I sat on the wall abutting the side-entrance plaza, with at least 20 people around me. Within about 5 minutes, a man came lurching (I wouldn't say this word if it wasn't appropriate) towards me.
He grabbed my arm. "I like your dress," he said, deeply, scratchily. "Myself, I don't like purple though. What are you wearing purple for? Are you a Sagittarius or something like that?" His tone was serious, menacing.
I backed away slightly, but he grabbed my arm again, strongly. I know that the thing to do in situations like this is to tell the person to Not Fucking Touch Me! but I never feel comfortable telling people off unless they are aware that what they're doing is inappropriate. This man clearly was not. So I told him,
"I'm sorry to be rude, but I need to go. I'm meeting a friend."
He grabbed my wrapped crepe and said, "Good, then, I'll take this! I'm just around the corner so it's easy."
Having gotten myself free of his hand for a second, I jumped at the chance to exit. I said, "Perfect! That's easy then!" and walked towards the next group of people along the wall.
"POIFECT!" he shouted, with an intentional affect, and began mimicking, at shouting volume, the other things I'd said in the conversation as he walked away carrying my food. The other people on the plaza stared at me, curious but without sympathy for my nervousness.
I didn't mind giving the man my food, other than the way that it happened, since I'd mostly finished what I could eat of it. But I mind that he's on the streets. I mind that he, and the countless people like him in this city, are receiving no help. And I mind that I feel either depressed or unsafe most places I go here because the streets in the less posh neighborhoods (like my own, even though it's already pretty much gentrified) are full of people who have been abandoned to their mental illness.
Tonight I rode my bike home from Downtown to the Mission along Market Street. The people along the sidewalk had no connection to reality. They were waving their arms, shouting, gurgling, slumping over. And alongside them, the middle-class workers of downtown switched through their playlists, rearranged the things in their bags. It was as if the two groups of people could not even see one another.
I had been to an amazing event about transit alternatives, where I met many people who told me their ideas for how we could improve our community here by fixing the urban planning. This is an area of thought that I deeply believe can have impact. The transition from the excitement of those conversations to the bike ride home was like a bucket of cold water over my head.
A city cannot function like this. The sane ignore the insane, the insane notice and develop an angry, defiant attitude. It's two cities, one on top of the other, the one for the stable and the other for the unstable.
I am aware that the terrible winters in Boston, where I grew up, and New York, where I most recently lived, are the reason that more people are in shelters there rather than some brilliant policy decision. I don't claim to know everything about this overall situation. I don't know how you help these people, and seeing how many of them there are here makes me realize how much I need to learn.
But it is disturbing to me that the city here goes about its business without even acknowledging the countless people around them who have fallen off of the edge. Most cities do this. But in all of the cities that I've lived in, I've never seen so many people who clearly needed help walking around unaided, invisible. There are enough here that it's almost a parallel city. I waited to meet someone at a subway stop the other day and after about 10 minutes I had to start riding my bicycle in circles around the block, because the 20 - 40 people who were hanging out there started noticing me and heckling me. I was invading their city, it felt like.
People tell me that they would never raise children in New York, because it's too busy. I would never raise children here. It seems that to function properly in this city, you need to ignore the sea of ill people who are constantly around you, in need, in danger. That is not a trait that I would like to develop in any child that I might have. Cities should inspire your curiosity about other people, not blunt you against empathy.
I am afraid of the people around me who are unhinged. And I am even more afraid of the fact that the majority of people do not seem to be concerned about any of it. What's next on the playlist? Oh, I hate that song. Look for something else. Ignore the woman screaming behind me.
The other day I was on the bus and a man sat down a couple of seats next to me. He had a deep, rasping voice. He began to describe the process of murdering a woman.
"Sluts," he said. "Fucking sluts. You get near them, don't matter, get near them, you get behind them, you take your arm and you put it around their neck. And you squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. Don't matter. Whatever they fucking say you squeeze and they push at you but you squeeze until they stop."
I sat there, rigid, with my headphones in, acting like I couldn't hear. Everyone else on the bus did the exact same thing. We didn't try to find out if the man was talking about a fantasy or about something he'd done. That will haunt me. He hissed away, unstoppable, and we did nothing. We waited until we could go back to our Victorian apartments and our alternative social events.
I love the people in San Francisco. I love the culture. But I think about Saramago's "Blindness" every day, here. There is something uniquely dystopian about this crowd of the invisible unwell. I can't ignore the person several paces away from me making strange sounds and leaning to the side. It seems in a way that to live here, I will have to be able to do that -- the ignoring. I don't think that that is the person I want to be.
