Loitering: New and Collected Essays Read Online Free Page B

is variously called buck or bull fever, and I’m now feeling a variant of that, imagining myself notched neatly in the iron sights of the Bad Guy’s gun. My fear is as vaporous and real and enveloping as the rain and fog, and I have this not-unfamiliar feeling of general and impending doom.
    This might seem unnecessarily preambular, but I also want to say my pants are falling down and I’m sopping wet. I came back from salmon fishing in Alaska with a severe case of atopic dermatitis primarily caused by contact with neoprene. I had what’s called an “id” reaction—pretty much systemic—and all week my fingers and neck and feet and legs were puffy and disgusting, with weeping sores. I think my condition even freaked the dermatologist. My hands were so raw and inflamed I wasn’t able to type, hold a pen, or turn the pages of a book. Because I don’t own a television my week of forced zombiism passed without distraction and nothing to gnaw on but my own increasingly desperate thoughts. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, the walls. It was a new kind of aloneness for me, being imprisoned in my own skin. It was easy to imagine never being touched by another human being ever again. The dermatitis made my skin crawl, and I was taking 40 mg of prednisone, a steroid that cruelly kept me awake so as, it seemed, to fully and consciously experience my suffering in a state of maximum alertness. I mention all this to establish a certain oblique connective tissue between observer and observed, between myself as witness and the thing witnessed. Half the reason I’m at the crime scene is I haven’t had any human contact for a while, and besides I can’t sleep with my skin prickling (and theother half of why I’m standing in the rain at two in the morning is I’m probably some kind of tragedy pervert). When I got back from Alaska my hands were already painfully suppurating and I couldn’t carry all my bags and grabbed only the expensive stuff, the rods and reels, leaving a duffel of clothes in my truck. The next time I could put on shoes and walk, three days later, the neighborhood crackheads had stolen my clothes, including my only belt and my only raincoat, and that’s why my drawers droop and I’m soaked and starting to shiver a little in this mellisonant humming rain.
    But I didn’t come to this crime-scene-in-progress innocently. Before leaving the apartment I put a pen in my pocket, along with a stack of three-by-five cards and a tape recorder, thinking that if this thing got real hairy, if there was actually some shooting, then I might jot a few notes and make of an otherwise blank night a bona fide journalistic story, full of who, what, where, when. Like a lot of my aspirations, this one, too, was internally doomed and hopeless long before I realized it. My main problem vis-à-vis journalism is I just don’t have an instinct for what’s important. I realize that now, looking over my notes. My first note was about the old alleys in Seattle, those island places where sticker bushes flourish and a man can still sleep on a patch of bare earth, where paths are worn like gametrails and leave a trace of people’s passing, and how these naturally surviving spots are systematically vanishing from the city, rooted up and paved over mostly because they house bums—an act of eradication that seems as emotionally mingy as putting pay slots on public toilets, but is probably cost-effective in terms of maintenance, since bums generate a lot of garbage in the form of broken glass and wet cardboard. Then I started another note about how, in contrast to these hardscrabble plots, the flower beds and parking strips of lush grass and manicured shrubs and trees are pampered and how, currently, it’s maybe three in the morning and all up and down the street automatic sprinklers spit and hiss in the rain, redundantly watering.
    Also my notes bleed black ink and blur in the rain as I write them. I don’t write a note about that.
    But