On Pedestrian Bridge, 11:05 PM

It's an hour short of Shakespeare's witching hour, and I'm sitting on one of those butt-numbing benches up on the bridge.  And what a bridge this baby is!  If Austin never did another thing right, they did some major on-top-of-the-situation when they made this thing.

Here's how it is tonight:  two young lovers sitting down the way, their voices low and murmuring, nothing really recognizable wafting to us.  But that doesn't matter.  Young love is pretty much the same everywhere a person goes.  Been there myself some decades ago, and it's kind of a lovely thing to see the hormone-monkey on somebody else's back for a change.  I'm old enough now that I am not led around by the nose of my second chakra.  Not much, anyway.  Well, okay, a wee bit.  Still, a lovely thing.

To my left is Tom, a good old boy who spent the day actually volunteering his services for eight hours or so--and this is a guy who sleeps on the street and yet manages to reach out to others in need.  I don't know about you, but I think that says an awful lot about who he really is.  Very nice, methinks.

And this:  cardboard laid out for Tom to sleep on.  A palatial bed down here.  A few feet away, a man on a blanket.  And others on these bum-numbing benches.  A community of sorts.  A community of the down-but-not-quite-out crowd.  Been down for a long count but we ain't reached the count of ten yet and I think some of us are gonna struggle back up on our feet.

And Chet Nichols sang, back in the 1970s...."...gimme the count, boys/Is it six or eight or ten?/And have I been down so long/I'll never get up again?"

I've asked Tom, sitting immediately to my left, and who's been reading this over my shoulder, to come up with some words of wisdom or sass or whatever so I can pass them along to you.

And here's what he said:  "Faster horses, younger women, older whiskey and more money.  The secret to life, the song said."  And he leans back and laughs.

The young man on the next bench to my right has a broken leg, dressed out in a stylish cast of sorts.  High-tech bone-fixing.  Another real-life example why we need real health reform.  I could point out a dozen who need some kind of health care but won't get it because the system has been designed and tweaked to leave them out.  I am not trying to be some kind of whiner here.  This is just how it is.  Reality lives by its own rules.

"Useless eaters," Kissinger is alleged to have said of us.

And I say us because I am very much a part of all this.  I'm here on some kind of quasi-spiritual Vision Quest, it's true, but I have a few physical issues myself that I've learned to more or less live with: a hernia that needs repair and is just getting worse and there's not a bloody thing I can do about it.

I am reminded of Mary Lou Wingate in John Brown's Body by Stephen Vincent Benet:

               "...staring at pain with courteous eyes;
                when the pain outwits it, the body dies."

Stop complaining, I tell myself.  Focus on what you DO have.

This night just seems to be beginning.  The story goes that we can sleep up here so long as we get our funky selves up off the concrete and the benches and hele ( that's Hawaiaan for move) on down the road before 5 AM.  That's the saying hereabouts, the wisdom of the collective mind.  And of course it's always subject to the whim of change.  They used to leave the street people alone on Pedestrian Bridge, I'm told, but now the pressure has increased.  They come now with the book of laws, and more and more they are going with the very strictest of interpretations.  See below.

A data-base emerges from the collective experiences of the street.  Hear about Brian?  Used to come up here?  Found him dead.  Yeah, some signs of violence.

And...so-and-so was ticketed this morning.  Another this afternoon.

Even I was ticketed today.  Here's how it came down:

I was down eating the free dinner from Loaves and Fishes and went across the street to eat the food.  So I'm sitting there on the sidewalk, leaning up against a black wrought-iron fence when of a sudden two bicycle cops come up out of nowhere and corner me and a black guy who'd just been smoking ganga.  He looked worried and I felt none too fine.

The upshot was that it's illegal to sit on the sidewalk.  And the unspoken subtext was that "Ignorance of the law is not excuse."  Bingo.  I sat there while the officer filled out the ticket, a bum with glazed-over eyes caught in the headlights of the system.  So I signed the ticket, promised to show up.  Arguing would have been futile, even counter-productive.  It would have made things worse.  So we were both polite and went with the flow of the unequally enforced law.  Cops know, and we know, and you know that a crowd sitting on the sidewalk in some of the more upscale parts of town would have been left alone, or at worse given a warning.  We were just nailed.


I want to talk more about this at some future date, but for now there's some bare nuts and bolts of the deal.  There was so much texture:  the adrenaline, the you-gotta-be-kidding-reaction, the suppressed sense of injustice which clamored out to be heard, expressed.I came away from the experience relieved that I didn't have to go to jail.  And also...pissed, dammit.  I was doing nothing worthy of that public humiliation.  And it is a shame and a discredit to the Austin Police Force to have their men out there violating the intent of the law.

I'm told the law was originally passed because the Drag Kids were massing on sidewalks and effectively blocking traffic.  So an ordinance was passed prohibiting the sitting on a sidewalk.  But it was meant as a specific remedy to a specific problem.  And then the particular of that intent was generalized and the cops just started running with it.  Another tool in their arsenal of harassment.

Okay, okay.  I'm pissed.  I'll get over it.

VULGARITY ALERT:  WHAT FOLLOWS IS A VERY EARTHY COLLOQUIALISM USING GROSS SEXUAL IMAGERY.  IF THIS OFFENDS YOU, PLEASE SKIP THIS PART.  IF NOT, COME SIT BY ME.

So here's Tom and he's been thinking about cute and clever sayings and this one is just kicking at his chest walls and throat, clawing its way out, like that monster popping out of John Hurt's chest in Alien.  So let's let him get it out of his system:  Here's one of his grandad's colorful (cough) sayings: "That's tighter than a preacher's dick in a calf's ass."

I told you it was gross.  Tom is roaring with laughter now, looking at me to see if I appreciate.  Yep, I do.  KindaSorta.   Sorry, but Jimmy Swaggart just suddenly popped into my head...heading for the barnyard...Lawd have mercy!  That's an image I do not want to hang onto.

Ok, just think of it like this:  Tom is this great big Falstaffian character, for those of you who know Shakespeare.  Yes, Falstaff.  Larger than life. Reincarnated and living on a bridge.  Bluff, hearty, but one you wouldn't want to mess with.  This clown has a wicked right.

And this just in (from his grandpa):  "If I tell you that a rooster can pull  a freight train, hook up."
In other words, my word is my bond.  Kewl, eh?  I love these colloquial sayings.

And this final jewel:  "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy."  LOL.

Enough for tonight.  Time to ride off into the darkness.

Much peace and aloha,

Elijah the Homeless