Glassell Street

Posted on January 19, 2005 in Prose Arcana Travels - So Cal

I was in a state. (A slam poet bursts in from the sides and ripostes “Yeah, California!”) After the reading in Orange, I took about fifteen steps (“Sure you counted them”) and stopped to lean upon an electric box so I could look at the theater that had become the Sonlight Church and a palm tree. I stared at the palm tree for several minutes. (“You looked like a pot head. Next time do coke!”) Were those fronds shaped like pears or mandolins? (“Stop it! You’re killing me!”) No one came out of the cafe while I waited there on the light. (“Who’d want to walk in on a psycho?”) I finally took a few steps, shot the slam poet dead and looked again at the palm. The shapes had vanished. The tree looked like a papyrus reed where it was dead.

Glassell pulled me down. I stopped to take in lit Victorians, a pair of Asian ladies holding up art deco lamps, an old-fashioned gas pump, an alley that led to a faddish restaurant called “The Courtyard”, and a chair with a strange back contorted to fit the shape of a figure of Columbia. I don’t think I could have taken a companion along for this, unless she was silent or talked continuously like the woman with whom I shared the pleasure of seeing Rome. (Some talkers of this variety know how to make their voices a pleasant background buzz and don’t mind that you wander in and out of their words like we wandered in and out of churches those three days.) When I finally turned around, went back to the parking lot, a friend from the reading saw me checking things in the windows. “Are you all right?” she cried. “Yes. I am fine.” We exchanged smiles and I walked up to my truck. When I turned the key, I looked around. The pellucid splendor of the evening had fled into the alleys or down the street. I saw the last flakes of it in a stained glass window of the First Presbyterian Church, then it was gone for good.