Horse Latitudes | Page 5

shops and abandoned
wrecking yards. Sweating and out of breath, I ran toward a light. When
I found it, I stopped.
It was a courtyard or a paved patch of ground where a building had
once stood. Fires were going in a few battered oil drums, fed by
children with slabs of dismantled billboards, packing crates, and broken
furniture. Toward the back of the courtyard, men had something
cooking on a spit rigged over one of the drums. Their city- issued
mobile shelters, something like hospital gurneys with heavy- gauge
wire coffins mounted on top, were lined in neat rows against one wall. I
had heard about the tribal homeless encampments, but had never seen
one before. Many of the homeless were the same junkies and losers that
belonged to every big city, but most of the tribal people, I'd heard, were

spillover from the refugee centers and church basements. Whole
villages would sometimes find themselves abandoned in a strange city,
after being forcibly evacuated from their farms in Venezuela and
Honduras. They roamed the streets with their belongings crammed into
government-issue snail shells, fading into a dull wandering death.
But it wasn't always that way. Some of the tribes were evolving quickly
in their new environment, embracing the icons of the new world that
had been forced on them. Many of the men still wore lip plugs, but
their traditional skin stains had been replaced with metal- flake auto
body paint and dime store make up. The women and children wore
necklaces of auto glass, strips of mylar, and iridescent watch faces.
Japanese silks and burned-out fuses were twined in their hair.
Whatever mutual curiosity held us for the few seconds that I stood
there, passed when some of the men stepped forward, gesturing and
speaking to me in a language I didn't understand. I started moving
down the alley. Their voices crowded around me; their hands touched
my back and tugged at my arms. They weren't threatening, but I still
had to suppress an urge to run. I looked back for the jacket that had
followed me from Cafe Juju, but it wasn't back there.
I kept walking, trying to stay calm. I ran through some breathing
exercises a yoga guru I'd knew for a week in Munich had taught me.
After a few minutes, though, some of the tribesmen fell away. And
when I turned a corner, unexpectedly finding myself back on Ninth, I
discovered I was alone.
On Market, I was too shaky to bargain well and ended up paying a
gypsy cab almost double the usual rate for a ride to the Sunset. At
home, I took a couple of Percodans and washed them down with vodka
from the flask. Then I lay down with all my clothes on, reaching into
my pocket to hold the new identity Virilio had provided me. Around
dawn, when the howler monkeys started up in Golden Gate Park, I fell
asleep.
I tried to write some new songs, but I had become overcome with
inertia, and little by little lost track of myself. Sometimes, on the nights

when the music was especially bad or I couldn't stand the random
animal racket from the park anymore, I'd have a drink, and then walk.
The squadrons of refugees and the damp heat of the rainforest that
surrounded the city made the streets miserable much of the time, but I
decided it was better to be out in the misery of the streets than to hide
with the rotten music in my room.
I was near Chinatown, looking for the building where I'd shared a squat
years before, when I ran into a crowd of sleepwalkers. At first, I didn't
recognize them, so complete was their impression of wakefulness.
Groups of men and women in business clothes waited silently for buses
they had taken the previous morning, while merchants sold phantom
goods to customers who were home in bed. Smiling children played in
the streets, dodging ghost cars. Occasionally a housewife from the
same neighborhood as a sleepwalking grocer (because these night
strolls seemed to be a localized phenomenon, effecting one
neighborhood at a time) would reenact a purchase she had made earlier
that day, entering into a kind of slow motion waltz with the merchant,
examining vegetables that weren't there or weighing invisible oranges
in her hand. No one had an explanation for the sleepwalking
phenomenon. Or rather, there were so many explanations that they
tended to cancel each other out. The one fact that seemed to be
generally accepted was that the night strolls had become more common
as the rainforest crept northward toward San Francisco, as if the
boundary of Amazonia was surrounded by a region compounded of the
collective dreams of all the cities it had swallowed.
I followed the