Poor.

Broke.

Chaotic.

I had $175.83 to my name and that was not much money in San Francisco.

I had made some friends coming through earlier, especially Ron, this Puerto Rican punk rocker from New York. Ron worked at a youth hostel were he didn’t have a vacancy that night, so I went to this bar called the Crow Bar and then to an all night doughnut shop and met these two runaways from the Midwest. We sat there until we got sick of it and then walked around until morning, talking about futures we did not truly believe in.

The next day I got a job through a labor service and ended up being the only white guy on a construction crew. The bosses liked me and I could have stayed. They were really bemused, astonished even, that I was a young white guy with a work ethic, which apparently don’t exist on the West Coast. They chalked it up to me being an East Coast guy, which was a theme when I was on the West Coast, that a white guy from back East gets a lot of street cred, just for being from a place like Baltimore. We were a stone’s throw from the only violent neighborhood at the time, Patreo Hill, where you could hear gunshots coming from and where we were erecting these atrocious condos for super wealthy buyers, which all had safe rooms built into them. I would get a gun or a sword, but these West Coast white people, they built a safe room, a fucking vault for pussies.

Ron got me a job at the hostel which permitted me to make $10 an hour and live at the hostel in a bunk bed with eight other dudes for $1000 a month! We ate ramen noodles and left over bagels from the guest breakfast and pasta night.

The owner was an insanely paranoid, Millionaire hippie who owned a bunch of property in Marin County, a very expensive area. The first night—I’ve got the midnight shift dealing with all these sketch-balls and their bullshit—and this woman is teaching me how to use the computer when I see on the monitor this homeless guy stealing and riding off with two bikes out of the bike rack. I run out there and grab him by the scruff of the neck and take back the bike that he is guiding along and then go for the other and he pulls a knife and says, “You got that one, boy,” and rolls off and I let him go, of course.

I didn’t have money for many pleasantries, an occasional candy bar or forty of beer. Miller Highlife was the beer of choice there.

I was sick of the bunkhouse living, the proximity fatigue, the dude in the bunk next to you banging his old lady, the fucking hippies! I scraped together enough money to get a train ticket, which was actually cheaper than the bus, and headed back to Baltimore where I still had the apartment and could make some money.

San Francisco?

That’s how a higher race dies.

Harm City

Survival