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[W r i t e r' s N o t e b o o
k]
Sketches of Those We Have Known: BERKELEY PEOPLE
Watson walked on listening for the creep of the bus behind him. It
reminded him of an animal, old and slow but indomitable and fated to rule
the earth. He turned and watched the old eyes glower through the mist that
were like beams of radiation. In the distance were the buildings; only two
were visible. One was brick, with large rectangular windows. The other was
a steel obelesque directly across the street, it's windows retracted into
the black steel. The fog hung along the tops of each on of them,
concealing the watchtowers. There were two watchtowers, he remembered. One
on the old building faced east, toward the surrounding hills. The other
faced west across the green expansive bay between the spires of the Golden
Gate and out to where the ocean and sky danced together in a vaporous
line.
He briefly thought of the women in those buildings. He thought they
were damsels from another age looking for heroes. One used to stand all
day combing her blond hair that fell down her back and rumpled along the
floor like some hairy snake. Occasionally she would pick up glasses and
search along Grizzly Peak.
The other paced with a cigarette in her mouth and held a trembling
mirror to her face blurring the room in the background. She had told him
that work was boring. But at least it was work and honorable, useful work
was hard to come by.
He had forgotten their names but remembered vividly the day he had met
them. They would search Shattuck Avenue for the "loners" they told him.
They were sitting in a cafe on the corner of Shattuck and Allston.
"Am I a loner?" he had asked defensively.
The blonde one had laughed like a little girl who sees her father naked
for the first time.
"I'm not a loner!" he demanded.
The one with the cigarette nodded her head, "that's right, you have
your pestering dreams. I can always tell a dreamer by the fog in his
eyes....and, mister, you have fog!" Then she laughed a husky, friendly
laugh that made Watson smile.
They said they worked for the city and when he told them he worked for
the post office the two of them took him down to the park. It was not late
at night but it was dark and Watson held onto the two hands that escorted
him down to the tiny creek running through a cool bankside.
There was something supernatural about these women even if they said
they were simple city workers.
Watson asked the blonde how old she was and she turned her head and
looked into the creek.
"I'm a silver leaf." Watson opened his eyes and, yes, it was true taht
a leaf was snagged on a rock and the woman bent to put her hand in the
cold stream and swirled it gently until the leaf was bumped from the snag.
The current pulled it gently into the middle of the stream. The other
woman flicked her cigarette into the stream, then stood behind Watson and
brushed her hand through his hair.
"I'm from Neptune," and her hand slid before her moved down his shirt.
Watson quit asking them questions, in the park, down by the creek, empty
of sound but the hurried feet of the squirrels somewhere behind them.
At that moment he would have given a five-dollar bill for the croak of
a frog.
Watson perceived a groan in the creek. It wasn't a bellow but an eerie
sigh that became a groan in that delicate gurgle of the water rounding
over the pebbles and rock.
A green stake, like the one used for surveying, suddenly became visible
to him. It stuck in the middle of the creek directly in front of him and
he wondered at the illusions of night that could make noise and things,
alternating like drunken eyes looking like blinking neon signs.
The two women were then opposite him, asking personal questions. They
wanted to know about everything. His age, his income, address, phone
number, place of birth, exact time of birth, his favorite color, favorite
books, favorite music. Did he sleep on the left side or right.
Right-handed or right-handed? Smoke? What was his philosophy of life and
if he was too boring to have one, where had he been? What did he do? What
did he know...exactly?
He answered as best he could and when he stumbled over something they
went to another question, to return to the previous one later. He didn't
question what they were doing. Perhaps it was out of the ordinary he
didn't know because often, he wasn't sure what he was saying. Even in the
cool air he felt hot and sticky with sweat.
The last thing he remembered saying was "letters" then they attacked
him.
On the bank they stripped him of his clothes and threw them in the
water. "What...what are you doing?" he yelled, kicking and scratching as
he tried to pull from the women who had suddenly turned on him. They
didn't say anything.
When his clothes had been disposed of in the creek, the blonde one (and
he remembered the monstrous green eyes palpitating in their sockets)
pointed up to the moon that was half a yellow grin, toothless but filled
with a pale cheek.
The two stood and started running through the park and when they had
disappeared Watson could hear a chilling, whining shriek that was joined
by a rebel call, "yeyeyeyeyeyeyeye" as if the tongues were vibrating like
the blades of a reaper against the roof of the mouth..
Watson was cold for a long time. He sat stunned, unable to fetch his
clothes from the water. They hadn't drifted downstream. His shorts and
pants were twisted around the rocks and fallen twigs that lay haphazardly
in the water.
On the bank naked and shivering, Watson could hear the squirrels or
ground birds rustling behind him. He knew if he turned there would be line
of curious and staring eyes, twinkling and fixed and bright
The bus was coming up behind him and he ran, then walked quietly to the
stop that was in front of the railroad tracks. The tracks ran parallel and
strung for a mile before bending around a small hill that was part of
someone's backyard. They were filled with broken green glass that nestled
with the crushed rock between the ties. Watson himself had thrown a few of
the bottles there, late at night. That is, when everything was shut up in
the neighborhood and he could experience the extravagance of sound that
exploded from the glass breaking on steel.
Before he reached the bus stop he suddenly halted. He had seen a crack
fissured slightly in the concrete. It had split just a fraction and he had
seen it, seen it like one could see the hands of a clock move when the
mind was concentrating adequately on it; on anything. Just so the eyes
blinked occasionally and not miss the movement of the hand. He was glad to
be outside. He had lived with earthquakes all his life and recognized,
now, how subtle they began.
He bent closer to the crack still reminding himself that he'd seen it.
After all, there it was. But, then, he had seen a sign in the distance
that enlarged his imagination and turned out to be a swab of paint some
vandal had put on.
He dropped his eye into the sliver that was nearly a foot long. It had
split through a handprint someone had made in the cement years before. The
hand that made this, he thought, is now red and beat like the porches and
roofs on the cottages that fell inward throughout the neighborhood.
The print was larger than a child's but smaller than a man's hand. They
had pressed hard because the print was framed by a rim of cement.
Watson pressed his ear to the crack, remembering an old prophecy that
earthquakes could be heard coming before they struck. He heard a faint
roar as if it were caught deep in the interior of the Earth and yelling
for help. He didn't hear any cries of help. Perhaps it was the ubiquity of
the ocean.
He looked to see where he was in relation to the telephone pole but
when he raised his head the bus rambled past him and he stood to run after
it, fingering his pocket for the quarter. But at that moment the red
signal light changed, black and white arms crossed the road, and in an
instant the area was shook by the stampede of cars, one after another, in
an endless row, led by a Gothic engine, all the wheels clacking like
playing cards hitched to a bike wheel.
It begins with dull impressions, like a poor forgery and on either side play cajoling mystic clowns. "Enter ye who dare O- we contemplate, contemplate, contemplate! And it gives us nuttin but jizzes; how serious must the gathering be? Outside, turn your head and tell me what you see. Ay, purblind traffic and a hard crust.
For, before us is a scene we must peer into. And eat the vestiges of fear and loathe the odor of ozone preparing our annihilation. It's our plague and we must adjust. Out of disease comes conscience. What say, boy! I see a man sitting on a rock, his legs folded under him. He's surrounded by dissolution and whisping trails of buildings. It's recognizable. It's fun. He believes he's the last man alive and consoles himself by turning the waste into pleasure. But let's hear him tell the story. It's his. He prepares to speak! Why, behind me traffic anneals itself and the day is swathed with wild clouds. And I know somewhere a flower blooms and I know of stories never ending. But here- Bah! To hell with'em all and all their crud. They should take all the radios and cram them up their ass. And drive all the cars off a pier. Where were we and what are we doing here? We've stopped by a side-show, a kind of rural snake pit that has a wretched air about it. But the sign has promised something different.
The air is infectious. I'm driving from San Francisco to Oregon to visit friends and at that at that moment in the drive where the scenery begins to collide; then I saw the billboards. They were spaced out fifty yards. "The Future Awaits." "Peek into the Bubble of the Future!" "See the Final Man!" Before its Too late. See!" The radio was out or in between stations and the combination of boredom and curiosity made me stop. As with any other Joe, I'd given the future a thought or two. In fact, I had devised a little theory about it along the lines of an organic theory of life. To wit: If an individual plays out the biological fate and dies, then too, nature had the same fate and would perish and, in fact, had given the brain the knowledge of its own destruction. Not simply knowledge, but facts and hardware. So, it was all connected together without question. The future had something indomitable about it. The attitude became infectious. What then is left but to drink, eat, and enjoy a woman? Keep warm for half a century maybe and then break down in weird babbling sounds. I've always been suspicious of the highway stand. But the promise of a peak into the future was an inticing element for a tired man. I learned later that the proprietor had enormous land holdings around Mt. Shasta but pretended he was struggling by wearing old overalls with Gorilla Ben patched on the back. He was a stooped fellow by the name of Zog and moved suspiciously behind the front table which was laden with artifacts and souveneirs appertaining to the future. He was a shrewd man because he had taken reddish lava rock abounding in the area and tried to pass it off as fused automobiles. There were ten in a row and when I called him out on it he became defensive. "This is the way they'll be!" I asked him if he had any buildings and he flushed in embarrassment. I caught a fleeting glance of his daughter in the back room, where the future was stored. She passed by the door like a scent and passed down my eyes where I was uplifted by her beauty. She was tall and lissome with long pale arms and a face unmarked but, rather, smoothed by the hot summer winds blowing toward Lassen. Her name was Roberta and she wore a star in her ebon hair. It was apparent that she was kept at the Amazing Future Faire, not only for the entertainment of the customers but that her father, Zog, had decided to punish her for some unexplained reason; as though she had to replace her mother and would never be free from the Amazing Future Faire. I felt compelled to buy a red lava rock under the scowl of the old German. He put it in a paper bag and kept it on the counter before calling Roberta from the back. I saw her sadness. Her smile was for customers and concealed what an experienced man could see. Under the smile was a ruined clock. I remember as a boy keeping a clock under water just to see if it would tick afterwards. To my surprise it did, but each day the face and hands corroded and a week later, it stopped. And when I watched Roberta move behind her father I associated it with the boyhood experience. Zog fingered a fat brown cigar. "This pretty lady'll show you through," he said and motioned me to the entrance between the desk. The Amazing Future Faire was a Quonset hut painted over in thick psychedelic designs with an enormous red eye on the wall facing the highway. The eye looked impressive from the freeway and was the one everyone noticed. A yellow pupil stared from the eye and around the whole ellipse shimmered an oracular rainbow in the prime colors. Surrounding the hut was a vast countryside littered with lava rock, manzanita, and weeds. Roberta took my hand and we went into the back; suddenly it was dark as if the light were put out by a mechanism triggered by body heat. We walked for an inordinate amount of time. Along the wall flushed sudden flourescent lights that washed over scenes of disaster, one after the other. The stern of the Titanic, the burning skeleton of the Hindenburg, the fireball of Hiroshima, the Dallas Motorcade, an unidentified corporate building and all the while a voice in monotone announced through invisisble speakers, "We live in the most barbrous age in the history of mankind and the future...."
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