Friday's Whims of the Time Traveler 12.1: November 10th, 2010
Walnut Avenue
by Belinda Roddie
Three years ago, I was walking to the liquor store on the corner of Walnut and Glassell when I saw a young, crazed man walk out of a house and smash his guitar into pieces. It was the typical black and white Fender – a Stratocaster, I could only guess – and he swung it into the pavement like a riled up rock star during a wild stadium concert. He kept swinging until he was only holding the snapped neck, and even then he continued to slam the remains into the ground, letting the fretboard split in his hands, the strings stretched taut as he tossed the fragments aside.
A girl watched him the whole time from the doorway, blonde and puffy-eyed and looking more than a little numb. As the man turned away from the wreckage and headed back into the house, she let her hand stray for his arm. But he pushed it aside and disappeared into the shadows of the ramshackle shelter. The whole time, he was completely silent.
I don’t remember much about the man’s looks, just the fact that he had a beanie pulled tight over his head and that one of his arms was heavily inked. I also don’t remember anything else about the girl except her face. There was something twisted about it, distorted, like an artwork by Salvador Dalí. She looked more than tired, more than shaken. She looked simply unreal. There was no other way to describe it. The way her eyes dimmed even in the thin sunlight, the way her cheeks were hollowed out in the moist breeze – colorless.
I stood on the corner for a while after what I considered to be a suitably dramatic occasion, looking back on the house but unable to see anyone else emerge from it. I merely let my eyes fall upon the half-risen walls by the sidewalk, the multitude of cars parked nearby. One particular truck’s headlights were on.
I trudged to the liquor store silently, bought the usual items to satisfy my unhealthy dietary routine, and went back the way I came. When I approached the house again, I slowed my pace.
***
The house looked as if it had been through years of neglect. The walls were gray and remarkably thin, as if they were only tattered drapes to keep out the cold. Gray shingles, cracked windows with gray shutters, gray doors on bent, uneven hinges. In fact, the whole place seemed gray. Even the level patio, slightly imposing with walls of brick that reached well above my chest, was just a gray shadow. The only other colors belonged to the cars, and even then, they were mostly shades of faded yellow, dirty white, and the occasional rusty red.
I didn’t know how many people lived in that house. I had seen enough people enter that I couldn’t tell which were visitors and which were residents. They all came in different shapes, sizes, and colors, and only a few of those were Latino. The rest were Caucasian, ranging from red-haired to bald, heavy-set with the stretched T-shirt displaying some sort of awkwardly placed logo. They were smokers, from what I had seen – I could smell the tobacco when I passed. That bitter smell, nipping the nostrils even in the heat.
I had been past the house several times, but I only started focusing on it after the guitar incident. I never saw the man responsible for the event afterward; instead, I noticed other recurring characters in the bizarre novella I had become a witness to. Specifically, I observed one of the few Latinos, with big poofy hair, black as pitch. His face was gaunt and unshaven. He liked his cigarettes, and each time I saw him, he wore the same hooded sweatshirt – gray.
Some people must feel obligated to blend in with the landscape.
***
When I approached the house again on the same day I had seen the silent wrath of a stranger, I slowed my pace. I wanted to see if anything had changed, if anything else had taken place. It was after an intermission, I thought; Act Two must have started. But there was no sudden event, no random bout of intensity or rage, no further damage.
What I saw instead was a circle, all men, including the Latino with the gray sweatshirt, sitting on the patio. They had set up chairs and lit up cigarettes. They were laughing and cussing and looking like they were having a good time. They talked loudly but I couldn’t understand what they were saying. Though they spoke the same language, it was as if I couldn’t grasp the diction or the inflections. They had situated themselves around a particular area and I craned my neck when I tried to get a closer look.
That’s when I saw the guitar. There it was, the body half intact, the fretboard in pieces nearby. It was a deformed skeleton of one man’s sporadic angst, and it had not been moved. No one had attempted to clear it away. It was like a shrine, a forbidden altar that could not be touched. I couldn’t tell if these men didn’t care or if they simply didn’t dare to touch it. An object of emotion is never something to get too close to.
So they just sat around it, and I finally swept myself away from the laughter and the smoke. The truck’s headlights were still on and I felt like saying something, but my coat felt heavy on my shoulders and the heat of the sun gave me no other desire but to head back to my room and eat my fill.
***
I never really questioned just why everything happened the way it did that day, and why I had been so drawn to the house since then. The whole atmosphere of that place, the aura of those men sitting around the remains of that guitar – it all intrigued me. I would always remember the black and white scraps of that destroyed instrument, standing out amongst a whole lot of gray.
Of course, maybe one reason I’ve never questioned what happened is because I’ll never get an answer for it. I’ll never know if the man who obliterated that guitar actually owned it – it could’ve been someone else’s. I’ll never knew who that girl was, and what she possibly had to do with this show of raw emotion and destruction. I’ll never know why those men just sat down around the scrambled mess of something that could’ve seen a spotlight on a stage. What I do know, however, is that it was the first time I ever saw life brim from that spot on Walnut Avenue.
There’s actually a lot of color on that street. I remember walking by the house a few days later, passing a particular growth of green leaves and shrubbery that rose like a natural barricade against the sidewalk. There was one flower, fully in bloom, present in that stretched wall of green. There was no explanation for it in my mind; it stuck out from everything else. Droopy white petals, a pink inner stalk that protruded almost seductively from the bud’s center. Almost a lily but not quite. Delicate. Perhaps irrelevant to everything else I had seen. But something stirring nonetheless.
Something about that flower allowed me to look at the gray walls of that weary house and think that whatever was there was stirring with some sort of unbridled emotion. Some awakening. Color from a shield of dull, lifeless shade, just like that pure white among that weary green. It made me think, and I kept walking.
***
I passed the street occasionally just to check on that flower, to see if it was still blooming. Eventually it died and withered in the June heat, but something else was coming to life in its place. Bit by bit, the scattered splinters of that guitar on that open patio were swept away, though they lay in a somber wake for quite some time before someone made the effort to throw them away. I had hoped to find one last remaining piece, to pick it up and take it back with me like some relic of an event I was never really a part of. But I was okay with not taking away such a splinter of something that wasn’t mine. And I left that gray house behind with the colors on my back and the moment finally shuffling into the corner of my memory.
The work you see here was originally written in the spring of 2008 and is based on a true anecdote. It was last modified for a short story reading on November 10th, 2010.
by Belinda Roddie
Three years ago, I was walking to the liquor store on the corner of Walnut and Glassell when I saw a young, crazed man walk out of a house and smash his guitar into pieces. It was the typical black and white Fender – a Stratocaster, I could only guess – and he swung it into the pavement like a riled up rock star during a wild stadium concert. He kept swinging until he was only holding the snapped neck, and even then he continued to slam the remains into the ground, letting the fretboard split in his hands, the strings stretched taut as he tossed the fragments aside.
A girl watched him the whole time from the doorway, blonde and puffy-eyed and looking more than a little numb. As the man turned away from the wreckage and headed back into the house, she let her hand stray for his arm. But he pushed it aside and disappeared into the shadows of the ramshackle shelter. The whole time, he was completely silent.
I don’t remember much about the man’s looks, just the fact that he had a beanie pulled tight over his head and that one of his arms was heavily inked. I also don’t remember anything else about the girl except her face. There was something twisted about it, distorted, like an artwork by Salvador Dalí. She looked more than tired, more than shaken. She looked simply unreal. There was no other way to describe it. The way her eyes dimmed even in the thin sunlight, the way her cheeks were hollowed out in the moist breeze – colorless.
I stood on the corner for a while after what I considered to be a suitably dramatic occasion, looking back on the house but unable to see anyone else emerge from it. I merely let my eyes fall upon the half-risen walls by the sidewalk, the multitude of cars parked nearby. One particular truck’s headlights were on.
I trudged to the liquor store silently, bought the usual items to satisfy my unhealthy dietary routine, and went back the way I came. When I approached the house again, I slowed my pace.
***
The house looked as if it had been through years of neglect. The walls were gray and remarkably thin, as if they were only tattered drapes to keep out the cold. Gray shingles, cracked windows with gray shutters, gray doors on bent, uneven hinges. In fact, the whole place seemed gray. Even the level patio, slightly imposing with walls of brick that reached well above my chest, was just a gray shadow. The only other colors belonged to the cars, and even then, they were mostly shades of faded yellow, dirty white, and the occasional rusty red.
I didn’t know how many people lived in that house. I had seen enough people enter that I couldn’t tell which were visitors and which were residents. They all came in different shapes, sizes, and colors, and only a few of those were Latino. The rest were Caucasian, ranging from red-haired to bald, heavy-set with the stretched T-shirt displaying some sort of awkwardly placed logo. They were smokers, from what I had seen – I could smell the tobacco when I passed. That bitter smell, nipping the nostrils even in the heat.
I had been past the house several times, but I only started focusing on it after the guitar incident. I never saw the man responsible for the event afterward; instead, I noticed other recurring characters in the bizarre novella I had become a witness to. Specifically, I observed one of the few Latinos, with big poofy hair, black as pitch. His face was gaunt and unshaven. He liked his cigarettes, and each time I saw him, he wore the same hooded sweatshirt – gray.
Some people must feel obligated to blend in with the landscape.
***
When I approached the house again on the same day I had seen the silent wrath of a stranger, I slowed my pace. I wanted to see if anything had changed, if anything else had taken place. It was after an intermission, I thought; Act Two must have started. But there was no sudden event, no random bout of intensity or rage, no further damage.
What I saw instead was a circle, all men, including the Latino with the gray sweatshirt, sitting on the patio. They had set up chairs and lit up cigarettes. They were laughing and cussing and looking like they were having a good time. They talked loudly but I couldn’t understand what they were saying. Though they spoke the same language, it was as if I couldn’t grasp the diction or the inflections. They had situated themselves around a particular area and I craned my neck when I tried to get a closer look.
That’s when I saw the guitar. There it was, the body half intact, the fretboard in pieces nearby. It was a deformed skeleton of one man’s sporadic angst, and it had not been moved. No one had attempted to clear it away. It was like a shrine, a forbidden altar that could not be touched. I couldn’t tell if these men didn’t care or if they simply didn’t dare to touch it. An object of emotion is never something to get too close to.
So they just sat around it, and I finally swept myself away from the laughter and the smoke. The truck’s headlights were still on and I felt like saying something, but my coat felt heavy on my shoulders and the heat of the sun gave me no other desire but to head back to my room and eat my fill.
***
I never really questioned just why everything happened the way it did that day, and why I had been so drawn to the house since then. The whole atmosphere of that place, the aura of those men sitting around the remains of that guitar – it all intrigued me. I would always remember the black and white scraps of that destroyed instrument, standing out amongst a whole lot of gray.
Of course, maybe one reason I’ve never questioned what happened is because I’ll never get an answer for it. I’ll never know if the man who obliterated that guitar actually owned it – it could’ve been someone else’s. I’ll never knew who that girl was, and what she possibly had to do with this show of raw emotion and destruction. I’ll never know why those men just sat down around the scrambled mess of something that could’ve seen a spotlight on a stage. What I do know, however, is that it was the first time I ever saw life brim from that spot on Walnut Avenue.
There’s actually a lot of color on that street. I remember walking by the house a few days later, passing a particular growth of green leaves and shrubbery that rose like a natural barricade against the sidewalk. There was one flower, fully in bloom, present in that stretched wall of green. There was no explanation for it in my mind; it stuck out from everything else. Droopy white petals, a pink inner stalk that protruded almost seductively from the bud’s center. Almost a lily but not quite. Delicate. Perhaps irrelevant to everything else I had seen. But something stirring nonetheless.
Something about that flower allowed me to look at the gray walls of that weary house and think that whatever was there was stirring with some sort of unbridled emotion. Some awakening. Color from a shield of dull, lifeless shade, just like that pure white among that weary green. It made me think, and I kept walking.
***
I passed the street occasionally just to check on that flower, to see if it was still blooming. Eventually it died and withered in the June heat, but something else was coming to life in its place. Bit by bit, the scattered splinters of that guitar on that open patio were swept away, though they lay in a somber wake for quite some time before someone made the effort to throw them away. I had hoped to find one last remaining piece, to pick it up and take it back with me like some relic of an event I was never really a part of. But I was okay with not taking away such a splinter of something that wasn’t mine. And I left that gray house behind with the colors on my back and the moment finally shuffling into the corner of my memory.
The work you see here was originally written in the spring of 2008 and is based on a true anecdote. It was last modified for a short story reading on November 10th, 2010.
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