Tales of the City 03 - Further Tales of the City

you look quite boyish. Not at all like you’ve crossed The Great Divide.”
    Michael showed his appreciation with a courtly little bow.
    “Run along now,” said the landlady. “Make little things grow.”
    After he had left, she permitted herself a private grin over this Great Divide business. She was sixty now, for heaven’s sake. Did that mean she had crossed it twice?
    Sixty. Up close, the number was not nearly so foreboding as it had once been from afar. It had a kind of plump symmetry to it in fact, like a ripe Gouda or a comfy old hassock.
    She chuckled at her own similes. Is that what she had come to? An old cheese? A piece of furniture?
    She didn’t care, really. She was Anna Madrigal, a self-made woman, and there was no one else in the world exactly like her.
    As that comforting litany danced in her head, she rolled a joint of her finest sensemilla and settled back with Boris to enjoy the fire.

Michael
    F OR ALMOST THREE YEARS NOW MICHAEL TOLLIVER HAD been manager of a nursery in the Richmond District called God’s Green Earth. The proprietor of this enterprise was Michael’s best friend, Ned Lockwood, a brawny forty-two-year-old who was practically the working model for the Green-collar Gay.
    Green-collar Gays, in Michael’s lexicon, included everyone who dealt with beautiful living things in a manly, outdoorsy fashion: nurserymen, gardeners, forest rangers and some landscape architects. Florists, of course, didn’t qualify.
    Michael loved working in the soil. The fruits of his labors were aesthetic, spiritual, physical and even sexual—since a number of men in the city found nothing quite so erotic as the sight of someone’s first name stitched crudely across the front of a pair of faded green coveralls.
    Like Michael, Ned hadn’t always been a Green-collar Gay. Back in the early sixties, when he was still a student at UCLA, he had paid his tuition by pumping gas at a Chevron station in Beverly Hills. Then one day a famous movie star, fifteen years Ned’s senior, stopped in for an oil change and became hopelessly smitten with the lean, well-muscled youth.
    After that, Ned’s life changed radically. The movie star wasted no time in setting up house with his newfound protégé. He paid for the remainder of Ned’s education and incorporated him—as much as propriety and his press agent allowed—into his life in Hollywood.
    Ned held his own quite well. Blessed with a sexual aura that bordered on mysticism, he proceeded to win the heart of every man, woman and animal that crossed his path. It was not so much his beauty that captivated them but his innate and almost childlike gift for attentiveness. He listened to them in a town where no one ever listened at all.
    The love affair lasted almost five years. When it was over, the two men parted as friends. The movie star even helped subsidize Ned’s move to San Francisco.
    Today, in his middle years, Ned Lockwood was handsomer than ever, but balding—no, bald. What remained of his hair he kept clipped short, wearing his naked scalp proudly in the long-haul trucker tradition of Wakefield Poole porno movies. “If I ever start raking my hair over from the back and sides,” he once told Michael earnestly, “I want you to take me out and have me shot.”
    Ned and Michael had gone to bed together twice—in 1977. Since then, they had been friends, co-conspirators, brothers. Michael loved Ned; he shared his romantic exploits with the older man like a small dog who drags a dead thing home and lays it adoringly on the doorstep of his master.
    And Ned always listened.
“You wanna go to Devil’s Herd tomorrow night?” asked Ned. “They’ve got a live band.”
    Michael looked up from the task at hand. He was boxing primroses for a Pacific Heights realtor who had fretted far too long over a choice of the pink or the yellow. The realtor eyed Ned bitchily, then resumed his fussing: “Of course, there are some potted fuchsias on the deck and those are sort of purplish. I mean, the purple might not even go with the yellow. What do you think?”
    Michael shot Ned an apologetic glance and tried to remain patient with his customer. “All flowers go together,” he said evenly. “God isn’t a decorator.”
    The realtor frowned for a split second, perhaps determining if the remark had been impertinent. Then he laughed drily. “But some decorators are God, right?”
    “Not around my house,” smiled Michael.
    The realtor leaned closer. “You used to