She was tearing through my mind at a good clip, hat off,
hair wild, pants rolled, makeup smeared and runny. “Then there was the
high-jacked knack you had for the dramatic— falling, caught, or listing between
storms, while I duct-taped my shoes and ran red lights with a shrug. With a
grain of salt and a shovelful of earth, just the space between a hiccup and a
sigh. Shattered low. Incompatible. And then there are those ruinous hospitable
instincts to contend with. Shared hittable pitches like emotional moments in
the history of bad luck. Rusty and shot down. Looking astute in the hurrying
clod of hobbling gaits and hollowed-out reminiscences.” I had better thoughts
to think, sure, but I just couldn’t get myself to get around to thinking them.
Some mendacious scumbag in rags with a few broken teeth and a shattered
personality was begging self-serving alms from me in the guise of
spare-a-dime-for-the-old-guy logic, while the only thing he wanted was a cold beer
and a colder pickle, really. I fished around in my pockets but all that turned up
was a bent cigarette and a discount pass to The Garden Of Eden. I sheepishly
half-grimaced in his general direction and mumbled, “Sorry, kid. I’m the stuff
regret’s made on.” The cigarette was too busted up to smoke and the pass to the
strip joint was expired. I put them both back in my jacket pocket and walked east
on Market towards the Embarcadero.
Somebody’d homered down at AT&T, and you could hear the
fog horns blaring and a bit of the crowd going wild. It made me wince, and I
hunched and shuffled, and I felt bad all over, and then a tad worse. I was
getting touchy and morose as the years passed. I didn’t like it. Something soft
and cravenly sulking about in there too much, like some dead pigeon rotting and
festering in the ruffled places of my weary disposition’s crutch. I’d like to
think that with the passing of years one acquires wisdom and perspective and a
certain grace that comes with experience’s accrued knowledge, but unfortunately
I’ve only found myself growing more petty and stupid and witless with each year
tacked on to this life I lead. I wanted a hot dog. I wanted to take the ferry
to Angel Island. I wanted a nice place to sit and watch Yerba Buena and the
bridge and the boats go by on the bay, a dozen oysters and an ice-cold vodka
tonic, maybe a waitress with a few specks of leftover glitter from the night before
on her cheeks and a rum-laced smile. I wanted to live in an old piano
warehouse. But I was sick of asking for things. My buttonhole was spoken-for by
a rusted safety pin. Things could’ve been better, I suppose, but it wasn’t
something I was letting myself let on about.
The street vendors were out in full force all along the
Embarcadero. I ambled by them, glancing at their wares and attempting to
reconfigure my notion of what it meant to be alive. A stooped Italian in a
butcher’s white smock was yodeling on about onions and peppers and sausage: some
lurid testament to more guts-and-grit times. Everything smelled like cocoa
butter and lard with a hint of jasmine. Carefully disobeying the traffic signal,
I moseyed quite carelessly across the trolley tracks, knowing that it didn’t matter,
that I didn’t matter, and therefore anything that could possibly happen to me—
whether of my own volition or not— could not matter in the slightest. It was
quite freeing. The clock tower loomed up above me, and I looked at it, just as
millions of others had for over a century as it ticked away the remainder of
their lives and continued on with its own. I looked at it— that ancient
sentinel of strict and steady passionless structure; that block of cement and
wood, never worried, never in love, never in debt or wandering aimlessly
through listless ways of trying and not. I looked at that damn clock tower
casting a big shadow over all of these small creatures down here whimpering
around, getting on with our small lives, conversing with our small voices; and
I thought, ‘I don’t care. Run off to the circus. Put the boot in the door. I
just don’t care. I do not care, not at all.’ Then some crazed rollerblading
lunatic wearing short-shorts, a midriff-exposing tank top, and a pink bandana
came rifling at me, slaloming madly through the throngs, his headphones pumping
into his ears what was to him the only sound in the world. Luckily I tripped on
my own feet and stumbled out of his way as he blared past without even noticing
anything outside of his narrow cubicled strip of world.
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