objects - from the reject pile :))

The stupid hat

I tend to believe homeless people are the voice of deep truth, because I’m a romantic. This is also why I’m on the streets of San Francisco on Christmas night...so when he says “Look at you, with your stupid hat and your stupid bag, you’re absolutely clueless!” I laugh in shock and say “you’re absolutely right.” But no one is there to pat my head for honesty. I move on and take off my stupid hat and put it in my stupid bag.

The bag, OK, is just a big container thing bought from a Chinese store in Vancouver. But the hat is the Divided one I bought in Budapest, the last time I was there for a music festival. Back then, after dramatic love-related misfortune, I thought I was alone and starting from almost-scratch, and that I was going to finally enjoy the good things in life etc. It was on sale at Zara, it looked stylish enough to desire, and I hesitated for a record short time. Then I wore it that very night, on my newly short haircut, in spite of the summer heat. I was trying a bit too hard to break it in: to make it mine, to make myself be that person I didn’t know yet.

Having only gotten compliments on it before, I think what really shocked me in what the guy said was, I couldn’t distinguish how the hat was stupid in his opinion: because it looked ugly and cheap (like the bag), or because it was standard cutesy and hipstery? And, if the latter, did he think that my sartorial insecurity showed through and through – or that I was just self-satisfied?

I actually stop and really consider this hard, for about a minute, trying to decide some words are just words. Random heckling.

I have a postcard from back-before-coming-to-North-America, which I’ve tacked onto walls in various rooms I rented. It says, in bold letters on a paisley background, “I do everything I want”. I felt choice and determination were so much more important to me because I was poor and Eastern European, because I had to learn to live in a culture from scratch. How exactly I got to wanting the things I wanted was less of a concern for me right then.

The place I met the homeless guy was right at the entrance into Kerouac Alley, which struck me as both a natural and an improbable occurrence. Would Kerouac have rolled his eyes at having his own alley, or be flattered? Two years ago it was a normal back street, used for the dumping of garbage, and probably more poetic in that form than with all these fancy scribbled plaques.

I took the Greyhound to San Francisco on a late December night, at Vancouver railway station. On the West Coast, through the Rockies and radiating outwards, snowstorms and danger alerts persisted. Airports were closed, pack-filled with families waiting to travel toward being reunited for the holidays. I’ve never recognized danger while I was still within its reach.

It’s become real in a hazy way that feels almost out of my control. People said oh, you’ll like it so much, and don’t forget to wear some flowers in your hair. They said take the electric car, you’ll go to Pier 39, won’t you? They said I hear the train trip is really nice, but, no, I replied, I’ve been dreaming to take the Greyhound for so many years. This is my first gratuitous trip ever, to a place where no one expects me and that I tell myself I expect nothing from. Then  all of a sudden I’m in a real landscape that doesn’t match my imagination, suspended with no clue. Hollowness, more terrible than the storms.

 It doesn’t feel like a big deal, but at the same time it feels like if this isn’t a big deal, then what is, ever? I’m smiling at how I could pick and choose, out of all that Kerouac I sifted through, just the parts about  simply moving towards something else; the parts about forever hot weather, icecream and apple pie.

So it seems only fitting for the mythical figure of the angry homeless man to come and put me in my place, to tar my presence and my hat with the same brush, give me the freedom of cluelessness. I bought it because it was there, Your Honor. It was the best I could afford. I just happened upon it. Or it happened upon me, if you will.

Back when I thought “I do everything I want”, I feel that I really meant it. Now I feel I’m oddly tired of taking so many stands. This is not a moment of illumination, I think, but I know I’ll remember it.

City Lights Bookstore is lit like a ship in the night. All the books are too expensive for me. I stand by the counter, as the bookselling girl is hugging someone and telling them how she’s been on the road this fall, with the Obama campaign. I pick a postcard of a young Diane diPrima in a miniskirt, sitting on the side of a half- made bed in an austere room in NY. I wait for the girl to finish her story before I pay and go out.

Since it’s cold, even in San Francisco, I take the hat out of my bag and put it back on.