Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

blinked at me in mild horror.
    “That’s Jake’s term, not mine.”
    “The point is, dear…to me it wasn’t about sex or pleasure or any of those lovely things. It was about identity. And completion. I couldn’t feel complete with what I’d been given. It just wasn’t possible. I imagine Jake feels the same way.”
    “But Jake doesn’t want the surgery,” I pointed out. “He wants to ignore that part of himself completely. Doesn’t that seem like a waste to you?”
    She shrugged. “We’re not Jake, are we?”
    I took a sip of my sherry and stared out at the growing gloom, the darkening green of the sycamore trees. We were so quiet for a while that I could hear Anna’s mantel clock ticking in the other room, and, outside, the sound of children laughing in the street. There were more of them than ever in the Castro these days; the landscape was forever reshaping itself.
    “So,” said Anna, suddenly chipper. “When did gay men start liking vaginas?”

17
    The Cave
    M y buddy Brian at the nursery has such a passion for Native Americana that he’s made a ritual of searching for a local landmark called Ishi’s Cave. He takes the N Judah streetcar to Cole Valley, stocks up on trail mix at Whole Foods, and climbs the winding streets above the medical center until he comes to the edge of a forest. Strictly speaking, it’s not really a forest, just a big grove of eucalyptus trees planted by schoolchildren one Arbor Day in the late nineteenth century. But somewhere on the slopes of this city canyon lies a cave—no bigger than an igloo—that once sheltered the last Stone Age man in America.
    Or so Brian believes.
    I have my doubts about this, having joined Brian on one of his many futile expeditions. I think the cave is largely his excuse for telling Ishi’s story, which is all the more haunting because it’s a matter of historical record. Ishi, as you may know, was the last of his tribe. He lost his entire family to bounty hunters, then stumbled out of his remote California valley, sick with loneliness and grief, throwing himself on the mercy of the white man. This was 1911. There were trains and telephones and automobiles in Ishi’s scary new world. He was taken to San Francisco, where a kindly professor made him an exhibit at the anthropology museum. There he became a global celebrity; hoards of sightseers swarmed to the museum every Sunday to watch “the wild man” carve arrowheads and string bows. Ishi, obligingly, would sweep the floor afterward, and generally tidy up the place, then sleep in a small storeroom on the premises, not far from the reassembled bones of his ancestors. When the crowds got too much for him, he took to climbing the hill above the museum and sitting alone in a cave— that cave—as if to connect with the world he had lost forever.
    The part about the cave is more local legend than established fact—a little too New Age-y romantic to be trusted. But it’s comforting to think that Ishi might have found such a refuge, however briefly. He died of tuberculosis five years after entering the modern world. The professor had promised his friend not to perform an autopsy (that procedure being contrary to native beliefs), but the professor was in Europe when Ishi died and had apparently neglected to leave instructions. Ishi’s brain was removed and shipped away for research. Its whereabouts remained a mystery until the end of the century when it was found floating in formaldehyde at a Smithsonian Institution warehouse in Maryland. After Indian activists lobbied fiercely for the brain’s return, it was finally laid to rest in the foothills of Mount Lassen, the homeland of Ishi’s people.
    The burial spot, understandably, remains a secret.

    “Okay,” said Brian, apropos of nothing, “this time I got it nailed.”
    We were at the nursery—a week after I got home from Florida—and he was helping me load an especially weighty laburnum into my truck.
    “Are we speaking of a lady?” I asked.
    “Nah, man. Ishi’s cave.”
    “That was my second guess.”
    Brian gave the laburnum a final shove, then collapsed on the tailgate, gasping from the effort. “Seriously. I met this old hippie who says he stayed there overnight at the Winter Solstice.”
    “No shit?” I sat next to him, brushing the burlap dirt off my hands. “Did he say what he was on?”
    “Okay, fuck it. I’ll go on my own.”
    “You’re going back again ?”
    “I’m telling you, Michael, I know where