Raising Wrecker

CHAPTER THREE





Lisa Fay lay in a hospital bed—the smell of antiseptic gave it away, and the faded cotton gown she wore—but could not recall how she’d gotten there. She remembered the green grass of Rolph Playground. Some stabbing pain. A sunset that bled orange behind the lump of Potrero Hill. She remembered crying, and not being able to help it. And she remembered him. Not clearly; just a fuzz of shape and sound and emotion, but enough to make the space between her hips ache hard with its emptiness. In a bed arranged not far from hers, a very pregnant woman moaned and winced through labor. A glass of water stood on the bedside table, and Lisa Fay drained it in one long pull. Her throat felt scraped raw. “Where’d they take him?” she croaked. “Where’s my baby?”

The woman in the opposite bed turned her head toward Lisa Fay. “Call. The nurse,” she huffed, sweat beading on her broad forehead. “Whoo. Get her to bring him.” When the pain eased she lifted a tired hand. “I’m Yolanda,” she said, patting her chest. “Nice of you to finally wake up. It was getting lonesome in here.”

Lisa Fay found a call button wedged against the side of the bed and pressed it. When nothing happened, she pushed it again, hard. “Nurse!” Her voice was a dry rasp that barely carried, and she fumbled for the button to buzz it again.

“Let me do mine,” Yolanda offered. A nurse poked her head in from the hall at the signal. “What would it take for you to get this woman her baby?” The nurse nodded curtly and disappeared. “Don’t hold your breath. It’ll be a little while,” Yolanda said. “This one’s my third. You figure out what to expect.” She cocked her head to one side. Her skin was the same polished brown as the butt stock of the hunting rifle Lisa Fay’s father kept locked in a cabinet back home. “Not that you bothered coming in to have your baby. Went ahead and delivered him yourself right there in a—oh, Lord.” Yolanda was a full-bodied woman who wore her hospital gown like a negligee, and her belly jiggled with laughter that sent ripples along the sheet. “In a public park, girl!” She tried to contain herself. “I heard the nurses talking,” she explained. “Bunch of magpies.”

“What else did they say?”

“Ambulance brought you both in. Baby’s fine, they said. Big. You lost some blood. Don’t you want to call nobody?”

Lisa Fay frowned and looked away. The people she knew didn’t have a telephone.

“The baby’s father? Nobody?” Yolanda narrowed her eyes at Lisa Fay.

The door opened wider and a nurse pushed in a bassinet on wheels. “I’ve got someone here who wants to meet you,” she said, and lifted a flannel bundle out of the cart. She cooed down at the blue lump. “Say hello to your mama.”

Lisa Fay hesitated, her heart pounding, but the nurse went right ahead and placed the warm little package in her arms. She looked down and gasped. Then she loosened the blanket and gaped at the baby in awe. One, two, three, four—ten fingers. Ten toes. Two eyes, two ears, a nose and a mouth in a head the size and shape of a pumped-up Florida grapefruit. “No wonder I passed out. You’re a bruiser.” She couldn’t take her eyes from his wrinkled face. “Hello, boy.” She felt suddenly shy. She had waited for this moment for so long, and now that it was here—now that he was here—she had no idea what to do.

The nurse bustled about with equipment. “Got a name picked out?”

Lisa Fay gazed at the baby’s face in dismay. None of the names she had thought of would fit. He wasn’t a Buzz, or a Jonas; not a Raymond; certainly no Kincaid, a name she’d seen plastered on the side of a bus. And he wasn’t an Arlyn, like his father. Her heart curled in on itself with the pain of that absence, and for a moment Lisa Fay lifted her eyes to the open doorway and willed Arlyn to walk through it. He had vanished, plain disappeared, before she’d had the chance to tell him what they’d made. She squeezed her eyes shut, then forced them wide. She would not cry. She shot a bewildered glance at her roommate. “What’s he look like to you?”

“Baby that big? Ought to call him Zeus.”

Gently, tentatively, Lisa Fay lifted the boy. His head lolled on the stump of his neck. “Zeus,” she said. “Hello. Zeus?” The baby opened his rosebud mouth and started to cry. She quickly brought him down. “I don’t think he likes it.”

“Try Angelo. Or Tyrone.” Yolanda gazed into the distance, cogitating. “James.”

“It’ll come to you,” the nurse said. “Right now, he’ll need to eat.” Lisa Fay looked over, alarmed. “This your first? Don’t worry. He does all the work.” She reached in to free Lisa Fay’s breast from the gown and settled the baby to suckle there. “See?” She tucked the blankets around them. “I’ll be back in to check on both of you in a little while.”

Lisa Fay gazed down in wonder as the baby nursed. His little cheeks flexed and his hand crept up to rest on her breast. It was a miracle, really. Yolanda breathed her noisy way through another contraction and Lisa Fay watched her son suck furiously until his tiny eyelids fluttered closed. It wasn’t the way she’d planned it, losing the basement squat, having her baby outside. She hadn’t planned any of this. She hadn’t planned him—but now that he was here, she would do whatever it took to keep him safe.

To keep him at all. How long would it take for the hospital to find out she had no money and no place to live? They could be checking on her right now. They could snatch him back as quick as that. “Yolanda,” she whispered. She was tired, but there was no time to wait. “I need to borrow your clothes.”

The huffs and moans had settled to quiet whimpers and Yolanda held her in a long gaze, considering. Then she sighed, and tilted her head toward the suitcase at the end of the bed. “Give me that baby while you dress yourself. You got someplace to go?”

“Anywhere but here.” Lisa Fay chose a plaid skirt and a pressed white blouse with a Peter Pan collar and slipped into the bathroom. Steal her baby? They’d have to beat her to it. A minute later she poked her head out the door. “Is it safe?”

Yolanda took one look and guffawed. “You won’t be winning no beauty contests like that, girl. Fit two of you in there.” She gestured to the end of the bed. “Hand me my purse.” When Lisa Fay came around the side Yolanda had scribbled a name—Belle—and an address on the torn back of a card. She handed the scrap and the flannel bundle to Lisa Fay and rustled in her handbag, drew out two five-dollar bills. “All I’ve got right now,” she said, passing them over. “Go by Mama Belle’s and she’ll take you in. You and little …”

Lisa Fay nodded her thanks. Tucked the address and the banknotes in her sock and settled the baby in her arms. “I’ll pay you back.”

“You better. And I want that skirt back, girl. Clean. Don’t go sitting in no grass like y’all do.”

Lisa Fay grinned and saluted. Turned and slid secretively into the hall.

Yolanda’s voice floated after her: “André. Jubilee. Harrison.”

She called him HeyBoy or BigBoy or Beauty; she called him Honey and Sweetie and Champ. For a whole year she called him Luxe, for Deluxe, meaning the best and luckiest thing that had ever happened to her. When she was angry with him she called him Son, and he held his neck stiff and waited to hear what he had done wrong. One day, gazing around at the trail of broken things strewn in his wake, she said, “Kid! Can’t you leave off wrecking things, for once?” And he turned his round face, his plum lips, to her and said, “I a wrecker.” It made her laugh. “A Wrecker?” And he nodded his head, serious, sure, and on that day it was settled.

There was a man on the moon. All across America children sat cross-legged on shag rugs and watched F Troop and Gilligan’s Island, Gigantor, Bewitched. Lisa Fay didn’t own a TV. She worked the swing shift at the Hills Brothers coffee factory on Second Street at a job Yolanda scared up for her, lived in a room with a hot plate and a cast iron bathtub above a Greek grocery, took the bus every weekday afternoon to leave Wrecker with Yolanda’s mother, Belle, in the Fillmore and the late-night bus back to pick him up after work. Weekends belonged to them. Lisa Fay was put together in a marginal way, and anybody could believe that the stress of caring for a baby—a big, rowdy baby like Wrecker—might wear her past the tolerances machined in. Instead, it worked the other way. Lisa Fay took to raising Wrecker like a boat takes to water; he gave her the ballast she needed to ride steady; he was rudder and anchor and sail. Sunday mornings she’d load him in the secondhand stroller and push the boy all the way to the Presidio. Wrecker never missed a parade. He learned to walk and quickly to run and terrorized the ducks in Golden Gate Park. Towheaded, blue-eyed, brawny as the Christ child in a Renaissance oil, Wrecker feasted on delicacies from the Greek grocery below and wore the love of the bums on Townsend—the ones who clustered each afternoon for a hot meal at the Salvation Army—like a coat of armor to shield him from the cruelties of life.

Which cruelties? Lisa Fay didn’t abandon Wrecker as a baby in a trash bin. She didn’t force him to spend long hours alone in a dark closet, nor hold his small feet in boiling water, nor use the sharp end of a safety pin to inscribe his skin, nor forbid him food when he was hungry, nor force him to eat sand or clay or feces. She did not touch his small body in damaging ways or allow others to do that. She loved her son more than she loved her own life.

But she didn’t always know what to do when he cried. Wrecker was a healthy baby, and still sometimes he cried so hard it made him throw up. Some mornings—once in a while—he woke dull-eyed and coughing and his nose ran green and his forehead and the skin of his arms and his chest were much too hot. Lisa Fay thought she should take him to a doctor but she didn’t know where to find the right kind or how she would pay for it. She fed him the little orange dots of aspirin. Time and the candy-flavored pills seemed to cure him.

Mostly she looked at her son and was delighted to see how strong he was, how happy, how soft and perfect and resourceful. Sometimes she looked at him and was horrified. He grew more or less on his own—his body seemed to know how to form itself, it followed some basic instructions that seemed built in—but what if she made a mistake? No. What if the mistakes she made (of course she made mistakes, how was she to know how to raise a child like this, any child) mounted up and somehow tipped the scale toward bad? What if she made—a monster? It would be her fault. Everyone would know she had been a BAD MOTHER.

Sometimes she thought it was absurd that she was a mother at all. Sometimes—not very often, hardly at all—she left him to sleep in the bed and she quietly shut the door to the rented room, locked it with the knob and the deadbolt, and quietly fled down the steps into the city night. Jazz at the pier and someone to buy her a drink. Remind her. What? Remind her she was a woman. A woman of San Francisco.

Jerry Skink slunk around corners; he moved like a polecat with a hard-on, stunk of sweat and perfume, chased skirts and moneymaking opportunities as long as they didn’t look like much work. He combed his wispy light brown mustache and let his hair flop over his forehead to hide the scars from teenage acne. No one knew how old he was. Forty? Fifty? Thirty-four? He was a wolf in sheep’s clothing; a sheep in pimp’s clothing; a pimp in a waxy body that gave nobody pleasure, not even him. He took it out on everyone around him. He smiled at them and gave them the creeps.

Except Lisa Fay. He gave her gonorrhea and a habit Hills Brothers couldn’t even begin to pay for.

It was 1968, and the year ripened from an innocent spring into the summer of love. Wrecker turned three and independent in June, no longer content to hold her hand, running everywhere, finding tall places to jump from. He was his mother’s nightmare and his mother’s joy. He was the only toddler who could pump the swings at the playground, pump them high and leap off to fall and tumble in the sand. He outran eight-year-olds, climbed every tree he could get a grip on or con a leg up, splashed without worry in the fountains, in the ponds. He made the city his own with the slap of his feet, the slam of his small body bouncing off its rough edges. He near-strangled the ducks he caught and smothered in affection. He stood in awe of the cranes that worked the waterfront, the cement trucks that rolled and disgorged the wet mix, the backhoes and loaders and forklifts and graders that wrestled earth and stone with yellow glee. He wanted to drive them. He was a boy in love with heavy machinery.

Lisa Fay was a woman quite taken with the idea of a little relief. She met Jerry Skink at the Fourth of July Hills Brothers cookout at the marina; he was somebody’s brother-in-law, or cousin, or business acquaintance; he was a skunk who disguised his stripe with Grecian Formula 16 and a touch of Brylcreem. She found him amusing. She rebuffed his advances until dark and the explosion of the fireworks finale—a grand display of positive attitude that everyone thought reminded them a little too much of the war going on in Asia—and Wrecker, asleep in his mother’s lap (spilling out of his mother’s lap, for he’d grown too big to fully fit) was still for once and then Lisa Fay let Jerry place his soft hand over hers and, very gently, kiss her on the cheek.

“Just so you know—” Lisa Fay mitigated, but Jerry stood and helped her up and took the baby in his arms.

“I’ve got a friend with a pad on Haight,” Jerry said, hopeful.

Lisa Fay walked with him as far as the bus stop and offered him her cheek and her address. “I haven’t got a phone,” she said. “Come for lunch some day.” She climbed aboard the bus with Wrecker, paying her fare. “Come for food.”

“Food,” Jerry repeated stupidly, and as the bus doors closed on his surprised face Lisa Fay felt certain that was the last she’d see of him.

It was all right with Belle to leave Wrecker overnight—he was sleeping already, why wake him?—although the first night Lisa Fay slept away from her son she woke up gasping, her palms wet with sweat, thinking she’d lost him. Jerry Skink went on snoring next to her on the mattress and through the open door she could see dark spots on the floor of the next room, the bodies of people (Her friends? Were these her friends?) who lay where they had fallen. They had all smoked a little much, they had done too many mushrooms, dropped a bit much acid—these were not her friends. Lisa Fay threw off the sheets and stood. She found her clothes and a clock: 3:15. On the streets at 3:15 in the morning. But it had to be better than here.

Jerry Skink showed up on the outside steps to her room the next day in time for lunch. Lisa Fay looked gray and soggy. She had downed half the bottle of Wrecker’s orange pills and felt no better for it. She was toasting white bread on the hot-plate burner, mechanically smearing on margarine and sprinkling sugar and cinnamon. She couldn’t keep up with the kid’s appetite but she was trying. Focus was hard. When she answered the knock on the door and stood looking at Jerry Skink, fresh-scrubbed and dandy in a new woven poncho, her efforts at focus slid off the plate of her mind. The son of a bitch. She stood waiting for his apology. She wasn’t sure what he should apologize for but felt fairly certain he should.

Jerry lifted his little upturned nose, nonchalant, and sniffed. He meant to say, “What’s for lunch?” but it came out, “Your kitchen is on fire.”

Lisa Fay turned and watched the last piece of sliced bread go up in a flame of glory. Wrecker cried. He didn’t like burned toast. He was still hungry.

Jerry stepped the three paces to the hot plate and switched it off. Then he smothered the flame with a cloth diaper that doubled as a dishtowel. He shot Wrecker a look that shut him up. Then he turned to Lisa Fay and said, all sugar, “I know a place on Gough makes great hamburgers. What do you say we go?”

Lisa Fay’s mouth watered for meat. She meant to say, “I have potatoes in the drawer. I have to get Wrecker to the sitter by two and be at work at three,” but it came out, “Medium rare. With fries and a vanilla shake and Wrecker likes pickles.”

Jerry smiled. “I have a car,” he said. “Let me take you out.”

Every silver lining has its cloud. Jerry Skink had time on his hands and access to a borrowed car and enough cash to every now and then treat mother and son to a day on the beach, to a meal out. They grew into a familiar routine. Saturday mornings Jerry Skink would come by with the car and ask Lisa Fay to cruise with him, down the peninsula some days, up to Muir Woods, and Lisa Fay would agree on the condition that Wrecker come along, and Jerry would suggest, tenderly but as the weeks went by more forcefully, that Wrecker be left with a friend, that he would have more fun with children his own age, that it was improper for a child to be kept in a car so long, that in fact much of the way Lisa Fay treated her son was not correct, that in fact the experts said—not that Jerry was an expert, what did he know about children, a single man, but he did read—the experts said, actually, to be fair about it, that Lisa Fay’s style of mothering was all wrong.

Wrecker was napping. Lisa Fay was sitting opposite Jerry at the table, snacking on the cheese sandwich crusts Wrecker had left in his wake. She was lifting the bread with her right hand and slowly, unconsciously, her left elbow slid on to the table and moved forward to shield the plate from Jerry and her left hand lifted and positioned itself on her forehead to shield her face from his view. She put back the scrap of bread and left her right hand in her lap.

“Hey. Whoa.” Jerry reached over to squeeze Lisa Fay’s upper arm. “Didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

It was just—well. He was getting attached. He only wanted what was best for the little guy. Didn’t she?

Of course she did. And so Wrecker’s day-to-day life changed considerably as Lisa Fay submitted to Jerry Skink’s tutelage. It was not best for Wrecker to spend his evenings in the care of Yolanda’s mother in the Fillmore, and so Lisa Fay moved in with Jerry and his friends in the flat above Haight Street. There were plenty of extra people there to look after the boy while Lisa Fay worked. And it was not best that Wrecker sleep in the same room as his mother; surely Lisa Fay could see that. Jerry generously moved his crib mattress into the hall. Furthermore, it was not best that Wrecker be allowed to bulldoze freely through his environment. He needed discipline, to learn respect for other people’s time and space and property—but Jerry could take care of that, too.

It did cross Lisa Fay’s mind that it might not be best for Wrecker to have a mother so frequently strung out on the drugs Jerry dealt for a living, but some changes would have to wait.

Jerry’s income increased, and so, correspondingly, did his work schedule. It was no longer advantageous for Lisa Fay to continue to work at Hills Brothers when she could ease his load—and contribute more fully to the family’s needs—by assisting him. Life was still looser than before, it was Haight Street, it was the October of Love, but the day trips and evening excursions they took incorporated more and more business. For this, Wrecker was always welcome. And Lisa Fay, who felt like she rarely saw her son, who missed his pint-sized muscular body in bed next to hers, was glad for any chance to spend time with him. Even if it meant holding on to the stash. Even those few times when Jerry handed her the pistol and said, Put this in your belt, girl. I want you to be safe.

Wrecker didn’t mind. He liked going to the parks. He liked playing on the swings. Jerry was almost always in a good mood at the end of those days and took them for ice cream at Mitchell’s, where Wrecker could have any flavor he wanted, three scoops that came in a miniature batting helmet from the San Francisco Giants.

It was a new park in a different part of town. It was big. Not as big as Golden Gate—which was a city in itself—but bigger than Yerba Buena, where they usually went, or the little block parks they used to go to when they lived over the grocery. It had more space between the playground and the basketball courts, it had a place to play tennis, it had a very nice slide, long and fast and curved at the bottom, that dropped the children into the sandbox. Wrecker stood and brushed the sand grains from his lap. There was some sand caught in the elastic waist of his pants and the air was starting to cool. Wrecker was hungry. He gazed away from the sun to the grassy slope, past the slope to the street and beyond that to the tall stone fronts of the school building.

There was a backhoe parked by a barricaded hole on the street. Wrecker’s eyes widened. A yellow backhoe with an open cab—just a canopy—and big wheels in the back and its stabilizers extended to keep it steady while the operator dug. But there was no driver Wrecker could see. It called to him. Oh! He glanced around to try to locate his mother, but quickly his gaze returned to the machine. He left his toy sword in the sandbox. He moved quickly. Lisa Fay had said Stay there, don’t move from the playground, but he couldn’t help himself.

A backhoe. A yellow backhoe.

His mother had said Don’t go in the street, Wrecker. Never go in the street.

But he had to get under the barricades to be able to climb up the big tire, gripping the treads, and scramble his way into the cab.

There was some noise. People arguing in a corner of the park. There was a big bang like an explosion, and then a lot of police cars with sirens and flashing lights. Someone was running and someone was chasing. There were dials and levers and pedals in the cab. There was a torn black seat Wrecker stood on and tried to reach the switch for the light but he was too short. He looked over to see a policeman tackle the running person. Wrecker wished he could turn the machine on. He wanted to move the arm; scoop dirt with the bucket. The policeman handcuffed the running person. He looked back again at the controls; pumped the pedals and pretended he had the key. He made a growl in his throat like the diesel engine warming up. When he looked up again, that corner of the park was deserted and the sky was dark.

Slowly a thought elbowed its way to the front of his brain. He rubbed his nose and tasted salt and dirt and snot.

That familiar shape? The one they had taken away?

That was his mother.