The Circle of Life
One day when I was driving on Los Angeles Avenue in Los
Angeles the city, I saw 3 cop cars worth of cops tiredly swooping homeless
peoples’ possessions into standard issue blue tarps they were trying to fold
into portable bundles for the harassed indigents to take with them to some
other street or park. One cop was shrugging off a homeless man like he wasn’t
there, as he collapsed the man’s tent, and another cop ignored a woman
repeating, “That’s my stuff. That’s my
stuff.” There was a pick up truck full
of grocery carts being reclaimed from the homeless camp, presumably to be taken
back to the stores they came from. One
woman began to charge at a cop but once she got inches away, she realized there
was nothing she could do, physically; she just hollered up close in the police
man’s face. She had the kind of Midland American
accent that I usually hate to hear, but in this situation, the aggressively
nasal vowels added to the sense of her being the mouthpiece for the impoverished
people of this country; she had the righteous bearing of a Dust-Bowl farmer
fighting back in vain.
“Where are we supposed to live, huh? No one wants us in their parks or on the
sidewalk -- are we just supposed to disappear into thin air? You’ll get your own goddamn karma back in
your face for this, you wait and see.
What you’re doing to us is wrong.”
I was at a long stoplight so I watched this scene for what
felt like an hour but was probably only a few minutes.
I wanted to pick a side, but it was so all-around ugly, it put
me in one of my blue moods. I don’t know
if you ever saw the animated movie “Lion King,” but it was a really popular
movie when I was a kid, and I went to see it in the theatre with a group of
friends and my mom. The determinist moral
of the movie is that life is a circle that can never be unbroken, even if you
want to: a person is born, has kids,
dies, repeat ad infinitum. Sitting there next to my mom with her soulful,
doleful eyes already growing wrinkles around them, I felt sorry for her and for
myself too (which was sort of a gift in the long run, as it kicked off a frank
closeness between the two of us that a lot of my friends are jealous of). If this is just all a circle, what did that make me and my mother, then,
but a couple of sad-sacks dutifully carrying out a boring destiny? This is still the main thought that plagues
me when I get sad. It’s that whole type
of question Philosophy Majors’ parents’ waste their money on in college: What is the Meaning of Life?
That is what I was thinking about when I was watching the
LAPD force the relocation of the group of itinerants. I was thinking about how, even though it must
be so horrible to be homeless, I’d had so many irritating experiences with
panhandlers, and honestly felt relieved when I walked down a street in downtown
without encountering a homeless person.
On the other side, there were the weary faces of the cops
who seemed not to like this part of their job, like it was an unpleasant thing
they’d rather not have to do. But of
course I couldn’t really drum up any empathy for them either. Trying to put myself in one of the cops’
shoes for a minute, all I could think of is all the stories of cops killing unarmed
black people all year.
Is this the circle of life?
Everyone just lives and then dies and I can’t even drum up much interest
in such a sad tableaux, the desperate hunger and untended wounds of homeless
people? The often unwanted job of
carrying out society’s ideas of right or wrong?
I was bored and blue for at least a month after that morning, and felt
purposeless for a couple years afterward.
Eventually, I snapped out of worrying about the
pointlessness of it all. It happened
when I went to my girlfriend Sam’s house for the first time, our first Thanksgiving
together, and encountered one of those implausible coincidences; her brother
was one of the cops I’d watched evict the homeless people from their tents and
boxes not too long ago.
That Thanksgiving night is one I don’t describe in
detail. It was Sam, her parents and her
brother Joseph. We just all drank too
much, that was the mistake, and after a while, my lips numb and my equilibrium completely
gone, I looked around at all of us at the table, my intelligent and beautiful
girlfriend, her well-read mother, her honorable dad and the pleasantly quiet
and unperturbed Joseph, who kept belching and then laughing at himself and
saying “I’m sorry, mom!”
Drunk, Sam’s mom didn’t bother to divide her love evenly
between the two siblings, just letting Sam’s conversation starters clunk down
awkwardly, while buoying each of her son’s short sentences with a charmed
tinkle of laughter.
I saw Sam and her dad flirt with each other a little, and
Sam and I had a quick fuck in the bathroom, even though we knew everyone was probably
hearing us and feeling angry or grossed out.
Even with Sam’s mom refusing to dote on her, it probably still made her
feel wistful, or protective, to hear her having sex with me. “We’re all just animals,” I remember saying
out loud to my reflection in the bathroom mirror, when Sam’d just left and I was
splashing cold water on my face. Here we
all were again, all us people stuck in this circle, the idea of wrong and right
not mattering, when nothing really matters anyway. Sam’s brother would have a kid and his own
dad would die. Then eventually he would
die. Then someday his son would
die. Then someday his son’s son would
die.
I left the bathroom and, while Sam was in the living room
loudly teasing her mom for how underdone the turkey had been, I followed Sam’s
brother to the rec room, where he was going to get the dart board, and I surprised
him by pushing a kiss hard onto his lips with my own lips. The instant look on his face was of guilt.
“Oh my god,” I blurted out, immediately sorry and
embarrassed, “you must think I’m such a bad person.”
But he just said, and meant it, “No, it’s okay, it’s okay. Don’t worry about it. I know you didn’t
really mean it.”
Now I just try to forgive everyone everything, all the
time. If life is meaningless, I forgive
fate for its own cruelty. I forgive
everything for being itself, because we none of us can help it.
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