The Road Narrows As You Go by Lee Henderson Page B

Haight-Ashbury and everyone gawking and taking pictures. That was the life, Jonjay and a ravishing tortoise. This whole manor smells like death, we need to get out of here, he said and got up from one seat and went and straddled his tortoise. Let’s go, my one and only friend, giddyup. Take me back to whence I came.
    When there was no doubt we were in the clear, we celebrated. Tacitly. We didn’t admit how happy we were to be alive. We chalked it up to the magic Jonjay played on us, placing a spell on our palates. Patrick took a bicycle and ran a trapline from one end of the city’s bars to the other, and then on to the steamrooms to burn off the alcohol and meet singles and threesomes for anonymous sex. Mark’s way was to drink six cans of beer and a mickey of rye, smoke three joints, and pass out in front of the turntable for thirteen hours listening to the crackle at end of side A. Biz ate copious drugs of all rate and function and spent the weekend in the Castro village a celebrity tripping from house party to house party.
    And Wendy crawled out of the fear and woke up from all that praying and sat down for the first time in a while at the longtable, and with Rachael and Twyla beside her, she got down to work on another Strays strip—Buck and Murphy in a round of Ping-Pong.
    If all else fails, I go with Ping-Pong, she said.
    We remember that one wall of the living room was dedicated to a massive collection of vinyl. Hick’s bootleg funk collection alone ran up to a thousand discs. He owned all the Brill Building seven-inch singles he could get his hands on. Most of the time we spent with Biz Aziz was flipping records; she loved to listen to rare Parliament or Carole King tunes while drawing, oldies gave her ideas for stage material and heavy funk was her heart and soul. She did all her drawing at No Manors; every page of her comic memoir was completed here. It turned out Biz renteda single room on a corner of the third floor, which she used as a kind of green room and costume department—all five hundred square feet was dedicated to her live performance persona. (No room for a drawing table there.) She was something of a drag nurse to the other queens in town who needed mending or on occasion commissioned dresses from her. In fact, Biz was our main source—once a month she dropped off a pound of marijuana she got from her boy in Oakland, for which we paid a thousand dollars. Split into ounces and dimebags, it was easily turned into ten or twelve thousand a month. This never would have happened if local cartoonists hadn’t stopped by No Manors so often asking to try some, heard we had some, here’s some cash. (None of us had the street smarts to survive on a corner.) This was how we sold a lot of very sweaty-smelling weed without much hassle, and we split the profits among the five of us, Biz included. Our fast-paced side business put cash in our pockets at a time when being Wendy’s assistants was more of an honorific or internship than a paycheque.
    While all this went on Manila Convençion parked her white VW van on the street outside for a few weeks, running an extension cord and plugging into the side of No Manors, trying desperately to woo Jonjay back onto the road with her. The iceberg lettuce megafarms beckoned to her and she threatened to leave for them almost every day, but when Jonjay didn’t seem upset at this prospect, she stayed longer. Wendy had ways to keep him on the premises, asking him to do favours in Hick’s memory, long overdue repairs to the place, protection against more of Disney’s henchmen, money to tide her over until she could take on the lease.
    For the time being, Hick’s master bedroom remained preserved as he had left it, laundry hamper and its contents included.

10
    STRAYS

    Our first job as Wendy’s assistants was to pretend to be. She wanted to impress her new business partner with a bustling team, so when Frank came over