I smoked a cigarette down to my knuckles keeled against the dumpster; she never came out. Probably she still had tables.
But it was late afternoon and my shift was over. I wasn’t going to wait around. I hadn’t slept much in the past four or five days––sparkles danced in front of my eyes, everything smelled like ditto paper––and I was looking forward to getting home and crawling into bed.
But this girl Jenny Sanders––everybody called her Pom-Pom––was on my mind. Pom-Pom worked as a waitress at the same place where I was a cook. We’d been going to bars and clubs and staying out all night until it was time to show up for the breakfast shift. We’d had a good time each time. The night before she even plunged her fingers down my pants and gave me a half-assed hand job.
“Wait. Oh. There you are.” Her eyelashes waved like anemones.
Pom-Pom straddled her stool and with the other hand held herself steady on the bar. I stood in between her knees. She was wearing a skirt and I had my hand up it. My thumb snugged into the stubbly divot of her pelvis.
But people trying to get to the bathroom or order drinks or say hi to someone they vaguely knew kept bumping me as they squeezed by.
Despite the interruption, Pom-Pom seemed to like me. I wanted to see just how far that went, but I couldn’t wait around forever. I was exhausted. All I wanted to do was crawl into bed. I flicked my butt at a club-footed pigeon and stepped for home.
There were all kinds of people walking along with me down the street––tourists, people wearing Moscone Center East “C++ Business Solutions” convention passes tied around their necks with shoestrings, bankers, people stooped heavily on canes. We danced an awkward waltz from corner to corner.
I crossed Market and walked down Third past the MoMA and saw the same homeless guy I saw standing there every day. Jake wore a full beard and a filthy meshed ball cap. He looked like someone from Ukiah or Willits or someplace. He had a partner, a black guy called Ed, who worked the corner at the opposite end of the block. His partner would sing soul and gospel songs at people walking by. Ed never even blinked when they skip stepped past his voice.
Sometimes one of them would give a message to anyone who walked by––
“Tell Ed that since he’s standing in the sun to let me have the vest. I’m freezing.”
Or––
“Ask Jake if he’s fed the dog yet.”
Stuff like that.
Jake was leaning on a parking meter looking down the sidewalk with a kind of haughty––for a homeless person––smile on his face. He wasn’t even bothering to ask anybody for money.
“You see that?” He asked me, pointing to a curly haired woman halfway down the block. “Right there.”
I looked at him. “See what?”
Just then a small black bird swooped down out of one of the trees that lined the sidewalk and buzzed by the lady’s head. She slapped at her hair and ducked running like someone who just got out of a helicopter.
“What is it doing?” I asked him.
He laughed, stroked his beard. “It’s been doing it all goddamn day––I’m starting to formulate a theory.”
I stood there with him and watched ten or fifteen more people go by. The bird swooped down and attacked all but a handful. Jake nodded or smiled in approval each time.
I said, “It’s building a nest, I bet.” I’d lived in the city forever. I had no idea about the habits of birds.
“Fuck that,” Jake scoffed, chopping the air in front of him. “Every goddamn day I see the same fuckers hurry by on their way to the office or the gym or Macy’s. Most don’t look at me, give me a dime, even nod fucking hello. Yet I’m still out here, proof that enough of you are struck by occasional compassion. But now, can I spot you coming down the street and know, hey, hey, there’s a dollar? Nope. I gotta suffer through every single one of you. Now that bird, ha, well, he can tell just by looking.” Jake grabbed the suit sleeve of a guy. “Say, Mac, can ya’ spare an old Kleenex?”
The man shrugged himself free and kept going. Sure enough, he was attacked by the bird.
“See? Today I’m taking notes. That bird is showing me who the cool people are.”
“There doesn’t seem to be many of them,” I said.
His eyes narrowed to slits. “You sound surprised.”
After it made an attack, the bird kept returning to the same tree right in the middle of the block. There didn’t seem to be another way around it.
“It’s building a nest,” I said again. “Is it Spring?”
Jake said, “I don’t see you walking.” He had spit in the corners of his lips.
“Here I go.”
“Wait. Do you have a dollar?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, then, do you have a quarter?”
I walked cautiously, keeping an eye on the tree the bird kept returning to. I slowed my pace to be engulfed among some Asian tourists who all wore too big green t-shirts cuffed thickly at the sleeves. Just in case, they would block for me.
The bird was sitting on a branch as I passed under it. He was very small, like a tangerine, only he was black and its feathers looked greasy in the late afternoon sun. He tilted a yellow eye to me.
“Ha,” I thought, passing it. I started walking with more swagger in my step.
“Oh!” one of the Asians cried.
Then I felt its wings at my neck; its talons raked across my scalp. I flung my arms and swatted the air. I wheeled around ready to let the goddamn thing have it, but the bird was already back to its tree.
“Oh!” They were ducking and covering, too.
From the other corner I could hear Jake laughing. He had someone else’s attention now. They were both pointing at me. That just made me madder.
“It’s building a nest,” Ed said. He held his hat in his hand, bent slightly at the waist and hugged at himself with his other arm. “I wonder if Jake wants any of this chicken salad I got.”
“I know what he wants,” I said. I dug into my pocket, tossed him probably forty-eight cents.
“All your life,” Ed sang. “You were only waiting for this moment to be free.”
But I didn’t have all day to sit there and listen. I was already crossing the street. The hand gave me five, four, three to make it and I couldn’t hear a note with all the traffic. I had to get home. I was exhausted; my tongue felt like a graham cracker. All I wanted to do was sleep.
But first I would give Pom-Pom a call.
