Loitering: New and Collected Essays

by Charles D'Ambrosio

  The falling rain makes a pleasant hum on the asphalt, but barely a block away the whole city gives out, dissolved in a granular fog, and I dreamily sense that out there, out beyond the end of the avenues and streets where right now the only destination I see is murk, there might be silence again, a silence we might enter and lose ourselves in and thereby forget all this cowboy business of guns and women. Meanwhile, back in the real world, my first instinct is a sort of stupid ducking motion I’ve learned from the movies, and I have the sure sense I’m going to be shot in the neck, where I feel particularly exposed and vulnerable. At first I don’t know in which building the guy’s holed up, and I assume it’s one of the high-rise Miami Beach–style architectural monstrosities that distort the human scale of this, the north end of Belltown. But this assumption is just pure cornball stuff, and I’m instantly aware that everything I feel and think is little more than the coalescence of certain clichés, that the Bad Guy isn’t a madman barricaded in the top floor of the tallest building, that he doesn’t necessarily plan to take potshots at pedestrians and commuters on their way to work, that he might just be drunk and deranged and wondering how he came to this strange pass on an ordinary evening that began normally enough and is now in the wee hours rapidly going to hell. In short, I don’t know anything about him, beginning with the most fundamental thing, like where he is.

  Not knowing where he is translates pretty soon into a polymorphous fear, and now it’s not just my neck constricting, but also my shoulders and my stomach and my balls, the fear having spread practically right down to my toes as I vividly imagine all the places a bullet can enter the body, and I try to squat casually behind a cement wall—casually because I don’t want to embarrass myself in front of the gathering pack of seasoned hardcore TV news journalists, who frankly seem, with all their unwieldy equipment and their lackadaisical milling around, like sitting ducks—until it occurs to me that the whole notion of being “behind” anything is a logistical matter I can’t quite coordinate, since I don’t know where the Bad Guy is. A ballistic line from point A (Bad Guy) to point B (author’s neck) can’t be established just yet, and for all I know I might actually be casually squatting right in front of him, cleanly fixed between his sights. In deer and elk hunting there’s a moment when you sight your quarry, when everything is there, and you feel the weighty potential of the imminent second in your every nerve, and this weight, this sense of anticipation, this prolepsis, can really screw up your shot. It’s as if the moment were vibrating, taking on static interference from the past and the future, and success depends on your ability to still it, to calm yourself through careful breathing right back into the singular present. The condition is variously called buck or bull fever, and I’m now feeling a variant of that, imagining myself notched neatly in the iron sights of the Bad Guy’s gun. My fear is as vaporous and real and enveloping as the rain and fog, and I have this not-unfamiliar feeling of general and impending doom.

  This might seem unnecessarily preambular, but I also want to say my pants are falling down and I’m sopping wet. I came back from salmon fishing in Alaska with a severe case of atopic dermatitis primarily caused by contact with neoprene. I had what’s called an “id” reaction—pretty much systemic—and all week my fingers and neck and feet and legs were puffy and disgusting, with weeping sores. I think my condition even freaked the dermatologist. My hands were so raw and inflamed I wasn’t able to type, hold a pen, or turn the pages of a book. Because I don’t own a television my week of forced zombiism passed without distraction and nothing to gnaw on but my own increasingly desperate thoughts. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, the walls. It was a new kind of aloneness for me, being imprisoned in my own skin. It was easy to imagine never being touched by another human being ever again. The dermatitis made my skin crawl, and I was taking 40 mg of prednisone, a steroid that cruelly kept me awake so as, it seemed, to fully and consciously experience my suffering in a state of maximum alertness. I mention all this to establish a certain oblique connective tissue between observer and observed, between myself as witness and the thing witnessed. Half the reason I’m at the crime scene is I haven’t had any human contact for a while, and besides I can’t sleep with my skin prickling (and the other half of why I’m standing in the rain at two in the morning is I’m probably some kind of tragedy pervert). When I got back from Alaska my hands were already painfully suppurating and I couldn’t carry all my bags and grabbed only the expensive stuff, the rods and reels, leaving a duffel of clothes in my truck. The next time I could put on shoes and walk, three days later, the neighborhood crackheads had stolen my clothes, including my only belt and my only raincoat, and that’s why my drawers droop and I’m soaked and starting to shiver a little in this mellisonant humming rain.

  But I didn’t come to this crime-scene-in-progress innocently. Before leaving the apartment I put a pen in my pocket, along with a stack of three-by-five cards and a tape recorder, thinking that if this thing got real hairy, if there was actually some shooting, then I might jot a few notes and make of an otherwise blank night a bona fide journalistic story, full of who, what, where, when. Like a lot of my aspirations, this one, too, was internally doomed and hopeless long before I realized it. My main problem vis-à-vis journalism is I just don’t have an instinct for what’s important. I realize that now, looking over my notes. My first note was about the old alleys in Seattle, those island places where sticker bushes flourish and a man can still sleep on a patch of bare earth, where paths are worn like game trails and leave a trace of people’s passing, and how these naturally surviving spots are systematically vanishing from the city, rooted up and paved over mostly because they house bums—an act of eradication that seems as emotionally mingy as putting pay slots on public toilets, but is probably cost-effective in terms of maintenance, since bums generate a lot of garbage in the form of broken glass and wet cardboard. Then I started another note about how, in contrast to these hardscrabble plots, the flower beds and parking strips of lush grass and manicured shrubs and trees are pampered and how, currently, it’s maybe three in the morning and all up and down the street automatic sprinklers spit and hiss in the rain, redundantly watering.

  Also my notes bleed black ink and blur in the rain as I write them. I don’t write a note about that.

  But after investigating the alley it occurs to me there’s a whole parking lot full of highly paid professional journalists just loafing around and that some of them might answer a few questions. I’m not properly credentialed and I’m feeling a little timid because, with my falling-down pants, my soaking wet waxed-cotton coat, and my sore, swollen, hideous, raw red fingers, I don’t look nearly so crisp and ready to report news as these people, and in fact, the way I look, I might be an escapee from the other side, I might just be a piece of news myself, but I need to approach them and find out what’s going on and, if nothing else, I’d really like to fix on a location for the Bad Guy. Certainly these journalists know the scoop, otherwise they wouldn’t look nearly so bored and unconcerned. Watching them from a distance, I have the feeling we’re all waiting for dawn and that dawn, in turn, will bring us death; the atmosphere is straight out of an old Western, where the man gets hanged at sunup. I mean this whole aimless scene badly needs a plot, and nothing emphasizes that more than these journalists, these TV people, standing around in a parking lot scattered with expensive equipment that now waits idly for . . . something. All this inaction is underscored and made emphatic by the sheer number of journalists flocking in the lot, which creates a sense of collective anticipation, a weird hope. Really it would be a relief if that gun would go off.

  In a kind of illustrated food chain of journalism there are big white vans representing every major TV station in Seattle and then several shrimpy economy cars, also white, with the names of radio stations printed on the doors. I notice every journalist is wearing a particularly nice raincoat, with team colors. Then I notice other things, like the cameras, the monitors, they too are covered in specia
lly made rain bonnets. And a couple of people are walking around with umbrellas the size of parachutes. All these dry people are from another tribe. This kind of hard-hitting, high-level journalism obviously requires neat hair, which partly explains all the first-rate rain gear, and that equipment can’t be cheap, not like three-by-five cards. One of the TV reporters is wearing navy-blue pants and a red coat, an outfit that resembles the unsexed uniform of a reservations clerk for a national hotel chain. Another TV guy is practicing a look of grave concern in his monitor, a look that, live at least, seems woefully constipated. It’s weird to watch what amounts oxymoronically to a rehearsal of urgent news, especially without sound, emptied of content, because this pantomime of immediacy is patently fake, a charade, a fine-tuning, not of emotions, but the reenacted look of emotions. It’s method acting or something. In a curious twist, I realize I always knew TV news seemed full of shit, but I never knew it was, in fact, full of shit. Previously I thought the TV news had a certain endemic phoniness because all the reporters were sorority girls who’d majored in communications, but it never occurred to me that the fakery was intentional. These people do this on purpose, and realizing that stunned me, because all my life I’d generously overlooked the canned quality of broadcast journalism, thinking it was, like other infirmities, something these people couldn’t help. I thought they were just naturally corny people and no more deserving of scorn than cripples, and in fact were entitled, because of their impairment, to an extra helping of tolerance and understanding on my part. And now this morning I’m learning that that peculiar phony quality really is phony.

  It’s all big-time wrestling.

  It occurs to me I’m not supple enough of an ironist to be alive and freely moving around in public anymore. With my skin practically leprous I might just hang a cowbell off my neck and clang around town the rest of my days.

  I’m not going to mention the name of the big-league TV journalist I finally talked to because later in the morning, in between taping the twenty-five seconds of filler that feeds into the national show, he tried on a couple of occasions to pick up secretaries who’d come out on the sidewalk to gawk. Every time I turned around he was chatting up another secretary, then he’d rush in front of the camera and morph into the face of a slightly panicked and alarmed person nevertheless manfully maintaining heroic control while reporting nearby horrors. To look at his on-camera face you’d think Godzilla was eating lawyers off the Winslow ferry. It was clear to me that sometime in the past the putative luster of his job had landed him in bed with bystanders.

  But before that, I thought he might be a reliable source of information.

  “Hey,” I said, “what do you think of this?”

  “It’s wet,” the guy said, and then, I kid you not, he lit up a cigarette and squinted at the sky—just like a hero of some sort.

  In a study of poetics you’d call that kind of rhetorical understatement meiosis. In its most simple metalogical form it works by deadpanning the ostensive situation (the Bad Guy with the gun, the hostage, homicidal intent) by rerouting it through the bluntly obvious and uninteresting observation that it is raining. This kind of locution can be found in King Lear and some of Auden’s poetry, and it’s nearly a national mental disease in England, plus it’s pretty common in war, where the irony functions as an anodyne against other, more painful emotions.

  Putting moves on secretaries, phony-faced reports, meiosis—you can’t finally penetrate the pose to anything real.

  I walk off and get my story by eavesdropping on a wondrously cute black woman wearing a blue coat, the back of which quite clearly states, in reflective block letters, her purpose: SEATTLE POLICE MEDIA RELATIONS. She’s exactly what I’ve been looking for, maybe all my life. She’s the unambiguous source of everybody else’s story anyway. The most interesting thing I learn is there’s no hostage.

  “Is there a reporter here?” some guy demands to know.

  His voice wavers with anger but his question floats unanswered and hangs ignored in a rude silence until, unnerved, I point to the parking lot and say, “Yeah, there’s tons of them. They’re all over the place.”

  Even as I watch the guy walk off I know in a low-frequency animal-to-animal way that he’s the one, the man I need to talk to. Some part of this story is lodged inside him. In terms of clothing alone he’s way worse off than I am, and what he’s wearing, jeans and a T-shirt, show he’s been rudely expelled from one cozy circumstance and dragged against his will into the rain. He’s now caught in between, trapped in some place I recognize as life itself. It’s obvious he hasn’t been sober in hours and maybe years. If it could be said that these big-deal journalists have control of the story, and therefore, in a fundamental sense, are liars, albeit professional and highly compensated, then this guy is the anti-journalist, because in his case the story is steering him, shoving him around and blowing him willy-nilly down the street. The truth is just fucking with him and he’s suffering narrative problems. He began the night with no intention of standing in this rain, and his exposure to it is pitiful. As he moves unheeded like the Ancient Mariner through the journalists I feel a certain brotherly sympathy for him, and I’m enamored of his utter lack of dignity. He’s moved beyond all poses. I know he’ll come back to me, that it’s just a matter of a little more rejection, and when he returns, when he settles on me, I’ll welcome him like a prodigal.

  He doesn’t know it yet, but I’m the only one who will listen to him.

  Meanwhile we’re at the edge of dawn, a first feathering of gray light that brings a bum stampede to the streets of Belltown. I live down here, and every morning at roughly five o’clock bums pour out of the missions and shelters and alleys in a kind of shabby and shadowy pre-commute, followed by the real thing an hour or two later. They pool up and briefly form a chorus. They fish around in squashed packs of GPC cigarettes, fire up. “Look at these news-media dicks,” they say. Lights have come on in the IBEW Local 46 building and a few guys with lunch buckets are standing outside the Labor Temple Restaurant and Lounge. More and more people are standing around, trying to figure out what’s going on. When the bums ask what’s happening the question sounds yearningly metaphysical or like a child stirring from a dream. Their need to know, at any rate, is tonally different than that of a big-league journalist. And still we’ve got beaucoup reporters doing their insane pantomime of sincerity in the parking lot. It’s like the Hitler tryouts in that Mel Brooks movie The Producers. None of the TV people have budged from their encampment in the parking lot, and I realize they’re operating under the strictest criterion of relevance—every camera is focused in the same direction—and that their sense of the narrative is, generally, in sync with the police, that is, their reason for being here will end in a roughly coincident moment.

  The guy’s back. No one will listen to him, he’s just learned.

  “These fucking cops,” he starts right up. “These goddamn pigs! They said there’s no room on the bus. Me and my friend been standing in the rain all night. I’m a vet and he’s an American Native. That ain’t right. And these fucking assholes—you don’t believe me? Here’s my card.”

  He shows me his veterans ID, establishing his credentials, his suprapatriotic right to feel and also express his grievous outrage.

  “That’s some real shit,” he says. “Dennis R. Burns. US Army Retired.”

  I tell him my first name.

  “You know anybody?” he asks.

  “You mean, like, somebody that could do something? Like Jesus Christ?”

  “You a Born Again?”

  “I was just joking.”

  “I know somebody,” Dennis says.

  I ask him if he knows what’s going on.

  “Yeah, got a guy with a gun, big black guy, 110 Vine Street, apartment #210. L. was throwing furniture at his girlfriend. This was about midnight. I’m the one that called the police, stupid me. I’m the maintenance man. L.’s generally a quiet guy, a little hypertensive, but nice. Very intelligent, wel
l spoken.”

  “So he has a gun?”

  “He’s got two, a 9mm and something else, like a .357. I hope they don’t hurt the man. Are you a journalist?”

  “I’m really wet. You want some coffee?”

  “What happened to your hands?”

  “They’re all fucked up. It’s not contagious or anything.”

  “Are you a reporter?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “7-Eleven’s open. We could get coffee at 7-Eleven.”

  On the way there I pull out my Olympus Pearl-corder S803—testing, one, two, three—and discover the batteries are dead.

  “You sure you’re a journalist?” Dennis says. “Hey, my son’s an editorial cartoonist for the Albuquerque Times. He makes fun of everything—politicians, everything. He’s always got a shitty fucking look on his face—like you.”

  On the way back from 7-Eleven with our coffees we hook up with Tom, who’s drinking something throttled in a brown bag. He tells me, “I been up all night and I’m getting kinda moody. We were just gonna get drunk and listen to Elton John or some Asian music. But this gunman kept me up all night.”

  “And they wouldn’t let us on the bus,” Dennis says. And then he asks, “You ever write about Veterans Affairs?”

  I feel bad I’ve led him on. “No,” I say.

  “There’s prejudice on the bus,” Tom says. “Those that like to drink and raise hell can’t get on the bus. I tried to sleep on the sidewalk but it didn’t feel right.”

  I ask about the gunman again.

  Tom says, “I don’t like L., but he’s a human being. I live right above him and he’s always yelling, ‘I don’t like white music!’ I’m reservation Indian, but I’m part white too. I’m glad he’s gone. He’s gone now. He’s not a tenant. Soon as he gives up, I mean.”