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.
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