher once showed to Robert Mapplethorpe. He shot his leather hood and piss pictures there. I pulled the pickup into an unofficial dust lot, where the adventurous often parked. The fog had come in for the afternoon. Although we were less than a mile Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK Folsom Street Blues63 from the Golden Gate Bridge, we could only see the very tops of the two towers. “Want to go down the path there to the bay?” I said. Like the parking lot, it was unofficial, dusty, and eroded. I knew it was easy going down, harder coming up. You had to be careful where you placed each step and look for scrubby wild bushes to hang on to in case the ground gave way. “Yes,” Luc said. “I’ve never been down there.” Luc knew where to find that little place in Chinatown where you ate in the kitchen, or the little bar that survived both the Gold Rush and the earthquake and still drew San Francisco’s lonely men. He knew the best off-Broadway performance art in the City. I knew the wild places, the rambles of bushes in Buena Vista park, the trails at Lands End. Places that had not yet been tamed and controlled by some recreation department or community com- mittee. Places where you could commune with nature au naturel while you got it on with your fellow man. I also knew Ringold Alley, Dore Alley, places for the best impromptu sex after the bars closed at 2:30 a.m. I knew Hallam Alley had a door that led straight into the Barracks baths. Yes, I knew the wild places where you met the wild men of San Fran- cisco in the 1970s, before neighborhood watchers with cell phones reported indecent exposure and lewd acts. You weren’t there if it wasn’t for lewd and lascivious acts. We slowly made our way down the eroded path in the fog. No mishaps. No one was there on the narrow dirty beach. Despite the cool air from the fog, we stripped and frolicked in the bay. Muf- fled foghorns played a coastal score as we made the two-backed beast against a gnarled driftwood tree and died a little death. We heard applause. Ever the actor, Luc stood and bowed. I saluted, with a sheepish grin, to applause and whistled cheers. A fishing boat, returning with the catch of the day, had cut its motor and drifted, silently in the fog, close to shore for the entertainment of the three fishermen onboard. I’m sure Luc and I provided them all with great fisherman’s tales that they traded for free beers and shots wherever they hung out.Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK 64Jim Stewart In the fall of 1976, President Gerald Ford visited San Francisco. Again. A year earlier, on a trip to California, the unelected- appointed President from Michigan had narrowly missed assas- sination. Twice. On September 4, 1975, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme was wrestled to the ground in Sacramento when she tried to take a shot at the President. In San Francisco a couple of weeks later, on September 22 nd , when Ford left the St. Francis Hotel by a side door, Sara Jane Moore tried her hand at assassination from four feet away with a .38. Billy Sipple, a gay man still in the closet, deflected Moore’s shot and most likely saved the President’s life. The press outed Sipple. California was important to Ford. The state’s ex-governor, Ronald Reagan, had tried to steal the GOP nomination from the sitting President. Ford won the Republican Party’s top spot. He returned to San Francisco for a GOP fundraiser. The local politi- cians held court for the President at a fancy downtown hotel, the Sir Francis Drake. My landlord, Clarence, had two tickets to the affair. “You’re from Michigan, aren’t you?” Clarence asked me one day. “Born and bred.” “Are you a Republican?” My Michigan family’s ancestors had voted Republican since Lincoln, probably since John Fremont, if truth be known. I had broken over a century-long family tradition by voting for Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964. “I guess you could say I’m an Independent,” I said. I had actually registered in San Francisco’s City Hall as a Democrat, so I could vote in the primary. “What do you think of Ford?” I wasn’t sure I liked where this might be headed. There were those who hated Ford for pardoning Nixon. Some thought if you were from Michigan, like Ford, it was somehow all your fault that Nixon hadn’t ended up in prison. Clarence must have seen my dilemma. “The reason I asked,” he said, “is that I have two tickets for a Ford fundraiser at the Drake. The President’s going to be there. Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK Folsom Street Blues65 Now, I wouldn’t give that son of a bitch two bits,” Clarence con- tinued, “but I hate to throw away the tickets. You can have them if you want. I’m sure there’ll be a big buffet and probably an open bar.” “Sure. It might be interesting.” Clarence handed me a small envelope much like a wedding invitation. I pulled the card out of the envelope and ran my finger over the script. It was engraved. “I don’t have to give them any money, do I?” “They’ll give their pitch. Just say no.” “Thanks.” Luc was delighted when I asked him if he would like to meet President Ford. As an actor he had never played a role where he met an American president. “Do I bow or anything, like meeting the Queen?” “Only if you want to. You can curtsy if you like.” Luc did a fake curtsy with his best Peter Lorre smile. We both burst out laughing. We decided we should get dressed up a little, even though the occasion was not formal. My old reliable tweed jacket would stand in again. Instead of the Levi’s, however, I found a pair of gray flannels that would lend me a certain young professorial air, as if I were on the faculty at Berkeley, or at least San Francisco State. Luc arrived. He was dashing in an Edwardian Norfolk suit from a smart boutique on the Right Bank in Paris. At the last minute I grabbed my Nikon. We took a cab to the Drake Hotel. We were fashionably late. There were no lines out the door of the hotel. Inside, when we inquired, we were directed to a side door off the main lobby. Security was everywhere. We were told to wait in a little hallway while our invitation was checked. “Where did you get this invitation?” “A friend gave it to me. Is there a problem?” “Just a moment, please,” said a man in a black suit with a suspicious bulge under his jacket. He started to leave the room when an idea struck me. “I’m from Grand Rapids, Michigan,” I raised my voice a little, “and he’s on a mission from France.” I nodded towards Luc. Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK 66Jim Stewart Grand Rapids was Gerald Ford’s home town. In a few minutes Black-suit returned. “What’s that?” Black-suit asked, pointing to my camera. “A Nikon,” I said, “I’m a photographer from Grand Rapids, and I want to get some pictures of our hometown hero.” Black-suit nodded and took the invitation. We went on into the ballroom. As soon as we were through the door, I realized what part of the problem had been. We did not look like Repub- licans. Most of the men and the few women in the room had the look of confidence, of privilege, and of the grooming and tailoring that wealth and power convey on people. They did not look at all like the rural Republicans I had grown up among. The gathering was not nearly as large as I had expected. We helped ourselves to the buffet laden with jumbo shrimp, imported cheeses and what looked like South American grapes and other sundry finger foods. No Cesar Chavez fruit here. Evidently Alice Waters’ “local and seasonal” mantra held no sway here either. There was neither California nor imported wine on the table. There was an open bar with mixed drinks and a bartender who I’m sure expected to be well tipped. He exuded that smart, snappy courtier edge-of-gay that causes Republicans to tip well and gays to snicker. We made our way across the room looking for the President. He was not here. At last, a rising in the volume of the crowd noise gave a clue he had arrived. People started moving toward one end of the room where Ford had evidently entered. We followed them, leaving our plates on some empty chairs. There he was, bigger than life, the President of the United States, POTUS. Dodging Republicans and black suits I was able to get off a few pictures of the President. I wasn’t really satisfied with any of the shots I got, due to the crowd and the black suits that kept within a close circle of POTUS. Black suits kept watching me, as if they thought my Nikon might be Sara Jane Moore’s snub- nosed .38. I ran out of film. I looked around for Luc. Where was he? Then I turned back to the President and saw Luc shaking hands with him. He let go of Ford’s famous big football paw and exe- cuted a smart stage bow, exactly like the one he had given the Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS WORK Folsom Street Blues67 voyeuristic fishermen who had caught us in flagrante delicto on the beach in the fog a week before. Luc had played his role of meeting the President of the United States to perfection and then taken his bow. He didn’t curtsy, any way. He spotted me and came over. “Here,” I said. “take the camera. I haven’t shaken hands with him yet.” I made my way through the crowd and did just that. Somehow it seemed anticlimactic. The true theater had been gain- ing entrance and Luc’s perfect stage bow in front of the President. I had pictures of POTUS. And we both had shaken the hand of the most powerful man on Earth. We left the Drake Hotel and took a cab to the Ambush. Luc, the Parisian dandy, soon left with a Francophile. They were off to do what? Something French? Perhaps sip Armagnac, smoke hash- ish, and read Rimbaud while lounging naked on an Aubusson carpet? I stayed, feeling overdressed at the Ambush. “Hey dad!” I looked up. Looking down was a youth, no more than 21 or 22. He had let his dark hair and beard grow, untrimmed. He looked a hippie leftover from The Haight a decade ago. “Want to buy a starving grad student a beer?” “Get us two,” I said. I handed him two singles. “Tip the bartender,” I said. “He’s a friend of mine.” He returned with a couple of beers. “So what are you doing your grad work in?” I said as he squeezed his young butt onto the meat rack next to me. “Poli sci, at San Francisco State.” “Poli sci. You might be interested in this hand,” I said. “You’re right there, dad.” He grabbed my right hand. He didn’t shake it but rather wrapped his fingers around it as if mea- suring its girth. I made a fist with my fingers pointing out. He started stroking it. “Do you know what this hand did just an hour ago?” I said. “Tell me about it,” he said. I could see by the growing bulge in his Levi’s he was interested. “This hand shook the hand of POTUS,” I said. “Who’s POTUS?” “President of the United States,” I said. “Not Gerry Ford! Not the man who can’t chew gum and Next >