On Valencia, at the Curtis Hotel (a weekly residential flophouse), having spent the twilight hours of a morning worrying why my urine reeked and why my pheromones and sleep cycles were whack, I finally realized―from recalling what I'd eaten the previous night, a takeout Mongolian chicken with asparagus, all the woody stems still digesting (which I'd've discarded had I cooked the dish), and from vague recollections of what I'd read, a 20-year old scifi by William Gibson, the second in his "
Neuromancer" trilogy, "
Count Zero" (the third being "
Mona Lisa Overdrive"), these two excavations of my psyche cored into the troubles―why I was wide awake wondering about piss stink, cockroaches and affordable housing, mostly the latter concern.
"
Count Zero" has a masterpiece description of the holoporn projection of the Ono-Sendai unit that malfunctions on Bobby Newmark ("aka Count Zero"), setting off a whole chain of events backwards and forwards in fictional time.
I'd been looking for the "
mincome arcology" reference that I thought had been a throwaway in some chapter, reminding me in my non-fictional grim reality in San Francisco, being near homeless, of imaginable alternatives.
This was the episode that was upsetting my psyche's sleep cycle, a writer's problem surely, I'd thought, which only happens to another writer, the compelling regenerative perspective perpetrating the disturbance.
My mind kept hunting instinctively for the nerve behind the story's motive. And my own folly perhaps of imagination.
I tried the first chapter, with its depictions of Turner, the introduction of the tech-commando character who's behind a biochip's recovery driving the story.
He spent most of those three months in a ROM-generated simstim construct of an idealized New England boyhood of the previous century. The Dutchman's visits were gray dawn dreams, nightmares that faded as the sky lightened beyond his secondfloor bedroom window. You could smell the lilacs, late at night. He read Conan Doyle by the light of a sixty-watt bulb behind a parchment shade printed with clipper ships.
He masturbated in the smell of clean cotton sheets and thought about cheerleaders. The Dutchman opened a door in his back brain and came strolling in to ask questions, but in the morning his mother called him down to Wheaties, eggs and bacon, coffee with milk and sugar.
And one morning he woke in a strange bed, the Dutchman standing beside a window spilling tropical green and a sunlight that hurt his eyes. "You can go home now, Turner. We're done with you. You're good as new."
from "1: Smooth Running Man" in "COUNT ZERO"
Copyright © 1986 by William Gibson
Nope, that description wasn't what I was after, I said to myself as I'd stared out the window, its cracked glass still holding remnants of the vinegar stench from a silicone sealant. Lights on in several houses across the rooftops, looking out over Lexington towards Mission in my view, showed signs of insomniacs (who may or may not have been troubled in the same way with what I'd been experiencing).
That excerpt wasn't where I'd seen the bit I needed.
The "mincome arcology" reference was utopian, establishing the vision that Paolo Soleri and other socio-geniuses have incorporated in their global village architectures for people who desperately need
affordable housing.
The thought still needed some archaeological digging and fixing, a writer's hope surely, that I could see delving into its potential manifestation.
The asparagus stems would pass.
Songbirds were awakening the then quiet neighborhood to its soon normal urban cacophony of garbagemen tossing plastic bins with glass bottles crashing and engines stirring the cylindrical crush of cluttered metal and mass paper waste. Shadows detectably began inching out the darkness with the first daylight's streams.
I'd returned to reading "
Count Zero" in the sixth chapter. I still had some questions.
Mincome arcology?
Affordable reality?
Home?
In a few hours, the first lights would start blinking on in the dark bulks of the Projects. Big Playground swept away like a concrete sea; the Projects rose beyond the opposite shore, vast rectilinear structures softened by a random overlay of retrofitted greenhouse balconies, catfish tanks, solar heating systems, and the ubiquitous chicken-wire dishes.
Two-a-Day would be up there now, sleeping, in a world Bobby had never seen, the world of a mincome arcology. Two-a-Day came down to do business, mostly with the hotdoggers in Barrytown, and then he climbed back up. It had always looked good to Bobby, up there, so much happening on the balconies at night, amid red smudges of charcoal, little kids in their underwear swarming like monkeys, so small you could barely see them. Sometimes the wind would shift, and the smell of cooking would settle over Big Playground, and sometimes you'd see an ultralight glide out from some secret country of rooftop so high up there. And always the mingled beat from a million speakers, waves of music that pulsed and faded in and out of the wind.
from "6: Barrytown" in "COUNT ZERO"
Copyright © 1986 by William Gibson
There it was, of course, the reference, right after the main scene of the main malfunction Bobby experiences with the
holoprojection, "
mincome arcology."
First exploration of affordable reality
In this bleak, bug-infested SRO hotel room, there I was, establishing my reality of some utopian homeless perseverance of affordable housing.
The bed's mattress was older than the book I was reading, if not older than me, with its fitted-plastic covering for bed-wetters or to fend off bed bugs under raggedy sheets that had seen better days. The linoleum was a peeling hideous mess, the tables and chairs, which I was lucky to have, were varnished with tawny shellac and chipping reddish enamel, the curtains were flimsy lace having social pretensions, and cockroach infestation was a major aggravation (crawling across the room in armies in the bright light, which made me shudder to consider what there'd be when the lights were off); the room's main focus was a television (only broadcasting whatever came off the antennae from Sutro Tower, three white noise local stations), and, unexpectedly, the wifi was weak, if at all available. The space was a roof over my head, nothing utopian, barely renegade, perfect for my needs in the Mission, centralized for the city's prospects of my work searches for a couple of weeks. I could read and ignore the television's presence taking up my space.
I had plenty to amuse me. And plenty to loathe.
With rent control laws now, landlords strictly abide by the conditional terms of tenancy; if you don't comply, within thirty days time, they must not allow you staying there. Therefore, you must either agree to meet all their demands or you must move to the next place that accepts you, for whatever time being.
Usually, the demands are set by one's credit rating, with no explanations allowed with respect to the rating's arbitrary numbers.
If I hadn't paid a doctor bill on time, my rating number fell, if I had ever had an eviction, my number fell, if I had ever been without a job and kept a bank account open for longer than a year without any activity, my number fell. My rating was just below 550, and any number lower than 600 is suspect. I only had some overdue bills and the lack of steady income, no civil claims against me, and no evictions. It was all this Equifax, Experian, and Trans-Union arbitrary credit reporting agency bugaboo.
Still I wasn't meeting the standards of terms and conditions for tenancy. Likewise, I wasn't meeting the standards for subsidized housing, which, had I remained destitute and homeless six months previous, when I was in a shelter, I'd've been eligible.
Rock and a hard place.
Yes; there it was, the "
mincome arcology" reference that I'd lost, in the first sentence of the fifth paragraph of the second sub-section of the book's sixth chapter, "
Barrytown." It all streamed back to me like the morning's sunbeams bringing their orangish-yellow brilliance into the subtle grey shadows across the walls of the Curtis Hotel that morning.
Yes, there I was, finding how affordable housing works in San Francisco: $200+ per week, for a room about the size of a prison cell, six by nine feet, except for having more privacy, with locked showers and toilets down the hall, and no kitchen.
A few blocks away, on Potrero,
Martin de Porres provides free meals that are a blessing by anyone's standards; I've helped with preparing and serving their food, so I know firsthand the actual ingredients for the comestibles (simple foods, locally grown and in season, a treat by any epicurean design, and the staff watches the bottom line of costs and portions, even though they don't feed a fraction as many during the whole week as St. Anthony's or Glide do daily, so they know when to cut off the lines).
"Messiah complex, hmmm," said one heavily tattooed guy, twenty-something, pale, a shock of bleached white hair framing his face, standing aside me this one morning on the corner where I stood at a traffic light, waiting to see how the lines were for food. "You somebody doesn't mess around."
I'd not realized he was speaking to me. He'd referred to how I dressed, my shirt, a white collarless cotton long-sleeved standby of mine and my fairly short clipped hair and beard, my blue jeans. I'd reflexively fawned scratching my nose to stop from laughing. He knew me from working at the food line at Martin de Porres.
"Not me, bub, I'm just looking for work," I commented back.
"Not my style, man," he said, which made him shift off into wondering about "all the white suddenly in the neighborhood, yourself included." I turned away from any further interaction or any behind the back comments. "And dude," he said, "I'm straight." I shook my head and walked with the light.
The culture of the area is predominantly cyberpunk/Latino/hiphop, with a broad other spectrum to balance out any misgivings.
Leather, spikes, chains, tattered construction dungarees, and tribal tattooes.
So with my budget for living being within reasonable limits, despite the deprivations around me, my complaints were minimal.
There was always amusement.
Second exploration of affordable reality
When it came time to move on, I went to Little Saigon, the area of the Tenderloin near Civic Center, which, where I was at the Balboa Hotel, being on Hyde near Golden Gate, was a bit of a shock.
The room was a huge improvement.
The rife culture was a stretch: scoring was a dream, for pills, bud, rock, and any flavor of sex, if that's what was desirable (not for me). "Mother-freakin' jokers," one guy in a group of bangers had said, leaving the corner doughnut hangout, my first night there, "not know where they comin' or goin', bein' they's makes they money off the local shrift." St. Anthony's is nearby, so I assumed the comment had to do with the monitors of the food line crowd two blocks down the street, more than with the neighborhood's regulars who pass their time at the tables inside the place they'd just left, not even a half-block away from where I'd be staying.
Jailin' oversizers flashing bling, or propped six-inch-heeled knee-boot types with piercings and breast implants that don't belong on a living being, and drug-running gear meant for agendas about which I may not want to know.
"You synthesize?" one goth sixfoot, in a hooded swath of weather-beaten black leather frock, said to me one early evening, which took me a moment to answer, in that, first, here I wasn't sure I was getting a musical invitation, a sexual proposition, or a drug combination solicitation.
"I'm, not, sure," I half-stuttered. "I, I just moved here," I stammered, as I'd fumbled for the keys to the Balboa Hotel's heavy metal front gate. The wind was blowing and the gangbangers comments had made me wary of lingering about outside.
"Maybe later, babycakes?" The dialect cross between Puerto Rican, trans-Asian, Seattle-Afro, and downriver New Orleans 9th Ward Creole, all tumbled together made me momentarily falter, and I just affectedly nodded, assuming the conversation had definitely not been about any musical invitation. "I likes squeeze."
I looked back at a vacuous stare. "Yes," I said, "I mean, um, later, much later."
"Oh. Okay. Thanks."
For the most part, I avoided interaction with most people in the neighborhood, since everyone seemed to have wanted something from me, everything but conversation.
The room itself was twelve by fifteen square with huge closets; the bed was a luxury after the last I'd had, a mattress nearly new, and, though the television was still the main focus in the room's arrangement, it wasn't what gave me the comfortable relaxation; it was that the wifi link was strong and the cockroaches were nonexistent.
My stay there was brief, the same three weeks before the landlord's recognition of tenancy took into account my status, which again depends on my credit rating. I knew what my alternatives were.
Third exploration of affordable reality
Russian Hill was not one of the alternatives that I'd originally had, the location being very high to high-middle to middle working class. As with the Mission, there're crowded bars and plenty of folks making the rounds.
Collegiate types dressed casually conversing with guys in $5000 Armani suits flaunting the latest, sleekest phones, scanning the women in their finest wear sporting their tough bitch urbaneity with nearly identically meaningless yet flirtatious expressions while scrolling their iPods, and clusters of parents with their strollers and toddlers, discussing the popularly significant topics of the day.
There I was, staying at the Broadway Hotel, probably the best of the SRO situations in San Francisco. "How you like yer pad?" one of the other residents asked me the first night of being there. "Nice neighborhood, huh?"
"It's a roof," I'd replied, with my best grin.
"You get tube?"
"No. I don't need it. I've got wifi though, which is all I need."
"Cool, man, you can come watch in the room down the hall, if you want, just me and my lady. You play cribbage?"
"Yes. Though I really need to spend most of my time looking for work. But thanks!"
"Offer stands," he'd said. The sense of being home seemed almost a reality for the moment.
Good food is abundant, a cultural diversity, too, like the Mission, yet not as cheap; for affordable, it's a search (this is beginning to sound like some Yelp blurb for the homeless tourist; panhandling is at a minimum on this stretch of Polk in its gulch below Russian Hill, yet there are the occasional requests, to which I must humbly submit or pass, depending on my budget's constraints at the time).
No obvious dealing is evident.
And no cockroaches, which made me wonder of their scarcity, despite the zoning and the cultural mix.
A window offers a view of potted palms and corydalis in planter boxes. I hardly hear traffic or sirens, though the 101 Van Ness corridor or the Broadway tunnel to North Beach are only blocks away.
I'm sure I could find some complaints.
Places in the city, certain ones especially, make me feel the resilience, an embryonic link to a way out of the nakedness of homelessness, a slide into worrisome jumbles of despair, desperation and through them to perseverance when I leave, picturing the mincome arcology on the horizon, the reality stretch, one of no mere imagination.
Homeless can't depend only on fiction for hope.
On an historic day in United States history, finding harmony in juxtaposition, articulating purpose with the common good, preparing to meet challenges of the homeless, all means of coping and making freedoms that are hard-fought entitlements, as what our U.S. Constitution frames, into a way to have our dreams, without taking dreams away from others around us, a pinch awakens us: clowns, acrobats and a white tiger float away in the moment's phantasmagoria.