“I’m leaving this place,” the boy says. “Too many … people.”
He leans against the brick wall of the club downtown, smoking a cigarette, resting his free arm on a guitar case. A crowd of clubgoers forms to the left – a swollen mass of art house twentysomethings in black leggings and shredded tees waiting to get their obligatory hand stamp and vodka cocktails.
But the boy is not interested in these things anymore. He is this moment’s blue-eyed Kerouac anticipating the next ride to nowhere in particular. We start a conversation about people. A species he is too eager to shed, I am too eager to nestle into.
Some days I can see his point. When trying to execute a simple act like climbing off the bus means pushing through a wall of bodies, the faces all kind of meld together and there exists only flesh and sweat and the smell of worn leather and body odor. That is when persons become people. And the collective heartbeat roars.
But mostly I enjoy the chaos.
It’s currency for the amateur sociologist to watch the ebb and flow of pedestrians; a comfortable constant really.
“Do you ever feel isolated among all those people?” a friend asks. “Like even though it is so big, you are still just alone?”
“No, not really,” I reply.
But this is a lie – for I am always alone; location only acts to heighten or subdue this feeling. Perhaps being surrounded by people is an antidote. There is always the polite nod in the hallway to neighbors, or questions asked at the checkout, the man wanting spare change at the corner, instructions to the cab driver and random conversations over coffee.
We are kind of self-defeatists. Building up walls only to break them down again. Interactions keep people from spending their whole lives trapped behind plastic and glass and touchscreens.
Everyone is looking to connect, aren’t they?
Even the blue-eyed boy can’t avoid it. An old, black man with little grey tufts at his temples shuffles up to him mid-drag of the cigarette.
“Hey, don’t I know you?” he asks.
“Maybe we met once in a dream,” the boy replies.
They conference in hushed tones. Two beings with stooped posture and weary voices, it is almost hard to tell where the young man ends and the older one begins.
“He’s a poet,” the boy later tells me.
A spontaneous poet of the street, on the street telling his stories in gravelly staccatos. They met a couple weeks prior outside another club. Is this what the boy is trying to escape? The circle we tend to walk, knowing no one, but essentially everyone.
They speak for a while, hiding in the shadows of the club’s veranda – the boy with his music, the man with his words. People brought together by the city.
Jill Tydor lives and works in the Bay Area.
