Nothin’ To Do Down on 16th and Mission
Another Homeless Vignette in San Francisco
An overflowed bathtub. That’s what stranded Cassandra Jackson on the streets of San Francisco.
“I was taking a bath and they said that I flooded the bathroom inside my apartment . . . And I did. It was big enough for me, it was just that . . . [the water] would go up to my bellybutton.”
And though she tried to keep it down, the water line kept rising. Cassandra remembers, “I kept knocking the water out on the floor.”
She would try to mop it up, but she couldn’t dab fast enough. Her neighbors kept seeing the water-stains on their ceiling and called the cops. “They kept comin’ in on me in the apartment,” Cassandra protests. “It wasn’t that much water.”
One day, when the water sloshed out of the tub again, Cassandra’s neighbors called the police, and they came. When they left, they took her with them. Cassandra’s pupils constrict and she enunciates: “They kicked me out.”
“They kicked me out without my security deposit — $2,400. And I didn’t have no other money for no other place.” She ruffles the mass of her black jacket and tests the dedication of my gaze, to see if I’ll look away.
Her eyes become wilder.
“Yeah, and they put me in the nut ward.”
I’m waiting for the bus at 16th and Mission when this black woman with big white eyes and an oversized black coat sits down next to me on the bus shelter bench. I wait for her brash ask for change. The woman doesn’t look at me for a few moments, and I think that she’s decided against a direct request or that she’s actually not homeless; maybe she’s just another housed human being waiting for a bus to take her to another part of the city.
Abruptly, she turns to me and, as if beginning a rehearsed performance, says over and over: “I’m homeless, ma’am. Please, ma’am, I’m homeless.”
The words not having meaning anymore: “I’m homeless, ma’am. Please, ma’am, I’m homeless.”
I don’t know how to respond to this statement. She hasn’t asked me for anything, except maybe acknowledgement.
She rocks when she’s talking.
“I just need some money to buy breakfast at McDonald’s.” She doesn’t pause to allow me mental space to deliberate. “I’m homeless, ma’am. Please, ma’am, I’m homeless.” Her voice is hoarse and low. It cracks at every other syllable.
“I want to get a breakfast sandwich — with some meat in it. Please, ma’am. I’m homeless.”
“I only have two dollars — and that’s my bus money,” I tell her, and show her the banknotes.
“Can you get [in] on the back?”
We meet for dinner at that same bus stop. Cassandra is still sitting in the same corner seat under the red rippled shelter. I wonder if she has moved since morning. As I walk up, she turns to face me and a grin splits her lips.
“Well hey, you came back!”
I ask her where she wants to go to dinner; she knows that I’m going to pay, in place of giving her the change.
She chooses McDonald’s, which is just across the street at the corner of 16th and Mission. I get up to go, but Cassandra holds back. She looks up at me, her slack face sad.
“Can I please have another five dollars to get through the next few days?”
I feel like a parent fielding a small child’s request for candy.
In my peripheral, I see the woman sitting next to me on the other side of the plastic bench is shaking her head.
“Sure,” I say, and hand Cassandra the money.
We move towards the restaurant.
“I have a disability,” Cassandra tells me, as we navigate sidewalk traffic. “I have a sore on my foot. It makes it hard to walk.” She stumbles and limps over the diagonal white lines on the road, in front of a row of impatient cars.
As we walk in, the middle-aged man who holds the door for me shakes his head at Cassandra’s back. “She’s here every day — asking for money.” He rolls his eyes and makes a kind of humph sound, looking at me for agreement.
I follow Cassandra into the dining area. We find a little twosome table in the center of the restaurant, seats attached to one another and to the table as if on a seesaw.
Cassandra sidles up to the counter. She tarries in front of the cashier bar, turns right around, and, by the time I drape my jacket over my chair, she’s back.
“I can’t — I can’t go up there,” she twitters, near her seat. “They know me. They seen me beggin’ for change.”
I order for her; I ask her what she wants to eat.
Just a medium Coke.
That’s it.
She’s delighted at the sight of it and immediately grips the cup tight and sips on the straw.
“I like to save my money,” she explains.
She’s already had lunch. Panhandling at the intersection of 16th and Mission, she managed to recruit a business woman in a skirt-suit to stray from her daily commute and wait in line for a primary-colored tray and a burger.
“This lady bought me a Big Mac. She slammed it on the table and walked away,” says Cassandra. She rumples her brow. “In her heels. It made me upset.”
According to Cassandra, this condescending or conditional generosity is typical of people bending to help: “Most of [the people who help homeless people] . . . they don’t want to give you food. They don’t want to give you a hamburger.”
Meals of meat seem to be a point of dignity for many homeless people.
I have heard men and women barely nourished lament their lack of a hamburger or steak sandwich. Red meat is what they crave as they wander the tough quarters of the Tenderloin.
“I been homeless since . . . January or February. I can’t really remember,” Cassandra reflects. Her eviction is recent. Everything that has happened to her as a homeless woman on the streets has been in the past six months.
The suction of the straw resists her lips.
“I used to work,” she asserts, self-righteous, as if she often has to defend herself against claims of laziness.
She explains how she can’t get a job now, because she has a documented history of mental illness, and a disability.
Segregated from the workforce, Cassandra is prisoner to only the most public of resources: the streets of San Francisco.
She draws again on the straw.
“There ain’t nothin’ to do right here down on 16th and Mission. They just smoke weed all day. They drink. I don’ drink, though.”
She sublimates with another sip of soda.
“I don’t wanna smoke weed. I want to be clean and sober. You know what I’m saying? . . . [But] there ain’t nothing to do.”
Wondering why she is so insistent on her asceticism, I ask her if marijuana is the only drug that’s ever won her devotion. She shakes her head ‘no,’ with a sly and wizened smile, her lip almost pitying my ignorance.
Cassandra stays on the street because she has no sanctuary in shelters anymore. In one long-term shelter, she was lucky enough to get a 90-day-guaranteed stay. One night, while she was sleeping, a man came and sliced her neck where she lay in her bunk bed. He tilted the top bunk out the window and slammed the pane down on her collarbone, then brought his knife along the curve of her vocal chords.
She bled in a lean line. She didn’t lose her life, but her precise voice was never the same. The tone she recognized as her personal own was gone, forever changed to a broken croak.
“My voice didn’t used to be this raspy,” she wheezes. “I didn’t used to sound like this.”
Never again mistaking temporary comfort for safety, Cassandra resorted to drop-in shelters, the kind for which the length of the wait is equal to or greater than the length of the stay.
According to Cassandra, the last shelter she was in kicked her out for no reason at all, and she has to wait nine weeks to even be allowed back on the list to get in.
The women’s shelter that was her penultimate refuge banned her because she pulled the fire alarm to get the staff’s attention.
“I was lookin’ for my 66-year-old friend. I’m 47,” she explains. “She was missing — I’m telling you. They think I’m crazy.” She challenges this with a laugh, and looks right at me.
Now, Cassandra sometimes waits in line at drop-ins, but not often. She doesn’t think the process is worth it.
“You can’t sleep on the chairs [they have in the waiting rooms] . . . Maybe you finally get a bed at six in the morning. And who wants to go to sleep then?”
She prefers to stretch herself and lean free against the sides of buildings in the Mission.
“So you sleep on the literal street?” I ask her.
“I sleep on the concrete.”
Cassandra has unshakeable faith in her future living situation. She had an appointment at the Mission Hotel for a room in an SRO (Single Resident Occupancy) house. It was this morning, and she missed it, but she says she called them by payphone to reschedule and the lady said ‘OK, come back tomorrow.’
“You know what?” Cassandra breathes, in a reverie. “When I get my house, I’m going to sleep for ten days. That’s what I’m going to do — go to sleep for ten to fifteen days.
That’s how tired I am. That’s how cold I am.”
Cassandra is cold because she doesn’t have many clothes. “I only got one outfit,” she tells me. “ . . . I gotta call my sister. She has clothes for me.”
“[She and her husband] don’t give me money,” Cassandra laments. “They give me food sometimes.”
Her sister won’t let Cassandra live with her. She doesn’t see her often, but her sister occasionally lets her stay over and visit with the kids at holidays, sit on the couch next to her nieces and nephews swaddled in thick-knit festive sweaters.
Most of Cassandra’s five siblings live in the Bay Area, but this sister is the only sibling she sees.
A man sits down at the two-seater table parallel to us. He looks around nervously — more than once at the counter — while waiting for his order, as if if he didn’t check it, it wouldn’t get made. He is tall, has cocoa-colored skin, and is dressed like a metropolitan man — clasped in a black leather jacket, with thick-framed glasses as the accent point. He looks about late twenties/early-thirties.
The man’s eyes find Cassandra, a hulk in the bulky black coat, the odd one in the room. He looks away, but not quickly enough to be polite and not fully turning his face. He is quiet, but he is not even trying to disguise that he is watching and listening to every word of our conversation.
Cassandra had a little sister — two years younger than her, whom she lost less than a year ago. “That was the one I was close to,” she says. A flush of pain passes over her face.
Cancer claimed her sister’s life — over time, and after a fight. Cassandra was there for every stage of the illness — from diagnosis to her sister’s final days. She winces.
“I saw her skin shrivel up, her bones crumble.” She shakes her head and her face crumples.
“It was awful. It was awful. It was awful. It was awful. The awfullest thing I ever seen in my life.”
She swallows, swollen, eyes dry. “She would’ve never let me be homeless.”
The cocoa-colored man interjects his body into the conversation and addresses Cassandra: “Excuse me — I couldn’t help but overhear — where is it that you said you lived?”
Cassandra’s shoulder twitches and she shifts in her thick winter coat. She looks at him. “I’m homeless, sir.”
He seems troubled. His soft forehead wrinkles. He opens his mouth once, twice, but is silent.
Cassandra squirms on the cushioned seat.
The young man looks like he wants to apologize for her entire life, but he still says nothing.
Cassandra stands up from her chair and steps away from him on the tile. She looks at me and murmurs: “I’ma get going. I gotta get movin’.” Before I can convince her to stay, she’s gone from the restaurant, leaving the cup of Coke, half finished, on the table.
The young man who heard Cassandra and I exchange contact information, grabs at a scrap of paper on the table. I lend him my pen. He inscribes a woman’s name below Cassandra’s signature on the page: Terry McHerror, and her phone number below.
“She was there for me during my cancer,” he says, breathless. “She helped me.”
He looks long into my eyes, and then strides away on the tile, weaving in between the empty tables, out the double-door, under the golden arches, and into the humid Mission night.
Thanks for reading. Please hit the green “recommend” button below if you liked it to make it easier for others to find. Follow the Culture Club Collection and check us out on Twitter and Facebook too. Sign up for the Culture Club Weekly RoundUp here. You won’t regret it.
