Character Craving

binding *
disparaging *
swept*
conditions*
comment *
overheard *
nighttime *

I stepped out of the subway station in those moments between daylight, twilight, and nighttime.  I stood at the top of the staircase to get my bearings before moving forward into the dark shadows the high rise building lining Market Street cast.  A sharp jolt to my back made me start as a young man wearing a ski cap and dungarees pushed past me onto the sidewalk.

Immediately, I knew the kid's story.  He was late, rushing from art school to his job parking cars at a fancy restaurant in the Castro.  He seethed nightly at the haughty insults and disparaging remarks he got from the businessmen and trendy club kids who saw a valet as something slightly less valuable than an empty can of Red Bull.  His art reflected this anger, poured out in bright reds and blues and chartreuses onto his canvases.  He had lost more than a couple of girls eager to see his paintings when they felt unsettled by the depth of emotion in that artwork.

This city street is my canvas.  It's where I find characters to fill my stories as I make snap judgments about a person's life from the few seconds I experience him or her in public. The end of the business day is prime feeding time for my character craving. 

Walking forward now past the steam rising from the grate in the sidewalk, I glanced at the transient finding a place to put his bedding.  He's in his late 40's with a scraggly beard, a dark jacket that might have once been elegant years before it ended up in the Salvation Army thrift store, and a hat set at either a jaunty or haphazard angle on his head.  It's that attitude with the hat that pegs this fellow for me.  It wasn't that many months ago that people treated him with respect.  He had a wife, a family, and a good job selling sub-prime mortgages to people who couldn't really afford to buy a house.  He did what his bosses told him, came home every night to his cheating wife, and indulged the kids with just the right piece of electronic gadgetry.  Then you can fill in the story from there.  The market collapsed.  The drinking started to get more intense.  The wife took the kids and moved back to Topeka.  He lived in his car for a while before selling that for booze.  Now he's getting settled in for the night, unrolling his filthy blankets from their bindings and trying to avert eyes that know the meaning of real fear.

I looked to the left as a whirlwind in red swept past.  This woman was dressed for the opening of the design market from her petite white strapped shoes to the green scarf trailing from her neck.  The rest of the vision was red, indeed more than just red.  Her top was a patchwork of burgundy, maroon, vermillion with a dash of crimson.  Perhaps the get up was a tribute to her radical past.  Now she works as a buyer at the furniture market on 9th street but she first arrived in San Francisco during the Summer of Love as an organizer for Abbie Hoffman's Yippies.  She thought she was coming to sunny San Francisco so the 19-year old version of my apparition dressed for the beach.  She doesn't make that mistake anymore in the freezing conditions of mid-July.  She gave up on the revolution at about the same time that Johnny got the big inheritance if only he would cut his hair and become an investment banker.  It wasn't long after that that she gave up on men in general.

I had barely made it a block and already I had three characters ready for my stories.  I wedged my way into the backdoor of a passing trolley car and started to make notes.  I was just starting into the transient when I overheard a comment from the next row.  Most of the people sitting on the surrounding benches seemed oblivious but perhaps that's because the remark was in Russian.  I sat back and pondered what I had heard as I stared out the window at Lotta’s Fountain sliding past.  That's when I knew what my next plot twist would be. 

Comments

[Danny Gayer]

I liked the city streets/canvas image. There is a strong Dragnet feel to the tones. I like that, and many others do, too. Maybe this is the basis of a TV pilot. It is not a New Yorker story--so what?