DK: I’m afraid to ask about your off-the-record response.
JS: Off the record? It’s where I’m from, but it’s not what I’m about. I’ve been able to move, the fuck, on. [Laughter.]
THE PLAZA
Some notes on the city at Sixteenth and Mission: In the corner are the steps leading down to the BART platforms, to the trains, all trains this way, this way all trains. Between you and those steps lives a micro-city; women selling homemade tamales; women nursing babies; pigeons loitering near the bus stops. There are the homeless and cheery — the jokesters, the peddlers, the I NEED MONEY FOR WEED sign-holding, missing-tooth-grinning, dog-owning variety; and there are the homeless and despondent — asleep, you hope, bundled up on the concrete in eighty-four-degree, windblown weather, nearly indistinguishable from the trash bags tethered to their ankles with yellow, flapping drawstrings. Their pockets are full of fifteen-cent, shoeprint-stomped BART cards they’ve peeled from the ground in their travels through the macro-city, travels that must occur in the night, though you can’t imagine them getting up off the checkered floor. Note the checkered floor. Black-and-white diamonds on the plaza, and you think: Makes sense. Chess is a game, checkers is a game, but chess and checkers have nothing on this. This — surviving a place — is the game. The hiss-stop, gunshot blare of a bus shakes everyone but the permanent inhabitants of the micro-city, and a heat wave from the bus’s exhaust turns the whole scene into a watery mirage you can’t wait to get close enough to dispel. You arrive at the steps and turn the corner, careful not to touch the handrail, and a black man in a battered three-piece suit is selling flowers on the stairwell. Just in the seven seconds it takes to cross the plaza to the steps, you’ve grown so used to ignoring these people that you’ve already made it to the bottom of the steps before realizing the person you’ve been walking with is still at the top, backlit by the day above him, fishing through his navy blue suede jacket for cash as the man in the suit bundles together the stems of four or five flowers with twine. The stench of urine — faintly at the back of your throat since arriving in the Mission — is faint no more. The stairwell, ground zero for the smell, is no place to linger. Your train is coming — you can hear it and feel the molecules in the air come to life, a savior — and you call out to the person at the top of the stairs: Our train is coming. The two of you jump on just before the sliding doors close, and take the two green, carpeted seats beneath the royal blue RESERVED FOR PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES sticker. No one will call you out on sitting here, but a small-town kid like you cares about rules. You practice your response just in case: As soon as someone needs this seat, I’ll be happy to move. In your mind, the response comes off as less forthcoming and more self-righteous, so you practice until you achieve the desired tone. Beside you, the subject of your assignment — the future president — cradles a newspaper-wrapped cluster of yellow-and-orange violets and acacias, water seeping through last week’s top stories. You live in this world, it occurs to you. You’ve lived in the Bay Area for years, but you never felt comfortable calling it home. For the moment, you’ve been considering yourself a visitor on assignment, and you’ve enjoyed the label, the justification for being here, but there is no such thing as a visitor, and you know it. Maybe there is only one city, micro or macro, and you happen to be a citizen. A woman approaches. Your heart jumps.
THE CONSTITUENT
A white woman in her fifties, wearing a purple sweatsuit and an enormous camouflaged backpack, asked Joshua, in a voice chipped away at for decades by the fiberglass in her filters, if she could have his seat. She pointed to the disability sticker, and, although she seemed perfectly capable of standing and showed no signs of physical impairment whatever, Joshua stood and said, “Of course.” This forced me — though I knew I’d be giving up my seat to a piece of luggage — to follow suit. Once Joshua and I grabbed ahold of the rail above our heads, the woman, by way of thanking us, shimmied out of the straps of her backpack, molting from the thing like a cicada from its exoskeleton, shouldered it onto the seat next to hers, and coughed out the following: “If all fags was nice as the two of you.”
I felt a shame so immediate and physical that I had to grip with both hands the bag of leftovers from the café so as not to slap her. But there was something comforting, too, to be thought of as part of a duo for the first time since Lloyd asked me to leave. All this, combined with my lack of sleep, prompted me to do what I’d avoided most of my life. I spoke up.
“First of all,” I said, “only one of us is gay. And even if we both were, what would happen?”
“What would happen if you two was gay?” she wanted to know.
“No,” I said, reminding her impatiently: “You said, if all fags were as nice as us … and then you stopped. Well? Go on. Finish the sentence.”
The woman stared up at me and scrunched her face in that curious way my mother always did when she’d forgotten why she came into the room. Joshua put his hand on the small of my back, and it took me a moment to realize this wasn’t the touch of a lover, but the touch of a wrestler tagging in.
The train had reached the tunnel beneath the bay, and the sheer volume of the electricity and the steel and the aluminum put our conversation on pause.
By the time we emerged from the tunnel and reached the quiet, outdoor stop at West Oakland, bracing from the sun coming greenly through the tinted BART windows, I’d moved on from the incident with the woman and prepared a question for Joshua regarding the evening’s event promoting job creation in the clean energy market. I was surprised, then, to see Joshua kneel on the train’s green carpet, face the woman in the purple sweatsuit with hardly two feet between their noses, and ask, in a calm and beguilingly respectful tone, if the woman happened to be a resident of Oakland’s third district.
“Currently I live off Telegraph and Twenty-third,” she said. “I don’t know what the hell district that is.”
“That’s it,” Joshua said, letting his legs slide under him, now that the doors had closed and the train was about to move again. What his smile couldn’t do, I didn’t know. His smile seemed capable of the vital but inglorious work of removing simple obstacles from otherwise happy days — it could jump-start a car, probably, or unclog a toilet. With this smile he introduced himself as the woman’s representative.
The woman coughed a laugh. “You’re a child.”
“The seventh-youngest city council member ever,” I offered.
“What’s your name?” Joshua asked.
“Shelly.”
“Nice to meet you, Shelly. You have a job?”
“I’m between things,” said Shelly. Suddenly her tone changed, which I attributed solely to Joshua Stilt’s charisma. Her skepticism had been replaced by a revelatory joy, as if she’d trained for this conversation her entire life and now had to try desperately not to vocalize or repeat the phrase, “This is not a test.”
“I’m a certified bus driver,” she said, “but for the furloughs. And we went on strike and nothing never came from it. And in the meantime, all the banks get free money, and there was protesters living on the streets a year ago, making the news every day, but they went and shut them up, too. My son Elijah — he’s sixteen — he gets a citation, but the banks, they get away scot-free.…”