Dolores Park

Horner woke up early and went for a run. It was already sunny and warm — Labor Day, the advent of San Francisco’s true summer, when the fog lifted and mild weather held for a month or so — and he tied a raggy old t-shirt around his head to shield his scalp from the bright sun. He set out on his usual route, weaving his way to Haight Street, uphill to Golden Gate Park, through the park to the ocean, and back. He tried to concentrate on the Duino Elegies. Hannah had seen him reading it and asked for a synopsis. He’d actually read Rilke’s great, long poem several times, but he found himself unable to boil down and articulate the internal depths to which it plunged again and again, and instead his mind turned to his own writing. Now Horner exulted in the idea that he was writing a book; that he had already written it, finished and published it, and was basking in public and critical praise.

Yet, he had promised to put such thoughts completely out of mind, especially the idea that he was writing all this for anyone other than himself, for his own enjoyment and edification. He did not want to fall into his old habit of losing himself in the fantasy of writing instead of the writing itself. Was it true — was he more interested in the end result, the acknowledgment and recognition, than in the actual, spiritual process?

It was a good run, and Horner made it home weary and sore. He hopped in the shower, then decided to walk up to Noe Valley and buy some bagels on 24th Street. The pace of the day seemed slow and leisurely, with nothing but time for him to dream and write. Horner treated himself to a stroll up and down the main drag of the busy neighborhood, stopping at Phoenix Bookstore to peruse the poetry section. Back at home, he toasted a bagel, smeared it with cream cheese, and sat munching it at the kitchen counter. Then, he cleaned. He cleaned the kitchen, the bathroom, and his own room, tiny flies blowing in through the open window and buzzing around lazily as he worked, the down-home voice of a radio announcer giving him an account of the ballgame underway in Oakland.

When he finished, Horner still had about three hours to kill before heading to 848 for rehearsal. He planned to use that time for writing. But he had no idea where to start. After having finished his book to universal acclaim during his morning run, he now found himself intimidated by the vastness of it, staring at the reality as into an abyss. The beautiful day still beckoned from the windows. He struck upon the idea of rolling a joint with the weed he’d pinched from Hannah and walking down to Dolores Park to write.

As soon as he arrived at the park, spread out on a couple blocks’ worth of sprawling hills with a spectacular view of downtown and the Bay Bridge to the northeast, this seemed like a mistake. The park was jam-packed, almost every patch of shade already occupied. Furthermore, Horner hadn’t counted on the strongly homosexual vibe, with a queer contingent from the nearby Castro having commandeered one whole hilltop corner, the men’s oiled and bulging muscles flashing in the sun. He longed for women to look at, interesting family scenes to observe. Instead, he felt as though he’d stumbled into a bizarre Shangri-La to which he’d not been invited.

Horner walked along the edge of the park looking for a place to sit with a view of his beloved City. How many times had he arrived at dusk, with the park seemingly all to himself, to watch the sunset — the light slowly draining down the facades of the buildings, the incredible contrast between the sun blazing on granite and glass, and the sharp cut of shadows on the other side. All of it framed perfectly by the muted white of the Mission in the foreground, the pleasing lines of palm trees, and the various-colored Victorian houses on the hills. He would watch until headlights began winking on, seemingly all at once by some silent assent on the Bay Bridge, and then the Coney Island lights on the suspension cables of the bridge itself, as though all of downtown were one giant carnival.

But now it was bright and hot, and Horner’s sunburnt arms stung in the midday sun. On the soccer fields there was a mime troupe engaged in some elaborate performance. People were picnicking, ranged along the hill to watch the show, some of them taking a siesta on their blankets. He walked down to the corner store and bought a can of soda and bag of chips to make his own picnic, then found a shady spot just off the sidewalk, under an enormous maple tree. A little to his right was a solitary man, reading; another man softly strummed a guitar to his left. Horner plunked down and fired up his joint, not the least concerned that anyone should object — there were so many illicit activities going on that the rich smell of weed blended right in — smoked half of it, then stubbed it out on the grass.

As his buzz hit, he became aware of the dogs. They were everywhere. In a city as crammed as San Francisco, there was nowhere else for people to take their dogs, and so they congregated in parks. Horner knew this; yet suddenly, the glut of dogs roaming free on the grass amazed and revolted him. They zigged and zagged among the clusters of humans, sniffing at every loose object, lifting their legs with utter abandon at the base of every tree, squatting unceremoniously to shit wherever they happened to get the urge, all while their owners sat gabbing away in complete indifference. Was everyone really so oblivious? Or had they all agreed to wink at this outrageous behavior, determined to allow their animals to release their inhibitions as they themselves could not? Horner half-expected to see one of the larger dogs simply mount the woman sprawled out by herself on the grass at the foot of the hill and begin humping her.

The dogs formed mysterious allegiances and roamed in mindless packs. They turned on each other, snarled, ran off, rolled in the grass. It was fascinating to watch — or rather, it seemed so later, when he’d come down from his buzz — but at the moment Horner felt horrified, as if he’d lifted a rock to observe creatures seething in the muck. And it wasn’t the dogs who horrified him so much as the humans; or rather, the obvious contrasts between them. The humans moved in straight lines, with intention, or the illusion of intention, silly grins or serious expressions on their faces as the case might be. They formed tight little clusters of conversation, or sealed themselves off with a book or a guitar. The dogs, meanwhile, roamed about in a stream of consciousness, roving easily from one thing to the next, guided by whatever trifle or whiff of food caught their attention. Hungry one moment, eager to shit the next; merely hunting for attention or companionship; they swooped around as if in orbit, making passes and getting sidetracked, but always instinctively aware of the center, which was the master, who sat talking or dozing on a blanket somewhere nearby.

Horner realized that it was enviable, preferable in a way, the canine method of interacting and moving through space. Humans were inhibited, neurotic, deceptively menacing balls of flesh. What if humans could move like this, following their noses, sniffing, scratching, making frank animal gestures of friendliness or snarling openly at one another? Perhaps this, too, would be horrible, or perhaps it would be preferable to the lies and fabrications, even in the way we move and glance, the denials of self, the indifference and guardedness, the reluctance to connect. And yet, as he watched carefully, Horner grew disturbed at the way some of the dogs broke from the center, tumbling away like asteroids. Some owners almost seemed to urge on this chaos, deliberately turning away from the network of dogs, as if shrugging off the burden of paying attention. Thus, Horner imagined, a few animals would wind up on one of those posters plastered to bus stops and telephone poles: “Reward: Lost Dog!” with a pleading message and phone number — “Please call!”

Hours had melted away, and Horner had done no writing. He had to get home. But now he was seized with a new terror: What if he really did not want to write, and had done all this, dawdled the bulk of the afternoon and gotten stoned, so that he didn’t have to? He revolved this thought in his head, disturbed by it, especially after he had practically awarded himself the Pulitzer Prize only this morning. In the peculiar telescoping of thoughts that often resulted from getting stoned — as evidenced by his ruminations on the canine world — he now examined his entire history of writing, or not writing, his pattern of inspiration followed by evasion. What was different about this time? Who could say he wouldn’t grow bored with his new idea after a week or a month, or an hour, and let it flicker out, as he had so many ideas before?

Ha! What was different, he reasoned, was that he wasn’t going to put an insane amount of pressure on himself. He would work at his own pace, for his own enjoyment, write freely and put everything down, no matter how personal or embarrassing. Above all, it would be fun. He’d make it fun, keep it fun, and if it wasn’t fun, he’d change it.

Ah, but this in itself was the most insidious evasion of all, his demon-self answered.

And his demon had a point. After all, he’d followed his own pace today, and look where it had gotten him. The only thing to do was to gather himself and leave, salvaging whatever time was left before rehearsal. Horner trudged home in defeat. As he walked, he noticed things. All of his observations were of the type he’d made on the lives of the dogs — extremely up close and absorbed, almost adhesive. People, shops, stray bits of talk and noise. It was as if he were seeing the face of a lover growing larger and larger, magnified to the point of repulsion, every pore a vast crater, every crease of skin a dry riverbed.

When Horner got to his room, he took out a notebook and began to write. It was like peeling scabs. The sentences came slow and painful, and he stopped after each one and examined the wound it had exposed. He wrote one page that way, then another. Then another, and one more. Watching him — me — undergo this torturous process, I want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him, maybe slap him across the face. He was so close; I was so close. I think now that when Keats wrote, “if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all,” he didn’t mean that if it’s not easy, you should give up. He only meant that poetry must emerge from, be in conversation with, the experiences and insights that are immediately at hand in one’s own life. He never said it would be easy, or painless. Seeds split and grow in the dark; sometimes, their progress is slow and jagged. There were fleeting moments when he — I — seemed to catch a glimpse of this truth. If I could reach out and just tap him on the shoulder, shift his gaze a little to the right or left, it all might have been revealed.

After what seemed like an eternity of this scab-peeling sort of writing, it was time to leave for rehearsal. Horner’s mind still felt sticky, and he moved as in a dream, grabbing a sunflower he’d bought yesterday on a whim and left in a vase on the kitchen table. Somehow it seemed necessary to carry the sunflower as he marched up 24th Street to catch the bus to 848 Studio.

So he did. Already wearing his loose-flapping dance pants, he climbed the steep hill to 24th, then worked his way through the throngs in Noe Valley, a lot of people out shopping or heading to dinner. He held the sunflower by the stem, gripping it like a scepter. A woman passing by glanced from the flower to his face, grinning as though he might be a bit daft, and he grew conscious of the flower again and raised it and looked at it, then brought it close to his nose and sniffed it, and finally lowered it and brushed it with his fingers, first feeling the soft, leathery petals, then the rough texture of the head. Then he raised it again and took a good chomp out of the petals, as taste seemed like the last sense he could naturally use — though it occurred to him later that he might have held the sunflower up to his ear and tried listening to it as well.

Horner set the sunflower down on the bus stop bench and became so absorbed in recording his findings in his notebook that, when the bus came, he forgot about the flower completely.

Disjointed, aroused, easily absorbed — Horner judged himself in the perfect frame of mind for rehearsal. Bounding up the stairs, he spotted Hannah, hurling herself across the floor to some music, and at first thought she was the only one there. He couldn’t believe it — perhaps it would be an opportune moment to ask her about the “sex massages,” which she’d let slip was her current source of income a few hours earlier on the phone.

“Hey,” she said, hugging him hello in the midst of a spin, “people are in the back, eating.”

He squinted into the gloom of the kitchen, at first seeing no one.

“Are you messing with me?”

“Yes, I’m messing with you,” she said, and only then did he begin to make out the silhouettes of Kayla, Megan, and Alan.

He had developed a sort of non-verbal repartee between himself and the others, something like the society of canines, somewhere between human and dog, and if they could ever fully capture and encode this secret language, they might have solved the problem of moving through space that seemed to be the whole aim of the project. Upon entering the kitchen, he hugged Kayla hello, careful not to overdo it as her boyfriend, John, hovered near the counter behind them. Then he clutched Megan to him as though he hadn’t seen her in years, muttering “Ohhh, Meg” into her neck, and she reciprocated, throwing herself into the role of long-lost sister or lover. It was then that Horner realized he’d forgotten the sunflower. He explained to Megan how he’d brought her a sunflower, but lost it somewhere along the way. Did she remember to bring hers?

“Well,” she began, “you know, I was sort of counting on you to bring one, so I left mine at home.”

Then there was Rachel, about to lead them in a round of yoga, spreading herself languidly on the floor — doglike, Horner dove into her belly and she giggled, for once welcoming his antics.

And they began: the yoga loosening their limbs, stretching back and forth diagonally, gliding on one leg, touching the sky. They did swan dives into themselves, groaned into a ball with their chins at their knees, sprouted new wings and exploded in every direction.

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