Samudaya.org » Poetry & Prose » Mendocino Avenue
Poetry & Prose
Mendocino Avenue
There was nothing remarkable about the night. The streets were quiet but businesses were bustling, people spilled out of bars to light their smokes and restaurants were closing shop. A man I had worked with for a week hurried past, not noticing me, or ignoring me, eating out of a styrofoam cup the food he must’ve got at the end of his shift. There had been a light rain in the evening, and with a cloud cover, the streets were still wet. Basu and I had just reached Ross Street when a homeless man staggered towards us.
“It’s you,” he pointed a finger at me. I remembered the guy. He had asked me for food a few days back. His name was Jack, a very ordinary and inconsequential name, but one that I remembered. I had just left the Indian restaurant where I worked as a server. I had a box in my hands. It was the evening’s meal that I got for working a full shift. It had been a lousy evening all around and I had already started considering leaving the job. It was raining outside. The stress at work had spoiled my appetite earlier, but being out in the streets had made me hungry. I couldn’t wait to eat. I had crouched under the awnings of a dress shop and eaten the rice and greasy curry. There was nowhere to throw the box.
I had to walk with exaggerated care because of the rain. It must have been the way I held the box that caught Jack’s attention. “You got some food to spare, bro?” he asked me.
“Sorry, man. That was my dinner,” I said.
“I don’t need much, bro. Help a man out. I haven’t eaten today.”
“Hey,” I said, looking him squarely in the eyes and spreading my arms out, shoulders ready to shrug, but a tempered indifference to show, “hey, if I had anything, I’d share it with you.” He didn’t believe me. I had to be careful with the box because it still had curry sauce in it, which I was in a habit of spilling on my clothes. Even the empty box must have smelled good.
“Just a bite will do,” he said. “Show some love, man.”
“Like I said,” I said, “I got nothing for you.” The rain was in my scalp and under the collar of my shirt. I turned and walked away. On the corner of Seventh and Mendocino I found a trash bin. I could hear somebody run after me. It was Jack, but I didn’t know his name then.
“You fucking throw away food? I could’ve eaten that food. You throw away your leftovers instead of giving them to me?” He was very angry.
“There was nothing in the box,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. He was large, hungry and upset.
“How the fuck can you do that?” he said. “I told you I was hungry.” His curled fists hung down his sides. The rain hung from his chin. “You didn’t want to give me food because you know I went to jail.”
“No, I didn’t know you went to jail,” I said. I wondered how the evening would end.
“You think you can kick my ass,” he sized me up with his eyes.
“No, I don’t, man,” I said. “I’m not looking for trouble. There was nothing in the box,” I pointed to the trash. “Do you want me to dig it out and show it to you?”
“I don’t eat trash, fucking bitch!” he said.
“I’m not saying you do,” I said. “I’m saying there never was anything in the box.” He looked around, defeated.
“You probably think you can smash my head on this,” he patted the round, dull gleam of a parking meter.
“No, I don’t. I don’t think like that,” I said.
“You probably think you can kick my head in.”
I turned and walked away. But I couldn’t cross the street without the signal. Jack called after me.
“I’m sorry, man,” he said. “It’s just I’m hungry, that’s all.”
“I’m sorry, too,” I said. “If you’d asked when I still had some food, I’d have given it to you.”
“Fuck this rain,” he said. “I’m Jack.”
“Good,” I said. I wanted to cross the street and get home. “Good to meet you, Jack.” The lights changed. I leaped over a puddle and crossed the street. I thought about him once in the week after that night, when I was eating under the awning of another business on the way home and a shadow sleeping by the door had startled me. Otherwise, there was no occasion to remember a homeless man hungry for food and talk.
Jack was standing before us. He was blocking the way, although the sidewalk was wide enough and the streets were empty. I looked at Basu, and he was already looking at me. I sidestepped Jack and kept walking. Upon reaching Fourth Street, Basu looked into The Sweet Spot. It’s a decent enough place where it is possible to catch, most of the time, live music that doesn’t immediately turn you off. But we walked on to the brewery instead. They also had a band. I don’t remember what kind of music they played.
After a couple of beers at the bar, Basu rolled a cigarette and I rolled a small one for myself. A very drunk girl stood at the door and looked at us. Then she came, hesitatingly at first, but with a bounce after she caught our eyes.
“Do you have a cigarette?” she asked. She showed a crumpled dollar bill to Basu.
“No, I don’t have cigarettes,” he said. She shifted her weight from foot to foot, looked at us again for longer than was necessary. “I have a dollar,” she said.
“I don’t have cigarettes, but I can roll you one,” Basu said. He took out a pouch of Bali Shag and rolled her a cigarette. He didn’t take the money.
“I’ve never seen anyone roll a cigarette that quick,” she said and set her glass of beer on the sidewalk.
“Do they let you do that?” I pointed to her glass.
“I do it all the time,” she giggled. She was drunker than was good for her.
“Is this one giving you trouble?” A guy with a tight head of curly hair approached us and stood by her side.
“He rolled me a cigarette,” she pointed to Basu. He stepped forward with a dollar bill in his fist.
“Where you guys from?” the girl asked as we smoked.
“I’m from Nepal,” I said. Basu said he lives here. “Really?” they asked. “Nepal?”
“What’re you guys doing here, then?” the guy asked. Why would anyone choose to be in California if he could be living in Nepal? “I really want to see that part of the world, you know,” he said. “Tibet and India and the Himalayas.”
“California is nice too,” I said.
“I’m sure it’s nothing like Nepal,” he said. “You guys are so spiritual,” he said without searching for a word. I looked at him and nodded. I am an atheist, but he doesn’t need to know. “You’re probably really in touch with the land and mountains and everything.”
“Some of the most beautiful mountains I’ve hiked are in Oregon,” I said. I went to college in eastern Washington. I was traumatized by the flat drabness of barren fields in late summer when I first reached Walla Walla. Over the next four years, I fell in love with the fields as they changed colors from the hoary shine of frost to a lap of green turning gold with the seasons. What people doesn’t find its land the most beautiful? Basu must have found the talk about Nepali spiritualism hollow. He disengaged from the conversation and smoked his cigarette.
“But, still, wow,” the guy said. “Nepal. What a trip. I’m going there soon as I got enough money. We traveled through eastern Europe,” he pointed to the girl, “and it was amazing. I like the east. You people are different than the people out here. And it doesn’t get any more west than California.” He punctuated west with air quotes.
“No, it doesn’t” I agreed with him. We went inside and found a table together. The girl saw somebody and teetered away. A waitress cleared the table and asked if she could get us anything. We asked for more of whatever it was we had been drinking. The guy sat and talked about the Dalai Lama and incense and meditation, but left us after our beers arrived. I was drinking a Belgian: a bit too sweet, but not as filling as you’d expect, and the highest alcohol content among their brews. I wanted to be drunk, and soon enough, I was drunk.
We ran into Jack again on our way back home. He was begging for quarters outside the gas station on Mendocino. He could barely walk. He looked at me and yelled, “It’s you!”
I kept walking. He caught up and grabbed my arm. I pushed him. There was a smell of decay around him. He had that sickly sweet smell of someone slowly fermenting to waste, from the inside out. The top of a red and blue tattoo peeked from under his collar. There was drool on his beard and snot under his nose. The white of his eyeballs was a solid yellow, and the pale blue eyes had no light in them.
“I know you,” he pointed a finger at me. I turned and kept walking. I had told Basu the story about the empty container of food. I told Basu in Nepali who Jack was. “Are you talking about me?” Jack followed us. People played ping-pong outside The Belvedere. Their voices carried to us. “What is it to you?” I turned and asked Jack.
“You better just fuck off, Jack,” I said. “Jack off, Jack,” I said. I was happy with how clever I could be. Basu didn’t laugh, but I couldn’t help it. I repeated the insult and laughed.
Jack lunged at me. But he was a lot drunker than I was, and the laughter and the unbridled joy of hurting another man had made me alert. He never reached me. His leg buckled and he fell forward. His hands didn’t break his fall. Instead, he fell on his right shoulder and the side of his face. I walked away again, but I couldn’t stop laughing.
It was a nice enough night. It could have been warmer—it was May, after all. But the sky was clear and stars that weren’t drowned out by the city’s lights shone in their places in the sky. I had barely walked ten paces before Jack punched the back of my head. He didn’t connect well, but it hurt. I jumped in fright. He threw a fist at me and once more hit the sidewalk. I kicked him as hard as I could.
He groaned and tried to pick himself up. I kicked him again, silently, but as hard as I could land, on the back of his head, which hit the sidewalk and bounced. His whole body dragged a couple of inches. I kicked him again, this time aiming just under his armpit. I felt Basu watching me. I stepped back from Jack and watched. He moved, got on all fours, sat up.
Then I turned and walked away. We didn’t speak a word until we were sitting on the porch smoking cigarettes. Even then, it wasn’t Jack we talked about. It was a nice enough night and there was a lot to do the next day. I still hadn’t found a dependable, steady job.
The next day I was called for an interview in San Anselmo. The interview didn’t last long. I got the job. I told them it would be a good idea if I could work out of Santa Rosa instead of taking the bus every day. That’d cost me four hours on the bus and ten dollars for the fare. We agreed that two days a week was enough commuting. Summer was here, and everything seemed to be going reasonably well, and better still, there was no ominous swell over the horizon. I called home and talked with people who mattered to me in Kathmandu. Soon I’ll start writing again, I told myself.
Basu and I were walking towards downtown Santa Rosa a few days after the incident with Jack when I saw him again. Somebody had patched him up, but he was already on the streets. He had on a new coat and his shoes looked clean. I stopped and stared at him as we passed. He looked back, but didn’t seem to see me. If he did recognize me, he chose not to show it. I couldn’t have cared less.
Around mid-May, Basu left for the east coast to walk at graduation and collect his diploma. I tried to resist going to the bar on my own. But after a couple of days, I was in the neighborhood, and it seemed natural to go in for a pint or two. It was an evening of just the sort. Once I was spending money it didn’t make any sense to walk out sober.
I saw Jack on my way back again. He was sitting on a bench at the bus-stop on Mendocino and Ross, trying to smoke a butt. His hands shook, and there was hardly any tobacco in the unlit stub.
“Jack,” I waved my hand. “It’s me.” I lit a cigarette.
He looked at me vacantly. He spat and wiped his mouth. He was missing teeth and his mouth was scabbed.
“You remember me, Jack?” I asked. I sat down and smoked the cigarette. I rolled and lit another and left it on the bench. I left Jack there, alone with his silence and a May night just as pretty as any.
(Photo: Kashish)
Comments
Jack got squat but here’s to you feeding a hungry bunch of NON NATIVE amateurs with a dose of bland and rather meek anecdote. The irony ceases to desist!
Yes, the years following one’s college graduation can be confusing. You have literally s-p-e-l-l-e-d it out for us. Thankfully some of us are not as starved as Jack for anything and everything ‘brutal and honest’ to devour on anecdotes of trips down neighborhood bars, or close encounters with – oh how typical - dumb white chicks and meathead American jocks! Next time around, how about some hot and spicy piece full of vanity, pretension and grandiosity instead?
And here’s my posing in all its glory: I STILL prefer your “earlier work to a more recent one where you blah blah blah…” like they blurt out in pretentious literary circles.
“Next time around, how about some hot and spicy piece full of vanity, pretension and grandiosity instead?”
sure, that works for me too. more the merrier. want to start a pretentious literary circle here too?
not satisfied with the story. you can do better.
why always write abou violenc? I think this story is also full of violence of different kinds.
Hey Prawin,
You did a fairly good job on this one. The fundamentals were sound. Unlike your last piece, this one hung together well. The execution was there, and the flow and rhythm of the prose carried the reader along; most of the time, the language did not get in the way, so one could actually pay attention to the story. The work you obviously put into polishing up your sentences showed to good effect. The story, simple as it was, and perhaps because of it, opened itself to various interpretations quite effortlessly; it is interesting that that often happens when the story is not trying to be “seriously literary”!
But bottom line: I liked and enjoyed this piece!
On the flip side, Basu never really came into focus for me and seemed to exist more as a prop than a character. And then, once again, there were those awkward constructions. Not many, but they were there. For example:
“Hey,” I said, looking him squarely in the eyes and spreading my arms out, shoulders ready to shrug, but a tempered indifference to show, “hey, if I had anything, I’d share it with you.”
The descriptions sandwiched between the first and second “hey” is difficult to comprehend.
Or: “I’m from Nepal,” I said. Basu said he lives here.
The tense is off here; it should be “Basu said he lived here.”
Or: I was drinking a Belgian: a bit too sweet, but not as filling as you’d expect, and the highest alcohol content among their brews.
The last clause, besides being gramatically iffy, just hangs there like a misplaced and lost soul.
There were a few more along those lines — minor points that a little editing could easily fix, but …
Sorry, I don’t have more time to really get into more details, but this is the best I could do for now. Hope my comments help. Thanks for the work, bro. Keep moving, keep writing.
I spend hours each week looking for english writings by Nepalese writers; fledgling or fully fledged. I don’t think I have missed any of your writings in the past few years. I sometime go out of my way to call myself a fledgling writer. It does take me a week to write few good sentences though. I thank you for posting your writings. just a small query, you did your high school in Nepal or abroad? Do you think someone with a normal Nepali schooling background can write English as good as you do? I know Samrat did his schooling back in Nepal; he is published and all but i think he had an english influence in his younger days from his family not exactly sure though. Manjushree, she writes beautiful but she was born and raised in US. Anyways, good work and agree with GP on couple of slip ups although one can easily see that those errors don’t reflect the quality of writer’s English.
hey this is the second time my post have been deleted without any obvious reasons??
let’s see: this is my fourth attempt to get posted!
hi intello_affaire,
we get 100s of robot spam comments everyday, and somehow your comments seem to have gone down the drain with the mass of that lot. i’ve attempted to republish them, let me know if i missed any.
thanks Sarahana, much appreciated!
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bravo prawin!
this was fantastic! it felt brutal and honest, lacking all pretensions and grandiosity!