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 store-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.
