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generation. You think you can’t fix anything until you fix yourselves. Well, let me be the first to tell you, you will never fix yourself.”
    Somebody throws some money into the jukebox at the same time a rack of pool balls slams into the gully. The Pixies,
I will grow, up to be, be a debaser
.
    “My wife,” I tell Pat. “I didn’t always sell bagels.”
    “What about your wife?”
    “Oh man. She was a sweetheart. Long legs, black hair. When people met her they said she had breeding. Because she walked so straight. But you know, she didn’t. I mean, we didn’t always get along. Like, we didn’t agree on a lot of things. We hated each other. She wanted things from me. I felt like I could never give them to her.”
    Pat’s looking in his whiskey glass with one eye waiting for me to finish. I know all about Pat’s marriage. His childhood girlfriend. And how her head isn’t right anymore. “So what’s wrong with selling bagels?”
    “Nothing wrong with it.” I drink my beer. Pat’s good for at least one more round. Maybe two. A perk of the job, I suppose, but still, I’m the one that has to be up at six in the morning. I only live two blocks away from this bar. I come here when the phone is ringing, when the fog is falling over the hills. I sit here at night with a beer, not trying to get drunk, just trying to make it last. I like to watch the young couples that come in here and sit next to each other on the couch. I love it when they lean into one another even though the couch is long, cutting off their own space.
    “Listen,” Pat says. “There’s a whole world out there. How old are you?”
    “Thirty-three.”
    “Keep going, man. You’ll be full manager. What would you do if you were the manager right now? If I said, Theo, you are now the manager of Hoff Bagels. I’m talking profit sharing. The whole business. What would you do?”
    I look at Pat slyly. “I’d change the world,” I tell him, putting down my beer. “If I was manager there’d be no more war.”
    Pat looks at me for a second like he’s going to laugh, but then he gets the joke and a queer expression passes over his face. It’s like somebody’s taken the air out of him. He sips on the bottom of his whiskey shot and then chases it with his beer. I give him a blank stare. “Yeah, well,” he says, and I feel guilty already. “No need to worry about that. Have another one, all right?”
    “All right,” I say.
    I send Ambellina a note that I won’t be able to see her any more, then sign off the kiosk and go to help Valerie behind the counter. I don’t know why I have to end it with Ambellina. Because nothing in my life has ever worked out quite the way I planned. Because I’m selfish. I do it because I’m lonely and when I don’t see her it’s worse and because after three years in San Francisco I don’t know anybody. Because I don’t want to be seen and I don’t want anybody to know. Because she was so human the last time I saw her, unsure of her next move. And I don’t have room for that, for reasons I’m unsure of. My small apartment. This city and all of the cities. No. And the jungles with their animals. People with their problems. The windows. I woke last night and grabbed at the end of my mattress. The windows. No. It’s hard enough.
    Valerie doesn’t want to talk to me. One time Valerie asked me to walk her to the campsite. She said she was afraid to go alone. All of the homeless were there, below the highway, at the base of Bernal Heights. Shopping carts were everywhere and they had strung tarp among them. A large fire was burning from a steel drum and we saw the men and women huddled around it from across Cesar Chavez. I asked Valerie why she wanted to go there though I knew it was to see Philc. But I didn’t understand that she had to go down beneath the highway and the thick traffic, a six-lane-deep river to be crossed. It looked like hell to me, that place she was going to, all the people and stray