There is Only One Misfortune  

2

 

He usually quit work in San Francisco about one in the afternoon and, a couple times a week, dropped by to see me on his way home. That day, he arrived an hour early and was already charged, shirtsleeves rolled and tie loosened. Usually there was preliminary chitchat. He was, after all, a salesman. But today he got right to an important sighting on a sidewalk as he was leaving the City.

“You know that old lady, the skinny one?” he asked, shoes crunching the gravel between his car and my door.

“The one with the baseball cap?” I asked. “And she’s always angry?”

“Yeah. I saw her today.”

I shut the door behind him. My cottage was a hundred and twenty-year-old water tower that a farmer converted when a state college was built nearby. It was a stack of three square one-room floors, connected by ladders, and narrowing toward the top. Dan accepted a cold soda and sat at the kitchen table on the ground floor.

At that time, 1970, communities around the country expressed their opinion of San Francisco by sending to it their indigent mentally ill via a one-way bus ticket. The City had become the national outpatient clinic. On every block downtown, it seemed there was someone crying out from their delusions. On every other bus, it seemed there was someone babbling to himself, oblivious to the nervous titters around him.

Among my favorites was the short, gentle-eyed, well-dressed black man I saw on buses who made calls to FBI Headquarters, intended to be overheard, on a regular pocket-sized transistor AM radio. And then there was the old guy who appeared every morning in a clean suit and tie on the same corner downtown where he stood under a traffic light and gracefully directed traffic.

But that old lady Dan spotted was a masterpiece, and he and I were connoisseurs. Scrawny, late middle-aged with cropped brown hair and soiled khaki pants and cap, she was always in a hurry, furiously striding along, swinging straight arms, face contorted with rage. Once, as we were driving out of the City, he went around the block to get a second look at her.

“She was walking around, like she does,” Dan said then leapt up from the kitchen chair, taking center stage. “Tear it down! Tear it all down! Tear it down!” he crone-shrieked, goose-stepping across the kitchen, impotently waving away Mammon.

I laughed hard. This was early for impersonations. He really was revved up.

He saw in her a courageous, thwarted prophet. I agreed but also felt her fear. Once, without him, I saw her melting before puppies in a pet shop window, and when she noticed my stare, she instantly switched to a protective scowl and took off. I knew he genuinely envied her, and I understood the feeling. My operating assumption then was: if you’re not seeing God everywhere all the time, there’s something wrong. I agreed with the Muslims who said that there was only one misfortune: not to see God.

Instead of returning to his chair as he usually would, he stood with his hands on his hips, waiting for me to stop laughing.

“We should listen to those people,” he declared. “They have the spirit-fire. We build walls between ourselves and the Source, but they stand in the Source and build a wall between it and the world - the superego.”

“Best of all would be to have the source and the superego,” I added.

“There are people who have both,” he said. “I remember this old man, kind of a hobo, all bent and crooked. I saw him as I was coming out of a supermarket in Tokyo .”

He became the old man, hobbling across the kitchen.

“All there was, was a quick glance between us. That’s all.”

He threw a furtive glance over a hunched back.

“But that was enough. I could see he had it.”

He straightened back into himself.

“And he saw that I saw, and he hurried away. He told me more in that glance than he could’ve in years of conversation.”