Chemical Billy

Krewe du Vieux

2012-02-06T13:04:00.000-08:00

In the coffee shop, a white, middle-aged couple sit at the next table. He's in a t-shirt and shorts. She wears a purple wig and a two-piece outfit that shows off her sagging midriff. Both wear beads, hopefully. They squint together at the ATM, she points a purple-nailed finger at the screen.

Behind me, at the bar, is a moss man. He is head to toe in a beautiful, elaborate moss costume. No clue what he looks like underneath it all. I only know it's a man from his voice as he orders a beer.

The crowds are denser as I step into the street. I'm in the French Quarter, and tonight is the first parade of Mardi Gras. I get turned around, walking up and then back down the street when I realize I'm going the wrong way. Two young men and a young woman, barely twenty-one, sit in a doorway. There is a tall margarita glass in front of each of them, tall as them. The young woman wears a bustier. She sits cross-legged, her neck long and vulnerable.

I look up from the street to see someone step out onto the balcony. I call out and wave, am pointed to a side door. I've met nobody here more than once; they all greet me with hugs. We're in the apartment of someone else I barely know, but he isn't here, he has to work. He's opened his place to all of us. It's a nice place, high ceilings, peeling wooden doors with painted windows to separate living room from bed. An aged armoire with a full-length mirror.

I've worn my usual camouflage, gray and brown, but it makes me the oddball here. One tall, cleanheaded man in a suit of broad white and black stripes and striped top hat has stepped directly out of The Addams Family. There are dark circles beneath his eyes. A batch of people appear in sparkling bodysuits and bulbous sunglasses. One man leaps into the splits. A woman in sequins and crinoline takes pictures of a transvestite who has lifted his skirt to show lighters, flashlights, keys hanging from chains against his bare hip. The disco ball that hangs from his penis matches the ones dangling from his ears.

The two of them are reflected in the mirror, the silvering worn away at the edges. She lifts one arm gracefully overhead, the black, waved hair under her arm looks as decorative as her gold sequins.

I could tell more, about the parade that passed below the balcony, about outrageous floats, brass bands, the mild night and the moon like a tilted teacup. But right now it feels like autumn outside, and I'm going to take a walk by the river, past low houses that survive hurricanes, the black billy goat lounging on a porch, the naked mannequin among the pilings, her arms lifted above her head in defense, or supplication, or sheer joy.

Remember that place with those people that one time?

2012-01-17T23:31:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure which way the ballet studio was. I danced there almost every day for ten years, you'd think I'd know, but so much has changed. Buildings torn down, new ones in their place, there are some things Americans aren't sentimental about.

Across the street is a gap where a building was recently demolished. My mind skims over the space. Maybe it was in the next block? I cross the street to look more closely as I pass. The one with the boarded-over windows?

It's only when I'm almost on top of it, when I see the red star with the arrow pointing up, that my brain admits it. That's where the stairs were. I trudged up them a thousand thousand times, my flight bag with rolled pink tights and black leotard. I don't remember, then remember the red star.

Memory slips out of my hands like a fish. I lean toward people over a certain age. Do I know you? I want to ask.

In my last post I wrote about my dad speaking his name and birthdate to enter the gallery, but this is a borrowed memory. My sister remembered it when we went to the gallery together. When she described it, it came to life in my head, but could it have come alive even if it wasn't true? A family story told and retold and shaped and rounded until it becomes the story of the story, the moment itself long lost.

I walk through my old neighborhood, down the steep slope of Apple Avenue, winding through the tree streets: Locust Lane, Ash Avenue, Cherry Lane. There the J's house, they had a zipline in the back garden and a parlor where you couldn't bring food. There R's house, who I broke up with because of his body odor, which maybe wasn't bad but set off bad chemical alarms in my head. There the house that stood empty, where B and I made out before he crashed his motorcycle and died. Was it the house? Or was it the one a block over, with the new siding and the melting snowman?

My brothers used to make fun of me for saying, I remember! to stories that took place before I was born. But I remembered the story, the Super 8 movie clip, they way we told each other the story so often that I could see it as though I'd been there, the ghost of me, dragging the memory forward through time.

I have tea with a childhood friend, and this isn't something I can forget, the ease we have with each other, the connection, still strong, somehow still strong, though we grew apart in elementary school. We grew apart, is what I always said. We grew apart, even though he lived across the street. I say it to him now: We grew apart, when I went to France, and he looks at me. No, he says. That wasn't what happened at all. He tells me my parents thought I was spending too much time with boys, I didn't have enough friends that were girls.

And my world shifts. The story I'd told myself was different, it changes now, edges toward tragic, answering the ache in my heart whenever I remembered my friend.

Stiff little oranges

2012-01-13T12:22:00.000-08:00

G sits beside me in the gallery. There's something about her presence that quiets my mind. My dad used to be the director of this gallery, thirty-five years ago. He would speak his name and birthdate into a microphone to gain access. I'd sit on a chair in the inner office, kicking my heels against the chair legs. Dad's colleague, Mr. Burnside, would slip his hand into mine, take me downstairs to the ice cream machine, buy me an ice cream sandwich. Mr. Burnside was impossibly old. He knew how to listen to a little girl. I'd eat the ice cream sandwich and chat with Mr. Burnside, kick at the chair legs while Dad worked, the gallery dark and empty on the other side of the wall.

G sits beside me now, while her husband R climbs a ladder to tweak the sound levels. It's a sound installation, a dozen little speakers suspended from the ceiling like faces. My voice comes from one of the speakers. R interviewed me over the phone a few months back about my decision to change my name. I don't remember what I said - I was just talking - but it's been captured and preserved. G has spent hours and hours listening to my voice, choosing which bits to save. I like the distortion from the telephone, except when I laugh. It sounds like a cackle.

It's a strange, intimate feeling. I am aware of G's silent recognition of a cadence in my voice. Like she has been brushing and braiding my hair while I sleep.

Later, at dinner, I say "ooh." G and R laugh. "You said it just that way in the interview!" A response that didn't make the final cut. We're eating homemade soup and salad. Dessert is a canvas bag of citrus from friends in Southern California. G puts her head in the bag to breathe it in, passes the bag to me. I gulp down a greedy breath. It smells like Santa Barbara, like the house of a long-gone friend who lived in the middle of a citrus orchard. R rolls a juice-heavy orange in his hand, "Such stiff little oranges," he says. I peel a grapefruit, clumsily, the oil from the skin running down my arm. "Sweaty grapefruit," says G. R peels his in a long spiral. He squeezes a piece of skin into the candle, and it sparks, a dinnertable firecracker.

G did, once, brush and braid my hair. She made a hundred tiny braids. I was in a play and the braids made it easy to tuck my hair under the wig every night. We spent hours with her hands in my hair. I sat at her feet while she braided and we talked.

We sit around the little table in their white-walled kitchen, eating sweet sections of grapefruit, the candles burning down. There is, I think, nothing better than this.

Sail

2011-12-24T20:57:00.000-08:00

I'm on a 34-foot sailboat in Monterey Bay. It's Christmas Eve day. I'm at the wheel, my friend Steve coaching me, gentle course corrections. A curl of his long white hair is caught in a spiraling current of air, a finger of the breeze that bellies out the sails. I almost convince myself that I can feel it, can feel when the wind takes her, yeah maybe I'm starting to get it, rolling the wheel by instinct, so what if I come from the desert, so what if I don't know enough to call them lines instead of ropes, I've got this.

"It's starting to luff," says Steve. Damn. He's right, the sail clapping sarcastically. I'm not even sure which way to steer to fix it.

It doesn't matter. I get us close enough to the buoy to see seals lounging around its base in the sun. Closer still and they're not even conscious enough to lounge, they're out, kay-o'ed, not one of them gives enough of a shit about us to even lift an eyelid. The buoy makes its call, skipper Eric says the light is solar-powered, the horn sounding from the motion of the buoy in the water.

"It sounds rather depressing," says Steve.

"Whonk," says Eric.

"Mom," says Dan. I hear its voice calling out over the waves: Mom....Mom...Mom....

Sun shines off the water like a gemstone spill. How can I write about a perfect day? About the sea otter kicking backward through the water on its back, wind taking the boat, the feel of her speeding beneath me to meet it when I get it just right, homemade baklava. Dan hands me a brimming cup of water, not a drop spilled, he laughs at his running attempts to pour from the bottle, but success in the end.

I start to feel the cold, the only reason I'm happy to turn back toward shore. We approach the harbor and tell stories, the stories turning grim, sad, until we get to the one of the woman who tried to kill herself with a knife and all her pills. Steve was her social services person, found her just in time, her bloody footprints all over the room, "She was a pacer," says Steve.

We're quiet. A long minute before Steve refreshes his voice, asks why talk about this when we're here? Maybe because we want to remember: this is a gift, this is rare.

Eric makes a neat three-point turn to bring her into the slip. "No blood, no gel paint," he says.

That's how you know it's a good day.

Faith

2011-12-11T11:21:00.001-08:00

"Would you mind if we bless your foot?" asks the young woman sitting beside me on BART.

"I'll take all the help I can get," I say.

They could be an ad for Christian youth. One hispanic woman, one white, one black, two young men. Their faces softly thrilled with their trip to San Francisco. They're going to church on Valencia Street, "God manifests in oil from the Bible there," says the girl on my right. Ice skating at Embarcadero later.

They reach out hesitant, delicate hands. "May we touch you?" A hand on my walking boot, another on my arm, they lay fingers lightly on each other. They all pray at once, strangely conversational, like overlapping dialogue in an Altman movie. "Jesus, your suffering on the cross was enough." "Take away her pain." "Let her be healed."

"Just the faith of a mustardseed is all you need." I don't know if I even have that much, I think, but no. I have faith.

Faith in my animal self that unfurls and stretches in the light of the full moon. In the alien moon herself, pasted yellow and flat in last night's sky. In friends who forbid me to ride the train and hobble home through dark streets, bundling me into a guest bed with borrowed pajamas and a glass of water. In the friend who makes a December refuge for me and my suitcase.

The homeless woman who sweeps an arm wide in greeting to everyone she passes. The elderly man in plaid pajamas out front of his building, chatting with a neighbor. The sudden, sharp column of sunlight between two buildings.

I have faith in pockets of strange beauty and unexpected generosity. A young man, good looking, in sunglasses, guards a shopping cart heaped with all his possessions.

He nods at my walking boot. "I hope you feel better soon," he says.

Liftoff

2011-11-26T21:07:00.001-08:00

This weekend was meant to be the beginning of my nomadic year. On Wednesday I learned my foot was fractured, tying me to earth. I'd had fantasies of walks up and down the long hill where I'm staying this week, but I'm forbidden to walk more than a few blocks at a time.

I've had to slow down. As I walk to dinner in my old neighborhood, I see a man in a doorway with his back to the street. My instinct is to turn my head away as I pass. There are many things a person can do in a doorway, especially in this part of town, few of them are things I much want to see anymore. But this guy was playing a bamboo flute. Not in that broken, half-assed way I expect of my neighbors. He's good. He's facing the wall and the sound bounces out onto the street, sweetening the slow walk, my foot rocking heel to toe in its stormtrooper boot.

At the bus stop, a man asks a cabbie at the curb if he knows how to get to Sparc. It's a marijuana dispensary, he says. Oh, says the cabbie, that's all the way down near 11th. A middle-aged Latino man in a suit is walking by, and he stops to say there's another very nice dispensary just in the next block.

A guy with a bullhorn is talking in Spanish about Jesús Cristo. A queen with a pink blossom tucked behind one ear smiles. She's well over six feet tall, closing in on seven.

I sit in a seat reserved for the elderly and disabled on the train. A woman sits beside me, long white hair in a turquoise clip. Gray pleated skirt and rose-colored coat, black felt boots. She turns a single-trip ticket around and around in her creased hands. We get to my stop, and she uses her hands to pull herself to her feet. I make the identical gesture, the two of us moving slowly out of the train. She's ahead of me as we go through the turnstiles, but she turns back from the stairs. I follow to see the escalator is out of service.

Looking for the escalator? she asks, as I turn toward the other exit. Yes, I say, and we keep each other company out of the station.

Tonight I'm re-reading Housekeeping. In it is a woman who chooses, for her own eccentric and half-understood reasons, to wander homeless. A strange piece of inspiration for my wobbling liftoff, weighed down, obliged to look around in every minute, slowed, but not stopped.

Just when you're ready to leave, you meet the neighbors

2011-11-10T20:28:00.001-08:00

It's late after a night out, past time for bed. I put on a robe and slippers to go to the bathroom. My building has shared bathrooms. It's not so bad. They're professionally cleaned every day. Some days they need it more than others.

Tonight, someone knocks on the door. This is not something we do here. If the door is closed, the bathroom is occupied. Just a moment, I call, drying my hands. I open the door to see my neighbor, his blue eyes open all the way.

Please, he says. I've cut myself. I need you to dress the wound. One hand is cradled in the other, wrapped in a towel. He leads me across the hall to his apartment, like mine but with no window. The man is easily two of me - maybe three - tall and broad. He walks with a cane. He leaves the door open and points at the drawer that contains his first aid supplies. There, he says, and stands back, as though I need plenty of room to work.

Usually, this neighbor avoids my eyes, but this week he's been friendly, saying Hello when we pass in the hall, on the street. He was in the stairwell when I was on the way to work the other morning, almost dancing, earbuds in. He turned a big smile at me. A certain flavor of bright attention, it's familiar to me.

The drawer is cluttered. He's explaining how he has an expensive knife from Japantown, but something just went wrong with it, he didn't know how it happened. My choice is between a large gauze pad and a regular Band-Aid. Let me see, I say to him. He looks a little taken aback, then shows me his finger. It's a small cut with a lot of blood.

You're going to be fine, I say. I wipe the cut with an alcohol pad and, unwrapping the Band-Aid, ask him his name, tell him mine. His face is open, eager eyes sticking to me. Are you a nurse? he asks.

I'm putting on the bandage when a woman appears in the doorway. She's my size, gorgeous, seemingly not much older than me. Hi Mom, says my giant of a neighbor.

Are you going to the hospital? asks the woman. At first I think she's talking about the cut, and I start to tell her it's not serious, but then I see this is a different conversation.

I'm different on this medication, Mom, he says. People tell me so.

What people? she wants to know.

The man at the smoke shop. He says I'm not myself.

I'm standing between the two of them in my robe and slippers, bandage wrapper in my hand. The mother touches my arm. Thanks, she says. I tell her - and him - to let me know if they need anything more. I mean this. I can't tell her how normal this feels to me, how light it is to me to put on a Band-Aid and make small talk, how they aren't completely alone.

But she nods me back to my room, down the quiet hallway. The door closes behind her, the two of them, mother and son. It's the middle of the night, and it's only them.

Walk outside

2011-11-01T17:48:00.000-07:00

I wasn't going to write today. What could I possibly write? There's too much happening out there and in here, and it seems impossible to throw a few puny words at that massive mountain.

So that's it, then. I can stop writing and put away the books and the tweed jacket with the patches on the elbows, stop calling myself a writer and rearranging the world to provide me with More Time to Write, because, and this is a secret: no matter how much you get, it's never enough.

And, still, it's always enough. I can sneak away like I'm cutting school, take a little walk.

And there's the young woman in the park, lying on her back, examining a leaf she holds at arm's length while she talks on her cell phone. An older man stands on the sidewalk and flosses. He works at his teeth with great concentration, and I love him for it.

I hear a man tell the girl beside him that she'll learn a lot while she's here. To not get caught is the main thing, he says, Ask yourself, do I need to not get caught standing here? She hasn't grown hips yet, her skinny arms a little too long for her body, she holds them out to the side, nodding.

One of my neighbors picked up a Halloween mask last night and wears it back on his forehead, over the top of his hood. It's new and shining silver, a brilliant red feather on one side. A short wind flirts through the feather, flaps the legs of his pants against his skinny shins.

A hundred thousand human beings, each one a hundred stories, all right outside my door. Any time I think I don't have anything to write, all I need to do is walk outside, like Exene said:

Hey baby, Baby take a walk outside.

Live everything

2011-10-28T19:14:00.000-07:00

There's a crowd tonight, and they show me their IDs as they line up at my bar, hopeful eyes on me. So many of these kids were born in 1990.

The obligatory contingent of sexy/slutty costumed girls, but only three. There are wizards and nerds, Mexican wrestlers, and the guy in blackface is a black guy. Two blond girls tell me they're Mary Kate and Ashley.

The bands playing tonight do covers of Misfits and Gang of Four. I'm wearing the spiked collar I wore when Gang of Four was still touring, before most of these people were born. I'm dressed as myself of many years ago, plus devil horns, because why not?

My teenage self envies me, if she thinks of me at all. She certainly never expected to see this many years, certain of flaming out before reaching such advanced age. Dumb luck, I tell her, but she's moshing, she doesn't hear.

One environmentally aware kid at the bar doesn't want a plastic cup for water. Instead he crouches under the spigot, mouth open.

I love these people. Another kid petitions J about a benefit for Occupy SF. I just had the idea now, he says. He has the angels on his side.

There are nights when I like nothing better than this: pouring drinks and watching the crowd. I don't hear it when someone kicks a hole in the wall, but I do see the kid who booked the show. The room is almost empty by now. His cheeks are red beneath his blue wizard hat, and he keeps saying he can't believe it. Nothing he says will un-kick the wall, he's on the hook for the repair, and the injustice of it all pops the air around his head like cartoon swears.

I should have some way to end this post, some exit strategy, but that's it. Bar packed up, drunk kids roused and sent home. There's no knowing how many more nights there will be like this, and every thought in my head is a question. I'm trying, like Rilke counsels, to "...be patient toward all that is unsolved in [my] heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms," he says, "and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue."

And what the hell, that guy knew how to put words together, even in translation it comes through:
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

October 16 comes every year

2011-10-16T22:52:00.000-07:00

Last night I read a story in a bar, bought a beer for a Pulitzer-winning author whose previous book made me stay up all night reading, and danced awkwardly with a roomful of writers. I wore my mother's ring, it makes me feel like I'm carrying her with me. I think she'd have loved every moment. If she still exists in any form other than behind my eyes, if she gives this world any thought at all, I like to think she's grooving on this literary life along with me.

Today is her birthday. It's San Francisco summer, October and one of the few days of the year when I can walk outside without a jacket. Outside the mortuary are six men in dark suits and crisp white and black hats. They hold trumpets and trombones, waiting.

I pass an open house, people who are able to contemplate owning a place in San Francisco heading up the stairs. A man stands just a few feet from the Summit Real Estate sign. He has his own sign. "Summit Real Estate are Thieves," it says. The sign is upside-down, resting on the sidewalk while he shakes out his arms.

On the steps outside Coit Tower, a woman's purple dress blows up in the wind. She's wearing matching shorts underneath, but still she holds her skirt down against the next gust. A grandly fat tourist and his blond daughter try to open the JCDecaux toilet, the girl prying at the door, listening for sounds from inside, the father concentrating on the display beside the door, occasionally poking the button with one slow finger. He finally sends the girl to join her siblings and gives his wife an I tried expression before tramping off to find some accommodating bushes. I wind my way down the steps, seeing the display as I pass the toilet: Out of service. Could none of the ten people close by the small drama read English? None of them tried to help the man as he pointlessly pressed the button.

Not even me.

I head up a street I've never walked before. The last block is steps leading up to a low wall. A young couple from the neighborhood are sitting on the wall, staring out at the view. The Bay Bridge, white sails shining like metal in the sun. The city is so beautiful today it hurts.

I wish I could call Mom.

Back downtown, people left flowers and notes and candles outside the Apple store in San Francisco. The outline of a cloud hangs in the window. I imagine Jobs perched on his iCloud, our very own capitalist saint. In the next block are the hip-hop dancers, a guy with his hair dyed bright orange, shaped into a square with a shelf cut in on the left side. A drumline winds past them, high school kids led by a tall kid with his bass drum, boom boom, a kid with a donation jar bringing up the rear. Another block and the tourists thin out. One of my neighbors is just waking up, putting on his shoes, squinting up at the sun from under the scaffold that serves as his roof.

Outside the International Art Museum of America is an explosion of flowers. Although they've been open for months, today is apparently their grand opening. The flowers are meant to be celebratory, but they strike me, today, as funereal.

I can't remember the last thing I said to Mom. Did I talk to her on the phone? Or was it on my last trip there? She was so diminished that time, but it never occurred to me that she had one foot already in the next world.

Home

2011-10-08T12:08:00.000-07:00

It's Saturday morning, and the sun is out. I walk through Civic Center, where the giant dandelion sculpture replaced the giant blocks. A young man in artfully scuffed leather jacket and steampunk goggles steps between the metal leaves, looking up at the dandelions. Maybe he's rolling on acid, or maybe he's never been in the big city before, but his face shows open wonder, that soft toddler gape.

A neighbor is just getting up, shaking out his shoes before putting them on, standing on his bed for the night, a clean rectangle of cardboard. I'm in his bedroom, walking down the street. A woman in a wheelchair is forehead to forehead with a man, her boyfriend maybe, the man kneeling in front of her, her arms tan and toned, a scarf around her hair, they're having a private moment, and I feel rude looking, but I don't want to look away.

Last month I was in Utah, and as my nephew drove us into town I was lost, the place has changed so much, I thought I was in a different neighborhood entirely when I saw the bones of the tabernacle, and I was jolted, the whole town shifting around this point, one of the few lovely old buildings still standing in my home town. And only barely standing, its burned naked ribs exposed, this is what they mean when they say a shell of its former self.

This week it was announced that the tabernacle would be rebuilt. But they're turning it into a temple, which means this sinner will be prohibited from entering ever again, unless I undergo a conversion, see the light, and purge my amiable apostate's soul. Not likely. So the place where Dad sang The Messiah with the Ralph Woodward Chorale, where I sang countless times with church choir, where I solved the mazes my brother drew for me, where we played hide-and-seek backstage, where I attended Stake Conference with the Osmonds, and we cracked up - silently, our faces turning red - to see that Donny wore spangled purple socks with his Sunday suit, that place lives only in my head. The last time I was there was for a friend's memorial. A nonsmoker, he'd died suddenly from lung cancer, leaving behind a wife, small children. I reconnected there with his little brother, a best friend when we were kids, I'd promised to pack him in my luggage and take him with me when my family went to Paris.

I was already on my way to other homes, even then. I'm home now in San Francisco, my neighbors making occult signs to nobody at all, arguing and singing in the alley beneath my window, when my music stops at night I think for a moment it's still playing, but it's my neighbors, the people who share this piece of earth, this moment, voices calling into the night.

One weekend only makes me want more

2011-09-21T18:04:00.000-07:00

I'm entirely too sleepy to be writing. Two and a half sleep-deprived days in New Orleans, and I couldn't stay awake long enough to drink the place in.

I didn't know the air would be so soft. It's heavy like Hawai'i, but not so aggressive about it. The air wraps sweetly around my shoulders. Coming from the airport, my eyes are wide open, looking for the thing that makes people go all loopy for this place. "It's not the skyline," I write in my little notebook, trying to see in the dark, my scrawly pen marks barely readable. I'm finishing the word "skyline" when we're in the city, and I say, "Oh." LIke every New Orleans movie you've ever seen. Free-standing houses, a hundred years old and older. Porches.

Of course the guy behind the bar is named Dmitri. Of course there's a writer with glasses and his toothsome girlfriend in an eye-popping red dress. Of course his blue-haired friend, the guy with heavy mascara and platforms, but I'm from San Francisco. What else you got?

What else: a buddha-headed guy on the sidewalk at midday, his head doused with thin red paint or blood, his hands dipped, too. His eyes a shock of white when he lifts them to look at me. He holds his hands out from his sides like he's been bathing them in gore, and maybe he has.

What else: a man on the street says Hello. A woman says Hello. A guy taking a smoke break from a restaurant asks how I'm doing. None of these is a come-on. Maybe here I can stop even trying to wear a metro face.

What else: for $5 I get to see John Boutté play. He's smaller than I'd expected, narrow-shouldered as a kid. But he sings Halllelujah, and it prickles up the roots of my hair.

Hallelujah is in my head as I turn down Chartres Street, only a block away from the Saturday night crowds and it's quiet, just me and my footsteps. A guy is taking a photo of one of the houses, his girlfriend posed in front. I duck to stay out of the photo as I pass, and they laugh.

A few steps down the street, a smell stops me. In San Francisco, in my neighborhood, I might keep walking. I'm not proud of this. Here, I stop. I circle back. The couple is behind me now, and I ask them if they smell gas. They cock their heads as though listening, and then nod. It does. I'm looking around, and finally see the streetlights. They're gas flames, the real thing. I point, feeling a little sheepish.

"You really care," the guy says.

Is it because I've only been here a day, or would it increase the longer I stay? Either way, he's right.

Long term care

2011-09-04T14:08:00.000-07:00

I'm at the long-term care facility at Laguna Honda to see my friend S. Passing the art room, I see two women wearing white lace mantillas. They seem to be leading a meeting, or a ceremony. The door is closed, so I can't hear them.

S has me wheel her to the farm out back. There's a life-size bronze statue of a rabbit-headed man. He's talking on a cell phone. I find him vaguely disturbing, but S laughs when I tell her so. She's more worried about the evil ones. They're still down at the far end of the farm, so we can't go there.

Instead we hang out with the turkeys and the goats. The big toms come right up to the fence, looking self-important, their feathers puffed out, their psychedelic, prehistoric heads. One goat keeps butting his head against our hands, wanting to be petted. The hills are all lost in mist, and I help S wrap a blanket around her shoulders.

Last weekend, I was in Utah, where the sun gave hard edges to everything. I saw my name on a tombstone in the cemetery. It wasn't someone else with the same name, it was me. Dad had put my name, and the names of my siblings and my stepmother, on the back of the monument he'd sculpted for my mom's tombstone. I didn't know about this until I saw it, after the unveiling, walking behind the tombstone to pose for a picture.

It stuck with me all week, the strangeness of seeing my name there.

I'm leaving S and on my way out when I hear singing. It's several voices, in tight harmony, and it's not a tune I recognize. I'm not even sure it's a style of music I'm familiar with. As I round the corner, the elevator doors close on the voices, and they fade quickly away. I take the next elevator.

On the first floor, I hear them again. They're ahead of me, and now I see about ten people in dark clothing, following a stretcher. I speed up, hoping to hear more of the song. They're still singing, and walking at a good clip. I can see their backs, a woman's straight black hair smoothed into a chignon.

Although I have no more than a glimpse at the stretcher, I'm almost certain they are singing this person into the next world.

Today I think, that wouldn't be a bad way to go.

We are all gods

2011-08-31T21:42:00.000-07:00

"I'm not like those guys across the street," says the man outside my apartment building. "I got Polo, American Eagle, good shit."

A tall, skinny man looks heartbreakingly vulnerable with his exposed Adam's Apple, long neck stretched out from a wrinkled collar.

It's morning, but the woman in the doorway is well on her drunk for the day. The tall can of beer in her hand is not her first. She's compact as a piston, feet firmly planted, but her body circles on its axis, her brow lowering. Her friend holds her hands out in a calm-down gesture. She sees the storm about to break.

"I'm good," a man says to me as I pass. "I'm good." It seems important that I know this. I nod.

At breakfast, a movement snags my attention. There is a couple at a table, a third person bending over them, his head between theirs. A friend, I think. But the movement judders like a loose filmstrip. He's moving too fast, chaotic. A glass is knocked from the table, breaks. The standing person looks confused about where to run for a second, then he's blasting out the door. I can see his path as a cartoon dotted line, a feint toward the back then veering wide, out into the street, disappearing in the crowd.

The couple turn toward the rest of us in the cafe, their faces empty as pie pans. The woman holds up her cell phone: he failed to snatch the one thing he was after. We - the customers, the waiter, the waitress - speak softly, gently with each other. The woman leans her head on the man's shoulder, closing her eyes.

I realize that coffee has splashed the people beside me, sloshed up onto the bench and table, missing by millimeters my coat on the bench, as though it was protected by a force field.

I feel strangely protective toward my neighbors, the waitress sweeping up broken glass, the customer wiping coffee from his arm. Even the desperate man, somewhere out on the street, cursing his rotten luck.

Last night

2011-07-05T10:54:00.000-07:00

Note: These posts are jumping around in time. It's appropriate to the way time bends, slips, turns in on itself here. More posts will come, from other days.

I am sad as the Portuguese around me today. The last day of workshop, and the crown of privilege that's hovered around my head is dissipating.

In the internet cafe, two new friends sneak up on me while I write. I've known them only two weeks, but in the distortion of days here, our friendships go back years. I push out chairs for them to sit. I don't want to stop seeing them, afraid to let them go, my heart can't take so many goodbyes at once.

I think I'm too tired for another reading, but it lights me up, again. Poetry and harmonica blues. "Some men hand out their hearts like leaflets." In a story, a couple talks about who will die first, letting themselves slip into fear.

I start to think, for the first time in over twenty years, that maybe I can write poetry. At the open mic a few days ago - two months ago, a year ago - everyone called my piece a poem. So maybe I already do.

A. and I put on our party dresses, and we say Wow together as we step out of the elevator. Another fragile wonder, another secret place in the city that has opened to us like a jewelry box. A terrace overlooking the city. The setting sun fires houses on the Alfama hill. We snap up hors d'oeuvres like starving writers, return to the bar for wine and port-tonic. We kiss cheeks again and again and promise to stay in touch.

Later we meet in the Bairro Alto. Impossible that we can find each other, but we do, like homing pigeons, keyed to other writers. We run into each other all over the city. The street is bursting with people, we squeeze by, shoulder to chest to ass, drinks in plastic cups held high over the crowd.

S. beckons and we follow, a long disappearing reappearing line, linked by sight to the person just ahead. Down and down, the crowds thinning but not gone. A white rabbit graffitied on a wall. Down the rabbit hole to a tiny room, where dancers somehow dance, somehow groove and sweat and move to make space for us. We dance to Madonna and Cher, we air guitar, we sing along, eyes squeezed shut and abandoned to this moment, this night, this sweating, jumping room.

I leave without saying goodbye, slip out of the club to my home for one more night. One roommate already asleep, the other already on her way home to the US. A third still out, the place is quiet and dark.

The day after

2011-07-02T13:44:00.000-07:00

The men at the outdoor restaurant two doors down are at work before noon. Shirtless over black charcoal smoke. I think of the god Vulcan in his underworld. The man with an apron over bare chest looks up at me as I pass, stepping carefully down the steep cobblestones.

T's feet slipped out from under her and she was airborne, graceful as a dancer, her legs to one side, landing hard on her hip. She's native to Lisbon and still slips. I help her to her feet and feel a little less clumsy. She says it's a controversy: one side passionate for the preservation of Lisbon history, the other dedicated to public safety. High heels are impossible here, though a few women - mostly foreign - teeter down the street on wobbling ankles.

The Alfama apartment is empty now; the others gone, and my head quieting down from two weeks of crackling. I thought I'd write during a writing workshop but every hour was eaten up. I can't seem to pin anything down yet, it's all still shaking and grooving in my head.

I didn't have roommates in college. Here I had three, an intense, short-lived family. Two elder sisters and a younger. We breathed and slept and drank together and each knew when the others came home, or didn't.

There's too much to say, so I'll say this: a beer and peanuts sit in front of me. I'll go to dinner soon, late: it's the fashion in Lisbon. Tonight I'll sleep on the bottom bunk in a hostel room with two young British women. They arrived and I did, we said hello and did not introduce ourselves.

Tomorrow I will swim in the Adriatic. On Monday, I'll step onto a bus and travel to an artists colony. A real Portuguese artists colony: a restored monastery on a river in a national park. A few days to untangle all the shining bits of glory that have knotted up in my head.

And then home.

Day three

2011-06-20T07:57:00.000-07:00

The man sitting at the next table has walked here out of a Saramago novel. He wears a jacket and a hat, a bow tie hanging untied against his mustard colored shirt. White beard and oval reading glasses. It is eighty-five degrees, and he wears a jacket and a hat. He is with two younger people, I imagine the young man with the large horn-rimmed glasses is his son. But the woman has a mouth like the young man, maybe they are brother and sister.

The man in the hat reads the newspaper while the young man types on his Mac and the young woman her iPad. They were talking earlier, their mouths shaped for smiling and drinking wine. I want to know them. I want to step into their lives, but I would be stumbling in, big-footed and American.

This cafe has walls that are feet thick, stone blocks strapped together at one end with enormous metal staples. Stone arches between the rooms. I sit on a couch. The table by the window is made from an old sewing machine, the machine gone, but the girl in the sundress sits there and rests her feet on the treadle.

Waiters here are slow to appear, but solicitous as nurses with my handicap. I speak my baby Portuguese to them and they answer in English, indulgently. But so far, strangers do not engage. They seem happy to stay sealed off in their own lives.

But it's only the third day.

I keep finding deeper happinesses at being here, narrow streets with the slick cobblestones, my sandals skating out from under me. As many churches as Utah, but these are Catholic and hundreds of years in place, the bells tolling the hour.

My apartment is in Alfama, the neighborhood untouched by the earthquake and tsunami, the oldest buildings in Lisbon. The streets a labyrinth, but you can only get so lost. Climb uphill toward the castle, or downhill toward the sea.

I sleep on a futon in the dining room, dreaming of my mother, my roommates softly passing on their way to the bathroom in their nightgowns, and I breathe in and count my luck before rolling back to sleep.

Long day to Lisboa

2011-06-18T10:05:00.000-07:00

The other passengers are looking pulled and sticky as chewing gum, the departure time ticking ahead another half hour, already two hours delayed.

It's nearly midnight and Wok & Roll is closed, as is the Mexican bar and the pizza place, no choice but McDonald's if you need something to eat, even the tiny newsstand's shutters rolled down.

I've found a place to plug in, but one person after another tries to follow suit, only to slump away in defeat when the socket won't hold the plug. It slips out, limp and ineffectual as all of us, blinking slowly at the overhead lights in the Newark Airport international terminal.

A slim blond woman's face turns red and she knocks her head against her husband's shoulder, she can't keep up that raging, scary smile, her eyes tear up and she hangs against his body.

We believe we can see the future. I can say I'm going to Portugal and I'll be back in July, but this morning as the plane took off and taxied out to shine us a view of San Francisco, there the Bay Bridge, there the Golden Gate, as it shuddered higher into the sky, my certainty shuddered too, the long rubber band of the round trip not as robust as it seemed when I bought my tickets.

Maybe this will be my last view of her face, my San Francisco, who's to say, there are a thousand slips possible between now and then.

Just when I believe I might never leave Newark Airport, we are boarding the plane at last. I can see a crew scrubbing the underside of another airliner, flood lights shining up their high visibility suits, and they are absurd and graceful as giraffes. I want to wave at them as we pull away.

There's no sleep for me, though my neighbors sprawl across each other's laps, blocking me against my window for the duration as my bladder swells and we hurry into the sunrise, it's already tomorrow, although my body believes in one long today, brain too buzzed to read, it's guilty episodes of House until we land.

I want to cry with relief in the airport bathroom, a heroic torrent of pee to mark my arrival in Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal at last, I've dreamed of Portugal for twenty years and more.

My sleepless brain is too foggy to register the grandeur of the moment. The passport agent looks at me like I'm a strange animal, his English is perfect, and I've misunderstood him perfectly. You must be tired, he offers, and my laugh is helium high.

But I am here. I am here. My roommate is disappointed with our one-night hotel, and it does smell of piss in the hallways, but our doors open onto tiny balconies and I can look down at the fashionable shoppers in Chiado, could work a loogie into my mouth and let it drop onto a casually coiffed head if I wanted.

The internet cafe just down the cobblestone street serves gazpacho and vinho verde, and I write looking over a courtyard, and every fourth person smokes, and the blue tiles on the building across the yard are more beautiful than I'd imagined.

Big shot

2011-06-07T17:15:00.000-07:00

He has one bare foot, pants leg torn halfway up, the foot swollen, elephantine, an open ulceration on the top. It looks like the photos in the brochure for wound cleaner, showing what happens when you don't use their product. Long, matted beard.

He holds one hand to his ear.

"Twenty-five K? Add a zero to that. Add a zero to that, dipshit. I gotta warehouse full of uniforms. Add a zero to that! Now we're talking. The dickwipe down in receiving doesn't know shit. Add a zero to that."

Homeless in the financial district too long, it's seeped into his hallucinations.

The F Market is standing room only. The man sitting in the front seat leans in, asks about my necklace. I tell him it's a typewriter. His face still holds a question. I'm a writer, I say.

"Oh yeah? You any good?"

Yes, I say. I lift my chin, just a bit.

He adjusts his baseball cap. "Win any Oscars?"

No. I think about saying more, telling him that's not what I write, but he nods up at me.

"Ever hear of Mark Andrus? As Good As It Gets? Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, huh? I've worked with all of 'em. Yeah? You know As Good As It Gets?"

He starts ticking off the names of people he's worked with, a long list. One name is familiar: Bellisario.

I've met him, I say.

"Great guy, really a nice guy. That's what you gotta do, just go down there and talk to him. He'll get you a shot. Ghostwriting, that's what I did. 'Course you don't make nothing. I mean nothing, just crap pay. Y'know when Stephen King sold the screenplay for The Shining, he got a check, he was all excited. Took it to the bank and handed it over, paid off his trailer and asked for the rest in cash. The teller looked at him like he was crazy. Stephen King thought it was a check for $7,000, the most he'd ever made at once, but he was missing a zero. It was $70,000, and he was asking for the rest in cash! The teller just about had a heart attack."

The man monologues, going into folksy old grouch mode. The train is slowly emptying out. It's just me and Mr. Hollywood, a bit fat and gray-haired, and a skinny man a few seats away. I wonder if the skinny man is bothered by Hollywood's rambling as it amps up, volume and speed, he's dropping names for all he's worth, talking about how he does it, plot devices, you gotta have a dog and a suspicious clerk, all the stock characters, but it starts to get surreal, the dog putting on a mailman's hat and undergoing an existential crisis, suspicious clerk lost in the woods and taking off his clothes piece by piece.

Now he's doing an impression of Jack Nicholson, he's back on As Good As It Gets, and Jack takes him to the bank to draw his pitiful check, but (and here he's talking out of the side of his mouth, Nicholson-style, and it's not a bad impression) then he writes another check for Hollywood, telling him he's earned it, he's nobody's bitch.

I'm noticing a theme. Banks and unexpected riches. I'm almost at my stop, and Hollywood pauses for breath. I shoulder my bag, and the skinny man speaks up for the first time.

"You really should follow up on that Bellisario connection," he says, "He's a good guy."

I don't have time to take it in, slamming my mouth shut, I hop off the train as the doors close, nearly catching my heel.

Bad night

2011-06-03T21:42:00.000-07:00

It's late but not terribly late. The F Market is stuffed full of tourists, baseball caps and shopping bags flapping out the windows, between the doors, but a #6 bus is right behind it, almost empty.

It's just us late workers on the bus, rolling quiet down Market Street. A woman gets on, she's stooped and seems to have trouble walking, her face hidden under a kerchief. The driver says "No," and a sob rips up from deep inside her, from the soles of her feet, tearing through and shuddering her whole body. She stands - barely stands - her back to us and facing the driver, wordless and heaving.

The driver tells her No again, and he'll have to call the police, get off his bus unless she can pay.

A man has gotten on behind her, he engages the driver, Let her ride, please, just let her ride.

The man has a speech impediment or he's maybe developmentally disabled, his words half-swallowed, but his righteous anger makes him glow.

The woman's sobs crash over us in waves, she's making words now, Please, and Only two stops.

Man and driver still arguing, back and forth, Two dollars, says the driver, and the man puts in money, Two dollars for her, too, and the man stares the driver down, Just let her ride, only two stops, let her ride.

You gonna pay for her, too?

The man shuts his mouth. His eyes are wide, staring at the driver.

The woman sobs. I've cried that way three times in my life. I know that sound. For whatever reason, she believes her world will end if she is forced to walk the two long blocks along Market Street.

I have two dollars. I'm sure I have two dollars, cash, in my purse. I could walk it to the front of the bus and save her. I don't. I don't know why. I could still, but I sit where I am.

The man finds his voice again. Let her ride. And then he puffs up his chest. He's tall, his eyes wide, he says something loudly and I see his hand makes contact with the driver's arm. It looks like just a touch, but now the driver is yelling, saying he'll call the cops, but the man's voice is bigger. Slow down, he says.

Slow. Down. Slow down. I didn't mean to touch you. I'm sorry. But let her ride.

He's wonderful. The driver sees he can't win. Okay, he says, shaking his head. Okay. You're responsible.

He closes the door and the woman's sobs stop. She sits close to the front. Thank you, she says. She turns to the man who stood up for her. Thank you. He nods.

She glances over one shoulder at the rest of us, sitting silent on the bus. She isn't old. She's no more than thirty, if that. She's beautiful. Crazy beautiful. Heart-shaped face, full lips, enormous lavender eyes.

But that face is covered with open sores. Deep, vicious divots the size of quarters. They will scar and never, ever go away. Her hands are swollen, held in close to her chest.

Her eyes flicker over us, then she turns away.

Friday, 13

2011-05-13T18:44:00.000-07:00

Walgreen's isn't open yet; delivery guys are loading boxes through the front door. One guy's shirt collar opens to show a perfect, lipsticked imprint on his neck. A kiss, preserved. It's so pristine I wonder if it's a tattoo.

I'm walking through the park when the fountain comes on. A sudden wall of water. I think this should make me happy, and it does, but in an abstract way. I observe myself being cheered.

One of my neighbors has wind chimes. The wind is sharp this week. The sound of metal on ringing metal is layered above the sounds emerging from the alley below. I don't know where the chimes are; I can't see them when I climb onto the window seat and press my face against the glass.

Today I'm visiting S at Laguna Honda hospital. A man in a wheelchair sits in the community room. He looks as though he may have severe cerebral palsy, like my cousin, my great-aunt. His neck stretched long and his head high against the headrest. His whole face smiles when I say hello as I pass. He lifts his chin as though to nod back at me, as if to thank me for recognizing the man inside. Or maybe I assume too much.

An elderly man in a black leather vest - missing teeth, tattooed arms - carries a bicycle wheel through the hallway.

There are snacks in a side room today. Guacamole and chips, wine and beer. H says she's feeling a little tipsy; she hasn't had wine in years.

"There aren't many of us in here," says a fast-talking man, "but we take up so much more space, with all the wheelchairs." He talks like he's trying to get out as many words as possible while someone is listening.

I hug S goodbye, wave to the others as I leave.

In the elevator, another wheelchair-bound man asks me to push him to the corner. I end up pushing him through hallways and onto a different elevator, through more hallways until we finally find the smoking area, a last patch of sun. He mumbles, his words trailing off to nothing; I keep bending over him to try to catch what he's saying. He asks for a quarter.

A skinny man on his way back inside is stopped by my companion. The skinny man asks him to repeat himself three times before pulling out his pack of Marlboros and handing him three cigarettes, taking a dollar in exchange. Price is up since I was a smoker.

I ask my charge if he'll be okay now. He nods, says something like Yeah, so I leave him in the sun to find my way back. Down the broad steps, onto the train.

A woman on the train carries a tight bouquet of white roses. A kid by the door looks like a hayseed, the arms of his plaid shirtsleeves cut off at the shoulder, threads hanging. I don't know if it's a carefully crafted look or the opposite.

A few steps from my building, a new sculpture has been installed: giant wooden blocks. I want to look for the monstrous toddler who left them here.

Outside my window, the chimes are ringing.

Fallen, Inc.

2011-05-09T16:25:00.000-07:00

There is the man in the sandwich board, Revelations in black on white, Fallen, fallen is Babylon. He seems standard-issue street prophet. Tall, thin, bearded, weatherbeaten.

But there, across the street, another man in another sandwich board. A competing philosophy? No, one morning I detour to that side of the street. Identical fonts, identical texts. This man is short and bald, wearing dark aviator sunglasses. He looks more like the driver of the getaway car than a street prophet. Or the man who calmly tells you why the goons are breaking your legs.

I'm oddly disappointed. A lone street crazy with his words of warning carried on his chest is human, full of pathos. But a franchise? How does that even work? They aren't asking for money. They have no literature to hand out. Only a scriptural warning, judgment raining down on the whorish Babylon of San Francisco.

Last week the man across the street was replaced by another short man, this one with brown hair and inoffensive eyes.

Today I see the tall man from the bus. He's conferring with the man in aviator shades. The brown-haired man across the street walks slowly. Is the man in sunglasses in charge? Is he paying the other two to carry his signs?

His face has the jowly, dissipated look of a cut-rate villain in a movie. The type who wears a heavy gold chain around his wrist, who gestures impatiently with his chin, whose smile is more horrible than his accustomed scowl.

But a man can't help his face.

May day

2011-05-08T19:36:00.000-07:00

I catch myself toying with the phantom of my wedding ring. The way I would fiddle with it with my thumb, pushing it up and down the ring finger. The first day I took it off, I couldn't stop worrying at the empty space, and when I got back to my room I put it back on in a panic, sat on the edge of the bed and got my breath back.

It's been over a year since my thumb went looking for the ring. Maybe it's because I wore my mother's ring last night, not on the ring finger, but on the middle finger, right beside it. Mom's ring is large and bold. It suited her long fingers and for a long time I thought mine too short to pull it off, but I like the way it looks now. It is a large glob of silver, pulled into random, organic points around a single pearl. I have to turn it around so the setting is in my palm in order to fit my hand into my pocket.

Yesterday I went to see Nine in Rockridge and I stepped off BART into a residential street. Roses are in bloom, and the smell made my heart cave in a little. I love where I live now, the white ladder I climb into my loft bed, the big window set in the brick wall, my neighbors out at the tender edge of almost making it, but yesterday I wondered if I needed something a little quieter, someplace where I could open the window and hear birds instead of bum fights. I missed, for a moment, my old flat in the Inner Sunset, neglected flower boxes on the lanai, crows bouncing on the power lines, my cats chattering lustfully at the window.

But this morning is bright and warm and people are out on my street. A black man is glorious in a lemon yellow suit, matching hat and shining yellow shoes.
He's talking with his friends, and along comes a giant of a white man, dressed like an extra from The Road Warrior, armored in pieces of tire and leather and steel, a vicious scar along one cheek emphasized with tattooed cartoon stitches.

"Nice suit, man," bellows the road warrior as he passes the yellow-suited patriarch.

And in only three blocks I'm in the park. They're just finishing the mowing, and I breathe in the smell of cut grass. An elderly man does his tai chi in front of the falling water at the Martin Luther King fountain. Two ancient Chinese women are running, their arms chugging in I'm-running motion, but their feet barely lift from the pavement. I could catch and pass them at a walk.

How many husbands, lovers, children have these women outlived? How many wars, how much self-delusion, how many lies and truths? They doggedly run, one behind the other, turning corners with military precision, every morning they meet to do their run.

Here is where I am now, and maybe I'll live long enough to treasure everything in this moment: my grief, my phantom ring, and all the soft green shoots springing up beneath my feet.

Foiled

2011-05-07T18:52:00.000-07:00

It's a crazy gorgeous day, sunshine overflowing onto my shoulders and I've walked for miles, up to Coit Tower and down, through Chinatown and along Powell, up Cathedral Hill and down, down into my neighborhood.

I'm only two blocks away from home, among Market Street crowds, I'm texting my friend as I walk. I know, I know, but I'm holding my phone in my left hand, out to the side while I text and then it's bumped from my hand onto the sidewalk. I hear a heavy breath, see shoe slap pavement beside my foot, a hand reach for my phone as I do, it misses, and a voice close to my ear says:

"Fuck."

I see his face for a millisecond, then his back, and his friend coming around me from the right, maybe 18 or 19, they are running flat out, cutting through the crowd. I have my phone in my hand again and I'm staring and trying to think what to do. Call 911? Yeah, that'll be their top priority.

They're still in sight, running straight down the block, backpack jouncing on the guy on the right, and some of the tourists are stopped and staring, open-mouthed, and I'm trying to keep them in view, and I think I see them slow down, walking, trying to blend into the crowd, and then they stop at the light.

I am feeling bold and righteous today, and I take some running steps to catch up, I'm maybe thirty feet away and the one on the left has turned to look back and I raise my arm like an avenging angel, pointing my finger at him.

"YOU," I shout, ignoring the people who turn to stare, "You want my cell phone!?"

I am on fire. I'm bearing down on them with speed. I have no idea what I'm going to do next.

His face turns innocent. He points at himself. "Me?"

A kernel of doubt rolls around my brain. Could it be someone different? Could this be just some random guy?

"YEAH," I say, as though there is no need for doubt, as though I am ready to fight him, who cares that he's a foot taller than me, that his friend is half again as wide. I'll take them both.

And then...nothing. It may not be him at all. I have no plan.

I keep walking, passing them, I see a neighbor and tell him what happened as I punch in the code for our building. He tells me this is becoming a common method of snatching cell phones. I say goodbye at my door and put my key in the lock.

My hand is shaking.

Don't stop

2011-04-21T13:30:00.000-07:00

Homeless man, nestled in the doorway of the copy shop for the night. Flattened Dell box makes a thin cardboard wall between man and street. The news plays on his radio. All I see are his legs, curled up under a thin blanket.

As I pass, he starts to sing. The man's voice over the sound of the radio, clear and younger than I'd expect.

"Don't stop belie-eeving....doo doo dooo

"Hold on to the fee-ee-elin'..."

I can hear my boots echo on the sidewalk as I turn the corner. You and me both, friend.

Cleaning

2011-04-19T17:25:00.000-07:00

It's well after midnight on a Monday night. A police car has driven up onto the brick plaza, one cop on either side of a guy with long blond hair and blotchy red cheeks. The hair looks like a wig, parted in the middle and straight curtains on either side. The blotches might be scrapes, or sores. I want to look more closely as I pass, but it's rude to stare. An arrest feels oddly personal.

I'm stopping for a quick snack; dinner was missed. The only choices this late are Donut World and Carl's Jr. I don't want doughnuts. The man in front of me orders loudly, startling me, but the guy behind the counter only blinks. He sees it all, at the Civic Center Carl's Jr.

Outside on the plaza, a man is pressure-washing the pavement. It's not one of those tiny wands; it's a wide-open hose, and the man leans into it like a Laurel & Hardy bit. He leans forward, held up by nothing but the force of the water.

Something about his hat, the high-visibility suit, his calm eyes - he looks like he belongs on the Mongolian steppes.

I watch him slowly wrestle the hose from one spot of pavement to another. I'm envious. He begins his work with filthy pavement. He turns on the water and makes it clean, washing away the pieces left behind by the masses of people: dead skin, vomit, hair, excrement, food, all of it, clean as the day the world was born.

The best job I ever had was washing pots at a restaurant. I came in early in the morning and worked my way through the stack of pots, sunlight streaming in the back door, music on the radio, me and the pots, each one moving through my hands until it shone on the rack.

This is a beautiful thing, just this: begin with something soiled and make it clean. Reset. Start over.

Uncle Stan

2011-04-15T17:33:00.000-07:00

Like me, he was the youngest of the siblings. Like me, he was the black sheep. I don't remember a time when I didn't have a crush on Uncle Stan. Long legs in jeans, cowboy boots, mustache just clearing the corners of his mouth. Must have been six feet, more. In my imagination, Uncle Stan is a giant.

I was pouring drinks for a guy the other night, and he told me about his boss. He said his boss was like Steve Jobs, he carried around with him a reality distortion field. And if you were in range, you'd fall right in, you believed anything he said.

Uncle Stan had a reality distortion field. Though his range might have been smaller than Steve Jobs', it was no less potent for those in its path.

I remember Uncle Stan's trailer parked out front of our house. The little door in the back, the two rickety steps up, Stan's mobile bachelor pad. He smelled like cigarettes and occasionally alcohol, although I didn't know it at the time. I only knew his breath was thrillingly scandalous in a culture that neither drank nor smoked.

But about that distortion field: Stan had a scheme, an idea. Uncle Stan always had a scheme. Rumors of having been a bounty hunter. He had a ceramic duck in his trailer. Uncle Stan with the ceramic duck in his hands, he lifts the head, and it's a lid! The ceramic duck is a soup tureen! Uncle Stan described a restaurant with hundreds of these ceramic ducks, the old ladies would go nuts for them. A theme restaurant, all about home cooking, country cuisine.

I believed in Uncle Stan's restaurant, with the ceramic ducks. I believed in Uncle Stan. Married seven times, I think. Twice to the same woman. The distortion field worked on them as well. For a while.

Uncle Stan, why do I love you so? I never lost that six-year-old hero worship, born when you helped us rescue the baby jackrabbit after our cat ate its mother. The jackrabbit died, but it wasn't your fault. You'd moved on.

I love you even after you got Grandpa to sign the ranch over to you. After you let it fall into mud, after you sold it to a stranger who presumably took possession after you died. I love you in that heartsick way when I hear about the ranch turned to mud and ruin. The ranch where my mom grew up, before you. The ranch that made my summers summer, where I picked corn and strawberries, where I crept into the henhouse and slid my hand under the fluff of a hen for the warm egg. Where my brothers killed rattlesnakes, coming home like heroes, rattler corpses hanging on sticks.

Ranch of my heart, my paper plate art on the wall in the men's bunkhouse, Reader's Digests from the '40's in the rock house, the fire and Grandpa worrying a toothpick, his head tremoring lightly.

The last time I saw Stan, he sat in front of the fire like Grandpa, his long legs extended to absorb the warmth. A toothpick worrying his mouth.

There's nothing left of the ranch, my brothers warn me not to even go there, it's too depressing. Nothing left, they say. Not even Grandpa's hybrid corn stalks, growing black and blue and red kernels for festive popcorn.

After Grandma and Grandpa died, Stan went missing. His ex-wife stopped by, worried she hadn't heard from him. She found his body on the property, a bullet in his head. There were whispers of suicide, even murder, but the inquest found it was an accident. He'd rested his shotgun against the fence when climbing over, it fell, it went off. He should have known better.

Uncle Stan's Vietnam buddies threw him a wake. They made him a wreath of barbed wire and sunflowers. Sunflowers, like the ones that grew above my head, nodding down at me as I ran through the fields at the ranch.

Excuses

2011-04-14T19:35:00.000-07:00

I've had the flu. The transition to freelance is a bitch. I should be copyediting. I should be updating my website, facebook. I should be working on the database. The dishes/laundry/housework need doing.

I've been trained well in a sense of obligation. Not so good at execution, but I wear my guilt like a cape, a superhero of self-recrimination. Like it makes a difference.

Ask me what is the most important thing I could be doing right now, and my answer is writing. So why are so many hours of my day spent doing anything but? Because I have no looming deadline. Because nobody is tapping a foot, waiting for the next chapter of my novel. Because other little tasks push in, promising a bubble of effort and then it's done. And then I can write. But another task is behind the first, and then another, like needy children.

Because of the fear. Because I didn't get a Stegner fellowship. Because I look over my novel in progress, the best thing I've written to date, and it wasn't good enough to get me a Stegner. Because the suspicion wells up that I'm fooling myself, hearing only what I want to hear, that I'll never be good enough. Because I make the awful mistake of reading other writers write about writing, and I think, if I'm not doing that, maybe I'm not a real writer.

I picture a crowd of people focused on me, expecting something. Expecting perfection, greatness. A perfect copyedit. A perfect database. A perfect girlfriend, hostess, friend. A perfect novel.

But that's just ego. Nobody gives me that much thought, nobody expects perfection.

I have to get outside, be in the crowd, see other people being the heroes of their own stories, and then it all quiets down. Let ego and the thousand tasks float away in their bubbles and I can come back to what matters. And then the words flow.

The bus driver with her newly-waved hair falling over her shoulders. The woman in office wear, carefully carrying a paper plate of food covered with another paper plate. The man on a bluetooth headset talking exuberantly, stepping out from every curb, waiting for the light to change so he can hurry across the street, light on his feet as a dancer. Where I am anonymous, my eyes as big as the block, the city, the whole world, seeing everything I can.

Fallen, fallen

2011-04-10T16:32:00.000-07:00

I see him in the mornings as I'm walking. He wears a sandwich board that carries the quote from Revelations: Fallen, fallen is Babylon.

The man in the sandwich board and the middle-aged people doing their morning tai chi in the park. A second group uses fans, the sound as they whip them open like a flock of monstrous birds clapping their wings in unison.

Two young women cling to each other in their walk-of-shame party dresses, tiny skirts and teetering, golden heels. Across the street two Mormon missionaries - about the same age as the girls - the boys' cheeks fresh, they seem happy to be here, walking past the sex club, the homeless men lying on the sidewalk, shirts slid up to warm their bellies in the sun, one with his hand tenderly down the front of his pants.

God damn it, you’ve got to be kind, my man Vonnegut whispers, and I try to climb inside the people I pass, to find the human center.

The man making broken, crazed cat's cradles asks for change, can't I give him something, anything? He looks healthy, lucid, young, capable of caring for himself, so why does he insist, why push for something from me?

I don't know. I don't know if he might be as unmapped as the strings in his hands, beaten and hungry in ways I can't see. Can I forgive him, the girls in their shoes worth more than my monthly rent, the hipsters laying out a picnic in the middle of the busy sidewalk, the pushy tourists with their Dolce & Gabbana shopping bags?

Does it matter?

I'm in my neighborhood now. The man walking in front of me steps on his right leg and the knee buckles out to the side. An old break that was badly set. My grandfather had the same limp, the same awful buckle that made me cover my eyes and peek between my fingers.

I shake my head at the man selling Street Sheets, but he calls after me as I pass, Thank you for the smile, he says. Thank you.

Reply to a Craigslist missed connection

2011-04-03T18:39:00.000-07:00

Kaitlin (caitlin?) from **** - m4w - 22 (downtown / civic / van ness)

I was the bearded guy that really liked beer. you were pleasant. :)

Dear bearded beer-lover,

I wish there had been Craigslist when I was your age. Back then, I met someone or I saw them once and maybe never again. Our eyes would meet across tables in the library, and for weeks I would carry the heat of that look in my head, straining to see him just one more time.

I did answer a classified ad, in the campus alternative newspaper: Male Agnostic Seeks Female of Similar Disbelief. Agnostics were a rarity at Brigham Young. We met, we drove to Pasadena to meet his family, we stayed at an empty friend's house on the beach. We blew bubbles that landed and popped on our naked skin. I don't remember how it ended. He wrote great letters.

When I was your age, 22-year-old boy, you were barely born. You were pushing your way out of your mother's belly and into the world.

I think I remember you. Do you know how many bearded boys I poured beer for that weekend? But I remember asking to see your ID, remarking that beards didn't fool me. Even so, you looked a bit older than twenty-two. You circled back more than once for a refill.

Or were you the one who asked for one big beer?

Either way, dear boy, I thank you. Your words covered me in sunshine, and I imagined another life, where I was twenty-two years old, now, in San Francisco.

What a blaze I'd cut through this city.

The International Art Museum of America

2011-04-02T18:14:00.000-07:00

The International Art Museum of America has opened its doors. It is on my block, just down from cherry-red suits, long jackets and matching banded hats in the men's clothing store and the Marinello School of Beauty. Already the front windows have been tagged, etched for permanence, for a place in history.

The International Art Museum of America is Doric columns and gold leaf, a wide, shining lobby. The windows that face on the street open on a jungle scene, a Disneyland fantasy of fake moss and plastic huts, one wall covered in jungle photo wallpaper that reminds me of a neighbor's basement in Utah. The forest wallpaper behind the ping-pong table. I can see seams between the sheets of paper.

Beyond and through the jungle I glimpse more white columns and the corner of a heavy gold picture frame. Another window sends back a mirror image of me, looking through the glass, tiny and lost in a block-deep jungle.

My neighbors totter by in varying states of lucidity. A woman with ruddy cheeks jumps back visibly, shocked by the scene through the glass. She turns and I see she's only a girl, her head loose on her neck in a way I recognize, white-knuckling her way to ageless and burned out like the girl with the tattooed Raggedy-Ann face, the outline of a grin that fools you into thinking she's smiling.

Like the girl who wears the night before in the shape of a red, swollen eye. The eyeball itself looks damaged, hanging the wrong way in her face, but she greets a friend like it's nothing at all, Hey Boo, what's up, huh?

The International Art Museum of America is closed as I walk by. A neighbor from my building smiles and says Isn't it wonderful? I tell him it looks like an amusement park. He says, I don't know what it is, but I want to visit!

Is it a sign of things to come? Is money lapping at our shores, the wave rolling up from Powell, washing clean the streets? The International Art Museum of America, then Twitter, and it's only up from here, my junkie neighbors pushed out and richer, whiter people moving in.

And will rents rise so I'm pushed out with the rest? Will the line fall above or below me?

The International Art Museum of America doesn't care where my neighbors go, some other neighborhood, filthying up their sidewalks. But they're tenacious here, they've held on through more urban renewal projects than this, and they might hold on still.

A man with matted hair and one bare, filthy foot, leans in toward the "wooden" hut behind the glass. A shining line of drool hangs unbroken from his lip to the sidewalk below.

A certain delight

2011-02-20T19:10:00.000-08:00

I glance out the window as I leave the apartment and see sunshine, sunshine, and then a quiet shhhhh and a curtain of rain is falling, the shhhhhhhh like a whispered secret, thundering into my heart.

I step outside and see tiny white pebbles popping into being on the sidewalk. Not rain, then. Hail.

Rain and hail, and I squint at my weather widget in the middle of the night, at the graphic of snowflakes, the temperature in the '30's. I never see the rumored snow, but it's cold and wet, rain in sudden drops, over in moments.

At the bus stop, a man smiles wide, It's so cold! he says. Yes! says the woman beside me. And the rain!

We seem to take a certain delight in the sideways weather. We smile at each other from beneath our umbrellas, hats, hoods.

It's evening, and I'm helping at the opening of an art show. I'd expected a small crowd, San Franciscans are easily put off by bad weather. But I'm pouring drinks as quickly as I can, more people appearing, shaking off the rain.

At one end of the bar a man turns, and I see his face: Jello Biafra. J. gets him a beer before I can hop to it, and he disappears.

It's late, the art crowd is putting on their layers and slipping out the door, and there goes Biafra. I pout, and my friends shoo me down the hall. He hasn't left yet, they say.

He's at the door, and I'm one of those fangirls, but I have to thank him. Your music kept me sane when I was a kid, I tell him. He remembers the last show I saw him play, in Seattle, during the WTO riots. They'd closed off downtown but kept open a route for people with tickets to the concert. Helicopters overhead, tear gas, craziness outside, but inside it was Biafra with the WTO Band. It felt like an ark in a storm, and we didn't want the show to end, the lights warm, the crowd surfing the tide of music and adrenaline, the brotherhood of protest. We believed we could change the world. The world changed us, but sometimes I can still find that belief. The Egyptians changed their world, and the inspiration is catching. It's spread all the way to Wisconsin.

I'm glad you kept your hair gray, says Biafra, on his way out into the night.

It's after two when we lock up and head home. The rain has stopped, lights shining on wet streets.

It's Sunday and still no post

2011-02-13T19:43:00.000-08:00

I can bring myself to the writing the way you drag yourself to do the dishes, one after another, the water flowing over a bowl, a plate, sun is shining in behind you and the sound of the water becomes a song, you had only meant to clean one or two but now the rhythm has you, you are wiping down the empty counter, dishes stacked and dripping dry, order restored, a little space opened up in your apartment, a space in your head where you can breathe and see a scrap of horizon.

If I tip my head to the right and shake it slightly, out falls the woman with the black leather eyepatch and upright 'fro, sunshine cutting down the north side of Market, the man on the bike arguing with the guy from the store that sells cheap Giants t-shirts and Raiders hats. The store guy demands his money, and the man on the bike, his mouth full of sandwich, replies, If you want to make a claim against my estate...

From him to my morning run, past the store with its doors open and drop cloths and ladders and two men in white coveralls with paint rollers, past another runner and a morning-shifter with his lunch in a paper bag. The guy in street-person clothes: layers and layers, short over long and all mud and dark colors. He startles at the sound of my feet slapping pavement behind him, his shoulders relaxing when his eyes dial in. It's still pitch black in the canyon of downtown, but when I get home, the sky is pale out my window.

It's been early spring for a week, and a girl in a pink, one-shouldered sundress steals my breath. I watch her where she sits in the cafe, her bare feet jiggling over her flip-flops, wide mouth open and smiling at what she reads, her awareness of her own beauty, bare shoulder an aching reminder of better worlds hidden somewhere in her curling hair, in the blades of grass outside.

The sun has shone and I've worn skirts and walked until I was browner than a week in Mexico, but tomorrow the rain is back. Tomorrow is Monday, and work, and maybe dishes, maybe a morning run along shining wet sidewalks.

All the Saints

2011-01-14T16:16:00.000-08:00

You want to whisper here. The ocean roar and clash of waves on sand seem to bracket deep silence, set it off. You look up and down the beach. White sand, water shining green at the edge of the beach then dropping off to blue-black. The Peligroso sign shows a pictogram of a person tumbled in the trough, beaten down by wave after wave.

White sand, water, footprints, but no people. Miles in either direction, and no human beings aside from you.

A geyser of water shoots up, then disappears. You look and look, your eyes awake, your whole self looking, and there it is again. Now you see the blow hole, a great round mouth in the water, the whale sighing and huffing, its shining back sliding just above the surface. Then the tail, unmistakable. Distances and sizes difficult to judge. The tail may be as wide as I am tall.

It's this easy: wade in the surf, lie in the sun, watch the whales who like to play in the deep waters just off this beach.

A few days ago, off a different beach. A boat full of people, music playing, people in polo shirts who are paid to make us jolly. Someone sights the first spout, shouting, leaning over the railing, finger pointing toward blank water. Another spout, another, and the boat gives chase, the volume turned up on Beyonce, Celine Dion. Another tourist boat beside us, several smaller ones. Ahead of us a ridiculous pirate ship, "sails" furled and unmoving, its motor gunned.

A polo-shirted boy tells us to pose and smile, and we do, bemused. He works his way through the crowd, switching English to Spanish, pumping his fists to What a Wonderful World.

More spouts and a tail, and then a leap. The great mammal is up and out of the water just off our prow, showing us his belly, polo shirts cheering and cameras clicking.

We keep up the chase but it's all anticlimax after that. The bartender stands ready but we're all here in recompense for sitting through a time share presentation only to say no. We don't want anything that isn't free.

Back to shore and disembarking, a polo shirt tries to sell us the photo of the breaching whale, already printed and glossy, instant postcard.

The time share salesman told us over breakfast how the whales used to come in closer to shore, but we chased them out to sea. Now the boats find them in their breeding grounds and how long before we've chased them away from there as well? He shrugs and swallows his coffee, and when he stands he's all sales, beckoning us to follow as he trots through the resort.

Nobody chases them here. Here I want to whisper, it's so quiet, the sound of the ocean dropping away when I am up and over the dune. It's afternoon and a few people appear. A family, mom and kids watching from the dune, dad playing out his fishing line along the beach. A wakeboarder and his friends, the body of a young god. I think about Death in Venice while he runs with taut attention for a wave. It doesn't matter that he's not all that good, one long arm reaching to catch himself in a fall.

We turn and clamber up the tiny mountain path and through the break in the fence, balancing on rocks and then it's dirt roads and chickens and dogs and kids playing video games under a blue tarp and men moving a boulder, one looking up as we pass and he laughs, inviting us to laugh with him.

At lunch I point out the nativity scene at the other end of the restaurant. We've seen a few Christmas trees still lingering. J. says he doesn't think it's a nativity scene, rather a prayer altar for all the saints, each one meaning something to someone here. I wonder if I should thank the saints for this place, for the quiet that makes me want to whisper, even after I'm home.

Lillian

2011-01-01T16:34:00.000-08:00

Lillian H- was ancient, to my kid brain. Her hair was floss white. She sang in the church choir, her old lady vibrato inspiring endless imitation from my brothers.

I was confused about last names at the time. Her brother lived in the neighborhood, and I took the fact that his last name was different from hers as evidence that she had never married. Her brother was married and had a family and held ice cream socials in his back yard, with homemade ice cream. I never knew if she had been divorced or widowed, but there had been a husband at one time. Mr. H-.

She barely existed for me. Old people seemed hardly human, except for those who fell into the Likes Children category.

Lillian H- did not. To me she was just Old Lady, with old lady vibrato and old lady hair and old lady clothes.

Until she wasn't anymore. I might have been walking home from school, when I saw Lillian H- running down the street. It was autumn.

Apple Avenue ran steeply up the side of the mountain. It was a hard slog to walk up, but you could let gravity take you on the way down, and run. Run to keep up with your feet, run for the fun of it.

Lillian H- was running. This was when I realized she was tall and slender. Not stooped, like so many other elderly women. She was tall and straight. She wore jeans, and her long legs carried her down the hill, her dark gray poncho swirling out behind her. As she passed me, she pulled a leaf from a tree, the branch bouncing back.

Lillian H- was smiling. As though there was nothing better she could imagine than this moment, this run down a steep hill, this leaf in her hand.

In that instant, she was no longer Old Lady to me. It was like a whole room in my head opened up, and I thought: Yes. This is a picture of age I'd never considered before, never knew was possible.

But when my hair is white and I don't exist for anyone under thirty, I won't forget how it feels to run down a steep hill. Lillian H- showed the way.

I should write about that

2010-12-27T21:15:00.000-08:00

I don't know what to write. It's been too long since the last time I wrote, and the words have been piling up in my head until I can't sort one from the other. I'm afraid that, having begun to type, they'll all fall out in random order: what, in, whangdoodle, of, Lillian, love, it, the.

I should write about the holidays, about solstice, about that year-end assessment we feel compelled to make. I've been reading back through the years, 2009, 2008, looking for clues to how I came to this place.

Might as well look for buried treasure. Might as well explain the pathways of the heart to a fly, read the future in its thousand insect eyes.

I'm shaking my head over the screen, rattling out a crusty build-up of unwritten, unsaid words. There are only beginnings in there. No conclusions. No answers. A dozen stories begun and lost.

Nothing left but the woman at the coffee shop. She puts her to-go latte on a table, places her hands together in prayer pose, and bows her head. Opens her eyes to scoop up the cup and she is gone.

Nothing but the doorman at the strip club. He wishes me a Merry Christmas as I pass. He looks me in the eye and says it with gravity, almost reverence.

Nothing but the family who folds me in as though I have always belonged.

Nothing but the one who puts his arms around my splintered self and sees where I am whole.

2010-12-10T17:51:00.000-08:00

Sunday:
The thing you're not supposed to do is meet someone's eyes. The man sits on a stoop. He's gorgeous. I look right into his large brown eyes.

"The white man's time is over," he says, conversationally. "We will kill you all.

"White devil," he adds as I pass.

Tuesday:
It's 8:30 in the morning, and a guy is pissing behind the courthouse in my alley. He's pissing, yelling something at me, but I can't hear what he says, not about to pull out my earphones to listen.

He's coming toward me, too late to avoid his eyes.

"...the FUCK away from me!" This much is clear through the music. He shakes his pink penis at me, drops scattering in a sunlit arc. I step out into the street to give the man plenty of room.

Wednesday:
First day of my mini-vacation, and it's raining. Can't find my hat, nothing but a scarf to shield me. I huddle in the bank, where it's warm. Hang out at J's office, delaying the trip home in hopes the weather will break.

The weather doesn't break, and I finally venture out. I head for the bus stop, but the rain is hammering down, I'm already wet. I'm already wet, why not keep walking? I walk and relax into the rain, listening to leaves opening up, soaking it in.

These two strangers knocked me off course this week. I don't know why I care. Random people in the street. But it matters.

I'm at the top of the hill now, back at the labyrinth. Nobody else is here today, not in this weather. There's another one inside the cathedral, but I've made friends with the rain.

I walk, and the rain soaks in, softening, opening me up. Today on the bus a woman smiled, genuinely, for no apparent reason except in recognition of another human. I wanted to hug her.

Monday:
There's a crowd outside the courthouse. People are holding small U.S. flags and signs that say Marriage Equality. A woman is crowned with laurel leaves. Two men carry stark black and white signs about God's Law. A woman in pink smiles at these men. Her little sign says Marriage is Love. The crowd is subdued, respectful.

The whole world is here, in my neighborhood. It all matters.

Makeout Room

2010-11-08T23:40:00.000-08:00

It's Monday night. I'm standing in a place called The Makeout Room. A disco ball revolves overhead. I'm forty-two years old.

I'm talking and trying to buy a raffle ticket and instead dump change on the floor. I'm on my knees, reaching for coins. "I only care about the quarters," I say, and then hope nobody heard me. Quarters for laundry.

I used to own a washer and a dryer. I used to own a house. Two houses, one after the other. A house in Seattle and a house in Hawaii.

The Seattle house was sweet and snugly built and surrounded with green, but it turned cold inside. A candle on the edge of the tub set my hair aflame. Candles, champagne, hair on fire, and the bedroom at the top of the stairs was colder than the basement.

The Hawaii house was warm and open, people showed up at the door to hang out, talk story. Two floors of house plus a lanai and carport, but no doors I could close, except for the bathrooms.

At the Makeout Room, I hold a beer in one hand and dig in my purse with the other. One-handed, I open my little pill holder, lip a white half-pill into my mouth.

I find people I know. They ask me how I am and I want to ask them: How do I seem? Who am I? What should I do with my life?

Someone waves at me, we know each other to say hello. I've read his book, heard about him long before I met him. I move halfway toward him to say something, but realize I have nothing to say, nothing witty saved up, so stop partway and pretend to be fascinated with the crowd. I want to ask him: When does the fear stop?

Being married somehow protected me from awareness of my age, but now I'm bare. I'm older than most here, except for the tall-headed rocker who will play onstage. But maybe he's always looked that way.

You can see it in the way I reach for skittering coins, unscrew my pill keeper one-handed. I can feel my stockings laddering up my thigh. The veins and thin bones are beginning to show in the backs of my hands.

A poet reads about a woman who crawled into a chimney and died there. They found her by the smell. The body is on its way to that stink from the moment we're born, already dying, cell by cell.

A woman hugs me and tells me I smell nice. I want to turn and feel the warmth of her compliment on all sides. I'm also terrified, wondering how long I can keep it up.

It's a good night, a good show, but I can't wait to get out and back to my neighborhood. The junkies slow-stepping through their dreamtime. The bearded street guy hoarsing out his own Pink Floyd variation: Hey you/Out here in the cold/Getting hungry, getting old, can you help me! Together we stand, divided we fall. We fall!

We! Fall!

Alone, among my neighbors, I can begin to reassemble myself, recognize my body as only itself, only me, only forty-two.

Alone with my keyboard under my fingertips, I'm whole, unquestioning. As forgetful as in the arms of a lover.

Labyrinth

2010-10-16T18:54:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking too many things today. Each thought piles on top of the other, possibly related, probably not. Each one stinking of anxiety.

It's time for a walk, time to clean some shit out. My friend L asked me if I had a meditation practice, and I said no, or maybe I said something half-assed, like, Kind of, maybe when I go running. But I'd forgotten that, in fact, I do. L said that it's best right after you've been exercising, when your body is tired and maybe you're still panting. This was something I didn't know, but was doing anyway.

Today is a good day for this. I walk straight up one of the steeper hills in town. There are stairs cut into the sidewalk in the last block. I'm panting, utterly out of breath, when I reach the top. At the top is the labyrinth. It's not a maze: there aren't multiple paths leading to dead ends. It's not a puzzle to solve. It's a single path, folding in and in on itself.

I begin to walk. Today is my mother's birthday. She died almost six years ago. I thought I was going to write about her, but she keeps slipping away. My boyfriend J's mentor and friend recently died. I asked J how he felt about it. I'll never get over it, he said. No, you won't, I answered, but it does get a little easier.

I haven't gotten over my mom's death, and that makes me think about Robert's death when I was sixteen. I saw Robert on the sly when I was twelve. I had a hot crush on him, and he introduced me to second base. I thought we were terribly perverted. The last time I saw him was my last day in Provo before leaving home. He took me for a ride on his motorcycle. The next day I called home from Las Vegas and my mom told me he was dead. He'd been riding his bike on the grass in the park, and the cops started after him. He hit a speed bump at 80+ miles an hour.

The path folds, and folds. My parents never knew about Robert and me. There's more to the story, there's always more, but now I'm thinking about Chrissie. I don't remember the last day I saw her. We were in first grade. The last day I saw her was like any other day. The day after the last day I saw her, I walked to her house to pick her up for school. Her mom said she was sick. Then she was in the hospital, and I wasn't allowed to see her. And then she was dead.

We were best friends. I was her and she was me. She was my adventurous, tomboy self. I'm not over her death, either. If I was a fictional character, I could draw a straight line from Chrissie to an inability to hold onto friends. I could paint it as fear of loss. But that isn't quite true. I have good friends who have been friends for years, but sometimes I go days without answering an email from one of these friends. Sometimes I feel like there's no one I can call when I'm feeling alone.

The path folds. The puzzle I'm solving is my own thoughts. I follow the path in toward the center and think about all the people I loved who have died. I think about my marriage, too, like a death. I think about writing about this, about fiction vs. memoir, about how much I should say, who I should protect.

I used to be suspicious of memoir, of self-revelation. Ralph Waldo Emerson said Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures, and I think that's true, and it would be even more true if this were fiction. But I've been reading some very good memoir lately, and if it's done well, it's about more than just the individual experience. It widens out into something bigger. A reader can see himself in memoir or fiction, and feel less alone. Or she can understand something new about the world, or about how to be a better friend or how to forgive. Or she can taste, for a second, the terror of divinity.

I'm at the center of the labyrinth, and look up to see city rooftops. A flag at half-mast, another fully aloft.

I begin to unfold as I follow the path outward, my limbs moving more loosely, my breath deeper and calmed. A white-bearded man waits to one side as I find my way out. I turn once to see him step into the labyrinth, his eyes following the path.

Virtue

2010-09-29T21:50:00.000-07:00

Market Street will never smell so fresh as it does at 5:30 in the morning. It's full dark out, my feet slapping pavement and shopkeepers hosing down the sidewalks. On the second floor of the building at 3rd street a woman is running on a treadmill, under bright lights. I'm a block down the street, two blocks, and the woman in the headphones is running in place.

A man stands partway in the street, his eyes focused high on the building with the abandoned deli, his hat to his heart like he's pledging allegiance.

"I thank you," he says. "I thank you..."

My breath comes hard and I think I can't keep running, I'm sure I can't and I almost stop but then feel the spring inside winding up again, it's only at the very bottom that it winds through and I'm running and it's okay.

It's easy to feel virtuous, running early in the morning when most of the city is still asleep. It's easy to find the division between Them and Us, Them and mighty, virtuous Me, but I don't run to for virtue. I do it to be pretty, I do it to not be sick anymore, I do it for all the selfish reasons.

And the dividing line is not so clear. I live here. I'm one of the people in my neighborhood. I've sat in the strip club, watching the woman's eyes grow bored when the big tipper leaves his spot at the front of the stage. She shakes and steps high because it's her job and the act is dropped, but enough of the customers don't see or don't care. Her skin is smooth and I think it must be very soft. When I was younger, I thought I wanted her job. I wanted to be seen.

We all have our drugs.

There are thieves and con-men and assholes here, just like anywhere, the thug in a good suit is still just a thug. The thieves here aren't so successful, or they'd be somewhere else. They're broken down, like the rest of us.

Ginsberg wrote about human seraphim: The security guard who closes his eyes at me like a blessing. The cluster of early shifters waiting for the bus, a man nodding into sleep on his feet, jerking himself awake. The fireman in his gear at the bottom of the stairs, smiling slightly into the rolling light from the truck. The woman leaning in the Ross entryway with her paper cup of coffee. She squints through the glass at temp workers moving slowly, near the end of inventory, reassembling the store one blouse, one dress, one jacket at a time.

I'm almost back to my building, the awning in sight. I want to stop now and walk the rest of the way, but I find the spring again, winding up and pulling me the last few feet to my door.

Not Boston

2010-09-15T21:20:00.000-07:00

Today I'm craving cream and meat, so I go to Boston Market for lunch. It's a fast food place that's trying very hard not to be a fast food place. Today, this is good. I have to get back to the office quick-like, but I don't want to look at a screen while I eat.

The cashier is grandmotherly. Would you like to donate $1 to end child hunger and get a free side with your next meal? she twinkles. How can I say no? She gives me a paper to write my name and my favorite side dish, and I write my full name, realizing it was the wrong thing too late. They post these on the wall. It's just an ad. I write down green beans, although I didn't order them today.

A matron gives me the stinkeye for sitting in a booth. I'm reading The Adderall Diaries, and I can feel her eyes boring through the pages. She has bad hair and a gaudy purse. Her daughters are miffed on her behalf, but a helpful Boston Market employee shows them to another booth.

A homeless guy wanders in. His nappy hair has a layer of dust, like powdered sugar. There's a commotion among the employees. They're trying to make him go away.

He plays with the plant, pulling at the leaves and watching them bounce back, a purse of drool falling from his open mouth. The woman at the next table turns up the volume on her conversation, determined not to notice him. One of the servers hands him a to-go container of food and lifts her arm toward the door. Maybe it's macaroni and cheese, I can't tell.

I need, he says. I need.

The girls in their Boston Market uniforms are moving fast. Napkins and plastic utensils. He's handed things in a flurry, and a tall employee, her chin up, walks toward the door, beckoning him like a child. He follows her outside.

I called Security, but they were too slow, she says, her bones loosening as she walks back to the counter.

It's an interesting bargain. They bribe him with food to leave. He holds them hostage by being there, stinking up the place, making people uncomfortable.

I want to know his story. I feel like I'm getting close to something, but I can't be sure.

How do you know?

Trust me, again

2010-09-11T18:32:00.000-07:00

Tonight I'm with friends. We're looking for someplace to have a drink, and when a man says Excuse me, in a polite voice, we stop. Without thinking twice, we stop and turn our attention on him.

Can you help me, he says. He gives us his name. He says he's from Alabama. Are you lost, we ask. Lost is the least of it, yes, you could say I'm lost. All of this preamble shifts the tone. Urban suspicions on the alert. He keeps starting and stopping, playing it out. I watch the line of his cheekbone. He is playing the part of Exhausted, annoyed with himself, proud and humiliated by the situation. He says he needs to get to Pittsburg on BART. We give him another chance, ready to tell him how to get there. I know how to get there, he almost yells. I want to clap. We're getting the whole show.

Just tell us what you need, we finally say. He lets out a groan. I don't have the money.

I don't have to look, I can hear the disappointment turning my friends' faces blank. In a flat voice, D asks how much. Six dollars and fifty-five cents, he says. My name is XXX, I'm from Alabama. I can give you my email address and return the money.

His props are better than the other guy's. Bluetooth headset. Smart phone showing a map. Handwritten notes, of course. How much for a cab.

We don't have anything, we start to say, but then I see my friends pulling out their wallets. I give in to peer pressure and dig some laundry quarters out. D finally just gives him six dollars. I can give you my email, he starts to say. He sounds angry. We turn away and start walking.

We're quiet for a few steps. I tell them I know this scam. J tells about someone who tried it on him every day. He'd say You already tried this on me yesterday, and the guy would just say, Oh. Oh, and move on to the next mark.

D says, Why don't I feel better? I gave him six dollars, and I just feel worse.

I know what he means. I don't like being played. And with these specific markers. The implication being that people will help someone who already has money. Someone who is just in a temporary tight spot, through no fault of his own. We can imagine such a thing happening to us.

But we can't imagine ourselves homeless. We can't, or we daren't. I live surrounded by people who have fallen off the edge, and it becomes harder every day to see the sharp lines between them and me. I used to live a thin four miles from here, but it was a different planet. I was insulated from these alien creatures who rub up against me now. I didn't see them. If I thought about them at all, it was in abstract terms.

Abstraction is no longer possible. So I come back to this again and again. What does it mean? What do I do with this? Is there a way to push through, to find the common heart that beats for the guy with the Bluetooth headset and beats for me? Could I fly past my own fear to learn his actual story?

I come back to this again, and again I feel I'm no closer to an answer.

Just this

2010-09-01T21:55:00.000-07:00

One day, I'll look back on this time with nostalgia. Do you remember, I'll want to ask.

Do you remember walking by Mr. S. Leather when the handwritten sign is out front, announcing Fetish Photo Shoot Today? The afternoon sun wraps around the bare skin of a man standing just inside the door, chain looping down from the collar around his neck to the slim hand of the man beside him, who has turned to talk to someone just out of sight.

The Asian woman who bursts into open-mouthed sobs. She's helped to the sidewalk by her husband/boyfriend/brother/friend. They sit down on the curb and tears are shocked from her eyes, making a cartoon arc before dropping.

The sweetly ugly tranny at the taco truck. She is businesslike and earnest in her white platforms and uncombed wig. Getting a taco before heading back to work.

The desperately beautiful tranny on the corner of 6th, her mind unlooping into the street. Her skin is darkly polished and her hot pink thong shows a perfect ass while she harangues nobody, everybody, crossing Market and turning around to cross again, her angry voice riding above bus brakes, cabs, the F Market singing in its track.

The suited man outside Market Street Cinema, slipping me free passes as I come home from work. Store owners and hired brawn watching the street from their shops. One waves and asks why I haven't called.

Do you remember, I'll ask. When I could walk into the gallery space and people would say hello like family.

When the whole world seemed to turn around the axis of Market Street, and all I had to do was hold out my hand to catch a piece of the Everything.

Pobrecito

2010-08-15T21:36:00.000-07:00

Several months ago, I was living in the Mission. Along my walk to work, I spotted a poster of a woman in a fairy godmother outfit. She looked something like Lily Tomlin, but not.

Pobrecito, I thought. Shouldn't it be pobrecita? And why was she a poor thing?

The word was assembled like a ransom note.

The image got under my skin in a strange way. I'd be feeling sorry for myself, obsessing over the cataclysmic changes I was making in my life, and then I'd walk by the poster.

Pobrecito?

When I scraped my knee as a kid, my mom would kiss it better. "Oh, le pauvre," she'd say, a gentle reminder that it wasn't so bad as all that.

My friend P's mom spoke Spanish. She'd call him Pobrecito in the same tone of voice. Poor boy. Isn't it awful?

Eventually, I moved downtown. I take a different route to work now, coming from the opposite direction. One morning, I see another pobrecito poster.

This time, it's Catwoman.

Or, someone in a Catwoman costume. Why the masculine form of the word?

Are they cross-dressers? Transgender? Or is the "poor thing" the person looking at them?

Is pobrecito a band, maybe? Or a poster artist? Is this his body of work?

Pobrecito follows me into work, sneaks in on me during the day.

It's entirely possible the answer is something depressingly ordinary. In a sense, I don't want to know. The mystery sustains me, in a quiet way.

Thursday, walking home from work, I see a new one.

I don't even know what's happening in this picture. Is she sucking on her toes?

Pobrecito, I think, as the homeless guy cheerily greets me. I tell him I don't have any cash today.

"It's okay," he says, waving me on, "I know you're cool. See you soon."

Pobrecito, I think. Pobrecito.

A nice girl like me

2010-08-02T22:25:00.000-07:00

When I turned in my lease application, the building manager said, "I hope you don't mind my asking, but why are you moving here?"

Here is where I can look out my window onto the alley below. If I lean out far enough, I can see transactions of all sorts in the doorways. I climb a ladder to get into bed, and I leave my apartment and walk through the hallway to use the shared bathrooms. I learned today that Stephen Elliott lives in a building much like this, but his sounds like it is larger, and doubtless hipper.

When I tell people about my building, about the shared bathrooms, they say it sounds like a dorm. Stephen Elliott made the same comparison. I've never lived in a dorm, but I don't think that's quite it. There's no communal hubbub, no running feet, no towel-snapping. People try not to run into each other.

Someone did leave a Spinoza paperback in there last week, though, so maybe it is like a dorm.

Here's what it is like:
I get up to pee in the middle of the night, fuzzily stepping into my slippers and walking down the bright hallway with my eyes slitted. From the bathroom, I hear loud voices. Unforgivably loud, for this time of night, or morning. When I leave the bathroom, the hall is blocked with a forest of cops. My neighbor, skinny and shirtless, says: "...keep it down, please?"

"What for?" a cop says, loudly.

The neighbor swings his bony arm in my direction, "So we don't disturb the neighbors."

I have to ask a cop if I can pass so I can get back to my room, my bed. Another cop, in a quieter voice, tells my neighbor he has to leave, now. He asks if he can get his stuff first. Put on a shirt.

The neighbors' open door faces mine, and I can hear the girlfriend talking to the cops inside. Pieces of things, tiny shards, are lying on the floor in the doorway.

Today I meet the little girl staying in the apartment on the other side of mine, the one with the Santa Claus on the door. She asks my name and tells me many things about her mom's boyfriend's kids, but she doesn't let her own name slip. I ask, but she prefers to tell me a complicated story about a brother and a sister who both, apparently, have my name.

The neighbor at the end of the hall invites me in to meet his cat. His Wanted poster is taped to the wall. I look closely at the photo. It's him, younger and with different hair. He points out the window. "You see those lights?" he says, "That's the city jail. I used to live there. Now I live here, and look out the window every day."

There's a whole universe behind every door in this place, galaxies of people and their lives and the people they know, ever-widening circles that overlap and extend into infinity.

Today I think, there's no place I'd rather be.

Really, it's not so bad as all that

2010-07-28T22:18:00.000-07:00

It's fogged in, but the air is fresh this morning. A man wearing the neon orange vest of a city worker rests against a fire hydrant. He's Asian, well over sixty. His hair, in two long braids, stands straight up from his head like antennae. His eyes are alert and smiling.

A woman at the bus stop beside me must be older than anyone I know. She's toothless, skin wrinkled and cracked. But her gray hair is in a ponytail. She wears skinny jeans and tennis shoes, her hands slotted casually into pockets.

I give up my seat on the bus for an elderly man wearing a perfume of marijuana. He looks at me closely around cataracts, nodding his head. "Somebody raised you right," he says. It's only a little thing, but he's tickled.

A black man rattles toward me on the street, his arms and legs moving loose in their joints. He throws one arm at his reflection in a store window. "Back in your motherfucking box!

In your box!" he laughs, passing me on the sidewalk.

Sin

2010-07-25T16:19:00.000-07:00

A man is lying on his back, halfway into the street. A well-dressed woman stands over him, making gestures with her hands. It looks incantatory, like she is calling his soul forth from his body. As I get closer I see his cane, his back resting awkwardly on the edge of the curb. Now I can hear what the woman is saying, "Can you roll this way?" Her hands eloquently calling to him. "Can you roll far enough to get out of the street?"

"No," I hear him say. He doesn't sound distressed. Like he's just fine where he is, thank you. "No."

I walk by, only slowing my steps long enough to take it all in, I step over his cane and keep walking. Behind my back I hear a man's voice: "Is everything okay? Can I help?"

Have I sinned against this man, against all of us, by not stopping? I'm quick to rationalize the decision: there isn't much I could do, even between the two of us, we wouldn't be able to move him, he seemed okay with where he was, not many people drive down this alley, there was still room for a car to pass. If the driver could see him.

My neighbors live close to disaster every day. They're out there on that edge: the man with blood running down his face, the woman with the bruised face and missing teeth, shoeless, shaking, crying out. In the morning I can hear voices from my window. It's hard to distinguish between ordinary street person fights and true desperation.

But there are are people who take the time to make that distinction. People who work in the free clinic, social workers, legal aid. I see them out here, too.

At the bus stop, a man with a black eye approaches me. I'm already steeling myself for the usual answer: I don't have anything for you. Is it a sin, my fear? My fear of knowing him, of knowing too well what he needs and my inability to provide it. Or worse - maybe I can give him what he needs, but I don't want to.

He introduces himself as Vince. He grew up here. He wants to ask me a question. Here it comes, I think.

"Do you really, truly believe that we landed on the moon?"

This is of great importance to him. He wants to know what I think. "Yes," I say. "Yes, I do." I don't go on to say it isn't a matter of belief. His face shows astonishment.

"Really?" He says, as I step onto the bus. "You really think that." I watch him as long as I can from the bus window. His hands are in his pockets and he's shaking his head.

There is a subway in Los Angeles

2010-06-28T23:28:00.000-07:00

To get from Long Beach to L.A., I board a train. I've been told that nobody checks tickets, that nobody bothers to buy them, if they ride the train at all.

"I rode the train. Once," says my Long Beach friend, dropping me off. She has lived here for most of her life.

The train, however, is full of people. A young Latino guy and his little brother wearing a child backpack walk down the aisle. The older brother holds a cardboard box, cut open to show his wares.

"Chocolate," he murmurs as he passes. "Chocolate." This can't be legal, so he speaks low. He passes once through the car and gets off at the next stop.

A band gets on. Guitars and tambourine and bongos, a crowd of people. I wonder if they're a Jesus band. They sit a few rows behind me and tune up, and then nothing. I start to wonder if they're going to perform at all. And then they start. No count that I can hear, nothing: they just start, in perfect time.

She was just seventeen
You know what I mean
And the way she looked was way beyond compare
So how could I dance with another (ooh)
When I saw her standing there

They're good. They hit that tight harmony, clip along at a bright pace, make it their own. And then the song is done, the youngest member in springy dreads walks up and down the aisle with a plastic garbage bag for offerings - and that's it. No more songs.

"People down here are serious," said my San Francisco friend a day ago. "Not like in SF. We just play around up there."

Another guy comes through the train with a cardboard box of goodies. He's a big black guy in his thirties. He doesn't keep his voice low.

"Snacksnacksnacks, twoforadollar, twoforadollar," he says, moving quickly down the aisle. "Snacksnacksnacks." And he hops off at the next stop.

More people get in at Rosa Parks station. This is where I realize I'm the only white person on this train. This is a comfortable, at-home sort of feeling. Is it some insufferable smugness in me? Am I trying to align myself with people in that presumptuous way of edging someone out of her seat, that unbelievable claim that I am One of You, coming in with my big feet and very white whiteness? I don't know. Nobody on this train seems to care one way or the other.

The next snack vendor is in his fifties at least, a Latino man with a trim mustache. He has no patter at all, and sits down at the end of the car, holding the box of chips and candy bars in his lap, staring into nothing. He touches one hand to his forehead and slowly blinks his eyes.

The car is full, but only one person is reading a book, standing. Another reads a pamphlet, his lips making mouse-sized words. Another talks into his cell phone. "Fuck America," he says, then, "I'm done. I'm moving."

I can see the towers of Los Angeles ahead. The sun shines in hard and bright, and we all wear crowns of fire. The light opens us from sternum to navel and our hearts shine back while we turn our heads, eyes bored with all this beauty.

We escaped places like this

2010-06-25T11:35:00.000-07:00

An official-looking truck passes slowly. There are lights on the roof that are meant to flash, though they are not flashing now. Along the side are sober black letters that read: Code Enforcement. My friend L says they are measuring the grass, checking that trash cans have been taken in by noon, that paint schemes are approved colors.

What sort of code violation emergency would require the lights to flash? Does it have a siren?

The streets are wide and sunstruck.

"This place reminds me of Texas," says L.

"It looks like Utah," I say.

"I escaped from Texas."

In the cool of the evening we walk through the street fair. The sign at one booth reads: Questions, Meaning, Destiny

A smaller sign asks, Evolution? I see the evolution of man silhouettes beside another chart showing silhouettes that are all human.

Across the street another booth promises Chocolate-Dipped Waffles on a Stick.

A man bends down to ask his kids, "Do you want to see people with feathers on their heads dancing?"

We do. The feather headdresses are gratifyingly high, rippling in the breeze. We don't know what tribe they are meant to be. One dancer is a flabby white guy in a cop moustache. He dances in an offhand manner, elbows in close to his sides, condescending to make a flicking gesture with the tassels in his hands. The woman in front seems to put her heart in it. She stomps and swoops, grinding her enemies to dust.

The moon is bright and high as we walk back to the car, the Evolution? booth disassembled, chairs stacked in the empty street.

Too tired to write

2010-06-09T20:44:00.000-07:00

My brain won't settle. Today I impress a client by spilling soy sauce, sloshing it onto my coat and over the bench where I sit; I feel a cold puddle soaking into the backside of my light tan trousers.

I order dos tacos al pastor at the taco truck for dinner. The man in the truck asks me a question in fast Spanish. I don't follow quickly enough. He speaks to me in English after that.

A couple with a wooden cart are picking up detritus from the street under the supervision of a pair of cops. The cops don't help.

Four homeless guys have set up a shantytown at the bus stop. What will happen to them when the new ordinance goes into effect, prohibiting sitting or lying on public sidewalks? They nod a friendly hello. I decide not to wait for the bus here.

A walk is better anyway. I cross the street and look back down Folsom. It's stunning: low clouds lit up by a diffuse sunset.

I stand in the middle of the street while the Walk sign counts down. Three, two, one.

A freaking giant

2010-05-31T19:14:00.000-07:00

The man is a freaking giant. He lurches through the train, his pants folded up to make shin-high cuffs, held in place with tiny safety pins.

How is it possible for him to find pants that are too long? His head could contain two of mine, his smile a gentle giant smile. He shakes his head, smiling, at the drunk that just got off the train. Drunk, he says, looking at me, smiling, and I smile back.

He keeps talking, speaking now to his reflection in the window, Drugs are bad, drugs, he says, shaking his vast, heavy head, and now I see that gentle giant smile is maybe a simpleton smile, maybe a retarded smile, maybe a psychotic break smile.

All the same, all the same, I smile back, getting off the train. All the same, he seems like an okay guy, just a little loose in his head, a little unjointed, pinned together with tiny, shining safety pins.

Sunday go to meetin'

2010-05-12T22:05:00.000-07:00

Sunday morning. Last night, this was a dance club. Today folding chairs stand in neat rows in the middle of a wide concrete dance floor. A guy in a gray hoodie sits onstage, casually holding a mike. "Go inside," he exhorts the crowd. "Go deep inside and find what's really there, what you really need."

Two hipster chicks walk to the front of the room, each carrying a small loaf of bread and a glass of wine. They stand beneath the mirror ball as people shuffle forward, taking a piece of bread and dunking it in the wine.

"Jesus had a feast," says the guy in the hoodie. "Called the Last Supper. He told his friends to remember his body, his blood."

The band takes the stage and the lyrics flash onscreen behind them. The guys running the sound board groove to the music.

A white boy in sagging jeans stands and moves behind the chairs. He closes his eyes and turns his face up to the stream of sunshine from a skylight. He lifts his hands, palm up.

Sunday afternoon, and my route is clogged with a street fair. People in outsize platform shoes and streamers and masks, costumed up like show horses. Skin open to the sun and stinging gusts of wind.

A pack of hula hoopers writhe and roll, the hoops always in motion, now vertical, now horizontal.

One girl moves her hoop like a lover, her eyes closed, ecstatic. She turns her face up to the sun, moving her hoop like a prayer.

I make my way through the crowd to the gallery. I'm the first one here, and I find a spot in full sun from the skylight, put on a pot of tea. One by one the others arrive. We open our computers, our notebooks.

We write and we read, and we close our eyes, listening.

Three days of spring

2010-05-02T18:59:00.000-07:00

Dolores Park on Friday: I see my first naked man after hearing about sightings for years. He is face down, belly spreading out to either side, meager buttock cheeks pinking in the sun.

The wind is whips and chains, but if you sit on the grass, you can duck below it, find the still place where sun cooks in. I roll up my pant legs and lean back on my elbows.

A group just behind and to my right speak French. In front of me is a crowd on blankets. Two girls have taken off their shirts, daring in bras. Between them and a boy in shorts lies another girl. I see just bare legs and shoulders, and wonder if she has stripped everything away, her friends acting as minimal screen, thrillingly half-seen.

A gaggle of gay boys is behind and to my left. One of the girls in her bra squeals, one hand over her mouth. A train has just pulled in. The girl gathers up her things, breasts swinging, no time to dress, she scrambles in her black boots and jeans up the hill, shouting again and again as the train closes its doors, rolls away without her.

"You go, girl," yells one of the boys behind me.

I see the friend wasn't naked after all, revealed now in a bikini with the straps down.

Another blanket island of people to my left. Men and a luscious woman, overflowing her tank top, long eyes looking demurely to one side. She lifts to her knees. "I am not a tranny!" she says loudly enough for all to hear. "I may have balls and a dick, but I am NOT a tranny."

"Tranny!" yells the boy from the peanut gallery. The woman laughs and falls back onto the blanket.

Saturday, Washington Square: The grass is full of people. A white guy with a sad little beard holds a glass ball in blackened fingers. He stands and rests the ball on the back of his hand, curved slightly backward to cradle it. He juggles the ball, spindly arms turning long and full of purpose, the ball shooting sunlight across his face.

A set of geekish kids practice backbends, leaning into each other, ankles wobbling. One falls, bringing the rest into a giggling heap beside her.

Sunday, Yerba Buena: I'm having tea with a friend, sunlight sluicing across one arm, the left side of my face. I wonder if I'll burn. A woman appears beside our table, staring stolidly. "Do you have something." Her lips are cracked. We shake our heads, slowly. "I'm sorry," I say, but she stares for a long accusing moment before turning away, pushing into a young couple's space until they have to look up, have to engage.

There are toddlers in flowered springtime church dresses. A mother holds her daughter's hands, crab-walking behind her while she balance-beams along the edge of the fountain.

Another woman raises one hand against the sun, pinching her face away from its light.

I want to absorb every drop of sun, store it in my bones so that tomorrow, in the office, it will radiate heat and grass and hiked up skirts and lazy leaning into shoulders and the quiet rustling of pages in a novel carried to the park.

Sunset

2010-04-28T22:20:00.000-07:00

I've hardly been outside all day. Rain was forecast, but when I step outside the sky is blue and a vicious wind whips hair across my face.

No, the sky is not blue. It's lit up like a scrim. The sun is setting somewhere west of here, invisible behind downtown buildings. I used to live west of here, and the house where I grew up had enormous windows facing west over the valley. It's easy to be seduced by garish sunset, but you can miss the light of the sky behind you, the blue over pink, fading to white at the curve of the earth.

I walk uphill, gazing down corridors of buildings at each street crossing. Two white skater boys carry their boards listlessly, not talking. A Chinese guy briskly exits his building, checking that the door closes behind him. One black girl is reading from her iPhone to her friend. Bits of her monologue float over the street:

"I'm sorry...I never imagined I'd meet someone like you, someone who brings together all of my dreams in a single person...what you don't know. So beautiful and creative, artistic in a real way, I didn't think people did that anymore, and funny...I don't know where to look...such grace and intelligence...a goddess, you look around and don't see what you do to..."

At "goddess" she releases a nervous laugh, reading on.

The Golden Pearl Spa at Sutter has a bright awning but vizqueen over all the windows. I want to walk in and ask what services they offer, but I don't. A Subway sandwich place is directly above.

A tourist stands in the middle of California Street, snapping photos of the long road down the hill.

Grace Cathedral, with its yellow lights shining upward, looks like a cutout against the bright sky. In the park across the street, dogs off leash snuffle in the bushes beneath the sign saying Dogs are welcome on leash. Two white guys with dogs stand next to the fountain talking loudly. One has a throaty voice, deep for his age. A lanky Asian guy in black leather pants, jacket, and leather newsboy cap pulled down over his eyes sits in half-lotus on one of the benches. An iPod in a speaker dock plays soothing music. His left hand is palm up in his lap, the right palm down, held in front of his face. He holds air between his hands.

It's dark when I start home down the hill, but the air is still and mild. A young guy in a cap offers me a fist bump. I know what's going to follow, but I can't resist the fist bump. Then of course the ask, and I have to tell him I'm sorry, I have nothing with me.

This is how I know I'm back in my own neighborhood.

A woman with lips painted black, extending so far beyond her own lips I think she's wearing a false mustache. Crazy Horse and the Warfield, where I saw X and Henry Rollins play, never imagining I'd live here.

The lights of Market Street Cinema shine the way to my building. In the lobby, someone has set a flower arrangement at the edge of the water feature. Yellow roses and dark purple blossoms.

The flowers are real, just on the edge of withering.

What happens when you walk outside

2010-04-23T16:25:00.000-07:00

It's dinner from Tu Lan tonight. I step out my door and skirt around the woman with long blond hair and tape holding her glasses together.

Got a dollar? she asks. I shake my head, and she smiles, sympathetically.

At Tu Lan, the guy behind the counter asks what I do. I tell him, and he shakes his head.

I guess the stereotypes aren't always right, he says.

Why? What did you think I was?

A librarian.

This cracks me up.

I take my soup, but the doorway is blocked by a woman staring in. She looks like somebody's mother except for the shiner, one eye swollen shut. African hair wrestled into neat French braids. I edge past her, but she puts out one arm to stop me, one dry hand on my arm, the other on my face.

She leans in and kisses me on the cheek, then turns away.

It's like a mother's kiss.

I pass the blond again. Sixty cents? she says. Her price is dropping.

I walk home, the air cooling the kiss on my cheek.

Sunday evening

2010-04-18T19:11:00.000-07:00

Across the street, the man with the walker leans over like he's reaching for something on the ground, but his hand hangs loose at the end of his arm. He leans, bent almost double.

A woman walks past him, bag of groceries held tight to her chest. She yells, loud enough for me to hear across Market Street.

"Do you see the people standing next to you on this street? They are selling drugs," she shouts.

The man with the walker is still bent over, hand reaching toward nothing.

A girl with shocking pink hair laughs as I pass. Her bare feet are flat on the sidewalk, skirt pooled around her hips showing perfectly white, round thighs.

Outside a gated store sits a paper bowl containing two neat pastries. A styrofoam cup full of coffee with cream beside it. Something unidentifiable splashes the sidewalk in front of the offering.

The leaning man now hitches up the front of his trousers before squatting in slow motion.

Four women in shining bare flesh and tiny dresses emerge from a cab, and the street boils over. Hey Baby and Oh Darling and I love you, you know I love you and Aaaaaaaah give it to me please. The girls blink mascaraed lashes. One smiles, showing teeth, while the others shrink closer together, tiny clicking steps in their heels.

The man with the walker looks at his watch, then slowly leans over again, again the hand reaching.

6:17 p.m.

2010-04-07T19:19:00.000-07:00

I'm walking home from work. I hear tires screech.

All afternoon I've been hearing this. I work on the fifth floor; traffic noises don't rise, but four times today we all went quiet at our desks, listening. The first time we waited for the crunch, but there was none. The second time we waited again. The third time a colleague got up and walked to the window, looking out and down. The fourth time we looked up for a moment, then back to our screens.

I'm walking home from work, and again I hear the screech. I'm not paying attention. I'm shamed from an email exchange with a friend. I was clumsy; the friend stung.

At the office, I locked myself in the bathroom stall and covered my face with my hands. Last week, there was a woman crying in this stall. She was past the point of being quiet. All she could do was lock herself behind the metal door of the stall. Symbolic privacy.

I don't cry.

I'm walking home from work, and the screech is right in front of me. A white car veers onto the sidewalk then sharply away, into the middle of the street. I know there was a clash - there were two at least - but the sound is strangely distant. Like it's happening in a soundproof room.

The car reels toward me and I can see the driver inside, her arm lifted.

Why doesn't she put on the brakes? I see airbags puffed out stiff. She passes only a few feet away and I turn to see her door open, the car still going, but the door open.

The door is open and she's past and she rolls out of the car. Something stops the car, but my mind can't hold onto it. The car is stopped and she is two yards behind it, on the street.

She's lying on her back. She's young, maybe twenty. She's crying.

I'm walking into the street, dialing 911. She's almost at my feet when the operator answers. I look up to see two cops. There are already police here, I say into the phone, and then I see the highway patrol building is right across the street.

One cop lifts the walkie-talkie on his shoulder to his mouth.

I hear a quiet voice behind me. It was me, she says. We all turn to see another young woman, blond, half-smiling. She holds one hand to her chest, one finger pointed up toward her own face.

It was me.

The woman in the street is crying. I can't breathe, she says. Of course she can breathe, or she wouldn't be able to speak, but she can't make words for what she's feeling. I can't breathe, she says again.

I want to cry, too, but I don't. It would be rude to elbow into her disaster. I'm just someone passing on the street, already in the way, already cruelly gawking.

I am aware again of the bags I'm carrying. I pull away, and start slowly down the street. The story shows itself as I go: the blond's white SUV, headlight smashed, rear-ended the little white car. The little white car was pushed into the parked truck. The truck's owner is there. Did you see what happened? he asks a man smoking. The smoking man shakes his head. All I saw was a car on the sidewalk, ready to hit me.

I see the truck's tailgate is demolished, tools lying scattered and twisted in the street.

More police are arriving. Shards of the accident have stuck to me, sticking in and sticking out. Anyone to embrace me now would be shredded.

The wave follows me out from the center of the accident. A woman is yelling at her boyfriend, ineffectually putting her arms around him as if to throw him to the ground.

Four blocks on, a man shouts. Can I help you? He yells. Can I help you? A man crossing the street the other way yells back, but his voice is lost in the siren.

An ambulance turns my way, beating it past me and down the street. The siren is gratifying. Appropriate. I'm the only one to turn and watch it go.

Trust me

2010-03-28T13:00:00.000-07:00

The man is on a cell phone, clearly upset. Almost - theatrically upset. I'm walking down Market Street and he is half a stride behind me. It's Friday night, and the street is crowded.

Shit! he says, clapping the phone shut.

He's caught up to me, and catches my eye. I'm sorry about that, he says. I didn't mean to...it's just...

He throws his arms in the air. I got carjacked today, he says. My family was carjacked. At the point of a gun.

I stop. I'm sorry to hear that, I tell him. Is everyone okay?

From the moment I hear him on the cell phone, I'm wary. No reason in particular, nothing I can point to - I keep looking for the director, the script girl. He wears a long herringbone coat, leather gloves. A suit. It looks like a costume.

He tells me a long, disjointed story. Pulls out a paper with notes taken on it. He says he has the police report. Details to make it real. The place: just south of here on 101. Their destination: Eureka. They planned to make Eureka tonight. The car was recovered. He's not a transient. You gotta trust me, he says. His wife and kids are waiting by the side of the road. He needs to buy a gas can, gas.

That's when it clicks into place. Gas can. An old friend of mine ran a variation of this very scam some twenty plus years ago. It was a strange and short period for him. He wore a suit and carried a gas can. A story about breaking down just outside of town. Wife and kids waiting.

The carjacking is a thrilling new twist. Violence! Drama!

I stop him there. I don't have anything for him, I say. I'm sorry.

What I really want to say is: how's this working out for you? What I want to say is: I'm sorry you're going to have to go through the whole show again for someone else. It's easier to just ask for cash up front.

What I want to know is: am I getting harder? Am I losing my ability to simply trust?

I'm out with a friend and a woman appears behind us. Help out a woman with a dollar, will you? she asks. We don't have a thing, we say.

Oh, come on, she says. Like we're not playing the game right. Like we didn't just step out of a cab. Like we owe her something, and if we can't just own up say No, without the excuse, we have to pay up.

And I want to know how long I can hold onto my trusting self in this place and this time. If I can look past the scams, the sense of entitlement.

If I can be brave enough to see into a person on the street, if I can learn to not look away, but look in. Look all the way in. And find the person inside who is worth the chance.

The sun shines down

2010-03-22T20:28:00.000-07:00

On a day like today, you have to be out in the sun. You have to steal time, walk outside, look at all the women and girls in their sundresses, flesh shining and hungry; white girls already pinking on shoulders, cheeks.

I start in my neighborhood, where the guy selling Street Sheets sings as I pass. We all love you, he calls after me, gold tooth catching sunlight.

As I walk uphill, the street people thin out, drop away; at the top of the hill, a tall young woman rises from the back seat of a limo at the Fairmont. High-heeled sandal, white draped calf, thigh, and now dark hair caught up in a jeweled clasp, bare shoulders, waist: she stands on the walkway in a long white evening gown. Just beyond her, in the doorway of the hotel, an older woman waits for her car, aggressively ugly in clothes chosen to announce wealth: shapeless, heavy, baldly ornamented.

Across from Grace Cathedral is a small park. Bronze fountain supported by naked young men, bronze eyes blank. A woman lies on a bench, head on her purse, eyes closed - almost closed - she tries to sleep but her consciousness keeps her tuned in.

Every bench is occupied and much of the grass, skirts lifted and sleeves rolled to expose skin to sun. At one bench is a man who would look at home in my part of town, down in the flats: dirty beard, dreadlocked hair. He's spinning.

I stop to look closer. I had thought it was a bicycle wheel, but now I see the thread winding from a spindle in his hand to the shining wheel. The wheel spins and the spindle dips and wool or cotton or gold from straw is spun.

The spindle dips and releases me, long running strides down the hill. Soon I'll be home, the mirror in my loft spinning the last drops of sunshine into a jar on the shelf by the bed.

At night, when the back door to the strip club slams and I hear voices spiraling up the walls to my window, I'll open the jar. I'll hear the beginnings of a fight, the Don't you dare, the I'm not the one, and I'll scatter stored sunlight down and over their shoulders.

They'll stop, look up, breathe in, and remember a day when bare toes dug into dirt and grass roots. When sun cooked into shoulders and back. When they dreamed of a spring that never ends.

Dianetics changed my life

2010-03-15T21:31:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it seems I've moved to a whole new country. A planet of lost souls, people hanging on to the edge of the city with blackened fingernails.

A woman toddles toward me with a terrifying goggle-smile. Her hair is blond and curly. She was cute, once. She might have been pretty. The smile now is pulled painfully over the front of her face. "Helloooo!" she says as I pass. "Helloooo!" exactly the same overbright tone to the person behind me. "Helloooo!"

Inside a restaurant, in a nearly empty dining room, a woman and her children raise their arms above their heads and spin. The woman pauses, and her eyes meet mine. She shrugs, raising her arms again.

A man in a wheelchair speaks a language that doesn't exist on earth.

On the bus, I'm taken in by the Dianetics ad. Indisputably the most read book on the human mind ever written, it says. Indisputably? I think. It seems an outlandish claim. A young man is sitting next to me. He looks like any of a thousand young men in the city. Skinny jeans, expensive backpack. Just before his stop he stands and reaches over the head of the woman across the aisle. He pulls at the ad, diligently. Sorry, he mumbles, as it doesn't give as easily as he expected. Finally he tears it down the middle, crumpling half in his fist before hopping off the bus.

Guess he doesn't like Scientology, a man at the back of the bus says.

The erupting volcano remains.

At night I dream of the blond woman's rictus, her teeth showing in a Joker grin. Helloooo? she asks my sleeping self. Hello, I want to say. Hello. I see you.

Alarm will sound as a whooping horn.

2010-03-04T21:44:00.000-08:00

This morning, as I walk to work, I see a man in the middle of the street. In the middle of a lane. I hear a siren coming this way. He plants his feet wide, bending his knees like he's going to go into a crouch. I watch him, curious.

At work there's a plate by the elevator with instructions in case of a fire. It tells me:

Alarm will sound as a whooping horn.

A sign inside the elevator informs me that the alarm will be tested tomorrow morning at 7 am. It will be very loud, it says.

The alarm is very loud. Last week it rattled me at my desk. We filed outside like schoolkids, down the metal and cement stairway and into the parking lot. We stood around and looked at each other while the building screamed.

In my new sixth floor loft, I can't hear much noise from the street. I do hear sirens; after a while they become a sort of backdrop. Tonight I hear protesters moving down Market toward City Hall. I step out on to the fire escape to watch them go by, escorted by police cars and vans and their flashing lights.

I can also hear church bells from my window.

The man in the middle of the street emerges from his crouch as the siren approaches. He's young and beautiful. He stretches one long arm out front of his body, palm up. He's pulling the ambulance toward him. Scooping out into the air with both arms now, and now his mouth opens, the siren is inside me and inside him; I see but don't hear his laugh as it rocks by, tossing his hair back in its wake, his eyes are open and both arms are in the air and he's laughing like he's found the secret of joy.

Invisible frogs

2010-02-22T19:52:00.000-08:00

I can hear frogs when I step outside. A stagey chorus of frog voices. I hear them, but I can't see them, although I lurked beside the pond this afternoon, peering into crevices. No dice.

I can even hear them in here, in my room. Don't be fooled; it's a creature metropolis out here in the country. Teeming. Last night I needed to walk, but the dark here is deep. I saw a path leading up and into trees and I stepped in that direction, flashlight in hand.

I stepped in that direction, then stopped. All the childhood fears - of things moving in the dark, things unseen, of lives going on in the underbrush - all came running up to hit me square in the face. I'm a grown-up woman who walks easily by neighborhood toughs and crackheads and drunks, but this was too much. An unknown path in the deep dark of the forest is just too much.

I turned back to my room, ready to run laps up and down the stairs.

Today a jackrabbit the size of a beagle looks at me out the side of his eyes, giant ears alert, then dismisses me. I'm not a threat; I barely exist in its world. A mutant bumblebee circles my head, impossibly staying aloft, buzzing like a small plane coming in for a landing.

Two deer have a friendly shit together not five feet away, and I barely register. I'm irrelevant.

A person could get used to this. If I could stay here another week or three, my little dramas might shrink back down into proportion. But it's only another day and a half, and then I'll be back in my own wilderness.

Until then, the frogs belch in their amphitheaters, unfazed by my tromping boots while I try to find them out. They're performing for another crowd entirely.

Time to make the doughnuts

2010-02-15T21:04:00.000-08:00

Because what a writer does is write. Because I said this blog is updated weekly, and it's been a week. Because when my brother owned a doughnut store, he got up at four or even three every morning to make the doughnuts, yeah, just like the guy in the commercial.

Because there's no such thing as writer's block. There's only the writer and the page and the words and you have to put the words on the page or you're not a writer.

You have to put the words on the page even when you think there's nothing to say. It's only when you start putting words on the page that you remember the German tourist in running clothes asking how to get to Castro, and then to Golden Gate Park, how you point back in the direction he came from and he's off and flying, ready to cover the whole city in his white running shoes.

And his shoes, like a dotted line, point the way to the blond sitting in a doorway, her head down. She asks for a cigarette when you're already past her. She doesn't look up, the words coming out of her like she's been saying them for years, pull her string and Spare a cigarette? and the string runs out and someone else walks by and her string is pulled again: Spare a cigarette?

From her to chalked exhortations on the sidewalk:

It May Not Seem Like It, But Things Will Get Better
You Rock My Socks
I Am A Better Person Because Of You

A neighborhood crackhead wavers on his feet, burning cig between his fingers. His eyes trace the one that reads:

You Are Exactly Where You Need To Be

Shall we dance

2010-02-08T21:56:00.000-08:00

The day starts with filtered sunshine, sliding in between the buildings and finding me out in my new little home.

From my bed I can lean out the window and see down the pocket between my building and the next: six floors to the bottom. Looking up I see HOTEL painted in red block letters. Behind HOTEL, GRANT BLDG. announces itself. Across the canyon of Market Street, faded letters spell RENOIR HOTEL from top to bottom. We are an exclusive society of aging buildings up here, a cotillion in gloves worn soft as kitten paws.

The sun is gone by late afternoon, and when I lift my head from work, the streets are shining wet.

It's nearly nine when I'm standing at the bus stop, scarf over my head. A tall white man with big teeth is the only other passenger at the stop. He wears salary man clothes: blue oxford shirt, gray trousers, shined shoes. I see his feet moving out of the corner of my eye. At first I think he's dancing with the cold, but then I look at him properly.

He's just dancing. Holding his coat as a partner, he's marking out steps. Right-two-three, he whispers, and turn! He spins, coat sleeves flying out, and I see his eyes for an instant, the tiny shock of catching my gaze. He calms it down, self-conscious, but I can still see his weight shifting forward, back, side, side.

His feet don't lift from the sidewalk, but he's dancing just the same.

Miscreant

2010-01-29T20:35:00.001-08:00

The neighborhood

2010-01-24T23:15:00.000-08:00

I step out the back door of my new building, and see a man in a doorway across the street. He’s sobbing out loud, his mouth open like a little kid.

It’s raining hard today and the train is packed, people stuffed close enough to smell. A young man gets on; he reminds me of a kid I knew in college. Open, freckled face, good raincoat. He’s talking earnestly to someone, but I can’t pick out who it is.

“Sure, they’re thinking, why does he get to stand there?”

I look closely at the woman next to him to see if she is the one he’s addressing. She looks closely at me. We both realize it’s neither of us, or both of us and everyone on the train. His hand holds the pole directly in front of my nose. He wears a ring on his left pinky; dolphins are embossed on the band.

“That’s why I’m the focus, that’s why they’re studying me,” he says.

“It’s not crazy to hear voices,” he says, “It’s just crazy to answer them.”

I get off at my station. A man stands just outside the turnstiles. He holds a Fed-Ex box. He holds it out to passers-by, asking, asking, but I can’t tell what it is he wants. I can’t tell what he wants, but I recognize the gesture, the heart’s need for something, and how many of us confuse one want for another? We all want something that we can’t always name. We all sob aloud – in our room if we have one – or quietly, hoping not to wake the person sleeping beside us. I turn away from the naked need of the man with the box, the sobbing man, the woman selling scavenged copies of Street Sheet, unable to answer, ashamed of the echoed need in my own heart.

Catastrophe

2010-01-09T18:34:00.000-08:00

I hear the scree of brakes and in the long 30th of a second before the crash, I anticipate it; I live through the long crushing grind six times before it happens, and it doesn't help, it goes right through my teeth and shakes my bones.

A cab has t-boned an airport shuttle, the nose of the cab peeled right back, skinned like a fresh kill, naked innards shoved under the side of the airporter, obscene and intimate. I cross the street at the light, coming closer to the accident, and see five people raise cell phone to ear, almost in unison, one-two-three-four-five.

I seem to be walking through sludge, everything slowed down, it takes an age to cross the street, turn left, walk the half-block toward the scene, glass glittering across the road, sprayed out from under the shuttle bus.

The cabbie is sitting very straight in his car, looking out through the windshield. A man with suitcases is out in the street, turning around, a bag in each hand. He turns and looks, turns and looks, like the answer is hiding just over his shoulder.

Someone opens the cabbie's door, but he doesn't move. He stares straight ahead.

Traffic is clotting in the street. It's a weekday, people are on their way to work. Someone honks, then honks again.

I look one more time over my shoulder as I walk. The cabbie still sits in his car, the man on the street turning and turning, but the rest of us have to get on with our day.

Blue moon

2009-12-31T15:49:00.000-08:00

Last night the moon sported a halo; a ring of lighted clouds circling clear black sky, like a hole punched through to the back of the universe.

A man on the street with a saxophone plays Auld Lang Syne - not a brilliant rendition, but competent - I'm just sentimental enough to slow down and turn a smile his way. He breaks off mid-song and waves. Happy New Year, he calls. As I walk away, he rolls into You Are My Sunshine; ten steps later and it's Pop Goes the Weasel. I wonder if these are the only tunes he knows.

Not everything transcends.

But just ahead of me is a woman in a miniskirt, her black stockings growing a hole and running just beneath her round bottom, and it's enough: I love her and the run in her stockings, her wide hips and the cheap windbreaker hanging from her shoulders.

A friend gave birth yesterday: twin boys, each weighing less than her hardback edition of Anna Karenina. They got here too early for any of us to be easy, but so far so good. One slugged the other on the way out, gifting him with a shiner, an early tell of which is which. This could be a good sign, a will to fight their way back from the far edge of the possible. Welcome to the world, brother.

In an hour or so I'll put on my party dress and dance in the new year with noisy revelers, but for me the year crept in on baby feet last night. The moon swung like a pendant in its halo of bare sky, sneaking through the blinds and prying open my eyes; I'm wide awake out here on this dizzy edge, waiting to see what happens next.

Ave

2009-12-13T15:16:00.000-08:00

It's raining in San Francisco. People crowd under an awning, one woman bending from the waist to look up toward the sky, a drop catching her eyelid. She blinks, then smiles and shakes her head.

My boots shine in white light from a laundromat. A young girl in a striped hat circles the central counter, middle finger tracing her path along its surface. She looks over at sister or mother loading clothes, and begins another round.

I'm running late, and the bus is too. I step out to hail a cab.

Crazy night with the rain, the cabbie says. He turns up the volume for Ave Maria.

The city seems to slow down, moving in time to the music. Girls in tiny skirts stretch their naked legs hopefully in skyscraper heels, every step a prayer.

Ave Maria
Gratia plena
Dominus tecum
Benedicta tu in mulieribus

A sodden Santa looks up as we pass, water dripping from his beard. Lights blink in store windows. I ask the driver to drop me off several blocks early; I want to walk. I climb out into the cold, rain hammering onto my umbrella.

Sancta Maria
Mater Dei
Ora pro nobis peccatoribus

At the corner store, teenage boys crowd the man behind the counter. They imitate his speech impediment, cruelly, but he doesn't raise his voice. Buy something or leave, he says, words squeezed and misshapen, but his eyes sharp. The kids are embarrassed, reaching into pockets to pay, edging back out into the night. I bring my juice to the counter and he looks at me, smiling gravely, like a blessing.

Still raining, he says.

Every time it rains, it rains pennies from heaven

2009-12-06T17:49:00.000-08:00

I don't expect Chopin on a Saturday evening. The pianist is at an old upright in the corner, its insides exposed. People sit at tables, arguing, ordering beer, flirting. He's playing one of the études while glasses clink and chairs scrape. He's smiling, curled over the keyboard and watching music roll from his fingers.

Between songs, he leans to the left for a kiss from the woman sitting at the nearest table. She reaches out a hand to play her fingers over his shoulder, whispering into his ear.

He slides easily into Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, lounge-worthy and loose, tinkling through the café.

In the BART station a bluegrass band is playing. A mob of a band, boys and girls in dreadlocks and bad beards, overalls and ragged layers of clothing. Three guitars, banjo, mandolin, fiddle, and three skinny guys hanging at the sides, shuffle-dancing and singing. I don't know the songs but they light me up anyway; I let my train go to listen a little longer.

They rearrange for the next song: "fiddle in the middle," says the monstrous boy with the mandolin.

A woman is walking her bicycle through the station. She's crying, walking her bicycle. I watch her hop on and ride into the night, crying.

The café pianist plays Pennies From Heaven, and I look out at the sky, feeling riches tumble all around my shoulders.

Caught

2009-11-27T18:12:00.000-08:00

There's a cluster of balloons caught in the wires overhead. Sunlight cuts sharp across the tops of buildings, turning one white stray almost translucent, where it nudges along the wire, feeling blindly for a way out and up.

Telephone workers are in the street, heads cranked back to look, hats pushed back. Equipment hangs heavy from their belts. The truck's cherrypicker is tucked in, door open, waiting for someone to climb in and free the balloons.

I stop - the sound of my footsteps catching up a second later - and look up with the men.

None of us wants to be the one to break the moment. We stand and look at the balloons, a handful of candy suspended in wire.

We watch. One by one, our thoughts separate and work themselves free, lifting up and into the cloudless sky.

We're wide awake, the moon and I

2009-11-22T12:58:00.000-08:00

A right turn off Shattuck, and cafés and bars and beery, stubbled boys are swallowed up in silence. On either side are close-buttoned houses like sleeping hobbits; I smell rustling trees, unfolding quietly in the dark.

The street rolls under my feet, dreaming of the day's bicycles and cars and dropped keys.

I walk for blocks, checking the address. I should be getting close, but still it's houses and pumpkins on porches and harvest wreaths. I'm not sure I want to get there, I could spend a while here between the sleeping houses, but then I see a pool of light on sidewalk, the sandwich board set out front.

"Here for the Science Review?" asks the waitress.

"I'm here for the band."

They're setting up in the next room, but it's reserved for a collection of beautiful college geeks. I find a place on the fringe, where I can see.

She tests her accordion, a lock of blond hair falling into her face. He tunes his guitar. They play loose and easy. You haven't lived until you hear Princess Yum-Yum sing to a calypso beat and accordion.

The accordionist's brother arrives late in the second set, as the last of the college scientists are wandering out, a last shining look toward the musicians. Brother stretches his legs out under the table and points his iPhone in their direction.

At the mercy of BART schedules, I don't stay long after the show. Back in SF, walking home, I pass a café with people spilling onto the walk. Three hairy white guys are playing hot bluegrass. The one playing harmonica has a washboard hanging from his neck; it sprouts shining cymbals and tiny drums and mysterious noisemakers.

Down South in New Orleans, they sing. The prettiest girls I've ever seen. Did the band in Berkeley sing the same tune? I'm pulled in. They're rocking the place, and I'm in the crowd, stomping and clapping.

It's late before the place closes down, chairs taken in from the sidewalk. I take the long way home, down empty streets.

We're very wide awake, the moon and I.

After the Party

2009-11-14T23:50:00.000-08:00

I can hear the footsteps of other guests heading toward their cars. One asks if I'd like a ride. No thanks, I say. Not tonight.

Tonight I want to hear the ocean to my right as I walk along the dark street. My own shoes on the pavement, my breath going in and out. The sound of a small pickup idling at the corner booms out in the silence. It is metallic and outsize, the sound of an entire factory clashing into production.

I turn onto Taraval. Music pushes out from the Riptide. Narrow windows give glances of a tight crowd; boys holding girls hard against them, smokers slouching just out front.

On the bench at the stop is a young kid in a big black cowboy hat. An older man stands guard over a pile of bags and backpacks.

"I'm gonna fill the tub with salt," says the kid.

"You ain't going there," the man says.

"Tsh! Tsh!" the kid shushes.

He stands up and paces back to check the display. He's limping; one heel doesn't reach the ground. "Eight minutes," he says, drawling it out: Aay-it.

The train is full of kids heading out for their Saturday night. They are loud and full and humming with energy. One tall boy wears sneakers with puffy, distended tongues. They look festive, cartoonish.

I get off a stop sooner than I intend, but it works out well. I walk through quieter streets, my head emptying of all the pushing voices.

The host of tonight's party got bad news this week. A tumor. The party had been planned weeks before. My breath stops. Everything at the party stops. He tells us he'll be okay. It's going to be okay. He wrote a song about it, in the key of E. Guitar and accordion and our host singing that he'll be all right, and we all join in for the chorus.

He's going to be okay, he says, but his and his wife's faces are wide open and pale. Their eyes are bright and they smile with their whole tired selves. In the warm of their kitchen, we sing songs and clap out the beat, and one by one we shrug on coats and say goodnight, shining with grace of these people, this moment of being alive.

Thank you Pumpkin

2009-11-08T15:09:00.000-08:00

I'm reading in a cafe in the Mission, looking up now and then from my book at the people coming and going. Most of them are young and beautiful - men and women - and they carry an awareness of this, like the sunshine edging in through the open front of the cafe.

A tiny woman enters, delicate-boned, made even smaller by the vicious curve of her spine, curling her completely over like a hook. Her skin is dark brown with large black freckles along her shoulders, the straps of her overalls hanging around her elbows.

A rope of drool hangs from her mouth, catching the light. She holds a brightly colored box of Trix in front of her as she wobbles toward the back of the cafe like a shield, a talisman.

I think about oracles in ancient Greece.

People in the cafe look and not-look as she passes. She disappears behind a corner near the restrooms, and one of the waitresses moves to talk with her. I can hear her speak, but I can't make out the words. Her voice is creaky as a cartoon witch's, words punctuated with a truculent "Aaaaah!"

The waitress disappears into the kitchen, and she fills the space with her voice: "Aaaah. Aaaaah! Aaaaah."

The waitress re-emerges with a plastic cup filled with milk, gaily-colored balls of cereal floating at the top, and a spoon.

"Thank you," scratches out the woman.

Her box of cereal replaced with this cup of baubles, she holds it aloft and retraces her path back through the room. She bumps into a woman as she passes, apologizing, and the woman shrinks away, looking her up and down with unveiled horror before her eyes sheath over with not-seeing.

"Thank you, Pumpkin," calls the hook-shaped woman one more time as she disappears into the hard light of the sun.

Mixed tape

2009-10-31T18:50:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting near the back of the bus, a group of college-age kids across the aisle.

"Oh that was a long time ago."

"Did you know that Sheila's dad's car has a tape deck? A tape deck!"

"When was the last time they made cars with tape decks?"

"Come on over and listen to my mix tape!"

They laugh uproariously.

But I'm snapped back in time - one instant on the bus, groceries at my feet - the next I'm the car with my brother. He's wired a CD player to the speakers, but it's delicate. On bumpy roads the CD skips. The technology is still new, and I wonder if they'll ever make them stable enough that cars will some day come with CD players built in.

"Oh, sure," says my brother, his arm resting on the sill of the driver's side window. We listen to Elvis Costello, hurtling through the dark.

My brother and I are escaping. It's New Year's, but we didn't spend Christmas home with family. We're in L.A., or rather, leaving L.A. We've each been on our separate trips this week, but tonight we're both staying at my former boyfriend's mother's house in Topanga Canyon.

The mother is away; it's just former boyfriend (now friend), brother and me. There's nothing but bags of wheat germ in the fridge, so the three of us take off down the other side of the canyon looking for food. We're almost ready to settle for a convenience store burrito when we find a bar that's open. The fifty-something waitress has high blond hair and blue eyeshadow. Bar patrons sing Auld Lang Syne and she brings us a vegetarian pizza. All the vegetables are grown in the garden out back, she says.

It seems to be the best pizza I've ever had.

All this I've told again and again. The pizza and how we learned we'd stumbled into San Fernando Valley when a girl exclaimed, "Oh, miga-aawd!"

But I've never told about the three of us in that mid-century modern house hidden in the trees. About the tall windows and the mirrored wall, reflecting our selves back, perched on three mismatched chairs. My brother with his long legs stretched out in front of him. About the deep quiet surrounding us, how I dream of a movie with this image: three people in a white room, trees outside whispering secrets to one another in the dark.

About the furtive kiss with the former boyfriend when my brother is in another room, the relationship over but our bodies unconcerned.

It's one of those rare moments when we're aware - my brother and I - that we're on the verge of something new. My brother will marry soon, become a father. It's the last time we'll be together like this, and I think we know it.

I'm on the bus on my way home from work, groceries between my feet, and I'm missing my brother sharply. Late night talks after a date. Riding to school with him in the '65 Mustang he'd fixed up, rolling in a cloud of music. Staring in shared terror at the black widow on the wall of his basement room, the red hourglass on her abdomen winking out. An early morning drive home from our brother's wedding, windows rolled down and music blasting to keep us awake. Lying on my stomach in his room, reading lyrics from his album covers.

That last drive in the living dark, music rolling over us, as I lean out the window to breathe in the green of the trees.

Why not

2009-10-27T21:39:00.001-07:00

This morning on my way to work, a man crosses my path from right to left. Before I see him, I hear an exaggerated plosion of breath, before even looking I recognize the sound of someone whose link to this world - to sidewalk and streetcar and yapping dogs - is fragile, fraying.

A street crazy, I think.

As he passes in front of me, I see his profile, then the back of his longish gray hair, well-tended and neatly pulled into a black band. He stops, now, just to my left, and throws one hand up, drawing himself onto his toes beneath his hand, balletic, perfectly executed.

He drops his hand and falls back into man walking down the street. And then, again! The hand lifts, the body follows, and now the other hand reaches out and pulls him into an arabesque.

And then it's gone; he's just a guy, walking.

There's nothing in it of that nutzoid tension, that buildup and valving off promised by his exasperated huff. There's a contradiction here, and I remember the other day when I saw a man flinging himself - beautifully - around the J Church tracks as they disappear into the tunnel. I thought street crazy then, too, until I saw the woman filming him, holding the Trolley Dances clipboard.

The dancer of today stops again, again the hand goes up, again that beautiful form, his long body describing an exquisite curve, and he seems to say Why not?

Why not dance?

Bikinis and swimsuits accepted

2009-10-25T22:17:00.000-07:00

The eastern half of Dolores Park is still in sunlight, but I'm in shade. There are bodies scattered over the slope, the woman selling empanadas, the man with marijuana chocolates. Two people are rolled into a blanket, a bare foot showing at one end, a hand at the other.

Just downhill from me is a crusty old man in baggy jeans, no shirt. While I watch, he stands up and unbuckles, sliding the pants down over his hips. Saggy old white man in saggy whities. Or former whities, now nearly transparent and the color of old bones. He reaches a hand down the front of them and roots around in there, and I wonder if we'll get the whole show; nudity is all the rage these days, I'm told. But he pulls his hand free and lies face down on the grass, arms out above his head. He looks like someone flung him there.

I stand up and make my way down the hill, toward Valencia. A boy sitting on a stoop nods at me as I pass, then says something I don't hear. I stop and turn. "You have a great smile," he says.

I'm looking for a cafe described by a Litquake volunteer, and almost miss it. I was distracted by the woman talking about how her bullet hole is still sore.

In the back, by the bathroom, is a poster advertising Halloween festivities here. Costumed guests will get two beers for $8. Bikinis, it says, and swimsuits accepted.

It's dark as I walk home past the tennis courts. I can hear the pok pok of ball against racket, see the green of the balls glowing against black sky.

Downpour

2009-10-20T20:27:00.000-07:00

Scattered showers were predicted.

It's mid-afternoon, and a sudden crush of rain halloos and stomps and clatters on the roof. The smell of softening earth springs close behind and I lift my head from my stuporous glaze. I gather up raincoat and umbrella and dash for the stairs while co-workers tsk.

Sacramento street is a crashing river, gutters overflowing until the two streams meet in the middle of the road. I leap as broadly as I can, umbrella high, knowing I'll never clear it and not caring, it feels so good to leap, and I laugh, splashing to my shins, the water sucking at my jeans and slurping over and into the tops of my boots, my socks turning squishy and damp.

I skip my way to the park at the top of the hill, to the top of the park, where bulldozers stand, water puddling in the open seats. I can see the city below, snugged into fogbanks.

One other human is at the top of the park among the giant trees. We hold our umbrellas as lightly as helium balloons. Tufts of reddish hair decorate the perimeter of his bald head, and he grins.

Another rain lover, he says. He was visiting a friend in the hospital when he heard the clamor and had to get outside. He's lived here thirty years, but he still misses the thunderstorms in his hometown in Pennsylvania.

We bow to one another and continue on the way. My jeans are wet to my knees, and my boots won't dry for a day, maybe two. I don't care. I can turn up the heater at work, eat soup for dinner.

The rain backs off, tiptoeing away in squishing socks. When I circle back to Sacramento, the rivers are gone, already gone, the street clean and shining in their wake.

Because I need to start somewhere

2009-10-18T22:40:00.000-07:00

I'm emptied out, used up, full to the teeth with other people's words. Yesterday was the crashing finale of Litquake, where I helped unleash an army of volunteers on the streets for the crazed high of the Crawl.

No words of my own, though. My own words slink away like criminals. I'm shattered, shaken and spitwadded, and no words, no words.

Someone might see

2009-05-29T15:47:00.000-07:00

I'm walking to work behind a young white couple, she with sleek blond hair and cloddish boots, he in hipsterish black, skinny legs in skinny black jeans.

He walks a little closer to her, lifting one big hand to lightly skim her ass, feeling her muscles move her legs forward and back, her hips side to side.

They walk this way for a block and a half, and then she looks left, right, her hair twitching from shoulder to shoulder, and reaches back to brush his hand away.

Midnight

2009-05-16T15:11:00.000-07:00

Mr. Billy and I are on the number 6 bus late on a Friday night, heading home after a play. Across from us, in the backward-facing seats, is a man and a woman. They're both wearing headphones.

She is looking out the window at the passing city. Her hair is pulled back in a bun. High, aristocratic eyebrows and composed mouth.

He looks vaguely in front of him. He's tall and loosely strung, large, freckled ears. One giant paw holds his iPod, the other holds his phone, each at the ready. In case. His mouth is open, like he'd been stunned by a bright light.

I'd assumed they were a couple, but as the bus trundles out of downtown and up Haight, I see they never once look at each other. I wonder if they know each other at all, if maybe, complete strangers on the bus, they are feeling the bare contact of thigh against thigh while looking away, denying the flirtation, their bodies exchanging lustful heat entirely against their will.

I look up at Mr. Billy, but when I look back, her head is on his shoulder. A couple, then. Still no words, no change in his expression or hers.

The bus is nearly empty, a lighted capsule in the speeding dark. We've passed the Masonic and Haight stop, where most of the passengers heave themselves from their seats and out to the street; our couple remains.

She's lifted her head from his shoulder and is looking out the window again. Not once have their eyes met, not once has one even tried to look at the other.

Suddenly she gets up from her seat, skirts neatly around the man's long legs, and is waiting near the door, her deep eyelids lowered as she gazes coolly at the floor.

He stays as he is, stunned face, devices held out in front of him like the reins of a horse, until the bus stops, and he's up and out on the sidewalk beside her, the bus rolling on; I'm unable to catch more than a glimmer of her legs beneath her pencil skirt in the dark, and then they're gone.

Fire, averted

2009-03-01T12:07:00.000-08:00

Mr. Billy and I are indulging in crepes at our favorite local creperie on Haight. I'm considering making a pig of myself with a dessert crepe (chocolate and salty butter - nothing comes close), when Mr. Billy stands up and heads for the door. The counter girl is next to him, pointing at a black Mercedes parked in front of the shop. Something is leaking at an alarming rate from the back of the car.

Mr. Billy gets closer to investigate. He puts his hand in the stream then stands up. "Yep," he says, "Gasoline." The counter girl and I watch as the gallons pour out onto the street while Mr. Billy disappears into the bathroom to wash his hands.

"We should call the cops," I say. It occurs to all of us at the same time that anyone walking by with a cigarette could touch off a fire, a Very Bad Fire.

The counter girl picks up the phone. "Um, fire?" she says.

"How fast is it leaking?" she asks nobody in particular.

"About a gallon a minute," Mr. Billy says.

Another customer has come in, and he's shaking his head. "Think of how much money is just running out onto the street," he says.

The counter girl hangs up the phone. "They said don't let anyone get near it."

I order a cup of tea while we wait for the firemen. A guy wearing an orange vest with a cigarette hanging from his mouth is sweeping the street. He gets close to the Merc.

"Stay away from that car, it's leaking gas," I say. Three of us point at the stream, still going strong.

He nods and says thanks, and keeps sweeping in the gutter, right up to the car. I realize the cig isn't lit.

"Get away from it now," says Mr. Billy.

"No, I'm okay," the man says, but he moves away.

"Do you see that cigarette butt lying right under the car, ominously?" asks the cook. She had been about to take her smoke break when she noticed the smell.

We look at the butt, at the growing lake of gasoline, running down the gutter to the Ashbury corner. Then we hear a siren.

It's been less than five minutes, and here are the firemen. They inspect the car, ask if the owner is around.

"Nope. She parked and went off."

Two guys open the gas tank cover, while a couple of others pour kitty litter - or something like it - into the gutter.

"Gas cap wasn't screwed on tight."

The fireman tightens down the gas cap, and the leak stops. Just like that. The firemen soak up all the gas, get back in their truck, and disappear.

"The owner of the car - she may never know what happened," I say as we walk toward the bus. I look back down the street where no fire started today, and I take Mr. Billy's hand.

Gumby in lace

2009-02-13T13:23:00.000-08:00

The bus is crowded this morning, but there is a loose, benign feeling. People are smiling. The woman whose toes I just avoid smashing holds back her gray hair with a girlish headband.

Rain was forecast today, but the sun shines.

I churn my way to the back, to a seat at last, and bury myself in my book. Near the end of the trip, I'm jolted by the appearance of two long skinny legs in lace tights just in front of me. The woman wears tiny black shorts - almost hot pants - and a vintage houndstooth jacket belted tightly at the waist. I glance up at her face: jewel stud in her sharp nose, lips crisply painted in fuschia.

It's cold this morning. I'm wearing enough layers to feel like the Michelin man, but she doesn't seem to feel it, although I can see her pale skin through the lace.

She's tall and thin as a rubber band - miles between the hem of her shorts and the tops of her boots. I think of Gumby, with his bright cartoon face. I picture again her painted lips and think her hair must be crimson, but I steal another look at her face and see I was wrong: it's brown - maybe auburn - and hanging to her shoulders.

The guy next to me shakes with laughter, his face hidden by his hoodie - the hood of his hoodie - I think, the words rolling around in my head. He's watching a cartoon on his iPhone.

To my left a high school girl tries to tell her friend a story, choking on her own laughter, the words coming out mangled and crushed.

I can't look away from the skinny girl in her lace tights. I compare my own legs in their boots and patterned tights. I'm short, and my legs haven't been that skinny since I was twelve and asked my mother why my calves were changing shape, maybe something was wrong. She smiled and told me I was becoming a woman, and I was terrified and thrilled, lifting my skirt to see the slight curve of my legs in the mirror.

I can see between the girl's legs to the people standing behind her. I slip a glance once more at her face - morning-sharp and vulnerable - and something in me recognizes her.

I step off the bus with her face ringing in my head, her legs and jeweled nose keep pace with me as I walk to the office, the sun disappearing behind gathering clouds.

Shared Sacrifice

2009-01-31T14:13:00.000-08:00

I've been a bad blogger lately, an unreliable blogger, an occasional blogger. But that isn't because I've stopped writing.

If you're jonesing for some Chemical goodness, check out the new online journal Shared Sacrifice. I'm not posting there every week, but I hope to be able to contribute on a regular basis. Today I'm hard at work on a new story for the next issue (with a short break for this plug), and you can read more of my work in the current issue and archives.

The journal is an outgrowth of the online radio program of the same name. Worth checking out.

If you'd like to contribute, they're still looking for writers and artists...

Divine nonchalance

2008-12-28T13:55:00.000-08:00

I hadn't realized just how many dangers lurked on my morning walk to work, until I started to read the signs along the way...

Hallelujah

2008-12-15T20:35:00.000-08:00

Night starts too early and lasts deep into morning, waking up dull and heavy, the dark weighing on my chest. I want to burrow under the covers like my cat, nose first into warmth, the fingers of dreams lacing in and through my waking mind.

I stand in the kitchen staring at an empty pan and wonder at its meaning.

I have an appointment downtown, the city desperately decked in holiday cheer and screaming SALE SALE, bell-ringing Salvationeers and brass bands and shopping bags knocking against knees, shoppers looking nonplussed to find only one bag in hand, last year it was twenty, but even Santa's cinching the belt another notch.

I'm cranky and late and hungry, no time to dodge my way through the crowds to the library, just hope for a train soon and home to lunch.

Down in the Powell Street station a stringy guy in reindeer antlers sings "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" with his guitar case open and he's good, the song pulls at me, but I have a train to catch and deeper in the station now another busker, this one a girl.

She looks unlikely, all pudge and colorless hair, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the station, guitar in her lap, but I get closer and now I can hear her voice, breaking free of the station and soaring up above the street, people are standing where they are to listen. She's singing "Hallelujah" and that's it, that's almost all I can take. I'm going to break into tears right here in the station. She finishes the song and I dig around in my purse to find all the quarters I can to drop in her case. Someone else is whispering his awe to her and she just says thanks and turns the page in her music.

A night later and already it's full dark at five. I'm in a coffee shop before strolling to a party, enough time to work on rewrites and I hear the familiar opening, it's John Cale's version, Hallelujah, and this time I think, yeah. Maybe the universe is speaking. We're on the edge of solstice, the earth turns and - miraculously - the weight shifts. Sun begins to rise a little earlier and hang in the sky a little longer.

Just hold on another week and watch. Hallelujah.

Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you
To a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

Baby, I've been here before.
I know this room, I've walked this floor.
I used to live alone before I knew you.

I've seen your flag on the marble arch,
But love is not a victory march,
No it's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah.

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

There was a time you let me know
What's really going on below,
Ah but now you never show it to me, do you?

Remember, yeah when I moved in you,
And the holy dove was moving too,
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah.

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

Maybe there's a God above,
All I ever learned from love
Is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.

But it's not a cry that you hear at night,
It's not somebody who's seen the light
No it's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah.

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn't much.
I couldn't feel, so I learned to touch.
I've told the truth, I didn't come all this way to fool you.

Yeah even though it all went wrong
I'll stand right here before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my lips but Hallelujah.

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah.
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah.

Weight

2008-12-02T21:16:00.000-08:00

On the bus tonight, a young white woman in neat sweats is getting off at my stop. Her hair is in a bun. She stands at the top of the stairs as the light above the door turns green. She bends at the waist, pushing at the doors without treading on the stairs.

She pushes with thumb and finger on the handle, then folds her arm back against her chest, then reaches out to push again. You need to step on the stairs to open the doors, but she doesn't know this, leaning gingerly over the gap to push against the doors one more time.

I make my way around the other passengers, and step heavily on the stair. The doors spring open. The woman launches out and over the stairs without touching them. She lands on one foot, darting up and across the street before the bus can close its doors and release the brakes.

I watch her sprint away, shouldering my bags and lagging by nearly half a block already. She pauses once to look behind her as the bus pulls around the corner, then turns back, her tidy bun gleaming in the dark.

A failure of imagination

2008-11-23T12:30:00.000-08:00

The movement of the historical moment beneath my feet has shut me up lately. I chose early on to make this a literary blog, not a political blog, but every time I begin a post, all I can think about is politics. So let me get this out of the way.

I was moved and exhilarated at the election of Barack Obama a few weeks ago. The next day, however, that joy was tempered as it became clear that Proposition 8 was going to pass here in California. This particular issue was deeply personal for me.

I was raised LDS, and I am still officially a member of that church, although I have been inactive for many years. My family and many of my friends are active members in good standing. Watching the church of my birth and my family put so much energy into the passage of this proposition has been painful.

Maybe it is a failure of imagination on my part, but despite my best efforts, I cannot see the compelling reason to strip away the right of gay people to marry.

A comment on a friend's website asked, "Why do they want the word marriage so much?"

This focused it all down to a single point for me. To me the question is, "Why do you want to be married? Why do you want the word marriage?"

"They" are not so different from you. Gay people want the same things straight people want (and have the same wide spectrum of wants as well). Did you grow up dreaming of being married? Did you imagine what your wedding dress would look like? Did you pick out your colors and flowers before you ever met your intended?

Now imagine all of that is true. You are still you, having the same dreams you have always had. And you meet and fall in love with the person you want to spend your life with, the person that all those fantasies centered around. But the person you love is someone the world around you says is someone you can't marry. Maybe there are a large number of churches (though not all) who believe it is a sin for you to love that person.

Does any of that change your wishes? Do you choose to be untrue to yourself and your love, and try to love someone the world approves of?

Do you foist a false marriage on someone you don't love, you can't love, in order to gain the approval of the world? (And what, then, have you done to the innocent other in this false marriage?) In order to obtain full citizenship in your society? Or do you quietly remain single and humbly take what crumbs the adults will allow to fall from the table?

Why is marriage important? Because marriage is the only way we have to choose and build our own family. We are born into a family, or we may be adopted into one, but when we marry someone, each party is freely choosing the other. A marriage makes the person you love legally your kin. No other civil contract can do this.

For those who believe in the words of Jesus Christ, it can be said simply: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

How would you react if a large group of people put vast amounts of money and energy into forbidding you to marry? Whatever else they may say, how loving would that seem to you?

Maybe my imagination has failed if I am unable to place myself in the position of the people who vigorously campaigned to make unlawful the marriages of many of my close friends, but if so, mine is not the only failure.

The ability to truly empathize is, I think, essential in a just society.

And here is where I see the problem of bringing politics in, because I can't end with just one issue. The prop 8 issue hit me close to where I live, but this should hit everyone:

5 at Guantanamo Ordered Released
Five men have been imprisoned and tortured by our government, and thus by all of us, for no reason at all. That we have allowed this to happen tells me that we have so very far to go. That we can, collectively, say that these people "deserved" this - that anyone "deserves" torture and no hope of justice - tells me that we have managed to convince ourselves that they are not people at all.

I'll go back to the way I usually write here. I can't write well or coherently about politics directly, but I hope that, at the bottom of every post, every little encounter I record, someone can see the fundamental reason I write: every human being is an individual with a soul. If your heart can beat for a moment with someone I see on the bus, maybe it can also beat with a man in a cell who has never seen his daughter, with a boy who dreams of being married one day, with a woman who wants to hold the hand of her wife in the hospital.

Update: I want to make absolutely clear that what I am talking about, what Prop 8 was about, is civil marriage. Religions are - and should remain - free to define what marriage means to them. Andrew Sullivan again puts it very well.

President Obama

2008-11-04T20:35:00.000-08:00

I am in tears. Soon, I'll be dancing in the street!

I think we've done a good thing.

Indian Summer

2008-10-24T15:16:00.000-07:00

So sorry for the long silence! I'm back now and seem to have my feet under me again...

Walking to the main library on an autumn evening, the sun casting long shadows on the ground. I see two men in vigorous conversation, arms waving. As I get closer, I see they're speaking sign language. It is an argument. One man's gestures get larger and faster, like he wants to scoop the whole street into his arms. In sign language, this counts as shouting.

The other man gestures back, quietly. The first man drops his arms to his sides. They look at each other, and the first man opens his arms. The second man steps into his embrace. The sun outlines them as they hold each other, then slowly separate, their hands on each other's shoulders. The first man lifts one hand, touching his fingertips to his chin, then moves the hand out toward the other man.

This means "Thank you."

On the train home later that evening; it's dark outside, but a breath of gentle air washes in when the doors open. A punk gets on the train. Four-inch double mohawk, pierced eyebrow, lip, ears. Studded collar and tattoos covering his arms and neck. Leather wristbands.

He's talking on his cell phone.

"I know, I know. She took it with her, and I don't begrudge her that, you know? It's just, I miss her."

His eyes fill with tears. He looks down at his hands, listening to the voice at the other end.

"I don't want to lose her," he says, his voice going hoarse.

My skirt blows around my legs as the doors open, and I step out into the night.

Why I haven't been blogging

2008-09-25T22:56:00.000-07:00

I'm volunteer coordinator for this:

If you're in San Francisco, check it out.

A little hope

2008-08-29T10:15:00.000-07:00

Naked hope, so sharp it's painful.

When I heard him speak four years ago, I felt the same thing. I wished - despairingly - that we were the kind of country that could elect someone like him President.

Yeah, he's just a guy, just a politician. I know this, too well. He won't save us. But if we take a chance on someone like this - someone who appeals to our better lights, who will say, "I am my brother's keeper" - if we take this chance, maybe we can save ourselves.

Maybe it will show we haven't given up on ourselves yet.

Boneshaker

2008-08-22T11:01:00.001-07:00

Walking to the bus from a doctor's appointment, I turn left, on impulse, down a small side street. It's mid-morning on a weekday, and there are no cars on the street.

I pass a domed building with wide, curving steps to the front door. The steps and Doric columns are pinkish marble. A small plaque tells me it's the Armenian Community Center. Beside it is a small chapel with a quiet garden in front, Gregory the Illuminator, Armenian Church. A young man, bag over his shoulder, turns sharply and disappears into the chapel. I think about going in, sitting in a cool pew, the scent of incense. Are non-Armenians welcome? What is the protocol? Does one cross oneself?

I turn right on Euclid Avenue. Something glides silently into my peripheral vision, snags at my eye, and I turn to look. It's a man in full bicycle-racing gear: lycra shorts and numbered jersey, sleek helmet that gives a feeling of speed. He is lean and muscled. He's riding an antique velocipede, a boneshaker, the front wheel almost as tall as me, holding himself still and upright, he moves at a stately pace down the road.

Two men are washing windows on my side of the street, one at the top of a ladder, the other holding the bottom. The man holding the ladder watches the velocipede pass, he can look at nothing else, he and I pause, and watch. The bicyclist stops at a light, balances for a few precious seconds, creeping forward and back, but finally he has to jump down. The light turns green and he's neatly in the seat again, he's moved so swiftly that I missed the moment. The window washer and I watch him turn and disappear around the corner.

I breathe in and breathe out, a space opened up inside my head, and I walk through soft morning air toward the bus.

Nostalgia is a drug, part 2

2008-08-10T20:44:00.000-07:00

Continued right away to give Geo a little something to read while she heals...

We ask the desk clerk (the twin who wears the dark glasses) for a Do Not Disturb sign. At least I think that's what I ask him. Behind his sunglasses, he gives no sign of even hearing me. I describe to him, in my parody of French, our adventure of the morning. We don't want another adventure, I believe I tell him.

He nods quietly, his sunglasses reflecting the light from the street.

We don't ride the metro in Paris. This surprises me a bit; I romanticize the metro - symbol of childhood freedom - it represents a big piece of my Paris memories. And I know how to find my way around from metro stops. Maybe that's one reason. I don't want to rely on ancient habits to find my childhood. I want a new route there.

And neither of us is interested in going underground and getting on another vehicle. We both want to walk. We've been cooped up too long; we want to wander and lose ourselves.

Paris is the place to lose yourself. People leave you alone. I appreciate this. When I was here as a kid, my family tried to teach me how to wear a "metro face." A metro face is stone cold, man. It tells strangers that you are not a soft touch, you are not interested in a date or a cheap watch. My sister had a great metro face, like a door coming down, shutting off her beautiful features behind bulletproof glass like the Mona Lisa. She looked like she was born here.

I looked like a goofy small-town kid from Utah. I'd give my gap-toothed grin to anyone, look people in the eye, chat with someone who tried to engage me. But here's the thing. Parisians don't engage.

I still have no metro face. I can shut it down some, if I'm paying close attention, but it takes a lot of concentration, and I can't keep it up for long. This gets me in trouble all over the world. Most often, it just means I get into some interesting conversations with colorful people. But it can be tiring, after a while. By the time we got to Paris, I was exhausted.

And I got to rest. In Paris, I can look people in the eye, I can smile at them, and they don't see it as an invitation. Parisians don't engage. This means a genuine rest for me. I can let my face do what it wants, and nobody expects anything from me.

I could have used a metro face in Provo much more than I need one in Paris.

As we walk, my bones loosen in their joints. I walk easily beside Mr. Billy, opening up, not caring where we go or how long it takes to get there. We follow side streets because they're small and curving and I see the wide doors I remember from this quarter. Behind these doors are broad courtyards and stairs leading to apartments or boarding-house rooms.

"Hey," says Mr. Billy, "I think the Luxembourg Gardens are right down there."

He points down a street. I can feel the past barreling in toward my chest; the pension was at one corner of Luxembourg.

We walk down the street, and my eyes are eating everything in our path.

"That's the metro stop," I say, pointing. I remember this. Climbing up and out of the metro onto a garden island in the street. I slow down. Many of the wide doors I remember have been replaced by slick storefronts. Children's clothing. High-end chocolate. None of this was here before, and I start to doubt myself. Maybe this isn't it. It's been thirty years. How would I know?

A paper store, called Marie Papier. This makes me smile, just a fraction. My mom's name was Marie, and she was a poet. A little joke, just for me.

Across the street is a patisserie. It's more than thirty years old, and it hasn't changed, it hasn't changed at all. I'm nine years old and pressing my forehead against the glass, counting my centimes for a mille feuilles or a chocolate eclair, dancing my eyes over cakes and trills of chocolate and fresh raspberries.

We're here. There, to the left, is the pension itself. It's a nondescript building, but for me it breathes and speaks stories into my mind. I can see the row of windows on the second floor, where the classrooms were. I would hang over the railing during class breaks to see what was happening in the street. The back window, where the French student stayed - the only one who wasn't part of our group - I had a crush on him. I don't remember his name, but he wore a scarf around his neck and little round glasses, and he would tell me, in English, that he was "teer-ed", and I would reply that I had fatigue.

I squeeze Mr. Billy's hand, drunk on memories. It's several minutes before I can move.

More to come...in the meantime, check out Mr. Billy's take on our adventures in France

Nostalgia is a drug

2008-08-10T12:29:00.000-07:00

Our first morning in Paris, and we're sleeping in. Blissfully, hedonistically, sleeping late. Until we hear the doorknob rattle. We both scramble up, clutching the bedclothes to our chests, staring at the door.

"The maid?" says Mr. Billy.

"We have the key," I say.

In Parisian hotels, you leave your key at the front desk when you go out. No danger of losing the key, and the hotel always knows when you're in your room. No "Do not disturb" signs, but that shouldn't be a problem, should it?

The doorknob stops, and we stare for a moment before breathing, sighing, then snuggling back under the covers. The fingers of a dream are just creeping over my brain when the rattling starts up again. And then the unmistakable sound of a key sliding into a lock.

We leap into action: I lunge for the door, Mr. Billy for the safety of the bathroom.

"Nononononononon" I babble through the door, holding tight to the knob. The door opens an inch and I search the dusty files in my brain for the right phrase:

"Nous sommes ici! Nu! Nous sommes nu!"

I'm unsure if an announcement that we are naked will be enough of a deterrent, but the door closes at last, and I hear footsteps recede down the hall. Mr. Billy peeks around the bathroom door and I collapse on the bed, laughing hysterically.

"Well, we're up now. Wanna go see Paris?"

We have three days in Paris. No agenda, no appointments. We'd planned this break in the city without any ideas of hitting the tourist hot spots. In a way, Paris had been a big blank spot in my idea of our trip to France. We have no plans at all. We step out into the city, and I realize that we must not be far from the pension where I attended school when I lived here as a kid.

I use "attended school" loosely in this context. I was nine, and my dad was directing a University Study Abroad here. "School" was college classes at the pension where the students stayed. My family stayed in an apartment a few metro stops away. I completed the 4th grade via home study, and attended the college courses for fun. I got an A+ in French, but my 12-year-old brother showed me up with an A+++.

We were in Paris for less than a year, but that time was crazily overbalanced in my memory. Up until then, I was a kid from small-ish college town Provo, Utah. I could walk to my best friend's house & play in the field across the street. We could walk to school together and ride our bikes to the swimming pool, but to really get anywhere, I had to be driven.

One week in Paris with a metro map and a carte orange, and I could go anywhere I wanted in the city - all by myself. I hung out with college kids. I ate crepes made fresh from a street cart. My brother and I did the shopping for the whole family, because we'd picked up the language quicker than the older folks. It was paradise. This word has been overused, its juice and flavor squeezed out, but it was paradise in the full, fat, juicy sense of the word.

So I feign nonchalance when I propose to Mr. Billy that we try to find the pension. I don't want to make it a mission; that fear of disappointment is still strong, and most of what I want is unstructured time with Mr. Billy. We wander as aimless as eight-year-olds, pointing at buildings and eyeglass designs. We watch Parisians on the shared bicycles that belong to the city; you can pick one up just about anywhere, insert a token, and ride it to another part of the city, then drop it off.

A lot of people ride scooters. Helmet designs are particularly attractive here.

We wander, and we stop to eat hot crepes on the street, and we casually glance at the maps that are all over the city. I laugh when I see we've been walking in exactly the opposite direction from the pension.

To be continued...

I love Paris in the springtime

2008-07-19T12:08:00.000-07:00

I was ready to be disappointed. The last time I was in Paris, I was twenty-one years old. I lived here when I was nine. But with age comes disillusion and cold, mature assessment. Paris would not - could not - wow me again.

Boy, was I wrong.

It starts the minute we leave the train station. I spy La Rotonde and the Café de Flore out the cab windows. It's all I can do to keep from squealing. Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre used to hang out here. We step out onto the narrow street and that old Paris smell - diesel exhaust and chocolate and a soft breath from somewhere above the buildings - spirals into my brain and sets the fireworks going.

We drag our bags behind us (the cab was unable to pull directly up to the hotel door) to our little hotel on the corner of the Rue d'Odessa. We learn later that this is where the finalists for "Nouvelle Star," the French version of "American Idol" are staying, but we would never have known: the place is small and sleepy. The desk clerks appear to be identical twins; one wears dark glasses. The elevator can only hold Mr. Billy with the bags, so I take the scenic route up the curling staircase.

I lean out the window of our tiny room. To my right is Montparnasse tower, and directly below are sidewalk cafés.

"Let's go out and walk around," I say to Mr. Billy. I feel like I'm nine years old again, or twenty-one. I bounce on my toes. "Let's go see Paris."

And so we do.

You gotta get in where you fit in

2008-07-12T12:33:00.000-07:00

To get to the main branch of the library from my doctor's office, I walk through the Tenderloin.

Past the legit theaters on Geary ('Tis a Pity She's a Whore, A Chorus Line, a one-man show about Shakespeare), then left on Hyde. It's morning still. A man walking toward me has a vivid bruise over his right eye, staining eyelid, brow, and all the way up to the top of his bald head. His toothless cheeks suck in against his gums.

Someone whistles behind me. I don't turn. They whistle again, and a skinny white guy at the next corner turns to grin past me. He raises a chin. A voice from behind me asks how his night went. The man across the street chuckles. The light changes, and I cross toward him, seeing the net of scars across his cheek and jaw. His hair stands out in tufts.

"You find your pot, huh?" the voice behind me calls.

He nods vaguely, grinning, and waves them off, crossing against the light. He heads toward the mini-park, a tiny green space tucked in among the buildings.

Ahead of me is a woman with bright blond hair hanging to her shoulders. She wears shining burgundy lycra tights under a tiny black miniskirt. A blue and green scarf is tied around one ankle, and she wobbles slightly in her green heels. I look for her face as we pass storefront windows, but all I can see are her big Jackie-O sunglasses.

At the library, volunteers are unloading books onto tables out front: "Linux for Dummies" and "Europe on $5 a Day." Passers-by gaze at the books, and the volunteers work silently.

On the front door is a notice - the library is closed until noon. It's a long time until noon.

I walk toward the Muni stop, disappointed. A man sitting on the library's low stone wall catches my eye. He looks big and healthy, and he smiles widely at me. He wears a knit cap with bright orange flames that stand out against his blue-black skin. It looks like a graphic representation of his thoughts.

"You gotta get in where you fit in," he says to me. "If you don't, that's it!"

I smile back at him and nod. The sun shines out from behind a cloud, and I head for my train.

4th of July

2008-07-04T10:09:00.001-07:00

Note: Digby just happened to link to one of my favorite songs, so I'm copying her today....

Music Video:4TH OF JULY (by X)

Music Video Code provided by Video Code Zone

My doctor ordered me to take a vacation

2008-06-30T20:17:00.000-07:00

...a real vacation, he said. No obligations, no running around. A good, solid rest.

No problem, I said. I'm going to France.

A direct flight is entirely too expensive, so we fly through Montreal. Nine o'clock in the morning on Sunday, we are on our way to the airport. At security, Mr. Billy is pulled aside. Suspicious character, Mr. Billy. Shifty eyes and whatnot.

He walks away with an official airport security shoehorn in his pocket. Thanks, security guys!

Eight hours or so later, we're in Montreal, or so they tell us. It's French-language training wheels. We wander through the clean, modern airport, the Limbo of air travel. Duty Free, bars, restaurants, endless shining hallways.

We are stuffed into another metal tube with wings, shaken and buzzed and fed and movied for another seven hours or twelve hours or fifteen days. Plastic shades are lowered over oval windows, and some people sleep.

Sleep does not come for us.

We touch earth at last. Paris. My head rings, a long, sustained note.

The training wheels are off, now, and my brain struggles to come up with the language I once knew. Mr. Billy has no French, so it's all mine to fuck up.

We follow the signs to the train station, down in the belly of the airport. We're scheduled to meet my dad on the Côte d'Azur this evening. It's Monday afternoon, local time.

We find the station. Victory! Now, we need to buy train tickets. TGV - Very Big Fast - the bullet train south. There are kiosks and vending machines and counters and signs and signs and my brain rings and the words mean nothing. Like writing in dreams, the words shift and change the moment I think I've decoded them. I leave Mr. Billy with the bags while I try to find something I can understand.

There, a queue of people, a sign that says something like what I need, I can't even form the question in English. I stand in line and I am standing in line for a lifetime and then I'm at the front of it. I walk up to the man at the counter and try my thirty-years rusty French.

"Two tickets, if you please, for San Raphael. Or Frejus."

He answers me in English. The train leaves in half an hour. All is well.

"Don't leave me for so long, next time," says Mr. Billy when I return. He's been sitting here, prisoner with bags. No language, no idea where I am. I'm hungry and thirsty, but don't dare spend a single precious Euro cent. The train tickets were much more than we expected. I can't even process the exchange rate. We can't afford this trip, not even close. What was I thinking?

There are no drinking fountains.

It's all right, though, our train is coming. We find the correct platform, we know which car we need to board. It's assigned seating on the TGV. The train arrives, and we look for our car.

No, we're at the wrong end of the train. We run the length of the platform. The car numbers are going the wrong way. No, somehow we missed our car. The note sings in my head, and thoughts are slow to swim to the surface. We should just get on, somewhere, but I can't articulate the thought, can't act on it. We're running, dragging our suitcases. I can't even see a door that's open, all we need is an open door, but it's too late, all the doors close, we're running and the train is moving, pulling away.

I can't speak, French or English. I make a panicked face at the attendants on the platform. They shrug at me. What's the fuss, they say. There'll be another train in twenty minutes.

Okay, okay, twenty minutes. I can deal with that. I'd better see if I need to change our tickets, I say to Mr. Billy. I have to leave him alone again. Back up to the queue. The minutes are ticking away. I get to the counter just in time. The platform attendants lied. It's another three hours until the next train.

We get to know the station very well. You have to pay to use the toilet. You have to pay for water you can drink. We sit, and we wait.

The train is twenty minutes late. We have to transfer in Marseilles. No problem; we have an hour between trains.

The train arrives thirty minutes late, and we get on the right car. We'll be all right now.

We watch the countryside out the window, but nothing sinks in. My ears sing. I'm tracking our progress on a map. The sun goes down. The next stop is Marseilles. It's dark outside, and the train slows, then stops. We look at the man across from us. He shrugs.

Some knocks. A clang. A loud report. A voice comes on the intercom. I can't understand these things in the U.S., let alone here. The announcer monologues. Clearly, it's quite a story. The man across from us looks at us for a moment.

"They don't know what's wrong," he says.

The process repeats. Knocks, clangs, the engine lurches, then silence. The voice monologues.

"They still don't know what's wrong," says our companion.

Again the ruckus, again the monologue. It's almost time for our transfer.

"They have no power," says the man across from us. He explains that we should still make our transfer - a lot of people are in the same boat, we just need to follow them.

The train begins to roll. The engine doesn't start up; they must have realized that there was enough of a slope to coast into the station. Softly as a dream, we pass graffitied walls and warehouses, and slide into the station.

We fall out of the train in the crush of bodies, dragging our corpse-suitcases. There are uniformed rail employees waiting on the platform.

"Transfer to St. Raphael?" I say, in French.

"Hurry!" says the rail worker. "It's leaving! Hurry up, hurry up!"

We step up the pace, rushing along with the crowd. The crowd rushes through the train station and out into the parking lot. Mr. Billy and I turn around, rushing back the way we came. There's the train, I see it now, we're running toward the train as it pulls away from the platform.

French comes flowing out of my mouth. I curse the rail worker eloquently.

"I told you to hurry," she says, shrugging.

"You didn't say where. Apparently that was too hard for you. Is your arm broken? Are you unable to point the way to the platform? I asked you about our transfer and all you said was hurry up. This was not helpful!"

She shrugs.

It's almost midnight, and we're in the Marseilles train station. The next train is tomorrow morning. I do what any grownup would do. I call Daddy.

"Don't worry," he says, "We'll pick you up."

It's more than an hour's drive, and my seventy-something-year-old Dad cheerfully suggests getting on the road at midnight to rescue us.

I find a bathroom (a pay bathroom, taking only coins, which requires me to buy water at McDonald's to get some change first), lock myself in the stall, and cry.

Mr. Billy is waiting out at the curb for me. We stare into the Marseilles night, nodding at the cat-sized rats that keep us company, and wait for Dad to arrive.

Sudden fall, part 2

2008-05-31T21:52:00.000-07:00

(Writing from a seaside villa in France. Life is grand, for you kind and hardy souls still reading. A break was called for, and a break this is. The story from before, however, continues...)

"I think I might've cracked a tooth," I say from the bathroom. I'm inspecting the damage to my face in the mirror. Not too bad. A scrape from the tip of my nose to my mouth. It jogs a bit to the right as it courses over my top lip. My boss will tell me later today it looks like the scar after harelip surgery.

Right now it just looks like I have a nosebleed.

A goose-egg is growing on my chin. It's already starting to bruise up.

I go back to the living room, where Mr. Billy is icing his foot with a bag of frozen peas. I get another bag and hold it to my face. I look over at Mr. Billy. "We're the disaster twins."

He tells me I shouldn't go in to work. I don't answer that. In only a few days, we'll be leaving the country for a three week vacation. There's just too much to do to miss a day.

I do, however, take time out to see the dentist.

"That's not a crack," she says, peering in (while I breathe out, relieved). "That's bits of sidewalk. I'll just buff it out."

My teeth appear to be intact, but there may be other damage. She can't tell - not even with x-rays - because of the swelling. I may have fractured my jaw.

"Soft food for a month," she says. Soft food? Is she crazy? I'm going to France! No crusty French bread?

"Just the soft, inside part."

Blecch.

On the bus back to work, I think of all the delicious soft French foods I can eat, while people's eyes slide off me. The bruise is in full bloom already. I feel like I'm wearing blinking lights on my face.

Eclairs, pot de creme, onion soup, pate.

Nobody wants to look at me. This isn't an insouciant, adventurous bruise. Something along the cheekbone, maybe, would speak of a branch in my way as I snowboarded down a pristine mountain.

Brie, chocolate mousse.

A bruise on the chin, a scrape on the mouth - on a woman's mouth - these are ugly. People see only bad crazy things that end up here. Somewhere out on the edge of sweaty half-dreams, where the money runs out, the addictions take over, that thing lives. That thing that most never ask themselves - How far can I fall and still live? A face like mine answers, Farther than you dare imagine.

Cafe au lait, I think. Ratatouille.