The Visible and the Invisible

Walking home the other day, I saw a long line of people on the east side of Jones Street, stretching up the block from the corner of Ellis.

I remembered a late afternoon sometime in the mid 1980s, when I lived in Manhattan. Day was melting into a warm summer evening, the late sunlight stretching its long arms down the canyons of the east/west streets, the air beginning to cool, the moisture your skin had carried all day now settling on it, a thin, cool layer under your clothes. My partner JC and I were walking with a friend in SoHo. The neighborhood was only newly named. The transformation had just begun. Abandoned industrial spaces were being appropriated by poor artists, whom real-estate moguls and reporters referred to disparagingly as “squatters”. These squatters were making livable endless blocks of commercial lofts, and by doing so they, in turn, created fortunes for those real-estate moguls.

The three of us were talking about the phenomenon of lines, chuckling at the silliness of so many New Yorkers in their frenzy to be au courant. They had to be among the first to have experienced the newest club or bar or restaurant -- or to see a show or attend a gallery opening or a book signing or whatever. One would, from time to time, see a line of people standing on the sidewalks, often stretching for many blocks. We joked that people would get into a line even when they had no idea what it was for. The fact that people had lined up must mean that something new and exciting was taking place. People would join a line just so that they could brag to their friends, nonchalantly, of course, that they had already seen/been to/eaten it.

We -- there were a half dozen or more of us -- formed a line outside a meaningless doorway and watched as people got into the line. They chatted about trivialities for quite a while before they ventured to ask what everyone was waiting in line for.

We were delighted with the success of our sociological experiment.

I remembered all that as I passed the line. But I had no need to ask what this line was for: I knew that this line was for a hot meal at Glide Memorial Baptist Church.

*

My friend MP is a poet. MP’s art is one of closely observed and simply described details that illuminate human relationships, personal and social. He recently shared this short prose piece with me:

On the way to work I saw a homeless man flatten a piece of cardboard he had retrieved from a recycling bin. With intense concentration he wrote on it his plea for survival.

I walked by another homeless man who was securing things to his bicycle; I think they were all of his worldly possessions. He complained, talking to the air surrounding him, about being harassed every morning by another man who stood in an alley across the street.

I watched people hurry along the sidewalk. I saw some of them descend below the street to the BART station where they will board a train that will take them to their place of work. Hurrying to the train out of fear of becoming one of those who hold up a cardboard sign on the sidewalk, gazing into the eyes of those who pass by, hoping for salvation. Hurrying out of fear of becoming one of those they avoid; one of those they wished did not exist.

When I read it I was struck by the accuracy with which he describes something I remember quite clearly: the way I used to feel when I had to pass close enough to a street-dweller to risk having to interact with him or her.

*

There were many reasons to love my Aunt Lee. Like both of my parents, she was born and raised in Oakland and graduated from U.C. Berkeley. To me, however, she seemed unlike anyone I had ever known. From my early childhood through my mid-40s, when she died, Aunt Lee brought me glimpses of a very different world than the one in which I was raised, a world of adults, sophisticated, witty, imaginative, and wise.

After college she had worked as a secretary to the President of a shipping line in San Francisco and then married a man much older than she, who had been born in Britain but lived in Canada, where he was Chief of Protocol for British Columbia. She lived in the company of officers, politicians, and dignitaries. (I have a photograph of her entertaining a group including the Lord High Mayor of London at tea in her garden.) She met royals. And she had no children.

So when she spoke to me, even when I was quite young, it was as an equal, expressing interest in my ideas and curiosity about my life, and never judging or seeking to discipline me in any way. She told stories about parties that she and her husband attended with a special group of close friends, men who had been in the R.A.F. with her husband during the war and their wives. I loved hearing about the things that grown-ups did that had no reference to children and family, per se, because family was the sole organizing principle of social life in the suburban America of my youth. Furthermore, Aunt Lee never became overly emotional or sentimental. She never reproached me with making her “worry”. And Aunt Lee knew -- and taught me -- wonderfully funny and quite bawdy music-hall songs.

Once when we all went out to dinner during one of her visits, I was a bit scandalized, and therefore completely delighted, by a remark she made as we opened our menus. The waitress had just brought them to the table, told us that her name was “Sarah” (or whatever it was), and that she would be our server.

“Why on earth would she think I would want to know her name?” Lee said under her breath, as she opened her menu.

I tried to hide my glee, lowering my smiling face into my menu.

*

You can find all the incest porn you want on the Internet, and the most (erstwhile) shameless deeds are confessed aloud, even shouted, by their perpetrators on almost every show on television. Abuse, adultery, lying, cheating, and manipulative spouses and parents and children have no shame any more. Racists and demagogues of every sort proclaim their prejudices and hatreds on radio and television, not to mention the Internet.

Yet one taboo remains. No one talks about the American class system, and its power is made enormous by the hush that surrounds it.

I always knew it existed. I tried to be aware of it. But its terms, their definitions, and their interrelations, kept shifting, defying clear analysis. But now I know it. It is clearly outlined, hard, and sharp. I feel it. I can tell you how it defines who you and I and everyone around us is; how it dictates our behavior to one another; and how it leads everyone, from the highest of the high to the lowest of the low to do evil every day.

I can, and I will.

An Excess of Black Bile

I apologize for not having posted anything here for a week.  I was told when I started that if I let more than a few days go by without posting, I would lose my readers.  I am once again writing to “those wonderful people out there in the dark”, having no idea who, if anyone, is actually there.

For the last three or four days, I have had to struggle with myself to get out of bed.  I have felt physically exhausted in part because of the heat we have had.  (Our big, cold neighbor, the North Pacific, being temporarily bested by the solar heating of the unusually dry, i.e. drought-ridden, landmass.)  I have also been exhausted because I have not had enough to eat for the last four or five days.  And a long-time companion of mine, depression, has kept me down, too.

I do not understand the prejudice against depression, which I have always thought of as my melancholy humor.  A sanguine humor, that is to say endless optimism and cheerfulness, is actually extolled as virtuous but is no more realistic -- and no healthier -- than melancholy.  Even the choleric soul, if she or he be a politician, a top executive, or a member of the armed forces, is praised and finds success in part because of his inappropriate response to reality.

Depression, however, seems to threaten people.  Americans habitually ask “How are you?” when first greeting one another.  Of course, they do not really want to know.  Katherine Hepburn used to respond to the question by saying “Fine -- if you don’t want the details.”  I am one of those quirky eccentrics who always answers truthfully, albeit as briefly ass possible.  In the months after my mother died, I would answer by saying that I was depressed and sometimes found it hard to get out of bed.

I was surprised by the frequency with which people responded to my answer by asking whether I had seen my doctor about it.  “They can prescribe something to help you with that,” they said.  Offended by the disrespect (for my mother and for me) implied by the suggestion, I would say, “My mother died.  There would be something wrong if it didn’t get me down.  I’d be worried if I weren’t depressed.”

What is the point of avoiding sadness, anger or frustration?  Is one fully alive if one avoids the pain of living and admits only the kind of giddy euphoria called “happiness”?

My final reason for having failed to post for so many days is that I no longer have an Internet connection at home.  I had one while a man in my building was generously leaving his wireless network unsecured so that anyone of us could use it.  He has now moved on.  So these postings have to be saved to a memory stick which I will plug into a computer at the library in order to upload to this blog.  I never know for sure how long it will take to get a computer at the library, so I beg your indulgence: bear with me through my occasional silences, please.

And if you can, please comment or follow or somehow let me know that you are there.  Hearing from you will do much to get me out of bed on the difficult days.

Inappropriate Behavior, Part One

I am finally becoming a mean old man.

Day before yesterday, I was walking along the north side of Ellis, near the corner of Hyde, and heading west.  I saw a woman lowering herself into the passenger seat of a car parked at the curb, and as she did, she dropped an empty plastic water bottle -- Crystal Geyser, I think -- in the gutter.  I had just passed her by a step or two and turned, pointed at her and then at the bottle, and said firmly, "Pick it up."  Her face went blank as she stared back at me.  I said, "Don't drop it in the street.  Pick it up."  She reopened the car door, leaned down, and picked up the empty bottle.  She closed the door, and it left with her in the car.

I smiled.  I have always been a coward.  I have only rarely confronted anyone in that way.  I habitually stay silent and burn with resentment and anger afterward.  So I felt proud both of my action and of the personal growth it demonstrated.

I have said it over and over again throughout the last decade or more:  shame is the glue of society.

When I was a kid, if I had pocketed some candy at Sam's Market, any adult who had seen me would have called me out, would have led me by the hand, shoulder, or scruff of the neck, to Sam himself, and he would have called my parents.  I would be in real trouble.  Standards of behavior depend on a community of individuals each of whom is willing to enforce those standards -- and on nobody trying to shelter their litle precious one from the consequences of the precious one's misbehavior.

Shame is good:  it is the assertion of our better selves, the proof of our essential identity as members of a greater whole, a family, a tribe, a community.  Without it we are vicious beasts.

*

If you have been sleeping in the cab of your friend’s pick-up truck, you will find it a challenge to be clean and look well-groomed by the time you have to go to work. Public showers are available at various centers around town, but they may lie in the opposite direction from that which you have to travel, and the uncertainties of traffic and transit connections increase exponentially with every transfer you have to make.

In these circumstances, you will have to make the best of what my father used to call “a sponge bath”. You can make do with any fairly capacious and private restroom (by private I mean that the door locks on the whole room, not just on a stall). The worst that will happen is that a line might form outside. Someone might go so far as to complain through the door. But since the room’s purpose is to provide privacy for acts that no one really wants to see, you are not going to get in trouble.

You can take off all your clothes, fold together a half-dozen paper towels as a washcloth, wet it with nice, hot water, and wipe off the previous day’s patina. I use soap sparingly and only where absolutely necessary (my armpits and feet) because it is difficult to rinse with the aforementioned paper towels, and my skin itches like crazy if I leave a film of soap anywhere on my body. I keep a change of socks, etc., in my bag so that I can put fresh clothes on my clean body. And yesterday’s undershirts (and some other garments) make perfectly good towels to dry with so you don’t end up with little torn bits and wadded balls of paper towel clinging to you.

I am always on the lookout for private restrooms, especially ones not far from -- or on the way to -- my workplace. The Mission branch of the Public Library, for example; Rainbow Grocery; most Starbuck’s, and Trader Joe‘s. (You are obviously in the right place anywhere you have to ask for a key to use the bathroom.).

At times, however, you will need to do without privacy. Minimizing your exposure and accepting your feelings of embarrassment are difficult and mostly painful. There have been mornings when I had to open the pick-up door (I sleep in the passenger seat which is always on the curb side), stick out my naked feet, and pour cold bottled water over them. Sitting in the truck shirtless, door still open, I use the same bottle of water to soak either a small rag or garment, or the corner of a larger towel, and rub furiously at my armpits. Then I dry myself, put on clean socks and undershirt, and finish dressing. I watch for a time when no pedestrians are coming and hurry through these ablutions, but frequently I am surprised by someone coming around a corner or out of a house nearby.

The shame is two-fold (at least). I am embarrassed to be seen even half naked by strangers who are fully clothed and going about their daily lives in a civilized, public space and in conformance with communal standards of appropriate dress. I am also ashamed because my homelessness itself is exposed to them along with my body. This is the shame that makes me want to start casual conversations with passersby so that I can drop excuses that would explain away the three large bags I am carrying. I don’t want to be seen to be homeless, even though I honestly am homeless. I know that poverty is not a moral failing; and yet I feel shame.

This is the kind of thing The Psychopath, a.k.a. MRM, uses to harass me. “Aren’t you ashamed to be carrying all those bags around. Everyone can tell you’re homeless. And your poverty is a moral failing,” he once said in a text message. I was enraged but couldn’t reply, since I obey the mutual restraining order we have against one another even when he does not. I wanted to tell him that I feel no shame because it is his fault, not mine, that I am out on the street. In fact I am much happier homeless than I was being housed with him, enduring his abuse. But later, when I am thinking not of him but of the others who see me, I have to admit what I call my “embarrassment”, but what is, in fact, shame..

The Almighty Dollar

Yesterday afternoon I walked a block or so to the Dollars and Cents store on Eddy Street between Leavenworth and Jones. I had passed it many times, but it had always looked small and dark inside, and the merchandise looked as if it had been jammed onto the shelves, some of it apparently long ago, long enough to have acquired a patina of settled dust over the sun-faded inks of the packaging. This time, however, it looked bright and open, the new wire shelving finished with shining chrome. The floor was bare concrete but looked well scrubbed, perhaps even polished and buffed, like the floors of some fashionable high-end shops I knew in SoHo during the 1980s. The big front windows were clean and uncluttered by signs or advertisements.

As I wandered through the aisles looking for toothpaste, I found one or two other things that I had been needing (e.g., scouring powder, petroleum jelly) but had not felt that I could afford. But here, for a mere dollar each, I could easily buy them without breaking my budget. I even found paper plates, for example, which I had passed up at Safeway many, many times because I could not justify spending something like $5.00 on them. They are tremendously useful not only for serving a meal but also for cooking in the microwave, the only appliance allowed in my hotel room. I had been making-do with other things for over six months but now picked up a package of 10.

The clean, well-lighted space, with the merchandise arranged neatly, allows the shopper to see what is available easily -- and to see that it is clean and new. And the soft-spoken, helpful Latino at the register, neatly dressed all in black, his hair perfectly combed, his skin shining with good health, made me feel completely at home. Something seated deeply within me relaxed in a way that I had not relaxed in over a year. I felt that I was seen to be sane, responsible, and connected to the world around me. I felt respected, and I moved more easily, with the solidity of our natural dignity.

All this for $6.40.

In the course of my year on the streets, I have found something similar at MacDonald’s. I imagine that most folks don’t take notice, really, of the Dollar Menu offered in every MacDonald’s restaurant in this country. Those of us trying to find ways to keep body and soul together on next to nothing -- some as little as $10 a day for everything -- understand the importance of this special group of items.

Everything on the Dollar Menu is priced at just $1. Among them are a MacDouble hamburger (with cheese), a chicken sandwich, and a truly delicious side salad. This salad consists of spring greens, cherry tomatoes, and a few other treats and comes with a choice of dressings, including my favorite, Newman’s Own Balsamic Vinaigrette. You can also get a large glass of sweet iced tea or a Parfait for dessert. All for $1 each.

I have a big appetite and usually order two MacDoubles and the side salad. Sometimes when I am heading home to a prepared dinner from Project Open Hand, I stop at MacDonald’s just to buy a side salad to have with my frozen dinner. Believe me, it is nigh on to impossible to get fresh vegetables in your diet when you are poor. A supermarket salad bar, at $3 or $4 per pound, cannot even be contemplated in the abstract. One comes to know that such things are not meant for folks like oneself.

But MacDonald’s is there by our side, providing fresh bread, red and white meat, healthy beverages, fresh vegetables, and even a sweet little treat to end the meal with a smile, with a complete meal costing less than $5. There have been evenings -- I think of last winter and spring -- when I sat in MacDonald’s, eating my dinner, feeling my hunger satisfied and knowing that my body was getting a wide range of nutrients that were necessary to my health, and was moved to tears. This company so often derided as an example of bland, homogenous American corporate culture displacing small, individualized, local establishments and local traditions, had also found in its heart, moving through the hundreds of thousands of people who make up the company world-wide, a true understanding of the needs of poor folk and had responded by providing healthy life-sustaining food at a price we can afford.

And that fact brings me to my last point. These establishments, the Dollar Stores and MacDonald’s and others like them, provide one more necessity of life, one of the most fundamental and profound, and one that cannot be provided by any social, charitable, or government entity or even by caring and selfless individuals.

Everyone needs to feel responsible, to know that she or he is capable of taking care of himself or herself. Otherwise we come to feel less than complete, as if we were something other than fully formed, dignified, adult human beings. Only we ourselves, as individuals, can provide this latter necessity by shopping and paying for the food, clothing, and other things we all need to show up for life day to day. For us poor folk, it is at the Dollar Stores and the MacDonald’s of the world that we find the opportunity to do so and thereby to enjoy the deep pleasure of selecting and paying for a few simple things that will help us maintain a respectable appearance, good health, and a sense of contentment with our life.

“Mid-Market” Musings

One week ago, I began my Tuesday with the decision to quit the job I had held for six months and trust that as I stepped off the cliff into the air, all would be well. Almost immediately thereafter, I received an email from KW, a long-time friend with whom I had only recently reconnected. The email contained a link to another blog being written in this neighborhood, “Lodging in Public”, the author of which, Martha Bridegam, had written a particularly expressive, informative, and righteous response to a new corporate plan to “make a contribution” to our neighborhood.

At about the same time, I received an email from Mark Ellinger, whose “Up From the Deep” blog is an indispensable resource for the history of San Francisco, weaving together both personal and public history. Mark was replying to the email I sent him last night saying that I expected that I would be quitting today and that I would therefore be free to meet with him anytime. He suggested noon today, and so it was that I met Mark today for the first time.

We had lunch at Taqueria Can-Cun on Market at Seventh Street, the first of what I am sure will be a long list of neighborhood venues I will learn about from Mark. He also introduced me to two more blogs from the TL: “The Tenderloin Geographic Society” and “Bluoz”. I am excited to have met someone who can teach me volumes about my neighborhood -- and about the life of our times.

Something else about Mark excited me, too: the voice of prophecy. He has the soul of Jeremiah and the requisite courage to speak truth to power. What is more, he knows, and the whole of his work reflects this knowledge, that we are nothing in ourselves. It is only in relation to others that our lives have any meaning. He spoke movingly of his losses, saying that his life up to 2001 is simply and entirely gone, but he also affirmed his commitment to the community in which he lives. And that commitment includes standing up to the corporate culture that has our country in thrall.

Mark laments the disappearance of the San Francisco we both once knew and loved and the emergence of the current “bland, soulless, corporate” enclave that the city has become. I told him that I think of San Francisco as a “gated community”, though in its case it is a “bridged and tunneled” community You have to pay a toll (or the price of a ticket for BART or a ferry) to enter within the City Limits.

We hear politicians and pundits discuss the “disappearance of the middle class” as a phenomenon of changing statistics: where once the percentage of the population identified as “Middle Class” was “X“, that percentage is now “X minus Y”. They speak and therefore think as if a number, a ratio, had changed, and the difference between what was and what is consists in the disappearance of a category, possibly through the death or the going away of certain people.

But hear me now: they are wrong. It is not that people have disappeared, died, or gone away. In the revolution of our society’s structure that began with Ronald Reagan and has continued under every individual and power to take office since, nothing has disappeared, no one has been lost.

I am still here, and I am the erstwhile “middle class”. I have not disappeared: I have moved. I have lived, at various times, in Walnut Creek, in Berkeley, in Baltimore, in Wellesley, in Schenectady, in Manhattan, on Long Island, on Fire Island, in Oakland, in Alamo Square, in Noe Valley, and even the Mission (recently named by the New York Times as the hippest neighborhood in the country):

I now live in an SRO on a dirty corner in The Tenderloin, surrounded by the dispossessed.

I am here to bear witness to the failure of “progress”, the failure of “markets”, the lies of “individualism”, “self-reliance”, and “democratic capitalism”.

And I am here to say, with Leonard Cohen, that “There’s a mighty judgment coming . . .”

 

 

                                                                  " . . . but I may be wrong."