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| HAUNTING PRESENCE | |
 December 22, 1998  | |
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TONY BENNETT: (singing) I left my heart in San Francisco -- RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: This is not the city about which Tony Bennett was singing; this is down and out into the real San Francisco. Other American cities and a good number of towns have a homeless problem. Only New York and Los Angeles - two cities much larger - have a homeless population on the scale of San Francisco's. The homeless problem here has grown so blatant that local newspapers are filled with complaints, people wanting the mayor, Willie Brown, to do something about the stench of urine and the beggars, their hands extended like dancing cobras. Experts say that the homeless population can be divided into three - not always distinct groups - the economically destitute, drug addicted, and the mad. Those same experts say that many people come to San Francisco because even on a cold day in December the bite of winter here is less terrible than elsewhere and the city is tolerant. Situated at the tip of a peninsula, surrounded on three sides by water, a port city on the far edge of the American dream, San Francisco has long imagined itself as an exception to the rest of the country. It was born in the Gold Rush, constructed in plywood and from a flamboyant idea, itself, as the Paris of the West. All my life I've seen people coming here from elsewhere precisely because this was a city not like elsewhere. Beatniks arrived in the 50's, hippies in the 60's, gays in the 70's, yuppies in the 80's, and still the young keep coming; they come from suburbs where everything is gated and clean and where the sidewalk at the mall is private property. The truth is over time that outsiders become insiders in San Francisco. Some hippies did not burn their brains with LSD. Some became advertising executives and live in big houses in Hait Asbury. There is a tension today between those who own expensive Victorians and the homeless a few blocks away: the middle-aged versus his more youthful shadow. I give the toothless woman a quarter, but on my dark days, when I'm impatient with my own soft center, I think that any true city requires a stern contract of civility among its citizens. The moment a sidewalk turns into a bedroom or the park becomes an encampment, the city cedes to chaos. And here it is Christmas. People come into town from the suburbs. People say it feels more like Christmas when one is in the city. Isn't it curious that one of our favorite motifs of Christmas is Victorian London, a De Keynesian Christmas? No one knew the terror of the city more sharply than Charles Dickens did once his father fell into poverty. Dickens grew to manhood, haunted by boyhood memories of crowds surging, uncomprehending - novel after novel he wrote about boys lost in London. The city - by definition - must be inhospitable to the homeless. The point of any city from ancient times has been a settlement - the end of the Nomadic trail. They also parody our tasks - the business of the city by not working. They are like the clowns who taunt Shakespearean kings, reminders of calamity against the optimisms of concrete and glass and the humming pace, and yet - and yet, whenever San Francisco voters have had the chance to get tough with panhandlers, we've shied away. We sense, I think, that some essential meaning of the city is contained by their haunting presence. TONY BENNETT: (singing) My love waits there - RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: In the absence of government strategies of how to help the lunatic or the destitute, or the addicted, we pass out quarters. In return, the homeless give us the assurance that we live in San Francisco. I'm Richard Rodriguez. |
