Telegraph, gurus on Sproul Plaza, ashrams in Napa. Jimi used to hide out in my place when he wanted to be with a chi—I mean, a woman—for longer than an hour. That’s before all the booze and drugs, of course. Who knows, I might even have met your mother.”
“Fucked her, you mean?”
Ham ignored that, and the distant implication. “That’s the way it was. Where’s she living now?”
“No clue.”
“Tell me something new.”
“She’s dead, for all I know. Like Jimi and Janis.”
“And if she isn’t?”
She’ll wish she were . But I didn’t say that. I said instead, “I wouldn’t know where to look. My legal parents—I was adopted when I was two—don’t know and don’t care to know.”
Bio-Mom I painted as a flake who’d backpacked across three continents, chasing herbs and new gurus.
“Half the girls in Berkeley were on those trips.” He got mawkish nostalgic, and looked like an old man all of a sudden. “The girls of our youth.”
I stabbed at wilted greens that I didn’t have names for. “Women,” I corrected.
“Two of my wives knew their way around Katmandu a lot better than Oakland.” He sighed. “And add to them, oh god! Laura Ann, Melanie, Loni, Jess, Cindi, the Holbrook twins …”
“I think my mother was different from the women of your youth.”
Ham gave my knee a pat, then a squeeze. His message came through: the times had been unique, not the women. Your mother was the product of her times. I’m old enough to understand, to be your guide through it, not that old.
“Does my story bore you, Ham?” I said. “I can pitch it different. I should’ve known, you’re a producer, not a friend.”
“The war screwed us up.” He wasn’t speaking to me.
“I can think bankable script if that’s all you want. Backpacking blonde and swarthy, mysterious guru meet cute.”
I’d barely got started when Ham stopped me. “It’s not that, hon, I’m not bored. No one’s bored by the ocean. No one’s bored by a tornado.”
The Gray Nuns had named me Faustine after a typhoon, I remembered. Was my fury that obvious? “You find me scary, Ham?” I pulled my charmer pout. Frankie’d been putty when I pouted. “I scare you?” I waited for Ham to laugh. “Ham, what’s wrong?”
“No force in nature stronger than a child trying to find her mother.” He plucked a wad of bills from his inner pocket, peeled off a twenty without looking and called the waiter over.
“Everything satisfactory, Mr. Ham?” The waiter offered two fortune cookies; I grabbed one, Ham crushed the other and dropped the crumbs back on the tray.
“You’re scary all right. You’re trying to enlist me in a war, aren’t you?”
It was true; I needed Ham, needed the nets he cast, the people he knew, the visions and delusions he’d survived. Without him I’d be drifting downstream in the trivia of my mother’s times. I knew that their seventies had been more than cheap beads and headbands, but I was never easy about their music, never quite sure who’d died when of what self-indulgence. Forget their death-by-Nirvana and death-by-bombmaking; the truth was I had no experience of counterculture. In Wyatt’s Circle in Schenectady, the most we could boast of was shoplifting or spray-painting. “Expressions of ad hoc spite against the Establishment” is how Wyatt dismissed our misdemeanors. I had to understand Ham and Bio-Mom and their Berkeley times. The girls of Ham’s youth . That’s when I made up my mind to let Ham seduce me. I could be the youth of Ham’s middle age. Late middle age. Deep-fried squid is not the aphrodisiac.
He scraped his chair back across the red linoleum floor. “Poor fucking Jimi,” he sighed. “Now you have me all depressed.” He pulled the table forward so it’d be easier for me to slide out.
The cashier had the receipt and two more fortune cookies on a tiny plastic tray. “Everything fine?”
“Thanks, Lee.” Ham picked one cookie off the tray and tossed