Mary Ann in Autumn by Armistead Maupin Page B

I’m supposed to find her. I know how fucked-up that sounds, but . . . she’s in my consciousness now.”
    “What was it? Her sparkling personality?”
    She shot him a peevish look.
    “Hey, I’m just trying to nail this down. You should’ve told me earlier.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I saw her this afternoon. Down at the Civic Center.”
    “You’re kidding? What was she doing?”
    He shrugged. “Trying a case at the courthouse.”
    “What?”
    He smiled like a naughty little boy, then popped a French fry into his mouth. “You gotta learn to tell when I’m teasing.”
    “No. You gotta learn to not be full of shit. Where was she? What was she doing?”
    “She was sleeping in a cardboard box.”
    “Seriously?”
    “Well . . . as seriously as you can sleep in a cardboard box.”
    Now she was really exasperated. “Why are you making light of this?”
    “Because, ladylove . . .”
    “Don’t call me that. Not while you’re being an asshole.”
    “Shawna . . . listen.” Otto’s tone remained calm, maddeningly enough. “I think you’re getting a little ooga-booga about this. I see these people every day, and most of them are seriously loony and dangerous. It’s not as quaint and Dickensian as you think.”
    “Did I say that? Did I say it was quaint and Dickensian?”
    “Okay. Fine. Sorry.” He held his hands up in placid surrender. “Want me to show you where she is?”
    She was surprised by the offer, until she realized the reason for it. “You don’t want me going down there on my own.”
    “That’s right. I don’t.”
    “Okay.” She gave him a half-smile to show that he was back in her good graces. “I can live with that.”
    “When do you wanna go?”
    “When do you think?” she replied.
    T HEY FOUND PARKING ON G ROVE Street, not far from City Hall, then cut across the plaza toward the library, passing the organic garden that Mayor Newsom had installed to demonstrate his support for sustainable agriculture. The rustic split-rail fence around the garden stood in ludicrous contrast to the grim-faced granite buildings in every direction. In the daytime, the plaza struck Shawna as a black-and-white movie; at night, even the shadows seemed to have shadows.
    “What were you doing here, anyway?” she asked Otto.
    “There was a matinee up at the Opera House. Sammy and I were working the crowd outside. We came down to Burger King afterwards.”
    It unsettled her when he spoke of the monkey as if they were a couple, but she never let herself say that. Sammy, after all, was why she had fallen for Otto.
    “By the way,” she said, “they call her Leia. As in Princess Leia.”
    Otto looked puzzled for a moment. “Oh . . . the woman, you mean?”
    “Yeah. It’s her nickname on the street.”
    “Did she use to wear her hair like that or something?”
    “Who knows?”
    “Well, it’s appropriate.”
    “Why?”
    “Because,” said Otto melodramatically, “I am about to take you to a galaxy far, far away.”
    They followed Grove past the library into the heart of the Tenderloin, entering an extended hellscape of junkies and whores. This was always a shock to Shawna. You would never guess that some of these streets stretched all the way across town to Russian Hill with its cable cars and postcard views of the bay. To make the two-mile journey from there to here was to witness firsthand the gradual degradation of a city’s soul.
    Instinctively, Shawna moved closer to Otto. “I thought you said she was in the Civic Center?”
    “Well . . . two or three blocks away.” He turned and looked at her earnestly. “Do you wanna call it off?”
    “No. Do you?”
    Otto just smiled dimly and kept walking. Ahead of them, on the corner, was a vacant lot with a low wall of concrete blocks on two sides, presumably to keep people from parking there. To Shawna it looked like a deserted construction site, or maybe the rubble-strewn remains of a demolition. A billboard on a neighboring building