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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 27, 2013)
12 street roots Sept. 27, 2013 "At Eternity's Gate," 1890 Vincent Van Gogh Our guilty hearts BY M ATT STANGEL A personal exploration into how g u ilt shapes our character, for better or worse C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R t’s a little after 3 a.m. and the 7-Eleven lights up the parking lot. You can almost see heat waves from the cooling street. The neighborhood’s up late: hot houses, cold drinks at bars, and I’m pretending last call didn’t just happen, staving off another night in the pizza box that is my bedroom. This guy calls himself Father. Could be 19 could be 29 for all I know. His voice is timid and lulling and he’s telling me about where he’s from, how he ended up living on the street. He seems honest, without pretense. So I decide to ask him the question I’ve been asking for the last few months: “What’s your guiltiest memory?” Father talks about hunting lizards as a kid. Makeshift pea shooters manufactured from latex gloves and pebble ammunition. He says, looking back, that he felt controlled by a violent culture, that he’s learned a lot since the afternoons he spent splitting lizards. He’s not the same person, nowadays, and he’s ashamed of the lives, however small, that he took. “One other thing that I feel terrible for,” he begins, “that I feel totally terrible for...” I He’s searching the inside of his pockets for the decision on whether he really wants to say it. “I was locked up one time and I ate some mushrooms,” talking faster now, “and they were poisonous mushrooms, but, like, I didn’t necessarily know that they were as fatal as they were supposed to be, and I also knew that they weren’t the hallucinogenic kind, and I convinced someone to eat ‘em with me.” Hands in pockets, digging for the words. “We were in the hospital, both, for, like, five days.” “It was his birthday. I was on the rec yard. Yeah. I feel terrible for that. I don’t really talk about that one very much.” t’s afternoons like these when I’m not sure if it’s the guilt or the anxiety that’s keeping me in bed. Problem postponed: Double-click the next episode and the space station at the edge of the wormhole comes to life. My shrink says that on days like these, I should just take the damn pill, so I do, replacing the nervous stomach pain with an I emotional numbness that just might get me out of bed and permit me to write today. I wonder if I’m alone in this. The only person so damn anxious, so filled with guilt, that I’ve ceased to exist outside my ability to project myself into “Star Trek” episodes? I start to ask around. On the street. In bars. Only strangers. What’s the guiltiest thing you’ve ever done? One woman tells me that she never responded to a message that a friend sent before he committed suicide. She never did forgive herself, couldn’t exorcise the question: “If I had responded, would he still be here today?” At the can deposit in front of the neighborhood grocery store a guy tells me about the time he erased himself with whiskey and woke up in a jail cell. Hungover in a courtroom, the charges were presented: He d stabbed a man who only barely kept his life. A hippie chick making line drawings on pieces of cardboard while spanging says she learned not to steal after swiping a stray longboard on a California boardwalk and See GUILT, page 13
