I originally intended to include this as one of the articles for Issue #2, but rambled on for 11,000+ words before realizing that maybe I should just cut another issue and call it #2.5. So I did.
I wondered what kept me attached, psychologically it seemed, to a certain neighborhood in downtown San Francisco. At the end I realized: Nothing.
The streets don't remember your name. They are only streets, after all. Did I expect the pigeon shit to rise up and greet me upon my return, like some prodigal hobo?
People. What people? There were no friends. Only whores, drunks, freeloaders, and thieves. There were snide, smug motherfuckers from outer neighborhoods, other cities -- the Haight, the Marina, Berkeley, Oakland -- poseurs and wannabes trying to get laid, rich, trying to get a life. It's cool to be wild and stupid in your twenties. Not so with forty fast approaching. Tsk-tsk-tsk.
Time to move on, I suppose.
Balanced upon this teetering-tottering point of view and after having argued with the wife, I went into the city to try to figure it out. Think it through, consider it. See it, smell it, feel it. What is it? A rotting peach? What is this beating, thumping flesh and head full of ideas and disturbing fanciful notions?
I'm looking in the rearview mirror and trying to figure out what the hell I left behind. There was something back there. What the hell was it?
Friday I returned to the city and revisited my old neighborhood haunts from a decade ago, back when there was a skinnier man roaming those streets with a pack-a-day habit and a slight drinking problem. Will these streets remember my name? Will it be like old times, and everything old will seem new again, as when I first discovered them? Geographically, everything is the same. What else remains?
I stayed at the City Center Hostel on Ellis and Larkin, right along the rim of the heart of the Tenderloin. I'd argued with Nadjet earlier that morning because she had gone out the night before and didn't get in till two in the morning. Waited up for her, feeling jealous and insecure. I'm old enough to recognize now that the real problem lay within me and had nothing to do with Nadjet. It's as Edgar Cayce said, just as all the Buddhist teachings, just as Jesus had probably taught: All life is self meeting self. As I had done, so had it been done unto me. I was only getting my own, as the saying goes.
So when I got home from work Friday afternoon, I packed up my backpack, thinking that I'd stay in the city at least till Monday morning, but telling Nadjet that I'd be gone a week. I'm leaving eighty bucks in the can, I told her. Better make it stretch. I tried to appear aloof, detached, without a care and unmindful. I headed out the door without saying good-bye and hoofed it to the BART station. My goal was simple: Drink then walk off the drunkenness. I aimed to wander around just as I had been doing once a week for the last few weeks. Nothing special, just wander, meander, watch and observe. It's when I'm not expected to do or be anything that I feel most like myself.
The train got into town with rush-hour under way, but it didn't matter because I was going the opposite way. Most BART commuters live in the East Bay and points farther out -- Concord, Pleasanton, Walnut Creek. How many times had I ridden that train into the city? I never tire of the ride. The train is a silver ghost passing through the backyards of people's lives. We see the clutter, the mess -- old bicycles, scrap metal -- the ubiquitous blue tarp, tattered and torn, covering, hiding unknown humps and clumps -- old beat-up cars, old beat-up sheds, weeds, wildflowers growing in pleasantly unexpected places -- next to abandoned railroad tracks, along polluted ditches, and in once case, in rain gutters along the roof of someone's house. Sometimes we'll catch glimpses of the people who live in these places, and it's like spying an animal in the wild. We see them operating in their natural habitat. Filthy white t-shirt with beer gut hanging out, smoking cigarettes, watering lawns that, from our vantage point on the elevated tracks, appear to be no more than hopeless postage stamp-sized patches of green awash in a sea of urban wasteland and urban decay, a sea of cracked concrete, rotting wood, torn up asphalt, bad roofing and weeds -- great wide expanses of gray, brown and rust, and then little bright patches of green dotted here or there. So pointless are these front lawns that dot the American landscape.
When the train reaches San Leandro station, we enter the industrial zone -- junk yards, roofing material companies, tube companies, scrap metal yards, recycling plants, and my favorite, the shipping container reseller and the Port of Oakland with all their shipping containers stacked four or five stories high, stacked up neatly and efficiently as only shipping containers and milk crates can be stacked. I hope to live in one of these some day, on a couple acres of land I plan to buy in the high desert of northern Nevada, but that's grist for another article.
Passing overhead on these elevated tracks, we spy grungy blue-collar workers operating those tractors, those trucks -- it's all blue jeans and steel-toed boots out here. We see the homeless encampments, the trash-strewn belongings, the seeming haphazard lives that are lived and forgotten.
We see the old Mother's Cookies factory, the driving range, the U.S. postal service mail truck training ground, abandoned cars, abandoned school buses. Wait, looks like someone's living in that one. The sheets as curtains are tacked up along the windows, decorated just so, at home along the road in an abandoned part of town.
Passing overhead on these elevated tracks we look down upon the grime, the filth, the creeping blight, all things that encompass the ugliness, the vileness of modern life incarnated in the form of decrepit buildings and decrepit sidewalks, festering weeds and toxic puddles.
We glide overhead, looking down, superior, aloof, detached. Or so we like to think.
---
I ride the train as far as Civic Center station and hike up the stairs to the city streets. How many times have I travelled this route and in how many different frames of mind? I ponder the ghosts that surround me pondering the same thoughts. Do subways even have their own ghosts? Maybe in Japan. Everything is haunted there.
First thing was to find a place to crash for the night. I didn't want to look like a dork drinking in those Tenderloin bars with a backpack strapped to my back. I was already feeling vulnerable, why look like a target? Better to travel light.
I hiked up Hyde looking homeless and poor in my ratty surplus army jacket and came across a horde of Critical Mass bicyclists. On the last Friday of each month, they take over the streets and ride as one rag-tag mass from the Ferry Building downtown all the way out to Civic Center and Van Ness, blocking traffic, ignoring red lights, pissing off commuters stuck in their cars. It appeared to be a bunch of twenty-year-old kids with nothing better to do, many of whom probably left their cars discreetly at home that day. A once-a-month occurrence. Better to go your own way and think your own thoughts. Riding along and following this crowd is really no different than riding along and following any other crowd. What is protesting, anyway, but a benign form of terrorism, a bitching and moaning form of terrorism which tries to force an idea or set of ideas upon others? It's the minority whining about the majority until they themselves become the majority. Without the safety of the crowd exactly who are these individuals? That's what they should be asking themselves. It shouldn't matter where you stand as long as you stand strong in your own beliefs, beliefs that you yourself have come upon through your own efforts. Change always comes from within, when it is realized, and it's never about getting clobbered over the head with someone else's ideas of a perfect utopia. Do your own fucking thinking, man. Get on with your own fucking life. Stop following the crowd and start telling yourself what to do. Neo-hippies are no better than neo-conservatives. It's all a form of funky fucked-up conformism if you think about it.
I walked up to what used to be the Astoria Hotel on Ellis and Larkin and discovered that they were now a part of Hostelling International or some such organization. The building itself was now called the City Center Hostel. Eighty-five bucks a night for a private room with no television, no phone, no stationary, no desk lamp, for that matter, by which I could get some writing done if I had wanted. The tiny wash basin of a sink was situated right over the toilet in such a way that you had to first bend into an L-shape and slide yourself under the sink if you wanted to take a seat on the crapper. But I didn't mind. The room itself was still bigger than my first apartment, which was an ascetic ten-by-twelve room with side appendages for a bathroom and a kitchenette. I lived in that little hole for six years until it became overrun with cockroaches and cigarette smoke. The walls were stained a dark yellow from all the years of chain-smoking Marlboros with the old creaky window cracked just a little. I'd read stories about cockroaches finding their way into people's ears, and when I started finding little baby cockroaches in the empty beer bottles sitting atop the stove and finding them in my sheets and around my pillow, I knew it was time to get the hell out of there. At first, I considered sleeping in a coffin, but when I called a mortuary to get a quote, the guy on the other end of the phone explained that coffins weren't really made for sleeping in. I couldn't afford one at the time, anyway -- the price of a new coffin was a few hundred dollars more than a normal bed. I doubted I'd be able to find used ones. This was before eBay and craigslist, of course, where I would look now if I were interested in such a things. I probably could've bought one from some recovering goth chick who had lost weight and was in the process of jettisoning the black makeup and black clothes.
---
Dinner was at the usual spot: Little Henry's on the corner of Post and Larkin. Hamburger sandwich well-done and a bottle of MGD. I had always ordered the Parmesian porkchops or the spaghetti with meatballs (only two and no more), but not tonight. Everything is good there, as long as you don't mind the strung-out transvestites; the clammy-skinned perverts, eyes darting about for boy-whores; the confused old people who have been living in the neighborhood for too many years, stumbling through the door half-drunk and speaking a few decibals too loud, missing a few teeth, bad breath. If you can ignore all of that and stay focused on the good cheap food, you'll be okay and you will enjoy a fine dining experience. Cops eat there, too. Motorcycle cops, the guys driving the squad cars, detectives, vice squad. You can spot them easily and pick them out from the usual denizens, the ones who aren't wearing uniforms, I mean. They sit confidently and maintain a steady eye contact when they catch you looking at them. They're bigger and healthier looking than the usual slouches, resting securely in the power they know they wield over the general populace. And they all have mustaches. I don't hate them, but I don't trust them, either. They're San Francisco cops, and they can beat you down and leave you in a bloodied pulp on the sidewalk and get away with it, but when you see them gathered in one place eating on a regular basis, you can trust that place will be cheap and good.
---
If you're going to do any kind of drinking, you're going to need water. The more alcohol you drink during the night, the more water you'll need at the end of it. Something I learned a long time ago that has worked well for me over the years -- no matter how drunk I was when I came stumbling home after another bout of drinking and shooting pool, I always tried to drink as much water as I could before falling into bed. I'd shove my face under the bathroom faucet if I needed to. Downed as much of it as I could without spitting it back up. Try this, and you'll see. Come morning, all that water you drank will help ward off a bad, axe-in-the-head type hangover, not always but most of the time, and all you'll need to deal with are the dry hairy shits and the consequences of whatever the hell you may have done the night before while you were in that cozy drunken stupor.
---
So I'm down the street and around the corner in the little grocery store/market that sits between my favorite Goodwill store and the bar in which I plan to start my evening's festivities. These three places, my job, and my apartment were all I needed at one point in my life. You could have blown everything up, razed everything else in that entire stinking city, and I would have been just fine. Nowadays, I commute thirteen miles to my job. Our shopping is done at the Food Maxx five miles down the road. My world has expanded, unfortunately, in ways that I had always hoped to avoid.
I'm shopping for my water and a toothbrush and toothpaste. Then I start searching for the baby wipes because that's how I like to finish off after I've done my deed on the crapper -- toilet paper alone doesn't cut it for me anymore. Baby wipes do a better job of cleaning up the wet drips. But the place doesn't have any in stock, so it appears I'll be roughing it tonight. I glance up and see this guy at the end of the aisle staring at me sideways.
"Eric!" I say. My old pool-shooting partner, drinking buddy from eight, nine years ago. He and I in that bar on the corner every night, all night, Korean hot chicks serving up the drinks, plunking those quarters down into the side of the pool table, game after game, night after night, two, three years straight. At the end of that run, I ended up owing the IRS fifteen grand from a tech job I'd been working, getting paid cash every week, most of it having been spent in that bar buying drinks and literally pissing it all down that barroom toilet.
My friend Eric could have passed for Eric Clapton, and now he looked like a slightly chubbier version. He said he didn't really drink anymore, wasn't really into that dive bar scene on account of getting punched in the teeth one night and getting his knee broken by some drug-addled maniacs who were in there hassling the barmaid. The cop who showed up some time later said it wasn't worth filing a police report since he probably wouldn't be able to find the guys who did it. So Eric was left hobbling around on crutches for a month or so, which sucks when you live alone, you're getting old, you have no car, and you still got to make it to work ten blocks down into the financial district. Shortly after, his company laid him off after eleven years of service. His severance package was one month's pay. Now he's learning to teach English as a second language and planning to move to Thailand.
We were in our bar now drinking a few rounds for old time's sake, reminiscing over things that hadn't really changed much to begin with. But drunks like to reminisce and so we were drunks once again. The jukebox was playing that same old tired song:
WHAT IS LOVE? BABY DON'T HURT ME...DON'T HURT ME...NO MORE...WHAT IS LOVE...?
Annoying. Painfully so with the volume turned up full blast. Eric and I were sitting across from each other one one of those bar tables that are barely large enough to hold a napkin and two drinks, and still we had to yell at the top of our lungs to hear each other.
"I DON'T RECOGNIZE ANY OF THESE PEOPLE!" I said.
"YEAH! DIFFERENT CROWD!"
"WHO ARE THOSE KOREAN GIRLS BEHIND THE COUNTER?"
"I DON'T KNOW! I DON'T REALLY COME HERE ANYMORE!"
"SAME OLD SONGS ON THE JUKEBOX!"
"HAH!"
"I HATE THIS FUCKING SONG!"
WHAT IS LOVE? BABY DON'T HURT ME...DON'T HURT ME...NO MORE...WHAT IS LOVE...?
It's true -- the more things change, the more they stay the same. It was the same crowd. I'd been gone for almost a decade. I return one night, and it's still the same fucking crowd. Different faces, sure, and different names to go with those faces, but really it was all the same. The energy, the spirit of that place hadn't changed. I recognized the dive bar archetypes: the cool loner; the happy-go-lucky drunkard; the pool hustler; the sexy bartenders with the low-cut blouses and mile-long legs and that fuck-me smile that says "Come spend some money on me..."; a suspicious European tourist or two, clutching their fanny packs in front of them; the regular who'd been there too long and doesn't realize that groove he'd found is actually an alcoholic rut going on five years; the immigrant Mexicans with their Coronas with the lime slices slipped in; the successful Asian businessman making and receiving calls on his latest greatest doo-hickey cell phone in between shots of the best house whiskey, expensive suit, shiny black shoes, slapping down twenty-, hundred-dollar bills for all to see and be impressed with, and still, he goes home alone every night. I glanced around trying to pick out which one might have been me ten years ago. All of them, certainly, at one point or another.
There in the corner was the angry loner brooding, smoldering. Or pretending to. This is the same guy who earlier had jabbed me in the back with his pool cue as he was lining up to take his shot. He shot me a look. "Sorry." But the motherfucker wasn't sorry. That look in his eye was telling me to fuck off. Well, so be it Mr. Gray-haired Chinaman. Go on trying to act like Bruce Lee, trying to stand a certain way, trying to be cool and intimidating. You're in some fucked-up loser bar in the Tenderloin and no one gives a shit.
A small group of Mexicans were running the pool table, playing for drinks and having a good time, cool like mice, unafraid and unassuming, most of them probably here illegally, scrounging up livings working as dishwashers, janitors, busboys, prep cooks. The Korean barmaids pay them no mind except to take their money. They are everywhere, nowhere. They are the invisible help. A decade ago I learned to play pool with another group of Mexicans, one in particular. Eric and I sipped our beers and wondered what became of Jose, the greatest damn pool player this side of all the self-proclaimed hustlers, the so-called pool sharks, the drunken hotshots, the hotdogs, this side of Minnesota Fats himself. Jose could win games drunk as hell. Barely able to stand, he'd have to prop himself up with his pool cue in between shots. Then, when it was his turn to take a shot, he would get down low, eye level to the table, line it up, pump, and shoot. Sunk. Jose possessed an innate sense of geometry and angles and velocity. The same sort of expertise that a physicist would apply when trying to land a man on the moon, Jose seemed to possess naturally without any post-graduate degrees in physics or mathematics.
I wondered why he didn't turn pro or play in any of the money tournaments around the city. We'd seen him beat down so many guys it night after night it wasn't even funny. But it eventually became clear why he never quite reached that level of competition.
He worked as a prep cook getting paid under the table at some mom-and-pop diner out in the trendy poseur wannabe Marina district. He worked till the early afternoon six days a week, which was the same for a lot of the other Mexicans who requented that bar -- one day off, and the other six days, you're working ten-, twelve-hour shifts, making seven, eight bucks an hour. Tax-free, no health benefits, no sick time. One things about those Mexicans, though, they were extremely generous. I would even say, self-less, with what little money they made, always offering to buy drinks, plunking down their own quarters for those games of pool, when they weren't hustling, that is.
When Jose's shift ended each day, from three o-clock onward, guaranteed you could find him perched atop his stool at the end of the bar, drinking Budweiser after Budweiser. Budweiser was his drink of choice while all the other Mexicans drank their Coronas with the lime wedges. Club-Med ain't the only place that's got 'em.
Every day, seven days a week, Budweiser upon Budweiser, for the two or three years that I was a regular there, Jose slowly drank his life away and pissing it all down that filthy barroom toilet. Just like the rest of us.
I was there every day, too. I'd roll in at about eight or nine. I could rarely hold out longer than that. I tried to force myself to stay home some evenings -- watch the baseball game, try some home-cooking for once -- but I wanted to be in a place where everyone knew my name. Well, some of them, anyway, so I'd slip on my Skinny Puppy baseball cap, slide into my leather jacket and head out the door. Drunks, all drunks. We were the low-life losers, the poor, the wretched. But it was more than that. We weren't yet laying in the gutter sipping hootch out of paper bags. There was hope for us yet. We each saw it, and we each recognized it for what it was. We were all loners, and we returned night after night to be a part of the crowd, to be a part of that giant sealed-off fishbowl of life, regulars co-mingling with lost tourists, shooting pool with the occasional lunatic that wanders in through those wide open doors. If you can survive for twenty-one years, you are allowed entry. That's the only requirement. No fat doorman at the door gauging your coolness, weighing your attractiveness. Exclusivity is for the insecure. Let it all in. We'll deal with it.
By the time I would get there, Jose was already shit-faced drunk, slouching over the bar, head resting literally in a pool of his own spittle, speech slurred, puke-stained breath. But get him over to the pool table, and he would shoot us down, one after the other -- bing bing bing. Next! Then stagger out into the night. Sometimes we'd wonder if we would see him the next day. One day we wouldn't. He was in love with the dayshift bartender, a fifty-plus-year-old Korean woman who wore her makeup in the tradition of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. She worked her shift until seven each night, and when she quit, he did too. I never saw him after that. I wondered if he got deported. He always talked about going back home.
---
Every bar has its share of dirty old men. They keep to the shadows, peering out lasciviously, hunched over, sipping their girly drinks -- pina coladas, margueritas, bloody marys, wine coolers, various "lite" beers. They're not there to drink; they're there to cop a feel, get their nuts tickled, taking a short break from spending dollar bills in the strip club down the block or preying on underaged crack ho's around the corner. The Korean bar girl struts up and down, working that bar, flimsy silky nighty for a top and short short skirts or Daisy Dukes, sweet perfume-scented, all smiles and light brushes across the hand like a feather as they hand you your change (what you think is left of it). The creepy old men wiggle like hooked worms in their seats, barely able to contain themselves. Some of them lean forward on the bar, like expectant schoolboys. It's all they can do to keep from lunging over the bar and having their way with one of those girls right there on the wet rubber-matted floor. I've had the same thoughts myself as has every other guy who may have wandered into that joint on a Friday or Saturday night. It's all a prick tease to loosen up those wallets, a practice that probably dates back to when man first realized that thinking with his dick could cost him a lot of money and threw it all away, anyway. Thus was born Lust and her wicked twin sister, centuries and centuries of Bitter Disillusionment.
Men outnumber the women five to one. The girls know this. They're surrounded like birds in a cage, yet they are the ones setting the trap. Their legs are closed and who knows what goes on in their minds. But nobody's paying any attention. The dirty old men sit there, mesmerized, leering. They think they are the ones in control with their wallets stuffed full of a trivial week's pay, but those Korean barmaids are as deft as pickpockets, much more adept and studied than the clumsy co-eds who work the strip clubs, bumping and gyrating and under the impression that fake tits and perfume bought at the Macy's counter is enough to get the job done. Korean chicks are smarter. They smile and laugh along knowing full well that fool and his money will soon be parted. At the end of the evening, you'll be left with a throbbing hard-on and no relief in sight. These are the poor saps who get tricked into purchasing a two-hundred dollar bottle of Exo, thinking it will buy their way into those silky tight Korean panties, but what they get is exactly what they paid for -- a bottle of overpriced whiskey and maybe a few turns on the karoake machine in the back room. All the while, the girl sitting intimately close, smiling and laughing along, but -- no touch, no touch!
There was an old Korean man who used to visit every week or so, spending all his money in this fashion -- wasting it, as we all were, wildly and with abandon. One of the girls mentioned he was filthy rich. He owned businesses or apartments or something and could afford to blow four or five hundred a night. Fool. Other folks seemed impressed, in awe of his spending prowess. Uh, yeah. In some dive bar in the Tenderloin. That's like going to the dollar store on payday with your five hundred dollars: "Hey, you say everything's a dollar? Well, then. I'll buy five hundred things!" What a waste.
Then there was a detective who frequented the place and made it known short of advertising it on a neon sign outside the place that he was a detective out of the Taraval precinct out in the Avenues. He walked and acted like a cop. He didn't need a badge or uniform to tip anyone off. He strolled into the place with a confident swagger and a smirk that said, "I've got a gun and the authority to blow your fucking brains out." He'd stroll up to the bar and lean on one elbow, again, with that confident swagger. He reeked of old school corruption -- dead prostitutes, Chinese gangland payoffs, back alley deals with the local drug lords. Or maybe that was all just according to my own drunken imaginings. His fashion sense was a mix of Columbo reruns and the glory days John Gotti. In fact, he bore a passing resemblance to the latter, except shorter and not quite as dapper.
I noticed this same detective there tonight as Eric went to order another round. Same style, nothing changed, propped up against the bar with that one elbow and that smile which was still a condescending smirk.
---
Outside was the Tenderloin with her junkies, her homeless, lost tourists, and residents like small animals in the forest scurrying about on the forest floor; chipped neon signs and the swishing and swooshing of passing traffic. Was any of this planned? It almost seems accidental that this neighborhood ever came into being. There is that familiar stench of rotting food and stale urine wafting up from the streets, perspiring through its asphalt pores. In a sickly sense, this part of the city is alive, much like a tumor. It has the disturbing ability to grow its own teeth, its own hair, within the folds of its infected flesh. Indeed, it lives. It is like a scab that will never fully heal and can never be peeled. It is simply there to behold and to deal with.
This neighborhood was my home for many years. This is where I left the thin shell of adolescence behind and threw myself head first into the murky waters of adulthood. You can't learn to think for yourself when you're constantly worried what everyone else is thinking. I came to the city to leave all of that behind along with whatever notions I once had of myself. This city became my blank canvas and my little hidey-hole all at once. It became my retreat whenever I felt threatened, insecure, or whenever my station in life wasn't as stable as I'd first imagined. I come here to refocus, zero in on what it is I really need to be doing with my life.
Part of this process is to head out the door and just start walking, in any direction, at any time of day or night. I didn't realize it then, but but walking was to become my primary form of meditation, to just go anywhere and just think by yourself. Only in some crowded city can you wander aimlessly on foot, you can observe the people, their comings and goings -- all of this done anonymously, through the safety of your own unfiltered thoughts. Cloaked in anonymity you have the freedom to be candid or the fool. There are no labels to hide behind. There is no pretending to be something you're not because nobody cares. And there's nothing to stop you from doing otherwise, either -- and still, nobody cares. Grow like a vine towards your own source of sunlight. I'm just some guy in an olive drab army jacket and baseball cap wandering the streets, anonymous, inconsequential, weak -- watching, listening, observing, then moving slowly and deliberately, like some half-baked Buddha. The Tenderloin became my own Walden Pond, except polluted and more like an oily puddle.
---
Eric and I finished our drinks then left. There was no point in staying for another. We were like ghosts, living in a past which no longer suited either of us. Another generation of alcoholics and no-life lowlifes had sprouted up in our stead, which is how it must be, how it's always been. These streets, these buildings, will never remember your name. Our lives pass like fragile wisps of smoke then quietly fade away. We bid each other good-bye on that noisy corner at Geary and Larkin and headed in opposite directions. He had to wake early the next morning for a class on teaching English as a second language. I headed for another bar down the street.
In earlier days I might have continued drinking until my vision blurred and staggering down the street wasn't possible without feeling my way along the wall. I'd wait for that familiar throbbing in my head and ears. My personality would change like the Incredible Hulk. Unlike the Hulk, I didn't grow stronger the drunker I got. Hulk is fiction, and I would still be stuck in my own painful reality. Things would be different this night. There would be no destructive rampaging or forsakening of the past and whatever obligations may have sprung from that -- marriage, fatherhood, a decent job with health benefits and all the free bottled watered a guy could drink. I no longer felt comfortable playing the part of Kali the Destroyer, who destroys in order to create again. It was time to search for a new role.
I wandered into the place on Geary and Jones. It's a relatively sleepy spot, not as loud or active as the place I'd just left. The same Korean woman from years' past was working there tonight with that same droopy, hang-dog face. Her greeting was dubious at best, but I know she recognized me from before. A younger girl was working there, too. Eye candy. Beautiful, intelligent, spoke perfect English, but with a stare like an icepick through the chest. I kept my distance. There was no hard sell like at the other place. No tits and ass in your face with fake smiles and false interest in your miserable uninteresting life. This was more low-key, take it or leave it. They made little attempt at masking their contempt for the losers who came in through that old wooden door. For some reason, maybe due to its proximity to Union Square, the place gets more white customers (European tourists, mostly) than the other spots. Because of this, I've tended to avoid the place over the years. Too many tourists and not enough locals make for a dry boring evening, indeed -- khakis, fanny packs, leathery suntans, and strange European or Mid-Western accents.
"Where ya from?" Ahh. "Whaddya do?" Yes, yes. "Nice to meetcha." "Take care." "In my country we do it this way and we call it that." Ahh, I see.
The old men regret bringing their flabby bird-like wives along and wish they could sneak out for a quick visit to one of those Asian massage parlors around the corner. Oh, the mistakes we men have made all in the name of lust. I would cave to no such temptations tonight. I downed my last drink for the evening and took a stroll up to North Beach.
---
Walking wherever and whenever. One of the beauties of being in a real city. This ability to meander and wander near or far, on foot, would be one of my top ten requisites if I were in charge of determining a city's worth as a true, world-class city or if it's just some bullshit pretender, a hob-nob collection of strip malls, chain restaurants, and artsy-fartsy shops that sell doilied crap that no one buys, except old ladies and other artsy-fartsy shop owners. The streets must be narrow, asphalt chipped and broken down, only good for walking with no room for cars or trucks; no expressways or freeway on-ramps or six-lane thoroughfares; no crosswalks where pedestrians have to sprint a quarter-mile to make it to the other side or risk being run over by assholes gunning their engines waiting for the light to turn green; a liquor/grocery store or deli/market on every corner; a varied collection of people living together on the same block, every block, and not just a bunch of monotonous hard-ons in Dockers khakis with perky-breasted girlfriends in tow, the ones with the nasally whines, searching for the nearest sports bar; a city where tourists are treated with contempt and not encouraged to be like idiots (see Las Vegas, Disneyland), a city that doesn't need them to survive (New York City, for example); a city where celebrities go to hide and not be seen, where they can relax in blissful anonymity like the rest of us. Hollywood is for teenaged girls or those suffering from similar youthful afflictions.
I would rather see a barren wasteland before me than some grotesque eyesore like Las Vegas or Orange County or Pleasanton, California. Forget about bombing Iraq. We ought to aim those guided lasers back at ourselves and blast away at those monuments to architectural stupidity and equally stupid city planning and engineering, where everything is designed around the automobile and the assumption that we, as dumbfuck Americans, are willing to drive five miles down the road for that gallon of cookie dough ice cream or bag of Doritos. Tell that to the 90-year-old lady with poor eyesight and a shaky grip who's got to get behind the wheel and drive down to the pharmacy to pick up her prescription. Suddenly that car becomes a two-ton death machine as she manuevers it down city streets. Hide the women and children! Here comes Grandma! Get off the sidewalk! Here she comes! That will be all of us some day. I don't want to be the guy who's got to catch a bus forty-five minutes uptown just so I could pick up another pack of adult diapers, praying to God I don't loose my bowels along the way. If I'm going to shit my pants, I'd rather do it in the privacy of my own home.
---
The stroll from the Tenderloin to North Beach isn't very far -- maybe a mile or two at the most -- hardly treacherous; the path is lined with tourists, late-night office workers, lawyers and bankers from the financial district entertaining clients. I find it peculiar to see rich old men out and about on a Friday night, like frat boys out there having fun, laughing out loud and confidently, as they stroll down the darkened lamp-lit streets. Their laughter sounds more sinister than joyous. Shouldn't they be home in their mansions tucked away safe and warm? Shouldn't they be preparing their last will and testament and atoning for their sins? Have all their years of success commanding men and companies made them confident in their old age that they would overcome it, that in all their material wealth, they have become like gods themselves and can laugh defiantly in the face of their Maker? This is the laugh of one was are born into privilege and expects it. Hard work has nothing to do with it. You could work your ass of at McDonald's for ten years, full time, making six-fifty an hour, and at the end of that decade you'll have enough saved up to buy a couple of cheeseburgers and a large order of fries. Fifty bucks a day. Not bad if you're living rent-free and you don't need to eat.
I'm hiking up through Chinatown now, making my way up Grant Street. The shops are closed, and the tourists have left. It's dark. All the years I lived in S.F., and I've never been up this way this late in the evening. In the distance, I can still hear the old rich men laughing, like slave-traders and devils. On the opposite side of the street, I see an old Chinese man making his way home, hunched over, beat down, tired, and sad looking. He's alone with his pink Chinatown plastic bag, the kind every Chinatown shop hands you when you've purchased a handful of their goodies. In the bag he carries tonight's dinner, leftovers from today's lunch. When he gets home, he'll reheat those pork noodles or that fried duck with rice that has hardened into little bits of plastic. Too tired to even remove his stained white smock, he wears it all the way home, reeking of fish, chicken guts, and back alley garbage cans. If these Chinatown streets were still crowded, tourists would be swerving to avoid him. It's good that he comes home so late at night, he thinks to himself. Spare him the humiliation of tredging through the suspicious, judgmental crowds. "Look, momma! Is that a real Chinaman?" "Yes, dear." "Ew, he smells like fish!" "Don't get too close now." In the distance, the old white men are still laughing.
From Grant, I cut over to Columbus and stroll past Vesuvio and City Lights Books. Nothing here now but poseurs and more tourists gawking at the posing poseurs, standing around staring at each other like weird beetles. The bookstore itself is always worth a visit, likewise the one a few doors down from the Condor on Broadway at the top of Kearny. The Beats are dead. They've been beat down and ground into a pulpy mass for mass consumption, little bite-sized chunks of rebellion for all the sensitive poets sniffing rose petal farts in creative writing classes. Slap a black beret on this shit and bury it already. Roll up a copy of the New Yorker and shove it down those pink cocksucker throats. There is no writing like a dying man whose guts have spilled onto the streets after he's blown himself up. Who? Please tell me, who?
I'm not book-shopping tonight or any night for the foreseeable future. There's an entire bookshelf of books sitting at home that I have yet to read. I'm buying them faster than I can read them. And there's an empty bookshelf that I haven't yet purchased that I plan to fill with all the books I hope to write. The two bookshelves of opposing forces are constantly warring upon another, and I'm stuck in the middle, paralyzed. Tonight I'm just walking, just passing through. Looking at everything and looking for nothing. Wear down that slight feeling of drunkenness before I head back to my room in the Tenderloin. Walk off the drunkenness, and along with it, the bad feelings, the jealousy, the insecurity, the hopelessness, the defeat that I'd been feeling recently.
I weave through the happy, eager crowds, immortal in their youth, and realize how I've aged. How the years have sped by, unseen and anonymous. I am content in my own silence, my quiet solitude. I no longer feel a need to meet anyone but myself, don't succumb to that pressure of being part of the crowd -- amongst them, yes, but not a part of them. It feels nice to disappear into it, amidst all that noise, the chatter, the traffic with the beep-beep honking horns, the music wafting out of restaurant windows and barroom doorways, young women excited to be spending a night out with their friends and boyfriends. Was a time when I was in awe of such people, when I felt intimidated by them, their happy lives and the bright futures that lay before them. I wondered, what was the secret, what was this thing they possessed, which I seemed to be lacking, that enabled them to feel so confident and certain of their station in life? But good looks fade, small fortunes are squandered, and that certainty in life might very well lead to boredom, monotony and secret addictions to painkillers. Failure, of course, is the best teacher. Better a three-time loser than some sentimental fool whose glory days are frozen in the past. Losers will always have something to look forward to, even if it is the mere thought of escaping the present. Poor today, hopefully not so poor tomorrow. But you got to try.
I looped around North Beach Pizza and headed back down Kearny. North Beach on weekend nights is the same it's always been -- crowded with people from the East Bay and surrounding suburbs. Suburban kids trying to look and act older than the minimum drinking age. Must be all the neon signs and crowds that attract them, like squirrels to nuts and old people to Vegas casinos. You feel drawn to all the excitement and that orgy of activity. The energy, the crowds, all that buzzing busy-ness that is often mistaken for life itself, people milling about trying to keep busy, doing things, anything, if only to say the following Monday that they did something over the weekend, anything to occupy themselves in that mad vacuum of space and time, when all you really need to do is just sit and be still. Be silent and observe like a quiet mouse in the forest. Everything else is the ego trying to assert itself. You must reach in and strangle it. Murder it. Obliterate it. Smash it into tiny pieces and grind it to dust beneath the heel of your foot. The ego is the reason for all the assholes, the jerks, and motherfuckers out there in the world. It is why we fought three world wars and every war before or since. The ego says "All is mine. Vengeance is mine." It struts about, an out-of-control throbbing hard-on, bumping into everything, stumbling over its own testicles. Any perceived threat to its existence must be dealt with swiftly, violently, without compassion, common sense, or any semblance of reason. The ego says "You are weak, and I am strong." The ego says "I am faster, smarter, better, and you, you are the loser. You are not worthy. I pass judgment upon you, and you are unworthy to stand beside me and partake in the warm glow which is my own glory." The ego is vanity and jealousy all at once. It is hatred and lust, snide smirks and mean-spirited comments. It is lord and master of the crowded night. The ego fills the room and leaves nothing of any value in its wake.
---
My feet were beginning to tire from all the walking I'd been doing, around town and downtown. It had been a long day. I didn't get much sleep the previous night waiting and worrying for Nadjet to come home at two, or was it three, in the morning. Then with jealous, insecure feelings I went into work, feeling like a pile of shit the entire day, email meaningless, test planning meaningless, a decent job at one of the best tech companies meaningless. Code reviews, test results, debugging and troubleshooting -- were nothing more than balls of lint tucked away in the corners of my mind, the great big empty halls of my mind, lonely footstep echoes all sad and gloomy.
Some people can escape into their work when they're feeling beat down and attacked, but not me and not with this kind of job, the meaningless, pointless kind, the kind that only pays the rent and provides a dim hope of more years of corporate servitude to follow, the kind that gets you spinning your wheels and firing your cylinders, but still, you get nowhere. Some go along willingly, gleefully, excited at the job title printed beneath their name on their business cards. Go forward, young man, and be proud to be ground into hamburger. Engineers fresh from India with their Wal-Mart slacks and Target buttoned-down shirts, still showing the creases from the factory fold, hurl themselves willingly into the mix. Now is their time to shine and make a name for themselves. Everyone will know that Gopal Ragamadishalan wrote the bit of code that went into the feature that went into the software that runs that little square box sitting on a rack down in the server room that enables Suzy Jones, admin assistant in the tight skirt, to update her MySpace blog site from her cube at work without her boss's knowledge, who in turn, is using that same bit of code to cruise porn sites on the sly with the door to his office closed as if he were huddled in there on a very important conference call.
Everyone wants to be brilliant. Everyone wants to be a genius. They must teach this in every school in India. They've studied all the brilliant geniuses who have come before them -- Einstein, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, the CEOs of all the Fortune 500 companies. They relate anecdotes from the lives of these men as if from rote memory, as if they were parables or Bible stories. Gandhi is frowned upon, his name muttered with a smirk. He was not a capitalist.
In baseball parlance, these guys want to be on the team that goes all the way to the world series. Very few will ever get beyond Double-A ball. Aside from the pioneering ones who came and made their mark, the rest are poorly made clones of the original, possessing the demeanor of robots, not champions. Me, I'm the bat-boy looking for a way out. I might take a few swings for the fence during batting practice, but that's the extent of my involvement. Let the other guys be the stars, albeit in their own minds, writing that slick piece of code, finding that gnarly bug that would have brought our biggest customer to their knees. Everything seems to be done with "visibility" in mind -- visibility to upper mangement, visibility to the rest of the team. In other words, they want to be known, they want to be recognized. Am I the only one who prefers to work under the radar? There can be no real glory in toiling away at work that can be done by trained monkeys or robots. Your only rewards are more work and an implied, but legally unenforceable, promise of continued employment. Dumbfuck newbies fall for it every time, myself included. It is only when you tire of the work and that gut-churning feeling of unfulfillment remains that you realize maybe quitting that mailroom job all those years ago for another gig that paid a buck-fifty more wasn't such a good idea after all. Should've kept it simple.
---
I find myself at the Chinatown playground across from the Holiday Inn on Kearny. There is a swimming pool on the roof of that hotel. We snuck up there once when we were teenagers -- me, my brother Andre, and our friend Larry. We had each dropped a hit of acid on the train ride into the city about an hour earlier. In the pool area on the roof of the hotel twenty-seven stories up, a sign greeted us: No Swimming. I picked it up and hurled it over the ledge. We leaned over and watched as it careened off the side of the building, then spun around and drooped down into the middle of the street just like a giant ace of spades. It came to rest with a dull, anti-climactic "kl-klang".
Back on the street, we watched a giant wrecking ball tear away at an old brick building. It was evening and they had the demolition zone covered in floodlights. The giant ball came around again and -- WHAM -- it slammed into the side of the building. Bricks, dust, and bits of debris came crumbling down. To my slightly hallucinating mind, the falling pieces took on the appearance of bodies falling out of windows, then flashed back to shadowy debris. I tried to watch more closely in hopes of spotting more bodies and warn the construction crew that, hey, there were people still in there, but my brother was having another kind of hallucination.
"I feel wet."
"You're not wet. You're tripping."
"Touch me. Don't I feel wet?"
"Dude, you're not wet."
"Feels like I'm wet."
"Well, you're not."
This continued every few minutes, and each time we had to assure him that no, he most definitely was not wet.
I was left wondering about the falling bodies. Many years later I would watch a similar scene unfold on live television as the World Trade Center towers came crashing down -- bodies falling out of windows like so much debris. I remember watching a black guy in a three-piece suit succumb to his fate as he let himself fall from a highrise window. He sort of just tumbled like a crash-test dummy. When he left for work that morning, did he have some clue, some hint or vibe that he would never see his wife and kids again, that he would never know that feeling of relief upon returning home after another fucked up day at the office? Maybe he didn't like his job. Maybe he was planning to quit. Perhaps he was sitting at his desk, daydreaming of a better existence. And yet there he was, alone in his office, throwing himself from the window. Post-It notes, desk, chair, computer, scattered papers -- the last things he sees before hurling himself into the abyss, his final witnesses. My dreams the next few nights were filled with the cries and moaning of the people who had died and those who lay buried in the rubble. It started as a distant whisper, then slowly grew louder inside my head until I awoke and thought I was hearing it right there in our bedroom.
The events from that day recede further and further into the past, coming up on five years now as I write this. How things have changed and how much they haven't depends on your frame of mind, I suppose. For me, the battle has always been more of an internal nature. Not changing the world but changing how I see the world. All wars begin with an internal seed of hatred and anger. Look at Hitler, Napoleon, Osama bin Laden, George fucking Bush. A single man with a certain hatred. Their own personal hatreds and flaws manifest into cultural hatreds and flaws. These seeds are spread and cultivated from individual to individual, generation to generation. It all begins with one man and a will to force everyone else to see things his way. HIS way. It's all ego and no life. It spreads like disease and atrophy. Dreams die. Lives waste away. Cultures fade and disappear. There is no hope, no art where there is no creation, no hope for the individual being itself. Ego doesn't create, it destroys slowly. It eats away like termites on rotting wood. It is the psychological manifestation of cancer. Nothing thrives. War is the result of ego. All those fuckers out there in the world -- they thrive like tumors on the brain.
Me versus myself. Self meeting self, as Edgar Cayce once put it. Why blow shit up if the problem is within yourself, your own psyche, your own flawed intepretation of other people and perhaps even of your own faith? How do you know? Fact is, you don't, and until you do, you should keep your mouth shut, keep your head down, and trudge along through your own miserable life. Nobody's fault but mine, ought to be our collective mantra. All fingers point back at you. All roads lead inward. This absolute belief in your own righteousness is nothing more than fucked up delusion. Judging what's right and wrong is not up to the individual. The point of life is to simply live it and go your own way. Live our own lives and not point fingers. The great cosmic balance is achieved on its own. It hardly needs the assistance of man -- weak, puny, and unworthy in all our glorious stupidity. We are like tiny insects caught up in an ocean swell -- folly to think we could ever control it.
And this is why I find myself in some Chinatown park on a Friday night, alone, insecure and trying to hear the answer, any answer, whispered my way on some cosmic wind. Whenever I find myself confronting problems with no obvious solution, I like to go off on my own, wander around, let everything simmer and stew for a bit. I need to be alone, get away from all the things that seem to be pushing me this way, pulling me that way. All the little things that needle away at me, poke and prod me, expecting, requiring my involvement, like a thousand racquet balls I've smacked out in every direction and now they're bouncing back my way, hurtling twice as fast. This is my idea of karma. And then: Oh, shit -- what the hell do I do now?
I.
Don't.
Know.
Some guys hold themselves out to be experts of one thing or another by the time they reach my age. I'm 36-years-old. What the hell do I know? I'm still bumbling about, struggling with the written word, trying to find an easier way to pay the rent. Pro ballplayers are nearing retirement after years of making good money playing a game they love. Lawyers are being made into partners. Med students are becoming doctors. Writers already have a few books and articles under their belts. Talking heads on the news channels prop themselves up as being experts on one subject or another: terrorism, finance, nutrition, whatever -- names and fancy titles flashing on a banner beneath their blabbing mouths.
I suppose this is what it means to have a career -- at some point you become an expert at what you do. And then you are expected to share your expertise. Bestow it upon those less knowledgeable. To nod like a gentle understanding parent when approached by eager acolytes and understudies: Yes, I know more than you. Yes, I too made the same idiotic mistakes.
And if you are content with simply sitting around daydreaming, doing absolutely nothing from day to day, then surely you will become an expert at being yourself. Or perhaps wandering aimlessly about, comparing this stone to that stone, the shapes of clouds and unseen wind patterns, how the tall grass bends and sways while never really losing its form. What else have you got to think about, otherwise, if not your own thoughts, your own little quirks, the way you walk, the way you lift a cup of coffee to your lips, how you perceive the light and the shadows as they pass through the leaves of a tree? You sit, you ruminate, you rediscover memories long since forgotten like smooth, round pebbles stored in a box over the years. You will learn infinite patience and the art of sitting still and keeping silent.
---
I sit in that Chinatown park on one of the benches in the dark, quietly. I spot a few slumped over shadows across the ways -- homeless snuggled in for the night. In the daytime, this place is crowded with Chinatown kids and old Chinese men playing Chinese boardgames, but they've all gone to bed in their respective Chinatown hovels, an impenetrable collection of tenement apartments that sit above the shops and restaurants and Chinatown barbershops and back-alley fortune cookie bakeries. You'll never find any of these places advertised for rent in any English-speaking newspaper. At least, I've never come across any. In Chinatown, Americans are the foreigners.
A row of hedges mark the boundary of the park and act as a divider which keeps us hidden from the people walking down the sidewalk. From the other side, I hear a young woman laughing with her friends. Across the street at the hotel, another group of people wait outside laughing and having a good time. I sit, listening. It would drive me mad to be homeless and to sit on that park bench day upon day, week after week, listening, seeing all the happiness, the normalcy, around me -- separated by an invisible wall, stewing in my own filth and hunger, knowing I could not be a part of it even if I'd wanted. All just sadness and rejection, being blocked out like a shadow, like cast out spirits. I suppose you'd learn to tune it out after a while. You become numb to it. You begin to believe that you are not human. Inhuman, you become accustomed to being treated like something worse than the family pet, worse than an animal running about in the wild. You begin to feel that you deserve the filth and squalor of living out on the streets. At what point do you forget the human spirit and let it die within you? Or does it merely lie dormant, waiting to be reawakened?
The alcoholic buzz has settled in. Whenever I close my eyes, I feel the pulse of my heartbeat throbbing in my ears. And the laughter all around of people enjoying a Friday night. Well-fed privileged kids from the suburbs, perfumed stank and false bravado. Teenagers and twenty-somethings out on the town. I am wary of them. The homeless I can understand and empathize with. They've been beat down and humbled, forced to grovel or dig through trash cans for the leftover crumbs and slightest bits of scraps. Society has cast them out and yet they exist within its folds and hide within its creases. At some point in their lives, some of them may have been just like these kids tonight -- confident in their youth, reckless, careless, invincible. Their smiles might very well have been just as wide and infinite as the universe, their laughter echoing throughout the cosmos. But now they sit hunched over in some abandoned park -- the children have gone home for the evening, the old men have gone home to wait another day for death. Only the homeless remain. They drift in like fallen leaves to claim the cold dark places. Sheer will and the breath of God within them is what keeps them alive. They don't have nice houses or fancy cars or nine-to-five jobs to pay for all of it. Their clothes are greasy oily rags found at the bottom of dumpsters; their faces sunburnt, cracked and creased; muscles sore, feet swollen. The act of bending to sit is painful and brings little relief. How close they are to knowing God, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed! They know hunger, deprivation. They know the feeling of being cast out and despised. They know failure, pain, long suffering. All that was once in their possession has been stripped away. What remains is that which brings them closest to God, which makes them like Gods themselves, and they are humbled. All of them -- the drunkards, the confused maniacs, the Vietnam vets, the schizophrenic heroin addicts, the black guys from Missouri -- all of them. They may have lost their minds, each and every one of them, but they haven't lost their souls. They might have lost families, fortunes, limbs. Rise up! Bow down and accept your karma, your miserable fates, your death sentences for life strung out over hours, days and years. And in all your misery and in spite of it, learn to see the glory of the morning sun and recognize the majesty of that which makes you human.
The kids -- the teenagers and the twenty-somethings -- haven't yet realized this. They're still invincible, immortal, unkillable. They don't yet know the pain of childbirth or the pain of having to pay for it without medical insurance, having to pay rent, mortgages, car payments, or having to show up for work every day, day in, day out, rain or shine with a boss who can't wait to shove his boot up your ass and the co-worker who can't wait to provide the assist. The future of which they are vaguely aware is only that which they've read or heard about from other people -- a friend's older brother who went into the navy, their dad who's worked as a lawyer/carpenter/banker all his adult life, a girlfriend or boyfriend who's got a cousin who moved to Hollywood to chase that superficial dream or maybe joined that punk rock band to tour the country in a rundown cargo van. Rumors, hearsay, dull expectations. That "go ahead and see for yourself" reality hasn't yet arrived with its dim baggage and gloomy clouds. Glory and fame lie just around the corner. There'll be no drudgery or monotony for them! They can do anything and will indulge themselves willingly. Stupidity and the risk of death or dismemberment don't register in their young minds. They only know fun and excitement and the adrenaline rush that those things provide. So they'll race down crowded streets going ninety miles an hour. They'll set fire to that homeless guy in the doorway. They'll smash windows and vandalize cars. They will fight and harrass people on the streets. They'll fuck and breed without knowing how to raise and nurture. There is nothing more dangerous than a marauding band of bored teenagers. I know what they can do because I've often done the same and failed just as miserably.
---
I retreat behind the hedge in that lonely Chinatown park and rest my tired feet. Slighly hungry, slightly buzzed. I close my eyes again. So peaceful, so calm. It is a beautiful cool evening. I rest my head against my chest and almost fall asleep. In all my years, I think I've slept outside maybe once in my life. 1983. Family reunion on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. All of us kids were sleeping in tents out on the beach. My grandfather had taken us spear-fishing out along the shallows earlier that evening. We caught nothing. We stabbed and jabbed at anything that moved just beneath the surface and only ended up cutting our feet upon the sharp coral. I realized then that I could never be a true native Hawaiian like my dad or my grandfather or any of my cousins or uncles who were all good swimmers and surfers and stuck their chests out all macho and tough, talking that tough Hawaiian talk, pidgin English style. So why even try? I was born in Hayward, California. The beach and that vast saltwater ocean were as alien to me at the time as girls and New York City. A good twenty years have passed and I can say with confidence that not much has changed.
I began to nod off. The cool evening and my own weariness lulled me. More crackling laughter across the street jolted me awake. Would I be able to spend the entire night out there? I hadn't planned on it, but the notion appealed to me. This idea of voluntary homelessness was not an alien one. It had occupied my thoughts for some time now. I'd say the last ten years or so. I wondered if I could live so ascetically. Could I wander this continent, the world even, like the hobos, the punks, the tramps, the teenaged runaways? Could I live like the worms and beetles tucked away in the soft earth? What would it feel like to sit on that park bench forever? To quietly retreat into myself, hear and feel the silent implosion of my own universe. Before the shell of my body is allowed to crumble and blow away as dust, there must be hunger, thirst, migraine headaches, and involuntary spasms. A dissolution of the attachment to the physical self. I soil myself and still I do not move from my place on the bench. Pigeons come to rest upon my shoulder. They defecate on me. My skin dries, then sags, then tightens against the bones in my face, tightens like leather about my skull. I am alone, and my breathing is shallow. I sink deeper and deeper within myself, like looking up from the bottom of a deep deep well, my soul.
More laughter from across the street. I open my eyes and spot a shadow shuffling about across the way. The homeless slumps of men stretched along the other benches toss and turn. They are still human. They can still see, hear, and smell the same things. They share the same sidewalks, breathe the same air. Though they might not have eaten in the last three days, they are not allowed to taste the food they cannot afford to buy. Though they might hear the laughter and understand the jokes, they are not allowed to participate in any conversation with people who are cleaner, more well-dressed than them. If they look at anything it is from a sidelong glance, a quick stab of a stare from within the shadows looking out toward a bright noonday sun. European tourists wrinkle their noses with disdain. There is not a kind eye amongst this lot. They are a suspicious bunch, clutching their purses, their Nordstrom's bags, their fanny packs. Centuries of Mongol and Moorish and Turkish invasions have taught them to be wary of that thing around the corner that will come to kick the shit out of them. It will arrive with certainty, and with certainty it will again kick the shit out of them. Centuries of being on the losing side of all the raping and pillaging and maiming have embedded this in the European mindset. They're expecting it. Not if, but when will it happen? Catastrophe, plague, grown men crying and flailing about, running down ash-covered streets in stained tighty-whities. Entire families slaughtered. Generations gone in the blink of an eye.
To be forced to live outside in the urban elements means more than sleeping on wet pavement, begging for change, or finding a quiet spot to loose your bowels. You've got to deal with the hatred, the contempt, being ignored and avoided. When you sleep you've got to watch for gangs of teenagers looking to light you up with a bit of gasoline and a match. Some may come merely to kick you in the head. Others may hurl empty beer bottles at you as they drive down the street. Or fire upon you with pellet guns or worse. Lack of shelter and food are the last of your concerns when you tuck in for the night. Being homeless is being vulnerable. I would imagine. I can only imagine. It would take great courage to embrace it willingly, with wide open arms and wide-eyed wonder.
I have a wife and kid at home. They have no idea where I am tonight. I left home in a hurry, angry and insecure. I left my cell phone on the desk because I knew they would try to call. I escaped to the city to be nobody. But that isn't true.
I stood up and walked back to the hotel.
-- END --