Thursday, January 24, 2008

Redux: Slow and Pink

It’s been exciting, being out on the LitPark stage and having mumbled e-conversations with others of my writerly ilk… but now I have to face the fact that time marches forward and it’s time for me to figure out what to put up here next.  I really liked that last story but the fairly resounding silence it met makes me wonder if I’m barking up the wrong bus stop with that stuff.  Fortuitously, as I surfed around I happened to get a random link at the bottom of my home page that reminded me of a story I quite liked, but that I’d posted elsewhere.  It was fairly popular there, too, so maybe it’ll satisfy my craving for public response retroactively.  Regardless, it is full of imagery I’d prefer to be able to get into my brain without dredging other people’s archives, so here it is again (for those of you who’d seen it back in ‘05) or here it is for the first time (for anybody else).

I don’t quite recall what Jules said about him, exactly, which was par for the course because I don’t recall too much about him generally, except that he blew my mind in a sad, sweet, very slow way. She said something, though, about the slow pink parasol guy, and I knew immediately who she was talking about. I haven’t been to Santa Cruz much but there can only be one slow pink parasol guy.

We’d been strolling along a busy but intimate district of small shops and cozy cafes last summer, a neighborhood with a lot of activity, commercial and pedestrian. It was a great place to windowshop and peoplewatch and take in the world. And that’s where he was hanging out, so that’s where we saw him.

We saw him a few times that afternoon as we worked our way up and down the main drag. He was unmistakable, so extraordinary and unique that I was uncomfortable looking at him too closely. I don’t know why this was so; he clearly invited curiosity: he was all in pink, as I recall, with a pink hat like a bowler and a pink suit in an archaic cut - something Edwardian, or the like. I get a vibe of velvet cuffs and a ruffled shirtbreast; pants - corduroy? velvet? something with a texture, surely, pink as well, down to improbably mauve men’s leather shoes. And over his shoulder he rested a parasol, pink, the interior of which he’d carefully lined with aluminium foil. I want to say there were some flowers or a balloon, too, associated somehow with this parasol, but the more I pursue the details, the more they elude me.

He’d had this gaze, see, this sweet, earnest smile that he turned on everybody who walked past him, a look so personal and penetrating that I felt compelled to turn my own eye aside and let him be what he was without invading his autonomy by staring at him and writing mental notes on what I was seeing. But it was hard not to stare and to take a good long stare at that, because the man was moving so incredibly slowly. He seemed like a young enough man, his face unlined and the hair that curled out from under his hat still dark and thick, but he was moving at an infinitesimally slow pace. Each step he took was a fraction of an inch in length, and each tiny step took an eternity. It was like a zen exercise, a walking meditation done in slow motion in the smallest possible increments. It took him twenty minutes to creep past one storefront; in the few hours we wandered around this area I don’t think he got further than a single block.

As we’d occasionally walk past him he’d settle his serene smile on us and I’d feel obliged to look away from his pink penumbra. But before I did, face to face with him, I always noticed that his ensemble was quite careworn, bordering on shabby - thought clearly lovingly attended-to. The suit jacket was threadbare and sunbleached; the hat was stained; the shoes on his barely-moving feet were worn and scuffed and his parasol was refurbished and made me inexplicably sad, its crumpled foil liner improvisationally attached and pocked with holes. When I looked into his eyes and his soft welcoming gaze washed into my soul, I didn’t want to see the holes and stains in his shirt, the bent spines of his fringed parasol, or any evidence of how he clearly strained and strove to maintain this persona.

I could invent any number of reasons he might be doing it; I’d never know the truth of that matter. But I could also see him as he wanted to be seen, a vision of color and kindness, filling his corner of the world with something sweet and inducing of smiles. If I looked too closely, I’d only see the ways his efforts fell short, but with a quick glance and a friendly nod I’d just see the him he wanted me to see. To do otherwise seemed disrespectful to him, and deprived me of his artistic vision, or whatever the hell he was expressing. And I guess that’s why I didn’t look that carefully, didn’t inventory his strangeness so closely. It felt like a violation, somehow, to scrutinize him when he couldn’t really stand up to such close examination. He needed to be seen in passing, briefly. So that’s how I tried to see him.

And that’s probably why I let it go altogether till that night when Jules asked me to put my thoughts about him on paper.  I still figure I’m not doing him justice, but so it stands - I’ve outed him. There can certainly only be one of him, one slow pink parasol guy, and Santa Cruz is a fine place for him to be. If you go down Front Street near Water, you’re likely to see him too. Give him a nod and a smile - you’ll get one back. But don’t look too closely or you’ll burn the wrong image into your memory, and he’s tried so very hard to create the right image that it would just break my heart to dishonor his vision. It must take a lot of effort to be slow pink parasol guy, and I’d like him to get full credit for it.

Have a good weekend, y’all.  Ours will be rainy but relaxing.  Get out from under your parasol for a few minutes and let the rain fall on your smile, okay?