And then I got arrested. That night, January nineteenth, was the last day I used. That was 2009. Since then I’ve been clean.
Until now, the people of San Francisco have been the counterculture. We’re all fucking weird, and we fit in here—there was a certain calling that made us feel comfortable. The homeless kids also latched on to that. We found family here for those of us who didn’t have one.
There’s a whole different genre of homelessness now. I see a lot of families living in their cars. With half of their belongings on the sidewalk. And they can’t afford to live anywhere. The crisis is becoming more visible now. The contrast is getting darker.
The people moving into the Haight now are first year out of college, working down in Silicon Valley. And they’re like, “Oh my God. There’s a homeless dog with his owner.” Some of them try to make me out to be the bad guy, for taking care of these kids. Like I’m making homelessness okay. But I’m just trying to fix what other people broke.
These kids are just your outside neighbors. They live outside. Most of them will clean up after themselves, most of them will be respectful of where you live and move. They’re neighbors. They just can’t afford to live in that $4 million house.
MAYA WILLIAMS
Her mother was a doctor, so she practically grew up in a city hospital: “It’s just shaped me. I like the hospital smell, that clean smell. That’s actually a very calming smell to me. It tells me this is a clean situation, it’s safe. When you’re a doctor’s kid, none of this stuff is traumatic.” Today, she works in one of San Francisco’s busiest emergency rooms.
The ER and the DMV are places no one can escape. You’re going to be sitting next to whatever your town looks like, and it looks back at you, right in the face.
You get very affluent people and homeless people and everything in between. I could take care of the mayor and, the next minute, that thirtysomething, wealthy, unclear-what-you-do-for-work young person. The young professional who just moved into the area for some random thing, then resuscitate some homeless guy who overdosed on heroin.
I’m a public-health person too, so I think of people more as a population. That’s why it’s important doctors have a stake in the community: I live where I work. Here, there’s a lot of homelessness. A lot of unaddressed mental illness, drugs.
You can displace all the people who have enough resources to move away and survive. But what do you do with the people who are like, “I’m so poor that I can’t even buy a car, which means I have to live in the metropolitan area, and work, and I get paid cash in three different jobs under the table, and there’s ten people living in my house.” It’s hard to get rid of those people.
Even harder to get rid of the homeless, the mentally ill, where are they going to go? Then you start to see a huge gap. All these affluent people who are able to afford to live in this crazy place juxtaposed with the destitute who can’t afford to go anywhere else.
If you see a homeless person, you probably don’t know how they got to that point. I get all-access, because it’s all relevant. “Why” is the best question. If someone’s in the ER because their heart failure is out of control, they missed their medication, you never know what’s going on until they tell you. “I can’t afford it.” Or, “My wife died last month.” Or, “I’m homeless, and my bag got stolen.”
I see people on their worst day. And the worst is so relative. You dropped a wineglass on your foot, or your heart is failing. You realize just how resilient people are and resourceful. And it does start to give you some perspective.
You see the impact of gentrification on people who take care of their parents or family members that are ill, parents taking care of small children with nothing—who live in their car, but their kid is still clean and going to school. And you think to yourself, I barely get up and get my cup of coffee in, barely get here on time in my car that was fully gassed.
Or mentally ill people with schizophrenia who come to the hospital, they’re actually taking their medications, they’re afraid because the voices are back. You see those sorts of things, and you don’t think you could handle it. But you see that people rise to the occasion. The majority of people rise up to the occasion, no matter their station in life.
It’s actually the minority of people who are addicted to drugs and can’t get it together and don’t take their medicines—a small chunk of the population that drive lots of the public costs.
You never want to see the same people over and over again in the ER, because then you know that the system is failing them. We’re the last resort—the safety net, we’re always there. If you can’t get in anywhere else—a doctor, a specialist, a clinic—you come to the ER. So when you see people continuously, you know that they are not plugged in: they should have a primary care doctor, or a specialist, or whatever to help with their needs.
Access, money, education, mental illness, behavior problems, addiction. If you don’t have a stable place to live or, say, you have to choose between your addiction and finding a place—your life is too chaotic—you can’t possibly take your medications on time, get a refill, go see your doctor. I mean all those things that we do—Oh, I’ll just put my next doctor’s appointment on my iPhone calendar—that’s because we aren’t living in complete chaos. It’s the tip of the iceberg—but to ask someone who doesn’t even know where they’re going to sleep tonight to call the pharmacy before they run out of their medications, to even take their meds, won’t work.
You try to help patients the best you can. But you’re never going to solve addiction, or homelessness—or any of the social problems that make people fall through the cracks—you won’t solve them at the ER during that one- or two-hour visit.
JOYCE AND EDDIE
He was a therapist, she was a nurse. But they met dancing. He brought her out of her shell, she encouraged him to take his writing seriously. They married, each their second, bought a home in the Santa Rosa hills, and brought their families together. In 2017, wildfires consumed the entire range, spilling over the nearest mountains and into the valley where they lived. That summer, the country had weathered a series natural disasters: flooding in Houston, hurricanes in Florida and Puerto Rico, wildfires in California. As the whole nation was consumed by the elements, this couple floated like pieces of hot ash. They have been squatting recently in the empty home of a friend. She lays out a plate of cookies that their dog, Sam, immediately attacks.
Joyce: At first, it was, Oh, this is an adventure. And then it was, What do you mean we can’t go home? And then, you know, you lose your way. You really do lose your way. . . . Or, at least we did.
Eddie: I was in such denial to start with. We headed to stay with friends in Marin, and then family in Oakland. Along the way, we stopped at a Costco. We don’t own anything anymore, so we started buying all these irrational things. We didn’t have any underwear.
Joyce: “Where were you? What time did you leave?” Those were the two questions for weeks—still happens. We recognized each other, as survivors. We stopped at Kaiser, in Petaluma, to get some medications because all of our medications were gone. And you could just look at people and you could tell.
Eddie: Running into people looking for underwear. . . . They looked like zombies. We were nuts by then.
Joyce: You were nuts. I was numb.
She opens her computer and begins scrolling through photos: her garden, a bench embraced by flowers, light breaking through tree branches, then dark soil—no, not soil, ash—charred stone and leveled ground.
Joyce: We went up with family to go through and find things. We were going to look for my wedding ring. That was the big thing. And look for the lockbox that had our bonds in it and whatever else we could find. There was nothing to take away because it’s all burned and charred and in pieces. The only thing left was a statue of the Buddha, sitting on the front lawn. My grandson, Devin, kept saying, “I think this would make a good art piece, Grandma.” And I said, “Oh God. I don’t think so. It’s not m
y style.”
Eddie: Eric, my son-in-law, said, “I think we found your dad!” I’ve had my dad and mom’s ashes on the shelf because I didn’t know what to do with them.
Joyce: That was the first bit of humor: “We’re going to go up there and find those two brass boxes, going, ‘Hello.’ ” But oh my God, every now and then I think about the things that are gone. Eddie lost all his poems, all his journals, all the anthologies that he was published in.
Eddie: I can’t even grapple with it. It’s like phantom pain. Like the limb is still there.
Joyce: The wall of kid paintings. Every one of the grandchildren is represented on there and they’re all nicely framed and signed by these little scrawny kids. I loved that wall. I looked at that wall all the time. And even just a couple weeks before the fire, I thought . . . I don’t know. We have three grandchildren getting married in the next year, year and a half. And I thought, I’m going to reframe those and give it to them as wedding presents. Wouldn’t that be fun?
Eddie: The heart of the family is wherever we are—we know that. But for so long, that was the physical place of it. We were married in ’91, and we bought in ’92. We bought it a year after it was built. It was full of light, lots of windows.
Joyce: We ended up making a beautiful home. And, not in a hoity-toity way, but beautiful: our families blended there. Eddie’s kids and eventually grandkids, and my kids and my grandkids. . . . And our parents were still alive. Everybody gathered at that house. Our grandchildren don’t know anything else. The kids played baseball and rode their bikes down there because we were at the bottom of the circle. It was a safe place to be.
Eddie: Joyce has a huge heart. She is a natural nester.
Joyce: I had a conscious dream that just kept going for days and days and days. I saw the flames . . . I felt like they were just eating everything. And I walked through every room in my house and saw all the things that I love, not expensive stuff, and watched the flames come up.
Eddie: The dreams are interesting. I dreamed of a red bear.
Joyce: I remember sitting on my son’s deck in Oakland one night. I had been doing pretty well. You know, tears but no real weeping. They had gone out, and Eddie was watching TV. And I went out on this beautiful deck just as the lights were coming on, on the bridges. And I was sitting there going, This is such a beautiful sight . . . but I want to go home. I want my home. I want my imperfect life back. I don’t want somebody else’s life. I want mine. I went inside and opened up a suitcase full of donated clothes. I want my own clothes, but I don’t have my own clothes except what I wore out of the fire. My friends surprised me with these little Christmas ornament gifts. I couldn’t even open them. I don’t want to be this person. I don’t want to be the victim here. I don’t want to be the survivor. I don’t want this. I want to go back to what I—[She begins crying.] I will not leave this community. I was born and raised here, most people aren’t. I’m not going anywhere. I am blooming where I was planted.
Eddie: But you know what I find ironic about this? California’s known for its environmental integrity. And still, we couldn’t control this. That shows you the power—you can’t plan for this anymore.
Joyce: No one is safe. I realize, for at least a month after the fire, I didn’t wake up to other people’s plight. I was so enveloped in trying to put one foot in front of the other. Listen to all the instructions from the police, from FEMA, from insurance, from my son, from the bank, from this, from that. Trying to keep things straight in my own mind, I carried these satchels around with all the papers of what we were trying to do. But I wasn’t thinking about what other people were going through. And then I started thinking, Houston, Puerto Rico, Florida. Times this by five thousand. How are people doing this? Are people as confused and strung out as we are? How are those people making it happen? How did they survive? Until you’ve lived it, you don’t get it. You really don’t.
Eddie: We all live in tribes.
Joyce: Until you’re standing in front of someone and listening to them with your own ears, you’re never going to understand them.
ROB GITIN
He started an organization called At the Crossroads that walks the streets of the city each night bringing food, health and hygiene supplies, and counseling to homeless kids.
I started volunteering at a drop-in center in San Jose. Every homeless kid downtown was coming to this place. I was nineteen, and the kids were roughly the same age as me. In a weird way, it was like the street being brought into this private setting. One that I was never privy to—condensed into this little space.
Kids were being real. I was struck by how raw everything was. How raw the humor was, how raw their stories were, even when they were brutal. In the moment, it didn’t feel that emotional to hear because usually that’s not the way kids were presenting it. It’s not that they were breaking down weeping and telling you the story of the stepfather kicking them in the stomach when they came home and said, “I’m pregnant.” He wanted to cause an abortion and succeeded, in this one girl’s case.
They were telling you it as more kind of like, “Oh, here’s a little background about me that gives context to the story that I’m telling now.” And then you’d come home and think about how fucked up it was that they could normalize an experience like this.
The client who told me that story—I ended up learning half of what came out of her mouth was total BS. But you learn in this job you don’t worry about the veracity of something; there’s a reason they’re communicating it. Even if the story is untrue, the feeling is usually real.
So I’d had this long conversation with her—and this was at a time where she wasn’t really talking much to anyone else. And I figure I’m going to get a pat on the back, metaphorically, from Ernest and Jose, the two leaders of the place. Because she has opened up to me about shit that I knew she’d never opened to anyone else about.
And Ernest just looks at me and is like, “You fucked up today.”
And I’m like, “What?”
“Rob, where is she going tonight?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s right, you don’t know. She’s going to sleep under a bridge. What is she doing before she goes to sleep?”
“I don’t know.”
“She’s turning tricks. So do you think that it is a good thing that now she is thinking about the fact that her grandfather molested her while she’s turning tricks at the hands of strange old men? Or do you think it’s better that she kept that bottled up for tonight?”
The privilege that I’d come from, there was a cultural assumption that anytime you’re dealing with something it’s a good thing. That you have the physical and emotional safety net to catch you—so if thinking about those things rocks you a bit, it doesn’t cause you harm. All I did is open a can of worms that, for her survival, was better off closed. Okay, lesson learned.
Our clients have been poked and prodded and analyzed and systematized and had so many things done to them against their will by people who were supposed to help them. They respond really well to just a person being there for them in whatever way they do or don’t want that person to be there for them: Where that person isn’t analyzing them, they’re not delving deep into their past, they’re not trying to take them places they don’t want to go. They’re just going with them wherever they want to go, being of support and helping them make sense of things.
You don’t have to be a therapist to be able to do that. You have to have a certain makeup, and then you have to be trained well. But sometimes ways that people get trained as therapists can interfere with just listening.
It makes me think about a scene in Bowling for Columbine. Marilyn Manson was being interviewed, and the interviewer asked him if he could have talked to Dylan Klebold, and whoever the other kid was, what would he have said to them? And he said something like, “I wouldn’t have said a thing. I would have listened. Because that’s what no one did.”
In particular, there’s one
subset of kids that have a really hard time accessing services: the kids who would tell you they’d known about the center for years before they ever set foot in it. Why aren’t these kids coming in sooner? We learned that there are personal barriers that they face that make it hard to ask for help. It could be that they were beaten up or raped by a kid who goes to that place every day. But a lot of it has to do with losing hope, so why bother trying to get help?
And so we started going to different neighborhoods at different times of night, going up to any kids who looked even vaguely homeless, and saying, “Hey, we got some money to start doing this. What do you want to see?”
The kids were telling us overwhelmingly, “We want you to bring the services to us.” And that’s a reflection of survival culture. It’s not about them being lazy, it’s like, “My life is about hustling and surviving 24/7. If I have to take a bus for an hour and then sit somewhere and wait for an hour, I’m not going to do it.”
So we had a couple of supplies on us and would go up to kids and offer them. In a way, it was utterly natural: “How are you doing? Do you need some socks tonight? Do you need a snack tonight?” But it often felt exhausting and completely inorganic. Like if you went to a party and you were tasked with the job of getting to know every single person by the end.
The number of times you get, “Get the fuck out of my face!” or “Who the fuck are you?” Or people threatening to hit you if you don’t leave, that happens. As long as you understand where it’s coming from, you don’t sweat it, you don’t take it personally.
Now it’s different. Now we’re out there and three-quarters of the kids we know and half of them are coming up and giving us a hug before we even see them. After having done this for seventeen years, those streets feel like home.
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