Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [20]
It was the Haight I finally picked as my space. My space, my turf, my homeland. It was where I should have been born if the Fresno flower child had strayed no farther from home than Ashbury and Haight. But then I’d have had a different look and less curiosity about sex and transcendence. I’d have inherited the Haight Street I’ll-cross-when-and-where-I-want-and-at-my-speed posture of entitlement. I had to practice a camel-like imperturbability as I crossed the streets on red, while motorists waited.
The Corolla-As-Motel-Room needed some getting used to. I wadded up dirty laundry to make myself a kind of sleeping pallet. For privacy I taped freebie weeklies to the windows. No cops hassled me, no creeps hustled me. What they said of the Haight, I mean the historical epoch, the mood I’d missed, I mean my bio-mom’s times and wants and needs and not the place, was still true. Do your own thing, do it proudly, and no one will bother you. Feel free, and you shall be free. I was a Cowbabe in Goodwill chaps riding a Japanese auto. Clear Water was never this free, this strong!
The car was room, and board came from neighborhood soup kitchens. Faustine and Debby were brought up Catholics, but Devi followed her nose: the Hare Krishnas, Buddhists, Baptists, Black Muslims and some religions that entwined love and profit, charity and sex, faith and ecology, space and time, combinations I hadn’t stumbled upon upstate. At the Church of Divine Intergalactica, parishioners wore crowns of Viking horns and feathered headdresses, headgear meant to collect outer-space signals undetectable on normal wavelengths. I felt free; I was free. It just happened overnight; one day I was afraid and on the outside, the next day I was a kind of outlaw, on the side of other outlaws. Maybe I was programmed that way; it seemed totally natural to identify with dropouts, to step around cops, to look out for scanners and closed-circuit monitors. All that shrapnel on cherubic faces, all those brandings and tattoos, looked cool, though not for me. The Haight’s lesson was: Nothing in appearance or behavior need cost a drop of dignity. I didn’t look jobless and didn’t feel homeless. No sour odor of dim futurity.
Stoop Man was the first neighborhood friend I made while I was scouting the city on my own for Bio-Mom. He had fruit and he shared it. We started with chatter about greenhouse gases and ozone layers. Stoop Man sat all day every day on the stoop of the triplex that housed the Church of Divine Intergalactica. He owned a set of seven signal-receiving headwear, one for each day of the week, Viking, Roman, Indian, Greek, Star Wars, biblical and Disney, all of them handcrafted from cardboard, velvet and tin.
One morning in late September, he stopped me with, “Did you feel that one, sugar?” He was sitting on the lowest step of the stoop as usual, but that day he touched my elbow. He was wearing my favorite, the Queen of Sheba tiara.
“Feel what?” I smiled at his fingers still on my arm.
The morning stayed bright, but all the car alarms were going off. Pigeons went into panic, and circled the telephone poles.
“The Earth move, what else? Sugar, your smile makes me feel good, and I haven’t been feelin too good for a while, you know what I’m sayin? Girl, you try being the Sultan of Bosnia, just try it for a day, get all your horses shot up, get all your sheep and goats barbecued by infidels, and pretty soon you’ll feel the way I do. Hungry and depressed, that’s how. Famished, you know what I’m sayin? What you reckon they be servin up at the Hare Krishnas for lunch?”
Stoop