Let us begin this wondrous moment with a black plastic garbage bag. You know the type of black plastic garbage bag. They started in America. Then they spread throughout the western world. And now black plastic garbage bags exist in all the homes and stores and nagging crannies of the entire. Inside the black plastic garbage bag are some dried, old earth-litter leaves, fallen from last autumn’s trees. We collect them in this country and places them along curbsides, in piles and heaps for young children’s Saturday afternoon jumping enjoyment. And we collect them inside black plastic garbage bags. Hold that image . . . and . . . thank you very much.
Thomas Moog had a doctor’s appointment at eleven in the morning. They were going to check the new growth on his temple and his recurrent fluttering heart. He took the morning off from work. He saw the UPS guy – “E” – running from a storefront, an establishment next to The Tail Lodge. “Is that, um, as in, ah, tail?” Thomas asked E. The UPS driver turned around and stared at the marquee of the rundown Broadway downtown Oakland urban road motel, sign and a tail. Wagging perhaps.
“Yup, I think so,” E said after reflection. Get me some tail, now, motherfucker! E was full of love for the brother. Thomas continued his walk. He dreamt some about Mosswood Park. Tall redwood trees early in the morning, unsullied, unhurried, untainted by any human activity or trash clutter or basketball trash talking shit up or shit down. No running full or half court. No Jason Kidd playing on his home turf. Where he learned the game. The game he eventually took to the University of California and ultimately the NBA. Right there, that court, those redwood trees. A Baptist Church, a big motherfucking one. The A&P gas station that will tell you your timing belt needs to be fixed no matter what you brought the car in for. And there’s a small oil leak. Fifteen hundred dollars. “No thanks,” she says, “I’ll stick with the tune-up. Thank you, though. The sexy off to the side charge. Everybody should have a charge.
It’s quiet in the early morning, dew on the grass underneath the massive old-time redwood trees, the trees that were there before the 580 came roaring through, before the hospitals were built upon the hill. Before Jason stupid-assed Kidd and his sweet crossover dribble and his quick first step. A young male in work coveralls sped around the wettish grass in a six-wheel John Deer tractor, with a payload bed that tilts like a dump truck. He sped with the empty back open. It clattered and jumbled as he raced and performed donuts and whooped up the morning underneath the tall surrounded-by-the-urban concrete splendor semper virens grove.Here, yes, right here, is the pocket in which Thomas Moog strolled.
Toward the hospital. Instead of walking through neighborhoods, Thomas decided to engage the stroll along the main boulevards. First Broadway, then MacArthur, and then Telegraph Avenue. Telegraph is famous. People in Beijing have heard of Telegraph. One end, in Berkeley, as it smacks the edge of campus, is a hippie zone of smalltime bud sales and Dead Head T-shirts and lefty political bumper stickers and handcrafted jewelry set to portable folding tables with tapestries and sometimes music playing and dreaded kids panhandling outside food joints. But the other end of Telegraph is Oakland, black, ethnic, soulful barbecue shop and oldschool Danish bakery and African Episcopalian Church and Baptist Church, convenience stores with steel gates that fold and unfold. Between Broadway and Telegraph there is a hill, and they call it the Summit region, or just plain Summit. Alta Bates Medical Center is there, Kaiser Permanente nearby, Summit Hospital, a smattering of attendant clinics, podiatrists, audiologists, prosthetics shops, blood banks, sperm banks, bank banks, car dealerships.
Thomas Moog continued to move past the redwood trees on MacArthur after pausing to observing the tractor-racing city employee in his overalls. The young black man whooped. A more serious comrade mowed the lawn. Thomas was worried now, because he was going to have his heart checked out. He was going to ask, “Doc, am I about to keel?” The growth on his temple was nothing to him. Actinic keratosis, and you just zap it off, no problem. Keep an eye on it. Watch the blazing California sun. But the heart? He was sure of numbered days. At times he would wake up gasping for breath, certain that his heart had stopped beating. On a walk, climb a hill, and right before the top his heart had skipped a beat or two. Two pots of coffee a day had entered his mind.
Thomas did not want to see the doctor. He didn’t want to hear any bad news. He was nervous. He shaved so that he would present a decent man who might be taking proper care of himself and who was not, of course, about to die. He washed his hair. He wore tan khakis and a nice shirt, a shirt he might wear to dinner with his mom. The shirt and the shaved face would say to the doctor, No, no, everything is fine, I am respectable, I’m not a fuck up, really. He’d forgotten to cut his fingernails. Though in the shower he’d said, “Cut cher fingernails, cut cher fingernails,” and swore that he would remember.
Past another urban Oakland motel of dubious nature, past a Carl Jr.’s hamburger enterprise, he turned left on Telegraph Avenue. The morning bustle. Folks standing two deep he could see through the windows of the Danish bakery, a building and windows and business that’s been there from the 50’s. Black people and white people and Asian people servicing this thick icing on the cupcake. A man with headphones wearing a long, tattered wool overcoat and baggy pants and thick bundled cuffs sagging over and around work boots at a bus stop. He was speaking to himself. He grunted a few times. He looked at Thomas and Thomas returned the look, which may or may not have been a mistake. The man shouted, “Hey!” Thomas looked away. “Hey! I’m talking to you!” Thomas walked by him and continued without looking back. Words trailed behind him, sailing on the cool, fresh morning. “I’m talking to you, mother fucker. Damn!”
The man cursed some more. He looked inside a trash bin on the corner. He’d already forgotten about the white man walking nervously to a doctor’s appointment. An appointment, just maybe, during which the man would find out his ticker’s days possessed an identifiable end. And when the ticker kicks the body, well, ha, the body goes right along with it. Thomas looked down at his hands in disgust. A flaw. He began to pick at the too-long nails at the end of each pudgy digit. Some he tore fine, without problems; some cut too close to flesh and cuticle and he bled. He sucked on his bleeding fingers.
As he was licking blood from his fingers and imagining the tsk-tsk from the doctor – who most assuredly would scold him for his horrendous, self-defeating lifestyle – and as the man behind was still cursing the bus stop and glowering at passersby, Thomas noticed in front of him the insane community-barrier of the freeway. 580, ripping communities apart not unlike the various political walls we know and loathe, Berlin and Gaza the prime examples of a rifting mankind gone mad.
The phenomenon of the elevated freeway is the same. In Oakland, Lake Merritt is cut off from Grand Avenue and the shops and restaurants and historic theater the Grand. To walk from the theater to the lake requires a heinous hike underneath the monolithic concrete and steel wasteland that is under six or eight lanes of freeway. Sure, sure, they’ve attempted murals and a mosaic. Some municipalities – Thomas thinking of Santa Rosa in particular – have spruced up the undersides of their freeway overpasses with lights and lampposts that mimic nineteenth-century London. Poor communities cannot place their train tracks or their subway tracks or their BART tracks or their freeways underground. And Oakland, Paramount Theater and Jack London included, used to be a very poor community. Even when surrounded by the untouchably wealthy tech hordes. Thomas, bleeding from his fingers, is a political bastard leaning mostly left. He smiles at the elements of his own construction. His heart pounding inside his chest. But he feels fine, he does. He would swear to it.
When first the nurse and then the doc took his blood pressure and they noted 150 over 111, for a twenty-seven year old young man, the friendly folks whose job it is to care for us weren’t so sure of his confidence. And there, in the examination room, completely naked, Thomas looked down at himself, at his fingers and his arm and his stomach and his obviously pounding chest and his knees and feet, even, he thought, “Damn, I’m pink.” He was pink, all of his flesh aglow, from head to toe. He apologized to Dr. Steve: “Look, I’m sorry I’m so pink.” Pigs are so pink, he thought.
But now, underneath the overpass, the sound of rushing vehicles and thundering trucks, the essence of flying steel and combustion engines and carbon monoxide and the accompanying litter and refuse and urban concrete detritus, Thomas noticed the black plastic garbage bag. It looked as if it had been tossed from a moving car. Slammed against the concrete wall (not painted, no mural, not mosaic-ed), opened by the force of the impact, and fallen to the corner of the sidewalk and the supporting solid wall. Dark underneath the overpasses of the world. And dirty. And nasty. Park your car under there for two weeks and you won’t notice it upon your return. Besides, crimes occur underneath freeways. Homeless people attempt to sleep in the California grass up the embankment. Here, the black plastic bag came to a rest in that ninety-degree corner, opened and spilled.
Inside a pile of leaves, garden mess, backyard compost perhaps. The bag looked as if it had been on the spot for four or five months, neglected, left. The leaves were decaying, right then and there. There were pools of condensation or drip-water from the last storm in the folds and cuplets of the garbage bag. The leaves were congealed in a thick, brown mush. Underneath these six or eight lanes, in the middle of the expansive divide, the world is dark. A business woman parked her car for the day and looked at Thomas nervously. He attempted to give off helpful, nice-guy vibes. People park their cars there during workdays because they don’t have to pay. No meter and no garage. The walk downtown or to the hospitals is easy enough. The woman sped away on foot, carrying a black leather briefcase over her shoulder. She did not look back. Thomas stopped to gaze at the black plastic garbage bag, there in the darkened stillness and the urban-dust dirt. The sounds of cars and trucks and a motorcycle thrashing overhead. The race of humankind is a barreling.
Rising at an angle like a tree that had germinated on a steep cliff, and bending toward the light, was a green shoot of some vigorous plant. Out from the dark and damp depths of the bag, from the mulch compost of the leaves, some seed had met with temporarily favorable conditions and was now going for it. It was bright, light green, with the appearance of being able to use more light if it could find it. Two broad and long leaves reached forth from the main stalk. If left unharmed by the urban mess around it, it would surely have grown and utilized the bag’s contents, the rest of the leaf pile. But then what? Sidewalk and concrete freeway abutment the terrain beyond the plastic bag and the leaf pile. Its prospects didn’t look promising. Even if a root somehow penetrated a crack in the sidewalk, the people, the authorities, the hoods and the mildly curious wouldn’t allow a tree to grow underneath an overpass. Would they? “Go, man, go,” Thomas Moog said. “Go for it, and who knows.”
Thomas was filled with a sense of life and an encroaching idea that futility is merely an interpretation. Some people never see the negative side. For some, that garbage bag and the pile of leaves is a perfect beginning. Interpretation, Thomas repeated to himself. He was going to take the seedling as a sign, a good sign, a nudging toward a positive omen. He had difficulty finding the entrance to the clinic. There was a security guard standing outside the large building who helped him. Thomas entered the building, located the proper floor, met the mean receptionist who would soon be reading the “Anxiety” report from the doctor and who would not show by her facial expressions what she was thinking, and then he engaged the momentum that flushed him to the bad news.