TENDERLOGUE: PAUL CORMAN-ROBERTS

(Photo Courtesy of Julie Michelle @ iliveheresf.com)

TENDERWOMB

It all starts with me coming home from my telemarketing gig, off the BART station at eleven every night per always, and on up the Hyde Street wind tunnel for six blocks to the Serv-Well corner liquor pusher for an overpriced quart of milk at Ellis Street when a brother in front of me the size of a brick shithouse strolls five, maybe six paces out into Hyde, then whirls one hundred and eighty degrees on a dime at the sound of some shit talk and the bark of a forty-ouncer smacking off the sidewalk; another brother a quarter of the block down Ellis throwing down the corner liquor store gauntlet; two young men about to get it on in the heart of the one and only Tenderloin and adrenalin ripples out from the intersection, pushing uphill, rolling downhill and crawling toward the back of every alleyway evenly over a three block radius and it’s all going down in front of the Serv-Well Market and I gotta go, yesiree I gotta get myself right the fuck across this here traffic, right across this here street and never in my life have I been so happy to see the gorgeous desolation of O’Farrell Street while pistol shots don’t sound like they do in the movies (PA-CHEW! PA-CHEW!) but are a pop popping percussion that leaks around street corners and boxes in my ears while I hole in against a cleft in a brick wall only to find myself with an older, darker sister with canyon deep wisdom etched in her handsome jawbone croaks out “awshit, fools is gonna be dealin’ out they dyin’” right before taking a gi-normous hit off of a tiny glass pipe, then gripping my shoulders while throwing her left leg around my waist and thrusting her tongue deep into my tonsils, allowing her coke washed, E & J flavored crack-hale roll into and overflow my sinuses leaving me heated, swollen and eager; leaving me wanting nothing more than to pull this smooth slab of loving neuro-electric carboplasm, deep inside of me until my wet has somehow consumed her wet but my ears pulse with the bastard cosmic hum of the ether and the distant pop-pop-pop, which caresses me warm, safe and sexy in the piss baked concrete smell of O’Farrell Street where I dream the creamy dreams of the possible for a period of time I cannot measure, but which only ever ends with me prone and alone in front of the stark, steely gray judgment that is the entrance gate to my apartment building…miraculously with keys, wallet and change somehow still in place…miraculously with my cock still dry and comfortably secured inside still zipped up Levis…miraculously with the sickly orange streetlight pall of O’Farrell Street completely abandoned, and every storefront bolted down and tucked snug against each other till the coming daylight, including, I am quite certain, my quart of milk safely ensconced within the Serv-Well market.

I can’t see past the next brownstone-studio-live/work-office-loft-space-apartment housing the local non-profit, communally alternative shared living arrangement. Instead an urban backwash din soundtrack for this seething metropolis of street ghosts; the creamy, swirling hustle – the freak show roll call voices popping and bubbling in the thin wisp cauldron of consciousness designed and marketed for my ears.

Yeah, I see yo’ ass slidin ‘round the way, yeah slidin’ round up on the highway but da law of physics say you got to fall down brutha. The law of the Tenderwomb say you pick and choose how high you get by how you pick and choose how far you got to fall, ‘cause sooner or later you got to fall back down and I ain’t seen you fall yet. I ain’t seen you fall yet. I’m sure watchin’ you fall is a very beautiful thing my brutha. Shit, I wait around all day waitin’ to see you falls; I wait around right here to see you falls, ‘cuz you be fallin’ any day now. But I come back and watch you fall some other day, ‘cuz now I gotta go get high…igh…ay..ay…ay…ay…ay…ay…ay…ay…ay!!!!

And as fast as it comes the cackling madness melts back into the flow of O’Farrell Street and I think I’ve lost my marbles for good this time, yes I think they’ve rolled out my ears and down the grimy hills because there are wharf rats barricading themselves in my kitchen and flying Oscar-fish chewing up my wardrobe. I’m watching people have conversations with fence posts and doors and walls and other people I can’t see, which are not to say they’re not there right? These voices don’t come from disembodied spirits but from disembodied bodies. Except that one time when the old stranger whispered in my ear as I passed “how’s that play you’re working on going?” or when the lumped woman with the backpack sticker that says “JESUS HATES SEX” asked if I could see “Him” crucified on the bottom’s of 747s overhead, and why, yes look there, there’s the savior now, arms strapped to the bottoms of the wings and flapping his dick out all over the city.

It stops becoming them.

Listen.

Did you hear that?

There’s nothing quite like the sound of a shotgun blast in the ‘Loin. It’s a long, blissed out white noise like sheet metal no wanna-be industrial alterno-grunge band could ever hope to set free; a noise so pure and metallic that it does not die easily in the caverns of a thousand different alleyways. To know what is on the other side of that sound; to see it from out of the corner of up here is to connect ever so deeply with that splash that someone else made before the neighborhood’s landlord association’s steam cleaning contract come to wash that unique masterpiece away in a stream of brown chunks down into the corner gutter is not unlike biting down on aluminum foil and liking it; chewing with a clanging vigor that makes me realize if I never feel any of these sensations again, it will be much too soon.