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Excerpt from mail sent in 1998
...When I'd been walking along Warren Street, I'd seen shrubs and trees bowing under the weight of pollen. I'd thought that it would sure be nice if a rain came along and knocked all that pollen off and swept it into storm drains. Some day, I thought, a real rain will come and wipe all this scum under the streets.
As I was sitting on top of Twin Peaks, it started to rain.
Had I asked for the rain to come now? I walked quickly down the steps, down the road. I walked quickly down the dirt trail next to the reservoir, the trail that opens out near the intersection of Marview and Farview. The rain was picking up. I was starting to get kind of wet.
I picked my way down the rocky path, avoiding the damp brushes of the plants lining the path. I had nearly reached the sidewalk and civilization when I looked up and saw the two men jog/walking towards me, coming up the path.
They were short, of Mexican descent, dressed kind of scruffy. They didn't appear happy to see me. One of them slowed down to a walk. The other kept jogging, saying something in Spanish. I kind of wondered why they were in such a hurry. I mean, I was moving fast, but I was heading towards an area where there were driveways to shelter in. They weren't running towads a rain shelter.
Then I heard the gentle rumble of an engine. Then I saw, behind them, out on the street, the police car emerge into view, backing up. The runner who'd slowed down started jogging again. In his right hand, he clutched some greens. I wondered if this guy had been picking plants around here to supplement a salad; I wondered if some helpful citizen had called in this suspicious activity to the police. And now here was a police car, complete with a helpful police officer inside. How nice to be white, I thought, so that I do not fall under suspicion any time I loiter on a quiet street.
As I walked towards the street and the police car, it occurred to me that right now, I might be under suspicion. Perhaps I'd been meeting with those two gentlemen on the path. Perhaps I'd been conducting some transaction. After all, the paranoid people who would call down the police on a couple of strangers--these paranoid people might also think that those greens that one of them had been carrying were something illicit.
I'm pretty sure they were not anything illicit.
I thought about the men on the path. They didn't really seem like hard-bitten types. I looked at the police car, quickly looked away, and started walking along the sidewalk at a brisk pace. I figured that if I got stopped, I would immediately ask if I could sit in the car, out of the rain.
There was one officer in the vehicle, and he was faced with a choice. There were two people hurrying up the path, and me on the sidewalk. The officer wasn't going to be able to keep track of everyone. He could get out of the car, into the rain, and follow those two guys along that dirt path.
Or he could follow me and stay dry.
I kept walking. The road turned. I was out of view of the car. Behind me, I heard a squealing of tires. The police car came rushing up. It slowed down as it passed me. Then it sped up again, went around a corner out of sight. When I got to the top of Glenbrook street, the police car was a block down the hill. It had turned around so that it could watch this spot. It had been idling, but now it started driving up the hill. I walked downhill, eyes ahead. The police car crested the hill, went around the corner, was out of sight. I would not encounter it again.
Heading down the hill, it occurred to me that it might have been better in a few ways if I'd started out by just walking up to the police car and asked the helpful officer inside for a ride. Maybe my actions had just reinforced some of his prejudices. I tried to imagine myself walking up to the police car and asking for a ride, asking in a calm voice. I figured that maybe I didn't have the nerve to do the best thing.
I decided to stop in at the Tassajara Bakery on Cole and Parnassus to get some coffee to warm me up for the last part of my walk home through the rain. By this time I'd been in the rain for a while, and was very wet indeed. I stepped up to the front door, which mostly consists of glass. Through the glass, I saw a small brown child hanging from the door handle inside. I realized that my glasses were so beaded with water that I couldn't tell the child's descent. He saw me, started laughing and backed away from the door. I opened the door and stepped inside.
The boy was looking at me and laughing. I was wet, I was dripping, I was a mess, I was a drowned rat. I grinned at him as his mother tugged at him and started clucking.