Sketches of Those We Have Known: BERKELEY PEOPLE

The Projects of Danielson

There was no other choice, finally. They had made him decide. They had taken his mind and he had seen the exquisite details of what needed to be built. A bridge, which later people would drive over non-plussed and thinking of the job, thinking of the spoiled kid, or the sudden cramps. "Oh, the bridge is pretty. It is a pretty bridge." And men had fallen from the bridge and plunged into the dark below.

He had remembered the city as a kid. It was a high explosion of color and sound, with everything large and moving quickly around him. An exoticism that even early travels to Mexico and the Midwest could not match. No matter how many times he was in the city he could not get over the feeling of being in a huge play or carnival. Now, as he reached a certain age, it all looked rather sad and low to him. There was color, certainly. There were exotic creatures but now they came at him like lost acquaintances, like friends he had known in another existence, at college or the first job he ever had. Or, like clowns who know you are no longer frightened of them and you can see their disgust under the paint. And the sound was muted. That was odd to him. It was as though some huge librarian, invisible, were telling all the people and machines to hush up and they were trying.

And he suddenly realized that he had absorbed them all, had made them into his own private world but had never really thought about them. All the pretty characters lined up in an orderly row ready to do his bidding. All of the males here, and the females there. Children here. A few mixtures of gender and ethnicity. Young, middle-age, and elderly. Dreamers and doers. The flaccid and the erect. Boozers and silent tempters dressed like saleswomen in fashionable stores. People had thrown off the old style of dressing and were like tramps in fashionable rags, faces old and beaten, discolored hair, and voices edged in ruin. Dope and loud music, he thought. And reading the wrong things, no doubt.

Ah, they all have mothers and do five predictable things per day. No matter who or what they may be. Since I know that for a fact, then I know everything in essence. What is the need to know more? Oh, I suppose the tale of Bulgaria is something to listen to or the tale of pets they have owned. We are captured, then, in their tales. And that is a sign. We want that sign given when the tale liberates us. We, I, you and who does it matter. A sign, a good healthy sign from something strange and exotic to tell us that we are free. Indeed that we are not in the oppression we fear the most.

I crossed the city gently in hurried feet to find a colossal head sticking out an old window above me. "Hey, not so gentle, not so fast....please." And believe me, I knew he said it sarcastically. It was a bitch that day. For one thing I was to meet a woman I had fallen in love with but I couldn't find her or, I had been with her and she ditched me. She just disappeared so it was my duty, then, to look for her. I was somewhat dejected but I also had a purpose and that gave me a wonderful sense of meaning, as though all my past sins would be forgiven if I found the lovely.

And all the traffic seemed to disappear and that was very odd. It's true that the traffic was simply another piece of the puzzle in a complicated city like this one but it was an important piece, a crucial piece as the politician would say and without it it just didn't seem like a city.

A mysterious wind kept blowing up, from the street, lifting the dresses of a few old women and catching the bill of a baseball cap and sending it head over heels along the street. It was not a whirlwind or a dust devil but a swoop of wind that seemed to glide up the side of one of the grand, rectangular shapes filled in with dark glass, a thing that defied the wind and, in fact, all imagination and tried to make one mute before it.

And then I suddenly realized I was standing in a spot I had seen filmed decades before when I was a kid and had taken the bus to walk with my cousin in the big city. We saw the cameras and the crowds and over and over they shot the scene of a man dressed in a suit coming out of a building and hailing a taxicab. Again and again and when we realized what it was we tried to position ourselves so we'd get in the movie somehow. When the movie finally came out my cousin and I saw it and were disappointed we had been cut out of the film, apparently, but that spot, I always thought about that spot along that long dirty street I now found myself on. The old building was gone but there was a taxi stand and a few drunken bums mumbling that Jesus was just around the corner. Here is where the famous actor came out, I thought. Here is where he walked hailing the taxi as he walked.

A man in love could never afford to live in the past. I came to that conclusion when I was taken for one of these bums and, in fact, temporally was in their company. "Ah old friend, you are among us again," and I thought, "this is a nightmare," but I didn't say anything because I had heard these bums could be dangerous if you riled them up. "I'm looking for someone, a woman." And I knew before I said it I should have said nothing. Two of these creatures reared back and roared with laughter, their spittle hitting me on the face and arms. "Aren't we all my friend, aren't we all!"

We should always be mindful that in the city danger is just around the corner. A piece of clothing can be floating in the strong, prevailing winds and smack you in the face so you walk into a doorway filled with nuts and killers. And as you disentangle yourself the first face you see scare the daylights out of you and you grab the first thing you can to defend yourself. And then you realize that, in this place, they kidnap and drug men like myself to go serve on tramp steamers from China and back, like the good old days. And they roll you after you're drugged up and then shoot you down a trap door where a guy gets you in a burlap sack and then you're dragged onto a stinking rusted out old thing and by the time you wake up you are in the middle of the Pacific Ocean; pelicans and the smell of salt and fish on your skin. It all flashed in my mind as a possibility so I threw down the errant clothing and found the door and walked out into the city that I embraced fully now. "Oh beautiful chaos and confusion, oh beautiful humanity!"

Ah, another adventure I will tell to my friends. This is what the city was to me; good, bad, and indifferent. And truth be told, many times I skulked around the city alone with only a little money in my pocket seeing how it felt that way and looking at the tourists and wealthy looking people as though I could be dangerous to them. To get their reaction. And they would start to whistle when they saw me and look the other way. I presented then, on days in which I planned such excursions, a face few would recognize.

I suppose politics had something to do with it. The sense of injustice that appears mysteriously on the scene. Two men die on a riverraft; two other men must die in the desert heat. Two men made members of the castrati against their wills, two men forced into unconscionable acts. An eye for an eye; tooth for a tooth; pecker for a pecker; louse for a louse.

For instance, continuing up the highway where pedestrians were hit and slaughter nearly on a daily basis, I caught the sight of a fellow I had known years before. A jovial, drunken man who could hit a golfball three hundred yards when he put himself into it; when he was sober. He used to call me Dufus. "Hey dufus, my dufus, you'll always be my dufus." I didn't mind in those days because we were busy trying to alter reality beginning with our names given to us at birth.

It may have been him. It may have been a twin brother or a stranger who merely looked like him. I hadn't spoken to him for years so his appearance could have changed without a doubt.

Ah, wonderful city full of memories! Words can't do you justice. There is the orange glow of the city at its center, invisible to all but her deepest lovers. And the voices hum high above the buildings waiting for the fog to roll in.

So, we were there and it was bright. It did not belong to us. Fine, give it up we thought. What belongs to us, exactly? And, on top of that, we loved the mountains more than the city. We loved the raging river more than the city. But, it was here too and indomitable like the new mountain or new raging river. What could I do? It was like a woman; you couldn't live with her or without her. So, she had the power and when she discovered this it was katie bar the door; the Indians are outside whooping for scalps.

The key was putting one foot on the step of the cable car and then swinging gracefully up and over the tourists so you were right near the brakeman. And they jabbered on the walkie talkie all the time as if they were part of a secret cult that new more than everyone else. Everyone else was simply a pawn or, more precisely, a prop that they wheeled in, wheeled out all day and night while the cult thrived beneath the lights and darkness and rumbling sound of the wonderful cable cars; past the old buildings where ancient affairs had taken place, where the fire had been, up over and down into the bay where bodies were still hidden in coves.

"Oh wonderful city, full of mischief!" She sang it in high tones by the old steel sculpture of the rider on the horse. Mischief. I always associated that word with matches but as I got older I began to associate it with that wonderful, overrated activity that was marred by an obscene word; a terrible word. You, word, leave the premises and never be heard from again! You belong in the Tenderloin bars and nowhere else. The word had come up from the deeps to penetrate even the most puritanical and asinine group of women who did "charity work" because they had lots of money and time. No, they said it, sometimes earnestly, as if it were a badge of honor. To prove that they, too, had been on streets and rubbed into the underarm of the people. Ah, democracy, you wonderful virus!

The city had known what could be termed, the marauding of empires. And these included native people's as well as the Spanish and infamous Americans. "Come," she says, "lay your pride on me; I am layers and layers of your pride." The huge difference was that the Spanish empire was in decline and the American thing, not an empire I suppose but a large swatch of action, was beginning to bloom especially since gold had been discovered. I had learned as a young boy that the robber Murieta had been beheaded and his head, in a large jug of alcohol, carried up and down the state for the entertainment of the masses. It seemed to me, at that time, a fully justified act to behead Murieta but I learned later that many of the stories about him were aprochraphal; inventions by clever hacks who wanted to sell newspapers. In truth, he was simply defending a rotting empire.

In the outposts of empire there is always gaiety. Women dance freely and men drink into a stupor as cattle is butchered for the feast. But then as the empire sinks in the darkening sunset funds are cut-off and the outposts have to fend for themselves. Then the gaiety ends, the women dance no more and men, while still drunk, get violent and short-tempered. Little pitched battles no one remembers break out along some obscure creek. Gun fire is exchanged. One man is shot fatally. Horses neigh and whinny. And at the end of the day every man engaged in the squirmish is ashamed but feels as though they have been, not simply to hell and back, but revived and ready for anything.

The Indians had driven out the primitive camel, the Spanish subdued the Indians, the Americans drove out the Spanish and the Americans no doubt, were going to simply drive each other crazy and so something foolish like join some terrorist group.

Oh beautiful tangled city! Ah, times mysterious weave! Come now and make me a wonderful cloak filled with the hearts of many people. Come now and be an observant bird in the gardens of the powerful.

We missed the magnificence. It was lacking or had never appeared. Ah, good that will make us all great or, at least, filled with our pride. No, the spirit couldn't be fooled and it knew the condition of things, even in the great city, was not good. Pathology had hit a critical mass and so the citizens believed it was reality. They never consulted that which could break the spell; there were some sources but they were hidden, afraid of the awesome rejection of anything half way good that came there way and ready to hide behind the facades of great, grey buildings or the words of the politicians.

"City! Buried under you is a seed no human hand has touched." Thousand and millions of non-plussed faces had passed over it looking straight ahead fearful one would read their hearts and report them to some authority. The powerless laughed and it was good to hear. The powerless laugh well and with meaning.

For instance, they understood nothing of the simplicity of making something complex. The mind can be a mighty spade in clear Earth double digging between the rats and lizards. Ah, favorite animals to contemplate! It took only a few to ruin the cavalcade of humanity, we knew it was only a few but a few we knew well and so dominant. It was our fate to know a few of the rats and lizards and have them run amok in our heart of hearts. They wanted to extract something from us, goodness knows what. We humored them. They tore at us with red eyes and demanded some accountibility. "What? We serve you? No! It can't be possible in a democracy." So they tried then to skin us and hang our corpses from lamposts to show everyone who was the boss. We ran. We ran with meaning. We ran as though our lives depended on it. They were all implicated, even those dogs who pleaded innocence. No, you are not innocent! You are fully implicated and it will be your final thought, god forbid.

The city truly had its good. There were smells around the stadium for one. And smells along the Wharf. Those were good, as were the sights from the hills. And darting into a dark club at 1am, leaping from a Triumph and being completely present and wanting to see waggling wild breasts shaking by a good woman. Good woman with her wild touchless breasts. Then we would dream for days on days about them. They did not belong to us but to the city and its great butt sticking in the air like a thick tongue dragging a old ferry to dock.

We walked on past the taxi cabs and street signs. Past the homeless vets and hairy women who protested out in the daylight with paper shit flying around them; they cried out into the red wind for justice and were hit with a wrapper. Now they live beneath the vaults of the train station where the silver cars go buzz all day long.

Lovely city of big hearts and kind moments. City of crazed, wonderful idealists and world seekers! City who makes me weep and flashes in every sign conceivable. City of remains and of expectations. City cut to the bone so the whiteless bodies wiggle under soft lamps at night. Beautiful and infinite ray of sun that makes an old hand warm in the late stages of an ordinary day. Oh sun that passes to the sea below! Forgives us for the disjointed joy we feel, this motion, this light so common but eternally rare and ourselves, a connective tissue without which we are abandoned molecules in the void.

When a master makes his move, look out. Anything can happen.

The city is a song. It makes song in its belly. It dares its citizens to understand the sublime nature of its song. Unlock the power of this song and all is yours, it seems to say. It drowns in the wrong songs but that is the fault of the people who don't know the difference betwen lousy songs and good ones.

Continuations, continuations, continuations into the night; rare birds through the trees of our delight. Phantom birds who speak our language and nest under red bridges. Speak. Make song. Declare.

Hard! And hard again! Down and through the bastards! A knife through their ice fjords; a ray of sun through their colorless spirits roaming aimlessly through themselves like old ghosts before they die. 2335 words to here:

It was something not admittable; the powerful had merged into the steel and glass buildings that ringed the lower end of the city. Connected to them was one of the fabulous bridges, a sterling example of engineering and technological know-how. And the decades had seen the huge black cars, the little white ones, the huge black ones again, reappearing after fifty years, stretched out a bit and roomier as they say.

And the ballpark near where the first one had been; close enough to the field to see the fading tattoos on players. Oh wonderful mock battlefield! Huge screen of childhood fantasies arching high into the blueness of all days. In those days the fans would fight and fights would break out and his dad would get excited, they'd all get excited, "hey, a fight!" and he look up to see two now three fists flailing in a crowd that had quickly collected until the rent-a-cops came along, big black and scary white guys probably queer came along and broke everything up. Big epics fights among the drunks in the coolest ballpark at the time.

I was a boy. And the ballplayers were heroes, beyond approach. I was a boy and the ballpark was a magic theater that breathed of history and vitality; memory as strong as a good tendon. Memory leaping with black men from the Dominican Republic reaching out in full stride for the ball streaking through the air like a missile. Memory of sounds and old women yelling at the top of their lungs, big fat women with wrinkled cleavage hanging over the railings cussing the players. Oh beauty. Oh beautiful life, do not deny me.

We filed through the streets as though the streets had to announce us; they had to make us real. "Here come the young men and they have tales they want to live out....let them live their foolishness out and then we will reclaim them!" So saith the streets as we passed on them, their hard and spoiled surfaces passive to the traffic, to the insolent smoke of old cars and gutted fast food remains.

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