Keep it Weird
Campbell Anderson
The Church of Scientology does not want the homeless woman on their stoop. They make a call. She is removed. I watch as the police officers corral her like a cow, essentially kicking her to the curb. Somewhere, surely, Tom Cruise lets out a sardonic laugh.
Someone has thrown up on the sidewalk. A single cormorant picks through the fluorescent-pink bile. The bird thinks that he can become a flamingo—you are what you eat. According to my recently-consumed Voodoo Donut, I am an Old Dirty Bastard, kind of like Tom Cruise. Doubtless, it is easy to feel that way in a city like this.
Portland’s sky is smoggy; the aftertaste of someone else’s weed permeates each of my reluctant inhales. The man down the street has become high on the oddities. He screams at his gaunt reflection and pulls at what is left of his hair. He pauses his self-admonishments to screech at me. I try to cross the street in a hurry. Before I can reach the other side, however, I am nearly struck by a car.
“Whoops!” the driver yells out of the Sedan’s window, as though she has spilt coffee on her blouse rather than almost killed a human being. She is gone in a flash; I am left breathless. Even the man down the street is stunned out of his half-crazed screaming fit.
Only for a moment, of course, and then the girl-guzzling city returns to life. The screams start up again, the cormorant upchucks, the woman without a home paces the Willamette promenade. Tom Cruise sips his Gaja Barbaresco somewhere in Italy.
In a daze, I resume my westward walk, brisker than before. Each stoplight is an enemy, warningly red. While I wait, my feet tap tap tap against the sidewalk, crushing an abandoned cigarette. There’s nearly no point in pausing: cars will try to collide with me whether the light is green or not. I wait anyway.
It’s a matter of minutes (though it feels like more) before I make it to Powell’s in one piece. A different kind of wilderness awaits me—the building is positively lined with books. I think to myself that there is no way I could read every book in even one of the rooms. I think, too, that I would love to try. My comfort levels are high, and I feel like I’m in a different world.
I shut my eyes for a second, and realize that I am in a new city: The City of Books. No cars threaten to swallow me up, but if I want to read about it—why, here’s a book on automobile accidents. If I desire to see cormorants in a less volatile environment, I could pick up this magazine about Pacific Northwestern avians. I could make a difference, I think, as I reach for a book of economic reformations.
The world is more safely explored through writing. But, I realize, I will have to brave the world on my way back to the car. I grab a survival novel on my way to check out.
