Ernest had smiled sadly, feeling his eyes glisten as he patted his daughter’s arm. “If I didn’t end up in the Tenderloin, I might never have met your mother.”
Now, he gave up trying to write. It was too late to attempt to rescript the past. Juju had already begun a comparative piece on what the world was like then and now, from the price of a gallon of milk to how women influenced politics. In addition, she’d tracked down dozens of locals who’d been to the AYP—those who were his age and older, men and women who could offer reflections and commentary on the two spectacles more than fifty years apart. The newspaper had named them Special Ambassadors to the Future.
To Ernest, the fairs were merely bookends, sentinels carved from stone, rooted in bedrock, immovable. His life, Gracie’s life, was the mystery caught in between.
That was worth writing about, if only to help Gracie remember the sweet moments, Ernest thought. Not old dirt and certainly not all this new stuff. Not the Cathedral of Science. Not the monorail. Not the Bubble-lift, Bubbleator, Bubble…whatever that elevator-thing was called.
The idea for the fair had originated a few years ago, when Sputnik went “beep-beep-beep” overhead, launching the Space Race. America and Boeing, which was based in Seattle, had been dragged into the future. And what better way to showcase Seattle to the whole wide world (and especially to the Soviets, and the People’s Republic of China, and the North Koreans) than by hosting another epic world’s fair? That’s when the twinges of Ernest’s deeply buried, seismic nostalgia had begun to stir.
Worried that an old news article—possibly even the one Juju had found—might drag him into the frenzy, Ernest had fortified his memories against a tsunami of queries and interviews that never came. With each evening-news broadcast that showcased the construction of the fair along with some old-timer who had been around back then, each starry-eyed, gray-haired recollection that came and went without a mention of his name, Ernest relaxed, relented, and embraced the comfort of his anonymity. If his life were a play, his had been a moment in the spotlight, and then an exit with no applause.
He never suspected his older daughter would be the first to come calling.
Ernest was still staring at the blank page when he heard a knock on the door. He thought that perhaps Juju had come back when he heard a familiar “Pssst!” from the hallway. Ernest sighed, unbolted the locks, opened the door, and was greeted by Pascual. Ernest noted that his friend was decked out in a dark black suit—his only suit. He also had on a tight V-neck sweater worn over a sharp, pressed dickie and a rockabilly necktie, which usually meant one thing.
“Kuya, I’m heading up to the Black and Tan,” Pascual said with a wink.
“I’m pretty busy…” Ernest protested.
“That’s why I thought you might like to come along, brother—take a break. Besides, a single man our age is just a lonely guy looking for trouble. But a pair of dashing old gents—that’s respectable magic.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small silver flask. “We can drink our way over.”
Ernest was about to say no, that he’d much rather stay in and read a good book, when he remembered that he was supposed to meet Juju tomorrow at the site of the first world’s fair. Suddenly a strong drink sounded irresistible. He looked at his reflection in the cracked mirror on his bureau and straightened his tie. He adjusted the double Windsor. Why not? Ernest thought as he buttoned his cuffs and grabbed his coat and hat from a single hook near the door.
Meanwhile his friend splashed a little whiskey in the corner of the hallway. “That’s for the demon.” Pascual grinned, looking like a fifty-year-old schoolboy. He offered the flask to Ernest, who took a large gulp, feeling the alcohol burn his throat. Then the two of them headed downstairs and out the front door into the cool night mist, which smelled like fetid leaves and the rotting pinecones that plugged up storm drains on every corner.
They walked against the tide of swing-shift workers carrying their nighttime lunch pails to the docks and avoided getting run over by delivery bikes laden with Chinese food as they made their way to the neighborhood’s last great jazz club. As they approached, Ernest could hear live music over the sound of rubber tires on wet pavement.
The Black and Tan had been around since the days of Prohibition, neatly tucked away in the basement of the Chikata drugstore and almost invisible on the corner of Twelfth and South Jackson. Ernest and Gracie had once seen headliners like Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington, and Cab Calloway there, but the lounge had faded since its glory days. Now it was just a cover band who played, more black than tan. They did their best to re-create the bebop of yesteryear amid the footlights and velvet swirls of cigarette smoke.
For hours Ernest sat in a tiny, faux-leather banquette, nursing a champagne cocktail, while Pascual had loosened his tie and danced the watusi with a cadre of inebriated Caucasian women half his age. Ernest watched the happy sway of their cotton print Woolworth dresses, their bouffant hair, which towered over his friend.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to dance?” The kind woman Ernest recognized as Dolores appeared, smiling. “Your friend tells me you’re a great dancer.”
“I would love to,” Ernest said. “But I’m saving the last dance for someone else.”
“Oh, is she here?” Dolores asked as she looked around.
“Not yet.” He shook his head. “But I keep hoping she’ll come back someday.”
Dolores regarded him with sad, puppy-dog eyes. Then she leaned down and gave him a warm hug and kissed his cheek before returning to the dance floor.
Ernest smiled as he wiped the lipstick off with a napkin. He watched Pascual and occasionally chatted with the barmaids who vaguely knew him, until he ran out of cigarettes and grew restless. He waved goodbye to his friend, who didn’t seem to notice.
Ernest walked home in a light rain, past all-night liquor stores and flower carts, around sailors in blue, and high-heeled streetwalkers with umbrellas who were arguing with the shore patrol, uniformed men who wandered the neighborhood in white helmets, twirling their chipped black billy clubs. Ernest drifted silently past the benign fa?ades of mom-and-pop businesses he knew to be fronts for Chinatown’s many backroom casinos. He pulled his collar up to ward off the damp April chill, grateful it was only drizzling as he strolled beneath pools of streetlight, steering around mud puddles that reflected forgotten constellations and lonely stars of the northern sky. He wasn’t disappointed to have played Dean Martin to Pascual’s Jerry Lewis, because Ernest had needed a night out. He’d been burdened by memories all week, and now the past seemed more resplendent than the present. But the past was no-man’s-land. He gave five dollars to panhandlers in front of the Publix, then climbed the creaking stairs to his apartment, thinking again about how to tell Juju the rest of his story.
He was still worrying when he saw two people standing beneath the glow of a single forty-watt bulb that dangled from the hallway ceiling. Amid the riot of blistered paint, there was a couple arguing.