Gradually I submitted to the way of Polino, the way of doing the least amount of anything. As I got used to eating garbage I let my disgust fade away, and it was liberating to do this. To surrender to the least resistance. That’s what I thought I was doing. Not fighting the world, or society, or the events of my life, but forgetting them. That’s what I thought.
5
One day Polino and I were walking down an alley off the main Mission Beach boulevard. We were talking about some girl Polino had seen, watching the people walk to the beach, and Polino told me he’d been married, so it surprised me when he then said, “Look, here come our dates.” I looked up as two girls were crossing the street in our direction. And just about as I saw them I felt this object hit me in the stomach. It was an avocado. A partially eaten avocado rolled onto the sidewalk and I looked up and saw a man running down the alley. Another man staggered up to us and said that his friend was drinking too much and didn’t know what he was doing. Well fine, I thought, okay, no problem. A drunk, right? What are you going to do?
I scraped the green mush off my shirt, looked up, and of course by then the girls had gone. I was standing there, talking with Polino, and I heard this “Hijo de puta.” I turned around and the avocado man was back. He was standing by a telephone pole saying, “Hijo de puta.” To me. “Hijo de puta, hijo de puta,” making an obscene gesture at me with his hand.
Okay. The man was drunk. So okay, we tried ignoring him. We tried to carry on a conversation, but “Hijo de puta, hijo de puta,” he kept saying it, and I didn’t know what it meant but this constant “Hijo de puta, hijo de puta,” whatever it was, was beginning to get to me. I thought I probably knew, more or less, what was right and what was wrong and what the man was doing wasn’t right.
“Hijo de puta, hijo de puta.” The man didn’t stop, he just kept pounding away and finally it snapped, or I snapped, and I took a few steps toward the man, to chase him away or teach him a lesson. Sometimes you have to use might in the service of justice, sometimes you just have to do something. I was thinking this as the man ran up the street.
Okay. Fine. Except the man came back. And he kept saying, over and over, “Hijo de puta, hijo de puta.” And I was going to chase him again but instead of that I thought, I can say it too, and I did. “Hijo de puta.”
And the man said it back. “Hijo de puta.”
I said it, and the man said it, Hijo de puta. Hijo de puta, back and forth, and the man was holding a flashlight, shining it toward me in the broad daylight, and even though it was having no effect, I wanted my own flashlight, to shine at him.
And right about at that moment I realized that I could have stepped back. I could have stepped away and seen the situation clearly. I could have stepped away from myself and just quit, just let go. I could have done that, but I didn’t. I felt that I was in this thing, that I was part of this hijo de puta, hijo de puta …
Desire is hard to get rid of. Even twisted desire, or especially twisted desire, like a weed, keeps coming up. By this time a crowd had gathered along the sides of the alley and a fat guy with a flag decal on his jacket back was urging me to “make the sucker eat shit.” And I was inclined to agree. They weren’t inciting me, but there I was, and there was this person, and somehow I felt trapped in the structure of this relationship we were creating.
That’s when I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, another man, a short man, standing by a redwood fence. He was saying, “Mira, mira,” and I didn’t see what he was referring to, or even think there was anything there to see. I’d seen everything I wanted to see, but the short man kept looking at me, and I thought he was talking to me, so I turned and looked around, and there was no way to know what he was trying to indicate, but what I saw when I looked made it all not matter. Walking up the street I saw the British guy from Kentucky.
It took a while for me to make the connection, a few seconds, and it might have been the beginning of hope, but I thought I’d had enough of hope. There was always hope and then inevitably the dissolution of that hope, and now I was just about done with hope. Except not quite.
I saw the man named Geoff, wearing a blue Hawaiian shirt, coming out of a sushi restaurant and walking alone up the street. I left Polino and the flashlight man, and followed Geoff, from a distance, following him around a corner and along a neatly manicured residential street named after a semiprecious stone. He crossed a street, walked into the next block, and went into one of the houses. I didn’t see which house exactly, but there were only a finite number of houses on the block and I imagined I’d know it when I came to it. And when I did come to it, there it was, sitting in the morning fog, a one-story bungalow with the two familiar cars parked, one in the driveway and one on the street.
I didn’t think of Anne because Anne was gone. I was thinking of the girl who wasn’t Anne.
My favorite expression during my time with Polino was “Fuck it.” When something presented itself I would just, with my newfound habit, say Fuck it. Meaning just treat everything as something not to care about. To want nothing else. To hate who I was. Fuck my body and my hair and my teeth, and also my desires. Especially fuck them. But now they were fucking me. I could feel them coming to life in my body, and I mentioned before about how desire turns into hope which turns into anticipation, and for me, anticipation had become a force, like a thing at the end of a rope, pulling, and I could feel myself being pulled, through the membrane that separated me from hope, pulling me out of Polino’s world and into something else.
That something else was the view of Linda’s house.
I walked past the house several times on the sidewalk, like a pedestrian, casually sneaking looks in the curtained window. I stood across the street, under the weeping branches of a willow tree, silently watching, like an Indian, for her to emerge. And waiting. And as I waited I imagined her, which kept me waiting. When she appeared, watering the terra-cotta pots on the front steps, I felt in my body a longing. Not necessarily for her but for something that I wanted. I wanted it with the excruciating want of a child wanting, and what was excruciating was my belief in the impossibility of even getting near it. It was in my heart, this thing that I wanted so much, and what was in my heart was love.
There was the fact that I loved Anne. Which I still did. And she loved me. She had and she did. Love had definitely existed, and I was happy in that love. I was happy to love, and also happy to be loved by her. Although she was gone, my need or my habit or my desire for her still existed.
And you might say, “That’s over.” You might say, “Move on and find someone else to love.” And that would be the correct prescription. Get on with your life, Jack. And it’s easy to say that, but for me it wasn’t so easy. I didn’t want to move on. I didn’t want to replace my love. And anyway, I didn’t see how I could. Where would the old love go? Into memory? I had plenty of memories already. I didn’t need more memories. I needed Anne. I loved her and she’s dead and I know she’s dead but I can’t just turn around, see someone new, and love that new person. And yes, I might like to be loved again, who wouldn’t? But I want Anne’s love. That’s the love I got used to, and having got used to it, I want it back.