PigeonLab

Yesterday.

Stephen’s house is fifteen blocks from the aquarium.  I decided to walk it in order to let the city rhythm soak into me.  The aquarium was in Mission Bay and I had to walk through some of the seediest parts of the city to get to Stephen’s house in the Tenderloin, the cities most colorful neighborhood where the sidewalks were nasty with the condensation of millions of people.

The city is a mixture of fluid and rigid elements. The buildings, those immovable, huge structures that we live in, work in and sleep in mix with the fluidity of the people and the cars that swarm them.  The city is a puzzle of box canyons, the buildings flat faces lock together creating a mathematical landscape, like a reef.  There is a math to the reef structure, I’m not good at math but I can feel the logic to it, the fractals of the coral and the flatness of the buildings.

I don’t try to but my eyes are usually trained on the sidewalk.  I count gum marks as they pass like dust on a movie reel. I am halfway out into a street before I realize what I’m doing.  I have tried to keep my head up so I can see the near future, things that are thirty seconds away.   But I can’t help it.  It’s not because I’m worried or that I’m afraid to look up.  It’s because my mind is filtering through the clips of thoughts that I think when I’m just killing time.  Images from movies, commercials, or books that I’ve read.  I am forever reorganizing the media stored in my head.  They pop up like library books left in a heap.

I wear headphones when I walk because it keeps people away.  Especially on the bus, which is such a circus.  If people aren’t trying to talk to you they’re babbling about their tedious lives, their sicknesses. Wearing headphones saves me from the guilt of walking past someone with their hand out.  If I can’t hear them then I’m off the hook, I don’t need to feel guilty because they know that I couldn’t hear them.  It’s a weak way to think, but with so many people asking for money everyday you need a system to deal with the guilt.  Anyone with a real conscience would go insane.  The headphones provide a socially expectable way to ignore people.  When people know that you can’t hear them they don’t talk to you.  It’s the same with a blind beggar, if you stay far enough away from them they don’t even know you’re there and then you’re guilt free.

Walking gave me quick and small video cuts of hundreds of lives, a few frames of a person’s day, their actions broken down into simple intentions, single thoughts.

I came across a group of older Chinese cooks hunched and leaning against the wall of a one-story, stand alone restaurant.  The moat of parking lot surrounding it was radiating disorienting heat waves that bent the straight lines of the city into pools of shimmering light on the asphalt.  The group looked like a black and white photo from the 1940’s.  Each one was wearing the white uniform of the line cook, holding cigarettes or their white paper caps between fingers.  I memorized each face.  They would have fit into a gap commercial with a slow crackly, man’s voice over big band jazz.  I had no context for understanding how those men lived.  My reality was light years away from what and in the end that means there is no way that we could see the same events in the same way.  It was impossible for me and any one of those guys to see eye to eye on anything.  We were coming from such completely different places.

I grabbed as many details about them in the little time I had.  All were tired. I imagined them struggling to get from some remote province in Western China to the U.S. their whole lives and now that they were here all they got to do was work for a shitty overpriced apartment and a set of ragged clothes.  I realized that people are bought and sold everyday.  People gamble their lives away or they get mugged or whatever and then they’re fucked, they can never get out.  Most disturbing was that in each cook’s eyes I could see that they knew that there was no way out, nothing new would happen to them Just a pair of eyes in a body perceiving.

Within San Francisco so much life is happening all the time. Deaths, births, marriages and it all has to happen right in the middle of everybody else’s lives.  There is no privacy while you experience your life, even the rich can’t buy enough space to protect themselves from the unsightly masses.  Everyone has to conduct their lives in plain sight.  It is not good looking.  I like to leave at least two empty seats between me and anyone else at the movie theatre, the more money you have the more space you can put between yourself and reality.

These people I see on my walks, the city’s people, are the regular people, the normal people, and the everyday people.  They are the pumps, their lives provide the pressure that keeps the city’s blood flowing.  There simply has to be a certain amount of people who provide the function to the organism.

I concentrated on the shape of the city, how the blocks opened up suddenly and a new canyon would appear.  I stopped for a minute exactly at each intersection and waited until everything had changed from when I arrived at the intersection, until things weren’t affected simply by my being there.  Every seven years the human body is made up of entirely new cells.  It’s like waiting for a bird to land on a stick.  The same things were happening at the next intersection, an infinite amount of universes, an infinite number of opportunities to witness everyday life.

Every canyon has the isolating cold feel of modern commercial architecture, architecture so straight that its human quality is lost.  The shapes become alien, and also cold.  The corrugated steel doorways with three heavy, metal posts on either side, each one filled with concrete just a little too much, like an overstuffed tamale.  I walked past dozens of little structures like those tamale posts, and within a few blocks I built a rhythm, the city’s rhythm: intersection, business, office space, business, ally, business, office space, office space, intersection.  All the canyons are the same but they differ in function.  Some are doorways to offices or sometimes houses, some of them harbor cars or doorways to garages.

I turned into one that I’d walked through a hundred times.  Every time I walked to Stephen’s I used that ally.  That alley saved me at least a minute each time that I walked to Stephen’s because it makes a direct line out of the round-about way that I would have to go if the alley weren’t there.  It’s just straight to Stephen’s house once you got out the other side. Halfway down this alley is another alley that intersects it, making a T shape.

I had my head down.  I turned a sharp left into the alley, took five steps and an odd feeling struck me, like a gust of wind that comes at you head on.  Someone was watching me, a primal feeling, fight or flight or whatever.  I raised my head and there in the middle of the alley were two men and one hand gun, in a space that seemed completely wrong, too close. They were both frozen still, their stone faces staring with unblinking intensity at me.  The alley walls, framed them in a rectangle of concrete and sky.

One of them was a businessman.  He was wearing a suit.  The other was a homeless guy.  The Homeless Guy was standing, looking down at the top of the Suit’s head, who was kneeling, his head bent down chin to chest.  At that point things began moving slowly.  I am haunted now by tiny details from the scene that have started to come back to me.  They come back to me in anxious dreams and flashes of color.  They also come back to me in moments of crystal clarity, still images, photographically perfect.

The Homeless Guy was dirty.  He had a dirty blue turban on his head.  Maybe it was just a towel wrapped around his head to keep warm, but it was August.

The suit had a blue striped tie on.  The knot was pulled way out so it was hanging loose around his neck.  The Homeless Guy was looking down at the Suit with pity. Whatever they were involved in, it wasn’t ugly. It lacked the aggressive tone of a murder.  It was confused.  The Homeless Guy looked helpless when he should have been so sure, of himself,  assured by the handgun that he was clutching.

The feeling was asymmetrical, the power structure of it felt off.  The two looked like they were acting out a staged scene, not like a spontaneous homicide.  This was premeditated.

The Homeless Guy was stressed, pulled in multiple directions, by my presence and the task at hand.  He was struggling with himself.  He was nodding and then shaking his head.

I was frozen in place by the equalizing pull of every cell in my body getting ready to run in different directions at the same time, if I had moved I would have pulled myself apart.

They were looking at me and I was looking at them for what felt like a minute and then they decided to ignore me.  The Suit was hoping that it was going to be over quickly.

I knew that the two of them weren’t going to hurt me, they didn’t seem interested in me and they made it seem like my stepping into this was just a waste of time for them, something that they had to deal with.

I was mesmerized, their positions were so intriguing. They looked like they were locked in an epic battle that they had been fighting there whole lives, and I had just happened to step into the climax scene where they were both fighting on a hilltop at sunset.  The Homeless guy was going to take the Suits head off with one swing. I had never been near anything like it in real life, it didn’t feel real.  I expected cameras to appear from around the corner any second.

I was in shock.  I wasn’t prepared to handle an intense situation like that, there was no pratice besides movies and those failed me miserably when I needed a guide.  For the first time in my life I was really, deeply scared.  I felt exposed, like I was standing out in the middle of a huge frozen lake at dusk, I felt out in the open.

The Homeless Guy had the gun held out away from his body, like he was holding something disgusting.  His arm was fully extended.  I saw his grip keep changing on the handle.  He was gripping it tightly, then stretching out his fingers one by one, pulling them off in succession, then wrapping each one tightly around the handle again.   He was lifting his index finger off of the trigger, momentarily lifting it off of its half-moon resting place.  He was shaking, shivering like the flu.  I could see it from, twelve feet away.  He started marching in place.  Lifting his feet irregularly then stomping them back down again, shifting his weight back and forth like a windup soldier.  He stroked his beard full length with his free hand while looking at the suit.  The Homeless Guy was mumbling something that I couldn’t hear, or maybe he was just whining slightly, totally confused.

The Suit could have been a statue fused to the curb, kneeling there with an electric white anticipation.  I had the absurd wish to have known what his life was like or if he was a dickhead, anything about the guy.  There was something totally familiar about him.  Like a painting in the house you grew up in.  I thought, “Is it ok with me that this guy’s gonna die right now?” I wished I would have thought, “No,” but I didn’t think anything.  I can’t tell if what I remember is because that’s the way that I want to feel now or cause that’s the way that I felt then.  I have gone back and built so much embellishment into the scene now.

I started to think about what might happen, I thought about getting shot.  I looked back out to the street to see if there were any other people around, witnesses, out on the street.  Half of my view was blocked by the wall of a building, and I could still see at least ten people who were within twenty feet.  There were people walking past the entrance to the alley who had to have seen us, they crossed the ally way and looked down its corridor and they must have seen us. I didn’t make eye contact with any of them.  I couldn’t scream, I was unable to do anything at all.  Which is so different from what I thought I would do in a stressful situation like this one.  I turned out to be a coward.

I have to admit to mylsef that I would have done the saem thing those people did,  I would have taken one look into that alley and I would have pretended like I never saw it I would never have walked into that situation on purpose. They all just kept walking by. They all took in the situation and decided that they don’t want to be involved.  I looked out past the two men out to Fell Street, no one there was even looking down the alley.  Most people don’t look down alley’s in the tenderloin because you’re likely to see exactly what was happening then. All of them kept their heads up.

I saw an accident on highway 101 two days before the alley situation, I was driving in the right lane, it was raining and you couldn’t see much.  About halfway down to Pacifica there was a lady standing outside of her car, on the shoulder.  I knew then that I should have gotten out and helped the lady, she had a flat and looked like she didn’t know how to change it.  I slowed down instinctively but I was hoped that one of the other people in one of the other cars was going to slow down first and help her out, and that is what happened. As soon as they did a huge rush of relief came over me and I realized that I was irritated that my day had almost been postponed.  I was relieved to be off the hook.  That second where you think that you are going to have to be the one to handle a situation, than you realize that there is someone else that has stepped in and relieved you of your moral obligation, the relief of being tapped on the shoulder and released from duty.  Because you are the person closest to an event, that automatically makes you the person responsible for making sure that it turns out ok, or at least that no one gets hurt.

It dawned on me that I was going to be the only normal person, the only outsider, to be involved in the shooting situation.  I was inside of the ally, I had stepped in unconsciously but there I was five yards in and effectively a hundred miles from the street.

I was close enough to see that the Homeless Guy was breathing heavily.  He had gotten so worked up that he lost his breath.  His clothes were ripped, like he had crawled through a barbwire fence and under a garage door.  His face was dirty, sweaty, and cut and bleeding.

I wanted to say something but I also wanted to run right past them and get to Stephen’s house.  I knew when I was in that alley that it all was going to make a great story.  Running right past them however was not an option.  I didn’t want to startle the already rattled, gun wielding, Homeless Guy.  I raised my hand and arm, hoping that the movement would draw the attention of the Homeless Guy and he might initiate the conversation that would lead to me getting the hell out of there.

He noticed.  Without moving his gun or his hand he looked right at me.  The two of them were there motionless except for the heaving of the Homeless Guy’s chest.  My heartbeat was throbbing.  I couldn’t hear anything else except for the deep pulse in my ears.  The Homeless Guy was shaking harder, he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to stay now, and finish the job, with me watching him.

“Leave!” I heard suddenly, through the ringing in my ears.  A quick yell, like a yelp.  The opposite street was forty yards and a lifetime away, completely silent.  Just a series of vehicles and buses moving across the screen created between the two sheer walls of the ally.

“Leave”.  Again it came into my brain but it didn’t register.  I looked at The Homeless Guy but he was staring at me and his mouth had never moved. The Suit hadn’t moved his body, he was still crouching there on the curb.  But he was the one saying it, repeating the word with more desperation each time.  “leave, Leave, LEAVE!!”

The Homeless Guy never moved the gunpoint from the top of the Suits head.  He kept his head cocked with the same expression worn by toll-booth attendants.  Like he couldn’t make out if I was real or not and then like he couldn’t decide if I was important enough to warrant dealing with.  He was looking at me like he was trying to figure out what I was.  I wasn’t registering as human.

The Suit was still crouching.  His voice coming out muffled from his wet bowed mouth.  The words were slobbery, bubbled, he had been crying, maybe for a while, but how long for sure I couldn’t tell, the tears were audible in his shaking voice.  He was holding his hands together at the wrists, hands spread out, each finger splayed out to his assailant like they were cuffed.  He was beyond desperate; he knew that was losing control of a situation that if he lost it would be worse than death.  The Suit was pleading with me to leave them so that his plan could be carried out the way that he had wanted it to.  If it didn’t he was going to suffer not only the humiliation of an attempted suicide but also the depression of being one of the most haunted types of souls, a living ghost, a suicide survivor.

My body quivered with an attempt at speech.  There was an energy welling up in me.  It was the start of my reaction.  I had no idea what it was going to be.  What I wanted to do was to protest what was happening, to me and to them.  I wanted to reach out, take decisive action, and have the situation be over with and out of my day. The situation was an intrusion on what I had planned.  I wanted to brush the both of them aside, breadcrumbs flicked with fingertips from a table, and keep walking towards Stephen’s apartment.  As far as I was concerned that moment would have been best frozen and shattered into a thousand shards of glass then swept underneath the concrete.

My head started to spin, I realized that I couldn’t speak up even if I had figured out what I wanted to say.  The two of them never made any sudden movements.  I can’t remember if my thoughts and my actions had any correlation at all.  I might have been stumbling around tripping over the curbs, I could have been flapping my arms, I dunno,  I was looking through tunnel vision, a small tunnel, and I couldn’t make out the sounds that were coming towards me.  I asked myself, “How am I going to get myself out of this shit?”

I felt a shout release from me.  My mouth was open. I felt my hands move up above my shoulders, hands out, palms toward the men.  My body was in a rush to release.  My nerves were in hyper mode but I had no true release, just a chest full of stale, cold air.  My brain was moving so slow that the sound of my own voice took seconds to register, I was reacting to an echo off the walls of the ally.  The Suit separated his clasped hands and let them fall towards the ground in front of him.  They were trembling less.  His eyes and head turned from the Homeless Guy and slowly rotated to meet mine.  I saw his mouth move, a second later the word reached me, “What?” He spoke it loudly and slowly, twice. “What?” Like he was asking me to repeat what I had just said because he didn’t believe it.

“What had I said just a second ago?” Did, I just say something before he said “what”, I couldn’t remember.  I was so bent.  I was seriously grappling with my inner dialogue.  I couldn’t get a handle on what was happening.  Paralysis was starting to set in.  My mind was simply overloaded with trying to keep up and filter all the information that was coming in.  Thoughts were bouncing off the walls of my head so hard that I began to feel my head shake from side to side.  There were two echoes now, the walls themselves and the walls of my head, four surfaces of bouncing words and thoughts. They bounced, bounced, bounced, bounced and then landed hard on my mind.

I couldn’t remember what to do, how to be cool and strong.  I had spent years of my life running situations just like this one in my head and at that moment I couldn’t even tell if I was speaking out loud.  I thought, “Maybe I didn’t scream anything just a second ago.” If I did it was something so shocking that it made the Suit forget about his suicide attempt and start to wonder what the fuck I was doing there staring at him, frozen in place while a crazy looking Homeless Guy was holding a gun to his head.  As far as The Suit was concerned I had gone into the alley in order to convince the Homeless Guy not to shoot him.  In truth I hadn’t even decided that The Suit shouldn’t get shot.  I didn’t even know him.  There was that familiar sense though.  I felt like he was close to me.

“Never mind just go away.”  The Suit said in desperation, exhaustion.  He turned his head back away from me, like he didn’t believe I would leave, he had a resigned tone.  Then he let his eyes drop to the ground.  That move must have taken at least 12 seconds.  I was still thinking, “This can’t be real.”  He didn’t have far to move his head around when he turned back quickly to yell, “I mean it leave, leave now!”  I was a stone, I couldn’t move, I was frozen. I wouldn’t have moved even if the Homeless Guy had pointed his gun at me.

I was still trying to figure out what the hell was happening. It hadn’t registered that the Suit had given the Homeless Guy a gun to shoot him with.  It was a suicide attempt, and I was botching it up.

The sirens had been in the air for a while before I really noticed them.  Their adrenaline-educing whine softly sneaking through the canyons.  Making their way into that alley and into my ears.  I turned and looked out at the street once more.  No one seemed to be taking a special interest in what is going on in there.

Little by little, the sirens grew, right down the street, then so close that their piercing scream was grinding against the inside of my eardrums with a supersonic sound.  The Suit got up suddenly to his knees.  He looked up at the Homeless guy, embarrassed, shaken, his lower lip was trembling.  He now looked the way that a man on his knees about to get shot in the head should look.  The Suit raised his shoulders in an embarrassed way and then got up and took off running.  Then it was the Homeless Guy and me so I turned around and ran back out to the street the way that I came in.

Once I was out of the alley I ran for about half a block and then stopped when I realized that I might look like I was the one running from the cops.  I was trying to catch my breath when a wave of disappointment came over me, so heavy it made me nauseous.

I realized to fast that my efforts were pointless, that nothing that I try to correct stays corrected for very long.  Why put any effort into it at all?  There will still be homeless; there will still be the haves and the have-nots.  People will always fight.  There will always be the people whose backs get walked on.  Disillusioned, I walked down the street in the original direction that I was walking before because if I hadn’t taken the alley then I would have been walking that way anyways.

The completely momentary and fleeting effect that any of us can have on a situation that lasts two minutes or a lifetime was making my head hurt.  How can it be that nothing has any importance because of its relativity?  Time is such a huge and terrible weight, and while it often works to cleanse it can also cause a washing away of any progress that has been made. Which that shows that progress itself is merely a matter of the timing of things.  What if I hadn’t been there at all.  What if I had never seen those two guys in that ally and what would I be thinking about right now instead of going over the story of it for the hundredth time.