After twelve years in San Francisco, I can make a visual list of the homeless people I recognize but have never come to know. I’ve made a silent pact with myself that if I see a certain homeless person regularly, it is a sign that everything is okay. If I was still riding my bike to work while living in the Mission, and they were still alive on our neighborhood’s streets, then our lives were quite possibly right on track. It was my way of feeling less guilty for never asking them their names.
In my early years in the city, there was a man I named “Streamers guy.” With light socket hair, he had colorful streamers that blew in the wind off the arms of his glasses. He would walk in the street against traffic during rush hour, and during the holidays, wore a suit that he had lit up and lined with white Christmas lights. He became such an icon that a guy had dressed up as Streamers guy for Halloween and was thrilled when I was the one person who guessed his costume.
Another guy I saw was an Indian man that looked like a character from Oliver Twist with his polluted face, five-o’clock shadow, and fingerless gloves. He sat on the corner of 18th and Guerrero Street, where his skin contrasted beautifully against the cerulean apartment building. When he wasn’t reading a trade paperback novel across from the classy French bakery with the line out the front, he was staring off into space talking to himself. I always wanted to squat down and tell him that I loved his country and ask him what he was reading, but I’ve always just noted his presence and kept walking.
It took my boyfriend, Bryce, who lived in a small town in Idaho where there were no homeless, to move in with me in San Francisco to teach me a few things. While I walked by the homeless with my head down (a tactic I had learned traveling alone as a woman in India), Bryce put our leftover Styrofoam containers on the tops of garbage cans when we couldn’t eat one more bite. Bryce always gave a dollar or a dime, and when he couldn’t, he’d stop for a chat.
PREVIOUS PAGE
