“We’ll take our chances. Why were you looking at Trevor’s porn?”
“Curiosity,” she admits. “I thought it might turn me on. It had the opposite effect.”
“It didn’t do much for me, either. Trevor used to show it to me when I was out here visiting. Told me he was trying to entice me over to the dark side.”
Then a thought hits Anna, who has the type of expressive face that registers every message she receives from her interior. “Do you know the photograph that Trevor has in the bathroom? Is that Charleston?”
“Yes, it is. Mind if I look at it while you’re getting my glass of V8 juice you promised?” I walk down the long hallway before taking a right into the tiny toilet area, where I see the blown-up photograph of the row of sumptuous mansions that line South Battery Street. The houses glitter in the rich overtones of a perfect sun-shot afternoon. It always got a laugh from his South Carolina visitors because Trevor would shout to us through the closed bathroom door, “I always think of Charleston anytime I find my body urging me toward excretion.”
Taking the photograph with me, I walk back into the living room and tell the story to Anna Cole as I drink the V8 that she has spiked with Tabasco sauce and lemon juice. “May I take this photograph, Anna? It’ll give a big lift to the people I’m meeting for lunch.”
“Yeah, sure,” she says, but with some reluctance. “But I’m going to miss it. Which house did Trevor grow up in?”
I was going to tell her the truth, but I think that people often need the mythologies they create. “He grew up in this one. On the corner of Meeting and South Battery,” I tell her.
“I knew he came from a life of privilege.”
“You were right on the money,” I say. “By the way, Anna, can I write down all the information about your stalker? I’m traveling with two cops, and I’d like them to run it through the system.”
I copy all the information in his wallet, then thank her for her help and give her our address. “If you remember anything that might help us locate Trevor, you can find us there. Sorry about the guy’s window. I surprised myself there, and it must have scared you.”
“I thought you were a nutcase,” she agrees. “Do you know how weird all this is, Leo?”
“Tell me.”
“I’ve gotten two letters from someone who claims she’s Sheba Poe. Also, phone calls—but I can tell it’s a female impersonator. Can you believe that?”
“Save the letters. They’ll be collector’s items someday.” I rise to my feet and collect the albums and photograph. “Thanks for your help. Here’s the phone number and address of where we’re staying. Keep in touch, kid.”
On the walk down to Washington Square, I think about my encounter with Anna Cole, and her reaction to me as a Southerner. I never knew how strange a breed of cat a Southerner is until I began to travel around the country. Only then did I learn that the Southerner represents a disfigurement in the national psyche, a wart or carbuncle that requires either a lengthy explanation or cosmetic surgery whenever I would stumble upon the occasional Vermonter or Oregonian or Nebraskan in my journeys. I could grow testy when I met up with folks whose hostility toward the South seemed based on ignorance. I once compiled a list in my column about the reasons people seemed to hate the South, and I invited my readers to add to the literature of contemptuousness a Southerner might encounter on the road. My list was fairly simple:
1. Some people hate Southern accents.
2. Some fools think all Southerners are stupid because of those accents.
3. Some dopes still blame me for the Civil War, though I remember killing only three Yankees at Antietam.
4. Many black people I have met outside the South blame me personally for Jim Crow laws, segregation, the need for the civil rights movement, the death of Martin Luther King, the existence of the Ku Klux Klan, all lynchings, and the scourge of slavery.
5. Movie buffs hate the South because they have seen Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, In the Heat of the Night, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Easy Rider.
6. A man from Ohio hates the South because he once ate grits at the Atlanta airport. He admitted that he put milk and sugar on them and thought it was the worst cream of wheat he’d ever tasted.
7. Many women who married Southern men, then divorced them, hate the South, as do any men who married Southern women and divorced them. All men and women who married Southerners, then divorced them, hate their Southern mother-in-laws—ergo the entire South.
8. All liberals based in other geographies hate the South because it is so conservative. They refuse to believe that any true liberals could also be Southern.
9. All women not from the South hate Southern women because Southern women consider themselves far more beautiful than women of the lesser states.
10. All Americans who are not Southern hate the South because they know Southerners don’t give a rat’s fanny what the rest of the country thinks about them.
That column struck such a nerve in the community that I received more than a thousand letters pro and con, so Anna Cole’s reaction to the South was not unprecedented.
From his first days in the city, Trevor Poe laid a claim as principal eccentric among the variegated tribe who frequented the Washington Square Bar and Grill. In all of its understated oddity and eclectic decor, it always struck me as a gauzy snapshot of the soul of San Francisco. Because of Trevor’s prominence as both a patron and a frequent performer, the place feels like a home away from home for us. Trevor had been given a window seat to welcome him to the neighborhood, and in many ways, he never surrendered that honorary table as he watched the great carnival of the city pass by in all the fey surrealism that North Beach has to offer.
When Leslie Asche—the greatest waitress on earth, in Trevor’s phrase—came to take his order, he pointed out the windows toward Coit Tower poised erotically on the summit of Telegraph Hill and asked her, “Darling, do you believe Coit Tower is an exercise in phallic symbolism, or a literal rendition of an erect penis?”
“I’m just your waitress, honey,” Leslie said. “I’ll get you what you want to eat and drink. You’ll have to hire your own tour guide.”
“There’s nothing I love more than a witty, unexpected answer from a sassy woman. Can your bartender make me a Bloody Mary I’ll never forget?”
“Mike, we got a rube in town. Wants to know if you can make a Bloody Mary.”
“A bloody what?” asked Mike McCourt (the world’s greatest bartender—Trevor’s words again). “Let me look it up in my bartender’s manual.”
That marked the beginning of Trevor’s long association with the Washbag, which became his headquarters, his refuge, and his hideaway from the home he never had.
Today, I am the first to arrive. Leslie puts me into a bear hug, then kisses me on the cheek like a sister. Mike McCourt blows me a kiss and makes me a Bloody Mary. The whole restaurant has marked Trevor’s sudden disappearance and all have been worried about both his disease and his whereabouts. It moves me when Leslie brings my Bloody Mary to Trevor’s table and motions for me to take a seat.
She tells me, “We’ll keep you posted on anything we hear about Trevor. If the little bastard was in trouble, he could’ve come to live with me.”
“You know how cats go off in the woods to die alone,” I say.
“Everybody who comes in here is looking for Trevor. We’ve got eyes all over this city.”
“Then we’ll find him,” I say.
Soon, the Charleston crowd begins to drift in, and the scene with Leslie and Mike repeats itself over and over. Our group has thrown parties for both of them when they visited Charleston with Trevor in the early eighties, before the AIDS epidemic detonated its quiet poisons through the bloodstreams of an unsuspecting gay population. By now, the newspapers across the Bay Area have become dense and swollen with the obituaries written by the partners and survivors—many of whom carry the virus themselves. It makes me weep to read them, and I always see the face of Trevo
r Poe in the rawness of the wording. It is a new and terrible literature delivering an ache of loss and a hopeless mourning over the death of boys.
We order light lunches and begin to compare notes from our morning’s work. Sheba enters the restaurant in her impenetrable disguise of everydayness and no one recognizes her. It surprises me that she did not greet either Mike or Leslie, and I let her know that.
“I’ve never met them,” she says. “I’ve never been here.”
“How’d the meeting with Herb Caen go after I left?” I ask. “It looked like the beginning of something sinful.”
“Full-page column. Tomorrow morning. Herb’s going to tell the story of the famous actress and her high school friends from Charleston who’ve come to hunt for her brother dying of AIDS. He loved the angle of Ike and Betty being black, Fraser and Molly being society broads, Niles being an orphan, and Leo being a brother columnist.”
We cheer, but Niles is clearly miffed. “Why did you have to tell him I’m an orphan? Why didn’t you tell him I’m the athletic director at Porter-Gaud or teach honors history?”
“Good copy,” I explain. “A pathetic orphan boy searching for a childhood friend dying of AIDS? We newspaper guys love hooks.”
Sheba has grown frustrated by this argument. “Leo’s a hermaphrodite, and Molly’s a lesbian whore, and I’m having an affair with President Bush. I just want to find my brother, okay? I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Niles. You know what we all think about you.”
“I have no idea how you think about me, Sheba,” Niles says.
“The same thing everyone else does: you’re the best of us. The very best, Niles. You’ve got character that comes from walking through fire when you were a kid. Your sister’s a nutcase for the same reason. Me and Trevor are both borderline cases because we didn’t do so well in the fire. But you and Betty—the fire made you stronger. It showed your mettle and proved your steel.”
For the next few moments we eat and drink in silence. Then Ike clears his throat and says, “Here’s what me and Betty found out: the chief of police handed us off to a cop whose beat has been the Castro for years.”
“But Trevor lived on Russian Hill,” Fraser says.
“Don’t worry,” Betty says. “Our boy’s well known in the Castro. This cop was fascinating. Told us right off he was gay. Had a dossier on Trevor. In fact, he said they once had a flirtation and he thought it might go somewhere. Trevor admitted he had a thing for guys in uniform.”
“I bet that’s why he always liked Ike,” I say.
“Shut up, Toad,” Ike says. “Trevor’s been picked up two or three times for public drunkenness. Got caught once for DUI. Paid a fine. Had to attend some classes. He was found in possession of pot four or five times, but that’s like being picked up for parsley in this town.”
“The most serious thing in Trevor’s file is he was picked up once for possession of cocaine with intent to distribute,” Betty reads from her notebook. “Again, he was fined for possession, but told the judge he was not guilty. And I quote here, ‘Your Honor, I plan to use every damn gram of it for myself.’ It got a laugh from the judge.”
“That’s our boy.” Niles grins.
“We called the cop who arrested Trevor for the DUI,” Ike says. “Cops are funny. He could’ve been pissy about it, being called out of the blue and everything. But I explained who we are and what we’re doing. He said that Trevor was the most gentlemanly, courtly, and comical drunk he’d ever picked up. Trevor told him, ‘Officer, it’s men like you who’re taking all the fun out of drunk driving. I’d be ashamed of myself if I were you.’”
“Jesus Christ.” Fraser puts her face in her hands. “If you had told me when I was fifteen that one day I’d be hunting for a sick homosexual who did drugs and had sex with a hundred other men, I’d have signed an affidavit that you were crazy as hell.”
“You were born with a silver service stuffed up your ass, Fraser,” Sheba says, her sudden fury silencing us into an abnormal discomfort.
“But you were born beautiful, Sheba,” Fraser says, shaken. “I’d trade for that any day of the week.”
“Do you think it’s made me happy? Do any of you think it’s made me happy, a single day of my life? Do any of you think of me and say, ‘God, I wish I were Sheba Poe?’”
“Leave Fraser alone, Sheba,” Molly says with an authoritative voice. “And let’s hear what Leo learned at Trevor’s flat.”
I pass around the four albums of photographs and mementos, which have turned out to be treasure troves. I see dozens of men I met over the years, smiling through time in the sheer enjoyment of their ineffable handsomeness.
“Jesus Christ,” Betty says as she and Ike turn pages. “Is there any such thing as an ugly gay man? These are the best-looking men I’ve ever seen.”
“Tell us about Anna Cole,” Molly reminds me. “Did you learn anything from her?”
I give an edited version of my encounter with Anna Cole and the lecher she had picked up. Already, I am feeling sheepish and uncertain about my outburst of machismo. I come up inadequate, if not quite wordless, when I describe my encounter with the beetle-browed stalker. I do not mention the pistol, but I do read out the license plate number, the Social Security number, and the number on the driver’s license of John Summey. I think my exploits will win me a round of well-deserved applause from my friends, but their full-frontal assault catches me off guard.
“You impersonated a police officer, you dumb son of a bitch!” Ike yells.
“You kicked in his window.” Molly is unable to hide her disgust.
“Have you lost your mind, Toad?” Niles asks.
“We’ll be lucky if John Summey doesn’t go straight to the cops,” Sheba says.
Fraser jumps in. “How do you know the guy was stalking her, Leo?”
“Because she told me,” I explain. “He was lying down on his goddamn floorboards. Why would anyone do that?”
Betty rushes in. “Lying down on his floorboards? I don’t know of a statute in a single state where that’s against the law. You kicked in his window. Intentional destruction of personal property.”
“You’re a journalist, Leo,” Molly says. “And the News and Courier would fire you if this story makes the local news.”
I say, “The hell with all of you. None of you were there. I did the best I could.”
“Were you trying to get laid, Leo?” Betty asks. “Was this gal pretty?”
“What difference does that make? I ran the goddamn guy off. The woman’s glad, so glad she let me into her flat and gave me these albums. She tells me that she’s got thirty boxes of Trevor’s stuff stored in her garage and she promised to help in any way she could. I think I did pretty well, to tell you the goddamn truth.”
“You’re right, Betty,” Molly says in disgust. “Leo was flirting, trying to get laid.”
“What is it with you women? Does every damn thing on earth revolve around sex?”
“Yep,” says Betty. The other women nod in agreement.
Niles says, “We’re operating in strange waters out here, Toad. All of us are in over our heads. We’ve got to make good, smart decisions. You screwed up, pal. But learn from it. All of us can learn about how not to do it just by listening to how you made a horse’s ass of yourself.”
Fraser says, directing the attention away from me, “On Monday, we start delivering lunches to indigent AIDS patients for a group called Operation Open Hand. The woman in charge told me and Molly that Trevor probably found himself living on a welfare check and got a room in some squalid hotel. Most likely, in the Tenderloin. We’ll be delivering lunch to the worst dives in the city. She told us we needed to be in the company of some of you guys because it’s so dangerous. A lot of times these gay men use aliases to avoid people like us who’re trying to find them. So we’ll deliver meals to those guys, then interrogate them. We’ll get addresses, phone numbers, everything. And sooner or later, we’ll find Trevor.”
CHAPTER 15 The
Tenderloin
Sunday falls upon us not as a day of rest but one of drowsy, melancholy, or, at best, enforced leisure. Since I was a child, God’s day has felt anxiety-fraught; the Sunday afternoon willies always leave a handprint on the middle of my stomach. I go to an early Mass and get back to a household gathered around the breakfast table. Opening the Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, we turn to Herb Caen’s column and read his piece, “The Queen of Sheba.” He is as good as his word, and his whole column praises the heroic efforts of the sex goddess Sheba Poe to locate her twin brother, Trevor, who has disappeared into that stricken underground world of AIDS.
Sheba opens a huge package of circulars that had arrived from L.A., featuring a photograph of Trevor in his dazzling prime that touches me to the core. “I hired a Boy Scout troop to put these up all over town,” Sheba says. “It’s a beautiful photograph. He looks just like me, don’t you think?”
Outside the limo driver honks three times. “Murray is going to ride us over to Powell Street,” I say.
“Why don’t we just stay around here and get drunk by the pool?” Sheba asks. “I hate when the Toad makes us go on field trips.”
“It’ll be interesting,” I promise.
“What’s on Powell Street?” Fraser asks.
“A surprise,” I say, “but one I promise you’ll like.”
On Powell Street, Murray rolls his eyes when he hears I am forcing my friends to take a cable car ride through the city to Fisherman’s Wharf. I think there might be a mutiny among my friends, who groan as they depart the luxurious limo and join a crowd of camera-laden tourists awaiting the arrival of the next cable car. In the storming of the cable car, I barely make it onboard, grabbing on to a back railing and hanging on for sweet life. The crowd is high-spirited as our car labors up the hillside. When we reach the summit of Powell Street, I look out toward the white-capped bay alive with the pretty slippage of sailboats and yachts. But I feel an uncomfortable danger when I realize that I do not have enough room to change hands or find purchase with my dangling right foot on the step I balance on. It is only after we pass through Chinatown, which smells like wonton soup and soy sauce and egg rolls, and begin a headlong dive toward the bay, that I have fears of my bright idea of a cable car ride turning life-threatening.