Under Lock and Key

29: The Last Gasp pt 1

The Last Gasp pt 1

Kelly Rossi, December 25th, 1949, San Francisco

The minute, the very minute I stepped off the bus, and onto the pavement of a San Francisco sidewalk, I felt my entire body relax. I didn't realize the difference. But I do now. My Modoc body and my San Francisco one are completely, completely different. I can feel my muscles sag in relief, not knowing they were clenched for almost four years.

I'm home, I say to myself. Ray, if you can hear me, I'm home.

Davey pushed behind me. "Move, jackass. I want to feel real concrete again."

I moved, walking across the road, checking both ways for cars, to stand looking out at the San Francisco Bay. The piers filled with people, everyone either working or sightseeing. Ships tied up at the docs, unloading box after box into huge warehouses. So many people, I couldn't even count them all. So many more, right here, right this second near me, than the total amount of people I encountered in my four years at school.

The rolling hills of my home covered from horizon to horizon with the city, building after building. There are pockets of green spaces. It's not all sterile. But you have to search it out, and when you find it, it's a nice surprise.

And of course, there's almost always the water. The bay to the east and the ocean to the west, and in the north, under that massive bridge that's dominated my life, there's the mouth of the bay. The bridge spanning the two sides of land, the water a bridge too, from a place wild and unknowable in its vastness, and a place people have harnessed, and yoked, to work for us, a place of commerce. Both aspects and the bridge and the deep dark waters under it, a place of change, a transition, a connection, a threshold.

Davey ruins the moment, but that's okay. I don't need to go into my head, I can't let the waters of the past swallow me. Even though I feel their pull on my heart.

"Fuck, Fuck. What the fuck am I supposed to do now, Kelly?"

We didn't talk on the ride down to Sacramento, pissing side by side, as we'd done for years, at the terminal where we transferred in Sacramento to a bus going west. Instead, we looked out the window, leaned on each other, holding hands where no one could see, under our coats. His long fingers tight around mine, even as we both dozed off.

The bus ride itself was another vehicle of change, taking us from our childhood into adulthood, from safety in jail, surrounded by everything familiar and familial, where our day to day was literally scheduled down to the second, into the unknown, where we get to create our own future.

Which is why I didn't talk, and likely why he didn't either.

We're afraid.

But thankfully, thankfully the very second I stepped off the bus, suddenly, I wasn't.

I'm a new man, literally. I left this place as a broken boy. But I've lived a lifetime in my days at reform school. At least that's how I feel. My feet touched the concrete and that hazy uncertainty lifted like coastal fog on a rare sunny day.

But this wasn't Davey's home, so he's still deep in that shit.

"Hey, hey!" I take him by the shoulders, and walk him to a secluded spot between the buildings. Push his back to the brick wall, and let him hold me again. His shoulders shaking, trembling. This asshole who hid behind high walls, never opening up, rarely, maybe even when we were our little family and sharing our souls basically in Morality with Mr. Campbell. It was always Davey who sat in our circle, not speaking.

Until the dam burst on the day Lee talked about love, and Davey confessed his confusion about his feelings for Lee, my Lee, in front of everyone in a torrent of words and passion.