The man outside

It’s 2:30am as I write this, and the man who sleeps outside my window hasn’t stopped screaming for the past five hours.

I live in an affluent neighbourhood in San Francisco, on a street with stores that sell bread pudding, individual furniture items, and expensive children’s clothes. I live above a store that only sells frames for paintings and photographs, and the man outside sleeps in that store’s doorway.

On many nights, I hear him mumbling to himself, and I’ll put some white noise on our bedroom Sonos to help us sleep, like rain, or ocean waves. But tonight is different. Tonight is a harrowing and unending cry of pain, like a man desperate, clinging to life, drowning.

I have never experienced the pain and the suffering that could cause this kind of anguish; the deep-rooted trouble that can lead a man to shout at the top of his lungs for hours on end, his voice ragged and raw. The double glazed windows on our first-floor apartment do very little to dull the wailing that speaks to a crisis the likes of which, if I’m being honest, I wish to never truly understand.

We bought new iPhones today, and were a little sad that we couldn’t get the silver ones.

I am not angry at the man outside, I am very sad for him. I am angry that this is tolerated in one of the richest cities in the world. That the mental health crisis that started in the 60s is nowhere close to being solved. That’s it’s not even a priority. I’m not worried about getting a good night’s sleep, I’m worried about living in — and potentially bringing up a child in — a culture that dehumanizes the disenfranchised, sees them as an inconvenience or outright ignores them, and treats them like they are garbage that needs to be collected and dumped somewhere out of sight. Like it’s their fault, and not ours.

For the past month or so, my wife and I have been withdrawing singles from the bank and distributing them to people on the street in SF. I grew tired of walking past the sick and the shattered, unable to even look them in the eye out of embarrassment. I haven’t had the need to carry cash for many years. Now, the money in my wallet gives me an excuse to start conversations, get their names, hear their stories. Treat them as people. It is a very meager price to give them a little humanity. It is not much, but it is something. Sometimes, I am the first person who has acknowledged them all day.

I acknowledge the man outside, but I can’t help him. He has the kind of mania that I am nervous to approach, because it’s 3:30am, and I lack both the training to soothe him and the intestinal fortitude to try. By the time I wake up, he will have been moved on by the manager of the frame store, and we can all pretend he doesn’t exist.

He exists.

So I write, out of impotent rage at a country, a city, a culture, and yes, an industry that seem fine with me in a comfortable bed, on an expensive laptop, with a new phone sitting on my bedside table, while the poor soul not ten feet away lies on cardboard, pounds the window, and screams in agony.

What are we doing?