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Remind me, next time you see me, to tell you the whole long story of the time Neeli asked me to accompany him to the DMV for a hearing. They were concerned his condition was rendering him incapable of driving safely; they feared he might fall into a diabetic coma on the freeway. I think I was there to be a character witness or something, the highest-ranking official person available, I figured. When we met out front on Fell Street, Neeli was a ball of nerves, more so even than usual, looking as though he was about to be fed to the lions. I couldn’t blame him; his license was on the line, his autonomy, his freedom. The hearing was held not in the Perry Mason-style courtroom with a black-robed judge scowling down at us from the bench Neeli had been imagining, but in a nondescript office with a number screwed to the door, presided over by a middle-aged clerk in a flowered blouse, a swivel chair, and the air of someone with a lot on her schedule. Neeli introduced me as “The Head of the San Francisco Library,” an unintentional overstatement of my position by an order of magnitude or more that didn’t impress our inquisitor in the least, despite the inflation. He also quickly established that she had never heard of either Jack Hirschman or Lawrence Ferlinghetti and was equally unimpressed by the fact that we had. She clearly couldn’t have cared less that San Francisco had a Poet Laureate or a nomination process for the position that involved the Mayor, or that Neeli was on everyone’s short list to be the next appointee. The last thing she needed was the two of us in her hair, telling her all this stuff she didn’t care to know. Out of ammunition with only a couple of minutes gone by, he glanced my way for help, support, rescue. He blinked. I only shrugged, feeling that I was somehow betraying him simply by having nothing to say. He blinked again. He had nowhere to go but forward, nowhere to turn but to tell his story, which took us, in great detail and with numerous narrative side trips, good intentions, and stops for gas, from his place in Bernal Heights out to I-5, down to LA, back up to Sacramento, and then home, until, two doors down from his driveway, the journey ended with a minor fender bender—exactly that morning’s issue at hand.
“How did you feel?” she asked with visible relief, as pleased to be safely back from our journey as anyone, “Dizzy? Sleepy? Had you taken all your medications?”
“I just felt terribly, terribly guilty for having dented this poor man’s car.”
She paused for a minute and gave the strange man sitting before her a careful once over and said, “I think, Mr. Cherkovski, this could have happened to anyone.”
Byron Spooner is retired as the Literary Director of the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library where he produced literary events and ran their book sales operation. He founded and edited The Readers Review, literary blog, where he wrote about books, music, film and bookselling. With his wife, Judith Ayn Bernhard, he co-edited Arcana: A Festschrift for Jack Hirschman. His writing has been published in Passengers Journal, Manifest-Station, the San Francisco Examiner, the Anderson Valley Advertiser, Autobiography and Isis.He serves on the Board of Litquake and the Advisory Board of the Beat Museum.