Wednesday, December 28, 2005

The Long View: A New Year’s Meditation

I’m heading out of town for New Year’s tomorrow morning at an hour that significantly precedes the asscrack of dawn.  We’re going to Maryland to party with the inlaws and introduce Zach to the rest of the family.  It’s a great scene every year, with raucous laughter and good food and drink at all hours of the day and night.  You’d never think such revelry was going on from the looks of the restrained georgian facade of the quiet suburban home where we’ll be staying.  It’s one of those tricks of perception and perspective - where you think you know what you’re getting but you get there and get so much more than you expected.  And with this principle in mind, here’s a few words about the low mountain and the long view:

Saturday, December 24, 2005

Random Holiday Merrymaking

Ho-ho-ho!  E-e-e-rev Chanukah!** I’ve been scouring the alleys and under the cushions of my sofa for a lovely gift for y’all, but all I found were some old cheerios and frankly I already et’em.  So instead of shining you on with nothing, here are a handful of tidbits that remind me, in a roundabout way, of you folks - disparate and unconnected, arising unbidden and unexpected in the course of my daily journeys, but never failing to bring joy to my heart or an inappropriate snigger to my lips.  Thank you, internet people, for enhancing a delightful year that has been too filled with blessings for me to measure them, and for helping me through a year of challenges and losses that were manageable so often because you let me share them with you.  Your friendship and support are priceless to me.  And that’s why you get this cheap-jack gift: notebook gleanings!  These are the dribs and drabs of ideas and comments that I wrote down and never figured out what else to do with.  Don’t read them all in one place.

* Actual sign at the Academy of Science’s temporary aquarium: “INDO-PACIFIC LIONFISH: A legend will soon explain how they are venomous.” Actual animal housed therein: “Encrusting Gorgonian.“

* “It’s no big deal.  It’s like the miracle of life: any jerkoff can manage it if you aim him properly.”

* Sign seen in nutritional supplement shop window: “Women’s Health Special: For You, Free Bag.” Yeah, you old freebag, this one’s for you.  Pretty special, eh?

* Sign seen in restaurant window: “Help Wanted.  Experience Waitress.” Yeah, get a job here and see what our waitress learned during her brothelmongering days.  Tips included.

* Query: Why didn’t anyone at the big Commission meeting eat any of the chocolate-covered strawberries?  Was it because they were in a bag that identified them as Keoki’s Surfin’ Ass Dingleberries? 

* LiveArchive.org.  For all your free live music needs.  Thank me with cds.

* You wanna do a little job for us?  Sign up anonomously with Mobster.com.  We’ll make you an employment offer you can’t refuse. 

* I didn’t want to belive that it was Mt. McKinley.  I guess I was just in Denali. 

* New business in the neighborhood: Dong Dong Preschool - to bring out your little dong’s full potential. 

* I’m telepathetic - able to be lame at great distances.  Similarly, I’m the guy who puts the “random” in “memorandom”

* Engrish, from the Haechandle Company: “Haechandle mean by utility.  Haechandle mean by honesty.  Haechandle with made by good people.” This is their corporate motto; I was led to seek it out by a comment printed on one of their boxes that I saw lying on the ground at my bus stop: “The reliable food of Haechandle.  The good-natured make it.”

I hope all you good-natured people get to make it this festive season.  Meantime, here’s some cute photos to get you started. 

bench made of ancient monestary stones, in GG park:

From the De Young sculpture garden:

From the De Young tower elevator lobby:

From the De Young sculpture garden’s hidden meditation chamber:

Views of the De Young roof from the tower:

View of Kel and Zach in the De Young tower:

Me and Zach on the monestary stone bench:

Zach discovers the miracle of xmas:

That’s all for now.  Time to open some presents for the munchkin.  Have a happy happy, and don’t drink and blog! 

** “Erev” means “evening of/before”, and is the beginning of any jewish holiday.  But you knew that already.

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

beginning the ending

* Stones of Summer: I heard of it though a magazine article about a documentary about hunting down the author, a one-hit wonder whose unremembered masterwork shook some of us to our foundations with its audacity and depth.  Dow Mossman had never been heard from since 1972 till this filmmaker tracked him down, and thus was reborn The Stones of Summer – nearly 700 pages of pure poetry, a Ulysses for the beat generation.

I bought it to read it in Hawaii two summers ago but was having too much fun not reading, so I brought it back home unopened.  I really started in on it in October 2004, and I just finished with it.  Now, I admit that I’m not trained in these matters, I probably don’t know what I’m talking about or what I even missed – but that was one miserable slog of a book.  I mean.  Oy.  It was a Faulknerian journey through the life of a young man, from his beautifully-rendered Midwestern farmtown childhood, through an adolescence full of rage and alienation and iconic characters you can’t quite fully believe in, concluding with a fabulous hebephrenic flameout, our hero having stumbled fatally over the threshold of manhood. 

Here’s the thing, though: it was basically unreadable.  Each page was full of imagery and beauty, but it made no goddamn sense and it didn’t go anywhere.  I’ve read Ulysses, and found it to be endlessly captivating.  Stones of Summer: not so much.  I couldn’t red three pages without falling asleep trying to parse out its symbolism or develop anything like a damn about any of the characters.  But, bless my scrivening soul, I finished it.  And that means I can put it away or get rid of it, retrieve from its turgid pages the cool Turkish bookmark I’ve consigned to it for fifteen months, move on to another book that’s a better place for such a colorful cool memento to reside.  I even have a good rebound novel already lined up.  So there’s something that felt interminable, but wound up, finally, ending – not very satisfactorily, but conclusively.  Endings happen. 

* My Tuesday night yogini missed class again last week.  A staff member came in twenty minutes after we were scheduled to start, to tell us that the teacher had a long-term family-related issue and would not be teaching for three to six months.  That’s a lifetime in yoga class circles (I’ve only been going to her class for about a year).  But she’s gone now and with her, the nighttime sunshine she coaxed weekly from my joints and fingertips.  Ten minutes into my first class with her, I had wanted to slap her – she was just too intense and cheery and personal.  I wasn’t there to learn to laugh or love my classmates – I wanted a good hard stretch and that was all.  Enough, already, with the sound effects and goofball chanting.  That isn’t what yoga is all about.  Ten minutes later, I’d come around 180 degrees – her humor and joy and personal connection with every one of us downing our respective dogs there that night were exactly what yoga was all about; I’d just never experienced it before.  And now I don’t know if I’ll get there again. 

After the staff announcement that class was and would continue to be cancelled, four of us stayed behind in the spacious studio, the lights down very low, listening to sitar music and doing a little freestyle stretching.  But the music made me sad, and the postures seemed forced, constricted, inorganic.  I left with a heavy heart.  Good things end too. 

* I’ve written before about my mickey pen, may its memory be a blessing.  It’s been more than a year that I’ve been without its firm reliability and jaunty wave of greeting.  But lo, just a few weeks ago our clerk went back to the MagiKingdom and brought me back a new mickey mouse pen.  I received it from him with delight, reacquainting myself with its many finely-wrought details – and then I noticed one new one, one which brought even greater joy to my pen-wielding ways: new words had been impressed on the barrel of the pen, next to the word “Disneyland.” The new words appeared in black on a silver background that had jaggedy edges, a text bubble signifying urgent, earthshaking news.  The words themselves read: “Acid Free.”

O limitless blessings of a benevolent universe!  Now I knew for sure – I had it on the unquestionable authority of a tiny plastic mouse: my writing implement was finally free of acid.  Or maybe free from acid.  Perhaps even free on acid, like some Kerouaked-out tripster.  The point is, my pen was even cooler than the old one had been, in that it was Acid Free, whatever that meant.  I wasn’t going to dwell any longer on misbegotten months wasted with my old acidulous and confined pen.  This one was free and inacetic and I was damn glad of it. 

Well, I’m learning that things end. I’ve had the new pen in regular rotation for a couple of weeks now and the new text-bubble with the jaggedy points is already peeling off.  I know that acid freedom is an inherent condition, unaffected by the presence or absence of that little silver sticker – but come on people, it was just so cool.  I really liked that “acid free” tag.  But in another day or so, in an idle moment, I’ll accidentally-on-purpose peel the rest of it away.  Then my acid status – free or otherwise – will be a matter of purely personal knowledge, neither advertised nor promulgated on the barrel of my new, allegedly acid-free mickey mouse pen.  I guess that’ll be okay, though – it will still write a nice clean line for me, labeled or not.  Just because the bonus sticker has peeled away and left me bereft, there’s no reason for me to feel bad. The pen is a good one. All that has ended is the label, and I guess I can inscribe my own remembrances and draw my own conclusions with it regardless. 

Recap: Book – ended.  Yoga classes – ended.  Amusing sticker – ended. I think I’m ready for something to start soon.  Oh, yes, it’s late December.  It’s all starting again, and soon enough.  Maybe it’s just a suggestion from the universe that I needed to clear a little room for the new stuff.

Saturday, December 17, 2005

frankly parsimonious

It sure is dark early these days.  I remember the days when it didn’t use to be this way.  Just a few months ago, the dawn broke brightly before I got out of bed.  Now I arise in stumbling darkness, smashing my unprotected toes into heavy furniture while the daylight hides from my eyes.  As the solstice approaches and the gloom reaches its nadir, I am drawn to recall the history of why the hell it’s so goddamn dark in the mornings now.  Gather ‘round, children, and be misinformed. 

Anyone who’s read the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is sure to have asked this rhetorical question: “Who wrote this crap?” Well that’s an easy one, chum.  Benjamin Franklin was one of the few of our founding fathers actually to have fathered foundlings.  He not only wrote the 3rd, 8th, and (unratified) original 12th amendment (vouchsafing the people’s right to “prurient and lascivious materials"), he also discovered electricity, built the first ever rotisseie pizza oven, and invented France.  Named after the $100 bill, Bennifrank (as he was known at the time) overcame a childhood of tallow-soaked poverty and rose to a position of international acclaim, what with his coonskin cap and his charmingly rustic lamb-gut condoms.  He wrote and published one of the most important magazines of the day, built a glass harpsichord, and founded a debtor’s workshop that eventually became the least-known college in the ivy league.  He wielded a stale day-old baguette like Sheriff Buford Pusser carries a 4x4 in the 1973 film Walking Tall, or in the 2004 remake thereof, also entitled Walking Tall.  He was the first man to cook Crepes Suzette, and, likewise, the first to streak the United States Congress.  He was a towering figure of manhood at a time of knee-breeches and gay looking wigs.  He was our national aspiration, personified. 

But today, Benjamin Franklin is best known for screwing up our circadian schedules.  Daylight Savings Time was a Franklinism, one of literally billions of whackball ideas he forced himself to disgorge during his daily “brainfart” sessions.  Benji noticed between madiera binges that days in the wintertime were shorter than days in the summertime, and in his quaint colonial way he thought he could adjust the fabric of time itself to cover the gap.  It was not until the invention of “sleeping in” some 127 years later that DST was initiated on a wide-scale basis, since when it has established itself as the single most important event of the year, especially for smoke-alarm batteries.  Annually, schoolchildren cavort with glee at DST parades on our nation’s parks and boulevards, and factories throw their doors open for DST free-for-alls.  Truly, it is a day of wonders. 

But ol’ Frankles didn’t just come up with this idea, as he did with so many other things, out of thin air.  He actually beta-tested several alternate models of DST, to see which one best suited his overall purposes of world domination and colonial studliness.  While the saving of “daylight” turned out to provide the most reputation-enhancing bang for his self-printed buck, he did seriously study other possibilities.  My investigations at the Franklin Institute of Imaginary Research have uncovered, in a foolscap scrap lodged in the dustjacket of the 18th century bestseller Mrs. Washington’s Falsies, the following list of THINGS BENJAMIN FRANKLIN CONSIDERED SAVING BEFORE HE DECIDED ON DAYLIGHT:

Urea
Soot
Twist-ties
Nitelites
Indigenous Peoples
French Strumpets
Wig Powder
Cod
Quakers
Nascent Democracy

Keep the legacy of this American Hero alive, if you have the moral fortitude to follow in his tiny feminine footsteps.  Start saving random stuff today.  By the springtime, we may have another goddamn holiday to celebrate.

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Meatwalker

I’d gotten an express bus downtown that morning, so my ride in was fast and furious and I got out as early as possible so I could walk the rest of the way in the open air.  Those BX drivers are crazy bastards and I didn’t like rolling with them any longer than necessary; if I didn’t dawdle when they let me out, I could usually even beat the bus to its last stop at the foot of Drumm Street.  Plus, it gave me a chance to do the sidewalk fandango with all the other folk strolling the financial district at 9 a.m.  It’s always an interesting crowd and I really don’t get out much most days, so on those occasions that I’m lucky enough to catch a fast ride downtown on the BX, I always also look forward with enthusiasm to walking the rest of the way to my office. 

Thus: I was hoofing my way in off the BX from Bush and Monty and I’d established a good crowd-cutting clip.  If I walk with sufficient purpose, a lot of people just get out of my way.  I was slicing along easterly on Bush and I’d gotten to Treasury Alley just off Market Street, when I noticed her.  She didn’t look like she was going to get out of my way.

She wasn’t doing anything.  She was just standing there, looking cool and glamorous and utterly above it all.  She wore a black suit over a white shirt with a black ribbon at her neck; straight black hair framed her classically-proportioned face and black modern-chic bugeye sunglasses shielded her against the sunrise at her back.  She was dressed both a little warmly and a little coldly – warm for the bright morning, but in clothes that seemed to render her frigid, austerely elevated, distinct from the rest of us, like a crystallized peak of black ice presiding over the rubble-strewn glaciers of street traffic.  She just stood there. 

And then I saw that above which she was elevated, lying in the alley directly in front of her: a man stretched out on his belly. His arms curled up toward his head and his feet splayed broadly on the blacktop behind him.  He lay right in front of her, perpendicular to the alley, and rather than walking around him, she simply stood and waited for her path to clear.  Actually, I couldn’t tell exactly what was going on.

I walked closer and the clues grew more confusing.  She had a black silk umbrella, but it was a sunny day and the umbrella looked broken beside her – its bowl was bent up and out, away from her face.  No, wait – the umbrella was clamped to a metal stand, carefully pointed away from her.  She stood stock-still, not moving at all, even though the workwhistle crowd surged and seethed around her.  Her hand was frozen at her hip - she was holding a black leather leash, which dropped to the sidewalk beside her, so far down that she could only have attached to it a weiner dog or some such. 

The man lying in the street – he didn’t look like a wasted vagrant.  His shoes weren’t ruined and torn, they were fairly new; his pants looked clean. His hands at his head - they held a big Hasselblad.  Okay then: He was a photogrpaher, shooting a model from an extreme geoproximate angle.  Or, no, he was not photographing her - he was focused on the dog.  I had drawn close, the crowd between us thinned.  Her dog was not a dog.  Rather: at the end of the leash, resting quietly on the pavement in the morning clear, was a raw rump roast, all silverskin and congealing blood and glistening carnality.  The photographer was shooting a lot of film as I walked past the lump of raw fatty flesh, and the beautiful woman to whom it was attached.  Then I went on to work.

That’s why I like this town, really.  Any day, your commute might just take you right past a model walking her meat.  And that’s the sort of image a person like me likes to keep very clearly in mind.  After all, we’re all walking our meat, each of us, in our own special way.  I know I am.

Monday, December 12, 2005

The Dog Who Flew

This weekend was a good, hard full couple of days, and there�s too much to report to take you through it very carefully. So here’s a sketchy run-through, followed by a nice story: 

Zach went to a Christmas-tree lighting at the Presidio, which was a great time for all until the lights went on and scared my boy a little.  He was much more sanguine at the winter wonderland fest up in Tilden Park, with the Victorian carousel and the dozens of decorated trees and the surreal illuminated yulescape they’d set up to trigger those mescaline flashbacks I so enjoy, what with the giant inflated penguin popping into and out of a chimney, and yule yaks, and a light-outlined dude in a sombrero and serape leaning against a saguro cactus. This was a display the boy enjoyed, and so did I.  Yee-ha, yule-siesta-guy!  Ho-ho-ho, illuminated flamingo!

Similarly, Zach is enjoying our own little tree, now necessarily tiny because it’s relegated to the truncated space above the media cabinet - but it’s laden with all our most favorite ornaments (Tut!  Elephant!  Cornboy!  and - oh - the noble seated mastiff.).  When I stowed all our cds in big books instead of on a teeter-ready tower, I finally found our copy of the Blind Boys of Alabama album where they’re doing xmas tunes with Chrissie Hynde and Tom Waites and folks, so that was fun to hear as we “decked halls.”

On saturday, I also got to attend a citizens’ advisory meeting for proposed changes to my bus line - a meeting that deteriorated into a bitchfest full of recriminations, insults, and fearmongering, and all the worst aspects of popular democracy in action.  So that was a bit of a downer, though the proposed design changes they shared with us were interesting, even though people sure seemed to resent not having more choices to consider.

But those vituperative few hours were the exception, not the rule, this past weekend.  I’ve had lots of sweet moving moments to enjoy over this past week that have already faded from my memory, and I am not going to share any of them with you because I don’t have time - and there’s a better story to tell, one that fits in with yesterday’s little trip to the beach in the murky gloom at 6:30 at night.

Friday, December 09, 2005

Poster Child

I’ll be out of the office all day today, on a site visit that could be very good or very bad.  Either way, I’ll miss y’all.  But let me leave you with this for the weekend - the legend of another dear friend who became more precious and important to me as our relationship matured:

Viola entered my life when I was six years old, and even though she was a cross-dresser I thought of her as an ally.  This was particularly so in comparison to some of her buddies – florid Falstaff, with the huge tankard-wielding fist and the slightly mad gleam in his eye; Rosalind, whipsmart with an icy smile; Mistress Quickly, her hair pulled up in two demonic horns that wrested a grin from her thin lips…. They were accompanied, as well, by a pedantic, goateed Charles Dickens, gesturing broadly to a menagerie of several dozen of his best-known (if not always best-loved) characters.  All were rendered in lifelike watercolor, expressive and piercing as they gazed out at me.  They all seemed, to my young eye, uncannily like real people, frozen in time (ancient) and place (my living room walls). 

For, in fact, all these were posters my parents pulled from the Times of London’s Sunday Supplement during our sojourn in England in 1970, and which they had gotten framed upon our return to LA and mounted around the house.  Many of these guys, frankly, sort of freaked me out, even though they each came with several columns of text explaining their individual intricacies.  Their eyes followed me around the room, and when I left the room, some of them (Fagin, Quickly) watched me through the walls.  These were imagined depictions of imaginary entities, staring at me with fantastic eyes.  But Viola, in her snappy silk cap and her girlyboy ruff, grinned with complicit good humor to me from her frame, as if to reassure me, “yes, I know we’re all freaks, but just made-up ones, and we mean you no harm.  In fact, we may even have a bit of fun together someday if you loosen up a little.”

I eventually got to know her play, 12th Night, better than any of the other works depicted in that set of graphics.  After I left her and home for college, I even got to appear in a production of that play, seeing her come to life charmingly with a new face and costume. 

By the time I graduated, my childhood home had broken up and when I moved back to the same house, which was now a very different home, Viola’s smile seemed a little more guarded, more worldweary.  Her jaunty headpiece no longer masked her frustrations with her misbegotten path.  It was good to come back to her and renew our acquaintance – me, happier and better-adjusted than I’d ever been, and her, changeless and consistent, yet somehow now deeper than the page on which she’d been printed.  Viola, the shipwrecked beauty, masquerading as a man, secretly longing for her lord, spurning his inamorata’s advances… Her limned eyes spoke again to me with more meaning than those of the other character posters.  Still, I couldn’t quite make out the message. 

Years passed.  Kel moved in with me, and then the two of us moved a few more times.  Viola came with us, first to a midtown LA flat, then to a bijoux pacific heights apartment, and finally to our place out in the avenues where we had two roommates, then one, then none…. Viola moved too, from wall to wall, always smiling, always agreeable, always a calming confection for the eye, so much a part of the interior landscape that I stopped noticing her, communing with her, perusing that mysterious smile.  She slid from the foyer to the dining room to the long dark hallway just outside our bedroom door, where she took up permanent residence as the Lady of the Corridor.  There, she seemed to fade a little into the background.  The hallway was not a place to linger, and she couldn’t be seen from inside the bedroom.  No other artwork hung nearby to keep her company; the closest were two mounted photos on the other side of the door – small monochrome prints of rough and desolate scenes.  Viola just hung tight to her wall and, for a couple of years or so, shone her smile into empty air.

Then came Zach, and the reconfiguration.  Our dyad became a triad and, consequently, the old yoga room gradually became a nursery, furnished a piece at a time till it was a warm and comfortable and entirely new room.  The crib and changing table and dresser formed a cozy set; the greenling-tinted walls were soothing to the eye and mind.  A blue star and a yellow crescent moon shone from one wall; Quan Yin and Korean tigers communed in the opposite corner.  The place was almost finished.  What remained were the finishing touches – a rug, whereon the boy could splay and scramble, and a chair, whereon we could fed him a bedtime bottle and read him Goodnight Moon again. 

One trip to Ikea filled both those gaps in the décor: we found a rug festooned with cavorting dragons that coordinated with the other furniture, and a comfortable easy chair for the corner near the window.  When I finally sat in that chair, the room finally really felt complete – the most complete place in the house.  Even so, I didn’t notice at the time the one detail that made it all work, that we’d inadvertently crafted years prior. 

That night, I heated up six ounces of formula and cradled Zach in my lap, fresh from his bath and clumsy with impending sleep.  I looked from his small, sweet head to the boardbook spread open on my knees, then around the intimate room full of friendly touches, and out the door into the hallway – and there I caught her smiling at me.  Viola was watching over us, looking right in from her once-isolated vantage, keeping a loving vigil over the final minutes of the baby’s day.  Her smile finally made sense to me as I reveled in the nurturing quiet of the warm nursery, my voice lulling Zach to sleep.  She wasn’t winking with sardonic derision; neither did she smirk sarcastically, nor did she grimace with ill-concealed sadness.  Her smile had opened, at long last, like a flower in a wild field.  After 400 years or so of being ill at ease and a stranger in her own house, she had find her place, her home, with us.  As she beamed at us, Zach fell asleep in my arms and I laid him in his crib.  I shut the lights and left him for the night.  When I closed the nursery door behind me on my way to my own bed and dreams, I’m sure I saw her wink at me.

Thursday, December 08, 2005

Wilding

I can’t bear to leave that bellicose story about my humidification of street youth up at the top of my blog any longer, but I don’t really have time this morning for anything substantial, so here’s my latest mental cul-de-sac, where my intellectual segway has been rolling in ever-decreasing concentric circles:

Maurice Sendak should revisit his classic book, Where the Wild Things Are, to describe for us what happened to Max and the monsters when they went to Cabo for Spring Break. 

I’d call it, “Things Gone Wild.”

Have a great day folks, I’ll try to lard up the verbiage real soon for y’all.  I got some good stuff in reserve.  Relatively speaking.

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Homeward Bound: The Hard Way

I’d had a long challenging day.  My morning at home had not been tranquil and my ride to work had been soggy, time-consuming and enervating.  My desk downtown groaned under a broad range of confusing and urgent (but not important) tasks.  I stayed late to try to make some cognizable dent in the workload, and wound up waiting in the rain again for my bus home – a ride that was, thankfully, though not interesting or entertaining, at least was uneventful.  However, I did have to continue riding on past my usual stop a half-block from my apartment to hit the bank out at 21st, and then work my way back home via a drugstore at 18th to get a humidifier for Zach (poor snotty kid) and then across Geary to Gordo’s to pick up supper.  Finally, with Kel’s boiled chicken & guac and my super carnitas with dual sauces stashed in my messenger bag over my left shoulder and a big cardboard humidifier box in a plastic shopping bag, plus my ‘pod, in my left hand, I was finally ready for the five-block walk back to my home and the end of my day.

I wore brown boots, indigo jeans, and a sweater under my goretex shell; the hood was over my head, cinched down against the sodden gusts that still swept the dark streets.  I felt spent, but couldn’t help noticing some commotion about half a block ahead of me, in jarring contrast to the charming bluegrass music to which I was listening:

It was at 17th, right at the corner, in front of the cheap smoke shop.  Four young people had gathered – two slender, sort of slutty girls with tight jeans and big hair, a tall slim boy, and a shorter stockier one with a shaved head.  They all seemed to be in their late teens.  I couldn’t hear them but I could see that the baldie was mad.  He took a swing at the tall boy and hit him on the jaw; the tall boy fell to the sidewalk like a narcoleptic.  The baldie immediately started kicking him in the face and head. 

I was two storefronts away, still unnoticed.  I quickened my pace a little, strengthened my stance, and pulled off my earbuds with my laden left hand, leaving my right free.  The tall boy was still on the pavement, face down, trying to protect his head; baldie was now down on one knee, slamming his fist into the other boy’s skull, pounding it against the sidewalk.  He was shouting at his prone victim as he beat him, cursing him, promising to teach him to lie to him or touch his girlfriend.  The two girls stood in shock, screaming inarticulately and ineffectually.

Baldie was striking out without martial discipline – his arm flailed high with each punch he buried into the other boy’s head as I reached the fray.  I did not slow down as I stepped right up to them, looped my right arm under baldie’s, and let my momentum pull them apart, dragging the attacker off his victim with a swift sweeping move.  Baldie stumbled backwards several feet before regaining his equilibrium and moving as if to step forward into another attack; I stepped in front of him with delts and jaws clenched and glared him down.  “It’s over,” I growled with a deep quiet voice. “He’s down.  Now leave.”

Baldie tried peremptorily to get around me, but I advanced a step or two toward him with each tack he took until he began to explain himself by means of resumed bellowings about infidelity and mendacity.  “I don’t care about any of that,” I explained to him firmly, reiterating: “This fight is over.”

Baldie dropped his hands as the boy on the pavement slowly repositioned himself for greater cranial protection.  He looked like he was hurting but he made no sound.  Baldie walked with relative calmness to the downed boy and began to lecture him.  As he spoke, his voice grew louder and more agitated.  Within seconds he had doubled his fist again and started back into punching the other guy in the head. 

I should have seen that coming, felt badly I’d let it happen.  It wouldn’t happen again, though – I gave the kneeling attacker a hard push with my boot and he fell backwards.  “If you get up and do that again, I’ll take you down and you’ll never get up again,” I nearly whispered, a few inches from his face.  He rolled to his knees, got up, backed away, avoiding my gaze.  One of the girls went to his side as he moved toward the boulevard crosswalk.  He continued shouting threats and accusations till he was halfway across the street, and then turned and ran, the bimbo trotting after him as fast as her spike heels allowed. 

The other girl sank to her knees next to the beaten boy, who still had barely moved.  “Are you all right?” “I’m okay,” he replied unconvincingly.  Two more people had gathered by now – a heavyset female pedestrian and the slightly-built merchant from the smokeshop.  The woman advised the distraught girl, “He kicked him in the head.  Should I call the cops?” The girl screamed, “Kicked in the head?  You bastard!  Call the cops!  Call them!”

The pedestrian and the shopkeep both had their cellphones out.  “Should I call the cops?,” each of them kept asking impotently.  The girl was weeping now, crouched by the boy’s head.  I turned to the bystanders, pointing to each in turn: “Call the police.  Call the police.” Both finally responded to this imperative and started punching 911 into their phones.  “This is finished,” I said, looking up and down the street one last time. “I’m outta here.”

“What if he comes back?,” the pedestrian asked.  “He won’t,” I replied.  “He left.” “But how will the police find him, then?” I pointed to the couple shuddering on the sidewalk: “They know where he lives.” I took a deep breath of the damp air and turned back to my homeward route, the vaporizer swinging clumsily by my side.  It was a chilly night, but I was sweating pretty hard.  When I got home I put the burritos in the oven and drank a nice cold beer.  My day had finally come to a close.

True story.

Friday, December 02, 2005

Trunk Line

It’s been a challenging and interesting week, with lots of blogfodder for future posts.  However, time this morning is short and I’m feeling like getting a bit of clarity and precision into my head before embarking on another weekend likely to involve significant festivation and imbibement.  I therefore will defer the stories about the big woman and the street fight, in favor of this smidge of doggerel about elephants.  I hadn’t realized how detail-oriented they were till I read this valuable tome.  It inspired me to propound as follows:

The Elephants of Style
haven’t been around here lately,
leaving carnage in their footprints,
sowing heartbreak with their stately
and imperious disdain,
tiny eyeballs glitter coldly
as the herd fixes upon you
not disuaded or cajoled, le-
aning into you as quarry
while they circle round your doubtlets,
with ironic snorts and snuffles
in their ropy leather outfits,
massive lips upcurled, disgusted,
mythic monsters gone etruscing:
line you up along the ivories
for a bloody viscious tusking -
now the village is deserted,
supper pots on coals yet burning,
you can hear them all around you:
it’s a lesson you are learning,
with your participle dangled
and your clothes old and outdated,
they are closing in around you,
huffing righteousness inflated,
tossing trees aside, uprooted
with their kicking and their trunking -
those White elephants of style
have you down for quite a Strunking. 

Have a good weekend.  Have two, they’re small.