I know now why guys who have returned from battle go into malls with guns and begin shooting people.
When I am on the subway platform, I search for his face through the windows of each train as it enters the station, desperately trying to see them all before it comes to a stop. As I walk anywhere in the city, I am searching the oncoming figures to see whether he is approaching me. Every slightly over-weight, middle-aged Latino is him from the distance of a half block -- and there are a lot of slightly over-weight, middle aged Latinos in this town!
I don’t know why I search for him. Do I want to see him? Or do I want to make sure that I can avoid him before he gets too close?
I have a few hundred things that I would like to say to him: some defending myself against his slander and accusations; some reminding him of his many, many betrayals; some describing my disgust at him; some declaring that I did all I could to show how much I cared for him once-upon-a-time.
The fact that I feel bound to abide by the mutual stay-away order has left me vulnerable to his harassment by text and email. I cannot reply to defend myself or to accuse him without risking the loss of my own credibility in court, and yet he suffers no consequences for his abrogation of the order. He gets away with it all. He can even frame his lies in the right way to have me arrested when I have done nothing.
He has attacked me in ways that I would never have thought possible, ways that I never could have imagined. I live in a continual state of anxiety, bracing myself for something completely unknown and unpredictable.
So I get it. That kind-looking woman approaching to receive her ration of fresh water or food turns out to be a walking bomb that blows your closest friends to pieces right next to you. A year later, back home, you see kind-looking women approach and every nerve in your body braces for the explosion.
You can live with that kind of stress only so long.
Today I got an email telling me the gate code to get access to my storage space, which he broke into just about a year ago, smashing some things he knew to be of particular sentimental value to me and stealing a computer.
I had not requested the gate code.
He has hijacked my email accounts before. He may have found out about this blog and be angry about it. I have to work long days tomorrow and the next day and have no way of checking on my storage space.
I will not sleep easily tonight.
Saturday, April 6, 2013
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Some (More) Context
This afternoon I walked the four blocks out Eddy to Van Ness. In my real life, when I had a car, I avoided Van Ness because they do not time the traffic lights, and the traffic itself is heavy. But Van Ness is now part of my neighborhood, and every time I reach its sidewalks, I remember my grandmother. I remember her talking about her youth in San Francisco and, in particular, talking about the two kinds of places where she had lived while growing up.
Born in 1892 to a mother from Illinois (herself born in 1875) and a father, Johann Van Drost, from Germany, this grandmother, whom I called “Nana”, spent her early childhood on Van Ness. He father was a successful druggist, and their house was both large and grand. Though her parents had met and married in San Francisco, my grandmother had been born in Aspen, Colorado, to which her mother traveled frequently to visit relatives. Nana's mother, whom we called Uma, was not concerned about traveling such a distance (by ferry, then by train, and finally by stagecoach) despite her pregnancy because the baby was not due for another two months. Nana, was, however, born prematurely. She told me how her uncle in Aspen, also a druggist, lined a cigar box with blankets, placed my infant grandmother in it, and kept her in the oven as a kind of make-shift incubator.
Nana and her mother, Uma, returned to Colorado to visit those same relatives when she was eight years old. It was spring time, and the thawing Rockies were magnificent. It was also 1906, and on April 6th, they got the news that San Francisco had been destroyed by an earthquake and that the hundreds of fires, which began in collapsed buildings that had kerosene lamps and gaslights, had rapidly become a holocaust consuming the few structures that had survived the quake as well as those that lay in ruins.
The telegraph operator in Aspen posted a map of San Francisco in the Telegraph Office window, and four times a day, when the latest reports on the progress of the fires came in, he would take the map down and blacken those areas that had burned. Nana and Uma watched with increasing anxiety as the black stain spread toward Van Ness. It was at that wide boulevard that the Army and the Fire Department were finally able to stop the monstrous flames. They stopped them by dynamiting every structure on both sides of Van Ness, thereby creating an empty space wide enough to form a viable fire-break. My Nana’s house, and everything in it, including her prize possessions, a collection of Dresden China dolls, was gone.
I wish I could find out what the address of the Van Drost family residence was, but all city records were destroyed in the earthquake and fire. The closest I have come is an insurance map from 1905 that shows the location and type of every structure in the city approximately six months before the disaster. If Nana's decription was accurate in saying that nothing stood behind her house but sand dunes to the ocean, they lived somewhere out by Lombard.
[The importance of history and of its Muse, Memory, cannot be overtsated. I have recently learned about Up from the Deep, a blog that has built and is building a monument of history and of personal memory about the Tenderloin. I am fascinated by the wealth of facts about San Francisco to be found there. Check it out!]
Johann himself had died in '04, and when everything was lost in '06, Uma relied on the advice of a friend who told her not to take the settlement of 10 cents on the dollar which was offered by the insurance company. Instead she held out for more and ended up with nothing. Making her living as a milliner, which did not pay much, Uma and Nana had to live in hotels
When Nana spoke of the other home of her childhood, she did so with a mixture of distaste and regret. “After Father died and we lost the house in the earthquake and fire,” she would say, “we lived in hotels.” I could think of nothing more adventurous, more luxurious, or more wonderful than growing up in a hotel. But Nana was not talking about the Fairmont, the Huntington, or the St. Francis. She was talking about buildings exactly like, and possibly including, the one in which I am living now.
San Francisco has been from its earliest days a city of single men. They required no kitchens or parlors, not even private baths, in their lodgings. They needed a place to sleep.
They ate in restaurants. They entertained themselves on the Barbary Coast or, for those more refined, at the Opera Houses, at Woodward's Gardens, or at the dozens of theaters that crowded the town. I can imagine how a child in such quarters, an only child without playmates, would be bored and lonely most of the time. But I can also imagine that for Uma, an attractive young widow, free of any need for chaperones or the other restrictions pressed on an unmarried girl, might have had a marvelous time.
I never knew Uma, who died when I was only two, but I remember being told that she had been a happy and fun-loving woman, who would “stay up until 4 in the morning playing cards” whenever she had the chance. Now I realize that playing cards for her was not like my mother’s bridge club. I see Uma shuffling the deck, joking and flirting, in the company of single men, her neighbors and having, I am sure, fun.
If only I could spend one night playing cards with her until four in the morning.
Born in 1892 to a mother from Illinois (herself born in 1875) and a father, Johann Van Drost, from Germany, this grandmother, whom I called “Nana”, spent her early childhood on Van Ness. He father was a successful druggist, and their house was both large and grand. Though her parents had met and married in San Francisco, my grandmother had been born in Aspen, Colorado, to which her mother traveled frequently to visit relatives. Nana's mother, whom we called Uma, was not concerned about traveling such a distance (by ferry, then by train, and finally by stagecoach) despite her pregnancy because the baby was not due for another two months. Nana, was, however, born prematurely. She told me how her uncle in Aspen, also a druggist, lined a cigar box with blankets, placed my infant grandmother in it, and kept her in the oven as a kind of make-shift incubator.
Nana and her mother, Uma, returned to Colorado to visit those same relatives when she was eight years old. It was spring time, and the thawing Rockies were magnificent. It was also 1906, and on April 6th, they got the news that San Francisco had been destroyed by an earthquake and that the hundreds of fires, which began in collapsed buildings that had kerosene lamps and gaslights, had rapidly become a holocaust consuming the few structures that had survived the quake as well as those that lay in ruins.
The telegraph operator in Aspen posted a map of San Francisco in the Telegraph Office window, and four times a day, when the latest reports on the progress of the fires came in, he would take the map down and blacken those areas that had burned. Nana and Uma watched with increasing anxiety as the black stain spread toward Van Ness. It was at that wide boulevard that the Army and the Fire Department were finally able to stop the monstrous flames. They stopped them by dynamiting every structure on both sides of Van Ness, thereby creating an empty space wide enough to form a viable fire-break. My Nana’s house, and everything in it, including her prize possessions, a collection of Dresden China dolls, was gone.
I wish I could find out what the address of the Van Drost family residence was, but all city records were destroyed in the earthquake and fire. The closest I have come is an insurance map from 1905 that shows the location and type of every structure in the city approximately six months before the disaster. If Nana's decription was accurate in saying that nothing stood behind her house but sand dunes to the ocean, they lived somewhere out by Lombard.
[The importance of history and of its Muse, Memory, cannot be overtsated. I have recently learned about Up from the Deep, a blog that has built and is building a monument of history and of personal memory about the Tenderloin. I am fascinated by the wealth of facts about San Francisco to be found there. Check it out!]
Johann himself had died in '04, and when everything was lost in '06, Uma relied on the advice of a friend who told her not to take the settlement of 10 cents on the dollar which was offered by the insurance company. Instead she held out for more and ended up with nothing. Making her living as a milliner, which did not pay much, Uma and Nana had to live in hotels
When Nana spoke of the other home of her childhood, she did so with a mixture of distaste and regret. “After Father died and we lost the house in the earthquake and fire,” she would say, “we lived in hotels.” I could think of nothing more adventurous, more luxurious, or more wonderful than growing up in a hotel. But Nana was not talking about the Fairmont, the Huntington, or the St. Francis. She was talking about buildings exactly like, and possibly including, the one in which I am living now.
San Francisco has been from its earliest days a city of single men. They required no kitchens or parlors, not even private baths, in their lodgings. They needed a place to sleep.
They ate in restaurants. They entertained themselves on the Barbary Coast or, for those more refined, at the Opera Houses, at Woodward's Gardens, or at the dozens of theaters that crowded the town. I can imagine how a child in such quarters, an only child without playmates, would be bored and lonely most of the time. But I can also imagine that for Uma, an attractive young widow, free of any need for chaperones or the other restrictions pressed on an unmarried girl, might have had a marvelous time.
I never knew Uma, who died when I was only two, but I remember being told that she had been a happy and fun-loving woman, who would “stay up until 4 in the morning playing cards” whenever she had the chance. Now I realize that playing cards for her was not like my mother’s bridge club. I see Uma shuffling the deck, joking and flirting, in the company of single men, her neighbors and having, I am sure, fun.
If only I could spend one night playing cards with her until four in the morning.
Monday, April 1, 2013
A Day Off
For more than a year I have said that all I really wanted was a room of my own, a place in which to write. Today I awoke at noon, ashamed that I had slept through half the day. I reminded myself that I had not missed any appointments or failed to keep any commitments. I also felt badly that I had only a few dollars left, and I don’t get my paycheck until Friday. I know where I can get food today and tomorrow. But on Wednesday and Thursday I will have to pay bus fare to work and back, and I will be in Sausalito without access to the food resources that I have here in San Francisco.
Let the Right decry “San Francisco Liberals” and the Left regret the gentrification and (St. Herb’s word) “Manhattanization” of our fair city, I am here to tell you that no one need go hungry in San Francisco.
How many cities are there who citizens can boast that hunger has been eradicated in their territory? I know only that being a San Franciscan means living among people who believe in the dignity of all persons and in the inherent right of all to the basic necessities of life. I am here to bear witness to the fact that even an old fool (and probably a scoundrel) like myself is cared for by the City of San Francisco (whose patron Saint himself threw off the expensive clothing his father had supplied for him and walked out naked into the world.)
San Franciscans give more than lip-service to these words from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations in 1948, less than two years after that agency of peace and brotherhood among nations was born here in San Francisco:
"Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care . . . .”
Nowhere on earth could there be a better city.
*
Back to that moment of waking (pace, Marcel): I am here.
*
I get seven frozen meals each week from Project Open Hand. I heat them in my microwave and have at least one well-balanced, nutricious meal a day.
Yesterday I had Easter dinner at St. Anthony's Diningroom, which serves hot lunches every day. They also have a technology Center at which I am able to go online daily.
And Glide Memorial serves breakfast daily.
Please support their efforts.
Friday, March 29, 2013
48°
Saturn, God of boundaries and limitations, turned retrograde on February 18.
Don’t count on your luck.
Even though you may be one of those people for whom traffic lights turn green as you approach them, or someone for whom buses materialize at bus stops just as you get there, know that your luck has ended.
Saturn, not merely a God but a Titan, now slips backward in the sky, retracing his recent steps. This isn’t just a time (as your optimistic therapist might say) to “Be aware of your limitations and respect the boundaries that you and others have erected.” Between now and July 8th, you will come to know your mortality and your fallibility. You will feel necessity bind you, its wires wrapped tight around your shoulders and on down around the rest of your body, all the way down to your feet, your legs squeezed together and your arms pinned stiff and straight down your sides, like Saturn bound by his rings..
This is not “Close your eyes and trust the Force, Luke”: this is Keep your eyes open and your wits about you because Force is closing in all around you. No more lucky breaks. No more reasoning with authority. No exceptions. No excuses. No escapes.
You will do well to learn patience and persistence.
And, as always, “You’ll all do well to learn politics, or I’ll lay your soul to waste.”
It is coming down out there. I don’t mean that it is raining. I am talking about the cold.
When you live in San Francisco, you are reminded every day that the North Pacific is a very big -- and very cold -- neighbor. Even on the sunniest days, when you might actually find yourself sweating as you hurry along Market Street, about to be late for some appointment, or as you break into a trot to make the bus that is just then reaching the intersection, hoping you catch it so you won‘t be late for work, even then, when you are sweating, if you step into the smallest bit of shade you feel the deep chill.
The second you are out of the direct blast of solar radiation, under a tattered awning perhaps or just in the meager shade of a barren winter tree, the air grabs you and reminds you that a vast, close-to-freezing body of water begins maybe a mile or two from where you stand and from there extends for five thousand unbroken miles beyond, a power immense, indifferent, and inescapable.
Tonight, after a number of unseasonably -- even scarily -- warm days and balmy nights, Winter has risen up again and stands towering above us, a sentry at the dark gates of the Pacific night. The wind swirling around Him bites. Your ears and your hands hurt after just a few short blocks.
I walked no more than five blocks tonight, but in every block those who sleep on the sidewalk were already hunkered down. Blankets, quilts, sleeping bags, cardboard or paper, any covering at hand, shrouded not only their bodies but their heads as well. It was early, before nine o’clock, but every one of them was already wrapped up tight, breathing and re-breathing the stale air caught within their thick cocoons.
I remembered the warmth of that damp, exhaled air, thinking back to times in my youth when I went camping high in the Sierra or out by the sea, keeping my breath wrapped close around me in defense against the bitterly cold air under the impossibly crowded sky of stars.
What stars you can see in The City these days can be counted on your fingers, our ambient light blocking out the heavens. And even though we blind ourselves to them, the Gods and Titans still rule there. Even though we do not look to them, or even see them, they nevertheless continue to wheel across the heavens, with their “disinterested, hard energy.” Nothing we here below can do will block out the descending cold.
You who stand in the dark, upholding the icy stars and allowing the sea’s menace, watch over those who are not housed tonight, keep them -- Your frail and harmless creatures -- through this night. They did not ask for any of it. Dare not to let harm befall them.
And let not one of us who are housed tonight think that you are not also out there, feeling your own weight press your bones against the hard concrete and feeling the freezing night itself pressing down from above.
We are all out in the cold.
We are all far from home.
Don’t count on your luck.
Even though you may be one of those people for whom traffic lights turn green as you approach them, or someone for whom buses materialize at bus stops just as you get there, know that your luck has ended.
Saturn, not merely a God but a Titan, now slips backward in the sky, retracing his recent steps. This isn’t just a time (as your optimistic therapist might say) to “Be aware of your limitations and respect the boundaries that you and others have erected.” Between now and July 8th, you will come to know your mortality and your fallibility. You will feel necessity bind you, its wires wrapped tight around your shoulders and on down around the rest of your body, all the way down to your feet, your legs squeezed together and your arms pinned stiff and straight down your sides, like Saturn bound by his rings..
This is not “Close your eyes and trust the Force, Luke”: this is Keep your eyes open and your wits about you because Force is closing in all around you. No more lucky breaks. No more reasoning with authority. No exceptions. No excuses. No escapes.
You will do well to learn patience and persistence.
And, as always, “You’ll all do well to learn politics, or I’ll lay your soul to waste.”
*
It is coming down out there. I don’t mean that it is raining. I am talking about the cold.
When you live in San Francisco, you are reminded every day that the North Pacific is a very big -- and very cold -- neighbor. Even on the sunniest days, when you might actually find yourself sweating as you hurry along Market Street, about to be late for some appointment, or as you break into a trot to make the bus that is just then reaching the intersection, hoping you catch it so you won‘t be late for work, even then, when you are sweating, if you step into the smallest bit of shade you feel the deep chill.
The second you are out of the direct blast of solar radiation, under a tattered awning perhaps or just in the meager shade of a barren winter tree, the air grabs you and reminds you that a vast, close-to-freezing body of water begins maybe a mile or two from where you stand and from there extends for five thousand unbroken miles beyond, a power immense, indifferent, and inescapable.
Tonight, after a number of unseasonably -- even scarily -- warm days and balmy nights, Winter has risen up again and stands towering above us, a sentry at the dark gates of the Pacific night. The wind swirling around Him bites. Your ears and your hands hurt after just a few short blocks.
I walked no more than five blocks tonight, but in every block those who sleep on the sidewalk were already hunkered down. Blankets, quilts, sleeping bags, cardboard or paper, any covering at hand, shrouded not only their bodies but their heads as well. It was early, before nine o’clock, but every one of them was already wrapped up tight, breathing and re-breathing the stale air caught within their thick cocoons.
I remembered the warmth of that damp, exhaled air, thinking back to times in my youth when I went camping high in the Sierra or out by the sea, keeping my breath wrapped close around me in defense against the bitterly cold air under the impossibly crowded sky of stars.
What stars you can see in The City these days can be counted on your fingers, our ambient light blocking out the heavens. And even though we blind ourselves to them, the Gods and Titans still rule there. Even though we do not look to them, or even see them, they nevertheless continue to wheel across the heavens, with their “disinterested, hard energy.” Nothing we here below can do will block out the descending cold.
You who stand in the dark, upholding the icy stars and allowing the sea’s menace, watch over those who are not housed tonight, keep them -- Your frail and harmless creatures -- through this night. They did not ask for any of it. Dare not to let harm befall them.
And let not one of us who are housed tonight think that you are not also out there, feeling your own weight press your bones against the hard concrete and feeling the freezing night itself pressing down from above.
We are all out in the cold.
We are all far from home.
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Traveling Light, Part 2
There are certain things which the bourgeois mind just cannot seem to grasp.
When I got out of County Jail following my second arrest, one of the friends I wanted to get in touch with right away was HG. When I texted him the news that I was walking out of the jail at 850 Bryant Street, breathing freely for the first time in ten days, he said the strangest thing in reply: "I don't know what I should say to you," he said.
I have been often struck by the fact that HG constantly describes himself as driven first and foremost by Jewish guilt. He complains all the time about his mother and her oppressive concern with propriety. (Indeed, as someone whose mother is no longer living, I have found his denigration of her and the bitter feelings he expresses about her made me uncomfortable.)
So at first I took his remark to mean that he felt he needed some formal or conventional words to use on the occasion, that he was searching his mind for something his mother would say to a friend just released from jail. But his mother, no doubt, would not have a friend who had been released from jail because she would never have a friend who was in jail in the first place.
I have to emphasize here how generous, caring, and helpful a friend HG has been all this year, ever since we first met shortly after I was "kicked to the curb". While I was looking for a place to live on my own, he has often let me stay at his house, sometimes for two or three nights in a row. His hospitality was especially helpful because he lives only a short walk from the gift shop where I worked. And he not only housed me but also fed me on those occasions, too. He even let me do my laundry at his house, which saved me a meaningful amount of money over the months. I have to say -- and have said to him -- that HG is a mensch, and his kindness to me was a true mitzvah.
But I notice that since my second stint as a guest of the County Sheriff, in the three or four conversations we have had -- via text, as always with HG -- he has not extended an invitation to come to his house again. Nor has he responded to my suggestions that we meet for breakfast or lunch.
I am left wondering what it was -- and is -- that he didn't know how to say. And so another companion on this journey falls to the side, veering off on a different path which may or may not ever cross mine again.
I seem to be traveling lighter all the time.
When I got out of County Jail following my second arrest, one of the friends I wanted to get in touch with right away was HG. When I texted him the news that I was walking out of the jail at 850 Bryant Street, breathing freely for the first time in ten days, he said the strangest thing in reply: "I don't know what I should say to you," he said.
I have been often struck by the fact that HG constantly describes himself as driven first and foremost by Jewish guilt. He complains all the time about his mother and her oppressive concern with propriety. (Indeed, as someone whose mother is no longer living, I have found his denigration of her and the bitter feelings he expresses about her made me uncomfortable.)
So at first I took his remark to mean that he felt he needed some formal or conventional words to use on the occasion, that he was searching his mind for something his mother would say to a friend just released from jail. But his mother, no doubt, would not have a friend who had been released from jail because she would never have a friend who was in jail in the first place.
I have to emphasize here how generous, caring, and helpful a friend HG has been all this year, ever since we first met shortly after I was "kicked to the curb". While I was looking for a place to live on my own, he has often let me stay at his house, sometimes for two or three nights in a row. His hospitality was especially helpful because he lives only a short walk from the gift shop where I worked. And he not only housed me but also fed me on those occasions, too. He even let me do my laundry at his house, which saved me a meaningful amount of money over the months. I have to say -- and have said to him -- that HG is a mensch, and his kindness to me was a true mitzvah.
But I notice that since my second stint as a guest of the County Sheriff, in the three or four conversations we have had -- via text, as always with HG -- he has not extended an invitation to come to his house again. Nor has he responded to my suggestions that we meet for breakfast or lunch.
I am left wondering what it was -- and is -- that he didn't know how to say. And so another companion on this journey falls to the side, veering off on a different path which may or may not ever cross mine again.
I seem to be traveling lighter all the time.
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