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“Nobody’s going to look twice at me when I come in with you anyway. You wearing
that tuxedo is all the camouflage I need. Besides, this is California, where casual is king,
right?”
“I guess,” Rondeau said. “It wouldn’t kill you to wear a skirt occasionally, you know.”
“No. But it might kill you to suggest it again,” Marla said, showing her teeth.
They took a bus from Union Square to the Castro, Marla sniffing suspiciously.
“Where’re the piles of filth? The aggressive panhandlers? The guys at the bus stop who
look like they’re just waiting for the right moment to shove a yuppie under the tires? I
don’t trust a city that has a bus system this clean.”
“They get a lot of tourists,” Rondeau said, leaning back in a sideways-facing seat.
Marla, too antsy to sit, was standing beside him, hanging on to an overhead rail. “They
have to observe the proprieties a little more. Nobody comes to our city to visit, unless
their relatives die or something. Besides, this is the middle of the city still—it’s got to
be nice. I’m sure there are places around here that are unpleasant enough to meet your
low standards.”
Marla frowned. “It’s not that I like dirty stuff for the sake of dirt, Rondeau. It’s just…I
distrust all this cleanliness. It feels like I’m in Disneyland or something, someplace
monitored and managed.”
Rondeau reached up and pulled the cord, making the “Stop Ahead” sign by the driver
light up. “Our stop,” he said.
“Already?” Marla said.
“San Francisco doesn’t sprawl as much as our own pockmarked metropolis,” Rondeau
said.
The bus stopped, and they got off. “Welcome to the Castro,” Rondeau said as the bus
chugged away from them. Marla looked up and down the street. Aside from the rainbow
flags hanging from the windows of well-kept Victorians and over the doors of various
businesses, it could have been any bustling, well-lit avenue in a prosperous city. Though
there were more men holding hands here than Marla generally saw elsewhere, and there
was a man wearing a leather vest over his otherwise bare chest. “I thought there’d be
more guys in dog collars and buttless chaps,” Marla said.
“We could come back later this year for the gay pride parade, or for Folsom Street Fair,
and I bet you’d see more buttless chaps than you can shake a riding crop at.”
“I’ll keep it in mind for my next vacation,” Marla said. There was no gay district as
such in Marla’s city, though of course there were bars and clubs geared toward such
clientele, and Marla found herself wondering, in a municipal-management frame of
mind, whether the incidences of domestic violence in this neighborhood were of greater