16TH AND MISSION

He watches them on their bench in the sun, the slattern and the junkie.
I’m going down to two milligrams a day, says the slattern. Abundant gray hair flaps around her shoulders.
Good for you, says the junkie, who looks like he died of old age several weeks ago. He wears a ‘Cal’ cap and maroon suit jacket that squeezes his narrow shoulders. They discuss the weather for a few minutes but – this being the dry season – the subject is quickly exhausted. The slattern then begins to talks about her recent dental work.
They had to give me seventeen shots of Novocain, she says, I have a very high tolerance.
A flip-flop dangles from one foot. The other foot is grimy and nude. The second flip-flop lies on the ground next to an open bottle of fruit punch and sundry shopping bags. She wears a gray dress big with flounces and gathers.
Pedestrians stream around the bench at various speeds. Commuters hurrying out of the BART entrance skim over the ground: it’s late, they want to get home, they have responsibilities, objectives, homes, meals, parties, bills. An invisible conveyor belt whips them up and away, down the gullets of gloomy Victorians with ornate moldings and inadequate wall heaters. Although the commuters pass through the corner every day they barely see it. They whiz by the ones carried on a slower belt, a belt that takes them in circles (like twigs in a whirlpool). Like the girl with cinnamon skin who has already sauntered by him three times. In short-shorts and tube top she’s enticing but she’s also…worn, in a cautionary way. Her body lists to one side as she sways back and forth, presenting herself to interested parties. He understands why she’s tired: the owner of a small business can’t afford to take time off. He looks at her without ‘looking,’ without catching her eye and thereby entering into negotiations. Across the street a residency hotel makes a kindly neon offer of rooms at low rates, rooms with cable.
On the bench the junkie is slowly pulling himself up. It takes about a half hour and is done in stages – arm, shoulder, slow rotation of the knee – one crumbling joint at a time. Addiction signs a flourish to every hesitant movement. The junkie’s face looks like a cigar-store Indian.
Don’t get hit by a car, the woman tells him, Don’t be falling down on the street and stuff.
The junkie nods and creeps away.
The commuters aren’t really worth looking at. They’re civilians, deodorized and boring. The ones to watch put the best of themselves on the corner: the homeboys with their menace walks, lovingly adorned in designer sweat gear, or the funky bums whose unwashed hair looks like topiary shrubs. They make the corner a bazaar and a temple. Their day begins when the streetlamps switch on, as they just have, although with the sun still in the sky the lamps are just pallid markers. An old woman with a cane taps along, death’s head grin swiveling relentlessly from side to side. Around him on the platform, Mexican men lounge like they’re in their hometown zocalo, laughing together or just watching. Paper-wrapped bottles swing in gloved fists, packets pass deftly from hand to hand.
Another pretty girl catches his eye (after decades of practice, pretty girls are what he sees best). This one is pale and slow, her uncertain movements a distress flare. She sits on the platform a few yards away from him and hunches over like she has a hole in her stomach, moaning slightly. Then she lies on the platform and curls up, still trembling. On the bench the gray-haired woman dozes.
He knows why the commuters don’t see. They’ve chosen to live in a healthier world, a world pointed at the future, and the choice blinds them to certain things, to the energies transmitted through the corner. Nowadays he lives in their world most of the time, he can point to the year and month when he made the choice. He can even pick a day if he has to, if he needs a symbolic turning point to reassure him: the day he took the last of his amphetamines out their hiding place (in a sock) and flushed them away (need it be said that he hungered for them a few days afterward?). Today, though, he has a powerful hangover, and the hangover is his ticket, a day-pass to another order of existence.
Shadow has moved across the slattern on the bench and she pulls a denim jacket over her dress. In California you move from hot to cold that fast, from light to dark. Shadow has cut the residential hotel in half but the sun ignites fireballs in the windows of the top stories. A man leans out of one of the windows, shouting a name and expletives at the street.
He can’t stop looking at the girl, fetal on the concrete. A tattoo sentence curves across the small of her back, just above a coccyx bared by low cut jeans. He leans forward but can only read one word: ‘Team.’ He shuffles closer on the platform. He needs to understand the sentence. It’s a key to the afternoon. Then he has the feeling that someone has noticed his stare and he sits back, ashamed. He doesn’t want people to think he’s a creep. On the bench a heavyset woman in red stretch pants and a stained tie-dye shirt greets the slattern and sits down.
What happened to you? the grey-haired woman asks, Somebody stabbed you in the head?
The heavy woman looks away.
That’s some nasty shit. You can’t trust those kinds of people. Is she your girlfriend? Is that all blood? Shit. The bitch.
The heavy woman says nothing, her face drooping with sorrow. So the stain he noticed on her tie-dye is blood. It’s a festive stain, starting at the neck, covering one shoulder, and circling under an arm. All the heavy woman’s hair on that side is matted flat.
You didn’t go the hospital? The older woman asks.
The heavy woman shakes her head.
She hit you in the head with a crate? That bitch. It didn’t split your head? I seen them take you away in the wheelchair. It didn’t need stitches? You didn’t want to go to the hospital?
The heavy woman’s mouth twists. Tears are running down her fat, confused face. The older woman sits up straight, her voice rising with indignation.
You’re an attractive woman, she says, We can’t stay the victims anymore. I’m fifty-five years old. I got kicked out of two shelters last week.
She picks up the bottle of fruit punch and takes a swig. He notices that his own hands are shaking a little. The hangover. He feels blessed. It’s a good hangover, a secondary high from the alcohol breaking down to formaldehyde in his veins, pickling his organs. He used to have good hangovers all the time when he was younger but now they just make him tired. The hangover stretches him, like he’s wrapped around shipping container filled with everything that happened last night. The crowded room, everybody dancing. The Vietnamese girl dressed all in white like a pornographic angel. Channeling Iggy Pop for a song. Channeling Sly Stone and Andre 3000. He kept going back to the bar but the drinks didn’t drown him, they lifted him higher. ‘This coke sucks,’ the Vietnamese girl said but he didn’t care. He was smooth and perfect, conscious but not self-conscious, his super-ego blackjacked and dumped in a corner.
On the bench the older woman, invigorated by her monologue, stands up and starts to gather her bags.
I’m going into a program next week, she says, I hope I see you out here.
Before she leaves she gives the heavy woman directions to the shelter with the best food, and advice on how to negotiate the politics therein.
Goodnight, she says.
The fat woman doesn’t answer, lost in her sorrow.
Partying is the best way he knows to stop time. And he can only be happy, really happy, when he doesn’t know time is passing. But you can’t stay high forever. The more heroically you attempt to, the more miserable your downfall when time starts up again and ejects you onto the corner of 16th and Mission.
On platform the sick girl sits up and rubs her baby-fat face. Something compels him to offer help, to take control. It’s the predatory, protective instinct men have toward pretty, fucked up girls.
The girl gets to her feet and approaches the Mexican man closest to her.
It’s a cold night, she says, You don’t have an extra shirt or something.
The man shrugs and smiles, no. Then she looks over at him. Now is his chance. But he just looks away. He’s afraid she’ll ask more from him than he wants to give (which is nothing at all). He doesn’t want to be subjected to some stupid hustle. Yet it’s not just that. He does want something to happen, even if talking to her for five minutes would put him to sleep. But he isn’t ready to start drinking again and that’s the only way they could end up on a sweaty bed in the neon limbo across the street.
The girl totters away and he shares a complicit look with the Mexican. They both shake their heads.
She’s pretty, the Mexican says as if her looks make her condition remarkable. But being pretty is only the answer to some of life’s problems. In another way the man is right. She’s a princess held prisoner by a demon, even if the demon lives inside her head and looks a lot like dad.
The drugs though, the man continues, If I was going to be like that, I would do just as well to stay home. I’m from Mexico City. A lot of people. We have the same problems there too. Same shit.
They smile at each other and say goodnight. The Mexican man walks away. The bench is empty. He feels hungry and tired; he’ll get a sandwich and then sleep for an hour. Under the streetlamps pools of pale light spread into the shadows.
On the corner of 16th and Valencia a bearded man is still playing guitar and shouting into a microphone. He’s been there for at least two hours, playing religious country-music songs.
I saw the light I saw the light
No more darkness no more night
Now I'm so happy no sorrow in sight
Praise the Lord I saw the light.
The singer has an acoustic guitar with a pick-up and there’s so much distortion on chords and vocals that it sounds like rock. The singer has blue eyes and a bright, fixed gaze particular to tweakers and religious fanatics. He always forgets how many rednecks there are in California. A group of mariachi musicians on their way to work have stopped to watch the singer. They’re wearing green and gold charro suits covered with silver buttons and carrying their instruments. It’s a Chihuahua staring at a Saint Bernard and thinking: ‘You’re a dog and I’m a dog but what else do we have in common?’
A large sign has been affixed to the telephone pole in front of the singer. It reads, ‘Where will YOU spend eternity?’ The sign sets the mechanism of his religious upbringing into motion and he feels a slight panic. What if he’s made the wrong choice? A little man, also a bearded redneck, runs up and down the sidewalk handing out pamphlets. He takes one. He likes the crude cartoon devils and he likes to read about what’s going to happen to people like him.