The apartment building across the street is a big problem. One of the residents – a woman who shot her boyfriend two days before Thanksgiving, which prompted at least 15 Portland police cars to arrive, along with the local Fox affiliate – runs a mini-mart of sorts. I don’t spend a lot of time peaking out the window to keep tabs, but when the traffic reaches a certain volume it’s hard to not notice. People come and go constantly, walking timidly down the sidewalk, looking back over their shoulders and then bolting for her door, from which they emerge a minute and a half later. She and various other drivers squeal in and out on a very regular basis as well, on errands that are either completed or aborted within four or five minutes at most, at which point the car returns. It is entirely possible that she is feeding the destitute or handing out and delivering batteries for cell phones out of the goodness of her heart. Her boyfriend, on the other hand, harbored no such doubts when, as he lay in the courtyard bleeding beneath a limestone-colored November skyscape, announced to the law enforcement brigade and the entire neighborhood “Every mother fucker she sell to is on that mother fucking computer!” All that, and so much more, without a microphone.
In addition to the entrepreneurial, pistol-toting grandmother – she is a grandmother, this much I know – there is another problem over there. Two or three young men moved into the apartment at the end of the building most directly across the street from my living room. They’re loud. Their friends are loud. They keep odd hours and they drink. And one of them – the black one, unfortunately – is dealing. Every morning at a few minutes after 8, he charges out of there and walks quickly past my house on his way to the market down on Glisan Street, the one that’s owned by the Lebanese family and that has a payphone in front. My neighbor walks with his head down, texting the entire way.
There is something abrupt and unfriendly about him. He shuffles along, head down, scowling. On cold mornings he wore a navy blue wool pea coat and a wool cap pulled down almost to his eyebrows. He’s scowly. As it got warmer, though, he started wandering around in tank tops and shorts that flowed in such a way that they could have easily been mistaken for skirts. (Basketball shorts, I believe.) And instead of hustling down to the corner to do his business, he’d chuck his skateboard out the front door and then – in what must require multiple motions but appears to be just one – jump onto the damn thing while closing the door behind him. It made me think, that’s the same dexterity you’d need to jump off a bridge and land on a moving train without killing yourself.
One morning I was sitting on my front porch having my coffee and smoking a cigarette when he skated past. Seconds later I heard the sound of a lighter that’s either dead or close to it. It sounds like a little corner of sandpaper rapidly rubbing a small block of wood. I have a big outburst of ornamental grass beside my front stairs so that I can sit there without being completely on display, but the grass is not soundproof: I heard the wheels on asphalt, coming my way. Great, I thought. He appeared in front of the gate, facing me.
Mercy.
“Can I get a light from you?” he asked. I’d describe his voice if it weren’t for the fact that all of my attention was focused on his face. I said sure and got up and went to the kitchen to get my lighter. And when I came out with it he looked at me with an expression of dread. “I … I cannot use that lighter,” he said. I must have looked puzzled, because then he said, “White lighters are bad luck. They’re cursed. Every time I use a white lighter it’s just before something bad happens.” I held my cigarette out and he leaned forward and inhaled my fire to create his own. I said, somewhat clumsily I think, that I guessed I could have just offered him my ciggie in the first place rather than going after the lighter. He asked me if I had anything I thought brought bad luck. Other than charming and sexy young men, I wanted to say, no, nothing much. Instead I told him, while silently hoping I was not jinxing myself, that since I was born on the 13th, I have always felt immune to superstitions for the most part.
There are two things about his face that are compelling. The first is that he is clearly not black. This may be a minor point but calling this guy black is like referring to the family two doors down as Chinese. They aren’t Chinese at all: they’re Korean. My superstitious neighbor obviously has some black blood in him, but there is something else – from what country or continent I do not know – but it’s clear when you look at him directly. The races mix and match around here in a way that reminds me of riding the subway in London or going to the farmers market in Los Angeles. With the exception of me and very few others, the racial demographics are unclear. Perhaps I am overemphasizing this point, but my patience for sloppily shouted matters of fact without a single thought (apparently) is all but gone.
And then there’s the duality issue. Looking directly at him, for me, is like looking not only at a composite of the races but a quiet collision, if you will, of the genders. It’s as if two negatives were used to generate one print. His face is a map of stern and sharp and unforgiving angles one second, and the next an almost musical grace that is utterly, unapologetically and magnificently female. When his face switches from one gender to the other it takes a little bit of what it left behind with it, so sometimes he looks mostly male with a remnant of female and at other times he’s almost all woman with just a trace, a hint, of scattered maleness. It is mesmerizing to watch, the back and forth of it.
It wasn’t until a number of weeks after he asked me for a light that it occurred to me that perhaps he was hoping I’d just walk to the gate and, with my cigarette in my mouth, lean into his face and connect mine with his. Then we could stare into one another’s eyes and agonize for moments that would be recalled and recounted, over the years to follow, as entire hours before we each …
He is polite but not in a way that is gushy or particularly encouraging. One of the things I’ve noticed about him is his size. There is something grand about his face and his voice but when I look at him from a bit of a distance it’s shocking to me how compact he is. He isn’t more than five feet and eight or nine inches and, although the pounds are distributed and arranged in a way that seems damn-near perfect to me, he is slight. And his walk is ungracious, almost clumsy – as if the ground beneath him is not quite reliable.
There’s another thing I noticed about him recently. One morning a few weeks ago I was getting ready to go downtown to meet a friend of mine who I had not seen in a while. As long as I was downtown, I decided to take care of a bit of banking, pick up a few birthday cards and run some other errands. As I was washing the coffee grinds down the drain my neighbor hustled by, head down, scowling, as usual.
A couple of hours later I saw him again, not in our neighborhood, but downtown, where he – as usual – had his head down and was wearing a frown on his beautiful, beautiful face as he squinted down at a page of a book, standing beside the shelf where they display the new arrivals at the Multnomah County Library. I looked at him, then looked again – I had to remind myself that even though we were downtown, it was still him, and it was still me – and then looked quickly away, and as I was doing that I think he may have looked up, or started to, but my mind was too busy processing, in a few short seconds, where I know him from, where he was, why he was there, why it was strange that he was there, why it was strange that it was strange that he was there. The simple explanation for the strangeness is that, according to the very loud and utterly certain narration in this neighborhood, my neighbor should not even know where the library is. Me thinking his presence there was strange was jarring: I pride myself on rejecting – with great fanfare sometimes – every single utterance of neighbors whose areas of knowledgeable authority are without borders or boundaries. I reject it, and yet the confusion knocks at the door of my awareness, softly at first, then not. At any rate, I am unable to speak when the logical sequencing part of my brain is at work, so rather than stop and smile and say hello, I kept walking.
