Jeremy's art

I walked down to the library today to return "Sleeping Where I Fall", Peter Coyote's memoir about the 1960s. I regret not taking the popular class on the 60s at Santa Cruz. I'm sure some of the major players taught it there still in the 90s.

Anyway, I picked up some other books to decide if any were worth the trouble of checking out and carrying the mile and a half walk back in the swampy heat. I'd set myself up at an empty table with my pile. No sooner had I settled in, flipping through interior design books, when a homeless man set a wooden suitcase in front of me. I let my eyes flicker up to him briefly, not wanting to make eye contact and be launched into a sales-pitch for pencils or bibles or whatever.

The suitcase was the old-fashioned kind artists carried paints and brushes in, and around the edge of it, I could see the plastic bags he'd also set down were full of tubes of water-color paints. He rummaged in one of the bags, produced a powder-pink, flower-illustrated, spiral bound scrap-book and sat back to read it. At some point, he began talking to me, a cacophony of words that started with the literal before quickly devolving into tones and gestures, his barely-toothed mouth making the effort to sculpt the words his lungs didn't have the interest in filling. Every now and then, he cocked his head and told me I was very pretty. It made me uncomfortable, so I was polite but withdrawn in response. He seemed to be amused that I was flipping through books, rather than reading them; he concluded he had read a lot of books in his day, so didn't care to read any more.

At one point, he announced he had lived in San Francisco, and I thought, what if he was one of the people Coyote mentioned in his book? I inquired what he did there, and his story flushed California out of its paragraphs to lurch into a narrative about Texas and getting drunk in a mansion in Mexico. I lost interest again. He could be one of the characters from that book, but if so, his mind was too gone to share any insight.

He introduced himself as Jeremy, and asked my name, after excusing himself for not asking the moment he sat down. He asked where I worked. "College," I said. I hate creating the gap between economics and education by announcing myself as a professor. He took this to mean I was a student, and I didn't correct him (how much longer will I be able to pull that off?). Jeremy asked if I was reading my books. I said, I am looking at the pictures (they were interior design books, after all; most of the writing is really bad, unrelated to the images, or obvious). He laughed at that. "I make pictures," Jeremy said. I asked what he liked to draw with, what he liked to draw. He lost interest in this conversation, again told me I was pretty, and I went back to my book.

A few moments later he asked if I went to church? If I liked beer? If I was married? Did I know about Sesquitach? What? "Sesquitach; I think that's how you say it." You mean Sasquatch? Jeremy smiled. No, I said, secretly hoping he would tell me. He seemed bored again, and went back to perusing his blank scrapbook. At one point, he pulled a page of stickers from it, carefully separated them from the backing, and replaced them on the backing. My peripheral vision watched intently.

He began rummaging through his bags and produced a song book commemorating Jimi Hendrix, and announced he was giving it to me. "I can't take your book." He insisted and pushed it toward me. I sighed, pushed my book aside, and flipped open the musical score. It fell open to a page with lose sheets tucked into it, the top of which had a landscape painting (pictured above). "Take the book, but I'll keep these pages." I was disappointed and went back to my book.

He announced he needed a smoke, and left me with his things. I snapped the photo of his drawing and remembered the man we saw in high school who was stealing from the homeless man's shopping cart while he was in the library. He'd jumped out of the bushes at us, cackled and sneered, then went back to look for more.

Jeremy returned. He continued his slurred, mumbled conversation, while opening a jar of spiced fruit cocktail. The smell disturbed me. He dipped his paint-covered fingers into the jar, and slurped the fruit off them, as he reexamined his stickers. He offered me the jar. I declined. A librarian approached and asked about Jeremy's fingers. "Oh, it's paint. I'm not sick," he said. The librarian seemed nice enough, saying, "oh, good. I was worried." They bantered a little before the librarian said, "You know, you sound like you're drunk. Have you been drinking?" Jeremy admitted to a few beers a few hours ago. The librarian told him he couldn't be there if he was drunk. Jeremy got up, packed up his things, muttering to himself, said "See you around" to me, and left. The Jimi Hendrix book was still on the table, and I sighed and put it in my bag to carry home.