I am waiting for the nocturne to start down on the streets below. All the machines and animals that operate them have gone to sleep and now only a faint rushing sound resonates through the hollow streets.
It acts as a strange adagio for all the creatures that inhabit this corner of downtown. They creep from the Greyhound station. They crawl from behind the Mason building. They ooze from the alleyways and burst from the corners and crevices to make their mad decree.
Howling a hymn of aberration, they come from their holes to claim the night and take heed of the silence in the hopes that their song could be heard while the machine sleeps. They bellow from the sidewalk in incomprehensible consonants and vowels entangled in their insanity. And this lunacy always has a source, packaged neatly in some sort of consumer product. Some sip it from brown bags, some suck it from glass pipes, and others have been consumed by it long ago, but no matter the terms of their neurosis, they all seek some sort of buoy in the storm.
My stoop is a soapbox here in downtown Bakersfield on F Street, nestled between 20th and 21st. There is always some deranged fool looking for an even bigger one to bum, leech or just rant to. Sometimes, it’s not always the street creatures looking for some sort of interaction.
Night after night I have been pulled into some unforeseen adventure. Whether it was merely a decadent night of regrettable inebriation or some long drawn descent into oblivion. They all share a similarity in that some souls seek a shut mouth and open ears. I am usually this voiceless recording device. I listen intently to them . in a bar sipping Tappist beers, on the corner chain-smoking cigarettes . lost, in some brick labyrinth smoking sorrow and wishing for a woman. No matter the situation, there is something about the gravity of this place that always draws out the suffering human inside us.
But after a while, when all you have done is play the confessional booth, your soul begins to beg for some kind of release other than that of the blank page. You crave an interpersonal divulgence, someone to rap madly about the entire spectrum that is the human condition. You become one of them.
The problem with this condition is that it releases its self in strange ways. You recruit people for a moment of unrestrained, severely personal divulgence who are left shaken and too un-stirred to ever want to talk to you again. I’ve absorbed too much of the crazies and have been irresponsible in releasing it properly. But nonetheless, I persist.
There is no hiding here in the downertowner. In living here, you will eventually find yourself in some act of personal decadence. And though you can hide yourself away, there is no escaping it. You can hide during the day as the great traffic leviathan roars all the folks with suburban symptoms to their place in the hamster wheel. But during the night the rhythm that echoes through the streets will eventually grasp you.
There are a thousand stories here, a million strange occurrences. I find that it is best that you listen to it all, and hold as tight as you can when it engulfs you – downtown, the bleeding heart of Bakersfield.
It was like God was contemplating the flood again, during those strange days in December when the rain beat down with merciless tenacity and all the bums came stinking out of their asylums like worms from the mud, hoping for mercy, but knowing the rain had too, washed all hope of that away. I stayed inside.
Divorced from the machine, I grew stale smoking and strung-out from strenuous thought, I began to mutate. Feeding off the madness in the streets below, inventing enemies and bedding with misery. The world became a great life-sucking ghoul and it was my mission to slay it before it consumed me. My blood became mercury, my lungs gulped poison, my skin cold lead and my heart beat discontent and loathing. In this I was secure.
I pitied no one during these days. Watching from my window all I see is all the sad hopeless creatures below huddled and humbled in that purging rain, I felt nothing. “Too long I have played the saint,” I thought. “To hell with all these leeches and blood suckers, void of life and desire, too scared to dare for anything better they seek out hearts so that they can forget that they have lost theirs.”
I had grown tired of charity. The world was strictly Darwinian and I intended to survive. The professional world was no better, merely cutthroat self-serving predators. They greeted with one hand and gutted you with the other. Perhaps this is how it always has been and the delusion of childhood serenity was fading away and the cold reality of adulthood setting in. So I boarded up my heart with no intent of ever opening it again. It was all a chess game now.
It was in a moment of curiosity that I dared from the security of my cave. Creeping down the stairs with a ghoulish disposition like some sort of nosferatu, I brought my nicotine love affair out to the haze of the day to observe the strange weather. It wasn’t long before Bliss came strolling my way.
Bundled, I noticed her head bob in my direction. Scoping me out, I knew I was once again going to be wormed for something. With wide eyes, she neared my stoop.
“Can I have a drag of your cigarette?” Saying nothing, I began to pick her apart. Loose drabs for clothes, bloated backpack, burnt leather skin, coarse voice, illusion-loving lips – street child!
“I can go get you one.”
“No, I’m trying to quit. I don’t want a full one.”
Another long stare, “OK” I say. She smokes the rest of it.
She breaks the silence as she indulges. Like instantaneity of creation all the elements of this character burst out in one long decree. I listen.
“My name is Bliss, I’m twenty years old, I smoke heroin, my boyfriend is an asshole, he says I’m fat and ugly. He doesn’t have sex with me. I want a new boyfriend. I’m a good cook. I live with him behind BHS .”
“Are you hungry?” I say.
She shakes her head.
“Do you want some tea?”
“Yes.”
We make the climb and upon entry into my apartment I apologize for the mess. She doesn’t mind. She tells me she is good at keeping up a home. I put the pot on the stove and try to make conversation. There is a $10 bill lying on my desk.
“Would you like to see some pictures I have taken?” We flip through the albums on my computer. She likes the nudes I’ve taken and tells me that she can do that. She tells me she has a curvy body and lifts up her shirt to prove the statement. She does.
I prepare the tea and we converse in my kitchen casually. The whole time she is pitching her interest and aspirations. It is strange to me, to see someone so chained and bound to misery – defeated – but yet they rise and rattle the chains in excitement. I sense no anger in her.
“I’m a writer, or at least I try to be,” I say.
“Really, whom do you write for?” She asks.
“Everyone and anything.”
We chat leisurely for a few hours about aspirations and dreams. She shows her bones and I am not thwarted by it at all. I show her mine.
“I’m trying to get some money to move out,” she says. “I just been roaming around bumming. I ran into this guy the other day and he said he’d give me $60 bucks if I fooled around with him in his car. He kicked me out afterwards and didn’t fucking pay me.”
It is strange to me now, how secure people claim to be in any position or outlook. How absolute their opinion is. How and why it should be seen as pure truth. How much energy people put into to convincing others. Why this is and why it was born with Bliss I feel I can never adequately explain but it always appears when I think of her. Maybe it’s because I listen too much. Nothing is definite because everything is fluid, constant and subjective.
My kitchen sink has been long clogged and the one in my bathroom has taken its place. It is chalked full of food bits and hair doodles from shaving. I explain this to her as she asks to use the bathroom. It wasn’t until after she left that I saw that she had cleaned it. “It’s cool how you just have $10 dollars chilling on your desk. Most people would hide it when a stranger is in their home.”
“You’ve given me no reason to believe that you would take it.”
“Thank you,” she says.
Around 4:30 p.m. she says, “I have to go. My boyfriend will be home soon and I have to let him in.”
“OK. Let me walk you out.”
We end where we started. As we smoke a parting cigarette there on my stoop, I am not sure if I will ever see her again. I say goodbye and she clenches my torso firmly, sliding away from it hesitantly as she disappeared back into the street.
The irony of all this is clear to me now. How powerful we are. How strange this downtown is. How hard I fight at times to distance and deify myself above them all. I now know the word for it all, it rises out of my lungs like the creation of some primordial god .