California Musing

My Neighborhood
It’s Friday night. I’m on my back on the deck looking up. If I tilt my head back enough, just right, with my nose and a bit of a squint I can block the bright sun from view and look at the sky. It is so blue, it can’t be that blue; I think it is my sunglasses and I take them off, and the sky is still that blue.
At 6:00 the deck is still hot, the sunlight still burns; in twenty minutes my skin is toast, well, almost–just right, really, but I want more and rationalize my lingering. I try to read, but would rather not. The writing is too good to skim over, too good for hot-sun brain-fried meandering casually through the lines, until paragraphs and pages have been consumed, gone as superficially as a bag of salty chips or the perfect Margarita–lasting effects, but so irredeemable.On the street below me, people coming back from being away from home all day (working?) are hauling their emptied recycling bins from the sidewalk to the house. Here, there is an official and an unofficial crew for emptying the recycling bins. The official crew came by in their truck about 4:30 today, late–I wonder why–and pitched glass and cans and cardboard into their truck. Earlier, from when the bins first started appearing on the sidewalk last night until mid-morning, the un-official unloading crew clanked down the street with their garbage-bag festooned shopping carts, gathering cans and bottles from the bins and other things from the boxes people had set out. Here, there are bottle and can deposits to be collected, some bottles are worth a dime–a source of tolerable income.

I love the clatter of these carts coming down the street. They are driven by real people, we look at each other and say howdy. This isn’t like the folks back in Seattle who throw back the lid on the litter bin downtown and forage for aluminum, lunch, cigarette butts. They seem like creatures to avoid, at least that’s how I see passerby look at them–like gnarly, mangy, hungry trolls escaped from places we don’t even go in our imagination; not even cute, like bears grubbing in picnic areas–more dangerous even.

Somehow here these scavengers get to be real people–time-honored “productive citizens,” almost. Later, on the weekend, I can buy things from them at one of the flea markets which rise up in unused commuter parking lots. These cart people will be there in some little space selling whatever treasures scored from the sidewalks. Last weekend in a lot, beneath the freeway overpass, I almost bought a wrought iron table from one of these shopping cart trolls.

Some of these flea markets appear in BART stations. A lot down here is defined in comparison to BART. I’m living near the MacArthur BART station–I would tell you that if you were thinking of coming over, or if I was asking directions to a store. You’d know a lot from mentally placing my home near the MacArthur station, including what kind of neighborhood I live in; you’d know that just two weeks ago a woman was murdered nearby, stabbed in the heart I heard, when she was walking from the BART station. For her money.

Later, the Oakland Police catch the man who stabbed her. They track him down because he made phone calls using the dead woman’s cell phone. There are some dumb people in this neighborhood. I try not to be one of them.

Mary on Piedmont

Hanging out up on Piedmont Avenue there is a guy with a long gray beard who goes by the name of CarWash. He is friends with Mary, at least that is what Mary says. Mary also says that CarWash saved her life and that she knows that he didn’t murder that woman–the one who was killed over on Manila Street coming home one night from the BART station.

Mary says that her girlfriend saved her life, the night she cut her wrists. Mary was in the bathtub, and heard her girlfriend calling, 911. Mary’s cut her wrists seventeen times, and pulled up her sleeve to show me–pale traces of scars criss-crossing her weathered skin. One night an angel came to Mary, all mother of pearl and golden hair, and the angel told Mary that she had three purposes in life, so Mary asked what they were. But the angel would not tell her.

Mary’s check is late, and she has three dollars to live on until it comes. I thought, “Now comes the pitch,” but Mary never asked me for any money, just told me about how she feeds her cats and one day some guys tried to get her drunk and took her into the park–behind some bushes they told her, “Mary, we know what you can do with your mouth.” But Mary says, “I’m not a whore,” and she told the guys to watch her stuff while she went to pee, and she just left her cat food there and snuck away.

A big round orange fireball sun was setting and Mary kept talking, explaining the settlement she got, even though she didn’t sue, and how she wanders the streets while the carpenters are there. “I just got these shoes,” she explained, and turned her right foot bottom-side up to show me the wear on the soles, the missing tread that she’d left behind on some sidewalk somewhere.

“Fred told me you are sleeping with my Al,” Mary accused. With this accusation she stopped me on the sidewalk, 41st and Broadway. We were a few blocks from Piedmont, where she had been hanging out with CarWash and the guys–just a few benches away from where I’d been dawdling at a bus stop, just watching things go by, listening in on the conversations that Mary and her buddies were having. I’d heard Mary go on and on about Al, how he wouldn’t see her during the day, wouldn’t walk down the street with her, but oh how he would be with her at night.

Mary tells me now, that Fred sleeps with all the women on Piedmont. I assure her that he’s not sleeping with me, but Mary just knows that he sleeps with ALL the women on Piedmont, and I guess I’ve become one of the women on Piedmont. This is not how I expected to settle-in and belong, in my new neighborhood