Marin
By: Harry Hogg
Tags: Creativity, Writing, San Francisco, Religion, Poetry

Some said he was an aged Rockstar, lonely after a life of abusing drugs. They said he didn’t have friends outside that kind of world. They said, as well, he could have any woman he wanted.

When the long black limousine pulled up outside the diner, on Van Ness Avenue, a woman, about thirty-five, with long bare legs, stepped out. She was wearing sparkling Jimmy Choo pumps, and wore a crucifix around her neck that buried in her cleavage. She was carrying Fig Newtons and a bottle of Saintsbury Pinot. She instructed the chauffeur to wait.

The patrons inside the diner stared into the street, as if watching a movie star arrive.

Marin didn’t see anything worth straining to see, in fact, he never strained to see anything happening in the world. For him, every night was another starless, black, huge, empty void.

They called him Marin because, for all anyone knew, that was where he came from. Nobody laughed at anything Marin said. It just wasn’t done. When he walked on the San Francisco streets, it sounded like stones had embedded into the soles of his shoes and people looked up from whatever they were doing.

Having arrived at the diner earlier in the evening, it was full, the doors wide open. The manager greeted him enthusiastically and hastily arranged another table, close to the door. Marin sat alone, drinking bottomless cups of coffee. His eyes were a hypnotic, iridescent, inky black-blue, framed by dark lashes and darker brows.

When the woman entered, she looked around, seeing to him to her left.

“I’m so glad I found you, Marin?” She said. “I brought you Fig Newtons and Saintsbury Pinot. Can we talk?”

Marin didn’t look up from the table. He heard her, but didn’t look up. She sat across from him. “I want to know the secret of your creative powers. I’m here to ask you to abandon your lonely life. I want you to use your powers for the purpose they were intended,” she said, pushing the Fig Newtons under his gaze and waited anxiously for him to speak.

Marin never believed in wasting words. He let others use short, stupid, meaningless sentences, keeping his own mind as blank as possible.

When he was a little boy, he lived with his parents in the Glasgow tenements. He was too shy to make friends. As a teenager, Marin spent years sat in a Paris apartment writing letters, drinking Saintsbury Pinot. After his thirty-third birthday, alone in the world, he never again got comfortable sitting in houses.

Marin liked it when no one expected anything from him. He left Paris because the only requirement of friendship was to allow others in close, those who wanted to feel his glow of perfection. But that was the hardest thing for Marin to allow. He wanted to be alone. He didn’t want followers, entourages, or disciples.

It was then he moved to California. He gave up writing letters and lived in a VW camper van on Belvedere Island, over the Golden Gate Bridge, not really an island at all. The local residents wanted him moved on, living in a privileged zip code, and him, a homeless person living in a vehicle. It was unacceptable.

The woman wearing the Jimmy Choo pumps, lived in Tiburon, owning a mansion high up, overlooking the bay. After a brief encounter, walking her dog, she had taken to the homeless man’s demeanor, allowing him to park in the driveway of her home.

In daylight, the sky was a wide calm blue. At night the moon rose from the other side of the house. Across the bay, the homes of Sausalito reflected on the water. Marin was grateful to the woman, giving her the crucifix he had worn around his own neck.

During the day, Marin ate only Fig Newtons and green apples; core, seeds, and stem. He was lean and long, with no fat or muscle tone hampering his tall skeleton. He had hollows under his eyes, like charcoal smudges. Sex was important him, but not if it required thought.

“Marin, listen to me. I’ve been wearing the crucifix you gave me,” which she pulled from her breasts, dangling it on her finger, “and I wish it would talk to me. I’m still so in the dark about what happened to you. I didn’t feel I ought to keep it, in fact, keeping it made me feel guilty. I read your letter. It wasn’t a letter, it was a ten page poem,” she said, and paused hoping he would say something. He didn’t. “It is almost Christmas, Marin. I wish I knew you better. I wish I knew God better. I read it and reread it, many times, till after midnight. I couldn’t turn the lights on because I couldn’t bear to read it without the atmosphere of darkness,” she said, and felt her eyes filling. “I think I’m in danger of loving what you wrote too much, loving the crucifix, loving you.”

Marin heard sincerity, the romance in her voice. Christmas is the season of love, he thought. She is speaking like a seventeen year old. Such women; they love; they hope; that is all. In the middle of Van Ness Avenue, inside a diner, with Christmas just days away, the woman was stung with the spirit of giving. Outside, the landscape is fired by moonlight.

“Marin, I know you are listening. Tell me your life, your work. We might even talk by letter, perhaps get more said. I have so much to say, to ask, and you will always know I will hold your words gently and honor them,” she said.

Marin spent a lot of time watching gulls at Fort Point. He saved the brilliance of his hands fo love making, bending backbones, and provoking sighs.

Life is complicated, differences as long as summer, unwilling to be shuffled, put away until winter. Even then not perfectly satisfied. He had words to write, hoping to cross the void of what he felt. He wrote as if his words were his blood.

Slowly, he pulled the Fig Newtons toward him. “Good food,” he said, tasting one. “How pleased I am that you liked what I wrote. I wrote those words with love, hoping you would understand them.”

“I really do,” she said.

Marin, enjoying his food, was not terribly touched. He felt his heart’s needle shifting. He knew she was unhappy, sick, and confused. He held her trembling hand across the table, smelled that her breath was intoxicated with affection, and her heavy children’s eyes meaning well.

She had married a wealthy New York stockbroker when she was twenty-five, lasting through turbulent quarrels and breakdowns, until finally he remained in New York. She lived alone in that dark drooping world. In such a woman, his writings will soar.

“I have read so many poets, but none like you. You understand all my hurts,” she said. “Your writing holds secrets, seasons of pain, but I will not praise you and make you nervous. People will one day take notice of you.”

Marin was already thinking about London. Damn her to hell. He looked up.

“I’m totally lost in the world, not by chance. God knows, I’ve been working at it long enough,” he said. “I hope life will get easier for you, but when you get everything you want, what else is there?” He said, taking another Fig Newton. “I was once a friend of fishermen. I became one of them. It was an education into poetry. But I won’t trouble you with my problems of past friendships. Save to say this: I have sought happiness and satisfaction through the agency of magic and miracles, but in the end, it was a sleight of hand that came off better than planned. Still, it was a trick worthy of better. One the world cannot fathom.”

Later that same evening, before dawn, he was in London. It had been a length of time since he had last talked about his shameful years. He wandered through the London’s streets on foot, toward the docks, always expecting a different experience. He learned to dream new dreams among the high end restaurants, fashion houses, offices, and the penthouses of the rich. The place had no soul. What person ever would ever come there looking for any sense of longing?

He will not be looking for a place to have bright, intelligent, literary conversation, an education in literary pleasure. He might have been forgiven for thinking London a sad place after bright-eyed girl asked, “What do they call you, old man?”

He looked up to a sign, dimly lit by a street lamp.

“Kew,” he said.

Kew was not the second coming. They were wrong about him, and they would never realize it.