Welcome to the Working Week

Because I had been beaten up in an alley

and my wallet taken and blood was

pouring from my lip and my eye

swelling shut; because I had not,

actually, fought back this time,

and also because I was still,

even after this pugilism,

pretty damned drunk

(most especially because of this),

I couldn’t remember where I lived,

or even what part of town.

So, I could not have hailed a cab

while bleeding down my bare chest,

where bruises were now blooming

like Chernobyl roses, and with any

sort of coherence tell the driver where

to take me (if I had even tried to speak, I’m

sure the words would have been so slurred

that I could have closed my eyes and let them

carry me away like a river dying in a sea;

in fact, I was so near the Los Angeles River, it turned

out, I could have staggered there and fallen into

its concrete channel. I never learned, or bothered

to find out, rather, in my time in that city,

where the River goes, it was always an ankle-deep

trench at the bottom of a cement-covered ditch,

swelling with the rain to a torrent that would

carry away a froth of trash and dead rats;

during the hot summer, kids would race bikes

there, and many times I sat on one of the still-hot

concrete plates and watched the sun go down and

wonder what dear god was I going to do that night

if I couldn’t find any blow or pussy)

or been let on any city bus by any sane employee

of the regional transit authority, let alone figure out

which route to take, the entirety of Los Angeles,

and most especially when you are drunk, high,

and newly beat, is like a spiderweb and you are the fly.

So I lurched from the alley and zigzagged on the sidewalk

passing, for some reason, off to the side and not in the

midst of the flow of traffic on the sidewalk, a whole onion,

just resting at the lip of the curb, its papery skin peeling

to reveal the white orb, shining to my gimlet eye in the night

like some fallen jewel from heaven’s crown, and I did not stop

and examine the onion, although later as I crouched

next to a dumpster and tried to sleep, it was the

only damn thing I could remember about that night,

not the face of the man who had beaten me,

not even where I had stumbled here from,

and certainly not how the sticky wetness in the crotch

of my jeans had gotten there when I opened them

to piss against the wall of, what the sign on the

receiving department door informed me, was

Schultz Brothers Leather. I must have, miracle of

miracles,

dozed off, because when my eyes opened, it was

still dark but I could make out the shape of

another young man, not me, standing and looking

down at where I had fallen asleep, wedged between

the dumpster and the brick wall (my first and only

night on the streets, all praise to the maker

who never misses the fall of a single sparrow)

and I even saw him draw back his high-topped sneaker

and even had time to pull my knees close and

ball myself up so his foot would not obliterate

my balls when he kicked me, just my kidneys and ribs,

but it was late and he was as far gone as I was, and the

kick, when it came, glanced off the dumpster and barely

hit me at all, and by that time adrenaline had me on

my own feet, crouched and swaying, ready to attack him

and he said, in a voice thick with what I recognized

as hopeless despair, give me everything you have.

And I reached out, because I knew the voice with which

he spoke, it was my voice too, and I rested my hands on

his shoulders and said, Nothing, I have nothing, I would give

it to you if I had it, but I have nothing.

And he looked at my dried-blood face and dried-blood

chest and black eye and crooked nose and all he did was nod

and believe that I would have, and I would have surely

lord I would have because I was, in that moment, and in many

of the moments that had preceded and would follow that night,

alive and aware and exultant in my place in the human

fabric, the brotherhood of man, even as I had taken the

first blow in the alley - the memory came back to me

as the young man slumped against me - even then my thought

had not been pain at the strike of the fist,

but pain that the fist had been thrown,

and that brother should fight brother

and slowly disassemble that silly and hopeful

edifice we fool ourselves into believing is real

and call a society