Hitting the Road

They’re an odd trio now, clumped out on the curb, reminders of other times and incarnations, ready to be hauled off somewhere.

Each one of them came to us in a different way. I didn’t think we needed the dumpster, dropped off last week by our trash and recycling agency, as our goal was getting rid of the couch and the fridge, but Mrs. Ombud was right—we soon filled it with junk:  rotten redwood timbers from the back of the yard, leftover wood scraps, parts of an unwanted crib, a rusted dartboard left on the wall of our back deck by the prior owner.

The prior owner had left the refrigerator, too. We already had a fridge we preferred, but we moved this one down to the garage, where it came in handy as extra freezer space and a place to store bottles of homebrew. For years we’ve been talking about getting rid of it—the light no longer works, and a thaw made a mess of the freezer. Our handyman would unplug it, needing an extra outlet for his power tools, then forget to plug it back in. We’d gone over to the coast to pick blackberries once, stored the surplus in our freezer, and the bags of berries had melted and run, leaving a purple stain on our new cement garage floor.

Each spring we would decide to limp it through one more summer, then get rid of it, and for seven years now it’s sat down there, motor occasionally whirring away, its doors often going weeks without being opened. For some bizarre reason ants had recently taken a liking to the damn thing, and there were little clumps of their papery exoskeletons inside. (And it’s not like anything sweet was spilled–it had beerbottles, fer chrissake). Then came the coup de grace, a rat had taken up residence last winter underneath, by the motor. It must have been nice, warm, and dry. The little bastard left plenty of calling cards, and that was it—this spring we paid an exterminator to attempt to rid us of the rats (they seem to multiply faster than the few we’ve caught), and we decided to replace the fridge. We found a used side-by-side on Craigslist, and last week drove out to Martinez to pick up the new one. It’s nice to have working lights when you open the door to the sparkling clean white interior.

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But the couch—the couch and I go way back. In 1985 I took a summer off from my job and traveled to Europe at the same time my friend J went. J thought he had a job lined up in Florence, where he flew first to find a place to live (although many told him it would be impossible) then went to see his sister in England.

He bought a car in England and drove to Paris where he had a car accident (“the traffic light was obscured by branches!”), then made it to Barcelona, where the car conked out. He waited for a few days, but every day the mechanic would say to him, “manyana, manyana.” He finally took a train to the south of Spain for that leg of his trip, before heading back toward me in Geneva.

I’d had a flirtation with B, a saucey Swiss I’d met here in San Francisco through S. S had liked me, and I liked her, but not in that way, if you know what I mean, and I’ll bet you do. B went home to Geneva and we had a pleasant teasing correspondence for a while, with her inviting me to come visit if I ever finally went to Europe.

So I flew into Frankfurt and drank delicious beer and went to Heidelburg and saw the Schloss and other sights and got on a train to Geneva where I met B and she told me she had a French boyfriend now. Which made staying together in her efficiency very interesting.

I never met the French boyfriend, and now suspect S had gotten upset about our rendezvous and complained to B, who, not wanting to lose a dear friend, had invented him. But we had fun and I met another in that circle of friends (it was amazing how much these 4-5 women traveled and visited each other), a Dutch woman, who insisted I should meet P, a Spanish nurse living in Lugano, which was on the way, sort of, to Florence.

Meanwhile, J, back in Spain, was still getting “manyana, manyana” from the Barcelona mechanic. So he took a train to meet me in Geneva.

I was very much looking forward to seeing J, a good friend I’d known first in Minneapolis then San Francisco.  I looked down from the tiny balcony and saw the cab drop him off. I went to the door and was trying to think of something cute to say, perhaps riffing off Stanely’s “Dr. Livingston, I presume?” but J brushed right on past me, hauling his luggage in, exclaiming, “where’s the bathroom?! I need a shower right now.” Well, that’s J, ever hurried and prepossessed.

After he got cleaned up we agreed to take the train to Lugano, but stop in Zermatt, first. In a paradoxical twist, while J had been assured there was a job waiting for him at Harry’s Bar in Florence, lots of people told him it would be damn near impossible to find a place to live there, yet he had.

It was an amazing old flat, too, shared with a young American woman nicknamed Coo. It was in a centuries old stone building, had hand-painted cherubs on the walls, and felt like a living museum. When I visited, hot and dusty upon arrival, I bent to untie my shoes, and found precise little swastikas in the tile floor. That startled me. They pre-dated Nazism, of course, by decades if not centuries.

Anyway, the Italian parliament had passed a law saying no one, absolutely no one could hire foreigners (upon threat of jail), even experienced waiters such as J, so he no longer had a job waiting for him in Florence. He was unsure what to do, as he’d planned on staying in Europe for a year. We stopped in Zermatt, Switzerland, met some locals including a well-connected Englishwoman who knew someone who needed a waiter, so he stayed behind to apply on Monday while I went ahead to meet P, the Spanish nurse, in Lugano.

P and I hit it off quickly. We had a wonderful long weekend together, taking the funicular up and down the mountain and driving to Lake Como in Italy and eating in wonderful little cafes until I finally said why don’t you come live with me in San Francisco? She looked at me as if I had suggested she apply to be Minnie Mouse in Disneyland.

“La la la la!” she sang out loudly, “I cannot hear you saying this!” It was preposterous to her, outrageous, to simply give up her job in Switzerland and go to San Francisco, a city she loved—so we decided to do it. After I had finished my three month trip around Europe, of course.

Meanwhile, J was delayed in Zermatt, where he’d had good luck finding work. I was still quite happy with P in Lugano, living the good life and sending merry postcards home to the US explaining to our mutual friends that J had a flat in Florence, a job in Switzerland, and his car, of course, was in Spain.

They all understood immediately, and if you knew J you would, too. He always had dozens of schemes and dreams going on. In SF I’d had a 35-gallon aquarium for several years and good luck with neon and cardinal tetras. A friend of ours once looked at the fluorescent blue and red of the tetra school, flashing in the light and he said, “it’s kind of like the inside of J’s brain, isn’t it? With all the tetras as separate dreams of his, darting together in different directions.”

I left P in Lugano and continued on my trip, going down to Florence and meeting Coo, whom J had said he would call and inform I was coming (he hadn’t, which steamed me, but she was very understanding). So I went to the Uffizi, and also saw all 3 Davids in a day, then met J and we moved him out. Everything in luggage and shopping bags, all higgeldy piggeldy. There was a train strike, too, which was real madness, but we got him to Lugano, left his stuff with P, and he and I traveled on to Zurich and Munich and Hamburg and Copenhagen together.

At Copenhagen we parted; he turned southwest, visiting Amsterdam before going on to his job in Zermatt, and I went up to Scandinavia and met long-lost relatives for three weeks.

I had a great time, including buying a Nordtourist pass and taking trains around Scandinavia–over to Finland, then up above the Arctic Circle in Norway, and I met some interesting women, too, eventually visiting one in Brussels in August, but I’ll skip all that, because I’ll bet you’re wondering about the couch.

What would you rather read about, all the great places I visited, sights I saw, people I met, or have me tie this back in to the couch? I mean, it might be fun if I mentioned the best museums and you could comment on your favorites, too, no?

Okay, I will say that I felt I should remain faithful to P, whom I  met in Paris for five memorable and mostly happy days, before I returned to London (two weeks total there, and a great time, including teaching a party of people how to mix margaritas) then flew home to San Francisco.

 Anyway, P and I did not work out. All I’ll say is that when she got to California, she was a changed woman. (S was not very happy with us, either–which is why I’ve often wondered about what really happened with B.) I wrote about seeing P again years later, fictionalizing the characters, here.

J also met someone. He worked at a hotel in Zermatt for a year, and on a day off he met W. When W came to live with J in San Francisco she told me how they first met. 

They were both in a cafe one Sunday morning, and she knew he was American and wanted to talk to him, but he was pre-occupied with his newspaper. She managed to get enough out of him to find out he had lived in Minneapolis—surprise, surprise, as she had grown up in Minnesota. They hit it off, skiing and drinking wine and having a great time in Switzerland, and she agreed to go with him to SF, where they set up housekeeping in an apartment at Pine and Larkin, not far from where I now work.

They bought a nice old cream hide-a-bed for their living room, as they furnished the place. But thy didn’t work out. She was still young and adventurous, and he was becoming a homebody, still wanting to read his newspapers, so they split up and neither had room for the couch.

I had just moved into a wonderful 10-room flat with a two car garage, where I lived from 1988 until 1996, and had plenty of room for the hide-a-bed. J & W’s cat, Bella, had done a number on one of the arms, but I fixed that up (sort of) and that couch has been with me for 20 years now, following me from SF to Alameda, with any number of friends coming through town and crashing on it, and getting chewed on by Ernie when he was still an anxious pup. That got patched, too. Some of my friends complained about the crossbar under the thin mattress, but the few times I slept on it, I found I could lie across the bar and it worked just fine, for me.

It’s final resting place had been down in a backroom off our garage, where I could recline and watch the TV in my office, at an angle, until the rats found it last winter, as I mentioned here. Now it’s out on the street, with the old fridge (taped up so kids can’t get in), and the dumpster.

I’ve kept in touch with P, on and off. The last I heard S had gone off to Australia to be a chef. B met some guy and went to South America. J is still a good friend, living in Phoenix now, and he once ran into Coo here in SF. She just happened to be passing through, and they saw each other on the street! W eventually married a vintner and now lives somewhere up in Napa.

You know, of course, of how objects can hold memories. Down through the years I’ve looked at that couch and thought about those friends, and how the series of events that brought it to me began almost a quarter century ago in Zermatt, Switzerland. It’s a winding sequence of memories, perhaps. But whose life works in a straight line?

And would you want yours to?