Sutter Street
by Jonathan Carillo
Mini was the first schizophrenic person I ever actually knew—besides my Uncle, who I only really knew of, and the people on Eddy Street that talked to themselves, who never really knew anybody. When I met her I was living in Daly City, renting a bedroom from a man I pretended to be Republican for; in the rental listing he stated he was looking for someone with “strong family values.” Upon my arrival to the house I quickly mentioned to him—Ray—that I was glad to see that “all that crazy immigration stuff” hadn’t spilled over into his neighborhood. His house was at the end of a horseshoe street that hugged a cliff overlooking the sea, from a distance that was sometimes nauseatingly close. If you went through the back door and walked straight, twenty paces would take you over the edge, to a drop that would take your life.
There was a wooden armchair propped at the edge, nestled into the earth a couple steps down the slope, before the drop fully commenced. I was sure that if I had the gall to climb down to the chair, the view would’ve been incredible, but I was not willing, too fixated on the thought of a couple clumps of soil coming loose, sending me careening down. We were looking at the chair when I made the comment about immigration. As soon as I did, Ray snapped his neck to face me. For a moment, he only stared, and I began to wonder if I’d made an error in judgement, until a smirk crept across his face, emerging from the deep recesses at the corners of his mouth, finally taking its full shape and bearing a set of meticulously straight but yellow teeth.
He told me it was a goddamn miracle; that he used to live in San Francisco when it was just a gay city and that was fine, before they started trying to make everything about everybody. He called London Breed a glutton and a liar, though the look on his face as he did betrayed to me a desire to say something more crude, and through the opal of his bright eyes I read the words “fat whore” forming in his mind, even though they never emerged.
I nodded along with everything he said. Though I was concerned I might not be able to supply a sufficiently provocative response, this turned out not to be a problem. Ray hardly took a breath to allow me to butt in, instead, he rambled with his eyes cast downward while he led me through the remainder of the house, hardly looking at me and surely not looking for input, other than nonverbal agreement. Soon, it dawned on me that we weren’t having a conversation at all, nor was he telling me anything, I was simply bearing witness to the long, extended ritual of him reciting something to himself, as if it had to be repeated over and over and over again in order for it to remain true—and though he nodded along with every flagrant assertion he made, a glimmer of doubt bubbled underneath, begging to be released.
The repetition of this monologue worked him into a trance-like state that didn’t lift until we arrived back at the front of the house, having fully toured the premises. For a moment we stood in the foyer, his mouth groping for words as if they had to be plucked out of the air before him, his eyes like fogged glass, until the lucidity finally snapped back and he offered me the room. I took it. Two weeks later, I moved in.
I was sitting in the chair on the edge of the cliff, having conquered my fear in gradual steps over the course of the first two months living in my new home, flicking through the gigs page on Craigslist when I came across Mini’s listing. It was written in a manner that made its authenticity unquestionable, as surely anyone trying to scam or defraud would’ve gone through the effort of ironing out the many oddities that existed within it.
I am seeking a talent to assist in recording a musical album with me. Must be of open mind and good heart. Awoken individuals only preferred, but willing to accept anyone willing to learn. I am a serious musician passionate about telling story. In need of someone to share a similar passion. Very important to me. Rate negotiable. Most importantly, the feeling must be right between us. We will meet once to discuss before moving forward. I have lots of the equipment. Microphones, amplifiers. Just need qualified engineer.
And then, she listed her phone number, which I quickly copied into my phone, before shooting her a text: Hi Mini. I’m reaching out regarding your listing. Are you still looking for an engineer?
After sending the text I lit a cigarette, put my phone away and forgot about it. I didn’t receive a response until a few days later, while I was eating dinner in the dining room of Ray’s house. The house was almost entirely silent, except for the sound of Ray in the next room, rambling on the phone.
Hi, yes. Are you available to meet this week?
Yes. I’m available Thursday or Friday afternoon.
Oh, lovely. Let’s do Thursday then. Hopefully the traffic won’t be bad. What time can you be here?
5 o’ clock?
Oh, the traffic will definitely be bad, but okay. My address is 230 Sutter Street. I have the unit on the second floor. I’ll leave the front door unlocked. You can come up the stairs, then knock three times on the door.
I read this message and smirked.
Okay, three times. I’ll see you on Thursday.
On Thursday, I wore a pair of light-wash carpenter jeans and a forest green knitted sweatshirt over a white undershirt, with a pair of white Reeboks. I drove from Daly City to the address Mini provided with the windows down and a cigarette hanging out of my mouth. Wind grabbed at the ashy embers of its tip, suctioning them out the window. I inhaled the sights as I drove; the rolling hills, the meticulously aligned Victorian homes draped across them like scales on a lizard’s back, and the shining corporate monoliths in the distance, with light glistening off their glass windows. San Francisco, as a city of traffic, is by extension a city of billboards, and there were many that lined the stretch of Highway 101 weaving from Daly City to the Bay Bridge, most notably the enormous red Supreme perched at a perfect crook in the road where traffic stood at a standstill for hours every weekday. As I sat in that traffic, waiting for my opportunity to exit, I stared at the billboard and thought about the fact that I had never owned a single piece of clothing from Supreme, which reminded me of a line from a song, which I then played through my financed-Acura’s Bluetooth sound system. I turned the volume as high as it would go, to assault anyone nearby with the words.
Bitch, I’m from the trap—I ain’t never wore Supreme.
I parked on the street outside Mini’s apartment, which was on a considerable hill, then walked to the door. As promised, the bottom door was unlocked. Behind it, a set of carpeted stairs led up to what I assumed was her apartment. I climbed the stairs, then knocked three times on the door.
Coming, I heard a voice call through the door. I heard the ruffling of things; objects being pushed, picked up and put down, something or the other. Then came the sound of shuffling, what I assumed were Mini’s little steps. After a minute, she got to the door and opened it just an inch. She was miraculously short and for a moment I overlooked her entirely before tracing down the crack in the doorway to where one of her big, bulbous eyes poked through. Are you? She asked. I am, I answered. We talked over text about me coming today.
The singular eye looked me up and down, then past me, to see if I was hiding somebody, then finally, when she seemed sure that wasn’t the case, with a grunt she opened the door.
Mini was the spitting image of her name, a miniature of a human. Somewhere between seventy and seventy-five. Small hands, small feet, and a considerable arch in her back. Her black hair was cut to the length of her ears and gave her head the shape of a lightbulb. She had a large crook nose and rough, wrinkly skin on her cheeks, reminiscent of a witch. Her skin was a shade of olive that didn’t reveal her background with any surety, and she had an unrecognizable accent to match. She wore a long, flowing, baby-blue gown. Her apartment was falling apart in the exact way she wanted it to, every piece and pile placed and angled in the direction she wanted them to be. I was sure that if I displaced something, even in a far corner, buried under a number of other things, somehow she would notice.
I’m a collector, she told me as she hobbled from the door to the living room, which was rendered largely unusable by her collections, aside from a divot she had carved on the left side of the room to make space for a round wooden table, two chairs and an old computer. Three large rectangular windows cast a blanket of sunlight over the set-up. She hadn’t been lying about having equipment. Strewn across the place there were microphones, amplifiers, XLR cables, guitars, keyboards, audio interfaces, mixers and more—but of what use they would be to me, I was unsure. Everything was archaic, usually missing some part of itself. It was an island of misfit toys. Past the living room I could see through a hallway into the kitchen, which was in a similar state of disrepair. Mini took a seat at the round table and gestured for me to do the same.
She told me she was happy I made it and surprised that I drove at this hour, with all of this traffic, which she said while gesturing in circles with her hands as if the traffic was in the room with us. I never drive, no, no, can you imagine me driving? She said, then laughed. She explained that she hadn’t driven for a very long time, not because she didn’t know how, but because she valued her health, and didn’t want to sit all day in that exhaust that was already taking precious days of our lives. I don’t even walk too close to the highways now, not that I do a lot of walking, with the way things are these days—it’s not terribly safe out there, I’m sure you’ve heard—I’m sure you’re seeing things the way I’m seeing things. It wasn’t always like this, you know? Oh, and now they’ve got people walking around wearing masks. It infuriates me, in fact, the other day I saw a man walking by my apartment wearing one of those things and so I went down and I, oh, I gave him a piece of my mind, yes. The look in his eyes when I told him, too! My, that was nice. You know why they do that, don’t you? Why they tell them to wear a mask? I was unsure how to respond, but thankfully, she didn’t give me time to. Because it takes away our humanity, she continued. It makes everyone scared of one another, you can’t read the expressions anymore, see, and that’s what they want, so we can’t be… we can’t be in tune and we can’t communicate about the things that are happening and what they’re doing to us. You know, you know. You’re a smart boy. I don’t see a mask on you.
Mini went on to explain that these things had been going on for a while but that nobody seemed to notice, or only a select few did, of which she was one, and that it was part of her divine duty to relay certain messages to the world, messages which she received from the birds that came to her window to tell her things—she pointed to the window, and as promised, there were three birds, standing dutifully on top of her AC unit, staring in at us as if they were part of the conversation. Music, she said, was the avenue through which she had chosen to communicate these messages with the world, and that she planned to do so with an all-encompassing rock-opera that would finally blow the lid off the mystery box, releasing the nefarious truth to the public and therefore, liberating them, at which point she would finally be granted permission to die. She assured me that now that I had learned this information there would be people who would try and find me, to ask questions and see how much I knew. She explained that it was of the utmost importance I never stop to answer questions from anyone on the street, no matter how innocuous they may seem, as this was a trap and a way of revealing more of what we knew, what she knew, so that they could combat her plan. As she talked, she went back and forth from her chair to the window, where she would stick her hand full of bird feed through the gap made by the AC unit and let the birds eat directly out of her palm, which solved the mystery in my mind of why three birds would so dutifully sit at some old woman’s window. It was then that I noticed their unusual weight: they were fat, a physical representation of their gluttony. I realized that Mini must’ve been doing this all day long, going back and forth from the table to the window, giving them more and more and more. Sometimes, when she went to the window, she referenced a sequence of lights, some other part of the communication she was receiving. They speak to me, she said. I followed her gaze through the window, but saw nothing. From what I could see, the sky was its regular shade of grey. If you are open to receiving them, she said, they’ll reveal themselves to you. Then and only then.
After ninety minutes of this, during which I spoke a total of maybe one-hundred words, I told Mini that I had to be going, but would be happy to come back another time, so long as we set a rate for my services. At the mention of money, she grew visibly nervous, and began to wring her hands. I don’t have much, she said, so you’ve got to be in it for more than just the money—it’s got to be about the mission, you see, above all else, it has to be about the mission. I didn’t lie, though—I’ll pay. I can do thirty for a session. I mulled it over in my head, then agreed. Relief washed over her. She walked me to the front door. As I reached my car, she called out after me: you should take the side streets home! You know, the exhaust. I thanked her, then got in my car and left.
Next week, I went back to Mini’s apartment and she showed me all the equipment she owned. There was an entire library of mixers and interfaces I hadn’t seen before, all of which I only vaguely knew how to use, along with a collection of microphones. I selected the microphone with the least-dented grill and the simplest interface I could find. When I went to plug the interface into my laptop, Mini shook her head no, and insisted that we use her own computer, so that she could keep the recording files for herself. I insisted we could record on my laptop, and I would share all of the files with her after the fact, but she seemed perplexed by the idea, so I agreed to attempt with her own computer. After fifteen minutes of waiting for the desktop to boot up, which looked like it was lifted off a stock-shelf in ‘04, and sat atop a white, bulbous base like a large golf ball, Mini came to agree that we should use my laptop.
Okay, she said, once everything was wired and ready to go. She sat on a stool across from me, her feet dangling a couple inches off the ground, holding her guitar, a microphone perched at her lips. I’m ready, she told me. I gave her a count, then signaled go.
Mini strummed a single chord, dark and foreboding. It reverberated in the room like a voice at the bottom of a well. She let it linger there, and I saw her lips moving as she mumbled a silent count to herself. When she reached eight, she struck the chord again, louder this time, and held her pick hand out and away from her body after she did, for dramatic effect—then out of nowhere, she clamped her fingers down, shutting off the note, then took off her headphones and said no, no. That’s not it. Not in time.
I stopped the recording. She took a moment to collect herself, humming the melody on a loop while miming the movements she’d make on the guitar. After a minute of this, she looked back at me as if to say, I’m ready.
I gave her the count, cued the recording, and sat back. She struck the chord once, then twice, then stopped. Hm, she said. Something’s…hm. She stood up, set the guitar down by propping it against the round table and went to the kitchen. I heard the sink running. When she returned, her face was damp. Okay, she said. She glanced in the direction of her avian friends. I looked over as well– and there they were, dutiful as ever, peering in through the window with wide, docile eyes. She took a deep breath to push down the disappointment at her own incapability, which I quickly understood could never be verbalized. There would always be something, something else that was causing her error, whether that was time, the equipment, the face I made as she tried to play—it didn’t matter.
I’m ready, she said.
Count. Record. Chord one, chord two, stop.
After this effort, Mini set the guitar down again, this time in a manner that made it clear she wouldn’t pick it up for the remainder of our session—then, she spurred into explaining her mission again, as if she were a dial-up toy that’d just been wound up and released. Specifically, she spoke about the forces that she, we, were working against. She never called them by a specific name, but assured me they were a global force, working tirelessly in secret to keep the public in an unknowing and oppressed state. They were everything and nothing, an allegiance of shadows. It was the Russians, the Jews, the aristocratic elites. It was the gay community, the fluoride in tap water, the Chinese. The sexually perverse, the takers of children. Hollywood, the music industry, the politicians. The schemers, the liars. Whatever it was, it was them. When I asked how her rock-opera would combat these powerful forces, she stated that it would ‘wake the sleeping,’ but did not provide further insight into what exactly that meant.
After an hour and a half of this, I brought the time to her attention and said that I had to leave. She agreed and walked me kindly to the door, insisting that I return next week.
Next week, I made what I considered to be a helpful effort to keep Mini on task, which only seemed to frustrate her further. After reminding her multiple times that we ought to give the recording another take, she looked at me suspiciously and said she was beginning to wonder whether I’d lost sight of our goal. After that, I no longer attempted to curtail her monologues. I simply followed them like driftwood caught in the current, with no knowledge of where I would arrive but an understanding that eventually, I would be washed ashore. Occasionally, she asked me about myself. When she did, I would indulge her with fantasies about my past: attending university in New York, the creative writing program at NYU, waiting tables at restaurants on the Lower East Side. I invented things I thought might appeal to her. She listened, but mostly used the tidbits of information I gave as springboards to return to her primary line of thought: the amorphous they and the unrelenting hold they had over us all. When I told her of the miscarriage my previous girlfriend had, at a time when I was deluded enough to believe I was ready for children, she solemnly shook her head and asked whether she’d been drinking water from the tap, as if that was sure to explain the event.
We opened the majority of sessions with a celebratory joint, passed gingerly back and forth between us, courtesy of Mini’s personal collection, which she kept in a tin container the size of a paperback novel with a Wu Yunlai literati painting replicated on its lid. While we smoked she would talk to the birds as if she’d forgotten I was even there, and I’d sink back into the haze of my high to watch them interact. There were moments where my perception fooled me, and for whatever reason, whether it was the cloudiness of my eyes or the overly assumptive nature of my thoughts, I tracked an exchange between them, where their little heads would bob in response to the things she said; their beaks would open to chirp a reply.
I returned on a weekly basis for the remainder of the summer, and we worked slowly through her project in what would’ve been a painstaking stop-and-go process had I not accepted long before that to Mini, whether she was aware of it or not, I was not an engineer but another heartbeat in the room to remind her she was still alive; to do what the birds once could but could no longer. I became a reminder of the world she had foregone, a world where people left their apartments and conversed with friends as if there was nothing to be afraid of, and while she constantly told me that I had to be aware of all the terrible things that could happen to me, she also constantly told me that they were trying to instill fear in us. It seemed that fear stuck to her like glue. She never mentioned family or friends so I assumed that to her, those things didn’t exist. The only other living soul she referred to was a man who allegedly engineered music for her before me. She expressed a particular fondness for him, not only for the quality of his work, which he after a while came to do for free—because he was, by her account, as invested in the mission as she—but in the quality of his character; his open-mindedness. Every time she mentioned that he inevitably ceased charging her for his services, she cast a glance in my direction and paused as if waiting for me to offer to do the same. And though I felt that it wasn’t really about the money or the music, that I was doing a kindness by being there with her, I never did make that offer, because I knew without the money I would no longer feel obligated to her in the way I did with it. My selfishness, held at bay by a thirty-dollar payment, would rear its ugly head and I would be Mini’s companion no more.
One warm, grey mid-August day, I arrived at Mini’s apartment prepared to run through our usual routine. I went up the steps and knocked three times. She took longer than usual to answer the door, and when she finally did, it was clear to see that she was unwell. She cracked the door only a little, and looked me up and down multiple times before allowing me inside. She did not ask me about the traffic, or tell me about her day and the birds.
We went into her living room. I set up the equipment to record. She watched me as I did. I felt her eyes drill into the back of my neck as I bent over to fiddle with the crow’s nest of chords beneath the table. When I sat up, she quickly looked away. Is everything okay, I asked her. She pointed to the window. Look, and tell me what you see. I followed her pointing finger to the window and saw nothing. I don’t know, Mini. You don’t notice? She asked. I continued to look. My birds, she said. My birds are gone. And as she said this I realized yes, her birds were gone, and although I assumed they had just gone for a quick flight around the neighborhood and would be back soon, she assured me that they had been gone for days, that she didn’t think she’d see them again. When I asked her why, her bottom lip and the little gullet of fat that hung beneath her chin trembled.
I don’t know why, she said. Every day, I fed them. For years. I looked after them as if they were my children, I wished them good morning and bid them goodnight…I never would’ve done anything to hurt them. I made them a home and they took it. I don’t understand how they could leave, they never told me they would leave. A single tear slid down her cheek as she spoke. Embarrassed to watch, I turned to face the window, where I was confronted again with the glaring absence of her avian friends. I saw the marks their tiny feet made in the paint atop the air conditioner, and ovals on the sill shades lighter than everywhere else that must’ve marked where the birds sat. It made me sick to see, and filled me with a desire to do something drastic, if only to change the temperament of the room between us, so we could both for a moment be freed from the sense of something missing.
When I looked back to Mini, she was staring out the window again with her mouth slightly agape, her eyes cartoonishly wide, cast upwards into the sky. There was a tightness in her features I hadn’t seen before; for a moment I thought she was paralyzed, until her lips moved to mumble something to me. She spoke very low, so low I couldn’t possibly hear without scooting closer, so I moved from my chair to her side, and held my ear just inches from her face.
My lights, she said. Can you see my lights?
And at once I remembered what she told me, that sometimes alongside the birds she would receive flashes of lights in a sequence. Though I had never seen them, she was adamant they were there, as real as the birds and the guitars and the microphones and me. As real as the wooden table, the ashtray in the middle, and the cigarette butts we dropped into it. Can you see my lights?
I turned to face the window again, and as I did I felt her breath on my earlobe, warm and sweet without a voice attached. I did my best to follow her gaze up into the cloud-covered sky. It seemed so impossibly large, and still it held the surreality of a miniature figurine—the outline of every cloud seemed too dark, too sure of itself. Can you see my lights?
Yes, Mini. I see your lights.
Oh, my. They’re beautiful, aren’t they?
Yes, very beautiful.