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.

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.