Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Transmision Complete: A Journey Through Strange Lands, plus a look forward to looking backwards
It has been a long time since I’ve allowed myself to write much more than the story I’ve been birthing for a few months or so already. I transcribed some new text recently and compiled the chunks - at 10,000 words, it’s my heftiest piece of drivel in years. I’m enjoying the process of seeing where it takes me and not cutting corners on the trip, but as is so often the case when one is a-birthing, sometimes I feel like taking a break from it. For me, that break is this: a return to my bloggy roots with a few observations from last week’s adventure on the city’s streets. Call it a literary epidural. See if I care.
Two weeks ago the car needed to go back to the shop - transmission (hereabouts you can’t call them “trannies") issues resurfaced and the vee-dub underwent several days of evaluation and repair. It was ready for pick-up last Tuesday evening so I went after work to a part of town I rarely otherwise visit - not far in miles from my office but surey a world away. I chose to make it an adventure, and here’s my tripartite travelogue:
1. I picked up the 27 bus at Market and Magnin, a bizarre bus stop at a bizarre intersection. The crowd that poured onto that bus, when it finally arrived, was radically mixed - thugs and housekeepers, zaydehs and hotties, all manner of persons from the lower orders of this city’s social structure. The night was damp and the bus, having arrived empty, was packed before I could even board it. When it pulled away every seat was filled and the aisle was jammed with humanity.
As we inched south on 5th with painful slowness, I couldn’t help but notice some faces that stood out among my fellow riders. The man next to me, for example, I would have judged to have been in his 50s, his round face very pink and his skin looking unusually soft, with a nice digital SLR hanging around his neck. He didn’t carry it, or himself, like a local. Then, before I’d fully processed what to make of him, I noticed a very tall white man hovering over some seats at the rear of the bus, which seats were themselves occupied by two white women, one tall and slim and youthful, and one older with white hair combed severly back. They all seemed huddled together, their proximity intimating to me a family resemblance: a brother and sister, with their mom. I wondered where on this gritty bus line they could be headed. They stood out like navy beans in a pot of pintos.
As I watched them I could feel eyes on the back of my head and turned to find their owner: a white woman in her middle years, hawkfaced and unsmiling, layered in color-coordinated windbreaker and sweater, her hair in a rigid comb-back. I caught her looking at me and smiled disarmingly. She declined to return the gesture.
The bus was barely moving through the holiday traffic, so I called home to check in. After I hung up I looked around again and saw the hard woman sitting near me was looking back to the tall man and the two women with him. They all four communicated wordlessly up and down the length of the big bus with anxious glances and shrugs, peering around the masses interpolated between them. Then they all turned their gazes to the pink-faced man standing beside me. He avoided my eye as I watched him convey ambiguous messages back to the others and forward to the hard looking woman, who saw me watching and assumed an indignant expression at my invasion of their privacy. For gods sake, woman, this was a very crowded public conveyance. She had no reasonable expectation of privacy for me to invade in the first place.
There they remained, the five of them, on a terribly overcrowded and basically motionless bus, separated and isolated from each other, visibly uncomfortable and actively doing nothing about it. I tried to read what they were saying to each other. I think it had to do with wanting to get off the bus but being rightly afraid that, despite the slowness and crowdedness of the ride, it was better than what they’d face outside on the dark and empty streets south of Market.
We reached Harrison street - my stop. I announced to those blocking my path that I was coming off, and made my way past them and out. As I pushed past the camera-toting guy, the whole family watched me with something approaching envy. I left them behind me and took to the cool, quiet pavement. I think they were from Germany. They certainly seemed very far from home.
2. One block south of Harrison at 5th is the homeless shelter at Bryant. As I approached it on foot I could see, in the gloom of the early winter evening, into the broad bank of upstairs windows, and there I saw a metal frame bunk bed and weary looking man standing next to it. He seemed to be weraing a t-shirt and boxers, or perhaps just baggy cotton pants. In his hands was a jacket, or maybe a sport coat, which I could tell even from a distance was well-worn to the verge of shapelessness. The man seemed to be standing next to a chair that I couldn’t see from my vantage below him, but he looked to be trying to drape the jacket over it. With broad, gentle gestures he folded the coat in half, smoothing it with the back of his hand. He did this several times, folding it, smoothing it, refolding it, refolding it again, resmoothing it… He’d lay it over the chair (or wherever he was laying it), then would pick it up again by the collar and resmooth it some more. In the minute or so I watched him up there as I approached the intersection and waited for lights to change at my crosswalk, I saw him set it down and pick it up again at least five times.
The light changed; I went to cross the street. The man upstairs at St Vincent’s Shelter picked up his jacket one last time, refolded it, resmoothed it, and then paused. Finally, his weariness spilling from him out the window and down into the street below, he tossed the jacket aside like a used hamburger wrapper and walked away from it without a look backwards. I turned east in my heavy warm coat, and walked half a block to the transmission shop.
3. Halfway through my half-block walk I passed a patch of unkempt ivy that covered an undeveloped strip of land under the elevated span of the central expressway. As I passed it, I noticed two residents of that barren space: a homeless man’s encampment against one fence, his ratty tent surrounded by overflowing bags of garbage, possessions, and things that were a blend of both at once; and a big glossy rat that raced through the undergrowth with bright eyes and a sense of invincibility, tracking my movement as I walked with some alarm, quickening my pace. The rat stopped when the ivy stopped. I continued for a few storefronts farther to my destination.
Once there I entered at the big garage door, wide enough for three cars, made a quick turn, and waited in the open-doored office area. The proprietor was at work on a computer in a back room so I bided my time, got a quarter’s worth of Hot Tamales from a vending machine, ate them, kept waiting.
A few minutes later the shopkeeper rolled out to attend to me and we breezily discussed the repairs he’d made, the weather, the generosity of his candy dispenser. He turned back to his desk to complete some notations, and that’s when I saw something run past us. It was bigger than a kitten; its tail was long and naked. I froze in place. It had zipped by less than a yard from my shoes.
“Um, dude, I think a rat just ran past me.” It had scurried through the office and into the back stockroom. George looked at me with the word “So?” written so plainly on his face that he didn’t need to say it aloud. I continued, thinking perhaps he’d misunderstood me, “A big one. Like this. It came from there, and it ran in there.” I used hand gestures. My vocabulary seemed inadequate to the task.
George sat back in his chair. “Yeah, we get a lot of rats around here. Can’t really keep’em out. They live in that ivy patch under the freeway. Go over across the street, there’s a storm drain - you can see’em there going back and forth, a whole train of them, all night long. Hundreds of ‘em.”
“Really.”
“Oh yeah. You know, springtime and summer, every morning when we get here we find six or eight of them in our dumpster in the back. The trash gets picked up on Thursdays, so Monday, Tuesday, sometimes Wednesday there’s not enough trash in it for them to climb out again, so they’re stuck in there and somebody’s gotta go in and kill’em with a shovel. Every day. And then the next day they’re back in there again. So, yer trannie’s all fixed up now; we replaced the wiring harness. Drive safe, ‘k?”
All I could do was nod and move on. I didn’t care for the rats I’d seen, but I didn’t like bludgeoning them to death much better. The car, however, is running great. Thanks for asking.
And now it’s the end of the year, innit? I doubt I’ll get back with another post for this decade. Popular punditry has it, and I’m inclined to agree, that it’s been among the worst decades ever. We could talk about why but you already know. Regardless, it hardly seems fitting to end it by beating rodents into pulp with shovels. I would fain conclude with more uplifting sentiments. Thusly:
As I complained vociferously on this very blog about two months ago, I lost my writing book, the 5x8 spiral notebook where I take notes and write stories and essays, where I unpack my brains while riding the bus and jot critical forget-me-nots when I find myself unexpectedly expected to remember something. Anyway, I lost it, the notebook, in a men’s room at work. How I happened to leave it there is immaterial - the point is, I lost it and it was gone, taking with it, as I recalled, ten pages of a short story in progress, notes about school registration for Zach, recollections of my kids’ childhood foibles that I wanted to preserve, some insurance info about the accidents that befell us earlier in the year… lots of stuff, all of it deeply meaningful and important to me.
I was back looking for it the next work day, but it was already gone. My phone number was prominently listed on the back cover; it would have been easy to return it to me, but someone found it, saw that it was filled with handwritten notes (truly it was almost full), and decided simply to dispose of it. That rankled, people. It depressed me. I detested my own absentmindedness, the selfishness and stupidity of others too lazy and ignorant to return my clearly-marked possessions to me, the cruelty of fate. It took me nearly a month to get over it and start writing again, trying to make up finally for what I’d lost, to the extent that I ever even could.
As I rebuilt the missing pieces of my story, I discovered that I liked my new version better. I started getting some creative traction, took some important notes in a new notebook that I’d bought under protest but was growing rather to prefer over the old one after all. I liked the mellow grey cover and double dividers and the ruler on the front page protector. About a month in, I ceased to mourn for the old book. The new one had really taken its place.
Three weeks ago, I got to work and visited the men’s room. There, on a little shelf, sat my old notebook again, as if it had never gone missing. Eureka! It had returned to me, the prodigal scratchpad! I felt it was a message, a lesson of some sort. What was lost, will be found; what wandered, will return. I was so relieved that it actually took me a while to page through the old notebook to remind myself of what I’d regained. And in doing so, the real lesson really came to me: the old notebook contained almost nothing meaningful to me. The notes, I’d transcribed from elsewhere and could have recreated. The story I’d been writing, I had already improved upon. The auto accident information was unnecessary - I’d already taken care of everything, and the incidents were closed. And everything else in that notebook was either already transcribed to the blog, or was frankly unworthy of my attention let alone anyone else’s.
In regaining the contents of that notebook, I regained absolutely nothing of value. However, I did learn that sometimes people will borrow something you love but they may return it once you no longer need it; I learned how much better I can do than my own best efforts, and I learned that the value of a thing lies much more in how it’s remembered than in what it actually is. Looking back at 2009, and the entire ten years of the aughts, I am now ready to let them go. Maybe there is something of value in them still, but I’m ready to do better, and to burnish the memories instead of tinkering with the reality. 2009 and your naught-y confreres, I wish I could say it’s been fun, but I think I can say this instead: I look forward to looking back on you.
Drive safely, blogging public. I don’t have enough readers for any of you to get hurt celebrating the start of something that may be actually worth celebrating. Catch you on the other side....