Excerpt from Dolores Park: A Memoir of the 1990s Bay Area Art Scene

There were many days when C. Horner emerged like a mole from the subway tunnel, fell in line with the others who shoved their tickets into the turnstile slots and were in turn spit out through the clicking machines, was conveyed up to the street by the endless escalator, and emerged to walk past the usual hoodlums sitting on the cement block by the alley and the frail waifs crouching along the chain-link fence that enclosed the Mission Library branch, begging for change. He crossed the street in a daze, the sun dazzling him through the mist blowing in over Twin Peaks, turned the corner on 23rd St. for the home stretch, and passed by his favorite character, T.J. Eckleberg, who sat in his customary spot on the sidewalk outside the corner convenience store.

T.J. Eckleberg, as Horner had secretly named him, was a dark, miserable-looking man who stationed himself there every day, seemingly only to watch Horner pass by. He was always there; he always wore a frazzled nylon jacket and surrounded himself with a sprawl of ratty clothes in plastic bags; he was always reading a book. He never failed to glance up into Horner's eyes as he passed, but the man was too proud to ask him for any change. Only once had he done that, and it had been an odd day, a Saturday, which somehow didn't seem to count: Horner, caught in a reverie as he paused before crossing the street, had felt a tug on his sleeve; turning, he'd found himself looking into the face of Eckleberg, who simply held out an upturned hand, as if demanding the return of a cigarette lighter from someone who'd borrowed it. Automatically, Horner had shoved a hand into his pocket, fished out a crumpled dollar bill, and slipped it to Eckleberg, who accepted the money silently and sat back down in his spot. Aside from this unusual exchange, no look or nod or grimace of acknowledgment had ever passed between them, although they clearly had grown familiar to one another.

It was a standoff. C. Horner merely walked by, pressing his own dark brown eyes into Eckleberg’s soft brown eyes (soft; and yet flashing with silent defiance), only so far, and no farther. Perhaps Horner looked a little more deeply into them one day; the next day, a tad less. It was as though there was an impenetrable cataract between them, as though they viewed each other through a film, and it was preposterous that anything more should pass between them than these mysterious, completely impersonal, yet oddly intimate glances… Yet Horner maintained the fantasy that one day — he would know when the time came and simply do it, with no premeditation — he would simply approach Eckleberg from a different angle, one which prevented the man from looking up and throwing the cataract between them. True, he could never be approached from behind. Perhaps that was the whole reason he sat with his back to the wall, guarding his peripheries jealously. Nevertheless, Horner would slip beneath his radar and sit right down next to him on the sidewalk, say hello and begin talking with him, just as though they were old friends who had arranged to meet here.

Perhaps that was Eckleberg’s secret: He had arranged to meet a friend here long ago, years ago. At that time he’d had a home, and a family, he was an entirely respectable member of the community; a welder, a fruit-seller at the market. Yet his son — could it have been his son? — had never shown up. Still, he dragged himself out to wait for him every day, reading a book, his clothes and his skin wearing against the cement and bricks, looking up into the face of everyone who passed, hoping for a spark of recognition, since he had long ago forgotten what his daughter — was it his daughter, then? — looked like. Daughter? Mother? Wife? God? But Christ himself hadn’t had to wait this long for someone to recognize him. For Christ had been holy — angry and anguished, but clear. Nowadays, saints are cracked mirrors, unable to show anyone to themselves except in distorted, fragmented reflections. Or so it seemed to Horner, although he didn’t think about it much at the time; only passed quickly, passed under the gaze of Eckleberg on his way home from work, from the store, from the movies, on his way home, always on his way home and always in a hurry. Passed under the silent verdict of that gaze — a judgment all the more harsh for its utter indifference.

Sometimes as he continued on, now crossing Guerrero, just one block from home, a strange weariness overtook Horner, and he had to resist the urge to collapse right there on the street, like a marathon runner who had endured 26 miles and yet could not muster the energy for the final four hundred yards. He would redouble his effort, and with a final push go that last block, through the door and up the stairs, only to let the weariness catch up to him at last in his bedroom doorway, where it hurled him onto the bed in a mindless heap. There he languished, napping or reading, waking up later for a drowsy meal that plunged him even deeper into exhaustion. He’d read some more, or make a feeble attempt at writing, before going to bed, sometimes as early as 10 o’clock.

But one particular Friday, he strode out of the subway tunnel exhilarated. He dropped a dollar into the velvet sack of the accordionist whose eerie playing filled the underground with the sounds of a carnival. Her rising wail seemed to lift him up to the street even more surely than the escalator, to claw at him like a hand from the grave and tug him down even as it thrust him up and out. He passed by the hoodlums, passed by the frail waifs hugging the fence, crossed the street shielding his eyes from the sun’s dazzle, passed by Eckleberg with his usual blank look — an even draw, this time. Something was different today, he did not feel like collapsing on Guerrero only one block from home, in fact he felt like walking faster and faster, breaking into a run and speeding right past the corner of 23rd and Dolores until he reached the top of the hill at Chattanooga and simply took off flying—

It was an enormous vitality that surged through him. A poetry. And he knew that in this state he could write and write and write… but it was fragile and precarious, and he had to carry it forward with a single-minded determination and plunge it into his work, or else it would soften, dissipate, and frazzle off in a thousand different directions. In this mood, he might squander the energy on a long, animated conversation — with Margaret, or with Sonny, or with a stranger on the street. Or he might sit down as he used to do in his Austin days and drink it away in gulps from a bottle of bourbon, drown the gleam in his eyes until there was nothing left but a sodden leer. He had to be especially wary of phone calls and women’s eyes. He wished he had Odysseus’s crew alongside him to lash him to the mast of his own being as he sailed through the irresistible sirens of phone calls and women’s eyes. He could already see it in the eyes of the women he passed as he rushed onwards — as they glanced up, they could recognize the ecstatic energy flashing on his face, and some of them recoiled as if he’d touched them. He must appear a fool, an idiot, almost a maniac. What he imagined as a sexual spark might be horrific and menacing to them. Horner knew that he was far too animated to stop and try to talk to any of the women he passed, and he wouldn’t know what to say to them even if he did. But he could easily take his energy and dole it out in dribs and drabs as he wandered the streets for hours on end, grinning at every face he saw. Or he could stagger home, shrug off his coat, and snatch the phone out of its cradle, dialing up anyone and everyone and spewing his words out into space.

In the end, Horner could not write. Not in any sort of focused, organized way. His sense of perspective and proportion was all wrong. He could not find the right distance, could not approach his subject matter from the right angle. He could see it, sitting right there, waiting for him to breathe on it and bring it to life. But something wouldn’t allow him to breathe.

He was me. I was him. At least, that’s what my memory tells me. It’s hard to believe as I observe C. Horner from the distance of however many years, crawling helpless as a beetle over the corrugated surfaces of San Francisco, looking for love, looking for friendship, looking for something, always looking for something. I want to reach out and help him along over some of the places where he got stuck, struggled, at times gave up. I want to tell him it’ll be all right — or maybe, in certain cases, warn him that it definitely won’t be all right — but all I can do is watch. All I can do is try to make sense of it all, from the distance of however many years.