All four work in San Francisco in banking, doing their part to feed an expansion that will draw more restless folk like themselves to the city. Over drinks on Montgomery Street a few weeks back, they got to talking about “grass,” as marijuana is known even to those who have never seen it. They know grass is around, but what is it, exactly? What does it do? All four like to drink. Quinn Davies drinks so that those around him will drink, too—which occasionally makes possible an unexpected adventure. Ben Hobart drinks because it subdues a greedy energy that can find no outlet around his wife and kids. Tim Breezely drinks because he’s depressed, but that isn’t a word he would use. Tim drinks to feel happy. He drinks because, after several bourbons, he’s overcome by a sensation of soaring lightness, as if he’d finally set down a pair of heavy valises he didn’t realize he was carrying. Tim Breezely has a complaining wife and four complaining daughters. Inside his small Clement Street house, he drifts in a tide of shrill feminine discontent that followed him here all the way from Michigan, ranging from aggrieved and exhausted （his wife） to shrieking and infantile （the baby）。 A son would have made the difference, Tim is convinced, but drinking helps—oh, it helps. Well worth the two bent fenders, the broken taillight, and the multitude of dents he’s made in the Cadillac.
No matter how much Lou Kline drinks—and he drinks a lot—a part of him is always removed, watching with faint detachment as the men around him get plastered. Lou is waiting for something. He thought it was love until he married Christine, whom he worships; then he thought it was fatherhood; then moving west, as they did two years ago. But the sensation of waiting persists: an intimation of some approaching change that has nothing to do with Christine or their kids or the house in Belvedere on a man-made lake where Lou swims a mile each morning and sails a little Sunfish. He’s become the social impresario of their cul-de-sac, organizing cookouts and cocktails, even a dance one night last summer, dozens of neighbor couples swaying barefoot by the lake to Sinatra and the Beatles. At Christine’s urging, he unearthed his sax and played it that night for the first time since his jazz-combo days at the University of Iowa, mildly electrified when everyone clapped. Life is good—it’s perfect, really—yet Lou is haunted by a sense of something just beyond it, something he is missing.
Charlene, whom they call Charlie, is six. This morning she scrutinized Lou, wrinkling her sunburned nose, and asked, “Where are you going?”
“Short trip north,” he said. “Some fishing, little duck hunting, maybe…”
“You don’t have a gun,” Charlie said. She watched him evenly, her long tangled hair raking the light.
Lou found himself avoiding her eyes. “The others do,” he said.
His little boy, Rolph, clung to him at the door. Pale and dark-haired; Christine’s coloring, her iridescent eyes. It’s the strangest thing when Lou holds his son, as if their flesh were starting to bind, so that letting go of him feels like tearing. He has a guilty awareness of loving Rolph more than Charlie. Is that wrong? Don’t all men feel that way about their sons—or those lucky enough to have sons? Poor Tim Breezely!
There will be no fishing, no hunting. What Quinn divulged, that afternoon on Montgomery Street as they drank and smoked their Parliaments and roared with laughter before driving their big cars home to their wives and kids, was that he knew of some “bohemians” who grew grass in the middle of a forest near Eureka. They welcomed visitors. “We can go overnight on a weekend sometime, if you like,” Quinn said.
They did.
* * *
How can I possibly know all this? I was only six, and stuck at home despite my fervent wish to come along—I always wanted to go with my father, sensing early （or so it seems, looking back） that the only way to hold his attention was to stay in his presence. How can I presume to describe events that occurred in my absence in a forest now charred and exuding an odor like seared meat? How dare I invent across chasms of gender, age, and cultural context? Trust me, I would not dare. Every thought and twinge I record arises from concrete observation, although getting hold of that information is arguably more presumptuous than inventing it would have been. Pick your poison—if imagining isn’t allowed, then we have to resort to gray grabs.