gordonzola

Nearly 30 years after Reagan's war on poor people* and defunding of mental health facilities began it's hard to write about homeless people without being full of cliché, a cynical bastard, or sounding like a prep school photography student looking for gritty urban realism. So bear with me.

I was walking down the street and heard what I thought was an argument. Then I realized it was only one angry, raised voice. If I had to describe the accent, I'd say hungover, bitchy queen after a couple of decades of cigarettes. Piercing and mocking. Tired and witty. But definitely loud.

I didn't hear the intro so at first I thought crazy street preacher when I heard:
"SOME say the world will end in fire!
Some say in ice!"

Somewhere in my memory I knew I had heard that before. I realized it was a poem when I heard
"From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with THOSE WHO FAVOR FIRE !"

I didn't know that I knew it, maybe it's because he was my Mom's favorite poet, but immediately I thought, "That's Robert Frost."

"That's Robert Frost people!" he said to the folks within hearing distance who were trying to ignore him. "And I'M SORRY, I can't remember the rest,** I'm really sorry. But it's really GOOD. Go look it up! It's a good fucking poem and you don't even care. ROBERT FUCKING FROST. Read a book, IT'S IMPORTANT"

I applauded but I was the only one and either I was too far away or he was too addled to notice and he started walking in the other direction. It was right across the street from the last homeless performance artist I wrote about. I'm sure that somehow there is an artist lifeforce there, emanating from beneath the concrete. Or maybe a performance artist ghost muse of encouragement. The recycling center is obviously just a coincidence.



*A continuation and reaffirmation of the war on poor people that has been passed down from generation to generation but was slightly disrupted during the '60s and '70s.

** I looked it up. Here's the rest:
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

I was walking to work, crossing market at Duboce like almost always. Market is a busy and loud street. Usually are you here are cars, and honking, and the occasional singer from the karaoke bar if it’s late enough at night and hot enough that they open the doors.

But it wasn’t hot and it wasn’t night so I didn’t expect to hear singing. But there it was. I was across the street, (and for out-of-towners market is two big lanes in either direction, a bike lane and parked cars on each side and a big median with palm trees in the middle.) so I couldn’t quite make out the song at first. But the homeless guy singing it in front of the closed karaoke bar was really belting it out. As I walked in the opposite direction I kept trying to figure it out. It was obviously rattling around somewhere in that poorly allocated brain matter of mine. Something by the Rolling Stones…

I looked back at the singer and I got it. He was re-enacting all the dance moves from the "Start Me Up" video like a Black Mick Jagger. I stopped to watch the rest of the show. Luckily I was going to work at an absurdly early hour* so the cross traffic wasn’t blocking my view too much. He finished his solo rendition with the occasionally vocalized guitar part then raised his arms and thanked the imaginary crowd. He hadn’t noticed me.

He did the whole thing. Fake crowd cheering, "yayyyyyyyyyyhhhhhhhhh", "yayyyyyyyyyyhhhhhhhhh", "Thank You" , "yayyyyyyyyyyhhhhhhhhh", "Thank You San Francisco!" Goodnight", "yayyyyyyyyyyhhhhhhhhh"

I turned to walk away, thinking it was all over. But then he started heckling his Jagger self. "Fuck you Mick Jagger! You racist shithead! You stole all that music, Motherfucker! You stole it all from Black people now you’re rich! Fuck you!"**

Because this is 2004, I looked around for TV cameras but saw none. As I headed down the Duboce hill towards 13th Street, I couldn’t help thinking of the nature of performance art and that what I just saw was the most unpretentious and concise work that I’ve seen in years. Karaoke is truly the performance art of the exploited. How come Homeless Mick can’t get a grant?



*Cheese never sleeps
**As a rule I try not to write about the antics of homeless people. It’s too much the trope of the sensitive young artist discovering sadness and unfairness for the first time. But this was truly spectacular.

Visible while crossing Mission street are the shells of the old sausage factories. Butcher Town is a few miles away, but I guess 14th and Mission used to be Where-We-Encase-Those-Parts-of-Animals-You-Wouldn’t-Eat-If-You-Could-See-‘em Town. But not anymore.

They were active until a few years ago, despite animal rights paint bombs and the old glue in the lock trick. Walking to work in the morning I’d often see some old guy on his knees in front of the door cleaning out or changing the cylinder. Finally the one on the west side went. A few years later the east side one put up ‘For Rent" signs. I kinda miss the spicy smell. I don’t miss the nasty rotting flesh smell. You never knew which you’d get.

At the corner was a bar that always scared me. When I moved to San Francisco I wasn’t city savvy enough to tell whether it was a dangerous place or whether I was being racist, but I crossed the street to avoid it. When it closed suddenly, the new tenant found guns and drugs hidden in secret compartments throughout the bar.

You can find that tenant wearing shorts and tank tops and chain smoking outside her converted bar apartment. Don’t say hi from me, she doesn’t know who I am. She’s usually shouting into her cell phone anyway.

Down the block there’s a great café run by one of the sweetest guys in the world. That space is cursed though. Some artists used to live there until the house got bought and they were evicted. The new landlord removed all trace of them including the Freida Kahlo mural on the side of the building. It was vacant for awhile until someone moved in with the worst business plan ever; hairdresser/café. I mean, I see the idea of serving someone coffee if they have to wait for their hair appointment, but can you imagine ordering food there?

Patron: "Excuse me, there’s a hair in my soup."
Counter person: "Duh."

They also had a really nasty display where they made a pyramid out of bagels then left it there for a year uncleaned. Not yum.

After another period of vacancy, a cafe moved from Hayes Valley to that location. They were fun but also had cleanliness issues. Roaches boiled by pouring coffee over them is not appetite-whetting.

But the new guy is great, I swear.

My favorite part of my walk to work is on this block. A light-up cross sticks out from a church. Calling out to the passersby, it proclaims "God is not Dead!"

Kinda defensive, don’t you think? Then again, it makes sense that churches are a little defensive in San Francisco. Is there a more godless city anywhere in the country?* And then, you’d also expect a church to be a little defensive when it’s elbow to elbow with a queer sex club.

I often walk on another street home when I get off work on Saturday nights. By the time I would walk by, many men are already discretely making their way to club in full cruise mode. Normally, I like being cruised, but after eight hours in the cheese mines I couldn’t feel less sexy. I smell of pungent cheese and bleach, my pores are full of dairy molecules and my hair feels heavy, greasy, and gross.**

The worst night was some Pride event when there was a line half a block long of people waiting to get in. Usually it’s more of a get-out-of-the-cab-at-the-next-block kinda place and discretion is called for, but on this night there was a gauntlet of guys, dressed all shiny for a night out. I walked by with tired steps in my soiled sweatshirt and cheesy hands as they checked me out. When guys say they’re into cheese, this is not what they’re talking about.

Further down the block, I’ve never figured how Socialist Action managed to rent out the bottom of the subsidized senior housing that was built a couple years ago over the vacant lot which served as a x-mas tree lot and pumpkin patch when appropriate. Since this is San Francisco, I hope there’s a couple of old CP members who live there who spit at the door and mutter, "Damn Trots" under their breath when they walk by. There’s never anyone in their "bookstore" and I can only imagine the meetings where cadre are forced to rationalize this.

Embarrassingly for Marxists, they also have signs in their windows to "Stop the Freeway Rebuild!" Seems rather insincere and anti-progressive, in the original sense, to me. What a colossal waste of money though. First they retrofit that freeway so it wouldn’t pancake like the Cyprus Structure did in the ’89 quake. Then they tear it down. Now they are building it back up slightly differently. Still, it is a pretty good jobs program, I guess. You’d think the Socialist Action folks would appreciate that. I wonder if the national organization knows.

Oh yeah, Needles and Pens, the cool new zine store, clothing store, and art space is also on this block, where Black and Blue Tattoo used to be. It has Epicenter-like hours so it’s rarely open when I walk by, but it’s definitely worth checking out.



*Attempts to find the answer to this question sent me on an half hour-long internet tangent. It seems that this title is claimed by many, usually negatively by a local religious groups seeking adherents. But according to this website , SF is nowhere near the most godless in ratio of adherents to population, though still well below the national average. Check out Medford! Who knew?

** Speaking of the smell of cheese, while cooking the other day, my housemate came into the kitchen. "What’s that smell?" she asked, "It smells like a pussy with a yeast infection." Oh, Antique Gruyere, how I love you.

The parrots live on the Dolores Street median. Not on the median, of course, but in the palm trees that grow up out of the raised, grassy, and concrete embankments. Palm trees run the length of Dolores, well over a mile, so there’s lots of room to frolic and fly. It’s long enough so that you never know if you’ll get to see them on any given day

The palm trees have their own story of course. The Dolores Street ones are well established and part of the tourist infrastructure. They’re included in the 49 Mile Scenic drive so they’re here to stay. The ones a block away on Market Street, however, are relatively new. Planting them might be the one good thing that Frank Jordan ever did, though the local Left, in one of it’s* sillier moments, opposed the palm trees,** saying the money should be spent on AIDS.

The parrots give me hope. Parrots can live longer than 50 years so they often outlast their owners, especially on this street so close to the Castro and the early death years of the ‘80s. . I don’t know how it started, but survivor parrots and strays formed an avian community in the trees of Dolores Street. Faced with foster homes and resentful estate liquidators, they chose risk and freedom; life smack in the middle of noxious, honking cars, church goers, and real estate brokers.

It’s hard to get a look at them, but I know they’re not all parrots per se. Other domesticated avians hear the call through the windows of their homes and plot their escape. Cockatiels, parakeets, budgies, and lovebirds have joined up with the pioneers and the more visionary warblers, blackbirds, sparrows and Pygmy Nuthatches who were born free. Parrots is more like a gang name, really. It’s tough and intimidating, at least for birds, because of the whole pirate/parrot connection. I’ve seen them attack when provoked too, swooping down at the heads of passerby who’ve come too close.

When the Parrots are there, you can hear their singing at least a quiet block away.*** It doesn’t make it feel like the country, or a small town, it makes it feel like a city where good things are possible.



*Should I say "our"? I consider myself part of the Left of course, but I argued strenuously against my more "militant" friends on this one.

** Don’t even start with that "native species" argument, by the way. I love my ice plant, eucalyptus trees, and all my friends from New York.

***I feel like I should make some kind of obligatory Brigadoon reference here. Consider it written.

On the last description of my walk to work I ignored the Safeway. I was going to write something about the UFCW strike in the Southland, but since it just settled, I think I’ll leave it for now. After that strike disaster, I doubt if the Norcal locals will be out after all, but who knows. My workplace, non-union but worker-owned and run, had just started an optional payroll deduction for the UFCW strike fund when the union voted to accept the last contract offer.

Where the Safeway sits used to be the main farmers market for this part of the city. Of course by that I mean like the Alemany farmers Market, not the Ferry Building one. You have to admire capitalism sometimes the logic is obvious. "People are already buying there food here, if we buy the land and put in a grocery store, we’ll pay the farmers less, charge the customers more, and make all that profit in the middle!" The rest is history.

At an anti-Gulf War ’91 rally that tried to march from Dolores Park to Duboce Park, the cops closed off Duboce St. right before we hit our destination. It was the calmest rally of that two-demos-a-day week, mostly because all of us were so tired.* Still, when they moved in to make arrests, a large contingent broke through the police line and ran into the Safeway parking lot, causing mass confusion among cops, rent-a-cops, shoppers, and car drivers. jactitation and I escaped arrest and ended up across the street for a breather, right in front of the Art Shade shop that’s in that Deco, altered-to-fit-Market-Street triangular building. When I looked up I realized Irish Matt was standing there.

He was in full white boy non-flashy hip-hop wear. Down for the Cause gear with a just slight nod towards his punk roots: baggy black pants, black slightly puffy bomber jacket, black angled Oakland A’s hat with the ‘s blacked out so it stood for anarchy. I knew Irish Matt from his ’88 anarcho-tourist days of chasing the Democrats and Republicans around to their conventions and chasing neo-Nazis wherever they turned up.

When I moved to SF, I got involved with Bay Area Anti Racist Action,** the group he was organizing for awhile with some other East Bay anarchists. It was centered around the punk scene because that’s where the Nazis and the people who wanted to fight Nazis tended to hang out. But in 1990 everyone of youth that I respected politically was listening to Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions rather than the (Canadian) Subhumans and MDC. I ended up drifting from the group because it was oriented towards street battles and beat-downs of stupid white supremacists. We did have some good times rousting the Nazis from a planned "White Workers Day" May 1 rally on Haight Street and an appearance at Union Square a few days later though. I do think that is the way to deal with Nazis, for the record, but I didn’t have the heart for non-spontaneously violence, even when people obviously deserve it. Besides, the action was mostly across the bay and you know how that is for the West Bay peoples.

When I lived at 16th and Valencia a few years later I ran into Irish Matt and didn’t recognize him. He’d dropped 30 Lbs. or so and was selling heroin on the street. Somewhere along the line he had gotten into needle exchange organizing and became a junkie. Or maybe he was a junkie all along, I’ve been dense to that kind of thing before. He ended up in prison for a bit before getting clean. I still run into him from time to time. He works just up the street from the Art Shade Shop has a kid and a sweet wife and seems to be doing well.

Usually when I see someone, even if only infrequently, my mind doesn’t fix them in one location. And usually if I pass by the same place every week, my memories are jumbled and diverse. Maybe it’s because I rarely walk on the south side of Market at 14th, but for some reason I always picture Matt there, smoking a cigarette and smirking, laughing at how we got away from the cops yet again.



*Spawning the memorable Rhetoric Factory slogan "We’re tired and we’re cranky and we don’t like the government!"
**They changed their name to Bay Area Revolutionary Action one month, but changed it back when everyone admitted they had been too embarrassed to use the more militant name.

In a post that should have been copied by more people, anarqueso detailed her walk to work. I started working on my version almost immediately but got caught up and distracted by one of my favorite urban pastimes, using the strorefronts and streets as a way of remebering the history of unimportant things. Well, unimportant when taken individually, but taken as a whole, the type of things that present a view of times that pass frightenly quickly in an easily gentrifiable city going through an economic boom.

A friend once described me as the most nostalgic person she knew, but acknowledged that I can get just as easily nostalgic for last week as for last decade. In a city like this, where knowing what store occupied a building five years ago makes people treat you like an old-timer, writing down my own unimportant memories feels like something I need to do. It doesn’t really matter that few people remember what I remember, and that no one will have the exact same triggers.

But I guess that’s what makes me nostalgic person, eh?

I’ve written a lot about 13th St. so I decided to detail my walk down 14th for a little change of pace.

My most hated new urban architectural features are the anti-pigeon spikes. Slowly most of the houses near mine have started installing these anti-avian lines of razor-sharp knitting needles on all their moldings and below their windows.. They stick straight up and make every home look like a military institution or like it’s filled with valuables to protect.

And that’s the thing. While I know they’re sold in order to keep bird shit and pigeon lice from ruining people’s homes and investments, they almost certainly have a dual purpose. Instead of putting bars up which block the occupant’s view, installing these thin spikes prevents break-ins and only pedestrians and neighbors have to see them. Well, until all one’s neighbors install them too. In the old days, and there are some holdovers, people used to just make their own irregular, but functional, versions with nails. The traditional nail method gets all rusty too, adding possible tetnus to the is-it-worth-it factor for a would-be burglar. The new mass-produced spikes have been going up so fast that the first thing I look for when I leave the house is any new converts.

At the end of my block, there’s a large apartment building that is sinking. The pigeon spikes glisten off the sun, when it’s sunny, and make the lack of level lines even more apparent. The shining metal make the moldings look like mini roller coasters. It’s the kind of house you look at and think, "Well, that’s going down in the next earthquake. Glad I don’t live there."

The union hall at the end of my street is a strange place. It’s the most conservative union in the city and I keep running into people I knew in high school there. One I worked with at the photo lab while he was trying to make it as a male model and had the hokiest stage name ever. At first it was just "Tor" but when people always laughed at his one-name, craggy rock pretentiousness, he started using his real first name with it. Paul Tor, Male model. He did get some gigs and was used a couple of times as the basis for illustrations in some old-west romance novels. He nearly got fired when he told a customer to fuck off when she called to make sure our free-photo, x-mas Santa wasn’t Black.

Another union member and ex-classmate was one of the CMP* skate punk clique. They were all working class kids who grew up together rightfully resentful amidst the wealth of our county. One year, someone’s cousin visited from England and over the Summer they all became Mods instead of skaters. This ended, and I may have written about this before, when a bunch of them saved up their money to go to England. They got really drunk and when the pubs closed they started singing, "We are the Mods, We are the Mods …"** really loud until they were set upon by real Mods who kicked the crap out of them. The next fall they were punks again.

Every weekend the same street vendor has been having an open air junk sale on the benches in front of the hall. The merchandise doesn’t change much. So I sometimes wonder how profitable it is for him. Mostly he sells bad artwork thrown out by thrift stores and books and clothes that were left on the street. But people are always there haggling. And since the cops started rousting everyone of Church St., it’s the only regular street sale around these days.

(To be continued, I haven’t even gone a block yet.)

*Corte Madera Punks! Isn’t that intimidating?
**You know, like in "Quadrephenia".

I still don’t know what to think about the tearing down of the Octavia Street off-ramp. The main construction, or really destruction, is on the route which I walk to work and back every day. Longtime readers will remember my many 13th Street entries.* And now my favorite street is changing.

I don’t want to romanticize the olden days, mind you. Huge sections of pavement which haven’t seen light for generations are now bright and sunny. The freeway overpass that made my street 10 degrees cooler and shady is now gone and the pavement radiates heat for the first time in my lifetime. I had to stop at the corner of 13th and Mission and just stare today. I honestly didn’t know exactly where I was because all the landmarks had changed. And this on a street I walk on everyday.

It reminded me of Los Angeles because without the Freeway overhead the whole intersection looks 50% bigger and the streets are still void of pedestrians because of continuing construction. The pillars are gone along with a decade of street grime and collected graffiti. The metal freeway decks that sheltered the homeless and the shitting pigeons are gone too. The drippy green mold is browning and flaking off to dust. The puddles of piss and mysterious urban liquids that had become permanent, like isolated mountain lakes, are dry now. The whole area just seems too bright and off-balance and I still can’t focus on the particulars.

Having walked these streets so much over the last seven years, it’s still hard to realize how much of the environment the freeway overpass formed. It’s undeniably "nicer". People, besides me, are going to care about this street now. Then what will happen? Somehow I don’t think all these new vacant lots are going to become parks or cheap apartments.



*Here’s some 13th St. nostalgia for you. Since the whole freeway isn’t being torn down, some of this still applies.

I haven’t written about my travels on 13th Street recently. I guess nothing that interesting has happened. It still smells bad. The junkies, homeless vets, and I still say hello when we pass each other. The cars still seem to stop randomly in the middle of intersections when they’re not trying to kill me.

But Fall is approaching so 101 now serves as my umbrella as I walk underneath it. The rain waterfalls out from the drainage holes so powerfully that it would be reminiscent of Hawai’i if Hawai’i was covered in concrete, noisy from car horns and the rain couldn’t quite manage to drown out the smell of human shit and urine.

It was strange slogan day on 13th yesterday. First I walked by the new ACT UP SF wheatpastings shouting HIV doesn’t equal* AIDS to the passerby. That’s just so. . . late ‘80s? I mean I know that their message is that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, but HIV doesn’t equal AIDS was the slogan of treatment-oriented health groups attempting to tell HIV+ people that their deaths weren’t necessarily imminent, that they could live years before coming down with full-blown AIDS if they got the right drugs. It seems a rather funny slogan for the HIV-denial joke of an organization that ACT UP SF has become. Surely they would have disappeared by now if they hadn’t had the foresight to start a pot co-op to fund their "work".

Immediately after rolling that slogan around in my brain, I saw a bumper sticker on a car that was honking and trying to merge into the highway on-ramp. It said, "Animals are people in little fur coats". Nothing else. No "PETA". No "SPCA". No "NRA". No "Webfurs.com".

Puzzling.



*It was actual a equal sign with a slash through it. I don’t know how to make that symbol on a computer.

Found by my housemate on her car window (XXX’s where I didn’t feel comfortable using the actual info):

(outside of folded paper)"Do policemen have honor?
(inside of folded paper) "Melinda Ng stated Chris Ng killed himself and cursed me.
XXXXXX Wong was raped.
Told me to drive carefully.
Susie Cal Fed Bank claimed her
cousin Kiang rear ended me.
She simply asked were you in
a car accident? Sinister smile
. . .that was my cousin.
Melinda dared to call me insincere. Melinda said her
Family will kill m ine

Police have been informed

Does Calfed have honor?
Or do they support the terrorist Ng family?
Raymond Lai
1-415-XXX-XXXX"


1. I have a friend named Ray Lai. It is not his phone number.
2. Chris Ng not Charles Ng, the serial killer, http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial/ng/. It had me checking the internet to make sure.
3. The lines "She simply asked were you in / a car accident? Sinister smile / . . . that was my cousin" show promise, imho. Better than most poetry zines I review for Zine World, that’s for sure.
4. I wish he had included the Cal Fed phone number if he was gonna bring them into it. I've hated them ever since they closed my local branch.