The New Span | Patricia Bidar

In the back seat, Richard Three is working my neck with his tongue and teeth, so smooth he doesn’t break his rhythm when night air blasts: we’ve reach the booth: with his free hand he passes Richard One pre-counted bills, folded lengthwise, for the toll. Richard One has extended his arm back for the bill. He smells of fabric softener and onions: he works days at his family’s burger shop on Hearst and Shattuck. The thick crash poles around the booth are lumpy with stickers from bands no one ever heard of. 

We pass Treasure Island. Richard Two is riding shotgun, with his faded black clothes and dirty hair. There is no music: the car doesn’t have a sound system and we all have cheap flip phones. 

Three Richards, one next to me in back, his hand down my tights creating magic and his eyes cast out his window, taking in the New Span. I’m still in my funeral outfit, a plain black sweater and short skirt. My mom’s leopard ballet flats. 

The New Span is white and modern with slanted white slants. We glide close to the water. The sky has darkened. On my side, the left, is the metal hulk of the Old Span, the two layer one that suffered all that damage in the Loma Prieta earthquake. It’s scary in the dark. The gray silhouette of it like a sunken ship a haunted palace a home for horrible fish that rose from the Bay and make their home in buckled concrete. Where old time suicides who misjudged leaps battered themselves bloody on its defunct beams. 

Richard Two lights and hands Richard One the single hitter. The air inside the car is nicely fuzzy with smoke. The weed had dried my mouth and I am not sure whether or not I want Richard Three to kiss me. 

“Did you ever take the F bus from Berkeley and get, like, butterflies seeing the Hills Bros sign and the red words spelling out “Port of”—and then the spire of the Ferry Building and the white clockface—and then “San Francisco”? 

“No, I never did that,” I answer. I know he is addressing me. The three Richards were two year ahead of me at Berkeley High. I knew enough about them to know they would take AC Transit to the TransBay Terminal, then walk to the clubs. I also knew about their band, An Embarrassment of Richards, later shortened to Embarrassment, then simply, Bare Ass. They used to play at parties around town until two of them got girlfriends and the band broke up. 

I hate Richard Two. I know he says vile things about me behind my back. Who in fact argued against my being invited tonight. I heard him. I also heard Richard Three saying I was okay for a fat girl, that I’d just lost my mother and had no friends. 

It was a stupid fluke they even came to my mom’s wake. Richard One has an older sister who rented a room in our apartment. Which makes us roommates now. It’s been decided we’ll keep that going. The wake was winding down and I was headed to my room when I heard voices inside, and that was the Richards. 

Richard Three’s finders have worked some crazy magic and now I am feeing something wholly new, a white light that blurs my vision and makes my body curl to his arm and grasping it, shudder. The Bare Ass laughs, but nicely, and Richard Two tousles my hair. And I see it and I do get butterflies mixed with a kind of doppler aftereffect of my first orgasm: the red block letter lights spelling out PORT OF and then the Ferry Building with its white face and then SAN FRANCISCO.

I have never seen these lights because I have never headed west to the city at night. The last time I traveled here it was for school clothes with my mother and she was drunk and we weren’t speaking. In the middle of the Old Span, I climbed into the back and curled up on the floor behind her seat, Stiff with anger, I’d stared at the asphalt rushing underneath like a warp speed river. Wishing her out of my life and me,  grown and in my own place.

Patricia Q. Bidar is a native of San Pedro, California with family roots in New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona. Her stories have appeared in Wigleaf, The Pinch, SmokeLong Quarterly, Sou’wester, Little Patuxent Review, and Pithead Chapel, among other places. Patricia is an alum of the UC Davis Graduate Writing Program and a former fiction editor at Northwest review. Apart from fiction, she ghostwrites for progressive nonprofit organizations. She lives with her DJ husband and unusual dog in the San Francisco Bay Area and tweets at @patriciabidar. Visit Patricia at www.patriciaqbidar.com.