2003, San Francisco, California

By Elizabeth Brooks

Sarah and Neil were waiting for us when we got to the coffee shop. It was late afternoon, the kind of dusk that doesn’t show until you look at the street through a window. Sarah stood up and waved.

“Hi,” said Aaron. “Sorry we’re late.” We had been drinking in the car and we weren’t in good shape to begin with. I had a broken foot and was walking with crutches. It was my left foot and I had broken it three weeks earlier, when, dragging Aaron home from a party, I slid down the concrete stairs that led to the garage.

“Welcome. Welcome,” said Neil. He said it mostly to me. Neil was incredibly creepy. He was about 60 and the leader of an unsuccessful cult whose members were Sarah and her ex-boyfriend, Christian.

While they were dating, Sarah and Christian had a thing for sidewalk preachers, aging anarchists, and loony bums who yelled about revolution and social change. In the aftermath of their breakup, Christian lured Sarah to his apartment, saying he had met the best one ever. Sarah told me that she had felt an immediate attraction to Neil, that there was an inexplicable closeness that had existed even before they spoke.

Neil was the author of a 400 page manuscript titled “Lucy and Neanderthal,” which claimed scientific proof that humanity was a nurturing system, that evolution was non-competitive. They held meetings, Neil, Sarah, and Christian, on Tuesday nights at one of the co-ops, where they talked about Neil’s theories. I went to one and Neil told me that I should come back with some of my friends. “Bring girls,” he said. “Girls are more receptive.”

We sat down at the table and I poured four vodkas.

“Just a little,” said Neil. “No juice.”

“Want to go have a smoke?” asked Sarah. I followed her, moving carefully between the chairs and purses and shopping bags that threatened to trip me. It was cold outside. I felt like I couldn’t drink enough to get rid of the bad feeling.

Sarah rolled a cigarette and I lit one from the pack that Aaron and I had bought that morning. Spending time with Neil and Sarah was kind of morbid, like watching an accident while your own car is spinning wildly out of control. But it was reassuring in a way, too. The gruesome wrongness of their union made me feel better about the odds of my own. And I liked Sarah. She was smart and funny, and nonjudgmental, when all of my sane friends had spoken their minds and then given up.

“What are you doing lately?” I asked her.

“I have an audition next week with a theater company. Neil and I have been making book clips.” She rummaged in her purse for a minute and held up something made out of copper. “We’ve made about a hundred so far, but we had to stop because we lit a chair on fire.” She laughed.

“Nice,” I said.

I took a drink from the vodka bottle. I had been working as a bartender at a downtown place with a happy hour crowd. When I broke my foot, they fired me. They had to, I guess. Aaron was finishing school, but he didn’t go often. Mostly we just stayed in our house, a one-car garage converted into a studio. We drank and did drugs and talked about books that we wanted to read, social movements we wished we were part of, art that we wanted to make.

“May I?” said Sarah. She took the bottle from me and took a long swig. Sarah could drink better than I could. She always seemed nonchalant about it. She was never guilty the way I was, for drinking too much, never wanted it when it wasn’t around.

When we got inside, I refilled the cups.

“Why don’t we buy some pot,” said Sarah. “I know someone in the park who will sell to me, but he doesn’t like Neil. Aaron and I could go.”

It was dark now, and the windows of the coffee shop were foggy with condensation. We went outside and I lit another cigarette. Neil rolled one of his own. We watched Aaron and Sarah disappear down the path.

“I’d like to show you my photographs,” said Neil.

I knew that Neil was some kind of photographer because Sarah had once lent me his broken tripod. I was a photographer, too, or trying to be one in a vague way that wasn’t actually working. The trouble was that I never took pictures. Or, when I did take pictures, I never printed them. If I did manage to take them and then print them, they sat in stacks in my room and I looked through them over and over until the people and the places stopped existing outside of the photographs.

Neil smiled and finished his cigarette. “Come inside,” he said.

We sat down at the table. I was feeling a bit drunk. It’s a bad feeling, being drunk on crutches. I felt desperate and began hating myself again, but it was too late to do anything about it.

Neil opened Sarah’s backpack and pulled out the pamphlet collection. There was some wacked-out stuff about the conspiracy behind the conspiracy behind 9/11. I took one of them and held it without really reading.

“You live around here, don’t you Neil?”

“I live up in the hills.” Neil had a habit of loosely pointing his finger while he spoke. “The city’s been trying to evict me for years, but I have too much stuff. I have too much stuff for them to ever move me out.” He laughed in a wheezy way and crossed his legs the way thin old men do, like their thighs don’t weigh anything and aren’t really connected to their bodies.

“I’d like to see your place,” I said to Neil. “Why don’t we go up there when the others get back? That way I could see your photographs.”

Neil had a way of making his eyes gleam. It seemed calculated, like a trick of some kind, but there was something engrossing about it. “If you’d like to, we could do that,” he said.

We rolled a joint in the car. Aaron drove and I sat in the front and hugged my crutches. Sarah and Neil were in the backseat. The weed was bad and I didn’t feel it much, or at least it had nothing on the vodka. We stopped at the supermarket to buy wine. When I got out of the car, the night was cold and clear and the black sky was huge behind the stars. Aaron carried the wine, but I had to buy it. Nobody else had any money.

The road wound, snaking up the hillside.

“Sarah and Christian cleaned my apartment last summer,” said Neil. “Before that, no one had been there in fifteen years.”

“Not since his ex-girlfriend, Diana, moved out,” said Sarah.

“Yup,” said Neil. “Not since Diana.”

I glanced at Aaron, but he was watching the road. He was working the gearshift with a cigarette in his hand and, each time he switched from second into third, the glowing end lurched toward the radio buttons.

“It’s just up here,” Sarah said, leaning forward. “This next left.”

We turned onto a narrow road that cut horizontally across the slope. Neil’s building was a square, yellowish complex that stood above a ground floor parking lot. There was an elevator with brown paneled walls. It had a smell.

I walked last, after Aaron, and Sarah, all of us following Neil.

“We’re still working on the place,” said Sarah. “But it’s a lot better than it was this summer.”

The door opened into a tiny passageway. What used to be a hallway was lined on both sides with stacks of newspaper and magazines that stretched floor to ceiling, their pages yellow and rotted with age so that the individual sheets of paper grew together into solid walls. The passage was too narrow for crutches. I leaned on Aaron’s hand and followed him into the apartment. Three yards in, the hallway split and we passed more piles, books, clothing, and weathered cardboard boxes, on the way to the living room.

“Wait till you see the view,” Sarah said.

The living room floor was covered in cardboard and the far half of the room was filled with more stacks. The mass of paper loomed up and threatened to swallow the couch and two feeble chairs that sat almost on top of one another in the little kitchenette.

“Look at this,” said Sarah. She pulled away a curtain and suddenly there was the whole city. Glass doors and then a balcony that stuck out into the darkness, where, so far below, I saw the lights from the buildings, and then the dark water of the bay, and more lights on the other side.

“That’s beautiful,” I said.

“Let’s go outside,” said Aaron. He started toward the sliding doors.

Neil sat on the couch. “Let Sarah show you how to open the door.”

The runners were broken and Sarah rattled the glass until the door came free. She held up a broken curtain rod and we followed her onto the balcony. It was cold all the way up there, and the wind was blowing.

“When Diana lived here, she and Neil had a table and chairs on this balcony,” said Sarah. “I saw a picture where they’re sitting in them. Neil looks really young.” She giggled and leaned on the railing.

“Who is Diana?” I said.

Sarah took out her tobacco and began rolling a cigarette. Aaron took out the wine. It was a screw top. We passed it around and drank a little.

“In the ’70s, Neil used to teach high school in Southern California,” said Sarah. “He had these classes and he was really close with them. I mean, he must have been a great teacher.” She paused and I passed her the bottle. “But there was some kind of scandal. Some of the parents were upset about the things that Neil was teaching. So, he and Diana ran away together. She was one of his students.”

“How old was she?” I asked. Aaron was drinking more than his share and I took the bottle from him.

“She was 15,” said Sarah. “She lived with Neil. I’m not sure how long they lived here, but she stayed with Neil until she was 35. Then she had some kind of emotional breakdown and she went to live with her mother.”

The bottle went around again. It was one of those big ones, the double size that costs $4.99. I looked through the broken glass doors at Neil. He was sitting on the couch in that way, legs crossed, looking as frail and weird as ever.

“Want to go back in?” I said.

We left the door partway open, leaned up where it should have slid, and sat down in the kitchenette.

“Make yourselves comfortable,” said Neil. He had gotten up and was rooting through a stack of books on the kitchen counter.

Sarah stood up. “I’m going to look for some glasses,” she said. She climbed up on the counter and opened one of the cabinets above the stove. Aaron and I passed the bottle. I lit a cigarette and inhaled.

“The best thing about this place,” said Sarah, “is that you can just ash right on the floor.” She climbed down from the counter with four large plastic cups. I handed her the bottle.

Neil brought out a big book. “I thought you might like these,” he said to me. “These were taken by a friend of mine.”

I turned the pages. They were sharp, black and white photographs, taken in the street. A woman stepped outside a storefront church to wipe her brow with a handkerchief. Two girls sat next to their dolls on a cement stoop. Traffic moved across a bridge, while a couple argued in the walkway below.

“I’m going outside,” said Aaron. “I’m going to climb onto the roof.”

“Now look at these,” said Neil. He handed me a black rectangular box. “These are mine.”

I put the book down on the arm of the sofa and took the box into my lap. Sarah sat next to me.

“Is Aaron trying to get on the roof?” she said.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“I don’t know how he’ll get up there,” said Neil. He moved around in his chair. “I don’t think that’s very safe.”

“You can tell him to get down if you want,” I said.

I opened the box. The first photograph was of four teenagers, three boys and a girl, standing in front of a jukebox. The boys looked at the girl and the girl looked at the camera. I lifted the print up and put it in the empty lid.

The next photo was taken at the scene of a highway car crash. The cars were outdated, vintage metal locked in twisted embrace. A small crowd gathered around the body of a victim. They had covered him in a sheet and snow was beginning to fall.

“These are wonderful,” I said to Neil. “Have you showed them to galleries?”

Neil shook his head. “I sent 10 prints to the White House,” he said. “I sent them with a letter to Bill Clinton explaining why he should revise his policy on Latin America. Though I didn’t get a direct response, I think he took my advice.”

I drank more of my wine and looked at picture after picture. I felt the stacks of paper swaying, growing taller and more imposing around me. There were scuttling noises, footsteps on the roof.

“Is Aaron up there?” said Sarah.

“I don’t think it’s safe up there. I don’t think he should be up there,” said Neil, shifting around again.

I laughed in my head, thinking Aaron is so drunk. We are so drunk.

My broken foot was freezing in its little blue bootie. I pictured Aaron toppling off the roof and falling, stiff-bodied, past the balcony and the broken sliding doors. I pictured the rain gutter on the edge of my parents’ roof when I was little. One misstep. I was holding the photographs. I couldn’t feel anything.

Sarah leaned over. “See that one?” she said. It was a bunch of high school kids in a class picture, the kind where they make you line up on the bleachers according to height, except this one was black and white and huge.

“That’s Neil’s class,” said Sarah. You could see all of their faces. They looked that way people look in pictures from the ’70s, long-haired and starry-eyed, all a lot thinner than we are now.

“That one in the middle is Diana,” said Sarah. I leaned closer to the picture. Diana was broad shouldered and tall, not in the top row, but the tallest in the second. She was looking right at the camera. I looked at her eyes, but what can you tell from eyes in a photograph? You just see yourself looking back. I thought: this girl lived with Neil for 20 years. She had an emotional breakdown when she was 35 and now she lives with her mother.

There was a thump outside and Aaron landed on the balcony. He stood out there with his back to us, holding onto the railing. The stars and the city lights and the black bay loomed around his silhouette.

“I want to go home,” I said.

“Are you sure you’re all right to drive?” said Neil. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for Aaron to drive.”

“You guys could stay here,” said Sarah. “You could sleep on the couch.”

I felt a hysterical sobbing laughter rise in my throat.

“We will be fine,” I said to them. “We will be fine.” I stood up and got my crutches from where they were leaning against the couch.

“Aaron, let’s go home,” I said. He took my hand and Sarah walked us to the door, past the stacks of molding papers that she had cleared and organized to make this hallway.

“Thanks for coming over,” she said. “This has been really fun.”

The door closed behind us. I leaned on my crutches and laughed in this way that was silent, but my whole body was shaking and tears came streaming out of my eyes. Aaron stood in front of me and put his hands on my shoulders. His eyes were glassy, he was so drunk. He held up his hands and, when I stopped shaking, I saw that his sleeve was torn and he was bleeding.

“Look what I did,” he said. He was looking at it, too; the light was better in the hall than in the apartment. “I got scared on the roof. It was easy to get up, but there was no good way down. I scraped it on the rain gutter.”

He started laughing and I took his hand and kissed it. We stood there in the hallway and laughed. We had been at Neil’s house. Now we would have to ride the elevator and drive home, drunk in the dark, and when we got home it would be cold and crowded with everything that was real and wrong.

There was a weird green light in the hallway and we stood in it. We stood there for a really long time.
Elizabeth Brooks grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, and moved to California in 2001 to attend Stanford University. She currently lives in San Francisco, where she works as an artist’s assistant and a photographer for the San Francisco Zoo.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 | Email This Post

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