Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash
I saw a man walking through the San Francisco Bay Area. After leaving the dank subway on a warm summer weeknight, I was emotionally high from exploring the beautiful city. The man, who looked like he was in his early 30s, was someone I would have mistaken for a construction worker, except he was wearing military camouflage pants. And I was loaded down with a paper shopping bag packed with snacks I had purchased at a drug store, and some paperback books from Barnes & Noble. My bag was beginning to tear; it suddenly started to rain heavily.
As soon as I caught up to the man, just before we approached the streetlight, he asked me politely if I needed a hand with my shopping bag and presented me with a plastic bag, after retrieving it from out of the trash can. Upon me answering him yes, he handed it to me. I thanked him and he asked me my name. I told him my name was Lena, like Lena Horne. Then I asked him his name and he told me it was John, like John Lennon. And soon, John began telling me about his life as an Army Sergeant.
He said he frequented an officer’s club and asked me If I was interested in visiting with him there. I was never one to be fond of talking to strangers, and especially not with someone who had multiple colorful tattoos engraved on their arms. If my father had seen John, he would have mistaken him for a bum. But John continued talking with me as I headed back to my hotel, and before he left he gave me his phone number to call him, in case I wanted to go out sightseeing at some point.
Soon John and I got in contact again; the front desk attendant rang my room the next day, and she told me a man was waiting in the lobby to see me. When I went down to meet him, John was dressed in blue jeans and a summer Hawaiian print shirt. His hair was neatly combed, and it had a fragrance of VO5. John had a caring face and poignant eyes that didn’t wander when he spoke. We immediately made plans to go visit his father who owned a restaurant, and to go get a taco. He said he knew a great place in the Mission district section of San Francisco where they made the best tacos.
I offered to drive us in my car, a rented red Firebird, which parked in front of the hotel. He directed me into the Mexican Chicanos barrios. It looked like the Bronx, with little mom and pop stores busily serving customers. Latino music played from car radios and from an old juke box inside the taco shop. Apparently, John was a regular there, and the owner smiled and shook his hand when he came over to order our food. We sat at a table with a bottle of hot sauce, salt, and pepper in the middle of the restaurant. I felt like I was a character out of an S.E. Hinton novel. No one unfamiliar with the neighborhood would normally be treated as nicely as I was. I felt like I knew this man, as if he was one of my relatives. John told me he was once married to a Mexican woman, and all the people knew him at the restaurant. He acted like a local hero and reminded me of Stanley Kowalski from A Streetcar Named Desire by the way he was built. But the strange part was here he was, this lonely guy living alone, and I was a lonely girl, staying at a hotel by myself after graduating from college. And the juke box played a series of love songs, and then “La Bamba” came on by Ritchie Valens and my blood rushed to my head thinking about how handsome Ritchie Valens was, played by Lou Diamond Phillips in the movie. I must have dozed off for a minute, because when I looked up, I noticed his soft, light-blue eyes, and long tan eyelashes brushed by a patch of dirty-blonde bangs, and a capped gold tooth revealed itself on the left side of his mouth.
The owner of the store, a tall dark-haired man with a kind smile, was his wife’s brother, John finally blurted out. And then he started to talk about his absent wife. He said she had long, black wavy hair that covered her waist, and she had a passion for Latin dancing. I could tell he wanted to go on and talk more about his wife, and his eyes slowly started to water. They had been married for three years and she had given birth to a little boy. When the marriage went sour, she filed for a separation and moved to New Mexico. He hadn’t heard from her since she left a year ago, and had been giving money to her brother to send to their son.
The wife’s brother seemed to be a nice man, and he spoke only a little English. He seemed to feel sorry for John, too, and at one point he came over to the table, put his left arm around John, and with his other hand reached inside his own wallet, and showed John a photograph which he let him keep. It was a picture of John’s son and wife posing in front of a brightly lit and well-decorated Christmas tree. John’s hand trembled when he saw the photo, and he looked at it for a long time before showing it to me. I looked at it, smiled kindly and handed it back to him. His wife had coal black eyes and dimples; his son had light-brown hair with turquoise blue eyes, and was a little brown-skinned version of him. He posed with his hands on his hips and was grinning from ear to ear, exposing his cleft chin. They were both so lovely.
After finishing his taco and placing more quarters in the juke box, John asked me if I wanted to leave to go visit his father at his restaurant. John told me his mother and father had been split up for ten years. His mom was a struggling hairdresser working for predominantly elderly clients and made house calls. His father was a recovered alcoholic who had started a band after John and his wife split up, and it was known to heat up a place with a raw Latin beat that attracted the best dancers locally. On a Friday night his dad’s restaurant would grow very crowded, and dancers lined up in couples to perform. We were on our way to the hottest dance scene in town.
When we finally arrived at his father’s restaurant, a little after seven p.m., his father was sitting on a barstool at the bar, smoking a cigarette. John introduced me to him. His father reminded me a little bit of my grandfather on my mother’s side, who liked to gamble and had a mean streak in him. John’s father looked woozy in the dimmed lights of the restaurant, and seemed kind of depressed with a faint smile, but a hopeful glint still shone in his eyes. He wore a two-piece suit that he was still growing into, and it looked like a zoot suit, returned from a closet of memorabilia.
Within a minute of being introduced to his father, a young couple started dancing the Conga, and John’s father motioned to his son to join him at a small table with a bouquet of fragrant red roses thriving inside a glass vase. John dragged a third chair to the table and held the chair for me to sit down. Then John briefly spoke to a male waiter and sat down at the table next to me before relaxing his left elbow around the back of my chair. He smiled warmly at his father. “How have you been Pop? This person here is my friend, Lena; she’s down in San Francisco doing some sightseeing, so I couldn’t resist showing her your club,” John said with a big grin.
I reached out to shake his father’s hand and noticed a small Irish claddagh ring on his pinky finger. His hand was warm and moist, as if he was perspiring some. I looked at his left hand and I saw a gold ring fitted tightly on his ring finger. Remarkably, there were no thick veins protruding from his hands; his skin seemed old but smooth. His nails were clipped short. He shook my hand gregariously, clasping it with his right hand and holding it within his left.
The next dance couple started doing the Rumba. Everybody applauded loudly and a top hat was sent around the room for donations. Dollar bills filled the hat to its brim before it came to our table, and John’s father pulled out his wallet and threw a twenty-dollar bill on top. John waved his right hand, steering the basket to continue to the next person. He wasn’t fond of gambling, or betting, or big tipping; the Army didn’t approve of it. “Gee Pop, I’m still on leave. I have to keep my hands clean,” John said cautiously.
His father retorted quickly, “It’s not gambling money, it’s just a donation that gets awarded to the best dance couple at the end of the night.”
John’s father continued to ask questions of his son— was he leaving town soon? Had he seen or spoken to his wife? And to each question, John shook his head no. A tear started to fall from John’s eyes as he reached out to gently touch his father’s hand. “No quiero nada,” he spoke slowly. “Hace lo bien, Pop.” John rose from his chair and reached out his hand towards me to leave. I reached out over the table with my other hand and shook his father’s hand tightly and smiled warmly at him.
He looked like he was genuinely sorry that he had said anything to John, pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, and stuck it inside my fist. “Keep this in case you need it, and come back anytime.”
I placed the money back on the table and turned to leave, while watching a dance couple do the Hustle to “Stayin’ Alive,” the theme song from the movie Saturday Night Fever. They were great and moved under a blue light as the crowd roared with excitement. I really wanted to stay and watch them do more dancing, but I knew John couldn’t take it anymore and he was already holding the door open for me to leave, so I managed to get past the crowd of couples lining up to dance and pushed my way towards the exit.
We left the club and walked a couple of blocks in silence holding hands before John said anything. “Did you like the club?”
“It was exciting,” I said as we approached my car.
The street was vaguely lit; some stores had signs that blinked, and the neon lights flooded the street. Small rainbows glistened over the water drains, slick and black. The meows of an orange calico cat flooded our ears and then its tail rubbed up against John’s pants. I stooped down and petted the cat, hungry for affection. Its eyes were green and wide as they looked into my eyes, reaching inside them for a home. I looked at John, who was bent down beside me, and he stroked the cat under its chin until its little green eyes closed, and its head rested on John’s knee.
“It’s a boy,” John said smiling assuredly.
“What will we name him?” I asked. “Jack, Harry, Peter…”
“Raul,” John said, pausing for a moment, “like my son. Let’s take him home, I’ll bring him to my place and see if I can get the landlord to let him stay.”
John lived in the same neighborhood as his father’s restaurant, so I didn’t have to drive him far. His apartment was inside a newly renovated building with a yellow door and green shutters that were freshly painted, guarded by a wet paint sign. The entire block was being renovated and they had just started to put up parking meters in front of the building. When John got out of the car, he stood there with Raul nestled in his arms, like a purring baby, licking his hand. My car was warm from the heat blasting from the vents and the windows were beginning to fog up from the moisture in the air. It was 53 degrees in June. I rolled down the window and John rubbed his hand on the black felt, sliding across the top of the door, and let the cat’s face peer inside at me. Raul looked thankful and his eyes seemed to hypnotize me as I reached out to pet it one more time.
“I’ll call you tomorrow. Thank you,” John said, clutching Raul under his arm. He turned around and proceeded to walk up a few steps to get to the building’s front door. He turned his key to open the door before disappearing, and I made sure to wave a wild goodbye when he looked back at me, smiling.
It had been a long, interesting night and I was tired. And I needed to assess what had happened. Slowly I closed my eyes and reminisced about the many people I had seen during the evening and replayed my memory of the dancers and the Latin music serenading me. What an experience, to meet a man wearing a replica of a zoot suit in 1990. I remembered John’s father’s sable-brown eyes, lit up with excitement, as he watched the dancing couples’ side to side hip movements, filled with passion, flooding the dance floor. And how sad it was that John and he were two different people. They lived in the same town, but their worlds often collided like dying stars drifting inside a black hole.
Tonight most likely had not been the first night that they had realized their ambitions had met each other head on. They were two people like alien spirits that needed to spread their seeds in different parts of the universe. John needed space, love, and wisdom to heal his broken heart. His father liked Latin music, women, dancing, and the thrill of a large crowd to keep his pulse alive. They were both so different from each other, that you wouldn’t have known they were even related by an iota of DNA, unless they had told you.
I wondered, where could these two people had met in their other lives? They had intersected each other’s paths to only refresh their memories, of how they both differed in thought and moved in space. Surely, I imagined they would meet again, under a new, brilliant night sky, blitzed by the stars from another dimension, that would occlude their minds of who they really were, and unblind them, to each other’s sorrows and joys, with new compassionate eyes.
Lisa Rhodes-Ryabchich is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and an adjunct professor of fiction, short-story writing, screenwriting, and poetry at Westchester Community College. She was a 2016 fellow at Marthas Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and her blog is http://www.lisarhodesryabchichpoetryblog.wordpress.com. Her fiction and poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Kairos Literary, Phantom Drift Limited, Artemis, Wordfest 2019, 2021, Pure Slush, Poetry Leaves Exhibition, Dash Literary, Chaffey Review, Journal of Poetry Therapy, Moonstone Arts Center, River Paw Press, Obsidian III, Penumbra, Nothing Substantial and elsewhere.
