Sunday preaching
Living in a place like the Mission is a
remarkable thing, really. As I was out on the back porch of
our flat scraping the dogshit out of the waffle treads of my
shoes one Sunday afternoon, I could hear the unmistakable
voice of the street preacher from around the corner. He’s
always in the same spot, standing, safely strapped into his
guitar, facing the intersection but back from the corner. He’s
there speaking and playing, and singing to no one in
particular. There are usually people waiting for a bus, or
headed for the subway steps, but it seems like there are
always fewer folk directly in front of him.
If you haven’t lived in San Francisco’s
Mission District your whole life, you’ll see lots of
things you’ve probably never seen before. I’d lived most
of my short life in small farming communities before moving
to San Francisco, and though I’d lived here a year already
before moving into this particular neighborhood, I came to
it relatively “unexposed” to many urban goings-on. I
knew I’d get along, and for artists, rents were more
reasonable, but I was vastly undereducated about things that
go on in a long-underprivileged, civicly ignored
neighborhood. My new neighbor, an old, dilapidated man named
Joe, said something as I was moving in that I’ll never
forget. From his perch in the streetside window of his
apartment (which I was to later learn was his favorite place
to sit, especially so he could proposition women and solicit
the prostitutes), he said: “Buddy, you just got to live
and let live down here. If you don’t bother other people,
and let them do their thing, they won’t bother you.”
To charitably describe this preacherman’s
look, you might use words like “conservative, low-budget,”
which, let’s face it, isn’t going to attract young mobs.
Neither will “dignified thrift store” win converts, or,
perhaps, being a middle-aged white man preaching to your
mostly Latino neighbors. But, who knows? Anyway, I always
kind of guessed through his themes and language that he was
somehow targeting the skinny addicts who were, just as often
as not, white. This may be my own prejudice, I know. But the
hardcore addicts, at least the ones who are not hard to
spot, usually look to me like they’re wishing shadows
could somehow come to their rescue as they cross the street
during a sermon. Just when they want to crawl and hide
inside their own clothes, the preacher brings a minimum of
zest into his delivery, and maybe a drug reference. The
preaching in Spanish is done by a family, which is seen less
often on the corner than this preacher is. I think they are
connected somehow, maybe members of the same church or
missionary group. The family’s not much more popular,
although it has a keyboard, which plays accompaniment to the
zippy Spanish delivery of the dad. The kids standing in the
background with mom give him the right to get way out there,
almost to the corner, with his microphone.
Now, this is a corner which is known for
its many uses: in addition to being home to three major bus
stops and two subway entrances, it is a playground, a
toilet, an obstacle course for skateboards and
scooter-riders, a place to drink, to cruise for women, to
eat, to beg for money, to sell, to score, and to meet and
greet friends. I knew it was him by the sound of his
monotone English, amplified as it always is by a portable
amp and speaker he pulls around on one of those cheap
handcarts used for luggage. His spiel has a flat cadence and
the voice is of an ordinary color, as beige as his
fuddy-duddy hat with its battered feather. I know his voice
even before the scraps of words like “Jesus Christ” and
“road to sin” float to me on the crisp November air. I
know his voice before I’m even aware that it’s a Sunday.
This man preaches every Sunday,
I think to myself, as I turn to look for something better to
scrape with than the folded piece of cardboard I’d been
using. He’s out there for what must be three or four
hours, though it could be more. His voice prevails over all
the other sounds on that corner, wafting triumphant over the
bank and the donut shop to reach me on my back step. The
sermon starts out as your run-of-the-mill fire-and-brimstone
catchall that everyone’s heard, and the fact is, he doesn’t
sound all that excited about it either. (Maybe it’s
because he preaches so much?) His tone weakly chides those
he wishes to reach as though they’re the members of an
opposing team. He sounds like a high school football
announcer, I think to myself. His team is the home team,
and they’ve got guts, but they’ve got no chance against
this unordered, insurgent force surrounding them on all
sides! His team is vastly outnumbered, doing battle with one
claiming no real quarterback or coach, no clear leader from
the looks of the field! It’s a shapeless, shifting lot of
lost souls wandering around, some trying to score. The
preacher, however, believes there to be a phantom hero among
his adversaries: His name is The Devil. The Devil radios
plays to an anonymous offense that are known for their
potency. The Devil’s not actually on the street level, or
even on the sidelines: he’s in the coach’s box high
above the action, perched atop the hotel, or maybe the bank
building, watching. The Devil shows up shortly after the
preacher does, riding atop the number fourteen bus, so close
to the electric contacts that they spark. The preacher goes
into some of the weaknesses in The Devil’s offense as if
to disprove his admirable reputation. The play-by-play
occasionally drifts over to me on my porch, and mixes with
the smell of shit coming off my shoe in my hands, as I gouge
out its channels with a screw. I imagine him saying, “You’re
not going to find what you’re looking for in the drugs,”
perhaps as someone scores a bag out in the open. I’ve seen
him, in fact, preach to one person, but vaguely, broadly, as
if he were pointing them out to an audience during that
player’s appearance on the corner. This larger audience
is, overwhelmingly, not paying attention. I hear, “The
Bible states that the wages of sin is death, and that the
way to eternal life is through the Lord Jesus,” perhaps as
no one listens, no one except the shockingly thin woman with
scabs dotting her body, who, to show her indifference and
make the most of her time in the game, strikes up giggling
conversations with each man at the bus stop in a falsely
lighthearted, overly friendly way. She would not want to
appear to be listening but loves the attention.
It sounds like the game is a close one. I’ve
been working on the unimaginably complex intaglio in the
shoe’s sole for quite some time, ejecting pungent mush
from its deepest recesses, thinking about the kind of
moralistic self-righteousness you get from well-heeled
believers in the Bible Belt. But, I’m thinking as I
scrape the last pebbly brown marble of crap out of the tread,
you’ve gotta hand it to this guy. He’s not getting
rich, and he’s got the balls to go and preach where he
believes his faith will do the most good. He is standing
there, alone with his guitar, saying what he thinks. Pretty
admirable when you think about it. Am I really thinking
this, I wonder? I hear his voice preparing for a weak
crescendo just as a bus blows through the intersection,
sparking, horn blaring, and then I’ve lost him. Shortly, I
hear the strumming of the guitar and the first few words of
a hymn sung in a voice somehow unchanged from its monitory
dispatch. He was building to a song of faith I think,
intended to stir even the darkest heart out there,
somebody who may just have plenty of their own troubles and
can’t cope any other way. But I knew that it wouldn’t.
As I put the still-stinking shoes down, I can’t help but
think that Sin is winning. His singing sounds like shit.
Kjell Cronn
