I really like San Francisco. It’s a beautiful city. My one main problem is that there are a lot of crackheads here.
There are crackheads throwing up on the side of the sidewalk at 4 in the afternoon. There are crackheads outside of the Walgreens. There was a crackhead in an alley in the mission last night, a crack pipe clutched in his hand. He was walking up to group of hipsters, and standing right behind their shoulders. He was making menacing looks at them. Then he was sucking on his crack pipe and jerking around. He looked sort of like Emilio Estevez.
I know you’re supposed to love all people equally. But when I saw that Emilio Estevez crackhead stomping over in my direction, I ran and cowered behind Caleb. The rest of the group we were with just stood around like nothing was going on. “What’s the matter with you?” Caleb asked me. I didn’t answer him because my eyes were trained on Emilio, who was huffing and puffing and looking like he might eat my face off at any minute.
I was feeling pretty bad about my terror. But then Caleb and I walked into a bodega in the Tenderloin — or whatever they call them here — and I had this weird olfactory flashback. Suddenly, I remembered being a very little girl, and walking into a bodega in the Bronx, and looking up at a dirty beverage display. I remember the feeling that there were people on drugs wandering around, at any minute capable of doing something harmful to my mother and me. I probably made this entire memory up, but it had a visceral feel.
My fear must be inherited from my mother, who was probably only 24 at the time of my flashback. She wasn’t afraid of the people using drugs, she was afraid of their unpredictability. She grew up in a tough neighborhood in the Bronx in the 1970s. She used to tell more stories about her friend who would smoke PCP, and tear parking meters out of the concrete. She used to talk about corners where people would shoot up, right out in the middle of the street. She used to talk about the time that she came home from school to an empty apartment, and there was an addict hiding in the hallway closet, caught mid-robbery.
It occurs to me that being afraid of crackheads is more human than pretending that they’re not there. There’s a recognition in fear — there’s an acknowledgement of existence. But still, I should be nicer than to write about them like they’re an infestation — like they’re zombies or a disease.
