Shiftless Seattlite Tour : San Francisco (Stop 2)

I

She is San Francisco.

She came to me late at night, turned down the covers and nymph-writhed her body next to mine. “So,” she said. “So,” I answered.

We lay there wrapped up in each other, staring at the ceiling. I thought about the first time we met, how I crossed her bridge over and over until we were both sweaty and tired. The twisting maze of her valley lingered as I drove from her, the sweet salt scent of her shores and her bulging-moon-captured hollow would beckon me back.

We arranged our trysts discretely, danced around each other coquettishly like thin paper coils in an updraft. We walked along the curiosity shoppes sharing chocolates and goat-skin drum heads. We chased each other through long, long alleyways perimetered with loud-colored townhouses that rose suddenly from each horizon as if our hidden hands were sliding the chewed plastic levers in a popup book.

She wrapped her starfish limbs around my toes to hold on as the tide pulled.

“It’s been seven years, you know,” she said casually, shifting her bare feet onto the sofa arm.

“Yeah,” I answered numbly.

“What do you think we should do about it?” she asked.

I ran my hand over my face slowly, pinching the unshaved skin together at my jugular. “What do you think we should do?” I responded.

We stared at the ceiling with our hands prayered upon our stomachs, and the hours passed.

II

As seen through glazed cellophane, she leaned forward throwing blurs of motion into the periphery. I was already pawing at the solid round table, counting nail points and reading the history of knees. “So, what is your spiritual practice?” she asked.

It all tunneled. Maybe they were Christians or maybe they were Buddhists or maybe they were Hindus. I couldn’t tell anymore. I fell back to stutters and fidgets, swallowed a hard egg lump, stumbled something about paganism or shamanism or wiccanism, all the while tensing my muscles for flight.

Years ago, in that office, she had cornered me and asked me what kind of faith is not based on the reverence of a sacred text, what kind of pathwork is not subject to systems of master/teacher, what kind of salvation could be gained without the structure of practice and movement. I wanted to explain that all these things were present in their fashion, that the basis for what I follow is as old or older, that I worked feverishly and with passionate dedication to my path, but more importantly that the comparison didn’t matter. But in the conflict heat, I could not. I blurted out something like, “It’s a feeling”.

She sneered and said, “Feelings change” and closed her bible on my fingers.

“So, what is your spiritual practice?” she asked with her soft heart, with her open, honest interest as the other faces turned to me and the cellophane ripped in raptor-shards. I wanted to leap over tables, spilling chai and scattering tofu, dashing towards the open window laughing gleefully, “Huzzah! You’ll never catch me!” I was the heretic in dirt mud marketplaces or the hermit starving in isolation or the fat child endlessly mocked and alone.

This is the stain of persecution. I cannot choose this any longer.

III

“What’s the word? The word is Revolution. You gotta make the choice now, kiddo. What’s it gonna be?”

I scoffed my feet across the cracked, elephant-skin curb and raised the coffee to my lips. The breeze of a late Sunday struck the sides of slow cruising cars and slid over their sun-hot roofs to roll down the hillside towards the bay. Flocks of children on low dirt bikes changed direction and intent with silent agreement, limbs and eyes and heads flashed in motion, indistinguishable to the predator.

I looked up at her, at the oiled, jet-black hair in tiny spikes, the silver lip piercing handcuffing her mouth, the scar along the her right eye. Her grey-faded clothes were punctured by underlayers of flame red. They hung in loose ripped segments down to her Converse tennis shoes, which were beaten and patched with bumper stickers, caution tape, and Hello Kitty logos.

I looked into her eyes and said nothing, didn’t need to say anything. There was nothing to be said.

She smirked and bit into her fingernails, “That’s your problem, sport. You always want it both ways, but that’s not how it works. Got no time for that shit anymore.”

I leaned back on my chair against the brick wall of the café and pushed my cup away from me, leaving a small smear of cream-brown and sugar on the tabletop. She laughed a short bark and scratched at the inside of her ear.

“Right? It doesn’t matter if you are right or not. Nobody ever knows that and who gives a fuck anyway? That’s not what it’s all about. This is Belief, brother.”

She took two steps forward and grabbed the chair opposite from me, turning it around in one sudden movement with a sickening metallic scrape. She swung one thin leg over it, straddling the seat, and leaned her hands upon the laced metal back.

I could smell her breath now. It was earthy, like sage, like infrequently brushed sage teeth, with the tart scent of cheap lavender candies. She smiled her pointy carnivores. Behind her, faint shadows flickered against the white wood doorframes.

“It’s all or nothing, kiddo. Time’s up for you. We either stay, or we walk now. Make it a good one.”

IV

The thing about poetry is that it infects you. When you hear good poetry, poetry that really reaches you, it causes little eggs to hatch in your brain.

That’s Mary. She’s my friend. That little poem is one of the best poems I’ve heard in a long time, and my friend Mary, she wrote it. She’s reading it right now, out loud, in a room full of ears. I’m having to hide my face with my hand because I can’t keep from crying. I’m sure I’ll brush it off later, maybe ask her for a copy, and not gush forth with exactly how this is affecting me.

The whole trip is crystallized in this moment, the warmth of the room, that scraggly-faced, beat-poet throwback standing next to me, so San Francisco. I’m sustained here, suspended with just that single voice speaking. She is radiant. And I’m feeling something way down deep in a place where I haven’t felt anything in a long time.

There’s a poem there. My poem is there. I’d forgotten what it was like to think poetically, how some things just want to be expressed that way. I touch it timidly. Maybe I’ll never write this poem. Maybe I’ll keep it secret and special, suspend it in this moment as well.

How long has it been since I felt this? Three years? Four years? Could it be five?

I’m realizing now that Mary’s poem is shorter than I want it to be, but then again, I want it to last for hours. This used to be what it was like to hear poetry and write poetry, the singular ecstatic moment, closer to sex and death than anything I can imagine. It used to be all that I ever wrote. I filled legal pads, journals, napkins, hard disks with this stuff. It’s funny the things you forget, the things you allow to die.

She’s finishing now. I bet she is nervous. The room responds enthusiastically. I cry again and pretend to scratch my nose. I close my palm around my poem and rise to leave.

V

We laid on our backs with enough space between us to allow our skin to cool down, but not enough to break the circuit. Her stomach rose and fell slower, slower and she gazed onto the place where the Y of walls meet.

I shut my eyes slightly, wandered my focus, and let my knee lightly rest against hers.

“It used to be simpler,” she said.

“Yeah,” I answered, barely moving.

She turned her head and ran her eyeline over the aging skin of my cheekbone, tracing small imperfections, a lover marking inventory.

“I don’t know what I want,” I said, letting my eyes fall open again, bringing the cracked plaster into sharp vision.

She sighed, which was my answer, and turned over onto her back again. Her fingers entwined mine, little cold porcelain sticks with seal skin nails. Her small breasts floated on her chest cavity, her underarms seaweeded against the random curves of her body. She put her head against my ribcage and smiled a faint, tiny smile.

“Honey, who ever does?”