The Salt Shaker

As a teen he had had his own television show as a real-life psychic who helped police solve crimes. He sold his services to the public at the end of each episode, so he had the phone numbers and money of many lonely, emotionally fragile women on his cell, He was often seen then with that bluish electronic glow on his face as he texted his latest visions to his poor girlfriends.

But those were his glory days.

Now he shared his story with other fallen stars who had been celebrities as children and lost their grip on reality almost immediately. Now, here he was, in his dirty apartment, hungover, late for work, and slowly rubbing his temples as he wondered why he couldn’t have just slept forever.

He would find out later that day in the cold cereal aisle at Safeway.

Had he not needed to use the bathroom, he would have stayed in bed longer. With much effort he got up and shuffled toward the toilet where he sat a while, thinking foul, useless thoughts. He remembered hearing about a Kansas woman whose skin had grown around a toilet seat she had been sitting on for two years straight. Better to be safe than sorry. Slowly, very slowly he stood up, making sure that his butt cheeks gently unstuck themselves from the toilet seat. Success.

Curious drab, colored birds dropped in from nowhere and stayed close to me, like the children on the street in Mexico, with the persistent hope that I would give them any morsel, even by accident.

Here, in San Francisco, there are no such children: there is no innocence here.

No, what drops in on you are loud, ugly toothless homeless men who don’t go away until you recognize they’re human, too- some of them.

But such is the sad music of the street here, where nostalgia is but a gift.

–

Unos pájaros grises y curiosos salieron de la nada y se me acercaron como los niños de la calle en México, con esperanzas persistentes de que les diera algo, lo que fuera, aunque fuera por descuido.

Aquí, en San Francisco, no hay tales niños- aquí no hay inocencia.

No, aquí se te aparecen hombres ruidosos, feos y chimuelos que no se te despegan hasta que se les reconocen como seres humanos- algunos, pues.

Pero tal es la música triste de estas calles, donde la nostalgia es un regalo.

I’m sitting, and I sit upon a chair and my feet rest on maybe a foot of concrete. There is a speed bump that transmits the weight of each car through the concrete, shaking it, up through my feet.

It feels unsafe.

At the very least, it’s not a comforting feeling: as if the firmament upon which one stands will suddenly break under the weight of distant and transient, but very present, giants.

And still, people carry on as if this were normal, and I’m distracted by the revelatory details of a sago palm planted in a concrete planter here in this San Francisco shopping mall.