In “Mining the States of City Minds,” a recent offering here, I introduced my approach to experiencing the texture of city life in Venice, California and writing up the resulting stories with a type of literary journalism. This kind of writing, with roots in the New Journalism of the 1960s, captures these stories as they happen in the streets and other sites of everyday life through scenes that are faithful to the action and events they emerged from. It lets characters speak for themselves, which gives the writing the feel of a fictional short story but also a more truthful approximation of the surfacing event through their differing perspectives or points of view. Like a Surrealist flaneur I amble through the city trolling for stories and find their potential elements in various clusters of activity, sometimes homeless camps, where these voices dramatize their challenging existences. They present the evidence that might lead to a larger story waiting to be told. My resulting scenes mix direct and indirect (playing undercover detective on occasion) observations and the reorganization of conversations. This is the sixth in my series. In the first I captured the chaos ensuing from a crime in the streets, and especially the actions and impressions of one person suspected of committing it as he escapes into the bowels of the city. In the second I captured another scene in a park at night where a few residents from the previous one are present along with others, including the suspect. In the third I traced this suspect’s continued journey, and his securing of temporary sanctuary. In the fourth I tracked this person’s escape from this place to the beach where he met several residents who occupied a camp. In the fifth I recorded his continuing experiences on the beach where he is detained by some of these residents. In the sixth I recorded what happened after he escaped from them and plunged into the ocean, returning to a friend’s place to get recharged before heading back to the streets, and then to the Dog Park where he encountered a woman who appeared to be stalking him. As she left the cops descended on the park. Here I record his journey after he leaves the park. He stumbles on a house he had been at before and this gets him to flash back to when he first arrived in the city and tried to live a normal life, and how and why he came to live on the street when this didn’t work out. He ponders the limits of street life but also how it helped him nurture a different existence and lifestyle.
Flashes From Underground
Wyatt holds his breath for what seems like minutes, expecting the worst. The diminishing oxygen leaves him feeling wheezy at first, but visually stimulated physically energized as the deprivation continues. He imagines vanishing completely through his own efforts. As the officers enter the park, he turns slightly upright and to the left so that the nearby tree screens him from their potential looks. He tries to do the best job he can of acting like a normal park resident, using the skills he’d learned from the acting gigs he got when he first arrived in town, looking as active and alert as possible.
Lollygaggers were always guilty until proven innocent in officers’ eyes, he’d learned. They knew how to quickly spot the undeserving in their fidgety mannerisms and other marks of weakness and inferiority. They might as well be wearing signs. You had to learn the art of creative idleness, the opposite of inactivity. Your stares had to have a certain flare. Too much gazing, or the wrong kind of it, could doom you to incarceration. It was the concentrated effort made habit of gazing inward in self-absorbed confidence, drawing looks toward you that bounced back to the sender and above suspicion that had to be cultivated.
Wyatt felt he could do this on certain occasions, when he had at least a smidgen of energy left from a moment, or a mental attitude that rushed him for whatever reason. He doesn’t know if now’s one of those times. He resigns himself to fate, hunches over as if he’s reading a book lost in thought, his motions frozen, and monitors the scene.
“You call us maam?” one of the officers asks in response to a set of waving arms thirty feet or so into the park.
“Yes, yes, thanks for coming so fast! She’s gone now…you missed her by a few minutes. But you have to arrest her. With all these kids around…I can’t believe this can go on here. Please!”
“Now calm down maam. What is it exactly you called about?”
“That woman was over there with no clothes on…she was trying to seduce the kids playing there when…”
“…a woman was completely nude?” the other officer asks.
“Well, just about. She…”
“…well was she or wasn’t she? Either she was or wasn’t nude!”
“She…might as well have been…had a see through…she sure wasn’t trying to hide anything. What’s next...going back to people running round the beach and streets with no clothes on? That’s why we got so many moral…”
“…well that’s a big leap. So what is it you want from us?”
“Arrest her!”
“On what charge?”
“There must be some…”
“…just tell us what happened!” another officer says, smirking to his partner who retrieves the paperwork. Wyatt wants to act naturally and confidently insert himself into the normal flow and leave, but he’s afraid that one flex of a muscle or twitch of an eye and the game will be up. He peeks to his right and sees the previous officer grab his cell to receive a call and decides to finally split…
He follows a couple and their two toddlers across Pacific but separates from them once he reaches the alley behind Clubhouse, slipping behind a dumpster. He glances down the alley toward Speedway and thinks he sees a friend from the Indiana camp talking to someone at the end of the block. He shuffles along the north side of the alley, trying to be inconspicuous and get a clearer look as he approaches her. But he senses he’s being watched and slips between two garages, glancing up to the roof of a condo across the alley, seeing no one.
He hears a rustling behind and turns sharply into the eyes of the woman he met at the beach strip who’s apparently trying to avoid notice. He stares nervously at her while trying to glance down the alley to see if his friend is still there. He now sees that she’s gone but wants to sprint to the area. Unfortunately his legs won’t cooperate. He’s exhausted, not used to being up and around so much in the daytime and having to confront so many new people and situations. In a split second he turns back toward the woman and sees her moving away from the alley and into the back yard of the adjacent house.
“Remember me?” he manages, while stumbling after her. He crosses into the back yard but she has apparently vanished into the house. The yard is a maze of foliage and garden furniture that offers many potential hiding places. But he’s tempted to go up to the back door and knock since this house seems familiar. Hadn’t he spent a few days here several months ago when he was looking for a place to live, after he’d gotten that part? It was a lively scene, a cross between crash pad, halfway house and commune. He’d slept in his bedroll under the stars one night, mesmerized by the swaying tree limbs and exhilarated by the sweet sea breezes.
He approaches the door but quickly recoils, finding a lawn chair in the corner coved by several ferns. Memories of his experience in this or another house rush him but then quickly vanish, leaving his mind curiously blank. He wonders what it would be like to get a lobotomy as he hears a muffled sound off in the distance. It begins at the far side of his mind as a feeble cry, and gradually comes closer. Building intensity, it morphs into a scream, which could be the concordance of kids’ voices in the alley, or an orgasm reaching its crescendo and spreading its timbre through and beyond the open windows in the neighborhood. This is a cultural plus in this open air stretch where the senses are as saturated as the early morning fog in June. It echoes with an afterlife, refusing to die, and works like smelling salts on his consciousness until he regains full awareness.
He curls up on the chair and muses about that scene, now pretty sure this was the house. He vaguely remembers people of various ages coming and going, most of whom he had barely noticed since he was only around for a few days. He was transiting to a decent existence above ground after a lengthy stretch of bad luck below, and he was high on himself, mostly into whatever got him swift passage away from the old traps and habits.
But he sees the folly of that now, how that life made him insensitive to what matters and denied him access to wholesome experiences. The signs were there even before his universe began to collapse like a house of cards. The looks on certain faces and the comments from acquaintances sent provocative but enigmatic messages. His preoccupation with making good money and moving in all the right circles suddenly seemed silly, superfluous. It was baffling. He felt like he was in a sort of limbo and needed to find a way to either heaven or hell. He had to figure out how to exist again; grasp new categories to define his situation and perhaps re-define himself.
Life on the street these past months was mostly hell, but it wasn’t like that at first. As he flushed out of his life above ground he felt rejuvenated. He wanted to cut loose from the whole program, experience the freedom of having no attachments, no commitments, even though it wasn’t his choice at first. To the beach, that’s where freedom rang, most everyone’s fantasy who grew up inland ogling those perfectly-sculpted gyrating bodies on the silver screen. He wanted to find new mates with a fresh angle on existence, purer forms of creativity than what the entertainment world offered. Something in Venice beckoned. He’d dropped in from time to time for dinner with acquaintances at various restaurants, hip eateries where casual deals were made.
He was impressed by the mix of people coexisting in a democratic style that ran against the grain of what most feel America is all about. Once he left a café a few blocks in from the beach and walked to meet some people for dinner and got lost in the maze of streets. Secretly frustrated and embarrassed, he frantically tried to escape but soon found himself enjoying his diversion. It was strange; he didn’t want to leave. He became a kind of voyeur, spying things from a distance that he would never have paid much attention to, like the architectural details and street activities. Later he sought out this same neighborhood and found a party in progress spilling over into several houses, and was pulled in from off the street to join in the festivities. He felt like he was being converted to a strange new religion, and willingly accepted the liturgies. There were realtors, artists, political activists, surfers, sun worshippers, dropouts. Some were homeowners, others homeless or living in their RVs parked on the street. Those on the edge seemed the most exciting. They welcomed him into their fold…
The street was liberating as long as the alliances shifted favorably. The different camps around town changed day by day, some migrating to other camps or clusters, or finding their way above ground, back into regular society, or returning to their previous states of incarceration or, unfortunately, but it’s a fact of life on the street, into a body bag. A bad apple, someone who had just been released from prison after a twenty-year stint, or furloughed from a mental institution to balance the budget, could tip the scales. The camaraderie could explode into radical infighting at the crash of a shopping cart. A good apple on the other hand, someone who may have been forced into street life for the usual and some unusual reasons, but who possessed at least a smidgen of social purpose and vision, inadvertently or intentionally choosing it as a refusal of regular society, could catalyze a community conscience.
Sleeping outdoors was rapturous at first, when he believed it was only temporary. He always had the fantasy of sleeping under the stars on the beach with other people like himself, in a kind of outdoor commune where they could live like nomads, relive a primitive existence. Not commune with nature! That was starry-eyed hippie stuff for spoiled suburban brats who cultivated exclusive fraternities for themselves to find more kicks. His goal was to feel what nature really means, live through and beyond it to the other side of possibility while reaching out to a more diverse community of souls. The supreme test for figuring your status in society was to show that you could face the dangers of the human jungle and be confident. You couldn’t know who you were until you were ready to take things to the vanishing point of your existence. He toyed with writing a script about this a while back.
In those early days he felt at times that some form of pure group magic was in reach. The people he met moved around in formation, going where the moments dictated, refusing that other world above ground altogether. It was in this grouping that he met Willow who invited him to the Indiana camp. These moments were some of the most exciting of his life, and he decided to become at least a quasi-permanent citizen of the streets, aware in the back of his mind however that he could always reverse it, return to his previous situation in some form.
Things changed when he and his mates had to face the realities of survival mostly alone and with few options for getting back above ground. To stay self-sufficient and avoid having to panhandle they would have had to get a plow and perhaps a mule to work the vacant plots around town. Or someone in the group would have had to find their trust fund. It was tough going at first. The euphoric moments were fewer. He became very aware of being flushed out of the system by powerful and insensitive people, the same sort that populated the world above, those who think nothing of taking your belongings, or even doing you harm.
He liked the group on Indiana. He remembered the evening Willow brought him to the alley. It was nothing like what he expected. He was given a warm welcome by the people there. They all seemed to know each other, and be interested in his situation. It was like they knew what he had been through and wanted to give him good advice.
The vibes were special. That first night they performed an impromptu satirical skit that made fun of street people, and Emil, who according to rumors had been involved in several plays back in Ann Arbor, brought him into it. And he did it very cleverly, breaking down his resistance and encouraging him to take part. In the next days he found himself thinking of other skits they could do. Some were even talking about putting together a theatrical group and getting a space for it down by the beach.
But it all vanished nearly as fast as this dream state surfaced. One night he woke up suddenly and didn’t recognize where he was. He felt like he might have interrupted a tense situation. Only a few from the group were there: Emil, Willow and two others. During his slumber some had apparently left and others replaced them. But these new members were different. A few looked like they’d been on the street for a long time and their crusted appearances had fused with the surroundings. They were nearly comatose and looked at you like they were afraid to speak.
Others didn’t seem to belong, like perhaps they just dropped in to check things out. One male, in his late twenties or early thirties, was dressed like he was nearly ready to head off for work at the office. He had few belongings. And he seemed to have a special rapport with a few of the other newcomers. Their accents and ways of using words were incongruous with streetspeak. And they seemed to connect with each other through some form of sign language. One conspicuously clean-cut male in his late thirties or so was fixated on Willow, who began moving further to the edge of the group. The dynamic was never the same again. Most regulars began to migrate to other camps around town with familiar bodies.
Then one night as he crept across Main toward the Indiana alley, returning from a visit with Alan and Jane over at the Dog Park, a scream pierced the mute blackness. At first he couldn’t locate it but as he got closer realized it came from the alley. The clean-cut male and another new face had cornered Willow by the dumpster. He knelt down behind a bush about fifty yards away and saw that they had her pinned on an old mattress, her mouth covered, torn between running for the police and offering her help. He slipped accidentally and they all instantly turned his way, making his decision for him. He ran back toward the beach as Willow’s screams continued.
He didn’t get the police, for fear of exposing himself. He had few allies on the street then, and there had been a spate of beatings, and even killings recently in adjacent camps. He felt guilty about this. And he wanted to explain his motives to Willow when he saw her a week or so later at a crash pad over on Ozone. He could never forget the look on her face as he surprised her and Rhiannon and a few of her friends on the roof. Rhiannon said they had been worshipping the sun god. They were all nude, including Willow who was encircled by the others, like she was the object of some sort of ritual. It could have been a performance at a gallery. In fact he remembered saying to himself how this had the stamp and feel of a happening. They seemed to be trying to exorcize something from her, chanting indecipherable phrases, putting their hands on her erratically, caressing her thighs and massaging her nipples.
From his vantage as the spectator they could have been staging, or actually creating a playing field for a reciprocal seduction, a willing and loving one for sure. It seemed evident in Willow’s occasional facial expressions and movements. Perhaps this was the undoing of her trauma in the alley, he remembered thinking. And later a friend of Rhiannon’s said that the purpose was an arty modification of some new therapy technique being used for rape victims. They did it differently each time. It all depended on who the victim was and what their circumstances were. The point was to get the violation out of their body and fill the momentary void with a replacement experience that became a positive memory. It was kind of a reverse séance. The connection was in the here and now; the energy from the victim’s immediate surroundings could produce a new wholeness. He remembered wondering if this might be another violation.
Once they saw him they tried to bring him into the seduction, but he resisted when he got up close and met Willow’s eyes. It wasn’t what he expected. He was embarrassed, for both of them he thought, and felt guilty for failing to come to her aid. But her look up close was radiant, and her gaze cut through him, making him feel naked and defenseless. He couldn’t speak. He lost his ability to express what he wanted, what he had rehearsed. And her look somehow said she knew that and understood. She effortlessly uttered, “I’ve been there before!”
It took him a while before he was able to begin making sense of what all of this meant. At first he found another roost farther down the beach, avoiding the entire area around Indiana. For several days he saw no one remotely associated with that scene. But he couldn’t get Willow out of his mind, and especially what happened to her. He eventually realized he had to see her. They had talked about coming up together, even getting a place. But this all seemed beside the point now. The image he had of her was fading. He knew the street was responsible for what had happened, and even for how he was seeing her now, yet he didn’t really know anything for sure, and that’s why he had to get back above ground. Or did he? One meeting with Willow would give him the assurance as to what had to be done. Living above would never be the same now, however. He had learned that much.
But where was life below taking him? The street seemed to scramble his senses with his thoughts. He’d be pondering the simplest problem, in a relatively clear frame of mind, when smells would rush him, several at once, lilacs, salty almonds, barbeque, expensive perfume, the sea air, grease, plumes of incense. He could single each one out, momentarily at least, and then they’d often blend into one fragrance that at times would be seductive, at others the most repulsive stench, and morph into a picture, often an abstract piece of art. With gestures he would physically try to reach through the sensual clutter and grab the lost clarity on the other side. But this often overloaded his synapses and weakened him. As he relaxed, accepting his fate, sometimes he would get insights that literally blew his mind, forcing him to take refuge in any substances available…
John O’Kane has published over a hundred stories, essays and poems in a variety of venues, blogs regularly on Huffingtonpost, and edits and publishes AMASS Magazine. His most recent book is, A People’s Manifesto (2015). He has a book of short stories forthcoming in 2017.