Moving On

I have changed neighborhoods.

San Francisco is a city comprised of distinct neighborhoods, each fiercely proud of its character and jealous of what it considers to be its superior standing vis-á-vis the others.  Competing snobberies and reverse-snobberies can make the place seem positively Balkan:  a collection of independent city-states always on the verge of internecine war.  I would guess that only two or three –- the Tenderloin, Bayview/Hunter’s Point, the back side of Potrero Hill – that is, the neighborhoods where poor people live, avoid this provincial snobbery.

Whenever I tell people that I left the TL for the Mission, they tell me that they are happy for me.  They say that the Mission is much nicer, cleaner, and safer.  I say that I agree with them, but I do not say how little.

I have left the most run-down, dirty, and impoverished part of The City, and moved to what The New York Times has called “the hippest neighborhood in the country.”  I have moved from streets that smell of human excrement, urine, and garbage strewn beside garbage cans to streets smelling of spicy Mexican and Central American comidas, of pupusas cooking over an open grill on the street, and of artisanal coffees which can take as much as ten minutes to prepare and cost $4 a cup.  Other cuisines add their aromas, among them Vietnamese, Thai, Indian, Pakistani, American, Italian, Chinese, Salvadoran, and Honduran.

I have also moved from the last part of downtown that remains free from gentrification, which is just beginning there, to one in which it started in earnest around the turn of the century, during the “dot com” boom.  (I liked to refer to the Techno-Plutocrats of that era as “dot-commies.”)   Now the Mission has reached the stage at which the prosperous are forcing out the last of the artists (see this report on the father and son who began the San Francisco observance of El Dia de Muerte), the older, blue-collar working class residents, and the most recent immigrants, who are always outrageously creative and entrepreneurial.

*

I now live on a block that only three years ago was dicey.  I remember attending a memorial service in the early 1990s for a friend who died of AIDS, which took place at his little Episcopal Church, which is around the corner from the SRO hotel where I now live.  The Church itself is lovely, dating back to an era of horses and unpaved streets.  It looks as though it belongs in the Lake District, set in the midst of rolling fields and perhaps framed by group of ancient oaks, where a wandering Wordsworth might see it encircled by "an host" of daffodils.)  Its siding is of weathered cedar shakes, and its trim is a pristine white.

When I attended the memorial service I noticed that its neat appearance was belied, when one got up close, by obvious damaged to both to the exterior and to the interior.  The floor seemed to dip and rise and dip as much as the Lake District topography itself.  And the surrounding blocks were littered and bleak, void of any vibrant commercial activity except the drug trade.

All in all, the Mission was then very like the Tenderloin is now.

But conditions here have changed completely in the 20 years since.  The hotel in which I live is itself a good example of the changes and may well have been one of the first properties to spark the revolution.   This hotel was gutted and refurbished in the early 1990s, and well‑maintained, clean, full of air and light, and well-managed.  Everything else in the surrounding blocks seems also to have been revamped since the 90s.  Even the church has been carefully restored.

Now, in the evenings, hundreds of errant people in their 20s and 30s crowd the sidewalks.  They range from restaurant to restaurant, bar to bar, nightclub to nightclub.  From what I have observed, their numbers are evenly divided between couples (both mixed and same-sex) and small knots of three to five.  These groups are almost all made up of men or women exclusively; the few groups that are mixed are usually made up of two or three couples.  Some individuals do walk alone, though they are not likely to be so for long, since they are looking not at the street, sidewalk, and people around them but at the little lighted screens they hold in their hands.  All seem eagerly social and either chatter with their companions or busily tap tap tap on their little screened devices.  The movement of the crowd is fluid, as everyone concentrates on bobbing and weaving their way through the masses, both stationary and on-coming.  These people never stop to take in their surroundings, whether shop windows or other humans, but pass by everything closed in on themselves.

The contrast to the Tenderloin is sharp.  There people wander more erratically, not noticeably intent on their destination but more involved in the ongoing life of their society.  In the TL, folks are always looking for friends, neighbors, or other familiar faces among the rest of the crowd on the streets.  When they see someone they know, they shout their greeting, their loud calls certainly not compatible with bourgeois manners.  But the folks of the TL bear no shame for their sociability.  And they could not be more different from the Mission crowds whose earphones cut them off from the surrounding humanity as surely as the screens at which they stare make them blind to the traffic, pedestrian or otherwise, around them.

In the Mission, the people who are out and about with groups of friends seem to have arrived together and to be traveling on together.  One does not see them encountering one another by surprise, as in The Tenderloin.  Their conversation often consists of the names and locations of bars, clubs, or other night spots and of the way to get to them. They are very much focused on their destinations and unaware of all that actually surrounds them at the moment.

I would guess that those who live here continue to be mostly Latin American and Asian immigrants and that they own and work in the restaurants, bars, and clubs that these disconnected crowds patronize.  Of course, some of the youthful bourgeoisie also live here, but many only gravitate here to eat, drink, and socialize after work.  Judging by the prices on the menus in the windows of the restaurants, which list salads at $8 to $12 and entrees at $16 to $25, these young diners and drinkers are part of the “tech” workforce which is rapidly growing in this town.  Their salaries start at $100,000 to $150,000, and they are pricing everyone else out of everything.

Rent for a small studio apartment in one of the less desirable parts of San Francisco begins at $2,000 a month; one bedroom apartments set you back $2,500 if you are lucky; and you cannot find a living space to buy for less than $900,000 to a million dollars.  And that million buys you a “starter” apartment or a small house that needs real work.

And while the little Latino market on the corner just went out of business, a new, brightly lit grocery, with expensive brands displayed on shiny chrome-wire shelving, just opened half a block away.  Prices there are roughly triple what they were in the old neighborhood bodega.

*

At the far end of my block, at the intersection of Valencia and Sixteenth Streets, the appropriately named Val-16 Market has gone out of business after twenty-five years.  It was larger than most corner bodegas but like the rest stocked a mix of fresh produce, boxed or canned foods, cleaning products, dairy products, sodas and mixers and waters, beer and liquor, and a few sundries behind the counter.

As with most markets in both the Mission and the Tenderloin, half to three-quarters of the items on the shelves were Productos de Mexico, including the candles in tall glass cylinders that sport images of various saints on the front and prayers appropriate to each in both Spanish and English on the back.  (I have a particular fondness of Santa Muerta, but we will not be talking about that.)

Outside, the faded maroon awning that runs the length of the store, wrapping all the way around the corner of the building, reads “Money Orders – ATM – Beer – Liquor – Frutas – Veduras Venta De Toda Clase De De Productos Latinos Y Centroamericanos.”  The implied priorities clearly belong to the needs of the old neighborhood, not to its future.

The building that housed the Val-16 Market is typical of almost everything in the Mission.  It has commercial space on the ground floor and apartments above – the “Alturas Apartments.”  If you begin at the entrance to the apartments and work your way around the corner, you will see that the first space holds a trendy restaurant and bar, the second is empty but has a “Leased” sign in the window, the third is the now defunct Val-16 Market, and the fourth is the “International Depository.”

This last business is quite interesting.  Its signs announce that Gold, Jewelry, and Silver can be bought and sold there and that Safe Deposit Boxes can be rented.  The storefront used to be a bank, hence the Safe Deposit Boxes.  What sets this business apart is that these safe-deposit boxes are not under the jurisdiction of the government.  No one will ever be able to examine their contents.  They are the most private and safest place to keep anything.  I believe it to be a business of use to so many members of every class that it will remain unchanged for years to come, impervious to any and all of the social and economic forces swirling around the corner of 16th and Valencia Streets.

*

Like the faded awning that wraps around the market, other relics of the past linger along this block.  Next to the Val-16 Market stands a much newer building on whose windows are painted the words “Centro del Pueblo.”  In front of that building, large river stones have been set in concrete.  Instead of having a straight edge along the front, running parallel to the façade, the line formed by the stones swoops and waves in and out, suggesting perhaps the watery environment that wore them so round and smooth.  While that suggestion may make a passerby think the placement of these stones to have been motivated by eco-friendly California-Warm-and-Fuzzy architectural values, I recognize that their function is to keep anyone from sitting against the wall (for back support) or lying alongside it (for shelter, comfort, and some safety) while sleeping.  The amateur urban archaeologist interprets the river rocks as evidence that a significant number of folks took lodgings along this block not long ago.

[There is still one gentleman who makes his bed in a doorway of the Val-16 Market.  Whatever business next occupies that space will most likely force him to find another shelter.  I will be watching.]

Another bit of the old community survives along that stretch of sidewalk too.  On any day of the week, and especially on weekends, a handful of people spread their collections of used items –- clothing, books, CDs and DVDs, dolls, housewares, small appliances and consumer electronic goods, gadgets, etc. -– in neat groupings along the pavement for sale.  I have seen these little shops-without-a-shop in the Tenderloin as well, though there the posts of the various floor-brokers in the double-auction drug market take so much more of each block that the little retail goods operations are both smaller and harder to spot.

I must say once again that anyone who thinks that the poor are lazy is himself too lazy to observe the world around him without prejudice.  These men and women are as resourceful, focused, hard-working and knowledgeable as any corporate executive; this is especially true of those who are homeless or, even if housed, getting by on General Assistance and Food Stamps.  The ingenuity by which they acquire their inventories, without benefit of small-business loans or other capital, and then display and market them amazes me.  These are Millet’s Gleaners living in a post-agricultural society; these are Edward Markham’s “Man with a Hoe” or Wordsworth’s Leech Gatherer in the new millennium.

*

But I have wandered from my topic.  What I want to articulate is the odd temporal and spatial double-vision I have experienced in making this move.  I had a strange feeling this afternoon that I had moved not just a mile or two but five to ten years as well.  Just as I remember walking the block on which I now live three years ago and seeing rundown store-fronts, intoxicated people, garbage, and shoddy hotels, I imagine that walking long Eddy or Leavenworth Streets (where I used to stay) two or three years from now, I will find new and high-priced restaurants, residential buildings renovated and sold as condominiums, fancy cars, and people who, if intoxicated, are nevertheless well-dressed, jolly, and utterly bourgeois.  Those who do their shaky dances, talk to the Shadow People, or ask me if I want a date will be all gone.

Or perhaps not all.

In the late afternoon and early evening, anywhere from three to eight o’clock, a few older African-American men congregate along the stretch of sidewalk in front of the Centro del Pueblo.  They hail one another, tease one another, and pass along the neighborhood news and gossip, loudly and with much laughter, enthusiasm, and affection.  The atmosphere they generate is omething like that of a black man’s barbershop without the barber or the shop.

Sometimes one of them is wobbly with drink –- or acting the part for comic effect –- as he approaches the rest.  As the teasing and boasting and reminiscing swell, their manner and humor remind me of the Rat Pack.  These gentlemen were young men out on their first nightclub sprees when Sammy Davis, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and the rest played similar pranks in those venues.  Now they gather on this windswept sidewalk, warming one another with good cheer, until the dark and cold drive them home.

Just past the Centro del Pueblo one finds the “Black and Brown Social Club.”  It is closed around dinner time but open again from 7:00 to 10:00 in the evening.  Despite the name, it is not a variation of the informal social club I have just described; it is a pre-school and daycare facility.  Early each morning I see the arrival of the children who attend the Pre-School there.  Parents walk up the block holding their little ones’ hands, or pull their cars over to the curb, get out, and walk the children to the door.  The evening hours are in effect extended day-care for those parents whose day-jobs number more than one and whose work day extends into the night.  Here older kids can find safe, healthy, and educational activities.

The words “Pre-School” and information about the school and its programs are painted on the windows to the left of the door.  On the window over the door are the words “Black and Brown Social Club”, with images of hands of different colors clasped together.  And on the glass panel immediately to the left of the door the following statement has been painted:

The Black and Brown Social Club is a project of Compañeros del Barrio pre-school, day care, and parent support project.  We strive to unite and empower the Black and Brown communities through support, guidance, inspiration, and training.  Encouraging and inspiring Black and Brown families to showcase their many talents in order to create and build their own futures.  Empowering people to believe in themselves.  Not to be co-dependent on government assistance or government agencies.  We must strength the hands of our communities, not weaken them.  [Beneath this statement is a drawing of a pair of handcuffs, the chain that tied the two wristclamps together broken apart.]
  

You might be tempted to think this rejection of government assistance to have its origins in conservative Republicanism.  One can imagine Paul Ryan as ventriloquist, moving his little Black and Brown puppets and making them prove that “good minorities” are as fiscally conservative as he.  But if you were so tempted, you need only look a bit to the right, on the other side of the door, to see a window full of pictures of Hugo Chavez and the slogan “Viva La Revolution Siempre!”

Despite the ongoing gentrification and displacement of the poor, this is still, after all, San Francisco.

*

Like the Tenderloin, the Mission has long been home to numerous non-profit, charitable, and governmental organizations and agencies.  Like the Tenderloin, it has long had a relatively high percentage of subsidized housing units.  In both neighborhoods there is growing concern as to how these essential services will be able to afford to keep offices where their clients can access their services easily.

Unlike the Tenderloin, the Mission has always been the Immigrants’ neighborhood.  Having been the Spanish-then-Mexican Mission settlement, it retained a largely Mexican population even after the Americans took the city for themselves.  Later the Irish and then the Italians made the Mission their home.  One can still find Irish and Italian businesses maintaining their place in the neighborhood.  Because it has been an immigrant neighborhood, it has always had a vibrant and prosperous economy of its own.

I simply cannot understand how anyone can think that immigrants drag down an economy.  The truth is as obvious to common sense as such a thing can be.  If you grow your population (and economy) by births, you will not realize the benefit resulting from the labor of each new person until they have about spent twenty years growing up and getting an education.  During these long years they produce nothing, but they do consume resources.  However, if you grow your population (and economy) by immigration, you will find that the new members of your community have been educated, nurtured, fed, clothed, and raised to adulthood at someone else’s expense.  And they become productive members of your economy from day one.

In all the demagoguery and politicking, and in all the endless media babble, I have yet to hear anyone speak this simple truth outright.  Does no one arguing on either side of the “Immigration Reform Issue” indulge in common sense?

"They've summoned up a thunder cloud"

Last night I finished reading The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck.  Almost every other Californian read it in high school, but I skipped that grade.  I am glad that I had not read it then, because I would probably not have read it again.  (I have been making a project of Steinbeck in the past year or so, beginning with the surprisingly powerful Travels with Charlie, and then another half dozen books including East of Eden.   I have not, however, re-read Of Mice and Men, which I read in school.

The Grapes of Wrath seems to me even more urgent today than when it was first published in 1939, for the injustices described in it alive in our land again but with less general awareness than there was during the Depression.  Steinbeck’s voice needs be heard now for its probing of the grievous wounds to our body politic that were bandaged up by the administration of FDR but not healed.  They were instead left to fester and now, since the avaricious, hypocritical, and mendacious policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations have poisoned this country’s political discourse, denigrating unions and mindlessly proclaiming the “failure” of communism, the pustules have once again burst open in running sores.

So I have copied out some passages that I believe we all must hear.  They appear in bold below.

*

And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval . . . Know the great fact:  when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away.  And that companion fact:  when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need.  And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.

And the companies, the banks worked at their own doom and they did not know it.  The fields were fruitful, and the starving men moved on the roads.  The granaries were full and the children of the poor grew up rachitic, and the pustules of pellagra swelled on their sides.  The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line. 

And money that might have gone for wages went for gas, for guns, for agents and spies, for black lists, for drilling.  On the highways the people moved like ants and searched for work, for food.  And the anger began to ferment.

Burn coffee for fuel in the ships.  Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire.  Dump potatoes in the river and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out.  Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

. . . There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation..  There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize.  There is a failure here that topples all our success.  The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit.  And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange.  And coroners must fill in the certificates -- died of malnutrition -- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

                The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river , and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed.  And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath.  In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

*

Things ain’t near bad enough -- yet.

I heard on this morning’s news report that the Supreme Court will be hearing a case that could have disastrous results for Public Employee Unions..  The ironic thing, and the most frightening thing, was that the unions and their employers -- the State governments -- are on the same side.  The challenge to the unions comes from only three individuals (out of 28,000 home health care workers in Illinois) who resent having to pay the portion of union dues that cover the costs of negotiating the labor contratcs from which they benefit.  They want a free ride.

Made me wonder who is paying them to file this suit.

The story also reminded me of what my dear Irish friend, GH, said about the American Revolution:  “Well, you know, growing up in Ireland we didn’t really learn much about it in school -- just that it was a bunch of country yokels who didn’t want to pay taxes.”

*

“But now I been thinking’ what he said, an’ I can remember -- all of it.  Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an he foun’ he didn’ have no soul that was his’n.  Says he foun’ he jus’ got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain’t no good, ‘cause his little piece of a soul wasn’t no good, ‘less it was with the rest, an’ was whole.  Funny how I remember.  Didn’ think I was even listenin’.  But I know now a fella ain’t no good alone.”

“He was a good man,” Ma said.

Tom went on, “He spouted some Scripture once, an’ it didn’ soun’ like no hell-fire Scripture.  He tol’ it twicet, an’ I remember it. Says it’s from the Preacher.”

“How’s it go, Tom?”

“Goes, ‘Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their labor  For if they fall, the one will lif’ up his fellow, but woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up.’  That’s part of her.”

“Go on,” Ma said, “Go on, Tom.”

“Jus’ a little bit more.  ‘Again, if two lie together, then they have heat:  but how can one be warm alone?  And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him, and a three-fold cord is not quickly broken.”

“An’ that’s Scripture?”

“Casy said it was.  Called it the Preacher.”

“Hush -- listen.”

“On’y the wind, Ma.  I know the wind.  An’ I got to thinking’, Ma -- most of the preachin’ is about the poor we shall always have with us, an’ if you got nothing’, why, jus’ fol’ hands an’ to hell with it, you gonna git ice cream on gol’ plates when you’re dead.  An’ then this here Preacher says two get a better reward for their work.”

“Tom,” she said.  “What you aimin’ to do?”

He was quiet for a long time.  “I been thinking’ how it was in that gov’ment camp, how our folks took care a theirselves, an’ if they was a fight they fixed it theyself; an’ they wasn’t no cops wagglin’ their guns, but they was better order than them cops ever give.  I been a-wonderin’ why we can’t do that all over.  Throw out the cops that ain’t our people.  All work together for our own thing -- all farm our own lan’.”

“Tom,” Ma repeated, “what you gonna do?”

“What Casy done,” he said.

“But they killed him.” 

“Yeah,” Tom said.  “He didn’ duck quick enough.  He wasn’ doin’ nothin’ against the law, Ma.  I been thinking’ a hell of a lot, thinking’ about our people livin’ like pigs, an’ the good rich lan’ layin’ fallow, or maybe one fella with a million acres, while a hunderd thousan’ good farmers is starvin’.  An’ I been wonderin’ if all our folks got together an’ yelled, like them fellas yelled, only a few of ‘em at the Hooper ranch --’

. . .  They sat silent in the coal-black cave of vines.  Ma said, “How’m I gonna know ‘bout you?  They might kill ya an’ I wouldn’ know.  They might hurt ya.  How’m I gonna know?”

Tom laughed uneasily, “Well, maybe like Casy says, a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one -- an’ then --”

“Then what, Tom?”

“Then it don’ matter.  Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark.  I’ll be ever’where -- wherever you look.  Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.  Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there.  If Casy knowed, why then I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’ -- I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready.  An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build -- why, I’ll be there.  See?”

*

This morning I heard something else -- something when I first woke, before I turned the radio on and heard about the Supreme Court and the unions.  An odd feature of my new home is that the window opens on an airshaft that is itself open at one end.  Lots of sounds from the street and from a neighboring restaurant and from backstage at a little theater two doors down get funneled into my room and into my ears.  This morning I heard two voices.  I was able to understand most of the words, though chunks here and there were muffled and unintelligible:

First voice, strong, clear, angry but not excited or uncontrolled:  “[unintelligible] used my mouthwash!  You can’t just just arrest me because [unintelligible] . . . sober.”

Second voice, clear but subdued:  “[unintelligible]  your date of birth?”

“December 20, [unintelligible].”

Silence.  Then the voices again, but nothing I could understand.

I think they let the poor fellow be.

Wristband

About ten days ago, I attended “Homeless Connect,” a kind of trade show for poor folks.  At a big auto show, all the most important car manufacturers in the world would have exhibits staffed by representatives who engage in conversations with attendees and disseminate lots of information regarding new products from their companies.  It would be the same at MacWorld or at the Consumer Electronics Show -- and it was exactly like that at “Homeless Connect.”

The Bill Graham Auditorium in the Civic Center was packed with tables staffed by representatives from (I would guess) more than 100 agencies or businesses that provide services for the poor.  The show also included a café where we were served a free lunch.  When we were finished, the path to the exit led us by tables laden with food from the Glide Memorial Methodist Church food bank, and nearly everyone left with a big bag of groceries.

I have learned in the last couple of years that there is a surprisingly wide range of resources available to the poor but that accessing them is not often easy.  When I used to go to the UCSF School of Dentistry for my dental care, I told friends that “they operate on the old Soviet system:  instead of a filing costing you a certain number of dollars, it costs you a certain number of hours in line.”  So too most services for the homeless and hungry can be had only after lining up any number of times – and that after traveling (usually by bus) to a remote location where the charity or government agency can afford to rent office space.

The nature of bureaucracies compounds the problem, since multiple layers of oversight and compliance require multiple forms and filings to qualify for whatever benefit is offered, requiring more lines and more waiting.  Sometimes I think that the politicians who write the laws that govern these things just want to be sure that no one is “getting off easy.”  If you are unemployed, they seem to think, the least you can do is show up at multiple meetings or individual appointments at multiple locations over a period of a week or more – just so we know that you aren’t getting something for nothing, even if the work you are being made to do is of benefit to no one, mind-numbingly tedious, and corrosive to your own sense of dignity or self-worth.

Not only that, but all the time spent queuing for this and that only makes it harder and harder to get on with a search for a real job.

Back to “Homeless Connect”:  a friend of mine needed to get a California picture I.D., an item which is necessary if you want to enroll in any government program.  At the DMV, he would have had to wait in line for hours.  Even if he called or went online to make an appointment, the next available one would probably be weeks away.  He would also have had to spend an hour or more on buses getting to and from the DMV office.  But at “Homeless Connect” he got his I.D. after waiting in a line less than twenty minutes.  And I was able to do something I had been meaning to do for months:  I submitted an application for a free phone and free monthly wireless service through the “Assurance” program ( which, by the way, I mistakenly called “Access“ in the post titled “Accounts Payable.”).

“Homeless Connect” was also like other trade shows in that it attracted so many people that the organizers had to issue tickets.  The tickets came in the non-transferable form of wristbands secured on your wrist by the official handing them out.  The wristbands were printed with admission times so that manageable numbers of people would flow through the facility throughout the day.  Men in bright yellow vests began to distribute the wristbands in the huge open square that is the heart of the Civic Center beginning at about 7:45 am.  I got mine at about 8:00, which allowed me to enter at 11:00 am.

Different color wristbands granted entry at different times.  I was looking at my wristband and smiling as I walked back home to eat breakfast.  My wristband was orange.

The last time I had worn an orange wristband, I had been a guest of the county, first at 850 Bryant and then at Bruno.  As I told you in Bruno, this label is affixed to your wrist as part of the dehumanizing and demoralizing process of being booked into the System.  It cannot be removed with anything less than a very sharp pair of scissors -- not something that one is allowed in jail.  Not even the officer who hands you back the clothes that you were wearing and the contents of your pockets at the time of your arrest will lend you a pair of scissors; nor will she cut it off herself.  Apparently, you must not be allowed to be anything more than an object while within the Sherriff’s domain, even if you are walking out the door.

I complained of this to the officer who handed me my property.

“O don’t worry, honey -- you’re gonna want that.”

Her condescension evoked a bitterly sarcastic response which I need not report.

“No,” she said, “that’s gonna get you a free ride on MUNI anywhere you want to go.  Just show it to the driver when you get on.”

Mumbling to myself, I carried my clothes into the alcove provided, stripped off my orange, dressed in my own clothes, and walked through the doors to the waiting area.  There I sat down and laced my shoes.  (When I was processed in, I was allowed to keep my own shoes, because they did not have any size 15 orange slippers, but I had to surrender the laces and shuffle around with my shoes half-fallen off for the ten days I was inside.)

Walking into fresh cool air was sweet not in the way sugar is sweet but in the way that moonlight is sweet.  I wandered away from the jail texting friends with the news that I was out and then began to consider where I should head for the fast-approaching night.  In jail, my Chinese friend (see Accounts Payable) had told me about a place nearby where I could get a room for $50, but there was, so to speak, no room at the inn.  I remembered that I had once been able to rent a room for about $75 at a motel across town on Lombard Street.  So I walked to Van Ness and waited for the cross-town bus.

It was now close to nine o’clock and very dark.  I had been wandering around SOMA and then walking out Market Street for a little more than an hour.  All that time, I did my best to keep my wristband, which was both a bright orange badge of shame and an advertisement to others to “Beware!”, pushed way up on my forearm, where the muscle was thick enough to keep it from slipping down to my wrist.  I wanted it well hidden under the sleeve of my shirt.  I had to keep pushing it back up my arm as it kept sliding down to my wrist.

I have to admit that there were a couple of dicey blocks that I traversed where I decided that I, a middle-aged white man with close-cropped hair and clean, neat clothing, might become a target (beggars; muggers), and I not only let my wristband slide out of my cuff but even casually rolled up my sleeves to just below the elbow so that everyone could see it.  I noticed quick looks that were registering my appearance, sizing me up, judging my potential as prey, relax into subtle smiles of recognition when they saw the orange on my arm.  So I felt more relaxed, indeed I felt safer, walking with my orange wristband through the knots of my fellow creatures along the sidewalk.

When the doors of the 49 Van Ness MUNI bus opened, I held my banded wrist up for the driver to see but pulled it back under cover of the cuff of my sleeve to hide it from the other passengers.  I sat down quickly, in the first seat inside the door, where no one was close to me.  After a couple of blocks, I asked the driver whether he stopped right at Lombard, and if he did not, where I should get off.  He named the stop just prior to Lombard and assured me that he would alert me when we got there.

The trip was quick and uneventful.  As we approached my stop, the driver told me we were there.  I thanked him and said something about looking for a reasonable motel.  As I stepped off the bus, I again thanked him for his help.

“Don’t mention it, Sir” he replied.  “You are my Number One passenger tonight.  Have a good night.  And good luck.”

I was at first confused by what I took as misplaced flattery.  What did he mean by that?  Then I remembered my wristband.  A heat of shame ran through me, leaving me a bit resentful:  was he being sarcastic with me, an old white man who should be a well-to-do retired something but who instead was just out of jail?  I was, after all, so obviously not important.  Then I felt ashamed of having questioned the driver’s sincerity, and I decided that his exaggerated graciousness stemmed from a sense that he did not know what an appropriate comment might be, and he had tried too hard to make up for it.

As the days and weeks passed, however, I came to see the meaning in his words and to appreciate the depth of soul that this MUNI driver had shared with me.  I see now that the moment shone with grace.  He was the angel (the word means “messenger”) come to welcome me into the light with an acknowledgement that I had crossed over into the realm of that “common humanity” I wrote about in my first posting to this blog (“A Cup of Coffee.”)  I realized that his brothers or father or uncles or even he himself probably had had experience with riding MUNI free with an orange wristband.  Even now I feel sadness, gratitude, longing, honor, and truth when I remember his words.

The driver had said what he meant, and I can only hope that the goodwill I feel toward him will be somehow manifest in the days of his life.

Inappropriate Behavior, Part Two

I remember being both mystified and irritated, back when I owned and drove a car, when usually poor, usually black, people would cross the street against the light in front of me, as if daring me to hit them. Their demeanor was almost always erratic, inattentive, and slow. Sometimes they seemed intoxicated; sometimes over-medicated; sometimes mentally ill. They seemed barely to notice me or my car. Only once in a great while would one of them give me a hard, direct look in the eye, as if to say ‘I know exactly what I am doing, and you can’t do anything about it.”

I became upset, in part, because it seemed such a dangerous, even potentially suicidal, thing to do. I would cringe in empathetic anguish at the mere possibility of serious injury, as one does when one sees a dog or a small child wander into traffic. I resented what seemed a toying with my emotions as I was made to feel such fear and anxiety on behalf of someone who appeared so extremely irresponsible and careless of their own safety.

I tried to think of explanations for this annoying behavior. I thought it could be a variation on a set of practices going back hundreds of years; a slave’s strategy. As such, it might be a form of resistance, a willful getting in the way of the oppressor, just as moving slowly, especially while working, had been one of the few forms of resistance for a slave.

I also thought, on a more basic, existential and psychological level, that crossing against traffic might be one of the few expressions of power available to people who have neither money nor institutional position with which to exercise their will. I am enough of a follower of Nietzsche to believe that the ability to realize the power of one’s will is essential to human existence. This rudimentary form of pedestrian civil disobedience is not significant enough to get you thrown in jail, but it is a way to throw a monkey-wrench (or a wooden shoe) into the machinery of a society that has devalued and disregarded your humanity.

Nowadays I find myself smiling with delight when I see a brother saunter casually toward an intersection, arriving at the corner just as the light turns against him, and then stepping smartly into the crosswalk and blocking all those people who had anxiously watched for the green light and stabbed the accelerator with their toes the instant the signal changed. Their cars make a half-jump into flight and then lurch to a stop so as not to hit the errant pedestrian. You can almost hear them cursing him, except that the glass and steel surrounding them is designed so efficiently to cut them off from actually being in contact with us that we cannot hear them. And you can almost see the cartoon-steam blasting out of their ears.

The pleasure I take on these occasions is akin to the anger I feel when, crossing with the light, as I am wont to do, I am startled by a car, especially if it is an SUV, bearing down on me at a reckless speed. These drivers seem to race to the white line that demarks my safety, charging toward a red light and then braking at the last possible moment. My heart always leaps into my throat in the very moment that my peripheral vision picks up this rapidly approaching large metal object. And nowadays rather than scurrying to the curb, which I feel they want me to do (“Get out of my way, low-life!”), I automatically slow my pace to a crawl, sometimes even to a stop, lingering right in front of the offending vehicle’s bumper. I stare through the windshield, sneering at the driver. Sometimes I hold out the index finger of my right hand and shake it at them, as if to say “Tsk-tsk-tsk. Shame on you.”

The drivers who are in such a hurry now seem to me callous, self-involved, and downright rude. Indeed, they have made me realize that the automobile, quite probably the single most destructive invention ever devised by humans, is the actual demarcation of a class line. Here in the Tenderloin, we pedestrians are the poor, and the cars that rush along our streets carry members of classes that lie at least two or three steps above ours. And in addition to being sealed off from us by these multi-ton boxes in which they ride, the speed at which they move is another clear manifestation of their disdain for us and of their intense desire not to have to interact with us in any kind of personal encounter.

[About the automobile: not only has this invention quite likely destroyed the delicate ecological balance that has provided a habitat in which human beings could flourish, possibly leading to the extinction of the species, but it has also torn apart the web of interactions among individuals that defined our societies. In cities born since the beginning of the twentieth century, individuals now glide past one another encased in tons of glass and steel that prevent communication and even recognition of one another. People no longer exchange ideas and goods and services and opinions and themselves with each other in the kind of public spaces -- market, forum, plaza -- that constituted what a city -- and therefore what a civilization -- was.]

I am reminded of the French aristocrats in the time of Louis XIV to Louis XVI who were carried on the shoulders of two or four strong men through the crowded streets in wooden boxes, “sedan chairs,” holding under their noses oranges studded with cloves, or something else that would give off a strong but pleasant odor, so that they would not  have to see or smell the vulgar masses.

And we all know where their disdain for and indifference to their fellow human beings led them in fairly short order.  [See Accounts Payable.]

So you in your BMWs, Escalades, and Priuses -- how’s that workin’ out for ya?