Saturday, August 25, 2018

Beginning of Berkeley Noir piece


Downtown Berkeley does not lend itself well to noir. It doesn’t understand subtlety. It doesn’t know nuance. It wears itself on its incense-singed sleeve, letting it all hang out the way that this city does both so well and so terribly. I should know. I’ve been here more than two decades, and either this place has gotten more extreme or I’ve become less so, and in either case I’ve been wondering if a split-up is imminent.

“Hey,” some dude says, and I cringe out of reflex. I’ve already been having a tough day. Jeremy hasn’t been returning my texts and I know damn well he’s been reading them. I mean, it says it right there on the phone. READ 1:46 p.m. READ 2 p.m. Technology is the worst tattletale out there. You can’t hide anything anymore because we’ve made it impossible.

The guy is relatively clean-cut for someone sitting on the sidewalk, and I have to wonder if he is even a part of the typical path of human debris that lines Shattuck Avenue on a more-than-regular basis. Maybe he’s just a student trying to experience Real Life by immersing himself in urine-scented concrete. Maybe he’s a tourist checking his iPhone for a likely Airbnb. Maybe he’s just an observer, and God knows there’s plenty of those here. Maybe, but as it turns out, he’s exactly what I thought he might be.

Berkeley, will you please surprise me from time to time?

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