Thursday, June 25, 2009
Bag Man
Welcome, new friends from Editorial Emergency - hope you have a comfortable visit. And for those for whom these words are meaningless, I have even more for you at the EE site where I guest-columned this month - check it out here!
It was an iconic morning, the stuff of childhood memories and Lifetime TV movie opening sequences. The sun shone with dappled brilliance on broad golden sands; the sea gleamed azure, turquoise and cerulean; breakers foamed furiously and crashed with comforting thunder.
We were eight: two families, four parents, three kids, one big happy poodle. We’d come to Baker Beach, a classic San Fran strand with the wide Pacific on our left and a postcard view of the big orange bridge to our right. It’s the beach nearest my front door, just a five-minute drive through fashionable avenues and a short hike down rail-tie steps hemmed in with effusions of wildflowers. Not yet ten ay-em, we’d made an early morning of it and reveled in our uncontested possession of a space so beautiful as to leave us gaping despite that all of us had been there countless times before. The lather of the roaring surf, the verdant knuckles of headland hills across the white-capped strait, festoons of swooping pelicans above our heads and the shrieks of children’s frolics ringing in our ears… “Pride of ownership” might rightly describe how we felt about that beach. Our beach.
My silent paternal alarm system went off the moment I sensed him stomping toward us. The only unthreatening thing about him was his flip-flops. His big naked feet rose up into big heavy legs, and his lumbering gait suggested something amiss - alcohol, anger, diminished capacity, or maybe even something worse. His basketball shorts hung low and baggy, swishing suspiciously as he trudged along; he carried a black plastic trash bag that dangled at his side with pregnant menace. He was shirtless, which I supposed was within the bounds of beach propriety, except for what his shirtlessness revealed: a heavy, waistband-overhanging gut, brazen and rotund; a chest and arms that suggested great strength fading to dissipation; and who could overlook that ink - scads of garish eagles and anchors, anvils and hammers, cryptic script and murky tribalisms, all in a bluish-green monochrome that covered his belly, chest, and arms from navel to clavicle to elbows, not with the coherence of yakuza sleeves but more like a series of individual efforts jammed together over years on an ad-hoc basis as the spirit moved him and finances allowed. Was that glint at his nipple a piercing, or just perspiration? Did I really want to know?
His thick neck rose from slumping shoulders to a wide chin that held his mouth in a grim grimace. Tightly pursed lips crushed each other flat between a moustache like a fingerswipe of greasepaint, and a stinger beardlet that only intensified his glower. His nose looked like it knew what it was to be punched, and his brow, dripping brutality and menace, shadowed eyes that hid behind coal-black wraparound shades. Crowning it all was dark greasy hair under a ratty baseball cap. Altogether, he had a very distinctive look - one that threatened everything I held dear.
Of course, all this I saw in quick, stolen glances. I couldn’t take my eyes off the kids, after all - they’d charge the surf and be swept instantly to China. Plus, I was scared of this interloper. With his sour scowl and ambiguous sack, I knew not of what he was capable, his goals, his motivations. I didn’t want to check him out too closely - subtlety was impossible on that empty beach, and he looked like a guy with a short fuse already half burned through. All I knew, from the edge of my peripheral vision, was that he had the look of one who could not be trusted. He represented everything I’d come to this beach to escape. His presence caused me turmoil and concern.
Then he did something that took me aback - something absolutely, utterly wrong. Right there on the beach, naked to the waist, in front of God and Neptune, he bent forward, picked up something from the sand, and stuffed it in his plastic sack. Then he took a few steps and did it again, and again, and again. There was litter on my beach; this was not unknown to me. I’d even seen a dead bird rotting in the sand not far from where we’d laid our blankets. And this guy, this malevolent encroacher on my golden paradise, was, piece by dirty piece, clearing the trash, doing work I hadn’t even thought to undertake. Step and stop, lower and lift, snatch and stuff: slowly he made his way along the beach, improving it by increments of refuse for everyone who’d follow in his outsized footprints.
As we lounged and played and munched our little snacks, he slowly filled his garbage sack, making pass after pass across the beach and back again, down by the surf, back up by the bluffs. It got to the point that I couldn’t stand to keep my weather-eye upon him any longer. All the evil I’d imputed to his ink-stained soul was coming back as a blemish on my own, and the guilt I felt could not have even fit into his bulging bag of garbage.
Camcorder screenshot from Baker Beach trip: Kel and Jesse playing by the water’s edge. And friend.
