Every morning when I waken to the sound of a freight train heaving past my bedroom, I smile and think, ‘my little house by the sea.’ Of course it is not the rose-covered cottage at Swansea I may have imagined in a more romantic youth—swans gliding with bowed heads into the gloaming sunset, birds calling their mates to nest and sleep. It is a snarl of train tracks, shipping lanes, and knotted Interstate. But it is a stone’s throw from the back bay and, arguably, the sea.
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Last year I was surprised that I moved here at all. This year, I am surprised by how much I love it. I try to account for this and fail although I have some hints in behaviors that are new; behaviors I would never even have thought of at Rockway, much less considered doing. For confessional example: I love to put on Parisian café music at evening and let the part of me that wanted to be a modern interpretive dancer have the floor. I love to dance. I did not know. As the evening matures, I give in to Frank Sinatra. By the wee hours, it is Miles Davis, Paris, 1957. My conclusion is that I am more emotional here than I have ever in my life been. I am freer for living among the antipodes, my true homies and the people I love the most.
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Then there is the matter of just being so weepingly thrilled to be living in a city again. Growing up gay in the American Midwest, ‘the city’ was to me what ‘North’ was to the slaves—a place where I could escape to a better life and be free. I do not do well in middle class America and I cannot aspire to upper class America so I run to the marginal bottom, where live the most creative people I have ever met. I am home. I am tempted to say that only circus freaks could comprise a more outré community but then I remember that there is a circus school only a few blocks from my loft.
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Before moving to California, I lived and worked my entire adult life in major, urban concentrations of all manner of folk; a freak show to some, a carnival for those like me. Arriving in California, I encountered something I’d never experienced before—suburbs. There is a Richter scale of soul crush for California suburbs and I wasn’t in the worst one but I was barely hanging on as I waited for the equity in my house to release me back to the demimonde of whinos, Bohemians, romantics, artists, and families of hip young fathers with perma-stubble on their square jaws and their unaffectedly lovely, pre-trophy wives. I embrace them all; even the derelicts or especially the derelicts.
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There is Chair Man, a homeless chap in his fifties whose sartorial sense leans toward wife beaters and pajama bottoms. I pass his shopping cart household every day where it is staked out in a public parking lot on the way to the 12th Street BART. He has a gas-powered generator he sets up and, from the electricity it produces, links to the world via the Internet (who knows how but I have seen him Googling away in the purpling dusk of many summer evenings). I call him Chair Man because he is one of the few vagabond people I have seen who carry a chair around. It makes him a stand out.
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I won’t say I know him, but I do speak to him frequently on my way to and from work. I may say something like: “Good evening.” And he will usually answer with advice, my favorite being: “You going to pop Jiffypop, you GOT to know what the fuck you are doing.” Well, true dat.
