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IN THE NIGHT, PART 1
Bare branches conform to circles around a streetlight. C’mon, you know that from childhood. Two-note music trails your fingers along a chainlink fence. Warmth from the hood of a Cutlass as it ticks and cools. Two stars and noctilucent clouds. A car alarm or truck backing up like some undersea sound. Three balloons, red, white, and pink, tugging at a storefront grate, and your shadow traversing the back of a cab seat. Bits of clear tape blowing on a pole.
I’m standing outside the Edinburgh Castle for a smoke, bikers on the sidewalk. Traffic, lit-up signs. Above, a window is open on the night. A room. A bulb, a skewed lampshade. Light through a thin red curtain. And more yellow windows opened in the body of night: in the offlight facades and lampblack of buildings. A ceiling, a glimpse of molding. Strings of blue fairy lights. A windowshade, a black wreath.
Two girls walk by, lost inside their outsider dress and outsider hair, talking quietly—so lost in their outsiderhood they think they can’t be found. But it could turn around. A bad break—a drug crash, a lost apartment or job—overnight one of them winds up at her parents’ place, cleaned up. It was all a strange dream. Her friend moving inward to the depths of individuality.
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Some guys, nonsmokers, cock an elbow when they smoke. They look up the street. Fridaynight bigshots. They’re not like me. I blew my big score.
A woman comes to where I’m crouched, writing on my leg, and tells me my hair looks soft. She asks if I use Pantene and bums a cigarette. I give her a one and watch her till she gets it lit. In the outdoor ashtray she finds a roach and asks if I want some weed, and the guy at the door asks her to move along.
A man in sandals and thick grey socks goes by pulling a cart with his neatly packed and bungied possessions, including a yellow square of foam for his head tonight.
Headlights along buckled asphalt under a parked car. Then not.
Black gumspots on pavement.
Later: the smoke of a match tossed out of a taxi’s window.
On the second night of the war on Iraq I meet Will at the YMCA. When we’re done there we watch the news in his hotel room next door. The Bay Bridge, strung with lights, presides over black water. Will moves around in the room, avoiding the TV but engaged with it. We take a cab to The Last Supper Club, thronged with people in high spirits, and eat in a dark corner. Will says no to wine. His brother’s among the Marines moving into Southern Iraq. After dinner we step outside to a night surprisingly soft. Now what? Sparse traffic on Valencia, warm wind. A scarecrow ambles toward us, his shopping cart rolls away behind him. Jack-o-lantern head. I’ve seen him on Mission Street dealing drugs and talking sharp, but he gives us the big grin and country-boy twang he uses for dopes.
He says “Heeeyyy, didya hear about Saddam Hussein? He shot off missiles of all that stuff he said he didn’t have!”
I’m walking, Will stops. He needs information so the fool closes in on him.
“Anthrax, sarin gas, mustard gas!”
Will reads his face. He’s a grinning fake-idiot, the better part of his humanity eaten away.
“They just announced it!” he says.
Will moves on, the fool follows. “One of ‘em fell down and killed forty thousand of his own people!”
He falls behind. “My family lost thirty forty aunts and uncles to Hitler, so we know a tyrant!”
Another down-home pimp trying to make a buck off the war.
Black puddle, blossoms white on the surface and sodden below it. The air is peppery and sweet. Melissa stretches to picks me one, her belly exposed between sweater and jeans. We walk to her stoop. There’s a moment in the wind, she’s on the steps. I turn back toward the bar.
She says “You going that way? Which direction you going?”
“I’m going home,” I lie. But I turn toward home, and it’s truer by the block, and I walk downhill inhaling the blossom in my fist. I walk through night jasmine and another scent so sweet it’s sour like pickles. Power lines on bluewhite clouds. A 76-station orb, glowing orange, seamed as you cross underneath it, miniature traffic reflected across the metal cup that holds it in place. I walk through streetcorner talk and behind me the hill is swept of life as though I was never there.
At Mission Street it’s time to straighten up, so I shirtpocket the blossom and walk tough.