It’s an oven out there. A literal oven.
I’ve taken to walking around town with yams in my hands, I hold them up around shoulder height as if I were bearing a kind of food cross. They’ll cook soon enough to have a nice dinner with some vegetables I keep in my pockets. I could just leave them in my car but there’s some more visceral, something more connected to the cycle of life, something silly and poetic about holding those yams up high. They are praise to the Almighty Lord of Root Vegetables! Next week it will be beets, they’ll release some liquid, and a red dye will run down my arms like stigmata. It will be a sight to see.
It’s hot out there, man. Oven hot. Surface of the sun hot. Standing in the foundry waiting for the steel to melt hot. Being dipped in a pool of burning napalm hot. Putting the toasted marshmallow in your mouth too soon hot.
So it’s kind of crazy to see the old homeless guy on the bike every day. Every day riding around Tucson slowly, pulling a baby trailer behind him filled with junk and other assorted life castoffs.
It would be easy to hunt him down, to drive up fast, cut him off like in a cop show from the 1970’s and demand he tell his tale. I’d buy hum a cold iced tea and a gallon of water. I’d find out what he was up to and know the truth for once.
Except that it would ruin the odd little moment of wonder that I get when I see him though. Where does he go? What does he do all day long on that bike? What is his deal man?
He could be Diogenes looking for the honest man. He could be Death making his rounds which might explain why I always see him passing the hospitals. He collects the souls of the dead and the dying in his little kiddie cart. He keeps them there until he can drop them into a hole at a consctruction site on Ajo Way out past the Tucson Mountains.
Mere mortals like myself see those souls as simple objects. They are the shadow of a deeper reality projected onto this dimension, they are the symbol and summation of a life. A lamp, a deck of cars, a trophy, all cast offs, like the souls have been cast off to be collected.
That skinny old man on the bike who moves slowly through the city could be the ultimate collector.
He could be a shadow of man he collected years ago. A man who stumbled into Tucson, who died under the train when passed out drunk, or was beaten by some chollos, or who simply sat down one night because he was done and the freight trains come by every few hours while starvation makes you wait.
The skinny old man on the bike could be the embodiment of Tucson. The desert examining itself. It had an eon of peace and solitude to exult the sun, to relish the release of the waters that once inundated this land. Now it ponders what has happened. The desert wanders through Tucson on a bike collecting detritus hoping to make sense of this strange new event. This new darkness of a sea of concrete and asphalt.
The old man on the bike that move with slow and steady turtle-like determination to win the race is on a race that only he knows about but soon all will reminisce about fondly. He is the vanguard of a new sport of slow-speed bicycling treasure hunting. He is the lead man in a flood of refugees heading east from the earthquakes of the future, from the drowning of a mega-city, he is the lone survivor getting out while getting out was still possible.
The skinny old man on the bike with the kid’s trailer wandering through Tucson is one of the constants that sets the poetic beat of a city.