Durante Avenue

February 2024

It’s 4 a.m. on Durant Avenue in Berkeley, California. Mist falls lightly, lit up by street and building lights, but the alleys are still loaded with darkness. People out at this time are either filled with end of night sadness or start of day gladness. A runner trots by brimming with gladness. Shirt tucked, shorts short, shoes springy, and his step is too. He hears not the happenings around. Not the odd car whizzing by, tires buzzing and hissing on the wet asphalt. Not the lonely bum grumbling, groaning, moaning to himself and whoever will listen. Not the drunk college kids ambling about. No, the runner’s headphones are in and filled with the sonorous sounds of gladness.

He runs passed a girl. She leans, alone, against a red brick wall outside the only 24-hour pizza joint in town. College kids, and a few older men and women who are stuck in a rut not grown up wait drunkenly in line for a big greasy slice slathered with sauce and cheese and sausage and peppers. They’d be happy with anything but the pizza here really is good.

The girl outside is not quite sober enough to stand on her own but she’s on her own so she leans on that big brick wall. She stares blankly at the ground, perhaps focusing on balancing, perhaps waiting for somebody, anybody to notice her, talk to her, perhaps even almost allowing herself to ask if what she’s doing is what she should be doing. But the kids all do it and when it all goes your way you sometimes find yourself in the arms of another young and confused lover. Warm, tangled up, and absolutely filled with life. But some nights you find yourself leaning on a big brick wall in the rain at 4 a.m. not sure how you got there and not sure how you’ll get home.

But not all kids on this night are so forlorn. Those who say man does not live forever surely have never met an 18-year-old boy. Surely, an 18-year-old boy never dies. A cadre of them stand in line for pizza. Perhaps too old to be called boys, yet certainly far from men, they are in that enviable state of becoming. A state we all yearn for once again, a state that soon even these boys will look back at with the greedy eyes of middle-aged men who have just another day ahead. Men whose lives can be tabulated on a spreadsheet of assets and liabilities. But for now these boys are immortal. For now these boys are!

A bum not far off from the sounds and smells of this popular pizza parlor snores comfortably, the subtlest hint of a smile on the sides of his cracked lips. He dreams good dreams. He has a warm, dark, dry nook and a heavy wool blanket and his dog curled up next to him. Nothing like being warm and dry on a cold and wet night. Some of his buddies are not so wise as to seek the simple pleasure of a good night’s rest. Dry cracked hands with dirt underneath fingernails careful wrap another spliff. The flick, flick, flick of a lighter, the soft crackle of an inhale, a deep, deep breath follow. Smoke bellows from a bum’s mouth, floats, fluttlers into the dank air and disappears. The atmosphere feels thick, almost soupy, with mist and smoke and life still teeming on Durant. The spliff is passed from hand to hand to hand to hand until the last life is desperately sucked out of it, right down to the filter fashioned from a piece old envelope found on the sidewalk. Tonight, these nervous souls will not know the pleasure of a good night’s rest.

The night is far from over for some, but dawn stubbornly hints at its arrival. Soon, the streets will be back to normal, hustling, bustling, people rustling and muscling all about. But the sun will set and this bizarre life after dark will once again be breathed anew into Durant Avenue.