Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Geary Depredations Part 1: The Grubby Groper

So there’s this guy - I’ll tell you about him: the Grubby Groper of Outer Geary.  I don’t know if he’s an inspiration or an exasperation to me, a cautionary tale or a mythic tragedy or what.  All I know is that he’s been shuffling around in my head for long enough.  Now I’m going to let him try his luck in yours. 

My piece of Geary Boulevard is broad and busy, punctuated regularly by sidestreets thick with duplexes and coruscating with cross-traffic.  Heavy buses and impertinent delivery trucks navigate six lanes of traffic amid innumerable autos observing innumerable international traditions of roadsmanship. It’s a polyglot community of bakeries, pharmacies, liquor stores and suchlike civilizational profundities.  Sidewalks are lined on one side by parking meters and parked cars, and on the other by storefronts that hiccup with recessed doorways opening inward to commercial depths.  It’s a sufficiently complex environment for any of us, but I really don’t know how the groper manages it at all. 

The groper in this case is an old man in a windbreaker and tan cordoury pants - I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in anything else; I doubt they’ve been cleaned in years, judging by the thick patches of crustspatter festooning his chest and the dank acreage of black stains rubbed into his thighs.  His skin is liver-spotted and wattle-creased; his hair is brillo-pad stiff and soap-scum grey.  But most meaningful, perhaps, are the sunglasses shielding the middle third of his face: they’re dark brown plastic jobs that make no nod to fashion, cutting crudely across his forehead in a straight line and drooping deeply down either side of his nose with humorless heaviness.  They’re the kind of shades one might receive from an opthamologist, to fit over one’s regular glasses.  They are the shades of temporary blindness, and he’s wearing them always. 

He walks down Geary, unimaginably slowly, slower than slow.  It isn’t even walking, really - it’s an incremental shuffle, a bare slip of one toe past the other with mindnumbing deliberation.  Even so, that progress, slight though it is, follows only after that of his breathlessly outstretched fingertips.  He walks, always, with one hand (if not both) extended before him protectively.  He leans forward on a creaky spine, his jacket stiff over his bent frame, his hand probing into the unknowable obscurities of the void that incessantly faces him. 

If there’s anything on the street side of the sidewalk - a wall, a rack of newspapers, a pallet of melons, whatever - he traces his way forward using that as his guide, dragging a thick filthy fingertip almost lasciviously along, creeping at his usual glacial pace, with his other hand still reaching forward to fend off imagined, anticipated disasters.  When there’s a doorway or some other gap in his tactile orientation structure, though, he locks up.  Both hands lift up before him, and he cuts back to taking sub-measurable steps.  He seems aware enough of his environment occasionally to ask a passerby - once, me - to help him to the wall again.  His voice is an eastern european caricature as he flags you down with repeated pleas that somebody eventually answers in the same way that somebody will eventually look for a crying baby.  In my case, he started begging beside me, “Sonny, please!” They were well-chosen words and I stopped on a dime.  His hand felt like snakeskin and I couldn’t tell the dirt spots from the liver spots on his head.  “Hep me - hep me get bak t’th’ wall.” I guided him, the work of a second or less except that this guy is a brittle old twig and I couldn’t push him too fast… “Hep me,” he’d plead, “Is’t very far?” Not at all, three steps forward.  He recoiled visibly at the idea of such an audacious trek; in the end it took several minutes to get him back to the safety of the shopfront less than ten feet away. 

And then, once I’d carefully, thoughtfully, courteously catered to his helplessness, he’d had the chutzpah to try to engage me in conversation - about the weather, the neighborhood, changes, manipulations; his heavy jaws chomping at each comment, his jowls hollowing around the vowels.  I shook myself free, extricated myself and went on my way, leaving him to fend for himself with the many upcoming doorways on that friendly neighborhood block.  I had neither the time nor the energy for his incapacities.  I left him barely inching along, moving by angstroms, hands stretched out before him and tense with awful expectations, face a little averted from the impending injury he imagined as he made his anguished way down three squares of open sidewalk. 

As it turned out, I know he survived that walk because I’ve seen him many times since then, always on the same block.  He’s always in the same clothes and the same stricken posture, traveling at the same infinitesimal rate, perpetually dislocated and begging for guidance, blindly seeking his place from behind those all-obscuring sunglasses.  That is to say, he’s always exactly where he always is.  And that’s the grubby groper of Geary Boulevard.  Watch out for him.  You can be pretty sure he’s not watching out for you. 

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Feel Me

I hopped the bus a little late last week and had to sit way in the back, but at least I still got an in-facing bench.  The back is where the action is, I told myself - where the young people congregate and excitement is born.  Whereas my old halfway-back seat is where the crabby grannies demand that I get up to give them the seat I’ve just gotten all warmed up for myself.  It was for the best, I told myself.  And then for some reason I took out my notebook.  Premonition is a funny thing, sometimes. 

Down in the raunchier part of town (and I mean that in the not-nice way), three thugs boarded.  All were young, maybe early 20s; all were dressed in jeans and sweats and seemed in excessively good cheer.  One wore wraparound shades; one had gold braces on his teeth; and one had big glassless frames on his face.  This glassless guy was really having a good time.  They were all laughing and grinning but glassless was loud, too - shouting, hooting, gesturing broadly and calling witness to heaven, or at least to whomever would listen to him, which was everyone in that crowded bus’ audience captivity chamber.  We were stuck there with him and I was going to hear everything he said, whether I wanted to or not. 

The three stood in the stepwell for the rear exit for several minutes, and the way they all huddled together with heads down roused my attention.  I suspected what they were doing but I couldn’t see clearly… but within a few moments I could tell by smell.  I was pretty sure no one had loosed an angry skunk on the bus.  That meant that the powerful scent of pine and biology that permeated the air was most likely caused by dank chronic.  That’s right, conservative blogosphere: I think these guys were rolling a joint.  Right there on the bus.  I didn’t know whether to chastise or applaud them but I chose the discreet path and kept my mouth shut and my eyes on my notebook.  They were having fun but I didn’t know if that could be counted on in the long term. 

Shortly after they had finished their craft project, glassless stepped up out of the stairwell and started waving his handicraft around.  It looked like a tiparillo, one of those skinny cigars that used to be advertised on television, but this time it was all made out of marijuana.  Glassless was shouting louder now, howling out his glee in the narrow bus aisle; his friends were content to smile and nod and shake their heads at him and at each other as he reached regular crescendos of hilarity.  He kept calling out to them, “my brothas,” “my cousins,” that sort of thing.  He kept introducing his ideas, and then self-confirming them, with the phrase “Can ya feel me?” He shuffled through his voluminous pockets, pulling out and examining what appeared to be dozens of small ziplock plastic baggies stuffed with dark green buds.  And as much as anything else, he talked politics. 

He was really excited about Obama, and he made no bones about it.  He shouted out how “the white - SO CALLED - house is appropriately placed.  It’s not in the middle of no nice condos and neighborhoods and shit; it’s in the ghetto.  It’s the capitol of the ghetto and it’s surrounded by niggas!  It’s all niggas up in there!  Tha’s why it’s appropriately placed!  Ya feel me, my cousins!” He insisted “Barak Obama my daddy but he don’ know it yet!  He went and got with my momma and she didn’t never tell him!  And now he’s got me and I gonna walk right up to that white house and bring all my shit!  Time to play some cards in the Oval Office!  Time to throw some craps in the ballroom, ya feel me?  Ya feel me, my brotha!”

He went on and on, with crudeness and profanity, waving that enormous joint around and threatening always to light it up right there.  His friends said nothing, egging him on with their smiles, but bothering no one.  But glassless, he was classless, and he made a lot of people uncomfortable.  And elderly woman with her two granddaughters sat near me and was complaining quietly to herself, about how it was disrespectful, that there were children present, that they didn’t know how important it was that a man of color had been elected.... she herself was of an age to have experienced institutionalized racism in person, and I saw the pain in her eyes as she saw young black men behaving so fecklessly.  “Don’ laugh, girls,” she impotently admonished them.  “He’s just nothin’ and nobody.  You know we don’ talk like that a-tall.”

But in the end I don’t think that glassless was as impertinent as he sounded.  He didn’t have a vocabulary for it, didn’t have the experience to make a cozy context for it, but I think he was genuinely proud to be able to disclaim about Barak Obama.  In his way he was paying homage, though he didn’t exactly know how.  But with that blunt fatty between his long delicate fingers, and those ridiculous empty frames surrounding tired eyes that had seen entirely too much, he couldn’t hold back his joy and he shared it with all of us as best he could.  “I don’ need to look up to no rap star no more - “ he crowed, “ - fukkin’ rappers are idiots.  They can go back where they come from.  I be lookin’ up to the presiden’ now.  I got somebody real to look up to.  You can feel me, cousins.  Feel that one.” And really, I think I could.

So, that was a bit of fun.  Now for the hovercraft full of eels:

In the Presidio, not far from where we used to run Cosmo off leash, there’s a forest rehabilitation project and all sorts of earthmovers and trail-layers.  But just 50 yards or so farther on, we found some little houses built of windfallen twigs in the downhill lee of larger trees.  Some were mere pup tents but some were pretty damn elaborate.  It was chilling to see them there, waiting for the return of their solitary dispossessed occupants, so I took a photo and perpetuated the discomfort:

Here’s Zach playing at one twig tent that had been started but not built up very far:

Changing gears quickly, here’s a photo of the nastiest sign I’ve ever seen for an open bar.  I think it’s in the window of the “Date Rape Tavern.” And yes, it does change colors randomly. 

Finally, as a burst of optimism at the tail end of what has turned out to be a somewhat glum post, I offer this: the sun setting down the Bush Street canyon, from my Market Street bus stop. 

Those days of sunlight when I leave work are now well behind me.  I think it’s time to hit that road and call it my own.  Have a delightful administration, now - ya feel me? 

Sunday, November 09, 2008

Reposted Wapitis, Kitchen Genius, and the Original Yah: A Blog Post that’s Sort of Like Gorp

I continue to get a fair share of my paltry few visitors as the result of their search for “Elky Summers”.  You youngsters may not know that that’s a crappy grandpa pun about a berlin-born actress of the late mid-twentieth-century, Elke Sommer, renowned from blockbusters such as “the Double McGuffin“ or the “Night in the Harem” episode of “Fantasy Island.“ Anyway, these friendly folk do a search for Elke and they find this site because of some elk photos I put up in 2004 but that disappeared in one of my various migrations from one host to another.  Anyway, I re-posted them.  Now if someone is looking for Elke Sommers and finds my site by mistake, at least I can show him some cool wapitis and ungulates.  No, seriously.  Enjoy, you craven ogler of germanic hotties.  I refrain from the “rack” jokes but you are warmly invited to make up the deficit. 

This morning’s pancakes were my best ever, I daresay.  The batter had a light even consistency so I could easily ladle it out onto the griddle, which I allowed to get hot but kept unoiled till the last moment so the oil didn’t sear and spoil; I added the frozen blueberries later than I usually do, at the last moment even, and that kept the batter nice and light in color, not a thick muddy purple; the spices - cinnamon and cardamom - were well-chosen and properly apportioned; the cakes cooked up light and fluffy, with golden-brown sears on each side but rising with airy abandon between them; I even flipped them all accurately and on time so every pancake came out looking as good as it tasted.  It put me on a kitchen rush, what can I say, so I’ll also talk up our new kyocera ceramic veggie peeler, which I used earlier today to peel a freaking GRAPE I love this tool, especially since our prior peeler was a crude twig with a blade from some manicure scissors taped to it. 

Hell, I’m so overflowing with the spirit here, let me just add a kitchen tip: when you’re cooking ground meat, be it beef, turkey, pork, veal, or an extruded sausage, which tastes just as good as it sounds, make sure you stick around and make sure the meat breaks down into the smallest pieces and doesn’t just fry up in big chunks.  The big chunk fry is not as tasty and it’s harder to incorporate evenly into other dishes in which this tasty ground meat can be used.  Oh and measure things using measuring spoons over a little bowl.  It’s way too easy to make a mess using those little suckers. 

Which leads me to another brilliant genius move I invented today au cuisine: we wound up - AGAIN - with a little can of tomato paste, of which we’d used 2 tablespoons and the rest was going to be YET ANOTHER experiment in low-temperature mold colonization.  We needed to freeze the tomato paste, dammit, and in a way that wouldn’t require us to thaw the whole thing just to use a little of it.  My BGM: I lined an ice cube tray with clingwrap, put a few tablespoons of paste into four of them, covered them up with a little more wrap, and let them freeze.  A few hours later I could pull them out of the tray without leaving any trace or stain of that very pungent, fast-staining stuff on my white cube trays.  The four nuggets of paste now sit individually wrapped in a freezer bag, awaiting my pastely pleasure. 

One additional kitchen tip that I don’t use is putting all the similar silverware in the same part of the cutlery caddy in the dishwasher - all the knives together, then the forks, then the tongs, then the skewers, then the jaws of life… that way you don’t have to separate the forks and knives when you put stuff away, it’s already separated for you.  Someone in our house says that’s too much effort on the front end for an insignificant savings of effort on the back end, but I’m not sure.  I am not constitutionally opposed to front-loading my back end, but then again, I’m not sure what I’m talking about anymore.

There may be more to say about kitchens, but I think that this is enough for now.  I have been reading “Wind in the Willows” to Zach and I just got through “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.” That is some freaky juvenile literature.  I’m going back to my blacklight strobe closet.  Oh, but one final notion: Z has Flintstones chewable vitamins, as I did at his age, with the distinction that I knew something about the Flintstones at the time and he does not.  SO I loaded him up an episode from the first season and we watched it this morning on You Tube.  The overt sexism, the brutal slapstick, the smirking acceptance of spousal abuse and the omnipresent laughtrack that rode the animated program like a tick on an overweight picnicker, none of these really caught my attention.  What I couldn’t help noticing was that Fred kept getting excited about doing something and would shout out “Ya-hoooo!” That’s right, Jerry Yang, he wasn’t shouting out Yabba Dabba Nuthin’.  It was Ya-Hoooo straight down the line.  I could have sworn he had a different catchphrase, but I guess that was an ad lib somewhere down the line.  The Dabba Doo was a Johnny Come Lately.  Only the Yah was truly with us from the outset.  I think there’s something theological about this, but the blacklight strobe closet calls.