Thursday, December 16, 2004
Death of the Ghoul
I guess by now it’s as many as 10 years ago, but maybe it’s more like seven. I’m not sure, really; I didn’t actually track it. But, however long it’s been since last he haunted my streets, I think he’s back again.
There are a lot of homeless people in California, and in San Francisco in particular, and quite a few of them around here have taken advantage of my own neighborhood’s many parks and greenbelts, like the one across from my house. I get to recognize these guys if they stick around for a while or if they come back regularly. Some are essentially permanent fixtures, benign, more to be pitied than feared - the guy who waits at the bus stop smoking stubs; the big guy who used to have that nice dog; the sadfaced man who spits in a styrofoam cup and sleeps outside the bagel shop....
But there are also sometimes men who roam our streets seemingly out of control, utterly empty, without even any remnant of an interior left to broach. I steer clear of these, and even gregarious old Cosmo shies away from their invariably overenthusiastic, drunken, pisssoaked salutations.
Got the picture? Well, this one guy was one of the worst of these. Tall and stringy with a mullet and a scragglebeard, camos and a backpack and tattered basketball shoes.... you could tell he was trouble by the combination of three factors: his lousy posture, always tilted to the ground as if his actual fall from grace had been temporarily arrested just before he landed in purgatory; by the vacant hungry leer in his vacant hungry eyes; and by his unmitigated filthiness. He made dirt look clean, and even from a distance he stank badly.
For a while he ran with a couple other hard cases, but they didn’t seem to me quite so far gone as he was; I could never imagine how they withstood his proximity as he crowded next to them to hisswhisper some foul utterance at them, usually concluding with a mirthless barking laugh in their faces. This guy seemed pretty much totally lost and, frankly, he scared me. I never knew what he was capable of, and such dehumanization struck a cold chord in my soul. One morning I actually thought I saw him curled up dead in a doorway on Clement Street; I was wrong, he was back on the streets in a couple of months, the worse for wear but persevering through his uncleanliness and degradation.
And then one night I was taking Coz across the street for his final evening piddle. There were, at that time, several big pines and eukes and downed boughs covered with ivy and nasturtium at the far edge of the greenbelt. Coz nosed up in the dark against this dense undergrowth - and suddenly a ghastly phantom of a man, a hideously hopeless homeless haggard, sprang to his feet from his bedroll from behind the low shelter of a dead viney bough just a few feet in front of us, shouting, screaming, his gaunt face a rictus of hateful fear; and Coz stood still, said nothing at all; and I went rigid too, and bellowed back in inarticulate horror; and there we stood, ten feet apart, a downed bough and a mastiff mute between us, the two of us screaming till our breath was gone; and when I had no more screams to scream at him I backed away, dragging the shocked dog - dragged him back indoors and up the stairs, and then I went to bed and tried to go to sleep, my heart still pounding and my throat suddenly hoarse.
But sleep came reluctantly that night and, regardless that this street ghoul seemed eventually to disappear from my streets and parks, I never did put the incident entirely out of my mind. I recall it still when I take Coz across the street on dark evenings. Even though many of the trees and boughs are gone and the vines no longer cover the ground to hide the absent focus of my fears, I always remember where he sprang at me and I gather my strength there against him despite the years it’s been since last I saw him coiled like a sick starving snake in my woods....
I’ve been thinking of writing about that night, off and on, for years, but the tale never seemed to resolve properly so I let it go. Still, it kept coming back to me, in images that scrounged for words in my head. I most recently recalled these events as I watched a new neighborhood fixture stagger toward me one recent morning along the sidewalk by the bus stop. This was an old man, bent over with weakness and hunger and booze and sickness and all the terrible weight of the world… I’d seen him several times before in the preceding few months, usually leaning over a garbage can at a corner near my house. It’s one of those big city cans with a cover welded over the top, and he’d station himself next to it, supporting his paltry weight against its sturdy solidity. I’d see him there when I’d leave in the morning, and he’d often be leaning there still when I returned at night. Frankly, he depressed me, with his bent staggering gait as he made his painful way to his appointed spot, his wasted face and hollow empty eyes, his clothes and skin both stiff with filth, and his tangle of grey hair matted with dirt and leaves, and his unkempt beard that curled over lips that had long forgotten smiling....
That’s when I realized: it was him. Again. The man who’d leapt up from behind the dead trees and skeletal vines to scare me literally witless - he was back. After years away, he was once more haunting my streets. But this time, he wasn’t scary. He had no power to evoke any emotion in me but sorrow, seasoned with some reluctant disgust. It was the ending I needed for my story: hideous spectre turns human and blows away in the cold morning wind. Finally, I am beyond the grasp of my nemesis. I guess I should feel good about it, but really, I don’t.
