Sunday Scribbling #144: Poorer, los pobrecitos

I’d hooked up with him outside the downtown library. Couple of gorphs gave us a pair of bus transfers about to expire. By the time we left the town meeting, we’d impeached the asshole president, rescinded the vagrancy laws, voted for chartreuse M&M’s, and come out unanimously for the old Elvis stamp, instead of the pretty boy stamp tapped by the postal yokels.

We headed down St. Mary’s Street to Convent, and crossed the bridge over the green swill they like to call the river.

“You spell your name ‘Charles,’ right?” said my companion. “I’ve seen you write it.”

“Correct,” I said. I had no clue where he had occasion to see my handwriting. I couldn’t have made ‘Charles’ out of the scrawl myself.

“So, what’s with the ‘Sharl,’ man?”

Latest nosey bastard. I lied: “My mother was French. What about you? Where’d you scare up the name Ris?”

“Dye my mother used on our clothes. She liked that it was short and to the point.”

“I believe the dye was called Rit.”

“My mother couldn’t spell for shit.”

I said, “Admittedly a tough call,” but I was already rethinking the bus ride. Air conditioning was one thing, but air conditioning for imbeciles was another.

“Rit, huh?” he said. “Like that Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind.”

We came to the corner of Convent. I slowed my step—maybe the transfer would expire if I walked slow enough. The 8 could be counted on to run late, and I’d never known one of its drivers to cut me any slack on the two hour grace period. If the ride fell through, I’d excuse myself and opt for a nap at the Saint Anthony Hotel. The second floor lobby had enough mildew to scare away their own staff.

Convent Street dead-ended into the stop on Navarro, a perfect little wind tunnel in the shade of two high rise towers. Half a block further sat the Municipal Auditorium, an old Spanish Revival relict in the oasis of Auditorium Circle, once rumored to have been an island. Bygone downtown royalty used to row over, plant gardens, escape the nearby predatory shadow of the several city blocks known as First Baptist Church.

My dyed friend eyed the two benches on Navarro, both smothered in pigeon shit, as if Jackson Pollock had come back as a gray bird and picked up where he left off. I sat right down on the iron bench; I’d long ago given up any hope of keeping bird shit off my back side. Mr. Ris struggled to maintain the bum’s fiction of being well-heeled, a difficult proposition when you counted bus transfers as a part of your revenue stream.

“There’s usually a corner of the concrete bench that they miss,” I said. “What’s there just seems to blend in better.”

He eyed the corner and smoothed down the back of his unlaundered jeans with his hand, like some demur debutante’s little fidget before sliding onto a banquette at L’ Etoile, the fancy uptown eatery of my adopted people. I had no idea if there were banquettes at the place. I make it up as I go along. If there aren’t any, there should be. I’m sure Mr. Hemingway would agree.

“You’re probably right to hesitate,” I said. “You purposely sit in bird shit, it’s just downhill from here on out.”

A small Toyota pickup truck pulled up along the curb in front of us. Two boys in teal-colored knit tees and Panama hats, towing a big plastic tub of water, always three days behind the pigeons and their rampant graffiti. They hauled out their pressure sprayer and started in at the corner, nary a by-your-leave to the two constituents standing by. Wind out of the north did a fine job of soaking Mr. Dye and me.

I walked over to Mr. Spray. His associate was standing upwind, in the flimsy shade of a palm tree across the street, blowing bubble gum bubbles half the size of his face.

I had to give it to Mr. Spray; he was a dedicated employee of the City of San Antonio. He done ‘em proud. The man standing at his left ear deterred him not at all from his duties as custodian of the streets. I’d seen Westside chicas derail a squadron’s worth of utility workers, but not so my humble fleabag self in baggy khaki pants.

“Sorry to get in your way!” I shouted, into the horrid din of the washer. Blasts of shattering noise, followed by windy silence.

Mr. Spray gave me a look that confirmed my suspicion that, given a double-aught shotgun in his hands, rather than his standard water nozzle, there would have been one less meddlesome citizen roaming the streets of San Antonio.

“What can I do for you, sir?” said my teal-resplendent civil servant. It was my experience that at some point in the 1980s the word ‘sir,’ rolled around in the right mouth, designated a variant of the human species just this side of vermin. Or maybe that side of it.

“My colleague and I were wondering just how one might go about gaining such fine employment as yours with the local constabulary.” I knew the word constabulary would throw him off, or piss him off. It did the latter.

“Fuck off, old man,” said my civil servant.

“Hey, Chuck. 8’s coming,” said Ris behind me, committing the unpardonable sin of a familiarity with my name he had no right to. Chuck, my ass.

I stepped up onto the bus behind Mr. Familiarity, waited for him to find a seat on the back banquette, and darted out the door, just as the bus pulled off. Good Rit-tance, asshole, I thought, and waved to him as he passed by. My transfer would work just as well on the 14, one block down.

The keys I’d purloined from the Toyota truck of my civil servants clunked nicely in the bottom of the trashcan at the corner of Navarro and Pecan, though there was not a chance my demolition buddies up the street would hear it.

We three kings…