Chick Perkins’ cherry ’59 Chevy roars up the Great Highway. In the darkness, headlamps reveal only the moment of road before him, and if he didn’t know this stretch like his face in a mirror it might seem a mystery. But a road doesn’t change. Once you know it, you know it, and following it’ll never lead you anywhere different until you decide to steer a new course. Chick cranks the window and lights a smoke. The sea air whips in, mixing salty with the burn of rich tobacco.

He fiddles with the radio dial, trying to find something other than the stinking Beach Boys, and settles finally on Nancy Sinatra singing “These Boots are Made for Walking.” Nancy’s own rich, salty voice is a comfort to him, though as to against what he is being comforted, he carries no notion.

It’s June 25th, 1966, and tomorrow Chick Perkins turns thirty. Penny’s off work at the Cliff House soon, and he’ll be waiting there to meet her. For five years Chick has waited for her after work, and for those same five years he’s waited for that thing people call love to bloom in his heart. Penny is beautiful by all common standards. And they get along well enough. His buddies called him lucky and slapped him on the back when she agreed to be his steady. So why does he feel so empty when he thinks of her?

Chick kneads his palm against the comfort of his car’s worn gearshift knob. This car—it’s the only place he feels at home. The leather seat vibrates warmly and his thighs tingle. He kicks the clutch, pushes the gearshift up to fifth and stomps the gas. The engine roars in his ears and the road peels away beneath him like a ribbon of apple skin knifed from the flesh.

Playland-at-the-Beach approaches on his right. The carnival air of fried dough and caramel fills the car. Before the War called him away overseas, Chick’s father took him once to Playland. Chick was too young, or too scared, to ride the rides then, so they just played ring-toss and gorged themselves on treats. His mouth waters—he can almost taste the enchiladas and Bull Pups, the frozen bananas and It’s It sandwiches.

After the fog of War had lifted and the ration books and blackout curtains had been tossed, Chick was grown enough for the rides at Playland.

His Uncle Joe would come around every Saturday with a quarter for him to tithe at the park, because what else can you give to a boy of eleven whose Dad never came back from some stinking rock in Japan if not a day of entertainment once a week? The feel of that round silver pressed into his hand by his Uncle’s soft fingers, his mother standing beside him, her tired face managing for once a soft smile. And off like a shot, running down Balboa towards the beach, a thrill in his chest as he rustled up along the way any other boy with a fistful of change.

First stop was Shoot the Chutes. The boat-ride gurgled and clicked in its ascent to that magical view from the top—on a clear day you could see the Farallones, set against the cold whitecaps like the fake emeralds in his mother’s best necklace. Once he lost himself staring out at those stoic green gems and grabbed in his delight the hand of the boy next to him, just for a moment, until the boy’s look forced his hand away. Then the boat rattled loose against the edges of its aqueduct and careened steeply back into the pool below. Chick screamed and felt that strange tingle in his groin as the boat careened down the slope and bounced wildly across the water.

Then there was the Fun House. He can still hear the shattered cackle of Laughing Sal echoing down the beach—her creepy gap-toothed smile and yarn red hair made his heart jump whenever he stole beneath her.

His buddies discovered how the air jets in the middle of the Fun House would blow the girls’ skirts up over their heads. It gave him a strange feeling, watching the girls squeal and boys snicker at the sight of white cotton panties.

And there was the great wooden slide, where he’d trade his shoes for a potato sack and trudge up that endless flight of stairs. The top of the platform smelled like sweaty feet and burlap. The kids below looked like quiet ants, the clamor of their fun muted by the distance. Chick would sit on his sack and inch his way to the edge of the slide and feel that brief flash of hesitation before pushing himself off.

Playland’s lights burn in sepia as he drives past. A gang of boys is gathered in the parking lot, leaning against their cars, legs and slouching torsos illuminated by crisscrossing beams of headlamp. Dust swirls in the golden cones. Chick and his friends used to gather in that parking lot, back when the engines revved up and down the highway, boys in cars drag racing for pink slips, a case of beer, the attention of a girl. This was when a hot-rod was still an extension of a man. Now any goober with a checkbook could buy a Corvette and clock 100 mph without ever turning a screw. Chick looks at the lanky boys in the lot and feels his heart grind like a worn clutch.

One of these days he’ll have to move out of his mother’s house and put a ring on Penny’s finger. Isn’t that what growing up is supposed to mean?

—-

Chick leans against his car in the Cliff House parking lot, smoking and listening to the erratic ticking of the engine cooling beneath him. People start to file out through the colonnade—rich fat men stumble drunk and ebullient under the Cliff House’s neon lights, their mink stole mistresses holding them up like tittering crutches. He waits as the parking lot empties.

The lights inside switch off, and finally, Penny. Chick drops the butt of his smoke to the ground and twists his toe on it as Penny, her hair up in a tight waitress’ bun, falls weary into his arms.
“Chicky baby—Happy Birthday!” She pulls the clip from atop her head and her golden hair spills down over her shoulders.

Chick strokes her tresses with his calloused hand, breathes in deep and smells a mixture of cooking grease and reefer smoke. “It ain’t my birthday yet, Pen,” he grunts. Penny has taken lately to smoking grass with the Negro busboys after her shifts. She takes him for a fool, is what he thinks, but Chick knows the smell—he remembers it from Uncle Joe and his queer friends. His hand starts to tremble against her hair and he pulls it down to his side.

The moon is nearly full. Penny lifts her head and her blue eyes glimmer in the light. She kisses him gently, but her lips taste sour. He feels mechanical as he kisses her back. When Penny pulls away there’s a sad sort of wobble across her mouth.

“C’mon,” she takes Chick by the hand, “I want to show you something special.”

Penny leads him around the side of the building, down the steps and past the old camera obscura onto the back patio. Trailing behind with his hand in hers, Chick feels shrunken, like a small boy being dragged by his mother. Turning north, the lovers see Sutro Baths across the way, its glass shell glittering in the moonlight. There is silence, save for the steady breath of waves crashing and receding against the rocks.

Penny squeezes his hand. “Beautiful, huh?”

Chick jerks his hand roughly from her grip. Penny stares up at him, her eyes round like an open question. His heart grinds again, the hollow shudder of a gear failing to catch. “Sure is,” he says with conciliation.

“Beautiful.” He looks at Penny and is puzzled to feel that he misses her already. The Bathhouse, glimmering eerily, relieves his gaze, and looking out at it he is struck suddenly with a profound awareness of the very instant that he occupies, as if he were experiencing himself looking back on a moment that had not yet passed. The smell of saltwater rises in his nostrils, mixed now with the sickly green odor of decaying seaweed and beach slime. The waves crash and recede against the rocks. The grinding in his heart releases with a warm rush, and he looks again at the sadness in Penny’s eyes and sees not a question at all, but an answer.

“You know I never been in there?” He says finally.

“The baths? Really? Not even for the ice-skating?”

Chick gives Penny a look that says: you know me enough to think I’ve been ice skating?

“Well,” Penny shrugs, “we went all the time as kids. ‘The Grand Dame’ my grandpa called it. He’d swim there, before they froze it over—he’d go on and on about the itchy woolen swimsuits that were always too big, and the rubber swim caps that were always too tight, and the trampoline and the slides and all the different games and fun. Course, the pools were closed by the time I was a kid, but we’d go skating or see the museum— the mummies and the suits of armor and that weird Chinese mannequin with the eyes that seemed to follow you around…” She shudders, “Cripes it was creepy.”

Chick nods silently and stares out at the waves. “I remember going skating there,” Penny’s voice is blank, the memories channeling up though her in the silent midnight. “The floors were all wooden planks and they were starting to rot. In the bathroom, you could look down and see the waves breaking through the spaces between the planks. Just the smallest little sliver of a view. And the huge window that separated the rink from the other pools. It was painted with this winter scene—snowmen and sleds and things—and you could peel away the paint just enough to make an eyehole to see into the old Bathhouse—that giant room with the iron beams crisscrossing it like a ribcage. I thought it looked like the inside of a whale, like Monstro, remember in Pinocchio?

I wanted it to swallow me up, just to see. And the pools were still full— the tide came in through the rocks and filled and emptied the water, just like that. Can you imagine? Never stopping, just water, water, in and out, forever. But now they’re tearing it down.”

Chick looks out at the great building as it shimmers in the moonlight.

“Doesn’t that make you sad?”

“Why would it?” Penny lights a cigarette and looks at him earnestly.

“Change is inevitable. You fight too hard against change you’ll wind up going mad.” She says it like she knows something he doesn’t. “People change, life goes on. It’s okay.”

“Life goes on,” Chick grunts. “Right.”

He remembers the day his father’s telegram arrived. He came home from school to find the front door open. He’d been singing “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean” to himself, his mind racing with new plans for their rooftop Victory Garden. More cabbage. His mother sat crumpled on the floor with the telegram in her hand, sobbing. The sheen of grease on her hands drifted up past her wrists where she’d been mixing a ration of lard with a ration of yellow coloring powder to make fake butter. The grease smeared on his face when his mother collected him into her arms. She squeezed him tight and whispered between her sobs “It’s just you and me now baby, so don’t ever leave me…”

Her mixing bowl sat on the kitchen table, the empty tin of lard turned sideways and rocking gently on its curve. There was a quality of light that day, a late autumn sun, low and golden through the kitchen window, it caught against the rocking lard tin and cast a reflection against the wall.

Chick knew he should feel sad, that he should cry, scream, or hit something, but he just stared over his mother’s heaving shoulder at the wall.

That dancing light—it was so beautiful.

Chick nods out at the Bathhouse. “Won’t you miss it, then?”

Penny takes a languid drag off her cigarette. “I already miss it. Don’t suppose it matters if the building’s there or not.”

Something in her tone makes Chick’s hands begin to tremble—how she just lets things roll off her back like they’re nothing. He moves to the railing and clenches his fists tight around on the cold iron bar.

“It doesn’t make you angry?” Chick presses.

“Why should it matter?” Penny looks annoyed. “It’s a relic of another time. I’d rather look to future. This town, it’s on the brink of something.

People are coming together to stop the war, to help Dr. King, to actually do something. There was this ‘test’ thing at the Fillmore? Blew people’s minds. Jenny went and says it changed her whole reality. Can you imagine, Chick?”

There she goes again, thinking him a fool. Always pushing at him with change, change, change. Just like a woman. Chick snorts. “The notion that you can change the world, just like that…” he snaps his fingers, “…it sounds like a bunch of beatnik faggot malarkey to me. Let me tell you, those types—”

“Hey what’s that there?” Penny points. A dim light floats ghostly across the front windows of the Bathhouse, casting the shadows of furtive figures against the glass. “Strange…” she whispers. “Someone’s in there.”

“Well, clearly.”

Penny punches his arm. “Don’t be an ass.”

Chick glares. “Mind your language, please.”

His eyes are drawn magnetically back to the Bathhouse. The figures of two men stoop and flex against each other in the candlelit gloom, as if wrestling in slow performance.

—-

After the War ended, Playland and the Esplanade were always packed with sailors. His mother kept a picture on the mantle of his father in his starched white uniform—smiling, seeming relaxed, a duffel at his feet, with what Chick always thought was the subtlest glimmer of fear in his eye. The sailors on the Esplanade all reminded him of that photo in some way or another. An eye, a smile, or a wisp of hair—something would catch in his periphery and his young heart would ride high in his chest for a moment, before he looked again and felt that rollercoaster drop of disappointment.

Eventually his Uncle Joe stopped coming around with quarters, but by that time Chick had quit going to Playland anyway. Those sailors he’d see—strong men with bright eyes, sturdy jaws and easy smiles—their looks gave him the same vertiginous thrill as the rides would. It had nothing to do with his father, was something else entirely, something dark and foreign and more terrifying than any rollercoaster. Besides, he’d grown too old for childish things like fun and amusement. So he stopped going. The last time he’d seen Uncle Joe was ten years ago, when he and that lisping friend of his were all agog about some poet guy and his “Yowl.” His mother spat and said Joe had been “lost to the beatniks faggots of North Beach.”

After High School Chick got a steady job working as a jeep mechanic up in the Presidio. It was a government job that kept him out of Korea when the time came, good money that supported his mother in her declining age. It was the job that taught the code of manhood—how to smoke and cuss and talk dirty about women. It was where he first found the pleasure of working on a car, the comforting feel of a socket wrench cranking in his hand, and the exhilarating sounds and smells of men at their work.

Penny stares out at the shadowed Bathhouse figures. “What do you think they’re doing?”

A strange bead of panic rattles in Chick’s throat. “None of our business, really now, is it?”

“Don’t you want to check it out Chicky?” Penny grips his arm. “You said you’ve never been down there, why not now?”

Chick’s hands begin to tremble as the panic rattles faster. He grips the railing tighter. “It’s trespassing, Pen. We can call the police when we get home, but this here, this is none of our concern.”

“Damn it all, Chick!” Penny slaps him playfully. “Since when are you such a pansy?”

“I ain’t no pansy!” Chick’s hand flies from the cold railing and cuffs Penny roughly across the mouth. Penny cries out and clasps her palm to her cheek. Her irises nearly vanish against the black of her pupils as she stares back at him. Chick turns back to the ocean. “I said to mind your language,” he says softly. They stand in silence, a broken tableau in the night, Penny with her hand to her cheek, Chick leaning against the railing and staring in fascination at the shadow-figures cast against the Bathhouse wall.

“Come on.” Chick turns finally. “Let’s get you home.”

Penny folds her arms across her chest. “I’m not going anywhere with you, Chick Perkins. I swear to God, it’s like I don’t know you anymore.”

Chick grunts, gulps down the bead of panic in his throat, and says nothing.

—-

Speeding south along the Great Highway, Chick Perkins’ eyes are brimming with water. He cranks the radio full blast but doesn’t hear the music. The engine hums beneath him as he presses the gas and urges the car forward, the speedometer tipping 80. He doesn’t know where he’s going, thinks only that if he can drive fast enough the rubber tires pushing against the road might start to spin the world backwards to a time when things made sense.

Playland races back by him, empty for the night. In his rearview, the last thing he sees are the boys in the lot. One of the shadowy figures tosses a bottle high into the air, sending the crowd around him scattering for cover. The bottle catches in the moonlight and seems to hold there for a moment, as if suspended, until the car pulls him forward and the scene recedes into darkness. Chick looks back to the road and flicks a finger against the stubble of his chin. His eyes play tricks with time and space, blurring the dotted yellow line into an indistinct streak.

Everything is blurred and indistinct these days. He imagines the sound of the bottle shattering, the broken glass glittering under the moonlight as the last drips of beer roll out to muddy the dry ground. His heart grinds against itself as he imagines the bottle, trapped in time forever and floating as he last saw it, a hollow green sliver against an indigo sky.

Kevin Hobson is a writer of fiction, essays, non-fiction, songs, music reviews, and industrial copy about chocolate.  His past stories have appeared in journals such as The Red Wheelbarrow and the Porter Gulch Review, where his story “Notes from the Chrysalis” won that journal’s 2005 Best Fiction Prize.  He was also a finalist for Glimmer Train’s 2007 Best New Writer award and is a regular contributor of album reviews to The Skinny Magazine.  Kevin is finishing his MFA at San Francisco State University, where he teaches as a Graduate Associate.  He is also the co-curator and co-editor of BANG OUT Reading Series and Online Journal, and plays bass guitar in the Accidental Poets, the backing band for the folk singer John Craigie.  He lives in San Francisco where he enjoys his chronic addictions to burritos and internet television.

Art: “Long Road Out” by Nickolas Mohanna. Nickolas lives and works in various places in America. His work is interdisciplinary–ranging from drawing, video, sculpture and sound. He has exhibited throughout San Francisco,sometimes collaborating with musicians and artists. He’s obsessed with adding lemons to water.