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.

Deserts

"Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?"
                                       -- from Hamlet, Act Two, Scene Two

[This post is dedicated to R "D" G, my downstairs neighbor.]

An idea prevails, it seems to me, that a person who uses drugs ceases to be herself, ceases to be responsive and responsible, to be human, or at least human in the way “we” are.  The user becomes someone from another culture, another tribe, a far-off land, and therefore can no longer be trusted.  One suspects, keeps up one’s guard, is wary, and cannot risk lending a hand for fear of being pulled down into darkness, of drowning in murky waters.  One is likely to be used by this erstwhile person, who has ceased to be himself and is now merely a drug manifesting its properties in the body of someone you once knew.

This way of thinking is three parts “Body Snatchers” and seven parts “The Exorcist.”

*

Be warned!  That is no longer your son talking to you.  That is the voice of the Demon whose names are legion: Crack/Meth/Heroin/Ecstasy speaking with forked tongue.  If you help them/it, you are only enabling them/it in to pursue their own damnation.  Better that “they” should fail utterly in life than that they should find a way to live as they choose, if their choice includes using ___________ {fill the blank with the name of the particular demonic substance in this case}.

*

God-Damned Nancy Reagan has won.  Drugs trump everything.   That guy’s partner may have been a predatory psychopath, but the point is that he used drugs.  So he is probably better off in jail:  at least he isn’t out on the street where he might end up using drugs.

*

Listen to me: you have no idea what incarceration means; what it is; what it does.  You think that if the cops arrested her, she must have done something to deserve it.  You actually believe that the cops don’t arrest people who haven’t dome something wrong.

Of course, that works out well for you.  You don’t have to fear the cops, because you haven’t done anything wrong -- or not anything that really matters anyway.  And there’s a bonus, too:  once the cops have arrested someone, you don’t have to worry about that person any more.  He isn’t “P.L.U.”* anymore.  And another bonus:  your belief in an efficient and just system of law enforcement makes you feel safer, even if you are not.

*

Well, even if he didn’t do exactly what his abusive partner claims he did, he still must have done something.  After all, he took drugs.  And he lied about that.  Or if it wasn’t exactly lying, it was the same thing.  He didn’t tell us that he was mixed up with drugs.

[Good ol’ BC didn’t mention that he was getting head in the Oral -- oops -- Oval Office either.   But did that mean that he could no longer be trusted?  Some people thought so.  But take a look at who those people were.]

*

You even think the courts and judges and lawyers and District Attorneys are all trying to serve Justice, to be fair, to establish who is in the right and who has done wrong.  Anyone who believes that has had no contact with the “Justice” system beyond watching “Perry Mason” or one of the metastasizing “Law and Order” shows.

Ask the little boy who was thrown in jail after the police came to his house looking for him.  They said nothing about why they sought him.  He protested that he had done nothing wrong:  he was thrown in jail for the night.  Unjustly accused of something, and unable to find out what it was that he was thought to have done, the little boy spent the night in terror, completely alone, unable to contact anyone, including even his parents.

It turns out that his father had arranged the whole thing with the police.  He thought that his son was not sufficiently earnest about “toeing the line,” about following the rules and sticking to his duty in general in life.  He thought that his son needed to have a scare thrown into him so that he would straighten up and fly right.

The boy never forgot the outrageous injustice done him by the institutions nominally devoted to “Justice” and by his own father.  He continued to rebel throughout his life, rejecting everything “proper” or even “normal” for a man of his class.  Instead he became an artist, and a subversive artist at that, working in a medium which at the time was hardly regarded as an art form at all, something barely a step above a carnival sideshow or a vaudeville burlesque:  he made “movies.”

The boy’s name was Alfred Hitchcock, and the movies he made tell the same story over and over again:  an innocent man is accused of committing a crime.  He cannot turn to the police because for them all that matters is the accusation.  The police have but one imperative: if someone is accused of a crime, he must be apprehended and jailed.  The identity, nature, reputation, moral standing, capacity for reason, or believability of the accuser does not matter at all.  The accusation has been made and imprisonment must follow.

Fuck “Innocent until Proven Guilty.”  It’s a crock of shit.  And once the innocent man is caught, or even if, pathetically, he turns himself in, believing that running just makes him look like he has something to hide, he looses.  Once in jail, he will never be able to gather the evidence necessary to prove his own innocence.  And the system is unlikely to look at the evidence if he can gather it.  The courtroom process has nothing to do with actual people or actual events.  The actual is much too nuanced, much too complex, and much too ambiguous to be dealt with by the law.

And so another soul is slowly worn down.

*

Read Tolstoy!  Wake up! 

___________________________________

*People Like Us

The Man Behind the Curtain

I have broken the cardinal rule of blogging:  I have let day after day go by without posting.  In June I made excuses to myself based on the length and complexity of the two posts that I did produce (My Generation I and II).  But the fact is that far from making up for the long delay between posts, the length of the pieces was just another violation of the genre.  I have to remember that this is not Montaigne's Essays; this is a blog.  I must post daily, so that readers will be rewarded for checking in daily, and keep my posts short, so that they can be read through completely in the midst of a busy day online.

I thank you for your patience, you who have continued to check back and are here reading this now, and I intend to do a better job of holding up my end of the bargain henceforth.

*

I wanted to create this blog while I was living on the street, and much of what you will read here was composed at that time. My efforts were stymied in part by the external problems of getting time on a computer to post my comments with some regularity and with all the necessary links and tendrils reaching off into the web. I also had the internal problems of settling on the nature and scope of the project: should I stick to the political, economic, and journalistic material or post the whole bloody personal drama, the idiosyncratic and intimate details of my experience? I knew deep down that the latter elements were necessary to this kind of personal reporting, but I wavered between confidence in the power of honesty and fear that my foibles and failings might discredit the broader message I intend to deliver.

I am now living in transitional housing, while I try to establish myself in a new job and begin to search for my own place. I am not far off the street, however, living as I do only three floors above the intersection of Eddy and Leavenworth Streets. My experience during the past fifteen months has taught me how fragile a thing the life we take for granted is. It would take very little to land me right back out there again: only one bit of bad luck or one mistake, being kind to the wrong person perhaps, or trusting too easily in my own ability to manage whatever comes along from day to day . If you learn only one thing from my story, I would want it to be the understanding of how close you are to falling out of the comfortable nest that you have been settling into for all these years. Sometimes the bough breaks, and it all falls down.

*

My first career was academic, but I can now only lay claim to being a sometime scholar of 18^th-century British Literature. That Age was very like our own in being conflicted, confused, and anxious: a fundamental re-valuation of everything one is and does was going on in and around and under everyone. The literature was either classical and highly stylized (e.g., Alexander Pope) or radically experimental (e.g. Lawrence Stern‘s “Tristram Shandy”). New forms, such as the novel, were emerging from an eruption of folk traditions, religious evangelicalism, the commercialism of a growing middle class, and the availability of inexpensive presses.  What one finds in the literature of that period is a crowded, noisy, improvised culture that finally matured at the end of the century in the works of Jane Austen.

The new art form that was emerging -- so new and unformed that all anyone could think to call it was "the new", i.e. "the novel", was an ungainly -- and even messy -- mélange. So is the blogosphere today.

So too will be whatever I lay down in these posts.  I have to say that I feel right at home.

Baghdad-by-the-Bay

On the 14^th of October, 1911 (eleven days before my father was born across the bay in Oakland) President Taft broke ground for the Pan-Pacific International Exposition to be held in San Francisco in 1915 to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal. He then made his way to the Cliff House for lunch. There the President toasted San Francisco as “The City That Knows How”, an epithet which was used widely at the time and not, I think, original to him .

For the canal was not the only marvel of American ingenuity, zeal, and optimism. San Franciscans were justifiably proud that their city was ready to host the world only 9 years after being reduced to ashes and rubble by the earthquake and fire of ‘06. In fact San Francisco’s ability to recover from disaster stretches back to its earliest days as a major city. Between 1849 and 1852, the city burned to the ground six times. The official flag of San Francisco depicts a Phoenix rising from the ashes and was in use around 1900, well before the ‘06 disaster.

In rebuilding the city after each fire, San Franciscans were repeating the origin of the city itself. From the beginning of 1848 to he end of 1849, the population of San Francisco grew from 1,000 to 25,000. Where every other American city had begun as a territorial outpost and developed naturally over time, San Francisco erupted full grown from the brow of its peninsula as soon as Sam Brannan’s cry “Gold on the American River” echoed from Portsmouth Square to the United States, Australia, Chile, China, and the European continent.

I have seen a documentary on the History channel about construction in Dubai, and I have heard travel and engineering enthusiasts marvel at the scale and complexity of the projects undertaken there, and I have marveled at the audacity of the tiny Emirate in using the wealth gained from the sale of its mineral resources to challenge both the sea (by building islands in the shape of palm trees and a map of the world) and the sky (by building some of the tallest buildings in the world).

I now realize that San Francisco in the 19^th century was exactly what Dubai is in the 21^st: San Francisco used the wealth of its economy, which came from the gold under the Sierras, to pull down a range of hills that once stretched along the Market Street corridor and to fill in much of the bay. Although San Francisco’s development was haphazard and ad hoc, it was no less audacious that Dubai’s. Just consider the streets, laid out in two grids, one north of market and one south, that ignore completely the topography of the underlying land. As a result, streets come to abrupt ends in hillsides or atop cliffs, or become stairways or tunnels.

This refusal to take the natural environment into account in building the city reflects the long-standing Western view of nature as something to be tamed, regularized, and re-directed. (In Shakespeare’s words “To husband nature’s riches from expense”.) Today San Franciscans hold quite the opposite view of nature, as evidenced by the enthusiasm for restoring the bay and its natural wetlands, for setting aside vast acreages as parks and wilderness, and for reducing waste, including nothing going to landfill by 2020. (The city was 80% of the way to that goal by 2012.)

Still, it seems that in many ways San Francisco has become not “The City That Knows How” but “The City That Doesn’t Have A Clue”. The examples abound. When I lived on Clipper Street in Noe Valley, crews came by to tear up the street to replace sewer pipes, then to repave and repaint the street. Within a few months, crews came by again to rip up the street to put the utility lines underground, then to repave and repaint the street. After the Loma Prieta quake necessitated the removal of the part of the Central Freeway that stretched up past the Civic Center and joined Franklin and Gough, the routing of the replacement plan appeared on the ballot three times before construction could begin. And now the new Eastern Span of the Bay Bridge, the construction of which was necessitated by the same earthquake, faces an uncertain future after hundreds of bolts have been found to be faulty.

The original Bay Bridge was built in three years and five months; the Golden Gate Bridge in four years and four months. So far, twenty-four years have passed since the Loma Prieta earthquake. And the roadway itself has been manufactured in China and floated across the entire Pacific Ocean to be lifted into place by cranes also floated over from China.

What happened? In part, I think, the “greening of America”, i.e., the refusal of Americans to accept poisonous air and poisoned water as a necessary cost of manufacturing resulted in manufacturing moving to countries (e.g., China) were environmental regulations are lax. In other words, the same shift in the zeitgeist that one sees when comparing the 19^th-century street grids and the 21^st-century zero-waste policies of San Francisco meant the loss of our manufacturing and skilled construction labor forces.

A few weeks back, I boarded a streetcar on the F line, traveling up Market Street to Eureka Valley. At both ends of the car were sections of open-air seating, which reminded me of the similarly open ends of the city’s famous cable cars. And the interior of the enclosed section of the car seemed much roomier that the interiors of other streetcars I have ridden. (This streetcar line runs cars from cities around the United States and from foreign cities such as Milan.) A sign posted inside the car identified it as one manufactured for the San Francisco Municipal Railway in 1912, one year after my father’s birth and one year before my mother’s.

I soon realized that the sense of space came from the fact that the seating in this section consisted of a bench along each side of the car instead of benches arranged facing forward and backward and extending into the center from each side. There were probably fewer seats, but the result was a spacious and comfortable place to stand. Where the other cars -- and all the streetcars, buses, and BART trains being made today -- provide more seating for the lucky few who board before the vehicle has made enough stops to have become crowded, this San Franciscan car of 1912 provided a capacious and egalitarian room for a population of equals, with provision along the sides for the aged or infirm.

I imagined the car full of businessmen in suits and ties and hats, women in dresses and white gloves and hats, all happily riding the Municipal Railway into a bright and better future. For a moment I thought I saw my father among them, on his way from the office to the Ferry Building from whence he would embark for Oakland and the train home. San Francisco knew how in 1912.

And I think she knew how right up to World War Two and perhaps for a while after. When Treasure Island was built for the 1932 World’s Fair, it was intended to serve as San Francisco International Airport after the fair was over. What a glorious arrival for travelers that would have been, gliding in over the beautiful mountains of the Coastal Range and settling down in the midst of the sparkling bay, the towers of the alabaster city rising from the water’s edge to the west.

The San Francisco that was, and the San Francisco that might have been, were casualties, it seems to me, of World War Two and of the Pax Americana that followed. Today the city reminds me of a gated community for the very rich -- except that instead of gates there are bridges (or the tube under the bay) that charge tolls for entry to the sparkling but relatively unproductive town. Or it reminds me of a resort, full of tourists and fun destinations, its working class reduced to janitorial and menial jobs that pay only the minimum-wage, the blue-collar jobs that supported the middle class being long gone.

No longer a wonder of modernity, no longer the financial and cultural capital of the western United States, perhaps San Francisco is living her life backwards, like me.

The Women

When I left the hotel this morning, I was chuckling to myself over the exchange I had heard through my window about half an hour before. A man had been bellowing (definitely bellowing -- not hollering or yelling but bellowing) about something the exact nature of which I could not make out. The voice of the woman who responded to him was, however, clear and concise: “Shut the fuck up!” she called out.

The bellower (the bellows?) responded in a much subdued rumble, his words still indistinguishable.

“Just stop smoking crack and get a job!” the woman commanded at the top of her voice.

Mine was not the only laughter that bounced around the air well onto which my window opens.

And tonight, shortly after I got home, an hour or so ago, she repeated her advice: “Just shut the fuck up! Stop smoking crack, and get a job!”

This time she was addressing herself to another woman, one who had been braying with a kind of shouted whine, complaining to (and no doubt about) a man.

I could not make out the whiner’s answer, but the woman answered her with real anger this time: “Then tonight I’m gonna have to come after you myself, and I will mess up your face.”

*

My friend MP, whose poetry I have mentioned before, sent me an email the other day in which he quoted John Panzer, who serves on Berkeley's Homeless Commission, as a formerly homeless recovering addict, living with HIV, and who remarked that “Homelessness is brutal on woman, it makes homelessness for men, look like a life of Donald Trump.”

I have been struck repeatedly during my sojourn here in the TL by the characters of the women I see (and hear) on the street. Admittedly my contact with them has consisted of no more than listening attentively and looking closely and purposefully at them in quick glances, so as not to look so long that an opening for conversation is realized. I notice too how the other men look at them, and especially how they look after them, turning around so as to be able to watch the fluid motion of their bodies moving on down the block. The power of women is rarely displayed so clearly as it is on these streets, and I’d wager that the degree of power some these women command is itself rare in most of the rest of our world.

*

Early one afternoon, shortly after I first arrived in the TL, I was walking up Leavenworth toward my hotel. Two young black women were approaching me. I could not make out what they were saying, but they were saying it with an exaggerated haughtiness, pretending to speak only to each other but doing so loudly so that the people they were passing could hear them. Behind them, a big, powerful looking black man hurried. As he caught up to them, I heard him say, “Don’t you ever disrespect her that way.” The young women were stopped dead in their tracks by the strength and authority of his voice.

“She’s Tata Nay-Nay, and she’s been out here longer than anybody. She’s been here seventeen years.”

Chastened, the young women continued on quickly and quietly, turning the corner onto Turk and disappearing swiftly.

As I passed the man, he was walking slowly at the side of a diminutive woman, speaking to her softly and solicitously.

I wanted to know who she was, what place she had in the society of these streets, and what she did to earn and keep that place.

*

Weeks later, I was walking in the other direction, down Leavenworth, on my way to the MUNI station.

The block between Turk and Golden Gate is often clotted with people milling around outside the corner store that sells crack pipes. You have to weave your way through them slowly. There are always two or three who, with backs to you, step across your path, apparently looking for or calling to someone on the other side of the street half a block away. I say “apparently” because I have always sensed that their purpose is to keep me from moving quickly toward whoever is ahead of me, giving those people time to complete or to cut short whatever deal they are doing, or at least time to check me out. The fact that this cutting-off of my progress happens less frequently now that I am a familiar face on these streets is evidence, I believe, that I am right about what they are doing.

On that day, I saw a black woman, probably in her late thirties, who was surrounded by a half-dozen black men. I heard her giving instructions to one of them to go to a certain place and to say such and such to a certain person. Another scurried beside her and offered in a pleading tone to do something for her, but him she reprimanded. I stopped for the traffic light at the corner, and she walked up to me, asking my name. I told her, and she began telling me that I looked good and asking vague questions. Her manner and her comments were flirtatious. I knew that she was simply checking me out, ascertaining whether I was undercover, perhaps. Yet despite knowing what she was really up to, I felt the power of her flirtation and found myself briefly fantasizing about having sex with her. Immediately I also felt the presence of those half-dozen men, who were now circling both her and me. I sensed that they were watching to see that I did not respond to her temptations and at the same time admiring the way in which she was working me for the information she wanted.

*

And then there was the day I stepped out of the front gate of my hotel and overheard one big black woman saying to another, “All my husband ever want to do is stick that big black dick of his in my tight little asshole.”

It was very clear that she was having none of it, and that he had no say in the matter.

*

These are some of the types of powerful women I have seen, but there is another type I see just as frequently, if not more so. These I think of as the lost girls.

It is hard to determine their age, for I suspect that their weathered skin, bad teeth, unkempt hair, and emaciated figures make them seem years older than they probably are. They are most often dressed in clothes that are girlish, small, and in disarray. They are often walking hurriedly alongside a man, seemingly struggling to keep up, and talking rapidly. Sometimes the man is silent, as if their chatter meant no more to him than the chirping of birds in the trees along the way. Sometimes the man will explode, yelling at the woman as she scurries along behind him apologizing and trying to explain herself.

When they are alone, they more often stumble and sway down the sidewalk, talking aimlessly to the air, or to whatever dreams or demons surround them. There is always something childlike in their manner, helplessness being their survival strategy. They want to make a man feel that he is much stronger than they and that they need his support and protection. It is clear that any man who takes them under his wing will get whatever he might want from them.

*

When I lived in one of the rooms at the front of the hotel for a couple of months last winter, I would hear voices from the street below all through the night. I was seldom able to see the speakers or to make out their words, but I heard their tone. I heard whores calling out to passersby or, later, telling their pimps what they had done and how much they got. In the small hours of the morning they might ask him to let them rest or even call it a night.

I remember in particular that a couple nights a week would see a very large black man standing in the shadow of a doorway all night. His van was parked close to where he stood, and I was eventually able to piece together the fact that he drove in from Antioch with a couple of women in his van and stood there while they worked the street. I wondered whether they did their tricks in the van or whether it was reserved as a place for them to rest and clean up between tricks. Sometimes I would hear the unmistakable noises of people having sex, which must have come from parking lots or alleys nearby. And from time to time I would hear a woman screaming or crying or yelling for someone, and I wondered what kinds of violence were taking place in the blocks around me, under cover of darkness, uninterrupted.