Our Responsibilities to Those Who Depend on Us

by Ben Jahn

Sally and I met where all people of our age (23) and background (suburban) meet: a drafty independent coffeehouse on the fragrant tree-lined fringe of our recent alma mater. At the time, Sally was cramming for the optometric entrance exam—an exam we referred to throughout the early going as the Big Test. In other words, she was out and wanting back in, while I was out and painting a house a week in Elk Grove.

My painting partner was a man named Skeevy Martin. Skeevy was 35 and twice divorced, a beer alcoholic and a jack-of-all-construction trades. He’d settled on painting because it combined the rhetorical value of preservation with the proof and effect of appearance.

Skeevy kept a third-floor bed-sitter with roof access in an old neighborhood near the state capitol where we went after painting to shoot the Delta breeze. We became pals the way work partners must—by way of admission. He admitted he’d done a stint in Quentin for quote, some John Wayne bullshit, an accident which took place “on this very roof” that involved the death of his best friend and the subsequent seizure of several thousand trucker pills destined for the hardy veins of minor-league ballplayers.

I told him that I couldn’t remember one damn useful piece of information passed down in my four-plus years of Liberal Arts—except maybe that the Great American Novel was in fact a book of short stories not yet written. And here I was dating a girl, Sally, who thought novels were composed in lieu of, or as a sort of proving ground for, screen plays (a mind-frame I found both thrilling and appalling). She owned a video library of movies based on books, a library I took upon myself to improve by replacing a dozen or so cassettes with high-school throwaway copies of The Great Gatsby. But that was after the Big Test, after we’d moved to the East Bay, after Sally’s secret sailing lessons, and after my thing with the Puerto Rican woman across the hall.


One still night on Skeevy’s roof, with the mid-summer air settling on our skin like grime, I became party to Skeevy’s vice. “Window Watching 101—a crash course,” he said. “First rule: Brooke Shields is a dude.” He’d come up with this rule the year hardball quit; Skeevy was between wives, and the player’s union called their strike and wrecked his plan to drink one Coors Light for every three outs of any game on TV. So he hit the causeway, autumn nights, firing empty silver bullets at the rice patties on his way to Davis or Sacramento State. He’d get drunk in a college bar and wander the warm and quiet streets with an eye for dorm and bedroom windows.

“I missed it so goddamn much,” he said. “My first wife was a dick with a body attached—my dick.”

So Skeevy learned to read the dorm-room walls. A brickwork pattern of glossy snapshots beside the bunk was a girl who hit the functions and got laid twice a week. A Brooke Shields poster meant there were dudes in the room, and when the poster came down it was girlfriend time. Candles and colored lamps were stoners and whole-earth types, good for tits and not much else.

“From this very roof, for instance, you can watch the Japanese couple on the futon at nine o’clock. The Brazilian woman who grows weed on that balcony wears nothing but a thong on weekends. She’s had girlfriends and boyfriends but seems to like to be alone.

“Maybe I saw you jerking off your freshman year,” he said.

“Maybe you saw Sally.”

This, too, I found thrilling and appalling.


Sally’s big score on the Big Test got her into the big school. We moved to a studio at the corner of Shattuck and Ashby, and right away I noticed that a yellow Enduro parked beneath our window meant Ricardo across the street would be toweling off a bleach blond with a dragon tattooed on the small of her back. She liked to stand on his bed and twirl while he rubbed the dragon dry.

Sally sometimes caught me staring. “You look like Robert Gatsby,” she would say, meaning, of course, Jay Gatsby played by Robert Redford. And I would think, yeah, except the light is yellow instead of green, I got a girl and no money (not the other way around), and the past, far from wanting reinvention, is of no consequence whatsoever.

“I like to watch the fog come in,” I’d say, though I hated the fog. At the base of a low grade, our neighborhood got a half-assed version of the gauze that had cost me a job in Piedmont. I was slap-brushing quick-dry primer on some second-story eaves, when all of a sudden the rungs grew slick, and my joints cramped, and I woke up in a hedge with a half gallon of “birdshit” all over me and my client’s BMW.

Sally used the bay fog in its various densities to illustrate every eye affliction in the book. Corneal obfuscations—detachments and degenerations—alternative ways to say the distances would cinch off until all you saw was the gas station price marquee and the billboard for that season’s romantic comedy looming larger and brighter than usual by some refractive trick.

Coming back from the market on a clear day in the late spring of our second year in Berkeley, Sally stopped me at a curb and told me how the after-effect of windshield glare described a particular deficiency.

“Close your eyes, Sal,” I said.

In those days, Sally’s sailing shoes never seemed to dry out, and the specific jangle of the Puerto Rican woman’s keys in the hall was enough to get my clear-slick flowing.

Sally closed her eyes. She was tall and jaunty with ruddy cheeks and a determined mouth—in every way the kind of girl you’d want in your boat when it came time to tack against a strong wind.

I said, “This is what it’s like to be blind.”

“We can’t really know that, can we?” she said, which, of course, had been my point from the beginning.

A few months after Sally and I split, I saw Skeevy one last time. He was standing on the rapid transit platform dressed up in pleated Dockers and a baby blue Oxford shirt, an outfit he called his sober clothes. He’d just come from a serious talk with his P.O. and he was ready to tie one on.
In my room on the fourth floor at the downtown Berkeley YMCA, I told Skeevy I’d given up on painting and had taken the LSAT. Now I was living cheap and killing time before law school and the rest of my life.

“Well,” he said, “sometimes the best way out is back in. You parlay a sense of purpose against the notion of your own worth to the world until the one thins out and the other takes over.” He gazed out my window across the tarred roof toward the I-beams of an unfinished structure, and toward the port of Oakland with its container cranes that looked, in the un-dark of the overcast city, like giant steel bitches—or neutered dogs.

“I’ve been out there,” I said. “There’s nothing to see.”

“Maybe you lost the taste for it,” Skeevy said. “You need to re-set. Go up north and fish and drink and read the box scores. I got a friend in Paradise named Lindsay Vance, she can introduce you to some women.

“You’re in the throes of a pussy ebb,” he said. “What have you got to lose but a little self respect?”

A week later, I’d rented a room above the Pair-A-Dice Wash- N-Fold for half of what I paid at the Y. I spent days driving canyon spurs and minor highways. I got lost on roads that turned from smooth pavement to broken asphalt to gravel on dirt to dirt into sand in the space of a few miles. More than once I found myself on the cusp of a dry wash some locals had used to dump busted appliances, and to drink beer—as if one of those activities somehow occasioned the other. Nights, I lay on the dirty floor and listened to the peal of washer belts and the tumbling rhythm of dryers, and wished, stupidly, that Sally was there.

One afternoon in August, I stopped at Doyle’s Roadhouse and found Lindsay Vance under a wooden sign that read FREE BEER TOMORROW. She said she didn’t know a man by the name of Scuzzy or Sleazy or whatever, but had once dated a Skip Martin, who wired houses, among other things.

Lindsay introduced me to the regulars, a crowd of folks, like herself, with workaday jobs and no real ambitions. She had a job hauling margaritas at the Mexican place on Midway Road, and after living in eleven towns in five states in the last nine years, all she wanted was to save some money and settle down.

I told her I was currently parlaying a sense of purpose against the notion of my worth to the world, which she took to mean I was out of work and going nowhere.

“I once had a notion I was John F. Kennedy’s bastard daughter,” she said. “I even memorized the speech he gave up at the Whiskeytown dam. My mother was a maid at the Shasta Hotel, where he stayed. I used to say: “September of ’63 was nine months before I was born.”

“That’s a good story,” I said. “It ought to be true.”

“My mother was a looker,” Lindsay said. “She did a Folgers Crystals spot some years ago. Picture a pretty, soft-jawed brunette with green eyes and slender hands. She was just the type you’d want to have instant coffee with.”

“Like you,” I said.

“Like me.”


Lindsay lived alone in a rough-cut split-level north of town. The house edged a jack pine brake on the husk of a little airport, where the bench began to ratchet up and affiliate with the canyon buttes.
Standing in the sunken living room before the open patio doors, I had the sudden dizzy feeling that Skeevy had set all of this up and was hunkered out there in the dark watching me put the moves on Lindsay.

“For too long, this water ran unused to the sea,” Lindsay intoned.

“Is that all you remember?”

“No. We can fulfill our responsibilities to ourselves, and to those who depend upon us.”

“I like that,” I said.

“Listen,” Lindsay said. “I don’t know if you plan on sticking around or what, but I could use a little intimacy right now.”

“Not here,” I said. “Somewhere else in the house.”

I watched her turn a corner, trailing her fingers on the wall for balance. I faced the patio doors and brought my hand up and raised the middle finger. Deep in the house, a tap opened and shuddered the pipes—Lindsay getting ready for quote, intimacy.