Inurement

Slumped, more not of it than most, he shoulders his mostly feeble way, rakish and awkward, recklessly slaloming through the crowd with an almost shuddering abandon towards, well, nothing. He has no destination. Nowhere to go, or be. There are just these motions that he makes. He goes through things. Waiting to worry through some more waiting.

Portsmouth Square deals in it. The hands-crossed-behind-the-back stance, leaning in to the card games, lit cigarette stabbed between taut lips, face blank with some sort of somehow Baltic sadness. The crowded huddles, intense with tonal yaps, around xiangqi boards on milk crates and waxed cardboard boxes, dotting the cement terrain like campfires keeping shudderers warm on a cold night. But some latent instinct for wonder was stashed there in Chinatown’s profane glitter, the shocked dismay festooning the arcade: the jewelers; the ancient “Chop Suey” bent-neon tubes gone cracked and chipped off to desuetude; the phony realtors; the knickknack discount emporiums; the vegetable stalls; the torn guano-stained awnings; the cliché head shops; the T-shirt vendors; the gritty ten-dollar-haircut salons without a spin in their poles; the ravaged lunch-special restaurants; the urine-bleach-and-sewer stink of crowded sidewalks; the overpriced “free” tea-tasting shops; the gaudy souvenir stores with their monotonous array of tacky odds without end; the hurried push and pull and crisscrossing…