Fulton Street By Eric Scot Tryon

She was taking me to my first drum circle. Golden Gate Park. Overcast July. The promise of barefoot hippies and music and weed and love, all things I desperately needed. The walk down Fulton would take a half hour, but it was Saturday and Saturday’s were for walking.

“Are you nervous?” she asked.

The 5 bus sped past us, the electric wires above, zapping and popping as it went. 

“Should I be?” 

“I just know it’s not really your scene.” She grabbed my hand, and we hustled across Divisadero even though the light was red. 

That was her thing. Talking in code. What she meant was that since we haven’t been together in years, was I okay doing things with her, going places, the two of us again. “I’m sure I’ll be fine,” I said. 

We traversed the next half dozen blocks in relative silence. She pointed out her favorite houses, the ones with killer stoops and rounded bay windows. I nodded just enough and tried to remember what it was like to live here. Burritos al pastor in the Mission. Pints of Guinness at Vesuvio. Losing an afternoon to the bookshelves of City Lights. She held my hand as we walked, and that was okay. That was her thing. Always holding people’s hands.

“Margot will be there,” she said. “And probably Kettlefish and Big Ed. Remember them?”

More code. Her way of reminding me I hadn’t been back in two years.

“Of course I remember them,” I said and let it go. I was excited to see those people too. Those smiling faces that once served as extras in my life. I suddenly longed to bang on a conga with Big Ed. To pump the keg while Kettlefish held the tap, counting in unison as if we were giving CPR. But maybe they were different now. Maybe our rhythms no longer synced up. 

We were approaching Stanyan and the entrance to the park when we spotted a man sitting in a doorway, perched on an overturned plastic bucket in an alcoved entrance to an apartment building. He was dirty and weather-beaten. As we got closer, I could tell he was awake, lucid. But no cardboard sign. No upturned hat. 

“Do you have any money?” she whispered, squeezing my hand. 

“No,” I lied. I only had hundreds. Travel cash. 

She sighed and that was that. We would walk by with nothing more than a “hello” like we’d done a thousand times before.

But as we approached, his head perked up. One eye was half shut and looked as if it had been so for quite some time. And the skin on his face was stretched so tight over bone I thought it might split.

“Hand in hand and it’s not even Valentine’s Day,” he boomed like a circus ring leader. “Must be love!”

She hesitate then stopped. Looked down at the man. He smiled a closed-lip smile. She looked at me and then back at the man.

“We don’t have any money, sir.” She let go of my hand and grabbed the small knit purse that hung low on her body. “But we can roll you a joint?”

“Are you serious?” I whispered.

“Well then,” he laughed, “must be love and my special day!” 

She plopped down next to him right there on the concrete and took out her rolling papers and an old plastic film cannister. 

“Well, well, well,” the man said, rubbing at his dirty cracked feet as if trying to keep them warm. 

She looked up at me and nodded to the ground. “Sit.”

I sat down, filling the open space between them as another 5 bus went rumbling down Fulton. Her eyes were hard and focused, meticulously, evenly filling the paper before rolling it slow and tight as drum head. The man looked at her then to me with a nod of approval. That was her thing. Rolling the perfect joint. 

She was right: this wasn’t my scene, and she was no longer my girl, and this was no longer my city. And in a few days I would be gone again. Back to humidity and Phillies’ games and a different cast of extras that still felt new and not yet mine.

She put the last lick on the finished joint and handed it to the man along with a lighter.

Yet here I was. Sitting on the sidewalk of Fulton Street on a brisk July afternoon, the cold of the concrete seeping through my jeans like water. She looked over to me and smiled. A smile that said she was glad I was here. A smile that said she knew I wasn’t staying. A smile that said it was okay to exist in the in between.

The man let out a long slow dramatic exhale as if it were not just smoke, but years of his life he’d been waiting to expunge from his lungs. He handed me the joint, and as I put it to my lips, he started tapping a beat on the white plastic bucket he sat on. His rough blackened fingers: Ba-dum-dum, ba-dum-dum, ba-dum-dum-ba-ba-ba… perfectly in time.

Eric Scot Tryon is a writer from San Francisco. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Willow Springs, Pithead Chapel, The Los Angeles Review, Fractured Lit, Monkeybicycle, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Longleaf Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, trampset, and others. Eric is also the Founding Editor of Flash Frog. Find more information at www.ericscottryon.com or on Twitter @EricScotTryon. 

7 January 2022