Plus Ca Change

Things look different to me now. I got up early and walked to Peet’s for coffee this morning. It is not yet the first of the month, so I could only afford a half pound.

On the way, I walked by some large pieces of cardboard, probably the remains of an appliance box, and a cheap comforter, chocolate brown and heavily soiled. The cardboard and comforter lay just off the curb, in what would be the curb lane or parking spaces at different hours of the day. What I saw was someone’s house, and I wondered what disturbance would have driven them from their sleep in such a hurry as to have left the house behind.

My first thought was of the police.

*

On many of the blocks I walk frequently in this neighborhood, one finds brass plaques, historical markers, each describing in some detail a jazz club or recording studio or restaurant that once thrived at that spot. The plaques are embedded in the sidewalk in front of burned-out buildings, abandoned buildings, parking lots, and empty lots. I had not realized before how exactly the historical markers resemble headstones in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, where my parents, their parents, their siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles all the way back to my great-great grandmother are buried.

*

I learned today that the definition of “homeless” is changing. Used to be that if you were in an alcohol/drug rehab program for a few months but had no home to which you could return after graduation, you were homeless. Similarly, if you were in jail but had no home to which you could return after your release, you were homeless. You might even be homeless if you were staying in a hotel room while looking for a home to which you could move or if you were staying with friends while looking for -- etc.

Now these “marginally housed” situations no longer qualify as homelessness for purposes of being granted subsidized housing. Now you are homeless only if you are wandering around on the streets all night or sleeping in parks or under bridges and freeway overpasses. The reason for this bit of vocabularial legerdemain is “Restrictions in Funding”.

For those who prefer plain English, I translate: The Ronald Reagan/Grover Norquist strategy of dismantling government by bankrupting it has worked. The society no longer has an institutional response to the problems of poverty. If you cannot shell out -- or finance -- 3/4s of a million dollars or more (in San Francisco), you must rely on your friends or live in public, i.e., the wild. From now on, the poor must live as the Ohlone did before the Europeans descended upon them like a plague of locusts.

A Modest Proposal

I have been getting up earlier these days, and getting outside as quickly as I can.  I love the feeling on the street in the first hour after dawn.

Lately I have noticed that on almost every morning crews with hoses and steam cleaners are cleaning the sidewalks in the blocks around my hotel.  I always thank the guys in those crews, who, for hours before I get out, have been working hard in their dark blue uniforms and rubber boots.  It would be nice to think that the city was finally rich enough (which, of course, it is) to clean the streets of the Tenderloin as well as it cleans the streets of the wealthier neighborhoods.  But what the steam-cleaning of these blocks means is that the rich are coming and that the rest of us will soon be squeezed out.

I look at the faces of my neighbors as they pass. Most look old before their time.  They are getting by as best they can, managing against very bad odds to keep up their spirits, to be willing to live another day, to say often “I am happy because I woke up again this morning”, all in the face of little chance that their lives will improve.  They perform their duties.  They find what diversions and pleasures they can.  They do not think of  moving because they know that they cannot afford to live anywhere else, certainly anywhere else in San Francisco.  And more than that, they do not want to move because they have their friends in the neighborhood.  They see each other at breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the Lafayette Coffee Shop, among other places.  They bicker and banter and tease one another.  They know each other’s relatives and will be there for each other when accident, disease, or age bring any one to a crisis.

But, of course, they  will have to move.  They will lose one another.  I have seen the sign of the times above Market Street, just across the intersection from the rising tower that it advertises:

 

I thought, yes, we would all be happy to have a clear and reliable contact guaranteeing our housing, but when the words also mean that I and my fellows have no secure housing in the coming months and years, I find the sign in such bad taste that I want to confront whoever created it and tell them the truth about what they are doing.

I look into the faces of my neighbors and I think, “Most of us pay 30% or 50% of our income in rent; that is, our rent is set at 30% to 50% of our income.  I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice -- wouldn’t it be fair -- to have those who are coming to displace us also pay 30% to 50% of their income for their housing.  Think was a windfall the city would have if it collected 30% to 50% of the incomes of all those Twitterists and Yelpers, et al.  Those millions upon millions could all be spent improving the housing of everyone in the neighborhood, restoring historic buildings and building new ones for all of us.

I think of this modest proposal as being like Reagan’s Flat Tax:  a principled idea that everyone should pay the same percentage of their income for whatever service is provided by the government, which, after all, defines all the privileges and responsibilities of landowners and landlords.

Then we could all enjoy clean streets, safe neighborhoods, and comfortable housing.

Think about it.

Death Throes

I like to make broad, sweeping statements that go against the grain for the class of folks among which I live -- or rather, lived.  These generalizations usually raise eyebrows, if not hackles.  This habit is not just a conversational gambit or bit of showmanship:  I always believe what I say even if I know full well that I have overstated my case.  My point is only overstated, not distorted.

I have often been heard to say in conversation with well-heeled tourists just returned from a jaunt to Thailand, say, or Patagonia:  “I don’t like travel.  Why should I haul my sorry ass half way around the world to look at ruins and monuments and works of art when I seldom cross the street to look at the ones we have here?”

I have been heard to say “I don’t like children.  I didn’t like them when I was one, and I don’t like them any better now.  They are cruel, selfish, mean-spirited, and have no conversation at all.”

I have been heard to say among San Franciscans who wallow in self-congratulatory declamations about the grandeur of “The City’s” beauty, restaurants, museums, and successful companies that

“San Francisco isn’t really a city.  Sure it was one once, but nobody works here any more, nothing is made here, and no one in Los Angeles or New York would mistake it for a hub of anything.  San Francisco has become a resort, an elegant ocean liner docked permanently in a grand harbor, a gated community for the very rich, who own houses and apartments here for convenience when traveling far from their homes in New York, Geneva, Paris, or Milan.”

This latter sentiment is one I subscribe to more strongly every day.  With the nascent “improvement” of the Tenderloin, the work will be complete:  no one not in possession of a fortune or earning a six-figure income annually (at least) will be able to find a home here any longer.  And then the death of San Francisco will be complete, what began around the time the Hippies held a funeral service of the Haight-Ashbury will be done.

Here is the latest essay from Mark Ellinger, one of the most important, insightful, and eloquent chroniclers of this sad history:

Whither Sixth Street?

A Luddite's Lament

I am becoming increasingly anxious.  My temporary housing will end in September, and I see no possibility of having enough income by then to qualify for any other housing.  I make $400 a month working as an event coordinator for a company that takes over a month to send me my paycheck.  I earn about $150 a week cleaning houses and doing yard work for a couple of people, work that I got through an ad I posted on Craigslist.

I dreamt last night that someone was teaching me how to sell drugs (marijuana, specifically).  I was terrified the whole time.  We were being followed by two policemen who did not arrest us because we weren't actually carrying any drugs.  It was a training session, after all.  Somehow I just don't think that option would work out well for me.

But then the "Justice" system and the Internet tend to lead people, people who have experienced what I have experienced, toward crime.  I am still awaiting trial -- a year later -- for the charge on which I was arrested the second time: misdemeanor battery.  MRM told the police that I had approached him in a park where he was walking his dog, that I hit him, and that he fell down and injured his wrist.  He made up the entire incident.  Nothing like it ever happened.

What did happen that day was that he approached me as I was having a cup of coffee on my way to work.  I tried to ignore him, but he let the dog, who always liked me, come over to me, and I began petting him.  I always liked him, too.  MRM tried to engage me in conversation, breaking the mutual restraining order that had been in place six months.  I did break down and speak to him.  I said, "Leave me alone.  Never speak to me again."  Those events became his false report:  he always told me that a good liar knows to keep his tale very close to actual events so that the lie will be easy to remember and so that it will be difficult to disprove (for example, I would not be able to prove that I was elsewhere when I was sitting by a cafe within a block of the park where he walked his dog.)

Two weeks later he walked into a police station and filed his false report.  Because he alleged physical violence and because he said that he was afraid of me, the police arrested me at work a few days later.  It was a few days later because he waited until Thursday to tell them where I could be found.  He did that because they hold you three days before charging you before a judge.  They have to do it within three days, but Saturday and Sunday don't count.  So if you are arrested on a Thursday or a Friday, you are guaranteed at least five days in jail, not just three.  MRM is the son of a cop and told me these things many times when he was plotting such actions against other people.

So I have an arrest record and a charge which has not been dismissed and of which I have not been found innocent.

MRM also used the two months during which he refused to give me my computer to tell more lies about me online.  He posted pictures of me using drugs (pictures he had taken secretly with his iPhone when we were getting high together.).  He searched through my private diary and even fictional pieces I had written on my computer and posted them to a blog he had created originally to smear his previous boyfriend and the boyfriend's attorney who were fighting him in court on domestic violence charges.   He was able to do all this because I could not -- as I still cannot -- go to the house in which we lived and get my things due to the restraining order which demands that I stay at least 100 yards from the place.

He also wrote emails to everyone I know repeating his lies about my violent behavior and "out of control" drug use.

WordPress refuses to take his blog down and cheerily advises me that the best way to counter such information on the web is to argue my own case in the same place.  I suppose they mean that I should comment on his blog, but if I do, he can block my comments.  Furthermore any time I go to his site,
any time anyone goes to his site, it moves up in priority on Google and other search engines.  As it is, if you Google my name, it is his lies which come up as the first three results.  MRM worked for Apple for five years and knows how to set up an automated search-and-select so that he could be sure that anything he posts will appear to have been chosen as the best result for a search.

Try looking for housing or for employment in this day and age when the Internet returns such lies to anyone who searches your name.

For the Birds

I always thought birds were pretty and musical and just plain nice to have around, and I thought that the idea behind Hitchcock's "The Birds" was to make the audience fearful of something inherently innocent and far from threatening. The movie seemed to me to be a virtuoso piece, proof that even the commonplace and mundane could be charged with anxiety and fear by the Master of Suspense.

 Of course when I lived in Manhattan in the 1980s, I adopted the locals' distaste for pigeons, which were known by some wag's epithet: "rats with wings". But in my heart I felt nothing like the disgust that gave me shivers if I saw a rat run across the sidewalk ahead of me or dart under some bushes or down a drain in Central Park. The first person I ever heard inveigh seriously against birds was my ex WS, who went so far as to call them "evil" and claim that they deliberately attacked him everyday as he approached his office, "dive-bombing" him as he crossed Levi Plaza and entered the building where he worked. I thought that he was simply exercising his well-developed wit and humor, adopting a counter-intuitive attitude toward something and then setting forth arguments and evidence that always made his listeners laugh.

Recently, my opinion of the little dinosaur atavists has grown dark. Last week I passed a seagull which was pecking away at the split carcass of another bird. The sight creeped me out, especially coming, as it did, fast on the heels of another avian sighting: two pigeons picking at a splash of dried vomit on the sidewalk.  I quickly realized that these creatures would indeed have mangled poor Suzanne Pleshette.

And because I have HIV (the only thing MRM gave me that he didn't try to take back), I have another concern regarding pigeons. The dried pigeon guano that cakes the sill outside my window can get airborne. It can get into one's lungs and give one toxoplasmosis.

My dear friend SN came down with toxo when I was visiting him in Palm Springs once back in the eighties. In his case, the source was not bird droppings but the feces of his neighbor's cat. He came close, very close, to dying. I can still see him lying in his bed at the Eisenhower Medical Center. I saw him only one more time, a few months later in Los Angeles. By then he could no longer speak.

At his memorial service I read a poem that I had stumbled across in an issue of “The New Yorker” which I had found lying on SN’s coffee table in Palm Springs at the time he caught toxo. The poem is by Marie Howe and is called "What the Living Do." The poem is addressed to her brother, who also died of AIDS.



What the Living Do
     by Marie Howe 


Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell
       down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn
      it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.