A Rock For Your Pocket
There starts to be a real pleasure in walking around the world with crutches from the satisfying clacker smacker of hard plastic and metal landing on the pavement to the joy of swinging my whole body from one standing point to the next, like taking big gulps of sidewalk instead of steps. My palms burn with the effort, resting on the grips of my lofstrand model walking aids, but I am resolutely happy and it shows. A man swerves my herky jerky to run into the subway station, bounding down the stairs two at a time, when he suddenly slows, turns back up the stairs and smiling, approaches me and touches my sleeve lightly. “Hey, you’re beautiful,” he says in an easy way. “I’m going to miss my train, but it doesn’t matter because I met you today.” He pauses. “I don’t need anything,” he adds, understanding how incongruent with urban social mores his current actions are. I laugh as my response, which I can see he thinks is just exactly perfect. He smiles and with one final pat on my sleeve, moving more slowly now, he heads back into the gaping maw of the subway with a jauntier and less frantic air.
That is how I know things are about to happen. Good things. I had to move away and come back, in a limited possibility constrained movement iteration, to make this happen. Last time I was here, a crazed and enraged man attempted to puncture my foot with a used drug needle. Luckily he chose an unattached syringe instead of one of the many needles fanned out beside him on the sidewalk but still broke a bone in my foot when he smashed it onto my exposed skin in my delicately formed ballerina flats. This is not the reason I am on crutches but I think of all the times this city tried to destroy me in one way or another and how much I have dreaded these homecomings until now, a slightly grey afternoon, with nothing particularly special to call it out.
I make my way down the street with anticipation. I don’t have to wait long for the next thing. A local pub, one of those San Francisco institution type places, is playing live music outside. It’s barely warm, which could be a tagline for the city itself, but people are dancing in short sleeves as if it were middle summer instead of late fall. Someone with particularly energetic and ungainly dance moves catches my eye, runs over and starts dancing with me on the street corner and I pull moves that I imagine look particularly cool while on crutches, watching as the whole party migrates to the corner and eventually reforms around me dancing and whooping until that song is over. “Wooo, you dance like the world is on fire,” one of the onlookers shouts. “I dunno about that,” I shout back, “but my heart is.” Nina Sanko – Fire Heart –, is the nickname given to me by a quechua guide on the trail from Cusco to Machu Picchu in Peru and I am obsessed with the thought of living up to it.
And just as quickly as it began, the song is over and I continue onward to my hotel, waving one of my crutches in fond farewell. After sharing charming anecdotes with lobby dwellers, I continue to my room, where I change into my costume. My friend is having a stellar themed wedding reception and I am dressing like a kind of outer space fairy, in a silver hologram dress with pointy shoulder pads, and an interstellar space/ moon/ stars headband. Silver lipstick and other random sparkles everywhere are of course required and with all this applied, away I go to the event space.
I don’t know most of the people there but it doesn’t matter. I sit in one spot with my crutches beside me and I occasionally pick one up and use it for emphasis in conversation. Another real advantage. My friend’s mother and all her friends are there and eventually they make their way over to see who I am and why I am there. I know my friend’s mother is very wealthy and I assume her friends are also, based on the way they are dressed and they carry themselves. They also seem to be out of their minds, which makes them infinitely more interesting than they’d otherwise be. “Are you a fairy?” one of them asks. “I’m not not a fairy,” I respond smiling. “That’s just what a fairy would say,” she says confidently. “So,” and she lowers her voice looking around “do you grant wishes?” “Um… depends what they are,” I say. “I cannot do anything manifestly negative, and I won’t move resources from one person to another, but in the sense that entropy works to our benefit and that eventually everything disperses and we become more alike and more free… I can get behind those kinds of wishes.” “Well okay,” she says with less certainty. “So how do I do this?” “Uh…” I am actually not certain about this, having never been asked to do it before. “Well you whisper your wish to me, it should be something deep in your heart, your innermost desire,” I continue “...and then I’ll ask you to repeat it twice more the same way and I’ll grant it for you.” “Okay,” she says brightly. “Let me think of it first.” I begin to feel mild alarm at how intensely she is thinking but my curiosity overrides my concern. “I’ve got it,” she says. “What is your wish?” I demand imperiously, sitting up straighter. No one ever granted anything with bad posture. “I wish I wasn’t so worrisome,” she says quietly. “Mmm,” I say surprised. “Is there a way to phrase that in the positive?” “I wish I was more light-hearted and carefree,” she says. “Perfect,” I say. “Now repeat.” “I wish I was more light-hearted and carefree,” she says again. “One more time,” I say. “I wish I was more light-hearted and carefree,” she repeats, still quietly but more confident. I flick my wrist in a way I think is graceful and say “May it be so.” “Well, did it work?” she says to me eyes open wide. I smile benevolently. “Well you tell me,” I reply. “Oh my god,” she screams. “GIRLS, GIRLS, she is granting wishes! WISHES! Come over here and have your wish come true. Mine just did! It WORKS!”
Very quickly, a queue formed of middle-aged and older women, chattering excitedly and I repeated the same formula and the same words.
“I wish I was a free spirit.”
“May it be so.”
“I wish I could stop comparing myself to everyone else I meet.”
“May it be so.”
“I wish I was helping find solutions instead of just creating problems.”
“May it be so.”
“I wish I could find the same joy I had when I was a young girl.”
“May it be so.”
As the evening wound on and the wishes continued, not a single one was selfish, or malignant. Not a single person walked away feeling dissatisfied. Everyone was willing to be touched by whatever it was that was radiating from the silver fairy with the crutches.
I once gave a sobriety rock to a heroin addict I met outside of an arcade. After an hour of conversation, clutching the rock that I carry in my pocket for luck and for tactile sensation, he headed home for what he knew would be a difficult detox. In the way that I just know things, his entire life changed in that moment. Was it me, the random stranger who understands more than she let on, who showed him some kindness in a moment where he needed some? Or was it the rock? Steadfast for possibly millenia, polished to a pleasing sheen, satisfying in size for fingers and pockets, radiating the energy of all the places it had been and was still to go? Now labeled for the task at hand, did it accomplish miracles? Rocks are always doing that, actually, and I am only smart enough to know to keep them around.
What is it about this body, this amalgam of spirit and blood sauce and bones and skin that has patterned itself in such a way that maybe it could help you? Especially I think/ know about all the times when it was stupid and it couldn’t help itself. It/ I am unqualified to do something different for you. This ability to tap into the collective unconscious and to pull something into the currently now is even more fleeting than I am. And yet, sometimes, the pattern emerges under the stars, even if you can only see them on my headband.
