What About Mongolia!

Dedicated to Jack Micheline

He brought a plastic milk crate to stand on. He put it down on the sidewalk against the wall of a towering building, with enough room from the corner so that people coming around the bend wouldn’t bump into him. He glanced at the jagged horizon of the downtown skyscrapers and at the people striding by. Except for some trudging homeless folks, most had clean gleaming shoes.

He stood in a shadow, but there was light in the sky. It was about twenty to eight in the morning.

Lines of cars clogged the streets, lurching forward when the traffic lights went green. Often traffic was stopped by a car paused at an intersection waiting to make a turn. You could feel the driver’s tension radiating from the car as he waited for a procession of pedestrians to pass, until the light went red, and he could lunge into the cross street just as the traffic started to roll.

This pattern repeated again and again, with various scattered bursts of frustrated aggression. A lane-changing taxi forcing another driver to stamp on her brakes. A raw angry squawk of a horn.

One weirdly throaty horn reminded him of the saxophonist he’d watched blowing on a corner in this same financial district. His playing was amazing. It was as if he had matched his masters and moved on to big soul realms of his own. Chops were maps. He was way past that.

This was before he got laid off by the bank. It was toward the end of his lunch break, and he was anxious about returning to work late. But he felt he had to honor the beauty of this man’s music by staying and listening. What he heard was a song for all the lost coasts scattered over the Earth—the thriving sadness of everyone toiling in his lonely corner or crouching in her secret crack in the floor but still striving because striving was only really being alive—and he regarded each of them tenderly with a generous majesty from the blessing blast of his horn.

This was why he was here. And now was the time. He stepped up on to the milk crate, breathed in, and blurted

The busyness of business.

A few people flicked glances at him, but no one glared or stared. Then in a bigger voice he said

The duty of money
driving us through these mazes
beneath the blank faces
of enormous corporate fortresses.

He gazed up at the peaks of the towers crowding the sky. It was as if he were standing in a canyon. He hollered

The fear of being seen as small
and the need to beat someone
to prove to ourselves we’re not beaten.

He had been afraid to say those lines. But no one attacked him. People’s passing glances lingered longer now. But so many had their ears plugged with headphones. Or were talking into cellphones.

Each of us stranding himself
staring at a screen in a room.
Or thumbing a digital device
alone on a windy beach.
Or yapping into a clamshell
at someone who is elsewhere.

Something was loosening in him. He shouted louder now.

The dreamless laser leer of lust.
The reluctance to look the other
guy in the eye and smile.
The inadequacy of our brutality
as a source of shame.

Words were flowing through him as if he were a horn. Each passage was a booming blast. He howled like a human bomb!

The lonely cunning fantasy
that even human kindness
can fit in a pyramid scheme.

He spat that last phrase with a disgusted growling effect. He swore he saw the grey head of a suited man twitch as he passed him. Time to throw the last blow.

The instistence on difference.
The desire to reside in the top tribe
and piss from a peak on the rest
of the mass impossible mess.

There! The bolt had flown. He breathed and surveyed the scene.

Nothing had actually changed. No crowd ganged around him. No police car sirens wailed. But he felt calm and warm inside. The whole downtown business bustle seemed smaller and sadder now. Almost gentle somehow. Full of striving. Sober, serious, somber striving—but striving all the same. He spoke a coda in a slow low voice.

All of this
my friends
is getting in the way of love.

He stepped down off the milk crate, picked it up and walked off, smiling shyly at the people whose eyes met his. While he walked he thought of the sax man again.

When the horn player paused, he approached the musician and spoke with him. He was a friendly man and after a while he asked him his name.

“Call me Mongolia!” the black man grinned.

He asked him how he got a name like that. The man told him that for years he’d been bitter about not being famous, for feeling like nothing but the man with the horn on the corner with a case propped at his feet for tossed coins.

“Man I played with contempt! I was blowing sheer murder out here mister! Daily! Then one night I was in a cheap Chinese joint and saw this big map of the world on the wall. And my eyes locked on Mongolia. From there I lost my complaint. I mean, what about Mongolia!”

Suddenly he was hungry. He turned a corner and went into a franchise coffee shop where all of the staff wore uniforms. And with a gentle smile glowing in his eyes, he asked an indifferent teenager for a toasted cheese croissant and a latte.



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