Like a Dog. Tara Jepsen
direct our path up the hill, lugging the paper bag full of wine coolers, which bumps against my leg rhythmically. The dogs wander and play and get acquainted with each other’s genitals. At the top of the road we climb over a steel railing onto a flat area where we can see the city sprawl north to downtown, east to the Bay and Oakland, and south to Portola Valley, Visitacion Valley and the Excelsior. We sit on a rock and watch the animals and people.
“What’s in the bag?”
“A flavor sensation.” I pull out the wine coolers and lay a cold, pink bottle in Irma’s open hand.
“Aren’t these illegal? Or like illegal in Europe because they’re so flammable?”
“That’s UltraSport, dummy.” I crack mine open and shake my head as I gulp the impossibly sweet and bubbly wine cooler. Irma pulls the cap off her bottle, throws it into the grass, and takes a long swallow.
“Dude!” I slap her arm.
“What?”
“Littering!”
“When did you turn into an environmentalist?”
“I’ve always cared about this!”
“Live with it, sister.”
Irma stands up and secures a tennis ball with the Chuck-It. She cranks her arm back and and sends the fuzzy green orb sailing, setting five dogs sprinting after it. A compact Jack Russell runs back with the ball in his mouth and stands panting with the other dogs, waiting for another throw. Irma repeatedly wings the ball and the animals chase farther and farther across the top of Bernal Hill. There’s something comical about all the exertion and joy happening in front of me, the superlative throws, and running, and response for the love of the air and the earth. I open a second wine cooler and sip more of its addictive sugar. My body, once I get a taste of sweetness, craves it in junkie proportions.
A woman walks up to us and looks at Irma.
“I think I saw you throw this bottle cap.”
“So what?” Irma snaps.
“I saw you throw this on the ground and I’m bringing it over here because we don’t want litter on Bernal Hill.”
“Who is ‘we’?”
“The people who live here.”
“I live here. Who exactly are you speaking for?”
“A very tight-knit group of us who are dedicated to making Bernal a nice place to live. Do you like living in a messy neighborhood?”
“Bernal Hill wasn’t always uptight, you know. You fucking people and your rules for perfect liberal living. It’s creepy.”
“I’m not trying to be uptight. . . .”
“But you are. So go away.”
The woman keeps the bottle cap in her hand and walks away, looking glum.
“You hurt her very rarefied feelings. Why were you such a jerk?” I ask Irma.
“I get sick of the weird passive-aggressive snottiness of this neighborhood sometimes.”
“Good point. You ready for another wine cooler?”
“Just a second, I want to throw the ball for these goofballs one more time. What do you want to do after we drop the dogs off?”
“Let’s go to Pier 39 and look at the seals.”
“In-town tourism!”
“I love doing the stuff that normal people do.”
“I know, me too, it feels so perverted.”
“No giving tourists good directions. Only bad information is allowed.”
“Deal.”
I park my car back at Irma’s house. Irma unloads her animals then picks me up and we make our way to the other side of town in her van, an ’85 Chevy full-size, dark brown with a big tan stripe around the middle. I love vans. A little house on wheels, the vehicle for adventure. Irma drives like she believes a power greater than herself is protecting her, cutting other cars off, grazing indignant pedestrians, running over the curb at almost every turn. She barely notices the honking and fear of people who thought our civic code and local laws meant something. I can’t tell what in the hell she is focusing on that mutes her senses so effectively. She can’t just be excited to see the seals, that doesn’t make sense. We’ve seen them a million times. Maybe it’s a low-grade form of astral projection that leaves her physically here, but otherwise wholly elsewhere, the kind of thing that would take training in another person and comes naturally due to trauma in others. We park on Francisco Street, kind of close to North Beach, and walk toward the Bay and the most cheeseball tourist part of town. I love a tourist zone, it feels like walking through an actual cartoon.
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