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

research,” I concluded. “To find out about his life. There are a bunch of people whose names are in his letters. Maybe you knew one of them.” Anton gave me a scrap of paper, a stray crimson brushstroke on one side, and I wrote out a list for him: “Danny Ficchino (aka Dean Foster), Ray Gladwell (female), Mike Kelsey, Don Drebinski.”
    A short while later Anton and I stood outside of his shop, my fingers rubbing the baggie of dope deep in my coat pocket, my eyes adjusting to the dimming sky. The building next to his wrapped around the corner to Valencia, where a new three-star restaurant had recently opened. We could see the dressed-up crowd already gathering on the sidewalk, near the valet-parking stand, where swift, uniformed boy-men clutched car keys and kept away the junkies. Not long ago, this place held a secondhand furniture store and a women’s community meeting space.
    “Not much antisocial behavior going on there,” I sniffed.
    Anton just shrugged. “You think this place is changing because there’s valet parking on the block,” he said. “But I thought it was changing when you showed up.”
    I could still taste Anton’s pot on my tongue as I made my way home, could still hear his voice in my head. Perspective is everything: The way a place is when you arrive is the way you want it to stay, the way you believe it’s always been. Anything new that comes along you see as alarming. It’s hard to remember that you’re just a visitor, too. It’s hard not to be bitter.
     
     
    Stoned and hopeful, I put in a call to Brady. “I think I have an idea for a project,” I told him.
    “Sweet,” he replied.
    I knew Brady Liu from KQED, where he worked as an audio engineer. Years ago, when I started producing local programming for the station, Brady edited my segments; we went on to create City Snapshot together. In that stressful, light-deprived, budget-crunched environment, Brady was my better half, the only person I ever wanted to spend time with outside the job. We would get high in the alley after work and take long, detouring bike rides home, or go to indie-rock shows and drink beer and talk politics. We were unlikely friends in some ways: he was straight, outdoorsy, half Chinese and all Californian, the first person I befriended who’d been born and raised entirely in the Golden State. Words and phrases exotically dude-ish to me, like right on and rad and sweet (pronounced sah- wheat ) fell naturally from his lips; he took it for granted that winters were for snowboarding and summers for backpacking, and of course you were a vegetarian and composted your organic peels. But under the mellow exterior, he was a true neurotic. He suffered greatly, my boy Brady, because he couldn’t, on one hand, live up to the ideals passed on by his (white) Buddhist-feminist-anticapitalist mom, who worked at a nonprofit in Berkeley; and, on the other, he didn’t have enough ambition to please his father, a gruff, task-oriented chemist with a long list of professional accomplishments for whom Brady’s decision to spend years in public radio was a waste of his talent. In the last conversation I’d had with Brady, he spent far too much time agonizing over whether shifting his voter registration to the Green Party was a valiant or a foolish course of action. “I want to vote my conscience,” he’d said. “But on the other hand, if I vote Democrat, I’ll at least cancel out my father’s vote for the Republicans.” It was on the subject of fathers that Brady and I had the most in common.
    Which is why I was so surprised to find him lukewarm about my idea to build some kind of report around my father’s secret year in San Francisco. “So, like a personal story? Like a father-son thing?” he asked me on the phone that night. “Because, no offense, dude, but you’ve got to have a real angle for something like that to work.”
    “That’s where the beatnik thing comes in. How he was part of this wave of people who