The Telephone

She sat on a cement bench with no back. Her feet, masked in shiny boots of leather, were touching, the proper position, her mother had always told her, for a young lady to sit. Her knees pressed together tightly, though now, with years and training, she hardly felt the pressure on the inside of both knees. Small pinkish white hands were folded in her lap, like a simple cloth napkin on a dinner table.
She was refined and cosmopolitan, like the crisp red wines she would sometimes sip in warmly lit bars that held soft laughter. Towering buildings stood behind her, all shiny and glittering with the bright sun. They whispered at her back, telling tales of newly-scented clothes, filling her ears with the familiar sputtering noise of a credit card machine.
She was this city’s Woman. She was the product of careful breeding, of clever advertising; the result of meetings in high offices around wooden tables. A fashionable wool sweater draped artfully over her shoulders, her thick legs were covered in thin black cotton that did not leave her shape to the imagination.
She was solid, but soft, a modern Amazon covered in expensive fabric. The strap of a sleek black leather handbag rested on her right shoulder, within were the contents of her world: a makeup bag filled with lipsticks and lotions and eye pencils. A tube of lotion, a tube of hand sanitizer, her cell phone, a little plastic bag of clean tissues, her red wallet, stuffed with plastic cards and yellow receipts.
She was the woman of the city, the pretty picture of Female, Wealth, and Urban. She was the photo, the living vision.

And there, on the other side of the train tracks, filling her world with the pungent stench of decay, was a man. He was not what they had envisioned. Not there in the board rooms or the executive meetings. He was the one that had fallen through the cracks, whether by sickness, luck, or habit, he was not what they wanted to see. No one wanted to see this.
He was a man fit for hospitals and drugs and white-walled rooms. But there were no hospitals now, no women in clean uniforms that cared. There was nothing for this man but the streets and the whims of his madness. In one body, he was the product of a rotting culture, a civilization in decay. He was a man with no home, no bathroom, no razor, nothing but voices and filth.
She had watched him for fifteen minutes, the entire time she had been waiting for the L train. She looked at the overhead sign again, blinking with the times for in-bound trains. Another six minutes to go. She judged the man to be about 40, but he was weathered by time, like a badly battered shell that had lost all its shine in the ocean’s tumbling surf.
Gray hair along the side of his temples merged into the black matted mess that was the rest of his hair. A scruffy salt and pepper beard looked like it had last been trimmed with a pair of rusty scissors. His feet were dark brown with soot and the street’s mess. She wondered what had become of his shoes, how long it had been since he had had any. The stained jeans he wore hung on his hips by a piece of string as thin as a shoe lace, maybe that is it was. She pictured him stealing the lace from another man in the middle of the night, someone just as dirty and forgotten.

He sat on the brick floor of the station, his back pressed to the wall. Beside him, on the glossy brick wall, was a telephone. It was a phone to be used by train-system employees, not one that could access the outside world.
Every few minutes, the man would rise, pick up the phone’s receiver and speak into it. Sometimes he would speak calmly, the next time he would yell, the next he would cry. She watched him from afar, watching the loop. She was a little afraid of his erratic behavior, but slightly intrigued and unable to look away, even when she tried.
He didn’t seem to notice her. He shouted into the receiver:
“I told you I’m coming! I’ve got all my stuff. I’m coming right now! Stop bothering me!”
It was the loudest he had been, a few other people in the station turned to look. She felt thankful for the train tracks between them, somehow feeling safer with the distance and metal rails.
The man sat back down on the ground. Looking agitated and worried. She wondered what he heard, what he thought, what he would do.
Her hair started to blow slightly and she heard the swishing sound of a train arriving. The metal doors opened and she got in, taking a seat by the window and looking out, to the man that she would soon forget.
He got up once again and grabbed the receiver, shouting into it. She watched him talking as the doors closed and the train took her away from his madness, from the telephone, from the glimpse of what she might one day become.

Train Ride

The screech of train wheels signaled to her ears that they were moving; a fraction of a moment later, her body felt the change. The bright light of a clear day found its way through plastic windows that had been scratched with gang symbols and cryptic messages. She kept her sunglasses on as the train passed hillsides packed with rectangular shaped houses all colors of the rainbow.
There was a young couple twenty feet ahead of her. The guy had on a new tie-dyed shirt and had shaggy brown hair. He sat next to a stylish young woman. She had pale skin and straight brown hair with bangs that reached to the tips of her eyebrows. She looked at her boyfriend occasionally, but mostly she looked out the window, down in her lap, at the seat ahead of her, at the ceiling…anywhere but at his face. When she did look at him, she did not smile. The girl in sunglasses wondered if something had just happened between them. If she had just found out he had cheated…something that would explain her disdain. His head was tilted in her direction, but her head was tilted slightly away from his, as though she just couldn’t stand being too close.
Next to the couple, across the aisle, was a young boy, two or three years old. He stood on the cushioned seat next to his large Samoan mother. The little boy was wearing gray sweatpants and wore something that looked like a backpack, only where the backpack would be, there was a small teddy bear. The device went around the boy’s shoulders and chest and fastened with a clip. There was a long cord attached to the teddy bear that the mother used as a leash for the boy. The child stood, he was just a little taller than the seats. His voice was shrill. He pointed to the hills and the houses, he pointed out the window excitedly. His little voice was so high and so excited that the girl in sunglasses could not understand what he was shouting. But she understood what he saw. He looked at the world with new eyes.
Every cloud was a shape that had not completely been solidified and understood and compartmentalized. Some clouds were dragons, but some where soozebuckels. There were spots of green houses and airplanes. But there were also hossplertas. He pointed at them all. His grandparents, in the seats behind his, smiled at him affectionately. Their bronze skin and slanted eyes glowed in their love for him.
The train screeched to a stop. The doors opened and a couple in their early thirties sat in the seats perpendicular from the girl in the sunglasses. The man was nearly bald, but he had shaved his entire head, revealing a pink scalp. He looked like an alien. He sat with his legs pressed tightly together. He clutched the backpack that rested on his lap. The woman next to him had long wavy brown hair and a floral printed cotton skirt. Neither of them looked at each other. They did not talk, but they both chewed on pieces of gum at an accelerated pace. Standing by the door was a young Latin woman who held the handles of a stroller. There was a little girl, just a little over a year, in the stroller. She had two black pig-tails on either side of her head. She looked around the train car with wide open eyes.
The doors closed and, again, the screeching sound of metal on metal signaled that they were on their way.

Tender Strangers

Sitting on the BART, a delicate film of sweat collected over my cheeks and collar bone, I rock and sway with the other anonymous strangers. The young man across the aisle from me sips from a disposable coffee cup. His sneakers are white, he wears a black fedora and leather jacket over his tee shirt paired with skinny blue jeans.
The metallic caterpillar rocks to a stop at the platform overlooking John Daly Blvd. and more passengers stream in as an indistinct mass and then separate, congealing into distinct forms as they find a place to sit or stand. One wears a black and white stripped shirt and looks like Ross from friends. This street means everything to me. It was the first and only street I knew of when I first arrived here in this strange cold land. Everywhere that I went I found my way by connecting it to this central artery and for years I followed these same desperate routes carved out in this cold wet and misty wilderness of concrete, afraid of becoming lost, tangled in streets whose purposes might elude me, ending at a chain link fence or curving around to swallow their own tails like the ouroboros. My path, which always sprang from and returned to this blvd., was ultimately always the least direct route. There were streets nearer at hand which connected to my destinations and traversing these would have taken half as much time as I spent tracing my way along the spinal column of road that stretched from the seas to the cemeteries and beyond into lands unknown, but I was oblivious to these paths.
And now that I understand the lay of these other smaller veins that reach through the city and they no longer represent a dark forest in which I might be ensnared by a witch abiding in a gingerbread box house, I have no car to take advantage of this knowledge. Now I sit on buses which also trace their way along their own main arteries, always watching the more direct route to my home flash by the smoky tinted window and then I am forced to walk the difference home. Cats now nest in my broken down Chevy Celebrity station wagon laid to rest in the garage like the hull of a sunken pirate ship nestled down in the sea bed. Swathed in the eerie and sparse illumination of a halogen bulb and coated with a fine white layer of dust as French toast is with confectioners sugar, it accumulates many little feline paw prints and a rank filthy odor. The power windows could no longer be rolled up after last summer and so whatever wants to come in can do so. In my car, spiders dance with newborn kittens on the juice stained cushions and they scale the mountains of debris that have accumulated to form a range reaching from the front seat to the back hatch. They can play with discarded little ponies and Barbie’s heads and dress up in the costumes that once belonged to my littlest daughter, dress as princesses or mermaids or disco queens. Or they can establish a school for young alley cats and the spiders can write out the lessons on the chalkboard that my eldest daughter used to use as a painting easel. But in none of these activities am I involved, so they do not concern me overly much.
I am a passenger on a little turbo train like the one that my father built into a train set for me as a child, coasting along on a rail high above the heads of ordinary commuters. A new influx of passengers board and I am joined by a new stranger that sits intimately near to me. He holds a bagel that smells of onion and a bottle of milk and pretends not to notice me writing and I pretend not to notice him eating, but we know that each person is aware of the others actions, and somehow it makes it even more intimate, our mutual respect, our ability to be alone together. We have suddenly become like a loving elderly couple that sits in easy chairs by the front window, one reading and the other knitting, only we rock along on the BART together for 7 minutes rather than fifty years. Then I hear “Powell Street” and I look big eyed into his face, seeing for the first time the blue eyes and sparse strawberry blonde beard of my tender stranger. Without words (for we are that sympathetic to each others needs by now) he knows I must get off at this stop, and he rises quickly, allowing me to slide out into the aisle and that first look at his face is the last as I bustle off of the train.

Resolve

Their effort was united, tied together in a sweet smelling bundle with thin satin ribbons and the colored thread of revolt that ignited every couple of seconds with burgeoning thoughts and the shiny lacquer of birthed possibilities. In the dampness of the morning, the smell of thick sweat and dew covered meadows and greasy hair and kiss covered nipples, they all mingled like never before. This was the aroma of motion, of ecstatic dance after a thousand lifetimes of slumber, of pure life, gazing at itself unpolished and unabashed within the pond of clarity. They gathered together, the five of them, each wearing tattered black leather and carrying small torches or candles. It was a pivotal move, a clear, turned corner that was already a hundred miles from the old way of being. Revolt was their new action, their new tactic. They had gathered four nights before, gathered just the same, sitting in a small circle around the flickering of a single flame. Without a word exchanged, they knew it had come to this moment, this decision, it was change or die. Push forward into the new flower which might await or die in the scarred arms of a deformed master, a breeder with arbitrary rules and masked instructors and chained teachers. Would this continue to be their life? Would they live the next seventy years in the invisible handcuffs of the Woman? In the grasp of the Man? The five of them, bursting with the same impulse, the uneasy flutter so easily found and so easily lost. They felt it, each in their heart and their circle tightened, each second demanding more. It was mandatory, something must be done, there must be a new way of being. They each knew something must change…but how? Their leader watched the flame, in his gaze it wavered and grew and jumped. The life moved and he followed with it, its partner in each descent and arrival. The others held their hearts, as he held the flame, they in turn, held him. It was trust that cradled them in the web. It was intuitive judgement that padded their chamber. Yes, the discretion was all up to one, to the one that commanded without force, yet, there was no steel, there were no weapons of blood. He was the warrior without a spear, the hunter that moved by the moon, by the smell on the wind, by the words that came to him like divine insight. He took the formless shapes and took them to bed, he rolled them up, bathed in their murmurings and wound them together in a sentence of understanding. He was their king without a crown, unjeweled and covered in the flavored milk of love. As they sat in the late hours of night, when the street lamps flickered and the last of the trains left with their sleeping occupants on their way to the suburbs; they planned their next move, their new approach, their renewed attention. They chewed their drug, they let their mouths taste the shape of the "s" and the contours of the "u." The smell lingered, slightly above their skin, playing hide and seek from one nostril to the other. Their drug was the color of a new understanding, and it leapt to them in measured waves and soft caresses. Take what you can and leave the rest for later, it crooned. Pushing too hard will break it, and grasping too hard only pushes the waves to the horizon. Let it come softly, it whispered. We are here, a frequency away. Just a small break and we are here, when your mind is ready. Some understood and then forgot, riding the steel bits of the city like surfers of urban oceans. Nothing could be forced. For a moment, they were united in that pivotal understanding.

A Quiet Moment of Tolerance

The narrow container of the underground rail system was packed with people. Yellow florescent lights bathed the mostly young group of riders in a morgue-like hue. On the right and left sides of the train car there were blue fabric seats in rows, two seats on each side. There was an aisle down the center of the car that permitted free movement from one end to the other, but today the seats were all taken and the aisle was crowded with people clutching onto the seat rails for support against the jerking movement of the electric train. In each car, there were two sets of doors that slid open at each station. The space in front of the doors lacked any seats and there were signs along the walls that set apart this space for bicyclists, people in wheelchairs and women pushing bulky strollers. It was a late Saturday afternoon and the seats were filled with white teenagers. There was a popular street festival happening downtown, and the teens were all dressed up for the giant party.
On the left side of the train, taking up three rows of seats, was a group of six girls. Two of them were wearing pink ballerina tutus that didn’t quite cover their white asses (when I saw them later at the event, the bright white flesh of their legs and buttocks made the thin, transparent fabric of their g-strings almost invisible). I noticed their bare thighs touching the dingy blue fabric of the seats and I shivered involuntarily. The other girls in the group were wearing matching tie dye T-shirts and tight blue jeans. Like hippies from another era, they had tied a thin ribbon around their foreheads. But unlike the old fashioned hippies, their T-shirts looked brand new and their faces looked sparkling clean beneath their carefully applied makeup.
The girls were loud and boisterous, almost screaming with each sentence and laughing often in great bursts of intense mirth. Each one of them used her hands to tell a story and her friends would respond with exaggerated facial gestures, like actors trying to project their emotions across a crowded theater.
Watching them, I wondered if I had ever moved with that much energy, if I had ever talked and laughed with that much intensity. I remembered myself as a serious little girl that grew up to be a serious teenager, finding virtue in a learned façade of maturity and self containment. While I delved into my memories, the girls’ bodies buckled over with the strength of their laughter and the sounds of their loud conversation could be heard throughout the train car. Their speech was dotted with exclamations: "like" and "oh my god" and "you know", little phrases which punctuated their statements, outlining them in clear verbal cadences and reaffirming a shared teenage bond. They spoke with authority, blissfully blind of their apparent naivete and youthful simplicity. A smaller group of boys accompanied them, sitting in the seats that were directly behind them, yet facing in the other direction. Every now and then, a single boy turned around in a brave attempt to join the conversation of the girls, but he was completely ignored, and, unable to find a gap in the girls’ conversation in which to interject a comment or a question, he gave up and turned back around.
In the rows of chairs just to the right of the girls, was an older Muslim woman. She was travelling with her daughter, who looked like a younger smoother copy of the woman. They both had the same pronounced eyes and nose, both had the same brown skin, both had the same look of gentle resignation. They traveled with a man that appeared to be the daughter’s husband and a couple of other people that did not appear to be related. The older woman was sitting on the seat closest to the aisle and the window seat next to her was vacant. Her daughter and son-in-law were sitting in the parallel seats beside her. The son-in-law appeared to be at least fifty and had dark eyes and short black hair. He looked in my direction and saw me looking towards them. He smiled at me with a manly gentleness that might have contained a dash of flirtation. The older woman and daughter never look around the train car. They simply looked at each other, at the son-in-law, or at the floor in front of them.
The older woman was wearing a loose white satin scarf around her head which had a subtle swirl design etched into the fabric. The scarf was long and reached down the front of her gray coat and past her hidden breasts. In the middle of her chest, holding the scarf together, was a circular gold broach, the size of a large sand dollar, with a small purple stone resting in the center. There was no artificial color on the woman’s face, but thin gold rimmed glasses sat upon her nose. She held her large black purse on her lap and her slightly wrinkled brown hands sat upon the purse, one over the other. On her left hand was a gold wedding ring. The woman was deeply calm and serene. Every now and then, she would speak to her daughter and to her son-in-law, and when she did, she made a singular repeating gesture with her hands that seemed to say: "we can’t change anything or anybody, so let’s relax…who knows what is their fate or ours?" It was a gesture of knowing compassion, a gesture of sharply etched and painfully earned humility and peace. Mostly, she remained silent and she rested her eyes on her hands and the floor and she kept her lips upturned in the faintest hint of a smile.
Without truly knowing her, I felt that this woman had learned to accept that she now lived in a different place, a different culture where girls ran around with their legs and ass showing and where they talked in loud voices instead of looking down at the floor in obedience and submission. She had learned to take this in and not react to it. Her faith had matured within her and she was no longer offended by the world. The world would keep on changing and she would keep on believing, she would keep on remaining calm and she would keep on waiting. The extent of her influence was clear and well defined. Anything that stood outside of it was to be accepted or ignored. To the young girls in tutus and tight jeans, she was invisible. To her, they were lost ghosts. In a tenuous fabric of tolerance, both of their worlds could momentarily coexist in this train car as it speeded in a blur of harsh mechanical sound and power on its way towards the city. In this moment, there was the understanding of silence, the understanding of staying in your seat when you are travelling, of standing when the doors open, of leaving when it’s time to leave. The older Muslim woman would not disturb the young girls and the girls would not disturb her. And I would look upon them both and see myself in all of it. I was the young girl looking for admiration. I was also the old woman diving deeply into myself in a search for knowledge and peace. I was invisible and I was also a ghost and I was something else, something that I couldn’t quite define just yet, something just beyond the reach of my understanding.
Directly in front of me were two Latina women. They both looked like they were under twenty. One was in charge of holding onto the handles of a pink baby stroller. It was a very simple plastic device, a straightforward piece of machinery that had one function and fulfilled it reasonably well. It had plastic white wheels, plastic white handles and frame, and a pink fabric covered in images of a small white teddy bear and some yellow flowers. The fabric covered the canopy of the stroller and also covered the seat for the small baby inside. The little baby girl was wearing a pink terry cloth outfit and she had a small gold bracelet around her tiny brown wrist. Her face and torso were covered from view by the stroller’s canopy, but her legs kicked out often and her tiny right hand repeatedly clenched into a tiny weak fist. I imagined myself in the stroller, awash in filtered pink light as the fabric in front of me disguised the various sources of sound, turning them all into a single rumble coming from a world yet to be discovered. To the little baby inside the stroller, all the people were invisible, all of them were ghosts, all of them were equally incomprehensible, equally strange, equally acceptable, equally easy to fear or love. The world was a spiraling haze of potential discovery and all beings held an unrealized promise in their simple presence. I looked at the girls dressed up as hippies and I looked at the older woman dressed up as a Muslim and I looked at the little stroller once again. I saw the little legs kick in spontaneous joy, and my eyes filled with tears.

The wise Muslim woman who remained calm
and unfazed by a strange modern world
of young girls with strong gazes,
short skirts, tight pants
and loud voices of daring and pride.

The little baby girl that responded
with little kicks of pleasure
as the promised world appeared around her
in loud bursts of grinding metal
and clouds of boisterous laughter.