My boyfriend was extremely convinced this method was the easiest and quickest way to make money because he had seen a tv special somewhere where one homeless person with a sign was followed home to a multi-million dollar mansion. He thought this was maybe the best-ever easy money scheme but I would not cooperate. If I had no other control in this runaway adventure of ours, at least I could put my foot down and insist that we had values we would not sink past. We would fight. We would hold true. Never mind the fact that I was on my way to a homeless shelter.
We'd been fighting for most of the night. Memory escapes me now...it could have been any fight in the world. It was probably about those damn cardboard signs he wanted design. But by a mile or so away from the Baptist Church basement they turned into a shelter if you got there by 11pm, he had had it. And so I found myself on the sidewalk in a neighborhood that bordered Seattle’s Chinatown.
I heard the singing before I saw it. It was a half wailing, half chant in the foreign language of the extremely high. She was almost naked except for a thin banding of cloth around her waist where her dress had rolled down her breasts and up her thighs into the middle. She was singing to a light pole, grinding against it. Throwing a powerful thigh up against the unforgiving rawness of the wood; cooing, crying. She was singing a love song, desperate lyrics of need and feral longing. I looked down and hurried on. My heels made a click-clicking on the sidewalk that reminded me of Junior High School teachers, oddly comforting, and I squinted at the concrete in the moonlight through the rain, trying not to catch the tip of my stride on an uneven slab.
I’m not sure if I heard something louder than her singing or my clicking footsteps, or if I simply felt the presence that made me turn around. I know my skin was prickling and I had a sense of dread, like when you don’t want to see something and can’t stop. I turned around to see a gang of men. So similarly dressed, so banded together, so late at night, they couldn’t have been anything else. I can still recall the gray and black bandanas stuck in their pockets like you see on bad after school specials.
Where were the police? I wondered. On a street like this on a Friday night the police should have been around every corner. But this was a silent foggy street. I was all alone. With 15 gangsters behind me. They were so many they didn’t all fit on the sidewalk, and they milled up on the yards of the houses we were walking past.
My legs turned immediately to lead, like stiff unbending poles, but somehow I managed to force one foot in front of the other. The night went silent. I could not hear the sound of my heels clicking. I could not hear the men. I could only hear the white hot of my blood rushing through my frontal lobe, seeming somewhere so far off in the distance, like a tv buzzing white noise in the middle of someone’s dream.
It’s not true what they say about your life flashing before your eyes when you are about to die. Instead it’s a rush of crystal clarity for everything around you. The shining apple red of the stop sign. The way the pavement gleamed slick in the moonlight from the rainfall, brighter somehow than I had ever seen it. The blades of grass on the lawn across the street from the intersection I was getting ready to cross. I wondered if I would even make it to that lawn and focused harder, determined that the last thing I should see would be something of beauty. And in that moment, those blades of grass were more beautiful that any night sky in the whole of my life.
I felt myself lurch off of the curb and my breathing quickened. I could feel the air change, the vibrations quickening to a pinnacle. I could almost feel their hot breath against my neck and the tiny hairs rose up in response to meet it.
A flash of something caught my eye. The streets in Seattle are very steep and this intersection sat at the midway point on a hill. Above me I could see the next intersection, and the big red van that lurched out from behind another stop sign, its headlights shining as it slammed on its brakes at the exact moment it noticed me. In one hysterical moment I felt frozen to the pavement, unable to move as I contemplated who would get to me first. I couldn’t see the driver behind the blacked out window of the driver’s seat, but I felt the stare.
But then the van slowly began to roll through the intersection. I watched it disappear behind the row of houses at the top of the hill and just like that the spell was broken. I whirled around again as I reached the other side of the street, fists clenched, heart pounding, ready to do or die. The men were gone. I stood frozen, wondering if it had all been a dream. A blast of cold swept past my neck and down my spine and I rushed on toward Chinatown.
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