STORY

Neither of them were bums, first off, the black bum or the Mexican bum. They were men, and a world that had somehow decided that it was going to include bums had decided to include them, and it was very nice to think that their situation was fixable, that hard work and determination could lift them out of it, but none of that changed the fact that a man who was down on his luck for a day was a man who was down on his luck for a day, and a man who was down on his luck for years was a bum.

The Mexican bum could do fine among the people of the Richmond District of San Francisco. He could smile with them and he could hold the door open for them outside Gordo's Taqueria on Geary Street, making sweeping chivalric gestures towards women. And he was pretty good about remembering to stick to singing when he was drunk, knowing that anything else would end with confirmation that he was a bum, and at least with singing, some of the people would look at him like there was something romantic about it.

He could do fine among the people because he knew his place among them, they made it very clear, but walking up Geary Street drunk at seven-thirty one evening, he saw the black bum walking towards him and he all of a sudden felt very free, and it was a desire to not have to stick to the rules of a bum but to the rules of a man, and a man seemed like he could do anything because he was not a bum.

The black bum usually stayed downtown, but he actually had a woman who lived in the neighborhood, which made him something completely different altogether - a bum who actually had a real and honest place to go with his sorrow. He wore it on his face - a look that was not fearful of nights in the street because he had faced many of them, but was angry about them, and sad about them, and not just his own, but anybody's who had had them, including the Mexican bum's, and it was that look that set off something wild and unruly in the Mexican bum, not the woman herself as they walked together, and he felt how not having a place to go with sorrow could make a man feel like he did not have a right to it, and it was one thing to not have a right to food or a place to sleep, but it was wrong to not have a right to his own sorrow. As long as a man had a right to that, he was still a man.

It was even in the black bum's walk, the way he was moving at his own pace, which looked like the pace of life. Not the pace of the city, but of the moon and stars. He was moving at his own pace even more than the men of the city in suits and ties, because their pace was really the pace of taxicabs and appointments. The Mexican bum's walk was either drunk and slow or fast enough to stay a step ahead of his sorrow, and he wanted to feel that sorrow because it was his, he had a right to it. If another bum could be walking towards him with a right to as much as the black bum did, then he at least had a right to his own sorrow.

He went to the man first, interrupting his walk, acting like there was something crucial and significant he had to tell him, and from the first moment it was miserable to know that it wasn't from drunkenness that his actions were coming from but from sobriety, that he could get as drunk as he wanted, and there would always be a part of him that stayed sober as long as he was a bum. Drunk enough was dead, and he had seen how that was a real possibility for a bum.

The rest of it was trying to fool them and fool himself that it was from drunkenness. He did not know about them, but he was able to fool himself. He turned to the woman, and it felt good because jealousy and its effects were a legitimate part of the world of men. He told her who he was and what he dreamed of. He told her in Spanish and she did not understand him and that was all right. He tried to take her hand and sing the songs he was used to singing.

"Get outta here! Go on!'

The black bum had seen it coming. He had seen it coming before the Mexican bum had seen it coming, because he knew what a bum was and he knew what drunkenness was. It didn't matter if the Mexican bum's actions were coming from drunkenness or sobriety, because as long as his own actions began soberly, he could handle them either way. That meant using his voice and not his hands, and anyway the Mexican bum wanted his hands. His staggering was offering himself up.

"Get outta here, man! This ain't you!"

And then it was as he thought it would be - the Mexican bum bumping into him as he staggered back, swearing in Spanish and English, trying to force the issue. He did not want to fight, he wanted to be fought, because it was better than nothing. What was he supposed to do, look for that sort of thing in the world of men, who already had things like policemen on their side before anything had even happened yet? This was the only place he had to go. He was pleading with the black bum to hit him now, exaggerating his drunkenness, as a promise that he would go straight down, or go away to lick his wounds, because he just wanted some wounds to lick.

He'd fooled himself, but he hadn't fooled the black bum. Besides, this is still America, the black bum thought, and I am still black. He kept his hands down, and as the Mexican bum was still yelling at him, began walking away, and when he was far enough away that the Mexican bum's words were no longer to him but to himself, or to God, or to everybody, the black bum called out, "You need to have been here for a while! You need to have been here like I have! You need to have been here for a while!"

And a young Middle-Eastern man who'd been watching and listening to the whole thing knew then that he'd been watching and listening to two men who were geniuses, that anybody who called them bums could do it accurately only by taking the word to mean somebody who included genius in them, a genius that could go unnoticed on the street, but could not go unnoticed by each other, as the Mexican bum seemed to know exactly what the black bum meant, and was using his own wild exclamations now to ease the weight of its truth, that he hadn't been here as long as the black bum had, that his people had been here for a long time but not long enough yet for him to know how to have a woman while he had no money, to know how to be all of a man while he was still all of a bum. It was a discussion among geniuses, and like any discussion among geniuses, they could get lost in it, without a thought of whether they were being understood by anyone else, and where they got lost was in the question of whether they even wanted to have that kind of length if it meant that kind of sorrow, and the young Middle-Eastern man who was watching and listening, who was only beginning to know that kind of length and sorrow, wanted to tell them, or tell anybody, that he sure as hell didn't know, that he was as absolutely lost in that question as anybody. He was coming home from an afternoon with a white American girl, who was pretty and friendly and miles and miles away, and had left him feeling miles and miles away from America. And as he watched and listened, he knew that any America that he had a chance of having was the America that the two men were discussing. He was going to have to start with the America at its bottom if he was going to have any chance of an America that was his own. It was going to be an America that was made of sorrow either way, because Americans died just like anybody else, so it might as well be a sorrow that was sure and knew itself. He watched the two men walk away in different directions and he told himself that he was never going to forget the America that they'd been discussing, he was never going to forget it among all the other Americas in all the other discussions, and he was especially not going to forget it among the America that wasn't really interested in a discussion, that looked at a bum and asked what right he had to be a bum in America, because the question wasn't a question when it wasn't meant to open something up outside themselves, but to close something down inside themselves, and the America he'd felt watching and listening to the two bums was actually the most open and free America he'd ever known, because it took in the sorrow of the world as its starting point and what everybody was going to do about that sorrow as its mission, and he felt like running back to the apartment of the white American girl and telling her that this was the America they were in, that whatever America they thought they were in, this was the one they were in, but he didn't know what he expected to come from that, and anyway, it didn't seem in line with learning how to be here himself, as who he was, as a man who saw the black bum and Mexican bum as two men to learn from, stopping there on the street and watching and listening if that was what it took to learn.