City Kids

Mount Sutro is where he said we’d always be friends. We talked about how things might change but really they wouldn’t. Seventeen and a half, practically newborns. He was about to split off to a different end of the country. The radio tower loomed over us with its three prongs impaling the sky, mother bear bracing for a fight.

Mom won’t let me work nights even though the pay’s higher, so here I am huddled in the ticket booth at the movies at one p.m. on a Wednesday. He sends me a book a month, whatever he’s discovered in his contemporary lit class. Behind the dirty plexiglass I hunch over his latest selection. My brows are furrowed and I’m trying to parse out meanings so I can send him an adequate text message, concise but profound.

We used to sit on the steps facing the stage at Stern Grove. We’d take turns reading aloud from random library paperbacks. Usually we gravitated toward titles with risqué covers, eager for hints of erotica. We paused every few paragraphs to reflect, giggle, gossip. Once in a while he’d run onto the empty stage and yell out an embarrassing line from the novel, something about erect nipples or firm buttocks. No one was ever really around except the occasional dog walker with headphones in, but we’d collapse into laughter.

He said he knew I was smart. We agreed grades didn’t mean a thing. My report cards were all over the place: I’d get a B, a C-, a D, a B again. My steady spiral toward failure.

We would saunter around the Haight wearing holey thrift store flannels. I loved the idea that…