The sound of distorted music being played much too loudly reverberated from inside a parked car, escaped through open windows, and swirled upwards from the narrow alley below. Two automobiles in a chance meeting were parked at 3:00 a.m., their windows open, their occupants shouting, boasting and laughing loudly.
Seven stories above, in a small apartment, a man had been sleeping. The noise coming in his window was only mildly annoying at first and the man awoke only partially. It was just another sound of the city he reasoned, the type of minor disturbance that happens 24/7 here in San Francisco or in any other city of any size. At least they weren’t gun shots. The man rolled over and tried to go back to sleep, but the noise persisted, piercing upwards through an early Tuesday morning known to some as late Monday night.
It was an old building on Fell Street, on the cross town route, heading towards Golden Gate Park. It butressed the last hillside facing downtown before you crossed over a small crest and began the long gradual downhill through the “Avenues” and towards the Pacific Ocean. The neighborhood that was on the edge of a regentrification zone, where new money, primarily gay money, was buying up beaten up old properties and refurbishing them. He had chosen this apartment because it was far enough from downtown to have what passed for reasonable rent in San Francisco. Out each of his two windows he owned a million-dollar view of downtown, a mile or so away, that glowed like a jewel when not obscured by fog.
But there was also a down side. Although new money was coming into the surrounding area, none of it had yet reached this particular building. The neighborhood remained a scary one. It was situated just a block from a large public housing project and the streets beyond the locked lobby door on the first floor crawled with an assortment of winos, derelicts and major scary dudes. Just a few months before, Chris Pursig, the son of author Robert Pursig, and a major character is his father’s classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintanence”, had been senselessly murdered while waiting for a bus, three blocks away. Three weeks ago, the man himself had been held up and robbed at knife-point and then thrown into a stinking dumpster while walking home with two bags of groceries. The last thing he heard was: “Stay in there for ten minutes!” The next thing he saw was an old women pearing into the dumpster to see if he was OK.
Still fearful and angry from the dumpster incident, the man went to the window and looked down. The fog obscured his view of the cars but he could see the eerie glow of headlights, each pointing in opposite directions. The cars had stopped in the middle of the alley, directly below his window, driver’s sides facing in. Engines had been shut off but stereos left blasting, and ‘yo dudes were being loudly exchanged. A glass bottle smashed and someone laughed hysterically. A fresh round of name-calling ensued, another bottle exploded, and the music was turned up.
He leaned out the window. “Hey, shut up down there!” he hollered in the direction of the parked cars, his vitriol accelerating at the rate of 32 feet per second/per second, as it plummeted downward. The music dimmed for just a second. “Well, that was easy,” he thought to himself. But then the clamor resumed with the music turned up even louder.
He hollered again, peppering it with the appropriate expletives. But this time there was no response. The din continued unabated. The man knew he would never get back to sleep as long as the ruckus continued below. Unlike the occupants of the cars, he had to get up in just a few hours and begin the 30-45 minute walk to his job in a small lithography shop south of Market Street.
Something shiny caught the corner of his eye.
Spilled out upon a nightstand near the window was an accumulation of pocket change, an assortment of dimes, pennies, quarters and nickels that were the remnants of what had been dollars the day before. Stealthfully, with a single eyebrow raised, he lined five pennies, side by side, on the window sill. He adjustted them as he eyed the trajectory. A little right. A little left. He had to clear the sidewalk but didn’t want to overshoot the alley. There was gravity to consider, and angular momentum… and fog.
He decided to go by feel.
Cocking his middle finger behind his thumb like a crossbow, the man applied pressure and then let his finger fly:
Flink.
A penny was jettisoned into space.
And then in rapid succession, he recocked his finger and sent the other four pennies off on their missions:
Flink.
Flink.
Flink.
Flink.
They descended like a squadron of falcons in a power dive. The wait seemed forever, although it couldn’t have been much more than three seconds.
… one-thousand-one-one-thousand-two-one-thousand-three...
Bam!…
…(pause)
Bam!
Bam!
Bam!
Bam!
It sounded like gun shots ringing out as the pennies slammed into hoods and trunks and roofs, and glanced off windshields like truck-tossed pebbles. The pennies then ricocheted about the alley, creating a secondary disturbance, clanking and crashing as they went. “What was that?!” a voiced hollered. The music stopped and the air was quiet. Worried voices spoke in hushed tones.
Five more pennies were already in place.
Flink.
Flink.
Flink.
Flink.
Flink.
…one-thousand-one-one-thousand-two-one-thousand-three…
Bam!
Bam!
Bam!
Bam!
Bam!
Car engines ignited. Bottles were jettisoned and drugs were stashed. The tires of old Oldsmobiles squealed and screeched as they tore off into the fog in opposite directions up and down the alley, leaving behind a wet spot in the night that was quiet - except of course for the usual minor disturbances that you’d expect in any major city of any size at 3:00 a.m.
The man looked out at the never-sleeping downtown lights, just beginning to twinkle as they poked through the lifting fog. He peed, got a drink of water, made sure the door was still locked, and then crawled back into bed for a luscious few more hours of sleep.
You get what you pay for, he thought. All things considered, it was probably the best ten cents he’d ever spent.
