Talklin' 'Bout My (G-G-Gay) G-G-Generation

I seem to have lived my life backwards. Not like Max Tivoli, whose Confessions are such a delight. No, I mean that it is as if upon entering adulthood, the scenes of my life were being acted in reverse order.

At 17 I stood on the balcony of a beautifully appointed hotel room which I had all to myself, having climbed the steep and narrow staircase of the tower which held this single room atop the rest of the palace. On that balcony I watched the full moon rise, vast and laden to the Pimsoll line, above the rooftops of Venice. Nearby, church bells rang out the opening phrase of a hymn. They were answered by the bells of another church, farther off and to the left, picking up the melody. Then from far in the gold distance came the third phrase from yet another carillon, which was followed by the closing phrase from a fourth church, much closer and to my right.

As the first church again took its turn continuing the hymn, the moon floated slowly higher, shrinking and blanching to that purest, shining white with which she dazzles overhead. I stood in that moment knowing that the fullness of life itself was washing over me and through me. I held the moment as it held me. I knew that it would never end.

And it hasn’t

Soon I heard my mother’s voice. She and my father were slowly making their way up to my aerie, and I excitedly told them about the shifting serenade that I had just heard. And in the more than forty years since, I have told the story of that moonrise whenever I attempted to describe the wonder of that ancient town.

 

*

 

In my twenties and thirties I wore ties and suits and carried a briefcase to the rooms where I taught 18th-century British literature or, later, to the rooms where I would advise both hard-working and luxuriously idle Manhattanites to invest in this or that security. Through the ear-biting cold of winter mornings, the damp heat of summer morning, and the blustery mornings of spring and fall, I traversed the southwest corner of Central Park, walking from my condominium near Lincoln Center to my office on 57th Street at Fifth Avenue. And on every weekend I possibly could, from earliest spring through the fall, I took my morning coffee in hand and walked the 100 yards from my beach house over the last dune to the glittering sea, where I would sit naked, sipping my coffee, watching the eternal morning rise over the water.

 

And, being gay, in my early adulthood I buried all my friends.

 

*

 

Now, at sixty, I struggle along, an artist who if not starving is nevertheless often hungry, in a bare room in an SRO Hotel. My single window opens on the precise, 19th-century brickwork of an airshaft that is full of dirt and pigeons and rats. The floor of my room is scuffed linoleum that is probably the same age as I. The follies and foibles of youth -- tempestuous romance, addictions, brushes with the law, economic instability, a life with only the barest of foundations -- these have been reserved for my old age.

 

Lest you think that I mean only that the circumstances of my life have dwindled and that the inner I in fact grows richer and wiser in a corresponding and compensatory way, I instead find myself unsure of my self, wondering what happened to my life, wondering who I am or might have been, and wondering where it all is leading.

 

*

 

I cannot say much about my adolescence, that turbid medium through which I try to peer back to my childhood, for when I try to search those times, my mind’s eye meets little more than shadows. I do know that I felt perpetually unhappy and out of place. I was lost, without map or guidebook that could show me how to tread the path ahead.

 

Then, when I was 22, everything changed. Or rather I changed. The scales fell from my eyes. My bewilderment and fear vanished. The path ahead revealed itself, bathed in sunlight. I “came out.”

 

In a moment, all the despicable things about myself which I had hidden in shame and which I had hated in myself, immediately made sense and no longer troubled me. All the broken pieces of my life fell easily and comfortably into place. I knew who I was. I found my social, political, sexual, and moral identity all at once. No longer troubled and self-loathing, I blossomed with confidence, good humor, and even serenity. Like Minerva, I emerged full-grown, not from the forehead of Zeus, but from the forehead of my new understanding.

 



*

 

Let me here introduce the first of Dasman’s Laws of Human Being:  Everyone Always Knows Exactly What Is Going On.

 

We may deceive ourselves or allow ourselves to be deceived, but the resultant “ignorance” is never fully convincing, and it is always temporary.

 

As an example, let me take the case in hand: I say that I became aware that I was gay, but in fact I knew it all along. I had been terrified of it, ashamed of it, disgusted by it and therefore by myself, but I cannot honestly say that I had no idea that I was gay. Lately, I have begun to think that this self-awareness might have been with me since my earliest consciousness of anything. One of my earliest memories is of a dream that I must have had at age four, if not earlier. I dreamed that in our entry hall, a group of witches, male and female, were gathered, performing their rites around an open fire. They saw me, and then I was in their midst, trembling with fear of painful death. “I want to join you,” I said, desperate to survive. “Make me one of you.” This is the only dream that I have ever had twice.

 

Throughout my childhood, I was fascinated by monsters. I subscribed to “Famous Monsters of Filmland” magazine. Other boys built model cars, planes, and ships. I bought and assembled plastic models of Frankenstein (sic), Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy, et al. I painted them with painstaking care and displayed them in a diorama on the shelf that ran beneath my double windows. I had little plastic bats hanging from threads above them, gravestones and blasted trees, bits of gore here and there. I had a working model of the guillotine, with a hapless aristocrat tied to the table whose head came off when I let the blade fall.

 

And when I watched the movie on TV, and precociously read the novel at age nine, I identified with Frankenstein’s monster, who had not asked to be as he was created, and my heart went out to him. I shed tears when the monster found his sanctuary, his proper home, with the blind man. There he could find true happiness and acceptance because his host, thinking the inarticulate monster to be an ordinary deaf-mute, showed him all the kindness due to any defective child of God, such as he was himself. The monster never meant to harm anyone, and it was the prejudice, ignorance, and intolerance of the vicious townspeople that ultimately killed him in that burning mill.

 

Did I know, before I had any knowledge of sex, that I was a monster, something out of the natural order, who would be hunted down by the townspeople if they ever saw my deformity? Long before I had even a curiosity about the difference between boys and girls, before I could have had a thought that was touched by the original sin, my heart knew that I did not belong, and it was this bleak landscape inhabited by horrors that comprised my Eden.

 

*

 

Even as I write these words, I am excited about what I am saying. In particular, I am excited because I am approaching a paradox, and whenever I find myself in the presence of a paradox, I know that I am close, very close, to truth. So here it is: the confidence, good humor, and serenity I mentioned above, the relief of simply shedding all that shame and anguish like an old skin, came in the moment that I realized that I am a monster.

 

Once I knew that I was indeed the thing that I had so deeply feared I might be, the monster ceased to be monstrous. The Beast was revealed to have been a Prince all along.

 

[“We are only undeceived /Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.”]

 

*

 

It happened when I was listening to Linda Ronstadt sing “Heat Wave".  In an instant, and then more and more with the unfolding of each word and each note, I understood that the song described the way I felt every day when I went to the gym and saw W.D., a young man whom I had first seen a number of weeks before and whom I had subsequently done everything I could to see and to talk to or to stand beside or to walk home with. Linda Ronstadt was singing to me about her experience of love, and I heard her telling me that I was in love too.

 

The great majority of you will be puzzled just now because I seem to be placing extraordinary weight on an emotional insight that you know to be quite mundane. But that is because the great majority of you have lived in a world where love has been real all your life. [Please note that I am using the word “love” to refer specifically to romantic love.]

 

Yours is not the world in which I grew up, however. In my world, social interactions with the opposite sex were unbearably awkward and trailed behind them the stabbing pains of shame and regret that lingered for months and years. Being both a smarty-pants and a contrarian, I had long said and had come to believe that “Romantic Love” was nothing more than a literary convention in which people believed for the same reason that they believe in any of the other opiates that Scripture, History, Science or Literature might foist on them.

 

You can probably remember moments in which you suddenly realized that you had a crush on someone. Those moments may even seem comical, showing a good-natured silliness in you. Those moments did not shatter the foundations of your understanding of yourself and at the same time sweep you into a new and bright and clean selfhood that, like a Palladian edifice as big as the world itself, gave order and meaning to everything. For you, realizing that you are in love is exciting and silly. For me, it was the salvation of my soul.

 

*

 

In those days I believed in God and believed that God was Love. The discovery that I was capable of loving meant that I did have a place in the Family of Man. I began to cry at movies and plays and good literature, all of which I had intellectually admired all my life but which I had never felt. I cried, and I loved that I did cry. Far from feeling any pseudo-masculine shame at crying, I felt stronger and more manly, indeed virtuous, when I cried. I became tender and sentimental, and for the first time in my life my melancholic humor gave way to joy, to what is called “the joy of being alive.”

 

For the first time in my life, I also knew that I was a man, as much a man and as true a man as any since Adam.

 

And like Adam, I was discovering the primordial magic, the power of names. Adam’s job in Paradise is to name the creatures great and small, flora and fauna, for the dominion that god has given him over them is one and the same thing as being given the power of naming. Jacob wrestles with the angel demanding that the angel tell him its name because knowing its name would give Jacob power over the angel. You raise demons by repeating their names, and the name of God is unutterable for that exact reason: to speak the name of God would be to assert power over Him.

 

If you consider yourself to realistic, too scientific, and too practical to believe seriously in magic, and especially in the magic of incantations and spells and the like, then consider what I have said. The world in which I live, as well as my self-understanding, my identity, and my soul, changed utterly once I spoke of myself using the word “gay.” Is not “magic” the most accurate term to describe my experience? I dare you to find another word that describes the scope of the change I experienced and expresses the depth of my emotional transformation as well. And do not think that the word is a metaphor or a sign or symbol for something other than itself : The Word is The Power; “The Word was with God, and The Word was God.”

 

*

 

Now I arrive at another paradox, one that I admit is comparatively trivial but which is nevertheless illuminating: I hate the word “gay.” I squirm when I hear it. I do everything to avoid it, and when I cannot, I pronounce it with an arch, stressed tone, the aural equivalent of “inverted commas.” The word sounds stupid, and I find it insulting.

 

To be “gay” means to be whimsical, giddy, and even silly. The phrase “gay man” means a man who is not serious, as one might assume a man without the responsibilities of wife and children to be. Like “queen,” a term for a prostitute, it is demeaning. Like “faggot”, which refers to a burning stick, or “punk,” which refers to a stick that has been lit and then blown out, so that a glowing tip is left with which to fire a fuse, the term describes a man as less than a man, as merely a penis. Similarly, we say that someone is “a dick” to mean that while he is anatomically male, he is not a man.

 

We know, or at least our language knows, that being a man is much more than having a penis. Consider the German “mensch”. The term is not just a descriptive; it is also an honorific. A man of integrity, a righteous man, a man who does what is right, not just what is natural or what is understandable, but what is right, is a mensch.

 

I have begun to see this meaning emerging again in a new usage over the past five or six years: I hear people say “man up”, by which they mean “do the right thing.” In particular I remember hearing a judge in Family court say in case after case that came before him that morning, to men who had failed to pay child support or had hit their wives or girl-friends or had tried to run them over with a car, “Man up.” Accept responsibility. Forget what you want or think you deserve and provide what another needs. Nurture and support, out of the strength of your own being give to the needs of another. Be a man.

 

Dasman’s Dictionary gives the following quote from Berthold Brecht as an example of the use of “man” in a sentence: “Why be a man when you can be a success?”

 

*

 

It is clear to me that now, as we begin the twenty-first century after the birth of Our Lord, that no one knows what a man is any more -- no, nor a woman either.

 

I am a student of the eighteenth century and know it to have been a period of social upheaval similar to our own. Economic and social conditions of life were changing so rapidly that no one could keep up. It was clear that the old feudal order no longer obtained, but no one knew what the new order would be.

 

Consider their experience of the break-down of the family as the basic unit of social order. For centuries, in fact for as far back as anyone could think, a family had been a multi-generational group of perhaps thirty people living together in an agricultural enterprise. That order disappeared as the enclosure of the commons drove people off the land and into the cities, making the industrial revolution possible.

 

[Note: it is labor not capital that makes economic progress possible. Labor creates capital. It is not capital that makes the productive use of labor possible. We will talk more about Henry George later.]

 

What followed the anxious, turbulent, revolutionary eighteenth century, the new order that emerged, was one of the strictest, most repressive, most unforgiving orders yet: it was Victorianism. The Victorians knew what a family was: a family was a man and a woman and their offspring living together under one roof and without any other mating pairs of adults under that same roof.

 

A woman knew who she was: she was in charge of the house, economically and artistically, and she had the responsibility for the moral and spiritual life of the family and the education of the children. A man was in charge of providing the material means of support for the family, and he went out into the world to procure the money necessary to support them all. At home, in the woman’s world, the morality was Christian; at work, in the man’s world, the morality was Darwinian.

 

This social order lasted through my parents’ generation. My father, born in 1911, left our house in Walnut Creek every weekday in the pre-dawn darkness to travel to San Francisco, where he worked in the same brokerage house from the time he was a student at U.C. Berkeley until his retirement. My mother, born in 1913, used the money he earned to feed and clothe us all, to keep up the house and garden, and to look after our educational and spiritual upbringing. When my mother expressed her desire to return to teaching, the job she had held before marriage, my father refused to allow it. “No wife of mine will ever work,” he said. End of discussion. And my mother allowed him the power to refuse her desire.

 

Today the herd would condemn my father, but I know that if his wife had worked, he would have been emasculated in the eyes of his peers, male and female. “That poor woman,” they would have said, “he obviously can’t make enough to support the family and she has to go back to work.”

 

So too, the herd today would say that my mother should have been stronger, more independent, and not have let my father keep her from doing what she wanted to do. The herd today would point to the tension that underlay their relationship, the repressed anger and resentment, the acting out, and say that they were wrong to do what they did.

 

But my mother and my father had something that the herd today cannot understand: their troth. They had vowed to endure life together and to support one another through anything -- anything -- that the years might bring. As for me, I can think of no higher standard for which to make my sacrifice, and I mourn for this world of self-realizing, self-actualizing Oprah an Phil dominated individuals who are following their passions, following their hearts, refusing to compromise themselves, and thus blindly wandering each of them alone into the dark forests where the hungry beasts await. One of the most beautiful sentences in English,two lines that encapsulate the truth, the troth, the paradox, of human being, words that make we weep, are the final words of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, describing Adam and Eve as they walk away from the Garden:

 

"They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,

Through Eden took their solitary way.”

Pedestrian Thoughts

I just got back from a walk to Amigo’s for milk and sugar, to add to guess-what. 

On the way there, I saw a man sauntering up the block ahead of me, wearing the dark clothes, cap, and heavy, accessory-laden belt of a policeman. I noticed how vulnerable he looked. For a second I asked myself whether he was male of female. When he passed into a patch of sunlight, the sight of his auburn colored, precision-cut hair beneath the back of his cap confirmed the former.

I hoped that I would reach him before the light changed at the corner at Ellis Street. Casually coming up beside him, I could greet him and tell him that it is nice to see an officer out for a walk in the neighborhood. I wondered whether he was on patrol or perhaps just talking his break by going for a walk. I hoped to ask whether the cops were on foot patrol these days but did not speed up my pace to reach him before he reached the corner.

Can you imagine? A policeman in uniform, because still on duty, leaving his loud, back-slapping companions at the station and taking his break not at the proverbial water cooler but out in the sunshine, walking in the plain air, and looking around the same way I do? He did not stop at the light to cross the street but turned left instead.

I reached the corner as the light turned green and crossed to Amigo’s. I looked to my left as I did but could not see him. Then as I stood at the register paying for my milk, sugar, and pan dulce rolls, I saw him walking east on Ellis. I asked the shopkeeper whether the cops were on foot patrol these days.

“No. Something happened. He is just looking around,” he answered.

“I was just thinking,” I said, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have them just walking around, so we could say ‘Hi’ and they could get to know us and feel like regular humans?”

I lived in Baltimore in the 1970s, in Manhattan in the 1980s, in Oakland in the 1990s, and in San Francisco since the turn of the century, and I have read a lot of articles in newspapers and magazines, from the Baltimore Sun to the New Yorker, about Community Policing. Today I have a gut-level understanding of it. I really wanted to introduce myself to the cop, maybe start to get to know him a bit, and be known to him myself by name eventually.

Crossing Ellis heading home, I saw a squad car parked on the other side of the street, probably his. I began to imagine a world in which everyone encountered the police routinely, day to day, and the police walked around as ordinary citizens, albeit armed and in uniform, like the rest of us. (You might argue that being armed precludes their being ordinary citizens, but believe me, there are plenty of gangstas walking around this neighborhood right now in uniforms of huge baggy clothes, one hand holding up their pants, who are themselves heavily armed.)

In this real world, a two-ton monster made of vicious metal and glass, screaming and flashing pitiless lights, descends on you and disgorges two policemen who accost you, block your freedom of movement, and more likely than not cuff you while intoning the ritual chant, the magic formula, “Under Arrest”. By the magic of those words your identity, your innocence, your intentions and your needs become irrelevant. Your descent into the Inferno of dehumanizing powerlessness (see Bruno) has begun.

And the men and women vomited onto the street by the squad car must feel like big, juicy, delicious targets. They must live each day with the wariness of small rabbits or fawns, desperately trying to see in all directions at once lest they be blindsided by the pounce of the cougar hidden atop the rock ledge overhead.

What if we were all humans? What if we shared the streets, parks, and other public spaces with people just like ourselves, some of whom were equipped to help any of us who were in danger, whether by accident or at the hand of another? What if we weren’t always isolated in boxes of stone or of steel and glass?

Wouldn’t we be less fearful of one another if we were more vulnerable to one another?

And would not the small chance that frail, timid Justice has to lay her healing hand on us all be made just a little bit stronger?

An After-Dinner Stroll

I passed a corpse a few minutes ago, walking home from Pearl’s at Sixth and Market, where I had dined on a ¼  pound cheeseburger, perfectly cooked, and topped with lettuce and tomato but no onion or mayonnaise.

I had left my hotel a little over an hour before and walked first to the Main Library.  I dropped the volume of Proust that I had finished reading yesterday, a volume containing the fifth and sixth books of In Search of Lost Time, into the Book Return Box in front of the library’s closed doors.  I continued to stand at those doors for about twenty minutes more while using my handheld device to check email, since I no longer have internet access in my room and the library‘s free wireless is on 24/7.

Uncertain about where to eat with only $28 dollars in my account and no income until day after tomorrow, I wandered down Market Street until I remembered that Pearl’s was just ahead and settled on eating there.  I limited myself to a Mini-Burger to keep my tab at $6.00.  I drank the complimentary water and helped myself to five complimentary spears of the best half-sour dill pickles that I have tasted since moving back west from New York in 1990.

As I made my way up Taylor, I was undecided about whether to turn onto Eddy and walk out to Leavenworth (the most direct way home) or to walk up to O’Farrell before turning west (in order to check the prices at a Laundromat/Internet Café I had passed two days ago).  I knew that I would stop at Amigo’s Market in either case, since I wanted a small sweet for dessert so that I would feel content and fall more easily to sleep.  I knew that I could get two little bags of gummy candy for $1.50 there, and as I have said before, I try to spend my grocery money at Amigo’s because the prices are very reasonable and the countermen are kind to the point of charity.

I crossed Eddy at Taylor still unsure which route to take, but stepping onto the curb I turned west.  Half-way out the block, I noticed that the fence on my right was covered by dark green heavy plastic sheeting and remembered that the corner park that takes up that half of the block was being renovated.  I looked ahead and noticed flashing lights atop an emergency vehicle that was parked at the right hand curb, facing me and against traffic.

A street dweller just ahead of me was huddled over a very large pile of possessions that leaned against the covered fence, arranging things.  Two other men, who had approached from different directions, had stopped and were asking him something.  As I reached the men I saw that police tape was strung from the covered fence across the front grill of a parked car, cordoning off the sidewalk.  At the same moment I heard the words “dead body”, and I then took a harder look up the sidewalk, into the bright white headlights and the flashing roof lights against the glare of which I had previously been unwilling to stare.

At the corner of Jones Street, diagonally across from the SFPD Tenderloin Precinct Station and in front of the closed off entrance to the little park, I saw it lying, covered by a sheet whose yellow was deep and brilliant enough to suggest vinyl but whose folds fell stiffly,  like some kind of angular drapery, characteristic of lighter plastics similar to the kind we used to cover the swimming pool in our backyard during winter.  I turned to cross to the other side of the street as one of the men asked whether the deceased had been stabbed.  “No,” said the street dweller, “He O.D.ed.”

As I crossed the street I saw another two or three people walking along the middle of he street, heading the other way.  I heard the word “boy”, and stopped again to look at the shrouded figure with as much focus and attention as I could.  From this angle, it did look rather small, but well within the average range for an adult.  I noticed too that it lay right in front of the door to one of the sidewalk restrooms The City imported from France a decade or two ago in order to provide facilities for those living on the street.  His feet were at the door, and he lay with his head pointing away from it.  Had he died inside and been pulled to the sidewalk by emergency responders?

I was glad the he was covered, and although the intense yellow seemed jarring in circumstances where black or white would have been more appropriate, I was glad that the dead was being afforded his natural dignity.  He could lie in his death privately, without violation, as is both meet and kind.

Had I ever seen him?  Was he and he or a she or a tranny?  Had she stopped me and asked for change as I left Amigo’s?  And had I, explaining that I had only my EBT card loaded with food-stamp credits, offered a pan dulce roll, which she accepted, instead?  Had he been inching his way up the sidewalk ahead of me the night before, his bare calf below his shorts wrapped in a dirty red neckerchief to cover a cut or abscess perhaps? 

Had the overdose been one of heroin or methamphetamine?  Had it resulted in a heart attack or in a relaxation of the diaphragm so profound as to end breathing and result in suffocation?

Had it hurt?

A Difficult Day or Two

Yesterday, hunger made me by turns restless and tired all day.
I awoke at 7:27 yesterday morning, just three minutes before my daily “Wake Up!” alarm would sound on my phone. I waited for it, stopped it, and stayed in bed, dozing as much as I could, until late morning. I had that first feeling hunger brings: enervation, a lack of energy profound enough to make you feel that if you got to your feet you might totter and even fall down before you could walk anywhere.

I had three possible sources of hope to look forward to. At 1:30 this afternoon, I would be able to pick up seven frozen dinners, my weekly allotment from Project Open Hand. Sometime around 3:00, the mail would arrive, and it might include a check for $25, payment for a piece of writing I sold, or a check for $400, payment for working as an Event Coordinator for a company that holds seminars at the Grand Hyatt once a month.

I stayed in bed to conserve energy until it was time to walk the four blocks to Open Hand. While waiting, my hunger progressed to the stage of nervous energy, a restlessness bordering on anxiety that prevents sleep but does not provide resources for much physical activity. I used that time to text my supervisor at the seminar company to ask whether this week’s seminar was still scheduled and to ask when I would get my check for last month. I then learned that I was supposed to have sent an invoice for the seminar three weeks ago. So I had to give up hope for the $400 check, but the meals and the possibility of $25 still lay ahead of me.

I brought the meals home shortly after 1:30. Back in my room I heated one in the microwave, ate it, and then heated and ate another. I knew that I would be doing yard work and getting paid for it tomorrow, so I didn’t have to worry that a second meal now would leave me short at the end of the week.

Reinvigorated at last, I went down to the community room and used the computer there to send the required invoice by email. Then I walked to Walgreen’s to pick up my HIV meds. (I had missed taking them for two days because when I got there Saturday evening, the pharmacy window was already closed, and yesterday I had no time even to try to get there.) Walking there, I phone my sister PD and told her about this blog and the two writing jobs it has brought me. On the walk home, I had a conversation with a stranger that led to a blessing.

When I got home, I discovered that the mail had arrived with nothing for me. I counted the pennies in the little bowl where I let change collect, and found that, with the few quarters, dimes, and nickels also in the bowl, I had a total of $2.07. I checked my bank balance by phone: $2.84. Since it costs $.50 to use a debit card for less than $5.00, I would have to make do with the $2.07 in cash. I wanted something filling and something sweet, the latter to comfort me before bed. I settled on a large baguette, which cost $1.50. I ate about half of it with some cheese I had in the fridge. Later I will finished it with sugar and cinnamon for my treat before bed.

But let me return to the conversation and blessing I mentioned above.

I stopped to look at the menu in the window of a sandwich shop on market at Ninth Streets. I had noticed the place before but had never looked to see their prices. The first number I saw was $7. I didn’t even bother to see what it was that cost that much. I already knew it was out of my league.

I heard a voice asking directions and thought it might be directed at me, so I remained engrossed in the menu. Then I heard the voice being answered by another voice, and they conversed. I turned and glanced at the two women, one in white, with dark glasses and a deep tan, and the other in blue, fair, with hair mussed by the wind. The fair one directed the other to me for directions, and I pointed her in the most direct way to her destination. As we two who remained began to walk down Market, we began to talk.

For some reason we talked about the birth years of the people who raised us, my parents and her grandparents, who were contemporaries. I said how glad I was to have been raised by people who lived through the Depression and who knew how to make things, how to repair and restore things, and how to keep things and keep them up. She agreed with me, and as we came to part at the dentist’s door (she was going for an extraction, on which topic I commiserated with her), she was saying that she had considered giving classes on basic survival, or rather self-dependence, skills. We said goodbye, and she said, “Bless you.”

“Bless you,” I said.

That was yesterday. Today I awoke at 7:30 hungry. I had an appointment with my therapist at AHP at 9:00. I struggled, not wanting to get out of bed to go. I decided to call and leave a message explaining that I needed to find food instead of keeping our appointment. I had just $2.84 available on my debit card, and if I spent $2.00 on a MUNI ride to therapy, I would have to walk to work later. I would arrive to do strenuous yard work already tired.

As I lay there my hunger moved into yet another mode, the one of physical pain in the mid- abdomen. I let myself sleep again.

When the time for work came, I made three cups of coffee, loaded each with sugar, and drank them in the half-hour before I left. I had plenty of energy to work 4 hours and left with cash to buy food on the way home.

It had been a difficult but brief period.

　

A Cup of Coffee

Yesterday afternoon I sat at a table on the sidewalk in front of the Maxwell's House of Caffeine on Dolores Street at 17th.  I had spent my last two dollars on a cup of coffee and sat with my two bags, one of which holds three days worth of clean clothes while the other holds my papers, the book(s) I am reading, stationery, stamps, notebooks, tools (tiny LED flashlight, screwdriver, etc.) and toiletries.

I had spent my last two dollars on coffee for a couple of reasons.  For one, I was tired and yet not ready to rest (that is, I had no place to rest, no place to go except the street).  For another, I wanted to stay within a few blocks of where I was while waiting for a return call from a friend who lives around the corner. The cup of coffee was a way to rent a table at which to sit while I waited.  And beyond these reasons, coffee assumes a special importance when you are as poor as I.

I grew up drinking coffee black.  I even believed in the moral superiority of those who drink coffee black.  I looked down on those who polluted the brew with cream and sugar as weaklings who could not take the real thing.  But when I became poor, I quickly learned that there are big jars of sugar and entire pitchers of milk available free to anyone who buys a cup of coffee.  If you can get the barista to leave enough room in the cup, you can add enough sugar (carbohydrate) and milk (protein and fat) to relieve your hunger for a couple of hours. So there I sat, sipping my meal and reading the novel I had checked out from the library.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw an African-American man pulling himself along the sidewalk sideways.  He approached me deferentially.

"' 'Scuse me, Sir," he said.  "I'm not tryin' to rob you or nothin'."

"O," I said, "I know that."

"Do you have a dollar or a quarter you can spare?"

"I'm sorry, but I don't," I said.

He had not paused for my reply but continued his probably oft-repeated appeal.

"'Cause I just got released --"

I cut off his pitch.

"Yeah, I got released two days ago," I said.

His tone of voice changed completely, no longer pleading but simply direct and familiar.  "From where?" he asked.

"Bruno," I said, dropping the "San" from the name of San Francisco County Jail 5, which is in the city of San Bruno, and thereby establishing my bona fides as a former inmate.

"And now I'm homeless," I went on, "and this cup of coffee is my dinner."

He looked at me kindly as he slid past me, continuing to sidle down the sidewalk on his way.  As he passed me he leaned in close, tapped me gently on the shoulder with a closed fist, and spoke softly, close to my ear.

"Take it easy," he said.

"You too, brother," I heard myself reply as he walked away.

It was the first time in my life that I had ever called a black man "brother", and I had done so instinctively, without thinking.

As much as I might have wanted to use that term in the past, I had always felt self-conscious and afraid of giving offense.  The shame of privilege had restrained me. That shame had kept me from expressing a common humanity into which my incarceration had now set me free.