The Human Rights Guy

I was tooling around the neighborhood of the world famous Dresden restaurant on my bike on Vermont Street (just left of Hollywood –– or just right if you’re upside down, which most people in Hollywood are), passing ‘Book Soup’ bookstore, attempting to thread my way between pedestrians (too dangerous to brave the street here), hearing smatterings of outdoor cafe table conversations about (to the ilk of) “…putting a team together” or “He is very interested in the material…” until I found myself within elbow crashing distance with a groovy guy of a ‘Burning Man disposition,’ holding a clipboard and delivering me his refined pitch:

“Sign for human rights today?”

In my younger days I might have stopped the bike, put one foot down to capture my balance to inquire in what direction he was headed with his offer of “out-and-out human rights” by mere signature, but those days were long past.  I feel I had paid my dues as a New York City resident and an occasional exit-ee of an Eagle Rock Target, enough to know I didn’t have to chomp his bait just to do good in the world. So I kept on. My response to his nearly irresistible offer was to give him the equivalent of a biker’s shrug, slightly more restricted in that I had front wheel steering integrity to maintain.  Something in the vein of a Hasidic jewelry seller’s dismissive shrug, complete with a lazy-lidded blink of the eyes and a “no hard feelings” tilt of the head, to touch the final note of a street-bargaining tete-a-tete all too easily deflated. I had to keep biking. Threading through pedestrians was a serious business when the crowd suddenly got thick no thanks to the sudden phalanx of cafe tables––and no generic human rights pitch was going to stop me now.  Send me to Zambia or the Congo to deal with human rights directly, but right now I had to watch for innocent elbows and rib cages I risked piercing with a rude protuberance from my sharp-anglesome biking contraption, all personal liabilities aside, it was an Immediate Human Rights Issue that I not impale a pedestrian or ambling dog-or-child, whether or not they were innocent or “about to sell their feature screenplay” (for which impaling them with a sharp bike protuberance would have been a triumph for the rest of mankind).  So I left the Burning Man acolyte to his generic human-rights-by-petition and carried on with more pressing matters, such as pasting the odd flyer for my movie on virgin telephone poles waiting coquettishly around the corner.

“What kind of human rights are we signing for today?” I would have asked.  But who’s got time for that in the big city? “Was it child trafficking?” I could be left to wonder.  “Female mutilation of the genitalia?” “Thirsting villagers with dysentery on a far-off dirty continent?” “Child poverty in America” vs. “Child obesity in America?”  “What?” “Give it to me.”

But no.  I could not stop to ask.  I still had a stack of Glory to Me flyers to eradicate from my ceaseless burden of shameless self-promotion.

I rounded the corner into a side street, a more residential street –– away from the teeming Hipster Avenue of arthouse marquees, independent book stores, just-left-of-center gourmet coffee shops and god-knows-what incidental hotspots –– and found small town relief on a side street of parked cars and mailboxes, walking paths that led onto front yards and struggling lawns of lower-middle income welcome.  This was the kind of street I could find decent and upstanding telephone poles upon which to post the flyers for my sad little indie thriller movie, about yet another stalker that hunts a girl he’s had his eye on for longer than anybody suspected. God knows the world doesn’t need more of these kinds of movies. Our society is riddled with them to the point where we don’t know if we’re hiding from a character on screen or the character sitting behind and two seats to the left of us at the movie theater, to the point where we don’t know if we empathize with the girl, the poor but comely victim, or whether we relate with the stalker/killer who wants to tear this angry and hostile world asunder.  We just don’t know! Does my little thriller movie answer or even address these questions? Now there’s a question. All I’m saying is whether or not stalker and prey are coming closer and closer together such that it becomes difficult to even tell the difference between them. All I really know is that I’m trying to find a decent and worthy telephone pole upon which to hammer my postcards of shameless self-promotion –– for a movie I don’t even like anymore. As I attempt to use a pushpin or a thumbtack to stick up one of my handy postcards, my shame and contrite embarrassment for cluttering up an otherwise unsullied advertising space –– the nadir example of which we have seen on lower Manhattan Bowery telephone poles layered with frayed and battered punk rock flyers –– me, now checking furtively over my shoulders to see if any upstanding hipster house residents emerge from their home carrying a newborn baby or something –– worse if it was a dad in a bathrobe, sleep-deprived, holding a preciously-sleeping tot in his arms, coming outside for some fresh air and sunlight to combat the dark and lonely gloom of his own interior walls while his wife-or-partner sleeps or works at an office, just coming out for a little release of freedom from the catacombs of early parenting, just to emerge and see a guy with a bike helmet sticking a flyer on a telephone pole, closer inspection not even necessary, before said new parent wants just to turn around and go back inside, simply turn his back on the unceasing world of stalkers and advertising hawkers pushing yet another killer-thriller movie, the kind that used to be commercial fare but now has descended into the cinematic pasture of the indie movie genre –– where are all the little relationship talkie films going to go now that thrillers are moving into the peaceful neighborhood?  Children’s story books?

I try to hurry up and get it over with, fumbling pushpins and nearly stabbing myself (I couldn’t just splurge and get a staple gun?) when I––

Hold on.

I saw something.

Someone I recognized.  Just coming off the hipster thoroughfare.  Turning toward me, coming right for me!

But no.  He (?) turned back onto the avenue, carrying his business somewhere else.  He was never coming for me at all!

I quickly looked back for the bleary-eyed dad with the newborn and his door was closed.  Or he was never there. He was just the physical manifestation of my own shame and embarrassment for riding around on a bicycle and sticking up flyers for my movie.

Yet I must press on.  I’ve still got a stack of postcards in my satchel, so many telephone poles yet to defile.  But who am I kidding? Despite my innermost desire to disappear down some hidden street, pass through a copse, crackle my way through a meadow and find an old hermit’s log cabin and knock on his door to personally hand him a flyer for my movie, an old societal outcast who would have no reason on earth to go see my thriller movie, and me secretly hoping I’d disturbed his Walden-esque scratchings in an old notebook with some kind of whittled bark pencil, when I’m really supposed to be out in the hustle-and-bustle of Hipster Avenue getting in the mix of life and cash-flushing youth, the kind of proper guerrilla street marketing that might actually get me Clicks on the streaming website, as hair-brained and anachronistic as street marketing may be in this modern era of links and likes and “fan friends” –– what was I think––?

There he was again!  Through the copse and the meadows of my nature-bound and bygone era reveries came lurking that face, that terrible face of the kid with the scruffy almost-beard and his––  with his––

Oh God.  It was him.  It’s the Human Rights Guy.  Watching me through the tangled vines of my busy mind.  He was following me! Him and his human rights.

I got back on my bike and started pedaling, pedaling as fast as I could go, to anywhere the wheels would take me, directly into a roaring avenue of opposing traffic if I had to –– anywhere to get away from him, the Human Rights Guy.

What do I want with human rights, anyway?  What good did human rights ever do for me? Oh yeah, if I’m a Creative (I shy instinctively away from the word “artist” for all its pretentious implications –– yet the word Creative won’t do either for it is only one word-insertion away from “Creative Executive,” the very term worse than anything, such as “Corporate Personhood”) I’ve labored and thrived on the sweaty backs of the Nation’s Founders so that I can presume upon society with my creative eking.  Fine. Basic human rights does have some bearing on my creative endeavors.  For after all, how can I write and make movies here in America if somebody somewhere has been shoved into a pit with barely a glimpse of the clouds in the sky…?

The nagging of conscience is a middling affair.

Exactly what kind of human rights are we talking about here?  And in what country? I’ll even take a region. Because locale will have great bearing on the type of human rights being violated, assuming violation was even the issue.  For all I know, he may have wanted me to sign a petition because there is too much human rights in a certain quarter of former Petrograd Russia, or simply prep school kids in Gaudí’s Barcelona.

Now I’m the fool.  If I had just stopped my bike long enough to hear a few words on, say, an issue in Uganda versus the Appalachias (though I doubt anybody white or black would come this far to start a petition for those folks).  The point is I didn’t even stick around long enough to find out. I was too possessed of sticking my own issue of shameless self-promotion on virgin telephone poles throughout the hipster enclave of America’s Great Fantasy Factory to even know what side this kid’s Human Rights issues were buttered.

If I could just ––  If I could just talk to him.  Why won’t he show himself? Why won’t he come out into the open, instead of sneaking around the Appalachian meadowy copse of my tangled mind and insinuate his point on some forgotten side street?

I must find him and settle this at once!  If there are human rights issues happening somewhere on this goddamn planet in some hole in the ground somewhere, I need to know about it right now.

Could it have been cafeteria lunches?  Does that qualify as a human rights issue?  The curiously flan-like sweet bean curd they try to pass off as a dessert in public schools?  Don’t even mention poor disabled or autistic puppies to me!

I need to know what kind of human rights I breezed right by on my bike while I was stuck inside the internalized agenda of promoting my sad little thriller movie.

Where is he?  What have I done?!  Ignored a very scrappy-bearded youth who took the time to stand out on a street corner with a clipboard like Atlas trying to raise up the world.

It’s my fault.  I ignored him and it’s my fault.  I’m the problem here. Too self-absorbed and solipsistic to stop on the street and sign my name and help this kid save the world –– or at least pour a bucket of earth into that horrible pit in Syria or Uganda –– even if he’s going to construct a Tower of Babel with one toothpick at a time.

I’m going to help him.  Certainly I’ve got nothing better to do with my thriller flyers and sniveling glory seeking.  If I’d just taken the time to listen. I could be on a plane to the Dark Continent tomorrow with a full printout of instructions on how to build a latrine in a desolate dirt village that doesn’t even have running water.  But no –– they don’t want my helping hands. They want my money, or at least some loose change. Or maybe they don’t want that at all. Maybe they just want my voice. Even if it’s just a grain-of-sand contribution to all the voices crying out together on the beachy shores of freedom.  Yes! Just my voice –– in the form of a signature, so mine can add just a little toothpick splinter to that chorus of humanity’s cry for justice, sounding curiously like the cacophony of voices wailing frantically up to the cosmos when you see the monolith in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Yes!  Find me that kid with the clipboard!

I pedal and I pedal, perhaps my bag of flyers has already dropped to the ground or in a trash receptacle.  I’ll find him. He’s hiding from me now that I need him. Give me some human rights to fix. It is my right, my human right, to fix a human rights problem somewhere.

I round the corner.  Foot traffic encroaching.  Tumult in the streets. People flooding busily to and fro, agendas soaring, personal and private.

At the cafe, the kind with little round bistro tables assembled outside for better viewing and discussion amidst the passing proscenium of cars and foot traffic––

There he is.  He sits at a small table with two other likeminded scrappy young people, one of them a serious looking girl in a ponytail.  He drinks a coffee. I move closer. I want to talk to him, but I don’t want to interrupt his discussion with the other two, presumably human rights related.  But I need to know. What kind of human rights did you want me to sign for? I need to insert my toothpick into your Tower of Hope.

I’m just about to speak, to reach out a beseeching hand, not to disturb him, but to ––

His coffee.  It’s foamy on top, not dark and serious like his ponytailed cohort’s mien.  It’s a latte. Human Rights Guy has taken a break and is sipping a latte.