Kneesies

 

San Francisco

      Wino Park was on a corner south of Market, San Francisco. My employer leased the lot and installed a drinking fountain, porta-potty, a couple of concrete benches and a dozen six-foot sections of three-foot steel culverts, so folks who were used to sleeping where they fell might find some shelter from the storm.  I was the janitor. 

     The job was simple enough. Every Friday I replaced the stolen handle from the drinking fountain and swept up broken green glass. I began the job wearing the same hat and boots worn as a hired man in the Salmon River Mountains but changed to a Giants cap and high-top Kedds after one of the park denizens kept asking me where I left Trigger.

     I was a walking cigarette machine. It was much easier to get the work done to buy a pack of Camel stubbies and leave them, slit open, on the table in the middle of the park. No one ever asked to help me.  

     One Friday, an autographed copy of Emily Post’s “Etiquette” was on the cigarette table. Had a commando wing of the Junior League placed it here, not understanding that south of Market if you can’t smoke it, drink it, shoot it, shit it, or spend it, it has little value? The big blue book was in good shape, hadn’t been puked on.

     Home was a rollaway bed on the concrete floors of Harvey’s Lunches, in the houseboat neighborhood of Sausalito. It began to rain as I boarded Golden Gate Transit, the cushiest public transportation in the United States, with upholstered seats and headrests. It was too early for the commuter rush. I found a window seat, curbside toward the rear, and opened Emily Post.

     On Van Ness Avenue, across from a Rolls Royce dealership, a hefty brunette woman wearing a gray power suit boarded the bus carrying a drippy tan umbrella and a boxy leather briefcase.  She took the aisle seat next to me, snapped the retainer around the umbrella, jammed it below the seats, put the briefcase on her lap, took a long look at Emily Post, leaned back, closed her eyes and tucked her right hand under the briefcase. 

     A couple of blocks later, while the driver slalomed through the taxi cabs and delivery trucks, I was reading that electric appliances were appropriate as eighth anniversary gifts when our knees touched. I scooted toward the window, as Emily might have suggested, but her knee followed mine. Her leg was jittering like she had a case of the twitchy coffee buzz. 

    Her eyes were still closed. She wore a bit too much earth tone blush, but she was a handsome thing, dark and stout and lippy, so I decided to go ahead and play the game. I concentrated on shooting energy out of my left kneecap. 

     While the bus was stopped, she held perfectly still, hardly breathing, but when we began to roll, that sixty cycle hum began in her right leg. By the on-ramp to the Golden Gate Bridge our knees began to lather. Emily Post had little to say about public masturbation. Her skirt was bunching, her lips were open, and her breathing loud. She kept her hand under the leather box, eyes shut, and her nylons beginning to snag on my Wrangler seams.

     Halfway across the bridge she started little pelvic thrusts, bucking and whistling. The rain had cleared and there was a perfect rainbow between Angel Island and Alcatraz. I nudged her and pointed out the window. She leaned against my shoulder and whispered “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, OH GOD. That is the most beautiful finger I have ever seen.”