I am (Not) a Thief.

Twenty minutes ago, around four o’clock, walking up the Woodstock hill, I thought I saw my high school English teacher, Mr. Steinkey.  I didn’t see him very well, and all I thought I recognized was the movement—the same walk.  He wrote in a small black notebook as he marched.  I couldn’t place the stranger and the original side by side, but I suspect Steinkey has grown slower in the past few years.  Four years ago, maybe the two men would have been indistinguishable.  I walked up the rest of the hill to the bank and down back.  I wanted one last glimpse of him. It was raining. I did not see him again.

***

Steinkey, the original, was the least respected of the faculty at Winston High.  Not only did he show up to work late, he delivered his excuses to the entire class, languid cholas  in the back, three white kids in the front, me in the corner by the door waiting for him. Excuses no one could refute or prove.  You just had to trust him.  His girlfriend left him.  The water pump in his fish tank broke and his crawdad died. He suffered a migraine. His clock reset itself for daylight savings time a week early.  He ran over a squirrel.  He got in an argument with a republican in the queue for coffee.

I once caught him shaving in the unisex bathroom during morning break.  He hovered over the sink, forgot to lock the door.  When I walked in I wasn’t sure what he was doing.

He slipped his hand and the disposable pink razor fell into the sink.  I didn’t move. “Get out!” he said, “I’m bleeding!”

“Is that a woman’s razor?”

He turned off the water. “Don’t you know how to knock?”

“Whoa dude,” I said.  “You need a band aid?”

He stuck his hand over his face.  “No—just get out!”

A circle of cholas waited down the hall outside of the restroom with Ramón, a scabby cholo . They always sat in the hallway, sitting on some of the old desks.  “Damn you pee fast,” Ramón said to me.  The girls laughed.

I looked back down the hall towards the restroom.  “Mister Steinkey’s in there.”

One of the girls kicked another.  Ramón looked at me, scratching the stubble on his shaved head.  “You saw him peeing?”

“No,” I said.  “I saw him shaving.”

One of the girls with orange-blonde highlights looks at me. “That fag shaves?”

“Everything but his eyebrows,” I said, “unlike some people.”

Two cholas behind her crossed their legs in the same direction.  The girl with highlights turned to Ramón and then back to me.  “You’re going to get your ass kicked.” She threw an open can of soda at my feet.  My tennis shoes were soaked.

Steinkey staggered past us to his classroom.  “Oblina,” he said, “come to my office and stop starting shit.”

That was the only time I ever got in trouble with Steinkey.  He was angry I’d seen him shaving and gave me a lecture after class about knocking on doors that were closed.  He forgave me this time, however, on the count of it being hilarious. He never gave anyone else a lecture that I can remember before or after that.  He wasn’t very strict. He couldn’t afford to be.  He never returned assignments, even when he remembered to collect them.  He teased students in class, took sides on arguments during conference, and told people to shut up. His hair was manic and light red, stood on end and reminded me of the only poster he displayed prominently in class, Derrida the philosopher with his pointy nose and hollow cheeks wandering through a windy French day.  “There’s reality for you,” he’d interrupt students in class occasionally, “dead and French, and that’s all.”  Steinkey kept an Oscar Wilde doll that bobbled his head in agreement to any of sudden movements.

This was one of my earlier memories of Steinkey, during the end of the ninth grade. He was the kind of person who put his head down when no one was looking.  I watched him when he didn’t know I was there sometimes, through a glazed semi-opaque window in the classroom door.  The glass distorted him and his desk into small pink and brown blobs. I drew him in my notebook sitting that way, head down and melty.

At the end of that year my older sister transferred me to a larger high school which boasted a step-team and AP classes but which was further away from where we lived.  Word had that Winston was going to be shut down, and the charter on the school was about to run out.  It had only existed for five years, and I enrolled near the end of them.  My tenth grade year I was moved to Menlo-Atherton High School, which lay on the border between East Palo Alto and Menlo Park, an affluent community with gauche taste in architecture.

My last day, Steinkey took the CD out of his CD-player and gave it to me.  It was a dreary copy of Radiohead’s Amnesiac.  I gave him three Canadian Loons I’d saved since I was a child.  We’d exchanged books earlier, mostly he gave me his old books because he said he had too many.  Later he sent me a copy of Alice in Wonderland through the mail.  We kept up with letters and emails, and he offered on a few occasions, in the case that things got too bad with my sister, to take me in.

My junior year, I came to live on Mr. Steinkey’s couch.  It was for less than two weeks.  It wasn’t strictly his couch; it belonged to him and his flatmate, Lewis.  They lived on Irving Street, in San Francisco’s Sunset district.  He hadn’t been my English teacher for two years, and Winston had shut down.  He’d moved on to teaching private tennis lessons for spare income, but was out of work during December when most of his students travelled for the holidays.

Things got bad right before Christmas that year, mostly because Christmas was coming.  My sister disappeared. I woke up the last Friday before winter break, no Vanessa, no food, and no money.  I went through three different knock-off Gucci purses before I found a $20 bill.  I briefly considered my options.  I could go bother one of my sister’s friends who lived in San Jose, a girl named Mary who lived with her patient Nicaraguan mother.  I couldn’t remember her mother’s name, but I remembered Vanessa once told me I could go there in an emergency.  They kept all kinds of girls at Mary’s house and I didn’t want to make any more enemies.  I preferred male company anyway. For these reasons I went to see if Steinkey’s offer stood true at his door.

I waited for the northbound train at the Palo Alto station during a rest between unexpected downpours.  I bussed there from East Palo Alto, the independent worker city where my sister and I lived illegally in a basement on a hill.  The route was officially called the 2-80, sometimes the two-shady when you saw it passing, but my sister called it La Carreta Chillona after a Salvadorian myth that warned of a ghost cart escaped from hell through empty fields to take the living dead from one wretched end of the earth to the next. It screeched through the night, picking drunken Stanford students off the corners and returning them safely to the Palo Alto station, where it was all downhill for them back to the dorms and main campus.  In the morning the same bus took all manner of sleepy-looking people into Palo Alto, and the stops were troubled with sober, frightened workers, mostly illegals.  I drew them under streetlamps and stooped on street curbs in my notebook.   These were the gargoyles of a past generation, the petrified citizens of my old country in all the familiar places: crossing the street, standing in line, buying groceries, cleaning bathrooms, assuming that when people say “hey you” it means “duck and cover.”

On that particular day, as the northbound train groaned into the Palo Alto station, a middle-aged blonde man got closer to me to ask me if the train would take him into the Mission district of San Francisco.  He held an Asian baby to his chest dressed in argyle-patterned wool; at oldest it was maybe a year.  While he addressed me in poor Spanish, his child shifted and I saw a white Ché outline on his black shirt.

“Perdon a me señorita,” he said, tapping me on the shoulder.  “Este tren va hasta la Mission de San Francisco?”

“Yes, of course it does,” I said in English.  I grimaced at his shoes because I couldn’t bear to look him in the face.  He was wearing white fat-laced tennies that brought to mind rap videos.

I managed to glimpse up.  He smiled with his gaze slightly to the left of me, like he was looking at my ear.  Despite smiling, his mouth appeared hard and unloved.  “Muchas Grasas,” he said.

I waited for him to leave.  “Good Greases to you too gringo puto.”

On the train I sat on the last car, in the back seat next to a window.  I put on my headphones, Vanessa’s gift to me for my sixteenth birthday.  Outside got blurry, and trees and houses turned into each other as we sped up.  I took my case of CDs out of my backpack.  I flipped through it and decided on Amnesiac. I pulled open Steinkey’s copy of Alice In Wonderland.  It struck me well that first it was his copy, and then it was mine.  A coffee stain covered a picture of the Cheshire cat disappearing.  His red pen marks covered the white spots, though the writing was illegible.  I slipped Amnesiac into the CD-player and returned the rest of the CDs to my bag.  Electric arpeggios drifted inside my ears, and I imagined myself Alice in her bottle floating on a sea of tears.  After years of waiting, I was on a train going somewhere I had decided to go, and I was going alone.

Usually I felt careless about wherever I was, as no one told me to come or go.  I held my notebook in my hand and wrote and drew in it constantly.  It gave people the impression I had business wherever I was, recording facts and taking extensive notes.  I was there for the details, not the big picture, so no one could accuse of me of being misplaced anywhere.  Anyone could assume I just wanted to see the patterns on the train’s seats, that I didn’t care if I got to San Francisco or not.  I was a fly on a wall, an ant combing over the crumbs of human experience, and at best a scavenger of lost dialogue floating by.  In this way I could spend a few hours in any kind of public place, a park, a library, a train station, a playground, straining myself for a reason to go back to Vanessa.  This time I didn’t plan on going back home. I wore a black coat and Vanessa’s red lipstick.  I thought about Steinkey.

Anyone could assume I just wanted to see the patterns on the train’s seats, that I didn’t care if I got to San Francisco or not. I was a fly on a wall, an ant combing over the crumbs of human experience, and at best a scavenger of lost dialogue floating by.

I had a theory about Steinkey.  I had many theories, but the best one was really a history.  My theory was that Steinkey never had a family, because he gave the appearance that he knew more than anyone else what it was like to be alone. Maybe he went to bars at night and got in arguments with women instead of hitting on them. Maybe he picked locks and had roof access to all the tallest buildings of San Francisco.  Maybe he took risks, biked against traffic with no reflectors.  Maybe he didn’t know his father’s name.  I suspected he was nimble, could steal anything, and if he hadn’t been an English teacher he would have been a thief.  He was thin and could fit in between windows left ajar.  And likely he was beautiful to other women and not just myself, irrevocably so, and no one and no amount of time would ever take that away from him.  At my age, he must have been traumatic to look at, androgynous and cupid-mouthed.  He must have turned down every kind of woman: red-heads that could have been his sisters, blonde girls with big eyelashes, tiny Asians who strung their fingers around their ears when they looked at him, older ladies with good jewellery, lanky women who looked into his eyes.  He probably had to bat off men in San Francisco too.  But I bet cholas didn’t like him, because he wasn’t manly.  Other Latinas probably left him alone.  Vanessa would spit on him and call him a lesbian or faggot.  My heart swam.

I wrote on the train about Steinkey’s door, about how it I thought it might look among the other doors, about its colour and its height.  I imagined a tall door, in dark cherry brown wood, with golden handles and a large keyhole.  Steinkey lived at the top of the hill, alone and dejected, waiting for someone like me to come visit him.

But Steinkey lived at the bottom of a hill, below the street level, his house a few steps down from the curb, and his flat was sort of a basement like where I lived.  The house was salmon and it had a light green iron door, the colour of Lady Liberty.  I couldn’t find a doorbell so I just rattled the gate by hitting it a few times.

Steinkey opened his door and immediately cursed. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” he said. “Did you drop out?”

“Look,” I said, “I just need to use your bathroom.  I was in the area. I thought I’d finally pay you a visit.”  I set my duffel bag on the carpet next to the door.  “Nice floors,” I said.  “Nice pad you have here.”

“What do you know,” he closed the door behind me.  “It’s a palace.”

Boxes of flaxseed and grape nut cereal overflowed from a recycling bin right in the middle of his living room.  The couch seats pouted off the sides and one of the springs sprouted on the matching armchair.  A series of green wine bottles lined a long elegant window that went across the top of the wall.  Since the apartment rested partially underground, the only light you got drifted in from relatively high windows. I looked up.  “I bet bitches can’t get enough of this.”

Steinkey moved towards the recycling bin.  “Didn’t you see the line outside?”  He picked the box up and moved it behind the armchair.  “I can hear them now: ‘Casper Casper! Let us into your domicile!”  He had an excellent falsetto.

I wandered down a hallway where the ceiling was painted a light periwinkle.  “Say!” I found his bathroom. “This isn’t as bad as I thought it’d be.”

He called to me.  “Stay away from my cabinet.”

I opened his cabinet. “Tampons!”

I heard a dry bump in the carpet—he was coming to see what I was doing in the bathroom.  “What else?  Did you find my vagina in there?”

On the mint tiled floor I noticed little navy mermaid designs.  “It’s splattered all over your mermaid tiles,” I said.

Steinkey crossed to his cabinet and closed it.  “Go explore something less humiliating will you?”

I walked down the hall and opened the first door to my left.  “Get out of there,” Steinkey called from the bathroom, where he was rearranging his cabinet.

A large tulip-shaped lamp hung from the centre of the ceiling, radiating a full-spectrum white.  The bar of window at the top of the wall was decorated with Hawaiian hula dolls.  Steinkey came out of the bathroom.  “Get out of there,” he said again.  He closed the door and herded me back into the hallway.

“You’re room’s not bad,” I said, eying the next door.

“That’s not my room,” he said.  “It’s Lewis’s room.  He’s my flatmate.”

I opened the next door. It was an explosion of books with a mattress near a wall and a small leopard-print dresser in the corner.  “This!” I said, gravitating towards a gilded copy of Moby Dick on a pile of other books.  “Where’d it come from?”

“I stole it from the Stanford English department.”

“Did you get the tampons there too?”

“No,” he said. “Those are Lewis’s.”

“Lewis uses tampons?”

“No, his ex-girlfriend did.  Now they’re just sitting in there.”

“You should make a hat,” I said.  He had Tibetan prayer flags across his long window, through which I could see the rain pick up again. “Take it out in the rain.”

He waved me to a fuzzy purple beanbag chair in the corner of his bedroom.  “So have you really dropped out?”

“No, I’m pregnant.” I dropped into the chair and took off my sweatshirt.

Steinkey frowned.  “Ramón right?”

“No loser,” I said.  “You really think I’d get knocked up by bacon-face?”

He pulled a small boom box from behind a stack of books near his bed.  He turned on the radio, keeping the volume low.  The lights were off. Guitars and falsettos kept us company. “Now tell me how I can help you.”

“Vanessa’s gone,” I said.  “And I need somewhere to stay over the winter break.”

He lay back in his bed.  “Over the holidays?”

“Just until school starts, unless you have somewhere to go, but I promise I’ll be no trouble and stay out of your way and help you cook and clean.”

Steinkey covered his mouth and coughed.  “No, I can’t—Lewis wouldn’t appreciate it.”

I got up and stood over his bed.  “Please?” I said.  “I have no where else to go.  Vanessa didn’t leave anything for me to eat.  I’ll starve to damn death.”

He looked up at me.  “Fine,” he said. “It’s not like I have any plans for the next two and a half godforsaken weeks anyway.  And at least you’re not pregnant.”

I threw myself on him and squeezed his bony body.  “Thank you thank you thank you!”

“My fucking kidneys!” He turned away from me and moaned. “Don’t grab me like that.”

I let him go. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had!”  I rolled on his bed and kicked my legs in the air. “I promise it’ll be like a sleepover.”

Suddenly the lights turned on.  A man with large dark eyes on a very small head stood in the doorway.  He wore a black trench coat, the trim dripping with rainwater.  My first instinct decided he could be a detective, until he spoke, and I realized he must be Lewis.  “Casper?” he said, eyes on me.

Steinkey sat up and brushed his shoulders. “Lewis, this a friend—”

“I’m Oblina,” I said, offering my hand.  “You must be Lewis.”

Lewis shook his head and backed out slowly.  “Pardon me for the interruption,” he said, with a dopey-sounding voice.  “Casper, it might be time to take out the recycling.”

Steinkey got out of bed and followed Lewis out of the room.  The two men discussed me in the living room and I sat in bed listening.

Lewis was trying to whisper.  “Where’d you find the cheerleader?”

Steinkey sighed and things were moved around.  I heard furniture being dragged across a wooden floor.  I suspected they were moving chairs.  “She’s just a kid,” Steinkey said.  “She needs a place to stay.”

“So she doesn’t have anywhere else to go?  No aunts or something?  There should be shelters for this kind of thing.”

“I didn’t interview her,” Steinkey said.  “I just know she’s illegal, and her family isn’t in the country.”

“So who normally takes care of her?”

Steinkey sounded angry. “Her sister, who may or may not exist.  Just for two weeks Lewis.”

Lewis breathed heavily. “You still haven’t paid last month’s rent and you want to bring a pet girl into this?”

“She’s a good friend. She’ll be on the couch.” Steinkey said.  “She’ll help out.”

“Casper, this is such a bad idea.”

“It’s a fucking holiday, okay, it’s the birth of Christ here. You want to throw her on the street?”

“You always exaggerate what I say,” Lewis said. “I feel upset when you don’t take my intentions well.”

“This isn’t a matter of pros and cons, Lewis.  She’s a human being, a little girl.”

“What will the neighbours think?”

“The Hendersons?” Steinkey said. “Who cares! They’re stoners, and they already think we’re gay.  We can say we adopted her.”

“I’m sure they’ll totally believe that, Casper.”

“Just two weeks.  She’ll stay out of your hair I promise.”

“Fine,” Lewis said.  “But just two weeks.  And just because she seems like a nice enough kid.”

“And I can cook!” I called out to them from Steinkey’s room.  And they both shut up.

I got the couch.  Steinkey went to bed early, around ten, after a late dinner.  Earlier, Lewis boiled corn-on-the-cob and we ate separately, Lewis in his room and Steinkey and I on the couch.  They didn’t have a place to eat other than the coffee table in front of the couch. We ate the corn buttered and salted and didn’t really talk. We listened to Billie Holiday on his record player. Steinkey gnawed his corn with his eyes half-open.

“My mom used to make this a lot,” I said, “when I was a kid.”

Steinkey nodded.  “I live off of $7 a day in food.”

“Corn is cheap,” I said.

I got the couch, Steinkey went to bed early, and I slept alone.  I felt collected there, like the books and the hula dolls and the recycling, one of many lost items that had finally found a home.  The nights would change, though.

Some nights were cold nights, where he’d stay in his room and I would stay on the couch.   Other nights we sat up on the couch together in our pyjamas watching the news while eating Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. We read foreign newspapers and tried to match stories up with the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times.  Any minute now the authorities would drag us out of his sedate pastel flat while we slept away a dark afternoon.  We’d cower in their lights, deny having any fun firmly, and demand a sense of privacy.  Our case would run next to Scott Peterson’s, jailbait myths cohabitating the bold-faced columns about Lacy Peterson’s bloated, pregnant corpse being dragged out of the San Francisco Bay.  I’d colour my hair and wear sunglasses.  But these were dark fantasies with no substance, as Steinkey’s resolve against sex with a teenager was strong.  He closed his eyes when my pants rode down my hips.  He hugged me but only clinically, as if administering regular doses of human contact.  And my feigned experience had no actual grounding.  I’d never even been kissed.  Steinkey was trying to be my mother.  I was writing it all down, every last interaction, theory, and analysis in a diary the size of a photograph.

Fog blended in with bits of frost on windows, so that displays in every store looked distant and irretrievable, and it felt as if we were walking through someone else’s memory of a good time.

We walked downtown to Market Street a few nights before Christmas in the middle of the night, maybe three o’clock.  White lights webbed themselves around streetlamps, businesses, and signs.  Bells moved around in the wind.  Fog blended in with bits of frost on windows, so that displays in every store looked distant and irretrievable, and it felt as if we were walking through someone else’s memory of a good time.  A homeless man sobbed loudly in front of a gigantic Macy’s display of children playing in snow.  I took Steinkey’s hand and we walked closely.  He looked down at me while we walked in front of the Old Navy.

“Steinkey?” I said, still holding his hand firmly.  “You think lots of people here are alone?”

“No, no one here is alone,” he said.  “What the hell kind of question is that?”

Steinkey looked up the street, then back the other way.  “What are you grabbing me so hard for?  I don’t see anything to be afraid of.”

“Just cold,” I said.  “That’s all.”

We trudged back home and I stared back up at Steinkey in between steps.  He had an awkward gate and his front leg swung out a little further than his left.  I spent another night alone on the couch, but this time I cried, and when he heard me he came and sat on the couch. I put my head in his lap.  He flinched his leg away and put one hand on my forehead instead.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, rubbing his eye.

I chocked it to my family.

“Just be quiet,” he said with his fingers in my hair.  “Lewis will wake up.  You’ll be okay here.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for keeping me.” I gave him a thumbs-up.  “I feel better.”

When he left for his room, I wrote down his name a half-dozen times in my diary.  “Steinkey,” with large loops.  “Steinkey touched me.”

The next night I was in Lewis’s bed.  I stared up at his flower-shaped lamp and flicked his hula dancers one by one before I went to bed. Lewis had left to go spend his Christmas with an Aunt in Chicago the very morning, and I hardly saw him before that.  But the things that were his were easily identifiable, as he liked brown and green things, and I snuck into his bed a few times when the couch wasn’t comfortable.  Steinkey didn’t say anything about it. I called out to Steinkey before I turned out my lights, which was not very long after he turned off his.  “Goodnight!” I said.  “Dream sweet!”

And he probably did, he must have dreamed much sweeter than I did.  My dreams were like death on steroids. Maybe only a few hours of death, dream-worthy and free of eulogizing, but it never approximated any desirable form of consciousness. I was taken hostage an inevitable eight hours when it came.  My body went limp.  My eyes rolled around under my eyelids.  My mouth hung open.  Drool got on my cheeks.  I sweat.  I had night terrors; every single one a different fear of Vanessa coming out to San Francisco and snatching me away, back to East Palo Alto.  I woke up and called out for Steinkey.

You want to know where miserable men hide from their pasts?  The same place where sixteen-year-old girls hide from their futures: 4 AM on Christmas Eve, jumping fences into the Japanese Gardens, absorbed in the art of petting koi fish, our eyes bleary with sleeplessness.  We split a bottle a champagne and a bag of blowpops.  We had to jump the fence back over to get out around 7 AM, all candy-breathed and half-past sober.  Chanting along our way through the business district with Hark the Harold Angels Sing. .  Walking home in the worst kind of way, stomping all over ants and any other crawling things, suffocating laughter and sneezes into our sleeves, invariably vivid before most people had even woken up.  Mister Steinkey looked at me in front of a closed coffee shop near his flat and put his hand on my shoulder. He suggested I captivate my mind at museums, that I learn instruments, that I read books, collect films, attend concerts, and that I continue to do anything possible from letting the real world affect my private fantasies.

I put my hand on his shoulder. “First of all you’re drunk,” I said. “I have no fantasies.”  I smiled at him.  “I’ll be an artist.”

“You fuckwit,” he said without conviction, “You’re going to die out there.”

“I can just stay around you.” I said.  “Be an artist and go to school.  Is that a fantasy?”

“As long as you’re okay with spending your time working thankless jobs.”

I shrugged his hand off my shoulder.  “Yes,” I said.  “I’m okay with that.”

He hiccupped and searched for my eyes.  “Let’s go back to the flat,” he said.

On the way back to the flat we passed by a cart handing out free doughnuts. A few Hispanic men stood around chomping down on the free meal.  “God Bless You,” one of the men said in broken English.

Steinkey pointed at the cart.  “They Are Free” he said with his face.

I laughed and got in line.  Everyone had the same doughnut, a generic gold sugary gift.  “Thank you,” I said to the woman behind the cart.

“God Bless You,” she said, and I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Thank you very much,” Steinkey said, urging me forward.  “Don’t laugh next time,” he said.  “I think she meant it.”

“There is no God,” I said. “Just free doughnuts.”

Steinkey shook his head.

When we arrived back at the flat, I sat down on the couch.  He sat down next to me.  It was eight in the morning, on Christmas Day, in Steinkey’s living room, on the couch, on the cheek.  He kissed me.  He kissed me on the cheek but I felt it inside my mouth, absorbed it by the teeth.  As soon as I felt it, it was gone.  I opened my eyes and the empty wine bottles cast spectres on the walls in between shades of blue and yellow.  The wind was blowing and you could hear it smacking tree branches against the building.  Then the power went out. He kissed me on the cheek again, but this time I opened my mouth and hummed the silent praises of Mister Steinkey in a dark room.  He didn’t know it at the time, but this went down as my first kiss.

We fell asleep next to each other on the couch, lying down breast-to-breast and wrist-to-hip (my wrist, his hip), my notebook only four inches below me under the cushion.

I wrote it all down.  My notebook was small, black, and fat with thin yellow unlined pages.  Dozens of inky Steinkeys looked back at me, the most recent of them travelling through different daily rituals.  Steinkey in boxers brushing his teeth over a sink.  Steinkey smoking a cigarette in front of his door.  Steinkey glowering at the neighbours.  Steinkey dipping his finger in his cup of coffee to see if it’s cool enough.  In my earlier drawings, Steinkey looked back at me from more fantastic designs. Steinkey in a white dress on a ship sailing past the moon. Steinkey trudging alone through a snowstorm in a Canadian winter.  Steinkey smoking a blobby cigarette amidst of sea of couples.  Steinkey on a train in a pose reminiscent of Oscar Wilde.  Steinkey kissed me, and I wrote down why.  I thought of several reasons. He loves me.  He’s lonely.  He doesn’t go anywhere for Christmas.  I’ll be eighteen in only two years.  There have been less happy people. I wrote as if I had an audience, a reader who needed just the facts.  Steinkey is thirty-three.  He has red-hair. He lives with Lewis North on Irving Street.  He doesn’t take me out in the daytime.  He hates time.  He kissed me. Today is Christmas. No one I know now remembers his name, but I wrote it down.

No one I know now remembers his name, but I wrote it down.

Christmas Day started late for us.  Steinkey acted as if the kiss hadn’t happened, and I wasn’t sure how to ask him if it had. I cut several pears open and served them in a bowl on the coffee table.  We sat on the couch mouthing on the watery white meat.  It looked like snow melting on his lips.

“I’m sorry about last night,” I said.

He chewed thoughtfully. “I don’t remember a thing.”

“You kissed me,” I said.  “Or at least I think you did.”

He stopped chewing.  “I think that’s the kind of thing that we should never do again.”

“Why?” I said.  “Imagine all the bastards my age that might kiss me.  That should be illegal.”

“Try not to scandalize me, will you?” He was very serious.  “Don’t tell anyone if you can help it.”

“Tell anyone?” I put my legs up on the couch.  “Who would I tell? Ramón?”

He got up and went to the kitchen.  “Don’t write it down.”

“Write it?”

He opened up the fridge.  “Don’t use my name, don’t write about me.”

“See,” I said, “I already called the New York Times.  There’s a warrant out for your arrest and a story on the front page, all for kissing me.”

“Stop it,” he said. He hid behind the fridge door. “I could lose my fucking credentials and never teach again.”

I shifted on the couch.  “No more girls I guess.”

“No more anything, no more food, no more couch, no more Steinkey for Oblina to kick around anymore.”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “You’d look awfully good in stripes.”

Gripkey slammed the door and came out of the kitchen. “You will not write about me.  You cannot dramatize this. It would be insulting.”

“Alright,” I flopped my back sideways on the couch.  “I won’t tell anyone.”

Three days later, I woke up to Steinkey shaking my shoulder.  He found it, and he found it before I woke up.  He served me a cup of brown soymilk in a china teacup and cast me his profile.  He spoke in perforated breaths, the words cutting around after S’s.

“So you’re writing about me,” he said, “and you want to sell my life to Oprah.”

“I don’t think it’s inappropriate.” We were both looking into the green bottles around the window as we spoke.  “You can’t hold that against me.”

“So why did you come here?”

“I don’t know.” I said.  “You have my diary.  You know why I’m here.”

He nodded.  “You want to write about the things that I do.”

“No,” I said, “not in a bad way.”

“I don’t trust myself to make the right decisions.”  He pointed his finger at my teacup. “You can write anything about me and I’ll be liable.  I know what you’re thinking.”

I drank.

He said, “You’re going to go home to your sister today.”

I stopped drinking. “No.”

He pointed at the couch.  “Pack.”  He folded some of my clothes.  We trapped lost hair clips and graded homework in my duffel bag and stared at each artefact until the next one was discovered under a cushion.  I’d stop to look at him.  “Pack,” he’d interrupt my gaze.  “We’re leaving.”

We prepared to drive through patches of wet in the post-stormy morning.  The night had been stormy but I hadn’t woken.  All of it happened while I slept.  Steinkey turned on the heater and thawed the windows of his grey pacer.  I slid on one of his wool hats.  He watched the time on his wrist.  My bag was in the backseat.  I opened my mouth and gasped little breaths against the foggy windows.   He began peeling an orange and eating it slowly.

I channelled his voice.  “You have to go home Oblina.  If this gets messier we’ll be neck-deep.  I’m a grown man and what I’m doing to you is wrong.  Because having a grown-up kiss you on the Christmas is so much worse than hanging out with those innocent boys your age.”

He looked directly at me.  “Don’t hold this against me.  You’re the one writing about me.”

“Hey.” I sucked on an orange slice.  “No one wants to read what I write anyway.”

“Except every newspaper ever.”  He put the key in the ignition and we drove.

There, as soon we arrived, he was gone.  We stopped three blocks down from where I lived on Wisteria Road in East Palo Alto.  I got my bag out and crossed to the driver’s window.  “Give me back my diary,” I said.

“No,” he said.  “I’m not going to.  You can start a new one.  This time I’d appreciate it if you didn’t draw me in a dress, or suggest I might be a thief.”

“You are a thief,” I said.  “You stole my diary.”

He looked angry. “You’re a thief,” he said blushing.  “You tried to steal my fucking life.”

“Oh what a horrid girl,” I said in his voice.

“More like what a horrid man.” His voiced cracked.

“Are you crying?” I said.

He held his breath.  “No,” he said.  “No.”

“Please don’t go,” I grabbed the window. “Don’t leave me here.”

“Oblina, I have to—”

I felt my nails losing their grip on the rubber surrounding the windows.  “Have to what?  Give up?  I swear I won’t try to write about you anymore.”  I dropped my wallet on the ground.  “Please,” I said.  “Don’t I mean anything to you?”

“Everything,” He shook his large red curls against his grey headrest.  “Questions like that don’t deserve an answer.”

I looked at my wallet on the ground.  Steinkey had both hands on the wheel. “But people like me do,” I said.  “I don’t need an answer right now.  Just,” I bent my head a bit, “Just take me back home with you.”

“Let go of my car,” he said.  “Get your hands out of the window and let me go.”

I looked at his gas meter.  He was running low.  “What’s the matter?” I said, “You afraid you’re going to get caught, with me, here in East Palo Alto?”

He put his head against the top of the wheel.  “YES.”

“You know,” I said, “I never thought my first time saying ‘I love you,’ would be in the middle of the street like this.”

Steinkey frowned.  “Go write it down in a diary.”  I let go of the window.  “Thank you,” he said.  “I’m leaving.”

I put my hands up and lowered my head.  “Do I get my diary back?”

He turned his head to look directly at me.  “No.”

I stood there.  “How do you feel about me?” I said.

He forced laughter. “What do you care how I feel?” he said, “Can’t you just make that up? Maybe the San Francisco Chronicle can tell you how I feel, when you tell them about my shavings habits and how much of a pervert I am.”

I was still standing outside, my ears smouldering in the cold. “Haven’t you ever written about me?” I asked.

“No,” he said.  “Never.”

“I wish you would,” I said.

He turned away.  “Goodbye now, Oblina.”

He threw his car in reverse and tucked into the neighbour’s driveway, then sped away in the opposite direction.  I picked up my wallet and my duffel bag off the asphalt.  I stared down the alley and kept looking, cooling my hands on a chain link fence, waiting patiently for his eventual return.  No women in his wake, no fantasy, just Steinkey on his way out again.

***

Twenty minutes ago, I didn’t see my high school English teacher, but I wish I had.  My theories were wrong, and Steinkey was common.  He slept on a flat bed.  Women didn’t accost him.  He was not a thief.  He was barely even an English teacher.  And when I relive the memory, I don’t knock at his door when I get there.  I look at the gate, pick my pocket for my transfer, turn around and go back to where I came from.