Saturday, November 29, 2008
Geary Personalities Two: The Trepidatious Creeper - Plus Aghast Updates!
I have been having a delightful time, sleeping in and overeating and partaking of various other excesses. I’ll bring the photos and quips soon enough, for my own gratification and memories - but that’s not why you come to the Chucklehut, is it? No, you’re more about the grub’s eye view on the wonders of urban living and a healthy whiff of stale streetwise bodywash. So let’s get back to the main event, shall we?
The last post was about a Geary Blvd personality, and so, as it turns out, is this one as well. This next fellow kept more to himself than the grubby groper. It’s also been longer since I saw much of him. Even so, for me he’s one of the key subfluences of the big boulevard. Any taxonomy that omitted him would be by definition incomplete.
The man I have in mind was the Trepidatious Creeper of Geary Boulevard. A tidy Asian man with a slight figure and undistinguished visage, he must have been in his 30s but carried the weight of many decades more on the trembling reed of his slender shoulders. He was usually dressed in a short-sleeved poplin collared shirt, buttoned all the way up and tucked into tightly-belted khaki chinos. Sneakers rounded the ensemble, scuffed and ragged, but really, the whole vibe was pretty ragged to begin with. His clothes appeared as clean as they’d get but very old and tired, hems frayed and fabric worn thin. His hair, too, projected diffusion, a little longer than it had to be and all pretty much completely straight. From one point at the top of his head a wiry stand of silver-black hair shot out in a wide flat circle, forming an essentially flat plane above his head from which was suspended a heavy mop that framed his face in a perspective-twisting convexity of stiff bristles. But the hair was not what anyone would really have noticed about him - not at first, anyway.
I’d see him already out in the thick of things on the Richmond district sidewalks of Geary Boulevard. They’re not particularly mean streets, but they do get busy and they keep their own counsel. It is a hard place to be very different, and this guy seemed a little more different than most. He’d toe up to a crack in the sidewalk or a pavement groove or a painted line, just standing there, looking at it, glaring at it, watching it, both eyes burning with debilitating singlemindedness. His body would tense up, as if straining at gravity; he’d shift up and down in his vertical plane like a willful little marionette, embodying somehow the will to move without actually moving. He’d almost totter forward, but the chafed toes of his sneakers seemed locked down and he powerless to move them.
Then he’d take a different tack: he’d try to relax, uncurling his shoulders by force of will, bellying his breathing. One could sense a buildup within him, potentiation, a growing conviction that he could do it, and then one earthbound foot would lift at the heel, just a little, but easily, and that heel would push the toe forward, just almost a little, but a few millimeters of pavement would be eclipsed by his recalcitrant foot, and that would be a half a step. One could see the relief and pride on his face as he looked down at his no-longer-even toes, and then the grim determination that would set in again as he steeled himself to move that other foot up to meet its mate.
Every shred of his energy and every atom of his being were committed to every part of every step, or step towards a step, that he took, or tried to take. He’d sweat with the effort even on foggy days and all the color seemed to seep out of his clothes and skin into the evergrey sidewalks to which he seemed anchored. Only his hair, monochromatic though it was, seemed to reflect the intensity of mental agitation that was going on within him as it burst like a static halo from his overwrought scalp. Man, that was some crazy hair.
And that was the Trepidatious Creeper of Geary Boulevard. He may be coming your way, but you’ve got plenty of advance warning now.
Or have you? AGHAST UPDATE TIME! I had hardly finished scrawling the above paean in my notebook and was on my way home from work yet again, as I seem to do almost every time I go to work in the first place. The 38 dropped me at 12th and I trotted across Geary at the light. As I came up the curb and turned to the sidewalk, I saw a man running up the block, head down and arms pumping. His path veered a little from side to side, but not enough to slow him down much or render him a potential threat. As he - rapidly - approached, I seized upon something about his high-waist pants, tightly belted over a tucked-in short-sleeve poplin button-up.... it was him again, the Trepidatious Creeper, reappearing as if summoned, fleet and in the flesh, running to make that cross-Geary light. Each foot was pounding that pavement with heedless confidence and then kicking off, launching forward into the void with each eager pace, lamplit sidewalk flashing past beneath him in the autumn gloom.... and his hair, that crazy hair, was much more white than silver now, and he’d shaved it down to a tamed and mannerly nub. It appears, therefore, to me, that the Trepitatious Creeper has left the boulevard. Keep your eyes open, he’s on the run!
AGHAST UPDATE THE SECOND: And even as the one was summoned, were they both; and lo, tho one appeared before me, so it was with both of them. Like catching a 90-year-old blind arthritic deer in your headlights, I was heading out a few days ago for some family fun (family included, supply your own fun) when who appeared right in front of our vehicle but the Gropester himself. He stood curved like a beseeching hand in the middle of Anza Street, crossing at 16th Avenue with the help of a woman who seemed to be having a difficult time of it. The Groper was rigid and motionless, frozen stiff with terror and disorientation as traffic backed up patiently on all four sides of the intersection. We were in front (westbound) and therefore had an unimpeded view of the conflicts within and without. The old man’s pants were rolled at the cuffs and he looked stricken, abandoned, lost in the middle of a wilderness of roaring cars and receding curbs, as if there wasn’t someone standing helplessly at his elbow trying to help him. His helper looked anxious, using eloquent body language that was clearly illegible to him, consequently forced then to lay hands on him to urge him forward to the sidewalk twenty feet ahead, a goal to which he appeared unaccountably but very actively resistant. I couldn’t help but notice how close her face was to his, and how she strained to remain blind to so much of what I knew she was unable to avoid seeing.