From the window overlooking the boulevard you see the gas station on the corner underneath the glowing billboard. That same Chinese fellow on his bike again. He rides on 40th Street every evening. Delivering something, holding a box on the platform above his front tire. Chinatown in Oakland. One man developed semi-nude photographs of children there and nobody said boo. You hesitate to call the deliverables pizza. Don’t be a regular old pizza guy, you think. Something different in this town. Thankfully, last night and the night before the box was tall and it was rectangular.
The bicycle fellow held one hand on the box to steady it. He rode slowly to the intersection, paused slightly, holding balance, watched the traffic, eyeballed the light, looked left and right, then pedaled through the red light and crossed the street while cars stopped behind him. He rode steadying his load on the platform he’d constructed over the front tire. Five times out of ten you can be doing anything during the early evening- eating dinner, washing dishes, out somewhere, flying a kite from the roof of the building, kissing your boy in the bedroom, and then, on some bodily whim difficult to pinpoint, may have to do with neurosis, may be the complete freedom of body and mind, you walk down the hallway into your living room, to the window overlooking the street, and five times out of ten you’ll see that guy riding his bike, approaching the intersection cautiously, looking both ways, balancing some box, crossing the avenue’s convergence and pedaling away.
Tonight it’s pouring.
And just once you want to follow the man, see where he goes, watch him deliver and return to wherever he works. Be a good story, something grand, private detecting that falls in line with all the other private detecting going on lately. Your neighbors down the hall are private detectives. The new bloke hired at the agency was a private detective before you booked him to do environmental snooping for you the sort of snooping detects poisonous chemicals in children’s anti-diarrhea medicine. Up till this point, this year, you always thought private detectives merely of the movies. But you were wrong: they’ve been real people all along, graduates from college even. Bottom line is people need to find stuff out about people.
So you follow this bicycle man to and fro, figure something out about him, write a story. He’s not one of those hipster bicycle messengers we know. Sort of messenger with tight khaki shorts long-johns underneath, Vans and nylon shoulder bag evolved to rage, sometimes the goat, piercings, tattoos, careening city corners and curbs, locking pole with chain, running into trying to be impressive lobbies, past guards who already know, into the elevator. A freak on the fifteenth floor among the suits. Then they tear away. Homemade delivery platform ain’t that. He rides languidly, la-de-da, balancing box on rigging above his front tire.
Tonight, it pours and you’re waiting for Pason and Roothie. They’re not boyfriend and girlfriend. Call themselves friends, though everybody suspects they’ve slept together. They do not live together yet. On your way to look out the window-nighttime finally- you brush past the black pair of jeans hanging on the corner of your closet door for a week and the jeans fall to the floor and you hear but don’t see yet know what they are and what they did. It’s distinctive, playing audible detective without double-checking or substantiating with sight. Kind of trust when you only use your ears. You know this as you reach the window, dark now and street lights and in the lights you see the pouring rain. Storm kind of rain. Heard nothing about a storm today. Why didn’t they tell you about the storm? Your usual weatherperson - the intern at work- didn’t inform you either. You wondered about that.
At the window you stare into the orange glow and watch the pouring rain and glance to the street streaking river runs down pavement into drains. You could kayak that shit. You watch the trees blow in the small park. You see cars parked intersection, at the stoplight, and spot the rider pedaling his bicycle slowly toward stopped cars, near the curb. He holds an umbrella over the box on the self-made platform over front tire, pedaling slowly rain driving hard.
Pason arrived first with the Indian takeout you’d talked about over the phone, curried eggplant over rice with tomato chunks and, believe it, long strands of white asparagus called spargel he’d purchased at a hippy organic food store. You talked, after shaking hands like guys will do, about PG&E going bankrupt, the botched deregulation of the industry, and how the energy business is the largest, richest and most expansive in the world. Conversation arose because PG&E showed up outside your office today and began jackhammering the sidewalk and they continued all day, without warning, and the jackhammering was loud and constant and when one guy broke for lunch another guy replaced him immediately and they both wore steel-toed boots. And earplugs. Their arms vibrated away and soon there was a large hole in the sidewalk and some guy was standing there with a clipboard and everybody, including yourself, wondered things. There was a large blue PG&E truck parked out front and its compressor hissed. Hip woman working on the crew and you wondered if she skied Tahoe. Outdoorsy.
Pason is an orderly at Kaiser and tells you stories about dying and blood and never any good stories. He’s tall, dark-hair, with an erect posture when standing and slump when sitting. Be curved in half when he’s older. Dark hair as in black, green eyes, and the kind of jaw and cheekbones movie stars have or skinny models in perfume-smelling magazines. Pason has a mole on his temple, just right so it’s sexy, and thick lips that move seductively in the air when he over-enunciates. Which many guys hate and they begin to feel all huffy, but many women love and they begin to feel all swoony. He’s too short for a model, and, truthfully, his head is too large. A real big head. Place his head next to yours, or next to Roothie’s, in a photograph you know, you’re posing in front of a building in New York, smiling teeth and lips, happy friends, and his head will be twice as big as yours or hers. Two times the size. Contemplate Easter Island.
Pason trained as a stone carver in New York for ten years. He worked on the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. British masters taught some American jobless youths the art of medieval stone masonry. His friends began calling him Pason the Mason. He thought he’d make a living carving stone for the rest of his life, master a craft, teach others, revive a dying art, work on churches in the name of God. But after the recession there were no more carving jobs and who, really, in the 21st, works stone in this country? In this plastic ecology. Pason for a time used his design talents constructing websites, how he ended up here in the first place, migrated to the health field because he “desired to help people get better” or something and now he’s taking night classes to become a nurse. Tells me stories about old wrinkled people. Gunshot victims. Flowers in rooms of the dying. Or two roommates, both in traction, dueling with separate remotes over the one television in the room. Or the night nurse he’s madly in love.
There was a knock at the door and it was Roothie with the wine. Finally, sitting at the table eating that Indian takeout, including co-op asparagus, drinking wine, and listening to Roothie’s stories about her job. Roothie talks with her hands. She is la-la blonde with bright orange skin from Los Angeles. Makeup and hairspray perfect hair and perfect clothes and she’s a lawyer who defends companies against environmentalists. She cites cases whereby the greens were clearly out of line. Knee-jerk reactionaries applying undo pressure on the system, being unrealistic, impractical, non-pragmatic. Or people who sue for large sums when it was their fault and not the corporation’s. “Otherwise, I really like environmentalists. In fact, I consider myself to be an environmentalist. Everybody wants a cleaner world, right?” We all agreed. Nodding is dope. She went to UCLA. Took her three times to pass the bar. She’d cried and cried after the first failure and considered giving up becoming a lawyer and she lay around in bed at her parent’s house for months. Finally made it past the bar and now works for a large firm in the Bay Area and she says this part of the country is too cold.
Pouring and the delivery guy rode by, on cue, holding his rectangular box over his front tire, and Pason the Mason arrived with the food and Roothie with the wine and then the four of you ate the yellow food on the white plates in your kitchen, at your grandmother’s table background music and you talked about private detectives.
And then you were doing the dishes and Roothie and Pason left together. You wondered what that was all about as you watched from your living room window over the wet-running street and rain slant in the street lights and then, there he was, the messenger with an umbrella over his box, pedaling slowly, moving to an easy rhythm, not worried about the red light or the storm, looking both ways, coming this way again you’ve never seen him going that way, you swear he was whistling, with the umbrella and the casual attitude, box over front tire.