You Can Say You Knew Me When by K. M. Soehnlein

Woody. Anton was very serious about digging the struggle of his gay brothers. He told me once he was thinking about changing the name of his shop because The Straight Blade sounded homophobic. I’d replied that we were living in an age of irony and he should keep it. The sign had stayed, but mostly, I think, out of inertia. Nothing in Anton’s world ever changed.
    “Anything else today, brother?” Anton asked, one frizzy eyebrow arched.
    “Some of your other product,” I said.
    He flipped the sign on the front door to CLOSED and led me to the back room. Behind a stack of paintings was a locker, from which he extracted several freezer bags crammed with green bud, along with a scale and a couple of scoops. Singing the praises of each strain, he presented my options: indoor versus outdoor, low stem versus top leaf, sticky versus shake. I took the usual, a forty-five-dollar baggie containing an eighth of an ounce—organic, homegrown, sticky—nurtured in a sunlit glen amid the redwoods of Humboldt County. “Excellent choice,” he said. “Grown in bat guano.”
    Ritual demanded that we smoke some of what I bought. I had spent a lot of time in this room over the years, listening to Anton’s tales. He was almost, but not quite, a friend. After a voluminous inhale, he asked, “So what’s new, brother?”
    “My father died,” I blurted out.
    “Whoa, heavy. Did he live here?”
    “No,” I said. “New Jersey. Though he lived here once, like, forty years ago.”
    “I’ve been here forty years myself.” He cocked his head and squinted. “Is that right? Yeah, 1959. Forty-one years. Hitchhiked from Billings.”
    “You came here to be a painter?”
    “No, no, that was later. There were three of us, see. All of us ranchers’ sons in Montana. We grew up herding cattle on motorbikes. We had plenty of room but nowhere to go. So we did what you did back then. Hitched to San Francisco.” He drifted off and began reloading. I guess I’d struck a chord; usually Anton packed only one bowl per visit.
    “I just started reading On the Road,” I told him. “It’s weird. I’m looking at it as history.”
    “It is, man. It’s historical. It was a migration, another gold rush, except we were panning for the truth. Kerouac, Cassady—that was something you could aspire to. You thought, I could be one of those guys.” Another staggeringly long inhale, and then: “Mostly we just wanted to be antisocial.”
    “Antisocial?”
    “Yeah-ahhh.” Extended exhale, a passing of the pipe. “See, there was this conspiracy of niceness. You wanted to subvert it, man. The cupboards were full—you know, prosperity—so, like, everyone believed it. Everyone believed the big story , the money story. You were supposed to be happy about it.”
    Another Antonism: “the (fill in the blank) story.”
    He shook his head. “You forget now, but World War Two was a tragedy. They’ve been glorifying it for fifty years, man. Back then, every one knew someone who’d been slaughtered. Kids in your school, the ones a few years ahead of you. So afterwards—well, like I’m saying. Everyone wanted to believe the big, nice story.” He smiled wide, a kind of mischief in his bleary eyes. “But some of us didn’t want to pretend.”
    Back then, we all wanted to be beatniks . I registered Anton’s confused expression and realized I’d spoken these words aloud. “My father came here the same time as you. Did you know him? Teddy Garner?”
    I could see the dulled mental machinery trying to pull a name from the clouds. “I’ve known a lot of folks in my day,” he said finally.
    “He was only here for a year, 1960 to ’61, so the chances are pretty slim.” I raced through a short version of the story—Dad’s past, my uncovering of it—not sure how deeply Anton was absorbing it, but suddenly wildly optimistic, as pot sometimes makes me, that Anton might be of help. Stoned hopeful, as my friend Ian calls it. “I’m trying to do a little