East of the Library, Across from the Odd Fellows Building

That bummy smell you meet off the escalator at Civic Center, right before you turn onto McAllister, seems to dwell there, disembodied, on a shelf above the sidewalk. The mad old lady with lizard skin bent double over her shopping cart and trailing a cloud of pigeons is nowhere in sight. A pile of rags here and there but no one underneath. An invisible shrine commemorating what? Old mattresses and dusty flesh, piss and puked-on overcoats, what? Maybe death, now there’s a smell that likes to stick around. You used to find it in downtown Sally Anns and once in a hospital cafeteria, only faintly, after a bite of poundcake. But here it lives, cheek by jowl with McDonald’s, still robust after a night of wind with its own dark little howdy-do for the drunks and cops, social workers and whores, or the elderly couple from Zurich leafing cooly through their guidebook.