My wife says it’s because I’m a solitary but maybe it’s that I just don’t know where the conversation might lead. I laugh, give a short wave and carry on with my walk. I’ll say something about the weather or about the local baseball team, what about those Giants? and he’ll have some funny comeback. Tommy and I have our own form of chitchat. “Got to keep hydrated,” he once yelled out, then raised his can in a bag and toasted me as I passed by. What does he live on now? I’ve noticed his buddies often bring him a can of beer when his supply gets low. Crystal says he lost that job and never found another. Bantering with the customers as he scanned the groceries. As soon as she said it I remembered seeing him when my wife and I first moved to this town, standing behind the checkout counter, dressed in the official Safeway uniform short-sleeved shirt, navy blue apron, blue tie, shiny name badge. She went on to tell me that he was once a checker at Safeway. That’s Tommy out there and that’s his bench.” “You must have been talking to Tommy Bench,” she says. One morning, a few months ago, I mentioned to Crystal, the counter person of the Chit Chat, that the guy sitting on the bench outside told me that the weather was about to change. Where he holds forth, holds court, holds my attention whenever I pass. He’s where he is every day, all day, in his spot at the end of a bench, kitty corner to the Chit Chat Café and the Pacifica pier.
#OSCAR DE LEON LA BOOM FULL#
A few more steps and up pops his face, florid, flushed, eyes at half-staff, smile on full beam. The rest of his body is obscured by a cement casement housing a trashcan but as I get closer I see his legs sticking out, crossed at the knee, his tan gams, his flip flops. I can tell, from the start of my walk on the beach promenade in Pacifica if he’s at his post, can spot the top of his faded baseball cap in the distance. For us, literature and language are as much about marking and representing space, as they are about storytelling. With “Postcards,” creative non-fiction stories grounded in place, we aspire to create a new cartography of California.
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