Only In Threes

On the walk in this morning, they came in reverse order. Like some cleverly self-conscious film, I’m rearranging them.

#1. Has the look of someone who has been on the street for awhile, but not quite a lifer. Looks like he may have been released from an institution, looks like he may believe there are insects in his skin. He stands on a corner, close to the bricks of the building. He pushes off as if to get across the street, but before he makes it 6 feet he spins and goes back to the building. As if there’s something far too comforting about the solidity of the building, as if the idea of flying into the wilds of the crosswalk forced the panic to come off of him in waves you can feel. In the time it took me to cross the street, he had made the same circle three times.

#2. He stands on a corner half a mile before. If you noticed nothing else about him but his clothes, you might think he was a golfer from the late 80’s. His feet are firmly planted, but his hands gesticulate wildly. I can’t hear what he’s saying, the ever present iPod makes it look like the guy’s heavy into the Talking Heads. I’m totaling putting it on him, but the man’s got the moves of a Baptist preacher on a tear. He moves as if the fire of God pushes through him like napalm, the veins on his neck pulse and jaws rabidly move with imagined righteous indignation.

#3. The car goes by me just on the outskirts of Pioneer Square. In memory, it seems to be moving in slow motion. A light brown stations wagon, the black man driving it with his arm crooked out the driver’s side window. Letters that you imagine seeing on the side of a mailbox, glittery and eye-catching letters that would look at home on the side of a cooler holding night crawlers and other fish bait. The driver had apparently felt so strongly about certain passages of the bible that he glued them in all their sparkly glory on the side of his car. He cruises the streets hoping to dazzle into submission those on the fence about religion, performing drive by savings.

I like to sit here and imagine the driver following my general path and picking up the other two not long after I passed them. I like to imagine them having a day of it, driving around the town, eating ham sandwiches, drinking wine coolers and chattin’ about God.