Where We Live Now
I’d only been to San Jose once and by “been” I mean passed through on my way to Santa Cruz. The second time I visited only a day spending the bulk of it in the airport and in the office where I now work. After a marathon interview, I left the office and wandered down the street to San Pedro Square, an urban market with food stalls, to get a bite to eat, cautiously optimistic and too hungry to be aware of my surroundings.
I’d been searching for a full-time copywriting position in Austin for four years struggling for job security in an over-saturated market. The older you get, the less patient you can be. Months-long contract positions and perpetually freelancing weren’t cutting it. I’d applied for positions all over the U.S. and when the offer from San Jose came in, we jumped on it. We needed things like better insurance coverage and a salary that could start to pay down $80,000 in student debt.
I texted Jeff. I felt it had gone well. I was right. I was hired two weeks later. I’d start in a month.
We found our house on Craigslist exactly one week before we moved and signed a lease online.
Jeff’s brother lives in San Jose and served as our point of contact sending us videos of houses we found and vague tips about the neighborhoods.
We share the property with two other tenants who themselves share a two-story mother-in-law unit broken into two separate studios. One is a tall, thin Japanese man who’s never without a baseball cap, who has yet to say a word to us or wave. The other man is younger, in his early twenties. He hasn’t said a word to us either, but I’ve seen his bare and hairy breasts several times when he answers his door for the steady stream of food delivery people. Every couple of weeks he leaves town for a few days. I know he’s back when he screams and runs out to his garbage can where he throws away whatever it is he’s found. Jeff and I suppose it’s food left out to rot, but why hasn’t he learned his lesson? What kind of rot are we talking about? Where does he go when he goes away? What size bra do suppose he’d wear?
Our house feels too big for the two of us. Jeff and I spend most of our time in the kitchen looking out our giant window and sitting at our table wondering how we got here while encouraging each other to live in the present. Wine helps.
We moved to downtown San Jose because it was close to my office. I sold my 1998 champagne-colored Toyota Camry to a friend back home so as not to accrue any additional expenses.
Now I walk to work every morning. For the first couple of weeks, my coworkers asked if I needed a ride home. I explained it was my choice to walk, that I actually like it, that making deliberate choices with how I treat my body is a thing I’m into. Like eating locally sourced foods from farmers markets. However, we’ve found that making these choices is only possible when there is a choice being offered. We watch as Sysco trucks deliver frozen foods to downtown restaurants with clip art logos. Where is the glut of farm-to-fork restaurants I assumed we’d be eating? Why does everything here taste like the cafeterias, airports and American middle schools of our past?
Walking to work in downtown San Jose is a constant negotiation. Abandoned businesses and Victorian style house serve as squats for many of of the homeless and mentally ill people surviving in the area. I spend most mornings dodging them camped out or passed out on the sidewalks. We’ve lived here for 6 weeks now and so far I’ve been yelled at by someone on the street nearly every day. Just last week I was told I fucking sucked. I don’t feel sorry for him.
Some mornings we wake to the sounds of a woman screaming outside on the sidewalk in front of our house. As the neighborhood wakes, she tells us that she’s going to kill us all because we’re all cunts and what the fuck are we looking at. She tells us to look away, she tells us that she’s really going to do it, she’s gonna fucking kill us all. Last week, I watched as a team of EMTs strapped a man to a gurney across the street from our house. He spat and writhed as the police looked on. An idle firetruck blocked half our street. I tightened my robe and watched out the window. I finished my coffee in the time it took to take him away.
This statue sits outside the Corinthian Grand Ballroom. Originally built in 1924 as a Scottish Rite Temple, it now serves as an event space. Sometimes they roll a red carpet outside over the steps leading to the entrance.
As grand as it is, it still faces St. James Park, where just last week I saw two penises over the course of two days belonging to two different men in varying states of undress. One sprawled himself across the sidewalk completely naked. I inched closer to him than I probably should’ve searching for a scrap of a blanket to return his dignity to him. I came up empty on a street that’s usually covered in garbage. The next day, while crossing the park, I watched a man urinate beside a garbage can.
I think the post office that anchors the other side of St. James Park is stealing my mail. Twice now I’ve tried sending greetings cards with trinkets inside, a small nurse’s pin for my sister, a tiny Virgin Mary for my mom. This branch has had this problem before. A postal inspector was charged with mail theft three years ago. Last year another was found guilty of the same.
Several times a week I watch as several of the same homeless people enter the post office with expectation only to leave letter-less. Help is not on the way. The calvary is not coming. No amount of screaming in the street, throwing garbage or spitting at passers-by in going to change the fact that you need help no one around here can seem to supply.
For all of its innovation, Silicon Valley just can’t seem to create an app for that.
On November 23, 1933, John M. Holmes and Thomas H. Thurmond sat in jail waiting prosecution for the crimes of kidnapping and murdering Brooke Hart, son of a local San Jose merchant.
When Hart’s body was recovered from the San Francisco Bay, 10,000 angry men and woman dragged the two men from their cells and hanged them outside the Santa Clara County Court House in St. James Park.
I imagine their ghosts must still haunt the grounds because only the most tormented souls have set up camp there currently.
There is nothing quite like uprooting your life. We told ourselves it would be easy. I’ve come to believe that there are certain lies you have to tell yourself in order to change your life. This is one of them.
