Horse Latitudes | Page 5

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 sleepwalkers, entering Chinatown through the big ornamental gate on Grant Street, weaving in, out, and through the oddly beautiful group pantomime. The streets were almost silent there, except for the muted colors of unhurried feet and rustling clothes. None of the sleepwalkers ever spoke, although they mouthed things to each other. They frowned, laughed, got angry, reacting to something they had heard or said