These Dreams of You

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The woman wasn’t much older than Zan, four or five years, and wore dreadlocks that weren’t particularly typical yet in the late Sixties. She smiled at him but her gray eyes didn’t smile with her mouth; in her eyes were fear and the anticipation of the unspeakable thing that was on everyone’s mind. As she pulled him to safety, she leaned over and whispered in his ear a single word.

The following summer, Zan had a job delivering pizzas in his father’s car. This was when the valley at night just north of Hollywood was still a crater of caves, except the caves weren’t in hills but in the night-air and you could drive in one and emerge somewhere else. One evening an order was called in from one of the dorms at the same local college where Zan would teach more than thirty years later. As Zan parked the car, someone sang on the radio and Ray Charles was shot down, but got up to do his best and Zan pulled the portable pizza oven from the front seat and strolled into the dorm to find himself the only white boy in sight.