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IN THE SUN, Part II
by Mike DeCapiteSaturday morning at the bus stop. I’ve got my black gym bag and I’ve got a pass: one of those brilliant mornings that leave you unsettled and hopeful in the absence of a hangover. I drop the bag, step off the curb to look down Folsom for the bus, and roll my shoulders like Stacy Keach in the opening shots of Fat City stepping onto the hot streets of Stockton. A guy walks over and says they come every fifteen minutes, it’ll be here any time.
He says “I just missed my bus, I was waiting on the 48. I went into the liquor store to get a half pint for these motherfuckers and the bus came while I was inside. That’s what I get.”
With his white-whiskered face and scholarly black-framed glasses, his relaxed martial crouch and layers of clothing—a shirt over a hooded sweatshirt, long cutoff shorts over pants, all of it faded to various shades of formerly black—he looks like he’s had a rough time of it and he’s ready for more. Oversized black shoes.
He’s one of the guys who congregate on my steps every morning. Despite the staggering pain of their mornings, faces in their hands and cursing the birds, they rouse themselves to scoot aside when they hear me coming down the stairs, all of them begging for death, except for this guy, who looks up from the bottom step and shouts “Off to see the Wizard?”
He unscrews the cap from a half pint of Ancient Age and takes a hit. Prison tattoo of a spider on the web of his browned left hand.
He waves the bottle across the sunlit intersection to where a pair of men are lying on the sidewalk against a wall. Two trickles run to the curb.
“See those guys over there? The one guy puts in forty cents and takes a two-dollar drink. The other guy don’t put in nothing so he don’t get nothing. Fuck him.”
“How do they get any money? They never ask for any.”
“There’s always a guy like me! Who goes out and gets it! They never get anything. No initiative! But somehow they still get fucked up. Fall down, piss themselves.”
A line I wrote a long time ago occurs to me, about how, broke or not, alcohol was beginning to find me. Sitting in a car at night, me and Tony with a pint, on 7th Street near Avenue B, and a tape player on the seat playing Professor Longhair. Across the street, a trash container lays a long shadow across a litter of small yellow leaves.
The morning looks like autumn to me. Autumn starts at the beginning of August.
Then again, spring starts at the beginning of February.
He says “The other guy just go out of jail.”
“Drunk tank?”
“No, he do violence.”
We stand there watching him.
He says “I was in jail too. This guy said something to me—I couldn’t see what he was doing, I wear glasses. He hit me with something, broke my nose, my lip”—he passed a hand over his face as though it were a thing separate of him. “I said ‘I’ll be back to see you tomorrow, you better believe it.’”
A kid in a white t-shirt is moving along the opposite curb.He shouts across—“Hey! Hey, Pico!”
Pico looks up, steps into the street. Waits for a car to go by. He slides across Folsom.
The older man hands him the half pint.
“Es para mi?” Pico says.
“Yeah, that’s yours.”
“Para mi?” Pico can’t believe it, or he acts like he can’t believe it out of politeness.
“Take it.”
Pico drinks the remaining two fingers of whiskey.
He says “Muchas, muchas gracias.”
He tips the bottle at the mayor, who’s surveying the street.
Delicately, Pico takes the bottle to a trash can and moves away. When he’s gone, the mayor spots a penny in the wet leaves at the curb. He gestures toward it and says “See what I mean? There’s pennies, dimes—these motherfuckers don’t even look!”
He plucks it from the gutter and pockets it.
The two men are still on the sidewalk, propped against the wall.
He’s shaking his head, watching them.
He says “I’m waiting for the 48 to take me up to 24th and Mission.” (Two blocks.)
“What’s up there?”
“Aah. Livelier crowd. More active!”