Filed under: Confessions, fragments, Landscape Ptgs, Paintings -Inspiration | Tags: california, Fort Bragg, night life, paul bunyan's thrift store
With an oblique view from my bedroom window overlooking the parking lot behind Paul Bunyan’s thrift store, I stood just out of sight, watching the parade of night people coming and going. Some came to drop off donations; many came to pilfer. A sense of desperation and greed and of wrong-doing pervaded the scene with people skittering about in the dark under cover of dark clothing and hoodies.
The thrift store provided employment and financial support for developmentally challenged and disabled people. After a night of thievery, it’s a wonder they found anything left in the morning that was worth selling. But the night people didn’t care that it was a helpful community nonprofit organization created to help people. For them it was a first-come first-serve help-themselves-buffet-of-goodies game. It was free and up for grabs, and that’s what counted. Using the parking lot to dump their trash also meant they could avoid paying the refuse site’s fees.
But it was not free to Paul Bunyan’s. After a night of pilfering and damage, they had to pay to clean up. They had to pay to haul damaged goods to the refuse site. They had very little good donations left to sell for profit. All in all, it cost them money.
They eventually put a lock on their dumpster to keep people from dumping their own garbage into it, but even that wasn’t fool-proof. Two ingenious night people hammered for an hour to break the locks. When they got it open, I heard them say, Shit, it’s nothing but garbage!
Serves them right, I thought.
Every night, one by one, all through the night, people crept into the parking lot searching for the better donations—clothing, children’s clothes and toys, stuffed animals, a large stuffed purple Barney, electronic equipment, furniture, bicycles, exercise equipment, televisions, bed frames, and even stoves and refrigerators.
Dressed in big coats with hoods and carrying tiny flashlights, they scurried around in the dark. They tossed items from one spot to another, good items to good piles and the rest, just tossed. When they were all done it looked like a tornado had ripped through the parking lot. The concrete floor littered with junk, clothing, old toys, everything now dirty, wet from rain, broken and unusable. Worthless; profits for the thrift store transformed into scattered bits and pieces.
And every night from my window, I spied a one-legged man waiting in his black Volvo with darkened windows across the alley behind my apartment. When a person dropped off a donation, he moved his car the short ride from one parking lot to the other, got out, hopped on one leg around to the trunk pulling out a wheel chair in which he sat and wheeled around, rummaging through piles and boxes of donations, finding and taking all the electronic equipment, radios, cassette players, TVs, stereos. He stuffed it all in the trunk of his Volvo along with his wheel chair, hopped back into the driver’s seat and drove back to the other parking lot to wait again, waiting, night after night after night, sitting like a spider on the edge of his web ready to catch the next fly that flew into his sticky trap.
At the time I assumed he had an electronics repair business and was gathering material from the donations, making an illicit profit from items that might well have brought money to the organization. It dawns on me now that maybe his purpose was to collect the valuable equipment, clean it up and repair it for Paul Bunyan’s. So maybe, just maybe he was a good spider, if there is such a critter!
Awakened bright and early one morning by a loud screeching sound, I got up to see a young man dragging a refrigerator down the alley. He was alone. All he could do was drag it, the fridge scraping and screeching in protest. Someone called the police. They came, talked to the man, and left. They may have called the director of Paul Bunyan’s and received permission to help the guy move the refrigerator, for very soon, they returned with a mover’s dolly and a truck. They loaded the fridge and the young man into the truck and took off. I thought it was the most kind and generous act of compassion I saw on that alley the whole two years I lived there. And Paul Bunyans didn’t have to haul it to the dump or worry about little kids getting trapped inside the abandoned fridge.
Just in that moment’s musing, a man teetered in a drunken stupor into my vision and unrinated on a wall below my window. Damn! Why doesn’t he just go home to pee? Or find a gas station? Obviously, I said to myself, he was probably homeless or too drunk to know he had a home.
The alley was a convenient place for all kinds of odd and nefarious human and animal activities. It was dark and hidden, not patrolled by the cops, a no-man’s land on the baby-scale of no-man’s lands. And I had landed in the middle of it.
I had moved to Fort Bragg on the California coast to find peace and quiet after my mother died. After having lived in hot valley towns for eight years while I was a student, I longed for cool light and the majesty and power of the ocean. I wanted to paint the ocean and beaches and bridges in all their grandeur. However, I soon discovered I had rented an apartment smack-dab in the middle of the movie Escape From New York, starring Kurt Russell and Lee Van Cleef. Although Fort Bragg was not a city prison as was New York in the movie, the events of the movie take place in the future and that future was 1997, exactly when I moved to Fort Bragg.
In the movie, the prisoner scavengers and rival gangs skittered about like rats during the day in the sewers and subways, living underground in the great maze of New York’s underbelly that WW III had left almost in tact. By night, they were above, out in full force, lawless, pillaging, killing, raping and torturing. It was a raging battle for survival and political power among the inmates. They controlled the night.
Like in the movie, the Fort Bragg night people came alive under the shroud of darkness and hoodies and I stood at my window watching it unfold, the light of flashlights flickering on the dark screen in the dark places of my mind. During the day, I looked out that same window, gazing over the rooftops into the distance to the ocean’s white light, the glare almost too much to bear as it returned me to sanity. I must leave this place, I remember thinking.
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Susan…beyond reading your wonderful words that describe a place, life or situation in the same detail as if the painting is evolving in front of ones eyes, is reading Jack’s reaction to your visual and literary art. He’s right. I might also add, that this is such an opposite view from the description Bob always told me about one of his favorite places on earth, Fort Bragg. A place he always wanted to take me for an exploration in eating, sites and smells and visual slice of wonder for my camera too.
Comment by jrWagenschitz January 28, 2012 @ 10:32 AMjrw
Hi jacquie – My slice of life was derived from living in a poor part of town – cheap rents, lots of young people, and right behind one of the main streets with shops and other businesses. Fort Bragg really is a beautiful place to live and/or visit. And as a tourist you wouldn’t see what I saw, heard and felt. Or as someone capable of purchasing a home in Fort Bragg, you may be in a slightly better neighborhood or out in the country a bit and never see any of the life I witnessed. I would recommend you pack up your camera and visit, with Bob in mind, the place one of these summers. Lots of open dramtic coast scenery, beaches and small coves, from FB all the way north and south. Very photographic! And paintable! It does have its good qualities and attactions.
Comment by Susan Canavarro January 28, 2012 @ 12:17 PMSusan, you have described an incredible slice of life. It reminded me a little of another movie: The Rear Window.
Comment by Jan W. January 25, 2012 @ 10:53 AMThere was so much to observe in your narative that I know I’ll want to read it again, and I’ll probably notice more things that I didn’t catch the first time.
Thanks for sharing it.
Jan
Thanks Jan. Glad you enjoyed it. I started this Fort Bragg series when I was living there. I wrote long letters to my sister about my life in Fort Bragg.
Comment by Susan Canavarro January 25, 2012 @ 11:16 AMWritten and told with the eye of susancanpaint detail. Splendid narrative, profound social commentary, with insightful political commentary because, as we know, nothing has changed. The man in the Volvo is now, more than likely, a vet who left his left in Iraq or Afghanistan, legacy of eight years of Republican idiocy and congressional stagnation. Oh, Susan. You have done a great thing here. I love the paintings. I should have found a way to use them all on book covers. Thanks for this. You must send this out–the audience is still there waiting for a gifted writer to rip the veil away so we can see the fruits of hyprocisy. Jack
Comment by jack remick January 25, 2012 @ 3:29 AMGoodness, Jack, what would I do if you weren’t around to read my stuff? Thank you. Thank you for seeing so much in my story.
Comment by Susan Canavarro January 25, 2012 @ 8:25 AMSusan
So glad you did and chose Florence as your new home.
Comment by gb January 24, 2012 @ 7:54 PMgrb
GRB – So am I. Thank you!
Comment by Susan Canavarro January 24, 2012 @ 8:05 PM