I doubted that I had the right bus time. I called a friend of mine who I figured to have internet access at that moment. I had done this a few weeks before to learn I had the schedule backwards and that I had missed my bus. But this time it should have arrived in the 10-minute period I had stood there. I considered taking a taxi downtown to catch the San Jose bus. The taxi passed and on the horizon I saw the bus approach. It was not so much my patience that paid off as much as it was my indecision.
I stepped up with my suitcase, tote bag and bocce set and paid and sat down. I inhaled and exhaled purposefully and a dozen blocks later decided it would be appropriate to take in the bus scene around and behind me. And there was Chad involved in his mobile device at the back of the bus. "Chad!" I shout whispered perhaps twice before he came up to see me or I went back to see him. He was playing a game on his android that I assume relieved his mind from his omnipotent studies of applied linguistics.
He asked me what I was doing and I said I was re-taking the bocce journey. Right now, you are doing this, he said. I can see you have your suitcase and your bocce set.
I have to catch a bus to San Jose at the transit station, I explained, then I will take a train to Oakland where I am staying for the evening.
We revisited a previous discussion of black holes or concluded the interaction in some other believable yet uneventful way and he went to the Monterey Institute of International Studies and I got on the 55 bus to San Jose and got out Zadie Smith's book of non-fiction occasional essays, Changing My Mind.
I was beginning an essay that was based in a lecture she gave about writing novels. I liked much of it but did not relate to certain rigorous revision processes. It's not that I have anything against revision and making writing better, I just hold a certain esteem for prose that owes subtle debt to the moment in time and space that gave rise to it, and reworking something that initially falls flat seems pointless to me. I had just finished and published a book, and while I had yet to hold a copy of it, I still had stakes in the matter.
I bought a coffee and donut at the train station in San Jose and sat at a counter affixed to a newsstand. I went to the bathroom doing something clever with my suitcase and then bought a train ticket and crossed under six tracks before emerging at my designated platform. When we passed the marshes north of San Jose I remember reading Smith's brilliant discussion of Barack Obama's pluralist vision being reflected through his ability to transform his mode of speech—or as the right calls it his duplicity. Polyphony we want from art; in politics we call this flip-flopping and we don't want this from politicians. Shakespeare, Obama, train tracks, north San Jose suburbs, San Francisco Bay marshes, all happening at once.
Arriving in the concrete of the east bay I looked at the graffitied walls between us and the city and the roofs that rose above them and I wrote a poem, the only writing I did, other than postcards, for a ten-day span.
On a train one sees
so many roofs and powerlines
and telephone lines.
It's as though the houses are televisions
that do not work.I am not sure how well this metaphor comes across—that I, by riding the train and looking at the houses out the window, am channel surfing between television sets (I guess it would then be television set surfing), boxes with cords coming out of them, whose screens (roofs) are black blankness—or if the metaphor comes across at all. I suppose this is where writer's workshops come in, and MFAs and book clubs and other forms of bourgeois-mediated literary creation. Chalk another good idea up for the status quo.
I got off at the Oakland Coliseum, a train stop that included a parking lot, industrial train-related bric-a-brac, and a chainlinked-fence-enclosed stairway to a chainlinked-fence-enclosed skyway that connected the coliseum to the BART station. A man asked me if I could spare some money to assist him in a desperate situation. I apologized and ascended the stairs with my suitcase, tote bag and bocce set. I was in the middle of the desolate chain-link-enclosed skyway when I received a phone call from a loved one. I had to set down at least one item to field it and I stood there for a few minutes discussing how the two of us were, what the two of us were up to, and, eventually, that I was paralyzed in a key transportation moment and was so sorry to have to say goodbye.
At the other end of the skyway two stairways went back down in different directions to ground level and the same man was now there, probably wondering what took me so damn long to get there and asking if he could help me carry anything. I was fine and asked which was the better route to the BART station. Both options were fine, he said.
I got off the Bay Area Rapid sky train at the station Tristan advised me to get to. I got outside and set my suitcase and bocce set down, and called him. He said he would be 15 minutes or so. But I was anxious to be on my way and asked if there was a nearby coffee shop, and there was, a few blocks away.
As I walked down the sidewalk along the street, witness to so much activity and noise, I thought about myself in relation to it all. Why was I walking down the street with a suitcase and a bocce set? It is such a ludicrous combination. Perhaps a suitcase and a guitar, or typewriter, or portfolio, or skateboard—but what self-respecting bohemian on the road brings a bocce set? The analogy would be Dr. Dad on a golfing trip, checking his clubs and carrying-on a small roll away. But these are just 9 different-colored spheres that are designed to be as heavy as possible. It is perhaps the most impractical thing imaginable to bring, especially for someone taking public transportation and walking. Five long blocks later I arrived at what I calculated to be the designated coffee shop and it struck me that the central mythical meaning to bocce had completely escaped me but was as obvious as a stone sphere's interaction with gravity: Sisyphus.
"Tristan!" I said in a way that included many more words, accepted social customs, nods to strangers pushing past us, hugging, "I have just brought this massive cube filled with eight large spherical rocks and one smaller one from Monterey, and I will continue all the way to Seattle just to follow them back to Monterey exactly as we did once before and I have done with less literal bocce sets for years. Bocce Balling on the West Coast is the Myth of Sisyphus ." I think I actually just mentioned this in passing after we had our expensive cups of coffee, when we got up and got into his truck, putting my suitcase and bocce set in the back.
When I got back into Monterey I got off the bus at the stop by the movie theater that had my W2 for the last paycheck I got the year before. I saw Chad in the adjacent café and we said hello. He asked how I was doing, I said I didn't really know I just got back into town. He asked how long and I said five minutes and he saw my suitcase (I had become separated from my bocce set, though I was soon once again reunited). Oh, you just got back into town. This was particularly striking, we realized, because it was moments before my bus brought me in from Salinas—at the very bus stop—that Chad got off the same bus on which we both last saw each other, at the same bus stop where Chad and I had dismounted 10 days before. It was like he picked me up and dropped me off at the airport without intending to or even owning a car.
No comments:
Post a Comment