Pride in the Park
a Homeless Vignette in San Francisco
They’re sitting up against a fence. On two stone benches— the boundary of Potrero de Sol Park, meaning ‘Stable of the Sun’. It’s around 6 PM in the Mission District, where the San Francisco sun is setting and bloodletting red and orange streaks across the sky. The last rites of sunlight are settling over the city, but this park in particular lives up to its name; the vast grass is a catchall for the last licks of warm light of the waning day.
The woman takes my voice recorder and holds it up close to her mouth.
“My name is Michelle Quezadeh. I lived the hard gang life. I’ve been shot in the head when I was seventeen years old, I’ve been gang-raped, molested as a child.”
We’re quiet.
There are two men and there is one stout woman sitting in the middle. The woman and the man on the left are both of at least partial Mexican descent, and the man on the right is black, old, weary, and bent, with bright pink cheeks. He is sitting on another cement bench, perpendicular to and facing the other two. A small Chihuahua plays at his ankles. The backs of all three people press up against the vertical metal cage.
Michelle takes a deep breadth of breath, looks up at my friend Colin and me with empty soup-bowl eyes. “Ain’t nobody perfect in this world.”
She breaks the eye contact immediately and points a blue-tinged finger at my notebook. “Now can I sign here?”
I hand her the notebook and pen. She returns to me my recorder. We trade. Her handwriting is big and loopy, with curved embellishments on the ends of some of the letters. Her signature takes up most of the page. The man to her left exclaims: “O.K.—¡Todo el papel!” Michelle flashes a gap-toothed smile. “That’s my name,” she says.
She gestures to the black man, her mouth softening as she looks at him. “His name is Edward Watts.”
Edward moves toward me and speaks. His voice is well-traveled gravel, with a faint drawl. “I sign too, if you don’t mind.”
Michelle and Edward are married—whether state accredited or street accredited is unclear. She is 35 years old. He is 65. The other man, Julio, is their friend and a regular in their urban caravan. The group’s two metal shopping carts are a few feet away, their lives contained within their cages.
Michelle is separated from the rest of her family: “My grandmother and my grandfather passed away, my father passed away, and then I don’t know what’s going on with my family now. I haven’t seen my kids in…a long time. And you know—it’s just miserable. It is—really.”
She screws up her eyes, tight. “I been in the gang life. I been jumped. I been— errything.”
She opens her eyes, wide. “I went to the store with a friend who was Transgender, to order a sandwich. It’s potato salad. ..Two days ago. I didn’t even do no-thing—I swear to God. I didn’t even do nothing. They just jumped on me for no reason. We weren’t stealing—he was paying for the food and everything!”
She bends down to tie her shoe—a simple boot—slowly, carefully, with only the tips of her fingers.
Straightening up, her voice arcs, coarse. “Yeah, my first son is Julio, my second son is Francisco, my third son is Anthony, and my daughter is Candaleria, and my last daughter is Crystal. They’re in San José—Modesto, Turlock—way out there, where my family is.”
“Do they know where you are?” I ask.
She inhales, then lets out her breath, heavy. “I don’t think so.” She brightens and smiles. “But I ca’ always talk to my Cousin Jackie! Sometimes [she helps me]. I’m telling her to bring her ass over here!”
Despite the distance from her kin of blood and skin, Michelle has formed an improvised family clan of the community. Edward is her constant companion: “I’m always with my husband,” she pronounces, proud. And years on the street have earned her familiarity with the city and the people who sleep beneath its sky. She looks almost offended at the suggestion of fear: “I’m not scared to walk around nowhere— ’cause everybody knows me out here.”
She waves at a passing friend: “Hey, what’s up, Rufus!?”
A vibrant graffiti -mural behind him reads: ‘Familia’.
“I’m an American Indian…I’ma artist,” says Michelle, “I do portraits and all that shit.”
She gestures at her arm and the curve of her shoulder. “Yeah—these are real. And this one: 5150. I did all my tats by myself,” she says. “Zzzzzzzz!”
She gives us a tour of the other tattoos on her body. She has ‘LOVE’ and ‘HATE’ inked into her separate hands.
“Lot of tattoo all over your body. Wow ,” says Julio.
“Any more?” I ask.
“No,” answers her husband, brusquely.
Suddenly, the dog is pulled, yapping, onto Edward’s lap. Edward forms a circle with his long arms and the little dog climbs around within its boundaries, up and down the arms, from shoulder to shoulder.
“I got the dog a’ he name “Snoop Dog,” says Edward.
Michelle whoops: “Snoop Doggy Dog!”
The dog was a gift. “They give him to me for Christmas,” says Michelle. “— my friend.”
“My friend,” Edward contests.
Julio sits back and laughs. “You no like it when she tell it her friend, ‘uh?”
I ask about the friend. Edward maintains: “Yeah, [she helps me] — if I want it. It’s a she. A woman.”
Michelle adds: “It’s an older woman. An old lady. She owns a laundromat—down on Bryant.”
“I met her a long time ago,” Edward says. “I don’t got no money.”
Michelle, Edward, and Julio perceive in society a policy of othering— an “us and them” philosophy— and they believe that they are in the excluded out-group, the “them” side of the apartheid divide of this city and human life.
They adapt to this system of othering by reversing it: adopting the properties of their own “us”, and finding offense with the pretense of service practiced by a designated “them”— the people who presumably are not homeless.
Michelle adjusts her sitting position on the concrete seat. “Yeah, they were talking about — the news—about the people that come down looking for homeless people to put in those houses…They never help me!”
Edward searches his cement surroundings. “Where are they? Where are they? I don’t see ’em. They don’t come here and help us here.”
“They” are the people with homes, people on the radio, the techies, the hippies, the politicians, San Francisco residents, citizens of the world…
Michelle, Edward, and Julio condemn “them” for lack of action. And when subtle suggestion isn’t enough, they make direct appeals:
Edward leans forward, close to the voice recorder. “Now I want to say: HELP. ME.”
“How?” I ask.
“HELP. ME. Me and Snoop Dog.”
“What do you need?”
“A room.”
Michelle interjects: “Yeah, we both need a room. We needa get off—ge’ ou’ o’ here.”
“What would you do if you had a room?”
“We live in there!”
“We sleep—”
“We cooking—”
Michelle says again: “They said on the news that people are going to come on the freeways and take all the homeless people out and put ’em in rooms. I haven’t seen ’em yet.”
“Other city [is doing that],” says Edward gently.
“Ya got a room—” says Michelle, with reverence.
“You want a drink?” Michelle holds out a golden bottle of beer. Colin and I decline.
They’re drinking Four Loko— out of bright cans with graphic labels and distorted font.
Michelle sits back and takes a sip. “I don’t trust nobody out here in this world, [but] no, I’m not [scared of them either]…”
She goes rigid. “—people already stole shit from me, the fucker took my backpack, they took my fucking nail clippers, they took everything from me.”
Her voice crescendoes: “Why would you steal from a homeless person?!”
“—Yeah,” she elaborates, “it’s other homeless people who steal. They’re on fucking heroin, crack, whatever—I don’t know! I don’t fucking do dope. I only drink. I used to do dope—back in the days— but I don’t do it anymore. I used to sell dope, and all that shit— make money. But I don’t do that no more. I quit.”
I ask her if she remembers the hazy pain of heroin addiction— the restrained desperation of the daily hunt for dollars. “Yeah,” she concedes. “The fuck I know.”
Still, she can’t forgive some things: “Shit—if you asleep, you don’t want your shoes [on] tonight, them motherfuckers’ll just walk off with the shit.”
I heard before about this internal ambivalence and segregation within the homeless community at an event called Hacktivation for the Homeless, when a formerly homeless man stood up on the podium at Glide Church and gave the most articulate and relevant speech of the evening. He said:
There are two groups of Homeless People: the Drug Addicts and the Ones who are Just Poor. “And they don’t want nothing to do with each other.”
He talked about his own experience of crossing the boundary between the two groups, standing on the threshold of the Tenderloin and seeing the signs leading towards a one-way street: ‘STOP’, ‘Do Not Enter’, and ‘One Way’. He looked around at our upturned faces in the pews. “I didn’t need the signs to tell me that.”
Michelle, Edward, and Julio have similar sentiments:
“Fuck The Tenderloin—shit, those motherfuckers are crazy! They’re crazy over there!” Michelle exclaims. Then she says, in a low voice: “I been out there before.”
Julio offers: “A lot of the molesters see the lady, they molest her. Every time they want the sex…You understand?”
Michelle interrupts with: “I been jumped. I been shot. I been hit with baseball bats.”
Julio insists: “…A lot of people planning things—day and night— and the police don’t do a-nothing!”
Michelle catches up: “But they— [the police] — like to harass people that aren’t even doing anything. And me—I just get up in the morning—around—ya know—5:30 or 6 o’clock in the morning, I go panhandling and drinking a couple of beers, and here comes the cops to tell me I gotta move…You know— I don’t bother nobody.”
She sets her gaze on my face. “Ya, those motherfuckers are assholes out here. They’re rookies and they like to fucking grab you and beat your ass and hit you with fucking billy clubs, and all this shit. They do everything.”
It’s the senselessness that distresses her. The utter having no order in the world, no reason for any event, justification for how things are, and for the conditions in which she lives.
She thinks maybe it was justified before, when she was in a gang, but not now, when she has chosen to get out. Now there is no reason, and it’s frustrating because though the benefits of street-cred and protection are long gone, the hardest parts of being in a gang never went away.
Michelle starts: “The other day— at the liquor store—”
“You told her that already,” admonishes her husband.
“Yeah, they hit me for no reason! Yeah, tho’ motherfuckers jumped on me. For No. Motherfucking. Reason.—”
She goes on, gone beyond the volition of her husband or of anybody else… Julio’s head is bent, and he nods at the ends of her sentences, affirming what she preaches.
She points at a slightly blue bruise blossoming below her brow. “Look at my eye.”
“Ya…”Julio breathes, responsively.
“Look at my cheek.”
“Ya….” he repeats, his cry rising.
“You see it, ’uh?”
“Yes!”
Michelle watches the sidewalk for a moment. “Yeah, I read this good book. It was called Smashed. It was [about] a girl that was a alcoholic in college. Yeah…She used to get ripped. She ended up on somebody’s couch—it’s a true story—and after that, at the end of the book, she turned her life around an’ she said ‘no, I don’t want no more.’”
“How’d she do it?” I ask her.
“I don’t know.”
She quiets. We are both thinking about the divide between the haves of Smashed, who can crash on a couch and then act from a moment of clarity and the have-nots, who don’t have reference points or beds: the physical and mental furniture that support revelations.
Michelle hangs her head. “I tried many times. But it’s hard.”
She straightens up again: “– because I been through so many shit: I been molested, raped, beat up, all this bullshit. It’s hard.”
Her voice drops off, soft. “It’s too hard.”
They say that they have to leave. Edward leads the group back— toward their lives lined with black trash bags.
People need to see this. The situation captured in aesthetic.
I ask them for a photograph. Julio declines. Edward protests (“No, no, no.”) but Michelle is resolute (“No, no, no, c’mon…”). “Well, I gotta take a photo with my husband,” she says. “I don’t take photos with nobody else.”
Colin takes the photo. I look at the other end of the lens to see what is framed in the photograph. The two people look small against the immense expanse of fence.
Michelle’s lip and eyelids quiver. She looks up at me, as they start to push their carts and we start to walk away from the stable in the sun. “Maybe later can you come back and bring us a picture?”
I ask when they will be back in the park—around this time?
“We’re here—”
“Every day.”
R.I.P.
Snoop Doggy Dog
Run over by a car on Easter morning
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