The Very Late Being

Tenderloin Night Scene, Eddy Street at Leavenworth

Eventually destiny for some becomes the late being. Others the very late being. 

I was on my mobile talking with Saleem Saturday night on Eddy Street and a gigantic headphone and a beanie covered my head while I chatted happily with Saleem and was oblivious to my surroundings when I got a wake up call.

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Eddy Street

Eddy street bustles the most on a Saturday night.  A hip and somewhat nerdy Anglo crowd linger outside Exit Theater after a performance.  A black majority of late teens and early-20 make noise outside of a Arab-owned mom and pops that serves fried chicken for one dollar  and is open until 2 a.m..  In front of Pandora and Underground 181 Nightclub, a large crowd of young Asians, mainly Filipinos and Japanese, gather with other Americans, Arabs,  Europeans, transgenders and gays. The night is hotter than a firecracker. A strange heatwave had hit usually cooler San Francisco.

In the distance another crowd at the corner of Eddy and Taylor, a mostly black and  some mixed-race people and the usual neighborhood whites waited by a chain-link fence to be served by a line of drug dealers/pushers, dominated by young black girls with stylish hair and draped in puffy coats.  In their persons they carry hundred dollars' worth of happy crack rocks and pills for sale while their pimps in over-sized pants half-down their backside exposing a name brand underwear guard the girls and smoke blunts and sweet thin cigars laced with weed and cocaine.   I am wearing light blue shorts, a tiny darker blue short-sleeve cotton shirt, flip flops and a beanie to help keep the headphones on that I purchased a few days ago.

I am trying to explain to Saleem why I did not intend to call him...and he wants to know why I didn't intend to call him.  Why would I not want to speak or call him?  Why?  Well, I do want to talk to you...but I wasn't planning to talk to you just now.  But why, he insisted.  Why? Why not just now?  That voice is like a truth serum. I can never lie to him about anything.

Suddenly I hear a  ringing in my left ear.  Voices.  But Saleem's voice I did not recognize anymore and noticed he sent an urgent text:  "Soooo much noise...are you at a party?"  Someone screamed, "you all right?"  

I figured then I had been shot, a random drive-by shooting. I just had not stumbled to that filthy Tenderloin sidewalk yet. Where was the pain I didn't feel?  I ducked expecting to hear a second shot when a man rushed over, "Man, why the fuck did he do that?"  It was then I learned it was really me who got struck in the head with a cane by an angry black guy high on drugs and running through the street attacking white people and Asians and me who wasn't white or Asian.   The code I've been told in the Loin is for blacks to attack everyone else  but not other black people.  Apparently, that code got broken in my case.

 I was not injured by this unexpected assault.  Thanks much, I supposed, to that awkward blue headphone and blue beanie Michael had given me for New Year's Eve in Oakland.  And those two blues saved me from being knocked unconscious in the middle of the Tenderloin. When I saw that guy coming after me again and swinging that cane and shouting if I wanted some more I ran like hell until I got home.

Thus, I learned a valuable lesson when walking through the TL or anywhere for that matter, keep alert and your head up, wear a beanie and huge headphones and forget that black lives matter just in case a mad person goes postal without any regards to code.

Tenderloin crime scene on Turk Street at Taylor.