Oranges on the Altar

The gravel terrace was covered with citrus in various stages of decay. Every year, she swore she would pick the pulpy grapefruits, copious Valencia oranges, bough-breaking Meyer and Thompson’s variegated pink lemons.

She pictured bringing them to a food bank or offering them in aesthetically perfect bowls to friends and neighbors. She would pluck them from their overburdened branches, placing them in an old wicker basket for curd, or preserves, or marmalade, or sorbet.

Juicing and freezing their sour sweet nectar in little trays with fanciful shapes like stars and moons or fish instead of the standard, boring cube. She would delight and amaze her guests with cocktails, plopping a little frozen lime heart into their gin and tonics.

But she never did. Another year and here they were again, rotting on the ground; their bright, energizing perfume tinged with the treacly scent of decay. Potential denied. The terrace sat above a small, badly neglected vineyard. She knew when she bought her childhood home with all its history, it might be overwhelming.

She picked a couple oranges off the closest tree, tucking one into her coat pocket and only half peeling the other. Without separating its wedges, she took a bite. Sweetness dripped through her fingers. The air was sharp with uncharacteristic cold as she watched the clouds open up over Mt. Tam. It would be raining within the hour, maybe even snow on some of the higher Bay Area peaks.

She considered wrapping the trees with strings of old Christmas lights, the ones that caused more than a few holiday house fires.

It struck her as an odd paradox that such sunny fruits came to ripeness in the dead of winter. She turned to go inside, when a text pinged:

SFPD found him. Trying to convince them to 5150 but they say his behavior does not warrant it

What the actual fuck. She responded:

Have them ask him where he thinks he is or what year it is. They have to bring him in. He won’t make it outside one more night

Not waiting for a response she headed to her car. A bag of rain gear and warm clothes was at the ready, in the trunk. She’d begun routinely venturing into the city to cruise his old haunts and give him the bag herself if she ever found him. Her searches were never fruitful.

In truth, she dreaded finding him. Every time she came across a doorway with a heap of dirty blankets under which he might be sleeping, her stomach turned to knots. She couldn’t bear the thought he might actually be under there somewhere; the golden boy, her life saver.

She had touched a blanket heap exactly once. Much to her relief, it was unoccupied. She ducked into a nearby Starbucks, threw up, and headed home.

A new text pinged:

Good news. They’re taking him to UCSF for exhaustion. Still no 5150, but we know where he is now. Back from Jackson, Sunday PM. If they’d called 5 min later, I wouldn’t have gotten the call. Kind of a miracle.

She responded: Miraculous, indeed! Glad you were there to pick up. On my way to SF now. Safe travels, you.

The Wedge

20 years earlier

Alternately tugging on her ill fitting bikini and awkwardly clutching a towel to her unwieldily breasts, she surveyed the beach, strategizing her advance with the dread of a World War II recruit about to take Normandy.

She return to California after three tumultuous years at a small public high school in New England. Enduring the violent and unpredictable yet inevitable outbursts of her mother, she sank into herself, failing courses and abandoning team sports. In her 14 year old reasoning, she simply failed to overcome new kid in town status. It would be years before she had the self knowing to understand the bigger forces at play. That was of no help to her now as she ran the gauntlet between the Newport Beach parking lot and the Pacific.

Back East, she honed the ability to disappear in plain sight. While other awkward kids were routinely dispatched upside down into trash cans, locked into bathroom stalls or taunted by jocks in the hallways, she stealthily glided past, blending seamlessly into the lockers until she was safe in the haven of the art room. Nobody in this school hung out in the art room.

Invisibility was key to the choreography of the Egg Shell Dance regularly performed around her mother. She tiptoed through the ordinances buried just below the crust of home’s hardscape with only marginal success. She was booted from home multiple times before the age of 14. In the last episode, her possessions — two Joni Mitchell albums, a glass jewelry box with a unicorn on it, her unstylish clothes, an old teddy bear, and, with particular gusto, her journal came raining down on top of her, jettisoned from a 2nd story bedroom window to the front yard.

She lit the short fuse of her mother’s explosive temper enough to land in foster care. After three years, bruised, battered and with the beginnings of what would blossom into a serious eating disorder, she risked her fate with a father she barely knew, and returned to California.

He had vigorously petitioned for custody of her and her siblings in a battle where each parent successfully proved the other unfit. But he was clueless when she actually appeared at his front door, broken, desperate and too young to drive. Off to boarding school she went. The Convent. It was a hail Mary pass.

She was not Catholic and had been to church exactly twice in her life: once at the age of 5 at the insistence of a faithful babysitter horrified she was minding an unbaptized child. The other time was after a Saturday night sleepover with her 4th grade bestie. Not knowing proper religious protocol, and not wanting to be left alone on the pew, she lined up behind her friend for communion. With no small disgust, she dawned on her she would be eating Christ’s body. Solemnly walking back to the pew without closing her mouth, the now slightly soggy wafer remained in tact on her tongue until it could be discreetly placed in bestie’s mother’s purse. Later that afternoon, discovering the uneaten body of Christ in her clutch, a quiet upset bestie’s mother ate it.

Happily enduring required attendance at Sunday mass, and partaking in family functions that didn’t require dodging fists and boots, the wayward tween embraced the structure and safety missing from her life.

Her oldest cousin’s wedding brought her here to brave the stares of the tanned, fit people of Newport Beach. She always felt at home in the water, but puberty’s changes graced her with more than most girls her age. Her lack of desire to be in a swim suit increased in direct proportion to her increasing cup size and the ever worsening cat calls she was experiencing daily. Her body became foreign to her as it became a sexual object to others; a weapon she had no idea how to use. So it was used against her. At 13 she was raped in a parking lot by a frat boy from the local university. She remembered the snow falling around them as everything went numb.

She dropped sports and began bingeing, retreating into the protective pillows of her own flesh. No longer invisible to others, she became invisible to herself; a flickering overhead light that makes you suspect a rodent is chewing on the wires behind the walls.

Years later, while in university herself and after unhealthy portions of Kafka and Nietzsche, she renounced food altogether, choosing to fast for weeks on end. But even below 100 lbs her 36DDs remained. She struggled for balance in a strong wind, a toothpick with tits.

That was all yet to come. Here in this sweltering beach parking lot, as the ocean glistened in the distance, the plump young teen handled her body with the elan of Eore. Her clothes, her bad skin, her thin, mousey brown hair, her shyness, her persistent love of Winnie the Poo, her inappropriate crush on her oldest cousin’s friend…The list of embarrassments was long and granular.

The inappropriate crush was harmless enough. He was from a pedigreed San Francisco family, the grandson of wealthy socialites. Their families went way back. An obsessively athletic Ken doll with a ready wit and wry smile, he had every possible advantage; the embodiment of old school, laid back California country club privilege.

He was seven years her senior and a college grad, but was suggested as an escort for her upcoming debut at the Winter Cotillion. Given the chaos, physical abuse and privation of the recent past, joining the ranks of smooth skinned debutantes seemed utterly ridiculous on its face. But her father was anxious she partake as a way to cement their relationship. She accepted the invitation and grew increasingly anxious as the date approached. Between the introversion, self loathing, and life at an all girl’s boarding school, finding a guy to prance her around a ballroom in a giant white dress was a daunting task, made all the more humiliating by the thought he would be pressed into service.

Still, she got lost in the way the light hit his tousled blonde hair, his effortless surfer abs, his always-in-on-it laugh, the absolute, unshakeable self confidence in his every foot fall. She fantasized of a world where she was beautiful and confident on his arm, not a pudgy little embarrassment he’d probably been bribed to stand near. She wanted to be in on whatever “it” was, instead of suspecting “it” was her, and she was just the butt of some lewd joke about fatties with big boobs.

She spied a spot on the beach and made her way, nervously dropping her towel before lunging like a walrus toward the cover of the waves. Had she spotted him there on the beach, she’d have ditched the carefully crafted plan that got her all the way into the water. But she did not see him. And he watched as she dove into one of the more dangerous body surfing spots on the California coastline.

The Wedge is notorious for how deceptively the waves break. It has paralyzed and gravely injured many more experienced and wary than her. He had almost gotten up to leave, but chose to stay put in case this silly girl got into trouble.

She waded out between sets, feeling a weird pull to the dark water. Then the swell came. She paddled hard to get to that perfect spot and ride the wave in, but she had been over anxious and caught it a bit early. Immediately she realized this would not turn out well. The wave lifted, then spun her like a rag doll in a washing machine until she hit the sand head first and hard. Her ears rang and she felt a distinctly sickening crunch as vertebrae succumbed to the impact. Then, like the scene that would play on endless repeat in her nightmares for years afterward, the water mercilessly pinned her down and kept her down. When the wave finally subsided, she was left exposed and semi conscious in a sandy heap.

She lay there confused and uncertain as to what hurt more, her head, her back, or her pride. The next wave slapped her face. She grimaced and hoisted herself to her knees, realizing too late her bikini top was around her waist pulled down in the tumble. She barely felt the pain as horrified, she turned away from the onlookers. The next wave caught her totally unprepared, sweeping her off her feet and suddenly into deep water.

It was only then she realized she had a problem more pressing than being half naked in front of all the pretty people. She couldn’t move her arms, or her legs, or inhale without a blindingly white hot jolt of agony. She pointed her toes, frantically seeking solid ground as the full scope of her predicament became obvious even to her concussed and foggy brain. She struggled to keep her head above the waves but with such limited use of her limbs, began to truly panic. Her hapless movements were no match for the powerful water and she began to sink.

The details of what happened next are fuzzy to her even now, decades later. A hand came from behind, pulling her up and dragging her backward, face skyward. She couldn’t hear anything clearly. She could barely breathe. She closed her eyes and allowed herself to be brought to safety. On the beach, she finally saw her rescuer’s face.

Her top was long gone by now. He made no mention of it, looking only at her face as he handed her a towel.

“You alright?”

Moving her head hurt, but she gave a weak nod…“Mmhm”

He laughed that easy laugh. “You got worked, dude! Total spin cycle. I was surprised you went back for more. Hardcore.”

She couldn’t even look at him. “Uh..heh…yeah… just, could you please not tell anyone? Like, ever? So lame.”

“It’s the Wedge, man. No shame. You gave it a shot! …But, yeah. Sure thing. Your secret’s safe with me. You sure you’re ok?”

He seemed like a wild ball of energy and was either speaking and moving really quickly or her brain just needed everything to slow down.

“Mmhmm. All good.”

She was not. She mustered a small breath, enough to give a little laugh as if her spine was not on currently fire — anything to convince him to leave so this humiliation would end.

“Alright. See you later!”

And he was off.

Invisible Birds

The February wind whipped down Parnassus. San Francisco hadn’t seen a winter this brutal in over 40 years, when snow blanketed the city, trapping unprepared inhabitants on its steep slopes. She pulled the edges of her collar close and made her way down the street to the Emergency entrance.

The last time she saw him was just before Thanksgiving. He had reached out for legal advice, which was strange on its face. She’d never been a lawyer and hadn’t worked in a law firm since college, decades ago. Apparently, he’d noticed something on social media about her arts advocacy work and erroneously thought she could recommend someone to help him out of his current trouble.

Prior to that she’d only seen him a few times. She missed his father’s funeral but attended a milestone birthday some years prior. He appeared 4 hours late to her own father’s funeral. Once, he asked her to the symphony to use tickets that his mother had said would otherwise go to waste. She attended his mother’s funeral years later.

He was always charming, but seemed ever more tightly wound, unfocused and fidgety each time they met. As time passed, cracks began to show in his laid back veneer. He was never impolite or aggressive. There was just something curious and off about all that excess energy. She chalked it up to undiagnosed ADHD. The symphony date was one of the more peculiar she had ever experienced. He couldn’t sit still through the 1st few bars of Mahler’s Sinfonia n. 5. He bolted from his seat and said, “Gonna go for a quick run around the building. Be right back.” This behavior repeated several more times throughout the course of the evening.

He had become fairly obsessed with an extreme exercise regimen, relentlessly training for marathons and triathlons. He had numerous quirks and restrictions about food. Her cousins who saw him more regularly, were confounded and frustrated by his lack of motivation to be more independent. He had been given every advantage in life. Such a waste.

But he’d saved her life, so she defended him from his many detractors. They were never close, though. He never left his parent’s home, never fledged the nest. The nest was after all, a stately Pacific Heights mansion. But he was now a middle-aged man. Save a brief stint as a model and some work as a personal trainer, he’d never really held down a job. She knew of no girlfriends. Or boyfriends for that matter.

There was something deeply damaged underneath the well honed, casual charm. It was as if his perfect exterior had kept him from ever being seen for the broken thing time was exposing him to be. In an odd way, like her, his body had been used as a weapon against him.

In that respect, she felt like they were birds of a certain feather, alone out of design or necessity, but part of the same flock of misfits. He carried the yoke of his privilege with all the strength of a bowl of watered down consommé. He would tell people he lived with an elderly couple, withholding the fact they all had the same last name until it made a good punchline.

It was funny, but this persistent lack of a formal diagnosis was not. There had been no attempt to address the glaring mental health issues that would have stopped someone of lesser means in their tracks. Money and a WASPy penchant for sweeping even the most obvious problems under grandmother’s large and expensive oriental carpet, had served only to keep him unwell.

Last November, when he reached out, the call came from inside SF General’s psych ward. He said they were holding him against his will. Some nonsense about trying to leave a moving ambulance.

Just before his mother died, the terms of his inheritance were altered. He was to have a trustee mind the money. He fought the change and the subsequent sale of the house in the way he registered all complaints. He did not show up for the meetings where the details were worked out. So a trustee was appointed on his behalf and he was eventually evicted.

That may have been the point when he shattered. Hard to say. By the time he landed at SF General, the fabric of his psyche was a tattered white flag. A dark and overpowering paranoia had joined forces with his obsessive tendencies and swallowed him whole. She was one of three people who showed up to spring him from the hospital. All imagined there had been some terrible mistake they were there to make right.

From outside appearances, he was still presentable; thinner but clean shaven with a little spark still visible in his bright blue eyes. His mind however, was a jumble of fear soaked conspiracy theories. The Mossad had put a hit out on him. People on the dark web were after him. He needed a full time security detail or would certainly be murdered once he left the building. So he couldn’t leave. But they were drugging his food in the hospital. So he desperately wanted to get out. Around and around he relentlessly ran the same closed circuit.

“They told us you can go any time you want. You just have to say you want to go, then you need to get up, collect your things and actually leave. Just those things in quick succession. Up to you.”

“That is not accurate.”

“Honey… actually it is” she said. “We just spoke to your doctors: all you need to do is say you want to go and then go. You’re free. We’ve scoped out some spots you might like here in the city, in the East Bay, in Marin. Wherever you want. We are all here for you. Just say the word.”

“These guys are black ops. I mean… I need a security detail. I want to go. I just want to live! Don’t you get it? Can you just give me 5 minutes? Come on. 5.”

“We’ve been here for four hours. We all want to live. We get that. You just need to make a decision.”

The frustration was mounting on everyone’s faces. She stood up.

“OK buddy. Train’s leaving the station. You want on, climb aboard. Otherwise, just call when you’re ready. Any time.”

For a second, it looked as if he might actually get up. Everyone else stood, there was a pregnant pause, and then they left him there and headed for the closest bar to try and wrap their heads around what they just witnessed. Psychosis? Schizophrenia? Paranoia or just the outer edges of OCD? No one had any answers. It was a shit show, whatever it was.

Roughly a week and a half later, he checked himself out of the ward leaving no forwarding address or contact information. Just, gone. The trustee, who seemed irritatingly unmoved by the gravity of the situation, decided to withhold the biweekly allowance, erroneously thinking a need for funds would surely flush him out of hiding.

His surfing buddy took to cruising around their old haunts in the Marina district and was actually successful on a couple occasions in locating him. But he was cagey and clearly uncomfortable staying in one spot too long. His ATM card had expired but he insisted he needed a lawyer present before punching in a PIN number at the bank for the new card. After another circular argument that defied all reason, he bolted.

Weeks passed without sight of him. His sister had just undergone a double mastectomy and in the midst of radiation treatments drove up to join the search whenever she had the strength. A missing persons report was filed. Eventually that paid off. The police found him lying on the ground in a Safeway parking lot.

By the time SFPD brought him to the ER at UCSF, a mere 92 lbs clung to his skeletal 6’1” frame. He was wild eyed and terrified when she found him parked on a gurney in the hallway. She kept her tone upbeat and calm, despite the utter shock of seeing him so gaunt.

“Hey, buddy. How are you doing?”

He remained silent, frantically scanning the room. Finally he said in a hushed voice, “Hey, is this real? Like really real? This is a movie.”

“It’s really real. I’m here. I’m really happy to see you. We’ve been looking up and down Chestnut for you… all over the Marina. You faked us out. The police said they found you clear on the other side of town over at Ocean Beach.”

He was obviously exhausted but refused to rest, training his gaze on every little noise around him. She continued speaking with as casual and conversational an approach as she could muster, “I mean, I get it. I like high ceilings too. But sleeping rough in this weather? Pretty hardcore, dude.” He stared at her. She asked if she could hold his hand and he nodded. “You cold? You seem really cold. You want some soup, maybe?”

He shook his head, no, then said, “They put tranqs in the food here.”

“Ok… well…I’m not so sure about that. But, no worries. I can get something from outside here, if you like. Maybe a boiled egg? You could peel it yourself so you’d know it was ok… No? You gotta eat something, honey. You’ve lost a lot of weight, you know. Your ankles are all swollen. You know physiology well enough. You think maybe your electrolytes are a little out of whack?”

No response.

“How about some warm blankets. You want more blankets?”

He nodded. Finally a yes.

“OK. A yes. That’s awesome. I just want to get you what you want. We can come up with a game plan to get you there.”

He scanned the room for a long while. “Freedom. I just want to be free.”

“OK, well… Get in line, honey. We all want that. I want a pony. How about something a little less esoteric. Like, a place to live and maybe some more control over your money.”

He nodded weakly. He was devastatingly thin. She could only liken it to pictures from Buchenwald and Auschwitz. Surreptitiously, she snapped pictures of him and texted them to her cousin his friends. She wrote, “Prepare yourselves. It’s grim.”

She continued talking to him in a measured voiced, “Baby steps right now though, ok? Let’s start by getting you feeling better. Are you on board with that?” He nodded.

“Ah! Another yes!”

She flagged down a nurse and wrangled a couple blankets, tucking them in around his stick like frame. He had a large laceration above his eye and a badly injured elbow. He struggled to pull up his shirt and revealed a devastatingly sunken chest. She noticed multiple admittance bands from this very hospital on his boney wrist and it slowly dawned on her… He had actually been here and they turned him back out to the streets in this condition.

No one bothered to check the missing persons report. No one had been notified. He had simply become a part of the underbelly of San Francisco. Yet another smelly homeless guy, crazy or drug addled. Didn’t matter.

In. Out. Rinse. Repeat. He was invisible.

She approached the lead ER nurse. “Has he been 5150ed?”

Not breaking her gaze from her computer screen, the nurse responded, “He doesn’t exhibit symptoms that warrant a 5150.”

“He’s 92 fucking pounds. He thinks the Mossad are trying to poison his food.”

“Well, he isn’t exhibiting symptoms that warrant an involuntary hold right now.”

Losing all composure, she snapped, “So tell me, what does a 5150 take? Filling out a raft of forms and committing Seppuku right in front of you? We had a missing persons report filed. No one checked. No one contacted us. Jesus!”

“I’ll page the psychiatrist.”

“Thank you.”

After a couple hours, a psychiatric nurse approached. It required every once of restraint to politely plead the case for keeping him in the hospital. “He is unwell blah blah so thin blah blah blah doesn’t believe it’s 2019 blah blah blah blah blah blah blah…” The psych nurse nodded, unfazed, unimpressed. Finally she looked at the nurse and said, “Hey. I get it. He’s random homeless dude to you. But he shouldn’t be homeless. He could buy an apartment building outright in Pac Heights if he wanted. He needs to be 5150ed. He needs help….Damn. Whatever happened to Do No Harm?”

“He has… financial means?”

“Significant. Financial. Means.”

Within an hour, he was moved to a private corner room with a 24/7 attendant and a spectacular view of the bay. IVs were dripping, scans were ordered, vitals were taken. He started to have trouble breathing. A collapsing lung. His blood pressure kept dropping, then stabilizing. His organs were struggling to function.

By now, his sister and friends were on their way to his bedside to keep advocating for him. The wagons were circling but the prognosis was bleak. She sat with him in the darkened room until he closed his eyes, then kissed him on the forehead, whispered, “I love you” and left him there.

She was spent and felt guilty for knowing she did not want to go back there, ever again. He had saved her but no matter how she tried, she could not seem to find a way to pull him from these dark waters. She could not repay her debt. The automatic doors to the hospital slid open to the clean night air as she headed to her car.

She noticed a ubiquitous pile of blankets and plastic bags dumped in the corner of the closest stoop. The wind howled and she turned away, tugging her coat tight around her when she felt a lump in her pocket: the orange she’d picked that morning. She pulled it out and held it in her hand, then turned back to face the stoop and knelt down, reverently placing it on the ground. It looked almost otherworldly there, a weird kind of still life, the bright little orange against the filthy grey heap. There on her knees, she felt an overwhelming urge to bow her head. As she got close, she saw two bare feet peeking out from beneath the blankets.