A Friend in Deed
When I was almost 27, I had to move to San Francisco to get medical treatment for a nerve problem in my pelvic region. I was 3,000 miles from home, alone, and in a great deal of pain and distress. I was unable to sit, and even going for long walks was mostly out of the question.
I lived in a hotel with a fairly lax cleaning policy near a “full release” massage parlor, in an area lovingly described by the San Francisco Examiner as both a “drug-addled neighborhood” AND “a hotbed for drug-dealing” over the course of one article. What I’m saying is, I was not having a good time.
There was a woman who worked at the front desk, a gorgeous, tall and slender lady with pale skin and long, black hair. Her name was Jackie, and everyone said she was an ex-model from New York. Of course, I was dazzled by her and desperate to know more. Of course, she was reticent and secretive and mysterious, and I could never find out anything about her. We never became friends - my lonely little insides yearned toward her lonely little insides and were met with a chasm impossible to cross.
But she loaned me a book, her favorite book, now one of my favorite books, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. This book was the one book I was able to read from start to finish during my time at the hotel, distracted as I was by pain and worry. The one book that brought me solace and comfort and humor and ecstasy of the soul in the entire year and a half that I spent there. The chess-playing cat, the charming Devil, the brilliant Master, and the fiery, passionate witch Margarita all came alive for me. They made me believe in an alternate world, a dreamspace, where each of them still exist, unchanged by time. A place I myself escaped into and forgot my worries, for a time.
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I came back to the hotel a year or two later, when I was recovering. I asked about her. The owner’s daughter said she’d become unable to work because of schizophrenia. She was living in a room somewhere nearby, convinced her roommate was spying on her through the electrical outlets. One of her breast implants had burst, and she couldn’t afford medical treatment.
I found out where she was living and rang her buzzer, many times.
She never answered.
We were never friends. We never had that easy familiarity, we never shared private jokes, we rarely ever even spoke. But by loaning me her book, she became a friend in deed: a stranger who, through one kind action, carves a friend-shaped space inside of you. In my mind, whenever I read that book, it is she who is always Margarita to me: a beautiful, high-spirited witch laughing as she flies on her broom over Russia, free, powerful, and madly in love.
