Entry #4: Forbidden Acts
Start with Entry #1 of Two Pigeons.
After Leah left I stayed in the park. The wind was picking up but the sun was out and I had absolutely nothing going on so I decided to walk a bit..to clear my head and think.
I turned the last two days over in mind and I didn’t really get it. There was something off, something they weren’t telling me. The big payment they offered…Leah’s supposed cluelessness about why her husband, who she’s been with for two decades, might have left her and his daughters without saying a word…and the fact that they called me — so suddenly, so out of the blue — to help. Sure Misha and I had been best friends when we were kids but that was decades ago. We were basically strangers now. Now that I was thinking about it I realized we hadn’t been friends about as long as he and Leah have been married. In fact an incident at the bachelor party I threw for him — or rather, his response to Leah’s response to this incident — is what ultimately killed our friendship. Funny to think back on it now.
I had been years since I thought about Misha. Now as I walked through the park, all sorts of memories flooded back. We used to spend a lot of time here before his dad got a job at a medical office in San Jose and he moved out of the city. Back then we lived a couple of blocks from each other. I was on 26th and Clement. He was on 21nd and California. Our families moved here at almost the same time in 1991 and someone introduced their family to ours…and since we lived so close, we started hanging out and became friends. A lot of our people are gone now but there were a lot of Soviet immigrants here in those days — tens of thousands of us, mostly crammed into the Richmond. We didn’t call it that ourselves but outsiders took to referring to our neighborhood as Little Russia because of all the food shops catering to the immigrant set…pickled cabbage, boxes of cheap chocolate candies, smoked sprats imported from Latvia. It was funny to call it Little Russia because the immigrants were mostly Jews and mostly from Ukraine.
Misha himself was been born in Azerbaijan to Jewish parents who moved there from Ukraine. Being from Baku had a big impact on Misha. We took acid on New Year’s Eve one year during college and sat up in the early morning overlooking the ocean, trying to remember our earliest memories…and Misha said the clearest episode he had was from when he was about eight years old. He and his cousin were walking home through their neighborhood on the outskirts of the city when they got stopped by a gang of men armed with sticks and guns and questioned about their nationality. This was right after a bloody anti-Armenian pogrom had swept through the city and this armed gang was still patrolling the streets looking for victims. They suspected these two kids of being Armenian. And Misha could pass as one. He was swarthy with a big nose, black hair…in fact he could have passed as for an Azerbaijani, too. That was the ridiculous part of it. No one could really tell ethnicity just by the way you looked. So the men stopped the two kids and questioned them about their family name…the names of their fathers, mothers, grandfathers, and where everyone was born. It was an extremely tense moment in which Misha thought they would be ripped apart like he heard happened to hundreds of Armenians all over the city. In the end though they were let go. Sitting on the rocks on the beach, coming down of acid, Misha said what he remembered was the crazy look in the men’s eyes…it was like they were full of burning desire. He talked about how stupid and insane it was that people would get worked up like that over a piece of land and some bullshit made up identity…worked up enough to want to kill a couple of kids.
The USSR was still alive then. Azerbaijan was a Soviet Republic, a place where ethnicity was secondary or not important at all and Baku was a multiethnic city where many families were mixed and everyone spoke Russian. But when the Soviet Union began to unravel the old hatreds broke through and were used to tear the place apart. So that was Misha’s first important memory…of lynchings and roaming gangs and nationalistic wars.
The park was mostly empty now and I walked into a grove near the old horse stables, now fenced off and turned into the neighborhood rad research zone.
We used to bike through it all the time. We had a routine, hitting a series of trails that would take us from Arguello all the way to Ocean Beach. Misha called it Mr. Bumpy because of the all the gnarled roots we’d have to navigate. I decided to duck into the trees and see if the trail was still there. And it was. It went past the old police station and the angling pools, which were now part of the research station, and dumped me out into the Enchanted Grove. It was the last stretch of trail before it hit the beach, a dark wooded area with dense overhanging pines surrounded by bushes with thick gnarled trunks and branches that grew sideways and at odd angles and formed little dark caves with overhanging covered entrances big enough for people to duck into. If I didn’t know better these trees look like they could have been twisted by the fallout but no this has always been their natural state. Whenever we’d bike through here we’d always see men walking around alone, ducking in and out of the bushes. No of them talked to each other, no one made eye contact. It wasn’t just one or two men, it was ten or fifteen of them, all crammed into this very specific isolated grove. It was weird and a bit frightening. We lived in our little sheltered immigrant ghetto, mostly oblivious to the world outside. A lot of things were mysterious. And this was one. We were convinced that this part of the park was enchanted, that these men were under some kind of spell, that there were devious forces at work. We’d race through it as fast as we could. Only later, in college, did I realize that the men where indeed under a kind of spell: sexual desire. It was a gay cruising spot, probably had been one for as long as Golden Gate park existed.
The Enchanted Grove was empty today. Even the most adventurous men…people going out for a quick fuck in the bushes with strangers…weren’t brave enough to be out now, not with the high wind advisory, not even with their breathers on. Only I was there, walking and thinking about the past.
I got another flashback from our childhood while passing through there. Me and Misha in my room jerking each other off. Not sure if either of us were…or are…gay. At least I don’t think I was or am. It was the usual sexual exploration that boys do when their testosterone starts to hit. It began simply enough. We were wrestling or chasing each other around and one of must have felt the other was hard. Not sure who initiated it but it progressed from there. First bouncing up and down on each other’s boners, then jerking each other off, and then finally blowing each other. That was back in the 1995 when being labeled gay in school meant being bullied and carried real social repercussion, even in San Francisco. And our own immigrant world was much more homophobic than the general population. Everyone bad was a pider or a goluboi. So what we did had an illicitness about it. I had the distinct feeling that I was doing something wrong, something bad. We never planned it or talked about, it just sort of happened when were were alone sometimes. Anyway our trysts didn’t last long. He moved to Cupertino not long after we started and I’m not sure how long it would have lasted anyway. The truth was that I found the taste and smell and texture of his dick revolting and could keep my mouth on it for more than a few seconds before starting to retch. But I endured the gagging so I could get my own dick sucked. That’s how horny I was. My horniness overpowered my revulsion. Not sure if he felt the same way but I don’t recall him having the same reaction that I did. We never discussed when we grew up. It just sort of stayed there in the background, a secret. Come to think of it, maybe this is what his disappearance was about? Maybe after all these years, he’s finally coming out in this weird awkward way? It’s possible. Everyone who I grew with up in my Soviet immigrant world is very weird about the gay issue. Most have remained in the closet all their lives.
At the beach the fog was rolling in from the ocean like a gray blob, obscuring the waves and hiding most of the sand. Not that there was anything to do here anymore. No one surfed, no one swam…not since the original diehards who wouldn’t stop eventually found that their lungs and guts had liquified and their bones had turned to chalk. Their bodies turned into soft wet bags…just like what happened to those radium girls a hundred years before.
The wind was blowing fiercely now. The big vinyl blowup tents in the refugee camp behind the dunes were swaying and wiggling like big blobs of jello. I looked around and saw that except a few people sitting in their cars — windows rolled up, hermetically sealed — I was the only one out on the promenade. I shouldn’t be out here, I realized. Even with my breather on the wind was forcing sand into my ears and my eyes and clothes. I called a robotaxi…straight to my neighborhood decon facility on Stanyan.
Read Entry #5: “Build it and He will come” next.