Day Forty-One
Jesse flinched in that way one does in a deep sleep, a reaction you think is unique to you but is apparently universal; he had no idea how long he’d been napping, or when he began to dream.
It was a weekend afternoon on the bike path along Venice Beach.
Jesse, on Rollerblades, lost his balance; how he’d come to flail in such an embarrassing way he never quite understood, he’d always been quite good on skates, but there were pockets of sand and trash on the paved pathway, not to mention idiots who stopped short to take a picture with a disposable camera, all of which was dangerous for bikers and bladers.
Jesse careened into his future husband’s bicycle heading the opposite way, knocking them both to the sand.
Jesse took the brunt of the hit and, as he wasn’t wearing a helmet, gave Norman, the handsome stranger on top of him, quite a scare.
In Norman’s recounting of their story, a meet-cute they told countless times over the years, embellishing it only slightly when they themselves got bored of the telling, Jesse’s first stunned word to him was “Dad?” And given that Norman was older by a few years and already starting to gray at the temples, everyone always had a good laugh at that.
Norman cleared his bicycle from the path and helped Jesse out of his Rollerblades and over to the nearby lifeguard station, where the guard on duty was built like he played collegiate sports and had a chest covered in hair that, drenched in sweat, glistened in the sun.
He shined a light in Jesse’s eyes to look for signs of a concussion, but the only light Jesse was interested in was the one in Norman’s eyes.
He was offered water as he recovered from his daze, and he and Norman sat and talked and laughed at their predicament.
“Don’t you have someplace to be?” Norman finally asked.
“Where you go, I go,” Jesse replied, using the dangling sleeve from the flannel tied around his waist to dab at his forehead and double-check that he was not bleeding. That became one of the sayings they repeated over the years, the first hit in the jukebox of their relationship.
Where you go, I go.
What a joke.
Jesse had been startled awake by his cell phone, his ringtone something called Departure, which he was now determined to change.
“Norman?” his voice croaked when he answered; he must have been asleep for some time.
“Mr. da Ruth?” an unfamiliar female voice replied. “Jesse?”
“Jesse del Ruth,” Jesse corrected. It wasn’t Norman, and now he wished he hadn’t so hastily answered. “This is he.”
“Mr. del Ruth. This is Jill from BHRC.”
BHRC? The letters were vaguely familiar, but it took Jesse a moment to place them. Beverly Hills Reproductive Center. Or Clinic? The C was one of the two.
“Uh-huh.”
“Mr. del Ruth, we’re looking at your statement here, and we have yet to receive payment. Have you not been getting our bills?”
Jesse’s eyes darted to the mountain of mail that sat on the kitchen counter unopened. Norman had set most of their bills to autopay, so he didn’t feel pressured to open any of it. “I’m sorry, who is this again?”
“Jill from the BHRC? Your annual payment is past due.”
“Payment for what?”
There was an awkward silence on the other end of the line. “Storage.”
Storage.
“Sir, if there is a question about the increase in rates, the contract you signed does allow for price adjustments due to unforeseen circumstances, in this case an increase in security. Perhaps you heard about the recent car bombing in Orange County? It’s quite a world we’re living in.”
“Right.” It was all Jesse could think to say.
“I could take payment over the phone with a credit card.”
Jesse lied and said he didn’t have his wallet.
“Sir, if we don’t receive payment by the end of the month, there will be additional late fees, per the contract.” Jill went silent and Jesse heard the shuffling of paper. “The other contact listed is Norman Alfano. Perhaps we could speak to him?”
“He’s…” Jesse didn’t know what to say. “Unavailable.”
“Of course, if storage is no longer desired, I can arrange for that.”
Goddammit, Norman.
Jesse rushed Jill off the phone by promising to send payment.
He felt the urge to throw his phone clear across the sofa, but instead he opened his camera roll and began scrolling through the more than fourteen thousand photos of his life with Norman, wondering where their relationship went.
Trips, homes, friends, fads, years—where had they all gone?
The photos were now documented memories, as the memories themselves seemed unreliable.
As he scrolled through his album, there was a growing urge to yell, Liar!
He began to doubt that any of them happened, and he felt so very alone.
As certain as he was that no one would understand if he dared share the truth of his situation, there was one person who actually might.
Or, if not the reality of it, the emotion of it, and that was what he desperately needed.
So he got in the car early the following morning and drove out of Joshua Tree, stopping for gas when he hit the 10.
The drive to Santa Barbara was an awkward one, which involved plowing through Los Angeles before merging with the Pacific Coast Highway and heading north; there was no more direct route.
Even flying required a connection through San Francisco.
Jesse tried music and then a true crime podcast, something he and Norman used to enjoy together, this one a profile of a serial killer from the 1950s who worked for a company contracted by Caltrans and was convicted of murdering at a minimum six children before disposing of the bodies under the Santa Ana and Ventura Freeways while they were being constructed.
It gave him the creeps as he sat behind the wheel, and he felt deeply for the families of the victims. Families torn apart in the night never to be reunited.
And yet their loved ones were most likely buried under the very freeways they used on their daily commutes, quite literally under their noses.
Was Norman similarly close by, easily discoverable if Jesse knew just where to look?
He turned off the podcast, settling eventually on silence and his thoughts, which was not any more healthy but had become the norm.
He cycled through a catalog of grievances: the way Norman always dropped one Advil on the floor for Jesse to find; the way he would fall asleep on his back, one arm dramatically raised above his head, bent at the elbow, like he was a Victorian woman collapsed on a fainting couch and only smelling salts or convalescing in the open air would revive him; the way he ate peanut butter from the jar with a fork, leaving marks like a backhoe.
His mental state brightened when the 10 freeway ended, and he emerged from the tunnel to see the sparkling ocean.
The light reflecting on the water resembled stars.
He phoned his mother, Gail, when he started seeing signs for his destination.
“I’m in Santa Barbara,” he said when she answered. He wasn’t quite yet, but almost.
“Who is this?” his mother demanded in her most accusatory tone. She approached every call like it might be from a Nigerian prince tricking her out of her money.
“JJ.” His mother, the only one left who knew Jesse Sr., was the sole person who still called him that. “Your son.”
Jesse Sr. had been a Marine deployed in the messy final days of Vietnam.
The last combat soldiers were being actively withdrawn (or, for many, redeployed to other countries throughout Europe and Asia) in the early months of 1973, but Jesse Sr., it seemed, had orders to stay on with some of the military command to protect U.S.
installations. His mother, to hear her tell it, had breathed a sigh of relief, as the war officially was over.
By then, it was hard to know which she hated more, the war or the anti-war movement.
Both seemed a threat to the young man she loved, and threatening to the simple life she envisioned for herself and their baby when he returned.
She thought him staying on would allow for frayed nerves to calm on the home front, she would eventually welcome him back and so would everyone else—she just had to wait a little longer for the national mood to brighten.
She was pregnant the day she received the fateful knock; only the week before she had written to Jesse’s father with the news.
Within the span of a year she had traded the life of a single girl for life as a single mother.
It happened so fast, she barely had time to breathe.
His mother made some noise like she was confused, and Jesse wondered if she could hear him over the rumbling of the freeway.
He could picture her in the kitchen with a pencil in hand; she always held a pencil when on the phone, assuming there would be something to write down, information, perhaps, to pass along to the police. “Why?”
“Why am I your son? Well, when a man and a woman love each other very much, sometimes…”
“No, why are you in Santa Barbara?”
Jesse scrambled for an answer that wouldn’t startle her or put her on the defensive.
Only one sprang to mind. “I was in the mood for some ice cream.” Ice cream was his mother’s kryptonite.
As Jesse parked the car, he wondered if he was here to talk about his father, or becoming a father—or neither or both.
Maybe there were just times when even a grown man needed his mother.