SAN FRANCISCO: JUNE 24, 2001
Hitchhiking out to San Francisco was far easier than I expected. I got five rides, and the whole trip took only about six hours.1 I caught my first ride from a sun-scorched and beer-drunk Belgian couple who felt each other up while driving and took me all the way out of the park to the rustic little mountain town of Groveland—home to the oldest saloon in the state of California—where I was picked up by a short, cologne-drenched Italian man in a red convertible who drove me out into the foothills and down through the central valley to the Oakland airport going ninety miles an hour and didn’t say one word the entire way. In Oakland, I walked about three miles down the shoulder of the interstate before I was picked up by a tattooed and paranoid rockabilly bruiser in a white A-shirt and black jeans who yelled at me that I was going to get killed walking around by myself right before he let me out on a busy off ramp, with trucks roaring by, rattling the windows of his old Mustang and making the ground shudder under foot. My last ride came a mere few minutes later from a small dreadlocked Madonna named Autumn who smelled like sage, dropped me off at the front door of Bay Area Rapid Transit station, and even gave me a few dollars to take the train into San Francisco.
Once I had emerged from the subway at the Montgomery Street stop, the naïve optimism that had me believing I could just walk into the city with my head held high and immediately find work somewhere disappeared. Somehow, I had forgotten that getting a job in the city isn’t quite like getting a job in a national park—you can’t just walk into a human resources office, pee in a cup, and start working on that first paycheck. You have to already have established yourself. You need an address, and a phone number, and some decent clothes. No one ever wanders into a coffee shop with all his possessions on his back and gets a job, no matter how good his resume may be.
I became extremely self-conscious walking around those downtown San Francisco streets under all that concrete and glass—walking in the shadow of banks and office buildings in my old clothes with my dirty backpack and my long hair—sharing the sidewalk with well-dressed businessmen and women, stylish young college students, tourists on shopping sprees—everyone all clean and showered and wearing the latest trends. Cars and trucks honked at each other and screeched down the busy streets, trolley cars roared on the tracks, bells ringing, a cement truck at work provided a steady hum over all the other noise. I entered a state of complete sensory overload, and decided I needed to get over to the Haight, or maybe up around North Beach and Chinatown, where I knew there would be some crazy old hippies hanging around and I would feel more comfortable. I walked to the Embarcadero and up to the North Waterfront, then cut down Stockton to North Beach and went to that mecca for energetic young Beat wannabes like myself: City Lights Booksellers & Publishers.
I pushed through the front door of City Lights with the ring of a bell and nodded at the clerk behind the counter—a skinny young man with short, perfectly combed brown hair, round glasses with tortoise shell frames, and a wool cardigan over a tight fitting button-up with a crisp collar. “How’s it going?” I asked.
He looked up from his book with a solemn face. “Pretty good,” he muttered. I noticed that he was reading A History of the Sierra Nevada, and I smiled and pointed at the book’s cover. “I just hitched here from Yosemite.”
His expression didn’t change. “Cool,” he said. He pointed at the floor by the counter. “Can you leave your backpack up here, please?” he asked.
“Alright.” I dropped my pack on the floor and rubbed my sore shoulders as I walked back through the main room, through the old barbershop with Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s hand-written signs everywhere (“Have a Seat and Read a Book,” “A Kind of Library Where Books Are Sold,” etc.) and up the narrow, creaky stairs to what is referred to as the “Poetry Room,” where I knew I’d be able to take a load off and read for a while without being bothered.2
I sat on a little wooden armchair in the corner of the Poetry Room, and I put up my feet and read Baudelaire’s Twenty Prose Poems in its entirety. I had never read any Baudelaire before, and I really got a kick out of it. Especially “CROWDS”:
“It is not given to everyone to take a bath in the multitude; to enjoy the crowd is an art; and only that man can gorge himself with vitality, at the expense of the human race, whom, in his cradle, a fairy has inspired with love of disguise and of the mask, with hatred of the home and a passion for voyaging. Multitude, solitude: terms that, to the active and fruitful poet, are synonymous and interchangeable. A man who cannot people his solitude is no less incapable of being alone in a busy crowd.”
When I was finished with Twenty Prose Poems, I left the bookstore and walked next door to the Vesuvio Cafe where I planned on eating, but ended up spending six of my last $13 on Anchor Steam, instead. I talked to the bartender, a nice older lady with big loopy brown curls who had recently moved to San Francisco from Chicago, and seemed to have a weird sort of fetish thing for sea lions. I kept trying to talk to her about the differences between the West and Midwest—the scenery, people, etcetera—but she just kept going back to the damned sea lions. After she started to get on my nerves, I told her she should leave the bar business and get a job at Sea World. She was nice enough, though, and even gave me a shot of rye on the house. And when I noticed that it had started to get dark outside, I walked back to the payphone in the back of the bar and called Heather, who informed me that she lived “on the other side of town.”
Twenty long blocks later, and my tired feet were kicked up on Heather’s ivy-covered back porch. The last time I had seen her was in Yosemite, where I knew her to be a soft-spoken, cute valley girl who took me on my first long hike and only spoke up when she was scolding tourists for walking on the meadows instead of the boardwalks (“You’re destroying a fragile ecosystem, asshole!”). In San Francisco, I saw her in a different light—she had shaved her head, her arms and chest were covered in tattoos, and she had a much more confident and socially-and-politically-active air about her. She had a big Ball jar full of weed that one of her roommates had given her, and she offered it to me when we sat down. Then she went inside and put on a record.
We listened to Cat Power and caught up on a few things, but the conversation mostly revolved around her decision to move to the city.
“I can’t do it anymore,” she said, fingering the leather bracelet on her wrist. “I miss the park, and I miss the mountains, sure. But I can’t be out there, ignoring everything happening in the world. I need to be in it.”
I looked at her. Her big green eyes. The grasshopper tattooed on her right forearm. I wondered if she was happy. Then I lit the joint and handed it to her, and she took it, though somewhat reluctantly. “There’s a lot going on out there, too, you know,” I said. I watched her take a puff and start to smile, then frown and look down at her feet. “It’s just not human. It’s nature,” I continued. “It’s the natural world, working. Doing its thing. People in the city seem to ignore nature just like people in the wilderness ignore things like politics.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said, leaning forward in her chair and wringing her hands together. “But there is so much to be done here, in civilization, among the people. So many people need help. And there is so much that we can do to ensure that future generations get to enjoy that nature just as we have. None of that is actually being done out there in the park. Everyone’s just getting high and walking around, or getting drunk and fucking each other.”
That made me laugh a little bit. “True, true, but there’s a beauty in that, isn’t there? I get really sad when I think about the fact that five years from now, all our friends out there in the park are probably going to be living in cities, working in offices and making babies.”
“I’m not working in an office or making a baby.”
Our conversation went on like that for a while. After we smoked that first joint, Heather started lecturing me like I was her little brother, but it didn’t bother me. She didn’t really seem like she meant to be doing it. And I was five years younger than her. Not to mention that I was a tramp of sorts, who was unemployed and sleeping on her couch. I grabbed the Ball jar and rolled another joint.
Eventually our conversation stalled, and several pregnant moments of silence were broken only by the clicking of my lighter as I sucked the last hints of tetrahydrocannabinol out of the microscopic, resin-coated roaches left over from our two-hour weed binge. Once Heather was no longer speaking at all and it got to the point where I was accomplishing nothing but the singeing of my fingertips, I said good night and excused myself to the couch.3
The following morning, I awoke—sprawled face-down on the couch in all of my clothes—to the sounds of pans clanging around in the kitchen, and the smell of a tomato-based soup of some kind cooking in an open kettle. Democracy Now! was playing on the radio, and there were young people in various earthen shades of plaid all over the place: back-to-back in the kitchen, walking past me from the kitchen to the living room (the couch was in a small middle room packed wall-to-wall with books and magazines), and messing around with bicycles and wagons in the front foyer.
Heather wasn’t there—she had left for work at some non-profit cooperative something or other—but after some mingling and small talk, another young short-haired and tattooed lady named Margot explained to me what was going on:
“We cook a couple big pots of soup or rice and veggies every morning, and put ‘em on the wagons, which we pull behind the bikes down Market Street to Union Square or over to Golden Gate Park,” she said.
I poured myself a cup of coffee out of a large coffee urn in the kitchen that had obviously been stolen from a Holiday Inn or any other of a number of corporate hotels, and I ate a bowl of soup and a piece of bread, fresh out of the oven. Then I walked outside and bummed a cigarette from one of the guys loading up the bikes, and I helped him put a chain back on one of them.
There wasn’t an extra bike, so I took the Market Street bus down to the square, and helped the Food Not Bombs kids dole out the soup to the bleary-eyed homeless—mostly older men, all of them extremely appreciative.4 After the soup was gone, I left them to wander around—studying the remnants of the Beat Generation in North Beach, stealing fruit from the tourist-swarmed fruit stands at the Fisherman’s Wharf, watching street performers do their thing in the Haight, drinking coffee with curb-sitters in the Mission. Then, after dusk, I wandered back to the Praxis House just as Heather was getting off work. I did the same thing for my first two days in San Francisco, but on the third day, there was a bit of a problem.
We got to Union Square around noon—a little later than usual—and a few other Food Not Bombs kids had beaten us there. The corner they had begun to set up for the soup kitchen was infested with blue-shirted policemen. A line of homeless people had formed, but the front of the line was blocked from reaching the long table by the cops. Greg, the oldest and most distinguished-looking member in our group, approached one of the policemen and asked him what the problem was. When he walked back over to us, his face was red, and his lips were pursed. He looked down at the street as he spoke.
“They’re pulling the table out from under us again.”
Margot threw her bike helmet down angrily on the grass. “At least they aren’t wearing riot gear this time.”5
Alex, the guy who had bummed me the cigarette, brought up the fact that the police weren’t going to hang out in Union Square all day. The decision was made to tell the line of homeless that we would return, and then go bike over to Golden Gate Park and see what the situation was like there. As Greg was talking to a few homeless gentlemen who were beginning to nag at the police, however, a yelling match broke out between all three parties. One of the policemen walked back to his squad car, and squawked into his C.B. that there was going to be a problem. Then another policeman, puffing out his chest and placing one hand on his billy club, approached us, marching so quickly and with his jaw stuck out so far that I almost thought he was going to come in swinging. He didn’t, but he did put his hand on the handle of one of the pots of the soup. The kid sitting on the bike attached to that pot of soup—a squat little guy with long brown hair, a big gut, and a nasty scowl—then pedaled forward (in either a genuine attempt at saving the food or an attempt at further riling up the police), and the pot dumped on the street. Now there was more yelling, and more threats. One of the homeless men, a short black man in a dirty white trucker cap and a denim shirt, was being handcuffed.
My urge to stay and stage a protest was extinguished as soon as I saw the handcuffs. I didn’t want to spend any time in jail. I had been there before, and it was no fun.
So I walked away.
As I got over around Geary and Kearny and started walking north, Margot biked by me and slowed, then hopped off her bike, pulled it up the curb, and walked with me.
“That was smart to split,” she said, spitting her words excitedly. “I always do the same. For these guys, this is their life. They get arrested all the time. Me, I like to help out, but once the police show up, I want nothing to do with it.”
I still felt like a coward. “It’s good to believe in something so strongly that you’ll sacrifice yourself for it,” I said.
“They aren’t sacrificing themselves,” Margot said. She laughed. “They know the routine. They know they’re safe because they’re white, and they’re not homeless, and they have parents who love them.”
I chuckled, too. Nervously. I felt a little unsure about the whole thing.
“What are you doing right now?” Margot asked. “You want to come over to my place?”
I looked over at her, looking straight ahead as she escorted her bike down the sidewalk. Her short, dyed-black hair just came over the tops of her pierced ears and left her tan neck exposed. She wore a sleeveless black denim jacket and a black cotton t-shirt, her left bicep had a tattoo of a paper crane, and the inside of her right forearm was scarred, like she had cut herself several times with a dull blade. Everything about her exterior looked tough, and she talked tough, but her eyes were sad.
She seemed lost.
Then I thought about Chloe, sitting up there in the mountains of Yosemite, behind her counter full of ugly sweatshirts on Glacier Point, and I felt like a dirt bag.
“I have to get back to my friend’s place,” I said. “But thanks.”
That night, Heather didn’t come home after work. I read from a beaten-up copy of A People’s History of the United States until I fell asleep. Then the following morning, I awoke before dawn, left a note on the coffee table thanking everyone for their hospitality, and I left.
The sheer quantity of tourists leaving Yosemite and driving west during the summer months is large enough that the chances of getting a ride are increased ten-fold. There are also lots of European tourists who fly into San Francisco, rent a car, and then make the five hour drive out to Yosemite, and having Europeans on the road is a godsend to any hitchhiker. Europeans are far more likely to pick up a person walking down the highway than any old scared-for-their-lives-because-of-Fox-News Americans. ↩︎
Henry Lenoir, the old bohemian who founded Vesuvio Café (the legendary North Beach bar next door to City Lights) once actually lived in what is now the Poetry Room. The old studio apartment houses a massive poetry collection—one of the largest in the country—as well as a few large shelves devoted to poetry criticism, anthologies, and Beat literature—and people are encouraged to sit and read. ↩︎
Looking back on this moment later in life—after I quit smoking marijuana because that subtle change of consciousness that it provides began making me terrified of everything—I began to wonder if Heather (who insisted that she didn’t really want to smoke weed before I lit the first joint, but then ended up partaking, anyway) wasn’t having herself a good old fashioned panic attack. I think that she was, and that I was an alien creature to her all of a sudden, sucking on his pungent alien weed, babbling on in exaggerated tones about embracing nothingness and impermanence, rarely speaking to her at all, but mostly at her, completely lost in his own thoughts. It is this kind of retrospect that makes me feel rather awful about it all, though I try to remind myself that all of this has quite possibly been lost to the point that not even I can recall whether what I perceive to have happened actually happened, or whether I am making all of this up. ↩︎
I haven’t had much experience in dealing with the homeless directly, but the couple times I have (once in San Francisco and once at the Karen House in St. Louis), I have been rather surprised at how the truly insane homeless people—the ones that bark on your corner and piss on your bus stop and scare the shit out of your parents when they come visit from Kansas or wherever—are never anywhere to be seen. The people who show up for food and shelter are the ones who are just like anybody else out there in the workaday world; they’ve just had a little rougher go of it. The truly insane ones don’t get any help because they no longer have the wherewithal to find the places where they can get help. Somebody should do something about that. ↩︎
Apparently since the second chapter of Food Not Bombs was started in San Francisco in 1988, it met opposition from the police, who were usually dressed in riot gear. Mayor Art Agnos repeatedly sent riot police to Golden Gate Park to find the Food Not Bombs table and overturn it, dumping the soup and bread out onto the ground right in front of the homeless people who had lined up to be fed. An even more conservative mayor, Frank Jordan, succeeded Art Agnos in 1992, and in Jordan’s four-year tenure he had more than 700 Food Not Bombs members arrested. It was a felony to serve food to the homeless. ↩︎