1972

Marisa was beautiful. A Mexicana. Pale skin, dark hair. Creamy, bright red lipstick. Perfect, white teeth. A full laugh, where all you could see was the reddest lipstick and whitest teeth you had ever seen.

Marisa lived in a house on Fulton Street, just across the street from Golden Gate Park. To get there, you would take the #28 bus, get off on 14th, cross the street, and walk three blocks east. The bus would stop running at 1:00 a.m. One night when we were at the bus stop, a gang of Asian men came up, knocked Jimmy to the ground, and kicked him in the head. It happened so quick. They moved up to him, stepping in between us girls as if we weren’t even there, and the littlest, runtiest one started yelling in his face. For a moment, we were a tableau, then the yelling and the kicking, and we froze while Jimmy let out an unearthly scream curled into a ball like a baby, and then they were gone. They left so quick, that if you blinked, you might have missed it.

There were always men around that house on Fulton street: young, light skinned Mexican men, with names like Hectar and Cesar, with trim beards and shaggy not-too-long hair. Seven alien young Mexicans lived there. Two women. The other woman was the girlfriend of one of the men. She and her boyfriend lived in the front room, with the three paneled Victorian style windows. They had a waterbed and a couple of chairs. The rest of the men doubled up, dorm style, twin beds in every room, a dresser, and not much else. Sometimes they would play songs like Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side. None of the men worked a regular job, but they got by.

Marisa would get ready to go to work. She wore chunky, baby blue high heeled strappy platform sandals, and a white wisp of a baby doll summer dress--just barely long enough to cover what she needed. Marisa sparkled. She was jaunty. She had long, lean bare legs, which just went up forever, disappearing under that wispy top, right at that point when there was nothing left to disappear.

Marisa was 22. I remember her laugh. She had this long-limbed, loose way about her. She would get herself ready for work, sashay down the long flight of wooden steps, the air shimmering wherever she had been. When she left, suddenly the house was just full of dark, shuffling shapes, quart sized beer bottles, and ashtrays overflowing with yellowed cigarette butts. Marisa would go to work every night. She didn’t use birth control. I never knew anyone that could shine so bright.