The Bay Breeze Motel

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She emailed and I found her in San Francisco at her sister’s apartment on Twenty-First and Dolores near The Mission. I parked the Benz halfway down the block on a steep hill turning the tires into the curb as one does on those steep San Franciscan hills. The sun was hot and orange in the late aftenoon but the air was clean and nice. I walked under the shade of the Fichus trees. I rang the bell and waited. The heavy wooden door swung open and she skipped down the steps, she radiated and threw her arms around me and her hair was still wet and curled against my face.


Sitting upstairs in the cool wood paneled apartment, pale beige with large old varnished wood-framed windows, books and magazines scattered on the chairs and the dusk light settling on her face and her ocean eyes and cheek bones, she seemed to run from her natural beauty.


I hear the train whistle in Oakland tonight, the mournful wail across the warm and steaming night. She’s sitting on the bed and I’m crawling in, pulling my tee shirt over my head. I hold her tight and she grabs and pulls me tighter. She was like a frog in bed that first time; small and lithe at fifty-five. Adorable pure physical attraction is what we’d found. She says she’ll never leave him. If she did she’d come to me. She was at Hecate’s Gate, the crossroads and could choose.


In the morning we showered together and I watched her sit and take her morning piss. I washed her tits and tummy and down between her legs where it was sensitive because last night I tore at her cunt and in the morning there were was blood on the sheets but she just smiled. When we embraced we merged and could not let go.


I drove her back to San Francisco early in the morning as the sun glinted golden off the Bay and fog hung around the Golden Gate, my hand between her thighs.  Sweeping up onto the Bay Bridge, top open on the Benz, I looked at her. Her spirit was aroused. She had been lit. I knew we had to be careful. I had a strange feeling, a strong feeling I’m falling in love with you like something from the past and something  that might last, a spell is cast, at last, falling in love with you. We kissed goodbye and you turned and walked away. 


There was a way she moved her hands, how they traced the air. And suddenly I realized I had to stay in California. But I was dying. I knew I would die of prostate cancer and that it was just a matter of time. It always is. But to find this kind of love at 68 years old was a blessing. But she said something strange about her own death, that she had a kind of death sentence inside her and she never said much more and I was afraid to ask.

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The light turned green. She stepped off the curb walking towards me, a red canvas overnight bag over one shoulder. I watched her. How she walked, how she strode. And then she looked up and ran into my arms and we kissed as lovers do.


We were looking for a motel close to the airport because she had an early morning flight and I unbuckled her jeans and pulled the zipper down as we drove the backstreets near the Oakland Airport searching for the Bay Breeze Motel. It was close to midnight when we found it. A man in a turban smiled welcoming us while his wife with long gray hair tied around her head and a tattoo on one temple, inspected my drivers license and then handed it to her son to input the information.


I leaned on the rail and looked over the industrial landscape, San Francisco airport all lit up not far away and I stubbed out the cigarette and looked back at  her in the room, her jeans half down and she pulled off her shirt. 


“We are mostly space anyway”, I said. We were laying on our backs looking up at the pale green ceiling. The ceiling lights were very bright and there was no bedside lamp at The Bay Breeze Motel.  “We are ninety-nine point nine percent space. Look, here’s the nucleus and way out here,” and I stretched my arms as wide as I could trying to express the vastness of the idea.


“So if we are really all space then we’re really not here", she said, "it’s all an illusion and nothing is real or as it seems to be. But I can feel your skin, your breath, your face, your mouth. But nothing is real. Strawberry Fields forever, forever  and ever I suppose”, and she swung her head toward me and kissed me and soon we were entangled again, another configuration, another journey, always a different ending. Like a river or the sky.






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