Thursday, January 20, 2005

Street Preacher

I was on the same old bus to work with the ‘buds in my ears, listening, as I recall, to The New Mixes (which I heartily recommend), when I realized I was missing the floor show.  The main attraction was a man, large and dark, standing up in the stairwell right next to me, facing the front of the bus and testifying in a loud and impassioned voice.  He was dressed in a blue windbreaker and reasonably fresh jeans, but his intensity and indiscretion on that commuters’ special busline belied his seeming normalcy.  Even from behind him I could see that his face was contorting and his neck bulged as he spoke.  I turned off my tunes and dislodged an earbud around Fillmore street, and listened to him preach till he got off on on the grungy corner at Jones.  To the best of my foggy recollection, this is what he had to say:

“Check it: you wake up every morning praising yourself for all the things you buy, the sex you have, for going out and eating in fine restaurants and having your warm bed under you, and you should be praising God, God Almighty, for the breath in your lungs - your love for yourself is a substitute, a substitute for the one true love of Jesus and you can’t even see it, but when you get back to your house at night you feel empty and alone and you don’t know why; you’ve blinded yourself, you delude yourself, and you can’t even see it, so you go and buy a faster car and more expensive clothes and fancy jewelry and boots and booze and you drive to your job where you sit all day doing nothing at all, nothing for no one, and it makes you crazy so you stay up all night thinking of more stuff to buy for yourself to make yourself feel good but it’s all a substitution - money for love and sex for holiness and a selfish job doing selfish things for selfish people instead of committing yourself to the betterment of the people you spend all your life ignoring - well check this, I’ve got no job and I’m full of love and holiness and the spirit of Jesus and I got a happiness you’ll never know....”

I’m sure he said more, but that’s all I could remember when I tried to write it down. But one thing I didn’t forget was the way the air on that bus vibrated after he stepped off onto the cold and filthy street.  I looked over to the riders sitting opposite me, and one middle-aged businesswoman knit her brow and gave me a tiny shake of her head.  I couldn’t tell if she was letting me know that she thought he was crazy, or if she had recognized herself in his tortured words, and was wondering now whether to keep going on her way to work.  But by the time she left the bus, her brow was smooth and she walked with the confidence of a woman who doesn’t need to look behind her, and the air through which she moved was very, very still.