Tales of the City 01 - Tales of the City

polyethylene palm trees or Florentine stick-on mirror tiles from Goodman Lumber.
    He gave himself a thorough inspection and smiled in approval. He looked damned good.
    His horns were outrageously realistic. His mock-chinchilla Home Yardage goat haunches jutted out from his waist with comic eroticism. His belly was flat, and his pecs … well, his pecs were the pecs of a man who hardly ever cheated on a bench press at the Y.
    You’re hot, he told himself. Remember that.
    Remember that and hold your head up later when your parents call from Orlando and wonder if you’ve met any “nice girls” … when that cute trick from The Midnight Sun turns out to have a lover on the diving team at Berkeley … when someone at the tubs says, “I’m just resting right now” … when the beautiful and aloof Dr. Jon Fielding furrows his Byronesque brow and declines to step out of his white porcelain closet.
    Well, eat your heart out, Dr. Beautiful! Pan is on the rampage tonight!
    When Mary Ann arrived at the Bay Area Crisis Switchboard, Vincent seemed to be on a bummer.
    She checked his extremities for recent ravages.
    He was still wearing a bandage on his truncated little finger, but nothing else—other than his left ear—was missing. Mary Ann heaved a secret sigh of relief and sat down in front of her phone.
    “Bad day, huh?”
    Vincent smiled wistfully and held up a string of Greek worry beads. “I haven’t let go since breakfast.”
    “What’s the matter?”
    “I don’t think …” He turned away from her, nervously twisting a Rolodex with his good hand. “I don’t like to lay heavy trips on people.” His sad eyes and scraggly red whiskers reminded Mary Ann of some pitiful zoo animal on the verge of extinction.
    “Go ahead,” she smiled. “It’s good practice for this.” She patted the telephone.
    Vincent stared at her. “You are really … a very far-out person.”
    “C’mon.”
    “No. I really mean it. When I first met you, I thought you were just another Hostess cupcake. I thought you were probably … like … slumming here, doing your bit for the Junior League or something … but you’re not like that at all. You’re really together.”
    Mary Ann reddened. “Thank you, Vincent.”
    Vincent smiled at her warmly, scratching his stub.
    His problem, it turned out, was his Old Lady.
    He had met his Old Lady when he was a house painter and she was a waitress in an organic pizzeria called The Karmic Anchovy. Together, they had fought for peace, forging their love in the fires of zealotry. They had named their first child Ho and joined a commune in Olema.
    A union made in Nirvana.
    “What happened?” asked Mary Ann softly.
    Vincent shook his head. “I don’t know. The war, I guess.”
    “The war?”
    “Vietnam. She couldn’t take it when it was over. She fell all to pieces.”
    Mary Ann nodded sympathetically.
    “It was the biggest thing in her life, Mary Ann, and nothing after that quite fulfilled her. She tried Indians for a while, then oil spills and PG&E, but it wasn’t the same. It just wasn’t the same.”
    He looked down at the worry beads twined around his fingers. Mary Ann hoped he wouldn’t start crying.
    “We tried everything,” Vincent continued. “I even sold our food stamps to send her to an awareness retreat on the Russian River.”
    “A what?”
    “You know. A place to go to get centered. Feminist therapy, bioenergetics, herbology, transcendental volleyball … It didn’t work. Nothing has worked.”
    “I’m really sorry, Vincent.”
    “It isn’t fair, is it?” said Vincent, blinking back the tears. “There ought to be an American Legion for pacifists.”
    Now Mary Ann was certain that she was going to cry.
    “Vincent … it’ll work out.”
    Vincent just shook his head in desolation.
    “It will, Vincent. You love her, and she loves you. That’s all that matters.”
    “She left me.”
    “Oh … well, then run to her side. Tell her how much she means to you. Tell her …”
    “I can’t afford to go to Israel.”
    “She’s in Israel?”
    Vincent nodded. “She joined the Israeli Army.”
    Abruptly, he pushed back his chair and fled from the room, locking himself in the bathroom.
    Mary Ann listened at the door, white with fear.
    “Vincent?”
    Silence.
    “Vincent! Everything is going to work out. Do you hear me, Vincent?”
    She heard him rummaging in the bathroom cabinet.
    “Vincent, for God’s sake! Don’t cut anything off!”
    Then her phone