To Kill a Dead Man

If you haven't heard the steady drumbeat of anti-homeless agita, you need to know: it's logical conclusion is not far off.

Alas. Poor Yorick. (Photo by Kasia Meow)

Dude stood there and with those with eyes to know, he was sporting a pair of $200 leather pants. Given that his personal GDP was some small order of magnitude not so much more of that, gave a rise to some quick street side arithmetic.

“Nice pants, man.”

He nodded, acknowledging the compliment right before I, with so much less couth than sense, asked “how much and where’d you get them?”

“Offa some fag.” And he laughed. But I was confused. This was back when people used words like “fag” to mean any number of things that may or may not have been “fag-like”. As in, not as nomenclature for a homosexual, but for someone, anyone, who was deemed a lesser. Politics of the day aside, the answer failed to satisfy since it was clear he could have gotten them from a suchlike fellow who worked at Macy’s.

And then a sotto voce comment behind me to my left: “I’ll tell you later.”

Four words, weighted with…portend. Later it was explained to me. The why’s, the how’s.

“Man, he goes over to Christopher Street…”

“Why Christopher Street?”

He looks at me like I’m stupid. “Like” I’m stupid.

“Christopher Street, the West Side, West Village, doesn’t matter,” he rounds off. “Some guy offers to suck him off. Maybe pays him. They dip into a doorway, he delivers a knee to the face. Takes it all. Cash, pants, shoes, whatever.”

All of which just hung there. Unbelievable to me but suddenly totally believable. The level of predatory, that combined with frisson of dishonesty around sexuality, gave it a whole other level of ick. A level of ick that had reached significant enough proportions that the perpetrator’s picture was being circulated in bars on the westside, marking him as a person of interest. And that interest was very much connected to stopping him before he stole again.

“Homeless man smears woman with human feces on…”, which resulted in the perpetrator’s comment for the ages, in court, when called on to explain. “Hey…shit happens!”

Years later when I asked him about this he disavowed knowing anything about it with a hand wave: “I did lots of foul shit back then, man.”

A thought that’s not left me when I read headline after headline: “Homeless guy stabs woman in Los Angeles”, “Homeless man arrested in gruesome hammer attack”, “Woman attacked by half-naked homeless man.” And my personal favorite if you’re a fan of dark, dark humor: “Homeless man smears woman with human feces on…”, which resulted in the perpetrator’s comment for the ages, in court, when called on to explain. “Hey…shit happens!”

But if you’re a student of trends, and subtle swings in moods and temperatures, this can’t be missed. Like a leitmotif in a raga about modern anomie, it asserts itself as both a visible and vocal explanation of how America, at the very least, is no longer great again. And not just America. A cursory tour through Europe sends some signals. Homeless encampments in France full of Algerians, Africans and Syrians. France swings toward Le Pen.

Italy? Syrians and North Africans. And Draghi gets rousted out by conservative opposition while Italian fascists tell me “the truncheon is too good for them,” when asked about “immigrants.” England, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, for chrissakes…tent cities, blue tarps and cardboard boxes. California Governor Gavin Newsom, former mayor of San Francisco, who damned well should know better, sends mocking videos to Floridians as he positions himself for a national presidential campaign but with a $97 billion budget surplus he just can’t figure out how to solve the glass house issue of California’s homeless problem.

While financial columnist John Nash explains, “Problem is all the homeowners keep blocking any kind of construction, be it homeless shelters or even regular housing if it’s denser than what’s already in the neighborhood,” this seems incomplete.

While Jews represented 1.7 percent of Europe’s total population in 1933, the year Hitler came to power having convinced the electorate that they were a “problem”, only 0.2 percent of Americans are homeless. That’s presently 17 out of 10,000 Americans. The magnifying effect of social, and every other kind of media, however, tells a different story.

And for permanent problems you probably have permanent solutions. Final solutions even.

Especially with 39.8 percent of the US homeless population being African Americans and 13 percent being Latinos, according to Policy Advice. If you’re good at the maths, that’s 52.8 percent being people of color. Meaning 47.2 percent in the US are white people. In fact in a homeless enclave in South Carolina, post-facto to Joe Rogan “jokingly” encouraging people to shoot homeless people, which just happened in Canada, five white folks were arrested as part of a wider murder investigation when they were found to have systematically beaten white homeless folks. This is in the face of the reality that homelessness is on a downward trend in the face of permanent housing interventions growing by 450 percent in the past five years.

Let’s make no mistake, homeless people, generally speaking, are hard to like. Mentally ill, drug-addled, unclothed and unwashed people dunning you for cash when you’re just trying to make QTAT (quick time across town), is a drag.

Getting out of the car in San Francisco, my eldest daughter riding on my shoulders, as we wended our way to an audition when she was doing TV commercials, we were having a grand day. This was father-daughter time and we were digging it.

“You got any spare change?” A 20-something homeless cat, white if you must know, had walked up behind us.

Keeping the day, light and happy, I answered quickly, “No. Sorry.” And I went on with what I was saying.

“Oh. You’re not sorry!” Which was all that was needed to activate that over reactive Brooklyn shit I’m well known for, a stream of invective, acid, though free of curse words since I was “fathering”, set him back on his heels.

“I should stomp your head like a grape you human piece of garbage…” and more, and worse.

“I wasn’t talking to you!” he screamed, which, in itself, was hilarious. There was no one else on this San Francisco sidewalk that day but it was enough for me, who switched gears quickly back to happy dad-daughter day.

I wasn’t proud of this. I wasn’t supposed to be proud of this. And while in Nazi Germany there were plenty of “good Jews” according to Himmler who was once quoted as saying “we all have our favorite Jews” to explain away World War 1 Jewish vets and others, there are very few stories of homeless people being any kind of version of good, or helpful. Though this happens too. Homeless people also attack other homeless people. But this is a nonstarter because they are cat’s paws for larger political objectives, you see. Objectives that are presently occult but whose end game can’t be missed since for most problems there are solutions.

And for permanent problems you probably have permanent solutions. Final solutions even.

All of which just hangs there. Unbelievable to me but suddenly totally believable.

Having created a permanent underclass, of families and people in need, how the “them” that has to worry about being neither is planning to negotiate their way through the future it seems they are spoiling for, has me molto concerned about the level of predatory.

Talk about a whole other level of ick….Yeah, I’m aiming to.