How They Met

[This description is based on a conversation I had with Wantu in the Washoe County Jail, in May of 2000]

Wantu waited in his Chrysler Lebaron with the canvass top down. He scanned the square from his parking spot, looking over the driver door (thanks to the Graco booster seat). He was there because the dream had told him to be there. He did not question, nor analyze dreams. For Wantu there was no “meaning” in dreams. They were as literal as any waking experience. Dreams happened, like day happened, like nodding to the mailman, or eating scrambled eggs; you flew with fairy wings, you wrestled a mule in your kitchen, or made love to your grandmother--these nocturnal experiences were as they appeared. Didn’t his feelings verify this? So when a hunter in camouflage, rose from a goose blind one night and told him to go to Jack London square he listened. Upon waking, he dressed and drove the Lebaron into downtown Oakland, to the waterfront, to the appointed square, and waited.

As he waited the radio played. Wantu liked radios. It was rare to be in a car or visit Wantu at his home and not hear the radio playing. Not that there was any station loyalty. The car dial was set to an oldies station, the radioshack in the workshop chatted with conservative news-talk, other electronic speakers caught the signals of a variety of country, pop, and public programming. It seemed as if Wantu simply turned them on and then stopped the dial on the first signal to catch.

At this moment, the moment they met, the radio was playing that Gloria Gaynor song, the one about survival, though this has no relevance, nor symbolic meaning.

The only life within the square that morning was a grey-coated congregation of pigeons, pecking at a Taco Bell wrapper. The wrapper was goldenrod. There was a slight breeze off the bay that morning and from time to time the paper would glide a few feet across the paved bricks and the pigeons would adjust, fluttering their wings and re-position themselves in relation to the bits of damp tortilla. While the mob moved round and round the golden raft, one pigeon stood transfixed above the churning flock. This pigeon stood in the morning light, his neck an oily rainbow. He stood upon the hunched shoulders of a wolf whose shadow stretched and darkened his hungry brethren. This pigeon showed no interest in tortilla. This piegon appeared disconnected to the creatures whose shape and coloring he reflected. This pigeon was still and focused, focused on a point beyond the square. That point was Wantu’s face.

Wantu turned and met the pigeons good eye. The pigeon released an anointment of pure white that ran along the cast iron fur of the Jack London wolf. Wantu took this as a sign.

The dream answered, Wantu stood, walked around to the passenger side, and opened the door. The pigeon, though quite capable of flight, stepped purposely across the square, circled the backside of the car, and hopped up into the passenger seat. Wantu got behind the wheel, slid the belt into the plastic slots of the booster seat, peered over the wheel and drove on. The pigeon, unbelted, gently placed his beak into the creases of the Lebaron’s leather seats and picked up tiny crumbs of cornbread which he consumed one-by-one, his feathered ass shuddering in the wind, pointing toward the open road.