A Man of Indeterminate Origin

He was known to walk the streets of San Francisco’s adamantine Tenderloin district, where he would peruse the vast library of human despondency that resided there. It was on those streets that you would see him idly conversing with the abandoned, the forlorn, the hated. It was here that you could find him transacting with those who had willingly exchanged life for a living death.

One time I spotted him reclining on a green bench near the civic center; I watched as he patiently and methodically recited the finer details of Pascal’s wager to a transvestite methamphetamine addict. In those hours of early morning, a thin film of orgasm and desperation seemed to slick everything. And when he walked, it was through the diffused glow of quick-loan neon, wrapped in an evanescent cloak of pre-morning mist.

I came to know him one night as we crossed paths in an all-night donut shop at the intersection of Turk and Hyde. He sat alone near the window. The 19-Polk roared past, and he watched it with an air of indifference. This was his world. He was comfortable.

I purchased a small cup of rehashed coffee and asked him why he chose to inhabit this place. Unlike those who made their crooked way in these nine square blocks of iron and concrete, his was a voluntary bondage. He responded that this was the only place that felt real to him, and whenever he crossed the arbitrary threshold, the world suddenly seemed to conceal – or perhaps discard – that which he liked to call “the soul of things.”

“Such is the way," he said. "The soul burns here. In these alleys and chain-linked lots.”

One night we crossed the boundary together. We walked to the top of the hill and gazed in silence over the valley, out to the sea. We were parallel with the stars. From our vantage the buildings extended below us in fantastically rich, all-consuming splendor – and from there we witnessed the burning in the endless valleys beyond. The tacit awe. The awe was the awe of life, the sweet ephemeral thing that ends soon. We knew there was no life tomorrow; only this life, the life that must be lived today. And for every valley, there was a man such as this. Not an evangelist or a shepherd. Just a guy who thrives on the least desirable portions.