Snow in Berkeley

By Pao Tzu
Pigdog Staff Writer
 

It snowed like hell on me last night.

Well, not like hell, snow in hell would be a lot colder.

I morphed into a miniature glacier on 23rd and San Pablo in Oakland... it quit hailing on me so I thought I could run down the street to try and use the payphone (again) when at about 3 or 4 am it started snowing... and I got all covered with ice. My hands started to turn purple, I ran out of cigarettes, my lighter went dead, I lost my Zig Zags on the sidewalk, and then I tried to get a cab but they said they didn't have anyone on duty yet who was gonna come to where I was. Bastards. I even told them I had a little extra "gift" for any driver they'd send me. The operator didn't understand what I was talking about, he's all making no sense like "en pree taxee's aveeleble he come deer."

And so I'm just thinking 2 hours until that damned bus comes. But snow just falling on me in these annoying little surges of stillness. Cold wind. Still wind, snow. Cold wind, still wind, snow...

So I'm wondering what's going on? Did New York's weather spread into Oakland like some kind of Ebola virus? Did terrorists plant some kind of cold weather biochemical warhead in our ecosystem? If they did, bomb them. What do they give us? Incoherent taxi drivers, heroin, bad diplomatic relations, and women who wear scarfs on their heads.

A taxi shows up. Gave me that look like "there he is, the only white guy" and stopped, asks me "you call for a cab?" Turns out he was from some super hot part of Pakistan and had never seen snow before. He always imagined it as a white sheet extending over vast mountains in the winter. Not as some alien crystals forming frozen legions on your back at 4 am in Oakland. So I tell him to take me to a bus stop so I can catch the 13. We get there and the bus ain't even close to coming so I tell him he should just wait. So he lights up a cigarette and asks me if I mind. Do I mind?? My heart raced with the kind of anticipation only felt by those who've experienced prolonged junkie mentality. A cigarette! I bum one off of him.

Korean cigarettes! If there is a God, or an Allah, he blessed that guy with some fine tobacco products. As I inhaled the smoke of that cigarette, coughing up Lord knows what, talking trash about the various fiends walking by, I felt pure tranquillity. I imagined myself as frosty the snow man, no, better yet, like a frost giant in one of those dungeons and dragons magazines. I knew that if I just had the right set of skis I could make a run all the way from San Pablo in Oakland to Market St. in Richmond without losing any momentum.

By the time the bus got there, my tab was $25.20, so I gave him $30, and caught the bus and got a transfer. Then I got off the bus at Baja and got some generic cigarettes that for some reason now cost $3.25 and thought about future arctic adventures, finding El Dorado, meeting Santa Claus, and taking bongloads with him out of a gold bong.