looked cool, though not for me. The Haight’s lesson was: Nothing in appearance or behavior need cost a drop of dignity. I didn’t look jobless and didn’t feel homeless. No sour odor of dim futurity.
Stoop Man was the first neighborhood friend I made while I was scouting the city on my own for Bio-Mom. He had fruit and he shared it. We started with chatter about greenhouse gases and ozone layers. Stoop Man sat all day every day on the stoop of the triplex that housed the Church of Divine Intergalactica. He owned a set of seven signal-receiving headwear, one for each day of the week, Viking, Roman, Indian, Greek, Star Wars, biblical and Disney, all of them handcrafted from cardboard, velvet and tin.
One morning in late September, he stopped me with, “Did you feel that one, sugar?” He was sitting on the lowest step of the stoop as usual, but that day he touched my elbow. He was wearing my favorite, the Queen of Sheba tiara.
“Feel what?” I smiled at his fingers still on my arm.
The morning stayed bright, but all the car alarms were going off. Pigeons went into panic, and circled the telephone poles.
“The Earth move, what else? Sugar, your smile makes me feel good, and I haven’t been feelin too good for a while, you know what I’m sayin? Girl, you try being the Sultan of Bosnia, just try it for a day, get all your horses shot up, get all your sheep and goats barbecued by infidels, and pretty soon you’ll feel the way I do. Hungry and depressed, that’s how. Famished, you know what I’m sayin? What you reckon they be servin up at the Hare Krishnas for lunch?”
Stoop Man became my ticket to soup kitchens. The street people accepted me as his girlfriend. That’s how he introduced me. “Say hi to my girlfriend, she touched down from another planet.” “Must have,” they’d kid, “she hasn’t the sense of an earthperson, that’s for sure.” The street people made room for me in soup lines. They tipped me off on which stores had hidden cameras, what time the Japanese and German tour buses came by (“The famous corner of Haight and Ashbury, the Cradle of Flower Power, ladies and gents”) so that I could do a little camera posing, chant my down-on-my-luck or my what-a-shit-country-we-live-in sob story and squeeze wads of sympathy cash out of fat-cat tourists.
I made other friends, Duvet Man, who lived inside his goose-down quilt and managed to be at the head of every food line, and Tortilla Tim, who saved me from being knifed by a Mill Valley kid weirded out on crack, and a guy who reminded me of Wyatt. A lot of people reminded of people I’d known, like we’d all drifted west till we’d run out of land, and then’d started to mutate a little, like salmon on their way back to spawn, getting a little cruder, a little uglier, on the way to die. The guy who reminded me of Wyatt looked like Wyatt, and kind of talked like Wyatt, too. One time just as I was about to make a small buy, he hummed a warning from a doorway. “Neck size, narc disguised.” I took him to the backseat of the Corolla that September night, and spilled my guts. I told him about Celia Montoya, the counseling Circle, the telemarketing job I’d left so I could find one or both my parents. The rest could wait.
“No parents? Some people have all the luck,” he said. He pulled a roll of breath mints from his pocket. “The name’s Gabe by the way, like the archangel.”
“My name’s Devi.”
“Like the goddess, eh? I had to learn all that Hindu, Jain, Buddhist shit at the U of T.”
“Where’s that? Texas?”
“Toronto, Texas, Tulsa, Topeka, Tempe.”
“Wow,” I murmured. “A goddess!”
“Tampa, Toledo—you shouldn’t need a private eye to track your Aged Ps.” He laughed. “Not if you are a goddess.”
“I was thinking of starting with the Yellow Pages.”
“Eenie meenie minie mo, et cetera?”
“I was thinking I’d pick the very first or the very last name listed.”
“Devi Aardvaark? Try
Stoop Man was the first neighborhood friend I made while I was scouting the city on my own for Bio-Mom. He had fruit and he shared it. We started with chatter about greenhouse gases and ozone layers. Stoop Man sat all day every day on the stoop of the triplex that housed the Church of Divine Intergalactica. He owned a set of seven signal-receiving headwear, one for each day of the week, Viking, Roman, Indian, Greek, Star Wars, biblical and Disney, all of them handcrafted from cardboard, velvet and tin.
One morning in late September, he stopped me with, “Did you feel that one, sugar?” He was sitting on the lowest step of the stoop as usual, but that day he touched my elbow. He was wearing my favorite, the Queen of Sheba tiara.
“Feel what?” I smiled at his fingers still on my arm.
The morning stayed bright, but all the car alarms were going off. Pigeons went into panic, and circled the telephone poles.
“The Earth move, what else? Sugar, your smile makes me feel good, and I haven’t been feelin too good for a while, you know what I’m sayin? Girl, you try being the Sultan of Bosnia, just try it for a day, get all your horses shot up, get all your sheep and goats barbecued by infidels, and pretty soon you’ll feel the way I do. Hungry and depressed, that’s how. Famished, you know what I’m sayin? What you reckon they be servin up at the Hare Krishnas for lunch?”
Stoop Man became my ticket to soup kitchens. The street people accepted me as his girlfriend. That’s how he introduced me. “Say hi to my girlfriend, she touched down from another planet.” “Must have,” they’d kid, “she hasn’t the sense of an earthperson, that’s for sure.” The street people made room for me in soup lines. They tipped me off on which stores had hidden cameras, what time the Japanese and German tour buses came by (“The famous corner of Haight and Ashbury, the Cradle of Flower Power, ladies and gents”) so that I could do a little camera posing, chant my down-on-my-luck or my what-a-shit-country-we-live-in sob story and squeeze wads of sympathy cash out of fat-cat tourists.
I made other friends, Duvet Man, who lived inside his goose-down quilt and managed to be at the head of every food line, and Tortilla Tim, who saved me from being knifed by a Mill Valley kid weirded out on crack, and a guy who reminded me of Wyatt. A lot of people reminded of people I’d known, like we’d all drifted west till we’d run out of land, and then’d started to mutate a little, like salmon on their way back to spawn, getting a little cruder, a little uglier, on the way to die. The guy who reminded me of Wyatt looked like Wyatt, and kind of talked like Wyatt, too. One time just as I was about to make a small buy, he hummed a warning from a doorway. “Neck size, narc disguised.” I took him to the backseat of the Corolla that September night, and spilled my guts. I told him about Celia Montoya, the counseling Circle, the telemarketing job I’d left so I could find one or both my parents. The rest could wait.
“No parents? Some people have all the luck,” he said. He pulled a roll of breath mints from his pocket. “The name’s Gabe by the way, like the archangel.”
“My name’s Devi.”
“Like the goddess, eh? I had to learn all that Hindu, Jain, Buddhist shit at the U of T.”
“Where’s that? Texas?”
“Toronto, Texas, Tulsa, Topeka, Tempe.”
“Wow,” I murmured. “A goddess!”
“Tampa, Toledo—you shouldn’t need a private eye to track your Aged Ps.” He laughed. “Not if you are a goddess.”
“I was thinking of starting with the Yellow Pages.”
“Eenie meenie minie mo, et cetera?”
“I was thinking I’d pick the very first or the very last name listed.”
“Devi Aardvaark? Try
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