THE new neighborhood was a dream: San Francisco's famed gingerbread rowhouses, fresh paint, well-tended front steps, a real dream. Kids skipped around making up inventive jingles about any odd thing that was just odd enough to sing about. Rosy-cheeked ladies hung their wash, aligned in beautiful harmonies--polyphonic, almost Arabic--bits of andalusian mosaics and their mesmerizing chromatic spray. The weathered old crooner who sat on his porch at night with his ancient guitar, strumming, lulling the neighbors to sleep with songs of timeless beauty. It was indeed Grand, a welcome song of clarity and beauty in a life that had become oddly disassociated. For weeks things had just seemed off, not right, not real.. It's strange to be a stranger in your own life--maybe in this neighborhood I wouldn't have to be a stranger anymore.
BUT just as with any move to a new neighborhood or city, you learn things about the place over time, things that weren't apparent at first glance, What is what and what is Not. And some things were out of place: The busted up shack in the middle of the block-- probably hadn't been fixed up since the big quake--and the old guy who came out to the front porch every afternoon, dressed like a halloween devil, shaking his plastic trident and screaming obscenities at the neighbors. There was the cranky old crazy lady who donned a different wig every day and shrieked at the kids to stay off her lawn. Every neighborhood is weird in its own way I guess.
SO like any well-intentioned neighborhood ingenue, I thought I would say something. Hey, buddy, pipe it down; the kids are just having a good time; they're just kids, let 'em play. But from experience I knew that that was just a formality: the notice, a cease and desist letter--it never really works, but it's a necessary step in the process of conflict resolution. But unlike a normal conflict, I couldn't exactly threaten litigation--what would I do, sue a crazy lady for being mean? And it's not like I would go over there and get into a fistfight with an old loon, even if I let him use his fake pitchfork. So my next thought was to talk to the terrified kids: Don't worry about these jokers; see that devil? he's just a clown, you can tell from the cheap dime-store make-up and plastic props; and don't worry about the crazy old lady, she thinks the sidewalk is her lawn and everyone should stay off it; besides, she sits in a wheelchair because she has no feet; couldn't catch you anyway.
AND something else was off. Maybe it was the strange wink in the neighbors' eyes when I complained about the bad seeds. Others would (though somewhat calyptically) roll their eyes. And it did sit, troubling but undeciphered, somewhere back in that part of the brain where you process language: The off-ness, the something-is-not-quite-right feeling. Because I've always been very well-attuned to people's patterns of speech, their voicing, the little clues they drop in the way they say their words, clues that are as obvious to me as lighting up a billboard that says I am Lying. It's what happens when you grow up as the not-white guy, the immigrant, the outsider, trying to fit in in the whitest of white towns and the whitest of white schools, places where it's assumed you must know kungfu if you're asian. /hey bruce lee kick this brick/ When you start out in life with a sameness deficiency, you quickly develop the skills to read people: friend or foe, good guy or bigot, sincere or patronizing. And liars are just like poets: bad liars, like bad poets, think that a convincing lie is just putting together the right words from a thesaurus. They think they're saying Truth, but in reality they're saying Not-Lie.
FOCUS always hits the mark with a resounding slap. There's only one point of optimum clarity and precise focus with optics--there may be significant hyperfocal range, but there's always just one point on the dial that is optimal for recording a given image at a given distance on a plane of film, and the rest is on a falling slope of line resolution.
I suppose I should have paid attention to that nagging little fleck of sand in my brain, the one that said, Hey, something is not quite real here. Everything I looked at looked clear to me, real. But being lost in the giddiness of novelty and enthusiasm, I wasn't seeing the edges that were all ablur. The point of focus had the kind of line resolution any photographer would approve of, but as soon as the eyes turned away the object was lost in the bokeh, a haze of soft shadow and ambiguity.
THE most terrifying and most alienating moment in any dream is not when you see the first oddity, or even ten oddities. A dreamer can withstand any bizarreness or combination of absurdities that would break his sanity if seen through real eyes. No, the moment where the dreamer is truly shocked is when he realizes that he's been struggling to grapple with and eject these unreal interlopers from his dream, but in reality he is the interloper, and all the fantasies know that it's the dreamer who really doesn't belong.
I guess I should thank some of the kinder neighbors who woke me up when they said Hey, take a closer look at the grain of sand--maybe it's a pearl and maybe it's not. Like any decent analyst (or reader who is confused at the end of a novel), I went back and reexamined my preconceived notions. Turn the clock back, flip back through the pages, fingers on the REV and FWD, compare this to that, what am I seeing and what did I miss?
AND like that crisp snap on the ground glass of a hasselblad, I finally saw it. I had walked through that neighborhood and not put it together, just like a dream where your mind adjusts to the unreality, makes the strange feel normal, appropriate even. I saw the images now: The house with the couple who were always playing cards, a hare drinking tea, smiles hanging from trees with no cat in sight, kids stuck on the same patch of sidewalk despite running all out, and of course the strange little men who would stand in my path, and no matter how many I kicked down, new ones would pop back up. Five of diamonds, eight of spades, joker.
SNAP. I'm awake.
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