Until that moment, he is looking me in the eye. For a moment, he looks away. “This is for a story?”
“An anonymous tipster calls, leaves information, hangs up,” I lie. “It could be nothing. But serious journalism often requires you to drop down a bunch of rabbit holes.”
“I probably can’t do much. But I know one guy who does telecommunications intel. What’s your phone number? I’ll have him check it out.”
I pull out my wallet and extract a business card.
Without taking his eyes off the card, he says: “You seem to know Pauline well.”
I clear my throat.
“Does she look okay to you?” he continues. “She seems off her game.”
I shrug.
He extends his hand and we shake. We part, awkwardly.
I head to the car. In my pocket, a thumb drive. In my head, bewilderment. I need refuge, answers. Beer.
I live nearby in Potrero Hill. It’s a neighborhood of steep inclines, a place best suited for donkeys and sherpas. Architecturally, it has an industrial feel, the ghost of a manufacturing past paved over with residences built for people who can’t afford Pacific Heights, the Marina, or sunnier and flatter neighborhoods.
Like much of San Francisco, Potrero is populated by transplants and transients, devoid of local roots and memories — people looking ahead in life, not behind, the embodiment of manifest destiny. Like the pioneers who settled this place, we can’t move any further west, the Pacific Ocean intervening, but we can keep upgrading our devices to feel like we’re in constant motion.
My home and home office are contained in a one-bedroom flat on Florida. Two blocks away is the Pastime Bar, where I did my residency and fellowship, specializing in studying the effects of Anchor Steam and quasi-wry bar commentary on the brain of a single male.
I drive to the bar, park in front, and wander to the bar’s door, uninviting to the point of foreboding. A veritable prisoners’ entrance. It’s thick and covered with numerous coats of cheap brown paint, peeling and frayed, graced with a single bumper sticker, haphazardly placed years ago, that reads: “Get Yer Beer Googles.” There are eyeballs in the misspelled words, two
I peer through the circular submarine window, I see a half dozen regulars. The Witch and Bullseye anchor the seats on the bar’s far right, their regular spots.
The Witch turns around. Maybe she senses my presence — she claims such powers. I back out of her view.
I’ve lost the energy to analyze the last three hours of my life: the shooting, the mystery thumb drive, and the weird military dude. Plus, if I go inside, I become the source of entertainment, the circus monkey, the unmarried guy spinning tales from the real world — while everyone else gulps down the drama along with hops and barley, plus a shot of envy and superiority.
In my car’s backseat, I spy my albatross: the ratty black backpack that carries my laptop — and that I tote wherever I go like an oxygen tank. It’s my mobile blogging unit. Call me old-fashioned, but when I need to research and file an on-the-go news update from a press conference, roadside or (yes, it happens) bathroom stall, I prefer to type on a full keyboard, not the touch-screen phone like the fancy prepubescent competition.
Time to take the laptop home for some answers.
Ten minutes later, I’m on my couch. From the backpack, I extract my computer. I insert the mystery drive. I retype the passwords I tried earlier, and new ones. No use.
I feed Hippocrates.
I call Magnolia Manor. A nurse tells me that Grandma is sleeping.
I consider calling Pauline. Tomorrow.
I should call my parents and tell them what’s going on with Grandma. Maybe they have counsel. Probably not.
Besides, I don’t need to hear Dad talk about the latest deal in the Sunday circular and Mom try and wake from the dead at a phone ringing at 11 p.m. in Denver, which is the clinching excuse. I try the laptop one more time. Several more passwords fail.
I fall asleep on the couch, my gray matter spinning with questions. Eight hours later, I wake up with one answer.
Chapter 7
“Galapagos,” I mutter groggily.
I open my eyes to find I’m lying on my back on the couch, akimbo, one leg dangling on the floor. I’m wearing vertically striped red boxer shorts and a white sock on my right foot, having shed the rest of my clothes progressively through the night. Something smells rancid, and I quickly identify its origin. Next to my discarded T- shirt, a furball. This is a distinct message from Hippocrates: “Clean my litter box.”
I look at the cat, who lounges on the top edge of the couch.
“In the future, I’d prefer e-mail,” I mumble.
I walk to the dining-room table and sit at the laptop, the mystery thumb drive still loaded into it. Into the empty password slot, I type, “Galapagos.”
The drive arrived in a package addressed “Highly Evolved World Traveler.” I’m hardly that, but I did once go on an extravagant journey — to the Galapagos — and recently blogged about a particular moment on the trip.
Shortly after my ex-girlfriend Annie drowned in a lake in Nevada, my close friends chipped in to send me to Ecuador so I could get away from my grief, and from the fast-paced wired world that had left me so off- balance.
Standing at an observation point on Culpepper Island, one of the islands that make up the equatorial paradise, I watched a swallow-tailed gull land on the back of a snoozing sea lion. The bird called out majestically. Two other gulls lazily glided down to stand atop the unperturbed lion.
Standing beside me was a mother and her son, who looked to be about ten. He said: “The bird has a loud ringtone.”
At that moment, I started to regain my perspective. I recently wrote about it for Medblog after Pauline asked her freelancers to craft items about our personal perspectives on medicine. Her idea is that the new era of journalism demands that readers develop personal bonds with writers. The point of my post was that in our pursuit of beauty, from Botox to hyperbaric oxygen chambers, we shouldn’t confuse real beauty with the digitized, synthetic version thereof. It’s pseudo-intellectual babble, and Pauline subsequently makes fun of it but refuses to let me take it down because she says it’s “adorable,” and “what you get when you fail to put any thought into your posts.”
I stare at the computer screen and the word “Galapagos” I’ve typed. I hit “enter.” It doesn’t work.
I try “Darwin.” It fails. I type “Culpepper,” then “CulpepperIsland.” Nada.
I stand, don my other sock and T-shirt, and walk to the refrigerator. It is covered with magnets collected from various public relations campaigns (e.g., Genentech’s Stick It To Cancer), which hold up take-out menus. In the mostly empty fridge, a bit of manna: a half-drunk two-day-old Starbucks quadruple-shot latte that I heat in the microwave. Simple life rule: never, ever waste a drop of a $5.45 coffee.
I sip it and take in my bachelor palace. I once described it to a skeptical Pauline as “mismatch couture.” Beneath the dining room table is a red area rug that, I concede, wears the scars of Hippocrates’s upchucks insufficiently cleaned. Against the far wall sits the beige couch. Next to it, there’s a green recliner that the Witch and Bullseye gave me when they outgrew their ’70s furniture. It doubles as a shelf for magazines and various remote controls. Above the chair, unframed, I’ve tacked two posters: a picture of Denver Bronco quarterback John Elway hoisting a trophy, and the print of a painting by Edgar Degas. It is called “Cup of Hot Chocolate After Bathing.” I’m an intellectual: I love cocoa after a hot shower.
A doorway on the wall to my left opens into a small hallway leading to bathroom and bedroom large enough for a bed and a TV.
