La Dispute
Here, Hear II

THE REVIEW

"Send help. The vultures are getting hungry." 1978. San Diego. I had just come out of a relationship that had made me explode... I was angry and disillusioned. Destroyed: practically in pieces. I had lost everything I believed in. I was completely, utterly alone as I had never been before. So I started walking. I began taking these long night walks around the outskirts of San Diego, in the area where I lived at the time. I would start walking early in the evening and return home around midnight, sometimes even later. I walked and thought and brooded over everything I had done wrong in life. One night, between Fourth and Fifth Street, I met and confronted the typical suburban "street gang." They sent me to the hospital with serious life-threatening injuries. When the E.R. asked me what my religion was, I refused to answer. Because I had made a "pact," private and internal, between me and the universe; regardless of life and death. Then something happened. I got angry. I got angry because I still had stories to tell. So I turned back. It took me two months to get back to decent condition.

But two things came out of this incident. First, I was no longer afraid of death. Second, as soon as I recovered, I started walking again, sometimes even until three or four in the morning in the most infamous areas of the city. When people asked me what I was doing in those places, my response was: "I'm looking for something." So I continued walking in the most dangerous areas of San Diego. Those places were home to prostitutes, drunks, and thug gangs. Finally, one afternoon I arrived in the same area where I had been beaten bloody and was struck by the dichotomy between that corner of the city by night and by day. During the day, there were businessmen, simple employees, and kids. All eager to return home to their families for dinner. As the evening arrived and then the night, the shadows of the forgotten emerged, the desperate seeking money, alcohol, or drugs. The streets were the same, but simultaneously they were two different worlds; they shared nothing but the same longitude and latitude. There was a nation by day and a nation by night, coexisting and fleeing from each other. The people of the day. The people of the night. I saw a country divided by something more than just the presence or absence of sunlight, as the lives of multiple people clashed close and got lost indifferently, crossing from one side to the other of the two worlds. They do not pretend to be seen because not being seen is easy. And I saw someone forced to walk on both sides of this metaphor, to learn how the greatest cruelty of our blindness to ignore others was there, but the grace of some god was not. In the end, I realized that I had found what I was searching for, without being sure of what had happened. I had found a story that had given meaning to my life again. This story. I still tend to take long walks, and I still stop to talk with the people who live “on the corner” waiting for something to happen: those waiting for a coin to fall into their hat or bowl, those waiting for someone to tell their woes to. Because the line between "the side" of the people of the night and the place where I am writing these words is thin and ephemeral, and can be crossed in an instant. And because the path of the people of the night can only be erased with compassion, which to be clear is not pity. I found my story, this story, on a cloudy afternoon in 1978. Now it's yours. The keys of the "nation of the night" are in your hands. What you will do with them is up to you.

J. Michael Straczynski Sherman Oaks, California, July 21, 2002