I don’t like saying it—being a believer in human redemption—but it’s been a good week for the death of diabolicals: James Watt, Pat Robertson and Ted Kazinski. I’m sure they have loved ones who have better memories of them than I do.
Cary Grant is dead too. Turns out he’s been dead a while—since 1986. As it happens, his costar in the film North By Northwest, Eva Marie Saint, is still alive. She’s 98.
In the great urn of ashes, Grant’s are still on top. His memory is still in the hearts of many, but even he will eventually blow away and be part of the cosmic ash that makes up stars.
Its theorized that the Brazilian rainforest is lush and fertile due to winds blowing sand from the Sahara across the Pacific. Fertility relies on the infertile. Mr. Grant is still fertile. Clara Bow and Fatty Arbuckle of the silent film era less so. Both my parents and my friend, Rhett Stuart, all dead 14 years now are unknown to most, though very much still in my mind.
When I was housemates with Rhett, living at the bottom of Hayes Street in San Francisco, I sometimes heard him weeping late at night when a friend or relative died. The last of his era were dying out, the way—if I anthropomorphize—I imagine Martha, the last passenger pigeon on earth might have felt in the Cincinatti zoo before she died alone in 1914, her genetic code and the billions of her kind who preceded her never to be seen again.
“I don’t know if I want to live in a world without Dinah Shore,” Rhett wrote when the actor passed—a statement that resonated particularly with me since Dinah and I are from the same small town of Winchester, Tennessee.
My grandmother Flora, born in 1908, four years after Cary Grant, lived a long time after him. She died in 2007, six months shy of her hundredth birthday and thirty-five years after my her husband, my grandfather Sterling.
This death theme came about from a simple Wikipedia search after rewatching North By Northwest with a friend this past weekend. Lord knows (if I were a religious man) I’ve been searching for a theme these five months or so since I last blogged. There was a moment during Spring break in April when I visited my land in Tennessee when I had a post ready to go , but I held it back.
It hasn’t been writer’s block as much as publisher’s block. After tromping around on my land in April, I took off an extra week from work to tromp around a particular million-plus-populated-southern-metropolis in search of a relative who became homeless around Christmas. After writing extensively about my search, the ethical dilemma of revealing someone else’s life situation without their permission reared its head. I had the feeling of being an interloper. Was I capitalizing on my relatives tragedy just to get a story? What part of it is my story? What is my responsibility? It was too confusing to digest.
The thought came to me—is any of it important? Anything mildly amusing? Where do I set my writing bar: an interesting bowel movement or nuclear holocaust caused by the war in Ukraine?
While I was in Tennessee the state government ousted two black legislators for violating the chamber’s rules of behavior. I was never so ashamed of my home state. They couldn’t even profess “well rules are rules” because they hadn’t kicked out the white lady legislator who had done the exact same thing as the black men.
Then there is the anti-drag law that was passed but has since been ruled unconstitutional by a Trump-appointed Federal judge. Tennessee legislators make me want to show up in a yellow summer dress wearing bauble earrings with my beard and work boots on. I’m just glad most of my Tennessee friends and relatives feel the same way I do. I’ll be there in a few days.
Previous to going to Tennessee I was already reeling from a feeling of existential insignificance. In late March I went to the California Association of Bilingual Education conference (CABE) at the Long Beach Convention Center. I brought copies of my story The Easter Thingy to read at an open-mic in the enormous vendor’s hall in the convention basement. An attractive space was designed for this — a large rectangle of artificial grass surrounded by a white picket fence with park benches around the perimeter. I handed out copies of my story as people gathered inside the “park”. Others milled through the nearby rows of educational book publishers, tech companies and public school districts vying for new teachers. The vendor’s hall was a place where you had to be careful of eye contact or pausing too long at a candy bowl lest you be hooked into a spiel.
The open-mic was actually in the style of a poetry slam with audience judges using a 1-10 scale to determine a winner. The ebullient MC happily gave me permission to read an excerpt from my short story along with a few other readers who didn’t fit into the slam genre. Everyone was welcome. But it was strange being judged with numbers and competing with others truer to the slam form.
Despite the kindness of the host, I felt out of place with my sad, though educationally-thematic story. I was an old white guy reading about societal disparity of wealth and race while young women of color with shaven heads slammed about coming from that place. As a storyteller, it’s difficult to ask for a seat at the table when I’ve been told by many, it’s my turn to shut up and listen. History’s a bitch.
Then, as if a glutton for punishment, on the way to a musical jam session I snagged an empty five gallon plastic water drum from beside a cooler. I had in mind my days of playing such a drum with my first grade students as well as the free-form drumming I participated in over the years at San Francisco’s hippie hill, the cable car turn around and aquatic park. What I found instead at this “jam session” were numerous, highly trained and talented instrumentalists and a leader that looked pointedly at me while addressing everyone and said, “If you are playing a drum for this song you need to stick to a beat that goes bumbum-bum-bum-bum——bumbum-bum-bum-bum.”
The universe seemed to be telling me to shut up even though the theme of the CABE conference was “Testimonios: The Power of Our Stories”.
I’m accostomed to being a minority in my profession. I’m often the only male in the room and, especially at my last job, sometimes the only ‘Merican white male. A teacher who I consider a friend often used the pejorative “old, white men” with me sitting just a few feet away. At first I was flattered because I thought she might not consider me one but then as the years wore on I started to wonder, am I a fool? Well, anyone who really knows me knows I am, but still…
I don’t bemoan woke people the way Florida Governor Ron DeSantis does. I appreciate woke. I just don’t want to play a game of musical chairs where everyone is fighting for a seat and some don’t even get to play. That seems backwards. I might be able to get on board if that was his message. As it is, it’s almost humorous to listen to DeSantis belittle “woke” because he is so much asleep.
Anyway, the impetus to get my words out was withering away with depression and a nagging feeling that this financially sound, supposedly mentally-stable, white guy, didn’t have anything important to say about my life let alone anyone else’s. I felt particularly impotent in regards to the plight of my relative who is exhibiting signs of a mental health crisis and refusing most help other than the kind that I, at least, am not prepared to offer.
There is a growing movement in many cities to force people into treatment. London Breed, the current mayor of San Francisco (and real-life persona competing for best comic book name along with Elon Musk) seems to be in this court. I’ve wavered over the years. We all cheered when the character “Chief” throws a massive piece of porcelain plumbing through the wall to free himself in the novel-made-movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but seeing a naked person smeared with feces, ranting at the world in downtown San Francisco, makes the Cuckoo’s nest more palatable, albeit without frontal lobotomies.
Governor Ronald Reagan is widely blamed for opening the doors of the mental institutions in California. I don’t know enough about the story to know whether he was just trying to lower taxes or if he genuinely believed in the patient rights movement, but laws changed to make it more difficult to commit people to institutions. Typically, severely disturbed people or people in crisis are taken in by hospital psych wards and then released after three days.
Nevertheless, it seems like holding people against their will is really just a red herring in the debate about treating the mentally ill. There is a great deal of space between forced commitment and hands-on mental health care. How much of mental health treatment is really just a housing issue?
When Gavin Newsom was running for mayor of San Francisco he was advocating for a program he dubbed “Care Not Cash” in which people would be given housing instead of monthly general assistance checks. The thought was to give people housing instead of money to spend on drugs. Many advocates for the unhoused said people weren’t spending the money for drugs but for getting basic necessities like food. They also said that people didn’t show up homeless in San Francisco (which the business community claimed) but were being evicted or priced out of the rental market when they moved.
Something about our society wants to have these chicken-and-egg arguments that don’t really do anyone any good. In reality, every possible scenario imaginable about homelessness can be found—from the old lady evicted from the studio apartment she’s had for thirty years to partiers who arrive to live off the fatted cow.
Ultimately “Care Not Cash” was just a good slogan. There wasn’t the will to house all the homeless people nor likely would it be possible in a city that so many people want to live in. What is possible is strong rent control and flipping the narrative of new construction from a small percentage of new units being “affordable” to the majority or all being affordable.
Personally I like the idea of experimental, culture-shifting solutions like compulsory work service in different sectors like the society imagined in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. How profound would it be to require a doctor to be a trash collector or a vegetable picker for a month out of the year? What kind of shift would happen in our collective conscious?
Not long after I came to San Francisco I started seeing Shepard Fairey t-shirts with a stylistically, minimalistic picture of Andre the Giant and the word OBEY. Fairey is the artist that went on to design the HOPE poster Obama used in his presidential campaign. The clever OBEY design inspired people to think about what it means to submit AND to resist.
In the context of people who are homeless due to mental health issues and/or substance abuse it’s seductively simple to think we can solve the problem by just making them submit. A full nelson would do nicely—the wrestling version of a straight jacket.
But making people submit rarely turns out well. The recent death of Jordan Neely on a NYC subway by the hands of one who would have him submit is a good example. Whether this case was specifically racial is hard to know, but angry white men have wanted angry black men to submit for a long time.
America can continue to wall itself off from its problems. We can go back to sticking people in institutions that have a different name other than “prison” or “jail”. Those with money can get in gated-communities and hide behind those walls coming and going in giant SUVs with their own security details. But there will never be enough mental institutions, prisons and gated-communities to escape the masses of people in poverty and crisis.
At the same time the laissez faire of anything goes does not work either. Just spend ten minutes at the corner of 6th and Market in downtown San Francisco sometime and you will see what I mean. But San Franciscans, don’t let your experiment in containment-zone-street-debauchery swing you too far the other way!
We all need to come clean about what creates homelessness. It’s not just drugs and mental health. It’s also the debauchery that takes place in private homes on Nob Hill, at Mar-a-Lago, in Washington, and every upscale, Great Schools, seven-out-of-ten-rated-community in this country. The haves and the have nots is widening. This is not a sea parted by Moses to the promised land. It is an enormous, cultural chasm with people falling to their deaths left and right.
Part of the wonder and beauty of being human is that we are all different. We all have different perspectives, come from different places and have different experiences to draw on. Maybe if we could see that, if we could see that each of us is a Martha, that each of us is unique and a species in and of ourself we might be able to stop what sometimes feels like a rolling ball of nihilism that may make us all like Marthas—the next extinct species on Earth.
Spotty West Goes East 