1989 USA
In 1989, I was three months in Hartford, Connecticut selling hotdogs and delivering pizza, then drove to San Francisco, where my friend Ron lived. Death Valley burned up my camera and very few photos survived from the trip. After the big earthquake, I found myself working in a homeless shelter on Polk Street.
In Hartford I was befriended by two Cubans, father and son, who worked with me at Dominoes Pizza. When my car radiator burst, they stole one for me. They drove me to what they called a “zona roja” and I watched as they walked over to another Datsun, opened the hood and disconnected the radiator to carry it away.
One day I went past Papi’s wife on a corner of the school playground. She was looking straight at me, waving and smiling. Afterwards, I discovered that she had died earlier that day.
In Hartford I was befriended by two Cubans, father and son, who worked with me at Dominoes Pizza. When my car radiator burst, they stole one for me. They drove me to what they called a “zona roja” and I watched as they walked over to another Datsun, opened the hood and disconnected the radiator to carry it away.
One day I went past Papi’s wife on a corner of the school playground. She was looking straight at me, waving and smiling. Afterwards, I discovered that she had died earlier that day.
Reading Jung’s “Modern man in search of a soul”:
“Does there exist for the psyche anything which we may call illusion? ....Presumably the psyche does not trouble itself about our categories of reality.”
“Nothing is surely more intangible and unreal than fictions, illusions and opinions; and yet nothing is more effective in the psychic and even the psychophysical realm.”
“a purposiveness outreaching human ends is the life-giving secret for man; he has a presentiment of incomprehensible happenings in the plenum”
“the mysterious truth that spirit is the living body seen from within, and the body the outer manifestation of the living spirit”
“The living spirit grows and even outgrows its earlier forms of expression: it freely chooses the men in whom it lives and who proclaim it. The living spirit is eternally renewed and pursues its goal in manifold and inconceivable ways throughout the history of mankind. Measured against the names and forms which men have give it, mean little enough: they are only the changing leaves and blossoms on the stem of eternal tree.”
At my hotdog cart, where I have to put quarters in the parking meter, unless it’s the police sergeant on duty and then I just have to give him a free dog with everything, I hear the man I call the Reverend going through the bins saying, “Precious garbage! Precious garbage!” in a voice like WC Fields with his teeth taken out.
When I hand over money or free food, however little, the regular me wants to haul off me-the-giver to some kind of police: “He is not responsible! He is mad! He is evil! He must be stopped before it’s too late!”
“Does there exist for the psyche anything which we may call illusion? ....Presumably the psyche does not trouble itself about our categories of reality.”
“Nothing is surely more intangible and unreal than fictions, illusions and opinions; and yet nothing is more effective in the psychic and even the psychophysical realm.”
“a purposiveness outreaching human ends is the life-giving secret for man; he has a presentiment of incomprehensible happenings in the plenum”
“the mysterious truth that spirit is the living body seen from within, and the body the outer manifestation of the living spirit”
“The living spirit grows and even outgrows its earlier forms of expression: it freely chooses the men in whom it lives and who proclaim it. The living spirit is eternally renewed and pursues its goal in manifold and inconceivable ways throughout the history of mankind. Measured against the names and forms which men have give it, mean little enough: they are only the changing leaves and blossoms on the stem of eternal tree.”
At my hotdog cart, where I have to put quarters in the parking meter, unless it’s the police sergeant on duty and then I just have to give him a free dog with everything, I hear the man I call the Reverend going through the bins saying, “Precious garbage! Precious garbage!” in a voice like WC Fields with his teeth taken out.
When I hand over money or free food, however little, the regular me wants to haul off me-the-giver to some kind of police: “He is not responsible! He is mad! He is evil! He must be stopped before it’s too late!”
Toronto
I have been welcomed everywhere, especially by Luisa & Karam and Dennis. When the happiness of gratitude is absent, so is life’s pleasure.
Kansas
“I’d rather be a rodeo clown than a burnt-out brownstone cowboy in a two-bit tinsel town.” Drive across the USA with the radio tuned into local music radio and 80% will be country and western.
Kirwin Reservoir, Route 36. Naked in splashing water. There is little between here and Denver save a Time Zone. Covered 450 miles today. When I go up at 5.15 this morning and put my boots down on the loose white stones, the moon cast a sharp shadow. Denver is a mile high and my admiration for this car is equal to it.
Road sign: “DON’T MISS SOD TOWN”
I have been welcomed everywhere, especially by Luisa & Karam and Dennis. When the happiness of gratitude is absent, so is life’s pleasure.
Kansas
“I’d rather be a rodeo clown than a burnt-out brownstone cowboy in a two-bit tinsel town.” Drive across the USA with the radio tuned into local music radio and 80% will be country and western.
Kirwin Reservoir, Route 36. Naked in splashing water. There is little between here and Denver save a Time Zone. Covered 450 miles today. When I go up at 5.15 this morning and put my boots down on the loose white stones, the moon cast a sharp shadow. Denver is a mile high and my admiration for this car is equal to it.
Road sign: “DON’T MISS SOD TOWN”
Colorado
Lost Lake Campsite off Route 135 west of Crested Butte. Uli never told me it was a first gear dirt track up to here. The hairy guy at Glenwood Springs told me it was five hours. Took two. Wanted to know if I knew his cousin Walt in Henley-on-Thames. In September this neck of the woods is dark green conifer, occasional browns and muddy reds, and whole acres of, stripes of, slivers of, knots, bands, dots and thick wedges of bright yellow aspens. Quaking aspens, their little round leaves all a-dancing.
Lost Lake Campsite off Route 135 west of Crested Butte. Uli never told me it was a first gear dirt track up to here. The hairy guy at Glenwood Springs told me it was five hours. Took two. Wanted to know if I knew his cousin Walt in Henley-on-Thames. In September this neck of the woods is dark green conifer, occasional browns and muddy reds, and whole acres of, stripes of, slivers of, knots, bands, dots and thick wedges of bright yellow aspens. Quaking aspens, their little round leaves all a-dancing.
The Milky Way mirrors the Canyon. The colossal celestial main drag. Our home. It is the desert and the mountains beyond that describe the canyon. The river green. Ravens.
Las Vegas
“Ein müder Abklatsch von Paignton,” said Jürgen.
Henning, arrived from six days of chicken pox on an Alaskan island, saw an RV towing a helicopter.
Sign: THERE IS A LAST TIME FOR EVERYTHING
I go $8 up on the roulette and quit. It is enough to pay for my hostal bed and food is more or less gratis.
Up from the Hoover Dam, the road cuts though mounds leaving a Toblerone landscape. No visible towns, just a road off to a place called Chloride.
“Ein müder Abklatsch von Paignton,” said Jürgen.
Henning, arrived from six days of chicken pox on an Alaskan island, saw an RV towing a helicopter.
Sign: THERE IS A LAST TIME FOR EVERYTHING
I go $8 up on the roulette and quit. It is enough to pay for my hostal bed and food is more or less gratis.
Up from the Hoover Dam, the road cuts though mounds leaving a Toblerone landscape. No visible towns, just a road off to a place called Chloride.
San Francisco, 18th Oct
Quake was 7.0 on Richter scale. Ron was under the dentist buzzing on nitrous oxide and Novocaine. My car threw a wobbly at the T-junction. “What the hell is wrong with it now?” I thought. Until I got out and found that the entire road was undulating.
1,200 homeless from south of Market and Tenderloin given refuge at the Moscone Center are cleared out for a convention of plastic surgeons. The Moscone occupants were removed to a barracks on the Presidio, except for the single males who were bussed off to USS Peladio on Pier 32. The Marines had to play host to black and Hispanic bums while having their shore leave docked.
Surrey Street, where I am housed with Adrienne and Ron, responded to the quake with a street barbecue. Glen Park is built on bedrock. Nothing happened here unless you count the power outage. Everybody talking hysterically on the phone. “What’s the big fuss?” I ask Ron. “These people haven’t been affected.” “Guy, he tells me, this America. If the TV goes off for more than an hour, it’s a disaster.”
“No backbone, the Americans,” says English Richard at the warehouse, where George Fazekas wrapped himself round a steel pillar when the earth shook, and then took off owing us all our wages.
Quake was 7.0 on Richter scale. Ron was under the dentist buzzing on nitrous oxide and Novocaine. My car threw a wobbly at the T-junction. “What the hell is wrong with it now?” I thought. Until I got out and found that the entire road was undulating.
1,200 homeless from south of Market and Tenderloin given refuge at the Moscone Center are cleared out for a convention of plastic surgeons. The Moscone occupants were removed to a barracks on the Presidio, except for the single males who were bussed off to USS Peladio on Pier 32. The Marines had to play host to black and Hispanic bums while having their shore leave docked.
Surrey Street, where I am housed with Adrienne and Ron, responded to the quake with a street barbecue. Glen Park is built on bedrock. Nothing happened here unless you count the power outage. Everybody talking hysterically on the phone. “What’s the big fuss?” I ask Ron. “These people haven’t been affected.” “Guy, he tells me, this America. If the TV goes off for more than an hour, it’s a disaster.”
“No backbone, the Americans,” says English Richard at the warehouse, where George Fazekas wrapped himself round a steel pillar when the earth shook, and then took off owing us all our wages.
At the Día de los Muertos a crucified Santa Claus wears a coat of dollar bills. A pair of Wellingtons, each with a one-dollar price tag, are nailed to scraps of wood. A skull on the TV. Mists and a weary whistling of the winds.
The mechanical oracle machine at the Exploratorium throws back responses to phrases you give it:
If I don’t work again
I’m sure
If I go mad
Then nothing will be held sacred
If I learn to love
Only you know what to do about it
If I say “fuck you”
Then caution is indicated
If I eat pussy
Then the mind may falter
If I get laid this weekend
It’s up to you
The more shit in the sea
The more surprised you’ll be
Polk Street
The Red Cross shelter on Polk Street, corner of Geary, originally a showroom for luxury Pierce-Arrow automobiles, housed 200 men when I was there. They slept on cots on its four floors. I was the only staff member who was not homeless themselves. I met some real characters, vaporizing the invisible glass that seemed to separate me from genuine human contact in the USA.
Ibn Abidi, the Iranian with the small, round flop hat perched on his head, who has never shaven around the smile he wears, was polishing a tiara with dozens of fake diamonds as he told me of an 1941 Expressionist painting by Hubbard that he says he bought for $5,000 and which is too big to take anywhere, so it is still in the old hotel room where he was staying and where the owners are oblivious to its nature, so often does the doss house change hands. Statues and paintings are the little man’s love. He misses his land which he left in ’83.
Raul, who I work the shift with, an old Vietnam vet who wheezes speech, cannot keep still. Always heading outside for a cigarette and I am left to deal with the madhouse on my own.
There is one payphone and mostly Gregorian Antonio is on it while others stand and wait to use it. What I know and they don’t is that there is no one on the other end of Gregorian’s line.
A passage in Henry Miller’s “Third or fourth day of spring” brings back one night in that rat’s cellar of the Monk’s in Oxford when I was so stoned or drunk that I was conducting the flow of events at the far side of the bar by the jukebox. “And so, when I stand at the bar of Little Tom Thumb and see these men with three-quarter faces coming up through the trapdoors of hell with pulleys and braces, dragging locomotives and pianos and cuspidors, I say to myself ‘Grand! Grand! All this bric-a-brac, all this machinery coming to me on a silver platter! It’s grand! It’s marvellous! It’s a poem created while I was asleep.” The Monk’s Retreat was a dark bar situated beneath a Berni Inn on the High Street and peopled by drunks and other misfits. It shared a toilet with the restaurant upstairs so that respectable citizens taking a break from their scampi, chips and peas would come face to face with nutters before each went their separate way.
Reading Hugh Prathers “Notes to myself”:
“Fears, indecision and frustration feed on words. Without words they usually stop.”
Anyone who talks about treacle, of smuggling, suicide, open-heart surgery, anger, six men called Dan, the root of the word “caoutchouc”, all at once and held together just this side of craziness by even the most questionable of threads, has my full attention and participation.
Night shifts at Polk Street. Five black guys having an argument stop me when I come down the corridor. They turn and face me.
“What’s the definition of a noun?” they demand to know.
“ A noun is what performs an action or has an action performed on it,” I suggest.
“No,” one of them says. “It’s a place, person or thing.”
My co-worker Lee agrees with them and they go off satisfied.
Two days after payday Lee Rafaelli is in hospital after falling off a trestle table. His eyes more glazed than usual. John Jones, who decked himself out in cowboy boots and hat on being made shelter supervisor, has disappeared from circulation together with the emergency beeper. The collective guess is that he is back on crack. Michael Williams throws his jersey away and pisses himself, “Not because I’m drunk: because I don’t care.” And these aren’t the unpredictable and unstable residents of the Pierce-Arrow shelter, these are my colleagues on security. Like Raul Kosterlitzky, lovable Raul, whose stories get longer and more baroque by the day, making me suspect that he will crack up also. He tells me all about how he nearly married a Mexican girl with a moustache and how Neil Diamond is a friend of his and wrote a song for him.
Raul on a chair in the sun facing the shelter steps, head tilted in half sleep, looks up to scowl at the transsexuals and transvestites. Raul on the corner of Polk and Geary, leaning on a traffic post, the image of a derelict. I go with him to check out the local attractions. The sex shop offers the “Safest sex yet. Inflatable sheep.” and down Geary a tropical fish shop has a rumblefish the colour of old brick. I prefer the smaller shop on piss-stinking Cedar run by the Chinese couple which has black and red orandas, bulbous goggle-eyed mollies and hosts of mauve and marble pink discus, giant and tiny mouthed.
Outside, Raul pukes after giving the kiss of life to a junky in the shower who had turned blue after shooting up on red smack and a motorbike messenger skids to the ground. He lies there cursing. Inside, the argument is about peanut butter smeared on a bed.
Nov 23rd
Thanksgiving and the Polk Street shelter has flowers from the Golden Gate Conservatory. “What’s for entertainment?” I am asked. “Live sex with a hundred turkeys,” I reply. Someone brings me in an oscilloscope (I have ceased asking whys and wherefores) and ex-Governor Jerry Brown jogs in and out in a tracksuit. He meets my beard more than myself. I am thought Fidel’s brother, that or Amish. A gross of condoms wrapped in newspaper like fish-and-chips. Nick offers me white girls. He works at the Century on Larkin where skinflick videos lead through to a strip joint. Fatty Williams, clinging to his house plants, announces he is being bitten. Little old Getze, who has his moment of fame being interviewed for the “Tenderloin Times”, is our toilet-stuffing suspect. There’s us trying to keep this place running vaguely sane and our team members, circus-cowboy Jones and bullet-head McCoy, never behave with anything less than veiled threat. Supervisor Jones is probably selling and now shacking up with his next in line, Louise. I stop off at the demonstration outside the Federal Building and beat the newspaper stand, “Stop the war! Stop the war! US out of Salvador!” Better though is: “Save a life! Take the day off! Take the day off!” Crazy Gregorian Antonio, clad in his eternal purple, asks Louise, ”You know down on Market where there’s a McDonald’s, a few blocks down at Jack-in-the-Box...I wonder if you can tell me...how much are the ice creams?” Posted on the library, still closed and damaged from the earthquake: “”The seminar on hatred and violence has been postponed.” “So fuck off” I want to add. Amongst the stinking homeless dossing outside City Hall (I try to count the men but some of them are just empty clothes) a city official in a grey sweater leans atop a ladder in the trees, picking olives. In Europe, East Germany wants only to be Deutschland, while over here in Indiana a woman is buried in her Cadillac. “Roger” Abidi raves about lost Mozart letters and a 15th century Dutch painting he has bought from a 90-year-old lady in Oakland. I make for the Vietnamese restaurant on 6th St near Market. In the bar next door is the spirit of Dennis Hopper. John Jones to the nurse: “I’m used to making $3,000 a week. I’m gonna open a massage parlour.” She giggles telling me, holding me by the lapels. Raul makes his peace with the gay men and starts listening to them. “Hallo, honey. If I was twenty years younger, I’d marry you.” I get a beer at the Wooden Horse on Polk and there’s Riders on the Storm. The sole space for reflection is amidst the action, where it is the intelligent breath that supplies the guffaw of colossal and ordinary rhythmical doings and their grammar.
James Boudreau, who blessed his lunch and quoted St Paul in the lobby, is expelled for showing pictures of naked men with hard-ons to residents in his office.
Lee is man enough to talk about his feelings in his voice made of gravel and something stronger. He has been repo man (he would repossess a Rolls at $3,000 a throw), Private Eye, debt collector, and security at a Vegas casino. He wasn’t allowed to drink on the casino job but it paid so well he’d fly to the coast for the weekend to get hammered. The drink cost him his job, wife and family. He ended up in the gutter and this half-assed job is a small step towards rehabilitation. He desires a quiet life in the country where he can raise his heavy eyelids, crackle that bass tone across the hills, get drunk once a month and have an occasional fight in a bar. Lee is the most honest and solid of my co-workers.
Gregorian Antonio asks me:
“Can you tell me what time it is?”
“Eight twenty.”
“That’s about a quarter to four, isn’t it?”
Someone from outside wanting to speak to Paul Digman asks Gregorian of all people to go look for him.
“How short is his hair?” says Gregorian, and: “What kind of food does he eat?” Then: “Are you waiting to use the phone?”
A black guy likes to introduce conjectures to me with the falling cadence of a marvellously elegant: “Let me put this in your mind...”
Tommy tells me always: “You’re sick, sir.”
Apollo Bonafide McDougal’s dream is to live in Amsterdam and sell horoscopes.
Unlike my homeless colleagues, I am able to maintain a certain distance and sanity by virtue of residing at a well-ordered Victorian house and family on Surrey St, from where Ron and I head out at weekends to a house clearance sale or a jazz bar. Ron counsels the same troubled, single men and attempts to place them in jobs, although employment is not something many of them can handle. He created a night-time office-cleaning service to avoid any contact with the business people and it works some of the time, although one of the cleaners would leave notes on the desks for the office staff to find: “Do not drop paperclips on the floor.” Another was so delighted with operating the driveable floor polisher that he put it on full lock and went round and round on the spot until Ron came and switched it off.
From the Minutes of Pierce Arrow Staff Meeting Dec 6th 1989
Raul: I am suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.
Marykate: Post traumatic stress disorder makes you sometimes feel like you are dying.
Raul: I’m going into hospital for a few days.
He hears gunfire and children crying.
After I give him a blanket, Gregorian tells me he saw a guy on a motorbike eating a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich who took his hand off the throttle to take a mouthful and crashed into a telegraph pole. “Did he get to finish the sandwich?” I asked. “No,” said Gregorian. “You got all these guys coming up taking bites out of it.”
Deaf-mute Walker, who is non-verbally abusive, resides with us for his own protection as the only witness to a murder. He doesn’t care what the police advise and spends most of the day out.
It is an unruly circus and Shannon Hubbs is back in full drag.
A woman once handed my co-worker Esther her baby and said she was going to commit suicide. Esther said: “Please wait six months so she can fully appreciate it.” At which the woman snatched the baby back and walked off in a huff.
God I loved coasting through Harrison above 24th, the neighbourhood, a place of years of dust and spent force, family fights and kids on song, below the hill.
The guy I saw before arguing with a post on Post St was on the corner of Polk and Bush, cigarette burning in his left hand, hammering his head down to his right shoulder and spitting out in mechanical iteration: “Dit, dit, dit, dit, dit, dit ,dit dit.”
Deaf-mute William Walker brought in three more buckets of flat cans which he will get 2¢ each for. Michael W. saw him standing ten or fifteen of them up in the street and letting trucks and buses flatten them for him.
Raul being confined to the VA hospital senza tobacco, Lee, Darryl and I drive over in my car to visit with cigarettes. Halfway there my entire exhaust falls off and we must abandon the run. Lee says: “This is Raul’s bad karma for telling all those outrageous lies.”
As I wait in the door of the ambulance for them to let the air drain out of the drip in Mr Tinoco’s arm, a man behind me says, “Is that Tom Pollock?” as if ‘Tom Pollock’ were the name of Everyman.
Pierce-Arrow shelter manager Steve Suwalsky prefaces advice to the team thus: “Let’s get real now. The easiest thing to do would be to say you must do this and you can’t do that and if you don’t like it you can take a fucking hike.”
When Steve goes in the liquor store, the alarmed owner greets him with: “Did you authorize all this?” Steve sees a list of the store’s most expensive alcohol, Courvoisier, crates of good champagne, the brand names misspelt in a grand Xmas shopping list. Just about anyone from the shelter might be trying this one on.
Sign at the third-floor Chinese: “All foods. No booze, no B.S., no jive, no coffee, no milk, no soft drinks, no fortune cookies, no VISA, MC, traveler’s checks.”
People get really mad if you say, “Either you get the joke or you don’t”, because at some time in the past they have seen it, but like me have lost it.
Erich Fromm: “in our culture... almost everything else is considered to be more important than love.”
New Year 1990
The Red Cross has done its job and hands over the shelter to the City. Steve Suwalsky calls me into his office and asks to see my Green Card. “Steve,” I say, reaching out my hand. “It’s been a pleasure and an honour.”
I sell the Datsun, which I see towed away a week later after picking up a seventh and final parking ticket, and buy a ride on the Green Turtle from San Francisco to San Diego. From there I will head down into Mexico, and Guatemala, and another story or two.
The mechanical oracle machine at the Exploratorium throws back responses to phrases you give it:
If I don’t work again
I’m sure
If I go mad
Then nothing will be held sacred
If I learn to love
Only you know what to do about it
If I say “fuck you”
Then caution is indicated
If I eat pussy
Then the mind may falter
If I get laid this weekend
It’s up to you
The more shit in the sea
The more surprised you’ll be
Polk Street
The Red Cross shelter on Polk Street, corner of Geary, originally a showroom for luxury Pierce-Arrow automobiles, housed 200 men when I was there. They slept on cots on its four floors. I was the only staff member who was not homeless themselves. I met some real characters, vaporizing the invisible glass that seemed to separate me from genuine human contact in the USA.
Ibn Abidi, the Iranian with the small, round flop hat perched on his head, who has never shaven around the smile he wears, was polishing a tiara with dozens of fake diamonds as he told me of an 1941 Expressionist painting by Hubbard that he says he bought for $5,000 and which is too big to take anywhere, so it is still in the old hotel room where he was staying and where the owners are oblivious to its nature, so often does the doss house change hands. Statues and paintings are the little man’s love. He misses his land which he left in ’83.
Raul, who I work the shift with, an old Vietnam vet who wheezes speech, cannot keep still. Always heading outside for a cigarette and I am left to deal with the madhouse on my own.
There is one payphone and mostly Gregorian Antonio is on it while others stand and wait to use it. What I know and they don’t is that there is no one on the other end of Gregorian’s line.
A passage in Henry Miller’s “Third or fourth day of spring” brings back one night in that rat’s cellar of the Monk’s in Oxford when I was so stoned or drunk that I was conducting the flow of events at the far side of the bar by the jukebox. “And so, when I stand at the bar of Little Tom Thumb and see these men with three-quarter faces coming up through the trapdoors of hell with pulleys and braces, dragging locomotives and pianos and cuspidors, I say to myself ‘Grand! Grand! All this bric-a-brac, all this machinery coming to me on a silver platter! It’s grand! It’s marvellous! It’s a poem created while I was asleep.” The Monk’s Retreat was a dark bar situated beneath a Berni Inn on the High Street and peopled by drunks and other misfits. It shared a toilet with the restaurant upstairs so that respectable citizens taking a break from their scampi, chips and peas would come face to face with nutters before each went their separate way.
Reading Hugh Prathers “Notes to myself”:
“Fears, indecision and frustration feed on words. Without words they usually stop.”
Anyone who talks about treacle, of smuggling, suicide, open-heart surgery, anger, six men called Dan, the root of the word “caoutchouc”, all at once and held together just this side of craziness by even the most questionable of threads, has my full attention and participation.
Night shifts at Polk Street. Five black guys having an argument stop me when I come down the corridor. They turn and face me.
“What’s the definition of a noun?” they demand to know.
“ A noun is what performs an action or has an action performed on it,” I suggest.
“No,” one of them says. “It’s a place, person or thing.”
My co-worker Lee agrees with them and they go off satisfied.
Two days after payday Lee Rafaelli is in hospital after falling off a trestle table. His eyes more glazed than usual. John Jones, who decked himself out in cowboy boots and hat on being made shelter supervisor, has disappeared from circulation together with the emergency beeper. The collective guess is that he is back on crack. Michael Williams throws his jersey away and pisses himself, “Not because I’m drunk: because I don’t care.” And these aren’t the unpredictable and unstable residents of the Pierce-Arrow shelter, these are my colleagues on security. Like Raul Kosterlitzky, lovable Raul, whose stories get longer and more baroque by the day, making me suspect that he will crack up also. He tells me all about how he nearly married a Mexican girl with a moustache and how Neil Diamond is a friend of his and wrote a song for him.
Raul on a chair in the sun facing the shelter steps, head tilted in half sleep, looks up to scowl at the transsexuals and transvestites. Raul on the corner of Polk and Geary, leaning on a traffic post, the image of a derelict. I go with him to check out the local attractions. The sex shop offers the “Safest sex yet. Inflatable sheep.” and down Geary a tropical fish shop has a rumblefish the colour of old brick. I prefer the smaller shop on piss-stinking Cedar run by the Chinese couple which has black and red orandas, bulbous goggle-eyed mollies and hosts of mauve and marble pink discus, giant and tiny mouthed.
Outside, Raul pukes after giving the kiss of life to a junky in the shower who had turned blue after shooting up on red smack and a motorbike messenger skids to the ground. He lies there cursing. Inside, the argument is about peanut butter smeared on a bed.
Nov 23rd
Thanksgiving and the Polk Street shelter has flowers from the Golden Gate Conservatory. “What’s for entertainment?” I am asked. “Live sex with a hundred turkeys,” I reply. Someone brings me in an oscilloscope (I have ceased asking whys and wherefores) and ex-Governor Jerry Brown jogs in and out in a tracksuit. He meets my beard more than myself. I am thought Fidel’s brother, that or Amish. A gross of condoms wrapped in newspaper like fish-and-chips. Nick offers me white girls. He works at the Century on Larkin where skinflick videos lead through to a strip joint. Fatty Williams, clinging to his house plants, announces he is being bitten. Little old Getze, who has his moment of fame being interviewed for the “Tenderloin Times”, is our toilet-stuffing suspect. There’s us trying to keep this place running vaguely sane and our team members, circus-cowboy Jones and bullet-head McCoy, never behave with anything less than veiled threat. Supervisor Jones is probably selling and now shacking up with his next in line, Louise. I stop off at the demonstration outside the Federal Building and beat the newspaper stand, “Stop the war! Stop the war! US out of Salvador!” Better though is: “Save a life! Take the day off! Take the day off!” Crazy Gregorian Antonio, clad in his eternal purple, asks Louise, ”You know down on Market where there’s a McDonald’s, a few blocks down at Jack-in-the-Box...I wonder if you can tell me...how much are the ice creams?” Posted on the library, still closed and damaged from the earthquake: “”The seminar on hatred and violence has been postponed.” “So fuck off” I want to add. Amongst the stinking homeless dossing outside City Hall (I try to count the men but some of them are just empty clothes) a city official in a grey sweater leans atop a ladder in the trees, picking olives. In Europe, East Germany wants only to be Deutschland, while over here in Indiana a woman is buried in her Cadillac. “Roger” Abidi raves about lost Mozart letters and a 15th century Dutch painting he has bought from a 90-year-old lady in Oakland. I make for the Vietnamese restaurant on 6th St near Market. In the bar next door is the spirit of Dennis Hopper. John Jones to the nurse: “I’m used to making $3,000 a week. I’m gonna open a massage parlour.” She giggles telling me, holding me by the lapels. Raul makes his peace with the gay men and starts listening to them. “Hallo, honey. If I was twenty years younger, I’d marry you.” I get a beer at the Wooden Horse on Polk and there’s Riders on the Storm. The sole space for reflection is amidst the action, where it is the intelligent breath that supplies the guffaw of colossal and ordinary rhythmical doings and their grammar.
James Boudreau, who blessed his lunch and quoted St Paul in the lobby, is expelled for showing pictures of naked men with hard-ons to residents in his office.
Lee is man enough to talk about his feelings in his voice made of gravel and something stronger. He has been repo man (he would repossess a Rolls at $3,000 a throw), Private Eye, debt collector, and security at a Vegas casino. He wasn’t allowed to drink on the casino job but it paid so well he’d fly to the coast for the weekend to get hammered. The drink cost him his job, wife and family. He ended up in the gutter and this half-assed job is a small step towards rehabilitation. He desires a quiet life in the country where he can raise his heavy eyelids, crackle that bass tone across the hills, get drunk once a month and have an occasional fight in a bar. Lee is the most honest and solid of my co-workers.
Gregorian Antonio asks me:
“Can you tell me what time it is?”
“Eight twenty.”
“That’s about a quarter to four, isn’t it?”
Someone from outside wanting to speak to Paul Digman asks Gregorian of all people to go look for him.
“How short is his hair?” says Gregorian, and: “What kind of food does he eat?” Then: “Are you waiting to use the phone?”
A black guy likes to introduce conjectures to me with the falling cadence of a marvellously elegant: “Let me put this in your mind...”
Tommy tells me always: “You’re sick, sir.”
Apollo Bonafide McDougal’s dream is to live in Amsterdam and sell horoscopes.
Unlike my homeless colleagues, I am able to maintain a certain distance and sanity by virtue of residing at a well-ordered Victorian house and family on Surrey St, from where Ron and I head out at weekends to a house clearance sale or a jazz bar. Ron counsels the same troubled, single men and attempts to place them in jobs, although employment is not something many of them can handle. He created a night-time office-cleaning service to avoid any contact with the business people and it works some of the time, although one of the cleaners would leave notes on the desks for the office staff to find: “Do not drop paperclips on the floor.” Another was so delighted with operating the driveable floor polisher that he put it on full lock and went round and round on the spot until Ron came and switched it off.
From the Minutes of Pierce Arrow Staff Meeting Dec 6th 1989
Raul: I am suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.
Marykate: Post traumatic stress disorder makes you sometimes feel like you are dying.
Raul: I’m going into hospital for a few days.
He hears gunfire and children crying.
After I give him a blanket, Gregorian tells me he saw a guy on a motorbike eating a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich who took his hand off the throttle to take a mouthful and crashed into a telegraph pole. “Did he get to finish the sandwich?” I asked. “No,” said Gregorian. “You got all these guys coming up taking bites out of it.”
Deaf-mute Walker, who is non-verbally abusive, resides with us for his own protection as the only witness to a murder. He doesn’t care what the police advise and spends most of the day out.
It is an unruly circus and Shannon Hubbs is back in full drag.
A woman once handed my co-worker Esther her baby and said she was going to commit suicide. Esther said: “Please wait six months so she can fully appreciate it.” At which the woman snatched the baby back and walked off in a huff.
God I loved coasting through Harrison above 24th, the neighbourhood, a place of years of dust and spent force, family fights and kids on song, below the hill.
The guy I saw before arguing with a post on Post St was on the corner of Polk and Bush, cigarette burning in his left hand, hammering his head down to his right shoulder and spitting out in mechanical iteration: “Dit, dit, dit, dit, dit, dit ,dit dit.”
Deaf-mute William Walker brought in three more buckets of flat cans which he will get 2¢ each for. Michael W. saw him standing ten or fifteen of them up in the street and letting trucks and buses flatten them for him.
Raul being confined to the VA hospital senza tobacco, Lee, Darryl and I drive over in my car to visit with cigarettes. Halfway there my entire exhaust falls off and we must abandon the run. Lee says: “This is Raul’s bad karma for telling all those outrageous lies.”
As I wait in the door of the ambulance for them to let the air drain out of the drip in Mr Tinoco’s arm, a man behind me says, “Is that Tom Pollock?” as if ‘Tom Pollock’ were the name of Everyman.
Pierce-Arrow shelter manager Steve Suwalsky prefaces advice to the team thus: “Let’s get real now. The easiest thing to do would be to say you must do this and you can’t do that and if you don’t like it you can take a fucking hike.”
When Steve goes in the liquor store, the alarmed owner greets him with: “Did you authorize all this?” Steve sees a list of the store’s most expensive alcohol, Courvoisier, crates of good champagne, the brand names misspelt in a grand Xmas shopping list. Just about anyone from the shelter might be trying this one on.
Sign at the third-floor Chinese: “All foods. No booze, no B.S., no jive, no coffee, no milk, no soft drinks, no fortune cookies, no VISA, MC, traveler’s checks.”
People get really mad if you say, “Either you get the joke or you don’t”, because at some time in the past they have seen it, but like me have lost it.
Erich Fromm: “in our culture... almost everything else is considered to be more important than love.”
New Year 1990
The Red Cross has done its job and hands over the shelter to the City. Steve Suwalsky calls me into his office and asks to see my Green Card. “Steve,” I say, reaching out my hand. “It’s been a pleasure and an honour.”
I sell the Datsun, which I see towed away a week later after picking up a seventh and final parking ticket, and buy a ride on the Green Turtle from San Francisco to San Diego. From there I will head down into Mexico, and Guatemala, and another story or two.