I
watched a dude pee in the bushes last night. Staggered precariously
between the routinely ignored one way sign and the easternmost shop
of the strip mall (a candle store, regrettably named “Scentsational
Scents” (is there anything worse than a stupid pun or a dumb
misspelling of a word used in the name of a store? Kwik Stop makes my
skin crawl. I once worked in and got fired from a short-lived coffee
shop named “Drink a Latte”)), the man looked back and saw me
standing on my second floor balcony and quickly went back to it. Nothing else happened. I couldn't have been happier.
 |
| Siji from a distance |
For
the past several years I've been surrounded by life. The kind of life
that takes care of its business wherever it needs to take care of it.
It wasn't uncommon to find myself sidestepping well-warmed puke
puddles on my afternoon walk through the park to school in Siji, a sort of suburb on the outskirts of Daegu. There always seemed to be chunks of instant ramen stuck in the
cracks of the brick sidewalk while the rest tried its best to
evaporate.
Suburbs
might be a misnomer, to be honest, at least if you were to apply the
American idea to its Korean counterpart. In a country where space
only exists on a mountain or a farm, the outer districts of cities,
while residential, tend to be just row after row of identical
apartment buildings with a few pockets of schools, restaurants, bars, and hagwons*. Good luck finding a house there. Shit tons of kids,
though.
I never did understand what it was that inspired people to drink enough to vomit it all back up, although I did understand the desire to drink in that overly organized part of town. It seemed there was no shortage of young men in their early 20s (which I guess I was then, come to think of it) still living there with their parents. It was a comfortable place.
I never did understand what it was that inspired people to drink enough to vomit it all back up, although I did understand the desire to drink in that overly organized part of town. It seemed there was no shortage of young men in their early 20s (which I guess I was then, come to think of it) still living there with their parents. It was a comfortable place.
One
afternoon I saw an ancient man take a piss through a fence on a well
trafficked sidewalk in the square there. I didn't know what to think.
-----
I
chose my apartment in Kansas City after seeing two cardinals flitting
around some birch trees out front. I'd
also always wanted to live in one of Kansas City's signature
colonnaded apartments, and this one was just shitty enough to be
within my price range. Kind of. It has a layout I don't know what to do with
yet, and a beat up balcony, but the pigeons perch on a pillar on the
other side of the partition, where they've dropped a literal pile's
worth of shit my poor neighbor hasn't done anything about yet.
It's
in the soup of the city though. Whenever I tried to explain my
hometown to people who had no conception of it (non-Europeans would
go for the Wizard of Oz, Europeans would go for Superman), I would
find myself having to reinforce the point that it was, in fact, a
proper city. The mental image of Kansas might be wheat fields, but
Kansas City was one of the biggest urban centers of the mid-19th
to mid 20th
centuries, situated at the intersection of the Santa Fe, California,
and Oregon trails and later a major railway hub. It's grown less
important in the age of modern transportation, but the social and
geographic makeup of the city contains many of the trademarks of its
history.
One
example, which is a stark contrast to what I encountered in the
largely homogeneous and cookie cutter layout of most Korean
neighborhoods (or Kansas City's surrounding suburbs-- in which I
currently spend more time than I'd like-- for that matter), is the
often strained diversity one finds in Kansas City. Urban segregation
has outlived the railroads and much of the industry that brought
Blacks and Hispanics here in the first place. If one were to zigzag
their way through the city, they would be able to tell pretty quickly
which part of town they were in. The Hispanic community lies, mostly,
on the west side of the city and into Kansas, while anywhere east of
Troost is largely Black. These are rough borders, but ones that
exist for very specific reasons I recommend everyone look into. Meanwhile, between the two, is a melting pot that I would say
is mostly white folks until the very center, between Broadway and
Main, which is apparently where I've ended up.
------
I
woke up to a nightmare in Hyderabad. The shitty hotel's shitty clerk
came to knock on my door an hour before checkout to tell me it was
okay for me to check out an hour later at 9. I had lent him 100
rupees the night before, not bothering to ask why he needed it. When
I went to check out, he insisted that I had to pay for an extra day,
since I was checking out an hour late. I had left the equivalent of
an extra night's stay as a deposit when I first checked in, so I was
in a fairly weak negotiating position, and appeals to human kindness
didn't work the opposite direction apparently. I finally got half of
my money back and said something along the lines of “if that's the
way you're going to live, remember me when it all goes wrong for
you”, which is pretty much the toughest thing I could think of to
say at the moment.
So
I fumed off into the hot ass Hyderabad morning and into the train
station, where I was catching a local across town to Secunderabad,
from which I'd be on another train to the coastal city of
Visakhapatnam, where the Communist Party's national conference just
so happened to be going down. That's another story. The local was all
second class seating. The scrum to get onto the car was humorous from
a distance, although it meant I'd be standing thirty minutes. It's a
bit of an Indian cliche, but seriously... the amount of people they
cram into these fucking trains is ridiculous.
As
we approached the station, I began to shimmy toward the exit to
disembark. People started jumping off while we were still going a
reasonable speed, which I again watched bemusedly, until I realized
people were jumping on the train while going the same speed. By the
time I made my own attempt to disembark, the crowd around the door
had grown to such a size that I was fighting against human waves to
even get to the door (something like this, maybe, but I would never hit a doggy). When I finally got about halfway out the door,
my giant backpack became an obstacle to both people entering and
myself trying to exit. I pushed and struggled and sweated my way with
what I'm sure was panic on my face, only to find an unsympathetic
crowd outside who all shouted at me to let them on. I saw no choice--
I stood to the side and let them on. Every sardine managed to squirm
its way past me and the train started to leave the station again, I
managed to leap off and into the skinny body of a teenage boy, who
said something to me I didn't understand and kept walking.
There
wasn't space for me on that afternoon's train.
 |
| Across the street from Secunderabad Station |
I
found myself in one of the shittier parts of the city whose nice bits
had already seemed inaccessible to me the past several days. I had a
weird piece of bread and a juice and talked with a friendly high
school kid in the city to take an exam. We chatted on the Facebook
randomly over the next few months. His profile picture was and is
some Tollywood star. I may or may not have persuaded him not to join
the military a few months later. Time will tell.
Then
I... walked around. I found a PC room where dudes had apparently been
watching Sunny Leone uhhh films. The kid next to me was playing Grand
Theft Auto: Vice City and loving it. I saw this a few times. I
managed to get a vague idea of how I could catch a bus later that
night and set about finding a travel agent where I could purchase my
ticket for a few hours later in the evening.
And
I had to piss. I asked the guy if there was one nearby-- nope. I walked back out
into the overwhelming street I had managed to escape from in the
seedy PC room and tried a few restaurants-- nothin. I walked down one
of the main roads perpendicular from the busy station and found
myself in dust. On the side of the road I was on was a real busy bus
station and a man selling fancy bags. I knew they were fancy because
he kept yelling it at steady intervals with the insistent tone of a
hungry parrot. “FANCY BAG!” then 30 seconds later, “FANCY BAG!” Over and over. The road looked like it went on forever, but I needed
to stay in this part of town. I also needed to go. Like, to the
bathroom. Behind the rightmost of the three bus shelters was a
concrete wall that was being used by dozens of men as a urinal. It
reeked. I had to go. The parrot man and a steady stream of air brakes soundtracked the event.
I had to go figure out how to get the hell out of Dodge. It went
smoothly enough actually. I found a travel agent across the street
from the train station and paid 700 rupees (12 dollars) or so for my
ticket. Now I had to kill time, which wasn't too hard because there
was a dark, dingy bar above a sweet shop where I knocked back a
couple big bottles of Kingfisher and waited out my two hours.
It
was my first private bus ride there, so I had little idea what to
expect. The guys at the travel agency just told me it was coming, but
it didn't for another hour. When it did arrive, it was a full size
van and I had to piss again. I had broken the seal.
My
seat on the bus was in permanent recline, and I had no idea when they
would stop again, if ever, on what I assumed would be a 10+ hour
journey. We stopped by and picked a few more people up at other
travel agencies along the way, but never stopped long enough for me
to get out. It was agony. I felt like urine was coming out of my
pores. I started getting sick to my stomach. I couldn't sit
comfortably, and I kept crossing and uncrossing my legs hoping to
find a comfortable enough position to ignore it for a while. I
meditated. I thought of my girlfriend. It started raining outside.
The raindrops on the window seal made it worse. I was going to die.
The
van stopped again on a crowded street. Some people departed and some
stayed on. The driver stopped again a little way down the road and a
few more got out. I closed my eyes and held my bladder tight. The
driver started yelling at someone. He sounded angry. I opened my eyes
and realized the bus was empty and he was yelling at me in Telugu,
gesturing out the front door. I rushed out the door and into the
first dark alley I could find and pissed next to some empty gas
canisters for what seemed like an hour. Finally, relief. When I
snapped back to, I remembered I had to figure out what bus I was
supposed to get on. And then I realized I left my satchel on the van.
As I ran back out into the busy street to see if I could see it, I
noticed a man lying motionless in a puddle situated in a row of
parked motorcycles, he might have been dead. The van and my bag were
gone. I sat on the street for a while, hoping it would return. The
rain stopped, the traffic cleared, the man in the puddle was carried
off by a couple other men. I spent my last 700 rupees on a pack of
Gold Flakes and an air conditioned hotel room. I felt sick to my
stomach again.
-----
What
do you do, huh? I just moved into an apartment with cardinals in its
trees. They've only reappeared once, which I chalk up to Kansas City
weather being as annoying for the rest of the animal kingdom as it is
for us bipeds. Then you get a guy pissing in the bushes.
 |
| Home? |
If
you're going to live anywhere, make sure it's in the guts of society.
There's plenty of pleasure everywhere on the modern landscape, but
when you think of all the emptiness that space between yourself and
your neighbor contains, the air can get a bit heavy.
When
I woke up in America for the first time and went to smoke a forbidden
cigarette on my mother's deck I was overcome with the blankness of
what should have been most familiar to me. The same houses still sat
there. A car or two had survived. But it was quiet at 10 a.m. on a
Friday morning. The only thing in motion were branches and the dead
leaves that were falling from them. The breeze animated what was
otherwise an uncomfortably lifeless setting to find myself in.
-----
In
the week leading up to this gentleman (I assume anyway) using the
bushes as his bathroom I'd finally begun to understand my
surroundings. They weren't conventionally pretty, although the nearly
a century old columns supporting the roof over my head had a certain
charm to them. What does new and shiny have to do with 2016?
Some
street kids heard me singing on my balcony. The Walkmen, I think.
They had a grown dog and a pup tagging along with them and they had
managed to grab my ear from behind the headphones. They were nice. They were waiting for the morning train. Nobody takes trains here... I wondered if their ride would be more comfortable than mine was crossing Hyderabad. I
came down to talk to them and handed off a beer and some cigarettes.
It was a couple American Indians and a kid who exorcised demons
through portrait. We got into a bunch of nonsense sitting on my
front stairs like a group of vagabonds. This time I was the outsider.
And
I guess that's a bit of the issue. I've been the guy pissing in the
bushes. I've been the guy getting off a train with nowhere to sleep
but next to everyone else on the train station floor. I've been the
girl at the gas station asking for a dollar to buy a gallon of gas to fill an empty tank. I've never been the guy at the gas station asking
me to buy him beer on his 53rd
birthday, or the same guy a week later when it's still his birthday, but I wonder if I will be in 25 years. I wonder if he's as
bewildered by his surroundings as I continue to be.
-----
I'm
back in the guts. I don't know what I'm doing in them, exactly, but I'm being jostled. I'll never pass through them naturally, it seems. I'm trying to make a home here, but I realize that's never been up to me. The struggle's back in an unfamiliar way, and I'm
beginning to think it's elemental. I'm inadequate in a lot of ways I keep learning about, but
I'm fine being reminded. If things get too clear we need to
get our eyes checked.
*private schools where business owners and parents conspire to torture their children with hours more education after public school finishes.
