If Not Paradise Then At Least the Garden of Earthly Delights

§1 San Francisco and the Invisibles
by Bryan Nelson Kelly
Artworks by Tim Barnard

Editors Note: This was the original creative nonfiction writing that inspired the creation of Absurdist and is being republished to celebrate the author’s arrival in the Bay Area.

I moved to San Francisco a little more than five years ago to accept a teaching job that was never formally offered and write a book that never started.

I moved in order to satisfy the urge to move, the need to move, to sate a wanderlust that, for a certain type of person, characterizes and consumes his or her post-college, early twenties life.

I chose San Francisco virtually sight unseen, having been to the Bay Area once, when I was about ten, on a family vacation. I remember going to a wax museum and having my mother deem most of the displays too graphic for viewing; and remember not being able to get tickets for a tour of Alcatraz.

Sight unseen, I went, though not without my goals and purposes. I had a friend in SF that I planned to live with; the (tenuous) promise of a Russian language teaching job that sounded hand-shakeable; and the idea for a book that took place on the West Coast which I would work on once I’d gained some stories and experiences.

It is all but expected for people in my generation and economic stratum to move somewhere else after college, hopefully to a city, and for that city to be hip, attractive, up-and-coming, ideally Big, certainly not provincial.

One is dangerously lacking in cosmopolitan virtues if one does not do so. Moving is an expression, however hollow, of how to do better than one’s parents, to assert our burgeoning economic freedoms even if we don’t have any, or even if they aren’t burgeoning. This is on the assumption that our parents didn’t move, or couldn’t move, to a hip, attractive and up-and-coming city after college.

With little to nothing in the hand, and a job and novel in the bush, I set out to honor these phantom freedoms, sate these wanderlusts, on the West Coast, unsure how SF was going to address my problems, but certain that treatment would be easier to find there than “here,” in Michigan.

∞

Almost immediately, the city felt off to me. Not as I pictured, not what I remembered. Like the faux-journalist I am, I’d done no research. The city, would be exactly as I pictured it: nothing like where I was before. Within this too-exploded framework, reality decided to write a program that looked too unfamiliar.

Only now, after four years of being away, and returning to visit a friend, can I put a name to my displeasure.

It’s not simply that San Francisco is a Big City. I’d lived in a Big City — New York — prior to moving out there, and was not filled with a paralyzing anxiety. I was lonely in New York, sure, and saddened by the garish commercialism, but anxiety was not the screaming totality of the condition.

What made me anxious about SF is also what delights most people: that nothing, not the land, the sea, the weather, least of all the people, are tamed. The fault lines. The tremors. The fog. The hills. The start-ups. Waking up to a shaking bed, and not for any reason you might hope for.

In New York City, the earth has been subdued, pummeled flat by our heels, tunneled, bridged and, when it won’t comply, paved over or buried. Its uses have been compartmentalized, its forms pre-writ. Get rid of the buildings, and it’s a lonely, flat, featureless island, plus Central Park. Once, all of the land there looked like Central Park — that is, rocky, hilly, green — but only that park continues as a reminder.

In San Francisco, everything has been built upon, but nothing has been paved over, nothing pummeled or tamed. The ground is alive, and not always in a placid mood. Boulevards rise and tumble, so steeply at times that the eye can hardly tell if it’s all part of the same earth, on the same plane, in the same dimension. It’s like that scene in Inception, the Dream Architect scene, when a whole city block is turned on its side.

“My question is, what happens when you start messing with the physics of it all?”

Indeed. When the land underneath you bucks you like a bronco, how do you live with the physics of it? How impossible is it to call a place like that home?

Obviously, a lot of people do call it home.

Also obviously: for a lot of people the “physics” of San Francisco — city blocks that bend, streets that rise, weather that never settles — are part of the charm.

For me, the geography alone was an immediate shock, from which I never did recover. It was not how I pictured it, not what was expected. What it actually was — which I will get to later — continued to elude me up to the moment I left.

There is, in here, a lesson to be learned: if you are going to move to a city, you should at least vet your idealistic notions of that city by buying a cheap plane ticket, flying out, and making sure those notions comply, even a little bit, with the physics, or you might waste at least a year of your life trying to deal.

I’d like to talk about the other challenge SF poses. But first, I’d like to tell you a joke. Not an original; courtesy of a friend of a friend.

San Francisco has the world’s highest concentration of invisible people.

I’m speaking, of course, about the homeless, the mentally ill; “street people,” as some call them. I hardly find them invisible.

When I lived in SF five years ago, it wasn’t as bad as it now. It couldn’t have been this bad (could it?), or else it would have been impossible to ignore. But on this trip, I couldn’t ignore or get over the problem. It took over my life while I was visiting. It ruined me. The broken faces, the puddled lives. Filthy bodies huddled under tarps. The man who, at a streetcorner, asked if we needed help finding anything. What he wanted in return was money, and what he wanted the money for, I could read, in his desperate eyes, was to purchase one of the evil plants blooming in the garden of earthly delights.

I do not know what sort of mental strength it takes to ignore street people, and I almost do not want to live to achieve it.

Maybe, when I really lived there, I could ignore them, because I lived there, and there was nothing I could do about it because, like the physics thing, it was too big to fathom.

∞

I was broke then, as now (and forever and always shall be), and so took comfort that I had little or nothing to give to the poor — though most anyone will tell you that, no matter how you’re doing economically, you can always give something, and it will almost always feel better than giving nothing.

To walk the streets of San Francisco today is to genuinely doubt whether the homeless and mentally ill do not outnumber “normal” people, whether there isn’t a form of fiscal or mental apartheid going on.

I do not put much stock in swooning guiltily over privilege. Unless you do something about it — unless there is something to be done about it — I do not think much is to be gained from torturing yourself about your own set of fortunes, however much or little you did to deserve them. Self-torture of this kind is a recipe for misery and, more often than not, for numbing that misery in ways far less constructive than the most basic steps you can take to counteract privilege. Talk is cheap.

As for the street people: there were so many, so many. I had not thought life had undone so many. Some, most, are in various stages of decomposition and mental disconnect. Everyone, from Asian women in bucket hats, carrying bags of cans, rifling through garbage — women who, it occurs to me now, may not even be homeless or mentally ill, but whose displays of thrift will shame and embarrass you — to folks with every last possession on their backs, in their shopping carts, asleep in the streets, accost you for spare change, a cigarette, a moment of your time.

Some don’t even see you; they do public battle against the ghosts that haunt them. They howl, screech, haranguing empty air, about themselves, to themselves.

“You did this to her, now she’s fucking pregnant! And I gotta buy a gun and shoot her, ‘cause I can’t afford to have it!”

I averted my eyes, stared at the ground, and was genuinely scared of these people, because, as I’ve learned, their threats are not always idle. The friend in SF that I was visiting had a most terrifying experience in this regard. A woman was waving a brown paper bag, shouting threats, talking about a gun. My friend passed by. The woman, as it turned out, really did have a gun, it really was loaded, and the guy right behind my friend really did get shot, in the leg, just walking down the street. (What did my friend do? Call 911, cry for about a half hour, and then buy some heirloom tomatoes from a farmer’s market. Gotta be tough to live in San Francisco.)

It’s a true story, all of it, or else I, too, would cry apocryphal, offensive, prolonging the stereotypically negative image of the poor. I submit it only to say that San Francisco street people are not to be fucked with. Less is more. If you’re going to walk by, walk by. If you’re going to help, try to help.

What to do about it, though? I fear that we look too often for solutions from government, whether because it is not profitable to care for the poor; or because large categorical problems like homelessness need large categorical entities to battle them.

But I have no new solutions, merely appalled, finding it awfully hard to picture myself enjoying a life of wealth and success in a town of so much poverty, brokenness and despair.

Bryan Nelson Kelly is a writer living in Ann Arbor, Michigan who ran in the 2014 mayoral race as an independent. This essay was originally published on his blog, The Mashed Potato Circuit, and set the tone for Absurdist.

Artworks by Tim Barnard.