Munk was funny, too, because he always spoke the truth. Sometimes people in the bar asked him intrusive questions and he, with his air of calm, would answer faithfully even if the truth—as is often the case—left him looking ridiculous.
“Want to get out of here?” a girl once said.
“No,” he answered.
“Why not,” she asked, “don’t you like me?”
“Yes, but I was already with another girl a little while ago.” He didn’t say everything, just the truth of whatever people asked him.
When I left, the young girl with the blue crest of hair was still sitting on the stool, now watching another Hitchcock movie (Vertigo, I think) on the hanging screen, and she opened the door to let me out. I went back to my hotel and sprawled out faceup on the bed. I felt less and less desire to give that talk and get a job at Berkeley. It seemed to me that my life as a professor was finished, but I couldn’t imagine what my new life would be. I was stuck on that when I dozed off, and I awoke in the early morning with the TV still flashing images. In the past, at least, when I would wake in the middle of night, the device would be casting white lines that ran up and down with an incessant crackling, like a signal from a frenzied universe far away.
3
I had to leave the room by noon, so I checked out from the hotel around 11 a.m., paid the bill, and walked a few blocks down Telegraph Avenue before settling on the Caffe Mediterraneum, thinking I could get a decent breakfast there without having to eat bacon and fried eggs. Indeed, I was able to get a double espresso with croissants, and I was reading something about Bush Sr. in the San Francisco Chronicle when I saw the girl with the blue hair appear, and she asked if she could join and sat down with me. What a coincidence. It wasn’t a coincidence; she’d been waiting for me by the hotel exit and had followed me when I went to get breakfast. She knew I was going to Sacramento and wanted a ride. She was very skinny, very young, in a little crop top, belly button showing, piercings in her nose. “It’s strange the way you talk in English,” she said, “it seems like you’re thinking about something else.”
Her name was Nancy Culler, and she was studying comparative literature and writing a thesis on Hitchcock’s The Birds. She’d begun with the novella by Daphne du Maurier that the film was based on and especially with the script by Evan Hunter, a great novelist who signed his crime novels as Ed McBain, but as she progressed in her research she decide to change her strategy and told her adviser that, for her thesis, she was going to film a documentary. According to her, it would be the first filmic dissertation in the history of the United States. And what was she planning to film? “Birds,” she said, laughing. She was carrying her video camera, a Sony DV, very compact, digital, the first one I’d seen, to tell the truth. She wanted to record everything that was taking place around the area, and Munk in confinement, and maybe she’d go to Montana and film in the woods. Didn’t I see the relationship between the irrational attack of the birds and Munk’s bombings? Wasn’t Hitchcock’s film an example of ecoterrorism? Birds attacking idiotic humans… Look out, because nature can rise up at any moment and the world will become an inferno… After informing me, in all seriousness, of her academic aims, she finished eating her cereal and yogurt and smoked a joint. It seemed so strange to her that I was from Argentina, La Pampa, Patagonia, the great open spaces, what did I think about the nature preserves in Argentina? On our way to the car, she filmed me walking alongside her, holding the camera up to her face. She’d never appear inside the frame, she said, she would be the camera’s eye. What did I think of the title “Bird’s Eye View”?
We crossed the Route 80 bridge into San Francisco, and once we were close to Union Square she suggested we stop by Robinson’s House of Pets, the pet store that they’d used in Hitchcock’s film with the name Davidson’s. It was on Maiden Lane and was the oldest aviary shop in the United States. At the beginning of The Birds, a wealthy and spoiled blonde, who drives a sports car and has jumped naked into a fountain in Rome, enters the shop to buy a parrot and meets a lawyer walking behind a pair of lovebirds, and she gives him the eye, or, put better, according to Nancy, she takes her fill of him because she sees him as super-macho, one big dick, etc.
We went up to the level where they displayed tropical birds, a specialty of the house. Tom Munk had bought his parrot here, and now Daisy was on display in a cage with a sign: Munk’s Parrot. It was a female parrot, in fact, and she was angry; egg yellow, her feathers ruffled, she buried her beak under a wing and raised her head every now and then, looking out with a single eye and squawking: “Go to the hotel, Tom, go to the hotel, Tom.” Nancy filmed her and then the large
