Art
by jai jackson

I'm walking down a sidewalk in the middle of the city.

It's a cool Friday afternoon in spring.

A man with his fly open, staggering, disheveled, walks off the curb into the street, weaves back toward the sidewalk, steps back up onto it, grabbing onto a no parking sign which brings him to an abrupt stop, preventing him from running into me. I'm just about to dodge out of his way, as others had, off to the other side of the sidewalk, to avoid him, but when the sign pole brings him up short, I continue on, unfazed, unflappable, disconcerned.

People look at me, I look straight ahead.

I think, they marvel.

I'm wearing mirror sunglasses. I walk straight. I'm cool.

At the corner, I stop and stand beside the bus stop bench, waiting for the bus. The bench is loaded to capacity with people. A black kid, about twelve years old, sitting in the center of the bench, is taking pictures with a Polaroid. He has a poster board display with photos he has taken propped between his knees. He takes a few shots up, of building tops, and after they develop, he pastes them to his board with a bottle of rubber cement that he takes from his photo bag between his feet. He puts the cement away, extracts a new pack of film, reloads his camera, stands, puts the poster on the seat against the back and props it up with his bag, to save his seat, walks away and around behind the bench and me to arrive at my other side.

I pretend not to watch him.

He looks up at me.

I turn my head toward him and look down at him across my shoulder. He jerks his head toward me, then motions his camera toward me.

I stare at him through the mirror sunglasses, then shrug.

He takes my picture. We wait, for it to silently develop.

In the photo, I look like Lou Reed.

I wish I'd had a cigarette in my mouth.

He pastes my picture onto the board with the others.

I am next to a picture of a young girl holding a baby.

There's not a lot of color to his photos, as if he had intentionally chosen areas of gray-tone, like the sun-angle bleaching my face, the black of my leather jacket, my glasses reflecting the blue sky dark in sepia with white streaks of clouds. His collage of whites, shadows, stone-washed blues, concrete grays and tans, pale mauve and taupe shops, frame and contrast the few bright small splotches of reds, greens, and one lady's scarf of purple in the middle, which accentuate in perfect composition specific people.

The photos on the poster board are not formally arranged, neither logically nor squarely, except at the edges where shots of the city skyscape define the top and upper sides, and shots of shops the lower sides and bottom. There seems to be no particular order to the rest of the photos, most of them of people, a few of them of dogs, one cat. Some of them overlap others. The board is crowded so that some pictures have been almost completely covered over by additions. Only a very few of the photos are still fully visible. The white photo borders make transition between them all but impossible, not that there appears to have been any sincere attempt at transition anyway. I think my photo and the photo of the girl with the baby will remain completely uncovered. I imagine that, since he has added my image, the pastiche is complete.

This is art.

7-14-97
from partial selves
unpublished