revolution's just a t-shirt away

Sun.|02.16

Sometimes I'm afraid of you. You're really big, so I think, just leave you alone. You'll let me know when you want something. I ignore you, and am at best a benign presence, not wanting to be involved, wanting to smooth things over, pretend you're a different way than you are.

When we lived on Haight Street you were smaller and I was getting to like you more. Well, I guess before Haight Street. Haight Street was where we veered off-route maybe. Or on-route, depending which course you think is the correct one. If one can be. Correct.

After the junkies moved out, Tobin and I moved into the big bedroom, the one that looked out over the street. They'd left the room half-painted. I liked what they'd done over the mantel: a yellow sun, mostly finished. The mantel itself was purple with darker purple and green trim. The rest of the room was white, mostly. If you stood in certain spots, the waves of kitty urine stench was overwhelming, despite the cats being two or three tenants ago.

Don't stand there, that's all. There are many other places to stand.

The war started a few weeks after Christmas. I remember that it was Connor's birthday; he'd been dead for five years. It's always someone's birthday, there's really no significance by saying whose. It's just a way to remember the date.

He would've been 22 that day. Death had turned him into the perfect man--who knows if we really would have been in touch at that point in our lives, but he'd grown so mythical in my mind that the only thing that had kept us from marriage and children and divorce, followed by the inevitable remarriage, was him dying. Damitol.

But now I was in love with Tobin, and we shared the big room in the three-bedroom flat, and I watched out the window as the protesters from Market Street trudged up Haight. Why they always ended the anti-war marches by climbing that hill I do not know. Now they just go to Civic Center, a more reasonable hike.

I was against the war, I was against pretty much everything. Candy tax? AGAINST IT! Prop whathaveyou? AGAINST IT! Working? AGAINST IT! Pete Wilson? NO THANK YOU! It wasn't well thought-out in my mind, I had no specific reasons. Just didn't like it.

Growing up, I had thought that the wars were behind us. I learned about them, and they were history, they were in the past, and there would be no wars in my time. What gave me that idea? I don't know. Not only would there be no wars, my mind told me, but nothing of significance would take place. Everything had already happened.

Almost as stupid was my childhood fear that New York would declare war against California and my brother would have to fight my uncle. The idea used to move me to tears. OH GOD! I would pray. PLEASE DONT LET US GO TO WAR AGAINST CALIFORNIA!

God granted my wish. Bless his heart.

So now I watched, from the warmth of our bedroom, the heads and arms and legs of the marchers for peace. I could see bald spots from my third floor hideout. Someone grabbed our old Christmas tree from the curb and held it up like the Olympic torch. Then it moved hand by hand overhead, to the back of the crowd. It went quite a way with them; later in the week I saw it up by Masonic, five or six blocks from where it had started.

Poor little tree. Sorry for killing you.