Half Moon Bay: A Novel (Clay Edison Book 3)

He wasn’t Fritz back then. He was Fred, and while he wasn’t a flower child, neither was he the monster he’d become.

He was young. He rode a motorcycle and had hair down to his waist. That sufficed to put him on the right team.

Us versus Them.

Them: parents, cops, the university, anyone over thirty; Nixon and Westmoreland, all the architects of carnage; polluters and exploiters and those who failed to comprehend that change was in the air or, worse, had sniffed at its spicy perfume and proceeded to wrinkle their nose.

Us: everyone else. Who lived by their own rules; who understood that love was free; who believed there was more to life than a paycheck, two point five kids, and a white picket fence; who knew Mother Nature possessed infinitely more wisdom than an army of iron-eyed men in lab coats.

A simplistic way to divide the world. Yes. Was the alternative better? Look at us now, balkanized and so much the weaker for it. At least they only had one choice to make.

Us/Them.

Rough around the edges, Fred. Part of his appeal: the fringed jacket and the boots. Very Easy Rider. He called himself a nomad. The white supremacist shtick—that was new. To her, anyway. Six months ago, after hearing about the park, she’d started searching for him. She checked Facebook. LinkedIn. In her mind he’d grown up and become a stockbroker.

A 2014 article in the Chronicle Sunday magazine marked the twentieth anniversary of the Anthony Wax murder. Fritz’s portrait put him in his cell at San Quentin, ink-dark arms hanging through the bars. He hadn’t aged well, in several respects, but the face belonged unmistakably to the same man.

It gutted her. She ran to the bathroom and threw up.

They’d met at a party. Nothing serious. Three or four nights. She shared a house on Derby Street with a bunch of girls. He’d pull up on his bike and gun the engine, and she’d run out and hop on behind him, and they’d zoom around the hills while she hugged his body, taking in the grubby lights of the East Bay, the water’s black ellipsis, the San Francisco skyline, dazzling, unattainable. Afterward they’d return to her room. He had a surprisingly tender touch. Five nights at most. Once they pulled over by the side of the road, gravel under her bare feet. Maybe it had happened then.

The noise of the bike spared them having to make conversation. God knew they didn’t have a lot to talk about. She allowed that he was intelligent after a fashion, albeit crude. He boasted about dropping out of high school, as if that was supposed to impress her. What did they have in common, really, except enthusiasm for psychedelics and disdain for the pigs? She had a BA in cell biology from Colorado State University, going to waste, if you asked her parents.

Fred told her he was thinking about joining up. Marines.

Why in the world would he do that, she demanded. Did he want to be a baby-killer?

Looking back, she felt bad about raining on his parade. He had limited options.

Still, she was frankly relieved when he stopped showing up. That was that. Fun while it lasted. Like the rest of her peers, she fancied herself a sailor on the seas of life. Why spoil nice memories with petty bourgeois resentment? She’d participated willingly. They’d never agreed to anything beyond the next morning.

By her second missed period, she had no means of contacting him. She didn’t have his number. As far as she knew, he didn’t own a phone. He might well be halfway to Da Nang.

She asked the friend who’d hosted the party about Fred with the bike.

The girl said Who?

Gayle couldn’t even be certain he was the father. By the standards of the era, she was tame, but she had slept with another man in the preceding months, the drummer in a band that had rolled through town. The timing didn’t seem to fit, unless she’d counted wrong. She couldn’t contact that guy, either. Any decision was hers alone.

Roe v. Wade was over a year out. But this was California, not Alabama. Women always found ways. You went to the right doctors and said the right things. She made an appointment and rode the bus into the city. She went into a waiting room, made herself known, and sat down in a sticky chair. She leafed through a magazine but found she couldn’t read anything. She tore out a subscription card, kneading it between her fingers, the paper breaking down till it felt as soft as lambskin. When at last the window squeaked open and they called her name, she stood up and walked out, as though the voice summoning her was judgment itself.

Weeks dragged. She carried on pretending, kept smoking and drinking and dropping acid. One morning she woke up sick as a dog. Drenched in sweat, hugging the toilet, she felt herself laid bare, not half-digested vegetables bobbing in the bowl but waterlogged tatters of her soul. She wanted it, this life striving inside her, wanted it with a desire that bled into madness. The primitive force of the emotion, its raw savagery, shamed her. Mine and yours had ruined the world. Yet she curled up on the floor, jealously cradling her midsection like it was a toy another child had tried to steal.

Speculation abounded about the culprit. Her friends expressed disbelief when she told them it was some biker guy she barely knew. They wouldn’t have kept it. But none of them had experienced what she was experiencing.

Her parents she hadn’t spoken to since leaving home. She couldn’t bear the thought of coming to them on her knees, having proven their worst fears. Her sister was no better.

Go it alone. The seas of life got choppy. Part of the journey.

During her second trimester, circumstances began to deteriorate. She lost her job, waitressing at Spenger’s, down by the train tracks. She was showing through her apron. The manager told her they couldn’t have her serving families. He’d gotten comments. She could stay if she put on a wedding band, but she refused to do that.

Too sick and wiped out to job-hunt, she squandered time, napping, reading the funnies, observing with a peculiar indifference as the balance in her checkbook plummeted toward zero. The nurse at the clinic said it wasn’t typical to have morning sickness that late in the game, but she continued to throw up much of what she ate.

While she’d stopped popping pills, she did continue to smoke the odd joint to take the edge off her nausea. She wept at the drop of a hat. Another reason the manager cited for letting her go: Her red eyes and red cheeks and tremulous voice bothered customers.

She hit her overdraft limit. Her housemates carried her for two more rent cycles. She could sense their growing discomfort, though. She packed up her few worldly possessions and left.

Her cousin Barry was a lecturer at the law school. Prior to that they’d never socialized. He was a Young Republican. Fifteen years down the line she would hold his hand while he lay in a San Francisco hospice, being eaten alive by AIDS. In 1971 he was closeted, fast-talking, Them in horn-rims and a tweed blazer. He frowned to find her on his doorstep, suitcase in hand, begging to pee. But he didn’t phone her folks, and he moved to the couch, surrendering his bed to her. There she rode out the final weeks.

On the evening of September 5, Barry brought her to the hospital in a cab. He sat outside the delivery room, departing midmorning to teach a class. His departure elicited titters from the nurses. Not the first husband to flee right as things got hairy.

Six pounds, fourteen ounces. Twenty inches on the dot. He came out purple, sporting a fringe of black hair like some middle-aged accountant. He did not cry. She began to yell. Something was wrong, he was dead, she had killed him with her bad habits and her inadequacies. They suctioned him out and the doctor gave him a hard slap on the behind and he emitted a thin wet sound, like a thread drawn through milk, and she believed that he would live.

She named him Marc.

“With a ‘c,’ ” she said.

She paused so I could write it down. I noticed her leaning toward the page, wanting to ensure I’d recorded the correct spelling.

“When they gave me the form for the birth certificate, I didn’t know what to put down for the father. I was confident that it was Fred, because the other guy was African American, and the baby didn’t look it, although I now know that pigmentation can take a while to change. They came back to collect the form and I still hadn’t completed it. I could tell what they were thinking. Loose woman. So many men, she can’t say who knocked her up. It gave me a taste of what was to come.

“I left the hospital without handing it in. I think I was supposed to finish it at home and mail it in, but I never got around to it. I didn’t need a piece of paper from the state.”

“Where did you go?” I asked.

“Back to Barry’s. I was totally unprepared. I didn’t own a crib or clothes. They’d discharged me with some diapers and formula samples. They didn’t schedule a follow-up. ‘Goodbye and good luck.’ That’s how it was. Right off the bat I had enormous trouble nursing. I had the baby sleeping in the bed next to me, and I was terrified I’d roll over and crush him, so I’d lie there until he started crying, and then I’d fumble around, helpless, while he got madder and madder, and louder and louder. You’re supposed to just figure it out. It was ludicrous, but I didn’t realize that. Every signal I’m getting is telling me it’s my fault he won’t eat. Meanwhile he’s screaming and waking up the whole house, Barry’s roommates are threatening to move out and leave him on the hook for the lease. He bought me a copy of the Dr. Spock book, and I stayed up till dawn, reading it cover to cover. The message was essentially the same: ‘You know more than you think.’ But I didn’t.”

Her voice had taken on a honed edge.

“I didn’t know,” she said, “and it demoralized me to be told I did, again and again. It’s a message that shames women for asking for help. It discourages us from demanding the kind of minimal institutional support any sane, developed society should take for granted.”

Maternal nutrition and perinatal health.

The sociology of mothering practices.

I said, “I can’t imagine how you coped.”

Gayle shook her head. “I was young. I had energy. After about two weeks I told Barry I was leaving so he wouldn’t have to throw me out.

“I bounced from one friend to another. I was better off than many women, who don’t have any safety net whatsoever, or have to contend with abusive partners.

“One night—it must have been November—I truly had no place to go. Everyone was full up or out of town for Thanksgiving. All night long, I sat at a bus stop with the baby in my lap. Luckily we had an Indian summer. But I could sense the weather starting to turn, I knew I had to get us indoors.

“Finding a new place to live turned out to be a lot more difficult than I expected. Barry had insisted on giving me three hundred dollars, but the problem wasn’t money, it was that nobody would rent to me. I’d show up to answer the ad and the landlord would ask about my husband. I’d say, no, it’s just the two of us. Wouldn’t you know, he’d suddenly remember he’d promised the place to someone else. They probably assumed I was a prostitute who’d stiff them. The parts of town I could afford and where they didn’t have an issue with a single mother, I didn’t think it was safe to be.”

Overtones of race and class, hastily glossed over: “I was terrified of getting mugged. Walking around with newspaper stuffed in my bra, subsisting on Hershey’s bars and milk, and nursing in public restrooms. Finally, I found a tiny room above a service station on San Pablo. The conditions were appalling. You accessed it by climbing up a ladder, through a trapdoor. I had to cradle the baby in one arm and climb with the other. The walls and floor were bare wood, with nails sticking out. It was meant for storage. The manager of the station would sleep there himself when he was fighting with his wife. He’d put in a cot and a cold-water sink, but there was no insulation. I bought a space heater. If I left it running for more than thirty minutes, the air got terribly stuffy, so I had to keep switching it on and off, opening and closing the window. During working hours the racket from the garage was deafening. Gasoline fumes leaking through cracks in the floorboards. I got migraines. I didn’t want to think what it might be doing to the baby.

“That’s what the manager said when I first approached him. ‘This ain’t no place for a baby.’ But clearly he wanted the money more. He charged me twenty-five dollars a week—an outrageous amount, for what it was. I told myself it was temporary. I just needed some short-term stability to get back on my feet.

“I did my best to make it livable. I scavenged. I got a crib for three dollars at a yard sale. The stroller I picked up for free. It was one of those rickety aluminum contraptions, a plastic seat and a sunshade, and a wire basket underneath for groceries. The seat was yellow, with sunflowers. It was sitting out on the sidewalk, a sign taped to the handle. YOURS IF YOU NEED IT. The sunshade had a rip, it rattled like a jalopy, but the wheels worked.

“I was as frugal as humanly possible, short of stealing, but without a source of income I burned right through the money Barry had given me. I took a gamble and went to Mr. Brenk, my old boss at Spenger’s. I said I didn’t have to be on the floor, I could clean or wash dishes. I’m looking him in the eye, claiming this, and meanwhile I’ve got the baby in the stroller and I’m pushing him back and forth so he’ll stay calm. Brenk stared at me like I was certifiable. But he said we could give it a try.

“I’d show up late, after hours. The baby had learned to sleep anywhere, under any conditions. I’d park him in the corner of the kitchen and do whatever they needed me to do: mop up, scrub toilets, fold linens, whatever. Eventually I started helping with light prep work for the next day. I got to be pretty good. Bear in mind, I’m the only woman in the kitchen. The things they’d say to me…It got so I stopped hearing them, I’d put my head down and chop, chop, chop.”

Weary with the memory.

“Eventually, the sous chef realized I was competent with a knife. He asked if I wanted to start coming in before service, to help out with more of the involved tasks. He was a nice guy. Pablo. He had a crush on me, but he was shy about it, never pinched me or flicked water down my shirt like some of the cooks did. I’m amazed I didn’t sever a finger. We were on completely opposite schedules, the baby and I. We got back from the restaurant at five in the morning, when he was waking up for the day. I had to wait for him to nap so I could close my own eyes. I never felt rested.”

I must have betrayed something, because she said to me, “You have children.”

“A daughter. Nine months.”

“How’s she sleeping?”

“Could be better.”

A brief smile, decaying into sadness.

She said, “Your world contracts. All I did was go back and forth from the garage to the restaurant. Aside from the kitchen staff I didn’t see much of people. My old friends couldn’t relate. They got stoned, listened to music, talked politics. Socially I was useless. I’d glance at the headlines and none of them would make sense. I didn’t hear about Nixon going to China until a week after the fact, and the only reason I did find out is…”

She shook her head in disbelief. “I used to change the baby in the women’s lav. I’m crouched down, newspapers on the floor, trying to corral him, trying not to get baby shit on me. Lo and behold, there’s the son of a bitch, waving from the tarmac, and a green glob lands smack in the middle of Pat’s face…It was lonely. Very lonely. Every now and then, I went to visit Barry. He got a kick out of the baby. He’d buy him gifts. He…”

A beat.

“The teddy bear, and the blanket,” she said. “Those were from Barry.”

I glanced at the eviscerated doll.

Bright happy blue.

One eye dangling.

Gayle Boyarin cleared her throat. “It got hard to be around him. My issue, I guess. He’d put himself out for me, and I didn’t like feeling beholden. Not until we both got older, and he got sick, was I able to think of myself as his peer. And he was forever trying to convince me to go home. The break came when he invited us over and handed me a bus ticket for Denver. He’d gone ahead and bought it without consulting me, and it made me so angry, because it felt like he was telling me to quit. Negating my noble struggle.”

Briefly she sat back in her chair. Too relaxed. She drew in a sharp breath and bent forward over the desk, pushing out the words:

“It happened in June.”

I calculated rapidly. Nine months old, give or take.

“We were still living above the garage. It was a Monday. The best day of the week. I didn’t work Monday night. Fingers crossed the baby would sleep until four or five on Tuesday, and I could sleep, too. That was heaven. That morning, I took him to San Pablo Park and put him down on the grass. He was wearing a green shirt, and I remember thinking that he was like a little lizard, shimmying on his belly, babbling nonstop. Everyone thinks their child is a genius, but the way he took the things in, absorbing, studying the sky, my face…I’d talk to him about whatever came to mind. Old movies. The Krebs cycle. When I was awake enough to appreciate it, everything about him was novel and wonderful.

“I nursed him, then we went back to the garage for a nap. The plan was to wait for him to get up again and spend the remainder of the day looking for FOR RENT signs. I put him in the crib, took an aspirin, and got into my cot, listening to the banging below, wondering how I was going to get to sleep. I smoked a little dope to help me relax. The next thing I knew I woke up and the sun was going down.”

The disorientation; the panic and self-loathing. I recognized all of it, viscerally.

“I jumped out of bed, mad at myself for oversleeping, and screwing up the schedule. I thought we might still be able to squeeze in some apartment hunting if I hurried. I was in such a rush that I didn’t notice he wasn’t moving or making noise. I put on my shoes and went to fetch him.

“He was bluish gray. My first thought was he was cold. It got so chilly in the room, I was still drowsy. ‘Let’s go, honey, we have to go, we’re going to be late.’ I gathered the blanket around him and picked him up, and his body had a, a, a heaviness.”

Beyond remembering, now; seeing and feeling, just as she had seen and felt. She pressed against her shut eyes. Tears broke through and streamed down her cheeks.

“His head rolled forward, against my neck, and his skin was like ice. I almost dropped him. I still wasn’t getting it. I climbed down the ladder, going, ‘Shhh, shhh,’ like he was crying and I was trying to pacify him, even though he wasn’t making a sound. I wasn’t getting it but I was. I knew. I knew.

“The garage was closed. Everyone was gone for the day. The manager had a phone in his office, I wasn’t allowed to use it. I grabbed, I think it was a can of motor oil, or something else heavy. I threw it through the glass on the office door and let myself in. I dialed the operator and said it was an emergency. That was how it worked, before 911, you had to wait for them to connect you to the hospital. A woman picked up. I told her my baby isn’t breathing. She started barking questions at me, does he have a pulse, what does he look like. She told me to take two fingers and press down on his heart, then breathe into his mouth. I put my mouth on his and he felt so cold. I was used to kissing him, or feeling him against me while he nursed, and, but…The coldness, it was totally repulsive, it made me physically ill. I kept wanting to pull away. I don’t know what that says about me or the kind of person I am. I could feel his bones bending, his stomach was swollen up with air, but he wasn’t responding or breathing. The phone kept slipping from my ear. I put it down on the desk and I could hear the nurse shouting for my address. I couldn’t remember the number. I should’ve just said ‘the service station on San Pablo and Virginia.’ I didn’t think of that. I started knocking the papers off the desk, opening drawers, trying to find something with the address written on it. I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it. The whole place stank of gas, and paint; there’s grease stains on the floor, and I’m the one who brought us there. I’m the one who let him sleep in a room full of poison. I abused my body. I wouldn’t put on a wedding ring, I wouldn’t go to my parents, or back to Barry. Meanwhile, the nurse keeps screaming at me. ‘Where are you?’ I didn’t know what to say. I was nowhere.”

Sweat sheened her face.

“I put the phone back in the cradle.

“I wrapped him in the blanket and put him in the stroller. I buckled him in so he wouldn’t fall out and left the garage and started walking.

“I went over to the tracks, behind the restaurant. They’ve turned the neighborhood into a mall now. It used to be industrial. I decided to throw myself in front of the next train that came through. But they’re so slow. And they really slow down right at that spot, maybe to five miles per. There was no way it could end in anything other than farce. They’d stop the train, arrest me and put me on trial. Everyone would find out. That’s what I was worried about. I didn’t think I could bear it, everyone knowing about me, and thinking that that was the person I was.

“I turned around and started walking up University, trying to work up the courage to run into traffic. Each time a car went by, and I stayed on the sidewalk, I could feel my resolve fading. I remember seeing a policeman, he smiled at me and wished me a good evening…I ended up on Telegraph. I was thirsty and light-headed, and I went looking for someone who could give me a glass of water. Everything was closed, so I walked around the corner, to the park. I thought there might be a water fountain. But there wasn’t any. I didn’t know that. I didn’t hang out in People’s Park very much. It had never been my scene. The place was a bit of a shambles. People would leave tools lying around, and anyone could bring flowers or seeds and plant them wherever they pleased.

“I pushed the stroller over and sat down against a tree. Some people were having a bonfire, playing the guitar. A boy came over and invited me to join them. ‘We’ve got wieners.’ I told him, ‘No thanks, I’m just resting my legs.’ I asked him for water and he said they had beer. So he brought me some of that, and gave me some of his joint. He said they were building a stage. It would be a zone of total freedom. Anyone could get up and speak their minds. He asked, was I sure I didn’t want a wiener, and then he went back to his friends.

“I got up to look at where they were building. They’d cut trenches for footings. The earth was broken up and it looked soft. It made you want to lie down in it. I went and found a shovel and dug down about three or four feet. It didn’t take long, the soil was already loose. I took Marc out of the stroller. I kissed him on the forehead and bundled him up in the blanket. I tied the corners so it wouldn’t come undone, laid him in the hole, and began replacing the dirt.

“The boy came over and asked what I was doing. I think he was worried I would mess up their project.

“I told him, ‘My baby died, I’m burying him here.’

“I expected him to grab the shovel away. ‘Are you crazy? You can’t do that here. What’s wrong with you?’ He said, ‘That’s a bummer,’ and left again.”

She threw up her hands. “That’s it.”

Sibley looked at me.

I kept silent and she did the same.

Gayle Boyarin said, “It’s never gone away completely. The pressure. But it did lessen. I kept moving. I went and had the rest of my life.”

The evidence of that life surrounded us: her home, diplomas and awards and memorabilia, the husband, the living sons. All the trappings of fulfillment.

“Carl—my first husband—he was what you call spectrumy. We married never intending to have children. He had no interest, and I didn’t think I could go through that again. When I found out I was pregnant with Adam, I started having panic attacks. Carl wanted me to get a prescription for a sedative. I blew up at him when he said that, and it all came out. His personality worked to my advantage: He could analyze what I was telling him without getting emotional. It had the effect of calming me down. Even so, I was on tenterhooks for the first year of Adam’s life. I wasn’t able to enjoy much. Things got a little easier with Matthew. But.”

A long silence.

Gayle Boyarin said, “It’s never really gone away.”

She reached for a box of tissues, wiped her eyes, sponged her damp throat. The wastebasket wasn’t in its customary spot—I had it by my feet—and she tossed the crumpled wad on the desktop, done with self-pity.

Her eyes passed from Sibley to me. “Just so you know, the bear was my idea, not Matthew’s. He was following my instructions. Whatever the charges are, they’re mine, not his.”

Sibley said, “Professor, we came here to show you something.”

She placed a copy of the toy company recall notice on the desk.

Gayle Boyarin picked it up, put on her reading glasses, scanned in silence.

“It’s thoughtful of you to give me this,” she said. “But ultimately, it’s irrelevant.”

She handed the page back to Sibley.

Some people hunger for absolution. Others cope by rejecting it.

I told Gayle Boyarin I’d issue a death certificate, listing her and Fritz Dormer as the child’s parents.

“Does he know?” she asked.

“I was required to notify him. He wasn’t interested in paying for burial, and I couldn’t find anyone else, so by law the remains were cremated. They’re in storage at one of our long-term facilities.”

“I’d like to have them.”

“Of course. I can help with that.”

“Thank you. And I’d like to reimburse you, please.”

Registering our confusion: “For the GPS thingy.”

Sibley said, “That’s not necessary.”

“To me it is.” Gayle took a checkbook and pen from the desk drawer. “I’ll leave the amount blank. To whom shall I make it out?”

Sibley said, “You can just put ‘University of California Police Department.’ ”

“I never thought I’d be giving you people money,” Gayle Boyarin said.

With a choking honk she tore off the check, and a ferocious spasm took hold of her, leaving her jackknifed and shaking.

We waited till she regained her composure. Then Sibley took the check and we left.