I Remember Rosemary Fishman

Nineteen eighty-one. If you were an 11-year-old boy, and you lived in the San Fernando Valley, and you owned a dirt bike, there was nowhere you could not go. You could ride to In-N-Out and buy a Double-Double with cheese, stop at Moby Disc for a new cassette, head north on Sepulveda to Castle Golf and challenge the chain-smoking, mustachioed high school dropouts to a game of Galaga or Centipede. You might have heard of other places--Kapalua Bay, Acapulco, Vancouver, Napa--but what did you care? You rode a Mongoose, whose prismatic decals glittered in the sunlight. And with your tube socks pulled halfway up your torso you were a valiant knight in pursuit of everything you did not know, and as yet mostly unconcerned with and uninterested in the fair maidens who roamed the Galleria and Topanga Plaza in satin shorts, the girls whose dresser drawers contained Lacoste shirts of every hue (jade, rutabaga, sunset, cocoa), folded diligently by the domestics who traveled with Windex spray guns and transistor radios tuned to frequencies playing mournful canciones. There were tubas and incomprehensible vibratos. Desert melancholy.

Most of all, there was dry and searing heat, until you cannonballed into the swimming pool, coming up only for the lemonade that you held with fingers as swollen as prunes. “Marco!” you shouted. “Polo!” came the gleeful reply.

Later, as you got older, following your college seminars in Lacan and Derrida, you would mock your beginnings--not realizing how foolish you were for failing to romanticize everything you subsequently reduced to a provincial backwater. You returned from Berkeley wielding words like “metatextual” and “semiotics” as if they were switchblades, and felled capitalist after capitalist at the Thanksgiving table. There they were, faces planted in the stuffing, dripping with cranberry sauce. And you were triumphant, having slayed the Romanovs. Without apology, you pocketed the brooches and bracelets, the diamond rings. It was only moments before the day laborers would forget their sorrows and inhabit the homes they had helped to build, one Spanish tile at a time.

Not until even more distance approaches, and you are in your mid-30s, do you refuse such general thinking, as I was reminded one afternoon during a lunch in Emeryville with a client. At the next table, a man pleaded while his paramour took spoonfuls from a shallow bowl of soup. “I thought you wanted me,” he said, disconsolate. “What happened to us?” The woman laid down her spoon. “You’re married, John,” she said. “That’s what happened.”

I could hardly avert my eyes, though my client, an aging powerhouse fretting over a career in decline, remained unfazed, lecturing me for failing to provide a saleable Web presence. She may as well have been speaking Xhosa.

The years fell away and I was 11, stupid from bravado, in the air high above the hills of Encino, until an unprofessional landing sent me into a bed of sharp rocks and ice plant. Along with the pain, I felt something moist on my forehead; I touched it and saw blood. My knees were banged up and it felt as though someone had tried to make a Bavarian pretzel out of my ankle. Had I kept the handlebars steady, I would have been halfway to the video arcade. My big mistake was attempting a “fishtail”--a flutter of the back wheel--while airborne, a move successfully executed by the neighborhood daredevil, named Jeff Fishman. (Jeff had a disease that forced him, on at least a weekly basis, to disprove his mortality. At a sleepover in Malibu Creek State Park, we watched in awe as he washed down Pop Rocks with Coca-Cola, vanquishing the suburban legend that had seemed holy and immutable.)

Whether from shock or bravery, I didn’t panic. Instead, I shouted for help. No one came. The words were swallowed by heat, chain-link fences, sage, eucalyptus and, in the distance, the drone of gardeners’ power tools. In the foreground was the ice plant, from whose withered green fingers emerged a singular red flower.

A flower is not usually the focal point of an 11-year-old boy’s imagination, unless it serves as the launching pad for something extraordinary. For example, a lizard. Speaking of holy and immutable. The lizard: rugged, stoic, molded from prehistoric clay. Special powers were attributed to the boy who could catch one. As far as I knew, even Jeff Fishman had not reached that level.

To define lizard-catching as a sophomoric pursuit was short-sighted, a failure to understand the very real spiritual needs of preadolescent males. We chased lizards just as our parents ran after love or maharishis or intoxicants. We, too, sought redemption and guidance from that which we could not fully comprehend. Were we not Kerouac? Were we not Castaneda?

I saw a whirring flash bounding from the flower onto a fractured slab of concrete where it stopped, save for a singular pivot. A lizard. Along the surface of his body was a sophisticated pattern of black, red and yellow that reminded me of the lanyards we so lovingly crafted at summer camp.

Whatever pain I had felt dissipated. I admired the lizard’s indifference, so distingue. An icon of cool, and yet not without substance. “I’ll call you Austin,” I said, pledging allegiance to my hero, the Six Million Dollar Man. My mission was clear. I calculated the distance from my coordinates to the concrete. Mirroring the mystical creature before me, I leapt. With an outstretched hand, I caught him by the tail and shouted into the sky. No matter the burning sensation in my knees or the dirt caking my legs--I had met the challenge. I transferred Austin into an empty water bottle and slit a few holes in the side with my pocket knife.

The Mongoose, Austin and I traveled alongside the chain-link fence, following it down to a cul-de-sac upon which sat two big houses. I picked the one with the car in the driveway, hoping that someone inside would give me a drink and a bandage for my forehead. Yes, the dangers of talking to strangers had been properly inculcated, but this, I knew, was a medical emergency and we were, remember, a good 16 years away from cellular communications.

A man opened the door. He was tall and muscular and listed forward with eyes clear as island water, giving him the appearance of a person perpetually ahead of himself, a man capable of reaching his destination before his arrival. He said, “Jesus, what happened to you?”

“I crashed my bike,” I said. “I need help and I’m bleeding.”

“Mara, get me a wet washcloth,” he shouted over his shoulder, and then brought his focus to the water bottle. “Whatcha have in your hand there?”

“A lizard,” I said. “I found him on a rock.”

“Either you’re pretty fast, or he’s pretty slow,” he said. “Come on in.”

I followed him into an enormous foyer. Sunlight subsumed the chandelier above us, sending a diffuse rainbow onto the walls. What I remember most about the house was a profound emptiness. Not only was it largely bereft of furniture, but the high ceilings had a way of trivializing whatever went on underneath them. The entire place smelled like new carpet and fresh paint.

We reached the main living space, a kitchen and family room combination separated by a vast counter, where I saw a middle-aged woman. Either memory or a then-dormant libido prevents me from declaring her beauty--most prominent to me were the black pockets under her eyes--but if you will bear with me as the fog lifts, I seem to recall a substantial figure. She had one hand on the countertop and the other on her hip.

As soon as she saw me she pulled her terry cloth robe so tightly against her body that any armchair psychologist would have accused her of self-abnegation. “What in God’s name?” she asked.

“He fell off his bike.”

“Mike will be here any minute,” Mara said. “I don’t know this boy from Adam.”

“Well we can’t let him bleed to death in the heat, now can we?”

“My name is Jared,” I said.

“Pleased to meet you, Jared,” said the man. “Call me Walker.”

“I mean it, Ned. Wash him off outside with the hose and then go out the side gate.”

Walker grumbled and gave her a nasty look as he yanked a dishrag from the refrigerator handle, soaked and then wrung it thoroughly over the sink. “Looks like you’ll survive,” he said, placing the cool cloth on my forehead. To Mara he said, “I need a bowl. Something with a lid.”

“Why not? You’ve taken everything else from me.”

“Christ,” he said, flipping cabinets open and peering inside. He disappeared from view, resurfaced with a scalloped Tupperware bowl, and then transferred Austin from the water bottle. “He’s got some room now. Should be more comfortable.”

“Just like you to get sentimental over an animal,” Mara said. “What about my comfort?”

Walker responded as could be expected of any true minimalist. He stared forward. “We’ll be right back, partner,” he said, pulling Mara by her robe into another room. I could distinguish the occasional phrase. For example, “your decision.” For example, “stringing me along.” I watched Austin, now in silhouette, as he acclimated to his new home. I listened carefully and heard the tapping of his feet--a reptilian Morse code. What does it feel like to be a lizard? Where are you going?

Walker and Mara returned. She stood beside the counter with her arms folded. Walker and I sat on the adjacent stools, and I told him all about my attempt at fishtailing.

“What yeshiva you come from, curly?”

“Woodland Hills,” I said.

“I’ll bet,” he answered, mussing my hair. “You want some dessert?”

“Sure,” I answered.

“How about Du-par’s?” he said.

“Don’t,” Mara said, with her head in her palms.

“Well I can’t stay now, can I, Mara?”

“I wish you could.”

“Tell your husband what’s in here,” he said, pointing to his heart. “That’s all he needs to know.”

With that, I followed Walker outside. He threw the bike into the trunk of his car. We drove to Du-par’s and found a table that faced the Boulevard.

“Detective Walker,” said the waitress. “What can I get you?”

“Dolores, my sweet. I’ll have a cup of coffee. Some ice cream for the boy.”

“I like pie,” I said.

“Pie a la mode it is. How about boysenberry?”

I nodded.

“You heard him,” he said.

“Are you a policeman?” I asked.

“Plainclothes,” he answered.

“Plainclothes,” I repeated, unable to fathom my good fortune. Lizard! Pie! Cop! From here, I was certain, there could be no greater triumph.

Dolores returned with a heaping plate of pie and vanilla ice cream.

Walker didn’t doctor his coffee. He sipped slowly, every so often taking a look around the restaurant, as if preparing for a hostile incursion. “I want to tell you something, Jared. Even if you can’t understand it now, you will someday. Maybe it’d be better if--hey, Dolores,” he called over to the waitress. “I need a pad and a pen.” When she presented a ballpoint and a few blank chits, he looked at me. “Now write this down. First, take chances, but don’t take foolish chances. You were right to jump the bike. But the fishtail? Come on, buddy. Nobody loves a showboat.

“Second, stay away from drugs. You ever smoked a joint?”

“No,” I said.

“Messed with your old man’s booze?”

“No.”

“Good for you,” he said. “OK. Third, and this is the most important thing, don’t trust anyone.”

“What about my mom and dad?”

“I don’t know them,” he said. Walker was almost as earnest as he was authoritative. “Listen, Jared, you have to think for yourself. You have to do for yourself. That’s it. Period.

“Mara, the pretty lady you just met, well, she married a son-of-a-gun and trusted him with her life. Now she’s in a lot of trouble. You can never know anyone, my friend. And that’s the truth.”

I wish I had been perceptive enough to ask why she should have trusted him. On second thought, he probably would have explained that her mistake, in fact, was to trust anyone, for any reason. He would have exonerated himself by claiming to have offered her a few moments of ecstasy--the best anyone could expect before being sent headlong and naked toward the abyss.

Det. Walker poked his head under the table. “Now let’s see that reptile,” he said. He opened the Tupperware and reached inside to catch Austin by his tail, much as I had an hour before. He held him at a downward angle, so that the lizard was perpendicular to the Sweet’N Low. “One hell of an ugly bastard, aren’t you?” Swiftly, Det. Walker forced him to the table. With his right hand, he picked up his fork and, careful to meet my eyes (to sustain whatever intimate connection he thought he had made?), sent the tines deep into the lizard’s head.

He stood, pulling on his blazer, throwing a few crumpled bills on the table, and then our sadistic sociopath--or harrowing truth-teller--bid his adieu. “Think about what I told you,” he said. Poor Austin shivered and flailed until the end. I watched, terrified. He had been so happy, sunning himself on the concrete, and I had ruined it all. There were tubas and incomprehensible vibratos. Desert melancholy.

When I emerged from the restaurant, innocence half-lost, I found my bike perfectly centered in its own parking space, as though Det. Walker, in his warped and cryptic way, had conveyed the importance of self-respect. Stand tall. Park well.

My parents were both at work, but Jeff Fishman’s mom, Rosemary, whose number my mother had forced me to keep in the change pocket of my Velcro wallet, said she’d pick me up.

Then I was 36 again. My lunch with the client had ended. I drove east, the bay, blue and languorous, in my rearview mirror. I thought that now, what struck me more than the ghoulish cop savaging the lizard was Rosemary Fishman, how she pulled into Du-par’s parking lot in her cream Oldsmobile station wagon and, upon witnessing my bandages and bloodied knees, said, “Jared, sweetie, my God you’re a mess!” On the way back to Woodland Hills, Neil Diamond promised that she was the sun and the words (he was the moon and the tune). Rosemary sang along until she looked over at the bewildered child riding shotgun.

“Oh, sweetie, it’s OK. You can cry,” she said. “You can cry all you want. I won’t tell.”

In her driveway, under the olive tree, she tended my wounds with iodine and kissed me on the forehead.

Rosemary Fishman deserved more than Lacan or Derrida would ever know.