Can Saturday Be A Prelude?
There lives, across the street and a couple of houses down, an overweight man (I wanted to avoid saying the phrase “fat guy” because I’m trying really hard to be a good and a nice person who doesn’t indulge the almost pornographic urge to say violent and nasty things, since so much of our world consists of things like that, said out in the open, in front of the children . . . for instance the man who wrote into the Capital newspaper a few months ago about how he was pretty sure that most Marylanders would gladly help pay the bill for the electricity used to electrocute the two men accused of being The Snipers last October . . . and this has bothered me for months, that this man would say this and then presume that I would go along with his idea, because really, all he has done is display – that is, to open up, to splay apart – his own feeling impotent, and substitute doing something with saying something violent that he thinks is clever. So I did not want to say “fat guy” because the world’s flabby, flabby sadness is our own damn fault) who lives with his mother and yells at her a lot. Really mean and X-rated stuff, often outside, as he stands on the porch, pounding on the front door. A tame hortative is “Open up, whore,” repeated several times.
I tend my tomatoes nervously, wondering if the negative energy will make them bitter, even at 70 yards. And I wonder if I should call the cops. I think of Kitty Genovese. I think about the meanness in the world and about the things that make people say awful things to each other and about the fact that I don’t really talk to any of my neighbors and about when, exactly, did this country sell its soul (but really, we didn’t sell it – what did we do with it? – we’ve spent too much time screaming at each other, – where did you put it? Why did you lose it, you idiot? I’m gonna smack you good and give you something to cry about, you little shit” – we’re too busy yelling things like that at each other to realize that it’s probably just stuck between the couch cushions or in the copy of On The Road, where we put it for safekeeping) and decide that probably it was sometime between 1941 and 1968 (but I also remember riding in the car with my mother through downtown San Jose in the mid 1970s, rain falling and matching the brutalist concrete SJSU buildings the memory of which makes me feel good, like going to the “health food store” and buying maple people candy and wondering if it was nicer to start eating them at the head or at the feet. All of these things could not have taken place in a compromised nation, could they?).
I think about Kitty Genovese, and I still have never called the police or even spoken to the large man or his mother or my neighbors about what goes on over there, and by writing it here I seem to want some sort of gold star for it, for admitting my failure to be a member of my own community. My garden is growing very well this year, and the tomatoes look good.
