Francis The Shards

        I DON'T KNOW HOW to start this, to write it all down, other than to say none of it was planned or simple. Neither was what happened. Nothing ever is. And yet, all the work, my collection of years collecting the raw material and nights lost to the city in search of the perfect spot, the image itself and its message, it all just became. And isn't that art? Isn't that beauty? Isn't that worth anything? 
	The answer, or maybe response is a better word, is clearly no. No, you cannot express wonder, even when it’s holy. No, you cannot rub exposed nerves, even when pain is necessary. No, you cannot beg people to stop and stand still, even for just a second, and see what they try not to. No, nothing you have to say matters, even when you never say a word.
	I watched as my voice was torn from the bridge in Ocean Beach where I left it, shattered to shards by city employees who cried while doing it. I wept too because of course they would get it. But I watched anyway, and they tugged and pulled and splintered what I’d struggled to pull from inside myself for over a decade. I didn’t realize I was screaming until the looks on people’s faces told me I was their source. In the newspaper, a woman said she couldn't stop hearing the noise.
"The only way I can describe it is pain’s language." 
	Those may be the most beautiful words she’ll ever speak, and all it took was my complete ruin and the first word I'd uttered in more than four years. Maybe that's all I should expect to come of this. Maybe that's enough.

                          *

	I came to Ocean Beach an abject failure. A casualty of yet another dot com bust, I had plenty of money to live—even by Southernmost California’s ridiculous standards—but nothing to do with myself. Well, that's not completely true. My counselor says all of the details matter if I want to understand what this means to me. She says I've been silent so long I can't process it all. So, I guess I really knew exactly what I needed to do, and that was to run from what I’d done. But I won’t tell everything here. Some things matter, some don't, and some belong only to me.
	My company, an Internet barbecue sauce retailer called The Sauce Boss, was a mild success in the early days of the net when all it took to be successful was a niche and a little press. Working 90-hours a week, I got regional sauce makers from all over the country to sell through us and, at the peak in '04, did more than $6 million in sales with only eight employees and a small office in Pasadena to count against the profits. And all this just three years out of college. I was 26 and a “self-made” success, like every other webtrepreneur. I even made the cover of a magazine, smiling in khakis and a bright azure polo with the company logo, above the words "David Grant - A Saucy Success Story."
	After a round of venture capital, we expanded into other more unique and expensive condiments with Dijon or Thai characters in their names before you could find them on the shelves of the local market in the Midwest. Hot sauce ruined us, though. Little-known fact: the second business ever on the Internet was a hot sauce purveyor. They were so good that when we tried to push into their market, they steamrolled us in a business school case study of having a market cornered before anyone else knows there's one to begin with. We regrouped and went back to our core products, but the momentum was gone and other sites were selling barbecue sauces, pulling at us from below. 
	Then the bottom dropped out of the entire economy, and the investments that had poured into businesses like mine for half a decade dried up. My shares in the company, once valued at north of eight million dollars, brought in about a quarter of that when I sold out to a subsidiary of one of the supermarket chains, a complete and utter failure of character from the guy who built his business model on calling store brands bad for the consumer soul. One might say this was the birth of art in me. All I knew was that I was a cliché. 
	A week after the money hit my account, I finished a break-even sale of my beautifully restored historic craftsman bungalow I’d bought in east Pasadena and returned my gleaming black Audi A6 to the dealer at a penalty for breaking my lease early. With all of the belongings I kept in the back of a rental truck, I drove to the corner of Lake Avenue and Colorado Boulevard where my offices once sat six floors up in a bank building. All seven members of my team had gathered there to watch the Rose Parade floats wheel past just two months earlier. 
	We took pictures and congratulated each other on having easy access to the best seats in the city. If you look closely, you can see how forced my smile was. The sale was basically complete, and none of them knew that in a few weeks they’d be jobless. I couldn’t even face them to break the news. I just didn't show up one day and in my place a corporate junior vice president of some nondescript title like "transition" called his first and last meeting, distributed severance checks and my apologies for not being there, and then shuttered the business I'd built. From my rental truck, I could see the completely barren office, all the furniture and use emptied days before. The view matched the ache in my stomach.
	I drove south because north felt wrong and because San Diego had always been my go-to weekend spot, mostly at the bars in Pacific Beach where I tried to pretend I was still in college by taking too many shots and banging girls from State like most guys my age. In the mornings, after I left random apartments rented by foursomes of random girls, I'd get coffee at a place in Ocean Beach I accidentally found once. It was small, never crowded, and had a ridiculously beautiful view of the pier I’d sobered up to so many times it began to feel like the only place I could feel that way. 
	So, after I'd rented a tiny, one room house a block from that coffee shop and put the majority of what I owned in storage, I tried and failed to find that sobriety again. All I found, though, was a hole blown through my soul. I tried to fill it with anything I could think of, even church, but all that offered was sanctified sinners become saints who took when they thought they were giving and all I could see was how much I'd have to give to replace I’d taken. 
	In time, the weight grew so heavy it crushed everything. Ugly inside and out, I cut myself off. From people. From everything I could deny myself. In the silence, an insatiable, unguided need to make something grew like a weed between the cracks inside me. What that could or should be was still unclear, but the need was crystal and I committed to waiting for it to express itself.

                          *

	It took four years. There's no need to talk about that time, other than to say it was all sameness and isolation and the sale of almost of everything I’d brought with me. By the time Jay-Bird lit the fuse in me that became my mural, I was completely austere. Thinking about 9/11 did it. No, that's not true. Not fully. It was the war on terror. So much surveillance. So much distrust. So much of everything. People with money went crazy trying to get more, like cash stacks could ward off imaginary suicide bombs. The poor got crushed because they’re who we should be fighting a war to save. Conservatives got surer. Liberals more superior. Everything and nothing changed, like the mythical San Diego seasons.  
	All of this just added to the weight in me, so I purged. I read a guy's book challenging me to live with just 100 personal possessions and I got down to 81 because 100 felt too conspicuously affluent. Those possessions did not include a phone, computer, television, or duplicate item. I did allow myself not to count personal hygiene products or food in my total, though I wanted to. The purge carried over into my spending and every month I had money left over from the interest checks the bank sent me. My guilt at cashing them accrued and interest of its own.
	Jay-Bird was one of six people I still talked to, the other five being my barista Tom; Kelly, a beautiful 40-something bar tender I could only speak to after two beers; Susan, the elderly woman who ran the Episcopal soup kitchen where I volunteered twice a week; a guy I'd run into around the pier at irregular intervals and whose name I still don't know as anything other than No Name; and Chip Copeland, a local cop living in the place next to mine.
	I wasn't shunning other people. If they said hello, I said it back. If I needed help finding something in a store, it's not like I'd point and grunt until the clerk figured it out. I just didn't go out of my way to engage. And as soon as I pulled back, the world seemed happy to oblige. There were some weeks when I'd say fewer than a hundred words and I thought about writing a letter to the author of the 100 Things book to see if he thought a 100 Word Challenge would catch on.
	Jay-Bird showed up a few years after I moved to OB. Black as pitch and cool as the best song you ever heard, he'd sit with his back against the concrete sea wall at Ocean Beach with his beat-up maple guitar and play. Sometimes he'd play an hour, sometimes four. And he could play anything. Any style. Any song, it seemed. I watched one time, on Memorial Day weekend when tourists strangled the beach in packs and they all wanted a song. Willie Nelson to Dolly Parton to Muddy Waters to Van Halen. And he played it all. It was almost mystical. I was so impressed, I had to ask how he did it.
	"You ever hear of a photographic memory?" His voice slid from his mouth like he didn't want to draw attention to himself, like it got stuck in some deep fold inside of him. He was packing up his guitar, scooping out what looked like more than $100 people had tossed in while he played. His raw fingers, tips red from pressing strings to fret board despite the thick layer of calluses, shuffled through the money, sorting like to like before stacking it all together.
	“Yeah.”
	“I got like a phonographic one." He looked up with a grin missing a few teeth that made me smile back and tapped his left ear. “I hear it once and it's there. Spend a lot of time in music shops. That and play a lot. Got to. Just cuz you know something don't mean you can do it without doin' it.”
	He smiled again and nodded and then left. I saw him again a few days later, asked if he would give me lessons if I paid him, turned a cheap but beautiful-sounding Gibson pawnshop acoustic into possession 82, and started meeting Jay-Bird twice a week. The lessons were simple, even as I improved. For a full year, he never gave me more than one tip a session and I never asked for more. Then he'd show me a scale or a set of chords and I'd play them over and over, him listening and playing them right when I got them wrong so I could watch his hands. That was it. We'd talk a little, sometimes about music, sometimes women, mostly about the ugliness we’d found here in one of the world's most beautiful places. That's what we were talking about when his words slammed straight into whatever was happening inside me.
	“You know you don't need to pay for lessons anymore, right?” He said it as I made my way through a complicated arpeggio run and then ended on a broken bar chord I messed up on purpose.
	“See, that's just proof you're wrong.” 
	“Naw, I ain't takin' your money. You can sit here and play with me, but you get no more teaching. You don't need it. What you need, if I may be so bold—”
	“—oh, here we go…” I laughed. Jay-Bird always prefaced life advice with a shake of his turkey waddle and the words if I may be so bold. I laid my Gibson across my lap and looked at him.
	“Now, don't go lookin' at me like that. It just seems to me you need to make your own music.”
	“Nope. I'm good just trying to play yours.”
	“You ain't playin' mine. I don't make music. I replay it. Never wrote a song in my life. Can't do it and wouldn't if I could. Wasn't made that way, seems, and no one wants to hear what I'd come up with if I was. It would make me too human when all they want is a big, black, smiling jukebox.”
	“Well, then we're the same, save the big and black part. No one wants to hear from me.”
	“Maybe your art ain't supposed to be heard. You ever think of that? Ever think you might just supposed to make it for yourself?” He looked at me longer than usual and then turned his eyes up the coastline. 
	“Honestly, I’d be the worst audience for my own art,” I said, embarrassed at even the possibility.
	Jay-Bird shook his head, packed up, and waved goodbye. When I showed up a couple days later he wasn't there. I waited an hour but knew it was over. I never saw him again. And before that seems too much like a story, Jay-Bird did exist, or at least he did until two weeks after that last lesson. His name was Jayson Randle Bird, he once played a studio session with Earth, Wind, and Fire, and his body was found in a sleeping bag under an overpass along the river where he'd stopped for the night. He'd been stabbed and whoever did it left behind his guitar, tucked in its case like he knew he’d be defiling the sacred if he took it. I still regret not asking him to write a song for me because I wanted more than a jukebox.

                          *

	The next few years, the six people I talked to became two. After Jay-Bird, I stopped volunteering at the soup kitchen because it made me hungry and that felt awful. I also gave up drinking and the bar with it. Copeland got transferred to a beat in City Heights and moved. That left Tom, who I saw a couple of times a week when he handed me my coffee, and No Name, who I ran into once a month at most. And the less I talked, the more Jay-Bird's words returned to me.
	To avoid becoming a shut-in, I started walking the peninsula at night. I covered every street on the map, from the lighthouse on the point, through town past the strip clubs and Sports Arena to the edge of Old Town where the I-5 cuts the boundary line to San Diego proper and the homeless keep their baskets safe for each other during the day. While I walked, I built three-dimensional map in my mind—houses, businesses, people, oddities, all in dark indigo tones against the yellow hue of sodium streetlights. I traced the Formosa Slough where the stark white cranes watched me pass and walked the wealthy Loma Portal neighborhood with lights made to look like old-timey gas lamps planted in the middle of streets bearing names like Byron and Keats. When I'd walked it all, I found the real Ocean Beach, the one only visible after the young professionals and college types lock their doors for the night; a world of art and the displaced most people never really see.   
	In the muted hush of the coastal fog, art crawls up from the sidewalks and leeches out of the walls. It's impossible to take it all in casually. A lawn plays pen to a sculpted plastic purple cow and rainbow-hued lawn flamingos positioned and repositioned to imitate migration. Amateur Seussian sneetches hand-painted on electrical boxes sneer at faux-meaningful, city-approved sculptures. Bridges and buildings canvas graffiti and hand-painted signs for businesses losing the war of economic attrition that is life in America. Guys with Rasta locks and tattoos of quasi-Polynesian origin fold reeds into flowers at the gates of community gardens planted in neat squares by anyone with time and desire to grow something. Cars with hand-scrawled with messages in house paint roll slowly between buildings evoking 1974 along a street where each week a man sells water color seascapes at the farmers' market in a stall outside an antique store. And just down the street, in front of the pier at the stone war memorial marking homage for the community's fallen soldiers, impromptu bands play in Jay-Bird's shadow with the airy tones of church bells in the background while the murals on the wall of the elementary school battle ocean pollution in cartoon sea animal form. Even the houses breathe art ranging down from Mexican hacienda to Spanish villa to Craftsman bungalow to ultra-modern Neo-Cubism. 
	For months, I traveled slowly from street to street, neighborhood to neighborhood, carefully marking where I’d stopped on a map each morning so I could come straight back the next night. With each walk, I grew entangled in the most intimate corners of this place intimately. I would stop when compelled and stare for minutes at a time. By the end of the first week, I had a notebook and a pen to capture the ways the city revealed itself to me. I was on my third by the end of the first month, possessions 83 through 85. When I walked my last street, 194 nights after I began, I cried openly and immediately began again. 
	This was when I stopped talking. I don't remember choosing silence. If anything, so much was happening inside me it felt like I was locked in a non-stop conversation with everything. I realized I saw the same street people those nights, all with nowhere else to go and looking for something just beyond what they could see. Art fails here because it is too securely lodged in safety or destruction, but not in both, I thought, and the growing urgency of Jay-Bird's advice to create swirled inside me like a brush fire. Maybe that's why I couldn't speak any of it. Maybe that was just the trajectory of my life. Either way, I was in labor. 
	And then, in a single night, Francis was born.
	The first two contractions happened simultaneously. I was passing the 7-Eleven just before the slough at about 11 o’clock when the headlights of a passing car bounced starburst against something on the concrete in front of me. I bent and picked up what felt like a polished stone, rolling it around in my hand as I walked to the brighter lights of a laundromat. In the palm of my hand, it glittered like a perfect half-inch circle blown cobalt glass. I didn't know its name, but it was clearly valuable and must have fallen from a ring or necklace. 
	I looked around, guilty like I'd stolen it, and slid the stone in my pocket. As I walked out, a notice from the University of San Diego's extension program on a bulletin board next to the door became the second birth pang. An Italian mosaic maker would be on campus for a one week seminar on creating installation mosaic murals. The course cost $2,000, which made advertising for it in a laundromat an odd choice, and only 15 people could register. Reaching up quickly, I snatched the paper off the wall and pushed out into the night air.
	Tracing the smooth dirt path along the edge of the slough, the sour salt stench curling up into my nostrils, I walked with my head down. Suddenly, a sound like taking a baseball bat against celery crunched wetly on the dark path ahead of me. I snapped my eyes up in time to see a police officer swing with his baton again, the sound repeating as the stick sank into the side of a man already on his knees. The man, a dirty-faced Desert Storm veteran named Sonny who’d stop and listen to me and Jay play once, cried out and the cop hit him one more time before dropping a knee into the small of his back and cuffing his hands behind him. Stepping off the path, I knelt in the reeds and watched men in orange city work vests carry a mattress and several trash bags out from behind a stand of trees just beyond where the cop had Sonny pinned.
	“—told you to stay back,” the cop was saying, breathing hard at the exertion of brutality.
	“But that's my stuff.” Sonny lay on the ground, huffing and wheezing, and when he turned his head toward me there was blood on his teeth and in the white hair of his matted beard.
	“No, that's trash, Sonny. It should be in a dumpster.”
	Sonny went silent. The fact that the cop knew his name landed like another baton to the side. I felt sick and frozen and angry in waves but cowered in the bushes until they finished clearing Sonny’s squat and the cop took him away in the back of his car. When I was sure they were gone, I walked as quickly as I could back to the well-lit streets and went straight home, the image of blood on Sonny’s lips burned into me.
   
                          *

	The sound of the drill bit tearing into the concrete bridge stanchion was deafening and I stopped, sure I’d be arrested immediately despite knowing my orange Cal Trans uniform was authentic camouflage and no one ever pays attention unless what you're doing is completely outlandish. Anybody watching that afternoon was just glad our work wasn’t slow down their commute. Turning my head without moving the rest of my body, I scanned the street in both directions, took a deep breath, and went back to work. 
	In my test installation on an abandoned handball court, I was able to put up the eight 4'-by-4' mock panels like the ones I mounted the mural to in just under two and a half hours with learning curve stops and starts. I hoped to be done with the real deal in less than that. My heart pounded as I drilled in my guide holes. Drilling the guides went quickly because I only needed to sink the bit 5/8 of an inch as a starting point for the 2-inch screws that would hold the panels in place. Done, I pulled down the pattern I’d taped in place and grabbed the caulk gun from my waist to shoot quick-drying epoxy around the perimeter of the space the first panel would hang and a thick X of it in the middle of the square. That and four quick screws were all I needed to make each piece permanent. 
	The mosaic panels leaned against the wall next to me in the order I would put them up. No Name stood next to them, his hands in his pockets looking for all the world like the ultra-industrious "extra guy" who always seems to be hanging around doing nothing on any public works job. His only responsibility, after watching over my shoulder for the police, was to hoist the panels in place while I affixed them to the wall. I wanted to do it alone, but it just wasn't possible without a lot of extra equipment. So, I wrote down my plan, showed it to No Name, offered him $200, and he agreed to help. He even brought the Cal Trans vests. I have no idea where he got them. 
	For the next two hours, we worked like a veteran team. Without words, No Name lifted each panel, his thin white arms turning pink in the late day sun while I slathered the wall with adhesive I’d ordered from an Italian supplier. As soon as I was done and reaching for the drill and screws, he slid the panels directly in place and held them steady while I drove the fasteners into the concrete. We did the bottom row first, four across, so the panels of top row could rest on them and give his arms a break. The whole thing was almost one fluid motion. No one stopped to ask what we were doing. The only pauses came in making sure the panels were perfectly aligned before I drove in the screws that wouldn't allow for adjustment, but even that flowed like water. 
	And then it was done, the tools packed away and the area swept clean of the concrete dust that came from putting it up. All that was left was to step back and look at the image that had burned in my soul so long my hair had gone gray in the time it took to draw it out of me.
	I have no explanation for my ability with mosaics. I had no idea I could see that way before that class. The first one I made was of half a face made entirely of black and white glass stones, like those angular art deco pieces from the mid-80s, kind of African but not really. When I finished, Andre, the Italian expert, said he'd never worked with a natural like me. A few months later, he let me stay with him in Rome for several weeks so he could show me finer points of the process no one week class could. After that, I blew past a hundred possessions buying new tools and filling a storage unit with practice pieces. They started small and simple, growing larger and more complex until I'd done a couple on the scale I envisioned for Saint Francis.
	At night I scavenged the streets, collecting pieces of Ocean Beach. Broken glass, rocks, sea shells, a set of dog tags, bike reflectors, aluminum can tabs, stones from zero-scaped yards, a license plate in the old blue and yellow, wine bottles, chunks of brick from the walls of businesses. I picked up anything interesting and tucked it away, putting it in a box with everything else I'd collected, filling and sorting through the stuff five times throughout the year I gathered. 
	And then, I stopped. Somehow, I knew what I'd gathered was enough. Another couple of weeks of breaking bottles and cutting down larger pieces before separating it all by colors and I was ready. I bought a table big enough to hold one panel, set it in the middle of my living room, and started laying the pieces out, sketching and revising and placing them in the right order, only to sweep it all aside and restart the process. Each panel took weeks and one a lot longer because I dropped it and had to start over. When I couldn't make the pieces an image, I'd walk to the bridge over the inlet where I planned to put it and stare at the blank concrete, painted over time and time again with industrial gray because that paint is only ever an invitation to tag the spot all over again. 
	And then, sun dipping low behind the Pacific’s stereotypically beautiful sailboats headed into the marina and concrete dust glued to my skin, I was looking at all of what I’d never seen more than one piece at a time. The feeling was too much. No Name must have sensed it because he left while I took in the mural. Finally, the image made sense of more than just itself. 
	In the center was Francis, a properly ragged and emaciated patron saint for the poor and the wild and the indigent. His face was sad, blue eyes leaking black tears down pale cheeks. His left eye was that first blue stone I found outside the 7-Eleven. With his right arm, he embraced a woman whose face was only partially visible. But addiction and loss pooled in the one green eye he could see. Her torn red dress stood vivid against the light-yellow background and Francis' white robes. The embrace was genuine but interrupted as Francis extended his left hand against the chest of a police officer with his nightstick raised over his bare head, blood in florid red beads dripping from it. The officer’s face was an exact replica of the one who beat Sonny, his lips curled around rage the rest of the image could not justify. A streetlight cast a sodium glow over the scene and across the bottom in stark black letters were the words "We are the least of these."
	I stood and looked a while, the fading sunlight glinting against all the colors, and I was still. For the first time in years, I felt stagnant content spread from my chest to the ends of my fingers and toes. I lingered for a moment and then, embarrassed at being so self-centered, I picked up my toolbox and walked away without looking back.

                          *

	Reaction was immediate. The mural was mysterious despite several hundred people driving past while I put it up. Maybe seeing is the wrong word for what people do with their eyes while locked in their wheeled commuter cages. Within hours, it seemed, everyone knew about it. Word spread on the internet, pilgrimages were made, city officials condemned it in muted tones, religious leaders spoke for and against it, anti-religious activists threatened lawsuits, the police offered a reward for the identity of who put it up, the mayor hired a firm to take it down intact, those "experts" said they couldn’t, and then, in an almost unanimous vote, the city council ordered Francis martyred, ironic given it took exhumation by mural for that to happen. 
	The day the workers tore him down and sprinkled his glass ashes on the asphalt under the bridge, I tried to stay away. I woke up, the charcoal gray morning mostly still, and walked away to the south. But then I was there, looking at it from across the street with a small crowd. I had not come back since I installed it and was surprised to find dozens of candles on the sidewalk beneath Francis' feet. Pictures of the lost and missing and discarded were taped to the wall on either side, Francis embracing them all until the workers started tearing them down. The crowd murmured at each image shredded from the concrete with rough, gloved fingers. The noise turned to tears when one of the candles was kicked over accidentally and shattered with a tinkling made faint by the passing traffic. Two police officers there to ensure the mural was taken down without incident hardened their eyes and one rested his hand on the butt of his gun.
	The whole time, I could feel the pressure building. The dam holding back my words spider-webbed at the base of my throat, a sigh the first noise to trickle through. When the last piece of what others had added to the mural was thrown in the trash bags at their feet and the workers turned to Francis himself, I tried to leave. But at that moment, the crowd swelled against me like the weight of the words against the failing barrier within me, holding me at the edge of the curb, my eyes fixed on the murder being committed in front of us all. It wasn’t sadness I felt. It was joy that this killing could not be hidden, and it brought up my first word from an even deeper place within me than Francis himself; brought it with the force of a bursting levee.
	“Speak!”

                          *
	
	I met my counselor, Tina, while serving the last of 90 days in the city jail for defacing public property. The assistant district attorney offered probation and no jail time with a public apology. I told him that even though I was talking again, I would never say those words. He smiled and thanked me, walked into the courtroom, and asked the judge to consider the artistic merit of my work when he sentenced me. Clearly not an art lover, the judge gave me the longest possible sentence and tacked on a $10,000 fine. It didn't matter. I walked directly out of the court and served the remaining 48 days of my sentence. 
	Tina came to offer me her services a couple weeks before I got out. I declined and she left. Then she came back the next day. And the next. And the next. Finally, I agreed to talk when I got out and found her waiting at my house the day I was released. We sat at the still-dusty living room table and Tina laid a copy of the newspaper on it. The lead story was about a mysterious mosaic that had appeared on a train bridge thirty minutes north. They called it the “Surfing Madonna” because people mistakenly thought it was the Virgin Mary riding a wave on what I can only hope was a Caster surfboard. It was beautiful in ways Francis had to be ugly. No one had claimed credit for the piece yet and I was mentioned as a possible suspect.
	“Woulda been tough for me to do from my cell.” 
	“How does this make you feel?” Tina asked after a minute. 
	In the coming days, I would come to expect that question enough to answer it before she asked. But that first time, I really didn't know what to say for quite a while. I stood and paced the small room and she sat silently, her silence deeply moving. Finally, I sat back down and laid my hands on the table, sliding them slowly over the rough grit.
	“Hopeful.”

— MICHAEL DEAN CLARK

Michael Dean Clark is an author of fiction and literary nonfiction whose work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays and nominated for Best of the Net consideration. It has appeared in Drunk Monkeys, Angel City Review, The Other Journal, Punctuate, and The Jabberwock Review among others. He lives and writes in Southern California.